eLib Column Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eLib Column Buzz copyright Citation BibTex RIS Kelly Russell, the assistant co-ordinator of the eLib programme, with a few words on how the project (and the programme as a whole) can be reflected in terms of success and/or failure.
As autumn begins to paint her subtle colours across the English countryside the good folks at the Electronic Libraries Programme office find themselves raking in project annual reports.
As part of the programme's evaluation strategy, all projects now up and running were required to submit a report by midAugust detailing progress to date and, more importantly, lessons learned thus far.
The report was to include all the conventional contents of an annual report facts and figures, but was also to include the projects preliminary evaluation results.
With 60 projects funded the programme is certainly in full swing and it is time to begin asking "so....how are we doing?"
Programme Success vs. Project Success It is conceivable that a national programme like eLib could produce 60 very successful projects at the end of 2 or 3 years (in fact we hope so) but that the programme itself would have little or no impact on UK Higher Education.
An important key to the true success of the programme is to continually ensure that the results of eLib projects whether positive or negative don't remain in isolation with the project but are finding their way out into the HE community.
The eLib programme will only be successful if its results are disseminated and have an impact.
Even a small drop in the proverbial bucket can ripple its effect a long way.
To an extent this means revisiting the term "failure".
What does it mean for a project to fail?
In terms of the eLib programme it may simply mean a project that doesn't ripple its results anywhere to anyone.
Even if a project established the most innovative and informative electronic journal in the UK, if it doesn't produce a model that others in the wider community can use or learn from, it may be a failure in the long term.
On the other hand, because of the innovative nature of many of these projects, they ride the crest of the new technologies wave and may find themselves pulled under.
If this is the case, we must examine what it is we learn from that project.
Is the technology not appropriate?
Are copyright difficulties too complex?
If the organisational environment resists the change proposed by an eLib project what work is necessary to begin institutional/organisational/cultural change which will provide a more responsive environment?
What can we learn from a project's failure to meet it's proposed goals which will make the programme a success?
By and large the eLib annual reports have yielded some honest, open feedback which will help the eLib programme begin to disseminate it's preliminary results.
The annual reports will be read by both the programme office and by the Tavistock Institute who will then produce a synthesis of the reports' findings to be distributed to the rest of the UK Higher Education.
A welcome pat on the back Alice Colban, Chris Rusbridge, Lynne Brindley, David Cook and Kelly Russell pick up the Jason Farradane AwardAs eLib begins the somewhat onerous task of disseminating initial evaluation results, it was exciting and encouraging to hear that the Electronic Libraries Programme has been awarded the Jason Farradane Award for its contribution to the field if Information Science.
The award is given annually by the Institute of Information Scientists and this year Lynne Brindley, chairman of FIGIT, will accept it on behalf of eLib and the Joint Information Systems Committee.
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Mailbase: Unique Electronic Discussion List Service for UK Higher Education Tops 100,000 Users Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mailbase: Unique Electronic Discussion List Service for UK Higher Education Tops 100,000 Users Buzz data mobile archives copyright video mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Morna Findlay and Elaine Blair report on the passing of a milestone for UK academia's premier Mailing List resource.
The National Mailbase Service has this month welcomed its 100,000th user!
Mailbase is a national service which provides electronic discussion lists community and information sharing facilities for the UK higher education and research.
It is based in the Computing Service at the University of Newcastle.
Uniquely in the world of Higher Education, Mailbase was founded especially for communities who are relatively new to using the Internet and offers a high level of user support.
For example, the friendly Mailbase Helpline staff deal with 2,500 queries per month.
(email them at mailbase-helpline@mailbase.ac.uk) Phil Satchell, Project Officer at the Open University's Office for Students with Disabilities, was this month the 100,000th person to join a Mailbase electronic discussion list.
Phil's Office provides support to students who need to use technology in order to be able to study.
Phil joined the Mailbase list dis-forum@mailbase.ac.uk saying "It is very important that I stay abreast of developments in my field.
One of the best ways of doing this is by sharing information with colleagues across the country (and across the world).
Dis-forum provides an environment both for obtaining good advice and for contributing something to problems facing other people.
There are few formal opportunities to share such specialised information and Mailbase is invaluable: when you're faced with new problems, there's always someone who has solved it before!"
Mailbase was set up by Jill Foster (Mailbase Director) in 1989.
The intention was to provide a facility to enable easy communication between groups of UK higher education and research staff.
The service has grown rapidly from 55 lists and 1,700 members in October 1990 1,400 lists and 100,000 members in October 1996.
The service now receives a three year rolling grant from the UK Higher Education funding bodies.
Joining the Mailbase community couldn't be simpler: all you need is an email address and a networked computer.
As most academics already know, email is spontaneous, quick, low tech and is delivered to you in your normal working environment.
Whereas email is essentially one-to one Mailbase facilitates group communication: the email medium takes on the feel of a Common Room.
Mailbase discussion lists cover topics as diverse as: low-cost sewerage, 18th Century culture, library acquisitions, mycobacterial diseases, organic chemistry, editing newsletters and forensic linguistics.
Each list is managed by one or more list owners, who deal with mail problems and member queries.
To assist list owners, Mailbase holds regular workshops in Newcastle.
We are interested in running mobile workshops for list owners.
Please contact the Mailbase Helpline, if you think that you could offer us facilities at your site.
Mailbase is a working tool for UK academics, researchers and associated support staff.
It allows daily collaboration regardless of geographical distance, with the result that list members can do real work with people they might otherwise never have met.
In his review of Mailbase for issue 3 of ARIADNE, Terry Hanson concluded that it is "hard to imagine academic life without it".
Mailbase can be used for making (or answering) enquiries, distributing research material and data, holding electronic meetings and much more.
Unlike Web-based resources that require users to visit the various sites, information via Mailbase is delivered to your personal mailbox.
Nevertheless, in 1994 Mailbase created one of the first Web-based services in the country, providing searching facilities, extensive documentation and "hypermailed" message archives.
All open lists and list archives are available on the Web, so you can browse and search for lists and resources that are relevant to your subject area.
Mailbase can also be used as a limited directory service to find names and email addresses.
The use of hypermail means that all URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that are included in email messages to Mailbase lists become live links when the messages are archived.
The Mailbase staff believe that email and discussion lists will survive and complement the Web, just as electronic media complement the telephone and postal services.
With this in mind, the team is now beginning to look other interactive methods of collaboration, such as video conferencing via the Internet.
Mailbase have a set of Web pages at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/.
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Around the Table Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Around the Table Buzz data database archives cataloguing graphics hypertext z39.50 gopher research Citation BibTex RIS Around the Table: Sheona Farquhar looks at sites in science and engineering.
Homicide Life on the streets 19/8/96 Episode "Five(2)": Detective "Where d'ya get so handy at setting fires? "
Accused "Off the Internet."
If this exchange had taken place a couple of years ago he would probably have found his information at the "public library".
Perhaps if the criminal had found an interactive site the virtual experience of fire-raising would have been enough!
The increasing availability of Internet connections gives the potential for immediate access to a wide range of information and learning resources for the sciences and engineering in a variety of formats moving visual images as well as text with the ability to use then interactively.
The potential is there but slow connections, false hits and not all sites being quite what they seem can make the search a long, often frustrating experience.
Good starting points when searching for Internet resources in all subjects, including all areas of science and engineering are services such as: NISS Information Gateway (http://www.niss.ac.uk/) BUBL-LINK (http://catriona.lib.strath.ac.uk/) BUBL (Bulletin Board for Libraries) maintains a gopher and web server, and is currently engaged in a project to combine them both into a new WWW/z39.50 service LINK (Libraries of Networked Knowledge) extending the BUBL Subject Trees.
WWW Virtual Library (http://www.w3.org/pub/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html) This is a distributed subject catalogue.
Links to resources in all subject areas are provided.
The 24 CTI Centres (Computers in Teaching Initiative) provide links to computer based learning packages and other resources in a range of subjects.
Included are Physics (http://www.ph.surrey.ac.uk/cti/catalog/) ; Geography, Geology and Meterology (http://www.geog.le.ac.uk/cti/) Two specific subject gateways currently being developed as collaborative Elib projects are EEVL (Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library) a UK gateway to engineering information on the Internet (http://www.eevl.ac.uk ) and OMNI (Organising Medical Networked Information) gateway to networked information services in the biomedical sciences (http://omni.ac.uk/).
Another good resource is TIPTOP: The Internet Pilot to Physics (http://www.tp.umu.se/TIPTOP/) is a comprehensive index of Physics resources.
All science and engineering subjects have a visual, structural, graphical and experimental content.
The Internet allows such information to be presented and manipulated in ways not possible with traditional printed sources.
Hypertext links to visual images, graphical representation of three-dimensional structures, organisms and molecules, with interactive manipulation or simulated experiments are possible.
Frog Dissection Images (http://www.geog.itg.lbl.gov/vfrog/) allows for humane virtual dissection.
Similarly the Visible Human Project (http://www.nlm.
nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html) is creating anatomically detailed threedimensional images of the human body.
Tree of Life Project (http://phylogeny.arizona.cdu/tree/phylogeny.html) .
The Tree of Life is still being developed but when complete this project is intended to provide an Internet map to biological information and knowledge about the diversity and unity of the earth's living organisms.
Images of Physicists (http://charm.physics.ucab.edu/people/hnn/physicists.html) provides useful illustrations of renowned physicists.
See how pulsars pulse at Black holes and neutron stars (http://www.gti.net/cmmiller/blkhle.html) .
Chemist's Art Gallery (http://www.csc.fi/lul/chem/graphics/) hypertext links to many chemical illustrations.
The Department of Chemistry at the University of Sheffield (http://www.shef.ac.uk/~chem/web-elements/) has produced an evolving periodic table database mirrored at several sites around the world.
Clicking on an element gives information about that element.
Graphical representations of the data can be viewed and used interactively.
Chemical examples of VRML (Virtual reality modelling Language) are available from the Imperial College, Department of Chemistry VRML Demonstrator (http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/VRML/).
Three dimensional images of molecules can be viewed.
Electronic Journals on the Internet have a number of advantages over print versions.
Articles on-line are immediately available.
Enlarging graphics and photographs for detailed examination is possible.
Hypertext links allow the reader to jump from text to illustrations and to search the text for keywords.
Recent SHEFC/HEFC agreements make an increasing range and quantity of titles available to the British academic community.
IDEAL Academic Press (http://www.europe.idealibrary.com/) has a strong coverage of titles in the sciences.
IOP (Institute of Physics) Publishing (http://www.iop.org/EJ/welcome) .
New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/) Nature (http://www.nature.com/).
Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com/) and Science (http://science-mag.aaas.org/science/) all have a Web presence.
Research papers and articles may also appear exclusively in electronic format; The Los Alamos E-print archive (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) is a store of physics electronic pre-prints.
Many scientific organisations and societies have a Web presence providing information about their activities, meetings, conferences, professional development opportunities and publications, examples are The Institute of Civil Engineers (http://www.ice.org.uk/), the Royal Society of Chemistry (http://www.worldserver.pipex.com/rsc/) and the Institute of Physics (http://www.iop.org/).
This concludes a small personal selection of the many sites available in science and engineering.
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The Eighth ACM International Hypertext Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Eighth ACM International Hypertext Conference Buzz infrastructure video hypertext research Citation BibTex RIS Nick Gibbins reports from the Hypertext Conference held in Southampton in April 1997 “ The reaction of the hypertext research community to the World Wide Web is like finding out that you have a fully grown child.
And it’s a delinquent.
” With this, Ted Nelson, who coined the term ‘hypertext’ in the early 60’s, summed up the reaction of one particular academic community to the explosive growth of the Web.
The occasion was HyperText 97 [1], the Eighth ACM Conference on Hypertext, the place was Southampton, the date was April 6-11th 1997.
This conference featured one of the first organised collaborations between the hypertext world and the Web world; a live video linkup had been arranged between Southampton and Santa Clara, where the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference [2] was taking place at the same time.
To many people, the idea of separate communities of web researchers and hypertext researchers is a curious one; isn’t all web research hypertext research by definition, and given that the web is the most widespread hypertext system, isn’t the majority of hypertext research web research?
From the point of view of the hypertext community, the answers to these questions are partly yes and partly no, though not necessarily in that order.
To many in the hypertext community, the development of the Web seems to be a somewhat erratic affair which has often ignored their research and so proceeded to make the same fundamental errors which they’d examined decades before.
In particular, the development of the web has not always (the more cynical would say hardly ever) settled on either the most elegant, the cheapest, the richest or the most scalable solutions.
Indeed, once you start reading through the literature, many of the more recent inventions in the Web world are long established and mature concepts in the hypertext world (Netscape frames are equivalent to composite documents, Atlas-style bidirectional links have been featured in a number of systems from Xanadu to Hyperwave).
This was my first hypertext conference, and I was quite surprised to see the diversity of the disciplines from which delegates had come.
I was expecting a predominance of engineers and computer scientists (hypertext is something on a computer, right?)
with a smattering of information specialists, and so didn’t expect to see english researchers, authors and poets also in attendance.
The papers, posters and demonstrations at the conference were similarly wide ranging, from the design of open hypermedia systems to hypertext rhetoric; I can’t hope to adequately sum up the sheer breadth of the conference as a whole.
The elib projects made a showing during the weekend, with the launch of the Journal of Digital Information [3] (an electronic journal supported by the BCS and the OUP, a stablemate of the Open Journal Project) and a poster from the On Demand Publishing in the Humanities [4] project at Liverpool John Moores University.
The main theme of the conference was the examination of the future role of the hypertext research community in a world where hypertext (as exemplified by the Web) is considered to be a mature technology capable of few improvements; several of the organised events (and rather more of the informal discussions over coffee) were concerned with this.
In his keynote speech, John Smith, the chair of the first hypertext conference at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1987, voiced the realistic, if less than popular, opinion that due to its success, the Web is now the basis for any future infrastructure, and that the hypertext community should consider basing their researches on Web technologies if they wanted them to be noticed by the Web-at-large.
This was later expounded on at some length in a panel session organised by Helen Ashman, in which opinions were voiced for everything from subsumption of the hypertext conferences into the Web conferences as a SIG, to a further separation of the two groups.
It was mentioned that at times the Web community didn’t seem to be that interested in hypertext itself; the conference in Santa Clara had not actually mentioned hypertext in its call for papers.
Also, now that the Web development was run by an industrial consortium, would they even pay much attention to academic researchers?
Ideally, this debate would have been taken further with the live linkup to the States, but despite the valiant efforts of David De Roure, Gary Hill and the rest of the technical crew, the transmission remained patchy through much of the session and the timelag made discussion difficult.
The consensus by the end of the conference was that the hypertext community still had much to offer the Web development effort, and that if they wanted to be taken notice of, they needed a higher profile at the Web conferences a mood of general optimism.
Thanks are due to the conference chairs, Wendy Hall and Hugh Davis, and all the other staff of the conference (yes, I may have been a volunteer, but this doesn’t mean that I can’t thank the rest of them…) References Hypertext Conference Web Site, http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ht97/ Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, http://www6conf.slac.stanford.edu/ JoDI (Journal of Digital Information), http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/jodi/ On Demand Publishing in the Humanities Web Site, http://www.livjm.ac.uk/on_demand/ Author Details Nick Gibbins Email: nichg@dai.ed.ac.uk Tel: 0131 226 1834 Address: Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The British Library's Digital Libraries Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The British Library's Digital Libraries Programme Buzz dissemination research Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh meets with Sue Howley to discuss the British Library's digital research programme.
THE DIGITAL LIBRARIES Research Programme at British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC) is at a difficult stage in its development, being currently in no-man’s land awaiting the appointment of a new Research Analyst.
The ethos of the RIC is such that a heavy responsibility is borne by the analysts with oversight of the programmes.
Sue Howley, the Deputy Director, while outlining the general nature of the programme, put the position: ‘The research analyst is responsible for developing an area and giving it a slant, which inevitably reflects the experience and the interests the particular RA brings to that area.
This is deliberate because we want the RA to own that area.’ The present programme is broadly based on investigating user needs, particularly in areas where access to information might not be easy, and there is a keen interest in the use of the Internet by specific professions.
The issues uppermost in the minds of analysts tend to reflect the preoccupations of the mainstream information professional: the widening of access to networked resources, the inclusion of digital sources in the broad spectrum of resource provision, cross sectoral developments and the ever-present skills problem.
The emphasis on the role of the analyst raised the possibility that there could perhaps be a bias in the thrust of the programme, but Sue quickly dispelled any image of a manic researcher taking the BL’s research to extremes of any kind: “The consultation with the profession, with other researchers and with other research organisations is something we are very happy with, and this takes place at all stages of the process.” The programme to date has relied on the support of an advisory panel and a raft of consultative procedures with the profession at large.
This has taken place both inside and outside the BL, and as well as the obvious bodies such as the LIC Research Committee and UKOLN, many individuals have also contributed.
There is therefore a sense that the Digital Libraries Programme is based on a consensus within the profession.
This does not lead to complacency.
A healthy degree of self criticism is also at work, and Sue confessed to some ambivalent feelings, not about the Digital Libraries Programme itself, but about the general direction of research into digital information.
Tongue-incheek, I offered the observation that maybe the problem was that the difficult part was the human dimension, and perhaps this was not being addressed as it should be.
Her response was interesting: “If you look across the programme you will see a catholic mix of technology based work and user concerns, and of course some aspects of digital library research can appear in other programmes.” Nevertheless, she feels that the time might soon be right for a general review of activities in this area.
A similar approach is also taken to the vetting of proposals, and the almost impossible task of sifting the response to a call.
Referees are approached on the basis of their subject knowledge, their previous experience of research within the area, and their expertise in the use of particular methodologies.
It was obvious while talking to Sue that she held out high hopes for one programme which is due to report in the Spring of next year.
This is the City University-led research into the effect of the Internet on journalists and other information users in print media.
In some ways it offers a model to a prospective researcher in digital information.
It is focussed on a specific group of users whose needs might not always be obvious, it relies on a strong input from the journalism profession itself, and it is paying due attention to dissemination.
It is also likely to lead to a further investigation.
(1) Our discussion inevitably turned to the recent LIC consultative document on research (2), and Sue saw this as a positive development for the information community and digital research in particular: ‘It’s quite clear that the vision that lies behind this document is very much a digital vision, although obviously I can only comment personally.
BLRIC has not yet formulated a response.
We are very anxious to work with the LIC and it’s quite clear to us that the digital library programme is crucial.
That’s another reason why we might want to have a review and a rethink about the programme.’ I inevitably took the opportunity to raise some of my favourite obsessions, and I asked Sue first of all whether BLRIC research calls were biased against small scale, “soft” research: ‘Absolutely not.
Some of the very best projects, in methodology and content, have been small scale.’ Q: Does putting in more than one response increase the chances of success?
A: Of course not.
The only criterion is quality, and you could end up with more than one project to run if they were both good enough.
So small scale independent researchers need not despair.
The next call for proposals from BLRIC will be based on the theme of the Value and Impact of Libraries, and it may well be that some digital research concerns will find their way into this area, so I went to talk to Barbara Buckley, who is the analyst responsible.
‘The overall aim of the programme will be to produce evidence to influence policyand decision makers regarding the value and impact of library and information services.’ Successful bids are likely to be cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary, in the manner of the City University project referred to above, and partnerships within and outside the profession are likely to be encouraged.
Barbara would particularly like to see responses that investigate the relevance of models, theories and approaches current in other sectors, and the call is likely to go out some time after next February.
I asked both Sue and Barbara if they had any advice to offer potential grantees.
The response was succinct: ‘Keep it simple.
Librarianship is a practical profession.’ Author details Lydon Pugh, Ariadne Managing Editor, Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Burnside Writes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Burnside Writes Buzz data archives Citation BibTex RIS John Burnside on pornography and the Internet.
With elections approaching, there has been much talk about morality.
By morality, I mean the peculiarly British fascination with sex, from Virginia Bottomley's attempts to prevent satellite stations broadcasting explicit sexual material, to a renewed interest in the views of Mary Whitehouse.
In one sense a concern with the commodification of sex is A Good Thing though I, for one, would worry if the power to decide what we may or may not view resided in the hands of a government minister or a self-appointed censor with her own, rather peculiar agenda.
Recently, because I am something of a sceptic, I tested the generally accepted view that explicit sexual material can easily be accessed via the Web.
Unfortunately, the accepted view is true, and I soon found myself visiting a site which offered 'live girls' (sic), 'thousands' of explicit pictures, and a whole host of links to similar pages.
It was an ugly experience and, on a single viewing, I would count myself amongst those who say something must be done, (though not, I would stress, on the side of the Whitehouse faction).
Many people will object that there is no proven link between pornography and sexual violence.
If I remember correctly, the same claims were made about the question of incitement to racial hatred and actual violence against racial minorities.
There may be grey areas but, as in the case of combat knives, we could find a working definition of what is harmful, if the political will was there.
The problem lies in the fact that, so often, the only people who care enough to exert pressure in this area are those who would deny sexuality, (except within a very narrow compass) altogether.
Anyone who recalls the 'successes' of the Whitehouse brigade, when fine plays and interesting television programmes were banned or forced to close because of an aesthetically-challenged right-wing minority, will not wish to return to those days.
On the other hand, we must recognise the role of pornography in sexual violence, and start working to eradicate it, on the Web and elsewhere, for everyone's sake.
Responses to this article Reply received Monday, 23rd November 1998: There is no question that pornography and sexual content is easily accessible in the internet.
However, to think that we have the right to shut it down is wrong.
What I mean by this is that instead of trying to shut down porn sites, we must instead educate our children about morality.
If we teach our children that these porn sites are places where women and men degrade themselves for the purpose of sexual freedom and money, than our children will learn the value of morality.
I also think that we should not try to shut down these pron sites because our great country gives these people the right to express themselves in any way shape or form.
Lets stop worrying about how much porn sites there are in the internet and lets talk to our children about righteousness and integrity.
Luis Osejo, LOsejo25@aol.com Reply received Wednesday 26th February 1997: I read John Burnside's article with interest, as the issue of porn on the 'Net is something which I have kept an interested, and at times amused, eye on over the last few years.
During that time there has been a remarkable change in what is "out there" on the web.
When the web was young (and we are only talking 3 or 4 years ago here) it was pretty much a free-for-all.
If you knew where to look, there was porn out there and it was unregulated.
Individuals could put up whatever data they wanted and porn was one of the things that they had an interest in "sharing for the greater good" As time went on, the number of people using the web increased by several orders of magnitude.
Free porn on the 'Net is something which a lot of people search out and find quite quickly.
As a result, any such sites started getting more and more hits which caused their downfall when service providers started asking questions.
Up until 1996 or so, during which most of the hype about porn on the 'Net came up, things were relatively stable.
There was porn out there, for free and easily accessible, but only from sites which could either sustain the high hit rate or smaller sites which would come and go of their own accord.
Over the last year the amount of free porn put up by amateurs on the web has reduced to almost untraceable levels while the companies selling access to their archives of (and I quote Johns article) "'thousands' of explicit images" tend to dominate.
This is a very significant change.
While these sites often offer very limited collections of "preview" images, to gain access to what they have to offer, you have to pay.
Suddenly porn on the 'Net is just as accessible, or on the other hand, just as restricted, as porn on the high street.
If you want it, you can get it if you have the money and can prove your age.
So, while porn on the 'Net may have been a "problem" in the past, it is considerably reduced now and has found it's proper place.
I move on then to wonder exactly what the "problem" is with porn on the 'Net?
If it is something along the lines of parents being worried that their kids will "accidentally" be exposed to it, then this is just a misunderstanding of the web.
As most people with any experience of the web know, you have to search long and hard to find whatever you want on the web, be it porn or the reference you need for a paper!
If the problem is that parents don't want their kids to go out looking for this stuff and then find it, I can offer no solution.
While it may be the case that the web makes it easier for underage people to find porn, there are others.
Lastly, there is the point John raised in the last line of his article; I quote: "On the other hand, we must recognise the role of pornography in sexual violence, and start working to eradicate it, on the web and elsewhere, for everyone's sake" I fundamentally disagree with Johns implications (which he admits are unproved) of such a link and the simple assumption that porn is bad.
However, a discussion of the social effects and uses of porn are beyond the scope of this publication.
I think that this moralistic statement is out of place, both in Ariadne and in an article which begins by saying about how morality is currently a political football and which tried to show both sides.
Glen Monks Network Systems Officer lisgm@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Very Long Way Away Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Very Long Way Away Buzz database archives accessibility copyright telnet Citation BibTex RIS J. Correia describes the use of the Internet in Macau.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN”> Down your very long way away: Macau In our occasional column featuring far-flung places, J. Correia, in his own words, fills us in on how Macau is embracing the Internet.
Macau is a small territory on the southern coast of China, where the Portuguese and Chinese cultures have been co-existing in relative harmony since the 16th Century.
It all began when the Portuguese navigators developed the land in 1557 in co-operation with the local fishermen, making it one of the busiest ports in the region at the time.
As a Portuguese colony in Asia, Macau has been, in many aspects, a bridge between the Western and Eastern cultures for more than 4,000 years.
The College of St. Paul, the first western university in the far east, was founded here in 1594.
Portuguese and Chinese are the two Macau’s official languages.
Of the total population of approximately 400,000, about 10 percent are able to speak both languages.
Otherwise, English is widely used, especially amongst the academic community.
Higher Education People generally were not interested in higher education before the University of Macau was founded in 1992.
Those who did take an interest before the 1990s pursued their education elsewere, most notably in Portugal, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.
This was despite the existance of the University of East Asia (UEA), a private institution with foreign owners.
However, the UEA curriculum was not applicable to Macau’s economic and social situation, in addition to the fact that many students could not afford the expensive tuition.
Since the establishment of the University of Macau a public institution representing the heir of the UEA and its gradual adaptation of the curriculum to Macau’s needs, an increasing number of people are considering higher education.
Including the Macau Polytechnic Institute, the Open University and the Army Higher Education School, Macau has a student population of more than 6,000.
Besides several documentation centres and other small academic libraries, the University of Macau Library (110,000 titles) and the Central Library (300,000 titles) are the two main units in the Territory.
There are also the historical archives, which mainly hold documents about Macau history.
The Internet The University was the first Macau institution private or public to be connected to the Internet.
This happened during 1993; the main problem we had to resolve in the Library was related to the different cultures and languages of the Library’s users.
We have Chinese users (around 80%), but also Portuguese and others from different parts of the world, from which resulted a multilingual library collection.
Four or five years ago it was not easy to find a system for library automation which could accept, in the same database, languages like Portuguese (with its special accents), Chinese and English.
This situation complicated the decisions regarding acceptable accessibility to our references through remote access.
In the beginning, besides the Library, only a few departments and faculties of our University used Internet facillities.
But, as everywhere in the world, the last few years have made international networking familiar to many people, especially in the academic environment.
Besides the general University homepage (http://www.umac.mo), almost all departments and schools of our University now have Web sites or pages, with links that to the two countries that for more than four centuries have inspired Macau history: Portugal and China.
But the long term peaceful relations between two completely different countries also made up an original culture, which turned out to be a mirror of Macau’s mixed social environment.
Here, you can find not only mixed people (half Chinese, half Portuguese) speaking both languages and, often, praying to Catholic and Taoist gods, but also many other examples of this cultural embracement, such as cuisine or music!
If you walk on our narrow little streets, on the end of one lane you can find a small Chinese temple, whose flaming red facade is surrounded by colonial Portuguese pink houses.
When you climb one of the 7 hills that adorn our picturesque city, the sight blends old churches with white lines of tiny Chinese houses… Visiting Macau homepages is a little bit like walking inside this town.
You find addresses belonging to Chinese people together with others from Portuguese cybernautics.
Some are really interesting, with lots of information, like the one from “Revista Macau”; others are what you can call useful, including official texts like “The Constitutional Law of Macau”.
There are more than 150 homepages in Portuguese, Chinese and English languages, which is not bad considering that 2 years ago almost only the University in Macau was on our national Internet map.
Even now, only our University has a library with Telnet address (telnet://umaclib1.umac.mo).
Because much of Macau economic life revolves around tourism and gambling, there are plenty of sites from hotels and tourism departments in these areas, including the well known Hotel Lisboa.
The main non-University Macau host servers are UniTEL and MacauNET Although, as we already mentioned, the last few years have brought an increase of Internet sites, the truth is that we still have a long way to go, particulary in official sites.
In fact, most of the addresses are still from private companies or persons, and even the Central Library the only public library in the territory does not have a homepage!
The same is true of many administrative departments.
Understanding that most of the future improvements depend on professional qualifications, the University of Macau has been preparing seminars and meetings for training in the use of the Internet.
Although Macau stands near the great metropolis of Hong Kong, the truth is that for a long period of time, life here was similar to a village where nothing happened.
However, together with a clear economic development, the last few years carried two events which brought this place much nearer the world: the establishment of an International Airport and the connection to the Internet universe!
The Future In 1999 Macau will become Chinese territory again, after centuries of Portuguese administration.
As you can imagine, this change brings some instabillity and uncertainty, mainly in what concerns the permanence of Macau’s very particular identity.
The Chinese culture is very strong and after a short time Macau could become just another Chinese town, loosing much of its especially appealing synthesis of Western and Eastern cultures.
It is imperative that this territory maintains strong contacts with Western countries, especially Portugal, so as not to be overwhelmed by Chinese cultural and social “invasion”.
There is no need to mention the advantages that accessing the international networks can bring to any country on earth, by interconnecting different people with different cultures!
But for a place like Macau, where the future depends on the fidelity to its past totally composed of an history of relations between different cultures I am sure the Internet can fulfil a very important role, as an open door to the world.
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Mailbase Reviewed Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mailbase Reviewed Buzz software dissemination archives browser gopher mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Terry Hanson reviews the mother of academic mailing list systems in the UK.
Background: What are electronic mailing lists?
The terminology is not yet standardised for what I prefer to call online discussion lists.
Other names used include computer mediated conferences, bulletin board systems and newsgroups.
Whichever name is chosen the concept is of a large number of people with an interest in common, and geographically dispersed, communicating as a group.
The mailing list is the mechanism that permits the communication and it does so by allowing one list subscriber to send a message which will be received by all other subscribers.
The message may be a question, a plea for assistance, an announcement of an event, a job vacancy, a complaint, a campaign, or even a semi-blatant advertisement.
Any subscriber may then reply and, again, all other subscribers would see this message too.
Most subscribers only “lurk” on the list, reading and discarding the messages with little particpation in discussion.
Others become very active and establish reputations for themselves.
It is no exaggeration to suggest that online discussion lists have transformed informal scholarly communication processes.
The invisible colleges of the past have been revisited with a vengeance and have been democratised in the process, and it is Mailbase and other services throughout the world that have facilitated this progress.
However, it is not just academe that has benefited from these services.
There is a mailing list system known as Usenet News within which context the lists are normally referred to as newsgroups, and the messages are known as articles.
The concept is the same as that described above but whereas online discussion lists as operated by Mailbase (and others) are primarily for those involved in academic pursuits, Usenet News is an open system for anybody with an Internet connection.
Consequently, a substantial proportion of the 5,000 or so Usenet newsgroups are devoted to entertainment and recreation topics.
Mailbase reviewed Mailbase is a well organised electronic mailing list service for the UK academic community.
It is funded centrally by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils and is based at Newcastle University.
The service currently runs 1,213 lists (as of 12 March 1996) on behalf of academics in all subject areas.
In total there are 144,000 subscriptions (from throughout the world) to those lists and 88,000 individual members of Mailbase.
Discussion lists are managed by software that automates the process of subscription and dissemination of messages.
Throughout the world there are many software packages for this purpose.
Perhaps the best known of them is the LISTSERV software from L-Soft International (http://www.lsoft.com) which runs from hundreds of sites.
In the UK we are fortunate to have our very own system in Mailbase.
Mailbase lists are subscribed to by sending an email message to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk that says “subscribe list name your name”.
For example: “subscribe lis-link joe smith” would subscribe Joe Smith to the lis-link list.
A little later Joe Smith would receive email messages from Mailbase confirming his membership, welcoming him to the list and giving some useful information about how to use the system.
He can then make direct contributions to the list.
In this case the address would be lis-link@mailbase.ac.uk.
It is a very common mistake to send messages to subscribe or unsubscribe to the list (i.e.
lis-link@mailbase.ac.uk) rather than to the administrator of the list (i.e.
mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk).
This is not a mistake that is unique to Mailbase.
All mailing list software is prone to the same error.
For many Mailbase users the ordinary subscription process would be their only contact.
They would be content to receive the messages every day into their mail box.
Others may wish to take advantage of the facilities available via the Mailbase home page (http://www.mailbase.ac.uk).
These include search and browse tools for list discovery and information about specific lists once located.There is also a very useful search facility for individual people, and their email addresses, who are members of Mailbase lists.
At the level of the individual list the information available includes: The owner’s name and email address Whether the list is moderated (quality controlled to keep out the trivia etc.)
A list of members and their email addresses A “hypermail” archive of messages.
This is an excellent feature of Mailbase that represents an alternative method for keeping in touch with discussion in particular areas.
The archive allows you to browse the messages from a list month by month.
With this facility you can avoid having your email box cluttered up with list traffic and instead browse the messages at your convenience, as you would with Usenet newsgroups.
Other files.
These would normally be documents relating the list and its subject matter.
Searchable message archives.
To become a list owner is a simple process.
Among the various help and information files on the Web service you will find a New List Template which includes an application form with instructions on how to fill it in.
On this form you would describe your list proposal, its purpose, subject areas, expected membership size, etc.
This would then be mailed to Mailbase.
Alternatively there is a form that can be filled in online provided your Web browser can handle forms.
To conclude: Mailbase does what it does extremely well and it is hard to imagine academic life without it.
From my own perception as a user I find it to be an excellent service.
My own high opinion of Mailbase is also shared by others locally according to a small local survey of users and list owners.
Other sources of list information If you wish to discover what lists are available globally there are some useful tools around but there is, unfortunately, not a simple Mailbase-like sytem that ties them all together.
The following tools are worth a look: List of Lists Champion.
This claims to be the world’s most comprehensive list of lists with more than 15,000 from more 2,500 different sites.
This directory is manually indexed and updated every six months or so.
See: http://users.aol.com/lolchamp/home.htm [though note it unfortunately costs $19, in advance] CATALIST.
This is a searchable directory of lists that use the LISTSERV software.
Currently some 8,400 public lists are described.
The directory is maintained by automated indexing techniques.
See: http://www.lsoft.com Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussions Lists.
Compiled by Lisabeth King for the Association of Research Libraries.
The 6th edition is due soon.
See: gopher://arl.cni.org:79/11/scomm/edir Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences.
Compiled by Diane Kovacs and team.
This well known directory is now in its 10th revision.
It is available for searching and browsing at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/kovacs/kovacs.html.
As well as general directories there are many examples of comprehensive subject listings available.
For example: Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials.
Compiled by Ann Thornton and Steve Bobario (formerly compiled by Charles Bailey) of the University of Houston.
See: http://info.lib.uh.edu/liblists/home.htm.
Psych Central: Dr. Grohol’s Mental Health Page.
This is a very well organised collection of psychology related discussion lists.
See: http://www.coil.com/~grohol/mail.htm.
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Wire: Interview with Nick Gibbins Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Interview with Nick Gibbins Buzz mobile software java javascript xml accessibility browser hypertext pics gopher ftp interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Nick Gibbins is put under the virtual spotlight to answer a few questions via email.
What are you doing now?
I'm studying for a Masters in Knowledge Based Systems at Edinburgh University's Department of Artificial Intelligence.
...and what where you doing before?
Before this academic year I was a software engineer working for Nokia Telecommunications in Cambridge on a variety of network management products.
Why the jump from the networkie side of a telecoms company to doing a masters degree?
Mainly for financial reasons, I think.
Also, after a few years in sprawling development efforts, further study and research starts to look like an attractive alternative.
What Web browsers do you use, and why?
At the moment I'm using Netscape 3.0 under sufferance; most pages now require browsers which support all the latest 'cool' features.
I work almost exclusively on UNIX, and have used everything from lynx and emacs-www to chimera and arena in the past.
In terms of network access, staff attitude to on-line resources etc., what are the main differences you have discovered between commerce and academic life?
Academia seems to have a much more open attitude to network access while commerce seems to view online resources with a certain amount of skepticism.
This is probably healthy; although there may be useful information on the Web, it may not be worth expending the time taken to find it.
What was your reaction to the Web when you encountered it for the first time (and when was this)?
I first used the Web in '93, and had already been using gopher quite extensively before that.
It seemed like a fairly natural step forward, although I certainly didn't envisage it taking off in the way it has.
How significant an impact do you think that mobile code, such as Java applets, will have on the development of the Web as an information resource?
Mobile code has some potential for making information retrieval from the Web a slightly easier prospect by distributing search tasks amongst a number of autonomous agents.
Unfortunately, Java will probably not be the best choice of language in which to write these agents.
The Telescript language used by General Magic, Motorola et al has many possibilities, but it is a proprietary language.
My own preference would be for agents implemented in an AOP (Agent Oriented Programming) language, and inter-agent communications using KQML (the Knowledge Query Manipulation Language developed as part of the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort).
Javascript what's the point?
Is there one?
I don't think that there is one.
Aside from the portability issues, it struck me as a very kludgey way to accomplish relatively little.
Security.
Different universities have different approaches to attacks from outsiders, using devices such as firewalls to keep unwelcome intruders out.
How serious should universities take the threat of such attacks?
The threat is a serious one, and should not be ignored.
Firewalling is a rather severe solution, since it can affect the ability of local users to access the network, and will affect the legitimate accessibility of local information.
Of course, if the security of individual network services (email, ftp, gopher, web) cannot be guaranteed, firewalling may be the only option.
eLib how do you perceive the effectiveness of the eLib programme to the UK HE sector to date, and how effective do you think it will be overall?
Even if the eLib is not effective in the short term, I think it will still be important in a broader context since much of the research is relevant outside the UK HE sector.
Pornography.
Much has been made, often hysterically, in the mass media, about pornography on the Internet, especially on the Web and Usenet.
What steps should or could academic institutions take to prevent students from choking up the networks by accessing such material.
The steps taken so far are mainly forms of blanket prohibition (removal of the alt.
* USENET hierarchy, for instance), which just encourages people to go further afield and doesn't reduce network congestion.
The alternative is to allow or deny access on the basis of a rating system such as PICS.
This seems to be a better solution, but raises other questions; should you deny access to all unacceptable-rated material, or only allow access to acceptable-rated material?
How should you deal with unrated material?
Whose ratings do you trust?
Given the complexity of these issues, I think that academic institutions should concentrate on user education for the present.
In your Minotaur article [1], you referred to Hyper-G in passing; why do you think this never took off in a big way, despite being in existence over a number of years?
My guess would be that by the time Hyper-G really came to prominence, the Web was already well established as _the_ internet hypertext system.
The development of Hyper-G seems to have been more controlled than the anarchic beginnings of the Web.
This has made Hyper-G a more sophisticated and coherent system, at the expense of losing out on the early virus-like growth of the Web.
Would you, or have you, ordered stuff over the Internet using your credit card (if not, why not)?
I've only made a single credit card purchase over the Internet.
Although it wasn't made via a secure server, I don't consider that to be a great risk due to the sheer quantity of other traffic.
Besides which, you probably have as great a chance of falling victim to credit card fraud when you pay for a meal in a restaurant.
You are stranded on a desert island.
You have a computer with a solar power source, satellite link and copy of your favourite Web browser, as well as back issues of Ariadne and your girlfriends Sainsburys loyalty card.
Nothing else was saved when your ship went down.
What do you do?
Delete the Web browser and get down to finishing off some of the spare time programming projects that I've left unfinished over the past five years.
The Web is fine and dandy, but it can be a bit of a timewaster.
Finally, to finish name one thing you hope will change, or emerge, in the Networking world in 1997.
I'm not sure if I can narrow it down to one thing.
As an interoperable set of technologies, I'd like to see XML and dsssl-o capable browsers on a Web which used HyTime addressing over IPv6 with widely available cryptography.
Failing that, a good web browser which isn't Netscape or MS Internet Explorer.
References [1], Gibbins, N., Sideline, Ariadne, Issue 6, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue6/minotaur/ Author Details Nick Gibbins is a masters student in the Department of AI at Edinburgh University.
Email: nichg@dai.ed.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/6526/  Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Dublin Comes to Europe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Dublin Comes to Europe Buzz data database metadata accessibility vocabularies z39.50 marc url Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller discusses issues raised at a recent European Commission meeting on metadata for resource discovery.
In writing for Ariadne, I have had occasion to report on a number of personal ‘firsts’, including my first trip to the southern hemisphere and my first taste of Finnish tar-flavoured ice cream.
The meeting reported here proved no exception, with my first flight in an aeroplane sans jet engine, and my first time snowed in at an airport.
Writing for Ariadne is, as you can see, a never-ending round of thrills and spills!
The event for which I and others travelled from the UK to snowy Luxembourg was organised by the Telematics for Libraries Programme [1] of the European Commission’s Directorate General XIII, and was intended to explore some of the ways in which evolving metadata initiatives such as the Dublin Core might benefit projects funded through the Telematics Programme and, by extension, other areas of the Commission’s work.
More than 50 people attended the two-day workshop, travelling from eleven member states and drawn from a wide range of projects funded through the Telematics Programme and other initiatives.
The first day was dominated by a detailed metadata tutorial given by Lorcan Dempsey and Andy Powell of UKOLN.
This tutorial, which is available on the UKOLN Web site along with the other presentations [2], served to introduce all members of the audience to a number of the issues underpinning current work on metadata, and offered an excellent synopsis of the many initiatives currently underway in this field.
Following a night of pizza, mainland European beers, and digesting of the metadata glossary provided by UKOLN the day before, participants were ready to begin the second day with a series of short project presentations.
Building upon the broad foundations laid the day before, these examined detailed issues affecting the use and application of metadata to specific case studies.
Firstly, Juha Hakala from Helsinki University Library discussed the use of Dublin Core within the Nordic Metadata Project [3].
This important project, funded by NORDINFO [4], has been running since 1996 and is exploring the use of Dublin Core, both as a native metadata format and as a translation from the various Nordic flavours of MARC, in enhancing the accessibility of online information throughout Scandinavia.
The provision of various tools [5] is an important part of this effort, and they are being used to create metadata for insertion into Web pages across Scandinavia.
The second presentation, from Mike Stapleton of the UK’s System Simulation Limited, broadened the discussion beyond Dublin Core with a review of experiences working with the Z39.50 protocol in heritage projects such as Aquarelle [6], CIMI’s Project CHIO [7], and SCRAN [8].
He demonstrated the way in which a protocol such as Z39.50 was essential in enabling the creation of an almost seamless virtual database from a collection of spatially disparate and technologically varied resources.
The final paper, by the author, outlined the work of the Arts & Humanities Data Service [9] in exploring the application of Dublin Core to cross-domain resource discovery problems.
With the papers out of the way, participants were broken into three groups in order to discuss issues related to the creation and maintenance of metadata, mechanisms for effective retrieval of metadata, and the possibilities for harvesting metadata, once created.
The group addressing metadata creation explored a wide range of issues, including perceived inhibitors to widespread adoption of something like the Dublin Core, and a number of suggestions for the means by which current work might be progressed further.
Perceived inhibitors, perhaps unsurprisingly, included the apparent lack of stability of Dublin Core at present, a feeling that despite (or, perhaps, because of!)
the explosion of Dublin Core-related articles on the Web clearly definitive and authoritative information was lacking, and a worry about the lack of widespread deployment beyond experimental or pilot projects.
The group called for a clearly managed development path for the Dublin Core, and highlighted the importance to potential users of being able to identify individuals or organisations considered in some way to be ‘responsible’ for the process.
Finally, this group asked the European Commission to call for the formulation of a clear organisational structure for the Dublin Core effort, including unambiguous and easily identifiable procedures for participating in the process; a clear European entry point or focus for discussion; and a statement of the current status and projected development path of the Dublin Core effort as a whole.
It was clearly felt that, whilst a wealth of (occasionally contradictory) literature was available online and the discussion process was, in fact, open to all, the development of Dublin Core appeared chaotic and inaccessible to those not currently involved.
These perceptions harm the process as a whole, and undoubtedly serve to make it difficult for non-experimental potential implementers to justify the costs of involvement.
The group discussing retrieval addressed the potential for allying Dublin Core-like metadata descriptions of resources with the Z39.50 protocol in order to facilitate cross-domain resource discovery amongst a number of physically remote and structurally different meta-databases.
They identified the potential for mapping Dublin Core to existing Z39.50 applications using, for example, bib-1, and also discussed the proposal for a new Dublin Core profile.
There was a strong feeling here, as elsewhere, that further controlled testing of the use of Dublin Core was required in order to gauge its true potential.
The harvesting group was able to draw upon experiences from pioneering results such as those from the Nordic Metadata Project’s Web index, and identified a number of issues associated with the manner in which different disciplinary groups recorded information and controlled their vocabulary.
As with other discussions throughout the workshop, there was a feeling that further experimental work was required to test the usefulness of Dublin Core under controlled conditions.
Use of Dublin Core’s optional SCHEME sub-element was discussed as one of the ways in which cross-disciplinary metadata might be made more useful for searching, enabling creators to use terminology from identifiable controlled vocabularies such as the Library of Congress’ Subject Headings rather than simply entering an uncontrolled string of words.
For such a system to work, it was suggested that a registry of acceptable SCHEMEs would be required, as well as mechanisms for encouraging their use.
A separate issue identified by the harvesting group was that of levels of metadata such as, for example, a single record for the Louvre and all its collections, related in some fashion to individual records for each work of art within the museum.
In the closing discussion, a strong case appeared to emerge both for testing the value of creating and harvesting Dublin Core metadata under controlled conditions, and for a clear European focus to further work on resource discovery using the Dublin Core and other methods.
The former closely parallels evolving plans within the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) for a test bed project to explore many of the implicit assumptions behind use of resource discovery techniques [10], and both have been taken on board by staff at the Libraries Unit for possible exploration in the future.
The summary of meeting resolutions, to be made available on the Web site [2] in the near future, will outline possible future directions for these and the meeting’s other outcomes.
Acknowledgements Thanks to all at DGXIII who were involved in the smooth running of this workshop; and especially to Makx Dekkers and Pat Manson, both for inviting me to speak in the first place and for their hospitality whilst I was there.
References [1] European Commission Telematics for Libraries Programme home page http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/libraries.html [2] Presentations from the Metadata Workshop http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/ec/metadata-1997/ [3] The Nordic Metadata Project http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/ [4] NORDINFO http://www.nordinfo.helsinki.fi/english/ [5] The Nordic Metadata Project’s Dublin Core template http://www.lub.lu.se/cgi-bin/nmdc.pl [6] Aquarelle http://aqua.inria.fr/ [7] Project CHIO http://www.cimi.org/projects/chio.html [8] SCRAN http://www.scran.ac.uk/ [9] The Arts & Humanities Data Service http://ahds.ac.uk/ [10] CIMI Metadata Testbed draft proposal http://www.cimi.org/documents/metprojprop.html Author details Paul Miller Collections Manager Archaeology Data Service King’s Manor, YORK YO1 2EP E-mail: collections@ads.ahds.ac.uk tel: 01904 433954 fax: 01904 433939 URL: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ahds/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cataloguing E-Journals: Where Are We Now?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cataloguing E-Journals: Where Are We Now?
Buzz database cataloguing opac marc ejournal licence url Citation BibTex RIS Valerie Wilkins reviews the results of a survey, showing a variety of current practices in cataloguing e-journals.
At the beginning of June I sent out a survey on lis-link to discover what other libraries/learning centres were doing (if anything) about electronic journals.
The survey was conducted at the suggestion of an in-house OPAC working party which I convene, since here at Derby we had all agreed that we ought to be cataloguing these resources, but had made no further progress due to lack of staff.
Breakdown of replies I received replies from 12 universities, both old and new, using a variety of computer systems.
One institution had not as yet felt the need to address the issue, another three were at a similar discussion stage to us, and were obviously being held back by lack of resources.
One spoke of little hope of any extra staffing for the foreseeable future.
The uncertainty over the future of the Pilot Site Licence arrangement was seen as a deterrent, considering the amount of work that would be involved to (a) add catalogue records for e-journals in the first place, (b) keep them accurate and up to date, and © delete them should the HEFCE project close.
One respondent indicated that the cataloguers were enthusiastic in principle, but wanted the situation to stabilise before proceeding.
What are they cataloguing?
Most libraries who are cataloguing e-journals seem to agree on the value of one entry per title, rather than just a blanket one for the service such as IDEAL.
There is also a widespread aim to provide the “real” URL for each title rather than that of the service.
However, maintaining direct Web access, presumably from a home page, was also seen as desirable.
This would enhance awareness of the facility and help to promote the use of electronic journals in a perhaps more pro-active way than just having access from the appropriate Web OPAC.
At present at Derby electronic journals are only accessible from our Library Web home page, rather than from within our Web OPAC.
Ideally, in keeping with BLCMP policy guidelines, [1] the URL for each title would be provided in the 856 field for shared use, and repeated in the 859 field for local use, from which links would give access to the e-journal itself.
The policy also states if the URL of the service is the only one available, it may be given as such, but with additional information in fields 500 and 773.
There should then also be a separate catalogue record for the service itself, to which the 773 field refers.
Notwithstanding the policy of having a separate record for the electronic version of a journal, there was evidence of a wish to also provide a note in the record for the print version, to the effect that the title is also available online.
Some libraries are at the moment maintaining a separate Web page for each journal, but would no longer need to do this after they set up one catalogue record per title with the correct URL.
A number of libraries had so far confined cataloguing to those e-journals accessed via a service, but one or two also catalogued other titles considered relevant, both those purchased and those obtained free.
The decision on what was relevant would usually be made by Subject Librarians.
One respondent spoke of using normal selection principles to decide which Web sites to catalogue, so that cataloguing e-journals was no more “expensive” than other sorts of cataloguing in terms of resources.
There was general consensus on only cataloguing e-journals to which full text access could be gained.
What to include One interesting variation concerned the decision on whether to include only those journals where the print format was also taken,or whether to exclude this category.
Not all of the replies I received made this clear, but two institutions seemed to be opting for the former, one for the latter, and another was cataloguing both categories.
Those opting for the former decision appeared to base this on being able to link/add to existing records.
Libraries preferring to concentrate their efforts on e-journals where the print format was not taken gave as the reason that this would be more helpful to users and should also minimize unnecessary Inter Library Loan requests being submitted.
I would personally have to agree with this decision given the constraints of staffing and budgets.
Given the obvious need to minimize the resources needed for cataloguing e-journals, it was clear that as much use as possible should be made of external sources of records.
The ease with which records could be created, adapted or copied is clearly quite significant.
Problems and solutions One fellow Talis user felt hampered by the BLCMP policy that a separate record should be created for the electronic version of a journal, which precludes the possibility of adding the URL to an existing record.
However, the policy itself seems perfectly logical given the notion of separate records for materials in different physical formats.
Cataloguers have been doing this for years with books and videos.
However, links of some sort between the two would be useful, just as see also references in the catalogue are.
I learned of one Talis library where care was being taken to create only non-contribute records so far, until sure they had got things right.
Another was adding a Talis holdings note to the existing entry for the print version, so that WWW shows up as the location.
Users could then either follow the link to the special electronic journals page, or if “experienced” users, were invited to click on the appropriate e-journal supplier code.
I was interested to note that users of entirely different systems had come up with the same solutions to some questions.
The phrase World Wide Web as a pseudo-location in the holdings field was being used by both a Talis library and a user of Libertas.
The latter system threw up problems in that it rejects certain characters such as the tilde and hash, which are frequently used in URLs.
Whilst being aware of the problem, the suppliers have not yet come up with a solution.
This is hampering this library’s aim of providing the real URL for each title, rather than that of the service.
Correct interpretation of the MARC manual was further impeded since the necessary subfields to be used with 856 70 are not enabled.
Another problem for Libertas users was that when they wanted to make use of the notes field within holdings for the URL, they were hampered by the inadequate length of this field.
Who does the work?
When it came to looking at who was doing the cataloguing of e-journals, the replies did not always make this clear, but where they did there was yet more variety.
Only one respondent indicated that the work was done by cataloguers, two said Periodicals staff, and another the Systems Unit.
It was my impression that quite often most of the work was being done by just one or two individuals.
However, a new university on the South coast, who sent me several most helpful and enlightening replies, indicated that their Subject Librarians had undertaken the task.
They realised that if they agreed on the importance of the project for which no other resources could be made available, it was ultimately up to them.
This option was made possible firstly by the co-operation of everyone involved.
The Subject Librarians are accustomed to creating brief MARC style order records which are then kept in a kind of holdings file, visible only to library staff until the book arrives and receives full cataloguing.
This system similarly allows them to create records for electronic journals, useful Web sites and anything else they consider interesting and relevant.
The cataloguing department then quality check and upgrade these records.
Use of a template has made things easier as well.
The system in question (DDE) allows the creation and maintenance of many different sets or bases.
Whilst multiple indexes are certainly possible in Talis, the ability to easily exclude things from the main database leaves something to be desired.
The Talis copy facility could serve in place of a template, but because of the co-operative nature of the system it would always be best to check the Union database first to make sure someone else had not already created a record.
Omitting this step could result in unnecessary work plus avoidable duplication on the BLCMP database.
Summary I suspect that there are quite a number of institutions like us, where everyone agrees that the work should be done, ideally by the cataloguers, but realises that these individuals would be hard pressed to take on the extra work load.
It is my impression that cataloguers are a bit of an endangered species anyway, and the respondent in the Midlands who was doubtful of getting any additional cataloguing resources spoke of the possibility of having to re-adjust existing staff duties.
This struck a chord with me!
There was some comfort in knowing others are in the same situation as ourselves.
But it was also encouraging to discover those who had found the time and resources to achieve something.
In some cases libraries are cataloguing e-journals ahead of having a Web OPAC!
There seems to be some variety of practice even among users of the same systems, and in some cases progress taking place in spite of system shortcomings.
System suppliers were also perceived as having been a little tardy in formulating and producing proper policy guidelines.
But perhaps this was inevitable given the rapid growth of e-journal services.
However, policies and practices do appear to be standardising, and out there in library/learning centre land the work goes on……………….. References [1] BLCMP, 1997.
Bibliographic Input Standards and Procedures.
Birmingham: BLCMP.
Author details Valerie Wilkins Acquisitions and Database Manager, University of Derby http://www.derby.ac.uk/library/staff/val.html email: V.A.Wilkins@derby.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Digital Library Showcase and Support Service the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Digital Library Showcase and Support Service the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE Buzz software html infrastructure archives metadata identifier repositories copyright preservation cataloguing sgml ead gopher research standards Citation BibTex RIS Roy Tennant describes a resource used to create digital libraries and services, and to help others do the same.
Few topics in librarianship seem as "hot" these days as digital libraries, and yet for all the heat being generated there is little light.
What are digital libraries?
How are they built?
How are they maintained and preserved?
How will they be funded?
These questions and more abound, while answers are few and far between.
We don't have all the answers, but we're a great place to start looking for them.
We are the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE [1], and this article is about who we are and how we may be able to help you.
The Digital Library SunSITE is one of several dozen SunSITEs [2] around the world, which are sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the institution where each is hosted.
Most SunSITEs are focused on collecting software for downloading (SITE after all, stands for Software, Information, and Technology Exchange).
Sun provides an initial hardware donation and the local institution provides the rest.
Between the initial donation and further upgrades by the UC Berkeley Library, the Digital Library SunSITE is now supported by a four-CPU Sun SPARCcenter 2000E with 1 GB of RAM and 112 GBs of hard disk storage.
Screenshot of the Berkely Digital SunSITE We are one of about four SunSITEs with a topic focus and the only one dedicated to digital libraries.
Our mission is two-fold: to create digital library collections and services and to help others do the same.
Some of what we are doing to fulfill this dual mission is outlined below, while much more is available at the SunSITE.
Digital Collections The UC Berkeley Library is working with a variety of tools and resources to determine the best practices for creating digital collections and services.
Generally each project has unique characteristics that provide opportunities for exploring issues or experimenting with specific solutions.
A small sample of such projects are highlighted below.
California Heritage [3] With the California Heritage project and other related projects, the UC Berkeley Library is helping to develop a standard for encoding archival finding aids in the Structured Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
The Encoded Archival Description (EAD) effort, now led by the Library of Congress, is working to define an SGML Document Type Definition that will provide a common file format for these enriched bibliographic descriptions of archival collections.
The California Heritage project is taking this effort further by also embedding digitized representations of collection items within the finding aid, thereby allowing users to easily browse from a library catalog record to the archival finding aid and, in some cases, directly to the item itself.
The Jack London Collection [4] Building upon the work of projects such as California Heritage, the Jack London Collection brings together a variety of materials related to this famous American author.
Besides the full text of many of his novels, non-fiction books, short stories, and journalism, the site contains over eighty digitized representations of his letters, postcards, and other documents as well as over eighty photographs of London and his family, friends, and acquaintances.
Primary sources are further enhanced by explicative and critical work that includes biographical information, bibliographies, and critical essays.
This section of the site is under the editorial guidance of a world-renowned London scholar from Sonoma State University, Dr. Clarice Stasz.
With the London Collection we are exploring the issues of libraries becoming digital publishers and the creation of "virtual" libraries -libraries that do not exist physically in one place.
A number of the digitized items in our collection are not held by any library, but come from private collections.
NCSTRL: Networked Computer Science Technical Reports Library [5] The NCSTRL project provides a method to simultaneously search distributed archives of computer science technical reports.
Dozens of computer science departments at universities around the world deposit their technical reports in a local repository using special software that interacts with a Web server.
Then, when someone at that local repository performs a search, the search is sent simultaneously to all the other NCSTRL servers.
All the respositories perform the search and send the results back to the site that initiated the search.
The results are then collated for the user by the local server.
Thus a user can simultaneously search archives at geographically distant universities in one step.
Digital Library Support Service We are using several strategies to support other individuals and institutions in building digital libraries, from providing information or current awareness services to tool development and research project support.
Information In a field that is being created from scratch, information is at a premium.
Part of our strategy at the Digital Library SunSITE is to locate the best information on building digital libraries and either host it or point to it.
[6] Major areas in which we maintain links include copyright and intellectual property rights, imaging, preservation, and digital library standards.
We have also published papers, proceedings from conferences, and draft standards documents.
Current Awareness Our activities to help keep digital library developers current are in some cases based on activities that we began years ago.
Our monthly current awareness publication Current Cites began in August 1990 in print, and soon migrated to email and Gopher publication.
It is now published on the Web [7] , with a plain text version being distributed via email.
Current Cites is comprised of one-paragraph evaluative annotations of the best print and electronic literature on information technology.
The SunSITE is also home to several important electronic discussions: DigLibns [8] (Digital librarians) A discussion devoted to the practical aspects of building digital libraries and those involved with the activity.
The 1,200 subscribers come from all over the world.
The complete archive of the discussion is available for both browsing and searching at the DigLibns Web site.
PubLib [9] The largest electronic discussion for public librarians, with over 3,600 subscribers world wide.
An archive of the last several years is available for both browsing and searching at the PubLib Web site.
Web4Lib [10] The largest and most active discussion of library technology is Web4Lib, with about 3,400 subscribers from over forty countries.
The archive is both browseable and searchable from 1995 to the present at the Web4Lib Web site.
The Web site also includes the Library Web Manager's Reference Center, which brings together in one place a variety of resources helpful to library Web managers.
Tools A variety of tools -both the hard and soft kind -are required to build digital libraries.
At the Digital Library SunSITE we try to point to tools that we or others have found effective for this purpose.
We are also involved with creating or enhancing tools that we need to do our work.
One such example is SWISH-Enhanced.
SWISH-Enhanced [11] For years we have used Simple WAIS Indexing for Humans (SWISH) software to provide searching of our Web sites.
But over time we discovered a few bugs in this free software and also accummulated a list of desired enhancements.
Recently we received permission from the software author (Kevin Hughes) to fix the bugs and enhance SWISH to include, among other things, support for HTML META tags.
This allows Web page authors to include subject descriptors, author identification and other information and offer searching limited to the information in those fields.
SWISH-Enhanced (SWISH-E, pronounced "swishy") in combination with a metadata standard such as the Dublin Core [12] can provide a powerful tool for digital library developers to build catalogs of digital resources.
Research & Development One of our strategies to support the development of digital libraries is to support individuals with innovative ideas and energy, but who may be lacking the infrastructure and resources to make their projects a reality.
If their project fits well with our goals and the support we have to offer, we sign up the individual as a "digital librarian" on the SunSITE, give them an account, a base hard disk storage allocation and permission to run existing software or request the installation of new programs.
We have no geographic restrictions for participation in our Digital Librarian Program [13] , nor do we require that they work at a particular kind of institution.
Some of the projects that have been hosted on SunSITE under this program include: Index Morganagus [14] Eric Morgan from North Carolina State University is using the Harvest software to create an index of electronic journals and newsletters in information technology and librarianship at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/morganagus/.
Librarians' Index to the Internet [15] A subject guide to Internet resources selected and annotated by librarians with a California-based public library audience in mind.
There are now over 2,600 searchable and browseable resource descriptions.
Come to See the Future, Stay to Help Build It The Digital Library SunSITE is very much a work in progress.
We add to it daily, but we only announce major additions on our Whats New page [16].
Come visit us and tell us how we could improve.
Or better yet, stick around and help us do it.
References [1] Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ [2] Sun Company Sunsite section, http://www.sun.com/sunsite/ [3] The California Heritage Collection, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CalHeritage/ [4] Jack London Collection,  Editor's note (5 October 2012): the original location on http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ now gives 'Location Not Found'; my researches did give the following which states it was maintained by: Roy Tennant and Dr. Clarice Stasz.
Sponsored by the Sonoma State University Library.
Last update 3 July 2009  http://london.sonoma.edu/ [5] Networked Computer Science Technical Reports Library, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/NCSTRL/ [6] Digital Library Information Resources section, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Info/ [7] Current Cites section, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/ [8] DigLibns Electronic Discussion area and list, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/DigLibns/ [9] PUBLIB and PUBLIB-NET Electronic Discussions area and lists, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/PubLib/ [10] Web4Lib Mailing List archive, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/ [11] SWISH-E (Simple WAIS Indexing Systems for Humans Enhanced) pages, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SWISH-E/ [12] OCLC Dublin Core section, http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/ [13] Digital Librarians programme, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Admin/librarians.html [14] Index Morganagus, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/morganagus/ [15] Librarians index to the Internet, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/ [16] Whats new page, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/new.html   Author Details Roy Tennant, Manager, Berkeley SunSITE, Email: rtennant@library.berkeley.edu   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Bernard Naylor: At the Eye of the Internet Storm Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Bernard Naylor: At the Eye of the Internet Storm Buzz software framework database licence rae gopher url Citation BibTex RIS Bernard Naylor, the University Librarian at the University of Southampton, describes the information hurricane that is battering the world of Libraries.
It seems such a short time ago since it was low on the horizon.
It was still difficult, then, to be sure the seascape was changing.
The burgeoning expansion of electronic communication had small beginnings in the late '60s and '70s with automated library in-house systems and online database searching.
Even as recently as three years ago, we were still arguing about those minor tropical storms called Archie, Gopher, Veronica and WAIS.
Now, World Wide Web stands massively higher than the other technologies, the defining symptom and possibly the continuing cause and focal point of an information hurricane.
Will World Wide Web still dominate the librarian's vision five years from now?
It would be a brave person who would confidently bet that it would not have been succeeded by some further and even more defining statement of the technology.
Even if it has, by then, become just a part of the history of the technology of information communication, we can be sure that the wind of change will still be blowing strong in the librarian's world.
Out there on the ocean, when the wind blows stronger, there are some sailing ships that head for harbour, whether from timidity or following a shrewd appraisal of their own seaworthiness.
Others, however, go looking for the eye of the storm, some prompted by foolhardiness, but others knowing that where the wind blows the strongest, the fastest passages are made.
There is so much apocalyptic talk among librarians about the meaning of the Internet for the future of libraries.
At the same time, there are plenty of courageous spirits among us whose nostrils are flaring at the smell of opportunity.
We need to take a closer and more considered look at this new primal force to see whether a better understanding will help more of us to confront the threat more wisely or even seize the opportunity more forthrightly.
Something seems to have happened in volume terms.
In the late '80s, the then Bibliographic Services Division of the British Library was warning us that we could be submerged by the growing flood of published literature.
The graph recording titles published annually seemed to be pushing inexorably towards the 100,000 a year mark and beyond.
Maybe it still is.
The potential of desktop publishing threatened to burst that barrier quicker and more decisively.
Now the stories of exponential growth are all about the World Wide Web, its connected terminals numbered in increasing millions, its information resources already beyond counting.
I used to be confident about the practical limits on human intellectual creativity; how could we read or write much more, since no miracle could possibly multiply the hours of our lives?
I'm less confident now.
What the Web has done is to merge two territories of communication.
Once, I talked with my friends in a small enclosure, but had to enter the great terrain of print on paper to communicate my thoughts more widely.
Now every immediate thought can be shared with the world almost as easily as with the local barman.
The fear of being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity is an atavistic one, but Malthus wasn't entirely right (nor entirely wrong for that matter).
It was said in the '60s that Chemical Abstracts was growing so fast that, in the early twenty-first century, the annual quantity of its umpteen copies would weigh more than the whole world, but over time that remarkable threat to the basic laws of physics seems to have reached a compromise with reality.
So let's all breathe deeply and slowly and reassure one another that we, and this startling electronic fecundity, will probably come to terms gradually, just as happened in the centuries following the eclipse of the scriptoria by Gutenberg's generation.
But should we have to?
Publishing in print on paper has spawned a complex, intricate industry, which desktop publishing has augmented, not destroyed.
Some writers are lucky, or very talented or both.
They can sit at their desks, confident that the next publisher will soon be knocking at their door.
Others have to expend their energies in seeking out a publisher to whose star they may be able to hitch the wagon containing their creation.
The whole drawn-out process of tying author to publisher acts as a filtering device.
So many seeds of ideas may germinate in writers' minds.
Only a fraction will see the light of day as what we call 'publications'.
In the environment of the Internet, this filtering process is much less likely to occur.
The Internet is not only a theatre where new ideas strut their stuff before the world.
It is also a labour ward where new ideas are born.
Plain experience tells us that the immediacy, the vigour and the breadth of the intellectual interchange facilitated by the Net can fertilise the ground and help new ideas to take root and grow more surely and quickly.
But I am one of those who has deplored some aspects of the growth of traditional publishing.
Pressurised by the need to pursue tenure, or by the next Research Assessment Exercise, or by some less definable push from the 'publish or perish' syndrome, scholars, I have argued, can be driven by the feeling that they have to say something, more than by the feeling that they have something to say.
Fundamentally, there is no reason why a peer review system should not impose a discipline on all this, and I am sure that we shall see peer review making its presence felt more and more.
In a conference hall, the voice of the chosen speaker can ultimately be distinguished from the hubbub of the audience's conversations.
It has been selected for a hearing by a form of peer review, though it may not, by that token, necessarily be wiser or better informed, as an unexpected intervention from the floor may eventually show.
In the electronic environment, outright control, which sounds like an intrinsically reactionary response, may prove to be unimportant.
What we may need are mechanisms for singling out statements likely to prove more authoritative from statements of the other kind.
At the same time, the Internet does seem to have a desirable potential for democratising and delayering scholarship, and making it easier for the new voice, especially the new critical voice, to get a hearing.
We need to be careful that any efforts to save people from drowning in the ever-deepening information pool lay emphasis on helping them swim better, not on emptying the water out.
Information sources that have authority are not just welcome in themselves.
They feature among the signposts and totem poles of any well-understood intellectual context.
One feature of the Internet is the impression it conveys, that the new world of information is a world without signposts and totem poles, a world of chaos.
To the minds of librarians,this can seem particularly offensive.
As a colleague of mine vividly expressed it: "The Internet?
It's like going into a large room full of books just thrown about on the floor."
In a conventional library setting, there are a surprising number of conventions which are unconsciously invoked, but are crucial to library use at even the most primitive level.
For example, an understanding of 'alphabetical order' is taken for granted, though there are people who are perfectly intelligent in other respects but find alphabetical order difficult.
Likewise, we take it for granted that books are shelved Western-page style, from top left to bottom right.
And the simple title page of a book encapsulates centuries of evolution towards structured information transfer as would occur to anyone who looks instead at the deep-plunging and mystifying incipit of a medieval manuscript.
I have been surprised recently to find how many seasoned Netsurfers are still dependent on technologically primitive means (like pencil and paper) to record URLs at the first time of asking.
And URLs themselves are inherently resistant to simple filing, with other access mechanisms also at a primitive level.
Do we have to wait years for another whole structure of conventions to evolve in the electronic environment, or is there some way we can accelerate progress towards conformity, and impose structure upon chaos 'in our own lifetimes'?
One step in the right direction could be the appearance of signposts and totem poles in the currently chaotic landscape.
Already there are more and more examples of prestigious journals proposing to offer an electronic Web version.
The Funding Councils' Pilot Site Licence Initiative will accelerate this for three important British publishers.
Others exist in the US.
Carrying their existing authority and status into the Web setting, these publishers may start focal centres of order and authority and spread them into the persisting chaos of their hinterland.
Is this a realistic prediction or just the nostalgia of someone who thinks instinctively that the old certainties can and ought to be successfully translated to a new setting?
Maybe my depiction of chaos already looks absurdly uninformed to some ardent Internet users.
In that case, I shall have to plead guilty but also plead that my ignorance has mitigating circumstances.
Such a plea can only carry weight where the degree of personal culpability for the ignorance is excusable.
My contention is that circumstances do justify a claim of that kind.
In over thirty years in libraries, I cannot recall any other area of professional competence where there was so much arcane knowledge needed for optimal performance and where so much of the arcane knowledge was so shifting and uncertain.
The bold explorers come back from cyberspace with the light of Marco Polo in their eyes (but beware the latest view is that he never got to China anyway!)
and their more stolid colleagues do not know whether to sit at their feet or shut their own ears.
There appears to be no way of substantially stemming the flood of material onto the Internet.
There also appears to be no way of blocking change in the supporting technologies, whether of hardware or software.
However, there could at least be room for a consensus, favouring trends towards simplicity and ease of use rather than complexity.
If we think of word-processing or spreadsheet use, if we think even of the trend in use of computers themselves over three decades, we would have to agree that increases in power and performance have most often been accompanied by, even devoted to, promoting greater ease of use.
Now that we are well into the '90s, it is quite clear that the seascape is changing.
However, even the boldest sailors know that, when the storm is at its peak, staying afloat can be a more urgent priority than identifying a precise landfall.
Nevertheless, we can breathe our 'if only's', even while we struggle at the eye of the storm.
If only we can quantify and legitimise some acceptable level of growth in information quantity; if only we can assemble an acceptable framework of quality referencing which does not stifle new voices; if only we can impose some useful degree of order on the apparent chaos; if only we can achieve a measure of technological stability which will promote rather than inhibit use, without stopping innovation, we shall leave many people (the majority non-librarians) in our debt, and incidentally secure our own professional future.
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From the Trenches: Network Services on a Shoestring Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From the Trenches: Network Services on a Shoestring Buzz software html database apache browser sql video graphics opac windows hypertext linux ascii telnet cd-rom vt100 authentication standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight describes how Linux is a cheap and useful operating system for library systems units and the like.
If you work in a library systems unit, it can sometimes be a bit depressing reading the computer press.
At a time when budgets are often fixed or falling and the expectations of patrons and other library staff are constantly rising, the last thing that the system team need is for the latest and greatest operating systems and applications to arrive demanding the latest hardware if they are to be usable.
However, if the library is to provide the high quality online information resources that patrons are now expecting to find, these latest operating systems will have to be installed and the latest hardware purchased.
Or will they...?
Sometimes there is an alternative: Linux.
Linux is a freely available UNIX like operating system originally written by one man, Linus Torvald, and now developed and maintained by a cast of thousands.
Linux runs on an PC with a 386SX processor or better and 4MB or more of RAM.
Its even possible to fit a usable system, including a number of useful utility programs, into less than 15MB on a hard disc.
The reason Linux is finding increasing usage in libraries world wide is that it allows useful services to be constructed and deployed on very cheap hardware.
The IBM PC clone is now a commodity item and the various pieces required to construct a fully working system can easily be acquired.
Some libraries may even be able to construct suitable hardware for running back room servers using Linux from parts salvaged from old user workstations and donated hardware.
After all Linux doesn't need a good monitor or keyboard to be permanently connected if the machine is merely acting as a server.
Day-to-day administration of the machine can be performed over the network as well.
This article will attempt to describe some of the uses to which Linux can be put in a library.
It is not exhaustive but merely a taster for the range of services that Linux can be pressed into service supporting.
It is most definitely not a "How to install Linux on your PC".
There are plenty of those available already, both online and in print.
Web servers Currently one of the most desirable services for a library to provide is a World Wide Web (WWW) front end to its services.
The WWW can provide a user friendly, platform independent front end to the wide range of services that many libraries run.
For example, some libraries are deploying Web front ends to their OPACs.
Others have a variety of online databases that are available through Web gateways.
Recently workstation and PC vendors have realised that there is a lucrative market in providing web servers to organisations.
These products are usually very highly priced and are capable of supporting very high loads.
Whilst these may be appropriate for a hosting a complete campus wide information service, smaller libraries and libraries that want to have their own internal web presence independent of the main campus server will probably find them to be overkill.
They'll probably also find that they are a bit on the pricey side.
Luckily Linux can run a number of the freely available UNIX-based web servers.
These include the CERN httpd, the NCSA httpd and Apache.
All of these servers have plentiful documentation and large installed base of users, some using Linux.
Even on a lowly 386, a Linux box dedicated to being a web server can handle a fairly respectable load if it just serving out static HyperText Markup Language (HTML) pages.
A 486 or Pentium has more than enough horsepower to also support dynamic document generation and gatewaying using Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs.
The great thing about using a PC as your web server is that you can start small and expand the system as it becomes necessary and finances allow.
Because of the commodity nature of PC hardware, it is often possible to switch components from one machine into another, allowing you to maximise your investment in hardware.
This would allow a library to start using, say, an old 386DX33 and a reasonably sized hard disc as its web server and then if it was found to be very popular and the funding was available, the machine could be changed to a 486 or Pentium.
The hard disc and some of the other components of the 386 machine could be used in the new machine, or the 386 could be used for other services or as a backup server.
Database server If a library has a small to medium sized collection of information that it wishes to supply to its patrons via a searchable interface, Linux is capable of supporting a number of the freely available UNIX database and indexing package.
These include CNIDR's Isite that give the end user a full text database service and Msql that supports small relational databases with a standard SQL search interface.
All of these can have a CGI based web front end placed on them that can also be hosted on the Linux machine as described above.
Because a database requires more processing and more intensive disc accesses than a simple web server providing static HTML, don't expect an old 386 to suddenly replace your library OPAC.
However for "light" database work, Linux makes an ideal platform, especially seeing as it may be financially possible to have both a production machine and a development machine for a fraction of the cost of a workstation based database server.
Having said that, a question that is often raised on some library mailing lists is whether there is a Linux based OPAC for small libraries.
The author is not currently aware of one but if the demand is out there, its almost certain that some enterprising individual or group will have a go at producing something.
CD-ROM gateway CD-ROMs, as many people know, are a perennial nuisance.
Although they provide access to large amounts of information, they are expensive and often have abysmal user interfaces.
Many are also only available with DOS and Microsoft Windows search engines.
Even if these are networked they are not much use to Macintosh or UNIX workstation users.
With something as expensive as CD-ROMs you really want to get every ounce of usage out of them if possible.
Once again, Linux provides a possible solution in that it can host a CD-ROM gateway allowing access to DOS based CD-ROM software running on a Novell network to other Macs, UNIX boxes and dumb terminals running other network protocols.
The main tool used to provide this functionality is a Linux application program called DOSEMU.
DOSEMU allows MS-DOS sessions to be run as a Linux process and, through the Linux kernel, gives full support for IPX based Novell networking to the DOS applications that may be run under DOSEMU.
DOSEMU is also capable of translating PC character based graphics and screen layouts into ASCII sequences that can be displayed on a VT100 or compatible terminal.
This latter feature allows the users on non-PC platforms to use a VT100 terminal emulation package to display the output of DOS programs running under DOSEMU on the Linux machine.
However to make a usable CD-ROM gateway, it can often be useful to hide a number of technical details from the user and provide a scripted login to the CD-ROM.
Luckily, Linux can run an incredibly useful tool called Expect.
Expect is a tool that allows scripted access to remote services and other Linux applications.
It is based on the popular Tool Command Language (TCL) and can be used in a number of scenarios besides the CD-ROM gateway (for example it could be used to provide scripted logins to remote information services such as Dialog).
If access to the CD-ROM gateway is available via telnet, the whole service could again be fronted by a set of HTML pages on a web server.
Terminals Because Linux is a multiuser, multitasking operating system, the machine it is running on can be used by more than one person at once.
It makes an ideal platform for a cheap and cheerful terminal server to allow more "bums on seats" and also to possibly support remote login to library services via either the Internet or dial up lines.
Linux supports a variety of serial boards, some specifically designed to allow a fairly large number of dumb terminals to be connected to the machine.
A Linux terminal server could be used to manage a collection of old dumb terminals or low end PCs for patron email or OPAC access or even providing access to the Web via a text only web browser such as Lynx.
Allowing dialup access to some library services might also be attractive, especially to public libraries.
These terminals could be run so as to allow anonymous users to just walk up and use them, or could make use of the authentication mechanisms available under Linux to ensure that only legitimate users can access the library services through them.
In a more sophisticated environment, a Linux box can also be used to make a very cheap X terminal.
The X window system is a networked graphical user interface that is very popular in the workstation market and is heavily used by engineers, scientists and programmers.
It allows programs running on one machine to display their output on another.
Workstations that support X have price tags starting at around £3000 and even dedicated X terminals (just a display controller, screen, keyboard, mouse and a network card) cost over £1000.
A 486 PC clone that is capable of running X under Linux will cost less than £1000 and provide the added benefit over dedicated X terminals that it has local processing capability allowing some of the standard X applications to be executed locally.
A library that operates in an organisation where X is widely used by their patrons might find that providing a couple of Linux based X workstations is very popular with their users.
The major downside with X under Linux (and any other PC based UNIX operating system) is that the X server usually has to be configured in some detail to make best use of the video card and monitor on a particular machine.
Sometimes you'll be lucky and find that the machine you are using is already covered in the list of preconfigured machines.
If it isn't, then a default 640x480 pixel screen resolution is usually achievable fairly easily; it just getting the most out of your video card and monitor which is what X really needs that takes some tinkering.
If you don't have the user guides for the monitor and video card you might find this tinkering very difficult to do.
Conclusions This article has tried to give a few brief ideas as to how Linux might be employed in a library environment.
It has attempted to demonstrate how Linux can provide useful back room services for a fraction of the capital costs of the alternatives.
Because Linux runs on commodity PC hardware, some of which is now being practically given away by large organisations, it provides a great way to prototype and develop interesting network services very cheaply.
One thing that is probably worth stressing is that this article is not intended to give the impression that Linux is about to replace DOS, Microsoft Windows and/or the Mac.
It isn't (though some Linux users claim that the world would be a better place if it did!).
The examples given above are a taster of some of the things that Linux can do; some of them might be appropriate for your library, others might not.
As with all systems developments it is up to the systems staff, and the librarians, to decide whether a particular solution fits their needs.
There is unlikely to be a "one-size-fits-all" solution to every problem that libraries will encounter.
When comparing Linux based solutions to other alternatives, the plus points in Linux's favour are that the operating system is free or at least very cheap, it runs on a wide range of hardware, there are lots of UNIX tools available for it and there is excellent support from the user community.
The down sides are that it can take a while to learn how to run a Linux box if you've never used a UNIX system before, some people find the UNIX commands rather arcane, X can be tricky to configure sometimes and you might not have a technical support line that you can ring and yell at to make you feel better when things go wrong!
Some ideas presented in this article have prototyped at the Pilkington Library at Loughborough University, but most have been implemented at a variety of other libraries worldwide.
The author found out about them through the linux4lib mailing list (send a message to Majordomo@virginia.lib.mn.us with the phrase subscribe linux4lib Your-Email-Address in the body of the message) and by talking to other Linux users.
The Linux community is very helpful and users are often willing to share the code that they used to solve their problems with anyone else in a similar situation.
There are a whole range of Linux newsgroups available for those with USENET access (the comp.os.linux.
* hierarchy) which is a great place to find out what others are doing and to ask for help with any problems you encountered.
The answers you get back are often far more useful than the bland responses from vendors technical support lines that you have to pay real money to access.
But that is typical of the Linux world; users pulling together to get more out of ordinary PCs.
Why not give it a try as well?
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ELVIRA 4: The 4th UK Digital Libraries Conference (Electronic Library and Visual Information Research) Milton Keynes, 6-8 May 1997 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ELVIRA 4: The 4th UK Digital Libraries Conference (Electronic Library and Visual Information Research) Milton Keynes, 6-8 May 1997 Buzz copyright Citation BibTex RIS Clare Davies announces the fourth in this series of annual Electronic Library research conferences.
Next May, ELVIRA reaches its 4th annual conference.
When the conference series started, the concept of the electronic library was still a novelty to many of us; now every self-respecting university, college and library is involved in developments in our field.
ELVIRA 4 promises to be the most exciting conference yet, and also the most varied.
The organisers are keen to encourage different types of submission and session, to fit the diverse needs of researchers and practitioners in electronic resource provision.
So, what are you doing?
What results or ideas do you want to communicate?
How would they best be presented in a traditional paper presentation?
In a technical demonstration?
In a workshop or panel discussion alongside fellow experts?
In a tutorial to teach non-experts some of your expertise?
Or in a poster display?
This year's ELVIRA Call for Submissions gives you the flexibility to work out exactly what's appropriate for your type of work.
The electronic library field brings in academics from many disciplines, as well as librarians, computer scientists, information scientists, designers and commercial developers.
You might be working on training and staff development, studying user needs and behaviour, grappling with copyright, building the ultimate user interface, or facilitating document transfer and conversion.
You might be supplying documents to your readers free of charge, or you may be skilled in implementing charging mechanisms.
You may have created an intelligent agent, studied organisational change, documented the relative merits of different formats, programmed a search engine or modelled users' cognition.
You may have a burning concern that you wish to air, or a theoretical principle you wish to propose.
Whatever, ELVIRA is your forum: the organisers are hoping for submissions that are original, informative, exciting and relevant.
As in previous years, the conference will be held in Milton Keynes.
Britain's newest city, with its green parkland, excellent shops and leisure, easy transport connections and traffic-free roads, is attractive enough to visit at any time of year.
This year, there are plans to add to the fun with a full social programme, and the chance to choose between varied parallel sessions during the 'work' parts of the day.
The organisers are striving to find ways to make this THE conference for all elib people, while at the same time keeping to reasonable costs.
More details of the venue, accommodation and social programme will be released nearer the time.
For now, just mark it in your diary, get to work on that submission, and tell your friends Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BUBL : How BUBL Benefits Academic Librarians Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BUBL : How BUBL Benefits Academic Librarians Buzz data database archives metadata browser copyright cataloguing graphics z39.50 lcsh ejournal ddc gopher url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alan Dawson and Jan Simpson take us through BUBL, an old service recently transformed from being Gopher-based to Web-based.
BUBL Basics BUBL provides a national information service for two audiences: the higher education community in general, and the library and information science community in particular.
The BUBL Information Service was relaunched on 23 March 1997.
The new URL is http://bubl.ac.uk/ BUBL is now based entirely at Strathclyde University Library.
It moved from UKOLN in Bath during the first quarter of 1997.
BUBL is not an acronym.
Although it began as the BUlletin Board for Libraries back in 1990, it has been trying to drop this label for the past three years.
The BUBL Gopher and WWW Subject Tree have been integrated into the BUBL LINK service.
Comments and suggestions for BUBL should be sent to bubl@bubl.ac.uk BUBL does more than offer a direct service to UK academics; it also offers a specialist support service to the librarians and information specialists who assist them with their information requirements.
During recent demonstrations to librarians of the new BUBL service, one comment has cropped up again and again: “I had no idea there was so much in BUBL” This indicates strong content, but suggests that in the past some material had been rather hidden away, or maybe just that more awareness is needed.
Another memorable quote came from a long-time contributor to the BUBL Information Service: “I don’t use BUBL as much as I should” This suggests a sense of duty.
After all, BUBL was originally designed by librarians for librarians, so presumably librarians ought to use it.
This article aims to address these and other comments by showing how use of BUBL can benefit library staff, and at the same time give some details of the new BUBL service that are of wider interest.
The benefits are classified under five main headings: Saving time Organising information Keeping up-to-date Helping other library staff Helping library users The focus is on use by academic librarians, though some areas of BUBL, notably BUBL LINK, BUBL Search, BUBL Journals and BUBL UK, offer a service to the wider academic community.
Saving time For many professionals time is their most precious commodity.
We hear a lot about information overload, pressure of work and time management.
Yet the Internet, wonderful though it is, can eat away at this valuable time like a caterpillar munching through a leaf.
There’s not much that can BUBL can do to overcome Internet congestion or increase network speed, but it does eliminate some other time-wasting features.
The main aim of the new BUBL service is to provide clear, fast and reliable access to selected information sources, which means no adverts, no animations, and few graphics.
For those trying to find information on the Internet, there are two main areas of BUBL likely to be of most help: BUBL LINK and BUBL Search.
Firstly, BUBL LINK [1].
This is a searchable database of Internet resources of academic relevance, organised by DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) and browsable by subject or class number.
Where numerous items all have the same general class number, e.g.
540 Chemistry [2], they are organised according to type, e.g.
societies, departments, companies, journals, rather than as a long alphabetical list.
When looking for a list or overview of resources in a specific subject area, the best choice is probably to browse BUBL LINK by subject.
Currently the title, abstract, author and class number fields are displayed when browsing.
Data held in other fields (e.g.
subjects, location, resource type) is searchable but not displayed.
When looking for a more specific topic the search interface is likely to be more useful.
The default search is conducted only on the item title, which is likely to give the quickest and most helpful results.
However, other fields can be searched individually, collectively or in combination, via the same simple interface.
The default search type is AND, so if more than one word is entered then only items matching all search terms will be retrieved.
BUBL LINK is of course only one of several catalogues of Internet resources, but it has a number of useful time-saving features: It is UK-based so JANET users should get very fast response.
Resources are evaluated and catalogued by specialist staff, not by an automatic process, resulting in a relatively small database of significant resources.
Many searches will produce a small number of hits, with few irrelevant items for users to scan and filter.
When searching for an unusual name, e.g.
a project or organisation such as JUGL, JIBS or EDULIB, there will usually be just one precise hit in response to a search.
Abstracts are held in BUBL LINK summarising the content of the resource, so less time is wasted contacting and investigating sites trying to find out whether they are of interest.
A record located in the BUBL system The limitation inherent in this approach is that the database of catalogued resources is small compared to the Internet resource base as a whole.
To put it another way, if you are searching for information on a very specific topic you might not find it in BUBL LINK.
In this case it is worth trying BUBL Search [3] before resorting to the unpredictable Net Search button on the browser.
As well as options for searching different areas of BUBL, this contains numerous links to major Internet search services.
The aim is to provide links to search options that are deliberately limited to certain topics or certain countries, as well as to the popular general search programs.
The usefulness of these limited-area searches varies according to topic.
The concept is powerful and potentially very useful, but at present the results offered are variable and some subjects are not yet covered by limited area searches.
Organising information In order to provide effective access to information, libraries have to ensure that their holdings are well organised.
However, many individual library staff have less optimal ways of organising documents, browser bookmarks and email messages.
Use of BUBL can help librarians improve their own electronic filing systems.
Instead of storing a large collection of URLs and messages, librarians can rely on BUBL to do much of this organisation of information for them and to keep it up to date.
For example, the BUBL UK service [4] provides an extensive index to organisations and institutions in the UK, including central and local government, universities and colleges, libraries, companies and political parties.
Some indexes are held on BUBL, some elsewhere, but this scarcely matters to users.
As long as an institution can be found via this route, there is no need to keep a bookmark unless the site is frequently accessed.
It is more useful and efficient to use a few good starting points and learn routes to information than to bookmark a large number of individual locations which then have to be organised in some way.
The same principle applies to use of the BUBL News service [5], which holds (amongst other things) details of forthcoming events, job vacancies and survey reports.
Much of this information is circulated to library mailing lists, and subscribers to these lists can read and immediately delete messages on these topics (instead of cluttering up their email folders) safe in the knowledge that the information will be held in the relevant area of BUBL News (with live links to any URLs mentioned).
The service also allows library staff to consider unsubscribing from some lists, with the reassurance that they can easily find any significant items via BUBL News.
The same advantages are available at an institutional level as well as a personal level.
Most libraries with their own web pages will offer a collection of links to useful external Internet resources.
This means that the person or group who maintains these pages has to decide which links to include and how to organise them.
The task is much more important than for personal bookmarks, as the organisation and updating of departmental pages requires substantial time and care if they are to be used and respected.
Library web editors can make their job easier by relying on BUBL LINK to provide organised subject-based access to Internet resources.
Many libraries and other resource collections already do this by linking to specific areas of the BUBL LINK subject tree, which allows webmasters to customise their external links to reflect local interests without having to duplicate any of the content.
If any important resources turn out to be missing from BUBL LINK there is a simple solution send details to bubl@bubl.ac.uk and the item will be assessed and added within the week.
Keeping up-to-date The BUBL Journals service provides a quick and easy method of staying in touch with recent developments in library and information science (LIS).
It contains over 140 LIS journals, magazines or newsletters; in most cases the contents and abstracts are stored, though some have contents only.
There are also twelve full-text LIS publications, including Associates, EJournal, Libres, MC Journal, PACS Review and the Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues.
Each title can be searched individually, or all LIS journals can be searched collectively.
Titles are organised into twelve main LIS subject areas to assist browsing [6].
Coverage of most titles stretches back to the early days of BUBL, around 1991 or 1992, so the Journals service also provides an extensive and useful reference service.
Where journals have their own home page then this is linked from the relevant journal page on BUBL.
Each week details of new additions to BUBL Journals are added to the BUBL Updates file, along with additions to other areas of BUBL, and this is posted to LIS mailing lists as well as appearing in the BUBL News service [7].
There are also two journal update lists, lis-bubl-e2 and lis-bubl-e2med, for those who wish to receive the full abstracts by email rather than just a list of new titles.
A separate file for BUBL LINK Updates holds the title and abstract of recent additions to the BUBL LINK catalogue.
This is also distributed via email, to lis-subjects and lis-link.
Helping other library staff Ever since BUBL began it has aimed to foster links within the LIS community and to encourage cooperation, and this is still the case today.
BUBL runs a number of mailing lists of interest to librarians, the best known of which is lis-link.
The list acts both as a current awareness service where members can announce new services and a debating medium where there can be fierce discussions on the issues of the day.
The membership of lis-link averages around 2500 members and the traffic on the list can be very informative.
There is also a lighter side to lis-link, with discussions encompassing Railtrack timetables and music-hall lyrics.
One regular feature of lis-link is the posting of informal survey reports about academic libraries and related topics.
The accepted convention is that anyone asking for help and feedback from others should summarise the results and post them to the list.
Topics range from cataloguing of e-journals to names of recommended removals companies.
These survey reports are extracted and stored in a searchable directory on BUBL News, along with survey reports from other lists [8].
Collecting these reports together on BUBL allows librarians to check whether a topic has been dealt with recently before sending a similar query to the same list.
The service is also used and appreciated by LIS students researching projects and essay topics.
Another area of BUBL News offering a cooperative service is Offers and Requests.
This is used to announce duplicate or surplus journal holdings for disposal or to request missing items.
This is the area of BUBL that most closely resembles the original bulletin board idea.
The diverse needs of the LIS community are reflected in the development of specialist services within BUBL LINK.
The most developed of these to date is AcqLink for acquisitions librarians [9].
Set up in partnership with Catherine Nicholson, Acquisitions Librarian at Glasgow Caledonian University, this area provides a self-contained collection for those involved in acquisitions.
The service covers journals, discussion lists, organisations, online services and library suppliers, and has links to the ever increasing lists of publishers and booksellers contained elsewhere in the catalogue.
Initial user feedback on the AcqLink service has been very positive.
For example: Acqlink is a welcome addition to the online resources available to all those involved in library acquisitions and collection development.
It supplements the well-established Acqweb, which although excellent is naturally aimed primarily at American users.
Now British and European acquisitions personnel have a comparable resource directly related to their needs.
Although only just established, there is already a wealth of information on Acqlink.
It is particularly helpful to have data on library suppliers together in one place.
Similarly, the journal contents pages are more accessible on Acqlink than on a more general list.
Acquisitions is a multidisciplinary field, so the links to publishers, copyright, etc are a bonus.
Of immediate practical use are such pages as currency converters and price studies.
The ‘bulletin board’ function is well served by the News section.
On the evidence so far, I am sure the huge amount of work put in by Catherine Nicholson and others to create and maintain Acqlink will be fully justified by the resulting service.
I hope all acquisitions librarians with access to the Internet make good use of it.
Jim Vickery Head of English Language Selection and Serials The British Library Helping library users For librarians involved in answering user enquiries or showing others how to find information on the Internet, BUBL LINK and BUBL Search may be particularly useful, as illustrated earlier.
As well as the many search options, the BUBL Search service provides detailed help with searching and holds a selection of search guides.
BUBL as a whole also offers new users a fixed and reliable starting point for Internet exploration.
For those who simply want an introduction to the Web rather than looking for anything specific, the random browse feature of BUBL LINK may well be of interest [10].
This contains a collection of links extracted at random from the BUBL LINK database yet organised within subject categories.
This is the only area of BUBL that was set up more ‘because it was possible’ rather than ‘because it would be useful’, yet it has proved to be an extremely popular feature.
The random links are updated every week, so many users make return visits.
BUBL also hosts pages for a number of user groups and other organisations involved in electronic library provision, including: JIBS JISC Bibliographic Data Services User Group JUGL JANET User Group for Libraries CATRIONA II eLib project investigating university management of electronic resources UK HUG Horizon User Group in the UK The best way to locate these at present is to search BUBL LINK.
BUBL is also managing a project funded by the National Library of Scotland to provide a service offering conspectus data from the Scottish Research Collections Online, on behalf of the Scottish Consortium of University and Research Libraries (SCURL).
Future developments Now that the new BUBL service is well established there needs to be a period of consolidation, review and content enhancement while possible new developments are considered.
At the same time as planning ahead, BUBL continues to hold almost all the information that has been part of the service for many years.
The searchable BUBL Archive [11] is home to many thousands of files from the old BUBL service.
Although much of this information seems out-of-date, usage figures show that it is still of value to those researching past Internet developments, or looking for references to older journal articles or email messages.
Two aspects of the BUBL service that are certainly set to develop are the use of metadata and the provision of Z39.50 access.
The BUBL LINK database already includes extensive metadata, in the form of DDC numbers, LCSH keywords, item abstracts and resource type entries.
There are already plans to make existing fields more consistent with the emerging Dublin Core standard for resource description, even though not all the elements of Dublin Core are likely to be used.
BUBL is one of the few national services already offering access via the Z39.50 protocol as well as via HTTP, but at present only BUBL LINK is available via this route.
There are plans to further develop this and to investigate the extension of Z39.50 access to other areas of BUBL, in co-operation with other organisations such as UKOLN.
Other development plans are to some extent dependent on the overall JISC strategy, as BUBL is funded by JISC and is keen to cooperate with other national services and projects while maintaining and developing existing services to users.
Further details of BUBL itself and individual contact details are provided in the BUBL Admin pages [12].
BUBL staff are always pleased to receive comments and suggestions from service users, preferably by email to bubl@bubl.ac.uk References [1] BUBL Link Service, http://bubl.ac.uk/link/ [2] Internet resources in Chemistry, http://link.bubl.ac.uk/chemistry/ [3] BUBL Search, http://bubl.ac.uk/searches/ [4] BUBL UK, http://bubl.ac.uk/uk/ [5] BUBL News, http://bubl.ac.uk/news/ [6] LIS journals held by BUBL, http://bubl.ac.uk/journals/lis/ [7] Current BUBL updates, http://bubl.ac.uk/news/updates/current.html [8] LIS survey reports, http://bubl.ac.uk/news/surveys/ [9] AcqLink, http://link.bubl.ac.uk/acqlink/ [10] BUBL LINK random browse feature, http://bubl.ac.uk/link/random/ [11] BUBL Archive, http://bubl.ac.uk/archive/ [12] BUBL Admin, http://bubl.ac.uk/admin/ Author Details Alan Dawson, BUBL Manager, and Jan Simpson, Information Officer BUBL, Email: bubl@bubl.ac.uk Tel: 0141 548 4752 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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Public Libraries Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner Buzz software licence cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS In the Public Libraries Corner for this issue, a guest writer, Catherine Wrathall, writes about the current provision of Internet-based community information in public libraries.
Methods of locating, obtaining and presenting information continue to increase at an unprecedented rate.
The recent review of public libraries published by the Department of National Heritage [1] emphasised the government’s view that public libraries are the logical choice as facilitators of access to information in all its multiplicity of formats.
Community librarians, in particular, are expected to assist in the fulfillment of the information needs specific to the community served.
Community information ranges from ephemera such as bus timetables to directories of local voluntary organisations.
Whilst the information required may not be physically held in the public library, the knowledge of how to obtain it should be.
Community information has traditionally been presented in printed format, and frequently as collections of pamphlets on various issues.
Initiatives such as Citizens' Charters have meant that information available to members of the public is expanding, although the methods of locating it may not be well publicised.
It has been said that "the value of information derives from the consequences of its use" [2].
Without an intermediary, much community information may be inaccessible to those people whose need is the greatest.
Some librarians see Information Technology (IT), and the Internet in particular, as the optimum method of information provision.
Wood [3] went so far as to say that "if they do not seize the chances now offered my own feeling would be that the public libraries would end up as neglected backwaters deprived of funding and gradually losing their purpose".
It appears that such warnings are being taken seriously, especially by community librarians.
An increasing number of Community Information Networks (CINs) are now being created in Britain with the aim of facilitating access to information held at various locations, not solely within the public library.
All the relevant sources of information are gathered under one umbrella service, allowing users guided access to a wider range of information than has previously been available to them and giving information providers a platform in which they have confidence.
Current initiatives in community information provision Who is connected and how do they use their connections?
Recent research [4] found that whilst 53% of public library authorities were connected to the Internet only 2% of individual service points had access, and of those only 20% permitted public access.
At the time of the survey it was discovered that 23% of British public library authorities were actively investigating use of the Internet, mainly through Project EARL.
It is not known how many were planning CINs, nor is it clear how many CINs have been created.
A search of the World Wide Web (WWW) using the Infoseek search engine discovered 11,896 entries using the keywords community and information.
However, the majority of these were not British, or not public library services.
Examples include Southampton University’s Community Information site and the Citizens' Advice Bureau's Manchester site which uses community and information as search keys.
The addresses for these Web sites, and others which may be of interest, are shown in the bibliography at the end of this article.
This may be because not all CINs are registered with search engine providers.
The Manchester Community Information Network (MCIN) [5] for example, is not registered as it provides dedicated terminals at various locations around the city, including several public libraries, and does not provide links to general Internet access.
It provides a wide range of community information, provided by a range of voluntary sector and statutory agencies, all of which is relevant to people living in Manchester and some of which may be of interest to a wider audience (for example national voluntary organisations).
The service is, at present, free to users.
Ways to connect The Manchester Public Library is one of the key partners in MCIN, other public libraries participate in local government initiatives [6].
The Cambridge Online City Terminal, for example, is "a fully sponsored terminal, using the Internet, which provides access to a wide range of Cambridge-based information" [7].
Some recent initiatives utilise new products developed by library systems suppliers.
An example of this is Hertfordshire Public Library which uses ALS’s Infocentre.
Edinburgh has one of the longest established CINs which has expanded from 4 locations in 1993 to 23 in 1995, all in public libraries [8].
The Linwood Information Project (Linfo) and the Whitehill Resource Centre, Hamilton are both Scottish projects providing online access to community information.
Linfo, however, interprets the information for users, whilst Whitehill’s policy is to provide access without interpretation [9].
The latter approach is not unusual.
Much of the literature concerning public library provision of information via the Internet implies that access is unguided except in a limited manner.
Batt [10] describes ITPoint in Solihull as providing "public access PCs, with resources including CD-ROM, computer-assisted learning packages, spreadsheet and word processing and, of course, Internet access" but not guidance in accessing relevant information.
In Cumbria it was decided that the public library authority would provide "public access to the Web and a very basic introduction as to how to access and start to search, but after that it was up to users to find their own way around" [11].
Access may be enabled by implementing a public library specific CIN, as a partner within a wider initiative, or by ensuring that any CIN which is created by other agencies includes the public library as a source of information.
Unless information relevant to the community is collected and presented in an understandable, accessible style it is debatable whether a service can be described as a CIN.
Commercial breaks Private sector involvement The funding of new services and the high cost of new technology are issues which must be addressed.
Several projects have obtained funding from outside the public sector.
Input/Output, KPMG and Global Internet are examples of private sector funding of information services in public libraries.
Input/Output is involved in several projects, including Cambridge Online.
KPMG is a partner in MCIN.
Global Internet has created Cybercity at Bath Central Library.
This has been described as "a cybercafe (without the coffee!)"
[12].
It is a profit making venture by the company with no involvement of the public library service other than free provision of space.
Whilst this may mean that the library gains kudos because it houses a high-tech development, it has very little control over the information provided.
Although users of the library might assume Cybercity is a public service and expect access to community information this is not the case.
Private companies may become involved in community information provision for altruistic purposes but they may also need to make a profit and consequently wish to charge commercial rates for access to the service.
It is important that the public library service ethos is not lost in the enthusiasm to provide state of the art information systems.
It has been stated that "A democratic society, it is argued, should provide facilities for citizens to become informed so that they can fully participate in economic, social, political and cultural life.
A main way of doing this is for citizens to have access to resources and information regardless of the ability to pay" [13].
Users requiring access to community information may very well be those least likely to have that ability to pay.
Great caution must be exercised to ensure that commercial considerations are not permitted to replace community needs.
Charging for inclusion on the CIN is another factor which may cause conflict between the needs of the community and the private sector service provider.
As Sawyer [14] indicated "for most Web site authors, advertising is their only possible source of income".
Private sector companies might interpret inclusion of an organisation or service on a CIN as advertising and therefore a source of income.
This would possibly result in a reduction in the amount of useful information accessible to users.
Policies Whilst all the major political parties have publicly announced a commitment to enabling all public libraries to access the Internet, none appears to have a policy for the utilisation of such a connection.
Public library service librarians should ensure that policies are created which include the provision of CINs and training in the use of the technology.
National guidelines on the content and functionality of CINs should be prepared to allow rapid implementation of effective services once connection to the Internet is established.
The issue of training needs to be addressed if the opportunities offered by connection are to be maximised.
It has recently been stated that training will be provided for every member of the population [15] although it is as yet unclear as to how funding for training will be provided.
Alternatives include funds from central government, from public library service allocations from local government or, possibly, as part of partnership agreements with private sector companies involved in the projects.
The Library Association together with the Library and Information Commission created the Millennium Bid which addressed many of the issues concerning the Internet, including training.
However, the bid was not successful at its second attempt.
The users Web crawlers of arachnaphobes?
Information for all According to Comedia [16] public libraries are "regarded as democratic, non-partisan, above sectional interests, inhabiting the value-free world of scholarship", a view which should mean that users feel comfortable and secure using public library services.
This could be of particular importance for those using community information services as they may feel discomfort at requiring the information or needing help.
To be presented with a computerised system with which they are unfamiliar or uncomfortable may present a barrier to their accessing information freely.
The needs of the users are paramount for community information service librarians.
Whilst it is important that public libraries should be at the forefront of the exploitation of the Internet it must be recognised that it will be many years before computer literacy is as widespread as text literacy is currently.
Public librarians must therefore be prepared to provide community information in forms which make it accessible to all members of the community.
Pateman [17] recently expressed concern about the declining usage of public library services amongst the more deprived members of society.
Undue emphasis on the use of technologies which this sector of the community is unable or unwilling to use may well exacerbate that trend.
Community profiling should ideally be an integral part of the provision of community information services in public libraries.
Analysis of the structure of the community can enable librarians to identify its information needs.
Statistics on computer literacy and the desire to use the technology should also be gathered to facilitate decisions as to formats used for the presentation of information.
The diversity of needs Users may need information in a format they can remove from the library, as public access materials for use in the library, or as more complex resources for use with the assistance of a librarian.
It may be necessary to present the information in several languages for members of the community for whom English is a second language.
The needs of people with disabilities must also be taken into account, for example by providing braille, audio or large print versions of information resources.
Information technology may be of assistance in providing information in various formats as software is now available allowing braille, audio and large print input and output.
The diversity of user needs and expectations means that community information services must be tailored to the requirements of each specific community.
It is generally agreed that information on work, money, family and housing related issues should form the basis for all public library community information services.
Certain other types of information, such as that provided in Citizens' Charters, will also be relevant to all communities, but others will be more specific.
For example, a proposal to construct a new motorway in an area may create demand for information on compensation, environmental issues and planning committee procedures.
Community librarians must be able to respond to such needs as and when they arise.
In order to do so they must be aware of the community’s current information needs and of developments which may affect them.
They must also be aware of organisations which may provide necessary information, both locally and nationally.
The Internet may provide a useful source of up to the minute information to enable community information services to respond to changing needs.
The future The presentation of community information As Usherwood [18] stated "community information is not only, or even primarily, a library function.
It is an activity which involves a wide range of organisations and many different forms of communications media".
It could therefore be said that the role of the public library community information service is to identify, locate, interpret and present this range of information in a manner which is accessible to all members of the community served.
One example of this is the printed guide produced by the Ferguskie project and distributed to each household in the community [19].
The guide contains information on council and Department of Social Security issues and details of community organisations.
Information must be current and not outdated if it is to fulfil its purpose.
The librarian must endeavour to ensure currency of information displayed, although this is not always easy to identify for either printed or electronic resources.
The amount of information available electronically is increasing rapidly.
The Government Direct initiative, for example, aims to make a substantial amount of government information available in the near future, including tax and driving licence payment procedures online via the Internet.
There are still relatively few people who have personal access to the Internet either at work, or at home.
This creates the possibility of an information ‘underclass’ of those who have no access to certain information.
Public library community information services are in a position to help prevent this.
Electronic access Public librarians are seen as impartial, and therefore trustworthy, with no hidden political or commercial agenda, by both the public and information providers.
They are, therefore, ideally suited to act as key-holders to community information held on the Internet.
CINs are an early example of this.
Whilst the public library is trusted as an institution there are concerns amongst information providers that users may download information from CINs for commercial reason.
Librarians will need to investigate and implement methods of preventing this to ensure confidence in their service.
New definitions of community?
The advent of the Internet and other technological advances may change people’s definition of "community".
It is now possible to remain a member of one community whilst physically living in another.
An example of this is a person who lives in Dallas, Texas, USA who organises the Huddersfield Town Football Club web site on the Internet, thus remaining a part of that community [19].
Perhaps CINs may be used by people who have emotional links to a community as well as those who are resident there.
Librarians may need to include, and allow for, the impact of this "virtual" community when assessing the usage of CINs and when performing community profiles.
Conclusion It is obvious that the Internet and other technologies are going to have an enormous impact on the delivery of community information within public libraries.
However, the needs of the whole community must be taken into account, and not only those of the computer literate.
The community information provision within the library must be constantly monitored to ensure that it meets the needs of the community in the optimum way.
CINs are an excellent addition to the resources available for community information provision in public libraries.
Until such time as the community achieves equivalent levels of text and computer literacy such services should be run in parallel with more traditional, text based services.
The role which public librarians are best suited, and most able, to play in the provision of community information is as facilitators of free and equal access to community information in all its formats and from all its sources for all members of the community.
In so doing they will enable users to obtain the knowledge which they are in danger of losing in the current flood of information.
References Department of National Heritage et al.1997.
Reading the future: a review of public libraries in England.
London: Department of National Heritage.
Barugh, John.
1989.
The relationship between community librarianship and community information.
In: Astbury, Raymond, ed.
(1989).
Putting people first: some new perspectives on community librarianship.
Newcastle under Lyme: AAL Publishing, 39.
Wood, Mark, 1995.
Leading the charge or holding the fort?
Library Association Record, 97(12), 659.
Ormes, Sarah and Dempsey, Lorcan.
1995.
Library and Information Commission public library Internet survey: first public report 20th December 1995, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/publib/lic.html Gallimore, Alec, (1996), Putting partnership on the Web Library Association Record, 98(4), p.205.
Sheffield University, U.K. community information networks, http://panizzi.shef.ac.uk/community/ Anonymous, 1996, Free access to the Internet, Library Association Record.
98(8), 388.
Dobson, Philippa, 1995, Information crosses new frontiers, Library Association Record: technology supplement, 97(11), 13.
Hasson, Alan C., 1996, Reaching out, In.
Kinnell, Margaret and Sturges, Paul, 1996.
Continuity and innovation in the public library: the development of a social institution.
London: Library Association Publishing, 148-166.
Batt, Chris, 1995, Networking for the world, Library Association Record year in review supplement.
97(12), 13.
Welton, Alan, 1996, Surfing in Cumbria, Public Library Journal.11(5), p146.
Ormes, Sarah, 1996, Public libraries corner: Commercial partnerships in the public library, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/ Comedia, 1993, Borrowed time: the future of public libraries in the UK, Bourne Green: Comedia, 39.
Sawyer, Don, 1996, The Net’s big commercial break, Internet Today.
November 1996, 32.
Her Majesty’s Government, Government direct: a prospectus for the electronic delivery of government services, http://www.open.gov.uk/ Comedia, 1993.
Borrowed time: the future of public libraries in the UK, Bourne Green: Comedia, 16.
Pateman, John, 1996, A question of breeding, Library Association Record 98(7), 362-363.
Usherwood, Bob, 1992.
Community information, In.
Kinnell, Margaret, ed., 1992.
Informing communities.
Newcastle: CSG Publishing Ltd. 20 Dyce, C. S., 1996, Huddersfield Town football club, http://www.uwm.edu/~dyce/htfc/ Author Details Catherine Wrathall is a third year student on the BA(Hons) Information and Library Management course in the Department of Library and Information Science, Manchester Metropolitan University.
This article about the provision of community information on the Internet by public libraries was inspired by the Community Information option taught by Margaret Kendall, who has provided guidance in editing the work for publication.
The views expressed are individual and not necessarily those shared by the Department of Library and Information Science.
Email: tau@fire900.demon.co.uk Department Web pages: http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/lis/ Tel: 0161 247 1753 Address: The Humanities Building, Rosamond St West, Manchester M15 6LL Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UKERNA: Training the Networkers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines UKERNA: Training the Networkers Buzz data software html copyright video Citation BibTex RIS John MacCulloch and Jane Batchelor, from UKERNA, detail their training course, designed for those installing, running, supporting, or managing a JANET connection.
Computer networking forms the basis for a whole raft of new information technologies; electronic mail, world wide web, networked data services, electronic mailing list services, electronic journals, on-demand publishing, and electronic document delivery to name but a few.
Staff who are required to run services based on such technologies obviously need an understanding of the underlying networking.
An examination of computer networking course provision at higher education institutions reveals a plethora of courses on WWW browsing and html generation.
Alongside the wordprocessing, electronic mail, and spreadsheet courses they form the bread and butter of the Computer Services training provision.
Whilst such courses are adequate for, and indeed designed for, end-users there is little evidence of training courses for the staff who are required to provide, run or support the networks.
Short of highly specialised and expensive commercial courses on TCP/IP, or similar, there is little other than on the job training.
This gap is filled by UKERNA's training courses, which were initially designed for staff at sites with new JANET connections.
Such sites had generally been found to be lacking the knowledge necessary to set up their wide area networking.
The courses generated have been made available to staff at established sites where they were found to be highly advantageous in bringing new staff 'up to speed'.
The funding for this development was provided by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
The training differs from that provided by the majority of institutions in that it is aimed at the staff running, delivering and supporting the network rather than at end-users.
It contains material on the hardware and software of networking, networking management, networking applications other than web, and the security implications of installing a network.
The course focuses on the JANET network by including material on policy and funding as well as value added services provided by the JISC.
Increasing attention is being paid to newer technologies as exemplified by sections on video conferencing and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM).
This course has undergone extensive modification since its initial delivery.
This has, to a large extent, been as a result of the feedback from attendees, but has also been caused by the need to keep up to date with changes in the technology.
In an effort to make the training accessible to the maximum number of sites, courses are delivered in different locations.
Courses have been held in London (3 times), Glasgow (twice), Cardiff, Belfast, Sussex, and Durham.
We generally like to limit sessions to not more than 20 attendees, and each session includes several hours 'hands-on' practice with various networking applications.
Comprehensive course documentation is supplied to every attendee.
As well as training courses for networking staff UKERNA also run a variety of workshops.
These include, on an annual basis, Networkshop for technical staff, User Support for support staff, and Networking Strategy for Directors.
Ad-hoc workshops on specific subjects are organised as required, recent examples include workshops on network security and video conferencing.
For further details of the courses and timetables see our web pages under http://www.ja.net/training/training.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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MIDRIB Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MIDRIB Buzz software database archives metadata digitisation copyright cataloguing png gif cd-rom standards Citation BibTex RIS Julian Cook describes a major database of medical images.
The task of MIDRIB ('Medical Images Digitised Reference Information Bank') is to create a system for the creation, storage and networked delivery of image-related information.
This involves a complex chain of events that takes an image from its raw form (such as a slide on a clinician's shelf) to the point where the user can retrieve it individually from a digital networked resource of potentially hundreds of thousands of items.
In between it has to be captured in digital form and described so that it can be retrieved.
This sequence demands a range of processes and software tools.
Securing new sets of images for MIDRIB requires all the stages in this procedure to be in place.
These include copyright, patient permission, digitisation, and cataloguing and indexing.
Most of the database development work is taking place using existing medical image collections that will form part of MIDRIB, such as the Bristol Biomedical Image Archive and the TICTAC database.
MIDRIB is also developing a 'shopping list' of key images which the archive should contain.
At the moment this is being done for Obstetrics & Gynaecology and Cardiology.
Because the Internet is so widely accessible and its content so easily manipulated, it is important that we ensure that patients are clear about what they agreeing to, and that they understand the medium.
MIDRIB has produced guidelines and information documents on this issue.
These also tackle the question of patient permission relating to older images acquired before the concept and potential of the Internet were realised.
The documents produced have been approved by the Bristol Ethical Committee, and are awaiting approval from St George's Ethical Committee.
The exponential growth of the Internet means that many groups are now addressing the copyright implications of this new medium with some urgency.
MIDRIB's main task in this area has been to examine the work already done and apply it to our situation.
We have received considerable input and help from the Wellcome Trust in this area, as well as from the Designers' and Artists' Copyright Society, and have now prepared a draft form for contributors, which has gone to our legal consultants for their opinion.
MIDRIB database records will consist primarily of images.
However, it will clearly be necessary for the records also to contain some text fields, in order that the images can be searched for and retrieved.
We are now in the process of finalising and implementing a provisional list of the fields for each database entry.
MIDRIB will use the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) classification system and the UMLS (United Medical Language System) medical thesauri to assist search and retrieval from the database.
One of the main advantages of using MeSH is that the system will already be familiar to anyone who regularly uses Medline.
This choice has been taken with input from the Wellcome Tropical Medicine Resource and OMNI (Organised Medical Networked Information) projects, both of which have been faced with a similar decision.
Subject experts will provide concise but comprehensive descriptions of the image, providing information to MIDRIB's medical indexer.
A database of images is very different from a purely text-based resource and requires specialised technical solutions.
We are participating in a working collaboration with System Simulation, a company with an excellent track record in image databases, which is already involved with a number of similar projects in the Higher Education sector.
MIDRIB is using the company's Index Plus software, and together we will be extending the facilities of the package.
It is likely that images will be stored in the MIDRIB database in PNG format, which is attractive because of its 'non-lossy' compression (where information is not lost during decompression) and its ability to store metadata within the file.
It was developed in response to the licensing problems that have emerged with the GIF format.
We are also investigating DICOM, an emerging standard in USA radiography and microbiology.
It is vital that end-users are able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily, whether they are students, teachers or researchers.
MIDRIB has decided to offer several different ways of finding images in the database.
Free-text searching, structured browsing through the MeSH tree and discipline-based searching will all be available.
With the record structure and searching mechanisms now broadly defined, we are making our first steps in designing a clear, usable and friendly interface which will be consistent and recognisable whether delivered over the Internet or on CD-ROM.
MIDRIB has a mailing list with over 200 members, and the strategy for evaluation is in place and underway.
We will shortly be developing a set of guidelines for people wishing to contribute images.
An initial service will be available by February 1997.
The intention will be to use this for testing and refinement.
It is likely to contain the Bristol Biomedical Archive of approximately 14,000 partiallycatalogued images, the TICTAC database of prescribed and controlled drugs, a Dermatology collection of several hundred fully-catalogued images, several hundred anatomy images, and a collection of Medical Line Drawings.
The official launch of the project will be held at the Royal College of Surgeons in London on February 27 1997.
It will consist of a series of demonstrations of the service, what it contains and how it can be used, as well as presentations and discussions of the technical, ethical and legal issues.
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Interface: Dr Isola Ajiferuke Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: Dr Isola Ajiferuke Buzz software infrastructure standardisation windows research Citation BibTex RIS Sheona Farquhar gains an insight into the problems of the information-poor.
The School of Information and Media at the Robert Gordon University (RGU) [1] in Aberdeen recently hosted Dr Isola Ajiferuke, a visiting researcher from the Africa Regional Centre for Information Science (ARCIS) at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Ajiferuke’s background is in statistics.
He spent the four years from 1986 to 1989 in London, Ontario, studying for the degrees of MLIS and PhD.
On his return to Nigeria he taught for a year at Ibadan Library School and then transferred to the Centre for Information Science.
The Centre, for West Africa, is one of four regional Centres for Information Science in Africa.
The others are in Ethiopia, Botswana and Morocco.
Ajiferuke’s research interests are in information systems design, measurement of information, modelling and simulation of information systems.
While at RGU he will carry out research in support of his current project on the impact of information technology on small and medium scale enterprises in Nigeria.
But he aims also to learn to use new software, particularly Windows-based packages which have become available and more widely used since he left Canada, and to gain experience of Internet resources, having access only to e-mail in Nigeria.
Nigeria’s status as a former British colony has resulted in many aspects of Nigerian libraries and library schools being similar to the UK system.
The major difference is in technology.
The available resources are spread thinly, and students are not adequately exposed to computer applications.
The Regional Information Centre has 20 PCs but these are relatively primitive, running mostly MS-DOS-based software.
Ibadan Library School has only four PCs for 150 students.
University and research libraries, funded by the Nigerian National Universities Commission, are relatively well computerised with internal networks, electronic mail and CDROMs available.
Other types of library, however, have been barely touched by computers, and the information superhighway has yet to extend to them.
Indeed, even in the country’s university libraries there is a low level of Internet access because there is no Nigerian gateway to provide a high bandwidth connection to the Internet.
Commercial service providers claim to provide Internet connections, but in practice the user bears the full cost of expensive international connections.
Awareness of Internet issues has been raised by the Nigeria Internet Group which was formed in 1995 with the assistance of the US Information Service.
Annual meetings and workshops have been organised.
The group is lobbying the Nigerian Government and international agencies for funding to the tune of at least $380,000 to meet the cost of a Nigerian gateway.
Ahead of Nigeria in Internet access provision in the continent are Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Mozambique.
Of these, only South Africa has full Internet availability.
“In West Africa, only Ghana is in a better position than Nigeria” states Ajiferuke.
“With only five universities to Nigeria’s thirty seven, academic Internet connectivity is more affordable.” Network development in the country has been slow because the computing culture has been relatively lowlevel.
The telecommunications infrastructure is poor, and currency devaluation has inflated prices.
The cost of a PC in Nigeria is equivalent to the annual salary of a professor at a Nigerian university.
This means that, unless a grant is available, or someone is returning to Nigeria from North America or Europe with a machine purchased abroad, a PC is beyond the means of all but a very few individuals.
However, job requirements are forcing people to become computer literate.
This has increased awareness that Nigeria is technologically behind and needs to catch up.
But there is a problem in finding adequate funding to satisfy the need.
Library networks are limited mainly to university and research libraries, with Ibadan University at the forefront.
But at present they are not connected to each other.
Communication is by fax at best which makes resource sharing difficult if not impossible.
Most universities are only slowly becoming computerised, and at a high cost.
Telecommunications are not reliable, and standardisation does not exist.
Yet the picture is not all gloomy.
The Nigerian economy has stabilised recently, allowing technological development to progress.
Internet access could be a real boon for rural librarianship in the country.
Farmers in remote, poor areas need to know about disease treatments.
Access to current, reliable information at the point of need could make a real difference to the lives of ordinary working people in an agrarian subsistence economy.
As we contemplate the struggle of this telematically-challenged country to become better informed, the fact that it is the universities which are the first to benefit from Internet access seems somehow ironic, as though a country were building roads only between universities for the benefits of construction engineers to study, ignoring the needs of those for whom remoteness is a threat to their very existence.
As Nigeria develops its information infrastructure and plans its priorities for the superhighway’s route, it must think about the real and very obvious needs of its citizens.
Could there be a lesson for our developed countries in that?
References School of Information and Media, Robert Gordon University http://www.rgu.ac.uk/schools/sim/sim.htm Author Details Sheona Farquhar, Site Librarian (Science & Engineering), Aberdeen University Email: s.c.farquhar@abdn.ac.uk Tel: 01224 272589 Address: Queen Mother Library, Aberdeen University, Aberdeen Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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MIDRIB Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MIDRIB Buzz database repositories copyright multimedia e-learning cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Julian Cook describes a project that deals with the storage and access of medical images.
MIDRIB is a project being undertaken by staff of St George s Hospital Medical School, London and the University of Bristol, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust.
Begun in April 1996, its aim is to create, maintain and deliver a comprehensive collection of medical images in digital form, for use in teaching and research.
The project will gather the best of existing collections from respected professional sources, and draw them together into a coherent resource.
This will be available free to medical and healthcare faculties of UK Universities and teaching hospitals.
It will be accessible via the SuperJanet higher-education network, from a single World Wide Web site, with prototype pages expected to appear during the Autumn of 1996.
Images will also be made available on CD-ROM.
Why are medical images necessary?
Why images?
Images are essential to medicine a picture is worth a thousand words, providing concentrated, accurate information available in no other way.
The field of medicine uses a vast quantity and variety of images, some familiar to the layperson, such as X-rays, CTs, ECGs, and ultrasound scans, and others less familiar, microscopic slides, MR scans and angiograms for example.
Diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions frequently depends on the production and interpretation of images such as those outlined above.
Images are vital for medical education Medical and Healthcare professionals need to be familiar with such pictures from an early stage and will use them throughout their careers.
So why is this MIDRIB project necessary?
Recent curriculum changes in medical education place more emphasis on the use of problem-solving scenarios involving real cases with the associated diagnostic imaging that this implies.
This aims to encourage students to understand the mechanisms of normality and disease by their own investigations, and so students will have an even greater need for access to a comprehensive range of relevant images.
With the trend towards treating patients in the community or as day cases without hospitalisation, medical students now have reduced contact with patients and can thus only gain exposure to many medical conditions through the use of pictures and multimedia resources.
However the availability of such images to students is currently very limited, as they are hard to find and costly to reproduce.
MIDRIB will provide access to images, immediately and without cost, via the WWW or a local network.
Why is a centralised digital resource necessary?
The images ordinarily in use by most clinicians and academics in the field are stored individually and in their original raw format (i.e.
on microscope slides, paper, film, etc.).
In this form these collections can only be made available for use within the originating departments or borrowed at some inconvenience.
The interdisciplinary nature of medicine means that these collections are also of interest to practitioners in a wide range of related subjects allied to medicine.
A centralised bank of digital images will make such resources accessible to all.
Most Medical faculties throughout the UK are building up their own collections of images, which leads to an enormous duplication of effort.
MIDRIB will remove the need for this, transferring images rapidly to all medical schools in the country via the high-speed SuperJanet inter-university network.
What will the project achieve?
As well as the resulting collection of many thousands of high quality images, the project will provide teaching sets of key images, and a series of tools to enable sub-sets of images to be put together.
These will form case-studies for teaching, research and discussion purposes.
MIDRIB will also create a number of ancillary products to be used with the images, including on-line slide-atlases, overlays and annotations, virtual tours, presentation and authoring templates.
The project will make these available via the interface, where appropriate.
A number of workshops and seminars will be arranged to train members of the medical community to turn their own material into digital form, thereby providing them with valuable expertise and enabling them to contribute their material to the MIDRIB resource in the most valuable format.
Workshops will also be held to communicate non-subject specific experience to those engaged in similar work in other disciplines.
MIDRIB will generate experience and expertise in a number of other issues and techniques.
Since many of these will be of a generic nature and not confined to medicine, the project will have a wide application and impact.
They include: copyright of on-line materials classification of images security of controversial images the financial position of contributors, etc.
patient permission a registration procedure which will help to prevent unauthorised access and improper use.
the technical considerations involved in the efficient acquisition, maintenance and Internet delivery of a very large distributed image database As this project matures during the next couple of years, this resource has the potential to become the natural repository for collections of images produced by individuals and departments throughout the Higher Education sector an easily-accessible, comprehensive and continually growing store of medical images.
Contact Details Please contact Julian Cook, MIDRIB Publicity Officer, at the Centre for Learning Technology in Medicine, University of Bristol, Royal Fort Annexe, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1UJ.
Tel: (0117) 928 8116, Fax: (0117) 925 5985, Email: jules.cook@bristol.ac.uk   Project Manager: Jill Szuscikiewicz, MIDRIB, Medical School Foyer, St George's Hospital Medical School, Cranmer Terrace, London SW17 0RE.
Tel: (0181) 725 3204, Fax: (0181) 725 3583, Email: MIDRIB@sghms.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Around the Table – Engineering Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Around the Table – Engineering Buzz data software database video cataloguing hypertext visualisation passwords ejournal research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod casts an EEVL eye over engineering resources.
Gateways EEVL: The Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library [1] can, I believe, make a fair claim to be the UK gateway to engineering information on the Internet, but it is not the only top level engineering gateway.
Other catalogues and lists of Internet-based engineering resources include ICE: Internet Connections in Engineering [2] with a bias towards American resources, CEN: Canadian Engineering Network [3], pointing only to Canadian resources, EELS: Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden [4], the WWW Virtual Library: Engineering [5], again focused mostly on US resources, and the subscription-based Ei Village[6].
BUBL [7] and NISS [8] also include details of selected engineering resources.
There are also subject-based lists such as the UK Building Resource Pages [9] and the Building Information Warehouse [10].
The resources: An analysis of the 1700 quality sites included in EEVL’s Main Database of Engineering Resources gives an overview of the makeup of engineering information on the Internet.
EEVL’s breakdown by resource type is as follows (resources can be of more than one type): Commercial 540 Society/Institution 276 Higher Education 272 Resource Guide/Directory 153 E-journal/Newsletter 112 Governmental 101 Document 73 Research Project/Centre 62 Mailing/Discussion List 61 Software 58 Database/Databank 49 Training Materials 39 Reference 31 Recruitment/Employment 22 Patents/Standards 20 Conference/Meeting Announcements 10 Frequently Asked Questions 8 Video 6 Library Catalogues 5 There is a preponderance of commercial/company sites, a large number of professional associations, societies, institutions and trade associations, and the majority of engineering departments at UK universities now have their own servers.
A growing number of e-journals/newsletters are becoming available, but perhaps the surprise in the list is the relatively small number of reference and documents sites.
It is impossible to choose which are the most useful sites in each category, as usefulness depends entirely the information required at a given time.
The following selections of mostly UK resources are therefore only indicative of what is available, and may omit various substantial or favourite sites.
There is considerable uniformity in the content of engineering departmental Web sites from UK universities.
Understandably, nearly all showcase their departments and are aimed primarily at prospective students.
Most consist of a profile of the department, giving details of research, teaching and courses on offer, a staff directory, lists of departmental publications, a contact address, and often local information.
While occasional gems can be found, especially in the areas of research interests and special projects, few match the content of some sites from larger US universities such as North Carolina State University’s Visualizations in Materials Science [11] which has interactive modules in materials science, or the Polymer Chemistry Hypertext [12] resource from the University of Missouri.
Many professional associations have developed substantial Internet resources.
Especially notable is the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) [13] site which contains not only the sort of information one might expect about the Institution, its Groups and activities, but also provides access to the IEE library catalogue, the text of Interlink [14] its quarterly international newsletter, an industry news section, a lengthy events calendar, and exhaustive links to related Web sites.
Other important associations with useful sites include the Institution of Civil Engineers [15] with its ICENet News [16] section giving industry news.
A user-id and password is required to access the ICE Library Catalogue, and the home page of the New Civil Engineer [17], the magazine of the Institution of Civil Engineers, is found at a completely different site.
The Society of Chemical Industry [18] has an impressive amount of material at its site, including an excellent online version of its twice monthly printed publication, Chemistry & Industry [19] which provides news and features on chemistry and related sciences.
Other notable resources include the Welding Institute[20] whose Connecting to the world [21] set of links to related sites is Clearinghouse [22] approved.
The Association of Consulting Engineers [23] with the text of its ACE Journal [24], the Institute of Materials [25], the Institute of Petroleum[26], the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors [27], the Institution of Chemical Engineers [28], and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers [29] (about to be relaunched) are all worth a visit.
Not to be forgotten is the Engineering Council [30].
Perhaps one example will suffice as a typical engineering company Web site.
The most recent one added to EEVL was that of Jenkins Newell Dunford Ltd. [31], a company which designs and manufactures a range of process plant and equipment.
It is attractively designed, but gets straight down to business by giving details of the rotary tube furnaces and swarf cleaning plant available from the company.
Not surprisingly, it reads like a company brochure aimed at those with some knowledge of process engineering.
Engineers tend to have far more interest in product information than their scientific counterparts, and this is reflected in the number of similar commercial engineering Web sites.
Resource guides and directories come in all shapes and sizes.
Engineering UK [32] is fairly typical of the genre with its large database of products and companies, its appointments database, engineering stock price lists, and news stories.
More specialised guides include the Rheology Home Page [33], the Offshore Engineering Information Service [34], SteelWeb [35], the promising ChemWeb [36], and the PVC Centre [37].
EEVL’s Evaluation Report[38] noted a demand by engineers for online journals.
Versions of a number of good quality trade journals are available on the Web, and some have been mentioned above.
Others include Electrical Review [39], Electronics Weekly Hyperactive [40], and the Mining Journal [41].
A growing number of subscription-based e-journals are being published, for example Estates Gazette Interactive [42], and there are many sites giving tables of contents and abstracts, rather than the full text of articles, such as the International Journal of Numerical Methods in Engineering [43].
On the whole, engineering does not fare as well as other disciplines in this area, although the development of the following refereed e-journals bodes well for the future: Terra-Nova: The European Journal of Geosciences [44], Journal of Corrosion Science and Engineering [45], and Optical Diagnostics in Engineering [46].
The Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) [47] at Oxford University should be included in any list of good UK engineering sites, as should Contaminated Land [48].
Criticism is occasionally levied at the quality of resources found on the Internet.
I hope that the above examples, which do not include various mailing lists, recruitment agencies, reference materials, software, and other categories, show that there are a number of very useful engineering resources currently available.
It is still early days in the life of the Internet, and one exciting feature of being involved with EEVL is in seeing new sites being announced every day.
References EEVL: The Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ ICE: Internet Connections in Engineering, http://www.englib.cornell.edu/ice/ice-index.html CEN: Canadian Engineering Network http://www.transenco.com/ EELS: Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden http://www.ub2.lu.se/eel/eelhome.html WWW Virtual Library: Engineering, http://arioch.gsfc.nasa.gov/wwwvl/engineering.html Ei Village, http://www.ei.org/eihomepage/village/intro.html BUBL, http://link.bubl.ac.uk/engineering/ NISS, http://www.niss.ac.uk/subject/62menu.html UK Building, Resource Pages, http://www.ukbrp.co.uk/ Building Information Warehouse, http://www.biw.co.uk/ Visualizations in Materials Science, http://vims.ncsu.edu/home/home.html Polymer Chemistry Hypertext, http://www.umr.edu/~wlf/ Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), http://www.iee.org.uk/ Interlink http://www.iee.org.uk/Internat/Intlink/ Institution of Civil Engineers, http://www.ice.org.uk/ ICENet News, http://www.ice.org.uk/ice/whatsnew/icenet.html New Civil Engineer Web Site, http://www.emap.com/construct/ncho.htm The Society of Chemical Industry, http://sci.mond.org/ Chemistry & Industry Web Site, http://ci.mond.org/ Welding Institute Web Site, http://www.twi.co.uk/ Connecting to the world, http://www.twi.co.uk/links.html Clearinghouse http://www.clearinghouse.net/ Association of Consulting Engineers http://www.acenet.co.uk/ ACE Journal, http://www.acenet.co.uk/services/library/library.htm Institute of Materials, http://www.instmat.co.uk/ Institute of Petroleum, http://www.petroleum.co.uk/petroleum/ Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, http://www.rics.org.uk/ Institution of Chemical Engineers, http://icheme.chemeng.ed.ac.uk/ Institution of Mechanical Engineers, http://www.imeche.org.uk/ Engineering Council, http://www.engc.org.uk/welcome.htm Jenkins Newell Dunford Ltd, http://www.jnd.co.uk/ Engineering UK, http://www.engineering-uk.co.uk/ Rheology Home Page, http://www.bohlin.co.uk/index.htm Offshore Engineering Information Service, http://www.eevl.ac.uk/offshore/ SteelWeb, http://www.indconnect.com/steelweb/ ChemWeb, http://Chemweb.com/ PVC Centre, http://www.ramsay.co.uk/pvc/ EEVL’s Evaluation Report, http://www.eevl.ac.uk/evaluation/report.html Electrical Review, http://www.reedbusiness.com/electricalreview/ Electronics Weekly Hyperactive, http://www.electronicsweekly.co.uk/ Mining Journal, http://www.info-mine.com/minpubs/minjournal/weeklysum.html Estates Gazette Interactive, http://www.egi.co.uk/ International Journal of Numerical Methods in Engineering, http://www.ep.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/numeng.html Terra-Nova: The European Journal of Geosciences, http://www.gly.bris.ac.uk/WWW/TerraNova/terranova.html Journal of Corrosion Science and Engineering, http://www.cp.umist.ac.uk/jcse/ Optical Diagnostics in Engineering, http://www.civ.hw.ac.uk/research/flic/ode/odemain.htm The Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), http://joule.pcl.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/ Contaminated Land Web Site, http://www.contaminatedLAND.co.uk/ Author Details Roddy MacLeod Project Manager (Information), EEVL eLib project Email: libram@bonaly.hw.ac.uk Tel: 0131 451 3576 Fax: 0131 451 3164 Address: Heriot-Watt University Library, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EDDIS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EDDIS Buzz data software html database infrastructure copyright z39.50 interoperability Citation BibTex RIS David Larbey writes about EDDIS, one of eLib’s document delivery projects.
The eLib programme categorises EDDIS as a document delivery project, but the concept is broader.
EDDIS is an acronym for electronic document delivery, the integrated solution meaning the integration of document discovery, location, request and receipt into a seamless operation for the end user.
It also means integration with library mediation and management work flow in which requests may be supplied as electronic documents or hard copy either for retention or return.
The core partners in the EDDIS consortium are the University of East Anglia, BIDS, Lancaster University and the University of Stirling, each bringing special knowledge and expertise to the project.
In particular, BIDS’ data services and Lancaster’s interlibrary loan system (ILLOS) are well known.
The consortium has developed a contractual relationship with Fretwell-Downing Informatics Ltd, whose Olib/VDX software provides a substantial foundation.
The consortium is also co-operating with the Australian-led project JEDDS which is upgrading RLG’s Ariel document transmission system.
EDDIS and JEDDS are converging in their closing stages, to develop a close coupled system in which JEDDS can provide document transmission for EDDIS and EDDIS can provide request and document management capability for JEDDS.
Through these alliances EDDIS is implementing international networking standards wherever possible: HTTP/HTML for the graphical end user interface; ANSI/NISO Z39.50 for database search and retrieve; ISO 10160⁄10161 for interlibrary loan; the GEDI Agreement for electronic document interchange; and SMTP/MIME email for ILL message and document transmission.
The breadth of functionality, degree of integration and standards implementation combine to establish unique status for EDDIS.
Not only does it provide the basis of a valuable service now, but positions itself strategically for further development in pace with the continuing evolution of networking standards and cultural shifts in the workplace.
Technology for electronic document delivery is, for the most part, mature.
Yet in practice, it is barely outside the boundaries of experimentation.
The mechanics of EDDIS work, but future success will depend on largely non-technical matters which seem to fall into five categories: connectivity, critical mass, copyright, cost and culture.
Connectivity is important because document delivery is a transaction.
It requires an organisation at both ends and an organised connection between them.
There must be agreement between the parties about the mechanism for giving and receiving otherwise it will not work.
In conventional processes, the supplier provides the customer with instructions and the customer is happy to follow them.
A similar thing happens where the supply business is supported by a proprietary computer system.
The supplier bears the cost of the system and of telling the customer how to use it, but is rewarded by the customer ‘loyalty’ that the system enforces.
Global connectivity, which provides choice and opportunity for supplier and customer alike, is achieved either by building ‘gateways’ between proprietary domains or by implementing global standards of connectivity.
Generally, it is quicker and easier to develop proprietary systems.
The surest way of achieving interoperability, which is developing and implementing standards, appears to be the more troublesome.
The idea of critical mass is associated with connectivity.
A few pioneer implementers of say the ISO ILL protocol do little for creating opportunity and choice in the matter of borrowing and lending documents.
This was the case in Canada for a number of years while the pioneering work was done.
In the US only recently did two commercial organisations celebrate the transmission of an ILL request from one to the other; and in the UK there is currently only one organisation with ILL capability.
In this context it is exciting to learn that BLDSC is starting work on ISO ILL implementation shortly.
Mass appeal of standards as a strategic route to library resource sharing and their application really is critical.
Copyright is the biggest debate by far and probably the biggest constraint on the development and uptake of electronic document delivery systems.
Commercial suppliers of electronic documents supply on a copyright paid basis, allowing them to deliver directly to the desktop computer, but most demand is for copy documents supplied under the fair dealing arrangement where desktop delivery is not acceptable to copyright owners.
In EDDIS, the idea of a one-stop-shop, help yourself, seamless process for end users is much compromised by this because incoming documents must be intercepted by the local library, printed, deleted from the system, and the hard copy forwarded to the end user by conventional means.
It is the law.
The cost of electronic document delivery has three major components: the once only cost of equipment; running costs; and the cost of documents supplied.
In any situation one or more cost elements may be marginalised.
Can the network take more traffic?
Can staff be redeployed?
Can a deal be struck with a supplier?
Also, it is a question of cost to whom.
What role is being costed, supplier, intermediary or end user?
The analysis must be specific to the process.
A library might analyse it as a cost and judge its acceptability entirely within the envelope of its own budget, perhaps an attempt at tactical cost saving.
A more robust business case might be possible by making a value analysis and including strategic benefits of electronic delivery.
Such benefits may map closely to the values and goals of the university.
Instead of being something the library can not afford, it becomes something the university cannot afford to be without.
Costs are important and generally limiting but it is not always appropriate to judge them by yesterday’s rules.
Information strategies are about change.
The opportunity cost of doing things differently, especially on the back of a pre-existing network infrastructure, can be an appealing proposition.
Cultural change, in this context, is about learning to use information technology effectively.
Information technology does two things well: it removes barriers of time and distance and it makes information available to people who ordinarily would not have it.
In business terms it means you can despecialise jobs, remove layers of management and provide a more effective relationship with the customer.
Internet and the World Wide Web is already changing the way scholars, researchers, teachers and students work, affecting their relationship with the library.
At the same time economic and political pressures on libraries are causing them to look closely at what they do and how they do it.
The eLib programme is exploring possible routes to the future and the small initiatives in electronic document delivery such as EDDIS are a part.
The need for easier and faster access to information in some situations and the ability to provide it electronically does not argue against the inherent value of printed works, nor against their provision and use in printed form.
But neither should requirements for traditional forms of study become a barrier to implementing new technologies and new ways of working.
For some time yet, libraries will be required to support a variety of individual and group cultures as the slow (but perhaps quickening) process of change moves through higher education.
Soon eLib’s new hybrid library projects will start to investigate models for how this might be achieved, by presenting services as a sort of ‘information landscape’ with navigational aids to resources in the combined, distributed physical environment and cyberspace.
Electronic documents are part of the landscape.
EDDIS and other products arising from eLib and similar programmes are not perfect, but are perhaps good enough to encourage library managers to tackle radical change in their uncertain world.
Author Details David Larbey EDDIS Project Manager The Library University of East Anglia Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Thread of Ariadnes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Thread of Ariadnes Buzz software database browser identifier cataloguing multimedia visualisation research Citation BibTex RIS One of my previous lecturers jokingly said that once you had a title, logo and an acronym for your project, 80% of the work was done.
Except I'm not so sure she was joking, now.
Ariadne took (relatively) little time to be decided on as a title, but as it turned out, many other projects around the world, and one in particular in the UK, shared this greek mythological name.
This has caused problems; for example, lists of digital libraries/training projects occasionally get us mixed up with the Ariadne project at Lancaster.
Dr. David Nichols from this Lancaster project gives a brief run-down of other projects that have taken the name Ariadne.
The title of the Ariadne newsletter illustrates a difficulty with content-based retrieval of resources multiple entities with the same name.
This duplication of identifiers inevitably leads to confusion.
These problems are particularly acute when the name has an appropriate metaphor associated with it.
Ariadne, with its Greek associations of navigation in difficult environments, is a case in point as Graham Whitaker has pointed out.
There are several other WWW resources whose projects have already chosen this identifier, several in the same field of network resources.
It is not surprising that these various projects are sometimes confused with each other.
Searchers could draw two kinds of inferences: They may think they have a come across a project before when in fact they have only noticed one of with the same name.
This could lead to (possibly relevant) resources being overlooked.
They may infer that two projects with the same name in similar areas are in fact part of the same project.
For example, they may think that the Ariadne browser is part of the Ariadne digital libraries project or that it runs on the Ariadne network (neither of which are true see below).
Using common Web search engines finds several more sites in a variety of different languages whose relevance is hard to determine.
Here is a list of those Web entities called Ariadne in the areas of computing and information science.
Ariadnes In addition to the Ariadne newsletter you are currently reading: Ariadne Collaborative Browsing The Ariadne project in the Computing Department at Lancaster University investigates collaboration, visualisation of the search process and the history of searches in Digital Libraries.
Ariadne Network ARIADNE is the National Academic and Research Computer Network of Greece.
Ariadne Intelligent Browsing The Open Software Foundation have developed a WWW browser called Ariadne.
“Ariadne is an advanced research implementation providing a simple to modify browser for the World-Wide Web.
It contains a broad subset of the features found in commercial browsers.“ Ariadne Electronic Library Advanced Retriever for Information and Documents in the Network Environment at Kyoto University, Japan.
Ariadne searchable database A navigation and search through the Web to Computer Science Subject Information using the ACM Computing Classification System.
Ariadne Italian Internet Engineering Company Ariadne offers consulting services and technical support in designing and developing information systems using public domain packages whenever possible.
Main projects are based on ideas and software packages from the World-Wide Web initiative which have been used to build multimedia client server applications.
Ariadne Solutions Internet service provider Ariadne Comunicación Spanish Company Consulting and public relations specializing in areas of information technology.
Ariadne Online Catalogue The online catalogue at Kalamazoo College Library is called Ariadne.
Lancaster’s Ariadne A screenshot showing the visualisation interface of the Ariadne system at Lancaster University.
Each card represents an action in browsing the database (in this case the Lancaster University Library online catalogue).
The lower level shows actual catalogue records, the middle level search actions and the top level general navigation actions.
Each card can be expanded by clicking on it as in the lower right hand corner.
These search histories can be saved, annotated and edited further examples using BIDS are available at our web site.
Acknowledgments: several sites in this list were collated by Aileen Barry of Thomson Technology Services Group (Internet Lab Group).
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Meta Detectors Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Meta Detectors Buzz data java framework html database dissemination archives metadata identifier repositories udc cataloguing z39.50 rtf marc aggregation licence research Citation BibTex RIS Lorcan Dempsey talks about metadata and the development of resource discovery services in the UK.
How do you find out what is of interest on the network?
The answer is with difficulty.
What should libraries and the eLib subject services be doing about this?
The answer is not clear.
Let's postpone the question for a while, and look at the rapidly shifting service and technical environment in which they are operating.
For many people the first ports of call are the major robotbased 'vacuum-cleaner' services such as Lycos and Alta Vista which provide access to web pages worldwide, or classified listings such as Yahoo.
Within UK higher education, there is a variety of services: NISS, BUBL, the new eLib subject-based services (ADAM, EEVL, IHR-Info, OMNI, SOSIG, et al), various listings and sensitive maps, and multiple more or less useful specialist resources.
In an interesting recent development there is some experiment with Harvest to create an index of academic sites at Hensa at the University of Kent.
(The absence of a service such as this or some crawler-based approach which concentrated on UK services has been a notable omission.
Another is a UK mirror, if it could be negotiated, of a significant global service such as Lycos or Alta Vista.
As noted elsewhere in this issue, there is some speculation that Alta Vista may be about to launch a European mirror.)
At the same time there are many local initiatives such as BARD at Oxford or the LSE pages which are of much wider than local appeal.
Within the subset that is supported by higher education funds there is some overlap and even competition.
BUBL has a growing classified collection of thousands of links and aspires to create MARC records for these links.
NISS operates an information gateway and populates it with records in a variety of ways.
BUBL and NISS aim to cover all subject areas.
The subject-based services are creating subject specific gateways.
Some are now available; others will come on stream, but major subject areas are not covered and projects are not constrained to take the same technical or service approach.
The Arts and Humanities Data Service will have various 'gateways' or 'catalogues' as part of its services in particular subject domains.
OCLC's NetFirst will be available in the UK through a central licensing deal: this will provide access to a database of 50,000 network resource descriptions, and will be hosted by NISS.
One might argue that such variety is a welcome sign of vitality and that multiple experiments are desirable in an environment in which technical, service and organisational models need to be explored.
This is certainly true at the project level: preferred future directions have to emerge and the need for more research and coordinated development effort is clear.
At the funded service level, I think there is a danger that this plurality leads to dissipation of expertise, effort, and funding, as well as to confusion and wasted time among users.
This is not to argue that there should not be diversity, but to wonder how central funding should be levered most effectively.
(There is a line between service and project, even if it is sometimes difficult to know where to draw it.)
So, we have a range of projects and services with different scope, coverage and ambition.
What these services do is provide access to metadata.
Metadata, a clumsy term, is data which helps in the identification, location or description of a resource.
Catalogue records are one form of metadata.
We can identify some emerging developments in the creation and use of metadata on the Internet.
The first, from which others flow, is that the discipline or control exercised over the production of collections of resources will improve as the web becomes a more mature publishing environment.
There will be managed repositories of information objects.
Such repositories may be managed by information producing organisations themselves, universities for example, by traditional and 'new' publishers, or by other organisations (the Arts and Humanities Data Service, for example, or industrial and other research organisations, archives, image libraries, and so on).
(This is not to suggest that the existing permissive publishing environment will not continue to exist in parallel.)
One concern of a managed repository will be its contents are consistently described and that these descriptions are promulgated in such a way that potential users are alerted to the resources they describe.
Secondly, discovery systems will be based on fuller descriptions.
One aspect of this is that there will be more description of resources by those responsible for the resources themselves.
This includes author-created descriptions, but will also be a central function of the repository managers identified above.
The META and LINK tags in web page heads will be used to provide inline metadata which will be harvested by programs.
Value may be added to this data at various stages along whatever use chain it traverses: by a local repository manager, by subject-based services, by crawler based indexing services, by various other intermediary services.
Librarians and others who now invest in current awareness and SDI (selective dissemination of information) services will be potential users and manipulators of such data.
These developments will be facilitated by more off-the-shelf products; one of significant importance is likely to be Netscape's Catalog Server, drawing on Harvest technologies.
A second aspect is that libraries, commercial services like OCLC's NetFirst, the UK subject-based services and others will in many cases originate descriptions or put in place frameworks for the origination of descriptions.
It will be interesting to see what sort of market conditions prevail for the creation and sharing of such records.
A number of factors, including the perceived value of a resource, will determine the relative balance between authorproduced, added value and third-party original descriptions in different scenarios.
Thirdly, descriptions will have to accommodate more data and complexity than is currently the case.
Web-crawlers tend to describe individual web pages; approaches based on manual description (e.g.
BUBL, NISS or OMNI) have initially tended to focus on servers, and not describe particular information objects on those servers.
Neither approach is complete as users are interested in resources at various levels of granularity and aggregation which may not be satisfied by either of these simplified approaches.
How to express the variety of relationships between resources and their characteristics is not clear: intellectual relationships and formal relationships.
For example, what is the relationship between a web document and the JAVA or OLE objects it contains.
A particularly important relationship, here expressed in traditional bibliographic terms, is that between a 'work' (an abstract intellectual object) and its 'manifestations' (its concrete physical instances): at a simple level, a work may exist as postscript, RTF and HTML files or it may exist in several places.
(URNs Uniform Resource Names, whenever they are operationalised, will have a role here.)
At the same time, basic 'description' is not enough.
To support a mature information environment a variety of types of metadata need to exist: data about terms and conditions; administrative metadata (data about the metadata itself: how current it is, who created it, links to fuller descriptions, and so on); data about file types, size and other technical characteristics.
In some cases, a link to some other source may be included; this might be especially suitable for variable data such as terms and availability.
This data will allow humans and clients to make sensible decisions about selected resources based on a range of attributes.
(A client may pull a resource from a nearby server rather than a transatlantic one to conserve bandwidth, for example.)
Again, the level of created structure (however it is designed) and the level of intellectual input deemed necessary will depend on the perceived value of the resources.
Next, programs will collect and manipulate data in a variety of ways, passing it off to other applications in the process.
Harvest is an interesting example of a set of tools which allow data to be extracted in customised ways from resources and passed between nodes to support the construction of subjector community-specific resource discovery services.
Data may be collected and served up in various environments, converted on the fly to appropriate formats: it may be collected by robot, added to a local 'catalogue', or pulled into a subject-based service.
The metadata we have been talking about refers to network information resources.
There may also be metadata about people, about courses, about research departments, and about other objects.
Programs might periodically look for resources that match a particular user profile, might search for people with a particular research interest, and so on.
At the same time greater use will be made of existing data.
For example, NetLab at the University of Lund has experimented with the automatic classification of resources based on matches between metadata and UDC schedules and with generating sets of related or central resources based on following links from a seed set.
They have looked at the generation of a set of engineering resources by automatically following links from several central known resources in this area and ranking found resources by the number of times they are linked to.
Finally, these developments will take place in a rapidly changing distributed environment in which directory protocols (Whois++, ...), search and retrieve protocols (Z39.50, ..), Harvest, and a variety of other approaches will be deployed.
These will be hidden from the user by the web, itself likely to be transformed by the integration of Java and distributed object technologies.
How do the eLib subject projects fit into this environment?
In different degrees, they emphasise selection of good quality resources and fullish descriptions.
Some have additional other emphases.
They are in early stages of development and are establishing an identity, a view of user requirements and subject-specific indexing and descriptive approaches, and links into the subject bases that support them.
Like other eLib projects, they have been told that they should consider how to become self-financing.
They may look at alternative sources of funding, relationships with abstracting and indexing or other services which wish to move into this area, and various forms of charging and of record sharing.
However, it seems to me that there is a strong case for continued central funding for one particular aspect of their work.
Individual universities, and the higher education and research system as a whole, will be making more information about their courses, more of their research results, and more training and course materials available on the network in more or less controlled environments.
In an increasingly competetive environment, the JISC should have an interest in the organised, effective disclosure of the results of UK research and teaching.
The subject services can play an obvious role here, but can also encourage the development of well-managed information repositories within their domains, and provide a focus for collection of metadata.
In whatever role they play, it is important that they put in place mechanisms to support the creation and submission of data from information repositories themselves, that they exploit emerging 'harvesting' technologies to enhance their services, and that they explore collaborative possibilities.
They may add value to this collected data in various ways, but without such an approach, except in the narrowest of subject areas, their one, two or three 'cataloguers' will be overwhelmed by the volume, variety and volatility of the resources to be described.
And individual libraries?
They have the immediate practical problem of describing network resources they own or license as well as a question as to how to present access to emerging resource discovery services.
In the medium term, they have a role, perhaps shared with others on campus, in helping manage local repositories of data, creating customised discovery services, and integrating access to network and print resources in ways that save the time of the user.
They can become the active channels through which their institutions effectively promote their own work as well as discover that of others.
Library interests touch on those of the subject services and others who will be bound together in the same metadata use chain.
They will all benefit from the protocol and standards framework which allows easy flow of data and seamless access to diverse services, and a service and organisational framework which identifies roles and responsibilities.
However, this framework is not in place.
Without a coordinated approach, valuable work will be done, but we are likely to end up with a patchwork of different incompatible services which waste time and effort.
With some coordination, and some concentration of vision and development effort, the collection of services could be greater than the sum of its parts.
I would argue that a development agency aiming to facilitate concerted action at technical, service and organisational level, would repay investment.
Its function would not be to be prescriptive, but to set a realistic aspirational level and to outline how we get from here to there.
It would provide a focus for concerted action.
We are embarking on a construction phase in which it should be possible to create something which avoids the fragmentation of current bibliographic services.
It would be a pity if this current opportunity were not taken, and high on the agenda of some future eLib programme, there needed to be the creation of a framework for the description of higher education resources or the purchase of such a service from some other source.
(I would like to thank Peter Stone and Frank Norman for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this piece.
The views expresssed are the author's own.)
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Copyright Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Corner Buzz database copyright cataloguing opac ocr licence research Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim answers your copyright queries.
Reproduction of Table of Contents Nicholas Joint, Andersonian Library, University of Strathclyde, asked: This puzzles meit is clearly a breach of copyright to digitise tables of contents from journals and circulate them to library users as a form of current awareness service without explicit prior permission from the copyright holder for each Table of Contents (TOC).
The table of contents is effectively the first complete article in a journal and has to be treated as such.
However, tables of contents from books are treated differently many in print bibliographies and cataloguing coooperative services list monograph tables of contents in their electronic database services, yet they would not include a chapter from a book in this way.
A library could digitise and distribute book tables of contents via it web pages or opac in the same way.
How does the law define this difference?
And how does it treat the grey area of a monograph series with both an ISBN and an ISSN?
Could a Library proactively distribute tables of contents from a monograph series arriving at quarterly intervals while refraining from distributing TOCs from a conventional serial published quarterly?
Charles replies: Librarians in prescribed libraries may only make copies for patrons under the library privileges if they receive a request for such a copy, if a signed copyright declaration form is received, and if payment is made for the copy.
They can also make a copy under fair dealing if they receive a request from a patron.
Either way, they need to receive a request they cannot make copies pro-actively though licences may allow them to do this.
Assuming the librarian is making the copy under library privileges, then the law permits making a copy of one article in a periodical, and making of a copy of “a part” of a literary work other than a periodical.
Librarians can make a copy of a table of contents in a periodical the TOC is an “article”, but then cannot make a copy of another article from the same issue for the patron.
To sum up it is breach of copyright for anyone to pro-actively copy chunks of any text, whether a journal or a book, unless it has a licence to do so.
Reactive copying (on request) of a TOC of a journal or a part of a book are both equally permitted; the one restriction is that one cannot copy a TOC and an article from the same issue of the periodical.
Thus, the situation is not quite as you describe it, and almost certainly the fact that some service reproduce TOCs in their services is all to do with the licence they have.
Either that, or they are infringing!
OCR-ing and UK Law Chris Willis, Copyright Administrator OPEL Project, Birkbeck College Library, had the following query regarding OCR and the imtegrity of documents: I’m currently OCRing a lot of articles, and I’m a little concerned about legal liability for any mistakes that creep in.
We proofread carefully, but from my previous experience as a journalist, I know that not all mistakes get spotted, even with 3 people double-checking everything at every stage!
If an error appears in an OCRed article, are we legally responsible and could we be sued by the author and/or publisher?
I raised this question at a recent seminar and got a variety of replies.
I’m presuming the short answer is “yes” but I’d be interested to get any informed views on this.
I’d also be interested to hear what other people do about proofreading.
Do you do it yourselves and/or get a professional in?
All advice appreciated!
Charles’ answer: Yes, you are liable, but your liability only becomes significant if you were reckless or negligent.
If you used your best endeavours, your liability could reduce to zero.
Copyright of Art Images Sarah Kennedy Subject Librarian for Humanities and Social Sciences, Worcester College of Higher Education wrote: Could you let me know if there are any copyright licences that cover artwork and images apart from the DACS licence for slides?
Charles replies: None in the UK to my knowledge.
Fair Dealing with regard to Slides and Images Alec J. Hartill, HARTILL ART ASSOCIATES, Canada, sent the following query: In the US but not in Canada (yet!)
there is a law giving exemptions to university libraries/staff/faculty/students when copying material ex-books for study purposes etc.
This is so-called FAIR USE but I know it is a very much abused exemption and I won’t go into all the situations that I am aware of but I think you are aware of this problem.
My question revolves around IMAGES, whether from the Inter Net or from hard copy as in SLIDES; under what circumstances may an individual in a British university make a copy of such illustration/image/slide without getting copyright clearances?
Charles replies: Fair dealing, as the exception is known in the UK, applies to images.
So, an individual may make a copy (or indeed in theory more than one copy) of an image for the purposes of research, private study, criticism or review, or for reporting current events (the last permission does not extend to photographs).
The copying must be “fair”, i.e.
not damage the copyright owner’s legitimate interests.
Making such copies requires no formalities or payment to the copyright owner.
In addition, there are certain educational permissions allowing teachers to copy artistic works whilst teaching (but the copying must not be by a reprographic process) or in setting examinations.
Librarians in the UK are not permitted to make copies of images for the clients under the library privileges.
Finally, there are various licensing schemes around.
One, the DACS scheme, specifically applies to slides and images, and it is possible that the university is a member of that scheme; in such cases, further copying may be allowed it all depends on the terms of the licence.
Author details Prof Charles Oppenheim, Co-Director, International Institute of Electronic Library Research Division of Learning Development De Montfort University Hammerwood Gate, Kents Hill MILTON KEYNES MK7 6HP charles@dmu.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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European Libraries Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines European Libraries Programme Buzz framework dissemination copyright mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS The European Libraries Programme instant cash for libraries who can hitch a ride on the Euro gravy train?
Or another limited budget R&D programme for those content to live on bread and water?
Rosalind Johnson of the UK National Focal Point for the European Libraries Programme explains all.
The European Libraries Programme more properly, the Telematics for Libraries Programme was conceived in the early 1980s with noble aims.
The wealth and diversity of Europe's information resources were seen as considerable, but it was clear that these resources were not readily available to European citizens.
Through the projects funded by what has now become the European Libraries Programme, new technology would be the tool that would be adopted to make this access possible, and therefore the European Parliament adopted the Schwencke Resolution calling for action by the Commission in the libraries sector.
In 1988 the Plan of Action for Libraries in the European Community finally went live, being consolidated into the workplan for the Libraries Programme, and became part of the European Commission's Third Framework Programme (1991-1994) of research and development.
The Third Framework has now given way to the Fourth Framework Programme (1994-1998).
The European Libraries Programme is one of huge number of programmes going on under the auspices of the Commission of the European Communities and its various Directorates General.
DG XIII has the responsibility for the Telematics Applications Programme, which is divided into various Areas.
Area B: Telematics for Knowledge includes the Telematics for Libraries programme.
Farmers may be rumoured to be able to shake the Euro money tree at will, and it is probably unlikely that you will ever see a starving MEP, but libraries have not been so lucky in the ECU lottery.
The procedure for submitting a proposal under the Libraries Programme is complex, and requires significant investments of time with no guarantee of success because of the limited budget for each Call, not all eligible proposals can be funded.
Project proposals can only be sent as part of a formal Call for Proposals, issued periodically by DG XIII, although wise libraries do as much planning as possible in advance of the opening of a Call information is usually available from DG XIII in advance of the formal Call dates.
The last Call opened on 15 March 1995 and closed on 15 June 1995.
The next Call is expected to be issued on 15 December 1996, with a closing date of 15 March 1997.
This is subject to confirmation, and should not be regarded as a definite Call date.
Calls can only be issued in the months of March, June, September or December.
As this is a European Libraries Programme, there must be evidence of a European dimension to each proposal.
There must be partners from at least two member states, though not all partners need be from the libraries sector.
The project proposal must address one of the "Action Lines" of the Libraries Programme failure to do so is a common reason for proposals being unsuccessful.
In the last Call three Action Lines were identified: modernising library systems to offer improved network-based services; improving co-operation and resource sharing; building and extending information resources and services mediated and delivered by libraries.
Within each Action Line are a number of Call Topics addressing more specific themes.
The application of new technology is a part of every theme, and each project should be capable of wider application once its pilot phase is over, although there is no obligation to do so.
The Libraries Programme was originally allocated 30 million ECU under the Fourth Framework Programme, but the amount of money available for the Libraries Programme under this Call is still under discussion.
Full funding for projects is never given the projects are officially "shared cost".
Involvement in the Programme should be seen as an investment, rather than a quick source of ready cash.
So what is in it for libraries?
Though it takes time and effort to put forward a successful proposal, libraries who have achieved the status of having a proposal accepted have found the experience worthwhile.
A glance at DG XIII's web site see Telematics for Libraries at http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/libraries.html shows the wide range of projects and innovative ideas supported by European funding.
Under the 1995 Call for Proposals, proposals funded included a project to provide catalogues and digital documents for blind and visually handicapped readers (TESTLAB); a project to develop multimedia for children's libraries (CHILIAS), and one involving digital encryption (TOLIMAC).
Libraries involved in the Programme are at the frontiers of technology as it applies to their projects, and this information is available, via the Web, to all even libraries without the resources to participate in the Programme thus benefit indirectly.
The Programme also fosters pan-European cooperation and development, not only between leading librarians and library researchers in a particular field, but between the staff of those institutions, and between the other organisations involved, such as software firms.
The European Commission is keen to support small and medium sized enterprises; and the Programme can provide an opportunity for libraries to work in real cooperation with the commercial sector.
Finally, the projects are increasing user access to library resources across Europe.
As librarians, we should be concerned to increase access to information, and the Programme is designed to provide the funds to facilitate projects towards that end.
It is anticipated that the next Call will be the last for the Libraries Programme under the Fourth Framework Programme, so what is the future for UK libraries seeking funds for European projects?
Following the Fourth Framework Programme, there will be a Fifth Framework Programme, again covering all areas of research and development in the European Union, and due to start in 1999.
Initial discussions are underway, and the European Commission is expected to launch a formal proposal in the spring of 1997.
It has already been decided that the Fifth Framework cannot simply be a continuation of the Fourth, and this may affect the future of the Libraries Programme in its current form.
However, the Preliminary Guidelines suggest, as one of three priority topics, the creation of a userfriendly Information Society, giving European citizens easier access to information and education throughout their lives, helping to share cultural heritage, and preserving linguistic diversity.
Making sense of all this for the library and information sector and other interested partners is the job of the various National Focal Points for the Libraries Programme.
There is an NFP in each of the Member States of the European Union.
The NFPs provide information and advice on the Programme, disseminate other information as appropriate, and refer potential proposers to other sources of information if necessary.
For example, an NFP can provide information on partner finding, or refer libraries to more appropriate sources of funding.
For several calls DG XIII has provided funds for consultancy, administered through the NFPs.
Some NFPs themselves provide consultancy for drafting proposals, and may be project partners, but this is not part of the remit of the UK NFP, which has a policy of neutrality.
The UK NFP has established its own open electronic discussion list, hosted by Mailbase the only NFP to have initiated such a list in Europe.
The list acts as a dissemination forum for information on the Libraries Programme, and aims to alert list members to other opportunities within Europe for funding opportunities, such as INFO2000, ARIANE and RAPHAEL.
To subscribe, send an email to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk.
Leave the subject line blank, and in the body of the message type, Join lis-uknfp firstname lastname.
Send the message.
Mailbase will respond with an automatic message welcoming you to the list.
In September 1995 the UK NFP become part of the Library and Information Commission; it is the Focal Point for the whole of the United Kingdom.
For further information, contact: Rosalind Johnson, UK NFP, Library and Information Commission, 2 Sheraton Street, London W1V 4BH.
Tel: 0171 411 0058; fax: 0171 411 0057; email: rosalind.johnson@lic.bl.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur: Nick Gibbins Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: Nick Gibbins Buzz data copyright hypertext gopher ftp Citation BibTex RIS In Minotaur, the collective voice of Internet enthusiasts is countered by words of scepticism or caution.
In this issue, Nick Gibbins gives an overview of some of the potential features that the Web does not contain, but a more functional successor to it might.
Nowadays, it seems as though the only people who haven't heard of the Internet and the World Wide Web are technophobic hermits who consider the radio to be a dangerously new invention.
Indeed, the media bandwagon seems to have created hype of such a magnitude that the Web cannot possibly live up to the expectations people have been lead to have of it.
Both the mainstream and the specialist press continue to laud the Web as the ultimate digital information system, a rather over ambitious claim.
My personal view is that the Web is just the most recent of a succession of Internet-based information systems, each more sophisticated than its predecessor; before the Web came gopher, and before that came ftp.
However, the Web was the first large scale distributed hypertext system on the Internet, and is probably responsible for introducing more people to the concept of hypertext than any of the work in this area during the previous thirty years.
Eventually, all hypertext systems end up being compared to Xanadu, the grand creation of Ted Nelson, who first coined the term 'hypertext'.
Xanadu, like Coleridge's poem, was never completed, but the fragments that exist point to a richer system of hypertext than that offered to us by the Web.
Many of the features of Xanadu have appeared in other hypertext systems, both before and since the introduction of the Web.
In some ways, the only strong point of the Web seems to be its extensiveness, since its lack of features make for a rather primitive hypertext system.
A small selection of features which a second generation hypertext system would be expected to have, and which the Web does not have, might be as follows: Bidirectional links and referential integrity In the same way that a citation index shows which papers cite a given paper, bidirectional links allow you to see which documents link to a given document.
The perennial problem of broken links, where the document at the destination of a link no longer exists, could become a thing of the past if bidirectional links were used throughout.
If a document were deleted or moved, it would be possible to see what links point to it, and amend them appropriately.
Collaboration and annotation At the present, the Web is a unidirectional medium with a marked separation between authors and readers.
If a hypertext system is to be more than a fancy word processing system with links, it should allow people to work together more effectively, with all users as both authors and readers.
Scalable indices The current brute force technique used to build an index of the documents on the Web is starting to show its limitations.
Even powerful search engines such as Altavista cannot hope to index more than a small fraction of the Web without containing out of date information.
Distributing the indexing processes between a large number of servers and building indices of indices (so that index servers would not need to build universal indices) would help to reduce the inherent bottlenecks of the current technique.
Transclusion and version management Another term coined by Ted Nelson, transclusion refers to the process of including a section of one document in another.
In this way, an author quoting someone else's work would not copy the relevant section, but would include a reference to it instead.
The implementation of a transclusion mechanism would make transparent document version management a near-trivial proposition.
There are development attempts underway to implement these and other features for the Web, but many of these are trying to produce results by adding layers on top of the basic structure of the Web, rather than by altering that basic structure.
One of my growing concerns is that the growth of the Web has been so rapid that much Web technology became widespread before reaching maturity.
It is now effectively impossible to make any major changes to either the underlying protocols or data formats, and the shortcomings of the Web cannot be overcome without these major changes.
So what will the successor to the Web look like?
The next generation of distributed hypertext systems are starting to appear already.
Hyper-wave (formerly Hyper-G) is a system initially developed at the Technical University of Graz in Austria which supports a number of the features listed above, and there are other contenders, such as Microcosm from the University of Southampton.
One thing is certain; the successor to the Web must remain backwardly compatible with the Web (in the same way that the Web integrated gopher and ftp with itself) if the recent World Wide Web boom is not going to leave us with a collection of legacy data of gargantuan proportions.
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Web Focus Corner: Running an Institutional Web Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus Corner: Running an Institutional Web Service Buzz data software java html database xml apache usability infrastructure metadata accessibility copyright graphics jpeg visualisation passwords cache cookie privacy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on a workshop on running an institutional web service.
About The Workshop Excellent; good opportunity to update knowledge and meet other, A much needed workshop.
Very useful to hear from speakers and finding out about other sites from discussion groups.
Same again next year please!
, Extremely useful and timely .
Just three of the comments received from participants of the workshop on Running An Institutional Web Service.
The workshop was held at King’s College London from lunchtime on Wednesday, 16th July until lunchtime the following day.
A total of 92 participants attended the workshop, together with myself and Hazel Gott (both from UKOLN) and Malcolm Clark (KCL) who were the conference organisers.
The workshop participants reflected the composition of many institutional web teams, with representation from system administrators, applications support staff, web editors, information management specialists and web designers.
Workshop Topics Presentations at the workshop reflected the range of backgrounds amongst the participants, with a mixture of introductory and more advanced technical presentations, and presentations on policy issues and information management models, covering the following topics: Charisma or camel?
A sociotechnical approach to Web redesign Information Flow and the Institutional WWW Networking For Webmasters WWW / Database Integration Security and Performance Issues WWW Caching Web Tools Next Year’s Web The presentations were given on the afternoon of the first day.
In the final session on the first day, participants selected a discussion group to take part in on day 2.
The following discussion groups took place: Design Information Flow Web Tools Caching Metadata Trials and Tribulations of a Web Editor The Presentations Charisma or Camel?
A Sociotechnical Approach to Web Redesign [1] Following the introduction to the workshop, Dave Murie, University of Dundee, gave a review of the processes involved in the redesign of the corporate web pages within his institution.
The history of the development of the web site will be familiar to many: an enthusiast initially establishing a web presence, which slowly grew to include a handful of departments, followed by an awareness of the problems of this organic growth, with no group responsible for overall coordination and no overall look and feel for the page.
These issues were addressed by setting up an Electronic Publishing Editorial Board (EPEB), a high profile committee which reported to the University’s Information Services Committee.
The EPEB was responsible for providing guidance of aesthetics, a code of practice for webmasters and ensuring that legal and ethical obligations were met.
The initial recommendations included (a) the need for a disclaimer to indicate limits of institutional responsibility, (b) the need for legal advice of liability, © the need for guidelines for information providers and mechanisms for encouraging/enforcing compliance and (d) redesigning the institute’s “home page” which was felt to be too long.
The redesign exercise was carried out by the School of Design.
A number of user groups were identified which included “techies”, who had an understanding of web technologies (such as accessibility issues for the disabled) and postgraduate students, who could provide an end user view on proposals.
The student’s view of the web was that the redesign exercise should address the confused look of the site, look for ease of learning and ease of use, and improve the performance of the web.
The Editorial Board felt that too much information was provided in a cramped layout.
There was a need to split the information to support two separate needs: intraand inter-organisational.
There was also a need to improve the quality of the visual image to support the web’s increasing importance for student recruitment.
Following these initial discussions an iterative design approach was taken, with the School of Design providing a number of design options, which were refined in the light of usability testing and comments from user groups.
Dave concluded by identifying the positive points of Dundee’s approach, which included the use of multiple stakeholders (Human Computer Interface specialists, design specialists, users and departmental information providers), the provision of a tool kit and libraries of images for use by information providers and a suitable compromise between capability with practicability.
Dave also listed a number of problem areas, including concerns over accessibility for disabled users and information providers attempting to use the latest technologies which could cause backwards compatibility problems.
Web designers also found the web to be a frustrating medium!
In conclusion: The redesign exercise was a major task, which required a stakeholder approach.
There were dangers both in being technology-led and designer-led.
It is important to keep the needs of the user in mind.
Good communications is of critical importance.
Information Flow [2] Following the talk on approaches to web design, Colin Work, University of Southampton, gave a presentation on Information Flow and the Institutional WWW.
Colin’s talk was based on his institution’s web-based information services.
The talk described information flow models and was independent of any particular technology.
Colin defined ‘information flow’ as the movement of information objects from the point of origin to the “target” user over time.
Information objects (which in other contexts are sometimes referred to as Document-Like Objects or DLOs) have a number of managerial attributes (or metadata) including: Author of the object: responsible for the information content Owner (publisher): responsible for making the information available Encoder / printer: involved in processing of the information All objects should have a single “owner”, though they may have multiple authors and encoders.
The “authority” of an object is an additional implied attribute.
If this is not made explicit, false assumptions may be made.
A web resource is a snapshot of the information flow.
This gives rise to a number of questions: Is the snapshot at the right point in the flow?
Does the snapshot carry the required authority?
Is the ownership clear?
Are the author and owner aware of all uses of the information?
A number of “tools” can be used to support the information flow, including: An information strategy for setting goals An information policy which provides a methodology for achieving the goals An acceptable use policy which defines constraints An editorial board for enforcement of the above Charging mechanisms (both real and notional) which can help to limit demands Institutions may adopt a number of information management models including: No management An “anarchical” model, which reflects how the web initially developed within many institutions.
This model facilitates rapid growth, but has many disadvantages including uneven coverage, diverse interfaces, contradictory information, uncertain responsibilities, etc.
Centralised management The centralised management model will be familiar with managers of information systems available before the web.
In this model, information has to be sent to a centralised group which is responsible for “processing” the information before it is made available.
This model provides consistency in style and presentation, but does not scale well, with a potential bottleneck in the information flow.
Distributed management In this model, responsibilities can be devolved to departments/groups, providing a more responsive and flexible service.
However, the model can tend towards the “No management” model unless there are effective information policies in place with an editorial board to ensure compliance.
Colin than gave an example of how different models could be applied to making an institution’s prospectus available on the web.
These models included: Processing file used to produce hard copy This can involve reformatting, which can be time-consuming.
The online version may have an inappropriate design.
“Intercepting” information sent from department to the Prospectus editor This model is more flexible.
However, there is a danger that changes made by the Prospectus editor will not be reflected in the online version.
Merging online versions produced by departments to produce print version In this model, departments provide their own contribution for the prospectus on their departmental web pages.
This information is processed centrally for the production of the print version.
In this model there are dangers that the departmental quality control is not as rigorous as that provided centrally.
Also the departmental information may contain information which has not been authorised (e.g.
courses which have not been approved by a course committee).
Producing online and print versions in parallel This model may require additional resources and technical expertise.
Colin concluded by recommending that institutions have an information strategy / policy and an editorial board which is empowered to enforce institutional policies.
Distributed and centralised management models have strengths and weaknesses.
The choice is likely to reflect the organisation’s culture.
Networking For The Web Master [3] John MacCulloch, UKERNA, gave a gentle introduction to the first technical presentation of the workshop, with a background to computer networks.
John described networking specialists’ concerns with network bandwidth.
He gave an example of a personal home page with the following file sizes: Raw text 1K HTML 2K HTML plus image 40K Postscript 100 K Postscript (300 dpi) 1,000K Law’s law (named after Derek Law, Director of Information Services and Systems at King’s College London) states that A picture may be worth a thousand words but a JPEG file takes longer to transmit.
An awareness of bandwidth issues is of particular importance today in the light of various discussions of charging models for paying for international bandwidth to the US, Europe and elsewhere.
John concluded by advising participants to look at their web site through different eyes: for example using a number of web clients and across low bandwidths.
Database Integration [4] After the coffee break Brenda Lowndes, University of Liverpool, gave an overview of various models for integrating databases with the web.
This is an important topic for a number of reasons: Providing access to existing corporate database Use of database management tools for maintaining information (e.g.
avoiding duplication of data and resources to maintain the data and avoiding inconsistencies across data) Providing a familiar (web) interface to resources Databases can be made available using two models: (1) static access and (2) dynamic access.
In the static access model a program is run offline to produce the HTML pages, which can then be copied onto the appropriate area of the web server.
The process can be automated and scheduled to run at specific times or triggered by a database update operation.
This model is appropriate for non volatile data and for supporting a standard set of queries.
In the dynamic access model HTML pages are generated from the database when the data is requested.
Data is therefore up to date.
There are several models for implementing dynamic accesses including running a CGI program which access a backend database directly, running a CGI program which accesses a database server, accessing a database server using database networking software or using ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity), and using web server extensions in conjunction with HTML templates.
Applications of these models include Microsoft’s IDC (Internet Database Connectivity) an extension of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server and Microsoft’s Active Server Pages a server-side environment which can access any ODBC database.
Brenda provided a pointer to sources of further information she is maintaining [5].
Security [6] Mark Cox, UKWeb, gave an overview of security and performance issues.
Mark Cox is a former research student from the University of Bradford who now works for a web company based in Leeds.
Mark is a member of the Apache development group.
Mark pointed out that malicious ActiveX components can potentially read and modify files on a local machine.
Even though Java has a better security model, bugs in the implementation of a Java Virtual Machine can introduce security loopholes.
In practice however, privacy is likely to be a greater concern (email and the use of floppy disks, for example, pose security threats but neither is banned within universities Brian Kelly).
Browsers are designed for use by a single user.
Use of a shared computer can compromise a user’s privacy by providing access to history lists, client side cache, cookie files and information protected by passwords.
Allowing users to publish static HTML pages does not normally compromise the security of a system, active pages are another matter.
Web servers such as Apache can be configured to allow safe use of Server-Side Include technologies, so that files for which the user may have read permissions cannot be served.
CGI scripts can be more of a security concern.
CGI programs execute as a single user.
A badly configured web server, in which CGI programs were executed as a privileged user (such as root!
), would enable a malicious information provider to cause damage.
Such a configuration could also allow an innocent information provider to inadvertently provide a back door for an end user to cause damage.
For these reasons, some Internet service providers do not allow information providers to run arbitrary CGI programs instead a library is provided for common functions, such as page counters, mailing results of form submissions, etc.
Caching [7] George Neisser, University of Manchester, described the important role that caching has in conserving scarce network bandwidth.
He described various caching infrastructures, including implementations at departmental, institutional, national and international level.
George described the history of the national caching infrastructure within the UK HE community, which was pioneered by HENSA, at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
On 1st August 1997 this service was replaced by a new national service hosted by the universities of Manchester and Loughborough.
This service has a service and a development component.
The service will provide a number of mechanisms for liaison with the user communities, including a web site, a regular newsletter, mailing lists, a help desk and a fault reporting system.
Web Tools [8] David Lomas, University of Salford, described the work of the UCISA-SG WebTools working party.
This group will be evaluating a range of web tools, including browsers and other end user tools, authoring and graphics tools, web page management tools, server software and management tools and database integration tools.
Next Year’s Web [9] Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath, gave a brief summary of new developments on the web and predictions on how the web will look in a year’s time.
He mentioned eXML, the Extensible Markup Language, which is a possible replacement for XML, and ideally suited for applications with structured information.
He described the development of visualisation software, and accompanying protocol developments, for improving navigation around web sites.
The development of metadata standards, such as Dublin Core, should provide improvements in searching and in web site management.
Other growth areas are likely to include use of Java, support for maths and improved network performances through developments in HTTP.
The Discussion Groups On day 2 the participants were divided into six discussion groups.
A summary of the discussion groups is given below.
Design The group made a number of recommendations: A workshop on design issues should be arranged.
The workshop should ensure that issues affecting people with disabilities and those with low bandwidth connections are addressed.
A list of resources on recommendations on copyright issues, etc.
should be provided.
Information Flow The group made a number of recommendations: Set up a Working Group to look into administrative metadata.
Establish national UK HE recommendations for administrative metadata .
Web Tools The group made the following recommendation: Set up a group (similar to AGOCG) to coordinate evaluation work on web tools.
Caching The group concluded that there is a need to raise awareness of caching, particularly in the light of the increasing costs of international bandwidth.
Metadata The group agreed that metadata was good in theory.
The major questions were “How do you implement it, especially in a distributed environment?
Are there tools to help?
Can it be automated?” The group made a number of recommendations: Use of Dublin Core metadata should be encouraged.
A pilot for metadata should be set up for use with prospectus material.
Trials and Tribulations of a Web Editor The group made a number of recommendations: A presentation should be made to a meeting of the CVCP (Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals) to demonstrate the importance of the WWW to UK HE institutions, with the aim of increasing senior management understanding of and support for the use of the Web within their institutions.
A standardised job description for a typical Web Editor position should be produced.
Conclusions and Further Information The feedback given at the workshop and in the evaluation forms indicated that, despite some concerns over the conditions at King’s College London (the temperature of the room and the noise caused by building work), the workshop was highly rated.
It was clear that participants valued the opportunity to meet with others and discuss mutual problems and solutions.
A number of participants suggested that a national workshop for members of web teams should be repeated, but should last longer than lunchtime to lunchtime.
In addition, there were several suggestions for smaller, more focussed workshops, on topics such as web design and management issues.
A longer report on the workshop has been prepared [10].
In addition, Juston MacNeil, Netskills, has written a personal report [11].
References Charisma or camel?
A sociotechnical approach to Web redesign, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html#design-presentation Information Flow, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html#info-flow-presentation Networking For The WebMaster, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html#networking-presentation WWW / Database Integration, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html#database-presentation Database references, http://www.liv.ac.uk/~qq48/publications/html/dbweb.html Security, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html#security-presentation Caching, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html#caching-presentation Web Tools, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html#webtools-presentation Next Year’s Web, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html#futures-presentation Workshop Information, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/intro.html Justtin MacNeil’s workshop report, http://www.netskills.ac.uk/reports/webfocus/inst-web-jul97.html Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus, Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 826838 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A New Publication for a New Challenge Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A New Publication for a New Challenge Buzz archives mis intranet research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl and Lyndon Pugh discuss their proposal for a web and print magazine for Information and IT professionals in UK Higher Education.
This article sets out to explore some of the issues to do with the establishment of a new periodical publication for information and IT professionals in Higher Education (HE).
It addresses the need for a channel of communication which reflects the developing broad spectrum of information services in academic and related institutions, and is intended as an aid to further discussion.
Over the last ten years the changes in both conventional library facilities and in the provision of electronic information have accelerated and arguably become even less predictable than they were, for example, in the midto late80’s.
At this time institutions first began to consider organisational changes in the wake of the growing impetus to integrate the delivery of information to the academic community.
Technological advances have made their impact through the development of the electronic library, hybrid libraries, Intranet development for academic and administrative use, and the involvement of both conventional information services and computer services in piloting such concepts as the virtual university.
These trends have led to consideration of new organisational patterns linking separate services in ways which range from complete convergence to effective forms of voluntary co-operation.
A significant number of services have formally created structures which offer a new focus for integrated support for the teaching and learning process, and for research.
With the Web acting as a unifying force for all information services, the boundaries between providers and users are shifting; a process which is hastened by the development of organisational information strategies.
This in turn has led to an awareness of the need for a redefinition of roles for many staff in information and IT services.
It has also led to a reappraisal of skills and training requirements, either through reskilling or upskilling of staff within the traditional library and academic IT areas, or by arriving at structural forms which permit a new skills mix to be applied to services without necessarily engaging in formal integration.
Such issues are also finding their way into debates about education and training.
At the same time other interested groups are positioning themselves to take a role in the provision of information for the academic community in general.
Recent government initiatives offer the opportunity for underpinning these changes, and the use of a combination of conventional and electronic information sources in research units, business information units and other academic-related organisations is developing rapidly.
The programmes of professional associations are similarly reflecting these preoccupations, and tentative exploration of ways of unifying the representation of all sectors of the academic information profession is now on the agenda.
In sum, there is a converging middle ground between the major arms of information provision in higher education.
This is the ground which could be occupied by a new publication.
The model in mind is partly inspired by the Educom Review.
The aim is to produce a bright, attractive magazine-style journal dealing with topical issues in networked information in HE.
It could feature news, special reports on new projects and developments, interviews with key managers and innovators, profiles of users of information services, site and publication reviews and commissioned articles including opinion.
The tone should be lively, enthusiastic yet critical, and tolerant.
Members of the various professions who hold strong views will be encouraged to write for the magazine, and debate will be promoted, particularly in the Web version which can publish responses to articles between issues.
This will be a vibrant addition to the professional literature.
A coherent community of information professionals is emerging in the field of Higher Education, and the new proposal will help define the shape of that community, its concerns and its values.
It should address the delivery of information in a converged services environment, covering the interests of MIS professionals, end-users of networked information and IT staff involved with user services, as well as those librarians and information professionals in academic and national libraries.
The hybrid library, sought by eLib as it reaches the conclusion of its Programme, is not broad enough to encompass the scope of the vision.
The information community is currently undergoing significant change because of networking.
The development of hybrid information services together with communication strategies will be the goal of most organisations over the next few years, as the delivery of information in a converged services environment becomes a common solution in HE.
Appearing regularly in its two forms this new publication is intended as the awareness vehicle of choice for the many professionals whose information landscape is changing drastically either through their own efforts or by the efforts of others for their benefit.
For the most part, journals active in this area are sectoral, and tend to reflect the preoccupations of their respective constituencies.
While some of them have accepted the need to work across existing service boundaries, they still appeal to a well-defined and exclusive readership predominantly made up of one or other of the partners in academic information services.
There is a niche which could be filled by a new publication positioned to occupy the middle ground of academic information services.
it could serve to build bridges, interpret common issues and illuminate the overlapping concerns of all information workers, while reflecting range of complementary interests which are not covered in a single UK publication.
The target audience is a number of groups whose interests are not reflected in a single publication capable of spanning boundaries and focusing on the concerns of staff at all levels.
It would appeal to staff from all sectors and all organisational levels based on the boundaries and potential audience sketched out above, the new journal would deal largely with issues.
Some examples of themes to be covered could be: Current technological advances Communication and Information Technology skilling Network literacy New roles for technologists Networked information and Intranet/Extranet development JISC activities Activities of other agencies in relevant areas of the IT/information field The teaching/learning /technology interface New organisational structures Forms of voluntary integration Federal organisations Cross-functional multi-skilled teams The physical requirements of modern information services Connective leadership Hybrid professionals and support staff Knowledge management Information strategies It is proposed that the new publication adopts a parallel print and web format with a common set of materials and a common production schedule for each issue.
The Web version should serve as an extension to the print version (essentially a superset), offering full text of articles which may have to be summarised or abbreviated in print and offer readers a medium for interacting with the editors and authors, permitting online feedback on individual articles.
The new material in the online version will be updated between issues, and the Web version will be the authoritative archive and index for keyword searches.
Interested parties are invited to discuss this proposal and help define a strategy encompassing the entire design, management, editorial remit and production process.
Last but not least, Navigator is only a suggestion, and a name for the new publication must also be agreed.
Readers’ comments are of course also invited, and can be emailed to Lyndon Pugh at lyndon@pewter.u-net.com or faxed to 01348 837681.
Responses can also be made via the Web version at ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Author Details John MacColl Ariadne Project Director Email: john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Lyndon Pugh Ariadne Managing Editor Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur Buzz cataloguing graphics research Citation BibTex RIS Dinty Moore, author of The Emperor's Virtual Clothes, worries about who will be the gatekeepers of online information in the future.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN”> Minotaur: Dinty Moore In Minotaur, the collective voice of Internet enthusiasts is countered by words of scepticism or caution.
Dinty Moore, author of The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes, worries about who will be the gatekeepers of online information in the future.
In my neck of the woods, the general consensus seems to be that the Internet, and the sudden explosion of the Web, is going to be great for libraries and for those who use them.
“Resources will be virtually limitless,” the trusting voices say.
“We can access anything we want.” I can’t count the number of wide-eyed Web enthusiasts who have proclaimed within my earshot, “Even the Library of Congress is online!” Well, that’s nice, but many people still misunderstand and imagine that this means they can read at will from the Library of Congress’ extensive collection.
They can’t.
If they want to read much more than a list of titles, they have to drive or fly to Washington.
Yet here in the States, the hysteria continues.
Libraries are falling all over one another to put computer terminals where the card catalogues used to be, and to offer free ‘Web access’ to their eager patrons.
“Now that people can visit the library and find information on virtually anything,” wired librarians gush, “everyone will come!” There are at least two problems with that statement.
The first is that it has always been possible to find information on ‘virtually anything’ in a library, if you look in the right places.
The second?
Well, if the Web does eventually become a decent, reliable research tool, people won’t need to come to the library at all.
If they have a computer at home, they can find the same information, more quickly, without bothering to shave or put on a clean shirt.
What television has done to movie theatres is evidence enough that most people will stay home if they have the choice.
Right now, the ‘Web access’ section of my local library is a haven only for those who have yet to buy a computer, but experts predict that we will all have computers at home soon enough.
So who will go to libraries?
The homeless.
In New York City, they already do.
And any human being with normal eyeballs can point out one more problem with all of this.
The computer screen is no place to read, at least not for any length of time.
Instead, the monitor is a great place to view vivid, snazzy graphics.
There is a poignant section of Philip Roth’s novel Goodbye Columbus where a young child sits in Stack Three looking at an oversized book of Gauguin’s paintings of Tahiti.
It is not at all clear if the boy can read, but it is obvious that he would prefer not to.
Gauguin’s sensual pictures are far more enticing than any text.
It seems somehow less poignant to see the same activity being performed in front of computer screens in my library, by Web-sters.
But all of these objections can be answered well enough, I suppose.
What really frightens me is something else.
What really frightens me is Market Forces.
Eventually, if all information goes online, as is predicted, who will determine which information resources are accessible?
Who will be the gatekeepers of information in the year 2050?
I’m worried that it won’t be my librarian, but rather the marketing team at Microsoft-Disney-Compuserve.
Market forces will determine what information gets packaged, what information gets dangled before the public, and what means will be utilized to make that information extravagantly seductive.
Wait one minute, you might say, that is true of the book industry today.
Except that, when a book is no longer attractive, popular, or making money for the publisher, it has a second, long life in the dusty stacks of a library somewhere.
But when a ‘digital information resource’ is no longer popular, making money, or holding market share, who is to say it will not just be erased from the master hard disk, freeing up those valuable electrons for something newer, brighter, more appealing to the consumer?
If the corporate entities that maintain online resources aren’t making money from certain information, where is their incentive to keep it available?
Truth?
Public service?
Don’t make me laugh.
I don’t care how people get their information, I only know that the availability of this information is what makes us free.
Turn over the availability to the wrong people, and it’s Goodbye not just to Columbus, but to all of us.
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Revolutionaries and Captives in the Information Society Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Revolutionaries and Captives in the Information Society Buzz software infrastructure windows Citation BibTex RIS Trevor Haywood on the shackles that bind us to the information revolution.
Every generation believes that it is at a seminal point on the time-line of technological progress.
It is either the age of iron, the age of the train, the age of flight or, in our case, the information age.
We can thus always say that we stand at an interesting moment in the development of technology.
Nowhere does this ‘interesting moment’ look more intriguing than our current location on the map of rapidly evolving information technology, particularly networking technology.
1996 was the year in which the Internet made the tabloids and TV and, as ever, we are impatient to look over the cyberwall to guess what might happen next, having been assured by those at the centre of it that we face a revolution of life-changing proportions.
Looking over this virtual parapet, commentators seem to separate rather too rigidly into optimists and pessimists.
However it is the ‘tension-ground’ between optimism and pessimism, the pulling and tugging between these two polarised messages that I believe brings the uncertainty, discomfort and anxiety of captivity.
Anxiety because large populations of people, for a multiplicity of social and economic reasons feel that this is all going too fast for them, that they will not understand what it is that they need to understand, and that when they do start to grasp the basics, ‘the others’ will have moved on to much higher ground and they will never be able to catch up.
Captivity because, for better or worse, we have all bought the message that we must adapt to these technologies without any clear evidence that they enrich our lives or make us more effective than we were before.
In the area of information technology we know that many of the revolutionaries are also in the business of selling us the hardware and software that will keep the revolution going.
But we should share enough healthy scepticism to warn us that such a confluence of ideas and trade may not always be motivated simply by the general good.
We know that Andy Grove of Intel must declare the fast-chip, rapid obsolescence faith, the Pentium (1994), the Pentium Pro (1996), the MMX (January 1997), the new Pentium II (and MMX for business, May 1997) and the interminable next generation processing power.
‘Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away’ and oftentimes we are not really sure why.
A serious symptom of our captivity then is as consumers who buy the message that we must discard one year old technology.
This is a captivity based on messages about obsolescence which we accept in the absence of any serious critical analysis of our needs.
We note also the alliances being forged, almost on a daily basis, between media content providers and those who provide the drivers and connections to the new networks and we also guess that these alliances have more to do with profit than with high ideals or unsullied altruism.
Although the language of the revolutionaries often displays a seamless merging of ideals and enterprise, we know that there are seams, that trade and competitiveness demand one set of standards and the public good demands another, and we can usually tell the difference.
In his book Knowing Machines (1996) Donald Mackenzie wrote “technologies may be best because they have triumphed rather than triumphing because they are the best”.
This is a thought well worth reflecting on when we consider the ubiquity of one technology over another.
Has DOS and Windows ever been ‘the best’?
Over the long term the real advantages of networking technology are more likely to be messily associated with the wider social, political and economic imperatives within which it resides than as a direct result of its underlying science.
The context, the way it compounds and coincides with the wider economic and political behaviours of both communities and individuals, the exclusivity that emerges as the prerogative of certain groups who gain seemingly unassailable advantages by developing deep knowledge early, and the time-scale over which all economic groups gain access to it, will all contribute to its place as a universal or restricted phenomenon.
Of course the info-rich among us will seize all the convenience that we can from IT.
We will employ it as a pack-horse in our affairs, we will exploit and develop it to transform further aspects of our lives, but we do not have to offer our souls to it, we can regain the critical no-mans-land between the extremes.
We are equipped to be both optimistic and pessimistic about it, and stay happy.
Yet in a world of Netspeed our minds too often have to respond to trivial definitions of urgency constructed urgency which result in harmful over-use of adrenalin, poor recall and pattern recognition, and ironically, given the abundance of information available to us, greater recourse to guesswork.
This leads to poor outcomes and stress related illness a spiral that inevitably generates more urgency, more pressure and more stress.
The concomitant fear of having to process more and more information, because it is available, in shorter and shorter timescales, compounds the problem.
The captives of my title are all of us.
At different times we all get caught in this tension-ground of wondering if we know enough.
This is the modern no-mans-land of information shell-holes and barbed wire.
It used to be the malice of inanimate objects, those piles of newspapers and cuttings that intimidated us from the corner of a room.
We left them there because we were convinced that there was definitely something among them that we wanted to refer to again.
We possibly even took scissors to bits of them to improve our hit rate.
But we soon forgot what it was that we wanted and as the pile increased the time needed for retrieval seemed less and less worthwhile.
Their silent screams sometimes become unbearable enough for us to blow away the dust and throw them out amid curious emotions of angst and liberation.
With the Internet we face even more intimidation a notional pile of cuttings which, like a whispering Iago, suggests that without it we cannot live.
Academics, as many publishers know, do not respond well to having their urgency constructed, but they are not by any means immune to these anxieties.
The sheer weight of information available in a large library can cause them delirium, almost sickness.
Many of us have experienced something like it as we walk away after hours of browsing in a large library only to feel the walls behind murmuring about everything we missed.
Academics are bedevilled by the fear of incompleteness and the constant worry that the key ingredient of their argument is lying somewhere they have not been.
So they worry, go back again and put off actually writing something useful or creative for another year or so.
As more and more information sources are brought to our attention via the Internet, learning to handle containment rather than access may be the challenge.
As seekers after information we often desire a mix of specificity and serendipity.
When we know precisely what we want, we want to go straight to it, retrieve it, use it, discard it.
When we are unsure about our precise needs we want to browse among likely sources hoping for interesting discoveries and connections to emerge.
B ut to be able to browse we need large collections organised in some way that facilitates stumbling across happy discoveries.
And yet, given our addiction to speed, we are also anxious to expedite retrieval.
To help us with our twin desires of specificity and serendipity, nineteenth century libraries developed rational classification schemes based on subject relationships which, as well as helping us find specific titles and subjects, also realised a modicum of serendipity.
The specific item would be shelved alongside related items which we could stumble across.
The Internet is the exact reverse of this experience an infinity of information where it is quite difficult to locate a specific request, but the serendipity can be overwhelming.
Despite continuing prophecies that predict its decline, the city will continue to be the melting pot where the social and economic extremes of internetworking will reside, where multinational corporations, amid their clusters of fibre optic cables and satellites, will co-exist beside communities that are lucky to find a pay-phone working, physical proximity to the infrastructure having little to do with easy access to it.
We know that the same technologies that disenfranchise, control and exploit disadvantaged groups can just as easily be used to empower and release them, and this ambivalence and contradiction will be seen at its most pointed in cities.
Social divisions and distinctions have remained largely untouched by the massification of a whole range of computer-based technologies and the Internet will be no different.
It owes its existence to the desire of info-rich actors to talk and share information and knowledge with other info-rich actors and, whatever their altruistic motives may or may not be, neither will have the power to extend membership of the club.
The users do not own the means.
They have great freedom to communicate but they do not have the freedom to decide who else may communicate with them.
That decision will remain with the investors.
These elite groups will naturally increase their awareness and extend their grip on the deep understanding and knowing which is such an important part of economic differentiation, inevitably accelerating their hold on the developing sophistication of systems.
Employing the latest and most satisfying version of networking technology requires on-going, hands-on know-how to maintain its benefits as well as the disposable income to continue investing in hardware and software with short life-cycles.
In developed economies the question ‘Are you on the network?’ could become as significant a social and economic differentiator in the late 1990s as ‘Are you employed?’ was at the beginning of the decade.
Indeed the answer to both questions might of necessity be the same.
The world has always been a place of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and internetworking is not going to change this.
Indeed it has the decidedly ominous potential to increase that sense of poor self-esteem and alienation that has always made it more difficult for the economically deprived to cross over into higher levels of economic activity.
The differentials run deeper than the deepest cable.
We will probably have to wait another 12 years or so before we can assess the impact of the internetworking revolution.
In 2010 those babies born in developed economies in the sunny mid-sixties, who will have grown up with computers, e-mail, computer games and CD information to help with their homework, will be in their mid-forties and occupying leadership roles in business and government.
They will know that to leave large populations of citizens outside the networking club will mean handing competitive advantage to those nations with more egalitarian and dynamic educational systems, and that a sizeable sub-culture of citizens unable to access the basic tools of a modern society will eventually generate dissatisfaction and even civil unrest.
Anxiety will increase as the complexities of life become more visible but no more comprehensible, and instead of a world of greater certainty they will know a world where confidence is always qualified by suspicions of incompleteness.
We have learnt to take the vehemence of the techno-optimists with more than a pinch of salt.
There will be great riches and great opportunities from internetworking but we have little evidence, so far, to suggest that all economic groups will secure similar benefits.
Without a major shift away from the current economic paradigm it will be the economics of profit rather than of social enrichment which will be prioritised.
Most people would accept that all technology is a Faustian bargain, that it giveth and it taketh away, and that the verdict on the value of the giving and the adverse impact of the taking often takes the jury many years of observation and discovery before it can be delivered with any accuracy.
Author details Trevor Haywood, Emeritus Professor of Human Information Systems, University of Central England Email: bm33@uce.cityscape.co.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Access to Newspapers and Journals for Visually Impaired People: The Talking Newspaper Association of the UK Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Access to Newspapers and Journals for Visually Impaired People: The Talking Newspaper Association of the UK Buzz data software html database repositories windows ascii ejournal ebook standards Citation BibTex RIS Neil H. McLachlan describes the work and electronic products of the Talking Newspaper Assocation (TNAUK).
Cathy Murtha [1] offers an inspiring vision of how harnessing computer technology and accessible Internet services, could give print impaired people access to newspapers, magazines and library resources generally.
This article describes what is already being done to help make this dream a reality.
The Talking Newspaper Association of the UK was founded in 1974 to unite local Talking Newspaper groups, the first of which was started by Ronald Sturt in 1969 at the College of Librarianship Wales, Aberystwyth.
There are now around 530 Talking Newspapers, helping to keep an estimated 250,000 people in touch with local affairs.
TNAUK itself runs a National Service with an individual membership of over 17,000 and distributes 6,000 audio cassettes a day, involving over 180 publications.
Towards the end of 1995 TNAUK began the distribution of electronic publications, under the direction of the Vice President, Ted Davis.
Growth has been rapid, with over 50 newspapers and magazines available as e-texts, these being distributed on IBM compatible computer disks, by e-mail, or retrieved from a bulletin board service(BBS).
On average, over 900 disks a week are dispatched to around 500 users; more than 100 people receive publications by e-mail, and 130 access the BBS.
For publications available in both tape and electronic form, the circulation ratio is currently running at about ten to one.
This article will describe these e-texts, who uses them and how they are used, their source, how they are prepared and distributed, with a final discussion of the challenges facing TNAUK in this area, under the headings: The E-Texts, Use of the E-Texts, Sources, E-Text Preparation and Structure, Distribution, Challenges, Lists of e-journals available, and joining TNAUK.
1.
The e-texts The wide range of material available can be gauged from the list of publications shown in the Appendix.
Distribution started late in 1995 with the Gramophone and HiFi News, three of the latest publications being the Times Education, Higher Education and Literary Supplements.
The first publications from TNAUK HiFi News and the Gramophone were initially privately distributed by Angus McKenzie MBE, through his good contacts with the Publishers.
Shortly afterwards New Scientist was also taken up by TNAUK, this had also been previously privately distributed, this time as a version scanned from the print copy and distributed with the Publisher’s permission.
It was the success of these two separate private distributions, together with some campaigning, which persuaded TNAUK to undertake the service.
Among the most popular publications are the Broadcasting Guides, produced with the kind permission of BBC Broadcasting Data Services, with a circulation of over 200 by the three modes.
These Guides cover all the national and regional radio, and terrestrial satellite and cable television broadcasts, and include a simple text navigation system, which enables the user to make easy listening or viewing choices.
Two utility programs have been written by members which further facilitate the use of these Guides, to tailor the Guide to their own region, and to quickly find out what is on at a particular day and time.
The Which?
magazines, produced with the kind permission of the Consumer Association, are almost as popular, and give the visually impaired reader the opportunity to make the same sort of informed choice that a sighted person will have.
Given the disadvantage visually impaired people are often at when purchasing goods, this sort of information is even more important than it is for the sighted purchaser.
Because of the logistics of disk distribution, dailies have had to be made available only by e-mail and from the TNAUK BBS one paper, the Financial Times, is actually available on the same day as the print edition, usually by about 10am.
The Saturday issue of this paper is also available on disk.
Through the Project Gutenberg [2] Monthly Update, members are given access to a growing literary store.
Project Gutenberg is a repository, freely accessible by all, comprising nearly 1000 books at various sites on the Internet; it is being added to at the rate of 32 books per month, all contributed by volunteers.
The PG Monthly Update gives a listing of the previous month’s additions, together with a complete author and book index.
Those readers who have Internet access are encouraged to download these for themselves, others can ask TNAUK to do this on their behalf.
For those interested in literature generally, with the kind permission of News International, the Times Literary Supplement is available.
Those who enjoy a good pint of beer while they are reading, can take What’s Brewing, the magazine of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, to help in their choice of beer.
2.
Use of the e-texts Although the TNAUK Charter permits it to supply newspapers and magazines to those with a print impairment generally, most readers are visually impaired computer users, rather than those with dyslexia, or simply a literacy problem.
A trial with some students from New Leaf, a family literacy group which meets at Maindee Public Library in Newport South Wales, was undertaken and reported on at the Conference of the International Reading Association in Prague (July 1996), and again in Literacy Today [3].
However, in spite of the encouraging results, this aspect has not yet been developed, because it is felt that it would be best to begin the service with visually impaired users: most publishers accept that to give this group free access to their material, will not damage their sales; also, while there is an appreciation that this is the only way visually impaired people can get access to information, much work remains to be done to extend this perception to print disability generally.
It is quite possible that permission could be extended to those whose dyslexia causes them to be ‘statemented’ by their Local Authority, although the situation regarding the free postal delivery to registered blind people would need to be explored.
The systems that people use to read electronic texts will depend on the nature of their visual impairment, their financial situation and their technical competence.
Some will be able to read the text on the screen without any other aids, though they would not easily be able to read the printed copy.
Others will need to enlarge the image, either using the natural font size enlargement within Windows, or a program specially designed to enlarge the image on a screen.
Those using the natural enlargement facility of Windows can obtain further help if their computer is equipped with a sound card, when selected passages can be voiced.
Those whose knowledge of braille is good enough, will be able to attach a braille output device to their computer, and read in braille.
Those whose knowledge of braille is inadequate, or who cannot afford the high cost of the braille equipment, will have a voice synthesiser attached to their computer.
Both the braille and voice synthesiser users will need a piece of software called a screen reader to interface between them, the computer and their chosen means of output; newer versions of these screen readers have the ability to use sound cards rather than the more expensive voice synthesisers.
Finally, all will need to choose to use either a word-processor or a dedicated text reader.
In general word-processors are not to be recommended, they tend to be slower than the text readers, but Windows-based users will still prefer them.
Two good text readers, both Shareware products, are LIST+ [4] and READIT [5], the latter the most popular, both of these products being DOS-based, the latter being particularly well-suited to the TNAUK e-texts.
The main factors affecting the rate and efficiency of acquisition of information are not dissimilar from those for any reader: natural ability, the skill and experience with which that ability is applied, the complexity of the text, will all have a bearing; an additional factor will be the technical competence of the e-reader in using the reading system.
The experienced e-reader will learn to skim and scan as well as any sighted reader, making full use of the text-search ability of the preferred reading program.
Someone using voice synthesis will increase the speech rate to the maximum comprehensible rate.
All will make the usual predictions from contextual clues to further speed up reading rates.
3.
Sources With the good contacts it had established in publishing and editorial offices over the years, TNAUK was in an ideal position to obtain the agreement of various publishers to distribute electronic copies of publications.
Generally the attitude has been one of interest and cooperation, with some organisations prepared to undertake serious development, sometimes tied into their own objectives with regard to the Internet, to make their publications accessible to visually impaired people.
Advertising is a valuable source of information, particularly employment advertising, but also equipment advertising in computer magazines.
Unfortunately this has so far proved to be the most difficult to acquire in part, possibly, because this is the major source of revenue for the publication, but also because of technical difficulties.
At least one publisher refused, citing the former ground; several others have indicated that this would not be a problem, but that because the material is prepared by outside advertising agencies, and is received in film format ready for printing, it cannot be supplied in an accessible form.
A vital factor in the rapid initial growth was the whole-hearted co-operation of FT PROFILE, which gave permission to use their extensive database of over 100 publications freely, provided only that the owners of the original material also gave their permission.
The great value of this source lay in the fact that the publications required no conversion to a readable format and that because of the similarity in the way the publications were structured, a single program could be written to produce a uniform output, for all of the publications taken from it.
This gave the necessary experience to deal with the more complex texts that came later.
About 18 of the titles for example, New Scientist, The Economist, the Daily Telegraph are obtained from the FT PROFILE database.
The remaining titles are sent from the editorial offices by various means, by pc or mac disk, by SyQuest disk, by dialling into the publications own bulletin board, by e-mail and through ISDN.
4.
E-text preparation and structure Texts which are coded as ASCII files, (a standard code, which stands for American Standard computer Code for Information Interchange), can readily be imported into any word-processor or text reader all of the FT PROFILE publications, as already mentioned, are held in this format.
Most of the non-ASCII texts are produced by QUARK, a desktop publisher for Mac computers.
Text must be manually extracted from these files, using QUARK on a Mac, to ASCII PC files, a laborious and time-consuming process a day can easily be spent extracting the textual content of a moderately-sized magazine.
Some publications will already have been converted to ASCII text files, from various word-processors and publishing packages before they arrive.
They may well contain the debris of their previous existence, sections involving word-processing control codes, or even editorial comments, all of which need to be removed.
Further, the order in which the separate articles are stored on the disk or transmitted down the telephone line will quite often be due to chance rather than editorial choice.
So to clean up the articles and impose a logical structure, which should reflect that of the print copy, a series of programs was created to produce the final output.
These programs were developed to make as much of the work as possible automatic; where intervention is necessary, it is made within the context of the automatic editing program, thus ensuring that the integrity and structure of the final text is maintained.
Cleaning up the text not only involves removing debris within it: certain characters are incorrectly translated, for example the pound sterling symbol, becomes L; line lengths must be adjusted to be about 75 characters and an occasional blank line inserted between paragraphs.
This ‘tidying-up’ process can sometimes be quite extensive: Which?
magazine, for example, contains many tables comparing different products; during the extraction process these tables are broken up into their horizontal and vertical components, which have to be reassembled in a way that tries to help the visually impaired reader navigate them.
Structure is imposed on the text by re-ordering the articles, with reference to the print copy, numbering them, adding a contents page and navigational hooks to help in moving from the contents page to the articles and between the articles.
The contents page has both a section index and an article index, the former referring the reader to the first article of each section, the latter giving the article headline and often a summary.
Two simple navigational hooks are added, a special character (the ‘hash’ symbol) is placed in front of the article number, as a search-aid, and the so-called form-feed, or page-break character is placed at the start of each article: this is recognised by a text reader popular with visually impaired readers, enabling them to move between articles by simply pressing the letters “n” and “p” for the next and previous articles.
Finally a prefatory section is added, containing acknowledgements, general information and help.
An escape is provided to enable a regular reader to skip over this section.
5.
Distribution Clearly it is important that people have access to their paper or magazine as close to the print publication date as possible.
Of the dailies, which can only be obtained through the BBS and by e-mail, only the Financial Times can be delivered on the same day as the print copy appears, generally the others are a day late.
Weeklies and monthlies are usually produced on or before the print publication date the Broadcasting Guides, for example, are available on the Tuesday before the broadcasting week begins on Saturday.
Some of the monthlies, such as HiFi News and the Gramophone, are received at the National Recording Centre at least a month before the print publication date, so these are held back until the print copy appears in the shops.
The basic means of distribution is the IBM compatible 3.5in floppy disk.
These are dispatched in plastic wallets, with reversible laminated labels.
Under an agreement with the Post Office, these are carried without charge to registered blind members.
The member is encouraged to scan all disks received for viruses, having done so, the file is copied onto the member’s computer and the wallet and disk returned.
Including audio cassette wallets, TNAUK deals with 50 sacks of wallets per day, approximately 6,000 cassettes and disks.
If the member’s computer has been equipped with a modem and older models can still be found for less than 50 pounds, with later 33,600bps modems less than 100 pounds e-texts can be downloaded from the BBS.
This has been set up as a 0345 local number, with a sending modem of 28,800 bps, so that with the modern modem’s error-checking and data compression capabilities (even for those below 50 pounds), high data transmission rates are achievable.
The Sunday Times, which can be about 2MB about the electronic size of Dicken’s “Dombey and Son” can be downloaded using a 28,800 bps modem in less than six minutes; allowing another few minutes to organise the transmission and log off, at local week-end rates this represents less than a 10p telephone charge.
Members with access to the Internet, or at least an e-mail address, can opt to receive their issues by e-mail delivery.
Those who have this facility will probably choose to have regular deliveries by e-mail, fetching the occasional item from the BBS, treating it as an electronic news-stand.
6.
Challenges Many challenges face TNAUK if it is to fulfil the early promise of the last eighteen months: the range and content of the material must be expanded, to try again to include advertising material, to provide more ‘life-style choice’ material magazines on cooking, gardening, sport, etc.
; there are still many visually impaired computer users who are unaware of the service, consideration should also be given to drawing in those with dyslexia; the presentation and structure of some e-texts needs to be improved, new formats should be explored for example, HTML, though this must not be at the expense of the more generally accessible ASCII format; to cater for overseas members, the electronic news-stand that is the BBS needs to be made available through an accessible web site; finally, but certainly not least, means must be explored whereby local Talking Newspapers can be involved.
7.
Lists of e-texts available, and joining TNAUK The following lists of available e-texts were current as of June, 1997: Quarterlies: Evergreen National Trust Magazine This England Bi-monthlies: British Astronomical Association Journal Monthlies: BBC Homes & Antiques BBC Music New Christian Herald Computer Shopper Disability Now The Gramophone HiFi News & Record Review London Underground Railway Society News BBC On Air Connectivity (PC User Group Magazine) Project Gutenberg Update Reader’s Digest TN News What’s Brewing (CAMRA Magazine) Gardening Which?
Holiday Which?
Which?
Health Which?
Weeklies: The Economist The European Financial Times on Saturday Investors Chronicle Independent on Sunday Local History Magazine Mail on Sunday Moneywise New Scientist Observer The People Sunday Mail Sunday Mirror The Spectator Times Educational Supplement Times Higher Educational Supplement Times Literary Supplement Scotland on Sunday Sunday Times Sunday Telegraph Take a Break Broadcasting Guides: Radio Guide Satellite & Cable programme information BBC and ITV programme information Dailies: Daily Mirror Financial Times Guardian The Independent Daily Telegraph Times Membership of TNAUK costs 20 pounds per annum, and entitles the member to any number of titles, either as e-texts, or on audio cassette.
For further information, contact TNAUK on: National Recording Centre, Heathfield, TN21 8DB.
Tel: 01435 866 102 Fax: 01435 865 422 Email: 101761.167@compuserve.com References [1] Web Access for the Disabled, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/web-access/ [2] Search The Project Gutenberg Database and Get Books With a Click!
Available from a link on the PG Web site home page at: http://promo.net/pg/ [3] Caroline McLachlan, ‘New Leaf in Wales’, Literacy Today, Number 9, December 1996, National Literacy Trust.
[4] LIST, Buerg Software, 139 White Oak Circle, Petaluma, CA 94952, USA.
Shareware program, available from many databases.
[5] READIT, Ferguson Enterprises, RR1 Box 238, Manchester, SD 57353, USA.
Shareware program, available from TNAUK.
Author details Neil H. McLachlan, TNAUK Council member.
Email: neilhorn@dircon.co.uk Tel: 0171 412 7109 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The 1996 UKOLUG State of the Art Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The 1996 UKOLUG State of the Art Conference Buzz data software java copyright video preservation e-learning cd-rom intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Melanie Lawes describes the 1996 UKOLUG (UK On-Line Users Group) Annual Conference, held in Warwick last July.
UKOLUG's State of the Art Conference, held in Warwick in July, attracted nearly 200 delegates including representatives from academia, publishing and commerce.
Day One Sir Brian Follett opened the conference with a talk about technology and libraries in 2000.
He described the background to the Follett report and the current implementation strategy.
In outlining his view of efforts to ensure the success of the libraries review he emphasised the importance of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) and in particular the potential of the electronic journals in the research environment.
Sir Brian concluded that libraries will continue to be a core resource in the year 2000.
He believes that librarians will still have an important role to play as I.T.
comes into teaching and learning provided that they are willing to adapt to the new technological environment.
This theme was to come up more than once during the following three days.
The second speaker Dr.
Guy Fielding, Head of Department, Communication & Information Studies, Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh talked about the effects of technology on people and discussed the importance of recognising and using the links between information studies and communication studies in this area.
He argued that the results of work carried out in the field of communication studies is can be seen to be extremely relevant when examining user's perceptions and use of information systems.
Next Karen Blakeman of RBA Information Services spoke about the future of intermediaries.
Karen pointed out that the much discussed "disintermediation" which is predicted to come about because of ability provided by the Internet to allow end-users direct access to information without the need for trained professional help has been threatened before following the advent of online and CD-ROM technology.
Yet the phenomena has yet to occur.
Following the theme introduced earlier Karen provided a survival guide which emphasised the importance of keeping up-to-date with the new technology, finding new ways of exploiting the resources it provides and the librarian's valuable role as trainer.
Zinat Merali from the National Council for Educational Technology discussed the training issues that need to be considered to ensure that the new communication technologies are used effectively.
Having first outlined what visionaries expect to happen in education in the future, Zinat used video clips to demonstrate the experience of projects currently being carried out in UK schools.
Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Electronic Libraries Programme rounded off the first day with an update on the progress of the eLib programme.
Chris outlined the background and aims of the programme and issues such as project evaluation, exit strategies and sustainability.
One of the key issues that Chris raised was the problem of preservation, how to ensure that material, stored only in digital form, can remain accessible in the future.
Day Two Thursday opened with three sessions concerned with publishing on the Internet.
In the first Rob Bamford of Sun Microsystems talked a change in the way in which we will use information technology especially as a result of developments such as JAVA.
He concluded that in the future we will see intelligent agents, greater interaction, ubiquity and payment.
In the second session Graham Walter of ThameSys Ltd. presented an introduction to publishing on the Web which included possible reasons why you might want to create pages on the Web such as advertising, personal, publishing, customer support and selling.
He also outlined areas that need to be considered by those responsible for managing a Web site such as the use of a house style, security, update procedures, statistics, and link checking.
Finally he covered areas such as ways of publicising the site in an acceptable manner.
Next was Andrew Charlesworth who gave a thought provoking introduction to the legal issues that must be considered when publishing material on the Internet.
He pointed out that it is important to bear in mind that various aspects of the law both criminal and civil do apply to information published on the Internet and it may be extremely perilous and costly to ignore them.
This does not only apply in obvious areas such as copyright, data protection and defamation but also areas such as blasphemy.
It is also important to consider the international nature of the Internet when considering the legal implications of publishing certain information.
Breakout sessions covering designing user friendly home pages, legal issues, quality evaluation criteria, keeping up with new information sources on the Internet, providing current awareness services, saving time and money, using the internet to search online and security concerns allowed delegates to participate in discussions on areas of particular concern to them.
Feedback of the conclusions of the sessions was received on Friday morning.
In the afternoon John Cox, University College, Cork presented a paper written jointly with Betsy Anagnostelis, Information Services, Royal Free School of Medicine which looked at evaluating Internet resources, an important skill as the explosion of resources on the Internet continues.
Key areas for evaluation were identified as Context, Content and Access, following the model developed by the eLib OMNI Project John went on to describe various evaluation initiatives such as the OMNI Project, Point Web Reviews, Megallan, Healthweb and Infofilter, all of which vary their approach.
They also drew attention to the Information Quality WWW Virtual Library which has a collection of quality-focused sections, including evaluation of information resources.
Next, Ian Watson, Caledonian Newspapers Information Services Manager, talked about the problems of effective Internet searching and in particular the use of current search engines on the Web.
He pointed out that so far indexing on the Web has been done only by "Tolkein reading, Star Trek watching, coffee pot monitoring, computer science geeks" with little useful input from the library service.
David Baynes, Information Services Manager at ERA Technology Ltd, described ERA's experience of using the Internet and the positive moves they have made in managing their Internet activities.
Sue Turner and Gulsham Kayam talked about the creation and management of IT POINT which provides Internet access to the public through the public library service.
Sue described the experiences and implications for the library following the establishment of IT POINT in Chelmsley Wood Library in Solihull, while Gulsham talked more specifically about the aims and services provided by I.T.
Point itself.
Finally Clive Watts of Digital talked about managing the Intranet and presented on overview of the development of internal networks which allow companies to share information internally without making themselves susceptible to security risks.
He described the scale of Intranet development arguing that by 1999 Intranet spending will be four times that of spending on Internet activities.
Day Three Friday's first paper was given by Jennifer Larkin, Final Years Honours Student, Department of Communication and Information Studies, Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh.
Jennifer was the winner of the UKOLUG Student Paper Award with her paper Women Online The Online Gender Gap.
Jennifer pointed out that while the Internet would appear to provide women with egalitarian environment it is estimated that 90% of the online population is male.
Reasons for this might include inequalities in the practical IT education in schools, societal stereotypes pursued in the marketing of IT products (e.g., Gameboy, SuperMario Bros.), the experience of women in the workplace.
Suggested ways of closing the gap include the development of neutral software, hardware (painting PCs pink has been tried) and education environments (segregated teaching); constructive parental, teacher and mentor influence; lobbying companies; and self empowerment.
Those women who do succeed in non-traditionalist fields can expect salaries far higher than their counterparts working in traditional areas.
Phil Bradley gave a lively closing talk about the role of the librarian in the challenging electronic environment and asked what would the ancient librarian think about the development of libraries and librarianship.
The role of the librarian is changing, we have moved from being the gatekeeper of information towards a role as a facilitator, developing new skills and new ways of thinking to help people to find information for themselves.
He argued that the ancient librarian may find it difficult to understand the changes to the modern library when viewed as a physical resource but if we move away from thinking about the library in a physical sense then they may find it easier to understand.
The event was very successful, it was well organised and the papers were varied and interesting.
Wednesday evening's reception, was hosted by Financial Times Information and Thursday's by Elsevier Science, both were very enjoyable and allowed us to get together and relax.
The accommodation and catering provide by the Warwick University Conference Centre was good and the setting extremely attractive.
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eLib and Telematics: Projects and Partnerships Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eLib and Telematics: Projects and Partnerships Buzz digitisation research Citation BibTex RIS Jill Beard announces a conference August 1997 in the south of England that aims to bring together people and ideas from the UK eLib and European Telematics communities.
New Tricks 2: eLib and Telematics: Projects and Partnerships BULISC ‘97 27-29 August 1997 The Conference is being supported by both eLib [1] [2] and DGXIII (Telematics Applications Programme [3] ) and will for the first time bring together projects in key areas of interest from across the EU, allowing both potential users and the project workers themselves to compare aims, objectives and results thus far.
Day one …Brings you leading speakers from both organisations Day two …offers a unique opportunity to hear reports on progress from both eLib and Telematics Programmes including the four sectors of Gateways/Networked Resources; Digitisation/Images; Electronic Journals; Document Delivery.
Delegates will be able to choose four from the eight sessions on offer.
Day three …stages a major debate on the electronic library and outcomes of the programmes.
Audience The Conference is aimed at senior managers and those with more technical interests; however all with an interest in the electronic library, will benefit from attending.
While the emphasis is European, the developments discussed will be of interest to the wider international audience.
Location Bournemouth University with its attractive campus is just 100 miles from London and its airports, well served by the main road and rail networks.
Further Details To ensure personal receipt of full conference details in April, please email: sgrant@bournemouth.ac.uk.
References eLib Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ eLib section in this issue of Ariadne, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/elib.html Details of some of the Telematics for Research projects, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/netskills-corner/ Author Details Jill Beard, Assistant Head (Academic), Library & Information Services Email: jbeard@bournemouth.ac.uk Tel: 01202 595567 Fax: 01202 595475 Address: Bournemouth University, Talbot Campus, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 14 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 14 Buzz rdf html copyright windows Citation BibTex RIS The Web editors, Philip Hunter and Isobel Stark, introduce Ariadne issue 14.
In addition to the articles mentioned by Lyndon Pugh in the print editorial, Ariadne, the web version has several articles and features to interest even the most world weary.
Oliver de Peyer reminds us all what it is like to be on the receiving end of the ‘end-user’ revolution whereas Brian Kelly looks forward to the latest dynamic HTML.
Also on offer is timely advice from Jon Knight on the problems encountered when using networked CD ROM redirectors with Windows 95 or NT, Walter Scales looks at bad and good web design and Rachel Heery explains RDF.
ELib projects are also well represented with reports from Superjournal, EDDIS and ROADS as well as the report from Catriona which is also in the print version.
Latest developments from eLib projects also crop up in the Newsline along with conference announcements, news from the UK and US goverments, national initiatives and so on.
And of course there are all the regular columns including the Copyright Corner, Public Libraries, Search Engines and Planet Sosig.
All in all, something for everyone whether your interests be of a technical or end-user bent.
Author Details Isobel Stark, Ariadne Web co-editor, Email: i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk   Philip Hunter, Ariadne Web co-editor, Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The 4th WWW Conference in Boston Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The 4th WWW Conference in Boston Buzz data software java html archives metadata browser identifier preservation linux ascii cache uri licence telnet url research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom and John Kirriemuir provide an informal report from the "cutting edge" of Web development.
This is an informal diary of two delegates who attended the big event for World Wide Web people, namely the 4th International WWW Conference.
Debra Hiom, the SOSIG research officer and John Kirriemuir, the UKOLN Information Officer provide the dialogue.
The good quality photographs were taken by Debra, on her expensive camera, while the not-so-good quality pictures were taken by John on a cheap and nasty disposable camera (7 dollars).
Due to the rapid speed of change within the Web World, International WWW Conferences are held roughly every 6 months; number 3 in the series was held in Germany in April 1995, while number 5 will be held in Paris in May 1996.
This conference took place in the Copley Marriott Hotel in central Boston (where a large number of the delegates stayed) from December 11-14th.
The series of World Wide Web Conferences are the events to go to for sampling the latest in the rapidly moving field of World Wide Web development, research and implementation.
This particular conference was hosted by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), which now consists of over 100 member organisations and is headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Web.
At this particular conference, 57 papers were presented, as well as an exhibition of Web products and technology, a poster display of ongoing research, a day of tutorials and workshops and a day dedicated to developers of Web-based systems and technology.
In addition, people were allowed to spontaneously set up their own "birds of a feather" session, where like-minded people could huddle and discuss their common interest.
Selected sessions from the conference were broadcast over the MBONE, which enabled real-time sound and pictures to be relayed.
This meant that people with an adequate network connection and the right software around the globe could watch the conference, as well as submit questions during the sessions.
The full programme is available on the Web, from which you can see the full versions of most of the presented papers.
Before the Conference Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th Getting there Saturday the 9th of December and a trip to London to catch a plane.
Before setting off, do a quick Web hunt for information on what to do if the plane crashes.
Very frosty and crisp; hoping for some warmer weather in the States (should have checked where Boston was on the map first).
Flying across on Virgin Airways was a surreal experience.
One of the inflight movies was "Babe", all about a pig that talks and herds sheep.
Several people in the row in front start crying at the happy ending; the in-flight dinner of ham salad is subsequently declined by many passengers.
With several alarming thuds, the plane touches down in Boston late-afternoon (eastern US time).
Boston airport is peculiar in that it is situated only three miles from the City Centre.
The approach involved flying over large tracts of American suburbia, intermingled with fog, low clouds and various combinations of rain/snow; disappointingly not that much different from home.
Baggage, customs and immigration was super-quick, so we were out of the airport less than half an hour after touching down.
As we discovered later, several other of the UK delegation, who were due to arrive not long after us, suffered 12 hour delays due to the weather at Boston, most of it staring at a lonely runway from out of their plane at Washington airport.
The hotels and conference centre Emerging from the airport reveals colder, wetter and windier weather than that left behind in England.
Due to the congestion at the bus to subway link, and a lack of faith in map reading, a taxi was requisitioned to speed us to our hotels.
The taxi driver took a suspiciously circular route, twice passing the bar on which "Cheers" is based on.
The two official conference hotels were the Sheraton and the Copley Marriott, both huge (and expensive) complexes, connected (thankfully) by indoor walkways.
Both hotels were luxurious, not really comparable to your average English conference hotel.
Most of the conference was due to take place in the Marriott, which had dozens of session/function rooms of differing sizes, the largest of which could comfortably hold 3000 people.
Exploration of the connecting walkways revealed the inevitable shopping mall, as well as the Hynes Convention Centre, a large building of mainly huge, empty rooms (reminding one of the film Brazil), where the remaining sessions were to be held.
Registration On the Sunday, the shutters were opened and registration began.
Delegates were handed a large and very smart shoulder bag, containing: A sweatshirt, with the conference picture on the front and (inevitably) the URL for the conference Web pages on the reverse A ticket for a conference mug, which it turned out was of tankard capacity with weight to match A conference poster.
Requests for a swap for an Oasis poster inevitably caused some puzzlement.
The "World Wide Web Journal", which consisted of the conference proceedings (all 740 pages of it) Proceedings of the tutorials, posters and workshops Attendees list Perusal of the attendees list made for some slightly depressing reading.
Out of the approximately 2300 delegates listed, only 63 were from the UK.
Other European countries were also represented with few attendees; 61 came from France (most of those from 1 organisation), 30 from Italy, 4 from Spain and 2 from Ireland.
Somewhat inevitably, out of the 10 pages of delegates, USA attendees filled over 7.
Monday 11th Tutorials and Workshops Monday dawned, and with it a day of tutorials and workshops.
Delegates had to nominate their first three choices of these sessions via email some weeks previously, so this was a day without deliberating over what session to attend.
Designing and Maintaining a highly Usable Site This half day tutorial was run by Jakob Nielsen of Sun Microsystems, and gave an overview of the design decisions behind the public and the internal Web server systems created and maintained by Sun Microsystems.
Initial worry that this would be half a day on someone telling us why Sun's Web site/Sun itself was so great proved to be unfounded, and a lot of reasoned Web design strategies were discussed in the session.
Jakob gave a summary of the analysis of the use of Sun's public Web site.
Some of the many points of interest were: People used a considerable number of different browsers to look at the Sun site.
For each of these browsers, significant numbers of people used different versions; several versions of Netscape and Mosaic, for example, were used in the same time interval by large numbers of people.
It became evident that if the pages linked from the home page were not as impressive/stylish as the home page, then people were put off, or spent less time, looking at those pages (no matter what their content).
Simple changes to the look and interactiveness of the pages had a dramatic effect on how people navigated through the Web site.
For example, when the "What's new" button was moved to a more prominent position on the main page, it resulted in a 416% increase in the number of people who used it.
Users were often reluctant to scroll; links to other pages at the bottom of a page were usually traversed less than those at the top of the page.
Evaluation of how users "read" the Web pages showed that many of them were reluctant to "read" in the conventional sense, preferring to home in on links (and the surrounding text) to other pages.
A summary of some of the considerable log analysis was given, showing the changing patterns in the geographic distribution of users, how the pages were browsed, access growth rates.
One aspect of the design criteria that was stressed several times during the morning was the desirability of "directing" browsers to the Web pages they would most likely want to go to, rather than just presenting them with a long list of linked items on the Web site.
(Trying to) email home In the afternoon and evening, the on-line rooms were opened to conference delegates.
The two rooms consisted of some 80 PCs and Macs.
All the computers allowed telnet access so you could (remotely) read and send email from your account back home.
Inevitably, all of the computers also allowed Web access, with most having Mosaic and Netscape mounted.
Having said that, it was noted that as the conference progressed, an assortment of browsers gradually appeared on many of the machines, probably downloaded and set up by delegates who did not use Netscape/Mosaic as a first choice browser.
The first big disappointment of the conference came when trying to make a telnet connection back home, to read/write email.
Connecting before late afternoon to the UK was impractical; even in the early/mid evening, characters crawled slowly across the telnet interface, frequently freezing for several minutes at a time.
Frustration was further fuelled by seeing people from other European countries, such as Sweden, France and Italy, typing away more or less in real time.
Web access to the UK was also very slow; in the time it took to access the home page of a Manchester university, a group of Swedish delegates at the adjoining PC managed to explore all of the Volvo Web site.
The one advantage of the relatively slow connection to the UK was that it was easy to spot other UK delegates in the on-line rooms; they were usually the frustrated delegates apparently not doing anything :-) Tuesday 12th Papers (Day 1) Tuesday marked the first day proper of the conference.
Breakfast in the conference area started at 7:30 am; 8:25 saw several of the British delegation shuffle in to a near-empty self-service area, mistakenly thinking that most people hadn't yet got out of bed.
As it later emerged, many of the US delegates had been queuing for food since before 7:30, and had now bagged the best seats for the opening plenary session.
Made mental note to in future appreciate the reasurringly late times that conferences in the UK generally start.
The Opening Sessions The opening session got off to a bad start with several of the key people not being there, and Tim Berners-Lee apparently stuck in traffic, causing repeated apologies from the conference opener.
Soon, we were into Bran Ferrens keynote address.
Bran works for Disney; despite their reputation for being draconian with anyone using anything even slightly Disney-like in their Web pages, he appeared to be quite a cheerful and fair character, greatly resembling Grizzly Adams in appearance.
Bran gave a potted history of technological breakthroughs, showing how the wrong person usually got the credit for inventions.
This went on for so long that most people forgot the point he was trying to make (but it was at least entertaining).
He described the Web as being like "a project commisioned by the Institute of the aesthetically challenged".
Unfortunately, there was little else of relevance in his address, entertaining a speaker though he was.
Resource Discovery IAFA Templates Dave Beckett from the HENSA Unix Archive presented a paper on IAFA templates in use as Internet Metadata.
Beckett is using IAFA templates to index an Internet Parallel Computing Archive at the University of Kent.
The archive is a mixture of resources including reports, software, documentation, bibliographies, etc.
Originally chose IAFA templates (1993) as they allowed for a much richer range of metadata to be created than other existing standards, e.g.
Linux Software Maps.
Even so had to create new template types and attributes (field names) to accommodate the different resources in the archive.
There is some automatic extraction of metadata from the resources, for example the format of the resource can often be gleaned by looking at the filename extensions e.g.
.ps (postscript).
However also added hand-written metadata such as descriptions to the templates.
Problems encountered using IAFA were difficulties in representing nested metadata and the use of non-ascii characters within the templates.
Some future work Beckett set out was to have user configurable views of the templates and provide a URC service based on the templates.
At a later URC bof Dirk Van Gulik presented some information about the European Wide Service Exchange (EWSE).
This is a directory service for people, products and services concerned with the application of Earth Observation data.
The data is stored in IAFA templates and they are using a harvester to find information.
Van Gulik was also interested in providing a URC resolver service.
URI Panel A panel of the great and the good were brought together to discuss URIs (Uniform Resource Indentifiers).
Chaired by Stuart Weibel from the OCLC Office of Research each speaker was given roughly 5 minutes to put forward his/her position on what they thought were the most important issues in this area.
This was obviously too short a time for any real discussion to take place but the the overall impression was that URNs and URCs were still a long way from being settled.
Some comments from the speakers: Larry Masinter from XEROX PARC thought that the problem with URLs is not so much that URLs change but that 'stuff goes away'.
A naming system won't solve this problem and the preservation of online material is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Karen Sollins from MIT Laboratory for Computer Science put forward a list of characteristics that were required of URNs.
They will need to have: longevity mobility potential to evolve ubiquity global participation Ron Daniel from LANL put forward a scenario for a hiearchical scheme where the client (browser) would first check the local cache for the resource, if this was not sucessful the client would contact a local resolving registry and the local resolver would in turn contact an outside registry.
Five years on Tim Berners-Lee speaks The last session in the afternoon was an hour of Tim Berners-Lee speaking about the evolution of the Web, and what he would like to see in the future.
This was probably the most heavily attended session of the conference, and certainly the one with the largest press and TV contingent.
The section on the early days of the Web were most interesting.
Tim preferred HTML before inlined images were introduced (into Mosaic), as it made people more literate.
He also noted how the concept of the "home page" had changed.
In the early, dark days of the Web (before 1994), the home page was the page where you started to browse around the Web.
Since, then, and partially helped by bookmarks being a fundamental feature of most browsers, the home page was now someones the self-publicity Web area.
This presentation produced, for many people, the highlight of the conference.
About halfway through, while he was using a demo version of a browser to view his Web pages, the browser licence expired, with an accompanying message on the screen.
The ironic situation of the founder of the Web, being unable to access Web pages because of a commercial/licencing software problem, struck home with many people.
Several heavily bearded and sandalled delegates in front of us, who appeared to closely resemble stereotypical techno-hippies, commented "like, symbolic, Man...".
The banquet and socialising In the evening, a banquet was held in the Marriott Hotel for all of the delegates and what appeared to be several dozen hotel employees.
The food was okay, so long as you weren't vegetarian; meals at the conference tended to have a vegetable/fruit based starter, and if you did not eat meat, you generally got the same again (but as a bigger portion) for the main course.
However, several bottles of wine on each table (most of ours drunk very quickly by 4 CERN employees) and the chance to talk to lots of people on things Web made up for this.
The music was provided by an odd jazz combination, the lead singer of which tried (and failed) to get into the "mood" by singing lines like "found myself a URL" and "got myself my Web page".
Hmmmm.
Wednesday 13th Papers (Day 2) Wednesday marked the second day of papers and, soon though it seemed, the closing session.
As with yesterday, the day started with Birds of a Feather sessions in the (very) early morning, followed by multiple parallel sessions of papers throughout the day.
Closing the conference The main wrap up keynote speech was by Robert Metcalfe, the Vice President of Advanced Technology.
Though heavily opinionated and somewhat lacking in real substance, this was quite entertaining; the speech was basically a collection of soundbites, including: "The percentage of people in the World who use the Web rounds to zero" "The least important subject covered at the conference was creating cool Web pages using HTML" [did think of pointing out that attractive, useful Web sites would make more people use the Web, and help move the aforementioned percentage above zero] Robert wasn't sure what the most important subject covered, but then later said "Java is the biggest thing to happen since the PC" "The Web is self-policing whevever I get near any pornography, the traffic keeps me out" Robert spent some time predicting that the Web would "collapse" or "enter a dark age" in 1996, but wouldn't say specificially what he believed such an event would occur of.
Thursday 14th Developers Day Thursday was developers day.
Despite the conference "officially" ending the day before, many people were still around for the various sessions aimed at people developing software, systems and standards.
As the sessions for this day had sold out some time previously, there were a noticeable number of people slipping into the sessions wearing dubious badges and identification.
Most delegates attention was also distracted by the heavy snowfalls that started during the morning, and got worse throughout the day.
A noticeable degree of concern about getting home became evident when one of the afternoon speakers didn't appear for some time as his incoming flight was snowbound.
Getting home Thursday, Friday and Saturday :-( John Straight after the conference, caught a packed subway train to the airport with a bad feeling about getting home.
At the airport, the driver on the subway to airport connecting shuttle bus cheerfully informed us that he expected the airport to shut at any minute.
Uncannily, he proved right the minute I made it to the checkout desk.
The airport closed for four hours while snow was cleared.
While this was happening, the plane I was due to get out on was stranded further west.
This came in five hours late, emptied it's intake of passengers and promptly suffered "slight engine problems".
At 2:30am (6.5 hours after expected takeoff), the engine problem was deemed to be "serious".
One mad scramble to the checking in desk ensued, followed by painfully slow allocation onto flights on other airlines leaving in the morning and a hotel room for what was left of the night.
4am sees arrival at hotel; 5:30am sees departure from hotel back to airport.
Three hours of checking in later, all ready to board new plane, which promptly suffers from "pilot stranded in slush" problem.
Take off two hours late; arrive back in England, at a different airport to my scheduled one, 17 hours late.
Debra I had arranged to extend my stay for another 3 days to get a chance to explore Boston.
This I did in sub zero temperatures and despite the odd bit of frostbite was very glad that I had stayed on.
Especially as by this time most of the snow had gone and I (very smugly) had a trouble free flight home.
After Robert came a plug for the 5th WWW Conference, whose official slogan appears to be "Paris in the spring".
It seemed a bit bizarre, with the conference only officially beginning 32 hours before, for it to be closing with details of the next one.
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Minotaur (Sceptics Column) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur (Sceptics Column) Buzz data Citation BibTex RIS Mary Hope doubts the wisdom of children using the Internet at school.
The Internet cannot be avoided.
Our children will be affected by it whether we like it or not and, as information specialists, we need to get involved.
Ignore it and we are doing a disservice to students young and old.
Most articles with this sort of opening then go on to laud the learning opportunities of the Internet and suggest ways of getting online.
A particular growth area for Internet use at present is in our children's schools.
I would like to suggest a different approach.
Let us do a thought experiment about why children in school should not be given access to the Internet.
The arguments for signing up have gone unchallenged for too long.
Imagine, first of all, a child doing a project on trees.
She collects leaves, flowers and fruit.
She draws tree shapes, takes bark rubbings and estimates size.
Mentally compare two ways of doing this.
The first is the concrete experience of going out to the local park to collect the artifacts and data and then writing about them back in the classroom.
The second involves sitting at a computer and downloading, cutting and pasting.
Surely the direct experience has a greater richness and depth?
The senses of the child are fully involved.
Most readers of this column will have taken part in such projects as children, and can recall the experience by use of the imagination the dizzying perspective, for a child standing taking a bark rubbing from a tree trunk; the smells; the feel of wind and the sound of leaves and branches moving.
Would a virtual experience provide such food for our imagination?
Do we need to enter the Piagetian debate about the necessity of concrete experience before the abstraction of principles?
Computer-mediated learning is abstract.
As such it has its place but it is too easy to negate the value of the direct concrete experience.
Secondly, Net learning is superficial learning.
'Surfing' says it all.
The natural style of Internet use is to start at one point and end up at some unknown destination, having flitted from one hot link to another.
Certainly there is breadth and there are occasions when this is valuable.
But the Internet assumes a short attention span.
Combine this with a high noise ratio and you have the antithesis of a reflective, analytical learning style.
We need to pause and consider what learning skills we wish to develop in our children.
We are also seduced by the glamour of distance.
Why does e-mailing a child in some far part of the globe, with questions about his life, seem more stimulating than local discussions with a child from a different culture in our own home town?
In our multicultural society there is no shortage of opportunities to exchange facts and feelings about different lifestyles.
We are turned on by the idea of comunicating across vast distances, and fail to notice the opportunities on our own doorstep.
What else could a school do with the money it costs to use the Internet?
Costs will vary widely depending on the size of the school and the commitment to use the Net for learning, but they are generally going to be in the hundreds (even ignoring the cost of computers and simply considering the joining and connection costs).
Every purchase a school makes denies it something else.
What are the alternative ways in which this money could be used to enhance the aesthetic and cultural life of our schools?
How many drama trips, musical instruments or art events could have been funded?
If you accept the argument that the Internet is a fundamentally important information medium and children ought to have experience of it, you still have to consider whether they will obtain access outside schools.
The danger is that children in middle class homes will, and the rest will not.
In any case, children already have an excess of virtuality.
They spend vast quantities of time watching television and then, for diversion, play computer games.
Outside leisure is as likely to be a shoot-out at Quasar as a game of football.
If you need convincing about the dominance of the virtual world read The Sun and The Daily Mirror, and note how little of their content relates to reality!
Do our children really need any more virtual environments?
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The Resource Discovery Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Resource Discovery Project Buzz data software framework html database urn metadata browser identifier repositories copyright cataloguing sgml z39.50 pics purl ontologies authentication url research standards x.500 Citation BibTex RIS As Renato Iannella shows, the Resource Discovery project at the DSTC in Australia is investigating issues to do with information discovery and access across large heterogeneous networks.
Resource Discovery at DSTC The Resource Discovery Project is one of the major research units of the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC).
The DSTC is one of over 60 co-operative research centres in Australia and is a Federally and commercially funded non-profit company.
The DSTC has over 25 participating organisations which provide resources to the research program, including, direct funding, seconded staff, hardware and software, and importantly, research problems.
The Resource Discovery Project was established in mid 1994 after the emerging problem of information discovery on large networks was identified as a crucial research area for Australian data networks.
The goal of the Resource Discovery Project is to investigate issues related to locating, retrieving, and promulgating information in large networked environments.
The Internet and WWW provide a challenging environment for deployment of these services.
The needs of information publishers to maximise audience reach and the user to minimise information overload require advanced technical solutions and investigative research.
The Resource Discovery Project framework assumes the three layer architecture shown in Figure 1.
The framework contains the following entities: Content Seekers what technology do users need to find the information they are seeking?
What technologies do users need for retrieving and managing resources?
Users require software clients with intuitive user interfaces to facilitate and manage simple and complex information retrieval tasks.
Discovery Services what mechanisms do you need to store, propagate, and manage the resource descriptions used by the users to select and retrieve resources?
Discovery services act as the intermediary between the users and the information providers matching the needs of the two to provide a unified view of information repositories.
Content Providers how do you describe your resources?
Various techniques can be used to provide descriptions of resources (metadata) and to support the management of the organisation’s information publishing strategies.
These include tools which automate metadata extraction and support access constraints.
Figure 1: Resource Discovery Project Framework   Key Ideas and Goals of the Research The Resource Discovery Project is aiming to provide timely solutions to some of today’s problems as well as a fundamental and applied research vision.
The following outlines the projects goals, key ideas and research rationale: Goal: Allow organisations to effectively disseminate and promote networked information both internally and externally.
Key Idea: Accurate resource descriptions and robust naming systems are essential for finding resources.
Research plan: Investigate techniques for describing and identifying resources.
Investigate technologies for producing and disseminating resource descriptions and identifiers.
Goal: Improve information discovery and access across heterogeneous information sources.
Key Idea: Information and services will be made available in various formats and protocols and no single standard will ever evolve.
Research plan: Use middleware discovery services to translate between the various formats and standards.
Goal: Provide scaleable and manageable solutions for networked information promotion and discovery.
Key Idea: Large information spaces are often distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic, and expanding.
Research plan: Create scaleable discovery services using distributed middleware techniques.
Goal: Improve user access to resources through better extraction of information needs and more effective information filtering.
Key Idea: Users have difficulty expressing their information needs and coping with the large amounts of information which may meet their needs.
Research plan: Investigate techniques for extracting and applying user information needs and for filtering information.
Technologies and Prototypes The Resource Discovery Project has investigated a number of the above issues and has produced prototypes to demonstrate various solutions.
These are described below.
Naming Naming is area receiving increasing attention as it is fundamental to the capabilities of many systems in distributed networking.
The rapid growth of the World-Wide Web has seen the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) scheme being used as the de facto naming system for the Internet.
The next generation of naming will however provide more flexibility with the development of Uniform Resource Names (URN).
The Resource Discovery Project has developed a URN resolver [1] based on the standard HTTP protocol and which supports various resolution media types (text, html, or sgml).
The major problem faced is not in the technologies, but in the deployment, utility and ease of use of tools for creating and managing URN systems.
URLs are easy to create, but pose a legacy problem.
URNs are more complex, but will be more persistent and stable.
The importance of effective and flexible schemes for URNs will be paramount for their early deployment.
Metadata Metadata is a significant area of research in the Resource Discovery Project [2] and there are a number of aspects to this research.
The first research issue which must be addressed is what set of information is to be captured by the metadata.
This depends on the type of the resource and on the purpose of the metadata.
A metadata scheme must be sufficiently flexible to capture useful information about a wide variety of resources for a range of purposes.
Ideally, a single metadata scheme should be used as this minimises the cost of using metadata.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that there will ever be agreement on a single metadata scheme and so a major aspect of metadata research is the relationship between different metadata schemes and the trade-off between the size and utility of the metadata element set.
The second research issue is related to the production of metadata.
Metadata is essentially a summary of the data produced by various levels of abstraction.
Using humans to generate these summaries is expensive and metadata systems attempt to reduce this cost by automating as much of the process as possible.
The final research issue of metadata concerns how the metadata is accessed and used.
It must be retrieved in a form which can be processed with its semantics preserved.
An important use of metadata is as a mechanism for resource location in distributed networks like the Internet.
Metadata can provide information for the user to identify which resources they might be interested in.
Once a resource has been identified, metadata provides the information to allow the resource to be accessed.
The Resource Discovery Project is working on the following metadata related projects: Indexing Dublin Core (using Harvest) and other metadata embedded in HTML files and providing a search interface to this database.
Using Dublin Core for describing resources for URN resolution services.
Using Dublin Core to map search results from Web servers (HTTP) and library catalogues (Z39.50) into a meta-search engine.
Using Dublin Core and GILS metadata in X.500 Directories to support the Warwick Framework and the Trading services defined by the Open Distributed Processing group.
Extending PICS to support Dublin Core and other text-based metadata.
Extending the Persistent URL (PURL) system to support Dublin Core metadata.
The Resource Discovery Project is also involved in the fundamental area of ontologies.
An ontology is a set of standard concepts, terms and definitions which are agreed upon within a particular community.
People often use different terms to refer to the same concept and they use the same term to refer to different concepts.
It is very difficult to find resources if they have been described using inconsistent terms.
We have been involved in implementing a system which suggests appropriate terms to users when classifying documents and allows users to refine this classification and evolve the ontology.
Z39.50 The Resource Discovery Project recognised that large information providers needed a standard and flexible information retrieval protocol, and that Z39.50 is the leading standard.
The US Government Information Locator Service (GILS) has also mandated the use of Z39.50 as its primary protocol for agencies.
The main focus of the research work has been on building flexible mechanisms for building Z39.50 access to various databases formats (for example, the Harvest database).
We also built a Z39.50 to X.500 Gateway system [3] to demonstrate the utility of Z39.50 and its ability to access Directory Services within the GILS environment.
The Web and Z39.50 have become very popular as Libraries and other information providers are adopting the Z39.50 information retrieval standard for accessing their on-line catalogues.
We have compared and reviewed many of the leading Clients and Web Gateways [4] The future of Z39.50 is unclear.
On the one hand, developers are in need of a standard and flexible information retrieval protocol, on the other, they want an easy and lightweight solution to the problem.
The Z39.50 community is attempting to solve this by defining a light version of Z39.50.
The Resource Discovery Project is also investigating the requirements of the Internet community for a lightweight information retrieval protocol as an alternative to Z39.50 [6].
Browsing The Web is large, too large in fact for normal users to cope with the amount of information shown using normal information presentation methods.
The Resource Discovery Project has been experimenting with an information presentation tool called the HyperIndex Browser (HIB) which helps users define queries and navigate large information spaces.
Users may not know the exact query terms to use when searching for information.
The HIB lets users enter general, encompassing terms as queries.
It then extrapolates the “information space” around that search term and presents the user with a number of related topics to select from: refinements which narrow the focus of the search, and enlargements which broaden the focus.
For example, in response to the initial search term internet security, the HIB might present you with the following suggestions shown in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: HyperIndex Browser Currently the HyperIndex Browser assists the user in coping with information overload and query construction.
The next stages of the research include using the path navigated through the HIB to build a profile of that user’s interests.
This profile can then be used to guide future resource discovery activities.
Heterogeneous Meta-Searching Searching multiple information servers is obviously a significant area of work for Resource Discovery systems.
The Resource Discovery Project has developed such a meta-searcher called HotOIL [5].
HotOIL assumes that resources are stored in many different types of information repositories (such as an enterprise’s databases and a public Internet catalogue) and that these repositories are distributed widely over computer networks.
To find information without HotOIL you would need to interact with each of these information repositories individually.
HotOIL performs these interactions for you.
Given your query: HotOIL consults a directory of information repositories and decides which are most likely to contain information relevant to your query.
For each repository chosen in step 1, HotOIL: translates your request into a query for this repository sends the query to the repository retrieves the results moulds the results into a common internal format HotOIL merges the results returned from each repository and then displays a summary HotOIL can currently access both HTTP services and Z39.50 servers.
The HyperIndex Browser is used as the front end to HotOIL and effectively gives the feeling of seamless access to a single database.
Internally, HotOIL uses URNs and metadata to describe the search engines that it accesses.
It also uses the Dublin Core metadata set to describe the resources returned from each search engine.
The experience with HotOIL highlights the growing perception in the Internet community of the need for a standard interface to queriable networked information sources [6].
Proxy Search Engine The fact that communities of common interest naturally occur within organisations can be used to enhance resource discovery.
The Resource Discovery Project has developed the What’s Hot system [7] which is based on the observation that people in an organisation share common interests.
If someone in an organisation requests information about a particular subject then it is likely that other people in the organisation have previously requested information about that subject, or will in the future.
The What’sHot proxy search engine intercepts a user’s request for information on a subject and directly responds with URLs which are both about that subject and are also popular within the organisation.
If the request cannot be matched by the local proxy search engine then the request is passed to proxy search engines at other sites who respond with URLs if there is a match.
The request is eventually passed to conventional search engines if no proxy search engine in the system can provide a match.
The innovation in What’s Hot is in the way in which: the proxy search engines recommend popular resources to each other, and the measurement of the popularity of an individual resource.
Periodic Discovery The information available on the Internet is highly dynamic.
New resources are continually being published, and existing resources change often.
An unsuccessful search conducted today might yield useful results tomorrow.
To address this problem, The Resource Discovery Project has developed the Orion prototype [8] which is a tool for locating new resources as they become available.
Orion can be thought of as an agent which can periodically performs searches.
The user is informed of new resources which may interest them.
See Figure 3 below for an example of the Orion search interface.
Figure 3: Orion The technologies underlying Orion are the more interesting aspects of the prototype.
Like HotOIL, Orion uses URNs and metadata to internally describe the external Web sites that it accesses.
Future Direction: Government Information Demonstrator The prototypes and technologies developed as part of the Resource Discovery Project have now reached a level of maturity where they can be deployed in a real environment: Government information discovery and information promulgation.
The Government provides a rich source of both information and scalability problems that will further challenge the Project.
The permanence of the government requires an architectural framework which is both scaleable and durable [9].
Figure 4 outlines the broad architecture that the Resource Discovery Project will be aiming to populate.
Figure 4: Whole-of-Government Architecture The three layers in the architecture match those of Figure 1.
The Agency layer deals with metadata for both individual-level and collection-level (AusGILS) resources.
The Middleware layer looks at both the distribution of indexes (gathering) and the intelligent routing of queries (brokering).
The User layer supports advanced client functions such as the HyperIndex browsing metaphor.
The technical strategies faced in developing a Whole-of-Government information access architecture are immense, including scalability, security and authentication, distributed indexing techniques, and future migration strategies.
We believe that the Resource Discovery Project will be able to demonstrate solutions to some of these technical problems and are excited about the prospect of real deployment of our technologies.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to the Resource Discovery Project team for their research work that is described in this report: Nigel Ward, Andrew Wood, Andrew Waugh, Ying Ni, Arkadi Kosmynin, Maria Lee, Mark French, Peter Bruza, Jane Hunter, Eric Proper, and Hoylen Sue.
The work reported in this paper has been funded in part by the Cooperative Research Centres Program, through the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet of Australia.
References Iannella, R & Sue, H & Leong D. BURNS: Basic URN Service resolution for the internet.
Asia Pacific World Wide Web Conference, August 23-28 1996 (Beijing & Hong Kong) http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/reports/APweb96/ Iannella R & Waugh, A. Metadata: Enabling the Internet, CAUSE97 Conference, Melbourne, April 1997 http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/reports/CAUSE97/ The Z39.50 to X.500 Gateway Prototype http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/ZXG/ Z39.50 Client and Web Gateway Surveys http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/reports/zreviews/ HotOIL Advanced Prototype Access Program http://www.dstc.edu.au/BDU/APAP/HotOIL/HotOIL.html Ward, N & Wood, A & Finnigan S, & Iannella I.
Discussion Paper: Networked Information Retrieval Standards, 1996 http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/reports/webir.html What’sHot Advanced Prototype Access Program http://www.dstc.edu.au/BDU/APAP/WhatsHot/WhatsHot.html ORION Advanced Prototype Access Program http://www.dstc.edu.au/BDU/APAP/Orion/Orion.html Ianella, R. Networked Government Information Access An Australian Perspective CNI Fall Task Meeting, San Francisco, December 1996 http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/reports/CNI96/ Author Details Renato Iannella (Resource Discovery Project leader at the DSTC) Home Page: http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/staff/ri/ Email: renato@dstc.edu.au Phone: +61 7 3365 4310 Fax: +61 7 3365 4310 DSTC Home Page: http://www.dstc.edu.au/ Resource Discovery Project Home Page: http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/ DSTC Address: Gehrmann Labs, The University of Queensland, 4072, AUSTRALIA Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Matthew Evans, Chairman of Faber and Faber and of the recently formed Library and Information Commission, in discussion with Lorcan Dempsey.
The Faber & Faber building in London’s Queen Square is smaller from the outside than one would imagine for such a prominent publishing company.
In his third floor office, Matthew Evans, Chairman of Faber & Faber and Chairman also of the recently formed Library & Information Commission, pushed aside a pile of books on the table (we spoke over a copy of the recently published script of Trainspotting).
Our starting point was a quote from the critic, George Steiner (a Faber author), which Evans has used in recent talks.
In the introduction to his recently published No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996, Steiner writes “The revolution … brought on by computers … is far more radical and comprehensive than was that initiated by Gutenberg.
It is today fairly evident that … printed and bound books will be instruments of scholarship … and of luxury.
As were illuminated manuscripts … after the invention of printing.” Evans himself does not fully subscribe to this view.
For him, the future lies with both electronic and print publishing.
He believes that the switch to digital publication will occur in a natural progression.
“Reference works will be the first to make the transition.
They can be used more efficiently in online mode, and they represent something like thirty or forty per cent of the total output of new books published each year.
This is a revolution.” As a company, Faber is investing in the digital future.
Evans waves at a pile of documents on his desk.
A small publisher has approached him with a request for Faber to publish the works of its poets in electronic form.
His response?
“Oh yes indeed.
We must engage with this quickly.” When it comes to student texts, Evans is reticent about specifying a timetable for a switch to electronic versions.
“So many aspects of the form of electronic documents are not yet clear.
If you allow students access to their set texts on the network, do you also allow them to download and print?
If so, why publish the book at all?” One senses an awareness that publishers of the most popular student texts are beginning to feel the ground beneath them being undermined by the ‘anarchists’ who publish using the Net.
“We can rail against them” he remarks, after noting that most of the poetry of T.S.
Eliot is now available on the Net, “but this is the future, and it is efficient.” Our discussion moves towards libraries.
Evans is tackling the post of Chairman of the Library & Information Commission with considerable energy.
The problems of the public library system are foremost in the minds of Commission members.
“Follett has kept up the morale of the higher education librarians it has bought them a few years”.
But public libraries are in a state of identity crisis.
“One finds considerable uncertainty in public libraries about the future.
One of the roles of the Commission is to stimulate original thinking.” Many of the books on his table were new Faber publications; many were reports about libraries.
Too many, Evans has argued on several occasions.
The library community seems happy to produce reports but less happy when putting in place new services or planning to meet new challenges.
What about the Commission itself?
Might public libraries be better served if their interests were represented within a larger Museums, Galleries and Library Commission, or even within the Arts Council?
Evans feels that whatever advantages such an approach might have are outweighed by the benefits of independent representation.
Their function is complementary to that of libraries in other sectors in education and industry.
But libraries are failing to recognise how complementary their roles are.
He agrees that we are moving into an age when the nation’s ‘digital citizens’ will require access to a range of information and entertainment resources provided across the spectrum of library types.
“This separation into sectors is dreadful.
I have visited public libraries full of students, whose own university or college libraries refuse to admit members of the public”.
As we move into the 21st century we need to think about the consumer and not the sector.
“The Commission should pursue solutions which are cross-sectoral.” If libraries fail to respond to the challenge, then the Commission will have failed in its objectives.
More seriously, libraries may find themselves on the fringe of society.
“There is a danger of being by-passed.
‘One-stop information shops’ have begun to emerge outside libraries, which is a great pity.” Entrepreneurs are waiting to convert into profit the opportunities which libraries are failing to meet.
The spectre which Evans fears is of our libraries ending up as ‘museums of the printed word.’ The Commission is only beginning its work.
It would be interesting to interview Matthew Evans again in a year’s time.
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Copyright Issues in Projects Funded by the Electronic Libraries Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Issues in Projects Funded by the Electronic Libraries Programme Buzz data database copyright sgml hypertext multimedia licence url research Citation BibTex RIS After several months experience of dealing with copyright and the eLib programme, Charles Oppenheim returns to the major issues that have a risen.
In this paper I will discuss some of the major copyright issues that have arisen as a result of experiences of the eLib.
This paper assumes readers are familiar with the basic ground rules about who owns copyright, what it is, the restricted acts that are given to the copyright owner, the exceptions such as fair dealing and the library copying provisions, the lifetime of copyright, and so on.
I would just emphasise a couple of points of law.
Firstly, many people mistakenly call the library permissions "fair dealing ".
"Fair dealing" is a defence against a copyright infringement action.
An individual can claim this defence so long as the copying was "fair" in other words does not damage the legitimate commercial interests of the copyright owner, and so long as it was for one of several purposes, such as for research or private study.
The onus is on the person who copied to prove that it was for one of the specified purposes and that what was done does not damage the copyright owner.
If he or she cannot prove this, then what he or she has done is infringement.
Each case is taken on its merits, and there are NO safe limits.
Copying 10% of one text may be fair, but of another may not be.
Fair dealing, then, is a risky defence.
In contrast, academic and some other libraries have their library privileges which guarantees them against an infringement action.
The copyright owner cannot even start the action, even if it wanted to.
That's the up side; the down side is the library has to insist on a personally signed form, money must change hands, and the library must not supply more than one copy of the document to the patron at any time for essentially the same purpose you know the rules.
They are important.
If you do not follow the rules, you are taking your chances that you may be sued.
So please do not call library privileges "fair dealing" the two are very different beasts.
The second point of law I would remind you of is that in UK law, no difference exists between print and machine readable data.
Therefore, the fair dealing and library privileges apply just as much to electronic materials as they do to print.
Don't be alarmed or put off by statements from some publishers that there is no such thing as fair dealing in an electronic environment.
Fair dealing DOES apply to electronic data.
This was confirmed by the recent conference in Geneva to update the Berne Convention, but already applied to UK law.
So the real question is, what is "fair" in an electronic environment?
I do not think anyone can doubt that what might be "fair" when photocopying will not be fair if you copy the same material and put it on a server.
So "fair dealing" in an electronic environment will be tighter than in a print environment.
Equally, if you are a librarian, you are permitted to make a copy of, say, a single item from a CD ROM or an online database and supply it to a patron who has signed the form, paid the money and so on.
In all probability your contract with the CD ROM supplier or online host allows you to do this anyway, and indeed allows the librarian to ignore the requirement for a form or for payment, but just in case the librarian's contract is ambiguous or leaves this matter unsaid, librarians have that right.
In this paper, I highlight some of the issues that have arisen in eLib, and how they are being tackled, or (as in some cases) how they are proving to be serious obstacles.
Some of the text is based on reports sent to me by eLib projects.
Electronic journals Some of the electronic journal [1] projects have involved capturing and displaying publishers' data.
The projects receive data from many publishers.
Typically, journal issues consist of article headers marked up in SGML and the full articles in PDF, or the entire article in SGML.
From the SGML headers data items are extracted and stored in the object database that controls the application.
There are inconsistencies between what different publishers include within the copyright tags.
Some publishers do not include a year with the copyright, others do not include a copyright string at all; some publishers have the same copyright string for all their titles, whereas others have a different copyright string for each journal.
In some cases, the publisher has the year at the end of the copyright string, whereas others put the year at the start.
There are also problems with including the copyright, such as: how many times do you put the copyright notice up to protect the interests of the publishers, but not annoy the users as they navigate; for example, one publisher requested that a copyright notice be shown on every page of an article.
This is presumably so that if a user prints off just one page of an article s/he will see the copyright.
However the printed copy of the journal does not have the copyright on each page and someone could photocopy a page of that.
Is there any justification for such an approach?
Some electronic journals include multimedia content with some articles, for example sound clips from the BBC Nine O'clock news, with accompanying photos of the speakers.
This raises the question of whether a copyright notice for multimedia items should be displayed and where it should be displayed by hypertext link?
The copyright owner for multimedia clips is probably not the publisher or even the article author.
In the case of the BBC clips, we know that they have given permission for their inclusion, but no-one knows who owns the copyright.
There are also serious Moral Rights issues that arise in the case of multimedia see my earlier article in Ariadne [2] on this topic.
Another major issue for electronic journals, and for other projects, is the inclusion of hypertext links on the Web to other materials.
There are two issues here is it an infringement of the copyright or Moral Rights of the original author of the article to amend his or her article by embedding such links?
And is it an infringement of the copyright or the Moral Rights of the item to which you are linking to offer such links?
The questions are not easily answered.
As far as the original author is concerned, the best way forward is to get their approval to make such amendments as are necessary to embed such links.
It is much less easy to get the agreement of the owners of materials to whom you are linking.
The current Shetland News versus Shetland Times [3] case in Scotland should act as a warning for everyone that you cannot willy nilly put links between your WWW pages and someone else's without careful thought [ed you sure about this?].
I would urge everyone to exercise great care in the links they set up.
Some caution also needs to be applied in the use of hypertext links for students.
They can be used to direct students to services such as the Electronic Telegraph [4]; thereafter its up to the student to register and abide by the terms and conditions attached.
Links can be used to guide the students to various URLs.
However, unless express permission exists you should not apply links to third party material (articles, etc.
that belong to someone else).
However, URLs can be given to students along with advice such as that they may find this article (or whatever) interesting etc.
This way, the student is being given a fact (a URL; no copyright in a fact) and they can decide for themselves if to copy it.
Electronic Document Delivery Copyright issues arise when a user requests a document to be delivered to them.
The various EDD [5] projects offer such documents by means of scanning in the original, transmitting the scanned material to a remote site, and then printing it off.
Typically, the document would be a serial article (or some pages from a monograph perhaps) and not copyright paid.
In other words, we are dealing with library privileges here.
The user should be able to locate, order and receive documents in a simple, unmediated process from a place of work where he or she has network access.
There is no question that the relevant technology is available.
However, copyright has forced the various projects to incorporate inelegant solutions on users.
When the user creates an order for such a document, he or she is required to complete a copyright declaration form, sign it, and send it to the library.
Nothing is done until receipt of the copyright declaration.
Documents are then sent to the server and stored pending use.
Users are notified of arrivals when they next log on or optionally by email.
Documents are printed by the administrator and the file is then deleted.
The copy is collected by the user or goes by internal post.
This means that the document is printed before it is seen by the user, and that the machine-readable copy is destroyed.
This is a waste of paper if the user, on giving one look, says "this is not what I want"; it is also a waste of time if user wants legitimately to use machine readable extracts; remember, fair dealing applies equally to electronic formats as to print.
Frankly, you have no choice in this matter.
The library privileges are designed to protect the interests of librarians, and all this formal bureaucracy is your protection.
At present, the law insists that you receive a form, personally signed, and that money must change hands in some way before a document delivery request can be fulfilled.
This may seem a nonsense in the electronic age, but that's the way it is.
Likewise, you have no choice but to destroy to scanned material when the request is fulfilled.
It is not the library's business to store copies of documents in this way, and if it did so, it would be outside the library privileges.
It is no secret that publishers are deeply concerned by the growth of the document delivery services, and would vigorously resist any attempts to change the law allowing, say, electronic signatures or e mail requests, or permitting the library to store the scanned material for future requests.
They may be more amenable regarding libraries using their privileges to deliver a single copy of an article in machine readable rather than printed form one of the JISC/PA Working Parties is working on this; for the moment though, although the law supports this approach, I would be wary of antagonising publishers by offering such a service.
Electronic Reserves and On Demand Publishing These are two closely related areas [6] [7].
Both relate to heavily used materials in academic institutions.
In the case of electronic reserves this is analogous to short loan materials, where the student is told what is on short loan, and can borrow the material for a short time.
An electronic reserve offers the material in machine readable form for the student to download, view or print.
Typically, such materials will be needed over a very short time and then never needed again.
In slight contrast, on demand publishing is an electronic equivalent to course packs.
These are collections of photocopies of articles and book chapters that students can borrow.
At present, they are created under a CLA licence.
Material is scanned in, and then printed out on demand, and at a certain cost to the student.
A printout is always the result.
Course packs may be longer lasting than electronic reserves in that they represent basic background data that may change slowly over the years.
eLib has been funding experiments in both areas.
Projects which are very short term say, one year pointed out to publishers that scanned material would only be held for one year and that we would write again if we wished to extend the life of the system.
Such approaches result in rapid positive responses.
On the other hand, longer term projects have tended to result in outright refusal, or demands for impossibly high royalties.
All this may be mere coincidence, but I conclude that permission is more easily obtained for short time spans.
It is clearly important for administrators of electronic reserves to identify the period an item is required on the system and to be very careful not to ask for a longer time than is strictly required for the course/module.
These projects also threw up other copyright problems.
Many publishers did not know if they held the rights to offer material to be scanned.
All too often, their contracts with their authors are ambiguous on this.
With the increasing aggressiveness of authors regarding the retention of rights, publishers are nervous about giving permissions, or else offer permissions but will not accept responsibility if it turns out the permission was not in their gift.
This is quite unacceptable.
Publishers must agree always to a warranty that they have the right to offer the permissions they give, and if it turns out they do not, they must accept liability.
A particular problem arose in project SCOPE [8] as follows: SCOPE wished to scan in some pages from a textbook plus some photos.
The publisher gave permission for the words, but said it could not give permission regarding the photo, as it did not own the copyright to that.
OK, let's not scan the photo thought SCOPE.
But then there is a danger of infringing the Moral Rights of the author who might regard the photo as a key component of his or her document, and could sue for derogatory treatment if the photo was omitted.
SCOPE had to drop all idea of including that material, caught as it was in this dilemma.
This, I think will be a common problem in all cases of scanning copyright materials.
I do urge you not to under-estimate the dangers of Moral Rights issues.
A final issue that arose in these projects was escrow.
Most publishers initially demanded that once the eLib project was completed, the project team must destroy the machine readable data.
This is frankly a silly request.
Much time, trouble and expense have been expended in creating the data.
Instead, the publishers should agree that at the end of the Project the data be placed in an escrow deposit, controlled by the publisher but with copyright in the machine readable data belonging to the Project (in other words, the publisher cannot make copies of the data without the project's agreement, but the project cannot release the data without the publisher's agreement.)
If you are involved in any scanning licence deal, make sure you have such a clause.
Education and Training One of the action lines under FIGIT has been educating and training library staff in aspects of the digital environment and its implications.
This programme, too, has been hit by copyright problems!
One project involves workshops for HE librarians.
They have nearly 100 HE librarians involved in taster and full programmes.
The workshop leaders dish out handouts before, and during the workshops.
These include articles from journals and pages from texts.
Initially the materials were produced on site under the local CLA licence.
However, as the project move to deliver the programme in the regions, they have been advised by some of the institutions involved that we cannot assume their CLA licences cover the Project team to have copying made for use in the workshops in various training venues around the country.
This is because the trainees are all staff from HE institutions but they are not registered as a student on a course in any of the institutions where the workshops take place.
This is just the tip of a broader iceberg regarding CLA licenses when materials are dished out to third parties off site, but one eLib project has been caught up in it.
Some general issues One very clear message from these projects is the need for a strategy for clearing any third party material, and that it always takes more time and money than you would expect.
Securing your clearances can take many months, and you might not receive a positive (or any) response at all.
You should decide very early on which third party material you wish to use, (plus substitutes), how you want to use it, and method of delivery.
Third party materials need to be cleared for all planned uses, media and territories.
You need to have a procedure that includes identifying rights required for your project; time-scale for clearances that would include a cut off date; chase up date; reporting refusals, inserting substitutes; cancellations; paying for clearances and record keeping for future access and use of all assets cleared.
If you send a request that requires them to construct a reply letter then they may just put it aside, whereas a letter that they can just sign and return gets it off their desk quicker and back to you quicker.
It is important to acknowledge all third party material, particularly in electronic media where ownership can be easily lost.
As soon as you move outside text, the problems multiply.
These are different industries, each with their own clearance culture and traditions.
As if that were not enough, another problem is growing.
IT has moved the balance of what is possible towards exploiters and away from the creators.
Many wish to exploit the technological possibilities to move information around freely without rewarding the creators.
If the balance is moved too far towards access, then those who create will have less incentive to so do.
You should be aware that authors' groups world-wide are flexing their muscles on these issues, and will not hesitate to sue both publishers or librarians if they feel their rights have been trampled on.
So things will get more complex in the future for LIS people in the future, as they will have to deal with both publishers and authors!
What we need, of course, is a central clearance house representing HE in clearing materials dealing with a central clearing house of rights to copyright materials.
Buying rights should be made no more difficult than going shopping in a supermarket.
Alas, this ideal scenario of a simple, fast, reliable method of rights clearance and permissions is some way off.
Conclusions There is a need to promote a greater understanding of intellectual property issues within the HEI community and perhaps surprisingly amongst publishers.
Many institutions pass responsibility for copyright issues on to a member of library staff, who is expected to take care of copyright amongst a raft of other responsibilities.
There is also a need for professional training relevant to the needs of HE staff and publishers.
Arguably, there is a need for a central advisory unit to advise Universities on copyright problems.
There is an urgent need for more efficient and cost effective clearance mechanisms.
Things have improved vastly, but there is a need for an on-going dialogue between the HEIs, authors and copyright owners.
Rights owners sometimes do not understand the needs of HE for quick and fairly costed clearance.
Equally, academics tend to view publishers as money grabbing profiteers and do not understand many of the issues and problems facing the industry.
Finally, I must stress that things are not all doom and gloom.
Initially publishers were wary and sometimes outright hostile to eLib projects, but are now much more relaxed.
I am not saying all scepticism has vanished, but there is no question there has been a sea change in attitude in the last three years.
Although problems have been encountered, the number of successful collaborations between HEIs and copyright owners is impressive and is growing all the time.
eLib has led to a number of meetings at a high level between the academic community and the copyright owners.
The JISC/PA Working Parties are progressing well, and should have all completed their work by April.
The result will be a set of ground rules that all can agree on.
All told, comparing the situation now to three years ago, I would say things have gone better than I expected, vastly better than I feared, but copyright remains a serious problem, and has thrown up some unexpected difficulties in places.
There are still many issues to be resolved, but the outlook is bright.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank all those involved in eLib projects who responded to to my plea for help and provided me with the examples of copyright related problems that I have used as the basis of this article.
References [1] Listing of Electronic Journals projects in the eLib programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/lists/ej.html [2] Moral Rights and the Electronic Library an article from a previous Issue of Ariadne http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue4/copyright/ [3] Copyright battles: The Shetlands Charles Oppenheims description of the copyright and legal dispute between two on-line newspapers in the Shetland Islands http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue6/copyright/ [4] The Electronic Telegraph Web Site: a parallel version (with links to sites related to news items) of the Broadsheet Newspaper http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ [5] Listing of Electronic Document Delivery projects in the eLib programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/lists/edd.html [6] Listing of Electronic Reserve projects in the eLib programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/lists/er.html [7] Listing of On Demand Publishing projects in the eLib programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/lists/odp.html [8] Web pages for the Scope: Scottish On Demand Publishing Enterprise eLib project http://www.stir.ac.uk/infoserv/scope/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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Networked Learner Support Current Practice Case Base Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Networked Learner Support Current Practice Case Base Buzz archives copyright hypertext mailbase Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ashton describes the Current Practice Case Base, an index of links to sites that demonstrate a use of networked learner support.
A new addition to the NetLinkS website is the Current Practice Case Base: [http://netways.shef.ac.uk/rbase/intro.htm] This current awareness resource provides links to relevant sites demonstrating networked learner support (NLS) in the UK and abroad.
As you are probably aware, NetLinkS is an eLib training and awareness project which aims to encourage the further development of NLS practice within UK higher education, through promoting the development of a networked professional learning community.
NLS is the term we have adopted to refer to the use of networked technologies to provide training or other forms of help to users of electronic information resources.
For example, user education, information skills training, and general advisory help can be carried out in the networked space.
We hope that librarians, IT and teaching professionals, and staff development officers will all use this resource to inform themselves about current NLS activities using Internet and computer-mediated communication technologies.
More importantly, we hope that this resource will provide inspiration for learner support professionals to adopt some of these approaches in their own institutions.
The Case Base forms part of the NetLinkS Resource Base.
The Resource Base is currently being developed by the NetLinkS team, and will include: current awareness reports (trends in NLS and networked learning, technologies for NLS, and organisational and professional issues), links to projects, papers and resources relating to NLS, and archives of the guest speaker discussions taking place on our mailbase list, nls-forum.
The first guest speaker in our programme of online conferences is Sheila Creth, University Librarian at the University of Iowa Libraries.
Sheila is currently presenting and chairing a discussion on "reference services in cyberspace", which is stimulating a good exchange of information and perspectives.
The aim of the Current Practice Case Base is to: develop awareness and activity in NLS, inform learner support professionals about current NLS initiatives, by providing examples of current practice from both the UK and internationally, provide a simple interface to access these sites, be a flexible, expandable learning environment, provide links to sites that the learner support community can explore, before returning to the resource base, add value to these links, by providing case descriptions written by NLS practitioners themselves, provide a facility for comments, feedback and recommendations from the users of the resource base, provide a facility for users to inform us about their work, for possible inclusion.
By drawing attention to current NLS initiatives, we hope to stimulate change in the way that academic institutions support today's learners.
It is clear from the Case Base that there is already much activity taking place.
However, there is a need to share experience and ideas for developing the practice more widely.
We have categorised current NLS activity using the following headings: Online enquiry services Information skills training Supporting use of subject resources Supporting distance education Supporting teaching Evaluating NLS services The types of service that you can expect to find under these headings include: electronic reference services, self-help guides in the use of electronic resources, learner-centred online information literacy modules, online tutorials in the use of electronic resources, subject-specific hypertext links, and course specific webpages or training programmes, details of projects supporting distance learners or particular courses, user feedback facilities.
As the Case Base grows and, with input from the NLS community, it will we expect that this categorisation will change.
However, we do not want the Case Base to be a bland list of external links; we hope to add value to these links by including "case descriptions", written by the people who have implemented these initiatives, so that it is possible to see how the service has been developed, and how it works in practice.
The Case Base already includes a number of UK case descriptions; several of the international sites included in the Case Base have also expressed an interest in describing their work.
We are keen to expand the Case Base, and if you would like to tell us about your own NLS activities or write a case description, we would very much like to hear from you.
In order to ensure the case descriptions are of a similar format, we have created a form with section headings.
Beneath these headings are a number of points that NLS practitioners may wish to consider when describing their service.
These guidelines are available through the website: [http://netways.shef.ac.uk/rbase/casedesc.htm].
If there is a site that you think should be included, please feel free to contact me, Sarah Ashton (s.j.ashton@sheffield.ac.uk).
Similarly, if you would like to comment on any aspect of this resource or the NetLinkS site, I'd like to hear from you.
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Interface Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface Buzz archives copyright research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl talks to Peter Nathan, acting president and distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Iowa.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN”> Interface: Peter Nathan John MacColl talks to Peter Nathan, acting president and distinguished professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa.
Peter Nathan, Acting President and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa, does not mince his words.
“It is rare” opines Nathan, “for the price of journals to bear any relation to the cost of producing them.” The University of Iowa is one of the mid-Western ‘Big Ten’ universities and a member of the sixty major research universities in the US which comprise the Association of American Universities (AAU).
Three years ago, the AAU and the American Research Libraries group (ARL) jointly created a Task Force on Intellectual Property.
The aim of the TFIP, which Nathan chaired, was to reduce the cost of scholarly resources to American universities.
Publishers have pushed up the prices of their publications beyond the point at which the research universities a mix of publicly and privately run institutions can afford to go on subscribing.
If this material is the lifeblood of academic research, the cost of keeping it pumping is now unacceptable.
“To some extent, the faculty are to blame” stated Nathan at a conference at Stirling University in February of this year.
Faculty, the academic staff in US universities, are uneducated in the subject of copyright.
They fail to realise how important to the survival of their institutions is their own research output.
“Faculty in the US consider themselves entrepreneurs” said Nathan.
“Their loyalty is to their invisible college other researchers around the world working in their own research area not to their home university.” University Provosts however, among whom Nathan was numbered until recently, have to think hard about costs.
In a scenario which is assuming greater relevance for the UK, the Provosts of the Big Ten came to realise that their faculty were simply giving away the universities’ most valuable asset its intellectual property to commercial publishers who then sold it back to libraries for a vast profit.
“Universities were quick to recognise the commercial value of patents” states Nathan, “But they have never considered copyright in the same light.
It is time to begin clawing back our own property.” After the Stirling conference, Nathan extended his stay in Scotland by a couple of days.
I met him on a crisp, sunny afternoon in Edinburgh, where the University Library kindly allowed us to discuss the US scholarly publishing crisis in a bright conference room overlooking the Meadows.
Still somewhat jet-lagged, Nathan was nevertheless determined to state the nature of the problem, and its urgency.
Certain commercial publishers are guilty of ‘confiscatory’ policies publishing more journal titles in some disciplines than are required, in order to maximise profits.
Faculty continue to churn out articles for these journals because of the vicious cycle which sustains the entire system.
The higher the number of publications produced by an academic, the greater his or her chances of promotion and tenure, not to mention the prospects of government funding for the next research project.
The TFIP sought ways of freeing its members from the stranglehold of the most notorious commercial publishers.
In its recent report to the AAU, it examined innovative new relationships between faculty, libraries and University presses, and proposed establishing a ‘US eLib’, funded on a consortium basis by the 60 AAU member institutions, to be called ‘Electronic Scholarly Publishing’ (ESP).
However, the AAU decided not to adopt the consortium solution, preferring a ‘university by university’ approach.
“Their argument” explains Nathan, “is that the AAU universities have become much more proactive in exploring opportunities in the electronic domain.” While this may be true, it must leave the academic library community in the US with a more difficult task in providing competition to mainstream publishers through the creation of new journal titles and pre-print archives.
Universities are likely to consider joint-funded projects with other universities, with university presses and learned societies.
Nathan hopes to see universities launching publications which will compete directly with those of the commercial publishers, or, indeed, new methods of scholarly publishing altogether.
An example of the latter is open peer commentary in place of traditional peer review, which publishers have always claimed cannot be done cheaply.
According to Nathan, “Peer review is not always necessary.” Open peer commentary, as exemplified in the Los Alamos high-energy physics archive, offers a cost-free alternative.
Peers are invited to add critical commentary to ‘published’ articles.
This commentary is made available simultaneously, providing for a culture of dynamic publishing of research results.
Back in 1994, the TFIP produced a number of recommendations.
Campus committees were formed to educate faculty about copyright.
University copyright officers were appointed and institutional policies on intellectual property produced.
The numerous university presses which exist in the US were involved, in an attempt to retain copyright control within the university of origin.
These have resulted in consortia arrangements between different presses which share responsibility for publishing important journals.
They have also led to a higher level of co-operation between libraries and presses.
But more requires to be done.
While no formal consortium basis currently exists, Nathan is still hopeful that projects will emerge which will alter the face of scholarly publishing in the US.
Might there be scope for joint work between US and UK institutions?
Nathan is positive.
“We have a lot to learn from each other.” But he remains unconvinced of the value of cooperating with commercial publishers.
“Do we need them?
We have university presses, libraries and learned societies all with a non-commercial, scholarly ethos.
By forging new innovative relationships, we can take control of scholarly publishing by ourselves.” Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: Chris Zielinski Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: Chris Zielinski Buzz archives digitisation copyright licence Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl meets Chris Zielinski, a champion of authors' rights.
The Authors’ Licencing and Collecting Society (ALCS) [1] has an international role in ensuring that UK authors are paid for the use of their works.
As such, it is represented in various international groups, which means a healthy globe-trotting schedule for its recently appointed new Secretary General, Chris Zielinski.
On the morning that we met in his office overlooking Oxford Street in London, he was in early, trying to catch up with mail which has accumulated during his most recent trip, to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) conference in Seville.
“Even though we look after the interests of British authors, almost everything seems to have an international dimension these days,” he says.
So is authors’ rights administration a glamorous are a of activity?
Not glamorous, says Zielinski, but certainly growing.
“When ALCS began, back in 1977, the work of the society was carried out by two people and a typewriter.
We now have a staff of 24, and are still expanding.” The authors Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy were instrumental in setting up the Society, which seeks to ensure that authors are properly remunerated for the use of their works beyond their contract with publishers.
At that time, the most prominent issue was the public lending right, which later became a statutory provision now administered by a separate government-appointed organisation.
The licensing of photocopying was the next hurdle.
To handle this, the Society set up the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) in 1983, in conjunction with the Publishers’ Licensing Society (PLS).
CLA licence fees are paid to ALCS and PLS on a 50-50 share-out for books.
Until recently, the publishers took the full 100% for periodicals, but this is likely to change under the new agreement governing the operation of the CLA.
Publishers are generally considered to be the beneficiaries of copyright licensing fees.
With ALCS, whose profile is growing each year along with its turnover (some 10 million pounds last year), also in the business of collecting fees from users, librarians might worry that the collective power of rights-holders could eventually break the bank.
Zielinski is keen to stress that the Society exists for more than the simple purpose of grabbing money to disburse to authors.
“We are often lumped together with publishers, because we act for rights-holders.
But authors are not normally looking for huge profits in the same way as publishers.
You might think of us as Woolworths, and the publishers as Harrods.
We want a larger audience, while publishers want a larger return on investment.
The two are not necessarily the same.” In fact, the presence of authors could serve to drive the cost of rights down, not up.
The subject of intellectual property rights tends to make the eyes of most information professionals glaze over, yet in the age of access an understanding of intellectual property rights could allow libraries to play their part in keeping costs down.
It is important first to understand that ALCS has generally not dealt with primary rights, which are covered by an author’s publishing contract.
Its concern is secondary rights, which allow authors to be paid, for example, when their texts are photocopied, or repackaged into CD-ROMs, or mounted on a commercial Web service.
The new challenge lies in digital rights, and this is where the Society’s 5,000 academic authors, and the large group of journalists who have recently joined, come into the picture.
“The digital age is our new frontier” states Zielinski.
The Society is leading the European Commission-funded Imprimatur [2] project, which is developing electronic copyright management systems, and it has been in discussion with JISC over the types of assistance which it may be able to render to eLib projects.
“It seems clear that, for the on-demand publishing and electronic reserve projects, the task of securing rights can consume huge amounts of project budgets.
JISC has asked us to organise a working party to review rights issues arising from digitisation.” Libraries need to become familiar with the work of ALCS, and the advantages it can offer.
“Around fifty per cent of the texts included in course-packs are out of print.
Rights for out of print works usually revert to authors, and we can handle these rights clearances.
Fees can be negotiated with authors, often at very reasonable rates.
Libraries only need to contact us.” ALCS is a not-for-profit organisation, and is not a trade union.
Zielinksi lays stress on the importance of ethics in information activities, and states that his organisation offers a way out of the impasse for librarians “who want to digitise everything compulsorily”, and publishers who are seeking to hang on to all rights.
In general, ALCS urges authors to retain their secondary rights, particularly electronic rights, as well as photocopy rights to articles, even those published in scholarly journals.
This is advice which academic librarians would do well to pass on to their academic colleagues, since it should help to restrain the costs of electronic information.
Meanwhile, Zielinski has defended the notion of the academic author as a ‘trade’ author, in recent e-mail discussions with Stevan Harnad of Southampton University.
“Academic authors have a right to income from the sale of their secondary rights” he insists.
“The popularity of the Los Alamos pre-print physics archive shows that there is a market for electronic scholarly articles, and that ought to yield payments for authors, once projects like Imprimatur have come up with successful business models.” But Zielinksi is keen to safeguard the rights of authors in all areas.
“In higher education, the traditional ‘publish or perish’ reward system is losing its grip owing to changes in contracts and the decline of tenure” he says.
Academic authors are no longer as distinctive a group as they were, and increasingly now occupy the rights territories which ALCS guards so successfully.
References [1] Authors’ Licencing and Collecting Society Web site, http://www.alcs.co.uk/ [2] Imprimatur project Web site, http://www.imprimatur.alcs.co.uk/ Author Details Chris Zielinski, Secretary General, Authors’ Licencing and Collecting Society Email: chris.zielinski@alcs.co.uk Tel: 0171 255 2034 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: Internet Cafes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: Internet Cafes Buzz html licence research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl orders lunch with a portion of e-mail.
So what is an Internet café anyway?
Most of us have heard of them, but how many have actually ventured in?
The very idea seems incongruous at best, totally nerdish at worst.
Those of us who have experience of controlling library environments will wince at the very idea.
Cappuccino and baguettes at the keyboard?
What about spillages?
What about crumbs?
What about the incessant distraction of slurping and chewing?
Quite clearly – our own offices excepted, of course – these conditions are quite impossible for serious intellectual endeavour.
Web13 is one of Edinburgh's three Internet cafés.
"We were the first one in Edinburgh" remarks owner Ian McCarron, "though Cyberia dispute that" he adds ruefully.
Café Cyberia, which owns a chain of Internet cafés, also opened a place in Edinburgh in the spring of 1995.
The argument over who opened first is only one of several sources of rivalry existing between the two establishments.
A third café, Electric Frog, poses a more recent threat.
It is Festival time in Edinburgh, McCarron is proud of the fact that Web13 is the official Web host for the Festival Fringe.
"You can book a ticket for an event on the site" he remarks, clicking through the relevant pages.
"Or post your own theatre review.
I've read some excellent reviews recently though it turned out that some of them had been written by the actors themselves between performances…."
What leads someone to start an Internet café?
Does the Internet come first, or is it the other way round?
"Web13 was conceived as an Internet café from the start" remarks McCarron.
"Computing had been a growing interest of mine for years.
When I first heard the concept of Internet cafés, something clicked into place.
I gave up my job in HIV research, scraped up some start-up capital, and went for it."
The going was not easy however.
Edinburgh City Council was perplexed by the hybrid nature of the establishment, and delayed the issue of a licence.
McCarron's luck changed, however, when he managed to convince the organisers of the 1995 Science Festival in Edinburgh to allow him to transport his concept to the Science Dome.
Scotland's national Sunday broadsheet, Scotland on Sunday, provided sponsorship.
Publicity was generated, and the press became intrigued.
"We were accepted" recalls McCarron, with a grin.
Other battles remained to be fought.
McCarron first wanted to call his new venture "Netcafé", but was prevented by an injunction taken out on behalf of the food giant in Switzerland.
As for the competition from the other cafés?
"Let's just say that the real Internetters come here" says McCarron conclusively.
"Our PCs run UNIX."
By 11.30 am the place is filling up.
The front of the shop is laid out as a conventional café, with counter, tables with flowers, and arty posters on the walls.
The PCs, printers and scanner are all located in the rear of the premises.
"We found that having PCs at the front was intimidating people" remarks McCarron.
"They'd see the blackboard outside, decide to come in for a cappuccino and a cake, then notice the PCs and think they'd made a mistake.
Now they come in for a cappuccino, notice people perched at the PCs in the rear section, and gradually gather the confidence to take the plunge."
So who uses the PCs?
Can there be any serious use, with bistro-style food being served all around, and music playing continuously (each PC is named after a dead rock star).
"We do aim for the informal end of the market" states McCarron.
"But you might be surprised.
We've had the Chamber of Commerce in for an Internet familiarisation event.
And business people frequently drop by to check their e-mail."
Any regulars?
"Oh yes.
Some people get hooked.
We have the Doom players and the Chatters, of course.
But serious regulars too."
He nods towards an intense keyboard-basher in the corner.
"He's an American journalist reporting on the Festival.
He's in for hours every day. "
What about students?
Edinburgh now boasts three universities, a college of Higher Education and other colleges.
"They usually only come in if they are desperate" replies McCarron.
"The fact is that the facilities at their institutions are better than we can offer, and don't cost them anything.
We get a fair amount of use from overseas students in the summer."
Some students are actually employed by McCarron to do HTML work, building up the café's own Web site.
This is the other side of the business.
The Web13 site acts as a host for various information providers.
Web space is hired out at an annual charge, and Web authoring and design is also offered.
With the membership scheme for Internet use, together with the perhour charges for network access, charges for mailboxes and various other services (such as scanning and printing), in some months the Internet service side can be as profitable as the café side of the business.
The site hosts online as well as physical events.
"We're running an online auction on behalf of Amnesty International at the moment" remarks McCarron, idly browsing through a list of items for sale which includes a number of first editions of works by modern Scottish writers.
I am struck by how casual this all is.
McCarron provides examples of the educational and reference use now regularly made.
A retired gent who is learning Web authoring.
A woman who found more information on the condition her doctor diagnosed for her.
Someone seeking information on the export business.
What must public libraries think of establishments offering public Net access to vast quantities of information, much of it community-based, and hosting literary events online to boot?
Perhaps ventures such as Web13 have a few lessons to teach us even if it means investing in a chef, a kitchen and some tinned music?
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RUDI: Resource for Urban Design Information Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines RUDI: Resource for Urban Design Information Services Buzz dissemination metadata copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Alan Reeve maps out a new site in urban design.
RUDI (Resource for Urban Design Information) [1] began in January 1996 and is run jointly by the Engineering Research and Development Centre at the University of Hertfordshire, and the Library of Oxford Brookes University.
RUDI is concerned with all aspects of urban design, but in particular physical design, within the Western cultural context.
The project is funded for three years by JISC.
The intention is for RUDI to become commercially selfsupporting at the end of its grant period by attracting investment, subscription and sponsorship directly from users and contributors.
The project seeks to build up a significant hypermedia collection on the topic of urban design.
In order to determine the structure and content of the resource, RUDI has employed a complex management and dissemination strategy.
Much like a journal, the project has a steering committee which effectively acts as an editorial board.
This is drawn from academics who are expert in the field, publishers and practitioners in urban design.
There is also an internal advisory group of four academics from the world renowned Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University, whose role is to manage more closely the selection and acquisition of material.
Already the site contains several bibliographies, a number of case studies with images and text, an electronic journal (Urban Design Quarterly) [2], and material supplied by the Department of the Environment.
The Urban Design Group has given RUDI its source book for publication on the Web.
RUDI will contain an independently searchable picture gallery of images generated specifically for the project, or for which copyright agreement has been obtained.
As well as obtaining funding from JISC, topped up by a grant from the British Library, RUDI is supported by ‘one off’ commissions for material.
For example we have been working closely with the Faculty of the Built Environment at De Montfort University, which asked us to put together a case study of images, reference and commentary on the city of Barcelona for teaching purposes.
Frustrations?
We have found it difficult to locate a search tool capable of allowing us to include a meaningful metadata.
The team has also had to spend a great deal of time and resources in marking up and technically editing material before it can be made public.
This should change in time as we begin to influence the Web publishing process in the field of urban design.
References RUDI Web Site, http://rudi.herts.ac.uk/ The quarterly journal of the Urban Design Group, http://rudi.herts.ac.uk/ej/udq/udq.html Author Details Dr Alan Reeve Research Associate email: arreeve@brookes.ac.uk Tel: 01865 483602 Fax: 01865 483998 Address: Oxford Brookes University Library, Gipsy Lane, Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Dearing, IT and Information Services: Two Cheers (or One and a Half?)
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Dearing, IT and Information Services: Two Cheers (or One and a Half?)
Buzz infrastructure url research Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh reviews a serious attempt to square a circle.
The Dearing Report (1) represents a most serious attempt to square a circle.
It takes as its raison d’etre the need for expansion in higher education in the UK, and chooses Information Technology as one of the engines of expansion; one of the most irresistible and compelling engines of all and yet expensive and unpredictable.
This is not where the contradictions of the report end for information professionals.
Communications and IT are linked to organisational change, management, decision making, research, estates and so on, but only in passing to libraries, and I don’t believe that the phrase “information services” is used at all.
A whole section devoted to the management of resources covers staff, estates, equipment and other resources but fails to deal with libraries and information services.
The recommendations concerning the collaborative use of resources could apply, but it is worrying that even after acknowledging the high level of dissatisfaction with library services and the currently less than exalted practical use of IT which often takes place, no attention was paid to management issues and there remains the feeling that the reality of the teaching/learning situation has not really been addressed by the report.
Inevitably in an exercise of this kind, while there is a grand design for the use of C&IT accompanied by the occasional nod in the direction of the less than ideal situation in reality, there seems to be a quite significant obfuscation as well.
Information services, both conventional and electronic, are badly underfunded.
The report itself accepts that student dissatisfaction with libraries has increased significantly.
This dissatisfaction is felt more acutely in the former public sector institutions than in the old UGC funded universities.
A cursory glance at any student satisfaction survey will confirm the significance students attach to the improvement of library facilities.
At the same time there is little evidence that IT has yet engineered a significant change in teaching styles: the Committee of Inquiry (2) made the point that the traditional mix of teaching styles still predominated and would always be a vital component in the learning experience: “It is clear to us, however, that personal contact between teacher and student, and between student and student, gives a vitality, originality and excitement that cannot be provided by machine-based learning, however excellent.
When free to make a choice, even though it costs more, individuals are likely to choose to receive information and experience in the company of others, rather than alone, and to receive it from a person who is there to respond, even as part of a group.
But, through C&IT, it is possible to offer forms of contact and access to some highly effective learning materials that were previously unavailable for many students.” The feasibility and the quality of the developing technology is not an issue, and I would myself argue that a reliance on conventional resources will increase the problems of academic support services, so that the electronic library actually offers the only possible long term solution to the problem of information resource provision in universities.
To see the Dearing Report stress the potential contribution of C&IT in print is an enormous boost in itself.
But it is a little like averring that we are all against sin.
Saying it doesn’t do anything to actually help us behave differently or to dispel the uncertainty surrounding the use and impact of C&IT for the student.
Bernard Naylor, in his commentary on the report (3), offers a sharp reminder that the impact of computer-based learning is often much more mundane: ”…one of the paradoxes we have to acknowledge is that the impact of screens on the learning process has not taken the form we might have expected given the investments that have been made….The heaviest demand is for word processing, the second for email, the third for Web access, and only the fourth for computer assisted learning.” If there is a gap between the potential of the idea and its current use, then Dearing needed to give some indication of how this gap could be closed, but although there are some clues to how this could be done some of the solutions also present problems.The idea that institutions should “ review the changing role of staff as a result of Communications and Information Technology, and ensure that staff and students receive appropriate training and support to enable them to realise its full potential” (Recommendation 9) will surely be seen in some quarters as a move towards institutions establishing a preferred teaching/learning style and in an area as sensitive as this it might be resisted.
The proposal to set up an Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Recommendation 14) is positive as far as it goes: “ identify good computer-based learning materials; coordinate the national development , over the medium and long term, of computer-based learning materials; manage initiatives to develop such materials; facilitate discussions between all relevant interest groups on promoting the development of computer-based materials to provide common units or modules, particularly for the early undergraduate years.” Unfortunately this is like a number of the other recommendations about how IT support can be improved, how the financial base of our universities can be strengthened and how C&IT can improve the “quality, flexibility and effectiveness of higher education…[and] support high quality, efficient management in higher education institutions.” It ignores the managerial problems faced by information specialists.
Earlier in the chapter on C&IT, the Committee stated: “Students will need to develop advanced skills in searching for and selecting valid, relevant and up-to-date information from computer-based storage.” We are already teaching them to do this, and will continue to strengthen our commitment to the development of these crucial skills.
This is a positive statement by the Committee and no doubt information professionals will make use of it.
Nevertheless I cannot help feeling that a sharper focus on information services might have helped: “…high quality, efficient management in higher education…” coupled with “…rigorous analyses of various aspects of educational and organisational practice and development, especially related to learning and teaching…” depend in no small measure on “high quality, efficient management” of the learning and teaching materials themselves.
We are currently grappling with the issue of the relationship between conventional resources and the electronic library.
A little over half of the university sector has undertaken some form of integration of provision.
Of these, a few are disaggregating their converged services and others are dismantling integrative structures while retaining unified management.
Of the rest, some have rejected the idea outright and others put their faith in voluntary arrangements.
For the moment, while the take up of computer-based learning is at its present level, this might not matter.
But the nature of C&IT, its place in the mix of conventional and electronic information provision and the success with which some library services embraced the electronic library, offered an opportunity to make the connection between the delivery of learning and the management of learning resources.
The committee acknowledges (13.2): “The challenge to leaders in higher education will be to harness both the communications infrastructure, and the growing and developing collections of high-quality learning materials, within a management strategy capable of being responsive to the needs of staff, students and other stakeholders in higher education.” It then goes on to advocate the development of a strategy, training and support.
Being a little more specific would have helped, and including this directly in the investigative brief of the proposed Institute would have been another step forward.
It would have made for one of the few occasions when a wide ranging and general inquiry into higher education focussed precisely on libraries.
It might be that this is taken as read within the broad reference to improving educational practice, but as usual, I suspect that information professionals will be left to press this themselves.
The fees issue could prove a serious matter for some information services.
Underfunded and facing criticism from students and quality supremos, they, as much as any other part of the institution, will face the problem of satisfying the paying customer.
How long will it be before someone alleges that poor information resources contributed to an inferior degree, particularly as computer based learning begins to shift more responsibility to the actual resource providers?
I must also confess to a great feeling of unease about the question of costs.
There is no real evidence that there are substantial economies in C&IT; indeed the Committee admits that it costs more.
As David VandeLinde indicated in the last issue of Ariadne (4): “To some degree it’s saving money when we compare what students need to learn today with what they needed to learn 20 years ago, but as far as IT saving money and reducing the cost of education, I don’t see that happening.” Dearing is in fact looking for savings and a reduction in Government expenditure .
This presumably means progressively more revenue raised from fees and chargeable services.
Nowhere in the report are information services specifically identified as requiring additional funding.
There is also the suspicion, as always when changes in teaching styles are promulgated, that there is actually going to be a shift in costs from teaching departments to service departments, unaccompanied by an equivalent shift in resources.
There will be many librarians and directors of learning resources who worked through the huge academic developments of the 70’s and 80’s in the public sector institutions in particular who will have the words ‘from within existing resources’ carved on their headstones.
This time round they might be joined by colleagues from older institutions as well.
For librarians, considering the potential impact of reports in this area is usually a case of looking for places where links with library provision can be made.
It is argued above that the information business will have to work hard to fashion an agenda from some of the recommendations of Dearing.
In another sense we have never been better placed to take advantage of the opportunities represented by Dearing, and there are in fact many of these opportunities in the report.
Information services, whether conventionally organised and managed, or reflecting more radical solutions to the problems of making available the continuum of information sources, have invested heavily in various forms of C&IT.
For a number of reasons they are now significant players, either because they manage large swathes of these resources and services or because they collaborate with other interested parties.
This position can only be strengthened by Recommendation 41, to put in place a communications and information strategy, so echoing the Follett Report .
This is an opportunity to give fresh impetus to a debate which accurately reflects the concerns of information services, particularly in practical terms.
Not all institutions have successfully developed information strategies, and some of those that do exist might not be recognised as such by JISC.
Similarly, no one could quarrel with the sentiment of Recommendation 42: ”…all higher education institutions should develop managers who combine a deep understanding of Communications and Information Technology with senior management experience.” Wasn’t convergence something to do with this?
And don’t Library Directors and Information Service Directors have to do this already?
Dearing also makes considerable progress with the recommendations to extend network connectivity to all higher education and “further education colleges by 1999-2000, and to other relevant bodies over the medium term.” Our effective utilisation of C&IT in the future will depend partly on how well we can really unite the education community in the UK.
Within institutions, Dearing could have gone a little further.
There is reference to the integration of C&IT systems for areas such as personnel, finance and accounting and student registration.
There is an obvious place in such integration for systems maintained and run by libraries, particularly as student services and other areas become a part of integrated information services.
Equally we can welcome the recommendation (53) that the functions of UCISA should be reviewed.
Although the argument about how we actually manage and provide information services will not be settled for a long time, let us take the bull by the horns and suggest that eventually it will make no sense for UCISA and Sconul to continue as separate organisations.
Some ex members of COPOL may have been uneasy bedfellows with Sconul, but all things pass.
An umbrella organisation representing the academic information community could be another powerful force for development, if this is what eventually emerges from any pursuit of this recommendation.
While greeting with acclaim the recommendation concerning access to networked facilities and portable desktop facilities for all students by 2005 (46), the logistics might cause some managers to swallow quite hard.
What is positive is the exhortation to consider how “…existing space, designed to accommodate traditional learning and teaching methods and library storage, could be freed up and remodelled.
This activity should feature in the C&IT strategies we are suggesting institutions should devise.” Any institution that can successfully promote this will be removing the largest single practical problem in presenting a totally integrated information delivery system which actually means something to users, and has an impact.
But the cost is enormous.
The other issue which will have a major impact on information services staff is skills.
We are working towards an understanding of the skills implications of electronic services for hitherto traditional libraries and professional librarians.
Our awareness of new skills requirements will always be incomplete, because the target will constantly be moving.
Although Dearing (Recommendation 9) talks in the context of educational and organisational practice, the electronic library will make a significant impact on the learning environment.
Information professionals will have a role to play in helping students to develop “the advanced skills in searching for and selecting valid, relevant and up-to-date information…” much as they do now.
Success will also depend on how the profession comes to terms with its own skills development, and it is to be hoped that this can be embraced somewhere in what comes out of Dearing: “Computer-based learning materials are valueless unless they are actually used by staff and students….We also see a role for a national body to assist …in the sharing of good practice.” (8.71) In an electronic environment where the barriers between producer, user, manager, author, publisher, teacher and student will change, we should be able to make common cause on issues that affect everyone.
Our ‘good practice’ will be fundamental to the success of the project.
In spite of the natural and inevitable reservations about some aspects of the Report, it offers a major opportunity for the information profession to stake out its territory and strengthen the already existing links between the learning/teaching process and the organisation and exploitation of information.
Perhaps for the first time in a report which is not primarily about the narrow area of information services, it affords the profession an opportunity to make capital from its already strong presence in this area.
Sam Saunders, <J.P.Saunders@leeds.ac.uk> responded on 22nd January: I wonder if I could suggest that there are some aspects of this article that illustrate the difficulties and the ironies of discussing infomation and communication technologies in such volatile times.
While the article does refer to the print version of the National Committee’s Report it does not mention the CD ROM or web versions.
Given the subject matter of the article, I would have expected these formats to have been cited, and possibly commented on.
As far as I know, the NCIHE reports were the first major UK Government Reports to have been published (in their entirety) on the web on the same day as their print publication.
The [next] irony (I blush to mention it) is that it was an eLib Programme project that was chosen to host the Committee’s web publication.
16,000 visitors came to the Education-line site in the first few hours, and seven months later about 150 new visits per day are being logged.
The url is http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe The words of the Report may not inspire us, but some aspects of the process (real consultation included), the circumstances (straddling a change of Government) and the presentation (on-line, full text and searchable from day one) are significant and encouraging.
As an information event, the Dearing Committee presents us with a remarkable instance of cultural change which (being truly important) has gone largely unnoticed.
References 1.
The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education: Main Report, HMSO 1997 2. op cit 3.
Naylor, Bernard: Response to the Dearing Report, in IT and Dearing: the Implications for HE : colloquium proceedings (ed.
Beetham, Helen), CTISS Publications 1997 4.
Van DeLinde, D: View From the Hill, Ariadne Issue 12 November 1997 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/view-hill/ Author details Lyndon Pugh Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Extending Metadata for Digital Preservation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Extending Metadata for Digital Preservation Buzz data software archives metadata identifier preservation cataloguing marc provenance gopher ftp authentication interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day suggests how the concept of metadata could be extended to provide information in the specific field of digital preservation.
Metadata for resource discovery and access When the library and information community discuss metadata, the most common analogy given is the library catalogue record.
Priscilla Caplan, for example, has defined metadata as a neutral term for cataloguing without the “excess baggage” of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules or the MARC formats [1].
The most well-known metadata initiative, the Dubin Core Metadata Element Set, has the specific aim of supporting resource discovery in a network environment.
The Internet has many virtues, but it and in particular the World Wide Web was not designed specifically for information retrieval.
The search technologies that evolved Archie for anonymous ftp sites, Veronica for gopher and search engines for the Web were developed as a response to perceived needs rather than as an integral part of the original concept.
Search engines like Digital Equipment Corporation’s Alta Vista construct indexes by means of robots which ‘crawl’ through the Web collecting indexing information.
This is a less than perfect solution as Web sites typically do not contain all the relevant information for automated indexing and if they do it is unlikely to be in a form identifiable to most robots.
It is possible that if Dublin Core metadata is attached to or embedded in a large number of Web documents, a new generation of Web robots or harvesters could collect this metadata and make it available through improved search services.
Search engines, however, are not the only solution to the Internet resource discovery problem.
An alternative approach has been to get people to select resources according to agreed criteria and then make them available via a Web site, where they can be browsed or searched.
Familiar examples of this approach are NISS, BUBL and the Electronic Libraries (eLib) access to network resources services like SOSIG and OMNI.
Typically, these services produce descriptive metadata in some format which can then be used as a basis for information retrieval.
Metadata formats come in a variety of shapes and sizes [2] [3].
Dublin Core is intended to be a simple structured record which can, if required, be enhanced or mapped to more complex records [4].
Other formats in use include the ROADS/IAFA templates used by the ROADS based eLib access to networked resources services and USMARC which is used by the Intercat project led by OCLC.
Dublin Core may have a role as a minimal metadata set in order to allow for interoperability between other, more complex, metadata formats.
Library and information professionals with an interest in the Internet should be interested in the development of metadata for resource discovery.
Clifford Lynch points out that if the Internet is to continue to thrive as a new means of communication, “something very much like traditional library services will be needed to organize, access and preserve networked information” [5].
Metadata does have an acknowledged role in the organisation of and access to networked information, but it could additionally be important in the general area of digital preservation Digital preservation The preservation of digital information can be seen as one of the greatest challenges for the library and information professions at the end of the twentieth-century [6] [7].
It is easy to get caught-up in the general enthusiasm for digital libraries but more consideration needs to be given to the problem of making this information available to future generations.
Useful work has been published by the US Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA), including an important report by a Task Force on the Archiving of Digital Information (TFADI) jointly commissioned with the Research Libraries Group [8].
Libraries have traditionally understood at least one of their roles as the preservation of information for future use.
This has been especially true of national libraries and selected institutions in the research library sector.
For example, in early 1996 the British Library proposed that legal deposit should be extended to include non-print materials, even allowing for the possibility of collecting networked (on-line) publications if this became technically and economically feasible [9].
Most countries in Europe, North America and Australasia have either extended legal deposit to electronic publications or are considering doing so.
This implies a commitment, by national libraries at least, to the long-term preservation of digital publications.
The main problem with digital preservation is that digital technology, in comparison to print, is an extremely fragile medium for the cultural memory of the world [8].
The most commonly given example of this fragility is the 1960 United States Census, where raw data stored on magnetic tapes apparently became obsolete and, to all intents and purposes, unreadable by the late nineteen-seventies [10].
Digital information has two main weaknesses: The storage medium digital storage media, whether magnetic or optical, are subject to relatively rapid decay: especially when compared with print.
The hardware and software digital information is machine-dependent, and to be ‘read’ accurately it needs specific computer hardware and software.
Unfortunately, hardware and software quickly become obsolescent or otherwise unusable [11].
Proposed solutions to these problems usually involve periodic ‘refreshing’ or recopying of the digital information onto new media and the occasional ‘migration’ of data into new formats.
Assuming that some answer can be found to these problems, there remains the important issue of intellectual preservation.
Even when digital information has migrated into new formats, there will remain a need for users to be sure that the ‘document’ they are looking at is the one that they were looking for [12].
The archives community especially in the United States has been addressing these issues for some time now.
This has partly been led by the need for electronic records to be accepted in legal evidence [13] but the fact that electronic records are increasingly created in a variety of important situations: government; health-care; business-transactions, etc., has resulted in a renewed interest in authentication and validation issues.
A research project at the University of Pittsburgh School of Library and Information Science has been investigating “Functional Requirements for Recordkeeping” and has attempted to identify and specify the fundamental properties of records [14].
The functional requirements identified by the project emphasised that records should be comprehensive, identifiable, complete, authorised, preserved, removable, exportable, accessible and redactable (Ibid.
Table 1).
The project suggested that records (or ‘Business Acceptable Communications’) should carry a six layer structure of metadata which would contain not only a ‘Handle Layer’ (including a unique identifier and resource discovery metadata) but also very detailed information on terms & conditions of use, data structure, provenance, content and the use of the record after its creation.
The metadata is intended to carry all the necessary information that would allow the record to be used even when the “individuals, computer systems and even information standards under which it was created have ceased to be” (Ibid.).
Extending metadata for digital preservation As the archives community are seriously considering using metadata to ensure the integrity and longevity of records, it might be useful to investigate whether a similar approach would be useful for digital preservation in a library context and in particular for networked documents.
Resource discovery metadata like Dublin Core already contain relevant elements like FORM or RIGHTS which can be used to give basic details about the technical or legal context of a document, but this would need to be extended so that future systems would know exactly how to accurately interpret the document itself, or to migrate the data to a non-obsolete format.
Where complex documents or publications are concerned, there may be some future in investigating Jeff Rothenberg’s concept of ‘encapsulating’ data together with all application and system software required to access it and a description of the original hardware environment [15].
Text only ‘bootstrap standard’ metadata would be then attached to the data which would provide contextual information and an explanation of how to decode the record itself.
Rothenberg envisages that future computer systems could use this information to emulate the software so that a document can be seen in as close as possible to its original context.
This sort of approach, if technically feasible, might be useful for the preservation of multi-media publications or for hyper-textual documents with all links maintained.
Conclusion Preservation metadata may, therefore, have a useful role in helping ensure that digital information will be available to future generations.
Several important questions remain: Who will define what preservation metadata are needed?
Who will decide what needs to be preserved?
Who will archive the preserved information?
Who will create the metadata?
Who will pay for it?
If a metadata approach to digital preservation is an appropriate way to proceed, these and other questions will have to be seriously considered.
References Caplan, P., 1995, You call it corn, we call it syntax-independent metadata for document-like objects.
The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, 6 (4), 19-23, http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v6/n4/capl6n4.html Heery, R., 1996, Review of metadata formats.
Program, 30 (4), 345-373, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/review.html Dempsey, L., 1996, ROADS to Desire: some UK and other European metadata and resource discovery projects.
D-Lib Magazine, July/August, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july96/07dempsey.html Lynch, C., 1997, Searching the Internet.
Scientific American, 276 (3), March, 4448.
Weibel, S., et al., 1995, OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop Report, http://www.oclc.org:5046/conferences/metadata/dublin_core_report.html Rothenberg, J., 1995, Ensuring the longevity of digital documents.
Scientific American, 272 (1), January, 24-29.
Day, M.W, 1997, Preservation of electronic information: a bibliography, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lismd/preservation.html Task Force on the Archiving of Digital Information, 1996, Preserving digital information: report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group.
Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/ British Library Research and Innovation Centre, 1996, Proposal for the legal deposit of non-print publications.
London: British Library, http://portico.bl.uk/ric/legal/legalpro.html Weinberg, G.L., 1995, The end of Ranke’s history?
Reflections on the fate of history in the twentieth century.
In: Weinberg, G.L., Germany, Hitler, and World War II: essays in modern German and World history.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 325-336.
Mallinson, J.C., 1988, On the preservation of humanand machine-readable records.
Information Technology and Libraries, 7, 19-23.
Graham, P.S., 1994, Intellectual preservation: electronic preservation of the third kind.
Washington D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, http://www-cpa.stanford.edu/cpa/reports/graham/intpres.html Piasecki, S.J., 1995, Legal admissibility of electronic records as evidence and implications for records management.
American Archivist, 58 (1), 54-64.
Bearman, D. and Sochats, K., 1996, Metadata requirements for evidence.
Pittsburgh, Penn.
: Archives and Museum Informatics, http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/BACartic.html Rothenberg, J., 1996, Metadata to support data quality and longevity, http://www.computer.org/conferen/meta96/rothenberg_paper/ieee.data-quality.html Author Details Michael Day, Metadata Research Officer, UKOLN Email: M.Day@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 323923 Fax: 01225 826838 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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An End User's View Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines An End User's View Buzz java database browser graphics opac z39.50 copac research standards Citation BibTex RIS Oliver de Peyer with his personal view of what it is like being on the other side of the the metaphorical electronic issue desk.
University librarians are often referred to as ‘end users’ so I’ve sometimes been jokingly introduced as an end-end user I’m Oliver de Peyer and I’m a biochemistry postgraduate at the University of Reading.
Like my fellow students, I use services like Biosis, Medline and BIDS for online literature searches and so on.
I am on the committee of the JISC-funded Bibliographic Dataservices User Group, or JIBS UG, where my job is to offer naive comments rather like the ones I’m going to make here although I hope some may not be so naive after all.
The key issue is, are students like myself satisfied with online dataservices such as BIDS or Edina?
The answer is no.
Let me emphasise immediately that this is often our fault as students, not yours as information providers.
We, the students, fail to make full use of what services and help you have to offer us.
Let’s start at how students actually learn of, and learn how to use, an online service such as BIDS.
We should go to our campus libraries and ask for self-help literature, or tutorials, and so on.
These items are available.
But we don’t.
We turn to our colleagues in the lab and ask them instead so we get a second hand, scanty account of how to use the service, from somebody who probably had no better introduction in their turn.
In a laboratory environment at least, your first port of call in your studies is your fellow students and postdocs and you’ll naturally turn to them first.
In my opinion, the only way out of this cycle is for the tutorials, the help files etc.
to directly confront the user at the point of access to the system.
This leads me on to the next area online interfaces.
In general, my colleagues consider text interfaces adequate but WWW-based interfaces are much more intuitive instead of having to remember the key combination to access a help file or whatever, you can just click on an easily-identifiable ‘help’ icon instead.
Another comment to make here is that information providers are in danger of aiming interfaces too much at the cutting edge.
Administrators see that 70% of the accesses are from Netscape 3 or 4, or Internet Explorer 3 or whatever and they begin to introduce features like Frames, or Java, or intensive use of graphics.
This excludes people with less capable browsers.
But, does that matter if such people account for so few of the accesses?
Well, I only have access to a slow 486.
I can’t use Netscape 3.
Along with the other students in my lab, I use Lynx, a very low-end browser.
I know professors who have even more limited computer facilities, maybe only 286 machines.
With limited funding, these machines will be here for some time.
But these underequipped people are the same ones that make most expert use of the dataservices, with extensive datasets generated per session, with extensive boolean search elements and so on.
My guess is that all those tempting high-version browser accesses are made from undergraduate computer rooms or library terminals much more up-to-date machines, but probably more simplistic and less involved searches.
The power users, perversely, have the lesser machines, so interface design should always have considerable regard for the lowest common denominator.
Users who have the facilities should have the option of a more advanced interface, but it should not be imposed universally.
Next, what are the students logging on to?
In my field, there are at least three main services used, namely Biosis, Medline and BIDS.
I’ve talked to the respective service providers and they tell me that the services have different features and are complementary but here’s the rub I don’t know anybody who uses more than one service.
People get comfortable with one system, usually whichever one they encounter first, and then they stick with it.
When I said this to a service provider, he jokingly replied ‘Does this mean it’s war?’ Well, perhaps it is, especially as the ‘Net becomes increasingly commercialised.
The different systems will have to compete for users by advertising reaching the student at his or her lab bench and telling us why your particular system is best.
Then we can make an informed choice as to which is best for each of us.
Now I’ll move on to the bibliographic data itself.
Again, problems here are not your fault the faults are those of the researchers and journals who write the abstracts in the 1st place.
There are minor quibbles, such as authors’ names or titles not reproduced exactly between journals and their on-line abstracts.
Perhaps more severe is the lack of standard terminology.
So far, I have avoided boring you with examples, but here I think one is instructive: I research a protein called membrane intrinsic protein, MIP26.
However, some people think it should be Major, not membrane.
Some people omit intrinsic.
Some people say polypeptide instead of protein.
Some people say MIP26.
Others say MP26.
Some have started calling it Aquaporin 0!
To find all the abstracts on my subject, I have to search for all these different permutations.
Of course, what is really needed is for MIP26 researchers to sit down and standardise their terminology.
Since this is unlikely to happen, my ultimate ‘wishlist’ would be for some form of neurally networked search engine, that would ‘learn’ that all such terminologies were really the same thing.
Leading on from my problems with the subjective nature of the abstracts, what if I don’t want to read the abstract at all?
What if my interest is in some other part of the reference?
For instance, I often want to know about the methods used to obtain the results described in the abstract.
Eventually of course, people will want to search and retrieve the whole text of references.
That’s already starting, with services such as BIDS Journals Online.
But such whole text services are embryonic at present and are not talking to the bibliographic search engines.
The ultimate aim would be a truly integrated, searchable database of full text references, also with links to other associated datasets for instance, a genetics paper should link to nucleotide sequences for the genes discussed.
There are already gene or chemical databases that link to abstract databases.
If students can’t get the whole reference text online, then could we at least have Z39.50, details of local holdings, and automated interlibrary loans if the desired reference isn’t locally held?
Perhaps COPAC shows the way forward for interlibrary loans.
There will probably always be a need for paper-based references, especially for older references of course here I am talking about EDINA, BIDS and so on but then I find I need scientific references from 30 or 40 years ago.
Again, it will greatly expedite students’ research if the older material is also eventually searchable electronically.
Perhaps one final wish if I do need to go into the library, and pick up a conventional paper reference, the final barrier is finding the reference on the shelves, and in my experience, most libraries are pretty labyrinthine!
Perhaps the ultimate OPAC could be programmed with floor maps, and even print out a route for you.
Maybe that sounds facetious, but it is something that takes up a lot of time, maybe as much as all the rest that I’ve discussed put together.
Well, those are all my ideas and experiences, sensible or otherwise.
Perhaps my last comment would be, how can you get more end-user feedback from people like me, so that you get a more quorate view of end users.
The JIBS User Group contacted me as part of a shotgun emailing campaign, where thousands of intensive users of Edina were contacted.
Only eight asked to know more about the committee, and only me, one person, got involved further.
So here I am the postgraduate voice of bibliographic dataservices.
What I say may well be unrepresentative or wrong.
The only other way I can think of you contacting more end users is to press-gang them into it an unedifying thought, but without it, you may never know how effective your decisions as service providers are.
Author details Oliver de Peyer School of AMS(Wing) University of Reading PO Box 228 Whiteknights Reading Berks RG6 6AJ Email: saspeyer@reading.ac.uk Tel: 0118 9875123 x7889 Fax: 0118 9316671 JIBS User Group Webmaster and committee member: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/jibs/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DeLiberations Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DeLiberations Buzz html Citation BibTex RIS Graham Alsop explains how an interactive electronic magazine can improve teaching methods.
In the current climate of higher education, the role of the librarian is changing.
"More often than not, librarians' teaching abilities are taken for granted by faculty staff; there has always been a resistance to acknowledging library staff as a legitimate faculty.
Academic librarians tend to be multi-skilled and equip themselves with a teaching qualification in addition to their IT/library/undergraduate qualifications ....academics will have to become more like librarians..." [1].
Deliberations [2], an interactive electronic magazine, is taking steps to increase dialogue between academic staff, librarians, computing staff, and educational developers.
These are groups which have traditionally worked in isolation from one another, but now increasingly need to work together (for example in the areas of course delivery and design).
We are experimenting with a number of different topics and structures in the web site to raise and enhance communication among these different communities by interaction with DeLiberations.
Librarians already have very fruitful discussions using the internet (e.g.
NLS -Forum and Web4Lib), but they seem relatively isolated from other groups.
So we are choosing topics specifically to stimulate discussion between these different groups of staff.
For example, we are conducting a series of interviews on Integrated Learning Resource Centres to stimulate discussion between librarians, audio visual and computer services staff.
Other topics geared to draw in all groups of staff include: Resource Based Learning, Flexible Learning, Courses and Resources, and Collaborative Learning.
In contrast, academic staff are generally less interested in generic educational issues and prefer to focus on their subject discipline.
Thus we have opened up sections on specific subject areas, for example Art and Design and Engineering, to interest them.
Discussion within these subjects includes the relationship between academics and resource staff.
We are experimenting with a number of different structural models to increase interaction with the web site.
Our section on Collaborative Learning offers a model which uses html frames to organise a discussion logically.
Here the user can both read the comment they wish to reply to and create their response using a form on the same screen.
This seems more intuitive than using a separate email system.
We have set up pages in conjunction with conferences and seminars to stimulate discussion both in DeLiberations and at the actual event, and offered questionnaires on topics like Assessment and Effective Learning.
The most popular topics in the magazine are currently generic issues rather than subject disciplines.
However, we are being approached by subject disciplines represented in the HEFCE's Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning Projects (History and Geography) to help them develop their web sites.
We are confident that this will bring the subject areas up to the same successful state as the generic issues.
Why not visit us and leave a comment?
References [1] Dale Wache, Flexible Learning librarian, [no other information] [2] DeLiberations Web Site, http//www.lgu.ac.uk/deliberations/ Author Details Graham Alsop is the Educational Developer at London Guildhall University Email: alsop@lgu.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Lotus Eaters On-Line: Forming an Alliance Between Groupware and the Web in a Pre-Prints System Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Lotus Eaters On-Line: Forming an Alliance Between Groupware and the Web in a Pre-Prints System Buzz software java html database archives browser copyright graphics authentication interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dan Fleming, co-director of the eLib 'Formations' project and lecturer in media studies at the University of Ulster, looks at some of the issues involved in adding value to a pre-prints system by using groupware such as Lotus Notes.
Among the facilities available from the scholar's workstation of the future will be access to pre-prints collections with added value.
Precisely what form such 'added value' will take remains to be seen, but it will address the current tendency for on-line pre-print depositories to become largely untamed wildernesses of relatively unstructured material, with wheat and chaff mixed in frustratingly unpredictable proportions.
This is not universally the case, but pre-print collections can become dumping grounds for all manner of stuff and the bigger they get the more unreliable they often become as sources of efficiently accessed and valuable material.
Of course, that is also one of the important things about the very concept of on-line pre-prints: what is valuable to one user is rubbish to another.
Nobody is making definitive judgements on a user's behalf about what is of value.
Print material, and electronic journals that follow the peer review and editorial procedures of print, will always tend to impose such judgements in advance (evoking all sorts of professional and disciplinary criteria).
Indeed, as electronic publication struggles to achieve respectability there is an in-built pressure to follow established quality-control mechanisms.
Pre-print systems can and should be different.
'Formations', a project in the eLib Pre-Prints Programme Area, was established at the end of March 1996 to explore some of these issues.
The project will set up a live trial pre-print system (in areas such as performance research, cultural policy and media) in early 1997, with the target of July 1997 for a stable implementation of that system, based on six months of iterative development.
A first detailed evaluation will be produced a year later.
'Formations' has a further 'exit phase' of eighteen months set aside to capture and communicate as much as possible of the learning that will have taken place inside the project and to plan for life after eLib.
'Formations' is deliberately positioning itself within the current debate about the relationship between 'groupware' and the Web.
That relationship could map fairly neatly onto the relationship between the editorial side of electronic publishing, on the one hand, and free-for-all pre-prints on the other, except that most collective editorial work is typically done off-line (supported by email) rather than as an integral and visible part of the particular electronic system.
When electronic publications are launched onto the world's wild Web (sic), they have already been highly selected and shaped.
What if 'groupware' could introduce some form of selection and shaping into a pre-prints system but integrally to it and flexibly enough to preserve the characteristic 'lucky dip' experience of pre-prints?
'Groupware' at its best is currently represented by LotusNotes release 4.
Lotus , now part of IBM, has built up a base of some 3 million users, or 'seats', and well over 10,000 'business partners' worldwide who develop Notes-based applications and bolt-on enhancements to the Notes system.
The latter allows asynchronous communication among users centred on an 'object store' of messages, documents, threaded discussions etc.
Lotus has specialized in handling free-form information rather than rigidly structured databases (although these can be plugged in to a Notes system easily).
Lotus SmartSuite 96 provides desktop applications, including wordprocessing, that integrate seamlessly with Notes.
Does this start to sound like the beginnings of an integrated scholar's workstation?
Maybe, but Notes is proprietary and expensive two very real drawbacks in the academic world.
A Notes-based system has to be carefully designed to do a particular job (with application development tools that tend to be demanding of time and skill).
Users need dedicated 'client' software to access the system.
Once set up, a Notes system can be a very powerful tool but development and deployment costs have made it a high-level corporate asset.
That is now beginning to change in principle.
Lotus have begun steering Notes very deliberately towards the Web and, therefore, towards a much wider range of potential users and applications.
In practice, however, Lotus would need to make some real pricing concessions to the educational marketplace.
Lotus Notes might then be one important means of adding value to Web-based working outside closed corporate environments, especially for academics and the electronic library.
Or at least, as the most highly developed groupware platform, Notes will be the first place where the groupware/Web convergence takes concrete shape.
Others may follow, but Notes is a good place to begin.
For this reason, 'Formations' will attempt to integrate Notes-based components into its Web-based pre-prints system.
Subsequent evaluation and technological changes may reveal other, better options but a Notes/Web combination looks like the best place to start learning about these things now.
There are five technical areas of immediate concern (these general issues are also touched on in a useful Byte article by Bill Roberts, 'Groupware Strategies', Ju ly 1996): (1) Interoperability.
Our scholar's workstation ultimately needs to support an easy pick-and-mix of tools and services.
As software for doing interesting things on the Web begins to proliferate, it is becoming clear just how difficult such interoperability is to achieve.
Release 4 of Notes supports TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP and HTML, on top of its existing support for all major operating systems and networking protocols.
In practice this means that a user can wordprocess in Lotus Word Pro (part of SmartSuite), add the document to a Notes application store (e.g.
for annotation by a group) but also automatically generate an HTML version of the document and have Notes add it to a Web site, without worrying about any of the different standards involved.
The process also works in reverse, with Web material being sucked into a Notes system, complete with live URLs.
The underlying documents may take nearly any form, including threaded discussions and graphic presentations.
A tailored Notes application can provide a user-friendly front end for the whole thing.
Of course you still need to have bought a fair amount of expensive Lotus software at both server and client ends to achieve such seamless integration ('seamless' is becoming something of a mantra word) but the technical interoperability exists.
Microsoft, Sun, Netscape and others are all developing bits and pieces of new Web-oriented software to achieve groupware functionality via the Web but the standards involved look far from open at this stage.
(2) Application development support.
In the kinds of client-server system we are talking about, there should be two levels of application development or programmability.
On the server side there will be the semi-permanent applications, such as a pre-prints 'store'.
On the client side, there should be enough lightweight programmability for users or groups of users to set up their own tailored workflow and access procedures if they so wish.
An application development environment with that degree of flexibility is a lot to ask.
'Components', or small application modules that can be re-combined Lego fashion, look like the way forward, especially if they can be architecture-independent like Java 'applets'.
Lotus Notes and SmartSuite desktop applications can function as 'containers' for Lotus' own components and eventually for Java applets as well, marking a move in this direction.
But what components might one need for an improved pre-prints system?
(3) Flexible 'document store'.
The HTTP server and Web browser have undoubtedly been a near-revolutionary change in how we store and retrieve documents on-line, driven by the huge flexibility of hyperlinking.
However, following hyperlinks is only one kind of on-line activity.
Making the Web support sophisticated searching, well organized asynchronous discussions, viewing options for users other than one-page-at-a-time, organization of material beyond simple bookmarking, etc.
is all leading to strain on the basic HTTP server, or on the backstage Common Gateway Interface expected to enable such work.
A Web server and a groupware application server nested side by side, with easy interoperability, translation and communication between the two, may offer greater flexibility and robustness.
In a pre-prints system, is there room for these two 'levels' of functioning within the document store and what should each offer?
As a case in point, Notes offers a highly customizable front end that can be much more flexible than a Web browser (although a browser is also now part of the release 4 bundle), and supports a range of different 'views' onto the stored material, including expandable outlines, annotations and so on.
The ability to 'view' a pre-prints store in various ways, backed up by sophisticated searching (Notes offers phrase, sentence, wildcard and Boolean) may be a crucial way of adding value to such a system over and above what can currently be achieved via the Web on its own.
(4) Notification.
Web browser developers are currently experimenting with better procedures to check sites and automatically alert the user to changes.
Notes has already implemented an agent-based notification system, extending the usefulness of its long-established document replication procedures.
The latter ensure that changes to a document are executed on-demand in any copies of the document that may be held elsewhere.
In a more flexible pre-prints system, dispersed collaborative work on documents (whether by co-writers or 'editorial' groups) could be easily synchronized in this way, avoiding the obvious nightmare of proliferating versions.
In fact, the more notification available the better in a pre-prints system, as an antidote to information agoraphobia.
Notification does not interfere with open-ended browsing but may be an increasingly necessary convenience.
(5) Security.
Particular systems may need to set up different levels of security for different purposes from access security on some documents, through authentication procedures to verify users' identities, to full firewalls erected to keep intruders away from the sensitive inner workings of a system.
Adding value to a pre-prints archive may include different levels of security to allow different degrees of access to and participation in the evolving store of material.
(Some dispersed workgroups, for example, may wish to 'protect' early work in progress.)
Again, Notes offers such flexibility while the Web is a tangle of often incompatible attempts at securing something which mostly wants to be anarchic and free.
So in all five of these crucial areas for 'adding value' to what can be done on the Web, especially in the case of a pre-prints system, Lotus Notes has the technical edge.
But it is still a closed system at its centre, no matter how permeable it has become to the Web at its outer boundaries.
To reap all of these benefits (in interoperability, application development support, flexibility in the document store, notification and adaptable security), one has to buy into the Lotus Notes world and close out those who do not.
A lone user has to pay around #100 for basic desktop client software to get a seat at a Notes application (although multiple licensing can reduce this significantly).
So-called 'core clients', with more functionality, cost correspondingly more.
This is fine for large-scale deployment in a corporate enterprise but is a bit much to ask of academic users in exchange for adding some bells and whistles to a pre-prints server which they might have been getting free access to via the Web.
'Formations' has to explore whether many of these groupware-based benefits can be leveraged towards the academic user before the threshold of unacceptable cost and inconvenience is crossed.
Fortunately, the convergence of groupware and the Web generally (and the development of Notes in particular) is tending to draw these benefits gradually out of the closed enclaves, where they are sustained by corporate budgets, into more accessible regions where cheaper hybrid options become possible.
As the 'Formations' project develops, that convergence may make it easier to achieve what the project is interested in doing.
To be clear about this, 'Formations' will not be setting up a conventional closed Lotus Notes application and inviting users to buy client software with which to access it.
Instead we want to see if some of Notes' functionality can be leveraged into a more open system, with primarily Web-based access.
What kind of an 'engine' can Notes be, driving an improved pre-prints archive?
The solution may still entail some levels of participation where having Notes client software is necessary or desirable but we want to define those boundaries, between the proprietary system and the Web, in ways that would justify the cost to those who need such access without disadvantaging those who do not.
It remains to be seen whether this is possible.
To achieve that sort of balance we will need a clear picture of what users want and of the processes, or workflow, involved in using a pre-prints system in the context of scholarly work as a whole.
'Formations' is developing an overview of its area of activity based on three intersecting 'models', or representations of the factors, processes, interests and functions involved.
These are a Process Model, a Value Model and an Application Model.
These representations are not intended to be prescriptive but as project planning tools they offer the advantage of systematizing and reminding us of things that might otherwise get overlooked.
The Process Model represents the structure of activities and interactions that may take place around an enhanced pre-prints system, both in contributing to it and in accessing material (terms like 'select', 'inform', 'discover', 'prompt', etc.
occur in the first version of this model).
An interesting aspect of developing this model is the question of what to do about speech act theory.
Long controversial in CSCW research (computer-supported cooperative work), speech act theory reduces interactions to 'acts' such as 'request' or 'promise'.
This way of characterizing interactions in our Process Model has tended to creep back in unnoticed, despite the fact that CSCW systems such as 'Coordinator' (for highly structured email exchanges within a workgroup) ran into trouble because users did not wish to have their activity structured around such explicit 'intentions'.
They preferred that accessing an on-line information or communication system should be a non-interpreted act (as distinct from explicitly 'searching', 'requesting', etc.)
The 'Formations' Process Model needs to be sufficiently explicit about identifying the interactions without imposing restrictive labels in advance on what users do.
(See Action Technologies for the kind of work that evolved from 'Coordinator').
This is one of several areas where the Value Model will provide checks and balances on the more instrumental formalism of the Process Model.
The Value Model seeks to represent the interests and values of various groups significant to the project: users, the academic community more widely, and eLib/JISC.
Thus an eLib value is 'effecting culture change' while a basic user value is 'ease of use'.
The model will attempt to map out such values and plot their interactions.
Like the Process Model, the Value Model will undoubtedly evolve in sophistication and usefulness as the project proceeds.
These two models will inform the third the Application Model.
'Formations' will hold distinct the actual pre-prints application which it builds from the more abstract specification of such an application that emerges as desirable from the project's work.
There is a simple version of the 80:20 rule here.
A costly and time-consuming effort could eventually be put into hauling the actual application up to the ideal standard of whatever Application Model the project identifies as workable and worthwhile (i.e.
crossing that last 20% gap).
However, identifying that 'ideal' and learning from it may be more important, more accurately reflective of the interests and values that converge on an eLib project, than putting a 100% finely tuned client-server pre-prints application in a shrink-wrapped box.
Setting our sights on an Application Model, which may or may not perfectly coincide with what we actually have time, money and energy to build, is our way of staying focused on what matters.
The trick, of course, will be to devise a project plan, backed up by appropriate project management procedures, which achieves an acceptable balance among these three 'models' while exploring the technical benefits that might be reaped by a pre-prints archive from the groupware/Web convergence.
To that end our project plan attempts to set the Process, Value and Application Models against a timeline in such a way that each informs the others.
For example, a particular technical benefit of groupware such as Lotus Notes should not make its way into the 'Formations' application unless it fits the process somewhere, reflects a value that is actually of concern to the project, and can be done (at least done in a 'good enough' way, if not ideally) with the resources and time available.
The triple-checking of technical features in this manner should cut down pretty quickly any purely technical over-ambition we might have!
Our hope is, also, that the models will themselves evolve in subtlety as they are progressively exposed to the actual technical work and the questions it raises.
Evaluation activities will be at the core of the 'Formations' project.
Where our three 'models' overlap we will be developing largely qualitative research techniques to explore the interactions among processes, values and the application's functioning.
At this early stage, it is appropriate for us to end with the conclusion from that recent Byte report on groupware: 'If you tried to design a seamlessly integrated groupware platform from scratch, you might come up with something very much like the Web.
Or you might come up with something resembling Lotus Notes.
Then again, you might come up with a model that blends the best of both worlds.'
(Byte, July 1996, p.78) Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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York Information Connections: An Attempt to Catalogue the Internet Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines York Information Connections: An Attempt to Catalogue the Internet Buzz database metadata cataloguing opac passwords ejournal licence url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Christine Ellwood and Sarah Thompson outline the rationale behind the approach of the University of York Library to cataloguing Internet resources.
LibWeb [1] is the University of York Library’s web information service.
LibWeb was designed right from the start as a comprehensive site which would provide as much information as possible on library services, staff and collections, and which would include electronic versions of all printed library guides.
One of the first questions that arose in designing the site was how to deal with Internet resources.
The Computing Service had maintained a campus information service for several years before the Web became the standard method of access to the Internet.
The Library already had a collection of bibliographies and other resources downloaded from other sites and made available on the information service which we did not want to lose.
On the other hand, there were already other national collections of resources, notably at BUBL [2] and NISS [3] which we did not want to duplicate.
As a compromise solution, we decided to provide a convenient collection of links to resources that would be of particular interest to the staff and students at York, including links to other more comprehensive sites where available.
This developed into the York Subject Tree and, ultimately, York Information Connections [4].
The development of this service and the rationale behind it is outlined in the first half of this article.
The cataloguing of electronic journals involves many of the same issues which apply to other Internet resources.
However, they also pose some of their own problems and these are highlighted in the second half of this article.
York Information Connections The York Subject Tree was part of LibWeb from the launch day.
The aim was to collect together Internet resources which reflected the teaching and research interests of the University of York in order to provide a starting point for staff and students.
As well as pointing to specific resources, the Subject Tree included links to other more comprehensive sites for those people who wanted to explore further.
It was, if not the first, then one of the first Subject Trees developed in a UK university library and has been much imitated!
York Information Connections introductory menu At that time, the Computing Service maintained a page of links on Exploring the Internet.
As the Subject Tree evolved it began to overlap more and more with this page and to include a broader range of information than was covered by the title Subject Tree.
It was decided to merge the two sections and this led to the development of York Information Connections.
Why did we decide to have our own Subject Tree?
The rationale was that since we do not send students to the British Library Catalogue when they want a book for their essay, why should they have to plough through the BUBL collection of resources to find Internet resources?
The idea was to develop a “collection” of Internet resources in the same way as we have a collection of books and journals.
Selection and cataloguing Selection of resources is distributed between the LibWeb Coordinator, Subject Librarians and members of academic staff in departments.
As is always the case, some people are more enthusiastic than others and this is reflected in the subject pages.
An example of a well developed page is that for Women’s Studies [5].
This is due to the enthusiasm of one member of academic staff who sends information on many resources to add to the page.
She has also advertised the page widely to researchers throughout the world with the result that usage statistics for this page are relatively high, justifying the time spent.
Most of the links on all the subject pages have a brief annotation explaining what the resource is about, but we go no further in cataloguing or evaluating the resource.
Subject arrangement The subject arrangement on York Information Connections is by University department.
We decided at the start that we would leave the major information gateways (at that time BUBL and NISS were the two main examples) to provide fully classified collections of resources and that we would concentrate on broad subject headings.
It seemed logical to relate the subjects directly to the departments (there are no faculties at York).
Since the whole site was maintained by one person it was impossible to do more at the time and this seemed a reasonable compromise between the impossible dream of a fully classified comprehensive collection of Internet resources and having nothing at all.
Now that there are many subject specific gateways, with links to evaluated and classified resources (such as EEVL [6], SOSIG [7] and HUMBUL [8]) the decision seems to have been the correct one.
Within the subject pages we developed a set of standard headings which are applied to all pages (the chemistry page includes all these standard headings [9]).
Headings are left off the page only if there is no resource relevant to that heading.
In addition to the standard headings, each page may have more specific subject headings which are generally related to teaching or research topics of interest at York.
There is an alphabetical index to LibWeb as a whole which was mainly designed to guide users through the whole site.
It does point to the main subject pages (there is an entry for archaeology, for example), but goes no more specific than that.
This was another pragmatic decision based on the lack of resources to do more and the lack of a search engine for the YorkWeb site.
Internet resources on the OPAC We briefly considered adding some of the main Internet resources to the OPAC.
There are several reasons why we have chosen not to take this approach: The main reason is that the Dynix WebOPAC is not sufficiently developed for us to purchase it.
This means we cannot link directly to the web resource from the OPAC.
We would probably want to duplicate the links on a web page while this is the case and this is seen as a waste of effort.
Our cataloguers have a hard time keeping up with cataloguing of books and do not have the capacity to take on web sites as well.
Web sites move about which would lead to inaccuracy in the OPAC.
We feel that this is less acceptable than inaccuracy on a web page (this may be a completely spurious feeling and has no logical reasoning behind it!).
We would rather avoid duplication of effort and rely on the national subject gateways for full catalogue entries at present.
We will certainly be reviewing this policy when we get the WebOPAC (due sometime in 1998).
An obvious category of resources to add to the OPAC would be the major subject gateways since they can be looked at as the equivalent of a printed bibliography or index.
Would this mean doing away with the subject web pages completely?
Perhaps.
However, there is some merit in maintaining the web pages as the equivalent of browsing the library shelves.
In addition, we use York Information Connections as a starting point for courses on using the Internet and the web.
Our undergraduate information literacy course, ILIAD (Information Literacy In All Departments), has two hands-on practical sessions on researching and evaluating information sources with York Information Connections providing the launch point for exploration of the web (the course is run jointly with the Computing Service and also includes sessions on wordprocessing and presentation tools).
We believe that the subject pages offer more than a WebOPAC.
Cataloguing e-journals The list of full text electronic journals available on LibWeb aims to include all the e-journals which can be accessed by the University of York user [10].
This includes those which are free, those where the online version is free with a print subscription, and those which are included in a site licence agreement.
Each title listed is linked to either the home page of the journal, or in the case of the HEFC titles, to the host site (Academic Press IDEAL [11], Institute of Physics Publishing [12], BIDS JournalsOnline [13]).
Some other e-journal pages which provide tables of contents and/or abstracts, but not free full-text, are listed on the subject pages of LibWeb.
A separate section provides links to publishers’ table of contents services [14].
We aim to continue to develop and improve the LibWeb electronic journal pages to make them the first stop for users wanting information on electronic journals.
When electronic journals became available through the HEFC agreement, we did not create catalogue records for the full text journals which were available online but which we did not already hold in print.
However, we did add a note to the catalogue record of those journals which we already subscribed to in print form (and therefore already existed on the OPAC): “Electronic version available through LibWeb URL: http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/ejlist.htm We decided to refer users to the electronic journals page created on LibWeb, rather than give the URL of each journal homepage.
This minimizes the work involved in adding and updating URLs, which is of course already necessary on the LibWeb page.
Also, the URLs of many journals can be quite lengthy and/or unstable.
We thought it best to encourage our users to consult the LibWeb page, which would act as a gateway and authoritative guide to the electronic journals available to the University of York user.
Links from this page also inform the University of York user of any additional information, such as passwords, that they need in order to access the journals, as well as providing brief information on host sites such as IDEAL.
When we have the WebOPAC interface to our catalogue we will be able to add the journal URL to the catalogue record; the user will then click on this link and seamlessly transfer to the journal homepage or, in the case of online journal hosts such as BIDS JournalsOnline which require users to log in with a username and password, we will provide a link to the host homepage.
So, should the OPAC have an additional role to play, other than that we have assigned to it?
Is it feasible to provide catalogue records for the journals only available to our readers electronically?
Can we justify extra workload of duplicating information already available from the LibWeb pages?
Or, looking at this from a theoretical rather than practical point of view, what should the role of the catalogue be?
The library of today and the future cannot simply be defined by its holdings (the stock housed in the library) but also includes material accessed remotely.
The catalogue should therefore include material available to the user, even if it is not held on library property.
Bibliographic databases held remotely on the SilverPlatter ARCPlus server are catalogued by us, so to be consistent, e-journals should be too.
Adding e-journals to the catalogue as access is arranged and as they are added to LibWeb does not seem unreasonable.
The problem facing us is how to deal with this retrospectively.
We do not know at the moment how long free access will be available; we are now 2 years through the HEFC scheme with one year to go.
There are over 100 Academic Press titles available through IDEAL which we do not hold in print form.
Should all these be catalogued?
If they are not freely available next year, they would need to be deleted from the catalogue.
We have now begun to catalogue Internet-only journals such as D-Lib [15] and Internet Archaeology [16] which are freely available.
The jury is still out on what to do with the Academic Press titles!
We have taken the decision to use one catalogue record to describe both the print and electronic formats of a journal.
But should there be one catalogue record for the print version of a journal and another for the electronic version?
After all, they do have separate ISSNs and due to the increased functionality of the web versions they often contain different material.
Take Ariadne as an example.
But there is a major problem regarding e-journals the administration of them is in addition to the work already involved with managing print journals.
Libraries simply do not have the resources (specifically, time) to duplicate cataloguing.
In many cases anyway, access to the electronic version is freely available for a limited period only.
So, we do not envisage changing our practice in this regard and creating even more work for ourselves.
One advantage of cataloguing e-journals is to provide subject classification for them.
They are not arranged by subject on LibWeb.
As the full-text alphabetical list becomes longer and more unwieldy, it would be very helpful for our users to having a subject listing as well as an alphabetical one.
We would actually prefer to dedicate time to this, rather than adding electronic-only journals to the catalogue.
The electronic journal pages on LibWeb would then provide alphabetical and subject indices to available titles, although they would not be searchable in the same way as the catalogue.
The catalogue tends to be regarded as the authoritative inventory of all the library’s resources.
If something is available, the expectation is it should be included there.
Future developments Our plan for the next academic year is to add to the catalogue a record for each e-journal listed on the full text LibWeb page (except for IDEAL and IOP titles, where we will wait and see what happens next year).
We will continue to add the LibWeb URL to records rather than the e-journal URL, as we want to encourage LibWeb to be seen as the comprehensive guide and index to e-journals.
We also plan to add a subject listing of our full-text journals to LibWeb, in addition to the alphabetical list.
This will be linked to from the alphabetical list, and from the subject pages already set up.
We are interested in the electronic journal management systems being offered by organisations such as Blackwells [17], Swets [18] and OCLC [19] and are hopeful that a CHEST deal will be announced soon.
We are also monitoring developments in the use of metadata and standards such as the Dublin Core [20] for cataloguing Internet pages.
These will influence any future decisions we make on cataloguing Internet resources.
In conclusion, we can say that the decisions we have made on cataloguing Internet resources have been influenced chiefly by practical considerations.
We have weighed the time involved against the benefits for our users and come to a compromise solution which we believe fulfills a useful function while avoiding too much duplication of others’ efforts.
References [1] LibWeb: University of York Library and Information Services Home Page http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/ [2] BUBL Information Service http://www.bubl.ac.uk/ [3] NISS Information Gateway http://www.niss.ac.uk/ [4] University of York Library: York Information Connections http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/subjects.htm [5] University of York Library: Women’s studies information sources http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/womenint.htm [6] EEVL: Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library.
The UK gateway to engineering information on the Internet http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ [7] SOSIG: Social Science Information Gateway http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ [8] The HUMBUL Gateway: International resources for the humanities http://info.ox.ac.uk/oucs/humanities/international.html [9] University of York Library: Chemistry information resources http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/chemint.htm [10] University of York Library: Full text electronic journals http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/ejlist.htm [11] IDEAL: International Digital Electronic Access Library from Academic Press http://www.janet.idealibrary.com/ [12] Institute of Physics Publishing: Electronic journals http://www.iop.org/EJ/welcome/ [13] BIDS JournalsOnline http://www.journalsonline.bids.ac.uk/JournalsOnline [14] University of York Library: Electronic tables of contents and abstract services http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/ejtoc.htm [15] D-Lib Magazine: the magazine of digital library research http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/mirrored/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/ [16] Internet Archaeology http://intarch.york.ac.uk/ [17] Blackwell’s Electronic Journal Navigator http://navigator.blackwell.co.uk/ [18] SwetsNet http://www.swetsnet.nl/ [19] OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online http://www.oclc.org/oclc/menu/eco.htm [20] Andy Powell, 1997.
Dublin Core Management.
Ariadne: the Web version, Issue 10. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/dublin/ Author details Christine Ellwood Head of Subject Services and Information Systems (and LibWeb Coordinator) J.B. Morrell Library University of York Email: cve1@york.ac.uk Sarah Thompson Periodicals Librarian J.B. Morrell Library University of York Email: st20@york.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Netskills Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner Buzz software java html browser video windows cache marc avi url standards Citation BibTex RIS Netskills corner Brian Kelly, Senior Trainer at Netskills, reviews Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Browser for Windows 95.
In the beginning was Tim Berners-Lee's WWW (World Wide Web) browser for the NeXT.
Then came the CERN WWW line browser and the Viola graphical browser for X.
However the first widelyused WWW browser was NCSA Mosaic which was developed initially for X, and then for the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh environments.
NCSA Mosaic was developed by a group led by Marc Andreessen at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In 1994 Marc Andreessen, together with a number of his colleagues from the NCSA Mosaic development group and elsewhere, left NCSA and, shortly afterwards, founded the company now known as Netscape Communications Corporation.
Netscape's best-known product is the Netscape Navigator browser, which is, no doubt, being used by many Ariadne readers.
Microsoft were never likely to let a new company such as Netscape dominate an area which is likely to be as profitable as the Internet.
So let's see what Microsoft's browser provides ... Internet Explorer Internet Explorer, Microsoft's WWW browser is currently available for the Windows 95 environment: ports for MS Windows 3.1 and the Apple Macintosh have been announced.
Internet Explorer version 1.0 was a very basic browser, based on the NCSA Mosaic code.
Version 2.0, which is now available, is beginning to attract a lot of interest.
Let's see what Internet Explorer provides.
The diagrams illustrate some of the facilities provided in Internet Explorer.
Note If you are reading this article using a WWW browser you can select the image to view a larger version.
This image shows the Internet Explorer Showcase Page, available at the URL http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ ie /iedemo.htmThe Showcase Page includes inline video.
"Have a Nice Day" Internet Explorer supports many Netscape features, includingclient-side pull.
The URLhttp://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ ie_intro.htmprovides a rolling demonstration of the features of Internet Explorer, including background sound.
Support For HTML 3 Internet Explorer provides support for a number of proposed HTML 3 tags including: Tables Background images Formatting options for P, Hn and HR tags (e.g.
<P ALIGN=CENTER>...</P>) Formatting options for IMG tag (e.g.
<IMG SRC="filename" ALIGN=RIGHT WIDTH=320 HEIGHT=250>) Prompt text for ISINDEX tag (e.g.
<ISIDEX PROMPT="Enter search term">) Internet Explorer also supports the proposed client-side image map HTML extension.
This proposal implements active images (sometimes referred to as clickable maps).
Support for client-side image maps is provided by tags within the HTML document, rather than sending the co-ordinates of a mouse click for processing by a CGI script on the remote server.
Microsoft's HTML Extensions As well as supporting a number for a number of HTML 3 tags, Internet Explorer also supports several tags which have been developed by Microsoft.
These include: Background sound which is played when you open a page containing the <BGSOUND> tag.
Inline video (e.g.
<IMG DYNSRC="TheEarth.avi" INFINITE">).
Control over the left and top margin of a document.
Font control (e.g.
<FONT COLOUR=#ff000>This text is red</FONT> and <FONT FACE="Arial,Lucida Sans,Times Roman">This text is in Arial, Lucida Sans or Times Roman depending on what fonts you have on your system</FONT> The <MARQUEE> tag for creating scrolling text.
Extensions to the <TABLE> tag, including control over the colour of table cells.
Additional Features Usenet Interface Internet Explorer provides an interface for handling Usenet News.
As can be seen in the accompanying diagram a simple interface for reading Usenet articles is available.
Unfortunately Internet Explorer does not provide a threaded display of articles, so that replies to articles are linked.
This image shows the interface to Usenet News.
Unfortunately threaded articles are not currently implemented.
Version 2.0 of Internet Explorer also allows you to post to newsgroups.
Inline VRML If Internet Explorer's interface to Usenet is disappointing, its interface to VRML is, in contrast, very slick.
VRML, the Virtual Reality Modelling Language, provides access to a 3-dimensional world.
Although dedicated VRML browsers are available for the main platforms (Unix, Apple Macintosh and MS Windows) Internet Explorer provides an seamless interface to its VRML browser.
The simple model shown in the diagram can be manipulated by the control icons shown near the bottom of the window, enabling the object to be rotated in 3D space.
This image illustrates inline VRML.
The navigational icons shown near the bottom of the window can be used to manipulate the 3D object.
Integration With The Desktop As might be expected, Internet Explorer is closely integrated with the Windows 95 desktop.
The History list of previously accessed resources is implemented by Windows Explorer, the Windows 95 replacement for the File Manager.
The Favourites option (which is normally referred to as Bookmarks in other browsers) is also implemented in this way.
This image illustrates using the History option to access files previously visited.
Windows 95 users will recognise the standard Windows Explorer interface.
Graphical files held on the local PC can be viewed using Windows Explorer by simply dragging a file onto the Internet Explorer application.
If you see a graphical file on WWW that you like you can use it as the background for your Windows 95 desktop by clicking the right mouse and select the Set as Wallpaper option.
Security Internet Explorer supports SSL security.
IN addition Internet Explorer will support STT (Secure Transaction Technology jointly developed by Microsoft and Visa International) for financial transactions.
The Best Browser?
Is Internet Explorer the best WWW browser?
The answer today is probably not.
Netscape version 2.0 includes support for Java applets and provides interfaces to Usenet News (including threaded articles) and email.
In addition Netscape have introduced the <FRAME> tag which provides a sophisticated user interface with multiple scrollable areas within an HTML document.
NCSA Mosaic provides greater control over the client cache and support for CCI (Common Client Interface) and a Collaborate mode which may be useful for distance support and training.
And then there are the commercial browsers such as Emissary.
However an organisation considering how to best exploit WWW services and, most importantly, future-proofing itself from changes in WWW technologies, would be advised to look at longer-term commercial developments.
At Microsoft's Internet strategy briefing, held on 7th December 1995 they announced the availability of beta versions of Internet Explorer for the Windows 3.1 and Apple Macintosh platforms, in addition to Windows 95.
Other announcements included a proposal for Active VRML, use of Visual Basic for Internet services, together with strategic relationships with companies including Oracle, Compuserve, CA and Spyglass.
Despite Marc Andreessen's brave comments in Wired (UK edition, December 1995), Netscape must be concerned about Microsoft entrance into the Internet marketplace.
My WWW Environment I currently have three WWW browsers on my desktop: NCSA Mosaic For Windows (which has a useful collaborate facility which I will be evaluating shortly for use in distance learning and support),Netscape and Internet Explorer.
They all have their strengths and weaknesses.
However I would prefer to select the browser of my choice -I would not want that decision forced upon me by authors of HTML pages making use of proprietary tags.
I still believe in Tim Berners-Lee's goal of platform and application independence.
Unfortunately HTML pages containing This page is Netscape-enhanced will soon be joined by Microsoft's Best viewed using Internet Explorer icon.
In the computing world we have seen, over the past decade, major companies such as IBM and Dec suffering hard times, and the takeover of companies such as Lotus and Wordperfect.
Can anyone guarantee that today's leading Internet companies are immune from just dangers?
Interestingly enough Netscape's prospectus, issued shortly before the company was floated, summarised many of the risk factors they faced: Limited Operating History; Accumulated Debt ...
Developing Market; New Entrants; Unproven Acceptance of the Companies Products; Price Erosion; Uncertain Adoption of Internet as a Medium of Commerce and Communications ...the Company's client software will likely be subject to price erosion due to free client software distributed by online service providers, Internet access providers and others.
In addition, computer operating systems companies, such as Microsoft and IBM are now bundling or are planning to bundle client software with their operating systems at little or noadditional cost to users ....Microsoft has announced its intention to improve and bundle [a WWW]browser with its Windows 95 browser.
... [this will] have a have a material adverse impact on Netscape's ability to sell client software.
In addition, because the Company's client software products will not be able to access Microsoft Network, the Company's client software products may be at a competitive disadvantage versus Microsoft's browser.
New Product Development and Technological Change ... Microsoft and IBM are each proposing an alternative security standard, and widespread adoption of either standard .. could have a material adverse effect on the Company's business, operating results or financial condition.
So to ensure that HTML files can continue to be accessed on a long term(over 5 years) am I suggesting that authors ignore Netscape's HTML extensions and stick with Microsoft, a company which appears to be in a more stable and financial secure position?
No.
Let's make 1996 the year of open standards.
Let's have more pages containing the stampThis document has been validated to the HTML 2 standard or, if you wish to use facilities such as Tables, This document has been validated to the HTML 3 (beta) standard.Let's use the HTML validation service, kindly mirrored by HENSA at the URLhttp://www.hensa.ac.uk/html-valsvc/ Don't let your institutional WWW service or your eLib project be locked into a proprietary format.
You could spend a long time regretting it.
Happy New Year from Netskills.
P.S.
Anyone want to buy a large and possibly valuable information resource?
Over 500 LPs, unfortunately locked in to an obsolete format.
Further Information Further information about Internet Explorer is available at the URLhttp://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/iedl.htm Details about Microsoft's supported HTML tags are available at the URL http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie2 0html.htm Detail's about Microsoft's Internet Strategy are available at the URL http://www.microsoft.com/internet/ Feedback Do you have any comments on this article?
Do you welcome Microsoft's entry in the WWW browser market, or find it threatening?
Do you support companies such as Netscape and Microsoft introduction of new tags, or are you concerned at the loss of browser-independence this will bring?
Your feedback would be welcome.
Please send email to B.Kelly@newcastle.ac.uk Author details Brian Kelly Senior Trainer Netskills   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Netskills Corner: Fifth WWW Conference, Paris Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner: Fifth WWW Conference, Paris Buzz data software javascript html database urn browser repositories graphics sgml dtd windows hypertext cache unicode url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly undertakes the arduous task of attending the 5th WWW Conference in Paris (is there a 'smiley' for 'green with envy'?).
About the Conference The CNIT The fifth World Wide Web conference was held at CNIT, La Défense in Paris from 6-10th May 1996.
The conference began with a day of tutorials and workshops and concluded with a developer’s day.
The technical programme took place on the 7-9th May.
In addition a Small to Medium Enterprises (SME) Forum was held on 9-10th May.
Impressions The WWW conference has certainly changed since the first conference was held at CERN in May 1994.
It is difficult to believe that only two years have passed since that date.
The conference has grown in size from 380 participants at the first conference, to over 2,000 in Paris.
Lots of men in suits were present at the conference I did not think there were any earth-shattering papers or announcements at the conference.
However there were announcements in a number of areas of interest to me: HTML 3.2 announced HTML 3.2 is W3C’s new specification for HTML.
The new specification has been agreed by the major vendors including Microsoft, Sun, Netscape and IBM.
For further information see the URL http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Wilbur/ Style Sheets The style sheet proposal appears to be mature and has been implemented in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (version 3, beta).
The Amaya browser / editing tool, which will be freely available shortly, will enable style sheets to be edited.
For further information on style sheets see the URL http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/ HTTP/1.1 A number of changes have been made to the HTTP/1.1 draft specification, including changes to content negotiation (mechanisms for dialogue between clients and servers regarding document formats).
For further information see the URL http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/ The conference consisted of paper sessions, panel sessions, invited presentations and W3C sessions.
A summary of the sessions I attended follows.
Paper Sessions The first paper session I attended was on Web Characteristics.
The papers were: An Investigation of Documents From the WWW Allison Woodruff, Paul Aoki, Eric Brewer, Paul Gauthier and Lawrence Rowe From User Access Patterns to Dynamic Hypertext Linking Tak Woon Yan, Mathew Jacobsen, Hector Garcia-Molina and Umeshwar Dayal Measuring the Web Tim Bray Allison Woodruff et al’s paper provided a useful summary on the usage of HTML tags in a large number of documents.
I was impressed by Tim Bray’s paper on measuring the Web.
This analysis covered connections to and from HTML documents.
A VRML display of the Web was provided, which provided a graphical illustration of a number of features, including the size of a site, and the numbers of pointers from the site and the numbers of pointers to the site.
Tak Woon Yan et als paper provided an analysis of usage for an individual browsing a Web site, and used clustering techniques to suggest related pages which other users have accessed.
This is likely to be a feature of commercial sites, such as virtual shopping malls (“We noticed you’ve access the tennis pages and the pages on holidays in the Bahamas.
You might also be interested in our pages on camera equipment”).
The next paper session I attended was on Document Structures in which the following papers were presented: Interactively Restructuring HTML Documents Stéphane Bonhomme, Cécile Roisin HTML Generation and Semantic Markup For Telepathology Vicenzo Della Mea, Vito Roberto, Davide Brunato and Carlo Alberto Beltrami Extending the Web’s Tag Set Using SGML: The Grif Symposia Authoring Tool Jean Paoli Stéphane Bonhomme and Cécile Roisin’s paper described techniques for restructuring HTML documents (e.g.
automatically converting a bulleted list to a table).
The importance of having correctly structured documents was made very clear in this talk.
Vicenzo Della Mea et al’s paper illustrated how they had added HTML tags to define a structure to a database application they had developed.
This work was similar to Simon Dobson and Victoria Marshall’s paper on Light-Weight Databases which was presented at a previous WWW conference.
Jan Paoli’s paper described a technique for extending HTML based on extensions to the HTML DTD.
I then chaired a session on Browsing Aids: Automatically Organising Bookmarks per Contents Yoelle Maarek and Israel Ben Shaul WebGUIDE: Querying and Navigating Changes in Web Repositories Fred Douglis, Thomas Ball, Yih-Farn Chen and Eleftherios Koutsofios Nif-t-nav: A Hierarchical Navigator for WWW Pages Kirsten Jones Yoelle Maarek and Israel Ben Shaul described an interesting technique for automating management of bookmark files based on clustering techniques.
Fred Douglis et al described software for visualising changes to different generations of HTML documents.
Kirsten Jones’ paper described a technique for providing state when navigating Web directory structures.
Keynote Sessions Stuart Weibel, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), gave a presentation on Mending Our Net: Gathering, Describing, and Preserving Information in a Digital World.
It was interesting to hear Stuart’s introduction to the subject of meta-data: he described how IETF working group meeting resembled the film Groundhog Day, with every meeting seeming to repeat the discussion topics aired at previous meetings.
In light of the difficultituies of advancing URN (Uniform Resource Names) Stuart suggested that PURLS (Persistent URLs) could have a role to play.
Bob Scheifler, X Consortium, then gave a talk on Broadway: Universal Access to Interactive Applications Over The Web.
The goal of Broadway is to “provide universal access to interactive applications on the Web the ability to locate and invoke remote applications via the Web and have their displays, including both graphics and audio, appear wherever you are, either as new top-level windows or embedded within a Web browser”.
For further information see the URL http://www.x.org/consortium/broadway.html Developer’s Sessions At the Developer’s Day, Dave Raggett and Håkon Lie gave a summary of developments to HTML and Style Sheets.
HTML 3.2 was announced, which should bring to an end the HTML extensions wars which were threatening to pull apart the Web community.
HTML 3.2 will include a number of widely deployed features, including: tables applets text flow around images superscripts and subscripts In addition it will include a number of widely-adopted HTML extensions (such as <BODY BACKGROUND>, <BIG> and <SMALL>).
Following these two presentations, a speaker from Netscape was introduced, and then Chris Wilson (Microsoft) gave a talk on the issues associated with writing software to support style sheets.
Chris described the importance of document structure and tag containers.
He described the difficulties of implementing support for document containing invalid HTML constructs For example: <B>Bold text<I>Bold Italic text</B> what’s this</I>what’s this?
can be interpreted in a number of ways.
When attempting to analyse such invalid HTML constructs, errors could be introduced (e.g.
using tools to create style sheets).
For example, the example shown above could be interpreted as: <B>Bold text<I>Bold Italic text</I> </B>what’s this</I>what’s this?
An implied </I> <B>Bold text<I>Bold Italic text what’s this</I>what’s this?
Ignore the </B> tag However, automatically generating HTML tags can cause problems, if, for example, <FRAME> or <FORM> tags had to be generated.
(Note the high proportion of document containing errors given in the URL http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~woodruff/inktomi/results_syntax.html).
Chris made the following recommendations: Validate your documents Understand HTML containers and use them properly Don’t use clever tricks to obtain a visual effect Following the presentations there was a panel session.
The following questions were asked: Are the HTML wars over?
Will be see the end of vendor-specific HTML extensions?
Although HTML 3.2 has been agreed, inevitably new features will be introduced, and this is needed to prevent the Web from stagnating.
Will there be support for folded lists (e.g.
outline views of documents)?
This can be implemented in a number of ways (e.g.
using Javascript, and perhaps using style sheets) What has happened to maths?
A small W3C working group has been set up.
Prototypes should be available by the end of the year.
Why are the <OBJECT> and <APPLET> tags both provided?
To continue to provide support for the widely deployed <APPLET> tag Will the <LI> tag support coloured bullets?
Yes When will HTML provide support for international character sets?
HTML can use Unicode, but font support is needed (this is coming) Other Comments Although 58 papers were selected for presentation in the parallel sessions at the Conference, it was disappointing that only three (Neil Smith’s paper on The UK National Web Cache The State of the Art, Dave Ingham et al’s paper on Fixing The “Broken Link” Problem: The W3Objects Approach and Leslie Carr et al’s paper on Open Information Systems) were from the UK HE community.
At the first WWW conference many of the speakers gave their presentations using OHP foils.
At that conference only one speaker (Dave Raggett) gave his presentation using the Web.
This time, in comparison, all speakers were requested to make their slides available in HTML format.
The files were then displayed using a Web browser (Netscape).
Although this did not provide the layout control available using desktop presentation packages such as PowerPoint, it was good to see the Web being used in this way.
Indeed two speakers (Chris Lilley and Håkon Lie) used the Arena browser with style sheets to provide a high degree of control over the screen display.
Social Programme The higlight of the social programme was the conference buffet, held in Le Louvre.
A modern exhibit was on display at the museum.
Robert Cailliau brought along Tim Berners-Lee’s original NeXT computer, which was used to produce the initial WWW browser and server.
Robert Cailliau, Brian Kelly and Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer The low point of the conference occured on the Sunday.
After registering I managed to find a computer and accessed the Carling football pages, only to discover that Manchester United were winning, and Newcastle were drawing :-( Further Information Details of the conference are available at the URL http://www.w3.org/pub/Conferences/WWW5/Welcome.html Conference papers are available at the URL http://www.w3.org/pub/Conferences/WWW5/fich_html/paper-sessions.html Details on next year’s WWW Conference are available at the URL http://www6conf.slac.stanford.edu/ Brian Kelly, Netskills, University of Newcastle Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Netskills eLib Project Launch Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills eLib Project Launch Buzz java copyright video cataloguing mailbase url Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir on the Netskills eLib project launch.
On 7th-8th February, John Kirriemuir attended the Netskills launch, which was combined with a Netskills training session; an overview of the event appears below.
In addition, pictures of the launch (warning: very large files) are available.
In this same edition of Ariadne, you can also find an interview with Jill Foster, the director of Netskills and Mailbase, as well as a more detailed description of the Netskills project.
7th February Afternoon Take the train from Bath to Newcastle, via London, armed with new (and unknown to me at the time, broken) camera and tape recorder for interviewing.
On the second leg of the journey, encounter a nervous Frank Norman, the project manager for OMNI, who is the guest speaker this evening at the Netskills event.
Upon arrival at Newcastle, dump clothes at respective hotels and head off to the campus.
Arrival at University of Newcastle campus, and spend several minutes wandering through depressing 60's architecture in search of the Netskills training camp.
Arrive at what appears to be a council tower block, to find professionally-produced signs pointing the way to Netskills.
The afternoon session of day 1 is already at an advanced stage; the trainees are sitting in a well-equipped lab of pentium PCs, going through "search and find on the Web" type exercises.
Go slightly envious when I notice the speed at which people were able to connect to resources on the Web.
Evening The evening meal, guest speaker and demonstrations are all taking place in an impressive auditorium, full of plants draping over upper balconies and trees and assorted potted bushes everywhere.
One table, full of large stacks of flyers from other eLib projects, looked as though it was ready to collapse.
The food was impressive, and the adjoining bar was well used by the 30 odd trainees.
These seemed to be a happy bunch, mainly librarians from the North East of England and Scotland.
Numbers were slightly down, as howling blizzards in Alba meant that a few people were stranded at home.
Speeches were given by the vice-chancellor, and messages of goodwill read out from several people, such as Nigel Gardener (who sent a telegraph) and the EduLib project.
Frank then gave an interesting half hour talk on the "information desert", illustrated with slides from what appeared to be his various holiday in deserts, jungles and forests around the world.
This showed how the networked resources in the UK had built up in the last ten years or so.
One highlight of Franks talk was his assault on "acronym hell" (which caused much shaking of heads from the audience); Franks alternative definition of "Acroynm" was: Adding Chaos Rather than Organising Networked Ynformation (!)
Meaningfully which was swiftly followed by "nightmares", which stood for: Networked Information is Getting Harder To Manage.
Action!
Resources Elib Skills Franks talk was then followed by a few demonstrations.
Brian Kelly, the senior Netskills trainer, was at a TAPin training session, and therefore left a hilarious movie of him creating a world wide web.
Out of inflatable balloons (you have to see it to appreciate it...).
This was followed by a simultaneous CU-CMe (video and sound link) session with several people from around the world.
George Brett, in Colorado in the US, was one of the participants; his voice and picture came through quite faintly, until he asked if the camera connected to the session at the Netskills node could be pointed towards the bar.
This was done, and a sudden improvement in sound and picture quality was noticed by all.
George conversed with the bar staff, via this CU-CMe link, which he had become very aquainted with during his previous visit to Newcastle.
Following the global link-up, four parallel demonstrations were started, which people could wander about at will.
Worldchat, a chat system with a highly graphical interface, generated the most interest (and noise); in addition, Donal demonstrated HotJava, while Jon gave a very impressive demonstration of VRML.
In this, he demoed manipulating a helicopter, as well as zooming around a "virtual" Wallace and Gromit; in addition, Emma played "chopsticks" on a virtual piano.
The obligatory Netskills trip to the pub then ensued; the author of this piece, having suffered from excessive alcohol consumption on previous trips to Newcastle, wimped out to stay sharp for the next day.
8th February Very early morning Get up, catch the laid on coach (at 8:15) from the Hotel to the session.
Very surprisingly for Newcastle, hardly any early morning traffic, with causes us to arrive early and ingest some very welcome caffeine.
The first morning session saw Walter Scales talk about searching on the Internet.
He gave an excellent overview of the search engines available (Archie, Veronica, Lycos, X500, etc), and demonstrated some of the capabilities of Web-based systems, such as the Leeds University Library catalogue and the facilities in Mailbase for searching for people.
Walter was followed by Jon Shepstone, who made the audience participate in a "Netskills Internet Lottery".
This consisted of people picking coloured balls out of a bag at random, which determined what type of Web site Jon would randomly access.
This worked very well, as many of the problems (speed, lost links, moved sites) associated with the Web were illustrated to good effect.
Jon used Lycos to search for UK government sites; he noted that what some Internet resources/indexes called abstracts were really just collections of words, or word streams from part of a Web page or document.
Jon also changed the search slightly from "UK" to "British", which produced a severely different set of results, illustrating the perils of search keyword choice and the lack of search engine thesauri.
Jon demonstrated SOSIG, and showed how useful it was (in terms of speed and access) to differentiate between worldwide and UK-based resources.
He quickly found, by searching, the CCTA service, and showed that in a proper index/gateway system, such as SOSIG, an abstract was really a proper abstract as opposed to a collection/stream of loosely/unrelated words.
A coffee break gave me the chance to talk to some of the trainees out of earshot of the Netskills trainers, so I could gain some unbiased comments; here is a sample: "I'm surprised how honest the demonstrators are; they can be quite negative about the problems of the Web."
[In response to the above] "It was refreshing, 'cos you knew you were getting an accurate picture of the problems.
The last course I went on, we paid a small fortune to be told how wonderful the Internet was, with no chance to verify this ourselves.
This is so different, I wish I hadn't bothered with that course."
"Been here less than a day and have learnt stacks; the package we got [the trainees are handed a formidable package of materials, such as copies of the slides, descriptions and URLs of useful Web sites] will keep me going for weeks."
"This is so good; the staff seem to be working themselves to the bone to keep us busy, especially last night."
"Absolutely excellent; wish I'd have had this available to me a year ago."
"Brilliant, but a bit scary; all those things we saw last night, Java, VRML, the thing with the bloke from America on the computer, all new.
How often will I have to keep coming on training courses to keep up, or stand still?
I wish all this internet development would just slow down for a while."
"Can't believe how much I've learnt since I got here."
"Isn't the young lad with the Irish accent [meaning Donal] cuddly?
Think they'd notice if I stuffed him into my bag and took him home?"
Mid-morning More opportunities to train on the PCs took place; the trainees had structured question and answer sheets by which (to win a prize) they had to find things on the Internet, in the process flexing their Internet searching skills.
Dave Hartland then gave a talk on various side-issues concerned with the Internet, such as Netiquette, copyright, libel, "bandwidth wasting" and the effects of commercialisation.
Following this was a group discussion for the trainees, and some comments from Jill on Netskills overall and future courses.
We then trooped off to one of the legendary Netskills buffet lunches (wide selection of foodstuffs, including diet destroying chocolate eclairs), a spot of unwinding and a chat with the departing delegates.
However, there is no rest for an information Officer; straight after, it was off to interview Jill, then hop on a train for the international networking conference.
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Down Under With the Dublin Core Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Under With the Dublin Core Buzz data html metadata identifier cataloguing dtd hypertext rfc marc lcsh pics opera url standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller and Tony Gill offer a view of the recent Dublin Core metadata workshop in the Australian capital, Canberra.
Continuing a long and glorious tradition, the 4th Dublin Core Workshop [1] last month went to a really nice country and picked one of the least lively settlements in which to meet.
Admittedly, in the company of such as Dublin (Ohio, USA, rather than the somewhat more picturesque capital of Eire) and Coventry, Canberra did rather manage to shine.
Nobly sacrificing sleep, wintry weather and the monotony of their offices for the higher cause that is metadata, the authors and two other UK representatives (Dave Beckett from the University of Kent at Canterbury and Rachel Heery from the UK Office of Library & Information Networking, UKOLN) descended upon an unsuspecting Australia.
This article offers a light-hearted and personal view of the proceedings, Australia, and airline cuisine.
To ensure maximum jealousy on the part of you, dear reader, sunny photographs are spread liberally throughout.
As regular readers of Ariadne will be aware [2], [3], [4], the Dublin Metadata Core Element Set, or Dublin Core, has been under development since the original workshop in Dublin, Ohio, back in 1995 [5] and is now increasingly to be found in the web pages of projects such as the Arts & Humanities Data Service, as well as in a number of metadata creation tools.
Not content with merely embedding Dublin Core in web pages, a number of projects in the UK and elsewhere are also experimenting with the use of Dublin Core-like records as a means of providing uniform access to more detailed holdings maintained in a variety of more complex formats.
However, despite widespread adoption of Dublin Core around the world, the precise semantics of implementation have never actually been formally agreed, and consequently several ‘flavours’ of Dublin Core have begun to emerge.
Part of the aim of the Canberra workshop was to explore the syntax behind Dublin Core implementation, and to draw up a single set of recommendations for its implementation within the HyperText Markup Language (HTML); probably the greatest single deployment medium at present.
Figure 1: Canberra, viewed from Mount Ainsley We’re off to Australia The workshop was organised by OCLC, the National Library of Australia and DSTC, and was held at the National Library in Canberra.
Perhaps best known to most people only from the last chilling words in Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, Canberra is actually the Federal capital of Australia and lies between the rival cities of Melbourne and Sydney in its own little territory the ACT, or Australian Capital Territory nibbled out of New South Wales.
Imagine Milton Keynes.
Take all the people away.
Add offices for every Federal government department, High Commissions for the Commonwealth countries and embassies for everyone else.
Slice the top off a hill and stick Parliament in it (not a bad idea, we hear you cry!).
Throw in a big artificial lake, marsupials, some hills and a space-age telecommunications tower and you’ve just about got Canberra.
It’s not really as bad as it sounds, and was certainly nicer to visit than our disparaging contacts in Sydney implied (they made it sound like Milton Keynes, Coventry and Dublin, Ohio, all rolled into one)!
Figure 2: The Australian Federal Parliament, Canberra, ACT However, your diligent roving reporters didn’t want to arrive at the workshop suffering from the illeffects of a 22 hour plane journey (where did Wednesday go?
), so felt duty-bound to spend some time researching the amenities of Sydney whilst acclimatising.
Notable highlights include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, established in 1874 and now housing eclectic collections from around the world; the immaculate and tranquil Botanical Gardens; the remarkable Opera House, designed by Jørn Utzon and completed in 1973; the revolving restaurant at the top of a very tall tower; the surfer’s paradise of Bondi Beach; and Sydney Harbour Bridge, a miracle of civil engineering and Commonwealth cooperation in its day, and still the widest bridge in the world.
Figure 3: The Art Gallery of New South Wales and breakfast!
Figure 4: The view over Sydney from Centre Point tower   Figure 5: The Sydney Opera House   Figure 6: The Sydney Harbour Bridge In the same spirit of international collaboration, the Archaeological Computing Lab of the University of Sydney [6] were treated (or should that be subjected?)
to a lecture on the archaeology of York (the one in Yorkshire), including a number of slides showing the city under several feet of water.
At no other time did Britain feel so far away!
The acclimatisation period also coincided with the Mardi Gras, an annual gay pride carnival, and the biggest event in Sydney’s entertainment calendar.
Unfortunately the suggestion from the Archaeology Department that step-ladders would be helpful in order to see the supposedly-colourful parade turned out to be less tongue in cheek than anticipated!
Although Canberra could not hope to compete with Sydney in the fun stakes, it did nonetheless offer the chance to see some of the countryside the workshop organisers arranged an excursion to the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, allowing participants to see some of the more exotic wildlife such as koalas, kangaroos, cockatoos and emus in their natural habitat.
It also had a very passable curry house.
Figure 7: Fancy cataloguing for ADAM?
Tony finds some cheap labour   The workshop The workshop itself took place over three days, and drew together more than 60 participants from several countries who between them represented much of the current thinking on Dublin Core from the libraries, computer science and implementation communities (not to mention a combined total distance travelled of more than a million air miles).
The fifteen elements [7] finally agreed upon in December of 1996 (Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributors, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage and Rights) remain unaltered following the workshop, but the syntax for implementation and notions of ‘appropriate’ element use both came under close scrutiny.
Differences of approach that have been apparent for some time on the mailing lists associated with Dublin Core came to the fore, with the formation of two definite extremes of opinion, from the vanilla ‘qualifiers over my dead body’ Dublin Core of fifteen elements and nothing else to the opposite ‘if it moves, slap a qualifier on it’ camp advocating an (optionally) much extended Dublin Core.
It is interesting to note that the minimalist group is almost entirely made up of librarians and others with experience of large and extremely complex cataloguing standards such as the MAchine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) used in the libraries world, whilst the extenders tended to be ‘techies’ or implementers from non-traditional cataloguing backgrounds.
Prior to the workshop, many implementers had been making use of the fifteen core elements, as well as the optional qualification provided by SCHEME and TYPE sub-qualifiers.
Under this system, SCHEME was used to denote that values were drawn from a recognised standard, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and TYPE was used to sub-divide existing Dublin Core elements by, for example, dividing the Creator element into email address, postal address, name, etc.
Syntax, although not formally agreed, was often of a format similar to META NAME = DC.creator CONTENT = “(TYPE = email) apm9@york.ac.uk” or META NAME = DC.date CONTENT = “(TYPE = created) (SCHEME = ISO31) 1997-04-02” This somewhat clumsy format was a major discussion topic in Canberra, although the proposed solutions also presented problems for those wishing to implement Dublin Core in the short term.
Dublin Core syntax wars And then there were three… Despite continued concern as to the extent to which they might be used, the workshop participants agreed in principle that an ability to qualify Dublin Core elements with some form of qualifier was useful.
It became plain that the functional distinction between SCHEME and TYPE was less than clear to a significant body of users and this was one reason for suggesting a slight change to the informal syntax outlined above.
Rather than continue to embed both SCHEME and TYPE information within the CONTENT area of HTML’s tag, it was proposed that TYPE information instead be appended to the element name, giving META NAME = DC.creator.email CONTENT = “apm9@york.ac.uk” or, with a SCHEME, META NAME = DC.date.created CONTENT = “(SCHEME = ISO31) 1997-04-02” Misha Wolf of Reuters made a vocal case in favour of internationalisation of Dublin Core, and advocated the embedding of language information with the metadata.
The fifteen elements currently include a Language field, which pertains to the language of the resource being described, but the Canberra workshop also recommended the addition of a LANG qualifier to the existing SCHEME and TYPE.
This qualifier relates to the language in which the metadata is expressed, and may well be different from the contents of the Language element itself.
Language information might be embedded, thus: META NAME = DC.creator CONTENT = “(LANG = en) Miller, Paul” The three qualifiers (TYPE, SCHEME and LANG) together are now despite the existence of two of them pre-Canberra to be known as Canberra Qualifiers and remain, like the elements themselves, optional; where you don’t need or want one, simply don’t use it.
Standards be damned… Even with the movement of TYPE out of brackets and over next to the element name, this syntax undeniably remains somewhat unwieldy, and the inclusion of bracketed element qualifiers within the CONTENT area is rumoured to make extraction of the actual metadata value (‘Miller, Paul’, for example) tricky for some tool developers.
However, this syntax neither breaks the current Document Type Definition (DTD) for HTML, nor appears to cause problems for any of the existing HTML validation tools and, for a community hoping to set new metadata standards, compliance with existing standards must surely be no bad thing…?
In an attempt to increase the ease of parsing and interpretation, a second syntax was put forward in Canberra, which appears to be in line with draft proposals before the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C.
The W3C proposals, however, are at least six months away from implementation, and if used at present, the second Dublin Core syntax will cause most HTML validation tools to report errors.
Nevertheless, it is neater than the first, and certainly easier for both computers and humans to handle.
As such, the workshop recommended this as a syntax to aim towards in the medium to long term, assuming that the W3C proposals go as expected.
With the proposed syntax, the existing META NAME = xyz CONTENT = “xyz” becomes META NAME = xyz TYPE = xyz SCHEME = xyz LANG = xyz CONTENT = “xyz” For example: META NAME = DC.date TYPE = created SCHEME = ISO31 CONTENT = 1997-03-07 Or, where TYPE is appended to the element name: META NAME = DC.date.created SCHEME = ISO31 CONTENT = 1997-03-07 Note that, unlike the earlier examples, the value of CONTENT (1997-03-07) is not enclosed inside quotation marks.
As with much of HTML, quotation marks are only required where there are spaces included as part of the value.
i.e.
1997 03 07 would need quotation marks (“1997 03 07”) whilst 1997-03-07 does not.
Other syntaxes were also explored, including an interesting proposal to embed Dublin Core metadata within a PICS-NG (the Next Generation of the Platform for Internet Content Selection format) header, but these may be even further off than the W3C-compliant syntax.
Future Ariadne articles will discuss these options in more detail, and keep readers up to date with developments as and when they happen.
The journey home After three long days, the fourth Dublin Core meeting was drawn to a close and the participants, exhausted by both mental exertion and jetlag in many cases, started to drift away.
However, conscious of the taxpayers right to expect value for money, your selfless correspondents changed their flight details in order to attend the Australian National Metadata Seminar, held the following day and also at the National Library of Australia.
The large audience received presentations both from Dublin Core 4 participants (e.g.
Stuart Weibel, Carl Lagoze, Rebecca Guenther and our very own Rachel Heery), and by others active in the field of resource discovery (for example John Perkins of CIMI, who was kind enough to insert a URL plug for the AHDS/UKOLN Visual Arts, Museums & Cultural Heritage Metadata Workshop into his Powerpoint slides).
The strategic significance of metadata for networked information resource discovery has certainly not been underestimated Down Under!
[Ed: If you want to see what a large collection of metadata people look like, then take a look at the picture taken at this conference in the Ariadne Caption Competition section.
Then it was a quick dash to the airport, a short flight to Sydney, then a somewhat longer flight to Hong Kong, for a two night stop-over (rest assured that this was not at the taxpayers’ expense!).
Landing at Kai Tak airport was as interesting as we’d been promised, and no doubt the residents of the numerous tower blocks could see the whites of the pilot’s eyes!
Claimed as a Crown colony in 1842, ownership of Hong Kong will pass to China at midnight on 30 June 1997, due to the expiry of the 99-year lease on the New Territories.
With a population of just under 6 million people squeezed into just 415 square miles (14,457 people per square mile), Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated areas of the World although this didn’t prevent your correspondents from investigating Victoria Peak, the Buddhist Monastery at Lantau, the cuisine (apparently some of the best Chinese food in the World), the shopping and of course the lively expatriot nightlife.
Figure 8: The Buddha on Lantau, and a (rather small) Tony Finally the time came to spend all our remaining currency on duty-free and head back for Blighty.
We landed at a dark, cold and foggy Heathrow at some obscenely early time of the morning, aching and tired but with a renewed resolve to work towards an international standard for resource description.
A veritable feast… Many of the important conclusions from Canberra are still being mulled over with, for example, small groups tackling the refinement of some of the less well understood elements, and a number of reports being compiled.
As well as the findings of these working groups, Stu Weibel from OCLC is tackling the official workshop report and there are at least two documents being carried forward for entry into the RFC process.
Whilst citation details for these (very, at the moment!)
draft documents are not yet available, future issues of Ariadne will hopefully carry details as they become available.
Also, Dublin Core metadata tools in the UK [8] and elsewhere [9] will soon be adapted to reflect the altered syntax pay them a visit, and start stuffing your pages with Dublin Core!
Figure 9: Sunset over Hong Kong Harbour Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Lorcan Dempsey of UKOLN for locating the funds to enable UK participation in Canberra, and to Chris Rusbridge at eLib whose money it was.
On behalf of all who were there, thanks once more to the people at the National Library of Australia (particularly Rachel Jakimow and Tonya Beeton, who managed to deal with all the problems we could throw at them with ease) and DSTC for organising and running an extremely slick meeting, and to Stu Weibel for staving off his jet lag sufficiently to keep control of the (occasionally fractious) rabble… Both authors are, of course, open to invitations to attend similar events anywhere in the world… [Ed: Not much chance of that after this article…] References The 4th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop http://www.dstc.edu.au/DC4/ Miller, P., 1996, Metadata for the Masses, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/metadata/ Knight, J., 1997, Will Dublin form the Apple Core?
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue7/mcf/ Knight, J., 1997, Making a MARC with Dublin Core.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/marc/ Weibel, S., Godby, J., Miller, E. & Daniel, R., 1995, OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop, http://www.oclc.org:5047/oclc/research/publications/ Department of Archaeology, University of Sydney, http://felix.antiquity.arts.su.edu.au/ Dublin Core Element Set reference definition, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core/elements.html The Dublin Core metadata creator, http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~napm1/dublin_core/ The Nordic Metadata Projects Dublin Core metadata template, http://www.ub.lu.se/metadata/DC_creator.html Author Details Paul Miller, Collections Manager Archaeology Data Service, Email: Email: apm9@york.ac.uk Web page: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ahds/ Tel: 01904 433954 Address: Archaeology Data Service, Kings Manor, York, YO1 2EP   Tony Gill, International Liaison Officer, ADAM eLib Project, Email: tony@adam.ac.uk Web page: http://www.adam.ac.uk/ Tel: 01252 722441 Address: Surrey Institute of Art & Design, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7DS Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OMNI-Corner: Meeting the Visible Human Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI-Corner: Meeting the Visible Human Buzz data software database dissemination browser graphics latex visualisation licence gopher cd-rom research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sue Welsh reports from the Visible Human Project Conference of October 1996, an event that brought together many of the people involved with one of the most high profile Internet-based medical resources.
The Visible Human is one of the Internets best known sites; one of its big stories.
However, the size of the Visible Human Dataset (VHD) means that most of us have no way of making use of the raw data itself.
We have, so far, been more impressed by the idea than the reality.
Not for much longer last month the first Visible Human Project Conference brought together the people involved in producing the data, the researchers, information scientists and clinicians who have used it and the ignorant but curious, for two days of demonstration and discussion, at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
What emerges is not a white elephant but a resource being used by many in research, medical education and, especially, in commercial products.
The Origin of the Species The Visible Human Project was first proposed in the late 80s, when the tools for really effective dissemination of such a dataset did not exist or were in their infancy.
The foresight of the NLM, therefore, is to be admired.
As early as 1986, the NLMs long range planning foresaw a coming era where NLMs bibliographic and factual database services would be complimented by libraries of digital images, distributed over high speed computer networks..... [1].
In 1989 the Board of Regents approved the principle and further committees made the decision to create a digital image library based on two cadavers, on male, one female.
The male dataset was the first to appear.
Consisting of MRI, CT and anatomical images at 4mm, 1mm and 1mm respectively, the total dataset is 15 gigabytes.
These simple facts do adequately tell the story of the efforts involved in the acquisition of the data, which was clearly conveyed by Victor Spitzer on the first morning of the conference.
The anatomical images were produced, as everyone knows, by literally slicing up the cadaver.
There are 1871 crosssectional anatomical images; on average, each took 6 minutes to make.
To make the cadaver more manageable it was sawed into four pieces before the slicing began, with some loss at the junctions.
Internal cavities appear blue on the anatomical images, as they were filled with latex.
The cadavers arms were glued to its side to preserve their relation to the trunk from one image to the next; similarly the cadavers legs were fixed at the ankle.
The cadaver had to be squashed to fit into the MRI scanner, and so these images do not coincide with the CT and anatomical data.
The female dataset was produced in essentially the same way, but its bigger about 40 gigabytes as the anatomical slices were taken at more frequent intervals, there are 5,000 slices in all.
The NLM makes this resource available without charge across the Internet, for those satisfying their license agreement [2], and essentially, the Visible Human Project Conference was a showcase for people whove taken them up on the offer.
Projects from around the world brought their software to the Natcher Conference Building in Bethesda, Maryland.
Silicon Graphics supplied the hardware, and the show began!
Meeting the Visible Man For most of us, a visit to the Visible Human web site is a two-dimensional experience.
Held back by our browser, we stroll through the dataset and are presented with a succession of flat, anatomical, CT or MRI images, similar to flicking though a standard cross-sectional anatomy text-book.
This approach is one valuable use of the data, and some projects were at the conference to demonstrate viewers for the data as it is, but to comprehend the real potential of the resource, its necessary to think in 3D.
Many of the projects demonstrating their expertise here are using the VHD to create 3D images of the human body and its internal structures.
Consequently, we were treated to so many flypasts and fly-throughs that it felt like being an extra in Toy Story.
Seeing a camera traveling up the spinal column, around the inside of the respiratory system and though the veins and arteries is an unforgettable experience.
How is it done?
Creating three-dimensional structures (volumes) out of 2 dimensional data is essentially a two step process.
Firstly, the boundary of the anatomical object must be identified in the 2D images, a process known as segmentation.
Secondly, the segmentation data must be interpreted in three dimensions, or rendered.
Once this is achieved natural looking colours can be artificially added, or false colours can be used to highlight specific structures.
Any identifiable structure or surface can, in theory, be thrown into 3D this way.
Perhaps the most extraordinary images from this conference were not the moving pictures of the inside of the human body, although these are striking, but the projects that included 3D images of the skin, thus showing the audience what the Visible Human people looked like when they were alive.
Among the many examples of these processes presenting their findings at the Conference were: The Mayo Foundation Virtual visualisations of the trachea, esophagus and colon are being developed for computed endoscopy.
Cambridge University have created a 3D model of the female pelvis, eventually intended for a simulation of childbirth.
In Milan, a collaborative project involving several organisations is using 3D volumes generated from the VHD to visualise electrical activity in the heart The next step forward, once you have generated your 3D images, is to make them behave like the human body does.
Virtual reality beckons, in the future medical students will be able to practice procedures on realistic, computer generated models, before they are allowed access to patients, the benefits are obvious.
To achieve this, small volume units, or voxels, in the 3D volume must be associated with physiological properties, and programmed with the basic principles of physics, so that they respond appropriately to interference from outside.
One project described how they we using the VHD and high tech interface devices to replace the orange as a model of the human body for practicing injections, another suggested that this arrangement should be turned on its head, that physicians should demonstrate procedures on simulated patients, and the computer should then perform it.
As well as its obvious uses in medicine, academia and research, the VHD has been pounced upon by many commercial companies, who have not been slow to recognise the market for these exciting images.
Although the dataset itself is huge, and the manipulation of it requires computing power beyond the reach of the average pocket, the products of the 3D visualisation process fit nicely into CD-ROM and can be viewed with a standard desktop computers.
Engineering Animation Inc. (Mosby) were most in evidence, demonstrating several CD-ROM products, including the Dissectable Human, which allows you to peel back the Visible Human skin, to see the musculature, the muscles to see the skeleton, view the nervous, digestive and respiratory systems etc.
Visit their site to see the sort of educational material which can be created from the Visible Human.
[3] Future Directions This was not the conference for discussion of the future of the project, with so much to be seen which is being done with the data as it is at present.
We learned, however, that the National Library of Medicine has plans to link the image data to other knowledge based, and that research is underway to achieve the connection of structural-anatomical to functionalphysiological-knowledge [1] with the goal of bringing together the print library and the image library in a single resource.
Virtual anatomy is already here and virtual physiology around the corner, where will we go next?
One delegate was for virtual biochemistry!
Another, perhaps more feasible in the short term, for a increase in the population of visible humans, with new projects providing data for different races and ages.
Whatever the NLM decides, it seems that the Visible Humans have a great future ahead.
[1] The Visible Human Project (factsheet) : http://www.nlm.nih.gov/publications/factsheets/visible_human.html [2] Agreement for use of images from the Visible Human Dataset : gopher://gopher.nlm.nih.gov/00/visible/vhpagree.txt [3] The Dissectable Human (TM) CD-ROM : http://www.eai.com/interactive/dhuman/dhuman_cdrom.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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Web Focus: Technical Aspects of Copyright and the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Technical Aspects of Copyright and the Web Buzz software java html browser copyright graphics multimedia rfc cache adobe mailbase url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on the TALiSMAN seminar: Copyright and the Web.
In April a former colleague of mine from Leeds University sent a message to me about a strange copyright statement she had come across on the web, and asked for my comments.
I was also intrigued by the statement and, on 23 April, sent the following message to the lis-elib Mailbase list   A strange copyright statment (sic) at the URL http://clans.cla.co.uk/www/auths.html has been brought to my attention.
It states that readers are not authorised to: (a) Alter the material in any way.
(b) View or print the HTML source code.
Statement (b) sounds very odd.
I’d have thought no more about it, but it comes from The Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd an organisation which sounds like it should know about copyright law.
Any comments?
Thanks Brian The posting generated a lot of discussion, with 37 messages posted during the last week in April [1].
Shortly afterwards I was asked to take part in a seminar on Copyright and the Web organised by TALiSMAN [2].
This articles gives a summary of my talk.
Technical Aspects Relating to Copyright and the Web Attending a talk by a copyright expert can be a worrying experience, as it seems that just about everything is covered by copyright.
The aim of my talk was to describe technical developments on the web which relate to copyright and the many ways in which copyright can inadvertently be infringed.
What Do We Want?
What do we, as web users, information providers and service providers want from the web, related to use of the web and electronic copyright: A Quicker, More Reliable Web We all know how slow the web can be.
Protection For Our Intellectual Property As web authors / developers we want to protect our intellectual property.
Sensible Ways of Including Resources We want to avoid delays and bureaucracy in processing copyright requests, both when we wish to use copyirghted resources in some way, and when others wish to use our resources.
Sensible Copyright Statements on our Pages We want to avoid copyright statements which show no understandings of web technologies.
Clarification of Responsibilities We want to clarify with use and misuse of copyrighted resources is my responsibility, my institution’s, the information provider, or perhaps even the manufacturer of the software I’m using?
Caching Client Side Caching The web works by resources being copied from a remote server to a local client machine.
The resource may be stored in a local (client) cache.
The contents of a client cache may be viewed by giving the URL about:cache in Netsape or using the Options menu in Internet Explorer.
Figure 1 Managing a client cache Little control is provided over management of a client side cache.
If a copyrighted resource is stored in a client cache for an extended period, who is breaching copyright the end user, the computing service (which installs and configures the browser), the software vendor, or even the information provider (for failing to provide expiry date information for automated processing)?
Server Side Caching Many institutions run institutional server caches.
In addition, JISC is funding a national cache, which is managed by the universities of Manchester and Loughborough.
The national cache has an importance role to play in conserving expensive international network bandwidth.
If, however, an institutional or national cache stores copyrighted (or illegal) resources, who is responsible?
Offline Browsers Offline browsers are useful for: Giving presentations when no network available Reducing online charges Retrieving resources when network / server load is low Ensuring consistent retrieval time But: Do they breach copyright?
Does the user breach copyright?
WebWacker (illustrated) is a well-known off-line browser.
However is use of such tools a breach of copyright?
Figure 2 WebWacker Configurable Views Of Web Resources Recent developments (e.g.
Apple’s HotSauce) enable end user to configure their view of a web site.
For example a user may want to configure a view of an American Sports information gateway, such as Yahoo, so that Soccer should be called Football and Baseball should be a sub-category of Rounders.
Would a tool that provided an end user will this flexibility be considered to be breaching copyright by altering a web resource?
Virtual Documents What are the copyright implications for virtual documents?
For example Merseyworld [3] provides access to Internet standards using a CGI program to retrieve a document and format it (using frames and embedded text / graphics).
If a header is appended to a copyrighted document (unlike the RFC illustrated), is this alteration of the appearance of a document a breach of copyright?
Figure 3 Merseyworld Embedding Controls A paper on Bookmarking Service for Organizing and Sharing URLs [4] was presented at the WWW 6 conference.
It described WebTagger which uses a proxy service which adds buttons at top of pages for bookmarking.
Is this “altering the appearance of a copyrighted document”?
Figure 4 WebTagger Including Links TotalNews [5] has links to over 1,000 news sources.
TotalNews uses frames to surround material from other sites with its ads.
Bruce Keller, who works for a law firm representing CNN, Wall Street Journal, etc.
is reported as saying “.. What TotalNews is doing is a trademark and copyright violation”.
What are the copyright implications in including links in your web pages?
Would a court agree that the image illustrated in Figure 5 misrepresented the owner of the pages?
Figure 5 TotalNews Solutions There are technical solutions which can address copyright infringements, such as: Using Java to control the display of images, thereby preventing people from stealing images from your website.
(For example, see ImageGuardian [6]).
Add digital watermarks to multimedia resources.
Include expiry dates in HTTP headers.
Use proprietary solutions, such as Adobe PDF.
However such solutions may be expensive, time-consuming to implement, or may degrade the quality of your web service by causing performance problems.
Copyright Statments Rather than applying a technical solution, you may wish to provide a helpful copyright statement, such as the ACM statement: “Permission is granted to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted with or without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit .. And that copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page…” How about adding: Permission is granted to make use of caching, off-line browsing and similar technologies to enhance web performance purposes only.
Small parts of this resource may be included in other documents for non-commercial use.
Minor changes may be made to this content and appearance of this document by, for example, automated tools, provided the meaning of the article is not altered.
However adverts may not be included.
This resource may be indexed by indexing tools.
Read the online FAQ for further details.
Fill in the online form to submit other copyright requests.
Permission is granted to link to this resource.
Conclusions Use of the web relies on the copying of, often copyrighted, resources.
Effective use of the web, through the use of caching technologies, off-line browsers, etc.
will increase the amount of copying.
Institutions need to think carefully when formulating copyright statements, to ensure that such statements not only safeguard the author’s and institutional rights, but also accept the way in which the web works.
References [1] “Strange Copyright Statement” thread on lis-elib Mailbase list, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1997-04/0045.html [3] TALiSMAN Copyright and the WEB seminar, http://www.talisman.hw.ac.uk/events/seminars/copyright/copyright.html [3] Merseyworld Web site, http://www.merseyworld.com/control/techwatch.html [4] Bookmarking Service for Organizing and Sharing URLs, http://www6.nttlabs.com/HyperNews/get/PAPER189.html [5] TotalNews Web site, http://www.totalnews.com/ [6] ImageGuardian Web site, http://demo.maximized.com/ImageGuardian.htm Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus, Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 826838 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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InfoSeek Ultra: (Yet Another) Web Search Engine Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines InfoSeek Ultra: (Yet Another) Web Search Engine Buzz software java html database url standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley looks at InfoSeek Ultra, a new search engine which claims to allow searching on a index of 50 million Web pages.
InfoSeek Ultra: What is it?
InfoSeek Ultra (http://ultra.infoseek.com) is a new search engine service from the InfoSeek Corporation, a Californian company with some years experience of developing Web search engines and Internet directories.
InfoSeek Ultra is a new development; described as an “innovative new search technology designed to provide users with the easiest, most efficient way to find information on the Internet and the World Wide Web”.
The service aims to expand upon InfoSeek’s existing search services and provide new levels of functionality, accuracy and speed.
Search engines generally work by using spiders automated pieces of software which go out and cruise the Web looking for documents which can be indexed into a searchable database.
InfoSeek Ultra claims to have taken this technology a stage further by using an “intelligent spider” in order to create a “real-time” index of Web resources.
The spider is able to detect new and changed pages on the Web and add these pages to the index; updating earlier copies of documents whenever they change to ensure that the most up to date information is always available when searching the database.
This should ensure that users doing searches on recent news topics should receive the very latest information available.
The intelligent spider also filters out dead and duplicate links on the Internet as these are stripped from the index as soon as they become obsolete.
InfoSeek Ultra is currently available in a beta test version and not all features of the service are implemented as yet.
The full release of the service is scheduled for later this year.
Size of database The database currently stands at around 50 million unique URLs (at 1 Sept. 1996).
The full text of all of these documents is indexed in the database.
This makes InfoSeek Ultra one of the largest search engine indexes on the Web Alta Vista is currently trailing behind with around 30 million URLs in its database.
How to search InfoSeek Ultra So how would you actually go about performing a search on InfoSeek Ultra?
Well, lets say, for example, you are looking for information on museums in London.
You could use InfoSeek Ultra to see if the Natural History Museum has a Web page simply by typing “Natural History Museum” into the search form on screen.
InfoSeek Ultra enables you to indicate a phrase or group of words which should appear together by placing them within quotation marks.
It will then retrieve documents where these words appear in direct proximity to each other.
However, if you try this search you’ll discover that there are lots of Natural History Museums out there….at the time of writing, InfoSeek Ultra retrieved 6,202 documents which contained the phrase “Natural History Museum”, including ones in Florence, Grenoble and Las Vegas.
So you need to narrow this search down.
This can be done by adding the word London to the search.
InfoSeek Ultra uses the + (plus) and (minus) characters to indicate AND and NOT.
So if you wanted to search for the Natural History Museum in London you would type +“Natural History Museum” +London This will ensure that InfoSeek Ultra should only retrieve documents which contain both the phrase “Natural History Museum” and the word London.
You can also search using the OR operator by leaving a blank space between words or phrases.
InfoSeek Ultra also provides another searching feature.
It is possible to search certain fields of a document in the index; so that if you wanted to find documents which contained the phrase “Natural History Museum” in their titles you could type title: “Natural History Museum” The ability to use InfoSeek Ultra to search particular fields of a document also means that you can search to find out how many other documents on the Web contain hyperlinks to your own Web pages.
This can be done by typing link:http://[your web page] into the search form on screen.
For anyone who has used Alta Vista in the past this search language will probably look pretty familiar and essentially it seems that InfoSeek Ultra doesn’t offer anything in the way of search language features which Alta Vista doesn’t already provide.
Where the service does differ, however, is in its speed, use of relevancy ratings and accuracy.
From personal experience with different types of queries at different times of the day InfoSeek Ultra certainly seems to be extremely fast.
A query can often be dealt with almost instantaneously.
However, it’s not certain that this speed will be maintained if the service becomes extremely popular.
InfoSeek Ultra also seems to have made great strides forward on accuracy.
Search results are automatically sorted and given a relevancy rating based on how well each document satisfies a query.
So those documents which receive a high score for relevancy will appear high up in your list of results.
The relevancy rating is influenced by the number of occurrences of query terms in a document and the position of the query terms in the document; so that if query terms appear near the start of a document or in the title this will give the document a high relevancy score.
Weighting is also applied to certain words so that those words which are relatively uncommon in the database will have a higher weight than more common words.
Other features InfoSeek Ultra has a nice “special search” feature.
If you click on the Special button in the title banner on the home page you get a number of search forms containing ready-formulated search constructions which enable you to search to see how many pages from your Web site have been indexed in InfoSeek Ultra, how many links there are from other Web pages to your pages and other field searches.
You can also check your own pages for HTML consistency (via Imagiware), perform a search for Java applets (via Gamelan) and use a number of other “quick reference” tools such as email directories and standard dictionaries which are linked from here.
So where’s the catch?
InfoSeek Ultra is covered in advertising.
The use of advertising on Web sites is something to which Web users are fast becoming reconciled; however InfoSeek Ultra does seem to have more than it’s fair share of animated adverts which flicker away at you distractingly as you’re trying to make sense of your search results.
Obviously this is the price that users must pay for a service which is free at the point of use adverts also pay for the continued development and enhancement of a service however, they don’t really lend themselves to effective or clear interface design and can make the interface confusing for novice users.
It would also be nice to see InfoSeek Ultra with a couple of other features; in particular familiar Boolean searching language using AND, OR and NOT instead of + and characters.
This would make the search language easier to understand and use.
The ability to restrict a search to a particular date would also be useful in helping users to screen out older material.
Although InfoSeek Ultra claims to be able to update the database with new pages whenever a document changes, this doesn’t help to screen out documents which have been around for a long time on the Web without having recently been updated.
The full release of InfoSeek Ultra will contain a facility for sorting search results by date.
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Netlinks Symposium Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netlinks Symposium Buzz mobile software framework infrastructure copyright sgml png videoconferencing research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ashton reports from the Netlinks Symposium, organised by the Netlinks eLib project and the Department of Information Studies in the University of Sheffield.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN”> 1st International Symposium on Networked Learner Support Sarah Ashton describes the presentations at the 1st International Symposium on Networked Learner Support, held in mid-June in Sheffield.
Sarah is an MA in Librarianship student in the Department of Information Studies, at the University of Sheffield.
The European Championships were well under way when 59 delegates descended on Sheffield for the 1st International Symposium on Networked Learner Support (17th and 18th June 1996).
Organised by Sue Fowell and Phil Levy from the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, the aim of the Symposium was to offer a forum for exchanging information on current initiatives in the delivery of high quality end-user support across the networks.
This new practice is being developed enthusiastically by many librarians and IT professionals, often in collaboration with each other.
As I am currently conducting research into the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) for the delivery of networked learner support internationally, I was particularly interested to hear the lively debate as the delegates explored the various learning, organisational and professional issues which arose.
Stephen Brown from De Montfort University kicked off with a strategy for resource-based, networked learning within a distributed university.
This case-study highlighted the need to find ways of making learning and support opportunities equally accessible to large numbers of often widely separated students.
This distributed model has encouraged the development and utilisation of resource based learning as a teaching strategy, leading to the exploitation of IT networks to provide delivery and support vehicles.
Professor Brown described the organisational challenge of the distributed university, the infrastructure developments and some of the educational and training projects currently underway at De Montfort.
These projects entail programmes of staff development through awareness raising seminars, workshops and staff skills development training.
Their existence shows ways in which the university is attempting to co-ordinate teaching and learning innovations centrally rather than relying on independent localised initiatives.
Fresh from his tour of the Crimea, Lester Pourciau of the University of Memphis, Tennessee, focused on collaborative efforts between library and IT colleagues to develop an electronic information resources course, designed to equip students and staff with the skills and knowledge necessary for work in the electronic environment.
He described the recent partnership between these support divisions, who until recently existed in isolation from one another, and avoided communication.
These efforts are part of an institutional plan to modify the culture of the university campus so as to position it appropriately for the utilization of information technology in the 21st Century.
This highlighted one of the recurring themes of the Symposium the need for improved communication and collaboration, both within institutions and between institutions on a national level.
The ball was passed to Graham Walton of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, who explored the perceptions of library professionals about their existing and projected roles in the networked environment.
He identified a lack of awareness of the wider implications of the development of networked learning, and fears of losing professional control particularly amongst subject specialists as potential barriers to cultural change within the profession.
Such were the findings of the IMPEL Project, conducted 18 months ago.
This work has now developed into the IMPEL2 Project, which will take a campus-wide view of the impacts of electronic information provision, incorporating academic staff and student users, impacts of resource based learning and educational development for library and information staff.
The overall aim of IMPEL2 is to develop a macro level approach to monitoring change associated with the electronic library to gain a clearer picture of the role which academic library services can play.
These findings will be of great interest to NLS professionals.
The Golden Goal was scored by Ellen Chamberlain and Miriam Mitchell from the University of South Carolina, whose entrepreneurial spirit should surely be an example to us all.
Again the benefits of collaborative professional development were described, this time as a means of developing an Internet-based training course, “BCK2SKOL”, for library staff on the applications, tools, and potential for research on the Internet.
Using CMC technologies in a networked learning environment, Ellen and Miriam collaborated across campus and departmental lines to create and run the course, first as a distribution listserv over the Internet and then as a resource page on the World Wide Web (available at: http://web.csd.sc.edu/bck2skol/).
“BCK2SKOL” has demonstrated both the need for and the success of Internet instruction delivered via the CMC model.
This need can be met using technologies that are already commonplace, through the collaboration of library and network professionals, and most importantly such courses can be shared.
After the half time refreshments of the Symposium dinner, Tuesday began with Gunilla Thomasson from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, who presented the WWW-based EDUCATE (End-user Courses in Information Access through Communication Technology) programs.
Funded by the European Union, the aim of the project is to produce a self-paced user education course in the selection and use of information sources, and to provide a structured interface to relevant high quality resources.
The courses are designed for use both within the classroom or at a distance for self-instruction, and introduces learners to both off-line and online information sources.
EDUCATE is based on the WWW with hyperlinks both within the program and globally.
So far the programs have been produced in two subject areas: Physics and Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
It is hoped that EDUCATE will, in the future, be a useful resource for libraries and academic departments who wish to provide courses about information handling.
The progress of the EDUCATE project can be followed in the EDUCATE Newsletter which is available at: http://educate.lib.chalmers.se/ Clive Cochrane from Queen’s University of Belfast explored the potential of videoconferencing, an example of synchronous communication, for the delivery of learning programmes in higher education, with particular reference to two universities in Northern Ireland.
Clive also described a survey of all schools of librarianship and information science in the British Isles, conducted to gauge the potential of videoconferencing for the library and information profession.
The schools of librarianship and information science within the British Isles currently make little use of videoconferencing (possibly due to technical and ergonomic problems) but there is a recognition that it has potential, in the not too distant future, for course delivery and professional practice.
Desktop videoconferencing offers one-to-one communication and an added dimension to the field of networked learner support, which the library and information profession should consider seriously.
Kathy Buckner from Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh raised a wide variety of issues in her presentation on the curriculum design for an undergraduate course in information management, which uses networked, case-based learning methods.
The production and use of these networked learning products is an expanding area, and Kathy examined the management issues (at course, institutional and national level) associated with the development and delivery of learning resources for such courses.
Crucially, her experience has found that the students themselves are receptive to this networked mode of learning.
Many of the key issues that were raised in this presentation need to be considered by the LIS profession and addressed at an institutional or more importantly at a national level.
Kathy highlighted the need for discussion and collaboration at both an intraand an inter-organisational level: NLS professionals need to act locally within a national or even a global framework, and it is here that Kathy saw the need for Funding Council leverage.
Joan Carty from the Open University addressed the issues of supporting the OU’s postgraduate students through networked access to information.
Joan described the support planned for the forthcoming Doctorate in Education, the importance of the collaborative approach to the delivery of distance education, and the need for staff to develop technical, authoring and operational skills.
The OU is tackling the issues encountered in planning a strategy for networked information support to distance learners, which includes the use of computer-mediated conferencing, structured access to the Web and electronic contact with the library help desk.
The need for quality Information Services, and for a scaleable model which can be applied to other postgraduate courses and to the larger community has been recognised.
If the strategies which the OU are considering can be transformed into workable and scaleable models, this evolution in the provision of library services at a distance should prove beneficial primarily to the students and the Institution, but also to the LIS community as a whole.
Brian Kelly from the University of Newcastle offered an insight into the approaches taken to develop network training materials by the Netskills project.
He provided an invigorating look into the future of Internet software in his presentation entitled “Oh no, not more Internet software!”.
Brian came prepared to deliver his highly stimulating presentation with back-ups of every description.
However, nothing had prepared him for his own “faux pas”, after he tripped over the computer cable and pulled the plug out of the socket!
Brian described the role of Netskills, and the challenges that the network trainer faces in the development and maintenance of network training resources.
He then went on to initiate us into some of the new directions in Internet software (for example, style sheets, SGML DTDs, the PNG standard, modular browsers, and mobile code), which will influence future developments in network-based training.
The floor was opened up, and the delegates talked about the issues and topics that had been presented to them over the two days.
Thankfully none of the delegates exchanged shirts, but they did exchange a variety of concerns, experiences, and opinions on issues relating to the emerging practice of networked learner support.
Evidently the discussion will continue well into next years’ Symposium and beyond.
It only remained to thank Nick Bowskill for his hard work in making the Symposium a success, and with that Professor Tom Wilson blew the final whistle Some of the presentations described here will be available in a forthcoming special edition of the journal Education for Information.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors.
This page last updated on July 15th 1996 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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FDTL: The Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines FDTL: The Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning Buzz database copyright Citation BibTex RIS Gerry Taggart gives a brief outline of this HEFCE funded programme of projects geared towards teaching and learning using IT.
The HEFCE has committed £8 million over the next two years to the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL), a new initiative aimed at stimulating developments and promoting good practice across the higher education sector.
This is the first time that the Council has linked the results of its quality assessment process to its allocation of funds to the sector.
Only institutions judged to be providing high quality education were eligible to bid for project funds.
Forty-four projects are being supported under phase one, which covers the 15 subjects assessed by the Council between summer 1993 and spring 1995.
They were selected from 192 original applications, 72 of which made a second-stage bid.
Nearly half the successful projects involve consortium arrangements between two or more institutions.
A list of projects and contact names can be accessed electronically at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/initiat.htm.
Full details will be published in October 1996.
Phase two of the FDTL will cover the eight subjects assessed between April 1995 and September 1996.
A circular inviting bids will issue in December 1996, and funding will begin in October 1997.
The following examples demonstrate the range of approaches being adopted by FDTL projects: A project involving a consortium of chemistry departments led by the University of Hull will bring together the academic membership of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the organisation for Heads of Chemistry Departments, and the Network for Chemistry Teaching.
It aims to disseminate good practice in teaching and learning identified in the quality assessment reports; and to help chemistry students develop the intellectual, scientific and professional skills needed to make the most effective use of their knowledge.
The University of Huddersfield is leading a project in computer science, with a consortium of institutions, which aims to improve student learning through placements on sandwich courses.
The aim is to integrate supervised work experience into the curriculum, and to provide materials that will help institutions manage the placements effectively.
These will cover preparing the students, monitoring, student assessment, and liaising with and supporting placement providers.
A consortium led by Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education aims to identify and disseminate good practice in the teaching, learning and assessment of Geography.
It will produce guidance manuals, disseminated through a national conference and department-based workshops, and set up a database of good practice on the World Wide Web.
The project is supported by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and the Conference of Heads of Geography in Higher Education Institutions.
Further information about the FDTL is available from the HEFCE by contacting: Gerry Taggart, FDTL Project Manager, HEFCE, Northavon House, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QD Telephone: 0117 9317452 Fax: 0117 9317446 E-mail: g.taggart@hefce.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: University of Ulster, Coleraine Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: University of Ulster, Coleraine Buzz database archives cataloguing cd-rom research standards Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark investigates University of Ulster, Coleraine.
THE VIEW, DOWN THE VALLEY and towards the mouth of the River Bann, from the Central Library of the Coleraine campus of the University of Ulster, is seriously distracting.
However, I was not here to be distracted, but to learn about the University of Ulster’s Library Services[1].
The Ulster Polytechnic and New University of Ulster (NUU) were merged in the mid1980’s as part of a rationalisation of higher education in Northern Ireland.
With 16,000 FTE students, the University is now split between four campuses, and all have distinct qualities.
Belfast is the smallest and the least diverse subject wise, housing only the Faculty of Art and Design.
Magee is double the size of Belfast, but is still a small campus with roughly equal numbers of full and part-time students.
Jordanstown has many part time and sandwich course students, and is by far the largest campus with about 8000 full time equivalent students.
Coleraine has a more traditional, mostly full time, student body of just under 5,000 FTEs.
The library service at Coleraine has grown from its origin in an old barn to two libraries, Central and South.
As well as the standard works to support teaching, learning and research, the library at Coleraine has received some generous bequests, namely from Henry Davis and John Hewitt.
Henry Davis was an industrialist who lived in Belfast and London and became an avid collector of books and bookbindings.
In his will, he left the most important parts of his collection, valued at £5M, to NUU, as it was then.
The bulk of his collection, although individually less valuable, went to the British Library.
The Central Library now houses 200 of Davis’s bequests, including 80 incunabula.
Examples are accessible on the web [2].
The collection attracts international scholars who always appreciate the opportunity to view and hear about these rare items.
John Hewitt, the influential poet and teacher, left his papers, personal library and literary archive to the University, and this material is also in the Central Library.
Much of it was uncatalogued until the university received a grant of £50,000 from the HEFC in May 1995.
The project ended in May 1997 with almost all of the work finished.
Information about both the archive and the poet have been published on the library’s Web pages [3].
This includes textual material and digitalised imaging technology was used to create visual examples of the manuscript material.
Not all the special collections are as literary.
Coleraine has been a European Documentation Centre (EDC) since 1972 [4].
The EDC in the South Library contains a wide range of European Union publications in most formats and now also links to European information on the Internet -including the ever informative Euromyths page.
The merger of the Polytechnic and NUU in the 1980’s brought its own challenges for the library service.
An Educational Services division was created and embraced the libraries, computing and media services.
There is managerial convergence at directorate level and all three services share the same mission: ‘to provide value to our clients through provision of, and leadership in, solutions to information access, information retrieval and information management problems’.
However like any modern library, the library staff need to have good working relationships with the computing and media services staff and the planned development of a 24 hour access computing cluster in the South Library at Coleraine will only heighten this co-operation.
The previously separate catalogues have been successfully integrated, and apart from the rather obvious difference in the classification schemes, little remains to show that the component libraries of the service were once independent.
The CD-ROM network across all campuses is managed centrally from Jordanstown and CDs can be made accessible over the entire network or restricted to one campus as necessary.
The growth of networking has brought the libraries closer and has led to a greater cross-campus exploitation of the stock by students and staff alike.
Some faculties operate on more than one campus, with the Business Faculty for example split between three of the four sites, and this inevitably increases inter-site loans.
The library has looked at a networked solution.
European Business ASAP is a full text database covering Finance, Acquisitions & Mergers, International Trade, Money Management, New Technologies & Products, Local and Regional Business Trends, Investments and Banking.
This is its first full year of use and its impact on inter-site loans is yet to become clear.
The Ulster Subject Tree is another cross-campus service [5].
It contains pointers to Internet resources of particular interest to staff and students at the University but it is not intended to be a comprehensive guide.
The idea is rather to provide a launching pad to quality Internet resources, especially subject guides, gateways and search engines, as well as to library guides and documentation.
It is also used by the library staff as a training tool: an associated training page for Internet matters generally is also being developed.
The Library is firmly committed to exploring how IT may be exploited to improve provision, as is evidenced by the participation in eLib projects.
The University of Ulster is involved in CAIN, ESPERE, Eurotext, Formations, EduLib and the SuperJournal projects [6].
However, despite all this technology, whether it be twentieth century or seventeenth, I found myself wondering how, because of the view, anyone in the Central Library could concentrate no wonder most of the desks face inwards!
References [1] University of Ulster Library Services http://www.ulster.ac.uk/library/ [2] The Henry Davis Collection http://www.ulster.ac.uk/library/craine/davis.htm [3] The John Hewitt Collection http://www.ulster.ac.uk/library/craine/hewitt/ [4] University of Ulster European Documentation Centre http://www.ulster.ac.uk/library/craine/bus/edc.htm [5] Ulster Subject Tree http://www.ulster.ac.uk/library/lib/subjects.htm [5] CAIN http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ ESPERE http://www.endocrinology.org/espere/ Eurotext http://eurotext.ulst.ac.uk/ Formations http://formations.ulst.ac.uk/ EduLib http://www.hull.ac.uk/edulib/ SuperJournal http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/sj/ Author details Isobel Stark co Web-Editor, Ariadne UKOLN, c/o Library, University of Bath, BA2 7AY i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Clifford Lynch in Interview Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Clifford Lynch in Interview Buzz data software framework database infrastructure metadata browser copyright z39.50 cache pics ftp cd-rom authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Clifford Lynch, the Executive Director of CNI, was interviewed by John Kirriemuir at the Metadata: What Is It?
workshop on 18 June 1997.
Clifford shares some views on mirroring, caching, metadata, Z39.50 and how he sees his role in CNI.
Z39.50 has been around for a long time, now why do you think it has not been assimilated into networked retrieval applications and technologies to the extent of e.g.
CD-ROMs, the Web?
I think that Z39.50 is now well established for large, if you will, mainframe or server-based systems.
Certainly, those folks who wonder what real Z39.50 systems are in use could look at institutions like the University of California, where we have had it in production for a number of years, and we're using it every day to provide access to our community of close to a quarter of a million people, to resources mounted at places like OCLC and RLG.
We also are using it for circulation data out of local library management systems, which have a very high transaction rate and for which we will easily clock hundreds of thousands of queries a day, according to circulation statistics.
So there is no question in my mind that it is well established as a production underpinning technology.
It's a very interesting question of why it isn't used more in CD-ROM systems; there is no particular technical reason why you can't provide a Z39.50 interface to a CD-ROM database in fact, I believe it's been done.
In the very early days, of course, there were constraints on the size of the PC's that were often the access portals to CD-ROM-based information systems, where running a full TCP/IP stack plus z39.50 was a lot to ask of those machines.
That's certainly no longer the case with current technology, and I would speculate, although it would be very hard to prove this, that a lot of the reason really has to do with marketing decisions and the view that they don't want a large, uncontrolled user community using CD-ROM, because of licencing terms and financial models.
That's, perhaps, a primary reason why we haven't seen more Z39.50 access to CD-ROM databases.
Many of those still follow a pattern where they have one set of fee's for a standalone CD-ROM, another set of fees for a networked CD-ROM, and often they charge by the number of concurrent users.
Trying to enforce those kinds of rationing mechanisms for a systems that is actually put out on a users premises is quite tricky, so I think that in many cases it has really been driven more by marketing and licensing considerations.
I think we've also seen many content providers who are much more comfortable with the physical character of the CD-ROM and the notion that the performance characteristics of the CDROM are such that not that many people can use it concurrently, and they really don't want to turn these into wide area networking systems.
Metadata formats, especially Dublin Core when are they going to happen, who is going to do them, what are the long-term prospects ?
We have spent a lot of time on that this morning at this meeting.
I guess my personal view on this is that one of the drivers will be the development of encoding standards that let us attach Dublin Core metadata [1] or other metadata packages to documents, or allow servers to provide metadata that is associated with objects.
The third model which was discussed this morning, external but linked metadata that is moved with the document is, I think, more problematic because it places a requirement on the protocols and software systems that move objects around to keep the objects and metadata together and related.
Certainly for most of the protocols in common use today -FTP, HTTP, etc -this is not a natural process: these protocols aren't designed to move complex, inter-related constellations of objects around in a consistent way.
So I think that encoding standards are a first step, authoring and site management tools the second.
Personally, I believe that as soon as a substantial body of metadata gets out there, we will see indexing services that capitalize on the advantages offered by this body of metadata.
Can you be more specific, in other words quantify, what, or how much, you mean by a substantial body of metadata One of the difficulties here is defining your universe.
It's certainly a property in general of information retrieval systems that if you have very sparse attributes it's very tricky to use for retrieval purposes.
For example, imagine that you had a bibliographic database and only 5 per cent of the records had subject headings.
Subject searching is clearly a powerful tool for the user, but how you present it in such an environment is very difficult, because by doing a subject search you are de facto restricting yourself to a very small subset of the database in this scenario.
The user probably doesn't understand what 5 per cent of the database had subject headings or why -the policy for when subject headings are associated with records becomes a critical element in understanding what searching this hypothetical database really means.
I think that we face a similar problem with the broad based web indexing services like Alta Vista or Lycos.
Their focus is sort of maximum reach and lowest common denominator.
There's a tremendous amount of transient, relatively low value information that's indexed by these services.
Those are not the places were I would expect to see metadata appear first; I would expect to se it appear on high value, persistent content.
In fact, this may only serve to reinforce the value of metadata: by restricting to documents with associated metadata, one may in fact be restricting to the more relevant part of the web for scholarly purposes.
So, part of me at least things that we may see metadata first capitalised on as a way of enhancing retrieval by more disciplined, specific, subject-focused and selective web indexing services --maybe those run by the academic/research community, or by communities of people interested in specific sorts of content.
You know when you do a wedding invitation, are you going to attach metadata to it when you incorporate it in your personal web page?
I don't think so.
I think that we may see effective use of metadata show up rather later in the very broad-based web indexes that provide access to the commodity web.
I think too that we need to be careful about equating Dublin Core descriptive metadata and metadata in general.
In fact, metadata is much broader than just the Dublin Core -it includes parental control kinds of ratings that the current version of PICS is intended to support.
It includes rights management, terms and conditions; it includes evaluative information.
I think that the Dublin Core is an important first step in supporting descriptive information.
The Warwick Framework gives us a broader setting into which we can also slot other kinds of metadata, and I think it's very important that we get some projects moving which give us some real experience with other classes of (non-descriptive) metadata.
We need to understand how these classes of metadata work in the information discovery and retrieval process.
I'm particularly intrigued, for example, by some of the experiments that are going on with collaborative filtering systems, like some of the systems Firefly and their competitors have deployed on the web.
There's a lot of interest in using PICS as a means of carrying this kind of metadata.
I think that the metadata requirements for supporting evaluative information and community filtering is a very fruitful research area.
Mirroring and caching your thoughts on these two approaches to reducing long-distance network traffic Mirroring and caching are both showing up as important issues, basically for getting around the very congested links that characterise parts of the internet.
This is, as you know, especially acute when we deal with traffic and information across the Atlantic and across the Pacific where there just never seems to be enough bandwidth.
We in the UK don't get to experience the speed, or otherwise, of the connection between the US and Australia; how bad is it?
It's not good, last time I looked.
I understand that in Australia they have set up tariffs and pricing models that essentially charge internet users on a traffic sensitive basis for information moving in and out of Australia.
This has made them even more sensitive to bandwidth utilization.
It's different than the US-UK situation; there's an economic issue as well as a (public good) performance I think that when we talk about caching and mirroring we are discussing two very different ideas.
Caching is a low level engineering trick that shows up at every level of a computer system or a network of computer systems.
It appears in managing the transfer between memory and the CPU inside a processor; between memory and disk storage in a computer system, and throughout a network of computers.
It's just good engineering to do caches.
Now, caches at an institutional or even national level, at the boundary between an organization and the broader network, for example, is a relatively new idea.
The performance claims I have seen for some of these caches is very impressive.
This kind of high level caching is raising new issues that go beyond engineering optimizations.
There are some interesting problems in the interaction between caching and business models.
For example, many web sites are supported at least in part by advertising, and part of setting your advertising rates is the ability to make accurate statements about how often your pages are being accessed.
Having your pages cached messes up these access counts, and in fact can cost a site money in advertising revenue.
There are protocol provisions that have been developed, though I'm not clear how widely they are implemented in practice, that ensure accurate reporting of page access for sites (or at least place bounds on the level of inaccuracy).
What remains to be seen is how comfortable web sites that are operating in the tradition of circulation-audited periodicals are with these technical solutions.
There are also copyright concerns that have been raised with caching.
There's this odd tension.
As you move information around the network through various routers and other intermediate systems that may include caches, copies are made (even in the trivial case of copying packets from one router interface to another).
There have been legal theories offered that even very transient copies represent copies in the legal (copyright) sense.
The longer copies persist, the more nervous people get about the copyright issues.
This is an area of deep uncertainty.
To me, however, caching is fundamentally and engineering issues; I tend to reject the legal arguments.
Mirroring is something very different.
Mirroring is a deliberate replication strategy which you apply not only to counter bandwidth problems, but also for reasons of reliability, replicating data so that if one site fails, there is another copy.
It seems to me that the notion of the mirroring of sites is one that is still poorly formulated, poorly supported and perhaps is sometimes solving the wrong problem.
In speaking to people who run mirror sites, it seems that running a mirror site actually involves a substantial amount of work, getting all the pointers to be consistent, getting all the links to be consistent, and dealing with not just moving files but a linkage structure within files, where you may also have external links.
It seems to me that one of the things we need to develop is a higher level construct that incorporates mirroring but doesn't explicitly expose mirroring to the end user; a notion, for example, of a public files pace into which you could place potentially high use files for distribution.
This public file system would be a distributed systems construct that might appear in many places around the network, and would automatically do the right kind of replication and caching; it would automate much of the mechanics of mirroring which are currently visible to, and of concern to, system administrators.
For example, imagine that Netscape releases the latest version of their web browser-the public file space should just replicate this around the network as needed, as long as usage justified extensive replication, and should provide users with an easy way of finding the "nearest" version.
I think that mirroring is just an early, immature step towards a much more sophisticated and user-oriented view of such a public file space.
As networked information applications mature, and we understand the requirements better, mirroring will become a lower-level engineering method much like caching and end users won't see it.
I view mirroring today as a catch-all term for what should really be more sophisticated and differentiated end-user oriented products and services.
Have you got any thoughts, now you are moving over from a more researchie type role to a more political role as the executive director of CNI?
I'm amused by how my role at the University of California is characterized as research-oriented.
In fact, the primary function of that role has been an operational one, running the MELVYL [2] system (a large information access service) for the whole UC faculty, student and staff community.
I also oversee the intercampus network, which links the nine UC campuses together and provides internet access.
Of course, in this role I am involved in various standards and advanced development activities on behalf of the University.
In some ways the biggest change I see in my new role at CNI [3] is that I won't have such a big operational component.
At CNI I will be able to focus more intensely on policy and planning issues, looking more at advanced technologies, standards, and how they can translate into operational infrastructure for the whole CNI community.
I'll be concerned specifically with the interplay among organizations, technology, standards and infrastructure: and I'll be trying to serve a much broader community -not just the University of California but the whole CNI task force membership, the constituencies of the sponsoring organizations, and beyond.
I think it's too early for me to talk in detail about how I see the specific agenda for CNI shaping up over the next couple of years.
As you know, I won't be taking up my position there till mid July, and while I have lots of ideas, I need to consult with the sponsor organizations (ARL, CAUSE, and EDUCOM), my steering committee, and with the CNI task force broadly before I cast these ideas into specific program initiatives.
I can tell you that I see a number of areas involving linkages among organizations, infrastructure, networked information, and technologies as being very crucial.
A good example is authentication, and coming up with authentication and authorization strategies that will facilitate sharing and commerce in networked information.
I don't know precisely what role CNI is going to play in this, but one thing I'm hearing from the community is a need for some broad-based leadership, and I think that CNI can help there.
Naming -persistent naming of digital objects--is another important issue.
CNI has been active in the metadata area.
It has co-sponsored several of the Dublin Core metadata meetings and has conducted research into the role of metadata in networked information discovery and retrieval.
I've spent time working with Craig Summerhill, Cecilia Preston, and Avra Michaelson on a white paper in this area which remains incomplete, and I'm eager to get back to work on this and finish it.
And there are many other areas where I am hoping that the work of the Coalition can help to inform and move the community's discussion forward.
I'm hopeful that in my new role I'll have more time for writing which can contribute to this sort of progress.
Acknowledgement The picture was taken at the UKOLN organised Beyond the Beginning conference, in London, June 1997.
Thanks to the British Library for permission to reproduce it.
References [1] UKOLN Metadata Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/ [2] Melvyl library system, http://www.dla.ucop.edu/ [3] CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) Web site, http://www.cni.org/ Interviewee Details Clifford Lynch, University of California, Executive Director of CNI Email: cliff@cni.org Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: Durham Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: Durham Buzz database archives cataloguing graphics opac sgml ascii gis ead gopher research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller travels to Durham and reports on a mammoth archival digitisation project.
Spread across four sites within the small historic city of Durham, the University Library caters for a diverse range of staff and student requirements, as well as acting in an important archival role for the surrounding area.
The University of Durham [1] is the third oldest university in England, with some 8,300 undergraduate and 1,900 postgraduate students.
The library plays a key part in supporting these students and the large body of research staff both through the provision of traditional services and through a joint programme with the IT Service to provide training in general information skills.
The main library building dates to the 1960s, when it was built as a science library to service the university's science site which adjoins it.
Extended in 1983, the building became the main library, and it is now once more sufficiently stretched as to warrant a further extension, due for completion in 1997.
With the construction of this latest extension, Marilyn Hird, who is responsible for the library's Web pages, hopes that the library will be able to offer 24-hour access to some of the building's facilities.
The building contains a single group of networked PCs, managed by the IT Service and offering a similar interface and range of applications as the other computer classrooms scattered around the university.
Despite my visit being during the vacation, all of the machines were occupied by industrious-looking students.
With the completion of the extension, it is hoped that networked PC provision within the library may be extended.
The most used service in the building is, perhaps not surprisingly, access to the newly upgraded On-line Public Access Catalogue via the text-only terminals available in small groups throughout all floors of the library.
The new Innopac system was installed in September of 1996 and is proving popular with both library staff and users.
According to Ros Pan, who maintains the system, there are now some 46,000 OPAC searches per week.
Of these, only around 1,000 are via the promising WebPAC Web-based interface [2] , but this number may well rise as the proportion of Web-enabled machines physically within the library rises, and as staff and students elsewhere in the university become more aware of this new facility.
The library's current Web service [3] has been in existence for some eighteen months and in that time has replaced both an earlier Gopher service and more traditional paper notices as the main method by which the library provides access to information.
Throughout the pages, simplicity and clarity are paramount, with very few images to be seen, and information laid out on a number of relatively sparse pages in such a way as to draw the user down towards the facts they require, rather than bombarding them with everything at once.
Extensive use is made of existing services, with frequent links to national initiatives such as NISS [4] and, as well as to the commercial search engines, useful connections to other university libraries such as York's Subject Tree [5] , and the pages of other Durham departments.
Moving up the hill to another library site, set halfway between the imposing structures of cathedral and castle, I entered the domain of Richard Higgins and the Archives and Special Collections.
Here, an eLibrelated initiative is using JISC funding to aid the retrospective conversion of archival lists in order to make them available across the Web.
This truly daunting task encompasses well over one hundred separate collections in a wide range of document types and subjects, ranging from hand-written documents spanning centuries (and, in some cases, still being updated today) to printouts of early word-processed lists.
Many of the documents are local, including early university records, collections of papers of prominent local families, solicitors' papers and literary archives, and the muniments of Durham Cathedral's Dean and Chapter .
The collection also includes material from further afield such as the papers of an Egyptian Khedive at the turn of the century and the important Sudan Archive.
In the first instance, Higgins aims to produce a basic ASCII text file for each list, but his long term aim is more ambitious, as he is beginning to explore converting all of the files using the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Document Type Definition.
With this conversion work completed, it will become possible to utilise the full power of SGML in searching through this vast archive, hopefully enabling both display of the holdings via the Web and more flexible searching within and between holdings than is offered by most document-oriented database systems.
With just over two years left to run, it will be interesting to see how flexible a resource can be created in this way.
Certainly many frustrated users of traditional paper and fiche archives will await the results of this project with interest.
References [1] University of Durham Web site, http://www.dur.ac.uk/ [2] WebPAC Web-based interface, http://gutenberg.dur.ac.uk/ [3] Durham Library Current Awareness Service, http://www.dur.ac.uk/Library/ [4] NISS Web Site, http://www.niss.ac.uk/ [5] Subject Tree at York, http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/subjlist.htm Author Details Paul Miller is a Graphics & GIS Adviser at the University of Newcastle.
Email: A.P.Miller@ncl.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Knight's Tale: Networked CD-ROM Redirectors Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Knight's Tale: Networked CD-ROM Redirectors Buzz software windows linux samba cd-rom url standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight describes how MSCDEX.EXE and networked CD-ROM redirectors can introduce difficulties when using Windows 95 and NT to provide access to library CD-ROMs.
Many libraries have collections of CD-ROMs which they must deliver to their patrons in order to provide a well rounded information service.
In many academic libraries and some larger public and company libraries some portion of the CD-ROM discs on offer are made available over local area computer networks.
These networked CD-ROMs can then be used by the library’s patrons from workstations distributed throughout the library and indeed organisation.
In order to provide network access to the CD-ROMs, there must be some form of networked CD-ROM server placed on the network.
Currently there are a large number of companies offering such products, with a wide range of facilities and price tags.
In many cases these servers run on commodity PC hardware and use either proprietary protocols or extensions to existing network operating systems such as Novell Netware.
When CD-ROMs are used on standalone PCs they have traditionally had to use a small extension to the DOS operating system called the Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions or MSCDEX.EXE.
MSCDEX.EXE is a small piece of software that can redirect calls to certain drive letters into commands to the CD-ROM drive.
The software provides a consistant interface to any number of different types of drive and even allows different sorts of drive to be connected to the same machine at the same time.
Many of the commercial networked CD-ROM server products have therefore simulated the Microsoft MSCDEX.EXE program with their own CD-ROM redirectors which must be loaded in place of the MSCDEX.EXE program in order to provide the workstation with access to the networked CD-ROMs.
Unlike MSCDEX.EXE itself, these redirectors are often capable of being unloaded once the user has finished using a networked CD-ROM product, which allows a library to “mix and match” multiple servers from different vendors.
Note that machines with local CD-ROM drives that load MSCDEX.EXE can often have problems with redirector products because once loaded, MSCDEX.EXE can not easily be unloaded.
Solutions to this problem include providing multiple boot time options (i.e.
run with or without a local CD-ROM) and trying to ‘hide’ MSCDEX.EXE whilst the network redirectors are running.
The first of these solutions works but is annoying for the end user whereas the latter doesn’t require a reboot but does not always work cleanly.
Problems with Windows 95/NT and large campus networks With the advent of Windows 95 and Windows NT the need to use MSCDEX.EXE has been removed from the operating system.
Both of these operating systems come with built-in driver support for a large number of CD-ROM drives.
Whilst this has proved useful on machines with local CD-ROM drives attached, it can cause problems when machines with these operating systems are used with older networked CD-ROM servers that require the use of MSCDEX.EXE style redirectors.
Either the redirector will refuse to load because it can detect Windows95/NT’s built in MSCDEX.EXE clone code or it can sometimes cause the operating system to crash or become unstable.
Another problem with using redirector software in a network environment is the need to install the redirector software onto all of the client machines prior to allowing them to attach to the CD-ROM service.
Whilst this is achievable with the PCs directly under the control of the library systems team, if the CD-ROMs are to be used on PCs spread throughout the organisation which are managed by a variety of department’s IT staff, then the task becomes much more difficult.
Ideally what is required is a method of accessing the networked CD-ROMs without the use of the redirector software.
Networking without redirectors Some commercial networked CD-ROM support products have provided access to the networked CD-ROMs without a redirector for some time.
One such example is the SCSI Express product from MDI which bolts onto a standard Novell Netware server.
SCSI Express provides management tools for CD-ROM towers and/or jukeboxes and allows the workstations to access the discs by simply mapping to tbem as though they were a normal Novell CD-ROM drive.
The SCSI Express system works well for many CD-ROM products and allows CD-ROMs to be accessed by DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT clients.
A few CD-ROM products do cause problems though: these discs have code built into them to detect the MSCDEX.EXE (or equivalent) redirector in order to access the CD-ROM directly rather than via a mapped drive.
Although SCSI Express does come with a “fake” redirector, this often does not fool these products.
Luckily these products are becoming rarer and rarer and amongst the networked CD-ROM products in the Pilkington Library at level access.
These include DOS versions of Clarinet Clearview based products such as RAPRA, CITIS and Ergonomic Abstracts, the UKOP disc and the DOS version of FAME.
Even with these products the newer Windows versions may be able to operate without the redirector in place (though you might need two discs held in different servers if you need to provide access to both DOS and Windows versions with and without redirectors respectively).
Another option for providing access to CD-ROMs via Netware is to make use of one of the free UNIX like operating systems such as Linux or FreeBSD and the freely available MARS NWE Netware server software.
The CD-ROMs can be mounted as normal Linux filesystems and can then be exported as Novell Netware volumes by the MARS NWE software.
The advantages of this method of providing access to CD-ROMs over the network are not only that the operating system and server software are free, but also that the UNIX-like operating environment makes it easy to mount and dismount discs, requires relatively low spec hardware to offer a basic service and also can host other file services (such as providing access to the CD-ROMs for Macintoshes using the netatalk package or to Windows boxes using their native SMB networking by installing Samba).
A more radical product that some libraries have used with some success is Citrix’s WinFrame product.
This allows any Windows application to be run on the server and merely have a thin client display the output on the user’s workstation.
As the server environment is under control of the systems administrator all necessary drivers, fonts, DLL, etc.
can be loaded on there for the CD-ROM products.
Once the WinFrame software is loaded on the client PCs, no further configuration or installations are required on them.
All new CD-ROM installations and upgrades are done directly on the server.
The major downside of the software is currently the cost, although that factor is likely to change now that Microsoft have announced that Windows NT 5.0 will contain a modified form of the underlying technology licensed from Citrix.
Conclusions The number of CD-ROM products that need redirectors that clone the behaviour of MSCDEX.EXE is becoming lower and lower.
With the introduction of technologies such as WinFrame, the prospects for successfully providing networked access to a wide range of CD-ROM products over large campus networks is looking brighter than it has for some time.
Coupled with the low cost options available by using the free UNIX look-alike operating systems as servers, there appears to be a solution for every budget and situation.
Author details Jon Knight ROADS Technical Developer Email: jon@net.lut.ac.uk URL: http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/People/jon.html Tel: o1509 228237 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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SETIS: Electronic Texts at the University of Sydney Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SETIS: Electronic Texts at the University of Sydney Library Buzz software html database tei archives thesaurus digitisation browser sgml dtd ocr ead cd-rom research standards Citation BibTex RIS Creagh Cole describes a project dedicated to providing in-house access to a large number of electronic texts on CD-ROM.
The University of Sydney Library has acquired a large number of primary texts in digital form over the last few years.
These texts include numerous versions of The Bible, the works of Shakespeare, Goethe and Kant, more than 700 classical Greek texts in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the enormous Patrologia Latina Database of the Church Fathers, the English Poetry Full-Text Database, and the Intelex Philosophy Texts.
To these texts and others like them must be added the texts available from remote sites such as the collection of some 2,000 French literary, scientific and philosophical texts at the Frantext Web site [1], and the many public domain texts available at the University of Virginia Electronic Text Centre [2] and the Oxford Text Archive [3].
This is the story of my Library’s attempt to provide the best possible support for this growing collection of electronic literary, philosophical and religious texts.
Whether commercially available (at substantial cost) or freely available on the Web, electronic texts such as these require a significant commitment of resources.
If the Library chooses to provide the texts at all, it must also provide, at a minimum, computers and associated hardware, search software (continually updated), auxiliary text analysis software and staff expertise.
In addressing these problems my Library has initiated a new service devoted to the needs of textual scholars throughout the University, and one which will not only maximise the utility of electronic texts currently held by the Library, but also provide valuable skills, knowledge and resources which can in turn feed into further initiatives in digitisation of textual material within the Library and at the University more generally.
The new service has no local precedent and has depended heavily on help from overseas sources and models, such as the University of Virginia.
This is the story then of the Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS) [4] at the University of Sydney Library [5].
The acronym SETIS refers to the Egyptian goddess of the inundation, and for no better reason than this the image of the goddess has become an icon for the new service at the University.
At the beginning of 1995 the Library approached a number of staff in the Arts Faculty on the feasibility of establishing an electronic text centre similar to centres already established at a number of universities in the United States.
(The Centre for Electronic Texts in the Humanities maintains a Directory of Electronic Text Centres [6] world wide.)
Consequently, a successful submission was presented to the University’s Information Technology Committee on the basis of strong academic support for the proposal, the university’s traditional involvement in and depth of research within the arts and humanities, and, finally, the Library’s strong record in introducing, managing and supporting new information technology at the University.
From the initial library group concerned with the project a fulltime Coordinator was appointed for the service and space within the Library was found for the new service.
SETIS was officially opened by the Vice-Chancellor in September 1996, although it had been functioning for some months prior to that time.
SETIS and its Coordinator were placed under the direct administrative control of the Associate Librarian largely responsible for its creation and the service currently operates with some independence from the departmental structure of the Library.
SETIS intended from the start to achieve results on a number of different levels: to improve the service already offered by the Library for the use of electronic texts at designated computers within the Library; to network texts via a common web interface throughout the University; to initiate and support programs of electronic text creation within the Library and at the University more generally.
1: Electronic Texts Within the Library SETIS provides in-house access to a large number of electronic texts on CD-ROM, for use with IBM Pentium and Power Macintosh computers with high speed CD-ROM drives, large monitors and ample memory.
The texts may be used in conjunction with auxiliary software programs: wordprocessing, text analysis and comparison programs such as TACT (Text Analysis and Computing Tools) and Collate.
Furthermore, the Library now provides specialist training and support for the use of the texts.
Previously the texts could only be used at slower machines already groaning under the weight of other functions required of them in the Reference Collection, and there was no access to auxiliary software programs.
Staff could only learn about electronic texts as part of their other Reference responsibilities.
Since the texts were relatively little used in comparison with many of the bibliographic databases they seemed to have little priority in this sense.
The gains have been important.
It should, however, be mentioned that a disadvantage of the new service dedicated to electronic texts has been, paradoxically, reduced access to the texts within the Library since they are now located separately from the other services and SETIS has more restrictive hours than the library as a whole.
This situation will change as staffing levels for the service are reviewed.
More importantly, the intention of the SETIS project was to concentrate on networking the texts so that their physical availability within the Library became irrelevant to questions of access.
The networking of the texts is the central development in this project.
2: Networking the Texts A visit to the University of Sydney Library in 1995 by David Seaman from the University of Virginia Electronic Text Centre gave us a strong impression of the value of networking our texts.
At the University of Virginia and a number of other sites, large bodies of text encoded in SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language) are made available via a web interface with the Open Text search engine (originally developed to search the Oxford English Dictionary).
The results of the search are filtered “on the fly” to html format for display on the user’s web browser.
The advantages of this approach are great: a single interface is used to access a large variety of texts so that a user with knowledge of Netscape, or a similar web browser, and the use of forms to search, can quickly orient himself or herself to searching each text.
Access is maximised, unrestricted by the physical location, opening hours of the SETIS computers.
while the Library can concentrate on providing the service, the user must take responsibility for his or her machine, client software and so forth.
While the initial cost to the library is heavy, over time the value of exporting these responsibilities to the client will be great.
due to the nature of the encoding of these texts, unlike the in-house CD-ROM’s which are, in general, platform dependent (ie the proprietary search software ties the texts to either IBM or Macintosh computers), our networked texts on the web are independent of client platform.
This has alleviated a major problem we have faced in the past in that whereas the library has been IBM based, virtually all of our clients, within the Arts Faculty in particular, are Macintosh.
One of the major publishers of electronic text, Chadwyck Healey, recently acknowledged the advantages of this approach, late last year releasing for access the new web site of literary and reference texts (The Lion Web site [7]).
Through this site the publisher is signalling the intention of moving towards leasing access to the products rather than selling the texts themselves for libraries to mount independently.
Libraries attempting to mount the texts themselves in this way will avoid the annual leasing costs involved in such plans but will need to solve some major problems: One is the sheer cost of disc space, which is not insignificant and decisions will need to be made for each new addition to the collection.
It is not easy creating the web interface for the texts.
The Open Text Search engine, the texts themselves, and the web do not simply plug into each other.
Whereas Chadwyck Healey has a bank of software developers working on this, libraries have for some time been relying upon “off the shelf” software programs and are not equipped with many of the skills required.
Not all of the available electronic texts that scholars will want to use are in SGML.
Many will continue to be used as stand-alone CD-ROM’s or discs for use only within the Library.
Nevertheless, the advantages of networking the texts in this way seem to outweigh the disadvantages, not least because skills learned in the process will feed into the Library’s own text creation and publishing ventures.
SETIS makes available a growing number of SGML encoded texts for use via web browsers.
Many of these are commercial texts and are restricted for use at the University of Sydney only (this is regulated by IP address of the client machine.)
However, some public domain texts and texts created at SETIS will be unrestricted and, therefore, available globally.
3: Text Creation SETIS provides IBM Pentium and Power Macintosh machines with flat bed scanners, imaging and OCR software as well as SGML editing software with compiled TEI and EAD DTD’s for encoding of texts and library finding aids respectively.
X-terminals provide direct access to texts on the main server and are expected to become increasingly important to the functioning of the service as we become more familiar with working directly on large bodies of texts and image databases in the UNIX environment.
SETIS is engaged in a number of text creation projects, and this has involved acquiring knowledge and skills not only about scanning and text recognition software, but more significantly, about Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) and the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines for humanities texts.
Current projects include work on lecture notes by Professor John Anderson from the 1930’s up to the 1950’s and which are held in the University of Sydney Archives; an edition of Lord Shaftsbury’s Characteristics, Manners, Opinions, Times held in the Rare Books collection at Fisher Library, digital images of the New Australia Journal in Rare Books which are in a state of decomposition.
SETIS is also engaged in encoding the novels identified for digitisation by the Australian Co-operative Digitisation Project [8].
These projects will give us the expertise to provide support for similar initiatives at the University among academic staff and research students.
Collaboration From the beginning the SETIS project has sought and obtained support outside the Library.
Academic staff within the Arts Faculty were closely involved from the early stages of the project and an Academic Advisory Group was formed with representatives from the Information Technology Committee, the Arts, Economics and Science Faculties and from SUPRA, the University’s Postgraduate Representative Association.
When we began our project we thought we might be breaking new ground in Australia.
We quickly discovered that in this endeavour we were in friendly competition with the University of Western Australia’s Scholar’s Centre [9] which, under Dr Toby Burrows had launched their own project centred on the networking of electronic texts but using a different search engine, Dynaweb.
In fact, their use of Dynaweb gave us an opportunity to compare the two main search engines currently used for this purpose, and more generally, we have gladly exchanged information and experiences for a range of common problems.
SETIS was in large part modelled upon the initiatives taken at the University of Virginia by David Seaman.
Following his visit to Sydney in 1995 we agreed to act as a mirror site for our region for the large collection of public domain texts provided by the University of Virginia.
Since that time, similar agreements have been reached with the Oxford Text Archive and the Stanford University online Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Conclusion The Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service began as an attempt to provide the best support possible for our growing collection of electronic texts.
In the process, the Library has taken on tasks and responsibilities that have not traditionally been asked of it.
These include supplying text analysis software which mediate the scholar’s use of his or her source texts, and participating in the creation of electronic versions of primary source material from the Library’s collection.
It is interesting that from the initial meeting of academic and Library staff there was a general consensus that this was an entirely appropriate thing for the library to be involved in.
Indeed academic staff voiced very strong support for the project, acknowledging the importance of Library involvement in the University’s adoption of new information technology.
References Frantext Web Site, http://www.ciril.fr/~mastina/FRANTEXT/ University of Virginia Electronic Text Centre http://www.lib.virginia.edu/etext/ETC.html Oxford Text Archive, http://sable.ox.ac.uk/ota/ Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS), http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ University of Sydney Library, http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/ Directory of Electronic Text Centres, http://www.ceth.rutgers.edu/info/ectrdir.html Lion Web Site, http://lion.chadwyck.com/ Australian Co-operative Digitisation Project, http://www.nla.gov.au/ferg/fergproj.html University of Western Australia’s Scholar’s Centre, http://www.library.uwa.edu.au/libweb/w_sch/ Author Details Creagh Cole SETIS Coordinator Email: creagh@library.usyd.edu.au Phone: +61 02 9351 7408 Fax: +61 02 9351 7290 SETIS Home Page: http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ Address: University of Sydney Library, University of Sydney 2006, Australia Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ROADS: Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-Based Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ROADS: Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-Based Services Buzz data software framework database metadata cataloguing z39.50 marc pics interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Rachel Heery, the ROADS Research Officer, describes this project from the Access to Network Resources area of the Electronic Libraries Programme.
The deliverables of this project will constitute a large portion of the underlying software for most of the other projects in the same programme area, as well as other eLib and non-eLib projects, and therefore is one of the more crucial facets of the overall programme.
As MARC and cataloguing give way to metadata and resource description, the true impact of the internet is realised.
Cataloguers are being transformed to.....metaloguers(?).
The ranks of library school students who sat bemused through lectures on UKMARC and AACR need to indulge in a bit of reconstruction.
Really they were applying a canonical syntactical representation to related manifestations, and maybe occasionally considering extensibility.
They were doing metadata.
And if we had realised that a bit earlier, maybe we would be as rich as Jerry Yang and David Filo; as reported in mid-April, the public share offering in the internet 'catalogue' Yahoo!
brings their personal worth to $100 million (each).
The ROADS project is very much concerned with metadata: how it should be created, organised, searched and presented to the user.
ROADS is an eLib funded project to develop discovery software for internet resources, and the software is sharable among the academic community.
ROADS will be suitable for a number of 'directory' applications (research registers, project databases), but primarily it is being developed to fulfil the needs of the eLib subject based services, and it is they who feed their requirements into the project.
My role in ROADS is as a research officer and I am based at UKOLN.
I have particular responsibility for the design and development of the metadata format, and I work with ROADS staff at the University of Bristol Centre for Computing in the Social Sciences to feed in requirements to the development team at Loughborough University.
The University of Bristol is also responsible for liaison with information providers, as well as for documentation and project management.
In addition UKOLN's role in the project involves investigating interoperability, both in terms of record exchange and provision of gateways to the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol.
At the beginning of the project it was necessary to choose a metadata format and a search and retrieval protocol on which to base the ROADS system.
The project started from the premise that internet resources differ from hard copy resources in a number of ways e.g.
location details, internal document structure, lack of stability of location and document versioning, method of publication.
These characteristics of network resources, and their effect on users' search behaviour and the search process, impact the design of a resource discovery system.
A simple illustration when considering metadata is the importance of non-bibliographic information in the description of internet resources.
The administrator of a web site that hosts a resource may well differ from the organisation that 'publishes' the resource.
The metadata format should be able to clearly identify this information.
ROADS chose a simple attribute:value record structure for its metadata format based on the IAFA template definition.
It is a text based record, human readable throughout with no sub-fields or numeric tags.
The format was designed for the purpose of describing internet resources so does not contain redundant features applicable to hard copy resources.
The simplicity and availability of the record structure allowed for speedy start-up of the subject services.
A significant factor in the choice of the IAFA template is that the simplicity of record structure facilitates involvement of information providers in the description of their own resources.
ROADS maintains that contribution of 'self-descriptions' from authors and web site administrators is essential to a sustainable service, and a simple record structure will facilitate this process.
It is acknowledged that other record formats will be used for the description of internet resources in other contexts, and that the ROADS software will need to interoperate with these.
An important aspect of ROADS is to track developments as regards metadata during the life of the project, and to contribute to discussions and emerging standards in this area.
There are interesting possibilities in the ROADS context for interoperability using the 'Warwick framework'.
The recent OCLC/UKOLN Warwick Metadata workshop proposed an architecture for an extended record made up of the Dublin Core set of elements with additional packages containing data relevant to the particular constituency eg.
terms and conditions of use, PICS ratings.
The ROADS system will use the whois++ directory service protocol for the search and retrieval of records.
This is a lightweight protocol to implement, and was designed for compatibility with the IAFA template.
It allows for searches to be refined (e.g.
by attribute, truncation of search terms) and for inclusion of special multilingual characters.
The whois++ protocol offers exciting possibilities for searching across multiple services which would allow sharing of indexing effort.
The mechanism to achieve this cross searching is the index summary or 'centroid'.
Whois++ enables the information contained in the inverted index of a particular service to be summarised, the summary consisting of a list of unique words associated with a particular attribute.
The summary (centroid) is then available for use by other compatible sites to increase the access range for the end-user.
Subject services might gather centroids from other sites in their subject area, in addition they could forward their own centroid to interested parties.
Alternatively centroids could be used for cross-disciplinary searching.
The whois++ protocol allows for centroids placed on different index servers to be linked in a 'whois++ mesh' so that optionally searches can be referred forward across the mesh.
Since the start of the project, the IAFA template format has been adapted for use with the whois++ protocol and a revised definition is now available.
Bunyip, who are associate partners in ROADS from the commercial sector, are making a significant contribution to the development of whois++ and the associated template.
The ROADS project will feed in experience of working with bibliographic descriptions to the development of whois++.
Where are we now in the ROADS project?
Two eLib subject services (OMNI and SOSIG) are in production mode using a prototype version of ROADS.
This is ROADS version 0 and it incorporates the IAFA metadata format.
ROADS version 1 is due to go into alpha test shortly and this will incorporate the whois++ protocol.
This version will develop whois++ standalone servers which will be used in an independent way by the subject services.
The following version of ROADS, version 2, is due for release in early 1997, and will implement centroids.
It is intended that this version will allow a directory of services to be established via a whois++ mesh, allowing unified access to distributed services.
Further details of the ROADS system and its partners are available on the ROADS web pages.
There is considerable technical information on these pages contributed by Loughborough University which refers on to technical documentation elsewhere.
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MIDRIB: Beyond Clip Art for Medicine Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MIDRIB: Beyond Clip Art for Medicine Buzz data framework database metadata thesaurus digitisation copyright cataloguing graphics multimedia z39.50 licence cd-rom interoperability privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Betsy Anagnostelis and Sue Welsh describe the recent launch of the MIDRIB (Medical Images Digitised Reference Information Bank) project, and describe the medical image resource the project will create.
A picture paints a thousand words, and in the field of medicine, images are essential.
The recent launch of MIDRIB (Medical Images Digitised Reference Information Bank) [1] , and the announcement of the Visible Human Dataset UK Mirror, have demonstrated JISC’s [2] determination to provide high quality content in this area for the UK higher education and research community.
Medical images are extremely diverse in both their content and modality, and can range from illustrations of medical equipment, to radiological images, to 3-D objects.
Using images in medical and healthcare education allows complex concepts to be conveyed and adds impact that is not present in textual information.
As undergraduate teaching moves toward problem-based learning (PBL), it becomes essential that students have easy access to a wide range of relevant images.
The rise of technology-based learning brings with it a need for high quality medical images in electronic form.
At present this can often only be answered from small collections held by individual lecturers or departments.
MIDRIB seeks to harness that effort for the benefit of the entire community; it is about making teaching and learning more effective by creating a comprehensive national resource.
Compered expertly by Geoff Watts of Radio 4’s ‘Medicine Now’ fame, the launch of MIDRIB was held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on February 27th 1997.
The day’s proceedings began with a fascinating tour through the history of medical images by Professor Heinz Wolff.
He stressed the need to encourage learning, by placing deliberate obstacles in the way hooks on which information may be attached, so as to create permanent footprints on the mind otherwise images alone may simply add to the current flood of preprocessed information.
We heard throughout the day how MIDRIB plans to build such hooks around the images.
As Alice mused: “what is the use of books without pictures and conversations”; and, indeed, an important part of the eLib Programme relates to the digitisation of images.
It fell to Dr Anne Mumford (Loughborough University and the Advisory Group on Computer Graphics) to provide insights into the wider JISC picture how MIDRIB fits in with the range of eLib Programme [3] projects and the JISC strategy.
In particular, she highlighted how interoperability among the variety of JISC funded projects and services might allow efficient discovery and retrieval of online resources: finding information about a disease such as cholera might involve accessing not just medical images through MIDRIB, but also other networked resources (eg through OMNI and SOSIG) or photographs depicting social conditions (eg through the Knowledge Gallery).
Jill Szuscikiewicz (MIDRIB Project Manager) and Stephen Morris (Director of Information and Computing, St George’s Hospital Medical School) introduced the project and illustrated how MIDRIB will be used in teaching, as a resource to support the preparation of lectures, tutorials and handouts, as a reference resource for students, and as an important resource for CAL development.
A test version of the CD-ROM distribution interface was demonstrated, illustrating the ease with which it will be possible to generate simple lecture material for storage and reuse either locally or online from the MIDRIB server.
Professor Reg Jordan (Academic Sub-Dean of the Medical School, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne), drawing on the University of Newcastle experience, discussed the role of IT-based learning in the new medical curriculum.
By promoting collaboration and networking, in his vision, MIDRIB’s shared resource of tens of thousands of donated images will become not only a source of clip art for CAL, but also an important learning tool for students: both in self-directed learning or revision, and also to incorporate images into projects and presentations, that are increasingly encompassed in active learning.
Distance learning will be an essential part of the medical faculty of tomorrow; already we are seeing an increased reliance on learning away from the teaching hospital, eg in GP surgeries.
Images, in their many different forms, will play an important part in supporting and complementing learning at a distance.
There can be significant logistical problems in developing and delivering images online, as well as issues of implementation.
Projects such as SWOT (South and West of England Obstetrics and Gynaecology Trainees) and VOW (the Virtual Ovarian Workshop), described by Mr Julian Jenkins (Consultant Senior Lecturer, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Bristol), are beginning to explore the use of medical images remotely.
Mr Jenkins illustrated how invaluable the availability of image data will be for continuing medical education across the field of medicine and healthcare.
Second-guessing how MIDRIB will be used as a teaching and learning resource and in clinical practice, Susan Gove (Librarian, St George’s Hospital Medical School) provided a detailed anatomy of users’ current needs, as experienced through enquiries received in the library environment.
The trend towards PBL in the new medical curriculum increases the demand for learning resources, including the use of images in essays, projects and student-generated learning materials.
Electronic versions of image atlases will be heavily used for revision, especially if self-testing and assessment are available.
Teaching staff will use MIDRIB to illustrate PBL scenarios and interactive key cases.
Library staff, through their training and expertise, will be well placed to raise awareness about MIDRIB, and to offer training and advice.
Mark Gillett (Technical Consultant, MIDRIB project) provided a fully user friendly account of the building blocks that will make up the MIDRIB system.
Developed to support the information needs of the users, the MIDRIB team and the image contributors, it will support each stage from acquisition through to delivery.
A rich search and retrieval system is planned so that, through a single interface, it will be possible to search MIDRIB alone or alongside other databases, either local such as TICTAC (a database of tablets and capsules), or remote such as other eLib databases (through WHOIS++); it is hoped that the search capabilities will extend even further afield using other remote query technologies, such as Z39.50.
Tailored interfaces will also be provided where subject specificity requires this, or to support users at different experience levels.
Powerful free text search options will be supported, as well as thesaurus-enhanced searching (using UMLS, the Unified Medical Language System) and browsing (using MeSH, the US National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings).
Additional features will include glossaries, simple templates for the creation of teaching sets and online tutorials, and a facility to import or export Powerpoint presentations.
Even digitised, images are of no practical use unless they can be retrieved.
This was vividly demonstrated by Jane Williams (Director, Multimedia Research Unit, Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol) and Margaret Munro (Tropical Medicine Resource (TMR), Wellcome Centre for Medical Science), who described the extensive work of the MIDRIB Cataloguing and Classification Committee.
Two text elements will aid retrieval: classification and descriptive information.
It is this information, or metadata about an image, that will help to get images out of the slide cabinet and into the community.
The metadata that MIDRIB uses will be Dublin Core / Warwick Framework [4] compliant.
A number of different classification and indexing systems are planned to be used in MIDRIB, such that will allow searches to be performed for information about image modalities and media, by geographical location, by medical speciality (using the NHS Management Executive list of medical specialities), and by subject (using MeSH and also, prospectively, UMLS).
Much of the first year of MIDRIB has been concerned with establishing standards in advance of the project being fully implemented.
Ethical standards are clearly a major concern: new technology has added a significant factor yet also provides an opportunity to set new benchmarks, as outlined by Professor Alastair Campbell (Inaugural Professor of Ethics in Medicine, University of Bristol).
The use of personal information for teaching and research is regarded as ethical only if specific consent has been obtained.
It is important that the use of medical images, dealing with areas regarded as sensitive by patients, does not entail breach of confidentiality or intrusion into patients’ privacy, and failure to gain consent would represent such a breach.
Assuring patients that MIDRIB will be utilised only for teaching and research requires safeguards on access to the image bank.
MIDRIB is devising a registration system that will ensure that the image bank is not accessible for any purpose other than healthcare education and research.
It is proposed that medical and healthcare faculties of UK universities and teaching hospitals will register with MIDRIB, signing an institutional user licence, and individual user registration will be administered locally.
Images of especially high sensitivity for example, in paediatrics will require additional safeguards, and are planned to be available on CD-ROM only, available only to healthcare professionals or healthcare libraries (with restricted access).
Patient information sheets will explain the implication of the new medium and will detail the safeguards that are implemented, so that patient consent is fully informed.
An ethics committee with strong lay representation may provide a further safeguard.
While interest has already been expressed from several owners of collections of images, a formal call for contributions to MIDRIB was launched on the day.
A key concern for contributors will be that of copyright.
MIDRIB will seek to license the images for use specifically in UK medical and healthcare education and research, but ownership of the copyright will remain with the individual or the institution with whom the licence is agreed.
Indeed, high quality medical images have a commercial value which the copyright owner might want to protect: as Catherine Draycott (Head of the Wellcome Centre Medical Photographic Library) and Jill Szuscikiewicz (MIDRIB Project Manager) underlined, under such an arrangement it will not be necessary for image contributors to forego potential future income streams.
The day concluded with an overview of how MIDRIB has collaborated so far with OMNI (Organising Medical Networked Information), the subject based information gateway funded as part of the eLib Programme to provide access to high quality biomedical networked information.
Betsy Anagnostelis looked forward to future joint initiatives by the two projects in areas such as evaluation, technical interoperability, selection of medical image resources, and promotion and training, that will see MIDRIB and OMNI continuing to work closely together in supporting teaching, learning and research in the networked environment.
MIDRIB will be accessible over the academic network, at http://www.midrib.ac.uk/ .
For further information, or to receive a copy of a CD-ROM test version of MIDRIB for evaluation, please contact Jill Szuscikiewicz, MIDRIB Project Manager, MIDRIB, Medical School Foyer, St George’s Hospital Medical School, Cranmer Terrace, London SW17 0RE (email: jillsz@sghms.ac.uk, tel: 0181-725 3420, fax: 0181-725 3583).
References MIDRIB Web Site, http://www.midrib.ac.uk/ JISC Information Web pages, http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/jisc/ eLib: Electronic Libraries Programme Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Dublin Core/Warwick Framework Information Page, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc.html Author details Betsy Anagnostelis, Deputy Librarian, Medical Library, Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine Email: betsy@rfhsm.ac.uk Address: Rowland Hill Street London NW3 2PF   Sue Welsh, Project Manager OMNI eLib project.
Email: swelsh@nimr.mrc.ac.uk Tel: 0181 959 3666 ext 2536 Web pages for OMNI: http://www.omni.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Netskills: A Major Training Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills: A Major Training Programme Buzz data java archives video mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS The Netskills Team explain how the need for training has never been greater.
With the rapid growth of the Internet we have seen a huge increase in the volume and range of networked information.
We have also seen an increased public awareness hardly a day goes by without some mention of the Internet in the national press or television.
URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are quoted everywhere even on Dutch tax return forms!
With the increased attention has come the increase in hype.
Businesses are urged to ‘be there or be square!’.
The situation reminds one of the Emperor’s new clothes.
Dare we question the benefits so loudly hailed by President Clinton and others?
Is there really something worthwhile out there?
“What is all this hype about?”, you say.
“All I can find is superficial information of dubious origin.” Indeed, if one went by some newspaper coverage, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Internet was all games and porn.
Slowly but surely there has been an increase in the amount of ‘quality information’ on the network.
This has been a particularly noticeable change over the last year.
JISC funding in the UK has ensured that the UK academic community has benefited from quality services such as NISS, BIDS, Mailbase, MIDAS, SOSIG, HENSA, BUBL, the ESRC Data Archive and many others.
The next few years will see new JISC and eLib Services on JANET, such as Subject Information Gateways and Electronic Journals.
The broader Internet is also benefiting from commercial information providers providing quality services.
These include other electronic journals and publications, daily newspapers such as the Guardian and the Telegraph, and current awareness services.
With increasing student numbers and decreasing library budgets, networked information resources are becoming an increasingly important element in the spectrum of information used by both staff and students in the higher education community.
In addition, the number of quality information services on the network will increase still further as a result of Follett and ISSC funding.
It is essential that this investment in services is accompanied by a parallel investment in raising the awareness of the HE community to the benefits of the developing electronic library.
Users of information and those supporting them need to acquire good network skills in order to be able to make effective use of networked information resources.
As more staff and students take advantage of the ease of publication on the network to publish their lecture notes or their research papers, there is a need to train them to provide quality online information.
Netskills is playing a major role in shifting the culture towards effective and widespread use of JANET and SuperJANET, of these new networked information services and of the Internet as a whole.
It is doing this by means of a programme of training and awareness for HE users of information and those supporting them.
Based at the University of Newcastle, the project is building on the results of the Network Training Materials Project and on the Mailbase network skills training programme for subject groups.
Netskills is using a variety of approaches to the widespread diffusion of the network skills required, with use being made of both traditional and new (network-based) methods of training.
A range of hands-on courses and awareness seminars are being developed and delivered to large numbers of information users at various locations around the country.
These courses are a mixture of general, specialist and subject specific courses covering between them the networked information environment, the types of information services available, how to search for information, some of the social and legal issues, and how to make information available on the network.
FIGIT felt that it was very important to have an early impact through awareness seminars.
Netskills started on October 1st 1995 and, by the end of March ‘96, will have presented at over 30 events (presentations, hands-on workshops, etc) and has already ‘spoken to’ well over a thousand people from a variety of strands within the UK HE community.
The Netskills courses currently being run are Introduction to the Internet and Authoring and Publishing on the World Wide Web.
The first provides a good grounding in Internet tools, in exploring and searching the World Wide Web and the changing information environment.
It has been delivered as both a general course and as a course tailored for particular subject disciplines (to date, social scientists, medics and librarians).
The course on authoring and publishing covers creating Web pages, together with tips and hints on the effective use of Web browsers.
Workshops held at Newcastle usually take place over two days, with dinner in the evening followed by a guest speaker and demonstrations, with a common theme of ‘what the future might hold’, including Java, CU See Me, Worlds Chat and VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language).
Information about Netskills workshops is posted to the netskills-news Mailbase list (see below)and is also available at http://www.netskills.ac.uk/events/.
There is an important role for librarians and other trainers in helping to change the culture within higher education institutions.
Netskills will provide various resources for existing and new trainers, such as short courses, training materials and hints on running a workshop.
This facilitates the rapid and widespread diffusion of the necessary skills and an increased level of awareness of the networked information environment.
A complementary project, EduLib, based at the University of Hull, will provide library staff with the pedagogic skills required to develop fully their role as network trainers.
The Netskills project includes the production and updating of a range of tailorable network skills training materials.
The materials for the two current Netskills courses is being developed into training kits which will include presentation materials, speaker’s notes, suggested demonstrations, workshop exercises and other complementary materials.
Another resource for trainers which is being developed is a Network Training Information Gateway.
This will use the SOSIG approach to describe networked information resources of relevance to network training.
This embryonic gateway has been named NETEG (pronounced ‘Net Egg’) the Netskills ‘Network Education and Training Electronic Gateway’.
A pilot version of this server will be available later this year.
It is expected that a large number of people will be unable to come to a scheduled course.
To cater for the individual learner a range of facilities is being developed, including disk-based tutorials, interactive Web-based tutorials accessed over the network, tutorials e-mailed out to a group with a tutor, and the pilot use of video-conferencing over the network to deliver training.
Building on our experience with Mailbase and the Network Training Materials Project, we understand that liaison with trainers, end users and other eLib projects is crucially important.
The Netskills Team is very keen to foster good links with all sections of the community to enable rapid input and feedback from information support staff, trainers and trainees on the materials and courses developed.
Where is your role in all this?
There are a variety of methods for becoming involved.
New to the network?
Why not attend one of our courses?
Interested in hosting a regional workshop?
The Netskills Team would be pleased to discuss running a workshop in your region or for your particular subject discipline.
Want to find out about Netskills training materials and new courses?
Join the netskills-news mailing list to keep in touch.
Want to help shape the project and the materials produced?
Join in the discussions on the netskills-forum mailing list.
More information about Netskills is available at our Web site.
Finally, work with us to make Netskills a success in providing a comprehensive national network skills training programme, which will substantially raise the awareness and effective use of networked information within the UK Higher Education community.
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Open Journal Trip Report Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Journal Trip Report Buzz software html database metadata browser copyright windows hypertext cache perl url Citation BibTex RIS Open Journal trip report: Jon Knight visits the Open Journals eLib project to investigate what research they are undertaking into electronic journal architecture and navigation.
I recently visited the ELib Open Journal Project at Southampton University (see <URL:http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/>).
My hosts were Leslie Carr (the project manager) and Steve Hitchcock (one of the OJ researchers).
The Open Journal project is part of the ELib electronic journals strand, but they have developed technology which may be of use to some of the Access to Network Resources projects.
This trip report details some of the work that they showed me and also outlines some possible ways in which the Open Journal Project, ROADS and the other ANR services may be able to cooperate.
The basic idea of the Open Journal project is to explore the concept of "opening" up the traditional journal model when it is moved into an electronic environment.
They are attempting to do this by providing technology to basically allow hypertext links to be retrospectively added to existing "closed" documents.
These hyperlinks are derived from specialised databases known as linkbases.
Communication with these linkbases is mediated by the Distributed Link Service (see <URL: http://wwwcosm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dls/dls.html>).
The hyperlinks in the linkbases are related to words or phrases that appear in the original documents.
A linkbase reference might apply to a specific word in a specific place in a specific document, any instance of a word in a specific document or any instance of a specific word in an arbitrary document.
Originally the user interface to these was supplied in a number of ways.
Firstly they developed a tool for MS Windows, Mac and X11 that allowed any highlighted section of text to be compared to the available linkbases to see if there are any related hyperlinks.
If there are, the user could select one and the tool will communicate with an instance of Netscape, or any other web browser, to download the object that the hyperlink points to.
This is quite neat as it means that you can look stuff up in linkbases from inside any Windows, Mac or X11 application that permits a selection to be made.
Could be handy if you are sitting in Emacs or your favourite wordprocessor writing a report and want to see if there are any references in the linkbases to a specific product, project, phrase or whatever.
However now the project is aiming for operating system independence by concentrating its effort providing access to the linkbases via a special proxy server that can add in extra hyperlinks based on the options that the user has selected.
For example the user might want to only see hyperlinks specific to that document or only general purpose ones.
The user communicates his or her preferences to the proxy server using either a small application that sits alongside his/her web browser, or by using controls embedded in the HTML document itself.
Both Les and Steve were keen to stress that they viewed their software as providing increased access to network resources as well as allowing existing journals to have neat navigation easily added to them.
Although the Open Journal project is using the software to integrate existing journal articles into the web's hypermedia, there appear to be plenty of other uses for it.
They told me that they wanted to form links with ANR services if possible as they could see a lot of "synergy" between what they are doing and what we are doing.
One suggestion they had was that ANR services might wish to generate linkbases for their subject specialisms which their users could then access with the Open Journal project's interface.
For example, SOSIG (say) could set up a linkbase using its keywords from the templates it holds in its ROADS database, with entries pointing either directly to the resource or possibly to the tempbyhand.pl script on the SOSIG machine.
Social scientists could then point at SOSIG's linkbase using the Open Journal project interface and use it to access quality network resources after selecting words in their Word documents or whilst reading other HTML documents.
There may be advantages for both the ANR SBIG and the Open Journal Project in doing this.
The SBIG would be getting kudos for basically reusing their existing existing database in a new form and providing their community with a handy new service.
The Open Journal project similarly would get some kudos for having their link service widely used and also ensures that subject specialists are generating metadata for their linkbases.
We chatted about this idea a little and I promised that I'd suggest it to the ROADS using ANR services (so here it is!).
The Open Journal project's software is definitely worth a look at and I can see a number of other uses besides the original purpose.
For example, it appears to be a handy way of dealing with lots of hyperlinks that appear in lots of documents from the same server.
Handy if you're looking after a large number of documents and somebody goes and changes one of the URLs that many of the documents contain a hyperlink to.
Instead of having to edit each document (or write a Perl or sed script to do it for you), you could just tweak a generic entry in the linkbase for the word or phrase that the hyperlink is usually described with.
Or how about using it to act as a sort of global annotations server where a suitably tweaked HTTP caching proxy queries a distributed set of linkbases for annotations to add to each document that passes through.
Anyway, that's my report folks (which hopefully justifies my 7.50 expenses claim.
:-)).
I'd just like to thank Les and Steve for putting up with me for a day, feeding me a yummy veggie pasta meal and letting me read my email whilst I was there, as well as showing me their current linkbase developments.
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What's Good and Bad about BUBL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What's Good and Bad about BUBL Buzz software html database usability archives metadata copyright udc cataloguing graphics opac z39.50 marc telnet gopher ftp mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Traugott Koch reviews the Bulletin Board for Libraries (BUBL).
There is no doubt that BUBL retains its place as the Number One Internet resource for librarians.
BUBL was one of the first of the major cooperative sites in our common subject area of the Internet, and is an impressive example of what can be accomplished by well organized, broad cooperation between colleagues.
The support which it receives from its many sponsors, enabling it to employ dedicated staff, is well deserved, as is the high level of usage, both nationally and internationally.
I still remember the delays we foreigners faced using the London gateway which allowed us to come into the old JANET network.
BUBL was always worth waiting for.
Access, fortunately, is now much easier, and BUBL can be reached by all major access paths Update information is widely distributed and allows, in its HTML versions, direct connection to the listed contents (although I suggest that the archive of update files should be somewhat extended beyond two weeks).
The introduction of BUBL BITS, the best BUBL feature stories, has certainly raised the level of usage.
Content, Form, Structure and Usability Even the best services can and must be improved from time to time in order to maintain their position.
I would like in this article to make some suggestions as to how BUBL could be improved.
Content Firstly, BUBL's service is directed towards two different target groups.
It originated as the 'BUlletin Board for Libraries', but it now provides an information service to the academic and research community more generally.
The prime components of the library service are the LIS material and the BUBL Subject Tree.
The 'wider' service is provided by the menus offering connections to other Internet resources (Internet Resources, Services by type, Major Network Services) as well as support on using the Internet and the World-Wide-Web.
Form The BUBL pages show a rather homogeneous form and layout.
The main pages of the Web server use the BUBL logo at their head, HTML headers consisting largely of lists of resources (almost exclusively links to remote resources) and very short extended titles.
The footer carries the communication links to the BUBL contacts.
Thus, the Web pages differ little from the layout of the Gopher pages, which still carry almost all extended and locally archived information.
Fortunately, the use of graphics is strictly limited, which helps to maintain fast connection times for most users.
Structure The content and structure of BUBL have neither the beauty nor the volatility of the bubbles in the logo.
My main criticism of BUBL is of its structure.
Such a huge information system requires a clear and logical structure.
After more than two years of the Web service, it should have been possible to integrate the material stored on the Gopher server in a much better way.
The advantages of the WWW protocol and the HTML markup language are not fully exploited for structuring, presenting and embedding information, for detailed comments and help, for providing different views of the material, nor for the potential to provide rich interactivity with the users of different parts of the service.
The main page arranges its topics in an unhelpful way.
The pages about BUBL and its services should be grouped together (Send Mail to BUBL, All About BUBL, ***Please Read***, Warning on Copyright!
), together with BUBL Updates and the local searching facility.
Entry points to the Internet, by subject, by type and by keyword search should form another group.
The major services LIS and the BUBL Subject Tree should be in the most prominent position on the home page.
As it stands, they do not receive enough emphasis, nor is there enough detail about their content.
The lack of structural clarity is reinforced by the fact that some resources are linked into several different main sections.
General WWW project information is to be found under both World-WideWeb (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/WWWInfo.html and Services Arranged by Type (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/ServType.html).
The latter should include lists of Web servers, but not information about the Web.
The alternative would be to combine both sections.
Internet Resources (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/GALLERY.html) seems to list selected bits and pieces from the home page down to various Gopher sub-menus, without any obvious structure.
Indeed, it looks like an alternative presentation of the whole service.
Its elements would fit much better into a strict facet structure: 'Resources by type' and 'Resources by subject'.
Both parts are in place already.
Most of the other Web pages are not further sub-divided and often the only structure given is a list in alphabetical order.
Usability There is plenty of help and orientation support available.
However, navigational buttons and links (to the home page for example) are often lacking.
This does not matter a great deal at present because of the relatively shallow hierarchy on the Web server, with normally only two levels to negotiate.
Something I do miss in the Web pages, however, is the lack of contact information for the individual responsible for the content of each page, and details of the date of the last update.
This is excellently done in all Gopher documents.
However, the extended titles in all Web menus improve the information about the content of the links, and BUBL does this better than many Web services.
The Keyword Searching facility (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Key.html) is important but not very satisfying.
A searchable database over the whole content of BUBL is needed.
At the moment, what we have is a full-text WAIS database covering the content and filenames of files on the Gopher server (gopher://bubl.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/Index).
Furthermore, it is hidden among all the other Internet search services.
The headings of the Gopher server and the complete WWW server are not searchable.
Some individual sections offer a separate searchable database, (for example, the BUBL's Journals TOCs (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/77/BUBL_Main_Menu/E/.waisindex/index).
A good list of keyword searching tools for the Internet needs to comment much more on the content, possibilities and limitations of the selected tools and to provide them in a logical order.
This alphabetical collection of tools unfortunately does not meet the expectations of information professionals.
BUBL's Two Main Strengths LIS The 'Library and Information Science' section is BUBL's greatest asset, and has no serious international competition.
BUBL should concentrate on making further improvements to this already strong service.
I regularly use many of the links, particularly the collection of information files from other services, electronic conferences and institutions.
The BUBL's Journals Tables of Contents is an outstanding resource, as are New Book Publications in LIS (a selection from BookData), the electronic journals archive, the conference announcements, the News section; directories, glossaries and the information networking section.
All represent excellent resources in their own right.
Organising all the material using Web pages would allow a further improvement of the quality of presentation, descriptions of resources and the links between different sections.
At present, the huge Gopher hierarchy is kept separate and completely hidden behind the label LIS Resources via the BUBL Gopher, which is just one among several links under LIS resources located on BUBL.
The collection of Web links contained in LIS resources available via BUBL is arranged alphabetically, which is not the most helpful order.
In addition, it is very difficult for the user to find the principles behind keyword formation for filing purposes.
For example, Denmark's Technological Library in Copenhagen is placed under the keyword 'Denmark', but the filing keyword for Sweden's most important national medical library, the Karolinska Institute Library, is 'Karolinska'.
A uniform principle must apply in keyword choice country, place, name or subject keyword.
It would be useful to know what standards BUBL applies in various areas: selection criteria and quality assessment, the choice of a subject structure or a classification scheme, and the level of detail of annotation.
There is still some material left on the BUBL Gopher server which is not strongly or exclusively related to LIS.
Network tools are still available, for example, although a much more comprehensive list is found within the Web service.
A consequence of the non-completion of the transition to WWW is section 15 BUBL Subject Tree: Library and Information Science Area, which has Gopher and telnet links in alphabetical order (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/Link/Tree/Library).
In the WWW menu (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Library.html), covering the same subject, there also appear gopher links, besides http and ftp.
Information about resources should be kept apart from the resources themselves, and so should archival material from current information.
Clearer audience guidance would also be an advantage.
It is not always obvious which resources are mostly of UK interest, and which are directed towards an international audience.
Section 17, OPACs, Library Catalogues via NISS (UK) and Hytelnet (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/BUBL_Main_Menu/OPACS) is unsatisfactory for such an important LIS resource.
Only a Hytelnet link and a telnet link to the NISS UK OPAC list is provided.
Services Arranged by Type from the Web home page points to a couple of other links in BUBL's Gopher (gopher://bubl.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/Type) and the Web version of the UK OPAC list at NISS.
These pointers to OPACs should be improved.
There are a lot of usable lists of international OPACs, reachable by telnet, via Gopher or WWW I hope that it will prove possible to keep most of the services up-to-date.
Some of the journal TOCs (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/BUBL_Main_Menu/E/E2) seem not to be current (for example, at the time of writing, recent issues of Internet World are missing).
Library and IT journals dominate this section, and clarity would be better served by non-LIS journals being placed in a separate collection.
A transition to WWW would allow improvements to the excellent conference section (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/BUBL_Main_Menu/H/H1/H1F) with links to follow-up material, publications and authors.
A useful feature in section: 06 Electronic Mail Discussion Lists (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/BUBL_Main_Menu/F) would be the addition of links to the Hypermail archives of library conferences at Mailbase.
BUBL Subject Tree There is a lot of competition in the area of general subject trees, but the largest services don't display very convincing structures or resource descriptions.
BUBL made a good choice by selecting an established library classification system (UDC) in preference to a home-made system.
However, many of the subject areas are not very comprehensively covered.
No indication is given as to whether it is a quality-assessed selection, or just a small collection.
There are a couple of huge subject-structured collections offered on the Internet, and the user should know the selection criteria and strength of every collection in order to be able to choose which to rely upon.
BUBL's Subject Tree is maintained by LIS professionals, whereas that of Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/) and the WWW Virtual Library (http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview2.html) are maintained largely by authors and Internet users.
The difference in comprehensiveness, clear selection, construction and description principles should be made obvious to the user.
BUBL gives the choice between UDC or alphabetical arrangement.
The UDC hierarchy is not very well displayed (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Tree.html), with selected subsections only shown in a linear list.
Subject substructures or facets (e.g.
by type) would have been possible on most pages.
The solution in the Computing section (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Computing.html) is commendable up to a point, with the lack of a decent UDC substructure compensated for by a homemade subject structure (although unfortunately this is in an alphabetical arrangement with 'General Computing' in the middle of a long page).
On every page, the links are listed simply in alphabetical order (not always correctly have a look at Arts at http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Art.html!).
The resources from BUBL's Gopher menu are only presented as one link above the individual WWW resource links in every subject page.
The titles and annotations for the resources are often too brief, and an indication of the original language of resources (such as, for example, 'Art Library Oslo: all information in Norwegian') is missing.
I believe that it would be worth investigating whether cooperation with the NISS (http://www.niss.ac.uk/subject/index.html) and other UK Subject Tree projects would accomplish better coverage, quality control, resource description and subject structure.
An alternative would be a looser coordination of different subject collections, managed in a decentralised way, applying different selection and quality criteria, different levels of resource description and varying structures.
Some UK institutions (SOSIG, UKOLN and the University of Loughborough) are part of the EU project DESIRE (http://www.ub2.lu.se/desire/), which has as one of its goals the development of an architecture which allows for a comprehensive usage of the material from subject-based information gateways (distributed resource discovery based on rich descriptions and quality-controlled resource catalogues for specific subject areas).
Incidentally, is the connection with the material from the CATRIONA project (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/maincatriona.html) in the home page an indication of coming efforts towards 'real Internet cataloguing'?
There is not much bibliographic control of this material at the moment.
The other current initiatives in this area (OCLC MARC cataloguing, Metadata discussions, Dublin Core Set etc.)
are encountering significant problems.
Conclusion My prime concern for BUBL is its structure.
The structure of the whole service needs to be improved considerably in order to allow the user easily to browse the wealth of important information and the spread of valuable resources.
The Gopher-based material should be integrated into an improved WWW structure, and duplication should be eliminated.
Nevertheless, BUBL is a first-class resource and one well worth building upon.
Here in Sweden, we hope for increased national and international cooperation, especially over LIS resources.
Traugott Koch Electronic Information Services Librarian Lund University Library Development Department NetLab P.O.
Box 3 S-221 00 LUND Sweden Tel: int+46 46 2229233 Fax: int+46 46 2223682 or 2224422 E-mail: traugott.koch@ub2.lu.se 26.11.95 Traugott Koch is also featured in the "Wire" section of this issue.
Response Dennis Nicholson BUBL Co-ordinator responds to the above article, which was also sent to lis-link.
Hello, As many of you will know, the first issue of the ELib electronic journal ARIADNE contained an article on BUBL.
This is a short(ish) general response to that article.
The article contains many positive comments about BUBL but also contains many criticisms, particularly of its structure.
Some of these criticisms are valid.
However, as anyone who has looked at our experimental new service will know, we have already begun to tackle them and are currently inviting the user community to help us design the new BUBL.
Information about the existence of our new server was included in the ARIADNE article as a very short 'stop press' note.
The note, however, did not give any details of our efforts, nor did it give the URL, which is: http://catriona.lib.strath.ac.uk/ If you have not already done so, I hope you will visit our new server and see for yourself how we are trying to improve the service.
Our plans seek to address all of the issues in the article as well as some others.
The business of bringing a new and better BUBL service into being has been in hand now for the best part of a year.
We have not been keeping note of exact dates, but it is roughly accurate to say that between January and November of 1995, the following essential stages took place: Planning a forward strategy Identifying and obtaining software Installing an experimental networked server Installing the WWW/Z39.50/Gopher software Teaching ourselves to use the software Formulating a basic design and structure for the new service Implementing that design on the experimental server In mid-december we finally 'went live' with the experimental service and structure, and began to consult our user community on the shape of the new service.
In early January 1996, we began implementing the next stage of our plan, which was to begin the process of bringing the look, feel and general structure of the current service into line with the proposed new service.
This first step was to change the logo(the one in ARIADNE is our old one) The next step, scheduled for mid-January, will be to make the structure of the current service resemble as far as is practical the new service structure.
This should help our users adjust to the new approach more readily and assist us in the planning and implementation of converting the current service into the new service.
The length of time this latter process will take is currently unknown, but it is likely to be significant This comment on the ARIADNE article is only a minor 'carp' sent out to correct what we feel is a misleading and unbalanced impression.
We wish ARIADNE every success.
We also plan to ask the author of the article for his views on the design of LINK and would also be more than happy to hear from anyone else on the ARIADNE team on this topic.
And, no, that DOESN'T let the rest of you off the hook!
We still want your feedback and will be coming out with a new topic for feedback any day now....
Cheers, Dennis Editor's Response: The timing of the article was a tad unfortunate, as it was commissioned before CLINK went live, but became available afterwards.
We extended the stop press message at the top of this article to include a link to the new Strathclyde-based service, which we urge people to have a look at.
This resource also contains a fair amount of background information on the BUBL/LINK service.
As with all resources in the UK LIS field, user feedback is paramount, so BUBL/LINK would greatly appreciate your comments.
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ERIMS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ERIMS Buzz software framework database identifier copyright Citation BibTex RIS Catherine Hanratty issues a call to ERIMS.
Part of the eLib On-demand Publishing Programme, the ERIMS Project aims to test the viability and user environment for provision of reading materials, in electronic format, to a cross section of users in Management Studies.
Management Studies information has provided an interesting context for the development, and study of use, of the ERIMS resource.
On-line databases are heavily used, and taking periodical literature for example, two full-text systems are used in UK Business Schools: Business Periodicals On-Disc and General Business File.
The availability of these and other full-text resources combined with improved opportunities for networking has prompted Business Schools to re-evaluate print collections and divert resources to electronic media.
This trend opens up the prospect of a more rapid transition to an integrated electronic library system than in other subject areas.
Four Academic Partners are involved with the ERIMS Project.
The School of Management Studies/ Templeton College at Oxford University is the lead site, the other participants being the Business Schools and libraries at Aston, Newcastle and Sheffield.
Each institution has been involved in the compilation of reading list information, and the libraries will act as test sites for the transferability of the system and for user studies.
Several processes have been fundamental to the development of the ERIMS system: the identification of priority reading materials; negotiations with publishers to gain permission to use material; and the development of the technical framework.
A combined database of Management Studies reading lists has been compiled, in Procite.
The Project is working with four leading publishers of Management Studies materials to gain permission to make electronic copies of existing printed documents, as identified from the reading lists.
Journal articles and key chapters from books are being used.
Items are mainly held in image format, but other formats are being explored, in particular for newly published items.
One of the participating publishers aims to provide the project with new books, in PDF format.
The original demand driven approach to the selection of reading material has thus been extended to explore the issues of a supply driven approach.
User access is via the Internet, supported by a database system for information retrieval and copyright management.
Only registered users have access to the system and mechanisms for monitoring usage are also in place.
Full user trials are scheduled for the new year.
User reaction to the delivery of full-text under different hardware, software and payment environments will be explored at each site.
Comparisons between the use of electronic texts and traditional short loan collections and reading packs are planned.
An initial survey has been carried out at Oxford to examine students' access to and experience of electronic resources.
At Aston a similar exercise has been undertaken to assess user reaction to an electronic library environment.
Further details about ERIMS can be found at our Web site.
References [1] ERIMS Web site, http://www.templeton.ox.ac.uk/www/college/library/erims/intro.htm  Author Details Catherine Hanratty, based at the University of Oxford School of Management Studies and Templeton College, works on the ERIMS project.
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Netskills Corner: Redesigning Your Web Pages?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner: Redesigning Your Web Pages?
Buzz software java javascript browser video intranet Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly gives some sensible advice on designing (or, as is more likely, redesigning) Web pages.
How many organisations, departments, groups and individuals throughout the country do you think are planning to redesign their Web pages during the Summer?
Are you?
Is your university?
What is the best design for your Web pages?
If there isn't a "best design" how do you avoid a bad design and anyone who has spent any time surfing the Web will know there are many examples of bad pages around.
The History There has been an evolution in the design of Web pages.
Institutions which made an early commitment to the Web tended to go for a simple text based interface for their entry page (now widely but incorrectly known as a home page the expression home page originally meant the default page displayed by a browser).
Indeed in early 1993 it was not possible to include inline images on Web pages.
Once NCSA released Mosaic For X (in autumn 1993) with its support or inline images, organisations started to make use of images in a number of ways.
We began to see home pages (I feel I'm forced to admit defeat in my battle for this term to retain its original meaning) containing university or departmental logos, and the use or coloured balls for bulleted lists.
In October 1994 the Netscape browser was released, which provided greater control over the layout of documents.
We began to see documents with centred headings and text with a variety of sizes.
We also saw blinking text on pages.
A little later the user interface began to change with the advent of the FRAME tag.
Microsoft's belated entry into the browser market saw the continued development of layout facilities, with pages containing background sound and inline video clips on display at the Microsoft Showcase pages (for the patient!)
With the advent of Java, and Netscape's support for Java and JavaScript, we began to see interactive pages, containing tumbling characters and advertisments scrolling across our screens.
With the release of VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) and plug-in components for Netscape (such as Shockwave) the amount of interactivity and variety on Web pages continued to grow.
Haven't We Been Here Before?
All of this new technology looks very exciting.
But before we start writing Java applets and VRML logos for our home page perhaps we should reflect a little.
Remember when the Apple Macintosh first became popular.
Who can forget those newsletters and posters?
For the first time it was feasible for end users to begin desktop publishing.
It was possible to use a wide variety of font faces and sizes and many people did.
The end result was not attractive.
Using all the new technologies on our Web pages will similarly not guarantee a pleasing result for the viewer.
Even worse, unlike paper technology, it can result in the Web pages not being visible by end users who do not have the plugin software to view the pages.
So What Should I Do?
If you are thinking about redesigning your Web pages, the following checklist may be useful.
Produce a written specification for your WWW service, stating why the redesign is needed.
Define the target audience for your WWW service, and the target platform.
If you are providing a internal intranet service, and your users all have a powerful Pentium system and access to the latest version of Netscape, you will be in a good position to exploit the new technologies.
If your end users are located around the world, perhaps using PCs which support only 16 colours, you should think carefully before using 256 colour images (such as photographs) on your home page.
Identify the strengths and weaknesses in the group responsible for implementing your Web pages.
If you do not have any programming expertise, you may find it difficult to implement Java applets.
If you do not have design expertise, will your home page look cliched?
Consider using external expertise, such as the graphical design expertise which is likely to be available in your audio-visual services department.
Carry out an evaluation of the redesigned pages.
If possible ensure that external users are involved in the evaluation, as well as your friend from the next office.
Define the maintenance procedures.
If the home page includes a Stop Press feature, who is responsible for updating the information?
What is the underlying directory structure?
Keep abreast of style sheet developments.
Style sheets provide control over layout in a way which will minimise future maintenance.
Have a look at a variety of pages on the Web.
Make a note of pages you like and those that you don't like.
Use a validation service to check there are no errors in your home page.
If you get it right, who knows you may win one of the UCISA Web Awards!
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Web4Lib: The Library Web Manager's Electronic Discussion List Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web4Lib: The Library Web Manager's Electronic Discussion List Buzz software archives metadata browser copyright cataloguing gopher cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Roy Tennant, Project Manager of the Digital Library Research & Development at the University of California, Berkeley, describes the Web4Lib mailing list, an electronic discussion forum for library Web managers.
The World Wide Web has quickly become an essential tool for librarians to communicate with their clientele, provide services, and build collections.
Well over a thousand libraries around the world now have Web servers (according to Libweb, a directory of library-based Web servers at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Libweb/), and many have public terminals available for accessing the Web.
Such a rapid deployment of this technology required rapid learning by the professionals who implemented it.
Part of that learning took place on an electronic discussion called Web4Lib (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/).
Web4Lib is an electronic discussion for library Web managers.
Although the primary audience is library staff, there are many others who find the list helpful who do not work in libraries.
Topics appropriate to the Web4Lib discussion include anything relating to Web systems and libraries.
Some examples include: Web resource selection in relation to existing acquisition and collection development procedures cataloging and metadata issues regarding Web information in-house patron access to Web servers (e.g., Netscape on patron-accessible computers) training staff or users to use the Web or to create Web resources Off-topic postings may lead to the removal of the person posting the message, and commercial advertisements are not allowed.
Web4Lib has been blessed with a cadre of very knowledgeable Web managers that often supply informative and helpful answers to queries from those of us who are less experienced.
Although occasionally Web4Lib receives an off-topic message or sometimes a discussion is pursued to a ridiculous length, in general Web4Lib retains a fairly high overall signal-to-noise ratio.
This is reflected in comments such as: "I thank you, for running a list that is head and shoulders above most.
I really appreciate the professional level of conduct and content."
"I subscribe to this list and also to comp.infosystems.www.providers and sometimes, ironically, I find this group more helpful when it comes to providing, or webbing in general, so that I don't even miss www.users and www.misc."
"From my corporate corner, I agree that Web4Lib at Berkeley is a wonderful service.
I too am grateful."
Current Statistics The Web4Lib discussion averages about ten messages a day (approximately 300 per month) on all kinds of topics related to Web servers and libraries.
Current membership stands at nearly 2,800 individuals from more than 40 different countries.
There are over 100 subscribers from the United Kingdom (using June 1996 statistics).
The top five countries with the most subscribers are the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany.
More detailed statistics by country are available at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/subscribers.html.
Resources Archive Web4Lib messages are available in a searchable and browseable archive (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive.html ) from April 1995 to the present.
The archive is updated automatically as messages are posted to the discussion.
The Library Web Manager's Reference Center The Library Web Manager's Reference Center (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/faq.html) began as an outgrowth of the Web4Lib discussion, first to provide easy access to some of the most informative Web4Lib postings, then later to also point to key resources for library Web managers.
Major sections of the page include the Best of Web4Lib, CGI Programs, Directories, Guides and Tutorials, Launching CD-ROM or Other Applications From a Web Browser, and Web Policies.
History In the spring of 1994, Information Systems Instruction & Support (ISIS) staff (a unit of the Library Systems Office) at the University of California, Berkeley Library were preparing to build a prototype Web server.
By that time it had become clear that such a server would be an inevitable expansion of network-based services that The Library had begun offering with its library catalog and Gopher server.
As knowledgeable as we may have been about the Web at that time (we had investigated the Web as early as 1992), we still had much to learn about mounting a Web server of the size that would be sufficient to serve a campus of 30,000 students and a library staff of 400.
In late April 1994 Bill Drew from the State University of New York posted the following message on the NEW-LIST electronic discussion: "I have been looking high and low for a list aimed at librarians involved in developing resources for the World Wide Web (WWW).
I have searched the List of Lists, print directories and other sources.
There already is a list for librarians developing gopher resources but there is no interest there to expand it to include WWW efforts."
Bill Drew's message acted as a catalyst that spurred us to pursue the possibility of hosting such a list at UC Berkeley.
We received permission from Library administration to host it, at which point we began work on the technical details.
I replied privately to Bill Drew that we were working on putting up such a list, and on May 5 I announced our intent to begin such a discussion on the GO4LIB-L list (a list for library-based Gopher managers which served as a conceptual model for Web4Lib).
On May 12, 1994 I announced the existence of the discusion Web4Lib on GO4LIB-L, NEW-LIST, and PACS-L (a broad-based library discussion).
In less than 24 hours we had 360 subscribers.
We hit 1,000 subscribers within two weeks.
By a measure of numbers alone we were, much to our delight and dismay (see below), a smashing success.
It quickly became clear that we were ill-prepared to host such a large discussion.
The software we were using (The Unix Listserver Program or TULP) was a bare-bones package that lacked some of the more sophisticated commands and features demanded by users familiar with electronic discussions.
TULP was slow, and it was frequently backed up with a long queue of messages waiting to be delivered to subscribers.
Dealing with returned mail was a nightmare.
The systems technician assigned to TULP dropped everything and spent most of her time for the first couple weeks dealing with problems from the list.
But despite a rocky start, the list was immediately viewed as helpful by its subscribers.
One early response we received read in part "I have read this list one day and have already found it useful...maybe if I have 900 messages over the next three days I will change my mind but it is certainly augmenting my R&D efforts.
So, thanks for starting it."
As cheering as that message was, it was also prophetic, as at one point a subscriber from Australia was causing an endless loop.
This meant that everyone on Web4Lib was getting multiple copies of the same message, leading to dozens of duplicate messages piling up in subscriber's accounts.
After tracing the problem to an institution and removing everyone on the list from that location (as well as corresponding with individuals there), we discovered the problem remained unsolved.
At one point, in our frustration and our belief that the message was being propagated by other servers, we were forced to remove the entire continent of Australia from the list and, for a time, to suspend the list entirely.
This incident also forced us to moderate the list, which meant checking every message manually before forwarding it to subscribers.
Web4Lib was moderated in this fashion for several months, until we felt comfortable that the bounced mail problem had ceased.
In September 1995 we moved the list from the TULP software to List Processor 6.0 (often called ListProc for short), which afforded much better electronic discussion support.
Key Commands The following are a few of the basic commands for interacting with the list.
A more complete list of commands is available at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/.
To Subscribe: Send the message "subscribe Web4Lib your name" to listserv@library.berkeley.edu To Unsubscribe: Send the message "unsubscribe Web4Lib" to listserv@library.berkeley.edu To Contribute to the Discussion: Send your message to web4lib@library.berkeley.edu.
For more information on appropriate discussion topics, please see the information below.
To Receive a List of Commands: Send the message "help" to listserv@library.berkeley.edu Administration The list is managed by Roy Tennant, with technical assistance provided by Janet Garey, Eileen Pinto, and Tricia McCarthy, all staff at the UC Berkeley Library.
Other staff who have assisted, both current and past, include David Rez, John Ober, and Lisa Rowlison.
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So What Is So Exciting about LAMDA?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines So What Is So Exciting about LAMDA?
Buzz software research standards Citation BibTex RIS Frederick Friend explains about electronic document delivery in London and Manchester.
NOTHING IS THE short answer.
LAMDA is not exciting for the technophile.
Some annoying problems to solve, yes, but nothing revolutionary about the hardware or software.
Just standard PCs, scanners and printers, loaded with the tried and tested RLG Ariel software.
Perhaps the most exciting technical development has been the JEDDS software, which will allow e-mail delivery of scanned journal articles to the users desktop, but even that will not cause a frisson of excitement in the computer science community.
Yet, people are talking about LAMDA and want to know more about this ground-breaking service.
Even viewed as a resource-sharing service I wonder why it has generated so much interest.
Libraries have been sharing their resources for centuries, to a far greater extent than library users realise.
True, resource-sharing (or “access” to give it its current name) has never formed the major component in any library service.
The emphasis has always been upon holdings (librarians are as acquisitive as magpies) and the needs of most library users are met that way.
But the value of resource-sharing has always been greater than statistics would indicate.
It may only be one out of a thousand routine visits to a library, but that one visit to request an item from another library may make such a difference to the users research.
For the librarian also, resource-sharing may have political value out of all proportion to its quantity in showing that librarians do co-operate.
Ironically, to be actively involved in resource-sharing may increase the librarians chances of getting an increase in the book-buying budget.
And yet the value of resource-sharing is heavily influenced by its cost.
Resource-sharing is expected to save money, and expensive resource-sharing is perceived to be a contradiction in terms.
I think that is the secret of LAMDAs success.
It is lean and mean resource-sharing.
It covers its costs and robs nobody but it provides good value.
Commercial document delivery exists to make a profit for the document supplier.
LAMDA exists to share existing resources.
Commercial users may be prepared to pay the prices charged by commercial document suppliers, but LAMDA exists to meet the needs of an academic community which has been grumbling about the even the prices charged by the British Library Document Supply Centre.
Many still perceive the BLDSC to provide good value, but the academic document delivery market is increasingly pricesensitive.
LAMDAs current price of £3.60 per journal article supplied is good value and covers all the supplying librarys costs.
If it does not rob the customer, neither does it rob the publisher, as the copies supplied are largely from low-use journals which have been purchased by one library but which will never be purchased by all.
There is nothing exciting about LAMDAs level of service either.
The service is good, but no better than library users have the right to expect.
There is nothing wonderful about LAMDAs speed of delivery any document supplier ought to be able to achieve 48 hour turnaround … References LAMDA web site http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Library/lamda/ Author Details Mr Fred Friend LAMDA Board University College London email: ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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HELIX Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines HELIX Buzz data software framework database archives digitisation copyright multimedia syndication licence research Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Glynn outlines the HELIX project, one of the new Images projects from the eLib programme.
Image collections and resources are of immense importance for research, teaching and learning across a wide spectrum of subject areas.
Images may be the primary research material or may inform and enrich research which is principally text based or experimental in nature.
Research carried out over the last three or four years had addressed many of the problems associated with digitization, indexing and retrieval, distribution, staffing and management issues, and problems concerned with copyright and access controls.
De Montfort University was commissioned by the JISC to investigate the needs of the UK Higher Education community in relation to the digital storage and network delivery of image-based information.
The final report, "Proposal for an Image Data Resource Service", can be obtained from JISC.
The aim HELIX is a two-year project and it started on 1 April 1996.
The aim of the HELIX project is to build on the prototyping work already carried out in the EC-funded project ELISE I, helping to create substantial and useful operational image banks, delivering images to universities throughout the UK.
The final database will enable access to some 45,000 "general" images, and a special sub-collection of a further 7,000 images.
This substantial body of image-resource content will be based on distributed image banks held in each of the partner organizations.
The project is to achieve this within a technical framework that uses recognized standards which will be hospitable to the incorporation of further image banks, both nationally and internationally.
The "sub-collection" of 7,000 images referred to above will be part of the module presenting a cohesive set of materials describing the Social and Political History of Britain from 1859 to the present day (SPHB).
The deliverables The project work has been divided into six phases, in each of which activities appropriate to an electronic project of this size are distinguished.
The key tasks will involve establishing mechanisms for interrogating the different databases in a uniform way following accepted standards and state-of-the-art technology, and implementing those via SuperJanet.
Retrieval software, interconnection technologies and a user interface will be defined and put in place.
Partners will be trained as necessary, although it is acknowledged that much expertise already exists at one or other of the partner sites and that this knowledge can be usefully transferred or exploited via the regular project meetings, or additional visits as appropriate.
Over the two-year period assigned to the HELIX project, the number of images digitized at each site will obviously gradually increase.
Only when a sufficiently large critical mass is available will certain specifications for the retrieval software and interface design be able to be finalized.
Each site must have 5,000 images digitized by the end of the first year (the end of March 1997).
A manual of good practice for the implementation and management of image banks is to be prepared, and a suitable licence agreement between the partners collectively is to be drawn up.
The Social and Political History module will offer a package of materials as a teaching and research resource which will act as a 'proof of concept' for others wishing to develop similar products.
Who's involved?
The lead partner is the International Institute for Electronic Library Research (IIELR) at De Montfort University (DMU), with St Andrews University Library (SAUL) and the Hulton Getty Picture Collection (HGPC) as the other participants.
De Montfort University DMU is well known for its electronic library and image retrieval research, with an enviable record in projects funded by the British Library, IBM, Elsevier, the European Commission and with a long history of providing national HE services throughout CHEST.
DMU hosts the National Art Slide Library (formerly at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London), 15,000 images from which will be contributed to the HELIX project, and is experienced in multimedia design and the co-ordination of large-scale and complex projects (such as ELISE I, which produced a prototype for international interconnection of image banks).
St Andrews University Library SAUL is host to the Valentine Photographic Archive, entrusted to the University Library by the famous photographic and postcard company of James Valentine of Dundee, as well as to other archival photographic materials.
The complete surviving archive, spanning 100 years of British History, consists of some 100,000 negatives and 200,000 reference prints.
The archive's importance as a record of British Life, leisure, architecture, townscapes and landscapes is considerable.
The HELIX project seeks to improve knowledge of and familiarity with its content and to this end 15,000 images will be made available via HELIX.
The Hulton Getty Picture Collection The Hulton Getty Picture Collection (formerly the Hulton Deutsch Archive) scarcely needs an introduction.
Based in London, this collection is universally acknowledged as the greastest library of photojournalism in the world.
The collection comprises in excess of 15 million photographs, prints and engravings, including the work of such famous names as Keystone, Picture Post, Fox and Central Press.
More recently, the HGPC became responsible for the management of Mirror Syndication International and for the digital archiving of the Reuters News Picture Service; it has published several CD-ROMs covering evocative images of a selection of decades from the twentieth century.
HGPC is also co-operating in RACE project called MEDIATOR, which involves the production of a digital newspaper.
From its vast archival collection, the HGPC is contributing 15,000 images for the main HELIX database and another 7,000 images for a module covering the Social and Political History of Britain from 1859 to the present day (SPHB).
Contacts Project Director: Professor Marilyn Deegan, Co-Director IIELR, De Montfort University, Hammerwood Gate, Milton Keynes MK7 6HP; tel.
+44 1908 695511, fax +44 1908 834929; email MARILYN@DMU.AC.UK Project Manager: Dr Ruth Glynn, IIELR, De Montfort University, Hammerwood Gate, Milton Keynes MK7 6HP; tel.
+44 1908 695511, fax +44 1908 834929; email RGLYNN@DMU.AC.UK Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 13 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 13 Buzz database copyright Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter and Isobel Stark present the editorial introduction for the web version of Ariadne 13.
In this edition of the Web version of Ariadne there are two “at the event” reports: one from Lisa Gray of OMNI, looking at the Online 97 exhibition in Olympia in December from the biomedical perspective.
Philip Hunter reports from a European Library Telematics conference held in Warsaw under the auspices of the local FEMIRC in the first week of December.
Among the regular columns Brian Kelly outlines the benefits of associate membership of The World Wide Web Consortium (W3c) in his Web Focus corner.
Professor Charles Oppenheim answers more copyright queries in his Copyright Corner column.
Sarah Ormes reviews the online reference query service run by the EARL consortium which she reports had a start up cost of around forty pounds in Public Libraries Corner.
The current Planet SOSIG features an article by Heather Dawson on the editing of the Politics Section of the database.
A new feature of the online version of Ariadne is our jargon-busting What Is…?
column.
The first column is by Glen Monks who gives a sys-admin’s view of Intranets.
Also checkout Newsline, which carries news and reports on current and future events.
This month you can find details of the upcoming UKOLN conference (Summer 1998), an item on the foundation of a new governmental strategy group concerned with copyright regulations and database rights, together with a notice of the new database regulations which came into force on the 1st January 1998.
Author Details Philip Hunter Information Officer, UKOLN p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk   Isobel Stark Web Officer, UKOLN i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Poem and Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Poem and Cartoon Citation BibTex RIS Win a copy of Networking and the Future of Libraries 2 Managing the intellectual record, in this issues caption competition.
The book, edited by Lorcan Dempsey, Derek Law and Ian Mowat, is a highly topical range of edited papers from UKOLN's major international conference held at the University of Bath in April 1995 which examine the future central role of networking for the library and publishing community.
Contributers to the book include Nicky Ferguson, Stevan Harnad, Joan Day, Paul Evan Peters, Margaret Hedstrom, Sheila Corrall and Brian Perry.
So, here's the picture...
This was taken at the Netskills launch in early February 1996, and shows Donal demonstrating networking tools to a group of enthusiastic trainees.
But what is he saying?
Or illustrating with his hands?
Entries for this competition has now closed; the winning entry, and the best non-winning attempts, are available from issue 3.
Poem Corner Another helping of verse to help you unwind over a steaming keyboard...
Snow Polly Clark Your words are falling on me, Not one at a time, but in half-words, In soft phrases; the exquisite fizz!
Of a single letter on my tongue: I walk home in a blizzard Of everything you have said to me; And not only words; your touch Babbles warmly on my skin, syllable By syllable you're obliterating The dark needles of the fir trees, a crow Is trying to scythe himself free Of the fragments cohering Into one great white word This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets (http://dougal.derby.ac.uk:80/lpoets/), Volume 1, Number II, February 1994.
It is reprinted by permission of the editor.
Cartoon Don't groan **too** loudly... Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sideline Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sideline Buzz copyright Citation BibTex RIS Sheona Farquhar makes the mistake of thinking that any conference held outside Aberdeen has to be warmer.
Trips from Aberdeen to most places take a long time.
Not being one to turn down the rare opportunity to travel abroad in my library's interest, I journeyed for 12 hours via three Flughafens and four Bahnhofs, two planes and three trains to a conference on Electronic Publishing and Libraries in Bielefeld, Germany.
It's very cold in Northern Germany in early February, much colder even than Aberdeen.
The temperature outside did not rise much above -9oC during my visit.
The conference was billed as being presented in German and English with simultaneous translation.
The uncomfortable reality of life as an MEP or a UN delegate hit me as I sat glumly in my headphones following each successive Powerpoint presentation.
Civil servants, telecommunications specialists, lawyers and computer engineers as well as publishers and librarians were among the presenters and participants from several European countries.
There was 'passion' for copyright and antagonism for German Telecom.
One view saw the Internet as allowing a return to the ideals of 17th century scholarly publishing by encouraging free communication among scholars.
Understandably, at a conference for librarians and publishers, a common theme was the key role of both in bringing order to the chaos of the Internet (provided that neither becomes extinct first).
What did I learn?
Never speak at a conference on electronic publication without back-up overhead slides.
Several exponents of the brave electronic future were let down by the limping technology of today.
Also, don't travel to winter conferences in Germany without thermals.
And never assume that the language of networking is international.
The return journey (travelling time – five hours, hanging about between connections – six hours) was frustrating.
In a curious way, however, it seemed appropriate.
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Copyright Management Technologies: The Key to Unlocking Digital Works?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Management Technologies: The Key to Unlocking Digital Works?
Buzz data software database doi digitisation accessibility browser identifier copyright passwords licence ecms authentication privacy intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Anne Ramsden brings us up to date with current developments in copyright management technology Digitisation of copyright works and other protected objects has many benefits for the user not least in terms of ease of access, however, for the rights owners it can represent both an opportunity and a threat.
It allows materials to be distributed speedily on the networks, increases accessibility and opens up new markets, and yet there is also the danger of loss of sales through unauthorised use and exploitation of these same materials.
Recently, there has been a great deal of activity on the part of technology vendors, copyright stakeholders (publishers, authors, collecting societies), academic institutions and libraries, to develop copyright management technologies for controlling access to and usage of materials, for assigning unique identifiers for all types of works, and for marking protected works in order to deter unauthorised copying and re-distribution.
The potential benefits are considerable.
Copyright owners gain the facility to collect and distribute fees, and are, therefore, more willing to give permission for the electronic use of their materials.
Libraries can track what items are being used and thereby manage their collections more efficiently, and are able to implement accounting and billing mechanisms to recover costs.
Users are informed of copyright ownership and the terms and conditions of access.
However, the development of electronic copyright management systems (ECMS) can pose many problems too.
From the user’s point of view, a complex system requiring registration and passwords, linked to pay-per-use charging mechanisms may deter use.
It is clear that there will be a considerable overhead involved in implementing an ECMS and it may, therefore, not be appropriate for content which is not of high intrinsic value.
Furthermore, there is the issue of privacy when a system may track and report to libraries and copyright owners what individual user’s are reading and printing.
If the user’s privacy is to be maintained then the technology should enable the user to be authorised but to keep his or her identity anonymous.
There are also legal problems raised by ECMS [1].
Firstly, ECMS are, at present, not protected under law and, therefore, there is nothing to prevent someone from developing the tools to circumvent such systems.
Secondly, ECMS are not designed to accommodate copyright exceptions like fair use which allow users free access to materials for research and private study in a library.
If this provision is to be maintained in a digital environment, should free access be restricted to the location of the library or should remote access to the library be possible?
Copyright management technologies fall into five groups and some systems may involve a combination of the different technologies.
A number of trial projects are also identified.
Document security and post-control techniques which ensure control over the distribution of works.
Techniques such as the encryption (scrambling) and decryption of objects to prevent unauthorised access; verification to prove the origin of a work; authentication to prove the work has not changed; attachment of a copyright notice to a document and the use of concealed information (labeling or watermarking), which can be used to determine ownership and the source.
Secure transmission of documents over the Internet is the basis of IBM’s Cryptolope [2] technology, whereby encrypted material is delivered in Cryptolope containers, which are unsealed by the user with a helper application in the web browser in order to view the content.
Tracking and recording document usage: the technologies employed include mechanisms for controlling access, user identification and authentication, metering use and, if necessary, charging for use.
Two projects, DECOMATE [3] and ERCOMS [4] , are developing generic systems for tracking use on campus intranets.
DECOMATE is developed for the library which holds materials under a site licence and reports use and delivery of materials on the campus.
ERCOMS aims not only to report usage but also to operate under various payment schemes: licensing, pay-as-you-use or a hybrid model.
Document identification and digital object identifiers (DOI): work is underway in Europe and the USA to develop a standardised system of identifier codes which can be used for marking and tracking use of documents.
The DOI prototype system [5] developed in partnership by the American Association of Publishers, Corporation for National Research Initiative and Bowker Saur, aims to facilitate electronic commerce by allowing users to locate digital materials and arrange for their purchase, and by helping publishers manage and market their digital products.
Secure billing and payment systems: over the last eighteen months the number of technology vendors offering or developing ECMS tools for electronic commerce on the Internet has increased.
In most cases, the documents or objects are held on the publishers’ own servers, but the Internet billing system allows access through registration, user identification and credit checking.
The pay-as-you-use approach is based on various payment schemes: credit cards/institutional or personal accounts/electronic cash.
There are a number of commercial and experimental systems in this area: BIDS [6] Journals Online (formerly known as Infobike), COPINET [7], Netbill [8] and IBM InfoMarket [9].
Rights management tools: these are administrative support systems required by libraries (and publishers) to manage electronic permissions requests, chasers and the electronic licences which are the result of the successful negotiation.
Two eLib projects, Acorn [10] and ERCOMS, are developing PC-based rights management systems.
Reply from: Paula Kingston p.j.kingston@lboro.ac.uk …on the 18th July 1997 I think Anne raises some very important issues regarding the use of ECMS, particularly with regard to sensitive data on users’ activities.
Just for the record, Project ACORN’s system is not only a rights clearance package, but it also tracks and logs usage, downloads this data from the AACORN document database into CLEAR (Copyright-Licensed Electronic Access to Readings) which is a PC-based database running under Microsoft Access.
This database provides very detailed and comprehensive usage information at the level of the individual article and user.
It generates reports to publishers, and calculates payments required, if any.
Two UK HE institutions have already taken the database design ACORN has developed and are developing it to meet their own local needs.
The entire ACORN model has been developed with this type of portability in mind, both for the tracking and rights clearance module as well as the system which displays the electronic documents to users.
We are about to begin testing the portability of the whole system at Leicester University.
However, what I wanted to clarify was that we do have an established and proven system for tracking and clearance, which operates as part of the ACORN intranet and we are happy to provide further information to those interested.
The issues Anne raises concerning privacy are very important and we are currently taking steps to develop a policy in this area which will provide us with guidelines on good practice, given the amount of sensitive data the system currently collects.
References [1] Legal Issues associated with Electronic Copyright Management Systems, Charles Oppenheim, Ariadne Issue 2, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue2/copyright/ [2] IBM Cryptolope Web Site, http://www.databolts.ibm.com/downloads.htm [3] DECOMATE web server and monitoring software can be downloaded from: http://dbiref.kub.nl:2080/Decomate-1.0/index.html [4] ERCOMS Web Site, http://ford.mk.dmu.ac.uk/Projects/ERCOMS/ [5] DOI system Web site, http://www.doi.org/ [6] BIDS Journals Online, http://www.journalsonline.bids.ac.uk/JournalsOnline/ [7] COPINET Web Site, http://www.dtv.dk/copinet/pro/ [8] NetBill Project at the Information Networking Institute, Carnegie Mello University, http://www.ini.cmu.edu/NETBILL/ [9] IBM Infomarket Web Site, http://www.infomkt/ibm.com/ [10] ACORN project http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/acorn/clear.htm Author details Anne Ramsden, ERCOMS project manager Email: ar@dmu.ac.uk Phone: 01908 834924 Fax: 01908 834929 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Copyright Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Corner Buzz copyright cataloguing licence url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim answers copyright queries.
Questions raised by The Royals Fytton Rowland, Lecturer, and Programme Tutor for Information and Publishing Studies, Department of Information and Library Studies, Loughborough University, asked a series of questions sparked off by the publication of Kitty Kelly’s book about the royal family [Charles] Assuming the UK courts state the book is defamatory, in my view the answers to Fytton’s questions are: 1.
If I go to the USA, buy a legitimate copy of the book in a bookshop, and bring it back to the UK in my suitcase, am I infringing any law, and could customs confiscate it?
No and no 2.
If I order it from an Internet bookshop based in the USA and they mail it to me, has any law been broken by either party, and again could customs confiscate it?
Yes, potentially the Internet bookshop is helping to publish and spread the libel and could be sued in a UK court for libel.
I don’t think Customs could seize as the post office is not liable for libellous material sent through the post it has immunity against such actions, and the customs could not interfere with legitimate posts.
3.
If I get my copy into Britain by one means or another, and subsequently sell it to a friend at a mutually agreeable price, have either of us broken any law?
Yes, you as seller potentially have spread the libel and could be liable.
Since only one copy is involved, though, the chances of being prosecuted are minimal.
4.
If instead I subsequently sell it to a British secondhand bookshop and they offer it for sale, has either party broken any law?
Comments apply as for 3 above.
5.
If a British bookshop buys a number of copies at the full US retail price from a US bookshop, and then offers them for sale in the UK at a mark-up on the American price, have they broken any law?
Are they now the UK publishers?
This is more serious as they are spreading the libel more widely, but comments to 3 and 4 apply.
6.
If the answer to questions 1-4 is that no law has been broken, but the answer to question 5 is that a law has been broken, how many copies does a bookshop have to offer for sale before they become the publisher?
It’s not a question of being a publisher, is a case of spreading the libel.
Distributing one copy spreads the libel a bit, distributing 100,000 a lot more; the penalty would reflect the number of copies distributed.
7.
The EU is supposed to be a single market.
Therefore, if the book is published in one or more other EU countries, has it not been ipso facto published in the UK anyway?
This misses the point; UK law is all about spreading and redisseminating a libel and nothing to do with who is considered to be a publisher per se.
8.
Finally, presumably the Royal Family could sue for libel in the US (or Irish, or Swedish) courts if they wished, so what risks are the publishers avoiding by not publishing the book in the UK?
US law is far more generous to libellers than UK law, so the chances are the Royal Family would fail in a US case.
So, by avoiding selling in the UK, where the laws are much stricter, the US publisher is massively reducing the chances of suffering legal action and that’s exactly why they’ve decided not to publish in the UK!
Copyright Transfer Steve Hitchcock of the Open Journals Project, Departments of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, asks for clarification on this topic.
What is the purpose of copyright transfer?
The primary purpose is commercial the publisher feels it cannot invest in the refereeing, marketing, indexing of the journal if it feels the author is likely to be putting the same article up and available at no charge or even at a charge, thereby damging the commercial publisher’s interests.
If the publisher ihas no interest in making money out of the articles, there is no need for a copyright transfer.
Of course, the transfer need not be complete, i.e “I assign copyright to you, Mr Publisher”; it could be a limited licence, e.g.
“I give you Mr Publisher the right to reproduce this material in your ‘Journal of Excellent Results’, but reserve all other rights to myself.” In addition to the commercial motive, there is a legal motive to protect the publisher from the unlikely, but just possible event of an infringement action from the author see below.
What terms are likely be common to all such agreements?
The standard terms are that the author confirms that the material is indeed his/her copyright (and indemnifies the publisher against legal action if this is not true), and assigns the copyright to the publisher.
Such assignments must in law be in writing.
Verbal agreements have no validity, and an e-mail assignment may well not be considered a legally binding assignment.
It is common to also include a statement that the material has not appeared anywhere before, and is not being submitted elsewhere.
This can cause problems if, say, a working draft is already up on the Web I return to this issue later.
In legal terms, how necessary is this transfer of rights to the publishing process?
As I indicated earlier, there is less of a legal requirement for an assignment, than a commercial one.
But there is one legal angle; the publisher would be well advised to get some sort of agreement from the author, even if it is just a limited licence to reproduce in ‘Journal of Excellent Results’.
If there is no agreement at all, then the publisher is technically infringing the author’s copyright if it reproduces the article.
Beware of anyone who tells you that by submitting an article to a publication the author is giving an implied licence to reproduce; court cases have shown this is NOT the case.
On the other hand, it would be a strange author indeed who decided to sue having sent an article to a publisher and the publisher then publishes without an assignment or licence.
The damages such an author would get would probably be trivial.
Given the proliferation of electronic versions of journals, what new terms, or allowances, are publishers commonly adding to these agreements?
Some publishers are making it explicit that the assignment of copyright does not just apply to the print journal, but to any publication in any medium that may exist now, or any time in the future.
This type of clause may or may not be valid in law; the New York Times versus Tasini case in the USA (which I describe in more detail in my “Lislex” column in ‘Journal of Information Science’, issue due out January 1998) has been a primary cause of such clauses.
Of course, it is up the author to accept, reject or amend any clauses imposed by publishers.
Many publishers are flexible on this matter.
What terms or amendments should authors seek if they wish to give only partial rights, print publication rights, say, but not electronic rights?
The ‘Aslib Guide to Copyright’, written and edited by Oppenheim, Phillips and Wall Section 5.9.1. has an excellent model form of words to be used.
I cannot of course copy it in my answer here, because that would be an infringement of Aslib’s copyright :-) What terms should authors avoid?
Some agreements cover not just transfer of rights but issues such as legal liability and costs of publication.
Publishers will usually insist that the author acknowledges it is the author, owns the copyright, that the material does not infringe copyright and is not defamatory.
Such terms are entirely reasonable and should not be disputed but you must have wording that any indemnity the author gives on this basis is null and void if the publisher makes any changes to the material without the express written permission of the author.
The author also will not know the defamation laws in other countries, and should quite reasonably restrict his/her liability to the laws of the country in which he/she lives.
Authors should never agree to clauses that give the author right of first refusal on further things the author may write.
It is difficult to answer your question because there are no standard clauses and each publisher takes a very different approach.
I would be happy to advise any author who has worries on these points.
A particular problem arises if you submit an article and it is already available on the Web, say.
Many publishers include a clause that you acknowledge that the material is not available anywhere else.
You should if these circumstances apply delete or amend this clause and hope the publisher does not reject your article for this reason.
Catalogue entries who owns the copyright?
From a librarian: I have a query which whilst not currently ‘electronic’ may be if the answer is on my side!
We microfiched our old card catalogues when one of our sites closed and the material re-distributed to here, our second site, and beyond.
We constructed a new automated catalogue dating back to 1975 partly as a stock-take of the ‘new’ libraries.
The microfiche catalogues date back to the founding of the Institute in 1919.
Many of the early cards are rich with annotation, whilst the more recent stuff is more standard.
My query relates to whether or not we have the copyright to this compilation of material?
In particular, one section of the catalogue was originally kept separate (and this is the nuts and bolts of the query).
All the stock was accessioned, catalogued and classified, and maintained by the library staff, but some of the material referred to in the catalogue was material used to produce an abstracting service.
I would like to make copies of the entire set for sale.
It is an unsurpassed resource of material much of it not covered by any other product (most CDs etc only begin in 1973, and are not as comprehensive), and we are often asked for access to it.
Ultimately I would like to produce a searchable CD, or raise it on the web.
Is the compilation our copyright?
Whether on microfiche or any other form (the original cards have been reluctantly destroyed due to lack of space we’re talking 30 full-size filing cabinets-worth!).
Charles’ reply: This is not actually a copyright question, but a question about employment law!
Copyright in employee created material automatically belongs to the employer, assuming the employee was paid to do this work as part of his /her duties.
I presume the library staff were paid to create catalogue entries, with added value if need be, and so copyright automatically belongs to the employer.
So the real question us: who was the employer at the time?
Assuming the employer was your organisation (or some direct precursor of it) then you organisation owns the copyright.
Talisman Carol Higgison, TALiSMAN Co-ordinator, passed on these questions which were submitted on-line prior to the seminar on Copyright and the Web.
Given the recent interim ruling on the “Shetland Times” case, what is the copyright position on: Maintaining lists of bookmarks for your own use?
Maintaining and distributing lists of bookmarks to students?
In the second case, could it be argued that they are the same as reading lists, refernces lists or bibliograpies?
The current legal position in Scotland seems to require obtaining the permission from a ‘web site’ before you can link to it from your own web pages.
Who do you approach?
The webmaster, the author of the material, the organisation who provide the web space and may own the copyright (ie employer of the author)?
Is it legal to obtain permission via email?
Is this legally binding?
Is it legal to send an email saying for example, if I don’t hear from you in 14 days I will assume you don’t object?
Since the Shetland Times case only offered an interim injunction, merely stating that there was an arguable case, it would be wrong to draw too many conclusions.
The full hearing was due to be held in November 1997 (settled out of court 12th November).
For the time being, as long as what you are copying is for your own private use, I think it is safe to continue to bookmark.
Offering bookmark lists is no different from offering bibliographic citations.
URLs are facts and there is never copyright in facts, so go ahead and offer such lists to students.
Email is unsafe as a means of doing legal business.
if you are going to approach someone for a licence, always do so by post.
The idea that if you don’t receive a reply in 14 days there is no objection is totally invalid in law and should never be used.
Failure to reply implies refusal, not consent.
Is there a legal difference between citing the location a web resource by providing the URL address as text and making it an active link?
Yes, potentially there are differences, but in most country’s laws it would not be considered infringement of copyright to provide an active link.
It may be considered an infringement of Moral Rights if the link is between two sites that one of the site owners considers impugns that owner’s reputation.
Generally, though, installing active links should be safe.
A Graduate Business School has a large printbased MBA course, very similar to the OU’s courses.
In the MBA course we have a number of collections of material, over 500 A4 pages, from such sources as Harvard Business Review.
We are making plans to develop an online version of the MBA.
Will we be able to retain the articles, chapters etc in our readers, for a reasonable fee, of course, when we go on-line?
You’d have to approach the copyright owners for permission.
Don’t be surprised if it takes a long time, some owners refuse permission, or demand extremely high fees.
Where does liability lie when an authorised user of a University website places information which is defamatory or inflammatory on these web pages?
If the University, upon receiving notification that such information is on its web pages, immediately instructs the user to remove the offending article/s does it have any further obligation to the aggrieved party?
The University has liability if it knew, or had good reason to know, that the material would be illegal.
Thus, if a University routinely checks up on materials posted by students and staff, then it would have good reason to know.
Perversely, then, the University might be better advised to turn a total blind eye to what is put up and then it could claim it did not know and could not have known what was going on.
However, a Court may be unconvinced by this.
On the other hand, if a University both removes the offending material AND punishes the offender (by expelling or sacking them), then a Court may well decide it was not liable to further punishment.
There is a dearth of cases, so it is difficult to be more precise on this issue.
NetMuse has copyright clearance on several thousand objects.
How do you negotiate to do this without having someone working full time seeking permissions?
You probably need to employ someone full time.
Author details Prof Charles Oppenheim, Co-Director, International Institute of Electronic Library Research Division of Learning Development De Montfort University Hammerwood Gate, Kents Hill MILTON KEYNES MK7 6HP charles@dmu.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur: David Allen and Tom Wilson Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: David Allen and Tom Wilson Buzz infrastructure identifier Citation BibTex RIS David Allen and Tom Wilson lament the return of IT strategies.
John MacColl, in the cover article of Issue 6 [1], suggests that some managers in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are questioning the usefulness of the concept of an ‘Information Strategy’.
Indeed, we would argue that some are now returning to the development of what are primarily Information Technology strategies.
In the current climate of national and global competition in the world of higher education, many of these strategies are being developed with a clear competitive focus.
This return to technological solutions for the complex organisational problems facing HEIs is a retrograde step and it is our contention that IT-focused strategies will not bring HEIs the elusive competitive advantage that many desire.
The idea that information technology can have strategic value for organisations was commonplace in the 1980s, and a good deal of ink was expended in writing about the potential strategic benefits of IT.
In the HE sector, at the behest of the Computer Board and the Information Systems Committee, most institutions developed IT strategies.
Yet by the 1990s it had become obvious that these strategies simply had not delivered on their promises.
Despite this, many of the original arguments which had been put forward in favour of IT as a strategic weapon are circulating once more within the HE sector.
One of the key arguments is that strategic use of IT can help build up entry barriers in a market, making it more difficult for new competitors to enter.
While this is undoubtedly true, the question must be asked – is this desirable within the HE sector?
There are numerous examples of organisations in the private sector which have developed IT initially as a competitive weapon, only to find that their application is copied by every other player in the market, and that a new essential cost has been added with no real competitive gain to show.
In the banking industry, for example, the development of Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) did not increase the long term profits of any bank, but merely made it necessary for all banks to have access to an ATM network.
The HE sector is rapidly finding itself in a similar situation, with HEIs requiring a certain level of technological infrastructure to compete within the market.
If we continue with this approach it seems inevitable that a number of HEIs will no longer be able to afford to compete and will either ‘merge’ with larger HEIs, or ‘fail’.
This process will thus reduce diversity within the HE sector.
A second argument has been put that information technology can add value to products and services.
Again this may be true, yet the very nature of the HE sector prevents this from being a basis for sustainable advantage.
The key distinguishing elements of the HE environment to date are the free exchange of information and a useful tension between the identification of members of a discipline or professional group, and their identification with their own university or HE college.
Competition between institutions is diluted by the fact of collaboration among academics and academic support professionals.
Concepts and best practice may be passed freely within a profession through informal and formal networks, and any successful application of IT, which might give an institution some competitive advantage, stands a high chance of being known about and copied.
Leveraging generic IT applications (such as the Web) may, therefore, permit short term strategic gains or ‘catching up’.
It will not allow an HEI to achieve a long term defensible position ahead of the market.
We do not see the advancement of the HE sector as a whole occurring through competition, but rather through collaboration using IT.
On an organisational level, IT needs to be applied sensitively and in line with clear, meaningful organisational strategies.
Rather than focusing on IT as the solution to all organisational ills, we should focus on developing the unique assets among the organisation’s resources and developing its distinctive competencies.
We believe that information and knowledge are primary resources within HEIs and it is to these and other ‘intangible assets’ (such as reputation and organisational culture) that we should look for a more sustainable competitive advantage.
There are no simple solutions or quick IT fixes to the problems facing UK HEIs.
References John MacColl, Information Strategies Get Down to Business, Ariadne Issue 6 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue6/cover/ Author Details Tom Wilson, Head of Department, Department of Library and Information Studies.
Email: t.d.wilson@sheffield.ac.uk Address: University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 1TN.
David Allen, Lecturer, Department of Library and Information Studies.
Email: D.K.Allen@Sheffield.ac.uk Address: University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 1TN.
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Search Engine Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engine Corner Buzz software java database browser windows multimedia url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley looks at 'Push', where a network-based service 'pushes' information to your machine, rather than you 'pulling' information from the service.
Pushing your Luck?
Wouldn’t it be great if you no longer had to spend hours trawling through search engines tracking down information on the web?
What if the information you needed simply arrived on your PC desktop on a regular basis with almost no effort required on your part?
A new crop of Internet applications which offer just such a service are now starting to emerge.
All of these products are using a technology known as ‘Push’.
The Internet currently demands a high level of motivation and interaction from its users, as it requires them to actually go out and track down information for themselves using a variety of tools which are available.
A typical web search might involve a long sequence of actions and events: a user will need to access the site of a web search engine by typing a URL into their web browser, wait for the home page to appear, type in their search query, wait for the search to be performed and results displayed, scroll through the list of results, check out some of the hits returned by accessing the relevant web pages and review the search and perhaps refine it if the information displayed isn’t relevant to their information needs.
This process may then have to be repeated again using another search engine if more information is still required.
Such a process can be extremely time-consuming, and often frustrating.
Push technology, however, emulates the model of a television broadcast.
Television is largely a passive rather than an active medium: most of us know, for example, that Coronation Street will be delivered to us by TV broadcasters at certain times of the week on a certain channel.
All we have to do is switch on at the correct time and sit down to watch.
Push technology brings this model of information delivery to the Internet: it involves information actually being pushed out or broadcast to Internet users so that they don't actively have to search and pull it in for themselves.
Typically, a user could initially choose to subscribe to a number of channels just as we might choose to subscribe to cable or satellite TV.
These channels could be content delivery services maintained by commercial information providers on the Internet.
The information providers make a viewer freely available for download from their web sites, and the user installs this viewer on their PC.
Information content can then be broadcast out to subscribers whenever the information provider updates its information database; and the user will receive regular updates of information without having to do any active web browsing.
to seek this information out for themselves.
Push technology has a number of added advantages over the television model of information delivery.
In particular, the user can actually customise what is delivered and choose how and when they want to view this information.
A user can set up a personal profile which can then be used to ensure that only information which is relevant to their individual interests is delivered.
Hyperlinks can also be provided so that users can follow up a link to get further information on a topic.
It is also possible to specify how frequently updates are required.
A variety of objects can also be delivered these might include java applications, multimedia objects, text or even software.
Various services are now available which use push technology to deliver information content.
The PointCast Network [1] appears to be at the forefront of this development, with a service which broadcasts international news, stock information, industry updates, weather information and sports and entertainment coverage.
PointCast take their news sources from other large information providers such as CNN, Time Magazine and Reuters.
Yahoo!
also has an application called My Yahoo!
News Ticker [2] which delivers news information, using a personal profile set up by the user to filter information.
Both of these services are freely available for download from the appropriate web pages.
These services deliver information using a specially customizable screen saver, or a dedicated taskbar on a Windows desktop..
This means that a user can receive the latest updates whilst working on other projects rather than actively web surfing.
However, the big push for Push is likely to come when Netscape and Microsoft release Push-enabled versions of their web browsers later this year.
Netscape is developing an application called Constellation, which will feature customisable areas of the desktop which can display pushed information from various different channels.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 will use ActiveX controls to enable information providers to push content out to users [3].
Currently all of the products available for Push use a separate application for content viewing, so it is likely that the technology will take off in a big way once it becomes integrated into a standard web browser.
Obviously an area where such services are already starting to prove useful is in the delivery of news services, and many big American news organisations such as CNN are already starting to get involved in delivering services in this way.
However, many of the services currently available are aimed at American users, and content tends, therefore, to be US biased.
Push is also very useful for delivering `just in time' information up to the minute sports and entertainment coverage, industry reports, stock market quotes, weather reports etc.
But how might such a service be useful to a UK academic user looking for research materials?
Push could potentially be put to good use in eLib information gateway projects such as OMNI [4] and EEVL[5]: imagine how useful it would be if you could receive the latest updates from an information gateway of your choice whenever new resources were added to your own particular area of interest, without having to go online to check for changes on a regular basis.
References PointCast Web Site, http://www.pointcast.com/whatis.html Yahoo Web Site, http://www.yahoo.com CNET Reviews, Pushing Match: Netscape vs. Microsoft, http://www.cnet.com/Content/Reviews/Compare/Push/ss05.html OMNI: a Web-based gateway to Internet resources in medicine, biomedicine, allied health, health management and related topics, http://www.omni.ac.uk/ EEVL: Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library Web Site, http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ Author Details Tracey Stanley Networked Information Officer University of Leeds Library, UK Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/people/TSStanley/TSStanley.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Librarian of Babel: for a Public Reading Right Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Librarian of Babel: for a Public Reading Right Buzz data archives repositories copyright video cataloguing multimedia cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS The Librarian, talking to Mike Holderness, considers the economics of gathering all human knowledge and proposes a Public Reading Right.
Welcome once more to the Library of Babel.
[1] At today’s lunch we will be discussing some of the economic issues raised by our uniquely comprehensive acquisitions programme, and a possible solution.
First, the problem.
This Library’s goal, as those who have visited previously will know, is to acquire or otherwise collect and (eventually) to catalogue all expressions of human knowledge.
We have previously discussed questions raised by the huge outpouring of grey and darker material through the new electronic media, and will have to return to these.
[2] Today we will concentrate on the problem of commercially published material in the new media notably the World Wide Web and its successors.
There seems to be a consensus that, whatever the rights and wrongs and ideals of the matter, increasing amounts of important reference and cultural material will be available only in electronic form.
[3] Some of this material will be available on subscription.
What is a librarian to do?
It is already increasingly difficult to justify paying subscriptions for journals on paper which may be consulted only a few times a year, or less often.
How can we make choices about subscribing to electronic journals, when we will not even be able to show the accountants physical evidence that we have acquired material for future reference?
The problem of subscriptions is exacerbated by the fact that we cannot, as things stand, archive or acquire journals in any meaningful sense.
Many of the proposals for business models for electronic publishing suggest that material will be delivered in encrypted form, with “keys” to read it a set number of times.
[4] In a sense, what we are being offered here is a paid-for equivalent of the inter-library loan: rental direct from the publisher.
Even where there is parallel publishing on paper and in electronic forms, we can expect that an increasing number of our users will be accustomed to the power of free-text searches and will demand electronic access.
[5] Clearly, we cannot afford to subscribe to all possible electronic books, journals and services.
Nor does any library’s budgets permit subscribing to all those which users might reasonably be expected to want or need.
Nor, we fear, will it be possible to pay for subscriptions as users make requests.
I have previously argued against the subscription model of journal pricing, not least on the grounds that its dependence on restricted access renders our automatic cataloguing schemes difficult or impossible.
[1] We do not, however, have control over the business models adopted in electronic publishing: subscriptions there will be, at least for a transitional period which may be decades long.
The preferred pay-per-read business model is not without its problems for this Library, nor for those with more restricted acquisitions policies.
How can we exercise any form of budgetary control?
For some years now, information services have been available on the internet which charge significant sums for small, sometimes very small, chunks of information.
The NewsPage service from Individual, [6] for example, charges up to £5 for some 100-word items, some of which are news-wire stories and some of which turn out to be press releases.
They may, however, be exactly the source which our user requires.
The US Dun & Bradstreet Business Background Reports cost $20.
[7] We could quite legitimately charge the Dun & Bradstreet report through to a local business user; but what about A-level economics students, or tenants seeking information on their ultimate freeholder, or even squatters doing the same?
In short, as a smaller proportion of the information which users want and expect is held on paper on our library’s physical premises, we’re in a mess.
The fact that this is partly to do with the increasing quantities of information to which users expect instant access does not allow us to evade the problem.
If our wealthier users cease using our facilities because they can bear a £500-a-year information budget in their home offices, while our less-wealthy users are condemned to wait weeks for information which the rich can get in seconds, then the division of our society into the information-rich and the information-poor will be a reality.
[8] Nor is the argument restricted to reference information although, after 20 years in which The Market has been the official religion, force of habit leads me to cast arguments in these terms.
Our libraries exist after all, not just to make data available, but to make recorded culture accessible to all, regardless of ability to pay.
Culture, cutting-edge culture in particular and High Culture even, increasingly means much more than books.
Future historians who want to understand the last decade of the 20th century in the UK will (probably) need to understand the environmental protest movement and (almost certainly) the whole area of popular culture associated with dance music.
Their understanding of either will be impaired if they do not have access to, say, a CD-ROM issued this September by Ninja Tunes [9] with pictures of one cut to the sounds of the other.
There I go again, justifying access to information on the grounds that there is a research and, hence, ultimately a financial interest.
Libraries not just public libraries should make culture available to the public.
It is time to make that argument clearly, to prepare for the time when The Market is seen for what it is, an intellectual fad serving particular interests and, on the time-scale on which libraries such as ours must operate, a passing fad at that.
What, then, is to be done?
To list some possibilities: 0: Make access to information through libraries free We can imagine some sort of electronic analogy to the copyright deposit law, under which owners of on-line information must grant free access to accredited libraries.
This has an instant intellectual appeal.
“Information,” notoriously, “wants to be free”.
Academics, in particular, having become inured to giving their work lock, stock and barrel to so-called “learned” publishers (or even paying page charges to persuade them to take it away), like to dream that all the important information in the world is free for the taking.
Few such people, it can safely be assumed, have paid sustained attention to the budget or accounts of the library which offers them the illusion of free information.
But, remember, we are not talking about books, nor necessarily about fixed documents in any medium: some of the most useful “publications” will bear more resemblance to live radio than to a manuscript.
Nor will we be able safely to draw a line, if we ever could, between “serious” and “entertaining” stuff.
To illustrate this, readers in the UK should do the following: stay up until 2am; watch the “keywords” strand on BBC2.
Note that its design cries out to be hypertextual: alongside the parallel moving pictures, text and voice there ought to be live links to movies, documentary newsreel, and scientific papers.
Now decide where the entertainment ends and the serious stuff starts.
Consider, then, the rules and regulations to which libraries would almost certainly have to submit in order for such a “real-time copyright deposit” law to stand any chance.
Imagine, first, Disney’s lawyers’ and market-droids’ reaction on hearing that Snow White is to be available, free, in libraries and, even worse, to be available whenever the library is open, foiling their plans to deliver carefully rationed doses to the market.
I see a nightmare outcome in which library users are expected to sign affidavits that they have Had No Fun, with periodic inspections by teams of corporate lawyers to ensure that no fun has, indeed, been had.
1: Do nothing Imagine if we had done nothing when printing was introduced, and had comfortably remained repositories for manuscripts.
(“Everything of real value is a manuscript,” I hear some dry stick mutter.)
The effects of ignoring the new media will be similarly marginalising.
Alternatively, libraries could respond as they have to video and become, in effect, second-rate retail hire outlets for the new media.
All the arguments about access to information, including cultural information, being independent of ability to pay would thus be lost.
2: A Public Reading Right Another economic model is readily available in the UK: the Public Lending Right.
This recognises that the information which is libraries’ lifeblood is produced by breathing humans, not corporations, and that these humans invest their lives in producing it in the hope of reward when and whenever it is consumed.
Because of the limitations of book technology the fatal lack of interactivity, in summary Public Lending Right payments are distributed on the basis of statistical surveys of library loans.
Extend this to a Public Reading Right.
(“Reading” sounds more worthy and less politically threatening than “Multimedia” or “Access to Information”, and we can take it in the post-modern sense of “reading” television.)
Each time information text, moving pictures, or as-yet-unnamed media is accessed in a library, a credit is made to the author or authors.
This will all happen automatically and will involve librarians in no day-to-day management work: various schemes are well under way to develop systems for collecting small payments to authors and re-distributing them economically.
[10] [11] These systems will have, before too long, to deal with the issues of distributing payments for access to collaborative works.
It is likely that authors would agree to payment under the PRR at a reduced rate, compared to the “commercial” price of their work.
PRR payments would be met from central government funds.
The most cynical argument for this is that it is the price of avoiding the growth of an information underclass.
(Perhaps an even more cynical argument, based on nationalism, can be made.
To be brutally honest, PRR is the price of ensuring that the information underclass forms elsewhere.)
PRR, like Public Lending Right, has the advantage of an appeal to fairness and the fostering of creativity.
It will be a payment to authors, for an entirely new right which they cannot legally have signed away.
It does, of course, raise the possibility of budgeting problems for libraries.
If it were funded by libraries themselves, it would in the near future lead to local newspaper stories about school pupils being prevented from handing their homework in on time, and students delaying their dissertations, because budgets had run dry.
We will have to give careful thought to the implications of the obvious alternative, which is that PRR payments should be met from a central government fund.
PRR will also expose yet another conflict between the border-less nature of the new media and the archaicisms of national government.
The solution, however, is simple: it should be introduced as soon as possible in the UK, as a model for the EU and then the rest of the world.
Payments to authors who live in jurisdictions which do not yet have PRR or distribution mechanisms will be held on trust until such time as their governments and authors’ organisations catch up.
(The Norwegian authors’ rights collection agency Kopinor, [12] for instance, successfully operates on this basis.)
The most difficult problem, however, will be to define what, or rather where, is a library.
I have a solution, though it is not perfect.
PRR should apply to information accessed by users on the physical premises of a library, elsewhere in a recognised educational institution, or in a health centre or GP’s surgery.
On the one hand, this restricts PRR to its primary goal: ensuring that information is available, free at the point of use, to those who cannot afford to obtain it in the comfort of their own homes and for whom an office is probably somewhere where they claim benefits.
On the other, it has disturbing resonances of a restricted role for the library.
Why should libraries as institutions be restricted to physical premises?
That, like many things, will have to be the subject of a further discussion.
Your questions?
References [1] See the first tour of the Library, at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/babel/, for a brief history and a discussion of the impact of different economic models on libraries.
[2] For a particularly fine example of this genre, see Disgruntled Housewives of the World Unite at http://www.urbekah.com/housewife/index.html.
To digress: the nature of the cataloguing problem may be brought home by the fact that the Librarian’s Assistant came across this while searching for a contact address for Ninja Tunes, a cutting-edge producer of dance music.
Someone who also likes the Tunes also likes the Disgruntled Housewives.
A proposal for a quantitative study of converging tastes in unrelated fields, with the goal of generating a Hilbert space of all possible personalities, is now being drawn up.
[3] See “Time to Shelve the Library?”, published in New Scientist 5 December 1992 and archived (as submitted) at http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/articles/ns-elib.htm [4] See for example the IBM infoMarket service white paper on Cryptolopes at http://www.infomkt.ibm.com/ht3/crypto.htm; on-line registration is at http://www.infomarket.ibm.com/ht3/registr2.htm [5] As an example, recently the Librarian’s Assistant paid a visit to the Science Reference Library for the first time in some years.
Having spent a large part of the intervening time working on the internet, he was amused to find himself composing an AltaVista query as he approached the reference desk.
So he asked, “err… how do you do a text search on this thing?” To two librarians the request appeared meaningless.
The third, younger, librarian responded appropriately: “Over there.
Subject catalogue.
‘Aardvark’.
Read.” [6] NewsPage is at http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/ttp://www.newspage.com/ [7] From http://www.CompaniesOnline.com/ [8] See for example “What does it mean to be information-poor?”, published in the New Statesman and archived at http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/articles/infopoor.htm [9] Possibly the least academic footnote ever to appear in a libraries journal: http://www.iuma.com/Southern/ninjahp.html.
Neither cash nor any other consideration has been received.
[10] See for example the Imprimatur project at http://www.imprimatur.alcs.co.uk [11] …and the Publication Rights Clearinghouse at http://www.nwu.org/nwu/prc/prchome.html [12] Kopinor http://www.kopinor.no Author (channel?)
details Mike Holderness, Freelance Journalist, Email: mch@cix.compulink.co.uk Mike Holderness: The Internet for Journalists Web pages at: http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/lecture.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Poem: Aurelia Aurita Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Poem: Aurelia Aurita Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Ralph Hancock with this issue's poem.
This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets , Volume 1, Number VII, April 1996.
It is reprinted by permission of the editor.
Ralph Hancock with this issue’s poem.
This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets , Volume 1, Number VII, April 1996.
It is reprinted by permission of the editor.
Aurelia Aurita Chrysaora Isosceles Aurelia aurita, four violet rings in jelly, one olympic ring short, trailing lips; four holes in a Celtic cross, ring traps in a lobster pot, food in, stays in, sea-coloured belly.
Chrysaora isosceles, opaque cloud of browns, long tentacles of tissue paper streamers, lung preserved in brine.
Barnacles mark high water rusting two halves of a diamond at the end of the quayside aquarium, jellyfish pulse frilly by pink image of olympian sex and domestic sewage, choking smog, creeping up the coast oh yes, creeping up the coast.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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HEADLINE (HYBRID Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines HEADLINE (HYBRID Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment) Buzz data html database doi identifier copyright cataloguing windows z39.50 passwords copac lbs cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Maureen Wade introduces HEADLINE (HYBRID Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment).
HEADLINE (HYBRID Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment) is one of the Hybrid Libraries projects funded under the eLib Phase 3 programme.
Starting in January 1998 and running for three years, the project aims to develop and implement a working model of the hybrid library in a range of real-life academic situations.
The project partners are the London School of Economics, the London Business School and the University of Hertfordshire.
Development work will be carried out at the LSE and the LBS, with all three sites developing the user requirements model, acting as test-beds and contributing to user evaluation studies.
Between them the three partner sites provide a good cross-section of the user profiles and organisational situations to be found in higher education institutions: postgraduates and undergraduates, fulltime and part-time students, single-site and multi-site operations.
In keeping with the aims of the Hybrid Libraries programme, the project will present to the user a wide range of library resources regardless of physical form, via a common Web-based interface.
Whether the information is contained in a networked CD-ROM, in an electronic journal accessed over the Internet, or in a book on the library shelf, should become irrelevant to the library user.
Information delivery will be provided in a variety of formats, ranging from electronic to print to conventional ILL or order process.
The subject areas covered will be economics, finance, business and management.
The HeadLine model for the hybrid library is user-centred with a user-dependent managed environment as a fundamental part of the project design.
The system will have access (via the login process) to the user’s administrative details such as status, subject area and registered courses,and will use this information to provide a tailored and supportive environment.
The system will retain feedback from the user’s actions, providing a mechanism for the user profile to develop with time.
The resources to which the user will have access will be wide-ranging and will include, for example: local course-related materials; catalogues (local consortium catalogues, M25, clumps via Z39.50, COPAC etc); primary sources (electronic journals, DECOMATE, locally digitised materials); Secondary sources (BIDS, IBSS, ECONLit, SOSIG, Biz/Ed); Current awareness services; Commercial intermediaries (subscription agents services, FT Profile etc); Financial datasets; Government information; Real time data services (newswires, financial markets data).
These data sources use a variety of access media and delivery methods, ranging from proprietary Windows interfaces to Web-based products and comprise numeric, graphical, bibliographic and full-text formats.
This both creates opportunities in terms of the richness of the resource base and poses a number of interesting technical, copyright and licensing problems for the project team to solve.
The resource database will manage individual resource access control data such as user ID and password and will support the dynamic creation of HTML pages incorporating Dublin Core meta tags.
Key enabling protocols for the HeadLine hybrid library model will include the network protocols TCP/IP and HTTP, complemented by the search protocol Z39.50.
The project will also investigate the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) as an aid to document retrieval.
An early task for the project team will be the development of mechanisms for incorporating user feedback and evaluation in the design, content and delivery of the service.
Another key task will be exploration of the licensing and copyright issues involved in providing access to the broad range of hybrid library materials.
Results and progress will be disseminated throughout the project via the HeadLine Web site (http://www.lse.ac.uk/blpes/headline.shtml) As prototype components of the system become available for online testing, “guest” access will be provided subject to any copyright restrictions.
Author Details Maureen Wade Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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COPAC: The New Nationally Accessible Union Catalogue Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines COPAC: The New Nationally Accessible Union Catalogue Buzz data software database tagging browser cataloguing opac z39.50 passwords marc copac telnet algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Shirley Cousins introduces COPAC and discusses some of the issues involved in the ongoing development of a consolidated union OPAC.
1.
Introduction COPAC is a new consolidated union catalogue which provides free access to a database of records provided by members of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL).
The CURL database has been in existence since 1987, permitting record exchange between member libraries and providing a reference service to library staff, and it has long been felt that the database would be of value to the wider academic community.
COPAC is the product of a JISC funded project to make the CURL database accessible to the research community as a whole.
COPAC was launched in April 1996.
Initially a Text interface was provided, with a Web interface being introduced shortly afterwards.
The project was working to a very tight schedule so it was decided to produce a basic system which worked well, rather than try anything too ambitious in the early stages.
If the user feedback on the early system is anything to go by, then the project team achieved this goal, as the general response to COPAC has been very positive, the major complaint relating to the desire for records from more libraries to be included in the database.
2.
The data The COPAC database contains the records from the main online library catalogues of: Cambridge University Edinburgh University Glasgow University Leeds University Oxford University Trinity College Dublin The records from a further fourteen member libraries will be added in due course, with the possibility of records from more libraries to be added in the future.
Obviously, the presence of records from many libraries results in considerable record duplication which is extremely undesirable in an end-user system.
To overcome this problem, record matching and consolidation routines are employed to eliminate as much duplication as possible.
This results in the production of consolidated records which provide merged bibliographic details alongside individual library holdings, where the latter are available.
Matching is based on two relatively simple algorithms.
Initial matches are identified using ISBN or ISSN, or author/title 4⁄4 keys and date (eg.
Tolk/Lord,1990 = Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, 1990).
These potential matches are then verified using a number of additional field comparisons.
This approach has resulted in considerable success in matching duplicate records, reducing database size from c. 5.5 million to c. 3.5 million records.
Inevitably there have been problems with the duplicate detection process.
Cataloguing variations between libraries, changes in cataloguing standards over time, and data errors, all mean that for some records automatic duplicate matching is not possible.
Human intervention would undoubtedly identify further duplicates, but the project does not have the resources for this type of editorial control and some duplication will remain.
If the matching criteria were made more liberal then it would be possible to increase the number of duplicates detected, but this would also result in the incorrect matching of records.
The presence of some duplicate records is preferable to misleading consolidation, so the matching mechanism is designed to err on the side of caution [1].
The resulting consolidated record is illustrated in fig 1, which shows a record produced by the merger of two records originating from Dublin and Cambridge.
Main Author: Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892-1973 Title details: The hobbit, or, There and back again / [by] J.R.R.
Tolkien ; illustrated by the author Publisher: London [etc.]
: Unwin Paperbacks, 1979 Physical Desc.
: 287p : ill, maps ; 18cm, Pbk ISBN/ISSN: 0048231541 Notes: This ed.
originally published: 1975 Subject(s): Children’s stories in English, 1900Texts Document Type: Fiction Language: English Local Holdings: Cambridge contact Cambridge University Library ; 9720.d.6196, 1990.7.3859 (unbound copy); Dublin Trinity College Library ; PB18-634, PB32-260; Fig.
1.
Example of consolidated record.
3.
The COPAC interfaces COPAC is accessible using both a Text Interface and Web Interface to ensure it is available to as many potential users as possible.
The principle underlying COPAC interface design has been to keep the user interaction as simple as possible, whilst providing behind the scenes support for the search process.
Both interfaces utilise the same basic approach, a mix of form filling and menu choices.
However, there are differences as the Text interface offers a wider range of facilities.
These differences arise from the way in which the interfaces were produced.
The Text interface was written in-house, giving us considerable control over its appearance and functionality.
In contrast, time constraints made it necessary to produce the Web interface using commercial software.
Inevitably, this is not tailored to the requirements of a specific service and it has been impossible to provide all the facilities which we would like to introduce.
We are waiting for the delayed release of the next version of the software to investigate whether this will permit us to add some of the missing features.
The COPAC main menu offers three search options, author/title, periodical and subject search.
Limiting the number of menu options helps to reduce the amount of decision making which the user has to make at this early stage of the search.
When a menu option is chosen the user is presented with a form containing labelled fields into which search terms may be entered.
The search logs have recorded a few users who obviously felt that search terms must be entered into every field, but this is very uncommon and as a rule there appears to be no difficulty with this approach.
The search form for the Author/Title search on the Web interface is illustrated in fig 2.
Fig 2.
The Author/Title search form on the COPAC Web interface Alongside the search forms, menus offer the user a range of choices, for example different display formats.
The two main facilities which are exclusive to the Text interface are the ability to tag and download records.
Tagging can be used for selective display of full records from a retrieved set, as well as for selective downloading of records via email.
Downloading is obviously possible in the Web interface using a browser’s own facilities, but this means full records can only be downloaded singly as they display one to a page.
4.
Retrieval mechanism The initial retrieval mechanism used in COPAC was the automatic combination of search terms using Boolean AND.
This has an obvious disadvantage.
Boolean AND reduces search set size and when working with the limited amount of text available in an OPAC record this can mean reducing the set to zero.
Indeed, the search logs indicate that there are significant numbers of searches which fail to retrieve any records.
At the other extreme, some users enter very general search terms which retrieve large numbers of records.
Both these situations are being addressed in retrieval mechanism developments in the Text interface, and will be reflected in the Web interface in due course.
4.1 Increasing search results Some users will obtain a zero result in response to a search simply because the database does not contain the required document.
However, in many other cases the search may fail for reasons such as spelling errors (by either user or cataloguer), mistakes in remembering the correct document details for a known item search, and typing in a subject which is more detailed than the subject information available in the records.
4.1.1 Word lists COPAC does not use a spell-checker, but an attempt has been made to handle title words unrecognised by the system.
Any word which is not in the index results in the user being offered the opportunity to browse a word list.
The unrecognised search word is truncated to the first five characters and all matching words displayed, as illustrated in fig.
3.
The user may select one or more words from the list to incorporate into the search.
These new terms are combined automatically using Boolean OR.
Fig.
3.
An example of the Word List.
Obviously, there are occasions where the user makes a spelling mistake in such a way that no words are found in the index which match the word stem eg.
‘Bronte’ entered as ‘Brnte’.
Even so the act of drawing attention to the unknown word should increase the likelihood that the user will identify and correct a mistake.
4.1.2 Tree searching Many searches fail, not because of spelling errors, but because the user has failed to match the wording used in the records representing relevant materials.
A different approach is required in these cases.
To try to improve search success tree searching [2] has been introduced into the title field search and is due to be incorporated into subject field and multi-field searching shortly.
Tree searching allows the selective implementation of successively broader search definitions in order to maximise retrieval results.
This first involves the use of phrase and keyword searching to form an initial result set.
If this fails to achieve a threshold number of records then additional search procedures are brought into play, such as dropping the search term with the highest number of postings in the database or dropping one element of a multi-field search.
For example, users sometimes enter information in several fields in addition to entering an ISBN.
Where the ISBN element fails the search could continue with the remaining elements.
Tree searching has a further benefit as it permits the ranking of retrieved records on the basis of likely relevance.
This makes it easier to review a set of retrieved records, as the user can stop browsing when the relevance of the records appears to be declining.
Obviously, the user who enters correctly the title of a novel is unlikely to benefit from this type of search enhancement, as the search should be quite precise and any additional materials retrieved through the tree-search will probably not be relevant.
However, the tree-search should not be detrimental to such a search, as tests indicate that the required document should occur at the top of the ranked list.
In other circumstances the tree-search can produce some very useful results.
For example, where the title is being used for subject searching or where an error has been made by cataloguer or user when entering document details.
The possibility of making some elements of the search tree optional is being considered.
This would give the user greater control over the way the search is conducted, but would have the disadvantage of complicating the user interaction and slowing the overall search time.
4.2 Search refinement Just because a user finds records in response to a query the search cannot necessarily be defined as a success.
Some users retrieve hundreds, or even thousands, of records by entering a very general query statement, whilst others find that most of the records retrieved are not a good reflection of the real search requirement.
Interestingly, tree-searching can provide some support for the user who finds large numbers of records.
Although a large record set retrieved using tree-searching will probably be the same as would be found using Boolean AND, the records will be ranked in order of likely relevance.
Whilst this may not always be useful, tests suggest that in many cases it results in a much more helpful ordering of retrieved material than can be achieved by, for example, an author and title sort mechanism.
In the future, mechanisms for relevance feedback and search refinement will be considered to enable COPAC to support users who are retrieving large record sets.
However, it is important to ensure that in trying to provide user support the interface is not becoming so complicated that it results in a significant reduction in the ease of use of the system.
5.
Further developments 5.1 Inter-Library Loans The ability for a researcher to order an inter-library loan (ILL) via COPAC would add considerable value to the service, and this is a feature in which users have expressed interest.
A review of ILL and document delivery issues has been conducted, and the results are currently under consideration by the CURL libraries.
Initially any such service would concentrate on the lending of returnable materials, whilst document delivery of photocopies etc.
might also be a possibility at a later date.
In the meantime, during 1997 a trial ILL service will be established between a selection of CURL and non-CURL libraries.
This will be available only to library staff, using COPAC to mediate ILL requests via email.
Its main purpose is to examine some of the organisational and economic issues associated with the establishment of an ILL service.
Links will also be developed with relevant eLib projects to ensure that work on the technical aspects of an ILL and document delivery service is not duplicated.
5.2 Z39.50 A COPAC Z39.50 target is under active development and a test version is available [3].
This is still in its early stages and we would appreciate feedback from searchers on both success and failure when accessing COPAC by this route.
It should be emphasised that it is not possible to display MARC records from COPAC, so some Z39.50 origins will fail as they will only handle MARC records.
Longer term development is likely to include production of a COPAC Z39.50 origin.
This would be designed to act as a Web/Z gateway and would make it easier to provide the user who accesses COPAC via the Web with the same functionality as that provided in the Text interface.
In addition the COPAC Z39.50 origin could provide links to other catalogues and information services of potential interest to the researcher.
6.
Summary COPAC is a union catalogue providing free end-user access to the online catalogues of some of the largest research libraries in the UK and Ireland.
It is intended that, in time, all CURL member libraries will provide their catalogue data for inclusion into COPAC.
Obtaining records from such a range of libraries obviously brings with it the problem of record duplication within the COPAC database.
Duplicate matching and record consolidation procedures have been implemented to minimise this problem, but some duplicates will remain as there is no human editorial input into this process.
COPAC is accessible via two easy to use interfaces: a Web interface [4] and a Text interface [5].
To enhance search results a variety of mechanisms are being considered, with word lists and tree searching currently being introduced in the Text Interface.
Z39.50 offers the possibility of providing another means of accessing COPAC and a test target is already available.
A significant development for the longer time may be the introduction of ILL facilities mediated by COPAC.
This is currently being considered by the CURL libraries, and mechanisms for supporting such a service are being examined.
References A more detailed description of the consolidation process is available in: S.A. Cousins, COPAC: the CURL OPAC., Program 31(1) 1997, 1-21.
The use of search trees was first discussed in relation to the Okapi project: N.N.
Mitev, G.M.Venner & S. Walker, Designing an online public access catalogue: Okapi, a catalogue on a local area network.
Library and Information Research Report 39.
London: British Library, 1985.
COPAC’s Z39.50 target; details of the test version of the COPAC Z39.50 target, http://copac.ac.uk/~zzaascs/z39.50.html COPAC Web Interface, http://copac.ac.uk/copac/ COPAC Telnet Interface, telnet copac.ac.uk, use username and password copac Author Details Shirley Cousins OPAC developer, COPAC Project.
Email: copac@mcc.ac.uk COPAC is based at Manchester Computing, University of Manchester Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CLIC: An Electronic Chemistry Journal Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CLIC: An Electronic Chemistry Journal Buzz data algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS CLIC is a project from the Electronic Journals area of the Electronic Libraries Programme.
Henry Rzepa, from the Chemistry Department at Imperial College, explains the need for journals in the field of Chemistry that use leading edge technology for molecular information storage, retrieval and manipulation.
Chemistry is one of the most visual and "three dimensional" of sciences.
For many generations, communication of the subject has been rooted on the printed pages of chemical journals, with even colour a rare event.
Partially because of such limitations, the subject has evolved a complex and arcane symbolism for its written representation.
The complexities of this "chemical nomenclature" in turn result in substantial risk of the propagation of errors and misinterpretation of results.
A refereeing system exists to catch both errors of science and transcription errors, but the reality is that referees have few "tools" to assist them to catch errors on the printed page other than then own eyes and minds!
To illustrate how important this can be, consider the antimalerial drug halofantrin.
It can have two so called chiral forms, known as R and S. This molecule also has a very unusual way of interacting with itself ("self-associating") that directly impinges on the method used to separate these two forms (using a process known as chiral separation chromatography).
The difference between the R and S forms and how they can be chromatographically separated can only be understood if the chemical structure of the molecule is considered in three dimensions.
It takes a highly experienced and confident chemist to translate the diagram shown here, together with the R/S symbolic notation, into the laboratory synthesis of a safe pharmaceutical product.
On the printed page, all that can be shown is a two dimensional image taken from one particular perspective view of this molecule.
However, in this view, the user cannot rotate or inspect the molecule themselves, and obscured aspects will be hidden.
Modern chemistry is often concerned with systems which might be one hundred times larger and more complex, and the reader may also wish to acquire say detailed toxicology or synthesis data, spectral and instrumental information, accurate three dimensional coordinates for the molecule determined from x-ray crystallography, the structures of a few dozen analogues, details of any enzymes involved in metabolic pathways, mathematical algorithms that describe the molecular properties, and theoretical models which might describe the mechanisms of its behaviour.
Most importantly, the reader will also wish to acquire all this information without any risk of transcription errors, in an instantly usable form for further processing by computer.
The CLIC consortium comprises groups in three university chemistry departments (Imperial College, Leeds and Cambridge Universities) and a learned society (The Royal Society of Chemistry) whose basic aim is to create an electronic chemistry journal ("Chemical Commuinications") that will provide such information to the reader, with what might be called "semantic integrity" and accuracy of the information.
We even envisage providing mechanisms for readers to comment on the individual articles, and thus to interact with the original authors.
To this extent, this aim differs from some other electronic journals, where the paramount objective is to achieve what is called "page integrity" with the original printed version.
Whilst semantic and page integrity are not necessarily exclusive, to achieve both requires significant extra effort in storing the basic content of the journal, and its presentation to the user.
Thus the CLIC project will concentrate on developing standards for storing, transmitting, displaying and applying molecular information.
Not the least task is educating the audience to actively participate in this method of information retrieval, and indeed persuading authors to contribute information in the appropriate form in the first place.
The CLIC Journal and ECTOC Conference Projects The production of a journal containing features such as the ones illustrated above is already under way.
In order to find out whether a general chemistry audience was receptive to such themes, we also carried out a smaller scale pilot project known as the ECTOC conference.
The comments received from the "virtual" delegates were highly positive and indeed the planning for the second ECTOC conference is already well under way.
The reception given to these conferences has encouraged us to believe we are indeed heading towards a new form of research tool in which collaboration and information come together in a single integrated environment for the benefit of the scientist.
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ESPERE Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ESPERE Buzz software graphics adobe research Citation BibTex RIS Dee Wood reports on the Electronic Submission and Peer Review Project.
The ESPERE project (Electronic Submission and Peer Review) [1] started in April 1996 and we have recently completed the research phase.
The project is lead jointly by the University of Ulster and the Society for Endocrinology and has seven Learned Society partners.
The project focuses on the electronic peer review of papers submitted to UK learned society publishers, initially in the biomedical area.
The aim is to achieve an introductory level of article submission and peer review by transfer of a file which includes all the figures and tables applicable to the paper.
Attitudes to electronic peer review One of the key elements in the success of this project is the readiness, or otherwise, of authors, referees and learned society publishers to adopt an electronic system.
The advantages and disadvantages of electronic submission are being assessed and the project is examining the attitudes of academics and publishers to these developments in order to determine whether the system would be acceptable for widespread use.
We have interviewed editorial staff from seven learned society publishers: the British Institute of Radiology, BMJ Publishing Group, CABI INTERNATIONAL, Society for Endocrinology, Society for General Microbiology, and The Royal Society.
As a result we have learned a great deal about how they currently manage the peer review process and their view of future possible systems.
A questionnaire was sent to 200 biomedical authors, one focus group has been held and an authors' group has been established to provide trial material and feedback to the project.
Authors are genuinely enthusiastic about the idea with 63% being interested in submitting electronically and 70% prepared to accept papers for review by this method.
File formats There are two issues, technically speaking, which have to be resolved.
: what file format is most suitable and how should the file be transmitted.
The most common file format used by the biomedical authors surveyed is Microsoft Word although a wide variety of graphics packages are used.
We think that it may be possible to accept Word, postscript or PDF files with graphics embedded and perhaps a limited range of graphics files.
For refereeing, we have decided on Adobe Acrobat as the most appropriate format for the moment.
20% of the authors in our survey had installed the Adobe Acrobat Reader and another 16% had heard about it.
If files are to be sent to referees all over the world a portable format such as Adobe PDF is essential.
Another advantage is that the file can be made reasonably secure.
Some initial experiments using actual material has shown that it is possibly to transfer some of the more difficult graphics such as gel diffusion results successfully to PDF.
Transmission of the files Experience with email attachments leads us to think that this method is probably unsuitable at the moment, until email software becomes more standardised and use-friendly.
We are looking into the possibility of using Web pages as the main user-interface for authors and referees and providing a user-friendly upload facility for files.
This development also makes it possible to experiment with group refereeing of papers.
We hope to launch a limited number of pilot systems in the summer of 1997.
A trial system will first be developed on a server at Nottingham University and if successful this will be transferred to one or possibly more of the publishers sites.
References [1] ESPERE Web Site, http://www.ulst.ac.uk/espere/  Author Details Dee Wood is the ESPERE Project Manager Email: dwood@salixedu.demon.co.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Wire: Interview with Jasper Tredgold Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Interview with Jasper Tredgold Buzz data mobile software java html database browser cache perl Citation BibTex RIS Jasper Tredgold is put under the virtual spotlight to answer a few questions via email.
What do you do in the world of networking/libraries/WWW?
I provide technical support for the SOSIG project and a few other web services.
... and how did you get into this area?
I think I am the rare case of someone who got a job via a training course for the unemployed.
On this course I learnt a bit of COBOL (!)
and C on old 386s and then, highly trained, got a placement here, at Bristol university.
I started out programming with toolbook and then got a job working on SOSIG and doing PC support for the department.
Since then I've learnt a lot about Unix and fitting hard disks!
... so what exactly do you do on SOSIG?
I have to do some tweaking and testing of ROADS, which SOSIG uses to provide its searchable database, since it is being continuously developed.
We also have a couple of Unix machines which I help look after, running the web servers, installing stuff, administering users, etc.
I also write some perl scripts, cgi scripts, look after the statistics and am generally on hand when things don't work quite as they should (there's always something that needs fixing or does after I've 'fixed' it).
What was your reaction to the Web when you encountered it for the first time (and when was this)?
I thought it was like a big electronic sunday supplement lots of stuff but nothing you really need.
You spend more time turning pages than reading them.
But this was early 95 when I wasn't working the web.
Since then my opinion has changed somewhat.
There's still a lot of junk but the useful stuff I have found (and am still finding) after much page turning more than makes up for it.
And its potential has obviously yet to be fully realised.
How significant an impact do you think that mobile code, such as Java applets, will have on the development of the Web as an information resource?
It's going to have a big impact undoubtedly, but the way information distributed all over the world can be accessed from one point is, I think, more significant for this aspect of web development and this happens already.
One of the most frequent complaints from UK Web users is the slow speed of accessing some Web sites, especially those held in the US during times of high network traffic.
What, if anything, should be done (and by whom) to alleviate this problem?
Are caching and mirroring the answer (and if so, how should these approaches best be deployed, locally, nationally and/or internationally)?
I think caching and mirroring are clearly important and should be used together in reducing the load on the web More national mirror sites of the netscapes and microsofts of this world would leave the caches for the smaller players, though I wonder if the increasing interactivity and security features of web sites isn't going to trouble caching services.
For our bit, we are mirroring SOSIG in the US and looking at running some sort of subject-based caching service for our users... And I'm all in favour of pretty pictures but some of the gifs I have seen must devour the bandwidth!
Any thoughts on the future of subject gateways/subject gateway technology?
They obviously have much to offer specific groups of users over the general search engines, especially as the web keeps growing, in that much of the quality/relevence filtering has been done already.
I'm sure we've all been put off by 20 pages of altavista results.
By the same token though the size of the job of maintaining a gateway's database grows with the size of the web.
That's where the automated robots have the upper hand.
I think there could be advantages in a combination of human quality control and software web trawling .
HTML standards/markup.
Some people produce strict HTML2 code, that works on nearly all browsers; some produce validated code that includes tables, that works on some browsers; some produce Web pages that are only legible in Netscape, or Internet Explorer, and so on.
Where do you draw the line with any pages you produce [alternately, if you don't have style/standards control, which would you prefer people to use].
I'm all for standards they mean you can work without worrying about how to get things to work.
Most of the PC side of my job seems to be little battles with compatibility.
So I think it's a shame microsoft and netscape have been able to run away with things as far as HTML goes I'm glad they're developing good browsers and a lot of their additions are useful but it'd be nice if these sort of developments were decided by agreement rather than who packs the biggest punch.
Having said that I don't do a lot of HTML so perhaps I'm not the best to comment I think I've just about managed one table in my time.
We do provide lynx on sosig though so we try to make our pages viewable in that.
Electronic Commerce; significant numbers of Web users, especially in the US, buy goods and services through the Web.
With the current state of data protection/encryption, would you feel comfortable in sending your credit card number to a company or service through your Web browser?
If I had one, no!
What would you like to see happen in the field of the World Wide Web in 1996/97?
More widespread access which is affordable.
I like the potential for information sharing and communication and the sooner it includes a wider audience the better.
I think that selling and secure transactions will be centre-stage though I guess that's inevitable not that we haven't got enough ways to buy things already....
Advertisers to decide the web's not worth the bother after all...the government to realise it's too valuable to be left to the whims of business... And the web to be the first to carry the news of the Tories' demise!
Ah well, I can dream… Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sociological Research Online: Web-based Journal for the Social Sciences Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sociological Research Online: Web-based Journal for the Social Sciences Buzz data software research Citation BibTex RIS Nigel Gilbert describes Sociological Research Online, a project from the Electronic Journals section of the Electronic Libraries Programme.
SocResOnline is a (free) Web-based journal for people involved in Sociology and Sociology-related fields; it contains refereed articles, a substantial number of reviews and debating forums.
Sociological Research Online is a new international journal which promotes rapid communication among sociologists.
The first issue was published at the end of March 1996.
The journal features high quality applied sociology, focusing on theoretical, empirical and methodological discussions which engage with current political, cultural and intellectual topics and debates.
The journal brings together peer-reviewed articles and debates concerned with the application of sociological forms of analysis to a wide range of public issues and private concerns, with the intention of demonstrating the wide social relevance of sociological research and theory to contemporary social issues.
All submissions are fully refereed in the usual way according to the standards of leading international journals.
The first issue includes five articles on a variety of sociological topics: Evaluating an empowering research strategy: Reflections on action-research with South Asian Women (Alison Bowes) Theoretical considerations in cross-national employment research (Jacqueline O'Reilly) 'Refuse of all classes?'
Social indicators and social deprivation (Geoff Payne, Judy Payne) Qualitative data analysis: Technologies and representations (Amanda Coffey, Beverley Holbrook, Paul Atkinson) Has funding made a difference to research methods?
(Jennifer Platt) Sociological Research Online also includes a section reviewing the latest books and software.
The aim is for Sociological Research Online to make effective use of the new opportunities for interactive comment and debate made available by the growth of the Internet.
In the Symposia attached to each issue, readers are able to discuss and debate articles, issues and longer-standing sociological concerns.
The Symposia will be moderated and will include: Forums around the articles and debates A Standing Conference to discuss issues of wider sociological concern about electronic writing, publishing and communicating in sociology A Women's Salon designed to encourage and support women's involvement in electronic publishing.
Sociological Research Online will be indexed and abstracted in both print and electronic journals and bibliographical searching tools.
The journal is organizing a series of training workshops through SocInfo about the use of electronic journals.
These will take place at monthly intervals from April 1996 in universities around the UK and seek to interest sociologists in the use of the World Wide Web.
Sociological Research Online is edited by Martin Bulmer (University of Surrey) and Liz Stanley (University of Manchester), with Victoria Alexander (University of Surrey) and Sue Heath (University of Manchester) as Review Editors, assisted by a distinguished Editorial Board and International Correspondents drawn from throughout the world.
The establishment of the journal is being supported by the Joint Information Systems Committee's Electronic Libraries Programme.
It is managed by a consortium of the Universities of Surrey and Stirling, the British Sociological Association and SAGE Publications, through a Management Board chaired by Nigel Gilbert (University of Surrey).
Further information about the journal and the training programme can be obtained from Stuart Peters (University of Surrey), the journal's editorial and IT officer (email: socres@soc.surrey.ac.uk).
The journal can be found at: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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British Academy Symposium: Information Technology and Scholarly Disciplines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines British Academy Symposium: Information Technology and Scholarly Disciplines Buzz preservation research Citation BibTex RIS Seamus Ross provides the programme for a symposium which seeks to explore how information technology has affected research in the humanities and social sciences.
The aim of the symposium is to explore how information technology has affected research in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in terms of the topics chosen and the way they are are approached – in other words, whether there has been a paradigm shift, and, if so, what its characteristics are.
This question will be examined by reference to research in individual disciplines, particularly as illustrated by the work of each speaker.
A timetable follows.
Each contribution will be given a slot of 45 minutes, of which 30 minutes only is intended for the main presentation: the remaining time will be for comment, questions and discussion.
Because of the size of the conference rooms available, numbers are limited, and places will be assigned according to the principle ‘first come, first served’.
Preference will be given to those who wish to attend both days.
The cost is £30 for the two days, to include tea, coffee, lunch with wine each day, as well as a reception on Friday evening.
A daily rate of £20 is available.
There are, incidentally, a number of places reserved for 20 graduate students at the reduced charge of £20 for two days (or £15 per day).
Enquiries and applications for places, including cheques made payable to the British Academy, should be sent to Rosemary Lambeth at the British Academy, 20-21 Cornwall Terrace, London NW1 4QP   British Academy Symposium: Information Technology and Scholarly Disciplines Friday 18 and Saturday 19 October 1996 DAY ONE: FRIDAY 18 OCTOBER 9.30 am Opening remarks: Professor Terry Coppock, FBA, Carnegie Trust 9.40 am Sir Anthony Kenny, FBA (University of Oxford): Information Technology in the Humanities 10.10 am Professor S Shennan (University of Southampton): Information Technology in Archaeology: lively but irrelevant?
Commentator: Professor Richard Bradley, FBA (University of Reading) 10.50 am Dr M D Fischer (University of Kent at Canterbury): Computer-aided visual anthropology in the field Commentator: Dr M.T.
Bravo (University of Manchester) 11.50 am Professor William Vaughan (Birkbeck College, University of London) History of Art and the digital image Commentator: Professor E C Fernie (Courtauld Institute of Art) 12.30 pm Dr Alan Marsden (Queen’s University, Belfast): Computers and the concept of tonality Commentator: Dr Ian Cross (University of Cambridge) 2.15 pm Professor R Susskind (Visiting Fellow, University of Strathclyde) Information technology and legal research Commentator: Professor D.N.
MacCormick, FBA (University of Edinburgh) 3.00 pm Ms Holly Sutherland (University of Cambridge): Information technology and the development of economic policy Commentator: Mr Guy Judge (University of Portsmouth) 3.45 pm Professor S Openshaw (University of Leeds): Supercomputing in geographical research Commentator: Dr Andrew D. Cliff, FBA (University of Cambridge) 5.00 pm Professor Richard Beacham (University of Warwick):‘Eke out our performance with your mind’: Reconstructing the theatrical past with the aid of computer simulation Commentator: Professor M.A.
Twycross (University of Lancaster) 5.45 Dr Seamus Ross (British Academy): Preservation and networking in aid of research Commentator: Dr Edward Higgs (University of Exeter) DAY TWO: SATURDAY 19 OCTOBER 9.45 am Professor A G Wilson, FBA (University of Leeds): Information technology and the Social Science.
10.15 am Dr R M Smith, FBA (Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure): Simulating the Past: CAMSIM and its application in demographic and family history Commentator: Professor Richard Blundell (University College London) 11.30 am Professor G N Gilbert (University of Surrey): The simulation of social processes Commentator: Dr Anthony Heath, FBA (Nuffield College, Oxford) 12.15pm Professor R J Morris (University of Edinburgh): Information technology and social history: case studies of a subtle paradigm shift Commentator: Dr Steven Smith (Institute of Historical Research) 2.15 pm Professor J-P Genet (Sorbonne, Paris): Cultural history with a computer: measuring dynamics Commentator: Dr Andrew Prescott (British Library) 3.00 pm Professor Roger Bagnall (Columbia University): Information Technology and the Renewal of Classical Studies 4.15 pm Dr Anne Anderson (University of Glasgow): Information technology and psychology: from cognitive psychology to cognitive engineering Commentator: Dr Charles Crook (Loughborough University) 5.00 Dr K I B Sparck Jones, FBA (University of Cambridge): How much has information technology contributed to linguistics?
Commentator: Dr Henry Thompson (University of Edinburgh) 6.00 Symposium ends Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur Buzz database opac research Citation BibTex RIS In our regular sceptic's column, information nirvana in the form of the Net has not yet reached Ruth Jenkins.
I have been a recreational Internet user for the last five years and when the Web first came along I was extremely impressed.
No more cryptic codes to remember!
Pictures!
The possibilities were endless.
Like many others I extrapolated on the basis of what I had seen and imagined great things.
Some wonderful things have appeared on the Web (the LANL Preprint database and WebElements to name but two), but I now feel rather let down.
Several weaknesses have come to light both through my own use of the Web and some of the comments I have heard from academics.
There are gaps in subject coverage: the Web is great for subjects that have always been very computer oriented or for fields of research which involve transglobal collaboration.
Other subjects are very underrepresented, especially if they involve research of commercial value.
Most articles about how wonderful the Internet is highlight the examples of fields (e.g.
High Energy Physics, Computational Fluid Dynamics) that are actively using the Internet instead of more traditional forms of communication.
The assumption is that academics in other fields will soon catch up but I don’t think that this is necessarily true.
Academics in some fields appear to be showing a great deal of resistance to the Web.
This is not just the people who say, ‘I never use computers’ when you point them in the direction of your OPAC.
Many academics who happily use the Internet for interpersonal communication simply do not take the Web seriously as an information resource.
A common comment seems to be, ‘I might use it at home for fun’.
And while academics in some fields are not reading information on the Web it also means that they are not putting information on it either.
One academic admitted to me that he feels he already receives more information than he can handle and doesn’t want another source.
I suspect that this view is actually quite common.
We shouldn’t be surprised if we get this reaction when we ‘sell’ the Web to academics, because all of our training about information use warned us that most people want ‘the answer’ with a minimum of effort.
Therefore, until using the Web saves people effort elsewhere many will consider it an extra burden.
Accessing material on the Web is getting slower by the week.
This is the number one complaint of the academics I speak to.
When I suggest to them that they try using it before 10am they often look pained.
Even walking to the library seems more attractive!
This also means that my dream of using the Internet to answer reference queries is thwarted.
If the enquirer is standing in front of me or waiting on the other end of the phone, the speed of using a good old fashioned book comes into its own.
Part of this slowness is, of course, because the so-called ‘World-Wide’ Web is dominated by American material.
Some may argue that this problem will be solved when we all have access to SuperJANET.
But I am concerned that SuperJANET, like the M25, will merely cater for the increase in demand that we already have rather than allowing for further increases in demand.
Indeed it may well encourage more bandwidth-hungry projects.
Much of the material on the Web is either mere self publicity or lists-of-lists.
Ideally the latter would only list the good stuff but in practice human beings are completists and most of these lists make no attempt to be selective.
Also, these lists rarely contain guidance about whether it would be worth following the links.
This was not a problem in the days when loading pages was faster and there were fewer links to follow.
But now it is frustrating to wait ages for a page only to find that it is yet another list of links.
And as a librarian, I am horrified by the number of pages that give no indication as to authorship or date of the last update.
Web pages give few enough indicators or context and quality as it is even when these facts are included.
Sometimes it seems to me that the very thing that made the Web so appealing in the first place its easy to write, easy to read format has led to its main faults.
I’m not dismissing the Internet it still appears to have a great deal of potential.
I just think that a small dose of scepticism is a very healthy thing.
This is a transitional phase and the attitudes of academics, plus the other problems may change.
I am hoping that my scepticism will be proved wrong but for now I will wait and see.
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Cataloguing Electronic Sources Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cataloguing Electronic Sources Buzz database metadata accessibility cataloguing opac ejournal telnet url Citation BibTex RIS Jackie Hwang, Team Leader, Bibliographic Services, surveys progress so far at Information Services, University of Birmingham.
We began looking seriously at cataloguing electronic journals early this year.
We already had full listings of the e-journals accessible to our users on our Web Information Services Guide, from which readers could click to the text, but we wished to improve on this by offering access via our Web OPAC.
We identified a number of questions immediately: how to decide what to catalogue, out of the fast-increasing numbers of journals accessible to our users, how to create the cataloguer time necessary to do the work, how to ensure that the work was done to the correct standards, what terms we should use locally on catalogue notes to explain the nature and location of the material being catalogued, and what we should be doing to ensure that material we had carefully catalogued at one url was still there some time later.
Some of these questions were more easily answered than others.
Membership of the OCLC Intercat email list had been invaluable in the preceding months, enabling me to see what problems cataloguers already dealing with this type of material were encountering.
Nancy B. Olson’s Cataloguing internet resources: a manual and practical guide (OCLC, 1995) was easily available through the list, and frequently quoted by contributors to it.
As Talis users, we would also be contributing records to BLCMP’s database, so the other obvious route to producing acceptable catalogue records was to consult BLCMP about their preferences and standards.
We were soon using the documentation supplied by BLCMP to construct a prototype record.
Decisions about what to catalogue have still to be finalised, but it seemed reasonable to begin with material for which we are actually paying.
At this point, the question of how to find cataloguer time became particularly difficult to answer.
We are addressing it by reorganising the allocation of work amongst cataloguers and information assistants.
Three small teams, with staff from each grade, will now be tackling monographs, serials, electronic sources, and other formats in their subject areas, whereas previously all serials work would have been the responsibility of the serials cataloguer.
Clearly, there are increased training requirements here, but the long term gain of being able to share this work amongst a larger number of staff will outweigh them.
The majority of cataloguers also wanted the opportunity to work with the new formats, for interest’s sake and for their professional development.
We have both Web and telnet versions of OPAC available to users at present.
Users of the Web OPAC are able to click straight to the journal from the catalogue record.
The same record displaying on the telnet OPAC shows Electronic Journal as the location of the title, and carries a note explaining how to access it.
We shall have to address the question of monitoring the continued accessibility of material at urls given in our catalogue records, when we extend cataloguing to material other than that purchased.
That is no longer the final question: since we began looking at this fast-developing area, new topics for discussion have inevitably appeared, such as the recent debate about e-journal nomenclature.
We also have a project team looking urgently at the provision of metadata to access other types of electronic sources.
During the first stage, we are simply using the Dublin Core format experimentally on some internally produced documents.
Similar questions to those above have to be addressed, but we see this area as one which will become increasingly important over the next twelve months.
Author details Mrs J.R.Hwang Team Leader, Bibliographic Services Information Services University of Birmingham Edgbaston Birmingham B15 2TT.
W. Mids.
Tel: 0121-414 5814 email: j.r.hwang@bham.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CINE: Cartoon Images for the Network Education (CINE) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CINE: Cartoon Images for the Network Education (CINE) Buzz data browser z39.50 Citation BibTex RIS Frances Blomeley describes the Cartoon Images for the Network Education (CINE) eLib project.
The CINE project, funded under the Electronic Libraries Training and Awareness programme, began in April 1996, and promised: “The approach will consist of short (2-5 minutes) animated sequences, designed to answer very general “how does it work?” questions.
These animations are intended to be entertaining, concise, and informative about fairly broad concepts.
They would use both conventional cartoon character animation as well as more schematic displays showing data lookups, transformations, and the way processes are managed across networks.” Although four months later than planned, three animations meeting that specification, on Z39.50, the World Wide Web, and Text Searching, have now been completed.
Seasoned animators, of both the computer and the pen-and-ink varieties, say “ANIMATION TAKES A LONG TIME.” I had heard this many times before embarking upon CINE.
I nodded my head in acknowledgement, but carried on regardless.
Not until one begins animation in earnest does the magnitude of the exercise, and the profound truth contained in the warning above, really hit home.
At the most basic level, a 5-minute movie will require 4500 frames.
Even allowing for pauses, and phases in which the animation runs slower, the amount of raw artwork required is still formidable.
But animation is not just artwork.
The foundation of an animation is the storyboard.
This is a skeletal version of the entire story, resembling a cartoon strip, with key pictures, dialogue, and approximate timings and scripting notes.
Before the storyboard is constructed, the story itself must be generated.
In order to do this, there must be a stock of ideas centred around the story topic.
So, long before pencil is first put to paper, a long period of thinking and discussion is required: about the subject, about the key elements of that subject, about ways in which those elements may be linked together, and about a setting which will provide a vehicle for those elements and make them into a story.
After that, a different kind of effort is required: producing the drawings which will expand the storyboard into an animation.
At this stage it is essential to decide upon a set of standards for drawing size, colour depth, colour palette, and drawing resolution.
Once the animation machine goes into production, these standards should be adhered to rigidly because variations are difficult or impossible to rectify.
For example, resizing bitmapped drawings will almost invariably reduce the quality of the drawing.
This is not a trivial exercise!
Having reached the stage where drawings have been accumulated and ordered, animation can begin.
In CINE, drawings were imported into the Macromedia Director program.
In addition to providing all the functionality necessary for producing movies, Director has additional utilities for compressing the movies for more economical network transmission, and a WWW browser plug-in (Shockwave) which displays Director movies within a WWW page.
By now, we had diverged from the original storyboards.
Viewing them critically, while cooling off after the frantic heat of meeting the storyboard deadline, it was clear that there was much that could be improved.
But although some sequences were reworked, and we reduced the number of metaphors present, time’s wing’d chariot was heard again, all too soon… So began the laborious task of importing pictures into Director, of sequencing and positioning, of timing, of checking colours, of adding interactive buttons, and of adding text.
The text element, replacing the planned audio narrative and dialogue, was an early admission of defeat.
Without professional actors, and a professional recording studio, voiceovers would detract from, rather than add to, the final product.
We did not have enough time or money to do that job properly: hence the inclusion of subtitles.
After initial compilation of the movies, it was necessary to run through them several times, editing for continuity, timing, alignment, and the general story sense.
Without a deadline, the process of editing could have gone on indefinitely.
Fortunately fortune being relative we had committed ourselves to a public presentation at the JANET User Support Workshop at King’s College London, in September 1997.
So one day in late August the Director programme was closed down for the final time.
I still strongly support the initial reasons for the use of animation in training: movement to hold the attention of the viewer, movement to illustrate the flow of information, and graphical images to represent concepts by analogy.
But it is hard to see how the procedures required could ever become viable for day-to-day production of materials.
This is emphatically not intended to deter other would-be animators!
A summary of what we did and how we did it will be available soon on the CINE WWW site.
So there you have it: the movies are currently undergoing evaluation, and will be made available to the academic community soon afterwards.
Anyone who might be interested in taking part in the evaluation exercise, particularly those involved in training, should contact me at the email address below.
References [1] CINE http://www.kcl.ac.uk/projects/cine Author Details Frances Blomeley King’s College London f.blomeley@kcl.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Survey Results Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Survey Results Buzz digitisation url Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl presents a selection of the comments arising from the first Ariadne readership survey [1].
This article appears in only the Web version of Ariadne.
Here are some concise comments, both plus and minus, regarding Ariadne: What respondents like about Ariadne That on the whole it is written in English rather than technospeak (but with significant lapses).
Thin.
Readable varied, some good intelligent writing information.
Up to date information.
Glossy, some interesting items.
Good production values.
Nice format.
Easy to read.
Up-to-date, informed articles.
A good way to keep up to date/informed about ‘key’ issues.
The coverage.
Excellent idea But haven’t got time to look at or even the print online version at work, so read the print version at home in the evening instead just like an ordinary journal!
Relevant to my job coverage.
Well designed, easily digestible.
Relevance of the articles.
Level/content of the articles.
That it keep me up-to-date with electronic developments in library and information world.
It is lightweight and portable and so can be read on the bus/at home, unlike the Web version.
Its content is relevant but succinct.
Who has time to read Ariadne on the Web (at work)?
Up-to-date.
Well-presented.
Covers a broad spectrum and is lively.
It is brief and keeps me, somewhat up to date with “electronic happenings” which I especially need, not being connected to the network.
Topical, interesting, related to job!
Light-hearted at times.
British view.
The way it is researching the two different versions (print/web) how best to use which.
Concise, current, regular.
Hand information on e-lib projects and odd useful http address.
Crisp, concise articles.
Up-to-date information on variety of topics.
I’d like to read the Web version but print is still more convenient.
There is just enough informative “meat” in it for a tube journey, leavened with touches of humour.
Clear and attractive format.
Good information about Digital Libraries.
Looks good, well-written articles, up-to-date.
I would prefer to read the print version because it looks nice and I can take it home with me also Netscape is too slow on my PC at work.
However, it would be a bit Philistine of me to insist that we pay for something which is available on the Web that’s the whole point, after all.
Good luck.
Professional, informative, understandable.
Sexy, and occasionally (probably unintentionally) erotic.
Improves my awareness.
Informality, cartoons, some articles.
Brevity and up to date.
Problem-solving articles.
The Web version (to “dip in and out”) rather turned the print version (to “plough through”).
Concise coverage.
Lively but sensible balance of style.
It helps to keep me up to date with new developments in Library, Information and Computing activities.
Easy to read and useful.
Very little rubbish.
Short news items.
Forward information, summaries of Elib project.
Thought-provoking main features.
What respondents dislike about Ariadne: Occasional pretentiousness.
John Burnside.
Sideline.
Boring print format.
All columns look alike.
High proportion of waffle.
If it didn’t arrive on my desk I doubt I would seek it out.
It might be nice to have slightly more academic articles.
Looking more at concepts/implications of digitisation of information etc.
Wish web version in print.
Nothing in particular!
Nothing given it is available in print form.
The print version doesn’t publish URLs you have to read the web version for them even if you only want to record them and pass them on to someone else.
Assumes background knowledge.
Trivia + humour/less articles.
I haven’t got time to read things no use to me in my job.
Nothing in particular.
I can’t read the extras in the Web version on the tube (yet) and there is too little time during office hours.
Dominated by librarians who are not always up-to-date on technology available.
I’m a bit serious and not over keen on the more light hearted/chatty articles it’s my problem not yours!
John Burnside.
‘Chatty’ bits.
Waffle articles.
There is too much to read.
Shorter items would be better.
Slips into jargon.
I have to look at it twice in case I miss anything and I don’t like reading long articles on screen.
Nothing!
except why do people insist on daft acronyms for their work?
The shiny paper!
Articles often dry, technical and boring.
Cannot use Internet version as too busy doing my job!
Shiny paper!
References The Ariadne readership survey Web version, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/survey/ Author Details John MacColl Managing Editor, Ariadne project Email: lbajam@tay.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Information Services: A Mission and a Vision Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Information Services: A Mission and a Vision Buzz software framework portfolio usability windows research Citation BibTex RIS Les Watson asks how we use technology in general as part of the learning process, in this extended version of the main article in the print version of Ariadne Through the development of a learning society the government wishes to build a version of UK plc which is a world leader in knowledge production.
Higher Education must have learning at the top of its agenda and information services (IS) have a significant contribution to make in meeting this challenge.
IS refers to support provided through the concerted actions of the Library and Computer Centre or Service.
This does not imply convergence, merger or integration, but it does mean that both units have to work in active partnership in supporting users.
Many articles on Information Services begin by referring to the pressure for change, coming from the increased availability of C&IT systems, more students, greater student diversity, and a reduced unit of resource.
It is important that Information Services management in such turbulent times clearly articulates a purpose and helps staff to see a ‘picture’ of the future and their place in it.
The development of a strategy around a clear purpose must be cognisant of both internal culture and the external environment.
The internal culture of the institution will include the generic aspects mentioned above and other factors specific to individual universities.
These factors include how individual universities view and manage their portfolio of activities.
Some clearly identify themselves as research organisations, others as teaching ones, and more recently several have adopted an explicit focus on learning.
The internal institutional culture must set the climate for Information Services strategy if it is to be acceptable in the institutional context.
An institutional focus on learning provides a common thread between the activities of teaching, research, and scholarship.
Information Services have a great deal to contribute to learning and can be at the centre of institutional learning strategy.
Imagine you have some minor ailment and visit the doctor, who gives a short general talk on the current state of ill health in society and concludes by informing all present that today’s remedy is paracetamol.
It is unlikely that you would be happy with such treatment, which makes no specific diagnosis of your need.
This is obviously not a good way to run a public health service.
How strange that we have run, and often still run, an educational system that operates, at least partly, in this fashion i.e.
administering the medicine to all patients regardless of whether they are ill or not, with no reference to their individual needs.
You may have heard it said that “teaching is one way of causing learning, but for many learners it is largely ineffective”.
For some recipients of teaching it may be that the result is sound and useful learning, but we need to do other things as well if all students are to learn effectively.
Apart from a few universities that operate a £35 million tutorial system the approach that higher education appears to take to learning is a didactic one.
Learning, or knowledge acquired by study, does go on in universities: but it is teaching on which the structures and systems of universities focus.
To suggest that there is any divide between learning and teaching is unhelpful and divisive.
There is clearly some common ground between these two activities.
The division is more an issue of perspective.
The business of universities is concerned with the activities of both teachers and learners.
These activities include research: the systematic investigation into and study of materials, sources and so on, in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.
But establishing facts and reaching what are, for them, new conclusions is what all learners do, at the personal level, when they engage in study.
Dearing commented on another HE activity, that of scholarship, which might be described as academic achievement or high level learning.
By definition this is also a learning activity.
The thread which runs through teaching, research, and scholarship is that of learning and study: the acquisition of information or knowledge, especially from books.
My conclusion, therefore, is that learning, which encompasses research and scholarship, is the core business of a university.
Information, because it feeds knowledge and understanding, is more important than the technologies (communications and information technology (C&IT) post Dearing) which handle it.
For information to have value it has to be transformed into knowledge.
Universities have always been knowledge based organisations in a basic sense.
There is now a new awareness of the importance and value of information, not confined to universities, and partly prompted by the work of JISC on Information Strategy.
There is a new awareness in business in general that employee knowledge is the organisation’s primary asset, and this increases the status of those who know how to manage knowledge.
Almost every month there is a new report or government paper on some aspect of education.
The Dearing and Kennedy reports, the Stevenson and Mckinsey reports and Connecting the Learning Society are just a few examples.
Most of these publications have something to say about education in general, lifelong learning in particular, and the increasingly important impact of C&IT on education.
What is clear is the intention to develop a nation of lifelong learners.
The aspiration is a national culture where learners are individuals and the opportunity to learn is a right which is not time bound.
Dearing highlights the increasing importance of C&IT as a vehicle for learning and suggests that senior HE managers need a deep understanding of C&IT.
Whilst C&IT is an important force in the development of learning and of institutions themselves, it must be acknowledged that we have made a mess of using C&IT.
Information Technology has been used in education for over 20 years.
It is arguable that most of the success has come from IT use in primary schools.
It is no coincidence that the Microelectronics Programme Primary Project in the late 1980s was an education and human focused programme of staff development for trainers in the use of C&IT in the classroom.
The human and pedagogical issues related to the use of C+IT in learning, and effective management for that matter, are more important than the technological diversions that HE has pursued over the past 10 years.
The barrier to effective implementation of C&IT in the adoption of new approaches to learning and the effective use of C&IT in management is the lack of an appropriate human resource development strategy.
This is a national issue affecting all phases of education.
IS skills and knowledge closely match institutional needs in the current climate.
Despite concerns and fears about the future there exist some opportunities.
Effective use of information technology presents an opportunity to improve the way any business is conducted, and in HE it affects the management of the business and the primary activity of learning.
Information services contribute to institutional development through the activities of information management, information technology and learning support.
At the intersections of these areas are the signposts to the most valuable skill blends for the future.
Many IS staff have good skills as information managers and also as information technologists.
However, staff who position themselves at the junctions of information management, C&IT, and most crucially learning development will be best placed to make the most significant future contribution.
They will need an understanding of information based activities, including C&IT, combined with a knowledge of, and active involvement in, student learning.
Despite the evolution of mice, windows, and pointer systems computers still present a usability barrier to the novice.
The hardware and software producers have failed users by continuing to mystify the operation of machines.
Basic C&IT skilling is analogous to learning to form letters in early writing and should aim to provide a gateway to higher use of the technology for composition and editing just as letter formation provides the gateway to written composition.
There is, however, a danger that access to computer systems dictated by a certain level of skilling becomes the end rather than the means.
In an article entitled “Computer Delusion” Tod Oppenheim notes that “In a poll taken early last year teachers ranked computer skills and media technology as more “essential” than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, and physics; than dealing with social problems such as drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical job skills; and than reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway or classic ones such as Plato and Shakespeare”.
The parallel in the university information service seems to be the preoccupation with learning a particular version of word processing and then retraining when the next version is released.
An analogy that springs to mind is stumbling around in the dark with a penlight torch.
This enables the exploration of detail but does not help with the overview.
Make sure that any C&IT training you undertake has all the lights on and that you can get to grips with the concepts rather than dive into the detail at the outset and never see the bigger picture.
The other end of the spectrum from the didactic approach mentioned earlier is a constructivist approach to learning.
Constructivists believe that, through their activities, learners develop personal constructs relating to the world about them, including the information in that world as well as the physical entities.
This constructivist view of education has its early roots in the work of Piaget ( 1979) and has been developed by Vygotsky (ed.Wertsch, 1985) to take account of learners’ current understanding in developing their conceptual frameworks.There is much current interest in constructivist approaches to learning, especially in relation to the effective deployment of C&IT in learning.
In particular, research has focused on the examination of learners’ current understanding, or alternative constructs, as a way of appreciating the range of commonly held existing ideas and explanations of phenomena.
By adapting to the learners’ current constructs the constructivist approach attempts to develop the learners’ understanding starting from where they are and intervening appropriately, rather than imposing a conceptual framework which is unconnected to current understanding.
Awareness of where people are coming from and helping them develop their individual capacities are mainstream activities for IS staff who work closely with users.
Clearly supporting learners does not mean telling learners: it means listening, questioning and guiding.
These are all key skills possessed by many staff in information services.
The opportunity is for the information professional of today to be the learning professional of tomorrow and be involved in implementing and developing the core activity of the institution.
Information, C&IT, and learning are vital areas of development.
The challenge for the individual is to identify their purpose in relation to Information Services and institutional strategy, and choose an appropriate course of self development.
References Oppenheim, T: Computer delusion in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1997 http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jul/computer.htm Boden, M.A.
(1979) Piaget.
Fontana Wertsch, J.V.
(ed) (1965) Culture, communication and cognition: Vygotskian perspectives.
CUP Author details Les Watson is Dean of Information Services at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of HE.
He is a biologist by training and writes and reviews for the TES on IT and learning.
His email address is les@chelt.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The BNBMARC Currency Survey Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The BNBMARC Currency Survey Buzz data database copyright cataloguing marc lcsh aacr2 research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman describes the BNBMARC Currency Survey, a performance measurement survey on the supply of bibliographic records.
Performance measurement has been used as a research tool for many years, and as such has been used in some of the studies undertaken by UKOLN and its predecessor bodies (the Centre for Catalogue Research CCR, and the Centre for Bibliographic Management).
In the past few years, however, increasing demands for accountability to the public and to local and central government, combined with the requirements of compulsory competitive tendering, have led to performance measurement becoming an integral part of public sector management.
This in turn focuses attention on independent performance measurement studies such as the BNBMARC Currency Survey.
The BNBMARC Currency Survey is a performance measurement survey on the supply of bibliographic records (the current term for what were known in pre-automation times as catalogue records, though the older term is still used).
Begun in January 1980, this long-running survey still provides the only publicly available, externally measured data (as far as we know) on the performance of a national library.
It originated in the period when libraries were beginning to invest in automation and machine-readable bibliographic records, and the British Library started to provide such records.
Libraries recognised the cost benefits in purchasing records which were created centrally once, instead of each library producing their own.
However, since the cost benefits of buying British Library produced records were only there if enough records were available when a library required them, libraries wanted to know what was the likelihood of finding the records they would want.
The BNBMARC Currency Survey was set up to investigate this by asking two questions: For what proportion of titles with UK imprints, currently being acquired by UK libraries, is a BNBMARC record available at the time it is most needed?
Is this proportion increasing or decreasing over the long term?
To be able to answer these questions, the survey requires a representative sample of titles being acquired by UK libraries to be supplied by a representative population of UK libraries each month.
The title sample The survey could have looked at an unrestricted sample of titles being acquired by UK libraries but there was good reason for restricting the sample.
In 1974, the British National Bibliography Ltd., a non profit consortium of various bodies established in 1949, was absorbed by the British Library, forming the nucleus of the National Bibliographic Service.
The British Library therefore was committed to producing bibliographic records for the publishing output of the UK and the Republic of Ireland from 1974.
The survey in turn uses a sample of items published in the UK and the Republic of Ireland in and since 1974 to monitor the availability of the records.
The bibliographic records created by the British Library from the UK publishing output since 1974 are held in files with the prefix BNB in the British Library database.
They are held in the MAchine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) format devised originally by the Library of Congress.
The data they hold is recorded as required by the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules 2nd edition (AACR2) from the book ‘in hand’.
These records are created by either the British Library, or, since 1990, by one of the other five copyright agency libraries in the UK (the libraries of the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, of Trinity College, Dublin, and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales).
CIP records are Cataloguing-In-Publication records created using information supplied pre-publication by the publisher.
Over the years these records have been created by a number of different organisations.
Initially they were created by British Library staff, but since 1990 have been created under contract agreements with other bodies Book Data in 1990-1991, J.Whitaker & Sons 1991-1995, Bibliographic Data Services 1996-.
These records are in MARC format but because of their pre-publication status the information held may change before publication, or not be known when created.
The second category of ‘formerly CIP’ records consists of records initially created as CIP records, which when the item concerned has been deposited as required by law, is checked for accuracy and omitted information, the record amended and the status changed from CIP to formerly CIP.
Apart from date and place of publication, there are a few further restrictions on which titles can form part of the sample.
Certain material is excluded from the BNB files by the British Library under its exclusions policy, and is in turn excluded from the sample.
Material so excluded comprises: official publications and materials in certain physical forms (maps, atlases and printed sheet music) for which records are available in other British Library record files, and local material such as voters lists, telephone directories, and promotional, ephemeral and non-book materials.
To measure the level of record provision by the British Library therefore, the title sample is restricted to those titles for which the British Library is committed to providing bibliographic records.
Libraries are therefore requested to only send details of titles published in 1974 or later, with a UK or Republic of Ireland imprint or distributor, in monograph form which do not fall into any category of the exclusions policy.
The library sample By now, most public library authorities and university libraries in the UK will have been asked, at some point since 1980, to participate in the BNBMARC Currency Survey carried out by UKOLN.
By August 1996, a total of 294 (118 academic and 176 public) libraries had taken part, 108 of them (65 academic and 43 public) on two occasions.
To the credit of the UK library community most of the requests for participation have been accepted.
Where libraries have declined the request, they almost always indicate that they would be willing to take part on another occasion.
Reasons for non-participation are generally shortage of staff at a particular period, short term heavy workloads due to automation or changes from one automated system to another, refurbishment or extension of library or move to new library buildings, and in the past 18 months, problems caused by local government re-organisation.
I would like to record here UKOLN’s thanks to past and present participants in the survey.
In order to ensure a representative population of libraries to provide the title samples, libraries listed in the Library Association’s directory Libraries in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland have been divided into a number of categories.
The initial division is into an academic sector and a public sector.
The academic (university) sector is subdivided into groupings by age of foundation the ‘old’ institutions, the ‘redbrick’ institutions, the ‘new’ 1960’s institutions and the very recent 1990’s institutions (previously designated polytechnics).
Oxford and Cambridge universities do not participate as they are legal deposit libraries.
Libraries of colleges of further and higher education are not included since it was anticipated that the university sector already gave maximum title coverage for the academic sector.
The public sector is likewise divided into groupings, this time by geographical area and library authority type.
The groupings comprise: London boroughs, metropolitan authorities, English counties and unitary authorities, Welsh authorities, Scottish Authorities and Northern Irish authorities.
Libraries are selected on a random basis, and participate in the survey for six months, after which they are replaced by another library of the same grouping in their sector.
So each month, six academic and six public libraries will participate, with one academic and one public library leaving the survey, and one of each type joining.
The monthly sample Originally only one sample was taken, at the stage items were about to be catalogued, since this was the time when libraries would require records if they were to purchase them from outside suppliers.
Later, however, increasing use of automation in order/acquisition departments prompted the addition, in February 1988, of a second sampling point at the order authorisation stage.
In order to make a representative reflection of patterns of cataloguing and ordering throughout the year, the survey sample is taken on a randomly selected date each month.
Randomly selected dates falling at weekends or bank holidays are rejected and an alternative date is randomly selected for that month.
The libraries are issued with guidelines on material that can be included in the sample and a simple procedure to enable them to randomly select their sample titles.
Libraries are requested not to include the same title more than once in a month’s sample (ordering three copies of an item counts as one title for the survey).
They are also advised that no more than half a month’s sample can be from the same publisher in order not to skew the sample (libraries sometimes order enough titles from a single publisher at one time that the whole of a month’s sample could be from that publisher).
Each month the participating libraries each return a sample sheet recording 10 items they are about catalogue and 10 items they are about to order.
The maximum sample each month therefore comprises 120 items at the cataloguing stage and 120 items at the ordering stage.
It is not unusual for the sample to be somewhat smaller than the maximum for a variety of reasons.
Firstly and most commonly, there may not be enough items awaiting cataloguing or ordering for a library to record 10 items on their sheet in a particular month.
Secondly, the library may temporarily not be ordering items due to book fund limitations.
Thirdly, samples may not be returned occasionally because the designated person has left the library, gone on maternity leave, is on sick leave or annual leave and no one else has been requested to deal with the survey.
Finally, despite the guidelines issued, libraries do sometimes include in the samples titles which are outside the survey parameters.
Processing the sample The sample sheets are returned to UKOLN each month.
On receipt of the sheets, the titles recorded are checked that they fall within the survey parameters, and any titles which are outside the parameters are deleted.
UKOLN staff then check the samples against the BNBMARC datafiles on the British Library online service Blaise.
The initial search for items uses the International Standard Book Number (ISBN)’s of titles as the search term.
If no record is found using this approach, or no ISBN is recorded on the sample sheet, keyword/author searches are made.
The number of titles with no ISBN quoted on the sample sheet is usually small, around 1% for the cataloguing sample and around 4% for the ordering sample.
A further 1% of items in each sample are likely to have either an incomplete ISBN recorded (eg.
9 digits) or an incorrectly transcribed ISBN (eg.
because of digit transposition).
For each title in the sample, the record found is categorised as (a) full MARC record, (b) formerly CIP record, © CIP record or (d) no record are found on file.
The sample sheets are marked up with the results, and used to compile the datafiles.
Since results from a single month would be too small to be statistically valid, and would be biased by seasonal and other variations, each month the results are calculated using a conflation of the previous 12 months of results.
The results produced from the analyses are known as the hitrate.
The survey search only counts as records found those records which have a date of creation at or before the sample date.
Records are added to the BNBMARC files in a weekly update procedure, so it is possible to see at the time of searching that in fact a record was added, say three days after the sample date.
So in addition to the main search, it was decided to investigate how many additional records had been added for sample items after six months.
The results of this search are known as the recheck hitrate.
Results of the survey Analysis of the data obtained from the samples produces an index of currency known as the hitrate.
Each month the hitrate for the previous twelve months is calculated for each of the two samples cataloguing and ordering.
For each sample the hitrate is broken down in two ways.
Firstly, the hitrate is divided by the type of library providing the sample.
Thus in addition to the overall hitrate for the whole sample, there is one hitrate for the samples provided by academic libraries and another for the samples provided by public libraries.
Secondly, the hitrate is divided by type of record found and this division is also available for the academic sample, the public sample, and the whole sample.
As noted above, records found are divided into (a) full MARC records, (b) formerly CIP records, and © CIP records.
The long term accumulation of data means that it is possible to look at how currency of records has changed over the period the survey has been running.
It also enables the investigation of possible correlations between changes in the hitrate and British Library policy and procedures.
Over the years a number of additional analyses have been made and possible correlations investigated.
The inclusion of a second search six months after the sample date has provided data on how many more records from the sample have been added to the BNB files since the sample date.
In 1980, the cataloguing hitrate was 63%.
Over the next six months records were added at the rate of 1% per week up to 14 weeks after the sample, the rate of addition then dropped.
The final recheck hitrate was 82%.
Ten years later in 1990, the hitrate for both cataloguing and ordering samples was 75%, with recheck hitrates of 80 % cataloguing and 79% ordering.
Thus the gap between hitrate and recheck hitrate has lessened, as has the rate of addition of extra records around 1% every 6 weeks.
In 1983 the British Library revised its Cataloguing-In-Publication (CIP) programme in an attempt to improve on the currency of records.
New procedures were put in place, the major change being the decision to no longer routinely recatalogue deposited items for which a CIP record existed.
Recataloguing would only take place where the published item differed from the CIP to such an extent that it was better to start a new record from scratch.
Otherwise, CIP records could be accepted with no change (then noted on the record as CIP confirmed) or accepted with some changes to the CIP record (then noted on record as CIP revised).
Data from the currency survey was analyses to see what evidence there was for the success of the revised programme.
Prior to 1983, CIP entries accounted for one third of the records found in the cataloguing sample.
By 1985, this had risen to nearly one half of the records found, and 1986 showed a continuation of this trend with CIP entries accounting for three quarters of the records found.
(CIP entries in this analysis include the CIP revised and confirmed entries.)
Despite the growth in the proportion of CIP records in the hitrate, the overall increase in hitrate was small at only 1-2%.
On investigation it seemed likely there were causes for this seeming failure of the project.
Firstly, the British Library was over-optimistic about the possible increase in hitrate that might be achieved, especially since at the time there was a backlog of around 40,000 titles awaiting cataloguing.
Secondly, between 1981 and 1987 there was a 34% increase in the annual output of new titles published in the UK.
Given these factors, it is possible that the CIP programme revision enabled the British Library to maintain the hitrate level at this time.
With an increasing processing backlog and having set a strategic goal of an 85% hitrate by 1990, the British Library then introduced its Currency with Coverage programme.
The main proposals here were (a) catalogue to AACR2 level 1 for around half the items added to BNB files, and (b) omitting Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
The programme was implemented in 1988, and the currency survey hitrates soon showed a trend upwards.
Thus the cataloguing hitrate which had been at 62% rose fairly steadily over time to reach an all-time high of 87% in 1994; a subsequent trend downwards to 79% during 1995 was followed by another increase in 1996 to now stand at 84%.
Some of the short term decreases in hitrate were probably due in part to factors such as the move of British Library Bibliographic Services from London to Boston Spa, which involved items being sent from one site to the other and back at some stages when not all sections had moved, and staff turnover since not all staff wished to relocate.
Pressure was also put on the British Library to reverse some of their decisions, and from 1993 subtitle and place of publication were included in level 1 cataloguing, while LCSH were reinstated in 1995.
From 1996, all records have been created to AACR2 level 2.
The reversal of these decisions does not seem to have affected the hitrate so far.
While a sample has been collected at the cataloguing stage since 1980, it was not until 1988 that the survey was extended to the ordering stage.
More libraries were using automated ordering and acquisitions systems at this point, and therefore requiring machine readable records.
It was anticipated that the hitrate for the ordering sample would be lower than that for the cataloguing sample.
Initial comparisons, however, found that there was little difference in the figures though those for the ordering stage were a little lower than those for the cataloguing stage.
Over the years the gap has varied from 1% to 8% but is most typically 5%.
A cooperative project between the British Library and the five copyright agency libraries, known as the Copyright Libraries Shared Cataloguing Programme (CLSCP) began in 1990.
The aim was to extend the coverage of legal deposit material, with each library undertaking to be responsible for a particular section of UK publishing output.
The British Library contributes 70% of current catalogue records and the other five libraries contribute the remaining 30% between them.
Since the aim was to increase coverage, it was not anticipated that there would be much effect on the hitrates.
Between 1991 and 1993 the programme accounted for around 1% of the cataloguing hitrate and 2% of the ordering hitrate.
Since then the proportion of the hitrate contributed by these records has increased.
The non British Library contributed proportion of the cataloguing sample hitrate was 3% in 1994 and the first half of 1995, rising to 8% at the end of 1995, remaining at 8-9% in 1996.
The non British Library contributed proportion of the ordering sample was 2% in 1994, rose to 3% in mid 1995 and to 6% at the end of 1995, and during 1996 has remained at 8%.
Since records contributed by the agency libraries are later enhanced with additional data by the British Library and lose their identifying source note, it is not possible to estimate the number of such records as a proportion of the BNB file.
To do this would require the records to be annotated as ‘formerly CLSCP’ in the same way that CIP records become ‘formerly CIP’ records.
Publication of results The hitrates produced from the sample data have been made public from the start of the survey.
For some years until 1993, they were published in the Library Association Record, but will now appear in the British Library newsletter Select.
They are available on request from UKOLN, and can be found on the UKOLN web site at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bib-man-archive/surveys/bnbmarc/summary.html.
The future of the survey UKOLN will continue to carry out the Currency survey, and at intervals to look at the data in a variety of ways to increase our knowledge of this area of bibliographic management.
At present there are plans to move the data from an in-house suite of programs and files onto a Microsoft Access database, which should make it easier to add each month’s data and increase the number of reports and analyses generated by the system.
In the past, the survey has always been carried out on the British Library BNB files and this will continue.
During its lifetime, however, the sample has been used for short periods to monitor the currency of records from other sources of bibliographic records usually under contract to the source concerned.
Results of this type of work have, of course, been confidential.
In this past year UKOLN has negotiated participation of eight sources of records other than the British Library in a multi-source study.
For this, the ordering sample is used to search Book Data and Whitaker CD-ROMs, and the databases of Bibliographic Data Services, BLCMP, CURL, LASER, OCLC and SLS.
After pilot tests, the first sample was that for September 1996.
Results will not be available until twelve month’s time when enough data has accumulated for analysis.
In addition to results in the form of hitrates and other numerical analyses, it is hoped that any reports produced will also include information on each source, the types of record they can provide, and what options are available for access.
Previously published literature on the survey Chapman, A.
Why MARC surveys are still a hot bibliographic currency.
Library Association Record 94 (4) April 1992 pp248-254 Chapman, A.
National library bibliographic record availability: a long-term survey.
Library Resources and Technical Services 39(4) 1995 pp345-355 Silverman, B.W.
and Wilson, J.D.
A beta-binomial model for library survey data.
Journal of Documentation 43 (2) pp112-124 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ResIDe: Electronic Reserve for UK Universities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ResIDe: Electronic Reserve for UK Universities Buzz data software database infrastructure archives metadata identifier copyright z39.50 gis research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tessa Bruce describes an electronic reserve system at the University of the West of England.
The aim of ResIDe is to pilot an electronic reserve system or short loan collection aimed at students in the Faculty of the Built Environment (FBE).
UWE Library Services and Faculty of Built Environment are working with the ESRC Data Archive, Museum of London, Institute of Housing and Ordnance Survey on this project.
Why develop an electronic reserve system?
Changes in patterns of teaching and learning have led to a decrease in academic staff/student contact hours and a greater reliance upon student centred learning.
This has resulted in an increase in student use of the library and other learning resources.
The modularisation of courses has resulted in peak periods of very heavy demand for some learning materials as hundreds of students taking a single module can be required to access the same items to complete assignments.
Traditional print-based short loan (reserve) collections have attempted to address some of these problems.
Books, journals and course readers have been made available for students to physically borrow once having made the journey to the library.
This, however, does tend to create difficulties for part-time students, distance learners and the disabled, and is itself often inadequate to meet the very specific demands and timescales of project work and assessments.
Simultaneous use of the same materials would enable better management of peak demands.
Similarly, the material could be date stamped to alert the library when it becomes redundant.
The cyclical nature of assignment work would require the materials to be held as an archive for rapid re-submission to the collection at the appropriate time.
The Faculty of the Built Environment have developed a system called ResIDe (as part of the DevR Research programme) which is designed to improve the research infrastructure in the faculty by enhancing access to information sources such as the ESRC Data Archive, Institute of Housing database, computer aided learning material, numeric data, geospatial data and Ordnance Survey maps.
We decided to build on this system to provide electronic reserve (or short loan collection) services to staff and students.
Copyright issues Copyright obligations apply to the information held and accessed by the system.
In order to fulfil the requirements of the various rights holders it has been necessary to develop a capacity to control access to data through the use of forms and audit trail techniques.
ResIDe has tackled each of these on a case by case basis but it is apparent during the development of the system that a more global approach is necessary to ensure the sustainability of the system and its wider application in the University sector.
So far copyright management has been developed in ResIDe for specific data and with particular security arrangements.
Forms have been established for requests for data provision together with an "honour" system of enforced awareness of the copyright issues as the forms will not submit until acknowledgement of the copyright terms and conditions have been reviewed and acknowledged.
We aim to build on this system to ensure that copyright law is complied with automatically before materials are submitted to the e-reserve.
Collection management and metadata Currently data entry is eased by using forms to prompt for data which is then held in MS Access.
The project will build on this to provide additional information to aid collection management and to enhance the automated aspects of this process by using scripts to pass information between the database infrastructure and the Netscape interface.
These mechanisms are currently in place for ESRC data and OS data.
Information will be controlled by fields for time and date of data-entry, period prior to review, period for removal from the active system, together with version code, originator, inputter, reviewers and quality control.
Empowering the user.
Users will be encouraged to enter their own materials by using templates, unless they have compelling reasons to develop their own idiosyncratic material.
Templates will ensure a minimum standard of data entry.
Data entry will alert a peer review process to check on the quality of the submission before publication, depending upon the level of access identified for the material.
i.e.
a closed group would not mandate review, while identification of open access across the WWW would mandate review.
The project seeks to provide the greatest flexibility for the management of the electronic reserve system.
We aim to develop a system which can support mediated document deposit if required, but which also supports the empowerment of users to submit their own materials via the copyright and data entry management system.
The Project strives to incorporate high functionality and extensibility even if not fully exploited initially.
Integration with other library services The project will address the request of materials to comply with a reading list and their subsequent electronic management and link to information.
This will be achieved through the use of standard software and protocols such as Z39.50 in conjunction with investigation of the flexibility of the copyright mechanisms developed and meta-data entered to aid collection management.
For further information, please contact Tessa Bruce, IT Development Librarian, UWE Bristol.
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Hylife Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hylife Buzz software dissemination cataloguing z39.50 research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ian Winkworth describes a Hybrid Library project for all.
HYLIFE STANDS FOR HYbrid LIbraries of the FuturE.
The project is about how best to deliver the mixture of print and electronic services likely to be required of higher education libraries in the foreseeable future.
The focus will be on users and on organisational, social and educational issues rather than technology.
Development will be iterative with users involved throughout the development phases.
Evaluation and dissemination will be a major focus of the project.
One of the research questions is how the boundaries of what libraries deliver will change.
The HYLIFE project will seek to establish, test and evaluate a knowledge of operating practices for the “hybrid library” which can then be disseminated to the wider HE community.
HYLIFE will develop a series of customer oriented electronic interfaces which give access to electronic and print services and are economically maintained.
This will be done via a generic software interface which will then be tailored to the needs of particular client groups.
The electronic and print services will be the real services of the test sites.
Client groups will be chosen initially from the partner institutions.
Six implementation interfaces will be developed during the life of the project.
These are: a conventional student interface serving full and part-time students in Geography, a franchise college interface (college groups in the North and South, many part-time), a research interface for researchers in Regional and Economic Development, a remote user interface in Business Studies, a practitioner/student interface in Heath Studies (many part-time participants) and a distributed user interface.
The project will use widely available standard technologies, moving with the mainstream current as new developments become standard.
The demonstrator interfaces will be open and system-independent and will take a two-stage approach with a Web interface initially providing access to a range of services including the library catalogue, then moving on to provide Z39.50 capability as a development of the Web interface.
The project will be managed through the University of Northumbria but is co-directed by Northumbria and the University of Central Lancashire.
The other higher education partners are the University of Newcastle, the University of Plymouth and the Highlands and Islands Project.
All the partners have strong interests in distance learning and remote access.
The project has undertakings of technical input from BLCMP and Ovid Technologies.
We will in due course invite involvement in testing from the 25 institutions who have been involved in the eLib IMPEL2 project as well as other institutions who wish to be involved.
For more details contact Peter Wynne at CERLIM (e-mail: p.m.wynne@uclan.ac.uk; tel 01772 892309).
Author Details Ian Winkworth Chief Librarian at the University of Northumbria Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill Buzz database cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Scottish poet Douglas Dunn waxes lyrical on all things Internet.
Scottish poet Douglas Dunn, author of several collections of poetry including the award-winning Elegies in 1985, is currently Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
Stepping into his book-filled office on a sparkling December morning, it took me a moment or two to spot the PC, only partly visible behind a mountain of textbooks.
"My glorified typewriter" is how Dunn refers to it.
He is nonetheless fully aware of the Internet, although he refuses to use electronic mail, asserting that he has more than enough mail to deal with already (a glance at his desk providing the proof).
Humanities resources online still have to prove their worth.
"Reading Shakespeare on a PC somehow gets up my nose" he confided.
However, several of the staff in the School of English at St Andrews, led (somewhat ironically) by the Old and Middle English scholars, were Internet enthusiasts.
"They tend to stay rather late" he remarked, with a note of distaste.
As for the students; they keep asking him to arrange for the School's expensive poetry database on CD-ROM to be networked to their residences.
Douglas Dunn was himself a librarian for many years, working in Scotland, the US and, famously, at the University of Hull under Philip Larkin.
His love of libraries and his love of books are locked together.
"I'm a rather book-bound person.
As a piece of technology, this is excellent", he says, leafing through the nearest example.
Dunn is fully in favour of networking digitised texts, however, citing the problems of impoverished students who turn up to his tutorials without the set books.
For him, the great value of the Net lies in the potential it offers to researchers to perform serious bibliographical searching.
Junk is a problem, of course.
As is the temptation to plagiarism.
"But these are not arguments for saying 'IT go home'".
And he is remarkably tolerant of those who use the Net to publish their own poetry.
"Vanity publishing has a long and honourable tradition.
Isn't that how Byron and Shelley were first published?"
So the Net has its uses.
But somehow I doubt whether it will ever inspire Douglas Dunn to eulogy in the way the libraries of his former career have done (in 'Libraries: A Celebration', 1993): Associates, Fellows and Office Bearers of the Library Association, Hear this!
the wheels of my retrieval system running On lubricants of print and permanent devotion!
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Changing the Lightbulb – Er, the Culture: How Many eLib Projects Does It Take to Change the Higher Education Culture?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Changing the Lightbulb – Er, the Culture: How Many eLib Projects Does It Take to Change the Higher Education Culture?
Buzz copyright e-learning odp research Citation BibTex RIS Clare Davies, Alison Scammell and Matthew Hall discuss what it takes to change Higher Education culture.
As part of the eLib programme's overall evaluation activities, a recent eLib Supporting Study has been investigating something called 'Mobilisation effects of eLib activities on cultural change in higher education' (HE).
This article describes what on earth that title means, and what we've been finding out about the 'culture' of eLib.
The study, funded by JISC, is managed by the Tavistock Institute and ends this July.
Among our activities, we've interviewed various key people in eLib, and examined project and programme deliverables for views and evidence about cultural change issues.
Defining Cultural Change First, what might we mean by cultural change?
Apparently it's one of the aims of the eLib programme, but how can we tell if it's happening?
The 1995 Anderson Report [1] stated that the obstacles to making research information delivery completely electronic were "mainly legal and cultural, rather than technical".
So it's always been recognised that some shifts in culture, both for libraries and other stakeholders in information, were crucial if electronic libraries were to make a real difference.
All very well, until we try to define what culture actually is.
The most comprehensive, but highly theoretical, definition given in the Tavistock Institute's 'Policy Mapping Study' of eLib [2] is: 'Cultural change involves new frames of reference, new ways of acting.
Cultural change results from actors acquiring new symbolic resources (cognitive frames/paradigms: concepts, knowledge, skills) in changed structural contexts (organisational contexts, work processes) where these symbolic resources are meaningful, deployable and operational.'
Fine in theory, of course, but a more pragmatic approach was needed for our study, so that we and the eLib people we talked to could understand what we were on about.
People in eLib projects are for the most part too busy getting systems built and documents digitised to worry about abstractions like cultural change, so we had to examine implicit hints of it rather than explicit descriptions of projects' cultural impacts.
(This also implies, of course, that these impacts aren't generally obvious or far-reaching, either within or beyond HE institutions.)
As far as eLib is concerned, we decided that there were two key ways of understanding it: that culture in HE (in terms of how people think and work together as a community) was already changing anyway, and that developments like eLib were supposed to help push (or 'mobilise') the sorts of changes that would help electronic libraries to be useful.
eLib is, after all, operating against a background of 'convergence' of many libraries and computer centres, and of many other changes in HE institutions, all of which are making big differences to our libraries one way or another.
This distinction between cultural change as an inevitable process, and eLib's ability to influence it, can at least be made in theory, but the reality is impossible to tease out.
How can anyone know whether something's happened because of eLib, or because of all the other current pressures and concepts floating around in HE?
This was described by one of our interviewees as "trying to get your hands round a jelly... You try to squeeze it into a certain shape and it comes out between your fingers".
In other words, we can't always produce exactly the cultural changes we need by deliberate action.
However, some findings have still emerged from our interviews, discussions and readings of eLib deliverables.
It's worth presenting a few of them here hopefully our final report will appear on the eLib WWW pages soon, containing a much more detailed discussion.
Cultural Change in eLib One problem with the cultural change concept, where eLib is concerned, is whether eLib itself has a culture.
If eLib projects were part of a 'culture', they should be learning from each other and from related developments elsewhere, and should have a sense of common purpose which is greater than the technical objectives of individual projects.
Some groups of projects, such as the ODP (On-Demand Publishing) or the ANR (Access to Network Resources) projects, have developed this to some degree, but the programme as a whole hasn't really inspired individual project teams towards strategically influencing the culture of their own institutions, let alone HE more generally.
This was partly due to the relatively late introduction of cultural change (and higher-level evaluation in general) as a major explicit objective of projects: the involvement of the Tavistock Institute in defining those particular objectives came after many projects had started in 1995.
The most important programme area in eLib, as far as cultural change is concerned, was always expected to be Training and Awareness (T and A).
Most of the T and A projects [3] are concerned with teaching new skills and imparting new knowledge to librarians within HE institutions, on the apparent assumption that this will feed back into their daily work and gradually affect the ways in which they and their users interact and operate together.
It's difficult to know how much impact the T and A projects have actually had on the culture of HE institutions, or indeed whether the uptake of T and A projects simply reflects cultural change which is happening anyway.
The number of people put through training courses and awareness-raising events, or even reading this magazine, is not a measure of cultural change in itself.
Although the T and A activities are likely to have an impact on the way LIS perceive themselves in relation to their jobs (and this is an important prerequisite for cultural change), the real change will only come with lasting structural changes in roles and therefore relationships.
There are T and A projects which raise the issue of new roles and relationships, but like all other eLib projects, it is not within their scope to restructure entire library and information units in order to make those changes felt.
As a separate strand of eLib activity, T and A finds itself neither addressing the technical issues arising from specific projects, nor satisfying the generic skills needed in the programme as a whole.
It will be interesting to watch 'the eLib generation' of young librarians returning from T and A courses tooled up for change: Will their collective vision alone be sufficient, or will their frustration grow as they encounter the same structures and attitudes running the library as before?
There is an argument for saying that library staff are the key people to bring about cultural change.
One person interviewed for the project went as far as to see librarians as "the catalyst for the transition between paper-based systems and the delivery of electronic information...
The most important people are the front-line staff in libraries, who get people to use the systems and give them training and help."
But librarians aren't the only people in the 'culture' that can be changed by innovations like eLib.
To get a real feel for this 'culture', we have to include other stakeholders in the model, as shown in the diagram.
Two key stakeholders, of which we know the most, are the academics and academic librarians.
The other stakeholder groups, especially those outside the immediate HE 'world', have been less fully included in eLib and other initiatives to date, and have arguably been less directly affected by them.
The relationships among stakeholders are changing, however, even where they haven't been playing a direct role in eLib.
For instance, our research showed the important role that publishers are now playing in the cultural change process, because eLib has started to have an impact on their attitudes towards electronic information.
The literature on electronic publishing has lots to say about the changes to 'scholarly communication' among academics, and about the (hopefully) changing relationships between them and librarians as the latter find new ways to support researchers' needs.
Librarians can also take the lead in trying to change scholarly working practices, by providing academics with electronic information options which are new and better than the ones they already use.
Changing the academic culture is not obvious: one of our interviewees pointed out that "Academic departments are not run as organisational hierarchies.
You don't get to change things, you get to persuade, cajole, seduce, and change comes about in those sorts of ways."
Another interviewee put it more bluntly: "You have the carrot, which is [e.g.]
the subject gateway, and then there's the stick approach which is just to cancel the book budget and say 'You have to use this whether you like it or not, matey'."
Certainly, some change towards electronic resources is going to happen, and is already happening in many disciplines.
However, the degree to which all this feeds into new ways of teaching and learning, always an underlying aim of eLib (and before it, the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme and similar initiatives) seems to be gradual rather than revolutionary.
Students aren't seeing a big change in their working practices as an immediate result of eLib.
But there's no doubt that technologies are making some progress towards more remote and less classroom-based learning.
So in changes like this, eLib's influence is long-term and less measurable than we might have hoped when the programme started.
Conclusions and future needs Our final report will contain some tentative conclusions about needs and recommendations for future eLib-like innovations.
These include, among others: greater support and encouragement for projects to take a 'people-centred' approach, even where their project is largely on the 'D' side of 'R and D'.
For example, the benefits of including some potential user representatives in the design and development process are well-established in systems development, but are not always obvious to people when rushing into a small-scale applied project in a library.
the need to consider the institutional context of any given project the way in which the institutions in which it's running are likely to dictate its development, relative to the needs both of that institution as a whole and of other institutions that could potentially benefit.
a much greater involvement of and partnership with the library schools.
There's no doubt that library schools do give librarians many useful skills for the electronic library (see e.g.
[4]), but the rapid developments in hybrid library developments must be fed back into their curricula somehow if librarians are to graduate equipped for the new technologies and the parallel cultural expectations that they're creating.
more training and awareness activities aimed at the middle-management (budget-holding) levels in academia, rather than top-level executives or bottom-level junior librarians, if we're to get suitable structures, procedures and investments to give a workable background to new innovations.
coordinated strategic (and grass-roots) action regarding copyright and other aspects of the relationship with publishers, to give project teams more time to focus on organisational issues beside the technical/legal (and to make publishers feel more involved as stakeholders in the 'culture').
more training and awareness activities regarding generic needs such as project management skills for development projects, understanding of generic issues such as rights management, and personal effectiveness and team-building skills.
the need for more centrally-provided consultants and resources within a programme, so that projects can draw on a common core of knowledge, not feel isolated or unique, and not 'reinvent the wheel' by solving the same problems that others have tackled before them.
The project team welcome feedback over the next couple of weeks, as we prepare our final deliverable and related publications.
Do you feel part of a culture?
What are the obvious, and less obvious, structures and assumptions that affect your working life?
And what do you think needs changing about those if the electronic (or hybrid) library is to make sense and fit properly into your institution?
If you don't know, and aren't prepared to find out, you could be part of the problem, not part of the solution... Feel free to respond to this article discussion can only help foster the right 'culture' for the future.
[1] Joint Funding Council's Library Review: Report of the Group on a National/ Regional Strategy for Library Provision for Researchers (The Anderson Report), http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/anderson/ [2] Tavistock Institute: eLib Policy Mapping Study, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/tavistock/policy-mapping/ [3] Training and Awareness projects: for details see: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/ [4] E.g.
see Rebecca Bradshaw's article on library school training in the previous issue of Ariadne.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/adam/ Author details The authors are all researchers at: International Institute for Electronic Library Research, De Montfort University, Milton Keynes, Hammerwood Gate, Kents Hill, Milton Keynes MK7 6HP Email: Clare Davies: cdavies@dmu.ac.uk Alison Scammell: ascam@dmu.ac.uk Matthew Hall: mhall@dmu.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Australian Museums on Line Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Australian Museums on Line Project Buzz data software database video research Citation BibTex RIS Louise Douglas and Stephen Hall describe the Australian Museums On Line (AMOL) project, which aims to dramatically increase access to the cultural resources of Australian museums via the Internet by 2001 through the AMOL World Wide Web site.
Overview To date, the focus has been on creating a working pilot of the Australian Museums On Line web site [1] which now includes: a pilot of Museum Search, a national Searchable Collection Database currently comprising 43 000 item level collection records from 10 museums across Australia the National Directory with 850 Australian museums listed the most up to date and the only national directory of Australian museums a wide range of information for museum workers, including links to the most important Australian and overseas museum sites a increasingly active discussion list (Australian Museum Forum) on Australian museum issues research into users of the AMOL web site through an on line survey The AMOL team is now working on substantial improvements to the pilot site, to be in place by June 1997.
Enhancements will include: a site redesign, building on the existing structure of the pilot site to increase visual impact and improve useability the addition to Museum Search of a further 26 museums collections comprising well over 150,000 item records the introduction of a new search engine for Museum Search with significantly increased functionality an expanded number of museums in the National Directory an increase in the amount of information on the web site for museum workers the establishment of a pilot of the AMOL regional network of servers which will decentralise the holding of data, but still enable access through a single Internet gateway From July 1997 onwards the AMOL site will grow rapidly in terms of museum coverage, database size and features offered to both the museum community and the general public.
By 2001 we plan to have the collection databases of more than 80% of Australia’s museums linked through a national server network.
Some background Conceptualisation of the project began in 1993 when the Cultural Ministers Council established the Heritage Collections Working Party and was brought to fruition by the Heritage Collections Committee in 1995 when it established a separate program specifically to examine at improving access to Australian museum and gallery collections using new technologies.
At the same there was growing awareness of the importance of the world wide web as a possible tool, and the Committee focused its efforts initially on a pilot to develop to ‘proof of concept’ stage.
This pilot was undertaken by the AMOL Coordination Unit established within the National Museum of Australia from October 1995-June 1996.
What are AMOLs overall objectives?
The following objectives summarise the direction of the AMOL project: to provide a single search of museum information across multiple, disparate and distributed databases using the Internet.
to allow individual museums to retain ownership and control of their data to minimise set up and maintenance costs for each museum involved in the project and the need for technical expertise to run the system to allow for future developments such as the use of 3D and moving representations of images (video, virtual reality): standards in these areas are currently being developed to maximise flexibility of software choice with the rapid change in the Internet, it is vital to ensure that the system is not tied to proprietary standards and products Who will use the AMOL web site?
One of the promises of the I-way [information superhighway] as a vehicle for museum programming is that it reaches a vast new audience.
But the vast new audience is composed of numerous small, specialised, audiences with particular knowledge, interests, needs and abilities.
If the museum is presented in monolithic fashion, it will be uninteresting to many of its potential electronic visitors.
But if museums are clever and rigorous in their analysis, they are in an excellent position to create data that can support users with many diverse points of view.
(David Bearman, US collection database consultant, 1995) An estimated 40 million people are using the Internet worldwide at the moment.
Many claims are being made about the extraordinary growth of the Internet, and even if these figures are treated cautiously there is little doubt that the Internet is here to stay and will certainly form another important means of communicating and obtaining information.
Australian estimates for home based use of the Internet indicate that 2 million Australians will have Internet access from their homes by the end of 1997.
This figure is likely to be higher if the price of bandwidth falls in the interim.
Statistical data on the way museums are using the Internet are not yet available.
Estimating use levels is made more difficult by the fact that museums are still in the process of connecting to the Internet even for general research purposes.
The provision of Internet access to their collections is being addressed only by a small group of museums with the resourcing and management issues usually precluding the majority of museums developing Internet based programs.
The Internet offers an enormous opportunity to enable increased public access to museum collections and activities.
Besides this, within the museum community itself it is anticipated that AMOL will be most useful for: assessing collections for possible loans for exhibitions professional exchange about museological issues increasing communication about museum activities and programs The geographic spread of Australian museums inhibits regular communication between them.
Many museum workers see AMOL as an invaluable tool for improving the general level of interaction between museums.
The level of use amongst the museum community is anticipated to be high, once AMOL has established itself as a fully operational information system.
The rate at which primary, secondary and tertiary institutions are taking advantage of the educational resources offered by the Internet varies considerably across states and sectors and is often determined by resource issues.
However, most state governments have recently moved to ensure their school systems are well connected to the Internet by 2000.
As AMOL becomes more widely known as a source of substantial information on heritage and cultural issues, it is anticipated that educational institutions will use it extensively.
Specialist subjects featured in many museums could generate great interest if made accessible through the World Wide Web.
Possible subjects for development include: the environment: the breadth and depth of natural sciences would complement existing on line services such as the Environmental Resources Information Network [2] multicultural/cultural diversity: increased access to museum collections would provide a unique resource for assisting students to understand Australia’s culture and society.
cultural studies: this burgeoning discipline addresses cultural issues through a wide range of media, and the mixed media nature of museum collections would be an invaluable resource for this kind of study and research.
Indigenous people are also increasingly requiring access to museum collections to assist in the process of cultural maintenance and revival.
Further consultation will be undertaken with potential users and in the process of reviewing the web site structure and design, consideration will be given to segmenting the site for particular types of user.
Who is involved in AMOL?
The AMOL project is a uniquely collaborative project in that it brings together the combined resources and expertise of: the federal government in the form of the Department of Communications and the Arts the museum community which is represented on the Heritage Collections Committee and its program committees and which is supporting the project through the participation of a range of museums in supply collection data or becoming server sites the state governments whose arts/heritage ministries support the project All three parties contribute funding for the project.
A number of consultants have been contracted to undertaken specific elements.
They include: National Museum of Australia administers the AMOL Coordination Unit Computer Sciences Corporation provides technical advice on the overall architecture of the distributed server network Datascape Information managed the first stage of the National Directory which incorporates basic directory information on 850 museums.
National directory of Australian museums In February 1996 all Australian museums were sent a questionnaire responses to this questionnaire form the basis of the National Directory.
Approximately 850 out of a possible 2000 survey forms have been received.
These 850 responses now appear on the National Directory.
Museums were invited to include basic information (the Australian Museums On Line Information Record a minimum data set for describing museum objects on AMOL) on five ‘items of interest’ from their collections.
About 100 museums were able to provide images with their directory entries.
Users can access the national directory by: state museum type collection strength alphabetical listing of all museums Connections to a number of museums which have their own home page can be made via the directory.
The network of AMOL servers and Museum Search Currently all AMOL information is on one server at the National Museum.
The next phase of the project will see a pilot network extension, with the addition of the Western Australian Museum as the first AMOL remote server.
From July 1997 onwards an Australia-wide network of distributed servers will be built on this foundation.
Museum Search is a searchable collection database made up of the collection records of a number of local and regional museums which is searchable as if it were one database.
The first stage pilot version of Museum Search was completed and made accessible through the web site in June 1996.
The pilot concentrated on bringing together a diverse selection of local and regional museum communities.
Museum Search comprises collection data from the following 10 museums.
Newcastle Regional Museum, NSW Castlemaine Art Gallery, Victoria King Cottage Bunbury, Western Australia Ballarat Gold Museum, Victoria Rockhampton City Art Gallery, Queensland City of Unley Museum, South Australia Schaeffer House Museum (Clarence River Historical Society), Western Australia Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo, Victoria Killer Whale Museum, Eden, NSW University of Melbourne Art Museum, Victoria All collections can be searched simultaneously.
This is possible because each museum’s data has been ‘mapped’ out of its original database and into a new database.
AMOL also provides separate searches of collection databases of museums with web access currently: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania Museum of Victoria’s Social History and Science and Technology Collections Australian National Shipwreck database.
In selecting participants advice was sought from: branches of Museums Australia museum sections of state arts departments local museum liaison officers working in state museums In addition, a number of museums (Newcastle Regional Museum and Unley City Museum) enthusiastic about AMOL, approached the AMOL Coordination Unit to be considered as contributors to Museum Search.
Criteria used to assess which museums to include in the pilot were: collection database system type a minimum of three different types were sought collection type the greatest diversity possible was sought covering all types of collections geographic location as a national project, it was essential for the pilot to include sites from around Australia availability of technological support participation in the pilot needed support from the participating museum in the form of technical liaison By mid 1997 another 26 museum collections will be added to Museum Search.
Although the majority of these museums will be local and regional museums, a number of large museum collections will be included.
Related Projects Canadian Heritage Information Network (http://www.chin.gc.ca/) SCRAN: Scottish Cultural Regional Access Network, (http://www.scran.ac.uk/) Aquarelle (http://aqua.inria.fr/) CIMI: Consortium for the Interchange of Museum Information, (http://www.cimi.org/cimi/) References Australian Museums On Line Web site, http://www.nma.gov.au/AMOL/ Environmental Resources Information Network http://www.erin.gov.au Author Details Louise Douglas, Stephen Hall AMOL Coordination Unit email: webmanager@nma.gov.au Tel: 06 242 2122 Address: GPO Box 1901, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CEI Looks for Bold Response Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CEI Looks for Bold Response Buzz database dissemination infrastructure archives preservation cataloguing z39.50 standards Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl describes the new call for proposals for further eLib programme work.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] this month releases a circular inviting higher education librarians and information staff to propose ways of developing the electronic library infrastructure of the UK.
The document begins by retracing the creation of ‘the successful eLib programme [2]’, starting with the Follett Report of 1993, and moving forward to the present time with 60 funded projects across the UK.
JISC’s five-year strategy document of last year described a new structure, including the creation of a Committee for Electronic Information (CEI) which has responsibility for developing the work eLib has begun.
The eLib programme will run through until the summer of 1998.
Most projects are funded until then, but for those whose funding finishes beforehand, a separate call for proposals to extend funding by a further period has been made direct to the projects themselves.
A later call will also be made for proposals to pilot the important work of digital preservation.
Here, the document suggests that the time is not yet right to look for proposals while extensive discussion on the future of legal deposit is in progress.
Two major areas for development are spelt out in some detail in the document.
The first is ‘hybrid libraries’, a concept which challenges libraries “to bring together … new developments, plus the electronic products and services already in libraries, and the historical functions of our local, physical libraries”.
CEI wishes to fund a few pilot hybrid libraries, and is asking proposers to include a ‘sketch’ of their vision of a realisable hybrid library in expressions of interest.
The Committee is interested in ideas with potential rather than full proposals, which will be invited later.
Chris Rusbridge, eLib Programme Director, emphasised the importance of ideas at this stage in the development of the programme’s objectives.
“We’d like to see some bold visions of hybrid libraries coming forward.
The first eLib call produced a lot of innovative thinking.
We now need more.
Sites should not feel that they must be involved in a big eLib project already funded and established indeed we would welcome proposals from sites which have had little or no involvement in eLib to date.
Developing eLib does not mean continuing to fund existing projects, but rather maintaining our commitment to the eLib vision of an electronic library infrastructure.” CEI is expecting proposers to draw on a wide range of electronic library developments, looking also to work done in the US, in the European Union and elsewhere.
The funded hybrid libraries must disseminate as they go, sharing their experience and their learning with the community, including the mistakes they make, rather than presenting results only at the end of their projects.
Together with other successful features of the eLib programme’s methodology, this formative dissemination will extend the commitment to openness and sharing within the community, a commitment which has given eLib a quite remarkable unity of approach since its inception.
The second major area is large scale resource discovery.
The connection of HE online public access catalogues (OPACs) to JANET does not equal a national service, which CEI envisages as a type of national union catalogue for the digital networked age.
The circular adopts the recommendations of the MODELS project [3] on distributed electronic library services, which proposes physical and virtual clumps of OPACs, utilising the Z39.50 standard for distributed database access.
Full proposals from consortia for the establishment of pilot bibliographic clumps are sought.
An agency to co-ordinate the national service will be funded through later bids, after the scoping study currently being undertaken by Fretwell Downing has been completed.
In addition to bibliographic clumps, MODELS has proposed cross-domain clumps for generic collections with specific cataloguing requirements.
Archives, museums and electronic text collections are all examples.
Again, CEI is looking for expressions of interest in this area, with encouragement given to the involvement of partners from outwith HE.
A single pilot project to co-ordinate national service requirements for cross-domain searching is also sought.
References Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Information, http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/jasper/intro.html eLib (Electronic Libraries Programme) Web Site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ MODELS Web Site, http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/models/ Author Details John MacColl Managing Editor, Ariadne project Email: lbajam@tay.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The International Institute for Electronic Library Research: A New Kid on the Block Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The International Institute for Electronic Library Research: A New Kid on the Block Buzz database infrastructure digitisation copyright video preservation opac research Citation BibTex RIS Marilyn Deegan describes the International Institute for Electronic Library Research, a significant new centre of research based at De Montfort University.
De Montfort University is one of the largest universities in Britain, with 29,000 students based on 10 campuses in eastern and central England.
Major city locations are Leicester, Lincoln, Bedford and Milton Keynes.
Given the distributed nature of the University, much use has to be made of the latest information and communication technologies: video-conferencing is used extensively in teaching, and in enabling teachers and researchers to meet and talk without leaving their own campus.
Development of an electronic library is a key component of the University's strategic plan, and the University is engaged on a substantial programme of research and development aimed at producing a teaching, learning and research environment which takes maximum advantage of electronic resources.
These developments are being implemented in the infrastructure of the University.
Driven by its own urgent needs for the development of cross-campus electronic library services, the University has long been a major force in electronic library research in Britain and is now becoming well-known on the European stage, too.
It is also developing links with nations outside Europe: the USA, Japan, and Australia in particular.
The first major project, begun in 1992, was ELINOR (Electronic Library Information Online Retrieval).
The partners and funders for this were the British Library Research and Development Department and IBM UK Scientific Centre, and the aim was to build a working electronic library for use by students, while addressing such issues as technical requirements, copyright, selection and acquisition of materials, and user aspects.
Other projects supported by a variety of funding agencies soon followed: the EU-funded ELISE (Electronic Library Image Service for Europe) was completed at the beginning of 1995, and provided a proof-of-concept pilot for the interconnection of image banks across sites throughout Europe.
A second phase of this, ELISEII, has just been agreed by the EU.
De Montfort University has also been involved in a number of EU projects led by other partners, in particular in the area of management information statistics.
The UKUs FIGIT programme provides funding for a copyright management project, ERCOMS, and for a major endeavour to deliver large image banks to the UK higher education sector: HELIX (Higher Education Image Exchange) with St Andrews University and the Hulton Getty Picture Library as partners.
Given this large investment in research in this area, in 1995 the University decided to set up an International Institute for Electronic Library Research.
Formally established in 1996, the Institute is chaired by Professor Mel Collier, Head of the Division of Learning Development at De Montfort University, and is co-directed by Professor Marilyn Deegan and Professor Charles Oppenheim.
Marilyn Deegan was formerly manager of the Centre for Humanities Computing at Oxford University, and has a particular interest in electronic library developments for students and academics in the humanities.
Charles Oppenheim was formerly Professor of Information Science at Strathclyde University, and is well-known for his work on the legal issues around the electronic library.
A team of researchers to work on projects within the Institute has also been appointed, and more funding is being actively sought from many sources to enable us to extend the range of projects in which we are engaged.
The Institute will carry out and promote research in many related areas, including: electronic library theory and systems; information delivery; information retrieval; textual analysis; information management; digitization; image processing and retrieval; human-computer interaction; collection development and preservation issues; electronic publishing; copyright and other legal aspects; standards monitoring and development; performance measurement; networking; implications for scholarship and authorship; implications for the learning process; human resource issues; use of electronic information.
It will also, in partnership with commercial partners, be building a more extensive digital library for the University based to some extent on the ELINOR model.
This will integrate the library OPAC with documents in all the possible electronic formats, images and image databases, and eventually sound and video, all to be accessed through a single search interface.
This will hopefully also provide a model for other institutions wishing to build their own electronic libraries.
The Institute also sees as one of its major roles the promotion of knowledge and implementation of the electronic library throughout the world, and it intends to do this by carrying out the following activities: Leading-edge research projects with international partners; Research and development projects with commercial partners; Quality consultancy services for publishers and educational institutions; Organizing lectures, seminars, conferences and workshops on all aspects of the electronic library.
The Division is already well-known for its annual ELVIRA conference at Milton Keynes, which is successfully established in its third year; Producing quality publications (both electronic and print) in the relevant journals in the field and with leading publishers; Offering a range of on-line information services on the Internet and elsewhere; Offering training and development services for publishers, academics, students, and others interested in learning the practices necessary for establishing and running an electronic library; Offering research degrees at Masters and PhD level in relevant topics.
An agreement has just been entered into with ASLIB to produce a major journal, Electronic Library Research, which will be provided in both print and electronic form.
This should be available in 1997.
The Institute has an ambitious programme over the next few years, and the key to the successful fulfilling of its aims is to work actively in partnership with other institutions.
The electronic library, as collaborative projects supported by the EU and FIGIT are showing, will not be built by any one institution or research team.
The global issues are too important for localism to ignore any wider concerns.
The Institute, therefore, is actively seeking partners in electronic library endeavours and anyone who wishes to work with us is encouraged to contact us.
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Poem: Henry Moore's Family Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Poem: Henry Moore's Family Buzz windows Citation BibTex RIS Jill Bamber with this issue's poem.
This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets , Volume 1, Number VII, April 1996.
It is reprinted by permission of the editor.
Henry Moore's Family Peering in, I see the studio floor adrift with bones and fossils.
He worked small-scale at first, from clay maquettes that washed up on the shelves.
Pushed to the back a marble woman waits among the shadows, white arm loose across her lap.
He died before she flowered.
I trail behind the group, touching families,torn from the same grey rock.
Her cavities are windows, flocks of sheep beyond, cropping grass.
Black-faced and meek, they stare across the fence like bundled refugees at crossing points.
This side a man is mowing cool green vistas.
New angles open like kaleidoscopes.
I chance upon huge half-hidden forms that seem to grow here.
No one sees my hands touch rippled surfaces skin to skin, where chisel marks reveal the flawed and secret energy of stone.
Deep in his thumbs he knew the grain of flint.
Clay like a river flowed beneath his hands.
I take the path between a line of trees.
Bronze bones articulate above me, a pelvic arch in balance like a cave, breeding memories, as if I lived here once.
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Putting the UK on the Map Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Putting the UK on the Map Buzz data software database archives browser copyright graphics windows dns gif gopher ftp research standards Citation BibTex RIS Peter Burden of the University of Wolverhampton's School of Computing and Information Technology describes the history behind his clickable maps of the UK, an essential and well established (though unfunded) resource for quickly locating academic and research Web sites.
Many of you are probably familiar with the WWW active maps of UK academic resources operated by the University of Wolverhampton's School of Computing and Information Technology.
If you're not point your WWW browser at http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/ukinfo/uk.map.html before going any further.
I thought it might be of interest to Ariadne readers to hear how and why these maps were created.
Maps such as these provide a very high density of information in a fairly digestable form, a recent version had well over 200 links to institutions displayed on a single WWW page.
This is a much better use of screen "real-estate" than simple text lists.
The history of the maps is closely related to the history of computing and facilities and network connectivity at the University of Wolverhampton.
Our first network connection was a PSS link for email only in 1988.
In 1988 a proper JANET link running at 9600 baud was provided to the then Polytechnic, this, however, supported only the JANET coloured book protocols.
It was not until October 1992, after the School of Computing had purchased SUN workstations in the previous May, that a proper Internet connection was provided initially running at 64 kbaud.
At this stage I obtained a modest timetable allowance for keeping the SUN workstations running and installing new software as required.
Enthusiasts within the School of Computing quickly discovered the riches available from the numerous anonymous FTP servers that were then the Internet's best public resource.
Clients using the "archie" software were quickly installed to help users navigate the Internet's resources.
By the end of 1993 two very significant developments had taken place.
I had decided that we ought to give something back to the Internet community in return for all the goodies we had downloaded for free and three separate researchers in the school had separately downloaded and installed a piece of X-windows software called "mosaic" (an early WWW browser).
A small sum of money was spent on a collection of CD-ROMs from an American source and I learnt how to run an anonymous FTP archive.
An email to the people at Imperial College resulted in details of our archive being included in the "archie" server database, making us the first former Polytechnic to run an "archie" indexed database.
I also decided that three copies of "mosaic" was a bit silly and decided to make a regular public installation configured initially to point at the NCSA server and shortly thereafter at the Manchester University server.
There was a large amount of interesting free software to download and install and it was difficult to know what to do next.
This work was all undertaken in the context of a general timetable allowance for running the School's SUN workstations and servers.
In April 1994 I attended a student seminar about the application known as "gopher", this was a very well presented seminar and I went away inspired to try and get a "gopher" server running.
This took about 2 hours (honest !)
and an e-mail to the UKOLN people at Bath resulted in our server being in the national list.
Next on the list was WAIS but it looked really rather complicated and I never quite got it sorted out, so instead in May 1994 I decided to install a WWW server.
This was rather harder and took about 2 days.
An e-mail to Imperial College resulted in our server being included a list they maintained.
We were rather impressed with an active map of UK academic sites available from Edinburgh University, however they didn't seem to have the resources available to support it as requests for inclusion went unanswered.
We had already decided to run a day course for industrialists on the Internet and its uses and had decided to provide hands-on experience of the WWW as part of the course and felt that those taking part in the course should see a map that showed Wolverhampton.
So we decided to do our own map.
I had already done a simple active map of South Shropshire so this didn't seem too difficult a task however a good quality outline map of the UK didn't seem to be readily available.
Scanned images were felt to be rather tatty.
Fortunately about 20 years ago I had written out (on punched cards) the outline of British Isles as a series of X-Y coordinates using the National Grid system and this file was still available.
However, not being a computer graphics expert, I was unsure how to convert this into an image and even if I could do that there was a requirement to annotate the image with place names etc.
So I decided to learn about Postscript.
We had the excellent public domain "ghostview" PostScript viewer and it proved not too difficult to convert the data file into a long sequence of "moveto" commands which drew lines.
The annotation was a bit more tricky and PostScript functions were written to draw red stars (for WWW servers) and green triangles (for gopher servers) as well as lines and text positioning.
This all worked surprisingly well and I would recommend direct PostScript coding to any-body who wants to create a good quality line image from coordinate data.
The WWW, however, required a GIF image, this was easily generated by using the excellent public domain "xv" image viewing program to grab the "ghostview" screen image.
The X-Y co-ordinates for the hot spots were also determined using "xv".
When this was all done and the necessary files had been created and installed we were ready to go.
The map went live in July 1994 and a note about it was posted to one of the newsgroups.
By coincidence Edinburgh stopped serving their map at about the same time.
Email to Geneva resulted in our map being included in the lists they maintained and the people at Boulder, Colorado who support the world active maps found out about it anyway.
The map had initially been drawn to show all UK universities even though they didn't at that time have Internet connectivity or a WWW server.
The last to come on line was Glasgow Caledonian in February 1996.
In order to support our course we had also prepared a classified list of UK WWW resources, this quickly suggested that maps showing research and commercial sites would be useful.
It should be remembered that at this time (July 1994) there were probably no more than 200-300 WWW sites in the UK.
Research and commercial maps were quickly prepared using the same techniques.
Reflection suggested that the commercial map was of very limited use as people look for commercial organisations based on what they do rather than where they are located so it was dropped and effort put into a fully classified searchable listing of UK WWW sites using Dewey Decimal coding, however that is another story.
It was always our intention to show all academic sites rather than just universities and it was also necessary to keep the maps up-to-date as new sites appeared.
Detection of new sites is done in a variety of informal ways, nowadays new sites often send us an e-mail requesting inclusion on the map but when we started examination of the access log was often the first indication of a new institution coming on-line.
We also examine the DNS domain listings from time to time.
The first non-university sites were University College, Salford and Aberdeen's Northern College.
The course which had motivated me to produce the map was now long past but I still had the allowance for running the system and the map seemed useful so I decided to keep it going with updates every 1-2 months as time permitted.
I had several e-mail correspondences about the precise names of institutions (it's Middlesbrough NOT Middlesborough !)
and their precise locations.
Somebody complained that I had put all the London sites in the middle of the North Sea but didn't suggest a viable alternative strategy for showing this congested area.
Congestion was getting serious, especially in the Manchester area, and it was getting quite hard work to shoe horn in new sites with correct annotation.
I'm still dreading e-mail from the Central Gloucestershire and Cheltenham Collegiate Institution for Agricultural Technological Education whose name MUST appear in full.
In early 1996 I decided on a major rework of the map to make it clearer what sort of institution a link pointed to.
To this end I used diamonds and stars (the last of the "gopher" triangles had long gone) to distinguish place names from institution names and different colours to distinguish types of institution.
These were red for a university, orange for a university sector college, yellow for an FE college and green for a school.
This was effective although one correspondent said it looked like an explosion in a Smartie factory.
A similar colour scheme was used on the research map to show affiliations of research sites.
At this stage some less obvious changes were also made.
We had installed an access counter in June 1995 and this was ticking merrily up to the half million but apart from complicated analysis of the main WWW server log we had no idea which sites people were accessing.
The standard NCSA server map software was also noted as being a bit clumsy interpreting a large text file for every query.
I decided to write a "bespoke" backend that did not use the NCSA imagemap facilities, instead depending on the CGI interface.
The site information is hard-wired into the back end which also logs every access with details of the site accessed.
This proved rather straightforward to write although some of the support software that tied the site list to our main database of WWW sites and prepared the associated alphabetical listing of sites was more tricky.
So what are the most popular sites.
Here's the top 10 from our very own University League table with accesses from May 16th to September 4th 1996:   Oxford 4481 Cambridge 3749 Edinburgh 3614 Manchester 2454 London 2424 Glasgow 1894 Leeds 1837 Sheffield 1792 Imperial Coll 1758 Aberdeen 1744 And who uses the map.
Of the 148574 accesses between May 16th and September 5th 1996 the following domains stand out:   UK academic (.ac.uk) 59703 Germany (.de) 11949 General commercial (.com) 11256 UK commercial (.co.uk) 6591 Netherlands (.nl) 3863 US Educational (.edu) 2508 France (.fr) 1689 More recently the academic map has been split into two, one for universities and university sector colleges and one for other colleges with the source of funding being the deciding criterion.
The map is still an unfunded activity, future plans include a further map for schools and the availability of the map and support/logging software as a licensed package for anybody who wants it.
The latter should be available, for Unix systems, by the time this appears in print.
The positioning of annotation on the maps is still a manual activity requiring editing of a PostScript text file.
This can be rather tedious and sometimes updates get "out of phase" with the main map resulting in links going to odd places.
There does not seem to be any realistic way of automating map preparation.
Our publicity department is waiting for the millionth access, due early 1997, with bated breath.
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Late Night News: The Electronic Telegraph Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Late Night News: The Electronic Telegraph Buzz java html archives hypertext research Citation BibTex RIS A night in the life of the Electronic Telegraph.
Emma Worsfold sits in on the editors' shift at ET.
7pm.
I take the Docklands Light Railway to Canary Wharf.
High up in the tower is The Telegraph Group.
The Electronic Telegraph [1] (known as ET, and not the ET I’m told) sits one floor above The Daily Telegraph, which occupies several floors.
A small man in a very large foyer hands me a security tag, and a member of staff comes down to collect me, since a swipe card is needed for all internal doors.
We go up in the lift, and I set my eyes on the ET offices.
They are open plan, they are full of computers, and the air is filled with the sound of the clicks of mouse buttons.
The editors have been here since 4pm and are busy at their screens.
Electronic Telegraph is very different from The Daily Telegraph, despite the fact that they share the same news sources.
ET has its own team, and the editor Derek Bishton, has a free hand in what he chooses to include.
The content, running order and front page of ET may resemble those of The Daily Telegraph, but will not be identical.
Sometimes there will be significant differences.
During a recent hijacking event, the ET Deputy Editor was able to wait through the night for the plane to land safely at Stansted Airport.
The news could be published on the server in minutes, making this the only morning paper to cover that story, as the others had already gone to press.
ET gets a different readership from The Daily Telegraph and this affects editorial policy.
The ET audience is more international, it’s younger, and it’s male-dominated.
ET is more likely to cover stories about the Internet, IT, education, international affairs and environmental issues.
It is less likely to cover UK specific stories, or fashion items.
It does not have a leader column or a letters page.
8pm.
I’m watching the Deputy Editor in action.
He has two computers on his desk.
One brings in the news, the other is a Mac which has Netscape, email, and some editing tools open.
The editor is scanning and altering the text of incoming stories.
Once the content is sorted, he transfers the file onto the Mac, and begins marking up with HTML.
Macros are used to save time and effort in the mark-up process so time spent on this is minimal.
Hypertext, archives and hot-links add significant value to the news stories.
For each story the editors do two types of search.
Firstly, they do a local search of the ET archive, which contains full text of every edition since November 1994.
Hyperlinks to articles in the archive help give each story a context and a history.
Secondly, a global Internet search is done to produce a list of hot-links to external sites which support the story in some way.
When I was there one story was captioned: “Leaked memo questions safety of burying atomic waste at Sellafield” The hot-links took readers to: a full text version of the leaked memo; details of the Friends of the Earth Planning Inquiry; and the home pages of British Nuclear Fuels, Greenpeace and Nirex.
The editor commented that ET prides itself on being good at analysis, and on providing background information.
He is willing to point to any site that is ‘legal, interesting and relevant.’ These links can give a natural balance to a story in ET it seems there are links to as many leftwing sites as right-wing.
10.15pm.
It’s time to go downstairs to get the proofs of tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph.
ET editors want to compare front pages, and to find suitable pictures.
It’s entertaining to see The Daily Telegraph offices.
At the Sports desk they’re watching footy on TV.
The City Desk has grey-haired gentlemen bent over their screens.
Glossy magazines and vases of flowers adorn the Fashion Section, while in Obituaries the table is stacked with large, black tomes.
A sea of news desks stretches out to the horizon, and in the corner Matt, the cartoonist, has a three foot model dog with bloodshot eyes gently patting his computer.
11.10pm.
Back at ET it’s time to decide on the running order.
Things are pretty flexible as space is not a consideration.
ET often carries much more information than The Daily.
This makes me think about the other ways that electronic publications can be manipulated.
The archives are potentially a very valuable research tool for academics, but does the ET ever make any retrospective changes to its copy?
To date changes have been few, but if legal action was brought against the paper, libel would be removed.
If external links prove to be less useful than originally thought, they may be removed.
12.50am.
The editing is finished and the files are being copied onto the server.
Sighs of relief all round and a chance to ask about future plans.
ET is not yet paying for itself, but with advertising and sponsorship it soon will be.
Meanwhile it seems to be boosting sales of the paper version, as a new generation and group of readers are being brought in.
One of the editors assures me “You’ll never have to pay for ET”, but it is possible that micro-payments for hits in the archive will be introduced in the long term.
It’s commercially sensitive for ET to talk about its future innovations, but I can say that they are looking at new JAVA applications; at allowing users to customise the paper to match individual interests; at the development of subject based online resources, and at including more sections from the paper copy.
At 1.15am the new edition of ET goes live.
One of Europe’s most accessed WWW sites, hits the virtual newstands.
References Electronic Telegraph Web Site, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Author Details Emma Worsfold Research Officer on the SOSIG and DESIRE projects Email: emma.worsfold@bris.ac.uk Web page: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/emma.html Tel: 0117 9288 443 Address: Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol, Bristol Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sideline: Skinheads in Cambridge Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sideline: Skinheads in Cambridge Citation BibTex RIS In Sideline, people give an alternative view of conference attendance.
Jim Huntingford is Subject Librarian for Accountancy, Management and Law at The University of Abertay, Dundee.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN”> Sideline: Skinheads in Cambridge In Sideline, people give an alternative view of conference attendance.
Jim Huntingford is Subject Librarian for Accountancy, Management and Law at The University of Abertay, Dundee.
Sometimes you just hate travelling.
Waiting for a connection at a Cambridgeshire station I’m blasted by unrelenting winds and find little solace from the weak April sun.
Seeking refuge in a shelter so charmless that it could conceivably be used in the event of nuclear fall-out, I’m met with uninterested stares from a dozen or so fellow travellers.
At least it’s warmer, but if one more person leaves that door open I swear I’ll … I pass the time by playing a mental game of ‘spot the librarian’.
I decide against approaching the likely candidates with “Excuse me, but I don’t suppose you’re going to the UC&R Conference ?” Perhaps they would be offended wounded at having been so easily catagorised as a travelling librarian.
Then again, non-librarians might take it even less kindly.
In Cambridge I catch one of the multitude of deregulated buses and begin to feel relieved that the long haul from Dundee is over.
This feeling quickly dissipates on arrival when I realise that my briefcase is still on the bus which is fast disappearing around a corner.
In a split second of inexplicable calm, I wonder what life will be like without my address book, cheque book, keys and rail tickets.
Then I start some serious panicking.
Incredibly, I spot a familiar looking bus driver (skinhead, earring, tattoos) in a bus on the opposite side of the road.
Offering up a prayer of thanks for circular routes, I dodge the traffic (mostly kamikaze students on bicycles) and manage to get his attention.
I babble incoherently about my briefcase before we establish that this is not the same bus.
Another bus pulls up alongside, complete with driver with skinhead, earring and tattoos.
As I transfer my hysterical babble from one driver to the next, the first accuses me of thinking all skinheads look alike.
Stereotypes?
The image problem?
As I grip the handle of my retrieved briefcase with relief, I wonder briefly if this topic is on the conference agenda.
I’ll check later.
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SEREN: Sharing of Educational Resources in an Electronic Network Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SEREN: Sharing of Educational Resources in an Electronic Network Buzz software database copyright video cataloguing z39.50 research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Lovecy from Bangor University describes SEREN, a project from the Electronic Document Delivery section of the eLib programme.
SEREN aims to provide the software to enable the Welsh HE community to maximise use of the library resource-base in Wales before turning to BLDSC and other suppliers.
Traditionally, interlibrary loans in academic libraries has made extensive use of the collections of the BLDSC as the primary resource; an approach emphasised by the designation of certain large academic libraries as “backup” libraries to the BLDSC.
In other sectors of the profession, notably among Health Libraries and Public Libraries, the position has been reversed: other comparable libraries have formed the main source, with the BLDSC acting as long-stop.
The reasons for this are many, and not just financial; indeed, analysis recently in one regional loan scheme suggested that as at present funded loans are actually costing some member libraries more than would use of the British Library.
Needless to say, SEREN does not start with the aim of running a more expensive system!
A brief analysis of likely costs and volumes of business suggested that the resources of the HE libraries in Wales could be shared at a lesser cost than using the BLDSC, based on the fact that the initial costs of the material and the storage overheads are covered by the holding institution for its own purposes.
In this respect, the project has origins not dissimilar to the LAMDA project – also in the eLib Document Delivery area – or the JEDDS project in Queensland.
However, there are respects in which SEREN differs from both of these, as well as ways in which it parallels what is being done in one or the other.
Wales has a number of features which make it an ideal area in which to instigate such a project.
The number of HE Institutions is manageable – 15 when the project was first under consideration, 14 currently, 13 (we hope) next month following another merger.
All are funded by the same Funding Council, and apart from some HE courses in FE institutions represent the entire sector of that Funding Council.
There is a strong tradition of cooperation between the libraries, in initiatives such as WALIA (Welsh Academic Libraries Inter-Availability) which allows borrowing rights at any of the institutions to researchers at any other.
The librarians meet together twice a year under the chairmanship of the National Librarian to discuss issues of mutual concern; the National Library of Wales is a member of the Project.
Despite the relatively small number of institutions, almost all the characteristics of the present diversified HE sector can be found: large universities; institutions with large numbers of part-time, distance learning, and franchised students; medium-sized universities; multi-campus institutions; small HE colleges which have evolved from single-subject public-sector institutions.
There are specialist collections in Medicine, Music, Drama, and Agriculture, as well as in Welsh literature and history, which make the combined library resource a significant enhancement of that of any one institution, even the biggest.
Three other factors, one of which at least is unique to Wales, have helped to shape the SEREN project.
The world of professional librarianship in Wales is relatively small – it is said that when librarians meet at one committee they have only to change their hats to become another committee entirely.
There is thus considerable interaction between academic and public librarians, and the geographical aspect of SEREN is coterminous with the regional loans bureau (WRLS).
This has had an influence on the approach to some elements of the design, as will be seen later.
Communication in Wales is difficult, at least for anyone wishing to travel north to south or viceversa.
The main arteries are the M4 in the south and the A55 in the north, both leading to England; rail travel from Bangor to Cardiff or Aberystwyth normally goes via Crewe.
It takes an hour longer to get to Bangor by train from Cardiff than it does from London.
The use of electronic communication for interlibrary loans or document delivery is therefore extremely attractive.
Finally, there is in parts of the Principality a practical need, and in the whole of Wales a statutory requirement, for any services offered publicly to be available in Welsh as well as English.
Perhaps I should have added a fourth factor, although its significance is hard to assess: the growing acknowledgement that academic library and computing services share a number of goals and approaches, as seen by the number of services which have in some measure converged.
It is perhaps significant that two of the institutions most heavily committed in the establishment of SEREN have wholly-merged Information Services.
The Project The aim of the project is to test whether, by utilising the whole information resource of Welsh HE, and the potential for electronic communication over JANET, it is possible to provide a service which delivers documents to users at an acceptable price and speed.
As such it falls into two fairly distinct parts, which were initially two separate proposals to the FIGIT Committee.
Development at NEWI (the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education at Wrexham) is concerned with the location of holdings, the transmission of requests, the scanning of appropriate documents and their delivery to the requester.
Development at Cardiff is concerned with the transmission of requests from the users through a local network to a point where they can be transferred into the location-checking element of the system, and the transmission of the received request to the users’ desktop.
Development of the inter-institutional elements is based on e-mail protocols, because of the potential advantages of the store-and-forward aspect of e-mail, and because it is felt that it will make the system accessible to any site, however small, which has access to a POP mailer.
(This could be important in the event of the extension of the system beyond HE.)
It is intended to use Z39.50 protocols for look up, and discussions are under way as to how catalogues which do not have this facility can be accessed.
Current thinking is centred on the development of a union catalogue, which may have the advantage that the catalogue server could also run some of the management software necessary for ensuring that all requests do not go to the largest libraries, and that accounts are kept of the level of lending and borrowing between individual pairs of institutions.
Although a union catalogue would not necessarily require the use of Z39.50, the possibility remains that systems which have that protocol will not need to be brought into the union catalogue, and that the search would be extensible to other Z39.50 catalogues (eg the IRIS system in Eire).
Libraries which receive requests will be able to access the scanner from within the SEREN program, and be guided through the scanning process, returning at the end to the SEREN software to transmit the document.
The document will be sent as a MIME attachment to an e-mail message, which will allow (theoretically) the transmission of other formats – audio and video documents, for example.
Where a location cannot be found within SEREN libraries, it is intended that the request will be transmitted as a normal request to the BLDSC without further intervention by the requester.
Extension of the system to the end user will be dependent first on the existence of a suitable institutional network, and secondly on the policy of the institution in respect of whether it wishes all ILLs to be monitored by the Library.
The software will, when fully developed, cope with maintaining accounts related to departments, research projects, or individuals, and will enforce authorisation where this is required by institutional policy.
An important feature will be a check that the item in question is not already in the stock of the home institution; and will have some method of indicating the facilities (eg sound card) required for viewing the document.
All the software will be developed to be capable of either Welsh or English dialogue with the user, and it is hoped that this will also allow the possibility of the provision of other languages also.
Central to the operation of the project is the matter of copyright.
There will have to be facilities for ensuring that documents scanned and transmitted cannot be held in electronic format for use by other persons, and arrangements will have to be made for the completion of hard-copy copyright declarations by requesters.
The Project will be approaching publishers to discuss what activities they are prepared to permit, and the possibility exists (although there would be reluctance to use it!)
of adding a royalty payment into the charging mechanism.
It is intended to design the software so that a document held already in machine-readable format could be transmitted without human intervention, and the feasibility of this will be tested using the Journal of the National Library of Wales which they are intending experimentally to digitise and of which they own the copyright.
Extension of this will obviously have to await agreement from publishers, and the present insistence in the pilot site licences that only paper copies can be used to provide interlibrary loans does not give rise to optimism in this area.
Future developments Work will be done – hopefully within the three-year project timescale – on the interfacing of the system to existing local ILL management systems; there is no intention of trying to write another ILL system, or of forcing libraries to change what they have.
It is likely that this interface will make use of the ISO protocols, but other possibilities are also being considered.
It is also hoped that there will be interfaces to other external document suppliers besides the BLDSC, thus offering requesting libraries a wider range of choice.
In these areas SEREN will be co-operating with other eLib projects, particularly EDDIS and through them the JEDDS project which is based in Australia.
Another possible area of inter-project co-operation is with the Infobike project at Bath; this may enable end users to turn a subject request to a number of databases into a document request to be transmitted to SEREN, checked against local holdings, and sent to an appropriate location.
It is intended that future work on the management system in the centre will include the ability of requesters to set their own parameters for which locations to use, and also for lenders to set their own prices for supply.
This latter, coupled with calculations of average delivery times, would enable requesting libraries to ask for an item from the cheapest source, however slow, or from the fastest possible source, whatever the cost.
Perhaps the most interesting area of possible future development lies in cooperation with the public libraries in the regional loan system.
The WRLS is considering its own union catalogue, and this could be merged with that of SEREN if this is the route chosen.
Although the electronic transmission of documents is probably less relevant to public libraries, whose interlibrary loans contain a high proportion of monographs, the system would still allow the speedy transmission of requests at relatively low cost.
Moreover, the stocks of the HE libraries would be readily available to public libraries – this could be important to institutions with significant numbers of parttime and particularly distance learners – and there could prove to be more use of public library stock by students than would be anticipated at this stage.
The system would fit well with the concept of Cymru-LIP-Wales, the Library and Information Plan for the Principality, and could provide a model for other regions where this sort of co-operation has begun.
Further information Schematics for the system, and other reports on developments, can be found on the SEREN Web server (http://www.newi.ac.uk/seren/) or by contacting the Project Manager: Mike Pycroft Gwasanaethau Gwybodaeth / Information Services Prifysgol Cymru Bangor / University of Wales Bangor Ffordd Sackville, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 1LD Ffon/Tel: 01248 382416 Ffacs/Fax: 01248 383826 Email: iss153@bangor.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Consortium and Site Licensing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Consortium and Site Licensing Buzz data software framework html database archives standardisation copyright aggregation ejournal licence cd-rom authentication Citation BibTex RIS Jim Huntingford reports from the Consortium and Site Licensing Seminar organised by the United Kingdom Serials Group.
Billed as an opportunity to explore the complex issues involved in forming consortia and negotiating site licences, the subtitle of this one-day seminar was What do we really want?
The short answer from the delegates may have been we don’t really know.
This was reason enough for over 150 of us to attend and grapple with some new concepts and terminology.
The increasing impact of consortia and site licensing upon all those involved in scholarly communication was reflected by the varied background of the delegates, with representatives from a wide range of publishers, information intermediaries and information providers.
International interest in developments in the UK was made apparent by the large number of European and North American delegates.
Martin White, Managing Consultant with TFPL [1], opened the day’s proceedings with a scene-setting survey of the history and development of library site licences, from CD-ROM to the UK Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI).
Most Higher Education institutions have adopted the PSLI, the first national licence of its kind in the world, with average savings on journal subscriptions of around £11,000.
Some Universities have been making extensive electronic use and have actively promoted the service, but a clear pattern of usage has yet to emerge.
Full advantage of electronic delivery cannot be taken because of IT obstacles, not least the resources needed to install the required software on all networked PCs.
Martin drew the delegates’ attention to the evaluation report [2] of April 1997 which recommended that a Mark II site licence should be in place for 1998⁄99.
This will be funded by means other than top-slicing, with the management put out to tender.
As little statistical information was available at the time of the first report, more evaluation is required and many issues need to be resolved, including the “apparent lack of direction of PSLI Mark II”.
A further report is imminent and perhaps this will shed some light on how meaningful data on use and benefits can be obtained.
The success of the pilot has been difficult to evaluate as the amount top-sliced from the HE budget to pay for the scheme has never been divulged, a fact commented on by the Chair, Richard Heseltine.
On the day, some news just in was that responsibility for PSLI Mark II had been transferred from the HEFCs to JISC, with a new steering group and a new consultant appointed to advise JISC on contract parameters.
The next paper, What makes a negotiating unit?, was presented by Jill Taylor-Roe, Sub-Librarian, Liaison & Academic Services, at the University of Newcastle.
Jill argued that the development of consortia in the UK and the USA has illustrated some tensions between the centralised and bureaucratic direction of purchasing and traditional library freedoms and discretion.
For example, long-term consortium commitment to purchasing journal titles can prove restrictive and inflexible to member institutions.
Nevertheless, Jill’s own institution is already a member of a large number of consortia, including NEYAL (North East and Yorkshire Academic Libraries Consortium).
Drawing upon lessons learnt from her own experiences Jill suggested that the benefits gained from consortium participation outweigh any drawbacks.
The provision of a negotiating framework and combined purchasing power have enabled libraries to obtain advantageous terms for the supply of journals and a reduction in the unit cost of information.
She argued that successful consortia are those which are adequately funded, have a clear purpose, shared vision and effective management structure.
Good communications between member institutions, a certain amount of flexibility and “commitment and team spirit” are vital characteristics of a successful consortium.
Robert Campbell, Managing Director of Blackwell Science, gave a publisher’s perspective on the impact of consortium purchasing and site licensing.
Of most interest to librarians were his views on the feasibility of publishers collaborating to create multi-publisher licences which offer subject-based electronic access to journal literature.
Robert admitted that such collaboration can be problematic for publishers, with compromises required on format, delivery, pricing and licensing.
For libraries, however, subject-based licenses would provide one-stop shopping for users.
This facility is already in demand in the USA where there is currently a large and confusing number of systems available from publishers and intermediaries.
The ADONIS project has shown that publishers will work together “if supported by the market” and it could be a forerunner of what we might see in the next 5 years.
But libraries, working in consortia, will “need to push for multi-publisher licences and help to hold publishers together” if this is to be realised.
Sally Morris, Director of Copyright & Licensing at John Wiley, and Elizabeth Heaps, Acting Librarian at the University of York, gave an overall view of licensing issues.
Surprisingly, given the anguish that licensing causes for both publishers and librarians, there were some areas of agreement.
The requirement of libraries for consistent terminology and simplicity in licensing documentation was recognised, as was the need for publishers to work together in order to achieve this.
The proposed model licence between publishers and UK universities [3], drawn up by a Publishers Association/ JISC working party, was identified as a good starting point by both speakers.
Nevertheless, it was clear that licensing will remain a contentious issue for the foreseeable future, especially as the new delivery technologies raise yet more questions.
Of particular concern is the apparent failure of many publishers to address the need for perpetual access to electronic journal articles.
It would seem that publishers are not yet committed to providing continuing rights to electronic material and are uncertain how and at what cost this facility should be provided.
This does not bode well for a library community who see no reason why they should pay more than once for access to an electronic journal, when a single payment suffices for a printed title.
Publishers, meanwhile, are concerned that inter library loan of electronic full-text articles represents a bigger threat to their interests than photocopying ever was .
This issue was addressed by Fred Friend, Librarian at University College London, who gave a robust view of what licensing rights libraries need in order to provide a full service to faculty and students.
He also emphasised the importance of fair dealing and inter-library loan in the electronic environment.
Fred reminded publishers that libraries will attempt to continue to pay for heavily-used journals by subscription, relying on document delivery for second level material only.
After all, money spent on inter-library loans tends to benefit individuals, rather than institutions, as items are often obtained for personal use rather than added to stock.
He argued that consortia could provide a framework for secure electronic document delivery and provide a “vital element of control”.
If a consortium has sufficient internal strength, with members expelled if they breach fair dealing provisions, then publishers could be reassured.
In this way fair dealing should “protect both publisher profitability and the free flow of information for the public good”.
Fred concluded with the prediction that publishers will not make large profits from document delivery to academic libraries, but that they could achieve a stable income.
This will be based upon consortium deals for subscriptions combined with fair dealing for inter library loan.
Albert Prior, Publisher Relations Manager for electronic services at Swets & Zeitlinger surveyed the role of intermediaries or content aggregators in facilitating access to electronic journals.
Provision of a number of value-added features were identified by Albert as the main advantages of electronic delivery through content aggregators, be they subscription agents like Swets, bibliographic database/secondary publishers like UMI and SilverPlatter or publishers themselves.
As intermediaries are “increasingly co-operating”, these features could include simplification of authentication procedures, provision of a common interface, one-stop shopping for e-journals and enhanced alerting and linking functionality.
But many librarians are often cautious and even suspicious when the talk turns to matters ‘value added’.
You don’t get something for nothing and the price-tag for any ‘added-value’ service reflects an attempt to recover extra costs incurred in adding the said value.
Libraries and consortia will only pay for such features if there is a clear and identifiable demand from their users.
The seminar was concluded by the Chair, Richard Heseltine, Director of Academic Services, University of Hull, who summarised the major issues and gave his thoughts on where the future lies.
Richard suggested that site licensing could prove to be a short-term and conservative solution” dead before it has begun”.
Channels of scholarly communications will continue to be revolutionised by further advances in IT and telecommunications.
The landscape of the Higher Education sector will continue to be transformed by developments in open and distance learning, the integration of work and study, and multiple membership of institutions.
All of this will undermine the concept of the physical campus and as this crumbles the site licence could prove either unworkable or unnecessary.
A longer term future was predicted, however, for consortia.
The present situation is already more complex and crowded than that of 12 months ago and the number of consortia will continue to grow.
Activity will undoubtedly be targeted on facilitating and improving electronic delivery with the Metropolitan Area Networks playing a vital role.
Archiving, authentication, and standardisation of formats and interfaces will be some of the major issues.
In this changing environment the experience of libraries participating and co-operating in the new paradigms might be to “fail frequently and then to learn”.
References United Kingdom Serials Group http://uksg.lboro.ac.uk/hi/text.htm [1] TFLP http://www.tfpl.com/ [2] UK Pilot Site Licence Initiative: Report on Phase I of the Evaluation of the UK Pilot Site Licence Initiative, April 1997, HEFCE Ref M 3⁄97 http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefce/pub97/m3_97.html [3] Joint Information Systems Committee & Publishers Association Working Party Proposed ‘Model Licence’ Between UK Universities and Publishers Available at http://uksg.lboro.ac.uk/hi/pajisc.htm in HTML and PDF and at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/pa/ in HTML and Word 7 Author Details Jim Huntingford Academic Librarian (Accountancy, Management and Law) University of Abertay Dundee j.huntingford@tay.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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2nd International Symposium on Networked Learner Support Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 2nd International Symposium on Networked Learner Support Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ashton introduces the forthcoming 2nd International Symposium on Networked Learner Support, to be held in Sheffield on 23-24 June 1997.
Issue 4’s At the Event column featuring the 1st International Symposium on Networked Learner Support [1] had a distinct football theme.
So it seems particularly appropriate that I sit down to write about this year’s Symposium on the day of the FA Cup Final!
(No footballs at this year’s event; however, be warned that your Editor is threatening to bring his boomerang!)
The venue for the 2nd International Symposium on Networked Learner Support (NLS) is Halifax Hall, Sheffield.
The Symposium will take place on the 23rd and 24th June 1997, and the theme of this year’s event is “New services, roles and partnerships for the on-line learning environment”.
The Symposium focuses on the potential of computer-mediated communications (CMC) and the Web in the provision of information support, and on the organisational and professional development issues associated with the NLS role.
It aims to offer an opportunity for those involved in creating networked learning resources and developing on-line information support strategies to share experience and ideas, and to contribute to developing good practice in this new area of activity.
Over the two days, papers will be offered on a range of aspects of NLS in higher education, and there will be opportunities for break-out groups to discuss the issues raised.
We are delighted to welcome presenters from Germany, Denmark, Australia, and the USA, as well as speakers from the UK sector.
Full details of the Symposium including the programme can be found on the Web [2] .
We anticipate that the Symposium will be of interest not only to library and information staff involved in learner support (e.g.
user education, information skills training or enquiry/reference work) but also to those involved in NLS from other points of view, such as teaching/learning support, computer services, academic departments, distance learning services, research and development projects, staff development/training.
The Symposium has already attracted a lot of interest from both the UK and abroad, so to ensure a place book now using the booking form [2] The Symposium is organised in association with the eLib training and awareness project, NetLinkS (collaborative professional development for networked learner support).
For further information on the project, see the associated Web site [3] .
References 1st International Symposium on Networked Learner Support http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/netlinks/ (Forthcoming) 2nd International Symposium on Networked Learner Support http://netways.shef.ac.uk/rbase/2ndsym.htm Netlinks Web Site, http://netways.shef.ac.uk/ Author Details Sarah Ashton, Netlinks Research Officer Email: S.J.Ashton@sheffield.ac.uk Tel: 01142 222 657 Address: Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BULISC '97 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BULISC '97 Buzz data software framework database archives digitisation copyright multimedia z39.50 passwords marc ejournal licence url research Citation BibTex RIS John Eyre reports on the Bournemouth University Library & Information Services Conference, New Tricks 2.
The Bournemouth University Library & Information Services Conference, 1997, was organised and hosted by David Ball at the Talbot Campus between 27th and 29th August.
The title of “New Tricks 2” reflected the interesting in new developments in library automation and digital resources.
The theme of comparing eLib and Telematics funded projects was a very interesting and useful one with a surprising amount of synergy.
The three days were organised in the familiar format of a half day for registration, introduction and conference dinner; a second day for the bulk of presentations structured in a two-tier manner with general themes for the individual sessions; and a final half day for summing up and debate.
David Ball introduced Professor Paul Light, Pro Vice-Chancellor of BU, who welcomed delegates and set the scene for the following days by suggesting that there is a move away from the traditional “library-centred” model of bringing learners into the library, towards a more distributed learning environment.
He made the point that this raised many technical, legal and commercial issues as well as the more difficult questions of the psychological impact of such changes.
Two very eloquent and informative presentations were made by Ian Pigott of DGXIII and Kelly Russell from eLib.
Ian outlined the history of the Telematics Programme from the Third Framework programme, Initiation of Change (and collaboration) 1990-94 with 51 projects and the Fourth Framework programme, Consolidation and Integration 1994-98 with 32 projects.
Another 70 initiatives have also been launched within this period.
The Fifth Framework programme covers the years 1998-2002 and concentrates on access to knowledge and culture for the average citizen, bringing libraries together with museums, galleries and other similar organisations.
Selection of successful bids is done by outside experts (typically three per proposal), but there should be at least one library and two countries involved in the bid.
New areas for consideration include children’s library services, smart cards, models of distributed services, and public library issues.
Ian pointed out the size of the problem, even in a European framework, with some 96,000 libraries and 400,000 new books arriving on the scene in 1996.
More information on the Libraries part of the Telematics programme can be found at http://www.echo.lu/libraries/en/libraries.html Kelly explained the need for the eLib programme as identified by the Follett report of November 1993, commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council.
This Libraries Review, chaired by Sir Brian Follett, identified a number of areas for attention and several initiatives were launched as a result eLib being one of them.
The eLib programme is based on cross-community partnerships and has funded 60 projects of one to three year duration from its £15M allocation.
After three years the outcomes are influencing current work and important lessons have been learned.
Areas of particular interest have included publishing, with copyright and licence models being significant, academic staff training, public libraries, archives and museums, and work with international bodies.
Future emphasis will be on integration of existing and new services.
For further information visit http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ Comments and questions from the audience at this stage concentrated on the difficulties of working on short-term contract-based projects and management of both internal staff as well as partners in other institutions and countries.
The need for having professional project managers was emphasised and the problems of loosing good management and technical people before and after projects were completed due to better conditions being offered in commercial environments.
It is often impossible to find appropriately qualified personnel that are willing to work on a 6 month or 1 year contract.
The sherry reception and conference dinner were well received with a very good menu and friendly catering staff.
After dinner most of the delegates retired to the bar where they continued to get to know one another.
On-site accommodation in the student village was more than adequate, based in modern buildingsand only five minutes walk from the lecture theatres.
On the second evening, the group was bussed to Poole Harbour for a boat trip around the massive harbour area.
The trip included jazz band, supper and drinks and everyone seemed to enjoy the event, all be it a rather cold one!
With all meals included in the price, breakfast was the next opportunity for inter-delegate communications.
The main day was split into four sections, including projects from both funding bodies, as follows: User Interfaces and e-Journals chaired by Marian Matthews Internet Archaeology Dr Julian Richards http://intarch.ac.uk/ DECOMATE John Paschoud http://www.lse.ac.uk/decomate/ SuperJournal David Pullinger http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/sj/ Access to Networked Resources chaired by James Tudor EDUCATE Gobnait O’Riordan SOSIG Nicky Ferguson http://sosig.ac.uk/ LIBERATION Andreas Wolf http://liberation.ub.uni-freiburg.de/ ADAM/VADS Tony Gill http://adam.ac.uk/ Images and Digitisation chaired by Matt Holland DIAD Pat Batley & Mark Gaved http://www.lond-inst.ac.uk/projects/diad/ ELISE II John Eyre http://severn.dmu.ac.uk/elise/ MIDRIB Susan Gove & Jill Szuscikiewicz http://www.midrib.ac.uk/ Access to and Delivery of Distributed Resources chaired by Jill Beard ONE Robert Bull SEREN Mike Pycroft http://seren.newi.ac.uk/user/seren/ EUROPAGATE Sean Philips http://europagate.dvt.dk/ LAMDA Frederick Friend http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Library/lamda/ CASELibrary Mark Pierce not presented As conference proceedings will be published in due course and abstracts are available, I will not try to describe each of these projects or presentations.
However, there were a number of common themes and points raised.
It was gratifying to see how closely related all these project were, both eLib and Telematics.
Each project seemed to have at least looked at outcomes or suggestions of those that had gone before or that were working in parallel and incorporated the latest technologies.
It was accepted that the most successful projects were those that were able to adapt to changes and although funding bodies required detailed plans for technical development and deliverables, they accepted changes where they were for the better.
There was a significant emphasis on using standards within the development and operation of open systems and services.
Tony Gill identified four categories for considering these under, technical, structure, content and organisation.
You can consider some of the following in these areas TCP/IP, Z39.50, Whois++, AACR, MARC, CIDOC, AAT, Dewey Decimal, Spectrum, etc.
Copyright was another obvious topic of conversation.
This was of particular interest in the DIAD project where they were dealing with very old issues of design journals.
Not only the permission of the publisher is required but each article has to be cleared by contacting the authors and photographers, some of whom have since become quite famous and may not be exactly happy about having their old work made available electronically.
If you are scanning material or re-photographing or sending out to bureaux then you need to consider rights at all these stages.
Most projects had accepted the need to move to the Internet and the World Wide Web for the user interface, with all the benefits and problems that that brings.
It was interesting to see how many projects had independently selected the services of a small database company based in Covent Garden in London.
System Simulation Ltd have a long history of software development and had already worked with some significant customers such as the London Transport Museum, HMV Music in the Oxford Circus Store, Stanford Research Institute and others.
Their Index+ database system and supporting tools were selected for use in the ELISE I project in 1993 and now seem to be providing the functionality in many UK and European projects, including DIAD, MIDRIB, MAID, Aquarelle, CIMI, ELISE and ADAM/VADS.
Some interesting comments and ideas for user interface designers were presented, with Internet Archaeology providing timeline and geographic search tools and analysing system log files showing that even presenting a simple user/password entry system was enough to stop 70% of potential users from progressing past that point.
It was not clear whether this was solely due to this loose barrier or just the fact that by that time the user had already decided that this was not a site of interest to them.
It was pointed out that e-journals are not the same as ordinary journals presented electronically and different problems and opportunities present themselves to these two areas of digital publishing.
David Pullinger suggested two dilemmas that work against the production of electronic material: Authors want to access and use multimedia data but not produce it.
Authors want to access interesting Web sites with multimedia objects but do not want to produce them.
LAMDA seem to be well on target to provide a commercially sound service based on providing sections of published material by electronic means.
This is done by first scanning the material, transmitting to the customer, then once receipt is acknowledged, deleting from store.
This service is operating at a price of £3.60 per transaction, which is lower than the alternative methods.
It appears to be providing about 40% of the requirements in participating establishments.
The ELISE system design will cater for a fully commercial system by the end of its development.
This does not mean that users and other developers will not have free or low cost access to outcomes of this Telematics project, simply that the framework will allow for a self-sustaining service.
SEREN appear to have taken the language barriers seriously and, unlike many European projects, implemented a bilingual interface Welsh and English.
The final day session was chaired by Professor Robin Alston of University College London who introduced the four chairpersons from the previous day, in order to summarise their sessions.
Once this was done, Robin made an excellent presentation of his own, drawing on his many years working in libraries to raise controversial issues about large amounts of money having been wasted in fruitless pursuit of automation.
The vast problem of archives too big to contemplate digitisation, the 20 million publications per day that are currently thrown away, the commercialisation of previously accepted public services, the inadequacies of technology to cope with the need for the highest quality scans for archival purposes and the low quality of delivery systems, these were all issues that Robin tried to bate the audience with while playing “devil’s advocate”.
By the end of the debate most people, including Robin, admitted that they were optimistic about the future and the way technology might help to bring wider access to otherwise hidden treasures.
Some 50 delegates from as far afield as Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Croatia and Italy, attended the conference and I heard only good reports of their experiences.
Thanks should go to Sally Grant and other members of the Bournemouth team for their efforts in organising the proceedings and making the visitors welcome.
Author Details John Eyre, Senior Project Manager International Institute for Electronic Library Research De Montfort University Leicester, LE1 9BH tel: +44 (0)116 2577159 fax: +44 (0)116 2577170 email: jle@dmu.ac.uk IIELR url:http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/ ELISE url: http://severn.dmu.ac.uk/elise/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cybercollege Scorecard: How Does Your University Score?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cybercollege Scorecard: How Does Your University Score?
Buzz java html cataloguing opac multimedia videoconferencing e-learning cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Tony Durham, multimedia editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, explains how to determine whether cultural change has affected your institute of learning.
Information technology is now essential to the effective running of a university or college, and a suitably high-tech image will help a higher education institution to compete in attracting the best students.
The Cybercollege Scorecard will enable you to determine whether your institution is successfully riding the IT wave.
Furthermore, if you have the necessary information you can go on to complete scorecards for rival institutions which you admire, envy or despise.
Does your institution have: a learning resources centre?
a multimedia production centre?
a cybercafe?
degree courses on the Internet?
a videoconferencing suite?
a satellite uplink?
a library OPAC (online public access catalogue)?
a MAN (metropolitan area network) connection?
a virtual reality centre?
student smartcards?
a prospectus on CD-Rom?
a 5-rated computer science department?
an IT strategy?
a pro-vice chancellor responsible for information technology?
Score 5 points for each of these.
Score 10 points if the learning resources centre plan is on hold, as you realise that if students can be forced to buy their own PCs the LRC won’t be necessary.
Add 5 points for each megabit/second bandwidth of your institution’s SuperJanet connection, 10 points for each major Janet resource or CTI centre hosted at your institution, 20 points for each Asian tiger economy which franchises your computing studies BSc, a point for every 50 student rooms with network sockets, 5 points for each campus spin-off IT company to reach 10 million pounds capitalisation, 3 points for each school you have connected to the Internet, and 2 points for each City finance house which has bought your Neural Networks course.
Take a point for each BBC Micro which is still working and interfaced to at least 20,000 pounds worth of equipment, and a point for each 100,000 pounds of income from open learning delivered online to local businesses.
Award yourself a 20 point bonus if at least 40 per cent of your computing undergraduates are women.
Lose a point for each “top 5 per cent of the web” logo or similar evidence of psychological insecurity on your Web site.
Lose 20 points if your institution still has no Web site.
Lose 10 points if your institution was involved in a disastrous Teaching and Learning Technology Programme project.
Lose 5 points for each member of staff profiled in UK Wired magazine.
Lose 2 points if your institution’s staff have sad email addresses like js990@bilbo.vax.poppleton.ac.uk.
Lose 2 points if the vice chancellor’s secretary still prints out the VC’s email.
Lose 5 points if your institution’s computers have been hacked.
Lose 10 points if nobody thinks they are worth hacking.
Lose a few points (determined by self-assessment) for each European Community collaborative project which failed to develop anything useful.
Score 1 point for pragmatism if you cheated on the previous question.
Finally, a check that your computer science department is on the ball.
The first language taught to undergraduates should be: (a) Pascal (b) C © B (z) Z (d) Lisp (e) Prolog (f) Smalltalk (g) ML (h) Ada (i) Visual Basic (j) Java (k) HTML (l) whatever Microsoft is offering cheap this year.
Lose 2 points if you actually think it matters.
Lose another point if we left out your favourite language, another if it was APL, and another if you thought we could possibly have meant that.
APL is cool!
It just needs a special kind of student.
You should now have a positive, or possibly negative number of points.
Because of the scoring system there is no absolute upper or lower limit, but a high score suggests you are a successful cybercollege, able to leverage your knowledge assets in the global marketplace to deliver a compelling lifelong learning experience into the information millennium.
A low score may merely indicate that you have not tangled seriously with the technology yet.
However a negative score suggests that despite your institution’s undoubted enthusiasm for technology, you have messed up bigtime: every piece of silicon you touch turns to sand.
Author details Tony Durham, Multimedia editor, Times Higher Education Supplement Email: tdurham@timeshigher1.demon.co.uk Phone: 0171 782 3256 Times Higher Education Supplement Web Site: http://thesis.newsint.co.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Impact of IMPEL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Impact of IMPEL Buzz data software Citation BibTex RIS Jim Huntingford reviews IMPEL, an eLib project.
FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS IMPEL2 [1], an eLib Supporting Study, has investigated the organisational, social and cultural impacts of educational and technological change on people, specifically on information providers and users.
The aim has been to reach a better understanding of the depth and complexity of change and its effective management.
This large project has focused on case studies carried out in a range of 24 UK Higher Education institutions, targeted to form a purposive sample and to provide rich data.
The methodology has been qualitative, with thousands of questionnaires distributed and over 300 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with staff in the chosen institutions.
QSR.NUD.IST software, a data analysis package, is being used for textual analysis of the information on current practice and views.
The final report is not due until March 1998 but the findings to-date have been disseminated at a series of regional workshops for library and related support staff, designed to help validate and extend the results through shared experience.
The underlying causes of seismic and rapid shifts in the structure, function and culture of HE organisations are now well-known: the expansion of an increasingly heterogeneous student population demanding an ever-greater level of IT provision; the expectation that these students will take a greater responsibility for their own learning; financial stringency; increased accountability and, crucially, developments in information, educational and networking technologies.
More specifically, IT continues to be the catalyst for changes in organisational structure and purpose.
Many Information and Computing Services have been radically restructured or converged on both an organisational and operational level.
Different levels of convergence, from informal co-operative groupings to the creation of single services, emerged from the study.
In some instances restructuring may be motivated as much by cost savings as by a desire to create an improved service.
No one model has appeared as an indicator of successful joint working practices.
The management of massive restructuring like convergence presents great challenges: the issue of ‘culture clash’ has been raised as few staff at operational levels are used to working directly with colleagues in other services, resulting in poor or non-existent communications in the new service.
There may also be uncertainty about how to effectively deploy staff across former departmental demarcations.
These and related problems highlight the training and support required by staff before, during and after convergence.
IT also continues to effect changes in the duties and responsibilities of individuals, freeing some from routine tasks and blurring categorisations of ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’.
Professional staff can be seen taking on a more managerial role while a para-professional grade has emerged with the same level of responsibility as the assistant academic librarian of 10 years ago.
Resistance to such changes and/or uncertainty as to present and future roles is common.
While ‘professionals’ jealously guard duties they consider to encapsulate their status, lower grades are called upon to acquire a greater variety and number of skills.
If hierarchical career and payment structures don’t provide opportunities for recognition of upskilling then morale will inevitably suffer.
IT continues to fuel a growing demand for staff training.
Skills are required to facilitate basic use of the technology, use of the exploding number of electronic information resources and in the creation of electronic resources.
But increased training requirements are not limited just to better IT knowledge.
Multiskilling or re-skilling for converged services staff is a prime example, with a requirement for training in customer care and teamwork.
The need for training to support the management of change is also strong at all levels, not just amongst senior staff.
Skills are also needed to support staff in changing roles resulting from the closer integration of information, computing and teaching.
Librarians are continuing to take a greater responsibility for supporting and training their own users in transferable information retrieval skills.
The need to support librarians in improving teaching skills has already been recognised in the EduLib project.
But will the direction and content of degree and postgraduate courses for Information and Library staff change quickly enough to take the new skills into account?
Hopefully, the findings of IMPEL2 will provide a knowledge base for teachers of information and library science as they equip students for work in the electronic library.
In such a dynamic and uncertain environment policy makers may struggle to effectively manage and predict change and to provide improved services.
IMPEL2 has found examples of a ‘cultural lag’ in which the most rapidly changing part of an institution, often the Library and Computing services, forges ahead, leaving the rest of the organisation struggling to cope with the changes left in its wake.
But what do the findings of IMPEL2 tell us about the institutions which have most effectively managed the move to the world of electronic learning?
Fundamental to success is an understanding, at the highest institutional level, of the potential benefits of information, educational and networking technologies to institutions and HE in general.
Such understanding may be realised more quickly in institutions where the top librarian has status in the senior management group.
Strong central initiative and support helps to facilitate the design and operation of a more coherent and effective service.
Without top-level support IMPEL2 found that initiative and direction were commonly felt to be lacking.
The crucial factors were perceived to be institutional support, access to technology, a comprehensive information strategy, communication at and between all levels, project management and teamwork.
As in all change management a commitment to learning and training and the on-going support provided by a specific staff development budget were seen to be essential.
References [1] Impel 2 http://www.unn.ac.uk/~liy8/impel2/impel2.htm Author details Jim Huntingford, Academic Librarian University of Abertay Dundee.
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From the Trenches: Networking (Notworking?)
CD-ROMS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From the Trenches: Networking (Notworking?)
CD-ROMS Buzz data software database windows passwords licence cd-rom authentication standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight on the perils and problems of networking CD ROMs.
Many libraries now make heavy use of CD-ROM titles.
Today databases held on CD-ROMs cover practically all subjects and provide a way for a library to acquire a large quantity of regularly updated information.
Coupled with the relatively cheap network equipment that is now available, these CD-ROMs should also be able to provide a very useful network resource for an entire library or even campus.
However the current crop of CD-ROMs vary enormously in their ease of use in a networked environment.
Some CD-ROMs will just "plug and play" whilst others almost seem designed to cause library systems unit staff to tear their hair out.
This article hopes to outline some of the major problems to look out for in networking CD-ROMs, based on experiences in the Pilkington Library at Loughborough University and discussions with fellow systems support staff at other libraries.
It will concentrate on DOS based CD-ROM database search engines delivered over Novell NetWare.
Rather than name specific examples of bad CD-ROMs, the aim is to outline general problems to watch out for.
However, to be a little positive, examples of good products and vendors in specific problem areas will be included.
If nothing else they will prove that it is possible for vendors to make good CD-ROM database products that work well in networked library environments and may encourage some of the more errant publishers to fix some of the deficiencies in their products.
It is very difficult to give detailed recipes that will solve all the problems with CD-ROMs that are in use in the networked library community, mainly due to the wide variety of network environments in use and the effect that even small differences in software and hardware can have.
This article is intended more to be a guide to what to look out for in CD-ROMs intended to be networked rather than a cookbook of ready made solutions for the CD-ROMs available today.
Who knows, maybe even the CD-ROM vendors might read this and then fix some of the more broken pieces of software that are currently on the market!
Our network environment Before describing some of the common problems that we've come up against in networking our CD-ROMs, its probably worth just describing the network environment in which this experience has been gained.
The Pilkington Library has a large number of CD-ROMs in use, of which a large proportion are available over the network (the rest are installed on a single stand alone CD-ROM workstation in the library and patrons have to have a CD-ROM issued to them by the library staff before they can use it).
There are three mechanisms in use for mounting networked CD-ROMS: 21 individual SCSI drives in three towers accessed using SCSI Express, 6 individual SCSI drives in a single enclosure accessed using OptiNet, 2 individual SCSI drives and 10 Pioneer CD-ROM jukeboxes each holding six discs all accessed using LanCD.
The SCSI Express and OptiNet devices and software share a single 486 based Novell server running NetWare 3.12.
This server also has the hard disc which contains the installed CD-ROM software.
The LanCD drives have their own 486 machine running the LanCD server.
The majority of the Library's CD-ROM products are on the SCSI Express/OptiNet server; the LanCD server only holds two multi-disc Civil Engineering databases.
The clients for the CD-ROMs vary greatly.
In the library, most machines that access them are discless 486 PCs.
These machines mount another Novell server to give them some user file store and access to the standard set of non CD-ROM applications.
Doing this makes managing the installation of software packages much easier than if every machine had its own hard disc and cuts down on the chances of virus infection as the mounted drives containing software are write protected from the user accounts and the user file store is wiped clean between users.
Many of the networked CD-ROMs are also available for use by any PC on campus, which includes both machines in staff offices with hard discs and discless workstations in Computing Services run PC labs configured in a similar way to the machines in the Library itself.
All access to the CD-ROMs from any PC on campus is made via a set of home grown batch scripts and executables that check user authentication against the central UNIX computing resources on campus.
These scripts are usually accessed from an option in a Doug Menu list, which means that users are not exposed to the DOS command line.
Software Installation The first thing that one comes up against with a CD-ROM when it arrives in the Systems Unit of the Library is the need to install the database search software.
This usually involves running an installation program supplied either on the CD-ROM or on accompanying floppy discs that makes a copy of the CD-ROM search software on your hard disc and configures it to look in the right place for your CD-ROM database.
The ease with which this is accomplished varies greatly; some packages take a few minutes to install whereas others take several days and a couple of phone calls/email messages to the supplier to sort things out.
It is interesting to note that the complexity of software installation appears to have no direct relationship to the functionality of the software once it is installed.
A good example of this is the current Guardian Online CD-ROM.
This is a very popular CD-ROM with a good user interface and search facilities.
However it requires absolutely no installation.
The search software is run straight from the CD-ROM itself.
This is a godsend in a networked environment and has rapidly become the favourite CD-ROM of the Systems staff!
Other CD-ROMs are not so straight forward.
Some installation processes are a nightmare made worse by the fact that the software seems to have no understanding of the network environment (despite the fact that the Library has most likely paid a large sum of money for a network site license).
In some cases one can only get so far using the supplied installation program and then its up to the Systems staff to "hack" the CD-ROM into working.
The manuals that accompany the software often have a whole A5 page devoted to the installation process.
This page usually makes two incorrect assumptions: firstly that the product is being installed on a stand alone machine with a local hard disc and CD-ROM drive and secondly that the installation process always works flawlessly.
The first can probably be explained away by the fact that fewer networked licenses are sold than stand alone ones but the second assumption is just a pain, especially when things go wrong in subtle (and often hidden) ways.
Some search engine installation programs require that installation passwords are entered in order to start the installation process.
Quite why this is necessary is unclear; if the supplier sends you the CD-ROM that you've subscribed to, one would assume that you will also get the password at the same time.
Of course, this isn't always the case as suppliers sometimes forget to include the password which results in much scratching of heads as you unsuccessfully try last month's password and try to get their technical support hotline to tell you what the password is.
One thing to be ready for in a networked CD-ROM environment is when a new search engine is installed and works well on a machine in the library but refuses to run at all on a machine in another department.
These problems often turn out to be a result of a lack of free memory.
Its worth ensuring that you load any network and other device drivers that you can into the high memory above 640K so that the CD-ROM software has as much memory as possible available to it.
This needs pointing out as some CD-ROM products fail to tell you why they refuse to run (or produce the obligatory cryptic error code).
It must be said that there have been occasions when even this has not helped us and the CD-ROM has to be consigned to the standalone workstation.
With the slow migration of CD-ROM software to Windows this 640K barrier will slowly be removed and hopefully this problem will occur less and less.
Even once the software is installed and working, the installation "fun" may not yet be over.
Next month or next quarter a new CD-ROM will arrive with "new and upgraded" search software.
Occasionally this new software does fix things that desperately need fixing but more often it seems to either provide nothing new or adds obscure features that most users will never use.
Some CD-ROMs will allow you to use the new CD-ROM database with the old software (all of our current Bowker-Saur CD-ROMs do this for example) which is great for both the Systems staff and the librarians.
Its good for the Systems staff because it means that the installation of the new CD-ROM is as simple as dismounting the old issue and then remounting the new one, which is just a five minute job.
Its good for the librarians because they are the people who produce the user guides and handouts and so they will be the people who have to rewrite them if new features appear or (worse) existing features are changed.
This in turn is good for the CD-ROM vendor as the two groups of people who decide which CD-ROMs to use in the library are happy.
In the now competitive CD-ROM market, where there is often more than one product trying to fill a niche in the market, this is something that vendors should be aware of.
At least one CD-ROM vendor has lost custom to a competitor partly because the search engine was too difficult to install in our environment.
Writing Files Some CD-ROM products generate temporary files during the user's search to hold intermediate or cached results.
This is often done to speed up access to the relatively slow CD-ROM, which is a reasonable idea if the temporary files are being stored on a fast local hard disc on the client machine.
However in an environment such as ours where many of the machines being used to access the CD-ROMs are discless, much of the performance improvement is lost.
The better CD-ROMs from a networking perspective either do not generate these files, or allow the systems administrator to specify where these files should be stored during the installation process or by using environment variables at run time.
Other products try to write the temporary files, and sometimes other files such as access logs, to the directory in which the search software is installed.
Whilst this may be acceptable on a stand alone machine that does have a local hard disc, this causes lots of problems in our environment where the clients are discless and the CD-ROM software is stored on write protected Novell volumes.
To make these products work, the systems administrator is often forced to revert back to "hacking" the product.
Either undocumented configuration files generated by the installation process can be tweaked to persuade the software to write any temporary files to a volume that the end user on the discless client machine does have write permission to, or a sneaky trick has to be employed.
One such trick is to map the same drive letter that the user sees as their writable disc space to the software installation volume prior to running the installation program.
Then, at runtime, a small script is run to copy the whole of the installation directory across from the software volume (which now appears mapped to its normal drive letter) to the user's writable disc space, execute the CD-ROM search software, and then, when the user exits the search software, delete the copy of the search software from the user's file store.
This allows the software to think that it is writing its temporary and internal files to the installation directory.
Whilst this works, it is not an ideal solution for a several reasons.
Firstly, copying an entire installation between two volumes on a Novell server (or in our case two different Novell servers as the user file store is on a separate machine for security and reliability reasons) can be very slow.
Some CD-ROM products can take up several megabytes of disc storage and all of this has to be copied from the server holding the master copy of the software, to the client and then back to the server holding the user's file store.
Secondly, it means that the machine with the user's file store on it can fill up rapidly during peak hours when many people are accessing CD-ROMs.
Thirdly, it can cause problems when the CD-ROMs are used outside of the library on machines run by other departments as they may not always provide enough disc space to some of their users to hold all of one of the large CD-ROM installations.
Lastly, it can be tricky to get right unless you know the CD-ROM product well.
Some products are "dirty" and drop hidden files all over the volume in which they are installed (even outside of the supposed installation directory).
All of these files have to be located and copied as well.
Sometimes the names even change between releases (which is a pain in itself as one can find lots of old, dead files hidden on the server taking up disc space).
"Dirty" products are something that systems staff should be wary of and its something to definitely watch out for when new CD-ROMs are being evaluated, especially if there is a choice of product for a particular area.
Poor Technical Support Of course the ideal solution would be for all the CD-ROM vendors to either do away with temporary files (it can be done!)
or provide a well documented, easy method of specifying where they are to be placed.
As has already been said, the installation documentation for networked CD-ROMs is often quite poor, and sometimes the systems staff need to fall back to the technical support from the vendors.
A few vendors have excellent technical support lines (H.W.Wilson springs to mind here) but unfortunately its often the case that the technical support staff seem to know less about the files that their products create than the library systems staff that have to put up with the CD-ROMs do.
This may be attributed in part to some database publishers relying on third party CD-ROM search and retrieval software.
Whilst the publisher's support line may know about the contents of the database in some detail and can even help with minor technical problems, in depth technical questions involving networked installations can leave them flumoxed.
When faced with a highly uninformative error message (which seems the norm for CD-ROM software) that isn't mentioned at all in the manual, this is not a nice situation for the library systems staff to be stuck in.
Luckily, there is a fairly large, helpful community of library systems staff on the Internet and they are often able to help out fellow sufferers of CD-ROM networking with technical hints and tips, and warnings of CD-ROM software and hardware to beware of.
The best technical support we've found is the CDROMLAN mailing list.
Some of the more clued up vendors even have real technical support people lurking on the list that jump in with solutions to technical problems involving their software.
You can subscribe to this list by sending an email to LISTSERV@IDBSU.IDBSU.EDU with the body of the message reading: subscribe CDROMLAN Your Name Conclusions This article has attempted to highlight some of the common problems that are encountered when trying to install and use networked CD-ROMs.
The technical points to consider when evaluating a potential networked CD-ROM are: How easy is the installation process?
Will the installation process have to be repeated regularly?
Does the search software coexist well with network software?
Does the search software try to write files to potentially write protected volumes?
What's the documentation like?
What's the technical support like?
Note that this list doesn't even include considerations of how easy the CD-ROM is to use for the end user, how consistant the user interface is with similar products already in use in the library and what the data quality of the contents of the CD-ROM is like.
As these are the issues which the end user and librarians are probably most concerned about they are obviously going to be very important in the evaluation of new products.
In choosing CD-ROM products for a library it is obvious that technical issues are only one part of a larger equation.
It has to be said that dealing with networked CD-ROMs is something of a black art still in some cases.
The potential benefits of allowing access the wide variety valuable databases available from public workstations, often spread across the campus, often means that the networked CD-ROMs are worth the hassle.
How much longer this will remain the case is difficult to say; those libraries with good Internet connectivity may well start to be tempted by some of the online versions of the same databases that vendors such as SilverPlatter are now pushing.
However, it is probably fairly safe to say that we are not going to see the disappearance of the networked CD-ROM overnight, so hopefully this article will of some help to systems staff contemplating networking existing stand alone CD-ROMs and also to vendors looking to improve their products.
See you all on the CDROMLAN mailing list.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to Simon Tanner and Gary Brewerton, my colleagues in the Pilkington Library for reading and commenting upon a draft of this article.
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Data Archive at the University of Essex Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Data Archive at the University of Essex Buzz data software framework database dissemination usability infrastructure archives thesaurus digitisation accessibility repositories preservation cataloguing visualisation foi research Citation BibTex RIS Denise Lievesley and Bridget Winstanley describe this national resource centre for computer-readable data in the social sciences and humanities.
Abstract This paper provides a background to the development and ongoing activities of data archives in general and The Data Archive (formerly known as the ESRC Data Archive) at the University of Essex in particular.
It describes the main activities involved in running the Archive and explores the benefits for both data producers and data users of a central repository of data.
It touches on the growth of The Data Archive in recent years.
The Data Archive’s main information systems are described in sufficient detail to allow the reader to go away and explore its catalogues and indexes.
The paper ends with a reference to some of the challenges which face those who have responsibility for the care of digital materials.
Background to the UK Data Archive The UK Data Archive at the University of Essex is one of a worldwide network of data archives which had their origins in preserving and providing access to social science data for use by the academic community.
Like many of these archives The Data Archive has expanded its role beyond social science data and it now services users outside of the academic community.
It was established 30 years ago and is located at the University of Essex, a university with especial strengths in social science and economics.
The Data Archive exists to promote wider and more informed use of data in research and teaching and to preserve these data so that they continue to be accessible over time.
Its holdings are acquired from a wide variety of sources including central and local government, academia, independent research agencies and commercial sources such as market research agencies.
Many of the activities of The Data Archive will be familiar to librarians and keepers of more conventional paper archives.
They include: establishing user needs to determine what data should be acquired negotiating to acquire the data and to determine the conditions of access clarifying any confidentiality restrictions assisting data providers to create documentation required by secondary users validation of data and documentation supplementing documentation by adding information on format, media, conditions of access, and on the outcome of quality checks preservation of the data and documentation on different media and the establishment of a programme to check for data corruption, to refresh existing media and to migrate onto new media cataloguing and indexing by professional staff reformatting the data, digitising documentation and delivering data and documentation to users promoting use and supporting users.
Benefits to users and producers of data The benefits to users of having access to The Data Archive are fairly obvious.
They obtain expensive resources cheaply often these are data which they could not have collected themselves such as census material or data which are by-products of administrative processes.
High quality research is promoted as a result of this access.
The re-analysis of data from a different perspective is encouraged.
The access to data in electronic form permits a level and depth of analysis which cannot be undertaken with published material.
It is critical that data producers should be aware of the benefits to them of sharing data if we are to continue to persuade them to make their data available.
These are discussed below.
There are strong altruistic reasons for depositing data so that secondary analysts have access to them.
In this way the data producers can contribute to the development of knowledge by ensuring their data are exploited to their full potential.
Secondary research facilitates multiple perspectives upon data which have often been collected to address a narrower range of questions.
Similarly comparative research can be encouraged by the preservation of multiple data sets for access.
A further altruistic reason for providing access to data is that it assists in the training of empirical social researchers.
Often data archives can be actively involved in teaching or in setting up teaching opportunities.
A large number of the social science data archives run summer schools on empirical social research.
The building and sharing of teaching materials can be carried out by data archives taking advantage of their links into many academic networks.
The recent establishment of EU funded large scale facilities in the social sciences at the Central Archive (ZA) in Germany and the UK Data Archive will also help to promote the use of data in teaching.
The Data Archive assists in the promotion of data through catalogues often held electronically, links with other archives and data suppliers, by submitting material to relevant newsletters, and e-mail lists, and running data workshops and giving presentations at conferences.
Assistance by user services staff helps to ensure that informed use is made of the data whilst data providers are cushioned from the demands of users who have queries on the data and how to use them.
In this way The Data Archive acts as a buffer between users and producers of data.
This is an especially useful role because many queries and problems are unrelated to the data.
Many potential users of data have little experience of computing or statistical analysis and often have limited assistance at their own institutions.
Supporting users is time consuming and requires an understanding of their needs.
The Data Archive can draw on resources for funding support which may not be available to producers.
Data producers are increasingly interested in forging links with users, in order to take advantage of users’ expertise and to create a community of knowledgeable data users.
The Data Archive assists with the establishment of this relationship which can be very useful to data providers.
They might consult this ‘expert group’, get feedback on use especially relating to policy relevant research and have access to a community of supporters who will fight with them when their resources and therefore their data are under threat.
The supply of data for secondary analysis reduces the need to collect data afresh and thus reduces respondent burden.
Compliance costs are a concern particularly when data are required from small populations such as surveys of businesses or elites.
The Data Archive improves the accessibility of data by employing demand led distribution systems and by integrating different datasets.
Value is added to data directly by The Data Archive staff or by requiring users of the data to redeposit data to which they have added value.
This might be by adding contextual information, improving or advising on documentation, reformatting data for delivery, extracting subsets of data and documentation, providing systems to permit data to be visualised, browsed and extracts selected.
An important attraction of giving access to data for secondary analysis is that credit will accrue to the depositor.
We try to ensure that this happens by specifying that acknowledgement must take place and advising on the wording of citations.
The Data Archive periodically writes to journal editors to alert them to the requirement to cite data sources.
In order to persuade data providers to deposit data it is vital that we ensure that their conditions of access are carried out.
In some situations this can involve implementing controls over use and occasionally charges for data must be collected.
It is also important that we are sensitive to confidentiality issues.
The Data Archive understands the importance of preservation of data.
We and our sister archives have built our reputation on the fact that we can preserve the electronic information in a way which permits both data and documentation to be accessible over time.
The data management and preservation system must ensure : physical reliability of digital information security of data and documentation from unauthorised use on-going usability of data & documentation integration of the data into information and delivery systems.
Management of data with very variable access regimes requires expertise, equipment and operational systems as well as trust and credibility.
Since very few data providers have built the expertise and facilities needed to preserve data so that they can be read over time despite changes to hardware and software environments a major advantage is achieved by giving depositors priority access to their own data.
Growth in the use of The Data Archive After many years of reasonably steady and manageable growth in the use of The Data Archive, demands for its services as a secure place of deposit and as a source of data have risen sharply.
Use has tripled over the last five years.
The increase in use can be explained by: increasing amount of electronic data being generated lack of expertise and relevant facilities in data preservation amongst data producers widespread computing access which has expanded the field of users academic requirements to maximise research outputs together with the expansion of universities has also led to a greater demand for data the increasing acceptance of secondary analysis as a legitimate methodology in a variety of disciplines lack of money for primary data collection which has resulted in a greater emphasis on using existing data the growing recognition worldwide that data should be exploited more effectively and the acknowledgement that not to use data or to use inadequate data has costs for society as a whole.
This last consideration must be emphasised as it has led to a climate where the idea of freedom of information is gaining ground over a culture of restricted data access.
How can the growth be managed?
The growth in use of The Data Archive has in part been managed by the use of automation for as many of the internal procedures as possible leading to a more efficient organisation.
It has become necessary to prioritise the acquisition of data since it is simply not possible to take responsibility for more than a small proportion of the data generated in electronic form.
Potential usage is judged by consultations with relevant members of the data using community and with the data suppliers themselves and by keeping full records on the level and type of use of past datasets of a similar nature.
Resources have been expanded by diversifying the funding base, made feasible because of the wider role played by The Data Archive.
At the same time efforts have been made to reduce the workload by ensuring that data depositors have guidelines on what is required of them in terms of documentation and quality checks on the data and by forming partnerships with other organisations with an interest in data supply.
Thus some of the load of data dissemination is shared with the national academic computing service located at the University of Manchester.
Similarly resources are shared across the European data archives this will be expanded below.
New specialist facilities have been established within the framework of The Data Archive to meet the needs of particular users.
These include: r-cade (the resource centre for access to data on Europe) established to meet the growing demands for comparative data for different European countries by providing access to data drawn from a variety of European and international agencies via an on-line system of access The History Data Service which exists in order to promote a culture of data sharing amongst historical researchers and to give them access to rich resources of machine readable material V-P Lab the virtual psychology laboratory recently set up jointly by the University of Cardiff, the centre for teaching initiatives in psychology at the University of York and The Data Archive in order to preserve and make available, via the internet, psychological experiments together with their software environment.
Questions to be addressed by the VP-Lab Project include how should such data be selected and whether the cataloguing systems developed for other social science data are of relevance to psychology experiments, as well as the particularly difficult issue of how to preserve data which cannot be understood without their related software.
The Data Archive has a recent initiative to try to reduce the heavy load of supporting relatively naïve users by establishing a network of academic organisational representatives who will be given special training and information packs to enable them to supply local expertise and assistance.
A programme of digitisation of documentation is enabling us to plan expanded on-line catalogues which incorporate documentation.
For those data with open access conditions such systems can incorporate the actual data too.
In the not too distant future we envisage being able to extend this to other data once the security of internet access allows better controls to be operated.
In anticipation of such developments we are exploring the use of on-line data browsing, visualisation, extraction and reformatting facilities to enable users to create their own customised datasets.
The use of the internet to provide information about Archive services and to deliver administrative forms to potential users has been of great assistance in reducing the telephone and mail queries we receive.
This is being extended in order to streamline the system of access.
A major component of the information system now available on the internet is the Archive’s catalogue and subject index, provided in a retrieval system known as BIRON and described below.
Bibliographic information retrieval: BIRON The catalogue and indexes with their associated thesaurus form part of the BIRON (Bibliographic Information Retrieval On-line) system.
The user interface of BIRON 4 utilises the World Wide Web and is simple and intuitive to use.
The thesaurus which forms part of BIRON can also be viewed independently via the Web.
This thesaurus is known as HASSET (Humanities and Social Sciences Electronic thesaurus).
There are many thousands of accesses of the databases in every year and users come from across the world.
BIRON consists of descriptive information about studies held, not the datasets themselves, which have to be ordered from the Archive in a separate process.
How does BIRON work?
Subject searches Subject searches may be carried out by the use of keywords or by searches on subject categories.
Subject categories are assigned on the basis of the broad subject coverage of the dataset as a whole while keywords are assigned to individual variables or questions within the dataset.
There are several thousand potential keywords to choose from but only approximately 24 major subject categories.
Keyword searches may be carried out using either HASSET (the thesaural interface) or BIRON.
In both cases the user is prompted to type in a word or phrase describing the topic for which data are sought.
This term is matched against a list of several thousand descriptive terms arranged in associated groups within the thesaurus.
These terms are derived from an examination of the questionnaires or data dictionaries associated with each dataset in the Archive and if the search is successful, will retrieve those records which have been indexed with the search term.
Keywords are assigned on the literal meaning of the questions or variables they represent and no attempt is made to index any theoretical concepts which the questions may have been designed to measure.
If an exact match is found, the user is told how many studies have been indexed with the matching term.
The user may then choose to view the descriptions of the studies retrieved, or may view other associated terms which might assist in focusing the search.
If no exact match is found, lists of similarly spelled words are offered for selection and the process of matching begins there.
A combined search using boolean operators may be carried out with retrieved searches, or a nested option may be used, allowing further searches to be made on a retrieved subset of records.
Subject category searches involve choosing from a list of broad categories.
Catalogue searches BIRON may be used to search for the names of persons or organisations associated with particular studies, titles or part-titles, dates and geographical areas of data collection.
These may be combined in various ways as described above.
What information is retrieved?
If the search is successful a list of one or more study titles may be viewed at the end of the search.
Users may then bring up on screen all the public information recorded about that study.
The information includes a list of indexing terms showing all the topics covered by the data and a catalogue record giving the Archive number, the title, access conditions, data processing codes, the names of principal investigators, data collectors, sponsors and depositors, an abstract detailing the main purposes of the research and main variables.
Dates, geographical areas, populations, data collection methodology are also displayed.
Note that BIRON consists of information about studies held, not the actual data available for analysis.
Internal uses of BIRON databases BIRON has associated databases used for internal administration: records of users, file locations and documentation are already included and more administrative databases are planned.
The system is an important source of easily-extracted performance indicators and developments in this direction are continuing.
Printed outputs from BIRON The Archive produces a variety of lists and catalogues.
All lists of titles and catalogue descriptions are selected using the BIRON information retrieval procedures and then output using special purpose formatting software.
All ‘back of book’ indexes for catalogues are produced automatically, indexing fields having been checked against authority lists at the time of initial cataloguing.
The Integrated Data Catalogue (IDC) The IDC provides a quick and simple method of searching the data catalogues of several European data archives including a version of The Data Archive’s catalogue.
This version is ourput from BIRON and the information it contains is exactly the same as is found in BIRON, but searching methods are much simplified.
Because it uses entirely different searching methods, the results may differ considerably.
Where a high degree of accuracy is required it is preferable to use BIRON.
HASSET (Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus) The subject retrieval within BIRON is driven by a thesaurus known as HASSET.
HASSET may be viewed separately from BIRON and may be used externally with acknowledgements of the Archive and Unesco (whose thesaurus forms the basis of HASSET), by anyone wishing to undertake indexing or keywording tasks.
It should be recognised, however, that HASSET contains only terms which have been used in indexing the Archive’s collection and does not attempt to be a universal thesaurus.
Accessing BIRON, IDC and HASSET The recommended way to access BIRON is via the Archive’s Home Page [1].
International links Council of European Social Science Data Archives The UK Data Archive which has been the focus of this paper is one of a number of national archives with their roots in the social sciences.
The network of such archives has been vital to their development.
Of especial importance is the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA).
Member archives share expertise and assist one another in staff training, a major activity being an annual workshop hosted by one of the archives on a specialist topic and attended by relevant archive staff.
We work together on joint undertakings such as the EU funded project to develop an integrated European catalogue of data a one stop shop underpinned by agreements to exchange data.
In order to avoid the duplication of effort CESSDA members specialise in different areas so that one archive might concentrate on demographic data whilst another concentrates on election studies for example.
CESSDA has also been very active in getting new archives established to ‘fill in the gaps’ so that every nation has at least one facility and can participate in the European network.
This is an excellent model for the future development of archival and dissemination facilities in other areas.
The challenges of the future The challenges which faced The Data Archive in its infancy thirty years ago were concerned with persuading data producers to provide access to their data and to extend the range of data users.
These challenges have been met with a large degree of success, although the packaging of data to become more accessible to a wider range of non-expert users and with a wider range of delivery mechanisms has only just begun and will involve exciting developments.
Bibliographic control of data within data archives has largely been achieved but the description of internet resources more generally is a subject of evolving standards which will require widely cooperative efforts to achieve results which will continue to be useful into the future.
The rapidly evolving technical infrastructure requires great flexibility and forethought on the part of the setters of standards in order to achieve useful results.
The Archive has had thirty years of experience in the preservation of materials within its control, including both data and documentation.
The issue of preservation of electronic materials is becoming central to a wider community as the digitisation of paper proceeds rapidly.
The burgeoning numbers of records which are created electronically and which have only ever existed in digital form adds to the sense of urgency.
The Data Archive is well placed to share its expertise in preservation with others who have come to it more recently and to take part in the evolution of standards in this area.
The rapid advance of technology and the speed of development and change in hardware and software systems make preservation an ongoing challenge, however.
References [1] The Data Archive, Web site, http://dawww.essex.ac.uk/  Author Details Professor Denise Lievesley is the Director, and Bridget Winstanley is the Information Director, of The Data Archive Email: bridget@essex.ac.uk and denise@essex.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata Corner: CrossROADS and Interoperability Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata Corner: CrossROADS and Interoperability Buzz data software framework api database metadata repositories cataloguing opac z39.50 isbd authentication interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day, Rachel Heery and Andy Powell report on work in progress on enhancements to the ROADS software.
The third phase of the ROADS eLib project [1] puts service interoperability at centre stage.
The project, which provides software to a number of subject services within eLib and beyond, is now working in an environment where interoperability is a requirement.
There is a ‘strand’ within the project where we are investigating a variety of tools and protocols that might contribute inter-working functionality to the ROADS ‘toolkit’.
This account attempts to give some brief notes by way of context to this work and to provide a sketch of work in progress.
ROADS and its environment For services participating in an ‘inter-working environment’, exploration of the business and organisational models on which future services will be based is critical.
These models will need to accommodate the strategies of the information service providers, strategies that may, at present, be unaligned.
Even more important, interoperable services will need to fulfil the requirements of information users, requirements that have not yet been articulated at a detailed level.
It is, for example, unclear which services users wish to be integrated in a ‘federated service’ and which should remain individualised and targeted at particular audiences.
However these wider discussions are for another forum.
Within ROADS, as with a number of other eLib projects, one of our objectives is to investigate and demonstrate ways in which the variety of existing and emerging technologies can be used to enable services to work together.
We are looking in particular at interoperability between the subject services using our software but also we are developing means by which the ROADS services can inter-work with services based on other software.
We hope that a number of the issues raised and the solutions developed will be of interest not only to ROADS users but also to a wider audience.
What do we mean by interoperability?
Interoperability can be viewed as existing at a number of levels.
It can be investigated from a variety of viewpoints.
The MODELS project [2] has been the focus for significant activity and discussion in relation to interoperability of service provision within the UK.
MODELS seeks to provide a framework for the management of access to distributed resources and services.
It proposes a system architecture for integrating the different stages of the information gathering process.
From the perspective of systems architecture interoperability can be seen in terms of processes, for example: Discovery Location Delivery Authentication Another approach might be to consider interoperability from a management perspective.
A valuable analysis might be made in terms of: Organisation strategy Economic constraints Technological opportunities Service profiles From the user’s viewpoint, interoperability can be more or less effective depending on how closely the various services are integrated as regards semantics, query language, indexing, management of results.
For the user of a typical library OPAC various assumptions are implicit in terms of the quality of the records, matching of query language to indexing policy, precision of the retrieval process.
(These assumptions may be more or less correct but they represent a shared view of the ‘information space’ and its navigational limitations).
A useful approach is suggested by Clifford Lynch and Hector Garcia-Molina in their report of the 1995 IITA Digital Libraries workshop where they outline a continuum of levels of interoperability.
These different levels are characterised by: use of common tools and interfaces ’ … provide a superficial uniformity for navigation and access but rely almost entirely on human intelligence to provide any coherence of content’ [3] syntactic interoperability ’ …(the interchange of metadata and the use of digital object transmission protocols and formats based on this metadata rather than simply common navigation, query, and viewing interfaces) as a means of providing limited coherence of content, supplemented by human interpretation.’ [3] deep semantic interoperability.
‘…to access, consistently and coherently, similar (though autonomously defined and managed) classes of digital objects and services, distributed across heterogeneous repositories, with federating or mediating software compensating for site-by-site variations.’ [3] It would be an interesting exercise to place proposed services on this continuum, and to consider how explicit this positioning needs to be in order to allow the searcher to navigate their ‘information space’ effectively.
Interoperability work within the ROADS project Within ROADS we are considering a number of ways in which services can begin to work together.
In order to illustrate the possibilities we are making ‘demonstrators’ available from the web sites of the project partners.
We are incorporating inter-working functionality into the next release of the ROADS software (currently beta testing).
We hope our implementation experience can feed into other activities.
The demonstrators fall into three broad areas: Searching across multiple ROADS services Interoperability between protocols Integrating other databases into the ROADS environment In addition we are looking at providing a framework to support common approaches amongst inter-working ROADS services.
Our work in this area has focused on producing guidelines for the usage and content of ROADS templates.
We have worked with ROADS services to produce Cataloguing Guidelines and a Template Registry to inform and promote standard practice.
Searching across multiple ROADS services ROADS provides a set of tools to manage Internet resource descriptions.
These descriptions are based on ROADS templates and are searchable using Whois++ [4], a simple directory service protocol.
Whois++ allows co-operating services to inter-work with each other by forming a ‘mesh’ of servers.
A server in the mesh that is unable to satisfy a particular query may route the query on to another server that it ‘knows’ holds the necessary information.
This process is known as ‘query routing’ based on ‘forward knowledge’ and is described in some detail by Kirriemuir et al.
[5] There are several ROADS-based subject services covering a number of subject areas.
Some of these services might be usefully grouped to allow them to be searched together.
Initial demonstrators of such grouping in the areas of medicine and engineering are under development [6].
Interoperability between protocols In the current information landscape, services are made available using a variety of protocols.
To search across multiple services that are made available using different protocols, gateways are required.
The ROADS project has already developed a simple Z39.50 to Whois++ gateway known as ZEXI [7].
This gateway allows the user of a Z39.50 client to search a ROADS-based service.
In this way ROADS services can be integrated into a Z39.50 environment.
ZEXI builds on Isite [8], a freely available software package for building full-text indexes.
It includes a Z39.50 front end.
Isite provides a simple back-end interface (API) to integrate existing external databases.
ZEXI provides a Z39.50 to Whois++ gateway by implementing a simple Whois++ client as a back end.
However, limitations in Isite mean that only unstructured plain text records (SUTRS) can be returned in the result set to the Z39.50 client.
We hope to enhance Isite and the current ZEXI to enable it to return structured USMARC or GRS-1 records to the Z39.50 client.
This will involve enhancing the Isite back-end API and mapping ROADS/Whois++ records to either USMARC or GRS-1 records.
Integrating other databases with ROADS The ROADS Whois++ server supports a back end API [9] that allows an arbitrary database to be used to store resource descriptions.
The NewsAgent eLib project [10] is developing a current awareness service for library and information staff based on a repository of resource descriptions.
This information is stored in an Oracle-based database developed by Fretwell-Downing Informatics Ltd. An experimental back end script that allows the ROADS Whois++ server to be placed in front of the NewsAgent database has been developed.
This allows us to integrate the NewsAgent database into a ROADS environment.
A demonstrator is available [11].
Usage and content of ROADS templates Resource descriptions in ROADS-based services are stored using ROADS templates.
Different templates are defined for different resource-types, e.g.
for documents, services or projects.
Data-elements are defined as simple attribute-value pairs.
The ROADS system has been designed to be configurable and it is relatively easy to create new data-elements and new template-types for ROADS templates.
The unlimited creation of new data-elements or template-types is likely, however, to have a detrimental impact on interoperability.
To help solve this, a metadata registry for ROADS templates has been set up.
The ROADS template registry [12] provides a human-readable list of all ROADS template-types and the associated data-elements that are in use.
Each element is briefly defined.
Users, and potential users, of ROADS can therefore find out which particular elements are being used currently and help avoid the unnecessary proliferation of service-specific template-types or data-elements.
Users who do need to create new template-types or data-elements can add these to the registry.
A metadata registry cannot, however, ensure that the metadata content in one subject service itself is interoperable with metadata content from another service.
For example, dates and names may be stored in a wide number of formats.
The traditional way of dealing with this problem in the print context is to develop cataloguing rules.
The ROADS project has developed, in co-operation with ROADS-based services, some generic ROADS cataloguing guidelines [13] to help define how services should deal with the content of templates.
The guidelines make particular suggestions on the format of dates, languages and names and also advise on the use of mandatory fields.
The development of cataloguing guidelines for ROADS can also have a positive impact on wider interoperability because it can, wherever possible, maintain consistency with legacy resource-description standards like the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) or the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) which are (or soon will be) in the process of revision to permit them to describe electronic resources of all types.
References The ROADS Project http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/ The MODELS Project http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/ Clifford Lynch and Hector Garcia-Molina.
Interoperability, Scaling, and the Digital Libraries Research Agenda: A Report on the May 18-19, 1995 IITA Digital Libraries Workshop.
August 22, 1995 http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/pub/reports/iita-dlw/main.html Patrik Faltstrom, Sima Newell, Leslie L. Daigle.
Architecture of the Whois++ service.
http://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-asid-whoispp-01.txt John Kirriemuir, Dan Brickley, Susan Welsh, Jon Knight, Martin Hamilton.
Cross-searching subject gateways: the query routing and forward knowledge approach.
D-Lib Magazine, January 1998. http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/january98/01kirriemuir.html http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january98/01kirriemuir.html http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/mirrors/dlib/dlib/january98/01kirriemuir.html CrossROADS demonstrators http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/crossroads/ ZEXI http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/zexi/ Isite Information System http://www.cnidr.org/ir/isite.html Martin Hamilton, John Knight.
WHOIS++ Gateway Interface specification version 1.0 http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/Reports/wgi/wgi.txt The NewsAgent Project http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/newsagent/ NewsAgent Whois++ search interface http://roads.ukoln.ac.uk/newsagent/cgi-bin/search.pl ROADS Template Registry http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/templates/ ROADS Cataloguing Guidelines http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/cataloguing/ Author details Michael Day, Rachel Heery and Andy Powell UKOLN Metadata Group UKOLN University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EduLib: The National Network of Electronic Library Accredited Trainers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EduLib: The National Network of Electronic Library Accredited Trainers Buzz dissemination portfolio mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS EduLib is an eLib project from the training and awareness section of the programme.
Jane Core describes the project, and how it will affect librarians in the Higher Education community.
User education, information skills, librarians as educators?
the literature is more plentiful than rich.
Paradoxically, references to the application of educational theory, concerning the way people learn, and how this is reflected in the activities and skills of librarians, are most infrequent.
Librarians are involved now in training and supporting the users of information, and have every reason to be optimistic about the value and need for this in future.
Changing terminology, trying to redefine the image conjured up by user education, has often served to do little more than perpetuate the cliché that librarians really want to be teachers!
The majority of librarians like being librarians but appreciate that they have an evolving educational role.
EduLib aims to make a more lasting change happen in libraries by recognising and providing staff development opportunities for the unique and complementary role librarians have to play in higher education.
Why should EduLib succeed now?
Demand from librarians already evolving their education and training role is fueled by the widespread availability of networked information services e.g.
under the auspices of JISC.
The exploitation of such information services has occurred alongside educational initiatives designed to harness technology in the service of learning, teaching and research e.g.
CTI’s and TLTP (within which TILT has been the first to address generic courseware for “electronic library” skills ).
The Follett Review Group, and as a result the Electronic Libraries Programme has positioned libraries to respond strategically to such educational and technological innovation.
As these initiatives have developed librarians have been identified as key agents in the provision of training in the use of networked information, and as such now have an opportunity to contribute to the cultural change taking place in higher education.
The developments above issue an exciting challenge and prospect for librarians.
Are we any better prepared to meet the challenge than we were when “user education” began 20 years ago?
EduLib and other eLib training and awareness projects mean that we are.
As the focus shifts from classroom centred teaching towards enabling active learning, librarians are empowered to contribute.
Any change or innovation must prepare to address strategic and cultural issues and these have been well documented elsewhere in respect of an educational role for librarians.
[1] The major issue for many individual librarians is whether they feel skilled to deliver “electronic library” training and support.
EduLib aims to provide librarians with the opportunity to acquire, or further develop their existing educational skills in order to ensure the design and delivery of effective training programmes.
This will be achieved by developing a nationally recognised and accredited network of library trainers.
EduLib trainers will possess both the networked information skills, and the pedagogic skills required to make the use of electronic libraries an everyday part of learning, teaching and research.
Shaping the EduLib model EduLib involves a cross disciplinary team of practicing librarians, academic colleagues and educationists.
EduLib will build on existing practice and will benefit also from the combined experience of the following: The initial Development Team of 12 practicing librarians who have been selected to represent the current diversity of higher education.
The development team will be the first accredited trainees of the project.
They will shape and guide the programme, assuring relevance to librarians supporting users of the networked information sources which underpin the notion of the electronic library.
The Centre for Teaching Learning and Support at the University of Hull which has established a successful collegiate staff development model.
The University of Abertay Dundee Library which has integrated LISP (the Library Information Skills Programme ), with students’ subject based modules, giving an excellent focus on the needs of students and the skills needs of library staff.
SEDA, the providers of teacher accreditation for higher education in the UK, and the principal organisation in the UK for the encouragement of innovation and good practice in teaching and learning in higher education.
At the end of the funded period EduLib will comprise, the training programme itself and equally importantly, the network of institutions and librarians that have participated.
Once the first Development Team of 12 Development Officers are trained they will recruit and train subsequent teams (of a further 6-10 people) within regional consortia thus perpetuating the model as a collegiate, rather than a top down approach to staff development.
What sort of content and materials will EduLib use or produce?
In keeping with the spirit of eLib the EduLib programme will use networked communication, dissemination and collaboration wherever it is appropriate.
The final programme materials will be available in appropriate networked formats, e.g.
WWW.
EduLib clearly involves two areas of training that are at times difficult to separate.
Firstly there is the educational (EduLib) programme itself, the actual content of the programme will depend upon the outcome of the needs analysis but is likely to equip trainees with the capacity to: select and evaluate methods relevant to network training, organise and develop learning events involving active use of networked information, and the use of the network as a method of delivering the learning experience, develop diagnostic skills focused to ensure that learners receive appropriate support and advice, develop knowledge and practical experience in methods of obtaining feedback from client groups about their satisfaction, and about the effectiveness as trainers, of those providing the learning events.
Secondly, there are the programmes developed by trainees as part of their EduLib portfolio.
The content and delivery of trainees own training programmes, upon which they are assessed, will involve developing original materials in addition to the evaluation and integration existing materials.
Here EduLib will cooperate with other projects in the training and awareness area principally Netskills.
Netskills will be developing high quality learning packages to address specific network skills.
It is envisaged that Netskills materials will be relevant to the content of the EduLib trainees’ own programmes, in addition to which Netskills materials may be used by EduLib trainees to enhance their own network competence.
Equally, the product development team at Netskills will benefit from the evaluations and piloting of materials EduLib can offer, and EduLib will collaborate with the Netskills team to offer appropriate pedagogic underpinning for product development.
What direct benefits will EduLib offer librarians in the HE community?
The development of a professional culture allowing librarians to take responsibility for their own training.
Ongoing opportunities for librarians to become involved in regional consortia supported by their institutions, with the additional opportunity of a nationally recognised accredited programme.
The programme materials themselves it is intended that these will be maintained for three years beyond the lifetime of the funded project to allow the training cascade to continue.
The training programmes developed by librarians during and beyond their training period these may have been used with students and / or with colleagues, they will be a tangible resource that may be maintained by and for the institution enhancing awareness and effective use of network potential in teaching and learning.
Getting involved with EduLib EduLib will keep the higher education library community informed of progress in the training of the first development team and will recruit trainees to subsequent development teams as the project develops.
It will be possible to get involved with EduLib actively, passively or virtually!
Librarians are encouraged to: make colleagues aware of EduLib and consider it’s potential as a model for institutional staff development.
participate in the programme directly as a member of a regional consortium or remaining aware of regional consortia a Development Officer has been assigned to every HE institution in the UK to act as regional liaison.
join and contribute to the mailbase list lis-elib-edulib which acts as a forum for the discussion of issues surrounding the teaching and learning role of librarians working with networked information.
attend awareness events held around the country, these may be regional or institutional depending on demand and will involve cooperation with Netskills wherever possible.
visit EduLib WWW.
which has been created, to inform the community further, to create links to the Core Team and the Development Team and to disseminate the programme outline and materials.
References Noon, Patrick (1994) Finding a stragetic role for information skills in academic libraries in Information Skills in Academic Libraries SEDA Paper: 82.
Staff Education and Devlopment Association.
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Interface: EARL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: EARL Buzz framework infrastructure cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Derek Law threw down the gauntlet to public libraries in a recent issue of Ariadne.
Appropriately, an EARL picked it up.
Alison Kilgour reports.
Project EARL was established in 1995 with funding from the British Library, the Library Association and participating libraries, with the objective of developing 'the role of public libraries in a networked environment, within a collaborative framework'.
The coordinating partner is the London and South Eastern Library Region (LASER).
Frances Hendrix, Director of LASER, and Catherine Hume of EARL, were happy to fill me in on what public libraries are doing on the Internet at present.
Hendrix explained that at the time of EARL's inception, public libraries were not using the Internet for service provision to any great degree.
LASER produced a study by Peter Stone, the EARL consultant, which looked into what was possible, what was available and what networking facilities libraries claimed they would like in the future.
It became clear that the issue was basic survival.
"At EARL we felt that, unless we took the initiative to try to get public libraries to use networked information, and to develop services for and with them, we would not be developing public libraries for the 21st century.
They would become a backwater."
LASER seized upon the arrival of Project EARL as an opportunity for an initiative which would demonstrate that public libraries were interested in the Net, and had a lot to offer.
Catherine Hume is EARL's Liaison and Development Officer.
Derek Law's comments about public libraries in his article 'A MAN For All Reasons?'
(ARIADNE issue 2) stung her into contacting us at the magazine.
Eager to prove him wrong, she began by recounting what Project EARL and the libraries in the partnership have achieved.
"We provide a focus for public library networking.
Not only networking on the Internet though obviously it is our greatest tool – but also the sharing of resources and ideas among Project partners."
Derek Law warned public libraries to avoid turning into 'couch potatoes'.
Hume points out that the Project has created a buzz around the UK from authorities keen to develop their networked services.
The project currently has over 75 members, consisting of local public library authorities individually and in consortia, together with organisations such as UKOLN, eLib and the Library Association.
It has its own Web pages.
In addition to providing the world with information about EARL and its partners, links are provided from the list of partners to their own home pages.
It lists the Internet services available within each of the local authorities involved.
"If you want to know what Hertfordshire, or Croydon, or Solihull are doing with the Net, try the EARL home page."
EARL also gives its partners space on its server to mount their own pages.
This is what the Project was established to provide.
EARL wants all its members to have a Web presence and can give professional advice on page construction and design.
As Hume explained, the picture is patchy.
Some services have had Internet access since the early nineties – others are still waiting to be connected.
It is one of Hume's jobs to keep in touch with members and chart their progress towards the goal of full connectivity and Web existence.
EARL also acts as a consortium broker with Internet suppliers on behalf of its members, and has successfully arranged a discount for members with PIPEX.
E-mail accounts can be supplied where necessary, and a regular newsletter is produced (in print and over the Net).
The Project has assisted public libraries to reach the point where the power of the Net for communications has become evident.
Net-based surveys are now common.
A recent example was a survey of unique special collections in member authorities.
From this, a catalogue will be built, and the eventual aim is to digitise some of the collections.
More prosaically, partners are also surveyed for information on their levels of connectivity (the British Library will require a report at the end of the contract).
The Project is now moving into its second phase, and is applying to the British Library for further funding to support Task Groups.
These focus on areas where partners perceive potential for co-operative resource-sharing.
Subject-based gateways to resources, a familiar topic in the eLib world, are under development.
eLib has recently become an associate partner in EARL.
Hume is enthusiastic.
"eLib is so far advanced in what it provides both for research initiatives and training that we feel we can only learn from it."
EARL is ambitious for the public library sector.
University libraries have surged ahead in networked information provision, largely though the easy availability of a high-speed network, which has been developed over the years into perhaps the best example of its kind in the world.
For public libraries, the journey has been much harder.
Without the physical infrastructure and collaborative funding at the service of strategic vision, the sector has lagged far behind.
But the existence of EARL testifies to the desire of the sector for progress, and MANs offer an infrastrucure of immense potential, as Law's article pointed out.
He also asked "where on earth have been the UK equivalents of the pioneers … in Colorado who developed Maggie's Place a decade ago?".
Suffering in our own Maggie's Place, they might answer.
But emerging at last.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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ACORN Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ACORN Buzz data database usability copyright cataloguing opac passwords adobe rdbms Citation BibTex RIS Paula Kingston outlines the ACORN project, which aims to develop a transferable model for the whole process of providing electronic access to short loan journal articles.
Project ACORN (Access to Course Resources via Networks) began in August 1996 and its distinguishing features are firstly the involvement of Swets & Zeitlinger (the international periodicals subscription agency) in the project consortium, and secondly its sole focus on journal articles.
The overall aim of the project is to develop a transferable model of the whole process of making short loan journal articles available electronically, and in particular to focus on the role of a third party agent in gaining copyright clearance and providing digital copies to libraries.
Permissions from publishers As with many similar eLib projects, a first hurdle is to gain permission from publishers to make an electronic copy of their articles, and to make these available across a computer network.
After hearing the experiences of several other eLib projects concerning the time required to negotiate with publishers, Project ACORN sought to reduce the numbers of publishers it might need to contact.
The project is working with the reading lists of three departments at Loughborough University Geography, Human Sciences, and Information and Library Studies and an initial estimate of articles on reading lists showed that we would need to contact around 250 publishers for approximately 1700 permissions.
We decided to check with lecturers which articles on their reading lists were genuinely 'high-demand', rather than just further reading, and the numbers of articles dropped dramatically.
Our current estimate is that we shall need to contact around 100 publishers for permissions for approximately 700 articles.
We are hoping that publishers will make their journal articles available to us free for the life span of the project, in return for information on the usage and costs of the service.
A preliminary check of the first 300 high-demand articles identified shows that Loughborough University subscribed to the hard copy original of 95% of these.
Technical strategy Our current plan is to use PDF (Portable Document Format) for the electronic articles, for a number of reasons, including the retention of the visual appearance of the printed original, economy in storage space compared with image files, and the availability of products to enable tailoring of facilities to local needs.
This last point is very important as documents will need to be kept secure, and certain functions, such as 'cut and paste', may well need to be disabled.
Articles will be made available to students via the reading list module of the TALISWeb OPAC in use at Loughborough.
We are also exploring the possibility of making direct entries in the catalogue for these reading list items, and also making them available via the Library's Web pages.
Whichever route the user chooses, a number of security features will be in place, including password access to documents only, and access only permitted from machines on Loughborough's network.
The articles will be held on a separate server, within a relational database management system, and will be retrieved from the database using CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts.
They will be displayed to users via Netscape and Adobe Acrobat.
The choice of commonly available tools such as these is entirely deliberate, in that the model we are developing must be transferable to other libraries.
Evaluating the Service We plan to offer a live system to students from April 1997, and have built in a number of monitoring mechanisms.
Firstly, we are gathering data on the management and usage of the paper short-loan collection, so that we have a point of comparison with the electronic service.
We shall also be monitoring the reactions of students to the new service, through questionnaire and focus groups, and undertaking a human factors analysis of the use and usability of the electronic articles themselves.
To test the portability of the model developed, we shall be implementing the model at Leicester University Library, the third consortium partner, in order to assess the transferability of both the management and dayto-day procedures, as well as the technical strategy.
At the end of the project we hope to be able to report on the costs of acquiring permissions and digital copies of high-demand articles, the costs and staff time involved in managing an electronic short loan collection, the usage of the electronic service, the likely benefits to libraries of using an agent for copyright clearance, and more generally the economics of this type of service.
For further information on Project ACORN, our Web site is at:http://liba.lboro.ac.uk/acorn/acorn.htm …or contact Paula Kingston, Project Manager on: 01509 222366 (tel) or p.j.kingston@lboro.ac.uk(email) Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Around the Table Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Around the Table Buzz html database archives copyright cataloguing hypertext ascii research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Budden points to resources for humanities scholars.
Is the Internet of any use to the study of the humanities?
One clearly strong area is in the provision of electronic texts; there are now enough out-of-copyright literary, philosophical and historical works scattered around the Internet for it to be a rival to Wordsworth’s Classics.
And Internet sites are increasingly doing more than just offering plain ASCII versions.
Firstly, HTML can be used to establish connections between different sections of a text, and between a text and critical apparatus.
The version of Pride and Prejudice at the Jane Austen site at Texas is an instance.
Passages in the text (for example, the names of characters or words that indicate important themes) are defined as links, leading to analyses of these characters or themes, which in turn include links to other significant passages concerning them in the novel.
Secondly, word searching can be done on a body of texts.
The Shakespeare Home Page at MIT is one that allows the user to search for the occurences of words in all or some plays.
A search will return the lines containing the word(s) searched for, plus hypertext links to the text of the relevant scene.
Thirdly, Internet sites can act as resource packs, drawing together related resources.
A good example is The Rossetti Archive.
Rossetti was both a painter and a writer, and several of the pages enable the user to move easily between, say, the text of the poem The blessed damozel, reproductions of manuscripts of the poem, and versions of the painting of the same title.
All these things can be (and have been) done on CD.
But the Internet makes them widely available; it is adding something extra to the study of the humanities unthinkable a couple of years ago.
How to find what Humanties Resources are available?
Good general gateways are HUMBUL, the Voice of the Shuttle, and Computing in the Humanities from Pennsylvania.
Among sites for specific subjects, the Gateway to World History at Connecticut and the UK Institute for Historical Research provide links to many historical resources.
The Media and Communication Studies site at Aberystywyth provides a very thorough list of links to resources in Television, Broadcasting and Media studies, and the Internet Movie Database describes itself, with justice, as “the most comprehensive free source of movie information on the Internet.”.
For literature, the CTI Centre for Textual Studies site and the UK mirror for the Literature section of the Voice of the Shuttle are two of many starting points.
Alphabetical (author or title) and keyword-in-title searching facilities for electronic texts are provided by the lists maintained at the On-line Books Page and the ALEX catalogue at Oxford.
The Universities of Bristol and Liverpool provide well structured lists of links to Philosphy resources on the Web; both provide links to Dey Alexander’s survey Philosophy in Cyberspace.
Myself, I’m off to study some Rossetti onscreen.
(Links to all the sites mentioned here (and more) can be found on the pages leading off from http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/pier/subjects.dir/arts.dir/arts.html.)
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Sideline Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sideline Citation BibTex RIS Chris Bailey goes to Heathrow, not to watch the planes but to attend a networking conference.
Up at 5 a.m. and make a dash to the bedroom window.
Relief!
The blizzard expected to hit Scotland with 10-15cms of snow has missed Glasgow.
Stretch out, bleary-eyed and zombie-like, in the airport lounge to be greeted unexpectedly by my Head of Department.
Make strenuous (and unsuccessful) attempts to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
We’re joined by the University Vice-Chancellor.
Principles of line management dictate that my boss should now take responsibility for eye-brightness and tail-bushiness.
I doze off again.
Safely on the ground at Heathrow, I head off to the courtesy coach for the airport hotel and am joined by a contingent of Irish librarians.
Check in, and am amazed at how peaceful it is.
Registration.
Grab the delegates list and find with some relief that there are lots of people I know.
After all, no successful conference would be the same without the opportunity for a good old gossip.
We keep getting fed; I’ve never seen so many biscuits.
Huge lunch turns out to be an appetite-whetter for an even huger dinner.
Saturday 10 February What a good conference this is turning out to be.
Really good papers, lots of great ideas (oh, and masses more food).
Almost tangible enthusiasm between papers.
At lunch I sit next to a colleague I haven’t seen for ages and have a good chat about the dubious joys of managing change.
Enthusiasm marred by then drowning her in coffee.
Conference approaches its finale.
Lots of notes to pass on to colleagues at work.
Get to the airport lounge; large gin and tonic and a first attempt to write a report while everything is still fresh.
Relax… Monday 12 February Into work bright and and early, still buzzing, to be met with a plaintive plea to change the staff rota.
The buzz subsides.
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M25 Link Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines M25 Link Buzz z39.50 Citation BibTex RIS Jean Sykes discusses M25 Link, a virtual clump for London.
M25 LINK AIMS to establish a pilot virtual clump to provide single search access to the OPACs of a subset of six members of the M25 Consortium of Higher Education Libraries.
Using the Z39.50 protocol, the six OPACs, which between them cover the five most prominent library systems featured across the full 38-member Consortium, will be linked seamlessly together.
Moreover, there will be a strong focus on serials holding information and an attempt to create virtual searching for serials across the pilot clump.
The partners are: LSE (lead site) for Unicorn, City University for Innopac, the University of Greenwich for Talis, Middlesex University for Horizon, Queen Mary and Westfield College for Serials, and the University of Westminster for Libertas.
At the end of the Project, for each of the five library systems we aim to have produced a blueprint which should allow the remaining M25 libraries to join the virtual clump.
Ultimately, therefore, it will be possible to search in one step the OPACs and serials holdings of a body of libraries which between them cover some 15 million books and 130,000 periodical titles, forming around 20% of the total HE library provision in the UK.
This will be a major contribution to the national and international attempts to make resource discovery an easier task for users.
Another step beyond that will be to combine M25 Link with other online information sources in the capital, including major public library collections, to offer seamless access to electronic resources including full-text sources and various electronic document delivery options.
See http://www.lse.ac.uk/blpes/m25/ for further information about M25 Link.
Author Details Jean Sykes Deputy Director Information Resource Services University of Westminster 115 New Cavendish Street London W1M 8JS tel: 0171 911 5095 fax: 0171 911 5093 email: j.m.sykes@westminster.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Australian Co-operative Digitisation Project, 1840-45 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Australian Co-operative Digitisation Project, 1840-45 Buzz data software infrastructure tei archives digitisation repositories copyright preservation sgml multimedia ascii gif ocr research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Ross Coleman describes a project which will create a unique research infrastructure in Australian studies through the digital conversion of Australian serials and fiction of the seminal period 1840-45.
The Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project, 1840-45 [1] (ACDP) is a collaborative project between the University of Sydney Library, the State Library of New South Wales, the National Library of Australia and Monash University Library funded through a Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Infrastructure (Facilities and Equipment) Program grant.
This funding, unlike the Elib [2] projects or projects in the US sponsored under the auspices of the Commission for Preservation and Access or the National Digital Library Federation [3] is not directed to the funding of digital library initiatives.
ARC funds are openly competitive for the development of research infrastructure and so submissions like ours are considered broadly in competition with facilities for science, technology social sciences and the humanities.
That the ARC decided to fund a digital library project against such a broad field is a significant recognition by the major Australian research funding body that such initiatives are of major importance in the support and furthering of research.
In our case historical and literary research in nineteenth-century Australian studies.
The assessment criteria for ARC funding include such broad ranging variables as “excellence of research activity to be supported”, “degree of concentration and quality of the research group”, “value to industry and other users of research results and potential for commercial development of research results leading to national benefit”, “increased institutional capacity for consulting, contract research and other service activities”, “ability to contribute to international links in research and innovation leading to national benefits”, and “ability to contribute to effective research training”.
In general fairly open criteria, and ones we were able to answer adequately enough in our submission to be successful.
So, while these criteria may not appear as technically as rigorous as perhaps they are for digital library projects in the UK and US (though there was some technical assessment), to succeed we needed to establish the importance of the creation of digital resources against the full range of major academic research facilities.
In this project we focus on the digital conversion of journals, newspapers and fiction of the period 1840-45 a significant period recording the emergence of a colonial identity.
The period 1840-45 has long been regarded by many scholars as seminal in the development of an Australian colonial culture.
This period, following the end of convict transportation to NSW and preceding the influx of the gold-rush migrations, heralded the agitation for, and introduction of representative government in NSW in 1842 and witnessed the early years of mass free migration to the Australian colonies.
It was a period marked by an upsurge in local publication in both the older and newer centres of settlement.
The project primarily concentrates on the journals and newspapers that began publication in the period a record of settlement and activity still largely untapped by researchers.
We also look to the fiction published in the period novels that for the first time were largely inspired by the changed circumstances of Australian life, and signalled the concentration on the description of bush life which was to be so dominant in later fiction.
The period and content was determined by an academic reference group of leading historical and literary scholars in nineteenth-century Australian studies a group that also gave the project strong academic credentials in the funding process.
The intention was to be comprehensive in our coverage of the period, and our bibliographical source for material was Ferguson’s Bibliography of Australia the most comprehensive bibliography of nineteenth century Australian material.
A total of 75 serial titles and four novels were identified.
The majority of this material was either scarce or fragile, and were mostly held in the two major repositories of Australian material the Mitchell Library in the State Library of New South Wales and the National Library of Australia.
Sydney University Library, the oldest and largest university library in Australia, also has extensive nineteenth-century holdings, provided the academic rationale for the project.
The primary purpose of the project is to enhance literary and historical research on nineteenth-century Australia by providing improved access to, and preservation of, scarce primary material confined to a few major library collections.
The primary character of the project the focus on preservation and access, of retrospective print collections was inspired by work being carried out in the USA under the auspices of the Commission for Preservation and Access.
Our project is modelled on initiatives carrying out large-scale digital conversion of existing textual collections for network access and provision of long-term preservation in microform.
Particularly work at Cornell and Yale University libraries.
The primary mechanism of the project is to establish a production process that would be carried out under contract by vendors with expertise in filming and imaging.
This initially involved the development of a set of workable technical specifications (documentation from the Library of Congress digital project proved very helpful) and testing the capacity of the local industry to do this level of work.
Technically the project is an integrated process of microfilming, imaging and networking, with the production work (microfilming and imaging) be carried out by contract.
The production process of microfilming first then scanning from the film may appear conservative, but given the fragility and scarcity of the original material and the lack of experience in Australia with imaging to the standards required (and conversely the expertise in microfilming) this approach is both appropriate and sound.
Unlike the UK contract microfilming of collections, even of scarce material, is common among the large research libraries.
The use of contractors for production processes rather than establish costly inhouse facilities is cost-effective.
The fostering and development of industry expertise in firstly microfilming and now imaging is a critical aspect of this project.
It will help create facilities and industry experience that will facilitate similar projects in the future.
The scale of the project was initially estimated at about 150,000 images a middling scale project, but large enough to be useful and enable us to investigate the management and technical issues of working with this kind of material.
The collaborative model for the project has set the operational organisation of the project each library participant has a general area of responsibility, by virtue of expertise or position.
Each participant is also involved in all aspects of the project to gain the benefit of experience of the project as a whole.
In these arrangements Sydney is generally responsible for overall management, coordination and academic specification; the State Library of NSW, for technical and design standards; the National Library of Australia, for network and design standards; and Monash for conversion of digital images of the fiction to ASCII with Sydney enhancing to produce the SGML etexts.
All participants are involved in the common issues of content, preparation, design, technical production, user focus, and broad management issues, through participation in operational committees.
Through this model each partner would develop broad management and technical skills and expertise in planning and implementing large scale digital conversion projects.
The Project Management Committee is chaired by Professor Elizabeth Webby, Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney.
The key operation groups managing the project are the Steering Committee (Alan Ventress from the State Library, Colin Webb from the National Library, Robert Stafford from Monash and Ross Coleman from Sydney who also the Committee Convenor) the Technical Advisory Group (chaired by Alan Howell from the State Library and including Diana Dack of the National Library) and site coordinators at the State Library (Andrew Heath and Rebecca Thomas), the National Library (Lawrie Salter) and Sydney University (Julie Price).
So in general the project would address itself to a period of scholarly interest and study, with a user/client focus based on the needs of the scholarly community provide a unique resource infrastructure for research and study in nineteenth century Australian studies provide a new level of national resource sharing through network access to material presently confined to a few major library collections ensure the long-term preservation of this material in a stable medium (preservation microfilm) with a known longevity independent of computer hardware; and also, by providing alternate digital access, reduce the heavy use of originals act as a benchmark technical project, introducing to Australia proven methods and standards from overseas for the large-scale digital conversion of print collections, and to provide the basis for future projects in Australia function as an integrated technical process of preservation microfilming, digital scanning, network access, with further conversion of the works of fiction via OCR to SGML marked-up electronic texts provide opportunities for scholars to further enhance the digital material in ways appropriate to their research and needs recognise the integrity and significance of the original materials in the preparation and process of the project provide links to industry in the development of a skills base and production facilities by contract work, and the provision of digital content for multimedia production To assist us develop sound and workable technical specifications for production work and to determine the capacity of local vendors to do the work a test phase was introduced into the project.
We had some concerns about the capabilities of local vendors to do the work to the standards that we required.
Many imaging firms had extensive experience at production work with large-scale corporate record imaging, but very little of imaging to the standards that we were setting in regard to the handling, filming, imaging and delivery of this kind of material that is to digital library standards.
This is also a problem in the UK.
A Sydney company was selected for this testphase through a call of Expressions of Interest, and five journal titles that would provide a range of technical problems including page sizes, were selected.
Of the five titles, three were to be filmed/scanned from the original print version and two were to be scanned directly from existing microfilm.
This test phase has been completed and final technical specifications developed and production work on the bulk of the material is now out for tender.
Digitisation of the fiction was completed some time ago, but for various reasons OCR conversion and SGML mark-up is only now taking place.
The works of fiction will be mounted as TEI -encoded electronic texts through Sydney’s Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS) [4] and will probably be mirrored through the University of Virginia’s Etext Centre and the Oxford Text Archive.
The process of ARC funding determined the nature of the audience of the project it is primarily an initiative to support researchers.
Researchers determined the content of the project, and researchers through an academic advisory group will test the interface and delivery of images.
Testing of the interface and delivery and output of images, electronically and in print form will be taking place over the next few months as the images from the completed production test phase are loaded onto our website.
However, once these digital resources are created and accessible via the web they will be available openly for browsing, for study and teaching at schools, to independent scholars irrespective of their location, and for use in the creation of other digital products.
In a technical sense the project is quite simple and basic.
As a film then scan process a lot of attention is being given to the quality of the microfilming process to ensure that the subsequent production process of imaging meets the quality standards and throughput required.
As the material is predominantly textual most images will be scanned as bitonal images at 400 dpi with provision for 200 dpi 8-bit greyscale where appropriate.
Many of our concerns have been to do with determining the optimum file sizes for efficient network delivery of quality images for browsing, downloading and printing.
The images of the journals and newspapers will be provided in bitmap form there will be no ocr conversion for display or indexing purposes.
In a sense we are providing a “raw” digital library, in a production environment, where researchers can access, download, use and enhance the data as best fits their purposes.
One area of some concern has been the delivery of images of broadsheet newspapers these have very large file sizes, and more investigation is necessary before finally deciding if this type of newspaper should be excluded from the project.
Network delivery of images is fundamental to the project and if material cannot be effectively delivered over the net then they may be excluded from the project.
In relation to newspapers work being done on tiling of large images for network delivery is among several developments that we are monitoring.
The document control structure and directory structure for the delivery of the digital images is also quite simple basically a hierarchical tree structure allowing browsing from title to issue to page.
This proposed structure will be tested by the academic advisory group.
During this test phase images will be available as either gif, tif or pdf to assist determine the best means of access for the range of researchers expected to use the material.
Copies of the technical specifications developed for the production work are available from the author and will soon be accessible from the project website.
We have been working closely similar projects in the US and the UK.
This project was inspired by the work done at Cornell by Anne Kenney and at Yale by Paul Conway both have acted as technical advisers to the project and the benchmarking work they have done through the Cornell Digital Library prototype and the Open Book Project have been a great help.
Two members of our project team have attended at different the Digital Imaging Workshop run through Cornell University Library.
Current work on the Making of America Project (Cornell and Michigan) and the Library of Congress digital library project have been of specific interest and documentation and advice from both have been of great assistance.
In the UK our major contact (including discussions in Oxford in 1996) has been with the Elib funded Internet Library of Early Journals [5] a project dealing with material of similar types, content and age.
The distinctions between the ILEJ and the ACDP generally relate to process, purpose, and sophistication.
The ACDP production process is predicated on the use of external vendors working by contract to technical specifications that can provide benchmarks for other projects.
This is quite different from the creation and use of inhouse facilities that characterise the ILEJ.
This difference is partly historical inhouse facilities for microfilming are not common in Australia while they seem to be in the UK and partly due to the design and intent of the projects.
With the ACDP we hope (and seem to have succeeded) to facilitate the development of a skills and hardware base with local vendors that will facilitate other digital conversion projects.
The ACDP is a preservation and access project while the ILEJ focuses on access.
The ILEJ is a more sophisticated project because of the use of ocr (or icr) technologies with fuzzy matching software to a provide some level of indexed access to the journals being imaged.
This is something that we have discussed in the ACDP, but apart from the fiction, is not within our project parameters as funded by the ARC.
However if possible it is an area that we need to investigate further.
The opportunities in using ocr’ing or icr’ing to create forms of keyword indexing (albeit “dirty” indexing) has enhanced access to the content of digitally converted journal publications.
This is quite exciting from a researchers/users point of view.
Other examples of use of ocr in retrospective digital conversion, such as the JSTOR project, confirm this potential.
The similarities in all these projects at this stage of digital development are much more fundamental, that is the use of these projects to develop the kinds of technical and management skills and expertise within and between the partner libraries to enable us to develop and extend the creation of digital library resources.
Our experience in the ACDP is that international cooperation and exchange of documentation and information has been of critical importance as we create digital resources in the Australian situation.
It is these kinds of collaborations that underpin the success of these projects, and that in turn, provide the basis of the global digital library.
References Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project 1840-45 Web Site, http://www.nla.gov.au/ferg/fergproj.html eLib programme Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ US Digital Libraries Initiative Web Site, http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/national.htm SETIS: Electronic Texts at the University of Sydney Library, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/scholarly-electronic/ Internet Library of Early Journals (eLib project) Web Site, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ Author Details Ross Coleman, Collection Management Librarian Email: collm@extro.ucc.su.oz.au Phone: +61 2 935 13352 Fax: +61 2 9351 7305 National Library of Australia Home Page: http://www.nla.gov.au/ Address: University of Sydney Library, University of Sydney, New South Wales, AUSTRALIA.
2006 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Netskills Corner: The Evolution of HTML Netscape Gold Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner: The Evolution of HTML Netscape Gold Buzz software java html browser hypertext Citation BibTex RIS Niall Mackenzie looks at using Netscape Gold for a more automated manner of Web page production.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is similar to an iceberg like most other programming languages, 90% of its bulk lies beneath the surface.
Writing Web pages can be a hugely rewarding experience but it can also be extremely tedious.
This is fine for believers in the ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy, but cowards, like me, welcome a bit of pain relief.
Netscape Gold is one of the best HTML analgesics around.
Within the browser window, on-screen editing facilities offer a welcome alternative to the tag-tweaking, window-hopping caprice that is sometimes the Web page author’s life.
Sounds too good to be true?
Well, perhaps, but we all know that, {SHIFT left angle-bracket} B {SHIFT right angle bracket} “tags” {SHIFT left-angle bracket} {forward slash} B {SHIFT right-angle bracket} or <B>tags</B> will shortly be transparent.
We’re not there yet but Netscape Gold seems further along the evolutionary process than a lot of the editing software available.
Netscape Gold offers three ways of creating Web pages: Wizards: the frozen dinner of Web creation quick and easy Templates: you stick to a tried and tested recipe but you can throw in your own ingredients Blank: you can lay your hands on the raw materials but you are wholly responsible for the final dish served.
1.
Wizards From Netscape Gold’s File Menu, choose New Document and then From Wizard.
The rest is down to the speed of your connection to Netscape’s Web server and your love or hate of online tutorials and Frames.
This really is an excellent way to get underway with writing Web pages.
It uses Frames intelligently to guide you through all processes, including publishing your page on the Web (assuming you have access to a WWW server).
You can even use your favourite Web pages to aid your design.
If your trans-Atlantic link is overly frustrating or your pathological hatred of Frames becomes unbearable or even if you just feel your creative juices have been stifled, forget wizards and look at templates.
2: Templates From Netscape Gold’s File Menu, choose New Document and then From Template.
You will again be taken to an area on Netscape’s Web server that contains a list of pre-written templates.
You can then choose a template and save it to your own machine where you can replace the template’s images and text with your own.
You can also use any set of templates which you’ve stored on your own machine.
The advantage with templates is that you can work off-line.
They are also great for those amongst us who have a modicum of creativity but are terrified of a blank page.
For brave-hearted artists a blank page offers unlimited possibilities.
3.
Blank This is where Netscape Gold comes into its own.
Pages planned on paper can quickly become reality with good preparation and Gold’s editing facilities.
From the File Menu, choose New Document and then Blank.
This opens up the editing window containing a blank page and a set of familiar-looking toolbars.
Images are easily added and aligned, text is modified and formatted using icons and links are found and inserted with little fuss.
The right-hand mouse button provides shortcuts to adjusting the properties of all Web page items.
Possibly the best feature of Gold is table manipulation.
Raw HTML tags for tables are very difficult to work with and on-screen editing for tables is a massive step forward, particularly where page layout is concerned.
Like all other editing tools, Netscape Gold has its limitations.
For example, we have found that it does not like tables with more than 99 rows!
More seriously, Frames, forms and Java applets are not supported in editing mode.
Tags can still be edited but appear as yellow labels and it is only in browse mode that Frames and forms can be viewed.
What Netscape Gold does provide is an HTML editing tool for the novice and the expert.
It is certainly very accessible to those with little Web editing experience and it takes the tedium away for the professional.
Give it a try and see what you think.
Download it from Netscape [1] .
It is also accessible from within the UK at mirror sites at Hensa [1], Imperial College [3] and Edinburgh [4] References Netscape Web site http://www.netscape.com/ Hensa Netscape software mirror site, http://micros.hensa.ac.uk/mirrors/netscape/navigator/gold/3.01/windows/ Imperial College Netscape software mirror site, http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/netscape/pub/navigator/gold/3.01/windows/ Edinburgh Netscape software mirror site, http://emwac.ed.ac.uk/mirrors/netscape/navigator/gold/3.01/windows/ Author Details Niall Mackenzie, Netskills Trainer Email: niall.mackenzie@newcastle.ac.uk Tel: 0191 222 5002 Address: Netskills, University Computing Service, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur Buzz archives repositories cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Robin Alston replies to issue Ariadne 13's Minotaur, by Louis Schmier.
Louis Schmier wrote a piece for Ariadne entitled No Miracles.
Well, I have been around in academe for a bit longer even than Louis.
I cut my teeth on computers working with a Univac at Toronto while starting on my PhD in 1954 with Jess Bessinger trying to compile a computer concordance to Beowulf!
I started teaching the Internet in 1990 when I became Director of the Library School at University College.
In those days very few librarians had heard of it, and even fewer academics.
What we had in 1990 was a modest collection of library catalogues, and a very brief guide written by Ed Krol, which later became The Whole Internet.
Then came WWW, and the pace has accelerated to the point where it is frankly impossible to keep up with what I call added-value sites i.e.
sites which are devoted to research and not promotional.
OCLC estimates that promotional sites account for about 60% of the Web, with a further 5% being abandoned or incomplete sites with nothing to offer, and a considerable number of sites offering varying degrees of pornography.
Our masters (that is to say, our governments and our vice chancellors, spurred on by Bill Gates) would have us believe in the indispensability of the Net: but, while I admit that there are some sites I find really useful, the burden of my research still depends exclusively on the books to be found in research libraries.
That, say the visionaries, is all about to change as we enter the new millennium and publishers, acting in consortia with the support of research libraries, embark on spectacular enterprises to convert print to digital form and create digital libraries.
This would, indeed, be a blessing for all who find it necessary to drag themselves to the great research libraries in order to get any serious research accomplished.
But who is going to pay for me to stay in my barn in mid-Suffolk and avoid the perils of Anglia Rail and the commotion of London and yet have all the research tools I need delivered to my PC on demand?
Teaching materials for secondary schools and undergraduates will, I have no doubt, soon be readily available electronically.
Such schemes enjoy governmental support because it is the first step in reducing the spiralling cost of education: schools, colleges and universities will be able to cut drastically the expense of acquiring teaching materials i.e.
books.
The second stage will likely concern serials, a crippling burden on every librarian’s budget.
But the third stage may well be the most interesting for it is likely that governments will realise that the existence of digital libraries of accepted texts could prepare the way for a radical re-think of education.
Why, for example, should departments of English be in competition for students?
Why not subscribe to the notion of distance learning?
Not as an Open University option, but as a real alternative to the expensive business of maintaining expensive specialists at localised education sites.
The opportunities for downsizing the education system provided by digital libraries are, I believe, too obvious to be ignored.
Some forms of book production will be unaffected by the electronic revolution: there will always be a place for pulp fiction, and the sort of books one finds remaindered at Dillons or Waterstones.
Magazines will, I assume, continue to flourish as will newspapers.
But what is going to replace the vast array of printed and manuscript sources currently available to the researcher?
There are more books and archive files in the repositories of the civilised world than there have been souls on this planet since the age of Pericles.
What will become of them?
The visionaries are, I suspect, not interested in such questions, believing that for every problem a culture encounters there will be an IT solution.
That, I suggest, may be a very dangerous gamble.
While automation has certainly brought us many benefits, there is always a down side to every innovation.
I think that a generation which is forced to depend on the computer screen for its information, its education, its entertainment will be a rather lonely one with correspondingly reduced interpersonal skills.
But I can see no way of arresting the drift.
Our love-affair with the machine is beyond reason: not because most of us wish it to be so, but because it has been made to be so.
Author details Robin Alston is Professor of Librarianship and Information Studies at UCL.
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eLib Starts to Deliver Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eLib Starts to Deliver Buzz database infrastructure digitisation research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne explains how the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), a key IT programme for academic libraries, is shaping up.
The Electronic Libraries Programme, funded by JISC as a consequence of the Follett Report into UK academic libraries, is now properly underway.
The UK Higher Education funding councils have committed £15 million to the programme, which will aim to pave the way towards the fully electronic library of the future.
The Electronic Libraries Programme, funded by JISC as a consequence of the Follett Report into UK academic libraries, is now properly underway.
The UK Higher Education funding councils have committed £15 million to the programme, which will aim to pave the way towards the fully electronic library of the future.
Among the key recommendations of the 1993 Follett Report was the need to invest in IT in order that the nation’s university libraries are able to exploit the developments in computing power and infrastructure now happening globally.
Last year JISC set up the Follett Implementation Group in IT (FIGIT), which issued a call for proposals within seven identified programme areas .
From hundreds of proposals from all over the UK, some forty funded projects have now emerged.
The programme spreads its net more widely than traditional librarianship.
Electronic publishing will also be fostered.
The Electronic Journals area will include the development of new titles as well as initiatives with print publishers to provide online versions of their publications.
New electronic journals in various disciplines are planned.
In addition, a number of projects will develop tools to support scholarly communication, pointing the way forward to a time when the very notion of a journal may no longer be relevant.
Another major area is ‘on-demand publishing’.
Seven projects have been funded to work in this area, which will realise the objective which libraries have had for many years of shifting their essential service orientation away from ‘holdings to ‘access’.
No university library can realistically hold all the information its users require, and in any case more and more of that information is only available by accessing remote databases and databanks.
Access provision therefore becomes the key aim, and on-demand publishing will create texts which can be read on screen, downloaded to disk or simply printed out as students require them.
A related area is ‘electronic document delivery’.
Four projects have been successful here, and the technical, legal and economic obstacles of this centrally important library service will all be addressed.
Gateway services have already proved their worth in the shared academic electronic environment.
eLib is taking forward the gateway concept by finding several subject-based gateway services.
Digitisation of existing materials is another programme area, allowing eLib to deliver benefits to those whose research involves the use of older printed materials.
Underpinning the whole eLib programme is training and awareness, and FIGIT has recognised the importance of this area by devoting an entire programme area to it, with five projects already approved.
As a national programme, eLib has succeeded in ensuring that there is as widespread a commitment as possible to the success of the programme.
As consortia begin their work with launches and early deliverables in the form of Web sites and pages, Chris Rusbridge, Programme Director, expressed satisfaction at the stage the programme has reached, comparing the spread of projects to “a shotgun blast across the horizon”.
But more are to follow.
Last month, JISC launched another call, for projects in the areas of grey literature, quality assurance, and electronic reserve collections.
Keeping in touch with the Electronic Libraries Programme There are several ways to keep in touch with developments in the eLib programme: Read Ariadne on a regular basis!
There will be updates of eLib events, progress and deliverables, in and between every edition.
Keep an eye on the eLib Web pages as well as having details of all of the projects, these also contain background information, reports, and links to all projects with their own Web pages.
Join (and contribute to) lis-elib, the main mailing list for discussions on topics arising and relevant to the programme and its projects.
If you find a project interesting, get in touch; maybe you can do something of mutual benefit.
For example, the Netskills project are keen to hear from people/institutions that can hold Netskills training sessions.
Other eLib features in this issue There are several other eLib related features in this first issue of Ariadne: OMNI Frank Norman describes an emerging key gateway to medical resources.
CLIC Henry Rzepa gives us a glimpse of the future of electronic journals in the fields of molecular sciences.
EduLib Jane Core describes a project that uses a cascading technique to train higher education librarians on a national scale Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JournalsOnline: The Online Journal Solution Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JournalsOnline: The Online Journal Solution Buzz database archives cataloguing hypertext passwords authentication Citation BibTex RIS Jane Henley and Sarah Thompson look at the BIDS JournalsOnline service and its commercial competitors.
The last two years have witnessed an explosion in the number of journals available online.
At the end of 1995 there were just over 100 .
By the end of 1997 The Open Journal Project estimates over 3000 will be produced in the UK alone[1].
This massive increase is causing libraries and readers some practical difficulty.
Libraries are faced with an increasing burden of administration and concern over archiving.
For the user, a multiplicity of access points and search interfaces can cause uncertainty and confusion.
These problems tend to reduce the advantages of the electronic format, such as 24 hour access, searchable text, interactivity, moving images, hypertext links from references to cited articles and availability before the print equivalent.
In November 1996 BIDS announced a completely new World Wide Web service called JournalsOnline[2].
The service, which is free of charge, currently provides a single access point to full text articles, including graphs and illustrations, published in the journals of Arnold, Academic Press, Blackwell Science and Blackwell Publishers, with more publishers expected to join the service shortly.
JournalsOnline offers access to 52,000 full text electronic articles from around 500 journals and hopes to increase this number to 1000 by the end of the year.
Tables of contents (TOCs) and abstracts are free to all, but full text is available free only to those users in UK HEIs who log in with a registered user name and password (the ATHENS3 system is to be used) and whose institution has either subscribed to that journal, or is entitled to view it online under the terms of the HEFC agreement.
The cost of the full text of other articles in the service is [sterling]7.64 including VAT, with access a third more expensive for users outside the higher education sector.
The full text may be displayed or printed using an Acrobat PDF viewer.
JournalsOnline was given a head start because of its JISC funding and looked as though it would lead the way in one-stop shop access to electronic journals.
It does have the advantage of an enormous end-user base that the publishers are very keen to get access to, but so far the number of publishers agreeing to join the service has been limited.
Its most significant development to date is in providing links between articles which appear in the BIDS ISI, IBSS, Compendex and CAB HEALTH databases to the full text in JournalsOnline.
Greater functionality is planned for JournalsOnline, which at present lacks some of the more sophisticated features being offered by the commercial services.
1997 has seen the launch of a number of commercial electronic journal services: Blackwell’s Electronic Journal Navigator, SwetsNet, Information Quest and OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online.
Unlike JournalsOnline, these services charge institutions an annual fee for initial access.
Each service offers online access to an integrated collection of titles from the publishers who have entered into agreements with them.
A growing number of publishers, including Blackwell Science, Kluwer Academic and Carfax, are signing up for all the commercial services rather than limiting themselves to one or two.
Users of these services are entitled to search and browse all the journals, but the level of what they see depends on whether their institution holds a subscription to a particular title in its electronic form, or is entitled to see it free.
Common features are a single point of electronic access and authentication for library users, subscriber-only access to full text articles in PDF and increasingly RealPage and other formats, online help, customer and technical support, email alerting services, and archiving solutions.
Differences are apparent between products at this relatively early stage of development but it seems reasonable to expect they will become more alike as they develop, particularly in respect of document delivery or pay-per-view access and in enabling links to the library catalogue.
The Blackwell’s and Swets products combine the services of a subscription agency with the provision of a single searchable Web interface to the titles of signed publishers.
SwetsNet[3] expects to offer 1000 titles by the end of 1997 and 3000 by the end of 1998, and the others are projecting similar figures.
SwetsNet is already capable of integrating with Web OPACs, providing a direct link from the journal title in the library catalogue to the title in SwetsNet.
In 1998 it will merge with SwetScan, the TOC service.
Non-subscribers to particular titles can only view TOCs; document delivery of abstracts and full text is planned for the future.
Blackwell’s Electronic Journal Navigator[4] offers transactional (pay-per-view) delivery of articles the user is not entitled to download, with the fee determined by the publisher’s rates.
Non-subscribers can view abstracts in addition to TOCs, and links to free journals are also being developed.
A CHEST deal for Navigator has recently been announced.
There are, however, disadvantages in using either of these services.
SwetsNet will only allow full text access to electronic subscriptions handled by Swets.
Navigator will allow access to titles not handled by Blackwell’s, but will charge an annual fee to do so, plus an additional fee per title.
For libraries who use only one agent for their journal subscriptions, this will not be a problem.
Those who don’t, and are not inclined to move their business in reply, may prefer to look elsewhere.
Information Quest (IQ)[5] has been developed by a Dawson company of the same name.
IQ does not handle subscriptions, but simply provides a searchable interface to the online journals in its collection.
Provided they have a subscription to any of these titles, regardless of which agent used, libraries can access the full text.
IQ has teamed up with Uncover to provide a fax back document delivery service for occasions when electronic versions do not exist and when the library does not hold a subscription to a title.
They have provided over 8 million TOCs from over 12,000 journals since 1990.
What sets IQ apart from its competitors are its enhanced searching capabilities, including Adaptive Pattern Recognition and Natural Language Processing, and the fact that it indexes every word of a journal; the other services index only citations, keywords and/or abstracts.
Unfortunately for most academic libraries.
IQ concentrates on scientific, technical, medical and business information and currently includes only a limited number of social sciences and humanities titles.
One product which does cover all subject disciplines, and is not linked to subscription management, is OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online[6].
Integration with the FirstSearch online reference service will take place in 1998, when document delivery will also be introduced.
TOCs are available to all users, with abstracts and full text for subscribers only.
It also promises support for those involved in consortia publishing.
Librarians have a number of decisions to make about online journals.
At the most elementary level, they need to decide whether to cancel any of their print subscriptions and replace them with electronic versions.
This will in part be determined by how easily their users can access networked computers.
Libraries not intending to subscribe to many online journals may not feel the need for an electronic intermediary service.
After all, there is only one more year left of the HEFC agreement and free online access to the journals of its contributing publishers.
Also, some major publishers ,like the Institute of Physics and Elsevier, are providing their own Web journals service, and so far have chosen to go it alone.
Is it likely they will throw in their lot with any of these intermediary services?
The online journal service has much to offer, but because all are still being developed it is very difficult to judge and compare the different alternatives.
What are the criteria by which these services should be measured?
Should librarians be aiming to direct developments, for example by uniting to draw up a list of requirements for such services, rather than merely providing feed-back on what is presented to them?
References [1] The Open Journal Project.
Project description.
Available from: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/open/ [2] JournalsOnline Available from: http://www.bids.ac.uk/JournalsOnline [3] SwetsNet Available from: http://www.swetsnet.nl/ [4] Blackwell’s Electronic Journal Navigator Available from: http://navigator.blackwell.co.uk/ [5] Information Quest Available from: http://www.informationquest.com/ [6] OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online Available from: http://gilligan.prod.oclc.org:3050/ Author details Jane Henley Assistant Librarian (User Services) University of York ajh1@york.ac.uk Sarah Thompson Acquisitions Librarian (Periodicals) University of York st20@york.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: Treasure Island on the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: Treasure Island on the Web Buzz software html copyright video graphics hypertext perl Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes looks at children's libraries and literacy, and describes the Treasure Island Web pages, a resource that shows how the potential of the Web can be used to make classic texts more accessible to a younger audience.
The Web pages described in this article can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/treasure/ Computers are becoming more prevalent in every aspect of our lives and with the development of networking technology this trend seems set to increase.
Schools have recognised these trends and are introducing children to computers at as early an age as possible.
If children's libraries are not to be left behind and more importantly are to continue in their role as literacy supporters they must begin to develop services which will also support these new electronic literacy skills.
However, it should be stated that these new services should not be developed at the cost of their more traditional services.
Print based literacy will remain important and users of networking technology will still need to be able to read and write only the context in which this happens will have changed.
New IT services therefore must complement the library's traditional services and not detract from them.
UKOLN has recognised the importance of the development of new electronic services in children's libraries and is hoping to set up a project which will explore with a number of partner libraries in the UK exactly how children's libraries can develop these new services.
What exactly is electronic literacy?
Electronic literacy consists of skills which are both familiar and different from more traditional forms of reading, writing and communication.
Reading in an electronic context, for example, still involves being able to understand language, spelling and grammar but now involves a monitor instead of a book.
This appears at first to be a reasonably simple change but involves some complex issues.
The transition is not simply learning how to read the words off a screen but also learning to navigate the document which is being read.
Moving around the document is no longer as intuitive as just turning a page.
To read effectively in a computer environment the reader must be able to scroll up and down through out the document.
Hypertext documents are no longer simply linear and the reader must learn how to navigate the links and understand the concept of hypertext.
New skills are also required in order to write in an electronic environment.
It is essential that a would be computer user has a certain level of keyboard skills.
Once the keyboard has been mastered or at least familiarised the would be writer will have to learn how to use a piece of software which allows them to write.
This could be anything from the simple Notepad to a word-processing package to an e-mail package.
Both reading and writing combine to allow people to communicate and again the electronic environment is offering new forms of communication.
As well as ubiquitous e-mail (which is replacing letters, faxes and phone calls) there is now the option of using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), video-conferencing or MOOs.
A MOO is a text based virtual environment which is based around the concept of rooms.
Visitors to the MOO can explore a collection of 'virtual' locations and chat and interact with other visitors who are logged onto the MOO.
The project which UKOLN hopes to set up will explore how children's libraries can support these electronic literacy skills but within a literature based environment.
The way UKOLN has identified for doing this is through the development of a WWW site which has as its theme a piece of children's literature.
This would allow the computers and networking to be introduced into the children's library but within a strong literature context.
The Internet can be used to allow children to experience stories and fiction in a new context, have opportunities to communicate in new ways and consequently become motivated and enthused about reading, stories and books whilst learning new computer skills.
A specifically designed WWW site like this would act as a controlled entry point to the Internet for the children and the library.
It could be carefully designed so to ensure site users have the opportunity to learn all the skills that make up electronic literacy.
Before attempting to set up a large scale project which would incorporate these ideas it was decided that it would be useful to have a 'trial run' and see whether it was possible to design such a WWW site.
When UKOLN was approached by a sixteen year old student called Stephen Hill looking for a six week work placement involving the Internet it was an ideal opportunity for this trial run to take place.
Stephen was an equal contributor to the WWW site and many of his ideas were incorporated into the final result.
The experimental WWW site Treasure Island was chosen as the theme of the site.
It was important for the book used for the theme to be well known, have a strong story line and have identifiable themes.
Treasure Island fitted all these criteria perfectly with its exciting storyline about pirates, treasure and sailing ships.
These strong themes also meant that there were likely to be a number of resources on the WWW on these topics which could link into the site.
Importantly Treasure Island was also chosen because it was out of copyright.
As this was a trial run for a larger scale project it was necessary to use a text which would not be bound by complex copyright laws.
As Treasure Island was published over 70 years ago it is now out of copyright.
This made a very simple and convenient solution to what threatened to be a very complex and time-consuming problem.
(Also all images on the WWW site were drawn by Steven and so again copyright issues were avoided).
Although Treasure Island was ideally suited for our trial run it is unlikely that we will use it again in the full scale project.
The language used in the book and its age could be a barrier for many children and also it is a very male orientated story.
By using a more contemporary piece (despite the copyright difficulties this will raise) there will be excellent opportunities to involve the author and publisher with the project.
It will also be possible to chose a book which better reflects the interests and issues facing children today.
The site's structure and look It was important that the site was carefully designed making it as easy to use as possible, fun and entertaining.
The pages had to attract the attention of the child and interest them.
They have to make visitors to the pages want to send in e-mail, explore the WWW and become more interested in the book itself.
This page shows the site's cheerful, bright and cartoon based look.
These three factors make the site look fun and consequently make it more appealing.
The screen shot also shows the use of frames.
As users were likely not to be Internet adept and could generally be unfamiliar with computers it was decided to use frames.
In this way a frame which has icons linking back to the Treasure Island site remains down the left hand side of the screen.
No matter which links the user follows and even when they follow links outside of the Treasure Island site this frame remains in place.
This makes navigation extremely easy and ensures that novice users cannot get lost.
We were aware that some WWW browsers do not support frames and so ensured that on the opening page it was possible to link to a no-frames version of Treasure Island.
All the pages are written in a humorous way relaxed way with the intention of bringing the characters to life.
The whole feel of the pages are hopefully very fresh and entertaining and appealing to children.
A great benefit of having Steven working on the project was that his age made him an ideal critic for what would and would not appeal to other teenagers and children.
The structure of the Web site The content of the WWW site is structured into four different sections consisting of: The author; The book; Links; and things to do.
The author The author section contains a very brief introduction to Robert Louis Stevenson and then lists other WWW sites about him.
The aim was to use information available on the WWW to link into the resources that were already available and so integrate the pages into the WWW rather than provide all the information on the page itself.
If users of the page want to learn more about Robert Louis Stevenson they will have to leave the Treasure Island site and consequently will, during this process, become more familiar with how to use hypertext.
The Book The second section, entitled the book, provides more detailed information about the story.
It includes a brief plot summary, information on the characters and a link out to the whole online text (available elsewhere on the WWW).
This link was included not to encourage visitors to read the book off the screen but simply because it was there and provided an interested link.
We decided early on that we would not try to make available ourselves the whole text of 'Treasure Island'.
This was not simply because this would have been a time intensive task but because we wished the site to complement the book and provide information about it and make the visitor to the site want to go away and read it.
The Captain Flint page shows a page from this section of the site.
Each character was given their own home page on which information was provided about their role in the book, how they are described by Stevenson and also what we imagined the characters would say if they could speak to the visitors to the site themselves.
Again the idea was to make the site fun whilst passing on information about the story and the characters in it.
Links The third section contains links out to other WWW sites which are to do with the themes of pirates, treasure and so on.
Frames are particularly useful for this section as the links will lead the users away from the Treasure Island WWW site.
Again this section offers users the opportunity to become more familiar with the WWW and hypertext.
Things to do The things to do section involves a more varied use of the communication tools that the Internet offers.
One of the advantages of the Internet is the way that it allows fast communication in the form of e-mail.
E-mail has, perhaps, been the most successful tool of the Internet and allows information to be exchanged quickly and informally.
It was obviously important to include the use of e-mail within the site.
The book review page shows how e-mail is used to get visitors to send in a book review of Treasure Island.
The visitor needs to read the book and then use e-mail to send it in again combining the twin aims of encouraging reading (using the WWW site as a prompt) and becoming familiar with e-mail.
Reviews received in this way are then added on to the WWW page so other visitors to the site can read them.
In the full scale project we will hope to get the children submitting these reviews in the form of simple HTML documents.
Other pages ask visitors to e-mail in reviews of the WWW site itself and a description of a pirate they have made up themselves.
Like the book review page each of these are presented as requests from the characters with the aim of bringing the book to life.
By thinking more laterally we also developed the idea of creating a quiz which could be completed on the site.
This quiz requires knowledge both of the plot of the novel and information found on the WWW pages the site links to.
Each question is followed by a drop down box which offers three possible answers.
Once the visitor has selected an answer to each question they are then given a score.
This score is presented as being calculated by Long John Silver who them a rating from the lowest of the low the 'cowardly landlubber' through to 'old seadog' to 'regular pirate' up, finally, to 'as good as Captain Flint himself'.
To complete the quiz the user must learn how to complete what is in essence a very simple online form and also move between the pages of the site.
The quiz is the first example on the site of a page which was not straight forward and easy to write.
In order to calculate the score achieved it is necessary to use a PERL script which involved some technical assistance.
The final type of interaction is made possible by using a MOO.
The MOO as already mentioned is a text based environment where you can create rooms, characters, objects and then interact with them and more importantly with anyone else who is logged in at the same time.
It is basically an open online social space which can be given a specific theme.
We created a few rooms based on locations which appear in Treasure Island so making it possible to log in and explore the Island and even interact with the characters (which is dependent upon me being logged in as one of the characters).
This has all been achieved at a very low level using rooms on a MOO which was already set up by another organisation.
This limited the extent to which the rooms could be developed we were only allowed to create a small number of very simple rooms.
However, these rooms still allow visitors to communicate with each other in real time in an Treasure Island setting.
There are great opportunities for children's libraries in using MOOs.
A MOO could be used to have a question and answer session with an author involving children from all over the country.
With a higher level of programming a MOO could be developed which operated in the form of a game which required a detailed knowledge of Treasure Island for winning it e.g.
making the user read the book.
These games could even be completed collaboratively by children working in different libraries.
Similar interactive resources could be developed using IRC or even video conferencing.
Reaction to the site Generally the site has been well received winning two 'site of the week awards' from major WWW education sites.
In the three months the site has been available it has been visited at least over a 1000 times.
Teachers and librarians have in particular been very enthusiastic about it.
One criticism which has been received is that the pages are slow to download because of the high number of graphics.
Obviously a careful balance needs to be struck between a graphically appealing site (so the pages look attractive and interest the visitor) and the speed they take to download (children will not be willing to wait a long time).
One solution for the full scale project will be to have the pages stored on the hard drive of the machines in the libraries which will make them much faster.
The pages will still link out to the Internet but as much material as possible would be on the local drive.
Conclusions Overall we have been very happy with the WWW site and the feedback we have received has encouraged UKOLN to pursue a large scale children's library Internet project.
As of January 1997 this project was at the proposal writing stage.
The project will be much more ambitious and is being developed in partnership with three UK city children's libraries.
The Treasure Island WWW site is definitely one way in which children's libraries can integrate the Internet into their services.
It is perhaps even a model for children's library services of the future.
Contact Details e-mail:s.l.ormes@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Unique Identifiers in a Digital World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Unique Identifiers in a Digital World Buzz software database urn doi identifier copyright video multimedia cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell reports on a seminar organised jointly by Book Industry Communication and the UKOLN on the use of unique identifiers in electronic publishing.
On the afternoon of Friday the 14 March more than 50 people involved in electronic publishing met for a seminar reviewing recent developments in the unique identification of digital objects.
Delegates included representatives of publishers, libraries and other organisations.
The seminar was organised jointly by Book Industry Communication (BIC) and the UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN) with support from the eLib programme.
A brief report follows: Introduction Why we need identifiers Brian Green (BIC) and Mark Bide (Mark Bide and Associates) introduced the seminar with an overview of why the publishing industry needs identifiers [1].
Unique identifiers for digital objects are an essential part of the technology that allows: electronic trading including rights transactions; copyright management; electronic tables of contents; production tracking and other in house administration; bibliographic control and resource discovery.
Several issues were highlighted: What level of ‘granularity’ is required?
Traditionally publishers have worked at the book or journal level, using the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and International Standard Serials Number (ISSN) as identifiers.
However, the unit of publication is getting smaller.
Recent schemes allow for the identification of individual articles within publications.
Increasingly we need to identify much smaller fragments of complete works, for example parts of text, images, video clips, pieces of software, etc.
Identifiers are either ‘dumb’ or ‘intelligent’.
A dumb identifier has no inherent meaning and can only be resolved by looking it up in a database.
Intelligent identifiers contain some meaning.
Consider the ISBN.
This is a relatively intelligent identifier because its various parts have some meaning.
The first part identifies the country, language or geographic region in which the book was published for example.
However, as book rights are sold from one publisher to another the intelligence of the ISBN decreases and any particular ISBN can only be resolved by querying it against a central database.
As the unit of publication gets smaller, the number of identifiers required grows and it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain intelligent identification schemes.
The trend is likely to be towards ‘dumb’ identifiers.
It is important to distinguish between identification and location.
The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that we are all familiar with on the Web is a locator rather than an identifier.
If an object moves, its associated URL changes and people using the old URL are likely to get a failure indicating that it is no longer available.
A true identifier must remain the same whatever the current location of the object.
The IETF URN Working Group are in the process of defining Uniform Resource Names (URNs) [2] which are persistent identifiers for information resources.
How persistent should an identifier be?
In the Internet world it is generally accepted that identifiers for digital objects need to last for a long time significantly longer than the objects they identify.
Indeed, they probably need to outlast current Internet technology and computer systems.
There is another complication at the moment in that we are in a transitional period of publishing.
Publishers must continue to deal with traditional paper publications, while also being involved with new electronic only publications and with parallel publications.
The music industry is facing similar problems.
In response the International Confederation of Authors and Composers’ Societies (CISAC) [3] has been developing the Common Information System (CIS).
This system includes identifiers for various manifestations of content and for creators and publishers.
A recent development is the International Standard Work Code (ISWC) which identifies the musical composition itself, rather than the recorded or printed expression of the work.
It has been suggested that the ISWC might be extended to cover literature and the visual arts as well.
Creators and publishers are identified by the Compositeur, Auteur, Editeur (CAE) number, which will be extended and renamed the Interested Party (IP) number.
The Digital Object Identifier Carol Risher (Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Albert Simmonds (RR Bowker) gave an overview of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) [4].
Their presentation included a video based largely on the first public demonstration of the DOI given in February that showed documents and other files being retrieved on the Web using DOIs rather than URLs.
Development of the DOI is being performed by RR Bowker and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) on behalf of the AAP.
A DOI contains two parts.
The first part, known as the ‘Publisher ID’, indicates the numbering agency and publisher and is assigned by the DOI Agency.
The second part, known as the ‘Item ID’, is assigned by the publisher and can be made up of any alphanumeric sequence of characters.
The use of an existing standard scheme in the Item ID, a SICI or PII for example, is encouraged though some publishers may choose to use a proprietary scheme.
A DOI can be assigned to any digital object at a level of granularity that is appropriate to the publisher.
Typically this might mean that a separate DOI is assigned to each component (text, image, sound, video) of a multimedia document.
The DOI system has two parts the ‘DOI agency’ and the ‘DOI computers’.
The DOI agency assigns Publisher IDs, issues guidelines for DOI usage and works with the relevant standards bodies to maintain the integrity of the system as a whole.
The DOI computers form a distributed system that resolve any DOI to its associated URL.
The system is based on the CNRI handle system [5].
Any user who knows the DOI of a digital object can query the DOI Directory directly by typing it into a Web based search form.
Typically however, DOIs are likely to be embedded in Web pages, hidden behind clickable buttons.
Queries to the DOI Directory are resolved and the client passed direct to the publisher’s system.
The current state of the DOI system is as follows: the DOI system is real and can be used now; publisher procedures are still being formulated; DOIs tend to be long but in general will not be seen; the DOI system is free to readers; publishers will have to pay to register a Publisher ID with the DOI agency; a European agency is planned.
Once assigned, a DOI remains unchanged.
If the ownership of an object changes, the new owner registers the change with the DOI agency.
If the object pointed to by the DOI moves (that is, the URL changes), the DOI entry for that object can be updated.
It is anticipated that the charges associated with registering with the DOI agency will be small enough that DOIs will be used in non-commercial areas of the Internet as well as by commercial publishers.
The DOI agency will assign Publisher IDs to individuals and other organisations in addition to traditional publishers.
The DOI is non-proprietary and will be introduced to ISO in May.
Development of the DOI system will continue over the summer culminating in a full demonstration at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1997.
The SICI and the BICI Sandy Paul (SISAC/BISAC) gave an overview of the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI) [6], a scheme for identifying serials and parts of serials.
The scheme has been in use since the late 1980’s and is now widely used, mainly at the issue level, by a broad range of publishers in EDI message transactions and by libraries and subscription agents.
The original version of the SICI allowed an identifier to be assigned to each issue of a serial (the Serial Item Identifier) and to each contribution (article) within a serial (the Serial Contribution Identifier).
Recently the SICI has been updated to identify fragments other than articles (for example a table of contents, an abstract or an index) and to identify particular physical formats.
The SICI contains the ISSN of the serial.
A final draft of the Book Item and Component Identifier (BICI) [7] is now available.
This is essentially a book version of the SICI, using the ISBN in place of the ISSN.
The BICI can be used to identify a part, a chapter or a section within a chapter, or any other text component, such as an introduction, foreword or index.
It can also identify an entry in a directory, encyclopaedia or similar work that is not structured into chapters.
The PII Norman Paskin (Elsevier Science) gave an overview of the Publisher Item Identifier (PII) [8] which was developed in 1995 by the Scientific and Technical Information (STI) group of publishers.
The requirements for the PII were: format independence; capability for future extension; one document per identifier, one identifier per document; easy to generate; generated by the publisher; minimal restrictions on applicability; compatible with other standards.
The PII is made up of 17 characters and contains the ISBN or ISSN in order to guarantee uniqueness.
It is a ‘dumb’ identifier that has the capacity of 10000 items per journal per year.
Future versions of the PII will have extensions to cover document components and versions.
Development of any new version of the PII will take account of developments in other areas, for example the DOI system and URNs.
Some interesting figures were given for the numbers of identifiers required for the STI area of publishing.
Estimating 1 million articles per year, identifying all the versions of all the components of those articles may require somewhere in the region of 1014 identifiers!
[9] Group Sessions The seminar closed with three group sessions covering: Copyright management applications Using DOIs in the information supply chain DOI syntax and system.
These were followed by group reports and a plenary discussion.
Some interesting issues were raised.
Should the DOI Agency be closely aligned to a country’s ISBN agency?
Should the publisher part of the Publisher ID be based on the Interested Party number from the Common Information System (see above)?
Can DOIs can be assigned to off-line (for example CD-ROM based) digital objects?
Yes.
Does the DOI have any relevance to traditional print-only publications?
No.
What happens to ‘dead’ DOIs?
How does the DOI system cope with digital objects that are mirrored across several sites?
The DOI resolves to the URL of a page that contains a list of pointers to the mirrored resources.
It was generally agreed that the group sessions could have gone on for far longer than the 45 minutes allocated and that follow-up meetings in specific areas may be required.
This was an interesting seminar and thanks are due to Brian Green (BIC) and Rosemary Russell (UKOLN) for organising a very successful event.
References Unique Identifiers: a brief introduction, Brian Green and Mark Bide, ISBN 1-873671-18-0 http://www.bic.org.uk/bic/uniquid IETF URN Working Group, http://www.bunyip.com/research/ietf/urn-ietf/ International Confederation of Authors and Composers’ Societies (CISAC), http://www.cisac.org/ Digital Object Identifiers, http://www.doi.org/ CNRI Handle System, http://www.handle.net/ SICI standard, http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/SICI/ A Standard Identifier for Book Items and Contributions draft (Report prepared for BIC and the British National Bibliography Research Fund), David Martin available after 21 April 1997 http://www.bic.org.uk/bic/bici.html The PII as a means of Document identification, http://www.elsevier.nl/inca/homepage/about/pii/ Information Identifiers, Norman Paskin, Learned Publishing (vol 10 issue 2, pp 135 -156) Author Details Andy Powell, Technical Development and Research Officer, Email: A.Powell@ukoln.ac.uk Web page: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisap/ Tel: +44 1225 323933 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UC and R Study Conference: Access versus Holdings A Virtual Impossibility?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines UC and R Study Conference: Access versus Holdings A Virtual Impossibility?
Buzz copyright graphics research Citation BibTex RIS Jim Huntingford listens to the 'access verses holdings' debate at the Library Association's University, College and Research group conference.
New ways of addressing the ‘access versus holdings’ debate were explored in March at the annual meeting of the University, College and Research Group of the Library Association, held at New Hall College, Cambridge.
The topics covered included electronic access, user education, the difficulties faced by distance learners, staff development, budget management and undergraduate access to networked learning resources.
These issues were explored during an intensive three day programme of papers and workshops (and over the odd glass of wine).
There were also opportunities to visit the new library buildings at Jesus College, St. John’s and the Squire Law Library buildings designed with some of the features of the ‘electronic library’ in mind.
The popularity of the ‘access’ theme, and its ever-increasing relevance to information professionals in the light of the Follet Report, was demonstrated by the fact that over 200 delegates travelled from all over UK to participate in this event (and from further afield with representatives from Austria, Eire, France, Hong Kong and India).
Thursday 28th March After a train journey that began at 6 a.m in Dundee I arrived in Cambridge in the early afternoon feeling as if I had travelled from Outer Mongolia rather than the East coast of Scotland.
However, after registration I still had plenty of time to find my room, shower, have a coffee and begin to look over some of the literature that had been provided on arrival.
The conference began with Lynne Brindley (Librarian and Director of Information Services, British Library of Political and Economic Science) defining the parameters of the access/holding debate in the Keynote speech.
I was particularly interested in her views on the barriers to full implementation of the access model (technical, economic and legal factors and structural issues within libraries themselves) and the strategies, technologies and resources to overcome them.
It was also useful to be reminded that the ‘just in case vs just in time’ debate could prove more important than the ‘print vs electronic’ argument, and that arguing for electronic access does not necessarily mean arguing against acquisitions.
A very entertaining paper followed on the planning and design of academic libraries.
Andrew McDonald (Director of Information Services, University of Sunderland) outlined the key principles and examined some of the problems of providing an accessible learning space for users in the electronic age.
A large number of slides depicted some of the successful and not-so-successful design features of old and new libraries from around the world.
The graphic illustration of the ‘not-so-successful’ ones was the cause of much hilarity and in some cases disbelief.
My only gripe was that Glasgow Caledonian University was placed ‘in England’ but this was corrected in good-faith after protests from the relatively small but vocal Scottish contingent!
The formal presentations for the day were now over and it was time for some activities of a more social nature.
First, an early-evening reception organised for ‘first timers’ to the annual UC&R Conference.
This was an excellent idea, especially for anyone like myself who initially found the sheer number of unfamiliar faces a bit daunting.
Then a very enjoyable Dinner and lastly, and rather unsteadily, onto the exhibitors’ reception for a look around the stands.
Friday 29th March The second day”s proceedings were kicked off with an report on the current status of the eLib Programme from its Director, Chris Rusbridge.
A year after the Follet Implementation Group in IT issued a call for proposals within seven programme areas, over 40 projects are now up and running.
Satisfaction was expressed at progress made so far.
But thoughts are already turning towards the next stage, with funding being made available for further projects in the areas of grey literature, quality assurance and electronic reserve collections.
Turning projects onto actual services and deliverables was identified as the key to the longer-term success of the programme, along with an ability in the academic library community to harness the potential of new technologies and to embrace a deep-seated culture change.
From the big picture to the specific a talk on the ELINOR project presented by Anne Ramsden (Project Co-ordinator at De Montfort University Library) which has already converted over 120 ‘high use textbooks’ at De Monfort into electronic format for network access.
The copyright and licensing aspects of this type of venture were, judging by the number of questions from the floor, of great interest to the conference (particularly the process of negotiating individual agreements with the publishers involved, the various licensing options available and copyright monitoring).
The first of two workshops I participated in was led by Eric Davies (Department of Information and Library Studies, Loughborough University).
Using the heading of ‘Undergraduate access’ a useful discussion and exchange of ideas/experience developed on the use (current and future) of campus networks to deliver a whole range of sources (information, teaching materials) to learners.
I also managed to get a place on one of the Netskills workshops (these proved to be very popular the available places being taken very quickly after registration).
The Netskills project (http://www.netskills.ac.uk/) is funded under the eLib programme to provide training to librarians and other information specialists in making effective use of the Internet.
After a presentation on the programme itself some Internet searching techniques were demonstrated and I came away armed with useful new knowledge about the major world wide web search engines.
The evening began with the conference dinner (I couldn’t comment on the after dinner speakers as the acoustics were truly dreadful and I didn’t hear a word) and ended on a successful note for those from north of Hadrians Wall in the pub quiz.
The ‘Low Flying Scots’ team fought against impossible odds in true Braveheart spirit to win £100 of book tokens (donated by Dillon’s who sponsored the conference) and a bottle of champagne.
Excellent.
Saturday 30th March Up early (bright eyed and bushy tailed of course) to visit the Squire Law Library.
In July 1995 the library moved from its previous Victorian home to an avant garde building designed by Sir Norman Foster.
An impression of spaciousness was contrived through an imaginative use of glass walls and open-plan floors which almost seemed to hang suspended in a void.
The books, meanwhile, were so compactly stored as to be hardly noticeable.
This library was definitely different.
I had a thoroughly enjoyable time at this conference.
The programme was well organised with a good mix and choice of presentations, workshops, visits and social events.
My only regrets were that: I didn’t get a chance to have a proper look around Cambridge.
An opportunity missed.
it was not possible to attend more of the events.
Delegates only had three ‘slots’ in which to choose between seven different workshops and three visits to new libraries.
Suffice to say that some hard choices had to be made.
I had to miss the penultimate and concluding papers on Saturday as I had to catch a train that would get me North of the Border sometime before Christmas.
I know, I should have flown.
Perhaps next time!
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ADAM: Bits and Pieces Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ADAM: Bits and Pieces Buzz data software database thesaurus copyright cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Tony Gill presents a few bits and pieces of news regarding the ADAM project which was featured in issue 3 of Ariadne.
Funding for Networked Resource Discovery & Delivery System The ADAM project has recently been awarded additional funding to procure a database system for the ADAM Service, up to a maximum of 30,000 GBP, following a bid to the Information Services Sub Committee (ISSC) of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
This will provide a number of significant benefits: The ability to more accurately describe complex resources (e.g.
web sites, individual web pages etc.)
and the relationships between them, both to enhance information retrieval for the user and to streamline the cataloguing process for the Project Team Better compatibility with more of the emerging standards for describing Internet resources More comprehensive database management features The facility for storing and linking thesauri, such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, which will be used as a searching aid The facility for storing reviews of network resources, submitted by end users Provide the ability to store content such as web pages, images and sounds, in addition to the descriptive catalogue records.
This will allow the system to be used for content delivery, and to experiment with a combination of full-text retrieval (like Alta Vista) and catalogue indexing.
provide a specification and a software tool that may prove to be of value to a number of eLib Projects and other initiatives.
Discussion about the specifications for this system will be taking place on the COUSNS mailing list shortly; should you wish to contribute, please subscribe to this list.
Details can be found at http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists-a-e/cousns/ Arts & Humanities Data Service: Visual Arts Service Provider The VADS (Visual Arts Data Service) Partnership, a subset of the ADAM Consortium consisting of the Surrey Institute of Art & Design, the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Glasgow School of Art and the University of the West of England, has been awarded funding to host the Visual Arts Data Service for the Arts & Humanities Data Service, following a response to the recent call for proposals in JISC Circular 5⁄96.
AHDS Web pages: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/projects/ahds/top.html JISC Circular 5⁄96 on the Web: http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/jisc/pub/c5_96.html ADAM presentation at CHArt 1996 Professor Chris Bailey and Tony Gill will be giving a joint presentation at the annual conference of Computers and the History of Art (CHArt), to be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London on the 5th & 6th of December 1996.
Our presentation (currently timetabled for 5th Dec although this is subject to change) will cover progress to date on the ADAM Project and the results of our recent survey of potential users.
CHArt 1996 has Web pages at: http://www.hart.bbk.ac.uk/chart/chart96.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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TAPin: Training and Awareness Programme in Networks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines TAPin: Training and Awareness Programme in Networks Buzz data software html infrastructure copyright url research Citation BibTex RIS Kay Flatten outlines the training and awareness project that focuses on universities in the Midlands area.
The TAPin project is a project which aims to deliver early in the eLib programme.
The first deliverable was the Interim Report featuring the six partner universities, each representing a unique segment of the HE community.
TAPin includes new and old universities with a variety of IT infrastructures and network readiness.
The Infrastructure Audit, IT Strategy Survey, and Academic Staff Audit touched the heart of information provision from a variety of perspectives.
The results of this research were intended to inform the subject librarians and LIS managers at the partner universities prior to their Stage Two work on the delivery of training and support to academic staff.
Others developing products and processes for networked information provision will find the Interim Report useful in shaping decisions.
A brief summary of the findings are presented here.
Orders for the report in print can be emailed to the TAPin research secretary at Meena.Patel@uce.ac.uk or watch for the electronic version of the TAPin Annual Report at: http://www.uce.ac.uk/tapin/tapin.htm Network Environments The study included Education, Law, Life Sciences subject areas, with Business Studies used as a benchmark.
The subject departments were mostly single sited; however, the university libraries were multi-sited.
The campus networks generally used ethernet with over half reporting a bit rate of 10 Mps.
Connection to campus networks with global access varied among subject departments and between universities.
Developments were ongoing to connect sites.
Dial-in access was not well supported or used.
The Interim Report includes tables with the most popular hardware and software applications across all subject departments and libraries.
Strategic Planners The IT Strategy Survey was shaped after observing information planning meetings at management level.
Strategic planners did not seem to have a clear picture of the future culture change.
References were seldom made to teaching and learning issues.
Every group observed was impressed with the mission and extensive nature of the eLib programme.
They were genuinely interested in what their academic staff reported to the research team.
This TAPin phase will continue through the summer and autumn.
Academic Staff Data were collected from 199 randomly selected staff who taught for 20% or more of their workload.
In-office interviews were held with 179 of these subjects.
Figure 1 illustrates the high percentage of staff reporting computer access at work.
There were only 14 people without computer access in their office.
Half of the sample had computers on their desk which were connected to Internet/JANET.
Home computers were also common among staff though the number connected to networks was low (n = 22).
Figure 1: Percentage of staff having computer access at work and homeAccess to a desktop computer was not universal and a significant university and subject affect was noted.
Staff at the older universities were significantly more likely to have desktop computers than staff at newer universities (Chi Square = 18.91; 1df; p<.01).
However, as illustrated in Figure 2 differences in desktop computing also existed between subject areas.
Staff were more likely to have a desktop computer if they were in Business Studies with 91.3% having access, than in Law with 61.8% (Chi Square = 14.60; 3df; p<.01).
Life Sciences and Education had nearly equal access with 84% and 86.8% respectively.
The difference in university group was not significant when controlling for differences in subject area.
Law had the greatest disparity among universities with an older university having 100% of its Law staff with desktop computers, and one new university having only one Law academic with a desktop computer.
When controlling for Law, no significant differences existed between old and new university access to desktop computers.
Figure 2: Percentage of staff from subject areas having computer and network access at desktop and homeLearning network skills When academic staff were asked if they would like training in the access and use of networked information, 78% answered 'yes'.
Perceptions of expertise was the main reason for not wanting training, with 'no requirement to do so' as the second reason.
The interview process revealed staff were not interested in seeking support, often mentioning that they preferred to be self-taught.
Only 20% of the staff from old universities and 15% of staff from new universities believed that academics automatically avail themselves of all support that is offered.
They mentioned that attending training courses in IT was too time consuming.
Slightly more staff indicated they were interested in finding out what information technology has to offer (53%) and will make time to learn IT tools (46%).
The focus group discussion with the interview team of 18 post-graduate LIS students revealed important insights into staff development issues.
Their main findings were: Staff value time over training and will not attend lengthy training sessions or courses.
Staff want training at the moment of need.
Staff want training which is specific to their information needs.
They do not want generic training or to learn network skills for IT sake.
Staff who do not have office Internet access claim they need this before training.
Staff prefer to be self-taught and to have easy guides for reference.
Staff want a colleague 'down the hall' who will be there for a question if they have a problem.
Staff should be represented on teams developing training models.
TAPin librarians were asked what training they needed.
They indicated a need in Internet skills including search engines, discussion lists, document delivery and electronic journals.
Because the librarians needed this training before they could be expected to develop support models, the first year of TAPin included a librarians' training programme.
Netskills piloted their Intermediate Internet Skills and HTML workshops with TAPin librarians, and Paula Kingston presented methods of presenting support in networked environments.
Project future Currently the research team is busy disseminating the Stage One results of TAPin.
The librarians are profiling the academic staff they will target with network support in the 1996/97 academic year.
Mailbases have be launched for the librarians to discuss URLs and problems encountered.
An impact study in November of 1997 will measure the effectiveness of TAPin.
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Beyond the Web: The Potential Uses of HTML in Library Disaster Control Planning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Beyond the Web: The Potential Uses of HTML in Library Disaster Control Planning Buzz software html standardisation browser preservation graphics hypertext multimedia passwords intranet Citation BibTex RIS During a lifelong library career, 2 out of 5 librarians will face a major disaster in their library.
Emma Blagg describes the design and evaluation of a HTML-based disaster control plan, used to provide the counter measures taken to minimise the effects of such a disaster.
A disaster control plan for the Pilkington library was created using HTML to link existing documentation.
The plan was then evaluated by both students and library staff in order to assess the usefulness of a disaster control plan in this format.
It was hoped that using hypertext would create a structured, easily accessible information resource.
The resulting hypertext system was called "Pilkplan".
In this article, the positive aspects and problems of using HTML in this area of library management are considered as well as feedback from users.
This paper is based on an MSc dissertation at Loughborough University, undertaken in co-operation with the Pilkington Library at Loughborough University.
What is Disaster Control planning?
Definitions A disaster is "an occurrence that causes death or destruction" [1].
Disasters in libraries have many causes, from the dramatic: arson, lightning and earthquakes to the mundane: electrical faults and burst pipes.
A disaster control plan is the written documentation that records the countermeasures taken against an event which is wholly unexpected and damages the collections of an institution.
It is a document which all organisations, not just libraries, should have.
History Disaster Control Planning has not been a major concern in British academic libraries until relatively recently.
Indeed, a study carried out in 1985 showed that only 6.6 percent of libraries had a Disaster Control Plan [2].
By 1993, 37 percent of academic libraries had a Disaster Control Plan, written or otherwise [3].
The most obvious reason for the increased awareness is the publicity surrounding major library disasters [4].
The most famous is that of the flooding in Florence in November 1966.
The level of the river Arno rose 16 feet and swept through the city at 40 miles per hour.
Much of Italy's heritage material was damaged or completely destroyed.
So devastating was this disaster that it has been viewed as the event which "ultimately changed the attitude of many librarians around the world" [5].
There have been many more recent disasters such as the Los Angeles Public Library fire [6] and the fire at the Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad [7].
Also figures for the US [8] show that a librarian has a 2 in 5 chance of participating in a major disaster in a 40 year career.
Why should you have a disaster control plan?
There are many reasons why an organisation should have a Disaster Control Plan.
These include: Arrangements can be made before any incident and they can be thought through to ensure a swift and effective reaction.
In a disaster deterioration of items can occur rapidly, a quick reaction will minimise this.
The production of a formal plan should help to convince management that a plan is necessary and needs adequate resourcing to minimise the effects on the whole organisation.
The presence of a plan with detailed procedures will help reinforce the importance of the whole issue of Disaster Control Planning to all members of staff.
The written plan will also be useful in training.
The various parts of a disaster control plan contain much material which overlaps with other sections and can result in repetition throughout a document; hypertext links can therefore be useful in minimising this.
In addition, plans are often accompanied by a variety of other sources of information such as sample disaster sheets and floor plans which would be more easily referred to in a hypertext document.
A disaster control plan describes the counter measures that can be taken to minimise the effects of a disaster, but "too often contingency plans are ring-binders that gather dust in some bottom drawer" [9].
It was hoped that by using hypertext, awareness of both the plan's importance and existence would be raised, particularly if it could be made available on the library's network or intranet.
Problems were foreseen regarding the usefulness of a disaster control plan which is only viewable with a web browser on a PC.
What Is Hypertext?
The idea of hypertext has been around since Vannevar Bush wrote his famous article [10], but its proliferation was enabled by the increase in powerful PCs and the creation of the WWW at CERN.
The simplest definition of hypertext [11] is that it consists of chunks, or nodes of information and the links between them.
Using this definition any text with references would be included.
The text and the one referred to are the 'nodes' and the reference forms the link.
This is the intellectual basis of hypertext.
What distinguishes hypertext from printed text is that the links are "machine-supported" [12].
When a link is selected, movement between the two nodes takes place automatically.
Hypertext allows the nodes to be any size and there are no limits on what can be linked to what.
A node can consist of text, graphics, film or sounds.
Features of hypertext It was Bush who originally suggested that hypertext mimics the mind because it is 'natural' and so should be easy to use [13].
The issue of how valuable hypertext is, when compared with paper, in learning is complex and has been discussed in the literature [14] [15].
Navigation and Hypertext "The user's freedom, to browse, navigate and take part in a journey or voyage of discovery at will, is the most distinguishing feature of hypertext" [16] but, conversely, is it also "the single greatest difficulty for users of hypertext" [17].
Lack of standardisation within and between hypertext systems may be at least partially responsible.
The Internet and its conventions are likely to be helpful in combating this.
Hypertext and Learning Hypertext offers different ways of presenting information.
It can be as effective as paper formats in learning, provided that users have definite aims and do not simply browse the document aimlessly [18].
Information Storage and Retrieval Electronic texts generally have the following useful characteristics: Ease of access: many readers can access the same text immediately and simultaneously via a network.
Lengthy texts can be easily searched and manipulated, and included in other documents.
Readers can generally be confident that they are reading the most recent version of a document.
Structure of the Document Hypertext can have many advantages in structuring information contained within a document.
Ted Nelson envisaged that ideas can be expressed with less overlap [19] and duplication as the same pieces of text can be referenced from several different places.
The organisation of information within a document is much more flexible, both hierarchical and non-hierarchical organisations can be imposed on unstructured information, there is even scope for multiple hierarchies to organise the same information.
Conklin considers these points in greater depth [20].
Creating Pilkplan The Pilkington Library's disaster control plan was in the early stages of planning when this dissertation began.
Some documentation had already been produced.
This included a list of the aims of the plan, details of the insurance cover, various pieces of safety information and details of how to handle damaged material.
The aim of Pilkplan was to create an information resource which would be capable of collecting together different forms of information and which would make it easy to cross refer between documents.
It was also hoped that it would be easier to link together material such as sources of further information and contact details of other organisations such as specialist disaster recovery firms.
Another aim of Pilkplan was to raise the profile of disaster control planning, at least partially, by providing an easy to use resource for consultation by all members of staff which outlines procedures for particular situations, including reporting faults.
Floorplans were created using image maps, where users can click on a specific area, such as short loan, and go to an information page about it.
Evaluation An evaluation was conducted with staff and students at Loughborough University.
They all completed evaluation forms containing a questionnaire and a list of questions to be answered using Pilkplan.
Users felt navigation was relatively easy as many links were included in ways that are used frequently on the Web.
As one user noted, it was difficult to estimate how much the ease with which she navigated Pilkplan was due to her familiarity with other hypertext documents.
The fact that this group of WWW literate users had so few problems with navigation could suggest that with increasing familiarity with the WWW and hypertext in general this potential problem will become less significant.
This evaluation suggests that as conventions have developed in HTML documents, navigation has become easier.
User feedback Users suggested the inclusion of a search engine, which has no parallel in paper formats.
The structure of information should be made more user friendly, including FAQs.
Eight out of the nine users thought that the links mostly lead them to where they expected to be.
This supports the idea that, for these WWW literate users at least, navigation is not a big problem.
Use of the 'find' option also increases information retrieval capacity; a feature which has no paper-based parallel.
Repetition of information caused some problems.
Using HTML to link to the same information in different parts of the document avoids this and the information only needs to be updated once.
Surprisingly users seemed to like the fact that there was more than one way of finding the same information.
Users didn't seem to mind scrolling through text to find information, and they suggested that on the contents page descriptions were made longer and more detailed.
All the users were very positive about the floorplans.
This indicates that the use of graphics to show information is one of the most important features of using a HTML plan.
Problems include active maps not working on earlier versions of Netscape and time taken to load.
Users like the use of graphics and other ways to differentiate between pages.
Hypertext or paper?
User's were asked if they prefer paper-based or hypertext documents.
All the student users said that they preferred paper but three of the four library staff preferred hypertext documents.
The six users who preferred paper documents gave a variety of reasons for this: Paper documents are portable.
There is no need to wait for graphics to load.
Browsing is easier in a paper document.
Computer screens cause eye strain.
It is easier to take in the scope of a paper document and be sure that you haven't missed out any information.
It is easier to make notes on paper based documents Paper documents are easier to use for demonstration purposes as they are available immediately; there is no time required for loading.
The three users who preferred hypertext gave the following reasons: Hypertext documents are available on-line so are much quicker to find; a book has to be found on a shelf.
Searching is quicker with hypertext than looking through an index.
Printing from on-line documents is easy.
Hypertext is easier to amend and update than paper.
Hypertext is convenient for users who are using a PC all day.
It is easier to create and store back-up copies of hypertext documents.
The different opinions of these two groups of users is related to the reason for consulting the document.
The users who prefer hypertext tend to require quick answers to questions and do not need to look at all the text.
The paper preferring users wanted to browse through information to make sure they have covered it all.
It seems that hypertext documents are viewed as being quicker to use, whereas paper is more convenient for browsing, particularly of long sections of text.
One hypertext preferring user wrote that in spite of his overall preference, his choice depended mainly on what he wanted a document for.
He also felt that few documents get much added value by being in a hypertext form.
Advantages of hypertext All the users felt that in some cases hypertext is more useful than paper.
The advantages were seen to be: Hypertext allows documents to be linked together which allows important points to be followed without using an index.
Hypertext makes moving around documents easier.
Hypertext avoids the limitations of a linear structure.
A well designed hypertext document can allow the selection of relevant material from a large document.
Graphics, such as the floorplans, make information more memorable.
Documents referenced may only be a click away.
Potential uses The WWW is now used by many people and full advantage can be gained by using a system that people are already familiar with.
Plans often have a large amount of information, this gives an easy way of looking at just an overview without overfacing the reader.
HTML is very simple to learn, impressive results are easily and rapidly achievable, hence staff training time will be reduced.
Updating will also be cheaper which will encourage regular changes to be made, increasing the currency of the information in the plan.
The structural emphasis was thought to be helpful in planning: HTML makes it easy to include areas of a disaster control plan which are incomplete and make additions.
An HTML plan can be put online which allows a number of people to have access in order to edit it.
Cross referencing is easier with hypertext.
HTML is a universally recognised system which maximises transferability between different software.
Staff can more easily dip into Pilkplan and find information relevant to themselves.
Including the phone numbers of people to be contacted in the event of a disaster can be a problem in a published document.
With HTML, passwords can be implemented, or access restricted to an intranet.
It is possible to link to other reference materials such as extensive safety information, and information such as annual expenditure and the costs of books.
One very useful feature of a disaster control plan being written in HTML is that it is possible to make links to references available on the web and even to books held in the local library.
A big advantage of using HTML is that active maps can be included which makes it easier to present detailed information in a more interesting way.
It is vital that a disaster control plan contains up-to-date, detailed information from a variety of sources in order to be effective.
HTML can provide an helpful way of presenting what can be a complex document in a more easily used and unusual way.
At the very least this will help to raise the profile of the plan itself and is likely to be more effective in training and updating.
References [1] Hanks, Patrick, ed.
The Collin's concise dictionary of the English Language.
London: Collins, 1988, p. 319.
[2] Anderson, Hazel & John E. McIntyre.
Planning manual for disaster control in Scottish libraries and record offices.
Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1985, p. 24.
[3] Eden, P, J. Feather & G. Matthews.
Preservation policies and conservation in British academic libraries in 1993: a survey.
British Journal of Academic Librarianship, 1993, 8(2), p. 71.
[4] Eden, P, J. Feather & G. Matthews.
Preservation policies and conservation in British academic libraries in 1993: a survey.
British Journal of Academic Librarianship, 1993, 8(2), p. 71.
[5] Donnelly, Helene.
Disaster planning in the 1990's: getting it right.
The Law Librarian, 1992, 23(1), p. 19.
[6] Eden, P, J. Feather & G. Matthews.
Preservation policies and conservation in British academic libraries in 1993: a survey.
British Journal of Academic Librarianship, 1993, 8(2), p. 71.
[7] Matthews, Graham.
Fire and water: damage at the USSR Academy of Sciences Library.
Library Association Record, 1988, 90(5), p. 279.
[8] Smith, Richard D. Disaster recovery: problems and procedures.
IFLA Journal, 1992, 18(1) p. 13.
[9] Joseph, G.W.
& G.W.
Couturier.
Essential management activities to support effective disaster planning.
International Journal of Information Management.
1993, 13, p. 321.
[10] Bush, Vannevar.
As we may think.
Atlantic Monthly, 1945, 176(1), pp.
101-108. http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/ [11] Hypermedia is a more general term than hypertext and suggests links to other media.
McKnight et al point out that hypermedia is often misused as 'multimedia' (McKnight, Cliff, Andrew Dillon & John Richardson.
Hypertext in Context.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 2).
They also note that traditional 'text' contains other media such as pictures and tables and so in line with this the term hypertext will be used here to mean a document containing several media.
[12] McKnight, Cliff, Andrew Dillon & John Richardson.
Hypertext in Context.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 3.
[13] Bush, Vannevar.
As we may think.
Atlantic Monthly, 1945, 176(1), pp.
101-108. http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/ [14] For a discussion and review see McAleese, R. Navigation and browsing in hypertext.
In: McAleese, R. ed.
Hypertext: theory into practice, Oxford: Intellect, 1989.
[15] McKnight, Cliff, Andrew Dillon & John Richardson.
Hypertext in Context.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
[16] McAleese, R. ed.
Hypertext: theory into practice, Oxford: Intellect, 1989.
[17] McKnight, Cliff, Andrew Dillon & John Richardson.
Hypertext in Context.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 17.
[18] Higgins, K & R. Boone.
Hypertext computer study guides and the social studies achievement of students with learning disabilities, remedial students, and regular education students.
Journal of Learning Disabilities, 1990, 239(9), p. 539.
[19] McKnight, Cliff, Andrew Dillon & John Richardson.
Hypertext in Context.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 8.
[20] Conklin, J. Hypertext: an introduction and survey.
IEEE Computer, 1987, 20(9), p. 38.
Author details Emma Blagg, FIDDO (eLib) project officer, Loughborough University Email: E.J.Blagg@lboro.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Print Journals: Fit for the Future?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Print Journals: Fit for the Future?
Buzz data dissemination archives copyright preservation hypertext multimedia licence research Citation BibTex RIS Do authors choose to appear in print journals for the wrong reasons?
Do print journals continue for the wrong reasons?
In short, are print research journals a corrupt form of scholarly communication?
We asked Fytton Rowland to provide a defence of the traditional scholarly journal.
In our next journal we shall provide a perspective from the other side of the debate.
The four functions of the scholarly journal It has been recognised for many years (Ziman, 1968 [1]; Ravetz, 1973[2]; Meadows, 1980 [3]) that the dissemination of information is not the sole function of the scholarly journal literature.
The paradoxical survival of this apparently archaic form of literature has depended on its multiple functions, which are essential to the orderly functioning of a scholarly community.
The four chief functions are: Dissemination of information Quality control The canonical archive Recognition of authors The first of these has not necessarily ever been the most important.
Occasionally a very important new finding has been reported by means of a rapid communication such as a letter to Nature ; for example, the famous paper by Watson and Crick (1953)[4] was published 23 days after submission.
But this is not the usual route for less epoch-making discoveries.
Usually these will be reported initially at a conference; even earlier, they may have been discussed informally among workers in the field.
The informal channels have been referred to as “the invisible college” (Crane, 1972 [5]).
Historically, the invisible college worked through international telephone calls, travel to other universities, and conference attendance, and therefore participation generally required money.
As a result, membership of the invisible college tended to be confined to senior scholars; junior members of their research teams participated vicariously through their boss, and people not situated in major research departments tended to be excluded.
The Internet has transformed this situation; the invisible college has been democratised and reinvigorated, and academic life radically changed, by the almost cost-free discussion across time and space that electronic mail offers.
Discussion versus publication It is important , however, to distinguish between academic debate and scholarly publishing.
Opinion is free but facts are sacred.
It is important that we maintain an unchangeable archive of verified research results.
If I drive my car across a high bridge, I need to be confident that the engineers who designed the bridge had access to sources of thoroughly reliable and tested information about the properties of materials, the geology of the foundations, and so on.
If I go to my doctor with a life-threatening illness, I need the doctor to have reliable medical-research information available, so that the best possible treatment can be prescribed.
A nice example of this important point has recently come to my notice (Sokal, 1996[6]).
Alan Sokal, a physicist and with unimpeachable left-wing political credentials, submitted a paper with an impeccable reference list to a left-wing journal of postmodernist social science, Social Text.
The paper was in fact a parody, but the editors did not notice this because the views it expressed coincided with their own.
Sokal then admitted the deception in a paper in another journal, Lingua Franca.
His purpose was to emphasise the importance, in the sciences at least, of scientifically demonstrated facts, which are not replaceable with culturally defined beliefs, even the one that one holds oneself.
Hence the second and third functions of the scholarly journal (quality control and the preservation of the archive) can be seen to be essential not only to good scholarship, but also to safe practice in the professions.
There has also been debate about the potential of the net for collaboration, and Rzepa (1995)[7] has coined the word “collaboratory” for the virtual space in which scientists at remote sites can work together.
There has, in my opinion, been a lack of clarity in much of the electronic publishing debate about the difference between discussion (which the Internet facilitates wonderfully) and the recording of research results.
Incentives to rigour It is also important that workers in any field of human activity should be encouraged to do thorough, rigorous work, and not cut corners.
For research workers in particular, both careful attention to appropriate methodology and an impartial and sceptical view of their own results are desirable.
Writing up their results and making them available to others (including nonresearchers such as practitioners and students) is also an important part of their professional duties.
It has recently been reported (Major, 1996 [8]) that, in order to secure patent rights in the USA, scientists in the UK will have to write up their daily work according to strict rules in bound, not looseleaf, notebooks, and certainly not electronically.
Similar levels of certainty are desirable even in work that is not destined to be patented.
The scholarly journal literature has always provided the mechanism by which researchers are given an incentive to be careful and rigorous in their work.
Peer review is not a simple binary decision, accept or reject.
Scholars were aware of the “pecking orders” of journals in their fields long before Eugene Garfield (1977)[9] started to document them through his citation analysis studies.
They submit their better work to better journals, and work they know to be less distinguished to those lower on the pecking order.
Thus there has evolved a graduated scale of quality facilitated by the journals.
Reputation and status depend on publishing in good journals, and further research funding and job promotion opportunities depend on this reputation.
The necessary incentive to quality is provided through the journals system.
This is not corruption, but a functioning and effective (though not necessarily efficient) method of allocating research posts and resources.
Publish or perish: does more mean worse?
Thus it is quite understandable that the fourth function mentioned above (recognition of authors) should be seen by researchers as the most important function of academic journals.
There is no real evidence that the number of papers per researcher has increased dramatically: the number of papers has increased because the number of researchers has (Ziman, 1980[10]; Meadows, 1993[11]).
Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that there has been a tendency towards “salami publishing” slicing up one’s research results thinner and thinner in order to get more publications from one research grant.
Some people believe that “more means worse”, in this as in other fields, but that is a matter of opinion.
The problem is that universities have grown, and institutions formerly not active in research have started to compete for research funding, while the budgets of university libraries have in many cases fallen in real terms.
Thus universities are producing more research results needing to be published, but their libraries lack the resources to buy the resulting publications.
Is the journals system corrupt?
There always has been some scientific fraud (Lennon, 1996 [12]), and the journals’ peer-review system has not always uncovered it.
There are dishonest people in every profession, but I would contend that no specific corruption in the journals exists.
The era of the widespread launch of new journals is now over; the reduced purchasing power of libraries has ended it.
Well-established journals will seek to retain or improve their place in the pecking order, not jeopardise it.
In the competition between printed journals, and between them and newly founded electronic journals, a reputation for quality is the main asset that a journal possesses.
It has a strong incentive to maintain that reputation.
Would free Internet journals do the job better?
The library funding crisis could in principle find a solution through the technology of the Internet.
We need to ensure, though, that all four functions of the academic journal are provided for, especially the quality-control and canonical-archive functions.
McKnight (1995) [13] has pointed out that as a very minimum the electronic journal must provide for all the functions that the printed journal performs; preferably, of course, it should provide for new features, such as multimedia content and rich hypertext linking, as well.
But the preservation of good scholarship is more important than new bells and whistles, any one academic’s career, or any one publisher’s profits.
Everyone will suffer if there is not a corpus of information that can be relied upon.
Harnad (1996)[14], Odlyzko (1996)[15] and others have suggested a new mode for “esoteric” publishing that avoids commercial motivations completely, and uses the Internet for direct transmission of information from scholar to scholar without middlemen.
Insofar as some research communities really are small, they probably are right.
But in many fields there is a large potential audience, and there are readers of scholarly papers who are not researchers medical practitioners are an obvious example.
Harnad (1996) has conceded that commercial publishers will probably continue to be involved with those journals that have larger, non-research markets.
Central to my argument, however, is the contention that electronic-only journals, whether paid for or free, must have quality-controlled content that, once published, cannot thereafter be altered by the author or anyone else, other than by a corrigendum that also passes through the editor.
This in no way underestimates the value of the Internet for scholarly debate, but it recognises that there is more than one kind of communication that is necessary if good scholarship and good practice in the professions are to be encouraged.
So do we need publishers in the electronic era?
It is true in theory that all the top researchers in a field could stop submitting their articles to commercial journals and refuse to referee for them, and transfer their energies to new electronic journals, thus raising their prestige.
In practice it is unlikely that this will happen by voluntary action.
This has led some academics to suggest that universities should retain the copyright in work done by their staff and publish it themselves instead of submitting it to journals published by outside (especially for-profit) publishers.
This is not wrong in principle so long as the work is peer-reviewed.
I have argued elsewhere (Rowland, 1996 [16]) the case that large journals will always need professional staff for administrative and subeditorial duties and that hence they cannot be free, unless subsidised.
Furthermore, the owners of the titles of major journals, which carry prestige, are not going to relinquish them readily.
Most of the major scholarly publishers are now offering their journals in parallel print and electronic forms.
I believe that the commercial publishers will come under intense pressure to use the new technology to reduce their prices.
The current position where the electronic version costs the same as or more than the printed is untenable, given the financial position of the libraries that are their major customers.
The large publishers, both for-profit and not-for-profit, argue that ceasing to print their journals will save only a small proportion of their total budget, and that in the intermediate period when publication is in dual form, their costs are actually raised by the need to provide both forms.
The radicals who argue for a complete reform of the system use zero-based budgeting to demonstrate that costs could be drastically lowered, if new electronic-only journals were started from scratch.
It is hard to predict where this argument will end.
However, the library budget crisis combined with the increased determination of universities to retain the intellectual property rights in their research seem likely to require some compromise from publishers.
The HEFCE Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PLSI) (Bekhradnia, 1995 [17]) offers one possible way forward, offering as it does electronic access free at the point of use to all members of a subscribing university.
It also demonstrates that the UK government is likely to support the survival of a profitable private-enterprise export industry.
But the smaller journals, genuinely “esoteric” seem likely to be replaced by free Internet publications on the Harnad model, to the detriment of publishers who have specialised in low-circulation, high-priced scholarly journals.
Response to this articles Reply received Monday, 27th January: I find Mr Rowland’s article both timely and relevant, as I have lately been assuring my colleagues ‘In 10 years there will be no scientific journals, only Web sites.’ The matter of archive integrity is interesting.
If Mr Rowland’s bridge engineer got his information from a paper containing errors, perhaps known to the author but awaiting publication, would he not prefer a web site which can be updated and corrected in response to new data?
The practical question for libraries is: how much larger will our buildings need to become, say in 50 years, if we do not move to a new system of publication?
Charlie Hulme Library Systems Manager John Rylands University Library, Manchester charlie.hulme@man.ac.uk References [1] Ziman, J.M.
(1968) Public Knowledge: The Social Dimension of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
[2] Ravetz, J.R. (1973) Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.
[3] Meadows, A.J.
(Ed.)
(1980) Development of Science Publishing in Europe, Elsevier, Amsterdam.
[4] Watson, J. D. and Crick, F. H.C. (1953) Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid.
Nature, 171 (4356), 737-738.
[5] Crane, D. (1972) Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL.
[6] Sokal, A.D. (1996) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, available at: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/p hysics/faculty/sokal/index.html [7] Rzepa, H.S.
(1995) The future of electronic journals in chemistry.
Trends in Analytical Chemistry, 14, 464.
[8] Major, L.E.
(1966) Making it patently obvious.
The Guardian, Higher Education section, 7 October 1996, vi.
[9] Garfield, E. (1977) What is the ‘core’ literature of biochemistry as compared to the ‘core’ of chemistry?
(Journal citation studies, 1), in Essays of an Information Scientist (2 vols), ISI Press, Philadelphia, PA, vol.
1, pp.
262-265 (and many subsequent Journal citation studies in the same book).
> [10] Ziman, J.M.
(1980) The proliferation of scientific literature: A natural process.
Science, 208, 369-371.
[11] Meadows, J.
(1993) Too much of a good thing?
Quality versus quantity, in The International Serials Industry (Woodward, H. and Pilling, S., Eds), Gower, Aldershot, pp.
23-43.
[12] Lennon, P. (1996) Cooking it up in the lab.
The Guardian, Online section, 10 October 1996, 16-17.
[13] McKnight, C. (1995) The human factors of electronic journals, in Project ELVYN; An Experiment in Electronic Document Delivery (Rowland, F., McKnight, C. and Meadows, J., Eds), Bowker-Saur, London, pp.37-47.
[14] Harnad, S. (1996) Implementing peer review on the net: Scientific quality control in scholarly electronic journals, in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (Peek, R.P.
and Newby, G.B., Eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.
103-118.
[15] Odlyzko, A.M. (1996) Tragic loss or good riddance?
The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals, in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (Peek, R.P.
and Newby, G.B., Eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.
91-101.
[16] Rowland, F. (1996) The need for management of electronic journals, in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (Peek, R.P.
and Newby, G.B., Eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.
243-250.
[17] Bekhradnia, B.
(1995) Pilot national site licence initiative for academic journals.
Serials, 8( 4), 247-250.
Author Details Fytton Rowland is a lecturer in the Department of Information and Library Studies at the University of Loughborough Email: J.F.Rowland@lboro.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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SOSIG: Social Science Information Gateway Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SOSIG: Social Science Information Gateway Buzz software html database browser udc cataloguing hypertext research Citation BibTex RIS SOSIG was established with funding from the Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC).
The Electronic Libraries' Programme (eLib) funds a Documentation and Training Officer, Lesly Huxley, under the Access to Networked Resources umbrella to raise awareness of and train people to use SOSIG.
Here Lesly provides background to the service and describes the Internet for Social Scientists workshops she is running at Universities around the country.
Behind all the hype about the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) lies the undeniable fact that valuable networked resources are becoming more accessible.
Internet access software has been much improved and simplified with the coming of the WWW and more staff throughout the UK academic community have access to graphical and text browsers such as Netscape or Lynx.
The Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) and other subject-based gateways are helping to provide academics, researchers, support staff and Librarians with quality, ordered fare from the chaotic menu represented by the vast and ever-growing number of networked resources.
Now Internet for Social Scientists training workshops are helping to widen access still further, but rather than offering SOSIG on a plate with little more than step-by-step exercises, they aim to introduce techniques and tools for information retrieval and handling which are more widely applicable.
The use of SOSIG is placed in context and post-workshop evaluations will inform our knowledge of both how Internet training is received and how academics and others make use of electronic information to support their work.
Order from chaos When Internet access first escaped from the domain of the computer experts many others in the academic community “gave it a try” and found it wanting.
The most common complaints were the lack of availability of useful materials and the difficulty in locating the few that did exist.
These problems persist with the continuing rapid expansion of the Internet: imagine a vast second-hand bookshop with a constantly expanding and changing stock but with little more than the spines of hundreds of thousands of books visible.
Rose Growing and Essays on Stress jostle on the shelf next to Developments in Cognitive Psychology.
Just like browsing the Internet, random selections from the shelves may uncover something up-to-date and worthwhile, but may just as easily disclose nothing more than outdated or frivolous comics on subjects of little or no interest.
The time and effort taken to clamber to the top shelf to retrieve Essays on Stress will have been wasted if eventual perusal of the back cover or a quick flick through its pages reveal it as a collection on stress fractures in bridges (or worse still, simply a list of titles of other such works) rather than on the psychological and physical effects of occupational stress you were looking for.
SOSIG provides a service which brings order to the second-hand bookshop equivalent that is the Internet, allowing social science researchers and practitioners easily to discover and access relevant, high-quality networked resources worldwide.
Each resource has been assessed for quality then catalogued, described and added to our database.
You no longer have to rely on a random collection of ‘spines’.
Users may browse the titles of a rapidly rising number of Social Science resources (900 to date) ordered under subject headings currently ranging from Anthropology to Statistics, or by Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) Scheme if preferred.
Better still they may use a simple on-line search form to track down relevant resources.
If the title is not enough, then the description the equivale nt of the book’s back cover is easily accessible and offers the chance to assess the resource’s relevance before connection.
Resource descriptions and other details such as keywords are entered via on-line templates and users will soon have the opportunity to offer suggestions for additional resources using a simplified form.
SOSIG uses indexing and search software developed under another eLib project, ROADS and its interface is uncluttered and easy to use whether a text-based or graphical browser is employed.
Many, however, may have missed the opportunity of making use of the service because they gave up on the Internet too soon.
Others, of course, have not yet had the time or access to facilities to try.
SOSIG on a plate?
The SOSIG Training Officer, Lesly Huxley, provides training materials and runs SOSIG Workshops at Universities throughout the UK both to draw attention to the added value the service provides as well as introducing Internet and particularly World Wide Web tools and techniques.
Although workshops are aimed at less-experienced netusers there are fewer absolute beginners now than there used to be.
Libraries and Faculties alike are establishing and developing provision of networked machines running WWW client software and some have their own excellent Internet training programmes.
The complaint of many staff and postgraduate students is that they have limited time to make use of these facilities and need to know how best to make use of that time.
The Internet for Social Scientists workshops provide a brief overview of Internet tools and facilities, but concentrate firmly on using SOSIG and other UK-based national services as starting points for Internet access to valuable networked resources worldwide to support teaching, administration and research.
An on-line tutorial is used at the beginning of each session to introduce Internet and WWW fundamentals and offer practice in navigation for beginners and some useful links to occupy those with more confidence.
During the course of the workshop SOSIG is provided ‘on a plate’ for the less-experienced with step-by-step exercises and hints and tips on using WWW browsers.
Quiz sheets along the lines of ‘twenty questions’ emphasise for the more advanced how SOSIG can be used to answer a variety of research questions and how the national UK services can be used singly or in combination for a variety of enquiries.
The use of SOSIG and other subject-based gateways is placed in context alongside the use of In ternet and WWW search engines and other electronic and paper sources of information such as Library Catalogues and Citation Indices.
It is not enough simply to achieve proficiency in the technology using a browser and clicking on hypertext.
Presentations, demonstrations and discussions seek to encourage all participants to develop their own information-seeking skills and strategies so that they can apply what they have learnt about using SOSIG and other example resources to any others they may use.
Allowing them to become dependent on the technology as it stands today would be foolish given the great leaps which lie ahead.
Participants should come away from workshops able to apply techniques and strategies to their use of the Internet, whatever stage of development it may have reached.
Workshops can be tailored towards the experience and subject specialisms of participants and sessions on publishing information for the WWW using HTML can also be included.
SOSIG is available at http://sosig.ac.uk/ where links to more information about the service and training workshops and materials are provided.
Requests for workshops have been heavy and current bookings are listed for you to check potential availability.
At the time of writing, bookings are being taken from October 1996 onwards (although some places are left for July and August if necessary).
If you would like us to run a workshop at your University, contact lesly.huxley@bris.ac.uk as soon as possible as dates are filling fast!
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Disabil-IT?
Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Disabil-IT?
Conference Buzz software accessibility video opac multimedia e-learning cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark reports from the February 1997 Disabil-IT?
conference, aimed at library and computing services staff to help raise awareness of issues related to IT provision for students with disabilities.
On the 12th February I attended the Disabil-IT?
One day conference in Birmingham organised by the teaching and Learning Technology support Network at the University of Wales, Bangor.
The conference was aimed at library and computing services staff to help raise awareness of issues related to IT provision for students with disabilities.
It was a long and packed day, with an exhibition to busy oneself at coffee, and it was warm, despite being mid-winter due to the sheer number of people present.
The opening address was given by Tom Vincent of the Open University, an institution with 7000 students declaring themselves disabled (interesting this number has risen at a greater rate than the able-bodied students in the past few years).
Prof. Vincent gave an overview of present activities and future developments.
Maintaining Access to Learning materials Present developments include: text in digital format which can be printed in large characters or be used in enabling technologies such as screen reading (synthetic speech) or soft braille digital audio, so audio can be searched via text, a necessary development as one OU course averages 200 hours of audio tape tactile diagrams and tactile overlays (to allow diagrams and maps to be read by the visually impaired) distributed audio Multimedia for Access Well designed multimedia is for everyone, not just for a niche market.
For example the OU’s Virtual Microscope [1] started off to help visually impaired students but is now used as a learning aid by all students on relevant courses.
Multimedia needs good design: screen layout navigation ease of reading screen auditory information compatibility with enabling software The Future Again the future will not be developed solely for a niche market.
Many issues are generic to all teaching, and with increasing student numbers and possible need to record lecturers for later playback to aid space restrictions (as at Stanford’s School of Engineering [2]) students with disabilities will increasingly be using the same materials as able-bodied students.
While Prof. Vincent advocated progress for the benefit of all students, there is little legal drive for the Higher education sector to change it ways.
Fran Tate, University of Wales, Bangor and Ann Wilkson, CTI Human services, both touched on the legal aspects to varying degrees.
Legal requirements “Higher Education institutions are free to determine to decide the provision they make” So said Lord Henley, Disabilities Minister.
The Disability Discrimination Act does not apply in its entirety to the Higher Education sector However, the Higher education Funding Councils are to have a regard to the requirements of disabled persons and HEI’s are to publish disability statements (to‘help students make informed decision’, Lord Mackay).
Disability Statements existing policy admissions examination equal opportunities existing provision advice services academic support careers service availability of IT acess to buildings future activity and development brief looking at next few years Making HEI’s Accessible Several speakers (Ann Wilkinson, CTI Human Services, Fran Tate, Wales, Bangor, Mike Wald, LSU, Southampton and Debbie Sapsed, Wales, Bangor) covered what HEI’s can do to help make their environments more accessible Decor gloss surfaces reflect light difficult for the visually impaired contrast floors and ceilings, skirting and furniture Building fabric and layout induction loops in lecture halls for the hard of hearing visual alarms as well as audio sloping boards for the physically disabled Computer provision issues can all students access a workstation for their own personal use (but not solely for their own use) volume control and earphones on a significant number of computers quite workspace within computer workspace (block out sounds) are WWW pages readable in Lynx?
can dyslexic students, for example, borrow laptops?
is adaptive equipment available for hire?
Library Provision can all students access an OPAC?
can all machines get at CD-ROM machines and get help?
are video and online resources accessible?
does the Library have quiet study rooms?
Software Issues can keystrokes be used instead of a mouse?
is it possible to add adaptive software?
see Ariadne issue 8B, in mid-April, for more discussion of software design for accessibility Staffing Issues awareness for all staff individual library tours for disabled students The speakers from the University of Wales, Bangor, spoke of the project at their institution to set up support study centres for students with disabilities.
They encountered many problems with incompatible software and have found the maintenance and support for the users and staff of the centres (one in the library and a larger centre elsewhere on campus) time consuming for a variety of reasons, including the staff’s lack of familiarity with products as there is a large range to master and there is infrequent need of support for each individual item.
Organisations Several organisations were represented at the conference, namely: Skill National Bureau for Students with Disabilities Skill promotes opportunities for young people and adults with any kind of disabilities to realise their potential in FE and HE, training and employment throughout the UK.
It is a voluntary organisation and a registered charity.
Skill: National Bureau of students with Disabilities 336 Brixton Road London SW9 7AA Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network (TLTSN) A network of centres around the UK supported by the HE funding councils.
The TLTSN exists to disseminate the experiences of the institutional projects, in the area of learning technology, to the wider academic community.
The centre from Bangor dealing with technical and organisational requirements for the use of IT by students with special needs, was represented at the conference.
[3] British Dyslexia Association The BDA’s Computer Committee provides information and support to dyslexics nationwide.
For more information see their web site [4] British Dyslexia Association 98 London Road Reading RG1 5AU Tel: Helpline 0118 966 8271 Tel: Admin.
0118 966 2677 Fax: 0118 935 1927 Email (Helpline): infor@dyslexiahelpbda.demon.co.uk Email (Admin): admin@bdadyslexia.demon.co.uk Access Centres The national federation of Access Centres is now 10 years old, but there still is not yet universal coverage across the UK References The Virtual Microscope http://met.open.ac.uk/vms/vms.html Stanford School of Engineering, Dept of Computer Science TLTSN, Bangor http://www.bangor.ac.uk/cat/html/tisnuwb/~titsnsni.htm British Dsylexia Association http://www.bda-dyslexia.org.uk/ Author Details Isobel Stark, Information Officer, UKOLN, Email: i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Phone: 01225 323343 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Open Peer Review & Argumentation: Loosening the Paper Chains on Journals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Peer Review & Argumentation: Loosening the Paper Chains on Journals Buzz html usability copyright hypertext adobe research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tamara Sumner and Simon Buckingham Shum of the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, describe the design and implementation of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, and some of the issues behind the approach that this journal takes to the process of scholarly review.
The emergence of the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have potentially profound implications for scholarly practice, particularly in the submission, review, and publication of articles in journals.
However to date, much of the impact of these new technologies on journals has been on digitising the products of journal publication; the scholarly processes involved in reviewing articles remain unchanged and unsupported.
We are using computer-supported collaborative argumentation (CSCA) tools to rethink and redesign the process of scholarly debate at the heart of journal reviewing.
This paper describes the design principles behind our approach, how they are currently being realised in the context of a specific new journal, and discusses some of the issues that this approach raises.
Keywords: digital journals, argumentation, electronic publishing, hypermedia, WWW The shift from paper to digital media The emergence of the internet and electronic publishing have far reaching implications for the way in which knowledge is disseminated and sanctioned within scholarly communities, which since the Gutenberg revolution in printing has been shaped by the affordances of paper.
Currently, we are witnessing the beginnings of a shift from paper to digital media in the submission, review and publication of scholarly work.
In many journals, it is now standard procedure for reviews and submissions to be transmitted electronically.
Sometimes, automated systems are in place for matching reviewers with submissions based on keyword analysis.
In a few cases, the final version is even published electronically as a set of HTML files available on the WWW.
Thus to date, this shift from paper to digital media has mainly affected the products of publication.
Various documents are becoming digital and some activities are automated, but the actual process of scholarly work has not changed to a great extent.
What remains completely unsupported is the intellectual 'meat' of scholarly publication, the review process itself.
This remains a private affair involving a small number of reviewers, and in most paper-based journals, the gap between initial submission and article publication can be dragged out over a year.
The potential of internet technologies for opening up and revitalising the scholarly debate process has yet to be realised.
Argumentation: the heart of scholarly debate What is the nature of intellectual work in the peer review process?
Reviewing a submission involves drawing on certain criteria (e.g.
theoretical content; empirical content; presentation quality; appropriateness for the publication) to evaluate the quality of reasoning and evidence provided, to probe for weaknesses, acknowledge strengths, and question background assumptions.
In effect, reviewing is an argumentative process where reviewers are engaging in an imaginary debate with distant authors who are not present to respond to their analysis.
This paper-based review model has shortcomings in that questions go unanswered; confusions go unclarified; criticisms go undefended.
The dynamic cut-and-thrust of debate normally found in face-to-face contexts such as workshops or conferences is not supported by the paper-based review processes, nor is it yet being realised in the new electronic media.
We are currently rethinking the review process to use new technologies in order to recapture the best features of a dynamic scholarly debate.
This rethinking is guided by existing research into hypertext-based, computer-supported collaborative argumentation.
Argumentation research is concerned with developing notations and tools to facilitate public debate and negotiation.
The remainder of this paper will begin by reviewing previous work in argumentation and distilling important design guidelines for creating argumentation tools.
Next, we will describe how these guidelines are being followed in the context of a specific new, tool-supported journal publication.
Finally, we discuss some of the issues which may be encountered in the new review model and its supporting technology.
Computer-Supported Collaborative Argumentation (CSCA) CSCA research has focused on designing notations to support debate processes [1, 3] , creating computational tools to support using the notations [4, 6, 9] and understanding the organisational contexts and work practices necessary for such notations and tools to succeed [5, 11].
Key lessons have been learned from previous research that point to design guidelines in each of these three areas:   Lesson 1: Avoid elaborate and rigid notations.
Much research has focused on finding the "right" notation to support debate.
Often, the resulting notations require people to express their thoughts using elaborate sets of provided distinctions such as positions, issues, comments, pros, and cons.
This, however, runs the risk of burdening people with excessive representational overhead by forcing them to categorise and commit their thoughts to rigid notations before they are ready.
Empirical findings indicate that people are often unwilling and sometimes even unable to do this [1, 2, 10].
Lesson 2: Computational tools must integrate argumentation with the artifacts being discussed.
Early Csca approaches separated the argumentation from other artifacts (i.e., the papers and drawings being discussed).
This separation hindered users from (i) quickly accessing relevant argumentation when it was most needed during problem-solving, and (ii) easily adding new argumentation.
Later work has shown that tools must support users to bridge the separation and move seamlessly in both directions between the artifact and argumentation [4, 8].
Lesson 3: Work practices must be redesigned so that argumentation is integral to the task being performed.
Empirical studies indicate that people often do not contribute to argumentation because it is perceived as extra work over and above what they are already required to do [5].
Successful argumentation approaches have redesigned work practices to make contributing to argumentation integral to the overall task being performed [11].
A CSCA environment for scholarly debate Our goal is to develop a CSCA environment for scholarly review of journal submissions which takes into account these three lessons.
This environment is being developed to support the reviewing process of a new scholarly journal, the Journal for Interactive Media in Education (JIME).
The JIME Web environment has been carefully designed in accordance with three design principles deriving from the three lessons introduced above.
Principle 1: Begin with a simple argumentative notation The notation used to support reviewing in JIME has one primary class of contribution called comments.
Optionally, debaters may choose to categorise comments as agreements (flagged as ) or disagreements ().
The power of the Web means that reviewers may elect to include pointers to evidence in their comments; evidence can be either plain text (e.g., "See Conklin & Begeman, 1988") or a Web hyperlink direct to an online source.
Thus, a body of secondary evidence may grow around an article under review, providing a valuable resource for both readers and authors.
Principle 2: Integrate the publication with the argumentation Prior to publishing for open debate, JIME submissions are marked-up to include special argumentation tags ().
Each major document section and the interactive demonstrations are prefaced with these navigation tags.
Clicking on one takes the reader to the argumentation about that document section, in the Review Window.
Conversely, from the Review Window, debaters can easily switch back to any part of the publication.
Figure 1 shows the user interface for reading an article in the JIME Web environment.
Reviewers can also download an Acrobat version since we believe that there is still a strong preference for being able to read a paper version.
Thus, a reader/reviewer has two main 'work spaces' in JIME the Article Window for reading, and the Reviews Window for making review comments, which are automatically opened and brought to the front as needed.
Figure 1: Reading an article in JIME.
In the lower left frame, the Comment icon takes the reader to the top of associated Review Window (see Figure 3 below).
The printer icon allows the reader to download an Adobe Acrobat version for printing.
In the main frame, the Comment icon takes the reader to the review comments about this figure and associated demonstration.
The Demo icon takes the reader to a Macromedia Shockwave demo of the system (see Figure 2).
Figures 2-4 show screens for trying out a demonstration (Fig.
2), displaying the Review Debate about an article (Fig.
3), and reading Reviews about a particular section of the article (Fig.
4).
The Review argumentation is added and manipulated using an environment which we have created by tailoring the NCSA HyperNews system [7].
Figure 2: Authors describing a new system must submit demonstrations of it using an appropriate technology.
The above example shows an interactive demo using the Macromedia 'Shockwave' plug-in.
This allows readers and reviewers to interact with the system described in the article, as though they were students using the original application.
Figure 3: Overview of a review discussion in JIME.
The example shows the outline view with headings for general categories of comment (e.g.
Clarity of Goals; Credibility of Results), followed by headings which match the headings in the article.
Section-sepcific comments are placed under these.
Figure 4: Details of a Review discussion in JIME.
The example shows review comments about a specific section in the article (3.3).
Principle 3: Make argumentation integral to the review process The proposed review model for JIME submissions is shown in Figure 5.
This model changes the role of participants in the process to directly involve generating and manipulating argumentation.
Reviewers return their comments to the editor in the JIME argumentative format.
The editor pulls together all the reviews to seed the argumentative debate.
The publisher marks-up the publication and the initial argumentation to include the special cross-tool navigation tags.
The article under review and the reviewers' initial comments are then published on the Web, and the review process moves into a phase of open peer review, in which authors, reviewers and readers can engage in debate.
The editor then decides whether the article should be accepted, and formulates change requirements for the authors.
We also wish to allow for the possibility that interesing discussion threads may arise during the review process which could be distilled into commentaries for publication with the final article.
Figure 5: Lifecycle of a JIME article under review.
Once the article is published, debate about it will continue.
Wth conventional journals, it is only at this point that debate would begin, perhaps a year or more after initial submission.
Even then, the debate is not tightly linked to the article, but located in other articles, often published in other journals, at substantially later times.
In JIME, discussion can continue directly linked to the published article, or via external links to related articles at other sites.
To summarise our design philosophy:   JIME is not simply making the conventional media of paper-based articles available on the Net, but addressing the interactive dimensions which are the essence of the new media;  JIME is not simply adding an e-mail listserver to allow peripheral discussion about published articles, but developing a journal review environment in which submitted articles and open peer review are tightly integrated with each other, and central to the journal's operation.
Discussion This project is still in its early design stages and the details of the current interface will undoubtedly change as it undergoes further implementation and user testing.
However, we feel it is important to discuss work such as this in its early stages in order to encourage more participation and dialogue between scholars concerning future publishing practices.
We believe the review model presented here offers several benefits for opening up and revitalising scholarly debate.
However, there remain many open issues to be resolved.
Some issues relate to the user interface for supporting collaborative, Web-based argumentation.
For instance, the Web introduces new concurrency challenges regarding timely updating of reviewers' screens with new contributions to the discussion.
Additionally, Web-based systems offer impoverished degrees of interactivity compared to what we now expect from direct manipulation interfaces, limiting our ability to take advantage of new developments in graphical argumentation tools.
Another issue raised by our proposed model is the perceived risk which authors may feel when exposing publications to large audiences at the review stage.
Submissions will be critiqued by many more reviewers than is currently possible in the conventional review process, and this will take place in a public rather than private forum.
The willingness of authors to do this depends greatly upon the professionalism and netiquette exhibited by reviewers.
The philosophy behind this model is that perceived risks of this sort will be outweighed by the benefit to authors of quicker, more extensive, and more relevant feedback, resulting ultimately in higher quality publications.
To conclude this brief article, we should not be surprised that electronic journals meet with resistance from some quarters, since they force to the surface huge issues which entail rethinking how scholarly knowledge is disseminated and sanctioned.
This is the time to reflect radically and creatively on the 'papyrocentric' scholarly practices which have until recently been taken for granted.
JIME is pushing the boundaries of electronic journals one step further with its Web-based open peer review.
This seems to us the logical direction in which to take journals.
We await your reactions with interest.
References Buckingham Shum, S., "Analyzing the Usability of a Design Rationale Notation," in Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques, and Use, T. P. Moran and J. M. Carroll, Ed., LEA, Hillsdale, NJ, 1996, pp.
185-215.
(Abstract :: Preprint postscript :: Request reprint) Buckingham Shum, S. and N. Hammond, "Argumentation-Based Design Rationale: What Use at What Cost?," International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol.
40, pp.
603-652, 1994.
(Abstract :: Preprint postscript :: Request reprint) Conklin, J. and M. L. Begeman, "gIBIS: A Hypertext Tool for Exploratory Policy Discussion," ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, Vol.
6, pp.
303-331, 1988.
Fischer, G., A. C. Lemke, R. McCall and A. I. Morch, "Making Argumentation Serve Design," Human-Computer Interaction, Vol.
6, pp.
393-419, 1991.
Grudin, J., "Evaluating Opportunities for Design Capture," in Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques, and Use, T. P. Moran and J. M. Carroll, Ed., LEA, Hillsdale, NJ, 1996, pp.
453-470.
Hair, D. C., "LEGALESE: A Legal Argumentation Tool," ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, Vol.
23, pp.
71-74, 1991.
LaLiberte, D., "HyperNews,".
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
McKerlie, D. and A. MacLean, "Reasoning with Design Rationale: Practical Experience with Design Space Analysis," Design Studies, Vol.
15, pp.
214-226, 1994.
Schuler, W. and J. Smith, "Author's Argumentation Assistant (AAA): A Hypertext-Based Authoring Tool for Argumentative Texts," in Hypertext: Concepts, Systems and Applications, A. Rizk, N. Streitz and J. André, Ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
Shipman, F. and R. McCall, "Supporting Knowledge-Base Evolution with Incremental Formalization," Proceedings of ACM CHI'94, Boston, Mass., 1994, pp.
285-291.
Terveen, L. G., P. G. Selfridge and M. D. Long, "From "Folklore" to "Living Design Memory"," in Proceedings of ACM/IFIP INTERCHI'93, 1993, pp.
15-22.
The Journal of Interactive Media in Education is at: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/ Open peer review of the first submission to JIME begins on 2nd Sept.'96.
We invite all Ariadne readers to participate and leave comments, either on the article itself if this is an area in which you are qualified, or on the journal's design more broadly.
An earlier version of this article was presented at HCI'96, Annual Conference of the British Computer Society on Human-Computer Interaction, London, 20-23 August, 1996.
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Sceptics Column Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sceptics Column Buzz data accessibility graphics gopher cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Jim Smith finds that the Internet is no place to do research.
For most of us, whether researchers, academics, information professionals, or even curious members of the public, the Internet appears to hold out incredible promise: all the knowledge of the world lies in wait for us, if only we know where to look.
At our fingertips awaits a bounty of information, the wisdom of the globe, the tree of knowledge.
The vision is misleading, a phantom that (unfortunately) may never possess substance.
There are very great differences between conducting on-line and 'traditional' research and, for the moment, the old ways still appear to be best.
It must be stressed first that this criticism is neither Luddite diatribe, nor technophobic rant.
As an academic, I like the Internet.
I enjoy being able to access UN Daily records and Security Council Resolutions from the comfort of my home.
I appreciate the wealth of on-line data on everything from the Aristotle to Zebra mating habits.
Thus, what I argue is out of concern for making the Internet a useful research tool, and not out of spite or fear.
Having noted that, let us turn first to perhaps the most important difference between on-line information and the occasionally-dusted shelves of our traditional libraries: quality.
Internet only rarely has a peer review process, and the documents found there can range from solid academic work to the worst kind of hate-mongering and unsupported accusation.
Some argue in favour of this lack of review on the basis that it gets information out quickly, and avoids peer review politics and unscholarly sniping.
While this may be true, the trouble is that it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between solid scholarship, polemic and propaganda.
Due to the way things like the World Wide Web are organized, the packaging is basically identical and it may be the flashier documents on the Net, the ones with graphics images and lots of buttons to push, which may end up getting the most attention.
Library material, on the other hand, has most often gone through a rigorous process of peer review, editing, and scholarship.
There is bad material as well as good in this setting, too, but it is the proportion which counts in the libraries' favour.
See The Times Higher Education Supplement , 13 October 1995.
Researchers looking for material on the Net waste a great deal of time sifting the good from the bad, for the Net contains a great deal of information, but much less knowledge; a great deal of noise, but little signal.
This becomes especially important if we note a problem raised by Thomas Mann (no, not him; this is Thomas Mann the General Reference Librarian at the US Library of Congress), something he calls the 'principle of least effort'.
Most researchers tend to latch on to the most easily available sources, even if they are of low quality.
Good research, however, is like any good craft.
Competent carpenters don't use termite-infested wood, and competent researchers will have patience and take time to acquire decent material but the temptation is there, and under the pressures of research exercises and assessments, it may be difficult to withstand.
In this light, the near instant accessibility of on-line material ostensibly one of Internet's great strengths suddenly becomes a weakness.
Another factor in favour of traditional research is that the Internet, as it stands, must be considered an uncitable source (an argument I have developed elsewhere).
* Certainly there are guides for technically sourcing information found there see Mel Page's work at East Tennesee State University, for example gopher://h-net.msu.edu/00/lists/H-Africa/internet-cit) [this link not working as of Jan 17th 1996] but there are important constraints.
Technically, Net information is unstable information.
In general, there is a single electronic copy of the document, often with no paper equivalent.
That single copy can be updated, changed and altered as often as the author (or any dedicated hacker) wishes to do so.
Its electronic address may also change.
Thus, anyone accessing such a document may either not find it where it was supposed to be, or find that it has changed from its original.
When was the last time that happened to a book?
The only way such information could be considered stable and academically useful is if multiple copies exist, preferably in unalterable CD-ROM format.
Apart from the technical restraints of citing on-line material, there are social consequences to digitising information.
If we are going to make a dedicated move from paper documents to electronic ones, and if, at some later date, all that exists are electronic documents, how will we ever be able to trust that any event actually happened?
The simple truth is that it will not be possible.
History itself can be rewritten.
Multiple copies, multiple locations, and unalterable formats currently prevent this, and must continue to do so.
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MODELS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MODELS Buzz data database dissemination infrastructure archives z39.50 url research Citation BibTex RIS Rosemary Russell reports on MODELS workshop, held on 5-6 February 1998.
This was the first workshop in MODELS Phase II, although it continued to build directly on the results of the five workshops in Phase I.
A Distributed National Electronic Resource?
involved the largest number of participants to date.
Around 50 people gathered at the Stakis Hotel in Bath on 5-6 February 1998, to discuss management and access approaches to the growing mass of currently unconnected national resources provided by libraries, data centres, archives, subject gateways, electronic journals, clumps and others.
We were grateful to Richard Heseltine of University of Hull, for once again chairing a workshop which posed a number of challenging management questions.
Funding to support the workshop was provided by eLib.
The workshop did not attempt to address the thorny problem of what constitutes a Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
Within a higher education context, the Content Working Group of the Committee on Electronic Information (CEI) has been examining the issues and CEI itself has discussed the DNER at recent meetings.
Rather than content, MODELS is instead concerned with strategic planning for achieving a managed environment, together with the technical infrastructure which will provide its basis.
However the DNER envisaged has a truly national character, and is certainly not restricted to HE.
There was a distinct shared recognition at the workshop that the management approach proposed by the MODELS architecture (which has been developed via previous workshops) is the direction to take, in order to provide fully integrated end-user services, in place of the current set of stand-alone services.
How the workshop worked A series of short presentations on the first day of the workshop set the scene, identified requirements and revealed some of the building blocks that are being put in place.
The group breakout sessions identified a range of organisational and technical barriers to achieving a DNER and matched the draft MODELS Information Architecture (MIA) against existing services, to see how well it fits.
The morning of the second day is usually when the pieces of the jigsaw start to come together and suggestions for ways of moving things forward emerge.
A series of recommendations was produced, which is available in the full workshop report.
However the fundamental issues that emerged centred around the following areas: ‘information landscapes’; the move away from current attention to user interface level; market ‘pull’ as a force for change; and of course MIA.
Given the close links between the successive MODELS workshops, it is usual for some of the same issues to re-emerge, albeit in different guises.
Information landscapes The concept of information landscapes bears different interpretations, but from a user point of view it essentially means that instead of being offered a mass of undifferentiated resources and services, a personal view is presented, based on the individual user’s information needs.
This view, or landscape, may be constructed in different ways, and initially it is likely to be fairly simple, perhaps just a set of web links.
Within a MIA context, the landscape is provided by a broker and will provide much richer functionality.
Landscape creation will involve three components: user profiles containing information about eg preferred interface, research interests collection/service descriptions mechanics of searching (eg Z39.50 Explain) There is currently no clear solution for implementing the second component (collection/service descriptions), although the first and third are reasonably well understood, if not yet widely implemented.
It is desirable for libraries to have some degree of control over user profiling.
User interface v. server interface It was acknowledged that services currently compete on user interface – people tend to distinguish between databases by the interface and become accustomed to using one particular service provider.
We need to move to a situation where services also compete on server interface in a MIA context it is also necessary for libraries to have access to the underlying search engine (via Z39.50); services that cannot provide this in future will not be able to ‘plug in’ to a distributed library service.
Market ‘pull’ needed Now that the library and information environment is more mature, the issues that MODELS is raising (eg lack of collection descriptions) are becoming more real and consequently the need for solutions is more pressing.
However solutions will not come about unless there is a market ‘pull’.
The more informed the market becomes, the more it becomes a force for change.
Therefore wide dissemination of MODELS results is essential.
The MODELS Information Architecture: MIA MIA has been developed progressively over the life of the project, with the input of a wide range of MODELS participants.
It represents a high-level blueprint for how distributed information services should be designed.
The library broker (or trading place) model lies at the core of the design.
The next MODELS workshop, to be held in May 1998, is specifically addressing the deployment of MIA.
The overall aim of the workshop is to ‘concretise’ MIA to take it one stage further into something practical, which can be used by the various parties involved: system vendors, information providers, and libraries.
We need an ‘embodiment’ of the architecture, so will be looking to develop demonstrator scenarios.
The way forward Over the coming months, UKOLN will be taking forward the DNER workshop recommendations, together with eLib, JISC, LIC and other partners.
A range of complementary dissemination activities will be undertaken, particularly to raise awareness of MIA in the relevant communities.
References The full MODELS 6 workshop report, together with the programme, participants list and other supporting material, are available from: URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/models6/ Author Details Rosemary Russell MODELS Project Manager UKOLN E-mail: r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Copyright Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Corner Buzz software html browser copyright graphics opac tiff lbs licence url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim answers copyright queries.
Old photos From Dr. Raymond Turley, Southampton University: I am still confused about the position of elderly photographs following relatively recent changes to UK copyright law.
I have yet to see a reasonably definitive statement of what the situation now is, and the last time I looked into the matter, it seemed that in some cases in order to determine whether or not an old photograph is in copyright (or likely to be so), you had to be aware of how it might be treated under the law of another EU state!
The situation seemed further complicated by the fact that in at least one EU member state, different types of photograph were afforded different kinds of protection, so you had to second guess how the courts in another country might view the particular image under consideration.
Charles replies: The law regarding the lifetime and ownership of photographs is indeed complex, but not as complex as is implied in this query.
The simplest summary of the lifetime can be found in the Aslib Guide to Copyright, Section 2.6.7.
Generally, it is 70 years from the date of creation or publication, but if made since 1989 and the creator is known, it is 70 years from the end of the year in which he or she died.
One thing, though, is clear you need take no account of any other country’s copyright law if you are copying photographs in the UK, then it is just UK law that applies.
Published Photographs of Paintings Barry Russell, Oxford Brookes, runs the section of the WWW Virtual Library devoted to theatre and drama and asks the following question: How would one deal with the following copyright problem?
Say there is a 17th/18thC painting in a museum.
The painting has been photographed, and the photograph has been published in a book.
I want to scan the image from the book and use it on a web page in a non-commercial, research-oriented context.
Whom should I approach to secure the necessary permissions the book’s author, the book’s editor, the photographer, or the museum?
Charles replies: The painting itself is out of copyright.
Approach the book’s publisher in the first instance to see who owns the copyright in the photograph, which IS copyright.
Copyright Declaration Forms and EDD From Stephen Graham, Information Systems Division, London Business School: We have a problem at the LBS that might be of interest.
We are planning on introducing our ILL module over the summer.
This will enable users to request ILLs via the OPAC in the Library and via the Webcat on the Internet.
We would then process the requests and send them electronically to the supplying library.
(In our case these would either be the BLDSC or one of the LAMDA libraries.)
However, the problem is that we have to have a hardcopy of the copyright declaration form with the requester’s signature on before we can process the request.
The only solution that we can think of is for the user to fill in an electronic form, and print a copy of it, sign it and submit both.
At least it saves time for us, as we will not have to type their details in.
It would be better for us if users could sign the copyright declaration form when they come to collect the article from the Library desk.
This is especially frustrating in another sense.
Documents via LAMDA are sent electronically.
At the moment we are using a piece of software called Ariel (ver 1.1).
Documents are scanned in, and “FTPed” to the requesting library’s PC (it works by IP address) which has Ariel installed.
The document is then printed out and sent to the user.
However, with Ariel version 2 documents can be sent via e-mail.
So if we receive the document by e-mail we then can forward it via e-mail to the end-user.
All the user needs is a special piece of software that will be able to open the document (they are multipage TIFF files) such as J-Fax or DocView.
They then can print out the document for themselves.
The weak link seems to be the need for the signature on the copyright declaration form.
Charles says: The analysis of the problem is correct.
The law is hopelessly behind reality in this particular regard.
WWW, HTML links and images Phil Bradley, Electronic Publishing Consultant, author and trainer, asks a series of questions: 1.
If someone has infringed your copyright, by copying your material onto their site (either with or without attribution, but without permission) what can you do?
What if they’re in another country?
Charles: Sue for infringement in which case you have to prove financial damage.
If there is no financial damage, get a court injunction restraining the offender from doing this again.
The same remedy is available in most countries.
2.
If I make a link to someone else’s graphic, so that the person viewing my page has their browser pull up my page and include the extra graphic on their page, have I broken copyright?
I’ve not actually copied it myself, but I am pointing to it in my html.
Charles: If your link automatically forces the graphic on the user’s screen, you may be considered to be infringing, but if you simply highlight a URL and the user has to click on this to pull up the image, then you are probably not liable.
However, if the graphic is on a public Web Site, why should the owner object?
3.
If I’m creating a frames site and one of the target frames comes from another site and appears in my frame on my page, have I broken copyright?
Charles: You may have infringed copyright, and you could be sued for “passing off” passing off your product/service as someone else’s.
Trade mark infringement may also be involved.
Without knowing the details, it is difficult to be definite, but I would be very wary of doing what you describe.
4.
Is it true that I need to use the copyright symbol (c in a circle) rather than just © to ensure its all legal?
Charles: No.
You don’t need c in a circle or anything else to obtain copyright.
The mere creation of something new gets you the copyright.
c in a circle helps in court cases in certain countries, including the USA, but is not a legal requirement.
5.
If I like someone’s graphic (say a logo) and I want to use something similar on my page, how much would I need to change it to ensure that I’ve put intellectual work into it, so I can claim copyright on the new image?
Charles: Sorry, you cannot.
Arguably, you are infringing copyright no matter how much you change it.
Always start from your own ideas!
6.
Is the HTML that I’ve written my copyright?
What if I copy some basic HTML (such as a table or form) from someone else, and just use their code, and put in my own words; have I infringed their copyright?
Charles: There would be shared copyright.
The originator of the HTML in the table would retain that copyright, and you have copyright in what you filled in.
This is not at all uncommon in copyright law!
In theory, you cannot reproduce without the table creator’s permission, and they cannot reproduce the contents without your permission.
In practice, copying a standard technique for making a table would not be infringement because there is an implied licence to copy and use the HTML code.
7.
If I write a newsgroup posting, do I own the copyright on what I said?
And how much could someone use of my original posting as “fair use”?
Charles: You own the copyright.
Fair dealing would be a very limited defence (it always is, contrary to popular opinion) and may well not be accepted by a court if you sued), but it has to be said that offering a text to a newsgroup is akin to a letter to the editor of a newspaper in other words, it could be argued that you gave an implied licence to copy.
8.
I’ve seen single images taken from, for example, TV shows and used on people’s pages.
One image from the 24 you get per second of a film is a lot less than 10% does this mean that I can use it on my page?
Charles: No, it is infringement.
A court case some years ago was based on precisely this a copy of a single frame from a full length film; the court said it was infringement.
Don’t copy it!
9.
You can’t copyright facts.
A URL is a fact, so can I copyright a collection of URLs that I’ve created?
Charles: Whilst facts are not copyright, a collection of them is.
So yes, indeed, if you’ve used skill and effort to create the list and you’ve not copied the list from elsewhere, you own the copyright to that collection.
Author details Prof Charles Oppenheim, Director, International Institute of Electronic Library Research Division of Learning Development De Montfort University Hammerwood Gate, Kents Hill MILTON KEYNES MK7 6HP charles@dmu.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: The Radcliffe Science Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: The Radcliffe Science Library Buzz mobile software html database browser windows hypertext passwords adobe telnet Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ashton meets the Deputy Keeper of the Scientific Book, Dave Price.
Filled with awe at the prospect of meeting the bearer of the weighty title Deputy Keeper of the Scientific Book, I journeyed to the Radcliffe Science Library in Oxford to meet Dave Price.
Dave is also Head of Systems and, wearing this hat, was keen to show me the work that has been done to advance a range of electronic information services.
The Radcliffe Science Library is one of seven libraries attached to the Bodleian Library, the largest academic library in Europe.
As the science department of the Bodleian and one of the legal deposit libraries, the Radcliffe Science Library receives a free copy of all British scientific publications and houses some 6 million books.
There are especially strong collections of older materials, and a unique collection of manuscripts.
The Bodleian is, however, very advanced in terms of Information Technology, and had the first library WWW server in the world.
Via the library website, BARD (Bodleian Access to Remote Databases) has provided a gateway to networked information services around the World, and there are many impressive online reader guides to using the libraries, a number of which are in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.
Again using Acrobat, the Bodleian is keen to promote and facilitate the use of electronic journals.
The Library is anxious that they are a success with users.
There are also a number of ongoing digitised imaging projects.
With so many electronic library initiatives going on in the Library, Dave focused on two particularly innovative projects: BRIAN and the Mobile Computing Service.
To optimise user access to expensive information sources, the Bibliographic Resources Interface for Accessing Networks (BRIAN) has been developed.
BRIAN integrates around 200 quality bibliographic reference databases (for which the university pays a subscription fee) that are made available on campus.
These electronic resources use a range of technologies like telnet, proprietary software and WWW and often require usernames.
Through a simple interface, BRIAN integrates these disparate services as far as possible and provides guidance in their usage.
The start up page provides a subject breakdown of all the information sources; this pragmatic classification matches to a certain extent the workings of the university.
By clicking on any option from the hypertext menu, the user is given a list of the available sources together with a brief annotation.
Having selected a source, the user sees a full description and any necessary technical information, such as registration details.
Finally, the user connects to the service, launching the appropriate programme to access it.
A script will automatically insert the username and password, a big help when you consider that some users need to remember up to 20 different passwords!
BRIAN is a configurable Windows 95/ Windows NT application, which only took 8 hours of programming.
It is fundamentally a homegrown WWW browser providing the necessary navigation system for people to use information sources easily.
The content of this system is html, and so it could be maintained by a subject librarian, not the Systems section.
Dave admits that the system is not perfect; indeed he talks about the limitations of what can be achieved at present in a recent paper at the 63rd IFLA General Conference [1].
Many of the faults lie with the suppliers of the database products.
However, this WWW-based solution frees users from having to know about technology before they look at a source.
A WWW version of BRIAN can be viewed at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/brian/ using a normal Web browser.
The Dearing report predicts that students will be required to supply their own personal computers in a few years’ time.
For the incoming students of the new School of Business Management at Oxford, this is already the reality.
This increased demand for users to plug their portables into the library network has driven the pilot Mobile Computing Service.
Learners are able to temporarily turn their portable PCs into reader workstations by using dynamic allocation of IP addresses, and then installing BRIAN.
The problems of weak Internet protocol and security of the network have been overcome by setting up a cross-campus central server.
Users need to know their ethernet card number, so that they can register to use their portable within certain units across the university.
If the user is not registered to access the network from a particular department or unit, permission will be denied when they try to connect their PC to an Ethernet socket.
If the system is abused, the IP address can always be traced to an individual.
Study space is a problem at Oxford, and there are few resources available to create more areas with user workstations.
At Oxford and at other institutions, initiatives of this kind will undoubtedly become increasingly important.
More information on the project can be found at: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/mobile/.
So, far from guarding library resources under lock and key, Dave and his colleagues at the Radcliffe Science Library are unleashing a range of information sources for cross-campus users.
References [1] 63rd IFLA General Conference http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/djp/ifla97.htm Author details Sarah Ashton is NetLinkS Researcher and Information Officer Dept of Information Studies, University of Sheffield Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN s.j.ashton@sheffield.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Yahoo: UK and Ireland Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Yahoo: UK and Ireland Buzz database graphics url standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley takes a good look at a new version of an old index, Yahoo, which is aimed at the UK and Ireland.
The problem with some web search engines is that they try to do everything instead of concentrating on doing a few things very well.
There's an obvious advantage, of course, to being able to have all your web searching needs served by one particular tool you only have to learn to use one interface, remember one particular URL, train users to use one particular tool.
But is it realistic to expect that we can use just one particular tool to find everything we need on the web?
Can a web search tool really be all things to all users?
In a market which is rapidly becoming quite crowded, Yahoo UK and Ireland (http://www.yahoo.co.uk) seems to be positioning itself as the leading place to search for information on the Web for both national and international resources.
Anyone familiar with the original Yahoo in the States (http://www.yahoo.com) will know that Yahoo is a search engine and subject index combined: you can choose to type a search term into the search box on screen, or browse through a list of subject headings.
However, Yahoo also offers a number of additional features, which are included in the UK version.
It's possible to look at latest news stories (with a UK focus) using their link to the Reuters news service, or you can read copies of their online magazine, Internet Life for a guide to the best of the Web.
If you've got children you can send them off to play with their own version of Yahoo, called Yahooligans*.
You can even create your own personalised version of the database.
And all from a European-based service boasting fast access and a strong focus on UK content sounds good doesn't it?
The original Yahoo indexes hundreds of thousands of sites around the Web, and has a very broad range of subject coverage.
Yahoo UK doesn't try to get as wide a subject coverage as the original Yahoo, and concentrates on a smaller database instead.
The Yahoo search engine has also been re-written to ensure that when a search is performed, UK and Irish content will "float" to the top of a list of search results.
The Good Bits Yahoo UK and Ireland is a pretty good place to start to look for information on the web.
It has a nice, clear interface with a simple subject index that is easy to follow.
Subjects are divided up into fourteen different categories covering arts, entertainment, business, government and news, amongst others.
To browse through a subject category you simply select the appropriate link and work your way down a subject tree.
On selecting a subject you are then given the choice of looking at just UK or Irish information sources or browsing through a list of subject categories covering world-wide resources.
This is straightforward and easy to use.
Navigating through the service is also straightforward.
You can click on the Yahoo menu bar to get to the Yahoo home page from anywhere in the subject index.
Your current position in the subject index is highlighted in bold on each page, so if you want to move up a category you simply select the appropriate link on screen.
It's also possible to use a search engine to search through the Yahoo database.
A search form is available on the Yahoo home page and on every page in the subject index.
The search engine uses Boolean logic using the + (plus) and (minus) signs to indicate AND and NOT.
OR is the default for searches, so if you just type in your search terms with spaces in between, this type of search will be performed.
You can also perform a search for a particular phrase by placing quotation marks around the phrase.
You can also search for documents where your required words appear in certain fields of the database record for example, if you want to find documents where a given word appears as part of a title of a document you can type [T] directly before your search term.
When you perform a search in Yahoo, an identical search is simultaneously performed in the Alta Vista database.
The usefulness of this feature is enhanced by the fact that both Alta Vista and Yahoo now have a very similar search language so you can cross-search the two databases quite easily.
Yahoo lists your search results by category according to the search database they have come from so that results from Alta Vista are shown separately from the ones which come direct from the Yahoo database.
If you don't find what you are looking for in Yahoo or in Alta Vista you can then choose to go off and perform the search in a range of other search engines as well.
These include Lycos, Open Text, Webcrawler, HotBot, InfoSeek, Excite and Dejanews.
Simply click on the link to one of these services and your search will be performed automatically.
If you're not sure about how to use Yahoo search features or you want some guidance on how to construct a search you can use the Yahoo search options form to help.
This can be found by selecting the Options link next to the search form.
Yahoo is also a good place to find latest news information, with a link-up to a Reuters newsfeed concentrating on UK news.
You can access the Reuters news directly by selecting the Headlines image in the menu bar, or follow links in the News category of the subject index.
The Reuters news is pretty up to date and you can usually read a range of news headlines from within the last 12 hours or so.
Like most commercially funded web search tools Yahoo UK does feature advertising on its pages.
However, its initially refreshing to note that all of the adverts appear to be for UK companies such as BT, Tesco and UK recruitment agencies such as PeopleBank.
Finally, Yahoo UK uses a "cute" little notation to indicate resources which have a UK or Irish focus.
An image of the Irish flag appears next to an Irish resource, and a graphic of the Union Jack appears next to UK resources.
Sites which have been classified as "cool" by Yahoo reviewers have an image of a pair of sunglasses next to them.
The Bad Bits Despite being a UK version of the Yahoo service, I feel that Yahoo developers haven't really thought too much about how things such as terminology might differ in the UK.
This is most evident when you look at some of the subject categories in the index.
For example, I wanted to see if the database contained any information about the television programme "The X Files".
From the top level listing I chose Entertainment:television, and I was then given another level of listings to choose from including broadcasting, networks and actors.
I looked around for a subject listing for programmes (as the standard term I'd use for a TV programme), but couldn't find it.
After some thought I decided to try under shows instead.
The category shows seems a bit of an Americanism to me, and not a term that would come straightaway to UK users.
Once I'd followed the link to shows I was then faced with yet another set of categories and what kind of programme is The X Files anyway?
Is it mystery, or science fiction?
I eventually chose science fiction and found it listed under here.
In other places the Yahoo developers seem to have gone too far in an attempt to categorise information in a way that will appeal to UK and Ireland users.
Why, for example is there a top-level listing for royalty under the section on Society and Culture?
Are people in the UK really more interested in the Royal Family than in other cultural and social issues?
Yahoo UK and Ireland also seems rather slow, and I'm not entirely sure that access is any faster than for the original Yahoo database in the States.
During the time I was writing this article I had numerous problems getting into the service at all, with connections frequently being timed out due to lack of response from the Yahoo server.
As of October 1996 the service has only been up and running for a matter of weeks, so this may improve with time.
The search engine is pretty slow most of the time and this must be at least partly due to the fact that it has to search Alta Vista in the States, as well as Yahoo UK whenever a search is performed.
If Alta Vista itself was mirrored in the UK this could potentially make searching much faster.
It's also worth pointing out that Yahoo UK and Ireland hasn't been designed with the needs of the UK academic community in mind.
It's a general database designed to appeal to all types of web users, and as such it doesn't restrict itself to strictly academic resources.
Yahoo employ reviewers to assess sites for inclusion in the database, but it's unlikely that they'll be using the kind of rigorous quality guidelines that we've become used to through eLib Access to Network Resources projects.
This makes Yahoo UK and Ireland great if you want to find the Web pages for Oasis, but not so wonderful if you're looking for solid academic content and useful descriptions of resources.
Summing up...
So, to return to my original question: is Yahoo UK and Ireland trying to do too much?
Or, alternatively, is it doing such a lot so well that our home-grown services such as BUBL and SOSIG are going to have to start looking nervously over their shoulders?
I don't think they have to worry too much as yet.
Yahoo UK and Ireland does have a lot of very nice features, and it's great to have such a powerful search engine combined with an easily browse-able index, but I don't think it really meets the needs of UK academic users.
The great strength of our information gateways is that they provide a means of finding quality academic resources which have been catalogued and indexed in a meaningful way.
Yahoo UK and Ireland can't match up to these quality standards and it probably won't ever attempt to do so.
*Editor's note: Yahooligans no longer exists.
See the following Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Kids  [15 May 2014] Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Do National Libraries Do in the Age of the Internet?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Do National Libraries Do in the Age of the Internet?
Buzz archives preservation cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Maurice Line, previously a Director General of the British library, ponders upon the questions faced by national libraries.
I ONCE WROTE (LINE, 1989 [1]) THAT there was nothing that national libraries did that could not be done in some other way or by some other body or bodies, and was not so done in one or another country.
This is true of even the most basic functions.
The deposit and preservation of national imprints could be spread among several libraries, where they can be consulted; and the national bibliography (which some countries do without) could be produced by the private sector or co-operatively by other libraries.
The big question was whether the most cost-effective way of performing necessary national functions was by the national library.
Present trends and problems Since then many national libraries have grown weaker simply because governments have cut their funds: they have improved their efficiency, but that has not enabled them to maintain their former acquisition programmes or services.
The Library of Congress is now the only national library that aims to have a comprehensive world wide collection.
This does not mean that many countries do not still try to ensure that they have a fairly comprehensive coverage of the world’s publications.
Several have attempted co-operative acquisition programmes, which have never really succeeded for logistic and other reasons.
Others have worked on the more sensible principle that their libraries collectively must achieve a wide coverage; as in Australia, their national libraries have made a virtue of necessity and proclaimed the Distributed National Collection (Henty, 1995 [2]).
Their policy of aiming to collect all national printed publications remains intact, but they have had great difficulty in extending deposit to other forms of publication, including material available only online.
This last is an obvious example of an established function of the national library being threatened by IT.
IT is changing the whole concept of publication; the Web contains, alongside research articles, vast quantities of trivia and also serious discussions of the kind that might previously have taken place in the press.
The Web is in fact enabling new forms of communication to prosper.
A national library that collected only printed matter would in a few years have a very incomplete record of the nation’s published output.
Similar factors apply to non-book media, which not all national libraries have collected in the past: if collection is restricted to tangible forms an increasing body of material will be missed.
Even if the legal deposit law is all-inclusive, as in Norway, the problems of enforcing it are almost insuperable, and the burden of collecting is insupportable.
Another problem is that globalisation affects publication like almost everything else, so that it is often hard to know what is published in or by a particular country.
This same factor of globalisation is one of several that is beginning to make national bibliographies an irrelevance.
Most of them are in any case very incomplete, since they cover only books; and who wants a published list of works issued in a particular country, rather than information on works of interest to them in languages they can understand?
However, a distinction should be made between national bibliographies and national bibliographic control, which is the only way to ensure comprehensive worldwide coverage.
Globalisation Globalisation is also making it less necessary for countries to aim at worldwide collections even of printed matter, whether selective or comprehensive, concentrated or distributed (Line, 1996 [3]).
Journal articles can be supplied by photocopy or by digitised text almost as quickly (often more quickly) from abroad as from the home country of the requester.
This will never apply to the same extent to books, but international access is improving yearly as the catalogues of more and more significant libraries become accessible online and libraries come to take more seriously their obligation to supply books in their ownership to other libraries.
This is weakening another function of national libraries: the construction of union lists (which can easily be put together from automated records), and the actual supply of publications, though only the British Library does this latter on a large scale.
Threats and opportunities All libraries are affected by IT.
At the same time it both poses threats, particularly that of being bypassed in favour of direct access, and offers opportunities.
The ultimate threat is non-existence, which some think is a real prospect: public libraries because there are other priorities for funding and other opportunities for enlightenment and entertainment; academic libraries because students and researchers will soon be getting everything online.
I doubt if anyone who knows and has thought much about these matters really believes in the coming death of libraries, but some do believe in their transfiguration into new types of organisation.
Others see the likelihood of gradual change, with some new activities added and some old ones fading away.
The ultimate opportunity is transformation (rather than transfiguration) into information storers and providers, reaching a larger number and wider range of users in a wider variety of ways and playing an interactive part as information exchanges.
Whether threats or opportunities dominate will depend on government policies and (not always the same) practices, on people both librarians and their consumers and on chance events.
National libraries too are faced with threats and opportunities.
Threats come not only from governments but from other libraries and from the private information sector, both of which can use IT to do what national libraries do now.
National libraries, like all big national organisations, usually attract a great deal of criticism (not to say abuse).
The causes of this critical attitude differ from country to country, but they include resentment of their wealth, fear of their domination, impatience at their bureaucracy, scorn of their inefficiency, and irritation at their arrogance or aloofness.
The fact that these features are usually exaggerated and often explicable does not change the criticism, which is often accompanied by an expressed desire to see them improved.
IT at last gives ordinary libraries the chance to join together in competing with the national library in collecting, in recording, in making bibliographic records accessible to users and available for use by other libraries, and in supplying material.
Some national libraries expanded their activities in the postwar period; these extra activities, like business information services, are the most vulnerable, because if they make a profit they are targets for the private sector, while if they make a loss (as most of them do if all costs are taken into account) they may not be affordable.
So we may see expansionist national libraries having to retrench and get back to basics (Line, 1995 [4]).
Opportunities for national libraries certainly exist, and they are being taken by many (Cornish, 1992 [5]); but they tend to constitute even greater opportunities for others.
The only more or less unique opportunities they have are those based on exploitation of their collections.
And there are opportunities that academic and public libraries have, in serving a prescribed body of users with personal services, that are not open to national libraries.
Unique roles of national libraries Yet there are things that good national libraries do that ordinary libraries in cooperation or the private information sector cannot do.
One is to offer for consultation in one place a collection of material, past and present, from all over the world.
There is room for more rapid acquisition and faster service, but no amount of access to remote resources can entirely substitute for this function, which is especially valuable for the humanities scholar.
Likewise, distributed legal deposit collections are not a substitute for central collections, since boundaries between subjects and forms of material are often irrelevant to users, even when they are not out of date or artificial.
It might be argued that near-comprehensive collections of national publications are becoming as much of an irrelevance as national bibliographies in a time of globalisation, but they represent a major part of the country’s heritage, and unless in some inconceivably remote future nations become obsolete their symbolic importance and real value will continue.
Britain has a unique element in its national library the British Library Document Supply Centre.
There is no doubt that it would never be established now, but the fact is that demand on its services from the UK and abroad is huge and continues to increase.
Is this a temporary phenomenon, due to the growth of literature and the simultaneous restrictions on library budgets?
If so, will this soon be counteracted by a massive switch to online access to electronic publications?
No-one dares to predict precisely what will happen to currently published journals and books.
However, it seems likely that most books will stay much as they are, and that scholarly journals will fall into three categories: print only, print plus online, and online only, possibly in roughly equal proportions.
If this is so it will still be immensely useful, not only for the UK but for the world, to have a vast collection of serials, conference proceedings, reports and books dedicated to supply to other libraries.
To oversimplify the case: if the UK demand placed on the British Library was shared by the top 30 academic libraries, and if the items they did not possess were excluded, they would each have to deal on average with some 60,000 additional requests a year.
Very large numbers of requests would not be accessible in the UK, and many would not be accessible at all.
This scenario is not readily imaginable, and it will be a long time before IT makes much difference to the situation.
National libraries do have a future It is always useful to ask “If we did not have such-and-such, would we invent it?” From a strictly utilitarian point of view, it is doubtful if we would now invent monumental national libraries; we would find other and cheaper, if less effective, ways of performing national functions.
But we do not start from scratch: big national libraries exist, and it is almost unthinkable, on the grounds of cost and logistics alone, to dismember them and distribute their resources among other libraries.
Secondly, national pride is a major factor.
National pride is not always a good thing; some terrible things have been done in its name.
But national libraries are at worst harmless, and at best major contributors to civilisation: a good national library is a legitimate source of national pride.
Otherwise, in an electronic age it is hard to explain the construction in recent years of huge new buildings for several national libraries, including those of Denmark, Estonia, France and the UK (Melot, 1996 [6]).
For such reasons as these they will continue to exist; and they need not exist merely as shadows of their former selves, so long as those that have worldwide collections are able to maintain extensive acquisition programmes, and those that confine their collecting to national materials are able to do so effectively.
In either case, the selective archiving of electronic publications is essential.
How far they go beyond building, maintaining and preserving collections to exploiting them will be a big issue.
Doubtless the better national libraries will continue to explore possibilities.
References [1] Line, M.B.
(1989) National Library and Information Needs: Alternative Means of Fulfilment, with Special Reference to the Role of National Libraries, UNESCO, Paris.
[2] Henty, M. (1995) Resource sharing ideals and realities: the case of Australia’s distributed national collection.
Advances in Collection Development and Sharing, 1, 139-152.
[3] Line, M.B.
(1996) National self-sufficiency in an electronic age, in Electronic Documents and Information: from Preservation to Access.
18th International Essen Symposium…1995 (Helal, A. and Weiss, J., Eds), Universitatsbibliothek Essen, Essen, pp.170-192.
[4] Line, M.B.
( 1995) Back to basics for national libraries?
(Editorial.).
Alexandria, 7(1), 1-2.
[5] Cornish, G.P.
(1992) The Changing Role of the National Library in the New Information Environment.
Alexandria, 4(2), 125-141.
[6] Melot, M., Ed.
(1996) Nouvelles Alexandries: les Grands Chantiers de Bibliotheques dans le Monde.
Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, Paris.
Author details Maurice Line is a former Director General in the British Library and is now a freelance consultant Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The NHS, the Internet and Libraries: The NHS Anglia and Oxford Internet Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The NHS, the Internet and Libraries: The NHS Anglia and Oxford Internet Project Buzz software database dissemination archives research Citation BibTex RIS Judy Palmer and Myles Chippendale describe an initiative that is using the Internet to connect widely dispersed health libraries.
In the Higher Education sector, following the Follett Report [1], there has been massive investment in developing and shaping the implementation of the electronic library through the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib)[2].
Libraries in the NHS have not been so fortunate.
Although health librarians are enthusiastic networkers, with no tradition of wide area networking, NHS libraries have had to operate as individual units, unable to communicate with each other apart from by post, telephone and fax.
Three years ago, reluctant to wait for wide area networking to become a reality for the NHS, the Health Care Libraries Unit (HCLU)[3] in the NHS East Anglia and Oxford Region took the decision to enhance communication and resource sharing among the health libraries dispersed over the Region by using the Internet.
The HCLU coordinates and facilitates resource sharing among the member libraries of the Health Libraries Information Network (HeLIN) in the Region and provides advice to the Anglia and Oxford NHS Executive on issues relating to library and information services.
This decision was made possible by the wide-spread emergence of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who were anxious to woo individual customers and drive down the cost of Internet connectivity.
With funding from Postgraduate Medical Education and the Anglia and Oxford Research and Development Directorate[4], the Internet Project began with the appointment of a Project Officer and the intention to connect 8 pilot sites across the region.
However, as the project left the planning stage, it quickly became clear that there was a much larger demand in the region for access to the Internet.
The aims and content of the Project The aim of the project is to “extend and intensify resource sharing amongst health libraries in the Anglia and Oxford region and improve access to evidence-based health care information for both librarians and users”.
This aim is achieved through the provision of connections, training, support and central resources.
Connections Initially, the project proposed to provide Internet access for 8 pilot sites in the region.
Subsequently, it was decided that the rest of the libraries in the region also should be connected.
In Anglia the additional connections were funded by the Postgraduate Dean.
Each library was provided with a modem and a year’s subscription to an ISP.
Around 25 sites have now been connected by HCLU.
Training A first training kit, covering a basic introduction to the Internet, has been developed from the Network Training Materials Project kits.
It has been delivered to over 90 librarians and library assistants in the region.
A second, intermediate level, training kit has also been created and delivered to 70 librarians.
Technical Support Many libraries in the region have little or no technical support especially for Internet related hardware and software.
Some of the necessary support is provided remotely by the Internet Project Officer.
Central Resources Access to central resources via the Internet is an important part of the project.
These are available primarily through the HCLU mailing list and web server[5] These services can be broken down into 3 types: 1.
Electronic versions of printed materials Services that were previously provided by printed material can quickly be converted to web pages using one of the many conversion programs available today.
This increases timely access to, and availability of, these resources whilst adding value by inserting hyperlinks to interesting Internet resources.
Examples of such resources include copies of the HCLU calendar of events, HCLU news bulletins and reports.
Librarians can now also access the most current version of documents which were previously distributed annually in print, and which, therefore, quickly became outdated, such as the Directory of Libraries and Librarians and the Union List of Periodicals.
The latter is available in a searchable format.
2.
New materials or services Resources created in the course of the project and which are Internet related are available including the materials produced for the 2 Internet training kits, archives of HCLU’s electronic mailing list and pointers to Internet sites of interest to librarians and medical practitioners.
The whole site (including the mailing list archives) can be searched using keywords.
3.
Central access to non-HCLU resources The web site can be used to mediate access to non-HCLU resources for librarians in the region.
At the moment, there is a link to Swet’s contents page service, SwetScan with instructions for HeLIN libraries on connection and use.
It is hoped that commercial databases and electronic versions of journals may soon be provided on the central server.
Future developments Future plans include: developing a FAQ to answer common queries including questions about compression software, uuencoding, installing different browsers or e-mail programs Adding a system for librarians to upload documents to the web site which can be automatically updated when the documents arrive.
This will be particularly useful for storing documents that are not produced centrally, for example the minutes of Special Interest Groups or other groups that meet regularly, and which can store documents on the web that can be downloaded on demand.
Monitoring and evaluation After providing access to HCLU information via the web, one of the first questions we asked was “Who uses the HCLU web site, and for what?”.
We decided to analyse the log files created by our web server to extract this information, but encountered an immediate difficulty in identifying our librarians separately from the other visitors to our site.
Many of the commercial ISPs that the libraries in the region use allocate IP addresses dynamically, which means that there is no unique way to identify these libraries: If someone, for instance, with a Demon account visits our site, there is no way to tell which library it was, or indeed if it was a library in the region by looking at the server logs.
Similarly, the use of proxy caches by many of the large ISPs distorts the figures, since people requesting a page from our site might not actually make contact with it and leave a record in the log (since the proxy has the page cached and returns it to the users without requesting the page from the server).
We have found, however, that the statistics about which pages are requested most commonly are useful, since they indicate which types of information are selected by visitors, allowing us to focus our developments on services that people want to use.
Internet Usage Survey Part of the project involves surveying a subset of libraries in the region about the use made of the Internet by them and their users.
Although this survey covers a very small sample (50 libraries have been sampled so far), the results give some impression of the extent to which the Internet is being used in health care libraries.
Since the survey has been conducted over a number of months in 3 separate sections, it is interesting to see how responses have changed over time.
Although no library has been surveyed twice in this time, and therefore any change in responses could be due to different use in different libraries, anecdotal information suggests that the changes in use and attitudes in this time are representative of changes occurring in most libraries across the region.
The Internet is being increasingly used by Librarians During the first survey period, under 50% of libraries reported that they had used the Internet in the previous week.
The reasons for not using it included not having a connection, a lack of time and not having a reason to use the Internet.
In the 3rd and most recent survey period, every library had used the Internet in the previous week.
For those libraries that did use the Internet, the average number of times that it was used to find information was roughly 5 times a week.
Besides reading e-mail and finding information, the most common uses of the Internet are for demonstrations or training and dissemination of information.
The Internet is being made available to Patrons Of the libraries that have been surveyed, only 4 libraries do not allow patrons access to the Internet.
Those that do allow access are split evenly between libraries that allow unsupervised access that those that require some sort of registration, appointment or supervision.
Most libraries are the only source of Internet access available to members of their organisation (65%) although 35% of organisations provide Internet access in some other way.
It is interesting to note that over 70% of organisations with other connections are HE organisations with JANET connections.
Opinions are changing The survey allows librarians to feedback general (free-text) information about how they perceive the Internet.
Over the course of the survey, the comments received have changed.
During the earlier part, many librarians were still dubious about the usefulness of the Internet.
Many librarians commented that finding information was either difficult or too time consuming.
During the later part of the survey, however, the comments received became more specific, for example requests for help on accessing Department of Health Executive Letters or sites where could they find collections of UK guidelines.
Some librarians commented that their users often resort immediately to the Internet, rather than locate the most appropriate source which may be provided locally.
Two comments have recurred regularly many librarians wished that they had more time to use the Internet, in particular to “explore”, and many also reported that the Internet was still very slow.
Conclusion Healthcare libraries serve a range of professions both in the higher education sector and in the NHS.
During the time that the Internet Project has been running, the Internet has changed from being a curiosity to being a working tool that is used on a day-to-day basis by many health care professionals.
Those healthcare librarians who straddle the higher education/NHS divide and who have access to the Joint Academic Network, have developed an awareness of, and skills in, electronic communication and network use.
Regrettably, most NHS librarians health care librarians who work in NHS Trusts have been denied this experience and thereby have been disadvantaged.
The Internet Project in Anglia and Oxford has supported librarians by providing the means, the training and the support to reverse this situation.
References Joint Funding Council’s Libraries Review Group: Report (The Follett Report) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ Electronic Libraries Progamme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Health Care Libraries Unit (HCLU) http://wwwlib.jr2.ox.ac.uk/ Anglia and Oxford Research and Development Directorate http://wwwlib.jr2.ox.ac.uk/a-ordd/ HCLU mailing list and web server http://wwwlib.jr2.ox.ac.uk.
Author details Judy Palmer (Directory, Health Care Libraries Unit) Level 3, Academic Centre John Radcliffe Hospital OXFORD OX3 9DU Email: judith.palmer@hclu.ox.ac.uk   Myles Chippendale (Internet Project Officer, HCLU) Level 3, Academic Centre John Radcliffe Hospital OXFORD OX3 9DU Email: myles.chippendale@hclu.ox.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: Rob Ainsley Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: Rob Ainsley Buzz data software java copyright graphics opera Citation BibTex RIS Rob Ainsley, editor of a clutch of Internet-based classical music journals, expounds on the dynamics of ejournals on the Internet.
Future Publishing, based in Bath, publishes 36 magazine titles covering sport, computing, music and leisure.
In 1987, the year Rob Ainsley joined it as a staff writer, it published only three.
Ainsley became features editor of Classic CD magazine when it began in 1990, and then took over as editor the following year.
Early this year, he decided it was time for a change.
Future had had its own promotional Web site for over a year, and Ainsley felt that it was time for the music titles to develop an Internet angle.
He said goodbye to the post of magazine editor, becoming instead On-line Internet Editor of Classic CD, Future Music and Total Guitar.
With considerable experience of publishing a print magazine behind him, Ainsley is still adjusting to the new electronic medium.
He finds it liberating, and yet not without its own considerable challenges.
“The magazine is a very confining thing because you have to work with the same shape of page all the time.
But it’s a nice physical object a nice thing to take on a train or read in the bath.
The biggest difference is in the organisation of material.
For example, the Web has no space limitations.
So if there is an enormous list of new CDs out this month, it doesn’t matter because readers can use the search facility to pick out only what they want.
But long articles are more difficult.
People will only read about one screen at a time.” Search software is a major benefit which on-line publishing has brought to magazines.
Future hopes to mount back issues of all its on-line titles eventually.
“It will be very useful for the magazine staff as well as the readers, because we won’t have to go flicking through all the magazines on the office shelves to find that passing reference to José Carreras’ role as Manrico in whatever opera it was.” Graphics are still an area in which print wins out, however.
“You can have nice big high quality pictures in a magazine where you really go for impact the pure impact of spread.
You know the sort of thing ‘Pavarotti: is his career at an end?’ That might be the only text on the spread.
But try that on the Web and it takes half an hour for the graphics to load.” Yet solutions are arriving all the time.
Ainsley looks forward to exploiting the interactivity built in to Netscape 2 and Java applets.
This should permit customised views of a magazine.
For a classical music fan who has indicated a major interest in 20th Century music and Russian symphonists, say, the contents page would present all references to Shostakovitch and Prokofiev at the top of the list.
That way, too, you can include everything.
“As an editor of a print magazine, it used to break my heart every month when reviews that I’d commissioned and paid money for couldn’t go in because there was no space.
You don’t get that problem on the Web.” Rob, his desk and a fluffy pig Future is still building up its Internet titles.
They have to make money, explains Ainsley, so subscription raising is a major area of activity, as is advertising.
What about the multi-media possibilities?
“Yes, obviously we can put in sound clips.
But copyright clearance is difficult because we have to be squeaky clean.
And a lot of record companies won’t let us have the copyright because they’re considering publishing on the Net themselves.
Just to make matters worse, the copyright period after a composer’s death went from 50 years back to 70 years recently, which is a pain because it means that Elgar, Holst and Delius are all back in copyright, as are Janacek, and Satie for three months.” Total Guitar fares best.
It contains blues tutorials for beginners, with fingering charts for readers to consult while they listen to the sound sample.
The music is commissioned by the magazine, so copyright clearance is not required.
Ainsley is worried about the economics of on-line magazine publishing.
For him the key is to find a charging mechanism which allows people to retrieve a small amount of information for a small charge.
Some people might just want one review, say, and be prepared to pay the equivalent of a quick phone-call to get it.
A ‘pay-per-use’ system such as this would be viable only in addition to a subscription-based service for regular readers.
The market for classical music magazines in print is stagnating, while Net accesses to the Web version of Classic CD are increasing all the time.
Frustratingly, however, it is nowhere near paying its way as yet, earning only what comes in from the sale of the odd advertisements and a trickle of subscriptions.
One advantage Web publishers have is the ability to derive detailed statistical data on readership.
“It’s a gift for the marketing people” comments Ainsley.
“So far, our statistics have shown us that we get five times more hits for the Beginner’s Section of Classic CD than for any other section.
Also rather depressingly, anything with sex or filth in the title gets masses and masses of hits.
Shostakovitch gets rather fewer.” Ainsley does not see the Net as a threat to print magazines.
Instead, the two media will specialise in what each does best.
“Speaking from the Classic CD point of view, the parallel form of print and Web will still be around in 50 years time.
People will still be taking the magazine to read on the train, but the Internet is very good at fulfilling niche requirements selling niche products and providing niche information.
The future is parallel.” Rob is the author of “Bluff your way on the Internet” which has just been published; a few extracts are available for perusal.
Here we present two extracts from Bluff Your Way on the Internet by Rob Ainsley, which is in the shops now.
The first of these is on Sex on the Internet (which will finally give those people who use the Ariadne search facility to search for “sex” a hit); the second of these describe the foolproof way to be a budding minotaur.
Sex on the Internet: Far and away the most accessed sites on the Internet are those related to sex.
This is a classic illustration of the saying: “Those that can, do.” “Those that can’t, teach.” “Those that can’t teach, put up articles about it on the Internet.” There are newsgroups, picture galleries and how-to articles for every orientation, desire, fantasy and fetish possible.
And several for those that aren’t, which goes to show how sophisticated those photo-retouching programs are these days.
The content of all sites is the same.
To get hold of it you have to wait a very long time, and when it does arrive it’s disappointing and extremely short.
Rather, come to think of it, like… Sex stories are best avoided, because whatever bizarre and outlandish things you claim to have seen in a newsgroup or pornographic site you have made up, someone else really will have seen something even more bizarre and outlandish.
Besides which you might be thought to fall into the fourth category of the saying: “Those that can’t even put up articles about it on the Internet, browse other people’s.” Internet Sex’s Great Paradox Sex-related newsgroups, in stark contrast to all other areas of the Internet, apparently have plenty of uninhibited women willing to engage in intimate e-mail correspondence with eager men.
However, on the Internet, it is impossible to tell genders, and pranksters abound.
The more forthcoming the ‘woman’, the more likely it is to be a man.
Web pages How to criticise them: You can safely disparage any web page for any, or all, of the following reasons: There are far too many graphics, which add nothing and take too long to load a postcard-sized picture can often take up to a minute, the same time as a long chapter of a book.
There are not nearly enough graphics.
Mere text by itself, no matter how quickly it loads in comparison, is boring; the whole reason for the Web is graphic ability.
The pages are too long.
Anything more than a screenful is hard to read and requires scrolling.
Information should be broken down into more, shorter, less weighty pages.
The pages are too short.
If you have to keep clicking on hot links all the time, it is too easy to lose the thread.
Information should be put together into fewer, longer, weightier pages.
The sound files are uncompressed.
A minute of sound might take three minutes to load.
All sound files should be compressed, using simple, readily available programs, to make them much smaller in size and hence far quicker to load.
The sound files are compressed.
A minute of compressed sound might only take thirty seconds to load, but the reduction in quality because of compression will ruin the effect.
All sound files should be uncompressed to make them actually worth listening to… Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Horse That Isn't There: 1997 US Digital Libraries Initiative Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Horse That Isn't There: 1997 US Digital Libraries Initiative Meeting Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Chris Rusbridge reports from the June 1997 US Digital Libraries initiative (DLi) meeting in Pittsburgh.
“ASQ-not!” seemed to be a catch phrase at the US Digital Libraries initiative (DLi) meeting in Pittsburgh in July.
The phrase roughly expands to “do not automate the status quo” and in part might be seen as an excuse for these heavily computer science-oriented projects to ignore the pressures of the real world that librarians face every day.
The 6 Digital Libraries initiative projects [1] are very technical indeed; the general approach seems to be to treat the Digital Library as something entirely separate from the real library of books and journals.
George Furnas of Michigan gave an interesting talk entitled ‘Beyond the Digital Library’ which amplified on this theme.
George used the familiar parallel of the “horse-less carriage”.
This name might imply that all we have done is to remove the horse; thinking in these terms does not anticipate the consequent growth of the rubber and oil industries, of assembly line factories, of the growth of suburbia and eventually the rise of McDonald’s.
If we think ‘digital libraries’, is our imagination similarly constrained?
George went on to examine some of the obvious differences between traditional and digital libraries, although he showed that many of these differences were shades of grey.
So, differences like static versus dynamic, are largely true, although one can find examples in traditional libraries of dynamic documents (in a way) in newspapers etc.
He looked at a number of other differences which are “big, crisp chunks with clear boundaries” (articles and books), while digital library documents are multi-size, fractal, and ill-defined.
In some sense, this is also true of traditional libraries, but the practicalities meant we did not deal comfortably with these issues.
Now we have digital documents which are collections of objects, and digital objects which are collections of documents, and mixtures of both and we need to deal equally with them all.
George’s point was not to criticise the traditional library (nor, I think, to criticise the 6 DLi projects!)
but to try by looking at these areas of difference, to find fruitful areas to ‘push against’, especially in planning the next version of the DLi programme.
I don’t think he meant to imply “it’s OK to carry on ignoring librarians they just want us to automate the status quo”.
But his remarks seemed to endorse that view.
As a representative of the eLib Programme which is much more library and much less computer science, I found this challenging.
A question which occurred to me (too late to ask George Furnas, of course), is whether the early use of the term “horse-less carriage” affected the rise of McDonald’s in any way?
I suspect not.
The term was a useful transitional aid, a mental crutch abandoned when it was no longer needed.
The technology did what it did, regardless of the name.
Technology liberates and also confines us in ways we are unlikely to understand at the time.
This is as true for digital libraries as for horse-less carriages.
It seems to me we can learn as much in different ways by small changes applied in realistic practice as by big changes applied in limited test beds.
Some of the biggest disasters of computing have arisen from attempts to be too radical, while many have profited from incrementally improving the status quo.
The fact that there have been some spectacular successes at re-inventing the business does not make this the only proper approach; in fact it is seriously high risk, and needs careful analysis.
I feel the DLi could benefit right now from trying to re-invent some of its radical approaches into a service context a library just as eLib could benefit (particularly in the forthcoming hybrid library programme area) from a range of approaches going beyond careful incrementalism.
George Furnas ended his talk with the challenge that we should “get out from behind the horse that isn’t there”.
But perhaps we should forget the horse and worry about the McDonald’s in our digital library future!
References [1] The six Digital Libraries Initiatives (DLi), http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/national.htm   Author Details Chris Rusbridge, Director, Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), Email: cudbm@csv.warwick.ac.uk Tel: 01203 524979 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Performance and Security: Notes for System Administrators Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Performance and Security: Notes for System Administrators Buzz data software api html bsd apache archives graphics rfc passwords cache dns perl solaris ssh ftp research Citation BibTex RIS Performance and Security Notes for System Administrators: Andy Powell offers some hints and tips on the performance and security aspects of running electronic library services on UNIX based machines.
The eLib Technical Concertation day last November brought together techies from many of the eLib projects.
(See Clare McClean’s report in Ariadne issue 6 for more details [1]).
A wide range of the technical issues associated with running electronic library services were discussed at the meeting but inevitably, given the time constraints, some of these were not covered in any great detail.
However, two issues were clear from the meeting; that server performance and system security were both areas of concern to system administrators and that most eLib projects were using UNIX based machines to make their services available.
This brief article provides some hints and tips in these areas and also gives a set of pointers to further information.
Performance What do you do if your users report slow access to your network based services?
How can you identify the source of the problem?
Is it your server hardware that is struggling with the load or are your users seeing underlying network problems?
Can your server software be configured or re-written to make better use of the available machine resources?
The ‘uptime’ command will give a general indication of the load on your server.
Typically this is shown in terms of the current number of users and the number of jobs in the ‘run queue’ averaged out over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
Run the command every so often to get a feel for the normal level of load.
That way it should be fairly easy to spot if the load starts to creep up, showing that you may have a potential problem.
Graphic tools (like ‘perfmeter’ on Suns for example) may give a better feel for how your server is doing and will allow you to view more specific information about CPU loading or network and disk traffic.
Consider your memory requirements.
A machine that is short of memory will start swapping or paging as it gets busier.
What this means is that, because there is not enough memory to hold all of the currently running processes in memory at the same time, the operating system will write some of the non-active processes out to disk in order to free up memory.
When it needs to run those processes, the operating system must first read them back in from disk thus causing a delay.
As a general rule of thumb, the more memory your server has the better.
To really see what is happening on your machine use a combination of ‘ps’, to show the processes that are running, ‘vmstat’ to give a summary of memory usage and any paging and swapping activity and, if necessary, ‘netstat’ and ‘iostat’ to show network and disk traffic.
The ‘top’ command [2] is a very useful ‘curses’ based tool for giving a detailed picture of what a machine is doing and will present much of the information available from the commands listed above in an easy to read manner.
While we’re on the subject of swapping and paging, don’t forget to configure enough swap space for your system.
A typical figure is to have twice as much swap space as you have real memory.
The combination of real memory and swap space is known as ‘virtual memory’ and is the limiting factor in the size and number of programs that your server can be running at the same time.
If your machine runs out of virtual memory then no new processes will be started!
Consider the location of your server on the network.
Is the route between your server and your users across a busy local area network?
Is there a firewall between your site and the rest of the Internet and, if so, does it have any impact on network performance?
As the traffic on the server increases, discuss your service with your Computer Centre or whoever looks after the network.
Consider the layout and usage of disks on your server.
Accessing disks is slow in comparison with the CPU or the rate at which information can be moved to and from memory.
On large systems with lots of disks the operating system will be able to pass requests out to lots of disks at the same time so it pays to share traffic across disks and disk controllers where possible.
If you want detailed information about tuning UNIX then ‘System Performance Tuning’ by Mike Loukides [3] is a good read.
It covers both BSD and SysV based systems.
Web server software.
For UNIX, Apache [4] seems to be the server of choice.
Older server software, the CERN httpd version 3.0 for example, tends to perform badly, so avoid it.
A detailed comparison of Web servers is available from WebCompare [5].
Apache offer some specific hints about tuning their server for better performance under various flavours of UNIX [6].
CGI scripting.
If you’re using Perl then see the guidelines towards the back of the ‘Programming Perl’ book [7] on efficiency.
Remember that there is an overhead associated with each process that the machine has to start so don’t start sub-shells unnecessarily.
For security reasons be careful with the arguments that you pass to the sub-shells that you do start.
In some cases using server-side includes may be more efficient than using CGI scripts.
Some servers offer alternative APIs which give better performance so this may be worth investigating.
In the case of Apache, writing your own Apache module may be the most efficient way to get a job done.
Take care that your Web server doesn’t defeat Web caches unnecessarily.
For example, dynamically generated pages are typically not cache-able and will therefore have to be regenerated by your server for each and every access.
The same information held in static HTML pages may be cached much closer to your end users.
The ‘Cache Now!
campaign’ [8] pages have detailed instructions for how to make your Web pages more cache friendly.
Check your operating system and/or hardware supplier documentation.
For example, if you (or your site) has a maintenance contract with Sun, then there will be various performance related white papers available from the SunSolve site [9] .
Sun have a freely available, fairly detailed paper on World Wide Web Server Performance including a section on capacity planning [10] .
If your service is run under Solaris 2.5.1 then Sun have some Web Server performance enhancements available in the form of the ‘Solaris Internet Service Supplement’ [11].
Don’t run daemons under ‘inetd’ run them stand-alone.
Also known as the daemon of daemons, ‘inetd’ listens for incoming connections for all the services listed in a configuration file and starts up the appropriate server daemon when it gets one.
This gives a level of resilience because you can normally be sure that ‘inetd’ will be running but it is much more inefficient than running the daemons stand-alone.
(If you do run daemons from ‘inetd’ under older version of the SunOS operating system then watch out for a bug on busy servers which causes inetd to hang every so often).
Very busy servers, particularly those serving requests to end-users across slow networks, may hit problems with the ‘TCP listen backlog’ under some operating systems.
Basically this is a limitation that the operating system places on the number of connections in the TCP startup phase at any one time.
See the detailed notes from Martin Hamilton’s Web caching pages [12] for more information.
Don’t forget dependencies that your service may have on external servers.
For example, a service that restricts access based on the domain name of the connecting system will suffer if the performance of the DNS is poor.
Security Security is inevitably something of a trade-off between protecting your service against attack and making your service available to a wide audience in an efficient way.
Making a service publically available is bound to leave your servers more open to attack than they otherwise would be but with sensible configuration the risks can be minimised.
Assessing the potential threat to your service by hackers is non-trivial and well beyond the scope of this article.
However, in offering a network based service it is well worth thinking through what are the things that you need to protect and what are the reasonable lengths to go to in order to protect them.
Brent Chapman and Elizabeth Zwicky [13] identify three areas that need protection; your data (some of which may be publically available, some of which you may want to make available in a controlled way and some of which will be private), your resources (the CPU and disk resources on your machine) and your reputation (if an intruder gains control of your machine then they can send out information as if they were you).
They also identify three basic categories of attack; intrusion (unauthorised users gaining access to your machine in order to use CPU time or disk space), denial of service (which may take the form of deleting files to prevent your service from running or flooding your service with requests thus preventing genuine users from gaining access) and information theft (stealing data from your server).
If you are running your service within the confines of a university campus network find out what your campus security policy is and what resources are available locally for making your service more secure.
If your site runs a firewall, consider what level of access through the firewall is appropriate for your service.
It is worth remembering that the security of your machine is somewhat dependent on the security of the site as a whole and that, in turn, is dependent on the security of all the machines at the site.
There are plenty of resources relating to security available on the Web.
For information specifically related to security and the Web see the World Wide Web Consortium’s security pages [14] and those put up by the JANET-CERT [15].
For general UNIX security see the JANET-CERT Web pages [16].
Consider running COPS [17] or SATAN [18] which are both utilities that will automatically test your server for well known security loopholes.
It is worth noting that SATAN can be used to monitor remote hosts and may therefore be used by hackers as the first step in attacking your site!
The TCP Wrapper package [19] provides monitoring of incoming connections to various network services.
It also provides access control to limit the address of machines that can connect to the system, remote username lookup (using RFC 931 protocol), and protection against machines that pretend to have someone else’s host name.
JANET-CERT provide a list of other useful security related software [20].
Don’t forget to archive your system so that you can recover should things go seriously wrong.
If you are making your service available in a distributed way with machines at different sites and have system administrators logging in between those sites then be careful not to send system passwords across the network in clear.
Use a system like ‘ssh’ [21] to provide strongly authenticated, encrypted sessions between your sites.
Every JANET site should have one or two JANET-CERT representatives who will receive timely notification of security alerts it will probably be someone in the Computer Centre.
It may be worth finding out who your site’s representatives are.
References eLib Technical Issues Concertation Day, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue6/technical-day/ TOP, a top process display, ftp://ftp.groupsys.com/pub/top/ System Performance Tuning, http://www.ora.com/catalog/spt/noframes.html Apache HTTP Server Project, http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/apache/ WebCompare Web Site, http://www.webcompare.com/ Hints on Running a High-Performance Web Server, http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/apache/docs/misc/perf.html Programming Perl, http://www.ora.com/catalog/pperl2/noframes.html The Cache Now!
Web campaign, http://www.net.lut.ac.uk/caching/CacheNow/ SunService SunSolve Online Server, http://online.sunsolve.sun.co.uk/sunsolve/ World Wide Web Server Performance, http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/Sun.Internet.Solutions/performance/ Solaris Internet Service Supplement http://www.sun.com/sunsoft/solaris/products/siss/prodspec.html Other Frequently Asked Questions about WWW Caching Unix TCP listen backlog http://egate.lut.ac.uk/caching/other/#listen1 Building Internet Firewalls, http://www.ora.com/catalog/fire/ W3C Security Resources, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Security/Overview.html Information about WWW security, http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/newsfiles/janinfo/cert/JANET-CERT/www.html The JANET-CERT WWW Pages, http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/newsfiles/janinfo/cert/cert.html COPS download site, ftp://cert.org/pub/tools/cops/ Information about SATAN, http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/newsfiles/janinfo/cert/JANET-CERT/SATAN.html TCP Wrapper, ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/security/ Computer Security Software, http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/newsfiles/janinfo/cert/JANET-CERT/SOFTWARE.html SSH (Secure Shell) information, ftp://ftp.cs.hut.fi/pub/ssh/ Author Details Andy Powell Technical Development and Research Officer, Email: A.Powell@ukoln.ac.uk Own Web Pages: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisap/ Tel: 01225 323933 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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TLTP: Teaching and Learning Technology Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines TLTP: Teaching and Learning Technology Programme Buzz software framework dissemination infrastructure copyright video cataloguing graphics e-learning url Citation BibTex RIS Joanna Tiley describes TLTP.
The Teaching and Learning Technology Programme, funded by the UK Higher Education Funding Councils of the UK, is a collection of 70+ projects aimed to 'make teaching and learning more productive and efficient by harnessing modern technology'.
The Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest technology based initiative of its kind across the world within higher education.
As a centrally funded initiative it provides us with an excellent example of the advantages of collaboration compared to the efforts of many individuals working in isolation.
The programme is jointly funded by the four higher education funding bodies, HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW and DENI, who allocated 22.5 million pounds over three years, starting in 1992-93, for the first phase of the programme and 11.25 million pounds for the second at a time when the sector was experiencing a period of rapid expansion.
Added to the funding bodies' own commitment of 33 million pounds is the direct and indirect contributions made by institutions to the projects they are hosting.
The overall funding for TLTP is probably somewhere in the region of 75 million pounds.
TLTP was launched with the aim of achieving productivity and efficiency gains whilst maintaining and improving quality in the provision of teaching and learning.
Challenges have arisen in the form of increasing pressure on resource and the demand for high quality teaching and learning from what is fast becoming a large and extremely diverse student population.
It seems, therefore, inevitable that technology has an important role to play in the future delivery of teaching and learning.
TLTP has funded 76 projects in a wide range of subject disciplines; these are: business and economics; medical sciences; staff development and study skills; science, mathematics and computing; arts, humanities and social sciences; engineering.
The 76 projects fall into three broad categories: subject based consortia, principally concerned with the development of courseware; single institutional projects concentrating on the issues of implementation of learning technology and related staff development; institutional projects developing a range of materials of generic interest such as study skills and computer based assessment.
Those projects developing courseware involve academic staff from different institutions working in consortia.
The size of the consortia range from two to as many as fifty institutions.
Copies of materials are now being widely distributed by projects and information about the materials is available through publications produced by the TLTP Co-ordination Team.
What does TLTP offer?
The 76 projects within the programme are developing learning technology which encompasses many of the following application areas: tutorials; revision material; information retrieval systems; simulations; microworlds; cognitive tools; communication tools.
These applications are considered to be ways in which teaching, learning and assessment can be substantially enhanced.
The inclusion of high levels of interactivity, graphics, animations, sound and video can contribute greatly to the overall student learning experience.
Academic staff involved in the development of TLTP materials, and also those looking to integrate the materials into mainstream teaching, are beginning to gather the evidence needed to evaluate the role learning technology can play in the delivery of high quality, flexible and innovative teaching provision for the future.
Other Related Initiatives When the Universities Funding Council launched the first phase of TLTP it was in the belief that the higher education sector as a whole would benefit from collective activity in this area.
The four successor funding bodies have gone on to actively promote this view through the encouragement, and support, of the dissemination of best practice and collaboration between institutions.
Other funded initiatives in the areas of teaching and learning are: the Computers in Teaching Initiative; the Information Technology Training Initiative; the Effective Teaching Assessment Programme; JISC Technology Applications Programme; the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning.
The funding bodies view TLTP as a major driver for change in the higher education sector.
The high quality technology based materials have been developed by consortia within higher education who are seeking to challenge the "not invented here" syndrome, so common within the sector.
The content of the materials has been provided by academics with reputations in their own fields of expertise which gives the materials much greater validity than many commercial software packages.
It is anticipated that through some of these teaching and learning focused initiatives that institutions will concentrate on areas such as: the development of coherent teaching and learning strategies; consideration of IT in a wider strategic framework; curriculum review and redesign; greater investment in human resources; improvements in infrastructure; the need to seek different methods of student and staff support.
Lessons for the Future There are, and will be, many lessons to be learned from the experiences of this programme and the four funding bodies have undertaken an independent evaluation study of the programme.
This study considered both the educational and cost effectiveness of the programme, its materials and the learning process in which the institutions and their academic staff have been involved.
The first report has been submitted to the funding bodies and will be available in the public domain shortly.
Support and Maintenance The funding bodies have recognised the importance for ongoing support and maintenance of the materials developed within TLTP and have allocated some transitional funding to assist projects to move to a self-financing position.
The funding bodies identified three key elements considered to be important in ensuring that the original investment was protected and the maximum value achieved, these were: to ensure that the materials are supported and maintained for the UK higher education sector; to maintain arrangements for the continued dissemination of the materials; to achieve the culture change required in higher education's approach to teaching to ensure maximum benefit is reaped through the use of the materials.
Of the 43 Phase 1 projects, 17 of the subject based consortia have received transitional funding.
We are now witnessing the establishment of good working partnerships between projects and publishers.
Additional funding has now been made available to the Phase 2 projects, which are scheduled to complete between the end of 1996 and Spring 1997.
These projects are currently seeking commercial/educational partners.
Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network (TLTSN) In order to provide the sector with additional experience and expertise in the implementation of technology based materials eight support centres have been established to form the Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network (TLTSN).
Advice and guidance is being offered to UK higher education institutions through a range of activities such as workshops, seminars and roadshows.
Further details of the TLTSN can be obtained from the TLTP Co-ordination Team.
Further Information Please contact Sarah Turpin, TLTP Co-ordinator, TLTP, Northavon House, Coldharbour Lane, BRISTOL, BS16 1QD, United Kingdom Telephone: (+44) 117 931 7454 Fax: (+44) 117 931 7173 Email: tltp@hefce.ac.uk TLTP Home Page URL: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/tltp TLTP newsletters and the two TLTP catalogues can be viewed via the Home Page Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 12 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 12 Buzz html metadata copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter and Isobel Stark introduce Ariadne, in its Web Version.
It’s new faces all round, as we welcome both Philip Hunter at UKOLN and Lyndon Pugh to the Ariadne team.
We hope you find us all, and more particularly the articles, to your liking.
This issue of the web version has its usual crop of features in addition to all the material that you can read in your printed copy.
Charles Oppenhiem answers even more copyright queries and Lorcan Dempsey looks at the latest report on networking public libraries, while the Librarians’ Resources section takes a look at the all new NISS service.
In this section, we invited the people behind several of the major Web-based resources for librarians (and, for that matter, academics, students and researchers), to tell us about what they have built and maintained, and how it is useful for people in the academic and research communities.
This issue looks as the NISS gateway.
The glass of fashion and the mould of form … : Annette Lafford reports on the new image for NISS’s WWW site.
Dotting the i: Walter Scales face to face with everyone’s favourite Education Gateway, NISS.
See also the Checkout review of StudentZone in this issue of Ariadne.
Three interesting reports on web technologies are included, with Tracey Stanley looking at how you can increase your sites ranking in search engines, Tony Gill and Paul Miller report back on the latest Dublin Core Metadata conference and Brian Kelly looks at the use of ‘fancy’ html in the UK HE sector.
Author Details Philip Hunter Information Officer, UKOLN p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk   Isobel Stark Web Officer, UKOLN i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Allerton 1996 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Allerton 1996 Buzz software copyright windows hypertext research standards Citation BibTex RIS Clare Davies reports on this years event in an annual conference series addressing user-centred aspects of library and information science.
The Allerton Institute is an annual conference series addressing user-centred aspects of library and information science, organised by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.
The conference, which this year took place from 27-29 October, is held in the disorientatingly English-stately-home-ish setting of the Robert Allerton House and Park near Monticello, Illinois.
This lovely mansion and its landscaped wooded grounds were built around the turn of the century, and were later donated to the university.
They're not what you expect to find in the midst of the Illinois flatlands!
The conference itself this year took the theme Libraries, People, and Change: A Research Forum on Digital Libraries.
Some of the best-known names in 'people' research in the US digital library area were there e.g.
David Levy, Cathy Marshall and others from Xerox Parc, Gary Marchionini from Maryland, Ed Fox from Virginia Tech, and Ann Bishop and her team from Illinois itself.
Many other names present were familiar to this author for having performed studies or written papers on user-related issues in this field (the delegate list was largely invitation-only).
A very slight international flavour was given by half a dozen European participants, including one from Hungary, but no other continents.
There were around 60 delegates altogether.
So it's good to report that one of the more stimulating talks was given by a European, albeit a brain-drain escapee, Andrew Dillon of Indiana University (but formerly at Loughborough).
His talk was largely an energetic and blistering assault on any complacency we might feel about user research, both in digital libraries and in wider human-computer interaction.
He emphasised the subtle influences that occur in the user-system interaction his examples included minor visual cues, users' spatial abilities, social contexts and image quality.
He also stressed that if we are to reach the goal of "informing the design of applications... aiming to enhance human capabilities", we need to perform research at an appropriate level of understanding, and with coherent research aims rather than mere system-specific evaluation.
The only problem with this rousing and intellectually wide-ranging presentation was its timing after dinner in the evening (this conference was no easy beano).
The importance of the nuances suggested by Dillon were brought out nicely in other speakers' presentations, such as the observation by Keith Instone (Bowling Green State University) that after the user interface of a HyperCard-based hypertext system was improved by changing some text-related functions, interaction with other unchanged parts of the system (such as digital maps) also improved in both accuracy and speed.
Later, Ed Fox noted that in a teaching and learning study using the Envision electronic library software, student performance depended less on technical or demographic factors than on the time of day at which a course module was run.
Gary Marchionini, meanwhile, highlighted the context-dependence of user evaluation efforts in different projects.
Having been involved in the well-known Perseus project, aimed at classical scholarship, he had assumed that a similar evaluation approach would be appropriate for the later American Studies Crossroads Project.
However, this was proved not to be so: firstly its 'stakeholders' were intended to include the whole of American society, and secondly users would be encouraged to add their own resources to the digital library.
In addition, the team had to soothe the Georgetown University librarians, offended on hearing that an academic department was apparently setting up its own 'library'.
Eventually their participation enabled the digital library to relieve them of certain work burdens, without excluding them.
An important lesson for all of us in inclusivity!
A session on classification issues for the digital library, which some user-oriented delegates found less than relevant to them, was nonetheless interesting in its attempts to compare formal library classification systems with 'folk' categories from which, inevitably, they originate.
Marcia Bates (University of California at Los Angeles) stated that most European libraries have more flexible classification systems than in the US, and were thus less likely to experience the same degree of dissatisfaction with them in the new 'digital age'.
Whether or not this is true, a gap of understanding between the cataloguer and the end-user was seen to be inevitable in any strict hierarchical system.
The panel discussion highlighted two different types of expertise: the expertise associated with understanding an item's content, and the 'information expertise' required to organise and retrieve items.
An important point, both here and in Dillon's earlier talk, was the questioning of the assumption that hypertext is some kind of universal panacea.
Dillon argued that there is still little proof that readers improve their learning or understanding by using hypertext instead of paper books, and also that the overall 'shape' of information is a more important issue than the old chestnut about 'navigation' through hypertext links.
In the classification session, Richard Greenfield of the Library of Congress pointed out that when too many links are created from a given document, it no longer helps one to reach conceptually similar items, but merely serves to confuse.
Meanwhile, more traditional keyword retrieval was equally assaulted by Marcia Bates' citation of the Zipfian distribution (cited in Nelson and Tague 1985, p. 291), which demonstrated that only 10% of the keywords in a typical information retrieval system receive frequent hits: some keywords are never searched, and the ideal 30-hit search that we'd all like to achieve rarely happens (instead, we all tend to find hundreds or no hits).
A more carefully constructed classification system might improve matters.
Michael Twidale of Lancaster University spoke about social and collaborative issues in digital library use.
He surprised the largely-US audience, by mentioning the explicit assumption in the UK that digital libraries will not accompany an increase in library staff support (more the reverse).
This clearly is not the case for the well-oiled 'Big Six' DLI projects in the States, nor for most other projects represented by Allerton delegates.
The notion that the UK initiatives were partly based on such an assumption was bewildering to many delegates, who cited studies showing the tendency for librarians' workload to increase rather than decrease with the higher expectations of computer-literate users.
However, Ulrike Schultze (Case Western Reserve University) described what happened in a company where such an assumption did exist, and where the corporate librarians felt themselves at risk of being seen as redundant they reinvented themselves with the job title of 'Knowledge Resource Analysts' and found themselves more in demand than ever.
The main contribution to methodological knowledge at the conference was provided, for the second year running, by Brenda Dervin's exposition of 'Sense-Making'.
This qualitative method for gathering information on people's information needs has become quite popular in the US, where Dervin and her colleagues have been developing it for over 20 years.
Dervin argues that we have designed information systems on the assumption that people want all the information we can give them, and that the information itself stands alone and independent of context (what Dervin calls the 'information brick') regardless of whose brain or what system holds it.
Although we know philosophically that this isn't true, this is still how we go about designing systems.
We also expect humans to be, or to learn to be, extremely well organised and predictably behaved.
We attempt to use demographic, personality and other characteristics to 'explain' why a person doesn't behave in an absolutely standard way, but still view them through system eyes (e.g., in her opinion, calling them 'users' at all).
The questions we ask are then all about us and our system, not about them.
According to Dervin, "What systems should be about is helping people to construct their own answers."
This is all very well, and is certainly a refreshing approach, but it isn't obvious how Dervin's method, which includes asking users questions like "How did that answer help or hurt?
", would travel across the Atlantic to more reserved and time-pressured British people.
It also wasn't clear by the end of her session just how the pages of transcriptions and notes that will result from a Sense-Making interview can be translated into design prescriptions that one can put across to less touchy-feely system developers!
However, as a relatively well-tested qualitative method, it is well worth investigating further.
Dervin's position paper to last year's Allerton conference, which includes links to her other work, can be found along with other contributions at the Allerton 1995 Web site.
There's also a Web site for Allerton 1996, which includes full delegate details but fewer text contributions.
The Allerton conference itself also reflected some very American methods of fostering discussion: a flipchart in the hallway was gradually covered with notes describing people's individual backgrounds and interests, although the reasoning behind this activity was never too clear.
Another feature was 'Break-Out Sessions', which had been a mystery to this delegate but were simply gaps in the timetable that you could fill by proposing a discussion topic, in the hope that other people would sign up for it.
One 'break-out session' on "The Politics of Digital Libraries" discussed, among other topics, the gender issues underlying the area.
Again Marcia Bates made some interesting points, this time about the way that a traditionally female profession (librarianship) had to some extent been hijacked because of the opportunity to play with "boys' toys".
At some level, she argued, these technological developments are happening for their own sake, because they're fun to mess around with.
Issues of power ensue, with imaginable consequences, but at least the name 'digital libraries' implies the involvement of librarians, regardless of the similarity between the old and new.
On the final morning delegates turned to musing about likely future issues of management and sustainability of digital libraries issues which smaller and older projects in both Europe and America are already having to address.
The session effectively petered out as people headed for airports, but not before the organisers had been thanked for laying on a very efficient conference.
Trying to summarise the content, however, I feel that the main value (as with many conferences) lay in the contacts made and the odd snippets and citations picked up, not in the presentations which were often short on either fact or theory, and long on anecdote.
Finally a joke, as told by David Levy in the opening session but already widely circulating on the Internet.
Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates are summoned to heaven by God, who tells them that he will destroy the Earth in 3 days and that they must return to warn their people to repent.
Yeltsin shuffles back to the Kremlin and appears on Russian TV "I have bad news and worse news.The bad news is, there is a God after all.
The worse news is, he's destroying Russia."
Clinton bounces onto primetime TV, saying "Hey, I have good news and a little bad news.
The good news is, there really is a God, and the bad is that he's destroying the world."
Bill Gates calls a meeting of Microserfs and says "I have great news and even better news.
The great news is, God thinks I'm one of the three most important people in the world.
And the even better news is Netscape won't be shipping in three days!"
(An alternative ending to that joke runs "... we won't have to fix the bugs in Windows 95!"
so take your pick...) The author is very grateful to the British Library Research and Innovation Centre for financial support which allowed her to attend this conference.
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John Burnside Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines John Burnside Citation BibTex RIS John Burnside, fellow in creative writing at the University of Dundee, gives us his thoughts on adapting to 'change'.
It's no accident that the great classic of early Chinese literature is called The Book of Changes.
In common with Heraclitus, this impressionistic text, while it is open to a wide variety of interpretations, insists on one key truth: that change, in all its manifestations, is the essence of life.
Even the most urbane Chinese scholars lived at such proximity to nature that the universality of change in the seasons, in growth and decay and, of course, in the affairs of the court could not be ignored.
The great trick, as they saw it, was to recognise and accept change; to work with the natural flow of things; to read the current, and make it work for them.
They also saw, in their wisdom, that change occasionally meant disorder, and patience was needed, to work through those periods of chaos.
For most of us, most of the time, change is unsettling.
I'm speaking from recent experience here in the last twelve months, I have changed jobs and moved home twice, and it's all been very wearing.
After ten years as a computer systems designer, I decided to give it all up and devote myself to writing.
I made the usual mistake of thinking that, because I wanted the changes to happen, they would happen smoothly, and the whole enterprise would be one big adventure.
I should have known better.
As a systems designer, it was part of my job to manage change within relatively large organisations.
The systems I worked on television airtime management for several years, then knowledge-based systems for underwriters were modified on the run, as requirements altered, driven by business needs, or new legislation.
True, we always began with a detailed specification of requirements documents that often took months, and occasionally years, to produce but by the time initial design work began, requirements had often changed.
Officially, the users submitted change-requests to the design team, who investigated the implications, costed the changes, and prepared a feasibility report.
In practice, there was little negotiation: changes had to be made, and were normally incorporated as the system was built.
It was never text-book stuff.
When confronted by text-book designers, the only possible response was to smile and tell them that this was "the real world".
The real world is messy.
We've all seen those programmes on television in which attractive, almost seamless computer systems talk to one another with little human intervention, and with an uncanny and unsettling wisdom.
I won't say these systems are impossible to build it's just that, despite what the programme-makers tell us, they will not happen overnight.
This is a time of immense technological change, but most implementations are gradual, tentative and, occasionally, messy.
Systems evolve in this way.
Revolutions are few and, no matter what the hype-merchants tell us, systems will continue to evolve, in businesses, libraries, schools, hospitals and government.
That's what the real world is all about.
Like the Chinese sages, we have to accept the reality of change, but we can learn to read the current, and to put up with a little chaos from time to time.
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JISC Projects Ahead Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC Projects Ahead Buzz software dissemination copyright multimedia cache algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl outlines some of the key points in JISCÆs five year strategy document.
Liberalisation of the UK Higher Education network, a drive for greater economy and efficiency, and the promotion of training and awareness, all emerge as key recommendations in the Five Year Strategy, 1996-2001 published by the Joint Information Systems Committee last month.
In his Chairman's Preface, Professor John Arbuthnott spells out JISC's role as one of "facilitating, not dictating or managing" the use of IT across the sector.
The document talks of the advance of the 'virtual university', with services such as electronic teaching materials, bibliographic and statistical datasets and full-text journals distributed to students in geographically remote areas or in their own homes and workplaces.
Academic and administrative information will be digitised and networked.
The environment in which our staff and students work will see the introduction of multi-service workstations which integrate telephony with multimedia information, smartcards for access to physical and virtual facilities and improvements in admissions and financial information relating to students.
The challenge, in a climate of 'unparalleled financial pressures and an accelerating rate of technological change' is to keep hold of the advantage enjoyed by the UK's HE sector, with its comprehensive high-speed network, SuperJANET, and its international reputation for excellence and innovation in new technology applications.
SuperJANET, which currently provides connections at a minimum of 8Mbps to more than 130 sites, will be replaced next year.
With the recent development of Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), JISC has found a cost-effective way of delivering broadband capacity (34Mbps and above) to institutions, with the potential for collaboration with FE, schools and industry.
Unfortunately, the quality of connections enjoyed within the UK community is not matched in its links to Europe, the US and the rest of the world, for political and financial reasons.
JISC's response to this problem, meantime, will continue to be based upon greater use of facilities such as mirroring and caching.
Efficiency is the driving force behind the entire strategy.
Over the past few years, CHEST has already played its part in assisting the community to do more with less through negotiating consortium purchases of software, saving as much as £30M per year.
does a similar job in dataset provision, and will look to fill the remaining gaps in subject areas between now and 1998.
The eLib Programme represented a new model of JISC technology funding.
Its bidding and project methodology, together with the strong emphasis on evaluation, dissemination and exit strategies, is likely to be adopted more widely in other areas.
JISC will continue to innovate, and wishes to play its part in developing a national electronic collection, in partnership with National Libraries, Research Councils, museums, galleries and the private sector.
Its remit remains higher education, however, which excludes public libraries from direct support.
Cultural change is as important as technological development.
The document states that "successful implementation of information systems into higher education is arguably more a matter of economics, sociology, psychology and even politics than of any technical rationality".
Institutions are therefore urged to include human issues in their information strategies.
JISC will restructure its operations in a bid to produce a more streamlined service.
A new post of Head of Programmes has been created, with a role which recognises the growing importance of media relations.
The number of main sub-committees will be reduced from six to four.
ISSC and FIGIT will combine to form the new Committee on Electronic Information (CEI) which will oversee eLib, among other things.
The emphasis on awareness and training is recognised by a new Committee for Awareness, Liaison and Training (CALT), and a Federation of Information Services (FIS) will manage the range of subject-based electronic information services.
But the full benefit to the community can only be reached by increasing charges.
A new charging algorithm will be developed which "reflects the utility of the network provision to individual sites but minimises the overhead costs of implementation".
Our institutions are currently leaping on a bandwidth bandwagon.
We should expect the fares to go up shortly.
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Conference Goes One Step Beyond Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Conference Goes One Step Beyond Buzz copyright research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl reports on Beyond the Beginning: The Global Digital Library.
One month before the Dearing Report was published, when the findings of the National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education still amounted to no more than an insistent trickle of leaks, a major conference considered digital libraries in a rapidly changing HE sector.
Beyond the Beginning: The Global Digital Library, held in London on 16-17 June, was co-ordinated by UKOLN and represented a joint effort by JISC, the US Coalition for Networked Information, the BLRIC, CAUSE the Society for academic computing staff in the US, and the Council of Australian University Librarians.
Following last year’s successful Heathrow event, also organised by UKOLN, the conference sought to push forward the agenda for the transformation of HE, supported and effected by digital library developments worldwide.
Over 200 delegates attended and were treated to a wide variety of perspectives on the directions for HE which digital library initiatives and developments were signalling.
The opening speaker was Mike Fitzgerald, Vice-Chancellor of Thames Valley University, who delivered a blistering keynote address in typically ebullient and persuasive fashion.
Linking education to the development of a successful economy, Fitzgerald envisaged a transformed HE system devoted to ‘learning for earning’.
Despite all the talk about a mass HE system, he pointed out that only 27% of 18-year olds in England and Wales currently enter the system.
HE needed to be democratised.
We should open the doors to part-time and distance education students, and end the practice of treating students differently depending upon mode of attendance.
If we are prepared to use OU materials to teach our distance students, he argued, why not use them for our campus students as well?
Fitzgerald’s mission was not to take HE into unchartered territory, but rather to recover the true traditions of university education.
The predominance of the full-time student throughout the post-war period has been anomalous, Fitzgerald told his audience that their university experience was probably quite unlike that of students today.
Most full-time students work, and are on campus for less time than are part-time unemployed students.
New technologies and communications allow us to transform the learning experience of all students.
Thames Valley University has Learning Resource Centres.
“These are not upmarket nineties-style libraries” he insisted.
“Rather, they represent a radical shift in power in universities.” In short, our digital libraries must be much more than libraries: they have the potential to liberate education from the constraints of time and space.
Delivering a message which linked Dearing to the Robbins Report of 1963, Fitzgerald argued that HE needs to be provided for all who can benefit.
“Education is not primarily about knowledge or skills or competences.
It is about confidence.” This chimes with the emphasis in the Dearing Report on increasing participation, while the difficulty of achieving this at the same time as passing on a much higher share of the cost to students remains a conundrum for the Government.
at the other end of the Conference, in his concluding keynote address, Donald Langenberg, Chancellor of the University System of Maryland, picked up the theme of transformation.
“Our university system is sedimented into stone” he declared.
Real HE will go on through new modes of learning, strongly supported by networks and including an increasing proportion of mature part-time students.
Meanwhile, the gilded undergraduate existence of the near past will become the retirement choice of the future, as those who have reached the end of their paid careers choose university campus towns as retirement locations, creating a new demand for humanities teaching.
And just as both Fitzgerald and Langenberg insisted that universities of the future would still contain physical social spaces, Chris Rusbridge, eLib Programme Director, was sure that their digital libraries would retain books, “at least for the next seventy to one hundred years.” Rusbridge reported on the findings of the eLib Programme, and on the ‘plain hard work’ it had performed in taking on the challenges of copyright and negotiations with publishers.
Much had been achieved, and ‘hybrid libraries’ were now emerging as the next phase of the Programme, drawing on the development work done to date.
Ronald Watts, who set up Australia’s Net-based electronic open learning network, addressed the consumer power of students in a virtual university environment soon to include players like Murdoch, Pearson, Viacom, IBM and AT&T.
Some student learning groups already recruit their tutors internationally.
He predicted that universities of the next century will establish a core business of providing educational resources, administration and tutoring.
Everything else – subject, expertise, research, teaching, intellectual property management and marketing – will be subcontracted.
Learners will spend their money carefully in an international marketplace revolutionised by communications and information technology.
Many other speakers touched upon similar themes.
Delegates were left with much to reflect upon, and not a little to worry about.
Returning to the Dearing Report, it seems imperative that Recommendation 42 – ‘all higher education institutions should develop managers who combine a deep understanding of Communications and Information Technology with senior management experience’ be prioritised urgently in all HE institutions which seek to retain their status in an environment in rapid transformation.
Author Details John MacColl, Ariadne project manager, Email: lbajam@tay.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Disabil-IT?
Part 2: Software for Students With Dyslexia, and Software Design Issues Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Disabil-IT?
Part 2: Software for Students With Dyslexia, and Software Design Issues Buzz software html accessibility graphics windows standards Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark presents the second part of her report on the Disabil-IT?
Conference.
In this article, software for students with dyslexia is looked at, and issues to bear in mind when designing software which may be used by students with disabilities are listed.
Software for Students with dyslexia Ted Pottage of the British Dyslexia Association [1] and Ian Litterick of iANSYST gave a presentation on software for dyslexic students.
They emphasised the facts that design for accessibility also is design for the able-bodied, for example what is good for a wheelchair is good for a pushchair; technology is only as good as the person using it and the use they get out of it; to always look for a low tech solution of possible (it is cheaper if nothing else) and that dyslexia, which often has associated short term memory problems, has only just been recognised in the past decade.
Expectation in dyslexic undergraduates are now quite high as the new undergraduates have come up through a schools system which allows the use of word processors in exams etc.
Computers are important for dyslexic students: the use of IT can help in teaching (if the software is good enough); it can support and help develop skills thus providing a crutch for those who need it to get stronger; it can liberate and motivate.
Ted Pottage then demonstrated the IBM VoiceType [2], a piece of voice recognition software that costs less than £80 and runs under Windows 95.
VoiceType corrects its interpretation of individual spoken words by comparison of context with preceeding and succeeding words.
The user can correct the interpretation at the end of sections or paragraphs.
The drawback of the package is that you cannot dictate straight into the package, but via a word processor and copy.
Other programs that help dyslexics include TextHelp which guesses words as you type them and presents a list of words from which the user selects the correct word.
Planning software can also often help as dyslexics are frequently better at visualising rather than linear planning and such software can help them plan visually and then turn that plan into a linear outline format.
Design Issues Mike Wald, LSU, Southampton [3], gave a general overview of design issues to bear in mind when designing software which may be used by students with disabilities.
These guidelines are very similar to general good design guidelines which all good software designers should use.
The guidelines, some of which are listed below, should become available from the TLTP Advisory Committee [4] in the near future.
Whatever software is designed support for the user and the robustness of the program are pivot to the final design of the program.
Other important factors, but by no means all, include : Benefits of Designing Accessible Courseware little or no increase in cost, grater users base, good design benefits everyone, more pleasing to international markets, meets legislation demands.
Colour The Apple Organisation design booklet always states that colour should be redundant all software should work as well on monchrome as colour monitors.
Use of colour should also take into account cultural differences, for example red signifies left on the sea, not right as used in one program.
Control and Navigation appropriate flexible range of input methods, appropriate flexible range of output methods, keyboard and mouse input (keyboard is 9 times as quick), access to all parts of the program, conceptual maps, consistency of interface, simplicity of interface, levels of menus, be aware of icons and metaphors (for example the dustbin on Mac’s), shortcuts for experienced users, exit facilities, undo facilities, feedback to user (where am I?
what’s happening?
), confirmation of lethal actions, mixed word/picture icons are more meaningful.
Learning A program may be magnificent in all ways, but if it doesn’t help the user learn what they need to know, it is rather useless!
identify user needs, what are users’ pre-experience, skills, knowledge, task analysis, prototype the program, iterative design, assess the quality and quantify of the learning experience.
Psychology factors to consider enjoyment, motivation, minimise memorisation, consistent placement of information, consistent and simple interface design, grouping of information.
Text As with the other factors listed, this is not the definitive list, but does contain many major points.
keep screens uncluttered, layout can help readability, 12pt serif or 10pt sans serif have proved most readable, only 2 typefaces on the screen at once, don’t use underlining, use bold, italics and colour for emphasis, upper case is slower to read, left justified is easier to read than fully justified, small character size is more readable (but not too small!
), short line length (8-10 words).
Conttrol and Navigation for Accessibility keyboard controls, time responses, control and stability of on-screen messages, consistent use of keyboard.
Sound for Accessibility volume control is essential, all information given through sound should also be in visual form, added visuals shouldn’t distract the hearing user, text representation of aural information should be synchronised with visual information etc.
Text for Accessibility no bit-mapped text images, customisable font style and size.
HTML for Accessibility use alt text for all images, concise text descriptive caption of all images, audio files or videos, description of images should be as close to the image as possible, alternative provision of text selection to graphic selection link, minimise the number of links on one line, vertical lists of link preferable to horizontal, punctuation should be used to end sentences, list items etc., only use informative words as links (don’t use ‘click here!
), large documents should be provided in smaller sections, text only versions of highly graphical resources should be provided, only use standard HTML, keep layouts simple and straightforward (for example columns can be difficult for screen readers).
Best of all evaluate and do trials involving people with disabilities!
References British Dyslexia Association http://www.bda-dyslexia.org.uk/ IBM Special Needs Solutions http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/ La Sainte Union College of Higher Education http://www.lsu.soton.ac.uk Technology in Learning and Teaching Programme (TLTP) http://www.tltp.ac.uk/tltp/ Author Details Isobel Stark, Information Officer, UKOLN, Email: i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Phone: 01225 323343 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur Buzz data software cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Louis Schmier finds no miracles in Cyberspace.
CYBERSPACE, THE NEXT FRONTIER.
This can be your voyage, to go where you have never dared to go before, to meet people you have never met before, to see things you have never seen before.
To the visionaries the Internet is an electronic superhighway constantly reminding us that we live in a time of remarkable connectedness.
We are told it is an ocean of information, across which we can sail to stroll through great museums and browse the great libraries of distant lands.
We are told it is a cyber-mall where we can rummage through the wares of all sorts of shops.
We are told it is the ultimate storehouse where we find and bring into the classrooms all sorts of images, data and knowledge.
We are told that we can join with others globally; that whatever we need we are milliseconds away from a host of people across the planet.
People who otherwise would never have known each other can talk together.
Imagine, a message passing over all natural and man-made barriers: a message received everywhere, as if invited to a cordial electronic global cocktail party.
It is exciting, fascinating and fantastic.
The internet affords us unimagined opportunities to grow.
We cannot grow without taking in other worlds; the more we grow the more we discover how small we are; the more we discover how small we are, the bigger we become.
If it sounds heavenly, let me be a virtual devil’s advocate.
Beware of miracle makers whose statements are punctuated by such words as “instant”, “automatic” or “guaranteed”.
Beware those who offer computers as a patent medicine for society’s educational ills, who would convince us that technology is going to produce automatic solutions.
“With this new technology we can…”, they exclaim.
With the wave of a wand, a click of the heels, the utterance of an incantation, the electronic gurus offer us easy answers.
If we stop to think for a moment, did the invention of the book magically make people literate?
Did the slide rule make students automatically better mathematicians?
Did the replacement of the quill by the typewriter mean that people instantly wrote like the Bard?
No.
The pundits have not considered human reality.
The experts have forgotten that how we actually use the technology is a very human thing.
I was born in 1940.
In time, that was not long ago.
In technological terms, it was the primordial past.
Educated during the chalk and pencil era, I began teaching before Xerox was a household word.
Yet I am among that 15% of the population that avidly, fearlessly, grasped the computer.
The other 85%, educators included, experience varying degrees of techno-stress.
Half of these are reluctant to use the technology until they know they can do so with the minimum of error .
The other half, a full 40% of the population, reject it.
They fear it will reveal their stupidity.
It is, indeed, hard to learn the new ways.
If nothing else, it demands a new language in which familiar words have strange meanings: spam is not something to eat; web site is not the home of a spider; surfing is not riding the waves; a hacker is not a sensational, perverse murderer; a boot is not something you wear on your feet; wired is not being high on an illicit drug and a laptop is not something to sit on.
Teachers can be intimidated by being overtaken by their students, especially in knowledge of the new technologies.
So while administrators rush to wire schools and libraries and go digital, they tend to ignore the mundane but essential software, which is not just the computer programming.
It means funds, time and effort to train teachers to become learners, without which computers would be less than essential.
There is a dark side to the online world.
Technology is creating a bias towards children of better-off families in better-off schools.
It perpetuates and accentuates class differences.
Some pundits insist the problem will take care of itself as technology proliferates, but I wonder.
This wonderful electronic library does not have the controls of a paper library.
It is deafened by babble, flooded by electronic trash mail, slowed by traffic jams and breakdowns and often overwhelmed by the solicitations of sordid street people and hawkers.
It is as confusing to find information as it is with a card catalogue.
And indeed, anyone surfing the web will tell of the inordinate amount of time needed to work out a convoluted reference term in order to find material.
Finally, however marvellous these new technologies ultimately may be, it is humans, with emotions, creativity, imagination, wisdom and humour, who are the most marvellous of all marvels.
The computer is only important if WE use it to serve us and make us more human.
The internet has little purpose unless it helps tap our human potential for life-long learning and teaching, and makes us all a little more humane.
Author details Louis Schmier Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Mind the Gap!
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mind the Gap!
Buzz html graphics adobe url research Citation BibTex RIS Sheila and Robert Harden describe the making of their public library Web pages.
It was joining the BBC Networking Club and wondering what to do with the 500K of web space that came with membership that got us started on filling gaps in the web.
A purely personal home page didn't appeal but we were, and still are, fascinated by the prospect of being able to publish something useful for a global audience from our home in London at virtually no cost.
We are both librarians with a public library background so that seemed a promising field to explore.
Sheila is Lending Services and Promotions Manager for Richmond Upon Thames Libraries [1] and Robert used to be head of libraries for another London Borough.
Not surprisingly given our background, some of the first WWW sites we looked at were libraries, most of them in the USA and Canada.
The Galaxy [2] and Yahoo!
[3] directories gave us a start until we found the library listings compiled by the St. Joseph County Public Library [4].
Using this as a jumping off point we toured the public libraries of North America.
We were impressed by much of what we found and admired the enthusiasm with which librarians across the pond had taken to networking technology and, perhaps more importantly, the idea of library networking.
By contrast the UK scene was pretty bleak back in Summer 1995.
Surrey County [5] was the only public library authority we could find with a WWW presence but, with the help of BUBL [6] and sites in America and Scandinavia, we did discover plenty of resources that were relevant to public libraries.
It's what didn't exist that gave us the idea of creating the UK Public Libraries Page.
There was no site providing a convenient single entry point into public library Internet activity in the UK.
That was a gap we thought we could fill.
We were also happy to demonstrate that, such is the nature of the Internet, two private individuals could contribute something worthwhile to the network without the benefit of institutional resources, working parties, project funding and the rest of the organisational paraphernalia that impede progress as often as assisting it.
From the outset our aim was to compile the definitive list of UK public libraries on the Web and combine it with a guide to Internet resources for the UK public library community.
Putting the page together was easy.
You can learn the bare basics of HTML in about an hour and a half and you can develop your skills by examining the source code of web pages you like the look of.
We also read a book (there's no point in telling you what it was eighteen months on it is well out of date) and later joined HTML Writers Guild [7] where the professionals share their expertise and beginners can pick up invaluable tips and insights into the world of web page design.
To start with we used downloaded editing and graphics shareware to create our pages.
Within a week of its conception the page went up on the web in July 1995.
We knew we would have to devote time and telephone bills to continuous maintenance if we were to make the page as comprehensive and reliable as we wanted it to be.
But keeping up with developments has not proved all that difficult.
At first, we regularly checked sources such as CCTA's Government Information Service [8] and the Tagish Directory of Local Government [9] for local authorities coming on line.
Sometimes that included the public library service.
The Library Association Record was a good source for web page announcements and particularly for suppliers with web pages.
We think of the maintenance process as gardening weeding the old, planting the new, watching sites bloom, wither or get transplanted.
Every link is checked on average once a month.
We prefer to do it by hand because we like to see how sites are developing.
Now the page is fairly well known around the world, site owners usually tell us if they would like a link from our page or if their URL has changed.
We do most of our systematic gardening at the weekend when the telephone is cheaper and we take full advantage of British Telecom's discount schemes.
Our telephone bill has only slightly more than doubled since we got wired up, which makes internetting one of life's more affordable pleasures!
While we're on the subject of BT, here's a tip for anyone like us with a single telephone line for voice calls and dial-up Internet access.
Try BT's Call Minder service.
This can record messages from callers while you are on line much better than an answering machine which can't work when your computer is using the telephone line not to be confused with the Call Waiting service which doesn't get on with modems.
Once the page was up and running we wanted the world to know about it.
We used Submit It!
[10] to register our page on the main Internet directories and search engines and emailed directly local listings such as Ukdirectory [11].
We also emailed the The Library COG [12], PUBLIB the US based public library mailing list, and posted an announcement to soc.libraries.talk [13] the news group for librarians.
The Library Association Record published a news item about the page, which we think was helpful in informing UK public librarians, very few of whom had Internet access.
What happened next made the effort worthwhile.
We received email from librarians all over the world complimenting us enthusiastically on what we had thought was a quite modest achievement.
We still keep in touch with many of the contacts we made at that time.
That initial response was important in encouraging us to carry on developing our site.
We had a counter on the page for the first six months or so which recorded hits at the rate of over 1,000 a month.
Evidently, the gap we thought we had spotted had needed filling.
The single page began to grow as we added more links until it reached a size which made the loading delay unacceptable.
It was time to divide it up into a series of pages.
We had just mastered the art of frames so we redesigned our pages in a framed format.
The addition of a What's New page was welcomed by many visitors who we suspect now only ever visit that page.
At about the same time the BBC Networking Club came to the end of its life and we transferred to Pipex.
That was fine except that our pages were now on a different server with new URLs and we had a new email address.
Telling everyone about our page the first time round had been fun.
This time there were many more people with links to us so sending out the change of address details was quite a chore.
Changing your URL is not something to do unless you really have to!
After a while we came to the conclusion that frames are clunky and unnecessary, a view confirmed by the experience of one unfortunate visitor to our pages who had a very small screen and could only see the content as though through a very narrow letter box.
And so the design of the UK Public Libraries Page evolved into its present form which seems to suit the content quite well.
The present design has space for a column of text so we decided to come out from the shadows and offer our personal commentary on the UK public library networking scene.
We also now put a star against sites which we think have something special to offer.
It's hardly rigorous evaluation but, with so many desperately dull and static library sites around, we hope it helps highlight the sites worth visiting.
Being free to comment is one the advantages of being independent of any institution or agency.
We try to be encouraging in our comments rather than harsh but a favourable (more or less) review of our site in .net Directory went so far as to call us opinionated.
We can live with that it's true!
A visit to Cathy's Newstand [14] brought home to us the need of blind and visually impaired people for web pages which they can access by means of their text to speech screen readers.
With Cathy Murtha's help we've tweaked the design of our library pages to make them speech friendly.
We would like to see public libraries in the UK paying more attention to this aspect of web page design.
Our next step is to make our pages searchable.
We've tried to organise the content helpfully but as the pages grow so does the difficulty of finding what you're looking for without the ability to search.
It's on our agenda for 1997.
The other thing we want to try is to see how useful PDF technology may be as a publishing medium.
When we get around to articulating our vision for public libraries in the 21st century, you may see it first as an Adobe Acrobat [15] file.
Having visited a great many public library web sites around the world we've formed a view of what distinguishes the good ones from the indifferent ones.
Net Notions is our attempt to encourage UK public libraries to use their web pages in a more adventurous way than many of them do at the moment.
The essence of our message is that the web is a new medium that you can use in new ways to connect with a new community of users.
If all you've got on your pages is the digital equivalent of a printed leaflet, you're missing an enormous opportunity.
A good active web page can serve so many worthwhile purposes from marketing tool to educational resource.
We've put together our ideas of how libraries can use their sites and we've illustrated them with real examples from around the world.
There has been a lot of favourable comment from the USA where our page has been used as a Internet training aid for librarians.
The influence of Net Notions in the UK library world seems to have been weaker, judging by the number of public library sites that haven't changed for best part of a year, show no signs of interactivity and don't contribute any real information to the network.
There are some brilliant exceptions but if you detect a note of impatience with the pace and quality of progress, you're right.
Our biggest disappointment with Net Notions was our failure to create the web pages for Borsetshire County Libraries.
We had the idea of putting up a model public library site to demonstrate all the features we are trying to promote.
A fictitious library with a ready made virtual community would have been perfect so we approached The Archers production team to see if they were interested in co-operating with the venture.
Imagine Jennifer Alldrige's local history notes, William Grundy's children's book review, Lynda Snell's complaint on the feedback page!
Unfortunately they declined and we haven't yet come up with as convincing an alternative.
[Note for readers unfamiliar with British domestic radio: The Archers is a long-running and much loved BBC radio series set in an English village.]
Our latest set of pages was suggested to us by Clair Drever, Information Manager for Berkshire.
She had seen the UK Public Libraries Page and wondered whether we might consider doing something similar for Europe.
Clair also put us in touch with Ian Piggott of the European Commission's Telematics for Libraries [16] programme who was cautiously encouraging.
We set out to see what we might be letting ourselves in for and immediately appreciated the wisdom of Ian's caution.
This was going to be a big project, particularly as we wouldn't want to confine our scope to the European Union.
It would be complicated by language and cultural differences.
We discovered that there was no existing WWW directory of European public libraries on the web.
There were international listings of academic, research and national libraries and there were national listings which included public libraries.
But there was no single WWW resource you could use as an up to date and comprehensive directory of public libraries.
We had found another gap and committed ourselves to filling it.
We would like to be able to tell you about the systematic search strategy we used to locate European public library web pages but that would be misleading.
The truth is it involved little method but lots of serendipitous surfing.
After one particularly frenetic weekend internetfest we ended up with a bookmark file overflowing with European library sites and no more than a hazy recollection of how we'd done it.
The purpose of the pages is to provide a listing of European public libraries on the web but we have also included links to key library-related sites for each country.
At Ian Piggott's suggestion we added a flag to public libraries with pages in English and we have used stars to mark sites that are particularly worth a visit.
There are still gaps in coverage, especially in Eastern Europe, but that is because there are countries with no public libraries on the web yet.
As is the case with our other pages, Public Libraries of Europe will retain its work in progress status for the foreseeable future.
The power of the network lies in making connections.
Our pages [17] are intended to help librarians and others see the extent of the public library network that already exists, to share ideas for using it and to set an example of currency and reliability.
Above all, we want to encourage public libraries in the UK to use the network to provide interactive services and real information by electronic means.
It's starting to happen but why does it have to happen so slowly?
It's not at root a question of resources.
It is a question of vision, energy and the will to make the right things happen.
We'll go on being impatient for a while yet!
References [1] Richmond on Thames Library Web site, http://www.richmond.gov.uk/leisure/libraries/library.html [2] Galaxy Web site, http://galaxy.tradewave.com/ [3] Yahoo!
Web index, http://www.yahoo.com/ [4] St. Joseph County Public Library, http://sjcpl.lib.in.us/ [5] Surrey Country Public Library Web pages, http://www.surreycc.gov.uk/scc/libraries/home.html [6] BUBL Web site, http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/home.html [7] HTML Writers Guild, http://www.hwg.org/ [8] CCTA Government Information Service, http://www.open.gov.uk/ [9] Tagish Directory of Local Government, http://www.tagish.co.uk/tagish/links/localgov.htm [10] Submit it!
Multiple search engine submission resource, http://www.submit-it.com/ [11] UK Directory Web site, http://www.ukdirectory.com/ [12] CCTA Collaborative Open Groups Initiative Web site, http://www.open.gov.uk/cogs/coglist.htm [13] Libraries discussion newsgroup, news:soc.libraries.talk [14] Cathy Murtha's Newstand, http://www2.cdepot.net/~mist/ [15] Adobe Acrobat Web site, http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/main.html [16] Telematics for Libraries Web site, http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/libraries.html [17] The Hardens UK Public Libraries Page, http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/square/ac940/ukpublib.html Author Details Sheila and Robert Harden are both practising public librarians in the UK.
Email: harden@dial.pipex.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Wire: Email Interview with Chris Lilley Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Email Interview with Chris Lilley Buzz data mobile software java html css browser graphics sgml dtd windows multimedia linux png rfc visualisation rtf gopher interoperability standards Citation BibTex RIS Chris Lilley submits to an interview by email.
I represent JISC at the Advisory Council meetings of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Most of the delegates are representing commercial companies, wheras I am effectively representing the UK Higher Education sector!
W3C member companies are given advance information in confidence, and I am currently working with W3C to see how I can involve UK HE in the work of W3C without violating that confidence.
This position is funded through the Advisory Group on Computer Graphics (AGOCG) and covers 25% of my time.
I run a mailing list (agocg-w3c@mailbase.ac.uk) where I notify people of the latest W3C work and the implications to UK HE is discussed.
My aim is to ensure that the academic sector has a voice to influence the development of the Web.
HTML and Stylesheets is an area I have been involved with for some time; I am an active member of the IETF HTML Working Group which standardised HTML 2.0; I am a contributor to the www-talk, www-html, www-style and www-font mailing lists and have helped with the development of the Cascading Style Sheet specification.
Working in a Computer Graphics Unit, the issue of Graphics on the Web is of great interest to me, and I gave a paper on the subject of "Quality Graphics for the Web" at WWW4.
I am one of the authors of the specification for Portable Network Graphics (PNG).
... and how did you get into this area?
In late 1992 I got hold of the CERN linemode browser.
After poking around the CERN web site for a while, I thought "this is much the same thing as Gopher" and forgot about it.
(I never saw the NeXT client,or Viola, until later on).
In spring 1993 the first beta of Mosaic for X was released which was very different a full Motif windowing application with inline images.
At the time, I was writing a series of teaching materials on Computer Graphics and I saw an immediate teaching use which was presented at an international workshop on Graphics and Visualisation Education (Barcelona, 1993).
The CGU web went live in August 1993.
I later went to the seminal First International Web Conference at CERN, where I participated in the 'Education and the Web' workshop.
You can read my position paper.
After that it just sort of snowballed.
How significant an impact do you think that mobile code, such as Java applets, will have on the development of the Web as an information resource?
Mobile code in general is clearly a very significant development but will require some work on object models, interoperability and security.
Java solves most of the security problems and I am pleased by Sun's open attitude with Java.
Plug-ins are a sort of mobile code, and people who use MS-Windows are getting all excited by Netscape plug-ins at the moment.
The Unix version of Netscape does not support plug-ins, however.
The Mac version does, I gather, but of course the MS-Windows plug-ins will not work.
When you compare a mobile code technology that is platform, browser, and evcen browser-version specific (like Netscape plug-ins) with a technology that is platform and browser independent (like Java, though there are others) it is hard to see what the big deal is.
Any developer given the choice between a) produce one Java applet that runs on everything that is Java-enabled b) produce the Netscape 2.0 Win 95 plug-in and the Netscape 2.0 Mac plug-in and the Microsoft Internet Explorer plug-in for Win 95 and the one for NT and the plug in for... ... is surely going to pick option a.
Academic developers simply do not have the time to do all these multiple versions, even if they do have the multiple development platforms.
...and how significant is VRML in the same context?
A 3D non-immersive virtual hyperworld could be very useful for constructng an information resource, because people can use real-world orientation skills for navigation.
This has already been shown with text-based virtual envirnments in an academic information context, for example with BioMOO.
The problem is that VRML 1.0 has nothing to do with VR.
It is (yet another) static 3D scene description language.
It has inline images and links, but no behaviour can be specified.
There is no real-time communication with the server.
If some-one else is viewing the same VRML 1.0 file that you are, you don't see them far less interact with them.
There was talk at WWW4 about adding behaviour and interaction to VRML 1.1 and 2.0.
That will be the hard bit.
VRML 1.0 was essentially just a question of asking Silicon Graphics about using their existing Open Inventor format, so that was quite easy.
So the short answer is, there is lots of potential and scope for experimentation and development, but I don't know about timescales for really using VRML for serious applications.
A friend buys a PC, relatively fast modem and an internet connection.
(S)he asks you what browser they should either buy or obtain.
What do you advise?
Get several and see which works best most are free, anyway.
More specific reccomendations well assuming the PC to be a dual-boot Linux/ MS-Windows machine running X-Windows ;-) I would say use the Linux version of Netscape 2.0 as a working browser.
Unix versions can use gzip'ed files which are much smaller, so downloading PostScript or Acrobat files over a modem becomes feasible.
I would also suggest the Linux version of Arena beta-1e for experimenting.
Alternatively, if restricted to MS-Windows 95 I would suggest Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 which seems to display faster than Netscape, particularly for forms, and seesm to be the "browser du jour" on that platform.
If this friend was not a native English speaker, I would recommend the Alis browser, which implements the Internationalisation extensions so that Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic etc documents can be displayed and also so that documents in the language of choice can be requested.
I see that Netscape 2.0N (the X version, at least) can also request documents in a specific language.
Many people have recently commented on the relationship between SGML and HTML.
Some speculate that they will one day merge into a "unified" language; some others see HTML diverging into various esoteric directions.
What do you think?
Well, HTML is implemented in SGML so that is rather like asking if, say, a wordprocessor (written in C) and the C language will one day merge.
People have been talking about putting other types of SGML document on the web, that use DTDs that are not related to HTML.
This has happened, and there are browsers such as Panorama which will read such files.
The general SGML publishing community has a rather different focus from the Web community.
For example, it is considered appropriate to abandon processing SGML documents on detecting any sort of error, while with the HTML DTD there is an application convention that says do as much error recovery as possible.
Regarding HTML, there is active work by W3C, IETF and others to capture the lessons of the last two years and not only produce updated HTML DTDs that describe newer things tables, embedded applets, internationalisation, and style sheets but also to make change easier in the future.
For example, modular DTDs that are easier to change; marked sections in HTML, and graceful degradation.
Is there any hope for Gopher, or will the Web and other resources make it (eventually) obsolete?
Tim Berners-Lee defined the Web as "the universe of network accessible information".
It is not restricted to just http.
Thus, Gopher is part of the Web.
There is existing legacy data on Gopher which is still valuable.
New projects would however be ill-advised, in my view, to select Gopher over HTTP as a means of delivery.
Electronic Commerce; significant numbers of Web users, especially in the US, buy goods and services through the Web.
With the current state of data protection/encryption, would you feel comfortable in sending your credit card number to a company or service through your Web browser?
No.
Then again, people read it out over the phone to mail order companies and hand their cards to shop assistants, which is not secure either.
Companies like First Virtual and DigiCash provide alternatives to sending a credit card number over the Web.
One of the most frequent complaints from UK Web users is the slow speed of accessing some Web sites, especially those held in the US during times of high network traffic.
What, if anything, should be done (and by whom) to alleviate this problem?
The bandwidth within the UK is extremely good, and we lead Europe and large parts of the US in that area.
This means it is just about adequate to the task for accessing academic UK sites.
Commercial sites, of course, are often on slow links.
The problem lies in the congested link to the US (and the link to mainland Europe) which is grossly inadequate.
The problem is that ten times the bandwidth costs ten times the money, according to the suppliers.
Given that we need more like 50 or 100 times the bandwidth, going to another supplier looks like a useful option.
Certainly the current bandwidth must be increased, by whatever mechanism.
Another approach (as well as increasing the bandwidth, I hasten to add, not an alternative to increasing it) is to make more efficient use of the network by sending compressed headers, keeping connections alive, multiplexing connections and so on.
There were some experiments a year or two ago using a new protocol, HTTP-NG, which did this.
The suggestion was that a pair of proxy servers, one in the UK and one in the US, would talk HTTP-NG to each other over the transatlantic link but would talk ordinary HTTP to other caches and to individual browsers.
I have not heard much about this plan lately.
The W3C has sometimes been criticised for the time taken to produce a "finished" HTML3 specification.
Is this criticism justified?
No.
To explain that, I need to cover a little history.
HTML 3.0 emerged from earlier design work called HTML+, which was presented in Spring 1994 at WWW1 in Geneva.
This was largely the work of one individual, Dave Raggett, who then worked for Hewlett-Packard.
HTML 2.0 was started by Dan Connolly in summer 1994 to capture current practice in HTML usage.
This work was carried out in the IETF HTML Working Group who took until September 1995 to release the HTML 2.0 specification as RFC 1866, a Proposed Internet Standard.
It was widely recognised that this took way too long.
The IETF is entirely a volunteer organisation, and anyone can join in.
The IETF also voted to not progress the HTML 3.0 draft, which had been stable since March 1995.
At one point this draft was listed as deprecated!
However, portions of that draft (eg tables, which had been implemented in several browsers by this time) could be carried forward as the basis for discussion.
In my view that was a bad move which caused a loss of confidence in the industry.
The HTML 3.0 draft was certainly not perfect and some parts had little implementation experience, but it had been around for a while, people were writing documents in it, and adopting it at that point would have "caught up".
So far, W3C has not figured in this tale.
They stated that work on individual parts of a "post 2.0" specification would henceforth be carried out by W3C and its member companies, so that mature drafts could be circulated to the IETF for comment.
W3C stated that this would make things quicker.
They started to issue a series of draft Technical Reports containing their work.
Since this happened, the tables draft has been produced, put through the IETF, and is in last call.
The most notable example of the W3C helping to speed things up was the issue of inserting multimedia into HTML.
Sun, Netscape, Microsoft, and others had all begun to do this, in mutually incompatible ways (app, applet, embed, bgsound, marquee, and so on).
The W3C called a meeting of the relevant companies, who were all by this time members of W3C, and very shortly there was a specification issued which they could all agree to and had helped create.
So, in summary: yes the production of stable documents that people can write pages to has been slow, far too slow, but since W3C has been involved the process seems to have become much quicker.
Web pages can be generally created by either (a) using software to convert from some other format e.g.
RTF, to HTML (b) using a package such as HoTMetaL to automate/validate the construction or (c) hand, in a text editor and then validated by e.g.
the Halsoft validation mechanism (mirrored at Hensa).
Which method do you use, and why?
I distinguish two situations re-using existing content, and creating a document from scratch.
For the former, re-typing is generally out of the question and a conversion tool is required.
I use FrameMaker for constructing printed documents, and the converter I use is WebMaker which was originally from CERN and is now a commercial product from Harlequin in the UK.
To create new content, I must admit I just launch into a text editor and start typing.
Then again I know HTML fairly well.
I always paste in the stuff from another document because I can never remember it ;-) and then validate using html-check which does a formal sgml validation against whichever DTD (HTML 2.0, HTML 2.1, draft HTML 3.0beta, W3C's HTML 1996) I have used.
This is not an "over the web" validation, it is a tool that runs locally.
I find this easier than typing into a wordprocessor and converting, because the converter never quite does everything you want and the work involved is often more than just typing by hand.
I have used some structured editors asWedit is a good one (for Unix platforms with X) when doing complex tables or playing with less used features like FIG.
asWedit has an icon bar and currently invalid elements are greyed out which is a nice way of indicating "you can't put that tag there".
I am currently beta-testing an editor called Symposia which was demonstrated at WWW4.
The details of the user interface require some work, but the presentation is excellent full WYSIWIG editing including tables, forms and so on.
This way of working is obviously going to become increasingly important.
What would you like to see happen in the field of the World Wide Web in 1996?
An end to messages that say "you must have browser XYZ version n to view these pages", "set your browser this wide", and pages that come up unusable or even totally blank for people not using the same platform and browser as the document author.
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Indian Ocean Rim Region Virtual Library Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Indian Ocean Rim Region Virtual Library Project Buzz data software html database dissemination infrastructure copyright graphics gif adobe research standards Citation BibTex RIS Susan Lutley describes a prototype virtual library, built as part of a co-operative venture focusing on broad issues in Social Development within the Indian Ocean Rim Region.
The Indian Ocean Rim Web Site [1] advances the scope of development studies researchers by providing access to material which has been difficult to obtain, and by offering a forum for researchers around the world, especially in the region, to network.
The Virtual Library is fully searchable, containing documents (free from copyright) in full text, research abstracts, subscription details for journals and reports from countries within the region.
The Indian Ocean Rim Region Site also provides researchers and students with a directory of Researchers and includes the opportunity to register their work, thus promoting the vast body of research currently within the region.
It has been jointly developed by Edith Cowan and Murdoch University Libraries; the Centre for Development Studies at Edith Cowan University and the Inter-University Consortium for Development Studies Western Australia (comprising Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University, Curtin University of Technology and the University of Western Australia.
Funding for the project, was received from the National Priority (Reserve) Fund Allocation from the improved Library Infrastructure which is administered by the Australian Vice-Chancellors Standing Committee on Information Resources.
Background and Content In Western Australia, each University has either a major research focus or postgraduate studies in the discipline Development Studies, with interests in countries including Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seyc elles, Africa, Mauritius and Indonesia.
Links had already been established with external agencies including One World Centre, AIDAB, World Vision, Marga Institute and CENWOR (Sri Lanka).
The project identified an area of increasing interest, not well covered elsewhere, with a regional focus (hence the Indian Ocean Region), and the subject area of Social Development.
The team were motivated by the need to harness fugitive or grey literature not readily available electronically.
The need for a systematic, accessible infrastructure to facilitate the storage, retrieval and dissemination of relevant information and documentation being the basis for this project.
The funding provided an opportunity to pursue collaboratively to address the needs and network and share information, within and about this region.
Objectives The overall object is to provide a prototype virtual library containing information related to global social development in the Indian Ocean Rim Region.
The project features:Web site for international access.
References to data sources, integrated with full text (mostly of the “fugitive” kind).
Register of research/research in progress.
Register of researchers.
Specifically, the aims have been:to contribute to a network for the dissemination of information and to foster and support exchange of information; to identify, select and acquire documents suitable for electronic scanning; to set up and manage a home web page on the WWW; to provide links to other information sources and existing collections in University Libraries, Institutes or Agencies (local, national and international); connect researchers and development organisations and centres within the region; improve access to information by making it available in an electronic format; The target audience included:(a) Australian Academics and researchers in Australian universities Development Studies centres Students Government departments Commercial interests in the Rim NGO’s Education (general public) Schools (teachers and students) (b) Overseas Development centres and research students Academics NGO’s Standard Practises adopted in this project 1: Standards for Document Delivery Documents have been provided in two formats; PDF (portable downloadable format) Adobe Acrobat standard HTML format These were chosen as the most likely to suit the majority of visitors.
Anyone accessing the Internet can obtain a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader and HTML format, providing easy access to documents which are linked to the main page which lists all thr documents available to download.
Standard for documents in PDF format All full text documents were split into a number of smaller documents for speedier retrieval.
Documents which have been split have a front page which lists all the documents available to download.
Tables or graphs are provided as separate PDF files.
Standard for documents in HTML format Where appropriate documents were scanned, edited and marked up in HTML format.
In some instances, where documents were large, they have been split at a suitable point in the document and linked by way of a chapter or section link.
Visitors can access any section of the document from the section they are currently viewing by way of a link backwards or forwards.
2: Standards for HTML Production The site conforms to HTML2 and HTML standards.
Generally, visitors can view the information without the need for a graphic display.
Except for documents which contain full text of publications, pages have been kept short for easy viewing.
Search pages have a standard “help for navigation purposes” and a link to the IORR’s copyright statement, as well as the University’s copyright statement.
Although all material can be searched through the search pages, an index has been provided for each directory section; eg.
Articles available, Researchers directory, Theses directory, Conferences Note: searches by country or region are available through a clickable map, or a listing of the regions.
Criteria for Document Selection The following formed the basis to assist in the selection of documents:Must be copyright free or able to be waived.
Available locally from Western Australia, or from within the region.
Materials will be sought from both individuals and institutions.
In general unpublished and/or difficult to obtain materials such as:brochures/pamphlets discussion papers, working papers conference proceedings newsletters policy documents, position papers press releases government publications which are difficult to obtain ephemera ngo publications Length of document some may require annotations (ie.
only scan components).
Ease of conversion to htm.
Topic areas to include:Social, economic, political, social movements (ie.
the broader view of changes in the region).
Health, education, gender, human rights, welfare, environment (ie.
the specific areas of concern which are related to social development).
Value judgement will be required only in areas where large amounts of material are collected.
Life of a document.
Generally exclude items likely to be redundant in less than 1 year.
All documents in English Outcomes Social Development researchers studying the Indian Ocean Rim Region are now able to electronically source (including full text) a range of research and information documents from the WWW, in particular items which are difficult to trace and obtain.
The project provides an opportunity for researchers studying the region to register their research interests, projects and theses.
The prototype draft web pages have been constructed and are under continued review by the Project Team.
Over 200 pages have been constructed.
More than 250 full text documents in HTML format, searchable and retrievable.
A collection of pamphlets (over 2,000 pages), research reports, over 50 theses abstracts and other “fugitive” material has been scanned.
This collection is available for searching and retrieval.
37 country files (HTML format) have been developed (includes statistical and background information).
Countries searchable by search or clickable map.
Links to other useful sites have been established, including other University Development Studies units, relevant Government sites, important sites related to social development and relevant electronic journals.
Data pertaining to Researchers and Research in Progress has been added (approximately 130 researchers from all parts of the Region).
Facility to self-register research interests and projects is in place.
Six graphs (GIF format) have been developed, representing health expenditure and education expenditure figures and GNP per capita.
Recommendations arising from the project need for a scanning policy: many documents in their hard copy format are not of a sufficiently high standard to be scanned; the need for strong and clear copyright clearance and ownership statements; formats as well as size of documents re document delivery need to be considered; data collection the need for input from a wide range of people: librarians, researchers and academics (requires co-ordination); collaboration has proven a key issue, and the fact that many overseas bodies from the region are keen to continue collaborating with the IORR project is indicative of the importance of providing a centralised (network) source of information; hardware and software issues (testing required); the need for dedicated IORR web server; the need for redesigning the information so that it is accessible through a database with a web interface for easier access to all material; prototype be used for other similar projects; co-operative links to be further explored.
References Indian Ocean Rim Project Web Site, http://www.cowan.edu.au/library/iorr/home.htm Author Details Susan Lutley, Faculty Librarian, Health & Human Sciences Manager email: s.lutley@cowan.edu.au Tel: (09) 2738704 Address: Edith Cowan University Library, Churchlands Campus, Churchlands, W.A.6018.
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Netskills Corner: Multimedia Web Design Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner: Multimedia Web Design Buzz software java javascript html browser copyright video graphics multimedia gif quicktime groovy url Citation BibTex RIS Netskills Corner: Multimedia Web Design: Walter Scales considers multimedia web design, asking whether we are running down an up escalator.
Paul Garrud, Issue 8 of Ariadne, looked at how multimedia might be used online in a medical context (patient education), and started from the premise that “ one shouldn’t neglect the presentation and visual impact of educational packages because they engage the user’s motivation, attention and aesthetic sense”.
Paul nicely encapsulates in one sentence the difficulties of designing with multimedia in mind.
In Issue 12 of Ariadne Brian Kelly discussed how widely some of the newer Web technologies are being used in UK university and HE college home pages.
So, exactly how easy is it to incorporate multimedia elements in Web pages, and is it a good thing?
Well, like most things in life, the answer is “yes and no”.
This is the subject of an entire Netskills one-day workshop (“Creating Multimedia Web Pages”), but in this article if we first look at some examples of how easy it is to insert multimedia objects into our pages, and how frightfully easy it is to make an absolute pig’s ear of our pages as a result, then maybe we can come up with some sort of general guidelines as to what we should and should not include, and when.
Let’s start with the most accessible (and perhaps the hardest) aspect the part about which absolutely everyone will have their own views: the aesthetics of multimedia.
Personally, my own all-time favourite site for showing the aesthetic dos and don’ts is the Bud Uglly site, at http://wwwvoice.com/bud/bud.html.
This site deliberately breaks all the rules on colour, animations, spelling, etc.
Incidentally, for an extremely well-argued expose of “bad” examples, see Vincent Flanders’ Pages that Suck, at http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/home2.html.
Smile we may, but how easy in fact is it to justify, formalize and quantify our reactions?
One way is to break multimedia on the Web into discrete parcels or technologies, and see whether we can arrive at a consensus of when a particular technology might prove useful.
Always thinking of the twin issues of impact and universality of access (presumably the key reasons why we want a Web presence in the first place) Web multimedia objects fit neatly into the three areas of Animation Video Audio Animation Animation can mean that old favourite, the ubiquitous animated image (“animated gif” those eye-pulling little rotating images on Web pages) or else text which is animated in some way.
GIFs pre-date the Web, and so any graphics-capable browser can handle animated GIFs.
The somewhat newer manifestation of animated text can be achieved using animated GIF technology, or it can be achieved using the newer technologies of Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, Shockwave or QuickTime to name but a few.
These newer technologies are not only about animations, of course, but they can be used for that purpose on a Web page, perhaps with the added bonus of sound effects.
They only work on recent browsers and even then, users may have to obtain a (free) plug-in to enable their browsers to handle them.
You can create your own animated text online via the Web without having an ounce of know-how about the newer technologies: to see how easy it is, go to: http://www.zyris.com/ and follow the instructions, or try an alternative at: http://www.mediabuilder.com/abm.html I promise you it’s fun for the author, but whether it’s fun for the final user is a moot point.
So far as animated GIFs are concerned, they’re everywhere for a somewhat eye-catching example, see: http://www.cimmerii.demon.co.uk/colourblind/ To find out how to make them, see the URL: http://cnet.com/Content/Builder/Graphics/Webanim/index.html (enthusiastic “let’s do it now” approach) or the (somewhat more thoughtful) site at http://members.aol.com/royalef/GIFmake.htm.
If you’re interested in how to ensure your animated GIFs are as inoffensive as possible (ie “optimize” them), have a look at the URL http://www.webreference.com/dev/GIFanim/ All very well and good, but when should we use animations?
When you want to attract attention, maybe in a “splash” or entry page; above all, the trick is NOT to place an animation near any text that you want people to read carefully animations are terribly eye-pulling and distracting.
They make good advertising banners most effective “click through rate” is when they’re placed at the bottom right of a page.
They are fun, and an easy way to liven up a site, especially when used thoughtfully: for example, there’s no need to have the thing whirring away at top speed, and there’s no need to assume the image has to rotate through 360 degrees sometimes a simple, slow, left and right movement is just as effective; use a few deep colours and a clear font; where animations are concerned, perhaps the message “less is more” is appropriate.
In theory, animations could be used in an educative way (to show progression over time, or transitions of some sort, for instance), but I’ve seen very few examples.
Perhaps one good example of an educational use is the illustration of a molecule’s composition, at the URL http://chemdept.uwsp.edu/pdbs/.
Of course, you’ll need a plug-in from MDL Information Systems Inc. called Chemscape Chime to view it.
You begin to understand now some of the problems about incorporating multimedia objects in your pages… Generally, animations are good in that they don’t usually “take over” the user’s page: the user can normally stop them, and in fact some animations involve intervention by the user (for example, manipulation of a molecule).
ActiveX “controls” actually invite the user’s intervention as navigation aids through a site, for example though remember that ActiveX frequently works best with Internet Explorer rather than with other browsers, one of the very good reasons perhaps why it doesn’t figure highly on institutional home pages.
Video Video (“movies”) is the ultimate luxury: moving pictures, sound, ambience, immediacy, you name it; yes, and HUGE files.
Only practicable on the Web as a supplement to your pages’ central message and even then best used as a trailer for active themes (eg.
dance or entertainment rather than an advertisement for, say, a thrilling new PC lab) or as a trailer to another movie.
Apart from the sheer size of movie files, there are other considerations: For one reason or another users may be unable to view or run the movie at all.
Quality users get frustrated with poor quality movies.
Image be sure that the image portrayed in the movie is the one you want to project: you will be judged on the way you speak, your gestures, tacky-looking buildings/decor/environment, difficult foreground/background colour contrasts, etc.
Behaviour modification: users will modify their behaviour on your site to avoid known pitfalls or sections which annoy them (page which are slow to download, for example, or seeing the same tired old out-of-date video clip every time they load a page).
Alternatives need to be provided (textual transcripts for example, or audio, and/or subtitles); I’ve never yet seen this done at any site that I can recall.
Information about information: file size; the format of the movie; the content of the movie; running time; stills from the movie so as to give the user the opportunity of judging for themselves whether they want to watch your clip; any necessary instructions.
And all this without having the faintest idea of what software will be used to view your movie: will users know how to ensure audio is turned on; will they know how to operate any play or rewind buttons; will the clip look alright in a tiny viewing window; will the user be embarrassed or distract other people sitting in the same room?
“Experts” from different backgrounds may have to meet and actually talk to each other (Audio Visual technicians may have to talk to Web administrators and to Departmental/corporate affairs staff, for instance).
The best way of considering these implications is to see an example: look at how movie clips are used to advertise a UK university, at the URL http://www.tees.ac.uk/video/ As a user, make a mental note of how just how many issues need to be resolved to make video successful on the Web, and then do a quick calculation of how much energy and enthusiasm will need to be continuously devoted to this aim by the providers of the Web page and by the people using the page.
Audio Audio is a much more practical option.
There’s less to go wrong, for a start!
Generally it’s less all-embracing than video while the audio file is playing or loading users can be doing something else (for example reading what a wonderful jolly place your institution is).
Audio files are much smaller than video files, of course, although they can be quite hefty beasts in their own right, and there’s still the problem of many formats, and many audio players that the user can choose from.
Overall, though, audio may be more educative than video for the following reasons: audio is great at establishing an ambience audio is a superb instructional tool in its own right (language work, or music, for example) audio on the Web poses a great opportunity for continuous commentary audio is less distracting than video audio is more accessible and less restrictive than video quality is less of a “mission-critical” issue than it is in video: the technology is cheaper, and the human ear is much more forgiving and intuitive than is the eye audio can add to (rather than supplant) other Web objects: for instance you could supply differing audible “clicks” to different navigation buttons left and right, or correct and wrong; don’t depend on audio, though, to provide the sole means of navigating your site.
Again, the same issues of providing alternatives, and providing information, apply to audio just as much as they do to video.
Perhaps even more than video, be aware that tastes change, trends in markets come and go, and what you consider to be actually rather a neat street-cred, groovy, hip-hop happening sound may in fact place you unequivocally in some sad parallel universe of no interest to your more worldly-wise visitors.
To see some examples of how audio is used educationally (and for fun, too) see the following URLs: Commentary: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio5/live/live.html Language: http://zeta.broonale.co.uk/falklands/slang.html Music: http://www.bagpiper.com/links/piping.html So, after a brief gallop through the multimedia traps of animation, video and sound, are we any nearer establishing a set of golden rules, as intimated at the start of this article?
We can probably draw out some general guidelines: Assess the need and relevance for multimedia: do your users (and your providers!)
really need it?
Be prepared for the extra maintenance: files/formats/alternatives/transcripts/information/instructions/help menus/co-operation of others/hardware and software considerations/rigorous testing/updating and modernisation There are other overheads: you (or someone else) will have to become very au fait with the finer nuances of HTML: although it’s not difficult to incorporate multimedia in your pages, it’s time-consuming to do it properly (for example, learning to use consistently the HTML attributes of ALT and OBJECT properly).
You will need to be critically aware of copyright and ownership issues.
Multimedia summarised in one (longish) sentence?
How about this: “Multimedia on the Web is a jolly good thing when relevant and well-managed: it’s what the Web should be all about: a lively, universal, interactive, stimulating, educational, intuitive medium offering lots of alternatives, and for those very reasons multimedia is a disaster when it demonstrates a failure to deliver.” Author details Walter Scales Netskills University of Newcastle Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Wire: Dave Beckett, Interviewed Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Dave Beckett, Interviewed Buzz mobile software java html database archives metadata browser cataloguing graphics windows linux png visualisation rtf cache research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dave Beckett is subjected to an interview via email.
What do you do in the world of networking/libraries/WWW I edit and maintain the Internet Parallel Computing Archive (IPCA) based at HENSA Unix, both of which are funded by JISC ISSC and I work at the Computing Laboratory, University of Kent at Canterbury.
The IPCA is a large and popular archive of High Performance and Parallel Computing materials which has over 500M of files, serves around 3,000 of them each day and has four mirror sites in Paris, Athens, Osaka and Canberra.
The popularity of the archive meant that there was lots of log information generated so I wrote some software, The Combined Log System which integrates of logs for WWW and other services.
I presented this at the 3rd WWW Conference in Darmstadt.
In a large WWW site it can be difficult for people to find things -the Resource Discovery problem.
To help this, I have catalogued by hand most files in IPCA using digital Metadata.
This is to a digital file as a library catalogue entry is to a book.
The metadata format I use is IAFA Templates (the same format being used by the ROADS project for the subject based indexes such as Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG), Organising Medical Networked Information (OMNI) etc.).
I implemented software to automate handling the metadata (presented at the 4th WWW conference in Boston) and I am currently adding searching to it using the Harvest indexing system.
Like Chris Lilley in issue 2, I am also interested in the new, open and legally unencumbered, Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard and have done several projects with it.
Firstly, I added PNG support to the Arena experimental WWW browser from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a demonstration of the key PNG features of full-image transparency and gamma correction.
Secondly I wrote a program, pngmeta, to extract the metadata that can be stored in PNG images and make it available.
I then used this with the Harvest system to index PNG images and give keyword searching of them.
This has been of interest to WWW indexing companies who are keen to do this on the Web.
Finally, I have been working on UK based resource discovery systems: UK Internet Sites which is an automated database of all the sites below .uk containing any known WWW sites and a short title, description and category.
The most recent project I have been working on, in cooperation with HENSA Unix, is the experimental ACademic DireCtory (AC/DC) service a WWW index of all the known sites in the .ac.uk domain (and a few others).
This is a collaborative project with Universities around the UK to share the gathering work but currently the majority of the gathering and all of the indexing is done at HENSA Unix.
... and how did you get into this area?
In May 1993, our Parallel Processing research group at UKC had developed lots of software and documents in the parallel computing area that we wanted to disseminate using the Internet was the natural choice.
At that point, HENSA Unix which is based at UKC had just started so I based the IPCA there.
Gradually other people and companies donated their works and I collected relevant materials I found all over the world into the one place.
The IPCA blossomed from there to the current state where over 1.1 million files have been taken during the three years of the service.
What was your reaction to the Web when you encountered it for the first time (and when was this)?
I first encountered it the WWW sometime in 1993 using the Lynx text browser and it looked interesting but slow.
I stuck to using that until I got a graphical terminal on my desk and could run Mosaic and see the graphical Web.
In 1993 and 1994, Mosaic was the web and it it is a little sad to think that there are probably people using the Web now who have never heard of it.
How significant an impact do you think that mobile code, such as Java applets, will have on the development of the Web as an information resource?
It could be a major development if they remain open standards and can be kept secure.
This has not been proven to my satisfaction with the recent security problems Java has had.
Processor and browser-specific 'plug ins' are not mobile codes and I hope they don't become the future we have met this kind of situation before with PCs and got locked-in to a specific architecture and operating system.
...and how significant is VRML in the same context?
I don't think the VRML is ready for the Internet yet it is pretty slow and the current state of VRML isn't powerful enough for proper animated and interactive 'worlds'.
If lots more bandwidth and more powerful machines appear, it should have a role in certain domains visualisation, art and entertainment.
A friend buys a PC, relatively fast modem and an internet connection.
(S)he asks you what browser they should either buy or obtain.
What do you advise?
There is a vibrant competitive environment between the major browser vendors currently and it is changing all the time so there is no definite solution.
However, assuming the PC is running Windows 95, I would advise trying out the latest beta versions of both Netscape Navigator 2.0 and MS Internet Explorer 2.0 (3.0 if it is out) and use one or more of them.
If you are running a PC Unix based system (Linux, BSDI) then Navigator or Arena could be used.
In the UK, with bandwidth to the US being very limited, a good text browser is also useful.
Lynx is the obvious choice and can serve well for fast WWW access.
I personally use all of the above but for my quick WWW use, I use the browser inside the GNU Emacs text editor W3.
This is portable among all the OSes that GNU Emacs runs on, from VMS to DOS.
One of the most frequent complaints from UK Web users is the slow speed of accessing some Web sites, especially those held in the US during times of high network traffic.
What, if anything, should be done (and by whom) to alleviate this problem?
Are caching and mirroring the answer (and if so, how should these approaches best be deployed, locally, nationally and/or internationally)?
All of the above: caching at all levels the user, the local site, the region, country and globally.
This is a rapidly evolving service and as the UK National Web Cache at HENSA UNIX: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/wwwcache/ shows, the UK is leading that process.
The mirroring of important and timely materials will be done for the foreseeable future until more sophisticated resource ''replication'' services appear.
Web pages can be generally created by either (a) using software to convert from some other format e.g.
RTF, to HTML (b) using a package such as HoTMetaL to automate/validate the construction or (c) hand, in a text editor and then validated by e.g.
the Halsoft validation mechanism (mirrored at Hensa).
Which method do you use, and why?
(c) I mostly write HTML by hand in my text editor, GNU Emacs, which can validate that the HTML is correct during the writing.
I also check it with other validating tools such as htmlcheck and weblint and also the Halsoft service at http://www.hensa.ac.uk/html-val-svc/ Most of the IPCA HTML files are generated automatically from the metadata, but to my style.
What would you like to see happen in the field of the World Wide Web in 1996/97 The further development and use of OPEN and machine independent standards for protocols, services and systems to support a growing WWW which is faster and more secure.
This should include an end to pages that only work on a specific version of one browser and don't work at all on text-only browsers.
For example, of the 6640 .uk WWW site home pages I have collected, 1603 (24%) of them mention a specific browser.
One of the main reasons Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and the Web was to remove such system dependencies from information services and provide universal access whatever way you are interacting with the web.
It shouldn't matter if you are listening to the web page being read out on a speech synthesiser, reading it on a text browser or looking at the images, animation or virtual reality version it should be available to all.
Ta for the interview, Dave Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill Jon Ferguy Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill Jon Ferguy Buzz data video intranet standards Citation BibTex RIS Do networks play any part in the making of films?
Isobel Stark is shaken (not stirred) when she finds out more from Jon Ferguy.
Question: What does the title sequence of the latest James Bond movie, Goldeneye, have in common with the whole of the recent production of Gulliver’s Travels, and advertisements such as Yellow Pages’ ‘Thank you for the days’, the Central Office of Information’s Modern Apprenticeships, the Halifax Building Society vote and Sony playstations?
Answer: the post-production and special effects on them all was done at Framestore, one of London’s leading film and video facility houses and the first non-US company to win a Visual Special Effects Emmy (for Gulliver’s Travels).
To work in special effects takes not only good visual sense, but lots of computers and lots of networks.
Which is why I found myself sitting in Soho, the heart of ‘filmland’ in London, talking to Jon Ferguy, an engineer at Framestore, finding out what they do, and how they do it.
Ferguy, a physics graduate from Southampton, has worked in various facility houses in London, and has been at Framestore since July 1996.
He explained that Framestore is mainly composed of creative artists and producers, but, for the company to work, technical engineers are essential.
The artists need to have ‘cutting edge’ equipment so that they can produce the effects wanted by the client, while the engineers need to understand the technology that the artists manipulate.
Ferguy has a brief to cover a range of areas, including equipment maintenance, installations, programming, intranet development and technology training, to name but a few.
A great deal of his time is spent troubleshooting.
Sometimes solutions can simply be a ten minute explanation, or the mere flicking of a switch.
At other times he might have to write a program to solve a problem.
He is involved with ordering new equipment, organising equipment demonstrations, and occasionally even dismantling a machine, fault-finding and replacing components.
“Play-outs, too” he remarks.
“They take up another large chunk of time.” Play-outs?
Ferguy explains for me, starting at the beginning.
Although it provides post-production work, Framestore is involved in films at an early stage, and sometimes has its artists on the set itself, ensuring that everything is technically correct and lending post-production expertise to the director.
A set of prints known as ‘rushes’ is processed directly after shooting for review by the director.
When the rushes come into Framestore they are transferred onto digital video if they are on film.
Then all the clever stuff is done to them using various dedicated, single-function computers (one of the most powerful is a special effects machine called Henry, which works at TV resolution).
All of the effects are brought together and various technical specification checks (‘tech specs’) are made.
These ensure that the video adheres to all of the appropriate standards governing colour, sound, image sharpness and other elements of the digital video quality.
Once it passes all of the tech specs, a film is ready to go.
If it is an advertisement, a copy will need to go to every commercial television company, as they all play adverts at different times.
Dubs (physical copies) can be sent out by courier, or play-outs can be done.
For play-outs, the advert, in the form of digital video, is played down a dedicated fibre optic line to the BT Tower.
The signal then goes to London News Network (LNN) and from there to the national network of dedicated lines which link all TV companies in the country.
The TV companies set their equipment to record the incoming signals.
Play-outs have even been done to the US, using satellite links, and can cost up to five pounds per second.
Ferguy admits that they can be nerve-racking especially at that sort of cost as several operations need to work absolutely perfectly and with precise timing for a transatlantic play-out to be successful.
Could university film-makers use SuperJANET[1] in a similar way to transmit their work?
Bandwidth would be the problem at present .
Ferguy stresses that the lines which Framestore uses for play-outs are not what most of us use when we send data down a line.
For TV the standard for serial digital video is roughly one megabyte per frame, making 25 megabytes per second.
For film, the amount of data required each second is much higher more than fifteen times that of video.
To cope with this, the facility houses have set up their own Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), Sohonet [2], a dedicated high speed network which runs at 155 megabits per second.
The video and broadcasting industries have been at the cutting edge of technology for a long time.
Indeed, they are used as test beds by manufacturers digital video recorders, for example, which are only now reaching the domestic market, have been used at Framestore for the past decade.
So, what is Ferguy’s vision of the industry five years down the line?
At present Framestore, like most facility houses, has a library of tapes from which items can be borrowed.
With ever-increasing network capabilities it is likely that in the future these libraries and their contents will be accessible remotely.
Ferguy also believes that PCs will soon be able to be used for high-end applications such as special effects, morphing, 3D animation and editing.
“But it will always be the skills of the artists and operators, rather than the power of machines and networks, which creates a good effects sequence.” Whatever the technical change, Framestore is determined to stay at the forefront.
Emmies can be addictive.
References SuperJANET information Web Site, http://www.ja.net/SuperJANET/SuperJANET.html Sohonet Web Site, http://www.sohonet.co.uk/ Author Details Isobel Stark Web Officer, UKOLN, Email: i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 323343 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: Thames Valley University Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: Thames Valley University Buzz software video cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ashton stumbles across a new learning centre in the Thames Valley University.
The Paul Hamlyn Learning Resource [1] Centre (LRC) opened in Slough in October 1996.
Named after the University’s Chancellor, the publisher Paul Hamlyn, the new Slough building is Thames Valley University’s [2] third LRC, and the first to be purpose-built.
Described on the one hand as a ‘beautiful barn of a building’ (by its architect, Lord Richard Rogers), and on the other as ‘an electronic hub’ (Mike Fitzgerald, Vice Chancellor, TVU), the LRC unites a wide range of facilities in an environmentally sound setting.
In addition to traditional library services, the LRC houses audio and video editing suites, seminar rooms, a media shop and an on-site cafe.
One side of the building is devoted entirely to IT, with 150 high-specification computers in an open centre and a dedicated PC-laboratory for more formal group teaching.
Five groups of people have been brought together to work under the same roof library staff, media services, security staff, catering personnel, and staff of ICL Sorbus.
This has undoubtedly required adjustment by all parties, and a loss of control by some, but the benefits to the students are manifold, and this ‘one-stop-shop’ is very much their space.
ICL requires particular mention.
Most of the IT facilities and services in the LRC are managed by ICL Sorbus in an innovative partnership with TVU.
IT and the Internet increasingly feature in TVU’s teaching and learning strategies.
The LRC is at the centre of TVU’s concept of an IT-rich learning environment.
However TVU, as one of the poorest universities in the country, could not afford the quantity of IT equipment needed to implement this concept.
The decision was therefore made to contract out IT provision, support and maintenance to ICL.
Library and ICL staff work together on the enquiry desk, and with their complementary skills field both library and IT queries.
To avoid confusion, ICL staff are easily identified by their purple shirts colour coding is a strong feature of the LRC.
Slough LRC has certainly benefited from the involvement of ICL.
Following the success of this pilot partnership, ICL will soon provide services right across the university, including IT provision for academic staff.
The LRC is part of the community, and there are a number of commercial links with local companies, whose employees are enrolled on business, management and computing courses.
Such links also provide much-needed commercial backing.
This ready-made student market is in a sense driving the technological provision in the LRC.
These learners use IT every day in their working lives, and therefore expect it in their education too.
In turn, TVU’s students emerge from university fully-qualified for the job market, having been exposed to the technologies that today’s organisations are exploiting.
Mike Fitzgerald is understandably proud of the fact that his students are attractive to employers.
However, in recent months TVU has been forced to make a number of tough decisions, and provides a prime example of a financially-challenged university responding to the current educational climate.
Some of these decisions have been unpopular amongst some lecturers, and earlier this year the university was the focus of BBC2’s FirstSight programme, which exposed its problems to a national audience.
Another millstone around the neck of the university is that it has fared poorly in published university league tables.
However, of TVU’s 27,000 students, the majority are non-traditional (65% are part-time, and 63% are mature students).
TVU is taking positive steps to build its reputation.
The LRC at Slough is a crucial step in this process: it spells a new and cheaper way to learn, and should boost the university’s profile.
TVU provides a new learning experience, supporting self-directed learners.
Students are provided with the learning opportunities and are encouraged to study at their own pace and in their own time, with minimum face-to-face interaction, but with maximum availability of resources.
Active learning is the key.
Throughout this year, academic staff have been developing New Learning Environment (NLE) modules.
The networked learner support, which will be in place when the modules begin in the new academic session cover networked resources themselves Web, online and CD-ROM sources, the campus-wide information service, diagnostic and remedial online study skills software, as well as email and groupware for all staff and students to communicate with each other, whether on or off-site.
All students will receive a programme handbook and a set of module study guides containing essential readings and other support materials.
Another key feature of the NLE is the Director of Studies scheme.
This brings students into groups of up to 20 who meet weekly with a tutor, retaining the same tutor/group for the duration of their programme.
The meetings are for discussion of learning needs, skills and assessments, and Directors of Studies will be responsible for co-ordinating individual and group study/learning skills support.
Each TVU building will also house a staff resource centre (SRC) comprising ICL supplied and managed technology making IT available to all academic staff.
The LRC should then really come into its own in the coming year.
Electronic media will be exploited much more in courses (with some courses being taught entirely online).
LRC staff have found that they need to learn to teach students in the use of electronic resources, and here they are turning to the eLib programme, and particularly to projects such as Netskills [3], NetLinkS [4] and EduLib [5], to assist them in their training needs.
TVU is taking a radical stance in extolling a new approach to education, an approach which other universities should perhaps consider emulating.
With the LRC at Slough, TVU has achieved high quality within a low budget.
The foundation and determination are certainly there for the same to be achieved within its courses.
References [1] Paul Hamlyn Learning Resource Centre, http://www.tvu.ac.uk/tabout/phlrc.html [2] Thames Valley University Web Site, http://www.tvu.ac.uk/ [3] Netskills eLib project (in this issue), http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/netskills/ [4] Netlinks eLib project, http://netways.shef.ac.uk/ [5] Edulib eLib project, http://www.hull.ac.uk/edulib/ Author details Sarah Ashton, Netlinks Project Officer Email: S.J.Ashton@sheffield.ac.uk Phone: 0114 222 657 Fax: 0191 222 5001 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Music Libraries Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Music Libraries Online Buzz data software archives cataloguing z39.50 standards Citation BibTex RIS Celia Duffy describes a virtual music catalogue.
THE AIM OF THE NEW MUSIC Libraries Online Project is to link the OPACs of all nine UK music conservatoire libraries using Z39.50 to form a virtual union catalogue for music materials of all kinds.
Music Libraries Online is the only subject-based project to be funded under Phase 3 of eLib and, under the leadership of Project Director Kate Sloss aided by an already very active Steering Group, the project has made an excellent start.
Together, the nine conservatoire libraries hold an incomparable set of scholarly resources for musicians.
With access to each others’ holdings through a virtual clump, they will be able to provide facilities on a scale which they are unable to support solely from their own resources.
The project will be staffed by one full-time Co-ordinator, based at the University of Central England, a technical consultant and a music libraries consultant.
The Steering Group will play a very active role.
This group mostly comprises senior librarians from the nine institutions, but with representation from the Performing Arts Data Service, Project Earl, independent consultants and Fretwell Downing, which is contracted to carry out the technical implementation.
One of the project’s early priorities is to agree a common standard among the nine libraries for bibliographic description.
Music libraries are out of necessity not noted for faithful and devoted adherence to standard cataloguing systems.
The bibliographic standards group will be tussling with issues that make the finer points of Z39.50 look like childs’ play.
The considerable diversity among the current library systems provides scope for testing the compatibility of new-generation Z39.50 compliant systems such as Unicorn with much larger systems based on older software and holding shared catalogue data.
Work will start with the five libraries which currently have Z39.50-compliant catalogues.
These are: Birmingham Conservatoire at the University of Central England, The Royal Academy of Music, The Royal Northern College of Music, The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and Trinity College of Music.
A further 4 libraries will join in the second stage of the implementation, in 1999.
These are City of Leeds College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal College of Music and the Welsh College of Music and Drama.
Music Libraries Online plans to investigate options for including in the consortium music libraries from other sectors and also composer archives.
In addition to the availability of the library catalogues, the project hopes to facilitate a highly efficient interlending system and co-ordination of acquisitions policies.
Several of the participating libraries have also been cataloguing special collections materials under the HEFCE NonFormula Funding initiative and enhanced access to these records will be of interest not only to scholars in the UK but worldwide.
Author Details Celia Duffy Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Theses Unbound Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Theses Unbound Buzz software dissemination archives sgml dtd adobe research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alason Roberts looks at the use of theses in academic libraries.
Is the age of the printed thesis doomed?
The University Thesis On-line Group (UTOG) has recently completed a survey, funded by the British Library and JISC, on the use of doctoral theses in UK universities [1].
The survey forms the first phase of UTOG’s work of addressing the problems and opportunities presented by making theses available electronically.
Surveys were distributed to all authors completing PhD theses in the year to October 1996 in eight participating institutions, representing a cross-section of UK universities.
Each author’s supervisor also received a separate survey, and a third was dispatched to all UK university libraries.
The results are available as a British Library research report.
Sixty six per cent of respondents claimed to use theses in their research.
Most are alerted to relevant theses through personal communication by other researchers in their field : the ‘invisible college’.
Many commented that they relied upon personal communication in this way because they found it difficult to source theses relevant to their research through other means, for example abstracts and indexes.
Theses are largely consulted by authors in their institutions, either in university libraries or departmental collections.
The majority of supervisors (80%) reported that copies of their institutional theses were held in their department or departmental library, and librarians’ returns show that 95% of university libraries hold the doctoral theses produced in their institutions.
These factors also encourage students to consult locally rather than further afield.
The survey sought to discover how keen authors of theses were to see their work published: would they wish to further develop their thesis into a work suitable for publication in a different form, such as an academic monograph?
Even though most indicated that they would like to develop their research, over two-thirds responded that they would be willing to publish their thesis more widely in its present form.
The majority (over 85%) of theses are already made available for consultation in print immediately.
Supervisors generally did not encourage their students to withhold theses, unless for reasons of commercial confidence, and very few expressed concern about plagiarism.
Central to the survey was the wish to ascertain whether theses were currently being produced in a form which would readily allow a shift to electronic-based production and dissemination.
From the survey it appears that nearly all UK doctoral theses are produced in electronic form using standard software packages.
In theory, this should make publication over a network straightforward.
Authors listed a large variety of inclusions such as graphs, photographs and tables, most of which are also readily digitised.
Supervisors indicated that there is already some use of local area networks to make theses available.
As might be expected, applied sciences and engineering show slightly more development in this area than other disciplines.
The positive attitude of thesis authors and their supervisors, and the potential technical feasibility of the concept, suggest that there are few barriers to widespread electronic dissemination of a thesis on its completion.
While recognising the enormous cultural shift required for this to happen, UTOG has nevertheless been encouraged by the survey to continue on its projected path to address the cultural and technical hurdles to establishing a model for the electronic distribution of UK theses.
A prototype finding list and thesis distribution service will be established and evaluated.
Other outcomes of the process will need to address model regulations and procedures which will assist the electronic passage of a thesis through its production to its management (including archiving) and eventual use.
Although this work is at an early stage in the UK, interesting developments have already taken place in the US.
Work on the concept of a national electronic theses and dissertations service began in 1987, and since then has involved Virginia Tech, University Microfilms International (UMI) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).
Last year, the US Department of Education provided grant support for a three-year project to develop a National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) [2].
Adobe, IBM and OCLC have all become involved in the development of a standard for electronic thesis structure based on the Standard Generalised Mark-up Language (SGML).
A Document Type Definition (DTD) has now been produced.
The viability of the scheme has been underlined by the policy decision at Virginia Tech to require that, from January 1997, all theses and dissertations are submitted electronically.
References [1] Available from the British Library as a photocopy or microfiche from the British Thesis Service, Document Supply Centre, Boston Spa, Wetherby, West Yorkshire LS23 7BQ, UK.
A Web version can be found at http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/Theses/ [2] NDLTD Project http://www.ndltd.org/ Author details Alason Roberts Sub Librarian, Bibliographic Services Edinburgh University Library Edinburgh EH8 9LJ email; a.roberts@ed.ac.uk Tel : 0131.650.3402 Fax : 0131.650.3380 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Lesser of Two EEVLs?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Lesser of Two EEVLs?
Buzz software database archives ejournal url research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod, EEVL Project Manager (Information), describes plans for EEVL.
Many of Ariadne’s readers will already be familiar with the main EEVL (Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library)[1] database of quality engineering resources, now containing over 2,400 searchable descriptions of, and links to, engineering e-journals, research projects, companies, mailing lists, directories, software, recruitment agencies, and so on.
Many may also know that EEVL provides a number of additional services.
There are plans to significantly extend the range and number of these additional services over the next year or so in order that EEVL becomes more of a gateway to networked engineering information, rather than simply a finding tool.
Here are brief details of some of the things which are being planned.
Under discussion at the moment is the possibility of EEVL hosting a relatively large fully-fledged searchable bibliographic database in a specialist subject area.
EEVL already hosts several small subject databases including a subset of the Recent Advances in Manufacturing [2] database, the smaller Jet Impingement Database [3], and the very specialised Liquid Crystal Database [4], all of which have been made available through the Library and Information Services Department at the Nottingham Trent University.
The database under discussion is a lot larger, consisting of over 40,000 records, and it is hoped that it will be made freely available to all of EEVL’s users.
If the new database proves popular, it may be followed by others.
Why should EEVL get involved in this area?
Is it not best to leave bibliographic databases to the traditional large commercial online hosts?
The answer is both yes and no.
‘Yes’ in that the online hosts are very capable of making available databases to large numbers of subscribers.
‘No’ in that they are not so good, firstly at making those databases available to casual, non-subscribing users, and secondly in making available smaller, more specialised databases.
The large online hosts (which, through various recent manoeuvers seem to be becoming larger still) are commercial concerns and there are obviously sizable overheads involved in making any database available through their systems.
A database which does not generate sufficient income may well end up being dropped.
The usefulness of a particular database to a relatively small number of users may not, therefore, be a significant factor to the commercial hosts.
Other specialised databases, of course, are never seriously considered by the online hosts.
This may be an over-simplification of the situation, however EEVL sees a useful possible role for itself in both encouraging, and nurturing, specialised engineering databases.
It may be that some databases cease to be available as a result of the amalgamation of hosts into the new EINS service, or it may be that there are bibliographic databases presently only made available within individual institutions.
In all such cases, as long as they are of use to engineers, EEVL is interested in the possibility of making them available to a wider audience through the EEVL gateway.
It should be noted that EEVL has only a limited role to play in this area, and has no ambitions of becoming an online host!
Another area in which EEVL sees potential for development is that of full-text indexes to particular subjects or types of resources.
The UK Engineering Search Engine [5], an index to 34,000 UK engineering Web pages, is a very popular part of the EEVL service as it allows more focused searches than the large search engines such as Alta Vista, but no-one would suggest that in its present form it is a perfect information retrieval tool.
EEVL is currently investigating alternatives to the Harvest software which underlies this index, and if no better solution can be found then changes may be made to the Harvest software itself.
Once the system is more user-friendly, EEVL hopes to make available other indexes, perhaps along the lines of the Index Morganagus [6] full-text index of library-related electronic serials, except, of course, that engineering e-journals will be indexed.
EEVL currently includes over 220 e-journals in its main database.
A certain number are electronic versions of scholarly journals, but a larger proportion are electronic versions of trade journals.
Examples of the latter which spring to mind include Chemistry & Industry Magazine [7], Underwater Contractor Magazine [8], Hot Echo: the Journal of the Scottish Software Community [9], and Dotelectronics [10], but many more are available.
The print versions of engineering trade journals are sometimes indexed in databases such as the Trade and Industry Database, but many titles are not includedthere or elsewhere, or are indexed in sources which are not likely to be familiar to academic and practicing engineers.
The electronic versions of these trade journals, which often include additional information to the print runs, are often not indexed anywhere.
And yet, the contents of trade journals can be extremely important for engineers.
Even in the case of the scholarly e-journals, many titles are not indexed in the traditional databases.
There is, therefore, potential for EEVL to provide easier access to such resources in the form of a full-text index to engineering e-journals.
In a similar area, EEVL is investigating the possibility of providing a forum for publishers of e-journals to announce new issues.
This has been tentatively entitled the Engineering E-Journal Issue Tracking Service (EEJITS), an acronym which may raise a smile on the faces of users north of the border.
The need for such a service is plain from the frustration some editors experience when sending details of new issues to announcing services which will only post each URL once.
or which refuse regular postings from the same source.
Recent contact with the Young Engineers Clubs [11] prompted EEVL to consider what more might be done to encourage potential or young engineers to visit the EEVL site.
There is no point in duplicating the contents of the Young Engineers Clubs excellent website, which amongst other things points to resources of particular interest to schoolchildren who are considering a career in engineering, but currently under discussion within EEVL is the possibility of making available some articles or other material of a general nature about engineering as a discipline and career.
One of the first services to be made available through EEVL was the Engineering Newsgroup Archive [12], a search system which queries a 40 day archive of news articles from Engineering newsgroups.
EEVL is considering expanding this service to include messages sent to engineering mailing lists.
A link to the Engineering Resources on the Internet: A bibliography [13] which lists books, journals, articles, and regular columns about engineering resources on the Internet was recently added from the EEVL home-page.
Although a very minor feature, the bibliography was visited several hundred times within a week, and its initial popularity suggests that perhaps EEVL should consider providing more information about printed engineering material.
Of course, a certain amount of this is already available through the Offshore Engineering Information Service [14], which lists publications and meetings dealing with a number of offshore engineering subjects.
EEVL is investigating whether to expand coverage perhaps provide lists of books on other engineering topics, or even links to publishers and retailers of engineering books.
Within a few months EEVL hopes to make available courseware in the form of a web-based guide to finding engineering resources on the Internet.
EEVL is also considering the development of various customised services.
These may perhaps include an alerting service which will inform registrants, by email, about new Internet resources in particular subject areas, and may even include, in the longer term, a database of experts in various engineering fields.
Not all of the ideas described above will, necessarily, come to fruition, but hopefully enough will reach the ‘production line’ to help EEVL further develop its services.
Already, the statistics appear to show that the split of use between EEVL’s main database and the additional services is running at around 50-50.
Work continues on the main database, new resources are constantly being added to it, and older records are regularly updated, but from the above, who is to say whether that main service, or the additional services, is likely to become the lesser of the two EEVLs?
What EEVL believes, however, is that each complements the other and that they go together to provide a useful gateway to engineering resources.
References [1] EEVL (Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library) http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ [2] Recent Advances in Manufacturing database http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ram/index.html [3] Jet Impingement Database http://www.eevl.ac.uk/jet/index.html [4] Liquid Crystal Database http://www.eevl.ac.uk/lcd/index.html [5] UK Engineering Search Engine http://www.eevl.ac.uk/uksearch.html [6] Index Morganagus http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/morganagus/ [7] Chemistry & Industry Magazine http://ci.mond.org/home.html [8] Underwater Contractor Magazine http://www.resort-guide.co.uk/subsea/ [9] Hot Echo: the Journal of the Scottish Software Community http://www.hotecho.org/ [10] Dotelectronics http://www.dotelectronics.co.uk/ [11] Young Engineers Clubs http://www.youngeng.org/ [12] Engineering Newsgroup Archive http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/nwi [13] Engineering Resources on the Internet: A bibliography http://www.eevl.ac.uk/bibliog.html [14] Offshore Engineering Information Service http://www.eevl.ac.uk/offshore Author details Roddy MacLeod Senior Faculty Librarian Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh EH14 4AS Phone: (0131) 451 3576 Fax: (0131) 451 3164 Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk URL: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/libram/roddy.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: The Natural History Museum Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: The Natural History Museum Buzz database dissemination infrastructure metadata digitisation copyright preservation multimedia cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir takes in megabytes of trilobites at the Natural History Museum.
Based in Kensington, London, the Natural History Museum [1] is housed in a building of palatial size and architecture.
The museum houses one of the largest collections of naturallyoccurring objects in the world, its holdings running to 68 million objects, a collection so large that less than a tenth of one percent is on display at any one time.
Every conceivable type of animal, plant and mineral is represented, as well as a surprisingly large collection of books, art (one of the largest collections of art on paper in the UK), journals and other literature.
I spoke to Ray Lester, the Head of Library and Information Services (formerly Librarian at the London Business School), and Neil Thomson, Head of Systems and Central Services, about the current philosophy behind the network and information infrastructure in the museum.
A massive task in organising information access within the museum is currently underway.
“The various departments of the museum have tended to work autonomously when it comes to information provision” remarks Lester.
“The first and main task of Information Services is strategic coordination of information across the museum, so that the needs of the museum’s staff, as well as its users, can be met efficiently.” A major problem for Information Services is how to structure an information system to allow for the retrieval of all relevant objects in all departments.
For example, an inquirer looking for information on an extinct bird, say, may be interested in textual descriptions, sketchings, and a replica all held by the museum, though in different departments.
A unified search across all object types and instances is required.
This is clearly a challenge for those currently engaged in metadata research although the absence of an eLib-type programme for the museum world means that, inevitably, progress is slow.
At present, each department within the museum has its own idiosyncratic database.
Investment is now being made in a single massive database management system to provide for the whole museum.
This system will have image recognition facilities, as well as the ability to store multi-dimensional information about objects, allowing sophisticated searching even across time periods.
The museum’s Web master is David Polly.
The Web pages are proving to be popular, with some 25,000 to 30,000 different IP accesses every month.
These accesses come from all over the world, with a significant proportion from the US.
The server is connected to JANET through Imperial College [2] (hence the ‘ac.uk’ in the site’s Internet address).
A connection to SuperJanet [3], coming soon, will greatly assist in providing network-based services to the outside world.
“A Web site for a national museum has obvious potential” states Polly.
“Multimedia can be used to show samples of the exhibits in a number of ways.
Currently, the site contains a large and diverse collection of material, including a virtual reality section which lets users manipulate fossilised trilobites tiny marine invertebrates of the Palaeozoic era.
The potential is difficult to imagine.
At present, we haven’t even scratched the surface.” Most of the staff of the museum now have Web access, though it is unclear how many of them have the resources to answer external queries.
Several maintain their own network-based resources (I was introduced to a mailing list for palaeontologists, by way of example).
The development of a Web-based service, and other remote services such as enquiries by e-mail, bring into the open the issue of funding and charging for access to information.
The appeal of networked services based on the museum’s resources is easy to imagine.
Classes of children from all over the country, recently wired up in their schools, could easily provide the museum with a long shopping list of network services, in addition to those currently being developed.
But these must be paid for.
In a situation in which the museum has to raise an increasing amount of its own funding, the provision of value-added Webbased information services at a cost is clearly something which the museum must consider.
Dissemination of the museum’s objects and collections in multimedia representation also has potential commercial value.
The museum’s management is currently reviewing its options in these areas.
A tour of departments revealed many different applications of IT to the collections.
The Botany Department has a large holding of highly detailed drawings and paintings of plants.
These images are currently being transferred to CD-ROM, a process which suits the aim of preservation as well as dissemination, since the original objects do not have to be handled so often, and a ‘fresh’ copy of the image can be permanently kept.
It is hoped that these images, and those of the manuscripts, may be made available over the network.
But the museum is concerned about its copyright in the images, and is reluctant to release them to the Internet until secure methods of protection have been implemented.
It all adds up to a set of demanding challenges for Ray Lester and his team.
“Elib [4] is tremendously relevant to our work here” he remarks.
“The big issues for eLib digitisation, copyright, access and commercialisation are at the heart of our concerns.
A national museum like this one must put preservation foremost.
But we can also act as an important Net content provider.” References Natural History Museum Web Site, http://www.nhm.ac.uk/ Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, http://www.ic.ac.uk/ SuperJANET Web-based Information, http://www.ja.net/SuperJANET/SuperJANET.html eLib Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Author Details John Kirriemuir Information Officer, UKOLN, Email: lisjwk@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 826354 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Are They Being Served?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Are They Being Served?
Buzz data software framework database infrastructure cataloguing licence authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Lynne Brindley, Chair of JISC's new committee on electronic information, writes on the fundamental issue of networked information user's needs.
Preparing to write this article, I sought inspiration in the form of a recurring question.
How can we improve our knowledge of users and their use of networked information services?
What should we be doing to develop our understanding in the context of emerging digital library developments?
And how might we make progress?
My starting point came from a recent reading of the executive summary of the TULIP project final report.
The goal of the project was jointly to test systems for the networked delivery of journals to the user’s desktop, and the use of those journals.
Some 43 Elsevier and Pergamon materials science and engineering journals were provided in electronic form, and delivered to workstations.
The objective of the user behaviour research was to obtain specific feedback about TULIP from end users to guide future developments for delivering journal information to the desktop.
In addition, insights were sought on the user requirements for electronic services to be attractive and valuable, both from the content provider’s side, and from the infrastructure provider’s side.
The findings are very clear and unsurprising.
The end user’s definition of convenience includes an intuitive and familiar interface, access to all information from one source, high processing and publishing speed, good image text quality, sufficient journal and time coverage, and linking of information.
Most users considered the coverage (in terms of titles and in time) of the journals in the project to be insufficient.
This required them to search additional information elsewhere, which was considered time-consuming and redundant, contributing to increased inconvenience.
One of the main conclusions was that users will only move to electronic publications when they find the content they need in sufficient quantity.
Having journals in electronic form and bringing them to the desktop are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the scholarly user.
You must deliver a certain critical mass of needed information to warrant learning a new system or accessing information in a different way.
We encountered a similar reaction here at the London School of Economics when meeting with departmental representatives who had volunteered to assist in a similar user behaviour study for a European Union funded research project, Decomate, which aims to deliver some 70 core economics journals from Elsevier to the desktop.
The general concept underlying the project was well received, but considerable concern was expressed at the lack of electronic backruns and the lack of integration with catalogues and subject bibliographies, such as Econlit and The International Bibliography of Social Sciences, which are commonly searched electronic entry point tools to this journal material.
Other complaints related to the speed of downloading and printing, and the timeliness (or otherwise) of information.
In particular there was disappointment that the anticipated advantage of more timely availability of information through electronic versions is at present a far cry from the actuality of a phototypesetting-driven, image-based process.
These two examples were salutary reminders of the need to look much more carefully at the relationship between different electronic services, and how best to integrate them with the broader approaches to information seeking, for them actually to be of sustained use to researchers and students.
This means thinking much more widely than the individual publisher level.
Valuable as the UK national pilot site licence initiative is, the very idea that in the long term, electronic journals deriving solely from a single publisher is the best approach from the user perspective, is to misunderstand or to be ignorant of user needs.
And the expectation that they will hop from one publisher server to another is simply unrealistic.
A more productive starting point would be to ask our academic colleagues to list their most regularly consulted journals and to see how best they might be electronically clustered, interlinked, and integrated with a range of associated traditional and electronic information services.
Perhaps the eLib Superjournal project approach to user evaluation will take us further?
At least here we start in a promising way with a consortium of publishers and journals clustering around discipline areas, and including at least 30% of the most frequently cited journals in each discipline grouping.
You may argue about the value of citations and impact factors, but as a first proxy in a research project for usefulness to students and academics, arguably it beats the single publisher approach hands down.
Of course our knowledge of user requirements of electronic journals is bound to be rudimentary at this stage of development, but we have an opportunity to do better than we have in the past with printed journals.
It has always been a source of professional embarrassment to me that serials, the most costly non-staff area of library expenditure, has received so much emotional and so little analytical attention in our libraries.
Even methodologies for deselection are generally suspect.
Peter Stone, formerly of the University of Sussex Library, rigorously defends its track record as a leader in use-driven and user-based decision making in collection management.
But the work done at Sussex is fairly exceptional, and by and large academic libraries know little of the ways in which users seek information and integrate it into their research and teaching.
The situation is made more complex by the plethora of new electronic options.
There are also new tensions.
In policy terms an open Web philosophy encourages and enables access, an 'all you can eat' approach, equivalent to our traditional open access browsing collections.
Detailed authentication controls, on the other hand, which would enable the collection of 'micro use' data, can seriously inhibit beneficial and widespread use of networked information services.
Users' preference for anonymity, coupled with widespread and unrestrained access to networked services, pose real potential problems to the researcher.
Within JISC a very clear and successful policy for dataset provision has been established through a model service, free at the point of use, which has enabled every higher education institution in the UK to obtain unlimited access to a range of data files for a flat subscription.
The success rate is easily measurable and there are inexorable increases in use as each new academic year rolls on.
And so we obtain justifiable requests for increasing hardware, storage, and extensions to user licence arrangements.
But have you ever really wondered what academics and students are really doing with this information?
What is its real impact?
Pioneering work in this field has been done by Harry East.
His 1995 report for the British Library on the development of access to database services in British universities contains, for example, a wealth of data on BIDS/ISI use.
There are tantalizing interview survey quotes, frequency of use data, broad reasons for use, document follow-up activities, information on linkages to home library’s holdings, hints about the inadequacy of subject coverage, comments on the US bias, glimpses of the uses made of abstracts, and other fascinating data.
All this is excellent and I believe that we should build on this work in a systematic manner, for example to examine carefully differences at discipline and sub-discipline level, and to see how use of such databases fit with the changing information seeking behaviour of students and academics.
It does of course raise questions about the development of appropriate methodologies for this kind of evaluation and the need to consider a long-term programme of 'market research', given that shifts and comparisons over time are always more valuable than any single exercise.
Peter Stone argues cogently that there are good lessons to be learnt from more traditional book and collection use assessment methods, and he has persuaded me that TV and radio audience research methods could usefully be applied to JISC-funded information services as well as local database and catalogue services.
These approaches might be complemented by data collected automatically from service providers (at the aggregate level) and subject and institutional survey approaches to enable a balance to be struck between the global quantitative data and the richness of personal qualitative assessments.
The specific question of non-use is a most interesting one in the context of JISC-funded information services.
The overall use and traffic growth figures indicate huge success, yet we can only speculate about what percentage of the potential user population is actually reached.
NISS, for example, has some 200,000 accesses per day.
Assuming an average of four accesses per session, and one user session every other day, this equates to around 100,000 individual users, or 8% of the potential target population.
Similar calculations can be done for dataset and network software services.
These figures are suggested, not in any negative way, but to propose that it is timely to construct a more systematic framework for use and user behaviour assessments so that JISC and others can see, at a level of complexity, the impact and relative benefits of its services, including the equality of take-up across UK universities.
From this can flow a more informed assessment of inhibiting factors (technological, cultural and organisational) and of appropriate pricing structures and their potential impact on use and non-use.
This would provide a baseline for exploring at the institutional level a range of complementary issues linkages between information strategies, operational policies, and the quality of information skills training and its integration into the curriculum all affecting the take-up of campus and national information services.
Through these musings I would like to make a plea for bringing the user of networked information services to centre stage.
As Chairman of JISC’s new committee on electronic information I will give priority to the development of this more analytical and holistic approach to the evaluation of use and user behaviour.
We are already doing this type of full evaluation at the JISC programme level, and we should now develop it further, with Harry East and others, for our services.
There is a danger otherwise that we might be opening up an increasing range of services with precious little understanding of the frustrations they will cause users, their true economic costs, and costs to users in lost time, or thwarted ways of working.
This is a shared responsibility the effectiveness of national services is inextricably linked with the effectiveness of any local campus information policy and its management and service delivery.
I hope you will wish as information professionals to engage with this new range of challenges in partnership with JISC, and as another element in the development of a better trained cadre of information specialists and information managers in higher education.
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The Katharine Sharp Review Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Katharine Sharp Review Buzz browser graphics rtf ascii ftp research Citation BibTex RIS Kevin Ward, the editor of the Katherine Sharp Review, gives an overview of the first two years of this major journal for Librarians, and looks to its future.
I would like to think that library and information science education is preparing students for employment as traditional librarians, information professionals, or even future LIS educators.
In each of these areas there is a call for publication as a requirement for tenure or promotion, or perhaps even as a requirement for attaining the position.
Thus it would be of some importance if the student has had some sort of experience with the procedures and expectations before arriving in the workplace or interview.
Unfortunately, the lack of exposure of students to the publication process makes it more difficult for them to have their work published and can create anxieties between both authors and editors when it does come time to submit a manuscript to a publisher.
It was to provide exposure to this overall process that the Katharine Sharp Review (http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/review/) was established.
History and Process The Review began in the spring of 1995 to provide a showcase for student research in library and information science and also to promote student interaction regarding their research interests.
As a student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I was curious about the type of work and ideas other students were pursuing.
Certainly there were opportunities to discuss current papers with classmates at the school, but I actually wanted to see what their finished work was like, and I wanted to view that of students from other schools as well.
The Review was established based on the following goals: to provide an outlet for student papers to encourage students to share their work by submitting their papers to provide an opportunity for students to undergo the peer-review process as authors to provide an opportunity for students to take part in the peer-review process as reviewers Each of these goals is meant to expose both the student author and reviewer to the process and expectations of scholarly publishing, and to do so within a solely electronic environment.
It is important that students keep pace with technological progress as it is becoming the backbone to much that takes place within academia and the public and private workplace, and since there has been great movement towards conducting scholarly communication and peer-review via e-mail, this would be a good opportunity to take part in such a process.
Submissions are solicited on an ongoing basis throughout the year but emphasis is placed on receiving papers by specific deadlines in December and May.
I originally desired to publish papers year round on a rolling basis as they were received, but after recounting my own experiences as a student, and after input from various classmates, I realized that deadlines and bi-annual issues would most likely result in better submission rates.
Judging by the percentage of submissions that are received with two days of the deadline, this appears to have been a valid assumption.
Submissions must arrive via some type of machine-readable media.
However, papers are received in a variety of formats.
I receive diskettes, email attachments of a variety of word processor formats, plain ASCII files in email, ftp, etc., and each of these can also vary between PC or MAC.
Since I maintain all of the Review files on a combination of PC and Unix systems, I convert the MAC files, and indeed all files are eventually converted to ASCII for circulation among the reviewers.
On the occasions when there are graphics integrated in the paper, images, figures, and tables which are not able to be represented in ASCII are pulled from the documents and stored separately.
These images are then mounted on the website so that the reviewers can refer to the images from the paper.
It may not be the most efficient means by which to review a paper, but it does solve many of the cross-platform difficulties that would arise if I were to send out copies of the paper as word-processor formatted documents.
To aid in attaining a purely electronic review process, reviewers are required to posses both email and a browser, preferably graphical, such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Submissions are then distributed to a subset of reviewers, who have been broken down into groups based on their subject interests.
Each submission is sent to between three and five reviewers.
The paragraphs of each of the papers are numbered so that the reviewers can then address their comments to a particular paragraph since page numbers are irrelevant in this electronic environment.
The paragraph numbering also assists me when I am compiling comments to return to the author.
Instead of having to wade through comments inserted throughout the body of an entire paper, the comments I receive are already arranged by paragraph and thus easy to compile.
The author then receives these comments referenced to a numbered copy of his or her paper which is also returned.
When considering the potential variations of word processor packages and the different platforms that may be available to the reviewers (i.e., PC, Mac, Unix), selecting the lowest common denominator, ASCII via email instead of WordPerfect or RTF by attachment, has proven to be a successful means of conducting the review process through purely electronic means.
In only one case up to this point has an author not possessed an email account, so the return of comments to the authors has also been quite efficient, and inexpensive, via this method.
Difficulties: Authors and Deadlines Across Boundaries of Time and Location Two major difficulties have arisen regarding the acquisition of submissions: the potential author base is turning over constantly; and the publication schedule is based primarily on the academic calendar of the U. S. With many North American LIS programs, a typical student may take between one and two years to complete all requirements for graduation from the program.
This rate of turnover makes promoting the Review and the solicitation of submissions a continuous struggle.
Potential authors need to be made aware of the journal on a constant basis to improve the odds that a potential author might be reached.
In order to meet the demands of reaching an ever-changing pool of potential authors, it has been necessary to encourage faculty to mention the journal to their students.
Now that the Review has published three issues, this seems to be happening on a wider scale.
Often I will receive submissions or at least queries from potential authors who mention that the Review was brought to their attention by a faculty member.
As the Review matures and grows, I hope this becomes more of a trend.
The schedule of deadlines for the Review did not really occur to me until it was brought to my attention by a faculty member of a U.K. institution.
With the academic calendar of the U.S. as the basis for the deadlines, it appears that submissions are due during the worst possible time for U.K. students (and potentially for Continental or other students as well).
Unfortunately, I have not really formulated a solution for this other than promoting the fact that papers will be accepted at any time and not just at the deadlines.
As the Review becomes more known to faculty outside of North America, I hope that this will help generate more submissions from that sector of the student population.
And yet this is a problem which I most desperately want to solve as I think it is important for students to share each others interests and research, not only amongst themselves in their own programs but also between programs in various nations.
Through lurking, and occasionally participating, in listservs such as LISSPS and LIS-LINK, I have been amazed at the differences that exist between the LIS curriculum of the U.S. and the U.K.
These two distinct methods stress different elements of the LIS discipline (these different approaches are even apparent between various institutions) and different overall pedagogy.
To foster greater understanding of LIS, the curriculum, and the problems facing graduating students, the Review and the mentioned LIS-related listservs can go a great distance to promoting cultural and scholarly exchange amongst students.
Looking Forward In the span of the past three issues, the Review has received 41 papers and published 15, and these have been circulated among a total of 60 reviewers.
I do not consider the numbers to be poor however small of a percentage of actual students it represents and expect that in time the number of submissions will increase.
However, the Review will always be faced with the matters of soliciting submissions from an ever-changing student population, and encouraging those current populations that the publication process is a learning experience and an excellent focal point for sharing learning.
The Review is meeting the goals established at its conception and for this I am much encouraged that a prosperous future lies ahead.
Perhaps in time other features might be integrated into the Review, such as point-counterpoint, or reviews of current literature, but for the time being it is important to stress those goals on which the Review was born.
There is much that can be done in education to equip graduates to meet the demands of the contemporary workplace, whatever that may be, and I hope that the Katharine Sharp Review is preparing those for whom the publication process may be a means to acquiring a position or as a means for promotion.
I would especially like to thank Dean Leigh Estabrook and the faculty of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for their support, as well as the countless students, professors, and those who are interested in what the Review is trying to achieve, for their countless comments, suggestions, and praise.
It is an evolving project that relies on the whole of LIS education.
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Interface: Les Carr Interview Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: Les Carr Interview Buzz data framework database archives browser hypertext research Citation BibTex RIS Steve Hitchcock and Les Carr of the Open Journal Project link up with Ian Budden.
Hypertext links in cyberspace are the subject of fascinating research being undertaken by Steve Hitchcock and Les Carr at Southampton University [2].
They have been funded by [3] to explore, in the Open Journal Project, the use of links within the context of electronic scholarly journals.
This work builds upon work being undertaken by the same team in a separate project, the Distributed Link Service (DLS) [4] .
This is creating a system which separates the link data from the document and stores it in link databases or 'linkbases'.
Sets of links can then be selected from the database and overlaid on the document being viewed.
Les Carr, Project Manager, explained how this technology was being applied in the Open Journal Project.
Storing documents and databases of hypertext links separately until the user combines them allows the user to choose different sets of links to appear in any one document.
Hitchcock calls it 'link publishing at runtime'.
To show me how this works, they pointed a Web browser at an interface to the Distributed Link Service maintained at Southampton and Nottingham Universities.
This allows the user to combine linkbases with other Web files, choosing the levels of links required.
For example, a user may choose to apply a linkbase specific to a certain page, (which is the usual choice) or a 'context' linkbase which sets up links appropriate to a certain subject.
Pages then displayed will contain hypertext links inserted 'on the fly' from the particular linkbase or bases chosen.
Watching this happen was simply stunning.
First, Hitchcock and Carr ran some 'normal' pages in Web browser.
Pages were displayed with as few or as many links as they had in their 'native state'.
They then asked the DLS server to apply some linkbases and viewed the pages again.
Documents which had had few or no links in them previously now positively sprouted with them.
For example, a page about computing that had been set to display using a context linkbase relevant to UNIX now contained many links to pages elsewhere providing information about UNIX terms.
The same document would display a totally different set of links if it was loaded using a context linkbase of terms relevant to, say, cognitive sciences.
Carr described the way the project aims to take a collection of archives of journal articles (both from the 'core journals' upon which a particular Open Journal is based, and related journals) and possibly of other electronic sources.
These are then integrated by means of hypertext links.
The information in any particular journal article is linked to all other information in the collection to which it is related by means of a linkbase.
In this way, a journal is 'opened' out.
Again, a demonstration brought this to life.
Displaying an article from one of the experimental journal archives with the relevant linkbase switched on showed words defined as keywords relevant to that subject area highlighted as links.
Clicking on one of the links delivered other pages containing the word within the collection of resources encompassed by this particular 'Open Journal'.
As Hitchcock and Carr recognise, the process of deciding which words should be defined as links is one that requires careful work.
In Carr's words, "a link is not just an instruction to jump to another location, but an expression of a relationship between two documents".
We discussed the advantages of this approach.
First, separating hypertext links into discrete databases aids the process of maintaining and updating them.
Second, it allows one link to point to several documents there are different display options to make it clear to the user that this is happening.
Third, as described above, it enables different links to be superimposed on the same document in different situations.
Carr speaks of 'information re-use'.
"You can publish things used in one context one day, in another context another day".
As Hitchcock explains, it functions as a direct way of giving people access to related documents.
Searching using a Web search engine would be an alternative approach, but the link service gives direct access to related documents rather than requiring users to go down a Yahoo-style hierarchy [5].
"The link server tries to project that information into the document you're reading at the moment".
In addition, the Open Journal Project, by linking the text, or at least the abstracts, of many documents from different sources, and by making a document available on-screen from a click within another document, tackles what Hitchcock describes as "the traditional library's lack of integration".
Many categories of related material can not only be displayed in one place, but they can be displayed fast (or, at least, as fast as the Web allows).
"Quality matters, yes, but speed does as well," commented Carr.
"You can follow these things through with almost zero cost in terms of time."
Hitchcock, who came to the project from a background in publishing, illustrates the way in which Open Journals is wider than just an electronic journals project.
The intention is for it to "act as a framework for on-line publishing".
Linkbases can be published as quality products, with the links being guaranteed as relevant and reliable.
"The value added element is contained in the links."
Publishers might choose to maintain some linkbases as subscription products, particularly those relevant to their existing publishing interests.
This is an exciting project.
"The single distinctive thing about the Web is links," said Carr.
"A link service is at the heart of what it is all about."
Watching the processes of integrating Web documents with linkbases, and of moving between the different pages within an Open Journal framework, bring out the potential of the Web in a way that is truly astonishing.
References [1] Open Journals Project, http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/  [2] Southampton University Web site, http://www.soton.ac.uk/  [3] eLib (Electronic Libraries Programme) Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/  [4] Distributed Link Service details, http://wwwcosm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dls/dls.html  [5] Yahoo UK Web Site, http://www.yahoo.ac.uk/  Interviewee Details Dr. Les Carr is the Project manager, while Steve Hitchcock is a programmer, on the Open Journals project.
Email: lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk and sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk respectively.
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From the Trenches: HTML, Which Version?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From the Trenches: HTML, Which Version?
Buzz data software html usability tei browser sgml dtd hypertext multimedia latex ascii url standards Citation BibTex RIS In From the Trenches, a regular column which delves into the more technical aspects of networking and the World Wide Web, Jon Knight, programmer and a member of the ROADS team, takes a look at the causes of good and bad HTML and explains what tags we should be marking up Web pages with.
Most people concerned with Electronic Libraries have by now marked up a document in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), even if its only their home page.
HTML provides an easy means of adding functionality such as distributed hyperlinking and insertion of multimedia objects into documents.
Done well, HTML provides access to information over a wide variety of platforms using many different browsers accessing servers via all manners of network connections.
However, it is also possible to do HTML badly.
Badly done HTML may tie a document down to a particular browser or hardware platform.
It may make documents useless over slow network connections.
As the Electronic Libraries programme is concerned with empowering people by giving them easy access to information via the Net, deciding what is and is not bad HTML and then avoiding using it is obviously something many librarians and library systems staff will currently be grappling with.
This article aims to provide an informal overview of some of the issues surrounding good HTML markup and hopefully highlights some resources that may be of use in helping to improve the markup used in Electronic Library services.
The versions available Before looking at what may constitute good and bad HTML markup, let us first review the wide variety of HTML versions available.
There are currently only two versions of HTML that are on the Internet standards track; HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.0.
All other versions are bastardised, vendor specific extensions to one of these open, non-proprietary versions.
There is a version of HTML prior to HTML 2.0 known, unsurprisingly as HTML 1.0.
It provides the basic hyperlinking and anchors that make HTML a hypertext markup language and some elements for highlighting text in a variety of ways.
HTML 1.0 provides us with a lowest common denominator of all the different versions.
If you mark a document up to the HTML 1.0 specification then the chances are that more or less every browser will do something vaguely sensible with it and so the information will be conveyed to the user intact.
However HTML 1.0 was an informal specification that was never entered as part of the Internet standards process and its use is somewhat depreciated today.
One problem with HTML 1.0 is that it only offers a way to present basic textual information to a user; the means of getting feedback from the user are very limited.
HTML 2.0 helps to overcome this problem by providing the document author with the FORMs capability.
The mark up tags allow you to embed forms with text input boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and many of the other features that are common in user interfaces.
These forms can be interspersed with tags from HTML 1.0 to provide additional functionality to a FORMs document and also to provide some for of access to the available data to non-HTML 2.0 compliant browsers.
However such browsers are few and far between these days.
HTML 2.0 is thus regarded by many as the base level of HTML to code to if you wish to reach the largest population of browsers and still have reasonable document presentation.
The latest version of HTML, HTML3.0, is still really under development.
HTML 3.0 addresses the lack of detailed presentation control in the previous two versions with the introduction of style sheets and tables.
The specification for HTML 3.0 also includes a mathematics markup that was very reminiscent of that provided with LaTeX.
As HTML 3.0 is still under development, no browsers can claim to be fully compliant with the standard, although many of the more recent browsers have added some of the core HTML 3.0 elements to their own HTML 2.0 base.
Vendors also add their own proprietary tags to the core, standard HTML specifications.
These tags are often presentation oriented or make some use of a feature peculiar to that vendor's browser.
The most well known commercial browser is currently the Netscape Navigator, versions of which estimates have placed at anywhere between 50% and 90% of the total browser population.
It adds many presentational tags that are widely used in many documents proporting to be HTML.
Reading one of these "Netscaped" documents on another browser can result in anything from a slight loss of visual attractiveness to a completely unreadable (and therefore unusable) document.
Some document authors are so intent on trying to use these Netscapisms that they even place a link to the Netscape distribution site on the Net so that those not blessed with Netscape can download it to view the author's documents.
Things are only set to get worse with the entry of Microsoft and IBM into the fray.
It is in part the fact that browser authors add extra tags from one version of the HTML standard to a core from an earlier version and make up their own proprietary elements that causes some of the problems experienced by users.
This is compounded by the fact that as the markup gets more complicated the opportunity for bugs to creep into different browsers increases.
The result is that we have browsers and documents that all claim to be HTML when in fact many of them are not.
To make matters even worse, many people don't specify which version of HTML a document is marked up in or even validate their documents to check that they match one of the specifications (known as a Document Type Definition or DTD).
Many browsers are very tolerant of the markup that they receive which in some ways is a good thing as it means that the end user is likely to see something even if the document's author has made a complete mess out of marking up the document.
This has probably helped contribute to the Web's rapid growth as people perceive it to be relatively easily to add markup to documents and get working results.
Unfortunately the flip side is that we are left with a Web full of poorly marked up documents not conforming to any of the standards, even the vendor specific extensions.
HTML Markup In Electronic Libraries Electronic Libraries are in the business of providing information to their patrons via the network.
The version of HTML markup used will therefore depend upon what they are trying to achieve and who their patrons are.
If a service is only to be made available on a single site and that site only uses a single vendor's browser then of course the library is free to use whatever vendor specific HTML extensions it chooses.
For example, if a service is only to be used within a site where all the users have Netscape Navigator v2.0, the Library can make use of blinking text with multiple fonts and frames, knowing that all its users will see much the same thing that the author did.
One point to note however is if the documents are intended to be very long lived the use of proprietary markup might render the upgrade process to the "next great browser" much harder than it would be if the documents were encoded using HTML 1.0 or 2.0.
For documents with long life cycles (in computing terms, long is more than five years!)
the library should really investigate the use of a more content oriented SGML markup such as TEI and then generate documents conforming to a specific HTML version from that.
However, if the service being provided will be used by patrons with many different browsers, it may be worthwhile sacrificing browser specific bells and whistles in favour of a more generic markup using the standard HTML DTDs.
All though the result may not look as "pretty" as one using a vendor's proprietary tags, the chances are that it also will not look a complete mess when viewed on another browser.
HTML 2.0 contains enough functionality that it can be used in most information provision situations.
A library after all should be providing useful, high quality information resources to all comers and not trying to compete with ad agencies for "cool site of the week" awards.
The are some things that all sites should do however.
The first of these is to include a line at the top of every document that they serve that specifies the DTD in use.
This is rarely done and even this author admits to having written a large number of documents with no indication as to which version of HTML they conform to.
To make this information easy for browsers to process there is a standard markup for it which is actually part of the SGML mechanism upon which all the standard HTML versions are based.
An example of this "DOCTYPE" line for an HTML 2.0 document is: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> The next thing that Electronic Library document authors can do to help raise the quality of HTML markup in use on the Web is to validate their documents against the appropriate DTDs.
Originally this was a tedious and difficult thing to do which might explain why it is rarely done.
However today there are a number HTML editors available that will prevent the generation of invalid HTML, some browsers (such as Arena) indicate when they receive invalid markup and there are also a number of online validation sites such as Halsoft's HTML Validation Service that this article has been checked with.
The latter are particularly useful as they usually have a range of up to date DTDs for a variety HTML versions and can be used without the need to buy or install any new software on your machines.
The validation is done using HTML 2.0 FORMs into which either fragments of HTML can be entered to be checked or URLs for entire documents can be specified.
When you give such a service a URL for one of your documents, the program that processes the FORM will retrieve the document from your server, validate it against the requested DTD and then return a list of any errors to you.
One neat trick with the online validation services is that you can often insert a small piece of HTML markup at the end of all of you documents that mimics the action of the service's form, allowing you to quickly validate a document by just clicking on a "validate me" button at the end of the document.
Having such a button present may also encourage your users to try validating you documents.
This will both help you spot accidental errors on your part if you make a change that invalidates the HTML but you forget to validate it and also "spread the word" about the practice of validating your HTML.
As well as generating valid HTML with an appropriate DTD, an Electronic Library service must also consider how its patrons will be accessing its documents.
If they are all on a campus sitting at workstations and high end PCs with graphical browsers and high speed network links then the inclusion of inlined images in documents will present little problem.
However, if they are accessing your service over slow international or dial up links, inlined images can be a pain.
Nothing is more annoying to a network user than finding that a potentially useful page is full of inlined images and little else.
If a document is to be widely available on the Web, the number of inlined images should be kept to a minimum and they should only be used for decoration or have their content replicated in textual links.
This is because most graphical browsers provide the option for the user to turn inlined images off which many dialup users take advantage of and it must also be remembered that there are still a large number of people using text based browsers such as lynx.
If the majority of a document's information content is only contained in the inlined images, it will be lost to these two classes of user.
Conclusions HTML is a great way of providing useful functionality to end users and has helped push the lowest common denominator up a little from pure plain ASCII text in many situations.
However, Electronic Library service providers must be aware that how they mark their documents up will affect their usability and thus usefulness to the end user.
Proprietary vendor extensions are best avoided for widely used services, documents should include an indication of which HTML DTD they conform to and some form of validation should be performed.
Public services should also avoid heavy use of inlined images to carry information content as it alienates users on slow links and non-graphical browsers.
If services take some of these simple approaches to marking up documents in HTML for delivery via the Web, we will have fewer users complaining able unreadable or slow links.
Electronic Libraries have the opportunity to become show cases of good HTML markup and high quality information provision.
Let's not miss that chance.
[Ed: this article has been validated at HTML 2, which is why it looks marginally different to other articles, in terms of style, in Ariadne.]
Author details Jon Knight (J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk), Dept.
of Computer Studies, Loughborough University of Technology.
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OMNI-Corner: Read All about It Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI-Corner: Read All about It Buzz archives research Citation BibTex RIS OMNI's Sue Welsh looks at the sites which keep you up to date in health and medicine.
One of the most common criticism of the World Wide Web is that much of the information published on it is ephemeral.
However, ephemeral isn’t always a bad thing; the World Wide Web has become the ideal place to keep abreast of breaking news stories.
The recent General Election on the UK, for example, was the first to really use the World Wide Web as a tool for disseminating campaign information and keeping up to date with analysis and the latest polls, as well as for discussion and publishing electronic manifestos.
In general, large news corporations have really arrived on the Web now, some appearing considerably behind others (ABC having just launched is ABCNews site, for instance).
Not all of these sites are geared up to help users searching for information on medical or health topics.
The rest of this article highlights the sites that are offering services to this sector and looks at some alternative ways of catching up with the news.
The Big Corporations ReutersHealth [1] Full marks go to ReutersHealth for this excellent service.
Approximately ten key stories are highlighted every day and information for the professional is clearly separated from information aimed at health consumers.
The archive is searchable so access to any stories from the last few months is easily obtained, and searches may be narrowed to a variety of categories (ethics, pharmaceutical, etc.).
Reuters have also called on the service of some eminent physicians to compile case reports for their “Clinical Challenge” feature.
CNN CNN also offer a specialised health section, this time as part of their general news service “CNN Interactive” [2].
The style is inevitably more popular, but there is still a separate section aimed at the consumer, including patient advice from CNN’s Better Health Network and a health and fitness magazine (part of “CNN Plus” [3]).
If you have access to CNN television channels, health related programmes are listed here.
CNN’s search engine searches the whole site, unfortunately with no opportunity to limit to stories in the health section.
ABC News [4] A late arrival, ABC News has some way to go before it challenges the established Reuters and CNN services to the health community.
Lumping health into a broad Sci/Tech section doesn’t help, and the search feature is not up and running yet.
Medical/Health Only Medscape News [5] Medscape is a high profile web service offering a variety of publishing services to the medical professions.
Their news service is based firmly around a newsfeed from Reuters and press releases from the major U.S. health organisations such as the FDA and the National Institutes of Health, and excepts from MMWR.
Newsfile [6] Firmly aimed at health professionals, this service offers partial access to news items from a series of weekly newsletters published by CW Henderson.
Access to back issues is on a subscription basis, so it is not possible to search the archive, but there are other useful features, such as a subject based events listing which covers some European conferences as well as U.S. meetings.
UK Newspapers Meanwhile, closer to home, the UK papers don’t offer much in the way of tailored access to health/medical news.
Worth a visit are: The Times [7] Although not offering special access to medicine a health specifically, the Times does allow you to set up a profile of your interests.
This is a simple process, involving choosing which sections of the paper you wish your information to be in and specifying some appropriate keywords.
The Telegraph [8] Consumer health appears in the Health section of etcetera (the Telegraph’s online magazine) and there is also a Science section which occasionally contains items on research, again aimed at the lay person.
The Electronic Telegraphs search engine searches the whole archive, but has a nifty feature allowing users to locate similar articles once they have found one of interest.
Scientific Press Many key print titles have translated well into web resources; these include Nature [9], New Scientist [10], the BMJ [11], and many others.
Although they are updated less often than the news services mentioned above (as often as the print publication comes out, typically weekly or monthly), they may provide a more in depth analysis for the scientist or clinician.
If all else fails…..
This guide is, of course, by no means comprehensive.
There are many other sources of news on the Web; I have not mentioned newsgroups and email lists, for example, or the many services which concentrate on a single disease or other narrow area, such as Outbreak [12] or the Centres for Disease Control AIDS summaries [13].
Try searching OMNI for quality sites in your subject area.
References Reuters Health Web Site, http://www.reutershealth.com/ CNN Health Section, http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/index.html CNN Plus, http://cnnplus.cnn.com/consumer/health/index.html ABC Science and Technology Web pages, http://www.abcnews.com/sections/scitech/ Medscape News, http://www.medscape.com/home/News/Medscape-News.html Newsfile Web Site, http://www.newsfile.com/ The Times Web Site, http://www.the-times.co.uk/ The telegraph Web Site, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Nature Web Site, http://www.nature.com/ New Scientist Web Site, http://www.newscientist.com/ British Medical Journal, http://www.bmj.com/ Outbreak Virus Alert Web site, http://www.outbreak.org/ Centre for Disease Control AIDS summaries http://198.77.70.131/cdcnac/cgi/databases/news/adsdb.htm Author Details Sue Welsh Project officer, OMNI eLib project.
Email: swelsh@nimr.mrc.ac.uk Tel: 0181 959 3666 ext 2536 Web pages for OMNI: http://www.omni.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Lessons Learned from Developing and Delivering the BORGES Information Filtering Tool Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Lessons Learned from Developing and Delivering the BORGES Information Filtering Tool Buzz data java html database standardisation tagging vocabularies copyright passwords cache wordnet url research Citation BibTex RIS Alan Smeaton discusses the development and implementation of BORGES, an information filtering service for WWW pages and USENET news.
Although it may appear that it is only recently that we have discovered a need for automatic information filtering, the practice of automatically filtering a flow of information has been in use for over 30 years.
The emphasis in systems since the earliest days has been on the speed of the filtering operation, ensuring that it is performed as quickly as possible.
Because of the volume of information now being generated and the requirement to have this filtered, issues of quality or the relevance of information filtered for a user, are now becoming increasingly important.
The BORGES project was a research and development project which was partly funded by the European Commission under the Libraries program (project 3052) and ran from January 1995 to July 1996.
In BORGES we developed, implemented and evaluated an information filtering service for WWW pages and USENET news.
There is a difference between an information filtering service as developed in BORGES and keeping informed about site changes in WWW pages as described in Paul Hollands' recent article in Ariadne.
Infomration filtering matches profiles which are expressions of users' fixed information needs against a stream of documents such as USENET news or new or updated pages appearing on the web.
The topic addressed in Hollands' article is keeping informed about changes to web pages irrespective of their content and whether they may be of interest to a user.
What made BORGES different from other information filtering projects was that it was user-driven and developed within a library context as a service offered by a University library.
The filtering service was offered to a population of users at two University library sites (Dublin City University and Universität Autonoma de Barcelona) and feedback from users as well as log analysis of system use, was used to refine the BORGES system.
At the Dublin site the users were from a broad spectrum across all Faculties while in Barcelona the users mostly came from parts of the Arts Faculty.
The majority of users were not experienced internet users and would be classified as novices in that regard.
The role of Dublin City University in BORGES was to enhance the functionality of an early version of the information filtering system with some IR techniques which would improve the effectiveness of the service being offered.
This was to be done by building upon our previous experiences in experimental IR research and here we present how the results of incorporating our IR research into an operational information filtering system, worked out.
Unlike information retrieval where the entire document collection is available at query time and thus can be used to make statistical estimates of word occurrences, in information filtering we are querying "blind" because we are filtering a new stream of documents, not knowing term distributions except based on samples of previously filtered documents.
In BORGES, a number of documents to be filtered are gathered together, either by retrieval by our web robot from WWW sites or from a local USENET news server, and these are indexed by the SMART text retrieval system on a daily basis.
Once indexed, normally done overnight, each user profile in the system is used as a query to the newly-gathered database and the top-ranked WWW pages or news articles are used as a digest for that user profile for the next day.
In performing document ranking, SMART assigns each term in each user profile a weight or degree of importance based upon its statistical distribution throughout the corpus.
The first version of the BORGES filtering system was operational and made available to users in Dublin in October 1995 and BORGES was operational for less than one year overall.
The second version called BORGES V2, with our information retrieval enhancements, was operational in March 1996.
Essentially BORGES V2 retained the features introduced in the first version of the system, namely keyword matching between a user's profile or query and the text of USENET News articles or newly found WWW pages.
There were approximately 70 registered users of the system in Dublin, and a larger number of users at the Barcelona site.
BORGES users used the system via Netscape or some other WWW interface supporting the same HTML as Netscape 1.1.
Each user logged onto the system with their personal username and password and was taken to their personal welcome page.
A user is allowed to have any number of profiles or queries and each running of the filtertool (5 times per week normally) matched each profile against the incoming documents to be filtered.
In response to this, each profile generated a digest consisting of the top 50 ranked documents from any source (WWW page or USENET news article) which was also stored locally in the case of a news page.
This relatively infrequent batching of documents and running against profiles contrasts with the up-to-the-minute response times of other information filtering systems and is so because USENET news postings and new pages on WWW are not necessarily of immediate interest to our user community; knowing about them can wait until tomorrow.
The BORGES filtertool filters all postings to a set of newsgroups and we also have a set of WWW pages that we use to act as "seeds".
Every time the filtertool runs, each seed page is retrieved from the web and analysed.
Any HTML links from that seed page cause a second set of pages to be retrieved into the filtertool and this process is repeated once again, thus retrieving seeds, their "children" and "grandchildren".
In addition to using known, static seed pages such as "What's New" pages, since the start of the project we have also been able to add URL specifications which are actually search specifications broadcast to WWW search engines.
These are created manually and added to the list of WWW seeds in response to a user's profile.
So, if a user is interested in tennis and tennis championship results, one of our WWW seed pages might be a search to AltaVista or InfoSeek for WWW pages on "tennis+championship+result".
For each of the pages retrieved by our web robot, if the date of last modification of that page is more recent than the last running of the filtertool, then that web page is added to the cache of documents to be indexed and matched against all user profiles for all BORGES users.
In addition to web pages, all articles appearing in all newsgroups from a specified list are also filtered and treated, for indexing and filtering purposes, identically to web pages.
Initially we filtered over 900 newsgroups but found the sheer number of news articles was drowning the much more limited number of web pages being found and we reduced this number.
When a user logged in to BORGES, he/she could examine the sources of information being filtered (list of newsgroups and WWW seed pages) and is also presented with a list of their profile names.
From there a user could view a summary (top 5) of the 50-document digests for each profile, for each day's filtering going back up to 10 days, as shown in Figure 1.
This would be done if the user had not logged on to BORGES for some time.
The alternative for a regular BORGES user would be to view today's digests, a top-5 summary of the best-matched articles for each of the user's profile Figure 1: Personal Digest Screen Figure 2 shows a sample user modification of a profile, although this could also be the creation of a new profile as the interface is the same.
The profile is called "Information Retrieval" and consists of 6 terms.
Each of these is actually a phrase rather than a word, as indicated by the "_" character linking the words.
By inputting "information_retrieval" as a phrase, this phrase is added to the BORGES phrasal database and for subsequent filtering operations, that phrase, and all phrases in the phrasal database, is identified in documents if it occurs.
Thus the user is allowed to augment the single-term vocabulary with multi-word phrases (up to 6 words) of their own definition.
In addition to the phrase "information_retrieval" being a searchable indexing term, constituent words of phrases, the words "information" and "retrieval" in this case, are also searched for in document texts.
The highest score is given to documents with "information_retrieval", then to documents with the terms "information" and "retrieval" both occurring, then to documents with either, and so on.
As we use SMART as the underlying text matching engine, this is done by automatically assigning term weights based on term occurrence frequencies.
Figure 2: Profile Input / Modification Screen The handling of phrases is something that has been introduced in V2 of BORGES but there are other features that V2 adds.
The most important of these is the manual disambiguation of polysemous query terms/phrases in users' profiles and the user-transparent expansion of profile terms.
In BORGES V2 we ask the user to disambiguate any profile terms that have more than one possible semantic interpretation in WordNet [Miller, 1995].
Figure 3 shows a sample disambiguation of the term "information" which, according to WordNet, can be a kind of message or subject matter, a formal accusation of a crime, or knowledge acquired through study or experience.
The user is requested to choose whichever of the offered senses apply to the profile in question.
If the user chooses none of the offered senses, that term is not expanded with related terms.
If the user chooses one or more interpretations, then for each interpretation the user profile is (transparently) expanded by adding in synonyms, "parents" and "children" terms from the hierarchy, albeit with smaller weights than on the original profile term.
The weights assigned to these term expansions depend on their relationship to the original profile term and have been determined empirically as part of our experiments in TREC-4 [Smeaton et al., 1996].
Figure 3: Disambiguating the Profile Term "Information" User's experiences of this disambiguation process have been positive as determined through questionnaires and interviews.
We have found that disambiguation of terms actually helps users in formulating their profiles and clarifying their information needs.
Profile expansion may also cause the retrieval of documents which would not contain any of the original profile terms but only their expansions and this this has not caused problems with users.
In fact we regard this as the "magic" Bruce Croft referred to in his recent article in D-Lib on the most important points for IR system developers to include in their systems [Croft, 1995].
The BORGES project is over and is no longer operational at either the Dublin or Barcelona sites and the interesting question is why not.
Involvement in a research and development project like BORGES leads to lessons learned and while some of these are the answers to scientific inquiries such as which IR techniques work best in terms of precision and recall for filtering applications, there are also lessons to be learned from providing and operating such a service.
A user-driven project where a service is deployed and its usage analysed generates experiences in both scientific and operational spheres.
Our first point to note is that our users' expectations from BORGES were high but BORGES V2 is not a high precision filtering tool.
It sweeps through a broad spectrum of newsgroups and WWW pages, often filtering as many as 27,000 articles in one day, and with such high numbers it is inevitable that there will be more junk than relevant information filtered for a user.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the signal to noise ratio in USENET News is very low, it is a low quality information source compared to Reuters newswire or articles from an on-line newspaper.
These factors left our user population of internet novices more despondent than we would have liked and in retrospect we now see why this is so.
It would have been preferable to include more high-quality information sources into BORGES and for the low-quality information sources, to allow each user profile to selectively filter only portions of the total newsgroup set.
Doing this, however, is something that we would not expect the naïve user to do so the sourcing of information sources to be filtered could be part of the service offered by the library as part of BORGES filtering.
At the start of the project we anticipated including many advanced features of information retrieval into BORGES but the library partners, representing the user population, kept us firmly reined in.
There is no point incorporating any kind of advanced IR technique into BORGES when it overly complicates the user's model of how to use the system, unless the payback is a significant improvement in effectiveness.
Our user population represents the typical user population served by a University library and many of them were not internet-aware and certainly most were not familiar with the subtleties of using USENET News.
For us as developers it would have been very interesting to add user-controlled term weighting, relevance feedback, selective user-controlled query expansion, etc., to our operational system but most users simply did not want to know about these things even if they do improve the quality of articles filtered.
Our users want things kept simple, and that is what we did when making the query expansion transparent to them.
That is not to say that the more advanced information retrieval techniques are not useful to users, they are, but they would not necessarily have been of use to our users most of whom were first-time users of News and WWW.
It is clear that the progress in the BORGES project was overtaken by technical developments.
Developments such as the advent of Java applets, HTML standardisation and increased plug-ins becoming available, web based resource monitoring, VRML and the emergence of WWW search engines as well as the emergence of information sources to be filtered which have a more attractive signal/noise ration than USENET or WWW, have all contributed to changing the landscape in which the BORGES project operated.
If we were to start BORGES now, in late 1996, the implemented system would probably have to be very different in order to take these developments into account.
Much greater use would be made of the existing and much more exhaustive indexes on WWW and perhaps WWW pages would not be downloaded into BORGES for matching against profiles but AltaVista, Lycos or Infoseek or even a combination of these [Smeaton and Crimmins, 1997], would be used for this.
In BORGES we used SMART to build an inverted file for a cache of WWW and News articles in order to allow the user to use the "Try this profile now" button shown in Figure 2.
This facility was put in place to allow users to interactively refine their profiles by examining the output of profile changes in terms of the previous batch of filtered documents.
In practice the facility was hardly used by our users.
A much more appropriate system architecture for an information filtering service would build profiles and match incoming documents against all profiles treating the profiles as documents and the documents as queries.
Frequency distributions for terms in profiles could be gathered over time and such an architecture would allow a faster filtering operation.
New terms appearing in a user profile would initially be assigned high weights until their true frequencies of occurrence can be established.
The frequency distribution of such new terms has been shown to be estimable within a relatively small number of filtered documents [Callan, 1996] and the advantages of such an arrangement are that changes to user profiles take effect immediately the profiles are re-indexed (a computationally lightweight operation) and users can be informed about filtered documents as soon as they are retrieved into the filtering system rather than after the next batch run, i.e.
the filtering can be a continuous operation.
Finally, the role of the (University) library in an information filtering task remains important and we believe BORGES has shown this.
Unless the total information source is reduced and constrained in some way in order to improve the quality of information filtered for the user, the user will become disenchanted with the filtering service as has happened to some users in BORGES.
The need for an expert to help users formulate their profiles and to restrict the scope of their filtering operation for them so the signal to noise ratio is improved, is clear.
References [Callan, 1996] "Document Filtering with Inference Networks", J. Callan, in [SIGIR, 1996], pp262-269.
[Croft, 1995] " What Do People Want from Information Retrieval?
", W.B.
Croft, D-lib Magazine, November 1995, [Hollands, 1996] " Keeping Track of Changes to Web-Based Resources ", P Hollands, Ariadne Magazine, May 1996.
[Miller, 1995] "WordNet: A Lexical Database for English", G.A.
Miller, Communications of the ACM, 38(11), 3941, 1995.
[Smeaton et al., 1996] A.F.
Smeaton, F. Kelledy and R. O'Donnell, "Thresholding Postings Lists, Query Expansion by Word-Word Distances and POS Tagging of Spanish Texts", in Proceedings of TREC-4, D. Harman (Ed), NIST Special Publication, 1996.
[Smeaton and Crimmins, 1997] A.F.
Smeaton and F. Crimmons, "Using Data Fusion Techniques for Searching the WWW", submitted to WWW6 Conference, April 1997.
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AC/DC Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines AC/DC Buzz data software database apache archives cache dns gopher ftp url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dave Beckett and Neil Smith explain a search engine that only indexes sites in the .ac.uk domain.
WWW Crawlers Why A New One?
All the major WWW crawling programs such as Alta Vista (Digital), InfoSeek, Lycos, Webcrawler, Excite etc.
are based in the USA and collect their pages across the transatlantic link.
There are two problems with the USA based services: They index the whole world and can return resources that are not very relevant for the UK.
A UK-based system will index only UK sites, and should return local answers to the queries which may be more relevant to UK academics on JANET sites.
The UK-USA connection is very busy and will remain so and the use of the bandwidth by such services isn’t likely to help.
A UK-based system will be faster and can be more up to date.
We decided that an experimental WWW crawling project, initially covering UK academic sites, would be a good starting point to test the viability of such a system.
It should be collaborative and distributed to spread the work rather than depending on a single system.
Getting A WWW Crawler The commercial services mentioned above have in the most part evolved from US University research projects and the software they use to fetch, index and search WWW pages is commercial and therefore not available to a research project such as this.
The alternatives to using an existing commercial server are to either write your own (a considerable project in its own right) or to find an alternative free software version.
We chose to make use of the existing Harvest system developed at the University of Colorado.
Harvest The Harvest system runs on standard UNIX platforms and has two major components: Gatherers These fetch or gather the data from WWW, ftp and gopher sites as well as some USENET newsgroups.
The gathered data is then made available to the world.
Brokers Brokers are the indexing part of the system and they collect data from the gatherers, index them and provide a query interface via a standard WWW query form.
Harvest is not designed to operate as a large multi-site webcrawler.
It is meant for individual sites to gather and serve their indices locally via the brokers.
The collected data is then meant to be shared in a hierarchical fashion.
In this sense, it was appropriate for the collaborative project that we invisaged – the gatherering of all the WWW sites could be split among different institutions and the results collected at our site for the top level index.
Running A WWW crawler The WWW crawler makes use of earlier research on fetching site specific details for all the sites under .uk the top level domain for the UK.
This reads the DNS regularly and updates a database of domains.
These domains are then used to look for a WWW host in the domain using the common host name suffixes such as www.sitename.ac.uk.
If one is found, the top level WWW page of that host is retrieved and the TITLE tag used to get a short description of the organisation.
This work is the UK Internet Sites project and the URLs from it were used to provide a list of active .ac.uk WWW sites for the WWW crawler.
As described above, the Harvest gatherer is not intended to be a full multi-site WWW crawler and it needed a little controlling software to bend it to this purpose.
Since we would be crawling several hundred WWW sites, it was essential to make this work efficiently not index every site every time.
This software invokes the Harvest gatherer regularly with a few top level site URLs to merge them into the database.
The initial WWW crawl of the UK consisted of fetches of up to 50 URLs from the root of each of around 300 sites.
The crawling was further restricted in that it was prevented from going more than 2 levels “down” (the depth) from the root and was restricted to the single WWW site contacted.
Around 15,000 WWW pages were indexed in the first run.
Experience from this showed that the gathering needed careful configuration changes to ignore certain WWW pages that were of no use images, executable binaries, archive files, CGI scripts, proprietary document formats etc.
Once the configuration was more satisifactory a deeper and more extensive WWW crawl was started, taking up to 400 pages from each WWW site, up to a depth of 5 levels and up to 10 hosts at each WWW site.
This is still the core part of the indexing data.
As more URLs were added it became clear that the Harvest interface to the network was rather crude, so the outgoing calls were done via a private proxy cache.
We initially used the Harvest Cache system which is now a commercial product and have recently switched to the new free Squid cache software which is a development of the Harvest cache.
The cache system stores WWW pages so that they do not need to be re-fetched if they have not expired and can use the If-Modified-Since HTTP header which makes more efficient use of the network.
Querying the Index The Harvest brokers provide a query service using the Glimpse indexer by default.
This required a little configuration to make it return results in a sensible order, with best results, in some sense, first.
The output of the query also needed some formatting to present the results better this work is ongoing.
Since many of the queries are repeated, future work could involve caching them for this reason and to allow more later results to be viewed without a re-query.
Collaboration A posting was made on the uk.jips newsgroup about AC/DC inviting people to test AC/DC and collaborate with us.
As mentioned above, Harvest is designed to handle remote updates easily.
Within a few weeks several other sites had started using Harvest on their local and regional sites.
The data from these are merged into the AC/DC broker regularly.
Our experience of the work was shared with the collaborating sites via a mailing list mostly help in configuring the Harvest gatherers for this project.
As additional sites are added, the work done by the large AC/DC WWW crawler is being reduced.
This is done by removing the sites from the list of URLs used by AC/DC but also by forbidding the AC/DC gatherer from attempting access to the remote-collected sites.
Current state At present AC/DC indexes 175,000 WWW, gopher and news documents covering over 1,050 UK .ac.uk sites using 15 gatherers and brokers around the country.
The current organisation of the collaboration is shown in Figure 1: Figure 1: AC/DC Structure Future This is an experimental, research project and cannot be guaranteed to be running in the long term.
If the administrative and resource requirements are low, it would be nice to continue if there is sufficient interest in this project.
The index for the gathered data is getting rather large, around 200 Mbytes.
With the current indexer, this runs rather slowly and updating it too frequently causes problems.
It isn’t clear what the solution is to this maybe multiple brokers indexing at different times or a better indexing system.
There were rumors on a UK newsgroup that Alta Vista was starting a UK based service whether that was an outpost of the US service or a specific UK based one, we do not know.
Thanks Thanks to Tim Hopkins and Maggie Bowman of HENSA Unix for their comments and support in this work.
Thanks to the software developers who wrote the freely-available or free systems used in this project: Harvest, Perl5, Apache, Squid, GNU Emacs with PSGML and W3 modes, W3C Arena, …   Dave Beckett,D.J.Beckett@ukc.ac.uk University of Kent at Canterbury <URL:http://www.hensa.ac.uk/parallel/www/djb1.html> Neil G. Smith, N.G.Smith@unix.hensa.ac.uk HENSA Unix, University of Kent at Canterbury <URL:http://www.hensa.ac.uk/team/N.G.Smith.html> HENSA Unix and the authors are funded by JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils and this work was done as part of research for HENSA Unix.
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The Importance of Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS): The European Connection Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Importance of Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS): The European Connection Buzz data mobile software framework infrastructure copyright video multimedia research Citation BibTex RIS David Kay describes ACTS, the Advanced Communications Technologies and Services, a programme under the European Community 4th Framework Research & Technology Development Programme, consisting of around 120 projects.
ACTS is an acronym for Advanced Communications Technologies and Services, a programme under the European Community 4th Framework R &TD Programme (collaborative research and technology development in Europe).
ACTS is one of the biggest European R&TD investments with around 120 projects in place.
The DTI/EPSRC High Performance Interfaces & Protocols (HPIP) LINK programme is the complementary UK initiative.
In the words of the Commissions overview: "ACTS is part of a new agenda outlined in the European Union's White Paper on 'Growth, Competitiveness and Employment' aimed at making direct contribution to Europe's economic and social development.
ACTS will provide the framework for advanced research and development in the communications field.
ACTS will build on previous European Union R&D programmes, including RACE in telecommunications, giving the impetus for the implementation of the telecommunications needs of the information society.
The work in the ACTS framework will stimulate the development of Integrated Broadband Communications (IBC) in Europe, with all manner of communications voice and sound, still pictures and video images, data and text providing boundless opportunities for new users, services and employment.
The IBC network will link fixed and mobile communications in a seamless web.
Isolated 'islands' of IBC technology are already operating.
The challenge is to ensure that widespread IBC services are made available as soon as possible.
Everyone, everywhere in the Union should have access to a pan-European IBC network by the turn of the century."
With the development of pan-European IBC as a primary goal, ACTS projects necessarily include a cross section of network service providers (typically the major PTTs), equipment manufacturers (such as Alcatel), telecommunications experts and applications software developers supported by university researchers.
Projects work in six main areas of advanced communications (known as the ACTS domains): Interactive digital multimedia services Photonic Techniques High Speed Networking Mobility and personal communications networks Intelligence in networks and service engineering Quality, security and safety of communications services and systems The Domains of immediate interest to the E-Lib community are Interactive Digital Multimedia services and High Speed Networking for reasons described below.
A full description of the ACTS Programme and of each project is available in the ACTS '95 Report, available from DG XIII, Directorate B, ACTS Central Office, Tel.
+ 32 2 296 34 15, Fax.
+ 32 2 295 06 54, email: ACO@postman.dg13.cec.be; and on the World Wide Web: http://www.uk.infowin.org/ or http://www.ispo.cec.be Further information relevant to ACTS, and other programmes within the European Communities 4th Framework can be found on the UK National Host Office Web server at: http://www.ja.net/UKNationalHost/welcome.html ACTS & The Research & Library Communities In simple terms ACTS is coming from the bottom up focusing on the issues of deploying an Integrated Broadband Communications (IBC) infrastructure, whereas the Telematics & IT (Esprit) programmes within the 4th Framework (FP4) are driven from the user community downwards.
Nevertheless ACTS has distinguished itself from its predecessor (RACE) in its concern for user centred trials in applications areas capable of exploitation.
These will be of interest to the Library community for a number of reasons.
(1) Broadband Applications The future of telecommunications ACTS projects will establish the impact of broadband (a real superhighway) on sought after applications such as information brokerage (eg GAIA, OSM projects), teletraining & distance learning (eg RENAISSANCE, LEVERAGE), public information services (eg KIMSAC) and services to the home (eg MUSIST, AMUSE).
The local testbeds ('Broadband Islands'), National Host services and trans-European broadband connections made available within the programme provide a unique opportunity to forsee the potential and the issues relating to a future 'Superhighway' made up of heterogeneous technologies such as ATM, Cable (CATV) and ISDN connected to local services (both to LANS and the home).
(2) Interactive Multimedia The future of document delivery The ACTS programme is specifically focused on multimedia services involving the delivery of interactive audio-visual (AV) 'streams' such as realtime video, music and virtual worlds.
This represents a facet of 'next generation' on-demand document delivery services that is typically outside the experience of programmes such as E-Lib, JTAP & FP4 Telematics.
ACTS research in this area is closely linked to the emergent DAVIC & TINA-C standards arising from the telecommunications and broadcast sectors as well as equivalent approaches in the Internet community.
(3) Information Brokerage The future of libraries In the 2nd Call (1996) the programme has contracted a number of projects in Information Brokerage.
These will be investigating aspects of the Search, Locate, Request, Delivery cycle pertinent to the E-Lib Document delivery projects (such as EDDIS & Infobike) and to the MODELS framework.
The ACTS programme is particularly concerned with the development of standards in this area which address the necessarily heterogeneous nature of a global network of service suppliers, brokers and clients as opposed to the development of end-to-end branded supply models.
It is notable that the GAIA project will be including standards and experiences from the library domain in this work.
(4) Recognition of Libraries The ACTS programme has set up a substantial 'horizontal' concertation mechanism to draw together 'Chains' of expertise across projects on key issues.
Some of these chains may produce insights of general value for developers of wide area services.
It is notable that the General Applications Cultural (GAC) chain will focus on implementation issues in Museums and Libraries.
Furthermore the recent call for ideas for ACTS 2000 (the 5th Framework) included recognition that libraries may evolve into a rich area for broadband service deployment.
There is clearly much to be gained by all parties if the library and the ACTS communities can synchronise their ideas, their needs and their dreams through the current programme.
The best starting place from a library viewpoint may be those ACTS projects such as GAIA that deal with the generic architectures for the digital supply chain.
Fretwell-Downing lead the GAIA project.
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Web Access for the Disabled: ASK Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Access for the Disabled: ASK Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Cathy Murtha describes a simple, but effective, library enquiry system, of use to disabled and non-disabled people.
The Wallace Library [1], located at the Rochester Institute of Technology [2] , has optimized its use of the web through the use of its e-mail system, called ASK [3].
Although they limit their services to their own community, they do provide an invaluable service to their faculty, staff and student body.
Public libraries could also provide such services.
Whether the services are offered to a local community, or the world, the disabled could benefit greatly by such a service.
The Wallace Library offers its ASK service to the RIT community.
ASK allows questions to be posed to the library staff.
whether it be a phone number, publisher’s address, or a source for information, the staff at Wallace is available to answer the questions.
The system is accessed through the campus on-line system or via the Internet.
ASK has its own e-mail address which is checked several times a day.
One might think that such a service would be abused and overwhelm the librarians who are responsible for the service, but it seems that just the opposite is true.
According to Linda Coppola of the reference department at the Wallace Library, the ASK system receives only 1 or 2 requests per day which are easily handled by the librarians on staff.
The questions are answered within 24 hours (not including weekends and holidays).
If the question is too complicated for a single e-mail, the patron is referred to an appropriate research assistant in the library.
Each member of the Wallace Library reference staff has a subject specialization, so the patron is referred to the appropriate staff member for further assistance.
ASK receives very few requests for information from outside of their service area, Coppola feels this may be due to the disclaimer they have posted on their web site.
Any requests that may filter in from beyond their service area are responded to with a post informing the individual that the service is limited to the RIT community.
The ASK service is complimented by a “center for the visually impaired” within the library.
This center offers equipment for reading and listening to materials that are available at the library.
Talking book players and an Arkenstone scanner offer access to materials that would, otherwise, be inaccessible to the blind and visually impaired.
These services, if offered by public libraries, could greatly benefit the disabled community.
Simple questions, which might otherwise take hours of research on the net, or special transportation arrangements to reach the library, could be answered via e-mail.
Appointments for research assistance could be arranged for a time when a librarian would be available to assist a patron.
Public libraries have only begun to tap the potential that lay at their fingertips.
It is through programs such as ASK that the disabled community can be brought into the mainstream of library patronage.
References The Wallace Library in the Rochester Institute of Technology http://wally.rit.edu/ The Rochester Institute of Technology http://www.rit.edu/ Guidelines for using ASK http://wally.rit.edu/pubs/guides/electref.html Author Details Cathy Murtha is interested in Web Access for the disabled, and has a set of Web pages on these issues.
Email: mist@pumpkin.cdepot.net Web Pages: http://www2.cdepot.net/~mist/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Displaying SGML Documents on the World Wide Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Displaying SGML Documents on the World Wide Web Buzz data software html database standardisation browser copyright sgml dtd hypertext latex jpeg ascii gif perl ftp authentication url standards Citation BibTex RIS David Houghton discusses a method by which documents marked up using Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) can be used to generate a database for use in conjunction with the World Wide Web.
This article discusses a method by which documents marked up using Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) can be used to generate a database for use in conjunction with the World Wide Web.
The tools discussed in this article and those that were used in experiments are all public domain or shareware packages.
This demonstrates that the power and flexibilty of SGML can be utilised by the Internet community at little or no cost.
The motivation for this work stems from the lack of standardisation on display techniques for SGML presentation.
Background Ever since the World Wide Web came into being in the early 1990's, the SGML community have become excited about the possibility of realising the potential of such a markup method on a global scale.
The concept of an SGML WWW browser became a real possibility.
SGML was suddenly recognised as being the parent of the concept of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and as such it could be used to develop the next generation of Web browsers.
Sadly, the initial enthusiasm of the SGML community has been dampened by the software industry's failure to pick up on the concept of SGML use, despite the efforts of such people as C. M. Sperberg-McQueen and Robert F. Goldstein [1].
The reasons for this failure are disputable but include the key concepts of SGML presentation techniques.
The lack of a suitable standard in this area has lead to SGML product manufacturers developing their own methods of presentation.
As far as standardisation of HTML is concerned, the dominance of the Netscape WWW browser has complicated this issue.
Given this state of affairs, how can SGML users harness the power of the Internet and the flexibility of their data ?
The solutions presented in this report relate to the use of public domain and shareware products to provide a mechanism of using SGML-based documents in a WWW environment.
There are no doubt many commercial alternatives, but as we shall discuss shortly the method of presentation of SGML presents the major problem.
Presentation issues for SGML Those companies and institutes who use SGML on a regular basis will no doubt be aware of the issue of presentation.
Unlike other markup methods such as LaTeX and Word, SGML documents themselves have little or no presentation markup information.
This is because they are written using the concept of logical markup rather than presentation.
SGML emphasises the structure of the document rather than how it appears.
This makes it possible to construct documents that are independent of the system for representing the document.
For those readers who are not familiar with this principle it is suggested that references [3] and [5] should be consulted.
SGML's power lies in the fact that logical documents can be manipulated and used in a wide range of applications such as databases, without the overheads that relate to presentation aspects.
So how are SGML documents presented ?
There is essentially no easy answer to this as the method of presentation will depend on the software product used to 'view' the documents.
There are at present a whole range of products from an ever-increasing number of vendors that attempt to provide a easy to use and flexible presentation method.
The list of public and commercial products provided in [6] illustrate the huge range of packages available.
The reader will soon discover that the common element of all these packages is the lack of standardisation on presentation method.
In order to overcome this lack of standardisation, a great deal of effort has gone into producing ISO/IEC DIS 1017.92 Document Style Semantics Specification Language (DSSSL).Unfortunately at the time of writing, no software manufacturer has implemented this standard.
The pragmatic approach taken in this report is to accept the lack of presentation standard and to accept that products such as Netscape provide sufficient flexibilty to provide an 'acceptable' viewing platform.
Of course, Netscape uses HTML as its markup language and includes vendor specific features.
This fact too will require some digestion.
Background for this study The motivation for this study has arisen from work carried out as part of the Electronic SGML Applications (ELSA) [14] project at the IIELR, De Montfort University.
The ELSA project is concerned with the investigation of the use of SGML as a method of delivering scientific journal articles for use in an electronic library environment.
The SGML articles were provided by Elsevier Science.
The work carried out for the ELSA project was intended to demonstrate that an on-line journal article service could be set up easily and efficiently.
A prototype system using HTML versions of the SGML articles was set up as described in the following sections.
The primary goal of the prototype system was to assess the user interface and to gain valuable information on the users' reaction to such a system.
The details The problem of converting documents marked up in SGML into some form of HTML has been solved by numerous methods.
In essence, the DSSSL standard mentioned above, when implemented, may remove the necessity of even this step as DSSSL includes a transformation process (SGML Tree Transformation Process STTP).
This study uses the Copenhagen SGML Tool (CoST), a publically available product developed by several people and available from [8].
The methods of conversion we have used in this study are based on the use of UNIX as the operating platform.
This is because the majority of public domain products used in the study are only available for UNIX, and because the processing power associated with computers running UNIX is required for dealing with large numbers of documents.
The CoST converter CoST (Copenhagen SGML Tool) is a structured controlled SGML application programming tool that uses TCL (Tool Command Language) as the programming language and the SGMLS SGML parser written by James Clark.
Details of this converter can been found in the accompanying documentation of [8].
CoST enables the user to 'map' SGML elements and entities to a corresponding target markup format.
The target format need not be SGML but can be any format that can be written in an ASCII format.
The example in Appendix 1 shows how CoST can be used to translate SGML into LaTeX.
Using CoST it has been possible to map a given DTD into a corresponding HTML equivalent.
It should be pointed out at this point that the limitations of HTML for presentation markup require compromises to be made and lead inevitably to a reduction in 'richness'.
The transformation process cannot be a 1 to 1 mapping for the majority of DTDs and so acceptable compromises must be sought.
Appendix 2 shows a sample of the CoST conversion mapping.
Having made the SGML to HTML conversion, there are a number of other factors that now need to be addressed.
The presentatation method of some SGML viewers require that such features as external figures or pictures be treated in a particular way.
Some viewers require figures to be treated as external entities that need defining in the DTD while others use the <LINK> feature of SGML.
It should be born in mind that the original SGML document may have features in them that HTML browsers cannot handle.
It is therefore recommended that HTML should be studied in detail before any SGML transformation process be undertaken.
Additional HTML browser features such as the use of BASE REF and BGCOLOR will need to be added to the target HTML by using UNIX scripts.
Translating the images Image formats that are supported in Netscape include GIF and JPEG.
If the source images are not in this format then it will be necessary to perform conversions.
If the amount of data is large, a UNIX script will be required and tools such as convert from ImageMagick will need to be employed.
Appendix 3 shows a sample of such a UNIX conversion script.
Often it will be necessary to change the size of images and/or make the images transparent.
Again a UNIX script is ideal for this and an example of image size conversion is illustrated in Appendix 3.
The database Once information has been transformed to HTML, the majority of users will require a new database system to be set up.
SGML data may well be structured in the form of a database that uses the SGML fields.
Although HTML will be used for presenting documents, there is no reason why the original SGML database cannot be used as long as it is accessible from the WWW.
Proprietary database systems may present a problem of access and so a new database may require setting up.
A typical SGML database is described in Appendix 4 and involves several thousand journal articles.
The articles are arrange in directories that relate to the specific journals that they are associated with.
Each journal is associated with a subject area.
No attempt has been made to cross reference material in this database.
Journals that appear in more than one subject area appear to be duplicated via the use of UNIX symbolic links.
The WWW and Internet communities have adopted a number of database technologies; amongst them FreeWAIS-SF [9] stands out as being the most powerful and flexible.
Other database systems exist that may be of more use to the reader.
These include Glimpse [10], ICE [11] and Harvest [12].
This study used the freeWAIS-SF package on a DEC Alpha OSF platform which allowed the database to be indexed and queried via a client-server architecture.
The actual techniques adopted are discussed in [9] and an example indexing and query set are shown in Appendix 5.
The user interface The user interface to the system described in this study is a set of HTML front end pages that enable users to browse and assemble queries.
The input data from the query page is converted by a CGI script to interface with the database search mechanism in use.
In order to provide a HTML front end page for the HTML documents, the kidofwais.pl Perl script written by Mike Grady [13] was modified so as to provide support for HTML forms.
Users enter information into this search form, and the parameters for the search are extracted and sent to the server in the form of a WAIS query command.
The ability to browse the database is provided by a subject area selection page and a journal list page.
The latter allows the user to select information via a journal cover thumbnail image or an articles image.
The thumbnail is linked to the journal information held on the journal home server while the the articles image is linked to a list of known articles in the current database for that specific journal.
The front end pages for browsing and searching are shown in Appendix 6.
The results A test bed of 5000 SGML files has been set up on a Digital Alpha Workstation and indexed using FreeWAIS.
Access to this database is via a HTML form that allows users to browse and search.
Although the database is potentially available to the WWW user community, access is restricted by the use of the htaccess mechanism [15] to the De Montfort University domain user base.
The freeWAIS search engine is sufficiently fast for local use although response times across the Internet are , of course, unpredictable as network congestion needs to be considered.
However, this is a matter which is outside the scope of this project.
Complex search queries are still not possible with FreeWAIS, but boolean algebra is supported and provides sufficient functionality to make the system useful.
In order to evaluate the system a questionaire has been designed and will be used on-line in trials on the university campus-wide network.
The system will provide a method of delivery of online electronic journals texts originally marked up in SGML using the publically available Elsevier 2.0.3 DTD.
Conclusions The study has shown that by using public domain software it is possible to provide a powerful and useful database system that allows full text search and retrieval.
Whilst the data has been transformed from SGML into its HTML equivalent form and hence lost an element of its 'richness', it has been converted into a form that is more accessible by a larger community.
It is worth noting that by attracting a larger audience the cost of production remains constant while circulation has effectively and significantly increased.
Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Elsevier Science for its support and permission to reproduce for this study extracts of its set of scientific journals provided to De Montfort University via its collaboration in Project ELSA.
The author is also eternally grateful to the support and understanding of his fellow employees Owen Williams and Anil Sharma for their help in setting up the experiments mentioned in this report.
The author would also like to thank the people who have dedicated long hours to the production of the publicly available software packages that have been used in this project.
References C. M. Sperberg-McQueen and Robert Goldstein.
HTML to the Max : A Manifesto for Adding SGML Intelligence to the World-Wide Web, http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/Autools/sperbergmcqueen/sperber g.html Berners-Lee, Tim, and Daniel Connolly.
Hypertext Markup Language: A Representation of Textual Information and Meta information for Retrieval and Interchange.
(Draft, expired 14 January 1994.)
ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation).
ISO 8879-1986 (E).
Information processing -Text and Office Systems -Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML).
First edition -1986-10-15.
[Geneva]: ISO, 1986.
Schatz, Bruce R., and Joseph B. Hardin.
NCSA Mosaic and the World Wide Web: Global Hypermedia Protocols for the Internet.
Science 265 (12 August 1994): 895-901.
SoftQuad SGML Primer.
http://www.sq.com/sgmlinfo/primbody.html Robin Cover's SGML page.
http://www.sil.org/sgml/sgml.html Document Style Semantics Specification Language (DSSSL) Lite standard, ISO/IEC DIS 1017.92, ISO, Paris (1995).
Copenhagen SGML Tool, ftp://ftp.crl.com/users/ro/jenglish/costB4.tar.Z Ulrich Pfeifer.
FreeWAIS Edition 0.4 for freeWAIS-sf 1.2 June 1995 Glimpse, http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/infosys/indexe rs/glimpse/ghindex.html ICE, http://www.informatik.th-darmstadt.de/ neuss/ice/ice.html Harvest, http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/ Mike Grady.
kidowais.pl, contact m-grady@uiuc.edu Project ELSA, http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/lib-link.html Mosaic User Authentication Tutorial, http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs1.5/tutorials/user.html Appendix 1 : TCL spec for SGML to LaTeX element ART { start{puts stdout "\\ documentstyle\{article\}\\ begin\{document\}"} end {puts stdout "\\ end\{document\}"} } element TITLE { start {puts stdout "\\ begin\{center\}\{\\ LARGE \\ bf" } end {puts stdout "\}\\ end\{center\}"} } element PAR { start {puts stdout "\\ vspace\{0.25in\}" } } element REF { start {puts stdout "\{\\ it" } end {puts stdout "\}\\ \\ " } } element ADDRESS { start { puts stdout "\{\\ it" } end { puts stdout "\}" } } element SECTION { start { puts stdout "\{\\ section*\{" } end { puts stdout "\}" } } Appendix 2 : TCL spec for Elsevier DTD to HTML element ATL { start {puts "<H1>" } end {puts "</H1><P>"} } element IT { start { puts stdout "<A>" } end { puts stdout "</A>" } } element P { start { puts stdout "<P>" } } element BB { end { puts stdout "<BR>" } } element BIBL { start { puts stdout "<P><H2>Bibliography</H2><BR><ADDRESS>" } } element AU { start { puts stdout "<H2>" } end { puts stdout "</H2>" } } element SNM { start { puts stdout " " } } element COR { start { puts stdout "<BR><ADDRESS>" } end { puts stdout "</ADDRESS><BR>" } } element AFF { start { puts stdout "<BR><H3>Affiliation</H3><ADDRESS>" } end { puts stdout "</ADDRESS><BR>" } } element RV { start { puts stdout " "} } element ABS { start { puts stdout "<BR><H3>Abstract</H3> <ADDRESS> " } end { puts stdout "</ADDRESS>"} } element BDY { } element BF { start { puts stdout "<B>" } end { puts stdout "</B>" } } element ST { start { puts stdout "<BR><H3>" } end { puts stdout "</H3><BR>" } } element KWDG { start { puts stdout "<BR><H4>Keywords : </H4>" } } element KWD { start { puts stdout " " } } element SUP { start { puts stdout "\^" } } element TBL { start { if {[attrValue ID]=="table_1"} { puts stdout "<IMG SRC=table_1.gif>" } } } element FIG { start { if {[isImplicit ID]} { puts stdout "No Fig ID" } else { if {[attrValue ID]=="1"} { puts stdout "<IMG SRC=fig1.gif>" } if {[attrValue ID]=="2"} { puts stdout "<IMG SRC=fig2.gif>" } if {[attrValue ID]=="scheme_1"} { puts stdout "<IMG SRC=scheme_1.gif>" } } } end { puts stdout "<P>" } } SDATA { case $data in { {&tilde;} {set out \~} {&lt;} {set out \{lt\}} {&szlig;} {set out \{szlig\}} {&deg;} {set out \{deg\}} {&minus;} {set out -} {&quot;} {set out \"} {&macr;} {set out \^} {&pi;} {set out \{pi\} } {&int;} {set out \{int\}} {&rho;} {set out \{rho\}} {&lambda;} {set out \{lambda\}} {&mu;} {set out \{mu\}} {&beta;} {set out \{beta\}} {&alpha;} {set out \{alpha\}} {&gamma;} {set out \{gamma\}} {&prop;} {set out \{prop\}} {&prime;} {set out \{prime\}} {&times;} {set out *} {&plusmn;} {set out \{plusmn\}} {&ndash;} {set out -} {&bull;} {set out \{bull\}} {&cir;} {set out \{cir\}} {&amp;} {set out \& } {&squ;} {set out \{squ\}} default {set out ? }
} puts stdout $out nonewline } Appendix 3 : UNIX script used to convert images #!/bin/ksh set -x TOP=/connect/mail/djh/elsevier/data PATH=$PATH:/connect/mail/djh JOURNALS="jpms ns cs corel infman lrp aca mlblue" for journal in $JOURNALS do cd $TOP/$journal for article in * do cd $TOP/$journal/$article for tif in *.tif do file=${tif%*.tif} if [ !
-f ${file}.gif ] then convert -geometry 600 -colors 2 tif:${file}.tif \ tif:${file}.new.tif convert -interlace LINE tif:${file}.new.tif \ gif:${file}.gif giftrans -t 1 ${file}.gif > ${file}.tmp.gif rm -f ${file}.new.tif mv ${file}.tmp.gif ${file}.gif fi done done done Appendix 4 : Database directory structure The above diagram shows the hierarchy of directories for the experimental SGML/HTML database.
The SA numbers reflect a Subject Area division defined by the data authors.
The fourth column represents the Journal ID codes, for example, cs could be Computer Science.
Each article is uniquely defined by an article ID number which is used to name the corresponding HTML file.
Appendix 5 : Typical freeWAIS-SF indexing and query Indexing using freeWAIS-SF cat listoffiles | waisindex -t URL /usr/local/elsa/public_html / http://www.elsa.dmu.ac.uk/~elsa -d / /elsa3/elsa-waisindex/GASS -t fields / -stdin where listoffiles is something of the format /usr/local/elsa/public_html/GASS/aca/00016451/00016451.html /usr/local/elsa/public_html/GASS/aca/00016452/00016452.html /usr/local/elsa/public_html/GASS/aca/00016453/00016453.html Where waisindex -t URL Basically, means that we are dealing with HTML documents to be served on the WWW.
With this, you need to specify the bit to chop off the file path, and the bit to add to the file path, in order to make the URL to the document as follows :/usr/local/elsa/public_html is the bit to chop off http://www.elsa.dmu.ac.uk/~elsa -d is the bit to add /elsa3/elsa-waisindex/GASS Is the directory and filename in which to create the index ie, in dir /elsa3/elsa-waisindex/ create GASS.fmt GASS etc.
-t fields Means that you are creating an index with fields in it.
Without this you don't need the GASS.fmt file <the one with the region: and so forth in> -stdin Take the list of files from stdin, instead of as command line arguments.
Querying using freeWAIS-SF freeWAIS-SF gate is VERY customizable and can be set up to do all sorts of interesting things.
The Search HTML source code for GASS is provided in Appendix 6.
When compiling SFgate, you must give it an application direrctory something like elsa/public_html SFgate.
This is where the things like header and footers are to be kept.
If you want headers and footers, then you add the tag <INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="application" VALUE="FILEPREFIX" > FILEPREFIX GASS would tell SFgate to insert the header and footer GASS_header and GASS_footer from the application dir (compiled in to be /usr/local/elsa/public_html/SFgate).
The maxhits is set to 40.
The database is used to specify the database to use.
local/GASS means use the local GASS database.
the locate data base file is compiled in to be /elsa3/elsa-waisindex/ SFgate can also be use to search databases over the WWW.
The hidden is used so it doen't show up as a button.
A menu could be used to select different databases to be searched.
With SFgate, you can either have a text field that is dedicated solely to doing one type of search (eg, and author search) or you can tell it that it that the text field is of a specified list.
We needed the second, more complex, way .... <INPUT SIZE=35 NAME="fieldsel\_0\_content"> <SELECT NAME="fieldsel\_0\_name"> <OPTION VALUE="ke" SELECTED>Keyword <OPTION VALUE="ti">Title <OPTION VALUE="au">Author <OPTION VALUE="ab">Abstract <OPTION VALUE="bi">Bibliographic <OPTION VALUE="text">Default </SELECT> As you can see, there are 2 parts to it, the text field <INPUT SIZE=35 NAME="fieldsel_0_content"> and the selecter <SELECT NAME="fieldsel_0_name"> To bind the two together, both have to have the identical prefix, here being fieldsel_0_.
(also note that fieldsel_0_ is the value given to the group_1 at from earlier) content is the word that you will be looking for, name is the name of the database field that will be looked in.
ke, ti and soforth are the database fields, as specified in the GASS.fmt file, which is used during indexing.
<SELECT NAME="group\_2\_tie"> <OPTION VALUE="or" SELECTED>OR <OPTION VALUE="and">AND Bascially, this links the first field of the index, to the second, linking its self to the second field search with group_2_tie -> group2 -> fieldsel_1 (name of the second field) Appendix 6 : HTML Browse and Search pages <HEAD> <TITLE>Search the Elsa GASS Collection</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFE6C9"> <BASE REF=""> <H2><IMG SRC="/~elsa/images/tree.gif" ALIGN=MIDDLE> Search the GASS Database</H2> <P> <FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="/cgi-bin/GASStest.pl"> <B>Search Term 1:</B> <INPUT NAME="term1" SIZE="40"> <SELECT NAME="op1"> <OPTION VALUE="AND">AND <OPTION VALUE="OR">OR </SELECT> <BR> <B>Search Term 2:</B> <INPUT NAME="term2" SIZE="40"> <SELECT NAME="op2"> <OPTION VALUE="AND">AND <OPTION VALUE="OR">OR </SELECT> <BR> <B>Search Term 3: </B> <INPUT NAME="term3" SIZE="40"> <P> <B>Maximum Number Of Hits: </B> <INPUT NAME="MaximumHits" SIZE="3" VALUE=60> <P> <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="Submit Query"> <INPUT TYPE="RESET" VALUE="Reset Form"> <P><HR> </FORM> The <I>Elsa GASS Database</I> can be searched using the interface shown above.
In order to search the database, search terms can be entered into any of the <I>Search Term Boxes</I> provided.
A search term consists of any word the user wishes to search for.<P> By using the <I>Boolean Operators</I>, <B>AND</B> and <B>OR</B>, the user can restrict or broaden their query so as to recieve as much useful information as they require.
<P> As well as providing support for Boolean Searches, the Elsa GASS Search interface also provides support for <B>Right-hand truncation </B>.
This feature allows a user to enter a search term, such as '<I>astro*</I>' and the search will return documents containing the words '<I>astrophysics</I>' and '<I>astronomy</I>'.
The Right-hand truncation operator is the asterisk (<B>*</B>).
<P> <A HREF="/~elsa/GASS/Search/help.html"><B>Example searches</B></A> can be found, by following this link.<P> <HR> This page is maintained by <A HREF=http://www.elsa.dmu.ac.uk/~djh> D.Houghton</A>, and it was last modified on Apr 12, 1996.<p> <HR> <A HREF ="/~elsa/GASS/Search"> <IMG SRC="/~elsa/Search.gif" ALT="[Search]"></A> <A HREF ="/~elsa/GASS/TheJournals"> <IMG SRC="/~elsa/elsa-brws.gif" ALT="[Browse]"></A> <A HREF ="/~elsa/GASS"> <IMG SRC="/~elsa/elsa-back.gif" ALT="[Home]"></A> <A HREF ="/~djh/ELSA/research/feedback.html"> <IMG SRC="/~elsa/elsa-fdbk.gif" ALT="[Feedback]"></A> <A HREF = "/~elsa/GASScopyright.html"> <IMG SRC="/~elsa/copyright.gif" ALT="[Copyright]"></A> </BODY> <HTML><HEAD> <TITLE>Browse the ELSA Database</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H2><IMG SRC=/~elsa/images/tree.gif" ALIGN=MIDDLE"> Browse the ELSA Database</H2> <P> <HR SIZE=5> <H3>Areas</H3> <UL> <LI> <A HREF=/~elsa/TheJournals/SA0/">Multidiscipline</A> <LI> <A HREF=/~elsa/TheJournals/SA1/">Life and Medical Sciences</A> <LI> <A HREF=/~elsa/TheJournals/SA2/">Physical & Environmental Sciences</A> <LI> <A HREF=/~elsa/TheJournals/SA3/">Materials Science</A&g t; <LI> <A HREF=/~elsa/TheJournals/SA4/">Engineering</A> <LI> <A HREF=/~elsa/TheJournals/SA5/">Social / Behavioral Sciences and Humanities</A> <LI> <A HREF=/~elsa/TheJournals/all.html">All Journals</A> </UL> <HR> <A HREF =/~elsa/Search"> <IMG SRC=/~elsa/elsa-srch.gif" ALT="[Search]"></A> <A HREF =/~elsa/TheJournals"> <IMG SRC=/~elsa/elsa-brws.gif" ALT="[Browse]"></A> <A HREF =/~elsa"> <IMG SRC=/~elsa/elsa-back.gif"ALT="[Home]"></A> <A HREF ="http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~djh/ELSA/research/feedback.html"> <IMG SRC=/~elsa/elsa-fdbk.gif"ALT="[Feedback]"></A> <A HREF ="http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~djh/ELSA/research/copyright.html"> <IMG SRC=/~elsa/elsa-copy.gif"ALT="[Copyright]"></A> </BODY> </HTML> About this document ...
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version .95.3 (Nov 17 1995) Copyright © 1993, 1994, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data mobile framework database infrastructure archives copyright cataloguing graphics z39.50 cache ead ejournal cd-rom intranet research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
National Networking Demonstrator Project for archives launch The Archives Sub-Committee is organising a meeting to launch the NNDP which it has instigated and funded through the Non Formula Funding of Specialised Research Collections monitoring programme on 18 March.
The Meeting is open to archivists and interested parties and is intended to be a platform for public review of the project’s developments.
The NNDP aims to implement cross-searching of multi-level archival data, originating from numerous sources, primarily but not exclusively in the HE sector, as presented in a wide variety of formats (from EAD, to fielded data in a MODES system, to catalogue entries in Word 6).
The NNDP supports the use of the international standard ISAD(G) and has linked this to the special development of Z39.50, a widely adopted standard for information retrieval.
In addition to this the project has developed a user friendly web-interface to permit effective and seamless cross-searching.
This demonstrator phase finishes in April 1998 at which point decisions will be made on whether and how to take the project forward.
A full report from the launch will be available in the next issue of Ariadne.
The Next UKOLN Conference, Summer 1998 The next UKOLN conference will be held at the University of Bath on 29 and 30 June and 1 July 1998.
The third in the series Networking and the Future of Libraries, it is entitled “Information Landscapes for a Learning Society”, and marks the 21st anniversary of UKOLN and its antecedent organisations at the University.
The conference will be opened by Brian Lang, Chief Executive of the British Library, with the closing address by Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) in Washington.
The opening keynote presentation will be given by Richard Heseltine, Director of Academic Services and Librarian at the University of Hull.
The main programme sessions cover the development of the digital library, the issues surrounding the emergence of integrated information services, use and users in a wider context and the influence of the network on organisation, roles and services.
This year the civic reception will be held in Bath’s Pump Room and Roman Baths, with the conference dinner in the city’s magnificent 18th century Guildhall Banqueting Room.
Further details and an online booking form are now available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ukoln-conf-98/ or, if you have any queries, you are welcome to contact Hazel Gott, who is the Events Manager at UKOLN, at workshop@wwwcache.ja.net http://wwwcache.ja.net/events/workshop/ Inform 98 Conference Announcement The second Grampian Information Conference, ‘Inform 98’, will take place on Thursday May 21st at the Macauley Land Use Research Institute, Aberdeen.
This year’s conference, which is sponsored by Blackwell’s Bookshops, includes a talk by Library Association President Bob Usherwood and covers topics such as ‘Managing Performance’, ‘ Charging for Library Services’ and ‘Marketing your Service’.
For further details, please contact the Grampian Information Development Officer, June Waters at <a data-cke-saved-href=“mailto:” href=“mailto:” waters@rsc.co.uk”=“”>waters@rsc.co.uk The Electronic Library: iGSS 1998 International Graduate Summer School 1998 held at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, takes as its theme, Managing the Electronic Library.
iGSS has always provided an opportunity for information professionals from around the world to meet and discuss current issues at the same time that they take part in a programme of lectures and seminars which aid their continuing professional development The full programme and booking details are available at the iGSS web site or contact Joyce Wallace (email: zyo@aber.ac.uk or Chris Armstrong (email: lisqual@cix.compulink.co.uk) for a printed programme.
EARL gets to grips with Life long learning EARL (Electronic Access to Resources in Libraries), The Consortium for Public Library Networking, is exploring plans to develop lifelong learning and investigate how public libraries can provide effective support for lifelong learning within a networked environment.
The first stage of this will be a Policy Syndicate on lifelong learning taking place in March.
This will enable EARL to define a general strategic framework with respect to lifelong learning, and also help identify practical initiatives for the development of new services and demonstrators to develop within the context of READINESS (Research and Development In Networked Subject Services).
Readiness is an 18-month project, funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre, to research and evaluate the processes and effectiveness of collaborative development of networked subject services in two areas : local history and lifelong learning.
EARL aims to demonstrate and extend the ability of public libraries to deliver networked information and knowledge-based services.
These are developed primarily through EARL’s 16 Task Groups working on new ways to deliver shared services over the network, including demonstration services for Serials, Reference Enquiries, Family History and Community Information.
Further information about EARL is available from the EARL website.
Scottish Office Public Libraries Challenge Fund Grants Announced On 5th March, Sam Galbraith, Scottish Office Minister with responsibility for the Arts announced the successful bids in the Scottish Office Public Libraries Challenge Fund.
The successful bids were: Argyll & Bute: Catalogue Network Project £29,179 Designed to improve access to information for users of the Argyll & Bute Library & Information Service.
All Argyll & Bute Council network information as well as all library information (Catalogue, Community Information, Open Learning and Voluntary Organisation Data) will be available through the Internet.
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles): Gateway Project £27,000 The Project will provide Internet and CD-ROM facilities to access links with local educational developments; to generate interest and support for the Gaelic language and to help foster community identity with particular reference to culture and oral tradition.
Dumfries & Galloway Ewart Cybercentre £50,000 The centre will provide flexible opportunities for individuals, community groups and the business community to develop skills in the application of new technology and thus improve prospects for employment and economic development.
The Cybercentre will provide a range of training courses from beginner to expert.
Dundee: Community Access to CD-ROM Network £34,335 The Network will provide access to the business information and educational packages throughout the city making specialised educational and informational opportunities available in local neighbourhoods.
The Project will take advantage of a new high capacity corporate Intranet.
Glasgow: The Virtual Mitchell £50,000 The wealth of resources of the Mitchell Library and the City Archives will be made accessible over the Councils network and more widely through the Internet.
Images from the Archives and the History & Glasgow Room will be digitised and provided with a full range of search facilities.
North Lanarkshire: Local Information Points £40,932 Five Local Information Points will be established as first-stop information stops providing information through all media, including public Internet access and CD-ROM.
The LIPs will attempt to provide all reference, community and Council information either directly or by acting as gateways to other service providers.
Engineering E-journal Search Engine available from EEVL The Engineering E-journal Search Engine (EESE) is an Index to over 70 UK and non-UK free full-text engineering e-journals.
EESE is a very focused search engine of electronic journals, with a similar function as traditional print and online indexes of print journals, with the added bonus that the information itself is immediately available electronically via the Web.
Titles include Chartered Surveyor Monthly, Journal of Corrosion Science and Engineering, Chemistry & Industry, Control Engineering Online, Bell Labs Technical Jouyrnal, Metals Watch, Industry Week, etc.
As trade and house journals are included, ESSE can locate full-text engineering articles, industry news, product reviews, job vacancies, and statistics.
EESE is made available through EEVL: the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library, a non-profit gateway to engineering information on the Internet.
EEVL is funded through the Joint Information Systems Committee’s Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), and based at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
It can be accessed at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/.
JSTOR at MIDAS The UK Mirror site of the JSTOR® electronic journal collection is now available at: http://www.jstor.ac.uk JSTOR is a unique digital archive collection of core scholarly journals starting with the very first issues, and made available to participating institutions via the World Wide Web.
The collection covers material from the 1880s up to a ‘moving wall’ of between 2 and 5 years; which guarantees the user a stable collection of past issues.
By the year 2000, a minimum of 100 journals in a variety of fields will be accessible and there are currently some 2 million pages from over 40 titles.
Details of how to subscribe will be sent to the CHEST site contacts very shortly and can be found at http://www.chest.ac.uk/datasets/jstor/contents.html.
A demonstration database and the background to JSTOR are also available at the UK Mirror site.
Manchester Information Datasets and Associated Services is maintaining the JSTOR UK Mirror site for the UK Higher Education community on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee, and in collaboration with University College London.
Questions regarding the service may be emailed to jstor@midas.ac.uk.
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Old Ghosts Rear Their Heads Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Old Ghosts Rear Their Heads Buzz software ascii research Citation BibTex RIS Peter Brophy calls for effective use of email.
I rather enjoyed a recent piece on email in the Independent on Sunday which appeared under the title “scam@gibberish.com”[1].
It set off rather nicely a more serious piece in the Financial Times called “Failing to get the message”[2] which contained the amusing (or is it?)
anecdote of one international company where every member of staff received the message: “Would the owner of the red Biro left by the second floor coffee machine like to come and collect it?” In our own profession, the nadir was reached for me when members of a supposedly serious list received instructions on how to draw pictures of guitars using ASCII characters.
Email is without doubt a very useful and now almost indispensable tool.
It enables us to communicate with colleagues across the world in minutes or hours and, even with the incompatibility problems of different standards, to exchange complex documents and engage in dynamic discussions.
Without email it would be extremely difficult to conduct multi-partner research projects, and the benefits of sharing good practice or pooling expertise to answer a tricky enquiry are immense.
But clearly not everything in the garden is rosy.
Email adds to the information overload which so many people now experience as part of their working life, and thus adds to stress.
It is frequently used within offices as a quick way to communicate when it would be more beneficial to everyone if human contact was used.
Its very immediacy leads to hasty and ill-thought-out messages being dispatched which the sender almost immediately regrets haven’t we all wished at one time or another that there was an email undo button!
Email is poor at conveying nuance and intention and can easily be misinterpreted.
Companies are becoming concerned at the ease with which employees could make them liable for litigation (as the recent case involving a prominent UK life assurance company showed) and at the potential for leakage of confidential or sensitive information.
All organisations face potential losses through the wasted time spent by employees sifting through ten, twenty, thirty or even a hundred messages a day.
Most people receive their fair share of junk email, adding to the frustration.
Finally, email can be dangerous to organisations’ systems as its ability to cross firewalls enables viruses to spread.
So what should be done?
I would suggest that the situation can be improved by attention to three areas.
Firstly, we need tighter control on some email content, especially where it is unsolicited and related to pornographic or extremist material[3].
This is an issue which governments, companies and academic institutions can and should address: interestingly, the main initiative at present appears to be coming from the European Parliament.
International co-operation is also needed to weed out fraudsters and this will become more important as secure payment systems become widespread and tempt more and more questionable companies onto the Net.
Secondly, while there is some software around to filter email and discard apparently unsolicited messages and no doubt it will continue to improve, much of the solution lies in the hands of ourselves, the users.
We need some kind of code of conduct on sending email.
For example: Do not send trivial messages to professional lists.
Do not send unnecessary images, especially in your signature file.
Do not put in an attachment information that can as easily be placed in the body of the message.
Before you apologise for cross-posting, ask yourself if it is really necessary to send the message to so many lists.
Do not reply all unless it is really necessary/desirable for everyone to read your comment.
If your recipient is in the same building, consider going and talking to them.
Finally, we need some advice and training on how, as recipients, we can get the benefits of email without the overload and hassle.
The following suggestions are based on reported research, mainly in the US, with a few additional points culled from bitter experience: Discard unread all messages that come from unknown, suspicious sources (for me .com is automatically suspicious!)
or are not key issues for you regardless how seductive the subject line.
Effective email users do not attempt to read all the messages they receive.
Read each message that you do open once only: act on it immediately if at all possible.
Keep your inbox small by moving messages to folders, or even better deleting them.
Keep the number of folders small.
Read your email at most two or three times a day: do not keep your email open and read each message as it arrives.
Most people worry that if they discard email unread, or fail to keep copies of everything, then there will be one vital message which they will miss which will well, what?
No-one in academia can think that they’ll be fired or that their chance of promotion will be blighted, for the sake of that email.
Yes, you will miss important messages.
But you will also be much more effective because the time you save can be put to much better use.
References [1] Arthur, C. “e-mail:scam@gibberish.com” Independent on Sunday 31st August 1997 [2] Houlder, V. “Failing to get the message” Financial Times, 17th March 1997, 10 [3] An example is the racist message sent to everyone with an Asian Name at one university.
CERLIM is currently investigating the use of the Internet by extremist groups in the EMAIN project, funded by the British Library Research & Innovation Centre.
Author details Peter Brophy Head of Library and Learning Resource Services University of Central Lancashire p.brophy@uclan.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz database copyright e-learning research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
The Next UKOLN Conference, Summer 1998 Information landscapes for a learning society is the title of the next UKOLN conference, to be held at the University of Bath from 29th June 1st July 1998.
It is the third in the Networking and the Future of Libraries conference series and marks the 21st anniversary of UKOLN and its antecedent organisations at the University of Bath.
The conference will be opened by Brian Lang, Chief Executive of the British Library, with the closing address by Clifford Lynch, the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) in Washington.
The opening Keynote presentation will be given by Richard Heseltine, Director of Academic Services and Librarian, University of Hull, who is chair of UKOLN’s management committee.
The conference will be divided into four main sessions: Information Architectures: constructing the digital library will identify building block and how they will be assembled Information landscapes: the accomodation of knowledge will look at the issues surrounding the emergence of integrated information environments Information and the public sphere: an informed citizenry extends the debate to examine users and use in the wider context Information exchanges: the library, the network and the future will look forward and consider how the network will continue to impact organisation, role and services.
UKOLN conferences are known for their national and international importance and also for the beauty of their setting this year’s conference dinner will be held at the magnificent 18th century Guildhall Banqueting Room.
Further details and online booking is available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ukoln-conf-98/ Government Database Strategy Group announced On the 3rd Decenber in the House of Commons, Ian McCartney, Minister of State at DTI, announced a new Database Market Strategy Group to monitor the impact of new copyright regulations on the education, library and publishing sectors .
The regulations came into force on 1 January 1998 (see below).
They seek to implement the 1996 EC Database Directive (Council Directive No.96⁄9 EC)on the legal protection of databases.
The Group’s objectives will be to identify developments in publishing, delivery technologies, and the library, academic and research environment, and their impact on the market for databases; to monitor the impact, including the economic impact, of copyright, database right, exceptions to rights, and licensing agreements on suppliers and users in the light of changes in technology and markets; to ensure that UK database suppliers are well-placed to take advantage of new market opportunities in the UK and overseas, whilst maintaining access for the education and research communities, so as to maximise the returns to UK industry together with the wider public interest; to inform related policy issues, for example in the context of future EC proposals on copyright, the information society and electronic commerce, and initiatives relating to the library and education sectors.
The minister stated “These regulations are introduced against a background of many changes and initiatives affecting the education, library and publishing sectors.
It will be important to continue to monitor developments.
The Government is therefore proposing to establish a ‘Database Market Strategy Group’.
“This will monitor the impact of the regulations and undertake a strategic review of the way the market for databases is evolving and the implications of this for rights, exceptions and licensing arrangements.
The Government intends to invite representatives of publishers, libraries, academic and research institutions to participate in the work of the Group.” New Database Regulations come into force On 1st January 1998 new regulations came into force in an attempt to harmonise the laws of EC member states relating to the protection of databases in both electronic and non-electronic (i.e.
paper) form.
The regulations make certain changes to the system of copyright for databases.
The Regulations create an important new, free-standing, right to be known as ‘database right’.
This is a right to prevent the unauthorised extraction of the whole or a substantial part of the contents of a database.
The Regulations maintain the approach of copyright law to rights and exceptions.
They largely continue the exceptions which operate in the copyright field.
These relate for example to research, education and libraries.
The Regulations also apply to database right the exceptions permitted by the Directive, of which the most important are those for illustration for non-commercial teaching and research, which are subject to a test of fair dealing.
ALA Cybercollection for Kids The American Library Association (ALA) has launched a new cybercollection of links to more than 700 fun, exciting and useful Web sites for children and their grown-ups.
“This is what librarians do best,” says ALA President Barbara J. Ford.
“We help kids connect to quality resources – only today it’s not just books.
The Internet is an exciting new tool that helps us offer both global reach and local touch.” The sites were selected by the Children and Technology Committee of the Association for Library Service to Children.
The site, which is sure to be a helpful reference point for similar UK initiatives, can be found at: http://www.ala.org/parents/ LTN98:Implementing Learning Technologies: Strategies and Experience This conference, being held at the University of Southampton from Monday 6 April to Wednesday 8 April 1998, is aimed at academics actively involved in teaching, IT managers, staff and educational developers, those researching learning technologies, courseware development teams, library and information support staff and computing and audio visual support staff.
The conference is is organised by SEDA, The Staff and Educational Development Association, SEDA Learning Technology Network, The Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network and The Interactive Learning Centre at the University of Southampton .
Broad themes for the conference sessions are: Learning Technologies The Student Perspective Learning technologies in relation to current theories of student learning; student perspectives of the use of learning technologies in support of teaching, learning and assessment Professional Development Techniques and approaches to professional development which overcome barriers associated with new technologies Achieving Institutional Change Institutional or faculty based strategies for implementing learning technologies which enable real change to be achieved Teaching Quality Issues Integrating and using new technologies to achieve added value in the learning process The Evaluation Process The Hows, Whys, and Wherefores of evaluating learning technology materials For more imformation see the conference web pages at LTN 98 online: http://tsms.ilc.soton.ac.uk/ltn98 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Glimpse at EEVLs' Evaluation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Glimpse at EEVLs' Evaluation Buzz software database archives research Citation BibTex RIS A Glimpse at EEVLs' Evaluation: Malcolm Moffat, Database Officer for the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) project, describes some findings from an initial evaluative study.
EEVL [1] and the other projects in the Access to Network Resources (ANR) area of the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme [2] aim to provide gateways to selected quality networked resources within focus subject areas.
They attempt this within the relatively immature and turbulent environment of the Internet where there is no clear picture as to the ways users search for, integrate and utilise different networked resources.
While a considerable body of information exists relating to engineers use of traditional information resources [3] [4] relatively little is known about their use of the Internet.
Why do engineers use the Internet?
How do they navigate?
What types of information are they looking for?
How are the plethora of new electronic options being integrated with other more established information resources?
Few answers to questions such as these are apparent yet these issues are clearly important if the provision of new services such as EEVL are to be successful.
Pilot testing [5] of the EEVL service although principally concerned with interface evaluation, offered tantalising glimpses into some of these more fundamental issues.
The service was introduced to six university test sites by conducting workshops for engineering academics, researchers, and postgraduate students.
Initial profile questionnaires from 93 workshop attendees indicated that 95% had used the WWW with over 85% having utilised web search engines such as Lycos or Alta Vista.
While opinion was divided on the usefulness of these large search services even those who did find them useful commented upon the lack of descriptions, unfocused nature of results and the time investment required to locate suitable materials.
The engineers in the study indicated that they were attempting to use the web to locate a diverse spectrum of resources ranging from software to bibliographic databases.
However, the most frequently reported usage related to locating full text papers, researchers conducting similar research, and product information from commercial companies.
Analysis of the EEVL database transaction logs during the pilot study revealed a 63% versus 37% spit between searching and browsing.
Search technique tended to be rather unsophisticated with over 50% of search statements utilising only a single keyword.
Boolean logic was specified very rarely and truncation was utilised in only 25% of cases.
Indeed, the way the majority of searches were conducted raised the issue of whether best match searching would be more appropriate than the currently supported Boolean system.
Although browsing the EEVL subject classification was less popular than searching it did offer a certain serendipity which was liked by a number of users.
This ‘opportunism’ was particularly appreciated by less experienced users who used it to gain an overview of resources in a subject area.
One commented ‘while browsing the subject categories I come across sources I’d never have searched for’.
By recording which links users followed during the first twenty five weeks of the live EEVL service a picture of the most commonly accessed sites was built up.
Over 14,000 connections to sites described within the database were made during this period.
Evidence from the pilot study suggested that the majority of users (77%) utilised the resource descriptions before assessing whether to visit a site held in the database.
The EEVL resource descriptions were rated positively by over 90% of users many of which felt that the descriptions saved them time and helped the location of more relevant sites.
The listing of most accessed sites should therefore reflect resources that a number of users have found genuinely useful.
A typically mixed group of resources are represented including electronic journals, commercial servers, software archives, conference announcing services, engineering associations, and bibliographic databases.
During the pilot stages and the first few months of the live service EEVL users have provided a substantial amount of predominantly positive feedback.
One user summed up the major advantages of the service as follows; ‘searching only in a relevant subject area, selected and annotated third party descriptions, no duplicates, faster than US searches’.
Criticism of the service, when it occurred, was mostly directed at the small size of the database during the period of the pilot study.
However, while appreciative of the EEVL service, many end users seemed unable to point out problems or suggest improvements because they perceived themselves as relative novices.
Comments such as ‘this is such a new area that I’m not sure what to suggest’ were fairly common.
This initial evaluation of the EEVL service clearly only scratches at the surface of the issues related to use and user behavior which are relevant to ANR services.
The findings represent no more than one small piece in the complex jigsaw of the information seeking behavior puzzle.
Some of the types of resources highlighted by engineers as important (e.g.
company information, product information, and technical software) emphasize the applied character of engineering compared to other disciplines.
Consideration should be given to the nature of such interdisciplinary differences in the design of ANR gateways.
Future comparison between ANR services on other aspects of patterns of use and user behavior, such as searching and browsing preferences, may provide further clues to help tailor individual services.
References Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) Web Site http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ Electronic Libraries Programme Web Site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Pinelli, T.E., 1991.
The information-seeking habits and practices of engineers.
Science & Technology Libraries, 11 (3), 5-25 King D.W., Casto J. and Jones H., 1994.
Communication by engineers: a literature review of engineers’ information needs, seeking processes, and use.
Washington D.C.: Council on Library Resources.
King I. and Moffat M.O., 1996.
Evaluation of the EEVL Pilot Service http://www.eevl.ac.uk/evaluation/report.html Author Details Malcolm Moffat, Database Officer, EEVL project Email: libmon@lucy.cs.waikato.ac.nz Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Libtech 96 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Libtech 96 Buzz software digitisation copyright intranet research Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir and Isobel Stark with some notes and pictures from the main annual UK library exhibition: Libtech 96.
The exhibition was opened on the 4th of September by Jack Schofield, the editor of the online section of the Guardian newspaper.
He gave a short speech, which included a witty section on the hassle caused by the frequent version updating of software; software where updates appeared every few weeks he named "dribbleware"!
Also at the opening, the University announced the award of 462,000 pounds to the University of Hertfordshire, Cimtech Ltd and International Imaging Ltd to set up a digitisation centre that will convert more than one million pages of printed text a year into 'electronic libraries'.
The initial development of the centre is funded under the eLib programme.
The exhibition proper consisted of stands from many of the commercial suppliers of CD-ROMs and all sorts of other equipment for the library community, from shelving to security barriers.
This year the exhibition was bigger than ever, and spilled over from the giant marquee outside the main University building into the North Hall.
The stage of the hall was taken up by a delightfully recreated cybercafe, with real chic tables and stands, genuine cappuccino, several PCs (on many of which Ariadne was in evidence) and a token cyberpunk with red and green hair… In addition to the exhibition, there were many senimars and presentations spread over the two days.
It was somewhat frustrating, with so many sessions in parallel, to pick out which ones to go to in preference over others; here a few notes from some of those.
Electronic Journals Some of the projects from the Electronic Journals section of the eLib programme gave presentations in a full afternoon session, which was attended by over 100 delegates.
There were presentations from JILT, Internet Archaeology, Electronic Seminars in History, Deliberations, the Open Journal project and Sociological Research Online.
Each of the projects described the background to their project, the problems and decisions involved in mounting their journals online in the way they have done, and all reported a healthy number of people using their resource.
Dan Fleming from the formations project (one of the projects from the pre-prints section of the eLib programme) gave an interesting talk which illuminated many of us on what a pre-print system was, and its relevance to electronic/on-line journals.
EARL Council Meeting It was interesting to attend this meeting of the Project EARL consortium which aims to provide electronic access to resources in public libraries.
Public Libraries can often seem the poor relation to academic libraries when it comes to network access.
However the enthusiam is not lacking as shown by the presentations, and hopefully if the present Millenium bid is sucessful, neither will the funds.
A presentation about the Millenium bid was made by Martin Dudley (Project Manager) and David Iron of Logica.
The meeting was also addressed by Sir Charles Chadwick Healey, Chairman of the company, Information for All, which has been set up to administer the bid.
Presentations were also made about a number of task groups in the EARL consortium, covering Business information, Training and policy issues among others.
More task groups presented in the afternoon.
Bailer AGM As with all AGM's, the BAILER meeting included a review of the past year's activities, with an emphasis on the value of a collaborative organisation.
A particular point of debate was the re-allocation of the research studentships to the British academy, an the loss of partial laboratory status how were the schools to combat any threat to the number of their studentships?
The only answer the meeting came up with, was to simply be better!
After the formal business was finished, the meeting was addressed by Nicky Gardener, Director of Educational services, University of Ulster.
Her theme was "Is the electronic library the latest manifestation of the 'universal' library".
The text of her speech will be available via the BAILER www server.
On-Demand Publishing for Learned Materials This session was given twice at Libtech quite a marthon as each session lasted just under 3 hours.
Several eLib projects presented Patron (University of Surrey), Acorn (Loughborough), ERCOMS (De Montford lead), ERIMS (Oxford), eOn (East London), Eurotext (Hull), Only Connect (Liverpool John Moores), Project Phoenix (Huddersfield), RESIDE (UWE and at the time only 3 days old!)
and SCOPE (Stirlinglead).
From project plans we can look forward to a glut of model agreements for electronic copyright in a couple of years!
Guest Lecture: Mel Collier Mel Collier is the director of the International Institute for Electronic Library Research (IIELR), and was asked to give this years Guest Lecture.
His theme was electronic library strategy; the thought-provoking lecture, will be published in the November issue of the Library Association Record.
Mel gave an overview of the development of the IT strategy of De Montford University, showing how this split campus University had evolved a modern, fluid strategy to cope with the increasing influence and necessity of IT.
He showed how a digital library strategy evolves from the development of an information strategy, with the key factors of teaching, computing, information and library policies being brought together.
He then gave a detailed rundown of the IIELR, it's formation and what projects it was currently involved with (a rather long and impressive list, including several eLib projects such as Helix, with lots of large figures in the budget column!).
He then briefly detailed a somewhat technical arrangement with IBM for integrating the IIELR with an advanced intranet like system.
The rest of the lecture was mainly concerned with the evolution of digital libraries on a global scale (which made a refreshing change from most lectures of this nature, which unfortunately usually concentrate exclusively on UK digital / electronic libraries developments); the printed lecture will be well worth waiting for.
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Wire: Brian Kelly Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Brian Kelly Buzz software java html infrastructure archives standardisation browser video windows multimedia rtf cache gopher mailbase algorithm standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly is put under the virtual spotlight to answer a few questions via email on his past, present, and thoughts on matters networking.
What do you do in the world of networking/libraries/WWW?
Since October 1995 I've been the Senior Trainer for the Netskills project, based at the University of Newcastle.
Over the past 9 months I've been involved in developing our HTML Authoring kit and delivering training courses throughout the UK.
I am also responsible for the quality control procedures for the Netskills training materials.
In addition I have been keeping abreast with network developments, which has included developing a Web Futures talk, using collaborative features of the Web (as described in my Netskills Corner article in Ariadne edition 2).
I was also fortunate enough to attend the recent WWW Conference, held in Paris in May.
I enjoyed the conference, especially as I was a member of the Programme Committee and chaired one of the panel sessions on Browsing Aids.
I was also asked to be a member of the Conference Awards Committee.
How did you get into this field?
In 1991 I was appointed Information Officer in the Computing Service at Leeds University.
During 1992 I began to look into the development of a Campus Wide Information System.
Although many universities were running home-grown systems, I felt something better was needed.
This was partly due to my enthusiasm during the late 1980s for the Apple Macintosh: I can remember developing simple teaching applications using HyperCard and, at a conference session on national information system, such as NISS, commenting on the text interface, and suggesting that information systems should have a graphical interface.
Yes, I was describing the Web, but I though it could be built using HyperCard!
This was before I knew a much about the Internet, and the importance of open systems.
What was your reaction to the Web when you encountered it for the first time?
In December 1991 a special interest group on information systems at Leeds University arranged an afternoon's session on various Internet tools, such as Gopher, Archie and the Web.
I was familiar with Gopher and Archie, but this was my first experience of the Web.
I was hooked!
After the presentation myself and my systems colleagues in the Computing Service agreed that the Web was worth investigating, so in January 1993 we installed the server.
Shortly afterwards we registered the server at CERN.
We found that only about 30 organisations around the world were running a registered server.
At that time I was slightly concerned that we may have chosen the networked equivalent of the Betamax video player technically superior to more widely used alternative (Gopher), but in danger of not gaining sufficient momentum to become widely accepted.
About 6 weeks later, I received an unexpected visitor, who arrived at the Computing Service Help Desk, asking if anyone knew about the Web.
He was brought along to my office.
I can remember him asking "Have you heard of the World Wide Web?"
and me replying "Yes, it's wonderful.
Would you like a demonstration?"
Imagine my embarrassment when he introduced himself as Robert Cailliau from CERN, and a co-developer of the Web with Tim Berners-Lee!
Robert was visiting relatives in Leeds, and took the opportunity to visit the local University to spread the word about the Web.
I arranged a meeting with a group of about 10 Web enthusiasts at the University, which gave us an early insight into Web developments.
I remember asking Robert how many software developers were involved in the Web project at CERN.
Robert's reply was four, but, in response to my comment that that wasn't many, mentioned strategic links between CERN and an organisation in the US called NCSA.
Robert hoped that these links would result in sharing the load for software development, and he mentioned a browser which was being developed with the name of Mosaic.
None of us at the meeting had any inkling how things would develop in the space of a few years if only we bought shares in those early days!
(Conscious of the need to keep a history of Web developments I have written a description of the history of the Web at Leeds).
What is the most embarrassing thing that has happened to you while giving presentations/demonstrations?
You should know, John, you were there!
At the Netlinks Symposia held at Sheffield University in June I gave a talk called "Oh No, Not More Internet Software".
I described the approaches being taken by Netskills to the development of network training materials, when the network infrastructure is changing so rapidly.
I also described how adaptable Netskills trainers have to be when delivering training.
I mentioned a number of embarrassing incidents, such as the exploding OHP at Manchester University in May, and described how we could even give network demonstrations when the network was not available at which point I theatrically removed the network cable and continued the networked presentation (unlike members of the Magic Circle, I am allowed to reveal my secrets: the client-side caching capabilities of the browser were being used).
Unfortunately five minutes later everything went black.
"What's happened?"
I asked the audience.
"You've stood on the power cable" was the reply.
Yes, while walking up and down, I had succeeded in stepping on the power lead and pulling the socket from the wall.
Not even my magic skills could help me!
I did suggest to the audience that as the Symposia was on the theme of Network Learner Support, and all my slides were available on the Web, that I should leave them to read the slides in their own time, leaving me to return to Newcastle (this was on the day of the England Holland Euro96 match).
Sadly I wasn't brave enough to do this, and continued the presentation after the PC had rebooted.
Do you see Netscape remaining the dominant force in the Web browser field?
During 1994 I gave several WWW presentations around the country and was a regular correspondent on the web-support Mailbase list.
I repeatedly said "Mosaic is not the only browser available.
Don't rely on today's favourite browser".
I still express the same sentiment today: it's the information stupid, don't get too hung up on the latest browser technology.
Web pages can be generally created by either (a) using software to convert from some other format e.g.
RTF, to HTML (b) using a package such as HoTMetaL to automate/validate the construction or (c) hand, in a text editor and then validated by e.g.
the Halsoft validation mechanism (mirrored at HENSA).
Which method do you use, and why?
I often use a text editor (MS Windows Notepad), although this article was written using Word For Windows, and converted using Internet Assistant (version 2).
Files created manually contain a link to the HTML Validation Service.
I use this method because I've three years experience of HTML authoring it's not a solution for new HTML authors.
I suspect I will use the Amaya editor in the near future, as this will provide support for style sheets which I predict will be an important HTML development by the start of 1997.
Java is now a relatively mature technology, but we don't seem to be overrun with useful applets why do you think (or do you disagree?)
that it hasn't been exploited in many different fields/areas of interest?
Is Java really "relatively mature"?
I think many organisations who are considering significant use of Java are still waiting for the standards to mature.
Don't forget that the spec for the OBJECT tag (Inserting Multimedia Objects into HTML) is still a working draft, dated April 1996.
I also think that organisations are waiting to see how the competition shapes out in particular Microsoft and their ActiveX technology.
One of the most frequent complaints from UK Web users is the slow speed of accessing some Web sites, especially those held in the US during times of high network traffic.
What, if anything, should be done (and by whom) to alleviate this problem?
Are caching and mirroring the answer (and if so, how should these approaches best be deployed, locally, nationally and/or internationally)?
Caching (cacheing?)
is very important two sessions were dedicated to this theme at the WWW 5 WWW conference.
We are fortunate in the UK HE community of having a long tradition (in Web timescales) of caching.
Neil Smith, the administrator of the HENSA national cache, based at the University of Kent at Canterbury, gave a paper on What can Archives offer the World Wide Web?
at the first WWW Conference at CERN in May 1994, in which he described the introduction of the UK national caching service.
At the recent WWW Conference Neil presented an update of the UK national Web cache.
The national cache is now distributed between HENSA and Leeds University, and the possibilities of cooperative caches (using technologies such as Harvest) are being investigated.
There are many other developments which aim to address these issues (such as document pre-fetching and improvements in compression algorithms and underlying protocols).
Many companies have invested vast amounts of money in the Internet.
They will see a return in their investment only if the Internet scales to greater numbers of users and amount of network traffic.
These companies are confident.
I think we should be as well.
What would you like to see happen in the field of the World Wide Web in 1996/97?
VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) will be important in 1997.
Recently the VRML 2 standard has been agreed.
The standardisation process for VRML 2 was interesting.
A number of alternative proposals were made including Active VRML (Microsoft), Dynamic Worlds (GMD and others), HoloWeb (Sun), Moving Worlds (SGI, Sony and others), Out of this World (Apple) and Reactive Virtual Environment (IBM Japan).
Fortunately a standards war did not happen.
Instead there followed a intensive discussion period, followed by a vote, which resulted in conclusive victory for Moving Worlds.
I hope that we will see the end of standards wars in other areas (especially HTML).
The Internet is far too important for decisions with far-reaching implications to be taken to maximise short-term profits.
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Down Your Way Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way Buzz cataloguing graphics opac cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Loughborough University has a reputation for technological excellence.
Its Information Service was revamped last year, and is becoming increasingly dependent upon the Internet.
Alison Kilgour reports.
Sprawling across a vast 216 acre site, Loughborough University is one of the largest university campuses anywhere in the UK.
The university is the largest employer in this little industrial town, and in term time the student population swells the population of the town considerably.
Fittingly, for an academic institution in an industrial environment, the university has a reputation as a leader in the field of technological innovation.
In addition, it is considering dropping the 'Technology', from its title, and is now known simply as 'Loughborough University'.
The university connects to the Internet's universe of information through a service called the 'Information Gateway', which has been developed by the Computing Services department.
Gateway presents a 'seamless web' of local and remote services.
It has been live in its present format for a year and a half.
Phil Herbert works in the Computer Services department and also rejoices in the title of WebMaster.
He is quick to acknowledge the support given by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor D.J.
Wallace, which has been crucial to the success of the service in gaining support from academic departments.
Users from other institutions connecting to Loughborough over the Web are presented immediately with the Gateway, which acts as the university's 'official' home page.
The University Library (named 'The Pilkington Library' after the university's first Chancellor) has had an Internet presence built in to the Gateway from the start, and its home page is found under 'Central Administration and Service Departments'.
A university of technology in fact, if no longer in name, Loughborough is well on the way to ensuring that all staff members have a PC, or access to one, and most departments are now connected to the Gateway.
The aim is to connect them all, and for all departments to have their own home pages.
As in so many institutions, staff resources are the issue here.
Loughborough has no staff employed permanently to develop the Gateway service.
Responsibility for the content of Gateway pages is devolved to departments with an individual point of contact within each.
A browse through the upper level pages of the Gateway service shows it to be of the sober variety.
Dry, mainly textual information predominates, with few graphics to distract one from the serious business of tracking down information.
The Pilkington Library offers a well-developed set of local resources via its pages.
The OPAC is linked in, as is a serials contents page service, various Library publications and the Library newsletter (albeit a year and a half out of date!).
A link is also provided to a select number of electronic journals, and to various Net subject trees.
Good clear links are provided to BIDS and to OCLC First Search, and there is information on the Library's CD-ROM provision.
An experimental Web version of the Library's TALIS library system is also now available.
An innovation which caught my eye was its 'Reading Lists' service, which permits a keyword search of reading lists which link directly to the catalogue records of the items themselves, with the option to reserve the materials available.
Students have access to Gateway from PCs within the library and from computer laboratories in departments.
Training in network services for staff and research students is approached in a very structured way.
The training programme is provided jointly by the Library and Computing Services, and is available to all levels of staff.
Computing Services provides the "know how", while Library staff furnish the information on the services available.
Training is provided across a range of skills levels, from beginners to advanced searching.
Unfortunately, undergradute students are not so lucky.
Some of the students I spoke to in the Library knew nothing about the wider Internet access available to them and the resources which they could tap into.
They used the services available to them through the Library pages and these are considerable but had not browsed the Internet or sampled searching techniques using search engines such as Lycos or Yahoo.
With 8,000 undergraduate students, it is easy to understand why training is difficult, but this is a challenge which needs to be addressed in Loughborough, as in many other universities.
What the Loughborough University Gateway lacks in visual attraction it certainly makes up for in clarity of structure and in the range of resources available.
The library resources on the Web portray a service which is actively looking towards the future of information services in university teaching and research, by helping its users to find the remote resources they need without sacrificing its commitment to the development of high quality local resources.
Response Thank you for the "Down Your Way" article focusing on work at Loughborough University.
However, I feel that I should point out several factual errors in your report which may cause some raised eyebrows.
Firstly, you state: The university is the largest employer in this little industrial town, and in term time the student population is almost twice that of the town itself.
Loughborough may only have a population of approximately 50,000, but even with the recent increases in student numbers, we are a very long way from having 100,000 students.
Actually, later in the article you mention that there are 8,000 undergraduate students, implying either a very small town (village?)
or a postgraduate body encompassing the entire country!
Secondly, your reference to the University as Loughborough University is a little premature: a recent review of our corporate identity has indeed proposed that our current full title "The Loughborough University of Technology" be amended to "Loughborough University", but this amendment has not yet received formal approval from the Privy Council.
It should also be noted that the proposed name change in no way implies a diminution of the importance which the University attaches to its technological activities.
Instead, it is considered that the proposed new name better reflects the excellence which the University achieves across a range of academic disciplines.
Thirdly, the service at Loughborough to which the article refers is the "Information Gateway", something which is quite clear once you access our home page http://info.lut.ac.uk/home.html Finally, a point which has raised the most eyebrows locally, is my supposed new job title.
On behalf of the Director of Computing Services, David Hogg, I should say that the report of my promotion was an exaggeration (apologies to Mark Twain).
Phil Herbert System Programmer and Webmaster The editor responds: "To err is human" or something like that :-) Thank you for pointing out the mistakes; corrections have now been made to the above article in the Web version.
Unfortunately, the Web being the Web and paper being paper, we cannot make changes to the print version.
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Digital Libraries '97 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Libraries '97 Buzz software database metadata copyright video windows hypertext multimedia licence interoperability algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS David Nichols reports on the important international conference: Digital Libraries '97.
The ACM conference on Digital Libraries is, despite its short life, the premier conference for the field.
This year the computer scientists, librarians and all those in-between travelled to Philadelphia in Pennsylvania for ACM Digital Libraries ‘97 [1].
The conference, from 23-26 July, took place in the Doubletree Hotel [2] in downtown Philly and was co-located with the more technical SIGIR ‘97 [3].
All of the usual conference elements were present with 28 papers, 2 invited talks, tutorials, workshops and a session for posters/demonstrations.
Predictably there was a strong US representation: both in papers (21) and in attendance.
Only 2 papers came from the UK one from an eLib project and one from a BL RIC project: this seemed disappointing although perhaps many projects would have targeted ELVIRA [4] instead.
The main themes of the conference program were multimedia, interoperability (via 4 D-Lib panels) and metadata.
Contrasting with the technical slant was an undercurrent of user-centered discussion sometimes seeming to be fighting to get itself heard amongst the systems talk.
Many of these discussions continued into SIGIR ‘97.
The conference kicked off with a keynote address from Jim Reimer of IBM on Digital Libraries in the Media Industry.
His main topics were the trend towards digital post production, the failing media (what to do when your magnetised particles start separating from your tapes) and the problems of supporting searching in very large collections.
Several large numbers (250 terabytes for a digital version of a film, $3 billion/year couriering analogue tape around the USA) punctuated an entertaining talk that encapsulated many of the problems facing the digital libraries research community.
Particularly salient were the anecdotes on searching: the (alleged) accidental discovery of the Beatles’ ‘Live at the BBC’ footage, the media house with 20 copies of the same video circulating and the advertising agency who re-shoot pictures of toasters because they can’t find the previous ones.
The first paper session was on the topic of multimedia.
A potentially very useful application of image processing techniques (from the University of Massachusetts Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval Group [5]) allowed text in images (e.g.
signs, maps, adverts, cheques etc) to be extracted and then used as index terms for the image.
Two papers from the Informedia Project [6] at Carnegie Mellon University examined the role of abstractions in accessing video and the problems in accessing transcribed text from spoken documents.
The video abstractions presentation was particularly interesting as it is symbolic of the general digital library problem: too much information.
The key challenge being to summarise and filter the information to manageable limits for a human user.
The techniques described (identifying relevant clips and then generating representative ‘skims’) are partly driven by bandwidth considerations but also by the temporal nature of video: you may have to watch a lot to determine that something is not worth watching.
Unsurprisingly the US Digital Library Initiative [7] was strongly represented at the conference most notably by Stanford University [8].
Their InfoBus system is a prototype architecture that integrates metadata and proxies to achieve interoperability with heterogeneous services (or in English it can work together with many different types of things).
The direct-manipulation user interface component (DLITE) [9] was particularly interesting integrating search and query objects into larger tasks by making intermediate results visible on the desktop.
This seemed to me to be one of the more stimulating papers at the whole conference showing an interface which has the potential to change work practices in dealing with search tasks.
DLITE is just one of the services that can be attached to the InfoBus and the whole architecture itself shows promise although, as one person during the D-Lib panel suggested, “what about scalability?” The movement of the InfoBus away from Stanford should be closely watched.
Further contributions from Stanford dealt with shopping models and the costs of translating queries between search engines.
All these elements had a strong metadata component and the twin themes of metadata and interoperability surfaced at many points during the conference.
The expected scenario is certainly converging on near-seamless searching of multiple heterogeneous databases held together with a metadata glue.
The session on agents was not particularly interesting doing little to counteract some computer scientists’ claim that agent is another word for ‘program’.
Thursday night was the major social event a banquet cruise on the Delaware River on the Spirit of Philadelphia.
Advertised as an all-weather event this showed prescient organization as Philadelphia was suffering unseasonably wet weather.
Added unplanned excitement came from one of the coach drivers (of course the one I happened to be on!)
who appeared not to know in which direction he was going.
After an incident with a couple of police cars and an unusual 3 point turn on a major road we finally reached the boat.
The end of the evening was no less eventful when the same coach couldn’t extricate itself from the parking lot.
After all the other cars had been moved (20 minutes later) we did eventually head off for the hotel: but only after several jokes about the InfoBus being stuck in the car park.
Underneath the already choppy waters of digital libraries research lurks the dread multi-headed copyright monster.
The conference addressed this squarely with a plenary session from Pamela Samuelson from the University of California at Berkeley.
She took the computer scientists to task for ‘flattening out complex copyright law to a pancake’.
In an informative talk Samuelson provided a legal perspective on a wide variety of issues.
One section asked the question of whether it was “lawful to link?” Citing both the Shetland case (see Charles Oppenheim’s discussion of this issue [10]) and some US cases [11] [12] [13] she summarised that plain (vanilla) linking was probably acceptable as a case of interoperability (generally regarded as a good thing by courts).
However, linking as part of a framed environment can cause problems: e.g.
when adverts in different frames are for competing companies who may have exclusivity agreements.
Samuelson commented that Web publication would probably be interpreted as an implied license to index the content.
Surprisingly, the talk also included the most interesting parts of the conference with regard to agents.
Private copying is often permitted under conditions of fair use: so can agents exercise fair use?
As many services rely (or intend to rely) on adverts to provide a revenue stream, the use of agents (not known for their appreciation of adverts) may not be considered fair use.
Consequently, even the temporary copying that agents may undertake could fall foul of copyright restrictions.
Perhaps we should be designing agents to read advertisements?
Following on from this Samuelson posed the question: can agents ever make an enforceable contract or are contracts the exclusive property of humans?
Samuelson’s reports from the legal frontline can be found in frequent contributions [14] to the Communications of the ACM.
As she commented, even children know stealing is wrong but it is the professors who have their computers full of illegal software.
The session on digital scholarship (whatever that is) contained the first UK paper.
Steve Hitchcock from the eLib Open Journal project [15] described a service that users would actually find useful: online citations linking to abstracts in a separate bibliography database.
This session also contained a typically stimulating talk from Cathy Marshall of Xerox PARC on annotation.
Those of us that remember the early versions of Mosaic may recall the unimplemented Group Annotation menu items: Marshall’s paper is a good example of the primary user-oriented research that should be done before rushing off to code solutions.
She examined the annotations that students made in university text books by searching through the stocks of a campus second hand bookshop.
Marshall noted the different functions annotation can serve (placemarking, tracing progress, problem-working etc) and gathered some limited evidence that students preferred annotated copies to pristine ones.
Friday night was reserved for the poster session and demonstrations.
I found the poster session a little disappointing with little of real novelty.
The notable exception being a poster/demonstration of a category map based browsing system [16] from the University of Arizona.
The system, based on an underlying neural network algorithm, produces an easily-understandable graphical representation of the underlying textual content of a Web page.
The other demonstration of note was from IBM, showing some research software called LexNav (for Lexical Navigator): in this case displaying query results as networks of lexical links on a 2D view.
This view is based on the actual contents of the collection and allows interactive query refinement through expanding the network of terms.
These were exactly the sort of innovative interface I had expected to find at the conference and it was a pity there were not more of them.
Saturday morning saw the user-oriented community claim the stage.
David Levy (Xerox PARC) captured the attention of the audience by describing the ways in which our attention is distributed and fragmented.
He argued that information technology, and in particular the Web, encourages a fragmentation of attention by splitting wholes into parts which are then re-linked.
And the very act of navigating hypertext requires additional attentional resources.
Computer screens make the problem worse as they promote multiple applications and windows whereas the wholeness of books promotes concentrated long-lasting attention.
Gary Marchionini described a technically simple digital library for a community of teachers in Baltimore and with several anecdotes showed that the major problems are not to do with the technology rather they are social and political.
Successful use of the resources required a change in the teachers’ style of work: from requiring greater explicitness in planning curriculum modules and in being less possessive about their own materials.
This non-technical session closed with a paper from Lancaster University on ethnographic research methods highlighting the difficulties of computer scientists working with ethnographers.
Saturday closed with workshops on thesauri and metadata, curriculum issues and collaboration in the digital library.
In summary, an interesting conference which was illustrative of the diversity of research in the field of digital libraries.
Ranging from the user-oriented research of Levy and Marshall to practical demonstrations of new interfaces, there was something for everyone although it seemed there were more computer-related people then library people.
They could have been put off by several technical papers which seemed to me would have been more at home in the following SIGIR conference.
But overall, thoroughly worthwhile attending and it would have been even better to see more UK involvement.
Next year, Digital Libraries ‘98 [17] is co-located with Hypertext ‘98 and moves a few miles west to Pittsburgh.
The author is very grateful to the British Library Research and Innovation Centre for financial support which allowed him to attend this conference.
References [1] The home page of Digital Libraries ‘97: http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~diglib97/ [2] DoubleTree Hotel, Philadelphia http://www.
doubletreehotels.com/DoubleT/Hotel61/79/79Main.htm [3] The home page of SIGIR ‘97: http://www.acm.org/sigir/co nferences/sigir97/ [4] ELIVRA 4 http://ford.mk.dmu.ac.uk/ELVIRA/ ELVIRA4/ [5] University of Massachusetts Computer Science Department Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval Group: http://hobart.cs.umass.edu/~mmedia/ [6] Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University: http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/ [7] Digital Library Initiative: http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/national.htm [8] Stanford Digital Library Project: http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/ [9] DLITE: http://www-diglib.st anford.edu/diglib/cousins/dlite/ [10] The Shetland Times dispute analysed by Charles Oppenheim: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue 6/copyright/ [11] The TotalNews case: http://www.wired.com/news/topframe/4204.html [12] The TotalNews case (2): http://www.wired.com/news/topframe/2230.html [13] This is the site that caused all the arguments: http://www.totalnews.com/ [14] Selected papers by Pamela Samuelson: http://info.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers.html [15] Open Journal Project: http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ [16] Online demo of the Arizona system: http://ai2.BPA.Arizona.EDU/ent/ [17] Digital Libraries ‘98: http://www.ks.com/DL98/ Author details David Nichols, Research Associate, Cooperative Systems Engineering Group, Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR Email: dmn@comp.lancs.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sideline: Boys (and Girls) and Blackstuff Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sideline: Boys (and Girls) and Blackstuff Buzz data copyright Citation BibTex RIS In Sideline, people give an alternative view of conference attendance.
Terry Morrow is Marketing Manager, BIDS (Bath Information and Data Services), University of Bath.
Dublin Airport Tuesday.
Chris and Ayesha hold back from grabbing the first taxi so they can indulge in a few swift puffs on their cigarettes.
They needn't have bothered, the taxi driver is smoking anyway.
Arrive at Trinity and agree to meet to find something to eat.
Paul and Nick are driving a hire van with the BIDS stand via the Holyhead ferry and aren't expected until at least nine o'clock.
Grafton street is still lively, but we find a bar on Dawson Street that announces attractive sounding food on a blackboard.
Inside the Cafe en-Seine the bar is amazing huge mirrors behind, the place buzzes with conversation.
No food in the evenings, the blackboard was a mistake, left over from lunchtime, but we should just pause a moment to check out this black liquid stuff.
A frustrating ten minutes while I am restrained from grabbing the glass until it's the right colour.
At last I understand the TV advert.
Walking back to Trinity after dinner, we see Paul and Nick driving past the ferry was delayed by three hours.
Wednesday.
Why does it take us four hours to put our stand together?
The Trinity comms experts are amazingly laid back but come up with the goods.
The three Ethernet connections are so quick that visitors to our stand express cynical disbelief when we tell them the system is downloading PDF files from Bath.
Thursday.
Product review time.
We are under strict instructions to stick to our ten minutes and not to use anything fancy like live PowerPoint presentations.
Ten minutes isn't long to say much, but it was said and seemed to be understood, despite my thick head (less the effect of Guinness than a developing cold).
In the evening, the Lord Mayor of Dublin greets us for the Civic Reception in the famous Long Room (maybe 'Long and High Room' would be more apt the wooden ceiling is stunning).
After the dinner we are royally entertained by traditional song and dance, including a woman with a beautiful voice playing a full size Guinness logo!
Oh, and the conference was good too.
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Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 8 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 8 Buzz dissemination infrastructure research Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir with the editorial for the Web version of Ariadne issue 8.
Welcome to issue 8 of the Web version of Ariadne.
As John mentions in the editorial [1] for the Print version of Ariadne, the eLib programme [2] is no longer a youngster; some projects are approaching the end of their funding; some projects have already produced significant deliverables, or contributions, towards the building of this elusive, shimmering, Electronic Library.
Overall, the programme is now gearing up towards a more concerted dissemination push [3] , at the level of individual projects, groups of projects, and the programme as whole, aimed at our target community those people in the UK Higher Education community who will build, use, or be influenced by Electronic Library resources, infrastructure and practises.
But, hey!
The eLib programme is not the only digital library initiative in the world very far from it.
For example, the December 96 edition of D-Lib magazine carried an article giving information on several Australian Digital Libraries initiatives and projects [4], some of which are featured in detail in this issue of the Web version of Ariadne [5], with some more to come in the May issue.
Also, in Europe there is the Telematics programme, from which some projects are flagged in Netskills Corner [6], while the US has several huge Digital Library projects [7]; the best place to start looking for digital library programmes and projects are on the IFLA index [8].
It is good to see the work of programmes and initiatives starting to blend and cross-fertilise.
While eLib is dedicated to the UK, conferences that mix people from Digital Library initiatives around the world will hopefully lead to projects discovering common interests and goals thus (hopefully) removing some duplication of work, and leading to new ideas, strategies and ultimate deliverables; two such conferences [9] [10] are flagged in this issue.
References Editorial for the Print version of this issue of Ariadne, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/web-edit/ eLib Web Site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Mailing list discussion on dissemination of the results of the eLib programme, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1997-03/0033.html Descriptions and pointers to several Australian Digital Libraries initiatives, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlib/dlib/december96/12iannella.html Australian Digital Library initiatives and projects featured in this issue of Ariadne, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/australia.html From MERCI to DESIRE: European Digital Library Projects, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/netskills-corner/ US Digital Libraries Initiatives Web Site, http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/national.htm IFLA Digital Libraries: Resources and Projects Index an essential starting point for seeing how the world is shaping up in terms of digital library initiatives, http://ifla.inist.fr/II/diglib.htm ELVIRA 4, the annual Electronic Library Visual Information Research Conference, to be held this May in Milton Keynes, UK, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/elvira/ eLib and Telematics: Projects and Partnerships: a conference for this August in the south of England that aims to bring together people and ideas from the UK eLib and European Telematics communities, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/bournemouth/ Author Details John Kirriemuir Web Editor, Ariadne Email: lisjwk@ukoln.ac.uk Phone: 01225 826354 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IPL: The Internet Public Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IPL: The Internet Public Library Buzz software database archives cataloguing graphics sgml telnet research Citation BibTex RIS Schelle Simcox describes a Web-based public library, designed in many ways to mimic, and improve on, features of and within a real, large-scale library.
The Internet Public Library (IPL) is the first public library created of and for the Internet community and its style and service is similar to any large library.
Your experience of the IPL will be different depending upon who you are and your expectations or needs when you visit its homepage.
Given your needs, it can be a comforting place to base your explorations of useful material, a place to begin your research, or a place for a child to turn the pages of one of the books in the youth division.
On the surface level, the IPL consists of a ready reference collection, youth and teen divisions, an exhibit hall, a reading room, services to librarians and a MOO (a multi-user real-time telnet accessible environment).
Until you get to the "services to librarians", and the "MOO", this seems very familiar reminiscent of a typical library with walls and books.
However the IPL is a library that from the first, was conceived on and for the Internet community.
This fact often changes the viewpoint of a visitor to the library in some very fundamental ways.
What the IPL is and what services it offers, who the people are behind the scenes at the library, and why they "built" it the way they did are questions which arise for librarians and our patrons as they explore this site.
The IPL web site is quite popular, receiving over 100,000 "hits" a day, but the problem now becomes an issue of how the library will be sustained.
This article will attempt to answer these questions, while at the same time, present many of the issues we as librarians have been grappling with as the Internet becomes a routine part of our lives.
Work began on the IPL in January 5, 1995 and the electronic doors opened on March 17, 1995.
The IPL consumed three very intense months (actually 70 days) of work by 35 graduate students at the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies (SILS) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Thanks to an extremely well-written press release, we had over 3000 members on our listserv in less than a week, and an extensive following before the library even opened.
At that time in early 1995, the Internet was still very new, and nothing like the Internet Public Library existed.
In fact, the description of the graduate seminar attracted potential members by asking the question: "What do you think a library on the Internet would look like?
What would it be?"
This question was answered in three short months, with the library looking very similar to what you see today.
A special group of people, ready to take on the challenge of the unknown began the IPL.
In 1995, the typical library student was changing at SILS.
The school was beginning to accept "Digital Library Associates" students with experiences in computer science, engineering, publishing, and media communications.
These students, along with students with a more traditional background of law, literature, and the arts, came together to investigate what this new genre had to offer the library profession.
In the first class meeting for what was to eventually become the IPL, class members separated into various divisions: reference, youth, services to librarians, public relations, design and technology.
In each group the task of translating traditional library services to the web began.
The design and technology group had the additional task of translating each groups' ideas into feasible web design.
It may be asked: Why use a library metaphor, why not create something completely different?
However, it was obvious that the library example was a powerful one.
It allowed us to easily talk to each other about core concepts of a library and begin the work of translating them to this environment.
This metaphor has also worked beautifully with our patrons; the Internet community who can immediately imagine the kinds of services that "should" fall under the headings reference, reading room, or youth.
In order to delve a little deeper into the IPL, let's take a quick tour of the library: Reference Center The reference center [1] consists of the "ready reference collection" and the "Ask a Question" service.
The ready reference collection was developed as a broad subject based collection of Internet resources that would be used by librarians and patrons to answer a broad range of questions quickly.
This collection continues to grow, although our selection policy is quite thorough and collection development is time-consuming.
Resources for the ready reference are selected if they are maintained consistently, clearly organized, contain adequate information on a specific topic, contain a clear statement of responsibility, and graphics add to content rather than detract from it.
In the "Ask a Question" service, volunteer librarians from around the world answer reference questions.
This extensive email-based reference service is handled by the software product "QRC" developed specifically for this task.
QRC is web-based software that organizes, archives, generates automatic responses, and handles both incoming and outgoing email.
Through our reference service, and similar interactions, the IPL is seeing what people expect of librarians, and obtaining a glimpse our near future.
We have found that people come to us expecting to find everything they need in electronic form.
Many people desire extensive citation and research services, however, many of them do not know that these services are expensive and are available only in larger research institutions.
It is likely that all libraries will find themselves a part of a world-wide community, in other words, the world will come to our doors via the Web.
This will have ramifications for libraries and the services they can provide via the Internet; until there is a widely accepted method of billing for services via the Internet, libraries may need to limit the kinds of services they can offer to this community.
Reading Room The reading room [2] consists of over 3000 titles that can be browsed or searched.
Recently, as a result of cooperation with the Humanities Text Initiative [3], the IPL has added innovative browsing and searching features.
The collection is now browsable by author, title, subject or Dewey decimal classification heading.
All works can be searched by key word, author, title, subject or Dewey decimal classification heading..
These improvements were made possible by transferring each record contained in a Filemaker Pro database into SGML.
These SGML records are then indexed by an SGML indexer, and CGI scripts interface with an SGML search engine to provide the searching and browsing capabilities.
Teen The teen division [4] must adequately serve the needs of teenagers and young adults.
In this division, teens have been asked to take a direct part in creating their own space.
We have solicited teenagers from around the world to become a part of the teen advisory board.
Social issues, college information, entertainment, and personal information must be made available to teens.
Regardless of the worries in the popular press about access to explicit or inappropriate content for children, teens need to be treated with respect regarding their ability to use the Internet as a positive research tool.
Youth The youth division [5] continues to be lauded in the press as a premier site on the Internet for children.
In "Ask the Author" , authors have a chance to respond to children's questions.
Once added to the list of authors, they are able to point to the IPL as a resource when they cope with their extensive fan mail.
The "Story Hour" was the one requirement of us from our professor, and now Director, Joeseph Janes.
This is a place for original electronic books.
Children can open up a book, turn pages and in some books, hear the text read aloud to them.
Many children from around the world participate in "A World of Reading", contributing their reviews of books they have read, and contribute to an annual story writing contests.
For now, our major collection efforts for children have focused on science in the "Dr. Internet" section.
Exhibit Hall The exhibit hall [6] began with one exhibit from the Detroit Museum of African American History, but has proven to be extremely popular as a place to explore curatorship in a web environment.
In the exhibit hall: a special resource on music history combines audio clips with art history, we collaborate with Euphrates to present photographs from a black community, document a family history, and present exhibits from special archives and museum collections to a world-wide audience.
Services to Librarians Our Services to Librarians [7] section contains resources for librarians on technology and on-the-job resources.
This division will undergo a large refocusing of effort in the coming months.
The services to librarians section will become the core of the "Internet Library Consortium".
Today the IPL continues to provide services to a worldwide community.
We are based at the School of Information at the University of Michigan and receive funding from a variety of sources including the School of Information and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
With a full-time staff of six, we grapple with ways to sustain our "free" public library knowing that the services we provide: collecting, organizing and disseminating information, answering reference queries, and creating new resources does not come cheaply.
We find ourselves in the position of needing to educate the information consumer our patronsof the monetary value of information and the value of library work.
In addition, we must find funding so that the librarians from the IPL can continue the kinds of innovative work we have begun.
Our current major funding source, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded us so that we may find ways to sustain our operations for the long-term.
This funding was for four efforts: the founding of an Internet Library Consortium, an Internet newsletter for children, an investigation into fee-for-service research, and the organization of a friends program (volunteer support) for the IPL.
One of the projects, the publication of a newsletter for children is in full swing.
"WebINK: Internet Newsletter for Kids" [8] is a bi-monthly print and web-based publication available via subscription for $19.95 US and $29.95 International.
From the start, the newsletter was designed to introduce the Web to parent, teachers, and children.
Twelve pages of articles (including four pages for parents and teachers) include citations to books and Web resources, showing children and parents how to integrate this new media into their lives, find meaningful sources of information, and learn how to utilize the web.
WebINK covers a single topic in each issue from many angles, integrating the web with curriculum and other forms of learning.
The response from teachers, school librarians and media specialists has been quite good, and we hope that eventually the profits from this publication will fund the day-to-day operations of the library.
The IPL has become a kind of online publisher, creating specialized resources for patrons such as "Associations of the Net" [9] a collection of associations who provide useful information on the Web, POTUS: Presidents of the United States [10] an extensive resource that includes historical documents, audio clips of speeches, photographs, and other information.
We have created many other special resources such as the photo collection: Genesis: A Photographic Essay of the Black Community in Kansas City, Missouri from 1885 [11] and a virtual tour of an auto assembly plant for children in the resource: "So You Want to Make a Car...." [12].
We began publishing these resources because many patrons have requested them or because we have seen a lack of depth on the Internet in a particular area.
Perhaps this will be a similar future for many libraries, who will find themselves responding to the stated needs of their patrons, and will collect, write and publish web-based resources addressing those needs.
Many libraries possess material that is fragile or available only on site, or at special request: one must go to the collection in order to make use of it.
It may become more and more important for libraries to offer those special collections digitally, thereby reaching a far wider audience than ever before.
What will the digital library of the future be?
Many of us have been expected to answer the question: "Do you think we will need libraries in the future when you will be able to find everything on your computer?"
As electronic texts in various formats become commonplace, many wonder if paper and books will be replaced by "digital libraries".
We don't believe this will happen, not anytime soon.
Until we have solved some fundamental user-interface issues, possess ubiquitous and flexible electronic formats, and created usable standards for all electronic media, the world will likely want and need libraries and books for many years to come.
The IPL is not only a collection of electronic texts, although we do collect, catalog, and bring them together in one comprehensive collection, our library is more than that.
The IPL has shown us that the "digital" library allows us to know patrons in a way never before possible, respond to their needs in novel ways, and rely on an ever widening group of colleagues who will be providing unique resources of their own.
This must affect the public's perception of our profession, and our perceptions of our own role in providing services to this rapidly expanding world view.
The Web is different from anything that has come before, it allows communication and sharing of information in ways never before possible.
References [1] Reference Centre, http://www.ipl.org/ref/ [2] Reading Room, http://www.ipl.org/RR/ [3] Humanities Text Initiative, http://www.hti.umich.edu/ [4] Teen Division, http://www.ipl.org/teen/ [5] Youth Division., http://www.ipl.org/youth/ [6] Exhibit Hall, http://www.ipl.org/exhibit/ [7] Services to Librarians, http://www.ipl.org/services/ [8] WebINK: Internet Newsletter for Kids, http://www.ipl.org/webink/ [9] Associations on the Net, http://www.ipl.org/ref/AON/ [10] POTUS: Presidents of the United States, http://www.ipl.org/ref/POTUS/ [11] Genesis: A Photographic Essay of the Black Community in Kansas City, Missouri from 1885, http://www.ipl.org/exhibit/euphrates/GenesisCover.html [12] "So you want to make a car" Web site, http://www.ipl.org/autou/ Author Details Schelle Simcox is the Assistant Director and Managing Editor of the Internet Public Library Email: ssimcox@umich.edu Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Launch of History Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Launch of History Buzz data database e-learning research Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark reports on the re-launch of IHR-Info as History.
On a crisp All Hallows Eve, I found myself in London at the launch if History [1], the revamped and expanded ANR service [2] provided by the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) at the University of London.
The launch was more than just an excuse for tea and scones there were five speakers and stands and demonstrations from related bodies, such as the Public Record Office at Kew [3].
First in to bat was Dr Steven Smith, Academic Secretary of the IHR and Project Manager for History.
He explained much of the motivation behind History and the IHR, likening the IHR to a 'History Laboratory' (a term used in the first annual report of the IHR) and information to chemicals and experiments as the interaction of these chemicals resulting in an end product.
Integration is a challenge which the IHR and History wish to meet: cross sectorially (other historical societies and so on); between academic and commercial; pluridisciplinarily and also internationally.
Harold Short of King's College, University of London, was next to speak.
He was pleased to note that the web seems to mark the decline in closed systems and hopes that instead of merely storing answers, computers would be used to help ascertain which questions should be asked.
Peter Denley, a founder member of the Association for History and Computing spoke about the history of history and computing (a subject he was well qualified for)!
He seemed fairly confident that 'the days of the Arts/Science divide is largely behind us' and the 'historians are even doing things which excite computing specialists!
He noted that increasingly both undergraduates and postgraduates in history are taking courses on data analysis and information management and also computing which not only famliarises them with the concepts but help them work more effectively.
However computers themselves, despite the valiant efforts of TLTP [4], are not being used as teaching tools in the majority of universities.
Reasons for this is complex, but Peter Denley finished by calling for more work into the area.
Christopher Currie of the IHR then took us through the history and background to IHR-Info, History's immediate predecessor.
For more information on this, please see Steven Smith eLib column in this issue of Ariadne.
[5].
Joyce Horn, Publications Secretary at the IHR, introduced one of additions to History since its IHR-Info days: thesis, completed and under supervision, and teachers of history in the UK.
All completed theses on historical subjects at UK universities since 1971 are now available.
It is possible, for a historian who gain their doctorate within the past 26 years, to find out where they teach, what their thesis topic was, who supervised them at which university, what theses they themselves have supervised and at which universities and so on and so forth.
The IHR has found that having their publications available on the Internet has actually increased sales of the printed editions so maybe publishers should be less wary of the web?
Steven Smith and Sophie Young, the Project Officer, both ended the presentation with more tales of History.
They stressed that History was committed to 'trailing edge' technology so that no historian would be neglected.
The ROADS [6] database of resources in History has only 700 entries so far, but is ever increasing.
It is also hoped to integrate all the databases in History before 1998.
So the message I left with was definitely to keep an eye on History.
References [1] History http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ [2] eLib ANR projects http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/intro.html#anr [3] Public Record Office (PRO) http://www.open.gov.uk/pro/ [4] Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) http://www.tltp.ac.uk/ [5] The History of History, Ariadne issue 12 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/ihr-info/ [6] ROADS (Resource Organisation And Discovery in Subject-based services) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/ Author Details Isobel Stark Web Officer i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Dublin Core Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Dublin Core Management Buzz data software html database xml apache metadata doi browser identifier copyright cataloguing cache lcsh pics perl purl url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell presents three models for the way in which metadata can be managed across a Web site and describes some of the tools that are beginning to be used at UKOLN to embed Dublin Core metadata into Web pages.
The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (the Dublin Core) [1] is a 15 element metadata set that is primarily intended to aid resource discovery on the Web.
The elements in the Dublin Core are TITLE, SUBJECT, DESCRIPTION, CREATOR, PUBLISHER, CONTRIBUTOR, DATE, TYPE, FORMAT, IDENTIFIER, SOURCE, LANGUAGE, RELATION, COVERAGE and RIGHTS.
As we begin to consider some initial implementations using the Dublin Core we need to consider how best to manage large amounts of metadata across a Web-site.
The ways in which we manage Dublin Core metadata need to be able to cope with potential syntax changes in the way that elements are embedded into HTML and allow for the migration of metadata to other formats [2], for example future versions of PICS labels.
Summaries of the current state of the Dublin Core are available elsewhere [3].
In short, the element set is now stable and the ways in which Dublin Core records can be embedded into HTML Web pages are fairly widely agreed.
There is still some discussion about the use of some of the elements, however Dublin Core is beginning to be used in several projects [4].
This article is concerned primarily with the practical issues of using Dublin Core metadata to describe Internet resources.
It will concentrate on embedding Dublin Core into HTML Web pages with a view to what can be done now and how can it be done.
Three areas need to be considered: Syntax issues how Dublin Core is embedded in HTML.
Content issues what sort of data goes into Dublin Core elements.
Management issues how can we manage metadata across a Web-site.
Of these, a brief overview, primarily by example, of the syntax for embedding Dublin Core elements into HTML is given here.
The second area is barely touched on.
The third area forms the bulk of this article three models for the management of metadata across a Web-site are outlined and the tools that UKOLN are beginning to use to embed metadata into Web pages are described in some detail.
Syntax Issues By and large the syntax for embedding simple Dublin Core records into HTML Web pages is now agreed, each element name and value being held in a HTML META tag.
Unfortunately there are two formats for embedding more complex, ‘qualified’ (see below) Dublin Core elements into HTML, one which is legal in HTML 3.2 (and older versions) and one which will be legal in HTML 4.0 [5].
Firstly, here is a simple example: <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>UKOLN: UK Office for Library and Information Networking </TITLE> <META NAME=“DC.title” CONTENT=“UKOLN: UK Office for Library and Information Networking”> <META NAME=“DC.subject” CONTENT=“national centre, network information support, library community, awareness, research, information services, public library networking, bibliographic management, distributed library systems, metadata, resource discovery, conferences, lectures, workshops”> <META NAME=“DC.description” CONTENT=“UKOLN is a national centre for support in network information management in the library and information communities.
It provides awareness, research and information services”> <META NAME=“DC.creator” CONTENT=“UKOLN Information Services Group”> </HEAD> <BODY> … </BODY> </HTML> (The examples given here are largely taken from the UKOLN home page [6].
If you want to see some embedded Dublin Core metadata for real, browse to the page and use your browser’s ‘View source’ option to look at the HTML source of the page).
Note that the META tags are placed within the HEAD section of the page and that the Dublin Core element names are preceded by ‘DC.’ to form the META tag name.
By convention the ‘DC’ is uppercase and the element name is lowercase.
Only 4 of the Dublin Core elements are shown in the above example that’s fine by the way, with the Dublin Core all elements are optional and, as we’ll see in a while, all elements are repeatable.
If we consider the Dublin Core elements in this example: DC.title is the title of the resource.
Note that the normal HTML <TITLE> tag also exists the issue of the relationship between embedded Dublin Core and other metadata in Web pages will be returned to later on DC.subject is by default an unconstrained list of keywords DC.description is a short description short means three or four lines of text typically.
Note that in HTML, the META tag CONTENT attribute can be split across several lines in the source file DC.creator is the person or organisation primarily responsible for the intellectual content of the work.
Refining Dublin Core element meanings The meaning of Dublin Core elements can be refined using three ‘qualifiers’ LANGUAGE, SCHEME and TYPE.
The LANGUAGE qualifier specifies the language used in the element value (not the language of the resource itself, that’s given in the LANGUAGE element!).
The LANGUAGE qualifier will not be described in any detail here.
The SCHEME qualifier specifies a context for the interpretation of a given element.
Typically this will be a reference to an externally-defined scheme or accepted standard.
For example, if we were to allocate Library of Congress Subject Headings to the UKOLN Web-site we might add: <META NAME=“DC.subject” CONTENT=“(SCHEME=LCSH) Library information networks – Great Britain”> <META NAME=“DC.subject” CONTENT=“(SCHEME=LCSH) Information technology – higher education”> to the META tags above.
Note that the SCHEME qualifier is currently embedded into the META tag CONTENT.
In HTML 4.0 the META tag will have a separate SCHEME attribute and it will be possible to write: <META NAME=“DC.subject” SCHEME=“LCSH” CONTENT=“Library information networks – Great Britain”> <META NAME=“DC.subject” SCHEME=“LCSH” CONTENT=” Information technology – higher education”> However, this syntax is illegal in HTML 3.2 (or older) and although it is unlikely to cause any serious problems for current Web browsers it would cause the page to fail to validate using an HTML 3.2 based validation service.
Finally, the TYPE qualifier modifies the element name so as to narrow it’s semantics.
For example, an author’s email address can be thought of as a sub-element of the CREATOR element.
To embed the author’s email address into an HTML page we can write: <META NAME=“DC.creator.email” CONTENT=“isg@ukoln.ac.uk”> Repeated elements Some elements may need to be given several times, in a Web page with more than one author for example.
Remember that Dublin Core allows elements to be repeated, so simply repeat the DC.creator META tag several times: <META name=“DC.creator” content=“Powell, Andy”> <META name=“DC.creator” content=“Stark, Isobel”> Note that it is not possible to group Dublin Core elements embedded in HTML in any formal way.
So there is no mechanism for grouping pairs of DC.creator and DC.creator.email META tags.
Content Issues This area is not considered in any detail by this article.
In designing a system for managing metadata across a Web-site some non-technical issues will have to be addressed.
Selecting the terms used in keyword lists and deciding on a format for names and email addresses for example.
One also needs to consider issues of granularity.
Which resources should be described?
In particular, for a multiple-page document does metadata go into every page or just the title page?
One view is that the Dublin Core is primarily being embedded to aid resource discovery so embed it in those resources that you want people to find.
In many cases that means that it is only necessary to embed Dublin Core into ‘main’ page (the ‘title’ pages of documents for example).
In some cases it will be sensible to embed Dublin Core into all the component pages of a Web resource.
Management Issues This section presents three models for the way in which Dublin Core metadata can be created and managed across a Web-site; firstly the use of HTML authoring tools to embed Dublin Core directly into an HTML page, secondly the use of Web-site management tools to manage metadata in parallel with HTML pages and lastly the use of Server-Side Includes to embed externally held metadata into an HTML page on-the-fly as the page is served.
HTML Authoring tools Metadata embedded when resource is created The first model is to embed the metadata directly into HTML Web pages by hand using whatever HTML editing tools are already in use.
In some ways this is a nice simple solution but… some HTML authoring tools do their best to hide HTML tags from you and as HTML becomes more complex this is increasingly likely to happen.
Simply typing in META tags or cutting and pasting them into your document from elsewhere may not always be possible maintaining large numbers of resources with embedded META tags is likely to become problematical if the syntax changes finally there is always the potential for META tags being created wrongly, either being syntactically incorrect or using element values in an uncontrolled way.
However this approach does have some advantages.
In particular it may be useful for training and raising awareness about the use of META tags.
Web-site management tools Metadata embedded when resource is published The second model is to make use of Web-site management tools to manage metadata.
These tools have only become available relatively recently and aim to aid the management of whole Web-sites rather than of individual documents.
They usually combine editors, for creating Web pages, with other tools for managing those pages across a site.
Typically they work by holding all the data for a site in a database.
A ‘publish’ button is used to create HTML pages based on the information held in the database.
These tools are unlikely to be Dublin Core aware but they are likely to support macros which may allow for the creation of embedded Dublin Core META tags as part of the publishing procedure.
However, it is worth bearing in mind that the formats used to hold data and metadata in the database are likely to be proprietary and there are unlikely to be interchange formats to allow the data to be moved easily into other formats so you need to beware of becoming locked into a single system with this model.
Nevertheless, in the longer term this looks likely to be the sensible way to go, not least because of the general advantages for Web-site management that these tools offer.
For the moment though it is probably too early to make recommendations about their use, particularly as far as metadata management is concerned.
Embedding On-the-fly Metadata embedded when resource is served The third model is to hold the metadata in a separate neutral format and to embed it on-the-fly using Server Side Include (SSI) [7] scripts.
SSIs are a simple mechanism for creating all or part of a Web page dynamically.
The Web used to consist of two kinds of pages.
Static pages maintained using HTML editors of some kind and dynamic pages generated by CGI scripts.
More recently SSIs have allowed static pages to embed other pages or call external scripts to form a part of their content.
SSIs are typically used to embed a standard copyright notice into or wrap standard headers and footers around all the pages on a site.
The third model makes use of a SSI script to embed Dublin Core metadata into the page on-the-fly.
A potential problem may be performance because, for each page that is served, the Web server has to check the HTML file for a SSI and, if necessary, run a script.
However, given that SSIs are increasingly being used for other purposes, this may be a problem that has to be addressed anyway.
One other potential problem is that dynamically generated pages tend to be marked with an expiry date of now, which means that Web caches do not cache them!
However, some Web servers, for example Apache, can be configured to give pages containing a SSI a sensible expiry date.
With this model there needs to be a tool for creating metadata in the chosen format.
In some cases it may be possible to use a commercially available tool.
Alternatively it is possible to use a Web based tool like DC-dot (see below).
Finally, this model needs a mechanism for associating the resource with it’s metadata.
There are two possibilities here.
The two could be tied together using a simple filename based mapping from the HTML file to the metadata file.
Alternatively, one could assign some sort of unique identifier, for example a PURL or a DOI, to each page and then use that to identify the metadata file.
DC-dot DC-dot [8] is a Web based tool for creating Dublin Core HTML META tags.
The use of tools such as this may be the simplest way of creating the metadata to be embedded using either the first or third models above.
DC-dot works by first prompting for the URL of the resource that you want to describe.
It will then retrieve the page from the Web and automatically generate some Dublin Core META tags based either on existing metadata in the page (title, keywords, description and existing Dublin Core) or on the contents of the page.
It should be noted that the methods used to automatically generate metadata are nothing to write home about and typically generate tags that need further modification by the user.
DC-dot also looks at the domain name of the Web-site and uses that to determine the publisher sometimes this produces sensible results, sometimes not!
DC-dot allows you to edit and extend the automatically generated tags.
Having done so, you can either cut-and-paste the resulting tags into your HTML page source or save the metadata in a variety of alternate formats including USMARC records, SOIF records, ROADS/WHOIS++ templates and GILS records.
DC-dot can either be accessed from the UKOLN Web-site or download and run locally see the UKOLN metadata software tools page for details [9].
The Metadata system at UKOLN At UKOLN we are beginning to embed Dublin Core metadata into our Web pages.
Initially we are concentrating on Ariadne articles because we have a requirement to embed metadata for collection by the NewsAgent Web robot into Ariadne as part of our role in the NewsAgent for Libraries [10] eLib project.
Currently our plans are to: Store metadata using SOIF records Embed on-the-fly using an Apache SSI script [11] Use MS-Access as tool to create the records Associate metadata with resource by co-locating them in the Web server filestore SOIF (the Summary Object Interchange Format [12]) is the format used by Harvest [13] and the Netscape Catalogue Server.
In some ways SOIF is not an ideal format for holding Dublin Core metadata but it is fairly widely understood and relatively simple to work with.
SOIF records have a simple attribute/value pair syntax, however the format used is not significant for this discussion and the details of SOIF will not be described here.
The use of an XML based format to hold the Dublin Core records would be a sensible alternative.
SOIF records could be created using the DC-dot Web based tool described above.
At UKOLN, after some experimentation with various tools, we have decided to use an MS-Access database to create our Dublin Core records.
This integrates quite nicely with the other tools in use on UKOLN staff PCs.
Finally we have decided to associate a resource with it’s metadata by placing them in separate files in the same directory on the Web server, with the name of the SOIF file being derived from the name of the HTML file.
The diagram should give you an idea of the way things work.
Consider a UKOLN author creating a Web page.
Having edited the page they then use the MS-Access database to create a SOIF record describing it.
The SOIF record is placed in the same directory as the HTML file, using the filename with a ‘.soif’ suffix.
For example, the description for intro.html is put into intro.html.soif.
Each Web page for which metadata is created must have a single line added to it.
This is the line that calls the SSI script.
The example in the diagram above shows the syntax for calling SSIs used by Apache.
Initially the person creating the metadata browses to the file we are describing.
By using an ActiveX Control the browsing can be done using a Web browser embedded into MS-Access.
Having found the required page, the person enters various metadata items title, keywords, description, etc.
As the record is saved a small Visual Basic program writes out a SOIF record as well.
It is important to remember that with this system, MS-Access is simply being used as a front-end tool.
Note that this system allows us to create some NewsAgent specific metadata which will be harvested by the NewsAgent robot and some UKOLN specific metadata which will be used for Web-site management purposes.
For example a group ownership is assigned to each page which will allow us to locate all the pages owned by a particular UKOLN group in the future.
Currently it is envisaged that the UKOLN specific metadata will be stored in the SOIF records but will not be embedded into Web pages.
Now, lets look at how things work from the point of a Web robot.
Imagine a robot collecting a page from the UKOLN web site.
It sends a request for the page to the UKOLN Web server(1).
Normally all the server has to do is read the file from disk and send it back to the robot.
In our case however, the server must also parse the file looking for SSIs (2).
If it finds one, it calls the SSI script (3).
One of the pieces of information that the Web server passes to the script is the name of the file it is currently reading.
The script appends ‘.soif’ to the filename.
If the resulting filename exists, it reads the SOIF record (4), converts it to HTML META tags and passes them back to the server (5).
The Web server adds the META tags to the page and returns the whole thing to the robot (6).
Remember that, as far as the UKOLN Web server is concerned, a robot is no different to a person browsing the Web so this procedure is followed for each and every access to the page.
However, in theory, it might be possible for the script to check who is accessing the page and only generate Dublin Core META tags for those robots known to make use of them.
Dublin Core vs. Alta Vista style       tags Many pages on the Web already have metadata embedded in them.
Most pages, for example, have an HTML <TITLE> tag because without it they are not conformant HTML pages.
Some pages also have KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION META tags because these are used by the big search engines such as Alta Vista.
Note that none of the big search engines, as far as I’m aware, look for Dublin Core META tags yet!
That’s not to say that they won’t index the words found in Dublin Core META tags, but they don’t currently give those words any special significance.Given that we have a script generating our DC.subject and DC.description META tags it seems sensible to let it generate keywords and description META tags containing the same values.
So we might end up with: <META NAME=“DC.subject” CONTENT=“national centre, network information support, library community, awareness, research, information services, public library networking, bibliographic management, distributed library systems, metadata, resource discovery, conferences, lectures, workshops”> <META NAME=“DC.description” CONTENT=“UKOLN is a national centre for support in network information management in the library and information communities.
It provides awareness, research and information services”> <META NAME=“keywords” CONTENT=“national centre, network information support, library community, awareness, research, information services, public library networking, bibliographic management, distributed library systems, metadata, resource discovery, conferences, lectures, workshops”> <META NAME=“description” CONTENT=“UKOLN is a national centre for support in network information management in the library and information communities.
It provides awareness, research and information services”> It is not so clear whether the DC.title META tag and <TITLE> tag should be the same.
Currently at UKOLN, we expect that the <TITLE> tag will continue to be embedded into the Web page by the person creating the page and that the DC.title META tag will be held in the SOIF record and embedded on-the-fly by the SSI script.
Conclusions This article proposed three areas that should be considered by those thinking about using the Dublin Core to describe the resources on their Web-site.
It concentrated primarily on the issues surrounding how best to manage such metadata.
By beginning to implement systems for managing metadata we can get some experience of real use and build up a body of resources with embedded Dublin Core.
It looked at three models for the way in which metadata can be managed, highlighting the key issues of each.
The issues of long term maintenance and transition to other formats should not be underestimated.
It also described in some detail one particular implementation of one of these models that is beginning to be used at UKOLN.
It is acknowledged that the design of this implementation is not perfect and may well change as we begin to work with significant amounts of metadata.
References [1] The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core [2] Web Developments Related to Metadata, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/groups/web-focus/events/seminars/metadata-june1997/iap-html/ [3] The 4th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop Report, http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/mirrored/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/june97/metadata/06weibel.html [4] UKOLN Metadata Resources Dublin Core, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc.html [5] HTML 4.0 W3C Working Draft, http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/ [6] UKOLN Home page, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ [7] Using Server Side Includes Apache Week issue 27, http://www.apacheweek.com/features/ssi [8] DC-dot a Dublin Core META tag creator, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/ [9] UKOLN metadata software tools, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/software-tools/ [10] NewsAgent for Libraries, http://www.sbu.ac.uk/~litc/newsagent/ [11] soif2metadc Perl script, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/software-tools/#soif2metadc/ [12] Summary Object Interchange Format (SOIF) A review of metadata: a survey of current resource description formats http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/DESIRE/overview/rev_20.htm [13] Harvest Web Indexing http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/harvest/ Author details Andy Powell, Technical Development and Research, UKOLN Email: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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British Library Corner: Setting Priorities for Digital Library Research, The Beginnings of a Process?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines British Library Corner: Setting Priorities for Digital Library Research, The Beginnings of a Process?
Buzz software dissemination infrastructure archives digitisation copyright cataloguing multimedia cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Graham Jefcoate describes the background behind the recently announced British Library Research and Innovation Centre call for proposals in the field of digital library research.
Further details on the call for proposals mentioned in this article can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/papers/bl/callforproposal.html The British Library Research and Innovation Centre has initiated a process of discussion and debate among those working in the field of digital library research.
This discussion is intended to help gain some idea of which issues need to be addressed and to establish how the research programmes and funding agencies in the field might set their own priorities.
It has provided valuable information in drafting a call for proposals in the digital library research field which the Centre has announced and in shaping our response to future grant applications in this area.
Our current research plan (1996-1997) describes digital library research in the following terms: "... exploring ways in which technology can be applied to improve the provision of information and library services, and investigating the consequent social, economic, legal and other issues; this programme covers networking (including the use if the Internet), document delivery, electronic publishing (including issues relating to copyright and legal deposit), digitisation of information resources and automation of library processes".
We therefore define digital library-related research very broadly, encompassing not only technical aspects but also the whole impact of networking and digital technologies on the library and information fields and their users.
The Centre already has an impressive record of support for research in the whole digital library field.
Perhaps most significantly, the Centre funds (jointly with JISC) the United Kingdom Office of Library and Information Networking ( UKOLN) as a national centre for support in network information management in the library and information communities.
An important recent example of a succesfully-completed research project is ELINOR (Electronic Library INformation Online Retrieval) at De Montfort University's International Institute for Electronic Library Research, the first project in any British university to build a full-text library system for students.
RUDI (Resource for Urban Design Information) is a project at the University of Hertfordshire which is building a multimedia information resource for research and teaching in the field of urban design.
Other current projects include studies of: the use of online journals (Loughborough University); retrospective catalogues in the non-academic sector (Bath University); an automated reference service (Sheffield University); and, an online thesis service (Edinburgh University).
In addition, the Centre supports an important programme of initiatives in public library networking.
Among recent projects are Project EARL, a pilot/demonstration project to enable public libraries to develop networked information and resource-sharing services, CLIP (the Croydon Libraries Internet Project) and IT Point at Solihull, all of which have had a significant impact, raising awareness of the Internet among library professionals and the wider community.
Research proposals currently under consideration (December 1996) relate to a wide variety of topics including the use of the Internet by sections of the community often "excluded" until now and its impact on specific professions.
A Call for Proposals Much preliminary work in building models and demonstrators or setting standards has therefore already been undertaken or is currently supported by the RIC and other bodies (especially, of course, the eLib programme in the higher education field).
But many key issues remain unresolved providing opportunities for fruitful research.
In the RIC Research bulletin No.
14, the Research and Innovation Centre announced that "it is our intention, ... to identify specific topics or broader programme areas where we and our advisers consider that some concentration of research effort is required.
We will then issue calls for proposals in those topics or programmes" (p. 4).
We are currently making a call for proposals in the field of digital library research.
This is an area where a number of national programmes has emerged and there is the potential danger of a duplication of effort or lack of coordination among them.
There is a clear need to target the Centre's modest resources to best effect.
To help me with the formulation of the call for proposals, and to assist in the selection process, I have been working with a small, informal advisory panel (Rosemary Russell, UKOLN; Heather Kirby, Croydon Libraries; Dr Andrew Prescott, British Library Special Collections).
The call itself was announced before Christmas and applications must be received by the Centre before 31 January 1997.
Two kinds of proposal will be defined: full-scale, longer-term projects such as involving one full-time research assistant and more modest, shorter-term studies, workshops or other appropriate activities.
Ariadne readers are referred to the Centre's Digital Library Research pages on Portico for further information.
The Discussion While working on the call, the panel decided it would be useful to widen the circle of those involved in informal discussions on the future of digital library-related research in this country.
The first step was to arrange a meeting, or rather an informal "brainstorming" session, of interested parties.
Key individuals were invited to participate from the British Library itself, the Libraries and Information Commission Research Sub-Committee, UKOLN, the eLib programme and the European Union's DGXIII.
Including the members of the panel, some fourteen individuals met at the Centre in London on 21 November.
These individuals were not regarded by us in any way as representative of all the agencies with an interest in the topic.
(In addition to this meeting I have held quite lengthy discussions with other centres of excellence in the field, for example the International Institute for Electronic Library Research.)
Neither was the November meeting intended to have any formal outcome, although it seemed useful to disseminate a résumé of points raised in discussion simply in order to stimulate further debate.
The meeting was asked to address two main questions: What topics and issues should be addressed by the next phase of digital library research in this country?
And, Which priorities should the research programmes and funding agencies set?
I am not sure we found any ready answers to either of these questions in the limited time available, but many helpful points emerged.
There was also a sense that the discussion was a useful beginning to a timely initiative.
To kick off the proceedings, the panel had drawn up a list a possible topic areas.
The list was intended merely to stimulate discussion but may have constrained the debate in that participants felt they needed to address and discuss only the points on the paper before them!
Some were also uneasy about the very wide definition of "digital library research" the Centre has used, feeling that a greater emphasis on technical aspects might be expected.
Access for all The first set of questions was grouped under the heading of "Access for all" which clearly recalls "Information for All", the current application by the Libraries and Information Commission with the Library Association for lottery funds to connect public libraries to the Internet.
Where Information for All is concentrating on widening connectivity in the physical sense, we were concerned that wider issues of access to networked information should not be neglected.
Among the questions we asked ourselves were: How could a 'public-benefit' network be established (covering not only public libraries but also citizens' advice bureaux, museums, charities, NHS trusts, etc.)?
Could the experience of the eLib programme be applied in other sectors beyond the higher education sector?
Is a NetSkills programme for the wider library and information community feasible?
How can access to digital information be provided for those with disabilities or other disadvantaged individuals or groups?
What initiatives could be developed aimed at children and young people or indeed older people?
Have possible therapeutic benefits of access to the Net been considered?
What hardware and software solutions might be developed?
Integration of digital information into services Here we felt that much more needed to be done to ensure that digital and networked information was integrated into the 'culture' of library services.
Questions included: How are digital information resources being used to support and enhance services?
How effective are staff awareness and training programmes?
Are there strategies to provide unified access to the full range of information resources?
How effective are they?
What are the challenges in achieving a unified service?
How far can the development of transparent interfaces (e.g.
scholar's workstations) help?
What can be learnt about the need for cultural change among staff and users (cf.
for example IMPEL 2)?
Digital information across sectoral boundaries Here we were concerned to address issues relating to the cooperation of institutions working in the same subject area but in different 'sectors', funded by different public and private sources: central and local government; higher education; business; voluntary organisations and so on.
Networking technology appears to invite the creation of 'virtual communities' of those sharing common interests, but these had in practice been slow to develop.
How can networked information initiatives break down sectoral barriers?
What models are there for successful, cross-sectoral cooperation in particular areas?
How are quality services (e.g.
eLib subject gateway projects) being used inside and outside the higher education field?
What is their acceptance?
Should national, non-sectoral information gateways be developed?
What lessons are there from experience in Europe and the US (e.g.
the Federation led by the Library of Congress)?
Economic modelling This appeared to us to be another key issue (or rather group of issues).
Structures and services will only develop when 'the price is right'!
What will be the principal pricing models for networked information?
What are the factors that will underlie pricing strategies?
What are the technological and market restraints?
What relevant initiatives are there outside the UK?
Electronic and print media Perhaps because the background of the present writer and some of the panellists is in the humanities, issues relating to the impact of digital and networking technologies on reading and scholarly communication also featured prominently in our initial discussions.
A 'new literacy' will be needed so that users are equipped to locate and evaluate networked information.
How will the spread of electronic media (CD-ROM, the Internet) affect the print industry?
Will a balance be reached between printed discourse and the dissemination of information in digital formats or over networks?
How will the presentation of discursive arguments and scholarly communication be changed by the digital format?
Will complexity be lost?
How will the process of reading be affected?
Further Issues and Suggestions The November meeting suggested a further range of possible issues.
Indeed the discussion ranged far beyond research priorities as such, seeking to define a series of desirable outcomes.
It was felt, for example, that JANET, the academic networking consortium, might provide a funding model for the non-academic sector.
This might have a similar kind of collective 'purchasing power' to JANET in negotiating with providers.
Networked 'virtual communities' might link individuals and institutions across sectors (the archives community was mentioned several times as one example; other topic areas mentioned were business and local history).
National services (for example, a 'virtual business library') might build on the blocks of local initiatives.
How could the experience of local projects be 'scaled up' for wider implementation?
New organisational models might emerge, for example 'federating services'.
A national body might be needed, however, to 'broker' or mediate between sectors.
There was much discussion of the need for mapping to ensure we were aware of research and relevant initiatives across sectors and indeed throughout the community.
Information flows and the value and impact of networked information needed to be better understood.
In any case a 'national networked information policy' and a strategy were urgently required!
The desirability of a workshop on economic modelling was also agreed.
The meeting also focussed on the prime importance of training: spreading the 'skills infrastructure' in the LIS community to match the physical infrastructure represented by the networks, the hardware and software.
Following up the experience of NetSkills and IMPEL in the higher education community similar projects in the non-academic sector were clearly desirable (IMPULSE was even suggested as a possible acronym for a public library project!).
Librarians and information specialists should seize the opportunity to re-establish themselves as 'mediators' (or 'knowledge managers'!)
between users and information, redefining (and adding value) to their professional skills.
But some felt that education in the LIS field was not equipping students with the basic technical skills they needed.
Was the profession in danger of missing a golden opportunity?
It was felt that the British Library should play a role in pulling together the results of individual projects and initiatives and ensuring their wide dissemination.
Conclusions and Next Steps My personal conclusion from the many discussions I have had with colleagues over the past few months on priorities for the next phase of digital library research is that there is a growing consensus.
Most seem to agree that priority in digital library research ought now to be given to what might be called 'user-centred' issues: access, awareness and training.
It is these issues that feature most prominently among the research priorities described under Centre's call where we express the wish to stimulate research leading to innovative solutions of questions such as the following: How can access to networked resources be widened to include the whole community?
How can digital information resources be integrated more effectively into library and information services?
How can networking technology aid cooperation between different sectors in the library and information community?
What skills will information professionals and users need?
How can they be acquired?
What will be the principal economic models for the digital library?
What technical standards or evaluation methods will apply?
We stress, however, that we would be happy to consider any proposal that will address the impact of digital and networking technologies on libraries and information, welcoming particularly proposals in the field of public libraries or community information.
The text of the Call itself will be found elsewhere on the UKOLN server.
Clearly the discussions we have held so far have only been a beginning of a longer process.
Perhaps they have only begun to indicate how such a discussion should be shaped.
We should welcome views on this document that might take the discussion further.
Meanwhile we have proposed a widening of the debate in the form of a panel discussion at the next ELVIRA (Electronic Library and Visual Information Research), the annual UK Digital Library conference to be held in Milton Keynes in May next year.
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ADAM: Information Gateway to Resources on the Internet in Art, Design, Architecture and Media Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ADAM: Information Gateway to Resources on the Internet in Art, Design, Architecture and Media Buzz data software framework html database dissemination usability tei archives metadata thesaurus browser vocabularies cataloguing graphics windows z39.50 telnet ftp interoperability mailbase algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Nearly half a year after the project’s official start date, ADAM has a fledgling information gateway to information on the Internet in art, design, architecture and media.
Tony Gill, ADAM Project Leader, outlines what has been achieved so far, and some of the challenges that lie directly ahead.
The ADAM Project is creating a subject-based information gateway service that will provide access to quality-assured Internet resources in the following areas: Fine Art, including painting, prints and drawings, sculpture and other contemporary media including those using technology Design, including industrial, product, fashion, graphic, packaging, interior design Architecture, including town planning and landscape design, but excluding building construction Applied Arts, including textiles, ceramics, glass, metals, jewellery, furniture Media, including film, television, broadcasting, photography, animation, Theory, historical, philosophical and contextual studies relating to any other category Museum studies and conservation Professional Practice, related to any of the above The 3-year JISC funding for ADAM was awarded to a consortium of 10 institutions, each with a vested interest in the creation of the service, as part of the Access to Network Resources initiative of the Electronic Libraries Programme.
Each of the 10 Consortium Partners brings something useful to the project; for example subject expertise, technical capabilities or project management skills.
Many of the representatives from the Consortium Partners who comprise the Steering Group also represent professional associations, for example the Association of Art Historians (AAH), the Council for Schools of Art and Design (CoSAAD), and Computers and the History of Art (CHArt).
The Surrey Institute of Art & Design, represented on the Steering Group by the Project Director Marion Wilks, is the lead institution in the Consortium, and is also the host institution for two of the salaried team members; one of the Project's two Resource Officers Rebecca Bradshaw, and myself.
The University of Northumbria at Newcastle is represented on the Steering Group by Chris Bailey, who is also managing the Consultation Process, described in more detail in the following section.
UNN also hosts the Digital AlphaServer on which the service will reside, and the Project's Technical Officer Mark Burrell.
Glasgow School of Art, represented on the Steering Group by Ian Monie, hosts the other Resource Officer, David Buri.
The other Steering Group members are Coventry University Art and Design Library, Middlesex University, The National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Southampton Institute of Higher Education, The Tate Gallery, University of West of England and Winchester School of Art.
The Story So Far...
Significant progress has been made since the Project's official start date of 1st December 1995 a basic service that allowed users to search a database of 50 resource records using the ROADS software was available long before the first warm day of Spring 1996!
A considerable amount of work has already been completed in order to reach this stage; for example, setting up the server, conducting research into emerging standards for resource description, cataloguing Internet resources and producing a project plan.
As a result, we now have a very clear idea of the challenges that need to be met in the coming months, and are working effectively as a team despite being geographically remote from one another the effectiveness of the communications between team members can be visibly demonstrated by the web pages describing the project, which were designed and produced collaboratively.
This remote team working (tele-teamworking?)
is enabled through the use of a diverse range of communication media Internet applications such as electronic mail, FTP, and TELNET are used in conjunction with more traditional tools such as the trusty telephone and the occasional face-to-face meeting to promote an effective collaborative working environment.
Currently missing from the list of useful communications media, however, is the Royal Mail: 'Snail mail' not only lacks the immediacy of the other media, it is also a hindrance in our attempts to move wherever practical to a 'paperless' environment.
This is both for environmental reasons, and in an attempt to reduce the administrative workloads and costs typically associated with paper-based filing systems.
The Post Office don't need to worry about lost revenue just yet though; the Consultation Process, described below, will make extensive use of the postal service!
Where we're going The following sections outline some of the issues and activities, in no particular order, that we are currently addressing.
Consultation Process As this article goes to press, we are embarking on the first major stage in a Consultation Process that will enable us to focus the service we create on the needs of the likely user community, to monitor the usefulness of the Service, and to create a framework for feedback from its users.
The Consultation Process forms the backbone of our Evaluation Strategy, and its successful completion is a key Project Objective.
In this first stage, we are currently conducting a survey of the information needs of a wide range of practitioners in all of the subject areas covered by ADAM, which will yield information about their awareness of and access to electronic information resources, their current information searching strategies and their views on barriers to access to networked resources.
Background information about the respondents is also gathered, to enable the data to be analysed according to discipline, job function and working environment.
A consultant was employed to design a detailed questionnaire and a list of recipients that will produce a meaningful sample.
The list of recipients was made up from the mailing lists of various relevant associations and professional networks, staff and students at Consortium Member institutions, and lists of commercial practitioners compiled by third parties.
Up to 5,000 paper questionnaires will be distributed by May 10th.
In order to encourage respondents to reply promptly, we have provided reply-paid envelopes and will be conducting a prize draw on 31st May, with a prize of £100 for the winner.
The data from the paper questionnaires will be supplemented by electronically collected responses an electronic version of the form is available from the ADAM web site, and announcements about its existence will have been made in various appropriate newsgroups by the time this article goes to 'press'.
Although the electronic version of the form was time-consuming to set up initially, it will provide an efficient and cost-effective means of supplementing our sample postage and printing costs are eliminated, and data entry consists simply of importing the data, which is already in an electronic format, into the main survey database.
The use of a large number of paper questionnaires was considered vital in order to collect representative information respondents who fill in the web version of the questionnaire will, by definition, already have some experience and ability in using networked resources.
These responses can be analysed separately, and will therefore still be extremely useful in determining the likely needs of users who are already network-literate.
Another benefit that will be derived from the Consultation Process is to raise awareness of the service, paving the way for the Dissemination Programme that will take place after the official launch of the Service for public evaluation, currently scheduled for 26 September 1996.
Interoperability & Standards Two key interrelated issues for any Access to Networked Resources projects are interoperability across different services, and the adoption of various standards that enables such interoperability to take place.
The use of standards affects almost every aspect of the Project's development and implementation, although in almost all key areas standards are still emerging and developing, and compromises are sometimes required.
For example, in designing the Project's web pages, a compromise was arrived at between the need for visual appeal (without which the Project risks the disdain of much of its potential user group!)
and a rigid adherence to standards.
We took the view that the use of non-standard HTML 2.0 'extensions' in our web pages could be sanctioned, provided that no reduction in functionality was caused to users with more standards-conformant web browsers.
For example, we set the background colour of the pages to white because a non-graphical browser such as Lynx would simply ignore those tags.
Conversely, we avoided the use of tables, because text formatted in tables is not represented clearly in certain browsers.
The pages were then tested extensively with a number of different browsers, on various platforms; Netscape, Mosaic, Internet Explorer and Lynx were used variously on UNIX/X-Windows, Macintosh, Windows 3.x and Windows 95.
The problems illustrated above pale into insignificance, however, when faced with a situation where there is no clearly defined standard, or a number of competing standards vying for universal adoption.
A particularly pertinent example of standards in flux for ANR projects are those for describing networked resources how to catalogue the vast ocean of electronic stuff that is available over the Internet.
These records are referred to as metadata, and there is currently much discussion globally about the best way to structure and communicate them.
The ADAM Project is currently using Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) Templates, since this is the format designed to work with the ROADS software.
A number of alternative metadata formats are now appearing, however; for example the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Headers, the Harvest Summary Object Interchange Format (SOIF) and the Dublin Core/Warwick Framework (discussion of these standards is thankfully beyond the scope of this article, but watch ADAM's web server for an Idiot's Guide to Metadata, due later this year).
This means that there's no guarantee that IAFA Templates will become the standard adopted by the wider 'net community.
ADAM's approach to this problem will be to store our metadata records in a structured relational database, and to then create filters from this database that will be able to output records in a variety of metadata formats in response to queries from different systems.
We are not planning to abandon ROADS, however, since we are keen to be compatible with the other ANR projects using the software, particularly once the WHOIS++ server functionality has been completed.
Without the free availability of the ROADS software, and the experiences gained and shared by the ANR projects that preceded us, it would not have been possible to get the service up and running so quickly.
It also has a number of other appealing features, for example the stemming algorithm used in the search engine is widely held to be the best for use with the English Language, and of course the software is available without cost!
We are also hoping to take part in the WHOIS++/Z39.50 Interoperability Trial, proposed by UKOLN.
Z39.50 is an information retrieval protocol that exists as both an ISO and an ANSI standard, and there appears to be steadily growing support for it to be integrated into the WWW.
Vocabulary control is another application of standards that can become important as part of a cataloguing function.
We are currently negotiating with the Getty Art History Information Program to secure the use of the Art & Architecture Thesaurus and the Union List of Artist's Names, both as tools to assist consistent data entry, and as tools to enhance information retrieval by providing the option to add synonymous terms to the search.
Some standards must be decided at the Project level, in response to the needs of the user community.
For example, what quality criteria should be used to select the networked resources to catalogue?
How comprehensively should web sites be catalogued?
How should mirrors of catalogued resources be handled?
Discussions on these topics and others are currently underway.
User Interface For the vast majority of the Service's users, the initial perception of the service will be largely based upon the web site's user interface.
Of particular concern are those elements of the user interface that are used when searching for information held in the database.
One of the most interesting aspects of the project for me is the opportunity to carry out usability tests on a wide range of web-based search interfaces, to try and determine what information the users of the Service actually want, and what information retrieval capabilities and interfaces are the best for getting it, across a wide range of different users.
We plan to implement a whole range of search interfaces, and then invite users to attempt more detailed information retrieval exercises.
This will take place in a structured way, for example through formal testing of volunteers under observation, and in a less detailed why, by analysing the log files on the server.
Initially we will be concentrating on user-friendly interfaces to handle boolean searches and the use of thesauri to expand searches to include synonyms, but if time and resources allow we will be looking at the feasibility of: 'Clustering' records into groups of 'like types' to allow browsing, as opposed to searching.
The use of persistent 'recordsets' so that the user can build up a complex search in a series of simple steps.
Ranking hits from a search in an attempt to present them in order of relevance to the user.
Natural language processing, which allows the server to 'parse' or understand a search expression phrased in plain English.
The additional use of semantic networks could also allow the data to be queried or ranked more intelligently.
User profiling, to build up a knowledge-base about the preferences and habits of different users Communication with intelligent agents, should these become more prevalent on the Web.
A Drop in the Ocean A fact that presumably every ANR project has to come to terms with at their outset is that it's impossible to thoroughly catalogue the contents of the Internet, no matter how hard you try.
Attempting to catalogue ADAM's subject areas will be particularly frustrating, however, since they cover such a wide area and will tend to appeal to a wide range of users.
New resources come on-line everyday.
In the long term, it is not practical to continue cataloguing networked resources by hand, except in very specialised cases.
Some method needs to be found, therefore, that can automate, or at least speed up, the process.
The solution may lie in software technology; intelligent 'summarizer agents' may crawl the web, 'reading,' summarizing and cataloguing the resources automatically, sending back nicely formatted records to HQ.
On the other hand, the responsibility for production of metadata may shift culturally to the information provider, who could easily add information that would be helpful in cataloguing the resources.
One thing is certain for the time being, it's important to keep the options open!
Contact Further information about the ADAM Project can be found at http://adam.ac.uk There is also an open mailbase list for the project at: adam-news@mailbase.ac.uk The author can be contacted via e-mail on tony@adam.ac.uk, or by telephone on 01252 722441 x2427.
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Metadata, PICS and Quality Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata, PICS and Quality Buzz data software framework database infrastructure metadata vocabularies cataloguing graphics pics cd-rom research standards Citation BibTex RIS Chris Armstrong looks at the possibility of a PICS application acting as a quality filter.
A recent Ariadne article by Anagnostelis, Cooke and McNab ended with a reference to the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) [1] and added that while PICS controls neither the publication nor the distribution of information, it offers “individuals and organisations the option of filtering out or filtering in selected views of networked information”.
There follows a reference to the Centre for Information Quality Management (CIQM) and its proposal to use PICS filtering in order to allow users to set constraints on the minimum quality of resources retrieved [2].
This article seeks to amplify this basic idea.
CIQM was originally set up by The Library Association and the UK Online User Group to act as a clearing house to which database users could report problems relating to the quality of any aspect of a database being used (search software, data, indexing, documentation, training, for example).
CIQM undertakes to forward the problem to the appropriate body (information provider, online host, CD-ROM publisher or Internet resource provider) and route the response back to the user.
The service is free to users.
Users tend to judge a new database on the description printed in vendor catalogues, on usage guides such as the KR DIALOG Blue Sheets and on general publicity material, so it is not surprising that searches are often performed which exceed the capabilities of the database.
Users rarely know of the information provider’s policy as to inclusion: some databases index every article in a journal, other only substantive or key articles, still others vary their rules depending on the journal.
Sometimes such expectations are based on nothing more than the idea that best practice will be followed and many of the quality issues reported to CIQM reflect a gap between expectations and the reality of searching.
thus users have to face the twin spectres of unknown database specifications and unknown adherence to the unknown specifications.
Building on its work as a clearing house, CIQM has been looking at ways in which database and resource quality can be assured to users if not measured against a fixed standard, then set against a published specification or user-level agreement of the database as it is at a fixed point in time.
These have come to be known as Database Labels and several prototypes can be seen at our web site [4].
The Labels can be used to describe any electronic resource whether it is supplied on diskette or CD-ROM, by conventional online or as an Internet or Web resource; however, with the current ongoing discussions on metadata, the Dublin Core and the Warwick Framework it is evident that, for Internet-based resources at least, there exists the basis of a more direct means of assuring resource users that it reaches an acceptable standard Metadata and PICS The Dublin Metadata Workshop of 1995 and the Warwick Metadata Workshop of just over a year later were “convened to promote the development of consensus concerning network resource description across a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including the computer science community, text markup, and librarians” [5].
That is to say, the use of descriptive data elements stored as a part of the resource they describe (metadata) which are a simple resource declaration of content, ownership, currency, etc.
As the Nordic Metadata Project shows, metadata can enhance access by making documents more easily searchable and deliverable over the Internet [6].
Already, the idea of ‘labelling’ resources is apparent although at this stage no application other than a general wish to make their location easier had surfaced.
With the outcry about censorship, an extension of the metadata methodology was developed that allowed for software filtering of resources as they were located.
PICS establishes Internet conventions for label formats (here, ‘label’, does not equate in any way to a CIQM Database Label) and distribution methods, while dictating neither a labelling vocabulary nor how the labels should be used and who should use them.
Resnick and Miller [7] suggest that, “It is analogous to specifying where on a package a label should appear, and in what font it should be printed, without specifying what it should say.” An overview of PICS and its uses can be found in an article by Resnick and Miller [7] while it’s use is described in detail in a document prepared for the technical subcommittee of PICS by Miller, Resnick and Singer [8]; label syntax and communication protocols are further described in a document by Krauskopf, Miller, Resnick and Treese [9].
It is important to note that PICS itself is a methodology or an infrastructure and not a rating service or an active system for selection/censorship.
It is values-neutral: it is the applications that govern the implementation.
PICS labels describe content on one or more dimensions using a purpose-made vocabulary and allow selection software to determine access.
In its most publicised role, PICS can be used to control Internet access by children.
The local selection software can be set to inhibit access if violence exceeds a level previously determined by the parent or teacher, for example.
The resource owner or labeller indicates on a mutually agreed scale the level of violence (or nudity, profanity, etc) for their site and the selection software bars sites whose label equals or exceeds this level.
Sites without labelling can also be barred.
Other uses for such a system can easily be imagined.
The first labels were designed to allow circumnavigation of indecent sites in response to the US Telecommunications Decency Act for example, using the Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC) rating system or the SafeSurf vocabulary and this is probably still the main application, but as Resnick wrote in his Scientific American article, ‘Filtering Information on the Internet’, labels can be used to “convey characteristics that require human judgement whether a Web page is funny or offensive as well as information not readily apparent from the words and graphics [within the page], such as the Web site’s policies about use or resale of personal data.” [10] Resnick and Miller [7] had already noted that “new infrastructures are often used in unplanned ways, to meet latent needs” and suggest that electronic journal articles could be encoded (seminal article, review article, short notice, etc); intellectual property vocabularies may develop; and reputation vocabularies could “associate labels with commercial sites that had especially good or especially bad business practices.” It is this last application which comes closest in spirit to the concept of CIQM Database Labels and Internet Resource Labels.
Over the last two years considerable development work has taken place in all the metadata areas; PICS development work is supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation responsible for the development of Web standards.
Behind the general and easily understood concepts, complex work on syntax and vocabulary has gone on at the same time that further PICS applications have been suggested.
PICS labels may be used to carry digital signatures of resources or to protect computers from viruses, and coming ‘meta circle’, as it were, it has been pointed out that mechanism to restrict access and to gain access are two sides of the same coin: requests to RESTRICT access to any site dealing with a given topic or having a less than up-to-date currency rating are very similar to requests to FIND any site by that topic or with a non-current date code.
At the PICS Working Group meeting held in London on 13/14th January 1997, usage of PICS within the USA was reported as widespread.
It also appears that PICS is being endorsed at government level in Europe.
In light of the PICS development work, it seems clear that the Internet community would benefit from work to make use of PICS for storing data on resource quality.
Locating Worthwhile Resources In addition to searching the Internet by way of search engines such as Alta Vista or services such as Excite Web Reviews [11] and the Magellan Internet Guide [12], users can access material through a variety of subject-specific gateways, such as ADAM [13] , EEVL [14], OMNI [15] and SOSIG [16], which will direct them to selected and evaluated resources in their interest area.
All of these have disadvantages ranging from the massive results of Alta Vista and the uneven reviews of the services reviewed in the Anagnostelis, Cooke and McNab article [1] to the subject gateways which either simply describes the resource or offer an arbitrary scoring mechanism.
No standard quality vocabulary has been developed and users are invariably unable to judge the strengths and weaknesses of sites.
One idea is being explored by the IEEE Computer Society Standards Activities Board.
The project currently under discussion is a proposal to use PICS specifications to indicate peer endorsement of articles [17].
Their view, as a professional body actively pursuing electronic publication, is that PICS could ensure that members and/or consumers know what materials have been peer reviewed and so endorsed.
CIQM believes that the same mechanism could be used for a more extensive labelling of resources and offer users a quality assurance mechanism covering a range of criteria.
The advantages of a PICS-based system come with the standardised vocabulary and scales which could be imposed on quality judgements.
Users would no longer have to interpret the meaning behind a site designated as “cool” or guess how current they could expect a three-star site to be; the quality vocabulary would include scales for these and other quality criteria such as those highlighted by CIQM’s earlier work and originally itemised by the Southern California Online User Group [18] .
A considerable amount of work has already been undertaken by both CIQM and others on quality evaluation and resource criteria.
In developing any set of PICS label values this should, of course, be taken into account.
Two of the most extensive studies are DESIRE [19] and Alison Cooke’s Doctoral Research project at the University of Wales Aberystwyth which has resulted in sets of evaluation criteria for various Internet resource types [3], while developments in the medical community, such as the development of codes of conduct for medical Web sites by the Health on the Net Foundation [20] and the British Medical Internet Association [21] are also relevant and should be taken into account.
Additional references in this area are given below [22] [23] [24] [25][26].
The existing CIQM Database Labels [4] contain a mixture of quantitative and qualitative information: for example, not only do they detail the number of records on the database and the percentages of records from different geographical regions, but they contain over twenty quality assurance statements such as, “All text fields are spell checked”, “All authors for every article are indexed” or “There is no duplicated information in this database”.
The PICS labels could contain a similar mix of factual (for example: author/ownership, type of corporate source, length, subject coverage, geographical coverage/relevance) and qualitative (spell check indicator, accuracy measurement, indication of peer-reviewing, timeliness, etc).
Even within these few examples, there almost exists sufficient data to enable an assessment of the resource: the name of the author coupled with his professional standing and the knowledge that he writes from a university or research institute (as opposed to, for example, from home); the length of the article and its topicality; the fact that care has been exercised in its production (spell checked, facts confirmed, citations validated, etc) and the knowledge that it is current, peer-reviewed and regularly updated all serve to attest to the value of the site.
As a part of DESIRE mentioned above [19], the SOSIG project has produced a detailed list of quality selection criteria for subject gateways [27].
This cataloguing tool is designed to be used by subject gateways “to define or refine their quality selection criteria”.
There are five sections: Scope Policy, Content Criteria, Form Criteria, Process Criteria and Collection Management Policy.
Each of these areas is covered in some detail.
Content Criteria, for example, contains sections on validity, authority and reputation, substantiveness, accuracy, comprehensiveness, uniqueness, composition and organisation, and currency and adequacy of maintenance.
Under each of these headings are a series of criteria couched as questions with a series of hints and checks that can be used to discern whether a resource meets a particular criterion.
Under Validity, the criteria in question are given as: How valid is the content of the information?
Does the information appear to be well researched?
What data sources have been used?
Do the resources fulfil the stated purpose?
Has the format been derived from another format?
Does the information claim to be unbiased (when in fact it is biased)?
Is the information what it appears to be?
Why is the information there?/What was the motivation of the information provider when they made the information available?/Do they have an ulterior motive?
Does the resource point to other sources which could be contacted for confirmation?
Is the content of the resource verifiable can you cross check information?
In terms of a PICS Quality Label, these could be translated into scales such as: Few references/ –> /Many references Data sources are poor/ –> /very good Bibliography/No bibliography Scope statement/No scope statement Scope statement supported/ –> /not supported by content Copy of data available elsewhere; scale: on paper/on CD-ROM/electronically/not a copy Information has a geographical/political/other bias Site is provided by personal/business/publisher/academia/research institution/ other Information is incomplete/adequate/complete Vanity publishing/ –> /refereed article Author e-mail contact/postal contact/no contact information Thus, for example, users could select sites by subject terms in the normal way and filter out those which do not contain at least an adequate number of references; that are available on another publishing medium; that are provided by an institution that is ‘lower’ down the scale than “publisher” (that is, personal or business); that are not refereed; and that have less than adequate data sources.
A search on AltaVista, for example, would still result in the same number of returns that would have been supplied before labelling but users of the PICS Quality Label will find that many of them are blocked from their workstation because they do not meet the standard which they themselves have set.
For the PICS Quality Ratings to work effectively, the general PICS system must be adopted by common browsers so that users can actually retrieve data according to quality criteria such as geographical relevance, authority and timeliness in addition to the search terms employed to discover the resource in the first place simply by setting their local software appropriately.
A quality filter effectively limits what users see to only the best resources; the filter being set in advance by information specialists or varied on a search-by-search basis by users able to judge and use information quality criteria for themselves.
Adoption of PICS-compliant searching by the regular Internet browsers seems likely to take place PICS is already supported, for example, by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Standardising search engines by the PICS quality vocabulary In addition to ad hoc use, a PICS quality vocabulary could be adopted by subject gateways as a standard means of evaluating the sites they include.
Such an access mechanism would be immediately useful to users, providing a meaningful comparative evaluation of the resources to which they point.
If taken up by more than one subject gateway it would allow sensible comparison of, for example, an OMNI site with an EEVL site and, additionally, would allow easy and quick transfer of records between gateways.
If search engines themselves were to incorporate the mechanism, users would end up with an extremely powerful access tool.
In this case the quality limiting could be undertaken by the search engine, obviating the need for a second-stage local processing/filtering.
The search interface could incorporate a few buttons or scales covering a subset of the PICS quality criteria and users would alter their defaults at the same time that they entered the search terms.
If left alone the quality filter could be set to function at median levels or to remain inoperative.
PICS metadata would be beneficial to everyone users and providers alike.
Users retrieve data that can be trusted to a known degree while the providers of the enhanced resources would gain a more accurate assessment of site use as their counters will tend to reflect the number of actual users rather than simply the number of passing visitors.
For sites that rely on advertising revenue, this has to be an added strength.
References Anagnostelis, B.; Cooke, A. and McNab, A., “Never mind the quality, check the badge-width!”, Ariadne Issue 9, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/quality-ratings/ Armstrong, C. J.
Quality on the Internet, db-Qual, Vol 2 Issue 1, January 1997, http://www.fdgroup.co.uk/dbq_3_4.htm CIQM Database Labels Cooke, A.
Finding Quality on the Internet: a guide for librarians and information professionals.
London: Library Association Publishing, in preparation, CIQM Database Labels, http://www.fdgroup.co.uk/ciqm.htm The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set Home Page, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core/ Nordic Metadata Project, http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/index.html Resnick, P. and Miller, J. PICS: Internet Access Controls without Censorship.
Communications of the ACM, 1996, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/iacwcv2.htm Miller, J.; Resnick, P. and Singer, D. Platform for Internet Content Selection Version 1.1: Rating Services and Rating Systems (and their Machine Readable Descriptions), May 1996, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/services.html Krauskopf, T.; Miller, J.; Resnick, P. and Treese, W. Platform for Internet Content Selection Version 1.1: PICS Label Distribution Label Syntax and Communication Protocols http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/labels.htm Resnick, P. Filtering Information on the Internet.
Scientific American, March 1997, http://www.sciam.com/0397issue/0397resnick.html Excite Web Reviews, http://www.excite.com/Reviews/ Magellan Internet Guide, http://www.mckinley.com/ ADAM: Art, Design, Architecture and Media Information Gateway, http://adam.ac.uk/ Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ OMNI (Organising Medical Networked Information), http://www.omni.ac.uk/ SOSIG (Social Science Gateway), http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ PICS Peer Review http://www.computer.org/standard/Internet/peer.htm Southern California Online User Group Quality Criteria, http://bubl.ac.uk/archive/lis/org/ciqm/databa1.txt Day, M. et al.
Selection Criteria for Quality Controlled Information Gateways: Report for DESIRE (Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education), http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/DESIRE/quality/report.html Health on the Net Foundation, http://www.hon.ch/ British Medical Internet Association, http://www.healthcentre.org.uk/bmia/index.html Widener University.
Web Sites Evaluation Checklists.
(Includes checklists for Advocacy, Business, Informational, News and Personal web sites) http://www.science.widener.edu/~withers/webeval.htm Grassian, E. Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources http://www.ucla.edu/campus/computing/bruinonline/trainers/critical.html Bartelstein, A.
Teaching Students to Think Critically about Internet Resources, http://weber.u.washington.edu/~libr560/NETEVAL/index.html Ciolek, M. Information Systems Quality and Standards, http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/QLTY/QltyHome.html Tillman, H. Evaluating Quality on the Net, http://www.tiac.net/users/hope/findqual.html Quality Selection Criteria for Subject Gateways, http://sosig.ac.uk/desire/qindex.html Author Details C. J. Armstrong, Centre for Information Quality Management Email: lisqual@cix.compulink.co.uk Tel: 01974 251441 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship Buzz software accessibility copyright cataloguing multimedia ascii gopher ftp Citation BibTex RIS Lori Widzinski, the editor, describes the evolution of MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship.
MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship (MCJ) made its debut in April 1992 as a peer-reviewed electronic journal on the Internet.
The concept for a peer-reviewed journal in academic media librarianship arose after an extensive literature search revealed very little regard for this specialty.
There are several scholarly publications in librarianship, but none in the U.S. focusing exclusively on academic media librarianship.
As Head of the Media Resources Center in the Health Sciences Library at the State University of New York at Buffalo, I thought about filling this void with an electronic journal.
I contacted my counterpart in the Law Library at SUNY Buffalo, Terrence McCormack, and at the end of our discussion, we had decided to explore the possibility of starting an electronic journal.
By this time in cyber-history, peer reviewed scholarly journals were appearing with increasing frequency.
For us, this new frontier seemed the logical synthesis between the manageability of the electronic format and a perceived need in the scholarly literature of academic media librarianship.
Working with our institution's Computing Center, we prepared "technically" for distribution of the journal.
Using the LISTSERV software, we would e-mail the table of contents with abstracts to subscribers.
Readers could then ftp any articles they were interested in studying.
We compiled an editorial board to assist with the peer review process, and provide input on journal operations.
A mission statement, author guidelines, style manual, ISSN, and copyright policy were all established.
The response from our first call for papers was impressive.
When the first issue was distributed to our 450 charter subscribers, it contained four peer reviewed articles, and represented the work of dedicated media professionals and librarians from across the United States.
Typically, articles for MCJ focus on a variety of issues facing media professionals in institutions of higher education.
Everything from cataloging the Internet to copyright to distance learning.
Although the word "librarianship" appears in the title of the journal, we use the word loosely to apply to media professionals in higher education.
We hoped to bridge a perceived gap between media professionals under the administrative arm of academic libraries and those managed by computing or media services departments.
While targeting those in the library field, media professionals who may not necessarily hold an MLS or be classified as librarians but who work in an academic media center are included.
From the technical standpoint, publishing an electronic journal has been a smooth process.
E-mail distribution is much more cost efficient than snail mail, and it speeds up the review process considerably.
Web access exceeds the capabilities of e-mail, and offers exciting possibilities for future development of the journal.
The problems facing electronic scholarly publishing are more philosophical in nature.
Issues of journal credibility and value to the tenure process; archival storage and retrieval; and copyright implications are now of primary concern to the world of e-scholars.
MC Journal's success can be measured through its development from an electronic journal of ASCII based files for ftp retrieval, to gopher accessible files, and now to a site on the World Wide Web.
It has grown to include three regular columns: "Inter-Media", written by Michael Albright of Iowa State University, focuses on making the most of the Internet for media professionals; "Technology Watch" by our Associate Editor, Terrence McCormack, takes a look at new technologies in our field; and the practical, everyday life in an academic media situation is represented by a different author with each issue for the "Media Works" column.
Another landmark in MC Journal's development occurred when the H.W.
Wilson Company chose to begin indexing the journal with the Spring 1995 issue.
The journal is now international in scope, as authors from Australia and Canada are included in the publication.
As of this writing in August of 1996, we have distributed seven complete issues containing twenty-four peer reviewed articles.
Our subscription base has dropped to 272 subscribers, however the web site (http://wings.buffalo.edu/publications/mcjrnl) received 1,642 hits in July 1996, 573 of those requesting the most recent special issue which was distributed in early July 1996 on Distance Learning.
With web technology advancing, presumably peer-reviewed electronic journals will evolve and mature with resulting increase in accessibility and credibility.
Future directions for MC Journal include encouraging authors to exploit the capabilities of the web and include multimedia options within articles.
It seems only fitting that a journal devoted to media librarianship should itself be available in a non-print medium.
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Down Your Way: Queen's University Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: Queen's University Library Buzz accessibility opac research standards Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark visits the Victorian and 20th-century splendours of the Queen's Univerity, Belfast.
Sunday 6 July, the Royal Ulster Constabulary was under attack on the Lower Ormeau Road, Belfast.
The following day, less than a mile away, the RUC band was playing at the Graduation Garden Party at The Queen’s University of Belfast.
The contrast between the conservation area of the Victorian university and the squat red-brick terraces of the Lower Ormeau Road could not be greater, yet they are both typical, in their own way, of life in the province.
Although Lower Ormeau Road tends to dominate the news coverage, Queen’s has much to offer, and I was determined to find out what it was, with Associate Librarian Trevor Lyttle as my guide.
University Library [1] has expanded greatly from its origins in the Main Library, now a Grade 1 listed building, and there are seven branch libraries spread throughout the city.
Like most universities, Queen’s has had to absorb a large increase in student numbers – 40% since 1990 – and has adapted its academic year to semesterisation.
The Library has tried to deal with this by means of an action plan which has been driven by the results from surveys of academics and students.
Overall there is a high satisfaction level, but one major weakness stands out – availability of required reading material.
Access to the library building has been a critical problem.
Pressure on the Main Library in the mid-1990s was severe, with queues frequently stretching out of the building into the old quad in busy periods due to the fire regulations which only allowed 600 users in the building at any one time.
The pressure was relieved this January, when a new purpose-built undergraduate library, the Seamus Heaney Library [2] (see picture, left), was opened to users on the main campus.
Inevitably, the Library was built with funding made available as a result of the Follett Report of 1993.
The Library combines quiet reading areas and computing facilities, housing 20,000 volumes and 20,000 off-prints.
The book collections are kept in ‘steady state’.
Since its opening, the Library has been well used, with an average of 4,000 users through the entrance on a mid-term weekday.
A new card-based entrance and exit system in which users must swipe themselves in and out, provides the Library with very accurate management information.
In addition to the problem of accessibility of the bookstock, Queen’s has suffered badly in recent years from the common problem of late notification of reading list material.
The Library was frequently in the position of not knowing what was required reading until after courses had begun.
Tackling this required a culture change on the part of academics.
Library staff always knew that it was going to be difficult to persuade academics to take on ‘extra’ work, as Law Librarian Miriam Dudley explained.
“We set up a working party in early 1996, which designed a standard form for submission of reading lists [3].
This relieved academics of the burden of completing proposal cards for each text.” This form was made available in both electronic and paper formats.
Reactions from staff to the reading lists project have tended to divide along discipline lines.
Academics in the sciences have tended to be more accepting than those in the arts and humanities.
“Some reading lists do still turn up unexpectedly at enquiry desks, having evaded the new system, but we have developed a fast-track procedure designed to get the books onto the shelves within a week, if possible.” The working party is scheduled to continue until Christmas 1997 at which point it is hoped the project can enter a maintenance phase and be handed over to the Acquisitions Department.
With the introduction of the new BLCMP TALIS reading list module, access to the reading lists should soon be available from the Web OPAC.
Even in the Long Vacation, an Open Access Computer Room in the Seamus Heaney Library is busy Network-based services have brought enormous gains to Queen’s, but not cost-free.
Staff training is an obvious expense and new posts have been created to help train staff and produce documentation.
According to University Librarian Norman Russell, there has been a huge development in staff expertise.
“Network technologies came to the fore in 1995 when the Library faced a periodicals budget crisis and had to make cuts.
We asked academic staff to identify the most-used journals in support of teaching as well as for research.
It made an enormous impact to the way journal articles are used in this university.” The result was a staggering 45% saving in the periodicals budget.
Although journal reductions are never popular, the Library offered electronic information retrieval, interlibrary loan and document delivery systems in their place – the now familiar holdings-to-access switch.
It has paid off.
The university is one of the pilot sites feeding into the JISC project to develop guidelines for institutions wishing to develop an information strategy.
Queen’s’ approach is not driven solely by the Library or the Computer Centre but by expertise obtained from across the entire university.
This links information closely to teaching and learning.
All academic departments are involved, with academics from the School of Management taking a leading role.
When the pilot sites report in the autumn, the approach taken by Queen’s, stressing the importance of information at the centre of the learning process, will reveal a fascinating combination of new techniques in the service of the traditional role of the university as a place of learning.
It is an approach symbolised by the handsome new Seamus Heaney Library which stands proudly at the heart of the elegant Victorian campus.
References [1] Queen’s University of Belfast Library http://web.qub.ac.uk/lib/ [2] Seamus Heaney Library http://web.qub.ac.uk/lib/wherelib/shl/shl.html [3] Reading List Project http://www.qub.ac.uk/lib/reading/reqread.html Author details Isobel Stark, Web Officer, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY email:i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Online Exhibition: The OMNI Perspective Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Online Exhibition: The OMNI Perspective Buzz software java database cd-rom intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Lisa Gray investigates the Online 1997 exhibtion for medical information.
The day didn’t start off quite as planned a late taxi led to a missed train, and 40 minutes of sitting at a very cold station!
But my day trip as OMNI Project Officer to the Online Exhibition at Olympia in London did however get better.
It was the first day of the exhibition, and everything seemed to be running smoothly.
The hall was packed with stands on two floors, an impressive display of the information world.
My aim was to check out the biomedical information scene, but before I’d even started, I was offered a drink of “Yakult” a health drink aiming to enhance my digestive system which suprisingly enough was quite pleasant!
After collecting my free bag of goodies, stress balls, mouse mat and balloons (always useful), I began to wander.
Out of the many stands available, from all areas of the information professions including law, business, news, a few of the biomedical stands caught my attention; Prous Science provides information on drug R&D, pharmacology, medicine and medicinal chemistry, since 1958.
A very interesting development is Timely Topics in Medicine a new Internet based information and communication system, aimed at health professionals and students, covering medical topics.
Ultimately will have 23 separate medical topics from AIDS to Urology and Nephrology, but at the moment, only a few (e.g.
Cardiovascular Diseases) are available.
Register free of charge for students and professionals.
Accessible from http://www.prous.com/ttm/index.html Other Prous Science products include Daily Essentials a daily interactive searchable and browsable drug news and views service provided via the Internet or Intranet.
The news sources for this service include the current literature, patent literature, congresses and company information.
A subscription fee is paid ($1,600 for annual individual user fee).
See http://www.prous.com/home_daily/main.html Molecule of the Month is a section on the Prous Science home page that highlights a different drug molecule each month, see http://www.prous.com/mom/nov_97/mom.html for Novembers drug Repaglinide.
Ensemble is a CD-ROM database of more than 95,000 compounds with demonstrated biological activity.
It provides chemical and pharmacological information on these compounds, including the chemical structure.
Subscription rate is $5000 for a single user.
Ovid The Ovid stand had a database of interest “Evidence Based Medicine Reviews” providing content from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Best Evidence (a database containing the ACP Journal Club, and the journal Evidence-Based Medicine).
It is the first product from a new line from Ovid Clinical Information Products Division aimed at reaching the needs of health professionals.
This database has the features of a function to limit searches in Medline to articles meeting evidence based criteria.
Access to this database will be with Java and Web interfaces via Ovid Online.
See the Ovid homepage for details http://www.ovid.com Optology Information Solutions At the Optology stand, a service caught my eye MIRON, Medical Information Resource on NHSnet.
This service provides access to a range of medical and health information through SilverPlatter Information including the databases Medline, Health-CD, Embase, OSH-CD, Toxline, Inpharma, Reactions, Cancerlit, Cinhahl, Aidsline, Food and Human Nutrition, Reactions and the British Nursing Index (many of these are not available till early 1998).
For details see the Optology web site which provides contact information: http://www.optology.com/ UMI A new database is available from UMI the ProQuest Medical Library on CD-ROM, which unlike Medline aims to provide full text articles (including images) from 110 journals indexed in Medline (currently I was quoted around 70% are full text).
MeSH headings are used, as in Medline.
This database is aimed at medical schools and libraries, and covers from 1994.
A fixed annual fee is charged.
There are plans to put it on the web but it is only on CD-ROM at the moment.
See the UMI web site at http://www.umi.com/ Aries Systems Corporation There are a number of medical journal databases available on CD-ROM from Aries, with the Knowledge Finder search software with full text articles complete with images.
One of the journals JMRI is now available on the web, with a free trial for 30 days (though couldn’t find it from their home page).
Their range of titles include NEJM, Annals of Internal Medicine, Neurosurgery.
Also available are the online databases, including Medline, Aidsline, Cancerlit, etc.
available for a subscription fee.
Check out their home page at http://www.kfinder.com/ Cambridge Scientific Abstracts CSA are planning to offer web links as part of their Internet Database Service.
When you search one of their bibliographic databases, a link to an additional results set, offering a collection of related web sites selected by CSA staff will be offered.
Initially this service will be available for environmentally related databases only, but CSA plan to expand the service to all their scientific titles, many of which are in the life sciences.
At the moment there is no separate access to the web resources selected, you have to be a CSA subscriber.
See Cambridge Scientific Abstracts home page at http://www.csa.com/ for more details.
Elsevier Science Elsevier Science, the scientific publishers, were at the exhibition displaying a number of new services.
Included was the Science Channel giving you scientific information using push technology across the web, covering science news, debates, events, personalised journal contents, and magazine reviews.
Other web based services offered include an based online interactive version of the journal Brain Research, and an online journal offering information to molecular biologists, called Technical Tips Online.
For subscription information, and more information about the other new services offered by Elsevier Science, go to the web site at http://www.elsevier.nl/ Other companies with a medical/scientific flavour included ISI the Institute of Scientific Information (producer of Current Contents and the Science Citation Index), Adis Online, Bowker-Saur, EBSCO, IMS Global Services, HealthGate (an online provider of medical information, including free access to databases such as Medline and AidsDrugs), Beilstein Informationssysteme, BIOSIS and CINAHL an impressive turnout.
Overall the amount of information to take in (and take away!)
was huge, and the day was an interesting look into the information world.
For further information about all the exhibitors, there is a search facility accessible from the Online Information ‘97 web site, http://www.learned.co.uk/events/online/.
Author Details Lisa Gray OMNI Project Officer lisa.gray@omni.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information Buzz data framework database thesaurus udc cataloguing graphics mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Frank Norman, project co-ordinator, describes OMNI, what it can do for you (and you for it).
OMNI is an eLib project from the Access to Network Resources programme area.
It consists of a well-maintained and expanding database of medical and health resources that can be accessed through JANET/Internet.
This database can be searched, via a World Wide Web browser; in addition, catalogues of the resources are available for browsing.
Have you ever wanted a service that could quickly and reliably guide you through the Internet jungle to a quality source of well-maintained information?
Do you despair of out-of-date bookmark lists that point you to obsolete web addresses, and too-powerful Internet robot indexers that retrieve everything but what you really wanted to find?
Then read the good news about the eLib programme's Access to Network Resources (ANR) projects: SOSIG, OMNI, ADAM, EEVL, IHR-INFO, CAIN and ROADS.
These seven projects are set to change the face of networked information use in the UK, bringing librarians' skills to bear on the tangled web of the Internet.
There is a tendency to speak of the Internet as a system but it is also possible to conceive of it as an information resource infospace rather than cyberspace.
Moving away from machine metaphors and towards metaphors of knowledge and information points the way to services based on human control rather than on machine control.
The ANR projects take the model of the subject librarian as their starting point and apply this to the UK networked information world.
Six of the projects will be devoted to creating gateways to resources in specific subjects, while one (ROADS) will develop a system to aid and automate the process of resource organisation and discovery.
OMNI The OMNI gateway, launched in November 1995, is a WWW interface to a catalogue of biomedical and health related information available via JANET/Internet.
It facilitates discovery of, and access to, resources likely to be of interest to the biomedical and healthcare academic community in the UK.
OMNI is a quality service, facilitating access to useful information.
Resources are not added to the gateway until they have been filtered, catalogued, classified and subject-indexed.
The filtering process weeds out material that is out of date, inappropriate or strictly local in context.
The cataloguing record includes a description of each resource.
Concerned with content rather than form Internet enthusiasts talk about Internet "wildlife" (e.g.
gophers, webs, spiders and subject trees) or maybe about types of information (directories, databanks, graphics, etc.).
These approaches have their place but OMNI will be relatively unconcerned about the format of networked information resources, paying more attention to the actual information content its quality and subject.
OMNI adds value to information resources by: adding indexing data (to improve searchability) arranging in classified order (to improve browsability) adding descriptions (to clarify purpose and use) Concentrating on a subject group The word "medical" in the title of the project is a compromise and is used in its broadest sense to include clinical medicine, nursing, allied health professions, biological sciences, public health and health management.
Although this might seem a very wide group of subjects, all these aspects of medicine are so intertwined that it makes sense to treat them together.
User liaison A service is nothing without users and OMNI aims to develop good links with the user community in the UK higher education and research sectors.
OMNI is launching its basic service early in the life of the project in an attempt to provide benefits to the community as soon as possible, and to give users the opportunity to mould the future service.
The Internet has grown through a spirit of openness and feedback and OMNI hopes to grow in the same way.
Specialist knowledge Many specialised classification and indexing schemes exist in different subject areas which aid retrieval of specialist concepts.
In the medical area the (US) National Library of Medicine (NLM) maintain well-respected indexing and classification systems.
Each resource in the OMNI database will be classified using the NLM classification scheme, widely used in medical libraries in the UK, as well as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC).
The MeSH thesaurus, as used in Medline and related healthcare databases, will be used to index resources.
Later in the project the NLM's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) will be used to enhance subject indexing.
What will OMNI mean for you?
The service OMNI provides YOU with a much better way of locating useful information on the Internet, and provides your USERS with a better way too, provided you tell them about it.
It is better because it is selective, it is UK-based hence faster and with less US bias, it is well-indexed, and it provides descriptions of resources.
This latter feature means that users can decide whether a resource is likely to be useful before trying to access it.
OMNI will help you to open up the world of networked information to your users without the risk of them drowning.
Unlike most existing services, OMNI will guide users to substantive information resources rather than show them every conceivable (and irrelevant) information source.
A user of SOSIG recently neatly summarised the philosophy underlying both SOSIG and OMNI: "Given the amount of information on the net, the real value of a resource such as yours is, paradoxically, not that it is comprehensive but that it is selective of high quality resources" The concept The IT section of the Follett report contained many recommendations, intended "not to deliver the virtual library tomorrow but to ... provide some of the electronic bricks from which the virtual library may be made" [1] OMNI does not provide new information but adds value to existing information by providing an organised framework for its discovery and use.
The development of student-centred teaching and learning and the need to provide information support to isolated researchers will both require better access to information over networks.
What can you do for OMNI?
OMNI is closely linked to the community that it serves and wishes to involve as wide a range of people as possible in order to continue building the service.
This will be critical for the next phase of the project (up to December 1996) as a faster rate of growth becomes necessary.
You can help OMNI by volunteering to monitor and add resources in specified areas, or to review OMNI's coverage of your specialist subject area.
You can also help the development of information provision by encouraging information owners at your institution to make their information available via the network and by promoting good publishing practices.
Sources of further information The primary source of information about OMNI is its WWW page: http://omni.ac.uk/ The OMNI discussion list at mailbase is a forum for disseminating news about the OMNI Project, for discussion about the project and comments on the service provided.
To join the list send the command: Join omni firstname(s) lastname (substituting appropriately) as the only text in the body of a message addressed to: mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk References 1.
Law, D. The Follett report: panacea or placebo?
Relay, (1994) 40: 3-4.
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Internet Resources for Older People Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Internet Resources for Older People Buzz software html database multimedia gopher cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Internet resources for older people: Monica Blake describes some findings from the Internet and Older People Project, funded by The British Library Research and Innovation Centre Digital Library Research Programme.
The number of older people in the UK is growing.
At the same time, use of the Internet is expanding rapidly.
A recent BLRIC report [1] brought together material concerning these trends in an attempt to explore the possible contribution the Internet could make to the lives of older people.
After looking at information and older people from a library and information perspective, it considered questions of access to the Internet, Internet resources, and the current use of the Internet by older people.
This article focuses on Internet resources, but first it gives an overview of the project.
In the above-mentioned study, older people were taken to be adults aged 60 and over.
However, several services and resources for older people aimed at those of 50+ are included.
With people living longer and staying healthy until a greater age, there is increasing interest in the needs of a population which is ageing but active.
There is great diversity among older people, in their interests and education, as well as in their degrees of fitness and level of income.
Many older people are among the poorest in the community, while others have considerable financial resources and are targeted as new consumers.
Some researchers focus on chronological age, while others stress the importance of specific events such as loss of occupation or illness.
Retirement is an aspect of life shared by the majority of older people.
For many, the additional time associated with retirement provides an opportunity to explore new horizons, by travelling, studying or developing their interests.
The fact that many older people are out of employment or formal education means that they are unable to learn about or access the Internet at work or college, and may have retired before PCs became widely used in the workplace.
Some use the extra time available to learn about computer technology and the Internet; others are deterred by their lack of experience.
The study does not lay emphasis on health problems suffered by older people, but it retains an awareness of such common physiological changes as declining vision and arthritis-related complaints.
While some older people cope perfectly well with computer technology and the Internet, others have problems with mouse and keyboard and difficulty seeing information on the screen.
For people with limited mobility, the Internet can provide new opportunities for making contact with others.
For those with impaired vision, the situation is more complex: on the one hand, the Internet offers information and communication resources beyond the scope of large-print books, audio cassettes and braille; on the other hand, increasingly complicated Web pages are laborious to read with devices that convert text into speech or braille.
The Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) provides information about designing a Web site so that it is fully accessible by visually impaired visitors.
Among its campaigning activities, it is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) so that it can influence the way HTML evolves; also it contacts Web sites that are difficult for blind people to use, and advises on improvements.
As many older people do not want to be burdened with maintaining PCs at home, it is vital that there is access to the Internet in public places, especially public libraries, and that older people are encouraged to use such facilities that is if older people are not to be excluded from this technology.
According to National Opinion Poll statistics, in June 1997 6% of 1004 UK Internet users were aged 55+.
In North America, a survey conducted by Third Age Media and the Excite Network in July/August 1997 found that 967 of 7184 respondents were aged 50+ (13.46%).
Currently, older people are using the Internet for email and searching the Web for information.
In North America, where local telephone calls are free, many older people participate in online communities.
A few older people create their own Web pages.
Signposts to resources This article presents a sample of resources available on the Internet that may be of use or interest to older people.
It does not attempt to be comprehensive, but aims rather to show the range of material available.
Many of the sites described below lead on to further sites.
For example, My Virtual Reference Desk Seniors Online has links to 92 sites on older people.
Joyce Post, Librarian at the Philadelphia Geriatric Center, provides readers of The Gerontologist with a regular column on Internet resources on ageing [2], and Peters and Sikorski give a list of geriatric resources [3].
In addition, there is a vast amount of material aimed at academics and healthcare professionals.
The Appendix provides a list of URLs that can be photocopied to be used as quick guide to exploring the area on the Internet.
UK organisations on the Web Many organisations involved with older people have set up sites on the World Wide Web.
These sites serve to provide information about their services and activities.
In some cases they offer information about ageing or information that might be of use to older people.
Some (e.g.
Age Concern) publish material on the Web, while others (e.g.
Disabled Living Foundation) list the titles of their publications.
Many use the site to advertise for volunteers or request donations.
A few carry details of job vacancies.
The main UK sites concerning older people are those of Age Concern (http://www.ace.org.uk), Centre for Policy on Ageing (http://www.cpa.org.uk/cpa/cpa.html) and Help the Aged (http://www.vois.org.uk/hta/).
Age Concern’s site is strong on campaigning and many items carry detailed news about government policies regarding older people.
Press releases scrutinise government decisions, and publicity is given to topical events like ‘Older People in Europe Month’.
Age Concern has started publishing its factsheets on the Web.
These cover such areas as health, travel and finance.
The site includes a useful compilation of statistics about older people.
Age Concern offers support to local Age Concern organisations wishing to be on the Web.
Its site hosts 27 such groups and provides links to a further three (Haslemere, Norfolk and West Glamorgan) on the Web.
Local groups offer information about services within a particular community.
For example, the site of Norfolk Age Concern carries details of bed vacancies in local residential and nursing homes.
The Centre for Policy on Ageing (CPA) aims to promote informed debate about issues affecting older age groups and stimulate awareness of the needs of older people.
Its Library and Information Service produces AgeInfo, a searchable database available on CD-ROM and, as a ‘limited edition’ on the Internet (www.unl.ac.uk:9999/).
CPA’s Web site offers links to other sites.
The Help the Aged internet site informs visitors how the charity works to improve the quality of life of older people, particularly those who are frail, isolated or poor.
In addition to giving statistical information about older people in the UK, it lists the services it provides along with the titles of its publications.
It suggests ways in which site visitors can work with the organisation to help older people.
Several UK sites provide information on disability: Birmingham Disability Resource Centre (http://www.disability.co.uk/text.htm) includes practical information on topics like the Disability Living Allowance and the Severe Disablement Allowance as well as ‘Shopmobility’ schemes in Birmingham.
CLICS (Communication and Interpreting Services for Deaf People in North Wales) (http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/ni30/clics.htm) gives details of its services (e.g.
sign language interpreters and document translation) and of HI-LINC (Hearing ImpairedLive Information through Computers).
Disabled Living Foundation (http://www.dlf.org.uk) carries information about disability equipment available in the UK.
It also provides a list of its own publications and links to other sites.
Disabilities Access (http://www.healthworks.co.uk/daccess/DA.html) contains samples of two newletters: Disabilities Informer Newsletter and ive Technology Monitor Newsletter The Disability Equipment Register (http://dspace.dail.pipex.com/town/square/ae208/) provides an opportunity for the buying and selling of used disability equipment.
The Web site is updated approximately a month after the Disability Equipment Monthly Magazine has been published thereby ensuring priority for subscribers to the service.
Disability Net (http://www.disabilitynet.co.uk) includes disability information, news, and small ads, along with facilities for shopping and penpals.
Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) (http://www.rnib.org.uk) Some organisations are planning a Web presence in the future.
The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, which already uses email, is creating a Web site which will give details of its services and provide pointers towards further information.
RADAR (Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation) also has plans to be on the Web.
CRUSE, which provides support for bereavement, is not yet on the Internet, but may be in the future.
Hairnet is a London-based initiative which offers Internet education to people aged 50+.
Its site (http://www.hairnet.org/) provides details of its courses and presents Web pages created by its students.
There are some links to other sites.
Two UK consumer organisations for the over 50s are in the early stages of Web site creation.
Saga, well known for its magazine and holidays, has a site at http://www.saga.co.uk/, but in early 1998 only the publishing part and a link to Saga USA could be activated.
Future items will include holidays, services, investment and insurance.
In November 1997, AgePower was planning not only a Web site, but also an online community (Senior Net) modelled on the American SeniorNet.
However, for commercial reasons, the AgePower representative interviewed did not wish to reveal further details.
The University of the Third Age (U3A) offers informal education and recreational activities to the over 50s.
Its national office in London uses email (u3auk@aol.com) and is currently preparing a Web site.
A local group Tewkesbury & District U3A already has a site (http://www.harjin.demon.co.uk/html/body_u3a.htm).
This site provides general information about U3A as well as details of local contacts and courses.
Increasing amounts of government information are appearing on the Internet (http://www.open.gov.uk).
For example, the Benefits Agency gives a list of available benefits.
The health pages contain such documents as Moving into a care home.
North American initiatives In the United States and Canada, there are many instances of how the Internet is being used by older people.
Services range from large online communities like SeniorNet, through official initiatives such as the Seniors site from the Office of the Minister Responsible for Seniors in Ontario, to local projects like SAINTS.
A selection of sites is described below.
Age of Reason (formerly Seniors On-Line) http://www.ageofreason.com Age of Reason is aimed at people over 50 who don’t want to spend the rest of their lives in ‘Never Ending Cyberspace’.
Offering over 5000 links to sites of interest to this age group, it has three geographical sections: Canada, International and USA.
There is a strong travel element as well as a Seniors Discount Mall.
Cyberspace Seniors http://www.azstarnet.com/~rschenk/CSS01.html Created by Martha Gore in Tucson in 1996, Cyberspace Seniors was designed by seniors for seniors connected to the Internet.
It is dedicated to the purpose of teaching, learning and sharing about the Internet.
Directory of WEB and Gopher Sites on Aging http://www.aoa.dhhs.gov/aoa/webres/craig.htm Compiled by Bruce Craig at the U.S. Administration on Aging, this site includes links to many other sites.
It is organised in menus on: aging topic; aging organization; academic/research; and international sites.
In addition, it contains options on other aging site directories and search engine site indices.
According to Post (1996), it is strong on links to government agencies and organisations providing community services.
ElderWeb http://www.elderweb.org/about/index.htm ElderWeb is an online community of older adult computer users.
Founded in 1994 by the Arts and Science Division of Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton, Alberta, it is designed to provide services to all adults over 45 in North America.
Yearly fees are CD$69 for individual membership and CD$89 for household membership.
My Virtual Encyclopedia Seniors Online http://www.refdesk.com/seniors.html This site provides an alphabetical list of 92 sites on topics of interest to older people (including several mentioned here).
Its coverage includes academic organisations like the Gerontological Society of America, mental health sites (eg Depression Connections, GriefNet, and Psychology Self-Help Resources on the Internet) and unusual sites such as Fathers Cattery (training cats to be helpful to senior abused citizens) and 1997 World Senior Games.
NCEA (National Center on Elder Abuse) http://interinc.com/NCEA/indexnf.html The NCEA performs clearinghouse functions, develops and disseminates information, provides training and technical assistance, and conducts research.
It uses its site to provide information on elder abuse, including statistics and publications.
OCSCO http://www.mbnet.mb.ca/crm/on/advoc/ocsco1.html OCSCO (The Ontario Coalition of Senior Citizens’ Organizations) represents the concerns of senior citizens across the province of Ontario, and is dedicated to providing opportunities for older people to become involved and participate in society.
The Web site gives details about the various initiatives OCSCO is involved in: action such as lobbying; policy development on issues like health care; public education in the form of workshops to assist older people to understand social programmes and new legislation; research on issues of relevance to older people; outreach; and alliances.
SAINTS: Student Assistance In North Toronto for Seniors (and disabled adults) http://www.rose.com~saints/ SAINTS provides a link between high school students and senior citizens in the Toronto region.
The students are available after school hours and at weekends to assist older people and adults with long or short-term physical disabilities with a variety of services.
The services include shopping, cleaning, light housekeeping, painting, gardening, letter writing and snow shovelling.
SCIP (Seniors Computer Information Project) http://www.mbnet.mb.ca/crm/ Officially opened in March 1995, SCIP describes itself as the oldest Canadian seniors online information system available on the Internet.
It allows older adults to explore the use of computers and communication technology.
A project of Creative Retirement Manitoba, it is funded by Seniors Independence Program, Health Canada.
Computer systems equipped with standard software, multimedia, Internet access and laser printers have been placed in six senior centres in Manitoba.
Older adults have access to these computers to explore the technology.
Support groups of seniors with computer experience are available at each centre to help beginners.
The SCIP Web site provides such features as CyberPals, Web Discussion, Health Line and Seniors’ Home Pages.
It contains information on health, lifestyle, finance and special needs, as well as a section on Canadian geography.
There are links to selected sites of interest.
SeniorCom http://www.senior.com/about.html SeniorCom was started by Tom Poole following a search for a senior living community for his grandmother.
Realising that information for the 50+ market was not readily available, he started his own company, SeniorCom.
Key areas of the site are: Community Calendar: events for seniors; can publicise own events.
Message Center: allows members to send messages to one another.
Prime Lifestyles: offers information on lifestyle alternatives such as retirement communities.
Senior Chat: main chat page.
Senior News Network: provides news for the 50+ market on arts and entertainment; careers; finance; government; health and wellness; housing; lifestyles; people; relationships; sports and recreation; technology; and travel.
Town Square: ‘mature guide’ to the best of the Web.
Member Services: registration.
SeniorNet http://www.seniornet.org/ SeniorNet is one of the better known groups and has been widely written about [4].
It was started as a research project at the University of San Francisco in 1986 by Dr Mary Furlong, and in 1990 was incorporated as an independent non-profit organisation with a mission to build a community of computer-using seniors.
It aims to provide adults of 55 and older with education for and access to computer technologies to enable them to enhance their lives and share their wisdom and experiences.
Membership has grown from 22 in 1988 to over 22,000 in early 1998.
SeniorNet offers computer classes at over 100 Learning Centers around the USA, and hosts two thriving online communities (one on the Web and one on America Online) providing resources for and engagement of the senior community.
In addition, it conducts research on the uses of computer and communications technologies by older adults.
SeniorNet Online features discussion forums, live chat in the Community Center and a membership directory.
Forum topics include: U.S. military; gardening; books, discussion and reviews; widows and widowers; divorced pals; genealogy research; bridge players; Alzheimer’s/dementia support; collecting; language clubs; animal friends; politics; senior entrepreneurs; travel; and writing.
Ann Wrixon, Executive Director since 15 September 1997, reports that during 1998 SeniorNet will concentrate its efforts on increasing the number of Learning Centers, particularly in lower-income communities, as well as reviewing the curriculum provided to the Centers.
It will also explore other methods of providing information about computer technology to older adults who want and need it.
Seniors: Office of the Minister Responsible for Seniors http://www.gov.on.ca/health/seniors/index.html This site from the Government of Ontario provides access to information of interest to older people, their families and those who work with older people.
As well as supplying public service type information, it has links to other sites.
It issues a disclaimer for these other sites warning that they are ‘for reference only and are not maintained by the Ontario government’.
SPRINT http://www.rosw.com/~sprint/ SPRINT (Senior Peoples’ Resources in North Toronto) is a non-profit social agency providing a wide range of home support services to help older and disabled people in North Toronto maintain independent lives in the community.
The Web site includes pages on caregiver support, personal support, volunteer opportunities and social programmes.
Examples of caregiver support are: home help, respite care, meals on wheels, footcare clinic and shopping.
Third Age http://www.thirdage.com/ This Web-based community was started by Third Age Media, Inc, which was founded in 1996 by Mary Furlong (the founder of SeniorNet).
The company’s mission is to develop communities for Third Agers which build on their knowledge and experience.
It believes that older adults are vital contributors not merely consumers and that they have vital ideas and knowledge to share.
The Third Age site has a magazine feel about it.
The home page has bright headlines announcing feature stories and sections like Connect, Explore and Marketplace.
The Marketplace has a shopping guide, books and music, cards and gifts, electronics store, financial services, gourmet shop, health and beauty, real estate, travel services and classifieds.
There are links to ‘essential healthy living sites’ like Wellness, Caregiving, Diet & Fitness, and Mental Health.M References References [1] Blake, M., 1998.
The Internet and older people.
London: British Library Research and Innovation Centre [2] Post, J.A., 1996.
Internet resources on aging.
The Gerontologist, 36 (1), 11-12 [3] Peters, R. and Sikorski, R., 1997.
Vintage care: geriatrics resources on the Net.
JAMA, 278 (16), 22⁄29 October, 1299-1300 [4] Furlong, M. and Lipson, S.B.
Young@heart: computing for seniors.
Berkeley, CA: Osborne, 1996.
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SOSIG: Training to Support Social Science Teaching and Research Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SOSIG: Training to Support Social Science Teaching and Research Buzz software portfolio copyright cataloguing mis mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Lesly Huxley, the SOSIG Documentation and Training Officer, describes the workshops that SOSIG, one of the projects from the Access to Network Resource section, run.
Meeting end users’ needs Although the ‘bread and butter’ end user workshops in the Internet for Social Scientists portfolio are aimed at less-experienced netusers there are fewer absolute beginners now than there used to be.
Libraries and faculties alike are establishing and developing provision of networked machines running WWW client software and some have their own excellent general Internet training programmes.
Fewer sites rely on access to the Web via text-based browsers such as Lynx, with the majority of sites visited now running Netscape.
The complaint of many staff and postgraduate students is that they have limited time to make use of these facilities and need to know how best to make use of that time for their own specific teaching and research needs.
The Internet for Social Scientists workshops provide a brief overview of Internet tools and facilities, but concentrate firmly on using SOSIG and other UK-based national services as starting points for Internet access to valuable and relevant networked resources worldwide.
The training for end users is partly tailored at each workshop to the audience’s subject-specialisms and level of knowledge and participants are encouraged to substitute their own interests for those given in the exercises.
Workshops are provided for small groups of 12 or less participants at their own institutions (although up to 18 participants can be accommodated with two trainers).
This has the benefit of introducing new information in a familiar environment where participants can use machines and configurations similar to those they will find on their desktops, most often with a group of colleagues with similar teaching and research interests.
The downside is that some feel obliged to return to their offices between sessions and are caught up in local crises, particularly in termtime, which occasionally prevent them from returning.
Lesly and Tracey are therefore heavily dependent on the goodwill, organisational skills and tact of their contacts at host sites who are equally responsible for ensuring that each training event is a success.
Materials The beginners’ workshops are designed to be flexible enough to cope with a mixed audience of complete Internet novices and those with limited experience.
The sessions are also suitable for those tasked with providing similar training on-site to a larger audience who may want to adapt SOSIG’s materials for their own use.
An online tutorial is used at the beginning of each session to introduce Internet and WWW fundamentals.
It offers practice in navigation for beginners and some useful links to occupy those with more confidence.
A generic version is available at: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/training/gennet.html although a revamped version, with less text and more interactivity, is planned for early 1997.
During the course of each workshop extensive documentation in the form of a workbook is provided.
The full-day beginners’ workshops see SOSIG supplied ‘on a plate’ for the less-experienced with step-by-step exercises and hints and tips on using WWW browsers.
Quick quizzes throughout provide more challenges and an opportunity to test what has been learnt.
Quiz sheets along the lines of ‘twenty questions’ emphasise for the more advanced how SOSIG can be used to answer a variety of research questions and how the national UK services can be used singly or in combination for a variety of enquiries.
The use of SOSIG and other subject-based gateways is placed in context alongside the use of Internet and WWW search engines and other electronic and paper sources of information such as Library Catalogues and Citation Indices.
The beginners’ half-day session has step-by-step and quick quiz exercises only and the half-day session for the more experienced has quiz exercises only.
Workshop Organisation Trainers and on-site organisers can sometimes have a difficult time preparing for workshops.
Problems can arise because sessions are organised at a distance and often booked 6 months or more in advance.
Organisers at host sites face difficulties when prime movers for a workshop leave or go on sabbaticals, leaving behind colleagues who are less enthusiastic about networked information.
Other priorities may also intervene, especially when workshops are booked during termtime, when there may be a high drop-out rate or last-minute substitutions.
Although the trainers are very specific about facilities and information required and what they can offer there can occasionally be a mis-match between participants’ and organisers’ expectations and what the trainers have committed to deliver.
As an organiser within an institution it is extremely important to identify the potential participants’ needs and abilities before booking a workshop.
These needs can then be discussed with a trainer and the course can be tailored to the group.
Good planning and communication with the institution beforehand generally produces satisfied customers at the end of the workshop and feedback is usually appreciative both of the on-site organisation and the session content.
The trainers themselves are particularly appreciative of a warm welcome, where overnight accommodation and an ‘evening event’ such as a pub supper have been organised in advance.
It can be disconcerting to find that the guest house or hotel is some way from the host site or the centre of town and that ‘safe’ areas to dine alone are difficult to find: trainers do not always travel in pairs (but when they do, details of late-night shopping hours are also appreciated!).
Evaluation Evaluation of workshops over the past six months reveals that the most-liked elements of the workshops include the documentation, the informal style of presentation and session structure.
Also appreciated is the opportunity for participants to explore resources related to their own teaching and research interests at their own pace, in a non-threatening environment, with support if required.
Least-liked elements where identified at all arise generally from two sources: training facilities and catering food and beverages available during breaks!
The size, layout and temperature of rooms used for sessions feature largely in the ‘least-liked’ comments and lead us to question the resources and support given generally to IT training within UK HE institutions.
Many institutions are equipping computing labs for students, often with 24-hour access, which are suited to open and computer-aided learning.
They are less suitable for workshops where the trainers need to be able to monitor participants’ progress unobtrusively yet still have easy access to participants and their machines to respond to queries and provide one-to-one help.
A ‘horse-shoe’ layout has proved the most ideal.
Awkward layouts, with pillars or odd angles resulting from adaptations of rooms from other uses, mean that some participants cannot see or hear demonstrations or presentations.
The need to cram as many machines as possible into a room often makes it difficult for trainers to negotiate the narrow space between rows of desks to provide one-to-one assistance.
Noise from air-conditioning or heating equipment, or the need for complete blackout during presentations because of low-powered projection equipment is a general problem and can seriously hinder the provision of training to the deaf or hearing-impaired.
The workshops The team’s portfolio of courses is expanding.
Courses in provision of resources on the Internet for contributors to SOSIG are planned to be available from early 1997.
The SOSIG trainers are also working in collaboration with colleagues at Newcastle University on the European DESIRE project to produce training materials which can address the wider issues of delivery at a distance and self-paced learning tools.
All end user workshops are run under the Internet for Social Scientists banner: Introducing Networked Information (INI) A full-day (6 hours) workshop for network novices with an initial afternoon session concentrating on an introduction to the Internet, a clarification of some of the jargon and an exploration of SOSIG.
The following morning session encourages participants to take a more independent approach to accessing social science resources worldwide, with exercises on NISS, Mailbase and a variety of Web search tools and virtual libraries, most often based in the US.
At least 70% of the workshop is occupied by hands-on sessions supported by step-by-step and quiz exercises.
Introducing SOSIG and Other Sources (ISO) A half-day (3 hours) workshop (morning or afternoon) aimed at beginners.
This is a cut-down version of the full-day course, providing a briefer introduction to the Internet, with the focus on using SOSIG and Web search tools only.
Step-by-step exercises are provided, although hands-on sessions are obviously shorter, given the limited time available.
SOSIG: Supporting Teaching and Research (STR) A half-day (3 hours) workshop (morning or afternoon) aimed at more experienced netusers who want an introduction to SOSIG and the opportunity to compare a subject-based gateway with Web search tools.
Familiarity with the Web and the use of browsers is assumed: quiz exercises, rather than step-by-step, are used during the hands-on sessions.
Details of the contributors’ workshops will be available from SOSIG’s training pages in early 1997.
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Burnside Writes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Burnside Writes Buzz framework copyright Citation BibTex RIS John Burnside on his first classroom experience of 'real' information.
I remember my first history lessons as rather dull.
At that time, teachers emphasised the importance of dates, as if those were the only facts that mattered, (looking back, I can see that these are the few 'facts' history has to offer).
Though never an enthusiastic student, I managed to find something of interest in most subjects, but until a year before 0 Levels I contemplated the Tuesday afternoon double history period with foreboding.
There were times, in that class, when I actually believed time had stopped.
Then, suddenly, everything changed.
A new teacher arrived, who made me see, for the first time, that knowing the dates of kings and queens was nothing more than a framework, a kind of map which allowed me to place the events that really mattered Vermeer's paintings, Bach's partitas, Newton's discoveries, the composition of Shakespeare's plays.
For the first time, I saw things in context.
The framework of European history showed who was working when, which writers or painters or physicists were contemporaries, what forms of government and society fostered artistic or scientific endeavour.
From being a study of facts and dates, history had become an enquiry into culture.
This is how information works.
Facts can be dull, to be learned by rote, or they can be enlivened by context.
No single piece of information is worth more than any other, unless it is invested with significance.
The problem with education, or rather with systems of education, is that knowing, the possession of information, is never enough.
I remember all the exams I have ever taken as exercises in recollection.
Nobody ever tested my understanding.
A good system of education would be one that encouraged in students the ability to think and to understand for themselves.
I occasionally wonder if that is a realistic aim, or only some vain ideal, to be constantly circumvented by politicians.
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Introducing Web Focus Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Introducing Web Focus Buzz software java html dissemination infrastructure archives metadata css browser graphics hypertext multimedia pics gopher interoperability mailbase url Citation BibTex RIS UK Web Focus a strange job title.
What is it?
What does it do?
In this article Brian Kelly describes his role as UK Web Focus, his previous involvement with the Web and his work as the JISC representative on the World Wide Web Consortium.
I first saw the Web in December 1992 at a meeting of the Information Exchange Special Interest Group at Leeds University.
At that time, as Information Officer in the Computing Service, I was looking for software which could be used to develop a Campus Wide Information System (CWIS).
Quite a number of institutions in the UK were running CWISes, mainly based on home-grown software, but some were beginning to make use of Internet tools, such as Gopher.
Around that time the Information Exchange SIG organised a demonstration of Internet tools, including Archie, Gopher and the World Wide Web.
And from my first use of the Web using a browser called Viola I was hooked.
From 1993 I promoted the Web, both within Leeds University and throughout the UK HE community.
I was privileged to attend the first WWW Conference at CERN in May 1994 (at which I arranged a poster display showing the Web activities at Leeds University [1]).
I also gave presentations about the Web throughout the country.
My involvement with the Web continued during my time as Senior Trainer for the Netskills project.
My training responsibilities included development and delivery of HTML authoring training materials.
In addition during my time with Netskills I gave a number of presentation on Web Futures.
I was also a member of the Programme Committee for the WWW 5 conference, held in Paris in May 1996.
UK Web Focus Following a submission to JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) UKOLN was successful in obtaining funding for the post of UK Web Focus.
Responsibilities of UK Web Focus include: Monitoring Web Developments Dissemination of information throughout the UK Higher Education community Coordination of Web activities within the UK HE community Representing JISC on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) On 1st November 1996 I was appointed as the UK Web Focus.
UK Web Focus Activities An important aspect of my work will be close liaison with various groups and individuals in the community.
I am currently working on a programme for a workshop aimed at people responsible for running institutional Web services.
In addition I am working with UCISA-SG [2] as part of a group which will be evaluating Web tools.
Both of these activities will involve liaison with the community.
In particular the workshop should help to identify some of the important needs within the community, and help me to focus in on future activities.
World Wide Web Consortium W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is a body founded to “further the evolution of the World Wide Web while keeping its interoperability”.
As of January 1, 1997, W3C had 63 Full Members and 97 Affiliate members.
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) is an affiliate member of W3C and I am the JISC representative on W3C.
A W3C Advisory Committee meeting was held at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Abingdon on 15-16th January 1997.
Over 100 people attended the meeting, including 73 from W3C member organisations and 21 W3C members of staff.
The highlights of the meeting are summarised below.
W3C Consortium activity areas fall under one of three Technical Domains: User Interface: the languages that convey information to Web users, which includes (a) HTML (b) CSS Cascading Style Sheets and © Graphics Technology and Society: the impact of Web-based services on society, which includes (a) PICS Platform for Internet Content Selection, (b) DSig Digital Signature Initiative and © JEPI Joint Electronic Payment Initiative.
Architecture: the infrastructure and increased automation of the Web, which includes (a) HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol (b) Addressing: URLs and © Object Technology.
HTTP HTTP/1.1 is intended to fix a number of deficiencies in the HTTP/1.0 specification.
HTTP/1.1 will help the Internet’s problems significantly (the improvement in packets will be at least a factor of two, with much lower congestion).
Users will see observably higher performance.
HTTP/1.1 should be deployed as soon as possible, although there are still a number of issues to be resolved.
Distributed Authoring WEBDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is an IETF group which is dealing with the issues of distributed authoring and versioning on the Web.
HTML The HTML ERB aims to: Standardize stable, widely deployed features Get style sheets deployed Work together to design and refine new features Define new versions of HTML The HTML ERB is currently preparing the next version of HTML, which is known as Cougar.
Working Drafts are available on (a) Scripting, (b) Fill-out forms, © Frames and (d) Multimedia objects.
Other drafts which are available include (a) Web collections, (b) Link types, and © Web page scripting services.
Stylesheets CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) level 1 became a W3C Recommendation on 17 December 1996.
It is the first in a family of specifications.
A number of implementations are already available (e.g.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) and more are expected (Netscape 4 will support stylesheets).
Stylesheets describe the presentation of a document, leaving it to HTML to describe the document structure.
Stylesheets in general are lightweight and fast-loading.
CSS in particular: allows multiple presentations allows external or embedded style sheets is simple, human read/writeable replaces all commonly used HTML extensions keeps HTML coherent cascading resolves reader/author conflicts Joint Electronic Payment Initiative (JEPI) The goals of the JEPI group are to produce a specification, a technical demonstration, reference code and an entry point into the second phase, integration with products.
Digital Signature (DSig) The Digital Signature (DSig) project was set up to address issues associated with (a) signing active content (e.g.
Java applets, ActiveX components), (b) publishing legally binding documents (e.g.
price lists, prospectus, etc.)
and © non-repudiation of documents.
PICS PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is a filtering mechanism which was developed in response to the US Communications Decency Act, which sought to restrict publishing of content on the Internet.
PICS provides a mechanism for controlling the reception of information, rather than the distribution.
It has been proposed that PICS will play an important architectural role in Web developments, including providing a general metadata architecture and for storing digital signatures.
Finding Out More A report on the W3C Advisory Committee meeting is available [4].
A Mailbase mailing list has been set up to provide a forum for members of the UK HE community to discuss W3C activities and for announcements of new W3C activities.
In the first few weeks the list was used to announce the report on the report mentioned above, and to discuss in further detail some of the important developments (see the Mailbase archives [3] for details).
To subscribe to the mailing list send the message join uk-web-focus-w3c firstname surname to the address mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk Feedback If you have any suggestions for other articles you would like to see covered in this column, feel free to email me at the email address B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk.
References World Wide Web poster displays, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/posters/WWW_display.html UCISA Software Group Web pages, http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/SG/homepage.htm UK Web Focus mailing list, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/uk-web-focus-w3c/ W3C Advisory Committee meeting report, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/w3c/reports/ac-jan1997/ac-jan1997.html Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus, Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Netskills Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisbk/ Tel: 01225 826838 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Creating Models for Electronic Citations Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Creating Models for Electronic Citations Buzz software video research Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Harnack and Eugene Kleppinger outline the case for better referencing of electronic sources.
In the fall of 1995 we first encountered the need to help our honors rhetoric students cite Internet sources.
We remember well one students first attempt.
In her works cited the student created an entry to list something she'd found on the World Wide Web.
With elegant simplicity she wrote Internet (1995).
Realizing that something was missing, we then began seriously to investigate just how it is that one cites electronic sources with some degree of grace, efficiency, and style.
A thorough search on the Internet revealed numerous helpful (but often confusing) available style sheets.
As teachers of rhetoric, we did indeed like the simplicity of Janice Walker's MLA-Style Citations for Electronic Sources [1].
However, a close examination of Walker's models revealed a number of ambiguities that we later described in ' Beyond the MLA Handbook: Documenting Electronic Sources on the Internet [2] ,' published in Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments 1.2 (1996).
As a coda to the Kairos essay, we attached our own 'Style Sheet: Citing the Sites. '
Within days, our email boxes were flooded with requests for permission to reprint our work, and we have been gratified by the number of teachers, students, librarians, researchers, journalists, and ordinary folk who have written to say that our style sheet provided exactly what they needed: clear, efficient, and unambiguous MLA-style models for citing Internet sources.
Rumors of our work quickly reached the editors of St. Martin's Press, New York, and by the middle of May 1996, with contract in hand, we began an expansion of our work now published as Online!
A Reference Guide to Using Internet Sources [3] (1997), featuring a companion website.
Containing ten chapters, Online!
provides citation models for MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE styles of documentation.
In addition to an extended glossary and directory of academic Internet sites, Online!
also discusses the evaluation of Internet sources and the conventions of publishing hypertexts on the Internet.
Writing Online!
has truly been an education for us.
As Janice Walker points out in her generous response [4] to our Kairos essay, one really must learn how to think differently about Internet sources of information.
Here, for example, is an excerpt from our discussion on how one might proceed in MLA-style when using page numbers in parentheses to mark closure of a source is no longer an option: The MLA Handbook .
.
.
requires that you identify the location of any cited information as precisely as possible within parentheses.
Because Internet sources are rarely marked with page numbers, you will not always be able to show exactly where cited material comes from.
If a source has internal divisions, use these instead of page numbers in our citation.
Be sure to use divisions inherent in our document and not those provided by your browsing software .
.
.
.
The MLA practice of parenthetical page-number citation lets you indicate precisely where information from a printed source ends.
Many Internet sources, however, appear as single screens, and MLA style does not require parenthetical page citations for one-page works.
By analogy, a single-screen document cited n text needs no page citation.
To let your readers know where your use of an Internet source with no text divisions ends, use a source-reflective statement.
Source-reflective statements give you an opportunity to assert your authorial voice.
Writers use source-reflective statements to provide editorial comment, clarification, qualifications, amplification, dissent, agreement, and so on.
In the following example, the absence of a source-reflective statement creates uncertainty as to where use of an Internet source ends.
According to TyAnna Herrington, Nicholas Negroponte has the ability to make complex technological issues understandably simple.
For those who are not techno-philes, this is a blessing; it allows them to apprehend the real significance of digital technology without feeling that such ideas are too difficult to consider.
In the next example, the writer has added a source-reflective statement to show that use of the source has ended.
According to TyAnna Herrington, Nicholas Negroponte has the ability to make complex technological issues understandably simple.
Herrington's observation is a good one.
It means that for those who are not technophiles, reading Negroponte is a blessing; reading Negroponte allows one to apprehend the real significance of digital technology without feeling that such ideas are too difficult to consider.
Here is the Works Cited entry: Herrington, TyAnna K. 'Being is Believing.'
Rev.
of Being Digital, by Nicholas Negroponte.
Kairos: A Journal for Teaching Writing in Webbed Environments 1.1 (1996) http://129.118.38.138/kairos/ 1.1 (24 May 1996).
Rethinking how one frames the use of Internet sources in such ways demonstrates not only our need to rethink the nature of electronic sources, but also our responsibility to find new ways to re-present electronic information in printed and electronic formats.
More than anything, however, we now realize that as teachers, scholars, and librarians we will always be behind the technology curve in learning how to document electronically-delivered information.
In the midst of writing Online!, for example, HyperNews [5] suddenly became almost universally available as a new Internet medium.
To make sure that we understood its delivery mode, we corresponded with Daniel LaLiberte, the creator of HyperNews, asking for his views on accurate citation of its visual format and language of delivery.
His comments to us were most helpful as we sought to devise models to document HyperNews postings.
Although almost unheard of a year ago, HyperNews is now a common medium for posting and exchanging information.
As new technologies emerge, how will writers and researchers cite them for purposes of research and argument?
For example, how shall we document video clips, televised telephone conversations, musical performances, and sound bits that we now see and hear by means of computer transmission to our terminals?
Knowing that much electronic information is by nature impermanent, must we download and store files (in a way analogous to the photocopying of print sources of information) for future verification and reference?
And more importantly, how do we fashion new guidelines to help us determine the nature of information as intellectual property appearing on the Internet?
Such practical and general questions are now being asked with great frequency and urgency.
To the degree that writing about the citation of sources has made us aware of the importance of these questions, we are grateful for the experience.
To the degree that we do not yet know the answers, we are humbled.
We are agreed, however, that as new technologies develop, we must collaboratively devise new styles, forms, and formats that allow us to refer to and retrieve what we have seen and heard.
As a printed guide, Online!
is linked to a companion Web site [3] that provides opportunity for readers to send comments and queries to us.
We invite the readers of Ariadne to visit this site and request examination copies of Online!
We hope they will forward their comments, responses, and suggestions for the next edition to us.
References [1] Janice Walker's MLA-Style Citations for Electronic Sources, http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/walker/mla.html [2] Beyond the MLA Handbook: Documenting Electronic Sources on the Internet, http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/inbox/mla.html [3] Online!
Web site http://www.smpcollege.com/online-4styles~help Link not working as of 27/1/97 [4] Response by Janice Walker to Kairos article, http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/inbox/walker.html [5] HyperNews Web site, http://union.NCSA.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/hypernews/about.html Author Details Andrew Harnack and Eugene Kleppinger are authors of the forthcoming book Online: A Reference Guide for Using Internet sources.
Email: engharnack@acs.eku.edu and actklepp@acs.eku.edu Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The History of History Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The History of History Buzz data archives metadata browser telnet research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Smith explains the background to the relaunch of IHR-Info as HISTORY.
In the early modern era of computing the first server and gateway to the humanities in Europe was established in London, UK.
It was the product of the Academic Secretary of the Institute of Historical Research looking over the shoulder of a member of the Institute who had used Lynx, a text-based browser, to establish a personal list of addresses and search engines.
“Could we do that for the subject of history?” And so IHR-Info was born [1].
It set out to provide four services: a bulletin board for the Institute and history in general, including information on seminars, conferences and training courses; an online publisher which provided the annual publications of the IHR including an annual bibliography of all books published on history in the UK, a list of all university teachers in history, and all theses in progress and completed; a gateway to electronic sites world wide, including libraries, datasets and other servers; internet navigational tools with an autodidactic set of menus which explained the various engines.
In October 1997 IHR-Info was relaunched as History, one of a number of subject-based servers funded in large part by the eLib Programme of JISC.
Its history is now in its address (www.ihrinfo.ac.uk) and at its launch it was surrounded by more recent information services offered by the Public Record Office, the British Library, the Royal Commission for Historical Manuscripts, the Royal Commission for Historical Monuments of England, and the Arts and Humanities Data Service.
The Historical Association also has its own site at history.org.uk.
The aims of the new History are: to provide a dynamic, high quality, user friendly, easily acessible, cross sectoral national service to the United Kingdom in the field of history and cognate subjects; to train and encourage students, researchers and historians to exploit the advantages of telematics; to bring about a cultural change in the learning, teaching and research habits of those interested in history; to work with ROADS and the Royal Historical Society to enable better and more comprehensive classification of history Internet resources; to develop the service technically so as to exploit opportunities, but also to maintain access for those whose facilities are not of the latest specification e.g.
an anonymous login telnet version of History (telnet.ihrinfo.ac.uk); to respond to evaluation and to stimulate opinion; to present formal reports and also publicity material in order to raise awareness of the service in a variety of sectors or populations.
The server and gateway was originally set up on a Sun machine at the University of London Computer Centre, but the Institute of Historical Research now maintains three IBM RS6000 Internet servers of its own, with a fourth as a hot spare thanks to the generosity of JISC.
The quality and quantity of the service is underpinned by a number of History Internet Editors from the academic sector and within Europe by the History Research Discovery Exchange whereby information and Internet links are provided by historians and librarians of other countries in exchange for those held and identified in the UK.
Wider afield, for example in North America and Australasia, mirroring agreements are being established in an attempt to avoid the delays of slow traffic!
It was the result of many visits abroad, particularly to western Europe, that triggered this year’s change of name to History.
The use of acronyms is very much de rigeur when applying for funding in the UK and the EU, but causes much confusion to the wider community in higher education and elsewhere.
History, Histoire or Geschichte is much clearer to all.
The service History has a choice of all three languages to lead those interested in history through most of its higher level menus, thus serving those countries with the largest number of Internet hosts in Europe.
Further languages will be added as interest and time dictates.
Language is a major problem for historians on the Internet.
Beautiful maps of Venice, for example, from the State Archives but put up by the Institute of Architecture in Venice will not be found generally by searching for Venice or Venedig.
History along with about twenty of its European friends applied for a multi-million EU funding project to establish a European network using a common concordance, much along the lines of a similar project that Venetian academic architects are involved in, but for the whole of East and Western Europe.
This passed its initial review, but seems to have failed at the final fence.
However, the enthusiasm of those involved is likely to prevail on an informal basis, relieving me of the burden of writing all those long reports to Luxembourg!
Demonstrations in the UK and around many other parts of the EU made it clear that a new structure was required for History and this is a major aspect of the relaunch of the service.
To be user friendly across sectors within the UK and across countries in the EU, servers and gateways need to be as simple as possible, so that they attract maximum use.
Average use of History at the moment is about 15,000 hits a week, with the UK taking one third of that and the rest of the EU about another third.
The new structure will be at the level of Who?
What?
Where?
The information and sources available must be accessible to all members of the modern information society, since marginal costs of additional distribution are absolutely zero, unless use drives up the power and provision of the hardware.
Another concern of any subject-based server and gateway is that of cognate subjects, and discussion is in progress with sites which might offer resource discovery in theology, philosophy, art history and archeology.
It will be interesting to see how a faculty-based arrangement of information and links will work.
How interdisciplinary subjects are served, and cartography is one that comes to mind, is of concern to those who are considering future national funding for services to the Higher Education community.
Eventually we will wish to include Further Education as well as more general interest groups.
Should such a service should be monolithic or distributed across many different sites?
Should it be provided through classification at metadata level?
Just how can quality be controlled?
Who is willing to give up their time to do it?
In many respects gathering and classifying data and links on the Internet is like that of constructing biblographies in that it requires cooperation from academics to essay quality and identify the class of the information.
The intellectual challenge for History in the final years of this century is to make itself truly international, multidisciplinary and structured in a way that makes the information easily accessible to all citizens in the information society.
A challenge which is even more demanding, however, is to ensure the financial future of the service.
The situation of History within the Institute of Historical Research goes a long way to securing its future.
Additional funds from JISC have allowed History to comply with the ROADS project on classification technology and to lay the basic foundations of a resource discovery service.
It is to be hoped that JISC will continue to provide sufficient funds to ensure national uniformity across the various subject and faculty-based servers and gateways in the UK, so consolidating the clear lead that this country has been giving to the rest of Europe and most of the world.
References [1] IHR-Info (History) http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ Author Details Steven R.B.
Smith B.A., Ph.D.
Academic Secretary and History Project Manager, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU Tel +44-0171-636-0272 Fax: +44-0171-436-2183 E-mail: ihr@sas.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: Politically Correct Editing the Politics Section of SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Politically Correct Editing the Politics Section of SOSIG Buzz data framework database archives thesaurus identifier udc cataloguing standards Citation BibTex RIS Heather Dawson from The British Library of Political and Economic Science talks about her role as a SOSIG Section Editor.
During 1997 the indexing and cataloguing of resources for the SOSIG database was reorganised with the creation of a committee of section editors based in a number of UK university libraries.
The purpose of this article is to give some insight into the role of the Section Editor with reference to my own work on the Politics section.
SOSIG (The Social Science Information Gateway)[1] was founded in 1994 as a result of funding from the ESRC.
At the outset all cataloguing of material was undertaken by two editors based at the University of Bristol.
However, with the major increase in the number of resources becoming available on the Internet it was decided in April this year to devolve this to a wider committee of librarians.
The reasoning behind this was twofold: firstly by increasing the number of people involved more resources could be added; secondly it could draw upon the existing subject expertise of the librarians to identify the most relevant resources.
Also through the development of a national consortium efforts could be pooled, avoiding local duplication and creating a better resource for all.
Specialist libraries were chosen including the Institute of Education, Exeter University, Edinburgh University and the British Library of Political and Economic Science, and each nominated an individual or team to act as subject editors for a specific section.
My own work at the British Library of Political and Economic Science is concerned with the Politics section.
In common with the other editors I spend half a day each week working on my section.
This involves the identification of relevant resources, creation of records and editing of existing records to ensure that they are kept up to date.
The collection is selective.
Resources are included if they meet the scope policy and quality selection criteria of SOSIG.
The scope of SOSIG is extremely wide, encompassing the social sciences in the broadest sense, covering such diverse areas as Economics, Sociology, Geography and Anthropology.
It also includes many different types of resources such as datasets, documents, mail archives, electronic journals and the homepages of organisations.
All resources are quality assessed before inclusion.
The criteria against which they are judged include: reputability of the source, academic level of content and frequency of updates.
Sites which consist purely of advertising or lists of links with no added annotations are excluded.
In terms of politics a wealth of resources can be found on the Internet.
These include election sites which are updated almost continuously with news from campaigns and opinion polls in a way that is not possible with paper sources.
Many also contain the added value of audio and visual clips.
It is also possible to access Hansard parliamentary minutes from a number of parliaments world-wide, including the UK, Canada and South Africa.
In this way the Internet serves to unlock a wealth of previously unreachable sources with more being continuously added.
As a result I view my SOSIG work as an important extension of the traditional collection development activities relating to book buying which I perform for my own employer as they are both concerned with enabling access to resources it is simply the format which is different.
Suitable resources are traced via a number of sources.
I receive some suggestions from SOSIG users.
I also monitor subject specific sites, including an election calendar for news of ongoing campaigns, and relevant email discussion lists.
I also use more general Internet alerting services such as the US based Scout Report for the Social Sciences [2] a biweekly newsletter providing evaluative comment on new sites and sites in the news, and the Internet Resources Newsletter[3] which is produced monthly by Heriot-Watt University and offers an A-Z listing of new sites as well as listings of recent journal articles relating to the Internet.
I also look at the daily newspapers for information on ongoing political events and then use a search engine to search the Internet for sites related to them.
A positive effect of this work has been to increase the efficiency of my searching techniques which has also improved the Internet training I provide for library users at the British Library of Political and Economic Science.
Cataloguing of resources is done remotely via an online form and then transmitted to the main database.
Figure 1: SOSIG cataloguing template.
The information input includes a number of standard fields, such as contact details of the site administrator, the language and location of the resource.
Descriptions are also added for each item.
These summarise the content and coverage of the source, drawing out the key features and any special technical requirements for access.
Subject keywords are assigned with reference to the Hasset thesaurus [4] developed by the Data Archive and the resources are indexed according to subject categories relating to the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) scheme.
During 1997 the large increase in the number of resources being added led more detailed subcategories to be adopted to enable more precise subject browsing.
For instance, the Politics section is now subdivided into a number of sub-categories including elections, parliaments and political parties.
An item can be placed in more than one category if appropriate.
Once the form is completed it is transmitted electronically to SOSIG and added overnight to the subject listings.
Addresses are regularly checked by a link checker to ensure that outdated material is deleted.
I also revisit sites to ensure that descriptions are kept up to date.
At present the Section Editors scheme remains experimental until May 1998.
However, there are hopes that it will continue beyond this date and form the basis for a national and perhaps even international framework of inter-library co-operation.
Indeed SOSIG is already trying to attract European participation in the form of European Correspondents [5] who will use their subject and language knowledge to make contributions to the Gateway.
From my own point of view, such activities can only have a positive outcome as co-operation between libraries will allow for a sharing of expertise and ultimately it will result in increased access to high quality resources for the user.
References [1] SOSIG (The Social Science Information Gateway) can be found at: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ [2] The Scout Report for the Social Sciences can be found at: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/socsci/current/index.html [3] The Internet Resources Newsletter can be found at: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/irn.html [4] The SOSIG Thesaurus can be found at: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/roads/cgi/thesaurus.pl [5]Emma Worsfold describes SOSIG plans for European Collaboration in issue 9 of the web version of Ariadne which can be found at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/planet-sosig/ Author details Heather Dawson The British Library of Political and Economic Science 10 Portugal Street London WC2A 2HD h.dawson@lse.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Serving the Arts and Humanities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Serving the Arts and Humanities Buzz data software framework html database tei archives metadata vocabularies repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing sgml multimedia jpeg marc gif ead tiff gopher ftp interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dan Greenstein gives an extensive description of AHDS, the Arts and Humanities Data Service: its objectives, organisation, and how the data will be collected, preserved and described.. Increasing scholarly use of computers and electronic resources raises a number of related challenges.
Computer-based research produces digital data with significant secondary use value.
Yet that value cannot fully be realised unless the data are created and described according to relevant standards, systematically collected, preserved, and reported to the widest possible community.
The outpouring of digital resources which make up a growing share of our cultural heritage makes digital preservation an urgent cause.
Commercial publishers and information services, the entertainment industry, and more traditional repositories museums, archives, and libraries are regularly "publishing" in electronic form.
The worldwide web hosts other forms of cultural expression.
Scholars need to search for relevant information across the numerous on-line indices and catalogues which provide references to the resources they require.
The Arts and Humanities Data Service: Its Aims and Organisation In 1995 the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils committed £1,500,000 over three years to establish The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).
The AHDS will respond to and address these several problems as they confront a well-defined range of academic disciplines.
It will collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from scholarly research in the humanities, and make its collections readily available to scholars through an on-line catalogue designed to interoperate with other electronic finding aids.
Because these aims can only be achieved by adopting community wide standards, and because our users demand and deserve seamless access to scholarly resources irrespective of where or by whom they are managed and of the form that they take (e.g.
paper-based, digital, or artefactual), the AHDS will also seek the widest possible collaboration to develop a generalised and extensible framework for digital resource creation, description, preservation, and location.
That framework will act as an essential guide to the Services own work, and be documented in a Service Providers Handbook and Standards Reference Guidelines.
The AHDS will also produce less technical Guides to Good Practice which will help raise awareness amongst the scholarly community about the importance and value of electronic information and provide guidance in its creation, description, and use.
Organisationally the AHDS is a distributed service comprising an Executive and a number of Service Providers as follows: The Executive, King's College London, Library, Strand, London WC2R 2LS Daniel Greenstein, Director email: daniel.greenstein@kcl.ac.uk, phone/fax: 0171 873-2445; The Archaeology Data Service, Department of Archaeology, University of York, The King's Manor, York YO1 2EP Julian Richards, Director email: jdr1@york.ac.uk, phone: 01904 433901 The Historical Data Service, The Data Archive, Essex University, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, CO4 3SQ, Sheila Anderson, Head of Service email: sheila@essex.ac.uk; phone: 01206 872001 The Oxford Text Archive, Oxford University Computing Service, 13 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 6NN, Michael Popham, Text Archivist email:michael@sable.ox.ac.uk phone/fax:01865 273200 The Performing Arts Data Service, Glasgow University, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Stephen Arnold and Tony Pearson, Directors email: stephen@music.gla.ac.uk, agp@arts.gla.ac.uk; phone: 0141 339-8855 The Visual Arts Service (to be selected, 1996) The Service Providers will: serve the needs of particular academic communities and be responsible for initiating discussion about the standards and archival practices which are appropriate for particular data formats; collect digital research data which emerge from and may be useful to their constituents; ensure that accessioned data are documented adequately and preserved; develop mechanisms for disclosing information about their holdings to the scholarly community; and distribute data as and where appropriate, to interested users; develop exchange agreements with other data archives and the managers and providers of other scholarly electronic resources (whether they are commercial or not-for-profit, in the UK or abroad); work to raise awareness within their communities about the importance of digital resource preservation and about good practices which relate to their creation and use; work with the Executive, to develop the Service Providers Handbook and Standards Reference Guidelines, the Guides to Good Practice, and the AHDS catalogue, soliciting input from expert advisory boards and professional societies which represent their constituents and from the strategic agencies and collections which serve them.
The Executive will co-ordinate and support the work of the Service Providers, and take the lead in developing the AHDS's collection policy and in producing the Service Providers Handbook and Standards Reference Guidelines, the AHDS catalogue, and its Guides to Good Practice.
The division of labour amongst the Service Providers (by both discipline and data format) provides the AHDS with a significant strategic advantages by enabling the interdisciplinary and intermedia discussions which will identify the standards and good practices the AHDS needs to implement.
Long-term data storage provides an example of an archival issue that the AHDS will have to address and about which it will want to make recommendations to the wider community.
From the data archivists' point of view, it may be desirable to treat electronic images, texts, and databases rather differently, notably because the case for compression is more compelling for images than it is for texts and databases.
Clearly, every arts and humanities discipline will require access to information stored in each of these formats, and these needs will be reflected in the Service Providers' mixed media collections.
Yet it is not efficient to encourage every Service Provider to develop the same level of expertise with every data format.
Rather, members of a single Service Provider will immerse themselves in the relevant literature and consult with other experts in the UK and abroad, in order to inform discussion within the AHDS about the practices which are most relevant for a particular data format.
The AHDS's organisation will also facilitate the development of a coherent approach to data description or metadata.
The information which is required to adequately describe or catalogue an electronic text may be rather different than that which is required for an electronic image or a database.
Again, we feel that media specialists within the AHDS must initiate discussion about what level of description is most appropriate for the type of data with which they are most familiar.
This division of labour will also ensure that the data description standards adopted by the AHDS will satisfy the needs of scholars across the humanities.
Arguably, historians, archaeologists, and visual arts scholars will want to know rather different things about a collection of digitised images that is based, for example, on some of the holdings of the British Museum.
Currently there is substantial work underway in the development of data description standards, but this is narrowly focused on particular kinds of collections and the needs of particular communities.
For example, library catalogues interoperate because there is a substantial level of agreement between the various flavours of MARC (a standard for machine-readable bibliographic records).
A framework for information interchange between communities demands a more inclusive approach to metadata than has hitherto emerged, one which the AHDS's interdisciplinary and intermedia organisation is designed to facilitate.
Data Creation In order to ensure the long-term viability and interchange of electronic resources some attention must be paid to data creation standards.
A common approach to data creation is required at least four different levels [1]: the formal language which is used to represent the syntactic and semantic features of a digital resource (e.g.
SGML for an electronic text, the use of tables and fields in a database); how such languages are used to record the categories of information which communities need to identify in their digital research resources (the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines for the Encoding and Interchange of Machine-Readable Texts which define a particular element set, or the Art Information Task Force's Categories for the Description of Works of Art which defines the categories for describing works of art); the shared vocabularies defined by specific communities for recording content (viz.
the numerous name and subject authority files which are used by bibliographers and many others world wide); the technical standards used to store that content in machine-readable form (viz.
compression standards such as JPEG and file formats such as GIF and TIFF for image files).
Agreement about the use of common, or at least interoperable standards ensures a level of consistency across accessioned digital materials without which electronic resource management and preservation is impossible.
They also enable the migration of electronic information from one processing (hardware and software) platform to another as technologies change.
Yet standards are not exclusively in the interest of digital archivists and data creators.
They serve users' needs as well ensuring, for example, that the electronic resources which they require can be obtained in a form that is compatible with their local hardware and software environments.
It is precisely because data creation standards promise to benefit the widest possible community, that they must be identified, documented, and actively promoted.
Data creation standards should not be conceived as a set of prescriptive or restrictive practices.
Rather we need to develop a flexible standards framework that accommodates local practice while ensuring the consistency essential for effective information interchange.
Such a framework of data creation standards will be identified by the AHDS in the widest possible consultation and documented closely in the Service Providers' Handbook and Standards Reference Guidelines.
They will also feature largely in the Guides to Good Practice which will offer explanation and instruction to a wider community.
Collection Collection is central to the AHDS's mission but it is essential to redefine the term as appropriate to this extensively networked and increasingly digital age.
Certainly the AHDS Service Providers will act as repositories for digital research data and will actively encourage scholars who are conducting computer-based research to safeguard their electronic outputs by depositing them with the AHDS.
Indeed with its Guides to Good Practice, the AHDS will point potential depositors to the data creation standards and practices which they will need to consider in order to secure the longevity of their materials.
Yet preservation is only one of the incentives with which the AHDS will attract depositors.
Documentation is another.
Without information about its contents and form, an electronic resource cannot be accessed.
Imagine using a traditional library which does not have a catalogue or other signposts to the books, journals, monographs, manuscripts and other objects that comprise its collection.
Nor is it sufficient for data creators simply to provide that level of documentation which they think is most appropriate for their electronic datasets.
Just as preservation relies upon attention to data creation standards, location requires some level of conformity in the way that electronic resources are described.
By depositing their data with the AHDS, data creators will ensure that their electronic products are documented according to the data description standards which are beginning internationally to emerge.
Accordingly they will enhance the possibility that potentially interested users will find the resources they require.
The promises of preservation, documentation, and location have proved attractive to several UK funding agencies which support computer-based humanities research in the UK.
So far, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy require grant-holders to offer any datasets they create to the AHDS for deposit; the Leverhulme Trust and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine encourage their grant-holders to consider the same.
The combined experience of the Historical Data Service and the Oxford Text Archive two Service Providers which predate the AHDS demonstrates that the same promises are attractive to data creators more generally and they are invited to approach the AHDS to discuss the long-term disposition of their electronic resources.
The AHDS's collection policy must also take account of the fact that scholarly resources know no national boundaries.
The AHDS's users will want to identify electronic resources which result from scholarly research outside the UK.
Accordingly, we need to extend our definition of "collection" to include datasets stored by other digital archives with which the AHDS can negotiate reciprocal agreements.
There are good precedents for this already within the AHDS.
The Oxford Text Archive has an agreement with the electronic text centre in Michigan.
The Historical Data Service is part of an international network of social science data archives and benefits substantially from an integrated catalogue which allows users to search across their respective holdings.
The AHDS seeks actively to multiply such agreements and to extend them into areas which are appropriate for the other arts communities that it serves, notably in archaeology and the visual and performing arts.
Not all datasets need to be deposited with the AHDS or with one of its associated data archives in order to be known to the AHDS's catalogue and its users.
Increasingly, computer-based scholarly research results in datasets which are made available over the network from numerous sites.
The AHDS shares the scholarly community's interest in preserving these materials and in enabling users to locate them.
Where data creators and the AHDS can agree compatible data preservation and description procedures, data deposit is neither necessary nor desirable.
Accordingly, our concept of "collection" needs to be extended still further to include electronic resources which are known to the AHDS's catalogue but neither stored at nor managed by any of its Service Providers or associated data archives.
Just as the AHDS collection policy cannot require central deposit, it cannot require that every item in the collection be made freely available.
Scholars need to find the materials upon which their research and teaching depends, irrespective of whether those materials are in the public domain.
Equally, those responsible for commercial and other resources to which access may be restricted, have an interest in preserving those resources and making their existence known to the wider scholarly community.
The AHDS's collection policy must take these realities into account.
Accordingly, it will negotiate the acquisition of some commercial and other resources to which access may be restricted.
Equally, it will ensure that its catalogue acts as a gateway to restricted resources that are maintained and managed at other sites and by other agencies.
In sum, the AHDS's collection policy will be built on our understanding that the time has passed (if it ever even existed) when any single agency could create a vast and comprehensive collection of scholarly digital resources.
The challenge today is to develop "collections" which can be preserved according to the same minimum standards and which may be integrated from the users point of view that is, accessed globally through several information gateways.
Preservation Digital resource preservation is vital to the scholarly community.
Archaeologists provide a vivid example as to why.
In the process of excavation, archaeologists may "destroy" some of the primary evidence upon which their scholarly investigations are based.
Excavation records accordingly take on seminal importance; they are the only window onto sites which no longer exist in their original or undisturbed form, and must be preserved.
Where such records are kept on paper, well-defined archival practices and cataloguing principles ensure their availability to scholars working 50 or even 100 years hence.
Where they take the form of complex databases, image banks, and digital site-maps as they do now with increasing frequency there are as yet no accepted (in some case even tested) models which promise to achieve the same end.
Historians' use of computer databases provides a somewhat different view of the same problem.
For a generation historians have compiled databases electronic summaries of information culled from primary sources such as censuses, parish registers, legislative records, and newspapers.
Unlike the digital record left by the archaeologist, that created by the historian does not significantly alter the artefacts on which it is based.
Subsequent scholars can if they wish refer to the manuscripts and printed editions from which so many historical databases derive.
Yet the machinereadable record is no less important.
It forms the building blocks upon which more comprehensive historical analyses may be developed as databases are extended, reworked, and compared with other, newer electronic collections.
Historical databases may also record typological information which simply cannot be found elsewhere.
A computer-aided analysis of early modern communities may develop a machinereadable catalogue of regional saints' days or standardised values for idiosyncratic currencies and other monetary measures.
A socio-economic analysis of industrialising societies may develop a machine-readable classification of eighteenth-century British occupations and place names.
These reference materials require substantial intellectual investment and may, irrespective of the data on which they are based, be useful to subsequent scholars [2].
Linguistic corpora databases in their own right are similarly worth preserving.
They, too, may act as the building blocks of increasingly comprehensive and synoptic analyses of language.
They may also hold a key to accurate and instantaneous machine-translation of spoken and written texts.
And of course, library, museum, and archive catalogues, indeed all indices of scholarly and other information, are themselves a kind of database without which access to information would be improbable if not impossible.
The case for preserving digital databases is not therefore parochially academic.
It is universal and it is compelling.
The case for computer-tractable texts is different, yet again, but no less urgent.
Texts are fundamental to scholarship in the humanities and are regularly rendered into machine readable form.
For more then a generation, arts scholars have been producing electronic texts in support of linguistic content, stylistic and other analyses which are most effectively conducted by computer [3].
More recently, scholars have begun to deliver electronic critical editions [4].
As the corpus of electronic text expands, so do the horizons for scholarly investigation, but only if the corpus can be maintained over time.
But there are other, perhaps more compelling reasons to preserve electronic texts.
At present an increasing number of late-twentieth century "texts" one thinks of on-line digests of legal, medical, and economic information, the enormous output of government departments, particularly in the United States, and of course, the vast quantities of textual material currently present on the worldwide web are only available in machine-readable form.
Commercial and scholarly book and journal publishers are turning increasingly toward electronic editions many of which are not or cannot be mirrored by more traditional paper based ones [5].
The situation with images and with digital audio and video recordings is similar to that of texts; only the technology is newer so the corpus of currently available material is not perhaps so large.
Yet the high tide is approaching.
The entertainment industry is actively developing digital technologies and it is only a matter of time before its combined outputs are only available in computer-tractable form.
Museums, archives, and libraries are also experimenting digitising collections in order to extend access to them (some good virtual exhibitions already exist on the "net") or to protect the rarest objects from the ravages of physical handling and use.
Without establishing viable methods of digital resource preservation these databases, texts, images, and sounds will be lost to future generations.
What is at stake is nothing lest than our cultural heritage.
It is one thing to recognise the urgent case for digital preservation.
It is another to address it.
The problems are vast and as yet without satisfactory solutions [6].
There are technical problems to be sure.
For example, no satisfactory or reliable estimates exist regarding the longevity of particular magnetic media.
Strategic issues are more intractable.
There is no agreement even about what preservation entails.
Is it possible to preserve electronic information independently of the processing platforms upon which it is initially mounted without any loss of significant content?
Does the content of a multimedia installation, in other words, comprise simply a collection of digital texts, images, and sounds linked together by a set of explicit pointers?
If so, then it is feasible to store the data independently of the software and hardware which present these features to a user in a particular way.
Alternatively, if the look and feel of the multimedia application, that is its look and feel to the user, is considered a crucial component of its content, then we need to think as well about preserving particular computers, operating systems, and software applications.
Should we adopt this latter view then the job of the digital archivist converges closely with that traditionally belonging to the curator of a science and technology museum.
Debate is as vigorous about the definition of a "digital publication" particularly where that publication exists originally in a networked environment.
Is the contents of a web page strictly limited to the text, images, and sounds which are represented on that page together with a series of pointers to other pages, or does it extend to the external information which the pointers identify?
If we accept the latter view, then preserving the AHDS web page could involve a digital picture of the entire contents of the worldwide web.
The scale of the problem in this case is only compounded when we think that the worldwide web is constantly and dynamically revised, updated and amended.
As may be expected, those communities which are traditionally responsible for preserving our cultural heritage library, archive, and museum communities are the ones struggling to define the problems inherent in digital resource preservation and to recommend tentative steps which may produce solutions [7].
In particular these communities are seeking experimentation with different models of digital preservation, which can be applied to particular and well-defined subsets of electronic information, and then documented carefully to enable them to be costed and scaled to fit the needs of other preservation initiatives.
The AHDS was established fully with this approach in view.
Focusing on its own holdings, and in consultation with the wider community, it will develop and implement strategies for digital preservation, and document them in the Service Providers Handbook and Standards Reference Guidelines.
Here we will not merely describe our practices.
We will also cost them so that they may be scaled either up or down and evaluated with respect to their prospective application to other digital collections and in digital archives organised differently than the AHDS.
In this respect, the AHDS hopes to make a significant contribution to the wider discussion which must take place within the library and archive communities in order to ensure that the electronic outputs of today are available for use and evaluation tomorrow.
Data Description Data description standards are crucial and must be adopted, documented, and implemented on a community wide basis if we are to enable scholars to search seamlessly across the numerous on-line finding aids which point to the resources they require.
Accordingly, the AHDS will collaborate extensively with other agencies to identify appropriate data description standards, document these in the Service Providers Handbook and Standards Reference Guidelines, and implement them with regard to its own collections and catalogue.
The problem that we face is integrating the very different descriptions which are used to document the various resources upon which scholars depend.
For example, records from a library catalogue may provide MARC-conformant information.
Those from digital text archives, museums and archives may reveal information more closely conformant to the recommendations made by the TEI, The Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) and the Encoded Archival Description (EAD), respectively [8].
What is required is a means of positioning the rich and distinctive descriptions that are appropriate to particular resources within a more general framework.
In this regard, we are encouraged by work on the Dublin Core and the Warwick Framework, and with object-oriented data models.
Together these may enable hierarchical integration of domain specific data description standards [9].
Resource Location No framework may be developed for the preservation, integration, and location of scholarly electronic resources which does not benefit from the lessons of practical application.
Accordingly, the AHDS catalogue will be developed as a means of testing, evaluating, and refining those recommendations which bear directly on data description, resource location and interchange.
The catalogue will provide users with seamless access to the resources that are deposited at and managed by the AHDS Service Providers and to those which reside at sites with which the AHDS has data exchange agreements.
To test our extension of the defiition of "catalogue" we also seek participation from a select number of institutions which manage on-line catalogues of both digital and non-digital materials, notably from the university, library, archive, and museum communities.
Though we will concentrate initially on resources managed within the UK, we hope to extend our efforts at least on a limited international basis.
To elucidate take as an example an Elizabethan scholar who is interested in the Bard.
That user must be able to enter a gateway (or, more probably, one of several gateways) to humanities resources and search for "Shakespeare, William B".
An initial query may return some very rudimentary information about the many resources which are known to a variety of interoperating electronic catalogues, indices, and other finding aids.
Accordingly, the first five records returned by such a query may be drawn from catalogues which are maintained by the Oxford Text Archive, the Archaeology Data Service, a Theatre Museum, a manuscript archive, and a university library.
To permit this level of integration, metadata records describing these holdings must share at least a small range of information.
Yet this range of information is not yet sufficient for the scholar to assess whether the resources identified are worth acquiring or pursuing further.
A richer level of description is required for the electronic text, the digital excavation record, and the objects listed respectively in the performing arts museum, archive, and library catalogues.
We may imagine, then, that the user conducts a second-order search to retrieve fuller information on the excavation record from the Archaeological Data Service and acquires the more specific detail appropriate to that resource.
In addition specific information may be required to enable the scholar to acquire, mount, and use the data locally.
This more technical description may be acquired in a third-order search and may only be needed for digital data.
The more integrated approach to resource location which we envisage is predicated on an extended definition of "collection".
Not all datasets need to be deposited with the AHDS or with one of its associated data archives in order to be known to the AHDS's catalogue and its users.
Increasingly, computer-literate scholars and commercial information services are making digital resources available over the network.
Additionally, more traditional respositories of our cultural heritage libraries, archives, and museums are providing information about their holdings in on-line catalogues and other finding aids.
The AHDS shares the scholarly community's interest in enabling users easily to locate these digital resources and to exploit these finding aids.
Accordingly, our resource location tools need knowledge of electronic resources regardless of their physical location.
Our aim is not to construct a single gateway to humanities resources or to centralise the management of them; only to construct a working prototype which may demonstrate the prospects for interoperability and interchange on a far wider scale.
Awareness and Education We have already indicated that digital resource preservation and interchange requires agreement amongst information services with regard to how they store, describe, preserve and provide access to the electronic resources which they manage.
We have also shown that information services rely upon data creators to adopt data encoding and formatting standards which will ensure their electronic outputs can be preserved over the longer term and be included in and accessible from resource location or cataloguing systems.
Accordingly it is not sufficient to document a framework for greater interoperation amongst information services.
We must also educate a larger community of data creators about the importance of digital resource preservation and interchange and about the practices which they should consider adopting if we are collectively to achieve these dual aims.
The AHDS's contribution to what must inevitably be a much broader exercise is a series of publications collectively referred to as Guides to Good Practice.
These will target scholars contemplating data creation or secondary analysis and highlight issues and methods which they need to consider.
They will also identify potential pitfalls and provide comprehensive references for further reading about particular subjects.
Perhaps most importantly, they will be written by subject specialists (e.g.
literary scholars) for likeminded subject specialists (e.g.
other literary scholars) and thus employ vocabulary and illustrative examples which are more approachable than so much of the methodological literature that is available today.
Some of the pamphlets will be written by the AHDS Service Providers and provide general guidance, for example, in the construction of historical databases, linguistic corpora, and archaeological sitemapping materials.
Others will be more narrowly focused on particular methodological issues (e.g.
nominal record linkage, encoding critical apparatus in an electronic text, the production of "archive-quality" images) and will be commissioned from scholars actively working in related fields.
The Case for Collaboration A framework for data creation, description, preservation, and interchange cannot be developed by the AHDS working in isolation.
Success requires substantial collaboration on at least two fronts.
We must solicit input from both scholars who have an interest in using our collections and those who will add to the collections through deposit.
Members of these two most crucial communities will be invited to inform us of their requirements so that we may ensure that they are met by the resources we choose to collect, by the framework that we document in our Service Providers' Handbook and Standards Reference Guidelines, by the operation of our catalogue, and by the instructional materials we provide in the Guides to Good Practice.
On another front, we must collaborate with other information services.
The development of robust and viable strategies for digital resource preservation requires experimentation with different models and substantial collaboration amongst digital archivists and librarians.
It also requires dialogue with organisations which document and promote the data creation standards that we all require.
To enable scholars more coherent and uniform access to the vast and growing number of on-line catalogues, indices, and digital resources, the organisations which construct and maintain such finding aids and collections must work together to develop compatible approaches to data description and to build interoperable systems.
While input from standards initiatives is crucial, we must also prototyping common solutions in collaboration with the institutions which create and maintain the on-line tools on which scholars increasingly rely in.
Elsewhere the AHDS is described as a broker facilitating collaboration amongst these various communities.
This function derives directly from the AHDS's very narrowly defined remit and from our recognition that that our goals cannot adequately be fulfilled without extensive consultation and co-operation.
We believe that by collaborating in the development of a generalisable framework for the preservation and interchange of electronic resources, all stakeholders have the opportunity to improve their own services or practices, extend and encourage access to their own collections, and elaborate their own institutional or professional identities.
In the hope that our causes are one and the same, the AHDS invites the widest possible participation in its work.
Daniel Greenstein, Director Jennifer Trant, Collections and Standards Development, Arts and Humanities Data Service Executive King's College London, Library The Strand London WC2R 2LS UK email: daniel.greenstein@kcl.ac.uk fax/phone: +44 (0)171 873-2445 URL: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/projects/ahds/top.html [1] This typology, specifically as applied to imaging is explored in Jennifer Trant, "Framing the Picture: Standards for Imaging Systems".
A paper presented at the International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, San Diego, California, October, 1995.
[2] Daniel Greenstein, A Historian's Guide to Computing (Oxford, 1996), chapters 3 and 6.
[3] Susan Hockey, "An Historical Perspective", in Sebastian Rahtz, ed., Information Technology in the Humanities: Tools, Techniques and Applications (Colchester, 1987), 22.
[4] Robin Cover and Peter Robinson, "Textual Criticism" in Nancy Ide and Jean Veronis eds., The Text Encoding Initiative: Background and Context.
Computers and the Humanities, 29:2(1995), 123-136.
[5] Ron Zweig, "Virtual Records and Real History", History and Computing, 4(1992), 174-82.
For another description of the extent of the problem see Proposal for the legal Deposit of Non-Print Publications to the Department of National Heritage from the British Library.
January 1996.
[6] Margaret Hedstrom, "Mass storage and long-term preservation", paper delivered at Reconnecting Science and Humanities in Digital Libraries.
A Symposium Sponsored by The University of Kentucky and The British Library, 19-21 October 1995, Lexington, Kentucky.
[7] Preserving Digital Information.
Draft Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) and the Research Libraries Group (RLG).
Version 1.0, August 1995.
"Long Term Preservation of Electronic Materials: a JISC/British Library workshop as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme.
Organised by UKOLN 27th-28th November 1995 at the University of Warwick", British Library R & D Report 6238 (London, British Library, 1996); U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
(1994).
Digital Imaging and Optical Digital Disk Storage Systems: Long-Term Access Strategies for Federal Agencies.
Technical Information Paper No.
12.
National Technical Information Service, Washington, D.C. (ftp://ftp.nara.gov/pub/technical_information_papers and gopher://gopher.nara.gov:70/11/managers/archival/papers/ postscri).
[8] International Documentation Committee of the International Council of Museums (CIDOC) offers a somewhat different approach than CIMI to the description of museum information.
[9] OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop Report, by Stuart Weibel, Jean Godby, Eric Miller, and Ron Daniel; "A Syntax for Dublin Core Metadata: Recommendations from the Second Metadata Workshop", by Lou Burnard, Eric Miller, Liam Quin, and C.M.
Sperberg-McQueen; "Issues of Document Description in HTML" , Eric J. Miller; "On Information Factoring in Dublin Metadata Records", C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BIDS Hits the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BIDS Hits the Web Buzz database archives browser copyright passwords telnet research Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark takes a look at the soon to be released trial BIDS web interface.
I will come clean straight away, First, after a couple of tries I found the BIDS Telnet interface pretty intuitive and second I am on record as being rather sceptical as to whether a web interface to BIDS could have the same degree of functionality as the Telnet interface.
I will probably find, however, if I do a bit of searching in the archives, that similar points were raised at the time of the change from pad to Telnet access of the databases.
Last week at Libtech the BIDS team bravely allowed the world a sneak preview of their barely finished first release web interface.
It didn't look too pretty but we were assured it would better by the time of the initial release at the end of September.
Personally, I found it pretty clear as it was a few minor twicks maybe, but that's all.
Sensibly, BIDS is not attempting to make a wholesale change from the present Telnet interface to the web version in one go.
Rather their idea is to gradually introduce more functionality into the web interface over time, while having both interfaces running in parallel.
The Web interface is planned initially for the ISI databases only.
The first release will not include citation searches, patents or research fronts.
Full functionality should be in place by Christmas 1996.
As for the way it actually works, this might appear very different compared to what the Telnet user would expect.
Obviously there is the difference of moving from a keyboard driven interface to one that allows use of a mouse, but possibly more disconcertingly for the Telnet user, gone are the display and output menus no longer does the user have to exit the search menu and select display and so on.
All results are displayed on screen and the level of display (unchanged) is chosen by the user before the search is conducted.
It is possible to move effortlessly from the barest bibliographic information (e.g.
title, author, journal) for a particular record (or even a group of marked records) to a full complete record simply by clicking a button.
Users can page through results a full record at a time, or scan an abbreviated list.
Records can still be marked and emailed to the user as before but now all this can happen directly from the display screen.
The use of buttons on the interface allows the user to navigate within the database, without having to rely on their browser's back and forward functions, and may well give the user a greater sense of where they are in the database (always a problem in the Telnet interface, despite each screen being labelled).
The Web interface also has the potential to be a very powerful full text retrieval interface.
With the advent of the HEFC electronic journals scheme, the BIDS web interface will eventually be able to link from a bibliographic record of an article, to the actual article.
At present a single web search-interface to Blackwell's Scientific, Blackwell's Publishing and Academic Press under the HEFC agreement is being developed by BIDS (this also was on show at LIBTECH).
It has the advantage that the user only need remember their BIDS username and password details of which journals they can access through the HEFC agreements are held centrally.
This facility will be integrated in the first release, initially for Blackwell's Scientific journals only, thus if a user tries to order an article through one of the BIDS databases, the system will be intelligent enough to know if the users institution already has access to the electronic version and present the user with this, instead of an order form.
(It is hoped to eventually encompass all publishers under the agreement.)
In the meantime, what will the web interface mean to Librarians at the work-face?
Given the increase of web-based information services within universities, the web interface should be more recognisable and 'friendly' to the novice user.
Unfortunately, the increased ease of use might lead more users to search BIDS without knowing enough about search techniques and possibly becoming disheartened at their lack of results.
Hopefully however, librarians will be able to concentrate less on teaching users how to use the interface and more on how to search effectively, with an overall result being an increased effective use of the service.
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Edbank Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Edbank Buzz software html database digitisation copyright video graphics licence Citation BibTex RIS Hilary Nunn describes this project to create, maintain and run a database of digitised teaching materials to support remote (off campus) students in teacher training, based at the Open University Library.
The Open University Library working with Routledge Publishers and the Open University (OU)'s School of Education and Rights Department aims to create, maintain and run a database of digitised teaching materials to support remote (off campus) students in teacher training.
In order to achieve our aim Edbank [1] requires: teaching materials permission to store electronically those sections of "text" (within these materials) that belong to third parties rights clearances an appropriate database and a means to make it accessible.
The plan is to digitise the course materials for the Open University's Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) together with the 9 readers co-published with Routledge and deliver them over the World Wide Web.
Access will be permitted to OU PGCE students and a specified number of other institutions who provide teacher training.
This will enable us to explore a number of issues such as: support for remote students based on dial-up access (PGCE students are loaned a PC, modem and printer for the duration of their course) perceived competition between digitised and non-digitised sources (PGCE students are supplied with OU produced materials at the beginning of their course) pricing of access to electronic materials and copyright management, including royalty collection.
Progress Work started on Edbank in earnest at the end of February 1997 with the appointment of a project manager and copyright officer.
A technical development officer has just been recruited and will join the project shortly.
Support from the OU's Centre for Educational Software who have specialist skill in designing Web interfaces to databases has also been acquired.
Additionally, because we were comparatively late in starting we have been able to take advantage of some of the experiences of other eLib projects.
This has proved invaluable.
Copyright issues The material we aim to digitise is primarily text although each of the 3 stages of the PGCE course has an accompanying video and audio tape.
The text comprises the 9 Routledge readers plus, for each of the PGCE courses, a study guide, a resource pack and a school experience guide.
The OU offers a number of PGCE courses (primary specialising in age range 5-8, primary specialising in ages 7-11 and secondary with 7 subject courses English, music, modern foreign languages (French), history, mathematics, science and design and technology).
Some documents and facsimiles are generic to all the PGCE courses.
Much of the material has been produced by OU academic staff with copyright ownership remaining with the university.
However, most of the individual study guides contain third party extracts: these range from a couple of lines to several pages.
In addition the resource pack includes facsimile documents which are reprints of key articles plus larger extracts from other books and teaching schemes.
All of the material has been cleared once for text use and in the majority of cases is integral to the context.
If permission for electronic use is not granted we will not be able to find supplementary or alternative material and/or rewrite sections of text to accommodate this.
Our copyright officer has experience in copyright and license negotiations for electronic rights gained within the OU Rights Department.
Given the OU's experience in clearing rights and the copyright officer's intimate knowledge of existing procedures that work effectively we are following existing OU rights procedures and linking into existing OU systems to record clearance applications, chase them and authorise payments where necessary.
Deciding to follow this route was important since it enables the OU Rights Department to continue to hold a centralised record of all copyright transactions across the university and gave Edbank immediate access to publishers, their addresses and contact information.
So far we have identified some 300 publishers to contact for clearance rights and are in the process of distributing letters.
Our letter contains a specific request for clearance for project purposes and asks separately for an indication of likely attitude for subsequent commercial exploitation.
A single A4 information sheet on the project is also enclosed.
Unsurprisingly responses are slow.
The OU typically allows 2-3 months for the whole process of approach, chase (if necessary), negotiate and agree.
Plans for the near future On the digitisation front we are assured that we will be able to obtain the Routledge readers in an electronic format (probably in Word[TM]) which would negate the need for scanning.
The OU-produced text material has been archived in an electronic format and we believe we can obtain either Word[TM], PDF or HTML formats for integration into the database.
We await precise information regarding the true extent of availability plus its cost (internal charging mechanisms prevail).
Missing from the text are all the photographs and graphics.
We therefore know that we will be required to do some scanning, but not yet how much.
Conclusion We are aware of the urgent need both to develop the database and to create and make information about the project available on an Edbank website.
Successful implementation of an Edbank website will be the first indication that our technical person has arrived and begun to deliver!
In the meantime please call or email us.
We will be happy to provide further information, learn from you or discuss areas of common interest.
References 1.
Edbank http://www-edbank.open.ac.uk/ Author Details Hilary Nunn (Project Manager) Email h.m.nunn@open.ac.uk Tel: 01908 858486 Sarah Gamman (Copyright Officer) Email s.a.gamman@open.ac.uk Tel: 01908 858473.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz copyright graphics gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell, giving a wry spin on the topic of Peer Review.
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Interface Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface Buzz software copyright cataloguing gopher Citation BibTex RIS Interview with Paul Evan Peters, director of the US Coalition for Networked Information.
Paul Evan Peters is of a philosophical turn of mind.
Even at breakfast, in his hotel in Hatfield where he was based for the LibTech Conference, he drops easily into a fluent analysis of the goals of the Coalition for Networked Information, the organisation which he founded five years ago.
The CNI was formed to promote the creation of networked information resources which will advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.
It draws upon a task force consisting of universities, publishers, hardware and software companies and library organisations.
Peters' primary vision of the CNI is as a facilitator.
Communication is the key.
At present, there is still a gulf between those who use networked services and those who provide them.
The organisation aims to foster an environment which eases communication betweenthe two groups.
To that end, it hosts meetings and conferences, encourages projects between providers and users (the TULIP electronic journal project is the best known illustration) and produces its own stimulus to the crucial debate on the information society.
This latter is achieved by commissioning issue papers whose main aim is to challenge and provoke.
"Despite the word 'Coalition' in our title, we don't advocate public policy positions" he explains.
"The kind of politics we are experts in are market place politics or organisational change politics."
Turning to universities as a special network services consumer group, Peters is clear about the advantages which the Net has brought to researchers.
This is the group whose need has always been greatest.
"The knowledge-producing communities had a need for generalised access to rare and expensive scientific and other resources".
Their needs drove academic network policy and standards for many years.
Now, however, the development of the Internet as a teaching tool is a major issue.
When it comes to the support which libraries have traditionally given undergraduate students, Peters believes that the first requirement is the networked availability of heavy demand material.
It won't be achieved, however, without first squaring up to the copyright problem.
Typically, Peters' approach would be non-aggressive.
"Publishers are the owners of these materials.
We need a solution which does not violate their copyrights."
I asked Peters to nail his colours to the mast and nominate his choice of the single-most significant network innovation for the information profession.
This was a difficult question, but it did not take him long to single out Gopher.
"Although it looks now like an old-fashioned way of organising information, it was the thing that liberated librarians from the view of networks as merely a means of access to their online catalogues.
Gopher gave us the technology to put up an information service which contained not only bibliographic information, but a variety of other types pathfinders, maps, community information...Librarians started to think, for the first time, that the network was something which could generate new value."
But what about the Web?
Hasn't it been the major breakthrough?
Peters is not convinced.
"I honestly don't view the World Wide Web as anything more than a much advanced presentation.
Although I'm very impressed at what search agents like Yahoo and Lycos can do, I'm very unimpressed at what they find."
He says he is 'stunned' by the complacency of those who believe that existing search engines have solved the information discovery problems of the Internet.
"What they are really talking about is known item searching.
The Web is really a publishing system.
The next breakthrough technology would be some way of organising intellectually, organising content."
Nevertheless, he considers that the Web has changed forever the 'look and feel' of the Internet.
It has wrested the main topic of debate away from engineering matters ("whether you need this kind of router and that kind of plug") to matters of content.
But there is a long way to go.
"The Web is not the end, because nothing on the Net right now is true to the dynamic, complex character of the way that people learn information, and it won't be until the basic architecture is phrased in human terms."
What does it all mean for librarians?
Peters believes that librarians are purposive information organisers.
Traditional collection development policies have always produced a customised view of the information universe for the library's host institution.
This need will continue to exist in the environment of a networked information universe.
As for our great fear of being bypassed by our former users?
Yes, it will happen, and happen increasingly.
But we must be a part of the information solution.
"Already, many people are happier achieving in four hours of Internet searching what they could find in one hour in the library.
What we must do is help them to find the same information in one hour on the Net."
The objective, he states, is to 'stay in the game'.
With team captains like Peters around, we may just succeed.
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Planet SOSIG: A New Internet Role for Europe's Librarians Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: A New Internet Role for Europe's Librarians Buzz software database infrastructure browser cataloguing hypertext url research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Worsfold describes the role and purpose of SOSIG, and launches a scheme where European Librarians can participate in adding relevant, quality content to this Social Science Gateway.
The Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) [1], is asking librarians across Europe to consider their role in Internet information provision.
SOSIG is proposing a model that offers both short and long term methods for libraries to increase their involvement in Internet information provision.
In the short term, SOSIG would like to invite academic librarians to become SOSIG Correspondents.
The Correspondents will form a pan-European team of information professionals and academics, working remotely from their workplace to select resources for the gateway.
Together they could build a significant electronic collection which could be used to serve their users, and users across Europe.
In the long term, SOSIG is suggesting that major European libraries (National and social science libraries) should consider setting up a social science information gateway for their own country.
If they follow the SOSIG model, then a network of national gateways can be created that can be cross-searched via a single interface.
SOSIG is funded by the ESRC [2] (Economic and Social Research Council) and eLib [3] (The Electronic Libraries Programme).
It has recently joined forces with the European Union’s DESIRE Project [4] , which is part of the Telematics for Research Programme).
With this EU funding SOSIG aims to create an information service that can support social science education and research across Europe.
This Summer SOSIG will have a new look and new functionality that reflects this aim.
It will also be promoting the idea of collaborative and distributed Internet information provision.
This is an exciting opportunity for librarians to assume an important role on the Internet, and to work together to build a European electronic library for the social sciences.
SOSIG as an Internet library SOSIG is an Internet gateway that can be accessed free of charge via the WWW.
It is fundamentally an online catalogue which points to a select collection of high quality Internet resources located on servers around the world.
Unlike a list of hyperlinks, this catalogue can be searched or browsed, and has the added value of resource descriptions, which allow users to decide whether to spend time connecting to a resource.
SOSIG aims to be a ‘one stop shop’ for social scientists who wish to see what the Internet has to offer that is relevant to their work.
In many ways SOSIG is the Internet version of an academic library.
The gateway points to Internet resources, but applies many of the principles and practices of traditional librarianship to the collection.
Every resource has been selected, classified and catalogued by an information professional.
SOSIG has a collection management policy, quality selection criteria, a classification system, and catalogue records and rules.
These methods are widely recognised as being essential for the organisation of printed information, and they translate very effectively to the electronic environment.
When users access SOSIG they can have the same confidence that they would have on entering an academic library they can be assured of the quality of the resources, and there is a well established system to help them find the information they need.
It is the human input, as opposed to the use of robots or web-crawlers, that is the key to the success of SOSIG.
In the printed world it is acknowledged that librarians can be vital ‘information filters’, whose work saves users time and effort in their information retrieval.
The same applies to the Internet librarians could serve their users by creating a tailored collection of Internet resources.
SOSIG would suggest that there are significant benefits to be had from creating a shared catalogue on a European scale.
SOSIG is offering a new role for librarians SOSIG is proposing that librarians might like to turn their skills and some of their time to Internet information provision, and in effect staff the electronic library.
Since SOSIG started in 1994 the number of social science resources available on the Internet has rocketed, with more and more information providers (academics, governments, organisations etc.)
using this medium to publish and disseminate their information.
Coupled with this, many users are increasingly keen to use the Internet to meet their information needs.
We are appealing to librarians who are interested in using the Internet to meet the information needs of their users, to use SOSIG as a means of doing so.
The SOSIG Correspondent model works on the same theory as many traditional cataloguing consortia, where many librarians feed catalogue entries into one shared system for the mutual benefit of all involved.
The idea is to have many librarians assume the role of SOSIG Correspondent as part of their work, and to spend time finding and cataloguing Internet resources for SOSIG on a regular but informal basis.
The advantages of this approach can be summarised as follows: A ‘one stop shop’ for users: Users are likely to prefer using a single interface run by a large number of skilled information professionals, to having to trawl many unconnected and smaller gateways.
They only have to do one search on one interface and can be assured of a quality return.
A comprehensive collection of Internet resources for Europe: Librarians across Europe can submit resources from any country and in any European language.
As more and more Internet resources appear, this European network of Correspondents will be able to catch and catalogue valuable resources and improve the users’ access to them.
Economy of scale: If many librarians contribute resources to a distributed, shared catalogue then duplicated effort can be avoided.
If many people feed into the same, possible distributed database then the collection will grow, without institutions having to invest in the technological infrastructure or administration required to support an information gateway.
Provides librarians with a role on the Internet: Librarians are ideally placed to contribute to SOSIG, having expertise in the core skills of resource selection, classification and cataloguing.
By becoming Correspondents they will create a new role for themselves on the Internet, and be widely acknowledged as having an important part to play in the management of Internet information.
All Correspondents will be formally acknowledged on the SOSIG site, with the option of having an individual profile that states the library in which they work, their area of expertise, and the part of the collection that they contribute towards.
The SOSIG Correspondent Model a simple and practical solution SOSIG has developed a system whereby resources can be catalogued remotely from any PC which has a WWW browser such as Netscape.
Librarians will spend a few hours each week cataloguing from their desktops.
All the tools and guidelines needed to work as a SOSIG Correspondent are available on the WWW, and the process of adding resources is relatively simple: 1.
Do a quick search on SOSIG [5] to check that the resource is not already there 2.
Check that the resource falls within the scope of SOSIG [6] 3.
Check that the resource meets with the SOSIG selection criteria [7] 4.
Create a catalogue record for the resource by filling in the simple Submit a Resource Form [8] (that has hypertext links to the cataloguing rules) 5.
Click on the ‘Submit’ button to email the record to SOSIG SOSIG staff will then add the record to the database and the resource can be viewed publicly on the gateway.
DESIRE will shift the predominantly UK focus of SOSIG towards Europe and its languages.
Three types of correspondent might be considered, although they may overlap: Language Correspondents Language Correspondents can focus on adding resources written in the language favoured by their users, and can build up the multilingual aspect of the collection.
We are particularly keen to find colleagues from mainland Europe who can submit resources written in other European languages.
Ideally, there will be correspondents for each language; French Language Correspondents, German Language Correspondents etc.
Country Correspondents The gateway aims to point to resources from all European countries.
Country Correspondents can improve the geographical coverage of the collection.
For example, a correspondent from Sweden can focus on submitting resources created in Sweden and located on servers in Sweden.
As more and more social scientists across Europe begin to publish material on the WWW, we hope the country correspondents can ensure that resources from all countries are added to the collection.
Subject Correspondents SOSIG covers a broad range of social science subjects ranging from anthropology to statistics, and aims to point to the highest quality Internet resources available for each subject.
Subject Correspondents can build up parts of the collection that have particular relevance for their users.
For example, a law librarian might want to build up the legal resources section by becoming a Law Correspondent, or a librarian serving psychology researchers may want to focus on psychology resources.
The Correspondent role is very flexible.
We are keen to pilot this model, and find the best way to make it work.
SOSIG can provide support while people learn how to use the system, and your comments and feedback on this approach will be welcome.
The level of input is also flexible, as we are aware that some librarians will have more time than others to devote to Internet work.
How to become a SOSIG Correspondent If you are interested in becoming a Correspondent please fill in the Form for New Correspondents at: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/desire.html Please tell us which area(s) you would like to work on (which language, country, or subject).
Further information, and the Correspondents’ tools and guidelines can be found at the URL above Rising to the challenge It will be interesting to see if librarians are willing to make Internet resource selection and cataloguing a part of their work.
SOSIG has set up the system to make collaborative and distributed cataloguing of Internet resources possible.
Correspondents can start submitting resources to SOSIG straight away, and the new multilingual interface will be made public later this year.
In particular, we hope to have built up the number of resources from mainland Europe before the new interface goes public, so that when it is made available, users will instantly be able to reap the benefits of a quality controlled European gateway, staffed by information professionals.
A strategy for Europe: Creating a network of national social science gateways The correspondent model offers an immediate method of providing access to Internet resources in the social sciences however, some of Europe’s National Libraries or major social science institutions might like to consider a more strategic long term approach.
The ROADS software [9] on which SOSIG is based has been developed under the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
It can be used to set up distributed databases based on servers in different locations, which can be simultaneously searched via a single interface.
It is therefore possible for each country in Europe to set up their own social science information gateway, and to then enable users to search this and all the other gateways simultaneously.
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) [10] is piloting this model as part of the DESIRE project.
A ROADS database is being set up on a server in the Netherlands, and resources selected by Dutch university librarians will be entered.
A National collection of Dutch Internet resources for the social sciences will be developed over time.
Once there are enough records in the database the UK and the Netherlands will enable the two gateways to inter-operate so that users in both countries can search and browse the two collections simultaneously.
It is possible for Koninklijke Bibliotheek to create their own interface in Dutch, or to use the existing SOSIG interface.
The tools and methods for setting up a National subject gateway are currently being developed by the DESIRE project.
The infrastructure and documentation will all be made publicly available.
Those interested would need to invest in the necessary hardware and would also need technical staff to set up and maintain the software and interface, and information staff to select and submit resources into the database.
Many of the skills required by the information staff can be acquired through the hands on experience gained by contributing to SOSIG as a correspondent.
A country interested in setting up a gateway might consider using SOSIG as a holding place for resources any resources submitted to SOSIG could be moved over to the National database once it was set up.
Conclusion The Internet currently has a strong American bias.
The DESIRE project hopes to balance this by encouraging the development of a European network of information gateways, and by encouraging academics and librarians to use these gateways to improve access to the thousands of valuable Internet resources created and located in Europe.
References SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway), http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Economic and Social Research Council Web pages, http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ Electronic Libraries Programme Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ DESIRE Project Web pages, http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire/ Search SOSIG, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search.pl Scope of SOSIG, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/desire/escope.html SOSIG selection criteria, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/desire/ecrit.html SOSIG form for submitting a resource, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/sosig-cgi/desire_newurl.pl ROADS Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/ National Library of the Netherlands, http://www.konbib.nl/ Author Details Emma Worsfold, SOSIG/DESIRE Research Officer, Email: emma.worsfold@bristol.ac.uk Web Page: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/emma.html Tel: 01179 288443 Address: Institute for Learning and Research Technology, 8 Woodlands Road, Bristol, BS8 1TN Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Document Delivery: A Trial in an Academic Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Document Delivery: A Trial in an Academic Library Buzz database copyright cataloguing passwords ftp research Citation BibTex RIS In the first of a two-part article, Fiona Williams describes the trials of various electronic document delivery systems in University of Bath Library and Learning Centre over the last few years.
A review of the latest trial, between BL Urgent Action Service and TU DELFT, as well as an overall comparison with the Blackwell's Uncover Service will be given in the next issue of Ariadne.
The Background In November 1994 members of the library staff met to discuss the feasibility of setting up an experiment in Electronic Document Delivery (EDD).
This was a result of the continued increase of periodical prices above the rate of inflation; the increasing difficulty in subscribing to core journals caused by price increases and the need to create more space in the Library.
The Deputy Librarian produced statistics which showed that 102 journals subscribed to by the Library cost over 800 pounds each i.e.
5 percent of the titles taken by the Library cost 30 percent of the total periodicals expenditure.
Most of these were in the sciences and technology area.
The Aim The short term aim of the experiment was to see if EDD could save money on expensive journal subscriptions.
The long term aim was to increase the cost effectiveness of obtaining journal articles, thus ensuring value for money, and to test the acceptability of a service delivering full text articles to users.
At no point did we consider replacing existing document delivery services with electronic document delivery.
The two would be run as complementary services.
Funding A total of 4,000 pounds was made available.
Using the Blackwell’s Uncover Service the experiment was planned to run for six months maximum or until the money ran out.
It was agreed to encourage the Library representatives from the University’s Science Departments to actively participate in the experiment.
Blackwells Uncover The ‘Uncover’ database was chosen because its journal title coverage of approximately 16,000 journals including good academic coverage, seemed extremely good.
Of the 102 titles mentioned previously Uncover could supply 100.
The average price of the faxed articles worked out at approximately 10.50 dollars although copyright charges did depend on the price of the actual journal i.e.
the more expensive the journal the more expensive the copyright charge.
The University of Bath Library paid for a password account, in which a designated sum was deposited.
Blackwells debited this account monthly sending regular statements itemising each transaction.
Advantages included increased security and a reduction of the copy charge for each article by 2 dollars.
Trial 1 The first trial started on March 1 1995 mid May 1995 2 Departments, Maths and Chemistry, were selected to take part in the experiment, and a steering party of two library representatives and four library staff was established.
Seven journal titles were selected; some which had previously been taken by the Library and cancelled; others were titles that the departments would like to subscribe to.
The total annual subscription for these journals would be 8,000 pounds.
All University staff and researchers at the University of Bath could order articles from any of these seven journals.
The above meant that we should be able to achieve our objective of assessing the viability of EDD in terms of quality and speed of delivery, and how such a service should be monitored and offered.
It would not give us a direct correlation between expensive current subscriptions and quantifiable measures of use, but would enable us to make comparisons to present subscriptions which may be of use if expensive journals needed to be cancelled in the future.
Method The trial was advertised in Staff and Student newsletters, as well as the combined Library and Computing Services newsletter.
Fliers were put in all lecturers’ and postgraduates’ pigeon holes as well as the Library’s noticeboards in the Departments.
Applications for EDD were originally only accepted by email, but eventually extended to receipt by post or in person.
Guidelines were given on the fliers detailing what information should be included, and a template was provided on the web page.
Web and email requests were sent to a special email address.
In order to monitor cost and use, requests for articles via EDD were processed by two members of Academic Services who staffed the Reference and Information Point .
All applications were first checked against the Library catalogue and holdings and if the item was not in stock, the request was processed and sent to the Uncover service.
If the applicant gave a fax number, the request to Uncover specified that number and the article was faxed directly to the applicant.
If not, requests were directed to the Library fax and then forwarded by internal mail.
Review After three months the original trial was reviewed.
Take up of the service had been extremely disappointing i.e.
only 9 requests.
We felt that EDD could still be a useful service and to test out the system it was decided to continue with the project, but in a revised format from June 1995.
The whole trial would again be reviewed in the Autumn.
Trial 2 1 June 1995 31 October 1995 The service would continue to be limited to researchers and all university staff.
They would be eligible to request any urgently required article (i.e.
required within 24-48 hours) on the Uncover database that was not subscribed to by the Library.
The experiment would last until the money ran out, unless the demand became overwhelming, in which case the service would be withdrawn for further consideration.
Although this trial would be carried out during the summer vacation, it was felt to be a good time as many of the lecturers caught up on their research during the summer; many postgraduates would be writing up and needing articles urgently, plus the new intake of postgraduates would be starting their projects and requiring articles.
Methodology continued as for the first trial with a few minor changes such as processing requests being limited to twice a day i.e.
early morning and late afternoon.
These changes took place because: a) the increase in the number of requests meant processing and checking became quite time consuming which had implications on the rest of their workload and b) the network was very busy between 11a.m.
and 4 p.m. making the system difficult to access and very slow to search and retrieve article citations.
In order that we received feedback on the service, users were requested to return the front cover of the fax back to the Library with comments about the service, such as speed of delivery, quality of fax, whether the service was useful or not.
Library staff also started noting the time spent on individual searches and how many orders were or were not successful.
Feedback Most of the feedback was made in the first few weeks of the new trial starting.
After the first request many people did not bother to return the front sheet, and we only heard from them if there was a problem.
On the whole the service worked well and was felt to be a success.
Statistics showed that 79 percent of requests made were fulfilled; 16 percent were unable to be fulfilled by Uncover and 5 percent of requests were already available in the Library.
Comments such as “excellent service”, “fast and efficient service”, “excellent additional service complementing existing facilities” were made.
The majority of take-up had been by teaching staff from nearly all of the Departments within the University.
There was no evidence of non-academic members of staff using the service.
It was particularly successful because requests could be made electronically without users having to come in to the Library and filling in a form.
Users increasingly wanted to order material via their PC and have it delivered to their desk!
Library staff working on the project felt that the back-up from Blackwells Help Desk had been excellent.
Emails were responded to promptly, and if necessary articles were re-sent on the same day.
There were however some problems with the service:As mentioned previously, actually accessing and searching the database, as well as inputting the information at certain times of the day became virtually impossible due to network delays.
10 minutes became the average time spent by Library staff dealing with each request, a cost of 2.50 pounds per request.
Some requests took longer because of the system being slow, or because articles were not in the system and required double and/or triple checking via author, keyword or journal title.
A list of journals available on Uncover would have prevented some of this unnecessary searching for titles not indexed.
Although 16,000 journals were indexed by Uncover, some of the lecturers felt that coverage was poor.
Often it was found that very current articles were also unavailable.
The cost of the service was higher than expected with the average price of articles costing 18 dollars each.
Library staff found the system rather “user unfriendly” with a lot of repetitive keying of passwords and commands being required.
The lack of complete alphabetic order in author search displays was also unhelpful.
One of the science departments stopped ordering articles via EDD because the quality of the fax was so poor, preferring the traditionally slower but good quality photocopies provided by the British Library.
On contacting Blackwells about this, they explained that clarity of small print, footnotes, diagrams and graphs always suffered with current fax technology.
The service had been advertised as a 24 hour service and delays of up to 48 hours became quite frequent.
Other minor irritations occurred such as articles arriving with pages missing.
These were immediately re-sent once we contacted the Help Desk.
We even received some articles that were not requested by us.
These, I am pleased to say, were not charged for.
From a Library point of view, our major problem was educating the users that the trial was for articles required urgently and not an electronic substitute for Inter Library Loans (ILLs).
Many users tried to take advantage of the free service rather than using their School’s ILLs budget whilst others preferred to send and receive their requests electronically, rather than coming over to the Library and filling out an ILL form.
These problems were reduced considerably after a letter was sent out to the departments reinforcing the aims of the experiment, and on a couple of occasions, some requesters were contacted in person.
The Way Forward The EDD steering group noted that: to a large extent the experiment had demonstrated that EDD could be a viable alternative to expensive periodical subscriptions but further research was necessary before Departments would be willing to risk cancelling journals and relying solely on EDD and ILLs.
an EDD service should be provided in the future as a complementary service to ILLs and not a substitute for it.
Although immediate delivery was not always necessary there was a demand for it, and users would be unhappy for the service to be discontinued.
research into other EDD service providers on the market should be carried out.
Investigations should concentrate on cheaper alternatives and/or better quality service.
administratively, the service was too time consuming to handle on a busy enquiries desk.
Any future trials should be handled by the User Services team.
This however would have long term implications on staffing and time.
Other options to be looked into could involve the departments ordering their own material but again would lead to monetary handling implications.
developments in technology were advancing so fast, that with the increasing number of full-text journals becoming available online, would this type of service be needed in the future?
Alternative document delivery systems : a survey As a result of the above recommendations, an investigation into other document delivery services on the market was undertaken in Spring 1996.
The following criteria were used to determine which services best suited the needs of the user, and those of the Library staff carrying out the trial.
What do our users want?
24 48 hour delivery direct personal delivery i.e.
via email, fax, post, without a visit to the Library good quality, clear copies of articles requested to request articles either by email, post or in person What does the Library want?
an efficient, cost effective, fast service to be able to request items via email, fax or phone, without having to search a database first to receive “confirmation of receipt” of the request good back-up service/customer support easy payment methods Research into the other service providers on the market, such as BIDS, Firstsearch and EBSCOdoc, showed that they worked in a similar way to Uncover; they were all rejected because the initial searching had to be undertaken by the Library which was a time consuming and lengthy process.
The following services were recommended for further trial.
In all three cases, the service providers acted as the intermediary and carried out the search for the requester upon receipt of the request:the British Library (BL) Urgent Action Service Delft University of Technology Document Delivery Service (TU DELFT) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Photocopying Service After discussions with the User Services Librarian, it was felt that:the RSC service was very subject specific and should not be used and that the British Library Urgent Action Service and TU DELFT should run in tandem.
(An outline of the three services are given below).
as the already very busy ILLs staff would be running the new trial, it would be better to use one familiar service BL Urgent Action, and one totally new service TU DELFT.
results of the previous trials showed that the majority of requests had been made by science departments, and that TU DELFT would be able to accommodate most of their requests.
Any requests unfulfilled by TU DELFT would then automatically be sent to the BL whose coverage is far more comprehensive, but whose cost is more than twice the price of TU DELFT.
this latest trial, using both services, could start in August 1996 and continue until funds ran out.
(A sum of 2,000 pounds had been allocated to run this trial).
British Library Urgent Action Service No.
of titles: Approximately 50,000 per year Coverage: Multidisciplinary Speed of delivery: Fax same day delivery 1st class mail within 24 hours Requests received before 3.30 guarantee same day despatch Delivery via: Fax Post Articles can be sent to any address given and still be charged to the Library account.
Ordering via: Phone Fax Electronically using ARTTEL 2 Price: 1st class post (article up to 50 pages) = 3 BL vouchers @ 4.50 pounds = 13.50 pounds Fax = 4 BL vouchers @ 4.50 pounds = 18.00 pounds Payment: Would continue to use the existing method of BL vouchers.
There is no longer a charge for unsuccessful requests.
Quality of copies received: Photocopies sent 1st class should be of the same good quality as the copies sent out by the BL normal service Fax dependent on quality of fax machine.
Not good for diagrams and/or graphs Customer support: Will update customer on findings within 2 hours of receiving request.
DUTL Delft University of Technology Library No.
of titles: 13,000 Coverage: Scientific and Technical literature.
Speed of delivery: Rush services (request dealt with that day usually within 8 hours of receipt) Delivery via: ftp Fax Ordering via: Email Fax Telephone Post Internet Price: Cost per article sent by ftp = 11.20 guilder/gilder + VAT = ú 5.19 Payment: Setting up a deposit account was preferred, so the costs of the article could be deducted Quality of copies received: Fax depends on quality of fax machine.
Not usually good for diagrams and/or graphs ftp printed off Library laser printers good for graphs and diagrams Customer support: Emails are sent confirming they are processing the order.
Cranfield University had used the service and were very pleased with it.
Internet address: http://www.library.tudelft.nl/   The Royal Society of Chemistry Photocopy Service No.
of titles: 2,000 (700 current) Coverage: Chemistry and related areas Speed of delivery: Express service items can be faxed on the same day if order received before 4.00p.m.
or despatched by first class post on day request received.
Delivery via: Post urgent action 1st class same day dispatch Fax urgent action faxed same day as receipt Ordering via: Fax (by voucher or typed request) Post Email Telephone Price: Urgent action post = 2 vouchers = 7.40 pounds Urgent fax = 4 vouchers = 14.80 pounds Payment: Annual corporate membership: 145 pounds.
Members buy a supply of pre-paid vouchers in books of 10 and use as requisition forms.
Quality of copies received: Fax dependent on quality of fax machine Post depends on quality of photocopying good for diagrams and graphs Customer support: Cranfield University also used this service and were pleased with it.
Holdings: A full list is available on request Internet address: http://chemistry.rsc.org/rsc/library.htm     Bibliography Baker, David.
Document delivery: the UEA experience.
Vine 95, 1995, pp.
12 14 Beddall, Jane.
Carl Uncover service.
Managing Information, 1(10), 1994, p. 50 Dade, Penny.
Pilot trial of Blackwell’s UnCover database.
Vine, 98, 1995, pp.
40 42 Dade, Penny.
Electronic information and document delivery: final report on the pilot trial of the Uncover database.
Vine, 103, 1997, pp.
43 45 Acknowledgements Thanks to Hannah South, Subject Librarian at the University of Bath, for her help in reviewing the practices of other service providers on the market.
Author details Fiona Williams, Faculty Librarian, University of Bath Email: lisfmw@bath.ac.uk Phone: 01225 826826 ext.5248 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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URL Monitoring Software and Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines URL Monitoring Software and Services Buzz data software html database browser cataloguing graphics windows jpeg ascii gif perl ejournal url standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Hollands describes and compares tools to help you notice when a Web-based resource has been updated.
Paul Hollands: One of the problems that the academic community faces with respect to the Internet is that certain types resources are, by nature, subject to rapid change (eJournals and eZines for example).
How do you remember when to look for the latest edition of your favourite Web publications?
Once you have found that ideal specialist list of sources, how do you know when new items are added?
From the web author's point of view an even greater difficulty is keeping links within your own documents up to date.
There are three basic approaches to managing information about site changes at your desktop: If you use the latest versions of the Netscape Navigator or NCSA Mosaic browsers you have limited monitoring functions built in.
The second approach relies on the use of email.
Whenever a site changes, you are sent an email message, prompting you to check that URL.
In the third instance you have a piece of software sitting on your machine which periodically polls the sites you have specified and informs you of any changes.
1.
Browser specific functions Netscape What's New?
Function Netscape v 2.0x has a built in URL monitoring function tied to its Bookmark facilities.
If you choose Go to Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu and then choose the File menu in the Bookmarks window proper, you will see a What's New?
option.
This apparently gives you the option of checking a selection or all of your bookmarks to see what updates have occured.Unfortunately I find the whole set of Bookmark functions in Netscape 2.0x very unintuitive and after running this function for several days I am still unsure what has changed in my bookmarks listings.
Nice try but no cigar... Mosaic Autosurf Function This function checks the links in a document rather than a list of URLs per se.
You simply pull up the page with the links you want to check and then choose the Mosaic AutoSurf option on the Navigate menu.
Mosaic then furnishes you with a report about the state of the links.
(Thanks to Walter Scales who originally posted these browser tips on the netskills-for um list.)
2.
URL-minder An example of the second or email approach to monitoring is the URL-Minder http://www.netmind.com/URL-minder/URL-minder.html service.
This is a free service provided by NetMind.
The number of URLs you can submit is unlimited and you can even include Yahoo!
search strings to be periodically run.
This is perhaps the most useful aspect of the service (and what's more, this should also work for any search engine that uses the "Get" command).
The URL-minder keeps track of World Wide Web resources and sends users e-mail when it detects a change in a registered Web page or CGI execution.
The URL-minder keeps track of one Web page, gif, or other resource at a time.
It will not keep track of all the Web pages linked to the page you submit.
A separate URL must be submitted for every distinct page you want the URL-minder to track for you.
The URL-minder tracks the actual HTML markup, binary contents, or ascii contents of the URL you submit.
If an HTML page includes a GIF or JPEG graphic, the URL-minder will inform you when the reference to the graphic changes.
If you want to know when the actual content of a binary graphic file changes, you must submit the URL of the binary graphic itself.
The URL-minder currently checks on your registered URL's at least once per week, and will inform you if it fails to retrieve your registered URL after trying twice.
There are two ways to register your chosen URLs.
Web authors can insert the relevant forms into the documents on their sites so that you can register as and when you visit, or you must make a note of then URL and then point your browser at the URL-minder site.
This would be an ideal service for managing sources such as eJournals and Online Newspapers.
Unfortunately it won't work with those sites where you have to register.
The benefit for the academic in using the email method over the software approach is that email is ubiquitous and platform independent.
No matter what type of machine you might have or what type of mail setup, the information will find its way to you.
There are no problems with software support, you don't have to use up hard disk space by building databases of site references nor do you have to wait around while your machine is busy polling sites for you.
However the only service around at the moment seems to be URL-minder and good as it is you still have to type in your email address and name each time you want to log a URL.
A better approach would be to have registration system similar to The Electronic Telegraph and The Times.
Also it would be nice to be able to log a whole list of URLs in one go.
An easy way of doing this would be to be able mail your bookmark.htm dump file to URL-minder and register the whole lot.
These are limitations at the moment, but NetMind are extending the service all the time.
I put my criticisms to Matt Frieval of NetMind.
He replied: "Multiple options for managing registrations seem to be in order, since everyone has an opinion and a preference.
We'll work the issue as time and resources allow.... We are adding more capacity next week, and hope to be able to put some additional user capabilities in place over the next few months. "
So watch this space.... 3.
Polling software The third approach to URL monitoring involves the use of a client on your own machine.
Examples of these are Netscape Smartmarks, Webwatch, Net Buddy, Blue Squirrel SqURL and Surflogic Surfbot.
This third area seems to be where most of the effort has been focused although from a lot a standpoints it is rather flawed.
The major stumbling block from the point of view of the home market (which is where most of these products are aimed) is that you need to be online hiking up your phone bill while your monitor goes off and monitors.
While this is not so much of a problem for academic users you still have machine time tied up while the software executes.
This is a major deficit compared to the email system.
Only Blue Squirrel seem to have acknowledged this and have bundled their package accordingly.
They offer a whole suite of software which includes a utility to launch applications on a timer.
This means that you could have your monitoring done while at home in bed to get the double benefit of cheap rate calls and an idle network.
The other difficulty is platform dependency.
These products are proprietory systems designed almost exclusively for stand-alone Windows PCs.
Also, nearly all of them have been developed by small outfits in North America, which doesn't bode well from a support point of view.
I have looked at several of these products: A) Netscape Smartmarks: http://home.netscape .com/comprod/smartmarks.html This is a product that was actually developed by a company called First Floor Software and is based on their Smart Catalogue Technology.
It has been licenced to Netscape to sell as their own.
This is a reasonable product if you need to organize a very large number of bookmarks.
(I find that the font size and layout of the existing Netscape bookmarks functions can make bookmarks difficult to locate once you get beyond a certain number of entries.)
It also interacts in a reasonably smooth way with the browser.
The big flaw as far as Smartmarks is concerned is its footprint.
It seems very memory hungry and my PC (DX-4 100mhz with 8Mb RAM) slows quite considerably when it's in the background.
I found that if I run any other memory hungry applications I get General Protection Fault errors.
When you have this and Netscape 2.0 running together and load up Word with a big document, you are walking on a knife edge.
Another difficulty is that when you fire up Netscape, Smartmarks starts automatically as well.
This makes the time taken for both products to load interminable (I go and make coffee while I'm waiting).
It is possible to stop both pieces of software loading at the same time but you have to decide at the installation stage or mess about editing yourwin.ini file.
If you are considering this product I suggest you get yourself a Pentium with at least 16 Mb RAM.
If you have a 4Mb machine then forget it.
I'd be interested to see how Smartmarks performed once the database had several thousand URLs in it as well.
My hunch is that it would be so slow as to be unusable.
You may encounter problems with the monitoring functions of Smartmarks if your institution has an HTTP Proxy.
Smartmarks reads the details from the Netscape.ini file and if this entry starts withhttp://then Smartmarks will not be able to locate it.
You will need to remove the http:// entry for the monitoring functions to work.(e.g.
wwwcache.uni.ac.uk instead of http://wwwcache.uni.ac.uk) Another problem I found was that the database tended to get corrupted easily.
Especially if you shut down Netscape before Smartmarks.
This can be fixed quite quickly by deleting a few files and running the backup / database check utility bundled with the product (a nice touch) but it's still a pain.
Also if you put bookmarks in the Bookmarks Menu rather than a Smartmarks folder and then the software crashes, you lose everything in the menu.
The final problem with Smartmarks is that it will only run under Windows (3.x, 95 and NT).
It is not available in Mac or Unix flavours.
Smartmarks comes with a quite impressive list of features including the Smart Finder and its use of the Bulletin standard to speed monitoring.
In practice however these are of minor benefit to your day to day work, and the problems of the beta make it less than pleasurable package to use at present.
Even when the faults are ironed out for the full release the huge footprint of the product will still be an issue.
Overall, at present, its over-engineered and cumbersome.
Would that it were designed more like NetBuddy... B) NetBuddy: http://www.internetsol.com/netbuddy.html NetBuddy is produced by Internet Solutions, a small company from Seattle.
It is marketed as an alternative to Smartmarks and its main selling point is its small footprint (510K).
Despite the silly name I like NetBuddy.
It reminds me of Eudora in the elegant simplicity of its design.
It is clearly being marketed as a friendly, fun sort of product and in this respect it succeeds.
NetBuddy is only available for Windows platforms.
Like Smartmarks, you can import existing bookmarks and arrange them in folders.
NetBuddy then contacts each site in turn and stores a record of the text of each HTML file.
I presume that when it checks for changes it looks for them in the text itself.
A nice feature is if you right-click on an entry, a dialogue box appears with option to view the text of the Web page.
You can also view the HTML source complete with various bits of meta data at the top and even search for words/terms in the body of the text using the Find button.
This is an enormously useful feature of NetBuddy as you can view the text contents of a web page in your listings without having to contact the site.
NetBuddy also interacts very well with Netscape and I found it easier both to pass URLs from browser to database and back again than with Smartmarks which is slow.
NetBuddy lacks a Find function to search the URL listings at present.
I have found this function to be invaluable in Smartmarks but this sort of enhancement is very easy to do.
I make a great deal of use of a similar function in Eudora to locate messages quickly.
What would be ideal is if I could search the text of all the URLs listed without having to open up a dialogue box for each.
Again this should be an easy extension of present functionality.
This would put NetBuddy head and shoulders above Smartmarks and its Smart Finder.
The other thing about NetBuddy is that it is very quick at contacting and checking Web documents; much faster than any of the other products I have tried.
Potentially this means much less waiting around.
I'd be interested to see how it copes under Windows 95 multitasking as this might solve the problem altogether.
Before you all clog up the Internet Solutions server to get this product however there is one major problem.
The software is still in Alpha test, which means it's free, but also that it is also very unstable.
NetBuddy has taken down Windows quite spectacularly twice this afternoon.
The copy I have (A51) is riddled with bugs and at the time of writing this is the latest release.
Let's hope the Beta is released soon!
C) Webwatch from Surflogic: http://www.specter.com/ww.1.x/products.html This is the most straightforward product of the three and also the cheapest ($18).
The design is very workmanlike (the whole product consists of one dialogue box), but again it is only available for Windows based platforms.
As input to the program you specify a local HTML document (on your hard disk) that references the URLs you want to track, and the date and time after which you consider updates to the referenced documents to be interesting.
You also have the option to override this date with the time of your last visit to each referenced document, as recorded by your Web browser.
(I presume the idea is that this file could be your bookmark.htm file exported from your browser.)
WebWatch will generate a local HTML document that contains links to only those documents which were updated after the given date.
You can use this local document to navigate to the updated documents, using any Web browser.
The benefit of this approach is that it is simple and quick but it does rely on authors including a "Last Modified" date for the site you are monitoring: WebWatch retrieves only the "header" of a document, to check its "Last Modified" date.
The size of this header is usually quite small compared to that of the entire document.
With WebWatch, your connect time, and ultimately the load on the network, is significantly reduced.
I tried this product on a local copy of my own Web page and it worked a treat.
It trawled through all the links in the document (ignoring the rest of the HTML and text) and gave me back a list of updated sites, error 404 sites (presumably sites that have died) and even sites that had moved.
I can wholeheartedly recommend this product both because of its brilliant simplicity and the price.
You do need to be careful to get the balance of your Include URLs newer than and Skip (seconds) settings; I would suggest at least 60 seconds for the latter (the length of time a site is polled before the software times out and moves on.)
The only difficulty is with sites with no last modified entries.
For these I would recommend you use URL-minder and you should have all bases covered.
Conclusions To summarize, I would recommend using URL-minder if you have a small number of sites you need to check which you know will change regularly.
The benefits are that you can register sites and forget about them.
The service does all the work.
If you are authoring and want to check to ensure your links are kept up to date the easiest product is WebWatch.
Use URL-minder as a supplement for the odd site without a Last Modified entry.
If you want to use a product which combines bookmark management with monitoring (and you have a Windows PC) then the only option available to you at present that is stable enough is Smartmarks.
My personal preference would be to regularly export my bookmarks using the Save As function on the Bookmarks File menu and then run WebWatch over it once a week until the NetBuddy Beta release.
For those of you who have a Mac I'm afraid the only option at present is URL-minder or whatever functions your browser offers.
I'm sure you folks out there using Unix based systems have a few tricks up your collective sleeves and that there are a myriad of Perl scripts in existence to monitor for you.
It is still worth giving URL-minder a try however as it is a good service which deserves to flourish.
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Planet SOSIG: Regard Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Regard Buzz data software database browser opac z39.50 marc telnet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sue Timmis introduces REGARD, a new research database now available on the World Wide Web.
Introduction REGARD [1] is a fully functional bibliographic database of ESRC [2] (Economic and Social Research Council) research awards and all associated publications and products.
It is publicly available on the World Wide Web without subscription and uses keyword searching, available at two levels.
Background Since the mid-1980s the ESRC have provided access to their research award information, initially through the RAPID database service run by the University of Edinburgh.
REGARD has now replaced RAPID and is available on the World Wide Web.
The service may be accessed via most Web browsers and makes extensive use of the characteristics of the Web.
Behind the scenes is a fully functional bibliographic database using UK MARC format, the Z39.50 protocol and Web OPAC software.
A telnet service is also available for those without Internet access or those using text only or slow links [3].
The service has been developed by the University of Bristol as a collaborative project between the Institute for Learning and Research Technology, a national centre of excellence in the development of teaching and research technology and the University Library whose bibliographic expertise underpins the project.
We have also benefited from a generous donation of hardware from Sun Microsystems UK [4], whose interest in and support for education is well known and who are world leaders in Internet technology.
REGARD data The database includes two types of records: awards and products.
Award records contain details of the ESRC award, including the award reference number, title, names of award holders, institution and department of the main award holder, award dates and amount.
The record also displays an abstract to provide further details on the research.
Products are the results of the research.
The database includes a very wide range of products.
Anything which can be counted as an output from an award can be included, not just refereed journal articles and book chapters but also software, newspaper articles, radio and TV broadcasts, conferences, training courses, datasets and more.
Awards and products are linked together by the award reference number and users can 'toggle' between the award record and its associated product records using a hyperlink.
Data acquisition Details on new research awards are sent to the REGARD team by the ESRC on a regular basis.
We also receive a research abstract and some additional information directly from each new award holder.
Once all the details have been verified, the information is entered onto the database.
Once a research project starts producing outputs they are added to the database, as they become available.
This can sometimes continue for several years depending on the publication time frames and other constraints that the award holders have to work within.
To make life easier for award holders and ourselves, we have developed online forms to capture information about the research abstracts and the possible products of the award.
These can be accessed from the award holder section on our Web site [5] and then downloaded for word-processing or completed and submitted online.
Searching REGARD With a large database such as REGARD, it is essential that the searching facilities are both powerful and easy to use.
There are two levels of searching available the Quick Search and the Concept Search.
When you first go into REGARD and select Search Database from the home page, you are automatically taken to the Quick Search screen.
The Quick Search allows you to enter one or more keywords, make a choice from the Search In drop down box and then click on the Search button to submit your search.
The default is to search subjects, which is the broadest search including the abstract.
In Figure 1 below a search has been entered on welfare reform.
Figure 1: the REGARD quick search screen Once this search has been processed, the results will be displayed in summary on the Brief Search Results screen.
This is shown in Figure 2 below.
The Brief Search Results screen gives details of the search, how many hits it has found and displays titles and award holders or authors' names in batches of 10.
You can elect to view these in larger or smaller batches if you wish.
Records can now be selected from each batch to be viewed in full.
Figure 2: the REGARD brief search results screen For those who want to conduct a more complex search, the second level of search will be more suitable the Concept Search.
This allows you to combine your search terms and selected search elements in two or three areas.
The example in Figure 3 below shows you an example of using the Concept Search.
Figure 3: the REGARD concept search screen In Figure 3, the search submitted will look for records where Subjects containing any of 'UK or United & Kingdom or Great & Britain' will be combined with Subjects containing any of 'small & business or small & firms' and record type is 'dataset'.
Clearly, this is a much more complex search, but still achieved without the requirement to enter complex syntax or Boolean operators.
You can also restrict the publication year for products using this search.
Hyperlinks One of the unique features of REGARD is its hyperlinks.
We have already mentioned the links between awards and associated products but there are other links within records.
You can link to a research project's Web site where the award holders have established a site.
The following example to find research records on the labour market in Russia demonstrates this.
Firstly, the keywords are entered using the Quick Search, as before (see Figure 4).
The search will produce Brief Search Results as before.
You can select which records from the list you want to see in full.
You can select awards or products or both, depending on your interest.
Figure 5 shows an award record, which gives details of the award, dates amount etc.
It also shows you the research abstract, providing an overview of the project and its aims.
You will see the URL link highlighted at the bottom of the screen.
Selecting this link would take you directly to the Web Site for this research project on the labour market in Russia, giving you further detailed information and the opportunity to contact the research project directly.
Figure 4: the REGARD quick search screen Figure 5: the REGARD full search results screen Records also contain other hyperlinks.
You can build on an initial search by using these hyperlinks to initiate new searches dynamically on award holders, authors, institutions, award numbers and ESRC subject and discipline terms without having to return to the search forms.
This makes REGARD a highly interactive and non-linear environment, in line with the general principles of the World Wide Web.
Keeping track of your searches REGARD also includes a feature to track the searches that you have made.
A search history is automatically created, allowing you to recall previous searches from the current session.
You can also print or download results using the standard tools available with your Web Browser.
Online help is available from all the search screens and a help desk operates to assist with further enquiries (contact regard-help@bristol.ac.uk).
Over time, as we gather more feedback on the service, we will also develop additional levels of support including an option for first time users and an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions List) to enhance the level of online help available.
Future developments REGARD will be running training courses and seminars to maximise the use of the service.
Further details are available on request.
We will also be establishing a "virtual" user group to ensure that REGARD stays close to the needs and requirements of those using the service.
We would like to hear from anyone that is interested in joining the user group or who has comments or suggestions regarding the service.
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An Investigation Into World Wide Web Search Engine Use from within the UK: Preliminary Findings Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines An Investigation Into World Wide Web Search Engine Use from within the UK: Preliminary Findings Buzz data blog repositories copyright graphics jpeg cache gif url research Citation BibTex RIS Simon Stobart and Susan Kerridge give some of the preliminary results of a JISCfunded investigation into the use of Search Engines such as Alta Vista and Lycos within the UK.
The use of the World Wide Web (WWW) is increasing and is likely to continue to do so for the considerable future.
The UK is served with a very good quality internal Internet backbone providing JANET (Joint Academic NETwork) users with a high level of bandwidth, resulting fast communications.
Unfortunately, international connections from the UK are poor and it is clear that ways of addressing the limited bandwidth the UK has at its disposal have to be found.
In this paper we describe the results of a project undertaken for UKERNA to investigate the use of overseas searching engines by the UK academic community.
These searching engines are primarily based within the USA.
With the growth of information available through the WWW congestion on the transatlantic link has risen as more users access searching engines to identify the location of valuable information.
To address this problem we describe two key areas of research we have undertaken to identify current search engine use trends.
The overall goal was to identify whether a UK based search engine would help alleviate international bandwidth congestion.
The Project Overview Currently, UK based cache servers are servicing in the order of 900,000 requests per day and this set to rise.
Because of the limited bandwidth at our disposal strategies are therefore required to improve the service to users by providing UK based facilities, thus reducing the transatlantic traffic and thereby improve its overall performance.
The siting of a new or "mirroring" an existing search engine within the UK has been proposed as a means of reducing the amount of international traffic.
We decided from the beginning of the project that our investigation should provide a means for the whole of the UK Internet community, in particular the academic community to contribute their opinions to the project.
Therefore we decided to proceed with our investigation in two main research directions: An examination of UK based server logs, contributed from various academic organisations.
Two different data sets were compiled and the actual search engine accesses were analysed.
This it was felt would provide statistics on the number of search engine access and which search engines were accessed the most.
An electronic survey (based on a WWW questionnaire).
This involved the design and construction of an electronic questionnaire to establish academic user requirements, and to gather information about user behaviour, preference, and satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the current provisions of search engines.
An Investigation of Server Logs UKERNA kindly provided us with our Web log data to analyse.
This was provided anonymously from various sites within the UK.
The names of the organisations which supplied the data has to remain confidential, but they do represent a good sample of about 10% of the sites on the JANET network from the very large to the very small.
Two separate logs were compiled: The first containing 1,000,542 URLs.
This was taken from the cache of a single site covering the dates Oct19th to the 25th 1996 for one week.
The second much larger sample contained 16,762,872 URLs.
This data was collected from 23 JANET sites and covers a period from June 1995 at from a few of the sites up to late Oct 1996.
In the initial stages of analysis the logs were examined to provide the total number of URLs which contained a match to 50+ search engines which we had previously identified.
While, this provided results it did not prove a very satisfactory way of identify which search engines were accessed more than others because: All graphics on the search engine pages were counted as separate hits, thus search engines with more graphics on their pages faired better The results included any visits to search engines whether searches were performed or not.
To address the first problem we decided to narrow the search patterns down to remove all GIF and JPEG references from the search.
To address the second problem we decided to search only for URLs of web pages which contained results of searches generated by search engines.
Analysis of the 1,000,000 URL Sample Figure 1 illustrates the results of the smaller data sample.
This contained a total of 1,000,542 URLs.
Our analysis returned a total of 18,015 search engine result page URLs, which are presented as a percentage distribution.
Figure 1 Search Engine distribution from the 1,000,000 URL Sample.
The most commonly identified search engine result pages were Yahoo 31%, Excite 25%, Magellan 15% and AltaVista and Lycos with 8% each.
Analysis of the 16,000,000 URL Sample Figure 2 illustrates the results of the larger data sample.
This contained a total of 16,762,872 URLs.
Our analysis returned a total of 230,76 search engine result page URLs, which are presented as a percentage distribution.
Figure 2 Search Engine distribution from the 16,000,000 URL Sample.
The most commonly identified search engines were Lycos 24%, Yahoo 23%, Magellan 18%, AltaVista 12% and Excite 10%.
World Wide Web Search Engine User Survey Our survey was carried out via a WWW Questionnaire between July and September 1996.
Respondents were asked to complete a form consisting of 14 questions which were submitted electronically and processed automatically by a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) application.
Obtaining results in this way enabled us to rapidly analyse the data and produce statistics.
We present below some selected results from our survey, but those interested in obtaining full results can do so at: http://osiris.sunderland.ac.uk/sst/se/ The survey returned 402 questionnaires which we used in the production of our results.
Of these 353 (88%) respondents were from domains with the extension .ac.uk.
A maximum of 7% of respondents were from a single UK domain location, which was the University of Sunderland.
Which Search Engines Do You Use?
Respondents were asked to identify the search engines that they used.
Figure 3 illustrates the search engines which respondents identified that they used most commonly.
Respondents were allowed to select and/or name more than one search engine.
The most frequently identified were AltaVista with 312 responses, Yahoo with 280 responses and Lycos with 225 responses.
Figure 3 Most Commonly Used Search Engines Which Search Engine Would You Use First?
In an attempt to gauge which search engines users preferred respondents were asked which search engine they normally used first.
The results of which are illustrated in Figure 4.
AltaVista scored most highly here with 194 responses.
This equated to 48% of responses.
Next popular were Yahoo with 59 responses (15%) and Lycos with 46 responses (12%).
Figure 4 Which Search Engine do you use first?
Why Do you Choose a Search Engine?
Respondents were asked why they chose to use a particular search engine.
Figure 5 illustrates that there was a wide range of responses to this question.
Most popular were Speed of Access to Information (186 responses) and the amount of information users perceived was stored in the search engine repository (146 responses).
Figure 5 Reasons for using favourite search Engine What Problems Do You Encounter With Existing Search Engines?
Users Identified three clear problems that they encountered when using existing search engines, these are illustrated in Figure 6.
The primarily problems reported are:The time to takes for the search engine to return its information is too long.
Too much information is normally returned.
Information returned is out of date or no longer in existence.
Do You Use Any UK Based Search Engines?
We asked respondents whether they used any UK based search engines.
Figure 7 illustrates that 167 respondents (42%) claimed that they did not use a UK based search engine.
However 139 respondents (35%) were unsure whether they did or did not.
Figure 6 Problems with existing search engines     Figure 7 Respondents who use UK based search engines Why Do you Use Non-UK Based Search Engines in Preference to UK based Ones?
Figure 8 illustrates that when asked why non-UK search engines where used in preference to UK based ones 54% of respondents claimed that "lack of information" was the primary reason.
Figure 8 Reasons for not using UK based search engines.
If the UK was to Mirror an Overseas Search Engine what would be Your First Choice?
Figure 9 illustrates that 212 respondents (53%) would as their first choice choose to mirror the AltaVista search engine.
Figure 9 First choice of search engine to mirror in the UK Conclusions We have not currently drawn any conclusions from our research.
Results of the project are to be presented to UKERNA and other interested parties at the University of Sunderland on 20th November.
During this meeting final conclusions are to be drawn, giving everyone who attends an opportunity to contribute to the conclusions and provide an opinion on our findings.
Acknowledgements We would especially like to thank Mr Stephen Bonner of UKERNA for his support and co-operation during this project.
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Wire: Interview with Icarus Sparry Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Interview with Icarus Sparry Buzz data mobile java javascript copyright cache telnet research Citation BibTex RIS In his own words, Icarus Sparry tells us how what he is doing at the University of Bath, as well as revealing his own opinions on various aspects of networking, such as firewalls and network charging.
What do do you?
My job title is ‘Computer Officer’, and I do everything connected with computers.
I am essentially third line support, as I was not brought up to tolerate fools.
How did you get into this job ie what did you do before?
I used to work in Electrical Engineering, working on data transmission systems over mobile radio links.
Firewalls in Universities essential security feature or inconvenience to open use of networked technologies?
Unfortunately they are an essential security feature the Internet has 2 million plus hosts connected to it, and as I don’t know the administrators of each of these hosts personally, and therefore am unable to vouch for their good motives, we have to protect ourselves.
Firewalls also help implement policy.
At Bath it has been decided that using MUDs is not an appropriate use of our equipment.
There are notices to that effect, but without a firewall they are just so much wallpaper.
With a firewall the access can be blocked.
Firewalls also help people configure machines correctly or in a more sociable manner.
All Bath WWW accesses go through a local cache, which helps reduce international bandwidth requirements.
However none of the popular browsers come with a setup file designed to directly fit our needs.
Without a firewall someone could just install say Netscape, and start using it.
They would get worse performance, and use more bandwidth than if they use out cache.
With the firewall in place, it just doesn’t work, so they have to make the effort to find out about the cache.
Home pages should students be allowed to use time and network resources (is there any significant impact) on creating and mounting their home pages?
And should staff, for that matter?
Well, for better or worse, the World Wide Waste of time is here to stay, at least for the next few years.
It is a very useful source of information, and even more so with search engines like AltaVista.
The problem is that too many people put up information and then do not spend time keeping it up to date.
The support implications for students creating home pages is fairly small, so there is no reason why they should not be able to do so.
As search engines like AltaVista exist, staff can justify putting time into creating pages as it can lead to contacts and ultimately research contracts.
Networking charging various debates are ongoing onto whether network access charging schemes for universities should be changed your views?
I think it would bring back a sense of reality to the use of the network.
While there is nothing wrong with genuinely spare bandwidth being used for recreational use, it currently impossible to do anything sensible using the transatlantic links in the afternoon.
Because of this, and the important National services based at Bath, we have invested in a link to Pipex.
Unfortunately this is expensive (12k per year for a 64k line), but it does deliver the needed bandwidth.
Obviously it is better to buy bandwidth in bulk, but until we have technologies like RSVP in place to make sure that we get the bandwidth we are contracted to get, then there is little to be done.
Of course, if the Universities paid 10 pounds per month per student then the resulting money would solve almost all of our networking problems!
What Web browsers do you use, and why?
Lynx, mosaic, telnet and Netscape.
I try not to download the silly pictures that people tend to clutter their pages with, and Lynx works well for that.
The choice of telnet may surprise a few people, but it is a nice, clean way of getting textual information, and also shows me exactly what is going on.
I use mosaic if I need to look at the pictures, and Netscape if I have to look at some Netscape extended site, but I tend to discard those on the basis that if they are not prepared to make the information available to as wide an audience as possible, then they probably don’t put much effort into the data either.
How significant an impact do you think that mobile code, such as Java applets, will have on the development of the Web as an information resource?
I think it will have very little impact.
Obviously it means that you can have nice pretty moving pictures on your screen, but I have them turned off anyhow, and more usefully you can have forms verified locally, rather than having to transmit the faulty data.
The network computer idea, which should enable state of the art small machines to again become less than 500 pounds (as the BBC micro and the Spectrum were) is obviously a good.
Having machines which you just plug in, and switch on will make administration simpler.
Byte-coded systems are a good idea, but more work needs to be put into the security design.
Currently ActiveX says allow anything and relies on the producers of the code signing it to ensure that it is correct.
Java allows you to do almost nothing by default, but users can enable it.
This opens up a whole range of social engineering attacks.
Javascript what’s the point?
Is there one?
Javascript only confuses the issue w.r.t Java.
Too many people do not know there is any difference.
Pornography.
Much has been made, often hysterically, in the mass media, about pornography on the Internet, especially on the Web and Usenet.
What steps should or could academic institutions take to prevent students from choking up the networks by accessing such material Nothing can be done to absolutely stop it.
Reasonable steps need to be taken to reduce the risks that people inadvertently stumble across it, so banning people from displaying it on screen in public places is reasonable and proper.
Informed adults should be allowed to view what they wish, but owners of equipment have a right to say what their equipment should be used for.
So if a student wants to buy a CD full of pictures of Cindy Crawford wearing little or no clothing that is fine, but don’t use our computers to view it, or our network to collect it a picture is worth ten thousand words.
One wish for what you would like to see happen in the world of networking and the Web in the next year… HTTP over TCP over IP to be dropped as a protocol, in favour of something that uses lighter weight connections and a hierarchy of caches.
Interviewee Details Icarus Sparry, Computer Officer, University of Bath.
Email: ccsis@bath.ac.uk, Phone: 01225 826039 Address: Computer Centre, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata for the Masses Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata for the Masses Buzz data software framework html database infrastructure tei metadata standardisation accessibility browser identifier schema cataloguing dtd hypertext gis marc gif url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller describes Dublin Core and several ideas for how it can be implemented.
Metadata.
The word is increasingly to be found bandied about amongst the Web cognoscenti, but what exactly is it, and is it something that can be of value to you and your work?
This article aims to explore some of the issues involved in metadata and then, concentrating specifically upon the Dublin Core, move on to show in a non-technical fashion how metadata may be used by anyone to make their material more accessible.
A collection of references at the end of the article provides pointers to some of the current work in this field.
What is metadata?
The concept of metadata predates the Web, having purportedly been coined by Jack Myers in the 1960's (Howe 1996) to describe datasets effectively.
Metadata is data about data, and therefore provides basic information such as the author of a work, the date of creation, links to any related works, etc.
One recognisable form of metadata is the card index catalogue in a library; the information on that card is metadata about a book.
Perhaps without knowing it, you use metadata in your work every day, whether you are noting down the publication details of a book that you want to order, or wandering through SINES or the History Data Unit in the hope of finding a particular data set of value to your research project.
Metadata exists for almost every conceivable object or group of objects, whether stored in electronic form or not.
A paper map from the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, for example, has associated metadata such as its scale, the date of survey and date of publication.
With products such as maps, the metadata is often clearly visible on the map itself, and is expressed using standard conventions that are easily interpretable by the experienced user (Miller 1995).
Figure 1: a simple example of map metadata (after Miller 1996a).
Click on the figure (above) to see the whole map [118Kb GIF image] In the unfathomable maze that is the Internet, things are not always as easy.
These generalised standards do not yet exist, and it can be surprisingly difficult to actually find the information for which you are searching.
The current generation of search engines are undoubtedly powerful, and capable of returning a large number of suggestions in response to any search, but it is almost impossible to cut through the irrelevant suggestions to find the ones you are actually interested in.
A search for Ariadne on Alta Vista, for example, found 5,468 references, and returned 3,000 links.
On the first page of links, there was a pointer to Issue 3, but nothing else relevant to my needs turned up until the very bottom of the third page.
In this case, it was fairly straightforward to distinguish between the (relevant);   Ariadne: Issue 2 Contents   Contents Page for Issue 2.
Welcome to issue 2 of Ariadne on the Web, the World Wide Web version of the magazine for the discerning UK Library and... http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue2/contents.html size 6K 25 May 96 and the (irrelevant?
);   Ariadne   Ariadne --A further development.
9th semester in Computer Science.
by: Henning Andersen.
Jan M. Due.
Peter D. Fabricius.
Flemming Sørensen.
Supervisor:.. http://www.iesd.auc.dk/general/DS/Reports/1989/ariadneFurther.abstract.html size 1K 28 Jun 94 This simple example illustrates some of the problems with finding information on the Web.
It is perhaps analogous (or perhaps not!)
to a paper-based list of contacts which, rather than being sorted conventionally by surname, is sorted simultaneously by the contents of every field (surname, company, street, etc).
Of course, when you attempt to look up an address in this contact list, you have no way of knowing which field the result is coming from.
Assuming you wish to contact our esteemed web editor to offer an article for Ariadne (hint!)
and search for his surname (Kirriemuir), you don't really know whether the result you have found is really him, or part of the address of some long-forgotten relative from a small Scottish town just west of Forfar.
To make your contact list useful, you need some metadata to describe what each string of text relates to (ie Kirriemuir is a SURNAME or Kirriemuir is a TOWN ).
Most applications are, of course, more complex than this, but it is at least possible to demonstrate the principles using this simple case study.
How, then, are the 'experts' currently approaching the description of metadata?
Existing approaches to metadata A large number of standards have evolved for describing electronic resources, but the majority are concerned with describing very specific resources, and often rely upon complicated subject-specific schema that make either widespread adoption or easy accessibility to these records unlikely.
Rachel Heery (forthcoming) offers a review of some of the major metadata formats in a forthcoming article.
In an environment such as the traditional library, where cataloguing and acquisition are the sole preserve of trained professionals, complex metadata schemes such as MARC (MAchine Readable Catalogue) are, perhaps, acceptable means of resource description.
In the more chaotic online world, however, new resources appear all the time, often created and maintained by interested individuals rather than large centrally funded organisations.
As such, it is difficult for anyone to easily locate information and data of value to them and the large search engines with all their faults are often the only means by which new information may be found.
In such an environment, there is an obvious requirement for metadata, but this metadata must be of a form suitable for interpretation both by the search engines and by human beings, and it must also be simple to create so that any web page author may easily describe the contents of their page and make it immediately both more accessible and more useful.
As such, compromises must be made in order to provide as much useful information as possible to the searcher while leaving the technique simple enough to be used by the maximum number of people with the minimum degree of inconvenience.
The expert approach A large number of techniques exist for the description of resources in an electronic medium, ranging from the various flavours of MARC (British Library 1980, Library of Congress 1994, Heery forthcoming) used in library cataloguing to the more specialised Directory Interchange Format (DIF) which provides metadata for satellite imagery and the like (GCMD 1996).
Developments such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) have gone a long way towards allowing a standardised description of electronic texts, and the ongoing review of the US National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) will hopefully succeed in realising a similar scheme for the complex issues involved in describing spatial data.
In the United Kingdom, the provisionally named National Geospatial Database (Nanson et al 1995) is aiming to increase the integration between governmental and non-governmental spatial data holdings, and careful thought will need to be given to the construction of rational metadata schemes for this project over the next year or two.
Each of these formats has been developed to operate within a narrowly defined field of work, and is poorly suited to the description of a wider range of resources.
Many of these existing metadata schemes are also extremely complex, and are geared towards creation by experts and interpretation by computers, rather than both creation and interpretation by as wide a range of interested parties as possible.
In cutting through the morass of existing and often conflicting metadata approaches, the work of eLib projects such as ROADS, ADAM et al will be well worth watching, as will the efforts of the Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS) to create a pan-subject metadata index that encompasses the current AHDS projects for Archaeology, History, Text and the Performing Art s, as well as any future projects.
It is interesting to note that several of these projects (ADS, ADAM) have already adopted a form of Dublin Core description for at least some of their pages.
As with this document, Dublin Core metadata is often stored in the <HEAD> </HEAD> area of a Web page, and may be viewed simply by selecting View... | Document Source from your Web browser's menu bar.
The search engine approach Recognising the need for a means by which searches may be better tailored to actual user interests, a number of the current search engines have begun to include the ability to make use of the HTML <META> tag in Web documents.
Alta Vista, for example, makes use of DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS qualifiers to the <META> tag in order to index a given page.
The DESCRIPTION is returned in response to a search, rather than the default (but usually far less useful) first couple of lines of text.
eg   <META NAME="description" CONTENT="The most useful paper on metadata ever written"> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Dublin Core, metadata">   in the <HEAD> area of this document would cause Alta Vista to return the following in response to a search on any of the words stored in either DESCRIPTION or KEYWORDS ;     Metadata for the masses   The most useful paper on metadata ever written.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/metadata-masses/ size 51K 9 Sept 96 The Dublin Core Notably different from many of the other metadata schemes due to its ease of use and interpretability is the so-called Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, or Dublin Core.
This approach to the description of 'Document Like Objects' is still under development, and is the focus of a great deal of activity worldwide as researchers work to produce the most useful model they can, capable of describing the majority of resources available on the Internet as a whole, and suitable for inserting into a wide range of file types from the simple HyperText Markup Language (HTML) of the Web to Postscript files and other image formats (eg Knight 1996, Beckett 1996).
Despite the emphasis of this, and other, papers (A.P.
Miller 1996b, E. Miller 1996a, E. Miller 1996b, Weibel 1996) on the HTML implementation of Dublin Core, readers should remember that the concepts are equally applicable to virtually any other file format.
In the case of this article, the HTML implementation is stressed because it is felt that this is the area in which the underlying concepts may most easily be demonstrated, and because it is in the provision of metadata for the many thousands of personal pages out on the Web that a structure such as Dublin Core may most rapidly make an impact of value to readers of Ariadne.
With luck, once you have followed the examples here and filled your text web pages with Dublin Core metadata, you will then feel both sufficiently enthused and competent to further explore the references in order to add metadata to your more complex file formats.
As Dempsey argues (1996b), Dublin Core metadata descriptions exist between the crude metadata currently employed by search engines and the complex mass of information encoded within records such as those for MARC or the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC 1994).
The Core Element Set The Dublin Core itself consists of thirteen core elements, each of which may be further extended by the use of SCHEME and TYPE qualifiers;     Element Name Element Description Subject The topic addressed by the object being described Title The name of the object Author The person(s) primarily responsible for the intellectual content of the object Publisher The agent or agency responsible for making the object available OtherAgent The person(s), such as editors and transcribers, who have made other significant intellectual contributions to the work Date The date of publication ObjectType The genre of the object, such as novel, poem, or dictionary Form The data format of the object, such as Postscript, HTML, etc Identifier String or number used to uniquely identify the object Relation Relationship between this and other objects Source Objects, either print or electronic, from which this object is derived Language Language of the intellectual content Coverage The spatial locations and temporal duration characteristic of the object Table 1: The fields of the Dublin Core Metadata Element SetIn creating metadata for insertion into Web pages, the HTML <META> tag is used to place the description within the page's < HEAD> < /HEAD> area, as shown below;   <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Metadata for the masses</TITLE> <META NAME="package" CONTENT="(TYPE=begin) Dublin Core"> <META NAME="DC.title" CONTENT="(TYPE=long) Metadata for the masses: what is it, how can it help me, and how can I use it?
"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#title"> <META NAME="DC.title" CONTENT="(TYPE=short) Metadata for the masses"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#title"> <META NAME="DC.subject" CONTENT="(SCHEME=keyword) Dublin Core, Metadata, Warwick Framework, Resource Description, Resource Discovery"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#subject"> <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=name) Paul Miller"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author"> <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=email) A.P.Miller@newcastle.ac.uk"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author"> <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=postal) University Computing Service University of Newcastle Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU UK"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author"> <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=phone) +44 191 222 8212"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author"> <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=fax) +44 191 222 8765"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author"> <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=affiliation) University of Newcastle upon Tyne"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author"> <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=affiliation) Archaeology Data Service"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author"> <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=homepage) http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~napm1/"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author"> <META NAME="DC.publisher" CONTENT="(TYPE=name) Ariadne"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#publisher"> <META NAME="DC.publisher" CONTENT="(TYPE=email) ariadne@ukoln.bath.ac.uk"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#publisher"> <META NAME="DC.publisher" CONTENT="(TYPE=homepage) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#publisher"> <META NAME="DC.date" CONTENT="(TYPE=creation) (SCHEME=ISO31) 1996-09-02"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#date"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.iso31 REFERENCE="ISO 31-1:1992 Quantities & Units -Part 1: space & time"> <META NAME="DC.date" CONTENT="(TYPE=current) (SCHEME=ISO31) 1996-09-09"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#date"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.iso31 REFERENCE="ISO 31-1:1992 Quantities & Units -Part 1: space & time"> <META NAME="DC.form" CONTENT="(SCHEME=imt) text/html"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#form"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.imt HREF="http://sunsite.auc.dk/RFC/rfc/rfc1521.html"> <META NAME="DC.identifier" CONTENT="(TYPE=url) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/metadata-masses/"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#identifier"> <META NAME="DC.relation" CONTENT="(TYPE=IsChildOf) (IDENTIFIER=url) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#relation"> <META NAME="DC.language" CONTENT="(SCHEME=iso639) en"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#language"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.iso639 REFERENCE="ISO 639:1988 Code for the representation of names of languages"> <META NAME="package" CONTENT="(TYPE=end) Dublin Core"> </HEAD> <BODY> ...{body of document}...
In writing metadata such as this, the user may include as many of the elements from Table 1 as necessary, and each of these fields may be repeated several times in order to describe all relevant details.
In the example above, elements such as Coverage and ObjectType have not been used at all, while those such as Author and Publisher have been used several times.
As Beckett (1996) notes, the use of case ( ABC... as opposed to abc... ) and whitespace ( A B C... as opposed to ABC... ) is not strictly defined within the Dublin Core, and may be modified to suit individual user and project requirements.
While not formally part of the Dublin Core definition, a recognised 'good practice' is evolving, whereby the Dublin Core element name is given in lower case, preceded by an identifier in upper case to denote that the element is from Dublin Core ( DC.author , rather than DC.AUTHOR , dc.AUTHOR , DC.Author , etc).
Also, META , NAME , CONTENT , TYPE and SCHEME should be given in upper case, while the values of each should normally be given in lower case (or a mixture of the two, where proper names etc are involved).
At the most basic, a Dublin Core entry coded within HTML should therefore take the form;   <META NAME="DC.element name" CONTENT="value of element">   eg   <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="Paul Miller">   Note the initial '<' and the final '>', as well as the use of " " to enclose the values of NAME and CONTENT .
Use of the <LINK> tag Although undoubtedly easier for the casual viewer to understand than many metadata schemes, the Dublin Core still presents scope for ambiguity in understanding, both of the core elements themselves and in the many SCHEME s involved in adding extra information.
The solution adopted for overcoming these ambiguities is to include a reference to further information through the HTML <LINK> tag (Weibel 1996, A.P.Miller 1996b).
For each occurence of a Dublin Core element, a <LINK> is provided to the definition of that element on the Dublin Core page at http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements, and for each use of a SCHEME a link is provided to an onor off-line definition of the syntax used within that scheme.
e.g.
<META NAME="DC.identifier" CONTENT="(TYPE=url) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/metadata-masses/"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#identifier"> shows a simple use of the Dublin Core element, Identifier , with a <LINK> to its definition, while     <META NAME="DC.language" CONTENT="(SCHEME=iso639) en"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#language"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.iso639 REFERENCE="ISO 639:1988 Code for the representation of names of languages"> illustrates a use of the Dublin Core element, Language .
As this example includes the use of a SCHEME , an extra <LINK> is included to a definition of this schema.
A <LINK> pointer to further information may take the form of a REFERENCE to an offline source or an HREF to another web page.
eg   <LINK REL=SCHEMA.iso639 REFERENCE="ISO 639:1988 Code for the representation of names of languages">     <LINK REL=SCHEMA.imt HREF="http://sunsite.auc.dk/RFC/rfc/rfc1521.html">   SCHEME s and TYPE s In order to better describe the resource, the basic thirteen elements may be further enhanced by the use of SCHEME and TYPE qualifiers.
As special cases, OtherAgent also has a Role qualifier, and Relation an Identifier .
The SCHEME qualifier identifies any widely recognised coding system used in the description of a specific Dublin Core element, and allows a degree of consistency and standardisation to be introduced to Dublin Core records.
Instead of describing (in the Form element) a web page as being "a web page", "HTML" or "HyperText Markup Language", for example, it is far easier and more consistent to use the existing Internet Media Types (IMT) and describe it as "text/html".
In Dublin Core's HTML syntax, this would be represented as;     <META NAME="DC.form" CONTENT="(SCHEME=imt) text/html">   and should also be provided with the necessary <LINK>s, as discussed above.
<LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#form"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.imt HREF="http://sunsite.auc.dk/RFC/rfc/rfc1521.html">   A SCHEME should only refer to the name of an existing coding system such as the Internet Media Type (IMT), or the International Standards Organisation standard on dates (ISO31), and should not be used for identifying, for example, that a use of the Author element is referring to a name, e-mail address, or whatever.
For tasks such as this, the TYPE qualifier should be used.
This suggestion differs from that given in the most comprehensive list of SCHEME s and TYPE s currently available (Knight & Hamilton 1996), but appears to create a more logical use of the two qualifiers.
Knight & Hamilton (1996) suggest including the vast majority of qualifiers to a metadata entry within SCHEME and only use TYPE in a few cases.
This author would suggest a different division, whereby only references to coding schemes appear in SCHEME and most other qualifiers appear in TYPE .
As a simple rule of thumb, if a <LINK> can be included to an onor off-line definition, then it is a SCHEME and if not, it is a TYPE .
An early implementation of this model was produced by the author (1996b), and the beginnings of a second may be seen evolving at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~napm1/ads/DC_ scheme_type.html, where a comprehensive list of SCHEME s and TYPE s will soon be available, along with guidance on usage for each.
The TYPE qualifier, then, is mainly used where a Dublin Core element occurs more than once in a metadata description.
You may, for example, use the Author element several times in order to provide name, address and telephone information.
In a case such as this, the TYPE qualifier would be used to differentiate between each occurrence of Author .
eg   <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=name) Paul Miller"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author">     <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=email) A.P.Miller@newcastle.ac.uk"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author">     <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=postal) University Computing Service University of Newcastle Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU UK"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author">     <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=phone) +44 191 222 8212"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author">     <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=fax) +44 191 222 8765"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author">     <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=affiliation) University of Newcastle upon Tyne"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author">     <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=affiliation) Archaeology Data Service"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author">     <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=homepage) http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~napm1/"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.dc HREF="http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements#author">   Note that TYPE s and SCHEME s may be used several times within a Dublin Core description in the same manner as the Core Elements themselves.
In the example above, Affiliation appears twice in order to effectively describe the affiliations affecting work on this project.
Extending the Dublin Core Even with the great flexibility afforded by SCHEME s and TYPE s, the thirteen elements of the Dublin Core are not capable of describing all eventualities.
If the core element set were extended in order to attempt this, it would rapidly become large and unwieldy, and ultimately one of the incomprehensibly complex metadata schemes that Dublin Core was created to avoid.
The currently held view of Dublin Core is that it should not be directly extended itself, but that any necessary extensions should be included in a separate 'package', as proposed in the Warwick Framework (Lagoze et al 1996).
Descriptions stored within this new 'package' may then either be from a totally different metadata scheme, such as DIF or FGDC, or they may be simple extensions to the thirteen Dublin Core elements, and described in a Dublin Core-like syntax.
In the same way as the package of metadata known as the Dublin Core is enclosed within   <META NAME="package" CONTENT="(TYPE=begin) Dublin Core"> ... <META NAME="package" CONTENT="(TYPE=end) Dublin Core"> so should any other package of metadata be denoted.
Where the metadata scheme used is Dublin Core-like in syntax, a form for element names similar to the SCHEME.element name (eg DC.author ) of Dublin Core should also be used.
eg   <META NAME="package" CONTENT="(TYPE=begin) Dublin Core">     ...Dublin Core metadata in here...     <META NAME="package" CONTENT="(TYPE=end) Dublin Core">     <META NAME="package" CONTENT="(TYPE=begin) ahdsDescriptor">     <META NAME="AD.precision" CONTENT="(TYPE=spatial) (TYPE2=recorded) 2"> <LINK REL=SCHEMA.ad HREF="http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~napm1/ads/ahds_descriptor_elements#precision">     <META NAME="package" CONTENT="(TYPE=end) ahdsDescriptor">   What the future holds...
Given rapid changes both in metadata and in the Web itself, it is difficult to predict exactly what the future holds, but for the Web/HTML version of Dublin Core described here to be most useful, the following developments need to be pursued:   HTML The current practice of inserting Dublin Core metadata within HTML's <META> tag certainly works, but enhancements to the existing definition of this tag should be encouraged in order to enable more legible representations whereby the current   <META NAME="DC.author" CONTENT="(TYPE=email) A.P.Miller@newcastle.ac.uk">   might be replaced by   <META NAME = "DC.author" TYPE = "email" CONTENT = "A.P.Miller@newcastle.ac.uk"> Whilst the latter form is accepted by the current generation of Web browser, it breaks the Document Type Description (DTD) for HTML, and therefore does not pass the majority of HTML validation tools currently used by Web authors.
Metadata creation At present, although tools exist for the creation of metadata conforming to some of the more complex schemes, Dublin Core-style metadata must be entered by hand.
Work is currently underway within projects such as the European-funded DESIRE (McDonald pers comm) to investigate means by which much of this metadata creation may be automated (McDonald 1996).
Such automation will undoubtedly make the creation and upkeep of useful metadata more straightforward, and therefore hopefully more commonplace.
Search Engines As discussed above, many of the web search engines allow the inclusion of limited metadata within the <HEAD> </HEAD> area, but this metadata is only fully used if it is in the syntax recommended for that particular engine.
While representatives of several of the search engine producing companies are involved in Dublin Core development, none has yet modified their software to make full use of Dublin Core-compliant web pages.
Such a development cannot be far off in happening.
Conclusion The world of digital metadata is a complex one, currently in a state of rapid flux.
As I sit in sunny Newcastle typing the last of this paper, e-mail messages continue to arrive from various lists that threaten to force a rethink of my ideas.
With deadlines looming, and demonstrating a remarkable degree of willpower, I ignore these latest ideas in order to actually get this article finished in time.
As such, it is impossible to say that the implementation of Dublin Core demonstrated here is exactly the one that will be recommended six months down the road, but given all the hard work that has gone into deriving the current offering any evolution is likely to be slight.
The next stage is to continue exploring different uses of the Dublin Core idea, and to approach standards bodies with a view to ratifying something in the near future.
As exactly the type of person for whom Dublin Core could offer so much, it would be extremely useful if Ariadne readers could begin to implement Dublin Core metadata in their web pages, and report back on any of the shortcomings that they discover.
If you start now, you'll be a part of a growing and exciting trend, whereby all the data available out on the Web might actually become information, and therefore of use to the wider community.
A selection of useful references Not all of these references are actually cited in the article, but they do form a useful introduction to some of the issues behind the use of metadata in resource description.
Beckett, D.J., 1996, Using Dublin Core Metadata, Draft 0.1, URL: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/pub/metadata/dc-encoding.html.
Beckett, D.J., Knight, J., Miller, E. & Miller, A.P., forthcoming, A guide to implementation of the Dublin Core Element Set, URL: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~napm1/ads/D C_implementation.html.
British Library, 1980, UKMARC manual 2nd edition, British Library: London.
Burnard, L., Miller, E., Quin, L. & Sperberg-McQueen, C.M., 1996, A syntax for Dublin Core metadata: Recommendations from the second metadata workshop, URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/~lou/wip/metadata.syntax.
html.
Day, M., 1996, The UKOLN Metadata page, URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/.
Dempsey, L., 1996a, Meta Detectors, Ariadne 3, URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue3/metadata/.
Dempsey, L., 1996b, ROADS to Desire: Some UK and Other European Metadata and Resource Discovery Projects, D-Lib Magazine July/August, URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlib/dlib/july96 /07dempsey.html.
Dempsey, L. & Weibel, S.L., 1996, The Warwick Metadata workshop: a framework for the deployment of resource description, DLib Magazine July/August, URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlib/dlib/july96/0 7weibel.html.
FGDC, 1994, Content standards for digital geospatial metadata, Federal Geographic Data Committee, 8 June.
Global Change Master Directory, 1996, Directory Interchange Format (DIF) Writer's Guide, version 5, URL: http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/difguide/difman.html< /A>.
Greenstein, D., 1996, AHDS: Arts & Humanities Data Service, Ariadne 4, URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue4/ahds/.
Heery, R., forthcoming, Review of metadata formats, Program 30/4.
Howe, D., 1996, Free on-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC), URL: http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/.
IFLA, 1996, Metadata Resources, URL: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/II/metadata.htm.
Knight, J., 1996, MIME implementation for the Warwick Framework, URL: http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/MIMEWF.html.
Knight, J.
& Hamilton, M., 1996, Dublin Core sub-elements, URL: http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/Metadata/DC-SubElements.html.
Lagoze, C., Lynch, C.A.
& Daniel Jnr., R., 1996, The Warwick Framework: a container architecture for aggregating sets of metadata, URL: http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu:80/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/ncstrl.cornell%2fTR961593?abstract=warwick.
Library of Congress, 1994, USMARC format for bibliographic data including guidelines for content negotiation, Network Development and MARC standards office, Library of Congress: Washington DC.
Lock, G. & Stancic, Z., (Eds.
), 1995, Archaeology and Geographical Information Systems: A European Perspective, Taylor & Francis: London.
McDonald, T., 1996, Welcome to the metatest site, URL: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/staff/m cdonald/metadata/index.html.
Medyckyj-Scott, D., Newman, I., Ruggles, C. & Walker, D., 1991, Metadata in the Geosciences, Group D Publications, Ltd: Loughborough.
Miller, A.P., 1995, How to look good and influence people: thoughts on the design and interpretation of an archaeological GIS, in Lock & Stancic, (Eds.
), pp.
319-333.
Miller, A.P., 1996a, The York Archaeological Assessment: an investigation of techniques for urban deposit modelling utilising Geographic Information Systems, unpublished doctoral thesis, Department of Archaeology, University of York.
Miller, A.P., 1996b, An application of Dublin Core from the Archaeology Data Service, URL: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~napm1/ads/metadata.html .
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Miller, E.J., 1996b, Issues of document description in HTML, URL: http://www.oclc.org:5046/~ emiller/publications/metadata/issues.html.
Nanson, B., Smith, N. & Davey, A., 1995, What is the British National Geospatial Database?, AGI'95 Conference Proceedings, pp.
1.4.1-1.4.5.
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Richards, J.D., 1996, The Archaeology Data Service, URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/ahds/welcome.html.
Schwartz, M., 1996, Report of the W3C Distributed Indexing/Searching workshop, URL: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Search/9605-Indexing-Workshop/.
Weibel, S., 1996, A proposed convention for embedding metadata in HTML, URL: http://www.oclc.org:5046/~weibel/html-meta.html.
Weibel, S., Godby, J., Miller, E. & Daniel, R., 1995, OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop Report, URL: ht tp://www.oclc.org:5047/oclc/research/publications/weibel/metadata/dublin_core_report.html.
Weibel, S. & Miller, E., 1996, Dublin Core Metadata Element Set WWW homepage, URL: http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core.
Acknowledgements Thanks are due to more people than I can sensibly mention here, so I'll just settle for thanking the global metadata community (!)
for their continuing hard work in this field, and hope that I haven't managed to misrepresent too many of the ideas currently being discussed.
A special mention is also due to Tony Gill of eLib's ADAM project, who is responsible for designing the informal Dublin Core logo that appears below.
Maybe it's time we formally adopted it...?
And finally thanks to the AHDS' Archaeology Data Service (ADS), my involvement in which finally gave me the necessary kick (or excuse?)
to make me take a good look at issues which I'd always sort of thought about, but rarely elucidated... Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
Formats for the Electronic Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Formats for the Electronic Library Buzz data software java javascript html database dissemination xml archives standardisation accessibility browser copyright video graphics sgml dtd windows hypertext multimedia latex jpeg png ascii gif tiff adobe streaming flash avi wav ejournal quicktime aiff realaudio licence gopher ftp standards Citation BibTex RIS Judith Wusteman describes the document formats used in electronic serials.
Every day, subscribers to the the NewJour mailing list [1] receive notification of new Internet-available electronic serials.
The NewJour definition of a serial covers everything from journals to magazines and newsletters; from the British Accounting Review to Ariadne, to The (virtual) Baguette and I Love My Nanny.
Some days, a dozen or more publications are announced.
As of 13th February 1997, the NewJour archive contained 3,240 items.
Most of these electronic serials, or e-serials, along with most other electronic publications currently available on the World Wide Web, are stored and represented using one or more of a relatively limited number of document formats.
In this article, I'll describe these formats and the formats that are likely to be prominent in the near future.
I'll give examples from the e-serials field but most of my comments are also applicable to other online publications such as books, dictionaries and manuals.
I'll start by describing the simplest and until recently most common formats; ASCII and bitmaps.
I'll then describe the format that has come to epitomise Web publishing: HTML.
This will be followed by a description of its parent, SGML, and then LaTeX, PostScript, PDF and some of the formats used in the multimedia components of e-serials.
I won't describe proprietary word processing formats, such as WordPerfect and Microsoft Word, as these are rarely used for widely distributed e-serials and are 'not encouraged' in the eLib Standards Guidelines [2].
1: ASCII and Bitmaps Early e-journals, newsletters and the like tended to use the lowest common denominator formats of ASCII or bitmapped page images.
More sophisticated formats couldn't be supported by the majority of users.
The term ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is often used as a synonym for 'plain text file'.
ASCII can represent just 128 unique symbols; the English letters and numbers and some of the more common keyboard characters.
Chemical and mathematical formulae and languages other than English can't be adequately represented.
Figure 1: ASCII-based title 'page' of Ejournal An example of an ASCII-based e-serial was the periodical Ejournal [3] as shown in Figure 1.
Issues were regularly emailed to subscribers until April 1996.
In August 1996, EJournal [went] hypertext'.
Unfortunately, this 'first issue explicitly designed to take full advantage of hypertext and the World Wide Web' appears to be its most recent.
Although many potential journal readers still don't have access to the Web, new ASCII-based e-journals available via email, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or Gopher (a document retrieval system) have virtually dried up.
Emailed newsletters in ASCII are still common; the Daily Brief [4], for example, is a U.S.-based 2-3 page news summary sent out by e-mail every weekday morning.
But for more sophisticated offerings (such as Ariadne), email is now often just used for notification, the publication being available at a Web site.
The next step may be a mixed email-Web model; services such as Netscape's InBox Direct could enable the emailing of HTMLbased tables of contents which could point to articles held on the serial's Web site [5].
Bitmaps, also referred to as raster formats, are graphical images stored, not as individual characters, as in ASCII, but as patterns of individual pixels or dots.
The graphical components of e-serials are generally stored this way, using bitmap formats such as GIF, PNG and TIFF.
These formats are described in Section 7.1.
Text is also sometimes stored using bitmaps, as in ADONIS [6] and Elsevier's TULIP project [7].
In the latter, the articles from over eighty Materials Science journals were made available in bitmapped (TIFF) format.
ASCII versions of the articles were also provided.
The combination of ASCII and bitmaps used in TULIP enabled full-text searching using ASCII and allowed articles to be viewed in the same visual format as in the paper version using the bitmaps.
Figure 2 shows a sample bit-mapped page presented using the TULIP Journal Browser [7].
Bitmaps are far from ideal; the bitmapped text is unsearchable and the files can be large and not always high quality.
A successor program, EES (Elsevier Electronic Subscriptions) [8], announced in February 1995, aims to offer libraries electronic subscription to all Elsevier Science titles.
As with TULIP, EES provides a TIFF bitmapped image and a corresponding ASCII text file for each page.
It seems a strange decision to use these formats when, even in February 1995, more advanced formats were available.
Figure 2: Bit-mapped page viewed using the TULIP Journal Browser But even where more sophisticated formats are used, bitmaps may still have a limited role in representing text in the short-term.
HTML can't represent many mathematical and chemical symbols so bitmaps (for example TIFFs or the more compact GIFs) are used whenever such special characters appear in an HTML page.
Advances in HTML and browser technology should mean that this solution won't be needed in the longer term.
2: HTML The majority of new networked ejournals and many other electronic serials are delivered via the Web and are currently based on an HTML (HyperText Markup Language) [9] backbone linking articles either in HTML or a different format.
This second format may be PDF, PostScript, LaTeX, SGML or even bitmaps.
Figure 3: HTML-based table of contents from the IDEAL system, viewed using Netscape   Figure 4: HTML-based article abstract from the IDEAL system, viewed using Netscape   Figure 5: PDF-based article from the IDEAL system, viewed using Acrobat Reader The obvious example of an HTML backbone with HTML articles is Ariadne [10].
Academic Press's IDEAL system (International Digital Electronic Access Library) [11], on the other hand, includes journal articles in PDF.
The tables of contents and article abstracts of 175 Academic Press journals are freely available in HTML.
In addition, authorised users can view, download and print journal articles in PDF.
Figure 3 shows an HTML table of contents.
Clicking on the first article title displays the abstract shown in Figure 4 and clicking on the 'Full Article' link below the abstract displays the PDF article in Figure 5.
HTML documents can include hypertext links to other documents.
'Documents' accessed via Web browsers can be almost any form of information, from a text-file to the result of a database query.
So documents don't have to exist as files; they can be 'virtual', generated in response to a user query.
In the IDEAL system, for example, all HTML pages, such as those in Figures 3 and 4, are dynamically generated.
Web browsers, for example Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), have a built-in capability to interpret some file formats other than HTML.
Netscape, for example, can read various graphics formats including GIF and JPEG.
To read other formats, helper applications or plug-ins may be necessary.
These software packages perform tasks such as displaying still images, playing sound and video and uncompressing files.
They're often available free of charge or as shareware on the Internet.
The terms helper application and plug-in are sometimes used interchangeably but can be distinguished by the fact that plug-ins are more closely integrated with the browser.
Helper applications, on the other hand, generally run files that can't be directly display inside the browser window but need a separate pop-up window.
New features are being added to HTML all the time.
Unfortunately, some of them aren't standard, in that they're not ratified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [12].
So, for example, non-standard tags to describe multimedia components have been introduced by the IE browser [13] and frames, which are still under discussion by W3C, are already available for Netscape [9].
The most notorious non-standard extension must be the Netscape blink tag which causes text to flash on and off to the annoyance of some Net users.
The eLib Standards Guidelines [2] which provide recommendations for standards in eLib projects, state that such 'vendor-specific extensions' are 'deprecated'.
The latest version of HTML to have been ratified by the W3C is version 3.2.
But it's not always wise to base Web sites on the latest standards as many user sites will lag behind in their ability to read them.
As of February 1997, the Web design company WebMedia often create sites using HTML 2.0 plus tables to ensure wide accessibility [14].
Despite support for cute features such as animated GIF's and active maps, HTML's functionality is still fairly basic in areas of importance to more serious publishers.
For example, as mentioned in Section 1, many special characters and symbols still need to be represented using bitmaps.
Support for mathematics, originally to have been implemented in HTML 3.0 [15], was obviously not at the top of the priority list for the evermore commercially-oriented Web community.
This is one reason why some journal publishers prefer PDF.
Another reason is the lack of author control over HTML article layout.
3: SGML HTML is a simple application of SGML, or Standard Generalised Markup Language, which, in turn, is a language for describing the logical structure and meaning of documents [16].
SGML doesn't describe documents' visual appearance.
For example, it could be used to identify the title, author and section headings of an article but it wouldn't say anything about where to display these components on the screen or what fonts to use.
Figure 6: SGML-based test article from JEP, viewed using SoftQuad Panorama SGML needs an application to convert it to a suitable viewing format.
This application could be an SGML viewer, for example, SoftQuad's Panorama for Netscape [17] as shown in Figure 6.
(SoftQuad have recently announced a 'Panorama-like' plug-in for Internet Explorer [18].)
Alternatively, SGML is often converted to another format, such as HTML, for display.
For example, in the eLib CLIC project, involving the parallel paper and online production of the chemistry journal Chemical Communications, SGML files are converted on-the-fly to HTML for display [19].
SGML has been around since 1986.
HTML Version 1 was SGML-like but didn't conform to the SGML standard; the latest standard, Version 3.2 is fully conformant.
An SGML Document Type Definition, or DTD, defines the rules for marking up a type of document, be it a journal article, a newsletter, a manual and so on.
Each SGML-marked-up document, must contain, or refer to, the relevant DTD.
HTML 3.2, for example, being an SGML application, is defined by a DTD.
If you're reading this article online, check the source code.
(From Netscape, choose View then Document Source Code.
From IE, click the right mouse button and choose View Source.)
You'll see that the first line is something like this: This is a reference to the HTML 3.2 DTD.
It says to the system reading the file, in this case a browser, 'If you want to know how to interpret the markup in this file, look at the HTML 3.2 DTD.'
3.1: SGML for Journals SGML development is costly; with some exceptions, its development tools are expensive.
The editor of Ariadne was unlikely to have chosen SGML when HTML was adequate for the magazine's needs.
But for bigger and more complex projects, such as the development and storage of a large number of journals, SGML is increasingly being seen as at least part of the answer.
The move towards the use of SGML in the journals field has increased in pace over the last 2 years.
Currently, its main use is in the representation of bibliographic information about articles.
There are several 'standard' DTDs that describe this 'header' information: The MAJOUR (Modular Application for JOURnals) Header DTD [20] designed by the European Workgroup for SGML (EWS) primarily for scientific articles.
SSSH (Simplified SGML for Serial Headers) [21] commissioned by the Book Industry Communications (BIC) and developed in 1996; a modified version of MAJOUR that attempts to overcome some of its drawbacks.
The 1994 ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) 12083 [22] standard DTDs for journals and articles.
They include markup for header information.
An increasing number of publishers are considering using SGML for the full-text of articles.
Although some use ISO 12083 as a starting point for their own DTDs, few use the standard as is.
In the long term, journal articles may be stored in SGML and delivered either in a second format or in SGML itself using an SGML viewer.
The latter approach was tested by the University of Michigan Press which made available, on the Web, SGML test versions of articles from JEP, the Journal of Electronic Publishing [23] using the ISO 12083 DTD.
An example is shown in Figure 6.
The articles have since been withdrawn but another of the Press's publications, the Bryn Mawr Reviews, is now in the progress of migrating to SGML.
Test examples for this aren't yet publicly available.
Whether the option of using an SGML viewer becomes popular will depend on how SGML on the Web evolves, in particular, how viewing software develops.
The Illinois Digital Libraries project, part of the US DLib initiative [24], has highlighted a number of problems with the current generation of SGML viewers, not least their inadequacies for presenting mathematical and chemical equations.
Despite the increasing prominence of SGML in the journals arena, only three of the sixty-plus projects funded by the eLib programme use SGML to any appreciable extent; they are CLIC, SuperJournal and Infobike.
Both SuperJournal 2 and Infobike (JournalsOnline) use SGML as an intermediate format for the provision of bibliographic information by publishers to the system.
The majority of eLib e-journal projects involve HTML or PDF.
The Programme Director, Chris Rusbridge, has suggested that HTML should be regarded as a short-term solution 'with perhaps a medium term aim of migrating to SGML and a suitable DTD.'
[25] The W3C have recently been promoting 'an extremely simple dialect of SGML' called Extensible Markup Language, or XML [26].
The goal of XML is 'to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML.'
It's very early days for XML but it looks like it will be influential.
4: Latex LaTeX is a system for typesetting documents which is widely used in the scientific and engineering community, particularly by mathematicians and computer scientists.
It has excellent facilities for representing mathematical formulae.
Packages such as Word have a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface, which allow users to view changes to a document's layout as they're made.
Most user interfaces to the LaTeX system, on the other hand, require the user to mark up an ASCII file with LaTeX codes and then convert the resulting LaTeX file into the appropriate format, usually PostScript, for display or printing.
This conversion is a two-stage process.
First, the file is passed through a LaTeX formatter to produce a DeVice Independent (DVI) form.
It's then converted to PostScript.
Software to perform these conversions is widely available in the science and engineering community, as are programs for previewing the DVI and PostScript documents.
Figure 7 shows a PostScript page from the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (CJTCS) [27] viewed using GSPreview, a previewer for PostScript.
This journal is available via the Internet in both LaTeX and PostScript form.
The 'definitive version' of each article is a LaTeX source file, There are two versions of LaTeX currently in use; the newer version, which came out in 1994, is referred to as LaTeX2e.
CJTCS aim to make their articles compatible with both versions.
LaTeX's graphical facilities are fairly rudimentary; diagrams and figures that can't be conveniently represented in LaTeX are made available in a format called Encapsulated PostScript (EPS).
As with SGML, the LaTeX mark-up is primarily logical in that, for the most part, it describes the logical structure of a document rather than the visual appearance.
Some publishers, for example Springer-Verlag [28] make 'style files' available to their authors and editors.
These style files define how the various logical features, such as headings, paragraphs and so on, are to appear for a particular journal.
As with every other format, the use of LaTeX isn't without its problems.
There will always be the authors who ignore the prescribed journal style files, invent their own and then forget to send them to the editor with their submitted articles.
In such cases, far from saving the editors time, electronic article submission can add to the editorial workload.
The problem isn't confined to this format but it can be particularly acute with LaTeX because of the potential sophistication of the documents being produced.
The editors of CJTCS aim for maximum portability of the LaTeX source files by using a 'disciplined subset of LaTeX'.
This often involves significant copy editing of the files submitted by the authors to remove 'clever' but non-standard markup.
Figure 7: Postscript version of CJTCS article viewed using a Ghostscript Previewer LaTeX is built on top of a lower level markup language called TeX.
Authors are increasingly using LaTeX in preference to TeX and, similarly, journals are increasingly providing articles in LaTeX rather than in TeX.
5: Postscript Whereas LaTeX provides a logical representation of a document, the PostScript page description language [29] describes the visual appearance of the final page.
Some e-serials provide articles to the end-user directly in PostScript.
The advantage of this for publishers is that the document files can't be easily altered by the user; the look and feel of journal articles can be retained and copyright can be protected.
But the files can be large, especially if they include graphics, so most e-serials make articles available in a more compact format, for example LaTeX, PDF or HTML.
The end-user is left to convert the files to the format recognised by their printer; for most laser printers, this is PostScript.
Another potential problem arises if the reader's machine doesn't have a font which is used in a document.
In the case of specialist journals which may use unusual fonts, default fonts may not be an adequate substitute and the original font may be too expensive to licence to readers.
One of the main advantages for publishers of the PDF format described in the next section is that the necessary fonts can be included in the document files.
6: PDF PDF, or Portable Document Format [30], is an increasingly popular format for e-serials, especially journals.
It's used as the underlying representation for the Acrobat suite of software.
PDF, first announced in late 1992, could be summarised as 'PostScript with hypertext'.
It's features include Hypertext links within and between documents Annotations and bookmarks Thumbnail (miniature) sketches of pages Fonts embedded in documents Indexing and searching facilities Page-at-a-time download Effective compression (A PDF document can be significantly smaller than its PostScript equivalent) Online presentation and browsing of PDF documents is via the Acrobat Exchange or Reader software.
Exchange allows links, annotations, and bookmarks to be created and used.
The Reader is a limited version of the Exchange software, allowing use, but not creation, of hypertext features.
The Reader software is available free of charge from the Adobe Web site [31].
Acrobat is being increasing integrated with Web browsers such as Netscape, the latest version of which allows PDF documents to be viewed within the browser window.
The Acrobat suite provides facilities for the creation of PDF files.
In addition, an increasing number of desk-top publishing packages, for example Adobe PageMaker 6.0 and above, include facilities to convert their proprietary formats to PDF.
PDF is becoming widely used because it's easy for the typesetters to produce from PostScript and because publishers can retain control of page appearance; as with PostScript, PDF isn't easily changed by the end-user.
And, unlike HTML, PDF looks the same no matter what viewer is used to display it.
As already mentioned, another reason for enthusiasm is that certain fonts can be legally embedded in PDF files, so tackling the problem of local unavailability of fonts.
As mentioned in Section 2, many e-journals, for example those in the IDEAL system, now comprise individual PDF articles linked by an HTML-based journal structure.
Adobe Acrobat is just one of a number of 'page description' systems currently available.
Other examples include Hummingbird Communications Common Ground, Novell/Tumbleweed Software Envoy and Farallon Replica [32].
A few e-journals, for example, those of the Royal Society of Chemistry [33], have been made available using CatchWord's 'Internet publishing environment', RealPage [34].
But Adobe PDF already appears to have consolidated its position in the e-journal field at least.
PDF isn't perfect but it's the best that's commonly available at the moment and, as it becomes increasingly common, it becomes increasingly convenient.
7: Multimedia In the long term, it's likely that multimedia features such as video clips, sound tracks and interactive images and data will be an accepted part of e-serials, particularly e-journals.
Users may be able to run simulation programs, rotate 3D images and apply mathematical formulae to test data.
7.1: Still Images GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is currently the most commonly used, and universally supported, data format for cartoon-like images and special characters on the Web.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is also used, mainly for photographic images [35].
When used with Web browsers, GIF and JPEG images may be inline, that is, directly on the Web page in question, or external, that is, appearing in a separate window when requested by the user.
GIFs can have more than one image per file; when these images are shown in quick succession, they can give the illusion of movement.
Hence, the 'animated GIFs' that are becoming increasingly frequent on Web pages [36].
Portable Network Graphics, or PNG, pronounced 'ping', is being promoted by W3C as an alternative to GIF.
PNG graphics have smaller storage sizes and can display more colours than GIFs but haven't yet taken over from GIFs in the popularity stakes.
There are many other still-image formats available, including: TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), used to provide bitmapped page images in the EES project described in Section 1.
TIFFs take up more storage space than GIFs.
EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) used to represent complex figures in CJTCS, as mentioned in Section 4.
The list of graphic and other multimedia formats supported by any particular browser can be viewed and added to by choosing the appropriate browser menu option, as shown in Figure 8 for Netscape.
Images can be large and slow to download but there are several ways that they can be speeded up.
When they're accessed via the Web, images, along with the page they appear in, are cached by the browser; that is, they're stored for possible reuse.
This can save time accessing images, such as navigation icons, that may appear on every page.
Another way of cutting load time is to compress the images [37].
Some techniques, such as that employed by the most common versions of JPEG, are described as lossy because information is lost during compression and decompression.
This is not usually important if the images are just for viewing; the losses may not be very significant to the human eye.
But it could be significant in interactive e-journals in which images such as satellite data and gas chromatography charts might be analysed to extract data.
GIF and PNG, on the other hand, are lossless but less suitable for photographic images.
Figure 8: Netscape Dialogue box for listing and editing helper applications 7.2: Audio and Moving images The use of video and audio is still very rare in e-serials.
The World Wide Web Journal of Biology [38], aims to provide HTML-based articles with links to movies in MPEG, AVI or Quicktime format, as well as to sound files and interactive molecules.
But, browsing the back issues, I didn't notice any articles that actually included these features.
Authors aren't yet used to the new media and their possibilities.
MPEG, or Motion Pictures Expert Group, is the closest approximation to an international standard video format.
Microsoft's AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) and Apple Quicktime are proprietary standards.
Viewers for MPEG and Quicktime are freely available for X Windows, Microsoft Windows, and Macintosh platforms [39].
An AVI video player for Windows is built into Windows 95 and NT and is available for Windows 3.1.
A small but increasing number of video and audio players allow 'streaming' [40]; VDOLive and RealAudio [41] are currently the most common examples.
Streaming is the technology that enables video or audio to be viewed or listened to as it's received, rather than having to wait for the entire file to be downloaded before playing it.
There are disadvantages to this approach; if your connection to the Net is slow, the sound or video may appear sluggish or arrive in bursts.
MacroMedia Director is the most common application used to generate multimedia titles [42].
The Director player is available free as a Netscape or IE plug-in for Microsoft Windows called ShockWave.
The latter may well play a part in future interactive journals; at the moment, its use is concentrated at the more commercial end of the eserial market.
Time Magazine, for example has an online demo incorporating ShockWave interactivity [43].
The only widely used and fully platform-independent sound file format is Sun Microsystem's AU format.
Elsevier's Speech communication journal invites authors to 'illustrate' their articles with audio files which are then made available to users in AU format [44].
Higher quality but platform-dependent formats include AIFF and WAV.
The latter is commonly used for sound effects in Microsoft Windows.
Netscape and IE have built-in facilities for playing AU, AIFF and WAV files.
The audio section of the MPEG standard provides very high quality sound and players are available for a range of platforms.
As already mentioned, the inclusion of sound files in e-journals is very rare to date and it's significant that eLib don't make any recommendations in this area [2].
7.3: Interactive Images The latest browsers support a new wave of formats that will allow not only movie clips but also interactive 3-D content via formats such as VRML and Java.
VRML, or Virtual Reality Modelling Language [45], enables the creation and display of three dimensional environments and models.
Version 2.0 has become the industry standard for 3D on the Web.
Various VRML browsers can be freely down-loaded [46].
A few work with Windows 3.1 or X Windows but most require the Windows 95/NT operating system or a Silicon Graphics machine; the more powerful the computer, the more impressive the results.
The potential of VRML in e-journals has already been recognised in the field of chemistry, and demonstrations can be viewed at the Imperial College site [47].
Developments such as Java [48] make full multimedia journals increasingly feasible.
Java is a relatively simple but powerful programming language, based on the more complex C++ language.
It's likely to become increasingly common in interactive presentations such as user processing of data, rotation of 3-D images and other simulations.
Small Java programs, called Applets, can be included in HTML files and run using Java-enabled browsers, such as Version 2.0 of Netscape or Version 3.0 of IE.
There may well be a delay before Java Applets find their way into the e-serials field on a large scale.
The programming required to develop Java content is considerably more sophisticated than that required to develop HTML pages and would imply a large investment by publishers.
But publishers may regard this as an investment worth making.
Unlike HTML, the code of Java Applets isn't transparent to either the reader or to the system on which it's running; publishers may see Applets as a way of regaining control over the content of their publications.
Among several simple 'scripting' languages currently being promoted, JavaScript [49] is starting to be used to add simple interactivity to Web pages.
Ariadne has already been experimenting with it to add a pop-up table of contents to the magazine [50].
Despite its name, JavaScript doesn't have anything in common with Java; Netscape originally called in LiveScript but changed its name to cash in on the Java hype; it's now also supported by Microsoft.
7.4: Multimedia Problems Until high-speed lines and relevant hardware and software are more widespread, a proportion of e-serial users will have to forego the potential added value of multimedia.
Some e-journals cater for users with slow lines and text-only interfaces, such as Lynx [51], by making all multimedia, including graphics, optional.
Most browsers allow the image-loading functions to be delayed or turned off.
But the main problem with current multimedia e-journals may not be a technical one but rather the difficulty of persuading authors to submit articles incorporating multimedia features.
8: Some predictions As more commercially-produced e-serials take to the Web, the few remaining ASCII-based journals and newsletters will disappear.
LaTeX will continue to be used until HTML or its successor (SGML or, more likely, XML) can deal adequately with maths and chemistry.
It's possible that a subset of LaTeX could be incorporated into HTML to form its maths component.
This, and a few other improvements, would make HTML a more viable format for serial article full-text.
But it's unlikely to rival PDF for layout quality.
PDF will continue to ride high for quite some time until something better appears.
And authors will begin to write articles for the Web.
References NewJour archive.
Owner/maintainer: Okerson, A.S. (Yale University), O'Donnell, J.J. (University of Pennsylvania) list of new journals and newsletters available on the Internet.
http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/ eLib Standards Guidelines, Version 1.0.
L. Dempsey, A. Mumford, A. Robiette, and C. Rusbridge http://ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/standards/version1/ Ejournal.
Owner/maintainer: University at Albany, State University of New York http://rachel.albany.edu/ ejournal/ejournal/ejournal.html The Daily Brief.
Owner/maintainer: Intelligent Network Concepts, Inc. Daily email summary of national and international events.
http://www.tiac.net/users/incinc/inc/inc_home.html Netscape Inbox Direct Service.
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http://home.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease216.html The ADONIS homepage.
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http://www.adonis.nl/ TULIP The University Licensing Program.
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http://www.elsevier.nl/homepage/about/resproj/tulip.html Elsevier Science/OCLC Electronic Publishing Pilot Program.
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http://developer.netscape.com/library/documentation/htmlguid/index.htm Ariadne magazine.
Owner/maintainer: John Kirriemuir, UKOLN The Office for Library and Information Networking http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ International Digital Electronic Access Library (IDEAL).
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BCS Electronic and MultiMedia Publishing Group seminar on Programming the World Wide Web, Institute of Physics, London.
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Details of specifications, drafts, and reports.
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http://tick.ntp.springer.de/author/sgml/help-sgml.html Simplified SGML for Serial Headers (SSSH).
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Owner/maintainer: Institute for informatics, University of Oslo, Norway ftp://ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/ISO12083/ The University of Michigan Press.
Owner/maintainer: University of Michigan Press http://www.press.umich.edu/ Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.
Owner/maintainer: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/ C. Rusbridge, 18 Jul 1996, Re: HTML standards, Mailing list posting.
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1996-07/0025.html Extensible Markup Language (XML), W3C Working Draft.
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(University of Illinois at Chicago) http://www.textuality.com/sgml-erb/WD-xml.html Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science.
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Owner/maintainer: CatchWord Ltd. http://www.catchword.co.uk/ What is the difference between JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs?
Extracts from the JPEG FAQ and Kevin Hughes' HyperMedia tutorial.
Owner/maintainer: M.Stonebank@ee.surrey.ac.uk http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/FAQ/standards.html GIF89a-based Animation for the WWW.
Owner/maintainer: Frazier, R. http://members.aol.com/royalef/gifanim.htm A review of Multimedia Technology and Dissemination Systems, L. Harrison .
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http://techweb.cmp.com/cw/072296/620max.htm The Web In Motion: On-line multimedia is limited, but not for long.
Owner/maintainer:Leland, J. http://www.kipinet.com/mmp/mmp_jul96/col_online.html MacroMedia and ShockWave.
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http://vrml.sgi.com/view/ Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) Chemistry Demonstrator, O. Casher and H. Rzepa.
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http://home.netscape.com/comprod/products/navigator/version_2.0/script/script_info/index.html The Professional Web-zine and Parallel Publishing Ariadne: the Web Version, J. Kirriemuir, D-Lib Magazine, February 1997 http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/mirrored/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/february97/ariadne/02kirriemuir.html Lynx Users Guide Version 2.3.
Owner/maintainer: Blythe, G., Montulli, L., Grobe, M. Ware, S., Academic Computing Services, The University of Kansas http://www.cc.ukans.edu/lynx_help/Lynx_users_guide.html Author Details Dr Judith Wusteman was a lecturer in Computer Science at UKC when she wrote this article.
She has since moved to UCD and her present address is: Dr Judith Wusteman Department of Library and Information Studies University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland phone: +353 1 706 7612 fax: +353 1 706 1161 Email: judith.wusteman@ucd.ie Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Best eLib Project Web Pages Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Best eLib Project Web Pages Buzz browser Citation BibTex RIS In the spring, we held a competition for those eLib projects that had, to date, produced and mounted their own set of Web pages.
Here, we announce the winner...
In the spring, we held a competition for those eLib projects that had, to date, produced and mounted their own set of Web pages.
The criteria for a good set of Web pages was: Simple and pleasing design Obvious and logical navigation A clear, not-too-technical, description of the project Pointers to related resources and services Pointers/reference to the project personnel and any other project partners Clear contact details Compatibility across a range of browsers (or, alternately, browser independent pages) Mention of the eLib programme/JISC (i.e.
the project funders :-) Two independent judges looked at a total of 26 Web sites, and decided that the site that most closely matched the above criteria was: ADAM: an information gateway to quality-assured resources on the internet in art, design, architecture & media ...which is one of the projects from the Access to Networked Resources area of the programme.
The judges awarded the Web pages 67 out of 80 points.
Nine other projects scored over 60 points, so the competition was somewhat close.
Congratulations to ADAM, who will be awarded their prize in the autumn.
The competition is closed, but that doesn't mean that Web site construction/maintenance stops for eLib projects.
The majority of eLib projects have their own Web Sites/pages, while the remainder are (hopefully) constructing their own.
If you cannot find the information you require about an eLib project from the eLib Web pages (which give a brief outline and contact details for all of the projects), then further information can often be found from that projects own Web site/pages.
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Interface: Hymns Ancient and Modern Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: Hymns Ancient and Modern Buzz data video cataloguing research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh talks to Mary Auckland, Chair, Committee on Electronic Information (CEI) Content Working Group.
Walking into many information centres these days is like a journey into multiple schizophrenia.
Work areas are zoned by degree of noise, and users work (or not) singly, in pairs and in any combination up to battalion size.
In the midst of all this energy staff often operate in the same way.
Yet this is part of the synergy that is sometimes a welcome advance on the monastic silence of 35 years ago.
A visit to the library of SOAS creates another impression.
It is calm, relaxed and friendly, and talking to Mary Auckland confirms that rather than looking for a single model most institutions will need to find their own way of dealing with the emergence of new organisational forms and new ways of working with electronic data.
Mary began our conversation by emphasising her occupation of the middle ground, after a long involvement with various applications of technology in librarianship: “ I hope [I] take a very broad and catholic approach to developments and not focus on one particular area.
I hope this always allows me to hang on to the human side.” This is reflected in Mary’s management of the library at SOAS and she has brought the same eclecticism to her chairmanship of the Content Working Group of JISC’s Committee for Electronic Information.
Although she has only been in the job for a little over a year she has clearly moulded an effective group of experts representing different sectors of the academic and information communities: “I come with a clean slate…it means I can ask naive questions with no history behind them and no agenda.
I can often go back to first principles and ask ‘why this?’ and ‘why that?’…” The group facilitates the development of the subject content of a range of learning packages for the academic community.
It is focussed on developing the content of the nationally distributed electronic resource and has to its credit a number of impressive achievements which place it at the forefront of developments.
Mary is very positive about the growing links with commercial publishers such as Chadwyck Healey and other partnerships for example with the JSTOR project, and work on imaging and video.
For her, the preparation of a collection development policy for the creation of electronic learning and research resources is most critical.
When this is released it will form the basis of a further systematic development of the resource.
The actual brief of the group is difficult to describe because of the enormous range of its coverage, but what is interesting is how the disparate interests and backgrounds of the group are harnessed: “…we are content, content, content…there is an impressive balance and marrying of skills and expertise so that people who are interested in the delivery of content feel confident that they can go to the people with the technological skills and say ‘how?’ and the people with those interests feel confident that they are partners and they can say ‘we’ve got this idea for doing this whizzy thing, how could we use it to deliver something useful?’ Unsurprisingly, this balanced and catholic approach extends itself to general issues to do with electronic data and the electronic library .
Mary is a strong advocate of the retention of traditional skills and is very positive about the continued need for the conventional skills of the library professional.
She refused to rise to my proffered bait of the electronic library’s potential to deskill and even make redundant the traditional librarian, and continued to affirm the combination of professional and technological skills that are reflected in the business of the Content Working Group: “I hope the [Departments of Information Studies] will also continue to educate people in the more established traditional skills…education in the skills of cataloguing and classification…this is how you organise knowledge…we’re moving into a new environment but it’s one where technology allows us to do it better.
The underlying skills are similar.” Her attitude to how we organise the results of the Content Working Group’s efforts is the same: “ Institutions will need to find their own way based on their particular mix of academic disciplines and research interests…there is no one way.” She identified the development of a cross-sectoral role as a crucial element in the future of the profession.
For electronic sources she sees a converging of needs in the higher education sector, the further education sector and the public library sector.
There is also a refreshing note of realism to be found in Mary’s assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Group’s activities.
While she stressed the achievements so far, she was also sharply aware of what still needed to be done.
I asked Mary what she considered to be the biggest weakness of the CWG’s position, and she saw this as a communication problem.
“The community knows we exist, they don’t know enough about us.” Although there are links with various discipline groups, research groups and other bodies such as the BUFVC and BFI which share some common concerns, there is insufficient general awareness of the activity of a group which is demonstrating an internationally acknowledged expertise.
To rectify this, the CEI has appointed a Collections Manager.
He is Jason Plent, and he can be contacted at Warwick University or via his email address which is j.plent@warwick.ac.uk Interviewee details Ms Mary Auckland, Librarian, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Downtime Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Downtime Citation BibTex RIS Downtime is a regular section containing items to help you unwind from the rigours of networking.
In this 'Downtime' section, Ariadne staff offer some poetry and cartoons for the entertainment of readers.
First, a spot of poetry...
THE HIEROGLYPH Jill Bamber Our highways cut across important pathways.
Last night I heard some wild geese flying over searching for open water on the outskirts.
Suburban hedgehogs rip our dustbin bags and hibernate beneath the garden shed.
Posting a letter in the nearest box I saw a green transfixion on the road.
The frog was nearly home a little tired after the April spawning in the pond.
Last week I saw them floating among lily pads paired in a long glut of other couplings.
His hands were still grass-green transparencies, their fan-like webs spread out on the hard road.
The grin, dragged down one side was almost there.
I had to pass him twice where paths had crossed.
Soon it will rain and wash him down the gutter or else the hieroglyph his body makes will have been carried off between tyre treads fitting their zig-zag pattem noiselessly.
This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets , Volume 1, Number III, February 1995.
It is reprinted by permission of the editor.
Campbell wryly gives us his slant on the effects of the recently signed US telecommunication bill.
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Catriona II Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Catriona II Buzz infrastructure copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Mary Fletcher introduces a new seeker after Web resources.
CATRIONA II is a project from the Access to Network Resources section of the programme.
This is an exciting period of growth in the development of electronic resources for teaching and research.
Many examples of electronic resources for teaching and research such as lectures, slides and research papers are now readily available on the Web.
However, a large proportion of the research and teaching material that is being created on computers is not yet available to the wider academic community.
It is often only available to the creator and perhaps to local students.
There can be many reasons why the electronic resources are not being made more widely available.
These can be technical, organisational or legal (where there are concerns about copyright and the ownership of electronic resources).
The CATRIONA II project seeks to address some of these issues.
It began in June 1996 and will last for two years, with a remit to investigate approaches to the management and creation of institutional and departmental electronic resources in Scottish universities.
It will seek out high quality, locally-created, electronic resources on individual campuses and consider their value both within and beyond the local institution, examining intentions regarding the provision of campus-wide and external access to such resources.
Associated questions relating to institutional policy, strategy, organisational infrastructure, and approaches to resource delivery and maintenance will all be explored.
A survey will be conducted, with the aim of providing an indication of the range of resources being created and the surrounding issues and concerns.
This will begin at Strathclyde and Napier Universities, the lead institutions, but will extend to the other Scottish universities.
An examination of approaches to policy, strategy, and organisational infrastructure will be carried out through various steering and discussion groups, again focusing on Strathclyde and Napier but extending to the other Scottish sites in due course.
In addition a number of the resources identified in the course of the survey will be mounted on demonstration servers at the two lead institutions.
Have a look at our Web site for further information about the project; this can be found at http://catriona.lib.strath.ac.uk/ISC848/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Promoting the Internet to Staff at a UK University Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Promoting the Internet to Staff at a UK University Buzz database dissemination hypertext cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Hollands is the human part of a project to promote the use of Internet based information services among teaching and research staff at the university; in his own words, this is how the project has progressed to date.
I, along with the team of stakeholders whom I report to, have been running this project for ten months now, and we have reached a point where it would be useful to sit back and reflect on what we have achieved thus far and where we go from here.
One of the most important aspects of the job in this first year has been to determine the levels of Internet service use among University staff.
Therefore, the first task I had was to survey levels of use of Internet based information sources.
I have had several inquiries about how the post is developing here at Loughborough from people trying to set up similar roles within other academic institutions.
Therefore I thought that it might be helpful to share the requirements we discovered with you and to explain how we have attempted to meet those needs.
First though a brief explanation of the projects aims: The post is intended as a 'pump priming' exercise to raise the profile of Internet use for information access, and also to determine the future focus of training in the use of the Internet as an information resource.
This is a joint project managed by the Library, Computing Services, and the Department of Information and Library Studies.
The aims of the Internet Information Officer project are as follows: 1.
Promotion of information services Every member of staff at the University involved in teaching and research has access to a desktop computer connected to the campus network and hence to the networked resources available via JANET.
These services offer access to a wealth of information available to each member of staff from their desk.
The purpose of the post is to raise awareness of the availability of these services among academic staff and to encourage effective use of them.
2.
Training to raise awareness and increase levels of effective use Training is inextricably tied up with the promotion of services.
Even though it is understood that use of Internet services is reasonably intuitive and that most people with some level of computer literacy can teach themselves the basics, training and support are needed to ensure that they progress and become effective users.
Due to their nature, Internet services can be very frustrating to use.
This means that unless promotion is coupled with training and support, new users tend to reach a certain level of skill, come up against the usual inherent problems (access speed, difficulty of searching) and become disheartened.
If the initial experience of new users is negative then it is very much more difficult to revive interest later on.
3.
Authoring training materials for the Information Gateway The Web provides an ideal medium for dissemination of information and training materials to support the training programme.
The aim is to produce a body of such materials on the Information Gateway.
As I have already stated, the first task undertaken was a survey of Internet service use among teaching and research staff within the University.
I produced a paper based questionnaire which was distributed to 1117 members of University staff.
We decided on a paper based form rather than an electronic means of collecting the information as this would have excluded those with little or no experience of using electronic media and we needed responses from these people too.
One of the main purposes of the survey, was to test the assumption that there is a large contingent of University staff who are interested in, and even enthusiastic about, Internet based services but who lack the skills and background knowledge to become effective users.
574 responses were received.
This represented 51% of those surveyed.
An excellent response rate for this type of survey.
The aims were:   To determine the groups to be targeted for training.
To identify their training needs.
To identify departments / sectors of the University which are infrequent users of Internet resources.
The results may be summarized as follows: 1.
The Internet Information Officer Target Group The target group of the project comprises those that have an interest in the Internet services available to them but who also have limited familiarity or experience.
The overwhelming majority of respondents (76%) have positive feelings about the services, but only half of these are effective users.
2.
Training requirements Services such as email and the Information Gateway seem to be heavily used by most respondents.
Services like Email Discussion Lists, Usenet News and Subject Guides have low levels of familiarity and use at present It was also very clear that the majority of respondents had difficulty searching for and retrieving relevant information from Internet resources.
This was clearly an area where training should be targeted.
3.
Deficit Departments / Sectors Departments with below average levels of use were determined along with those in our target group ie., the majority of respondents had positive feelings about services but levels of use were low.
A fuller report detailing all the survey results is available on the Web [1] .
In addition to the survey I have been visiting departments and collecting information about the general levels of use and training requirements in each.
Responding to user requirements The Internet & Information Training Stream Prior to my arrival at Loughborough University members of the Library and Computing Services had been running a stream of courses for University staff entitled Internet & Information.
This covered electronic information sources such as CD-ROM databases and online services like BIDS and OCLC FirstSearch as well as Internet based services.
Many of these courses were also run under the umbrella of the University Staff Development programme [2] .
As a result of the Internet and Information Survey we were able to focus our efforts even more closely to staff requirements and this year we have increased the number of courses in this stream by a third [3] .
At the same time (though unrelated to the survey) it was decided that the entire stream of courses should be run under the Staff Development umbrella and this has meant the development of a very close working relationship between these three elements of the University.
We have been able to extend the range of courses to target individual requirements specifically.
For example, we noted during courses about the Web and departmental visits that questions about managing Netscape bookmarks cropped up regularly.
We have been able to respond to this by running one hour lunch time courses about bookmarks.
To supplement this [4] and other courses I have also developed Web based training materials [5] .
These materials allow people to refresh their memories after the course and practice what they have been taught, both during hands on sessions and after the course has finished.
Also, we can include further information in the materials which we might not have time to cover during the course and to point people to other web based resources and examples via hypertext links.
They have proven extremely popular and are especially useful to staff who are unable to attend the course itself but are interested in the topic.
They are intended as a supplement to the courses and not a substitute however.
Wherever possible I have tried to link to existing materials (e.g.
TONIC [6] and Sink or Swim [7] ) rather than develop my own and duplicate work.
Duplication of effort is one of the banes of the Web.
I have always attempted to make it clear where the material comes from if I do link to sections of other people's work.
In addition to course materials I have also developed documentation about Usenet News [8] and Email Discussion lists [9] as the survey indicated relatively low levels of awareness for these services.
We have also given these services a special focus in the Internet & Information Stream.
A list of the courses in the Internet and Information stream [10] is available on the LU Information Gateway.
As a part of an ongoing effort to decentralize responsibility for maintenance of areas of the Information Gateway [11] the library has taken over responsibility for the Information Sources [12] cluster of pages.
These pages have been revamped over the Summer in response to requirements highlighted by the survey.
Again use has been made of existing web based sources such as Ross Tyner's Sink or Swim (we are now a UK mirror of this site.)
In addition to all of this I have been ideally placed to be able to produce 'bespoke' courses for individual departments [13] .
These have proven popular precisely because we are able to use key resources in areas of special interest as examples, and to introduce staff to key sources they might not be aware of.
Plans for year 2 We are hoping to receive confirmation soon that we have funding until February 1998.
This second year would mean we could complete our plans for several projects we have run out of time for in year one.
We can finish our programme of bespoke courses for individual departments, which is crucial.
We also have plans to run Internet Clinics for members of staff on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and we can continue to develop and improve the courses and materials for the Internet & Information stream.
We are also in the early stages of implementing a service which would allow campus wide sharing of bookmarks and references to useful Internet Information sources using local Usenet Newsgroups.
Heavily used web documents could also be archived on the news server for easy access by being posted as attachments using Netscape's Mail Document... function.
They would then appear as full blown hypertext documents in the Netscape News window.
This would be done as part of a larger 'limited access local newsgroup' programme being implemented by Computing Services.
We intend to pilot this service in individual departments initially, but it could then easily be scaled up to a faculty level.
In summary then, we have tried to ensure that every activity we have undertaken or plan to undertake is in response to a specific requirement expressed by staff within the University.
This has ensured that what we have done thus far has been successful and that we have had positive responses from members of University staff.
We appreciate how valuable and scarce time is to them in the present climate and we have tried to respond accordingly.
Further information about the Internet Information Officer project [14] is available on the LU Information Gateway.
References [1] Fuller version of the report this article summarises, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/report/ [2] University Staff Development Programme, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/std / [3] Staff development workshop details, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/std/WORKSHOPS/I&I.html [4] Details of course on bookmarks, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/bmcourse.htm [5] Web based course training materials, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/#training [6] TONIC training course (produced by Netskills), http://www.netskills.ac.uk/TONIC/ [7] Ross Tyners "Sink or Swim", http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/sink.htm [8] Usenet News documentation http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/news.htm [9] Email discussion list documentation, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/email_lists.htm [10] Courses in the Internet and Information stream, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/std/WORKSHOPS/I&I.html [11] Loughborough Information Gateway, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ [12] Loughborough Information Sources Web pages, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/ [13] Information on courses for individual departments, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/#depts [14] Internet Information Officer Project information, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/ Author Details Paul Hollands is the Internet Information Officer at the University of Loughborough Email: p.j.hollands@lboro.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: Ask A Librarian Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: Ask A Librarian Buzz research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes reviews the online reference query service that EARL has developed which draws on the cooperation of 40 libraries around the country.
How much do you think it would cost to provide the nation with a free 24 hour reference query service?
Millions of pounds?
Hundreds of thousands of pounds?
Surely not less than hundreds of pounds?
Well Ask A Librarian has done it for an amazing start up cost of only £40.
Ask a Librarian is a new online service developed by EARL [1].
The service is very simple in concept.
It is a reference enquiry point for anyone with access to the Internet.
If you have a reference query that needs answering you simply need to visit the Ask A Librarian webpages [2] on the EARL server and complete a short form detailing your query, your name and e-mail address.
Ask A Librarian will try and get the answer back to you via e-mail within the next two working days.
The service is available 24 hours a day and is completely free to use.
The brains behind the Ask A Librarian service is Sheila Harden, Librarian at Richmond Upon Thames, co-compiler of the UK Public Libraries page [3] and EARLWEB [4].
She felt that there was a need for public libraries to develop networked services which are aimed at the public instead of other librarians.
She also wanted to develop a service which would involve a large number of front line staff in order to raise the profile of the Internet with them.
“Many of the very interesting and valuable research projects that are currently being pursued involve only one or two large authorities at most and to be honest, I suspect that for the most part they have little impact on the day to day lives of working librarians.
To spread the word about the benefits of networking these librarians needed to be able to contribute their skills in a networking environment.” Ask A Librarian therefore involves the front line staff in 40 public libraries across the country.
The scheme operates through the free collaboration of these librarians and their library authorities.
The libraries take turns in answering the queries that are received though Ask A Librarian.
By means of a rota each library is responsible for answering queries for a particular day.
When a reference query form is completed it is automatically e-mailed to the library on duty for that day.
As there are 40 libraries involved in the service each library is only on duty roughly once every forty days.
The time commitment that each library is asked to provide is therefore kept at a manageable level.
This high level of collaboration was also an aim of Sheila’s.
“We wanted to show that public libraries and public librarians, though often deprived of opportunities for investment, can develop major initiatives by working collaboratively.
Even now I find it difficult to bring to mind any other major project of this type which involves 40 public libraries across the nation working together for no reward other than the satisfaction of taking part.” Service Reception The service has been successful and since its November 1997 launch has received over 1632 visits to the website’s main page, 584 accesses of the reference query form and over 220 queries.
On an average day about four queries will be received.
The majority of these questions are from people in the UK but others have been received from people in places as far flung as the USA, Singapore and Australia.
Users of the service often send in very favourable comments after they have received the answer to their query.
People have been particularly impressed by the level of cooperation that is taking place between geographically dispersed librarians around the country.
Response within the profession has also been very positive messages of support and admiration have even been received from librarians in the USA.
The reference staff involved have been very positive about their experiences.
What could have been a potential drain and unwelcome distraction from their more immediate duties has proved to be both enjoyable and challenging.
It has also led to some of the librarians developing informal contacts with other participating librarians.
This communication also takes place through the bulletin board that EARL maintains for the librarians involved.
Types of Questions The majority of questions Ask A Librarian has received have been straightforward queries, for example Who founded the dance theatre of Harlem?
What is the recipe for Hasty Pudding?
The resources used to answer these queries are the same as the ones which are used to answer the more traditional face-to-face reference query i.e.
standard reference texts, CD-Roms and the Internet.
The reference service being provide has not changed, it is the means by which it is delivered that has altered.
In effect the service brings the resources of UK public reference libraries to people’s desktops which is especially useful at times when their local reference library is not available or not accessible online.
Some questions which have been received have caused problems.
Some of the questions require indepth research in order for them to be answered properly, the classic example being, Are counselling and psychotherapy effective, or do they, by and large, do more harm than good?
Staff involved have been slightly concerned as these queries have proved more time-consuming than anticipated and in a number of cases could only be answered by a referral to a specialist library or collection.
The aim of the service is not to be an indepth research bank but to help the average home computer user with their everyday information needs.
Budget As mentioned before the budget for this service was only £40.
The service has been provided at such low cost due to the participants willingness to collaborate for free.
With the libraries providing their time for free, EARL providing their technical expertise for free and Sheila Harden providing her time spent on managing the service also for free the budget remains an impressively low.
The money which was spent went on the postage charges incurred for the distribution of posters and information packs to participant libraries.
Future Plans Ask A Librarian was initially planned to run for six months.
In March/April this year all the participating libraries will be surveyed in order to both evaluate the success of the service from the librarian’s perspective and establish the its future direction.
Sheila has plans for its future “I hope and expect that they (the participating libraries) will want to continue the service.
I would like us to develop the collaborative element and draw into the scheme specialist libraries to support the generalist public reference libraries.” Ask A Librarian is a marvellous example of how effective collaboration and cooperation between public libraries can be.
This very simple collaboration has lead to the development of a national (if not global) service.
It is a wonderful example of how public libraries can utilise very simple networking in order to create an imaginative new service for the public.
At £40 it is a true bargain.
Acknowledgement Many thanks to Sheila Harden for her help with this article.
References [1] EARL is a UK public libraries Internet initiative which aims to make the advantages of the Internet available to all library users and other members of the public.
The consortium members consist of over 60% of UK public library authorities and many other interested organisations.
More information is available at http://www.earl.org.uk/ [2] Ask A Librarian, an online reference query service.
Owner/Maintainer: EARL Available from http://www.earl.org.uk/ask/[16th January 1998] [3] UK Public Libraries Page, links to UK and European public library networking resources.
Owner/Maintained: Robert and Sheila Harden Available from http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/square/ac940/ukpublib.html [14th January 1998] [4] EARLWEB, EARL’s ready reference to key information resources on the Internet.
Owner/Maintained: EARL and Robert Harden Available from http://www.earl.org.uk/earl/earlweb/index.html [14th January 1998] Author details Sarah Ormes, Public Libraries Officer, UKOLN Email: lisslo@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: MODELS 5 Workshop Report and Futures Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: MODELS 5 Workshop Report and Futures Buzz framework authentication interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes gives a report on the recent MODELS 5 workshop and its outcomes.
For a description of the MODELS programme and its aims see Rosemary Russell’s article in Ariadne [1].
As Rosemary explains this was the final workshop in the MODELS programme and was entitled ‘Managing Access to a Distributed Library Resource’.
The workshop had a strong public library focus.
Background to Models 5 This workshop was in response to the recommendations for increased resource sharing between libraries that have been emerging from a range of sources.
These sources included the ASLIB Review of public libraries [2] the APT Review of cooperation [3] and the Anderson Report [4].
However, despite this need for greater resource sharing the majority of local library management systems currently in use do not interoperate, so resources are fragmented making unified distributed access difficult if not impossible.
The situation is complicated by organisational and business issues.
The aim of the workshop was to explore motivations for resource sharing, examine some current initiatives and develop a systems framework which will improve access and support more effective management of resource sharing.
The workshop focused on public library developments and the possibilities for cross-sectoral cooperation, particularly with academic libraries, were also explored.
The workshop The workshop was attended by over 40 invited representatives of the public library, academic and library and information research community.
The workshop was chaired by Richard Heseltine, Librarian of Hull University.
The first day of the workshop consisted of a number of presentations about the importance of and the current state of resource sharing in the library community.
Some of the presentations given were Motivations for resource sharing for public libraries and academics Local initiatives responding to these motivations : Coalition of Academic Libraries in Manchester (CALIM) and Counties which Used to Be Avon (CUBANs) in Somerset.
Regional/national initiatives responding to motivations: Viscount [5], Unity, Salser, [6] National Bibliographic Resource at the British Library and the National Agency for Resource Discovery scoping study Systems framework: SILO State of Iowa Libraries Online [7] These presentations were followed by breakout sessions where workshop participants identified the main issues that need to be addressed before easy access to a distributed library resource can take place.
Each group then reported back to the workshop as a whole.
On the following day these issues were consolidated and inhibitors to a distributed library resource were identified.
A possible systems architecture [8] and its requirements for a distributed library resource to come into existence was then devised by Fretwell Downing.
The workshop as a whole then identified a number of actions, recommendations and policy statements which would move library services closer to a distributed model.
These ‘outcomes’ are listed below.
Outcomes Actions LASER and BLRIC will organise a meeting of interested parties from Higher Education, the British Library and public libraries to develop a set of agreements which will define a UK ILL protocol profile.
UKOLN will drive a cross sector initiative on collection level description.
UKOLN will disseminate the MODELS architecture widely using examples from the public library environment to explain this architecture.
EARL and NEWSAGENT will emphasise the strategic importance of Dublin Core to public libraries.
UKOLN will emphasise the importance of the IP protocol to the LIC IT Working Group as future library services will be inhibited without use of this common protocol.
LASER will ensure that the LIC is aware the importance of ‘authentication’ through the LIC Research Mapping exercise.
ELib will ensure that JISC authentication work liases with CNI developments.
Recommendations MODELS recommends that: the LIC Working Group on IT adopts the proposed UK MODELS Z39.50profile.
the LIC IT Working Group recognises the importance of common information frameworks there is public library involvement in the eLib clumps programme the LIC research mapping exercise considers network issues in areas like local history and lifelong learning a proposal concerning lifelong learning and the use of networks should be developed for the next BLRIC call.
Policy Statements MODELS supports the current proposal to the BLRIC by Gloucestershire Library Service for community information clumping project.
MODELS supports a revised ILL interoperability proposal to the BLRIC.
Highlight to the LIC IT Working Group that IP is essential and that future networking services will be inhibited without common transport mechanisms?
Protocols?
A fuller description of this workshop and its recommendations will be available in the near future at the UKOLN WWW site in the form of a workshop report.
References MODELS: an introduction to…, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/models/ Aslib (1995) Review of the public library service in England and Wales for the Department of National Heritage : summary and schedule of recommendations.
London:Aslib.
Apt Partnership (1995) The Apt Review: a review of library and information co-operation in the UK and Republic of Ireland for the Library and Information Co-operation Council (LINC).
Sheffield:LINC.
British Library R & D report, 6212 The Anderson Report http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/anderson/ Viscount Web pages, http://www.viscount.org.uk/LASER/viscount.htm Salser Web pages, http://edina.ed.ac.uk/salser/ SILO Web Site, http://www.silo.lib.ia.us/silo.html Fretwell Downing’s presentation of a MODELS architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/models/models-5-presentation-1/ Author Details Sarah Ormes, Public Libraries Officer, UKOLN Email: lisslo@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 826711 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Around the Table Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Around the Table Buzz database repositories copyright Citation BibTex RIS Many legal resources are ideal for searching online.
Noel Whitty highlights some sites for lawyers.
Lawyers have a reputation for conservatism.
Jokes still abound about the law professors who refuse to switch on the PC on their desk and defiantly handwrite all their work, then shamelessly thank their secretaries in prefaces for "deciphering unintelligible handwriting".
Happily, such types are in a minority as the benefits of information technology are increasingly recognised in legal education and practice.
The subject matter of law can be as diverse or as traditional as one wishes.
Consequently, the range of Internet sites of interest to law lecturers, librarians, students and practitioners is vast.
What follows is only a personal snapshot of some sites of particular interest to constitutional and human rights lawyers.
Some law specific search tools are Findlaw and Law Society Legal Links.
The Georgetown University Law Library, the US House of Representatives Internet Law Library and Internet Gateway: International Sources are excellent general sources of legal information, with many international links.
For European law materials, see Edinburgh University's Europa Library.
Most lawyers take account of NGO activity in their area.
The NGO Global Network and Human Rights Internet are good starting points.
Of particular interest is the American Civil Liberties Union site for access to ACLU briefs and court decisions, and Amnesty International Documents.
An excellent women's human rights bibliography, with country and subject specific sections, is available on DIANA Human Rights Database.
For valuable United Nations materials, see the University of Minnesota Human Rights Library.
For those interested in constitutional reform, all South African materials are at Witwatersrand Constitutional Law Repository.
Every lawyer should insist on the democratic principle of free access to government information.
Must sites are US Supreme Court and Supreme Court of Canada.
Compare Australian Legal Resources and US Library of Congress with the UK government's resistance to free access to all HMSO material: UK Government Information Service.
Finally, for information on campaigns against Internet regulation check out Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties (UK).
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Anoraks and cardigans (2): New Text Search Engines, Bath, April 1996 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Anoraks and cardigans (2): New Text Search Engines, Bath, April 1996 Buzz thesaurus ocr research Citation BibTex RIS Nigel Ford, who gave the summary address, gives us his impressions of the April 1996 Infonortics conference n Bath on text retrieval.
The 1996 Bath meeting raised some interesting questions some explicit and others less so like "Do we really need librarians?"
And "Is traditional information work such a backwater that it takes 30 years for technology to transfer from the research laboratory into professional practice?"
On display an impressive array of computer-based systems for the retrieval and analysis of information.
All offer natural language input with best match output based on statistical techniques pioneered by the late great Gerard Salton.
Salton was very much present in spirit a warm tribute being paid by conference organiser Ev Brenner in his opening remarks, and many of the speakers referring to the important influence of Salton's work on the new breed of commercial systems.
The systems on view offered much.
In summary, they represent great advances in our attempts to: Save the time and/or expertise demanded of the end user: Natural language querying; transparent access to heterogeneous information sources from a single request; automatic repeated searching; merging of results.
Be less narrowly literal in handling information requests: Fuzzy matching to compensate for errors e.g.
resulting from OCR conversion; automatically handling semantic relationships in order to retrieve more than was literally asked for; retrieve information requested in one language in other languages.
Learning: "Discovering" concepts; automatically learning to achieve a better match between retrieval and the user's conception of what is and is not relevant.
Pre-processing information for easier retrieval: Automatic thesaurus generation; automatic indexing.
Integrating retrieval across media: E.g.
indexing and retrieving information at bit level, allowing fuzzy retrieval of patterns in text, sounds and pictures via one unified mechanism.
Getting to grips with the content of information: Not only searching for and retrieving information for the busy end user, but also using natural language techniques to extract and summarise relevant content.
Whilst the new generation of commercial systems generally offer statistical techniques in conjunction with Boolean, a number of speakers injected a more competitive note in their remarks.
We were reminded that research consistently tells us that statistical, natural language approaches out-perform Boolean the mainstay of the traditional (human) librarian.
So have the anoraks having finally attracted real money from the sharp suits really de-skilled the cardigans?
Well, yes but there again, no.
As Peter Schauble from Eurospider noted, casual end users using statistically-based systems can retrieve information as effectively as trained intermediaries using Boolean.
However, statistically-based systems can also boost the effectiveness of the trained intermediary in allowing the formulation of much more complex queries less susceptible to the casual user entailing possibly hundreds of search terms.
And as Neil Infield, Information Manager at Hermes Investment Management Ltd., observes in a recent article (Infield, 1996), the advent of powerful end user searching (a) releases professional intermediaries from less enjoyable routine searching, creaming off for them more interesting, complex searches; and (b) creates an appetite amongst end users resulting in their appreciation of, and demand for, the more sophisticated searching skills of the professional.
Interestingly in this context were the models at least embryo models proposed by a number of speakers at the conference, who attempted to map Boolean and other IR approaches onto different types of need.
I feel sure that it is at this level of sophistication that the debate about the role of professional intermediaries, and the relative merits of Boolean vis-a-vis statistical approaches, must advance.
I have a number of friends who possess a cardigan.
They sometimes come and go in anoraks.
Some have occasionally been observed in a suit.
Appropriate dress for different conditions and occasions.
A final word of congratulation to the conference organiser, Ev Brenner.
He achieved a rare and enjoyable blend of the academic and commercial, somehow persuading suppliers to talk about ideas rather than give us the hard sell.
I was not alone in noting that, paradoxically, the products on offer gleamed and impressed all the more because of this.
Reference INFIELD, Neil (1996) Dealing with disintermediators.
Library Manager, 18, 5.
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WoPEc: Electronic Working Papers in Economics Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines WoPEc: Electronic Working Papers in Economics Services Buzz software database archives metadata ftp research Citation BibTex RIS Thomas Krichel describes WoPEc, a working papers project.
Back in 1991, when the Internet began to emerge properly, there was a large quantity of computer software available on FTP servers, but few documents.
Why?
If the academic networks could carry free software, why not free research documents?
The economics seemed nonsensical.
Why would academics work to produce research without being paid, submit that research to a publisher (often involving payment of a submission fee), referee the work of other academics for free and pay a heavy price to buy the output back from the publishers?
In Economics a printed free publishing system has existed over a long period of time in the form of working papers early accounts of research findings.
They are usually published by the department with whom their author is affiliated.
Many university Economics departments have series of working papers which are circulated to other universities on an exchange basis, or at a nominal charge.
Wider use of working papers has however been hampered by problems of current awareness and the handling costs associated with holding stocks of papers.
To realise the vision of a free electronic publishing environment in Economics, we need to take the existing free publication system off the paper cart and put it into an electronic Formula-1 car.
There are many reasons why an electronic working paper collection is superior.
First, it is less costly to its publisher, because the author supplies the first copy at no cost and the marginal cost of an additional copy is close to zero.
Second, if a good current awareness database system for working papers is available it can break the ‘insider problem’ of papers only circulating among a small group of researchers who thereby gain an advantage.
If the insider circle is based in the United States (as it often is) British research is at a considerable disadvantage.
Third, it allows poor institutions with Internet access to obtain research results at low cost.
WoPEc (Working Papers in Economics) [1] was the first collection of electronic working papers to open in Economics.
It received its first contribution in April 1993, and continues to store working papers, though its main activity now is to collect metadata on electronic working papers stored at other institutions.
Collecting bibliographic references to documents rather than collecting the documents themselves may seem odd at first, since most pre-print services hold documents and metadata on the same site.
A central Economics pre-print archive was indeed opened in the US in 1993, the Electronic Working Paper Archive, based upon the Ginsparg software used in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Electronic Preprint Archive [2].
It has not been overwhelmingly successful.
Other ‘local’ archives continue to proliferate.
These may be held on institutional or departmental servers, or even collections of documents in an individual’s Web home page.
Our collection of bibliographic information from these sites now runs to well in excess of 3000 documents from around 300 series.
The exposure that papers on the system enjoy is quite impressive.
WoPEc ran unfunded from April 1993 to August 1996, and was developed by the author.
In the second year the project gained José Manuel Barrueco Cruz of Universitat de València.
ELib funding was awarded in May 1996.
A whois++ based search interface has now been implemented.
References WoPEc Web Site, http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/WoPEc.html Los Alamos National Laboratory Electronic Preprint Archive, http://xxx.lanl.gov/ Author Details Thomas Krichel WoPEc Project Director email: T.Krichel@surrey.ac.uk Tel: 01483 300800 x2785 Fax: 01483 303775 Personal Web Page: http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk/ Address: University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur: Valerie Mendes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: Valerie Mendes Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS In Minotaur, the collective voice of Internet enthusiasts is countered by words of scepticism or caution.
In this issue, publishing consultant Valerie Mendes puts the PC in its place.
One morning in early June 1990 I caught a train from Oxford and went to see my bank manager in London.
"I want to start my own publishing consultancy, " I told him.
"I've spent twenty-five years in the industry.
I've developed a series of specialisms which no single publishing house can satisfy.
My second bedroom will make a perfect office.
I can write, edit, research, project manage.
I want to offer a top-quality service.
I'm very flexible and very determined. "
A pair of bright blue eyes glinted at me across the polished desk.
"And what equipment do you have? "
he asked.
"A fountain pen and lots of white paper," I replied.
"Oh and a telephone.
What more could I need?"
We both laughed.
I signed the documents, received my small business loan, travelled home and rang my accountant with the news.
I comissioned a designer to create the logo for new stationery and began with the utmost care to spend the remainder of the loan on new equipment.
First an answerphone.
Then a fax machine.
Then, three hard-working months later and with great trepidation, a computer and a laser printer.
Within days the machines had transformed my professional life.
Letters, faxes, analyses, reports, memos, minutes of meetings, budget sheets, production checklists and children's stories poured out of the laser printer, immaculately headed, typed and presented.
They could be edited, altered, revised and updated with clarity and ease.
They could be saved or not.
I could no longer even imagine how I had ever managed without my chief of staff.
It served my creative and administrative purposes magnificently.
But I soon realised what it didn't do.
When it comes to editing a typescript, give me my Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V7 Fine red pen.
Very fine, very red and absolutely no substitute.
The really detailed, meticulous, caring editorial process is complicated, intricate and highly skilled.
The editor becomes a cross between a police officer and a washerwoman, a teacher and a linguist, a grammarian and a pernickity rulemaker, a sign-poster and a designer, a typesetter and a mini-dictionary.
The spelling of all names, the dating of all dates, the physical descriptions of all peoples and places – every tiny detail must be consistent.
Quotations from sources must be accurate.
The editor must ask at the end of every sentence – "Does that make sense?
Is it clear and concise and unambiguous?
Would I as a reader understand it?
No?
Then how might I as tactfully, neatly and economically as possible improve the original text?
Make it flow with grace and effortless ease?"
When do I alter the original without asking and when do I check back with the author to confirm the change?
When do I make silent unilateral decisions and when do I make a fuss For me, this entire process is crucially paper-based.
The weight and feel and presentation – the project's own individuality – sit on my desk.
"Here I am," it says.
"I am immaculately presented/a hideous mess.
I have been carefully written/thrown together on the back of a bus.
This book is the result of years of painstaking research/a rehash of an old thesis which I am tired of presenting."
I can tell at a glance what I am in for.
On goes the police officer's hat.
On go the washerwoman's gloves.
The paper can be sorted and sifted and sieved.
The extent can be checked and the contents list amended.
The references can be identified and the look and feel of my latest baby weighed and measured.
None of this can be done in the same way, at the same speed and with the same antennae on screen.
On-screen editing is a secondary process which should be done only after the hardcopy has been cleaned and corrected, pruned and polished.
Ideally, on-screen editing should be done by an efficient typesetter who has the skill to manipulate and to read the original disk.
Why should the editor be asked or expected to do it all?
To save time?
To limit costs?
To cut a few corners?
To reduce the hassle?
To ignore the postage?
Possibly all of these.
Then where is the commitment and courtesy?
And where are the standards of excellence?
In my book, if you can't publish without those, why bother?
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Burnside Writes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Burnside Writes Buzz html Citation BibTex RIS John Burnside takes his first tentative step in Web page creation.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN”> John Burnside writes John Burnside describes his first tentative step at Web page design… Having worked in the computer industry once, I still find myself scanning the IT jobs pages in newspapers, just to see what’s around.
Force of habit, I suppose.
Recently, what’s been interesting is the growing demand for web page developers, people who bring with them a certain design flair and, more importantly, an ability to develop the client’s web page as a corporate asset.
In other words, as a medium for PR and marketing.
This is no surprise.
The Internet is too obvious an opportunity for businesses to miss out on.
It’s no surprise, either, that presentation wins out in such developments.
After all, businesses want to be seen in a good light.
What is surprising, however, is how the presentation over content mentality so quickly and radically permeates one’s thinking and expectations.
By now, we all know that you can’t talk about the real world on television.
This is because the real world is complex and subtle, while television subsists on simple, thirty second soundbites.
If you want to be heard, you have to learn to talk in soundbites, or risk being cut or, worse still, misrepresented.
It needn’t be so.
And it needn’t be so on the Internet.
The trouble is, there’s a danger we are all going to be “raised” to the level of the corporate image makers.
Home pages that look like something from IBM.
University libraries that resemble corporate sales departments.
I sincerely hope we’ll stop short of that.
Recently, though, I was working on a modest web page of my own.
It was fun writing the basic HTML, and I thought it would be fun to develop things further.
The purpose of the page is, basically, to offer a few examples of my work.
Yet when I started thinking about the design, I found myself gathering obscure pictures, working out how to put together panels, adding links for the sheer hell of it and generally missing the point.
It was some time before I could bring myself to discard the fancy design, and just put up a few poems.
They look okay.
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Web Editorial: Goodbyeee Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Editorial: Goodbyeee Buzz metadata groovy research Citation BibTex RIS The Web editor, John Kirriemuir bows out after ten Ariadne issues.
This is my last issue as editor of the Web version of Ariadne.
In a few weeks time, I will leaving the fluffy bunch of people collectively known as “UKOLN” [1], to join the equally fluffy bunch of people known as the “ILRT” [2].
Just time for a quick look at what is in this issue, and then some thanks to various people who have been useful/groovy/fluffy to Ariadne over the last ooooh, two years or so, now.
Issue 10 in particular In this particular issue, the topic of metadata looms heavy, with several articles making direct or indirect reference to said subject area [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] not always in a positive sense.
This is a crucial summer for the Dublin Core posse the Core has been around for a while, now, but for it to be useful and effective, a fair body of quality resources on the Internet need to incorporate it.
With a critical mass of Core-d resources, it will be possible in the short term to experiment with more accurate indexing of Web-based resources, while in the longer term, search engines and subject gateways could well incorporate it into their indexing systems.
The more quality resources that embed the Core, the greater the chances of this happening.
It’s up to you… (but Andy’s got a few tips to share to help you on your way [8]).
Also in this issue, Cultural Change, rears its many-faced head, both in the frank and revealing report [9] on how eLib hasn’t quite (so far) been the catalyst for cultural change that many people were hoping for, and in the wry Cybercollege article [10], where you can test whether your insitution has embraced Cultural Change and IT to full effect.
On the eLib front, it isn’t all doom and gloom Netskills reports some impressive results to date, for example [11], while ACORN reveal how their deliverable will work [12].
The section on resources for librarians (though also embracing all academics) consists of articles from major single-site Web-based resources.
So we have NISS [13] and BUBL [14], who form with the ANR services such as SOSIG, OMNI, ADAM and EEVL, a sort of “love triangle” of gateways through which academic librarians can discover quality on-line resources.
Speaking of SOSIG, Tracey Hooper reveals the new interface [15] to the premier on-line gateway to Social Science resources, while back in the resources section, the Berkeley Digital Library [16] is an interesting support resource that people involved in building “bits” of the Digital Library should check out.
Other topics of interest to those building the Digital Library include the trials of an Electronic Document Delivery system in an academic library [17], while another article of direct interest to academic librarians and digital library researchers speaks of the implementation of electronic journal systems in libraries [18].
Amidst the many other articles in this issue, the caption competition returns!
We were fortunate for someone with a camera to be in the same lobster restaurant as the JISC Head of programmes, Norman Wiseman [19] have a go, and see if you can win a prize!
And the future The future.
As subscribers to lis-elib will know, Ariadne was offered funding for another year, and decided to take the money and run, for another six issues (minimum).
Therefore, every two months until at least July 1998, issues will be appearing on the Web, and in print form.
Haven’t seen the print version of Ariadne?
Well, if you work in a UK University library, computer centre or learning resource centre, you should have, as several copies of Ariadne are posted to your unit.
Ask your librarian/director/cyber-resource facilitator (yuk!)
where the copies go to if this question elicits blank looks, email the folks at ariadne@tay.ac.uk, who will tell you who is hoarding the print copies of Ariadne in your institution.
Issue 11 and onwards of Ariadne on the Web, as well as lot of other things such as the eLib Web pages until someone replaces moi, is handed over to Isobel, UKOLN’s Web Officer (good luck, and beware of thinly disguised adverts for CD-ROMs, masquerading as articles)(you know who you are out there give it a rest).
Suggestions for (proper) articles, comments, thoughts, electronic cash should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk from now on.
Similarly, emails about things elib should not go to my email address, but should go to: elib@ukoln.ac.uk (we’re too sensible here to go in for all this silly “capital letters in the middle of words” business).
And thanks A lot of people have been involved in Ariadne in some way or other; nearly three hundred different people have directly written for us.
As well as the aforementioned legions of scribes, Ariadne has had the backing of an excellent and virile editorial board, who have provided much comment and support; so long, petals, and drop into Bristol for the party.
In addition, all of UKOLN have participated (sometimes even willingly :-) in some part of Ariadne production, be it writing for Ariadne, snaring authors, administration tasks, keeping out of my way during markup/issue-build week, and so forth.
Ariadne stands or gently topples over by its content; the advantages of producing it in an organisation which is in (or maybe, just “is”) the eye of the hurricane of Library and Networking development (Peter: now you know what the logo means!)
have been obvious and crucial in obtaining, or providing the means of obtaining, this content.
To use the old cliche, there are simply “too many people to thank”.
So cheers to you all; a very special “ta very much” for various things goes to Emma and Catherine from the ILRT, Sarah (Netlinks), Sue (OMNI), the entire Netskills team (well-excellent people), Beckie and Tony (ADAM), Clare “will the last person to leave the IIELR in Milton Keynes please turn off all the lights?
Oh shit, it’s me…” Davies, Jon and Martin (ANR would be up the creek without an IAFA template without you), Nicola (fluffy JILT workaholic), Emma (FIDDO) and Fiona from our own library here at Bath.
JISC and the BL have been equally groovy, supportive and useful to Ariadne over the 2 or so years; notable people who well deserve thanks are Dave Cook, Lynne Brindley, Norman Wiseman, Alice Colban, Chris Rusbridge, Kelly Russell and Graham Jefcoate.
Finally, but certainly not least, we have the “gang of more or less six or so” who work on Ariadne (all of us part-time), so cheers to Lorcan, John, Isobel, Terry, and (most especially) Alison Kilgour (huge thanks and a slice of Dundee cake there you’ve done a magnificent job).
Finally, as an afterthought, I’d like to thank the stranger at last years boomerang championships who showed me how to improvise a working boomerang out of a print copy of Ariadne.
If you ever read this, it still works, and I did eventually get one made out of an eLib poster to fly the aptly named “Cultural Change” took off in the end… References [1] UKOLN Staff Index, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/groups/ukoln/staff/ [2] ILRT Staff Index, http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/index.html [3] Interview with Clifford Lynch, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/clifford/ [4] Dublin Core Management, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/dublin/ [5] Search Engine Corner Keyword Spamming: cheat your way to the top, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/search-engines/ [6] Minotaur: Gordon Dunsire Metadata: to be, or not to be (catalogued), http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/metadata/ [7] Metadata Corner Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/metadata/ [8] Dublin Core Management, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/dublin/ [9] eLib: Changing the Lightbulb er, the Culture, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/cultural/ [10] Cybercollege Scorecard How does your University score?, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/cybercollege/ [11] Netskills Network Skills for the UK Higher Education Community, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/netskills/ [12] The technical implementation of project ACORN, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/acorn/ [13] NISS: What it is and what we do, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/niss/ [14] BUBL: What it is and what we do, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/bubl/ [15] Planet SOSIG the new SOSIG interface, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/planet-sosig/ [16] A Digital Library Showcase and Support Service the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/sunsite/ [17] Electronic Document Delivery: A trial in an academic library, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/edd/ [18] Electronic Journals problem or panacea?, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/journals/ [19] Caption Competition starring the JISC head of programmes, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/caption/ Author Details John Kirriemuir, (Outgoing) Ariadne Web editor, Email: lisjwk@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Document Delivery: A Trial in an Academic Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Document Delivery: A Trial in an Academic Library Buzz database copyright tiff ftp Citation BibTex RIS In part two of this report, Fiona Williams describes the trials of various electronic document delivery systems in University of Bath Library and Learning Centre over the last few years.
Following the original Electronic Document Delivery (EDD) trial using Blackwell’s Uncover Service, a number of recommendations were made which led to an investigation into other document delivery services available on the market.
The criteria used to decide which services would best suit the needs of the user, and the University of Bath Library staff who would be carrying out the trial are outlined in the first article of this two-part series (Williams).
Two services were recommended for further trial, the BL Urgent Action Service (BLUA) and the Delft University of Technology Document Delivery Service (TUDELFT).
BLUA was used as it was already familiar to the library staff and because of its extensive coverage.
TUDELFT was decided on because of the low cost and because the majority of requests in the past had been science and technology requests.
It was hoped that TUDELFT would be able to accommodate most of the requests.
Aim to run the two services in tandem to compare and contrast the cost, speed of delivery, and the quality of copies received to compare this trial with the Uncover trial and decided which service/s best suited the needs of our users and the Library.
to look at the advantages and disadvantages of all the services to use the trial to see if EDD could save money on expensive journal subscriptions to continue to quickly obtain “urgently required documents” a service which had become very popular to provide a complementary service to the ILL service and not a substitute for it Funding A total of £2,000 was made available from Library funds to run the service initially for six months starting August 1996.
If the service became so popular that it became administratively difficult to run, the service would be withdrawn immediately.
The trial eventually finished at the end of the Easter vacation in April 1997.
Method The trial was open to all staff and postgraduates within the University.
It was emphasised as a service which was available for urgently required articles only, and not as a substitute for normal ILLs.
The trial was advertised in staff and student newsletters, as well as the combined Computing and Library newsletter.
Fliers were also put in staff and postgraduate pigeon holes within the Departments.
The trial was run by one member of staff from the User Services team.
Applications were accepted by email, post or in person.
Approximately 90% of the requests were sent to TUDELFT first, unless they were very obviously Arts & Humanities based.
If TUDELFT were unable to process the order, the request was immediately sent to the BL for Urgent Action.
Requests to TUDELFT were sent by email and received via ftp (file transfer protocol).
The articles were then printed out on the library laser printers.
Requests to the BL were faxed and articles were sent out by first class post.
Requesters were informed by email that their requests had arrived which they collected from the Library; the copyright declaration forms were signed on collection.
Review after 4 months A review of the service took place in December 1996.
Overall it was felt that the service was running well.
In the 4 months since the trial began:137 requests had been processed; 7 had not been supplied and 6 were returned as they were already on our shelves; 10 had not been collected; 58 staff/postgrads used the service; 115 titles had been provided; 50% of the £2,000 allocation was spent Feedback A questionnaire was sent to all users in December 1996 19⁄45 replies were returned.
What do you use the service for?
13⁄19 replied that they had required information urgently 12⁄19 also felt it was an alternative to ILLs 8⁄19 more convenient than filling out ILL forms How do you order articles via EDD 100% electronically 16⁄19 of them via the Web page.
0% by hand “ease of use” 18 replies said that was either good or excellent 9 Excellent 9 Good 1 Fair How good has the response rate been?
3 <24 hours 10 24-48 hours 8 other Have you been satisfied with the response?
16 yes 2 no 1 no answer Have you been satisfied with the quality of print?
12 good 4 excellent 1 fair 2 no answer Do you want to see the service continued?
19⁄19 yes     Would it be useful as a complementary service to ILLs?
18⁄19 yes 1 no answer   Would EDD be an acceptable alternative to cancelling a subscription 9⁄19 answered yes 7⁄19 answered no 2 N/A Results of the whole trial 1.
Speed of delivery The following table illustrates the length of time taken to process and deliver requests by the 2 service providers.
In total 271 requests were made.
74.6% of those provided by TUDELFT and 56.4% provided by the BL were delivered within 48 hours.
However, of the 271 requests made (the majority of which were science and technology requests) TUDELFT were only able to provide just over 50%.
At first they were able to provide a very high percentage of the requests, but as they trial continued this reduced to virtually a 50⁄50 split.
Delivery Time British Library UA % TUDELFT % 4 48 hours 75 56.4 103 74.6 48 52 hours 14 10.5 11 8 4 days 31 23.3 15 10.9 5 days 6 4.5 4 2.9 6 days 0 0.0 3 2.2 7 days 3 2.3 1 0.7 8 days 0 0.00 1 0.7 ?
4 3.0 0 0.00 Total 133 49.1 138 50.9 * requests ordered and supplied over a weekend.
Types of journal titles supplied Titles TUDELFT BL Science 103 54 Medicine 1 17 Management 4 11 Environment 8 0 Humanities/ Social Sciences 2 29 Details of borrowers by department and numbers of requests Departments Requests No of requesters Chemistry 63 13 Biology & Biochemistry 47 11 Management 30 8 Pharmacy & Pharmacology 24 8 Physics 20 9 Chem Eng 16 5 H&SS 16 6 Maths 13 5 Education 11 4 Others 31 16 The statistics showed that in the 9 months the trial ran, 271 requests were made by 85 different people.
The two highest requesting Departments were Biology and Chemistry; most of these requests were satisfied by TUDELFT.
The third highest requesting school was Management; most of these requests were satisfied by BL Urgent Action.
Considering the high proportion of science and technology articles requested, it was disappointing that TUDELFT only managed to provide just over 50%.
Advantages and disadvantages of BLUA, TUDELFT and Uncover 1.
Cost effective At £5.19 per article TUDELFT were 2½ times cheaper than the BL and about 3 times cheaper than Blackwells.
BL’s and TUDELFT prices are guaranteed for articles under 50 pages, whereas Uncover’s prices are dependent on the individual copyright charges made per article .
2.
Delivery via email, fax or post BL articles were sent out by first class post to the Library, so we were dependant on the postal service but overall found the service very effective.
TUDELFT articles were sent via ftp which were received by the Customer Services Librarian and then sent to the Library laser printers.
Uncover was the most popular service with the users because the articles were faxed directly to the requester as required.
3.
Quality of articles received Very good quality from both BL and TUDELFT.
One of the main criticisms of Uncover had been the quality of the faxes particularly for articles with diagrams and tables.
4.
Request articles via email, fax or phone Most requests were made by email which were printed and then faxed to BL, or forwarded straight to TUDELFT.
Uncover had its own request system, which was very time consuming as all the information had to be re-keyed.
5.
Database searching All requests were directly sent to BL or TUDELFT without having to search a database first to check if the order could be processed.
With Uncover, the database had to be searched first, which was one of the major problems with the service, because searching and access was so slow, and very frustrating.
6.
“Confirmation of receipt” of requests Uncover did not provide this service at the time the trial was being carried out.
BL confirmed whether or not they could process the request within a couple of hours of receiving the order.
TUDELFT were variable, sometimes confirming quickly, other times not actually confirming the order was going to be processed until after the article had arrived.
This caused some problems as we were sending most of the orders to TUDELFT first and then onto the BL if they could not process the order.
This was particularly frustrating for the users who required the articles urgently, .
7.
Ease of payment BL payments made by the voucher scheme so no increased workload.
Accounts were set up with TUDELFT and Uncover who debited them after each transaction.
8.
Copyright declaration Copyright declarations were required for all requests from the BL and TUDELFT.
The forms were signed by the requester on collection of the article from the Library.
Uncover were able to fax articles directly to the requester because a copyright charge per article was included as part of the service.
9.
Customer support All 3 services have a very good back up service, although as the trial continued, the responses from TUDELFT were very variable.
In some cases the article arrived before the message confirming that they were processing the order.
Near to the end of the trial, it was felt that TUDELFT was getting slower in replying and providing articles.
10.
Administrative handling The BL service has been used by the University of Bath for a number of years, and therefore we are used to the administration required.
TUDELFT was administratively more difficult to set up initially because all the procedures were done electronically.
This took time to get used to and a few procedures needed to be “tweaked”.
It was also time consuming getting the article because of the number of commands needed to retrieve the articles from the server.
A macro however could solve this.
Both the BL and Uncover services sent the article in a format which could be used immediately.
TUDELFT became a very paper administrative service.
All the information about a request needed to be on paper to help with the customer service side of the service.
Uncover was frustrating because of having to rekey the information and search the database, but overall was very easy to handle administratively.
Technical problems With TUDELFT we had some problems which were peculiar to OUR environment.
Articles were being sent by TUDELFT via ftp.
To print these tiff format files, they had to be converted to postscript using the tiff to postscript command.
Large postscript files were created but were very slow to print (approximately 10 minutes per page) because of the serial line .
To rectify this, the files were converted to postscript in a two stage process, creating smaller postscript files which improved the download time.
Each page was received individually via ftp.
These were sent to the Library laser printers individually which as already mentioned was extremely slow.
Computing Services wrote a program to assemble all the pages into one document, which was then sent to just one printer.
It still took a long time for the pages to be printed but it only kept one of the three library printers out of action.
The Way Forward The feedback from the trial showed that the main uses of EDD are:to quickly obtain urgently required documents an alternative to the ILL service by some users an option when cancelling expensive journal subscriptions if necessary (one of the Library’s main aims when it first started the EDD trials) The results of the trials suggest that BLUA is an efficient and easy to use service, but expensive.
Although initially difficult to get used to, 50% of the requests were processed by TUDELFT, with 75% of those requests being processed within 48 hours.
In balance the comparatively low cost of the service outweighs the potential problems.
Although Uncover was popular with the users, access and searching the database was too slow, it is expensive and the poor quality of the faxes make it an unacceptable service at the present time.
The University of Bath Library staff would like to develop an EDD service further, but the costs of implementing and integrating new procedures into the ILLs department is not feasible at present with the possibility of a new library system being implemented in 1998.
However once implementation of a new system takes place, it is recommended that EDD is offered as part of the ILLs service.
Until then, starting in September 1997 the following service will be offered to the Departments:Urgent requests will be accepted by the Customer Services Librarian, via the Web page or on a signed ILL form with URGENT ACTION written on the front.
A copyright template will be available on the Web which must be downloaded by the requester, completed and signed and put in the internal post to the Customer Services Librarian.
The Customer Services Librarian will immediately request the document from TUDELFT or BL Urgent Action, depending on whom she thinks will be able to supply the document.
If TUDELFT are unable to supply, the request will then automatically be sent to BL.
On receipt of both the article and the signed photocopy declaration, the article will be sent by internal post to the requester.
Implications for the Departments: the EDD trials are over, the service will no longer be free.
The costs will be charged to the Departments and they must decide how they want to use the service.
costs are as follows: BL Urgent Action service is the equivalent of 3 ILL forms (£13.50); TUDELFT is £6.50 (i.e.
cost of the service plus printing charges).
methods of payment: BL Urgent Action requests will be charged as normal; money will be credited to the TUDELFT account which they will draw upon once the requests are fulfilled.
Once a term the costs will be worked out for each department and be adjusted on the Library spreadsheet.
References WILLIAMS, F (1997) Electronic Document Delivery a trial in an academic library.
ARIADNE issue 10, July 15 [WWW] http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/edd/ Acknowledgements: My grateful thanks to Pat Heynes, Customer Services Librarian, University of Bath for all her hard work in running the trial using TUDELFT and BLUA and to Dennis Davis, BUCS for his technical help.
Author details Fiona Williams, Faculty Librarian, University of Bath Email: lisfmw@bath.ac.uk Phone: 01225 826826 ext.5248 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sideline Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sideline Buzz windows Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl on the delights of sharing the blandest of Midland hotels with a group of eLib project managers for a couple of days.
Not a PC in sight.
Not a torn fly-poster left over from the end of last session's revelries anywhere.
Instead, seven storeys of the blandest of Midlands hotels, on a smeary wet couple of September days towards the end of the summer vacation.
This is a course for eLib Project Managers new to the business of balancing the three key Project Management variables (Time, Quality and Cost).
Delegates have had their hotel bills generously paid by FIGIT.
Suites abound.
There is the Dinkworth Suite and the Lapwing Suite, the Hogshead and the Ashford, the Meltdown and the Boredom.
Each has a stickle-brick noticeboard outside.
"JAGUAR APPRENTICE'S TRAINING".
"ELIB PROJECT MANAGER'S".
We're in the Dinkworth, sitting round three sides of a rectangle of tables.
The course presenter takes us through the material at a snappy pace.
It transpires that the question we all want to have answered is how to manage a Project whose participants are a consortium of geographically dispersed institutions?
Our Project teams are reliant upon e-mail and team meetings at mutually inconvenient sites.
The Presenter is keen on breaks.
We break for coffees and mini-doughnuts; for lunch; for tea.
We break into syndicate groups to discuss our strategies and confess to each other our failures to date.
Rain falls at three different speeds.
It dribbles down the windows, plops from the grey ledges above, and fizzes darkly against the trees across the road from the car park.
Lunch on the second day is largely a re-heat job from last night, as though a ploy to confirm our jadedness.
Course over and Presenter thanked, I collapse with relief into an airport-bound taxi with two fellow (now fully fledged) Project Managers.
The rain has stopped, and the sun spreads some new light around.
We pass a sign which says "Welcome to Solihull".
I grin, inexplicably.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: An Internet Open Day Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: An Internet Open Day Buzz archives research Citation BibTex RIS Sally Criddle describes a World Wide Web training event organised by UKOLN and the University of Bath for the 1997 National Libraries Week.
As the number of public libraries that offer Internet access, for their staff and/or the public increases, many libraries will be wanting to provide basic training for staff and the public that familiarise them with the World Wide Web.
In many situations what is required is a training package that is flexible, that staff or members of the public can work through independently or in a group and that is relatively cheap to produce and administer.
The recent report, New Library: The People’s Network [1] places great emphasis on the need for all public libraries to provide Internet access for the public and for all library staff to be competent in its use.
If the proposals in the report are adopted, there will be a further incentive for public libraries to provide such a basic introduction.
In November of last year, UKOLN and the University of Bath [2] responded to National Libraries Week by devising such a programme for local councillors and the public.
This article describes how the programme was put together and the Open Day that the University hosted at which the programme was used.
UKOLN and the University of Bath’s response to National Libraries Week was initiated by the University Librarian, Howard Nicholson, and Sarah Ormes, UKOLN’s public library networking researcher.
The Librarian was keen that the public should get a chance to see and use some of the facilities available in the recently refurbished University Library and Learning Centre [3].
The Centre is open 24 hours a day and has 350 PC networked terminals with Internet access.
Sarah Ormes, was a member of the Bath 1997 National Libraries Week working group, which included representatives from public, school and special libraries.
The working group were particularly keen that any event planned around that Internet should give people that would not normal have the opportunity or the inclination to use the Internet, a chance to sample the World Wide Web.
A project team from UKOLN (Sally Criddle, Sarah Ormes and Isobel Stark) and the Library and Learning Centre (Dan Holden and Jonathan Orford) organised the event with help from Bath University Computing Services [4] IT Trainer, Rosie Brown.
Other staff from the Library and UKOLN provided support on the day.
Aim of the event In order to try and make the event appealing to those people that would not normally seek out the opportunity to use the Internet, we wanted to promote the event through the subjects that could be investigated on the WWW.
We wanted to highlight that this would be an information finding event using the Internet – promoting the idea of the Internet as a tool rather then something to be used for it’s own sake.
To achieve this we focused on particular groups of people and their information needs.
The groups chosen were: Local Councillors The public library was particularly keen that local councillors be specifically invited to an introductory session.
It was felt to be important that councillors, particularly member of library committees, are aware of and understand the significance of the Internet in the context of public libraries.
We also wanted to demonstrate to councillors the resources available on the WWW that could be of use to them in their work.
Family History Researchers Anecdotal evidence suggests that older people make less use of the Internet than other age groups.
Indeed, a study [5] conducted recently at Bath Central Library (when the Library provided public access to the Internet) found that only 5% of users of this Internet facility were 45 years and over, and none of the users, surveyed at random, were over 65 years.
In consultation with the local public library, we decided that Family History, a very well used section of the local libraries, was an area that would particularly appeal to older people.
Parents helping their children with homework/school projects Many parents are introduced to IT and the Internet through their children.
IT is an established part of the National Curriculum and the Government has made a number of statements to suggest that they aim to enable all schools to have a connection to the Internet [6].
Many children are using computers and the Internet in schools and public libraries already and helping their children use the home or local library computer to complete homework and projects is often a way into IT for parents.
Materials We wanted to demonstrate the diversity of resources available on the WWW, from local to international information, to show people material that was relevant to their information needs and to dispel myths about the Internet only being for ‘techies’.
Rather than let people loose in the vastness that is cyberspace, we selected 20-30 sites for each subject area.
We were looking for attractive, easy to navigate sites that contained useful and relevant information.
Web sites selected as examples of Family History sites included: The web site of the UK Public Record Office [7].
Familia: a web-based directory of family history resources available in UK public libraries [8].
Pier 21: a Canadian project of archive materials and personal reminiscences of people who entered and left this important port in Nova Scotia during WWII [9].
In order to give people a more structured introduction to the WWW a number of questions were devised for each web site.
To answer the questions people would have to explore the site in-depth and for a reason.
This avoided directionless ‘surfing’ and showed that the web can be used to find specific pieces of information.
Separate web pages were produced for each session with each page listing the resources that had been selected.
The questions were produced as an A5 handout.
Posters and tickets for the event were produced in house, using PowerPoint.
As well as the event being advertised in the local public libraries, the Bath 1997 National Libraries Week working group produced a brochure listing all the local events that were planned for the week.
This was delivered to all households in the area and was published in the local newspaper, the Bath Chronicle.
As we had to limit the number of people we could accommodate in the Library and Learning Centre, the Central Library in Bath issued tickets, free of charge, on a first come first served basis.
Structure of the day Four separate sessions were held during the day, each lasting for 90 minutes.
As well as the three subject areas already described, we ran a session entitled “Around the Internet in 90 minutes” which looked at resources of general interest such as current affairs, music, gardening and food and drink.
Each session was lead by a different member of the project group.
We were able to use 50 terminals in an area of the Library that could be cordoned off.
As the computing/Internet experience of the people attending varied greatly, each session began with the University’s IT trainer giving a short introduction on using the terminals and a basic description of the Internet.
An A5 handout “The Internet and the World Wide Web” was also produced and given to all participants, which provided a little more background to the Internet/WWW.
After the general introduction, the leader of each session gave a short presentation describing how the materials could be used as an introduction to the WWW.
The sessions proceeded with people either following the questions devised or if they chose, roaming freely around the WWW.
Most sessions had a ratio of about four members of the public to one member of staff to ensure that help was readily available for those that required it.
Everyone taking part in the sessions was asked to complete a questionnaire that asked about previous Internet experience, opinions of the event and issues related to the Internet and public libraries.
Participants could take the handouts away with them at the end of the session.
Practical arrangements All local councillors were personally invited to their session by the University Librarian Entry to the public sessions was by ticket only, which were available from the central public library.
No charge was made for these.
The only restriction made was that anyone under 16 had to be accompanied by an adult.
People were offered a tour of the Library and Learning Centre after each session.
In preparing the event, we had liased closely with Bath University Computing Services staff to ensure that we had taken as many steps as we could to ensure that we could illuminate as many potential technical problems as possible.
For example, at the beginning of the event, the terminals were set with our Internet Open Day web site as the home page so that if people got lost during the sessions, clicking on the home button would return them to a familiar page.
Before each session, all WWW links were cached to the local University store to ensure that links would be as quick as possible.
We did prepare for the unlikely, but not inconceivable event, that a serious technical problem on the day meant that we were unable to use the terminals at all.
Short presentations were prepared in which the selected web sites would be talked about and illustrated with screen shots of the pages.
The Day Despite the threat of high winds and torrential rain, on Saturday 6th November, over 150 people made the trip up the hill to the University during the day, which passed without major technical hitches.
The Family History session was particularly successful in attracting people from an older age range with little experience of computers – our target group.
Disappointingly, only four local councillors attended.
Informal feedback from the participants was very encouraging and a studious hum and tapping of keyboards was all that could be heard during most of the day’s sessions as people were enthralled by what they were finding.
Questionnaire results From the questionnaires that were completed, 76% of people attending were 41 years of age or over and an encouraging 28% were over 65 years.
About a half (56%) had never used the Internet before, but all would use it again.
Everyone questioned felt that public libraries should provide Internet access and 77% would be willing to pay up to £5 an hour to use it.
However, the fact that 86% of people said that they would pay £5 more tax a year to enable this does somewhat cast a shadow of doubt over these statistics!
Many positive comments were made on the questionnaires, including: Really great to hold this sort of event I wish we had an “Internet consultant” at the local library Very grateful for the opportunity Easier and quicker than I thought Good opportunity for families to learn together A very angst free introduction Training site was very helpful/interesting Entry to a new world, excellent!
I have crossed a barrier and found this session very interesting.
Very helpful staff, good opportunity to involve people who hadn’t tried before.
The Library Association nominated the event as one of the twelve most innovative activities of National Libraries Week.
Conclusion All the staff involved in the event felt it a very worthwhile experience.
We were particularly pleased that so many of the people taking part in the sessions had little or no experience of IT and that the vast majority of them enjoyed their new experience.
It was disappointing that we did not attract more local councillors.
It could have just been that they could not afford the time, but if it was due to lack of interest it does suggests that public libraries have much work to do in persuading councillors of the value of public access Internet connections.
Another interesting observation was that the group who were most easily bored by the exercises were some of the younger children, who were more interested in playing games than exploring the web sites in the programme.
We did not have a budget for producing the materials and organising the Open Day, so materials had to be produced in house and printed using a laser printer.
The materials were produced inexpensively and quickly – all the printing being done on the office laser printer.
As well as providing a well attended and valued contribution to Bath’s National Library Week programme, this event provided the opportunity to demonstrate how a flexible training package can be produced and delivered inexpensively.
Materials available The original web page that was produced for the Internet Open Day is available on the UKOLN server [10].
Other materials produced for the event, questions, “Introducing the Internet and WWW” handout, the poster and tickets are available as Word and PowerPoint documents and can also be downloaded from UKOLN’s website [11].
These materials are being incorporated in a New Library: The People’s Network briefing pack produced by UKOLN in conjunction with the Library Association [12] and EARL [13] that will be distributed to all library authorities soon.
Notes UKOLN provides research, awareness and information services in the area of network information management.
It is supporting the emergence of viable digital information environments, and works to influence practice and policy through a range of activities and publications.
UKOLN is funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC’s Electronic Libraries Programme and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
References [1] Library and Information Commission.
New Library: The People’s Network [online] Place of Publication: UKOLN Available from http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/ [March 6th 1998] [2] University of Bath http://www.bath.ac.uk/ [March 6th 1998] [3] University of Bath Library and Learning Centre http://www.bath.ac.uk/Library/ [March 6th 1998] [4] University of Bath Computing Services http://www.bath.ac.uk/BUCS/ [March 6th 1998] [5] Criddle, S. L., 1997 A Study of Internet Use in a Public Library.
MSc dissertation (unpublished).
[6] Connecting the Learning Society: The Government’s consultation paper on the National Grid for Learning.
Owner/Maintainer: Department for Education and Employment Available from http://www.open.gov.uk/dfee/grid/index.htm [March 6th 1998] [7] UK Public Record Office http://www.open.gov.uk/pro/prohome.htm[March 6th 1998] [8] Familia http://www.earl.org.uk/familia/index.html [March 6th 1998] [9] Pier 21 http://www.pier21.ns.ca/ [March 6th 1998] [10] Internet Open Day Web pages http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/libweb/nlw97/internet-day/ [March 6th 1998] [11] Internet Open Day Printed Materials http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/publib/intro2.html [March 6th 1998] [12] Library Association http://www.la-hq.org.uk/ [March 6th 1998] [13] EARL http://www.earl.org.uk/ [March 6th 1998] Author Details Sally Criddle Resource Co-ordinator UKOLN s.criddle@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill Buzz ejournal research Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Jenkins looks at BIPEx, Bowker Information Professionals' Exchange and meets some of the people behind it.
Ruth Jenkins BOWKER SAUR HAS RECENTLY introduced a new service which is designed to appeal to the increasingly catholic profession of library and information service professionals.
BIPEx is the Bowker Information Professionals’ Exchange.
Ruth Jenkins went to talk to the UK-European Sales Manager Fiona Leslie, and Commissioning Editor for LIS Lists Linda Hajdukiewicz, who is the prime mover behind the service.
From January 1998 subscriptions to the electronic versions of the main Bowker Saur LIS journals will include BIPEx.
This has been done with the laudable aim of keeping the cost down.
The publishers are naturally very aware of the strain on budgets in this particular sector but it will be interesting to see if the company is able to continue to offer BIPEx as a minimal cost addition to journal subscriptions.
The launch followed a thorough exercise in market research using a very wide range of survey techniques.
Feedback from the results was incorporated into the project.
For example, Acrobat was already being widely used, hence PDF was deemed acceptable.
Linda and Fiona believe that the research has been painstaking, but quite naturally they will review the operation in the light of experience and make further changes if necessary.
Linda mentioned that the “In touch with LIS” feature and the electronic journals had been the most well-received services during the market research phase.
LIS professionals had particularly welcomed the opportunity to receive electronic journals without waiting on a circulation list for paper copies.
This is one strength of the new product.
When I was given an overview of the service, my first impression was that the Web pages were very easy to navigate, with a simple and logical structure.
The News section consists mainly of an electronic current awareness service called “In touch with LIS”, sourced from LISA and updated fortnightly.
Each issue contains 20 abstracts chosen by Elizabeth Rowan, the LISA editor.
There are links to associated Web pages and articles, and this is a good way of keeping up with some of the latest research.
So far there is no material covering current news such as funding announcements and new projects, because there is no supporting Bowker-Saur material yet.
The implications of the link with Bowker-Saur need to be borne in mind, but Linda would like to broaden the scope of the BIPEx News page in any event.
This would of course bring the service into direct competition with various other sources of current news.
For paper copy subscribers, BIPEx does offer week-ahead electronic versions of the Bowker-Saur journal titles.
Whole journal issues appear in PDF format.
The next area we looked at was the Meeting Place.
This will include open discussions, moderated by editors, with topics suggested by users and virtual letter pages for the journals.
There will also be special discussions chaired by well known professionals, such as Maurice Line and Guy St. Clair, who will each choose their own topic and write their own ‘manifesto’ in order to start the discussion.
Messages will go directly to the moderators, who can filter the comments to avoid duplication or timewasting.
The aim is to involve people from all over the world.
Fiona particularly expects input from Scandinavia because of their interest in communicating via IT.
Finally, we looked at Member Services.
The recruitment area is currently under development.
Linda aims to provide a single search mechanism for many of the services currently online.
Member Services also includes a “Special Offers” section, which will offer demonstrations and discounts for services and books.
Linda will broaden the scope of this service to include other publishers.
I then asked Linda why she had tried to include all these different services, rather than merely providing electronic versions of their journals.
She replied that she had “wanted to build a community”, rather like the “Ei Engineering Village”.
She feels that the LIS market sector has room for a single service offering a wide range of material.
For Bowker-Saur, the benefits could be ideas for new books, better communications with customers and generally more reader involvement with their publications.
If LIS professionals use BIPEx in the way Linda hopes then the result might be a “less confrontational environment for publishers and LIS to meet”.
It will be interesting to see whether we use BIPEx in the way that Linda hopes, and it might be that not everything that BIPEx is offering will be sufficiently distinctive to appeal to a discerning and properly critical potential customer base.
Nevertheless, there are strong features: access to ejournals and the promise that ‘In Touch With LIS’ might select the vital elements from LISA.
For some of the other ideas, time will tell.
Author details Ruth Jenkins, Academic Liaison Librarian, University of Birmingham jenkinr@lib.bham.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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British Library Corner: Text and the Internet Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines British Library Corner: Text and the Internet Buzz data software java html dissemination archives accessibility browser identifier video cataloguing graphics windows hypertext cd-rom url research Citation BibTex RIS Graham Jefcoate, a Research Analyst from the British Library Research and Innovation Centre will be writing this regular column for the remaining issues of Ariadne.
In this issue, Graham gives us the text of his Libtech talk: Text and the Internet.
This is the text of a paper given at Libtech 96 on 5 September 1996 in a session organised by the British Library's Centre for the Book.
The author regards it in the nature of texts on the Internet as a "work in progress" and welcomes corrections and comments.
He hopes to improve the text on the basis of comments received and will, of course, acknowledge their source!
Abstract The advent of the Internet is sometimes regarded as the beginning of the end of the book as we know it.
It might be worth making a number of points, however, about the Net as a medium for the dissemination of texts, raising questions of functionality, content and access.
The Web is essentially text-based and therefore depends on data that is intended to be read.
Traditionally, high-quality discourse in the West has been disseminated as print on paper bound in the codex format but this is relatively inflexible.
Texts printed in the machine age are for all intents and purposes "static".
Digital documents delivered over networks could be characterised as "dynamic".
Networked texts exist as constantly changing data in a "dynamic" digital environment.
They are made available on a server for users to locate and read as they choose.
The computer allows one to locate a particular text rapidly and readily and to search and manipulate it for local use.
These functional characteristics of the Net raise serious questions about the possibility of serious discourse across open networks, but the dynamic nature of digital documents does also bring opportunities for the free flow of ideas.
Authors will increasingly choose the Net as their primary means of communication.
In theory, the same library of documents could be available via the Internet to anybody everywhere.
The entire, rapidly growing assembly of texts available through the World Wide Web is available to any user with appropriate browsing software at the point of use.
No further mediation or dissemination is required.
Many of objections raised about the content of the World Wide Web are really objections about this functionality.
Much of the content of the Internet is said to be junk, but a similar point could be made about almost any other given communications medium, print being no exception.
One might argue that the Web is the only medium where information of real value is actually increasing.
There is no indication of a decline in the production of print.
Particular texts will be disseminated using the medium that is more appropriate and convenient.
Traditional literacy skills the ability to read, interpret and evaluate text will play just as important a role on the Internet as with print on paper.
Perhaps the ability to exercise critical judgement will be even more important!
"A mass of trivial electronic information" The advent of the Internet is sometimes regarded as the beginning of the end of the book as we know it.
With the demise of the book, the cultural pessimists contend, we shall lose the medium through which complex ideas are expressed or serious arguments developed.
The Internet will impoverish our culture by discouraging text-based discourse and reduce intellectual exchange to the level of the sound-bite, the trivial and the trite.
Our attention span, the level of concentration required to receive, assimilate and evaluate propositions or concepts, will be reduced.
In any case, people will not want to read long, discursive texts on a computer screen.
If readers are to move from print to screen, then much will be lost.
Computers, and powerful computer applications like the Internet, contend the pessimists, are therefore per se a bad thing.
An extreme example of such pessimism about the Internet could be found recently in the Daily Telegraph, where Edward Chancellor inveighed against the new, electronic Science and Business Library at the New York Public Library where access is provided to the Internet.
According to Chancellor, this "is not a place to contemplate or write and its culture is profoundly anti-book.
It has turned its back on its grand progenitor, whose building ennobles while enabling intellectual activity.
It hails a world which is visual and fast-paced, not cerebral and reflective; a world which deadens the spirit and confuses the mind.
Its frantic atmosphere will produce no Keyneses, no Edisons, and quite likely, no J. P. Morgans.
It has cleaved the world of science and humanities in two.
SIBL portends a world, disconnected from the past, where civilisation has been extinguished amid a mass of trivial electronic information" (24 August 1996).
One is reminded of Pope's bleak vision of the future at the end of the Dunciad (Variorum edition, Lomdon 1729, lines 335-356): "Thy hand great Dulness!
lets the curtain fall, And universal Darkness covers all."
Before we accept this grim scenario unquestioningly, it might be worth making a number of points about the Internet as a medium for the dissemination of texts.
But first, I should like to say something about my own personal background as this might explain how my thinking on these issues has developed.
My only knowledge of and interest in the Internet and its applications is as a user.
I have no technical expertise to offer; my degree is in English and I have a post-graduate diploma in library science.
For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed the physicality of the book and have appreciated elegant solutions to the problems raised by the presentation of text as print on paper.
Indeed, I have spent by far the longest part of my working life cataloguing and researching early printed books and historic collections.
My professional interest in texts has therefore been as keys to understanding the past.
But another aspect of text-based culture has also fascinated me from the beginning: the need in a democratic society for the widest possible access to information of high quality.
Originally I saw physical libraries as the best means of achieving this goal.
Like many others with a background in the humanities, I have now become intrigued by the possibility that the Internet in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, might be the means to provide that access.
My interest in the Internet is therefore not centred on technical issues but rather on its potential as a medium for disseminating text-based information more widely and equitably.
This raises questions of functionality, content and access.
How can digital documents carried over networks be compared with physical documents available in other formats carried by other, more traditional, media?
How can they be accessed and used?
What do World Wide Web documents actually contain?
What special characteristics do they have?
I cannot pretend to have any of the answers to these questions, but, in my new post as Research Analyst (Digital Library Research) within the British Library's Research and Innovation Centre, I should be happy at least to open a debate on some of the issues.
I believe them to be crucial to the future of the Internet as a medium for the dissemination of serious text-based discourse.
The World Wide Web: A Text-Based Medium The World Wide Web is one of the most popular and successful Internet applications, providing users with access to a vast assembly of disparate texts, images, audio and video files, and the means to retrieve them.
The Web itself originated in the late 1980's at CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory at Geneva, as a medium for exchanging project documentation using hypertext with integrated graphics.
It quickly became the primary medium for disseminating text-based information over the Internet, establishing itself with email as its most popular function.
It is often overlooked that the two most widely-used Internet applications, email and the Web, are both essentially text-based and therefore depend on data that is intended to be read.
The telephone, radio, film and television, of course, are sound and image-based, but the Internet could be described as the first new text-based communications medium this century.
Admittedly, hypertext allows us to order and manipulate texts in ways impossible with one-dimensional print on paper.
But hypertext is still text.
Unlike audio and video applications, an illiterate person will not be able to use it.
Far from undermining our literate culture, will the Internet, by placing the written word at its centre, in fact reinforce it?
Static and Dynamic Documents Traditionally, high-quality discourse in the west has been disseminated in the form of print on paper bound in the codex format established in ancient times, in other words pages arranged sequentially and held together between covers.
This format has been tested over centuries.
It is often convenient (normally allowing the user to carry even quite substantial texts around with them) but it is relatively inflexible.
Any bibliographer or historian of the book will tell you that compositorial practice meant that no two surviving copies of an early printed text issued as part of a single edition are exactly the same.
Texts printed in the machine age, however, are for all intents and purposes "static".
The data they carry can only be changed by manual amendment or by new print on paper replacing old information with new.
Stasis in the evolution of a printed text is reached when it is received by a reader in the form it is published as, for example, an article in a serial, a book or even, more recently, on a CD-ROM disk.
Once it has entered the public domain in this form it can be evaluated, recorded and archived.
These versions represent the result of a decision by an author, publisher or bookseller to halt the process of change and issue the text to the reader.
The process of authorial revision and editorial correction may then begin again, but this will produce a new edition of the text to replace the old.
Bibliographers seek, if one will, to categorise and describe these "static" versions as separate and definable stages in the evolution of a printed text.
It is not merely the texts of printed documents that could be described as relatively static or inflexible.
Their physical format means they need space and other resources if they are to be appropriately stored and preserved as archival documents.
All this entails considerable and and long-term costs.
But their greatest drawback from the ser's point of view is surely access.
It is difficult to find information embedded within a discursive printed text unless it is supplied with a good index.
Furthermore, the information contained in printed texts is not usually readily available to us at all unless we live or work in close proximity to a comprehensive collection of printed materials with an unusually good catalogue.
In contrast to the relative inflexibility of static print on paper, digital documents delivered over networks could be characterised as "dynamic".
Potentially at least, they are easy to locate and to retrieve.
Above all, networked documents are available to users when and where they need them.
The Pope quotation is a case in point.
I happen to work on the British Library's Soho site where no copy of Pope's works is likely to be found.
I decided to check the reference through the Web by entering the keyword "Dunciad" in the search engine Alta Vista.
The first option among the sites retrieved was a good resource description by the National Library of the Netherlands with a hyperlink to a site at the University of Maryland.
Here Wendy J. Carter has mounted the text of the Dunciad from the Variorum edition of 1729 in a version that reflects the original orthography.
By keyword-searching the text itself I quickly found the lines I wished to quote and (using the copy-and-paste facility within Windows) I incorporated them into the text of my talk today.
In the case of the Pope quotation, the computer therefore allowed me to locate a particular text of obvious quality rapidly and readily and to search and manipulate it for personal use.
The process saved time, effort and resources.
But the success of this one sample search can clearly not be used to justify the entire shift from print to digital information.
What other considerations should we take into account?
Unlike print on paper, networked texts never reach true stasis.
They exist as constantly changing data in a "dynamic" digital environment.
In order to use them in the same way as conventional texts we would need to turn them into conventional documents, halting the process of or potential for change, for example by transferring them to a static medium such as print on paper.
The act of publication, in which a "definitive" text is agreed and disseminated, even if only in interim form, is replaced by a process rather less easy to grasp.
It becomes a different kind of transaction between the originator of the text and its user.
To borrow the jargon of post-structuralism, the process of publication is itself "deconstructed" and the text itself becomes in a very real sense "unstable".
In the networked environment, the text is merely made available on a server for users to locate and download as they choose.
Its author or any other person with access to the text on a server can and often does alter and refine the text after the original act of making it available.
This is possible as extensively or as frequently as he or she chooses.
At no time need anyone decide what is a "definitive" version of the text nor need they call a halt to the process of change.
If the document's own unique identifier, the so-called uniform resource locator or URL, is changed or deleted, any hyperlinks made to it will result in an error message.
The originator might indeed decide to withdraw the text entirely from the public domain by deleting it on the server.
If no one has turned the dynamic document into a static one, by printing it out or copying it to a secure electronic archive, citations of it or links and references to it will become instantly obsolete and the text in the form it was received and evaluated will be irretrievably lost.
Of course, a text can also be downloaded by others, altered, manipulated and made available again in a form not envisaged or authorised by its originator.
It the eighteenth century, this would have been called piracy.
I could take Wendy Carter's Variorum text of the Dunciad, in which she has been careful to retain as much of the integrity of the printed original as possible, and create a completely new version full of my own editorial ideas and interpretational errors and offer it as an alternative to catch innocent users of search engines on the World Wide Web.
Although nothing here would have been inherently impossible with printed texts, the nature of networked digital documents and the technology of the Internet seem almost to invite intervention or manipulation by the reader.
Serious Discourse across Networks?
These functional characteristics of the Net raise serious questions about the possibility of serious discourse across open networks.
What is the value of a text made available on the World Wide Web if it can be changed, moved or withdrawn by anyone with access to the server on which it is placed?
The dynamic nature of the Web makes the traditional tasks of evaluating, citing, recording or archiving texts extremely difficult.
Among other things, it makes life for electronic librarians very difficult.
What version of a networked document should be "acquired"?
How and when should it be described and archived?
How indeed does a national library with an archival responsibility deal with the deposit and storage of such documents?
But the dynamic nature of digital documents delivered over networks does also brings opportunities for the free flow of ideas.
These have been well argued in an article published last year by Fred Nash.
Far from seeing difficulties in publishing scholarly or scientific articles on the Net, Nash identifies a number of real advantages: "It can", for example, "accelerate the exchange of ideas by removing the vetting and publication lead time.
A piece can be on the Internet in a matter of days, and responses to it can be added in a matter of minutes.
...
It can enable us to generate genuine debate and real and open exchange of ideas between all who have something to say on the subject.
...
The reader participates instead of reading a polished report.
It can enable more papers, and views, to be published ...".
What is clear is that authors will increasingly choose the Net as their primary means of communication.
If the functionality of the World Wide Web has, from a traditionalist's point of view, certain disadvantages, the benefits for scholarly exchange may surely not be left out of consideration.
Thousands of individuals and organisations across the globe have seized on the Web as an attractive and effective way of presenting information on the Net.
The Lycos online search service currently indexes nearly sixty million separate Web pages, and even this does not provide exhaustive coverage of the current resources of the Web.
The rapidly-growing corpus of documents represented by the Web might well be the prototype of the global electronic library dreamt of by many politicians and journalists.
As such it is clearly of the greatest significance to anyone concerned with the future of the written word and discourse based on texts.
Access to the Global Library Access to this information is open to all who are linked to the network.
World Wide Web documents are available, potentially at least, to an enormous and rapidly-growing community of Internet users world-wide.
A report issued earlier this year estimated that some 35 million users would soon be connected to the Internet.
By 2002, more than 200 million people were expected to be connected to at least part of the Internet.
The World Wide Web itself was doubling in size every three months, and approaching 100,000 Web sites were forecast by this spring.
In theory, the same library of documents could be available via the Internet to anybody anywhere: in remote third world villages just as in ancient university towns or in Silicon Valley.
The educational value of the Internet clearly excites President Clinton, who, in his speech to the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago, sees the information superhighway leading across his bridge into the information age: "We need schools that will take our children into the next century, ... with every single library and classroom in America connected to the information superhighway by the year 2000.
... Now folks, if we do these things, ... every 12-year-old will be able to log in on the Internet, ... and all Americans will have the knowledge they need to cross that bridge to the 21st century".
We too must ensure that there is the maximum access for everybody in the community: not just at school or at work, but increasingly in public libraries, citizens' advice bureaux and at home too.
The needs of minority groups and the disabled should not be neglected.
This priority was recognised here by the recent House of Lords Select Committee report on the information society.
The danger of creating a society of information "haves" and "have nots" is all too apparent, but one we have the means to avoid.
We also need to find the will.
The entire, rapidly-growing assembly of texts available through the World Wide Web is available to any user with appropriate browsing software at the point of use.
No further mediation or dissemination is required.
Ease of access to pages on the World Wide Web is ensured in two ways.
Online services enable users to select, locate and access specific services from menus often supported by a graphical interface such as a map.
A range of sites of this kind is already available.
They are supplemented as finding aids by a variety of search engines, the so-called web crawlers or worms such as Alta Vista which index and allow searches of large sub-set of the World Wide Web by keyword.
Once accessed, each of these documents might well contain embedded in its text numerous hyperlinks to other WWW documents deemed relevant by the author.
Content and Quality By means of a World Wide Web browser, anyone connected to the Internet can therefore locate, often in a matter of seconds, material on any given subject.
Many of objections frequently raised about the content of the World Wide Web are really objections about this functionality.
Broadcasters and publishers have until now determined what will be disseminated applying criteria of quality and decency and reflecting contemporary values.
National governments and other agencies have sought to regulate what will be disseminated.
Educationalists and politicians have drawn up curricula with lists of approved "set texts" for schools and colleges.
Censorship has restricted published discourse to what authority found acceptable; legal sanctions were imposed on what was not.
If not forbidden, material that did not conform to accepted criteria has traditionally been difficult to access.
The nature of the Internet, its world-wide reach and ease of use, makes it highly suspicious in societies, such as our own perhaps, where regulation has been the norm.
Objections have addressed both issues both of decency and of quality.
Notoriously, the Net has brought pornographic material down from the newsagent's top shelf and made it as instantly and easily accessible as any other material.
Important as questions of decency certainly are, academic users of the Net and librarians will be equally concerned with the issue of quality.
Much of the World Wide Web could be described as a branch of the vanity publishing industry.
The ease by which HTML pages can be made and mounted on a server has empowered tens of thousands of enthusiasts to give us access to their views on a myriad of subjects.
Again, the only difference to conventional media is the relative accessibility of this material through search engines.
And again, it is up to us first to ensure the content of the Internet includes more and more information of high quality and second to enable users to locate it readily.
The eLib programme has shown the way here.
The Web already functions as an enormous library of hypertext documents.
Common prejudice (too often confirmed by the random results of online keyword searches) tells us they are of little value: the weird and wonderful hypertext scribblings of naive and nerdy enthusiasts, mostly American and often interested, it seems, in computers, trivia and sex (or any combination thereof).
New applications like Java are toys, tricks to impress others, of no real value, because they are about style and not about substance.
And the enthusiasts rarely seem to master the basic tools of literacy: their spelling is notorious!
According to witnesses before the House of Lords committee, much of the content of the Internet is junk.
Similar points could, of course, be made about almost any other given communications medium, print being no exception.
Our television channels fill the schedules with the ephemeral and trite.
We expend floods of useless words across the telephone.
For each book of real value, the shelves of our newsagents, bookshops and, yes, public libraries groan under the weight of trivia and trash.
And every day we hear complaints that standards are declining.
The Dunciad, of course, was a denunciation of the floods of trivia emanating from the printing presses of eighteenth-century Grub Street.
But, far from collapsing into the abyss where 'Dulness' reigns, the eighteenth-century after Pope is accepted as one of the high points of our literary culture.
Of course the presses produced trash; they also brought forth the prose and poetry of Samuel Johnson, his English dictionary and edition of Shakespeare.
One might argue that the Web is the only medium where information of real value is actually increasing.
Hardly noticed by the Internet's critics (and often ignored by the computing enthusiasts), scholarly journal articles, scientific reports, newspapers (including the Daily Telegraph), new legislation and reports public information of all kinds from across the globe is being added to the global library hourly.
Links will be found to information about or from innumerable central and local government organisations, universities and research institutions, libraries and museums, publishers and booksellers, commercial firms and so on.
The Web is the only source for much of the information provided at these sites.
Even if we have not quite reached the open road of the information superhighway, we have long since gone beyond the point at which anyone concerned with the provision of timely and appropriate information can afford to ignore the Net.
The new illiterates, it could be argued, are those who have yet to grasp this.
A Future for the Codex?
That computer users will not wish to read long, discursive texts on screens is indubitably true.
The Internet will therefore demand a more concise form of discourse and different forms of presenting arguments.
This is not necessarily always a bad thing how many traditional printed books contain no padding?
The publishing industry needs to produce a certain number of which need to be of minimum length to be sold at a particular price.
There will always be room for the codex.
After all, it's a relatively cheap, durable and portable product.
There is no indication of a decline in the demand for or production of print.
How then will the two media co-exist?
The Internet may well become a bulletin-board carrying directory or encyclopaedia-type information, while the codex continues to carry discursive arguments requiring sustained development or novels.
Different versions of one text may appear in both.
A particular text will be disseminated using the medium which is most appropriate and convenient.
Eventually, of course, technology will allow us to produced codices at will from networked, digitised data, thus giving the user maximum choice.
Literacy Skills for the Net It could be argued the advent of the Internet demands a range of literacy skills.
The computer literacy required, it seems to me, is really a minimum.
We must offer people training in the use and interpretation of documents on the Web to ensure they can find what they need and exploit it effectively and responsibly.
Traditional literacy skills the ability to read, interpret and evaluate text will play just as important a role on the Internet as with print on paper.
Perhaps the ability to exercise critical judgement will be even more important!
The World Wide Web will continue its rapid development.
Its functionality will be further refined and its content greatly expanded.
As awareness of its potential spreads, it is predictable that more and more individuals and organisations will see the Web as a primary medium for text-based discourse.
We should remain aware of its apparent shortcomings but not blind to its numerous advantages.
The information it provides will become de facto the most readily available on many given subjects.
We must ensure that information of quality is accessible through it and that finding aids are developed to guide us to it.
And finally, we should give no more credence to the cultural pessimists than to the blacker forebodings of Alexander Pope and what would he have made of the availability of the Dunciad over the Internet and my easy piracy of it?
Contact Details Graham Jefcoate Research Analyst (Digital Library Research) British Library, Research and Innovation Centre Tel.
+44 171 412 7109 graham.jefcoate@bl.uk Portico The British Library's WWW Server: http://portico.bl.uk/ric/research/digital.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 11 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 11 Buzz copyright cataloguing ejournal Citation BibTex RIS The Web editor, Isobel Stark, introduces Ariadne issue 11.
This is my first attempt at editing an issue of Ariadne, the Web Version.
I hope you find it up to stratch!
Unsurprisingly, as this is the first issue since the long vacation, this issue is particularly strong in conference reports in the At The Event section.
Thanks to Christine Dugdale and Jackie Chelin there is even a report from Libtech ‘97, which has only just finished as I write this editorial.
The other conferences reports have a definite international flavour, ranging from Bournemouth to Philadelphia and cover a broad swipe of topics in electronic library context.
Another theme of this issue is cataloguing and presenting electronic journals and on-line resources.
Reports of progress to date from the universities of York and Birmingham are complimented by Valarie Wilkin’s survey on the state of cataloguing e-journals in the HE sector libraries.
Of course, we still have all the usual regular columns, including a new column by Professor Charles Oppenheim answering your copyright queries.
If you want to submit a question for this column, please email your queries to ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
All it remains for me to do is to wish you Happy Reading!
Author Details Isobel Stark, Acting Ariadne web editor, Email: i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
Are Print Journals Dinosaurs?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Are Print Journals Dinosaurs?
Buzz software html dissemination archives cataloguing opac passwords marc adobe ejournal licence telnet privacy url research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Tony Kidd wonders if he and and his kind are palæontologists.
A few years ago, Southampton University’s Librarian, Bernard Naylor, sent round an email to his University Librarian colleagues, asking by which year each one thought he or she would be subscribing to just 20% of their periodicals as print rather than electronic journals.
The replies duly rolled in, revealing that the consensus within this particular subset of the UK library profession was that 80% of journal subscriptions would be in electronic format by somewhere between 2005 and 2010.
Bernard Naylor has been active again this year, leading a NetLinkS Discussion Area entitled ‘Your chance to re-invent the scholarly journal’[1] in which he asked thirteen questions on the future of the journal, based on the assumption that the electronic version was well on its way, and that this could change the whole basis of research literature provision.
Few people took up this invitation.
Inevitably, there were no unequivocal answers.
It is abundantly clear that there is no magic pathway to the sunlit uplands of a future of quick and easy access to academic information.
Earlier this year, Ariadne ran a debate between Fytton Rowland[2] of Loughborough University, and Steven Harnad[3], indefatigable advocate of free access, at the point of use, to the world’s ‘esoteric’ research output.
Although the former was supposed to be defending the value of print against the latter’s championing of electronic access, it was interesting to note the level of agreement between the two.
Both agreed on the functions of the journal literature and on the vital necessity of preserving peer review and some sort of quality hierarchy, whatever the output medium.
They accepted that electronic production and output are here to stay.
The main arguments centred more on future developments and on how the large commercial publishers could be circumvented.
Although he no longer predicts any dates for their demise, Harnad regards the existence of expensive learned journals as fundamentally untenable in an electronic world where authors and readers are the same people with access to the same electronic resource.
Rowland is not so sure that their extinction in all cases is so certain.
The previous paragraphs are an indication of the crucial changes taking place right now, of the difficulty of predicting the exact outcome of the changes, and the course and duration of the transition period en route to any new steady state.
My crystal ball is as cloudy as anyone else’s in the information business, and I do not wish to offer any predictions additional to the above, but what I can do is give an account of the present position of electronic journals (ejournals) in the UK higher education sector.
It is apparent that the Higher Education Funding Councils’ Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI)[4] has been a real catalyst in encouraging the use and marketing of ejournals within UK universities.
This is in spite of the fact that the PSLI was not initially seen as primarily a vehicle for ejournal promotion, but rather an experiment in trying to break the vicious circle of excessive journals inflation.
This initial emphasis may reflect its origins outside the orbit of JISC[5] and eLib[6].
This in turn may have limited some of the discussion on the future of, and any successors to, PSLI.
The ejournals funded under eLib Sociological Research Online[7], Journal of Information Law and Technology[8], Internet Archaeology[9], etc have been very useful examinations of the process of setting up, running, and financing an ejournal.
However, it is probably true that they, the rather different SuperJournal project[10] and the PSLI have to an extent missed out on some promising cross-fertilisation by not coming under the same immediate umbrella.
The same could be said of the future development of ejournals in general.
Pre-PSLI, a few libraries had been experimenting for a year or two in the mid 1990s by providing access to some of the free-of-charge ejournals.
The pioneers started publishing in 1990, well before the World Wide Web, HTML, Netscape and Acrobat utterly transformed the ejournal scene.
There was even very tentative adoption of one or two of the ejournals released by the pathfinder commercial publishers like Chapman & Hall[11] in the UK and Johns Hopkins University Press[12] in the US.
BUBL[13] was also doing its bit by providing access to some full text ejournals.
However, the lack of a reasonable base of well-known journals meant that take-up, beyond a small band of enthusiasts, was low.
Until 1998 the PSLI provides the UK higher education community with full text access to all 170-180 journals published by Academic Press[14], and to all 35-40 Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP)[15] journals, providing the library subscribes to the print version of at least one title.
Via BIDS[16] it offers access to the full text of Blackwell[17] and Blackwell Science[18] titles where the library maintains a print subscription, with contents/abstracts information on the rest.
Academics therefore suddenly acquired the ability to read, in the privacy of their own labs or offices, the current issues of around 250 well-respected peer-reviewed journals.
That is the good news, but that previous sentence requires some qualification.
First, I use the word ‘suddenly’ loosely.
Titles first became available in the spring of 1996.
It took around six months after that for most Academic Press titles to appear online.
IOPP titles did appear quickly, but BIDS JournalsOnline[19] with the first Blackwell Science journals was launched in November/December 1996, while some Blackwell titles are still (autumn 1997) reaching BIDS for the first time.
Many issues are still not appearing on the Web at the same time as the printed version is distributed, let alone a few weeks in advance which in theory should be possible, with timely publication often put forward as an advantage of electronic over print.
Second, the question of ease of access needs scrutinising.
Even now, not all academics and researchers have everyday individual control of their own networked PC.
The use of Adobe[20] Acrobat PDF viewing software by all PSLI publishers, and many others, has also not been without its difficulties.
Although Acrobat software is freely downloadable[21], action still has to be taken to achieve this, either by individuals or by those controlling particular servers or networks.
This can take time to arrange or negotiate, and acts as a barrier to some.
The recent upgrade to Acrobat 3.0, rendering some recent issues unreadable by previous software versions, means the whole process has to be repeated.
Printing from Acrobat has been another controversial area.
Fairly high specification laser printers, or printers configured in particular ways, are required to print Acrobat documents reasonably speedily, with some libraries initially reporting printing times of several hours for a single article.
Other viewing software has been adopted by different publishers, for example Catchword’s RealPage[22] by Carfax[23], the Royal Society of Chemistry[24], Taylor & Francis[25], and others.
This software may well have some advantages over Acrobat, but requires separate downloading and registration, creating another potential barrier.
Another aspect of ease of access is the use of usernames and passwords.
Initially all three PSLI publishers required the use of passwords.
Some institutions have announced these on restricted Web pages, but the majority have issued passwords individually as requested.
This is a further restrictrion on widespread adoption of the new resource.
Academic Press and IOPP have now moved to control through IP registration, while retaining passwords as an alternative in certain circumstances.
This provides academics and students with transparent access, and is being adopted by more publishers, certainly simplifying both administration and use.
An alternative may be the use of the new ATHENS3[26] authentification procedures.
JournalsOnline is a slightly different case, in that researchers can use their existing BIDS ISI passwords, which will also come under ATHENS3, to enter the service.
There are other reservations.
Even with 250 journals available, there are likely to be no more than one or two of interest to any individual researcher.
Slow response times and server downtime cause frustrations here, as much as in other parts of the Internet.
Yet it is still my belief that the PSLI has acted as an undeniable incentive to libraries to think out ways of making the ejournals available and publicising their existence, which they are then applying to other ejournals as appropriate.
Many academics have vaguely heard of PSLI, and are gently pressing library staff to provide more information.
Libraries have advertised the PSLI, and ejournals in general, in various ways.
Documentation has been written, and sent out to individuals, departments or committees; the library’s website has been used; articles have been placed in university and faculty newsletters; demonstration sessions have been held for individuals and departments; ‘electronic journal parties’ have been held, where any pain inherent in learning about something new has been alleviated by a glass or two of wine; the publishers themselves have written to academics.
One of our biggest surges in demand at Glasgow followed Academic Press’s letter to individual staff.
Despite all this, demand is still not overwhelmingly high.
At Glasgow, one of the heaviest users in the UK of Academic Press’s service, fewer than 400 articles have been downloaded from about 175 journals in the busiest month.
However, use has to start somewhere, and will I believe continue to increase as a standard service develops, and more journals are issued in electronic format.
One service that has varied considerably from library to library in the UK has been the dissemination of information on which PSLI journals are available electronically.
Over the summer, I have checked out the OPACs and websites of the majority of UK libraries.
Only a small minority have entered PSLI journal details on their OPAC.
Where a Web OPAC exists, the number of libraries that have made use of the MARC 856 field to provide direct access to a journal title, or even a publisher’s home page, is probably in single figures.
Very few OPACs even provide a note indicating that the journal is accessible via the Web.
A similar number of libraries provide direct access from their OPACs to a few other ejournals: for example, only four out of the nearly seventy OPACs checked provide a link to the electronic version of Ariadne[27], although rather more than half list the print version.
Of course, the majority of OPACs are still telnet rather than Web, but only a tiny number mention the electronic version, even if direct access is impossible.
Most library websites do recognise the existence of ejournals, including PSLI, although it is often necessary to move through various levels to discover entry points.
More than half do not provide any listing of individual titles, however, only linking for example to IOPP’s home page.
Most of the rest that do list titles then connect again to the publisher’s home page.
This was very understandable when individual Academic title URLs, for example, changed with each reload, but that is no longer the case, and it is now possible to save the user time and effort by pointing directly to a title-level URL.
We surely do not expect academics and students to search for journals by publisher, and although time is always at a premium, it is probably appropriate to invest a little more effort in informing users, through the library’s OPAC and/or Web pages, which particular journals can now be inspected online.
An alternative popular with some is to concentrate on subject pages and/or to make use of general services like BUBL.
These are certainly essential, and a good route to access sources like the excellent eLib broad subject resource discovery services such as EEVL[28], OMNI[29] and SOSIG[30], but I suggest that traditional access via general catalogues and listings is also still important, and likely to be a part of various ‘clumps’ developments.
What of the future?
There are so many developments at present.
The serials agents are launching or developing their ejournal administration and control services such as Blackwell’s Electronic Journals Navigator[31] and Swets SwetsNet[32]; OCLC is providing a similar service through Electronic Collections Online[33], emphasising its archiving functions; the US JSTOR[34] project is tackling the problem of providing electronic runs of back volumes of prestigious journals; the eLib Open Journals project[35] is trying to enhance the linking capabilities of HTML, and Acrobat, by constructing ‘linkbases’ that enrich many times over the content of an individual article or document; the initial evaluation of the PSLI[36] has been published, and there is much interest in what if anything will replace it when the agreement expires at the end of 1998.
Finally, almost all large STM publishers are now producing ejournals, all on offer under different charging mechanisms.
Each of these topics, and there are others, could be discussed at some length.
The moral would appear to be that, whatever the future holds, and whatever paths we shall follow to reach that future, there is no shortage of activity, and no danger that anyone working in this area is likely to suffer from boredom.
References [1] Your chance to reinvent the scholarly journal http://netways.shef.ac.uk/discuss/naylor.htm [2] Rowland, Fytton.
Print journals: fit for the Future?
Ariadne 7, January 1997, 6-7.
Available online at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/fytton [3] Harnad, Stevan.
The paper house of cards.
Ariadne 8, March 1997, 6-7.
Available online at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/harnad/ [4] Higher Education Funding Councils’ Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI) http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefce/pub97/m3_97.html [5] ] JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ [6] eLib http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ [7] Sociological Research Online http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/socresonline/ [8] Journal of Information Law and Technology http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/ [9] Internet Archaeology http://intarch.ac.uk/ [10] SuperJournal project http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/sj [11] Chapman & Hall http://www.chapmanhall.com/thomsonscience/default.html [12] Johns Hopkins University Press http://calliope.jhu.edu/muse.html [13] BUBL http://www.bubl.ac.uk/ [14] Academic Press http://www.janet.idealibrary.com/ [15] Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) http://www.iop.org/EJ/welcome [16] BIDS http://www.bids.ac.uk [17] Blackwell http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/11.HTM [18] Blackwell Science http://www.blacksci.co.uk/online/default.htm [19] BIDS JournalsOnline http://www.journalsonline.bids.ac.uk/JournalsOnline [20] Adobe Acrobat http://www.adobe.com/ [21] Acrobat software http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html [22] Catchword’s RealPage http://www.catchword.co.uk/ [23] Carfax http://www.carfax.co.uk/ [24] Royal Society of Chemistry http://www.rsc.org/j1.htm [25] Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/ [26] ATHENS3 http://www.niss.ac.uk/authentication/athens3_presentations.html [27] Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk [28] EEVL http://www.eevl.ac.uk/"> [29] OMNI http://omni.ac.uk/ [30] SOSIG http://sosig.ac.uk/ [31] Electronic Journals Navigator http://navigator.blackwell.co.uk/ [32] SwetsNet http://www.swetsnet.nl/) [33] Electronic Collections Online http://www.oclc.org/oclc/menu/eco.htm , [34] JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/ [35] Open Journals project http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ [36] Initial evaluation of the PSLI http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefce/pub97/m3_97.html Author details Tony Kidd Head of Serials Glasgow University Library t.kidd@lib.gla.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Elib Technical Issues Concertation Day Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Elib Technical Issues Concertation Day Buzz data mobile software java html database apache metadata identifier copyright video sgml passwords perl adobe authentication interoperability mailbase cookie standards Citation BibTex RIS Clare McClean describes a day given over to the more technical issues arising from the Electronic Libraries Programme.
This long-awaited and well-attended concertation day had 35 'teccies' (slang for technical / systems / computer-orientated people) in attendance.
A wide range of issues were discussed, probably too many for one day and certainty too many to be covered in this article.
One of the main outcomes of the day was the identification of major issues, of interest to many projects, which warrant further discussion.
It was an informal day allowing for a lot of attendee input and interaction.
Chris Rusbridge introduced the day before handing over to Brian Kelly who gave a brief presentation on two topics; this helped to pinpoint areas for further discussion later in the day.
These presentations, Introduction and overview of document formats Overview of mobile code and VRML are available in Powerpoint format from http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisbk/events/elib/concertation/agenda.html Issues arising from these presentations included the use of 'style sheets' in the creation of HTML documents.
Style sheets are a means of separating document structure from document appearance.
They are of particular importance for long-life documents which will have to adopt to the constantly moving standards of the Internet.
Creating HTML documents without style sheets can be compared to writing an entire program using local rather than global variables.
The long term maintenance problems can be immense.
Style sheets have detailed specifications for font, colour etc.
They are very flexible and functionally rich and are now available for Internet Explorer version 3.
The incorporation of style sheets should play a role in the setting of standards, else users won't be able to access old documents.
Another topic which sparked interest was the use of frames.
Frames defy the principles of using style sheets by grouping the user interface information together with the document content.
However, W3C propose the implementation of frames using style sheets.
Some people see frames as a complicated means of doing something simple.
The use of frames can leave the end-user with little control and web developers shouldn't force the interface on the user.
Although the advantages of frames such as the reduction in maintenance were noted, disadvantages were also identified.
These included the increased download time due to large memory load and the fact that 'frames' cannot be bookmarked.
Frames are an example of a newly introduced formatting tag which is architecturally flawed and contravene the spirit of SGML.
In the quest to separate document appearance from HTML structure, developers should use HTTP facilities to enable content negotiation.
This could allow the client to choose the document format which the server will provide.
The second presentation led to discussions on the problems of overloading the server when using cgi scripts to deliver dynamic documents to the client.
An alternative is the use of mobile code which is downloaded from the server and run on the client computer.
Examples of mobile code which were discussed include Sun's Java and more recently Microsoft's ActiveX; however, security poses a problem with both.
These topics were given further attention in the 'breakout sessions' later in the day.
Next there was a brief presentation from the DIGIMAP project which focused on the problems encountered when accessing digital map data across the Internet.
Ways of defending the network and server against too much traffic while a user downloads a map were discussed.
Although developers can push more processing to the client side, they shouldn't overload the client due to hardware limitations.
DIGIMAP currently uses cgi scripts written in Perl and Java; the Java has caused some problems with printing the maps.
After these brief presentations which helped to pinpoint certain problem areas, the attendees were split into groups to identify technical issues for discussion in the afternoon session.
A wide range of issues were identified (for details see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisbk/events/elib/concertation/reports/report-back.html ).
Of the many suggested problem areas, four which were common to a number of projects were used as a basis for the thematic discussion sessions.
Attendees choose which theme was most relevant to their project and joined the respective group.
The four groups of approximately ten people each set about debating the following issues: Authentication Systems Issues Interoperability Document formats and user issues The aim of these breakout groups was to identify problem areas, suggest possible solutions and what groups such as eLib and UK Web Focus can do to help; each group gave a report back on their findings.
Authentication was regarded as a difficult area, the main problem being the maintenance of a large number of user ids.
Issues such as data protection and management of usernames and passwords were also discussed.
One recommendation was to look at cookie technology and software such as VeriSign.
Cookies work by sending information from the server in the HTTP header of the server request.
They can be used to trace the interaction of a user through an entire session, allowing web browsers to gather information about the user of a web server.
VeriSign issues and manages digital ids to support a wide range of users; for details see http://www.verisign.com/.
There weren't any strong recommendations for solutions to the many problems; perhaps a day devoted to the issue of authentication would be useful.
Systems issues was another group with a lot to discuss and the outcome of the discussion was the identification of various issues which require further attention.
Such issues include database integration, electronic and video conferencing and virtual WWW servers.
Apache was felt to be a good server.
The interoperability group focused on the need for eLib resources to be accessible via cross-project searching.
The advantages of this close interoperability between projects were put forward but it was noted that cross-searching wouldn't be applicable to all projects.
If the idea was to be implemented it would have to be based on a standard such as the Dublin Core or Whois++.
Another result from this group was the recognition that there is no standard metadata set and one needs to be developed.
The final group was dedicated to document format and user issues, and discussed the pros and cons of using PDF on the Internet, as well as HTML tools.
One of the advantages of Adobe's PDF format for documents was the ease of referencing due to accurate page representation.
PDF was deemed as the most secure means of transporting documents across the Internet.
One disadvantage noted was the problem of printing PDF documents using non-postscript drivers.
Some useful HTML tools were also recommended.
These included Microsoft's Internet Assistant and RTFTOHTML.
Automated website development tools suggested for the Mac were Frontier and Myrmidian.
Frontier can also be used for statistical analysis of users.
This group also suggested the introduction of a lis-elib-tech mailbase list rather than using the more general lis-elib.
There has been a quick response to this suggestion and there is now a list lis-elib-tech, the centre for which can be found at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib-tech/; this is devoted to solving those endless technical problems.
The overlap between various projects was also noted and an elib FAQ to help people overcome common problems effectively was suggested.
Elib teccies were encouraged not only to post questions, but also the solutions, once a problem has been solved.
All in all, the day proved very successful and due to the number of issues yet to be discussed in detail, the need to hold more events for elib technical staff was recognised.
Perhaps a day focused on each of the breakout group topics could be arranged.
Now that there is a teccies list, people will be able to voice their queries and solutions and maintain cross-project interaction.
Another recommendation from the day was to look at the use of hypernews and video conferencing for elib technical staff; small trials are being planned so watch lis-elib-tech for more information.
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Copyright Battles: The Shetland News Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Battles: The Shetland News Buzz data database copyright hypertext licence url standards Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim takes a look at the Shetland Times versus Shetland News copyright case, and its implications for users of the World Wide Web.
On 24 October 1996, Lord Hamilton gave in a Scottish court a preliminary interdict (equivalent to injunction in English law) to prevent the Shetland News, an Internet based newspaper, from offering links from its WWW pages to those of its rival Internet newspaper, the Shetland Times.
Right now, the Shetland News is appealing for funds to help fight the case in 1997.
The wording of the interdict includes the following key text (I trust I am not infringing copyright by reproducing it): "... Interdicts the Defenders, their employees, agents or anyone acting on their behalf or with their authority from (1.)
storing in any medium by electronic means or otherwise copying or (2.)
including in any service operated by the Defenders on the Internet any headline, text or photograph from any edition of "The Shetland Times" newspaper or the Pursuers' Internet web site www.shetland-times.co.uk..." Robert Wishart, the managing director of The Shetland Times Ltd. commented on this preliminary injunction with the following statement: "Recent statements by Dr Jonathan Wills [the Editor of the Shetland News] are an attempt to lay down a smoke-screen over the issues.
We took action to prevent him presenting our news stories as part of his web site.
These stories are gathered by professional staff at considerable expense to the company."
Put simply, this is an argument over whether a publisher on the Internet retains copyright in any material once it goes "on-line";.
My view is that by incorporating our copyright material into his news service he infringes our copyright.
The technical process by which this is achieved is irrelevant.
How Dr Wills arrives at the conclusion that the ruling makes the Internet in its present form illegal I don't know.
There is no restriction on "free" access to the Internet and we would be perfectly happy with a proper link to our home page so that readers can have access to our reports in their intended context.
Our successful action at the Court of Session demonstrates that this is by no means a "frivolous" action as claimed by Dr Wills.
On the contrary it is a case which will be of vital interest to every publisher on the Internet.
Had our action failed it would have meant that the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 would no longer apply to any material published on the Internet.
I have every confidence that if Dr Wills wishes to pursue the matter we will receive support from other publishers on the Internet.
It is quite clear that Shetland News were driven to this action because they were unable to provide a proper news service on their own.
In the meantime we will continue to develop our Internet site as a quality product.
Dr Wills' attempts to use his web site to generate nuisance mail and phone calls is exactly the sort of infantile action I have come to expect from him.
We really should be arguing about the principles involved.
As a part-time journalist himself one would have thought he would have some understanding of the protection which copyright laws offer to writers and publishers."
A lot of fuss has been made regarding this interim injunction, with headlines about "this means the death of the Web".
Nonsense.
Where where the grant of an interlocutory injunction is concerned, the party seeking the injunction undertakes to provide compensation should that matter proceed to trial.
Therefore, the court can afford to be "generous"; in its ability to grant interim injunctions, as all the court considers is whether there is an issue to be tried, and then considers the "balance of convenience".
It does not consider the rights and wrongs of the case in terms of matters of law.
So the preliminary injunction is simply a confirmation that there is a possible case to answer and indeed, as the discussion below shows, there may indeed theoretically be a case to answer!
The first question: are these Literary Works?
There is the background.
What are the implications of this little spat, which has received wide publicity, including an article in New Scientist and an item on BBC TV News on 6 December?
The first thing to be aware of, is that the two individuals concerned, Dr Wills and Mr Wishart, have a long history of disputes; some years ago Jonathan Wills was editor of The Shetland Times, and was dismissed, which resulted in an out-of-court settlement, paid by Robert Wishart to Dr Wills, to prevent a hearing for unfair dismissal.
So, it is clear this argument is as much to do with personalities as it is to do with copyright.
But what about the rights and wrongs of the case?
Under copyright law, even storing the text of material temporarily on a hard disc is, technically, infringement.
Certain proposals being discussed by WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation the body that largely controls international copyright law) in December in Geneva would, if passed, make this even more explicit but the truth is, UK law is already pretty explicit on this point anyway.
(I will write an article for Ariadne on the WIPO conference in due course.)
However, in order for infringement to be proved, the person making the complaint must prove that his material is indeed a Literary Work as defined in the Copyright Act, that the defendant had copied all, or a substantial part of that Literary Work, and that none of the standard user permissions applied.
The complainant must also demonstrate that there was no implied license to copy the material.
The defendants "simply" linked their Web pages to those of the other company.
The user clicks on the hypertext link and is transferred to the other newspaper's pages.
They were not copying the full text of the articles; only the URL and the title of the article.
So the first hurdle for Mr Wishart is to demonstrate that his URLs and the headlines of his articles are "Literary Works" and are therefore worthy of copyright protection.
This is not an insignificant hurdle!
A work needs to have some substance to enjoy copyright.
Many UK Court cases have confirmed that to quote or copy a part of a sentence, or a single word, is never infringement.
Song titles and advertising slogans cannot enjoy copyright.
Can a single sentence, such as a newspaper headline, enjoy copyright?
This probably depends on the length and uniqueness of the sentence.
Looking at the headlines that were copied in this case, I would doubt very much that they would enjoy copyright, but it is just possible that they would.
What about the URLs?
It is well established in UK law that there is no copyright in a single fact, although there is copyright in a compilation of facts.
Since the number of URLs copied by the defendants represents only a very small proportion of the total number of URLs on the complainant's WWW pages, it is unlikely that any action claiming there was infringement of copyright in a database of URLs would succeed.
So, to sum up this stage of the argument: it is possible, but unlikely, that the single sentences in question would be regarded as copyright; it is possible, but unlikely, that the small number of URLs copied out of the large number possible would be considered sufficient significant that a substantial part of the database of URLs (which, being a compilation, is a Literary Work worthy of copyright) had been copied.
In any case, I am not sure that Mr Wishart had developed a clearly identified database of URLs; it is far more likely that they simply were individually associated with particular stories; if that is the case, then the defendants were entitled to copy these facts to their heart's content.
So Round 1 may go Mr Wishart's way in the full Court hearing, but this is not certain.
The second question is there a defence?
But this is not the end of the story.
Even if Mr Wishart can prove the material in question is copyright, he now has to overcome the defences that the defendants will suggest.
These are: were we entitled to copy under "fair dealing" and/or there was an implied license to copy?
One can "fair deal" in other words one can copy a Literary Work without having to ask permission or pay a fee as long as it is indeed "fair" (in other words, does not damage the legitimate commercial interests of the copyright owner) and as long as the copying is for one of several permitted purposes.
It must pass both tests to be permitted.
In a section below ("What if Mr Wishart wins?
"), I consider the financial damage to the complainants, and conclude they have suffered no financial damage.
So the defendants pass the first test.
They also pass the second, because one of the permitted purposes for fair dealing is for "reporting current events".
The Courts have shown themselves generally sympathetic to newspapers that copy for this purpose, because they have a concern that freedom of speech will be prejudiced if newspapers cannot report current events.
It is normal too, for one newspaper to have an "exclusive" and for other papers to copy the material in later editions; this is considered to be fair dealing.
I would therefore conclude that the defendants have a cast iron defence of fair dealing.
What about the question of implied licences?
It is a defence against an infringement action that there was a clear implied license to copy.
If I write a letter to the Editor of Ariadne, there is an implied licence for the editor to reproduce that letter in the journal.
In general, as regular readers of this column will know, I warn against relying on this as a defence, as it is only rarely applicable.
However, this may be a case where it is applicable.
Consider the facts: The copyright owner made a deliberate choice to place his Web site online, with full knowledge (presumably) of how the system operates.
Linking of Web sites to one another is extremely common and is, arguable, both the raison d'etre of the WWW and the reason for its success.
It is custom and practice, and so if a copyright owner puts up a Web site, he MUST expect others to link into his site.
Services such as Web search engines could not operate without this ability.
When someone opens a shop, they expect people to walk into the shop.
Customers do not have to get permission from the shop owner, to go inside, even though they are entering private property.
Permission is inferred, by the presence of the shop, and that the door is unlocked.
This is how most shops operate by custom and practice.
If you don't wish people to walk into your open shop, you should clearly state that fact, at the shop's entrance.
When someone opens a public WWW site, they must expect people to put links into their site, and for them to put links to other sites.
The system was designed to work like this.
Permission for any links (I think) is therefore granted by implication, owing to the very presence of that site.
If you do not wish to have such links made, you should clearly state this fact, at your web site's entrance.
I have said it many times in presentations and it articles, but I will say it again: if a copyright owner is worried that his material will be copied on the Web, he has one simple choice: do not put your material up on the Web!
Summing up the case So, to sum up my view of the case; it is possible just possible that the Court at its full hearing will agree the text copied is worthy of copyright protection.
Even if it does decide this, the defendants have two excellent defences that they were fair dealing, and that there was an implied license to copy.
In my view, the defendants have a 99.999% chance of winning their case.
But what if I am wrong?
What if Mr Wishart wins?
Copyright law allows for two things an injunction, and damages.
An injunction stops the guilty party from continuing to infringe.
To claim damages, the complainant must either demonstrate a loss of sales or profits, or must demonstrate that the defendant had made profits out of his infringement.
Since both the newspapers are available for free on the Internet, there seems to be no basis at all for suing for damages.
Copyright law also makes certain actions liable for criminal penalties; these include deliberate piracy (selling infringing goods), or malicious intent to damage the sales or market position of the injured party.
Since neither party is, as far as I know, making income out of their respective Internet offerings, criminal issues do not enter the case.
As far as market size is concerned, Dr Wills' paper had, according to data I have seen, the lions' share of accesses and was, in effect, giving free advertising to Mr Wishart's paper.
(The Shetland News is read 4,500 to 8,000 times a day, whereas The Shetland Times site was only getting around 500 to 600 hits a day.)
They gave Dr Wishart's paper a bigger readership, and as such were positively enhancing their market position.
(For the short time the links were in place, the Shetland Times hit rate reached 1,000 per day.)
The defendants are the bigger, and stronger Web site in terms of readership, world-wide coverage, advertisers, etc.
The Shetland Times had no advertisers paying them at the time of the action, whereas the Shetland News had several.
Incidentally, the Shetland News went live on the Internet in November 1995, and the Shetland Times in March 1996.
So in practice, if the Shetland Times wins, it would not win money, but would win the injunction.
This, of course, would have a "chilling" effect on the development of the WWW in the UK.
(The decision would have no effect abroad.)
People would be reluctant to put links between their service and any other WWW pages for fear of problems based on the precedent.
This could seriously damage the development of Internet services such as search engines, as well as WWW developers generally.
Whilst not going as far as some commentators have on this topic, I have no doubt it would seriously damage the long term development of the WWW in the UK.
That is not, of course, a problem for the Courts.
They take no regard of such issues; they just look at the niceties of the case in hand.
You may wonder if Moral Rights apply to this case, as I discuss them so often.
They do not; the Copyright Act makes it clear they do not apply to material appearing in newspapers, magazines or periodicals.
The Shetland Times is at http://www.shetland-times.co.uk/st/ The Shetland News is at http://www.shetland-news.co.uk/ Finally, I am quite prepared for the possibility that either party might sue me for infringing the copyright in their URL, or in any of the public statements they have made.
[Editor: Yep, and you are on your own, Charles :-] Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Education-Line Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Education-Line Buzz database thesaurus browser vocabularies Citation BibTex RIS Sam Saunders reports on a pre-print project for education professionals.
Education-line aims to help education professionals to present their work for immediate review and find elusive whole documents on-line.
The pilot service was launched in January, and observers have already started to comment on indications of success.
Our ambition is to have a fully-functioning, high-value service up and running by the end of February 1998.
Some distinct and valuable achievements can already be reported.
Document acquisition has been steady.
At May 30th, the collection stood just short of 200 documents, with negotiations well in hand to acquire larger numbers of additional documents through the Summer and Autumn conference seasons.
Wherever possible, each document acquired has been encouraged as a first contribution in a series.
Several authors have returned with a second, or even a third submission.
Authors’ purposes in submitting to Education-line have included frustration with long delays in print journal appearance, the need to have policy relevant material visible while its subject matter is current, the desire to have work stored and indexed for the future, the determination to be involved in new media as early as possible and the commitment to open and collaborative models of scholarly discourse.
In many cases, our approaches to authors have been through the intermediary of one of Education-line’s partner organisations.
These organisations have been crucial to the progress we have made in acquiring such a number and variety of high quality documents.
In the first five months our database logs have shown active, often extensive enquiries from 1200 separate IP addresses.
One in eight of these have already made return visits.
50 new users are arriving each week.
On average, the bibliographic details of each document in the collection have been “found” through one of the search procedures five times.
The less reliable web server logs indicate that anything between 20 and 60 whole documents are downloaded each working day.
Education-line’s adoption of a controlled vocabulary (the British Education Index Thesaurus) and a robust, well supported database (BRS) has allowed us to develop a precise, multi layered search interface for the web browser.
Terry Screeton of the University of Leeds Computing Service has written generalisable code that supports the current range of search possibilities, and lays foundations for subtleties and extensions as the service grows.
We have been sensitive to users’ approaches to the database, gathering detailed information about the search strategies they adopt as well as talking to scores of users directly.
We believe that the resulting facilities reconcile the extremes of what we have found by offering a range of options.
At one pole is that familiar advocacy of immediate and perfect results without the trouble of learning strategies to achieve them.
Here we offer a “latest 20” option, and direct access to special groups of documents.
The opposite extreme is a more technicist approach, demanding certainty, flexibility and transparency, willing to spend some time learning and refining strategies appropriate to purpose.
Browsing the thesaurus and index, or using Boolean searches to query specified fields satisfy aspects of this demand.
Structuring the search interface carefully, and offering context specific help makes it possible for users to become more focused and more expert in relatively painless stages.
With 104 extra documents arriving as I write this, with four conferences to service before October, Education-line is acquiring that critical mass that will make it a natural and essential part of the education and training world.
References [1] Education-line Web Site, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ Author details Sam Saunders, Education-line project officer Email: edu6jps@lucs-03.novell.leeds.ac.uk Phone: 0113 233 5525 Fax: 0113 233 5524 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Link: A New Beginning for BUBL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Link: A New Beginning for BUBL Buzz software database browser cataloguing opac windows z39.50 marc lcsh telnet gopher ftp url Citation BibTex RIS Dennis Nicholson and Joanne Gold present an overview of 'daughter of BUBL'.
The BUBL Information Service, formerly BUBL, the BUlletin Board for Libraries, is in the process of transforming itself into a new service called LINK, an acronym for LIbraries of Networked Knowledge.
LINK already exists in embryonic form and can be accessed via the WWW at: http://catriona.lib.strath.ac.uk/ The service can also be accessed via Z39.50 at the same address Port: 210, Database: Zpub.
Gopher access is also available on Port 70, however gopher client access is currently very limited and is not recommended.
Telnet access is planned but is not a current priority.
This will probably be based on Lynx, but no final decision has yet been taken.
Since becoming an operational service in May 1991 BUBL has been managed and operated by staff of the library at Strathclyde University in Glasgow.
However, it has never been physically located there, being based at Glasgow Unversity until September 1993 then on the UKOLN server at Bath University until this year, 1996.
With the full introduction of LINK, sometime in 1996, the service will, for the first time, be both managed and based at Strathclyde University.
As indicated above, LINK is not yet an operational service.
However its basic form is already largely in place.
Once this is finalised, the service will grow through the gradual addition of resources from the Bath based service, and elsewhere, but neither the underlying philosophy of the service, nor the details of its structure, organisation, operational methods or technical basis are expected to alter significantly, at least in the short to medium term.
This makes it possible to contemplate an article which aims to explain and illustrate both the basic form of LINK and the reasoning behind it.
Such an article is pertinent at this point, partly because BUBL is still seeking user feedback on the design of LINK (Tell Us what you think), partly because we believe that LINK will be more effective and useful as a tool if users and intermediaries understand how it is designed, structured and organised.
With this latter point in mind, we have attempted to ensure that the design, structure and organisation of LINK is easy to understand, learn and remember.
The key is the mnemonic Menus, Help, Search, Libraries.
Everything you need to know and remember about LINK is contained in these four words.
The Libraries are subsections of the WWW browser interface to resources accessible via the service.
They consist, or will consist, of the current BUBL Subject Tree but presented in Dewey Decimal Classification order.
The current BUBL Subject Tree contains Internet resources of interest to the U.K. Higher Education community, and covers every major subject area.
The present intention is to make all of these resources accessible via LINK, although discussions are currently taking place with JISC,who fund BUBL, regarding BUBL's relationship to the eLib Access to Network Resources projects ADAM, CAIN, EEVL, IHR-INFO, ROADS, RUDI, OMNI, SOSIG, and to NISS that may yet have a bearing on the final focus of the service.
One possibility is that LINK will cover only those subject areas not covered by the other services and within this will focus in particular on Pure Science and Library and Information Science.
However, other possibilities are also being discussed and it may be that LINK will specialise in covering all subjects via one search facility and in offering access to these via Dewey, LCSH and Z39.50.
Further information will be reported through ARIADNE and other sources as soon as it is available.
Regardless of the final focus of the service in terms of subject coverage, the key interface with LINK will be the Search facility.
All resources accessible via LINK will be catalogued and searchable via both a WWW Search form and Z39.50.
All of the following will be recorded and searchable: Item Name the name/title of a resource or service *** Item Abstract the abstract assigned to a resource or service *** Item Content Type indicates the format of files on LINK *** Author the individual, organisation, or corporate body responsible for a resource or service LCSH Library of Congress subject headings assigned to a resource or service Subjects (non-LCSH) free text subject headings assigned to a resource or service LINKhelp the field assigned to all help information on LINK Resource or Service Category defines the type of resource or service, e.g.
news, software, OPAC, JISC, FTP, Z39.50 server etc Date Added the date a resource or service was added to LINK Expires the date a resource or service is to be removed from LINK *** Item Name, Item Abstract and Item Content Type are system provided fields.
As such we are unable to alter their names to more intuitive, easily recognised ones.
A general keyword search of all fields will be available and will include an implicit boolean AND facility.
It will also be possible to search individual fields, to combine terms from these fields using AND, OR, and NOT, and to employ left and right hand truncation in searches.
As already indicated, the Search facility will be the real key to LINK, and extensive guidance in using it will be provided via the Help facility.
This currently consists of three subsections: Begin here Search help Service help Begin here covers the Menus, Help, Search, Libraries structure, Search help gives tips on how to get the best out of the search interface, and Service help covers such things as LINK services, BUBL, JISC, Sponsors, WWW and Z39.50 access and related items.
Access to Help and to other key functions, including the Dewey classified Libraries, is accessible at the top and at the foot of every page of LINK via the header and footer Menus.
These are identical in terms of content and cover: Help provides help on all aspects of the LINK service Search allows you to search the LINK database via the WWW Browse takes you to the classified browsable interface News takes you to special features on LINK, news, jobs etc E-Mail Updates provides access to LINK Updates messages sent to lis-link Tell Us allows you to tell us what you think about the service, and suggest URLs to add NetSearch provides access to different ways of searching the Internet More takes you to the Service help page which provides some background to the service, with information on LINK services, BUBL, JISC, sponsors, access to the service, and much more The footer menu looks like this: [Help] [Search] [Browse] [News] [E-Mail Updates] [Tell Us] [Net Search] [More] You can get a feel for its use and the functions it provides access to by clicking on each of the items in turn, then using Back on your browser and page down to return to this part of the article.
It covers the same functions as the footer menu, except that it also enables immediate access to the LINK home page at any time try clicking on any part of the banner outside of the menu itself, then use Back on your browser and page down to return to this part of the article.
LINK is the culmination of a process that began as far back as 1991.
In that year, BUBL almost came to a premature end when Project Jupiter, the Glasgow University based initiative which gave rise to BUBL in its experimental form, came to the end of its natural life and ran out of funds.
A group of volunteers from Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities took over the service determined to build it up, widen its appeal, and develop a user base large enough to ensure its survival.
Very few people in the U.K. had heard of the Internet in 1991 but a few farsighted individuals, some of them (believe it or not) librarians, had grasped its potential.
BUBL helped feed these individuals with much sought after information about Internet developments and, in the process, helped ensure its own survival.
This was the beginning of an attempt to provide end users and librarians with a helpful interface to Internet resources.
It led, inevitably, two years on, to the transformation of BUBL from a JANET based local-access-only service into a fully fledged Internet based service with gopher and World Wide Web servers linking its users to resources across the developed world.
Shortly after this, towards the end of 1993, the BUBL Subject Tree was born a first attempt to provide user-friendly helpfully organised access to Internet resources.
This, in turn, led in 1994-1995 to the BLRDD funded CATRIONA project, an investigation into the feasibility of a distributed catalogue of Internet resoruces based on library standards like Z39.50 and MARC, and integrated with the traditional OPAC approach to hard copy resources.
CATRIONA CATaloguing and Retrieval of Information Over Networks Applications showed that there were already commercially available Z39.50 OPAC clients which, having searched for and retrieved MARC records describing electronic resources and containing URLs, could automatically load a WWW client like Netscape, pass it the URL and so deliver the electronic resource to the desktop via the catalogue.
This meant that the CATRIONA model, which envisaged a distributed catalogue of Internet resources based on Z39.50 and MARC and integrated with the retrieval of information as hard copy resources was already a practical proposition at a basic level.
Many enhancements to the standards and the software were necessary to make it a practical reality, with a requirement from parallel distributed searching being a key element.
However, the central approach appeared a sound basis for a future development path.
The introduction of LINK was a direct consequence of the CATRIONA project.
The aim was to design a service that could ultimately be an integrated part of a distributed catalogue of Internet resources based on MARC, Z39.50 and the CATRIONA model.
The next step was to find software that would support a service of this kind and that would also provide other required enhancements to the BUBL service.
In the event, Ameritech's NetPublisher software proved to be the answer, providing: Z39.50, WWW and Gopher access in a single piece of server software a simple user friendly cataloguing interface to an underlying MARC based cataloguing system a built in sophisticated search facility, together with other built in forms a GUI-based point and click drag and drop document creation and management facility an image map creation facility automatic URL checking The software, which runs under Windows NT, is a vital tool in the implementation of BUBL's new strategy.
It enables us to plan for what we believe is the future whilst at the same time staying abreast of developments in the currently favoured trend of WWW.
LINK is expected to become an operational service in the final quarter of 1996.
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International FEMIRC Conference, Warsaw Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines International FEMIRC Conference, Warsaw Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter reports from the International Conference on Activities in Science and Technology in CEEC towards European Integration, organised by the OPI (Information Processing Centre) in Warsaw .
References [1] The Information Processing Centre (OPI), Warsaw, is at: http://ciuw.warman.net.pl/alf/opi/ [2] Information about the Polish Femirc can be found at: http://ciuw.warman.net.pl/alf/femirc/ Information about the activities of the partner organizations can be found at: http://ciuw.warman.net.pl/alf/femirc/dok5eng.htm A new FEMIRC server is available at: http://www.femirc.org.pl This service will eventually replace the services mentioned above.
The final programme for the conference, issued shortly before it began, is available at: http://www.femirc.org.pl/wiadomosci/n/n07.html.
The actual running order of the presentations was slightly different.
[3] Available at http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/libraries.html [4] The EXPLOIT Accompanying Measure is listed among related accompanying measures at: http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/newproj.html [5] , “Creating a user-friendly Information Society”; [Document EUR17651], p5, and Annex II of the same document, section II.
The document is available on the web at: http://www.cordis.lu/esprit/src/istwork.htm Author Details Philip Hunter Information Officer UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Handling MARC With PERL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Handling MARC With PERL Buzz data software api metadata video cataloguing graphics opac multimedia z39.50 marc perl aacr2 isbd ftp research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight investigates the inner workings of the MARC record's binary distribution format and presents the first cut at a Perl module to read and write MARC records.
The MAchine Readable Catalogue (MARC) format is probably one of the oldest and most widely used metadata formats today.
It was developed in the United States during the 1960's as a data interchange format for monographs in the then newly computerised library automation systems.
In the following years the MARC format became a standard for export and import of data to library systems in much of the world and various national and vendor enhanced variations on the original MARC format appeared.
The original MARC became known as USMARC [1] and itself continued to develop to include the ability to hold metadata on works other than simple monographs.
The other MARC spin offs acquired their own names such as UKMARC, OZMARC, UNIMARC, CANMARC, PicaMARC, BLCMPMARC and so on.
Recently considerable interest and effort has been expended to attempt to integrate many of these MARC variants back in USMARC so that we can return to the situation where we have one true MARC.
USMARC also underlies many of the Z39.50 based search and retrieval systems in use today.
With Z39.50 slowly growing in popularity, there is now a need to be able to generate USMARC format records from other metadata sources such as Dublin Core [2] data, Apple MCF [3] files and ROADS [4] templates.
It would also be useful if existing library catalogues could import and export metadata about some of the resources they have catalogued for use in systems built upon these other metadata formats.
Unfortunately, whilst the use of MARC is well understood by cataloguers and other librarians, the data format is often thought of by the techies as a bit of a mystery.
The purpose of this article is to explain the basic MARC format, describe how the various national and vendor supplied MARC derivatives differ from USMARC and offer a description of a simple Perl module that can read and write MARC records.
Format of a MARC record As the original MARC records were developed in the 1960's and the basic layout of the record has remained largely unchanged since then, the format of a MARC record owes a lot to the state of computer technology at that time.
MARC is a binary format designed for writing to magnetic tape.
It contains enough information to allow machines with what we would now consider to be very small memories to load just the parts of a MARC record that they are interested in whilst skipping over the rest.
It was also designed with some of the popular computer languages of the time in mind, with a fixed length record header that would be easy to read into the data structures available.
Structurally therefore MARC is quite simple; the complexity is derived from the fact that it can carry a wide variety of information in precise and detailed formats (such as AACR2 rules).
The basic layout [5] of a MARC record is to first have a 24 byte leader, then a variable number of directory entries and then a variable number of variable sized fields.
The fields are sometimes split into variable control field and variable data fields.
The layout of a whole MARC record is thus: +--------+-----------+-------------------------+----------------------+ | Leader | Directory | Variable Control Fields | Variable Data Fields | +--------+-----------+-------------------------+----------------------+ The leader is designed to provide basic information about the size of the whole MARC record, the size of some of the data structures in the directory and data fields and the some very basic information about type of work that the MARC record is describing.
The layout of the leader in the original MARC format was: Byte Name ------0-4 Record Length 5 Status (n=new, c=corrected and d=deleted) 6 Type of Record (a=printed material) 7 Bibliographic Level (m=monograph) 8-9 Blanks 10 Indictator count (2 for monographs) 11 Subfield code count (2 0x1F+subfield code itself) 12-16 Base address of data 17-23 Blanks The leader in some of the new versions of USMARC and some of the other MARC variants have some subtle changes from this original version, though the number of "Type of Record" entries has typically increased [6]!
For example the structure of the UNIMARC Leader (according to the 1987 UNIMARC Manual) is: Byte Name ------0-4 Record Length 5 Status 6 Type of record (a=language material, printed b=language material, manuscript c=music scores, printed d=music scores, manuscript e=cartographic materials, printed f=cartographic materials, manuscript g=projected and video material i=sound recordings, non-musical j=sound recordings, musical k=2D graphics (pictures, etc) l=computer media m=multimedia r=3D artifacts and realia 7 Bibliographic Level (a=analytical m=monograph s=serial c=collection 8 Hierarchical Level Code (blank=undefined, 0=no hierarchical relationships, 1=highest level record, 2= record below highest level) 9 Blank 10 Indicator length (2 as in MARC II) 11 Subfield code length (2 as in MARC II) 12-16 Base address of data 17 Encoding level (blank=full level, 1=sublevel 1, 2=sublevel 2, 3=sublevel 3) 18 Descriptive Cataloguing Form (blank=record is full ISBD, n=record is in non-ISBD format, i=record is in an incomplete ISBD format) 19 Blank 20 Length of length field in directory (always 4 in UNIMARC) 21 Length of Starting Character Position in directory (always 5 in UNIMARC) 22 Length of implementation defined portion in directory (always 0 in UNIMARC) 23 Blank Some of these differences in the leader can be used to help software distinguish one MARC record from another.
For example, in BLCMPMARC the last byte of the leader is always the character 'g'.
In most other MARC variants, including USMARC, this byte is a blank.
Therefore we can treat the presence of a 'g' at the end of the leader as a hint that the MARC record is in BLCMPMARC format.
Such hints may not always be correct (for example there might be another MARC variant that in some circumstances has a 'g' in the last character position) and in some cases there is no way to tell different MARC variants apart from the leader.
This is a pity as the different MARC formats sometimes have completely different interpretations for the data in a particular field and so it is handy to know what MARC variant you are using.
In some cases it can even make processing the rest of the record more difficult as we shall see in a moment.
The directory The directory is used to indicate where each field starts and how long it is.
The directory can be of variable length (though there is an implicit maximum size imposed by the fact that the MARC record can be at most 99999 bytes long in total) and consists of a number of 12 byte directory entries.
In most MARC variants the format of the directory entry is: Byte Name ------0-2 Tag 3-6 Length 7-11 Start Address However there are some oddities around.
For example in BLCMPMARC the directory structure is a little different: Byte Name 0-2 Tag 3 Level 4-6 Length 7-11 Start Address As can be seen BLCMP have sacrificed the length of each field to allow them to include a "level" element in the directory.
This is to allow them to record the level within an analytical work that the particular field applies to (rather like byte 8 of the Leader in UNIMARC except that it works on a tag by tag basis rather than applying to a whole record).
If one processes a record that is in BLCMPMARC as though it were in, say, UNIMARC, there is potential for the software to misinterpret the directory entries for analytical works and assume that the length of the field is greater than it actually is.
This could result in rubbish being read in from the MARC record and is an example of a situation where not knowing which version of MARC you are handling can lead to some unpleasant surprises.
The Fields The fields are the part of the MARC record that actually hold the bulk of the metadata about the work.
There are two main types of field; control fields and data fields.
The control fields are used in some systems to carry information such the control number of the work.
There are typically only a few control fields in a single MARC record.
The data fields are usually more numerous and contain the bibliographic metadata about the work.
The structure of both control and data fields is identical however; they both start with an indicator field and then have a number of subfields.
The size of the indicator field is specified in the Leader (the indicator code length at byte 10) of the MARC record and is typically two bytes long.
The subfields are typically separated by a subfield delimiter which is the character 0x1F and have a subfield code, which is usually a single character (although there is provision for multi-character subfield codes by specifying a subfield code length greater than 2 in the Leader at byte 11).
In many library systems the subfield delimiter is often represented on screen as a "$" although it must be emphasized that this is just an on screen rendering; in the binary file 0x1F is always used.
The end of each field within the record there is either a an end of field delimiter or an end of record delimiter.
The end of field delimiter is used at the end of all fields except for the very last one, in which case the end of record delimiter is used.
The lengths of the fields specified in the directory entry for a tag include the field delimiters, so this is a handy way to "sanity check" the MARC record as its being read in.
If the directory entries are not structured as the software assumes, there is a good chance that at least one tag will have too much or too little data read in and the field will not be terminated by such a delimiter.
The software can then either abort at this point or use the information to make a better informed guess as to the MARC variant that it is attempting to process and try again.
Processing with Perl One thing that would be very useful for the metadata handling communities would be some freely available tools for processing and generating MARC records.
Whilst any general purpose computer language could be used to handle MARC records, the approach this work has taken is to start working on a MARC processing module for Perl.
The reason for this is partly because Perl offers some nice modularization features and data structures that make producing an Application Programming Interface (API) relatively painless.
It is also widely used in the web, library systems and metadata communities for building Common Gateway Interface scripts, OPAC support tools and metadata handling systems.
Lastly its my programming language of choice and it fits in with the other tools I'm writing!
:-) An alpha release of the Perl module discussed here is available online [7] and interested parties are encouraged to download it and have a play.
Its still in a pretty raw state; at the moment it only knows how to read and write BLCMPMARC (the MARC format that we use at Loughborough University) and exports just two subroutines into the program that uses it.
These subroutines are ReadMarcRecord and WriteMarcRecord and as their names suggest they are used to read and write MARC records.
The ReadMarcRecord subroutine currently takes a single argument that is the file handle of an input stream to read the MARC record in from.
The first thing that this routine does is read the Leader in by reading in the first 24 bytes from the current file pointer position.
It then calls another routine that reads in the directory entries and then loads in the actual fields themselves.
The information from both the Leader and the fields is then loaded into a Perl 5 style complex hashed data structure.
The format of this data structure is: $MarcRecord = { marc_type => "BLCMP", status => substr($Leader,5,1), type => substr($Leader,6,1), class => substr($Leader,7,1), indicator_count => substr($Leader,10,1), subfield_mark_count => substr($Leader,11,1), encoding_level => substr($Leader,17,1), analytical_record_ind => substr($Leader,18,1), source_of_record => substr($Leader,19,1), on_union_flag => substr($Leader,20,1), scp_length => substr($Leader,21,1), general_record_des => substr($Leader,23,1), data => { %FIELD }, level => { %DIR_LEVEL }, }; In the above description, $Leader is a 24 byte buffer holding the Leader information.
The marc_type element of the MarcRecord data structure is used by the module to tell the user's software what sort of MARC record it thinks it has read in.
At the moment valid values for this element are Invalid, BadDirectory and BLCMP.
The first two indicate that either a Leader could not be read in (because there were less than 24 bytes left in the input file for example) or that the directory entries could not be read properly.
The later indicates the variant of MARC that the routine thinks the record is in; at the moment only BLCMP MARC is recognised but other variants will be added based on the techniques described in the previous sections (initially USMARC and UNIMARC will be added, with other MARCs being added later if documentation about them can be secured or other individuals on the Internet contribute code patches).
Following the marc_type element in the MarcRecord data structure is a set of elements that hold the contents of the Leader.
These will vary depending upon the MARC variant being read, but there are a core of these such as the Record Length, Record Status, Record Type, Indicator Count and Subfield Mark Count that are likely to be present in all MARC formats.
Next comes the actual fields themselves.
These are held in Perl 5 hash of arrays (a feature not available in earlier versions of Perl and many other languages).
The hash key is the MARC tag for that field in the MARC record and the array index is the instance of that particular tag (to allow for more than one instance of a particular MARC tag within the MARC record).
In the initial alpha release the field contents are then just dumped straight into this hash of arrays.
In a later release it may be found to be worthwhile to split off the indicator and each of the subfields and place these in their own data structures within this hash of arrays.
Lastly in the initial release there is another hash of arrays that is keyed and indexed in the same way as the fields themselves but which contains the level code from the BLCMP Directory entries.
This is an example of an element of the MarcRecord that will only be valid for a limited subset of the potential MARC record variants.
Software that makes use of the this Perl module should be aware that if it makes use of these proprietary or localised extensions a nd alterations to the basic USMARC format, it must be prepared to deal with cases where it meets MARC records that do not contain this information.
The WriteMarcRecord subroutine is similar to the ReadMarcRecord routine and makes use of the same MarcRecord data structure.
It takes two parameters currently; a file handle for the output stream and the MarcRecord data structure.
The variant of MARC that it writes out is set by the marc_type element in the MarcRecord.
It works by constructing the fields and directory sections of the MARC record and then generates a Leader and concatenates the three sections of the record.
Conclusions This document has tried to explain the structure of the MARC record and has pointed out some of the differences that can appear in the data structures of different MARC variants.
It also describes the API of a prototype Perl module to handle MARC records.
In the next issue, this API will be developed to handle more MARC variants and some examples will be presented that demonstrate how to use the module to provide conversions between MARC and other metadata formats.
It is hoped that this module will prove to be of use to the library and metadata communities and that it will grow and develop over time into a flexible MARC handling package.
Even if it merely demystifies MARC for some people it will have served a useful role.
Any comments, suggestions and feedback on this article and the associated Perl module are most welcome.
References [1] Library of Congress USMARC Web-based information, < http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marc.html > [2] Dublin Core elements, < http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements/ > [3] Apple MCF Research Information, < http://mcf.research.apple.com/ > [4] ROADS Web pages, < http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/ > [5] The USMARC Formats: Background and Principles, < http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/96principl.html > [6] Expanded definition of USMARC leader/OG type of record, < http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/leader06.html > [7] Alpha release of MARC Perl module, < ftp://ftp.roads.lut.ac.uk/pub/ROADS/contrib/Marc-0.01.tar.gz > Author Details Jon Knight works on the ROADS eLib project at the University of Loughborough, UK Email: jon@net.lut.ac.uk Personal Web Page: < http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/People/jon.html > Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Netskills Corner: Beneath the Surface of Your Web Pages Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner: Beneath the Surface of Your Web Pages Buzz software java html database graphics windows hypertext doc ftp url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly looks beneath the surface of HTML pages and provides advice on the design of the underlying directory structure.
Pick up a book or read an article on HTML design and what will you find: advice on the use of graphics in Web pages, using tables and providing animation in your pages using technologies such as animated GIFs and client-pull or server-push, use of plug-in software, such as Shockwave, or programming environments such as Java and ActiveX.
There is, however, much more to the design of HTML pages than the appearance as seen by the end user.
Of particular importance to the future maintenance of a large set of HTML pages is the underlying directory structure.
It is important to take care in the design of the directory structure used to store your HTML pages in order to ensure (a) that permissions to update areas can be delegated appropriately, (b) that directories will not have to be renamed or files moved, which will cause hypertext links to fail and (c) minimise the resources needed for future maintenance.
An Exercise Rather than providing a set of guidelines, you may find it more useful to attempt a simple exercise in the design of a directory structure for a departmental information service.
You are responsible for managing the information needs of your department (a computing service).
You have analysed the information flow in your department and arrived at the following list: Staff List Staff names, phones nos.
etc.
Documents Documents produced in your department.
These are categorised as follows: Beginners' Guides Further Guides Facts Sheets Tutorial Workbooks A total of 150 documents are available.
Documents are between 8 and 50 A4 sides.
Training Materials Training materials for about 20 software packages.
The training materials are produced using Powerpoint.
Newsletter A newsletter, which is produced once a term (about 16 A4 sides).
Newsflash A news sheet which is produced on a weekly basis.
One or two sides of A4.
Software A list of software for Unix and PC systems.
Clusters Details of computer cluster areas on campus.
Includes opening times, location, nos.
of machines, etc.
Personnel Details Staff reviews, promotion requests, etc.
Note that the Information Officer is responsible for producing the Newsletter.
The Information Assistant is responsible for producing the NewsFlash.
The Training Officer is responsible for producing training materials.
About 6 support staff are responsible for maintaining software information.
The Admin Assistant is responsible for maintaining cluster information.
The Information Officer, Information Assistant and Training Officer are familiar with Word For Windows and HTML authoring.
The Information Assistant only uses PCs, however, and is not familiar with editing on Unix systems.
Some software support staff are familiar with Unix and PCs and HTML authoring, but others are reluctant to learn a new skill.
The Admin Assistant uses Microsoft Access to maintain the cluster database.
The Admin Assistant is also responsible for the Personnel Details.
The Task Produce a schematic drawing of the directory structure for the WWW pages for this departmental WWW service.
Identify names for the directories and files.
Identify links between the various directories.
Identify links which may be pointed to from other departments in the University.
Include details of the person responsible for the maintenance.
Make a summary of other issues which must be dealt with in order to ensure that you are responsible for a quality WWW service.
A Solution Design Exercise The following table can be used to assist in the design exercise.
Figure 1 Table used In Design ExerciseDirectory Structure A sample directory structure for part of the exercise is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Directory DesignIn Figure 2 the following signs are used: * The directory will be repeated for other instances using a defined naming convention (initials followed by surname [e.g.
jbloggs]; newsnnn, newsflnn, doc-codenn {e.g.
beg05, fur13 or fac12] or software name).
$ Main menu entry point.
Issues Some of the issues to consider include: Will personal home pages be allowed?
Where should they be located?
What can and can't they say?
Who is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the content?
Who is responsible for ensuring consistency of look and reel and writing style?
Who is responsible for ensuring the quality of the HTML?
The naming convention to be used.
The persistency of URLs.
Skills levels needed and associated training requirements Naming conventions HTML authoring model Responsibilities The Information Officer will be responsible for finalising documents before final printing.
As part of the final printing exercises, the document will be converted to HTML format (using rtftohtml or Internet Assistant), copying files to the WWW server and links from the appropriate menu files updated.
Permissions needed: Update docs.html file.
Create directories beneath this level.
Software Support Staff will be responsible for updating help files for software and for adding links to corresponding documentation (or should this be done by the Information Officer?).
Permissions needed: Software support staff group require update permissions to software.html Also need to create directories beneath this level.
The Administrative Assistant will be responsible for updating the staff list and [providing link so the files containing names and phones numbers for each individual member of staff.
Individual members of staff will be responsible for maintaining the name.further.html (subject to departmental and organisational rules and guidelines and UK legislation).
HTML Tools The following tools will be used: Word For Windows and Internet Assistant For Word PowerPoint and Internet Assistant For PowerPoint Unix / PC editor A Database Gateway Using The Tools Microsoft Office software (Word and Powerpoint) will be used in a rigorous way (e.g.
consistent use of styles in Word) as the main authoring tools.
Internet Assistant will be used, with a modified template to produce a consistent department look and feel.
Modifications to menu files will normally be made on the Unix WWW server using a Unix editor (emacs or vi).
Staff will little Unix experience will copy the file to their PC and use a PC editor.
An FTP Client (e.g.
Rapid Filer) will be used to copy the file between the PC and Unix system and to rename the file (to change from .htm to .html) Microsoft's dbWeb (or equivalent) will be used to provide dynamic access to the cluster database.
Information Not Made Available Personnel Details will not be made available on the Web.
Tips On The Design Of Your Directory Structure Produce a paper design of your proposed directory structure before producing your HTML documents.
Review your paper design with your colleagues.
Agree on a naming convention for files and directories consisting of multiple words (e.g.
use of hyphens [/docs/overview-guides], underscores [/docs/overview_guides] or capitalisation [/docs/overviewGuides]).
Agree on a convention for the capitalisation of files and directories.
Identify responsibilities for maintaining areas of your Web service and ensure that the directory structure reflects the responsibilities.
Discuss security issues with the system adminstrator of the WWW server.
Arrange a training session on the design of directory structures for your colleagues.
Farewell This is the last Netskills Corner article to be written by Brian Kelly.
From 1st November 1996 I will be working at UKOLN, University of Bath as the UK Web Focus Officer.
It's been hectic working for Netskills over the past year.
I have delivered training courses and given presentations throughout the country (from Aberdeen to Surrey, taking in Belfast, Bradford, Brunel, Coleraine, Durham, Leeds, London, Loughborough, Manchester and Rutherford Labs).
I was also fortunate enough to attend the WWW Conference in Paris in May.
When not travelling I was involved in the development of Netskills training materials, in particular the HTML Authoring kit.
My new post is a challenging one, acting as a coordinator for the Web for the UK HE community, as well as managing the Information Services Group at UKOLN.
I'm looking forward to this new challenge.
No doubt I will continue to contribute articles to Ariadne!
[Editorial comment: You are very right, there :-]   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Monash University Electronic Reserve Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Monash University Electronic Reserve Project Buzz data software html database browser identifier copyright cataloguing graphics opac windows jpeg passwords gif tiff adobe lzw licence ftp cd-rom algorithm url research Citation BibTex RIS Hans W. Groenewegen, Debbie Hedger and Iris Radulescu describe Monash University's Electronic Reserve Project which is at the core of the electronic library project at the University's new Berwick campus.
Monash University is one of the largest universities in Australia.
It has six campuses, five in metropolitan Melbourne, of which the biggest is in the suburb of Clayton, approximately 30 kilometers from the Central Business District and one in the South Eastern region of the State (the La Trobe Valley).
Its newest campus is located at Berwick a major population growth centre, south-east of Melbourne.
The University obtained government support for establishing the Berwick campus in 1993 and it was decided from the outset that this new campus would rely heavily on electronic delivery of courses and course materials from the University's other campuses.
In line with this emphasis on electronic teaching, the plans incorporated a concept of an electronic library.
This was translated in the building plans into an area of some 200 square metres to be equipped with computer workstations and printing facilities, from which staff and students would be able to access information located elsewhere.
At the start of 1995 the University enrolled its first students at the Berwick campus.
However the building would not be ready until 1996, so students were accommodated at the adjacent Casey College of TAFE.
Conventional library services were also provided by arrangement with the Casey College.
Monash University Library funded the purchase of a small collection of basic reading materials which were located in the College Library and listed in its catalogue.
However it was recognised that it would not be feasible to build up another substantial library collection at Berwick and that the electronic library solution was probably the most practical alternative.
During the second half of 1995, as the building was slowly beginning to take shape on the University's Berwick campus, the Library started work on an electronic "reserve" [1] facility that was to be at the core of the electronic library .
It was decided to base the e-reserve [2] on an existing image system that had been developed largely inhouse by Library systems staff , to give access to past examination papers.
This system stores digitised images of examination papers, which can be retrieved for viewing and printing.
Most of the functionality required for an electronic reserve system was already incorporated in the examination papers system, including a module which would let the Library charge a fee to recover printing costs.
The major new features required were: more direct integration with the Library's on-line public access catalogue (OPAC) and a copyright management facility.
Intellectual property issues The examination papers system had avoided the intellectual property issues associated with the scanning of texts for electronic storage; the University owns the copyright in these materials.
This made examination papers ideal subjects for earlier library imaging projects.
However with the types of publications that are included in undergraduate reserve collections the copyright problem can no longer be avoided.
The educational copying (Statutory License) provisions contained in Part VB of the Copyright Act do not extend to the making and storing of electronic copies.
Indeed, the CAL Collection Scheme Agreements specifically exclude these activities.
During 1995, in discussions between the Copyright Agency (CAL) and the Australian ViceChancellor's Committee, through the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), the possibility of some comprehensive electronic reserve license agreement was explored.
However it did not appear likely that a satisfactory arrangement would be arrived at in time to fit in with Monash University's timetable for the Berwick campus.
It was therefore decided to adopt as an interim solution the approach previously taken by San Diego State University, reportedly successfully [3], and contact publishers direct.
To this end a form letter was developed and this was used in all initial approaches to publishers.
The following conditions were offered by the Library in return for permission to scan and store the material in question: to restrict access to the electronic versions of the documents to students and staff of Monash University, such access to be protected by password.
to keep statistics of the use made of the electronic versions of the documents and to provide the publisher with the statistical information on demand.
to warn all users of the system, by means of prominently posted notices on or near the computer terminals, against infringement of copyright and the limits to the making of copies for private study and research, imposed under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act.
to destroy the electronic versions of the text when the materials are no longer in high demand by the students.
Should there still be a demand 24 months from the date of initial approval, the Library undertook to contact the publisher again to seek a renewed permission for the continued storage of the document in electronic form.
Those publishers who replied requesting payment of a fee (or who indicated that they would withhold their permission because of concerns re potential loss of income) were offered a royalty payment based on the following formula: RP x TP x U.
In this formula the value of RP is the Recommended Retail Price of the monograph, or, in the case of a journal the single issue price of an issue of the journal, or the annual subscription price.
The value of TP is based on a straightforward page count, i.e.
number of pages scanned as a fraction of the total number of pages of text contained in the monograph, or in the case of a journal, the total number of pages of editorial contained in the entire issue (if RP is the single issue price) or the entire volume (if RP is the annual subscription price).
The value of U is either the number of students enrolled in the course/10 or 15, whichever is the greater [4].
The rationale for dividing the number of potential users by 10 is that this would be the likely number of uses of a physical copy of the material that the library would expect to get in the conventional reserve system.
The rationale for introducing a minimum value of 15 for U is that otherwise the royalty payable for small classes (i.e classes of less than 150 students) would become trivial.
As is clear from Table 1, the approach taken by the Library was successful to the extent that the majority of publishers who replied gave their approval without charging a royalty.
The minority who wished to charge a fee, were generally happy to accept the "Monash formula".
The major problem encountered was that a very large number of publishers did not reply at all, in spite of several follow up letters.
Almost certainly, in the majority of cases the letter ended up in their "too hard basket", although inevitably, there were problems locating a current address for many smaller publishers, particularly of older publications.
Number of requests sent: 1,235 Number of requests approved (no fee): 489 Number of requests approved (fee charged): 53 (*) Number of requests denied: 45 No reply: 648 (*) Total amount paid in royalty fees AUS $ 3,900, i.e.
average of AUS $73.68 per item.
Table 1: Fate of Requests for Approval to Scan (as at 28/2/1997) Technical issues Graphics File Format: After detailed investigation, the Library adopted the TIFF format for imaging examination papers and, consequently, for the e-reserve.
The exact flavour is TIFF Group 4 CCITT compressed multipage, which provides the highest possible compression for images of text documents (as opposed to formats like GIF and JPEG, which offer good compression for pictures, with JPEG being exceptionally good albeit lossy at handling high colour photographs).
The compression scheme avoids the usage of proprietory algorithms, such as LZW or GIF (which can also be supported within the TIFF format), yielding fairly compact files, which is necessary in view of the Internet transmission method adopted.
Obviously, even with this scheme, the higher the resolution adopted for imaging, the bigger the file size.
We have decided to avoid imaging at more than 300 dpi for this very reason.
The multipage feature of this format also means that documents are much more manageable, as all the related pages are stored within a single disk file, rather than in multiple files that must be put together by program or other means.
PDF (Adobe Acrobat) also handles multipage documents.
However, later statistics show that it is very labour intensive to create PDF documents, which may themselves include other binary formats and even TIFF, with the added drawback that speeding up their printing is not possible, unlike with TIFF more about this later.
It is generally accepted in imaging circles that TIFF Group 4 is the best option for imaging books or documents that are black and white text, even when these include the occasional diagram.
There are drawbacks to the use of this TIFF format, one being that multipage is not handled well by most of the available freeware viewers for Windows 3.11.
Also, the specification [5] allows for a huge range of variations, including the hardwarespecific fill-order of bytes and even bits within the byte.
These problems can, however, be overcome by software, and we have been singularly successful at that.
Scanning: Very few programs for the IBM PC exist that interact with a scanner to allow the creation of the required TIFF format.
Utility tools from Kofax, Watermark and Accusoft were trialled and eventually the Accusoft engine was included in the final product.
However, there are other issues in scanning large numbers of pages, such as the cost and availability of high-speed scanning equipment and staff numbers to handle what is, essentially, labour intensive.
For this reason, it was decided to send large batches of pages / volumes to be scanned to an outside bureau specialised in this sort of work.
The Library has received excellent service from its chosen contractor, the Australian Securities Commission, which uses specialised high speed scanners and a properly run quality control work flow so that results are always of the highest quality.
In the context of the day-to-day operation of the e-reserve section, however, many book and article excerpts are trickling in.
These can easily be scanned in-house, using a simple scanning utility built in the viewing module, or using the off-the-shelf Watermark program.
The images are stored directly on the computer's hard disk.
To overcome the limitations of flat-bed scanners (the Library uses a HP ScanJet 3c), a photocopy of the chapter or article is first made.
These A4 pages are then fed into the scanner's ADF for automatic chaining within the multipage TIFF file.
For both in-house and bureau scanning, the very simple idea was adopted of barcoding the article or excerpt and using the barcode number as the file name.
This has worked extremely well for both imaging implementations.
The graphic resolution used is quite low, such as 200x200 or 300x300; this yields perfectly acceptable quality both on screen and in print and leads to very small file sizes.
For example 20 densely-printed pages, scanned in-house at 300 dots per inch, are stored in a 1 Megabyte file.
Storage: When large batches of documents are scanned by the bureau, the resulting CD-ROM is used both as a transfer medium and as a back-up medium.
For speed of access, images are transferred to the hard disk of the server, which is periodically backed up to DAT tape.
In-house scans go directly to the hard disk, so they are also picked up on the tape backup.
Retrieval of imaged documents: At the point when it comes to handling more than 100 documents, one needs a database and a search algorithm.
In the case of the Monash Library, PALS, the Library's on-line catalogue, already holds the searchable records of all required course reading, making it an ideal candidate for the on-line e-reserve database.
The Library also has a web-based interface to this mainframe catalogue, implemented via CGI programming to pass search parameters from a web user to the mainframe, capture the search results, format them as HTML, then display them to the user's browser.
For imaged course materials, a tag is added to the catalogue record, containing the full path name of the associated image.
The CGI program, in turn, was modified to look for this tag before displaying the search results, making this into a hot link with the caption "View this item".
When the user clicks on the hyperlink, the browser fires up a full URL that results in the e-reserve WWW server automatically retrieving the image file and serving it directly to the user's browser.
The delivery mechanism is built into the http protocol, and so is the subsequent handling of the image file: if the user's browser has a viewer configured to handle TIFF files, then this is invoked by the browser, else the user is prompted to get and install a multipage TIFF viewer.
This kept programming and development work to a minimum, while utilising the best and most up-to-date tools to achieve the purpose.
Viewing: Because of the lack of commercially available viewers capable of handling multipage TIFF under Windows 3.11, one was developed in-house: Monview, a standalone viewer based on the Accusoft imaging engine.
This is available for FTP download from the campus web server [6], and has been downloaded by about 500 users world-wide in the past 9 months, since its development.
The viewer also includes options for scanning and printing TIFF images, and can also work as a DDE server.
Printing: The thorniest issue in imaging implementations is the very slow speed of printing, since any graphics files are converted by the Windows printing engine before being submitted to the printer.
While it does that, the workstation is kept busy, sometimes for a very long time.
The Library solved this problem by implementing a "fast-print" method, which relies on using a specialised printer capable of doing the decompression and printing at the same time.
QMS printers with the ImageServer option accept the raw compressed TIFF and process it extremely fast, freeing up the computer within a fraction of a second [7].
There is specialised code added to the Monview viewer which detects the presence of a QMS printer, then encapsulates the raw TIFF in PostScript and submits it directly to the printer queue, bypassing the Windows conversion mechanisms.
Although all new models of QMS also accept raw TIFF, it was decided to stay with EPS because it permits separation of the pages, so they can be counted for internal accounting purposes.
Print charges are levied via the University's networked print accounting system, itself using a shareware program called PCOUNTER, or via Unicard charge cards on slaved QMS printers.
Implementation and User acceptance To ensure that the e-reserve supported the teaching programme on the Berwick Campus, academic staff were encouraged to give suggestions and reading lists to the Library.
In the initial stages, before the campus opened, liaison with the academic staff was largely via email.
Academic staff had to be re-educated in the use of electronic reserve.
It was stressed to the lecturers, that the long lead time required for receiving copyright permission would require them to get their reading lists in promptly.
As is the case in "conventional reserve", some lecturers did not return lists in time, if at all.
The lecturers who did submit reading lists sent in lists of articles for electronic reserve, and also lists for books.
The book lists were forwarded to the Casey College of TAFE Library.
In some pressing cases, books were temporarily transferred from other campuses.
When the library opened in late March 1996, there were 24 networked Pentium workstations and a QMS printer.
There were 72 documents scanned on the database and available for viewing.
A further 73 articles were available in "hard copy" format, as permission to scan had not yet been received.
By the end of 1996 there were around 500 items available for viewing on the electronic reserve database.
The workstations at Berwick are set up with the web interface to the Library catalogue.
To catalogue new additions to the e-reserve system, the conventions of the traditional reserve system were followed.
An item record is created with author, title, description and identification fields.
When the publisher's permission to scan an item is received, the item is scanned using the document feeder on the scanner.
It takes approximately 20 seconds per page to scan in an article [8].
The resulting TIFF image is saved to the image drive, under the appropriate course code directory.
To link the catalogue record and the image file, the identification field in the catalogue record is updated and then the image is viewable immediately over the web.
Responses from users have been varied.
The best use of e-reserve seems to occur when lecturers encourage their students to use it.
For example, when they brought their students into the library for classes at the beginning of semester, this resulted in the highest use of e-reserve by these students.
Other students learned to browse by asking library staff for help and soon became quite successful in browsing for themselves.
Mature age students found the whole system quite overwhelming, and many of them made a point of coming into the library for lunch time user education classes and even after examinations were over, for refresher lessons, to prepare themselves for the next academic semester.
Some students could not understand why the e-reserve articles were not on the shelf, like the ones for which the Library had not received permission to scan and which were on the shelves in folders.
The advantages of electronic reserve were explained to them, such as the item never being "out on loan", and its protection against theft and mutilation by anti-social students.
Also, in "conventional" reserve, students can spend a good deal of time queuing to use an item that is in great demand, and then, quite probably, again to use the photocopier.
Having e-reserve cuts down on the chaos created by the situation when one or two hard copies of a document are required by a entire class.
Correspondence and record keeping As letters started coming in from publishers, letters were filed in manila folders under publisher name.
It was decided, as the folders became more numerous, to file them in alphabetical order via use of "Cutter numbers" [9].
The Cutter number was added to the description field in the catalogue record.
This number became the link (for staff use), between the correspondence files and the catalogue record, for use in the end of year statistical reporting, and will be used in future enhancements to the reporting procedures.
A final comment The bilateral negotiations with publishers have proved to be very labour-intensive and only partially successful, due, in particular, to the very large number of requests that received no reply.
In August 1996 the AVCC made application to the Copyright Tribunal for a determination concerning the rate of equitable remuneration payable under the Copyright Act by tertiary institutions for making electronic copies of literary works for storage in a data base for electronic reserve.
Assuming that a reasonable rate is set by the Tribunal, this will ensure a rapid growth of the facility.
Footnotes and References The concept of a "reserve" collection is well known in university libraries.
Basically such collections consist of student texts and articles from journals and chapters of books that have been recommended by teaching staff as undergraduate course reading materials.
Monash University Library Berwick Campus Electronic Reserves, http://er01berwick.lib.monash.edu.au/library/ Bosseau, Don L. Anatomy of a small step forward: the electronic reserve book room at San Diego State University.
J. Acad.
Librarianship vol 18, no.5 p. 366-368, 1993.
For example: If we were to scan 10% of a publication, whose RRP is $40, for the use of a course in which we had enrolled 300 students, the fee we would pay for the right to scan would be: $40 x 10/100 x 300/10 = $120.
If the number of students enrolled in the course was 60, then the fee would be: $40 x 10/100 x 15 = $60.
(as 60/10 is less than 15) The TIFF specification is currently at version 6, with version 7 being now drafted.
The official maintainers of the specification are Adobe (email bmaret@adobe.com for details of the upcoming web site where Adobe will publish the draft).
Monash Library Electronic Reserves Microsoft Windows Viewers, http://www-berwick.lib.monash.edu.au/library/tools/home.htm There are other print accelerator cards which may be used with other printer models, but they are usually very expensive (so adding their price to a cheaper laser printer will simply put its price up so it becomes comparable to, if not dearer than, the equivalent QMS laser printer) and they may not necessarily relieve the workstation from the burden of decompressing the image.
This compares favourably with processing times for Adobe Acrobat, for which a recent report indicates that one page, using PDF, takes 46 seconds to scan, 105 seconds to process and 180 seconds to proofread.
Named after Charles Ammi Cutter, who developed a table of alphabeticonumerical codes for surnames to facilitate their alphabetical arrangement.
Author Details Hans W. Groenewegen, Deputy University Librarian, Debbie Hedger, Project Officer, Iris Radulescu, Systems Programmer, Email: hans.groenewegen@lib.monash.edu.au, debbie.hedger@lib.monash.edu.au and iris.radulescu@lib.monash.edu.au Phone: +61 3 9905 2672 Fax: +61 3 9905 2610 Address: Monash University Library, Wellington Road, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Preparing Students for a New Electronic Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Preparing Students for a New Electronic Service Buzz usability copyright opac adobe Citation BibTex RIS Preparing students for a new electronic service : Elizabeth Gadd outlines the approaches and experiences of Project ACORN in training and promoting their new electronic 'short-loan' collection.
The JISC-funded eLib project, Project ACORN [1] was set up to explore the mechanisms for establishing an electronic ‘short-loan’ collection of journal articles for undergraduate students.
Having received permission to make 236 high-demand journal articles from the reading lists of the departments of Geography, Human Sciences and Information and Library Studies available to registered undergraduates over the University computer network, the next vital step was to prepare students to use the new service prior to its launch on April 21st.
This article outlines the approaches and experiences of the ACORN team in training and promoting the new service to students.
Promoting the new service We felt it was important to make the promotion of the ACORN service a way of life, beginning with the launch of the project, not just the launch of the service.
Promotional activities were not restricted to students, but to every ACORN ‘stakeholder’.
We thought it particularly valuable to promote the service to academic and library staff for with their support, they would themselves become promoters of the service to students.
We used any method open to us to reach them: departmental staff meetings, staff-student committee meetings, library and university newsletters, regular update reports and seminars, and even a survey of academic staff concerning their approaches to reading lists and their views on the Short Loan Collection.
Although news of the ACORN service may well have reached the students via the above methods, our main means of promoting the service to students was via targeted training sessions and promotional materials.
We felt the promotional materials to be a particularly important aspect of the promotional activities.
Not only could they be used in conjunction with student training, but they could also stand alone as promotional material to any interested party.
We produced a bright yellow A4 flier [2] giving details of the modules covered by the service, and how, where and when articles can be accessed and printed.
Using bullet points we kept it short, snappy and completely relevant to the student.
A bookmark style user guide [3] in bright red card was also produced.
This gave a step-by-step route to the articles on the front, and listed the basic functions of the Adobe Acrobat Reader on the back, using images of the buttons for clarity.
We wanted to make the materials as bright, fun and unforgettable as possible, being very much aware of the information overload faced by most students.
Targeting training The timing and frequency of the training sessions was something we considered very carefully.
We decided to train the students in the week before the end of the spring session, as the service was due to go live the week they returned, and the last week of the session can be very busy.
The library staff training was then scheduled for the week prior to this, to prepare staff for any student queries arising from the training in the following week.
We offered six half-hour training sessions to library staff.
These short but frequent sessions enabled 67 of the 70 staff to attend a library training attendance record!
Having won the support of many of our academics, we were able to approach them to request time in their lecture slots for student ACORN training sessions.
This approach allowed students to receive instruction at no additional time cost to themselves, while also further promoting the service to the academic.
Most were happy to comply and we reached 9 of the 23 modules this way: five Geography modules, two Human Sciences modules, and two DILS modules.
Some academics offered to hold training sessions but found that their students had already been covered by other sessions.
In all, approximately 50% (300) of ACORN’s target students received training in this way.
The group sizes ranged from between 5 to 80 students and only a handful received training twice by virtue of being on two modules covered by ACORN.
We also offered two general training sessions within the library’s lunch time Information Skills training programme for any staff and students not covered by the targeted sessions.
Training content One of our main considerations when designing the training sessions was, again, the information overload already faced by the students.
Most are not actively seeking out new electronic sources, rather, they are struggling to cope with those already in existence.
For this reason it was decided to keep the training as short and straight-forward as possible.
The sessions lasted no longer than 20 minutes and gave a clear, ‘what, where, how and when’ of the ACORN service, followed by a step-by-step demonstration of how to reach the ACORN articles.
This was followed by a brief overview of what could and couldn’t be done with the articles once reached in terms of printing and viewing with the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The session was prepared so that it could be delivered in any of three formats: live, PowerPoint and via overhead projector.
Due to the lack of computer facilities in teaching labs, seven of the ten sessions were performed using an overhead projector, the others were a combination of PowerPoint and live demonstrations.
Training evaluation In order to assess the success or otherwise of the training, we distributed simple evaluation forms at each session.
We asked students to identify the part of the session they found most helpful, what they thought could have been improved, and left room for any other comments.
All the questions were open; students were not guided to respond in any particular way.
We received 49 completed forms from seven of the sessions.
The most helpful element of the training The vast majority of students (25, or 51%) appreciated the ‘step-by-step’ approach that ACORN adopted to illustrate the route to the articles.
Comments included, “it took us through the process step by step”, and “explained very thoroughly; the use of the overheads showing each individual stage of the programme was very beneficial”.
Related to this appreciation of the ‘step-by-step’ approach was an appreciation of the clarity and simplicity of the training sessions.
Fourteen students stated that this was one of the most helpful aspects of the session.
“Simple discussion of the use of the system”, “simple format,”, and “simple language” were all praised.
Many students (11 or 22%) commented that the session was most helpful in just informing them of the ACORN service: “finding out facility exists”, and “improving my basic awareness” were two such responses.
Despite the fact that much of the student training had to be performed using an overhead projector, some students said that this was the most helpful part of the training session: “clear instructions and plentiful overheads”.
Six students praised the informative nature of the sessions saying “the information given was delivered in a pleasant manner, was informative yet concise” and “informative, said everything it needed to”.
A small number of students were grateful for the brevity of the session with comments such as “quick, simple explanation”, “brief and informative”, and “straightforward explanation in simple form allowed quick grasping of concept”.
Two further students praised the handouts: “the red “How to Use” list will come in very useful.” Suggested improvements There were considerably less recommendations for improvements than there were comments on the sessions’ helpfulness (25 compared with 70).
Despite seven students (14%) praising the overheads, twelve (24%) saw the need for a live demonstration “with the aid of a computer”.
Four further students (8%) expressed a desire to have a “trial run” with “hands-on experience”, with one other saying that they found the session “uninvolving”.
In our request to academics to use their lecture slots for training sessions, we did ask whether computer lab facilities could be arranged for just these reasons.
However, this was simply not possible in most cases.
Despite our preference for including hands-on training, we decided that training sessions without handson were preferable to no training at all.
Some more experienced students (3, or 6%) said that they required less detail from the session.
One said “be less specific about instructions.
ie, the session was too in-depth over procedures which were obvious” and another, “most people already know how to use the library’s computers.” Considering the range of IT abilities amongst undergraduates, the fact that only a very small proportion of respondents made this comment implies that the session probably was pitched at the right level.
Indeed a couple of students went so far as to say the session couldn’t have been improved.
Other comments This section revealed some interesting comments and some encouraging praise.
The majority of students who used this section did so to recapitulate how clear the training sessions were, e.g.
“very very good and useful.
Thanks a lot”.
Five students (10%) expressed a desire to see the service extended: “it would be helpful to have this information available for other modules I suppose this will be added after the initial trials”, and three mentioned their pleasure that the service was being piloted on their department: “a very good idea glad that its being piloted on the Geography department!”.
Five Human Sciences students from one module made the comment that the service start date was too late in the semester for them to benefit.
This has been a concern of ACORN, but unfortunately the launch dates were predetermined by the timing of the Project Team appointment.
No other students made the same complaint, so it is hoped that only this module’s coursework submission and exam schedules fail to coincide with the ACORN timescales.
Some fears were voiced in this section, such as “Will there be enough terminals?” and “Will it be slow like [the] OPAC?“.
These are questions that ACORN has considered but only running the live service will provide the answers.
One student expressed a desire to be able to save articles to disk.
Again, ACORN has looked quite carefully into the issue of downloading to disk.
It was decided that by supporting such a facility, copyright owners would be less agreeable to participation in the project.
It is an issue that will be raised with copyright owners at ACORN’s Publisher Seminar in June.
One final suggestion was that the commands needed to be more “user-friendly”.
The whole issue of the use and usability of the ACORN service is one that is being investigated by a Human Computer Interaction Masters student.
The student is due to report in August 1997.
Future activities In terms of promoting the service, further publicity will go out at the beginning of term both to academics and students via email, and internal mail.
The official launch is occurring on April 24th where Loughborough University’s Vice Chancellor will be ‘pressing the button’ in the presence of various ACORN ‘stakeholders’.
Obviously, the real value of the sessions will only be seen once the service is launched and students begin to put their training into practise.
In order to assess the usage of the system we have carefully designed usage logs which will monitor viewing and printing times, access points, usage by department and year and so on.
We have posted a comments form and email address on the system itself, and are in the process of designing an online questionnaire for the system as well.
Towards the end of the summer session, we will be holding some focus groups for library staff, academic staff, and students to assess the impact of the service.
As mentioned above an MSc student is investigating the use and usability of the system from a Human Factors point of view, and in June we will be holding a seminar for publishers participating in Project ACORN to gather views, amongst other things, on design features that may affect students’ use of the system in the future.
References Project ACORN Web Pages, http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/ ACORN flier.
Web version of the paper flier produced for promoting the ACORN service, http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/acorn/flyer.htm ACORN User Guide.
Web version of the user guide produced for students to access the ACORN service, http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/acorn/guide.htm   Author Details Elizabeth Gadd, ACORN Project Officer email: E.A.Gadd@lboro.ac.uk Tel: 01509 222403 Fax: 01509 223993 Address: Project Acorn, Pilkington Library, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire.
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Burnside Writes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Burnside Writes Citation BibTex RIS John Burnside with a few brief words on the perception of knowledge.
It was Francis Bacon who said that knowledge is power.
By knowledge I take him to mean the possession of, or the ability to access, information.
In Bacon's time, I expect that the amount of information readily available to most people was limited.
Some Bible stories, a few pictures and an endless supply of gossip and hearsay would probably be your lot.
Even the top dogs at court would possess no more than a handful of books on hunting,hawking and the arts of war.
As always, no doubt, the real power lay in knowing what the people in charge were up to.
It might save your life if you got the right piece of information at the right time.
Today it's different.
Those in power still guard their knowledge carefully, but we live in a sea of information, whose accuracy no one can really determine for sure.
We know that the average television-age human cannot concentrate for more than three minutes, or assimilate any argument not presented in easy soundbites.
We know too that fatty foods are bad for the heart, that almost any food additive causes cancer, that Darwin's theory describes a process known as 'the survival of the fittest', and that eating beef will kill you.
These things are common knowledge, received wisdom.
A few years after Bacon finished writing the works of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope observed that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Ours is a time of random and untried information, when a significant number of people readily accept that UFOs roam the skies on a nightly basis, pausing only to abduct innocent bystanders, or mark out a few crop circles.
I can't say that they don't, but I've seen no reliable evidence.
We have so much information to hand, and the media to propagate it, that most of us think we know more than we do.
Maybe we should remember Socrates, who was the wisest man in Athens because he was the only man who knew that he knew nothing.
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Wire: Email Interview with Traugott Koch Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Email Interview with Traugott Koch Buzz data mobile software java html database urn tei archives thesaurus browser video cataloguing sgml dtd windows hypertext rtf purl gopher cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Traugott Koch submits to an interview by email.
In this 'Wire' interview Ariadne staff ask Traugott Koch for his views on how libraries can develop in response to the World Wide Web.
1) What do you do in the world of networking / libraries / WWW?
Projects developing the use of networked information at NetLab, the Development department of Lund University Library, Sweden.
80 % of the projects are externally funded, by local, national, Nordic and European partners.
(http://www.ub2.lu.se/UB2proj/egnapubl/netlab_present.html) Administrating and developing "Lund University Electronic Library" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/), our electronic library service, since four years.
I specially maintain pages like "Browsing and Searching Internet Resources" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/nav_menu.html) and "Library online catalogues" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/opacs/opacs-top.html).
Develop database services for campus access, providing information from commercial services and integrating it into the electronic library (Web SPIRS to Silverplatter ERL databases, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, Elsevier CAPCAS etc.)
EU-Project DESIRE (http://www.ub2.lu.se/desire/ Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education), part of the Telematics For Research program.
We work, together with people from UKOLN, SOSIG, Loughborough and others, on the "Resource discovery and retrieval" part of DESIRE, and develop amongst other features, an European WWW Index.
This will be based on our experiences with the "Nordic WWW Index" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/wwwindex.html).
My main activity this Spring will be to write a state-of-the-art report on Internet indexing and search services and to contribute to the specification of the European WWW Index.
Teaching, examination etc.
at the Institute of Library and Information Science, Lund University.
Largest course: "The electronic library: Knowledge structuring and information retrieval", fully documented and run using the Web (in Swedish only: http://www.ub2.lu.se/biblutb/koch/elbibladv.html).
"Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden" (EELS http://www.ub2.lu.se/eel/eelhome.html): Responsible for the methodological development, the technical maintenance, the adaptation of the classification scheme and thesaurus, and the construction of WWW-pages.
Work for "Nordic Net Center for Libraries" (http://www.nnc.dk/nnc/), a Nordic Centre of Excellence for Networked Information Services and the coordination of all three NORDINFO centers.
Coordinator of Electronic Library and Conference.
The conference "NordElib-conf" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/NNC/email-conf/) is available as Hypermailarchive as well.
This Spring, I am preparing a trial issue of an electronic journal "NordElib Journal", which is supposed to publish Nordic contributions to our subject area.
Publishing pages on library issues and projects on the Web, i.e.
"Electronic library projects" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/tk/ellib-projects.html), "Nordic libraries: information servers" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/resbyloc/Nordic_lib.html) "Finding Internet resources in the subject area of Library and Information Science/Librarianship" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/lisres.html).
Editor of "Libraries and Internet: Electronic text collection" (http://www.ub2.lu.se/UB2proj/LIS_collection/collection_top.html), which publishes original articles in hypertext structure with external links and papers from LIS Schools.
Talks, papers, courses, workshops etc., mainly in the Nordic countries and Germany (http://munin.ub2.lu.se/person_tk.html).
2) ... and how did you get into this area?
Into libraries: by chance, after a period of unemployment as a foreign social scientist (regional and urban planning) in Sweden.
Into networking: Worked for some years with CD-ROM networking and LAN's; read about WAIS in April 1992 and had to develop this interest in my spare time the first couple of month', before it became "accepted" late Fall that year.
3) What was your reaction to the Web when you encountered it for the first time (and when was this)?
I discovered CERN's line-mode browser in Fall 1992, did demonstrations to others but did'nt use it myself.
CERN's High Energy Physics stuff didn't interest me.
We provided WAIS databases and a gopher server at that time and I found them superior.
But I liked the hyperlinks, displayed as numbers.
In July 1993 we established our own WWW server.
4) How significant an impact do you think that mobile code, such as java applets, will have on the development of the Web as an information resource?
Not imediately the kind of huge impact the licensing by all big software companies would indicate.
In principle, turning Web pages into tools which allow to handle dynamic documents and processes is very important for our information intermediary branch as well.
The first applications, I would like to see for us, are user support and educational programs, simulations and demonstrations of search processes, experimental modules inside scientific articles etc.
We will probably have to wait another year for this type of applications, I am afraid.
5) A friend buys a PC, relatively fast modem and an internet connection.
(S)he asks you what browser they should either buy or obtain.
What do you advise?
Get the free Netscape browser for MS Windows and the PPP-software, if necessary.
If no Internet-provider offering PPP is available, I would advise to use the free, character-based lynx-browser.
6) Many people have recently commented on the relationship between SGML and HTML.
Some speculate that they will one day merge into a "unified" language; some others see HTML diverging into various esoteric directions.
What do you think?
HTML is one of many different DTD's (Document Type Definitions) of SGML, to put it simple: a SGML application.
I expect many more DTD's to be used on the Internet and especially more advanced ones (TEI for texts in Arts and Humanities is one example).
I hope for more advanced hypermedia linking possibilities.
Now, since style sheets (using the DSSSL standard) can be linked into HTML, I hope, proprietary software will not continue to put layout-control into HTML which should remain simple.
I welcome embedding tags, though and hope that major browsers will embrace SGML/DTD display very soon (cf.
SoftQuad's PANORAMA PRO).
7) Is there any hope for Gopher, or will the Web and other resources make it (eventually) obsolete?
No hope for Gopher anymore, according to my opinion.
Gopher menu structures and facilities can be provided by HTTP.
The latest development ideas by the Gopher inventors, 3D objects and similar things, can easier be implemented using VRML or Java on the Web.
8) Electronic Commerce; significant numbers of Web users, especially in the US, buy goods and services through the Web.
With the current state of data protection/encryption, would you feel comfortable in sending your credit card number to a company or service through your Web browser?
I wouldn't send my credit card number at the moment.
The payment routines in VISA's and their competitors approaches, which will make the breakthrough during 1996, avoid the necessity to send real credit card numbers over the net.
They seem to have developed pretty safe electronic transactions and they will take the risks on behalf of their customers.
The proposal of the Millicent protocol seems promising to me, in order to recover some of our costs as public sector information providers.
9) The frames feature, introduced by Netscape within their browser, allows the interface to be split into several quasi-independent windows.
Some people have started to use this feature as a basis for presentations [someone at Boston did and it was surprisingly effective].
Newer versions of Netscape use it to good effect as the basis of the inbuilt Usenet reader.
What are your feelings on this feature?
Very good feature, offering several "windows" inside one.
Usable for comparing things, showing table of contents or help information together with other data in the same document window.
10) Web pages can be generally created by either (a) using software to convert from some other format e.g.
RTF, to HTML (b) using a package such as HoTMetaL to automate/validate the construction or (c) hand, in a text editor and then validated by e.g.
the Halsoft validation mechanism (mirrored at Hensa).
Which method do you use, and why?
I use all the methods mentioned, depending on the original document, I am working with.
When writing a completely new document, I prefer still a HTML add-on to emacs, my normal editor.
HotMetal and similar editors for UNIX seemed to slow and not individually configuerable enough.
When i work with existing files, I use conversion software like RTFtoHTML.
When working under MS Windows I prefer to use a special editor like HTML Writer.
I try to avoid validation software, its to finicky and not "flexible" enough.
11) What would you like to see happen in the field of the World Wide Web in 1996?
Advances in scalable, distributed indexing.
Agreement on index data exchange format standard, at least in Europe and a closer cooperation in this area.
Adoption of an URN standard and establishment of URN-URL distributed resolver services, alternatively agreement on the PURL model (OCLC proposition).
Advances in cooperative software for usage on the Web.
HTML 3.0 should be adopted, and an embedding tag introduced in HTML.
Realtime video applications on the Web (cf.
VOSAIC).
Comprehensive freeware authoring environment, easier SGML and PDF editing tools.
Dramatic increased involvement from Nordic and European libraries and cooperation on innovative applications and services.
I hope, not to be drowned in business, marketing and selling when the big electronic payment systems are released.
Author details TRAUGOTT KOCH Electronic information services librarian LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, Development Department NetLab, P.O.
Box 3.
S-221 00 Lund, Sweden Tel: int+46 46 2229233 Fax: int+46 46 2223682 or 2224422 E-mail (Internet): traugott.koch@ub2.lu.se URL:Traugott Koch, Lund University Electronic Library Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Never Mind the Quality, Check the Badge-Width!
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Never Mind the Quality, Check the Badge-Width!
Buzz html database metadata cataloguing pics soap research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alison McNab, Betsy Anagnostelis and Alison Cooke compare and contrast the methods used to identify and indicate which Internet-based resources are of high "quality".
How does the World Health Organization rate compared to Medical Students for Choice (a reproductive health rights group)?
How do the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention score across a range of review services?
As commentators begin to question the value of much of the information currently available on the Internet, how helpful are stars, badges or seals of approval (SOAPs) in identifying quality resources?
Is a "Cool site of the moment", an accolade that literally changes every moment, of any real use?
It is arguable that the more "awards" become available, the more debased the concept may start to appear.
The OMNI Advisory Group for Evaluation Criteria The OMNI Advisory Group for Evaluation Criteria [1] has been examining a range of services that seek to provide access to selected health and biomedical networked information resources.
In comparing those services, and especially in comparing the criteria they use for evaluating materials, our overall aim has been to establish how effective such services may be in facilitating access to quality materials available across the Internet.
We have identified a number of differences between the review services as they have emerged over the last two years, as well as differences in their approaches to resource evaluation.
For example, services such as Excite Web Reviews [2], Lycos Top 5% Sites [3] and the Magellan Internet Guide [4] offer brief and informal reviews of sites, and cover a wide range of subject disciplines.
Alternatively, the eLib [5] ANR [6] projects (e.g.
ADAM [7], EEVL [8], OMNI [9] and SOSIG [10]) offer subject-specific gateways to selected and evaluated resources.
Descriptions of sites are accessible through a searchable database, and inclusion in the database is indicative in its own right of the quality of a site.
A more detailed comparison of a wider range of services can be found in an earlier article [11].
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 3 stars, 4 LEPs and no SOAP?
Informal services such as Excite Web Reviews and Lycos Top 5% Sites often cover large numbers of sites, but offer minimal evaluative detail.
It is such services, in particular, that have tended to adopt numerical or star rating systems.
Some services award a badge that can be displayed to indicate a site's quality, and most offer a searchable database of reviewed resources.
Using reviews of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC [12]) site [13] as an example, it is possible to examine the usefulness and value of such rating schemes, and especially their effectiveness in offering the user a guide to the quality of a site 'at a glance'.
Magellan Internet Guide Popular among such services is the use of a star rating system.
Indicatively, the Magellan Internet Guide allocates 1 to 10 points in three areas: Depth: Is it comprehensive and up-to-date?
Ease of Exploration: Is it well-organized and easy to navigate?
Net Appeal: Is it innovative?
Does it appeal to the eye or the ear?
Is it funny?
Is it hot, hip, or cool?
Is it thought-provoking?
Does it offer new technology or a new way of using technology?
This results in an overall rating of one to four stars: 28 to 30 points = **** 22 to 27 points = *** 13 to 21 points = ** 1 to 12 points = * The CDC site has been awarded a Magellan 3 star rating only, even though the site is reviewed as 'arguably the pre-eminent authority on the control and prevention of disease, injury, and disability in the United States'.
(The user has the option of linking to a more detailed and informative review.)
Inevitably, if the reviewers rely on criteria such as these, evaluation will be biased towards the 'hotness', 'hipness' or 'coolness' of sites, rather than quality of content.
The scores are indiscriminately cumulated to generate the star rating, and the user is not in fact informed of the different scores for each of the three criteria.
The more detailed review does not differentiate between the three possible scores, or explain why the site did not receive four stars.
As Rettig suggests, 'given the fuzziness of the criteria used to generate those stars, they shed little light on the usefulness and value of the 45,000 reviewed and rated sites among the four million in the Magellan directory' [14].
Excite Web Reviews Excite editors rate reviewed sites with between 1 and 4 LEPs.
LEPs are illustrations of Excite's mascot: the little Excite person.
According to Excite: "a 4-LEP rating is the highest, denoting a fantastic site.
A 3-LEP rating indicates a very good site.
A 2-LEP rating points you to an average or somewhat dull site, and a 1-LEP rating indicates that 'the site leaves a lot to be desired".
In this scheme, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site attracts 4 LEPs.
Excite Web Reviews presents the rated sites in order 'from best to worst' within broad subject topics or subtopics, in effect ranking resources relative to each other.
Interesting juxtapositions result so that, in the Health & Medicine > Substance Abuse > Drugs category for instance, the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (of the National Institutes of Health), scoring only 2 LEPs, ranks below The Truth About Drugs, produced by Narconon(r), according to Excite 'an organization based on the teachings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard', which is awarded 3 LEPs.
Lycos Top 5% Sites Lycos Top 5% Sites reviewers award a 0 to 50 rating for resources in three categories (content, presentation and experience).
For the CDC site, a brief display is provided: 'Centers for Disease Control Government health research site Content: 41 Presentation: 26 Experience: 37'.
The user can follow up the numerical scores by linking to a more detailed review, but no information is available about the criteria used to determine the scores, and no details are given in the review itself regarding how the ratings are assigned.
Like Excite Web Reviews, Lycos Top 5% Sites allows search results to be displayed according to the scores awarded to sites in any of the three categories (as well as alphabetically): broad subject categories or search results can be browsed in order of the scores sites have received for their content alone.
The discrepancies of the rating system are once again clearly revealed as, for instance, the World Health Organization (at 36/50) is awarded the same score as MedWorld (a 'Forum / help for Stanford med students'), and features below Medical Students for Choice ('Reproductive health rights group') (at 39/50) in the same broad category of Professional Medicine.
Six Senses The Six Senses site [15] also uses a scoring system, and reviews healthcare and medical resources using six criteria: content, aesthetics, interactivity, innovation, freshness, and character.
A score from 1 to 6 is awarded in each category, and the total of these scores represents a site's overall rating.
The Six Senses Seal Of Approval is awarded to any site that scores 24 or above, which can then display the Seal.
The user can follow up this score by examining the scores allocated in each area by three different reviewers.
Brief annotations are offered, though sometimes it would appear that little care is taken in their construction, and they offer little insight into the quality or coverage of the CDC site itself.
Despite its subject specialisation, the focus of the Six Senses evaluation is very much on the superficial aspects of sites, as indicated by the criteria used.
Incredibly, and despite a consistently high score for content awarded to the CDC site by all three reviewers, the CDC site is awarded 21 out of 36, and does not receive the Six Senses Seal of Approval; possibly because 'it could better seize the opportunity to engage visitors with innovative features' and, although 'unlimited in potential, the CDC has an opportunity to aesthetically make this site a more pleasing stop as well'.
Medical Matrix Medical Matrix [16] focuses on clinical medical resources of interest primarily to US physicians and health workers.
Star ratings of 1 to 5 are occasionally awarded, and the CDC site attracts 3 stars.
However, simple inclusion in Medical Matrix is meant to be indicative of the quality of a resource, as even the absence of a star rating indicates 'specialized knowledge with suitable clinical content'.
The basis of the distinction between none, one or many stars remains unclear (for instance, how can one usefully distinguish between a site awarded four stars as an 'outstanding site across all categories and a premier web page for the discipline' and one awarded five stars as 'an award winning site for Medical Internet'?
), and there is no indication whether all sites included in Medical Matrix have in fact been rated.
Interestingly, the Medical Matrix submission form encourages resource evaluation beyond superficial aspects of a site, and incorporates differential weighting across the evaluation criteria: content related criteria (peer review and application) attract a greater number of points than media, feel and ease of access, so that sites that score highly on content alone are not penalised for lacking in appearance.
It is unclear how this point rating system influences the star rating that accompanies the annotations, if at all, since selection is reviewed by an editorial board, drawn from the American Medical Informatics Association's Internet Working Group.
The verdict In assessing the use of numerical and star rating schemes by sites that review health and biomedical resources, the Advisory Group have yet to identify examples of any that: demonstrate internal consistency are defined robustly enough to ensure reproducibility (avoiding subjectivity) relate closely to a service's stated review or evaluation criteria are supported in accompanying reviews or annotations scale effortlessly with increasingly large numbers of resources scale convincingly across potentially variable audience interests and contexts of information seeking apply satisfactorily across a full range of resource types or collections of resources In addition, numerical and star rating schemes appear to be used as a measure of a site's 'coolness', rather than as an indicator of the quality of a site's content, despite research suggesting the importance of quality of content to users themselves [17].
If numerical and star rating systems can vary so widely in their implementation and interpretation, as we have seen here, it remains questionable whether they can succeed in usefully guiding the user to the selection of high quality resources 'at a glance'.
It is perhaps not coincidental that eLib ANR projects have so far been cautious in this regard.
Work from the European DESIRE project has produced a working model for subject based information gateways (SBIGs) [18].
While the project has surveyed the criteria used by a range of review sites, no recommendations are made with regard to the use of rating systems as compared to other evaluative systems.
As a result of ongoing work in this area, the Advisory Group has identified examples of 'good practice' and recommended these for consideration and adoption by the OMNI Project.
These include features such as the inclusion of the date on which a resource was described or reviewed [11].
Beyond stars and badges: PICS content rating with a future?
The US Communications Decency Act sought to restrict publishing of content on the Internet.
One filtering mechanism which was developed in response to this is PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) [19].
While PICS will control neither the publication nor the distribution of information, it may instead offer individuals or organisations the option of filtering out or filtering in selected views of networked information.
One vision of how this may be achieved has already been articulated by Chris Armstrong of the Centre for Information Quality Management [20].
Through the likely adoption of PICS compliance by the regular Internet browsers (PICS is already supported by Microsoft's Internet Explorer), it may in future become possible to configure browsers to access resources that satisfy trusted quality ratings.
In the meantime, however tempting it may be to line up the badges awarded to your website, it may be worth asking whether they are worth the pixels they occupy on your screen or whether more formal criteria for evaluating information resources, as adopted by the emerging eLib SBIGs remain a more helpful way to judge the quality of WWW resources.
Response to this article Sam Saunders, J.P.Saunders@leeds.ac.uk , replies on 21-May-1997: While this article is sensibly sceptical of the populist award systems, and cautious about PIC, it leaves the very difficult question towards the end, and then avoids taking a position.
What is quality?
It does implicitly suggest, through it's championship of the CDC site, that there are quality criteria with which all its readers would concur.
But it only hints in the last section what they might be, or how they might be derived.
I would suggest that even within a fairly well specified community, criteria would be hard to agree, especially if they were to be applied "objectively".
Relatively trivial criteria, such as numbers of words, level of reading difficulty, date of last revision, and errors in spelling and HTML could be applied with some consistency.
These are descriptive, however, not evaluative.
Beyond that, quality becomes more contentious and its arbiters start to take on heavier responsibilities.
As a mere guardian of a web site, I would be very wary of awarding stars or writing general evaluations of material created in a field in which I was no longer active.
The simplest reason why this is so is that quality cannot reside in the item itself.
Quality is tied to purpose, and purpose is negotiable as between the creator and the user.
The suggestion that it can be derived from association with a third party makes the problem more, not less intractable.
If I were to agree that "inclusion in the (SBIG) database is indicative in its own right of the quality of a site" it would have to be because my own purposes were closely matched by those of the site's reviewers.
As things are at present I will develop a relationship with a subject-based gateway, and gradually learn about its idiosyncracies.
It will become very useful to me.
But I cannot rely on it simply because the quality (or qualities) I am looking for are as much a consequence of my own purpose as of the item's inherent proprerties or the creator's intentions.
Dr.Gary Malet, Medical Informatics Fellow, Oregon Health Sciences University and Co Chair AMIA's Internet Working Group and involved with "MEDICAL MATRIX", gmalet@healthtel.com, replied on 13 July 1997: The author of the critique of Internet resource rating systems provides the following summary: "however tempting it may be to line up the badges awarded to your website, it may be worth asking whether they are worth the pixels they occupy".
I would like to take this opportunity to defend and provide some of the backround for the rating system that has been attached to the Medical Matrix Internet Clinical Medicine Resources Guide.
I would assert, contrary to what is reported in the article, that the point rating system is indeed, "an objective and reproducible approach to rating sites".
The review criteria for Medical Matrix are explicitly stated at http://www.medmatrix.org/info/sitesurvey.html.
Any medical Internet resource can be evaluated using this template with an eye to the resource's utility for point of care clinical application.
We have found that the approach can be extended to any number of contributors.
A clinician editorial board has provided focus for this effort.
"The basis of the distinction between none, one or many stars remains unclear (for instance, how can one usefully distinguish between a site awarded four stars as an 'outstanding site across all categories and a premier web page for the discipline' and one awarded five stars as 'an award winning site for Medical Internet'?)"
An example of a discipline is a medical specialty.
It is expected that medical specialists will appreciate a pointer to the premier resources in their field.
An example of a five star site is the Merck Manual.
(A search based on star rank will be instituted in the future.)
"and there is no indication whether all sites included in Medical Matrix have in fact been rated."
They have all been rated.
"Interestingly, the Medical Matrix .... incorporates differential weighting across the evaluation criteria: content related criteria (peer review and application) attract a greater number of points than media, feel and ease of access, so that sites that score highly on content alone are not penalised for lacking in appearance.
It is unclear how this point rating system influences the star rating that accompanies the annotations,...." The point rating system is an objective and reproducible approach to rating sites.
The point rating system is the foundation for the stars that are assigned.
This may not have been made clear to the authors of the critique.
We will make this clearer in our presentation of the resource.
"The verdictIn assessing the use of numerical and star rating schemes by sites that review health and biomedical resources, the Advisory Group have yet to identify examples of any that: demonstrate internal consistency" Our rating sytem is explicit.
It is applied to each resource.
"have yet to identify examples of any that are defined robustly enough to ensure reproducibility (avoiding subjectivity)" Our criteria are explicit.
We have used the same template for our editorial board and contributors.
Enlisting a panel of esteemed analysts eliminates subjectivity.
"have yet to identify examples of any that relate closely to a service's stated review or evaluation criteria " Our rankings are based on our stated criteria.
"have yet to identify examples of any that are supported in accompanying reviews or annotations " It is not clear why the annotation should repeat the ranking.
"have yet to identify examples of any that scale effortlessly with increasingly large numbers of resources."
Our methodology of having our contributors complete an evaluation template and having periodic peer review seems efficient to us.
"have yet to identify examples of any that scale convincingly across potentially variable audience interests and contexts of information seeking" Our resource is targeted to clinical practioners.
We have announced this.
The markers that would seem to overlap for health professionals and consumers might be quality of science, extent of peer review, date, etc.
However, it seems more effective to distinguish a professional from consumer oriented database.
"have yet to identify examples of any that apply satisfactorily across a full range of resource types or collections of resources " It has been our approach to rank entries in comparison to other entries of the same resource type.
"If numerical and star rating systems can vary so widely in their implementation and interpretation, as we have seen here, it remains questionable whether they can succeed in usefully guiding the user to the selection of high quality resources 'at a glance'."
Rating systems are fairly ubiquitous.
We all select restaurants, movies, etc.
using them.
The systems are inherently imperfect because the criteria and values of the cataloguer and user differ.
However, the precise definition of what is clinically relevant information has allowed the site selection and rankings within Medical Matrix to be fairly obvious.
Hopefully they are intuitively understood by clinicians.
We have surveyed our users and have found this to be true.
While, it is clear that additional metadata descriptions such as date authored, impact factor, or even statistical significance could be applied, it is not clear that confining the indexer to a standard template for resource descriptions would prove economic.
In my opinion the greater need is to subcategorize resources along MeSH trees.
In conclusion, I fully appreciate the value of the academic exchange in this journal.
However, I would appeal to readers of this forum to embrace the Internet medium and take advantage of the capabilities that it offers.
An email to contributors to Medical Matrix is an easy way to learn about its methodology.
There is a great potential to improve patient care by cataloguing Internet medical resources.
It would appear to me that supportive, collaborative, and cross discipline efforts would help to accomplish this goal.
References The OMNI Advisory Group for Evaluation Criteria, http://omni.ac.uk/agec/agec.html Excite Web Reviews, http://www.excite.com/Reviews/ Lycos Top 5% Sites, http://point.lycos.com/categories/ Magellan Internet Guide, http://www.mckinley.com/ eLib: The Electronic Libraries Programme, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Access to Network Resources Projects, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/lists/anr.html ADAM: Art, Design, Architecture and Media Information Gateway, http://adam.ac.uk/ Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), http://eevl.ac.uk/ Organising Medical Networked Information (OMNI), http://omni.ac.uk/ Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG), http://sosig.ac.uk/ Cooke, A., McNab, A.
& Anagnostelis, B.
The good, the bad and the ugly: Internet review sites in Proceedings of the 20th International Online Information Meeting London, 3-5 December 1996, pp.33-40 http://omni.ac.uk/agec/iolim96.html Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) http://www.cdc.gov/ The treatment of the CDC site by a range of review services is examined in detail in: B. Anagnostelis, A. Cooke & A. McNab "Thinking critically about information on the Web" Vine Issue 104 1997 (forthcoming) James Rettig.
Beyond "Cool": Analog Models for Reviewing Digital Resources, Online, September 1996, http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/SeptOL/rettig9.html The Six Senses Review, http://www.sixsenses.com/ Medical Matrix Web Site, http://www.medmatrix.org/ Alison Cooke (mailto: aic94@aber.ac.uk) is currently conducting research into the information seeking and information use behaviour of medical users of the Internet in order to devise criteria for evaluating the quality of networked resources.
Preliminary results indicate an emphasis by users on the quality of a site's content when deciding which sites to access and use in their work The DESIRE Quality report is forthcoming from the DESIRE Web site at: http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire/ PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/ Armstrong, C. Quality on the Internet, db-Qual, Vol 2 Issue 1, January 1997 http://www.fdgroup.co.uk/dbq_3_4.htm   Author details Alison McNab, Pilkington Library, Loughborough University Email: A.S.McNab@lboro.ac.uk Tel: 01509 222356 Fax: 01509 223993 Address: Loughborough, LE11 3TU   Betsy Anagnostelis, Medical Library, Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine Email: betsy@rfhsm.ac.uk Tel: 0171 830 2585 Fax: 0171 794 3534 Address: Rowland Hill Street, London, NW3 2PF   Alison Cooke, Department of Information and Library Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth Email: aic94@aber.ac.uk Tel: 01970 622146 Fax: 01970 622190 Address: Llanbadarn Campus, Aberystwyth, SY23 3AS Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Corner: Meta-search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Corner: Meta-search Engines Buzz data software database browser graphics windows flash url Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley discusses the next level up from conventional search engines in the 'information food chain', which provide a sophisticated approach to searching across a number of databases.
When I first started using search engines on the Web a few years ago, I had a choice between a fairly small number of available tools.
In the early days of search engines, choosing an engine was really pretty much a matter of finding one where the host was available when you needed to use it, and which would process your query fairly quickly.
The searching facilities which were available were all quite unsophisticated, and the databases behind the engines were generally small, when compared to the huge databases available from services like Alta Vista and Excite today.
These days, however, the whole process of selecting an appropriate search engine to use has become far more complex.
For a start, there are now an estimated 2000 different search engines available on the Web, whereas in 1995 there were perhaps a dozen.
Each of these search engines has different features, searching facilities and interfaces for the user to assimilate; resulting in a separate learning curve to climb each time you want to try a new service.
Furthermore, none of them can offer comprehensive searching of the Web, and although many of them may have overlaps in their database coverage, it is also likely that potentially useful resources may be indexed on one search engine and not another.
If you want to avoid missing out on potentially useful information sources on the Web you are probably going to have to face the fact that you will need to use more than one search engine to get the results you need.
Web searching is a time-consuming process at the best of times, so imagine how much more time-consuming it is going to be if you have to search a number of engines instead of just one each time you need to find some information.
Meta-search engines have been developed in order to streamline and simplify this whole process.
Meta-search engines have been described as the next level up from conventional search engines in the ‘information food chain’, in that they provide a sophisticated approach to searching across a number of databases.
A meta-search engine basically provides the opportunity to search a number of different search engine databases at the same time.
This is in contrast to the conventional approach of having to search each database separately by calling up the search engine home page and inputting keywords.
Meta-search engines don’t collect or maintain their own individual databases; instead they utilise the databases of other available search engines.
This can cut down significantly on hardware costs for the Meta-search engine provider, and also on utilisation of the Internet itself, as robots don’t have to be used to gather and index a database.
The advantages of using a meta-search engine include: you need only access a single Web page in order to perform your search you need only learn one interface for searching you need only type your search query once you can perform more thorough searching across a wider number of search engines you can obtain an integrated set of results, with (in many cases) the duplicate results stripped out.
Individual meta-search engines offer searching across a wide range of different search engines.
Some may provide for searching across a handful of the best-known search engines, whereas others may offer searching across a much wider range of engines.
Metacrawler, for example, utilises Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler and Yahoo!
In order to take a closer look at how meta-search engines function and operate, I’ve chosen to investigate two examples.
These are Metacrawler and WebFerret.
Metacrawler Metacrawler was originally developed as a prototype search service in 1994 at the University of Washington.
It is now operated by go2net Inc., an Internet content company based in Seattle.
Metacrawler can be used to search Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler and Yahoo!
Two options for searching are available: simple search and power search.
The simple search consists of a single search form, with options available for searching on ALL keywords (Boolean AND), ANY keywords (Boolean OR) or on phrases.
The power search option provides a number of additional features, such as restricting your search to documents from North America, Australia, Europe and Asia etc., and for controlling the maximum number of results you want to be retrieved from each search engine.
Power searching options can be set and then re-utilised the next time the service is used.
Metacrawler performs relevancy ranking on your search results, arranging them in terms of a score for ‘best match’.
This ranking is presented next to each result on screen.
Results from the search engines are collated, and the duplicates are stripped out.
In order to explore the performance of Metacrawler, I submitted a search on the topic "Brit Awards 1998" (with the option to search for this ‘as a phrase’ selected).
The first point to note from this search is than Metacrawler was able to complete it extremely quickly.
It searched across all of the search engines and returned my ranked results in less than five seconds, and discovered 14 references.
The search engine which has provided each of these references is listed next to the result.
The following table lists the top five references which Metacrawler retrieved for me: 1000 Mentor Graphics More News Hot Products Design Creation Design and Process.
Tools Design-for-Test Embedded Software IC Design Intellectual Property.
http://www.mentorg.com/whatsnew.html (WebCrawler) 1000 Brits Nominees For 1998 BRIT AWARDS 1998 The nominations for the 1998 Awards were announced Monday 12 January at the Café de Paris in London by Paul Conroy, President of Virgin Records and Chairman of the http://www.bpi.co.uk/britsall.htm (Infoseek) 1000 Darrens Music Homepage WELCOME TO… *Radiohead * Oasis * The Verve * Pulp * Suede * Manics * Prodigy * Smiths * Primal Scream * Check the latest charts, new releases and http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Underground/4256/ (AltaVista) 757 Paris Mode d’Emploi Paris User’s Guide accueil / home Paris Tourist Office L’Office de Tourisme de Paris.
.
Info-flash (franais) !
An 2000 Paris !
Football Soccer World Cup 1998 in Paris La coupe du monde de football 1998 Paris Which information on Paris are you searching ?.
Accommodation Children Events Monuments-Museums Paris nightlife Pratical info Restaurants Shopping Sport Trade shows Transport http://www.paris-promotion.fr/ (WebCrawler) 749 News Ok, finalmente parliamo di date, se non proprio ufficiali, almeno ufficiose: la data di uscita prevista per il prossimo album (che si dovrebbe chiamare http://users.iol.it/cristt/news.htm (AltaVista) The number next to the title of each resource indicates the relevancy score it has received.
However, on immediate investigation the most accurate of these results appears to be the second result, which has come from InfoSeek, as this actually mentions the Brit Awards in the title and first paragraph.
Of the other sites, the ones which have been retrieved from Webcrawler appear to be least relevant to my topic.
The first result actually contained the date 1998 and the word awards quite a lot in the text of the page, but no mention of my other keyword.
This is possibly because Webcrawler doesn’t support phrase searching, and therefore, documents which contain any of my keywords are being retrieved from that search engine.
Unfortunately there don’t appear to be options available for restricting the choice of search engines which Metacrawler utilises.
It would be extremely useful to be able to exclude a particular search engine from the list according to your needs, especially when, as shown above, one seems to produce results that are off-track.
I tried the search again, and this time enclosed it in quotation marks, as I am aware that many search engines use this notation to signify a phrase.
This time I received nine results, only one of which was from Webcrawler.
Given that Infoseek seemed to have provided my most accurate reference, I tried the search again on Infoseek to see if Metacrawler had missed anything from that database.
Infoseek retrieved 5 results, all of which I had already seen from the Metacrawler search.
Three of these results came from the same Web site, which Metacrawler had stripped out as duplicates.
Metacrawler had also found some of these sites on other search engines for me, and presented them, once again stripping out the duplicates.
WebFerret WebFerret is a freely available Windows client for Meta-searching which is available for Windows 95 and NT.
The great advantage of having this available as a separate Windows client rather than on a Web page is that it makes it possible to leave the search engine running in the background whilst you do other things.
Potentially you could even be looking at other pages on the Web whilst the client works away quietly behind the scenes.
WebFerret has an extremely simple interface: a simple search form, with options for searching for all and any words in the search string.
WebFerret utilises the following search engines: Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Yahoo, AOL Netfind, Euroseek, Galaxy, Infoseek, LookSmart, Lycos, Search.com, Webcrawler, and one Veronica engine.
It is possible to select from this list so that you can choose to exclude certain search engines.
Each request to each search engine is sent off simultaneously, and the results are then listed in the order in which they are received.
The results are listed in a window, and the user can then automatically look at any result by double-clicking it to launch a Web browser of their choice.
Options also exist to save and re-run searches using WebFerret.
To test WebFerret against Metacrawler, I ran a search on the topic "Brit Awards 1998".
I selected Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos and Yahoo from the list of available search engines, and chose the option to search for all the words in my query.
WebFerret began to run the query, and I stopped it when it reached 78 results.
On looking at the results I discovered that many of them appeared to be irrelevant to the topic as WebFerret appeared to be retrieving documents which contained any of my keywords, so I decided to revise my search strategy.
I tried again using the same phrase enclosed in quotation marks in order to utilise phrase searching on the search engines which support this feature.
This time I received four results.
Interestingly, WebFerret didn’t find the Infoseek result which Metacrawler had already supplied for me.
All of the results which it retrieved came from Alta Vista or Yahoo!
On viewing the documents, three of them contained the exact phrase "Brit Awards 1998", and the fourth contained simply the keyword 1998.
Again, WebFerret was extremely fast in both processing and displaying my results.
Hints and Tips for Using Meta-Search Engines It really does help if you already have a good understanding of the search engines which the meta-search tool is utilising.
For example, if you know how to perform phrase searching in Alta Vista, you can get much better results from a Meta-search engine by using the phrase search notation when keying in your search.
The Meta-search engine will then utilise this effectively when searching on your behalf.
Many of the big search engines share similar search query languages these days (Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo, InfoSeek and Hotbot all use quotation marks to signify a phrase, for example), so you can get quite effective results from a meta-search engine which utilises these tools if you pay attention to these sorts of features.
Its also a good idea to be quite selective about the search engines you choose to utilise when using a meta-search engine.
Many will have an option whereby you can select from a range of search engines.
If you choose the ones which you have past experience of as being generally reliable, fast, accessible and powerful you will usually get quicker and more accurate results.
Although it may be tempting to search across a hundred search engines at the same time, you need to think about the likely number of results you are going to get, and the time it is going to take to produce these results.
Nobody wants to have to sift through millions of documents retrieved from a search, and nobody wants to wait around for an hour to see their search completed.
This would also be wasteful in terms of use of limited network resources.
As ever, try to do your Web searching at times of the day when the internet is less likely to be very busy.
Almost all of the major search engines are based in the US, and meta-search engines don’t usually give you the option of switching to European mirror sites where these are available.
If you search at less busy times of the day you’ll generally find that your results are retrieved more quickly and with less frustration from the search engines.
Overall, meta-searching tools do represent an extremely useful method of retrieving information from a number of search engines without having to visit each engine individually.
However, they do tend to work a lot more effectively if you already have a good understanding of Web search engines in general, and if, in particular, you are very familiar with ways of getting the best out of the particular search engines that they are utilising.
Author Details Tracey Stanley Networked Information Officer University of Leeds Library Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk URL: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/people/TSStanley/TSStanley.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Burnside Writes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Burnside Writes Buzz Citation BibTex RIS John Burnside has a quick look at poetry on the Net.
It's is one of those hot questions in the poetry world: does poetry work on the Web, and if so, how?
How is electronically transmitted verse different from poetry read aloud, or scanned from a conventional book?
Is there a magic in the book's physicality, in the smell and feel of it, in the intimacy of it all?
In the end, I think there is.
On the other hand, poets and poetry lovers can find good stuff on the Web, and in recent weeks, I've been drifting around, in a more or less random fashion, looking for the interesting sites.
A new home-grown poetry site is The Poetry Map, created by the Poetry Society, in London.
As its name suggests, users navigate a wealth of information about poetry using a map, whose topography includes such features as a Sea of Inspiration, (specially commissioned poems, celebrating a sense of place), a Pool of Talent, (a heterogeneous list of poets, from the much-hyped to the quieter, some would say more thoughtful, voices), a Factory, Studio and a Police Station for poetry, (the latter to alert users to some of the dodgier aspects of the poetry market).
The main interest of the Poetry Map, (for me, at least), is the information it provides.
I find it difficult to enjoy poetry, especially longer works, on a screen.
Where the Web might best serve poetry, however, is in providing texts which are not easily available in this country.
An example might be La Pagina de Sabines, pages celebrating the work of the great contemporary Mexican poet, Jaime Sabines or "A Poetic Corner of the Internet", as it's designated by its creator.
What makes this site work is quite simply the quality of the poetry combined with a genuine enthusiasm for a fine poet.
I still prefer to get my poems from a book, but in the hope of finding more sites like this one, I'll go on poetry surfing just to see what's out there.
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Information Strategies Get Down to Business Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Information Strategies Get Down to Business Buzz copyright Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl on the JISC approach to Information Strategies.
Information is the foundation on which any strategic plan is based" stated Gareth Roberts, ViceChancellor of the University of Sheffield and Chair of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP), opening a conference of University Librarians, Computing Centre Directors and Directors of Information Services in Sheffield last month.
Universities, like many large companies, now recognise that information is a resource which can be used to strategic advantage.
While it is clear that no planning document could ever appear without it, it is only recently that universities have begun to develop strategies for the management of information in its own right.
"Within the set of strategic plans of an institution, it may be considered to be the glue" said Derek Law, Director of Information Services & Systems at King's College London.
Some senior information managers remain cynical about the value of strategies for information, believing that their use for competitive advantage in the business world does not fit the HE model.
The concept was first raised in the Follett Report, which appeared in December 1993, seized upon by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in a circular to English universities in the summer of 1994, and adopted seriously by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in 1995.
JISC commissioned management consultants Cooper's & Lybrand to assist with the development of guidelines for sites wishing to prepare information strategies.
Many universities believed then that the writing was on the wall that future funding council income would be linked to the existence of information strategies.
"Of all the reasons to have an information strategy" said Derek Law "that of keeping the Funding Council quiet is the least defensible."
Easy to say, perhaps, but for smaller institutions which perceive themselves to be more vulnerable in the case of sudden drops in funding council cash, the risk could not be ignored.
Some admitted quite candidly that their information strategies had been 'made up' simply to keep the funding council quiet.
Others had completed the exercise quickly, often as a trigger for the convergence of library and computing services.
Some of these had found the arrival of JISC's guidelines in December 1995 an unwelcome distraction.
Convergence emerged as a strong theme running alongside information strategies throughout the conference.
Derek Law announced that in the previous week the UK's fiftieth Director of a converged library and computing service had been appointed at the University of Sussex.
Size was an issue here.
Alun Hughes, Head of Information Services at the North East Wales Institute of Education (NEWI), had found convergence relatively straightforward.
"Some people ask whether Cambridge should converge its library and computing services.
Of course it shouldn't."
JISC is currently running a pilot scheme involving six sites of different sizes, ages and funding constituencies across the UK.
Peter Ford, Chair of JISC's Information Strategies Steering Group, stated that the newer universities were in general progressing more quickly, "due to more focussed management structures."
The typical approach involved setting up a steering group chaired by a university manager at the level of Pro Vice-Chancellor, to which a working group reported.
Functional analysis of the university's information flows would then be undertaken, using various survey techniques, including Business Process Reengineering (BPR).
Many involved stressed that the process could not be undertaken without some resource being made available.
A common view was that it was the process itself which mattered, creating collaboration and acknowledgement of inefficiencies in the use of information which would lead to healthy change.
Contributors emphasised repeatedly the importance of having the Vice-Chancellor supportive of the process if it is to be successful.
Few participants seriously doubted the value of the exercise, though fewer still knew how to prove that it could deliver value for money.
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Interface: All Pre-Prints Servers Are Not the Same Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: All Pre-Prints Servers Are Not the Same Buzz framework archives metadata schema research standards Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark talks to Dan Fleming of the Formations project.
In the field of Media Studies, Dan Fleming is a man of many parts.
Head of the Division of Media Studies at the University of Ulster at Coleraine, Visiting Lecturer in New Media at the Federal University of Salvador in Brazil and a recent Visiting Research Fellow in Human Factors at BT Laboratories in Martlesham Heath, Fleming’s newest incarnation is as Co-Director, along with Lynda Henderson, of the eLib Formations Project, which officially launches its Cultural Studies pre-prints service mid-September this year [1].
When we think of pre-prints servers we think of xxx, the High Energy Physics server at the Los Alamos National Laboratory [2], which is the best known and most successful online pre-prints server in the world, and one which has been discussed many times in ARIADNE.
But we should think again.
Fleming has some clear views about simply translating working practices from the Sciences to the Arts and Humanities, lock, stock and barrel.
It does not work.
This is not just prejudice or an instinctive hunch, but a view backed up by evaluative research into working practices undertaken by the Formations Project.
Humanities scholars traditionally do not make a great deal of use of pre-prints.
The task of Formations was to see whether the recent development of online pre-prints could be adapted to cross-disciplinary areas in the Humanities such as Cultural Studies, with a particular focus on fields such as Performance Research and Media Studies.
“We had to establish whether there were no pre-prints systems in the Humanities because there were none that answered the needs of Humanities researchers,” says Fleming.
“From information we obtained from structured interviews on research practices with academics, we found out that for any notion of pre-prints to work, a system would have to be adapted to fit in with working practices.” The interviews delivered information to the Project about the need of Humanities scholars for feedback on their research, their motivation to attend conferences or present papers and their attitudes to solo versus collective effort.
On the basis of this qualitative evidence, Fleming and Henderson realised that more time would have to be spent on building the system than originally thought.
“It was clear that we could not ‘parachute’ a pre-prints system into this area.
Building on an existing pre-prints paradigm simply would not work.
It would have shackled us, and we would simply have needed to adapt it later.” The Project Directors therefore went back to eLib to re-negotiate the Project milestones.
The pre-prints system which has now finally emerged is highly tailored to the requirements of academics in the relevant fields.
It will be launched to the target audience at an evening event at Worcester College, Oxford on 23 September.
When it came to producing a system for a field where computer knowledge was as Fleming diplomatically puts it “bitty”, ease of use was important, especially as the only help available is to be online (no training sessions are planned because the system has to be workable well beyond the lifetime of any specific training initiatives).
The ‘look’ of the system was also critical, so it follows a standard layout in its various sections (Pre-prints, Journal, Subject Gateways, Registrations).
It is also bound together by professional illustrations and incorporates Dublin Core metadata in its Journal and Pre-prints.
‘Push’ and ‘smart pull’ technology ideas lie behind the use of ‘channels’ in the Pre-prints section.
Selected articles from the Pre-prints pool can be read on screen in the online Journal.
Other areas of the Pre-prints section are restricted so that journal editorial boards can use the system for peer review prior to print publication, in this way positioning the service as a tool for academics working in a parallel print and Web publishing environment.
A playful Living Dictionary helps to put users at ease.
Formations is very much a user-driven tool.
There will be no content in it unless users contribute their work.
How will its success be judged?
Fleming rejects the idea that use-count equates directly to value in this type of project.
“There is no point in becoming fixated with the notion of getting hundreds of thousands of users.
The goal is the learning process itself.
Part of that process is to look at why people are not using the service.
The reasons could be subject-specific or due to their own personal constructs.” Positioning and user satisfaction with a system are more important than the numbers using it.
Formations Service Home Page Evaluation of the Formations system will continue for 18 months after the eLib funding ends.
The evaluation phase of the Project will be funded by the University of Ulster.
“We are interested in the theory of schema, especially research-related schema, frameworks of understanding, belief and information.
After the Formations service has been available for use, we shall revisit and see whether the schema of individual academics have changed.
From this we shall develop long-term evaluation.
We have employed a social psychologist to oversee that evaluation study as an independent exercise.” For Fleming it is not the design detail of the pre-prints service that is most important, but the evaluation and how that reflects on the application model.
“So even if technology overtakes the actual application, at least we have the model which can be implemented elsewhere.” Fleming feels that this approach may have been lacking from some areas of the eLib Programme, with projects spending too much time on the specifics rather than extracting a clearly identified model from the application deliverable.
“Especially if the evaluation shows that the present implementation is flawed,” he concludes, “then we can go back to the model.” The research pedigree of Fleming and his team validates this emphasis upon evaluation, which is at the very heart of the eLib Programme itself.
References [1] Formations http://www.ulst.ac.uk/faculty/humanities/media/form.html [2] xxx e-Print archive UK site http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/ US site http://xxx.lanl.gov/ Author details Isobel Stark, Web officer, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY email:i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cashing in on Caching Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cashing in on Caching Buzz data software html database infrastructure browser copyright hypertext cache gopher ftp cd-rom mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight and Martin Hamilton describe Caching, possibly the most crucial tool available to frequent Web users, and point out why libraries should be aware of it.
The Internet is obviously the current buzzword in many organisations and libraries are no exception.
Academic libraries have long valued online access to their OPACs and the ability to provide search services of large scale remote databases.
However the phenomenal growth in the World Wide Web (WWW) and the demands from an increasing number of people to get easy access to the wealth of information now available has meant that library network provisions are currently undergoing a rapid period of evolution.
Even in the underfunded UK public libraries there is a growing interest in public access Internet provision, with a number of public libraries experimenting with a variety of access models.
This growth in both services available and demand to use those services poses many problems for the librarians, systems and networking staff.
Not least of these problems is providing a sufficiently responsive service to meet the expectations of the user community.
Those readers that have ever tried to retrieve an HTML document from the other side of the planet at three o'clock in the afternoon on a working day will know just how slow this can be.
The reasons for this performance problem are many fold: not only are you competing for bandwidth on the local library networks but also for bandwidth on the national and international Internet links and also the capacity of the remote server.
Ideally one would like to dimension the network and the machines so that there is always sufficient bandwidth and server capacity available to handle everybody's requests.
However this is not practical for both economic and logistical reasons.
Instead we must all try to make the most of the facilities that are available.
One technique which helps both improve responsiveness for WWW end users and also reduces network loading is caching.
This article explains how WWW caching works, why librarians should be looking at it and briefly outlines the software and services that are currently available.
What is Caching?
In the WWW, resources are accessed via a variety of protocols such as the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and the Gopher Protocol.
The access protocol for a resource can be seen at the start of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that is entered and displayed by the Web browser.
For example, the URL pointing to the Loughborough University home page, http://www.lut.ac.uk/, has an access protocol of "http" indicating that the HTTP protocol should be used.
For the vast majority of protocols, the browser opens a connection directly to the remote server using the specified access protocol in order to retrieve the resource.
Protocols, in case you're wondering, are the mini-languages that computer programs use to talk to each other over the network.
HTTP is the most popular one on the Internet at the moment due to its popularity as a transport mechanism for HTML pages in the World-Wide Web.
The basic idea behind caching is to keep copies of the things which have recently been looked at.
Caching techniques are used at all levels of modern computer systems, but are a comparative late-comer to the Web.
On the Web, caching typically involves the browser itself remembering the objects which were returned when URLs were looked up, by storing them on disk and in memory, and possibly sending its requests via a cache server rather than using them to directly access the remote server.
Cache servers are a particularly useful concept, because they allow large numbers of users to share a pool of cached objects.
The cache server takes the URL requested by the Web browser and examines a database of local copies of resources that it has already seen.
If the resource with the given URL is held in this database, the cache server returns its local copy of the resource straight back to the browser.
If not, it uses the URL to retrieve the resource from the remote server, passes one copy of the resource to the end user's browser and enters another copy of the resource into its database.
This copy in the database can then be used to locally satisfy requests for the same resource from other local cache aware Web browsers.
In practice, things are slightly more complicated, in particular because of the need to consider when an object in the cache is out of date.
Most Web browsers now come with good support for cache servers via HTTP proxy mode.
The common graphical browsers often have dialogue boxes such as the one from NCSA's X Mosaic shown in Figure 1 below, which make the entry of this information easy.
Alternatively some platforms allow Web browsers to pick up their proxy information from environment settings or external files which can be configured by systems staff and then made available to all workstations in a cluster, or an organisation.
Also note that many browsers allow a list of machines and/or domains which are not to be proxied to be entered.
This is useful for allowing access to local Web servers without having to go through the local cache server.
Figure 1: The proxy configuration dialogue from X Mosaic The basic model of caching works well for static documents that never change.
However there are now many parts of the WWW that consist of dynamic or short lived documents.
The presence of these types of resources has resulted in the development of more sophisticated caching policies that allow browsers and proxy servers to determine how long local copies of cached resources should be kept.
Some resources can never be cached such as most Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs that are used to query databases and provide processing for forms.
It has to be assumed that the objects these return may be different every time.
The end users will usually be unaware of the sometimes quite complex decisions that the Web browser and proxy server will make on their behalf to deal with these situations.
The only noticeable effect to the end users should be that access times to most, but not all, resources are dramatically reduced by the use of caching.
We should note in passing that Web page developers may defeat most caching schemes by making extensive use of uncachable resources such as CGI programs.
Whilst this might seem desirable for some reasons, such as the gathering of authoritative statistics on server hits, developers should bear in mind the impact that this approach has both on the network and on the machines which serve up these resources.
If there is a bottom line, it's that the Web is evolving towards an architecture which will be totally dependent upon caching, and you cannot count on being able to gather truly accurate statistics.
So get used to it!
To really work effectively, caching should ideally take place over a relatively large population of users.
This is so that the chance of two or more users requesting the same resource which can then be return at least once from the local cache is increased.
However, the more users that a cache server has, the bigger the machine that will be need to host it.
Also the cache server that the Web browser contacts should be kept as local to the end user as possible ideally within the local area network of the organisation so as to not flood expensive or low bandwidth long distance links with traffic from the Web browsers.
This appears to be a dichotomy on the one hand we want to cache for as many users as possible but on the other hand we don't want to have to buy a massive machine to act as the cache server and also we'd like to locate it as near to the users as possible.
To overcome this problem, the idea of cache meshes is gaining popularity (see figure 2).
Conceptually this is very simple the Web browser on the users desktop machine has a small disk cache to keep local copies of resources that just that machine has accessed.
The browser is configured to talk to a local cache server running on a relatively small machine that caches resources for all the browsers within the organisation.
This cache server in turn can refer to similar neighbouring caches in the network and also to very much more powerful regional and/or national cache servers which are located close to the physical network boundaries between Internet Service Providers and/or countries.
International Internet connections tend to be very expensive!
Figure 2: One possible layout for a cache mesh.
In the cache mesh model, when the user presents the browser with a URL (or follows a hyperlink), the browser firstly checks its local disk cache.
If the requested URL is not found there, the browser uses proxy HTTP to ask the local cache server for it.
If the local cache server has a cached copy it returns it immediately, otherwise it asks its neighbouring caches if they have a copy of the resource.
If none of them do, it asks its parent cache or caches.
If the parents don't have a copy, the remote server finally gets asked for the resource.
Incidentally, most of the efforts to build meshes of cache servers are using yet another protocol the Internet Cache Protocol invented by the Harvest project at the University of Colorado.
This approach may sound long winded but the delay in doing the whole operation is negligible compared to the delays experienced in satisfying trans-oceanic and trans-continental Web requests.
If possible, a copy of the returned resource is cached in the parent regional or national cache, the local organisational cache server and the browsers disk cache, so that future accesses to the resource will be much faster.
Note that sometimes cache meshes are refered to as cache hierarchies.
However as shown in the figure, browsers and cache servers can connect in at any height; some people have their desktop browser configured to use HENSA's UK National cache for example.
Therefore they are not strictly hierarchies in practice.
Why should libraries need to know about caching?
There are a number of reasons why libraries with Internet access and public Web browsers should be interested in caching.
The first one is that it will improve the perceived response speed of the WWW for their end users, especially if lots of the users are accessing the same sets of pages over and over again.
As "keeping the punters happy" is always a good policy in a library, this would appear to be a very important benefit!
Caching also reduces the amount of communication traffic between the organisation's local area network and other machines in the Internet.
This is helpful for two reasons.
Firstly, for all types of library site, be they academic, commercial or public, the Internet links that they have will appear to be able to handle the demands of the browser users better and may remove the need to upgrade the bandwidth capacity of the link.
For libraries that actually pay real money to send and receive bytes on their Internet connections (which discounts many of the academic libraries with their block funded JANET/SuperJANET connections but applies to many commercial libraries) the possible reduction in network traffic due to caching could equate to a saving in real money.
For example, imagine that a library has a 128kbps ISDN connection to the Internet that is charged for by the second.
Also assume that it call costs are about 5p per minute (which is roughly right for a daytime local area call).
Now if there are 10 Web browsers and on average their users each generate 1MB of network traffic per hour from 9am to 6pm, then the total amount of traffic per day would be 90MB.
This would take 5898.24 seconds of connect time to transmit and would cost thus cost at least £4.92 per day without the use of a cache.
This gives a quarterly call cost of a little under £300 for this single line.
Now imagine that the Web browser traffic from the ten browsers goes through a cache server and that 20% of the requests can be satisfied from a locally cached copy.
Looking at this simplistically, this could mean that on average 20% of the connect time to the ISP is no longer required and thus the quarterly bill would be cut to £240.
Let us now see what happens if we decide to be radical and have 50 Web browsers running in the library, each of which is still producing an average of 1MB of network traffic per hour.
This would give rise to an average bandwidth usage without a cache of around 117kbps very close to the raw line speed of 128kbps.
This means that without a cache, the ISDN connection to the Internet would be swamped with traffic, particularly since the overhead in running an Internet connection over the ISDN is not considered!
With a proxy cache server in place and an average hit ratio of 20%, the bandwidth demand would on average be reduced to around 93kbps which results in less likelihood of congestion for the Internet link.
The call costs (which would now be much higher per quarter) would still be reduced by an average of around 20%.
There is of course a point below which a local cache server is uneconomic.
If there are only a few machines that can access the Web from a site and/or the users are likely to always be retrieving very diverse resources from the Web, the cache's hit ratio will be low and the amount of bandwidth saved will not justify the expense of having the cache server.
In this case, it is advisable to have a large per-browser cache, and to take advantage of any cache server offering of your Internet Service Provider and/or any sites running cache servers which are "nearby" in network terms.
Whether a particular site will benefit from having a cache server is a call that only the staff at that site can make of course only they know what resources they have and what their users are likely to be using the Web for.
However, as a data point, here at Loughborough University the cache hit ratio is typically over 40 percent, which represents a significant saving on bandwidth usage on our SuperJANET link and improved response times for our users.
It also means that we're being "good network citizens", as a large fraction of that traffic that we didn't generate would have been going across the already heavily overloaded international connections in the Internet.
There is a last reason that librarians should be aware of Web caching if the library is part of a larger organisation (a company or university for example) that makes a strategic decision to deploy Web caching across all of its machines, there may be some copyright and licensing implications.
These arise because the cache is effectively making an automatic local copy of a resource.
At the moment, this mechanism is treated as part of the operation of the network infrastructure by most information providers.
Whilst most of the information being gathered from the Web is provided free of charge (even if still under copyright), this does not cause a problem.
However as commercial publishers are now trying to shoehorn existing paper and CD-ROM based subscription services onto the Web, there are likely to be an increasing number of sites that can only be got at using some form of access control.
These are typically used to determine whether or not to return a resource, and sometimes even what type of resource to send.
The only universally applicable form of access control which is available for the Web is restriction by Internet address.
This is a very weak approach and in addition to the ease with which it can be spoofed, is liable to being broken when cache servers work together in meshes.
On the other hand, it is simple for both publishers and librarians/site network managers to use as it usually just requires the site to give the publisher a set or range of addresses for the machines that should be able to access the service.
The danger comes if the cache server is included in this range and the user's browsers are configured to use the cache for the publisher's Web server.
Requests for resources from this commercial publisher from local Web browsers will cause a local copy to be cached.
This can then be accessed both from other local browsers and also from other sites which have caches that can talk to the local cache server.
It is mainly the latter that needs the most careful attention as it means that third parties can access some of the commercial publishers resources through the local site without paying the subscription fees.
This is obviously something that librarians are ideally placed to advise upon and monitor.
In this simple case, browsers should simply be configured not to use the cache server when talking to the publisher's Web server, and the publisher should be told to refuse requests from the cache server.
More complex scenarios exis t, however, and more effective forms of access control also exist.
The most effective mechanism is probably encryption of the communication between the browser and the Web server.
This turns the whole Web session into a code which cannot readily be deciphered.
Encryption has been widely deployed in the form of Netscape's Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.
This forms a "secure" communications link over which HTTP, for example, can be spoken.
Unfortunately, the version of SSL which has been put into Netscape's Navigator Web browser has been crippled in order to satisfy the US secret services who object to people using codes which they cannot decode!
This is unfortunate, to say the least, since the nature of the changes means that the encrypted messages sent by Netscape Navigator can readily be decoded by anyone who is sufficiently interested and has a moderate amount of computing power available.
Ultimately this end-to-end encryption is the most effective way for publishers to protect their intellectual property, but interference from the likes of government spying organizations and politicians is hindering its use.
Documentation and Software Available Now that you are all hopefully sold on the idea of Web caching, what resources are available to help you find out more?
We've tried to gather some information about caching at Loughborough University, and you may find these pages a good place to start.
This includes details of the current Web caching activity on JANET, as well as pointers to software, setting up cache meshes, and some info on the international caching scene.
Other good places to look for information about Web caching are the HENSA/Unix team's collection of Web caching related material, and the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research site on Web caching in the United States.
The European Commission DESIRE project recently completed a comprehensive study on Web caching technology, which is also well worth checking out.
If you are interested in all of the gory technical details of how caching and proxy servers work, which have been somewhat glossed over in this article, then check out the W3 Consortium proxy documentation.
This explains all about the techniques used by proxy cache servers, why some documents are uncachable and how cache servers determine if a document is stale or not.
If you are a techie and you're contemplating running a cache server, you might want to join one of the many caching related mailing lists.
There are too many to document them all here, but a couple which might be of interest to UK folk are the cybercache mailing list in Loughborough, and the wwwcache-admin and wwwcache-users mailing lists at Mailbase.
The cybercache list is primarily for UK related caching discussions.
It also acts as a sort of self-help group for UK people running the Squid (aka Harvest) cache server software.
The wwwcache-admin list is specifically for people running local cache servers which are using the HENSA/Unix cache service as their parent, and is run as a closed list.
The cybercache list, on the other hand, is an open list which you can join by sending a message with the word subscribe alone in its body to cybercache-request@mrrl.lut.ac.uk.
The wwwcache-users is also an open list for general users of HENSA's JISC funded National Cache.
NB: these lists can be very techie!
Conclusions This article has hopefully provided a brief introduction to the concept of Web caching.
Whilst it is not claimed that caching will be beneficial for absolutely everyone, many sites will find that Web caching provides improved response times from Web browsers and reduces network traffic, both locally and also on the overcrowded international links.
It therefore can make users happier, reduce communication infrastructure costs and allow sites to be "good network citizens".
It is hoped this is article may pique the interest of librarians and computer centres at sites not currently running Web caches, and also draw attention to its presence and implications to librarians at those sites that do already employ it.
Web caching is a technology whose time has come!
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ERCOMS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ERCOMS Buzz java database apache digitisation browser copyright video graphics multimedia passwords perl authentication research Citation BibTex RIS The ERCOMS team explain the intricacies of their Electronic Reserve Copyright Management System project.
The ERCOMS [1] project, one of eLib’s electronic short loan projects, focuses on electronic copyright management.
The partners in the project are the International Institute for Electronic Library Research [2] at De Montfort University [3], the Library and GeoData Institute at Southampton University, and The Open University Library.
The Project takes advantage of current Web technologies, in the form of Java programs, mod-Perl and mSQL database tools, to facilitate the development of a generic copyright management system for Webbased electronic reserves.
This makes possible a cost-effective solution for these new library services, which require effective user authorisation, usage monitoring, accounting and reporting functions.
The ERCOMS prototype is a scaleable modular system based on a secure Apache web server.
The system includes access and password control; tracking of usage of document objects, which have been delivered from the server to the client, and provides the tools for collating and reporting on that usage.
There are three components to the system: the client, the web server and the accounts/tracking database.
A Java applet, known as “SureTX”, controls the user authentication and access facilities and this must be running before a restricted object can be delivered to the browser.
It feeds details of the user to the web server, which checks the accounts/tracking database to see if the account holder has clearance.
This approach has two advantages over the simple HTTP protocol: the applet has a timer which can be used to remove account holder details if an object has not been requested within a specified time period, and additional user information may be checked through the applet credit card details for example.
Furthermore, all the Java code is running on the server, so no special features are required by the browser.
An important element of the ERCOMS project is the development of the testbed e-reserves by the supporting partners, The OU and Southampton University.
Any new digitisation project needs built-in monitoring of its performance in order to optimise or improve it, and the tracking module in ERCOMS is being developed so that libraries can learn how their evolving services are being used, as well as to demonstrate effective copyright control and authorisation.
Evaluation of this prototype will begin late in the summer.
An electronic publishing group based in the GeoData Institution [4] at the University of Southampton has pioneered the use of electronic resources for student teaching.
The work was initiated under the University’s Scholar project, which strove to make use of electronic delivery to increasing student numbers.
In the meantime the University Library which has a short loan collection of over 24,000 items was concerned at the ever increasing volume of the collection and the corresponding administrative load.
As the collection provides efficient but restricted access limited numbers of copies for limited periods of time the library was interested in exploring alternative solutions.
Electronic delivery could perhaps maintain the availability for students of all disciplines, but enhance the delivery to a larger number of students with perpetual tight deadlines.
With departmental moves and additional sites, attention has been focused on the growing need to provide easy multi-site access to teaching and learning materials.
The Coastal Zone Management resource mulitmedia training module allows access to over 3000 pages of text and imagery for a series of classes for over 200 students and is accessible anywhere in the University.
Using this as a model, the Library short loan collection was assessed to identify possible further target areas and suitable types of material for digitisation.
These include the development of core collections for the Departments of Human Morphology, Oceanography, English, Adult Continuing Education and the School of Nursing.
This delivery provides the opportunity to utilise multimedia materials such as video, graphics and spreadsheet exercises.
The materials are currently accessed from the GeoData Institute’s server.
At the Open University [5], e-reserve development is based on a lecture series on Astronomy delivered by staff at the OU for the Gresham College.
The e-reserve will consist of books, lecture notes and supplementary articles.
Twelve lectures will be given in total and each lecture has six references, including articles or research papers and books.
These materials are of interest to Open University students on two specific courses.
References [1] ERCOMS Web Site, http://ford.mk.dmu.ac.uk/Projects/ERCOMS/ [2] International Institute for Electronic Library Research Web Site, http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/ [3] De Montfort University, http://www.dmu.ac.uk/ [4] GeoData Institute at Southampton University, http://www.geodata.soton.ac.uk/ [5] Open University Library, http://www.open.ac.uk/OU/Admin/Library/Library.html Author details Anne Ramsden, ERCOMS project manager Email: ar@dmu.ac.uk Phone: 01908 834924 Fax: 01908 834929 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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NewsAgent for Librarians Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines NewsAgent for Librarians Buzz copyright z39.50 Citation BibTex RIS Mark Kerr, research assistant on the NewsAgent for Libraries Project, describes a project to build a news and current awareness service for the LIS community.
Information overload has created a need for information delivered to the desktop at a time, in a format and covering topics chosen by the user, not the provider.
NewsAgent for Libraries started on April 1st 1996, and runs for two years.
Located within the Electronic Journals strand of the eLib programme, the project will develop a personalised news and current awareness service for the LIS community.
The main partners involved in the project are: LITC project coordinator, content provider CERLIM evaluation DILS-UWA editorial coordination Fretwell Downing technical development UKOLN networking, content provider.
A report on filtering systems and agent technology is in preparation, and the views and needs of potential users are being sought through a series of focus groups run by DILS-UWA.
Users will select from a variety of options: mode of delivery email, web page or via a Z39.50 client; frequency of delivery weekly, daily, or on publication of each item ('real time' newsfeed); subject matter using keyword profiles, selection of sources, type of material (eg 'only refereed articles', or 'excluding book reviews').
The range of customised news services and current awarenes services already available on the Web Infoseek Personal , NewsPage Direct, InSite, to name but a few demonstrates both the demand and the potential for this type of service.
The NewsAgent service will contain material from a range of sources, including refereed and other papers, reviews and editorial material from leading UK LIS journals such as Program, VINE and JoLIS.
As well as the main partners, the project consortium includes several leading LIS organisations LA, ASLIB, IIS, British Library, Bowker-Saur who will contribute a range of news, publications and briefing materials.
Information from other sources identified during the project may also be included.
With this range and depth of content, the LIS professional will have access to an information source second to none for scope, immediacy and relevance.
As well as identifying appropriate sources and developing technical solutions for handling them, the project will be addressing publishing and managerial issues concerning content, including quality control, copyright management, user registration, access and billing policies and strategies for handling negotiations with content providers.
Publishers wishing to offer editorial content should contact the project as soon as possible, indicating the kind of materials which may be available, and contact information for us to follow up.
Further details about NewsAgent are available from the LITC website, or direct from LITC.
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Web Focus Corner: The World Wide Web Consortium Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus Corner: The World Wide Web Consortium Buzz data software html css copyright hypertext pics research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly ponders whether the academic community can have a role in shaping the web of the future.
Launch of the W3C-LA Initiative On Wednesday 3rd December Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, was one of the guest speakers at a meeting held in London to mark the launch of the W3C-LA, an initiative funded by the European Union’s Esprit programme aimed at leveraging the Web for European Industry.
The meeting [1] provided an opportunity for W3C staff members to summarise recent developments to web protocols.
The presentations were accompanied by poster displays and demonstrations.
As described in the W3C’s Press Release [2], the leveraging action is aimed at accelerating the adoption of innovative web software developments.
Work to be carried out within W3C-LA includes the development of Demonstrator systems, including implementations of new HTTP technologies, aimed at improving the performance of the web, use of new CSS and HTML facilities to demonstrate best practices for information providers, PICS for rating and filtering materials, etc.
A series of Symposia and Workshops will be held which will describe web advances and the development of the demonstrators.
W3C-LA is run by INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control and W3C host in Europe, in partnership with CLRC-RAL, the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils-Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom.
To enhance the communication between W3C and the Web community, W3C have opened a number of offices.
The UK Office is based at CLRC-RAL [3].
CLRC-RAL have produced further information about W3C-LA [4].
Joining W3C The launch of W3C-LA and the establishment of W3C Offices in the UK should be welcomed by members of the UK Higher Education community, as it will help in developing links with the body responsible for coordinating web developments.
JISC [5] and UKERNA [6] have been members of W3C for some time but, until very recently, no UK universities have joined.
It is now timely for institutions to consider joining.
W3C feel that by joining W3C, institutions can maximise the potential of their business while helping W3C to achieve its mission: “to realise the full potential of the Web”.
The reasons for joining W3C can be summarised as: Information: W3C Members become the best informed organisations about the Web allowing mature decision making.
Image: W3C Members are seen to be the play-makers evolving the Web and its services.
All the main players are Members.
Involvement: W3C Members participate in the policy forming activities that chart the future of the Web.
Influence: W3C Members submit proposals, make and implement decisions that shape the future of the Web.
Outcome: W3C Members through their involvement with W3C become the preferred suppliers or the expert users of Web products and services.
Universities can join W3C as associate members for a membership subscription of $5,000 per annum.
It should be noted that the associate membership, which is open to non-profit making organisations and businesses with a gross revenue under $50M, entitles the organisation to full membership priviliges.
What Next?
If you feel that your organisation would benefit from active participation with W3C and the W3C working groups, you should consider joining.
Universities with research interests in hypertext systems, networked information, communications and data formats may well have much to contribute, as well as to gain, by establishing close links with experts in W3C Working Groups.
Universities who are active in developing networked information services or distance learning could benefit.
If you would like further details, please contact Brian Kelly, who, as UK Web Focus, is the JISC representative on W3C.
Brian can be contacted by sending email to B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk, by phoning 01225 323943 or at the address given below.
References Evolution of the Web: Impact on European Industry, http://www.cclrc.ac.uk/News/03dec97.html World Wide Web Consortium Launches W3C-LA Initiative, http://www.w3.org/Press/W3C-LA Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, http://www.rl.ac.uk/ W3C-LA: World Wide Web Consortium Leveraging Action, http://www.dci.clrc.ac.uk/Activity.asp?W3C-LA JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ UKERNA, http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus, Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323943 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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From Books to Bits Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From Books to Bits Buzz atom copyright video streaming cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Ian Brown describes the transition from paper-based to Web-based textbooks, and outlines a novel solution for the production of teaching material within academia.
Time’s up for the textbook?
Don’t believe the hype.
The high priests of Internet hysteria frequently predict the death of the traditional print media.
But regardless of the technological problems speed, speed and speed that currently confront the Internet, there are compelling reasons why paper-based books and journals will always exist.
BYTE a computing magazine not known for Luddite tendencies summed them up as portability, information density and character (1995).
You can’t really curl up in bed with a good computer.
Textbooks, however, are not protected by all of these advantages.
Information density yes.
Character maybe.
Portability not likely.
Five hundred pages seems an absolute minimum these days to satisfy an author’s machismo.
On-line material is also a worthy opponent in this area.
It is always up-to-date no need for new editions every few years.
Space is absolutely no problem.
And other media can be seamlessly linked in.
How could a biology book compare to an on-line version with a video clip of, say, a frog dissection?
This article looks at ways in which the World-Wide Web equivalents of textbooks are likely to evolve.
Publishers are already moving some of their wares on-line.
Government-funded groups such as the Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) are rushing materials onto the Web.
Even more radical efforts, such as students themselves writing Internet materials as part of their course, are underway.
How much will all of this affect the traditional textbook?
Wholesale transfer to the Web New media usually begin by copying forms from old.
It’s easy to turn a textbook into Web ‘pages’ just take the original computer file, and re-save it in this format.
The only reason we haven’t been overwhelmed by these conversions is profit.
Who would buy a textbook if it was freely available on-line?
Publishers are therefore using the Web as an advertising forum.
Excerpts sometimes whole chapters are published to persuade readers to buy the whole book.
While this is an admirable extension of the ‘try before you buy’ concept, it is unlikely to change publishing as we known it.
A more promising approach is adding value to a textbook with a Web site.
Additional and more up-to-date information can be made available, and referenced in the text.
Dorling Kindersley (see http://www.omix.com/family-library/) is taking this approach with many of its childrens’ educational books.
Each book has dedicated Web pages, accessible only to those who have registered their purchase of the book.
Microsoft even use this feature in their CD-ROM encyclopaedia, Encarta ‘97.
Another version of this approach is to debate issues raised in a book on-line.
An example is The Race Gallery, by Marek Kohn (1996).
A Web site contains discussion on the many controversial issues raised in the book.
Relevant items in the news are also considered.
Readers can directly make points and argue with the author and each other in such forums.
The traditional one-way model of communication between author and readers is therefore redefined something that could produce very exciting changes in the whole field.
But who pays for it all?
The key to this problem is that readers cannot be charged for accessing Web pages.
This forces the information provider, rather than the reader, to pay for the material.
While some academic journals charge authors to print their work, this is unlikely to work in the textbook world.
Unless Web sites can encourage sales of related books, they provide no revenue.
This situation will soon change.
Several Internet standards being developed will allow on-line ‘micro-payments’ of units as small as 0.1p to be made using ‘e-cash’ (VISA, 1996).
Web sites can therefore charge users, and so fund their material.
Publishers could conceivably charge by the Web page perhaps finally breaking the ‘bigger is better’ view that grips the industry.
Other models such as subscriptions to books (or even whole libraries) may become common.
This, however, ignores the absolutely fundamental challenge that the Internet brings to conventional publishing.
As Nicholas Negroponte observes in Being Digital (1996), we are transforming from an atom-based world to a computer ‘bit’ (a tiny piece of information) dominated society.
The fundamental difference is that atoms exist physically, whereas bits do not.
The relevance here is that printing and distributing books costs money.
Producing an extra book costs money.
On the Internet, it does not.
Once information has been created, it costs next to nothing to distribute.
Once an on-line textbook has been written, it can be made freely available.
The question then, of course, becomes: Who pays the author?
The most obvious answer currently is the Government.
HEFC-funded bodies such as the CTI (1996) are putting a wealth of information on-line.
Their role could be greatly expanded in future, as the authors of WWW textbooks that replace those currently used in education.
Universities could form consortia to share lecture notes and other materials they have developed, as well as commission new items.
A truly radical solution, however, would be to help students themselves to write the material.
Teaching material is often the best way of learning it.
As well as aiding their education, the results of their labours could be used by others.
Such collaborative efforts may also encourage more peer-group learning within classes something very much in educational vogue.
Dr. Tony Downing is currently running such a scheme in Newcastle University’s psychology department.
He started it hoping to give students the feeling that their written work was valuable through seeing it published, and also to encourage co-operation in producing and evaluating academic work.
As he said, “I hope that working as (helpful) critics and editors as well as authors will help students to develop a more sophisticated awareness of academic quality in their own work.” He also hoped to “use the good work produced by individuals and groups as a resource for everyone, rather than waste it lying in drawers.” As the scheme has only just got off the ground, it is difficult to know how well it is achieving these aims.
However, one other benefit has already become apparent “Already some people who had been fairly computer-phobic seem to be enjoying using e-mail, which they would not otherwise have done.” You can see the system as it evolves over the next few months at http://york39.ncl.ac.uk/WWW/P3.html.
It is only when you consider the cumulative dimension of such work that its real benefit becomes apparent.
With a new intake of students each year, such courses benefit from the previous incumbents’ efforts.
Even better, the material can be continually expanded and refined.
One year’s work may produce a very useable resource.
But after ten years… The End Computer networks are only going to get better.
John Major has promised to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on new digital information systems.
Even more importantly, ‘user-friendly’ is now the mantra of the entire computing industry.
The days of the awkward and intransigent computer will soon be a distant memory.
Publishers are moving fast to embrace this new opportunity.
But the World-Wide Web has made publishers of us all.
The information streaming onto the Internet today is a mere trickle compared to the Niagara that is to come.
When every computer is a Web ‘server’, how will we make sense of it all?
This may become the new raison d’etre of publishers (or libraries…).
Sorting and filtering the information torrent is not something computers can manage on their own.
Internet rating systems, such as Point’s ‘Top 5% Web sites’ (1996), are already taking off.
Such quality control previously almost a side-effect of the publishing process may be the new selling-point of on-line ‘textbooks’.
Their form and authorship may be very different, but it could be editorial judgements we end up paying for.
References BYTE (1995).
“Information Underload”: http://www.byte.com/art/9502/sec1/art1.htm Computers in Teaching Initiative (1996).
“CTI Home Page”: http://www.cti.ac.uk/ Marek Kohn (1996).
“The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science”: http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/racegallery/ Nicholas Negroponte (1996).
“Being Digital”: http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/digital.html Point (1996).
“Top 5% Web sites”: http://www.pointcom.com/categories/ VISA (1996) “VISA Cash”: http://www.visa.com/cgi-bin/vee/sf/cashmain.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ACORN Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ACORN Buzz digitisation copyright mailbase Citation BibTex RIS Elizabeth Gadd and Paula Kingston report on progress with Project ACORN.
Project ACORN (Access to Course Readings via Networks) is one of eLib’s electronic reserve projects.
It is a partnership between Loughborough University, Swets & Zeitlinger B.V., and Leicester University.
Acorn Launch Having gained permission to digitise 211 (66%) of the journal articles requested from 54 (60%) of the publishers approached, ACORN is now preparing to launch on April 21st.
Library staff training was undertaken in the week beginning March 3rd.
Six sessions were offered and, in all, 67 library staff attended, which is apparently a record!
Evaluations were very positive, but indicated that some staff would like more time for hands-on practice nearer the launch date.
The week beginning 10th March was devoted to student training.
Eleven sessions were arranged in students lecture periods with the permission of academic staff, covering students on 11 of the 24 target modules.
In all about 300 students attended these sessions, 50% of the total target group for the Acorn service.
The majority of student training sessions had to be done by overhead projector as lecture rooms did not have computer equipment readily available.
Consequently, there were some pleas from students on the training evaluation forms for hands-on sessions.
We are learning that there is no substitute for hands-on training.
We are having an official launch ceremony on April 24th where Loughborough University’s Vice Chancellor, Professor David Wallace, is to ‘press-the-button’.
Major stakeholders in the project including publishers have been invited.
Publishers’ Seminar On June 11th ACORN is holding a seminar for participating publishers and other invitees in London.
The purpose of the seminar is to gather important information on publishers’ views on electronic ‘short-loan’ charges, document security, the role of an intermediary, and digitisation issues and costs.
It is hoped that this will provide a valuable forum for publishers to air their views and concerns, while also being a stepping stone to increased co-operation between publishers, libraries and intermediaries for the provision of such electronic services.
Web pages update We have recently updated our Web pages with a number of items which appear to be in great demand.
These include a document on the Acorn System Design, a Manual of Procedures on Copyright Clearance, our Acorn user guide and flier, a permissions update and an overall progress report.
Do come and visit our Web site [1].
Copyright permissions list Elizabeth Gadd, ACORN’s Liaison Officer and Andrew Brown, Project Officer for the University of Derby Electronic Library, have recently joined forces to set up a new mailbase list for copyright permission seekers.
Seeing the need for a ‘safe environment’ in which permission seekers could share copyright owner contact information, prices and policies, they have set up Lis-copyseek to provide just that.
To join please send a message to lis-copyseek-request@mailbase.ac.uk stating your email address, name, job title, organisation, telephone, and a brief description of your involvement with copyright permission seeking.
It should be stated that this is a closed list, for obvious reasons, and the owners reserve the right to refuse membership.
References Project ACORN Web Site, http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/ Author Details Elizabeth Gadd, ACORN Project Officer email: E.A.Gadd@lboro.ac.uk Tel: 01509 222403 Fax: 01509 223993 Address: Project Acorn, Pilkington Library, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire.
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ELVIRA 4 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ELVIRA 4 Buzz software accessibility copyright multimedia z39.50 research Citation BibTex RIS Claire Davies sets the scene for ELVIRA 4, the annual Electronic Library Visual Information Research Conference, May 1997 in Milton Keynes, UK.
Springtime in Milton Keynes means blossom on our famous shrubs, daffodils on our famous roundabouts, and at De Montfort the sound of busy people preparing for this year’s ELVIRA [1].
While the endless controversy rages over pronouncing the conference’s name (which stands for Electronic Library and Visual Information Research), all is progressing well.
Whether pronounced with Vera Duckworth or the ‘Queen of Darkness’ in mind, ELVIRA’s an old lady now in relation to most digital library conferences.
With the fourth year’s programme finalised, what can we learn about the progress of the field from her history so far?
The most important change, of course, is the shift from proposals of what a digital library would or should be like, or descriptions of hopeful prototypes, towards reports on actual working systems and completed research studies.
Thus presentations at both the 1996 and 1997 conferences consider the longer-term experiences of managing, and observing usage of, relatively mature digital repositories.
Indeed, for this year’s conference the reviewers rejected many papers which they felt were still in a relatively early stage, with too little experience to report, since there are by now plenty of more mature studies and developments to choose from.
Real systems will also be demonstrated, alongside new designs.
Issues now arising include integration of developed technologies, long-term economic models, and use by well-experienced users.
At the same time, innovations are still appearing, especially in multimedia and in the use of network protocols like Z39.50 to link multiple sources together.
As digital libraries become a more established field, so we also begin to see clear specialisms developing such as electronic journals, rights management and user issues.
Meanwhile, the digital library community is also changing.
The days are fast vanishing when a few researchers and computing experts could expect to lecture to wide-eyed librarians about their new developments.
Thanks to initiatives like the eLib programme [2], the European Community Libraries Programme [3] and the US Digital Library Initiative [4], we’re all researchers and developers now.
At this year’s ELVIRA, reflecting this trend, four workshops (mainly panel-led discussion sessions) will run in parallel with the traditional paper sessions, giving delegates the chance for participation in semi-structured debate.
Naturally the workshops reflect some of the most topical issues in the field: management and integration, the research agenda, collaborative systems, and the troublesome migraine of copyright.
As Ariadne readers will know, it’s very important to learn from new initiatives across the world, not merely in the UK, since digital library developments and research are going on in all English-speaking and many other countries.
Past ELVIRAs have reflected this, with papers from Japan, the US, Ireland, and other European countries.
This year, our keynote speaker is from an Australian university, and we have papers from South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, and an Austrian-Hungarian collaborative project.
However, not all the overseas submissions were accepted the same criteria applied to all (broadly, the criteria of originality, readability, interest, quality and relevance to the conference).
What about the projects themselves?
One would expect a change in more than quantity as time passes.
Content, technologies, Internet dependence, accessibility, size, user interface metaphors and the scale of ambition of projects might all be expected to change as well.
This isn’t always obvious, however: many new eLib projects are still on a relatively small, exploratory scale.
Furthermore, until all the technical and copyright issues are resolved we are likely to see continuing variance in the use of document formats and software architectures.
Some projects continue to choose ‘tried and tested’ over ‘innovative and standards-defined’; others are looking beyond their own collections towards enabling their users greater accessibility to the vast collection of material that is the WWW.
This year’s technical sessions include, inevitably, a heavy emphasis on the WWW, but also on other technical innovations.
One definitely growing trend is in my own specialist area of interest, user issues.
Right from the start, ELVIRA has included papers on this theme: at least three papers in each year’s conference have explicitly focused on social or organisational aspects, user interface design or user cognition.
In the 1997 conference, user issues are touched on in a number of papers, and those explicitly focused on them form two sessions in their own right.
As somebody who has been involved in human-computer interaction projects for some years, it is exciting to work in a new field where human factors are recognised as important and interesting right from the beginning of the technical developments.
Finally, the sign of a maturing field is perhaps the point where people step back and consider higher-level strategic and policy issues underlying the hectic pace of developments.
This is definitely a growing tendency, as shown by last year’s inclusion of papers considering the cultural changes implied by the new paradigm.
This year’s conference has a whole paper session devoted to policy issues, and inevitably they will also be discussed in the workshops on the research agenda and on rights management/economic models.
Thus ELVIRA continues to be a conference for everyone in the field: library managers and staff, technologists, researchers and anyone else interested in the fast-growing digital library world.
References Elvira 4 Conference Details, http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/ELVIRA/ELVIRA4/ eLib Programme Web Site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ European Community Libraries Programme, http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/lib-link.html US Digital Library Initiative, http://www.dlib.org/projects.html#federal Author Details Claire Davies Research Fellow, Email: cdavies@dmu.ac.uk Phone: 01908 834922 ELVIRA 4 Conference Details: http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/ELVIRA/ELVIRA4/ Address: International Institute for Electronic Library Research, De Montfort University, Milton Keynes, Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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MCF: Will Dublin Form the Apple Core Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MCF: Will Dublin Form the Apple Core Buzz data html database metadata browser vocabularies schema cataloguing sgml dtd ftp url research Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight looks at how Dublin Core and Apple's new MCF metadata file format might make useful and interesting bed fellows.
For many years librarians and computer scientists have been researching and developing metadata standards and technology.
Although library OPACs are obviously commercially viable systems for maintaining metadata about hard copy resources, they are something of a niche market still.
With the explosion in information provision on the Internet, this niche metadata market is set to explode itself, as an increasing number of companies develop a commercial interest in the provision and support for indexing, cataloging and navigating Internet resources.
One major computer vendor that has started to make a concerted push into metadata standards for online resources is Apple Computer.
As part of the 'Project X' research programme Apple has produced a metadata file format called the Metadata Content Format (MCF) [1] MCF is a text based file format that provides an extensible structure for encoding and transporting metadata.
If it were just a closed metadata file format MCF would be a relatively weak foray into the metadata arena as the associated metadata content that Apple has devised so far are relatively simplistic.
However MCF has a number of major points in its favour which may well make it a technology worth watching.
A growing toolbox The first plus point for MCF is that it has a growing number of tools available to aid the generation of the metadata and that make use of this metadata in novel ways.
The most notable of these tools is probably Apple's HotSauce [2].
HotSauce is available as both a standalone application and a web browser plugin for Apple Macintoshes and Wintel boxes running Windows95/NT.
HotSauce provides the end user with a way of visualizing MCF files in such a way as to give a "hotsauced" site a three dimensional graphical site map.
This map can be navigated around by "flying through" the graphical representation of the site's structure generated from the metadata held in the MCF file.
The 3D view of a site's structure can provide the end user with more cues as to where they can go and what parts of the site are likely to hold the most data.
There are certainly human computer interaction issues that still need to be addressed (such as how to deal with very large sites with a broad, flat hierarchy in a way that prevents the screen from becoming too overcrowded with objects) but this does appear to over a very interesting new way of making use of relatively low quality metadata to aid navigation.
In the case of the current release of HotSauce, little information aside from the object's title, its URL and the URL of the hyperlinks from it is used to generate the representation.
This information can be generated by either using the HotSauce tool itself to make and edit MCF files, or by using one of the growing number of third party MCF generating scripts.
An example of the use of one of these scripts gives you the ability to let you fly through the eLib programme information[3], which was generated by Andy Powell from information held in the ROADS [4] based eLib project database.
This demonstrates how MCF can be generate automatically, not only from HTML documents held within a local web site but also from hand generated catalogues and robot generated indexes on a subject basis.
Dublin Core in MCF The next plus point of MCF is its very minimalism.
It is a simple format and yet provides plenty of room for expansion.
The simple syntax makes it relatively easy to write new, homemade scripts that will be able to read and write MCF files.
The flexibility allows MCF to carry metadata other than the simple titles and URLs that HotSauce currently uses.
Apple have already said that they are interested in incorporating the Dublin Core Element Set [5] within MCF files.
This is good news; one of the goals of the entire Dublin Core development to date has been to build an abstract, lowest common denominator metadata content model that can be expressed concretely in a number of ways.
Existing proposals are on the table for the concrete representation of Dublin Core metadata with HTML2.0/3.2 META elements [6], WHOIS++ document templates [7], USMARC records [8] and an SGML DTD [9]; adding an MCF based concrete representation of Dublin Core seems to be a natural and sensible step for Apple and MCF's supporters.
It also forwards the goals of the Dublin Core supporters to get something out there.
By incorporating Dublin Core into MCF, Apple are gain a number of advantages.
Firstly they can gain leverage off existing metadata that is either directly in a Dublin Core concrete representation (such as Dublin Core metadata embedded within HTML documents) or can be translated into Dublin Core concepts via a mapping function (such as extracting the "core" out of a USMARC record).
This means that the tedious and troublesome task of creating large amounts of metadata to "pump prime" the MCF format has effectively already been done for them; all they need to do is to write a few tools that can grab this metadata, convert it into a Dublin Core format if necessary and then stuff it into the MCF files.
Once this is done, end user tools such as HotSauce and its successors can present the user with a much richer information environment.
Rather than simply relying on the titles of objects to guide the user's selection whilst browsing, they could provide the user with detailed descriptions and abstracts or allow arbitrary groupings to be set up based on controlled subject vocabularies held within the Dublin Core.
Resources that have had their MCF metadata extracted from, or extended by, information provided by a quality review sites (such as the eLib funded SBIG like ADAM, EEVL, OMNI and SOSIG) might be given some visual highlighting to make them stand out from the rest of the resources at a site.
The richer the metadata available, the richer the navigation experience can be made for the end users.
The second advantage for Apple in incorporating Dublin Core into MCF is that they may be able to take advantage of the interest being shown in Dublin Core in general by the developers of the various Internet indexing and directory services.
If authors can generate Dublin Core metadata this is embedded in their documents and this can be easily turned into MCF files by the webmaster of the site that mounts the documents, then the robot indexers could grab a single MCF file that describes in detail all the resources available on the site, in much the same way as they currently check robots.txt for permission to index the server.
In many respects this is what Martijn Koster [10] did some years ago with Aliweb [11], but with added advantages that the metadata can also be used for improving browsing navigation for end users as well as running a search engine.
This provides benefits to all parties concerned; the authors get to describe their resources in detail in a way that they feel will appeal to their target audience.
The webmaster of a site will only have to run a local DC-to-MCF converter at regular intervals on their local sites in order to reduce the traffic due to robots.
The indexing services in turn only have to pull a single file from sites carrying a DC enhanced MCF file, which will speed their indexing operation.
Apple benefits because MCF will be used more and so there will be more metadata for their tools such as HotSauce to process, making the tools more attractive to end users.
Lastly the Dublin Core community will benefit by having more commercial backing Conclusions Apple's MCF is a relative newcomer to the metadata field.
However it is a promising commercial entrant into this arena and the option of having Dublin Core metadata elements held in MCF files appears to offer a number of advantages.
Whether the three dimensional representation of metadata structures provided by tools like HotSauce will turn out to be more than a passing fad remains to be seen.
It does open up interesting new possibilities in applying HCI research and irrespective of whether HotSauce itself takes off or not, MCF looks like a format with a future.
References [1] Metadata Content Format (MCF), http://mcf.research.apple.com/ [2] Hotsauce, http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/download.html [3] eLib MCF fly-through, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ROADS/MCF/elib.mcf [4] ROADS eLib project Web site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/" [5] Dublin Core Element Set, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements [6] HTML 2.0/3.2 META Elements, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/metadata-masses/ [7] WHOIS++ template records, ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-asid-whois-schema-00.txt [8] USMARC records, http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/dccross.html [9] SGML DTD, http://www.uic.edu/~cmsmcq/tech/metadata.syntax.html [10] Martin Koster, mak@webcrawler.com [11] Aliweb, http://www.nexor.co.uk/public/aliweb/ Author Details Jon Knight works on the ROADS eLib project at the University of Loughborough, UK Email: jon@net.lut.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/People/jon.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz copyright graphics gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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Netskills Corner: NCSA Mosaic Web Browser Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner: NCSA Mosaic Web Browser Buzz mobile software java javascript html browser graphics windows cache uri authentication url Citation BibTex RIS In this Netskills Corner, Brian Kelly describes a UK-Wide collaborative (combined directional Web and IRC chat-like system) meeting.
The World Wide Web, as originally conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, was intended to provide a collaborative groupware system for the European particle physics community.
Although Tim Berners-Lee's original browser for the NeXT system provided collaborative authoring capabilities, the mainstream browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape, implemented a publishing model, with a small number of authors and large numbers of readers.
A number of software developers are currently working on collaborative authoring tools.
A future Netskills Corner article will describe some of these tools.
This article, however, will describe a collaborative function which is currently available in NCSA Mosaic For Windows.
NCSA Mosaic Remember NCSA's Mosaic browser?
NCSA Mosaic was the first widely-used WWW browser.
The NCSA Mosaic X client proved the concept of the World Wide Web.
The release, in November 1993, of NCSA Mosaic for Windows and the Macintosh provided access to the Web for large numbers of users.
In October 1994 the Netscape browser was released.
Netscape proved to be a more reliable browser than NCSA Mosaic and its support for an enhanced set of HTML tags, although controversial (as discussed in the Netskills Corner and in Jon Knight's article on HTML: Which Version?
in the last edition of Ariadne), undoubtedly helped Netscape to gain acceptance with a new community of Internet users.
Although no longer the most widely-used browser, NCSA Mosaic still provides a number of facilities not available in other browsers.
In particular, NCSA Mosaic For Windows provides a Collaborate option.
NCSA Mosaic's Collaborate Facility NCSA Mosaic For Windows has a Collaborate option which enables a Mosaic user to host a session (as shown in Figure 1).
Other Mosaic users (from around the world) can join the session, by simply entering the name (or IP address) of the computer hosting the session.
The person hosting the session can then control the participants' screen display.
Figure 1 Selecting The Collaborate Option.
The Collaborate Session window can be used by the participants to communicate with each other (as shown in Figure 2).
Figure 2 The Collaborate Window.
In Figure 2 notice the following areas: List of participants The Chat Alias of the participants Message Input Area Messages are typed in this area Transcript Area This area contains a record of the dialogue The menu options which are available: Enable the contents of the transcript area to be saved and cleared.
Enable participants to specify whether links should be sent.
(This option is used by the person hosting the session).
Enable participants to specify whether links should be followed (used by participants who wish to follow links sent by the person hosting the session).
Case Study On 14th February 1996 a small group of experienced WWW users took part in a Mosaic Collaborate session on the subject of World Wide Web Futures.
The participants were Chris Lilley (Computer Graphics Unit, Manchester Computer Centre), Simon Dobson (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory), John Kirriemuir (UKOLN), Dave Ingham (Newcastle University), Dave Hartland and Brian Kelly (Netskills).
The collaborate session was led by myself (Brian Kelly).
I had prepared a set of HTML pages on various aspects of WWW Futures including developments to the WWW Architecture (e.g.
HTTP, URIs), Caching, Indexing, HTML, CGI and CCI, Mobile Code, Modular Software, VRML and Conferencing Systems.
Figure 3 Typical Page From WWW Futures Talk The pages had a consistent structure, with navigational aids at the top and bottom of the pages providing links to next and previous pages, the section contents and the main menu.
The pages typically contained a short piece of text and an accompanying illustration (see Figure 3).
The participants could discuss the contents of a page.
At the end of the session the contents of the transcript area was saved (as a plain text document).
The file was subsequently marked up in HTML and has been kept as a record of the session.
Since this file is a commentary on the WWW Futures pages, it is not intended as a self-contained document, and the URL of the file will not be disclosed except to the participants.
However it may well provide useful source material for the analysis of discussion styles and protocols of users of collaborative tools.
Feedback The participants seemed to find the session useful and enjoyable.
As Simon Dobson reported "The discussion itself ranged widely over most web topics.
I found it extremely interesting ...
There seemed to be a fairly broad consensus about the way things are going more (hierarchical) caches, Java and JavaScript, a proliferation of HTML variants, authentication."
Simon also commented on the collaborative session itself: "More interesting from a general perspective was the actual mechanism for the meeting.
This used the collaboration functions of Mosaic (on PCs) to set up a chat-style dialogue.
What anyone typed in to their chat window appeared to everyone else.
Moreover one could set the system to transmit to others any links you clicked in the main browser window, and select whether to follow other peoples' links.
This meant that someone (Brian) could conduct us around his slides, and we could still explore links privately (or collectively) if we wanted to.
At several points in the session I went off down links to investigate topics that I wasn't up to speed on, without losing context with the discussion."
A number of limitations were encountered: "The problems were also fairly severe, though.
Mainly these arose because the protocol being used is ever so slightly asynchronous, so that peoples' messages could appear out of order.
It needs a good bit of netiquette to work satisfactorily.
It might be nice to be able to set up "whispers" with a sub-group, so that a private discussion could occur alongside the main one."
"Having said all that, for small, quick meetings it's going in the right direction.
Certainly if things get a little more interactive it'll be a useful alternative to a protracted e-mail exchange or set of 'phone calls.
Certainly a morning well spent!"
Fancy A Go?
Collaborative use of WWW browsers clearly has potential in a number of areas: it could be used by a lecturer to display lecture notes to a group of students, or in a distance learning environment.
It would even be possible for the lecturer to pass control of the screen display to the students: for example, in a virtual dissection, the lecturer could remove the skin, and then ask a student to complete the dissection.
Netskills will be exploring the potential of wide-area collaborative tools for the delivery of network training and support for network trainers.
As a continuation of our evaluation of collaborative tools, we intend to host another Mosaic Collaborative session on WWW Futures, which is open to Ariadne readers.
Participation is open to those who have access to a recent version of Mosaic For Windows, experience of the World Wide Web and an interest in WWW Futures.
The software can be obtained at the URL http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/WWW/Mosaic/Mosaic/Windows/ If you are interested please contact Brian Kelly (email B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk).
http://www.netskills.ac.uk/staff/kelly/ariadne/ariadne2/details.html This initial session is intended for experienced WWW users.
If the session is successful we will consider hosting more general training and support sessions.
Further Information The Collaborate option in NCSA Mosaic For Windows is just one example of a collaborative system.
It has the advantage of being based on a proposed open standard: CCI (Common Client Interface).
Further details on CCI are available at the URL http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/XMosaic/CCI/cci-spec.html.
Unfortunately the Collaborate facility is believed to be implemented in only one browser (NCSA Mosaic) and on one platform (Microsoft Windows).
W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) maintain information on Collaboration, Knowledge Representation and Automatability which is available at the URL http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Collaboration/ Another useful source of information is NCSA's list of collaborative projects which is available at the URL http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/www/collaboration.html Acknowledgements Many thanks to Chris Lilley, Simon Dobson, John Kirriemuir, Dave Ingham and Dave Hartland for participating in the collaborative session and in sharing their expertise and views on WWW developments.
Brian Kelly, Netskills, University of Newcastle Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Superjournal Update Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Superjournal Update Buzz data video hypertext multimedia passwords research Citation BibTex RIS Christine Baldwin describes work so far on the Superjournal project which set out to study factors which make e-journals successful and useful to academia.
SuperJournal [1] is studying the factors that will make electronic journals successful.
What features and functionalities should be present in electronic journals to deliver real value to the academic community, and what are the implications for publishers and libraries?
This article gives a brief update on the project research and the early results.
Overall Approach The objective of the research is to answer the question: What do readers really want from electronic journals?
The problem is that if you ask them the question directly, they can’t answer it.
They need hands-on experience using electronic journals to provide a context for their views and opinions.
The project has therefore adopted the following method: Conduct baseline studies that establish how academic researchers use printed journals and their expectations for electronic journals (“before” data) Deliver clusters of journals in an electronic application which can be changed over time, analysing usage patterns to identify critical success factors and barriers (“during” data) Once the users have experience using electronic journals, hold informed discussions with them to explore what they really want, and the critical success factors as they perceive them (“after” data).
To guide the research, we developed lists of hypotheses that could be tested in the following areas: The features we felt would be most valued Why users might prefer electronic journals to print (or vice versa) The factors that would discourage use (barriers) How users would actually use the electronic journals, initially and over time How local factors would influence use The differences we would expect to see between users in the sciences and the humanities/social sciences, for all of the above.
Manchester Computing developed the SuperJournal electronic journal application, which contains clusters of journals contributed by participating publisher.
To date three clusters have been launched: Communication & Cultural Studies (CCS), Molecular Genetics & Proteins (MGP), and Political Science (PS), and a further cluster will be launched early in 1998: Materials Chemistry (MC).
All clusters are available to the ten participating university sites, though baseline studies and promotion have been targeted at sites and departments where we felt there would be greatest interest.
Access is password protected, all usage is logged, and the resulting logfiles are analysed in detail.
Reader Expectations The baseline studies allowed us to explore with readers their initial views on electronic journals and what they thought would be important features.
The following potential benefits were mentioned most frequently by readers in the sciences and humanities: Immediate access Guaranteed access (no missing issues!)
I mproved time management (browsing or following up on a reference when you have a few minutes spare) Convenience of remote access Powerful (fast and flexible) search engines Improved current awareness Hypertext linking to abstracts or other articles Electronic bookmarking.
Users in the sciences also mentioned the following: Getting the latest articles sooner than they are available in the library Email alerts to let you know about new articles High quality colour images, often not published in printed journals due to cost.
Users in the humanities also mentioned the following: In many subject areas having access to the backfile is critical Access to more journals than the library may subscribe to Links to multimedia, for example video clips.
So already we’re building a list of the features that readers think will be important.
Now that they have access to the electronic journals, we’re looking at how they use the journals to see if usage patterns support their initial wish list.
Initial Usage Trends SuperJournal has been available to eight of the user sites for a year, and to two newer sites for four months.
Over this time period, 1,770 users have registered, and in a typical month there might be 350-450 user sessions.
We’re just starting to analyse usage and map out patterns.
These work will be followed up with interviews to explain the behaviour behind the usage patterns.
So far the following initial trends have been observed: For all the journal clusters, usage has built up slowly over a period of months Growth of usage for the MGP cluster (life sciences) has been faster than for the CCS cluster (humanities) There are three times more users for MGP than for CCS, which may reflect the larger department sizes at the university sites The percentage of repeat usage is similar for both clusters (say 30%) Use of the CCS cluster has spread more widely within the university sites, certainly beyond where promotion was initially targeted Most usage is browsing of current issues, and relatively few users are taking advantage of the three search engines available.
We’re now studying the logfiles in detail to see how users really use the journal clusters, what features they use, how often, and why.
Watch this space or visit the SuperJournal Web site over the coming months to find out what we learn!
References [1] The Superjournal Project http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/sj/ Author Details Christine Baldwin SuperJournal Project Manager, Information Design and Management Broom, Hinksey Hill Oxford, OX1 5BH Email: c.baldwin@dial.pipex.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Access V Holdings, Cranfield Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Access V Holdings, Cranfield Buzz software database copyright video z39.50 research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ashton reports on an event of interest to the Document Delivery community.
I can only apologise for the brevity of parts of this report, and offer my excuses in the Sideline column in issue 7 of Ariadne (mid-January 1997).
For reasons to be revealed there, I missed the first half of the Access v Holdings seminar, held at Cranfield University on 30th October 1996.
[Out of the 38 delegates, I seemed to be the only one to arrive at Cranfield by public transport; perhaps they all knew something that I didn't!]
So I cannot properly report on the papers by Janet Evans [j.e.evans@cranfield.ac.uk] (BIODOC Background and Design) and John Harrington [j.harrington@cranfield.ac.uk] (BIODOC provisional results); my apologies to them both.
The BIODOC project aims to explore a number of key issues in the current debate over access versus holdings; in particular, the project aims to determine whether it is possible to offer a better service to library users by providing access to information held in journals through electronic current awareness services than by holding collections of journals in-house.
It is hoped that BIODOC will not only provide the library with an alternative strategy for information support, but will offer users an enhanced service, capable of individual current awareness profiling.
The results of the project will be disseminated amongst the academic/research community.
In the meantime, readers may like to find out more by looking at the references (provided by the authors on the day) at the end of this report.
But to get to the half of the day for which I had a corporeal presence.... Reinder Jan Zwart, director of Document Supply and Logistics at Delft University of Technology Library (DUTL), gave an overview of the Eurilia project.
The project, now in it's third year, is funded by the CEC Action programme for Libraries, with partners from five EU countries, including Cranfield in the UK.
The aim of the project is to extend the access and availability of major aerospace collections, by establishing a new service based on a standardised pan-European system for information access, retrieval, image browsing, and document delivery.
The user-friendly Eurilia system is not designed for the librarian, but with the simple user in mind.
Reinder demonstrated the Eurilia Z39.50's ability to connect to a group of servers; the client can connect to up to 10 databases simultaneously (more depending on the number of Winsockets), or indeed to just one particular database.
The beauty of the Z39.50 protocol is that the user can initiate his/her query, without needing to know the type of system that is being used, or indeed where it is located.
The interface is familiar to the user, as it has the look and feel of a Microsoft package.
After conducting a Eurilia search, the user can process the results through DocUTraiL, a spin off of the Eurilia project, operated jointly by DUTL and KN/Minolta.
Through DocUTrail, the user can complete the delivery process by opting to have the document or image delivered over the Internet, by fax, or as a hard copy.
Delivery time to the user is less than two days, and all requests are automatically invoiced and packaged.
A pilot to DocUTraiL has looked at the project's effect on workprocesses at delivery, request, and finance department level, as well as the effect on working conditions for library staff.
DocUTraiL should be fully operational November 1996, and if all goes well, ISO 9002 certification will be awarded January 1997.
The second presenter of the afternoon, Frank van der Heijden, Software R & D Manager for KN/Minolta, presented KN/Minoltas view of "The Digital Highway"; a high-tech project from KN BV for DULT Library.
To use a before and after scenario: before the project, Delft Library document delivery department used six Minolta photocopiers for copying customer requests.
The sources for these requests were of varying quality (books, journals, newspapers, and so on), and the working conditions for the library staff were poor.
The library wanted to improve both quality and conditions, whilst at the same time improving the speed of delivery and diversity of the output (print, fax, or email).
If articles are unavailable locally, the library also wanted to be able to locate and download these articles from other libraries.
Furthermore, the library wanted automatic processing of customer requests, and automatic invoicing and statistics for management information.
KN/Minolta set about improving the copy quality, by digitising images with the PS3000P.
This system scans ten pages per minute, at 400tpi, and is operated using finger buttons or footpedals, resulting in better working conditions for employees.
Output can be print, fax or email.
KN/Minolta developed fault tolerant barcode driven software for processing the scanned images before putting them on the network; no operator interaction is needed.
After the Minolta commercial break the snazzy Minolta corporate video the delegates were able to inspect the PS3000P system more closely.
So what is the future of document delivery?
The general consensus of the day seemed to be that, in five years' time, paper will still be the predominant form of document delivery.
However, there may well be a shift towards delivery over the Internet.
Access or holdings?
In either scenario, the future looks bright for KN/Minolta.
References Evans, J.
& Harrington, J.
1995.
Access versus holdings: a report on the BIODOC current awareness and document supply experiment at Cranfield University, Managing Information, 2 (11), p38-39.
Evans, J., Bevans, S. & Harrington, J. BIODOC: Access versus holdings in a University Library, Journal of Interlending and Document Supply (To be published in November 1996).
Evans, J., Harrington, J.
& Bevans, S. 1996.
BIODOC: A preliminary user analysis Serials, 9 (2), p170-177.
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CURL OPAC launch Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CURL OPAC launch Buzz data software database portfolio infrastructure tagging cataloguing opac z39.50 passwords copac telnet vt100 research Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Cooper describes the CURL OPAC launch in Manchester.
The Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) has for some years maintained a database of machine-readable catalogue records contributed by member libraries to enable the costs of cataloguing to be kept down, to members' mutual benefit.
Hitherto, these records have only been made available to librarians, but with funding from the Higher Education Funding Councils' Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the database is being turned into an Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) known as COPAC (i.e.
the CURL OPAC).
COPAC was officially launched on 30 April 1996 at a seminar in the John Rylands University Library at the Uni versity of Manchester.
There were four speakers: Professor Martin Harris, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, recalled how the Follett review had been set up in order to provide extra reading-places in the libraries of new universi ties, but had developed into a far more wide-ranging enquiry with as much emphasis on research as on teaching.
He saw COPAC as a symbol of the larger universities' responsibility to the needs of scholarship in the academic community as a whole.
Derek Law, Chair of the Information Services Sub-Committee of the JISC, dwelt on the richness of the CURL dataset and the opportunities for further collaboration with the National Libraries in a National Bibliographic resource.
COPAC fills a slot in JISC/ISSC's portfolio somewhere between the Anderson Report and the ELib programme.
With the development of document delivery facilities, access for researchers in all HEIs to the great wealth and richness of university research collections will become easier.
Further, the revenue from such services would be kept within the academic community.
Reg Carr, Librarian of the University of Leeds and Secretary of CURL, spoke of the founding of CURL in the early 1980s and of the establishment of the Database and its subsequent history.
Funding from the (then) UGC was conditional on access to records being open to all HEIs.
CURL has always recognised that its activities are intended to benefit the whole academic community.
Thus, when a new platform had to be found, it was recognised that its future should not be as a purely commercial operation, and the Follett review had offered a way forward.
Sarah Davnall, CURL OPAC Project Leader at Manchester Computing, paid tribute to the COPAC team (Shirley Cousins, Ashley Sanders and Peiyao Shao), who had worked long and hard to get COPAC up and running by the agreed date.
Inevitably, problems had arisen, some of which had not yet been solved.
Work is being carried out as a matter of urgency on enabling the retrieved record set to be sorted, making available a wider range of download formats and adding help for specific commands.
Other enhancements will take a bit longer.
There is a problem with searches by author, where search results are inaccurate the nature of the data may prevent a complete resolution, but some improve ment can be expected.
The consolidation of records needs further attention, and holdings for those CURL libraries not yet represented in the database need to be added.
(This is purely a time and re source problem.
It is not the libraries' fault: they are queuing impatiently.)
Even when all machine-readable records have been loaded, COPAC will not accurately reflect the total holdings of CURL libraries until retrospective conversion of manual records is complete.
Serials in particular are not well represented at present.
On the interface side, search aids such as relevance feedback, particularly valuable in a context where authority control is not possible, will be added.
In addition, BRS/Search, the software underlying COPAC, has a natural language processing module which offers further possibilities.
The World Wide Web interface has some limitations (for example, the absence of record tagging).
In the long term, the appropriate progression will be to implement the Z39.50 protocol.
This may well be the appropriate way to eventually implement a National Bibliographic Resource.
Manchester Computing is contractually obliged to provide document request facilities in COPAC.
However, there are still many problems to be ironed out at the infrastructure level.
If an end-user requests a document, it will be necessary for a transaction to be set up between two libraries.
This is not as simple as it sounds.
Can the item requested be lent at all?
(COPAC does not currently provide any detail about the precise location of items or their loan status.)
Is the user in good standing with his/her home library?
Which particular branch does (s)he use?
What about user charges t hat are now often levied, or payments between libraries?
These matters are under discussion; resolution of them may not be easy.
The co-Chairmen of the seminar, Chris Hunt (Librarian and Director, John Rylands University Library of Manchester) and Professor Robin McDonough, Director of Information Systems at the University of Manchester, expressed thanks to all who had helped to bring the COPAC project to fruition: CURL, JISC, Manchester Computing, Shirley Perry and David Miller (who established the CURL Database) and, last but not least, Derek Law, its current godfather.
The Heads of Agreement upon which COPAC is founded were formally signed at the launch by Reg Carr for CURL and Derek Law for JISC.
As well as World Wide Web access to COPAC, there is a VT100 interface: Telnet to: copac.ac.uk and answer copac to the login and password prompts (Note that the word copac must be in lower-case).
Both interfaces include context-sensitive on-line help.
Further help and information is available from the COPAC Helpdesk, email copac@mcc.ac.uk, telephone 0161-275-6037.
Any comments on the interfaces or the database should be sent to the Helpdesk.
User Guides are available for each service, giving brief details of the facilities and commands in use.
The Guides are available for downloading from the World Wide Web site.
Alternatively, copies can be requested from the COPAC Helpdesk.
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Interface: Dennis Nicholson Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: Dennis Nicholson Buzz database cataloguing z39.50 gopher mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Chris Bailey finds a crusader at Strathclyde: Dennis Nicholson.
Dennis Nicholson is the head of Library Systems at the University of Strathclyde, where he has been responsible for the installation of two generations of library systems.
In the library community at large he is best known as the driving force behind the BUBL Information Service [1] and is also involved with a number of Scottish collaborative initiatives.
BUBL began life as the Bulletin Board for Libraries under Project Jupiter at the University of Glasgow.
Funding for the project ran out in 1991 and Nicholson, with a group of colleagues, took on the service on a volunteer-effort basis.
The database continued to be mounted and supported at Glasgow but the development and editorial work moved to Strathclyde.
After mainframe services were withdrawn at Glasgow, the service was moved to UKOLN at Bath.
“BUBL provided an opportunity to mount a crusade to get librarians involved with the development of networked information services” states Nicholson.
The initial priority was to sell the service as the primary awareness tool for the UK library community.
In collaboration with Peter Stone of the University of Sussex he set up the Mailbase e-mail discussion list LIS-link [2].
The two initiatives grew together, with LIS-link initially providing a mechanism for distributing BUBL current awareness bulletins .
From a text-based service initially run by volunteers, BUBL developed first into a gopher and Web-based service at UKOLN, then, in 1997, into a Web and Z39.50-based service located at Strathclyde University.
JISC-funded since 1994, with an annual budget recently doubled to 100,000 pounds, its importance was recognised in 1995 when it won the Institute of Information Scientists’ Jason Farradane award.
“In the early days” says Nicholson “there was a great deal of satisfaction in getting people involved and interested, and in making contact with others similarly motivated, often at an international level.” But there are always frustrations.
“We can never move fast enough to keep up with the speed of change.” He has some grumbles about the bureaucracy involved in running the service.
“I sometimes feel we are expected to spend too much time on administration time that might be better spent on service development.
” BUBL is funded primarily to do two things.
It offers fast and reliable access to selected Internet resources of academic relevance covering all subject areas, and it also provides a support service to UK librarians involved in network-based services.
Asked about overlap with other JISC services such as NISS’s [3] NetFirst and eLib subject gateway projects such as OMNI [4] and EEVL [5] , Nicholson indicated that he felt there was less overlap than was sometimes supposed, but that all players, and particularly JISC, recognised this as an area that needed sorting out.
Cost and value for money were important questions and BUBL, he felt, was very competitive in this respect “The BUBL approach, including its subject tree, is popular with users, who like to be able to browse as well as search.
And BUBL provides a range of unique features, such as specialist support for particular groups of librarians.
The recent Acqlink service for acquisitions librarians is an example.” Access figures continue to rise.
“The service is still developing, and has a healthy future.
” Nicholson has also been involved with two generations of CATRIONA projects.
CATRIONA (CATaloguing and Retrieval of Information Over Networks Applications) [6] was a collaborative British Library-funded project involving Strathclyde and Napier Universities, and the National Library of Scotland.
It examined the possibility of a Z39.50-based distributed catalogue of Internet resources integrated with hard-copy library OPACs.
CATRIONA II, funded by eLib, involves all the SCURL (Scottish Consortium of University and Research Libraries) institutions.
CATRIONA II is looking at approaches to university management of electronic resources and surveying electronic resources on selected Scottish campuses.
The surveys for Strathclyde and Napier Universities are already complete, with those of Edinburgh, Stirling, Abertay and St Andrews well underway.
There have been some interesting results.
“Over 90% of respondents at Strathclyde and Napier said that desk-top access to research materials held at other UK universities was either important, very important, or essential to their research.” A key aim is to investigate whether universities have the institutional will to manage electronic resources with a view to providing services.
This ties in nicely with information strategy initiatives.
“It is interesting how research like this can change your perceptions.
I began by thinking that the development of research-level services would be of most interest to universities.
In fact the need to protect and exploit teaching material may be just as significant a motivation for managing services.” Nicholson is actively involved in various Scottish collaborative projects.
Is there something distinctive about the Scottish environment?
“I think so,” he replies.
“The Scottish library and information community is the right size to favour collaboration and co-operation.
There is a sense of community and national identity everyone knows everyone else and there are several structures which facilitate co-operation.” Looking ahead, Nicholson is a key player in SCURL’s bid to JISC for a Scottish CLUMP.
“This is a joint vision which could provide the basis for a confederated Scottish virtual library.” It weaves together threads of strategy from many sources from SCURL projects and others outwith higher education, from local library IT strategies, and from BUBL and CATRIONA I.
“It is a vision of an integrated co-operative future with minimal duplication of effort.
Every systems librarian’s dream.” References [1] Article on what BUBL contains, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/bubl/ [2] Lis-link mailing list, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-link/ [3] Netfirst Web Site, http://www.netfirst.ac.uk/ [4] OMNI (Organising Medical Networked Information) subject gateway, http://omni.ac.uk/ [5] EEVL (Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library) subject gateway, http://www.eevl.uk/ [6] Catriona II eLib project Web site, http://catriona.lib.strath.ac.uk/ Interviewee Details Dennis Nicholson, Manager, BUBL, Email: d.m.nicholson@strath.ac.uk Tel: 0141 548 4529 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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REDD: Regional Electronic Document Delivery Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines REDD: Regional Electronic Document Delivery Service Buzz data software html browser copyright windows hypertext tiff url standards Citation BibTex RIS Chris Taylor provides details on an Australian electronic document delivery service that is based on standard Internet protocols.
REDD is the Regional Electronic Document Delivery Service.
The service began life in 1995 as a co-operative project of three libraries in Brisbane, The University of Queensland, Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology.
A successful grant application was made to the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training to “develop and implement electronic technologies to enable rapid request, scanning (converting to digital images) and electronic delivery of materials via the Internet”.
A demonstration version is available [1].
Essentially, the aims of the REDD project were to: Provide a simple, timely and cost effective mechanism to request, send and receive documents electronically Not re-invent the electronic world, nor to develop an ILL management system Rely on existing Internet standards, such MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) Run under a platform that library staff and users would want to use, namely Web browsers The original idea for using existing platforms and software came from Tony Barry and Steve Thomas [2].
The vision and driving force for REDD came from two programmers, Geoff Collins (Griffith University) and Kingsley Gurney (The University of Queensland) and the Project Leader, Ann Burns (The University of Queensland) [3].
The equipment required to run REDD A Web Server.
REDD was developed for the Windows 3.1 environment using Win-HTTPD by Robert Denny [4].
The system is currently being transported to the Windows 95 environment using O’Reilly’s Website, also by Robert Denny [5].
A Web browser.
Any form-enabled browser will work.
A Twain compatible scanner.
The scanner is operated by launching a product called HP DeskScan II from within the Web browser.
Any Twain compatible scanner that will work with this software could be used.
Project participants used HP Scanjet 4e.
A laser printer.
The only requirement for the laser printer is that it should be capable of printing out 600 dpi.
An HP LaserJet 4 was used by the project participants.
A Mail Gateway.
REDD is able to run over any TCP/IP network providing a POP3 server is available.
How REDD works Registering Users must first register with the REDD service.
To comply with Australian copyright legislation, a user must register electronically using a Web form and also send a print copy to the Library.
This is a once only activity.
For multi-campus/branch libraries, the user is assigned a specific branch library, to which requests are automatically forwarded.
The user receives an email message with a unique “user i.d”.
Users may change the details of their registration at anytime.
Requesting Once registered, users may access the Electronic Document Delivery Request Form from the Library’s home page.
Each web page is customised for the specific institution, giving local information on charges (if any), turnaround times, eligibility requirements, and tips for successful delivery.
There is also a section on Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
When the user selects the Electronic Document Delivery Request Form, a copyright warning message is clearly displayed, with links to the text of the act itself.
This could be easily customised to cover differing copyright requirements.
The user does not need to enter personal details (name, status, school/department, email address, delivery address) as they appear on the request form automatically.
The user fills in the fields giving as much information as possible.
There are a number of mandatory fields and failure to fill these out will result in an error message and a chance for the patron to correct the form.
Once the form is complete, it is submitted.
Request processing Library staff use their Web browser to access the outstanding requests.
The option to transfer the information to the Staff Request Form is selected.
It is similar to the one available to registered users except for some additional fields: a request number field, a “box” for choosing a supplying library and a field for staff notes.
Staff can edit the request field by field, verify the data, ensure that the request is valid, select a library and submit the request.
At the same time, an email message containing a copy of the request is sent to the user.
Staff may also initialise requests received by other means, such as by mail, fax or phone, using the Staff Request Form.
A CGI script takes the data input and emails it to the supplying library’s email address.
Supplying an item The email containing the request is delivered to the email directory of the supplying library.
A background process scans new mail, converts the messages to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and copies the message to the interlibrary loan working directory.
It then deletes the message.
The supplying library uses its Web browser to look at the working directory.
Each request has a Request Number, the date and time sent and a priority rating.
These requests can be printed and taken to the shelves for retrieval.
Once the items are retrieved, the staff member returns to the working directory and clicks on each request.
At the end of the request are three “boxes”: SCAN, ENDSCAN, and RETURN.
The item is placed either face down on the scanner or through the form feed and the staff member clicks on “SCAN” for each page.
When all the pages have been scanned, the staff member clicks on the “ENDSCAN” button, triggering a prompt to ensure that the scanning is complete.
Once the “ENDSCAN” prompt is answered in the affirmative, a background process takes the original message and adds it to the file name of the scanned image in HTML format.
The return address is read from the message and the reply is emailed back to the requesting library.
A second background process takes the scanned image and emails it separately to the requesting library.
As the email package being used is MIME compliant, the scanned image is encoded into MIME’s Base64 format for transmission.
The scanned image is deleted once it has been sent, in accordance with copyright regulations.
If the supplying library cannot supply the item, the staff member clicks on the “RETURN” button, and either selects a standard response for not being able to supply it or keys in a reason.
Once the request is returned, the Requesting Library has the option of clicking on the “DELETE” button or the “TRY AGAIN” button.
The latter option downloads the request information into another Staff Request Form from which the staff member can select a different supplying library as well as annotating the request in the Staff Notes field.
Receiving an item The two replies to the electronic request are delivered to the requesting library’s email directory.
A background process checks all incoming mail for the MIME binary indicator (X-Finfo).
If it locates this string, the file is processed as binary; if it does not find the indicator, it simply HTML-ises the file, copies it to the working directory and deletes the message.
If the incoming email message is recognised as a binary file, it is run through a Base64 decoder which will extract the scanned image in its original format.
This file is then copied to the working directory.
The requesting library views the HTML-ised email message through its browser, and selects the link to the image which will launch the appropriate viewer for that image.
The image can then be printed.
As a housekeeping measure, a background process monitors the access log for the process and deletes image files that have been accessed.
The length of time before this deletion occurred could be parameterised to suit individual libraries.
What’s new with REDD REDD is no longer a project, but a fully operational service.
Enhancements continue to be made to the software.
For release in the near future will be an option to provide virtual desktop delivery to users.
This is how it will work: The supplying library scans the item into a multipage TIFF file.
A page giving details of the transaction will be added to the TIFF file by creating a Visual Basic CGI script using the Wang Imaging for Windows 95 OLE custom controls.
The CGI script will then email the MIME encoded TIFF file to the requesting library.
On receipt, another Visual Basic program will automatically decode the TIFF file, store it on the Web server and send an email to the user, providing the URL of the file and a unique ID.
The user locates the Web file, copies or prints the file.
If the user has a mail client (such as Pegasus) that supports clickable links, this becomes a very simple process.
A monitoring programme deletes the file once the user has located it.
If the file has not be accessed within a defined period, it is automatically deleted.
The REDD team rejected the option to email files directly to users.
Firstly, the legality of emailing files under Australian copyright laws, is at best, uncertain.
Selecting a file from an email server usually entails taking a copy of the file.
The original copy on the server is not automatically deleted.
The existence of two electronic copies is a major problem.
Secondly, the image files could be relatively large.
This makes some network administrators extremely nervous.
They argue that email was never designed to carry large attached files.
If their threats to impose an upper limits on file sizes for email attachments are carried out, desktop delivery via email will hit a virtual brickwall.
The methodology being implemented for REDD avoids both these problems.
Libraries using REDD Apart from the original three institutions, other Australian libraries have joined what is called the remote partners scheme.
They include the University of Southern Queensland, Australian Catholic University, Southern Cross University and the State Library of New South Wales.
Enquiries continue to be received from libraries all over the world.
While the requirements of the government grant require that the software be offered to Australian libraries free of charge, the REDD software is also available to any library on a “use as is” basis.
A competent network administrator should have little problem installing the software.
To receive the full benefits of REDD, both the requesting and supplying library should both be using REDD.
However, a request can be sent to any library with an email address.
The library’s users still get the benefit of simple requesting mechanism and the library gets the benefits of an integrated requesting mechanism.
If you are interested in hearing more about REDD, send an email to r.develop@library.uq.edu.au References University of Queensland REDD Web site, http://www.library.uq.edu.au/library/docdeliv.html Barry, Tony and Thomas, Steve (1994).
Use of email to transmit scanned images between libraries, http://snazzy.anu.edu.au/CNASI/pubs/docdel.html REDD: an electronic document delivery model for Australia, http://130.102.42.183/reddlook/vala.htm Win-HTTPD software by Robert Denny, http://tech.west.ora.com/win-httpd/ O’Reilly’s Website software, http://website.ora.com/ Author Details Chris Taylor, Manager, Information Access and Delivery Service The University of Queensland Library email: ctaylor@library.uq.edu.au Tel: +617 3365 6623 Address: The University of Queensland Library, St Lucia 4072, Australia Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Beyond the Beginning: The Global Digital Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Beyond the Beginning: The Global Digital Library Buzz metadata copyright url research Citation BibTex RIS Hazel Gott introduces a major Digital Library event, taking place this June in London.
This international conference, with the overall theme of “Realising the Digital Library”, will feature invited speakers from around the world, including Australia, Europe, Japan and the United States.
The conference is being coordinated by UKOLN on behalf of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee for the Higher Education Funding Councils), the British Library Research & Innovation Centre, CNI (the Coalition for Networked Information, Washington), CAUSE (the Association for Managing and Using Information Resources in Higher Education, Colorado) and CAUL (the Council of Australian University Libraries).
The conference will take place on the 16th and 17th of June 1997, at the QEII Conference Centre, Westminser, London The registration fee for this two-day, non-residential conference is 140 pounds sterling.
A booking form and further details are at URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/global-digital-library/ Or, if you prefer, please email or telephone Hazel Gott at UKOLN on h.a.gott@ukoln.ac.uk or +44 (0)1225 826256.
Conference Programme Monday 16 June 09.30-10.45 Registration 10.45-12.45 Welcome Keynote address by Michael Fitzgerald, Vice-Chancellor,Thames Valley University 1st Main Session: The Dynamics of the Information Market 12.45-14.00 Lunch 14.00-15.00 1st Parallel Session: (a) Digital Library Coalition and European Union Projects (b) Electronic Libraries Programme and The Digital Library in Japan 15.00-15.30 Tea 15.30-16.30 2nd Parallel Session: (a) Quality Management of Internet Resources and Report on Information Fatigue (b) The Information Profession and Information Professionals 16.30-17.30 2nd Main Session: Copyright/Intellectual Property Rights: an international update 18.30-20.00 Reception at the new British Library, St Pancras Tuesday 17 June 09.00-10.00 3rd Main Session: Lifelong Learning the Context of the Digital Library and Re-engineering the Learning Process 10.00-10.30 Coffee 10.30-11.45 3rd Parallel Session: (a) CNI Project: Assessment of Network Services & Systems and Evaluation of eLib Programme (b) Metadata Policy Level Issues for Implementation with speakers from the UK, the US and Australia 11.45-12.45 4th Main Session: Digital Library Plans for European National Libraries: the example of Britain, Germany and the Netherlands 12.45-14.00 Lunch 14.00-15.00 Panel Discussion 15.00-15.30 Closing Address by Donald Langenberg, Chancellor, University of Maryland System Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Knight's Tale: The Hybrid Library Books and Bytes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Knight's Tale: The Hybrid Library Books and Bytes Buzz database infrastructure cataloguing opac multimedia z39.50 marc cd-rom standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight gives his personal view on the fashionable concept of a 'hybrid library'.
Automation and electronic information services are not newcomers to the library world.
Back in the 1960s the early library automation systems were already beginning to prove their worth and the development of the MARC record format was well underway.
The intervening thirty years have seen the power and features provided by library automation systems improve tremendously, the advent of online services, CD-ROM databases, the rise and growth of the Internet and its associated World Wide Web and beginnings of a truly digital virtual library appear.
Recently the UK eLib programme’s projects have investigated many aspects of providing services to an “electronic library”.
These projects, and other similar initiatives elsewhere, have demonstrated the feasibility of providing catalogues of quality assessed network resources, multimedia electronic journals, online document delivery and digitised short loan material.
Some of these projects have been constructed so as to form part of the operational services of a conventional library but many have been testbeds that exist in isolation, with only a hyperlink from a few conventional libraries’ “electronic services” webpages.
To the user these services are additional routes that they have to investigate when looking for information.
This means that it takes the users additional time and effort and sometimes requires that they go out of their way to locate these services.
Whilst many of the services have proved popular, surely we shouldn’t demand that the users have to locate and then individually learn to use many different services just to locate the information that they want?
What is needed now is a period of integration and consolidation.
eLib and the other digital library development projects have taught us alot about what services we might usefully offer electronically.
These services now need to be folded back into the operational systems within libraries in such a way as to make them as easy to use as possible for the end users.
After all, libraries are really about providing easy access to information, not providing access to other services.
The Hybrid Library Concept This is where the concept of the hybrid library comes in.
The hybrid library is a library which can provide a “one stop shop” for both hardcopy and electronic resources.
Its information systems should provide the end user with a seamless interface that will allow them to locate paper books and journals held locally and at neighbouring sites at the same time as being able to find relevant online resources, electronic publications and digitised material.
To do this, the user needs to be provided with a front end that can access information in a variety of databases which are widely distributed and can contain a variety of information in different formats.
Like library automation and electronic libraries, the concept of the hybrid library is not a new one.
People have talked about providing access to multiple information systems with a single front end for many years.
Often library systems vendors would demonstrate technology that allowed users of their OPACs to access a limited range of other databases and services through the same interface.
However now we have the network infrastructure, open standards and available information systems to attempt to build a distributed searching and retrieval system that does not lock people into one vendor’s system.
Technologies for the Hybrid Library A number of existing technologies are likely to be used in providing the hybrid library.
Obviously the Internet and the World Wide Web will have to play a large part as they are now becoming the ubiquitous means of electronic information delivery.
Many of the existing services that will need to be tied into the hybrid library only exist on the web.
The hypermedia nature of the Web allows it to act as both the front end of the hybrid library’s search system if necessary and also the means of delivery of any electronic resources that the end user locates.
To provide the integrated searching over multiple databases, many people are looking to Z39.50 to provide a solution.
Z39.50 is an American search and retrieval standard that has been for over a decade.
It potentially allows a single search query to be sent to multiple databases and have results that are held in many different internal formats presented to the end users in a single, uniform display.
Many commercial library systems now include a Z39.50 server as either an integral part of their OPAC or as an optional bolt-on feature.
A number of free Z39.50 clients and toolkits also exist and there are Web-to-Z39.50 gateways already in use.
Z39.50 is a very complex standard and has traditionally been geared towards bibliographic searches.
To date this has severely limited its impact on searching for electronic information on the Web.
However there is an initiative known as ZSTARTS which intends to make a cut down form of Z39.50 suitable for accessing Web search engines available.
If this works, then it might be possible for Web searches to be integrated into the hybrid library’s search system as well.
Although Z39.50 offers the ability to search multiple databases it does have one very major drawback.
It doesn’t include any way of routing a user’s query to only the database servers that are likely to have relevant information.
Whilst this isn’t a problem if you’ve only got a couple of databases, it is more of a worry if your hybrid library is offering a single front end to maybe hundreds of different databases, spread all over the world.
If the system blindly sent each user’s query to all of the available databases, the network would quickly grind to a halt!
What is needed is some “forward knowledge” that allows the query to be routed forward to databases that are likely to have useful information, whilst ignoring databases that are known not to have anything relevant.
A technology that is currently being developed to allow this is the Common Indexing Protocol (CIP).
CIP has grown out of the “centroids” mechanism that is part of the WHOIS++ protocol used by a number of the eLib ANR services.
CIP allows databases to provide each other with what are effectively summaries of the information that they hold.
Databases that swap this information become part of a mesh around which client applications can route users’ queries using referrals from one server to another.
This means that the databases that are actually queried for a single search will vary depending on what was in the query (and also maybe other factors such as where the user comes from and what options he has selected).
It also means that library systems staff won’t need to spend alot of time constantly reconfiguring which Z39.50 servers their clients should be able to talk to (systems staff have more than enough to do already!).
Conclusions Of course there is still a lot of work to be done before the hybrid library can be fully deployed.
CIP must be applied to Z39.50 servers and tested to see how well it scales to cross-domain searching.
Web browsers really need to have Z39.50 functionality integrated into them so that the end users have a single front end application to cover all of their electronic information search and retrieval needs.
CD-ROM and online database vendors need to embrace open systems technology to allow their products to be searched using the standard Z39.50 search mechanism.
Cataloguers need to include online resources into the existing library OPACs.
Bits of this are already happening on a piecemeal basis in many libraries around the world.
Hopefully the eLib Hybrid Library projects will provide the push to enable the technologies to be integrated and the vision realised.
Then the users and librarians can get on with what libraries are really there for accessing information.
Author Details Jon Knight ROADS Technical Developer Email: jon@net.lut.ac.uk Own Web Site: http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/People/jon.html Tel: +44 1509 228237 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata Corner: DC5 the Search for Santa Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata Corner: DC5 the Search for Santa Buzz data rdf framework html database dissemination metadata cataloguing z39.50 gis marc pics vra research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tony Gill and Paul Miller's report from the 5th Dublin Core metdata conference in Helsinki.
Largely in recognition of the sterling work of the Nordic Metadata Project [1], invited representatives of the informal Dublin Core community set off to Finland’s lovely capital for the fifth Dublin Core workshop [2].
Following the success of their exploits Down Under [3], the authors once more fearlessly packed their rucksacks and embarked on a long and arduous voyage for the sake of Ariadne readers, selflessly braving outrageous Scandinavian beer prices and over-zealous representatives of Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise in their efforts to bring the latest news on Dublin Core to an anxiously waiting readership.
Representatives in Helsinki were drawn from around the world, and included the now traditional mix of librarians, computer scientists and subject specialists.
For the first time, those actually implementing the Dublin Core in real-life situations were well represented amongst the 70-odd participants [4].
The UK was once more well represented, with attendees from the Arts & Humanities Data Service [5], eLib subject gateways [6], UKOLN [7], Reuters [8], and the museums world.
Hel-where?
Helsinki, capital since 1812 of one of Europe’s oft-forgotten member countries, is a comfortably sized city of some 520,000 inhabitants situated on the Gulf of Finland at approximately the same latitude (60º North) as Unst, the northern-most of the United Kingdom’s Shetland Islands.
For those looking at these things from a UK perspective, there is a distinctly Russian feel to much of the architecture, which is perhaps unsurprising with St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad, for those readers not ‘up’ on the latest round of name changes across the planet) only a few hours away on the train.
Indeed, we were told that several films have used parts of Helsinki as stand-ins for the less accessible cities of the former Soviet Union, so maybe Helsinki appears more Russian than St. Petersburg or Moscow to our Hollywood-befuddled eyes.
Finland itself is a country of just over five million inhabitants, covering 338,000 square kilometres and stretching from the Gulf of Finland in the south to well inside the Arctic Circle to the north.
About 70% of the country is covered in forest, with another 10% under the water of some 188,000 lakes and countless bogs.
Free of foreign rule since the Russian Revolution of 1917, Finland spent much of the twentieth century under the shadow of the former Soviet Union, and is now a member state of the European Union, and an increasingly and deservedly popular travel destination.
For those like us fitting their sightseeing in between a hectic round of workshop sessions and breakout group brainstormings in and around the bar, highlights of the city definitely include the Lutheran and Orthodox cathedrals, the fish market by the harbour, a church cut straight into solid rock, and a restaurant with a penchant for garlic (yes, this did include garlic beer, which turned out to be surprisingly palatable!).
Another ‘interesting’ Helsinki highlight was the tar-flavoured ice cream.
Some 70 rather bemused workshop participants are still trying to work out whether this really is a Finnish delicacy, or merely a rather strange joke on the part of the chef.
Still, we ate it, and we’re not dead yet.
The capital of Estonia, Tallinn, is also close, and several Dublin Core-ites took the hydrofoil across the Gulf of Finland to this little Baltic state before or after the workshop.
The Dublin Core For those of you who have spent the past few years pretending to be dead for tax reasons (apologies to Douglas Adams), this talk of a Dublin Core workshop probably makes little sense.
To briefly recap, the Dublin Core is a set of fifteen elements [9] identified by international, interdisciplinary consensus as being ‘core’ to the process of describing diverse objects in such a way that they may be effectively discovered and evaluated.
The Dublin Core is not a replacement for existing detailed metadata structures such as the library world’s MARC [10] or the geospatial community’s Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata [11], but can rather be seen as a means of describing the essence or ‘core’ of both library books and mapsand many other types of digital and non-digital resource.
The Dublin Core effort has been moved forward under the guidance of Stu Weibel of OCLC over the past three years by means of five international workshops and an active electronic mailing list.
Those who want to know more can find further information in several articles from earlier issues of Ariadne, or by consulting the official workshop reports published in D-Lib Magazine [12].
The Dublin Core site on the world wide web [13] also includes a host of useful links.
Although the Dublin Core is further refined in the wake of each workshop, a significant usage base is beginning to emerge around the planet, and representatives of many organisations using Dublin Core managed to travel to Helsinki.
Those using Dublin Core include many projects within UK Higher Education, as well as others such as Reuters, the Danish Government’s Information Service, and Environment Australia.
Synopses of this growing adoption were gathered prior to the Helsinki meeting, and over thirty of them remain available on the workshop web site [2].
During presentations from a handful of implementers, the results of the AHDS/UKOLN evaluation of Dublin Core [14] were circulated, as was an example of simple usage guidelines (prepared in this case for Interconnect Technologies Corporation by Diane Hillman of New York’s Cornell University [15]).
Issues Explored in Helsinki A great deal was discussed over the three days of the workshop, and will be formally reported in the official workshop report, due to appear in D–Lib Magazine early in 1998.
Several key issues which appeared especially important to the authors can be identified, and we’ll discuss each of them briefly, below.
The Resource Description Framework — and a formal data model for Dublin Core?
A major debate at Canberra was the way in which Dublin Core information might be embedded within HTML’s basic <META> tag without breaking existing automatic HTML validation tools.
Discussions explored the need to add functionality to this <META> tag within the — then — forthcoming HTML 4.0 specification, and extended to a potential future solution offered by embedding Dublin Core within the structure of a Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) header.
The draft HTML 4.0 specification has now been released by the World Wide Web Consortium [16] and following recommendations from the Dublin Core group, includes the capability to specifically handle Dublin Core’s Qualifiers; SCHEME and LANG.
Where a pre–HTML 4.0 compliant piece of metadata was forced into the tag using kludges along the lines of; <META NAME= “DC.Format” CONTENT= “(SCHEME=IMT) (LANG=en) text/html”> HTML 4.0 now allows the far neater <META NAME= “DC.Format” SCHEME= “IMT” LANG= “en” CONTENT= “text/html”> which means the same, but is easier for both humans and machines to parse as the contents of CONTENT — the value that most people are probably searching for — is identifiably separate from any qualifiers.
More excitingly for the future, the work of Eric Miller, Renato Ianella and others on extending the functionality of PICS has evolved to become the World Wide Web Consortium–backed Resource Description Framework (RDF), a model for which was unveiled in Helsinki [17].
RDF offers the potential both for expressing the detail of the most complex Dublin Core records, and for realising many of the aspirations of the Warwick Framework [18] by permitting the creation of metadata records comprising multiple metadata ‘sets’ compiled from different cataloguing paradigms.
The RDF work has also resulted in the development of a technique for modelling various metadata structures.
This technique is applicable to the Dublin Core in general, rather than merely to the Dublin Core implemented within RDF, and a working group is exploring this work in order to derive a formal data model for the Dublin Core effort as a whole.
Z39.50 and the Dublin Core The Z39.50 protocol (now internationally recognised as ISO 23950) is currently talked about almost as much as the Dublin Core, and is probably understood even less!
A number of UK projects, including AHDS, are making use of this protocol in order to allow the integration of disparate — and remote — databases behind a seamless search mechanism.
Z39.50 supports a series of ‘profiles’ in order to enable translation between the various databases, and in the past Dublin Core elements have always been squeezed into either the bib–1 or GILS profiles, neither of which necessarily handle the detail of Dublin Core qualifiers very well.
Recognising the value of querying distributed Dublin Core–based databases via Z39.50, a number of organisations within the Dublin Core and Z39.50 communities are now exploring the feasibility of creating a specific Dublin Core profile.
The ‘1:1’ debate (or, what should Dublin Core metadata describe?)
In the course of actually using the Dublin Core to describe ‘real–world’ networked resources, implementers have come across one of the age–old problems of cataloguing ‘complex’ objects — just what should the metadata describe?
This issue was raised in Helsinki both by a proposal from the Research Libraries Group, who wanted to use Dublin Core for museum object records on the web, and in the AHDS/UKOLN report.
Strictly speaking, metadata should describe the properties of an object which is itself data, for example a web page, a digital image or a database — this is analogous to the librarian’s practice of cataloguing ‘the thing in hand’.
But with networked resources, these properties are often not very interesting or useful for discovery; for example, if a researcher is interested in discovering images of famous artworks on the web, they would generally search using the properties of the original artworks (e.g.
CREATOR = Picasso, DATE = 1937), not the properties of the digital copies or ‘surrogates’ of them (e.g.
CREATOR = Scan–O–Matic Imaging Labs Ltd., DATE = 1997).
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that networked resources can contain a large number of digital objects that have been derived from diverse sources; for example, consider a web page about an architect created by an academic that includes a scanned image of a photograph, taken by a famous photographer, of one of the architect’s buildings –– who is the creator of this ‘digital object’?
The architect, the photographer and the academic all have a valid claim to the title CREATOR, and future generations of researchers may even be interested in the creator of the digital surrogate!
Of course, this is not a new problem –– traditional guides to information resources, such as librarians, museum curators and archivists, have been wrestling with the seemingly impossible task of ‘Modelling the World’ in order to describe information resources for decades.
The draft IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records [19], for example, makes a distinction between works, expressions, manifestations and items.
SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard [20] discusses objects and reproductions, and the VRA Core [21] refers to works and visual documents.
It became clear in Helsinki that the only way to address this problem coherently, and without contravening the semantics of the Dublin Core elements, is to use a separate ‘set’ of metadata for each discrete object, and to create links between the various sets using the RELATION element.
This approach became known as the “1:1 approach”, because it entails the creation of one discrete metadata set for every object.
A working group was formed to collate and categorise relationship types between different objects, so that digital resources can be discovered when searching for information about their contents.
However, although not impossible, it is likely to prove impractical to create multiple distinct metadata sets in HTML using the <META> tag, which is still viewed as the most important application of Dublin Core metadata.
An interim proposal, to embed another Dublin Core set describing a source object within the SOURCE element using qualifiers, was reluctantly accepted by the group.
The 1:1 approach becomes much more feasible, however, in the more sophisticated environment offered by RDF.
Perhaps the most useful outcome of these discussions, though, was the formal recognition of the problems faced when describing complex, mixed–media resources for discovery purposes.
Expressions of Date The Dublin Core DATE element has long proved contentious, with many different viewpoints as to what it’s for, how it might be used, and whether or not ‘normal’ use of it breaks a guiding principle from Canberra that qualifiers should refine rather than extend the meaning of any element.
Although not agreeing on how DATE should be used, there has been a growing recognition that the current definition is unsatisfactory.
Officially, DATE currently has an extremely narrow definition, stating that the element is used to store the date that a resource was ‘made available in its present form’.
Following the recent AHDS/UKOLN workshops in the UK [14], AHDS proposed a broader definition of DATE; Dates associated with the creation and dissemination of the resource.
These dates should not be confused with those related to the content of a resource (AD 43 in a database of artefacts from the Roman conquest of Britain) which are dealt with under COVERAGE or its subject (1812, in relation to Tchaikovsky’s eponymous overture) which are dealt with under SUBJECT.
This definition was felt by AHDS to usefully broaden the definition of DATE in the first sentence and — importantly — clarify the function of DATE with respect to the two elements users appear to most often confuse with it in the second sentence.
This definition — and others — are being considered by the DATE working group with a view to clarifying the current confusion felt by so many.
Sub–elements in the Dublin Core Almost since the creation of the Dublin Core, there have been those who sought to refine the 13 (15 since 1996) core elements by means of the TYPE qualifier, which was recently renamed SUBELEMENT to reduce ambiguity.
Various mechanisms were used to do this within HTML, such as;   <META NAME= “DC.Creator” CONTENT= “(TYPE=email) collections@ads.ahds.ac.uk”> or, since Canberra,   <META NAME= “DC.Creator.Email” CONTENT= “collections@ads.ahds.ac.uk”>   A number of lists have evolved, each defining those sub–elements of value to a particular community or world view.
However, none of these lists have yet been universally accepted (as can be seen by the continued trend to create new ones!
), and the mechanisms by which ‘core’ sub–elements might be specified, or how community–specific sub–elements might be added to this core, have never been formally defined.
In order to remedy this obvious problem, a working group was set up at Helsinki with a remit both to define the mechanisms by which new local and global sub–elements might be defined, and to draw up a non–exclusive list of those key sub–elements most likely to be required across the Dublin Core implementation community.
As with the other working groups of the Dublin Core, further details of this effort are available on the Dublin Core web site [13].
Results from the Workshop Arguably the most important single outcome from the Helsinki workshop is that the band of Dublin Core implementers around the world have been shown that they are not working alone; that they are, in fact, part of a concerted international effort to help organise networked information which is continually gathering support and momentum.
Although there was not much time during the formal workshop sessions for implementation discussions divorced from the purity (or pedantry?)
of data models and semantics, a great deal of informal discussion did take place in bars and over dinner, and many contacts were established that will surely prove extremely useful to several fledgling projects in the coming months (indeed, some commentators might argue that the BAR–BOFs, alcohol–assisted ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions, are where the real work gets done!)
Although the more ‘academic’ discussion of semantics, terminologies, data models etc.
continues to be a vital part of the Dublin Core effort, there is perhaps a case to be made for the next workshop including an Implementers Day before or after the main event, where only real implementations are discussed, and questions of the ‘what problems did you encounter with x?’ and ‘how did you get around y?’ variety are encouraged.
A second outcome from Helsinki was an explosion in the number of working groups addressing issues related to the Dublin Core.
These working groups, which are discussed further on the Dublin Core web site, include those addressing the COVERAGE and DATE elements, the procedures for adding sub–elements to the Core, the creation of an encompassing data model, and clarification of the relationship between the SOURCE and RELATION elements.
Finally, the formalisation of the Dublin Core as an Internet standard continues to move forward, with various people tasked with the production of six draft RFCs (Requests For Comment; an information publishing mechanism of the Internet Engineering Task Force) covering the semantics, HTML and RDF implementations for both ‘simple’ and ‘qualified’ Dublin Core.
These documents should begin to appear in the not too distant future; and certainly before the next workshop in approximately six months time.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Kelly Russell at eLib for finding the money to send us both to Helsinki.
On behalf of all who were there, thanks also to Juha Hakala and his team for facilitating the meeting, and for keeping their cool in the face of seventy very strong–willed individuals.
Stu Weibel also deserves a special mention for his continuing drive and enthusiasm, without which the ongoing Dublin Core effort would be much lessened.
Oh yes, and thanks to Ford for sponsoring the multilingual T–shirt!
J The search for Santa?
Finally, despite having spent several days in the country where Santa allegedly hides out during most of the year, neither of us managed to spot him in order to deliver our Christmas lists (although Paul did see one of his reindeer in Stockholm).
So if you’re reading this, Santa, Tony would like someone to filter his e-mail, and Paul would really be quite happy to settle for a good book and a bigger travel budget for next year.
You see, he’s never been to the Americas or Africa, and he’s just sure there must be a nice conference out there somewhere… References [1] Nordic Metadata Project, http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/ [2] The 5th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop, http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/DC5.html [3] Miller, P. & Gill, T., 1997, Down Under with the Dublin Core, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/canberra–metadata/ [4] DC5 group photo, [5] The Arts & Humanities Data Service, http://ahds.ac.uk/ [6] Electronic Libraries Programme, Access to Network Resources http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/#anr [7] The UK Office for Library & Information Networking, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ [8] Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/ [9] Dublin Core Element Set reference definition, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements [10] MARC Maintenance Agency, http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/ [11] Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata, revised draft, http://www.mews.org/nsdi/revis497.pdf [12] D–Lib Magazine, http://www.dlib.org/ also mirrored at http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/ [13] The Dublin Core, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core/ [14] Miller, P. & Greenstein, D., (Eds.
), 1997, Discovering Online Resources Across the Humanities: A Practical Implementation of the Dublin Core, http://ahds.ac.uk/public/metadata/discovery.html [15] Dublin Core Metadata Element Set: Guidelines for Use, http://www.interconnect.com/dc_guide.html [16] HTML 4.0 Specification, http://www.w3.org/TR/WD–html40/ [17] Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax, http://www.w3.org/TR/WD–rdf–syntax/ [18] Lagoze, C., 1996, The Warwick Framework: a container architecture for diverse sets of metadata, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july96/lagoze/07lagoze.html [19] IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/VII/s13/frbr/frbr-toc.htm [20] SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard, http://www.open.gov.uk/mdocassn/spectrum.htm [21] VRA Core, http://www.oberlin.edu/~art/vra/wc1.html Author details Paul Miller Collections Manager Archaeology Data Service King’s Manor YORK YO1 2EP, UK E–mail: collections@ads.ahds.ac.uk Web page: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ahds/ Tel: 01904 433954 Tony Gill ADAM & VADS Programme Leader Surrey Institute of Art & Design FARNHAM GU9 7DS, UK E–mail:tony@adam.ac.uk ADAM web page: http://www.adam.ac.uk / VADS web page: http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/ Tel: 01252 722441 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OMNI-corner: Patient Information on the Web – Doctor on Your Desktop?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI-corner: Patient Information on the Web – Doctor on Your Desktop?
Buzz database archives provenance licence research Citation BibTex RIS Sue Welsh, the OMNI maintainer, examines the perils of using the Internet as a substitute for your local family practitioner.
I’m an E.R.
fan, you’re an E.R.
fan and official figures indicate we’re not alone.
There’s plenty of choice these days if your taste in entertainment is medical.
Millions of us eavesdrop on the physician/patient relationship every week, both the medical ones and otherwise.
Sometimes it is a lot more interesting than real life.
However, when it comes to being sick, most of us would agree, you can’t beat a bone-fide, qualified medic.
We wouldn’t take advice from Dr. Green, charming though he is, because, well, he’s not a real doctor, obviously.
And television is no different from any other communication medium, right?
Not, it seems, if you’re talking about the Internet.
In the September issue of Medicine on the Net, a physician criticised the HealthFront site for its advice on sore throats, which recommends use of the pain reliever Advil.
See <URL:http://www.mednet-i.com/advil.html> for the article and < URL:http://www.healthfront.com/maraframe.htm> for the Advil web site.
He commented: “No word about the possibility that strep A could be the cause…….and, if untreated could lead to cardiac and renal disease.” The article suggested that the presentation of information in this way bordered on “practicing without a license”.
This is, of course, not an isolated example, but the use of the Internet for advertising is not the only method by which medical advice is published.
Many well meaning sites offering responsible information don’t make it clear where the medical content comes from, many carry no “health warning” to advise surfers not to use the information they offer as a substitute for a visit to their doctor, and information compiled by patients from their own experience can be presented as the official word.
It is now even possible to consult with a psychiatrist on the Internet even though the psychiatrist involves states clearly “At this time I do not believe that it is possible to do psychotherapy over the internet”.
This apparently does not prevent people being charged for the e-mail consultation offered!
Why should medicine on the Internet be any different?
Why do people flock to medical sites produced by faceless individuals and institutions with no obvious medical qualifications or affiliations?
Why do sufferers post their symptoms to sci.med newsgroups and do they pay attention to the replies they’re given?
Can the Internet deliver anything of real worth for patients?
The first two questions require an insight into the human psyche which, thankfully, is beyond the scope of this column.
The third can be answered with a “Yes”, albeit a qualified one.
There is useful information on the Internet for patients, but as always, you have to know what you’re looking for, keep a thought for who you trust to provide it and, most importantly, know when the medium has reached its limitations.
Leading the field are the various agencies and institutes of the Department of Health and Human Services of the USA, which includes the National Institutes of Health, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the Agency for Health Care Policy Research (AHCPR).
Indeed, the quantity of information available and the size and complexity of the Department have made a focal point for consumer related information necessary, complete with a browsable subject classification and descriptions of each resource.
Professional associations are a good source, for example see the American Association of Family Physicians online information service, or the American Academy of Dermatology’s series of pamphlets Individual institutions also contribute, sometimes in one particular area of expertise, for example, the Beth Israel Medical Center, New York has an extensive collection of breast cancer documents for patients (to supplement their Breast Cancer Program).
Access to printed material is also enhanced by the American Academy of Family Physicians’ HEP (Health Education Program) service a searchable database of all the AAFP’s printed material.
The U.S. is clearly well served, a variety of publishers (government, academic, professional) and the depth of provision is impressive.
Where does that leave us in the UK?
Lagging behind our colleagues across the pond as usual?
Not at all; although use of the Internet to deliver consumer health information is not commonplace at the present time, it would seem we are on the verge of becoming extremely well provided for.
The Help for Health Trust recently added to its web site a list of WWW services it uses, alongside more traditional methods, to answer real telephone queries from the public to its Health Information Service Hotline.
There are already a few excellent resources online, provided by a variety of institutions, from the selection provided at the Department of Health (for example this advice for elderly people moving into care homes) to community information projects such as Libra (public information on substance abuse in Oxford).
What of those who have a responsibility to supply information to the public?
The picture here is promising too: the Health Education Authority has stuck a first, tentative toe in the water although their WWW site seems to be in testing at the moment.
Meanwhile, north of the border, the Health Education Board for Scotland will be launching a content-rich site in November, which I have seen previewed and promises to be a fine resource.
These are exciting developments, and of course you can rely on OMNI to cover the whole picture.
OMNI (Organising Medical Networked Information) is eLib’s subject based information gateway in biomedicine, covering a wide range of topics from cytology to psychology and from proteins to practice guidelines.
Consumer health information is clearly a challenging field for the Project.
First impressions suggest that there’s a great deal of it (perhaps too much for us to cover).
However, as soon as a few basic quality criteria are applied to the problem, the field narrows considerably.
Before being added to OMNI, each resource is assessed for: audience level who the resource is aimed at?
authority who is responsible for the resource (publisher or author)?
provenance is the resource well established?
is there adequate version control, archiving etc?
currency is the resource up to date?
accessiblity are there restrictions on access to the resource?
OMNI does not include patient orientated material which is based purely around personal patient experience is unattributable is not published by a trusted information provider is advertising a particular company or product To see what patient-orientated material we’ve evaluated so far, try searching OMNI for “patient education”.
We welcome suggestions for new resources, please contact me personally or visit the OMNI home page.
An active approach is also being taken by the Health on the Net Foundation (based in Geneva).
They are asking sites providing medical information to sign up to a code of conduct, which includes assurances that medical advice will be given by trained professionals and requires balanced views of any particular product or treatment.
Sites which claim to conform to the code may display the HON logo on their pages.
The scheme’s weakness is that it will not be policed by the HON Foundation; they will rely on the honesty of webmasters and the vigilance of the public to identify incorrect or inappropriate use of their quality mark.
A pattern (I hope) is emerging.
We don’t trust just anyone to provide health information off the Web we should be just as choosy on the Web, and encourage the same spirit of healthy scepticism in our users.
It is quite critical to be able to attribute the source of any information used, and that the information is not used as a substitute for consultation with a medical professional.
It is also essential that those with a responsibility to inform patients make their presence felt in this arena.
In the meantime, the US scene has both some examples to follow, and several to be avoided.
Response Mark Selby, from the Health on the Net Foundation, responds to the above article.
Regarding your article on the HON Code of Conduct, I want you to be aware that Health On the Net Foundation is indeed policing the use of the Code and has already sent warnings to several Websites re improper use of the HONcode logo.
Each day we monitor the Web for all sites displaying the logo and review these on a regular basis.
This is a very timeconsuming exercise but we believe it is essential if the quality of medical information on the Net is to be improved.
The HONcode is designed to be dynamic and the principles of the code are continually being reviewed.
Health On the Net Foundation welcomes suggestions and ideas from your readers and any modifications will be agreed with sites displaying the HONcode logo before they are adopted.
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What Is an Intranet?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Is an Intranet?
Buzz html browser telnet gopher intranet standards Citation BibTex RIS Glen Monks explains the buzz word: intranet.
In a world where things change as fast as the world wide web and the Internet, it is often hard to get a grasp on the exact meanings of buzz-words that suddenly spring up all the time.
Some such words appear in newspapers and other publications, are used for a few months and then are never heard again, while others eventually become part of the language we ar all expected to understand.
The word “intranet” seems to have established itself, but it will be a while before you find it in everyday dictionaries.
So, what exactly is an intranet?
If you had asked that question in 1995, if you got any answer at all, it would probably be different to the one you would get now.
At that time, the word “intranet” would refer to any network within an organisation.
Confusingly, if that network was made up of lots of little networks (as is the case for most campus’ or large organisations) then that network could be called an “internet” (with a small i, as opposed to the Internet, which is the network of all such networks across the globe).
You can probably see why there is room for confusion on this issue.
The question now is what is an “intranet” nowadays?
The best definition I can give is this: An intranet is service making use of the technologies of the world wide web (usually HTML over HTTP) to distribute information within a single organisation over it’s internal network.
Note that the intranet is no longer the network itself, but a service run over it.
For people with a University computing background, this may sound hautingly familiar.
Many Universities have (or had) an intranet for years and never knew it, because it was called a “campus wide information service” or CWIS.
Universities all over the country ran CWIS services using a variety of technologies, mostly Gopher or Telnet.
As these are both accepted standard Internet protocols, I claim that these are valid intranets, although some would say that only HTTP/HTML technologies count.
Other institutions may have called their local information service a bulletin board, but with the same aim moving information around within an organisation.
Having established what an intranet is, what are they used for?
This is hard to say because of the very nature of an intranet only the people within the company to which it is specific gets to see it.
However, the long and short of it is that whatever information you (or more to the point, the people in charge) want to pass on to everyone else in the company can be put on the intranet.
Intranets are mostly used by large companies, many of whom have had internal networks for years, to cut communications costs.
The cases that are often quoted are about the cost of publishing and distributing a health and safety manual or a phone directory within an organisation with a thousand staff spread over thirty sites with an intranet it is easy.
Because the technologies concerned (ie a web browser) can be run on nearly any machine under the sun, an intranet is probably the simplest network technology to install, as well as being one of the easiest to use.
I feel that at this point I should mention the next “big thing” since the invention of the intranet, which is the extranet.
Once again, this word would have had a different meaning back in 1995, and it has only been over the last few months that the word has generally been accepted in the networking communities.
An extranet is generally defined as an extension of an intranet for the purpose of providing company-specific information to selected other companies or individuals.
Examples include post-sales customer support information or product previews to selected distributors.
So, a company might now have three types of information service: (1) It’s intranet, for internal information for it’s staff, (2) An extranet, for information available to a select few external bodies, and (3) it’s world wide web site, for public information.
I see it as likely that (3) will be given a new name in a year or so, probably one that already means something slightly different, simply because calling it “our web site” is a bit confusing when the company has three of them.
Author details Glen Monks, Networked Systems Support Officer, UKOLN, 1996-1997 G.Monks@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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From Aberystwyth to ADAM: Using the Skills Acquired on a Library School Course in the Real World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From Aberystwyth to ADAM: Using the Skills Acquired on a Library School Course in the Real World Buzz data html database thesaurus video cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Rebecca Bradshaw reflects on how the skills and knowledge she acquired when a library school student are relevant (or not) to her current role, developing a network-based subject gateway.
Library school?
What library school?
Oh yes, I spent four years there, didn't I?
After only eighteen months, I have to confess my memory isn't quite that bad, but immersed in my job with the ADAM Project [1] , library school certainly does seem an age ago.
Everything I learned seems to have merged into one large mass of indefinable matter, and when asked to write about it for Ariadne a little wave of unease stirred within me.
As I took a deep breath and stoked the distinctly cool embers of my memory, I found that the first thought to hit me was one of nostalgia.
Students days, what bliss.
When faced with the thought of a time when the word bill meant the bloke you met down the pub the night before and having a good time was your sole occupation, even classification seminars are remembered fondly.
Well, perhaps that's stretching things just a little far...
Compared to the first years of library training, it really does seem as if I was just dreaming then, and now reality has kicked in.
One of my first year projects was an analysis of a bibliography, and anticipating the onset of boredom, I was delighted to find Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a work devoted to pornographic literature of the 19th century.
It was certainly more interesting than some of the more turgid tomes that lined the library shelves, but I cannot imagine for the life of me how it could help me in my present job!
As I reflect upon this further, I realise that many things seemed pointless at the time.
But then, I never aspired to be a librarian, I did not apply to university to study librarianship, I was cajoled into it by a smooth talking head of department.
After four years during which I went one step further and took a Masters in the subject, I have a nasty feeling I might have quite enjoyed it really.
Of course, historical pornography aside, there are many things that make no sense until suddenly you have to put them into practice.
Now, I always swore to myself that I would never, ever be a (God forbid) traditional librarian.
My post at ADAM really isn't what you would call traditional in terms of librarianship, but the world is changing and perhaps there really is no such thing as traditional anymore.
ADAM may not be a library as such, but the skills I must call upon to carry out my job are from a breadth of knowledge I did not imagine I would ever need to employ.
I will take a little time here to describe the project further.
ADAM is part of the Access to Network Resources area of the Electronic Libraries Programme, and as such is concerned with building an information gateway to resources on the internet in art, design, architecture and media.
Essentially what this means is that we provide a service to enable people to search for art and design resources without having to trawl through the vast quantity of extraneous material that exists out there.
As part of a UK higher education funded programme we are committed to serving that community.
We are also committed to providing access to information that has been quality assured, or in other words evaluated carefully according to our selection criteria before it is included in our database.
The Project is made up of a group of consortium partners, ten institutions spread throughout the UK.
Four of those institutions provide project personnel, although the main base is at the lead institution, The Surrey Institute of Art & Design.
My main role for ADAM these days is essentially coordinating the cataloguing and classification activities which go on between four of us in three separate geographic locations.
I am also fairly heavily involved in various aspects of service development, and am largely responsible for maintenance of our web site.
Library school prepared me to a certain extent for the first of these roles.
I was taught religiously about cataloguing and classification, although I maintain it is only when you practice it in a real library environment that you actually understand anything.
For me, ADAM has extended this training and experience much further than library school.
We catalogue internet resources in much the same way as a library catalogues books and other physical materials.
We share many of the problems and issues experienced in the library.
However, there are very different problems in describing and organising virtual information.
There is no physical manifestation of an internet resource as such, and therefore there is no shelf to put it on.
In many ways, the internet seems to be a law unto itself and therefore there are no publishing standards to rely on.
As a cataloguer, I cannot turn to the front of my resource and find data about the author, the title, the publisher, the date of publication, etc.
I have to dig around for this, hoping that it will be stated clearly and unambiguously, but so often it is not.
It is frustrating to always be so unsure of what you are dealing with.
I suspect that library school actually prepared me for this much more than I might have realised.
I was taught much more than just the practical method of cataloguing.
We were all also primed to face crises and problems outside of the normal procedures.
We were endlessly taught how to work in a team and respond to difficult situations.
God, those role play seminars were awful.
The video replays afterwards were even worse.
Fortunately, the real occasions now are not intimidating so I'm thankful I managed to blush my way through.
ADAM has also been embroiled in a long struggle with classification since the beginning of the project.
To explain first, we want to classify our resources in order to provide a facility to browse our database.
A classification scheme provides a hierarchical structure which can form a base for a browsing tree.
From the start we decided that we want to provide a browsing facility that is extensible.
It has to be able to work with our current record number, a small 330 odd, but cope with expansion to much larger numbers potentially.
We also want to provide multiple access points to our records for the most intuitive browsing facility possible.
We have discovered over the course of the past year that this last point is a great ideal, but one we are finding hard to live up to.
In order to facilitate multiple access points, we would effectively have to classify each resource many times.
For many resources this becomes impractical very quickly.
For example, the WebMuseum [2], ex-Web Louvre, has vast amounts of information about hundreds of artists and many art movements.
Ideally, someone searching for, e.g., Matisse, would find the WebMuseum.
However, to enable this we would have to classify that resource hundreds of times under each artist's name.
And if we do it for the WebMuseum, we must do it for everything.
It is easy to see why this level of classification is difficult to maintain.
For me, this has tested my training more than anything else so far.
It has involved intense intellectual debates and long, hard hours trying to put together proposals that will work.
I have to say that eighteen months ago I would not have dreamed I would be involved in such work.
Shying away from the traditional, I thought an internet project would be a far cry.
How wrong could I be.
As I look back again at my library school days, I can see that I learned much more than the kinds of things most people associate with librarians.
Contrary to popular belief, I didn't have a single lesson in stamping books, but there was plenty on cataloguing, enquiry and reference work, thesaurus construction, etc.
However, I was also taught a great deal about management, working with people, making presentations and writing reports.
Essentially, I was taught how to behave and conduct myself as a professional, and this is something I value very highly now.
My first degree was in fact a joint honours split between librarianship and English, and I have to say Chaucer and Austen taught me nothing of the every day working skills I need now.
In conclusion, there are many things I have learned whilst working for ADAM that I wasn't taught at college.
But most of these things are skills such as HTML authoring which is not something I would not necessarily expect to find on a library course.
More importantly, there are many things I was taught at college that have been built on greatly with ADAM.
Endless seminars practicing Dewey classification were meaningless at the time; now they are invaluable.
It does appear that in this reflective frame of mind, library school is not so far away from my working life now.
It may seem like decades ago, but the more I learn at work, the more I realise how inadequately I would be prepared for it without my training.
I still balk at the idea of working in a traditional library (my smooth talking head of department never cured me of that) but I do concede that my work at ADAM owes a lot more to the traditional than I might first admit.
Response to this article Francis Devadson devdsn@rccsun.ait.ac.th, replies on 22-May-1997: It is a wonderful article.
I belong to the Ranganathan school of faceted classification.
I used to wonder when they drilled into my memory the Cataloguing Rules of CCC (Classified Catalogue Code) and the principles of faceted classification.
It made sense when I became a practicing librarian and more when I meet the challenge of the web.
Congratulations.
References ADAM Web Site http://www.adam.ac.uk/ Web Museum Web Site http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/wm/ Author details Rebecca Bradshaw, Resource Officer, ADAM Project Tel: 01252 722441 ext.
2427 Address: Library, Surrey Institute of Art and Design, Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey Email: rebecca@adam.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Ticer Summer School on the Digital Library at Tilburg University, The Netherlands Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Ticer Summer School on the Digital Library at Tilburg University, The Netherlands Buzz software database infrastructure copyright cataloguing ejournal interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Robert van der Zwan describes a two week summer school in digital library developments at one of Europe's main research centres in this field.
For two weeks, from 4 16 August 1996 at Tilburg University in The Netherlands,  a group of 60 librarians and information specialists from around the world was introduced to the strategic and practical issues relating to digital library developments.
Participants came from as far afield as Japan and Costa Rica, but mostly from Western Europe, with a significant representation from the Netherlands itself.
I was the only UK delegate, however three of the lecturers were from the UK including one from Ireland.
The computing and library services of Tilburg University have set an international example in electronic library development since the late eighties.
Building on that experience, a consultancy bureau, Ticer, has been established.
Ticer had organized various smaller events, but this was its first International Summer School on the Digital Library.
A similar event has been organized in the US by The Institute on Digital Library Development at the University of California, Berkeley.
I attended the Summer School specifically to gain insight into electronic library development and to benefit from the practical experiences of others.
It was hoped that this knowledge would be of direct relevance and could be used to inform the further development of the electronic library strategy in my home institution, the Open University Library.
The Open University has a well established international position in the delivery of distant education, and increasingly does so with the aid of information technology.
For many OU courses the use of e-mail, conferencing software and the WWW is common practice.
Within this context and with an eye on the increasing availability of electronic information, the Library's remit has been extended to develop a strategy for supporting students through networked access to information.
As a result a student services project has started, an IT Development Group has been established, the Library is involved in two e-Lib research projects, and the development of the electronic library is a key feature of the Library's overall strategy.
In view of these developments, the opportunity offered by the Ticer Summer School to broaden our knowledge in this interesting field was very welcome.
The program in the first week concentrated on strategic issues relating to the development of electronic libraries.
The second week focused on technical issues and offered the opportunity to acquire practical skills through hands-on sessions.
During the first week general introductions were given to the information society, the future of libraries, and the theory of strategic planning and innovation.
Additionally a number of case studies were discussed.
In this report I will concentrate on elements of the first week's program.
However, a wide range of topics were on the agenda.
Please refer to the Ticer Summer School web site for more details.
Information society and the future of Libraries The week started with an overview of the history of the communication of information.
It was argued that this process has known several revolutions.
Overcoming the boundaries of time and location, has been very important.
Most recently, however, another revolution has taken place which might have an even greater impact: the content and the carrier of information have become separated.
Electronic information can be used and re-used without having to use a different carrier.
Different types of electronic information: text, sound, still image, moving image can be integrated, presented etc.
while the carrier is of no relevance.
The conclusion offered to us was that the added value of electronic information lies precisely in this separation of content and carrier, and that this has to be exploited for the information society to become reality.
The first week ended with an insight into the future of Libraries in the information society.
The presentation was based on a report produced for the European Commission DGXIII, which has recently become available (Mackenzie Owen, S.J.
and Wiercx, A.
Knowledge models for networked library services.
Luxembourg, European Commission DGXIII, 1996.)
In the presentation it was argued that the driving force in the electronic age is "the move towards the digital distribution of information through the global network infrastructure".
This has four characteristics: services of libraries will be based on electronic networked information, or off-line digital products.
distance access will increasingly become more important than on site access.
emphasis will be on access rather than collection/holdings.
the catalogue will develop into a resource discovery mechanism libraries will develop from being institution based to being domain-based, large nation wide libraries specialized in one subject.
In this future library "knowledge mediation" will be extremely important, and it is in this intermediary role that the added value of libraries will be found.
Case studies A large part of the remainder of the week was spent on the presentation of four case studies, preceded by general introductions to strategic planning and innovation.
This was a new and alien subject for most of the delegates and the topics provoked a fair amount of discussion.
The general message though became very clear.
A strategic planning process is all about making (difficult) choices about what to do, how to do it and how to allocate resources.
The combination of the presentation of the theory and its practical application highlighted in case studies proved extremely informative and instructive; rather abstract concepts and ideas became much clearer.
Four cases were presented; Tilburg University; De Montfort University; University of Michigan; and the University of Limerick.
In the four development examples, common elements can be distinguished.
Firstly, there were strong economical and political incentives behind all of them.
Secondly, in the case of Tilburg especially, the early developments were very much technology driven, rather than user-oriented.
Thirdly, support from University management throughout the projects was considered to be very important.
In all cases there were strong links between the academic computing department and the library.
This was regarded as an essential factor.
In the case of Michigan, the local library school was heavily involved.
It was also considered to be of importance to have strategic alliances with other universities and major commercial players.
Finally, in all cases the developments very much depended on the continuing availability of external resources through national and/or international R&D programs.
Knowledge mediation One of many other highlights of the conference was the presentation by the University of Michigan.
The most recent projects there centre around the "trendy" concept of knowledge mediation.
As was argued, electronic information has become increasingly available.
However the sheer amount and the unstructured nature of this information makes the availability of adequate retrieval tools a high priority.
The University of Michigan Library is undertaking one of the six digital library projects within the Digital Library Initiative funded by NSF/ARPA/NASA.
The project presented, focused on the development of an agent architecture for the digital library, which aimed at enabling diverse users to access a diversity of electronic collections, which in turn have a diversity of tools and support services.
A range of agents has been developed to perform several retrieval tasks arising from a user query.
The agents operate as intermediaries between users and collections/services.
Knowledge mediation has also become an central issue in the further development of the electronic library at Tilburg University.
It is seen as an additional element of a range of user support services.
IWI ("Innovation of Scientific Information", an initiative funded by the Dutch government) has recently granted funding to a project concerned with the heterogeneous searching of various databases.
This project will develop a user interface through which databases will be selected, queries formulated and results presented.
Additionally it will develop a module to search databases simultaneously, and will develop interoperability between locally maintained databases and the national catalogue.
In a later phase semantic structures will also be implemented including thesauri, synonym lists, topic trees and information about the characteristics of collections.
Access to electronic information, especially electronic journals Another thought provoking part of the program centred on access to electronic resources.
It was interesting to see that various commercial organisations claimed an intermediary role for themselves describing their services as "warehouses", "gateways" and "clearinghouses".
Swets announced its electronic full text service called Swetsnet which, together with its established current awareness and document delivery services, will provide a single source for ordering and accessing subscription based full text e-jounals.
A representative of Elsevier announced an initiative called ScienceDirect, which will operate as a gateway to Elseviers e-journals and also possibly host journals from other publishers.
PICA, the Dutch library co-operative has recently launched its WebDOC project giving access to electronic documents through the WWW.
Central to this is the Webcat, a distributed catalogue of electronic documents maintained by participating libraries.
Some publishers have already joined the project and others are expected to follow.
A similar project will soon be launched by the RLG in the USA.
(A report on the future of subscription agents is due to be published this year: David Brown, Report on the future of Subscription agents and other intermediaries.
UK Serials Group and JISC ,1996).
Concluding remarks The Ticer Summer School web site gives access to the text of the papers, information about delegates and lecturers and the results of the evaluation.
The papers will also be published by Tilburg University Press in due course.
The Summer School will be organized again next year, but probably on a somewhat smaller scale.
The Ticer team deserves praise for its excellent achievement, however I do have some criticism to offer.
User needs were somewhat neglected as an issue (2 out of 40 lectures) and it was generally felt amongst participants that this should be a more central theme next year.
There was not sufficient time allocated for delegates to present and discuss their own cases and, especially in the second week, the focus was very much on Tilburg University.
However, a visit to the second International Summer School on the Digital Library in 1997 can be highly recommended.
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CAUSE / EFFECT Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CAUSE / EFFECT Buzz data software framework html database dissemination video hypertext ascii research Citation BibTex RIS Julia A. Rudy, Cause/Effect Editor and Director of Publications at CAUSE, an international, nonprofit professional association for managers and users of information resources on college and university campuses, describes CAUSE/EFFECT.
Campus executives are beginning to look to information technology as a means to address many of the difficult challenges facing our colleges and universities today.
Electronic information resources have become a key strategic resource of the institution in a far broader sense than bibliographic indexes, data processing, or administrative information systems.
As articles in CAUSE/EFFECT and other professional publications show, there is growing synergy among the many departments on campus that handle various aspects of the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of information through digital technologies: library/information services, administrative computing, academic computing, networking (voice, data and video) services, distance and continuing education, instructional media, and university presses.
New Professional Challenges Increasingly, information professionals in higher education are focusing on the ability to facilitate access to information itself throughout the campus, with little if any concern as to whether this is academic or administrative in nature.
This is a much broader view of the function of electronic resources on campus, encompassing the technology (conduit), the information (content), and the services which link both of those elements with users at all levels, through help desks, applications development, training, and a host of other functions.
From this perspective, the information resource is surely one of the most precious assets of colleges and universities.
And that information resource includes everything from the growing global digital library of networked information, accessed by scholars--faculty, researchers, students-from their desktops, to administrative databases and the content of campus-wide information systems, increasingly indispensable to everyone in our own institutional communities.
It is all this and more, and our concept of the breadth of this resource is growing almost on a daily basis.
Information resources managers are trying to deal with hybrid environments, and our historical compartmentalized traditions don't work any longer.
We are all engaged in trying to foresee the future and prepare for it, while managing current realities of existing hardware, software, staff, and budget infrastructures.
This is equally true for CAUSE as an association and the issues we address through our services and publications, especially CAUSE/EFFECT.
While the journal's history lies in administrative information systems management, in the past decade our readers and our members have begun to oversee a plethora of functions that now fall into the purview of "information technology" or "digital resources" on campus.
As an association, we find ourselves seeking an ever-wider variety of papers and articles to publish in our journal and include in our Information Resources Library, recognizing the broader "playing field" on which information resources managers interact today.
CAUSE/EFFECT: A Practioners' Journal The flagship publication of CAUSE, CAUSE/EFFECT debuted in 1978 as a publication dedicated to managing administrative information systems in higher education.
But today, the journal encompasses a much broader purview, reflecting the changing electronic information services environment (as described above).
The journal is written by and for managers and users of information resources--information, technology, and services--on college and university campuses.
Published in print four times a year (approximately in March, June, September, and December), journal articles are also made available on the CAUSE Web server in multiple electronic forms, including ascii text, PDF (Acrobat), and HTML with appropriate hypertext links (see http://www.cause.org/cause-effect/cause-effect.html, or mirrored in the U.K. at http://cause-www.niss.ac.uk/cause-effect/cause-effect.html).
The more than 4,400 CAUSE members and other subscribers who read and contribute to the journal are involved in many different aspects of managing information technology and other information resources.
Their experience in the profession runs the gamut from those who are new to information management, to those who have many years of experience (more than half have been computing and/or information professionals for fifteen years or more).
Most of our readers are managers, with roughly three-quarters at the director level or above in their professional positions.
Many have a background which includes computing, but current responsibilities, interests, and activities are often broader and more diverse.
Frequently they are technical experts in one part of the field, while developing professional skills in other areas.
What We Publish Papers submitted for publication are reviewed by an Editorial Committee who rate them, comment on their publishability, and make suggestions for revisions.
Journal content is written primarily by members of the profession, not from an academic discipline perspective but from the perspective of the practitioner, i.e., the articles revolve around the campus management and planning issues of our profession rather than research or theory.
Through the years, CAUSE's journal has contributed significantly to the development of a new area of professional literature and it is increasingly cited in more scholarly work.
Articles in CAUSE/EFFECT fall into several categories.
Each issue of the journal contains a Campus Profile (an overview of the information resources environment--information, technology, and services--of a member institution) to promote a better understanding of how information resources are organized, managed, planned for, and used in colleges and universities of various sizes and types.
Feature articles are in-depth articles that relate to the many issues of concern to information resources managers.
Other types of articles include Current Issues (a brief overview and analysis of a timely issue facing the profession that puts the issue into perspective and offers insights and may propose solutions); Viewpoints (opinion pieces, usually with some controversial overtones); and Good Ideas (descriptions of exemplary applications or management techniques that have been successful on a campus and could be implemented by colleagues on other campuses).
We also publish book reviews in the Recommended Reading department.
About 25 percent of the articles published in the journal are submitted "over the transom" (unsolicited, not invited), with about 65 percent solicited from conference presentations (either CAUSE-sponsored or others).
Another 10 percent are invited or arise from other sources.
Thus the "feature" content is highly reflective of current practice, while the department and column articles (which are generally solicited or invited) tend to deal with more "leading edge" issues.
Regardless of the kind of article submitted to the journal, contributors should recognize the underlying values that we seek in journal content: sharing campus strategies for approaching the management of information resources from the perspective of integration and coordination rather than separation; and promoting alliances between the library and information technology elements of the information resources professions to address key issues associated with new electronic access strategies.
Contributing to the Journal The CAUSE Board of Directors adopted as a theme for 1997 "Enterprisewide Leadership for Information Resources," and the association's Current Issues Committee has encouraged submission of journal articles in the following areas as being of high priority in the coming year: information policy in a networked environment support crisis in a distributed computing environment integrating planning for information resources with institutional planning benchmarking information technology in higher education development and deployment of integrated digital libraries achieving widespread integration of technology in teaching and learning meeting the challenge of expectations rising faster than budgets fostering diversity in information resources management preparing for electronic commerce CAUSE/EFFECT contributors are encouraged to submit articles addressing these and other topics for review by the CAUSE Editorial Committee.
Publication guidelines and submission details may be found on the CAUSE World Wide Web site at http://www.cause.org/cause-effect/ce-pub-guide.html, or mirrored in the U.K. at http://cause-www.niss.ac.uk/cause-effect/ce-pub-guide.html     Testimonial quotes: "I first became involved in CAUSE as an academic library director over ten years ago.
Their conferences and publications became the best way for me to put into context the technological development of information services on my campus.
CAUSE/EFFECT provided me and my staff with thought-provoking and educational opportunities that stretched our thinking and goals.
Since I started teaching, CAUSE/EFFECT and CAUSE's other publications (for example, documents from their Information Resources Library and the CAUSE Professional Paper Series) are required reading for my students -as they should be for practicing librarians anywhere."
Anne Woodsworth Dean, Palmer School Long Island University/CW Post Campus  "CAUSE is the preeminent American association for information technology professionals in higher education.
Managing human and information resources is the theme which defines the essence of CAUSE.
CAUSE sponsors stimulating annual conferences, produces a first-rate periodical, and publishes a distinguished series of special studies.
Libraries are recognized as vital information partners within the CAUSE framework.
In this age of digital libraries, information transfer, and integrated systems, libraries cannot reach optimum levels of performance without a comprehensive exposure to the principles and practices of information technology.
Libraries have always embraced a great CAUSE, and this one is surely no exception."
Arthur P. Young Director of University Libraries Northern Illinois University Acknowledgement: This article includes content from an article published in CAUSE/EFFECT in Fall 1994, "Information Resources: Technology, Services, and Information," by Jane N. Ryland, CAUSE President.
Full text of that article is available by sending e-mail to search@cause.colorado.edu including the message: get cem943president.
Special thanks to Elizabeth Harris, Managing Editor of CAUSE/EFFECT, for her contributions to this article, and to Jeff Hansen for online production.
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MIDAS: Manchester Information, Datasets and Associated Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MIDAS: Manchester Information, Datasets and Associated Services Buzz data software html database archives metadata css browser cataloguing visualisation passwords telnet gopher research Citation BibTex RIS Anne McCombe describes a service that provides a wide range of datasets to the wider communities.
MIDAS [1], based at Manchester Computing, University of Manchester, is a National Dataset Service funded by JISC [2], ESRC [3] and the University of Manchester [4], to provide UK academics with online access to large strategic and research datasets, software packages, training and large-scale computing resources.
The datasets are supplied by arrangement with CHEST [5] and The Data Archive [6].
Anne McCombe was appointed on October 1996 to promote awareness and use of MIDAS in the academic community.
After a brief history of MIDAS, I want to talk about the WWW made us think again about how we publicize, document and deliver the service and what we have done to exploit the growing use of the Web, and what the Web has done to help us attain the unattainable.
History In May 1993, Manchester Computing Centre was designated one of the first National Datasets services, and capital funding to replace the national scalar service on Amdahl (running VM/CMS the common user interface of the day) with a UNIX-based machine was provided.
At that time, MCC already had a substantial holding of on-line datasets including the 1981 and 1991 Censuses of Population and several large government datasets.
In 1991 Manchester had inherited some of the national scalar computing service users that had been using the national service on the Amdahl at the University of London Computer Centre, and the London Office of Manchester Computing was opened with two member of staff to provide local support to users in the London Institutions.
It was named MIDAS (Manchester Information Datasets and Associated Services) a couple of months later to reflect the new focus of the service.
The Cray CS6400 Superserver was installed in February 1994.
Manchester Computing had its first Web Server in December 1993, and the first documents to be put up were the National Service Newsletters [7].
Comprehensive on-line documentation was provided via the Gopher.
Web Service gets going By March 1995 we had a 'rapidly developing' WWW server for the MIDAS service.
It contained general information about the service, pointers to the appropriate sections of the MIDAS gopher for detailed information about each service, registration information and links to other related WWW servers.
Work started on mounting the CSS Notes (documentation on MIDAS services) in PostScript and WordPerfect 5.1 and registration forms in PostScript.
Information on Courses, the midas@mailbase.ac.uk list [8] and how to login via telnet, support arrangements all these were reformatted for browsing with a graphical interface browser such as Mosaic or Netscape.
Both forms of on-line information were maintained.
For documentation a gradual transition The primary on-line source for detailed documentation on how to use most MIDAS services has been textual and in some cases remains so (but not for long, see below), and the information is accessible directly from a graphical Web browser which displays the information in the same way as would the Gopher or Lynx.
The most popular MIDAS documentation (SAS, SPSS, NQS and the Current Documentation list) was translated into HTML format.
We are looking at how we can best serve our users' documentation requests to have extensive Web-based documentation and still be able to provide paper copies to users on request.
The more appropriate medium for informing users of new developments was fast becoming graphical, and if information was "on the Web", it was expected to be in HTML format, have pictures, provide hyperlinks to related information.
A WAIS searchable catalogue of datasets and software [9] was set up at NISS and a guide to statistical software on the Web [10] were set up.
MIDAS already had an extensive amount of Census help and information on its gopher server.
Census-related material appeared elsewhere in the World Wide Web, and graphical images such as maps and graphs illuminated the information; Web interfaces for some of the software packages for processing Census data were being developed.
To draw this information together, the MIDAS Census Gateway [11] was set up.
The Web provided us with the mechanism for giving access to Census users in t he UK to related research in the UK and all over the world.
Soon we shall see this gateway develop a Visualization Gateway to the 1991 Census: a new project which takes deliverables from two NTI projects, KINDS [12] (set up in 1994 to provide an intuitive interface to the spatial data) and ARGUS [13] (developing techniques to allow the visual exploration of spatial data), to create an intelligent, highly interactive, on-line mapping and visualization interface to the 1991 Census data and associated boundary data held on MIDAS.
In recent years the spatial data resource [14] on MIDAS has grown considerably, with the acquisition of global and national digital map datasets from Bartholomew and the digital census boundaries for the UK.
The satellite data archive was acquired in 1995.
To offer potential users an introduction to the SPOT data and to provide a quick reference for registered users, we built an interactive index of SPOT images [15] containing 'quicklooks' of each scene along with various metadata.
A similar site for Landsat is under development.
We hope that this resource will attract users from many branches of research, not just from mainstream geographical research and remote sensing.
We must be able to show how it can be used, and to some extent the KINDS project can do this.
More information than we provide is sometimes offered by the suppliers of the data, and as the newer Web interfaces are written we include links to these other resources.
Many users of MIDAS users are from the social sciences.
It is the data that's important and as far as possible we want to make the data easy to identify and simple to extract and/or process.
A Web interface was built for the CSO (now Office for National Statistics [16]) macroeconomic time series databank and the Ingres database, but we had to ensure that the data was only available to authorized users, and we had to wait a while for Web password security to be established before releasing the interface.
The interface has been greeted enthusiastically by users and it has the potential to significantly widen access to this important teaching and research dataset.
The ONS Web interface [17] was demonstrated at the MIDAS User Forum in July 1996.
What did our users think?
In the summer of 1996 we conducted a electronic survey of 400 of our MIDAS users.
Response was low but nevertheless informative.
Telnet was the most popular form of access (75% of responses), but we expect the use of X (currently 16.2%) to increase in the future.
86% considered themselves to be only novice or intermediate users of UNIX .
Virtually all respondents had Web access which they preferred to the gopher.
We presented the results to the MIDAS User Forum and many people indicated they would be happy to see information migrating to the Web, but it was pointed out that some students did not have Web access and that the gopher was quicker to use.
This situation is likely to change.
Increasingly access to the Web will be provided and there will be the expectation that if the information is worth having it will be on the Web.
We asked the MIDAS User Group how they would feel about us transferring all our on-line documentation to HTML (yes, yes, yes) and to consider the implications of transferring the support from text to the HTML.
The User Group agreed that we should transfer our support to the Web interface, and we hope that by July of this year we shall have all our on-line documentation in the new format.
The old format will remain but decline in its 'up-to-dateness'.
Where to next MIDAS is developing, so is the Web, so too are our users.
The culture of sharing resources is growing, and, as was brought to my attention last week at the Arts and Humanities Data Service [18] launch, it is not just the resources that we should share, but the method of extracting and processing the data.
We know the sort of questions we want answers to.
How many people eat fish one or more times a week in this region.
Show me the streets where more than half the occupants have central heating.
Let me ask my next question.
Gradually we are getting there.
References [1] MIDAS Web site, http://midas.ac.uk/ [2] JISC Web pages, http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/jasper/index.html [3] ESRC Web site, http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ [4] University of Manchester, http://www.man.ac.uk/ [5] CHEST Web site, http://www.chest.ac.uk/ [6] Essex Data Archive, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue7/essex/ [7] National Service Newsletters, http://www.mcc.ac.uk/newsletters/ [8] midas@mailbase.ac.uk list, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/midas/ [9] Searchable catalogue of software and data, http://www.niss.ac.uk/niss/softdata.html [10] Guide to statistical software on the Web, http://cs6400.mcc.ac.uk/sapi/sapimenu.html [11] MIDAS Census Gateway, http://midas.ac.uk/census/census.html [12] KINDS NTI Project, http://midas.ac.uk/kinds/ [13] ARGUS NTI Project, http://midas.ac.uk/argus/ [14] Spatial Data Resource, http://midas.ac.uk/maps/ [15] Index of SPOT Images, http://midas.ac.uk/maps/spot/spotindex.html [16] Office for National Statistics, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ [17] ONS Web Interface, http://midas.ac.uk/ons/ [18] Arts and Humanities Data Service, http://www.kcl.ac.uk/projects/ahds/ Author Details Anne McCombe is the publicity officer for MIDAS.
Email: a.mccombe@mcc.ac.uk Tel: 0171-405 8400 ext.363 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: Mel Collier Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: Mel Collier Buzz dissemination digitisation research Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh talks to Mel Collier, previously Director of the International Institute for Electronic Library Research at De Montfort University and now Director of Strategic and Operational Planning at Dawson Holdings plc.
From his present position as Director of Strategic and Operational Planning at Dawson Holdings plc Mel Collier can look back over almost 30 years spanning early work with SWALCAP, pioneering convergence at De Montfort, JISC and the Library and Information Commission among other activities.
We began with the motivation behind the changes at De Montfort in the 1980’s : “It was clear that the traditional approaches simply weren’t going to be adequate.
We were on the threshold of a significant change in the way that information would be processed and published.
We decided to be proactive, and get involved in research and so on.
De Montfort had also set itself a very ambitious business agenda.
At a simplistic level there was no way that as we grew from 8000 to 28000 students on nine campuses we could replicate the central archival library.” One difficulty identified was the lack of a model.
The debate ranged over the ways in which new technology was introduced into other sectors and the relevance of this to the continuing work on the electronic library and digitisation: “The digital library work had no base of prior experience elsewhere, it was genuinely new.
Examples of the management of change under the technological imperatives we were subjected to were few, apart maybe from the Carnegie Mellon initiatives.
We were doing a lot of action research.
Early library automation was to do with changing processes and looking for technical efficiency.
The electronic library is changing the way the library works.
We are potentially changing the content of the library, the interaction between the users, the material and the staff.
So it is change management of a totally different order.
We still don’t have a theory of change in that context, nor a theory of the electronic library, if you like.
Maybe that’s possible now, and I have often postulated that we need it.
The challenge is several dimensions greater than introducing library automation or putting new technology into a production line.
The electronic library is a different outcome which radically changes the material available to help people learn.
The change is such that really big questions have to be asked about how we handle things, as part of a holistic approach.” This also brought new demands on staff.
In this context, Mel Collier has frequently used the term “multi-talented” to describe the attributes he felt would be needed in the electronic library environment.
He takes the view that it is not enough to talk about skills, but what is required is a new attitude: “Multi-skilling and re-skilling imply a linear approach: ‘we have to do something, so let’s retrain ourselves to do it.’ No-one should come into the information business today without good IT skills, but we need to have people who are flexible.
People have to be responsive to change, and it’s as much an attitude of mind as anything.
Career and organisational plans can change at any time.
The issue of skilling is not just technical skills.
It’s to do with team playing, communication, presentation, being able to see an opportunity, and being multi-talented is all of these.” We ended our discussion of this issue on a positive note, with the affirmation that we were already producing professionals with the necessary attitude, and that this was coupled with strong IT skills and a general acceptance of the growing technological character of the information profession.
Perhaps one of the most newsworthy of Mel Collier’s interests has been the structure and management of new services.
From time to time he has shown a robust approach to convergence, and he is still realistic: “Convergence is not a panacea, and of itself it is not necessarily the answer, but it is here to stay and it has more than delivered.
Looking back now the justification for convergence was fairly simplistic, but it’s delivered some things that we didn’t anticipate or articulate, like the involvement of information service managers in how courseware might be designed or made available, or how programmes might be redesigned.
Those things are now taken as read, but the number of organisations that have really converged teaching and learning development with the information side is relatively small.
At Tilborg University, which I know very well, everything is based on an extremely creative but informal relationship between the librarian and the head of the computer centre.” Assessing the overall development of the electronic library produces the same realism.
Professor Collier feels that in some senses the progress has been less than was expected, but looking back at the position when the early work started, there has been a remarkable progression.
This naturally led us into an assessment of where we were now and where we were likely to go in the future: “The next move is going to be the virtual university, and this has already started to emerge.
We will have to get into technology based teaching, web based teaching and distance learning, even if these things are used on campus, and not only for distance learning.
In the context of lifelong learning that’s the way things are going.” The present climate is seen to be one of the most encouraging for the information profession for some time.
Summing up initiatives such as the LIC draft research proposals, a positive picture emerges: “We will get an integrated superhighway for the UK.
I shall be very disappointed if we don’t get a public library network linked to the National Grid for Learning, to Janet and SuperJanet and other nets.
The shift in the delivery of academic journals will continue.
High cost, relatively low circulation products will tend towards the electronic.
This is common sense.
Low cost, high volume material will still be in print form, and the textbook world still has plenty of life left in it, but it will be complicated by the integration of electronic and paper based learning materials.
Naturally, I wholly subscribe to the LIC vision as a statement of where we are going and I certainly support research which helps the development of a networked learning society.Dissemination will be crucial.
What I won’t do is attach dates to anything, because I will be wrong.” Author details Lyndon Pugh Ariadne Managing Editor Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EDINA: WWW, Z39.50 and All That!
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EDINA: WWW, Z39.50 and All That!
Buzz data software database browser copyright cataloguing z39.50 copac solaris Citation BibTex RIS Peter Burnhill gives a briefing note on what EDINA and the Data Library are doing about the World Wide Web (W) and the Z39.50 Protocol (Z).
Why W?
Well, a lot has been said and done about W. W clients are cheap (free?)
and easy to come by.
End users like them, they have point-and-click graphical interfaces.
But the problem for the national bibliographic data services is how to provide access to the databases held in text management software, like BasisPlus used by both BIDS and EDINA, in a way that allows users to build queries interactively, across several physical databases.
Why Z?
Well, because this provides, or will provide, an economic and versatile way to search complex databases and retrieve records without having to use the search commands particular to the database software in question.
Inter-operability, as they say, in a client/server environment.
Quite a lot is being said about Z, and you can have a look at Ariadne or Dlib, although I have yet to find a 'Noddy Goes Z' explanation.
To jump in at the 'official' deep-end, try http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ which gets you to the Library of Congress.
Two problems: end-users want to use the Web browser on their desktop (eg Netscape), not a special Z39.50 client; the protocol spoken by W (http) needs to be translated back and forth into the Z protocol.
So what have we been doing?
First, as part of a collaborative project with BIDS and COPAC, we have been looking at OCLC SiteSearch, which contains a product called WebZ and a search engine called Newton with a Z39.50 server.
WebZ acts as a W to Z gateway.
The result of that work is experimental Web access to PCI, currently being field-tested by a group of academic support staff in a number of universities.
Last month, we received the source code for an alpha-level Z39.50 server for BasisPlus from IDI, to port onto Solaris.
If that can be made to work, then we should be able to use WebZ to connect to PCI in BasisPlus, and therefore be on the way to providing W searching for PCI, and subsequently for Biosis Previews.
We are also building upon the advances made in SALSER, a 'virtual' union catalogue of serials (http://edina.ed.ac.uk/salser/).
This was launched in 1994 with concurrent searching of WAIS-indexed files, Version 1 of the Z environment.
Over the course of the next quarter, SALSER is to be ported into SiteSearch, into Version 3 of Z.
This would offer the possibility of allowing an end user to discover an information object (article) of interest in PCI and then be able to locate the carrier (journal) via SALSER.
All this is to state that we do have a real interest in both W and Z: we rate both as important in the UK electronic library.
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Minotaur: We Must Not Be Driven by IT Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: We Must Not Be Driven by IT Buzz data java metadata sql windows z39.50 intranet standards Citation BibTex RIS Ray Lester says IT is not just a tool in an information strategy.
We must not be driven by IT.
IT is just a tool.
We should be formulating information strategies, not IT strategies.
Information Technology (IT) is nowadays such a critical and fundamentally different vehicle for information handling than heretofore that all organisations must have an explicit, coherent and comprehensive strategy for its future use.
IT is not simply a tool; it has the power to transform your business.
And YES, indeed, if that business especially revolves around information and communication–as does the whole of the education business–that business in the future will and should be driven by IT.
By continuing to view the IT function as secondary–even marginal–to the business, organisational leaders run the risk, at best, of their IT people aimlessly driving around the old part of town; at worst, of them haring off in a bullet-proof Ferrari down some self-constructed highway in completely the wrong direction.
Further, such relegation can easily be compounded by those who advise the creation of organisational information strategies, without–in parallel–fully taking the technology into account.
Consultants patronisingly say to institutional managers: “The key thing is to make sure that the technology does not run away with itself.
Computers and networks and so on are actually rather complicated, Sir.
But do not worry, we will shield you from the complexities.
Our friends in the computing department will deliver what we need as and when you and I have together decided the information strategy we will adopt for your institution.
We cannot have these IT people telling us what to do and in the process wasting lots of money on inappropriate technology.” Nonsense!
Vice-chancellors and all others charged with running organisations must have a sufficient understanding of the technology for there to be a real proactive partnership between technology and mission.
They must realise that the IT industry–driven in turn by the demands of the entertainment and leisure industries–is creating a fundamentally new technological landscape through which vehicles will drive with a speed and reach previously unheard of.
Non-technologists need to grasp enough of the basics of the new communication and information technological environment to make properly informed decisions on strategy so that they are then confident to put IT into the driving seat.
To continue with the driving metaphor, managers need to ask their IT people such things as: “How good are the roads around here?
Do they need just a little re-surfacing and regular maintenance?
Or do we need a completely new transport system?
[network] Do we have enough support services located at optimal positions across the system?
Do we have too many–dissipating our efforts at too many service points?
[servers] What about the vehicles?
Are they becoming obsolete technology, or will they be good for a few years yet?
Do we have enough vehicles?
Are they easy to drive?
[networked desktop computers] Are all the places we need to get to already well connected?
Can people get to us easily and quickly?
[LANs/MANs/WANs] Who is responsible for drawing the map and keeping it up-to-date?
Who makes and locates the signposts?
Is there just one standard map and set of related signposts?
Or several which need cross-checking and inter-connecting?
[metadata] …and so on.
Of course, you may well feel such a characterisation to be far-fetched, even farcical, and I could easily agree with you.
But the underlying point is not.
If information strategists and IT strategists are brought together early in the process of information strategy making and persuaded to talk about the technology and where it is going, it is surprising how far you can get.
Suddenly, everyone is talking about and understanding enough of ATM, Novell/NT, Windows 98, Z39.50, Java/ActiveX, Dublin Core, SQL Server, ORDMS, Intranet, Apple, Unix, Netscape/Internet Explorer etc.–to name just a few of my own organisation’s current preoccupations.
(However, it is admittedly still easy for the apparently most straightforward of terminology to confuse.
When the other day, I wrote in an internal document that “we must tie-in any re-cabling for a new data network with that for a new voice network”, some senior managers thought that by the latter I meant the Museum’s tannoy system!)
So: IT these days must be the driver of information strategy.
But that does not mean that IT will determine where your organisation is ultimately driven to.
Having properly identified and understood the technological possibilities, at the micro level we can then ask such questions as: “Who is doing the navigating?
The passengers themselves?
Trained information specialists such as librarians, information scientists and so on?” and at the macro level, a question like: “Who decides who can go where on the network, and how is that implemented with the technology?
Are there destinations which are out-of-bounds to certain people, or routes that only buses and taxis can go down?
Who makes sure that what we need will be still existing and preserved when we get there?” Senior decision makers within the higher education sector–and in all other sectors still clinging to an outdated concept–must consign to the bin the model which says: first, you decide what you want to do with information; only then do you decide what technology to use.
The great policy issues those framing organisational information strategies must grapple with have not changed since the time of the Greeks.
What has changed is that for the first time in history we have technology available which could enable us to resolve those issues in practice.
Thus the ‘informational age’[1] can decide whether to make information instantly available to all, can decide whether access to such information will be free of transactional charge, can decide whether to recompense directly the owners of intellectual property contributed to the net, can decide whether to reduce the inequalities of information access, for instance, between those who inhabit the back streets of Hackney, and those who stride across the playing-fields of Eton, and so on.
But we can only organise society’s affairs to make such decisions, if indeed IT is the driver!
References [1] The phrase used by Manuel Castells in his excellent ‘The rise of the network society’ (Blackwells Publishers, 1996).
I am grateful to Lorcan Dempsey, UKOLN for drawing my attention to this book.
Author Details Ray Lester Head of Department Library and Information Services Natural History Museum Cromwell Road London SW7 5BD r.lester@nhm.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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SCOPE Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SCOPE Buzz dissemination infrastructure copyright passwords odp Citation BibTex RIS Leah Halliday believes there is SCOPE for a major shift in the publication of study texts.
The Scottish Collaborative On-demand Publishing Enterprise (SCOPE) [1] is investigating some of the copyright and logistical issues raised by on-demand publishing in academic libraries.
We are producing course packs from digital files and developing an electronic resource bank of teaching and learning materials to be transmitted over the Internet and delivered online to staff and students at a consortium of 13 Scottish Higher Education Institutions.
The Project team seeks to establish whether an electronic resource bank of journal articles and book chapters is more effective than traditional means of delivering teaching and learning materials.
The consortium allows us to test our systems at a range of institutions whose culture and levels of infrastructure vary.
It is essential that SCOPE systems are flexible enough to accommodate requirements at all of these institutions.
Most of the materials included in the SCOPE electronic resource bank are reading-list based and include extracts from texts and journal papers.
We have aimed to develop a model for negotiating and clearing copyright that will be useful to academic libraries beyond the lifetime of the Project, and are exploring a variety of issues related to copyright including an appropriate fee structure.
Progress in this area was slow at first as few publishers had considered in any detail the issues raised by On-Demand Publishing (ODP), let alone devised and implemented policies on licensing the rights that we sought.
However, we have made significant progress over the last year.
We approach rights negotiation by offering publishers a model contract outlining our proposed terms.
These include indemnities and warranties that we require, our commitment to security, details of copyright fees and how these will be calculated.
Our contract is based on one supplied to all eLib ODP projects.
It addresses issues that concern publishers now and may be increasingly important as alternative means of delivering teaching and learning materials are developed in the future.
Before going online, SCOPE aimed to include in the electronic resource bank a critical mass of materials in at least one subject area.
We have now agreed terms with a sufficient number of publishers to allow us to deliver a useful collection of reading materials in three different subject areas.
During 1997 the SCOPE online delivery system, Cactus, will be piloted at one institution, and before the end of the Project online access will be extended to other institutions in the SCOPE consortium.
SCOPE differs from many similar projects in that we plan to transmit copyright materials over the Internet rather than deliver them from standalone machines or over campus wide networks.
Cactus is an Acrobat module that will restrict access to authorised users using IP addresses and password protection.
Encryption technology will be used to secure documents transmitted across the network, and documents will be ‘watermarked’ with the identity of the authorised user and the institution at which they are matriculated, thus making infringing copies readily identifiable.
Over the next year the SCOPE team aims to extend its activities to institutions within the consortium which have not yet received SCOPE resources.
Also, in the final year of the Project and of the eLib Programme as a whole, we intend to focus more on dissemination of our findings to all groups with a stake in the delivery of Higher Education teaching and learning materials.
References SCOPE Web Site http://www.stir.ac.uk/infoserv/scope/ Author Details Leah Halliday, Copyright Officer email: l.l.halliday@stir.ac.uk Address: SCOPE Copyright Unit, The Library, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Centre for Database Access Research (CEDAR): The Huddersfield Connection Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Centre for Database Access Research (CEDAR): The Huddersfield Connection Buzz data software framework html database usability thesaurus vocabularies copyright windows intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Steve Pollitt describes the history and research behind CEDAR, the Centre for Database Access Research, which specialises in work on the design of interfaces for information retrieval systems.
Almost in the very beginning … The seed which has grown into CeDAR the Centre for Database Access Research was probably planted way back in 1973 at the early days of online searching.
The Marconi Research Laboratories at Gt.
Baddow in Essex had developed an Automated Ultrafiche Terminal capable of storing enormous quantities of information on high density microform.
This device offered access for a wide variety of potential applications from telephone directories to criminal records, maps to images of grasses brought back by Darwin from Australia, learning programmes to literature abstracts.
This was a rich area for research and development and the writing of software to make it possible to search what could amount to gigabytes of information on the desktop yes this was 23 years ago.
Alas this technology never made it from R & D to widespread application … but that’s another story …   Seven years later … The CeDAR story resumes at the Polytechnic of Huddersfield where a project to investigate the information needs of cancer therapy clinicians began in 1980 in collaboration with the University of Leeds.
What has followed is a succession of projects which have investigated and developed interfaces for end-user searching of databases.
The evolution of these interfaces follows a logical progression from an expert systems approach to what is termed view-based searching where some of the key interface features have survived from the first prototype CANSEARCH.
What follows is a brief overview of the prototypes and projects highlighting what survived and what became extinct.
CANSEARCH (1981-1986) An expert systems approach promising much and after several years delivering promise: Description: A touch screen display formed by selected hierarchies for potential facets expected in queries for cancer therapy literature.
A rule-based program which controlled the interaction and formulated legal MEDLINE search statements.
Performance: Sometimes (10%ish) it performed better than the real thing as judged by a real expert (i.e.
not me) at least in terms of the quality of the search statements generated.
Like all good early expert systems (including MYCIN) CANSEARCH was never used in anger.
Good features: Easy to use interface which offered selections to the user rather than requiring them to type Browsability of controlled vocabulary (Medical Subject Headings) Automatic inclusive searching Occasionally it even impressed it’s author once given a rule it never forgot it Not so good features (in hindsight): Limited vocabulary Complicated and time consuming to build Didn’t perform as well as the professional   MenUSE Menu-based User Search Engine (1987-1993ish) The first MenUSE system was built at the National Library of Medicine in the USA and could be used to search the complete MEDLINE database switching subject matter revealed major weaknesses in the expert systems approach.
(beware advocates of intelligent agents been there, done that, no T-shirt, good luck with the programming!)
Description: The original target information was on biotechnology, and as no clear CANSEARCH-like model could be devised, a simpler menu-based approach using combinations of selected concepts (akin to Quorum searching) was used to present the user with several sets one for each combination as the outcome of their interaction.
Browsable menus were eventually automatically generated from the Medical Subject Headings.
Subsequent development for the INSPEC and EPOQUE(European Parliament Online Query system) databases courtesy of funding from Huddersfield Polytechnic (as was) demonstrated general applicability and significant potential for multilingual information retrieval Performance: Never really tested but it did work and it would always give a result unlike other approaches available at the time which used a form-based model of interaction.
The highlights included demonstrating a search in Japanese of INSPEC on DataStar from the SIGIR conference in Copenhagen in the Summer of ‘92 and a three day event in Brussels, including prime billing at the Council of Ministers Working Party on Legal Data Processing in Brussels in May ‘93.
Good features: As for CANSEARCH + Extensive vocabulary with direct access to menus at all levels using entry terms Relatively easy to replicate for other databases in different subject areas using the INSPEC thesaurus and EUROVOC.
More informative screens incorporated the number of documents against each concept or term derived from inclusive searching Not so good features: Limited use of interaction the process was one of complete search specification and then a search Required a thesaurus which would ideally have a limited number of top-level concepts   VUSE View-based User Search Engine (1993ish ) A feature was introduced to MenUSE for INSPEC and EuroMenUSE (yes we had to call the European Parliament System something like that) which came to shift the thinking radically.
The feature was implicit Boolean searching through filtered views: Description: Browsable hierarchies, as in MenUSE, provided the means for users to specify the subject matter of their search, but this was then used to progressively refine the database.
Subsequent views of the vocabulary would provide data on the number of documents matching the condition of the filter and each entry on the view.
It seemed appropriate to drop the reference to menus as the user was no longer selecting components of a search statement, they were electing to see a breakdown of a selected subset of documents according to different sets of criteria.
Performance: VUSE for INSPEC was tested at the conclusion of research which examined ranking and relevance feedback extensions to a view-based system and found to perform slightly better in respect of recall and precision.
Yet these sessions were mainly mediated somewhere in the design process we introduced too much complexity.
Highlights included watching MEP Assistants (including Mr Kinnock Jr) in Brussels competing to demonstrate whose MEP was most active in what area of the Parliaments business.
Good features: More powerful searching akin to an analysis e.g.
profiling sets of documents by year or treatment code More interesting to use, the approach lent itself to exploration of the databases.
Not so good features: Difficult to understand and use more so VUSE for INSPEC than VUSE for EPOQUE Proposals to enhance the forms-based Watch-CORDIS interface using VUSE are still under consideration at the European Commission in Luxembourg (I hope!).
HIBROWSE High-resolution Interface for Database Specific BROWsing and Searching (honest) (1993ish ) The usability problems of VUSE were serious a parallel development in CeDAR demonstrating improved access to an ORACLE database HIBROWSE for Hotels offered features which might overcome these problems.
A British Library Funded project which went live on March 1st 1995 provided the opportunity to examine usability issues in applying HIBROWSE search techniques (View-based searching) to the EMBASE database published by Elsevier Science Publishers BV in Amsterdam : Description: In the early attempts at design the user was to be presented with multiple views for a chosen set of search parameters browsable indexing vocabulary (EMTREE), year of publication, author, journal, institution.
This just would not work (in spite of the confidence with which it was presented at the Online 95 conference!).
The current approach illustrated below enables the user to select multiple views from the vocabulary according to the major divisions (facets) of EMTREE (and more recently EPOQUE we just can’t leave it alone).
The chosen views serve to mutually filter each other.
Each view (or facet) can be refined to reduce the number of documents or expanded to increase them forcing reciprocal updating of the numbers of documents against each term or concept on the presented views.
Performance: Looks promising but we have to develop the prototypes (one a Visual Basic front-end to EMBASE on STN-International and EPOQUE, the second a development in Natural for Windows accessing a subset of EMBASE held as an ADABAS database on our own Sun Server with co-sponsorship from Software AG of the UK and Sun MicroSystems) to a level that we can put them in front of real users.
But you can bet all the money you have the outcome will be very superior than what is currently on offer to the end-user.
Good features: Even more powerful searching a much more drivable interaction Even more interesting to use, the approach lends itself to deeper exploration of the databases where we can programme the full HIBROWSE functionality and find out, for example, which Institutions write the most papers on Alzheimer’s disease Not so good features: We’ll tell you after the usability testing High points so far: Presenting at the INFO 96 conference at the Tel Aviv Hilton in May 1996 Presenting at the ISKO 96 conference at the Library of Congress in July 1996 Best description in HTML   View-based Searching on Intranet Systems (1996-1999) A VACANCY for a RESEARCHER Description: Doing it for Web browsers hopefully with collaboration from two large and well respected organisations there is a University Bursary, which will hopefully be enhanced, to recruit a student who would register for a PhD.
Anyone interested please contact Steve Pollitt to discuss the opportunity.
Projects HIBROWSE for Bibliographic Databases Hibrowse for Hotels VUSE for EPOQUE VUSE for INSPEC IR-Framework Information Unlimited KIRKLEES-NET for Kirklees Interactive Telematics Partnership Steve Pollitt is the UK coordinator for ISKO The International Society for Knowledge Organisation.
HIBROWSE, VUSE and View-based Searching are Trade Marks of the University of Huddersfield Address: CeDAR Centre for Database Access Research School of Computing and Mathematics University of Huddersfield Queensgate Huddersfield UK HD1 3DH Tel: +44 (0) 1484 472147⁄472248 Fax: +44 (0) 1484 421106 The Web pages for CeDAR can be found at: http://www.hud.ac.uk/schools/cedar Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BOBCATSSS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BOBCATSSS Buzz framework database digitisation standardisation research Citation BibTex RIS Christine Dugdale reports on the 6th BOBCATSSS International Symposium, Budapest.
‘Shaping the Knowledge Society’ was the theme of the 6th BOBCATSSS symposium held in the National Szechenyi Library, Budapest 26-28 January 1998.
Initially, it seemed a little incongruous discussing recent developments such as Internet connections and the integration of national and local online databases in the grandiose architectural surroundings of a reconstructed magnificent royal palace.
The National Szechenyi Library is thought to occupy the site of the famous Corvina Library and is housed on eight floors.
The main entrance, on the fifth floor, is approached by passing a series of museums and art galleries in other wings of the palace.
This is reached by climbing or taking a funicular railway to a spectacular vantage point overlooking the Danube.
The conference is unique in being organised by library school students as part of their studies.
It seemed particularly appropriate that the 1998 symposium, concerned with shaping the future of the knowledge society, should be run by future LIS professionals who will shape frameworks to structure the provision of information and knowledge in the next century.
The 1998 symposium was organised by students and staff from the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen who took over responsibility from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam who had arranged the previous five symposia.
The symposium is also unique in its emphasis on encouraging and supporting papers from students as well as practitioners and lecturers and some of the clearer and more refreshing overviews were given by LIS students.
In all, there were over 50 papers from 21 different countries of Western and Eastern Europe.
Speakers came both from countries with well-developed electronic networks and those which were still devising policies on digitisation to support educational and cultural initiatives.
It was interesting to note the number of countries using the year 2000 as a spur to new developments.
Many appear to be formulating policies to build information infrastructures which would guarantee local access points to information networked to mark the new millennium.
The Hungarian Deputy Culture Minister who gave one of the opening addresses, for example, spoke of a three-year programme culminating in the year 2000 which would move Hungary towards the knowledge society.
A new law had recently been passed giving everyone, whether they live in the centre of Budapest or a small isolated village, the same rights to access to information and the use of public libraries.
Though, at first sight, this might seem many years behind Britain’s Public Library Act, it represents a significant advance on it as information here includes digital/electronic information, thus giving everyone the same rights to these as they have to print information.
It was clear that every speaker and every country represented believed that their future educational cultural and economic advancement lay in developing information infrastructures based upon digital networks.
The recent conference trend towards more emphasis on people, quality and social issues, however, rather than technological issues/development was most emphatic at the symposium as should, perhaps, be expected at a meeting representing a wide range of institutions of Education in Librarianship and Information Science.
Warnings were voiced that information specialists need to take responsibility for the quality of management of digital information.
Emphasis should always be on the content and not the media.
We ought to be an IT-using society and not an IT-driven society.
Conference themes centred around the issues of human resource development, democracy and infuriation literacy, quality, knowledge management and future roles for the information specialist.
A great deal of debate centred around the issue of exactly how ‘knowledge’ should be defined, and to what degree freedom of access to information necessarily meant free-of-charge access to information., Though the latter was a declared aspiration of many of the countries represented at the Council of Europe, recent cuts and attacks on the public library system in these countries meant it was often far from a reality.
Many public libraries face the dilemma that failure to charge for digital information reduces income which cuts opening house which usually results in under-use of all information.
Charging for digital information means they fail to attract possible discounts from information providers which reduces access to some digitised sources.
Like the British public’s belief in the Rule of Law each delegate believed that we should develop a knowledge society while defining knowledge in a different way.
Some thought knowledge and information were synonymous while others believed that knowledge was something different, but resulted from information and others that is was to difficult a concept to describe.
Everyone, however, believed that every human being had a right to access to it and that every government should develop a national framework of information provision and that these networks should integrate different information systems.
The concept of information-rich and information-poor societies was a recurring theme, but most speakers appeared to believe that their country’s successful and prosperous future development lay in developing electronic information provision further.
Those from countries with existing well-developed systems spoke of quality, standardisation, integration and technological advances in the realms of speed and security whereas those from countries with less-developed infrastructures spoke of creating national networks and encouraging use at local access points.
Nearly all speakers saw the information society and knowledge society as present and future scenarios and so it was refreshing to hear a few point out that man has always lived in an information society.
Information is and always has been necessary for survival.
The biggest different toady is the economic value placed on information.
We only live in an information age in that information has become a commercial product.
Technological development and digitisation have vastly increased the amount of information which is publicly available and the speed with which it can be transmitted.
They have also increased the commercial possibility of providing information which may deny access to some groups.
The 7th BOBCATSSS symposium will be held in Bratislava, 25-27 January 1999 on the theme of Lifelong Learning and will be organised by students from Stuttgart.
Further information 1998 BOBCATSSS symposium http://www.db.dk/bobcatsss/ 1999 BOBCATSSS symposium http://www.fh-darmstadt.de/BOBCATSSS/conf99.htm Author details Christine Dugdale Research Fellow (Information) ResIDe Project Library Services, Bolland Library University of the West of England Frenchay Campus, BRISTOL BS16 1QY Tel: 0117 9656261 Ext.
3646.
Fax: 0117 9763846.
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Open Journals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Journals Buzz data html database accessibility browser copyright multimedia adobe research Citation BibTex RIS Steve Hitchcock describes the Open Journals project.
This involves the use of an innovative approach to handling the hyperlinks between Web-based resources, which could have significant implications for on-line journals and publishing.
Everyone involved with scholarly journals has a problem with the Web.
Readers wonder whether they will find what they want, and librarians want to bring some order to the Web's unregulated chaos.
Authors are concerned with recognition, and publishers with how they can make money from the Web.
The Web presents many new opportunities, especially for academic works.
For those those who want to exploit the Web it is just possible that one approach, such as is being developed in the Open Journal project, could assist in providing a single solution to all of these problems.
Think of the Web as a car engine.
In this analogy Web pages are the mechanical moving parts, and links are the engine oil.
Without oil an engine will seize up.
Web information is dynamic, always changing, so links have to be maintained more frequently than the average car service.
The problem with the Web as it stands is that the links are treated as mechanical parts: link data has to be coded within documents.
So adding links to documents and link maintenance are both more difficult than they ought to be.
The Open Journal project treats links as the oil, using a system, not uniquely, that separates the link data from the document and stores it in link databases, or linkbases.
Sets of links can be selected from the database and overlaid on a document being viewed.
The management of links and the superpositioning is handled by what is called a link service: we are using the Distributed Link Service, developed at Southampton University.
Sounds difficult?
Anyone can use the link service to follow and make links.
What the user sees is either a forms interface or drop-down menus, so interaction with the service is controlled simply by a mouse or keyboard prompts.
That is the technical part.
What the project is doing, since it is a publishing project, is to make this work for people, both users and publishers, and this is the difficult part.
Applying links in this way is imposing a new publishing model, and people are sceptical, not surprisingly since there is no precedent.
The project's first open journal is in biology, a field particularly rich in online information.
We are working with the Company of Biologists, Academic Press and Electronic Press, with its online BioMedNet service.
The 'journal' has: a document management service, a sort of table of contents which is structured to cover a large range of resources; an interface to the link service, which allows users to customise the way in which they want the information to be presented; precompiled sets of links grouped into categories pointing to such resources as online journals, an online biology dictionary, molecular image databases, an abstracts database and so on.
A user could select one or more of these categories.
Consider an example.
A biologist is browsing the Web through the link service interface, by setting the proxy within a Web browser to point at a server hosting the link service.
The biologist is viewing a technical paper with all the above link categories 'switched on'.
Within the text the link service highlights a particular term: it looks like any other Web 'button'.
The link could point to a number of documents note, this could not happen with a conventional Web link which would be listed should the link be followed, possibly including accessible journal articles that use the term as a keyword, say, or the entry for that word in the dictionary.
If using a comprehensive abstracts database, every reference would be linked to the corresponding abstract, or to the full-text article if available.
How often do you see journal papers with this number of links?
So on to further articles, with the same set of links applied to all articles viewed, whether linked from the previously viewed article or not.
Every document visited, from whichever resource, is linked into a seamless web, whether or not the original document has any authored links.
Yes, people may be sceptical, but first indications are that this way of following information is going to be powerful for users.
The project has a test user group.
Feedback from users will be used to refine the interface and provide many more links.
Open journals are also planned in the areas of computer science and cognitive science.
Collaborating publishers include the British Computer Society, Oxford University Press, John Wiley, MCB University Press, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), and we will also be working with publications in psychology edited by Stevan Harnad.
In due course the interface will be generally available on the Web for others to try.
Access to subscription-based journal services cannot be guaranteed, but there is plenty of good information that is openly accessible.
Development of the link service interface, and of the links themselves, is managed within the Multimedia Research Group at Southampton University.
Links can be applied to html documents and, because it is a popular format with publishers, to documents viewed with Adobe Acrobat.
The capability to superimpose links is not available with the commercial Acrobat package, but a 'plug-in' has been developed for the project by the Electronic Publishing Research Group at Nottingham University, which has much experience of Acrobat publishing through its CAJUN project.
Perhaps solutions to the problems cited at the beginning are now becoming apparent.
Links provided by a link service add a new layer of organization to the Web.
For publishers the 'journal' now becomes a set of links: substitute links for the glue of the paper journal.
A paper may be ordinarily available on the Web, in a preprint server say, but how can you choose to see only papers that have been refereed?
Subscribe to a publisher's link service.
For authors this gives accessibility; also recognition conferred by inclusion in a refereed source, just as with paper journals.
It adds up to quality information accessible at the desktop, which seems to be the current demand, with scope for commercial value-adding, the hallmark of good publishing.
Contact: Steve Hitchcock, sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk.
The Open Journals project has Web pages at http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/.
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Libtech '97 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Libtech '97 Buzz data database archives digitisation copyright multimedia licence research standards Citation BibTex RIS Christine Dugdale & Jackie Chelin of the ResIDe project, University of the West of England, report on the seminar which took place at Libtech at the University of Hertfordshire.
Four eLib projects: three electronic reserve projects, ResIDe [1], ACORN [2], PATRON [3], and one on-demand project, SCOPE [4], introduced and led a discussion about the difficulties/problems facing those who wish to digitise, store and disseminate copyrighted information.
Each project outlined their own specific copyright problems and approaches to solving them; giving examples of their experiences, their successes, failures and lessons learnt.
They emphasised that they were unable to give anyone any clear advice on how to approach requests for copyright clearance or how to solve their own specific problems, but they were able to report what they had done, what conclusions they had drawn in the context of their own projects and experiences and give tips, for example, about identifying copyright owners, contacting them, writing letters, sending out reminders, dealing with royalties and with refusals.
To a degree, many of their experiences were very similar because they all share common problems.
They are all operating in a confusing and uncertain environment which can boast no rules, no legislation, no case law, no agreements, no common practice nothing at all.
There is no provision under the Copyright Design and Patents Act of 1988 nor any accepted agreements on Fair Dealing or the role of the librarian.
There is no collecting agency like the CLA for digitised works.
Permission must be obtained for everything.
Nothing is permitted until copyright clearance has been obtained; until all and everyone in whom any copyright rests with that document has given permission whether this be author, publisher, illustrator, photographer etc etc.
This situation, obviously, must change with time.
It may well change in the medium-term if not short-term.
Over the past year, for example, 5 JISC/PA Working Parties have been examining these issues to seek and agree solutions.
They have been looking at a possible standard licence agreement, copyright clearance mechanisms, fair dealing in the electronic context, provision and access to networks and retention and archiving of electronic material.
The reports produced by these Working Parties may well form the basis for a working environment for digital copyright clearance.
Certainly Dearing recommended (43) “We recommend to the Government that it should review existing copyright legislation and consider how it might be amended to facilitate greater use of copyright materials in digital form by teachers and researchers” (p 209 of the main report) [5].
Certainly, the present situation is unacceptable.
Requesting copyright clearance for each and every document each and every time is far too time-consuming for librarian and publisher alike.
ResIDe alone, for example, has sent out, in the space of one year, individual letters requesting permission to digitise the contents pages of over 400 journal titles.
This number does not include chasers and, as ACORN reported, a large number of chasers may be sent.
Chasers have to be sent for about 80% of their requests.
On average, ACORN found that it took 2 months to obtain permission to digitise material.
Nor does ResIDe’s requests for the 400 titles include repeat requests for 129 titles which had to be sent when the user base was increased.
Nor does it include repeat requests for future years.
Against this general background, each project has faced and explored specific copyright issues which they are addressing.
ResIDe, for example, is a short term project and has, therefore, sought faster, possibly more short-term solutions.
Being concerned with the Built Environment subject area ResIDe has looked at copyright issues surrounding the inclusion of such multimedia as 3-D models and maps on a digital system.
ACORN has been researching into the role of the subscription agent in the copyright process.
PATRON, concerned with the performing arts, has more copyright considerations than mere intellectual, typographical and moral rights issues faced by the other projects.
SCOPE is examining yet another set of conditions in that it is not a reserve or short loan project like the others, but is concerned with on-demand publishing which means it requires a longer copyright clearance permission period than a short-term reserve.
It quickly became obvious that there were a large number of points of agreement between the projects in their approach to the copyright issue.
All agreed that it was vital to accurately identify the copyright owner of each item and that it was essential to create an accurate and up-to-date database of publishers, their addresses and a contact within that publishing house.
A great deal of time may be wasted by sending letters to the wrong address or by not addressing them to a specific person.
Addressing requests to a vague title such as ‘Permissions Manager’ or ‘Rights Officer’ can result in letters languishing in a mail room for weeks.
Every speaker agreed that the publishing world is such a dynamic and fluid environment that it is essential to keep track of which publisher currently owns which journal title.
They also all agreed that it was necessary to identify every copyright owner and that this could sometimes mean many different people.
SCOPE, for example, identified 33 copyright owners in a document of only 50 pages.
PATRON faced difficulties identifying and obtaining clearance from each copyright holder for most of their documents.
All four speakers also agreed that the wording of their letters was vitally important.
Publishers are as uncertain about the digital environment as the academic community and need reassurance about security mechanisms which are in place.
They also need information about the project what it aims to do and about the user group how many people will access the material, in which format the material would be held, how often users are likely to access it and over which time period.
It was agreed that each letter should clearly outline what they would like the publisher to permit.
All four speakers also emphasised the importance of obtaining written permissions as such letters became legal documents proving that permission had been sought and given.
Generally, publishers appeared to be sympathetic to academic institutions and each project had had considerable success in obtaining copyright clearance for documents.
There was some variation between the projects as to the wording of letters and the amount and type of information which should be included.
There was also some variation in the approach to offers of a payment.
SCOPE, which produces course materials, always offers payment with a standard contract.
ACORN offers a payment in the form of usage statistics and other information beneficial to the publisher.
ResIDe’s letter does not mention royalties.
All projects, however, agreed that it was always possible to negotiate on any royalties requested just as it was always possible to re-approach publishers (especially by telephone) who have refused permission.
An interesting discussion ensued which ranged over a number of issues: Since the projects had stressed the necessity to keep copious details of publishers the idea was mooted that other institutions might access these details to save them time in requesting permissions, in future.
This is a tricky area owing to data protection laws.
eLib is about to put out a call for a project to gather together information on the permissions organisations have managed to obtain from publishers.
The institutions interested in digitising a work would then be able to check if rights to digitisation had already been obtained, and by whom (although any confidentiality clauses in contracts would, of course, be honoured).
There is also a closed email list called “lis-copyseek” which people use to share, informally, their experience of obtaining permissions.
The fact that publishers seem to drag their heels on the issue of granting permissions for digitisation was put down to the fact that: clearing rights is a boring job for publishing staff and does not take priority some publishers have huge backlogs of requests to plough through ACORN is currently investigating exactly what processes publishers have to undertake in order to approve copyright.
This may well change our attitudes!
Publishers are sometimes culpable of granting rights to works they do not own.
This raises issues for the agreements/contracts devised.
It is advisable that they include warranties signed by the publishers accepting liability in this event.
On the subject of contracts and Heads of Agreement, it was pointed out that JISC would offer legal advice on any document an institution had drawn up to contract with a publisher for permission to digitise a publication.
The idea of a “one-stop-shop” clearing agency which would be sympathetic to libraries and the educational process was heavily supported.
References [1] ResIDe: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/itdev/reside/ [2] ACORN : http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/ [3] PATRON : http://www.lib.surrey.ac.uk/eLib/Patron/Patron.htm [4] SCOPE : http://www.stir.ac.uk/infoserv/scope/ [5] National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (The Dearing Committee) available online at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ Author Details Christine Dugdale, Research Fellow (Information), ResIDe Project, Library Services, Bolland Library, University of the West of England, Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Bristol BS16 1QY.
Tel: 0117 9656261 Ext.
3646.
Fax: 0117 9763846.
E-mail: c2-dugdale@uwe.ac.uk Jackie Chelin, ResIDe Project, Library Services, Bolland Library, University of the West of England, Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Bristol BS16 1QY.
Tel: 0117 9656261 Ext.
3646.
Fax: 0117 9763846. ja-chelin@uwe.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 6 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 6 Buzz copyright Citation BibTex RIS The editor introduces Ariadne issue 6.
Ariadne: The compact edition....
Welcome to this, issue 6 of the Web version of Ariadne.
Comparisons with the last edition will show a large reduction in the number of articles, features and stories.
This is explained in the editorial for the last edition, but to recap, each edition of the Web version of Ariadne is split into two "happenings": An edition to appear at the same time as the parallel paper edition.
This will contain all of the material that is in the paper edition, as well as other articles, reviews and conference reports.
In all, there will be about 35 articles in this "happening".
A major update to appear about a month after the aforementioned edition.
This "happening" will consist of about 5 or 6 articles, reviews and reports; it will be integrated with the main edition, though the new material will be clearly indicated.
The major update for this edition will be on December 21st.
Splitting an issue into two "happenings" will have two effects: Readers will not, as some of them have pointed out, be overwhelmed with a large amount of material in one go... ...however, readers will have new material to select and read every month.
The editor chooses... ...not to be vain, else he would probably pick the caption competition from this issue!
Seriously, for this issue, the editor picks the search engines article, on Yahoo UK and Ireland, by Tracey Stanley.
This is a good look at a UK version (in that the results are biased in favour of UK resources) of one of the oldest Web-based indexes.
The benefits of having UK-based indexes and search engines, which contain only, or have a bias towards, UK resource descriptions, are clear; searching the index, if it is based in the UK, takes less time and is relatively network friendly, as does checking out resources discovered through said index.
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Copyright Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Corner Buzz data software database dissemination infrastructure digitisation tagging identifier copyright multimedia passwords licence ecms privacy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim details some of the legal issues associated with electronic copyright management systems.
The owner of a copyright has the right to prevent others from selling, hiring out or renting, copying it in any form, performing the work in public, broadcasting the work on radio or TV, or amending ("adapting") it.
These acts are the so-called restricted acts.
Anyone who does any of these acts without permission is deemed to have infringed the copyright and can be sued for damages.
Infringement is subject to the requirement that either all the work, or at least a "substantial part" of the work was copied.
If it is shown that the defendant did copy, then his or her intentions are irrelevant in other words, whether the copying was malicious or accidental.
Authorising an infringement is also an offence; it extends even to having a general atmosphere within an organisation that discourages respect for copyright.
Under UK Law, though, it would not be authorising infringement by simply providing employees with the potential facility to infringe, as they may well wish to use such facilities for legal copying, as long as suitable warning notices are given to staff about the dangers of copying and as long as the employer has a track record of disciplining staff how have been found to infringe.
As far as taking a substantial part is concerned, the definition of substantial will vary from case to case.
Substantial certainly does not mean a majority of the material, and can be a very small part indeed.
It is worth noting that the Copyright Act specifically states that storing a work in any medium by electronic means is copying, and therefore a restricted act.
It is also worth noting that the penalties for infringement, except for the most serious cases, are payment of damages and costs in other words, it is a civil offence rather than a criminal one.
The damages are the actual financial damages caused the copyright owner.
International Treaties Copyright law is governed by international treaties the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention.
These allow for basic minimum laws in all countries who are party to the particular treaty, and allow for reciprocal protection for nationals from different countries.
This means that if there is some question about copyright, it is the local law that applies.
If someone wishes to download some records from a French database loaded on a US host, the crucial question is what country he or she is in.
In the UK, British law applies, and the person need not worry about what other laws have to say about this activity.
Impact of Contracts and Guidelines to copyright law Contracts are a key feature of copyright.
Because of the Unfair Contract Terms Act, no clauses can be included in a contract that would be considered "unfair" by the Courts.
These would, arguably, include clauses that reduce the basic rights that someone would have under the provisions of the Act itself.
For example, a contract that attempted in any way to reduce a client's statutory rights under "Fair Dealing", could be rejected as invalid by a Court.
No such case has ever come up to the Courts to my knowledge, though.
Literary works Current Electronic Copyright Management Systems relate primarily, although not solely, to what are known in copyright law as Literary Works, so we need to look at this aspect in more detail.
In principle, ECMS can apply to all types of media, such as musical works, multimedia works, films, etc.
However, the current interest is in Literary Works; the law for the other types of works is subtly different in places, so readers should not assume the comments below apply to such other works.
One of the infuriating things about current copyright law is that it takes no account of the convergence of technology represented by multimedia!
What sorts of works are covered by copyright by the term "Literary Works"?
Virtually anything that is written, printed or recorded in some other way can be the subject of such copyright protection under this heading.
It covers hand-written documents, books, pamphlets, magazines, the words of songs, poetry, learned journals, tabular material such as statistical tables or railway timetables, as well as computer programs, and data in machine readable form.
There is no implication that this is quality literature.
Fair Dealing Fair dealing is a defence against an infringement action.
An individual may make a single copy, or in theory even multiple copies of a literary work as long as the copying does not damage the legitimate interests of the copyright owner and as long as it is for the person him or herself, and is for one of three purposes: for research or private study; for the purposes of criticism and review; and for reporting current events.
What would be considered "fair"?
You will hear people saying: copying anything less than 10% of the original length as being acceptable.
This is wrong.
It is the quality, or importance of the material copied that is important not length.
Look at it from a negative point of view.
What if the material copied were missing from the work?
How much would that reduce its value?
If it would reduce it a lot, then the material copied is substantial and the copying is not "fair".
If not, then it is not substantial and the copying is "fair".
Assuming the copying is for yourself, is not substantial and does not damage the copyright owner's commercial interests, it still has to be for one of those three purposes.
Education is NOT amongst the permitted purposes.
A teacher cannot claim "fair dealing" if offering copies of materials to students.
In other words, all such copying is infringement.
(In fact, the law does allow a miserly allowance to educators if they want to avoid accusations of infringement, but the allowance is so minute as to be meaningless.)
Incidentally, librarians have a unique place in Copyright Law as people exempt from the usual rules and as people permitted to make copies for their patrons, so long as copyright forms are signed and as long as they receive payment for the copies made.
Moral Rights Moral Rights give the right of the author of a work to be acknowledged as the author, and not to have his work subjected to derogatory treatment.
It also gives authors the right to not be falsely attributed with the authorship of a work he or she did not create.
It is important to note that authors must choose to assert their Moral Rights (they are not automatic as copyright is), but at the same time, Moral Rights can never be assigned they remain with the author even if he or she assigned the copyright to a publisher.
Therefore, contrary to some of their statements, publishers have no interest whatsoever in Moral Rights.
Moral Rights are extremely important in an electronic environment it is extremely easy when downloading material to either omit the original author's name or to cut and paste material in a manner that might be considered derogatory.
However, there is little ECMS can do to control such issues (other perhaps than to ensure that the author's name can only be deleted after a warning message is given).
In theory, an ECMS could give a warning every time someone tries to cut or amend a portion of a text, but this is likely to annoy users.
Electronic copyright Because of the ease, low cost, and impossibility of policing of copying materials in machine readable form (such as downloading) or of converting print documents into electronic form (so-called electrocopying), and because of the high quality of the resulting electronic copies, copyright owners are rightly concerned about copyright in machine readable records.
Only if these issues can be addressed to everyone's satisfaction can the proposed "electronic" or "virtual" library become a reality, as well as being technically possible.
If, however, there is no agreement, then there is an increased chance of alienation between libraries/users and publishers, of library users flouting or ignoring the law, or of information users by-passing the publishers altogether and obtaining information directly from authors through bulletin boards.
This will not be in the interests of publishers, nor ultimately in the interests of the libraries or users.
Publishers provide a means of controlling the information explosion by maintaining quality.
By-passing them will be a serious step with implications for bibliographic control and the quality of research.
There is already a delicate and tense relationship between data owners and data users.
How can it be resolved?
It is here that ECMS Electronic Copyright Management Systems can perhaps help.
ECMS Publishers have difficulty in agreeing to any license for the distribution in electronic form material for which they hold the copyright.
There are two major reasons stated for their concern.
The first is the worry that the material will be copied and/or re-disseminated in an unauthorised manner, and therefore, by implication, the publishers will lose sales.
The second concern is that material will be amended and will then be passed off as new material, and it will be difficult to demonstrate that the material had originated from that material that the publisher owned rights to.
Such copying and amendment are, if carried out without the permission of the copyright owner, potentially copyright infringement.
Furthermore, the amendment, if carried out without the author's permission, is potentially an infringement of the Moral Rights of the original authors.
There is a clear need, therefore, for the development of robust, reliable, economic and tamper-proof mechanisms to identify, or tag, copyright material and/or to control the usage of such material.
The existence of such a mechanism would give publishers the reassurance that they require to more readily give permission for the release of their material in machine readable form, or for the digitisation by clients of print material that they own.
An ECMS can address these issues.
One type is software incorporated into word processing, computer typesetting, and DTP softwares, as well as Document Image Processing equipment.
This type of ECMS would automatically tag the document in a tamper proof fashion.
This could be read by anyone to identify the original author and/or copyright owner of the material, and to identify who had made any amendments to the document.
An audit trail would thus be clearly identified.
Another type of ECMS is software used solely to govern or control distribution of the work, which may be in printed or electronic form.
This can be used to limit what can be done with the original or a copy of the file containing the work.
It can limit the use of the file to view only.
It can also limit the number of times the work can be retrieved, opened, duplicated or printed.
Such systems will serve the functions of tracking and monitoring uses of copyrighted works as well as licensing of rights and indicating attribution, creation and ownership interests.
Such measures must not only effectively protect the owner's interests in the works but also do not unduly burden use of the work by readers or compromise their privacy.
The systems will also provide copyright management information to inform the user about authorship, copyright ownership, date of creation or last modification, and terms and conditions of authorised uses.
Once information such as this is affiliated with a particular work, users will be able to easily address questions over licensing and use of the work.
No well established Electronic Copyright Management System currently exists.
There are various independent moves, many by Governments, around the world to develop a globally unique identification system for all types of data.
At this stage, it is not clear whether software houses will develop de facto standards before international bodies agree formal standards.
ECMS and the law British law currently takes no note of ECMS.
Indeed, no country's law at present notes the existence of such systems.
However, ECMS will almost certainly soon have the backing of the law in the USA.
The USA's National Information Infrastructure's Task Force on Intellectual Property published its White Paper in September 1995.
This White Paper focused on changes in the US copyright law needed in the networked environment.
To quote from their Report: "The Working Group recommends that the Copyright Act be amended to include a provision to prohibit the importation, manufacture or distribution of any device, product or component incorporated into a device or product, or the provision of any service, the primary purpose or effect of which is to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent, without authority of the copyright owner or the law, any process, treatment, mechanism or system which prevents or inhibits the violation of any of the exclusive rights under [the Copyright Act]."
The Working Group also stated: "The Working Group recommends that the Copyright Act be amended to prohibit the provision, distribution or importation for distribution of copyright management information known to be false and the unauthorized removal or alteration of copyright management information.
....The proposal prohibits the falsification, alteration or removal of any copyright management information -not just that which is included in or digitally linked to the copyrighted work."
The Working Party Report was followed by Bills to US Congress in October 1995.
At the moment, they are at an early stage of their legislative process.
The Bill is controversial, not because of the material in it on ECMS, but because of proposed changes to "Fair Use" the US equivalent of our "Fair Dealing" and the introduction of a new "transmission right" for copyright owners; so it is unclear if it will become law.
Discussions are developing in the European Union, too, following the publication of the Green Paper Copyright and Related Rights in an information Society in July 1995.
This discussion paper was enthusiastic about the possibilities for ECMS in helping to control the problems of copyright infringement.
it posed the question as to whether such ECMS should be given explicit legal protection, as is proposed in the USA.
Responses by user communities to the Green Paper have been cautious; warnings have been given that ECMS will not solve all problems; they will put barriers, both financial and in terms of user unfriendly systems with hurdles to overcome before someone can access information, for users; and the track record of similar devices (copy protected software, dongles, etc.)
the PC software industry shows that users will boycott products of this type.
The responses have also strongly argued the privacy problems raised by ECMS see below.
It is not clear whether the European Commission intends to issue a Directive on this topic and it will be no doubt some time before it makes any decisions on this issue.
Legal problems raised by ECMS There is no question that the development of ECMS poses many problems.
For example, there is little point in developing an ECMS that is impractical to use, because of too complex a password or charging mechanism, or one that is so expensive that people are tempted to by pass it or ignore it.
However, what I want to consider here are the legal problems created by ECMS.
In my view, there are four major issues raised.
The first is: should ECMS be protected in UK/EC law like the US Bill?
My own view is "yes", they should be, but that to balance users' interests other changes to the law should be introduced at the same time.
The second is: should "fair dealing" and the library provisions be amended to take into account ECMS?
Or if they are not amended, what requirements should be built into ECMS to ensure these provisions are protected?
My view is that the concept of "fair dealing' is already under threat in the electronic environment.
Rights owners are flexing their muscles and are pressurising governments to amend the law to, for example, introduce a "transmission right" that could override "fair dealing" in the networked environment.
I have no doubt this pressure will increase.
Some librarians are arguing that in practice, "fair dealing' cannot last in a networked future ad so we should make the best of the situation by accepting the loss of this right and in return getting publishing to agree that they can circulate copies to users for an agreed modest fee a standard site license in other words.
My own belief is that for ethical and philosophical reasons concerning equity of information dissemination, "fair dealing" should not be given up, and instead users should be arguing for legislation to ensure that no ECMS device can restrict someone's rights to fair deal.
The third is: should ECMS be obliged to include facilities to protect Moral Rights, e.g., to ensure an author's name can never be deleted from a text, or amended?
I believe that this should be a legal requirement, but can see no way that a software can detect "derogatory treatment", however.
The final issue is: what are the implications of ECMS for data protection legislation?
UK Data Protection law currently provides virtually no protection for the individual in respect of data collected by an ECMS, other than the right to inspect the data collected and correct inaccuracies; the new EC Directive, which will come into effect in the UK in stages from 1998 onwards, provides greater protection; in particular, collection of personal data, such as reading habits of an individual, will only be permitted if the ECMS controller can demonstrate that such collection is necessary for its legitimate interests and it does not over ride the individual's right to privacy.
Under the new Directive, too, the ECMS controller is obliged to inform individuals who has received information about them.
I do not believe there is any need to change the law further on this, as I believe a Court would argue that yes, indeed, someone's reading habits is part of his/her right to privacy, and so an ECMS would be unable to collect such information without the individual's express written consent.
Conclusions Clearly, significant legal issues must be addressed before ECMS become well established.
There is just enough time; as has been noted, ECMS are just in the R&D stage at present.
Clearly, publishers will enter into site licensing, electrocopying and other agreements with far more enthusiasm if they could be assured that their copyright interests will be protected by a robust, widely acceptable, well-established tagging and audit system.
ECMS offers a possible solution to this desirable goal, but the legal issues do need to be addressed now.
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Around the Table: Social Sciences Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Around the Table: Social Sciences Buzz data database archives cataloguing ftp mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom from SOSIG takes us on a guided tour of major Internet-based Social Science resources.
The resources references in this article are just a small sample of what is available to social scientists over the Internet.
All of the sites mentioned can be accessed through the Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) [1] a HE-funded gateway to high quality networked resources in the social sciences.
Other subject-based gateways in this area include Biz/ed [2] for economics and business education information.
Biz/ed also contains some excellent primary material such as company facts, tutor support pages and searchable datasets.
Probably the largest social science site is Coombsweb [3] at the Australian National University.
This contains a range of File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), email and Web resources, including a number of the World Wide Web Consortium Virtual Libraries and a useful What’s New in WWW Social Sciences Newsletter.
There are several services in the UK providing access to social science datasets.
The main depository is the Data Archive at the University of Essex [4].
The Archive houses thousands of datasets from a variety of sources, including the Office of National Statistics, the Economic and Social Research Council and other national archives.
Details of the datasets are available through the Archive’s catalogue, BIRON [5], as well as through the integrated catalogue of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives which allows you to search nine data catalogues simultaneously.
Manchester Information, Datasets and Associated Services (MIDAS) [6], provides online access to a number of census-related datasets, government surveys, macroeconomic time series data and digitised boundary data.
The latter is also available through the Edinburgh Data and Information Access service (EDINA) [7].
The Resource Centre for Access to Data on Europe (R*CADE) [8] was launched earlier this year.
This has been set up to help locate and provide access to European datasets and currently contains data from the International Labour Office, the European Union’s Eurostat service and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Of particular importance and use to many social scientists is material from government departments.
The UK is finally following the United States’ lead by beginning to provide invaluable access to this type of grey literature.
Her Majesty’s Treasury Service [9] was the first UK government department to have a public Internet site.
This includes news and press releases, the full text of speeches as well as details of budgets since 1994.
This was quickly followed by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) Government Information Service [10] which provides access to a whole range of national and local government information.
Another good source of traditionally hard-to-find information is the New UK Official Publications Online (NUKOP) database of recent official publications (including Acts of Parliament, Command Papers, House of Commons Bills and other official publications) at the University of Southampton [11] .
To complement these, the Statewatch Database [12] , set up by an independent group of journalists, writers and lawyers, contains over 20,000 entries of news items, books, reports, European Union resolutions and documents monitoring state and civil liberties in the UK and Europe.
For background research, the International Bibliography of Social Sciences (IBSS) [13] contains the bibliographic details of over 680,000 journal articles, book reviews, and monographs from 1980 to date.
The service recently announced a new Web interface to the database via the Bath Information and Data Service (BIDS) [14] and plans are underway to provide abstracts for selected articles as well as converting the back editions of the bibliography from 1951.
Community and voluntary sector issues are covered by the VOLNET [15] database which has over 80,000 bibliographic records from Barnardos, the National Youth Agency, the Community Development Foundation, the Volunteer Centre UK and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The full database is available as a subscription service, but a restricted service is available freely over the Web, containing approximately one-third of the full database.
Another excellent site for community and Non-Governmental Organisations is OneWorld Online [16].
This site contains a huge quantity of information from 120 organisations concerned with sustainable development, human rights and relief issues.
There are a number of good electronic journals available and these often have useful added features such as searchable archives, discussion facilities and links to other resources.
Sociological Research Online [17], a Web-based journal set up under the eLib programme for the publication of work in applied sociology, is a notable example.
People are perhaps one of the greatest resources on the Internet and the ability to share information quickly and easily is invaluable.
There are hundreds of mailing lists of interest to social scientists, a good selection of which can be browsed in the special subject group section of Mailbase [18].
References SOSIG (Social Science Gateway), http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Biz/ed (Business and Economics information Gateway), http://www.bized.ac.uk/ Coombsweb Social Science Server, http://coombs.anu.edu.au/CoombsHome.html Essex Data Archive, http://dawww.essex.ac.uk/ BIRON The Essex Data Archive’s online catalogue and subject index, http://dasun2.essex.ac.uk/services/biron.html Manchester Information Datasets and Associated Services, http://midas.ac.uk/ Edinburgh Data and Information Access, http://edina.ed.ac.uk/ Resource Centre for access to Data on Europe, http://www-rcade.dur.ac.uk/ Her Majesty’s Treasury Service, http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/ CCTA Government Information Service, http://www.open.gov.uk/ New UK Official Publications Online (NUKOP) database of recent official publications, http://www.soton.ac.uk/~nukop/ Statewatch database: the state and civil liberties in UK & Europe, http://www.poptel.org.uk/statewatch/ International Bibliography of Social Sciences (IBSS), http://www.bids.ac.uk/ibss/ Bath Information & Data Services, http://www.bids.ac.uk/ VOLNETUK Community and Voluntary sector database, http://orca.unl.ac.uk:8001/volnet/volnet.html OneWorld Online, http://www.oneworld.org/ Sociological Research Online, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/ Social Science mailing lists at Mailbase, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/other/social-science.html Author Details Debra Hiom, SOSIG Project Researcher, Institute for Learning and Research Technology.
Email: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Tel: 01179 288443 Address: 8, Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TN Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Paper House of Cards (And Why It's Taking So Long to Collapse) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Paper House of Cards (And Why It's Taking So Long to Collapse) Buzz dissemination archives multimedia licence ftp url research Citation BibTex RIS In our previous issue, Fytton Rowland defended the continuation of print research journals into the networked age.
Here, Stevan Harnad presents a different case.
One cannot disagree with most of what Fytton Rowland wrote in his Ariadne article: The four chief functions of the scholarly literature are indeed the ones he listed: quality control, information dissemination, archiving and academic credit.
He is quite right about the indispensability of peer review [1], [2], [3], and about how the safety of our bridges and of our very bodies depends on it.
Nor can one take issue with his distinction between fact and opinion (in principle, though their disentanglement in practice is not always that straightforward [4], [5]).
Both prepublication peer review and continuing postpublication peer scrutiny in the form of critical commentary and attempts to replicate and build on published work are vital to the self-corrective enterprise of scientific inquiry, and perhaps to all of learned inquiry [6], [7].
Incontestable also is the existence and the utility of a hierarchy of learned journals, from the most rigorous and prestigious ones at the top all the way down to a vanity press at the bottom.
If the distinctions that these journals mark were levelled, scholars and scientists could not calibrate their reading and research universities could not calibrate their hiring and promotion practices.
Rowland correctly recognises that both peer review and the prestige hierarchy are medium-independent, but that the inertial mass is currently tilted toward the old medium, and that many aspects of the status quo conspire to keep it there for as long as possible.
The disagreement begins when we get down to specifics: Harnad, Odlyzko and others have suggested a new mode for esoteric publishing that avoids commercial motivations completely, and uses the Internet for direct transmission of information from scholar to scholar without middlemen.
In those research communities which are small, this may be appropriate.
But in many fields there is a large potential audience, and there are readers of scholarly papers who are not researchers medical practitioners are an obvious example.
Unfortunately this misses the crucial feature of my distinction between the trade and nontrade periodical literature [8]: In the nontrade literature not only are authors not paid royalties for their texts, but it is so much in their interest that their publication be untrammeled that they have shown themselves willing to pay for the printing of prepublication preprints and postpublication reprints and the postage and labour to mail them to those who request them; they also invest in the preparation of a digitised text (via their word-processors) and some even pay journal page charges to expedite the dissemination of their work to its would-be readership.
It is this anomalous reward structure, more even than the size of the readership, that distinguishes the esoteric corpus from the exoteric one.
Harnad has conceded that commercial publishers will probably continue to be involved with those journals which have larger, non-research markets.
I concede only those cases where the authors of the articles in the journals are writing for a royalty for their words rather than to report their work.
I don’t think any scholar or scientist would willingly collaborate in restricting access to his work.
There is no longer any need to make that Faustian Bargain in the Postgutenberg galaxy where learned inquiry can at last be skywritten, free for one and all [9].
But electronic-only journals, whether paid for or free, must have quality-controlled content which, once published, cannot thereafter be altered by the author or anyone else, other than by a corrigendum which also passes through the editor.
One cannot quarrel with the refereeing and the unalterable publication; but the net, unlike the paper corpus, also allows errors or advances to be linked to the unalterable first edition in ways that safeguard our bridges and our bodies far more effectively than the scattered corrigenda and letter-to-the-editor resources of the papyrocentric corpus.
This in no way underestimates the value of the Internet for scholarly debate, but it recognises that there is more than one kind of communication that is necessary if good scholarship and good practice in the professions are to be encouraged.
Indeed, and all these kinds of communication are medium-independent, though far more effectively and economically realizable in the aerial medium than earthbound one.
This is as true of primary research as of critical commentary (and I ought to know, having umpired both in paper for nearly two decades now [10], and electronically lo these half dozen years [11]).
It is true in theory that all the top researchers in a field could stop submitting their articles to commercial journals, refuse to referee for them, and transfer their energies to new electronic journals, thereby raising their prestige.
In practice it is unlikely that this will happen by voluntary action.
It is optimal, and it is inevitable, but there’s no second-guessing human nature.
We can, however, try to nudge it along, with subversive projects like electronic preprint archives [12].
Although I’ve given up trying to predict the day of the Apocalypse [13], I would suggest that for large parts of the Physics corpus it may not be long in coming, thanks to Paul Ginsparg’s [14] revolutionary eprint project, conceived in fitting proximity to the conceptual epicentre of another earth-shaking project in Los Alamos.
The only thing that still keeps the paper house of cards propped up in physics despite the fact that xxx.lanl.gov has become the locus classicus for access to the literature is the failure (and it is a failure) to identifying a means of paying the much-reduced but still nonzero cost of implementing peer review and the prestige hierarchy in the new medium [15], [16], [17], [18], [19].
The reason that publishers cannot make an instant transition is not that the learned community is unready for the change.
The change has already happened in physics and in some respects happened so rapidly and so globally that it has hardly been noticed.
But there is a safety net under xxx, and it is held in place by the “Invisible Hand” of peer review, which is still being financed by the publishers whose paper journals are still the final resting place for virtually every eprint in xxx.
No one can imagine what would become of the physics literature if all means of support for publication quality control in physics were withdrawn.
Possibly universities might pick up the tab in some cases, but it’s hard to see how the load would be distributed: with the worldwide physics community the beneficiary, who’s to be the benefactor?
One hears learned societies, university consortia (funded by savings from library serial cancellations) and governments mentioned in this context, but no one has written a credible transition scenario.
I don’t claim to know the right one either, but I can recognise the wrong one when I see it: The large publishers, both for-profit and not-for-profit, argue that ceasing to print their journals will save only a small proportion of their total budget, and that in the intermediate period when publication is in dual form, their costs are actually raised by the need to provide both forms… The HEFCE Pilot Site License Initiative (PLSI) offers one possible way forward, providing as it does electronic access free at the point of use to all members of a subscribing university.
It also demonstrates that the UK government is likely to support the survival of a profitable private-enterprise export industry.
But the smaller journals, genuinely esoteric, seem likely to be replaced by free Internet publications on the Harnad model, to the detriment of publishers who have specialised in low-circulation, high-priced scholarly journals.
I think the hybrid scenarios – produce parallel print and paper editions, offering the electronic one for slightly less than paper and both for slightly more than paper, on the assumption that if and when the centre of gravity shifts to electronic-only, the cost recovery model will stay the same – is nonviable and doomed to fail, because it continues to be based on levying a reader-end toll (whether through subscription, site-license or pay-per-view) which has a fundamental conflict-of-interest, the Faustian Bargain, at its core.
The profitability of journals is well and good, as long as it is not needlessly at odds with the best interests of the authors.
The best interests of nontrade authors (and, when they wear their other hats, the readers of the nontrade serial literature) are best served by having their work available free for all, in perpetuum.
The remaining cost of serial publication, once expenses are scaled down to the electronic-only level, is low enough to render the interests of everyone – the author, the reader, the funder of the author’s research, the university supporting the author, and, yes, the electronic learned serial publishers – better served by recovering those costs and a fair profit at the author’s end, in the form of page charges (paid for by the funders of the author’s research and/or the university employing him to do the research, both co-beneficiaries, with the author, of the widest possible unimpeded distribution of the research reported), rather than by any version of reader-end payment, the latter depending as it does, on restricting access to what the author and his supporters would all prefer to see as free for all.
References Harnad, S.
(ed.)
(1982) Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in scientific quality control, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harnad, S. (1986) Policing the Paper Chase.
(Review of S. Lock, A difficult balance: Peer review in biomedical publication.)
Nature 322: 24 5.
Harnad, S. (1995) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals.
In: Peek, R. & Newby, G.
(Eds.)
Electronic Publishing Confronts Academia: The Agenda for the Year 2000.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Pp.
103-118. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.peer.review.html Harnad, S. (1984) Commentaries, opinions and the growth of scientific knowledge.
American Psychologist 39: 1497 1498.
Harnad, S. (1985) Rational disagreement in peer review.
Science, Technology and Human Values 10: 55 62.
Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the American Physical Society’s Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic Publishing.
Serials Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for Electronic Publishing, pp.
58 61. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub.html Hayes, P., Harnad, S., Perlis, D. & Block, N. (1992) Virtual Symposium on Virtual Mind.
Minds and Machines 2: 217-238. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad92.virtualmind.html Harnad, S. & Hey, J.
(1995) Esoteric Knowledge: The Scholar and Scholarly Publishing on the Net.
In: Lorcan Dempsey, Derek Law & Ian Mowat (Eds.)
Networking and the Future of Libraries.
London: Library Association Publishing.
Pp.
110-118.
Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge.
Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2 1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.)
Computer Conferencing: The Last Word.
Beach Holme Publishers, 1992; and in: M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists (A. Okerson, ed), 2nd edition.
Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992); and in Hungarian translation in REPLIKA 1994; and in Japanese in “Research and Development of Scholarly Information Dissemination Systems 1994-1995. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.html Harnad, S. (1979) Creative disagreement.
The Sciences 19: 18 20.
Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry.
Psychological Science 1: 342 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/intpub.html Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal.
In: Ann Okerson & James O’Donnell (Eds.)
Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing.
Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/subvert.html" Odlyzko, A.M. (1995) Tragic loss or good riddance?
The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (formerly International Journal of Man-Machine Studies), 42 (1995), 71-122.
Condensed version in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 42 (Jan. 1995), 49-53.
Available at URL ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/odlyzko/tragic.loss.Z Ginsparg, P. (1994) First Steps Towards Electronic Research Communication.
Computers in Physics.
(August, American Institute of Physics).
8(4): 390-396. http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/ Harnad, S. (1995) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis?
Serials Review 21(1) 78-80 (Reprinted in Managing Information 2(3) 31-33 1995) http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.quo.vadis.html Harnad, S. (1995) The Post Gutenberg Galaxy: How To Get There From Here.
Information Society 11(4) 285-292.
Also appeared in: Times Higher Education Supplement.
Multimedia.
P. vi.
May 12 1995. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/thes.html Harnad, S. (1995) There’s Plenty of Room in Cyberspace: Response to Fuller.
Information Society 11(4) 305-324.
Also appeared in: Times Higher Education Supplement.
Multimedia.
P. vi.
June 9 1995. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/harful1.html Harnad, S. (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of Electronic Quote/Commenting.
In: B. Gorayska & J.L.
Mey (Eds.)
Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface.
Elsevier.
Pp.
397-414.
Harnad, S. (1996) How to Fast-Forward Serials to the Inevitable and the Optimal for Scholars and Scientists.
Serials Review.
(In Press) http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/intpub.html Author Details Stevan Harnad Professor of Psychology, University of Southampton / Founder of CogPrints preprint archive in the cognitive sciences Email: harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Web page: http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Tel: 01703 592582 Fax: 01703 594597 Address: Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur Buzz framework database browser graphics url Citation BibTex RIS In Minotaur, the collective voice of Internet enthusiasts is countered by words of scepticism or caution.
In this issue, Mike Holderness gives a few worrying examples of how much people outside the western hemisphere are behind us in terms of on-line resources.
I live in a small housing co-operative in East London.
We have more access to electronic information than does the entire Indian university system.
Between 15 of us, we have 72 kilobits per second of network connectivity, with more coming soon.
The link between the Indian academic network ERNET [1] and the rest of the universe is 64kbps; some of the institutions on ERNET make do with 9600bps.
Say it out loud: "Fifteen people in London have more bandwidth than the entire population of India" (I exclude, of course, multinational corporations which can put their $100,000 satellite terminals anywhere they want.)
I could go on at much greater length about information poverty.
But I already have, more than once.
And let's not get this entirely out of perspective.
The electronic information revolution is going to take a while to reach the whole world.
Heck, the mashed-up-tree information revolution has only barely reached the majority of the world's population.
Right now, I want to grouse about the things people do to make it all worse.
Of course, they're not doing it deliberately.
Anti-Paranoic Rule One if it walks like a conspiracy and talks like a conspiracy, it's probably the Invisible Hand at work.
But one does, still, wonder in the case of the Microsoft Network (MSN).
The other day I was trying to look up where fellow freelance journalists' work was being re-used without their permission.
I hit the MSN music site, and a virtual brick wall.
'This is a Microsoft Internet Explorer site.
Click here to download MSIE3.'
Stop.
End.
I tried to cheat my way round this hidden toll-booth on the information superdirt-track, and so far I've failed.
MSIE3 is 'free' to download from the Net (doing so with a fast domestic modem takes three or four hours).
It is also a computer program which requires an absolute minimum of £1000-worth of computer equipment to run.
How much is £1000?
Well, in January I had £1500-worth of portable computer stolen in India.
Naturally, people wanted to know how much it had cost.
I begged some paper, borrowed a pencil, figured out which was the business end, and did some long division by hand.
"It cost," I blushed, "the entire annual income of 3.3 schoolteachers.
[ed earlier versions of this article stated 75, not 3.3 the article author is now retaking GCSE Maths :-] " I can still see them, crowding the room, correcting my arithmetic.
Meanwhile, a colleague in Yorkshire was, last I heard, browsing the Web on one of those neat Tandy portables which the newspapers used to lend to their correspondents.
Runs off A-cell batteries, 300-bitper-second built-in modem, still working after a decade.
Microsoft is not the only force hindering him, and the entire population of India, from getting to many of the 68 million pages which the Web-indexer Lycos [2] had found by mid-November of last year.
Lycos' more powerful competitor is another offender.
To you and me, Lycos looks colourful and packed with tedious, slow-to-download adverts and AltaVista [3] looks cool and businesslike.
But if you access them with the text-only Web browser Lynx, Lycos loads quickly and your cursor is one hop away from the search dialogue, whereas AltaVista dumps you in a forest of links to other things you might want to look at later.
And Lynx is the most interactive use of the Web that most people around the world (where what phone lines there are barely support 2400 bit-second connections) can dream of.
It's not hard to make a Web page which has quite a rich layout in a graphical browser and also works in Lynx, to reach the people who are hungry for information.
I am quite proud of my Internet for Journalists page [4].
Try it!
But I have yet another gripe.
Those 68 million pages represent a decreasing proportion of the information which is actually available.
The rest is hidden behind log-ins and database interfaces which deliberately return garbage URLs as publishers hedge their bets over subscription-based access control.
Only when there is a clear framework for pay-per-read, with a 'Public Reading Right' for access through libraries, and fair recompense for us authors, can the Web fulfil its potential as an information source that is global in both senses.
Responses to this article Reply received Wednesday, 12th February 1997: Your article reminds me of some work I did for a Commonwealth IT group.
From the group I learnt that, although universities in Zimbabwe had access to the Web, they had to pay for their connection time.
They were willing to pay for the useful information, but didn't want to use their budget for accessing logos and gratuitous graphics.
I also learnt that the telephone company in many developing companies is often owned by a multinational company such as AT&T so accessing the University home page with its ornate logo and photo and sound clip of the VC results in hard currency moving from the developing country to a multinational!
You may be interested that a goal of the W3C is universal access to resources.
W3C have prepared a briefing paper on their work on access for people with disabilities.
See http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Disabilities/ for further information.
Brian Kelly UK Web Focus Officer B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk References [1] ERNET Web Site: < http://www.doe.ernet.in/ > [2] Lycos Search Engine: < http://query3.lycos.cs.cmu.edu/ > [3] AltaVista Search Engine < http://www.altavista.digital.com/ > [4] Mike Holderness Journalist pages < http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/lecture.htm > Author Details Mike Holderness is a freelance journalist Email: mch@cix.compulink.co.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: John Hatt Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: John Hatt Buzz copyright video Citation BibTex RIS Alison Kilgour meets John Hatt, traveller's companion turned virtual tourist.
Sitting in the comfort of the kitchen in the basement of the Victorian terraced house which doubles as home and workplace, John Hatt explains how he came to be both a writer and publisher of travel books.
It happened by accident.
"I worked at one time as a publisher's rep, selling books around the country and doing some editing work.
At one point I decided to take a sabbatical, and spent some months in Asia, Africa, and the US.
I have always had this compulsion to give advice and a publisher friend of mine asked if I would do a chapter of a book of advice for travellers -The Tropical Traveller.
Then he commissioned me to write the whole book."
That led to requests from the odd magazine for travel articles.
"But it has been an entire accident because I have always disliked writing."
While writing the book, Hatt discovered that there were many travel books out of print which he felt should be republished, "I started a company to bring some superb books of travel literature back to life.
My misjudgment was not to hoover them all up at once, as I was immediately copied by about twelve other publishers."
The company he started was called Eland, and initially consisted only of Hatt himself and an assistant.
It has, however, grown "organically" over the years.
"It began as travel literature, but I have branched out, mainly because I was determined to publish really good books readable books from beginning to end.
I follow my own enthusiasms."
Hatt has been described as a traditionalist, and believes in good literature.
But this does not preclude an interest in the medium of the Internet, on which his company has its own home page, which boldly states "If you don't like any Eland title, please send it back to us, and we will refund the purchase price."
What was attractive to him about the world of electronic publishing?
This was another accident, but one which has led to his conversion.
"I'm a sort of 'born again' publisher", he remarks.
An American magazine approached Hatt to write for it for 'a very large sum of money'.
He agreed, and to his delight was then offered more money if he was prepared to write for the magazine online providing a traveller's agony column.
Clueless as to what 'online' and 'the Internet' meant, but intrigued and lured by the money on offer, Hatt hired a computer guru.
There followed a period of "absolute misery" for someone whose primary delight was in discovering old books and publishing new ones.
"Everything was on this steep learning curve.
Unfortunately you are not learning about one thing only, you are learning about newsgroups, e-mail, and so on.
I must say that it caused my assistant and myself a great deal of distress."
The online magazine folded after only one session, but by then Hatt had undergone his conversion and was madly enthusiastic about the Internet.
He agrees that there is huge amount of useless information published on it, but feels that this is irrelevant because of the small percentage of good material out there, and the potential of the medium as a whole.
"It's absolutely mind-blowing.
I'm quite Messianic about it, I think there are so many aspects of the Internet that will be beneficial.
The employment of disabled people in their homes springs immediately to mind but there are thousands of other ways in which society will benefit."
The Eland pages have been live for two or three months only.
Hatt admits that he has not sold many books over the Internet, but he is excited by the interest which has been shown by people who would not otherwise have bought, or even looked at, the books he publishes.
It seems there is a great deal of potential for passing trade on the Net.
Drawing on his business instincts and his new-found zeal for networking, Hatt has recently set up another business entirely on the Internet.
Cheap Flights provides a travel information resource.
Flight prices are advertised for the different airlines and agents, together with links to sites giving information about the various destinations.
The site generates income by taking advertising from the various airline companies and agents.
Advertising, at present is the only realistic way to make money out of the Net.
Hatt's next plan is to publish The Tropical Traveller online, chapter by chapter.
It, too, would include advertising, thus generating revenue to offset income lost to book sales.
Fine, but is an online book still a book?
Hatt is a great believer in the book as object d'art.
His are published only on good quality, acid-free, cream-coloured paper.
The bindings are sewn as well as glued, providing wider gutter margins which improve the page appearance as well as making the book much stronger.
"No of course you cannot translate the pleasure of handling a beautiful book to the Internet.
But you can still deliver the content.
It's a lesser experience, but very convenient for all that."
He feels that the format of his book lends itself to electronic publishing, as it is designed to be dipped into.
"I can't imagine anyone would conceivably want to print the whole thing out, but they may want to print out the page on malaria for example, or on buying flight tickets ...
The screen really is not a nice medium for reading, in any sort of a way.
There is no danger whatsoever for a good book."
A bigger danger, for Eland as a recreational publisher, is that the reading habit among the general population has decreased because of television, video and now the Internet.
Nevertheless, the Net provides undreamt of possibilities for marketing books.
Millions of Internet users are now potential Eland customers (provided they have their credit cards to hand), and browsers of Net resources, who happen to share Hatt's esoteric interests, stumble across his books through the use of search engines.
"It gives our books a whole new lease of life".
My final question involves a spot of map-reading, with the help of the professional travel writer.
Any advice for the traveller about to embark on the jungle of the UK rail network?
"Take a good book."
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Copyright Info on the Net Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Info on the Net Buzz data software html browser copyright graphics multimedia licence url research Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim takes a look at some of the Web sites and Bulletin Boards that contain information on copyright issues.
Copyright is an exceptionally popular subject on the Web, as a simple search on Alta Vista or one of the Web Crawlers will show.
The usual rag bag of articles, advertising announcements, academic sites and so on will be picked up by such searches.
In this brief article, I want to draw attention to some of the sites that I find useful when wandering lost in cyberspace.
The sites are in no particular order, and many of them are linked to each other.
I have given them a personal smiley rating as follows: :-| Good site:-) Very good site I have not bothered to list any sites that I would regard as :-(, but on the other hand, the absence of a particular site should not be construed as implying that I think it is :-(; it is much more likely that I am simply unaware of it!
It follows, therefore, that I would welcome input from readers who have come across sites that they think are good.
Please e mail me at charles@dmu.ac.uk; if I get enough comments, I will update this article from time to time.
One thing the research for this short article has shown me is the crazy length of some URLs and the total lack of consistency of style of URLs.
Why do some end with html, some with htm and some with nothing at all?
Is there nothing being done to standardise things, I ask myself...
The Web sites All the URLs listed were checked in September, 1996.
This is no guarantee they will remain up, or with the same content, as the weeks go on!
http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/SIMA/legal/toc.html This is an excellent overview of legal issues associated with the WWW by Andrew Charlesworth, a noted expert in the field.
It not merely provides interesting text, but also useful links to other sites, to Codes of practice, some Acts of Parliament, etc.
Written from the UK point of view.
Charles' rating: :-) http://www.goldnet/users/bn74/law.htm This is a general legal source, with links to law firms and useful libraries.
Charles' rating: :-| http://www.cla.co.uk/ The Copyright Licensing Agency's pages provide background on the CLA generally, with some material on copyright and the Internet, and Press Releases relevant to the CLA.
The advice and commentary it gives are very much based on the copyright owners' point of view, and in particular, its comments on fair dealing and library permissions when handling electronic material need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
Charles' rating: :-| http://www.eff.org/ For the opposite point of view to the CLA's, "point your browser" (as the appalling cliché goes) at this URL.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a libertarian pressure group eager to preserve, or indeed enhance, the anarchic aspects of the Internet; its pages are thoroughly professional.
Excellent links to many articles relevant to the Internet, including a number of polemical articles on copyright and the Internet.
Charles' rating: :-) http://www.aimnet.com/~carroll/copyright/faq-home.html Frequently asked questions about copyright and the Internet, with the answers, by a well-known US expert.
Primarily covers US law, but some coverage of international aspects.
Unfortunately, last updated February 1994, and very poor presentational graphics, but still a useful starting point.
Charles' rating: :-| http://www.copyright.com/ccc_frames.html The US Copyright Clearance Center's pages are much better than its equivalent organisation's in the UK (CLA) because of the non judgmental approach and the many links to other official and unofficial sources of information.
The links cover both the USA and the rest of the world, and the page is a good starting point for any browsing.
Charles' rating: :-) http://www.clari.net/brad/copymyths.html Ten myths about Internet copyright explored and exploded by an eminent US expert.
Although based US law, the comments apply generally.
A useful demolition job of, for example, the idea that there is an implied license to copy anything that is put up on the Net, and some useful links to other sites.
Charles' rating: :-) http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/works/strong.copyright.html This is a lengthy article on copyright and electronic publishing.
Charles rating: :-| http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/ecuplist.html An introduction to ECUP (European Copyright User Platform), and an invitation to register for their discussion list.
ECUP is doing some interesting work on developing model contracts for site licensing of electronic data in academic and other libraries, and I hope once that work is completed, model licenses will be posted n these pages.
At the moment, though, the pages are of limited value, and I am not aware of any sites other than at de Montfort University that offer model contracts.
Charles' rating: :-|, with the potential to become :-) http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ Useful general copyright site, with many links to other sites, to regulations and statutes, issue papers, reports of key court cases, general articles, etc.
US biased.
Charles' rating: :-) http://findlaw.com/index.html This leads you to a search tool for searching just legal Internet sites.
Useful to avoid the dross of general search tools such as Alta Vista.
For example, a search on the keyword COPYRIGHT gave me just 212 hits, and a glance at a few showed them to be mostly highly relevant.
Charles' rating: :-) http://lse.ac.uk/decomate/ Decomate is an electronic library copyright research project involving LSE and Tilburg University The pages tell you about the project and what it is hoping to achieve, and invites you to get involved.
Charles' rating: :-| http://www2.echo.lu/legal/en/ipr/ipr.html Full text of papers published by, or presented to, DGXIII's Legal Advisory Board on intellectual property issues.
There are links to other EU papers of relevance, to Directives, to material on international negotiations, the Berne Convention, national laws, and links to useful articles.
(I have to say "useful" as one of the links is to one of my articles in Ariadne!)
The facility to browse and download the longer documents is handy.
Charles' rating: :-) http://benedict.com/ This is immodestly entitled "The Copyright Web Site", but the title is justified.
It covers everything to do with copyright and the Web, with many articles and links.
Mainly US material, such as the full text of the US Copyright Act.
Most of the material is helpful.
The site needs updating though some of the links are to URLs that are now empty.
Charles' rating: :-) http://www.cic.org/ The Web Pages of the Creative Incentive Coalition, which appears to be a US based copyright owner's group.
Despite the resulting obvious bias, this is an exceptionally useful site, as it provides news items, useful articles from around the world, general commentary, and updates on changes to the law.
US biased, but a fair amount of international coverage.
Unimaginative graphics spoil it a bit, but because it is regularly updated, it is excellent for keeping yourself up to date.
Charles' rating: :-) http://www.imprimatur.alcs.co.u k/ General background on the Imprimatur project, with its own bulletin board, not much used at the time I visited, and a few links.
Charles' rating: :-| http://batnet.oikoumene/ Entitled "WWW Multimedia Law", it covers all aspects of the law and multimedia, such as defamation as well as copyright.
Useful links to articles and newsletters.
http://dorsai.org/p-law/wong_dir/docs/wongpap1.html Lengthy material on intellectual Property Law for multimedia creators; US biased, but the issues raised are international.
Appears to be an extract from a printed work, Charles' rating for both the above sites: :-) if you are into multimediaAnd last, but not least.... http://www.cyberlawcentre.org.
uk/ The UK Cyberlaw Centre, run by Hannah Oppenheim, a law student who is no relation.
Many links to legal sites of relevance to Internet law; UK bias, informal in style, some useful links, covers all aspects of computer law.
Relatively new and still developing, but give it a visit, as us Oppenheims have to stick together.
Charles' rating: :-|, with potential to become :-) Newsgroups and bulletin boards Frankly, I don't think there any worth joining unless you are heavily into this subject.
I am not aware of any general list for sorting out simple queries.
The various Usenet Groups with "copyright" or "IPR" in their names are not heavily used.
The best bulletin board is cni-copyright.
To join, e mail listserv@cni.org and put in your message subscribe cnicopyright, but be warned, you will get at least 20 messages a day, discussing detailed aspects of US law, legal cases and hypothetical situations.
I find it useful because it keeps me up to date on important US cases and their implications, and on the disagreements and confusion in so many areas of the law.
There is a heavy emphasis on Internet and software copyright in the discussions, but it also covers photocopying, libraries, educational use, book and journal publishing, etc.
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Copyright Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Corner Buzz software metadata repositories copyright cataloguing multimedia licence ecms research standards Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim on the copyright issues that all eLib (and many other projects) should be aware of.
Part of the basic philosophy of the eLib programme is to explore issues to do with copyright, to engender culture change amongst librarians, users and copyright owners about copyright, and to explore novel contractual or technical means to overcome the difficulties that copyright poses.
In this article, I look at some of the major project lines and the copyright issues that might be raised from them.
On demand publishing The major issue that has arisen is negotiating rights from publishers for scanning the material in that subsequently is offered under on demand publishing.
Publishers have shown remarkably wide variation in their reactions to requests for permission, even when it is pointed out this is for a short time scale for experimental purposes only.
Amongst the problems raised by publishers are: outright refusal; permission on such onerous contractual terms to make it unrealistic; a refusal to accept liability for errors or inaccuracies in their works; unrealistic charges that make the commercial operation of the service impossible.
Some publishers are also insisting that at the end of the experiment all material that has been converted into machine readable form be destroyed, something that could be addressed by having some sort of escrow arrangement, whereby instead the material is deposited in some repository to which no one can have access without the copyright owner's permission.
Even more surprising, perhaps, is that a given publisher may react in entirely different ways to two different approaches from two different On Demand project teams.
One issue that has arisen recently in connection with this area, but applies equally to other project lines, is the role of the creators.
We think of publishers owning copyright, so they are the ones to talk to.
Often an author or artist also has rights they may not have assigned all their copyright rights to a publisher, and in any case, will almost certainly retain Moral Rights themselves.
In recent weeks both the ALCS and DACS, who represent authors and artists respectively, have approached FIGIT asking that their members' views are taken into account.
The only way to ensure that you do not get into any problems about authors or artists is to INSIST and I use the word advisedly on a clause in any On Demand contract as shown in my first Handout: The Publisher represents and warrants to X that it is the owner of the copyright in the Information or that it is duly licensed to use the copyright material contained in the Information and that the Information used as contemplated in this Agreement does not infringe any copyright or other proprietary or intellectual property rights of any natural or legal person.
The Publisher shall indemnify and hold X harmless from and against any loss, damage, cost, liability or expense (including reasonable legal and professional fees) arising out of any actual or alleged infringement of such rights.
X shall promptly inform the Publisher of any such infringement or suspected or threatened infringement upon X becoming aware of the same.
This indemnity shall survive the termination of this Agreement for any reason.
This indemnity shall not apply if X has amended the Information in any way.
If the publisher refuses such a clause, or something similar, don't sign a deal with them.
I cannot put it simpler than that.
Electronic Journals Here the main issue is copyright assignment by the authors.
As you may be aware, there is considerable debate right now whether authors should assign copyright to journal publishers at all, and if so, whether they should confine themselves to assigning just very limited rights.
FIGIT does not wish to be prescriptive; we want to encourage all sorts of different models; however we would be disappointed if all the electronic journal projects adopted the current publisher stance of; you must assign all copyright to us if you want this item published by us.
Let me make one thing clear if an author submits an article to an electronic (or any other type of) journal, and there is no clear contract stating that copyright is being assigned, then in copyright law, the author retains copyright.
Therefore, in theory the electronic journal is infringing copyright by publishing the article!
There isn't necessarily any implied transfer of copyright just because someone has submitted an article to you.
Therefore, the one thing you cannot do is ignore this issue.
You MUST have some policy in place.
Besides having some clause making it clear that you as the e journal publisher have some rights to reproduce the material on your electronic journal, you will need some standard contractual clauses with your authors along the following lines and remember, this time you are the publisher: The author warrants to the Publisher that it is the owner of the copyright in the material submitted, and that the material does not infringe any copyright or other proprietary or intellectual property rights of any natural or legal person.
The author indemnifies and holds the Publisher harmless from and against any loss, damage, cost, liability or expense (including reasonable legal and professional fees) arising out of any actual or alleged infringement of such rights save where this is the direct result of any amendment of the material done by the Publisher without the agreement of the author.
The author further warrants to the Publisher that publication of the material will not contravene any laws, including but not limited to the laws of libel, defamation and contempt of court (or concepts approximating thereto).
The author shall indemnify and hold the Publisher harmless from and against any loss, damage, cost, liability or expense (including reasonable legal and professional fees) arising out of any illegality or alleged illegality save where this is the direct result of any amendment of the material done by Publisher without the agreement of the author.
This really is to protect your own interests; I strongly commend these clauses to you.
Document Delivery This is potentially a copyright minefield.
Librarians have a unique position under the Copyright Act.
Unlike the rest of humanity, we have a guaranteed immunity against being sued for infringement by copyright owners, as long as we follow certain boring bureaucratic procedures concerning copying for our patrons.
We are explicitly allowed to make single copies which can, in theory, either be a hard copy or an electronic copy incidentally, but it must be a SINGLE copy but only on the following conditions: The person requesting the copy personally signs the standard form requesting that copy.
There is no risk that copies of substantially the same material will be supplied to more than one person at substantially the same time for substantially the same purpose.
Thirdly, you may never supply more than one copy to the same patron, or copies of more than one article from the same issue of a journal to the same patron.
The library may also make copies of a reasonable proportion of any book or monograph upon request to the patron "reasonable" being undefined, but 10% maximum would be a good working rule.
Fourthly, the user is required to make a payment that covers the cost of making the copy plus any overheads associated with the copying facility.
Note that requests on the phone, by e mail, etc.
are unacceptable.
The form must be personally signed by the individual.
This means a secretary's signature is not acceptable.
It also means a stamped signature is not acceptable.
Whilst in theory the form should be received first, then the copy made, in practice the library can make the copy first, as long as it is exchanged with a signed form from the patron.
The library should store these signed forms for six years, and be prepared for them to be checked.
What does this mean in practice?
It means that whilst in theory you can create a copy electronically and deliver it electronically, or in printed form, in practice to avoid the risk of making multiple copies which would be infringement you must control the creation and distribution of electronic copies very carefully indeed.
If you plan to go down this route, I suggest you consult with your own lawyers, or with me and Chris Rusbridge before you proceed.
The law is totally explicit on the need for a personally signed form, so there is no way to get round this, incidentally.
Access to Network Resources The main issue here is that you will have invested time and effort in creating certain types of metadata some indexes or value added catalogue records in a particular subject area.
The products of these efforts, under copyright law, are your copyright, but things get more complex when there are several partners, each of whom has contributed to the resulting network resource tool.
You should sign an agreement amongst yourselves as to the ownership of the copyright in what you create; I commend the TLTP Copyright Guidelines, which can be obtained from TLTP at HEFCE, as a good model for such agreements; please don't ignore this issue, as should your network tool turn out to be another Yahoo!, you will surely want a clear agreement so you can divvy up the money when you float your company on the Stock Exchange.
This may sound flippant, but it isn't.
I have no idea if the developers of Yahoo!
had such an agreement in place, but to avoid problems, get one set up now.
The only other thing to say is that you should be vigilant in protecting your metadata and value added information against infringement, if you believe you have created something of value that you wish to protect for financial reasons, or to protect your own reputation.
Incidentally, exactly the same remarks apply to those projects in the education and training action line if you are creating products that will assist in education and training, such as multimedia packages, and you anticipate they will be sold, or widely used and copied.
I would add that the copyright situation of multimedia is FAR more complex than simple Literary Works by which I mean texts and software.
I suggest if you are creating multimedia products and are concerned about the copyright situation, check the TLTP Guidelines and chat to me, as I do not have time to discuss the issues here.
Electronic Copyright Management Systems Let me finish off by briefly mentioning ECMS Electronic Copyright Management Systems.
Publishers have difficulty in agreeing to any license for the distribution in electronic form material for which they hold the copyright.
There are two major reasons stated for their concern.
The first is the worry that the material will be copied and/or re-disseminated in an unauthorised manner, and therefore, by implication, the publishers will lose sales.
The second concern is that material will be amended and will then be passed off as new material, and it will be difficult to demonstrate that the material had originated from that material that the publisher owned rights to.
An ECMS addresses these issues.
One type is software incorporated into word processing, computer typesetting and DTP softwares, as well as Document Image Processing equipment.
This type of ECMS would automatically tag the document in a tamper proof fashion.
This could be read by anyone to identify the original author and/or copyright owner of the material, and to identify who had made any amendments to the document.
An audit trail would thus be clearly identified.
Another type of ECMS is software used solely to govern or control distribution of the work, which may be in printed or electronic form.
The systems will also provide copyright management information to inform the user about authorship, copyright ownership, date of creation or last modification, and terms and conditions of authorised uses.
Once information such as this is affiliated with a particular work, users will be able to easily address questions over licensing and use of the work.
No well established Electronic Copyright Management System currently exists, but there is a lot of research going on in the field in the USA, Europe (mainly funded by DGXIII) and in the UK (funded by eLib).
eLib is funding two separate projects a review of the whole area, carried out by Bill Tuck that will be completed in the next few weeks, and a medium term project called ERCOMS, based in my University and starting in a few weeks' time, for the development of ECMS for a particular application electronic reserve systems.
There is no doubt that the copyright owners are keen on the idea of ECMS.
In the USA, the Digital Rights Management group, representing major players such as UMI, West, Reed, Lexis-Nexis, Dun and Bradstreet and McGraw Hill are actively developing policies and standards in the field.
It is a moot point whether technological fixes such as ECMS will ultimately prove viable, but it is important that those involved in eLib and similar projects keep a close eye on developments in this field.
Below is a reply to comments made by Nick Joint about this article.
Nick's original response is tabbed with >'s Charles response to Nicks response appears as normally tabbed text > May I congratulate both the author and the journal for publishing such > an informative and helpful article on the thorny topic of electronic > copyright in the most recent issue of ARIADNE (May 1996).
Could I also > tease out some points from the section outlining the statement > to be included in On Demand Publishing contracts with publishers, which > I copy (for the purposes of fair comment and scholarly criticism!)
> below?
> > Firstly, it would be interesting to know how to fill in a variable for > the value "X" in the contract statement!
Elib-funded projects are > funded on an avowedly collaborative basis, which gives rise > to problems over liabilityjust who is responsible for what in the > consortium model, and how do you regulate such responsibility?
If a > lead site handles the drawing up of contracts, should that site be the > elusive "X", or should the whole consortium be named as the potentially > offending "X" in question?
Even if the consortium is named as the entity > with whom the publisher makes the agreement, should a separate document > regulating responsibility be looked to as the main means of regulating > liability between the members of the consortium, and to what extent > should the distribution of the liability between members of the > consortium be explicitly stated in the publishers' agreement (since it > would be vital for the publisher to know just who is responsible for > what in the contract they are signing)?
The contract has to be a natural or legal person.
A consortium team may have no formal status (e.g.
as a partnership or registered companhy), so I would always recommend that the contract should be signed with the lead institution.
You might then want to have letters of agreement between that lead institution and the partner institutions outlining their share of their responsibilities (this is how SCOPE, for example, has done it).
> Secondly, the phrase limiting the danger of liability through > infringement of moral rights ("the Information used as contemplated > in this Agreement does not infringe any copyright or OTHER > PROPRIETARY OR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS of any natural or legal > person...") makes it very important that the exact nature of the use > of the information is explicitly laid out somewhere in the agreement.
> Since many On Demand Publishing Elib projects will be taking excerpts > rather than complete works of authors, it is important that > publishers/authors be aware that they are being asked for permission for > partial copying of a work, and for a statement that moral rights (rather > than "copying rights") are not being infringed in any way.
This is > especially true in view of the final sentence of the clause, which > renders the protection given by the clause invalid if the work of the > author is amended in any waypartial copying may be taken as a > form of amendation to the work, and thus prohibited by the terms > of the clause itself.
Yes, absolutely right, and the question of Moral Rights should have been adressed at far greater length in my article.
The digitising may well be permitted by the copyright owner, but that does not stop Moral Rights arising if only a selection of the book is scanned in.
The author may object on the grounds that this is derogatory treatment.
How to deal with this?
*Either* write to the author in person outlining what you plan to do and ask for their agreement to it; *or* go ahead anyway and hope that what you are doing is not derogatory treatment.
the latter is risky!
On the plus side, Moral Rights only apply if the person has asserted them.
By checking the book to see if the author has asserted his/her Moral Rights.
if there is no mention of such an assertion, you can ignore the issue of Moral Rights.
> Lastly, the clause is an excerpt from a contract between > an Elib project and a publisher.
Because (as the article > specifically states) authors can assign copyright but > reserve moral rights, for a publisher to sign the contract > in legal safety, they would have to contact their authors to gain > assurance that (for example) partial copying of their work does > not infringe their moral rights.
Only then could the publisher sign > the contract.
Isn't this rather a lot of work for them?
Surely there > is a danger of them walking away from the amount of administration > involved in this sort of agreement?
Publishers are completely free to assign copyright as they see fit.
They are not going to get involved with the arguments on Moral Rights that is between the eLib consortium and the author direct so it does not cause a problem for the publishers, other than perhaps to supply the consortium with the publisher's address, or act as a post box for communications.
> I make these points having read recently that the conductor Claudio > Abbado is suing his record company for "publishing" a cd of excerpts > from Abbado's cycle of Mahler symphonies.
These excerpts > were compiled allegedly in breach of his moral rights.
If only they > had contacted Charles Oppenheim before producing the album... Yeah, and if only I charged a proper consultancy fee... :-< Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Netskills Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner Buzz html graphics multimedia gif Citation BibTex RIS Justin MacNeil reviews FrontPage '98 Beta.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a great fan of Microsoft.
And yet, despite my innate prejudices, I have to admit that I found FrontPage 98 to be very impressive.
This is a tool which anyone who can use a typical word processor could use to create a very professional looking website in a matter of hours.
And that includes learning to use the package.
The complete FrontPage “package” includes both FrontPage itself and Microsoft Image Composer (MIC), a graphics package designed with the Web in mind.
Image Composer includes a “Web export Wizard” and Microsoft GIF Animator, to help you create graphics suitable for the Web.
As you might expect from Microsoft the integration with FrontPage is very close: Image Composer and GIF Animator are used as the image editing components in FrontPage.
You can import an existing Web site into FrontPage, either from a directory on one of your drives (local or network) or directly from a Web server.
FrontPage works best though when you’re creating a site from scratch.
You can choose to do this in two ways: by creating a “One Page Web”, which essentially just sets up a home directory with a blank index page in it, or “From Wizard or Template”.
Creating a site using the provided templates and wizards allows you to very quickly create an impressive looking and well structured site with a minimum of effort.
The site will be created with a number of pages for the different areas of your site and suitable navigational links to join them into a coherent whole.
Most impressive for those with a pressing deadline, and a desire to create a site that looks slick and “professional”, are the included Themes.
These are rather like the pre-defined presentation designs in PowerPoint, in that they provide a series of coordinated graphics for page banners, navigation buttons, bullet points, etc.
Admittedly, as with the PowerPoint presentation designs, I imagine that after your users have seen half a dozen unrelated sites using the exact same designs they may cotton on to things and be a lot less impressed by your “creative talents”, especially since (at least in the Beta) there are only seven basic themes to choose from.
Nevertheless, the fact is that almost anyone can put together in minutes the outline of a site which would have required the talents of a professional web designer only a few months ago.
FrontPage isn’t just a competent WYSIWYG editor though; it includes a variety of site management features to make the web maintainer’s life easier.
These include a link verification feature (see Fig.
1), a “Hyperlinks” view (Fig.
2) and a “Navigation” view (Fig.
3), which shows the relationships between your Web pages.
It is these hierarchical relationships between pages which define the navigation links which are inserted by the program.
In addition to helping you organise your Web pages, FrontPage also helps you keep track of your work schedule through the Tasks view (Fig.
4).
The idea here is that you can associate “To Do” items with the various elements of your site, and assign them to named team members, thus allowing you to get a feel for how your site development and maintenance are proceeding.
In Conclusion: It is clear that the days of hand-coding individual web pages and then laboriously stitching them into a seamless and consistent Web site are numbered.
You could say that I’m from the old school of HTML authors my favorite authoring tool is a good text editor and I’m inclined to think of WYSIWYG HTML editors as being WYGIWYD editors What You Get Is What You Deserve.
And yet I like FrontPage (although it does have it’s foibles) and I think that it, and tools like it, are certainly the future for most of us.
And it’s a future that is very nearly upon us.
Expect FrontPage to be released early in the new year.
If you want to try out the free beta version go to: http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/ It will expire on 31st December 1997.
There is also an online “multimedia demo” available from the above page, implemented with Shockwave, which demonstrates some of FrontPage’s more interesting features.
Figure 1 FrontPage window showing a Hyperlink Status view Figure 2 FrontPage Hyperlink view of a small web site < P ALIGN=“CENTER”> Figure 3 Navigation view of a FrontPge Web   Figure 4 The Tasks view, showing the status, priority and person responsible for various tasks Author details Justin MacNeil Netskills Trainer University Computing Service University of Newcastle Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU UK justin.macneil@newcastle.ac.uk http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Journals: Problem Or Panacea?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Journals: Problem Or Panacea?
Buzz data software database archives identifier copyright video cataloguing hypertext passwords marc ejournal licence telnet cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Judith Edwards outlines some of the problems faced by academia in the acquisition and provision of electronic journals.
Most staff and students in UK higher education now have online access to hundreds of academic journals, thanks to the HEFCs Pilot Site Licence scheme.
Many more journals are also available in electronic form, access to which must be negotiated separately.
The total number of electronic journals is now so large that the most ostrich-like of librarians can no longer ignore them.
A recent posting to lis-elib maintained that "There will be 3000+ e-journals based on existing publications alone (i.e.
parallel print/e-journals) by the end of this year (until now we have been talking about 100s)" [1].
I shall discuss here some of the problems encountered in trying to provide access to all this material I wish I could also provide the solutions!
The Universities Science and Technology Librarians Group discussed the topic at a meeting in March 1996 [2], and I'm grateful to my colleagues for the long list of problems raised then.
In an ideal world, the electronic journal is surely the answer to so many of our traditional problems, with speedy delivery, availability unlimited by time or geography, and searching facilities.
And think of all the shelf space saved!
In reality, we're in a transitional period, having to cope with all our print journals at the same time as coming to terms with a new medium.
I suspect few libraries have yet replaced print journal subscriptions with an electronic service, as they have already done with bibliographic databases.
What do I mean by an "electronic" or "online" journal?
"Electronic" one where the text is read on, and/or printed from, the end user's computer rather than as print on paper.
"Online" the data is downloaded directly from the host computer rather than via an intermediate medium such as CD-ROM.
Not being a CD-ROM fan, I shall here discuss only the problems of online journals.
I'm also mainly talking about "academic" journals, from reputable publishers such as learned societies and containing scholarly, peer-reviewed articles, rather than the newsletter type of publication.
Most of the journals we're currently concerned with are electronic full text versions of an existing print-on-paper journal.
There is however a continuum from titles providing Tables of Contents only, to those adding abstracts of articles, selected full text articles, all articles as full text but excluding letters, reviews, etc., and complete full text equivalents of the print version.
Some add content to the electronic version, such as responses to articles and hypertext links to related resources.
Electronic journals fall into several groups according to the method of payment and/or licensing.
The HEFCs Pilot Site Licences provide subscribing UK HE institutions with free access either to all a participating publisher's online titles, or to those to which the institution subscribes in print.
Many other publishers are allowing free access to the electronic version of titles one subscribes to in print, sometimes just for a trial period; some are making an additional charge for the electronic version from the start.
Some academic journals are freely available online, for example those funded under the eLib programme [3].
The medium should not overshadow the fact that most of the electronic journals we deal with at the moment are still traditional journals, and many of the procedures for dealing with them will be little different from those for print on paper.
A simplified flowchart for traditional academic library journal processing will be something like this:   Traditional academic library journal processing Each step has its own problems with the implementation of electronic rather than paper journals, which I shall discuss in turn.
Selection Identification of suitable titles is in some ways easier in the electronic medium, with the availability of services such as the ARL Directory [4] and e-mail notification services like the NewJour list [5] .
All the usual journal selection criteria will apply relevance to the needs of one's users, peer review, status of publisher, etc.
and additional ones will apply to the electronic medium.
Foremost among these is whether users will be able to read the journal and print articles from it do they have appropriate hardware, networking and software?
Many publishers are making electronic journals available free for a trial period analogous to the sample issue and it's important to get users to try these out and give you feedback.
A problem here is that of control over the timing of the trial academic staff must be free to take part, which may be impossible at certain times of the year.
Selection is in some ways easier if you already subscribe to the print version.
If the electronic version is free with the print subscription, as many are, then the feeling tends to be "We might as well take the electronic version too".
Checking in Checking-in of issues of a print journal is generally straightforward, whether or not you have an automated serials management system.
Checking that electronic issues are available online is likely to be far more time-consuming, especially since they are often available before the corresponding issue appears in print (for a dual print/electronic title).
Another problem is what is an issue?
The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science [6] publishes articles as and when they are accepted.
While it maintains the idea of the volume in that articles are organised on the Web page by year, the "issue" concept no longer exists, and one has no way of knowing when the next article may appear.
This makes claiming missing issues impossible!
Making available Most licences for electronic journals will allow access by bona fide members of the institution holding the licence, and it is up to the institution to ensure that only these people are given access.
External users needing to consult a print journal are admitted to most academic libraries, with or without various registration procedures, but access to electronic journals will often be impossible for such people.
The terms of the licence may prohibit it, or the institution's own arrangements for access may do so, for example where the user has to have an account on its computer network to be able to use any of the machines on campus.
The electronic medium may present problems for access and use of the journals, for both library staff and users.
Publishers generally limit access by either the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the user's computer, or by password.
The former is now common, and more convenient for most users, who don't have to obtain and remember a password.
However, the range of permitted IP addresses for the institution's sites must be established and changes notified to the publisher; there seem to be as many definitions of an "institution" and a "site" as there are electronic publishers multi-site institutions beware!
The problem as far as users are concerned is that access will be restricted to their institution and they will not be able to access a journal from home, thus negating what many see as the major advantage of electronic journals.
Password access gets over this problem, but the library then has to decide on a mechanism to give passwords only to authorised users.
The national ATHENS initiative [7] , whereby users only need one username and password to get access to many different services, is an important step forward here.
(At the time of writing only electronic journals published by Blackwell and Blackwell Science are covered, in the JournalsOnline service [8] ).
The IDEAL service [9] is, as far as I know, the only one to offer users the choice of direct login (from a computer in a subscribing institution) or username/password (which they can use from home) to access the full text of journals.
One of the stumbling blocks to promoting the use of electronic journals is the potential plethora of interfaces and delivery mechanisms with which the user may be required to become familiar.
The situation has stabilised considerably in the last year or so, with primary access via the Web and delivery of full text as a PDF (Acrobat) file becoming almost the norm.
However, although Web interfaces may have many features in common, their implementation by different electronic journal publishers varies considerably, with a variety of search options and navigational tools.
Increasingly, multi-media features are appearing in electronic articles, such as sound or video clips, and users will need to install the appropriate software and hardware to access them.
Cataloguing A recent posting to lis-link [10] summarised the results of an informal survey on electronic journal cataloguing practice.
The small number of replies would seem to indicate that few libraries, in the UK at least, are so far cataloguing electronic journals.
The main reason is probably that expertise in cataloguing electronic resources has not yet built up here, and another that few records are as yet available for downloading from sources such as OCLC.
Another problem is that standards are still evolving.
For instance, the 856 field (Electronic Location and Access) isn't yet part of UKMARC, so even those UK libraries with Web catalogues can't link from the catalogue record to the electronic journal itself.
This will no doubt be resolved in time, and we at UCL are putting the 856 field in our records anyway.
For examples of our electronic journals catalogue records, try looking for Appetite or Journal of Biological Chemistry on our Libertas system [11].
Those of us without a Web interface to our catalogue must provide access for our users by listing electronic journals on our Web pages.
This means a duplication of effort if we also catalogue them, but this should be a temporary state of affairs until we all have Web catalogue interfaces.
Ideally, one would like an electronic journal's URL (whether linked from a plain Web page or a MARC record) to be that of the title itself.
In practice, many libraries are linking only to the home page of the publisher's electronic journal service, for example, Academic Press's IDEAL service [9], both because the URLs of each title can be extremely long, and because in the past they have changed, and may do so in the future.
Printing Printing the article the user wants is the equivalent of photocopying the printed page.
The problems it presents will often be those of the networked rather than the stand-alone environment, and particularly those of cost.
Most academic library users pay a charge per page of photocopying, but this is not yet always the case for computer printing.
Where it is not, the institution may incur heavy printing costs, especially when students cotton on to the fact that such printing is free to them!
Problems may also arise for users with older printers, and whose printer is not configured to suit the file format of a particular journal.
Users may not yet be aware of the length of time it can take to print a journal article in PDF format, which will again pose particular problems with networked printers.
Costs One of the biggest problems for libraries at the moment is the extra staff time needed to administer electronic journal provision, as virtually all the work involved is on top of that which library staff do already.
There are also extra costs in training users; more resources are offered to them each year and consequently we have to increase the number and/or length of training sessions.
And before staff can train users, they have to train themselves, or be trained, in what electronic journals are available and how each is best used; some people will find this easier than others.
Staff costs, particularly for supporting users, will also be incurred by departments other than the library, such as the Computer Centre.
Electronic journals which are currently free may well start charging for access soon, and the periodicals budget will have to absorb these costs if the library decides to continue subscribing.
It is difficult to quantify the extra hardware and support costs, as these are increasing already with the growth in personal computing and Internet use generally.
Computers and printers may be tied up for longer downloading and printing articles; helpdesks and enquiry points will become even busier.
If and when electronic journals replace their printed equivalents, then the savings in terms of human and other resources may be considerable.
Libraries will no longer have to shelve or bind their journals, or replace lost or damaged issues, and may need fewer photocopiers.
Archiving The equivalent of metres of back issues of journals is the electronic archive.
It is assumed now that libraries will hold back runs of journals and that at least one library somewhere will hold a complete run of a title but the question of archiving electronic journals remains unresolved.
At the moment, publishers are maintaining their own archives of electronic journals, which are quite extensive in some cases, but even given the ever-decreasing cost of electronic storage, one wonders whether this situation can continue.
Many people feel that archiving should ultimately be the responsibility of national libraries.
One problem is that currently copyright deposit does not apply to the electronic medium, so they incur extra costs in acquiring electronic material.
Another, which also applies to other libraries holding large electronic archives, is that of access to the holdings.
Who will be allowed access to a title?
licensing arrangements have so far been quite restrictive.
Will access to issues which the library has purchased be maintained if the subscription is subsequently cancelled?
Will data be refreshed and ported to new hardware, or will legacy hardware need to be maintained to read older data?
Such problems probably do not concern most of us in our daily work, and will not arise for a few years, but it is useful to be aware of them, particularly if making a decision as to whether or not to cancel a print subscription in favour of an electronic one.
A related question concerns inter-library loans.
If a library subscribes to only an electronic version of a journal, under present copyright legislation and licences it will not be able to make copies for another library.
Feedback It has always been notoriously difficult to quantify the use of printed journals, and one feels that the electronic medium should improve the collection of statistics in this area, as it has, for example, with online circulation.
The publishers are presumably collecting statistics on the use of their electronic journals, but whether or not they will make them available to institutional subscribers remains to be seen.
Measuring access to Web pages is notoriously inaccurate, although some access mechanisms should improve accuracy.
The problem of finding out what the user does with a retrieved article (such as how much of it they read and how useful they find it) remains; in these early days there must be a lot of exploration and trying things out, which will inflate the apparent use of a journal.
Many currently free electronic journals will start charging for access from 1998, so we need feedback now to enable us to decide whether or not to pay an extra subscription for electronic access, or even to cancel the print version.
As well as quantitative data on number of accesses, we need qualitative information from users on how useful they find online access, whether or not they prefer it, the problems they've encountered, and so on.
Projects such as SuperJournal [12] have funding to enable them to use questionnaires and run focus groups, and their results should prove very useful to all of us.
In the meantime, we have to collect and make use of feedback from our users as best we can.
Response to this article Amy Tucker, Electronic Journals Product Manager, Institute of Physics Publishing <amy.tucker@ioppublishing.co.uk> replies on 22-July-1997: I would like to respond to Judith Edwards' article 'Electronic Journals Problem or Panacea' Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) is part of the HEFCE agreement and provides access to 28 full text journals online to participating institutions providing they have one or more print subscriptions via the Electronic Journals service (http://www.iop.org).
In her article Judith states that: The IDEAL service [9] is, as far as I know, the only one to offer users the choice of direct login (from a computer in a subscribing institution) or username/password (which they can use from home) to access the full text of journals.
Just to let you and your reader know this is not the case.
IOPP abolished the need for obligatory Site and user passwords in November 1996 and since then have offered a multi-level service which includes access from the home and office: Standard service allows end-users to access our journals online without the need of a username or password, Enhanced service which offers extra functionality such as e-mail alerting, personalised main menu, default searching, and a virtual filing cabinet.
The nature of this level of service requires that the user sets up their own username and password.
Remote Service where the users can users their username and password to access the service from home.
Access to the service is verified by IP address.
Judith also mentioned the problems associated with IP registration: However, the range of permitted IP addresses for the institution's sites must be established and changes notified to the publisher; there seem to be as many definitions of an "institution" and a "site" as there are electronic publishers multi-site institutions beware!
We allow institutions to register their site by domain name, thus solving many of the problems that occur if a number of IP address ranges are covered, or require adjustment.
I hope this information is of some interest to you.
References [1] Steve Hitchcock, (12 June 1997).
Re: Secure document delivery.
Posting to lis-elib.
Archived at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1997-06/0050.html [2] Report of USTLG Meeting 14 March 1996.
Posting to lis-scitech.
Archived at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-scitech/1996-03/0041.html [3] Electronic Library Programme project details, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/ [4] Association of Research Libraries (1995).
Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists.
Mirror site: http://www.gold.ac.uk/history/hyperjournal/arl.htm [5] NewJour: Electronic Journals and Newsletters, http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/ [6] Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science, http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/publications/cjtcs/ [7] Athens Authentication service, http://www.niss.ac.uk/authentication/index.html [8] BIDS Journals Online, http://www.journalsonline.bids.ac.uk/JournalsOnline/ [9] IDEAL (International Digital Electronic Access Library), http://www.janet.idealibrary.com/ [10] Val Wilkins, (20 June 1997).
E-journals: summary of survey.
Posting to lis-link.
Archived at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-link/1997-06/0162.html [11] University College London Library: Libertas online catalogue, telnet://lib.ucl.ac.uk log in as library [12] Superjournal project, http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/sj/ Author details Judith Edwards, Assistant Librarian, University College London Library, Email: j.a.edwards@ucl.ac.uk Tel: 0171 380 7833 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Animate Your Pages Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Animate Your Pages Buzz software javascript html browser copyright dom interoperability Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly gives an introduction to Dynamic HTML, explaining recent developments that enable dynamic web pages to be produced using simple scripting languages such as Javascript.
Background to HTML HTML was designed primarily to define the basic structure of documents.
Documents contained headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc.
), paragraphs (<HP>), list items (<LI>), etc.
Web browsers, such as Netscape and Internet Explorer could then display the document structure, with headers displayed in a large font, list items with bullets, etc.
HTML’s simplicity was instrumental in the Web’s early growth in popularity.
Web pages could be produced very easily, since there was no need to master a complicated language.
Authoring software could also be produced very easily, and indeed many authoring tools were written and often made available free-of-charge.
But HTML’s simplicity meant that Web pages were very limited in what they could do.
It was not possible to provide the more interactive facilities which were available in other desktop tools we are familiar with.
Dynamic HTML Dynamic HTML [1] overcomes these limitations by providing an object model for HTML elements (and accompanying style sheets).
The content of each HTML element is available to a programming language.
The programming language can respond to end user events, such as moving the mouse over a heading, clicking on an element, etc.
An action can then be applied to any of the HTML elements.
So, for example, all of the headings in a document can be clickable, providing simple outlining capability.
Example Like to see an example of Dynamic HTML?
Well this article has been written in Dynamic HTML!
If you are using a Web browser with full support, clicking on the heading in this article will cause the article body to collapse.
Clicking on the article again will redisplay the article.
Figure 1 ilustrates this.
Figure 1a: Initial View of Article Figure 1b: Article After Collapsing Two Headings Figure 1a shows the original article.
The cursor is moved across the first heading (the cursor incidentally changes shape to a pointing hand).
Following a mouseclick, the article is then collapsed.
The second section is then collapsed, leaving the display as illustrated in Figure 1b.
How is this done?
This example of Dynamic HTML is easily achieved.
The following Javascript program is included in the HEAD of the document.
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=“JavaScript”> <!– function ToggleVisibility(e) { if (e.style.visibility == “hidden”) { e.style.visibility = “visible”; } else { e.style.visibility = “hidden” } } // STOP HIDING –> </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE=“JavaScript”> <!– function toggleDisplay(e) { if (e.style.display == “none”) { e.style.display = “”; } else { e.style.display = “none” } } // STOP HIDING –> </SCRIPT> Then each of the headings contains a definition for the cursor and an action to be carried out when the cursor is clicked, as shown below: <H2 STYLE=“cursor:hand” onclick=“toggleDisplay(sect4);”>Limitations</H2> The text of the section to be hidden is defined using the <DIV> element as shown below: <DIV ID=“sect4” STYLE=“display: visible”> … <DIV> When the cursor moves over the heading, the cursor changes shape to a hand (due to the STYLE=“cursor:hand” definition).
When the mouse is clicked the toggleDisplay Javascript function is executed, which toggles the visibility attribute of the named division, between the values of hidden and visible and the display attribute between the values of none and empty.
Limitations This example of Dynamic HTML is backwards compatible.
If you use an old browser the article will be displayed as normal, and clicking on a heading will have no effect.
Both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 4.0 and Netscape Communicator 4.0 claim to support Dynamic HTML.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s and Netscape’s implementations are not fully interoperable.
In this case it seems that Netscape are failing to support the Dynamic HTML as currently being defined by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Netscape’s lack of support for the Dynamic HTML model being developed by W3C means, for example, that, in the example given in this article, if the article is displayed initially with the section text collapsed, it is not possible to expand it.
Conclusions This article has given a simple example of how a dynamic effect can be layered onto an existing structured HTML resource.
Although such simple effects can be achieved quite easily, it is not necessarily easy to ensure that Dynamic HTML is used in a backwards compatible.
A number of books and Web resources about Dynamic HTML are available including Microsoft’s Dynamic HTML tutorial [2] and Instant Dynamic HTML Programmer’s Reference IE4 Edition [3].
References [1] Document Object Model, http://www.w3.org/DOM/ [2] Dynamic HTML, http://www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder/workshop/author/dhtml/ [3] Instant Dynamic HTML Programmer’s Reference IE4 Edition, http://rapid.wrox.co.uk/books/0685 Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323943   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Moral Rights Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Moral Rights Buzz copyright multimedia Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim describes the issues and pitfalls in this often overlooked area of copyright legislation.
If you are involved in any digital libraries project that deals with other peoples' material held in an electronic form, read this article.
In previous papers for Ariadne, I have examined some general copyright issues for eLib projects, and copyright problems associated with Electronic Copyright Management Systems.
In this paper, I want to look at some of the effects of Moral Rights legislation on electronic library developments.
Moral Rights give the creator of some copyright works, including literary works, artistic works and films, three rights.
The first is the right of the author of a work to be acknowledged as the author or creator.
The second is the right to object to his or her name being attributed to something he or she did not create.
The third is the right not to have his or her work subjected to "derogatory" treatment, i.e.
to some amendment that impugns his or her integrity or reputation.
This is the most important of the rights and the one I want to home in on, but please don't ignore the other two in anything you do!
It is important to note that authors or creators must choose to assert their Moral Rights (they are not automatic as copyright is), but at the same time, Moral Rights can never be assigned they remain with the author even if he or she assigned the copyright to a publisher or some other organisation.
Therefore, contrary to some of their statements, publishers have no interest whatsoever in Moral Rights.
It is also worth noting that in some circumstances, Moral Rights can never exist, e.g.
if you are an employee who is paid to create copyright material, you cannot acquire Moral Rights to that material.
Moral Rights are extremely important in an electronic environment it is extremely easy when downloading material to either omit the original author's name or to cut and paste material in a manner that might be considered derogatory.
Moral Rights and the Electronic Library There are several ways that Moral Rights issues might arise in an electronic library, and it is important not to trivialise or ignore the issue.
The key point to remember is: it may be legal to do something from a copyright point of view but that action may well still infringe Moral Rights and lead to legal action against you!
Consider a few examples: You have an On Demand service whereby certain portions of texts or journal articles have been scanned into a server and are then delivered, in electronic form and/or in printout form, to library users.
You have taken great pains to ensure that this service is free of all copyright problems because you have used out of copyright material and/or material created by your own staff who have agreed to this and/or you have obtained the necessary licenses from the copyright owners.
Nonetheless, you may be infringing the Moral Rights of the creators because either you fail to mention the author's name in the material you deliver and/or because you are only offering a portion of the original material, this may present a biased view of the author's thoughts on the topic, and is therefore derogatory treatment.
You have developed a service whereby you take original material and have added value by inserting a number of WWW links into the text to link this item to other relevant items that the library (or other) user will find useful.
Again, you have obtained all the relevant copyright clearances to download the material, and you have done all the added value for yourself.
The author may object to these links if they are derogatory.
You may, for example, link the author's paper to an organisation's Web page of which he or she disapproves (Church of Scientology home page, tobacco company home page, anti-abortion group home page, neo Nazi group home page , a link to a paper by the author's rival.... Can you be sure the creator will not object to any of the links you have provided?)
the creator can, in theory, then sue because you have amended his or her article in such a way as to impugn the author's integrity by associating the article with something of which he or she disapproves.
(Message to the Editor of Ariadne: do not link this article to any WWW pages associated with Dr Ray Wall!)
[Ed: Who?]
You are developing multimedia products and choose to use a short extract from some music, some picture or some moving images.
These are either so short you are confident you do not infringe copyright (bit of a risk, but let's assume you are right), or you have permission to take these copies.
You still could infringe the creator's Moral Rights by failing to acknowledge the creator by name or because the short extract is derogatory.
These are just three of the ways you can wander into the Moral Rights minefield by accident.
The law seems to get you both ways if you take a portion of item that is such a small proportion you are confident it is not infringement, you are likely to be caught out by the fact that such a small piece is derogatory as it does not give the whole picture of what the creator was trying to say.
Notice too, that because Moral Rights can never be assigned, it is quite irrelevant what copyright clearances you have obtained from the copyright owner.
You need to ALSO get Moral Rights clearances from the original creator.
So, is all lost?
Not necessarily.
I suggest you go through the following process: Check the Copyright Act 1988.
Some types of works can never be protected by Moral Rights.
With luck, the piece you want to handle falls into that heading.
Even if the material can be the subject of Moral Rights, such rights must be asserted.
Check whether they have been asserted by the creator.
(Check the first few pages if this is a book or article and/or ask the copyright owner, whoever it is, who owns the Moral Rights and whether they have been asserted.)
If the Moral Rights have NOT been asserted, you are in the clear.
If Moral Rights have been asserted, contact the creator, explain what you want to do and ask him or her for explicit permission to do these acts.
don't ask the creator to waive his or her Moral Rights; simply ask for explicit permission to do what you plan to do.
if the creator says there is no problem, you are safe.
If the creator says "no", or does not reply at all, make your own judgement: is what I propose to do likely to infringe Moral Rights?
What if I were the creator?
Would I be offended?
If so, change what you propose to do to something you regard as safe.
Remember that it is only worth the creator's while to sue if you have caused them damage to their reputation rather like libel or slander.
So remember the question of what reputation the creator enjoys and how much damage you might cause them.
It may not be worth their while to sue you!
Make sure you, or your employer, has appropriate liability insurance; ensure that any staff working for you, or people with access to your system are aware of the risks as well.
Keep a close eye on what they do, as you could be caught up in any action if it were shown you had been negligent in your control over what they did.
Conclusions Moral Rights are a potential minefield, and are a nightmare for anyone developing electronic library services.
My advice to anyone offering such service that in any way include the amendment, no matter how apparently trivial, to copyright works is: seek expert advice (e.g.
me!)
before offering the service.
Acknowledgements This article was triggered off by discussions I had with a number of individuals involved in the SCOPE and Open Journal projects.
I am grateful to those individuals.
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Search Engines Corner: Alta Vista LiveTopics Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Corner: Alta Vista LiveTopics Buzz data software java database browser windows Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley looks at Live Topics, a more flexible and user-controlled way of searching the Alta Vista Web Page index.
The search engine world seems to be becoming an increasingly competitive environment with each major service vying with the others in order to come up with a killer feature which will attract more and more users to their site, and so boost their advertising revenue.
Developers are always looking for new features which will increase the functionality of their search engines, and so far the battle has been fought over issues such as the size of the database and the ‘look and feel’ of the user interface.
Alta Vista has always been something of a trailblazer in this area, and they now appear to have stolen a march on the likes of Lycos and Excite by introducing a new service called LiveTopics [1].
Although it is currently in the public beta testing stage, LiveTopics represents a potentially major enhancement to the already highly functional Alta Vista search service.
Alta Vista refer to LiveTopics as a “personal search assistant”[2].
This means that it can take the results of an individual search and automatically sort them into a set of categories in order to add structure and meaning to your results.
A typical search on Alta Vista might yield as many as 500,000 results, and as the web continues to grow this problem of information overload is likely to intensify.
As a consequence, users can often feel overwhelmed by such huge sets of results: making sense of them and finding information which is actually relevant can be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
LiveTopics aims to get around this problem by the use of something known as dynamic categorisation of results [3].
This means that once a search has been performed Alta Vista can then group the results into a number of different key topics or themes thus organising web pages with similar content under the same heading.
This grouping is not predefined, but is instead done ‘on the fly’ based on the results of your search.
Pages are automatically analysed for their content and statistical analysis is used to group subjects into themes; this is based on the number of occurrences of words in each document forming part of the search results.
The great advantage of this is that the categorisation of documents can change as their content changes, rather than being fixed.
The user can then review these topics and refine their search by choosing the ones which seem most appropriate and relevant to their needs.
Irrelevant information can be excluded from the search.
When your perform a search on Alta Vista your results are displayed on screen.
If you’ve got 200 or more hits, Alta Vista will automatically offer you the opportunity of refining your search using a number of different LiveTopics options.
LiveTopics isn’t offered if you get less than 200 results: this is because Alta Vista is generally unable to come up with appropriate topics if the set of search results is quite small (by web standards), and tends to start generating categories out of irrelevant words such as you and yours.
On selecting one of the available formats for LiveTopics your results will be categorised into a number of different themes.
You can then select or exclude the main topics presented, or any of the sub-categories which fall within them.
Once you have refined your search Alta Vista will then run it again and give you a new set of results based on the topic areas you have selected or excluded.
You can then choose to refine your search further if necessary.
Three formats are available for LiveTopics: a java interface, a java script interface and a plain text interface for those with text-only web browsers.
The main differences between the interfaces are explained below: Java Interface Alta Vista need to be congratulated here for providing possibly the best example I’ve seen so far of how Java can actually be used in a useful context!
However, the Java interface can only be used with javaenhanced web browsers such as Netscape 3.0 and above on Windows 95 or NT, Macintosh and Unix, Internet Explorer 3.0 and above on Windows 95 and NT, and Netscape 3.01 on Windows 3.1.
The Java interface also takes a little while to load the first time you use it as some delay is experienced in downloading and running the Java applet.
The Java Interface actually offers two views of your results: Topic Words and Topic Relationships.
Clicking on the tabs shown below enables you to meve between the different views.
The Topic Words option displays the different topics as rows in a table, with those topics that are most likely to be relevant to your query at the top of each list.
Figure 1: A search through the Java Interface with table-based results To require a word in your search results you can click on it once; as you do this it become underlined in green and will appear in the search form above the table.
The original query updates as you select or exclude new words.
Clicking twice on a word in the table will exclude it from your search it then appear in red with a line through it in the table.
The Topic Relationships option display a graphical representation of your results this appears as a map of topics with links where they have relationships.
Each topic heading is expandable so that you can see the sub-categories which fall below it.
Where different topics are linked this usually means that some of the words under each topic heading are likely to appear in the same or similar documents.
This enables the user to zero in on the areas that are relevant to their information needs.
It also helps you to see where the relationships between different topics might be, and to perhaps come across unexpected relationships and contexts.
Figure 2: A search through the Java Interface with relationship-based results When you move your cursor over a word the entire topic, with all its related words, is displayed.
You can then choose to include or exclude specific words from within that topic.
Clicking once on a word includes it in your search, clicking twice will exclude it from the search results.
In both cases, once you are ready to re-run your refined search, you can do this simply by clicking on the Submit button.
Java-Script Interface The java-script interface works with any java-script enabled web browser such as Netscape 3.0 and above for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Macintosh and Unix, and Internet Explore 3.0 and above for the same platforms.
The java-script interface doesn’t have as much functionality as the Java interface, as it isn’t possible to display the graphical topics map.
The java-script interface basically consists of a series of tables containing the main topic headings and sub-categories of words beneath them.
Figure 3: Searching on a variety of political concepts You can choose to include or exclude words from the topic areas.
Clicking in the boxes underneath the tick mark includes a word, whereas clicking in the boxes underneath the cross mark excludes a word.
The query is automatically updated in the search form as you select or exclude words.
Text Interface This interface is for users who have a text only web browser such a Lynx, although it can also be used with any other web browser.
It is basically a simple table interface with limited functionality.
A Search Example A good example which tests the functionality of LiveTopics quite well is to perform a search for the keyword ‘Ariadne’.
If you perform a search for ‘Ariadne’ on Alta Vista you retrieve around 9000 documents.
None of our first 10 hits appear to be relevant to our search for the journal as they are links to software companies of the same name.
With a set of results of this size, Alta Vista automatically prompts you to refine your search using LiveTopics.
LiveTopics brings up a number of topic headings including mythology, Amiga, Goddess, OPACS, UKOLN and Libraries.
We can now exclude all of the irrelevant documents from our search by clicking on the irrelevant subjects to place a cross in the boxes next to them.
We can also choose to specifically select certain words such as librarians, electronic, journal etc.
which appear beneath them.
The topics we have chosen or excluded are displayed in the search form as we make our selection.
We can then re-run the search by clicking on the Submit button.
Figure 4: Searching on Ariadne In the example shown above, I have chosen to include the words electronic, journal and ukoln; and to exclude the words theseus, mythology and myths.
This brings my search results down from 9000 documents to around 200.
I can then go back and further refine my search if necessary.
Alta Vista prompts me to use LiveTopics to summarise my results: if I choose this option it will re-define the categories of topics in my search results and present me with a new set of options based on these dynamic categories.
I am now presented with a new set of categories which include Elib, Librarianship, Scholarly, Networked and Harnad.
I can choose to select or reject further words from within these categories to further refine my search.
Are There Any Drawbacks?
When using LiveTopics it can be tempting to select all the topics which appear to be relevant to your query.
However, if you do this what you will actually be performing is a Boolean search using the AND operator.
If a large number of words are present in your query this is going to drastically restrict the amount of data you get back from a search, as only documents will be returned which contain ALL of the words you have specified.
For example, a search on Alta Vista on the phrase “general election” retrieves over 10000 documents.
If we then put LiveTopics into action it suggests a number of topics and possible keywords including Labour, Tories, Blair, Britain, British, Conservative, Conservatives, Liberals.
It is tempting to select all of these options as they all appear to be relevant to the type of information we are looking for.
However, on selecting all of these we are actually only going to retrieve documents which contain every single one of the specified words.
This limits our results drastically.
The best way to use LiveTopics is perhaps to initially be quite conservative (no pun intended) about the number of required words you select, and to be prepared to keep going back and further refining the query according to the results you are receiving.
Alta Vista recommend that preferably you should select required words one at a time and review your results after each addition or exclusion [3].
It would also be useful if you could exclude an entire topic from a search simply by clicking on the topic heading.
At present you can only exclude specific words from within that topic.
For example, with the Ariadne search which I performed above I was presented with a number of topics which clearly weren’t relevant to my query: such as the ones on Greek Gods and Amiga software.
However, I can choose to exclude specific words from these topics such as mythology, Theseus, Aphrodite etc.
but it isn’t possible to exclude the entire topic as a whole.
Unfortunately, LiveTopics doesn’t currently appear to be available on the Alta Vista European mirror site [4] .
This may be because the service is currently in beta testing, and so hasn’t yet been rolled out to European users.
Finally, one other uncertainty I have about LiveTopics is that it seems to be promoting a model of information searching which, as a librarian, I’m not sure that I’d entirely recommend!
Librarians tend to spend a lot of time promoting the need for careful planning of a search strategy in advance of sitting down at a computer to perform the search.
To some extent, LiveTopics seems to be aiming to take the need for this away, by suggesting alternative terms, synonyms and antonyms that might be used to refine a search once the initial search has been performed.
I’m not really sure whether this is to be praised because it takes some of the hard work out of searching for information, or whether I should be expressing doubts about it for the same reason!
References Alta Vista Live Topics, http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/lt/ Malkiel, C. and Monaco, K., Alta Vista announces breakthrough in Internet Search Technology, http://www.digital.com/info/internet/pr-news/970211livetopics.html Alta Vista Live Topics Help, http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/lt/help.html Alta Vista European Mirror Site, http://www.altavista.telia.com/ Author Details Tracey Stanley Networked Information Officer University of Leeds Library, UK Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/people/TSStanley/TSStanley.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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PICK: Library and Information Science Resources on the Internet Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines PICK: Library and Information Science Resources on the Internet Buzz software database archives cataloguing opac sgml provenance telnet url research Citation BibTex RIS In 1995, the Thomas Parry Library, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, won funding for PICK, a project to build a gateway to quality resources in the LIS field.
Here, Andrew Cox describes this gateway, and reviews the project's achievements at the end of the first year.
The Electronic Documentation Project is funded by the HEFC (Wales) as part of funding for specialist research collections in the humanities.
It is based in Thomas Parry Library (formerly the ILS library) which is closely associated with the internationally respected Department of Information and Library Studies, UWA.
The broad purpose of the project is to ‘collect’ (in some sense) Internet Resources in our field; integrate them into the existing collection and promote their use.
Our core users are the students and staff of DILS, but potentially our Internet collection is of interest to any librarian or information worker.
The rationale of the project is simple: given that the library collects LIS material in all formats from books to videos to slides it is bound to explore collecting material published on the Internet too.
Much of the information available on the Internet is only available there.
Some services, such as journal indexes complement our existing collection.
At the moment most services are free.
The Internet also has the advantage of offering 24 hour, remote access.
So for our increasing population of distance learners part of our collection becomes accessible.
This will be supplemented by more and more in house databases and publications that the library plans to put on the Web.
In turn there are many gains to the project from being based in a specialist library: immediate access to the latest printed publications and detailed knowledge of the information needs of a specific user community (eg from CAS profiles).
The project’s first target was to produce a library homepage (URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/~tplwww).
We then moved on to creating PICK, a gateway to quality Internet resources in library and information science (URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/~tplwww/e/).
This is a subject directory rather in the style of SOSIG and OMNI, filtering for quality, organising resources by subject, highlighting the best resources.
Resource Discovery Resource discovery is a long term, on-going enterprise.
We have made some systematic searches (using Alta Vista and Lycos and the broad subject trees).
We have looked at existing collections of LIS resources on the Internet.
E-mail lists such as Web4lib, PACS, Nettrain and of course Lis-link are valuable for announcements of latest resources.
The printed literature is also useful eg Computers in libraries, Electronic Libraries, Database; as well as Web based alerting services such as Herriot Watt’s Internet Resources Newsletter, and the Web version of IIS’ Inform.
Selection The dominant factor governing how we select resources is simply content.
We are looking for substantial, current information.
We naturally emphasise UK based resources, but draw on relevant services from any part of the World.
Design of the resources for easy access eg availability of a site specific search engine is an important but secondary criterion in selecting material.
Scope E-mail conferences, telnet access to library catalogues, BUBL are established and recognised Internet resources in the LIS field.
But there are an impressive array of new resources.
Some idea of the scope of the subjects covered by PICK is apparent from the contents displayed on the index page, for example: The Internet, As well as introducing the Internet and basic search skills, this section points to on line tutorials about using the Internet.
It also looks at resources for exploring issues raised by the Internet as a publishing medium such as freedom of speech and expression, information quality, computer mediated communication.
Electronic journals and newsletters, As well as some printed journals and newsletters offering a Web version published in parallel; there are quite a number of well established e-mail based journals, such as PACS Review, LIBRES, Associates and several Web based journals, including Katherine Sharp Review, Provenance, D-Lib.
We maintain a pretty comprehensive, up-to-date directory of the dozens of newsletters and journals in our field.
Access to a number of these has been further improved by Mr Serials Harvest a service allowing the user to search a number of journals and newsletters from one interface individually or collectively.
Full text documents (such as conference proceedings, individual papers and reports), LIS Reference (databases, directories, thesauri), Libraries, This section covers OPACs and library Web pages, national and public libraries on the Web plus library policy documents plans and reports collection development policies.
Libraries have been in the forefront of using the Internet.
National libraries for example have been very active in using the Web: the Library of Congress, National Library of Canada, National Library of Australia as well as the British Library all have outstanding servers with loads of full text information.
Academic libraries have made wide use of the Web for library guides, and even bibliographic instruction.
Library publications such as policy documents, collection development reports and annual reports are appearing in increasing numbers.
Library related organisations (LIS education, UK and International and non UK bodies), Many professional organisations such as ALA, IFLA and ARL are making much information available.
Important initiatives such as ELib, Telematics for libraries programme, and the work of UKOLN can be best followed by students from their Web servers.
Other topics and resources, Our collection of literature from library automation suppliers is now supplemented by our own fairly comprehensive list of their Web sites.
Our collection of book supplier catalogues by links publishers’ Web sites via AcqWeb, Sharp Web.
Many job openings and recruitment agencies are advertised on the Web as well as training courses and conferences.
We also make suggestions about good starting points for wider topics of interest such as CAL, management, business information, SGML.
We have tried to illustrate the depth of information available on some servers by outline reviews of some of the main servers, some National libraries, IFLA, NISS, BUBL.
We have tried to put as much added value into our pages as possible, from annotating lists to producing in depth reviews of important resources.
Organisation We have divided the resources into broad recognisable subject areas, and all accessed from the main index page, rather than via a complex hierarchy; in addition there is a subject search capability (using Glimpse on a manually created index), a site map and a what’s new page.
Promotion and integration Many of our pages are designed to be printed out so that the user can have a hard copy to read.
They are in the style of library resource sheets, and are available in the library in printed form.
We have always tried to integrate printed references with online resources, so stressing that the Internet is just one among a number of potential sources for a particular topic.
A series of library displays have explored different ways of promoting and integrating Internet resources with existing collections.
Our first exhibition consisted of a foyer display of works from the library’s Horton Collection of early children’s printed books, with in parallel an electronic exhibition of text and images; Our second exhibition was on careers/ professional development, with books and material from the library’s collection, University careers service and some of the recruitment agencies; plus a web page linking to relevant Internet resources.
A third exhibition, libraires on the Internet, highlighted the top twenty Web sites in our field; illustrated how libraries are using the Web, libraries and the Web; and displayed recent library journal articles exploring the use of the Web in libraries, now incorporated into a rolling bibliography.
Continuing issues The Internet is in a constant state of flux, new resources appearing, old resources moving, changing, disappearing, while the client software itself is continuously evolving.
Part of producing a quality service is keeping our information current and accurate by continous checking.
Changes in the client software are both an opportunity and a problem for the Web designer.
They are an opportunity to improve the visual appeal and functionality of Web pages.
But they threaten also to obscure the message in glossy presentation, and to disenfranchise users with text only browsers or older versions of Netscape, say.
The emphasis in the project has always been on promoting access to information, rather than producing glossy logos and images.
Many of these site management issues will be relieved when we start using the software developed by ROADS, hopefully in the near future.
Work in hand The project has recently won funding for a second year, current work in hand includes: An 8 part e-mail course introducing the Internet, to be posted to the DILS student e-mail list at the beginning of the new academic year.
It will cover basics of using Netscape, finding and evaluating resources, the information issues surrounding the Web, e-mail lists and creating a Web page.
A ROADS database of full text papers and conferences proceedings available on the web, probably with a locally held copy to guarantee long term availability, and quicker access; probably also with full text searches of the archived documents.
After that the whole service will be migrated to ROADS.
Incorporation of students reviews and selections in areas marginal to our main areas of concentration, eg archives, business information or giving an individual perspective on an important area, e.g.
electronic journals.
Publication of in house databases and material on the Web.
We already provide background information on LIBEX the library exchange scheme that Thomas Parry runs in conjunction with the International Group of the Library Association with a full list of the posts currently available for exchange.
A Web form allows users to request more information, and we have received a growing flow of such requests.
We also put the library’s accessions list on the Web; and provide access to searchable/browsable databases of DILS theses and an in-house index of press cuttings relating to libraries, publishing etc.
We plan to expand this lists of Web publications, perhaps to include Professional Calendar the library’s database of courses, conferences and meetings of interest to librarians and information workers.
In the slightly longer run if the University invests in a webbed OPAC there will be a further leap towards integrating valuable Internet resources into the collection.
We invite Ariadne readers to visit and explore PICK, URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/~tplwww/e/ and contact us with general comments or suggestions of resources to add.
Andrew Cox amc@aber.ac.uk Thomas Parry Library University of Wales Llanbadarn Fawr Aberystwyth SY23 3AS Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Downtime Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Downtime Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne offers its readers a cartoon, poem, and caption competition.
Win a copy of The Library and Information Professional's Guide to the Internet, as reviewed in Ariadne.
This photo was taken in a dimly lit corner of the bar at the International Networked Information Conference at the Ramada hotel in February of this year.
The photo features Caroline Bardrick (JISC), Lorcan Dempsey (UKOLN) and the left arm of someone who is wearing a burgundy blazer but who wishes to stay anonymous.
Email your caption; you can enter as many times as you want.
Judging will be done by independent jurors; no correspondence, offers of drinks or other bribes, threats of removal of future funding etc will be entered into.
The closing date for submissions is 1st July 1996; the winner and the caption will appear in Issue 4 of Ariadne on the Web.
Entrants should note the comments about how we whittled down the captions for the previous competition (below).
Due to popular request (mostly, strangely, from Newcastle for the previous caption competition), entrants can have their name/email address kept secret the winner will be announced as a.n.onymous, and will still receive their prize.
So, here's the picture...   Last month's winning caption... We asked you to think of a caption for: Our anonymous judge has deliberated at great length, consulted the stars, independent advice and the bottom of several whisky bottles, and without persuasion or influence has declared the winning entry to be: So, you just click on "practice your rugby catches", wait a couple of seconds while it loads and then..." submitted by com3thomacm@ntu.ac.uk.
Honourable mentions go to: Sadly, the vaporware chose that moment to evaporate from tel@learned.co.uk and: "Now the most important thing is to be aware of what's happening on your screen at all times...... OK, did anyone see who moved it?"
from m.lawes@sheffield.ac.uk.
The winner wins a copy of Networking and the Future of Libraries 2 Managing the intellectual record.
The book, edited by Lorcan Dempsey, Derek Law and Ian Mowat, is a highly topical range of edited papers from UKOLN's major international conference held at the University of Bath in April 1995 which examine the future central role of networking for the library and publishing community.
Contributors to the book include Nicky Ferguson, Stevan Harnad, Joan Day, Paul Evan Peters, Margaret Hedstrom, Sheila Corrall and Brian Perry.
Many of the entries were filtered/barred through being obscene, crude, offensive or just too weird to make sense.
Entries that mentioned Baywatch, Pamela Anderson or breasts formed over 40% of the submissions, which made the job of rapidly whittling them down quite easy.
Cartoon Some more merriment for you... Poem NATURE TRAIL Alec Rapkin sunlight, in wavering glints, blows upon spider's threads, thrown over litter, from gorse to grass-bent a squirrel jumps off, on springs, weightlessly, sinuously staccato no dump of raw stew on the road and in the weed-clogged canal, a little grebe, at its toilet, squirms its head down to scoop water rears upright, wingings milling spray, and with peeping squeaks, beaks into sensitive spots, preens and sashays, shimmying its shoulders for pleasure, wing over wing then speeds, streamlined by cleanliness head and beak flat to the water, to gobble some low-flying insect, having got in under its radar This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets , Volume 1, Number VII, April 1996.
It is reprinted by permission of the editor.
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Press Release – JISC / Caul Collaboration Agreement Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Press Release – JISC / Caul Collaboration Agreement Buzz software framework infrastructure Citation BibTex RIS Kelly Russell outlines the collaboration between JISC and CAUL, and announces the appointment of the post of International Co-ordinator.
Following the recent international conference on the Global Digital Library held in London 16⁄17 June, representatives from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee met with colleagues from the Council of Australian University Librarians to consolidate an agreement for co-operation which was initiated in the autumn of 1996.
JISC/CAUL collaboration began in October 1996 when it was agreed that the current technological and economic climate made collaborative work possible, attractive and increasingly necessary.
These most recent discussions have moved theory into practice and the commitment to collaboration is now embodied in several identified areas of work.
These include issues of intellectual property rights, the creation, discovery and retrieval of networked information and finally, networking and infrastructure issues.
Collaborative work will build on the relations established through the JEDDS [1] project which is funded by eLib and based at Griffith University in Brisbane [2].
While the collaborative effort will address some of the overarching international issues such as IPR, it will also focus on some small scale projects to foster co-operation “on the ground”.
Possible new work includes a study on collaborative networking strategies and a discussion paper on possible strategies and mechanisms for sharing digitised resources.
More practical work may focus on current activities in providing access to network resources in particular subjects or disciplines, for example collaborative work on subject-based information gateways to network resources: Australian colleagues at The University of South Wales plan to establish an Internet gateway to chemistry resources and some discussions have taken place about possible collaborations building on the ANR experiences from eLib.
Both the UK and Australian representatives look forward to building alliances and working together in the future.
The UK representatives involved in initial discussions have been Lynne Brindley, LSE; Derek Law, King’s College London; Alistair Chalmers, University of Essex, and Mel Collier, De Montfort University.
Although JISC has had a formal link with the U.S. through their membership in the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), it has never had such a link with Australian colleagues.
Over the next 12 months it is hoped that collaborative effort will manifest itself in some specific project proposals which aim to solicit co-funding from both the CAUL (through the Australian government) and the JISC.
Following the first round of discussions in the autumn JISC has now appointed Kelly Russell as International Co-ordinator (.5FTE) to foster links between the UK and other countries working with networked information provision in Higher Education.
Kelly will continue her work with eLib (.5% FTE) and will be supported by a new Assistant Co-ordinator to be appointed in July 1997.
Although this work will focus mainly on areas of interest to JISC’s Committee on Electronic Information (CEI) there is also scope for a broader collaborative framework to include co-operation with other JISC subcommittees such as the Advisory Committee on Networking (ACN) to strengthen the UK’s international links.
References [1] Ariadne article on JEDDS, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/jedds/ [2] The Joint Electronic Document Delivery Software project is working on the development of a MIME compliant document delivery system based on RLG’s Ariel software; Web pages are at: http://www.gu.edu.au/alib/iii/docdel/jointdev.htm Author details Kelly Russell, eLib Assistant Co-ordinator and JISC International Co-ordinator, Email: k.l.russell@warwick.ac.uk Phone: 01203 524552 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Networking Moving Images Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Networking Moving Images Buzz data software infrastructure metadata copyright video graphics multimedia e-learning authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Anne Mumford summarises the meeting organised by the British Universities Film and Video Council at the National Film Theatre on 18 December 1996, which looked into the problems and issues surrounding using academic networks for multimedia applications.
The JISC Strategy [1] states: "The JISC recognises the growing importance of multimedia data and will promote measures to ensure such data is appropriately available and transmitted electronically."
As part of this consideration, a meeting was organised by the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) [2] which is now funded through JISC.
This consultation meeting was held at the National Film Theatre on 18 December and was attended by about 220 people.
It is important to establish the user needs for any new form of technology or content provision and the meeting was addressed by a number of subject specialists and by some speakers talking about current activities.
It became apparent that there is a need for a range of materials for use in teaching which include moving images.
For many disciplines movement is inherently important for our understanding of change and dynamism.
For some subjects the availability of clips of information would be useful for inclusion in teaching materials.
For other subjects, such as the performing arts or media studies, the context may be important and thus complete packages of material may be more appropriate.
Different subjects do have different needs and a subject based approach for consideration of content may be a useful way forward.
Broadcast material is a major resource for use in study, particularly within the social sciences and can support many disciplines.
Recording for academic use is permitted and many sites do make recordings with the BUFVC offering a backup service for their members.
The possible benefits of making broadcast material available online with overnight delivery was discussed.
Consideration was also given to the potential of links with the British Film Institute and the potential benefits of long term storage in digital form.
Having material available online and being able to link this with other forms of material has a great deal of potential for both teaching and research.
Examples quoted included: broadcast news material linked to propaganda material; manuscripts and parliamentary proceedings for historical study; dance clips linked with dance notation and music scores; anthropological field work video linked with photographs, spoken accounts and field notes.
The academic community is also a producer of material as well as a consumer and this needs to be remembered in any considerations.
It was also noted a number of times that the use of film and video is not always seen as having the scholarly benefits which might accrue.
The speakers all recognised the importance of the metadata associated with the materials with the details stored recognising the need for access by a range of different disciplines.
We need an understanding of the context and the images.
The potential benefits of gaining metadata for broadcast and file material are great, even if the material itself is not available online.
Finding the material in both physical and digital forms can by the greatest barrier to use.
In considering the use of moving images it is important that we do not loose site of relevant JISC and Funding Body experience to date.
This experience relates to the following areas: content, infrastructure, technology and standards.
Content JISC and the Funding Bodies have developed a range of materials and datasets which include some still and moving images.
Many packages produced through the TLTP (Teaching and Learning Technology Programme) [3] include animations.
The JISC New Technologies Initiative resulted in the creation of databanks of dental and biomedical images.
Further work which is focusing on the potential of virtual reality is taking place through the JTAP [4] initiative and example include virtual laboratories, design studios and field work.
The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) [5] is producing online image content including photographic collections, cartoons, medical images and maps.
The mirroring of the Visible Human is another example of the availability of image related information.
The Knowledge Gallery initiative between the commercial sector and H.E.
aims to provide a gateway to image related content produced within H.E.
as well as international and commercially created resources.
Moving images are only part of a continuum of imagerelated resources which range from still images through to virtual worlds.
Infrastructure SuperJANET is one of the leading networks in the world.
The emergence of MANs is providing broadband connection within geographical areas.
JISC are committed to providing a pervasive video service.
Although initial interest has focused on video conferencing, clearly the network provision and gateways, for example ISDN gateways are relevant to the discussions here.
JISC have also supported MPEG encoding and video capture services.
Technology and Standards The eLib and JISC New Technologies programmes have seen the investigation of software and hardware for image servers and suitable industrial strength solutions are emerging.
Standards are critical both for storage (file formats and metadata) and for search and retrieve and this is an area of wide interest for JISC in its provision of online services.
Both eLib and the Arts and Humanities Data Service have worked on good practice guidelines for projects which include considerations of standards.
The JISC's Committee for Electronic Information (CEI) now has to consider the recommendations from this meeting.
It seems clear that there is a need for online materials which include moving image for both teaching and research.
Such materials may be from film, broadcast materials or created within higher education.
In all cases teachers and researchers benefit by being able to access such resources and to link them with other online materials.
The provision of moving images does present some special problems.
These relate to the potential volume of data and, more especially, for the need to deliver at a specific rate.
JISC need to consider, and to advise sites, on the requirements of the network provision for moving images.
Are we to provide national and/or local delivery of moving images on demand?
Many issues raised on the day are of a more generic nature and relate to metadata, resource discovery, authentication, copyright, good practices, acquisition strategies.
In conclusion, this was a useful workshop which will form a useful start for the JISC/CEI in its deliberations.
References [1] JISC 5-year strategy, http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/jisc/pub/strategy.html [2] British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC), http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/ [3] the TLTP (Teaching and Learning Technology Programme) Web site, http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/tltp/ [4] JTAP (JISC Technology Applications Programme) information, http://www.jtap.ac.uk/ [5] eLib Web site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Author Details Dr Anne Mumford is the Co-ordinator for the Advisory Group On Computer Graphics Email: a.m.mumford@lboro.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A MAN for All Reasons?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A MAN for All Reasons?
Buzz cataloguing windows jpeg Citation BibTex RIS Derek Law, the Director of Information Services and Systems at Kings College and chair of JISC's ISSC, details his vision of the cooperation between the library sectors blossoming through the use of Metropolitan Area Networks.
All of a sudden the regions are fashionable.
The potential benefits of co-operation and strategic planning at regional level and of providing an enhanced role for Regional Library Systems have been raised in a number of contexts recently.
One thinks of the Anderson Report, the Public Library Review, the Apt Review of Co-operation and the Broadvision review of Library and Information Plans (LIPs).
The nations of Scotland and Wales also have a well-developed sense of place and the possibilities which lie in co-operation.
Regional assemblies, regional development authorities, Metropolitan Area Networks and regional transport systems are all refocusing interest on what might be considered another facet of distributed systems.
Librarians in large metropolitan conurbations are conscious from experience if not experiment of the complex interrelationships between public libraries and university libraries.
Whether from convenience, conviction or congenital laziness many students use public libraries, while most university libraries claim some kind of public mission.
Even were that not the case the arrival of Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) at the same time as apparently fundamental shifts in educational needs suggests that it is an opportune time to reconsider the benefits to higher education of looking afresh at the requirements of its user base.
Two changes may be seen to line the new landscape.
The first is the increase in the number of part-time students.
Coupled with this we may expect a rising number of students to move in and out of higher education and employment as a way of funding study, as the state progressively transfers the cost of education to the individual.
The other is the general move towards life-long learning.
It is not at all implausible even now to imagine a National Health Service manager in York using a university medical library to acquire information on clinical trials, studying part-time for a distance learning MBA at the London Business School, requiring information and materials for the NVQ course which she is setting up in the hospital and reading the Booker Short List for light relief.
A personal Compuserve account would also cover everything from e-mail to homework.
It is impossible to classify what is the 'home' library in this case and the user at least might feel it not unreasonable to channel any request through the nearest service point rather than working out which request is appropriate to which service.
LIPs were designed to mobilise the resources of a region, and that they have done to greater or lesser effect.
The opportunity presented by the MANs is to create the resources for the region.
This will not be easy and it requires a leap of imagination which most institutions may find difficult.
At present, effort is being concentrated on the physical creation of the MANs, but some thought now needs to be given to how they will be used, the resources which will exist on them, and the arrangements for their use.
The erection of arbitrary barriers against particular groups would seem unsustainable as the groups themselves blur, while the provision of services outside the narrow HE community may in any case be seen as desirable as a way of funding the population of the network with rich content.
Higher education is the method by which one gains a higher grade of prejudices, so let me now display some of mine.
The average British librarian will leave no stone unturned to see that nothing disturbs the even tenor of their lives, fearlessly grasping the nettle with neither hand.
I now live in Kingston-upon-Thames where I am a frequent library user.
I have used public libraries in half a dozen major cities and I meet public librarians regularly in Library Association Council.
And I fear for them.
The great driving force of public libraries for a long period of time was the Carnegie spirit of learning and self-improvement.
For a large number of perfectly honourable and selfless reasons, public libraries seem to an outsider to have lost their way, to have been sucked into the morass of local government reforms and placed in leisure groupings.
There they have sat, comfortably meeting user needs rather than creating user aspirations.
Just as a small example, where on earth have been the UK equivalents of the pioneers of Pike's Peak in Colorado who developed Maggie's Place a decade ago?
Or where are the champions of the Freenet movement?
There are of course honourable exceptions but it does sometimes feel as though they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
There seems little evidence that public librarians are negotiating with the cable companies to set up an experiment like the Blacksberg electronic village or responding to the challenge of Compuserve and America On-Line and the growing band of consumer information services.
Unless challenges are mounted quickly and forcefully, the public library movement will become the public library couch potato, relegated in a horrible parody of Brave New World to supplying Jeffrey Archer novels to the population in order to keep it in a semi-comatose state.
All too many libraries use the acquisition of a cataloguing and book circulation system, (essentially a ledger-cum-mechanised abacus), as a substitute for thought, or prize the possession of a Windows environment over intelligence.
Too many blow in the wind (or is it flatulence?)
of this week's overhyped technology.
A picture may be worth a thousand words but a JPEG file takes longer to transmit.
The present position of the regional library systems reminds me of a passage from Milton's Paradise Lost (Book I): Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes I firmly believe that there is an opportunity for the regions to expand and grow and have an important role in information provision, to revive libraries as a force for learning, for education and self-development.
But this involves more than looking at the further refinement of interlending systems.
As Oscar Wilde said "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
Critical to all of this is the development of the MANs.
There are already some bright spots.
In Scotland, SHEFC has been promoting initiatives of which perhaps the most notable so far is that linking Lothian Region Schools with local industry and with JANET.
In Wales, John Redwood developed a plan, mercifully spared by the new Secretary of State, to link all educational establishments from schools to universities with a broadband network.
In the North East their development office is driving forward a regional information network as the vehicle for industrial regeneration.
In Manchester, CALIM is linking the major libraries and, unusually,includes the City library in its deliberations.
What is notable about each of these developments (save the last) is that libraries are not the leaders.
It is others who see the value of networks as a focus for information and who have a vision of the way ahead.
Thus far much of the content provision on JANET has been fuelled by top-slicing.
But JISC's ambitions have always been limited and it certainly would never have nor wish to have the resources effectively to nationalise HE information provision.
ISSC is considering currently a proposal to look at the organisation and management of local campus-based resources, but it has felt unable to become involved in an exploration of how the MANs will populate themselves with resources.
Shortage of funds too often conceals a shortage of imagination, but before very long the MANs will have to consider what role they wish to play within a region, how they will manage an information policy and, indeed, what it should be.
Pressure is building to open up the MANs as regional rather than HE resources, but even if this is seen as inevitable it does not remove the need to create a vision of how user needs will be supported, from which an agenda for change should emerge.
The focus of the vision must be the new type of library user.
These new users will be students who weave their education into busy lives already patterned with career, full or part-time employment and, very often, childcare.
Many will be unable to study in 'real time' because of the other demands upon their time, but will log in to seminars, tutorials and, indeed, resources, in the evenings from their own homes.
Can eLib contribute to that agenda?
One of the keys to the success of the eLib programme has been its use of a small group of professional leaders who have chosen a path and pursued it in a wholly focused and fairly autocratic manner, although attempting to mobilise and invigorate the staff of literally dozens of universities.
To paraphrase Orson Welles, patronage properly deployed brought us the Renaissance and Michelangelo: democracy brought us Switzerland and the cuckoo clock.
We badly need leaders who can speak for the regions and develop plans such as the Singapore IT2000 plan for the wonderfully named 'Intelligent Island', which bends the resources of a city state to creating a transparent library system where the citizen can enter the library network of the area at any point to meet any need and where, from kindergarten, children are taught the skills of information management.
The development of regional communications structures will lead to the development of regional information providers.
We can then choose to be producers or consumers, to be road warriors on the information superhighway or mouse potatoes at the terminal.
If I described the present state of the regions with a quotation from Paradise Lost, we may expect to see their salvation in one of Milton's other great works, Paradise Regained (Book IV), where he describes an early Metropolitan Area Network: mother of arts And eloquence, native to famous wits Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, City or suburban, studious walks and shades As the population increasingly fails to fit the convenient pigeonholes which we have used to segregate our client groups it seems a good time to consider how far the network can revivify the common mission of all publicly funded libraries, whether city or suburban, public, government or university, in support of lifelong learning and personal development.
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Globally Yours Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Globally Yours Buzz copyright Citation BibTex RIS Hazel Gott gives a brief overview of the Follett Lecture Series, where overseas experts in the fields of Library and Information Science speak in various UK locations.
A packed lecture room in Leeds was the venue for the series' second birthday, when Richard Lucier gave his well-received talk The University as Library.
Developed from an idea put forward by members of JISC's Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology (chaired by Lynne Brindley), the series began with Clifford Lynch's lecture on The Role of Libraries in the Networked Information Age.
It has always been the aim to take the lectures to the audience.
So far venues have ranged northwards from London, through Birmingham, Manchester, and now Leeds, to Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Venues later this year will open up the series to Northern Ireland and the South West.
The speakers themselves have found the experience a challenge and a delight.
Miriam Drake felt the challenge was to present material which would stimulate thought and discussion.
And, for her, the delight was in meeting and talking with colleagues and friends.
Colin Steele remembers intellectual stimulus and warm hospitality, plus the audience's surprise at hearing a speaker from Australia with a north-eastern English accent.
The venues, too, have become memorable to the speakers.
Bill Arms was particularly pleased to be lecturing at the Western Infirmary at Glasgow, with its scholarly traditions.
While Peter Lyman, facing his audience in the British Library's Novello Room, felt he should be singing, but despite the mysterious and fascinating link between computing and music, remembered just in time that he cannot carry a tune!
We look forward to our first visit 'across the water' in September.
Sheila Creth of the University of Iowa will speak at Limavady as part of the Irish Information Systems Symposium, and will then repeat her lecture in London.
Organised by UKOLN on behalf of JISC, full details of previous lectures, speakers' papers, and the future programme, are at:http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/follett_lectures/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data database identifier copyright passwords authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
EC funds second phase of TOLIMAC library smart card project Monday, October 20th, 1997 Contact: Françoise Vandooren, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bibliotheques, Av.
Franklin Roosevelt 50, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgique Tel: 32 2 650 23 80 Fax: 32 2 650 41 86 email: fdooren@ulb.ac.be or Contact: Anne Ramsden, International Institute for Electronic Library Research De Montfort University Milton Keynes, Hammerwood Gate, Kents Hill, Milton Keynes, MK7 6HP Tel: 44 1908 834924 Fax: 44 1908 834929 email: ar@dmu.ac.uk The TOLIMAC consortium funded by the European Libraries Programme started the second phase of its library smart card project this month.
As the volume of better quality Internet information grows, so the pressure for libraries to provide brokerage and mediating services increases.
The aim of TOLIMAC is to build a system, which provides controlled access to and management of networked information services for library users.
TOLIMAC enables the user to access and pay, through a single card and a library web-based interface, a range of online services (e.g.
electronic journals, electronic document delivery services, bibliographic databases etc) supplied by different data providers.
The same card will be used to pay for library off-line services (e.g.
photocopying).
The system is based on smart card and encryption technology to ensure access control and user authentication and to secure easy online payment of chargeable online services.
The TOLIMAC acronym stands for “Total Library Management Concept” and the partners involved are the Library and the Department of Cryptography and Computer Security of Université Libre de Bruxelles; International Institute for Electronic Library Research, De Montfort University; INIST document supply centre; ABSEC smart card manufacturer, and XAFAX payment and access control systems supplier.
The project started in October 1996 and runs for two years.
It is divided into two main phases of work.
Phase 1, which ran for 11 months (15/10/97-14/09/97), was devoted to the definition of the TOLIMAC services, on the basis of the requirements of the library users’ and INIST, the data provider, as well as to the technical specifications of the system.
During the second phase of work, a pilot TOLIMAC system will be implemented between the libraries and the data provider involved in the project.
The pilot will then be evaluated.
As networked information services continue to expand, so the problem for libraries of controlling access and management of these services increases.
There are three problem areas for libraries: computer security with regard to open networks (confidentiality, authorisation, identification and authentication), delivery of electronic products (document integrity) and management of these services in the library environment (complex and time consuming administration of access to various electronic resources: managing different charging policies for user categories; financial administration of invoicing or handling small sums of money for mediated services, such as on-line searches or inter-library loans (ILL)).
Users, in turn, have to cope with numerous passwords, different interfaces and charging mechanisms for these services.
There are also inevitably complex problems for the data providers (DP) in terms of controlling access to these services, which have a large number of users.
Today’s chipcards with built-in microprocessors, can serve not only as identity cards, but act also as pre-paid cards for a multiplicity of services including pay phones and vending services.
There is, therefore, increasing interest in libraries in the use of these cards and their electronic cash for payment of, for example, photocopying and printing services, and ILL. Smartcards use encryption techniques to secure electronic payment transactions, so there is the further opportunity of libraries exploiting this technology for accessing and securing payment by users for a variety of electronic information services.
Smartcards have been introduced into universities and libraries as identify and payment cards.
The TOLIMAC system offers more than just a card, it provides management functionalities for electronic information services such as access control to online services, a single interface in the user’s language to access a variety of resources, a single and easy payment system whatever the service used, advantageous rates for library users, access and price control according to user categories etc.
By providing libraries with such a management tool, TOLIMAC will enable them to become key actors in the electronic information chain.
Further details of the TOLIMAC project are on the Web at http://tolimac.ulb.ac.be Newsline menu Staff News from Robert Gordon University The School of Information and Media at The Robert Gordon University is pleased to announce the promotion of Jane Farmer and Dorothy Williams to Senior Lectureships, and Amanda Richardson to Senior Research Assistant.
The School has appointed a number of new Lecturers: Paul Green, formerly a Lecturer in Media and Marketing in the Business School at Grimsby College; Fiona Milne, formerly a Librarian at the Fire Service College in Moreton in Marsh and previously Stock Buyer with Heathcote Books in Warwick; Susan Parker, a Research Student in the School; and Kay Wilson, a Research Assistant.
The School has strengthened its research team by the appointment of Kirsten Mertens as Research Fellow in Cognitive Sciences.
Kirsten has degrees from the Universities of Cologne and Dundee; a Diploma in Logic, Text and Information Technology from Dundee; and a recently completed Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, awarded for a thesis on the Philosophy of Colour.
Also joining the School as Research Assistants in the areas of Modern Languages and Publishing Studies respectively are Sylvie Davies, a graduate of the Sorbonne, who has recently completed her Masters degree in Information and Library Studies with a dissertation on the development of the new Mitterand Library in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France; and Sharon Jessa, an editor with Butterworths.
Sharon has a law degree and a Diploma in Intellectual Property Law.
Newsline menu New research at DILS, Aberystwyth The MODELS eLib project at UKOLN, University of Bath has awarded the supporting study, “The likely role, nature and impact of electronic publishing on scholarly monographs and textbooks” to the Department of Information and Library Studies, University of Wales Aberystwyth and the Centre for Information Quality Management.
The project is being directed by Ray Lonsdale and Chris Armstrong, will last three months and is worth UKP 9,800.
It is hoped that the final report and publications will show the extent of such electronic publishing (particularly in the UK) and detail some of the issues for collection management and users as well as those faced by publishers.
Ray Lonsdale DILS, Aberystwyth rel@aber.ac.uk Chris Armstrong Centre for Information Quality Management lisqual@cix.compulink.co.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Croatian Libraries: The War Is Behind Us, What Brings the Future?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Croatian Libraries: The War Is Behind Us, What Brings the Future?
Buzz data software database dissemination infrastructure copyright cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Croatian Libraries: "The war is behind us, what brings the future?
": Jadranka Stojanovski, the head of the Rudjer Boskovic Institute Library, describes the post-war progress made in implementing IT and networks in Croatian Libraries.
I am going to speak about Croatia and the new information technologies implemented in the Croatian libraries.
How are Croatian librarians coping with the consequences of the terrible war we had from 1991 to 1995?
What can be done in the situation when the whole country is being restructured and where the priority list is so long?
What makes the Croatian libraries so special?
Croatia is the new state, established in 1990, recognised by the United Nations in 1992.
For the last fifty years Croatia was part of Yugoslavia, the government, public administration, foreign affairs, military and police have been mostly formed by Serbs.
The Croats were represented in negligible numbers.
At the beginning of the war Croatia had nothing the other side had the army, the weapons, the money and the media.
The similar situation was in the computer network: prior to establishing the independent Croatian state we had poor public switched digital network based on X35 protocol, and only a few institutions were connected.
And there is a really interesting paradox in the young Croatia!
In autumn of 1991, when hundreds of tanks had been hurtling down to freeway from Belgrade to Zagreb (Serbia had gained complete control over the ex-Yugoslavian army) to destroy the idea of the independent state of Croatia and we hadn't known whether we would survive, the ministry of science and technology had decided to establish the scientific computer network.
The government had been determined to spend one million dollars to establish such a national backbone and infrastructure.
They had realised that we could survive only as an (inter)active part of the world, which meant communication, knowledge acquiring and dissemination of our own knowledge.
In the next few years, during the war, the Croatian Academic and Research Network (CARNet) was established, based on the TCP/IP protocol and UNIX operating system on all network nodes.
There are four Universities in Croatia (Zagreb, Osijek, Rijeka, Split), about two hundred research organisations (higher education institutions and purely research institutions); about ten thousand active researchers; and sixty thousand students.
After five hard years of the war more than one hundred institutions are connected to the CARNet, which makes more than a half of the community.
Those institutions include about 80% of the active researchers (about eight thousand of them).
Currently, there are about two thousand libraries in Croatia and 160 of them rank as scientific libraries.
During this war, numerous public, school and university libraries, as well as research and special libraries were wounded (about two hundred libraries).
Great number of valuable memorial libraries and collections of old and rare books and manuscripts were destroyed by bombs and rocketing.
Some of these libraries were completely burnt, others were seriously damaged.
It is hard to describe those days even during air raids, the librarians often helped by the readers tried to protect damaged buildings and put the library collections in safer places.
The mostly wounded and damaged libraries were those in eastern and southern part of Croatia.
The western part including Zagreb remained relatively spared from attacks and destruction.
Within scientific libraries there are 91 faculty libraries and the rest are attached to the research institutes and one central library (attached to the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts).
I could not get the exact number of the libraries connected to the CARNet and Internet, but the approximate number is about 50 libraries.
Scientific libraries differ greatly in size of the inventory.
The largest libraries are situated in Zagreb.
The most outstanding among them are the following: the Faculty of Philosophy Library in humanities, the Faculty of Law Library and the Faculty of Economics Library in social sciences.
In the field of natural sciences, the most outstanding are the Rudjer Boskovic Institute Library and the libraries of the Faculty of Science: the Central Chemistry Library, the Central Mathematics Library, the Central Geography Library and the Library of the Faculty of Agronomy.
In the applied sciences the most important libraries belongs to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing and the Faculty Pharmacy and Biochemistry.
In the medical sciences, the library system includes the Andrija Stampar" School of Public Health Library and the Central Medical Library.
Their collections of books and periodicals (cca 150,000 volumes) and their current periodical subscriptions (cca 850 titles) are the most important sources of biomedical information in Croatia.
I am working in the Rudjer Boskovic Institute Library which is the largest scientific library in the field of natural sciences in Croatia.
Our library was established in 1950, and has since developed to meet the information needs of scientists inside the Institute as well as those of external users (engineers, university members, students etc.).
Library holdings includes about 30000 books and 390 current periodicals.
The computerisation in our library started in 1989 when we had received the first PC.
The library computers were networked in 1993, but the most significant development started in 1994, when we had received the first library server (Sun Sparc Classic) as a donation from the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology.
Our biggest problem today is the lack of the integrated online library system (client server architecture, Internet compatibility, etc.).
We are building our databases of the books, periodicals, etc.
using different kind of software (freeware, or in-house made), then we put all the databases on the server, and use freeWAIS and MiniSQL to provide access to our library collections.
Taking all that into account there are a few dozen databases which should be weekly or monthly updated what is rather a hard work.
The Rudjer Boskovic Institute Library is also the coordinator for the host system for Croatian Natural Sciences Information system, the project financed by the Croatian ministry of .science and technology, which started early in 1994.
Ten largest libraries in the field of natural sciences in Croatia are included.
The main goals of the project are: working on the data input building the databases of books and monographs, periodicals, bibliographies, doctors' and masters' theses, etc., especially in the libraries which, due to the lack of either personnel or equipment or adequate programme support, have not undergone computerisation yet; providing online access to local and commercial databases and other information resources; to provide permanent education of library staff (courses, specialisation and professional visits in Croatia and abroad); to coordinate the acquisition of monographs, periodicals as well as databases on CDROM (to economise limited financing); to establish a database for all current research projects in Croatia in the field of natural sciences collaborating with the ministry of science and technology; to improve the interlibrary loan services; to compile Union catalogues for books and periodicals; etc.
In the period to come we plan to work intensively on the input data of the complete library collection (retrospective conversion), to work more with the users, to educate them of how to use the new information technologies, especially network services, and to provide our users with scientific information as much as possible so as to meet their information needs much accurately and faster than today.
To realise that we need an adequate (and affordable) integrated online library system.
To make the most of very limited financing, we need to reduce the paper based resources which is usually limited to the very small number of researchers and acquire needed databases so as to meet the needs of much wider number of users.
Hereafter, every library must be equipped by computers and connected to the network.
Furthermore, most of the libraries which already have the Internet access are connected very slowly, sometimes unserviceably slow.
It is a great problem which we are working on to solve, but it requires considerable investments.
In the future we will build virtual libraries for specialised fields of scientific research with variety of possibilities.
Mr. Trotsky says "You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
This is the reality that is fortunately behind us.
In the past five years we have survived the war, we have defended our country, and we have built an information system which is not perfect, but is the best possible result of our efforts.
In the Republic of Croatia we have responsible young and enthusiastic people that are managing CARNet, we have also willing people in the ministry of science and technology which realize the extreme importance of libraries and their information systems development, and there are librarians that work very hard.
Abroad we have many colleagues with good experiences in the new information technologies implementations willing to help us.
The future seems promising to me.
Response In her own words, Judith Stamenkovic responds to the above article.
No other letters on this particular aspect will be published as this is not the place to entire into a duscussion on the rights and wrongs of the war in the former Yugoslavia.
I obviously have to declare an interest at this point, as I am married to a Serb whose car was spat at in Croatia simply because it bore Belgrade number plates,well before the beginning of the recent sad war which broke up the state of Yugoslavia.
In spite of this interest, I hold no particular brief for the current Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Even if one accepts that the nationalism of Mr Milosevic provoked the declarations of independence by the former member states, I thought this was going to be about the development of IT in Croatian Libraries since the war.
I didn't expect a re-rehearsal of Croatian propaganda with emotive language such as "hundreds of tanks hurtling down to(sic) freeway from Belgrade to Zagreb".
I expected an interesting article on the problems of developing IT in a country which had suffered war damage.
After several years I don't pretend to even begin to understand the complexities of the situation in the area where my partner was born and am therefore surprised and disappointed that you felt able to publish paragraphs 2 and 3 with their political comments in their present format.
The encyclopedia of nationalism (Snyder, 1990) I have just checked, tells me that Tito, whose dictatorship the people of former Yugoslavia "enjoyed" for much of the 50 years that Croatia was part of Yugoslavia, was in fact a Croatian.
But then, since Tito apparently never supported Croatian nationalism, perhaps that is why your author neglected to mention it.
Yours sincerely, Judith Stamenkovic Response The author of the original piece responds to the above response: The words like tanks, bombs, war etc.
are not nice words, and I would be very happy not to use them at all, but unfortunately, the war (and everything ugly that came with it) is our reality.
It seems I simply can not write an interesting article "about the development of IT in Croatian Libraries", without mentioning the war and its terrible consequences.
Yours sincerely, Jadranka Stojanovski Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Is RDF?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Is RDF?
Buzz data rdf framework html xml metadata identifier namespace schema sgml marc gif uri interoperability intranet url Citation BibTex RIS Rachel Heery explains RDF (Resource Description Framework) What is RDF?
It’s the Resource Description Framework.
Does that help?
No?
RDF is the latest acronym to add to your list, one that is set to gain in significance in the future.
At present though it is early days for RDF and little accessible information is available for the interested reader.
This short summary will try to outline some key points regarding RDF and point to available further information.
What is certain is that this summary will go out of date quickly, RDF is ‘work in progress’ and is an area which is undergoing rapid development and change.
Information for this article is largely derived from the February 1998 version of the RDF specification [1], but all interpretation is entirely the responsibility of the author, as are all views and opinions.
First to give some context, RDF is an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [2], a ‘members only’ organisation restricted by rules of confidentiality so inevitably there is some delay in disseminating information about emerging work.
A few UK universities are members of W3C as is JISC in the person of Brian Kelly, the Web Focus Officer, who is based at UKOLN.
These memberships of W3C give individual UK researchers a crucial opportunity to increase their awareness of current work.
RDF is about metadata for Web resources, by resources we mean any object that can be found on the Web.
Essentially, RDF is a means for developing tools and applications using a common syntax for describing Web resources.
Last summer W3C recognised there were a number of connected areas which all depend on the existence of metadata for Web resources.
Work on resource discovery, content ratings, intellectual property rights and digital signatures was connected in its need for a ‘resource description framework’.
So over the last few months a working group within the W3C have drawn up a data model and syntax for RDF.
So what is RDF?
RDF is distinctive in that it is designed specifically with the Web in mind, so it takes account of the features of Web resources.
It is a syntax based on a data model, and this model influences the way properties are described in that it makes the structure of descriptions explicit.
This means RDF has a good fit for describing Web resources, but, on the downside, it might cause problems within environments where there is a need to re-use or interoperate with ‘legacy metadata’ which may well contain logical inconsistencies.
(An extreme example might be the MARC format, the design of which was influenced originally by the needs of tape storage.)
The RDF data model represents the properties of a resource and the values of these properties.
The model is syntax independent but can be expressed in XML, and the specification uses XML as its syntax for encoding metadata.
XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) is a sub-set of SGML.
It can be viewed as a simplified dialect or abbreviated version of SGML.
Whereas HTML is a non-extensible syntax and says nothing about the semantics of tagged fields, XML allows ‘locally defined’ tags to be created.
Communities can agree on a set of tags to indicate content, as well as structure of resources, so that functionality can be built into the client to manipulate content, promising much innovative development at the client side.
XML offers the possibility for building products based on exchanging structured data between applications.
Some examples of such applications are given by Richard Light [3] in his recent book, they include Sun’s online documentation application AnswerBook, health care industry information and electronics industry datasheets.
XML itself facilitates the creation of ‘metadata’ and RDF is seen as a framework to realise the potential of XML.
The opportunities to build applications provided by XML apply equally to RDF.
RDF provides the syntax for interworking applications to recognise and exchange metadata for Web objects.
This might be metadata designed to facilitate resource discovery or metadata describing content ratings or intellectual property rights.
One of the barriers to understanding RDF is that little has been revealed of the way it will actually be used in tools and applications.
Although we have an idea of the general areas of interest, little has been communicated about any future ‘products’.
Some of the commercial ‘big players’ have shown interest in RDF but where do they see RDF fitting into their products?
Possibly as a component of intranet management tools or possibly as an adjunct to Web authoring tools.
RDF is a means to express properties of a resource and to associate values with these properties.
It does not mandate the use of any particular properties or element names.
The creator of the RDF record can choose which particular properties or sets of properties they wish to use.
In order to ensure properties have unique names, and to allow for reference to an authority for the meaning and usage of the Property name, RDF makes use of the namespace mechanism, which is also used in XML.
This mechanism is not yet fully defined but involves reference to a namespace URI (in practice a URL) where the particular property is defined.
This URI could link to a machine or human readable definition, or the URI could merely serve as a unique identifier with no real link to information content.
A collection of properties describing a resource is called a Description.
The properties and values used in a Description also are defined by a schema identified by a namespace URI.
The specification of RDF schemas is under discussion and has not yet been made available publicly.
One of the significant issues for those interested in providing managed access to the internet is whether future implementation of RDF will offer sufficient flexibility to use it as basis for ‘low cost’ resource discovery.
Will RDF tools use properties based on Description schemas decided by the product vendors?
Or will communities be able to agree on their own Description schemas tailored to their particular searching requirements?
So, for example, will Web browsers and authoring tools allow a variety of RDF Description Schemas according to the choice of the user, or will these tools mandate a particular Description schema?
The RDF ‘association models’ between the metadata and the resource are similar to HTML.
The metadata can be embedded in the resource, it can be associated to the resource, it can be independent from the resource, or the resource can be contained within the metadata.
Some of these methods of association will not be available for certain resource types, e.g.
it is not possible to embed metadata in a gif image.
How accommodating will RDF be to ‘legacy’ metadata formats which are not based on data models and do not fit easily with the logical structure of RDF?
Will the namespace mechanism be used within a system of registries?
Or will the namespace URI merely serve as an identifier with no data behind it?
If the latter then it seems likely that ‘unauthorised’ identifiers will proliferate.
For RDF to reach its potential for resource discovery it seems likely that namespace registries with machine readable schemas will need to develop in tandem.
But even without this development, RDF will still offer considerable progress for syntactical interoperability.
So there are still a lot of questions to answer.
Once again service providers need to make critical decisions as to whether they wait for the answers to emerge, or use existing technology.
Certainly within the Dublin Core community there is acknowledgement of the potential significance of RDF, and there is considerable activity centred on accommodating Dublin Core to the RDF model.
However alongside this activity various projects are beginning to identify the real issues involved by implementing Dublin Core using the existing HTML technology.
This summary provides a snapshot.
In order to keep in touch with progress refer to the W3C home page for RDF at URL: http://www.w3.org/RDF/ References [1] RDF specification February 1998 http://www.w3.org/RDF/Group/1998/02/WD-rtf-syntax-19980206/ [2] World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org/ [3] Light, Richard.
Presenting XML.
Sams.net, 1997.
Further information Some example of RDF records provided by Andy Powell: URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/rdf/examples/ Lassila, Ora and Swick, Ralph (editors).
Resource Description Framework (RDF) model and syntax.
W3C, February 1998.
Latest version at: URL: http://www.w3.org/RDF/Group/WD-rdf-syntax/ Lassila, Ora.
Introduction to RDF Metadata, W3C., Note 1997-11-13 URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-rdf-simple-intro Frequently asked Questions about RDF, W3C.
URL: http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ Frequently Asked Questions about the Extensible Markup Language,W3C.
URL: http://www.ucc.ie/xml/#FAQ THE XML Specification, W3C.
Proposed version December 1997.
URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-xml.html The navigational home page of XML at URL: http://www.w3.org/XML/ Author details Rachel Heery Metadata Group UKOLN University of Bath Email: r.m.heery@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Poem: Disembarking at Digby Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Poem: Disembarking at Digby Citation BibTex RIS Cate Young with this issue's poem.
This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets , Volume 1, Number VII, April 1996.
It is reprinted by permission of the editor.
This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets , Volume 1, Number VII, April 1996.
It is reprinted by permission of the editor.
Disembarking at Digby We waited all day for this for the hills lifting out of the floating horizon the basin webbed with nets the sky with its gulls And it would have been worth it despite the squalls that followed us over the Bay of Fundy but as we drove off the Arcadian Queen the left front tire went flat and the sun went down behind stranding us two helpless spiny creatures at the lowest tide of the year crippled in unfamiliar air but still praying for the revival of the wave that brought us here.
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The Librarian of Babel: The Key to the Stacks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Librarian of Babel: The Key to the Stacks Buzz dissemination portfolio browser copyright cataloguing passwords research Citation BibTex RIS The Librarian, ably assisted by Mike Holderness, considers one of the obstacles to the unhindered dissemination of human knowledge, and makes a modest proposal.
Good morning, and welcome to the Library of Babel.
Many of you will have heard of this great institution of learning only through the melancholy brochure produced for us by Jorge Luis Borges [1] in 1941.
As, however, you will discover in the course of our tours, it is in the nature of this Library that the more closely one searches for the details of its foundation, the more complication one finds.
The great logician Willard van Orman Quine [2] traces the founding concept to the psychologist Theodor Fechner [3] and notes contributions to the design by Kurt Lassiwitz, Theodor Wolff, George Gamow, and Willy Ley.
There have even been attributions [4] to various ancient Hindu philosophers.
As Librarian, I am proud to announce the Library’s new Mission Statement: To make accessible to all the totality of human knowledge.
This is, to be sure, a challenging task, and an undenumberable series of further tours will be required to explore its different facets.
As Librarian, I am of course more intimately concerned with the information in the Library than with its history or physical structures.
Historians and architects may thus protest that we are beginning our tours in the middle.
Librarians will recognise that with this particular Library there is nowhere else to start.
At the time of Borges’ brochure, our Mission Statement would have seemed impossibly ambitious.
The Library had, it is true, an acquisition programme which, we believe uniquely, guaranteed absolutely that it would contain all human knowledge, and much else besides.
But that brochure (probably the finest produced by any library) could not but reflect the misery of the then librarian, faced with the impossibility of the task of cataloguing.
We were immensely encouraged, however, by the emergence from the mid-1940s onwards of proposals for competing institutions.
(I refer, of course, to the extraordinary prescience of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson.)
And, from 1989, it seemed that the arrival of the World-Wide Web and then of its search engines [8] offered us salvation.
We were no longer, it seemed, fated forever to footle in fallible catalogues.
We could, it seemed, present our reference interviews directly to the Library: (Alexandria NEAR hypocaust) AND NOT permanent Try it.
[8] You will find that our accession programme has some way to go before it fulfils its promise.
Today’s tour will, from now on, concentrate on just one of the interesting issues which this this raises: and it will propose a solution which may startle or even shock many of you.
The Web search engines, in principle, offer us a new view of human knowledge and culture: and the more stupid the engine, the newer the view.
Those which reproduce a more librarian-like experience involve human judgements: in the case of Yahoo, this seems to mean that the model user is concerned largely with financial information, and is perhaps a US citizen managing his own IRA (Individual Retirement Account) share portfolio.
The stupid worms, on the other hand, simply index every word they can get hold of.
A search for “East Timor” should, in principle, produce the official Indonesian government position [14] right next to an anti-occupation perspective [15] right next to all the newspaper articles.
But, whatever you seek in my Library, it is extremely unlikely that you will find any article from a newspaper.
It is easy to verify that many newspapers are present in the Library: from the UK alone, the complete recent editions of the Daily Telegraph [9] and of the Times [10] are available; and they can be searched, but only by visiting their sites.
If you do find a newspaper article with a Web search, it’s probably a copyright violation on someone else’s site and this is a clue to the nature of the problem.
You won’t find many professionally published books, either.
Sample chapters, perhaps, and blurbs in their thousands are there.
This rather spoils the potential of the Library of Babel and, to be honest, it’s putting the kybosh on our Mission Statement.
Here we are, with the technology to put the whole of human knowledge at the disposal of the entire human race… In fact, of course, we must not lose sight of the fact that the technology puts whatever knowledge we can muster only at the disposal of those members of the human race who possess: US$2000 or so to spare for a computer, modem and so forth; If they live in one of those relatively uncivilised countries where local telephone calls are charged by the minute not the month, upwards of $300 a year for these; Access to high-quality telephone line, by world standards; A reliable supply of electricity; and A willingness to come to grips with Boolean algebra.
These points will have to be covered in detail elsewhere.
[11] The obstacle which concerns us now is the fact that the more resources have been directly invested in producing a document, the less likely it is to be accessible through a Web search.
You will find only what people are able and willing to give away for free, and what you will find therefore exhibits a distressing tendency to be worth every penny.
It can be divided into three broad categories, in order of increasing value: The content-free: the product of the Spokesentity and of Public Relations creatures; The obsessive: disordered thoughts, conspiracies, labours of love, and the very best amateur experts; and The indigestible: the very highest-quality primary sources, some of them rigorously refereed a process which, unfortunately, is believed somehow to be connected with the exclusive use of the passive voice, with the working assumption that the whole of the rest of the relevant literature has been absorbed by the reader, and with syntax far more fractured than can by any reasonable parody be conveyed.
The point is that authoritative, well-researched, fact-checked, accessible, edited and attractively-presented material requires a very significant amount of human effort; and at present the only means we have of exchanging that effort at a distance are the tokens of stored labour which we call “money”.
The precise protocols we use in these exchanges have significant effects on where labour is applied; and the conventions which are all too rapidly spreading through the Web lead naturally to the locking up of significant chunks of our great Library of Babel in a myriad of closed collections.
This is a betrayal of the potential which the technology offers us and may yet turn out to be the biggest obstacle to the fulfilment of our Mission.
The reason for this sad state of affairs is (I would say at my most charitable) a failure of imagination on the part of the Men in Suits who run newspapers and other publishing businesses.
And the way to remove this obstacle to the unhindered dissemination of human knowledge is to charge money for information.
The one reason that newspapers are invisible to the Web indexers is that publishers are hedging their bets on the elusive Internet Economic Model so they are hiding.
They are preserving the option of running their Web businesses in the two ways which most resemble what they already do: by charging subscriptions to access their product, and by selling advertising.
The subscription model leads publishers into elaborate coding to ensure that their site can be accessed only through a single gateway.
At present, all but a few are offering their Web product as a loss-leader and an experiment.
One exception is the Wall Street Journal, charging US$49 a year for access to its online edition [12] and reputed to be the only internet publishing operation making money.
All those requirements to register and to remember dozens of irritating passwords are immediately useful for internal market research and may well represent a future revenue stream which no traditional, mashed-tree newspaper could dream of selling the readers’ names to direct marketing operations, sorted by what they read.
But they are also the visible tip of an iceberg of a subscription mechanism.
The advertising model requires, to a less drastic extent, that readers be funnelled through the maximum number of the publishers’ own pages before reaching the information they seek.
Hence the legal action [13] threatened by by CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post against TotalNews, which is in effect selling advertising space on a virtual news-stand which “surrounds” the publications and thus (the publishers can be expected to argue if the case goes to court) is a “ParaSite”, detracting from the impact of their own advertising.
Consider, as an alternative, an economic model in which the online Wall Street Journal had no subscription fee, but instead charged readers by the article.
The technology is all in place.
It allows you, in principle, to have an “electronic purse” incorporated in your Web browser.
You charge it up with actual money.
You find yesterday’s WSJ article on the death of Suharto in a a Web index; follow the link; and are asked whether you want to spend US$0.02 to read the article.
You could well tell your purse not to bother you over amounts less than a nickel.
No account numbers or passwords are needed; and, since you are dealing with electronic cash rather than an old-fashioned credit card payment, the transaction is anonymous and you won’t be bothered by junk-mailers unwisely targetting you for holidays in Bali.
It is possible that the WSJ would deliver the article in encrypted form, set to erase itself after a month; it is equally possible that the publisher would simply “sign” the article with the fact it had been licensed to you and rely on fear of the courts, rather than annoying technology, to prevent you re-selling it.
The only technical development missing is governments’ agreement on the encryption needed for electronic cash and for “signing” documents.
At present they’re panicking, but there is a reasonable hope that they will calm down.
You thought you were visiting the Ultimate Library, not a nerds’ convention on e-cash and encryption?
You are.
If the WSJ paid the costs of good research, writing and editing this way, it would not be hiding its articles from the Catalogue of the Library of Babel®.
It would be paying our Web worms to visit it.
The Ultimate Library would become the Ultimate Newspaper (and TV channel and medium-yet-to-be-named).
All Human Life would be Here.
Some sort of code of ethics might be required to prevent Web search engines selling top billing to the highest bidder.
On the other hand, any search engine which did that would in short order find that some enterprising nerd had put up a ParaSite which submitted a search on a user’s behalf and then re-sorted the results in descending date order.
(Hmmm… not a bad idea, even under current circumstances… and, as of now, unpatentable.)
The pay-per view approach has other advantages.
It removes the justification for publishers’ increasingly desperate attempts to become outright owners of information which aggrieved freelance journalists dub “superhighway robbery”.
[16] Before, freelances (and, on the mainland of Europe, staff writers and photographers too) owned their own work and could rent it to whom they pleased.
Now they are surrounded by publishers saying “give us the freehold for the price of a month’s rent, or never work again”.
Pay-per-read makes it very, very simple for authors and publishers to share the risks and opportunities: you pay your $0.02 to to the publisher, and $0.01 of that goes to the author.
This may seem of little concern to librarians until you look at the possibility of Disney, Microsoft, Sony and Panasonic owning very significant chunks of the world’s written culture outright.
It can be argued [17] that pay-per-read will increase the diversity and quality of new content arriving in libraries.
But… what about the horrendous cost to actual libraries?
The answer is very simple, though in urgent need of fleshing out with details: a Public Reading Right for electronic publications.
This author is willing to accept a much smaller payment for readings done on the premises of a school or library than for those made in the homes of people who can afford to do so.
The alternatives are for libraries everywhere to be saddled with paying electronic subscriptions without knowing whether users are going to use them or for the content of our precious Library of Babel to be dominated by intrusive advertising.
Thank you for your attention.
Please do not forget the collection box as you leave the Library.
References [1] Borges, J. L. (1941) “The Library of Babel” in Ficciones.
A text (of dubious legality, but let us assume fair use for critical purposes) is available at http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdis cordia/library_of_babel.html , together with a charming illustration of one of the Library’s newer wings, designed in the late 1960s.
[2] Quine, W. V. O (1987), “Universal Library” in Quiddities, an intermittently philosophical dictionary, Harvard: Harvard.
Probably: the attribution is taken from http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdi scordia/universal_library.html .
[3] Fechner, Gustav Theodor [Pseud.
: Mises], 1801-1887.
Pionier der Sozialwissenschaften; Ästhetiker or so it says at http://library.byu.edu/~rdh/prmss/eg/fechner.html .
[4] Or so it says [5] at [6] http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdis cordia/akashic_records.html .
This site turns up with distressing frequency in searches [8] on the subject.
Honest, three separate searches led to it… [5] It’s lying.
Probably.
Like much of the ancient Hindu philosophy thrown around in the West, this bit was made up by Madam Blavatsky.
Or so it is confidently asserted at http://www.hollyfeld.org/Esoteric/Usenet/Tantra/REF.akasha-.9508.
[6] The credibility of the site is corroded by its name, and somewhat further lessened by the fact that one of the “authorities” cited in reference [4] appears to be a pseudonym for a co-author of the Illuminatus books [7] .
That’s the Library of Babel for you… [7] Oh, look it up yourself [8] if you must… there’s loads in the Library.
[8] And the greatest of the search engines, of course, is the AltaVista Advanced Search.
[9] The Daily Telegraph is at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ .
[10] The Times is at http://www.the-times.co.uk/ .
[11] For example, in “The Internet: enabling whom, when and where?” in preprint at http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/unu-sout.htm [12] See the Wall Street Journal subscription form at http://interactive5.wsj.com/std_regchoice.html .
[13] See (not the most complete source, but readily to hand): http://www.gn.apc.org/media/9705bite.html [14] See http://www.indonesianet.com [15] See, as one of the first examples to show up: http://inx.de/~campaign/english/world/washburn.html [16] The author declares an interest.
Anyone replying, as owner of the words in which they do so, acquires an interest too.
For details of the “superhighway robbery” see the Creators’ Copyright Coalition pages at http://www.gn.apc.org/media/cccindex.html.
[17] It can be argued… and I have, at http://www.gn.apc.org/media/culture.html.
Author (ghostwriter?)
details Mike Holderness, Freelance Journalist, Email: mch@cix.compulink.co.uk Mike Holderness: The Internet for Journalists Web pages at: http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/lecture.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Change and Uncertainty in Academic Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Change and Uncertainty in Academic Libraries Buzz framework infrastructure copyright rae research standards Citation BibTex RIS Catherine Edwards highlights the impact and issues surrounding organisational change in academic libraries.
Charles Handy, the management guru, tells us: Thirty years ago most people thought that change would mean more of the same, only better.
That was incremental change and to be welcomed.
Today we know that in many areas of life we cannot guarantee more of the same … [we] cannot even predict with confidence what will be happening in our own lives [1].
The sense of uncertainty engendered by rapid and unpredictable change is as evident in Higher Education (HE) as in politics, the National Health Service, the media, or in business and commerce.
Arguably, Library and Information Services (LIS) within HE are the point within academic institutions where the impacts of change, be they political, educational or organisational, are most acutely concentrated, and where information technology is the most potent change agent of all [2].
ELib’s IMPEL2 Project, based at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, has been conducting case studies in a range of HE institutions during 1996 and 1997 with a view to gaining greater understanding of the organisational, social and cultural impacts of the growing electronic environment on both providers and users of electronic information systems and sources.
Through its qualitative approach, based largely on in-depth, semi-structured interviews, IMPEL2 has a window into the real experience of information workers and users.
It provides the opportunity to ask, ‘If change is a cause of uncertainty, what form does that uncertainty take, where is it most keenly felt, who experiences it and what can be done to cope with it?’ It is not the intention to paint a depressing picture of LIS at the present time, because although all the examples given below are genuine expressions of people’s feelings of uncertainty at a point in time, a typical visit to a university library is a more positive and exciting experience than might be imagined.
Managers and staff appreciate the significance of the impacts of rapid and profound change on their service and are seeking ways to maximise their strengths and position.
The following observations and verbatim quotations are based on interviews with a total of 80 library and related support staff (also LIS directors and a small number of institutional managers) in a sample of IMPEL2’s case study sites which represents a range of different types of institution.
Feelings of uncertainty were more commonly expressed in institutions where significant organisational changes had or were occurring, although they were not exclusive to those sites.
The fundamental source of concern centred on defining the future role of LIS and LIS staff as the impacts on HE, not only of technology, but of the wider political and economic environment, become evident.
I worry about the indiscriminate rush into IT.
At the moment we’ve got the government and the Funding Councils being almost evangelist about how IT-based solutions are going to solve all our problems, which I think is a bit optimistic.
(University Librarian) The problems he refers to relate to the UK’s mass HE system, and include the increased and diverse student body, rising costs, increased accountability and competition, reduced funding, and the expansion of franchise and partner agreements.
The complexity of balancing such a range of factors along with the additional imperatives of technological development has become extreme.
Information technology in teaching and information provision has not yet provided cheap solutions, nor do simple arithmetic calculations for infrastructure and staffing of future IT-based learning environments promise savings.
HE managers are faced with such a bewildering set of both external and internal pressures that it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to a vision and direction with confidence, as one Pro Vice Chancellor frankly admits I find it very difficult to know what’s going to happen.
It’s embarrassing if I don’t have a vision … I’m supposed to be guiding the university’s decision making over the next couple of years … if I don’t, who on earth does?
LIS directors and managers, however, are seeking commitment and direction from the top; they often feel constrained by what they perceive as lack of central initiative which increases their sense of uncertainty and vulnerability.
The rapid pace of change, greater influence of government and the exigencies of quality assessment exercises encourage a climate of short-termism which inhibits planning.
The hierarchical management and committee structures typical of HE institutions may also blunt their focus and discourage new creative approaches such as Morgan’s ‘inside-out management’.
The leader of the future will not always lead from the front; in times of uncertainty, a significant part of a leader’s role rests in finding ways of unlocking the ideas and energies of others … Management will become much more concerned with empowerment than with close supervision and control [3].
As this type of business terminology creeps into academic institutions, employees may be forgiven for questioning what the role of HE now is; within that LIS staff and managers question the role and direction of their service.
In 1995, Brophy wrote of “the need to define much more clearly which limited range of services we will offer … then to achieve excellence in delivering those services [4].
LIS staff and managers are seeking a consensus between institutional management, academic staff and central services as to how the institution’s business should be supported, so that this support may receive top level commitment and financial underpinning.
This kind of consensus is extremely elusive.
Strong central initiative and funding may enable units such as LIS and Computing Centres to plan more efficient and effective services but more often than not decision-making and spending power are devolved to academic departments which are unwilling to risk their own autonomy by releasing power to the centre.
Mismatches occur between institutional objectives as stated in Information Strategies or Corporate Plans and the level to which these objectives are supported on the ground.
Central service staff frequently perceive that a failure of understanding of their departments’ roles within the institution is at the root of these mismatches.
Faced with cuts to his service, one LIS Director comments It’s essentially based on the view that the core business of the university is teaching and learning and research and that we ought to be putting more of our resources into the core business … I don’t actually believe that all the academic staff do is core business and I don’t believe that all the administrative staff do is non-core business.
I think the library is actually a clear example of something which directly supports student learning even though it uses non-academic staffing.
There is a general consensus among LIS staff that the clearest impact of the changing LIS environment is a shift in their role towards more instruction and teaching of users I want to move libraries away from being standard support services into something which is part of the academic process.
(Site Librarian) Just how to fulfil that role is not clear however.
Shortage of staff, space, appropriate skills and financial resources all constrain teaching initiatives, but academic staff perceptions of LIS colleagues may also be implicated.
I think one of the problems is that the notion of the traditional library has never quite been overcome and they don’t actually expect us to do anything like promotion and teaching for them … some people would argue that it isn’t the function of a library – but if it isn’t the function of the library, who else is doing it?
(Site Librarian) The perception that LIS are somehow of lower status than academic departments persists, despite the trend towards student-centred, resource-based learning, the growth of electronic information systems and sources, and increased workloads among academics, all of which drive students in the direction of the library.
Librarians are fearful for their professional identity as never before.
Their efforts to gain a firm foothold in departments are often frustrated, so that information skills sessions which are embedded in the curriculum are the exception rather than the rule, encouraging a sense that these skills are undervalued.
There is a noticeable tendency among librarians to hold their ‘professionalism’ very dear, but this notion may be overtaken We’ve always been clear that a so-called professional is someone who has a library qualification, but that’s not the case any more.
We have a growing number of staff who have IT qualifications, and who are employed on what we have always called a professional grade.
(Deputy Librarian) The ‘profession’ of librarian becomes a less discrete entity through its growing convergence with computing.
The role of the subject specialist is more difficult to sustain, a costly luxury in an environment where courses are increasingly modularised and cross-disciplinary and where information sources are complex and diverse.
The traditional differentiation between ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ staff has the potential to become blurred as technology releases people from routine, time-consuming chores.
Even the most phlegmatic and philosophical librarian must at times view his or her role with uncertainty: We’ve come to a situation where our traditional library can’t really deal with the way information is going and we don’t know what the new framework needs to be.
It’s a paradigm crisis stage.
(Assistant Librarian) Direct support of users by LIS staff is a source of many dilemmas, not least those relating to information handling skills.
Recent electronic discussions bear witness to the inadequacy of ‘library tours’, the difficulty of delivering interesting and valuable information skills sessions to sufficient numbers of students at the appropriate time, and whether sessions should aim at an awareness level or go further into the use of individual sources.
The provision of basic IT skills, not traditionally within the remit of the library,is also in question.
Indeed the boundaries between what are core IT skills and what are information handling skills is unclear.
One University Librarian speaks of … the vacuum next to the library operation students without IT skills not being picked up by departments or by the Computer Centre.
Students disadvantaged by lack of basic IT skills, either as a result of cuts to central services or failure by the institution or individual departments to address the problem adequately, are likely to turn for help to the library.
Here, restricted resources, hardware and accommodation are barriers to providing this help, even if the skills and desire to do so were present.
The dilemma is most acute in the context of the Internet.
While many LIS staff are happily creating Web pages and finding suitable sites for their users, many still question their role.
The problem is that the subject specialists don’t feel they have the time to wade through the Internet looking for things.
They still see that as difficult and as a job they do when they’ve done everything else.
(Assistant Librarian) Responsibility for Internet development and exploitation seems to be split between LIS and Computing Centres, and where a co-ordinated joint approach is not carefully worked out, tensions tend to occur.
There is much debate about how Internet access and skills should be incorporated into existing provision, how to promote and evaluate it, and whether to take a subject or a tool-based approach.
Some feel that the Internet should not necessarily be associated with library and information services at all.
The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has placed an additional burden on LIS staff and resources.
Here again, staff are unsure of how research should be supported in the balance between access and holdings, although policy formulation may become clearer in the wake of the Anderson Report [5].
There are implications for structure, resources and training.
In one breath they’re saying we’ve got to increase the research profile, almost every department has to take on a research element.
In the next they’re saying “but there’ll be no support for it.” (Subject Team Leader) Uncertainty associated with organisational change is probably inevitable.
Morgan [6] and others [8] advocate flatter structures and team working as more flexible in times of change, more likely to motivate staff and encourage self-development.
John Kelleher of the Tavistock Institute states in ARIADNE 7 [9] What we find time and time again is that technology is the pretext for organisational change.
LIS staff may add suspicion of hidden agendas as well as frank cost-cutting to the reasons they perceive for massive restructuring.
The desire to retain the status quo in the form of traditional library hierarchies where staff ‘know their place’ within the structure, remains strong in many academic institutions; ‘dynamic conservatism’ (the tendency to fight to remain the same) as described by McCaskey [10] persists.
Certainly the management of such change presents great challenges to managers: poor communications, absence of job descriptions months after restructuring, uncertainty about reporting and line management, and problems of re-training and multiskilling were all found in the IMPEL2 study.
With the plethora of new sources both local and remote, new possibilities for document delivery, non-uniformity of interfaces, ever-changing search engines, and the sheer range of technical skills required in the workplace, LIS staff find difficulty keeping up, which intensifies their sense of vulnerability, if not inadequacy.
This sense is not restricted to those working at the sharp end of information provision, as a University Librarian confesses Information technology is very destabilising of structures of authority because I don’t think there has ever been a period in my professional life when I felt so unconfident about my grasp of some of the most essential technologies that are driving the future of the operation I manage.
Staff are also most concerned about the ultimate implications of end-user access, not only within their building, but also of remote end use.
Are they doing quick and dirty searches, coming away with a poor bunch of references, so that their research ratings are going down?
… Then it’s even more important that I get to know thembefore they start picking up bad habits from other people.
(Information Specialist) Typically LIS staff have no way of measuring the amount of remote end use which is occurring and so have no control over it or means of assessing its effectiveness.
Concern is expressed about the risk of inequality of access for mature and part-time students and those studying on remote sites such as partner colleges or nursing libraries where even technical support may be uneven.
The risk of plagiarism is also a source of concern.
The eLib Programme is already presenting many new opportunities for the electronic library and will continue to do so in the near future.
As well as advancing electronic developments, one of its strengths will be in defining the barriers to implementing new initiatives: these include technical barriers such as copyright and publishers’ policies, organisational barriers, funding and political barriers, attitudinal and cultural barriers.
Having defined these, the route to overcoming them should become clearer.
The role of management in periods of change and uncertainty becomes the most important tool in the armoury.
LIS managers face in several directions at once.
They try to accommodate the incongruities and conflicting pressures to create strategies which position the service appropriately within the institution.
Good managers seek to bring all of their skills to avoid the service becoming passive, or reactive with piecemeal development which risks rendering it vulnerable and powerless.
Campus-wide Information Strategies are often criticised for being bland wish-lists, but the exercise of rigorously compiling one may be the first step towards an integrated approach to IT in relation to the institution’s overall mission.
An Information Strategy is less about technology than the wider issues of communication, teaching and learning.
It provides a basis for defining objectives, resourcing, training and staffing issues, teaching and research issues, management of administrative information and also the technological infrastructure.
The Information Strategy may be primarily symbolic, but if it symbolises genuine commitment then its value is immense.
Management activity within LIS, as observed by the IMPEL2 interviewer, is designed to strengthen the position of the service.
Activities such as SWOT analyses, Total Quality Management programmes, group planning exercises, training needs analyses, competencies lists, training programmes, and use surveys, all increase staff awareness of both external and internal environments.
If documented, much of this activity may be used as ammunition in the fight for resources and recognition, underpinning decision-making and enabling funding opportunities to be seized.
Many libraries are now engaged in activity costing, the formal breakdown of what the service consists and the costing of all elements of that service.
In this way, departments may differentiate between standard and tailored services.
Activity costing undermines the long-held assumption that the value of libraries and information is somehow ‘incalculable’.
This new business approach sets out the LIS stall for scrutiny; the range of goods and services offered coupled with their costs may startle institutional managers and academic departments into giving LIS higher priority in their planning.
In theory LIS should be less vulnerable to budget cuts as a result.
However, at the root of much uncertainty in the modern HE library is the fear expressed here by a Faculty Librarian.
There’s a simplistic argument that says if you’re providing fewer books, then you need fewer librarians.
Current thinking urges us to take uncertainty on board and turn it to our advantage through creativity, intuition and innovation: The better approach … is to accept uncertainty, try to understand it, and make it part of our reasoning.
Uncertainty today is not just an occasional, temporary deviation from a reasonable predictability; it is a basic structural feature of the environment.
11 Coping with uncertainty is not only a management role.
Individuals also have responsibility for self-management in what one senior librarian describes as ‘a crisis of confidence.’ Training and personal development are part of self-management, as are the ability to remain flexible, the sharing of knowledge and expertise, good communications, leadership and team work.
On 1st November 1997, Norma Bruce, Veterinary Medicine Library, Ohio State University wrote: I was particularly pleased to find Catherine Edwards’ article on Change and Uncertainty because I was looking for something that examined the intellectual process and emotions of library workers who are experiencing change… “The sense of uncertainty engendered by rapid and unpredictable change is as evident in Higher Education (HE) as in politics, the National Health Service, the media, or in business and commerce.
Arguably, Library and Information Services (LIS) within HE are the point within academic institutions where the impacts of change, be they political, educational or organisational, are most acutely concentrated, and where information technology is the most potent change agent of all.” Thanks for an excellent article.
References [1] Handy, C. The Age of Unreason.
In: Henry, Jane (ed) Creative Management.
Sage Publications 1991, 269-282.
[2] Woodsworth, A., Maylone, T., Sywak, M. The Information Job Family: Results of an Exploratory Study.
Library Trends 41 (2) 1992, 250-268.
[3] Morgan G. Emerging waves and challenges.
In: Henry, Jane (ed) Creative Management.
Sage Publications 1991, 283-293.
[4] Brophy, P. Prisoners of addictions or prisoners of envy.
The Journal of the University College and Research Group (Relay) 41 [1995], 18-21.
[5] Joint Funding Councils’ Libraries Review.
Report of the Group on a national Regional Strategy for Library Provision for Researchers (Chair: Professor Michael Anderson) 1995.
Also available online at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/anderson/ [6] Op.
Cit.
(3).
[7] Corrall, S. Flat structures: how low can you go?
Library Manager 5, March 1995, 9-10.
[8] Von Wahlde, B.V.
The impact of the virtual library on library management and organisation.
In: A.H.Helal & J.Weiss, eds.
Proceedings of 15th International Essen Symposium.
Essen 1993, 27-42.
[9].
MacColl, J.
A View from the Hill.
Ariadne 7 January 1997, 5.
Availavle online at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/view/ [10] McCaskey, M. B. Mapping: creating, maintaining and relinquishing conceptual frameworks.
In: Henry, Jane (ed) Creative Management.
Sage Publications 1991, 135-152.
[11] Wack, P. Scenarios: uncharted waters ahead.
In: Managing Innovation.
J. Henry & D. Walker (eds).
Sage Publications, 1991, 200-210.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ILRT: The Institute for Learning and Research Technology Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ILRT: The Institute for Learning and Research Technology Buzz data mobile software framework html database dissemination infrastructure archives copyright video cataloguing multimedia e-learning cd-rom authentication intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Gillian Austen, External Relations Manager at the recently founded Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol, gives an overview of its structure and objectives.
The Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol is host to more than seventeen funded projects at the forefront of learning and research technology, including four eLib projects ranging across the subject divide, from medicine to business to social science and beyond into generic issues.
In this article we describe these four projects, SOSIG, ROADS, biz/ed and MIDRIB, as well as providing an overview of the Institute and its other projects.
Elsewhere in this issue of Ariadne, Lesly Huxley, Training and Documentation Officer for the SOSIG project, describes the workshops and training materials which support users of the Social Science Information Gateway.
SOSIG is the longest-established of the Institute's four eLib projects and its experience in indexing, description protocols and quality assurance for Internet resources has been shared widely across the Institute and in particular its other three eLib projects, creating a web of interrelationships which span across subject boundaries.
ROADS (Resource Organisation And Discovery in Subjectbased Services), with which many Ariadne readers will be familiar, is a collaborative project with Loughborough and Bath Universities to design and implement a user-orientated resource discovery system.
The ROADS software is used not only by SOSIG and biz/ed but also OMNI and the eLib programme's own information server, and is likely to be deployed by EEVL, IHR-Info, ADAM and CAIN.
By supporting these emerging subject-based services with tools, guidelines and advice, ROADS is making a significant contribution to the development of a sharable, distributed systems platform for resource discovery services.
ROADS also has a leading role in implementing and testing standards and in working with information providers to involve them in the description of their own resources.
Biz/ed is the Institute's second information gateway, collecting, assessing and describing quality educational resources of use to the business and economics community.
The biz/ed team have drawn on the experience of SOSIG and, like SOSIG, biz/ed uses the ROADS software.
Launched as a self-funding project, the core service is targeted at the needs of students and staff up to first year undergraduate.
Funding under eLib is extending the biz/ed service to research users, with a comprehensive and searchable database of electronic resources for business and economics.
One of biz/ed's great strengths is its links with the business community the new layer is being developed in partnership with the Association of Business Schools and it also works closely with the CTI Centre for Economics, a link which keeps the team in touch with developments in the academic use of networked resources in economics.
The youngest of the Institute's four eLib projects is MIDRIB, a collaboration between staff at St George's Hospital School London, the University of Bristol's Faculty of Medicine and members of the Institute.
The project is developing a fully-indexed, searchable on-line image database which will provide medical practitioners and trainers with an invaluable tool for use in teaching and learning.
Like SOSIG, MIDRIB will provide training and awareness workshops and materials to support users.
MIDRIB is also confronting the many medicine specific issues relating to copyright, quality assurance, classification and security of images.
A great deal of preparatory work has already been done by partners both in London and Bristol and MIDRIB will be formally launched in February 1997 at the Royal College of Surgeons.
A Little History ...
The Institute for Learning and Research Technology was formed in August 1996 from a merger of the Centre for Computing in the Social Sciences (CCSS) and the Educational Technology Service (ETS).
The Institute is currently the largest group of its kind in the UK, with a staff of more than forty, and a range of projects including national and international Internet services, award-winning software development and innovative academic support services.
The CCSS was founded as the Centre for Computing in Economics and was successful in acquiring externally-funded projects such as the Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG), the first subjectspecific information gateway on the Internet.
In August 1995 the Centre was redesignated within the Faculty of Social Sciences and renamed the Centre for Computing in the Social Sciences.
The CCSS was formally launched in December 1995 and continued to acquire major externally-funded projects during 1996.
The ETS was established in 1989 with the CTI Centre for Medicine, which grew out of an interactive video project based in the Department of Pathology in the Medical School.
The success of these initiatives encouraged the University of Bristol to create an Educational Technology Service at the end of 1991, with a remit to promote and support the appropriate use of technology in teaching and learning.
Based in the School of Education, the ETS worked closely with the Library and Computing Service to support academic departments within the University in the adoption of new learning technologies.
In addition to this local role, the ETS developed pioneering means of image capture, storage, and retrieval over networks.
... And the Future The mission of the Institute is to be a centre of excellence in the development and use of new technology in teaching, learning and research.
In pursuit of this mission, the objectives of the Institute are: To initiate projects in the use and development of technology-based methods in teaching, learning and research To ensure that the University of Bristol is provided with rapid access to these developments and that its own use of technology-based methods in teaching, learning and research is fully advantaged by the work of the Institute To assist the staff of the University, in collaboration with other support services, in the acquisition, development and delivery of teaching, learning and research materials using technology-based methods How it all Fits Together The Institute for Learning and Research Technology hosts more than seventeen projects, which are organised into six project groups: Networked Information Research and Services SOSIG, ROADS, DESIRE Learning and Research Software Development WinEcon, CuDOSS, QuickStart Multimedia Research UnitM Mobile Multimedia University, ISDN in Dental Training, NetQuest, TASI Centre for Learning Technology in Business and Economics CTI Economics, biz/ed, ILRT Internet Development Centre for Learning Technology in Medicine CTI Medicine, BSCD, MIDRIB, ReproMed Learning Technology Support Service A dedicated learning technology service for the University of Bristol Networked Information Research and Services Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) SOSIG is a service funded by ESRC and JISC which provides an easy means of access to relevant high quality networked resources available on the Internet.
SOSIG points to a wide variety of electronic resources under subject headings ranging from Anthropology to Statistics.
A catalogue of these resources has been built, including brief descriptions.
Users can browse or search through the entries before dynamically connecting to resources of interest.
The SOSIG project also runs training and awareness sessions all over the UK.
Attendees include research and teaching staff, subject librarians and support staff.
The project freely distributes training materials and documentation, specifically designed for social scientists, to help newcomers to the Internet and to encourage potential electronic publishers and information providers to share their resources with the community.
Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-based Services (ROADS) ROADS is a collaborative development project, funded under the Electronic Libraries Programme, to design and implement a user-oriented resource discovery system.
The ROADS project is investigating the creation, collection and distribution of resource descriptions, to provide a transparent means of locating (with browsing and searching techniques) and using networked resources.
ROADS also aims to provide a common platform to allow searching across multiple subject based services.
The ROADS system enables the process of creating resource descriptions to be kept with the appropriate subject specialists.
Designing a European Service for Information on Research and Education (DESIRE) The DESIRE project aims to build an information infrastructure for the European academic community and is developing tools to provide better support for multimedia information, better indexing services and better facilities for information management.
DESIRE will address the needs of European end-users of research data to locate and retrieve the information relevant to their research activities.
DESIRE will also provide tools for creating and recording research resources in discovery systems and provide a framework for quality assessment and control.
This description and discovery apparatus will enhance the value of resources by making them more widely accessible.
Learning and Research Software Development WinEcon WinEcon is an award-winning, customisable multimedia learning package covering the whole syllabus for introductory economics.
The software offers more than 75 hours of tutorial material and includes exercises, self-assessment questions and examinations, economic databases, an economics glossary and references to leading economics textbooks.
WinEcon was developed over a period of three years by the TLTP Economics Consortium and was managed by the Centre for Computing in Economics.
The Institute for Learning and Research Technology continues to manage the ongoing support, maintenance and further development of WinEcon and Blackwell Publishers are responsible for its world-wide distribution and marketing.
WinEcon has now won three major software development awards.
The program was a medallist in the 1995 British Computer Society Awards, a winner at the 1996 European Academic Software Awards, and a winner of the 1996 Asymetrix Interactive Awards for Best Educational Software.
Customised Delivery of Study Skills (CuDOSS) CuDOSS is developing a study skills handbook which can be customised by academic departments to reflect their specific teaching methods, syllabus, student profile and available learning resources.
As the handbook is to be held electronically, it can be delivered to students as a browsable World Wide Web application or as a printed guide, whichever medium is most appropriate and amenable to their level of familiarity with information technology.
The CuDOSS System will support initiatives such as Open Learning Centres and distance learning and will help to facilitate the move towards more open and flexible provision of learning materials.
QuickStart The QuickStart template was developed to enable academics to develop Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) courseware without having to acquire advanced programming skills.
The template consists of a collection of reusable designs and software components built on top of the popular Asymetrix ToolBook authoring tool.
As its name suggests, the package greatly reduces the learning curve for novice developers.
In addition, it also increases the efficiency of authoring for more experienced developers.
QuickStart is currently on version 2 and work is underway to transfer features such as graphs, spreadsheets and assessment from the WinEcon Authoring Tools into this easier to use environment.
Multimedia Research Unit Mobile Multimedia University The Mobile Multimedia University (MMU) is a Bristol-based collaboration between Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, the University of the West of England and University of Bristol to develop and investigate access to electronic resources via fixed and mobile networks.
Drawing on the distinctive expertise of each of the consortium partners the MMU aims to work with the Bristol MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) to promote the development of a regional infrastructure for continuing education and training.
As part of this work the MRU is developing a distributed database structure for the delivery of electronic learning materials such as still images, video or courseware over networks.
This is being implemented in MIDRIB (see under Centre for Learning Technology in Medicine), which incorporates the Bristol Biomedical Image Database, an early MRU project.
ISDN in Dental Training ISDN in Dental Training is a project investigating the use of ISDN video conferencing links between general dental practitioners, dental postgraduate centres and dental consultants based in leading hospitals for continuing professional development and postgraduate education.
This technology will enable lecturers to teach aspects of clinical dentistry which lend themselves to small group teaching, such as treatment planning and the acquisition of technical skills.
Video conferencing systems over ISDN offer an optimum solution where remote transmission of lectures, workshops and diagnostic support all require a two-way exchange of visual information.
NetQuest NetQuest is a project developing TML (Tutorial Markup Language), a superset of HTML, to enable tutors and students to create sets of questions for selfor course assessment with automatic marking and user authentication if required.
The project aims to provide a large questionset which will act as a central resource, accessible over networks including the World Wide Web, marked up so that the user can request a set of questions on any given topic.
Funded by the University of Bristol's Continuing Professional Development Fund and the charity Baby Lifeline, NetQuest is compiling indexed and searchable "questionbanks" in the subject areas (initially) of geoscience, chemistry, medicine, veterinary science and engineering.
These will be complemented by "assessmentware", software which will allow students (for self-assessment) and tutors to grade automatically the tests they have requested.
The next stage will be the development of an NT server version which will allow delivery over an intranet.
Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) is a JISC-funded project to provide technical advice and consultancy on the digital creation, storage and networked delivery of image-related information to support the development of image-based projects in HE institutions across the country.
TASI will draw on the expertise and experience of members of the MRU to provide advice on all issues encountered by such projects, ranging from choices of hardware and software, formats and compression standards, search and retrieval methods, indexing and cataloguing, archiving, conservation of both original and digital collections of material, through to intellectual property rights and user issues like authentication and licensing.
Centre for Learning Technology in Business and Economics Business Education on the Internet (biz/ed) Biz/ed is a comprehensive source of education centred business and economics information on a single World Wide Web site.
Biz/ed hosts original business and economics case studies, statistics, assignments and support materials, signposts relevant quality business and economics Internet resources, and provides network facilities for economics and business students, teachers and information providers.
The core service is currently targeted at the needs of students and staff up to first year undergraduate level.
A grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) is extending the service to both research users and those developing and using materials for more advanced courses in the HE sector.
CTI Centre for Economics The CTI Centre for Economics is one of a network of 24 subject based centres at higher education institutions throughout the UK which are working to promote the use of information technology in teaching and learning.
Its activities include liaising with economics departments, running workshops and seminars, maintaining an electronic information base on the World Wide Web and providing an on-line resource guide detailing available CAL/CBL software.
It publishes, in both paper and electronic formats, a termly journal, Computers in Higher Education Economics Review (CHEER), in collaboration with the CALECO Research Group at the University of Portsmouth.
A key aspect of its work is visiting economics departments to discuss the potential for using computers in teaching economics, presenting staff seminars and giving software demonstrations.
ILRT Internet Development The Institute undertakes a variety of privately funded Internet development projects, ranging from bespoke educational applications to full commercial Web site design and implementation.
As a national centre of excellence in the development and use of new technology in teaching and learning, the Institute is able to bring to bear the latest Internet technologies on behalf of its clients, who include educational institutions, charitable organisations and selected leading companies.
Centre for Learning Technology in Medicine (CLTM) CTI Centre for Medicine The CTI Centre for Medicine, promoting the use of learning technology in medicine, dentistry, veterinary science and pharmacy, is one of the largest and most complex of the 24 subject based centres of the Computers in Teaching Initiative.
Its activities include maintaining a World Wide Web presence with an on-line Resource Guide and links to other relevant Web sites.
In addition, the Centre publishes a Newsletter twice a year and hosts a conference every other year.
The Centre's staff visit medical, dental and veterinary schools as well as schools of pharmacy to demonstrate courseware and to advise on the use of learning technology in education and training.
Because of its particularly large and diverse constituency a top priority has been to establish and cultivate networking and collaboration.
British Society for CAL in Dentistry (BSCD) The British Society for CAL in Dentistry (BSCD) promotes the use of computer aided learning (CAL) materials in dental training and continuing education.
BSCD is funded entirely by institutional and individual membership fees.
Its senior officers are drawn from a number of dental schools across the country and the society welcomes members from around the world.
BSCD publishes the Journal of Computer Aided Learning (CAL) in Dentistry biennially on CD-ROM, runs an email discussion list called dental-cal, organises an annual conference and maintains a World Wide Web presence.
Hosted by the CLTM, BSCD acts as a focal point for discussion of issues and the dissemination of information on all aspects of CAL in dentistry.
Medical Images Digitised Reference Information Bank (MIDRIB) MIDRIB is a JISC-funded national project being undertaken by staff of St George's Hospital Medical School London and the University of Bristol in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust.
MIDRIB will create, maintain and deliver a comprehensive collection of medical images in digital form for use in teaching and research.
MIDRIB draws together the best of existing collections into a coherent resource which will be accessible via the Joint Academic Network from a single World Wide Web site.
MIDRIB will provide training workshops to raise awareness of its potential among medical educators and will also make images available on CD-ROM.
The project is developing on-line tools and case-study imagesets to facilitate the use of the archive in teaching and learning.
ReproMed ReproMed is directed by the University of Bristol's Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and funded by the University's Continuing Vocational Education Fund.
The project is producing an on-line information guide to help GPs, for whom it is primarily designed, to keep up to date with the latest developments in reproductive medicine.
The guide will also be useful for trainee doctors, gynaecologists, family practice nurses, students and patients.
ReproMed will cover both contraception and infertility and each subject will be delivered as two modules, one for healthcare professionals and one for patients.
The Family Planning Association have agreed to provide all their leaflets and their training manual so that the guide will be able to describe the full range of contraceptive methods in an interactive format for the doctor with accompanying leaflets for patients.
Planned as an on-line resource, the final product will incorporate interactive elements with appropriate use of multimedia.
Learning Technology Support Service (LTSS) The Learning Technology Support Service (LTSS) provides information, advice and assistance to staff at the University of Bristol who use, or wish to adopt, learning technology in their teaching.
The Service, which is wholly funded by the University, aims to develop and maintain an environment in which learning technology is used effectively to support the University's teaching and research activities.
The LTSS promotes and supports the appropriate use of new technologies by informing departments of the latest developments in learning technology and the implications for teaching, learning and research.
It provides training and information on learning technology through workshops, seminars and an advisory service.
To ensure the production of locally produced learning technology material the LTSS assists departments and members of staff in developing proposals for fully funded learning technology projects, which can then be implemented in association with staff from the Institute's other project groups.
The LTSS also plays an important strategic role by assisting in the development of the University's teaching and learning strategy in collaboration with other educational support services.
The location of the LTSS within the Institute ensures that it is kept up to date with the latest innovations in the field and that the University of Bristol remains at the forefront of developments in learning and research technology.
Further Information For further information about the Institute or any of its project, please contact: Gillian Austen External Relations Manager Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol 8 Woodland Road Bristol, BS8 1TN Tel: +44 (0)117 928 8478 Fax: +44 (0)117 928 8473 Email: G.Austen@bristol.ac.uk URL: http://ccss.bris.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Resource Creation and Management at Scottish Universities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Resource Creation and Management at Scottish Universities Buzz html dissemination usability infrastructure metadata accessibility browser copyright graphics windows jpeg z39.50 marc gif rae url research Citation BibTex RIS Dennis Nicholson and Martin Smith describe the Catriona II project.
Key questions The CATRIONA II eLib-funded project is in the process of examining approaches to the creation and management of electronic research and teaching resources at Scottish universities, looking in particular at the following key questions: To what extent are academics creating electronic RAE-level research material?
; To what extent are they creating electronic teaching material of value beyond the local institution?
Is the material in deliverable and usable form and is it accessible?
Is it important to academics that it should be?
Will universities create and manage services to deliver such resources to the desktop either within or beyond the local institution?
What are the institutional, as well as the operational, requirements of such services, and what, if anything, is the role of the Library in terms of policy, strategy, organisational infrastructure and related matters?
The project, which began in June 1996, is based at Strathclyde and Napier Universities and has the support of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL).
Progress report: surveys and a demonstrator service During 1997, the project conducted surveys of over 500 randomly selected academic staff at six Scottish universities, seeking to discover: the position with respect to the first three of the above questions; and, associated feedback likely to be of relevance to the other two questions.
In addition, work was begun on a Web-based demonstrator service that will: act as a focal point for the project’s consideration of the various issues relating to the university management of services to deliver electronic research and teaching material; and, provide an illustrative browse-and-search Web/Z39.50 interface to examples of the kinds of electronic resources being created at Scottish (and presumably other UK) universities.
This article summarises the results of the surveys and looks briefly at the initial development and implementation of the first of the project’s two demonstrator services based at Strathclyde University Library.
This service has been designed at the library and ultimately also the Research Park – of the Clyde Virtual University project, a SHEFC-funded project managed by Niall Sclater at Strathclyde University.
The Strathclyde demonstrator envisages a distributed model of institutional service provision, with departmental servers as well as a central service.
The second demonstrator, based at Napier University, will look at a more centralised approach to service provision and organisation.
The surveys: purpose and extent The project’s purpose in conducting the surveys was to examine the situation across Scotland with regard to the existence, in electronic form, of RAE-quality research material and externally valuable teaching material, to establish whether such material exists on Scottish campuses in a deliverable and usable format and, if it does, to evaluate to what extent it can be considered accessible.
Six of the thirteen Scottish Universities have been surveyed – Abertay and Napier (two of the five ‘new’ universities), Stirling and Strathclyde (two of the four ‘modern’ universities), and Edinburgh and St. Andrews (two of the four ‘ancient’ universities).
In each case, the two chosen institutions were the smallest and largest of their type, ensuring that the surveys covered both the smallest and largest of the Scottish universities, together with a good sample of intermediate-sized institutions.
Key issues and conclusions of the CATRIONA II surveys The results of the surveys in respect of the key issues of resource creation, delivery, usability and accessibility, show that a significant amount of research and teaching material exists (90% report that they have such material), but that it is not generally accessible (31% say they have some accessible material) and that even ‘accessible’ material may require further conversion or the use of specialised ‘helper applications’ and may be difficult to find.
An important finding of the surveys was that a high percentage of academics regard desktop access to resources created at other institutions as either important, very important, or essential (85% in all).
Such findings – given the high creation to accessibility ratios found – underline the importance of seeking to examine institutional intentions regarding the creation of services to manage the delivery of such resources: the key element of the second part of the project Key survey results: research and teaching material combined The surveys asked about research and teaching materials separately.
However, it was possible to combine the results of the two questions using, in effect, a Boolean OR to give a measure of the extent to which relevant electronic resources of both types are being created at the surveyed sites, a procedure which effectively balanced the various institutions in respect of one or other having a stronger focus on research or a stronger focus on teaching.
They show that a high percentage (83% 97%) of electronic resources are being created at all six universities, and that such differences that were found in the survey results are not statistically significant.
This suggests strongly that once the research/teaching variable is removed from the equation, all six universities surveyed are essentially similar – each is creating electronic resources at essentially the same high level and the measured differences between them are not statistically significant.
Electronic material (research and teaching) Yes No All Universities 90% 10% Edinburgh 93% 7% St Andrews 97% 3% Stirling 85% 15% Strathclyde 91% 9% Abertay 97% 3% Napier 83% 17% Key survey results: research material in electronic format In total, 74% of all academic staff surveyed at the six institutions indicated that they had research-level material in electronic format.
There was, moreover, a clear pattern of response linked to university type: respondents at the ‘ancient’ universities (90%) were, on average, more likely to have research-level material in electronic format than were ‘modern’ (78%) or ‘new’ (52%).
The institutions of each type were chosen as the largest and smallest of their type, yet the two in each type pair showed no statistically significant differences between them.
Arguably, therefore, each was representative of its type and, since the sample sizes were relatively large (50% each for modern and ancient and 40% for new), it is not unreasonable to assume that the results may be representative of the other institutions of similar type across Scotland.
Research material in electronic format Yes No Not sure All universities 74% 22% 4% Edinburgh 89% 11% 0 St Andrews 90% 10% 0 Stirling 78% 22% 0 Strathclyde 78% 16% 6% Abertay 66% 31% 3% Napier 47% 46% 8% Ancient 90% 11% 0 Modern 78% 17% 5% New 52% 42% 7% Key survey results: teaching material in electronic format The survey revealed that 69% of all respondents had teaching material in electronic form which they thought either would be of value beyond the local institution (35%), or might be of value beyond the local institution (34%).
The figures for individual institutions ranged from 49% to 87%, highlighting that significant amounts of material were being created at all six institutions.
Looking at university type, it appeared that both modern and new universities seemed to be equally likely to have such material (74%) and much more likely to have it than ancient universities (57%).
However, these figures disguise a situation which is much less clear.
Looked at individually, the institutions show the following: Despite the average figure of 57%, one of the two ancient universities, St. Andrews, returned the highest figure of all six universities at 87%.
Edinburgh, the other ancient university, returned the lowest at 49%.
The three institutions with the highest percentages were an ancient, a new, and a modern university respectively (highest first).
The three lowest (highest first) were a new, a modern and an ancient university.
The two smallest institutions looked at had the highest percentages of material and the largest institution had the lowest; however, the other three institutions did not follow this pattern.
The overall picture, however, is clearly one of significant levels of creation of teaching material, and of significant variations between institutions not related either to type or, less clearly, to size, or size within type.
Teaching material in electronic format Would be of value May be of value No Other All universities 35% 34% 30% 1% Edinburgh 24% 25% 52% 0 St Andrews 59% 28% 14% 0 Stirling 39% 29% 32% 0 Strathclyde 38% 37% 22% 3% Abertay 31% 53% 16% 0 Napier 33% 38% 28% 1% Ancient 32% 25% 43% 0 Modern 38% 36% 24% 2% New 33% 42% 25% 1% Key survey results: accessibility of electronic material to others A substantial number of all respondents (64%) who had electronic research or teaching material said that this was accessible only to themselves.
Only 31% of those surveyed had network accessible material and 6% had material accessible to others by some other means.
Results of manual trawls of Web sites at Napier and Strathclyde Universities suggested that even the networked material was not generally accessible in that is was often difficult to find and frequently in formats that might cause potential users access problems.
The general pattern, therefore, was one of inaccessibility.
Across the six institutions, 90% of respondents had some kind of quality information in electronic form, but only 31% said the material was networked.
Even at Edinburgh, which showed the highest level of network accessibility, the figure (43%) compared unfavourably with the level for the existence of material in electronic form (93%).
This was the clear pattern at all six sites and it is again not unreasonable to conclude that the same pattern may be found at other Scottish universities.
It is worth noting that those respondents who indicated that they had accessible material were not suggesting that all of the material they had created was accessible – only that they had material that was accessible.
Key survey results: are resources in deliverable and usable formats Provided the user has access to the appropriate helper application, any electronic format is arguably deliverable and usable.
If they do not have helper applications – and this may often be the case if the surveys are accurate – only HTML and Web browser compatible graphics formats such as gif and jpeg can truly be considered to be widely deliverable and usable.
The figures for specific graphics formats are not known, but on average only 21% of respondents had html material, with the level at new universities significantly lower.
It follows, therefore, that much of the material available is not necessarily in an immediately accessible and usable form, although high scores for Microsoft’s Word for Windows package indicate that a substantial amount of the material might be easily converted to HTML by a combination of automated and manual methods.
No clear pattern across the six institutions has been discerned to date, however, the general picture is so varied with so many different formats involved, it is safe to assume that the pattern across Scotland is similarly varied, and that much work is likely to be required in respect of formats at least as far as existing material is concerned.
Key survey results: is lack access to resources important?
Overall, 85% of respondents viewed desktop access to electronic versions of published and unpublished research and teaching material at other UK universities as either essential (14%), very important (25%), or important (46%).
Differences between institutions, institution types, and institution within each of the three types, were not statistically significant, suggesting that the pattern across Scotland (and perhaps beyond) is likely to be similar to the survey results, i.e.
that academics would much prefer wider access to resources created at other institutions.
Summary of other survey results Besides the key issues discussed above, the CATRIONA II survey also investigated a number of issues associated with the creation and accessibility of electronic resources at Scottish universities.
These issues included: the balance of research and teaching responsibilities; use of different desktop computing platforms; availability of network facilities within institutions; transference of copyright ownership; and, factors which were likely to encourage electronic resource creation amongst academics.
In very general terms, there was a fairly predictable variation in the balance of research and teaching responsibilities amongst respondents from different types of institutions, with academics at the ancient universities spending more time on research activities than their colleagues at the modern or new universities surveyed.
In terms of the proliferation of computing platforms at the institutions, IBM-compatible computers were found to be the most widely used, although Macintosh and UNIX machines still have a strong user base.
The survey found very high levels of staff access to e-mail and Web browsing facilities within the surveyed institutions, together with significant levels of departmental Web server deployment.
The survey also attempted to assess the relative importance of a number of factors aimed at stimulating resource creation amongst academics.
Of the various incentives put to respondents, those which ranked of highest potential value included: more free time to create resources, and improved technical support and advice during development.
The final issue which was put to academics in the survey was copyright ownership.
This section seemed to reveal a considerable degree of uncertainty amongst respondents regarding the copyright status of published and unpublished electronic research and teaching materials.
In addition, there were clear indications of a general reluctance to insist on retention of copyright ownership on materials that were being submitted for publication, although a considerable majority of those surveyed did express a willingness to at least ask to retain rights if not insist.
Full details of the survey results covering all of the above issues can be found on the CATRIONA II Web server.
The demonstrator Introductory page of the demonstrator service A demonstrator service providing users with a search and browse interface to catalogued resources has recently been developed and implemented at Strathclyde University.
The demonstrator allows users to either, (i) access resources at participating institutions by using a Boolean keyword search facility of an index of various catalogued fields including: title, abstract and author, or (ii) browse through Dewey Decimal Classifications to locate individual campus resources.
The resources included in the demonstrator were identified during manual trawls of institutional and departmental Web servers.
The Strathclyde demonstrator service incorporates links to other Web resources of potential value to students, researchers, librarians and information scientists.
Working in conjunction with the Clyde Virtual University project at Strathclyde University, the demonstrator has now been incorporated into the CVU site as the library of this innovative virtual institution.
The demonstrator is still very much under development at this stage and ways to extend and enhance the service are currently being investigated.
A second demonstrator is currently being designed for the CATRIONA II project at Napier University in Edinburgh.
This demonstrator is proceeding according to a different institutional approach to the management of electronic resources than at Strathclyde University: at Napier the model revolves around the library taking a more central role in the management of resources, whereas at Strathclyde the model assumes the library participates as an equal, but expert, partner with other departments.
The Napier demonstrator will allow users to access materials via Napier’s WebPAC, which will include MARC records for each resource.
Future developments The main objective of the CATRIONA II project in its second stage will be to research and evaluate the institutional implications for universities developing services to create and manage electronic resources and investigate university intentions in this regard.
A detailed questionnaire aimed at assessing the current situation at Scottish institutions is being prepared and will shortly be circulated to information policy and strategy groups at all Scottish universities.
The questionnaire will be followed up later in the year by a series of videoconferences inviting institutional representatives to participate in discussions of the issues raised in the surveys.
A feedback and dissemination plan has been established to help raise awareness of the project with academics, researchers and administrators at universities throughout the UK.
The project team very much welcome feedback on any aspect of the project, in particular, comments and suggestions regarding the development of the demonstrators from the point of view of users is most appreciated.
It is also intended to incorporate Dublin Core metadata elements into all main documents of the demonstrators and of the main project Web site, to aid with discovery and description of pages.
The project also intends to look at the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) metadata specification with regard to teaching resources.
The project will also continue with its other ongoing work, including: producing best practice guidelines on the use of formats; looking into developing guidelines on copyright issues; further collaborative work with the CVU; development of a research park area and electronic enquiry desk on the Strathclyde demonstrator; integration of Strathclyde and Napier demonstrators; gain feedback from various institutional Web authoring groups regarding expansion of demonstrator services; and, investigation of overlap and integration with SCURL Z39.50 CLUMP.
The full survey report covering all six universities will be published on the project’s Web site by the end of March.
URLs CATRIONA II: http://catriona2.lib.strath.ac.uk/catriona/ Strathclyde Demonstrator: http://catriona.lib.strath.ac.uk/ Clyde Virtual Library: http://www.cvu.strath.ac.uk/ Dublin Core Metadata: http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/ IMS Metadata: http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/ Author Details Dennis Nicholson Head of Library Systems Strathclyde University Library 101 St. James Road GLASGOW G4 0NS Tel: 0141 5484529 Fax: 0141 5523304 Email: d.m.nicholson@strath.ac.uk Mr Martin Smith CATRIONA II Research Assistant Strathclyde University Library 101 St. James Road GLASGOW G4 0NS Tel: 0141 5484618 Fax: 0141 5523304 Email: martin.smith.100@strath.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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How to Grow Gossamer and Keep It Untangled Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines How to Grow Gossamer and Keep It Untangled Buzz software java html database browser repositories copyright graphics gopher ftp mailbase url Citation BibTex RIS George Munroe describes the experiences in establishing a large institutional web site.
Note: The Web Pages for the Queen's Webmasters Guild can be found at http://boris.qub.ac.uk/webmasters/ Abstract This is a personal view of the events at the Queen's University of Belfast which have lead to the present mobilisation of all 'units' in contributing to the information service.
The experiences described are of interest to any web site where a large number of people are involved.
The 'gossamer' refers to a collection of flimsy webs, fragile because of their once uncertain life span on 'renegade' servers.
The 'untanglement' refers to a co-operative environment in which everyone can contribute freely, with no knots of dispute holding up progress.
The story extends over the past three years.
It covers the first attempts to have World Wide Web, the 'web', supported at Queen's (The early days); how a group of server managers, the 'webmasters', took a lead in co-ordinating development across campus (The webmasters group); how the University officially recognised the importance of the web (Official moves); the coming together of all appropriate parties in a web initiative (Real progress); and the first tangible result of that initiative (Project Silverlining).
I close with a brief backward glance at what I regard as important lessons we've learned and with a forward look to the ongoing challenge at Queen's.
The early days In October 1993 Jill Foster (Mailbase and Netskills, UK) introduced me to George Brett (then of CNIDR, US) in the foyer of the Europejski Hotel in Warsaw, at the registration desk of the 93 Network Services conference.
George sat us down, pulled his Apple notebook out and, with his usual enthusiastic "Have you seen this?
", gave an impromptu demo of the first beta Mac Mosaic web browser, adding an entertaining touch by opening a 'kookaburra' call from the excellent Australian National University site, holding his notebook to our ears to ensure we didn't miss a note.
This was a memorable landmark in my work with World Wide Web.
The realisation that this software would now be freely available to every networked PC and Mac worldwide, started to 'boggle' the mind.
I went home with little doubt as to how to make my own presentation at the conference available to all those who hadn't been as fortunate as I to attend -yes, my first bash at HTML.
I needed a server to put the files on.
I used an ordinary Unix workstation with anonymous ftp enabled and quoted the URLs with 'ftp://...' -enough to publish documents while I tried to persuade Computer Centre management to put more resource into the web.
However this was still a relatively unproved system and many thought it was another fad which would soon pass.
But my own embarrassment, at not having a proper web server, grew to the point that I ditched a lot of development work from my Unix box to make room for the NCSA httpd software.
And in the early Spring of 1994, the University had its own web home page, running from a 68030, 8 Mb RAM, 140 Mb hard disc workstation, which was also acting as the University Gopher server, ftp server, and test popmail server -those were the days!
Meanwhile other servers had started to appear on campus, independent of the Computer Centre.
Tom Looney had forged ahead in the Institute of Computer Based Learning and other sites were starting to regard this server's top page as the University home page.
It was important to 'catch' other local servers before we ended up with anarchy.
So the concept of a very simple home page on one server pointing to other University unit home pages on different servers was born.
This was discussed over regular Friday morning coffee breaks with others in the University who were interested in improving any or all aspects of information services.
My very basic server was nominated as the 'front door' to the campus web and stalwarts of the new age, such as Mark Handley from UCL, who maintained an invaluable list of pointers to home pages at a national level, were informed that Belfast was 'on the map'.
At this time, Spring 1994, the University had decided to fund a number of projects to demonstrate and encourage use of our new SuperJanet link.
I was in a position to advise those drawing up proposals and... with a web based Geosciences electronic journal project led by Brian Whalley (and now sponsored by John Wiley Publishers) and an Orthopaedic Surgery image database on the web led by George Kernohan (now part of a large EC project), we eventually managed to secure a brand new web server with oodles of RAM and disc (relatively speaking).
The new server was named 'boris' after the spider in an old 'Who' number, and boris soon started picking up hits as several other miniprojects were given some web space.
The value of small projects, many of which were managed by students, should not be underestimated.
Shane Murnion's ARC/INFO tutorial, Michael McGrath's GAA pages, Ben Aldred's markup of Computer Science lectures, Ed Smyth's collection of pointers to scientific resources, and Tony Bowden's local entertainment guide, to mention but a few, all became 'popular' at home and abroad.
And when a friend brings back a tee shirt from holiday with a URL on it referring to one of your machines, or the BBC asks the University for an interview because some of your pages were mentioned in the Washington Post, then you know these guys are doing pretty good PR work for you!
The Webmasters group At the end of May 1994, myself and a colleague from the School of Psychology, Gavin Bell, attended the first international World Wide Web conference at Geneva -the 'woodstock' of the net, as I dubbed it later (and Brian Kelly hasn't let me forget since).
We reinforced friendships, some of which had only been 'virtual', and made lots of new friends.
We picked up some more mini-projects for boris, such as Gavin's SIGWEB (special interest group on the web) or Mark Pesce's (see Time Magazine, 11 November 1996) initial VRML pages.
As we sped back across Europe on the TGV we speculated on the theoretical maximum bandwidth of fibre optic, and whether it would be enough!
We knew the web was going to get bigger.
We decided to try and connect the web activists across campus through more than a haphazard coffee morning.
Gavin's youthful enthusiasm was an inspiration.
We put together a presumptuous web page, linked from the Queen's home page, describing the 'web team' at Queen's.
This had the desired effect of attracting others who wanted to be associated with any concerted web effort.
Within a few months we had an informal email discussion list going and a proposal for a formal face to face meeting.
This took place in November 1994.
Ten attended.
A mission statement was agreed, a list of areas of development which should be addressed, and a schedule of formal monthly meetings for the coming year.
This webmasters group grew steadily in numbers and in the conviction that the group was doing something that undoubtedly needed done.
The mission statement was (and still is) "to assist in the co-ordination and development of an evolving on-line information service at Queen's by facilitating the co-operation of server managers and the controlled introduction of emerging technologies".
The aim was to guide policy, not make it.
Notes were taken at meetings and published on the webmasters' pages.
Representatives from the Library and the Information Office were invited.
Efforts were made to alert University management to the existence of the group and the importance of 'officially' developing a University web service.
However, and more important, the webmasters group was not just a 'talking shop'.
Members believed that the University would 'catch on' to the web soon and that until then they were obliged to lead the way.
So, for example, John Pelan collated recommendations for server configurations, Stephen Trew worked on guidelines for information providers, Stephen Fitzpatrick spent weekends building an indexer program, Allan Lee and Gareth Keane made time to build a flexible web based email directory, John Knowles researched ways to add metainformation to web pages -all with the support of the whole group.
By 1995 the Computer Centre had commissioned a new central web server, to replace mine as the home page bearer.
An individual from another group was asked to take charge of this.
My own small group, Information Services Group or ISG, (just four of us now) had responsibilities which involved a lot of 'firefighting' in other areas, but I made time to coach my staff about the web.
They were the kind of conscripts any general would envy!
Soon they were building Computer Centre pages on 'boris' and trying to involve staff from other groups.
I openly presented ISG as the bond between a central computing service and the webmasters, endeavouring to make that liaison part of the work of the Computer Centre.
At the end of 1995 one of the team, Christine Cahoon, took over as the webmasters convenor; Majella McCarron has become the web systems expert within the new Computing Services; and George Dunn is leading the organisation of administrative information at the top levels of the new web structure.
After 18 months and a change in Computer Centre management, former 'clandestine activities' are now openly recognised as important work which should be lead from a central service.
Official moves In the Autumn of 1995 the University formed a World Wide Web steering group.
This was not well publicised and infrequent meetings were not reported publicly.
This was frustrating to the webmasters group.
The chairman of the steering group, was, and is, a tireless champion for the web.
However he was not aware of the webmasters perception of being 'left out'.
Assumed channels of communication were not working and an uncomfortable period of tension between the steering group and webmasters ensued.
The storm broke when the steering group published a set of regulations for the use of the web at Queen's.
The webmasters prepared a letter to the chair of the steering group, expressing their views on the matter.
It was some time before dialogue began... but begin it did, with one phone call, and once it did new friendships were firmly established.
A revised set of guidelines, bringing all viewpoints into play, was prepared.
Where there is a common goal and little self interest, minds will come together.
In January 1996, the Secretary of Academic Council at Queen's established a 'high powered' editorial board for the University.
The purpose was not primarily to exert editorial control over electronic publication, but to actively promote the use of computer mediated communication, as realised with an upsurge in new electronic mail accounts, and, mostly, the web.
This editorial board subsumed the earlier role of the web steering group and boasted a membership which included senior managers and vice chancellors of the University.
Meetings were few but communication was good.
Informal briefing meetings took place between individual members of the board and webmasters.
There was openness, a will to learn about the technology, and on all sides a commitment to build, and build well.
Within months the editorial board had agreed that the webmasters group should be represented on the board.
Real progress With the knowledge that the University was now fully behind efforts to develop the web and with growing encouragement from (the newly renamed) Computing Services management, my own group organised a special meeting in April of this year.
We took the opportunity of a visit from Dave Hartland (Netskills), who was over giving courses in Northern Ireland, to call together all senior individuals with an interest in training and the network.
The attendance was excellent.
Many views were expressed about how to demonstrate the web's potential and persuade people to invest some time and effort in it.
The conclusion was that the University needed to train staff at three levels: first everyone should be encouraged and enabled to read the web through basic use of a browser; secondly a group of core information providers should be identified and trained to 'author' material and be able to advise and encourage others to do so in an acceptable manner; thirdly a small number of individuals should have advanced authoring expertise to compile 'high profile' web pages.
Of these three, the second was most important.
It was agreed that a training programme would be organised, a University initiative.
A Pro Vice Chancellor would authorise all necessary measures.
The first step was a briefing for all directors, to affirm the commitment to the web as clear University policy.
The briefing took place.
The webmasters group was formally recognised and the Vice Chancellor fully endorsed the proposed programme of web 'proselytisation'.
It was explained to every director that their unit would be expected to provide information via the web, that a core provider for the unit should co-ordinate this, and that the director, as head of unit, was ultimately responsible for all the web pages connected with the unit.
The director of Computing Services confirmed the commitment of central resource to the co-ordination and support of a revitalised information service.
Project Silverlining My group discussed and planned the content, trainers, format, timetabling of a 'training programme' for core providers.
We involved webmasters, Library, Computing Services training unit, Institute of Computer Based Learning (ICBL), and a few other relevant individuals.
Finally it was set.
Six weeks of training courses over August and September, five half day modules, each module delivered 12 times.
Estimated audience was up to 150 nominated core information providers or 'cips'.
All of my team were involved in the training, plus two from Computing Services, two from the Library, one from ICBL, two others from the webmasters group, and the director of an academic school.
This was a combined effort.
The format of all modules was three teaching sessions interspersed with two practical sessions and a coffee break.
The sessions were informal and relaxed, encouraging questions and comments.
The aim was to teach concepts and working procedures whilst building a tier of support reaching all the way through the University and consisting of this larger team of core providers.
The implementation would not have been possible without the active leadership of a Pro Vice Chancellor.
During June letters were sent to all unit heads asking them to nominate a core information provider and to register that person on the training programme.
A follow up letter was sent in July and an open version published in the University's newsletter.
The person nominated was expected to "have knowledge of the structure and operation of your unit, have reasonable organisational abilities, and be experienced in wordprocessing and general computing and network use".
And it was made clear that "this person will be key in how your unit is presented to the rest of the University (and the world)".
We set up a new server for use on the courses, and as the prototype for a new central server which would replace the current central web server.
We created a directory structure for University units which matched the existing management structure of the University.
August came and went; around 120 core providers attended the five modules.
They learnt about HTML, HTTP, URLs, authoring, conversion tools, good wordprocessing, CGI, Java -and lots in between.
We told them what was possible and what wasn't.
They got involved in talk and debate about the best ways forward.
Most were enthused.
A few may have been a little 'bewildered'.
They all learnt that they had a part to play and that they would be listened to.
As an initiation process the training programme was a success.
There was an overwhelming consensus that the modules gave the core providers new knowledge, useful in their work.
The greatest result was the formation of a body of core providers, on the ground, working together and now with a voice listened to by senior management.
Throughout the courses we noted issues that were being raised, and have taken these to the editorial board.
Already funding has been approved for a new central server which will 'quietly' replace the small server which we set up for the courses as the new repository of all unit home pages.
Every unit at Queen's will have a URL which identifies their pages as a path on the new central server.
The changeover to the new central server system is planned for January 1, 1997.
All unit home pages, started during the practical sessions of the training programme, will be ready before that!
As a first follow-on step to the training programme, we established an electronic discussion list as the main communication channel, for the core providers to talk to each other, and with webmasters and Computing Services.
We also produced a sixth workbook, supplementing those from the five modules.
This contains reference material, such as: summaries of the recommended 'format' of home pages; how to use the central graphics library to maintain a consistent look and feel across different unit pages; useful bookmarks for HTML reference; the Queen's recommended metatags.
Monthly face to face forums or 'clinics' have also been organised.
The first took place on November 6, with over 60 core providers attending.
The meeting included useful discussion on refining unit templates (proposed during the training programme).
The director of Computing Services and our Pro Vice Chancellor were present to listen to comments and answer questions.
The name 'Silverlining' -the venture has been about revising and revamping, not starting again from scratch.
We've built on work done by many in the past and added the quality trimmings.
Closing remarks At the time of writing this University has a battalion of willing and able core information providers, drawn from every University unit, led by Computing Services, supported by webmasters, and all fully endorsed by senior management.
I am confident that we have laid a solid foundation for ever improving information exchange within and without Queen's.
The experience to date suggests that the web is driving a rationalisation of information resulting in an integration of systems that could only have been dreamt about a few years ago.
With the continued support and encouragement from our site 'champions' this will undoubtedly continue.
The gossamer's intact, the tangles are taken care of, we're on our way -at last!
People are important.
Involve all those who have something to contribute.
Win their respect.
Don't expect to be able to dictate.
Work with the enthusiasts.
Listen.
Build partnerships.
Channel the energy.
Some up front support from the top works wonders.
Think about and plan your underlying web structure so that you do use an order that fits with other systems so that the web can be used to 'efficiently' and very 'effectively' tie all your information together.
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Dotting the I Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Dotting the I Buzz mobile Citation BibTex RIS Walter Scales examines everyone's favourite Education Gateway, NISS.
Do we like it?
Yes, I, for one, do.
At least, I’m pretty sure I do.
I love the NISS logo very elegant.
A bit like the “tick” beloved of all educationalists (or, of course, the Nike “swish” symbol).
The new NISS page is much nicer and more modern-looking than the old NISS page, and its pleasingly simple and minimalist look makes it easy for the eye to see the various sections.
I like the intuitive way the page is divided into “header, main body, and footer” sections, with searching offered right at the top; this functionality is emphasized by the three areas of the page having clearly defined colour-coordinated buttons.
In general, I do like the 5 individually-coloured buttons going to the categories Education, Reference, Studentzone, News, and Noticeboard.
I also like the way it’s clear now that NISS looks after sectors other than HE, but why does the Studentzone category seem to cater only to HE students?
I also chuckled at the way the Studentzone is chosen to get the hip Frames treatment.
I find the pleasing effect of all the white space and gaily coloured buttons somewhat marred by the size of the explanatory text underneath the five category buttons.
Better safe than sorry of course, but I think the text is just a little too big, or else there’s something odd about the way the page is laid out.
The search group and the “about NISS” cluster quite rightly manage to get by without such text.
My only real criticism is that the new NISS face has an alarmingly transient look to it: a rather cute but mobile expression.
It puts me in mind of the attitude my local supermarket manager seems to have adopted towards the arrangement of his shelves.
I hope this isn’t so, as I like the new fresh NISS look.
I guess the (thoroughly admirable) Contents and Help pages will be updated soon come on those awfully nice NISS people, Help Page last updated 12th September?
In summary, a nice, attractive, pleasing face; a positive thumbs-up from my corner.
Author details Walter Scales, Netskills Trainer Email: walter.scales@newcastle.ac.uk Tel: 0191 222 5002 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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E-print Archives: Key to Paperless Journals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines E-print Archives: Key to Paperless Journals Buzz dissemination archives research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl on why electronic print archives are the key to paperless journals.
Electronic journals could overturn the dominant force of print in a scenario created by a 'domino effect'.
At a conference on scholarly publication held recently at the University of Stirling, Stevan Harnad, Professor of Psychology at Southampton University and editor of the well-respected print journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and the online journal Psycoloquy, described how a rapid switch away from paper journals could occur.
The catalyst will be the creation of electronic preprint archives in the main academic disciplines.
Harnad referred to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Electronic Preprint Archive for physics literature, started by Paul Ginsparg in 1991.
This archive is now used globally by researchers in most of the areas of physics, and is estimated to have captured over 70% of the current physics journal literature.
No serious attempt has yet been made to emulate its success in other disciplines.
The Los Alamos archive has succeeded in dispersing the stereotype which sees the network as a 'second-best' publishing medium.
Most authors in physics now routinely substitute their Los Alamos preprints with electronic versions of the final, refereed, published versions of their articles.
But the result, says Harnad, is an economic absurdity.
"Print journal publishers continue to make profits by pushing up their prices and relying on their academic library customers.
The journals fill the shelves of libraries and lie unused, since everyone is already reading the articles online."
Absurd though it is, this system somehow manages to stagger on.
"But libraries will get wise to this" warns Harnad.
"They won't be content to bankroll the expensive and inefficient paper journal process forever."
The 'domino effect' will be the change in usage patterns from paper to electronic.
"It starts with the preprints" says Harnard.
"This leads to readers going there first, which leads to swapping for reprints: this keeps the readers in the archive.
Then, as there is no use for the paper version any more, library subscription revenues fall, and publishers either switch to electronic only, recovering costs from author page charges, or else they release their journals whose editorial boards will simply reconstitute electronically under the same name, with learned society sponsorship."
But this does not mean that publishers themselves will disappear.
The peer review and copy editing role which publishers have in the dissemination of scholarly literature is still essential, but will need to be funded from a source other than subscriptions to printed journals.
Page charges are Harnad's answer.
Authors themselves will pay to have their work published in online journals (using research or institutional funding).
Harnard maintains that ten dollars per page would be sufficient to finance the operation.
"The match-box calculations have all been done".
The switch is needed now.
"It's time for the dominoes to fall" stated Harnard.
If they do, then, for librarians, the days of trying to divide meagre journal budgets among academic departments hungry for ever greater numbers of academic journal titles, may soon be coming to an end.
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INFOMINE Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines INFOMINE Buzz html database cataloguing hypertext marc lcsh gopher ftp research Citation BibTex RIS Steve Mitchell describes INFOMINE, an impressive attempt to build a Web-based virtual library for the academic community.
The original need and context for the development of INFOMINE and the academic virtual library Immense potential for communicating important information, immense chaos in finding useful scholarly and educational tools as well as what promised to be immense user interest and acceptance, were conditions that characterized the Web in 1993.
INFOMINE [1], a virtual library (VL) currently providing organised and annotated links to over 8,500 librarian selected scholarly and educational Internet resources, was created in January of 1994 as a response to this situation.
It was a response to the realisation that librarians and librarian-designed finding tools could play significant roles in making the Web a more useful environment for large numbers of researchers and students.
It was apparent to those participating in INFOMINE that this information environment was our business.
At the same time, the impression of Gopher, paramount at the time in terms of user interest (and still useful), was one of an information version of Kansas in contrast to the Web’s promise of the Emerald City.
Now, more than three years later, much of the Web’s early promise has been borne out and our efforts appear to have been well spent.
We and other librarians have been participating in developing the newest form of mass media, one used by millions of people on a daily basis.
Today, after personally gaining thousands of hours of experience with robotic search engines and other finding tools and after spending hundreds of hours helping and instructing patrons in the use of these tools [2], I feel as strongly as when INFOMINE began that for the majority of Web users and the majority of skill levels among them, it and similar tools play a continuing and growing role as a major, crucial type of Internet finding tool.
When used appropriately, most Web users experience significant benefits in using VLs to locate relevant resources.
A virtual library, for our purposes, is an Internet finding tool that features a collection of selected, organized and generally enhanced links to useful Internet resources.
The common bond among VLs is that a subject expert or some knowledgeable person has made active choices regarding the inclusion of each resource, its description and how it will be presented or ordered in the VL.
Beyond sharing this approach, academic virtual libraries come in many different flavors ranging, on one side of the spectrum, from simple lists of titles (actually deluxe bookmarks) to, on the other side, attempts to do almost full MARC cataloging and situate this work in powerful database management systems.
The roles of virtual libraries and search engines It is noteworthy that some of the major search engines (e.g., Lycos with its a2z service) now employ virtual library approaches.
Sometimes these represent themselves as rating or reviewing services.
Conversely, a number of virtual libraries like Yahoo and INFOMINE now provide convenient, well integrated access to many of the larger search engines, such as AltaVista, to augment their service.
What’s obvious to me about this convergence is that the niche of the virtual library is being carried forward and strengthened and this is despite much thought occurring three years ago that we would be seeing AI/smart search/fuzzy logic augmented super search engines effectively covering the majority of our needs.
Not that we don’t remain hopeful and optimistic that this may someday occur see AltaVista’s LiveTopics for an interesting, practical development.
These days successful searching is not a question, at least for those line or reference librarians who frequently work with patrons using the Internet, of preferring one type of finding tool in exclusion to others.
Rather, it’s a question of knowing when to effectively employ which type of tool for which type of search.
At the same time, it’s also a question of matching user skill levels with the appropriate type of finding tool.
For instance, the use of Alta Vista or HotBot might best not be encouraged among users who are overly challenged by your online public access catalogue and/or who are looking for broad search concepts.
Similarly, you wouldn’t usually challenge most general VLs to ring up good results in searching for an Arctic insect species, rare chemical or arcane poem.
Striking a Balance The choice of flavour for the site designer depends on the designer’s notion of, for lack of a better phrase, ‘striking a balance’ between the numbers of important scholarly and educational resources proliferating on the Web and your resources for handling them.
For, from the outset, most realise that it usually won’t be the virtual library type tool that will be able to maintain a comprehensive view of all relevant sites on the Web (considering that tools like AltaVista and HotBot can’t do this).
This balance, where the line is drawn in the sand, in turn is completely dependent on the designer’s gut conception of roughly how many relevant resources are out there and projected user needs which are, in turn, often dependent on intuition, hopefully bolstered by a considerable number of hours of experience in using and working with the Web and working with the patrons who use it.
Flavours of virtual library are further dependent on the amount of value that is assigned to the variables in the ‘value added’ equation.
All virtual libraries are attempting to add value to the links they collect if only by grouping similar, well-selected titles together.
Of course, one person’s conception of significant value added can differ substantially from another’s.
Half of the value added equation concerns the amount and type of service to be provided or level of value to add depending on assumed user needs.
This service level to the user is comprised of a number of possible factors involving designer decisions including: depth of description needed (whether to do one or more indexing or even cataloguing schemes; whether to do annotations/key words/title enrichment and so on); comprehensiveness needed (number of resources to reasonably include does one stay at some conception of a ‘reference level’ collection or go beyond this); the utility/ease-of-use/number-of-access-points inherent in the VL system needed, among other factors.
The other half of the value added equation is of course the ‘bottom line’: what monetary and personnel resources are available.
Relatedly, those involved in VLs will often try to determine whether collaborative effort is possible to reduce personnel and/or systems costs.
Of course, the more sharing that can occur the less expensive the VL is to develop and maintain and/or the greater the value/coverage that can be added.
For academic VLs, increasingly, it is the degree of effective collaboration that determines the scope, range and depth and, ultimately, service value of the VL.
In this regard, I’ve seen a number of VLs paring down their scope.
Often this comes in the form of either choosing some level of a ‘reference collection’ approach and/or pursuing greater subject specialization.
A smaller number are remaining general and/or expanding in scope.
With the vehicle so created in weighing the above considerations and striking a balance among them, one sets sail.
Fortunately, maybe the crucial factor here is in the expertise and commitment of those sailing as much as in the vessel they’re crewing (libraries not generally being known for having access to large pools of resources).
And so, I’ve seen extremely useful, relatively short but impeccably well chosen link collections containing only titles while I’ve also seen well-financed efforts with lots of participants that were much less useful.
I’ve also traversed VLs that were all content and no organization and, conversely, sites that were all organization and no content.
Various balances can be struck with the value added equation being solved in different ways and resultingly (usually dependent on the designer’s correct intuitions/experience with user needs coupled with actively seeking user input, commitment to making the tool a success, and success in garnering resources and collaborative effort) you either have a useful project or not.
I’ve personally been surprised by the variety of approaches found in apparently thriving and successful VLs.
INFOMINE’s description and the balances struck INFOMINE has been relatively successful.
It now records over 100,000 accesses each week.
More importantly, as an indicator of its utility, it has 3,000 5,000 other Web pages linking to it (funny how those Alta Vista link searches can vary).
INFOMINE has received a Point Top 5&##37; of the Web award and a Magellan 4 Star Rating.
It is included in several subject areas in the Argus Clearinghouse, was mentioned in a2z (the Lycos-associated index) as one of the top 25 science and technology sites, and is in PC Computing’s Map to Navigating the Web.
INFOMINE has also been noted in CyberHound (Gale Research), the InterNIC Scout Report, and the Los Angeles Times (2/3/97), among others.
Incidentally, in regard to such services, have you ever had the rare pleasure of justifying your efforts to supervisors by intimating slyly that your project has just received the highly coveted Four Bones rating – ‘got the bones, boss…’, or shown them a complimentary magazine rating that looked like a kids treasure map, or pointed them to rating service icons that look like trading cards for sports stars?
What follows is a brief description of INFOMINE (for a fuller one with technical details, see reference [3] ) along with thoughts about the balances we’ve struck in charting INFOMINE’s course.
INFOMINE provides numerous access points to the information it contains.
These include several indexes and a search engine.
It provides annotated and Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) indexed links to resources relevant to the University of California (UC) and to the entire academic community.
INFOMINE is divided into 8 major subject discipline areas, two examples of which are the Biological, Agricultural, and Medical INFOMINE and the Government Information (U.S. Federal level) INFOMINE.
With approximately 2,500 resource links each, these represent INFOMINE’s most comprehensive subject collections.
Given the subject breadth of many of our files, such as Bio/Ag/Med, we are able to supply a very interdisciplinary focus.
Balances: While hardly the most natural language for users and with its flaws well-noted by many, LCSH remains THE U.S. academic library descriptive language.
Users are aware of it.
Librarians are familiar with it.
Its usage implies that INFOMINE will, with some modification, be compatible with library LCSH-based online catalogs of print resources at some point.
In order to accommodate LCSH with the Web, we have adopted our own core approach [4].
This approach is pragmatic and has meant that we can use LCSH and do so while spending less than 20 minutes per record added.
This is crucial.
Many indexing/cataloguing schemes in operation or being promoted would result in much longer indexing times which, given the Internet numbers, would restrict them at the start from including more than a very limited set of the possible good, solid resources available.
Currently, we’re again looking at the Dublin Core and are very excited about its prospects but only in so far as it will work, in practice, within the time limit mentioned.
Librarian experience in selecting and describing resources is crucial.
Experienced bibliographers and selectors apply their expertise in evaluating Internet resources.
Resources are added to INFOMINE utilising a simplified input form.
No knowledge of HTML is necessary thus freeing up contributor time to find and evaluate resources rather than manipulate HTML.
INFOMINE was designed to provide ease of use for contributing librarians with varied microcomputer skill levels.
This approach assures that all generations of librarians, representing many different levels of personal or professional interest in information technology, can contribute their subject expertise.
Balances: No one knows the information content and value of scholarly or educational resources better than the academic librarian.
This is expensive time, say compared to a student employed surfing for Yahoo, but it is our belief that the high value and solidity of many of the resources out on the net warrant this investment.
This is especially true if one believes that we can do this kind of work and, moreover, exercise professional self-reliance and leadership instead of simply letting commercial, usually non-library focused, operations, which are free for now, do this work for us, do it less well and later charge handsomely for it.
As a friend pointed out: ‘Do you click on the ads?’ And, what does not clicking ultimately mean for commercial services needing to recoup costs?
Though INFOMINE was at first exclusively a UC Riverside project, it now includes librarian participation from all 9 UC campuses and Stanford University.
One of the major benefits of the INFOMINE project is that, for many librarians, it is acting as a model for multi-campus shared Internet collecting activities and has stimulated important dialogue on the issues, opportunities and challenges involved in this [5], [6].
Balances: The more people participating, of course, the more disciplines that can be reasonably well covered.
In addition, while different campuses and colleges often do have somewhat different collecting needs, it has been our impression in looking at the VLs or subject guides of similar campuses and systems that there is a great deal of redundant collecting effort being expended.
The downside here in trying to reduce this through collaborative effort is the considerable amount of time required to do the organising.
Many libraries seem bound by time honoured, print world based conceptions of ‘areas of influence’ and cooperation.
More generally, in addition, most are understandably trying to get a grip on what the Internet revolution means overall for shared collecting and cooperatively sponsored access to both free and subscription based resources.
We feel that there exist a great number of Internet resources of very high quality which are at least as useful as their print counterparts.
Resultingly, we have chosen to annotate and use LCSH to index those pointed to via INFOMINE.
Librarians who add resource sites to INFOMINE add significant value by providing a customized annotated paragraph in addition to linkable subject, keyword, and title words.
Most importantly, subjects applied average about 6 per record while key words average over 6.
These numbers of terms for retrieval are much greater than many library related databases, which traditionally average around three subject headings.
It is the annotation and indexing sophistication which assist the users by allowing them to be better able to find and then quickly evaluate a resource’s relevance, in relation to other related resources, before attempting to access the site.
For users, INFOMINE is a value added Internet finding tool not only because of its enriched content but also due to enriched access resulting from the multiplicity of access points through which users can easily find the information contained.
These include: Boolean searching; Browsing through our Table of Contents (titles interfiling under their subject terms), Title, Subject and Key Word indexes; and, Browsing hyper-linked Subject and Key Word Indexing Terms embedded within each record’s long display.
Moreover, as mentioned above, few other virtual libraries provide so many indexing terms per record.
This alone has been a major contributor to INFOMINE’s use value.
INFOMINE is based on a hypertext database management system.
It was one of the first Web sites to combine the power of the Web with that of a database management system.
This allows participants to add, edit, provide access to and generally manage several thousand records easily.
For example, all indexes (e.g., The Table of Contents) are automatically generated by the database management system rather than manually.
This saves time for contributors (e.g., instead of going to several HTML index pages in order to effect changes in a record, you simply access the editor form and make the changes on this single form while the database management system then automatically changes the indexes specified).
For users, unique searches yield dynamically created, unique HTML results documents customised to their interests.
A great number of VLs, in comparison, rely primarily on browse access (though a number of these are now adding simple text search capabilities) offered through a specific set of already created, static indexes ordered via a subject organisation or classification scheme, often pyramidal.
Difficulties with this approach include that the hierarchical browsing systems may or may not be familiar to the user.
Resources with multiple subjects can be hard to find if they haven’t been laboriously placed within the many relevant subjects they may cover.
It can also be difficult to arrive at a useful balance between generality and detail.
Never the less, such tools are often very useful.
INFOMINE too features a structured, browse approach to finding (and faces some of the same types of challenges mentioned above) as one good way to present its contents (visible in our LCSH organised Table of Contents and Subject Indexes).
In addition, though, INFOMINE goes beyond browsing by emphasising our search engine, which has always been a central focus of our resource.
Relatedly, we also try to go beyond LCSH by applying key words (which often include common, specialist and natural language terms that aren’t in LCSH) to adjust for some of its shortcomings as well as to simply apply more handles through which a resource can be found.
Overall, it is interesting to note that the last year especially has seen a convergence among VLs where those that were browse oriented are now offering text or other forms of searching while those that were placing the emphasis on searching via database management systems are now augmenting their service by creating static or static-like indexes.
INFOMINE, for example, does something like this with its General Reference Resources feature (see the top of the INFOMINE home page).
Balances: There has been much discussion of the advantages of various organising schemes for VLs.
Just as we use an LCSH core concept, others are gainfully employing LC Classification Numbers, the Dewey System and other traditional general and specialized (e.g., MeSH headings in the medical area) organising schemes.
Some of these are based in hyper-text enhanced relational databases.
Others are hierarchically arranged in hyper-text augmented tiers of static HTML pages.
Some are oriented towards more graphical, almost shelf-based, organizing principles.
Many utilise a number of these concepts in one tool.
Those VLs that work best seem to generally share the following traits: They add more rather than less value in regard to the value added equation; they usually are hybrids bundling more than one of the approaches mentioned above; the access points they provide are accessible via both search and browse modes; regardless of the specific approach or mode, they provide numerous access points through which the information contained can be accessed/discovered; they are intended to handle larger rather than fewer numbers of resources and cover more rather than fewer numbers of disciplines; they link conveniently at numerous points to other VLs and search engines; and, maybe crucially, because this makes all the above possible, individual entries or records can be added and be well-described in a minimum of time.
Our collecting goal has been to include items of greatest use to UC faculty and students.
Generally this has meant selection of the largest, most comprehensive and highest quality resources.
Occasionally it has meant collecting other less central resources in order to meet specific research needs.
This mirrors our print format collecting efforts and policy at UC Riverside and most UC campuses.
Balances: There has been much discussion of the need to rigorously formalise collection development policy in regard to collecting for VLs (and other access tools) and to provide in-depth training for this.
This may be worthwhile.
In the mean time, we’ve found that the transfer of Internet collecting skills to print savvy librarians has been generally pretty effortless and has almost always resulted in well-chosen selections without a great deal of extra training.
The content is THE thing and that is what most of us know instinctively well.
Still, for some it is more difficult than others and generally this difficulty breaks down by generational lines.
An interesting development to me is that some seem tempted to apply more stringency to Internet collecting standards than they sometimes do to their print collections.
And, while most of us would agree that the poster child for grey literature is the Web, others can overemphasize quality criteria.
The tonic to this is to have such people take an honest browse through their print stacks.
INFOMINE’s Drawing Board Education: Not a new challenge to many of you, our biggest and continuing job, like yours, will remain that of educating librarians and information specialists as to the value of Internet information provision and of the great contributions that many libraries are making in both creating and providing enhanced, easy access to important research and educational tools.
Librarians can play a major, proactive role in guiding and shaping the Internet revolution if we so choose.
And, of course, as we educate our own, so must we continue to educate our researchers and students.
In addition, we need to continue to address the need for education around and participation in cooperative, shared efforts on the part of libraries.
Systems: We are looking at means to incorporate full-text indexing of sites in our selected INFOMINE domain of resources as a complement to our current approach.
With this development, expanded INFOMINE searching techniques (such as the use of adjacency operators) would be provided.
This would be our “power search” option and a good addition to our current service.
References INFOMINE Web Site, http://lib-www.ucr.edu/ General Internet resource finding tools: a review and list of those used to build INFOMINE, http://lib-www.ucr.edu/pubs/navigato.html Mitchell, S. and Mooney, M., 1996, INFOMINE: A Model WebBased Academic Virtual Library.
Information Technology and Libraries, 15 (1), http://lib-www.ucr.edu/pubs/italmine.html Mitchell, S., 1996, Library of Congress subject headings as subject terminology in a virtual library: the INFOMINE Example.
In: Proceedings of “Untangling the Web” Conference, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1996, http://www.library.ucsb.edu/untangle/smitch.html Mooney, M., 1996, Linking Users to Internet Government Information Resources through INFOMINE.
DLA Bulletin, 16 (1), ftp://ftp.dla.ucop.edu/pub/dlabulletin/issue35/infomine.txt Baldwin, C. and Mitchell, S. 1996, Collection Development Tools/Methods for Virtual Libraries and Subject Lists in Selected Major Subject Areas: A Panel Discussion and Presentation.
In: Proceedings of “Untangling the Web” Conference, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1996, http://www.library.ucsb.edu/untangle/index.html Author Details Steve Mitchell Science Reference Librarian, Email: smitch@ucrac1.ucr.edu INFOMINE Web Site: http://lib-www.ucr.edu/ Address: Bio-Agricultural Library University of California, Riverside Riverside, CA 92521, US Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Mailing Lists: Keeping Up With eLib Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mailing Lists: Keeping Up With eLib Buzz archives copyright mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS We point out the advantages of being on the lis-elib mailing list, and briefly describe the other public eLib mailing lists currently in use.
As mentioned in last issue’s Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) section, a wave of new projects has recently joined the programme.
This now takes the number of projects to roughly 60, with the majority of UK universities, and many other research centres, organisations and companies, being involved in at least 1 project (some organisations have a stake in as many as four).
A consequence of this increase is that many people, either directly working within a project, or less centrally as a project deliverable tester or eventual end-user, are interested in how their project and it’s supporting programme develop.
Most of the projects overlap with other projects, in some cases very significantly.
This leads to much shared interest in the same topics and issues.
For example, many of the projects from across the subject areas are interested in copyright legislation as applied to electronic material, as well as Web-based charging mechanisms.
These shared interests can be explored at (physical and virtual) meetings, via the traditional method of email, and the more archaic methods of phone and paper.
However, mailing lists come into their own when it comes to easily remotely disseminating and discussing interests such as those raised by the programme.
Okay, mailing lists are simple beasts, and appear pedestrian when compared with IRCs or the Collaborate function within Mosaic.
However, an email is still quick, can be kept as an (electronic) record or printed, and you don’t have to be in to get them; with mailing lists, you can also send the same email to several thousands of people in one go.
And so to lis-elib.
This mailing list currently has around 800 members, and serves as the main email list for the Electronic Libraries Programme.
To give you some idea of the traffic on the list; the first month it was running (June 1995), 5 postings were sent to it; for the last full month (April 1996) there were 58 submissions.
The list is used to: Make announcements of significant eLib project milestones/events, such as open days, launches, conferences, new project deliverables etc.
Start discussions of how eLib projects/the eLib programme will satisfy the needs identified in the Follett Report/of the end-users of such systems.
Start discussions of the changing IT environment in which the eLib projects are based.
Post announcements of jobs in the eLib programme.
With the new wave of projects joining the programme, many of these recruiting staff, and staff moving between projects creating vacancies from where they leave, job hunters are well advised to keep a close eye on the list.
Anything else relevant to the eLib programme, or its component projects.
You don’t have to be in an eLib project to join and participate in the list; if you are involved in an eLib project, you should be.
Lis-elib is a Mailbase mailing list; this has the advantage of being relatively stable, quick to respond and easier to use when compared with other mailing list systems.
Mailbase lists also offer some extra functionality… Other features of lis-elib As lis-elib is a Mailbase list, there are several additional features available to you: You can look and see who else is on the list.
You can browse the archives.
These are partitioned into monthly folders and the messages are “threaded”; this means that you can follow the thread of a discussion across several messages without having to wade through non-relevant emails.
You can also sort the messages as they are displayed in several different ways.
You can search the archives of the list.
Joining, contributing to and leaving lis-elib To join lis-elib, send to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk the email message: join lis-elib yourfirstname yourlastname stop To leave lis-elib, send to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk the email message: leave lis-elib stop To contribute to lis-elib, send your contribution to lis-elib@mailbase.ac.uk.
Please: make it relevant in some way to the eLib programme, projects or an on-going discussion on the list avoid overlong email signatures quote URLs (in full) to any supporting Web pages/other internet resources.
These will be made active when your message goes into the lis-elib hypermail archive, so people reading your message in there can click on the URL to go to the desired page/resource.
Other eLib mailing lists There are several other Mailbase mailing lists connected with the eLib programme you may wish to consider joining, browsing the archives of or submitting to; a list of these is maintained at Mailbase.
Amongst these, as of Mid-May 1996, are (with their descriptions): adam-news a discussion forum for the ADAM project cousns this is a list to support communication among member of COUSNS the Committee of UK Subject-based Network Services.
Members of COUSNS are the subject-based services from the eLib programme.
lis-elib-edulib this is a forum for librarians & others supporting users of networked information.
Opened by EduLib: the national network of electronic library accredited trainers, the list will stimulate discussion on the skills required in the Electronic Library, exchange experience on training issues & report progress.
lis-scope a list for discussing the copyright and technical issues surrounding the Scottish Collaborative OnDemand Publishing Enterprise (SCOPE), which has been funded by the Electronic Libraries Programme to digitise documents for customised publication as undergraduate student readers.
netskills-forum Netskills is a national eLib-funded training project, to increase awareness of networked information resources within UK Higher Education.
This list provides input to the Netskills programme and materials by supporting discussion between those involved in delivering and receiving network training.
netskills-news a general list to disseminate information and news about the Netskills Network Training Project.
omni a forum for disseminating news about the OMNI Project (Organizing Medical Networked Information), for discussion about the project and comments on the service provided.
omni-collaborators a list for news of, and discussion about, technical developments and issues affecting the creation by collaborating organisations and individuals of resource descriptions in OMNI (Organizing Medical Networked Information).
sosig this mailing list discusses the Social Science Information Gateway service and is used to post news about news about new developments and services on the gateway.
It is hoped that the social science community will contribute with ideas and suggestions for developing the service.
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NHS Libraries: At Home on the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines NHS Libraries: At Home on the Web Buzz software html database copyright cataloguing telnet gopher url research Citation BibTex RIS Ben Toth describes the establishment and maintenance of a regional Health Web site.
That many of the challenges and difficulties (see the two lists below) facing medical information specialists, have potential solutions in the near future organisation of the World Wide Web, is widely accepted.
The problem facing medical information specialists is how, in the context of the NHS, do we make the Web work for us?
Challenges to health librarianship in a changing NHS Primary care led NHS: with more health care taking place away from hospitals information services should be more available to primary care practitioners Creation of an evidence-based culture: decision makers are ready to consider using bibliographic information to inform clinical and policy decisions provided the information is made available effectively Specific difficulties facing health libraries Lack of resources Increasing demand Changing pattern of funding for health libraries in the Internal market Continual expansion in published books and journals A small start has been made by health librarians in the South and West region of the NHS, a large area stretching from Gloucester in the north, to Basingstoke in the east, to Penzance in the west.
The region includes 49 NHS trusts, 12 health authorities, 2 medical schools, colleges of nursing and occupational therapy.
During 1994 most of the libraries obtained Internet accounts, some from their own budgets and some through small grants from regional funds.
In April 1995, in a joint initiative between the Regional Library Networks and the Regional Research and Development Directorate, a South and West Health Libraries web site was created.
Nine months is a long time in the development of the Web, and the reasons for creating the site now seem a little passe.
At the time, there were few classified lists of Internet health resources available at UK sites.
David Pencheon was maintaining a site in Cambridge, and collections of URLs were available from Manchester and London.
It was hoped that a good collection of URLs would prove useful to librarians in the South West, and that a web site would provide a starting point for librarians beginning to incorporate the Web into their services.
Once the decision to create a site had been made the collection of URLs grew quickly.
The site places an emphasis on evidence-based-medicine; tools for librarians such as publishers catalogues, library organisations; search engines; and specialty home pages, along with more usual groupings like electronic journals, electronic texts, patient information guides, and a short-lived and much missed reference librarian site which included a wonderful photo of a bald librarian in a check jacket.
Other strengths include occupational health links and databases of current research such as the UKCCCR register.
The other initial section was a news page.
Between five and ten items continue to be added most weeks.
These might be details of new Web sites, conference announcements, or snippets of news gleaned from discussion lists and newsgroups.
Some parts of the original site plan have yet to be implemented: a directory; a union catalogue, a diary of events, and a newsletter.
The site has grown during 1995, and now contains about 250 links (WWW, gopher, and telnet) to health resources.
Recently, a backlink into Lycos has been added.
The site receives about 75 visits per day on average.
Maintaining the site at its present level takes about one hour per week, thanks to the tools available: pages are created and edited in Microsoft Word 6 using the freeware html editor attachment called Internet Assistant.
Once created, pages are mounted on a network drive, from where subsequent editing is carried out directly.
Like the editor the Web server software came free, and is installed on a departmental UNIX machine.
One of the great things about Internet technology is that it is cheap, or as I have been advised to put it, not expensive.
Training The web site has also served as the core for teaching.
In the Summer of 1995 a seminar held in Bristol featured a morning's practical tutorial on the Internet.
Feedback indicated that the session was useful to the 20 librarians who attended, and a second seminar is planned for Southampton this March.
Looking to the future The idea of a locally maintained web-site largely composed of links is becoming redundant as projects such as OMNI begin to take shape.
As well as OMNI, during 1996 we can expect initiatives from the National Library of Medicine, along with improved search engines.
But useful as the present cataloguing initiatives are, the Web has still yet to deliver any major content, with the exception of OMIM.
It is in the area of content that we hope to see major improvements in 1996.
During 1996 we hope that the South and West web site will become a support for distributed working between libraries.
In this respect the HeLIN site in Oxford, serving librarians in Anglia and Oxford offers some pointers.
But the biggest challenges are in the areas of policy.
Can the NHS create a network which librarians might use to deliver services to its customers wherever they are?
Can the barriers to full-text and electronic document delivery be overcome?
Can more and better databases become available?
One day the Net will be a basic tool for all librarians.
In the South and West we have started to get ready.
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OMNI Seminar Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI Seminar Buzz data software database infrastructure metadata cataloguing pics research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom reports from the second annual OMNI seminar.
Over 150 people gathered at the Wellcome Institute in London on the 23 January to attend the 2nd Annual OMNI [1] Seminar.
This brought together a range of participants including medical academics, library and information professionals and practitioners; a good indication of the impact OMNI has had during its first two years.
The keynote address was given by Lynne Brindley, the chair of the new JISC Committee for Electronic Information (CEI).
Entitled 'The future beyond the eLib Programme' Lynne looked at the prospects for eLib projects when initial funding comes to an end.
Future strategy is to scale up successful projects into services which may be achieved in some cases through the merging and regrouping of existing projects.
There was an acknowledgement that not all projects will be successful, but in every case lessons will have been learnt and there is an intention to disseminate those lessons.
The Tavistock Institute has produced an evaluation of the Programme so far based on the annual reports of the projects, this should be available in the next few months.
Sue Welsh (OMNI Project Officer) and Betsy Anagnostelis (OMNI Assurance Officer) provided a progress report on the project since the first OMNI seminar in November 1995.
This included some statistics on the number of records in the database and patterns of usage across sectors and domains.
One of the areas highlighted by a user survey is the size of the OMNI database; as a selective gateway OMNI uses strict evaluation criteria to catalogue only quality resources.
Whilst users appreciate the quality control that is undertaken, there are times when a search outside these selected resources is necessary.
In order to complement the selected database OMNI have been experimenting with HARVEST (an automatic indexing tool).
This will allow them to take advantage of the subject expertise of researchers and practitioners who compile listings of sites that would not normally be added to the database.
Other plans for the project include integration with some external data sources such as DERWeb and a Continuing Medical Events Database.
OMNI's Project Manager Sally Hernando then went on to outline the project's future strategy regarding long term funding and goals.
A phased plan to make OMNI financially independent by 2001 was put forward.
Potential ways to achieve this are; subscription, commercial sponsors, non commercial sponsoring, joint ventures with other services, the NHS (a rather grey area at the moment with regard to cooperation and funding) and advertising.
Sally followed this by inviting members of the OMNI team onto the platform and opening up the forum to the audience.
Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus Officer based at UKOLN) suggested that OMNI may also want to consider investigating micropayments as a possible future method of funding the service.
Other comments from the audience included the issue of quality one participant suggested that a list of resources that were rejected by OMNI would be as valuable as a list of the resources that were included.
The final presentation of the morning was a double act by two members of UKOLN: John Kirriemuir, the web editor of Ariadne (acting in his capacity as information officer for ROADS), and Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus Officer).
John presented an overview of the ROADS [2] software which is used to build the OMNI gateway as well as some of the other eLib funded gateways such as ADAM, IHR-Info and SOSIG.
Brian followed with an introduction to the concept of metadata (data about data), why it is needed and some potential standards and solutions such as the Dublin Core and PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection).
One of the central features of subject gateways such as OMNI is the selection of high quality resources.
The first speaker after lunch was Alison Cooke from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth who is researching quality on the Internet as a PhD topic.
As part of the research she teamed up with OMNI to study user's perceptions of quality and presented the preliminary results of the study at the seminar.
Alison interviewed 33 medical information users at 3 institutions about their use of the Internet and strategies they use for finding and evaluating networked resources.
There were several interesting results from the study; most importantly it suggested that users are aware of quality issues and have their own criteria for evaluating resources.
The content of information was generally found to be more important than the format that the resource was available in; although in the case of CAL materials format was sometimes a primary issue.
This suggested that there may be scope for establishing different criteria for different types of resources.
Continuing the theme of quality information Ron Appel spoke about an international initiative, Health on the Net Foundation [3] The foundation is a non-profit organisation based in Geneva, 'dedicated to realising the benefits of the Internet and related technologies in the fields of medicine and healthcare'.
The organisation is involved in a number of initiatives to promote Internet use in the medical professions including MARVIN a robot that searches sites and documents specifically related to health and medical fields.
The resulting documents are stored in a database and are searchable through their search engine MedHunt.
Of particular interest with regard to quality of information was their HONcode: Health On the Net Code of Conduct.
This initiative is an attempt to improve the quality of medical information on the Internet.
An official HONcode logo is displayed by sites who demonstrate specific quality standards outlined in 6 principles (these evolved from discussions with medical professionals and web maintainers).
The code of conduct is largely self policing although there is some random checking of sites that adhere to the code.
Mark Meade from BioMedNet[4] provided a commercial view of medical information.
BioMedNet is a club for biological and medical scientists providing access to journals and full text articles, job listings, discussion groups and chat facilities and an electronic newsletter.
Membership is free at the moment but once they have built up a critical mass of members subscription fees will be introduced.
They are also offering a corporate and library membership; providing free access to the full text of 29 current opinion journals for a limited period.
Generally, abstracts of journal articles are available free with a fee for each full text article requested.
It seems to be fairly early days for commercial ventures such as BioMedNet with most of their revenue coming from advertising; but the infrastructure is in place once the market is ready.
The final speaker was David Smith from the Department of Health who introduced NHSnet, a national network developed exclusively for the NHS.
NHSnet sits behind a secure Internet gateway for reasons of security and confidentiality of information to allow GPs and other NHS bodies to exchange data.
The NHSweb Directory is an initiative to help their users locate information and services.
As a system for non technical users it was designed with a lot of input from the user community.
The directory can be viewed from different user perspectives for example as a GP, clinician or administrator; as well as different organisational and geographic perspectives.
The seminar was brought to a close by Frank Norman, the OMNI Project Co-ordinator.
Frank focused on three themes, namely: quality (the cornerstone of the project), plans for further collaboration and integration with other projects particularly with institutions outside the HE sector and training users to use the network effectively.
This was an interesting and well run seminar and congratulations should go to all the OMNI team for a very successful day.
References [1] OMNI Web Pages http://www.omni.ac.uk/  [2] ROADS Web Pages http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/ [3] Health on the Net Foundation Web pages http://www.hon.org/  [4] BioMedNet Web site http://biomednet.com/  Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Internationalisation and the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Internationalisation and the Web Buzz software html css standardisation browser graphics dtd hypertext rfc ascii unicode doc i18n utf-8 utf-16 ftp interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight looks at how the Web is currently undergoing the sometimes painful internationalization process required if it is to live up to its name of the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web is intended to be “an embodiment of human knowledge” [1] but is currently mainly an embodiment of only West European and North American knowledge resources.
The reason for this is simple; despite the name, the development of the World Wide Web has until recently been very heavily oriented towards English and other Western European languages[2].
If you want to display a resource with an ideographic character sets from Asian languages for example then you have been forced to either use inlined images or localized, kludged versions of software.
The former solution results in poor performance and the latter limits interoperability and freedom of using the latest tools.
The real solution to the problem is obviously to move the development of the Web to the point where resources can contain information in multiple character sets and languages.
However this is no simple matter; there is already a lot of software deployed that uses the existing standards.
Internationalization (or I18N as its sometimes known) of the Web must ensure that this existing base of tools can still make use of the information available; in other words it should provide for backwards compatibility where possible.
This article will briefly look at some of the options for I18N of Web documents.
Firstly the issue of the various character sets that can be used is examined.
Then the progress of providing support for these character sets and the languages that use them in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML)[3] and the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)[4] is reviewed.
Finally an overview of the current, often heated, debated surrounding the internationalization/localization of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)[5] is given.
Character Sets Most of the information systems that have been developed in the past twenty years have relied on the 7 bit US-ASCII character set[6].
This provides upper and lower case Roman characters, Arabic numerals and a selection of punctuation characters and control codes.
Whilst this has proved adequate for handling English texts, it forced people using languages that had other characters to use anglicised/romanised versions.
Many information systems still exist with these limitations; indeed many library OPACs make heavy use of romanised transliterations of foriegn titles.
A slight improvement over US-ASCII is the ISO-8859 series of character sets[7].
These character sets all use a full 8 bit byte to represent each character and between them handle most of the character sets needed for both West European, East European and Middle Eastern languages.
The lower half of the character sets are broadly compatible with the US-ASCII character set, giving them the ability to “grandfather” in resources that already exist in US-ASCII format.
The upper half of each character set contains the characters required for each localized group of languages.
The full list of the ISO-8859 series of character sets is: Latin alphabet No.
1, ISO 8859-1, Latin alphabet No.
2, ISO 8859-2, Latin alphabet No.
3, ISO 8859-3, Latin alphabet No.
4, ISO 8859-4, Latin/Cyrillic alphabet, ISO 8859-5, Latin/Arabic alphabet, ISO 8859-6, Latin/Greek alphabet, ISO 8859-7, Latin/Hebrew alphabet, ISO 8859-8, Latin alphabet No.
5, ISO 8859-9, There are two major problems with the ISO-8859 character set series.
Firstly each character set is effectively independent of the the others.
This means that if, for example, you need to produce a document that contains both Greek and Hebrew text, you have the problem of having be able to specify which character set each part of the document adheres to.
Secondly, the ISO-8859 series of character sets still do not cover the characters natively used by languages in use with an appreciable fraction of the World’s population.
In the Far East another set of ISO character sets have been filling the void left by US-ASCII and the ISO-8859 series.
The ISO-2022 standard[8] introduces a method of encoding large ideographic character sets such as Japanese and Chinese into 7 and 8 bit characters.
The basic technique used is to assume that the characters in a document are initially simple ASCII style Roman characters.
However if a specific set of escape sequences appears, processing of subsequent characters then assumes that they represent a specific set of ideograms.
The ISO-2022-JP[9] character set is widely used in the Japanese speaking portion of the Internet and in Japanese information systems.
There are also variations for Chinese (ISO-2022-CN[10]) and Korean (ISO-2022-KR).
The ISO-2022 style of extended ASCII based character sets also compete with locally with a number of other de facto standard encodings of ideographic character sets which complicates the matter still further.
The ISO-2022 series of character sets suffer from the same problem as ISO-8859 if one needs to represent characters from more than one character set.
In an effort to allow true multilingual resources to be made and to attempt to bring together the characters handled by all the previous disparate character sets, the International Standards Organization has been working on different character set called ISO-10646[11].
Unlike all the previous character sets that attempt to encode all of their characters within at most a single 8-bit byte, ISO-10646 natively uses a 32-bit code space (known as Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set 4 (UCS-4)).
This should provide enough room for every character used by every language on Earth.
Related to ISO-10646 is the Unicode standard[12].
Unicode basically replicates the lower 16 bits of the ISO-10646 canonical 32 bit format.
This canonical format is known as UCS-2.
Both ISO-10646 and Unicode have a number of UCS Transformation Formats such as UTF-16 and UTF-8[12] that allow their 32and 16-bit canonical characters to be represented using a variable number of 8 bit characters.
The major complaint that people raise against both standards is that the popular UTF-8 transformation rules favour English (US-ASCII characters appear as themselves for backwards compatibility) whereas some of the ideographic languages with large character repertoire require upto six bytes to represent a single character.
Despite this, Unicode is currently our best hope for a single, universal character set.
I18N of HTML The previous section has outlined a number of problems with the ISO-8859 series of character sets and how ISO-10646/Unicode attempts to overcome these.
Even so, the standard character set adopted by Tim Berners-Lee and the other original developers of the WWW was ISO-8859-1.
This allowed existing US-ASCII documents to be easily marked up using normal editing tools whilst also allowing the use of accented characters that are frequently required in Western Europe and North America where most of the developers and early users lived.
Also at the time Unicode and the related ISO 10646 standard were not as stable and well known as they are now.
Both the HTML 2.0[13] and HTML 3.2[14] standards currently specify the use of ISO-8859-1.
They both permit the use of character entities to allow US-ASCII based editors to include the full repertoire of ISO-8859-1 characters (either by name or by using the appropriate numeric code).
However the Document Type Definition (DTD) from RFC 2070[15] corrects this by specifying ISO-10646 as the base character set.
This permits an HTML document to contain multiple languages all represented with their native characters.
RFC 2070 also includes a number of new elements and character entities in its DTD that allow users to explicitly state the language that a section of an HTML document is written in and the direction that the characters should be written.
This is important because without this information browsers will have great difficulty in correctly rendering documents that contain multiple bidirectional language sections and some cursive writing styles.
Indeed rendering of complex multilingual documents is still a major problem even with ISO-10646 as the wide range of fonts that we are used to using with ISO-8859-1 documents do not exist for the full 35,000+ Unicode/ISO-10646 characters.
RFC 2070 suggests that the application may have to resort to displaying the hexadecimal form of the character which is somewhat less than user friendly.
Having said that if the browser that a user is using can not render a character it is highly likely that the user will not be able to read the document anyway!
Some of the proposals in RFC 2070 are being incorporated into the W3C’s next DTD recommendation codenamed “Cougar”[16].
One aspect of HTML that has not yet received much attention from the W3C or any of the browser vendors is the extension of the CSS style sheets mechanism[17] to handle non-Western writing styles.
I18N of HTTP As well as internationalising HTML, some work has been expended on providing support for multiple languages and character sets the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) often used to retrieve the documents.
In HTTP/1.0[18] (the most common version of HTTP currently deployed), uses the charset parameter from MIME[19] to indicate the base character set of the document.
The definition in RFC 1945 includes a list of character set names that were registered for use with MIME at the time that it was written.
The HTTP protocol has been updated and improved to give HTTP/1.1[20].
As with HTTP/1.0, the document might be encoded in any IANA registered character set but the protocol also now allows clients and servers to negotiate language content as well as character sets.
They do this using the Accept-Language header from the client and the Content-Language response header from the server.
This is a distinct improvement over HTTP/1.0 where multiple versions of the same resource in different languages are often indicated by different URLs.
One thing to note is that HTTP/1.1’s default character set if none is specifically requested is ISO-8859-1.
This is fine for HTML 2.0/3.2 but is of course incorrect for RFC 2070 and Cougar that have a base character set of ISO-10646.
However this is not really a major problem as browsers capable of handling the multilingual features of the RFC 2070 or Cougar are likely to also be able to generate and process charset parameters correctly when requesting documents.
I18N of URLs The last area of the Web that is the subject of debate concerning I18N issues are the URLs[21] that are used to address and locate resources.
URLs are the technology that makes the Web work as they provide the uniform interface to distributed resources accessible via a large number of protocols.
Part of the success of the Web is that URLs are universally usable; even though people might not be able to “read” the URL, nearly everyone stands a pretty good chance of having a keyboard that allows them to enter ASCII characters and therefore enter URLs.
The URL standard is currently moving through the IETF standards process and as part of its review, a number of people have suggested that URLs should be extended to incorporate support for either multiple character sets or more practically Unicode rather than plain ASCII.
They argue that this will allow non-English speaking users to use URLs that contain strings that mean something to them.
To deal with the problem of the large amount of software that already handles ASCII URLs they have suggested that non-ASCII characters from the Unicode character set can be “percent-escaped” in the same way as “reserved” characters from the normal ASCII character set already are.
Some example URLs and processing software (such as servers that generate Unicode URLs from localised filenames) have been produced and are currently under discussion.
At this point it is still not clear that the advantage of being able to support localized character sets in URLs for specific groups will outweigh the clumsiness and possible difficulty of entering them on existing, non-internationalized systems.
Conclusions This document has outlined some of the I18N issues present in the World Wide Web today, and also some of the work that is being undertaken to address them.
Without a doubt there is an increasing push towards producing both standards and products that permit multilingual usage; both the standards setters and the software producers have realised that there is a large market for Web technology outside of North America and Western Europe.
I18N is a complex subject, especially if one is attempting to maintain backward compatibility with an installed software base of the scale that is currently present in the Web.
There is plenty of work still to be done and the debates about aspects of I18N are sometimes not for the faint hearted (or easily offended I18N is almost a religious topic on some mailing lists!).
However we can rest assured that in the next few years we will definitely see the World Wide put back in to the Web.
References W3C, About The World Wide Web, 1996, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/WWW/ W3C, Internationalization / Localization: Non-western Character sets, Languages, and Writing Systems , April 1997, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/International/ W3C, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/ W3C, HTTP HyperText Transfer Protocol, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/ W3C, Naming and Addressing, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Addressing/ US-ASCII.
Coded Character Set 7-Bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Standard ANSI X3.4-1986, ANSI, 1986.
ISO 8859. International Standard – Information Processing – 8-bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets – Part 1: Latin Alphabet No.
1, ISO 8859-1:1987.
Part 2: Latin alphabet No.
2, ISO 8859-2, 1987.
Part 3: Latin alphabet No.
3, ISO 8859-3, 1988.
Part 4: Latin alphabet No.
4, ISO 8859-4, 1988.
Part 5: Latin/Cyrillic alphabet, ISO 8859-5, 1988.
Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, ISO 8859-6, 1987.
Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet, ISO 8859-7, 1987.
Part 8: Latin/Hebrew alphabet, ISO 8859-8, 1988.
Part 9: Latin alphabet No.
5, ISO 8859-9, 1990. International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Information processing – ISO 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets – Code extension techniques, International Standard, Ref.
No.
ISO 2022-1986 (E).
J. Murai, M. Crispin and E. van der Poel, Japanese Character Encoding for Internet Messages, RFC 1468, June 1993, ftp://ftp.nordu.net/rfc/rfc1468.txt HF.
Zhu, et al, Chinese Character Encoding for Internet Messages, RFC 1922, March 1996, ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc1922.txt.gz ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993(E) Information Technology–Universal Multiple-octet Coded Character Set (UCS), 1993 D. Goldsmith and M. Davis, Using Unicode with MIME, RFC 1641, July 1994. http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1641.txt HyperText Markup Language 2.0 http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc1866.txt HyperText Markup Language 2.0 http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-html32.html F. Yergeau, G. Nicol, G. Adams and M. Duerst, Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language, RFC 2070, January 1997, http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc2070.txt W3C, Project: Cougar, W3C’s next version of HTML http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Cougar/ W3C, Web Style Sheets http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/ T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, H. Frystyk, Hypertext Transfer Protocol – HTTP/1.0, RFC 1945, May 1996 http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc1945.txt N. Freed and N. Borenstein Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies, RFC 2045, November 1996 http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc2045.txt R. Fielding, J. Gettys, J.
Mogul, H. Frystyk and T. Berners-Lee, Hypertext Transfer Protocol – HTTP/1.1, RFC 2068, January 1997, http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc2068.txt T. Berners-Lee, L. Masinter and M. McCahill, Uniform Resource Locators (URL), RFC 1738, December 1994, http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc1738.txt Author Details Jon Knight ROADS Technical Developer Email: jon@net.lut.ac.uk Own Web Site: http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/People/jon.html Tel: 01509 228237 Address: Computer Science Department, University of Loughborough, Loughborough, Leicestershire Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Project Builder Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Project Builder Buzz metadata digitisation copyright z39.50 authentication intranet research standards Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Pinfield outlines the aims of Project Builder, a phase-3 eLib project.
BUILDER is an eLib Hybrid Library project based at Birmingham University.
It aims to develop a working model of the hybrid library to support both teaching and research through providing unified access to a wide range of printed and electronic information sources, local and remote, using a standard Web-based Intranet interface.
It is known as The Birmingham University Integrated Library Development and Electronic Resource (http://builder.bham.ac.uk) and the model will be based on a series of six inter-related modules which will be developed for and applied across six subject areas.
The first module, User Registration and Induction, sets out to look at authentication issues relating to local and remote services, aiming to achieve single login access to a variety of services.
It will also incorporate online induction packages to provide new users with training and support.
The second module will examine ordering and document delivery processes with the aim of producing a series of Web based forms for ordering purchases and inter-library loans.
Direct connections with online bookshops and document delivery services will also be established.
The third module of BUILDER will seek to establish a high-level metadata index to provide seamless access to a range of printed and electronic sources.
This will help users to move between various information formats using a single interface.
The next module, Teaching and Learning, will encompass a variety of issues ranging from electronic short loan collections to computer assisted learning packages.
The enhancement of student-teacher communication throughthe use of Intranets will also be investigated.
A fifth module will be concerned with developing services in the area of publication and digitisation.
A number of specific digitisation projects will be undertaken using previously published material.
Electronic publishing of new material will also be investigated with the assistance of the University of Birmingham Press.
The final BUILDER module is Access Gateways.
This will consider a wide range of issues associated with the accessing of external resources.
Technologies such as Z39.50 and services such as dial-up will be particularly relevant.
The modules will be implemented at Birmingham across a number of subjects.
The disciplines that have been chosen are: history and archaeology, education, business, physics, sports science and medicine.
However, it will be essential that the results of the project are portable.
To achieve this a number of primary partners from other institutions will be involved in designing, testing and evaluating BUILDER products.
These are the University of Oxford,University of Wolverhampton, Westhill College of Higher Education and Birmingham Central Library.
In addition, a number of non-library secondary partners have agreed to bring a range of expertise, advice and value-added services and products to the project.
They are publishers, systems suppliers and professional associations.
A system of evaluation involving representatives from all of these different groups has been set up for each of the six modules.
This will help to ensure that the project remains not only user-focused but also innovative.
The training of users and information professionals will also be an essential part of the project.
The BUILDER project homepage is at http://builder.bham.ac.uk Author Details Stephen Pinfield Project Leader Project BUILDER University of Birmingham Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CTI (Computers in Teaching Initiative) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CTI (Computers in Teaching Initiative) Buzz software dissemination copyright multimedia visualisation e-learning Citation BibTex RIS The CTI, set up in 1989, offers a UK-wide service to academic staff in higher education institutions through its network of 24 subject-based centres.
Joyce Martin, acting head of the CTI Support Service, describes this HEFCE funded initiative.
The mission of the CTI is "to maintain and enhance the quality of learning and increase the effectiveness of teaching through the application of appropriate learning technologies."
The CTI is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and the Department of Education for Northern Ireland.
The CTI has provisional funding to run until 1999 renewable on an annual basis.
Why use information technology?
The CTI is challenging all academic staff to rethink their approach to teaching and learning.
The past 5 years have seen dramatic changes in UK higher education: increased student numbers and class sizes; reductions in unit costs; students arriving at university with more diverse academic backgrounds; Teaching Quality Audit (TQA).
The CTI believe that information technology has a role to play in addressing many of the issues raised by these changes.
Our view is that computers should empower good teachers, not de-skill.
Computers offer the opportunity to depart from the traditional constraints of the curriculum, allowing teachers and learners to schedule the place, time and pace of learning.
Their capabilities can facilitate experiences that would be too expensive, dangerous or time-consuming to generate in conventional terms.
Visualisation techniques will enable teachers to illustrate their teaching in more dynamic fashion than the current norm.
New generations of authoring tools will broaden the base of courseware authorship and students themselves will increasingly act as authors in their coursework.
IT will support important teaching strategies such as collaborative learning as well as assessment.
The role of the CTI By promoting the effective and appropriate use of learning technologies the CTI works to meet the needs of the future and enable change in higher education.
The main strength of the CTI comes from its discipline focus.
Each of the Centres is responsible for a different subject area covering the sciences, humanities, social sciences, arts and the professions.
CTI Centres are seen as part of the discipline communities they serve.
As such they play a key role in advising departments on how uses of technology can enhance teaching quality.
With higher education institutions finding it ever harder to sustain conventional approaches to teaching and learning the CTI is demonstrating the growing viability of technology-based alternatives.
The CTI Centres The Centres are all directed by an experienced university academic and staffed by subject specialists with expertise in learning technology.
Each centre provides: answers to individual queries online information via electronic mailing lists and on the World Wide Web at http://www.cti.ac.uk regular newsletters and journals subject specific resource guides and software reviews workshops, visits, open days, software demonstrations The CTI has a major presence on the World Wide Web.
Not only have Centres mounted their own material on their Web servers (information about events and activities, online newsletters and resource guides) but they also evaluate other sources of information, building links from their pages to servers which meet their criteria for quality and relevance.
Full contact details for all Centres and a link to each Web site is available at http://www.cti.ac.uk/centres/index.html The CTI Support Service The CTI Support Service, based at the University of Oxford, coordinates the 24 Centres and acts as a focal point for activities relating to the use of computers in university teaching in the UK.
The Support Service maintains the central CTI Web server and has a busy publishing programme (CTISS Publications ).
Its publications include a journal (Active Learning) published twice a year, an annual report, other special reports and conference proceedings.
Active Learning is the major refereed journal of the CTI and is essential reading for all those interested in learning technologies in higher education, emphasising the learning outcomes rather than the technologies.
Each issue includes in-depth articles, case studies, critical reports and opinion pieces by specialists in the field.
Recent theme issues include: Computer assisted assessment (I) Using the Internet for teaching (II) Teaching with multimedia (III) TLTP: what has been achieved?
(IV) Issue V, to be published in December 1996, will feature Learning Technology Success Stories.
The subscription is FREE to academic staff members of UK HE institutions; attractive rates available to others.
You can subscribe by emailing the CTI Support Service: CTISS@oucs.ox.ac.uk or by using the subscription form at http://www.cti.ac.uk/publ/actlea/subscribe.html Collaboration with others The structure of the CTI, with its discipline based Centres, lends itself easily to the forging of links between Centres and others working in the same fields of study.
Overseas links are growing in size and strength but the bulk of the collaborative work undertaken is with academic colleagues and professional bodies which are based in the UK.
The strongest links are with TLTP (the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme).
Staff involvement includes belonging TLTP consortia and managing software development; advising TLTP projects and evaluating their software; demonstrating TLTP software at workshops and conferences; running TLTP software training workshops; supplying up-to-date information on developments in TLTP newsletters, online, and in resource guides and information packs.
The CTI also liaises closely with the Scottish Learning Technology Dissemination Initiative (LTDI) an initiative that exists to promote good practice and disseminate materials from TLTP and CTI.
Links have begun to develop with the Further Education sector partly by way of the National Council of Educational Technology (NCET).
The greatest concentration of international links remains in Europe and Australia with several of the countries copying the CTI pattern of subject-based dissemination centres.
The CTI Support Service operates an overseas subscription scheme which allows overseas university departments to benefit from CTI Centres in the same way as those in the UK.
Further information If you would like any further information about the CTI please contact Joyce Martin.
Email: CTISS@oucs.ox.ac.uk Telephone: +44 (0)1865 237273 Fax: +44 (0)1865 237275 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Provenance Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Provenance Buzz html archives provenance research Citation BibTex RIS Neal Chan describes Provenance, a Canadian-based Web magazine for Information Professionals.
Provenance, the Electronic (Web) Magazine, started as an idea in May 1995 at a Preconference Workshop of the British Columbia Libraries Association conference.
The workshop was "Networking the Pacific" and was convened by Stan Skrzeszewski and the 60 plus participants can from throughout the Pacific Rim.
The actual idea of a newsletter was refined over a beer with Carol Joling, IDRC who has continued to be a guiding spirit, for the magazine.
The magazine is totally run on volunteer time and efforts.
Our primary corporate sponsor Internet Gateway Corp. continues to be generous in its support of hosting our site.
We currently developing a mirror site with a new Internet Service in Victoria, B.C.
As with most volunteer organizations, at this stage of our development we are still refining our "Model" of what we are "becoming" as an online magazine.
Certainly, we publish articles that might not be included in traditional library journals/publications ... partly because many of our contributors come from a Special/Corporate Library environment, and partly because we seek to have some "fun, pleasure reading... articles included e.g.
travel articles by Teresa Murphy.
After a relatively quiet summer, as is evidenced by little work done on our site, other than a core group of articles -we plan to have a fuller bodied issue in the next few months.
I would like to acknowledge the special contribution of Adrian Cunningham, of the Australian National Library for his contributions and recruitment of writers from Australian libraries and archives.
The many contributions of the Australians, combined with work of our advisors in the Canadian Arctic circle to Eastern Canada (Stan Skrzeszewski and Carol Joling), and not to forget John Evans, at the University of Papua New Guinea--have had times given me the feeling that we are a part of the old "Commonwealth".
The magazine has been a testing ground for those of us that have been involved in the html coding and trying to keep up to some degree with the technology.... an unending process.
It has been heartening to get email from librarians and archivists from around the world from the Azores to Russia and the Eastern U.S., with comments ranging from "spelling and coding problems" to enjoying what they see.
In February 1996 we were given an honorable mention in "THE CYBERSKEPTIC'S GUIDE TO INTERNET RESEARCH".
The National Library of Canada has sought to archive us, a project that due to our time restraints we have yet to be able to implement.
We hope to rectify this this coming year.
We continue to be encouraged by by the network of advisors that have offered advice, help and moral support.
I can't mention all the names of the people involved, they are on our masthead...
I would like to thank everyone for their participation during this past 12 months and look forward... Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Library Association Web Site Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Library Association Web Site Buzz data software api javascript html database apache metadata accessibility cataloguing windows ftp authentication rdbms intranet standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Alan Cooper and Finbarr Joy talk about the past, present and future of the Library Association Web Site.
Relevant Web Site The main Library Association Web site: http://www.la-hq.org.uk/ The LA Vacancies Supplement: http://www.la-rvs.org.uk/ The Library Association Publishing service: http://www.bookshop.co.uk/LAPUBLISHING/ Two years’ ago the Library Association was considering how best it could deliver services and information to its members using the Internet.
There seemed no obvious need to add to the substantial number of successful e-mail lists catering for the UK library community, but a number of librarianship bodies overseas (notably the American Library Association [1] and the International Federation of Library Associations [2]) were developing their use of the World-Wide Web.
We were concerned about the resources needed by a small organisation such as the LA to operate a Web site.
A long-term IT strategy had been developing at Library Association Headquarters which had led to our having in place a 2 Mbs secondary connection to JANET, and a decision to refurbish most of the building with a network using structured cabling for voice and data.
However, we were not convinced that we had the technical expertise or financial resources to be able to set up our own Web server, and the commercial rates for externally-hosted Web sites were prohibitive.
Fortunately, at this time we were approached by Fretwell Downing Informatics with a free offer to host a Web site on our behalf.
The Library Association would retain full editorial control, while Fretwell Downing would operate the Web site and provide the technical expertise.
The Library Association was extremely pleased to take up this offer, constrained by the resources we have to develop and maintain the information rather than any space limitations imposed by Fretwell Downing.
Library Association activities The immediate objective was decided as being providing a source of information about the Library Association and its activities for members and potential members.
Established in 1877, with a Royal Charter granted in 1898, the LA is the UK’s leading professional body for librarians and information managers and has more than 25,000 members.
Among its activities, are: a voice for the profession The LA influences government and other decision-makers affecting the library world, by campaigning, lobbying, and responding to government initiatives; in particular, campaigns such as National Libraries Week [3] and Library Power have changed the way people view libraries.
career development Members can gain professional qualifications with Chartered status and receive help and advice on employment-related issues; in addition, librarians can obtain career opportunities through the INFOmatch recruitment agency, take part in an extensive programme of short courses and purchase professional resources published by Library Association Publishing.
promoting standards University library and information courses are accredited, awards are given to promote professional excellence, and service guidelines in a number of sectors are developed and published.
products and services The Library Association record (12 issues a year) and Library technology (5 issues a year) are free to members and available on subscription; the Vacancies supplement (fortnightly) is the leading medium for job advertising in the profession.
Initial Web site These activities generate much information of significance to library and information professionals.
For example, the Web site now contains many of the information sheets and policy documents otherwise produced in print and provided by post on request.
The site also provides a preview of the forthcoming issue of the Library Association record, including the text of some feature and news articles, and the full text of National Libraries Week news.
Many of the activities of the LA take place within its special interest Groups and regional Branches, and all were encouraged to make their information available on the Web, either on their own sites or the main LA Web site.
A majority of Groups now have Web pages.
In addition a number of organizations in liaison with the LA (i.e.
national organizations with a substantial number of LA members which have formal links with us) have pages on the LA Web site.
As a consequence of there being these many sources, information for the Web site arrives in a variety of formats, mostly word-processor or text files, but in some cases HTML files and in some cases pieces of paper!
A deliberate decision was made not to be prescriptive, in order to encourage Branches and Groups to participate and editorial control is extremely light.
The training section on the LA Web site Two years’ ago, LAHQ staff had terminal access to Uniplex (office automation software) and elm (e-mail software) running under Unix.
As a result of the implementation of the next phase of the IT strategy, LAHQ staff now have Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange running under Windows 95 on the desktop, with servers running Windows NT.
(Our monthly journal, the Library Association record, is the exception, in being Macintosh based.)
Our new systems will begin to make it easier for LAHQ staff to develop materials for the Web site, and the use of Web editors , such as the FrontPage editor, is being encouraged.
In the long term, the ability for us to develop and maintain the LA Web site is dependent upon generation of Web information being integrated with our everyday office procedures for creating and sharing information.
In order for this to happen, as well as promoting Internet use for all LAHQ staff, we are beginning to look at developing our use of Intranet technology.
Library Association Publishing was sufficiently convinced of the value of the World-Wide Web to the book trade, that it soon arranged to have its own Web site, as part of the Internet Bookshop.
As well as the advantages of LAP’s current list being accessible as part of a large collection of publishers’ catalogues, the Internet Bookshop provides facilities to order books online and to be notified of new titles by e-mail automatically.
LA JobNet During 1996 it became clear that the Internet was becoming a significant source of information about vacancies in the profession (for example, services such as NISS [4] and the BUBL Information Service [5] include LIS job information).
A number of recruiters were also beginning to enquire about placing job advertisements on the Internet, attracted by the opportunity it would provide to reach an audience wider than the LA membership.
An Internet version would also have significant advantages for overseas members.
On the other hand, the Vacancies supplement is seen by members as being one of the major benefits of membership of the LA.
A decision was made that the advantages to the Association of a Web-based version clearly outweighed any possible disadvantages.
It was agreed that the service would be available to anyone and not just the LA membership, but that users would need to register.
Members would continue to receive a personal copy at least three days before each issue goes live on the Internet.
Fretwell Downing was commissioned to develop the new service, which started in January this year.
Platform Both sites are housed on a Sun UltraSparc II Internet server installed with Netscape Enterprise web server software.
LA JobNet also makes use of an Informix RDBMS.
The Netscape Enterprise server is typical of the latest wave of web servers in that it offers much more than a simple HTTP server daemon.
Such servers now also provide suites of web publishing tools to help with server administration (usually through a GUI interface as opposed to the old command line/ configuration file hacking method).
Typically, user administration, authentication/security, version control, and text retrieval components are available ‘out-of-the-box’ and are configurable through the GUI administration interface.
These features are even to be found in ‘freeware’ servers such as Apache (although without the GUI interface and only after some patient source code hacking and compilation from you/ your pet programmer).
In addition, the latest servers also support direct access to the server API.
This offers many benefits for those developing applications or interactive elements for web sites since it obviates the need for the more complex (and slower) CGI -based programs traditionally used and gives the developer direct access to the server’s more powerful functions.
To further aid developers, many server vendors also provide their own development platforms in Netscape’s case this is known as ‘LiveWire’ [6] and consists of a JavaScript implementation which executes entirely at the server (as opposed to the more common implementation at the client) through the server API.
The LA HQ site runs as a ‘traditional’ web site in that all HTML pages are created by LA staff and transferred to the server using FTP.
These pages are updated remotely on a regular basis as required.
In contrast, most of the information contained within the LA JobNet site is generated from within a database i.e.
HTML pages are dynamically generated by the server at the time of each user’s request.
Dynamic Publishing through Database Integration The LA JobNet site is driven by a relational database which holds information on job vacancies and users registered to use the service (registration is compulsory, though free to all).
In addition , authority files are maintained for regional and sector information used in querying the database.
The actual job of presenting the site via database queries is handled through the Netscape LiveWire interface which provides a library of database connectivity routines for use in server-side JavaScript.
This supports the direct connection and execution of database operations without the need for third party web/database gateways and so simplifies the development process.
Since LiveWire is an extension of the server’s API performance is also enhanced.
A standard ‘template’ is employed throughout the site which defines common page elements that can be constructed programmatically according to the context.
Hence, site-wide ‘headers and footers’ can be defined which need only be edited in one ‘template’ file for changes to be reflected across the site.
Similarly, query and record display screens are composed of form and list elements which are called on as needed from a single file.
The advantage of constructing a site in this way is that maintenance is greatly reduced since only one (template) file is edited rather than multiple HTML files to effect changes.
These templates are automatically populated by data from the database according to the context of the user’s actions so that database interaction is transparent to the user who navigates the web site in the same manner as a ‘static’ site.
Future Developments A number of issues need further examination as part of the development of the LA’s Web-based services: Web preparation and management We are looking at how , in the long term, the Web site will become integrated with information management within LAHQ and with information services to members of the Association.
For example, information for print publication and the Web site should need to be created once only.
Also, if we are to allow our members to re-new their subscriptions or book a course place online, this clearly has implications for our in-house membership and courses systems.
Existing tools, such as FrontPage, still have a number of inadequacies in areas such as ensuring accessibility, generating metadata and carrying out validation.
This raises a number of issues, such as the extent to which we feel able to decentralise responsibility for the Web site to staff using these tools.
new services The Library Association is committed to developing new information services to our members and the wider profession using Internet technologies.
Already, BLISS [7] and the BUBL Information Service [8] provide information about the professional literature, and the University of Wales, Aberyswyth provides the PICK gateway [9] and Electronic Calendar [10].
The Library Association is well placed to provide information on LIS in the media, suppliers of library services or products, and legal and parliamentary matters affecting the profession, for example.
The Library Association is an information provider to the NewsAgent for Libraries eLib project [11] .
LA JobNet will be extended to provide complete details of all the posts advertised in the print version.
The LA JobNet web site is currently exploiting some of the most advanced features available from the latest wave of web servers.
The ‘next wave’ (already looming over us!)
will bring closer integration with other applications besides database servers such as news, media and directory servers (based on X500 or LDAP the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).
Such integration would enable organisations such as the Library Association to set up authoritative, secure information services to its members that would be available over the Web.
References [1] American Library Association, http://www.ala.org/ [2] International Federation of Library Associations, http://www.ifla.inist.fr/ [3] National Libraries Week, http://www.la-hq.org.uk/nlwnews.htm [4]NISS Library vacancies service, http://www.niss.ac.uk/noticeboard/jobs/libvac.html [5] BUBL Jobs Service, http://bubl.ac.uk/news/jobs/ [6] Livewire developers guide, http://europa.rlj-consulting.com/documentation/livewire/developers_guide/ [7] BLISS, http://portico.bl.uk/bliss/ [8] BUBL Library and Information Science journals, http://bubl.ac.uk/journals/lis/ [9] PICK LIS Gateway, http://www.aber.ac.uk/~tplwww/e/ [10] PICK Electronic calendar of events, http://www.aber.ac.uk/~tplwww/eleccal/ [11] NewsAgent for Libraries eLib project, http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/newsagent/ Author Details Alan Cooper, Information Manager, The Library Association Email: CooperA@la-hq.org.uk Tel: 01636 7543 Finbarr Joy, Internet Services Consultant, Fretwell-Downing Group Ltd. Email: fjoy@fdgroup.co.uk Tel: 0114 2816112 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CAIN Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CAIN Buzz archives copyright video Citation BibTex RIS Martin Melaugh reports on a site devoted to the Northern Ireland conflict.
Many people remain hopeful that the violent conflict in Northern Ireland will end in the near future.
‘The Troubles’ represent the violent expression of the different constitutional, political, religious and cultural allegiances of the two main communities.
It is recognised, however, that an end to the violence will not in itself heal the serious fracture in Northern Ireland society.
The divisions in Northern Ireland have been present for over 300 years and will continue.
These divisions and the period of ‘the Troubles’ will continue to be of interest to academics, and others, for many years to come.
The CAIN [1] (Conflict Archive on the INternet) Project aims to provide information on the Northern Ireland conflict and to offer an insight into the nature of society in the region.
CAIN is one of the projects funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) under the eLib Programme.
The CAIN Project started in January 1996 and the initial phase will be completed in December 1997.
There are three partner institutions involved in the CAIN Project: the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, the Queen’s University of Belfast, and the University of Ulster.
The University of Ulster acts as lead site for the administration of the Project.
Within each of the partner institutions a number of groups and individuals provide support for the Project.
In addition to providing information on the conflict, CAIN is recording experiences on a number of matters of importance for eLib including, the issue of copyright, and the problems associated with selecting material which attempts to give an unbiased account of a controversial subject.
There has been a wealth of information, generated over the past 28 years, that could be included at the web site.
The majority of the information at the CAIN site will be divided into three main components.
The first is a section of ‘Background Information’.
The other two components will look at ‘Key Events’ and ‘Key Issues’ of the conflict.
In each of these sections a selection of material will be presented which is representative of events and issues of importance during ‘the Troubles’.
A substantial part of the material presented will be in the form of text specifically written for the CAIN Project.
In addition there will be: text from documents produced by a wide range of individuals and organisations, scanned images of a range of material, photographs, and audio and video clips.
The CAIN service is being designed principally for researchers and students who have an academic interest in the study of conflicts in general, or the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in particular.
The service will also be of benefit to lecturers preparing and delivering undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes in peace and conflict studies.
In addition the content will be relevant to courses in other areas of the humanities and social sciences.
The service will, of course, be available to anyone who has access to the Internet.
References Project CAIN Web Site, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ Author Details Dr Martin Melaugh, CAIN Project Manager email: martin@incore.ulst.ac.uk Tel: 01504 375517 Fax: 01504 375510 Address: Aberfoyle House, University of Ulster, Northland Road, Derry, BT48 7JA Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata Corner: Naming Names Metadata Registries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata Corner: Naming Names Metadata Registries Buzz data software framework database archives metadata standardisation namespace repositories cataloguing opac z39.50 marc interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Rachel Heery examines metadata issues.
To-day’s information user may well have access to a range of resources, and these resources will be described in more diverse resource description formats than traditional MARC.
During the search process a user will encounter systems based on several different resource description formats, for example, their local OPAC, an internet subject gateway, an electronic text archive, each of which will manipulate a different variety of metadata.
Although the promise of an increase in ‘seamless searching’ across interoperable systems will mean the end user will not themselves be aware of these diverse formats, there are other people, and indeed software, that will need to understand and manage these formats.
Creators of resource descriptions, those who are implementing new search services, designers of interoperable systems all need to be aware of the authoritative versions of a particular resource description format and the precise data element definitions.
Those who recall updating loose leaf manuals (UKMARC, USMARC etc.)
will realise this is not a scaleable option.
The information needs to be made accessible quickly and accurately over the network.
Among those involved in the Dublin Core effort, the need for sharing information about the element set was recognised at the 4th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop.
How would implementors communicate their decisions regarding the use of qualifiers and extensions?
How would the ‘final fifteen’ elements be recorded authoritatively?
Stu Weibel comments in the workshop report [1]: Name space management is prominent among the thorny impediments of deploying a world-wide metadata architecture.
Who controls a given metadata name space (such as the Dublin Core, for example)?
How can such a name space be partitioned such that it can easily be extended by others without re-inventing a particular wheel?
What conventions are necessary to make a naming authority globally visible and accessible, and what sort of structured or unstructured data should be available online for humans or applications to process?
Establishing some form of ‘metadata registry’ seems to offer a way forward.
For any particular ‘metadata element set’ the registry could record designation of content and agreed usage.
Any extensions to the format would be recorded, as would agreed mapping between formats.
The role of such registries would be both to promote and to inform thereby encouraging the use of standard formats and reducing duplication of effort.
Within the UK there is growing recognition of the desirability of searching across subject domains and across media types.
The higher education funding bodies have shown commitment to encourage adoption of standards and protocols which will enable such cross searching and retrieval.
Interoperability can be facilitated by the use of registries.
Interoperability requires metadata to be used in standard ways and one way to promote such standardisation is for a system of registries to be established.
The need for interoperability occurs at various levels.
These can be typified as global regional domain (by subject or resource type) There may be more (e.g.
sectoral).
At each of these levels there is a different business model for interoperability.
The organisational impetus for achieving interoperability differs, the market differs, user expectations differ.
A distributed model for registries would take account of this fact.
Distributed domain/regional registries might exist in a mesh with higher level ‘global’ registries.
UKOLN is currently setting up a registry for use of the ROADS template, ( ROADS is an eLib project providing software to support subject based internet search services.)
UKOLN registers template types and elements in use in current implementations.
We act as a focus for additions and amendments to the element set, and provide element definitions and guidelines for use.
We have drawn up mapping ‘cross walks’ from ROADS templates to USMARC and to the Z39.50 bib-1 use attribute set.
UKOLN has plans to extend its registry activity: to provide rules for formulation of content (simple cataloguing rules), and to begin to provide a framework for interoperability within UK higher education resource discovery services.
We also intend to record use of extensions to the Dublin Core element set in UK implementations.
It does appear there is some convergence of interest in metadata registries at the moment, coming not just from the digital library community but from a variety of other implementation areas and business groups.
This interest has been recognised by the International Standards Organization in particular those individuals involved with development of ISO/IEC11179 : Specification and Standardization of Data Elements, Part 6 of which deals with registration of data elements.
The ISO Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 14 (Data Engineering) proposed a ‘Joint Workshop on Metadata Registries’ [2]which was held in Berkeley in July of this year and was sponsored by the US Environment Protection Agency, OCLC and the Metadata Coalition.
The Metadata Registries Workshop brought together people from a wide range of communities including those involved in digital library management, database management, and software engineering; they included people from research backgrounds, as well as service providers in government, business and educational sectors.
In fact the diversity of this meeting was such that achieving consensus on an approach to metadata registration that could be encapsulated in any single ‘standard’ was not seen by many as a viable objective.
The value of such a gathering was rather to increase awareness of different approaches to metadata, indeed to gain some understanding of what ‘metadata’ means to these communities, and to become informed regarding good practice and implementation experience.
One interesting example of the very few metadata registries in existence is the Australian National Health Information Knowledgebase [3].
At the Workshop Nigel Mercer, Head of the Institute’s Corporate Data Management Unit, gave an account of the development of the registry.
The initial contents are based on those elements in the Australian National Health Data Dictionary, but in the future the registry will be extended to include data definitions from welfare and community services.
This an electronic repository and query tool for health metadata, providing information about the use of particular data elements so as well as definition and permitted values, information is included on related types of data and the nature of the relationship, data collections available, who collects that kind of data, and so on.
The Knowledgebase has been constructed according to ISO/IEC 11179.
In the US the Environment Protection Agency has established another ISO 11179 compliant registry, the Environmental Data Registry [4].
This data registry allows you to retrieve information about data elements and data concepts found in selected EPA systems.
Once again the context of the registry is that of data surveys and data collection, with an acknowledged hierarchy of authority for formulating definitions and permitted values.
Clifford Lynch as keynote speaker at the Workshop considered the role of the metadata registry in facilitating extensibility and interoperability in the context of network resource discovery.
So for example the registry would allow specific communities of practice to assume a common framework as regards their chosen ‘tagged language’ and ensure ‘collision avoidance’ within the format structure.
Extensible semantics as defined in a registry might be either human readable or machine readable.
The registry might allow the interpretation of different metadata formats by means of crosswalks, mappings or translations.
As a participant in the workshop I, along with others, found communication across so many boundaries a difficult and, at times, a frustrating process.
That the workshop was able to agree on a number of resolutions (at present in draft format [5]) was no small achievement and a tribute to the determination of the organisers.
References [1] The 4th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop Report, D-Lib Magazine, June 1997 http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/mirrored/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/june97/metadata/06weibel.html [2] Joint Workshop on Metadata Registries http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/EPA/Workshop/ [3] Australian National Health Information Knowledgebase http://meteor.aihw.gov.au/ (Formerly http://www.aihw.gov.au/nhik/ -Ed.)
[4] Environmental Data Registry, http://www.epa.gov/edr/ [5] Joint Workshop on Metadata Registries http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/EPA/Workshop/report.html Author details Rachel Heery UKOLN Metadata Group UKOLN University of Bath Email: r.heery@ukoln.ac.uk Own Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/r.heery/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Copyright Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Corner Buzz archives copyright ejournal licence url research Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim answers your copyright queries.
The Web and legal deposit Paul Auchterlonie, University of Exeter Library (J.P.C.Auchterlonie@exeter.ac.uk) asked: From what I have read of your column in Ariadne, any downloading and storage by an ordinary library of material from a Web site is a straightforward infringement of copyright, unless the agreement of the copyright owner is obtained in advance.
However, if this permission is granted, are there any other laws, preventing the library from making material produded on a Web site or in e-journal form available to its readers in hard-copy?
Charles replies: As long as the licence gives permission, that licence over-rides the law, so there is no other legal impediment.
On a related issue, what is the position of the British copyright deposit libraries on downloading from Web sites or e-journals.
I understand that the national libraries of some Scandinavian countries routinely archive material produced on Web sites in their countries on the grounds that it falls within legal deposit.
There are moves afoot to extend copyright deposit in the UK to non-print materials, and if the law were so amended, then the British Library could store electronic materials and make them available to patrons, though no doubt the law will be fairly restrictive regarding how many users can access the materials and what they can then do with it.
At the moment, though, the law in the UK does not extend to non-print materials.
It is certainly true that Scandinavian countries are leading the world on the law in this regard.
Using images in OHP’s for lectures Chris Willis, Copyright Administrator, OPEL Project, Birkbeck College Library asked: Would I need copyright permission to use an image as an OHP illustration in a lecture or seminar, or would this come under fair use?
Charles replies: Since it is not for one of the permitted purposes (research, private study, reporting current events or criticism or review), it cannot be fair dealing.
It is therefore safest to request permission.
However, it must be said the damage you are causing the copyright owner might be so slight that you may wish to risk not bothering to ask for permission, but that would be for you to judge.
Free e-journals and copyright Another query from Birbeck College related to an article from a free e-journal: We have a copyright query which we wondered if you may be able to shed some light on.
A lecturer has printed off some articles from a free electronic journal and wants to put them in short loan, but we’re not sure if this breaches copyright or not.
Have you come across anything about this at any of the copyright conferences, etc.
that you’ve been to?
Does the fact that it is freely available mean that it doesn’t have the same copyright restrictions as something we have paid for?
Charles replies: The fact that something is free is irrelevant.
It is just as much copyright infringement to reproduce something from a free newspaper as reproducing something from a newspaper you pay for.
The material in the electronic journal enjoys copyright and the lecturer is wrong to make printouts and distribute them without seeking permission.
What the lecturer should do is either get formal permission, or draw the attention of students to the relevant URL.
It is then up to the students themselves to take their chances under ‘fair dealing’.
The library should advise the lecturer to stop doing this, and should certainly not become a party to the infringement by stocking the material in its short loan or any other part of its collections.
Author details Professor Charles Oppenheim Co-Director, International Institute of Electronic Library Research Division of Learning Development De Montfort University Hammerwood Gate, Kents Hill MILTON KEYNES MK7 6HP email: charles@dmu.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Interface Miriam Drake: A Rainy Night in Georgia?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface Miriam Drake: A Rainy Night in Georgia?
Buzz database copyright cataloguing multimedia research standards Citation BibTex RIS The Library is still busy, as Miriam Drake explains to Alison Kilgour.
Miriam Drake, Dean and Director of the Library and Information Centre at Georgia Institute of Technology, feels that librarians should concern themselves with making money for their libraries and confesses that most of her time is spent doing just that.
The climate is changing and universities have to become more and more self-sufficient.
In the US, says Drake, "...there will be more jobs created by small business than big.
My advice to you is to identify and seek out the potential small business starters and be very good to them.
Give them technical information and, more importantly, marketing information.
When they become successful they should repay you for the service you have provided to them."
At Georgia Tech, she adds, they are very good to their users.
Miriam Drake came to libraries quite by accident.
In the late 1960s, with a degree in Economics, Drake took a job as a transportation economist.
One of her projects was working on an airline reservations system for small airlines.
Her colleague was Calvin Moores, a key figure in the early history of the discipline of information science.
This prompted an interest in computing and information retrieval, and she decided to specialise in librarianship, where a fascinating relationship with new technology was just beginning.
She progressed to a varied career in libraries, including a spell in an advertising agency, moving to Georgia Institute of Technology in 1984.
A year after she started at Georgia Tech, the library went online with the aim of creating the most technologically advanced library possible within its means.
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennysylvania, launched its electronic library at almost exactly the same time.
They were the first libraries in the US to have campus-wide access from day one.
Initially the library catalogue and databases such as INSPEC were run from a mainframe.
Ten years on, in March 1995, the Web became the standard interface to all electronic library services.
"People seem to like it", comments Drake, somewhat unenthusiastically.
Doesn't she?
"Not altogether.
I foresee dangers for the point-and-click generation".
She believes that students' learning is impoverished by the lack of use of traditionally published materials, and that the new generation of students 70% of whom have access to computers either at home or in school do not understand why information is not instantly available to them.
"We fail to develop critical thinking in students if they are challenged only to find the right answer and not the method of finding it."
The Web is wonderful, but not necessarily for deep learning.
Nor is it the last word in networked publication and communication.
"Something else will replace it.
We've made all of this conversion, and we'll convert many times before we're through."
Academic librarians are more and more involved in the learning process, and this particular Library Director has strong views on teaching and learning methods.
She is dissatisfied with current course evaluation methods, and takes the view that students should be assessed after they have left university.
"Students are in a university to learn competencies, skills and critical thinking that will prepare them for the workplace and to lead useful lives.
This cannot be judged until they have been out of school for a while... We can test students on what they know in terms of being able to solve equations, or do chemical experiments, but what is it going to do for them in terms of enriching their lives or preparing them for the workplace?"
Higher education needs to fit more closely with the real world of work and working lifestyles.
Distance learning must play an ever greater role in course provision.
"The more flexible we can be with that the better.
Everything from using interactive television and multimedia, to actually coming back to campus, is very important."
She sees in the future the graduate of Georgia Tech coming back for courses every two years, for a couple of weeks of 'recycling'.
Drake recognises that libraries also have other constituencies to serve.
We have a responsibility to the needs of our universities' administrations, and a role to play in bridging the gap between higher education and the surrounding industrial and commercial communities.
While Georgie Tech's GTEL (Georgia Tech Electronic Library) databases are available only to the student and staff body at the Institute, the GALILEO databases are run by the state of Georgia, and include UMI periodical abstracts and full-text articles, ABI Inform full-text, and a number of OCLC databases.
This is surely an impressive example of bringing cutting-edge technology to the general public?
Drake agrees, with typical pragmatism.
"Sure.
If a member of the public walks into my library, they can access the range of GALILEO services.
But they usually don't come to us because they can't find a parking space."
The future of the Web service lies in access to key articles and book chapters.
Already an electronic reserves facility is available.
Copyright permitting, lecturing staff can put items on reserve, which students then access from their dormitories.
The effect of comprehensive networking of library services has been to reduce physical usage of the library by 20-25% over the last few years.
Indeed, for some 20 years now a delivery service to academic staff has been in operation, allowing orders to be placed for library material now including document delivery from external hosts.
"Some of our best users have not been in the library for years".
Georgia Tech is the most engineering-intensive university in the US, and this type of service suits the study patterns of engineers.
The university supports a $200m research business, and the library is used on an equal basis with commercial research establishments.
Where time is money, the library has to be in the business of providing an express service.
The users appreciate this.
And one of them may be the next Bill Gates.
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ILEJ: Internet Library of Early Journals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ILEJ: Internet Library of Early Journals Buzz data software digitisation copyright ocr Citation BibTex RIS Hugh Wellesley-Smith turns back the clock with a description of the Internet Library for early journals digitisation project.
The Internet Library of Early Journals (ILEJ) project aims to offer expanded access over the Internet to digitised page images of substantial runs of out of copyright 18th and 19th century journals and to evaluate them in terms of use and acceptability.
A part of the eLib Digitisation Programme, the project has been funded for 2 years starting on 1 January 1996.
It is being run by a consortium of 4 institutions the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the John Rylands University Library of Manchester and the University Libraries of Leeds and Birmingham.
Oxford and Leeds are the joint lead sites.
The journals to be digitised are three 18th century titles: the Gentleman's Magazine, the Annual Register and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; and three 19th century titles: Notes and Queries, The Builder and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
The initial aim is to digitise at least 20 consecutive year runs of each title to provide a critical mass of material.
This may be expanded to include longer runs and/or other titles within the available resources.
The project will explore various aspects of the digitisation, retrieval and display processes.
Both paper originals, using the recently available PS3000 Minolta scanner, and existing microfilm copies will be used for image creation.
One of the challenges of the project will be how best to digitise material of the age of these journals.
Preliminary investigations have already revealed problems resulting from show-through, foxing, page alignment and variable type face weight.
The project will provide an opportunity to assess the effects of resolution, data compression and the use of black/white and grey scales on problems like these.
Much improved indexing will result from using OCR'd full-text with fuzzy matching software, existing electronic indexes and the creation of electronic versions of printed indexes.
Access to the material will be provided via the World Wide Web, with Leeds hoping to use newly released Excalibur EFS WebFile software.
Once material is available on the Internet, evaluation of the project will start and will include the collection of feedback from users in the four metropolitan areas and elsewhere and also from voluntary reference groups.
The project maintains a Web Site at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ which, amongst other things, contains contact details.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz jpg Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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Interface: Jane Core Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: Jane Core Buzz portfolio Citation BibTex RIS Chris Bailey discusses librarians and learning with Jane Core of EduLib.
Jane Core is the Associate Director of the EduLib project.
Her home base is the University of Abertay in Dundee [2] where I met her on a wet day in January.
EduLib is one of the projects which received funding under eLib’s Training and Awareness programme strand and is a collaboration between the University of Hull [3] and the University of Abertay Dundee in association with SEDA (the Staff and Educational Development Association) [4].
EduLib provides a nationally recognised programme of educational development for library and support staff.
EduLib’s central objective is that library and information staff of the future should possess both the networked information skills and the teaching skills needed to work within the environment of the electronic library.
"EduLib is a developmental project" says Core.
"It is testing the capacity of the higher education sector to take responsibility for education and training in this area."
So what is the rationale behind such a project?
Certainly most librarians involved with what used to be known as bibliographic instruction or user education are aware that the nature of the task is now far more complex and that there is a much greater demand.
There is a debate taking place within higher education about the lack of formal teaching qualifications for academic staff.
The Association of University Teachers, SEDA and the Universities and Colleges Staff Development Association (UCoSDA) [5] have all produced policy documents in this area.
Core believes that EduLib provides the forum in which information professionals are conducting the same debate.
"It is highly ironic that teachers in higher education do not generally have a teaching qualification."
Yet the impact of the shift to mass higher education, together with the Quality Assessment programme in universities has forced many academics to look at educational principles and to introduce teaching programmes based on, for example, problem-based learning methodologies.
EduLib will provide librarians who teach information use with particular skills in managing student learning.
"We are not setting out to create an elite" says Core, "but librarians do have particular problems.
Unlike academics they don’t have continual student contact.
Their sessions are typically one-off with no feedback.
If there is no assessment then students are not motivated to attend. "
I remembered reading what became known as the 'Jaundiced View' debate on lis-infoskills.
The question asked, essentially, was whether the teaching librarians were giving to students was worthwhile or was it all a waste of time?
"Many people do user education because they think it is 'a good thing' " says Core.
"But 'a good thing' is not enough there needs to be a focus on learning rather than teaching.
We need a new perspective.
What librarians teach should be linked to the learning the student is engaged in a particular course.
We have to contribute in the institutional context and be involved in teaching and learning strategies."
It is misdirection the attempt to teach information skills in isolation from the rest of a student’s learning programme which creates the jaundiced view.
"The transferable skills which we are teaching need to be based on sound educational principles and assessed within the cognate area.
The assignments we set should require the use of the skills being taught.
We need to work in partnership with academics what we are engaged in is a professional collaboration."
What do librarians think about formally accrediting such staff development?
EduLib has undertaken a training needs analysis.
Discussion in focus group sessions certainly indicated that librarians were concerned about their lack of understanding of what constitutes an acceptable level of knowledge and expertise in education.
Accreditation would enhance their status in higher education, improve their career paths and contribute to their continuing professional development (CPD).
"We have over a hundred people registered for the First Wave Workshops, which we find very encouraging".
The needs analysis identified training needs which are strongly focused on general teaching skills.
So where do library schools fit in?
If it is accepted that librarians in higher education will spend an increasing amount of time in transferable information skills teaching then surely this is a factor which library schools should be taking on board in their own curriculum development?
Core disagrees.
"A teaching option within the library school curriculum would not provide the environment for continuous reflection on practice".
Reflection and re-evaluation are part of the SEDA principles underpinning EduLib's programme.
Library schools are interested in what EduLib is doing but there are already a large number of librarians actively involved in teaching who need training.
"Library schools may not consider a role in CPD as a viable diversification of their portfolio, and, to be fair, there are huge resource implications" says Core.
"If a library school is asked to take this on board, will employers be willing to pay for their staff to participate? "
EduLib has to persuade the higher education sector to recognise its modules and be prepared to adopt them as part of their own staff development strategies.
Core admits that there are thorny issues connected with this which the EduLib Steering Committee is starting to debate.
In the longer term it remains to be seen whether the modules are accredited by various institutions and formally adopted as part of the staff development of institutions.
And for Core personally?
"Libraries are part of the learning process.
As a librarian I am here to help that process, and if that means I need to teach, then I am happy with that but I want the confidence to know that I can do so effectively. "
References EDULIB Web pages, http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/CTLS_Web/edulib/edulib.html University of Abertay Dundee Web Site, http://www.tay.ac.uk/ University of Hull Web Site, http://www.hull.ac.uk/homepage.html SEDA (the Staff and Educational Development Association) Web pages, http://www.seda.demon.co.uk/ Universities and Colleges Staff Development Association (UCoSDA) http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/ucosda.html Interviewee Details Jane Core Assistant head of Information Services, University of Abertay, Dundee.
Email: j.core@tay.ac.uk Tel: 01382 308851 Fax: 01382 308880 Personal Web Page: http://www.tay.ac.uk/www/library/staff/jane.htm Address: University of Abertay Dundee, Bell Street, DUNDEE, DD1 1HG Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) Update Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) Update Buzz data software database archives thesaurus digitisation copyright multimedia mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Recently, a wave of new projects under the umbrella of the Electronic Libraries Programme was announced.
A consequence of this is that a large majority of the HE institutions in the UK are involved in at least one eLib project (is yours?
), as well as many non HE organisations and institutions.
Here, we give brief details of some of these new projects.
Recently, a wave of new projects under the umbrella of the Electronic Libraries Programme was announced.
A consequence of this is that a large majority of the HE institutions in the UK are involved in at least one eLib project (is yours?
), as well as many non HE organisations and institutions.
Here, we give brief details of some of these new projects.
In the Preprints/Grey Literature area, we have three projects: Formations Lead Site: University of Ulster Contact: Nigel Gardner, Dan Fleming (dr.fleming@ulst.ac.uk) Formations is a preprint database in the areas of cultural policy, media studies and performance theory.
The project proposes creating an interactive connection between editorially moderated newsgroups and a "grey" electronic journal.
BERID Lead Site: University of Leeds Contact: Mr High Wellesley-Smith Tel: 0113 2335542, Fax: 2335539, H.N.Wellesley-Smith@Leeds.ac.uk A project to establish an thesaurus indexed database of grey literature in the field of education and training accessible via the WWW.
The system will provide and electronic forum for comments on documents as a form of "peer review".
EPACS Lead Site: University of Southampton Proposed Partner Sites: Los Alamos Physics Preprint Archive Contact: Prof. Stevan Harnad Tel: 01703 592582, Fax: 594597, Harnad@Cogsci.soton.ac.uk A project which plans to establish an international, interdisciplinary electronics preprint archive in the Cognitive Sciences.
Four projects are announced from the Electronic Short Loan Collections section: ERCOMS Lead Site: De Montfort Contact: Prof. Mel Collier Tel: 0116 2577039, Fax: 2577170, MWC@dmu.ac.uk ERCOMS will develop an Electronic Reserve Copyright Management System capable of working with different electronic reserve management systems and providing full tracking facilities.
ACORN Lead Site: Loughborough University Proposed Partner Sites: SWETS, Leicester University Library Contact: Mr J.A.
Arfield Tel.
: 01509 222340, Fax: 234806, J.A.Arfield@lut.ac.uk Project ACORN (Access to Course Readings Via Networks) aims to develop a transferable model for the whole process of providing electronic access to course readings.
Working initially in the areas of engineering, geography and LIS, ACORN plans to demonstrate a model for "effective and cost-efficient working relationships between university libraries and third party agents for copyright clearance and digitisation of text".
ResIDe (Research, Information and Delivery) Lead Site: University of the West of England Contact: Ms Tessa Bruce Tel: 0117 965 6261 *2702, Fax: 976 3846, T-Bruce@uwe.ac.uk Electronic Reserve for UK Universities aims to develop a pilot electronic reserve system aimed at students in the Faculty of the Built Environment where work has been pursued previously in this area.
The project will use a Netscape server and provide a facility for the "management of the flow of documents and data in and out of the system" as well a system for managing copyright.
PATRON : (performing arts) Lead Site: The University of Surrey If ‘Patron’ then Contact: Mr T.J.A.
Crashaw Tel: 01483 259231, Fax: 259500, T.Crawshaw@surrey.ac.uk The project will develop a system to store and deliver multimedia short loan materials in music (CD's, videos, music scores) on demand to students over a broadband network.
A few Images projects (all proposals from the 4/94 targeted call) HELIX Electronic Document Delivery Lead Institution: De Montfort Contact: Prof. Mel Collier HELIX is a project which aims to develop a substantial body of image resource-content based on distributed image banks held in the partner institutions.
Access will be via SuperJanet.
The project will be based on the methods and standards developed for ELISE and its successor, ELISE II.
DIGIMAP Electronic Document Delivery Lead Site: University of Edinburgh Contact: Mr Peter Burnhill Tel: 0131 650 3301, Fax: 0131 650 6547, P.Burnhill@ed.ac.uk The Digital Map Data as Electronic Document project's specific aim is to identify and assess service models by which staff and students in HE can access Ordnance Survey digital map data.
The project will continue with work in this area already underway at Edinburgh.
MIDRIB Lead Site: St. George's Hospital Medical School Contact: Ms Susan Gove MIDRIB (Medical Images Digitised Reference Information Bank) plans to collate a comprehensive collection of medical images for use in teaching and research and make this available nationally, across networks via the Internet (WWW).
One other project... NewsAgent for Libraries Lead Site: South Bank University Contact: Mr Robin Yeates Tel: 0171 815 7871, Fax 815 6699 A proposal held over from the 4/94 call for proposals.
NewsAgent for Libraries proposes an innovative information and current awareness service for the library and information science community.
The service will focus on value-added to existing published material by creating an "user-focused" systems for distributing information resources direct to end users.
More details will be available from the Electronic Libraries Programme Web Pages when we have them.
There are snippets of eLib project updates, as well as news relevant to the eLib programme, in the news section.
In this issue of Ariadne, we again feature three projects: Netskills one of the biggest of the eLib projects, this is an ambitious three year project dedicated to large-scale training of Internet skills and awareness.
In this same edition, we interview Jill Foster director of Mailbase and Netskills, and take a look behind the scenes at the recent Netskills launch.
SEREN Ian Lovecy from Bangor University describes SEREN, a project from the Electronic Document Delivery section of the eLib programme.
SEREN aims to provide the software to enable the Welsh HE community to maximise use of the library resource-base in Wales before turning to BLDSC and other suppliers.
SOSIG one of the most established subject-based gateways on the Internet, SOSIG is dedicated to providing a quick, reliable and easy to find searchable/browsable index of Internet based Social Science related resources.
Issue 1 of Ariadne contained an overview of the eLib programme Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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OMNI Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI Corner Buzz software database url Citation BibTex RIS In her regular appearance in Ariadne, Sue Welsh, introduces a new experiment in network indexing underway at OMNI.
MNI is by no means the first or only of the Electronic Libraries Programme Access to Network Resources projects to experiment with using the well known and popular Harvest software to create descriptions of networked resources automatically.
EEVL (the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library, for example, recently announced the availability of their own Harvest experiment [1]) and non-eLib gateway projects had in any case, beaten us to it some time ago.
In the light of this activity, setting up a Harvest for OMNI is neither a difficult or revolutionary thing to do, and in fact such a thing has existed in the development area of the OMNI server for some time.
The best way to deploy the Harvester though, was not immediately clear, especially taking into account the prominence given by OMNI throughout the Project's existence to the issue of the quality of Internet resources.
This article describes how these concerns were resolved, and describes the new OMNI Harvester.
Finally, if you are a researcher or practitioner looking after a list of links in your own subject area which you'd like to share, we'd very much like to hear from you, read on!
Harvest for Beginners Harvest creates full text indexes to web documents.
It can be used to index single files or entire servers, or be allowed to wander far and wide, using hyperlinks as its means of knowing which route to take.
The two key variables which can be controlled are: the number of hops that the Harvest can make (or how many documents to index before stopping) the starting point or starting points a list of URL's It is also possible to restrain the Harvest software by preventing it from leaving one particular server.
Commonly, Harvest has been used to make a automated, full text version of gateways containing records created by hand.
In this scenario, the URL's contained in the gateway records are used as starting points for Harvest.
After indexing the document identified by a URL, the Harvest is usually allowed to follow URL's contained in the document, and continue indexing.
As all the starting points are relevant, it is likely that all the URL's in the corresponding documents will point to other relevant resources.
Of course, the further Harvest is allowed to wander, the more irrelevant documents will become to the subject gateway.
But, it is assumed that most documents which are only a few hops from the originals selected by the subject gateway will be useful.
It's the Quality, Stupid!
The same assumptions cannot, however, be made about the quality of the items found by this method.
It is not possible to say if the items linked to the documents used as starting points are of the same quality, or if the author intended to recommend them to his readers, or hold them up as an example of what not to do!
It is even less possible to make predictions about the accuracy and authority of resources that are five or six hops down the line.
Restraining the Harvest by keeping to one server may help, but cannot be considered foolproof.
OMNI has always made evaluation and selection cornerstones of its approach to creation of our gateway to biomedical resources.
If we created this sort of Harvest database, it would be necessary to make quite clear to our users that they were using something quite different; nothing in the Harvest database could be said to have been reviewed, evaluated or selected.
After much discussion, there was no consensus on whether this was a useful thing to do, was there another option?
The OMNI Harvester Built on Expert Advice Towards the end of 1996, a different approach was suggested.
OMNI is regularly contacted by subject experts who are compiling lists of Internet resources in their speciality, and usually in the form of a request to place links to their lists in the OMNI databases.
The best way of dealing with these lists has been a subject for concern.
Do they belong in the main OMNI database or should they be listed separately?
How can we avoid OMNI users searching OMNI and finding only other lists, lists within lists, when they are searching for "Content"?
However, one thing these lists undeniably represent is selection, selection by subject experts.
There must be a way to harness this sort of activity and make it available for OMNI users.
The OMNI Harvester is an experiment based around these two strands of activity.
It is a full text database of resources taken from listings compiled by subject experts (in virology, nutrition, pediatrics, orthopaedics, neuroscience) or projects such as PharmWeb [2] (for pharmacology) and the UK Human Genome Mapping Project [3] website (for genetics/molecular biology).
Seven subject areas are covered so far, and the scope of the Harvester will be extended.
Because we constrain the Harvest software so that it does travel away from the resources contained in the lists, the key element of selection is retained.
In the future we hope to integrate the Harvester and the main OMNI databases so that both can be searched simultaneously.
For more information..... Visit the OMNI Harvester and associated documents [4] and tell us what you think.
Even better, if you are a subject expert maintaining a list of resources, contact us and we'll include your resources next time the Harvester is updated.
All the listings involved are used with permission, and are prominently linked from the Harvester pages.
References [1] EEVL, the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library, http://eevl.ac.uk/ [2] PharmWeb: Phamacy Information on the Internet, http://www.pharmweb.net/ [3] UK MRC HGMP Resource Centre, http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/ [4] The OMNI Harvester, from http://omni.ac.uk/general-info/harvest.html Author Details Sue Welsh is the project officer for the OMNI eLib project.
Email: swelsh@nimr.mrc.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: Anne Dixon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: Anne Dixon Buzz software archives aggregation dirac licence research Citation BibTex RIS Amy Tucker peers into the future of Physics journal publishing with Anne Dixon Anne Dixon is on a mission.
Recruited as the Business Development Manager for IOPP (Institute of Physics Publishing) [1] in April 1995, her task was to “create a blueprint for the future”.
Nine months later, IOPP launched their Electronic Journals service comprising 31 journals available online in full text Postscript or PDF (Portable Document File) files.
Now in the post of Electronic Publisher, she is responsible for developing and promoting a range of online products and services.
Her team is continuing to expand along with the range of services offered.
What are the benefits of electronic publishing for the publisher?
“Right now” says Dixon, “the benefits are competitive advantage, increased readerships and more satisfied authors and customers.
But there are no financial benefits”.
The advantages to the end-user take longer to enumerate.
Speed, ease of access, and searchability are obvious.
High on her list are also access to electronic archives, and easier submission of material for publication.
But why be an electronic publisher if it does not pay?
What are the aims of the Electronic Publishing team?
Dixon sees these as threefold.
“To serve the community, to support print journals and to survive the transition from print to electronic form.
During this transition, the publisher needs to become completely customerfocused”.
One method which she uses to ensure this is feedback sessions in institutions and libraries in the UK, Europe and the US each year.
Considering the library as one very important customer, what does she feel about librarians’ generally critical view of the pricing policies of print journal publishers?
“Coming from a software background I find the pricing models in scientific, technical and medical journals rather unusual.
We are trying to pursue various options – free services such as Physics Express Letters, services funded by advertising or sponsors such as the Higher Education Funding Council’s Pilot Site Licence Initiative, and very economically-priced models such as CoDAS Web [2], the Condensed Matter Abstract Alerting Service (jointly owned with Elsevier), which offers 65 physics journals from five publishers at a very competitive price.” IOPP provides access to a full listing of electronic journals via the HEFCE agreement.
What were the reasons for entering the agreement?
“We wanted to explore ways of breaking the vicious cycle of subscription cancellations and annual price increases” replies Dixon.
Nevertheless, libraries participating in the scheme recently received notice of IOPP’s wish to terminate the agreement when the pilot ends.
“We have a two-year termination clause, and had to give notice now in order to renegotiate at the end of the three-year pilot” she says.
IOPP is not involved in any aggregator agreements, in which several publishers make their journals available via the same service (for example, BIDS’ Journals Online [3]).
In her article Are They Being Served?
[4] Lynne Brindley wrote “Valuable as the UK national pilot site licence initiative is, the very idea that in the long term, electronic journals deriving solely from a single publisher is the best approach from the user perspective, is to misunderstand or be ignorant of user needs”.
Dixon agrees that ‘single stop shopping’ is desirable to users.
“But not necessarily at just one stop.
I believe that distributed publishing derived from content providers’ collaborations is a viable way forward.
It is extremely unlikely that one aggregator or content provider will dominate a given subject.
There will come a time when publishers compete less on delivery methods and return to what they are good at – filtering information.
Then they can compete once more on content quality”.
In a recent poll of US and European librarians, IOPP found that, because the number of electronic journals remains comparatively small overall, and transactions can be complex, librarians often find it quicker and more convenient to deal direct with a publisher than to use an agent.
Dixon recognises that this will not remain the case and monitors the aggregator situation carefully.
“We are embarking upon a test with BiomedNet shortly in which relevant electronic journals will be made available to individuals both through that service and our own.
” Surprisingly, Dixon is positive about the notion advanced by Stevan Harnad in Ariadne 8 [5] that journal publishing should be funded by research rather than through subscription prices.
She agrees that research budgets can be more attractive than library budgets, and also considers it an approach that would dovetail with IOPP’s mission as a not-for-profit publisher.
The physics community is an active one, particularly in the electronic arena.
For publishers, the advantage is that there is a customer base already ‘tuned in’ to the Internet and electronic services.
The disadvantage is that it is not only the publisher who can serve this base.
The community has been using Paul Ginsparg’s pre-print physics archive [6] at The Los Alamos National Laboratory for several years.
IOPP disputes Harnad’s claims that researchers use the archive in preference to print journals.
Its research reveals that they submit to both the archive and to print journals.
The statistics reflect this.
“As of a couple of weeks ago” says Dixon, “Los Alamos was serving about 50,000 transactions per day.
We serve 20,000 to 35,000 accesses per day”.
So the future will consist, for some time to come, of a mix of print and print-simulation electronic publishing, together with the more anarchic pre-print culture.
“Publishers should reach into other fields for advice and inspiration.
They must collaborate to provide a breadth of content which is significant and meaningful.
I believe that print journals will have a long ‘tail’, and they will be required by a proportion of the community for a very long time.
” References Institute of Physics Publishing Web pages, http://www.iop.org/online.html CODAS Web, http://www.iop.org/cgi-bin/CoDAS/Unreg/bin/codas BIDS Journals Online, http://www.journalsonline.bids.ac.uk/JournalsOnline Lynne Brindley, Are they being served?, Ariadne Issue 4 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/user_services/ Stevan Harnad, The Paper House of Cards, Ariadne Issue 8 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/harnad/ Paul Ginspargs Pre-Print Physics Archive http://xxx.lanl.gov/ Author Details Amy Tucker, Institute of Physics Publishing Email: amy.tucker@ioppublishing.co.uk Tel: 0117 929 7481 Address: Dirac House, Temple Back, Bristol Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review of Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review of Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net Buzz data html copyright gopher research Citation BibTex RIS Marylaine Block describes the construction of Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net.
Becoming a Gatekeeper, or, Creating Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian’s Guide to the Best Information on the Net by Marylaine Block, Associate Director for Public Services, O’Keefe Library, St. Ambrose University “Where the Wild Things Are: Librarians’s Guide to the Best Information on the Net” can be found at: http://www.sau.edu/cwis/internet/wild/index.htm When I first got onto the internet, I started systematically looking through All the Gopher Servers in the World, and it became clear to me immediately that there was so much there that nobody could ever be an expert on it–all anybody would ever know about it was just their own little corner of it.
The biologists would find the biology stuff, the historians would find the history stuff.
That was all most faculty had the time to do–if they even had time to do that.
Because there was WAY too much stuff out there, and 90% of it was junk.
I, on the other hand, was in the information business.
I had to make the time to find the good stuff.
What was needed, it seemed to me, was a place where I could let people know about what I had found, and where they could share their discoveries in turn.
I set out to do that with a little newsletter called The Gopher Broker.
I soon realized, however, that the kind of people who wanted to know about neat new web sites were people who had an almost visceral dislike of paper.
By then, of course, we were all using Netscape, and they all wanted me to put this on a web page of my own.
As one who knew virtually nothing about computers, I was nervous about this, but a web site was created for me, with a program that wrote the mark-up language automatically, so I plunged in.
Later, as that site proved to be insecure, my page was moved to a Mac server.
I had to re-tag every single file, which was painful.
But by the time I got finished, I knew basic html cold.
Getting Started There are two basic issues in creating an index like this, it seems to me.
The first is what you select–what are your criteria for choosing, or not choosing, a site?
And how do you organize what you want to link in?
What you choose will vary entirely in accordance with your institution, its mission, and its clientele.
Since this page was going to represent my library, at St. Ambrose University, it clearly had to meet the mission and standards of a Catholic liberal arts institution.
Furthermore, I was clear that this was going to be curriculum-driven.
Our campus network was rickety and unstable, and I didn’t want to link in enormous, byte-wasting, time-wasting game and entertainment files.
Aside from which, the students were perfectly capable of finding the fun stuff themselves.
What was far more difficult for them, and for our faculty, was to find the high quality, academic level research material.
Selecting Sites I was looking for authoritative information, which meant that I leaned heavily on files created by academics and government agencies.
I also looked for sites sponsored by professional organizations and research institutes.
Entirely aside from the question of authority, these organizations and agencies offered some commitment to maintaining the file–I had already loved and lost too many disappearing web sites.
Some of the tools I used for locating the files were the magazines–Internet World, NetGuide, Syllabus, Wired, and others.
I also used the guides to web sites by discipline in College and Research Libraries News.
I paid some attention to the recommendations by Magellan and Point.
The Herriott-Watts Newsletter, which is linked on my What’s New on the Net page, is geared specifically to colleges and universities, and was a prime source.
Chronicle of Higher Education has also gotten into the habit of supplying internet sites directed at higher education.
But as I surfed, I paid a lot of attention to what pages were frequently linked in by similar pages–the more you were linked, I figured, the better you were considered to be.
Naturally, since there are a lot of disciplines I know nothing about, I relied on my faculty to help me select the material for “Important Sites by Major.” I got into the habit of e-mailing them interesting-looking sites, and asking them to evaluate those sites for me.
More to the point, though, I examined each of the files at length.
The kinds of questions I asked were: How authoritative is the person who contructed the file?
What kinds of data are presented?
How valid is the material presented?
How frequently is the file updated?
Are the links carefully selected and useful?
Do they work?
Does the file provide bibliographies?
Does it answer reference questions, like who?
what?
where?
when?
how many?
Will these sites help our students do research?
get through college?
say healthy?
get into grad school?
look for work?
Will these sites be in keeping with the mission of a Catholic university?
Organizing the Files I already had a rough idea, from all my surfing, of the kinds of sites available, and the things I set out to look for, and link to my page, were: Full text books, documents, journals, poetry, articles, laws, court cases–because these were valuable supplements to our library collection.
No library is rich enough to own everything.
Reference sources of all kinds–statistics, atlases, gazeteers, dictionaries, biographical sources, etc.
My reference desk is my pride and joy, something that I use all the time to answer people’s questions, including my own.
I tell people that my reference desk is me in the act of making myself obsolete.
Important beginning sites for every academic major we offered Picture sources.
One of the first things that struck me about the web was what a wonderful source of pictures for all purposes this was–medical images, chemical molecules, art of all kinds, travel pictures, diagrams, you name it.
Since many of our faculty and students were new to the net, I wanted to put basic internet training information on there, and also link in good, comprehensive subject indexes to the net.
I saw the net as a wonderful place to look for work, and created the jobhunting file.
Later, this became the more general student-aid-and-comfort file, when I discovered that there was an enormous amount of financial aid and health info, as well as material on graduate schools and the various grad school tests.
I wanted the Hot Paper Topics file because, as you know, every semester, all students meet together and select the 3 or 4 topics that they will ALL write papers on that semester.
(At least, that’s the only way I can account for this extraordinary coincidence.)
There is no way that any library can ever have enough books about gun control, capital punishment, etc., so I wanted to link in good quality, full-text, neutral information on all these topics.
Disability information, because we have a special education program, a physical therapy program, an occupational therapy program, and an outreach program for disabled students.
(At that time, our library was in a building that was totally inaccessible to the handicapped, and I wanted desperately to offer SOME sort of library service to them.)
News, I thought, was a kind of obvious, though boring, thing to link in.
Later, of course, as the news sites became more interactive, and linked current articles to previous articles, they became in many ways better news sources than the “dead-tree-editions.”.
Faculty and Administration Resources was a given–there was so much research data available that college administrators could use in their planning, and so much in the way of online instructional materials that faculty could use to improve, or change the entire nature of, their teaching.
Other things got added over time.
I saw that students tended to click immediately on Netscape’s own “search” button.
Since they knew next to nothing about the principles of searching, they tended to get lost and frustrated going through thousands of sites on their topic.
Clearly they needed to have other search engines available to them, but just as importantly, guidance in how to search, and how to evaluate the sites they found.
So I created my “Find” page, with search engines linked on the left, and advice on using search engines and evaluating sites linked in on the right.
As a hopeless “good government” romantic, I added the “Voter Information” file on my Reference Desk in 1996.
I have become progressively more unhappy with the mainstream media’s coverage of the election.
These journalists concentrated only on the two parties, and ignored all fledgling third parties.
They refused to let us hear what the candidates were saying, and what their legislative records or political accomplishments were.
Only a few newspapers told us what was in the party platforms.
Since all of this information was available, full text, on the net, I linked it in, along with things like the “Register To Vote Online” file, and “Mr.
Smith E-Mails Washington.” The “What’s New on the Net” file was simply the file of announcement services I routinely checked–What’s New on Yahoo, Gleason Sackman’s site, the Berkeley Public Library What’s New page, etc.
Possibly nobody else but me ever clicks on this, but that’s o.k.
I’m who it’s there for.
The “Sites for Librarians” came along later, because there was just such good information I had to share with my colleagues, even though, strictly speaking, they were not who Where the Wild Things was for.
(This is also where I hid the truly fun stuff, where students wouldn’t dream of looking for it–the poor dears think we’re boring, little do they know.)
I added in Dilbert, and the Center for the Easily Amused, and, in an act of shameless self-promotion, my weekly column on the London Mall Magazine, My Word’s Worth).
The “Neat New Stuff I Found This Week” site came about because I had begun contributing web sites every week to the River Bend Library System’s newsletter, Current Comment, and I figured that if I was doing that anyway, I might as well post it on the web where other people could see it.
I was also resolved that I would have an outstanding page of Catholic resources, and other Christian documents, in keeping with our mission; this was filed under Important Sites by Major.
In addition, I provided detailed, comprehensive subfiles on ethics, bioethics, and human rights.
Learning on the Job When I first started writing html, I knew so little about it that I didn’t put in titles and headers.
When Carole Leita, from the Berkeley Public Library, mentioned this to me, I had to ask her why you needed titles and headers.
That’s when I first heard about making it easy for webcrawlers to find you.
Well, since the object of this enterprise is sharing what you know, I put in the headers and titles, and, lo and behold, people started finding my pages and e-mailing me.
The interactivity of the web is wonderful.
What it means is that all kinds of people who know more than I do have made extremely useful suggestions on new links to add, new tricks to use to make my pages look better.
I urge librarians who are starting a webpage to think carefully about the headers and titles they use to maximize the chance that people will find, use, and contribute to, their pages.
Other people kept offering me advice on the appearance of the page.
My colleague, Nanette Miller, who was simultaneously creating our library’s home page, showed me how to do internal links within lengthy files–much needed, since some of the pages were getting totally out of hand.
One of our history professors, Dr. Jon Stauff, showed me how to do tables, which contribute to the tidiness of a page (and also make the page look the same on every computer, regardless of the differing monitor resolutions).
One distinct flaw with my page is the fact that it is not transparent–it is most useful when you already have some idea what files are linked in to it.
What it desperately needs is an internal search engine, which I have no idea how to create.
I think that when the file moves to our own library server at some point, I may get someone to write a cgi scipt for searching my entire set of pages.
Further Thoughts The internet and libraries are made for each other.
After all, both institutions are about putting information out there for everyone to share.
There’s no question in my mind that the internet is going to totally change the way libraries do business.
For one thing, why create handouts just for your own patrons, when you can put them on your homepage for everyone to use?
That’s why I began the BookBytes page–I had created all these annotated reading lists of “Books Too Good To Put Down” for a class of reluctant readers, so I just retyped them on my own page.
Not only did I make a useful resource widely available–I have gotten the most fascinating e-mail from booklovers because of it.
Because so many people e-mailed me, complaining that they wanted to read the books I had recommended, and they were out-of-print, so how were they supposed to find them, I added another page on strategies for finding out-of-print books.
In short, whatever your page started out to be, it will change because of your users’ comments and needs.
Another consideration one should keep in mind is web traffic.
Keep track of your statistics.
(Where the Wild Things Are is averaging about 7000 hits a month right now, and the traffic has been increasing steadily.)
The amount of traffic will affect what server you use, the number of ports, and other hardware decisions that I don’t know enough to even speculate about.
The statistics are also a useful gauge of your performance, something to be reported annually to your administration or board of directors.
Another way of monitoring the usefulness of your site, incidentally, is going onto AltaVista or HotBot to find out who has linked your site to their page.
I was excited to find out some of the places I’ve been linked to–the Smithsonian, Chicago Public Library, Library of Congress, a number of training pages on how to use the internet, among others–and see some of the nice comments that have been made about it.
Oh, one other reason to start a web page.
You’ll meet the neatest people.
I know a whole lot of great librarians I have never met and wouldn’t recognize if I saw them on the street.
But they have found my web pages, or I have found theirs.
I clicked on their mailto addresses and told them how much I admired their work, or they clicked on my mailto Marylaine Block and told me what they liked on mine and how to make it better.
It’s a great way to make friends and influence people.
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ELVIRA Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ELVIRA Buzz data software framework database infrastructure identifier copyright video multimedia z39.50 ocr ejournal licence mpeg-2 research Citation BibTex RIS Tessa Bruce from the ResIDe eLib project describes the recent high profile electronic libraries conference hosted by De Montfort University.
Hurrah!
Users enter the Metaverse.......in their anoraks?
The third Electronic Library and Visual Information Research (ELVIRA) conference opened on 30th April.
The conference was truly international with delegates and speakers from Japan, Australia and throughout Europe.
The conference was as usual very well organised and in extremely comfortable surroundings.
ELVIRA is held in Milton Keynes and as De Montfort University is one of the leading UK electronic library research Universities (they have just established the Institute of Electronic Library Research) the venue is wholly appropriate.
I have attended all three ELVIRA conferences and looking back, I think there have been changes both in terms of the papers given and the knowledge of the delegates.
I was conscious that in the first year there were a few "experts" giving papers and attending as delegates.
The rest of us were left feeling inspired but conscious that much reading was required to catch up.
I have not attempted to report back on all the papers.
The abstracts are now available in electronic format at URL: http://ford.mk.dmu.ac.uk/elvira/fullprog.html.
In the first year the concept of electronic library research and theory seemed very new and without cohesion.
Two years on there is a greater wealth of knowledge amongst the delegates, many of whom are running their own research or development programme into electronic library provision.
This growth in the understanding of electronic library research ensured a lively and interesting conference overall and a greater sense of electronic library theory.
I feel that the "sea change" in the UK is in part due to the JISC funded Electronic Libraries Programme which has managed to get participation from almost all HEIs in some way and to European programmes such as Telematics.
Interestingly it also matches the theory posed by Hans Geleijnse that people (staff and users of the library) take about three years to fully absorb new technologies and electronic services.
The eLib movement was well represented at the conference with papers from MIDRIB, IMPEL2 and the Open Journals project, a poster session from SCOPE and representations from ERCOMS, ARIADNE and ResIDe.
We also had a very interesting poster session from the DECOMATE project which is funded under the EU Telematics programme.
Amongst the delegates there were a number of project managers including myself representing the ResIDe electronic reserve project.
I was also struck by the speed with which electronic library research is being incorporated into library service provision.
Last year at ELVIRA we had papers on the use of Z39.50 and WWW.
Practical applications of this are still not common but are used for real in a number of places and the use of the Z39.50 protocol takes a high profile in the eLib projects.
Academic Press were talking about providing journals in electronic format and investigating licencing issues, but this has been overtaken by the HEFCE site licence agreement.
Similarly the use of electronic reserves has been developed as a theme by the Electronic Libraries programme and is starting to be used in UK libraries to provide access to exam papers or other high demand materials.
General impressions of ELVIRA There has been a healthy and encouraging shift in emphasis away from pure technology to real benefits for the user.
This was represented within strategic, theoretical and practical papers.
Hans Geleijnse stressed the importance of bringing the user with you towards your vision of the electronic library.
Tilburg University in the Netherlands has introduced innovative facilities based on provision of electronic information and as a result has made huge steps towards the electronic library.
Tilburg has been working on this since 1984 and as a result has much experience in the staff and user perspectives on IT innovations.
Hans drew upon his twelve years experience to talk about strategic success factors for the electronic library.
He highlighted issues which pervaded the entire conference: the need to have a vision the need to have support from executive/management close co-operation between library and computer centre well developed computing infrastructure backed by a firm institutional policy people and staff are critical to the success of IT innovations/developments.
Joan Day (University of Northumbria at Newcastle) argued that this approach constitutes a culture shift and that there is a growing conception of the "culture of the users".
She picked up the theme of close co-operation between library and computer centre.
There has been much talk in the library press recently about convergence between computing centres and libraries.
The discussion has centred on the pros and cons of the two "departments" or services becoming a single entity with merged management structures.
Joan's excellent paper discussed the changing relationships between computer centres and libraries and she pointed out that convergence doesn't have to be a structural or organisational "merger".
It can simply mean a much closer working relationship in order for the needs of the university to be achieved.
Joan alerted us to work carried out by Ratcliffe and Hartley which stressed that there is nothing wrong with staying apart and the of information as a linking mechanism is tenous.
Any strategic changes towards convergence have to backed up by cultural change.
In summary: operational convergence is inevitable communication about values is needed joint staff development and training could be considered need to effect an attitude change training to support change identify key change agents often computer officers or people who are hybrids to help or facilitate the others get up to speed.
At some point during the conference the culture of anoraks and cardigans was mooted as relating to computer centre personnel and library staff (apply where appropriate!).
This had, I think, come out of comments made by HEI staff during interviews with Joan and the IMPEL2 team.
This caused the ELVIRA delegates to eye each other up nervously for wool marks and useful internal hoods.
These strategic thoughts (not I hasten to add, the thoughts on "ready-to-wear" fashion adopted by certain professions) on users and effecting cultural change were reflected in practical papers such as that given by Jane Williams (Bristol University) on the MIDRIB medical images project.
MIDRIB plans to enable users to enter their own data to describe images.
Similarly the BORGES project "empowers" the user to manage their own information needs by developing information filtering tools which could potentially be used without intermediaries.
This system is in place and being piloted by the library with Usenet newsgroups.
Other papers which followed the theme included a theoretical paper given by Jessie Hey of the Multimedia Research Group at University of Southampton.
Although the paper compared the advantages of closed and open approaches to provision of information in an electronic library environment, we heard about the Open Journal Framework project which will enable users to annotate and create their own links within documents to gain a personal view of materials.
Jessie talked about the use of Hyper-G and Microcosm which highlight the differences between open and closed systems.
Using Microcosm, the group has developed a distributed link service in order to allow users to create their own links to documents.
The Open Journals project uses Microcosm-based technology within World Wide Web to integrate electronic journals with other e-journals, on-line databases and teaching resources.
Thus, for example, it is possible to create a link from a journal to an electronic dictionary.
The links are not embedded into the document the environment is highly configurable and the user decides how the links work.
These links are created locally but can be made available to others.
I think the concensus was that an open environment was desirable but that there is a tension between the open environment and the need to deal with copyright and access issues which could be readily managed within a closed environment.
However the idea of being able to offer services which are literally tailored to individuals even if in a large organisation is very appealing.
The theme of empowering users to manage their own information needs is reflected in other current research and development work.
Our own eLib project (ResIDe) for example recognises the importance of empowering the user to enter their own materials.
I felt that the Lancaster Ariadne project brought a new and welcome perspective to the difficulty in encouraging users to learn and make use of electronic sources which may have implications for the way in which we teach information skills in a flexible or distance learning environment.
The paper presented at ELVIRA highlighted the collaborative aspects of searching and browsing sources.
Michael Twidale argued that introducing support for collaboration into information retrieval systems would help users to learn and use existing systems more effectively.
The overriding issue which hampers the progress of so many projects and electronic library development is copyright.
This was referred to in many papers.
Mel Collier (of De Montfort University) posited a national licencing scheme during one of the poster sessions.
This is an alternative to the need for individual libraries to deal with publishers and each develop local payment facilities, which would seem eminently sensible.
At the moment, many projects are trying to develop local copyright management systems which provide payment facilities for the end-user certainly for higher education institutions, the administration entailed would mean makes this an undesirable option.
We had a rather understated talk and demonstration of the digital library system at the Mandela Library of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
For non-techie types the network infrastructure was phenomenal if you want the techie information, Nara has a 1Gbps network backbone for normal network traffic ( ordinary Ethernet networks are 10Mbps) with 800Mbps for multimedia traffic.
What are the implications of this?
Essentially the library is able to offer digital video over the university network.
The library wanted a practical digital library service which used established technology e.g OCR, IP, WWW and NFS.
The library has developed a video ondemand system based on MPEG-2 video dataformat.
To date the system has 50 x 2 hour video programmes which can be viewed by up to 20 clients simultaneously!
Viewing and printing is only accessible by registered users.
We had a demonstration of the video transmission at various network bandwidths which at least proved that digital video was a real possibility even at lower bandwidths.
Nigel Ford has attended each ELVIRA conference and always provides an entertaining paper.
He presented research which looked at gender differences in Internet perceptions and use.
The results from a recent survey seemed to indicate differences in the way women and men perceive and use the Internet.
As you might imagine, we had a lively discussion at the end of this paper.
So why "Users enter the metaverse"?
I think we are starting to see the sort of space the user and the library will inhabit in the electronic world or metaverse.
It is very encouraging to hear research papers which attempt to provide the user with collaborative rather than isolating electronic environments, as well as an identification of a user culture.
To illustrate, I thought I would finish off this report with a passage from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash which is where the use of "metaverse" (a computer generated universe) first originated (note this is basically an extension of William Gibson's "Cyberspace" concept).
Hiro is one of the main characters in the book.
"Hiro is approaching the Street.
It is the Broadway, the Champs-Elysees of the Metaverse.
It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturised and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles.
It does not really exist.
But right now millions of people are walking up and down it.
He is not seeing real people of course.
This is all part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer.
The people are pieces of software called avatars.
They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse" I wonder how many "cardys" and parka anoraks were in evidence..... Stephenson, N (1992) Snow Crash.
Penguin Books Ltd, London.
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DESIRE: Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DESIRE: Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education Buzz data framework html usability infrastructure copyright cataloguing multimedia cache authentication research standards Citation BibTex RIS Klaas Wierenga, the director of DESIRE, describes this pan-European project in which the academic network services of the UK have a large stake.
Desire is a large, panEuropean co-operative development project to promote the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the European research community.
The project has attracted substantial funding from the European Union's Fourth Framework Programme.
The project is co-ordinated by SURFnet bv, the academic network provider in the Netherlands and has a total of 23 partners in 8 countries.
Other major contractors are the University of Bristol, Lund University Library, Netlab (Sweden), UNINETT/AS (Norway), Origin bv (the Netherlands), the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Queen's University of Belfast and the Joint Research Centre of the European Union (Italy).
The aim of Desire is to solve the problems which currently hamper the use of the World Wide Web as a means of giving researchers access to research data.
This is done by improving the technical infrastructure, by enhancing the users knowledge through training and by creating well-maintained collections of relevant research data.
In establishing this service, Desire builds on existing projects like SOSIG, ROADS and Netskills in the UK, The Nordic Web Index project in Sweden and SURF-ACE in the Netherlands.
The reason for co-operation on a European level is to make the developed services more general and to gain knowledge and raise mutual awareness.
History In the ISUS work group of TERENA, devoted to Information Systems and User Support, there were a lot of thoughts on the future of the World Wide Web as a means for researchers to disseminate research results.
On a conference in December '94, people involved in ISUS decided on writing project proposals for the Telematics Applications Programme.
Erik Huizer of SURFnet, now managing director of the SURFnet ExpertiseCentrum, wrote project proposals for an e-mail, a conferencing and an Information Services project.
The Information Services project plan later resulted in the Desire project proposal, nominated by the EC as the best proposal in the Research for Telematics area.
Negotiations on the contract with the European Commission proved to be extremely difficult.
The start of the project was because of these problems delayed by half a year, thus serious threatening the stateof-the-art properties of some initial anticipated deliverables.
The official start of the project was January 1, 1996 The Issues The World Wide Web has grown dramatically over the last few years.
However, the amount of data available is enormous.
The problems have grown equally.
It has become increasingly difficult to locate relevant resources.
It is not uncommon to get over 10,000 hits when searching for a single word in search-engines like AltaVista, Lycos and Webcrawler.
Even general subject based catalogues like Yahoo are becoming less useful because of the enormous amount of data.
Another problem with these tools is the fact that they are US-oriented thus inducing a lot of expensive transatlantic traffic whereas the bandwidth of transatlantic connections is scarce.
As opposed to the time before the 'Web revolution' it has become extremely easy to put information on the Internet.
The ease of doing so has meant that everybody, indeed, does put information on the web.
However, the quality of the information in terms of availability, relevance, uniformity and timeliness is on average very low, and in fact unacceptable for serious research activities.
A last problem is the lack of tools to provide access to information on a restricted basis, whether because of commercial interests or because of matters of confidentiality.
The Works The goals of Desire are stated as to deliver the following: A sustainable approach to making searching, finding, browsing, accessing and retrieving multimedia resources as easy as possible.To make it as easy as possible to find resources on the Web, Desire takes a dual approach.
To cater for users trying to locate arbitrary information in the European information space, Desire proposes a European Web Index (EWI).
The EWI builds on the Nordic Web Index, a project carried out by Lund University Library.
The EWI will enable researchers and others in Europe to discover and locate information resources from all over Europe in a coherent way.
Other users need to locate information in a narrower set of identified categories.
For this purpose Desire will provide the foundation for this kinds of services by developing subject-based information gateways (SBIGs) through which mediated, quality controlled and well-catalogued data sources may be accessed.
An example of an existing service like this is the SOcial Sciences Information Gateway (SOSIG) in Bristol.
Tools for the creation, maintenance, quality, cost-recovery and description of information resources.For the creation and maintenance of information resources Groningen University in the Netherlands extends a modular set of tools called Webmanager developed at the Royal Dutch Library of Sciences.
This integrated set of tools allows groups of users to collaborate.
The tools specifically focuses on link checking and the integrity of the information base.
Description of the information resources plays an important role in the indexing and cataloguing which takes place in the EWI and SBIGs.
On one hand, mechanisms to incorporate standard ways of describing information resources will be developed, on the other hand attention will be paid to the feasibility of automatically classifying resources.
Security mechanisms to control access to information resources for reasons of confidentiality or charging.The increasing adoption of networked information services raises many issues of access control and confidentiality, for example: An information system that provides feedback (such as answering a questionnaire or providing a registration service for a conference or course) may need to validate the identity of the user to prevent false or duplicate entries.
An information system may contain a mixture of public information and private information with access permitted only to appropriate groups of users.
An information provider may provide a public service, but only wishes to permit access to subscribers who pay part of the cost of the service.
An information provider may wish to provide access to information via both public and private networks whilst wishing to keep those networks separated for security reasons.
The security part of Desire is devoted to the investigation of the usability of firewalls to separate public and private networks and to the usability of charging and authentication mechanisms on an individual basis.
Authentication for access to information resources will be based on tables and identity controlling mechanisms like chipcards.
Quality checking mechanisms to permit the quality of information and information services to be monitored and reported.To make sure that information sources are always available, a group of partners (with as main contractor the Joint Research Centre of the European Union) will develop enhancements to existing Management Information Bases (MIBs).
Goal is to make it possible to use generic network management protocols like SNMP and SNMPv2 to monitor and manage information servers.
Performance features to reduce the international bandwidth requirements of access to multimedia information across the European continent.The impact on the use of network bandwidth of the simplicity with which networked information can be explored and retrieved through the use of the World Wide Web has been enormous over the past few years.
One way of reducing the use of bandwidth is to keep copies of recently or frequently requested information close to the requester of this information.
This process is called webcaching.
Special attention will be paid to find an efficient and effective way to implement hierarchical caches and co-operating caches.
The creation of the European Web Index is anticipated to further reduce the use of, mainly intercontinental, bandwidth.
The Results In general, taking on a project the size of Desire means taking risks.
It is anticipated that some parts of the project will fail to deliver useful results, while others will not deliver the desired results.
Large parts of the projects will hopefully end in useful contributions to the European research community.
Several of the pilot services which will be established, are planned to continue as production services.
Component technologies (caching, indexing methods) have clear exploitation possibilities by providers of information services and network operators, although the legal problems of providing secure information services, particularly across national boundaries, will remain.
The participating service providers in Desire (SURFnet, UNINETT, Origin) will exploit the technical infrastructure to deliver an information service infrastructure to their customers.
The ongoing monitoring and review and the provision of full documentation and training packages means that the benefits of Desire will be clearly and careful recorded and that the project is ready for transition to the exploitation phase.
Tangible results so far are the deliverables presented in three of the workpackages: The caching workpackage delivered 'Caching Requirements Survey/ Specification for a Prototype'.
The information tools workpackage delivered 'Overview of HTML Authoring Tools' and 'Specification for Information Provider Tools'.
The indexing and cataloguing workpackage delivered 'Specification for Indexing Approach'.
Further deliverables will be presented on the Desire deliverables page, http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/pr ojects/desire/deliver/deliver.html.
Conclusion The co-operation in a project of the scale of Desire remains a hot issue.
It is hard to keep coherence between the workpackages.
The evaluation and training workpackages and the project management will need to keep a close eye on the evolvement of the project.
When this can be achieved the total of the project can have a great impact on the use of the World Wide Web as a means of communication between researchers and others in Europe.
More information on the Desire project can be found on the Desire webpages, http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire , or by e-mailing the author, Klaas.Wierenga@sec.nl.
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Minotaur Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur Buzz software video research Citation BibTex RIS Librarian at Kirriemuir Library, Angus, wonders if public libraries will ever go to the ball.
We had a telephone call from a reader recently.
“I’ve got a blackbird feeding a cuckoo in a nest in my garden is it legal?” she asked.
Public librarians perhaps encounter this sort of inquiry with greater frequency than academic librarians, but we all grow adept at the mental gymnastics required to guide the searcher to the information which will put their mind at ease.
Similarly, when it comes to Internet provision there is little point in setting up a few machines and letting the public loose on them.
Intermediaries will be required who know their way around sources of information, and who can shape half-formed inquiries into something coherent.
Some may call these wired-up intermediaries ‘librarians’, but I prefer the term ‘bipedal search-engines’.
I suppose as intermediary transmitters of information, we are only a small evolutionary twist away from becoming Teletubbies.
Uh-oh.
But as yet only some five to ten per cent of public libraries are connected to the Internet, and my branch is one of the 95 per cent.
Remember school trips to the seaside?
A couple of show-offs would run full-tilt into the North Sea and splash about noisily, and you would shout out, “What’s the water like?” and they’d reply, “Brilliant!
Come on!”, so you’d run down and plunge in yourself, and it would be absolutely PERISHING.
But what did you do?
You’d turn around and shout to the others on the shore, “Yes!
It’s great, hurry up!” until eventually every one was chittering in the water, clutching their nipples and swallowing jellyfish.
The public library experience with the Internet seems to me to be still at the stage where a few exhibitionists are plunging about like the nutters who break the ice on the Serpentine on Ne’erday, while the rest of us are wondering whether to take off our mufflers.
But what a good time they look as if they’re having!
Perhaps, and sooner than I imagine, I’ll be cavorting with the rest of them, but first they’ll need to smear my naked body with a liberal coating of rancid chicken-fat.
Where’s it taking us anyway?
Here’s an illustration of customer behaviour.
A mother and her eleven-year-old daughter are examining our rack of videos.
The daughter brandishes an 18-cert sex-and-violence box.
“Can I get this one, can I, can I?” “Ask the man.” The man, vexed that his career should have come to this, says, “That can only go out on an adult ticket.” The mother produces her ticket, I issue her the video, she gives it to the daughter and says, “Happy now?” Thick as stovies in a bottle.
We all know that some parents don’t give a toss, and we all know that there is plenty of sleazy material on the Net.
In July’s Which?
magazine, a reader wrote “Looking for GCSE exam boards I put in ‘examination bodies’ and got nudes.” Parental control software is available, sure, but operating blocking software may deny adult users access to research material.
The USA hangs itself as usual with the First Amendment invoking Freedom of Speech and claiming that censorship is unconstitutional.
Over here we have an unwritten constitution so bugger knows what you can’t say.
So as well as being the intermediary for some users, we’ll have to be class monitors for others.
Assuming the hardware works.
The latest managerial jargon talks of taking a ‘helicopter view’ of developments (no doubt if you have a wonky global strategy you take a Mir space-station view).
Taking a helicopter view, there are some developments which make me willing to pull on my bathing-drawers.
One which cheers me up is the prospect of closer links with other bipedal search-engines as a result of the activity of the likes of Project Earl, which is working to bring public libraries into the Internet community.
And with some clout at last, since society’s developments will be heavily dependent on electronically available information.
Undeniably, in the words of Chris Batt (Public Library Journal vol.11 no.6), Cinderella service though libraries may have been, “We will go to the Ball; in fact the Ball could be ours.” Am I dancing?
Are you asking?
Author Details John MacRitchie Librarian Kirriemuir Library, Reform Street, Kirriemuir, Angus DD8 4BS Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: Commercial Partnerships in the Public Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: Commercial Partnerships in the Public Library Buzz software Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes looks at the increase of net access in public libraries.
When walking into Bath Central Library readers would find it impossible not to notice Cybercity.
Cybercity, as the prefix 'cyber' suggests, is an Internet project.
Situated just beyond the issue and return desk Cybercity' consists of a screened off area which contains five PCs.
Each of these PCs offers access to the Internet via a broad bandwidth leased line.
The centre is fully staffed and has instantly available technical support.
It is usually extremely busy with members of the public (at certain times of the day) queuing up to use the computers.
Users of the centre range from children and their parents, to Internet enthusiasts to OAPs.
The centre offers access to the full range of Internet services including the WWW, local information e-mail.
In fact, the centre has become popular with tourists who want to check their e-mail back home.
Since its installation in March 1996 it has been extremely successful and Jane Carey, Bath's Librarian considers it an extremely positive addition to the library.
Other public librarians when reading about Cybercity may immediately wonder how Bath can afford to provide such a service.
Chris Batt, Librarian of Croydon Library Service, has calculated that a well used leased line Internet connection alone would cost the average library £11,500 per annum without considering staff, technical support and equipment costs.
For most public libraries this is simply beyond their means as they struggle with annual budget cuts.
They do just do not have the available funding to set up such a centre as their resources are already over stretched.
The only way that most libraries could manage such a centre would be with additional funding from an outside source.
Bath, however, received no additional funding and sadly, like most libraries in the country, operates on an already over stretched budget.
The library is able to provide Internet access only because Cybercity costs the library nothing to install, nothing to equip and nothing to manage.
The only cost the library has to met is in terms of the floor space the Cybercity uses.
Cybercity is in fact not a library service at all but a cybercafe (without the coffee!)
which is run for profit by a local company called Global Internet.
Cybercity, like all cybercafes, offers charged access to the Internet.
How it differs from other cybercafes is that instead of being situated in a shop/cafe it is found in the public library.
The partnership between Bath library and Cybercity came about when the library was approached by Global Internet.
Global Internet felt that the public library was excellent site from which to offer Internet access 'to the lowest common denominator'.
In return for space in the library the centre allows the library to be associated and seemingly provided a service that it could never afford to provide on its own.
The attractions of a public library site for a commercial company like Global Internet are fairly obvious.
Libraries are used by a large number of people, usually have a very central position, are open long hours and are traditionally associated with high quality, positive services.
The company does not have to pay rent for its site and has reduced overheads because it is inside the library.
Global Internet is not alone in identifying the benefits of working with a public library in this way.
Across the country other companies are working with libraries in a similar manner.
The most well known company working in partnership with public libraries is Input/Output.
Since opening their first centre in Marylebone Library in November 1994 the company has expanded to having ten centres in public libraries across the country with three more currently being planned.
Input/Output differs from Cybercity by setting up centres which not only offer public access to the Internet but also to software packages such as word-processing, spreadsheets, desktop publishing and so on.
They also run a number of computer training courses.
Both their success and Global Internet's gives a strong indication that such partnerships between public libraries and these type of commercial companies looks likely to increase.
They also show that there is a real demand from the public for these types of services.
There is also obviously demand from public libraries themselves to host these centres.
Jane Little, Westminster Libraries Manager explains Westminster's reasons for going into the partnership with Input/Output: We already had PCs for hire in our reference library at Marylebone.
They were making a fair income but also a lot of work for the staff: people needed help setting the margins, etc.
Our reference library staff weren't geared up to this and it was taking them away from their "real" work.
David and James (who later became the directors of Input/Output) saw the PCs (they live locally) and came to us with a proposal: they would set up and run a centre, and we would share the income.
We had a spare room and it sounded like us to be a good proposition: a service we knew our customers wanted; professionally-run; no risk to us; and it would generate income.
A similar successful story can be found at Richmond on Thames.
Sheila Harden, Area Librarian for the London Borough of Richmond, calls her authority's experience of hosting a commercial computer centre a 'win/win situation'.
Reader surveys had indicated to the library service that there was a demand for computer services to be provided but: We had no opportunity within our current budget restraints to set-up, maintain and staff a computer centre and were unlikely to have in the foreseeable future.
By working with a private company enables public libraries to provide their users with access to service which the public want but the library itself could never afford to provide.
All the centres seem to be very successful and well used by the public.
Libraries involved have also noticed unexpected advantages in the partnerships with increases in the number of visitors to the library and a greater level of kudos with Council Members and with their readers.
These partnerships really do seem to be, as Sheila Harden calls says, a 'win/win situation'.
But is it that straightforward?
Are the benefits really that good for public libraries?
Is it a positive partnership?there are some librarians who think not.
Angela McCormick is the manager of The South Ayrshire Cyber Project, an IT initiative funded by South Ayrshire Council.
The project is committed to maximising equal access to IT resources for members of the public.
The authority aims to open a number of Cyber Centres in libraries across the county which will provide public access to the Internet, software packages and CD-ROMs.
The first centre opened in June 1996 in Carnegie Library in Ayr and others are planned.
Angela McCormick has worked in the field of public access to computer technology for several years and is very aware of a desperation in people to become computer literate.
People want to become computer literate in order to support their children's computer skills, join in conversations and generally feel involved in the information age.
Computer literacy, she feels, is therefore simply too important an issue to be left to commercial companies.
The main reason for computer centres in public libraries should be to help develop a computer literate population rather than make profits.
She says Computer literacy and the information available over the Internet are just as important as literacy and information was when Andrew Carnegie funded libraries one hundred years ago.
Why charge so heavily for it?
Whereas Carnegie's libraries encouraged literacy for free, these partnerships ensure that computer literacy will be achieved at commercial rates.
Rates which will too high for many members of society.
Some librarians are uneasy about these partnerships and feel that they are incompatible with the public library ethos.
John Murphy, Group Manager of the Central Information Service of Sheffield Library and Information Service is another librarian who is concerned about the appropriateness of these commercial partnerships for public libraries.
He says: Whilst this appears on the surface to be a good way forward in that it allows libraries to achieve levels of investment in equipment, training and expertise which may not have otherwise been possible, the main problem is that such companies will always be driven by the commercial imperative to make a profit.
This is not compatible with ensuring public access to information.
As John Murphy implies commercial companies will not be interested in the providing services to members of the public who cannot afford to pay the very members of society who could benefit the most from access to information resources and IT.
Commercial companies will not open computer centres in libraries which will not be commercially viable.
Small and rural libraries will not be approached to host one of these computer centres.
It may not be such a clear 'win/win' situation after all.
Both John Murphy and Angela McCormick are also concerned about whether libraries are making artificial distinctions between book based services and digital resources.
By agreeing to work in such a partnership the library is making a distinction between book based resources, which they provide for free, and digital resources, which the company will charge for.
As both books and computers are now mediums in which people need to be literate in order to take their place fully in society they wonder at the appropriateness of charging for computer access.
As more and more print material becomes available solely in electronic form libraries will no longer be providing free access some resources simply because the medium through which it is accessed has changed.
Libraries would not charge people access to books and print based medium so why should they charge access to electronic media when the end result for the user is the same?
A debate on this issue recently took place in Denmark.
Danish libraries were forced to come to a decision as a profession over whether the Internet was a new service or simply a new medium which was used to offer traditional information services.
This distinction had to be because if the Internet was only a new medium it could not be charged for as information services are provided for free.
If the Internet was classified as a new service then libraries would be free to charge for it as it was an additional service to the core free services.
After considerable debate it was decided that the Internet was a new medium for information services and therefore must be provided as a free service.
This decision lends credence to John Murphy's and Angela McCormick's argument about the inappropriateness of working in partnership with companies which charge commercial rates for, in particular, Internet access.
For John Murphy there are serious consequences for the whole public library service if libraries continue to enter into these partnerships: I believe the public library has to re-assert its role of providing free access.
We lost the plot with audio-visual material several years ago, there is a grave danger we will do this again with electronic information resources.
As these come to dominate informational publishing where will that leave the public library in its role as an information provider to all citizens?
Working with private computers therefore may be convenient in the short term but be in effect could be helping to weaken the future role of public libraries in society.
With lending figures seemingly on a terminal decline public libraries could become sidelined unless they provide and run electronic information services themselves.
But the question that needs to be answered if libraries do not work with private companies are how are libraries to afford to run and set up these services when they are suffering from such a budget crisis?
The question of whether to work with a private partner of not to provide Internet access and computer access presents a complex problem to the public library profession.
Libraries who are involved in such partnerships are extremely pleased with the way the partnership works and have had positive feedback from the public.
But the arguments against such partnerships are very worrying and do question the future implications for the library if such partnerships develop.
It appears to be an insoluble difference of opinions and beliefs.
One development which may work to help resolve some of these issues will be the success or failure of the current LA/LIC Millennium Bid.
If the Bid is successful and every library has free Internet access having a commercial company in the library charging for access to the Internet becomes a nonsense.
One model suggested by Global Internet in a post successful-bid public library service is newly connected libraries turning to companies like themselves who already have the expertise and experience of running public Internet services and contracting them in to run their Internet services.
The commercial companies would charge the library to run their Internet service and these costs would not be passed on to the user.
The centres would then be run to the public library dictated ethos rather than simply to commercial aims and would operate at a professional and effective level.
But even in this model of service the questions about whether public libraries should provide computers for hire for purposes other than Internet access need to be addressed.
There is also the danger that the Millennium Bid will not succeed.
So either way the issue of whether to work with a private company or not will still be one that most library authorities will have to address at some point.
It will be up to each authority to decide whether it is in fact a positive partnership.
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IMPEL2: What Is eLib Doing to Us All?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IMPEL2: What Is eLib Doing to Us All?
Buzz data database copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Catherine Edwards describes the IMPEL2 project, from the Supporting Studies area of the programme.
As its subtitle, 'Monitoring Organisational and Cultural Change' suggests, IMPEL2 is unlike most eLib projects as it is not developing a product or a service for the electronic library.
As a Supporting Study of eLib it investigates the human implications of the electronic environment in UK Higher Education, the changing culture of organisations with the new demands of education and technology at the centre.
The IMPEL2 team are based at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle.
The project is an extension of the earlier IMPEL Project (IMpact on People of Electronic Libraries), for convenience now referred to as IMPEL1.
IMPEL1 was funded by HEFCE for two years from December 1993, the very date of publication of the Follett Report.
Its aim was to identify key factors in the management of the networked campus through particular focus on qualified librarians.
Through 6 case studies in the library and information services (LIS) of Aston, Cardiff, Central Lancashire, Cranfield, Stirling and Ulster universities, that project yielded rich qualitative data relating to issues at the institutional, strategic, management and personal levels.
It was particularly successful in exploring convergence of LIS and computing services, the role of subject/information specialists and also management structures.
IMPEL2 develops the IMPEL1 approach through 4 distinct but related strands.
The 4 mini-projects combine form one co-ordinated whole: Project A continues and extends IMPEL1 in following up the impacts of the electronic library on LIS and related support staff.
The original 6 sites will be re-visited plus a major research library and a Higher Education College library.
The resulting longitudinal study of the extent and rate of change in the intervening two year period promises to be extremely interesting.
Part of Project A will focus attention on non-library-qualified and paraprofessional staff, complementing the study of qualified staff.
Project B, where possible, will run concurrently with and in the same sites as Project A.
Project B involves academic staff and student (undergraduate and postgraduate) users of electronic sources and services.
The intention is to 'follow the interview trail' from LIS staff with particular subject responsibilities through to teachers of those subjects and ultimately to their students.
Project C investigates the implications for LIS of resource based learning policies, in 6 institutions which featured in an earlier study by the Oxford Centre for Staff Development.
This project extends the scope of the whole study in concentrating on educational aspects.
Project D's role is to monitor the impacts of EduLib, an eLib project run jointly from the universities of Hull and Dundee, Abertay.
EduLib has developed a programme of educational development for LIS staff, a response to their increased instructional role.
Four contrasting sites within each of 3 consortia will be studied.
A common methodology semi-structured interviews and focus groups, questionnaires, scrutiny of documentation, along with a common indexing structure for computerised textual analysis will enable cross-project analysis and comparability of findings.
The extensive nature of IMPEL2 is reflected in the number of staff involved: part-time input comes from the co-directors, Professor Joan Day (Head of Department of Information & Library Management) (DILM) and Graham Walton (Faculty Librarian, Health, Social Work & Education), and from supervisors Margaret Watson (Principal Lecturer, DILM) and Sandra Parker, Senior Lecturer (DILM).
Full-time input comes from the co-ordinator, Catherine Edwards, the administrator, Linda Kiakides and from 3 project officers, Craig Bartle, Sally Curry and Maureen Jackson.
The team has strength in the varied backgrounds of its members, ranging from teaching, to library to social science and research methodology.
Work began in November 1995.
The first few months have been taken up with staff appointments, updating the literature review, producing a ProCite database of around 1,000 items, knowledge-building, development of Project and Evaluation plans and pilot work.
The first case studies begin in earnest in July 1996, continuing for around 9 months and perhaps longer in the case of Project D which has a longer timescale.
As data will be gathered in around 28 sites, IMPEL2 has the opportunity to gain deep insight into the changing culture in our Higher Education institutions and their library and information services.
Although the electronic library sits at the centre of the investigation, the different emphases of the 4 linked projects promise to give a full picture of the wider educational environment and within that, the role of libraries and library staff.
The stated outcomes of IMPEL2 are as follows: A macro level approach to monitoring change associated with the electronic library in a turbulent educational environment.
Monitoring of the general effects of staff training and development programmes under eLib.
Taken together, the projects will enable more informed decision-making and a clearer picture of the role which academic library services can and should play in the context of national teaching and learning initiatives, and in support of research.
Regional seminars designed to disseminate general findings across all 4 projects, and through them, support the management of change during and beyond eLib.
A knowledge base for teachers of information and library science as they equip students for work in a changing environment.
Specifically, a checklist of issues which must be addressed will be built up, without, of course, any suggestion that there is 'one best way' to manage the electronic library.
The programme of seminars and workshops during late 1997 and early 1998 is likely to involve other eLib projects and promises to encourage greater awareness of the issues, and, doubtless, lively discussion.
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Web Access for the Disabled HOTmetal PRO Helps to Bring Access to the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Access for the Disabled HOTmetal PRO Helps to Bring Access to the Web Buzz software accessibility windows Citation BibTex RIS Cathy Murtha gives some details of an upgrade to a popular Web production tool that will make Web page creation easier for many disabled people.
Many web designers express a desire to provide access to the blind and visually impaired, but don’t really know where to begin.
Although the tools are available and there are a number of web sites on the internet where information on the specifics of accessible design can be found, there seems to be something lacking.
That something could well be the support of mainstream corporations in providing a means to help web designers create accessible web sites.
Happily, one corporation has decided to forge a new path in the world of web design by incorporating accessibility into its new product.
SoftQuad International [1], makers of the popular HOTmetal PRO web authoring program, took a decisive step last month by extending a welcoming hand to the disabled community with an exciting announcement.
At the W3C conference in Santa Clara, California, SoftQuad, the developers of HOTmetal PRO, announced their intention to release an AdaptAbility Toolkit with the next release of their Internet Publisher.
HOTmetal Pro already offers web designers the tools necessary to create pages which can be displayed on all of the mainstream browsers but, with the addition of the AdaptAbility Toolkit features, HOTmetal will not only provide a means to create accessible web pages through the use of an “auto prompting mechanism” which will alert web designers to features which could be added to make a page more accessible, but it will also allow the disabled access to the program through the various toolkit features: The Visual Dynamic Keyboard option (VDK) will allow those who cannot use a conventional mouse or keyboard to access the program and create web pages.
The Screen Enlarger function will enlarge the screen in a logical fashion, thus providing access to the program by the visually impaired.
Since the Screen Enlarger function will be able to access the fonts in windows, the image displayed on the screen will be crisper and clearer than current screen enlarger software currently offers.
An integrated screen reader will allow the blind access to the program as well.
Softquad is developing the program so that the screen reader will be able to be configured to the preferences of the individual.
Customized user profiles will enable multiple users to use one program.
SoftQuad understands that a growing number of netizens suffer from disabilities.
This significant step in programming offers hope to the blind, visually impaired, and disabled community.
With the help of HOTmetal PRO, we are one step closer to the goal of 100% access on the World Wide Web!
References Softquad International Web pages, http://www.softquad.com/ Author Details Cathy Murtha is interested in Web Access for the disabled, and has a set of Web pages on these issues.
Email: mist@pumpkin.cdepot.net Web Pages: http://www2.cdepot.net/~mist/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Glass of Fashion and the Mould of Form Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Glass of Fashion and the Mould of Form Buzz data software framework database accessibility browser udc cataloguing graphics authentication url standards Citation BibTex RIS Annette Lafford reports on the new image for NISS's WWW site.
The unerring ability of sites to change their appearance completely between one visit and the next must surely be a feature of life on the Web that all but the most novice surfers have experienced.
NISS's electronic residency over the years provides ample qualification for a 'new look' every now and then in terms of Web 'fashion', but it is hoped that the changes in 'form' that were introduced recently alongside a new visual appearance have helped to make the NISS site easier to navigate, and also created scope for future expansion in the range and value of NISS services.
Whilst not striving to cover all aspects of the recent redesign, this article aims to supply some background detail about NISS's view of the process and the way that the new site should now look and work from your side of the glass ... NISS has been in the business of providing electronic information services for, and from within, the UK education community for ten years and is supported in this work by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
We have attempted to use and adapt new and emerging information technology to the best possible advantage throughout this period.
Thus our initial text-only JANET services grew into Internet services and later into WWW services with graphics and colour.
Technology and the information needs of our users continue to change however and the new look for our main Web service, implemented in mid-September of this year, is the latest stage in this ongoing development.
In common with any redesign process a number of often competing factors determined the final shape and form of the product that product being our collection of Web pages and information files.
In the period since the last redesign our Web service had continued to expand and provided access to a growing number of information resources from a diverse range of sources, and had also developed or refined the use of various aspects of WWW technology.
Use of the Web is expanding generally and individuals and groups within education, as well as bodies outside the sector, continue to make contact with NISS with requests and queries about how we might help to make their information more widely available.
This has resulted in a situation where NISS now works alongside bodies such as the Higher Education Funding Councils, the Office of the Data Protection Registrar, Hobsons Publishing plc, and the UK Government's Department for Education and Employment in the distribution of their information to the education community.
Our success in increasing the number of 'partners' who work with us to provide information which is of value to that community, also helps ensure that we are able to provide access to a diversity of information which meets users' information needs.
The redesign process brought with it a chance to evaluate the current shape of the NISS Information Gateway (as the main service was then known) and see how it might need to be changed in order to better respond to the changing characteristics and demands of the technology, our information providers and users, and our strategic policies and aims.
An important variable in information services such as ours is that of the user's focus, and the means by which we can help users easily identify the collections or resources they wish to access.
We already offered access to particular groupings of related information resources from our service's home page but we realised that the focus on key or popular areas could be made more prominent visually, and so the new NISS home page [1] (illustrated here) features a layout which adds emphasis to the five major areas: Education, News, Reference, Noticeboard and StudentZone.
NISS home page These areas together do not represent all the information resources available via NISS.
However, the first four cover the collections of resources which had been identified in our strategic plans and are popular with users, and which had gradually evolved into their current format during the period that NISS has had a Web presence.
The fifth, StudentZone, is a new service which is targeted at a particular section of the education community the student body itself and as such also required a separate identity and profile.
Although individual information resources available via each of these areas vary greatly in terms of their content and presentation, they have been identified as being related by topic or interest and brought together under the five main headings.
The selection of items can change of course as new resources come along, or older ones become out of date, and to accommodate this need for continual updating each area has its own Editor that is a member of the NISS Information Team with responsibility for the maintenance of the information content within their area.
The greater clarity of focus on the five areas which is reflected in the layout of the new NISS home page should lead to a greater awareness amongst users of the types of information available via each one, and a corresponding appreciation of the different facets of NISS's online services.
Each Editor operates within a policy and developmental framework with greater control than before over the way that their pages look and grow, and the areas have already adopted particular styles and a visual appearance which will no doubt continue to be refined over the coming months.
These separate identities should help users to gain a feeling of familiarity with the sets of pages and a greater recognition of 'where they are' when visiting NISS services users might have noticed for example that we have associated particular colours with each of the five areas, and these colours are carried through the pages via graphical or textual features.
There are of course some shared features too, such as the buttons for "Comments", or "Expert Search", and a small "NISS" logo which serves as a link back to the NISS home page from most lower level NISS pages.
In addition to changes in the visual appearance of the area pages there has also been some restructuring of the data within the areas, although this has been kept to the minimum and very few URLs were altered as a result of the redesign process.
The Editor of the Noticeboard area [2] (see illustration) for example, notes that: "The main aim was to give users improved ease of access to the ever broadening scope of information available in this area.
To this end a side navigation bar was added to the Noticeboard main page so that users can move directly to the index page for each sub-section.
Links to individual areas within a sub-section were also added to the main page to allow users to move directly to specific pages without having to work through several levels, and they also serve to indicate the type of information available in each sub-section.
At lower levels the side navigation bar shifts to a horizontal alignment at the bottom of pages to allow quick access to different areas without having to go back to the top index page of the Noticeboard area."
NISS Noticeboard area The Education area [3] posed a different set of problems and the Editor here reports that: "Before redesigning the area, we undertook a consumer survey, which showed clearly that although a lot of users saw NISS Education (see illustration) as a route to other institutions, there was also significant usage of all the other areas of information provided.
People liked the clear, low graphic, layout but there was a general feeling that the existing 'starting point' pages were too long.
There was also a desire here to broaden the information we held for the benefit of the other (FE and Schools) sectors, and we needed a structure which would allow us to do this."
NISS Education area "Some of the information available via NISS is only relevant to one sector of the education community, whilst other items have relevance to two or more sectors.
Users may come looking for information from their own sector, or from one of the others.
Some users are not aware that there is a difference.
So we had to provide access for a broad spectrum of need, in a way which made the choices obvious, within a confined space.
We were also aware of the wide range of both browser software and hardware in use within the community, and aimed to design the pages so that they would be as accessible to as many people as possible."
The new Reference area pages [4] echo some of these design themes as well, for the Editor comments: "The redesign has also introduced a much shorter main page here than before (see illustration), although the area has in fact expanded to include the former Datahosts collection (now called 'External data services'), a link to ATHENS Subscription Services with additional information about NISS's ATHENS authentication service available here too and a new section for Travel information links.
The link to the library catalogue pages has been given more prominence on the area main page, and further consolidation of the various OPACs listing pages is also under consideration.
The area as a whole is set to grow as further reference material becomes available."
NISS Reference area The News area [5] (see illustration) continues to expand too, and the redesign process provided the opportunity for the separation of the area's various sections into their own pages, thereby making maintenance more straightforward, and navigation to the collections of links is clearer now than before.
The range of newspapers and journals available via this area has increased greatly, and a large amount of world-wide material of this sort is now available.
NISS News area Since StudentZone [6] (see illustration) is a completely new service we were able to start the design process in this case free of any constraints imposed by existing pages or resource collections.
The StudentZone Editor explains that: "The service was built with the aid of university students from a number of institutions and NISS also collaborated with organisations such as the NUS.
Further partnerships of this nature are planned to ensure the continued growth of the site.
It was uppermost in the developer's minds to ensure that the site could be easily navigated by web beginners and experts alike.
It was for this reason that the use of frames was considered and finally approved, with the StudentZone home page displaying the nine subject sections in a short colour-coded index.
All this with the welcoming page, gives students an overall picture of what StudentZone provides before each user diverges into the different areas for the information they require.
> StudentZone service main page "The site now has a good overall structure with over 3,000 links, but as always things can be improved.
The future development of StudentZone is still being finalised, but it has become obvious that the current screen formatting will not be flexible enough to display sufficient information on all occasions (this is already the case with pages such as Club Football links and News about Institutions).
Therefore we plan to change these information documents to full size Web pages, and provide appropriate links to them via new pages which will themselves be kept frame-sized to reduce the number of scroll bars appearing on the screen.
"Other proposed enhancements include an academic section where students can talk about their studies, share information or read about the latest developments in HE.
This facility would complement NISS's Education and Reference services and hopefully help increase students' knowledge of and perhaps their 'voice' within the Higher Education sector.
The most important source for future development is of course students' own ideas and suggestions, and these will be used where possible.
We have already rearranged the presentation of student home pages following comments from users, and hope that more students will get involved, making the site much more their own 'domain'."
One other important area of NISS which has also been given a new look but not yet discussed here is the "Directory of Networked Resources" [7].
The Directory pages can be accessed via a button near the top of the new NISS home page and they allow exploration of all the 'classified' resources available via NISS.
You can browse for resources via an alphabetical subject listing, by UDC shelfmark order, or via hierarchic UDC listings.
As well as offering access to the Directory of Networked Resources, the cluster of buttons at the top right of the NISS home page also provide access to the NISS search facility.
Search was further developed prior to the release of the new look NISS pages, and you can now choose either a simple search where you key a search term into an input box that is generally available on the Web page adjacent to the 'Search' button or alternatively you can follow the 'Expert Search' button which takes you to a separate search form which lets you build more complex or refined searches.
Expert Search gives the option, for example, of applying your search terms to text on NISS Web pages (the NISS Services option), to NISS Resource Descriptions (i.e.
records in the database of classified resources which forms the core of the service), or to records in the NISS NetFirst Service (available only to education sites participating in the CHEST agreement for NetFirst).
The search facility is a valuable way of finding resources and information which is available via NISS, and is now more extensive and helpful than it was prior to the redesign of our pages.
Editors have ensured that access to the search facility is also available via their pages within the Education, News, Noticeboard and Reference areas.
This NISS-wide search facility will become available from the StudentZone pages at a later date where search currently operates only on the StudentZone pages themselves.
Throughout the design process we endeavoured to uphold a number of guiding principles which we believe are important features of NISS's online services.
These include the fact that although NISS will clearly not be able to provide all the information all its users might ever want, we aim to provide at the very least an invaluable starting point for users' online exploration if we don't have the precise information you need, then we hope that we can point you towards a site that might answer your questions.
Another feature is that we aim to provide quality information which is of value to the education community and our resource descriptions (accessible via the 'standard' [Info] links) help users decide whether a particular resource may be what they are looking for before they need to connect to it (a time-saver when network traffic is heavy).
We also try to ensure that information is presented in the most appropriate and useful way for example, a series of documents from the Higher Education Funding Council for England can be both browsed and searched.
In addition, our work with partner information providers helps sustain both the quality and diversity of information available via NISS services and hence also ultimately benefits users.
Identifying and responding to the ever-changing needs of our users remains a fundamental activity for NISS, and any redesign of our services needs to take these requirements into consideration.
The higher profile given to the five Editorial areas in the new design has we believe, addressed some current issues concerning identity and ease of use, and will hopefully bring future benefits too in the context of a more focused relationship between users of a particular area and its Editor.
All the Editors value feedback from users and the simplest means of establishing such contact is via the Comments button that is included on most NISS pages and which directs the email message to the individual who edits those pages.
NISS calls on other groups within the community for advice and feedback too one case in point being the design process itself, during which members of the NISS User Group commented on our emerging ideas about the new look.
Our new service, StudentZone, was also developed as a result of collaboration and consultation with interested groups within the education community.
The Editor areas will grow, adapt and change as time goes on, as will all of NISS's services.
Each change that is presented to the user is, we hope, an evolutionary step towards a better service more appropriately harmonised with user requirements and the available technology.
NISS's wide and varied user-base, in terms of information needs, computing expertise, and accessibility of computing equipment, means that we constantly have to try to balance a number of features and factors when creating and maintaining our services.
Much as we may wish to, we can never please all of our users all of the time each person works to their own agenda when looking for information but we always aim to meet the requirements of the majority.
We hope that Web fashion and form have successfully combined in the recent redesign of the NISS site to produce services which will continue to be useful and accessible to staff, students and administrators throughout education.
References [1] NISS home page http://www.niss.ac.uk/ [2] NISS Noticeboard area http://www.niss.ac.uk/noticeboard/ [3] NISS Education area http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/ [4] NISS Reference area http://www.niss.ac.uk/reference/ [5] NISS News area http://www.niss.ac.uk/news/ [6] StudentZone http://www.studentzone.org.uk/ [7] Directory of Networked Resources http://www.niss.ac.uk/subject/ Author details Annette Lafford Information Officer NISS Email Annette.Lafford@niss.ac.uk and the NISS Editorial team (Simon Call, Catherine Humphrey, Oren Stone, Liz Struzyna) Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Project Patron Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Project Patron Buzz data software framework html digitisation browser copyright video graphics opac multimedia gif adobe wav photoshop url research opendocument Citation BibTex RIS Elizabeth Lyon and Jon Maslin describe this JISC eLib Programme project (Performing Arts Teaching Resources Online).
Project PATRON (Performing Arts Teaching Resources ONline) has been designed to deliver digital audio, video, music scores and dance notation across a high speed network to the desktop.
The JISC eLib Programme project is based in the Library at the University of Surrey.
Many of the resource materials are in the short loan section and one of the aims is to investigate ways of improving access to reserve materials, such as music CDs and dance videos, for staff and students.
User requirements were investigated via a series of initial focus groups which informed the design of the PATRON interface.
Digitisation of Audio, Video, Scores and Notation Material for digitisation was identified from selected courses in Music and Dance and appropriate rights (copyright, moral rights, neighbouring rights which include performing and recording rights) clearance was obtained.
Rights issues are covered in more detail in an earlier paper.
Unlike most eLib projects, PATRON has digitised three specific types of media: images, audio and video.
The images, namely music scores and dance notation, have created particularly demanding conversion problems: Originals vary in quality and size Music scores may be reprints, so the resolution and contrast can be poor.
Dance notation is often hand-drawn and can be faint.
Both types can have fine lines and detail which do not display well on a computer monitor.
The application demands that images display quickly, so files should be small but include sufficient detail to enlarge without a disturbing loss of quality The digitisation procedures have used a degree of compression which is a balance between achieving acceptable quality and limited file size.
Scores and notation were scanned and saved in .gif format with adjustments via Adobe Photoshop for quality.
Watermarks were added to sample images using plug-ins from companies such as IBM and SureSign.
The first stage for audio conversion used Optical Media International software called ‘Disc-to-Disk’ and produced .wav files from the CD.
This was followed by compression to MPEG using the Fraunhofer-IIS Layer-3 encoder Video source material on VHS cassettes was digitised using MPEG1, which can be played on a PC with software.
Conversion has been undertaken at the Computer Graphics Unit at Manchester University using Optibase Forge software, and at Audio Visual Services at the University of Surrey using Avid software.
More details of the digitisation procedures are given in a recent article.
It was essential to guarantee delivery of data across the network in order to maintain the quality of the audio and video and a modular approach with an open architecture that adopted international standards was preferred.
IBM Digital Library software was selected for searching/retrieval and rights management, and an off-the-shelf IBM media server and ATM network were implemented.
Data conversion and interface development were completed locally.
The PATRON Interface The PATRON user interface works within a web browser.
The design allows the application to be implemented flexibly, with a simply managed layout consisting of a large frame which is primarily designed to cope with vertical pages of notation, and smaller frames for video and audio playing, searching and other activities.
Any of these frames can be switched to the larger frame.
One of the frames includes a history of the current session with links to previous frames.
The PATRON interface is shown in Figure 1.
The controls for playing video and audio are essentially the same as those on a video or CD player and will also be familiar to users.
Users can view and listen, move backwards and forwards, change speed, and make selections which can be played repeatedly.
In the case of music scores and dance notation it is necessary to cope with a variety of sizes, so the user can zoom in and out, pan around the image and move to the next or previous page by a mouse click or a single key.
Users who are listening to audio or watching video and simultaneously following the corresponding score or notation can therefore turn the page rapidly with a single mouse click.
To provide direct access to a specific movement, act or page, each work is accompanied by a table of contents which has a hierarchy of up to three levels of hyperlinks which are equivalent to the structural sections of the work.
The PATRON Profile The creation of individual PRO-Files by the user is a unique feature of PATRON: a profile is an annotated list of dynamic links to selected points or sections within a digital resource e.g.
a video segment of a dance associated with corresponding pages of dance notation.
The use of a profile can best be illustrated with a typical scenario: A dance student studying on the notation course sits in the Library at a workstation and opens the PATRON application.
She retrieves the Giselle video together with the electronic notation.
She creates a profile and works through the dance noting the interpretation of the principal dancing Giselle, which involves frequent use of the zoom feature.
She makes links to appropriate points in the video and notation and types in some explanatory annotations.
Her analysis is recorded in the profile together with the live links to the video/notation and saved on the server/disk for future use in a tutorial or seminar.
The PATRON profile enables the user to link different media or to mark related elements in the same work and these links can be annotated.
The profile provides the student with an electronic framework for constructing a subjective analysis of a music or dance performance which may contribute to the course work submitted for assessment.
A desired link is achieved by the user dragging the cursor on screen at the precise time in a recording or page of a score, to the profile which then develops through the addition of free-text notes and the creation of further annotated links (Figure 2).
The profile remains an open document with links to URLs, it conforms to HTML standards and can be subsequently read in any web browser.
The PATRON interface and PRO-Files exploit some of the technical features available in the latest browsers, specifically Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, and a combination of ActiveX controls has been used in the players together with Dynamic HTML and JavaScripts.
User Feedback Current work on the project includes evaluation of the prototype by staff and student users in the School of Performing Arts.
A summary of the main feedback points is shown below: More bibliographic details on performers were requested.
The link to PATRON from the Library TalisWeb Opac was useful.
Audio and video players were simple to use and provided adequate controls.
Repeat playing of a section of audio/video was particularly useful: ‘just what we need for analysis’.
Table of Contents was helpful but could be enhanced to include access to a specific page and to provide easy access to repeated motifs/sections of music.
Speed control was especially useful when viewing dance videos for movement analysis The ability to go quickly and accurately to a specific point in a video was welcomed: ‘great’, and ‘and there is no wear on the tape or equipment’.
Quality of audio was sufficient: ‘almost indistinguishable from CD’; quality of video could be improved: ‘ a bit fuzzy’, ‘did I see a jerk there?’, ‘well it is better than some of our videos’.
Quality of scores and notation was generally acceptable: ‘no problem’, ‘you really need better originals’.
Page turning of scores/notation was positively received.
The large 21 inch monitor was preferred for viewing scores: ‘much better with a big screen’.
The history frame was found to be useful.
PRO-Files required some explanation: some users felt they would simply listen and view the materials without using a profile: ‘interesting, I need to think about this’.
Other students immediately started to use the facility for course assignments: ‘I could use for my next project, can I come in again tomorrow?’ One student took editing further than we had anticipated and added his own formatting to the profile in an HTML editor.
Overall impressions were very positive: ‘superb’, ‘elegant’, ‘When can I have it on my desk?’ In the future, it is hoped to expand the resource base and to embed the use of PATRON more widely into the curriculum in music and dance.
More information about the PATRON project can be found on the website at http://www.lib.surrey.ac.uk/eLib/Patron/Patron.htm References [1] Lyon, Elizabeth and Maslin, J.
(1997).
Audio and video on-demand for the performing arts: Project PATRON.
International Journal of Electronic Library Research, Vol 1 (2), 119-131.
[2] Lyon, Elizabeth and Maslin, J.
(1998).
PATRON.
BUFVC Viewfinder Newsletter, No.
32, February.
(In Press).
Author details * Dr Elizabeth Lyon is Head of Research & Multimedia Development, George Edwards Library ** Jon Maslin is PATRON Project Manager, Project PATRON, University of Surrey Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Reaching the OPAC: Java Telnet Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Reaching the OPAC: Java Telnet Buzz software java javascript html zip browser cataloguing opac windows z39.50 licence telnet url research Citation BibTex RIS Bill Drew writes about accessing his library's OPAC within a web page using Java Telnet.
He looks at the need, implementation, problems, and opportunities.
Many remote users of our library catalog [1] have difficulty accessing it via telnet or dial-up for several reasons.
It is available via telnet through a URL on our homepage [2].
Some problems using the OPAC include: Wrong terminal emulation Terminal emulation does not include special keys Lack of telnet software No technical support from their service providers Possible solutions include providing all remote users with software, provide technical support for multiple packages, or ignore the problem.
None of these solutions is feasible because of lack of staff and money.
We couldn't ignore the problem because we are a service oriented organization.
After looking around for several months, I stumbled across Java Telnet.
Java Telnet is a Java based applet.
It provides full terminal emulation for a telnet session within a web page.
It is authored by Matthias L. Jugel and Marcus Meißner.
It is available over the Internet for downloading at the Java Telnet homepage [3].
The Java Telnet package is freely available under the GNU Library General Public License [4], popularly know as "copyleft".
Java Telnet is available in compressed format and must be "unzipped".
The package contains three major parts: telnet connection services.
Terminal emulation.
modules for configuration and local control over "look and feel".
Using a Java based package offers many advantages among which include no need for a separate telnet program, cross-platform (at least potentially), can be used by different brands of browsers, and requires no set up by the user.
It does require a Java capable browser and a microcomputer with the power to run that browser.
The applet was developed by two computer people in Germany.
Matthias L. Jugel (a graduate of University of London, Birkbeck College) is employed by the German National Research Centre for Information Technology.
Marcus Meißner is a Computer Science student at the University of Erlangen.
He's almost done with his diploma (MSc).
Mr. Jugel "started to program the first version of the applet as a very simple thing to learn Java.
When it became clear that it may be useful I asked Marcus to help me."
Both authors are involved in text-based virtual realities (called MUDs) and the applet would be a useful client to access the MUDS.
Installation and Setup Installation and set up is simple compared to many software packages.
The first step is to uncompress the software.
The compressed package is available in a UNIX tgz file or as a Windows NT/95 zip file.
Special care must be taken in using the uncompression program in that the directory structure must be maintained.
The software must also be housed on the same machine that the telnet session will run on.
This is do to security restrictions built into Java.
It is possible to "redirect" a session to another telnet via a proxy server.
Details on how to do that are in the package.
The files use long file names so if your system should be one that allows long file names.
Otherwise you will have to rename files and any of the html references will not work in the documentation and example files.
After installing all of the files, make sure that they are readable by other users.
The next step involves editing the index.test.html document.
The file is fully documented.
Below is sample code from that page: <APPLET CODE="appWrapper.class" WIDTH=600 HEIGHT=480> <PARAM NAME=applet VALUE="telnet"> <!-applet initialization: address and port and emulation --> <PARAM NAME=address VALUE="www.first.gmd.de"> <PARAM NAME=port VALUE="23"> <PARAM NAME=emulation VALUE="vt320"> <!-terminal emulation --> <PARAM NAME=VTscrollbar VALUE="true"> <PARAM NAME=VTresize VALUE="font"> <PARAM NAME=VTfont VALUE="Courier"> <PARAM NAME=VTfontsize VALUE="13"> <PARAM NAME=VTid VALUE="vt220"> <!-modules: #1 is a buttonbar --> <PARAM NAME=module#1 VALUE="ButtonBar"> <PARAM NAME=1#Button VALUE="connect|\$connect()"> <PARAM NAME=2#Button VALUE="disconnect|\$disconnect()"> <PARAM NAME=3#Button VALUE="Detach/Delete Window|\$detach()"> <PARAM NAME=4#Button VALUE="Send:|\@send@\r\n"> <PARAM NAME=5#Input VALUE="send#10|who"> <!-modules: #2 is a scripting module --> <PARAM NAME=module#2 VALUE="Script"> <PARAM NAME=script VALUE="login:|leo"> <!-make sure, non-java-capable browser get a message: --> <B> Your Browser seems to have no <A HREF="http://java.sun.com/">Java </A> support.
Please get a new browser or enable Java to see this applet!
</B> </APPLET> The first part of the applet coding loads a "wrapper" which controls the other parts of the software.
The size of the Java window is controlled here.
That is the only part you should change.
You will find it necessary to change the size of the window depending on how you set parameters in the modules section of the applet.
Applet initialization controls where you telnet to.
You must change <PARAM NAME=address VALUE="www.first.gmd.de"> to reflect your IP address.
It can use alpahbetical or numerical addressing.
It is also possbile to set the port as well.
This section also sets the terminal emulation.
Do not change this.
Terminal emulation controls the appearance of the window and the "look and feel" by setting font and font size, terminal ID, and scrolling within the window.
Play with these to get what you want.
Do not change the terminal ID without reading the documentation.
The next section of coding sets up the button bar.
The various functions are fully explained in the documentation.
Using buttons allows the user to connect or disconnect from a telnet session, send commands, detach the tenet window to a separate window, and so on.
The last module controls scripting.
This is one of the most useful features of this software.
The login can be scripted as well as specific commands.
Check the documentation for details.
After making the necessary changes, save your document and test it using your browser.
Using SUNY Morrisville's Java Telnet Our library OPAC Java Telnet is available for public use [5].
As you can see from the screen shot below, I have taken great pains to design the complete "environment".
Tables have been used to provide control over formatting and to list the key emulation for special keys used by our OPAC.
Our library system uses DRA/MultiLis which makes use of the VT keyboard.
Figure 1: Welcome page of the Java OPAC I made several modifications to the coding.
The window size is reduced by using a smaller font size.
the catalog is actually on another computer from the server.
The login used puts the user into an account that send him/her to our library catalog computer while doing the remote login.
After the catalog appears in the window the user must "activate" the Java window by clicking his/her mouse in it.
The next step is then to use the arrow keys to select "Begin the search" and press the return key.
You will then be at the main menu, as you can see from the screen shot below.
This is where the special keys begin to be used.
I found from trial and error that is very beneficial to have them "listed" next to the window.
Figure 2: Menu options for the Java OPAC The applet has proven to be very easy to use and while still experimental, will continue to be available on our web site.
Conclusions The Java Telnet applet is easy to install and to set up.
It is one of the few useful Java applications I have found.
I have developed a web page listing other useful Java applets and Javascript resources [6].
While it doesn't support TN3270, I believe every library that does not have Z39.50 implemented should make this applet available for users of their OPAC.
Update, July 1997 The JavaTelnet applet has been updated to correct various problems and to improve itsperformance.
The display is now much better.
The JavaTelnet functions without any major problems with Netscape Communicator 4.01 on Windows 95 platform.
I have not yet tried MacOS.
The applet also functions well (actually better) witn Internet Explorer 3.01 and 4.0.
The applet can now be launched from a button.
Got to the URL below for an example: http://snymorac.snymor.edu/pages/library/telnet/newtest.htmlx References SUNY Morrisville College of Agriculture and Technology Library Online Catalog telnet://nopacmor@139.127.2.3:23/ SUNY Morrisville College of Agriculture and Technology Library homepage http://www.morrisville.edu/pages/library/ Java Telnet Homepage http://www.first.gmd.de/persons/leo/j ava/Telnet/ GNU Library General Public License, This license governs the usage and copying of software under this license designed by the Free Software Foundation.
Java Telnet may be copied or used by anyone as long as they comply with this license.
http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/lgpl.html The JAVA Telnet for SUNY Morrisville Library Catalog http://snymorac.snymor.edu/pages/library/telnet/netopac.htmlx Java and Java-script enhanced Library Resources.
This page contains links to Java and Javscript software appropriate for use on a library webpage.
It also contains actual applications.
http://www.snymor.edu/pages/library/java.htmlx Author Details Wilfred Drew (Call me "Bill") Systems Librarian SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology Email: DREWWE@MORRISVILLE.EDU Web page: http://www.snymor.edu/~drewwe/ Address: SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology P.O.
Box 902 Morrisville, NY 13408-0902 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata Corner: Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata Corner: Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research Buzz data software database archives metadata identifier preservation hypertext ascii aggregation provenance research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reports from the Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania May 29-31, 1997.
Archivists and records managers share an interest in the archival management and preservation of what are today known as electronic records.
Recognition of important issues related to the archival management of electronic records dates back to the early 1970s when archivists began to investigate the accessioning of what were then known as machine-readable data files.
It has long been recognised that the archival community and the library community have shared concerns in this area, and this was demonstrated by the recently published report of a US Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group [1].
These shared concerns mean that other information professionals, including librarians, information scientists and computing scientists, will have an potential interest in the archival community’s response to electronic recordkeeping.
The Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research was organised by the Pittsburgh based Archives & Museum Informatics [2] and sponsored by the Centre for Electronic Recordkeeping & Archival Research (CERAR) at the University of Pittsburgh [3].
There were around fifty invited participants at the meeting and, as it was a working meeting, virtually all of them at some time were detailed to be either presenting papers or leading break-out group sessions.
The meeting was held at the Embassy Suites Hotel close to Pittsburgh International Airport but twelve miles from the downtown area.
This isolation was intentional as there would be less potential distraction for participants in the meeting.
Half of the participants came from the United States, the remainder representing Canadian, Australian or European organisations.
The intention of the Working Meeting was to identify areas for future research and implementation.
David Bearman of Archives and Museum Informatics introduced the meeting with a brief contextual paper describing the previous ten years of electronic records research and practice.
In 1987 the archival profession’s interest was largely focused on appraisal techniques and on media longevity issues.
Throughout the next ten years further technological development combined with an added emphasis on functional requirements led to a significant change in focus.
Interest in media longevity and ‘refreshing’ techniques, for example, has developed into a concern with data migration in an environment of software-dependence.
Bearman briefly described the various international meetings and conferences which had taken place over the last ten years and then identified the five general subjects which were to be discussed throughout the rest of the meeting.
What makes a record?
What policies ensure the accountability and integrity of a record?
What business events generate records?
How can the relevant metadata be captured?
How can electronic records be preserved?
The purpose of the meeting was to attempt to identify a few unresolved issues and to suggest desirable research methodologies and sensible research outcomes for them.
Each of the five sessions started with two or more short presentations outlining current research outcomes or experiences with electronic records which were intended to identify relevant open issues.
These were then taken-up by the six break-out groups for discussion and these reported back to the whole meeting at the end of the session.
This report will not attempt to describe the proceedings of the meeting in detail but will pick up on particular themes and hopefully demonstrate some shared concerns between the archives and records management professions, on one hand, and the library and information professions, on the other.
Electronic records In the same way that the coming of the digital library has prompted a certain amount of reassessment of the role of libraries and information workers, the electronic record has prompted some discussion of the way archivists do their work.
Much of the debate has been concerned with defining what exactly electronic records are and how they should be dealt with.
Two North American projects have investigated different aspects of this problem and representatives from both gave short papers at the meeting.
No attempt will be made to outline the projects here as descriptions are available elsewhere [4] [5].
Wendy Duff (University of Toronto) and Richard J. Cox (University of Pittsburgh) represented the University of Pittsburgh Electronic Records Project [6].
Their presentations at the Working Meeting elaborated on the concept of “literary warrant”, which can be defined as the mandate from outside the archives profession from law, professional best-practice and other social sources which requires the creation and maintenance of records.
It is thought that the concept of warrant might be helpful in fostering the understanding of records within an organisation and might, in addition, provide the authority necessary for records professionals to perform their important role within it.
The other project looking at this general area concerned “The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records” and was based at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
The methodological approach of the UBC project was to determine whether the general premises about the nature of records in diplomatics and archival science were relevant and useful in an electronic environment.
Diplomatics has been defined as a body of concepts and methods, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the purpose of “proving the reliability and authenticity of documents” [7] .
At the Working Meeting, Marcia Guercio (Ufficio Centrale Beni Archivistici, Rome) and Luciana Duranti (University of British Columbia) outlined the contribution that they felt archival science and diplomatics could give to a better understanding of electronic records.
The UBC project has adopted the concepts of reliability and authenticity from diplomatics.
Duranti has defined both of these terms as follows [8]: Reliability refers to the authority and trustworthiness of a record as evidence Authenticity proves that the document is what it claims to be Reliability is, therefore, something exclusively linked to record creation while authenticity, according to Duranti and Heather MacNeil, is linked to “the record’s mode, form, and state of transmission, and to the manner of its preservation and custody, and [ensures that it] is protected and guaranteed through the adoption of methods that ensure that the record is not manipulated, altered, or otherwise falsified after its creation …” [9].
This type of terminology might be useful, for example, when discussing the long-term preservation of electronic journals.
For example a future reader of an article in a electronic journal will want to know about the journal’s provenance and whether the article has been peer-reviewed (its reliability) and also whether the article he is reading has not been deliberately or accidentally changed since it was first published (its authenticity).
Systems that records professionals devise to maintain these concepts over time may, therefore, be of interest to information professionals interested in digital preservation.
Authenticity, indeed, is a key component of Peter Graham’s description of “intellectual preservation” [10].
The UBC project has also been concerned with preserving the concept of “archival bond” in electronic records.
Archival bond refers to what Duranti and MacNeil call “the link that every record has with the previous and subsequent one in the conceptual net of relationships among the records produced in the course of the same activity” [11].
It is interesting to speculate whether links in a hypertext database or Web page pose the same type of conceptual problem.
The UBC project elaborated the idea of a “record profile” which would contain “all the elements of intellectual form necessary to identify uniquely a record and place it in relation to other records belonging in the same aggregation” [12].
The record profile is therefore essentially a type of annotation (or metadata) which would be linked to the record for its lifetime.
The identification of relevant metadata and its capture was also a major preoccupation of the Pittsburgh project, and it is this subject that will be dealt with next.
Metadata Some archivists have been for several years advocating a metadata approach to the archival management of electronic records [13] [14].
This has, in part, built on an awareness of the inadequacies of traditional archival description for the description of records in the electronic era [15].
Margaret Hedstrom has commented that the “types of information needed to describe electronic records will differ from, and may exceed, that needed to describe records in paper formats” [16].
The description would have to include sufficient information about the record to enable identification, access, understanding of its provenance, interpretation, authenticity and management over time.
The Pittsburgh project built-up a specification of the attributes of evidentiality, and this provided a foundation for the identification of a specific set of metadata [17].
Building on this, David Bearman’s short paper at the Working Meeting on “Research issues in metadata” raised many important issues.
Just a few will be outlined here: Metadata linkage: how can the relevant metadata can be securely linked to the record content itself over time?
Metadata semantics: Bearman commented that records metadata “must be semantically homogenous” but it was also desirable that it should also be “syntactically heterogeneous”.
Structural metadata and migration: in what way can metadata about the structure of a record ensure “least-loss” migration of evidence over time?
The discussion following Bearman’s paper indicated that there was a need for what one working group described as “generic records metadata standards”, and to instigate further analysis of metadata attributes and semantics.
Interest was shown from some quarters in the Dublin Core Metadata Element set (DC) [18], and it was suggested that research could be carried out into the minimum elements which would need to be added to DC to make it useful in the records context.
It was also recognised that resolution of many of these (and other) problems depended upon intelligent implementation in test environments and this seemed to be the immediate way forward.
Migration and software-dependence issues Bearman in his introduction to the workshop noted that archivists concerns had moved from media longevity ten years ago to an awareness of the need for ongoing data migration from one media or software format to another.
Margaret Hedstrom (University of Michigan) in her paper on “Migration and long-term preservation” pointed out that migration had recently replaced the concept of digital refreshing.
The Task Force on the Archiving of Digital Information, of which Hedstrom was a member, defined migration as “the periodic transfer of digital materials from one hardware/software configuration to another, or from one generation of computer technology to a subsequent generation” [19].
The concept of data migration has evolved as a response to two related problems: software-dependence hardware and software obsolescence Avra Michelson and Jeff Rothenberg have defined software-dependent records as “electronic documents that can be read only by using a particular piece of computer software” [20], and defined in this way all electronic documents are software-dependent, even if some are stored in what are considered at the current time to be relatively simple formats like ASCII.
Unfortunately, all software formats will at some point become obsolete, as will also the hardware platforms for which they are designed.
Migration, in its widest sense, might also mean something more than periodic file conversion, and might include, for example: transfer to a human-readable medium like paper or microfilm; the use of software-independent formats; the creation of surrogates; and possibly the development of systems capable of emulating obsolete software and associated data [21].
These options need further research and it is unlikely that any single approach will be suitable for application to all types of electronic records.
The Working Meeting identified several areas of potential interest for research: Defining acceptable data loss.
Data migration is and will be a complex procedure, and is likely to result in some degree of data loss or degradation.
What level of loss or degradation would be acceptable?
Documentation of the migration process.
Subsequent users of records will need to determine which characteristics of a document were lost in each format conversion, the reasoning behind the migration strategy chosen and the authority responsible for implementing it.
The development of migration agents.
“Self-migrating” records managed by artificial agents might be a long term goal, but any feasible system will have to be designed in collaboration with software engineers.
Cost models.
Some research needs to be done into cost models for the different approaches to migration.
Professional collaboration.
Hedstrom asked whether the requirements for the long-term preservation of electronic records is fundamentally different from the requirements for the preservation of other types of digital information.
If not and this is itself an area for legitimate research what sort of collaborate activity would be appropriate, and with whom?
Conclusions With a working meeting held over three days, a conference report like this cannot attempt to cover even a fraction of all of the topics raised for discussionfor example there has been no mention of involvement in developing international standards or the importance of risk management [22].
The last afternoon provided a forum for defining consensus, and at the risk of distortion, here is a personal interpretation of the main themes of the meeting.
Throughout the three days, the most consistent thread was the need to do something NOW.
This was best articulated by Greg O’Shea (Australian Archives) who pointed out that the solution to the problem presented by electronic records is not technological but strategic.
There appeared to be a strong feeling that research alone was not enough and that an implementation strategy was also required.
Another important point was that the archives and records management communities should not be afraid to learn from mistakes, and should not expect a perfect solution first time.
Increased collaboration between researchers and practitioners might also help to solve problems and facilitate the implementation process.
A need for improved communication and collaboration with other professional groups was also identified.
I t was considered that archivists and records managers could learn and borrow from the other professions who work with electronic records for example, lawyers and auditors and the computer scientists who design applications software .
It was recognised that in the realm of migration and long-term preservation of digital information, archivists had many shared concerns with people involved in the development of digital libraries.
The Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research was a valuable chance for a diverse group of specialists to get together and discuss important issues in a specific context.
One surprise was that there was no significant discussion of electronic records and the World Wide Web during the meeting.
This is a subject that will have to be addressed in the near future.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank David Bearman and Richard J. Cox for their invitation to the Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research.
This visit was supported by grants from the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
References [1] Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, Preserving digital information.
Commissioned by: the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group.
Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1 May 1996, http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/ [2] Archives & Museum Informatics, Pittsburgh, PA, http://www.archimuse.com/ [3] University of Pittsburgh, Centre for Electronic Recordkeeping and Archival Research, http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~cerar/ [4] University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences.
Functional requirements for evidence in recordkeeping.
http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/ [5] University of British Columbia, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies.
The preservation of the integrity of electronic records, http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/duranti/intro.htm [6] Duff, W. Ensuring the preservation of reliable evidence: a research project funded by the NHPRC.
Archivaria, 42, Fall 1996, 28-45, [7] Duranti, L. and MacNeil, H. The protection of the integrity of electronic records: an overview of the UBC-MAS Research Project.
Archivaria, 42, Fall 1995, 46-67, p. 47.
[8] Duranti, L. Reliability and authenticity: the concepts and their implications.
Archivaria, 39, Spring 1995, 5-10, [9] Duranti and MacNeil.
The protection of the integrity of electronic records, Archivaria, 42, Fall 1995, 46-67, p. 56.
[10] Graham, P.G.
Intellectual preservation: electronic preservation of the third kind.
Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, March 1994, http://www-cpa.stanford.edu/cpa/reports/graham/intpres.html [11] Duranti and MacNeil.
The protection of the integrity of electronic records, Archivaria, 42, Fall 1995, 46-67, p. 53.
[12] Duranti and MacNeil.
The protection of the integrity of electronic records, Archivaria, 42, Fall 1995, 46-67, p. 51.
[13] Wallace, D. Metadata and the archival management of electronic records: a review.
Archivaria, 36, Autumn 1993, pp.
87-110.
[14] Wallace, D. Managing the present: metadata as archival description.
Archivaria, 39, Spring 1995, 11-21.
[15] Bearman, D. Documenting documentation.
Archivaria, 34, Summer 1992, 33-49.
[16] Hedstrom, M. Descriptive practices for electronic records: deciding what is essential and imagining what is possible.
Archivaria, 36, Summer 1993, 53-63, p. 55.
[17] Bearman, D. and Sochats, K. Metadata requirements for evidence.
1996, http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/BACartic.html [18] The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set home page, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core [19] Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, Preserving digital information.
Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, May 1996, p. 6.
[20] Michelson, A and Rothenberg, J.
Scholarly communication and information technology: exploring the impact of changes in the research process on archives.
American Archivist, 55, Spring 1992, 236-315, p. 298.
[21] Rothenberg, J.
Ensuring the longevity of digital documents.
Scientific American, 272 (1), January 1995, 24-29.
[22] Bearman, D. Archival data management to achieve organizational accountability for electronic records.
Archives and Manuscripts, 21 (1), May 1993, 14-28.
Author Details Michael Day, Metadata Research Officer, UKOLN Email: M.Day@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 323923 Fax: 01225 826838 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
Intranets Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Intranets Buzz data software html database dissemination apache archives browser copyright opac linux passwords perl licence cd-rom intranet Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight investigates what is meant by the current buzzword intranet and looks at how it may be applied in a library environment.
A suggestion for a low cost entry level intranet solution is also given.
If you open a computer magazine today, the chances are you will be confronted by articles and advertisements discussing how to set up a corporate intranet.
The term intranet seems to have sprung up as if by magic in the last year or so and now many products are “intranet ready” or “intranet enabled”.
But what exactly is an intranet and should libraries be making use of them?
If one is being cynical (and being cynical when it comes to advertising is always a good idea!
), the intranet concept is merely marketing hype.
The intranet is more or less the repackaging of technologies developed for the global Internet for use within an organisation.
The idea is that the tools that are allowing people to effectively communicate across the planet and between different organisations can also be applied to improving communication and information dissemination within a single organisation.
In other words, intranet development takes existing, outward looking Internet technology designed to provide inter-organisational communications and turns it in on itself to service the internal communication needs of a single organisation.
The companies that are developing tools for use on the Internet see the corporate intranet concept as a way to increase the returns on their development investments.
It is increasingly important for them to do this as many organisations have far greater needs to spread information internally than they do to communicate with the outside world.
Where a company might only require three or four web servers for providing information to the public over the Internet, it might be possible for a web server vendor to sell its products to every division or even departmental group with that company in order to spread information internally.
This allows vendors of Internet technology to begin competing with the vendors of special purpose groupware technology (such as Lotus with its Notes product).
One big win for corporate network managers in using intranet technology over groupware technology is that it means that end users will only need one set of tools to access all networked information, whether it be from outside the organisation via the Internet or from internal systems via the local intranet.
If you’re looking after a thousand desktops, only having to license, install and maintain a single web browser rather than a web browser and a set of groupware tools can be a big win.
Similarly only having to deal with web server technology rather than web servers and groupware servers makes life easier at the source as well.
So, is the intranet just hyperbole aimed at the large corporate network managers that can be ignored by library systems staff?
The answer depends on your organisation; its size, structure and geographical disposition will effect how useful an intranet is to you.
In a small library employing only a few people in a single building, intranet technology is likely to make less of an impact than in a large public library system with hundreds of staff distributed over a relatively large number of sites and running a large number of IT based services.
The reason for this is that in a large, spread out organisation, an intranet allows people who might never meet to communicate with each other and provides access to data that might not otherwise be easily available to them.
In the rest of this article, we’ll briefly look at some intranet options that may be of use in a library environment.
We’ll also look at how you can setup an intranet on the cheap using low cost or free hardware and software.
It should also become clear that in many academic libraries, the intranet is already here except that we did know that was what it was called when we were developing it!
Accessing Management Information The library typically provides access to a large number of resources.
These resources include books, journals, CD-ROM databases, online services and even the library OPAC itself.
It is often useful to be able to track how popular and heavily used these resources are, in order to make funding and resource allocation decisions.
Usage information is an example of management information.
Other examples of management information are reports and reviews written by members of staff.
Management information is something that can be relatively easily delivered to librarians desktops using off the shelf products and/or a few home grown programs.
For example, consider the case of access to CD-ROMs.
At Loughborough University, we provide access to a fair number of CD-ROMs over the campus network.
In order to use one of these CD-ROMs, users must supply a user name and password which is validated against the users on the Computing Services central computing resources.
The reason for this was mainly to ensure that we were abiding by the licensing agreements of many CD-ROMs that stipulate that only users from within your own organisation can use them; by validating against the central user list we could provide these CD-ROMs all over campus, even in the public laboratories.
As a side effect of this validation, a log file is built up each day listing the users and the CD-ROMs that they accessed.
For some time this information was just left to accumulate and occasionally the librarians would request that one of the systems staff process the collected logs to provide them with some usage information on the CD-ROMs.
However this was an awkward situation as it meant that the librarians had to request the reports some time in advance and it was yet another time consuming task for the systems staff to perform.
It was decided to investigate how easy it would be to provide access to these logs to the librarians via the web.
At the time a web server had been loaded onto the library OPAC machine in order to prototype the WebOPAC.
If the web could make the OPAC more friendly and feature rich for the end users, it seemed natural that it could also provide an friendly and easy to use interface to the CD-ROM logs.
The solution developed was a relatively simple Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script written in Perl.
Every day, the log file is transfered from the Computing Services central hosts to the library OPAC machine.
The CGI script makes use of the logfiles, in conjunction with a couple of configuration files to map between department and CD-ROM codes and names, to allow the librarians to perform simple usage queries.
They can specify which CD-ROM they are interested in (or all of them), which department (or all departments) and a period of time.
The CGI script takes this input from an HTML form and then uses it to extract the required usage information from the logfiles.
The script only took a morning to develop and is easy to maintain.
It has proved popular with the librarians who can now find out how well used particular CD-ROMs are from their web browser.
It is a good example of how existing data can be repackaged and made more readily available using normal Internet technologies.
The script, though running on the main library web server, is only accessible to a select group of librarians and so is really an intranet application.
Improving Internal Communications As well as providing a means of allowing access to existing data sources for management purposes, the intranet is also supposed to help foster group working.
It can do this in a number of ways.
Firstly, in most academic institutions at least, email has already become a replacement or alternative to internal memoranda.
The ability to easily set up and maintain Internet mailing lists can be applied in the intranet context to support group communication.
Mailing lists can be archived and the archive made available from the intranet’s web server to allow a group memory to be developed.
This permits the experience of a group to outlast the original participants in the group; as older group members are replaced by new ones, the newcomers can “get up to speed” on what the group has achieved by reviewing the archive.
Mailing list archives are also more accurate than traditional meeting minutes and means that groups no longer need to dedicate someone to make notes of their decisions.
The groups themselves are also no longer constrained to actually physically meeting if they do not want to; indeed some people (the author included) find mailing lists much more amenable to supporting the group discussion and decision making processes than face-to-face meetings.
The removal of geographic barriers permits to establishment and effective operation of groups that would otherwise be too costly or infrequently communicating to be viable.
As well as mailing lists and their archives, it is possible to host bulletin board services.
These support group work and can also be used to share ideas and foster interaction amongst a broader group within an organisation.
A number of Internet tools exist that could be reused in the intranet context but probably the most useful is the USENET news system.
Many institutions already have USENET systems running and its little trouble to create new newsgroups for internal distribution only to support group work.
Some of the newer USENET software even supports secure, closed newsgroups with limited membership, making them a viable alternative to mailing lists in some situations.
An Intranet on the Cheap If the concept of an intranet sounds attractive to your library, the next task is to decide how to implement it.
The Internet technology vendors are falling over themselves to offer their solutions for the intranet but most of these have a fairly heft price tag, sometimes even for educational sites.
However it is possible to at least test the water using cheap hardware and free or low cost software.
Because the intranet just reuses Internet technology in a more limited environment it is possible to make use of the plethora of free web servers, scripting languages, USENET news servers and mailing list software that are already widely deployed in the Internet.
Indeed it is likely that you have already got some the software installed at your site if you provide Internet access to your staff or patrons.
Teaming this free software up with a free or low cost operating systems and a cheap PC and hey presto; you’ve got an intranet server!
Now those of you that have read my previous Ariadne articles know what is coming next; my recommendation for the basis of an intranet server is Linux.
Linux is a UNIX operating system clone that runs on PC and workstations and can be downloaded for free over the Internet (or, if you want commercial support, a number of suppliers will sell you a package with a CD-ROM, printed manuals and a variety of telephone or email support deals).
Even on a lowly 486 based PC, Linux can support a web server, a few CGI scripts written in Perl that mine management information out of logfiles and existing databases and a small set of mailing lists.
Put it on a Pentium class PC or a small workstation and you’ve got something that will quite happily support the intranet needs of a reasonably sized library.
These days Linux usually installs on common hardware with little or no fuss (especially if you’re doing it from a vendor’s CD-ROM) and it can be up and running in a couple of hours.
Factor in a day or so to become familiar with the system if you’ve never done UNIX before and another half day to set up all the services and you’re away.
Things such as mailing lists, web servers and archives are set up by editing a few text based configuration files according to the supplied instructions.
Providing management information from existing database is a bit more involved and will usually require a bit of programming (but then what doesn’t in a library systems unit?)
The nice thing about doing the intranet on the cheap in this way is that it lets you test the water without breaking the bank.
It also lets you scale up easily; you could start with an old 386DX40 (yep, Linux is lean and mean enough to run well on old hardware like that) to get the feel for things and to prototype a few scripts and mailing lists and then move up to a more powerful machine if the intranet services prove popular.
This is obviously much better than falling for the marketing hype and buying the latest and greatest commercial OS and intranet tools, plus the hefty machine to run them on, only to find that it didn’t work out too well for your site.
Of course there are downsides to the cheapie Linux approach.
Firstly you have to pick an chose the tools that you’ll need to do the job.
There are some suggestions at the end of this article but new packages are appearing daily.
The big plus point for the commercial intranet packages is that they try to provide a single vendor source for all the tools that you’ll need, and therefore also a single point of contact when something goes wrong.
The commercial packages usually try to provide a unified, friendly front end to the software, whereas Linux tends towards the traditional UNIX text based configuration.
And lastly there can sometimes be resistance within an organisation to the concept of “free” software such as Linux and its associated tools, even if they are of a higher quality than some of the commercial products that are available.
Conclusions This article has hopefully outlined some of what is meant by the term “intranet” and provided a suggestion as to how you can try it out for yourself at bargain basement prices.
As was said at the beginning, the chances are that if you’re providing Internet services for staff or patrons, you’ve already got at least some of the technology in place.
Whether the intranet is something that you need to consider depends very much upon your organisation but it is likely that you can reuse existing Internet technology such as the web to provide at least some internal services.
Information Sources Here’s some useful sources of information on intranet technology and tools that maybe of some interest: Apache Web server (a version of which is included in many Linux distributions), INN USENET news server, The Complete Intranet Resource an intranet reference site Linux on the Web (UK academic mirror), Majordomo mailing list software, Comprehensive Perl Archive Network UK academic mirror (Perl is a popular scripting language for writing CGI scripts) Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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FIDDO: Focused Investigation of Document Delivery Options Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines FIDDO: Focused Investigation of Document Delivery Options Buzz data url research Citation BibTex RIS Anne Morris, project manager, describes a project from the Supporting Studies area of the eLib programme.
The FIDDO Project is studying options, methods and the management of document delivery.
The principal aim is to disseminate reliable and objective data to enable library and information managers to make informed decisions about the feasibility, selection and implementation of electronic and other document delivery services within their own institutions.
A range of issues, challenges and decisions confront the manger of the modern library and information service.
The pressure to use dwindling resources more economically, the growth in numbers and variety of information users, and the demand for a 'customer based culture' all converge to present a formidable burden.
Moreover, what is almost always lacking for effective management is reliable, timely and complete information on which to base judgements.
Within this context and the growing power and availability of information technology, various forms of electronic document provision have been developed, ranging from single article delivery to complete electronic journals.
The technical feasibility of electronic document delivery is no longer in doubt the technology exists to enable a variety of delivery mechanisms not only to libraries but, increasingly, direct to the end user.
However, while technology has forged ahead, economic and human factors considerations have lagged behind.
FIDDO seeks to redress this imbalance.
The project will include a comparative assessment of existing and potential services together with 'traditional modes'; evaluation of their impact on library policies and operations, and the response of end-users.
In addition to desk research, the project will be undertaking 'live' testing of services.
The testing will initially focus on the delivery of engineering documents in four collaborating academic libraries acting as test sites but this will be later extended to cover a range of subjects and sites.
The project began on November 1st 1995.
Research so far has included surveys and an extensive literature review to identify the document delivery services currently available together with past and present research projects in this field.
The information available to-date can be found at the FIDDO General Advice Point which is located at the following URL address: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dils/research/fiddo/fiddo.html In addition to a project description, the General Advice Point currently contains detailed information about commercial document delivery services, projects and services under development, relevant discussion lists and FAQs.
The contents will be expanded, to contain a 'what's new' section, for example, and up-dated throughout the life of the project.
Specific questions, queries or comments relating to the Advice Point should be sent to either Sandra Price (s.p.price@lboro.ac.uk) or Mandy Webster (m.webster@lboro.ac.uk).
A workshop/ seminar for library managers on document delivery, offering practical advice on setting-up and developing services, will also be held in Autumn 1996.
This will be followed by other workshops and the preparation of a set of guidelines for library managers intending to implement electronic document delivery services.
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Wire: Interview with Glen Monks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Interview with Glen Monks Buzz data mobile software java copyright cataloguing cache flash standards Citation BibTex RIS Glen Monks is put under the virtual spotlight to answer a few questions via email.
What do you do in the world of networking/libraries/WWW?
I’m one of these “Networked Systems Officers” type people.
“Technical support,” “System Administrator”, call it what you will, I’m the person that every organization has to fix problems, yell at when the network is down and keep forever occupied with unending lists of minor problems.
To anyone who is in my position will know, it is a self sustaining job, for every attempt to fix anything results in two things breaking.
…and how did you get into this area?
For the last two years I have been studying Maths and Computing at the University of Bath.
This year is my placement, my big opportunity to spread my wings, go to places anew and learn about “real life.” However, I ended up (still at Bath Uni.)
working for UKOLN (-8 What was your reaction to the Web when you encountered it for the first time (and when was this)?
I had been aware of “The Internet” since my sixth form, and quickly became accustomed to electronic mail using my modem over a amateur network called Fidonet.
When I came to university and was let loose on an early version of Mosaic it was just what I had expected a wealth of information about everything and anything.
My main impression was to think that’s it’s all very nice, but for my first few months on the web I didn’t learn a single thing that I particularly wanted to know.
I browsed university home pages and read about courses they offered (little use once I’m stuck on a four year degree) through to dozens of Star Trek fan pages which contained no more information than books I had read, and many were straight from those same books!
However, I spent many, many hours entranced by the flow of information as I “surfed.” Only when I started working for UKOLN did I start using the web on a regular basis with a specific aim to find specific information, and at that point, I realised it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
How significant an impact do you think that mobile code, such as Java applets, will have on the development of the Web as an information resource?
Well, they are all very nice, very flash and so on, but on the whole they just make things worse.
There are a few cases where they are useful in making information available in a better way (such as directly embedding word documents) but on the whole they are used for effect.
Because of this, the commercial side of the web, with it’s flashy front-ends, is becoming a place for the “have”s and the “have-not”s.
If you do have a Java programmer working for you, your pages glow in the dark and sing the national anthem of whatever country you are accessing from.
If you don’t, people start to see your pages as mundane.
The actual content of the information on offer no longer seems to be an issue.
One of the most frequent complaints from UK Web users is the slow speed of accessing some Web sites, especially those held in the US during times of high network traffic.
What, if anything, should be done (and by whom) to alleviate this problem?
Are caching and mirroring the answer (and if so, how should these approaches best be deployed; locally, nationally and/or internationally)?
Well, as a teccie person, I get to see logs of web usage as they happen.
Also going from my own experiences described above I would say that the vast majority of web usage is simply wasting time for leisure activities just like cheap TV.
I see this as a good thing when it comes to commercial service providers network usage is a pleasure activity for which they charge.
If there is more out there, more people will want it and will pay more, paying for the bandwidth.
However, it doesn’t work this way for academic sites.
It is just as if we have given every undergraduate a free phone line and some people are complaining that the exchanges are busy all the time.
The usage of the network has changed far too quickly for institutions, and their access policies, to keep up.
Free access to all when bandwith is limited may not be a viable option in a year or two.
On the more technical issue of caching and stuff, it is the only solution for the time being, and I am surprised how much some institutions are dragging their feet.
There should be an enforced cache system on all transatlantic network connections so that no single piece of data has to go over it more than once (this applies to Usenet as well as Web pages and so on.)
Our cache here at Bath is about 1Gb, the one at Hensa is a few times bigger.
As far as storage sizes go, this is tiny and yet they both get over 50% hit rates consistently.
If every university, every service provider and every transatlantic data carrier demanded that users go through their cache and had intelligent software filtering out duplicate Usenet feeds going over their bandwidth, our networks would go a lot further.
Security.
Different universities have different approaches to attacks from outsiders, using devices such as firewalls to keep unwelcome intruders out.
How serious should universities take the threat of such attacks?
Working here at the University of Bath, I have found a lot of the problems to do with being behind a firewall.
While it may offer us security, it is a pain in the proverbial neck most of the time.
Whenever we try out something new that need access to the Internet, we find that we need to find some sort of special route.
This, I suppose, is the flip side of the enforcements I described above.
Web pages coming into Bath Uni must go through our cache few other machines have direct Internet access.
So, if we need to do something different, such as try out new protocols for PUT ing web pages, we are stuck unless the cache/proxy/gateway maintainer works with us.
This isn’t always the case.
Pornography.
Much has been made, often hysterically, in the mass media, about pornography on the Internet, especially on the Web and Usenet.
What steps should or could academic institutions take to prevent students from choking up the networks by accessing such material.
This goes back to the leisure aspect of the ‘Net, and as far as I am concerned is just another type of leisure activity.
Okay, steps should be taken to keep the stronger stuff away from kids but I’m pretty liberal on the subject of what consenting adults can have access to.
What would you like to see happen in the field of the World Wide Web in 1997⁄1998?
The Web has got too big.
It’s current amorphous state is no longer viable and we are having to depend on search engines such as Alta Vista to find anything.
Having worked in UKOLN for 6 months now, I am firmly of the belief that librarians do hold the key to getting useful information out of the ‘Net.
We need some unified way of indexing and cataloguing resources that will scale and last.
We need a standard.
However, the wonderful thing about standards is that there always so many to choose from.
)-8 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Task Force Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Task Force Meeting Buzz data framework database infrastructure metadata doi identifier copyright preservation hypertext aggregation url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Kelly Russell reports on the US CNI Conference.
The US Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) held its Fall Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the 26⁄27 of October.
As JISC’s International Liaison I had the opportunity to attend and did so despite reports of record low temperatures!
Minneapolis is a very cold city (even by the standards of a Canadian) and I was grateful to CNI that they didn’t decide to hold the Fall meeting at the beginning of December as they did in 1996.
CNI Task Force meetings are held bi-annually in spring and ‘fall’ and are open to all members (both institutional and individual) of CNI.
In my view, full conference summaries can be quite dull so I will not endeavour to summarise the entire conference programme.
Instead I will summarise the keynote address and a few of the project briefing sessions in order to provide an impression rather than a detailed picture.
This CNI meeting marked the first under the directorship of Clifford Lynch, the new Executive Director of CNI.
Cliff opened the meeting on Sunday with a warm welcome to everyone including delegates from as far afield as the UK, Sweden and Australia.
As CNI’s new leader, Cliff outlined the CNI programme of work for 1997-98 which was to have been published in December.
In October the document was still in draft form but even when it is finalised, Cliff emphasised that will not be a rigid or static document but an ‘invitation to an ongoing dialogue with the community’ and would therefore remain ‘live’.
The programme outlines the methodology and strategic framework for CNI’s activities over the next 12 months.
It is divided into work in three main areas: developing networked information content transforming organisations, professions and individuals building technology, standards and infrastructure Highlights of the proposed activities of particular interest to UK HE include: support for arts and humanities on the networks paralleled by JISC’s ongoing support of the AHDS networked scholarly communications with specific aims to extend this beyond text (JISC’s increasing programme of work on digital imaging technologies and its new Technical Advisory Service for Images TASI)[1] metadata standards developed through direct support of the Dublin Core initiative which is relevant to much of the JISC work ongoing here particularly through UKOLN [2] digital preservation, various activities including a move to address the practical issues of what it means to preserve digital data (in the UK, eLib Phase 3 CEDARS project will also be addressing these issues through CURL in a research library context) [3] Library and Information Services and their relationship to distance learning of particular and timely relevance in the UK as distance and “lifelong” learning come into the fore.
eLib’s Hybrid Libraries projects (in particular, the HYLIFE project) will be addressing some of these issues [4].
The list above is simply a taste of a much larger programme of work proposed in the new strategy document.
More information can be found at the CNI Web site.
Although the programme focused on work which will have long term importance, Cliff Lynch stressed that the CNI would also focus on tangible activities of significant short term benefit to the community.
When asked what he felt was the biggest challenge facing CNI over the next year, he simply answered that the range of opportunities for CNI work vastly outweighs the resources available.
Sounds familiar?
Certainly UK funding bodies such as JISC find themselves with the same dilemma as the exciting and ground breaking possibilities of information and communication technology continue to pull in a variety of new directions.
According to Cliff Lynch, for CNI the key is to ensure resources were not spread too thinly.
In order to do this he suggested concentrating on areas where CNI could get some ‘traction’ to allow for measurable substantial progress and offer a balance between short-term visible outcomes and long-term strategic work.
The proposed programme of work for CNI appears to be robust and not substantially altered by a new Executive Director.
There is a well-considered balance between the obvious investment in long-term benefits and the necessary short-term solutions.
One issue which seemed to be in the back of most minds emerged when Cliff was asked what, if any, effect the merger between CAUSE [5] and EDUCOM [6] would have on CNI.
He explained that the merger would have no significant impact on CNI except for a change in the Fall Task Force Meeting which would (as of 1998) be coupled with the Internet II conference rather than the CAUSE/EDUCOM event as it has been in the past [7].
Keynote address : intellectual property rights Although not explicitly highlighted in the introductory session, implicit in much of the current work in networked information are the complex issues associated with intellectual property rights (IPR).
In the meeting’s first plenary session, keynote speaker Pamela Samuelson from the University of California Berkeley addressed this issue head on.
Although her presentation focused primarily on three specific legislative initiatives in the pipelines for the US which were not directly relevant to the international audience, the general issues to which the legislation pertains were extensible to a worldwide audience.
The presentation began with an invitation to consider intellectual property rights and to do so seriously.
Dr Samuelson expressed grave concern about the lack of influential champions for IPR issues.
Digital preservation and other pressing issues in an electronic environment have champions where IPR as yet had none at least none with a broad representation of viewpoint which included the interests of higher education (HE).
She seemed to suggest that in the US Senate, debate on IPR issues was dominated by the interests of big commercial corporations like Disney and Microsoft whose interests were not necessary applicable or even helpful to higher education.
The corporate vs HE viewpoint on IPR is a poignant illustration of the dichotomy of freedom to and freedom from.
It is crucial that the IPR legislation balances these interests to represent both the corporate giants and the academic community.
The first of these issues is database protection legislation.
The main issue in this arena seems to be lack of protection for database creators.
Current copyright law does not protect database compilers unless there is recognised creative input into the selection and presentation of the data.
Although this issue did not get much attention at the WIPO conference in Geneva in December 1996, it has resurfaced in the US after recent legislation in the Europe Union includes protection of database creators [8].
There is cause for concern in the US because EU legislation includes a reciprocity clause which suggests that this legislation only applies to foreign databases where the country in question has also adopted this law.
If (as is currently the case) the US does not adopt this law, US database content could be taken by European compilers, input into a database product and copyright under EC legislation.
Under this directive, database products will be copyright for 15 years.
Each time an update to the database occurs the 15 year copyright period is renewed.
An interesting point was raised during the question session which asked what constitutes an ‘update’.
Is simply changing or adding hypertext linking considered an update worthy of renewing the copyright for the database?
Other concerns addressed by the keynote pertained to the interpretation and implementation of the WIPO copyright treatises agreed in Geneva in 1996.
Prof. Samuelson stressed that these treaties are not self-implementing but require considerable initiative.
In this sense the keynote address took the form of a “wake up call” to the academic community to ensure appropriate and effective action on IPR issues at local, national and international levels.
Something we would all do well to bear in mind.
More information about these and other IPR issues can be found on the Web at the Digital Future Coalition Web site [9].
Project briefings: a selection As is the case with all CNI Task Force meeting the majority of sessions are parallel and take the form of Project Briefings.
These sessions were of high quality and relevance and I will attempt to capture some of this in my descriptions below.
Where possible I will also provide links to relevant Web sites (not all of these mentioned directly in the presentation).
Session 1: linking references with the DOI The first session I attended was most certainly not uncontentious.
I hadn’t realised quite how stirred up an audience could get about Digital Object Identifiers!
The session was led by Ed Pentz from Academic Press and he confessed to me later that he should have realised it wouldn’t be easy to speak about the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) [10] to a room full of those who were involved in developing it.
The presentation focused on the need for change to keep pace in an electronic information era.
He suggested there were several factors which were evidence of a changing industry.
These included: a recent increase in the number of aggregators or agents such as OCLC’s Electronic Collections Online [11] or SWETSNET [12] a new market for secondary databases such as ISI’s Web of Science which is now under construction [13] a growing number of publishers creating their own systems a number of learned and professional societies online with the aid of, for example, HireWire Press [14] In this new electronic environment, links are needed to present a coherent service.
Linking can be within the same system, external linking to another source, database linking to full text.
The standards which allow for this linking include the SICI (the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier), the PII (Publishing Item Identifier), and now the DOI.
In general, the DOI is a dumb number meaning one can determine nothing about the content from interpretation of the number.
However, other identifiers can be used within the DOI and these need not be dumb numbers.
For example, in practice several publishers (such as Academic, Wiley and Springer) plan to use the SICI as part of the DOI which will therefore give basic information about the content.
Other publishers intend to use the PII as part of the DOI, but unlike the SICI, the PII is also a dumb number.
Some discussion ensued about the usefulness of a ‘derivable’ number like the SICI which may be helpful to users.
Links to DOIs will be kept in a centralised database by the DOI Foundation which acts as an agency to promote use of the DOI, provides guidelines for usage and works to maintain the integrity of the system.
The DOI system is a number of computers which form a distributed system that resolve any DOI to its associated URL.
The system is based on the CNRI Handle system.
Ideally from a users point of view the DOI will remain invisible, hidden behind a clickable button which will taken them directly to the digital object.
DOIs will be assigned by publishers but in order to do so they will have to join the foundation at a cost of $1000 per publisher.
During the question session, concern was expressed about this fee to join which might exclude or discourage small publishers or individual authors adopting the DOI.
The bone of contention for the group focused on the DOIs ability to achieve consistent naming, resolution of URLs and permanence.
The speaker emphasised that the DOI allowed for a central registry which didn’t rely on a particular URL for identifying an object.
A great debate ensued about whether there was value in developing a DOI when a permanent URL could achieve the same degree permanence.
But can it?
A senseless debate in my view.
The DOI has a permanent registry which is kept separate from the object itself and can therefore be controlled and maintained.
A URL is linked inextricably to the object on the Web and can be changed at any time.
However, it was apparent that the tension in the room stemmed from something deeper than just a pointless debate over the value of the DOI vs a URL.
The contention stemmed from what appeared to be an inherent scepticism (on the part of the largely academic audience) of a standard which is being developed and advocated by the publishing industry.
If we are to adopt a standard for access to electronic objects (in this case specifically journals) there must be consensus and uniform acceptance and use.
The DOI is an emerging standard in which publishers feel an ownership.
They have been involved in the development of the standard: it is therefore something they will employ and they will encourage other publishing companies to do the same.
There is value in this which shouldn’t be underestimated.
The DOI marks an important step forward because it is a standard which our publishing colleagues might actually implement.
The fact that they may have helped to steer the development should not detract from the obvious benefits.
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Alta Vista Vs. Lycos Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Alta Vista Vs. Lycos Buzz software database cataloguing hypertext foi url standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley presents the results of a detailed comparison of the two main search engines of today, Lycos and Alta Vista.
Searching for information on the World Wide Web (WWW) can often be a long and tedious task.
The WWW has grown phenomenally since its origin as a small-scale resource for sharing information and finding the information you need amongst this huge collection of resources can be very difficult without effective tools.
As the WWW has grown it has become necessary to provide a quick and easy method of rapidly searching webspace; and search tools often known as search engines have been developed which can perform this activity.
Search engines provide a front end to a database of indexed WWW resources, into which search keywords can be typed.
However, the number of search engines available on the WWW has also grown quickly over a very recent period, and this has posed new problems for WWW users.
There are now a bewildering variety of search engines available each offering different features and interfaces.
Many are linked to sizeable catalogues of WWW resources, and some claim to offer a comprehensive index of the entire WWW.
Given the problem with choosing a search engine from the range of tools on offer; this article concentrates on two particular tools Lycos (http://www.lycos.com) and Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com).
These two search engines have been chosen because they offer two of the largest databases of WWW documents at the last count Lycos claimed to have indexed 10 million WWW documents, and Alta Vista claims to have a database of over 21 million documents.
They also offer a number of fairly sophisticated searching features.
This article will attempt to compare the performance of these two tools in order to provide some recommendations for their use.
Which has the best interface?
Alta Vista Lycos Ability to restrict a search by date Yes No Relevancy Ranking No Yes Adjacency indicators No Yes Ability to refine a search Yes Yes “Help” documents Yes Yes Simple keyword searching Yes Yes Abstracts provided of “hits” Yes Yes WWW interfaces to search engines generally consist of a form which appears on a WWW page.
Keywords can be typed into the form and a button is provided which can be clicked on with a mouse in order to activate the search.
Other features such as small menus for selecting Boolean operators may also be present.
Both of these search engines effectively have two interfaces one for simple keyword searching and another for more advanced queries using Boolean operators.
Simple keyword search interfaces are located on the home page of each search engine, so these are the first interfaces that the user sees, and many users tend to use these by default rather than exploring the other options available.
These interfaces generally provide a fast and easy to use tool for very simple WWW searching, but their use may be problematic given the size of the WWW and the generally diverse nature of material available.
Alta Vista offers its Advanced Query mode under its clickable logo at the top of the home page.
Lycos offers its advanced search form under a hypertext link from the home page called Enhance your search.
For the purpose of this article I’ve concentrated largely on features offered by the advanced searching options of these tools, as I feel that the extended features they offer are of considerably more use than simple keyword tools in searching a large and disparate database like the WWW.
Figure 1, below, displays the Alta Vista Advanced Query Interface.
Alta Vista provide a facility to search both the WWW and Usenet News from their interface, and these options can be selected by clicking on the ‘down’ arrow to select from the Search menu.
Another menu gives you the option of choosing how you would like your results displayed.
Standard Form gives a short abstract of each document retrieved.
Detailed Form can be used to display information on the publication dates of documents.
On-line help in using the search interface can be accessed by clicking on the hypertext links these point to a standard help file.
A query can be typed into the Selection Criteria box, and relevancy ranking can be activated by typing keywords which have a high priority in the query into the Results Ranking Criteria box.
Boxes are also provided which enable you to set a date threshold for your search.
Once a query has been formulated the search can be initiated by clicking on the Submit Advanced Query button.
Figure 2, below, displays the Lycos enhanced search interface.
Lycos provides a small query box into which search keywords can be typed.
The Search Options menu enables the user to choose and and or Boolean operators (the not operator can be implemented by placing a dash (-) in front of a keyword).
Various levels of matching can also be chosen a loose match on the keyword computer would also retrieve the plural computers.
The user can also determine the format of the results they retrieve, so that Standard Results will give a title and brief abstract of a document whereas Detailed Results will give information on indexing keywords and date of publication.
Help is provided through a hypertext link to Search Language Help.
Once a search has been constructed it can be initiated by clicking on the Search button.
Lycos provides a feature known as relevancy and adjacency ranking; and this is implemented when it sorts your search hits.
Documents which contain a high incidence of your particular choice of keywords, and a high incidence of your keywords appearing close together within a document will score higher than those which don’t and so appear higher up your list of hits.
Alta Vista only performs relevancy ranking on your hits if you specifically ask it to by specifying keywords in the Results Ranking Criteria box.
WWW search engines generally seem to go through a process of more or less constant upgrade to their interfaces, and this can be very annoying for users who have spent time becoming familiar with an interface only to find that it has changed when they next want to use it.
The Lycos interface has gone through numerous incarnations over the last year or so, and it seems likely that Alta Vista will also follow this pattern.
The Alta Vista interface is currently a test version, and upgrades will be made once the developers have evaluated user responses.
Both Alta Vista and Lycos provide the ability to refine your search once the results of an initial search have been posted on screen.
Alta Vista provides the full search form at the top of a list of hits so that a user can immediately refine a search if necessary.
This form also retains the query structure of the previous search so that it can be quickly modified.
Lycos, however, defaults automatically to its simple search form which means that a number of the enhanced features are lost.
Which has the best query language?
Alta Vista Lycos Phrase searching Yes No Full Boolean searching Yes No Wildcard Yes No Ability to restrict search to a particular field (eg: title) Yes No Alta Vista supports a number of options which Lycos doesn’t have, and this increases its functionality greatly.
Phrase searching can be implemented by placing quotation marks around a phrase to ensure that Alta Vista only retrieves documents which contain the keywords in direct proximity to each other.
Its also possible to use a wildcard when searching Alta Vista to ensure that a number of possible variations on a word are included in search results.
The wildcard symbol is *.
Alta Vista also enables a user to restrict their search to particular fields of a document.
The fields available are the title of a document, the URL, the host (a page’s server) and the links contained within a document.
These features can be implemented by typing -for example title: directly infront of a keyword.
Alta Vista also supports full Boolean searching, and it is possible to use and, or, not and near to expand or constrict a search.
Parentheses can also be used to control nesting.
Which gives the best results?
The best way to illustrate the features of these two tool, and their differences, is to conduct a few searches and measure how they perform against each other.
To test the capabilities of the two search engines I performed a number of searches, aimed at testing how features such as phrase searching and use of wildcards can actually influence the results of a search.
The aim was, wherever possible, to compare like with like, so I performed parallel searches on the same days in both Lycos and Alta Vista using the different features they offer, and compared my results.
The first search I performed was to search for information on the Communications Decency Act.
As I anticipated that there would be a lot of material on this particular topic I decided to narrow my search by restricting it to sources which contained the phrase ‘freedom of information’.
I first performed the search using Alta Vista’s Advanced Query tool.
This enabled me to perform a phrase search by typing my query as “Communications Decency Act” and “freedom of information”.
This search returned 173 hits.
I then decided to further refine my query by introducing a date restriction, and searched again, limiting the date to material published between 1 January 96 and 23 February 96 (the date on which I performed the search).
This gave me 6 documents.
All of this material looked relevant to my subject; there were documents from the Electronic Freedom Foundation on ‘censorship and free expression’ and a number of resources devoted directly to the discussion of the Communications Decency Act.
It was interesting to note, however, that all of the documents listed had been published in January 1996, and there was no material available for February.
I felt this was incongruous given that one of the key features of the WWW is that material is often available which is extremely current and up to date.
At the time of performing my search the Communications Decency Act was a hot topic on many American newsgroups and mailing lists, and I felt that there should be some very recent material available on the WWW.
This led me to question how up to date the Alta Vista database actually is.
Alta Vista don’t provide any information in their ‘help’ files about how often the database is updated with new material.
I then performed a search on Lycos on the subject of the Communications Decency Act.
I used the ‘enhanced search’ option in Lycos and typed the keywords communications decency act freedom information, setting the search options menu to 5 words to enable Boolean and.
Lycos doesn’t enable phrase searching so I was unable to specify phrases in my query.
Lycos also ignores word of less than three characters in length, such as of, so I had to leave this word out of my query.
Lycos wasn’t able to find any documents which matched my query so I broadened my search and tried again with just the keywords communications decency act.
Lycos found 94 documents, and displayed the first ten of these.
All of these 10 documents contained my three keywords, and one document entitled ‘Stop the Communications Decency Act’ was dated 10th February 96.
So in this case, Alta Vista was able to retrieve many more documents than Lycos and it was extremely useful to be able to qualify my search using phrases and date restrictions.
However, Lycos did find a document which was more up to date than anything which appeared to be in the Alta Vista database at the time of writing.
My second search was on the subject of dyslexia or special needs education.
I first performed this search in Alta Vista, using the Advanced Query option, and I decided to test the Boolean searching capabilities by including parentheses in my search.
My search was structured as follows: (dyslexia or “special needs”) and education.
This search retrieved over 40000 documents obviously far too much information to wade through.
The first hit which Alta Vista posted on the screen was an advertisement for an American gift shop which contained the line ‘we provide gifts selection for clients who have special needs’!
I concluded from this that I would need to further refine my search in order to retrieve more useful information.
I decided to use the title tag to qualify my search, and I structured it as follows: (title:dyslexia or title:“special needs”) and education.
This restricted the information retrieved to only those documents which contained the words dyslexia or special needs in their titles, rather than anywhere in the entire document.
This second search retrieved 183 documents, and all of my first 10 hits were relevant to my query.
However, I again had the problem that all of my first 10 hits were dated from before January 1996, so I would need to refine my search again to discover very up to date material.
I then performed a search on this topic using Lycos.
The keywords dyslexia special needs education were used and I set the search option to match 2 terms in order to implement Boolean or; this gave me 294 hits.
All of my first 10 results were relevant to my query, and five of these results were dated February 1996.
The keywords special needs, special education or dyslexia appeared in the titles of all of the ten documents.
Lycos doesn’t support use of a title tag to restrict queries, although it has a much narrower indexing policy than Alta Vista so this may explain why the search results appear to be more efficient.
Conclusion Criteria The Winner The most frequently updated database Lycos The best query language Alta Vista The best interface A draw The best search results A draw Overall, both of these tools can potentially be extremely useful in searching the WWW, and they both provide a number of options which are invaluable in helping the user to retrieve relevant information.
However, there are a number of issues which this article raises which need to be addressed before these tools can be wholeheartedly recommended.
Alta Vista seems to have a significant problem with updates to its database; it may be that their hardware and software is having difficulty with keeping up with the rapid growth of the WWW, and that database updates are lagging behind as a result.
However, Lycos update their entire database every month, and new pages are added on a weekly basis so at present it seems to have the lead over Alta Vista as regards up to the minute information.
As Alta Vista has such a big database it is very important to qualify a search as much as possible in order to retrieve information which may be relevant to your query.
As demonstrated in the searches I performed, it is often necessary to make use of features such as field searching in order to maximise the effectiveness and accuracy of your search.
For the user who is unaware of these features it could be fairly difficult to get good results using Alta Vista.
In many cases single keyword searching isn’t really effective when searching such a huge and diverse database as the WWW, and I find it worrying that both of these search engines seem to be promoting single keyword searches through the layout of their pages.
Users are encouraged to use the basic search forms which appear on the home pages of Lycos and Alta Vista and it isn’t really made clear that using the advanced or enhanced query options will result in more efficient searches.
Lycos even hides away the route to its enhanced search form under a rather vague ‘enhance your search’ link.
It’s also worth noting that the Lycos simple search form has the Boolean ‘or’ operator set as a default.
This can be confusing for users who are trying to perform a search.
For example, its quite common for a user to want to perform a search on a phrase such as user education, and it would seem logical for a user to type these keywords into the simple search form in order to retrieve information on this topic.
However, the default setting results in a search on user or education.
At the time of writing, this search would retrieve over 36000 documents from Lycos!
It’s important to point out to users the drawbacks of using the simple search options, and try to encourage them to use the other options available in order to enhance their searches.
However both of these tools provide help files which are very limited in their scope and users are often confused by the query syntax available.
Neither of these tools can therefore offer an ideal solution to searching the WWW.
Acknowledgement With thanks to Karen G. Schneider for information and discussion relating to this article.
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The Future of Digitising at the State Library of Victoria, Australia Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Future of Digitising at the State Library of Victoria, Australia Buzz data software html database infrastructure metadata accessibility repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing multimedia jpeg marc url standards Citation BibTex RIS Catherine Herman and Indra Kurzeme discuss the multimedia source project, set within the context of the pro-multimedia State of Victora, Australia.
The State Library of Victoria has dedicated itself to becoming a Library of the Future.
It has embraced the possibilities that Multimedia has to offer and is working towards developing an online collection of digitised materials for the world to access.
The establishment of the Multimedia Source Project is evidence of this and reflects the main role of the State Library which is to preserve the cultural heritage of the State of Victoria.
Our mission reflects this and the notion of providing access to these materials.
Mission statement The State Library links Victorians to the world’s knowledge, the world to our documentary heritage.
Background to the Project The beginning of providing online access to materials by the State Library began in 1990 when the State Library of Victoria received a grant of $309,000 from the Sidney Myer Fund to create a videodisc consisting of a range of Victorian pictorial materials from the Library’s extensive Picture Collection (more information can be found at the State Library’s web site [1]).
The videodisc was aptly named Pictoria.
The Picture Collection consists of over 600,000 pictorial images in a wide variety of formats.
This collection is sometimes difficult to access because of the fragile and often unique nature of the materials.
The project’s intention was to make these images available to the Library’s users through the use of video and computer technology.
At the time the primary focus was to make reference, not archival copies of the images and videodisc technology was seen as the most cost-effective option.
Initially, materials from this project were made available via stand-alone terminals from within the State Library using propriety software and an NT Box as an image server.
The Pictoria team captured 104,000 images to videodisc.
Included in this capture process were images of oil paintings, water colours, drawings, photographs, postcards, woodcuts and etchings.
As part of the project, records were created in the Library’s catalogue, using a slightly modified version of the standard MARC graphical materials format.
Separate indexes were created for all materials (digitised or not) which were catalogued using this format.
The next stage in the history of Pictoria was to enable the State Library to provide these images online via the World Wide Web.
Pressed by the rapid development in the Internet in Victoria, due to organisations like VICNET [2] , the State Library of Victoria looked for further funding to add value to the Pictoria Project.
Victoria has set a precedent by appointing the first Minister of Multimedia in the world [3] and a funding body Multimedia Victoria [4] dedicated to ensuring that projects like Pictoria are possible.
Multimedia Victoria granted the State Library the funding to digitise Pictoria and the Multimedia Source Project is the result.
Multimedia Source Project The Multimedia Source Project has just finished the first year of its two-year funding.
The first year was spent establishing an appropriate database infrastructure to support access to digital content.
In reviewing the requirements of the multimedia database the Library focussed on the need to: provide a comprehensive bibliographic description of the resource provide access to the digitised resource within the context of this description be able to provide context relevant links to other resources, such as Internet sites, adding value to existing data within our catalogue make the database easy to access and widely available, both for our internal requirements as well as extending access to a wider audience via networks such as the Internet avoid duplication of already existing resources provide copyright and reproduction information readily to users ensure that the database conformed to international standards for information interchange When planning the multimedia database it was known that virtually all of the collection items that had already been digitised and already had existing bibliographic records in the State Library’s Dynix catalogue.
When Ameritech released WebPAC, a World Wide Web retrieval interface to its Dynix bibliographic database, the decision was made to identify these records as the Multimedia database within the already existing bibliographic catalogue, rather than create a separate multimedia database.
WebPAC had made it possible to meet all our requirement without the need to duplicate already existing bibliographic data.
Implementing WebPAC In implementing this infrastructure the Library has gained many benefits.
However, as with all new products, developmental issues have taken time to resolve.
Prior to “going live” the Library customised the WebPAC interface to reflect a look and feel consistent with the Library’s web site and to more fully reflect the information requirements of our database.
Customisation of information templates have been fairly simple and the WebPAC interface has been set up using updateable features such as image maps that can be centrally changed if required.
These image maps add value to the catalogue as they contain links to information about copyright and reproduction rights for available material, as well as links back to the Library’s contents page.
Part of the customisation of WebPAC required adjusting the display of the MARC Record’s 856 tag in the long view so that URL’s would display the thumbnail images as active hyperlinks within the record.
The 856 tag is the tag in the MARC record that contains information needed to locate an electronic resource.
Records with images now provide this hyperlinked, thumbnail size display of the image in the long view of the record.
With records containing multiple images, the first image is provided as a thumbnail and subsequent images are provided as text hyperlinks lower down in the record.
A decision was made not to display more than one thumbnail per record to facilitate speed of access to bibliographic information.
The thumbnail images and the multiple image hyperlinks, are linked to large versions of the image displayed in a separate web page via the 856 tag.
Both the thumbnail and web page image are in jpeg format at screen resolution.
Figure 1: A record from the database The large image web pages provides information about the title, artist, subject, library record number (Dynix Bibliographic Number) and links to copyright and reproduction conditions.
This strategy whilst effectively duplicating some of the data held in the Dynix record, provides additional access and usage options over the World Wide Web medium.
Each of the web image pages stands alone as a unique entity that can be linked to by other sites.
In addition the Web page includes data consisting of title, artist, subject and format in the hidden title field providing the potential for indexing by web search engines, broadening the scope of access to the Library’s resources.
This data in the title field is currently in the process of being transferred into official metadata tags to comply more fully with HTML standards.
Implementation Problems The Multimedia Source Catalogue went “live” at the end of October 1996 in Phase 1 release.
The release of the Catalogue has not as yet been publicised by the Library as there still some constraints in its functionality.
During the initial public access phase the Library became aware of a number of data integrity issues impacting on searching, causing WebPAC errors.
One problem it was later discovered resulted from hidden null characters within the bibliographic data which, though they had no ill effect within the Dynix standard catalogue, cause error message and problems displaying brief records sets in WebPAC.
Currently we are running a regular program over our data to remove such problem characters.
It was also discovered that some Dynix records had been generated with two leaders in the MARC records, one with data, the other without.
Again this issue had never caused problems in Dynix standard.
In WebPAC however, while this problem was not sufficient to always cause an error we found it was probable that in cases where a double leader existed, a non-display problem would occur.
Recently all empty leader fields have been removed and this has considerably reduced error issues in the WebPAC catalogue.
More recently “invalid access” error messages have been reported by a small number of users when attempting to search the WebPAC catalogue.
Users are able to access search pages, and enter search requests but receive invalid access errors as a response.
Currently we have been unable to resolve this problem however we believe that it may be occurring to users who are accessing the Library’s catalogue via a Proxy server.
One essential component of the WWW catalogue is ensuring that hyperlinks remain valid in the WebPAC catalogue.
The Library is currently in the process of implementing a link checking program to resolve these problems.
This program will confirm the validity of all hyperlinks, both those we add to our own database and those which may be downloaded via ABN when we update bibliographic records.
While many of the problems we have experienced are data or server related we have also experienced some issues that require input from Ameritech.
Amongst these are the inability to display the subject field in the short view of the record, something which could be deemed as unnecessary in a bibliographic catalogue, but a significant feature in a database of images.
This we are hoping will be resolved with the next release WebPAC.
Another issue is in the brief view of the record, WebPAC translates the MARC coding for the presence of an image as “Film” whereas the correct translation should be to “Visual Material’.
This has a detrimental effect on the validity of our presentation of the material.
Apart from giving the impression that the user will be able to retrieve a moving image, it also makes it appear that the Library has been less than rigorous in its cataloguing of its content.
Despite some of our initial teething problems with ensuring data integrity the WebPAC interface has proven to be a valuable tool in making our image resources accessible to the world community.
While the initial Pictoria Project only provided access to images to patrons who had to physically visit the Library, WebPAC has disolved the physical boundaries of the State Library taking us a step closer to the “virtual library” concept.
The Library is in the process of fine tuning the WebPAC catalogue and future plans, hopefully with the next release of WebPAC, will include customising the brief view record display and adding automated request forms to allow online ordering of material via the catalogue.
The Current Status The Project has been dormant for a few months as the original Co-ordinator left to take up a post at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Multimedia Assistant is now the State Library of Victoria’s Web Administrator.
This temporary hiccup has delayed aspects of the project by three months.
Digitising of images still continued despite the change of management.
Working in collaboration with the Co-ordinator and Assistant are a team of 5 Imaging Assistants who manage the imaging of items using 2 UMAX scanners.
For the purpose of image capture, the Multimedia Source Project purchased two Umax Powerlook 2000 flatbed scanners for reflective and transmissive scanning of photographs, negatives and transparencies of no greater than A4 size.
Specific training requirements in using this equipment were met in-house and through a one day training session using a consultant.
Recently, a new Co-ordinator was appointed and an Imaging Steering Committee has been created which consists of the Deputy State Librarian, the Head of Technology Services, the Head of Preservation and Storage, the Head of the Network Services Division, the La Trobe Librarian (Australiana) and the Multimedia Co-ordinator.
From the outset it was evident that the Committee could be called nothing else but the Digitising Steering Committee as types of media other than pictures will be digitised in the future.
In correlation with this the Imaging team also has had a name change to Multimedia Access Team.
The upgrading and training of the Multimedia Access Team will improve their opportunities for employment and make them specialists in their field.
The Future While there is a vast amount of content for the Multimedia Project within the Library’s collections the State Library is also committed to developing cooperative digitising projects.
While public institutions are primarily repositories of source materials, there is still much that rests in private or commercial hands and this project will be used as an opportunity to encourage the owners of these collections to allow them to be copied and held on the source materials database.
An example of this cooperative relationship is the Rural Water project currently in the process of being digitised.
This collection is on loan to the Library for 50 years before it is passed on to the Victorian Public Records Office.
The State Library is selectively digitising this collection and will retain the images making them available via the source project.
This ensures ongoing accessibility even after the collection is physically removed from the Library.
The future of the project will see the incorporation of VRML files and small animations showcasing areas such as the new Information Centre at the State Library of Victoria.
Admittedly this is a form of advertising of the newly designed and fitted out space however, the State Library of Victoria has recently undergone a major redevelopment both physically and technologically and multimedia provides the opportunity to show these changes to the world in an innovative and creative way.
The Multimedia Project’s brief is not just to create an online catalogue but also to add value to existing resources through the use of multimedia.
A perfect opportunity for this exists in the creation of online exhibitions providing a virtual tour of some of the Library’s unique collections.
The State Library is employer to some extremely talented reference librarians who have specialised, in-depth knowledge about their collections.
There have been several “real world” exhibitions that could be quite easily transformed into virtual exhibitions combining short animations as well as audio.
The catalogue essays that accompany the exhibitions are concise, informative introductions to more specialised material that the State Library of Victoria houses.
The main access point to the Multimedia Source Project is the State Library’s website and a close working relationship with the Web Administrator has been established.
There is no one particular area on the web site that will be exclusively multimedia orientated.
All areas of the State Library’s collection and all information will be enhanced by multimedia techniques where deemed appropriate.
The Multimedia Source Project will be investing in a Real Audio Server to enable access to audio recordings of artists such as Dame Nellie Melba.
The State Library of Victoria also has a large collection of oral history tapes that will benefit from being digitised so that a larger audience will be able to enjoy them.
These files will be incorporated into the WebPAC catalogue as well as possibly being included in virtual exhibitions about the artists.
There is a great deal of work still to be done over the next twelve months and it is hoped that when the funding runs out further funding from Multimedia Victoria or a commitment by the State Library of Victoria will mean the creation of a Multimedia Unit within the State Library to continue to enhance the Library’s future as a Digital Library!
References State Library of Victoria Web Site, http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/ VICNET Web Site, http://www.vicnet.net.au/ Alan Stockdale, Minister for Multimedia, Victoria State, Australia, http://www.stockdale.mmv.vic.gov.au/ Multimedia Victoria Funding Body, http://www.mmv.vic.gov.au/ Author Details Catherine Herman, Web Administrator email: cherman@slv.vic.gov.au Address: State Library of Victoria, Victoria, Australia Indra Kurzeme, Multimedia Co-ordinator email: indrak@slv.vic.gov.au Address: State Library of Victoria, Victoria, Australia Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: Life After the Millenium Bid Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: Life After the Millenium Bid Buzz data graphics research Citation BibTex RIS After the recent disappointing turn-down of the millenium bid to connect public libraries to the Internet, Sarah Ormes wonders where we go from here.
With the failure of the second public library Millennium Bid the dream of a gift-wrapped-paid-for-by-someone-else-national-networked-public-library-service disappeared.
Although Information for All [1], the company set up to run this bid, has pledged to continue looking for funding from other sources it seems unlikely that they will be able achieve the national implementation that Millennium funding would have made possible.
The failure of the Bid, however, must not be seen as the end of Internet services in public libraries but as a starting point.
Public libraries are already behind the majority of society as it adapts to the new opportunities offered by networking technology.
Opportunities are being missed.
This is especially true when we compare public libraries with other sectors which do not even have the provision of information as one of their primary aims.
A recent survey by Berkshire Library Service found that 54% of companies in Berkshire with a turnover in excess of £500,000 have Internet access with a further 14% planning to have access within the next six months [2].This is symptomatic of other sectors like schools, universities, companies and even councils which are adapting to the new electronic environment and learning how best to exploit these new opportunities.
This sense of being left behind was succinctly expressed by Jennifer Cram [3] when talking about Australian public libraries and the development of the Web [4].
During 1995 our civilisation changed profoundly.
In this single year we moved from an atomised disconnected hierarchical civilisation to public recognition of a networked interconnected globalised civilisation.
This was the critical moment of transformation and virtually all public libraries in Australia missed it.
Well, two years further down the superhighway most public libraries in the UK are still missing it.
It is time now to get on and get connected the failure of the Bid was a disappointment but also a wake up call.
It is highly unlikely that there will be another national initiative which will wire up public libraries.
Public library authorities are going to have to take the initiative themselves and develop their own services if they do not want to fall further behind.
With tight budgets this may initially seem impossible, hence the Millennium Bid is the first place, but already some authorities have found methods to fund Internet services.
These methods can very roughly be split into three types: get someone else to pay for it make use of resources you already have get someone else to do it.
Getting Someone Else To Pay For It A number of library authorities have funded their Internet services by securing new sources of funding for it.
The most obvious source for additional funding is from the library's local authority.
A number of library authorities have secured funding in this way.
They are typified by their strong and clear vision about how Internet services are important to the library, community and consequently the council.
Basically they have sold this vision to their council.
They have taken their enthusiasm and belief in what needs to be achieved and successfully communicated this to their council officers.
They have done this to such an extent that the council now also believes that the development of these services is so important that they have freed up additional money.
Other authorities have explored the development of Internet services through research funded by bodies such as the Library [5], the Department of National Heritage [6] and the European Union.
Money of this type tends to be for a limited period only and is not for use for day-to-day costs of running an Internet services.
Often a research grant will not cover the cost of computer hardware.
However, it has allowed a number of authorities to explore the implications of offering Internet services through the funding of a specific research post.
This research can then be used by the public library community when developing their own services.
Importantly it will have brought the networked culture into the library and will have enabled the library to experiment and learn about the new technology.
It will also give the authority a higher profile which consequently will assist in securing additional funding in the future from other sources.
Finally, in America many libraries have funded the development of their Internet connections through sponsorship with commercial companies.
The largest example of a model of this type is the Libraries Online [7] programme which is funded by Microsoft [8].
It is perhaps in the facilitation of this kind of development that the future of Information For All lies.
Little sponsorship of this type has taken place so far in the UK.
Using What You've Already Got A number of authorities have taken another route and used resources already available to them to develop their services.
South Ayrshire [9] took the difficult decision of taking money out of its library resources fund (book fund) in order to fund a public access Internet services and a computer centre.
This is perhaps the most difficult choice to make as actually cutting back on buying books has the potential of being extremely unpopular with the library users.
However, the cybercentre has been very successful and well received.
The willingness to make a short term cut in resources has proved to be worth the long term benefits which the cybercentre can offer.
Suffolk [10], in comparison, are using existing physical resources in a new manner.
They are using the network over which their library management system runs to also provide Internet access.
At present it is still in quite early days of experimentation but free Internet access is available in a number of libraries with plans to expand it to the whole county.
One drawback of this method of delivery is that due to the restricted bandwidth of the library network the graphics on the WWW browsers need to be turned off as data-heavy images could potentially slow the network down and affect the library management system.
This lack of graphics is a drawback and may become more of a problem in the future as the Internet develops.
But at present the users are very happy with the service and it has been a great success.
So through lateral thinking Suffolk have maximised their resources and found a cost effective method of offering free countywide public Internet access.
Letting Someone Else Do It Another option for libraries is to work in partnership with a commercial company.
The major example of this is the Input/Output Centres [11].
They rent space from libraries to set up computer centres from which they provide PCs for hire, training services and also charged access to the Internet.
This model has the advantage of being a means of income generation and allowing a library to be seen in partnership with Input/Output to be offering a high quality computer services to its readers.
The money generated from such partnerships could be used by libraries to fund the development of to some degreetheir own Internet services.
Conclusions This has been a very brief run through some of the various methods by which some authorities are developing and funding Internet services.
Admittedly all these methods do have drawbacks and will not have the national in-depthness of the failed Millennium Bid.
Whereas libraries now have to concentrate on developing local Internet services it is still to be hoped that they will retain some national view through bodies like EARL.
But importantly the methods discussed here show that the failure of the Bid need not be the end of Internet services in public libraries but could be the beginning.
References [1] Information For All: Millenium Public Libraries Bid http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/informall/ [2] Library Technology Record 2 (1), February 1997, p.20 [3] Jennifer Crams Web pages http://www.alia.org.au/~jcram/ [4] Engaged in Triumphant Retreat?
Public Libraries and the Social Impact of the Internet: by Jennifer Cram http://www.alia.org.au/~jcram/engaged_in_triumphant.html [5] British Library Web Site http://www.bl.uk/ [6] Department of National Heritage Web Site http://www.heritage.gov.uk/ [7] Libraries Online Programme http://www.librariesonline.org/ [8] Microsoft Web Site http://www.microsoft.com/ [9] South Ayrshire Local Government Web Site http://www.south-ayrshire.gov.uk/ [10] Suffolk Government Libraries and Heritage Web Pages http://www.suffolkcc.gov.uk/libraries_and_heritage/ [11] Input / Output Web Site, http://www.iocentre.co.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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On Demand Publishing in the Humanities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines On Demand Publishing in the Humanities Buzz software copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Phil Sykes reports on the latest work in On Demand Publishing in the Humanities, an eLib project.
On Demand Publishing in the Humanities [1], apart from being the most acronymically challenged of eLib’s progeny, was one of the earliest projects to start, and will shortly conclude.
The project deliverable was the creation of a set of electronic modules for Humanities students, combining lecturers’ materials with copyright materials provided by publishers.
One of the interesting things about doing research is the way that one is occasionally ambushed by one’s result.
Here are a few of the surprises we have encountered along the way.
Our first surprise was a pleasant one.
Our principal aim was to create a “cheap and cheerful” model for networking electronic texts.
We surprised ourselves by the extent to which we were able to do this without recourse to fancy programming and expensive, project-specific, hardware and software.
For a university library which has access to a WWW server and can afford to make a PC available the hardware and software costs of copying what we have done would be less than £2,000.
As for programming, the only original work needed for implementation of our model was a neat bit of CGI script which writes coded details of the user into any text which he or she downloads.
Our next surprise was the staggering extent of technoilliteracy among humanities students!
Though our project proposal anticipated this as a possibly interesting feature of our work, we did not know how interesting.
Of the twenty one students who turned up for induction to the first of our three electronic modules, nineteen had never used a networked computer before this despite the fact that they were third years, with reasonable access to computer facilities, who had been required to hand in typed essays in the past!
Interestingly, however, the level of computer literacy rose dramatically even during the short life of the project.
When we re-ran the module referred to above in the succeeding academic year we found that the proportions of experienced users to novices was reversed: nineteen had previous experience with using networked computers; two didn’t.
The third surprise was the extent of the difficulties caused us by copyright.
Obviously we anticipated problems here, but still the actual severity of our problems came as a shock.
We were, to an extent, cushioned from copyright problems with our first module, because most of the relevant readings were provided by our helpful project partners, Blackwell Publishing and Routledge.
With our second and third modules, however, we relied upon a far wider range of publishers.
Our inability to get copyright permissions for some key extracts in these areas seriously undermined the usefulness of the electronic modules we provided, and made it difficult for academic staff to plan their contribution to the modules.
We were also disappointed to find that publishers were virtually never able to supply us with electronic originals of texts: this meant that we had to create original electronic copies from print, imposing a heavy extra cost.
Though copyright remains the biggest difficulty for all On Demand and E-reserve projects it would be unwise to be despondent.
Electronic delivery is pre-eminently an area where the goal posts move with dizzying speed, and there is now an active dialogue between libraries and publishers largely thanks to eLib.
References [1] On-Demand Publishing in the Humanities http://www.livjm.ac.uk/on_demand/ Author Details Phil Sykes The Aldham Robarts Learning Resource Centre Liverpool John Moores University Mount Pleassant Liverpool L3 5UZ tel: 0151 2313147 fax: 0151 707 1307 p.sykes@livjm.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JEDDS: Joint Electronic Document Delivery Software Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JEDDS: Joint Electronic Document Delivery Software Project Buzz software infrastructure windows research Citation BibTex RIS Kerry Blinco provides details of a global electronic document delivery project.
JEDDS is the Joint Electronic Document Delivery Software [1] project.
The project aims to develop electronic document delivery to the desktop based on MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions).
It also seeks to improve the efficiency of document delivery services by providing links between document delivery systems and interlibrary loan management systems, and to foster the adoption of document delivery standards.
JEDDS is partly funded under the eLib [2] Programme.
Why is someone from the Antipodes managing an eLib project?
The Australian version of the Follett Report and eLib began in 1994 when the Australian government granted funding to the Australian ViceChancellors’ Committee to undertake a set of programs known as Projects for the Development of Library Infrastructure.
Dr Brian Cook, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Information and International Services at Griffith University, was appointed to chair the Program on Improved Information Infrastructure – Network Information Services, which included projects targeted at improving document delivery services in Australia.
The conditions of the funding included directions to avoid duplication of effort and to take into account the work being done within Australia and overseas.
JEDDS thus came into being.
Cook’s vision was of desktop electronic document delivery to the client.
The imperative was to develop the ability to deliver documents by e-mail using MIME.
We looked for opportunities within Australia to develop cooperative relationships with organisations who shared this vision.
The National Libraries of Australia and New Zealand soon became partners.
Brian Cook and Lynne Brindley (Chair of CEI) initiated discussions between the Australian and UK programs during 1994, but it was not until the announcement in June 1995 of the funding of four eLib electronic document delivery projects that detailed exploration of the potential for co-operation could occur.
As a result, the EDDIS project (Electronic Document Delivery – the Integrated Solution) [3] was nominated as the liaison partner on behalf of eLib.
As the project progressed, the other UK electronic document delivery projects have also become active in JEDDS.
The Research Libraries Group (RLG) in the US confirmed that it was interested in adding MIME delivery to its document delivery product, Ariel, and the JEDDS partnership was complete.
The last few months have been particularly exciting as the project is starting to deliver real product.
After successful testing, Ariel for Windows 2.0 will be released in February 1997.
In November, training for international Support Office staff was conducted at the National Library of Australia.
The software developed by JEDDS will be marketed worldwide as Ariel for Windows.
Each partner will distribute Ariel to their member organisations for the next five years, and a Support Office will be established in each country.
The project will also contribute significantly to developments in document delivery standards over the period of the project.
Development will be completed in the fourth quarter of 1997.
References JEDDS Web Site, http://www.gu.edu.au/alib/iii/docdel/jointdev.htm eLib programme Web Site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ EDDIS project flyer, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/eddis/ Author Details Ms Kerry Blinko, JEDDS Project Manager email: K.Blinco@gu.edu.au Tel: +617 3875 7231 Fax: +617 3875 7845 Address: Division of Information Services, Griffith University, Queensland 4111, Australia Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Report on the WWW 6 Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Report on the WWW 6 Conference Buzz software java javascript html database xml usability browser sgml dtd multimedia cache gif adobe utf-8 dom Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly describes the sixth International World Wide Web conference which took place in California from 7 – 11 April 1997.
The Sixth International World Wide Web Conference took place from 7-11th April 1997 in Santa Clara, California, USA.
I attended the conference in my capacity as the JISC representative on the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium).
About 1,800 people attended the conference.
This figure was down on the last two years, due possibly to the close proximity of other conferences the Javasoft conference attracted about 8,000 delagates and the Microsoft Hardware Engineering conference about 15,000 delegates.
Both of these conference took place the week before the WWW 6 conference.
The main part of the conference took place from Tuesday, 8th April to Thursday, 10th April.
Over these two days there were a number of Technical Sessions, covering themes such as Caching, Beyond HTML, Database Query Techniques and Usability Issues.
In addition to the Technical Programme (which was based on refereed papers) there were also a number of Plenary Talks, Industrial Sessions, Business Presentations, W3C Presentations Collaborative Events and Birds of a Feather sessions.
On Tuesday, 7th April there were a number of half-day Tutorial and Workshop sessions.
The conference Developer’s Day was held on Friday, 11th April.
On the same day the first History Track took place.
Main Themes Of The Conference XML Two years ago the major talking point at the WWW conference was Java.
This year Java seems to be accepted as the language for developing Web applications.
The major new talking point was XML, the Extensible Markup Language.
XML has emerged from the SGML community as a lightweight version of SGML, designed for use on the network.
Using XML information service providers, or even individual authors, can define the structure for their documents.
Currently it is not possible using HTML to define a rich structure for an information resource.
We do not have (and will not expect HTML to have) tags such as <STAFF-NUM>, <ISBN> or <LATITUDE>.
With XML it will be possible to define such elements.
The definition of the elements (known as the DTD or Document Type Definition) can be sent along with the document.
This is known as a valid XML document.
An example is shown below: <?XML version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8” ?> <!DOCTYPE greeting [ <!ELEMENT greeting (PCDATA)> ]> <greeting>Hello World!</greeting> However the DTD does not have to be defined.
The following is an example of a well-formed XML document.
<greeting>Hello World!</greeting> Note that there are a number of rules which a well-formed XML document must satisfy, such as: All attribute values must be quoted e.g.
<A HREF=“index.html”> and not <A HREF=index.html> Elements must contain a closing tag e.g.
<P>Notice the end paragraph tag</P> and not <P>The end paragraph tag is missing Empty elements (elements which do not have an end tag) must be defined e.g.
<IMG SRC=“logo.gif”/> As XML is an extensible markup language it can be used to define rich structures in documents.
The big question, however, is how and whether browsers will support XML.
As the XML FAQ says “with a few small changes an HTML browser like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer would be able to read XML (the designers of XML would really like the authors of Navigator and Internet Explorer to make those changes)”.
Further information on XML is given in the XML FAQ [1] Cougar Cougar is the codename for the next version of HTML.
The Cougar specification [2] is due to be released in the summer.
It contains a number of components, some of which have already been released: WD-htmllink [3] which introduces the linking mechanisms for HTML and provides a few basic recommendations describing current practice, based upon discussions with search engine vendors.
WD-style [4] which extends HTML to provide support for style rules.
WD-script [5] which extends HTML to support locally executable scripts including JavaScript, VBScript, and other scripting languages.
WD-frames [6] which describes frame documents, the HTML syntax for frames, frame implementation notes, and includes a new proposal for extensions.
WD-forms [7] which describes proposed extensions for rich forms and interactive documents.
Particular emphasis is placed upon access for people with disabilities.
WD-object [8] which extends HTML to support the insertion of multimedia objects including Java applets, Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) objects (e.g.
ActiveX Controls and ActiveX Document embeddings), and a wide range of other media plug-ins.
WD-entities [9] which extends HTML to support additional named entities for all characters in ISO 8859-1, all characters representable by glyphs in the Adobe Symbol font, and entities required for Internationalisation Unlike the HTML 3.0 specification, Cougar is being developed in conjunction with the major software vendors (including Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, IBM, etc.)
Microsoft, in particular, were well represented at the WWW 6 conference and their presentation of Internet Explorer 4.0 in the Industrial Session emphasised their implementation of various aspects of Cougar.
Interesting Papers There were several interesting papers presented at the conference.
A brief summary of some of the papers presented insessions I attended is given below.
Towards An Advanced Multimedia Oriented Retrieval Engine Sougata Mukherjea’s paper on “Towards An Advanced Multimedia Oriented Retrieval Engine” [10] will be of interest to developers of information gateways.
The paper describes a search engine which can be used for searching for images, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The AMORE Interface Responsive Interaction for a Large Web Application Arturo Crespo’s talk on “Responsive Interaction for a Large Web Application” [10] describes WebWriter, an HTML authoring tool.
WebWriter was initially developed as a server-based authoring tool, using a number of CGI scripts.
WebWriterII makes use of Java to transfer some of the processing to the client.
It will be interesting to see if applications such as this are developed to exploit the Document Object Model (DOM) for HTML, once browsers which support DOM become widely deployed.
Figure 2: The WebWriterII Interface Transforming Command-Line Driven Systems to Web Applications Constantinos Phanouriou’s paper on “Transforming Command-Line Driven Systems to Web Applications” [12] will interest programmers who have developed large applications which they wish to port to the Web.
This paper was another example of a utility which had been written using Java.
Conference Proceedings The proceedings for the WWW 6 conference are available on the Web [13].
Unfortunately, unlike the previous WWW conference, speakers slides were not made available in a central location.
As part of an online conference I will be hosting about the WWW 6 conference I have created a Web page which contains a number of trip reports and speakers’ slides [14].
References XML FAQ, http://www.textuality.com/xml/faq.html Cougar, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Cougar/ WD-htmllink, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-htmllink WD-style, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-htmllink WD-script, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-htmllink WD-frames, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-htmllink WD-forms, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-htmllink WD-object, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-htmllink WD-entities, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-htmllink Towards An Advanced Multimedia Oriented Retrieval Engine, http://www6.nttlabs.com/HyperNews/get/PAPER3.html Responsive Interaction for a Large Web Application The Meteor Shower Architecture in the WebWriter II Editor, http://www6.nttlabs.com/HyperNews/get/PAPER86.html Transforming Command-Line Driven Systems to Web Applications, http://www6.nttlabs.com/HyperNews/get/PAPER41.html WWW 6 Conference Proceedings, http://proceedings.www6conf.org/ WWW 6 Trip Reports, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/groups/web-focus/events/conferences/www6/focus/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus, Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web Focus Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisbk/ Tel: 01225 826838 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: ALISS and IRISS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: ALISS and IRISS Buzz html database metadata cataloguing copac mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom on recent developments and happenings with ALISS, IRISS, and SOSIG.
First call for papers for IRISS’98 An international conference on social science research and information on the Internet is planned for the 25-27 March 1998.
The conference will be held in Bristol in the UK and is being hosted by the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT)[1], home to SOSIG[2] and a number of other social science and Internet related projects.
The conference is aimed at social science researchers, practitioners and information professionals who are interested in the role and impact of the Internet on the social sciences and society in general.
The conference will also provide a platform for social science information providers involved in publishing over the Internet.
The first call for papers was announced in July 1997.
Conference themes The main themes for the conference will be Internet skills, sites and social effects: Skills To make full use of the Internet requires users to build and develop practical skills in a number of areas.
A pre-conference workshop for newcomers to the Internet will be available, as well as a series of hands-on workshops including sessions on how to evaluate the quality of information available over the Internet, HTML authoring and using metadata in Web pages.
IRISS’98 also welcomes papers on key issues in the areas of user education and Internet skill building.
Sites One of the difficulties Internet users face is knowing just what is available in their subject or area of interest.
An Internet Gallery will provide conference delegates with access to some of the key social science Internet services from the academic, government, voluntary and commercial sectors.
The conference organisers invite social science information providers to promote their services by giving a paper or having a display in the Internet Gallery.
Social effects The Internet promises to transform the lives of individuals and society; to what extent have these transformations already taken place?
How has the Internet changed people’s daily work?
IRISS’98 welcomes papers that describe research into the social impact of the Internet or case studies of how the Internet has impacted their teaching or research.
General conference details A provisional programme is available from the IRISS’98 website [3].
Submitting an abstract The deadline for abstracts for the conference is 7 November 1997.
Abstracts for papers should be submitted on the submission form and accompanied by a conference booking form.
Displaying at the Internet Gallery A fully networked computer suite will be available for social science information and service providers to exhibit and promote their sites.
More information Any queries or requests for further information should be sent to the IRISS’98 Conference Office email: iriss-info@bris.ac.uk ALISS AGM and update The Academic Librarians In the Social Sciences (ALISS) group was set up in 1994 to provide a forum for university social science librarians to meet together and discuss matters of mutual interest or keep abreast of developments in the area.
After an initial good start the group faltered slightly as some of the founder members left to take up new positions out of the social sciences.
However, after expressions of interest were raised about the continuation of the group a revitalisation meeting was held in July of last year and the membership has since expanded.
The Annual General Meeting of ALISS was held in June this year at the University of Manchester.
Delegates met the night before the AGM for a night out in Manchester, this began with a search for an appropriate venue for an evening meal and after a couple of false starts ended with a meal in an excellent curry house.
The more serious business began the next day when new officers to the group were elected and a regional steering committee set up (details of these are on the ALISS web site.)
It was agreed that the group should promote co-operation with other organisations and societies with similar interests in the UK and internationally.
To this end the new chair of ALISS (John Naylor from the University of Warwick) has since approached ASSIG (ASLIB Social Sciences Information Group) and the two groups will hold a joint meeting at the King’s Fund headquarters in London on 20 November 1997 to discuss areas of common ground.
Any ALISS members who would like to attend this meeting should contact Steve Lee at the University of Glamorgan (email address given below).
ALISS have also established representation on the SOSIG User Group.
It was agreed at the meeting that an annual institutional subscription of £20 should be levied to cover administration costs and allow the group to set up twice yearly events and meetings.
Meetings for 1998 were provisionally set for the IRISS’98 conference and the AGM at the University of Warwick.
This years AGM was combined with a MIDAS [4] seminar at the Manchester Computing Centre.
MIDAS is a national research support service providing access to online datasets, including the 1981⁄91 Census of Population Statistics for Great Britain and other continuous surveys; macro-economic time series databanks and digital map datasets.
MIDAS also provides facilities for the storage, access, manipulation and analysis of large and complex datasets for the academic community.
The introduction to MIDAS was accompanied by short presentations on two projects also based at Manchester: COPAC [5], a national consolidated online catalogue of university research libraries and the SuperJournal Project [6] which is a consortium of publishers, universities and libraries investigating key issues in providing successful electronic journals.
Finally Jose Manuel Barrueco from the NetEc [7] project demonstrated WoPEc a bibliographic database of economics working papers available over the Internet.
More information on ALISS There are currently 168 members on the ALISS Mailbase list lis-socialscience.
Anyone wishing to join the group should send an e-mail to: mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk with the message: join lis-socialscience firstname(s) lastname (replace with your own name) If you would like more details about ALISS contact Steve Lee at srvlee@glam.ac.uk or take a look at the ALISS website[8].
References [1] Institute for Learning and Research Technology http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ [2] SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ [3] IRISS’98 http://www.sosig.ac.uk/iriss/ [4] MIDAS http://midas.ac.uk/ [5] COPAC http://copac.ac.uk/copac/ [6] SuperJournal Project http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/sj/ [7] NetEc http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/~adnetec/local/NetEc.html [8] ALISS http://www.glam.ac.uk/lrc/aliss.htm Author Details Debra Hiom SOSIG Research Officer Email: D.Hiom@bristol.ac.uk Tel: 0117 928 8443 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JILT: Journal of Information, Law and Technology Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JILT: Journal of Information, Law and Technology Buzz data copyright hypertext multimedia Citation BibTex RIS Nicola Clare presents the case for an electronic journal in law.
The Journal of Information, Law and Technology is the first journal to be launched under the banner of the Electronic Law Journals project.
The Electronic Law Journals project brings together the Law Technology Centre at the University of Warwick and the Centre for Law, Computers and Technology at the University of Strathclyde in partnership.
The goal of this partnership is simply to revolutionise legal publishing.
The underlying aim of the project is to present suitable articles that are heightened by hyperlinks and accompanying demonstrations where possible.
The electronic only medium of presentation will take both types of subject matter and present them in a superior way to plain text on a page.
JILT represents the first stage of the overall project to create an interactive electronic legal journal environment with a number of original on-line journals and parallel editions of existing journals.
These will be not only IT related law journals but also journals of international relevance.
Alongside the journals there will be interactive discussions where authors, editors and readers can interact and debate articles.
The journal’s subject matter is a mix of articles on IT Law topics such as data protection as well as articles on IT applications relating to law.
This has been demonstrated by our first issue which included a downloadable run-time demonstration of a CAL package for teaching students how to write answers to contracts problems.
Articles of a non-technical nature benefit from hypertext links to sources such as the Data Protection Act and the European Data Protection Directive.
JILT has published 2 electronic editions to date.
We have initially stuck to the notion of issues in our start up phase, however where material ages quickly we can publish it prior to an issue or after.
Publishing in issues also means that we able to present a more cohesive body of articles such as those on Data Protection.
However we have exploited the fact that we are an electronic journal to date by publishing an article between the two on-line dates.
We have also used both issues to take advantage of the electronic medium.
Our articles on the European Data Protection Directive have links to source materials, and one of our articles on a CAL package designed to teach law students how to write an essay benefited from 2 types of demo.
A downloadable run-time version of the program and on-line imagemaps of selected screenshots of the package.
JILT is the first UK based on-line legal journal relating to all aspects of IT and Law.
The fact that it is UK based, should not give the impression that it is solely an outlet for UK contributors.
as is demonstrated by our special feature on the European Data Protection Directive which has contributions from Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and the Republic of Ireland.
This special feature continued in Issue 2 with a contribution from Belgium.
Articles are available from issue lists and subject lists which is a very useful feature of an on-line journal.
Author lists are also planned.
JILT is not only of use to IT Law academics but is also of use to a wider audience that have an interest in these increasingly litigious times to legal issues of the Information age such as data protection and copyright.
Published articles in the two editions so far include: Towards Open Access to British Official Documents, Professor Sol Picciotto Hypertext within Multimedia Applications in Legal Education, Richard Jones and John Scully Data Protection in Belgium, Sophie Louveaux From Academic Tombstones to Living Bazaars The Changing Shape of Law Reviews by Dr. Abdul Paliwala Contracts: An Introduction to the Skills of Legal Writing and Analysis by Dr Paul Maharg While we have stuck to “issues” for articles our news section and notices of conferences can be updated regularly as and when needed.
All articles are peer-reviewed in the normal way but we are looking to exploit the WWW in publishing Work In Progress articles which throw them open to much wider review.
We have just published such an article in our Work In Progress section.
JILT has been well received by readers and has received a lot of positive feedback for its design and layout.
The project is being funded under JISC’s eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme for three years after which time the journal will be self-financing through subscription.
JILT is edited by Abdul Paliwala, Ian Lloyd Moira Simpson and Andrew Terret assisted by an advisory board of distinguished international legal academics.
Further information is available from the editors email: editor@themis.law.warwick.ac.uk JILT is available from http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/ http://elj.strath.ac.uk/jilt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur: Metadata -To Be, Or Not to Be (Catalogued) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: Metadata -To Be, Or Not to Be (Catalogued) Buzz data metadata schema udc lcsh ddc research standards Citation BibTex RIS Gordon Dunsire thinks that all is not rosy in the garden that is metadata, and wonders how it can assist cataloguing in a real-world sense.
Metadata [1]: it’s one of those words that rolls off the tongue; I expect Tony Hancock of h-h-h-half hour fame, could have had some fun with it, as in (I think) the Blood donor, where the ‘drinka pinta milka day’ slogan catches his eye eatametadataday, anyone?
What I want to rant about in this column is something close, yet ‘further away’ metametadata.
If metadata is ‘data about data’, then metametadata is ‘data about metadata’.
While the Webblies have at last cottoned on to the need for some kind of structured approach to information retrieval, and there is much gnashing of teeth about Dublin cores and the like, the emphasis remains on structure, rather than content.
In other words, it’s all very nice to know that most, if not all, Web objects ought to indicate who the ‘author’ is, and what subjects are covered, etc., but where are the guidelines on how to formulate the content of this metadata?
Is it OK to enter ‘Gordon Dunsire’ as the author of this object, or should it be ‘G Dunsire’, or come to that, ‘Dunsire, Gordon’, etc.?
And what happens if I use a pseudonym, not to conceal but to categorise various types of output?
Will the form I choose make a difference to the reader’s ability to search for all the stuff on the Web that’s written by me?
Or about me?
Do search-engines know that ‘G Dunsire’ and ‘Dunsire, Gordon’ are the same thing?
And that ‘George Dunsire’ isn’t?
What happens if my name is ‘John Smith’?
And that’s the easy bit!
Most people know what their name(s) are, and most people understand personal name inversion to allow filing under surname.
But what about subject content?
Some cataloguers indulge in fantasies whereby all ‘authors’ entitle their works with the appropriate Library of Congress Subject Heading (unfortunately, LCSH isn’t even consistent within itself) or, better still, the classification number (but then, which scheme: DDC, UDC, LC, other?).
Thus, instead of ‘The World Wide Web unleashed’ we get ‘004.6’; this has the advantages of brevity and accuracy.
The book (a hypoWeb object) is not about dogs or spiders; it’s about computer communications (or is it?).
The trouble is, it’s not very readeror author-friendly, and authors do like to intrigue with their titles.
Richard Dawkins is a shining example: ‘The extended phenotype: the gene as the unit of selection’ (nice one!
); ‘The selfish gene’ (ok, probably about genetics); ‘The blind watchmaker’ (wha???
); ‘Climbing Mount Improbable’ (give us a break!).
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.” “The question is”, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.” [2] So who is to be master?
Most cataloguers would say, if not the author, then the authority file.
Standardised lists of metadata content terms have been around for some time.
Names are taken care of with the combined British Library/Library of Congress file (in English transliteration, at least).
Subject words and headings have some standarisation with LCSH, although not perfect.
In general, there should be standardised answers to the interrogative primitives of ‘who?’ (personal and corporate names), ‘when’ (standard event citations including date and time), ‘where’ (standard geographical thesauri and gazetteers), ‘which’ (publication and event titles as citations), and combinations.
This is achievable through a little international cooperation, and with some training and guidelines, it might even be possible to get authors to add such metadata at source, using readily available authority files.
It is, after all, in the authors’ best interests for their publications to be accurately retrieved; unless, of course, they want them to be retrieved for quantitative rather than qualitative purposes.
If the former, then the best thing to do is classify their publication as ‘Pornography visual’, and use the word ‘sex’ in the title and at least twenty times in the first paragraph.
I guess Richard Dawkins prefers the latter, but I wonder if he’s saving ‘sex’ for his magnum opus?
I doubt whether we will get authors to comply with authority schemes, even if we could agree amongst ourselves as to what the standards are.
In any case, the problem of subject indexing using a universal, standard scheme is intractable; librarians have been unable to do it, so why should we expect authors to?
And yet we can’t just leave it up to the search-engines, for exactly the same reasons.
If there was such a beast as a universal subject classification schema, then I bet research into strong Artificial Intelligence would have been far more fruitful than it has been.
As it is, it is near-impossible to ‘teach’ a know-bot (yuk!)
that ‘a blind Venetian’ is not the same thing as ‘a Venetian blind’ without providing an exhaustive, prescriptive look-up table, but such a table would constitute a universal scheme for categorising human knowledge.
And if you think that some magical trigger-point will be reached, where a sufficient bulk of human knowledge in machine-readable form (for example the Web) can be used as the basis of a look-up table, then think of all the ‘noise’, remember Garbage-In, Garbage-Out, and try reading ‘Godel, Escher, Bach’ [3] for an explanation of strange loops and self-referential systems.
So we can’t get standardised metadata assembled at source, automated ‘post-coordinate’ indexing has huge limitations, and we don’t want to leave the reader drowning in a sea of false-drops.
Enter the cavalry in the form of the cataloguer.
Isn’t it about time we pointed out the error of their WAIS (sorry, couldn’t resist that one) and did something about it?
“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” [4].
References [1] The UKOLN Metadata Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/ [2] Through the looking glass, Lewis Carroll.
[3] An eternal golden braid, Hofstadter, Douglas R. Godel, Escher, Bach, 1979.
[4] Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (Introduction to the 1865 ed.
), Lewis Carroll.
Author Details Gordon Dunsire, Head of Information Strategy and IT Development, Napier University Email: g.dunsire@napier.ac.uk Tel: 0131 455 3427 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Net Gains for Digital Researchers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Net Gains for Digital Researchers Buzz data database archives thesaurus vocabularies copyright video sgml multimedia visualisation ascii gis interoperability research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Amy Friedlander, the editor of D-Lib, looks at, and towards, some of the benefits of the Web and digital technology towards how we do and present research.
Predicting the future is a risky business.
On the one hand, the current instantiation of the Internet and the World Wide Web interfaces will one day become obsolete -perhaps sooner than we think.
On the other hand, some configuration of networked digital information technologies is here to stay.
Moreover, many of the tools and behaviors that arise to tap the web's potential will migrate as the underlying technologies evolve.
Thus, the Internet is far more than a set of data transfer protocols operating over a series of leased lines, packet switches, and servers.
It is also an opportunity to consider what happens when a lot of people of different skills and expectations begin to play with advanced information and communications capabilities.
Given the inevitability of technological change coupled with the persistence of human behavior, the question resolves into one of aesthetics: what do the digital technologies let us do that is unique to this networked environment?
that we cannot do -or do well -elsewhere?
Leaving aside the implications of e-mail for rapid and accurate interpersonal and group communications, I see at least four technology-independent characteristics on the web that affect the way we do and present research: hyperlinks within and across documents and collections; the malleability and de-contextualization of digital data, which enables users to store, subdivide, and combine information within the same digital medium; support for multimedia, including text, sound, still and moving images; and interactivity, which has a number of dimensions of which surfing, searching, and filtering are the most widely appreciated.
Rarely do any of these features occur in isolation.
In combination, they have the paradoxical potential of empowering the individual to identify data and describe results, and enabling the collective activities, such as building very large data sets, sharing and re-using data, and accessing information too large and complex to be maintained by any single organization.
Other observers of the impact of new information technologies on scholarly research have commented on the significance of hyperlinks, multimedia, and interactivity.
For example, in American Archivist (Spring 1992), Arva Michelson and Jeff Rothenberg argued that connectivity and end-user computing were the two major trends in scholarly communication, and that the net effect was to enhance the "autonomy of the researcher" (p.244).
Enabling the end-user is implicit in notions of interactivity, which together with hyperlinks and multimedia are among the "novel features" that Steve Hitchcock and his colleagues at the Open Journal project identified in on-line scholarly publishing in science, technology, and medicine.
Biologists, the authors observe, found this environment appropriate to the visual depictions of their data and built databases that were conducive to sharing information and stimulating continued research.
Indeed, Nature as well as other well-respected publications now require require authors of articles containing genetic sequence data to submit these data directly to one of the recognized genetic databanks (e.g., GenBank) as a prerequisite of publication to ensure that the data are in the public domain.
Positive feedback relationships among display of information, storage technologies, and the ways in which researchers understand, collect, and work with data extend to other subject domains.
Indeed, the central assumption of digital libraries -the subject of the on-line magazine I edit -is the existence of collections of digital information linked by communications networks that enable access by individual researchers anywhere and at any time.
In addition to preprint archives in science and mathematics and such well-known biomedical projects as the Human Genome and the Human Brain, which integrate advanced computing and information technologies to support future investigations and applications, collections have been constructed around rare texts and artifacts, notably Beowulf, the Perseus project, and Thesaurus Florentinus.
In the Thesaurus Florentinus, digital imaging and storage technologies have enabled the creation of a series of images of restoration work at the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence that themselves constitute a re-usable information resource.
Thus, the "raw materal" of research results can coalesce into collections that possess underlying digital consistency.
Similar collections of digital information in history and the social sciences are maintained by the Economic and Social Research Council Data Archive at the University of Essex (ESRC) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [ICPSR].
These centers accept submssions, update the formats, and offer users search capabilities.
Courtesy of the digital technologies and the network, then, the process of building the collection has at least partially devolved to the researchers themselves, who are invited to submit data or reports in a common format; the notion of a collection is enlarged, and access to uniform data is expanded.
Although the autonomy of the user is enhanced, as Michaelson and Rothenberg argue, so, too, are the opportunities to collaborate not merely through the established process of papers and conferences but also in nut-and-bolts that support the reseach.
In this sense, though, the network reinforces and offers coherence to but does not necessarily create the community of scholars itself, which coalesces around common interests.
On the other hand, the very ease of discovering and sharing information on the net means that researchers may find common interests where they had earlier believed there were none.
Part of the ease of using the web stems from the visual, point-and-click technology, perhaps the best example of how visualization informs and alters the way we work -an observation about end-user computing that Michelson and Rothenberg also made.
At the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the researchers employ digital imaging technologies combined with greater computing power to create and capture new information on brain function and pathologies.
Particularly dramatic is the use of video, so that the representation of brain function can be displayed dynamically in real time.
Potentially anyone with access to the data and the necessary equipment can re-use the verifiably identifical information.
Of course, continued observation remains necessary to control for distortions in the initial observations as well as to advance the knowledge base.
But re-visiting the original sources -whether in history, music, or biology -reduces or eliminates a level of ambiguity.
Moreover, research on visualization may offer new tools for examining conceptual relationships while traversing them seemingly effortlessly and for (see, for example, the summary of related work at Xerox PARC in the June issue of D-Lib Magazine).
In addition to capturing, re-using, and visualizing information, the digital technologies also enable integration of multiple types of information.
For example, compilation and registration of information captured in three different technologies and hundreds of digital images enabled the creation of the Visible Human, an on-line biomedical resource for human anatomy.
Roy Williams has made a similar case for user-defined hypermapping by extending the idea of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with multiple data sets in a recent issue of the Cal Tech's Engineering & Science.
He envisions a distributed information environment that supports constructing self-defined documents on the fly from complex sources of information too large and too infrequently used to be housed by a single user or institution.
And in the June issue of D-Lib Magazine, David Fenske and Jon Dunn argue that digital representations of music can enable musicologists to move from scoreor text-based analyses toward explorations based on the digital recordings themselves.
In three of these examples -genetics, medicine, and cartography -there exists an agreed-upon structure that underlies the organization of the digital data: the notion of genetic code, the basic human anatomy, and earth mapping systems.
Conventional text offers a harder problem, because its form is defined by the writer, witness e.e.
cummings.
Of course, most text is not poetry.
In print on paper, we have used organization, layout, and typesetting as well as text to convey meaning.
The Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML), with its various applications to historic documents and text storage and retrieval, focuses our attention on structure and provides a standard vocabulary and representation for a field that was formerly dominated by paleographers and literary critics.
We can begin, then, to talk about consistences across material as diverse as rare manuscripts and professional engineering journals.
The web feature that we most associate with making connections within and across documents and other objects is hyperlinking.
Links have let us do some wonderful things: We can extend information in the way that footnotes, marginal commentary, appendices, and bibliographies have traditionally extended and annotated text and images.
Consider, for example, Project Bartleby at Columbia University, which offers versions of English and American literary works in which the annotations can be invoked on demand.
Secondly, we can assemble collections of related material from multiple locations either permanently or as needed, witness WebMuseum or any of the information clearinghouses.
Finally, in crafted presentations, we can be emancipated from some of the linear constraints of text, hence the proliferation of home pages with imagemaps, tables of contents, keys, and outlines as devices for helping users navigate the information contained within a conceptual space.
In its current form, hyperlinking is, nonetheless, limited.
As Howard Webber cautioned D-Lib Magazine, "for sustained knowledge work, casual hyperlinking is like having a conversation interrupted every minute or so by someone who wants to talk about something slightly different."
Thus, hyperlinking contributes to the de-contextualization of information.
This de-contextualizing occurs at many levels.
In the physical sense, representations of rare items, like Beowulf, can be de-coupled from the physical artifact, affording perhaps a higher level of scrutiny as well as broader access.
VRML technologies let users view complex structures from vantage points not otherwise feasible, just as the Visible Human can allow students to practice virtual surgery, and wavelets permit progressive resolution of extremely large images potentially offering users access to relevant portions or details.
Moreover, we talk about searching by "keywords", or strings of characters, over swaths of text in the same way that segments of genetic code can be searched in GenBank.
Still, writers, editors, and librarians worry a lot about these broad searches, particularly in domains in which the language is used evocatively or in which the underlying concepts have evolved.
As an informal experiment, I ran the word "cancer" over the Library of Congress' on-line historical collections.
The first document retrieved was a transcript of an oral history in which the informant mentioned his brush with the disease.
The second item was a newspaper's reporting of Booker T. Washington's 1898 Jubilee Thanksgiving address in which he "likened the effect of race discrimination, especially in the Southern States [of the U.S.A.], to a cancer gnawing at the heart of the republic."
Experienced users automatically resolve the semantic ambiguity.
Naive users, confronted with less obvious choices in usage, need help to discriminate useful from misleading information.
We immigrants from print are hardly alone in our concern for the integrity of the information.
Indeed, there is considerable research into issues of semantic interoperability and information retrieval, which addresses one aspect of disembodied text.
There remains the question of how the artifact adds to the meaning of the text.
Some of this relationship can be captured by SGML.
But more is conveyed by the physical item itself.
Consider the preceding example: holding the yellowing scrap of newsprint instantly tells the user that a reporter intervened between Washington and posterity; holding notes in Washington's hand tells the user what he intended to say.
Solutions to issues of data capture and re-use that preserve the context but do not constrain de-construction and analysis are likely to arise in many forms and many tools from user interfaces and visualization tools to storage and retrieval.
For example, JSTOR provides bitmapped images of pages as well as ASCII text, taking advantage of efficiencies of digital storage and searching while preserving the traditional benefits of layout.
Other efforts such as Stanford's ComMentor and Berkeley's multivalent document model are exploring the notion of a document as well as the creation of web annotation and collaborative tools that promise to sustain interactions with the information among reseachers and over time in the tradition of Ted Nelson's original vision of transclusion, "or reuse with original context available, through embedded shared instancing" (Communications of the ACM, August 1995, p. 32).
To borrow Webber's words, such tools will "allow multithreaded information to weave a highly personal fabric of specific meaning for individual users," which they may share or hold private as the situation demands.
Amy Friedlander Editor, D-Lib Magazine Copyright © 1996 Corporation for National Research Initiatives Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A National Co-ordinating Body for Digital Archiving?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A National Co-ordinating Body for Digital Archiving?
Buzz data java html database dissemination archives doi identifier repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing graphics cd-rom research standards Citation BibTex RIS David Haynes discusses one possible way forward for ensuring that potentially valued digital materials are preserved for future study and use.
During the supporting study the authors consulted various stake-holders in the creation, distribution and use of digital materials.
A number of recommendations arose from this study and are presented in this paper.
These recommendations are not official policy and represent the authors’ views of one possible way forward for ensuring that potentially valued digital materials are preserved for future study and use.
How the study originated The JISC-funded study on ‘Responsibility for long term preservation and access to digital materials’ extended beyond rights holders to include all stakeholders in the production, exploitation, distribution and preservation of digital materials (see Figure 1 below).
Much of the current debate on digital archiving was started by the Task Force on Digital Archiving in the USA, which recommended the development of a national system of digital archives to act as repositories for digital information.
The Task Force felt that: Without the operation of a formal certification program and a fail-safe mechanism, preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage in digital form will likely be overly dependent on marketplace forces, which may value information for too short a period and without applying broader, public interest criteria.
Figure 1 Production of Electronic Publications The RLG/CPA Report (2) was subsequently analysed by a team at Loughborough University (3) which came up with eight prioritised actions, including: · appointing a National Digital Preservation Officer, · establishing a National Digital Preservation Body, · devising guidelines on practice and a digital preservation policy, Methods of consultation The researchers appointed for the joint BLRIC NPO study conducted a 39 face-to-face and telephone interviews and conducted a series of four focus group meetings to identify the main issues and to develop some priorities for topics to be addressed in any future archiving policy for digital materials.
The focus was on who should be responsible for long-term preservation, how long the materials should be preserved for, who should have access to these materials, and who pays the cost of archiving.
Definitions Digital materials can include everything from electronic publications on CD-ROM to online databases and collections of experimental data in digital format.
Although we excluded material that was published in printed form and subsequently digitised from the study, many of the same considerations apply to this material as well.
For the purposes of this study the following definition of digital materials was used: Digital archive material is text, data or documents originated in electronic form.
This data may be made available to the public in electronic or printed form or it may result from publicly-funded research or be produced by public bodies.
The scope does not cover conventional printed publication that re subsequently digitised for study or conservation.
Compilations of data on CD-ROM, electronic databases and documents available via the Internet are included in this definition.
Stationary and moving images and sound recordings held on digital media are also included in the scope of this definition.
Co-ordination Material which is suitable for archiving comes from a variety of sources including commercial publishers, the academic community, and government departments and agencies.
Each of these groups has its own priorities (making a profit, being accountable to the public, dissemination of research results widely, keeping the nation’s intellectual heritage) and is therefore unlikely to subscribe to a common archiving policy.
A co-ordinating body vested with the authority to formulate policy on digital archiving, advise government and carry out legislative or statutory requirements would be able to implement a consistent archiving policy.
The remit of the body would be to co-ordinate digital archiving activities in the public domain.
A suggested title is the National Office of Digital Archiving or NODA (the name by which we will refer to this proposed body from now on.
NODA would provide a forum to represent the interests and views of the different stakeholders including rights holders such as authors of experimental data and publishers.
In our view the co-ordinating role should be separated from the archiving role which would be delegated to specialist agencies.
The role of NODA would be to develop appropriate standards of service and to arbitrate where there are disputes about who is responsible for which materials.
NODA would also provide a focus for liaison with digital archiving bodies in other countries and international agencies.
By setting archiving standards and selecting appropriate bodies to provide the archiving services, NODA will be taking on a policing role.
It would be answerable to the government through its sponsoring department.
Distributed archive Digital materials are very diverse in their format and scope and can range from sound recordings through to experimental raw data in electronic form.
Even text-based materials can range from html files with embedded Java scripts used for Web sites to Word processed documents incorporating graphics and spreadsheet data.
Specialist skills are required to handle different types of material.
Rather than centralising this activity we envisage a distributed archive, with the responsibility for archiving different materials being vested with specific bodies.
Some of these may be public bodies such as the National Sound Archive, the Public Record Office, or the British Library for instance.
Other areas could be handled by commercial organisations with the appropriate resources and expertise, on a contract basis, such as publishers, data storage and recovery companies and private picture libraries.
Some material of particular national interest could become the responsibility of the National Library of Scotland or the National Library of Wales.
This approach would necessitate the establishment of a national register of archived digital material.
The starting point for this would be an audit of existing digital archives.
Production of detailed catalogue records would be the responsibility of the individual archiving agencies, using agreed standards.
The feasibility of using a common descriptor such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) should be explored.
Material should be divided into specific categories such as: Electronic publications including text, databases, digital sound and digital video Electronic public records records generated electronically by public bodies in the course of their business and falling within the remit of the Public Record Acts.
Data generated in the course of publicly funded research or private-sector research regulated by national or European legislation Standards and guidelines NODA would be responsible for the development of guidelines for retention and preservation of digital materials so that individual items can be identified and managed effectively.
There is on-going debate about the relative merits of preserving digital materials in their original formats or of converting them to one of a few well-supported formats.
It is probably not possible to make hard and fast rules about preservation or conservation of materials in the long-term.
In practice some materials may be kept both in its original format so that the future researchers have a better appreciation of all the proprietary features and attributes.
In such cases conservation in a standard format would probably also be advisable with a migration policy to ensure future readability.
Selection and permanent retention The majority of those consulted during the project felt that material selected for preservation should be kept for ever.
Selection would probably be based on content rather than form, although some exemplars of a particular format may be preserved for future historians.
Electronic publications could be subjected to similar criteria used for printed documents on legal deposit.
Public records in electronic form fall under the public records Acts and are within the domain of the Public Record Office.
Sampling may be appropriate for some categories of material.
Although some put forward the idea of periodic reviews of archived material we believe that this is incompatible with the idea of permanent retention of selected material.
One of the problems of periodic reviews is that priorities change and selection criteria could change to such a degree that material of value to future users is lost.
Funding Public funding is probably the only way to ensure continuity of archives.
This could be through a variety of public bodies including the legal deposit libraries (if their remit is extended to cover electronic documents), research councils, and the Public Record Office.
Recovering the full economic costs of archiving by charging users is unlikely to be viable, because the charges would probably be prohibitive and this would deter users from consulting historical digital materials.
This in turn would reduce the number of users sharing the costs, raising the cost to individual users.
Conclusion A National Office for Digital Archiving represents one possible way of carrying forward the agenda on digital archiving.
The problem of preserving (or at least conserving) digital materials is growing and a coherent, co-ordinated national strategy needs to be put in place.
Already potentially valuable material has been lost.
The next stage in this process should be to conduct a feasibility study for the development of a national digital archiving policy.
This study would need to explore the main options that are available and provide some costings for these alternatives.
This would then form the basis of a business case for the formation of NODA.
References Haynes D, Streatfield D, Jowett T, and Blake M. Responsibility for Digital Archiving and Long Term Access to Digital Data.
JISC/PO Study on the Preservation of Electronic Materials.
London, LITC, August 1997 Water, D and Garrett, J.
Preserving Digital Information.
Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by The Commission on Preservation and Access and The Research Libraries Group, Inc. 1996.
ISBN 1-887334-50-5.
(http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/) Matthews, G, Poulter, A and Blagg, E. Preservation of Digital Materials: Policy and Strategy for the UK.
JISC/NPO Studies on the Preservation of Electronic Materials.
British Library Research and Innovation Centre, 1997.
ISBN: 0-7123-3313-4, ISSN: 1366-8218.
British Library Research and Innovation Report 41.
National Library of Australia, National Preservation Office.
Statement of Principles: Preservation of and Long-Term Access to Australian Digital Objects.1997.
National Library of Australia.
Legal Deposit in Australia, Fourth edition, 1997.
Last updated 12 May 1997. http://www.nla.gov.au/1/services/ldeposit.html) National Library of Canada Electronic Publications Pilot Project.
Summary of the Final Report, 1996.
Department of National Heritage, Scottish Office, Welsh Office, Department of Education Northern Ireland.
Legal Deposit of Publications: a consultation paper.
Department of National Heritage, February 1997.
8.Copyright and the digital environment.
Managing Information 3 (1) Jan 96, p.25-6.
ISSN: 13520229.
(Statement prepared by the Library Association, UK /JCC working party on copyright which includes representatives of: Aslib, the Association for Information Management, the Institute of Information Scientists, the Standing Conference on National University Libraries, and the Society of Archivists.)
9.Hendley, A.
The Preservation of Digital Material.
London, British Library, 1996 (BL R&D Report 6242) 10.
Long Term Preservation of Electronic Materials.
A JISC/British Library Workshop as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
Organised by UKOLN 27th and 28th November 1995 at the University of Warwick.
Report prepared by the Mark Fresko Consultancy.
The British Library, 1996.
BL R&D Report 6328.
Author details David Haynes and David Streatfield Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The People's Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The People's Library Buzz infrastructure research Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh discusses the latest noises from government over public library networking and life-long learning.
As this issue goes to print, the response to New Library: the People’s Network [1] is awaited.
At the same time, David Blunkett has recently made a statement which can only add to the interest in the topics covered by the LIC proposals.
The green paper The Learning Age [2] in some ways pulls together a number of issues dealt with in the Dearing [3] and Kennedy [4] reports and in New Library: the People’s Network.
While we do not yet know what the response to this latter document will be, responses to the other publications were published alongside the new green paper.
In the press release, David Blunkett referred among other things to “a programme of measures which link new, practical means of delivering learning with the mechanisms for giving individuals both expectations and choice.
Building on existing expectations and excellence, we offer through the University for Industry and digital and interactive communication together with individual learning accounts a new approach to learning in the 21st century….The use of computers, the Internet and digital technology allow us to bring learning closer and more conveniently placed for the needs of the learner, at home, at work and where people spend their leisure time as well as in more traditional centres of learning, colleges and universities.” Local libraries are specifically mentioned as centres where technology will be available, and the response to The People’s Network ought to mesh with the thinking in the green paper.
So what can we hope for?
On an inside page of this issue, Mel Collier goes on record with his view that the UK will soon get an integrated superhighway pulling together a public library network, Janet and Superjanet, the National Grid for Learning and other developments.
If Blunkett’s vision is to be realised, this will be an essential outcome of The People’s Network, and other things will also be important.
The network is clearly going to be crucial, and it is to be hoped that the response to The People’s Network will pick up the report’s sections covering infrastructure, implementation and evaluation.
The willingness to attach costs, albeit provisional, and the proposals for proper and exhaustive programmes of research were welcome aspects of the proposals, and should satisfy the technocrats and accountants.
Some focussing on the skills issue will also be important.
It is a little worrying that some apparently unconventional access points will be used for the University of Industry on the grounds that they are more welcoming than colleges.
Let us hope that as skills like net navigating will not remain exclusive to librarians the skills monopoly will not be lost.
Users will not come to information services as technological neophytes and one of the worrying things about The People’s Network was that there was little in the services detailed in the report, and in the illustrative scenarios, which could not eventually be done outside a library and without the intervention of a librarian.
The press release of the 25th February indicated that most of the major recommendations of the Dearing committee would be accepted, and there was specific reference to the new Institute of Learning and Teaching.
This might be a good place to start providing for the new skills librarians will need, and also to tackle the huge task of the new approaches required for training in the use of electronic sources.
The People’s Network is a judicious mix of radicalism, caution and vision.
It is conscious of the human dimension of technological change, and there is a section on achieving the right balance in user issues.
It is to be hoped that the response will hold to this, and to the principle of free provision of information at the point of use which was enshrined in the document.
How the government reacts to The People’s Network will weave the last threads into a tapestry of proposals for opening up access to education.
Information services, public and academic, conventional and electronic or digital, have a part to play which has not always been clearly articulated by all of the reports which have appeared during the last year.
Nevertheless, with the Dearing Report, Learning Works (the Kennedy Report), Prospects: a Strategy for Action and the green paper The Learning Age, we have a corpus of proposals which will allow information services to play a full part in creating “fair and accessible learning opportunities …for all our people.” References [1] New Library: the People’s Network.
LIC 1997 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/ [2] The Learning Age.
DfEE 1998 Press release http://www.coi.gov.uk/coi/depts/GDE/coi8169d.ok [3]Higher Education in the Learning Society (Dearing Committee).
HMSO 1997 http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ [4]Learning Works (Kennedy Committee).
FEFC 1997 Summary produced by NIACE http://www.niace.org.uk/Organisation/advocacy/kennedybriefing.htm Author details Lyndon Pugh, Ariadne Managing Editor, Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Securing HTML FORMs Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Securing HTML FORMs Buzz data html database apache browser rfc passwords authentication algorithm standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight discusses some of the options available to the designers and implementors of HTML FORMs for providing authentication of users in a library environment.
There are now many HTML FORMs in use in libraries of all types.
These forms are usually the front ends to Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs that implement such things as webopacs, electronic ILL requests and access to backend databases.
Often these FORMs have to be authenticated to ensure that only valid library users can make use of the services.
Web browsers and servers offer a number of a facilities for doing this authentication, each with different benefits and problems.
This article provides a brief overview of the choices available.
The Password TYPE in <INPUT> The <INPUT> element is used in HTML FORMs to allow the user to enter data and make selections from check boxes and radio buttons.
One of the available TYPE attributes of the <INPUT> element understood by most FORMs capable web browsers is password.
This type provides an text input box for the user but the browser does not actually render the characters that are entered.
Instead, they are replaced by asterisks, or in some cases nothing at all.
When the FORM is submitted to the server, the contents of this element are transmitted just as though they had come from a normal text input box.
This mechanism prevents other users from seeing a user's password on the screen as it is being entered.
It has the advantages that it is easy for the user to use, easy for the FORM/CGI script designer to use and is widely implemented in web browsers.
However, that preventing the password from being seen on the screen is really the only security that it provides.
The password itself is sent over the network in the clear which means that anybody monitoring the network traffic will be able to see the password.
It is therefore only really suitable for situations where the FORM is only being used over a local area, physically secured network.
Also other users can often use the browser's back function to go back to the FORM, change other fields and then re-enter the FORM with same, valid password.
This is especially important to note in public access situations where a single machine is used by many users.
Timing out the Password TYPE To overcome the last of the difficulties with the password TYPE, one can take advantage of the fact that the FORM is providing a front end to a CGI script to add some extra cryptography.
One way of doing this is generate a cryptographic hash value based on the time the original FORM was generated concatenated to a secret value known only to the server that generated the form.
This cryptographic hash can be generated by one of the Message Digest series of cryptographic functions such MD4 (see RFC 1320).
It is then concatenated with the plain text version of the time and placed in an <INPUT>; element with a hidden TYPE in the FORM, along with the <INPUT> element with the password TYPE and any other FORM elements.
The hidden <INPUT> element forms a time limited session ID for the password entry.
When this FORM is returned by the browser, the first thing that the CGI script has to do is to split the session ID into it two constituent plain text time and hashed parts.
It then recomputes the hash value using the plain text version of the time and checks to see if it matches the hashed value it received in the session ID.
If the two hash values don't match then someone has tried to tamper with the password entry form and it is rejected.
If the two hash values are the same, the script then examines the plain text form of the time and checks to see whether it is still valid.
It does this by checking whether the plain text time value is older than the current time minus some predefined timeout value.
If it is older, then the password entry FORM has timed out and a new FORM should be generated asking the user to reenter his password.
The technique presented so far prevents people from using the back function on public access browsers to use someone else's password after a certain timeout period.
Even though they can go back to the FORM and resubmit it, after the timeout period it will be rejected by the script.
This is much the same as existing text based OPACs that assume that if the user has not done anything for a couple of minutes then that session has ended and a new session should be started.
Sometimes we may wish to have passworded access to a whole series of HTML FORMs.
Rather than having to ask the user for his password on every FORM, we can use cryptographic hashes to embed a hidden, time limited, encrypted form of the password in subsequent FORMs.
The way to do this is to generate a Propagated ID in the CGI script after the user's password has been authenticated from the first FORM.
This propagated ID contains a plain text time, a plain text user name and then a cryptographic hash.
This time the cryptographic hash is formed from running the hashing function over the concatenation of the time, the server's secret value, the user name and the user's password.
In this case the subsequent scripts first split the propagated ID up into its three constituent components.
It then looks up the user's password and recomputes the hash value.
This new hash is compared to the one that was in the propagated ID; if the two do not match then the FORM has been tampered with.
If they do match, the time value is checked to ensure that it is within the timeout period and if it is, the real operations of the CGI script can proceed.
This technique has the advantages that the user only needs to enter his password once (unless he waits so long that the timeout occurs), it provides timeouts to a series of FORMs, it is widely supported by web browsers and no modifications are required to the HTTP server's configuration.
The disadvantages are that more codes is required in the CGI scripts and the password still appears in plain text once on the network.
HTTP Authentication The authentication techniques presented so far all rely upon the CGI program performing some form of authentication operation.
However sometimes you may wish to make use of a CGI script that does not have any built-in authentication operations and also may not provide the facility for them to be added locally (it may be distributed only in binary form for example).
In this case, it may be worthwhile making use of the built in authentication in the HTTP protocol.
The HTTP authentication mechanism has to be turned on by appropriately configuring you HTTP server.
Exactly how this is done varies from server to server but it usually involves editing some of the configuration files in the server's home directory and then restarting the HTTP server process.
The authentication can usually be applied on a directory by directory basis and sometimes even a file by file basis and there are a number of different authentication mechanisms defined.
The most widely implemented mechanism is called Basic authentication and it offers much the same security as the simple password TYPE >INPUT< element.
However more secure mechanisms such as Digest and one time cryptographic passwords are being standardised and are likely to be widely implemented in the near future.
The HTTP authentication causes the HTTP server to check for authentication information in the HTTP request.
If none is present, it returns an HTTP error code to the browser.
This in turn causes the browser to request authentication information from the user, which it then uses to resubmit the request.
Once the authentication has been successfully achieved, most browsers will continue to send it to the same server host for subsequent HTTP requests.
This means that the it is again possible for other users to make use of the browser's back function to reuse a user's valid authentication after he has left a shared public access machine.
Some of the newer authentication mechanisms being proposed for HTTP may help overcome this but unfortunately the widely implemented and used Basic mechanism is susceptible to this.
HTTP based authentication also has the disadvantage of having to give CGI script authors/implementors access to the HTTP server's configuration files, which some HTTP server administrators may not wish to do.
Secure Sockets Layer One solution to the problem of sending passwords and other valuable data such as credit card numbers in plain text over the network is to encrypt the whole of an HTTP transaction.
The main standard in this area is Netscape's Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) which is implemented in their servers and clients.
A number of other commercial servers and browsers also implement SSL and there is an SSL module available for the popular Apache HTTP server as well.
SSL works by establishing an encrypted session on a separate port of the HTTP server (usually port 443 rather than the normal port 80).
The client then performs what is known as a handshake during which cryptographic information is exchanged between the client and the server in order for them to authenticate each other and exchange cryptographic keys.
SSL supports multiple encryption and cryptographic hashing algorithms, thereby allowing an upgrade path to newer, stronger cryptographic functions and the ability to "blackball" algorithms that have been compromised.
SSL offers a much higher level of security than the previous examples by encrypting the entire session, even if it is composed of multiple HTTP transactions.
Unfortunately the authentication performed is based on a the client rather than the user and so it is not necessarily appropriate for use with public access browsers unless it is used in combination with one of the techniques above (preferably the time limited passwords on FORMs) or by using some external hardware to provide the SSL authentication certificates.
SSL also suffers from not being as widely implemented as the previous technologies and has to some extent been partially crippled by the United States restrictions on the export of cryptographic technology.
Conclusions As can be seen from this brief overview, the designer or implementor of CGI program(s) and HTML FORMs has a variety of authentication mechanisms available to them.
The appropriate mechanism will vary depending upon the environment and task in hand, the facilities available and the amount of effort that they wish to spend.
For example, one might use just the <INPUT> element's password TYPE to secure access to an ILL database on a machine that is only available to private library staff machines over a secure physical network.
At the other end of the spectrum one might use SSL to encrypt time limited password access to a FORM that requires credit card information to be presented from a public access workstation.
The choice, as they say, is yours.
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Interface: George H Brett II, in Interview Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: George H Brett II, in Interview Buzz copyright multimedia research Citation BibTex RIS An interview with George H. Brett II, International Library and Networking consultant.
George Brett set up CNIDR (pronounced 'Snyder' – the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval) in 1992, with a three year grant obtained from the National Science Foundation.
CNIDR exists to promote and support the implementation of networked information discovery and retrieval tools through working with applications developers and through its involvement in producing networking standards.
With the grant due to run out in October of this year, Brett decided it was time for a switch.
Now a consultant in Colorado, he is working with the Boulder Public Library and on the ACLIN (Access Colorado Library and Information Network) Project.
I caught up with him at the University of Bath recently, where he was based while engaged in a research project for ISSC.
His has been a varied career (his Curriculum Vitae includes the jobs of postman and printer).
He graduated from Florida State University with a degree in Constructive Design.
From the PC in his UKOLN office, Brett showed me images of some of the artwork that he produced at this time, rather appropriately large spider's web-like constructions.
The sculptures, both site specific and time-based, woven from twine, were stretched between different points and left to gather whatever the wind and weather would supply.
Brett would then return and photograph the ever changing sculpture (the images are available from his home page).
A desire to teach led him to the completion of a Masters Degree in education, and a spell in teaching.
How does he feel about librarians having a teaching role?
"Should librarians be educators?".
He pauses for a moment.
"Yes indeed!
There is no better way of learning than by teaching."
But in the context of information Brett prefers to use the term 'coach' rather than teacher.
What differences has Brett observed in the library and information world of the UK as opposed to the US?
Not many.
Indeed, the number of libraries that are networked is relatively comparable.
The main difference is that in the US the advertisement of services is at a much more advanced level.
He explains "For as many US libraries as are networked, there are probably more which are not.
It's just that the networked libraries are honking their horn loud."
So is the belief that the state of networking affairs is more advanced in the US something of a misconception?
The short answer is yes, although, ironically, this is because US libraries have been in the game for longer.
"They've been paying out for networking equipment and training people all along, and now they are reaching the point where they are less able to jump onto something new … so in a way you in the UK have the lead.
It's a game of leap frog."
George Brett, Cyberjockey Nevertheless, Brett has found the culture of network use in this country deeply frustrating..
He was invited over to investigate the possibilities of creating what he described, intriguingly, as 'an umbrella organisation for the provision of the meta level'.
The meta level comprises particular network services which coordinate and integrate the vast range of other services now emerging.
Reluctant to give too much information away as to the exact details of his research, he did say that he felt there is no one thing that needs to be done to achieve this level, but that his recommendations would mix physical technologies for access with tools and applications for the content.
He admits that in the UK the content level is very high and it is here that the UK excels, especially in subject based resources.
At a higher policy level there is a lot of work to be done.
But at the level of access to networks, he senses a fear of lack of control by computing centres.
"The computing centres keep the doors closed on the Internet, and hope that you don't want to know what's behind there.
Everybody seems to be worried about pornography on the Internet, but I've seen pictures in British book stores and magazine stores that you would not be permitted to display in America.
It strikes me that you want to start with your corner supermarkets and not mess with the Internet."
He is critical of UK higher education's 'head in the sand' mentality.
A lot of commercially available material provides the public at large with information on the Internet, yet access to it is constrained in unnecessary and arbitrary ways.
He has been consistently frustrated in his attempts to use the breadth of networking technologies which support his work and lifestyle.
'Have laptop, will travel' is his approach, and he came to the UK expecting to have no difficulty in making telephone calls and multimedia file transfers with his folks and colleagues back home, via his PowerBook.
Sadly, he has encountered problems at almost every step.
The networking support in our universities is perhaps not yet ready for fully fledged Net citizens like Brett.
Moving on to the question of ownership of digital information, Brett is very concerned by what is happening in the US.
He returns to his favourite subject.
"I find it scary that companies can now buy the digital rights to reproduce works of art on the Internet."
Commercialisation is rampant, and public access to information is being lost.
Brett's great grandfather, a bookstore manager, took over the management of the Cleveland Public Library in Ohio, in the days when readers paid to borrow.
When the library began to lose money he opened the stacks to the public and organised reading sessions for local children.
Free access, so long taken for granted, is under threat once more.
"Librarians need to wake up and organise – particularly with the subject based resources.
It is time to think about copyright, access issues and protecting the collections that have been built up."
He is not hopeful.
"It's already late.
And getting later."
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SCRAN: A Taste of Scotland and Food for Thought Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SCRAN: A Taste of Scotland and Food for Thought Buzz infrastructure archives copyright video cataloguing graphics multimedia cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Bruce Royan outlines an epic millennium project to digitise much of the culture and heritage of Scotland.
The images that the year 2001 bring up are either seductively utopian or dimly dystopian from an information and technology point of view.
Visionaries either see an information rich world with constant online access built into your clothes in some scenarios or HAL 9000 calmly saying, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."
There is probably no doubt that we will have the technology, but can we build a bionic information system?
From where is the valuable content the material that has meaning, rigour and depth going to come?
It's almost a truism in information circles that the Internet is a mess -with the ridiculous stored cheek by jowl with the sublime.
And how do we make sense of this heterogenous material and provide intelligent links that meets the needs of those in education, at home and in professional life?
As anyone with a trusty copy of Chamber's Dictionary will tell you, SCRAN is a scottish word meaning provisions food.
It is also an acronym for a far reaching information project to provide unique access to Scotland's material culture.
The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network is going to be one provider of that valuable material discussed above.
Supported by funds from the UK National lottery , SCRAN [1] is a Millennium Project with important founding partners such as the National Museums of Scotland, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and the Scottish Museums Council.
Representatives of the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum [SCCC] and the Conference of Scottish Higher Education Principals [CoSHEP] are also on the board emphasising the strong educational element that is at the centre of its work.
It will have spent ú15 Million by the end of 2001 to translate material culture into a networked multimedia resource bank for study and appreciation.
SCRAN's core will be 1.5 million records of artefacts, buildings and sites of interest.
100,000 of the most important of these will include online multimedia resources: video or sound clips, animations, graphics, plans, virtual reality objects and in particular, colour photographic images.
While SCRAN will benefit from existing records in institutions, it is accepted that some upgrading will be necessary and grants are available to turn records that were originally created for the purposes of *inventory control*, into tools for information *disclosure*.
This implies an emphasis on access points, jargon-free descriptions of the objects and their context and cross references to other materials and web sites.
Multimedia resources are being digitised by grant aided projects with individual resource holders or consortia.
For example, the Royal Commission are currently contributing arial photographs and maps; Historic Scotland are digitising 500 images of historic sites open to the public; the Highland Folk Museum are contributing scenes from rural life; Glasgow Art Galleries are adding their collections of Impressionist Paintings, and there are other projects underway from Dundee to Shetland, and from Aberdeen to Skye.
All this imagery will be available via a user friendly interface, on the World Wide Web.
Small images, suitable for fast internet access, will be freely and openly available to all.
Larger, higher definition images, suitable for inclusion in multimedia programmes and presentations, will be available to licensed educational users.
The highest quality images will also be available for commercial exploitation, for a fee which will be passed back to the original copyright holder.
It is expected that making large amounts of high quality copyright cleared multimedia available to educational users in this way will greatly encourage the development of interactive courseware and interpretive material, and SCRAN is also funded to grant-aid the development of 100 such "multimedia essays", to be published on CD-Rom or other new media.
Such projects must have an educational focus, and many will be targeted at the school, college or university curriculum, but SCRAN also sees its educational remit as covering Lifelong Learning, and the funding of such products as gallery guides or site interpretation tools will not be ruled out.
Over the next few years therefore, SCRAN products and services will be available at a wide range of outlets, including libraries, schools, universities and the home.
A home user, anywhere in the world, would be able to retrieve a record describing, say, a favorite painting and download a web quality version of the related image (thumbnail size or a little larger).
Such use, it can be argued, supports the Collection's educational mission and may attract visitors to the institution, without compromising the possible commercial exploitation of the painting (for which a web image would be wholly inadequate).
An educational user (accessing from an institution registered with SCRAN as such) would, with appropriate safeguards, additionally be able to gain access to an educational quality image (say half a screen at 72dpi, 256 colours).
This would be adequate for a teacher or lecturer to incorporate into locally produced, non-commercial courseware; or a student to use in a report or his/her own multimedia essay.
Such images would be lower definition versions of the archival image, which will have originally been digitised at the highest resolution currently available.
Rights in this level of reproduction will remain with the original owner of the object, and copies will only be released under specific circumstances agreed with the rights holder.
In practice, we expect that many institutions will come to regard SCRAN as a sort of clearing agency for commercial reproduction rights, and the web resource base as a "seed catalogue" from which picture researchers can order the commercial quality images they require, the fees being passed back to the IPR holder minus a small handling charge.
The development by SCRAN of this resource base bringing together the holdings of many institutions and in many media will give rise to synergies that can at present only be guessed at.
The recent National Museum of Scotland CD-ROM "Investigating the Lewis chess pieces" showed some of the benefits of bringing together digitised images of related objects now held in institutions hundreds of miles apart.
Bringing together different media may be even more effective: one of the early SCRAN projects will include a digital reunion between Celtic charm stones that have long lain in silence in the National Museums, and recordings from the sound archives of the School of Scottish Studies of the Gaelic incantations that once gave them power.
We believe that the model that is evolving for SCRAN is one in which every stakeholder stands to gain.
Cash-strapped museums and galleries will have a new source of grant-aid for innovations in fulfilling their educational remit.
Teachers will be given unprecedented access to high quality resources for incorporation into their teaching, without having to concern themselves with copyright issues.
And the people of Scotland will gain a millennium monument at least as valid as those being planned in concrete and steel: a source of quality content among a range of infrastructure projects, and a means of interpreting and celebrating Scotland's history and culture with the aid of its future technologies.
References [1] SCRAN Web Site, http://www.scran.ac.uk/  Author Details Bruce Royan is the Chief Executive of SCRAN Email: b.royan@stir.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Internet Resources Newsletter from Heriot-Watt University Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Internet Resources Newsletter from Heriot-Watt University Buzz html archives copyright graphics telnet gopher mailbase Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod describes a Web-based resources newsletter.
The Internet Resources Newsletter which is published by the Internet Resource Centre at Heriot-Watt University and edited by myself and Gordon Andrew is one of a large number of Internet current awareness services, but is different from most in that it concentrates on items of interest to academics, especially those in the UK who specialise in science, engineering, and the social sciences.
Its raison d'etre is that it informs students and staff of Heriot-Watt about new and recent Internet resources of potential interest and provides news about developments in various networked resources such as BIDS, NISS, BUBL, EEVL, and SOSIG, but it is also written with an eye to a wider audience in the knowledge that whatever interest academics at Heriot-Watt may also interest academics and others elsewhere.
Currently a free monthly Web based publication, the Newsletter started out in October 1994 as an in-house email service, and in this form it borrowed heavily on the work done at the University of Hull Brynmor Jones Library (McNab, Alison, "Navigating the Networks" The Times Higher Education Supplement, June 25, 1993, p. 26).
At that time it was one element in a draft strategic plan which aimed to raise the profile of the Library within Heriot-Watt University.
Other elements included the development of a library email helpdesk, various printed publications about networked resources, and a blueprint for a dedicated Internet Resource Centre within the Library.
The Newsletter attempted to answer the much repeated criticism of the time that there seemed to be only worthless ephemera on the Internet by highlighting the most useful and academically related resources which were appearing in ever greater numbers.
The first email edition was distributed to staff and students of Heriot-Watt who had registered for BIDS, plus various people who were known to have an interest in or influence over locally networked information.
When the University Computing Services urgently advised against sending the same 35Kb email message to over 200 addresses on the mainframe computer, the idea surfaced to publish it on the Web.
At that time little was known about restricting access to local users, and this was not considered as an option in any case, it seemed to be in the spirit of the Internet to make it available to anyone else who might find it of use, both as an example of a library publication, and as a current awareness service.
I did not expect it to become as popular as it has, and I have been very pleasantly surprised to find that it is regularly accessed by quite large numbers of readers in the UK and elsewhere.
Rather ironically, the number of accesses from within Heriot-Watt (.hw.ac.uk) has sometimes been disappointing, but steps have recently been taken to market it more energetically within the University, including the production of a leaflet.
Attempts are made to make the Newsletter appear as professional as possible, but at the same time graphics are used sparingly, and little advanced HTML coding is used.
Feedback has indicated that this is appreciated because it reduces downloading times, and as the publication is produced largely in the editors' spare time, there is really no other option.
Apart from knowing that each issue will appear at the beginning of the month, there is little in the way of a publication plan, but we are fortunate in that, on the Internet, something interesting inevitably crops up, and the main problem is not in discovering things to write about, but rather in finding the time to write about them.
The Newsletter has neither an income or a budget, and so it is likely to remain a simple, but hopefully appreciated publication.
Content and sources The largest section of each issue of the Newsletter consists of an A-Z listing of new and recent Web, gopher, and telnet resources.
Recently this has become an almost exclusively Web resource list.
Resource descriptions are kept as brief as possible, and often a quotation from the resources' home-page suffices.
There is a New Resources Submission Form facility which allows anyone to submit details of new sites by email to the editors, and each month perhaps two dozen items are received.
Only a proportion of these are included in the following issue, the rest being rejected because they are deemed to be of little interest to academics, however all submissions are acknowledged.
Information about other new resources is gleaned from a variety of printed and electronic sources.
Perhaps the most productive is the What's New Too!
announcing service which is a daily listing of several hundred new Internet resources.
On average, each day two or three sites listed in What's New Too!
are visited and included in the Newsletter.
What's New on the Internet [tm] from EMAP Computing, the publishers of the , and UK Yellow Web: New in the UK are examples of announcing services which do not depend entirely on submissions, and tend to list more useful new sites.
The best source of this kind is undoubtedly the Scout Report, a weekly publication which employs reviewers to select a handful of the best new resources.
Other services which are occasionally checked include What's New for Commercial Sites Index, a daily listing from Open Market, an Internet commerce company, Whats New in CooLynx from a Canadian company called VirtuaLynx, and WebCrawler Select: New Sites This Week from the WebCrawler search engine.
The Netlink Server from Washington & Lee University, is regularly checked, normally when its new additions are posted to Net-happenings, and new engineering sites are often found using EEVL's Engineering Newsgroup Archive.
The Newsgroups uk.announce and scot.announce occasionally yield a site of interest, but these, along with many other announcing services, tend not to be very fruitful.
Printed sources available to the editors include The Financial Times which normally includes a Cyber Sightings list in its Media Futures section, the network sections of various other daily newspapers, some popular magazines such as the Web, newspapers and journals aimed at information professionals such as Information World Review and Online & CDROM Review, the excellent Science & Engineering Network News (SENN) which also has a Web site, and numerous trade journals which have started to give news about new sites.
Many of the Mailbase mailing lists carry announcements about new sites, and these are often repeated in the Newsletter, as are announcements about relevant new Mailbase mailing lists, and listserv lists.
In a small way, the Newsletter tries to encourage good practice by promoting what are deemed to be well designed and particularly useful sites through a regular Nice Web Site section.
Featured recently have been reviews of the UK Building Resources Pages, Applegate Media, Pharmaceuticals Today, and the British Council, all of which are high quality resources.
The Newsletter attempts to be more than just an Internet current awareness service, and periodically included are short items on topics of interest to students and academics recent features have included summaries about Internet recruitment agencies and job sites, and information on networked resources about Edinburgh.
New printed Internet journals and magazines are also reviewed, and lists of new Internet related books received by Heriot-Watt University Library are included.
Occasionally other relevant news is added.
Finally, to make the Newsletter appear less formal, and in an attempt to catch the attention of students, there is now a regular column which briefly lists leisure orientated sites, especially those in the Edinburgh area, such as football and other sports clubs, camera clubs, and local bands.
Maintenance Microsoft Access is used to collate the resources listed in the Newsletter, and in particular to produce the Archive which currently contains details of over 2500 resources in a 5MB file plus smaller A-Z lists.
Although all links are checked at the time of publication, no attempt is made to update this archive.
After some discussion, it was also decided not to list the resources by subject.
Promotion The original email distribution list mentioned above of 200 addresses has been used to notify readers as each new issue of the Newsletter is published, and has been added to from time to time in response to requests to the editors, and in addition monthly mailings are sent to four Mailbase lists and two listserv lists.
Alerts are also normally sent to a few Newsgroups, and two announcing services (Net-happenings, and What's New Too!).
Duplicated effort?
Any regular user of the Internet will quickly realise that there is currently a great deal of duplicated effort in the provision of various networked services.
Perhaps the most cutthroat competition can at the moment be found in the areas of search engines, Internet access provision, news feeds, lists of lists, and subject directories.
As can be seen from the number of electronic announcing services mentioned earlier (and the list is by no means complete), the Internet Resources Newsletter is one of many vaguely similar publications, and to these might be added NISS What's New, and BUBL Updates, both of which inform about new Internet resources.
A number of the resources mentioned in the Newsletter A-Z lists also find their way into the BUBL and NISS updates, but many are not (and vice versa), and this is because the focus of the Newsletter is rather different from any other publication, electronic or printed.
Perhaps the most similar publication is the Info To Go print and electronic newsletter from California, which lists new sites relevant to "information specialists: educators, libraries, leading government agencies...law schools and legal professionals, medical schools and medical professionals, and major corporations", in a similar way to the Internet Resources Newsletter.
However Info To Go not only has a heavy bias to the US, but is only available on subscription (currently US$120 for 12 issues).
The Newsletter has no pretentions to being anything other than a minor player in the Internet world.
The editors are happy if people find it useful, and most of the feedback received indicates that this is the case.
I was delighted when it received 3 stars from Magellan, but the most rewarding aspects have been to see it appreciated within Heriot-Watt University and in the friends that have been made, both virtual and otherwise, through its publication.
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Parallel Publishing for Transactions (PPT) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Parallel Publishing for Transactions (PPT) Buzz data archives digitisation preservation adobe research Citation BibTex RIS Hugo Brailsford introduces a parallel publication in Geography.
Parallel Publishing for Transactions (PPT){1] is a research and development project for a parallel online version of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, an internationally-renowned journal of geographical research with a sixty-year pedigree.
The project partners in PPT are the editor of Transactions, based at the Department of Geography, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and the Electronic Publishing Research Group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.
Extensive liaison also takes place with the journal’s publishers, the Royal Geographical Society, for whom this is a first venture into the world of electronic publishing.
Transactions is published by a relatively cash-constrained scholarly society, edited by a full-time academic, with a staff, readership and range of authors largely unfamiliar with electronic publishing.
PPT aims to report on the practicalities and consequences of introducing a parallel publishing system within such an environment.
These constraints led us to base our development work upon a number of key provisos.
Our electronic publishing solution had to be a low cost, technically uncomplicated means of electronic delivery capable of preserving the important ‘look and feel’ of Transactions, including the preservation of page fidelity and complex diagrams in the electronic format.
These considerations shaped our choice of Adobe Acrobat and its Portable Document Format (PDF) as the electronic publishing medium for articles.
Initially, PPT focused on modifying the manuscript preparation scheme at the editorial office and data processing at the printers so as to establish a system for producing PDF versions of articles with a minimum of extra training or workload for existing employees or the editor.
The resultant PDFs are produced automatically along with conventional copy by the printers and arrive ‘customised’ with in-built features for ease of use, such as hyperlinks to article references, figures, endnotes and full reference citations, and links to ‘bookmarks’ and article headings and subheadings.
The first fully parallel online issue of Transactions was produced in December 1996 and each quarterly issue is now made available on the electronic Transactions Web site along with pre-print PDFs of forthcoming articles, contents of forthcoming issues, and links to resources in geography on the Web.
The PDF production techniques have also been successfully transferred in trials to Transactions’ sister journal, Area.
PPT is now well into its second and final year with current work focused on securing the future of electronic Transactions beyond the period of eLib funding.
Like many other projects in the electronic journals area, PPT is rapidly approaching cost-benefit judgment day.
While electronic Transactions brings valuable benefits to the journal as a whole through international publicity and increased flexibility in its design and delivery, it implies a considerable strategic and financial commitment and a shift in attitude towards the uses of information technology on the part of all those involved in its production and delivery.
However, the ‘value-added’ aspect of electronic Transactions has recently received a significant boost through the eLib Higher Education Digitisation Service Fast-Track scheme.
As a trial run for HEDS, the entire Transactions archive from the first issue in 1935 to the present day will be scanned, passed through optical character recognition processing and made freely-available to all UK HE institutions in PDF form through the electronic Transactions Web site by the end of the year.
Digitisation will significantly improve access to a journal which has just become proportionately the most cited in academic geography, and is now a member of the top ten most cited journals in the social sciences.
The digitisation makes possible an online archive that will comprehensively document the best of research in geography in modern times.
Archive PDFs will be fully text-searchable reproductions of the printed source material, and if needed, will print out to a very high quality on a laser printer.
References [1] Parallel Publishing for Transactions (PPT) http://ppt.geog.qmw.ac.uk/tibg/ppt_hom.html Author Details Hugo Brailsford email: H.F.Brailsford@qmw.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: DESIRE Training for the Distributed Internet Cataloguing Model Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: DESIRE Training for the Distributed Internet Cataloguing Model Buzz framework javascript database metadata identifier cataloguing passwords research Citation BibTex RIS Lesly Huxley looks at the work of the project DESIRE: Training for the Distributed Internet Cataloguing Model.
Subject gateways like SOSIG [1] have already proved that librarians can play a critical role in the development of Internet catalogues and collections [2].
The next challenge for subject-specific gateways is to develop systems for distributed and collaborative cataloguing of Internet resources in the same way that collaborative systems are used for print resources with many libraries feeding records into shared databases.
This paper discusses some of the work being done by the DESIRE project [3] within the European Union to develop the systems and methods required for collaborative distributed cataloguing of Internet resources and at some of the training issues involved for those responsible for managing such systems.
SOSIG is one of the lead partners in the pan-European DESIRE project, participating in two of the project’s ‘work packages’: Indexing and Cataloguing (WP3) and Training (WP8).
DESIRE (Development of a Service for Information on Research and Education) began in mid-1996, funded under the European Commission’s Fourth Framework programme.
It builds on existing European telematics initiatives and WWW technologies with the aim of increasing the value they offer to European researchers.
SOSIG is working with other European partners to develop distributed subject-specific WWW-based cataloguing systems, methods and tools [4] which help European researchers to locate simply and effectively relevant and high quality information on the Internet.
The SOSIG training team is working with partners at the University of Newcastle [5] to develop training materials to support the needs of the distributed subject-specific services, taking into account issues of distance and the use of the Web to deliver material.
A workshop at the University of Newcastle in October 1997 brings together staff from the WP3 partners’ services, the WP8 trainers and invited participants from non-DESIRE UK subject-based gateways with a view to sharing experiences of Distributed Cataloguing Models and the tools, training materials and methods of delivery to support them.
The Distributed Cataloguing Model There are three main partners in WP3 working on the development of distributed subject-specific catalogues of Internet resources: DutchESS: the Dutch Electronic Subject Service at the Royal Library in the Netherlands [6] EELS: an engineering service based at the University of Lund, Sweden [7] SOSIG: the Social Science Information Gateway based at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol, UK The Orthopaedic Information Service, based at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, is also participating in DESIRE as an evaluation service of some of the DESIRE tools.
These subject-specific services aim to provide a one-stop shop for their user community: researchers in the social sciences, for example, can connect to SOSIG and browse or search the catalogue records for descriptions of Internet resources, knowing that they have been evaluated against the SOSIG quality criteria and described and classified by subject specialists.
Although providing similar services to their users, SOSIG, EELS, DutchESS and the Orthopaedic server all have differing underlying technical and cataloguing structures.
One of the aims of DESIRE is to provide for the integration of such services through adoption of standards frameworks and technologies which can ‘speak all their languages’ without the need for common classification schemes or databases.
The SOSIG Distributed Cataloguing Model The SOSIG model has evolved during its participation in DESIRE as a result of financial support from JISC and DESIRE and volunteer effort from UK and European users.
The Model now has four main elements: Core Staff SOSIG core staff have responsibility for overall collection management and systematic link-checking.
They locate, evaluate and catalogue resources across all subject sections and act on recommendations from other contributors.
They catalogue directly into ROADS [8] templates online.
Section Editors The expertise of SOSIG’s core staff is complemented by that of subject specialist librarians based in ten UK universities.
These ‘Section Editors’ have responsibility for a specific subject section in SOSIG and locate and evaluate resources before adding their descriptions, keywords and classifications directly to the SOSIG catalogue using ROADS templates accessed via the Web.
Section Editors are supported by funds from JISC which allow for a half-day per week’s protected time within each institution: in some cases responsibility is shared between two or more people.
A SOSIG Section Editors’ Admin Centre (password-protected) has been established on the Web to provide a quick and easy gateway to all the online documentation and templates Section Editors need to locate, evaluate and catalogue resources.
Face-to-face contact between Section Editors and the core staff is limited: an initial workshop brought them together for training in applying evaluation criteria and cataloguing rules and another is planned for this Autumn to facilitate the sharing of experiences, provide an update on developments and a refresher on issues of concern.
All other communication is by email, either person-to-person or via the Section Editors’ mailing list.
European Correspondents European Correspondents are academics or librarians who have volunteered to submit new resources to the gateway on an informal but regular basis.
The role of the European Correspondents was described in an earlier edition of Ariadne [9].
The European Correspondents’ pages [10] on SOSIG offer links to evaluation criteria, the scope policy and other documentation to assist their task.
SOSIG Users SOSIG also invites recommendations from users: an online form is provided, accessible via the main SOSIG button bar.
The ‘Add New Resource’ form [11] is the same as that used by the European Correspondents.
All recommendations are checked, evaluated and if acceptable catalogued by the SOSIG core staff.
The SOSIG Model can be represented visually in two ways: Figure 1: Workflow Figure 2: Tasks Other Models The workshop at Newcastle in October is designed to prompt discussion and sharing of experiences of Distributed Cataloguing Models.
We already know, however, that the other DESIRE WP3 partners operate different models to SOSIG and that other UK subject-based gateways have different models again.
DutchESS has, for example: a network of subject specialist librarians who select resources and evaluate their content an editorial board of three with subject and particularly technical expertise who evaluate librarians’ recommendations from a technical viewpoint based on form and process criteria a maintenance group who provide and input records to the database and offer technical support for the service The Orthopaedic server uses clinicians who describe resources particularly images often on paper or in text files.
These are then added to the database by core staff.
Other services make use of an extensive network of volunteers or a small group of paid staff: others rely heavily on automatically harvested records for initial location of resources, followed by systematic sifting and describing by volunteers or paid cataloguers.
It will be interesting to see the visual representations and descriptions of these various models at the workshop.
Training for the Distributed Cataloguing Model The DESIRE training work package (WP8) partners have already delivered a framework for the development of quality training materials to support DESIRE services [12].
This provides guidelines and templates for the production of materials and a pilot module on metadata based on these.
The Distributed Cataloguing Model raises a number of issues for training: the need to train paid core staff, paid ‘distributed’ staff and volunteers the differing funding models and amounts for training for each of these categories the location and distance of contributors the variety of tasks undertaken by different contributors the dynamic nature of the tools and technologies involved the need for distance learning and support, via email and the Web the need for the personal touch!
Although DESIRE services operate different models, WP8 partners have identified common needs amongst them and developed the two-day workshop to train those who will be responsible for training their contributors at various levels.
Participants will have ample opportunity to share experiences and learn from each other as much as from the tutors (from SOSIG , DESIRE and Netskills).
The DESIRE ‘tools’ will come under scrutiny and be assessed for applicability across a number of models.
Much of the sample material is based on the initial SOSIG Section Editors training materials (with revision after feedback) and SOSIG is used as an example throughout the two days.
The workshop programme covers: Day 1 an update on ROADS and cross-database searching developments an exploration and discussion of Distributed Cataloguing Models issues of day-to-day management and support for the DCM identification of potential problems and solutions in training for the DCM exploration of existing sample materials Day 2 hands-on exploration of sample materials and support sites hints and tips on creating training materials hints and tips on authoring static and interactive materials for the Web hints and tips on planning and delivering workshops Participants from DESIRE and non-DESIRE services will attend on day 1; on day 2, DESIRE services only will participate.
All the materials are subject to evaluation and peer review as part of the DESIRE project procedures.
In an attempt to focus on issues of distant delivery of training, the sample materials will include a new slide viewer used at SOSIG workshops [13] and the pilot TONIC-NG system, still under development at Newcastle to deliver interactive online tutorial material via the Web.
It is hoped to make a summary of the results of the workshop discussions available in a future Planet SOSIG.
References [1] The Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ [2] Planet SOSIG: Issue 9 A New Internet Role for Librarians http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/planet-sosig/ [3] DESIRE home pages http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire/ [4] Three key areas of research have provided tools for DESIRE subject-specific services.
For more information see: A review of Metadata: A survey of current resource formats http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/DESIRE/overview/ Selection Criteria for Quality Controlled Gateways http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/DESIRE/quality/ The Role of Classification Schemes in Internet resource discovery and description http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/DESIRE/classification/   [5] Netskills, University of Newcastle http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ [6] DutchESS http://www.konbib.nl/dutchess/ [7] EELS http://www.ub.lu.se/eel/ [8] ROADS http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/ [9] Planet SOSIG, edition 9 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/planet-sosig/ [10] European Correspondents’ pages http://www.sosig.ac.uk/desire/ecorresp.html [11] Add New Resource form http://www.sosig.ac.uk/sosig/cgi/newurl.pl [12] DESIRE Deliverable D8.1 http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire/deliver/WP8/D8-1.html [13] SOSIG Slide Viewer (uses JavaScript) http://www.sosig.ac.uk/training/pres_slides/slide_contents.html Author Details Lesly Huxley, Training & Research Officer Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TN, UK Tel: +44(0)117 928 8472 Fax: +44(0)117 928 8473 email: lesly.huxley@bris.ac.uk http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~eclh/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: University of Bath Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: University of Bath Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark has a look at the new library building (from where the Web version of Ariadne is produced) at the University of Bath.
The University of Bath’s [1] new Library and Learning Centre [2], which offers full 24-hour access to all collections, is considered to be the first example of its kind in the UK.
I met Keith Jones, Deputy Librarian, to talk about this radical step taken by the university, the day after it was announced that the new Centre had been commended in the national Civic Trust awards for the environment.
The Centre is based in the old library building which has been refurbished and extended to make it almost unrecognisable from the original 1971 library.
It now houses both the library and its staff, and the staff of the User Services section of Bath University Computing Services (BUCS).
The two staffs are not converged, but work closely on shared interests, such as the operation of the complementary help desks.
Library users now have 24-hour access not only to the library collections but also to approximately 350 computer workstations.
Jones explained that the decision to ‘go 24-hour’ did not originally come from the Library.
Like many university libraries, by the early 1990s Bath was rapidly running out of space.
Several low-cost proposals were put forward to create more room by in-filling corridors between 1991 and 1992.
However it was not until the appointments of a new ViceChancellor, Director of Estates and Librarian, that the need for more space was taken seriously.
The new Vice-Chancellor, Professor David VandeLinde, asked the Library to look at 24-hour opening as part of its plans to alleviate pressure on space.
Librarian Howard Nicholson and his team could see no way in which a small-scale 24-hour facility could be made to work satisfactorily, and so the concept of a fully open 24-hour learning resources centre was accepted.
With fortuitous timing, the University of Bath was able to take advantage of the HEFCE call for building proposals (receiving its grant just before the fund was reduced by budget cuts).
The proposal put forward encompassed an extension of the Library onto ‘the Parade’ the main thoroughfare of the university, and a refurbishment of the twenty year-old original building.
HEFCE provided 1.25 million pounds (29% of the total cost).
A further 20% came from the maintenance fund for the refurbishment, and the remainder was met from university reserves.
Building took longer than expected.
The major problem was asbestos removal, which delayed the final completion date by six months.
Originally there were no plans to remove stock from the building, but due to the asbestos problem, a 1,200m2 temporary library with two kilometres of shelving was set up in a temporary building.
This held the most-used stock, mainly seven-day loan and the short loan collection.
In the original library building at least one floor was always open, although sometimes the only access was by using external stairs.
Most of the library’s stock was always accessible, but a proportion was confined to closed access.
Total issues for the year 1995-1996 fell, not surprisingly, by about ten per cent.
However, in spite of all the disruption and occasional grumbling as the Parade was cordoned off, the library managed to retain the goodwill of the university community.
Library staff received several votes of thanks from public committees and the library management took a deliberate decision to keep the Students Union (SU) officers well informed of all developments.
This common sense approach and the understanding of the SU officers meant that there was little student opposition to the emergency arrangements and inconvenience of split sites.
The Library and Learning Centre has been open fully since the beginning of the current academic year.
The building offers 24-hour access for the use of computers and for study almost every day of the year.
The only exceptions are major public holidays, when the whole university shuts down, and the period after pub closing on Saturday nights, when, at the insistence of the university’s security staff, it is closed to prevent any trouble from the groups of students on campus emptying onto the Parade near the Library and Learning Centre.
Twenty-four hour security staffing is an important feature of the building.
The Centre is not permanently staffed.
At present, term-time coverage is from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, and at weekends the staffed service is restricted to Issue Desk only, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The BUCS User Services help desk is staffed from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. on weekdays with no coverage at the weekend.
It is not envisaged that the Centre staffing hours will increase in the foreseeable future.
Current statistics from Centre use would suggest that, if the Issue Desk hours were to be extended, opening at 8 a.m. would be the most popular option.
Library staff are also keeping a close watch on developments with self-issue systems.
Early experience of the levels of night-time use have exceeded the modest estimates made before the rebuilding, when it was generally accepted that the security presence would be justified as much by the need to guard the equipment in the building as by night-time use of the facility, even with 1,800 students living on campus.
“The initial response is very encouraging” says Jones.
Use for the hours between midnight and 6 a.m. is usually well above 100, and hit the 400 mark on the Friday before the end of the spring term.
The number of users overall in the final week of the spring term averaged 8,000 per day, with a peak of 9,000 at the busiest point.
For a small university, with approximately 6,000 students, this is impressive.
“We have also been pleased to note high levels of use in the early morning before lectures between the hours of seven and nine, when occupancy levels often reach two to three hundred.” The university is proud of its new, unique facility, which is obviously proving a hit with students at Bath.
Worthy of a Parade, indeed.
References University of Bath Web Site, http://www.bath.ac.uk/ Some fairly accurate drawings of what the Library looks like from outside, http://www.bath.ac.uk/Library/lc/lc_images.html Author Details Isobel Stark, Web Officer, UKOLN Email: i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 323343 Address: University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sideline: Seagulls and Boomerangs Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sideline: Seagulls and Boomerangs Buzz mobile Citation BibTex RIS In Sideline, people give an alternative view of conference attendance.
John Kirriemuir is the Information Officer for UKOLN and the editor of the Web version of Ariadne.
Early summer.
Sun high in the sky, white fluffy clouds skittering overhead, birds tweeting, and it's off to this year's Elvira at Milton Keynes.
One paper to present, several interesting ones to listen to, and the flat, lush fields of Milton Keynes seductively beckon for that noblest of hobbies, boomerang throwing.
The first programme session over; a quick swim in the pool, step outside and the God of rain decides to remind us of his/her presence with an all-evening deluge.
A somewhat unpleasant group of insurance salesmen from a parallel conference commandeer the pool for the evening; the sight of several dozen loud and chubby yuppies, bobbing up and down in the water while speaking on mobile phones, puts several of us off our evening banquet.
Day two of three.
The sun rises high.
A long lunch break beckons.
I step outside, armed with genuine boomerang and smile at a cloudless blue sky.
The smile quickly fades as a large seagull (so far inland?
), dumps the (extensive) contents of its bowels on my head.
No hat.
I step back inside; one of my fellow delegates, who has spent the lunch seemingly imbibing for England, asks why I am wearing the contents of a tub of yogurt on my head.
Mentally note to think of awkward questions for his presentation.
Day three of three.
The sun rises high.
Another long lunch break.
No seagull (surely refueling somewhere?).
I step outside, with female delegate who hopefully might just be impressed by manly testosterone-filled hunter skills.
An adjacent large field, the breeze dies down and FLING!
The boomerang arcs round impressively.
And crashes into an impenetrable thicket of trees.
An hour is wasted searching for said wooden item, to no avail.
Spend the final session of the conference in deep stick-deprived distress, and promise to restrict my activities to scrabble at future events.
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Controlling Access in the Electronic Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Controlling Access in the Electronic Library Buzz data database infrastructure metadata identifier copyright video passwords solaris licence authentication ldap Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell and Mark Gillet discuss methods of electronic authentication.
Abstract The growth of networking and the Internet has led to more and more information resources being funded centrally by JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Council) and provided from a single or limited number of locations to the whole of the academic community.
Centralised networked services such as these have been a fact of life in commercial organisations for many years and this model is now being adopted by government agencies like the NHS.
The centralisation of services naturally offers both cost and organisational benefits; however, it brings with it a complex user authentication problem which stems from the need to control access to a service with a large number of users, across many sites all requiring access.
While registration of users on each host system has been an effective approach in the past, the inter-networked community is ever increasing in size and already millions strong.
This potentially has significant associated problems and a more practical model is needed.
The development of such a system is not trivial but must be solved in a coherent way before the benefits of distributed networked resources can be fully realised.
Introduction & Environment The term "libraries without walls" has been used both within and outside of eLib (the Electronic Libraries Programme) for the development of electronic libraries with multiple network centric points of access.
These 'wall-less' libraries offer unique opportunities to share and distribute knowledge and information widely and concurrently to many interested parties around the world; they also offer manifold challenges in terms of: copyright and intellectual property rights administration, usage monitoring (and user profiling) access restriction charging All of these are at least partially resolved by a user based authentication system, provided in a conventional library by the library card.
In some libraries, cards not only identify the member to the librarian at the time of removing a book on loan, but also identify the member to the library itself (in the case of a library whose entrance is policed by card readers), to specific areas of the library, e.g.
the copying room, video viewing rooms or computing facilities and also to confirm identity and status to staff in the event of a requirement to view or remove 'restricted material'.
The bulk of these uses are administrative in function.
However such data as is available in the larger university or municipal library may now be used for profiling, usage monitoring and thus, for the improvement of service.
The issue of 'restricting access' is often seen as a philosophical problem by those intent that knowledge should be as free and widely available as the learning from it is desirable.
Such people often see the advent of computing as the opening of the final door in their quest, by making high-fidelity high quality information resources available to an audience that need not be restricted by print run or by economic 'cost or print' considerations.
It is likely however that few would agree to the wide and unrestricted distribution of the clinical photographs of child abuse [1], the photographs of human dissection [2] or perhaps the detailed instructions for the manufacture of poisons or drugs.
Some would go further or set wider briefs or definitions of restricted material.
For the scope of this discussion it is simply necessary to confirm that any single such restriction may be a requirement.
The technical and practical need for authentication flows from the requirement for any restriction and remains largely unchanged by the scope or detail of such restrictions.
It is however true that most libraries have books (or other material) which for some reason are of restricted availability being lent only to those with adequate reason (usually defined by some local procedure/national legislation) to view them.
These issues, which are not restricted to academic computing, are just as relevant to the wider community.
Internet commerce is struggling to provide a secure method for transmitting payments across the Internet, some of which require a confirmed identity for one or both of the parties involved in the transaction.
Many other information providers are becoming increasingly interested in restricting portions of their services to certain pre-registered users, in order that they may provide information that is either confidential or commercially restricted; still more people are concerned about the lack of security with the current standards for e-mail, leading to technologies such as PGP and S/MIME becoming more prevalent as methods of authenticating sender and recipient identity and where necessary providing encryption.
Many groups, including the W3C, are investigating the opportunities for progress in these areas and those of digital signatures [3] as well as other international standards such as X.509.
The Problem Most authentication systems require some form of electronic user registration and subsequent access control and monitoring.
The concept of username (identifier) and password (authenticator) in computing is as widespread as the use of the library card in libraries; however, it is seldom used in Internet information services.
This arises for several reasons: Initially, many services were established to serve information with few or none of the above concerns the information was meant be freely and anonymously available.
Where restriction was seen as necessary, it was often applied on a site/campus wide level (e.g.
only on-site hosts were given access to some resources).
There are several problems of scale and detail in registering and securing access on a public network, which may have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of users.
To give a measure of the scale of the problem applicable to the eLib programme, MIDRIB [4] a system aimed at a typically small faculty, medicine, has a potential 800,000 users.
This is a significantly larger scale than registering users for access to a typical campus' computing facilities, e.g.
The University of Bath, with 6000 undergraduates, 3000 postgraduate students and some 2000 staff or most typical corporate computing systems.
Some of the bigger access controlled WWW sites do not even have that many users at present, e.g.
The Times Newspaper which has had an electronic site established for some two years has recently (Jan 1997) reached 500,000 users [5].
Most existing WWW servers offer a link to Operating System (OS) level security with relatively small numbers of users (thousands as opposed to tens or hundreds of thousands) recommended as the optimum operational size for the UNIX password file.
The type of electronic reference service typified by the eLib programme may either immediately or in the future need to be 'mirrored', 'cached' or otherwise 'distributed' Significant problems are posed with performing these duties with the existing OS-led authentication model.
Indeed only two such systems are in common use; NIS and NIS+ from SUN is available for many flavours of UNIX while NDS from Novell is available for their proprietary NetWARE and UnixWARE operating systems (UnixWARE is now distributed and maintained by SCO) and converging with SCO OpenUnix.
The latter is much more sophisticated than the former and there is some evidence to support the view that even SUN believe it, indeed they have recently licensed NDS from Novell for implementation in a future release of Solaris [6].
Consequently, many of the resulting resources have grown organically, driven by local need, into databases in the broadest sense of the word i.e.
stored and structured data-sets with or without access control or monitoring.
Some national services like Bath Information Data Services (BIDS) and National Information Services and Systems (NISS) have group usernames which are allocated at institution level.
This type of system does not typically identify an individual, rather it locates a user at an institution, where the institution is known to the service.
Commonly, users are left with one campus username, one or more usernames for national services and a larger number of 'partially' self selected usernames for other services, e.g.
The Times [7] and New Scientist [8].
The problem is not confined to electronic reference works or journals; indeed the problem is not restricted to academia most hospitals have more than one system (e.g.
Administration and Pathology) as do many companies.
The Need To summarise the requirements so far.
It appears that there is a need for a locally administered, centrally managed, distributed authentication system which need not be accessed through the OS, although it could be.
Such a system would need to be secure enough to be used to control access to the systems themselves as well as the information they contain, support a rich enough data-set to contain the majority of information required by any local system and be fast enough not to mitigate against regular and widespread usage.
Self replication in such a system would also be desirable as it could provide for increased performance and more localised network traffic (so reducing the strain on the wide area).
Local administration in such a model would permit accurate and timely data collection while minimising duplication of central or departmental administrative overhead and data re-entry.
Such a system, given sufficient import and export tools, could even become a master index used by any or all institutions.
Indeed such a local 'directory' of information would offer a resource of additional value to both the local institution and the 'world' as a whole.
Conclusions and a Way forward The academic community has made some inroads into investigating the issues surrounding mass and wide scale implementation of an 'open' authentication service.
The work commissioned by the JISC on Technologies to support Authentication in Higher Education [9] is a valuable study of the available technology and gives a useful survey of providers requirements in the academic community.
It does not however offer firm recommendations as to a single coherent solution.
Some existing academic information providers such as BIDS and NISS have developed their own infrastructures for the deployment of service wide authentication.
The NISS system, ATHENS, [10] has evolved from a system based around departmental rather than individual level authentication (though it will now handle the latter) and is centralised rather than distributed in concept, though some of the administration can be devolved to libraries in other institutions to manage User Id's.
It does however appear to provide a useful interim solution to many of the problems raised above.
The requirement for authentication services on any significant scale will require the widespread introduction of directory systems.
In addition there will be a requirement for the secure (probably encrypted) transfer of data between the various system components.
Recent increased interest in directory systems, in the form of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the success of Novell's 'Novell Directory Services' (NDS), offers a glimmer of hope that the future will provide the kind of integrated solutions that would be of benefit to all.
Taken with the availability of both the PGP and X.509v3 key based encryption standards, these developments in the availability of stable and scaleable directory infrastructures pave the way for the development of a secure national authentication infrastructure.
Such a distributed system, if implemented, could offer many advantages; the reduction in administrative overhead on the service providers could result in an increased spending (both in terms of effort and cash) on the provision of more, higher quality data resources, while the increase in load on local administrative authorities would be relatively low in comparison.
The directory would therefore deliver both better value for money when assessed in terms of the resources delivered and reduced overheads, both of which are a significant benefit to funding authorities.
It may not yet be too incredible to suggest that (given the resources and a commitment and a clear national agreement as to the specification of such a service) one username per person providing access to all sites of interest throughout the community could be possible.
Authentication in computing is the process of confirming the identity of a user by comparing a 'secret' (piece of information known only to the user) with one stored against their user ID in a database of those authorised to use a service.
References [1] The Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, HMSO [2] The Anatomy Act, HMSO [3] Digital Signatures http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Security/DSig/DsigProj.html [4] Medical Images Digitisted Reference and Information Bank, MIDRIB http://www.midrib.ac.uk/ [5] The Times Newspaper, Interface, Wednesday 8th Jan 1997 [6] Sun licence NDS from Novell http://www.novell.com/strategy/sunqa13.html [7] The Times Newspaper http://www.the-times.co.uk/ [8] New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/ [9] Technologies to Support Authentication in Higher Education v5, A study for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, August 21st,1996: A.Young, P.T.Kirstein, A.Ibbetson http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/wk_papers/scoping/jisc5.html [10] NISS Athens Web Pages http://www.niss.ac.uk/authentication/index.html Author Details Andy Powell works for UKOLN on metadata and resource discovery projects Email: a.powell@bath.ac.uk Mark Gillett works in the Computer Unit of St Georges Medical School Email: mgillett@sghms.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Very Long Way Away Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Very Long Way Away Buzz data research Citation BibTex RIS We take a look at the library and networking facilities in more remote places around the world; in this issue, we feature the Faroe Islands.
The Faroe Islands is a small archipelago, comprised of 18 small islands, off in the middle of the North Atlantic, between Norway and Iceland.
The total area is 1,400 sqr.km., and the population only 43,000.
The population of the capital Tórshavn is approximately 15,000.
Although the nearest neighbour to the south is 300 km.
away, the Faroe Islands has always maintained close connections with other countries.
The Faroe Islands has to import most of its commodities, as well as to rely on regular access to export markets in Europe, USA, and other countries.
This commercial intercourse has been the basis of the continued economic development and welfare of the Faroese society.
The Faroes is a modern fishing nation, and Faroese fishermen fish almost all over the globe.
Fish and fish products constitute the major part of Faroese exports.
Politically the Faroe Islands is a self-governing part of the Danish kingdom, but historically and culturally it also has close ties to Norway, and Iceland.
In 1948 the Faroes received Home Rule, establishing the present governmental structure.
The Faroe Islands has its own Parliament (Løgting) and Government (Landsstýri).
In accordance with the Home Rule system, Denmark donates a considerable subsidy to the Faroes, and assume responsibility for Foreign Affairs and Defence.
Unlike Denmark, however, The Faroe Islands is not a member of the European Union.
Over the last few years, the Faroes have been hit hard by an economic recession.
Many people have left the islands, and the population has dropped by approximately 10%.
Unemployment is high.
Fortunately this the downtrend appears to have levelled off at the present time, and many Faroese now hope that the exploitation of expected oil findings around the Faroes will make it easier for the community to emerge from the recession.
Further information: the Faroe Islands.
(http://www.sleipnir.fo/faroe/faroe.htm) The Faroese Language.
Education and Libraries The language spoken here is Faroese, a westnorse language, closely related to Icelandic and Norwegian.
Since 1979 the Faroe Islands has administered its own education system.
Many young Faroese, however, must still go to Denmark or other countries for higher education.
For more information about research institutions in the Faroe Islands, visit the homepage managed by the Faroese University.
(http://www.sleipnir.fo/research.htm) The Faroese library system is purely a Faroese affair, and has been since the introduction of Home Rule in 1948.
There are 15 public libraries in the Faroes.
Thirteen of them are small, and are only open a few hours a week.
The largest library is the Town Library in Tórshavn.
The Faroese National Library ( http://www.sleipnir.fo/flb/flbst.htm) (FLB) is also situated in Tórshavn.
Communication All year round, there is a daily air service between the Faroe Islands and Denmark, as well as a twice weekly flight to Iceland and a weekly flight to Scotland.
In addition a car ferry sails once or twice a week between the Faroe Islands and Aberdeen in Scotland.
During the summer there is additional car ferry service to Denmark, Norway and Iceland.
The Faroe Islands has its own postal service, Postverk Føroya.
Útvarp Føroya, the Faroese radio, was established in 1957, and broadcasts in Faroese.
Since 1984 the Faroe Islands has had its own television station, Sjónvarp Føroya.
In addition the city of Tórshavn retransmits BBC World, MTV, Eurosport, and the Danish TV3.
The telephone network is highly developed, and since 1975 it has been possible to dial abroad directly from anywhere in the Faroe Islands.
In 1993 the number of telephone subscribers was 23,256, or 517 per 1.000 inhabitants.
1994 marked a major improvement in telecommunication between the Faroe Islands and the outside world, when the Faroe Islands together with Iceland were hooked on the CANTAT-3 optical cable connecting Canada with Europe.
This optical cable meets all standards for modern telecommunication (eg.
ISDN), and provides the islands with a stable and efficient connection with the outside world.
It is also used in data transmission, including the use of the Internet.
Starting on February 29th 1996, the Faroese Telephone Company (TFL) will offer private users access to the Internet.
TFL estimates that the total number of Internet users in the Faroe Islands will be about 500.
The Internet The Faroe Islands was put on the Internet map in January 1995.
The research institutions in Tórshavn, including the Faroese National Library, were connected through a 64 Kbit/s leased line between the Department of Natural Sciences at the University of the Faroe Islands and UNI-C in Lyngby, Denmark.
At the moment there are two user groups, with Internet access through the Sleipnir-server, which is maintained by the Faroese University.
These are 1) people employed by the above mentioned research institutions, who do have direct Internet-connection, and 2) dial-up users, consisting mainly of libraries, schools and educational institutions around the Faroe Islands.
For technical information about the Sleipnir-project, see the article “Faroe Islands now on the Internet” (http://info.denet.dk/nordunet/faroes.html) written and published in 1995.
There has not yet been any widespread use of the Internet in the Faroe Islands.
Our considerations on how the Internet can be used effectively in the Faroes, is therefore in part based on our limited experience with the Internet at the Faroese National Library (FLB).
Obviously the Internet has meant an immense extension of communication possibilities.
Internet is both a communications net and an information net, and thus can be used by the Faroe Islands in many different ways.
Being one of the worlds smallest nations and a remote part of Europe, the Faroes can exploit the great possibilities offered by the Internet in distributing data and information about the Faroe Islands to an international audience.
This can be done both easily and inexpensively.
It is of great importance to learn how to manage the huge amount of information on the Internet, and how to effectively use this information in a Faroese context.
One of the most exciting aspects of the Internet is that it can be used as a means of communication within the Faroe Islands.
For example this could mean a radical improvement in communication between schools, libraries, and other institutions all over the Faroes.
The use of Internet Who will use the Internet in the Faroes, and to what extent?
We expect use of the Internet to range from non-use to extensive implementation.
We envision two major groups of Faroese Internet users: Users, who will use the Internet on a limited scale.
These users may be individuals as well as institutions and organisations.
They will feel, that they have no need of all the Internet applications.
These users may use the e-mail service, and they may even publish a homepage on the net.
Users, who will more or less frequently exploit a wide range of possibilities on the Internet.
This group includes private users, private organisations, public institutions, students, researchers and business companies.
They would use the Internet for a variety of purposes, eg.
education, entertainment, communication, research, and marketing Faroese libraries will play a major role in the use and implementation of the Internet.
Libraries will use the Internet on a full scale basis: for referance work, for on-line searching, and for on-line ordering of books and documents from other libraries and document collections.
In addition libraries have, we feel, an obligation to assist library users in use of the Internet.
Furthermore libraries should expand their hardware to provide the public with free access to the Internet.
Although it might be an impossible task, Faroese libraries should try to sort and organize the information available on the Internet.
Here we will be able to make use of the work in this field done by libraries in other countries.
The Faroese National Library The Faroese National Library has used the Internet since January 1995, mainly for on-line searhing and ordering, and to a lesser degree for reference work.
FLB has its own homepage: FLB (http://www.sleipnir.fo/flb/flbheim.htm), containing information about the library, and with links to other Internet ressources.
Here we also have published the first Faroese Internet guide (http://www.sleipnir.fo/flb/flbint.htm), including general information about the Internet, and the various Internet services, and how to search the WWW.
Still at the experimental stage, this is our first attempt at organizing information sources by subject headings on the Internet.
Future plans include placing a searchable version of the Faroese Booklist from 1970to present (approx.
3,000 records) on the net.
Another of our projects involves setting up a computer in the library to provide our public with free access to the Internet.
Although the Faroe Islands is a small country, we have to be able to manage the Internet on the same levels, as in other countries.
We have to have the same skills in using the Internet as users and institutions in larger countries.
Unfortunately our ressources are quite limited, but we have to work with the available rossources.
We need to keep ourselves informed of new development in the Internet, and to be aware of what information is available on the net, and we need to know, who is publishing all this information available on the Internet.
We also need to be able to evaluate the quality and reliability of information on the Internet.
Unfortunately, the Faroes has not yet mapped out an official Internet strategy.
At the present time work with the Internet depends largely on the interest and enthusiasm of certain individuals.
While this is a beginning, work would proceed much more efficiently and effectively if we could from the start establish clear guidelines and strategies for cooperation in the distribution of information, including the Internet, in the Faroes.
To a certain extent we lack the ressources necessary for extensive education and training in the use of the Internet.
Hopefully this situation will soon change.
There is a multitude of opportunities in the use of the Internet, especially for small countries like the Faroe Islands.
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D-Lib Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines D-Lib Buzz infrastructure digitisation copyright research Citation BibTex RIS William Y.
Arms, D-Lib publisher and Amy Friedlander, the editor, describe this successful Web-based magazine that carries more technically-minded articles on all aspects of digital/electronic libraries research.
Shortly, D-Lib Magazine will go to press with our fourteenth monthly issue and it is remarkable that even after a year, we are still using the language of print to describe something that only exists on the web.
D-Lib is funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on behalf of the Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) Working Group of the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) program.
The magazine has become a highly visible element of a broader effort at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) to stimulate communication among the several research and professional communities that have an interest in networked telecommunications and digital information.
Our starting point was the broad program of research associated with the six projects of the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), but then has expanded to embrace all aspects of research into information on networks.
Thus, using the Internet is central to our identity.
This early decision, to treat the Internet as the default and to identify print-and-paper as the alternative, has had some interesting and possibly profound implications for what we do.
For example, our lawyers have advised us from the outset to think about terms and conditions for access rather than traditional aspects of copyright.
We treat the net as a medium in its own right rather than as a means of distribution wherein digital communication was somehow a substitute for paper.
Therefore, we are very flexible in our instructions for authors.
The medium itself, both the technology and the track record of what works and what does not, seems to change weekly if not daily.
But we encourage writers to avail themselves of what is "out there" we like pointers to other sites, demos, and on-line resources.
Thus, the editor (who still greatly misses her blue pencil) spends more of her time worrying about hyperlinks than about citation formats.
On the other hand, many of print publishing's standards and values have migrated with us!
On more than one occasion, we have resolved differences between editor and publisher by consulting H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage (Oxford University Press, 1965).
Relying on the web presumes an active reader, who will seek us out.
But active readers seem to appreciate the routine of a regular monthly magazine another carry-over from print publishing announced by e-mail to a "subscriber" list.
This decision may have made it more difficult to build circulation, the difficulties in measuring the notion of "circulation" notwithstanding, since we do not have an equivalent to mass mailings of trial issues.
Moreover, the decision effectively excludes the great portion of the world that does not have web access or for whom access is slow or costly.
Although we recognize this price, we do not believe that it loses us our basic audience: the researchers engaged in the research and implementation projects in digital libraries and the various groups who may be affected by this research (e.g., publishers, lawyers, economists, many kinds of librarians) but may not participate directly in the research process.
These people have access to the network either at work or at home.
But their connections may not be as advanced as their interests, so D-Lib's own use of technology tends to lag the cutting edge it seeks to cover.
The point of publishing, after all, is to reach readers and, in our case, to promote scientific literacy across several disciplines, not all of which may be equally sophisticated all of the time.
On the other hand, D-Lib has aggressively courted content.
We do this in two ways.
We stay current with the progress of the six DLI projects, and encourage the Principal Investigators to discuss their work in the magazine.
Because we employ a magazine-style acquisitions strategy and are not juried, we encourage writers to provide us with succinct and informal discussions of technical papers and to include pointers to the formal literature, which, more often than not, is first made available on-line.
In this way, we have discovered that a story which is an introduction for a naïve reader often acts as synopsis for a sophisticated reader who then pursues the links to the professional papers.
The second way we pursue stories is to identify areas of digital library research that are subject to investigation in other venues or that are pursuing congruent goals.
For example, the National Endowment for the Humanities has historically supported digitization and conversion programs in which mark-up techniques were pioneered and in which workflow and other management concerns have been systematically investigated.
Although outside of the DLI, these projects have much to contribute to the discussion, and related stories were run in November and February.
Other non-DLI agencies and organizations in the U.S.A. that have contributed to D-Lib include the Library of Congress, National Agricultural Library, National Library of Medicine, and numerous universities and corporations.
Overseas contributions have come from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), and eLib itself.
Over the next several months, we expect to run stories on programs in Australia and New Zealand.
Both eLib and ERCIM have been important to our aim of to achieving a global perspective that we believe is essential to covering digital libraries research.
ERCIM provided us newsfeed almost from the start and members of the consortium contributed stories on their research.
And our very first unsolicited story idea came from one of the eLib projects: it described the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), and we ran it as part of "Clips and Pointers" in the September 1995 issue.
"Clips and Pointers" has since morphed into a new column and project descriptions have been spun off into an occasional column called "Project Briefings", which first ran last December with a lead story by Chris Rusbridge on "The UK Electronic Libraries Programme".
Finally, UKOLN has maintained a mirror site for us since March resulting in an estimated increase to our readership of about 25 percent.
D-Lib Magazine came out of the Digital Library Initiative in the U.S.A.
But much to our delight, we have found ourselves contributing to a movement that is worldwide.
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Down Your Way: Cyberworld Croydon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: Cyberworld Croydon Buzz python cataloguing multimedia research standards Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh took a trip to the cyberworld of Croydon, to see 'what was going down'.
“Public libraries can rule the world, given the right attitudes and the right response to changing times”, said Chris Batt, Director of Libraries and Museums for Croydon.
Walking around the headquarters of the service and talking to Chris leaves the impression that in Croydon at least there is a strong tide under the library service and a keen entrepreneurial team determined to take full advantage of all opportunities.
Behind the Victorian facade of the town hall is a building, completed in 1993, which could typify the public library in the information age.
It also offers an interesting perspective on the practical application of many of the imperatives articulated in the reports that have appeared recently.
The building itself is light, attractive and welcoming.
Its character faithfully embodies the philosophy behind a modern information service, making connections with most groups in society and providing access to a seamless web of information, irrespective of form: The public library should be a focus for a range of disciplines.
Our professional skills are those of the information manager, bridging the gap between people and learning, acting as a channel and a clearing house.
I prefer the phrase ‘learning for life’ to the commonly used ‘lifelong learning’.
We are helping people to improve their skills so that they do things better.
Superficially, the building still looks much like a conventional library, and this is how Chris Batt thinks it should be, so there are books on shelves and the collections on each of four levels are categorised.
Technology is dispersed and accessible everywhere and the floors on all levels are raised to accommodate the services, allowing total flexibility in the positioning of equipment.
The management system is Geac and is at least middle aged, but like an elderly jumbo jet it has been overhauled so often that it is in fact a new animal.
It is in the use the system is put to that a difference begins to emerge.
It is networked to the local further education college and there is a burgeoning relationship between providor and client.
The college is ambitious and it is the intention of the library that the relationship already forged will grow with the aspirations of both partners.
Is it impossible to envisage a situation where a university college contracts out its information service to a public library?
The library catalogue is also networked to the branches and to some schools in the area.
Elsewhere there is ample evidence of a strong and growing student demand being met, not least by the specialist business services provided by the library.
Apart from a wide range of print resources, Croydon On Line is the web based information service not only for the business community and academic users, but also for the borough in general.
Web pages are rented to other organisations, and managed for them.
Websites are sometimes given away to some voluntary organisations and at present the library is discussing the possibility of a health website with potential partners.
On another level, Croydon is working to establish and strengthen links with developing countries, and is regularly used by the British Council as an example of good IT practice in public libraries.
Croydon’s Internet home page There is a multi media cd rom network throughout the building, and as soon as the band width is adequate this is likely to be extended to the other service points and to schools that might want it.
One point which was stressed is that although the service has a strong entrepreneurial flavour it is essentially market led: it will attempt to meet a legitimate demand if it is articulated.
Standard cd rom is already networked across the borough.
The Internet naturally features heavily in Croydon’s operation.
It is well used by students and by local business, and the system networked to local schools is a managed Research Machines version.
The Open Learning network inside the library will provide information technology tuition, and machines can be hired as can email boxes if any member of the public needs an email address.
Inside the complex, as well as a cinema named after the local luminary David Lean, there is a gallery which some time ago displayed 25 Picassos and has recently hosted an Escher exhibition.
In the planning stages at the moment is an event organised by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python’s Flying Circus fame.
This breadth of approach is seen again in the museum.
Covering the history of Croydon since about 1830, it does so through a series of interactive tableaux.
Already the winner, in 1996, of the IBM Museum of the Year Multimedia Award, staff are now planning to apply internet technology to the museum displays.
Also in 1996 they were winners of the Interpret Britain Best Heritage Site.
Croydon On Line is a BLRIC supported initiative.
The service is also active in the PubliCA Concerted Action for Public Libraries programme of the European Union.
This is a showcase for the best practice in public libraries across the member countries.
A number of outside bodies have found a congenial home within the library.
The careers service is based there largely to make use of the extensive resource collection, and other community organisations are also provided with facilities.
Ted Hughes’s concluding stanza in Here it Again, quoted in The People’s Network, runs: Even the most misfitting child Who’s chanced upon the library’s worth, Sits with the genius of the Earth And turns the key to the whole world Chris Batt put it in a slightly different way: “We can start to conduct an orchestra.
We can introduce you to lifelong learning experiences.” References Croydon’s website can be visited on http://www.croydon.gov.uk/ and the PubliCA Net on http://www.croydon.gov.uk/publica/index.htm Author details Lydon Pugh, Ariadne Managing Editor, Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Making a MARC With Dublin Core Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Making a MARC With Dublin Core Buzz data software html metadata identifier schema cataloguing sgml hypertext marc perl ftp standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight revisits his Perl module for processing MARC records that was introduced in the last issue and adds UNIMARC, USMARC and a script that converts Dublin Core metadata into USMARC records.
In the last issue of Ariadne the basic layout of the MAchine Readable Catalogue (MARC) records [1] used by most library systems worldwide was introduced.
The article also described the first release of a Perl module that can be used for processing MARC records.
Since that article was published, a number of people have been in touch saying that they either were developing similar in-house MARC processing software or were planning on developing something similar for public usage themselves.
As there is obviously some interest in this software, a second alpha release [2] has been produced that includes the first cut at support for UNIMARC [3] and USMARC [1] [4] style MARC records as well as the original BLCMPMARC [5].
The implementation of USMARC should make the Perl module more useful to a far wider range of people, as USMARC is rapidly becoming the MARC format.
The Marc.pm makes some attempts to determine the MARC format being read in based on information held in the Leader as described in the previous article.
Whilst not perfect, this does work for some classes of MARC record (it will distinguish all BLCMPMARC records from USMARC records for example, but only be able to tell a few USMARC and UNIMARC records apart).
The new release also incorporates a number of bug fixes, so anyone who picked up the previous version is encouraged to pick up the new version.
This latest alpha release also includes a demonstration script that shows how the Perl module can be used.
This script is intended to allow Dublin Core metadata that is embedded in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents to be extracted and converted into a skeleton MARC record.
It is this script that this article will concentrate on.
Mapping Dublin Core to MARC The Dublin Core Element Set (DCES) consists of fifteen basic elements [6].
These elements are cover a broad range of basic metadata needs such the title, authors, subjects and identifiers for resources.
The basic definition of the DCES can be enhanced by the use of qualifiers which provide a way of specifying a more precise way to interpret the metadata held in a particular Dublin Core element.
A draft set of proposed qualifiers is currently under discussion [7] and, although the details are likely to change in the next few months, the basic mechanism will hopefully remain the same.
Now Dublin Core is intended to be a relatively simple and easy to create metadata format.
Whilst keeping to this goal is not always easy, as there are often demands that it just must support some particular communities own needs, the Dublin Core format is capable of holding a far less richly defined set of metadata than the more complex MARC records.
It is therefore necessary to have a mapping between the Dublin Core elements and their qualifiers and a basic subset of the tags in the MARC record.
This mapping definition needs to take into account the basic, unqualified form of a Dublin Core element as well as any special treatment that should be made for specific qualified instances of an element.
Luckily such a mapping between Dublin Core and the USMARC format has already been developed by the Library of Congress [8].
This mapping was used as the basis for the demonstration script for the Perl module.
Dublin Core embedded in HTML 2.0/3.2 Another proposal being considered by the Dublin Core metadata community is the ability to embed Dublin Core elements directly into HTML documents.
The exact format of this embedding is still the subject of ongoing discussions but a number of services now generate embedded Dublin Core metadata of the form: <META NAME=“DC.author” CONTENT=“(TYPE=email) jon@net.lut.ac.uk”> The NAME attribute of the META element is used to hold the metadata schema (in this case “dc”, standing for Dublin Core), followed by the name of the Dublin Core element.
By explicitly stating the scheme, this format allows other metadata besides Dublin Core to be embedded in an HTML document in a fairly standard way [9].
The CONTENT attribute holds the element’s value and any qualifiers.
Whilst this embedded format may change in the future, it is a format that follows the HTML 2.0 and 3.2 DTDs [10] [11] and has seen experimental operational deployment and so this is the format the the demonstration script makes use of.
Rather than complicate the dc2marc.pl demonstration script with a full SGML parser, the Metadata::MARC Perl module distribution uses much simpler pattern matching to extract the embedded Dublin Core metadata from the HTML documents.
This makes use of Perl’s powerful regular expression features and, with careful construction of the regular expression can handle most instances of the HTML META element, even if it is split over multiple lines.
In fact because the script does not use a proper Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) parser it is able to extract META elements from HTML documents that don’t conform to the HTML DTDs (an example of the “be conservative in what you generate and tolerant in what you accept” policy that characterises many Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) derived protocols).
The script proceeds by extracting each META element one at a time.
For each element a check is made to see if the element contains DC metadata.
This is done by checking to see if the NAME attribute starts with “dc.” and if it does not, discarding that META element.
If it does, the “dc.” is stripped off and the remains of the NAME attribute are tidied up to give the Dublin Core element name.
The CONTENT attribute of the META element then has all qualifiers removed.
Qualifiers are recognised by being surrounded by brackets in front of the real Dublin Core element in the CONTENT.
If the real value of the Dublin Core element also starts with a bracket it should have a space inserted in front of it which this script also removes.
It should be noted that this is only one of a number of proposed ways of embedding qualifiers in Dublin Core metadata inside HTML documents.
Others involve using escaping mechanisms to distinguish between brackets used to surround qualifiers and those in the actual element value or moving the qualifier into the META NAME attribute.
Both the qualifiers and the element values are loaded into complex Perl data structures in the same way that the MARC data is processed in the Marc.pm module.
There is one structure that holds the element value that is keyed on the element name and the instance count for that element.
Another structure holds the qualifier values keyed on the element name, qualifer schema (ie TYPE, SCHEME, ROLE, etc) and the count.
Generating the MARC record Once all of the META elements in the MARC record have been read in, the dc2marc.pl script then processes each of the fifteen DCES element types one at a time to fill in the MarcRecord data structure.
For each element type each instance of the element is examined.
For those elements that include a mention of qualifiers in the mapping definition [8] each of these qualifiers are checked in turn and if they are present, an entry is made in the MarcRecord data structure for the more precise interpretation of the metadata.
Otherwise the script usually make use of the more general mapping form, with the exception of the AUTHOR/CREATOR Dublin Core element which is only inserted into the MARC record if the metadata is the normal format of the name (rather than the author’s email address or affiliation, etc).
Once all the Dublin Core META elements has been examined and entries have been made in the MarcRecord data structure, the script makes a call to the WriteMarcRecord subroutine in the Marc.pm module and the resulting MARC record is created.
The WriteMarcRecord subroutine automatically generates the MARC record tags in the correct order (ie: increasing numerical order).
Conclusions This article has detailed the working of a simple Dublin Core to USMARC metadata convertor written in Perl and based on the Library of Congress mapping definition [8].
It demonstrates the usage of the Marc.pm Perl module [2] and also provides a testbed for the mapping function.
The MARC records it generates are nowhere near as full as a trained cataloguer would generate directly but it is hoped that they could be used as a skeleton for the cataloguer to work from.
In this way it also demonstrates how embedded Dublin Core metadata can be used to help reduce the cost of cataloguing by allowing authors and publishers to provide machine readable versions of the metadata that cataloguers need.
References Library of Congress MARC Standards, http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marc.html Latest alpha release of MARC Perl module, ftp://ftp.roads.lut.ac.uk/pub/ROADS/contrib/Marc-Latest.tar.gz Brian P. Holt (ed.)
with assistance from Sally.
J. McCallum and A.B.Long, UNIMARC Manual, 1987, IFLA UBCIM Programme, British Library Bibliographic Services, ISBN 0-903043-44-0.
Walt Crawford, 1984, MARC for Library Use, Knowledge Industry Publications Inc, ISBN 0-96729-120-6.
Talis MARC Manual Revision 4.0, 1994, BLCMP Library Services, Dublin Core elements, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements Dublin Core Qualifiers, http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/Metadata/DC-Qualifiers.html Dublin Core to USMARC Mapping, http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/dccross.html Embedding Metadata in HTML 2.0, http://www.oclc.org:5046/~weibel/html-meta.html HyperText Markup Language 2.0, http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc1866.txt HyperText Markup Language 3.2, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-html32.html Author Details Jon Knight works on the ROADS eLib project.
Email: jon@net.lut.ac.uk ROADS Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: Centre for Alternative Technology Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: Centre for Alternative Technology Buzz database research Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh visits the Centre for Alternative Technology, somewhere in the UK.
There cannot be too many information services that are reached by means of a water balanced cliff railway, nor can there be many that operate from a former slate quarry.
What is more, the regenerative design of the railway system and its method of computer control offer an appropriate introduction to the principles behind the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) near the town of Machynlleth in mid Wales.
The Centre’s genesis was in the seventies, when a group of enthusiasts set out to create a “living community to test the emerging technologies, finding out which ones worked and which ones didn’t”.
In just over 20 years the enterprise has grown so that, based now on a plc and with charitable status, it has a mature programme of research and public education in the practical application of what the staff today prefer to call sustainable technology.
Behind the residential courses and the steadily increasing flow of visitors looking at the low energy self-build house, the solar powered phone box, the wind turbines, the organic gardens, the reed beds and the solar roofing there is a serious purpose.
This is reflected in the research programmes, web site developments, publications and the conventional information services.
With Cardiff University, the CAT has recently completed a joint research project, locally called “The Roof” but more properly known as the Large-scale Photovoltaic-integrated Roof.
The photovoltaic modules used form a waterproof layer, eliminating the need for separate waterproofing.
The design has unique features, and as well as helping to meet the energy needs of the Centre it also sells surplus electricity to the National Grid.
Research into landfill sites is currently being carried out in collaboration with Powys County Council, and other activities are being grant-aided by the DTI and the Millennium Commission.
The latter is supporting a programme of Gaia theory research.
Paul Allen, in charge of Publicity, says “Most of our work is interpretative, but this has to be backed up by information.
Our own web site contains most of the organisational information, and we have won a DTI prize for our virtual site, but the web is also the best way to keep up to date with current developments in ecology throughout the entire world.” Over the year, the site (http://www.cat.org.uk) averages 1500 hits per hour.
Paul went on to ask “What’s the point of the web if it’s just one big glossy brochure?” Part of the CAT’s answer is the Virtual Reality Guide to Green Solutions.
This is the interactive multi media guide to the Centre, in the form of a tour of the site with links to other websites and databases, as well as to the manufacturers and suppliers of equipment.
One of the purposes of this initiative, supported by the DTI, is to demonstrate the benefits of multi media technology to business.
Most of the information about the CAT is on the website, including services, courses and publications.
The trail starts with an electronic version of the printed user guide, then enables the user to move on into a wide range of environmental experiences.
The websites are managed by Dave Thorpe (email davidthorpe@IIP.co.uk) and his other major project, again with external funding, is the Palace of Amnesia.
In the form of a sophisticated game, this is a novel attempt to use the web as a means of exploring belief systems, religions and philosophy as an aid to self-knowledge.
The web aside, the information picture in general seems to be fairly conventional.
Well over 7000 people a year use the service by phone, fax, email or personal visit, and over one third of these are schoolchildren or students.
The activities of the Centre, including the developmental work, publications and consultancy for big name clients like The Body Shop, Amoco UK, The National Trust and British Rail are supported with information on sustainable technologies either from the information service’s own databases or from existing expertise on site.
Given in particular the leanness of the staff establishment, the range of subject areas to be covered and the variation in degree of sophistication from school projects to other researchers, the service is impressive.
In addition, there are over 80 publications covering renewable energy, organic growing, sustainable practices, permaculture, environmental building and environmental education among other things.
A range of Factsheets, Tipsheets and Resource Guides are available.
Among the long term plans for the Centre is the intention to develop a federation of similar establishments on a world wide basis.
In the meantime, the Centre for Alternative Technology is a good starting point for anyone involved in ecological studies, and is particularly useful for environmental education.
The Centre for Alternative Technology was introduced to Ariadne by Paul Allen and David Thorpe, with Martin Donnelly.
Author details Lyndon Pugh lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Netskills Corner: The 2nd International Symposium on Networked Learner Support (NLS) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Netskills Corner: The 2nd International Symposium on Networked Learner Support (NLS) Buzz data owl research Citation BibTex RIS Walter Scales summarises the 2nd International Symposium on Networked Learner Support (NLS), held on the 23rd and 24th June 1997 in Sheffield.
The Symposium, organised by The Networked Learning and Work Research Group at the Department of Information Studies in the University of Sheffield, was held in a very convenient location in Sheffield: lecture rooms, dining and bar facilities and bedrooms were all in one building, Halifax Hall, one of the University’s halls of residence.
The grounds were nice, too, complete with squirrels and at least one owl.
The programme didn’t differ from the advertised programme, and ran very smoothly and exactly to schedule.
The way it was arranged meant that everyone could attend all the papers.
All the papers and most abstracts were placed on the Web well in advance of the Symposium, and this was alluded to more than once by speakers and participants alike as exemplifying the best spirit and practice of NLS.
The papers and abstracts are shown in the programme below, under the respective links paper and abstract.
A (very subjective) summary of the papers can be found by following the links summary.
The Symposium’s declared aims were twofold: to focus on the potential of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in general and the Web in particular, and to discuss the organisational and professional development issues associated with the NLS role.
These aims were to be tackled under the three heads of: The design and implementation of NLS strategies and materials Professional development for NLS Organisational and other strategic issues.
The symposium was truly international: four out of the twelve papers were by overseas presenters, and about 30 of the 80 or so participants were from overseas.
Most participants seemed to be either librarians or IT specialists of one shape or another, and only 2 of them were not from academia.
The welcome by Professor Tom Wilson, Project Head of NetLinkS, made formal reference to the work of Nick Bowskill and Sarah Ashton, as well as the Project Management and technical support.
Tom also pointed up the fact that the term NLS seems to have now passed into commonly accepted usage.
Programme Monday, 23rd June 10.30-11.30 Registration & coffee 11.30-11.45 Welcome and introduction to the Symposium 11.45-13.15 Helene Williams & Anne Zald, University of Washington: "Redefining roles: librarians as partners in information literacy education" Abstract | Paper | Summary Madeleine McPherson, University of Southern Queensland: "Practising the paradigm shift: real world experience of on-line support" Abstract | Paper | Summary 13.15-14.15 Lunch 14.15-15.45 Bob Hunter, University of Lincolnshire & Humberside: "The development, delivery and support of the Effective Learning Programme at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside" Abstract | Paper | Summary Bob Banks, Fretwell Downing Data Systems "Beyond the on-line library the learning environment" Abstract | Paper | Summary 15.45-16.15 Tea 16.15-17.45 Tracey Mulvaney, University of Birmingham "The TAPIN Electronic Libraries Project and the experience at the University of Birmingham" Abstract | Paper | Summary Trine Schreiber & Camilla Moring, Royal School of Librarianship, Copenhagen: "The communicative and organisational competencies of the librarian in networked learner support" Abstract | Paper | Summary 19:00 Bar & Symposium dinner Tuesday, 24th June 08:00-08:45 Breakfast 09.00-10.30 Jo Pye, University of Exeter: "Academic partnership in NLS resource design: a European case study" Abstract | Paper | Summary Christian Langenbach & Freimut Bodendorf, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremburg: “Learner support in a distributed learning environment the use of WWW-based teachware packages” Abstract | Paper | Summary 10.30-11.00 Coffee 11.00-12.30 Gilly Salmon, Ken Giles & John Allan, Open University: "Large-scale computermediated training for management teachers" Abstract | Paper | Summary Tina Wilson & Denise Whitelock, Open University: "Facilitation of on-line learning environments: what works when teaching distance learning computer science students" Abstract | Paper | Summary 12.30-13.30 Lunch 13.30-15.00 Michael Hammond, University of Sheffield: "Professional learning and the on-line discussion" Abstract | Paper | Summary Philippa Levy, University of Sheffield: "Professional development for networked learner support" Abstract | Paper | Summary 15.00-15.30 Symposium close, tea & departures Epilogue The one strong theme of this symposium was the perceived need for collaboration between different specialisms not only within institutions but even within the individual NLS worker many skills were seen as amalgams of convergent disciplines.
Virtually every paper addressed this aspect in some guise, and Philippa Levy’s paper, concluding the Symposium, took a nice overview based on this theme.
Another strong theme was the idea of change, particularly the shift of student from traditional school-leaver to life-long learner.
The accommodation and catering (especially the desserts!)
were excellent, with lots of fresh coffee to break up what would otherwise have been a rather punishing two-day regimen.
Rather surprisingly, the venue seemed to be without networking facilities.
The symposium was very vigorous, with not a single instance of cardigan or spectacles-on-a-chain visible.
Average age was probably late 30’s, with a near-equal male/female mix.
Above all, the symposium was thoroughly enjoyable, with presentations by enthusiastic and knowledgeable speakers, and a friendly and open atmosphere, with hospitable organisers.
All the papers were followed by vigorous question and answer sessions.
Note: much of the formatting, all the abstracts and papers, and many of the ideas are as contained in the NetLinkS pages at http://netways.shef.ac.uk/rbase/2ndsym2.htm.
The summaries of the papers, however, do not necessarily reflect the views of Netskills or of NetLinkS.
Author Details Walter Scales, Netskills Trainer Email: walter.scales@newcastle.ac.uk Tel: 0191 222 5002 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: John Moores Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: John Moores Buzz software opac multimedia Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark visits one of the most prominent new university library buildings of recent years.
Few libraries in the UK can be as converged with computing services as at Liverpool John Moores University.
In fact to talk of a library, either as a physical space or a body of staff, at all in the context of JMU is nonsensical.
Since 1994 instead of a University Library, John Moores Cathedrals campus has had the Aldham Robarts Learning Resources Centre (or ARC for short).
The ARC serves the schools of Business, Built Environment, Design and Visual Arts, Law, Social Work and Social policy, Modern Languages and Media, Cultural and Critical Arts and thus c. 5,500 FTE students (8,000 actual individuals).
It brings together facilities which were previously spread between two separate libraries and two computer centres.
But what makes the ARC unique is not the combination of computing and library facilities in the same building after all several universities provide this service, the latest addition being the new 24 hour Library and Learning Centre at the University of Bath.
Instead its uniqueness comes primarily from its staff.
All members of staff share core skills such as basic fault fixing on computers, demonstrating the OPAC, issuing books, selling laser print out, but they still specialise in certain areas.
This convergence came about as a method of rationalising, as in 1992 the new university was faced with 5 libraries and 5 computer centres.
Facilities needed upgrading in particular the Mount Pleasant Library which had 28 rooms spread over four floors of a Victorian building.
The University took the bold decision to completely merge both library and computer user services and create three Learning Resources Centres to serve the University.
The physical and structural convergence of the two services would, it was hoped, improve the user convenience, ease and encourage the use of networked information, facilitate the use of multimedia learning materials, encourage innovation and development, allow greater opening hours due to economies of scale, cut duplication, however small, and increase staff development opportunities.
The first of these learning centres was the ARC, which opened in July 1994, the second, named after Aldham Robarts wife, Avril, and known as ARC II, is now nearing completion.
Convergence goes all the way up the management structure.
Most staff are divided into subject teams consisting of information officers (professional librarians), computing officers, information assistants and computing assistants (library and computing auxiliary staff respectively).
The building was designed to reflect this staff structure.
Floors are divided by subject area and on each floor you will find all you could want for a particular subject, be it print material, audio visual or software.
There are appropriate staff on each floor to help with most enquiries.
Unfortunately the system slightly falls down here.
There are simply not enough computer officers to have one, and more properly two, per floor, thus the computing officers (but not assistants) are concentrated on a single floor and can be called on in case of problems.
The newly merged service and the new building which housed it proved immediately popular with students.
Compared to before the ARC was opened, there has been an 100% increase in gate figures, c. 400% increase in enquiries, c. 70% increase in computing transactions and c. 117% increase in issues.
Although it is obvious from user surveys that part of this increase is due to the close proximity of all resources, it is also clear from surveys and statistics, that the ARC is being used by a large number of students in schools other than those covered by the subject stock simply due to the pleasant working environment.
The building was designed by Austin-Smith: Lord.
Each subject floor follows the same basic layout of four 'streets' leading out from a central area where the staffed help desk is.
The sense of space and light on all levels is quite breath-taking.
As much natural light has been used as possible, even in the Lower Ground level which is entirely below street level.
All the desks and carrels, whether they are used as study spaces or computer stations are of the same basic design made especially for the building.
They are large (900mx900m) and all are capable of being wired.
False floors throughout the building further enhance the building's flexibility.
This was particularly useful when after the first year of use, the original design of fully integrated workspaces, e.g.
computers next to private study carrels and a/v equipment proved too noisy to be used throughout the building.
Several 'quiet' areas were designated by moving the area of computers and group study places elsewhere on the floor and 'walling' in the silence with shelving.
Even on the Tuesday afternoon that I visited the ARC was bustling, and there were very few seats to spare, and this in a building with 723 seats (including 188 computer places).
The figures speak for themselves: an average increase from 40.3% student satisfaction with computing services in 1994, before the building was opened, to 60.6% in 1995; for libraries the figure has jumped from 48.5% to a huge 75.3%.
With such pleasant surroundings and such a wealth of resources under one roof, it is not hard to understand why.
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Electronic Journals, Evolutionary Niches Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Journals, Evolutionary Niches Buzz passwords gis ejournal rae research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley describes what academics want from their journals and shows how these criteria can be met by an on-line journal.
Most academics regard themselves as radicals; in practice, they are probably as conservative as anyone else in the world, publishers included.
These are generalisations of course, but regarding new and novel forms of publishing it would appear that physicists logging on to Paul Ginsparg's workstation at Los Alamos are well ahead of the field.
Ginsparg is, according to some, changing the face of academic publishing.
Publishers and academic authors and readers all have some experience of electronic journals, an indication that they are no longer on the horizon but have arrived.
The possibilities of electronic journals have been aired in New Scientist as well as Times Higher over the last year so Stevan Harnad's views should be well known beyond the realms of Ariadne readers ( see Ariadne 2).
So, where are all these journals?
Is it simply that monolithic publishing groups and their accountants keep a firm grip on the market and inhibit innovation?
I shall not attempt to answer such questions here, nor indeed challenge Harnad.
However, I do see a need for alternatives to traditional publishing systems to be examined.
In this article, one such alternative will be presented, not so much as a highly specific proposal but rather as another way of viewing academic literature.
At the outset, I suggest that the reason why there is no headlong rush to publish electronically is because of an inherent preference for academics to see their literature in paper form.
Figure 1 is a schematic of the way in which, broadly, scientific literature exists and gets communicated.
There will undoubtedly be differences in treatment in various academic areas but the diagram will suffice for this review.
The relatively informal reviewing direction on the right is that taken by Ginsparg and his particle physics e-journal using a sort of 'successive approximation' of pre-prints to refine the quality of the output.
Experience suggests however, that most academics are far more conservative than this and (especially with the Research Assessment Exercise in mind) prefer traditional refereeing procedures, despite its acknowledged difficulties.
This does not avoid the main aspect of academic conservatism, that of publishing in electronic media in the first place.
The general task is to obtain quality publication at minimal costs to authors and readers.
What does an academic want from a journal?
Namely, to communicate material: rapidly accurately widely cheaply and which can be preserved for 'posterity' and provide a vehicle for discussion.
Within these functions, there are conflicting notions, even aside from the concept of inexpensive journals.
For instance, an author may be prepared to wait for some time in order for a piece of work to come out in a prestigious journal.
There again, although it is desirable that a paper be widely disseminated, there is a often 'target' of readers.
As Harnad and others have recognised, there is a gross waste of money in going through all the complexities of publishing for a small, and perhaps very small, number of readers.
It is important for posterity that the referenced and final 'lodged' material is accessible to all.
A further, but significant, consideration not included in the above list is a journal's status.
Academics wish to publish in high quality journals for prestige, believing that the journal's high status will somehow rub off onto them or their research group.
We know all about this from the recent RAE just past.
However, there is another consideration that is probably less prominent: not where to publish but what to read out of all the published papers.
A paper published in a high quality journal is more likely to be 'must see' rather than one in a journal deemed to be of lower standing.
This is likely to be true even if an article appears as a result of a literature search.
A while ago, a gap was identified in the academic journal coverage, specifically in the area of geology and physical geography dealing with glaciers.
Disregarding the cry of 'not another journal' it was thought appropriate to consider the implementation of a new journal in a totally electronic form.
There were several reasons for this.
First, there is a need to have coloured images, not only of topographic features but geological thin sections, maps, images from digital terrain models and geographic information systems.
As these are very costly for print on paper journals, a WWW distribution is clearly advantageous.
Secondly, an aim is to avoid delays in printing and thirdly, to make it adaptable to changing circumstances and needs.
Glacial Geology and Geomorphology (GGG) has, from the outset, been set up as a totally electronic, peer reviewed, journal.
It is mediated on the WWW and exists in a printed version only in as far as a reader may print out a selection from it.
We call it a 'pure e-journal'; journals published in both electronic and paper version are 'hybrid' electronic journals.
One aim of GGG is therefore to provide the benefits of electronic transfer as well as other value added products in an accepted academic, peer-reviewed system.
So far, so unexceptional, although there are technicalities in setting this up this e-journal which need not concern us here.
GGG joins other Web-distributed electronic journals such as Psycoloquy, Electronic Journal of Theoretical Chemistry and Hypermedia Joyce studies.
GGG does not try to break new ground in going towards a 'page charge' funding mechanism.
The idea is to provide funding in a different way.
We shall return to this, but first a trip back in time.
In 1939 J.D.
Bernal claimed that, of papers in the thousands of journals then published, 'possibly as much as three quarters' were of little value anyway!
Hence, returning to the point made earlier, concentration on high quality journals is not just a matter of prestige but is also one of selection by the reader.
This may be the most important function that a high class journal can provide; that of filtering information.
Of course, it does nothing to save the paper that gets 'lost' in the welter of other material that has been published over the years.
Bernal's notion to make life easier for the busy researcher was to publish a synopsis rather than a full length paper (the full material would be archived 'centrally').
This idea has always appealed to me.
If the gist of an argument can be describeded in a couple of pages of text then why bother with the remainder unless it really needs to be studied in detail.
This concept has been taken into GGG.
In brief, an author submits a paper in the usual way together with this 'extended abstract'.
If accepted after refereeing, the main paper sits in the background and can only be viewed on a 'pay per view' basis.
The extended abstract also has to be paid for, but resides in an area to which access is gained through a small annual subscription.
The aim is to make this payment a small one for the individual (and not large for an institution).
The subscriber has access to other facilities within the subscription area we have termed the 'milieu'.
These other, 'value added', facilities include book reviews, field notes and a discussion forum as well as correspondence about papers.
The objective of this structure is to provide a flexible and adaptable structure within a 'one stop shop' for the academic in an area of interest.
Moreover, at least with e-journals, feedback can be very rapid and this accentuates the significance of the milieu.
In GGG, the main paper, which is marked up with appropriate links to images, references etc., is available from within the milieu if a reader requires it.
A password system is used for this.
An alerting device to subscribers will be provided so that even if subscribers do not pay frequent visits to the milieu then they will know of the addition of the latest refereed paper.
This alerting will apply to extended abstacts as well as full papers as they are reviewed together.
Prices for a full paper to be downloaded have not yet been fixed but a guideline might be the price of an inter-library loan request.
With this system there are no reprints provided.
Production is speeded as there is no need to accumulate papers in order to produce a volume.
Each paper becomes a separate 'issue' numbered sequentially for each year.
There are no page numbers as a search facility is provided for the journal.
We shall provide more technical information at a later date.
Although the thinking behind the formulation of a new e-journal was motivated by research interests, there has been a potential spin off into teaching.
Again, it is the notion of flexibity which is significant.
It is at least the potential to be flexible and to respond to needs of teachers and learners in a manner which is not feasible through traditional CAL and CR ROM distribition.
Some of these ideas have been propounded elsewhere in Active Learning.
To conclude, I suspect that geoscientists, if not physicists, are as uncertain and conservative as the population at large.
They probably only respond when something is presented to them that works and is useful.
This is where the adaptability of the WWW-based 'milieu' comes in to play.
The future of electronic journals is probably assured.
The form and timing of the 'domino effect' is less certain.
What is not known is the direction electronic journals might take.
The ideas presented here are new and untried and certainly other manifestations are possible.
We suspect that trying to be prescriptive is inhibiting.
Evolution of a number of different concepts is possible.
Indeed, this is the only real way forward as it allows responsive changes in demand to be responsive to need and to fill different publishing niches.
This flexibility is surely only possible with electronic media.
Glacial Geology and Geomorphology is published for the British Geomorphological Research Group by John Wiley and Sons.The following at Queen's University are involved with the project: Brian Whalley School of Geosciences, QUB George Munroe Projects Group, Computer Services, QUB Sheila Landy Science Librarian, QUB Stephen Trew GIS Technician, School of Geosciences, QUB Justin MacNeil Research Assistant, School of Geosciences, QUB (funded by John Wiley and Sons Ltd) Further information can be found at: 'Publishing a Scholarly Journal on the World Wide Web' Forthcoming ASLIB Proceedings (ELVIRA 1996) Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JUGL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JUGL Buzz data software java portfolio archives copyright video graphics windows hypertext multimedia cd-rom mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Wright put on her woolies and went to Preston to report on the annual JUGL (JANET User Group for Libraries) conference.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN”> The 1996 JUGL Annual Conference Emma Wright describes the 1996 JUGL (JANET User Group for Libraries) Annual Conference, held in Preston in early July .
Emma works for the Netskills eLib project.
Education on the Net This year’s JUGL Annual Conference and General Meeting was held at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.
The theme was one of particular interest to all library and information staff who are involved in raising awareness about the Internet and who provide training on how best to exploit the enormous range of services on the Internet.
The Conference packs included a JUGL 1996 mouse mat and a copy of Issue 3 of Ariadne.
Day 1 Pre-Conference Training Nearly 70 people registered for the conference and about half took advantage on the first day of the pre-conference training provided by the Netskills and Mailbase Teams.
The first session was an Introduction to the Internet which began with a short presentation introducing basic networking skills and tools, mainly the WWW.
After the unfortunate delays logging into the system there was a hands on session using Netscape enabling the attendees to become acquainted with the World Wide Web and some of the services available via the Web, such as NISS.
After coffee, with toast and croissants which was very welcome, since there had been no time for breakfast for the trainers, Elaine Blair gave a talk on Mailbase ‘A Better Way to Communicate’, telling us about the services Mailbase offers and the mailing lists related to library and information services subject area.
Hands on exercises continued until lunch, looking at the different searching facilities available on the Internet for finding quality information.
The Conference The first session of the Conference, chaired by Aileen Wade, was opened with a welcoming speech from Brian Booth, the Vice Chancellor of the University.
A series of presentations on training for both on and off campus learners, and on a number of funded projects designed to educate users of the Internet then followed.
Grasping the NETtle Peter Brothy, Librarian at the University of Central Lancashire, spoke about ‘Grasping the NETtle’.
The networked universities enable remote teaching such as surgical procedures, video conferencing, the transfer of large amounts of data etc.
Peter acknowledged problems such as non users, costs, copyright, archiving and quality assurance, disabled users, and the need for mass training.
He looked at the concept of the Virtual University: Central Lancashire has many sites, some remote from the main campus.
These campuses are networked to bring the sites together.
20,000 students use 1500 PCs internally networked but 20% are off campus.
VALNOW is the Virtual Academic Library of the North West which needs appropriate technology such as high speed networking.
It allows remote students to reserve books and note references which are faxed or delivered to their remote site.
The system is based on the EC funded BIBPEL.
From Surfing to Searching The second speaker was Jill Foster, The Director of Netskills and Mailbase.
Her talk ‘From Surfing to Searching’ gave an introduction to the Netskills project looking at the training the Team is delivering.
She discussed how the training is helping staff in Higher Educational institutions use the Internet for their daily work, developing their skills to progress from surfing to searching.
Netskills also makes their materials available to those who have a training role in their work.
Jill invited trainers to try out the first set of materials, Kit 1, ‘Introduction to the Internet’, which is now available and feedback their comments to the team.
The kit is available from: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/materials/kits/kit1/ Training at a Distance Ted Smith, Head of Computing Services, University of Central Lancashire ended the first session with a demonstration of ‘Training at a Distance’.
He believes that learning should be fun and that new technologies should be used in HE for education.
Ted believes that because of the new technologies by the year 2000 there will be less HE Institutions due to the new ICE age, the change in Information Education and Communication.
Distance learning and Just-in-Time self paced learning change the ways in which we are educated, and collaborative working through email and video-conferencing all change the ways in which we communicate.
The technology will change what we teach, how we teach, where students learn, and when students learn.
Ted gave us an example of the way in which new technology is being used now to teach students by way of a live demonstration of a TLTP project.
The multimedia CD-ROM self-paced course / tutorial for students studying marketing was modular, had video clips of film footage, graphics, and included self test multiple choice questions at the end of each module.
Ted concluded by saying that due to cuts in funding in HE, the only way to reduce spending was to reduce staff costs by reducing staff numbers.
He felt to survive we need to adapt and courses such as this will help reduce the numbers of staff needed to deliver courses.
Tours and Excursions Before dinner, there was the optional to take a trip around Preston, looking at buildings and hearing about things which you would never have dreamt went on in Preston.
After dinner, for those who felt the need for some sea air another trip was laid on to Blackpool, ‘England’s favourite holiday resort’.
Day 2 Current Projects After a long, wet walk through the rain to find breakfast, the morning’s talks, chaired by Graham Jefcoate, looked at some projects which are already up and running.
Two eLib Projects were described to the group, IMPEL and NetLinkS.
IMPEL Catherine Edwards from the University of Northumbria, told us how the social, organisational and cultural impacts on academic library staff of working in an increasingly electronic environment are being looked into by the IMPEL 2 project.
Much of this work builds on the first IMPEL (IMpact on People of Electronic Libraries) project.
IMPEL 2 is split into four project areas A through to D, looking at Library and related staff, users, resource based learning and the monitoring of EduLib.
A prize, an entire box of smarties, was offered to anyone who could come up with more meaningful names for the project areas.
NetLinkS Phillipa Levy from NetLinkS introduced this eLib project.
The key aims are to support local and national development of networked learner support.
The Follet and Fielden Reports predicted that there would be a greater involvement of informational professionals in teaching and learning, especially in the support of resource based open learning.
The Fielden Report looked at the human resource issues and NetLinkS builds on the vision of the network being exploited for networked based open and distance learning.
NetLinkS have just found out that they are to receive funding for a further twenty months.
EDUCATE An EU libraries project, EDUCATE, which began in 1994 is another project that was described by Patricia O’Donnell of The University of Limerick.
This multilingual programme, available in Spanish and French as well as English, covers physics and engineering disciplines and is intended for use not only by librarians but also by postand undergraduates, researchers and industry.
As a model for other disciplines, users of the program follow a pathfinder route enabling them to find materials for their level of study and amongst other services can access lists of library and Internet resources for specific subject areas and are told which texts are available in their library.
The EDUCATE newsletter on the WWW is at the URL: http://educate.lib.chalmers.se/PUBLIC/newslett/english/index.html Bits Bytes and Bandwidth Making Information Really Useful Nicky Gardner’s talk ‘Bits Bytes and Bandwidth Making Information Really Useful’ was an interpretation about what the Internet is, which included some views on its uses.
Questions posed included the usefulness of the information on the Internet: does the network make the information useful?
Is any improvement of the network going to make the information better?
Is the technology really the knight on the white charger who is going to whisk us away to where the desired information is?
Nicky felt that content will be the key to network success, hence the funding from the HEFCs the information is only as good as the people who put it there.
Nicky is on the JISC and explained how it is reorganising into 4 groups the Network Group, the Electronic and Information Group, the Technological Group and a new area to be covered by the Human Cultural and Organisational group.
ISSC and FIGIT as we have learned to know and love them will no longer exist.
JUGL Annual General Meeting The afternoon session opened with the JUGL AGM, which announced the newly elected members of the committee and included the financial statement and a summary of the year’s activities from the Chair.
Amendments to the ‘Terms of Reference’ for JUGL were accepted.
Training in Practice After the close of the AGM, the sessions continued with how some members of the community are offering training in practice to their users.
Four speakers representing Oxford University, the British Library, Loughborough University and the Medical Research Council shared their experiences, problems and solutions to training academic staff, students, researchers and other library staff.
Following these talks, delegates were divided into groups and provided with the opportunity to share their views and experiences of approaches to training with others.
Each group was then asked to feedback to the whole with their five main points.
From all four groups the main points which came out of the sessions were: The importance of identifying and understanding the needs of the people you are going to train Liaison with other staff, including academics Who’s responsibility is the training?
the library’s, computing service’s, staff development’s -who is responsible for which elements?
Training must be timely and relevant to course work for students and relevant to the daily work of staff.
A variety of approaches to the training is needed in order to cater for the different starting points in people’s knowledge base.
Many more points were brought up in these sessions.
JUGL will summarise and publish the findings on their Web pages.
The Ceidhli The venue for the conference dinner was the Harris Hall Conference Centre.
It is a former orphanage which was built by a local benefactor and opened in 1888, named the Harris Orphanage after him.
We were greeted by a sherry reception and after a very varied and filling buffet meal, the calories were burnt off by a select few who joined in the Ceidhli, the less energetic using their remaining strength to prop up the bar.
Day 3 Increasing Access with the Net This session, chaired by Beth Gabb from the University of Central Lancashire, interpreted throughout with British Sign Language, looked at increasing access to Internet resources for the visually impaired or deaf.
Does the Net Work?
Peter Osborne is visually impaired, and is the Multimedia Publishing Manager for the Royal National Institute for the Blind.
He posed the question, ‘Does the Net Work?’.
Despite the fact the lecture theatre was fully equipped with equipment for a multimedia presentation, Peter deliberately decided not to use any visual aids.
Peter first heard about the Internet when he was studying at Leeds University.
People were saying how good it was and how he would never have to use Braille any more unfortunately several years on, this is still nowhere near reality.
From his perspective, Peter looked at the pros and cons of the Internet.
Looking at what the net means for him, Peter compared the Internet to Bob Monkhouse’s television game show, where he is given two totally unconnected words, and he then tells a story starting off with the first word and ending up with the second.
The Web is like this, following hypertext links takes you from one subject to another.
Thinking about the word ‘Net’ to Peter this could be likened to a fishing net, catching information.
However, because there are holes in the fishing net, it is easy for information we need to slip through, and there is always a lot of the catch which we do not want which we sift through and toss back.
Or, it could be looked at as a tennis net, but because the net is continually growing the player keeps clipping the tape.
Comparing it to a safety net, we are never quite sure if it is going to be safe and hold us when we need it to.
However, being visually impaired, there are positive sides to the Internet for Peter.
Braille takes up lots of shelf space in the library, takes time to emboss and is expensive to produce.
The Internet helps with these problems.
Also, because the Internet is a trendy medium for communication for everyone and as it is a faceless medium, people do not know if you are visually impaired or not, and communication is on a level playing field.
It is easier to be independent using email, as you are not relying on people to emboss or read letters.
However, at the end of the day, Peter said no matter how good the information on the Internet, he will always want access to the real thing, paper copies, and he is sure Braille will not be supplanted by the Internet.
Other problems for the visually impaired trying to gain access to information on the Internet begins with the cost of hardware and software.
Braille speak software for the Internet costs around £1700 thus making access elitist.
Training is the next problem.
Most training up till now for the visually impaired has been on DOS and not Windows which you need for most Internet software.
Peter and others like him ‘find it difficult to get their head round Windows’.
Once on the Internet, much of it is inaccessible to the visually impaired, for example graphics.
People need to be made to think about their Web pages at the design stage.
Careful design and coding of information can alleviate access barriers, for example, every graphical image should have associated text.
To summarise, Peter feels the Internet is of use to the visually impaired, it is accessible but needs to be put in context with other media.
It needs to be developed with all members of the community in mind.
He was particularly excited by the potential of JAVA which allows developers to embed code into their applications to help the visually impaired so there is a lot of optimism for the future.
The RNIB home page is at the URL: http://www.rnib.org.uk/ A Vision in Future Peter Kendall, who has been deaf from birth, is from the Cheshire Deaf Society.
His presentation ‘A Vision in Future’ was given in sign, which was translated for those of us who did not read sign.
Peter told us about the Video Phone service which is available in Cheshire.
Communication for the deaf can be difficult.
One of the early facilities developed about 10 years ago to help the deaf was the Minicom.
This basically is a text telephone.
The user types text in to the telephone and to receive the call you need the Minicom.
There are some 20,000 in use today in the UK, however, not all deaf people have written or spoken English as their second language, which still leaves these people with a communication problem.
Cheshire Deaf Society in conjunction with the British Library and the Government have been looking at Video Phones.
All you need is a PCC, a Personal Communication Computer.
Peter chose Olivetti machines, as it was thought these best met their needs.
They are using ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and the software package Text Talk.
Text Talk allows the user to sign and type text.
The text can also be translated into different languages if needs be.
With sign, body language is very important, the video phone gives access to this body language, you can see the person you are signing to and vice versa.
In Cheshire, some 52,000 people out of the total population of some 1 million have some degree of deafness.
There are now 14 video phones in the county, 8 of which are in the larger public libraries, each of the 3 Cheshire Deaf Society offices have one, and the remaining 3 are located in residential units for the deaf throughout the county.
It has been found that through the use of these video phones it has been more convenient and a lot less time consuming for deaf people to arrange visits and appointments with people such as the Citizens Advice Bureau.
They have simply gone to their local public library and used the video phone to make contact with people.
This has saved much travelling time and money, especially for Peter, so much so, that already the money saved has covered the cost of the Video Phones themselves.
Peter is aware that these Video Phones are not just for the deaf but for hearing people too.
The Video Talk facility has been promoted as a public service throughout the Cheshire public libraries.
Looking more specifically at the Internet, Peter told us that access is fine for deaf people who have written English as their spoken language.
As there are many deaf people who are not bilingual access is still very superficial.
In contrast to Peter Osbourne, who said graphics can lead to inaccessible areas of the Internet for the visually impaired, Peter Kendall said more graphics make the information on the Internet more meaningful for the deaf who are not bilingual.
Therefore, the use of graphics has to be considered carefully to make the Internet more accessible to a wider range of the community.
REVIEL The last speaker of this session, and of the conference, was Peter Brothy, a Librarian from the University of Central Lancashire.
Here we were told about the REVIEL Project Resources for Visually Impaired Users of the Electronic Library.
The University of Central Lancashire has provided services to visually impaired staff and students for over 10 years.
These services operate alongside the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) which has a well developed portfolio of research in electronic library services.
The REVIEL project seeks to ensure that when services are provided they are accessible to all potential users.
Through appropriate policies and design, visually impaired people should be included as full users of the services, that is they should be able to access and use services independently without additional intermediaries.
One aspect of the project is to look at the feasibility of developing a virtual library of networked resources in formats suitable for persons with a visual impairment.
This will be known as VIPIR, Visually Impaired People’s Information Resource.
Peter referred to a couple of resources: All our Friends Everywhere, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/aofe/ SIMA (Support Initiative for Multimedia Applications), Sue Cunningham ‘Multimedia and the Disabled’, http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/SIMA/disabled.html Conference Close Beth Gabb thanked the speakers, closing the 1996 JUGL Conference with thanks and expressing the hope of seeing everyone again next year at Sheffield Hallam University for the 1997 JUGL Conference.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors.
This page last updated on July 15th 1996 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: The Student's Guide to the Internet by Ian Winship and Alison McNab Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: The Student's Guide to the Internet by Ian Winship and Alison McNab Buzz database cataloguing telnet gopher Citation BibTex RIS Ian Winship and Alison McNab publish cut-price guide, aimed at all students, to the Internet.
Release Date: October 1996 Price: 7.99 ISBN: 1 85604 2073 This is the first Internet handbook written specifically for university and college students.
It aims to provide FE and HE users with an accessible introduction to the Internet and what it has on offer for them, demonstrating particular methods and explaining which procedures and sources are important.
Using a practical presentation style, the emphasis throughout is on the specific needs of the student.
Topics covered include: electronic mail and discussion lists essential techniques: telnet, gopher, World Wide Web information sources: electronic journals, bibliographic database, learning material, library catalogues etc.
what's new how to keep up publishing on the Internet citing electronic sources This guide represents an essential companion for all students who wish to exploit the resources of the Internet for their studies.
It will also be particularly useful to those who cannot access training within their own institution.
The authors expect that librarians and academic colleagues will want to recommend this book to students to relieve pressure on the over-burdened information professional.
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Intelligent Searching Agents on the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Intelligent Searching Agents on the Web Buzz software database browser windows hypertext research Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley describes Web-based Intelligent Searching Agents, and takes a closer look at a few examples you may wish to play with.
What are Intelligent Searching Agents?
Many web search engines use the concept of a ‘spider’ automated software which goes out onto the web and trawls through the contents of each server it encounters, indexing documents as it finds them.
This approach results in the kinds of databases maintained by services such as Alta Vista and Excite huge indexes to a vast chunk of what’s currently available on the web.
However, the problems which users can face when using such databases are beginning to be well documented.
A recent JISC-funded investigation [1] into the use of web search engines indicates that users can typically encounter a number of difficulties.
These include the issue of finding information relevant to their needs, and the problem of information overload when far too much information is returned from a search.
Typically, a search on Alta Vista can result in thousands of hits, many of which will not be relevant to a user’s enquiry.
The size and wide coverage of such a database can make it difficult to quickly and effectively track down relevant information, using the limited searching features which are available.
Intelligent searching agents have been developed in order to provide a solution to this problem.
Intelligent agents can utilise the spider technology used by traditional web search engines, and employ this in new kinds of ways.
Typically, these tools are spiders which can be trained by the user to search the web for specific types of information resources.
The agent can be personalised by its owner so that it can build up a picture of individual likes, dislikes and precise information needs.
An intelligent agent can also be autonomous so that it is capable of making judgements about the likely relevance of material.
Once trained, an agent can then be set free to roam the network turning up useful information sources whilst the user gets on with more urgent tasks, or even goes off line.
This means that intelligent agents could be left roaming the web overnight, or at weekends, and a user could simply pick up search results at whichever is the most convenient time for them.
Another feature of intelligent agents is that their usefulness as searching tools should increase the more frequently they are used.
Over a period of time, an agent will build up an accurate picture of a users information needs.
It will learn from past experiences, as a user will have the option of reviewing search results and rejecting any information sources which aren’t relevant or useful.
This information will be stored in a user profile which the agent uses when performing a search.
So, an agent can also learn from its initial forays into the web, and return with a more tightly defined searching agenda if requested.
Some examples of Intelligent Agents FireFly Firefly is a music and film recommendation system on the web which uses intelligent agents to build up a complex profile of user preferences using a technique known as automated collaborative filtering.
Lets say, for example, that you are a big fan of The Spice Girls, and you want to find out if there are any other similar groups that might also be to your musical taste.
You can tell FireFly which groups you like, and it will start to build up a picture of your tastes.
This information goes into a personal profile which is stored in the FireFly database.
FireFly will then go away and check its database to see if anyone else has indicated a preference for The Spice Girls if so, it will take a look at the musical profile of other Spice Girls fans and suggest other artists, based on the premise that people who like The Spice Girls will also like other similar types of music.
So, it’s the computer equivalent of running into someone in the pub and having a chat about the types of music you like.
Once Firefly starts to recommend artists to you it will also give you the opportunity to rate these artists on a scale from “don’t know” to “the best!”.
As you continue to add your ratings, you continue to expand the musical profile of you which Firefly now holds.
You can also click on a hypertext link to find more information about an artist, read the views of other members, or follow links to audio clips of music.
There is also a facility for buying albums on-line.
By now you’re probably thinking that Firefly sounds more like the kind of system that might be popular with American undergraduates, and not really the kind of tool that has any use for serious research.
The point to be made here is that it is important to think about the other possible scenarios in which a tool such as FireFly could be used.
Imagine, for example, a group of social scientists using a Firefly-like tool to create a rating system for social science resources on the web.
Researchers could input a set of keywords describing the type of material they are searching for and then have their request cross-matched against thousands of others in the database.
It would also be possible to build up individual user profiles of research needs, so that you could send Firefly out on a regular basis to traverse its database or other publicly accessible databases to find potentially useful material which has been rated as useful by others working in your field.
Interestingly, FireFly have also recently announced a collaboration with Yahoo to create a website recommendation service.
This will work in a similar way to the music and movie recommendation service in that users will be able to build up their own profile of web sites they find useful, and get recommendations for new sites based on their profile and the profiles of other users [2].
One word of caution with FireFly: you do have to spend quite a lot of time inputting your preferences in order for FireFly to build up a useful and accurate picture of your tastes.
This can be time-consuming; so unless you are prepared to dedicate a fair amount of time initially in order to let FireFly get to know you, you may find that you are disappointed with the results it produces.
FireFly is available [3] over the Web.
Autonomy Autonomy provides you with a whole suite of different intelligent agents to suit a variety of searching needs.
Autonomy isn’t a web-based service; its a package which needs to be downloaded and installed on your own PC in MS Windows.
It then works with your web browser to provide searching facilities.
A free 30 day trial of the product is available at the Autonomy web pages [4] and it has been available for sale in the UK since November 1996.
Autonomy agents are trained by typing a few sentences about your subject of interest into a box provided on screen; you then let the agents loose on the web and they go off to look for relevant documents.
These documents are graded according to their perceived relevance to the topics you have chosen.
Autonomy enables you to create a variety of agents to search for different topics.
Each agent has to be individually trained, and they are then released onto the web by dragging them onto a web icon on screen.
The agent will then start to search the web for your chosen subject As it searches you will see a graphical map of the sites it is exploring appear on screen as it moves from one server to another.
Once your agent has finished searching it displays a list of sites it has found.
You can then review these sites and accept those that appear to be relevant to your information needs.
Autonomy will create a library for the sites you have accepted and use this information to refine its searching the next time you ask it to perform a search on that particular topic.
It is possible to send your Autonomy agent off on a web search and leave it running in the background whilst you get on with other work.
However, I found that you do need a fairly fast PC for this to work well; my PC suffered quite a bit under the strain of having both Autonomy and Word 6 open at the same.
The searching process seems to be fairly slow, although this problem could be avoided by setting the agent up to search over evenings or weekends.
I also had some difficulties making sense of the results I got from my Autonomy agent,as the sites it retrieved didn’t necessarily seem to relate to the topic I had requested.
Recent discussions on the lis-ukolug mailing list [5] show that other users seem to have encountered this problem as well.
Certainly, help information on how to train your agent effectively isn’t very clear, and is presented in a way of screen which makes it difficult to read easily.
It may be necessary to spend quite a bit of time thinking about your search query and how best to frame this to get the results you need.
References [1] Stobart, S. and Kerridge, S., WWW Search Engine Study, November 1996, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue6/survey/ [2] UMBC AgentNews Web Letter, Agents on the Net, Vol.
1, No.
17, December 1996, http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agentnews/96/17/ [3] Firefly Web Site, http://www.firefly.com [4] Autonomy Web Site, http://www.agentware.com/ [5] Correspondence on lis-ukolug mailing list, Intelligent Agents, November 1996, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-ukolug/1996-11/index.html Author Details Tracey Stanley is the Networked Information Officer of the Library at the University of Leeds, UK Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/people/TSStanley/TSStanley.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: A Public Library Metadata Initiative Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: A Public Library Metadata Initiative Buzz data software framework html database archives metadata cataloguing marc research Citation BibTex RIS Sally Criddle introduces an initiative to extend current developments in the use of metadata to the public library community.
The increasing volume, not to mention variable quality of resources available on the Internet can make searching for that useful resource time consuming and frustrating.
Popular search engines such as Yahoo and Alta Vista can deliver hundreds of sources in response to an enquiry, but refined, sophisticated searching is difficult to achieve.
Enabling effective and efficient searching is particularly important when you are providing public access to the Internet, where people are often using the Internet for the first time.
Metadata (which is data about data) is being increasingly used in attempts to provide more effective ways of searching and to make Internet resources more accessible.
This article introduces an initiative to extend that use of metadata into the public library community.
What is metadata?
Metadata is data that describes the attributes of a resource, e.g.
its author(s), title, physical format etc.
Two forms of metadata widely used in the library are the simple catalogue card, where the information on the card is metadata about the library item and the more complex MARC record used in OPACs.
The importance of metadata in managing information can be grasped by imagining a library without a catalogue a huge but inaccessible store of information.
A useful introduction to the subject is provided by Paul Miller in his article ‘Metadata for the masses’ [1].
In the online world, where new resources appear all the time and are often created and maintained by interested individuals rather than large centrally funded organisations, there is an obvious requirement for an extended and enriched use of metadata.
Associating a richer form of metadata with resources is a way of enabling search engines to provide more sophisticated searching.
Once created this electronic bibliographic description can aid resource discovery, evaluation and effective management of networked information.
There is no one universal format of metadata, different types of resources in different environments require different elements of description.
For example, a public library website may only need a brief description, whereas a data archive may require extensive description.
One core set of metadata elements that is becoming widely used however, is the Dublin Core [2].
This is a collection of up to 15 elements of description.
Elements in this set include ‘resource type’ that relates to the category of the resource, such as home page, novel, poem, working paper, technical report, essay, as well as details of the title and creator(s).
Current development work and initiatives The metadata group at UKOLN is currently participating in a number of projects relating to resource description.
One of these is NewsAgent for Libraries [3], a project in the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
The aim is to create an electronic news and current awareness service for library and information staff.
Content will include refereed and other papers, reviews and editorial matter from the most highly respected UK journals in the field including Ariadne.
By including metadata descriptions of resources used, NewsAgent for Libraries is acting as a metadata demonstrator project.
To support resource description projects tools have been developed to enable metadata to be associated with resources.
DC-dot is a web-based tool for automatically generating Dublin Core metadata.
Once generated, the metadata can be updated by hand to create HTML <META> tags suitable for embedding into the HTML source of web pages.
In conjunction with this, software tools (robots) are being used to automatically gather and index Internet information (harvest).
Public libraries and metadata If metadata is to have a significant impact on searching and document management these emerging technical solutions need to be coupled with wider recognition and use of metadata beyond the current confines of academic research communities.
At present few creators and managers of web resources are providing richer forms of metadata, such as the Dublin Core element set.
With so few of these metadata records, few search engines are incorporating the richer metadata elements in to their searching.
To advance the ‘metadata cause’, into the public library community, UKOLN proposes forming an EARL task group on metadata.
Project EARL (Electronic Access to Resources in Libraries) is a national public libraries Internet initiative [4].
It provides a framework for partnerships within the public and private sectors and actively seeks links with other superhighways initiatives.
It aims to make the advantages of the Internet available to all library users and other members of the public.
Current task groups within the EARL Consortium are investigating a wide range of subjects including family history, managing access to distributed library resources, training and community information.
This metadata task group will provide a motivating environment within which information providers in the public sector can explore issues relating to the use of metadata with the aim of developing demonstrator services using tools currently being developed.
It is envisaged that the group would run a workshop(s) to disseminate information on current metadata developments, exchange views on issues relating to the use of metadata and decide the best method of sharing these findings with other EARL partners.
We would hope to produce guidelines for the use of metadata in the public library environment.
Some of the most pertinent issues that the task group will need to address are: Syntax Issues the meaning and format of metadata labels to be used in the particular context.
Content Issues selecting the terms used in keyword lists and deciding on a format for names and email addresses for example.
Another related area to consider is granularity.
Which resources should be described?
In particular, for a multiple-page document does metadata go into every page or just the title page?
Management Issues there are a number of ways of creating metadata and managing it across a website.
Metadata can be created by the author of an HTML article, by a website manager or by a third party.
HTML authoring tools exist to enable authors to embed metadata into HTML tags.
Alternatively the metadata about a resource can be held in a database and only embedded into that resource when it is published or served.
Promoting the use of richer metadata in Internet resources can be seen as an example of the public library ‘adding value’ to information in networked environments; a key future role for public libraries.
If you are interested in contributing to this initiative and your organisation is a member of project EARL I can be contacted at the address given below.
References [1] Metadata for the masses, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue5/metadata-masses/ [2] The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core [3]Newsagent http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/NewsAgent/ [4] EARL http://www.earl.org.uk/ Author details Sally Criddle, Resource Co-ordinator, UKOLN, University of Bath.
E-mail: S.Criddle@ukoln.ac.uk Phone: 01225 826250 Fax: 01225 826838 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Buzz software database dissemination ejournal Citation BibTex RIS Linda Kerr introduces a project from the Access to Network Resources section of the eLib programme which takes a holistic approach to providing access to high quality on-line engineering resources.
EEVL [1] is approaching the end of its two-year funding from JISC as part of the eLib Project.
We have applied for a further twelve months of precious funding to enable us to carry on providing and developing our services, to tie in with other three-year Subject Based Information Gateway projects such as SOSIG [2] and ADAM [3].
EEVL provides a free gateway to networked engineering resources, primarily for the UK Higher Academic community, however it is peculiarly gratifying to see from the log files that users from Greenland and Swaziland, as well as the USA Military Network have also accessed our site.
The project is based at Heriot-Watt University Library and the Institute of Computer Based Learning, also at Heriot-Watt.
An integral part of the project is the EEVL Team subject specialists from Napier University, Imperial College London, Edinburgh University, the Nottingham Trent University and Cambridge University, who locate and describe websites for the database of engineering Internet resources.
This devolved system has meant that EEVL has been able to build up the database quickly, but more importantly the project has had input from subject librarians who are also information providers to our target group.
There is central “quality control” of resources, based on decisions reached by the EEVL Team.
Each record is examined a second time before being made active.
This model of resource location and evaluation is something we intend to continue in year three.
New Services on EEVL As well as the main EEVL database described above, which currently contains nearly 2,000 records, we have added two others: a subset of the Recent Advances in Manufacturing [4] (RAM) bibliographic database produced by the Nottingham Trent University, and a Directory of the UK University Science and Technology Librarians Group (USTLG) [5].
We plan to bring online other databases in year three or before.
We have also implemented a popular UK Engineering Search Engine [6].
This is based on Harvest [7] software, and indexes every word on the pages of the UK sites included in the EEVL database, up to a limit of 250 pages per site.
There are currently 25,000 pages indexed, and the Harvest gatherer, which does the indexing, is run every month.
Evaluation EEVL’s overall aim is to provide a service to the higher academic community which covers all the engineering disciplines, but which is tailored to the individual’s information needs.
And how do you find out information needs?
EEVL completed an evaluation [8] of the project’s pilot stage and will hopefully extend this evaluation in year three.
A series of sessions, introducing EEVL to engineering department staff and students at various universities, will also provide ongoing feedback on user expectations and requirements.
Handouts from these sessions will form part of an online EEVL tutorial which will be made available at the EEVL site.
Future for EEVL Our future plans at the moment depend on whether we receive third year funding from JISC, and fall into three areas maintaining and enhancing the database of engineering resources and other existing services, introducing new services, and dissemination of information about EEVL in the form of training and publicity.
Top priorities are developing a Harvest index to ejournals, and user customisable services.
References Project EEVL Web Site http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ SOSIG Web Site http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ ADAM Web Site http://adam.ac.uk/ RAM on EEVL http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ram/ UK University Science and Technology Librarians Group (USTLG) http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ustlg/ UK Engineering Search Engine http://www.eevl.ac.uk/uksearch.html Harvest Web Pages http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/ EEVL Evaluation Report http://www.eevl.ac.uk/evaluation/report.html Author Details Linda Kerr, EEVL Project Officer email: L.Kerr@hw.ac.uk Tel: 0131 451 3572 Fax: 0131 451 3164 Address: Heriot-Watt University Library, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way Buzz software database cataloguing graphics opac e-learning gopher cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Alison Kilgour takes a look at the networking facilities inside Glasgow University Library.
The library at Glasgow University literally towers over the campus, standing high on a hill above the round reading room, its stark geometry contrasting powerfully with the neo-Gothic main University building opposite.
The University is the second oldest in Scotland and the fourth oldest in the UK.
Its library, built in the 1960s, was pioneering for its time in stock arrangement, each level of the building devoted to a subject area.
This ‘forward looking’ ethos is still very much in evidence today.
Glasgow University is one of the UK’s major research institutions, and is currently at the forefront of developments in teaching and learning support.
It produced the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TILT) packages, generic courseware for self-instruction in various subject areas.
The library had major input into the design of these courseware packages and has produced five packages for teaching and learning in the library environment.
These are available to students and staff throughout the campus, mounted on the various network clusters and from all of the 59 networked PCs in the library itself.
Following ‘supermarket’ display practices, one PC per subject floor (a quarter of the total) offers the students the ‘basic fare’ direct access to the catalogue.
All others provide MERLIN, the library’s information service, which has an eye-catching array offering the choice of access to the CD-ROM service, the TILT packages, the OPAC and the library’s Web service.
The Web service is a relatively new addition to the library service provision, launched late last year.
A Library Web Working Group has been set up to develop the pages, which are seen as a window to the library collection as well as to resources held locally within the University and beyond.
The service will also be used to promote the treasures of the library’s special collections.
Access is provided from the home page to the library’s Innopac catalogue and to external information sources available online at the University (BIDS and OCLC First Search).
The design of the home page makes for efficient use.
The most heavily used services are all available immediately.
Interestingly, on the day I visited, only a few workstations were being used to give access to anything other than the catalogue; perhaps evidence that students are conservative shoppers.
The menu bar at the bottom of all screens is useful, providing access to previous screens, back to the library home pages or to GLANCE, the university’s Web service.
I particularly liked the handy link to the catalogue provided at the bottom of the page.
The only graphic in evidence is the banner on the home page, put there primarily to mark the change from the gopher service previously in use.
Indeed most of the subject-based information is still in gopher format.
The intention is to have subject resources linked from the various subject librarians’ individual pages, thus linking the face with the subject.
Information will be grouped first by subject and then by form databases, journals, mailing lists etc.
The library is involved in the Clyde Virtual University project.
Linda Creanor, who worked on the TILT programme, has been seconded to this project.
It aims to provide courseware to the HE community in the Clyde area.
Building on the courseware produced by TILT and using ClydeNET (the local MAN), the materials will be able to reach a much wider audience than the TILT packages do at present.
One of the criticisms of the TILT packages was that setting up the software was often problematic.
The use of the Net eliminates this problem, since the software is loaded centrally.
Within the University the library is also very active in a campus-wide approach to teaching and learning on the Internet.
There has been a positive response from users to the new service although students have been observed to be as interested in pursuing entertainment via the Web as they are in searching for resources in support of their studies.
Students can enrol on courses, given by library staff, which are accredited as part of the modular scheme.
These are aimed at first year students at present, but it is intended that they should eventually be offered to students at all levels.
Library staff also run courses for new academics, providing them with information and hands-on experience in accessing subject gateways and the use of search tools.
These seminars to both staff and students have proved very popular.
Library Web Editor William Nixon remarks “Lecturers can actually get away from their desks and practice for a couple of hours guilt-free!” Netscape is used, but the emphasis is on searching rather than the technology itself.
Feedback from all courses is very important to the editorial team, as the information and suggestions are used in the design decisions for the library’s own pages.
With the help of its users, library staff at Glasgow are now building a new library, still organised by subject, whose architecture is of the virtual variety.
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Acrobat a High Flyer: John MacColl Discusses the Success of Adobe Acrobat and PDF Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Acrobat a High Flyer: John MacColl Discusses the Success of Adobe Acrobat and PDF Buzz software html dissemination browser graphics sgml windows hypertext adobe licence research standards Citation BibTex RIS Acrobat a High Flyer: John MacColl discusses the success of Adobe Acrobat and PDF.
As electronic library initiatives begin to move out of the research phase and into full production, one product is emerging as a dominant force in the presentation of electronic documents.
Adobe's Acrobat software [1], which is used for both generating and viewing Portable Document Format (PDF) files, is gaining widespread acceptance in the world of higher education.
PDF files allow documents to look like on-screen versions of their print equivalents.
The format is based upon Adobe's own PostScript page-description language, which has for years been the industry standard.
Like PostScript, PDF represents text and graphics on a page by 'painting' regions according to instructions coded in the file itself.
One reason for PDF's success is its portability.
It can be interpreted by all popular operating systems, so that PDF files will look the same whatever computer is used to view them.
Another reason for its recent prominence in the dissemination of electronic journals is that it is supported by the latest version of the Netscape Web browser, which allows PDF files to be distributed across the Web using the most popular browser software on the market.
Adobe distributes its Acrobat viewer program free of charge.
This has created a market opportunity for publishers of print material who are taking their first tentative steps along the route of electronic publishing.
In the UK Higher Education community, PDF is the format chosen by the publishers of electronic versions of journals available through the HEFCE [2] Pilot Site Licence Initiative.
For them, PDF represents a safe way of making their materials available on the Web, because they retain control over the appearance of the on-screen page.
Unlike the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which is used to produce 'native' World Wide Web documents, PDF is based on page description, not document structure.
An HTML file can look very different in different Web browsers, and can even be read by non-graphical browsers, but PDF files will always look the same.
"Whatever the merits or otherwise of Acrobat" said Steve Hitchcock of the Open Journal project [3], in an e-mail discussion group message in October 1995, "for many readers of scientific journals Acrobat is what they are going to get".
But Acrobat is increasingly finding itself in use beyond the realm of electronic journals.
Electronic reserve and on-demand publishing projects are rapidly developing, and in almost every case the distribution format adopted is PDF.
At a recent conference in London organised by The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) [4] in conjunction with eLib [5], speaker after speaker confirmed the choice of Acrobat and PDF in these electronic publishing projects.
In the US, electronic reserve systems are fast becoming an established campus service.
It is clear from developments there that PDF has another major advantage over HTML existing documents can be converted into PDF, using the relevant Acrobat PDF generating software, at the press of a button.
Thus, pages of lecturers' course notes commonly find their way into such systems as PDF files, when a more interactive (and, many would argue, educationally beneficial) use of the medium would certainly be obtained by preferring HTML.
As adoption of the Adobe software spreads, so the 'last resort' role played by academic libraries in the provision of reserve collections begins to look as though it may be coming to an end.
Lecturers can put materials on the network without the aid of the library, and students can access the materials from anywhere.
Whereas for campus-based undergraduates the benefits in using on-screen versions of short loan documents may still be marginal at best, for the growing population of part-timers, the advantages are clear and significant.
But for those interested in developing the full potential of the Web for serious academic use, PDF is at best an interim solution.
Because the publisher retains control over the page appearance, the material is inert.
Hyper-linking is rudimentary and still poorly developed.
"Though it is the technology of choice at the moment" concluded Steve Hitchcock at the ALPSP/eLib Conference in December, "there are flaws and problems with PDF."
Responses to this article Reply received Tuesday, 28th January 1997: Personally I've always found PDF a disincentive to view information -the files tend to be large and 'clunky' to use, often just for the sake of a gigantic logo and an excessive number of typefaces.
PostScript isn't exactly compact either.
Whatever the relative technical merits (or otherwise) of PDF are, however, the fact remains that, like PostScript, PDF is still a proprietary standard, and suffers from the same problems as other proprietary standards.
Who knows whether Adobe will continue to provide free browsers once a sufficient user base has been established?
I have to say I'm somewhat mystified by the general willingness to accept proprietary standards when they originate from Adobe -if Microsoft had marketed PDF, they would almost certainly have attracted widespread criticism.
Tony Gill ADAM project Manager tony@adam.ac.uk Reply received: Wednesday, 12th February 1997 The answer to the problem of distributing information and maintaining the layout.
Simple.
The format is widely used.
Authoring tools are widely available.
Plug-in readers are freely available which can be integrated with your favourite Web browser.
The solution?
Microsoft Word For Windows?
You object?
Microsoft, don't trust them.
It's proprietary.
True.
So why support Acrobat PDF?
OK, Adobe aren't Microsoft.
But they could be taken over by them.
No, the answer has to be use of SGML.
Greater control over the appearance is now available in HTML using Cascading Stylesheets.
Tools are now available to create stylesheets (HoTMetal and HotDog to name two).
Let's not repeat the errors of the past and go for a short term solution which is clearly flawed.
Find out more about style sheets at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/ Use a browser which supports stylesheets to see an example of what stylesheets can provide.
Brian Kelly UK Web Focus Officer B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk References [1] Adobe Acrobat software, http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/main.html [2] HEFCE Web Site, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/" [3] Open Journals Project, http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ [4] Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), http://www.alpsp.org.uk/ [5] Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) Web Site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Author Details John MacColl is the project Director of Ariadne Email: lbajam@tay.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: Edge Hill University Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: Edge Hill University Buzz html metadata opac cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Alison Kilgour checks out the network facilities at Edge Hill College.
Edge Hill University College [*] is beautifully situated in the historic little market town of Ormskirk.
The leafy 70 acre campus was purpose-built in the 1930s, when the college moved from the Edge Hill area of Liverpool.
The college has seen many changes since the move, not least in its transition from being a Women's Teacher Training College to its current status as a university-level institution providing a range of degree courses.
Teacher training still accounts for around 30% of course provision, but the institution now offers a range of courses for its 4,500 full time equivalent students.
Social sciences are particularly strong, alongside health studies, environmental sciences and other more recent additions.
Growth in student numbers has meant that the lovely symmetrical 1930s buildings have now been joined by several more modern buildings.
A purpose-built Learning Resource Centre was completed over two years ago, opening in January 1994.
Its 4,500 square metres are on three levels, giving students access to group and individual study areas, with specially adapted rooms available to disabled students.
Throughout the college the student to PC ratio is a very low 7:1.
The Learning Resources Centre has a total of 150 PCs open to student access, with more being added during my visit.
The Library is reliant upon the good relationship which it has built with Computer Services.
Computer Services is based within the Student Information Centre.
Another 130 PCs are found in this building, which includes "drop in" facilities and bookable areas for teaching purposes.
This separation gives the Library an enviable degree of control over its PC rooms, which are designed to be used mainly for student group work and individual student use.
Joint planning of information and learning support services in the institution takes place through a federation known as ASSIST ("Access for Students and Staff to Information Services and Technology").
It comprises Library Services, Computer Services, MediaTech Services, and Teaching and Learning Development.
The latter provides support for students in study skills, running sessions on exam technique, coursework preparation and so on, but of the four services it is Computer Services which currently runs the most extensive programme of IT training courses.
Available on a voluntary basis, students can join sessions which include an introduction to the network, word-processing, spreadsheets and Web training.
It is in this latter area that the Library sees a potential complementary role for itself.
A programme of workshops is currently being prepared in effective information retrieval over the Web, building upon the introductory course offered by Computer Services.
The Library currently provides the usual induction training to students in OPAC use and CD-ROM searching.
For next session it hopes to formalise this training and to give both an introduction to CD-ROMs and a more advanced session dealing with downloading records and how to process the information found.
The College Web pages are the responsibility of Computer Services.
The Library's pages were put together initially by a student on a placement from John Moores University, Liverpool.
Library staff worked with him to produce the pages, which went live when the new Resource Centre was opened.
Since the launch the Library has become concerned about the exploitation and arrangement of resources on the college Web pages.
Currently, links to resources are provided though the college's pages rather than through the Library's own.
As in many institutions, the design of what is in large part an information service has been entrusted to a unit of the organisation which lacks the depth of experience in information structure which Library staff could bring.
Library input is required to arrange the resources logically by subject, and to provide the metadata.
Strong links have been built up by the Library with the various academic Schools, and each professional librarian on the staff has a liaison role with one of the Schools.
The librarians are currently working on individual subject pages for their School, but finding the time to do the development work required can be very difficult.
They have all been given some basic instruction in HTML-encoding and one of the staff is designated Library Web Editor, with responsibility for checking all pages before they go live.
Edge Hill caters well for a student body which requires a high degree of access to learning materials and networked PCs.
Even so, current provision is not sufficient to meet the constantly growing demand.
Students, particularly part-time students who make up a high proportion of the total, have requested longer opening hours.
"We extended opening at weekends last session" said Cathy Burns, who showed me round the Resource Centre on a quiet afternoon during the summer vacation.
"Now the students want later evening access.
The demand just keeps on rising.
We seem to be victims of our own success."
As we spoke, technicians wheeled in more PCs to be added to the 150 already in the Learning Resource Centre.
Edge Hill has clearly joined the university sector at the leading edge of IT provision.
*Editor's note: Since receiving official confirmation of university status in April 2006, the institution is now called Edge Hill University.
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Public Libraries Corner: Soul and Song Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: Soul and Song Buzz framework infrastructure digitisation copyright preservation research standards Citation BibTex RIS Lorcan Dempsey writes about the recent report: New Library: the People's Network.
New Library: the People’s Network has had an overwhelmingly positive reception.
Caveat and qualification may exist but they have been submerged in enthusiasm, gratitude even, for the vision the report presents of a renovated public library service and the specific recommendations by which it might be achieved.
Its content succeeds in making its readers feel positive about the future of a strong social institution, committed to the communication and preservation of knowledge, imagination and learning in all their manifestations.
The report is itself a handsome book, and includes a specially commissioned poem by Ted Hughes.
It is a volume that people will want to read, and to hold and to keep, and this is apt for a work which will be seen as a defining moment in the life of a changing service.
A service which Joe Hendry, president of the Library Association, likened to Yeats’ aged man, "a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick", when talking about the report at this year’s LA Members’ Day.
New Library is a report prepared by the Library and Information Commission at the request of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
The working group was chaired by Mathew Evans, and included people with a range of experiences and perspectives (of whom the current author is one).
The project leader was John Dolan of Birmingham Central Library.
An electronic version is available on the web.
From the start, the group agreed that content and services were central, and the opening Chapter reflects this.
It identifies potential public library services under the following headings: education and life-long learning; citizen’s information and involvement in society; business and the economy, training and employment; community history and community identity; the national digital library.
The next Chapter reports the conclusions of a small-scale qualitative research programme into public perceptions of the service.
Among other findings, it endorses other work that shows that there is a fund of goodwill towards the service, highlights the role of the library in a broad educational or life-long learning context, and notes that most people had a narrow view of the total range of services offered by public libraries.
Chapter three discusses the need for training and awareness programmes to ensure that library workers have appropriate skills to meet emerging challenges.
Chapter four reviews the network infrastructure needs and recommends the commissioning of a dedicated network to interconnect local public library networks; it further proposes negotiation with library authorities to upgrade local library networks to a common UK standard on a shared funding basis.
Chapter five discusses investment and income opportunities, exploring a range of funding models including private public partnership.
Chapter six looks at copyright and licensing issues and Chapter 7 at performance evaluation.
Chapter 8 examines the mechanisms for moving the plan forward, and I return to these below.
There is a final summary chapter and several appendices, including a review of international information society initiatives, the results which supported Chapter 2, and a glossary.
It is not possible to summarise fully the wide-ranging recommendations here, but it may be useful to briefly review the implementation proposals.
The report recognises challenges to four main groups of stakeholders: government, industry, libraries and library authorities, and educators.
For the government there is a challenge to take a lead in developing and delivering an integrated information policy with a strong central role for libraries.
For industry there is the opportunity to provide and manage infrastructure, services and content for libraries.
Libraries need to ‘embrace the concept of the new library and to provide a new and dynamic interface between people, technology and information’.
And for educators there is a challenge to ensure that benefits can be delivered to those within formal education and to life-long learners.
A central coordinating mechanism, a Public Library Networking Agency, is recommended and it is recognised that a mix of funding will be needed to deliver the vision contained in the report.
Towards this end, it is recommended that government develop partnerships between public and private sectors and that they provide some funding which will encourage others to contribute.
The agency is to establish a programme for developing content and services, network infrastructure, and staff training.
It will commission other bodies to carry out the elements of the strategy.
A suggested outline of commissioned activity is included under each of the three main strands (content and services, network infrastructure, and training).
For example, such work under content and services includes: consortium purchasing, servie development, digitisation, Internet services, enhanced library cooperation, and others.
New Library should be seen in the wider context of government thinking and planning.
The White Paper on the People’s Lottery proposes significant training programmes for training teachers and librarians.
The National Grid for Learning proposals outline a wider framework for a learning society, and proposals on life-long learning are expected.
There are also potential points of contact with the Dearing and Kennedy reports on higher and further education respectively.
We have grown accustomed to speaking of an Information Society, even where we are not quite sure what this means.
It might be sensible to begin speaking of an Information and Learning society, in which formal education, libraries and other memory and information organisations, governement and industry work to fashion new digital environments.
The government is expected to respond to the report in early 1998; initial public statements have been encouraging, as has the majority of the coverage in the media.
It has marked out a role for the public library service.
This role depends on the active service of the library which acquires, organises and manages network resources; which joins its collective resource to emerging knowledge networks; which equalises access between the connected and the unconnected; which supports new ways of communicating and learning.
It looks forward to a richly interconnected information and learning landscape, which affirms local identity at the same time as allowing participation in emerging global communication systems.
The public library system that delivers these services will have to be designed, built and paid for.
If it is to be achieved, this will be a major development exercise, involving unprecedented collaboration, investment and planning.
Joe Hendry did not carry on to quote the next lines of Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium.
They are "unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/ For every tatter in his mortal dress".
For the public library system it is indeed an occasion for soul and for song, and for clear concerted action.
References New Library:The People’s Network Electronic copy is available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/ The printed edition of the report is available from the Library and Information Commission for the price of £25.
Please send a cheque made payable to the Library and Information Commission with your order to: Mary Johnson, Library and Information Commission, 2 Sheraton Street, London WW1V 4BU.
Author details Lorcan Dempsey is Director of UKOLN, which is supported by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre and the Joint Information Systems Committee.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Lorcan Dempsey, Director, UKOLN, University of Bath.
E-mail: l.dempsey@ukoln.ac.uk Phone: 01225 826254 Fax: 01225 826838 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Print Editorial: Introduction to Issue 15 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Print Editorial: Introduction to Issue 15 Buzz cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS The Managing Editor, Lyndon Pugh, introduces the print edition of Ariadne issue 15.
Much of what is said in this issue of ARIADNE relates to the fundamental aim of the publication, which is to interpret new technology and to strengthen the connections between the technology and the people who manage and use it.
Jon Duke, the new chairman of UCISA said at their recent conference in Jersey, “technology is no longer the issue.” John MacColl in his report of this event commented on Diana Warwick’s view that “the key issue is not technology management but people management.” Elsewhere in this issue there is evidence that the on-going eLib project has taken another step forward.
Anne Mumford sets out JISC ASSIST’s priorities within this dimension, and comments on JISC’s achievement in creating a situation where the groups involved in moving forward the electronic library idea have learnt to understand each other and to co-operate.
Derek Law also refers to the human dimensions of the issue, and the Down Your Way feature is an example of the marriage of new technology and old skills within the strongest of human dimensions and on a human scale.
Gordon Brewer’s Minotaur, as well as taking a realistic look at organisational issues from the standpoint of a manager who has nailed his colours to the mast of voluntarism, is partly an echo of the appeal for people to continue to develop the skills of working together and sharing.
On other pages, there are more examples of good practice in the development and use of both eLib and non-eLib programmes.
Una O’Sullivan reports on ROUTES, which is the Open University project on the selection and exploitation of electronic resources.
The cover feature by Liz Lyon offers the vitality of a combination of multi media and technological analysis applied to teaching and learning in the arts.
This would fit well with Ann Mumford’s point about the different responses of different disciplines to the application of technology.
In the main article, Terry Hanson describes his use of the access catalogue as an aid to the integrated exploitation of all forms of electronic information.
Author Details Lyndon Pugh Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Gordon Brewer re-examines the "convergence of services" issue.
In the long running debate on the merits of convergence of library and other support services, particularly computing, in higher and further education institutions, there are two intriguing features which continue to surprise.
First the issue is sometimes discussed without adequate definition, and as though convergence and non-convergence are alternatives.
The implication is that current practice represents a polarity rather than a spectrum of different approaches, so the whole question is over-simplified.
Second, the terms of reference have narrowed as information technology has become the dominant factor in the equation.
Consequently, the debate has become increasingly concerned with the connection between the library and the computing service, rather than the broader context of teaching and learning strategy within which much of the rationale for convergence has been based.
The problem starts with a lack of clarity in identifying what convergence actually means.
The simplest and most frequently used definition requires only the creation of a shared management structure, with overall responsibility for traditionally separate services resting with one individual.
This implies nothing about the extent to which traditional functional distinctions are modified by this managerial scenario, and may lead to minimum change on the ground.
Is there any physical integration of work areas and service points?
Is there one single budget, and are there flexible arrangements for virement?
Is there a genuinely integrated staff structure, and how are different specialisms deployed within it?
Is the service perceived by its users as an integrated whole?
Is there a recognisable common culture?
To categorise services as converged or not merely on the basis of their line management is almost meaningless without reference to the operational practicalities for staff and users.
The findings of the eLib IMPEL 2 project confirm this, for in almost 50% (11 out of 24) of institutions studied, libraries and computing centres had to some extent converged, but in only three was convergence fully operational.
It was also noted that within both converged and non-converged structures there were widely varying models and degrees of convergence.
This is probably no more than a snapshot of the current position in the context of a long term trend, but given the continuing lack of consensus on the issue after quite lengthy debate it might equally suggest that there is no universal optimal solution.
To make sense of current experience there is a need for rigorous analysis of the significant features of convergence as represented by the different models, including those involving support units other than computing and libraries, and the rationale that underpins them.
That is, where there is a serious rationale and not merely an opportunistic response to particular local problems or a matter of individual whim.
Meanwhile the overlapping interests and the level of collaboration needed between library and computing services in the electronic information environment are now such that it is becoming hard to conceive an institution without some form of operational convergence.
Are not all academic libraries hybrid?
Are we not all in some sense forced to converge in practice to provide adequate technical support for the systems on which our services depend, even if our managerial structures do not strictly conform to the usual definition of the term?
The alternative is a duplication of skilled specialist personnel which few institutions can afford.
Given the variety of solutions, the measure of agreement on the rationale for convergence is remarkable, though the weight given to different factors has altered significantly in recent years.
The current phase of the debate, since convergence became a hot topic amongst practitioners in the university sector about 10 years ago, has been dominated by the concept of the digital library and the huge impact of IT on teaching, learning, research and patterns of scholarly communication.
Prior to this much discussion through the 1970’s and 1980’s, in particular in the schools and colleges, was more concerned with the role of media, with resource based learning and the evolution of libraries into resource centres.
It was thus closely related to ideas on so-called progressive teaching methods, including student centred learning and project and group work, which are also evident in the teaching to learning shift now under way in many HE institutions.
What is significant about this earlier stage in the debate is the emphasis on pedagogy, and also the associated educational development issues.
Educational Development Units, under various names and sometimes hidden within Media Services, were often constituent elements in converged structures.
Arguably, given the place of teaching and learning as part of the rationale for convergence, they could be seen as the most crucial element, providing a mechanism for the staff development necessary to drive forward changes in teaching and learning strategy.
In many more recently converged situations pedagogic issues are no longer so much cited in the justification for convergence.
Given the current political correctness of a back-to-basics, anti-progressive approach in education, though not (yet?)
evident in HE, perhaps this is just as well.
Whatever the arguments presented for convergence, the range of different models and the varied operational arrangements within them suggest that local pragmatism plays a large part in what has now become an established national trend.
While acknowledging the relevance of the technological and pedagogic factors underlying this trend, in practice convergence is essentially about the best strategy for managing resources in each institution.
The optimum model in each case depends on the individuals actually providing the library and related services, and their willingness and ability to work together.
The effective deployment of staff with different specialist skills at the operational level is what matters most in terms of delivering quality service.
This functional integration is what really matters, and it is achievable in various ways.
Convergence through common line management may be needed when people cannot or will not collaborate, but it is doubtful that this will necessarily and of itself bring about a well integrated, seamless service.
Author details Gordon Brewer Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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MODELS: MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MODELS: MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services Buzz data framework archives metadata identifier z39.50 Citation BibTex RIS Rosemary Russell shows how MODELS are built from clumps.
MODELS (MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services) [1] is one of the three eLib Supporting Studies [2] projects.
It was intended that projects in this area of the programme would help to define issues in more detail and set parameters for other work.
In addition to fulfilling this role, MODELS has generated several significant national initiatives and achieved some important results for the management of distributed library services.
The project is a UKOLN initiative, which has support from eLib and the British Library.
FretwellDowning Informatics provides technical consultancy.
MODELS is essentially concerned with the enormous range of networked library and information services currently available to users via entirely different access methods.
MODELS has five intertwined project lines.
The project centres around a workshop of invited stakeholders for each line, where issues are explored and a set of recommendations drawn up.
The first line focused on the distributed discovery, location and request of journal articles.
The main outcomes included recommendations for a series of studies to perform critical evaluation of specific standards (currently being commissioned by UKOLN) and an event to promote the use of serial part identifiers such as SICI.
This is to be held in March 1997.
The second workshop was organised in conjunction with OCLC and addressed metadata for network information objects.
The “Warwick Framework” for resource description was its most significant result.
The third line is on national resource discovery û organising access to printed scholarly material.
The concept of “clumps” emerged at the second workshop.
Clumps are groups of distributed resources which can be searched together to facilitate discovery.
JISC’s Committee for Electronic Information (CEI) development programme aims to fund a small number of pilot virtual clumps.
A particularly significant outcome of this workshop was the proposal for a National Agency for resource discovery.
A scoping study is currently being carried out, funded by the British Library and JISC.
A MODELS Z39.50 profile is also in draft form.
The most recent workshop, held in December 1996, was on integrating access to resources across domains (for example, libraries, museums and archives).
Discussion focused on cross-domain metadata and discovery issues including use of the Z39.50 digital collections profiles.
Many of the issues are being taken forward by the forthcoming metadata workshops co-hosted by UKOLN and the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) [3].
The final workshop on managing access to a distributed library resource will be held in April and will have a public library focus.
The eventual aim is for a distributed systems model, where services are physically dispersed over the networks, but the systems behave as a single logical entity.
Sophisticated “middleware” services will provide the necessary “glue” behind the scenes.
References MODELS Web Site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/models/ List of eLib Supporting Studies projects, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/supporting/ Arts and Humanities Data Service a description, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue4/ahds/ Author Details Rosemary Russell MODELS Project Manager email: R.Russell@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)1225 826547 Fax: +44 (0)1225 826838 Personal Web Page: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisrr/ Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Wire: Interview Via Email With Jon Knight and Martin Hamilton Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wire: Interview Via Email With Jon Knight and Martin Hamilton Buzz data software java javascript html database archives metadata browser cataloguing graphics opac sgml windows latex linux cache perl gopher ftp cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS In this interview we question Knight and Martin Hamilton and present their replies.
So what do you both do?
Martin: Couch potato and his trusty sidekick “toast man” but which is which?
Jon: We’re both “techies” on the ROADS project in eLib and the EU DESIRE project (which for us is basically “EuroROADS”).
I do two days per week on ROADS and a day per week on DESIRE.
ROADS and DESIRE are both concerned with the provision of access to network resources via Subject Based Information Gateways (SBIGs); these are services such as SOSIG, OMNI and ADAM.
As a result both Martin and I do the odd bit of work on metadata and resource discovery standards.
I also work in the University Library’s systems unit for one day/week (looking after CD-ROMs, doing database work, fiddling with out Talis OPAC and other miscellaneous library systems stuff), in our PESS&RM department for half a day per week (doing biomechanics modelling) and up to half a day per week for the eLib ACORN project as a technical consultant.
…and what were you doing before, ie how did you get into this?
Martin: Unable to get a proper job, sheer bad luck, … :-) Jon: I did both my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Loughborough and for the most part just slipped into doing the local jobs because I’d volunteered help or done smaller contracts in the past.
For example I was known to the Library chaps because I’d written the software for the BLR&DD funded ELVYN project (an electronic version of a journal delivered in HTML) and helped out on a prototype of our WebOPAC.
I got into ROADS and DESIRE because Lorcan Dempsey got in touch with Martin and suggested that we might be interested in joining in on a proposal for an eLib project based on what he’d seen of us on various mailing lists.
ROADS and DESIRE were lucky breaks for me because I was planning to just do odd jobs for a few days each week and then spend the rest of my time doing the “Internet stuff” I enjoyed unpaid; these project pay me to do it!
:-) Thoughts on Java?
Jon: As a few people know, I’m not too enamoured with Java; its definately currently in the over-hyped-solution-looking-for-a-problem category for me.
It always strikes me as C++ with the useful bits removed, which is not unnatural considering its heritage.
Having said that, the hypewave has reached such a point that too many companies and individuals have staked too much on Java for it to suddenly collapse and go away and it does appeal to me more than ActiveX (which looks like a security nightmare waiting to happen).
Maybe when Java gets a better standard GUI toolkit that AWT, faster JIT compilers and I can think of a good reason for using it rather than a C program or a Perl script for myself I’ll give it another go.
Thoughts on JavaScript?
Martin: Hot Java Lava got quite a kick.
Best if kept in fridge.
No Active ingredients.
Jon: Javascript is a passing fad in my opinion; its poorly defined, has little in common with Java bar the first four letters of its name and just smacks of “kludge”.
Whenever I’ve sat down with someone that just wanted to “knock out a little bit of Javascript” to do something odd in a web browser, I’ve found that the language was either poorly documented or couldn’t do what was needed.
I certainly wouldn’t use it for anything that was intended to last anything length of time or be an integral part of a widely deployed service.
Thoughts on caching?
Martin: Nothing to say about this that you haven’t heard a thousand times before… Jon: Caching is cool (see, I do like some things… :-) ).
In fact its more than cool; its vital to the future scaling of the Web IMHO.
By pumping all access for remote documents through a campus cache, a site can “save” an appreciable portion of its bandwidth and improve the percieved performance of the network for its end users.
Getting every site on JANET to have a campus cache in the same way that every site has a mailer would be a very good thing to do.
More so if these campus caches then took part in a cache mesh whereby they asked regional siblings and national parent caches for objects that they didn’t have.
I think that the institutional caches are a vital part of a national caching strategy because enouraging invidual users to point their web browsers at a single set of national caches is bound to lead to hotspots on the network far faster than if local or regional caches could satisfy the request first.
One thing that really irks me is the current trend that some vendors have of wanting to generate “dynamic content” that is purposely designed to “cache bust” (ie not be cachable).
Their argument that they want to tailor the information that they return to individual users just doesn’t hold water for me; what’s the point of a set of dynamic data tailored to my exact needs (or what the vendor tells me my exact needs are at least) if the network becomes so slow and congested that I can’t actually get any of it?
Many people will already have experienced how slow the Net can get on a weekday afternoon; I consider vendors that are pushing cache busting products out to be adding to this congestion and thus be the worst kind of bad network citizen.
Thoughts on CD-ROMS?
Martin: Probably the fastest way of getting hold of stale information.
Only good as drink coasters and novelty indoor fireworks (requires microwave).
Jon: Heh, John has put this question in because he knows it’ll guarantee to have me frothing at the mouth.
:-) I look after both the networked and standalone CD-ROMs in the Pilkington Library here in Loughborough University and they are a never ending tale of woe.
Don’t get me wrong; a few CD-ROMs are model products that you just slide into the CD-ROM tower, build a fileset for and away you go with no problems (the Guardian CD-ROM fits into this category a top product that I’ll highly recommend to any library).
If only all of them could be like that.
Most require some jiggery-pokery to be done to get the software working over the network but once done, updates are easy.
However there are some CD-ROMs that not only are a pain to install but also are a nightmare to maintain.
These are the ones which have frequent updates, with each update requiring a new installation of the software (usually to add some feature that wasn’t needed or asked for) and, better yet, encryption keys that mean that the CD-ROM suddenly stops working when you least expect it to (usually with either an obtuse error code guaranteed to scare the living daylights out of most non-IT literature users or no error at all so that as a systems support person I get to play “guess the problem”).
You sometimes get crappy technical support from vendors to add to this, although I must admit that most of the vendors I deal with have now got reasonably good H.W.Wilson still stand out as one of the best with multiple trans-Atlantic phone calls on their dime to help fix a minor problem).
Throw in one A5 page for the installation instructions (that naturally assume nothing goes wrong) and idiosyncratic user interfaces and I think we can safely say that CD-ROMs are a pain.
As to the future of CD-ROMs, I think we can also safely say that they’ll be with us for some time to come.
They’re still a very efficient way of shipping large quantities of data around relatively cheaply.
Because they’re mounted locally, you also only have local congestion to deal with.
However we’re already seeing a move away from CD-ROMs to online services on the Internet; at Loughborough we’ve replaced a couple of CD-ROMs with access to OCLC FirstSearch for example.
This reduces management time to practically nil; all the mounting of the databases is done at the remote site.
How well this will perform over congested network links and how well it is accepted by the end users remains to be seen.
One thing is for sure though; at the moment as soon as one CD-ROM product is removed because an online version exists, another quickly steps forward to take its place.
There are a lot of CD-ROMs out there containing data that a lot of end users want and that isn’t going to change overnight.
Future high capacity optical discs are also going to ensure that we’ll be mounting little silver discs well into the next century.
Thoughts on Windows 95?
Martin: “Don’t have a cow, man” Jon: Yuck.
The few times I have to use it really make me wonder why people actually buy the damn thing.
Its user interface is somewhat less than intuitive and yet still make some simple operations really tricky.
I seem to have the nack of walking up to Windows95 machines and completely screwing them up in no time at all this just shouldn’t be possible for a normal user in this day and age.
Give me a copy of Linux and the fvwm window manager any day of the week.
And before someone says, “Ooh, but how do you read Word documents?” the answer is that I read them using Word, loaded off a Novell server into Wine running under Linux on an AMD586-133 based PC with 8MB and then displayed on my Sun under X11R6.
Works a treat.
Though Word isn’t my choice of application for text generation (I’m a die hard LaTeX user; far more powerful and lets me concentrate on document structure rather than distracting me with glitz and wizards).
What browser do you use?
Martin: I print everything out so I can read it in the bath… Jon: Until very recently I used X Moasic 2.7b5 almost exclusively, with a bit of lynx thrown in occasionally.
However I’ve now faced up to the fact that the NCSA X Mosaic series is dead (the 2.8 alpha series just stopped) and so I’ve actually got a copy of Netscape 3.01 for X11 open on the desktop at the moment.
Whilst Netscape gives me working tables (some thing that the 2.7 series of X Mosaic never did manage) I still find I miss some of the nice X Mosaic features such as the right button menu that let you do an Alta Vista search based on anything highlighted in any X11 application or go straight to a URL highlighted in any app, and the ability to closely configure which sites you don’t want to ever see images from (which means that you get rid of the banner ads completely and get a lot more information on the screen).
I also still find Frames to be a real pain; with Mosaic they were a pain because most people seem incapable of using the <NOFRAMES> element to deliver a copy of the content of a resource with no navigation bars or cute fixed logos and so you had to look in the HTML to find the “real” page to go to.
With Netscape the frames display but I’ve yet to find a site that uses them for anything other than pointless navigation bars and glitz.
Plus the viewing area for content is reduced (and content is what I’m after; I use the TV for eyecandy).
I’d really like it if Netscape made frames an option that you can turn off just like Java and Javascript.
Other than that and the fact that its bloated (I have mail user agent and newsreader already and they’re far superior to the ones in Netscape), Netscape 3.01 works OK for me on the Sun.
I still use Lynx on the linux box though as it seems a little happier with 8MB and an EGA display.
And you don’t even have to turn image loading off… :-) eLib is it working?
Will it work?
Will anyone notice?
Martin: How can you tell?
Jon: I think it is; unlike some people I don’t expect that every eLib project will be a complete and total success or failure; every project is likely to find out useful things, even if those things are “the way we tried to do it didn’t work”.
Finding out that something doesn’t work and showing some reasons why it doesn’t work is still a good result in my book.
Despite what has sometimes been said, eLib is definately a research based programme.
Also if eLib is supposed to be encouraging the use of electronic resources in academia then its already working; the ANR SBIGs have increasing numbers of hits each month, more users are introduced to IT, new resources are brought online, etc.
As I said above, our library is moving from CD-ROMs to online resources as a service provision (ie a non-eLib funded activity) and we’ve got a WebOPAC that allows us to do neat things with the catalogue data (like link directly to the online version of Ariadne for users not sitting at the OPAC-only terminals in the library).
ROADS: will the vision of a national gateway system (using centroids?
Or not) come off, and how do you see it in two to three years time?
Martin: It won’t come off the rails, because then the acronym wouldn’t fit ;-) The future: from a palm-tree on my private island in the Carribean.
Jon: I don’t know about ROADS being exciting; its been fun doing it and I think we’ve produced some useful output but I don’t want to overhype what we’re doing too much.
I think we will see a national set of SBIGs all talking to one another at some point, and indeed some of the ANR services have already played with getting a single ROADS front end to allow searches to multiple backend databases.
When we ship ROADS v2 later this year with centroid support I expect to see alot more of this happening, as it allows the SBIGs to provide much better support for multidisciplinary searching for quality resources.
However I must admit to still not being clear on the politics going on behind the scenes on such a federated information gateway and what funding model the SBIGs that form it will have (I’m just a techie after all; its not really my concern).
It will be interesting over the next year to see what happens in this arena.
Does your office mate have any annoying habits?
Martin: He seems to be on the phone a lot… Jon: He stops me from playing the same tape in the office for 12 hours solidly (we have the stereo on continuous play and I sometimes don’t notice that the Ozric Tentacles album is on its 6th pass of the day) :-) Seriously, no, Martin doesn’t really have any annoying habits, which is probably why we still get on after nearly 10 years (we were Freshers together).
I probably talk too much for him though (especially when I still talking to myself whilst I’m thinking).
Firewalls in Universities essential security feature or inconvenience to open use of networked technologies?
Martin: Job for life for IT guru?
cf.
Windows NT.
Jon: That’s a tricky one; I think some parts of Universities need firewalls (say the admin chaps for example) purely because there are so many nasty people out there.
However I think that there should be at least some untrusted machines outside the firewall that allow people to experiment with new protocols and ideas.
And not just researchers as well; lots of undergrads have good ideas that deserve to be tried out.
Networking charging various debates are ongoing onto whether network access charging schemes for universities should be changed your views?
Martin: Take the phone companies out of the loop and watch the prices plummet.
Jon: No, don’t charge for JANET in general.
The US and Australians have gone down this route and all I’ve seen is academics regretting it bitterly as it results in penny pinching and the stifling of discourse and interaction.
I personnally would have been badly effect if blanket charging already existed; for example it would have been unlikely that we’d have got into multicast IP and the MBONE as early as we did and I would have missed out on many valuable conferences and seminars that I have been able to virtually attend over the network, plus it would have affected my PhD work (which included some long haul multicast IP based experiments).
Indeed unless I could have “played” with multicast IP freely to see how it worked, I might never have taken the route I did in my PhD and some of our community knowledge would have been lost.
As this is what Universities are all about, this would obviously have been bad news.
However, it might be worth penalising sites that don’t do their bit to be good network citizens for service traffice; FTP, Gopher and HTTP traffic not originating from a campus cache incurring a charge might encourage some of the more lax sites to get into gear and state such a cache.
Home pages should students be allowed to use time and network resources (is there any significant impact) on creating and mounting their home pages?
And should staff, for that matter?
Martin: How could they be prevented?
Jon: Yes, both staff and students should be able to put information on the Web.
Its often valuable to be able to find out something about people before you meet them and there are loads of very useful resources on the Web that are really just bits of people’s home pages.
Pornography.
Much has been made, often hysterically, in the mass media, about pornography on the Internet, especially on the Web and Usenet.
What steps should or could academic institutions take to prevent students from choking up the networks by accessing such material Martin: Tailor courses to follow consumer demand?
Jon: Well, if you precached all the Playboy and Hustler sites’ material in your campus cache then you’d quickly reduce the traffic on your JANET link!
:-) Seriously, I think that the problem is blown way, way out of proportion; whilst it is true that a lot of people do look at “porn” sites, I’d say that much of this is because there is so much in the news about porn on the Internet and people are natually interested.
There’s been porn available over JANET for years; certainly when I was a fresher it was available if you knew where to look.
The difference today is that its easier to use the network to find any information, including porn, and because of media hype in the last few years more people are now looking.
If you were feeling a bit fascist and wanted to censor stuff that you consider pornographic you could always enforce the use of a campus cache and then get that to quietly discard retrievals from known porno sites.
This does mean that someone would need to be constantly looking out for such sites (and this might well have to be a community project with several sites sharing the load).
Using filtering systems at the web browser end is not such a good idea; many people in academia can easily circumvent those tools and they can also remove single terms that change the meaning for documents used for research (a classic set of examples has recently appeared on the web4lib mailing list where all a librarian in the US was testing one such product and noticed that it indiscriminately removed the word “queer” from a set of USMARC records she had downloaded).
A last point to bear in mind about the filter products is that they usually censor material based on the vendor’s view of what is objectionable and not the view of the library/computer centre/senior management/moral enforcement committee of the University.
One wish for what you would like to see happen in the world of networking and the Web in the next year… Martin: Me just hired gun, not paid to have opinions :-) Jon: Its got to be to get everyone into using caches (including the vendors of dynamic content, through customer pressure if nothing else).
They’re a cheap and yet effective way of helping make the bandwidth we’ve got go further.
Be good network citizens folks!
What was your reaction to the Web when you encountered it for the first time (and when was this)?
Martin: This is really boring.
Why aren’t there any nice animated graphics and blinking text ?
Give me back my Gopher!
Jon: I encountered the Web sometime in 1991⁄2 (I forget when exactly).
Martin had been playing with it and I’d taken a look as I ran an FTP and gopher archive.
At that time we were using the CERN line mode browser, X Mosaic was just appearing in its early, slightly flakey alpha releases and images were few and far between.
My first impression was that it was a nice idea but the SGML style of HTML seemed to be a real bind; I’d have personally gone for an extension of LaTeX if I’d have been Tim Berners-Lee as I was very anti-SGML at the time (I’m less so now, though SGML does still seem to be struggling to do what LaTeX has been doing for years).
I created some pages for the archive (that mostly hyperlinked to the gopher version of the data) and that was that; I got hooked, CGI came along and the rest is history.
You are stranded on a desert island.
You have a computer with a solar power source, satellite link and copy of your favourite Web browser, as well as back issues of Ariadne and your partners Sainsburys loyalty card.
Nothing else was saved when your ship went down.
What do you do?
Martin: Order a bottle of champagne and a sun-shade.
Jon: Throw the Sainsburys loyalty card as far away as possible for starters; its useless on a desert island and I refuse to have one anyway (I don’t feel very predisposed to giving a large corporation market profile information in return for the odd free box of doughnuts every few months).
Then build a shelter and work out what food I can gather (I assume that this desert island has food sources available; otherwise the next thing I do is use the laptop to send an SOS email to lis-link :-) ).
Then I settle down with a bowl of fruit and berries to read my email and get to work on the web.
Hmmm, this sounds very attractive; no meetings to go to, nice environment, lots of peace and quiet.
When do I get to go?
:-) Thanks, Jon and Martin.
Author Details Jon Knight ROADS Technical Developer Email: jon@net.lut.ac.uk Own Web Site: http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/People/jon.html Tel: 01509 228237 Address: Computer Science Department, University of Loughborough, Loughborough, Leicestershire Martin Hamilton, ROADS Technical Developer Email: martin@net.lut.ac.uk Own Web Site: http://gizmo.lut.ac.uk/~martin/ Tel: 01509 228237 Address: Computer Science Department, University of Loughborough, Loughborough, Leicestershire Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sideline: Nick Hornby Made Me Do It.. Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sideline: Nick Hornby Made Me Do It.. Buzz mobile cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS In Sideline, people give an alternative view of conference attendance.
Here, Sarah Ashton has fun with public transport as she tries to reach Cranfield with increasing desperation... Nick Hornby made me do it!
This is my defence...Unaware of the distractions that lurked in the suburbs of Milton Keynes, I rose at 5.30 a.m. Jogged between bus-stops, in that hesitant 'does the 52 run at this hour?'
kind of way.
Caught my train and two connections.
Bored of pondering life's mysteries (do you stir your coffee with the square or triangular end of the plastic thingie?
), serenaded by the Mobile Phone Chorus, I retreated into my book, High Fidelity [1].
I was on a mission for ARIADNE: The Web Version.
If you are in the midst of that publication as you read this, it should be a mere couple of clicks away [2].
But if you are reading this in print (on the train perhaps?
), there may be a slight delay before you can discover what it was.
It happened on page 80.
"Write down the worst four things that you have done to your partner, even if especially if your partner doesn't know about them."
So I did.
Now, I'm basically a good girl.
Desperate to catalogue more than my one item, I rummaged in the annals of past loves, dredging for cruelty and venom.
At the fleecy edges of my wool-gathering, was Milton Keynes.
I neglected to get off.
Alarm bells rang as Watford Junction flashed by.
Hello London Euston.
Before you say "Silly concrete cow!
", list your own four worst things.
Think about it.
Distracting isn't it?
London friends beckoned, but I dutifully returned to Milton Keynes.
No shuttle bus to Cranfield.
No money for a taxi (my bank balance had forced me to borrow a tenner).
Waited an hour for a local bus.
Arrived at Cranfield in time for a hasty sandwich from the demolished buffet.
On with the afternoon speakers.
Met a friend afterwards for restorative cider, and armed with my bus fare, an apple, and some Dairy Milk (my tea), I headed home.
Collapsed on the sofa, famished and fatigued, at 11 p.m.
The lesson of this sorry tale is probably this.
Don't send a newly-employed ex-student to cover an event on the 30th of the month.
If you do, make sure she's reading something morally uplifting!
References [1] Book previews, Pure Fiction Web Site, http://www.purefiction.co.uk/pages/previews/july96/prev3.htm#hornby  [2] Ashton, S.J., Conference Review: Access v Holdings, 30th October, 1996, Cranfield, UK, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue6/cranfield/  Author Details Sarah Ashton is the Research Associate of the NetLinkS eLib project.
Email: S.J.Ashton@sheffield.ac.uk Personal Web Page:  http://netways.shef.ac.uk/about/staff/sarah.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Internet Archaeology Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Internet Archaeology Buzz data database archives multimedia gis research Citation BibTex RIS Alan Vince, the managing editor of Internet Archaeology, describes an electronic journal that will apply the multimedia aspects of the Web to the field of archaeological research.
Internet Archaeology is an electronic journal run by a consortium which includes the British Academy, the Council for British Archaeology and the Universities of York, Durham, Oxford, Glasgow and Southampton.
The project is managed by a steering committee chaired by Prof B W Cunliffe, Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford.
The project has two staff, myself (Managing Editor) and Sandra Garside-Neville (Assistant Editor).
The choice of archaeology the study of the past as a subject for an electronic journal is based on the wide variety of media now being used by archaeologists in their research.
These include digital plans and maps, computer databases, scientific analyses of artefacts, remote sensing data and the very varied techniques and sub-disciplines of environmental archaeology.
The journal is one of eLib's Electronic Journals projects and one of the few such projects not to have either an established sister print journal or at least a print version built into the project design.
This is a mixed blessing.
On the one hand, it frees us from the need to follow a linear route in our papers but on the other hand makes it more difficult to find papers of sufficient quality for our purposes without detailed negotiation with other print publishers since, naturally enough, most archaeologists with quality work they wish to see published have already made arrangements with print publishers.
The journal's first issue will be formally launched in August 1996 and is likely to have about seven or eight substantial papers.
These papers have been chosen to fit the following criteria: i) They must have an international importance.
We believe that one of the real benefits of internet publication comes from the ability to publish one minute in England and see the results the next in Australia (and vice versa).
ii) They must be subjected to peer-review.
We want to establish Internet Archaeology as a presigious publication outlet for archaeologists.
This means that papers published with us must have the same status as those published in an international print journal which in turn means that we must have a strict refereeing policy.
We will be using access control to allow papers to be published on the web but readable initially only by their referees.
iii) They must be able to demonstrate advantages of web over print publication.
It is our contention that web publication should take advantage of the new medium rather than be a straight translation of print to web.
We have therefore chosen our first papers to illustrate these advantages.
For example, the first paper (already on the Web, at http://intarch.york.ac.uk/journal/issue1/amphoras/index.html) uses clickable maps as an index to the sources of Roman amphoras found in Britain and allows the reader to click on a timeline to retrieve links to amphora types available at a certain date.
Other papers will include archaeobotanical data from the British Isles, the archaeological evidence for clay pipe manufacture in the British Isles, the peopling the Americas project (the spread of palaeoindian settlement through north and south America following the last Ice Age) and papers using VRML and applying a new statistical routine to archaeological data (Kernel Density Estimates).
The papers must cover as wide a chronological and thematic range as possible.
We want to ensure that Internet Archaeology gets a reputation for catering for the entireity of the discipline, especially since it is obviously easiest to get our first papers through personal contacts.
Our papers make heavy use of cgi scripts, mainly written in perl5.
These enable us to give the user considerable control over what information is presented.
A module under development at present is a map server/GIS which allows users to query distribution maps to see the evidence upon which they are based.
There are now numerous GIS systems linked to the World Wide Web but we are trying to produce one which is applicable over the whole world, ie.
it must be able to use latitude/longitude coordinates and must allow the projection used to be varied to suit the particular area being mapped.
The journal has already received considerable interest within the archaeological world.
In general, is seen as a good example of how new technology can benefit the profession, which has had an almost continuous publication crisis for the past twenty years as a result of the vast amount of data produced by archaeological fieldwork and the increasing demands for access to this data from archaeological specialists.
On the other hand, there is a fear that the technology will disenfranchise those without access to the Internet and perhaps hasten the downfall of print journals which are already facing declining subscriptions and rising costs.
Most archaeological publications at present fall between stools.
Archaeological professionals want access to raw data, the logic behind particular interpretations and an indication as to what data exist in archive.
Other academics using archaeological publications usually want the conclusions and synthesis and get exasperated at the mass of detail that has to be trawled through to get to the bones of the work.
The results of these conflicting aims are that they include too much detail for the general reader, are too expensive for the casual reader to buy but are felt to be essential by other archaeologists.
It would be nice to think that by joint publication with Internet Archaeology, archaeological book publication could get a new lease of life.
At least three of our forthcoming papers will be published in parallel, giving readers a chance to compare the respective merits of the two media.
For futher details either visit the Internet Archaeology Web Pages or contact the editorial staff at: Internet Archaeology, Department of Archaeology, University of York, The King's Manor, York YO1 2EP Tel: 01904 433955 Fax: 01904 433902 Email: editor@intarch.york.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Report on the 'Networked Information in an International Context' Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Report on the 'Networked Information in an International Context' Conference Buzz data metadata research Citation BibTex RIS Chris Bailey at the "Networked Information in an International Context" conference.
This excellent conference, jointly organised by UKOLN, JISC, BLRRD, CNI and CAUSE, was one of the best I have ever attended.
The quality of the papers I heard was outstanding.
After listening to Sir Brian Follett talking about eLib to start us off, I decided to concentrate on the briefings from the American speakers.
There isn’t space to discuss them all so I’ve decided to focus on the most interesting for me.
Jana Bradley (jbradley@indyvax.iupui.edu) presented a report on 10 projects dealing with innovative ways of learning in a networked environment.
If you want to see how Fine Arts might be taught in the future have a look at http://www.usc.edu/dept/finearts/fa121/.
Or, if you want to see the impact of an electronic community on teaching and learning, go to the UWired project at http://www.washington.edu/uwired/.
Another interesting paper came from Barbara McFadden Allen, CIC Center for Library Initiatives (BMALLEN@UIUC.EDU).
The member libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation have developed a prototype, fully managed electronic journals collection (http://www.cic.net/cic/cic.html/).
This in itself is just a part of an overall strategy to develop a virtual electronic library for the benefit of all the member institutions.
Given the very disparate nature size, funding, mission etc of the CIC members, cooperation at this level is impressive.
Why can’t we do it in the UK?
Clifford Lynch, University of California, presented the results of research exploring architectural, performance, standards and metadata issues pertaining to improving networked information discovery and retrieval.
This really brought home just how outmoded or inappropriate much of our thinking (and our ‘solutions’) are in the context of NIDR.
The report is available from the CNI server and I heartily recommend it.
David Koehler, Princeton University, looked at the impact that the Web is having on administrative computing.
Students will be able to view their timetables, grades, loan records, personal data, admission forms, application forms…….Anybody working on institutional information strategies should have a look at the following article in CAUSE/EFFECT magazine ( http://cause-www.colorado.edu/cause-effect/cem95/cem9533.html/), and at the work done in this area by the University of Delaware (http://www.mis.udel.edu/).
I can’t comment on the presentations relating to various eLib projects as I didn’t attend them, but informal feedback seemed to indicate that these were also enthusiastically received.
Certainly ‘Ariadne’ was referred to on a number of occasions as a ‘very significant development’!
Finally, I did appreciate a venue which was very reasonably priced, with excellent accommodation, food and company, and which avoided that tedious journey from Heathrow to the centre of London.
My thanks to Hazel Gott and could we have more of the same please!
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View from the Hill Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill Buzz data software cataloguing ftp Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl meets Ian Kingston, a freelance copy-editor, proof-reader and typesetter.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN”> View from the hill: Ian Kingston John MacColl meets Ian Kingston, a professional whose traffic problems are confined to data.
For Ian Kingston, more than for most people, time is money.
He saves both through having one of the shortest commutes in the country, travelling the distance of the staircase of his home in a Nottingham suburb.
Kingston is a full-time freelance copy-editor, proof-reader and typesetter.
Publishers have used freelances for these crucial stages in the publication process for many years.
Freelances usually receive heavy packages through the mail or delivered by courier, containing manuscripts to be ‘marked up’ grammatical and typographical errors removed and the publisher’s ‘house-style’ for the layout of each journal article or book chapter indicated.
They charge by the hour or by the page for their work.
Suitably marked up, the manuscripts are then despatched to an in-house editor, who sends them off to a typesetter.
When the proofs arrive back from the typesetter, they require to be checked against the marked-up manuscripts.
Once again they are bundled up and mailed out often to the same freelance who performed the copy-editing to be proof-read, the final stage prior to printing.
This protracted process is one reason why ‘publishing lag’ is so often cited as a major frustration by academic authors.
It can take several weeks to prepare even a single article for publishing in a journal, and that is only after the much lengthier routine of peer-review has identified an article for inclusion, or an editor has finally approved a monograph for publication.
Ian Kingston realised some years ago that networked computers provided a means of speeding up this process.
He was one of the first freelance copy-editors in the UK to promote himself to publishers as an on-screen editor, editing direct onto authors’ disks, rather than working on manuscripts in the traditional way.
Copy editors in general feel comfortable with paper.
Their job is to prepare a manuscript to be transformed into a set of finished page proofs by the typesetter.
Their traditional tools are pens, and for sizing images china graph pencils and paper guillotines.
How do these tools translate into software?
“That is the wrong question” replies Kingston.
“Instead a freelance should think ‘how can my software help me to do the job better?’” He runs the Computer User’s Group of the Society of Freelance Editors and Proofreaders and gives frequent training courses in on-screen editing to freelances around the country who are worried about the impact of this new working method upon their careers, and frightened by the level of technology involved.
“I tell them that, once they are familiar with their word-processing package, and experienced and skilled in the techniques required, editing on-screen can be 20-30% quicker.
Also, that they should acquire an e-mail account, to allow for much more efficient contact with clients around the world.” Kingston also moderates an e-mail discussion list for computer-using freelances.
“They need some way of screaming for help.
A sense of isolation is their biggest problem.” Kingston went full-time freelance in 1991.
His computer and networking skills have given him a competitive advantage which allows him the luxury now of editing only the type of material he enjoys.
“I stopped doing journals some years ago, because the frequent panic jobs arriving from publishers were ruining my social life.” Computing books are a speciality.
Publishers need to get them into the marketplace quickly.
They offer the work to Kingston because he offers a full, speedy service.
“I now typeset the material as well” he says.
“After all, if you’ve edited the copy on disk, you’ve already done half the typesetter’s work.
A software package like Ventura Publisher can then add the publisher’s own coding.
For a traditionally-trained publishing professional, knowledgeable in the rules of page make-up and in how to read a type spec., it’s not difficult.” The publisher saves a lot of time this way.
Kingston is sent an author’s disk, and returns a disk ready to be fed direct into a Linotron for the production of film from which the printing is done.
But more use could be made of the Net.
Disks could be cut out of the process altogether if FTP were a more viable option.
“This is the downside of working from home” remarks Kingston.
“Slow telephone lines make file transfers too expensive at present.” Publishers don’t help.
Too few of them have really begun to explore the potential of the Net for efficiency gains.
“Their Web sites are under-developed.
The few that exist at all may have a little catalogue information but that’s about it.
They could be using the Web to make productivity savings in the way they use freelances.
They could also be using it to sell books.
But then,” he continues, “publishers have never been particularly good at marketing books, even before the Internet came along.
Music and film companies have seen the commercial potential of the Web much sooner than publishers.
People will part with £15 for a CD much more readily than for a book.
Bookshops have not helped with their attempts to mimic dark forbidding libraries.” Kingston is ambivalent about libraries.
“I’ve wasted a lot of time in them.
It wasn’t so bad, as a student, when I had time to work out the system though I always felt that libraries were laid out purely for the benefit of librarians.” Now he uses the Net as his first resort for information.
Virtual libraries appeal to him.
“After all, researchers need information immediately.
I want to see the librarian’s skills applied to Net resources so that I can get the information I need there and then.
I don’t have time to head into town for it.” Ian Kingston glances at his watch.
A book in the form of a box of disks is awaiting his attention upstairs.
I realise that my time is up.
Response Stephen Cracknell, who works in the same field as Ian Kinston, responds to the article.
“I was very interested to read John MacColl’s article on Ian Kingston’s copy-editing, proof reading and typesetting business as I work in the same areas.
As you say, it is true that copy editors feel comfortable with paper, and this is part of the reason for the slow take-up of editing on screen.
But that is not the whole story: authors like to see what the copy editor has done, which is much easier to arrange if you work on paper; most people – copy editors included – do not like to spend all day in front of a computer; and not all copy editors have the skill and equipment to deal with disks from a variety of word processors and computer systems.
My second comment relates to Ian Kingston’s claim that slow telephone lines make file transfers too expensive at present.
With a 28k modem I regularly transfer 1MB files in about 5 minutes (on Compuserve).
If the files have been zipped this is equivalent to over 2MB of data.
(A typical unillustrated book is only about 1MB) I currently typeset the Council for British Archaeology’s magazine “British Archaeology” using email.
The editor emails me the files; I email the proofs (in Acrobat format) to the CBA; and the copy for the printer is sometimes sent in as a Postscript file.
This allows me to work from home in Stow-on-the-Wold or from our holiday house in France.
As you suggest, electronic pre-press work is an increasingly important part of the publishing industry and can be personally liberating if you control your own working patterns.
I can, however, see considerable dangers if you are glued to somebody else’s keyboard all day.
Yours sincerely Stephen Cracknell” Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Subject Trees: The Exeter Experience Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Subject Trees: The Exeter Experience Buzz software html accessibility tagging copyright hypertext gopher url research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Tilsed, Computing Development Officer at the University of Exeter Library, describes the building of the main University subject tree, or index, of Internet Resources.
The exceptional growth of the World Wide Web over the last few years has brought with it an additional and ever-expanding source of information to those with access to the Internet.
Building upon the work of many gopher servers, the WWW has quickly become the popular medium for provision of information on the networks.
The development of intra-nets within businesses is a testament to the accessibility of the WWW model.
However, the proliferation of Internet resources, from topical sites to electronic journals, has posed a significant challenge to the information profession.
Issues regarding the quality, accessibility and classification of Internet resources have all become legitimate discussion points for librarians and information scientists throughout the world and they will remain so for the foreseeable future.
What follows is an account of one academic library's practical approach to Internet resources and the issues that were encountered when developing a set of library web pages.
The University of Exeter Library first began to develop its own web pages during late 1994.
Under the guidance of a Library Web Working Group (chaired by the Education Faculty librarian and consisting of the Science Librarian, Systems Librarian and the Computing Development Officer), the core set of pages describing the library service were put in place and made available to the world.
The various issues encountered during this time have been documented elsewhere but, briefly, the Computing Development Officer took on the role of Library Web Editor, checking pages and advising on HTML tagging and style.
[1] Having established the central library web pages, attention turned to the classification and accessibility of Internet resources.
There was a desire to offer some sort of service to the University as a whole, providing guidance to available Internet resources in a manner that offered maximum accessibility.
The structure of a topical 'listing' or 'subject tree' of Internet resources became the chosen approach, although this was by no means a new apparatus or technique.
NISS and BUBL had long offered some sort of resources listing, the 'Virtual Library' was in existence and at least one UK academic library (University of York Library) had started creating web pages with the same purpose.
Nor was the decision to develop a 'subject tree' without its critics, some believing that the existence of NISS and others made the venture a fruitless 're-invention of the wheel'.
However, the resulting discussion did help to clarify the intentions and purpose of the 'subject tree', an informative exercise that strengthened its basis.
The Exeter Subject Tree was never conceived as a 'rival' to the more established resource listings.
From the outset the subject tree has been designed and built with its target audience in mind the staff and students of the University of Exeter.
Only those subject areas that are appropriate to the teaching and research of the University are covered.
The result is that some academic subjects do not appear, whilst other more unusual disciplines, such as Complementary Health Studies, are present.
Additionally, it has never been intended that each subject listing should be comprehensive the fast growth of the WWW, along with resourcing issues, prohibits the attainment of such a goal.
The job of searching the Internet for resources and creating and maintaining subject 'branches' is the responsibility of the relevant subject librarians.
Whilst some libraries have specifically appointed network information specialists, in Exeter the task of keeping up with Internet resources is seen as an integral part of the subject librarian's role.
This alone has had some training implications.
Each subject librarian is not only responsible for finding the resources; they are also responsible for the actual creation of the HTML pages and their subsequent maintenance.
To assist, a Subject Tree Style Guide has been developed and a template made available.
In addition, all those involved with the tree receive training in HTML tagging.
With such a diverse group of people it was inevitable that some colleagues would take to tagging more quickly than others.
One of the tasks of the Library Web Editor therefore is to assist in the tagging of pages and to pass on relevant developments in HTML.
With the Subject Tree Style Guide offering only general comments on structure and presentation, the actual content of each subject listing varies.
Some subject 'branches' (particularly in the social sciences) carry short evaluative descriptions of each resource, whilst others offer links with minimal commentary.
Currently the resources are grouped according to theme or sub-discipline within each subject area, rather than by any classification scheme.
There has been much discussion in the information profession about the merits of classifying Internet resources according to Library of Congress or Dewey, and this has been considered as a means of structuring the Exeter Subject Tree.
However, at the present time, it is felt that the current system of listing, in accord with local academic requirements, offers better accessibility.
In some cases, the work on the Subject Tree has led to the development of separate web documents, thus contributing to Internet resources in general.
Roy Davies, Science Librarian, initially had a section within one of his subject branches on finding e-mail addresses of individuals.
The material for this section eventually became too extensive for the subject tree format, so a separate guide was developed, based on the material.
[2] His document is now widely accessed from all over the world.
My own Library and Related Resources Guide also started out as a section of the Subject Tree but quickly outgrew the format and is now a separate and frequently accessed resource.
These are but two examples of many documents that started out as parts of the Exeter Subject Tree.
There is the inevitable resourcing issue, however.
The current method of creating and maintaining the Subject Tree adds an additional task to the workload of those involved.
Whilst a significant amount of time is spent creating the tree in the first place, there is still a considerable ongoing commitment to the maintenance of the resource, particularly in checking existing links and searching for new resources.
With increasing term-time pressures on subject librarians, maintenance of the pages has, for many, not surprisingly become predominantly a vacation activity.
Software to check hypertext links is now being investigated, but this offers only a partial reduction in the task of maintenance.
Reaction from around the University as a whole has been favourable.
Many academic colleagues regularly use the Subject Tree pages as starting points for exploration of the WWW in classes and many assist in development by submitting URLs for investigation and possible inclusion.
During the re-design of the University departmental home pages this summer, a link to the relevant subject 'branch' was included in each, further anchoring the position of the Exeter Subject Tree within University academic life.
Additionally, access statistics have shown that the Exeter Subject Tree has also been widely accessed from beyond the University, with other sites carrying links to selected parts.
So what of the future?
Alongside the ongoing commitment to maintaining and developing the pages of the Subject Tree, there is the intention to take aspects of the subject listings one step further.
Building on the development of Networked Learner Support within the information profession, the Library Web Working Group is exploring the possibility of creating electronic teaching resources in conjunction with academic departments.
The structure and nature of the Subject Tree will also be reviewed, to ensure its continuing contribution to the serving of information needs within the University and beyond.
[1] See M. Myhill et al, 'Keeping the Threads Together: use of the World-Wide Web at the University of Exeter Library' in Vine, 99, June 1995, pp.15-18.
[2] See Finding E-Mail Addresses of Individuals by Roy Davies.
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NISS: National Information Services and Systems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines NISS: National Information Services and Systems Buzz data database archives browser schema udc cataloguing licence telnet research Citation BibTex RIS Annette Lafford and Oren Stone talk us through NISS, one of the major sources of on-line information for academics and librarians NISS.
What does it mean ?
What does it do ?
Why ?
Answers to these questions will strike different chords for everyone reading this article, depending upon your experience of networked information resources and the type or area of work with which you’re involved.
Can NISS help with your work ?
NISS provides information services for the education community, and specifically for the UK higher education community.
Electronic information services, so you’ll need a computer.
What sort of information ?
A wide range: details about education, its organisation, committees, funding; material produced by education, reports, catalogues, directories; resources used in education, teaching materials, databases, journals.
Anyone in the community staff, students, researchers with a networked computer and a suitable WWW browser can access NISS services [1].
A text only interface is available if you prefer to telnet [2].
Information needs in education are many and varied, and whilst the scope of material NISS accommodates is vast, we clearly cannot guarantee that every item you need is available directly.
But we often know where that information can be found, and provide onward links to get you to there as quickly as possible.
So, what exactly can you find via NISS services?
Higher Education is multi-faceted and its organisation and operation is a complex mixture of interests and initiatives.
With never enough money.
So it’s often useful to be able to see what the Funding Councils are saying and doing.
A great deal of information from the Councils is available via our Education area [3] reports, circulars and other publications can be easily accessed in electronic format, and are usually published on-line in tandem with printed versions.
A similar situation applies to groups and committees further down the organisational structure of HE.
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) for example, which itself funds or manages other services and groups such as AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service), MIDAS (Manchester Information Datasets and Associated Services), and the Electronic Libraries (eLib) projects, provides extensive on-line documentation about its activities and don’t forget that you can connect to each of the JISC services themselves from NISS too.
Links to material about the UK’s Research Councils are included in our Education pages as well the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), to give just one example, offers news and details about its extensive range of work.
The benefit of NISS for anyone wanting to find information of this sort is that it is collected together within the Education area, and you can gain a good idea of how the various committees and so on are related to each other, as well as investigating particular reports or other items that each might produce.
In common with NISS services generally, this education material is kept up to date and expands to accommodate new material as it becomes available.
Other education-oriented information takes a different viewpoint that for example of existing or prospective students.
In addition to a comprehensive collection of links to campus information servers at HE sites, you can also find a page which focuses on prospectuses and other admissions information.
UK education of course attracts students from outside the country too, and details from the British Council’s education information service might provide the answers to enquiries of this nature.
Ever since it began in 1988, NISS has provided national information services for the education community from within that community, and it is therefore perhaps not surprising to find that the scope of the education-related material it offers access to has grown, over the years, into a substantial collection.
Whilst the HE sector remains our primary concern, we have also grouped further education and schools material into two further sets of pages the points of contact between the three sectors increase in number all the time, and finding out about what goes on elsewhere in education is likely to become ever more important.
Rapidly changing news and updates about various events of interest to people working or studying in HE are included in another area on NISS, called the Noticeboard [4].
As its name implies, the sort of information you can find there are details of conferences, training courses and the ever-popular job vacancy pages.
Since this type of information tends to have a short life-span it’s always a good idea to dip into Noticeboard now and then to keep up to date, and since the conference and jobs notices are grouped by subject disciplines it’s a simple matter to bookmark the particular pages which match your interests.
A record located in the NISS system Information produced within, or used by people working in education manifests itself in a variety of forms, and many resources of this sort are available via NISS.
Sources of such material are not restricted to the UK either someone working in an academic discipline such as geography for example will, from time to time, want to access world-wide information within this discipline.
Our Directory of Networked Resources [5] lets you track down sources of information starting from a subject-oriented perspective.
It is based on the fact that every link to an external resource on NISS is ‘catalogued’ as an entry in a database, and assigned a classmark (the classification used being a simplified version of UDC, which is superficially similar to Dewey Decimal Classification) and descriptive elements.
These entries are visible as the ‘[Info]’ page accompanying all external links from NISS, and available via the results screen after any search using the ‘Search’ button.
The descriptions are not as detailed as traditional library book catalogue entries or as detailed as those in the NetFirst [10] database but they are recognisably ‘library-type’ records.
The database therefore underlies the whole structure of the NISS’s main on-line service, and as well as being fully searchable (from any Search button) it is visible in various output formats in the Directory structure browsable by inverted ‘Subject Tree’ UDC menus, by UDC classmark ‘library shelf order’, and by alphabetical subject heading.
Choosing the alphabetical topic order for example allows you to pinpoint resources on Africa’s History, or Cartography, Economics or Telecommunications.
Many of these resources will in themselves provide a selection of onward links to other sources of related information NISS can often furnish a single starting point of this sort which subsequently leads on to much additional material from a diverse selection of information providers and in the context of subject-oriented collections, these providers include the subject oriented gateways and services set up by the HE community as part of JISC’s ANR (Access to Networked Resources) initiative.
Electronic sources of information can of course also supply details about more traditional media.
Not all the material you may want is available on-line books and various printed documents, journals and tapes are still necessary aids in all educational matters.
NISS can help here too.
Our Reference & Bibliographic area [6] offers links to library catalogues at HE institutions throughout the country (and also includes Ireland), so it’s a simple task to check to see whether another site has a copy of that particular text you require.
There’s also a page of bookshops and publishers for those occasions when you need to purchase an item you cannot obtain elsewhere.
Other general reference material can also be found in this area, including on-line dictionaries covering a multitude of languages.
However, many large datasets and directories widely used within the education community are available in electronic format, and we have collected some of these together on NISS’s Datahosts page [7].
Citation indexes and services, such as the BIDS-ISI service, can be accessed via this page, so can several of OCLC’s database services such as FirstSearch.
Chemists will find a link to the CrossFireplus service here, and people working in literary fields can connect to the Oxford Text Archive … the Datahosts collection is very varied in scope and subject focus, and represents only a subset of all the resources of this type which can be accessed via NISS.
As part of NISS’s commitment to increase coverage of ‘news information of all sorts’ our News area [8] has been greatly expanded this year.
Since the number of on-line versions of national dailies is now something approaching 2,000 world-wide, we took the opportunity to present a selection of these from all the individual countries in Europe on our pages, so that users would at least have the chance to select ONE national daily from the country of their choice on this continent without having to go to other places on the Internet and rummage around for suitable links.
The selection of one particular national daily from any single country for presentation over another has not been based on any specialist knowledge, so please send your comments to the News editor via the Comments button if you know of a better one than that which you find on NISS.
(We have already altered the entry for Flemish-speaking Belgium in response to feedback from academics with better local knowledge.)
In the future, if feasible, we may enter into mirroring arrangements with important national dailies that are slow to access from the UK.
Business and financial information is a field which depends very much on currency of information for its value.
NISS’s Business and Industry service provides full text journal articles on general business trends at a competitive site subscription, and Biz/Ed provides valuable material on business education for the community.
But these resources form only half the picture.
Business studies need raw data to fuel their work.
Much of this appears and disappears in the form of daily stock market reports, hourly share price updates and information on tickers updated in real time, which is constantly changing it may never be enshrined or fossilized in periodical articles.
While a lot of this data costs money and is only available by subscription, there is also a certain amount available free.
If this area interests you, have a look at the new Business News page [9], (accessible via the NISS News page).
NISS is attempting to select and collate business news data on a world-wide basis, starting with the UK but working outwards through the United States and Europe, using a tabular schema which is designed to help users track information of a specific kind within each resource presented to them, with the minimum of investigatory effort.
Opposite each resource is indicated the kind of information most strongly represented within it; you can access that information directly by clicking on the Info Button in the appropriate cell.
If the resource or some significant aspect of the resource requires you to register, there is a direct link to the Registration information in the appropriate column (signified by a clipboard).
If you have any suggestions for the improvement of this interface, which is still experimental or if you have any comments or criticisms please mail them to the News editor using the Comments button.
The range of material available via NISS is extensive, and grows all the time.
Although NISS can often provide a depth of information within particular areas such as Education [3], our services also offer a valuable starting point when you are looking for information resources across a spectrum of subject interests.
A separate service hosted by NISS which can also help with such a task is that of the NISS NetFirst Service [10].
NetFirst has been made available free of charge to the UK Higher Education community via NISS services under an agreement between CHEST [11] and OCLC.
Once a higher education institution is licensed to use NetFirst, all staff and students at that institution may access it.
Almost all UK Universities have signed the license agreement hence it is pretty well universally accessible to people in the UK academic community.
NetFirst is essentially a hot-linked database of Internet resources not a Search Engine, but a mirror of a ‘library catalogue’ type database produced in the USA containing roughly 70,000 records, and added to at the rate of several hundred a week.
The resources are selected by OCLC (the database providers) on the basis of their usefulness to librarians and library users.
NetFirst covers all subjects, and though most of the resources in NetFirst are sited in the USA, a large number are from elsewhere, including countries outside the English-speaking world.
At present, about 5% of the database comes from the UK, mostly from universities; OCLC are aiming to maintain this level of UK representation.
The resources in the database are classified (Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress) and the user interface offers search and browse facilities.
NISS, then, provides information.
More specifically, it provides services which enable members of the education community to access electronic information resources which can help with their work or study.
NISS is of course only one of a growing number of WWW information providers and hosts within the community, and in addition to material that we administer we also aim to include onward links and pointers to all such services, so that everyone who uses NISS is given the best possible opportunity of finding exactly the sort of information they need at that particular time.
References [1] The NISS Web Site, http://www.niss.ac.uk/ [2] Telnet to NISS, telnet://niss.ac.uk/ [3] Education area, http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/ [4] Noticeboard, http://www.niss.ac.uk/noticeboard/ [5] Directory of Networked Resources, http://www.niss.ac.uk/subject/ [6] Reference and Bibliographic area, http://www.niss.ac.uk/reference/ [7] Datahosts page, http://www.niss.ac.uk/datahosts/ [8] NISS news area, http://www.niss.ac.uk/news/ [9] NISS Business news page, http://www.niss.ac.uk/news/busindex.html [10] Netfirst service, http://www.netfirst.ac.uk/ [11] CHEST Web site, http://www.chest.ac.uk/ Author Details Annette Lafford, Information Officer, and Oren Stone, Information Officer NISS, Email: niss@niss.ac.uk Tel: 01225 826036 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Corner: Finding UK and European Resources on the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Corner: Finding UK and European Resources on the Web Buzz database passwords url Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley looks at how to keep your search results coming from within particular geographic areas and thus save on bandwidth.
When searching the web, many people are keen to find ways of restricting their search to material based in the UK or Europe.
The advantages of being able to get hold of such material can include the possible greater relevance to UK needs of material with a UK or European focus, speed of access to the information, and greater ability to focus a search on local topics such as news.
A number of tools already exist for finding UK and European information on the web.
Many of the eLib Information Gateways such as SOSIG and OMNI offer options which enable you to restrict your search of their database just to UK and European material.
Other tools, such as Alta Vista, will enable you to restrict a search to UK material by adding the string url:uk to your search.
For example, an Alta Vista search on +Oasis +url:uk will find documents about the group Oasis which have been published on UK web servers.
This limits the search of the database to those documents which contain the word UK in their URL.
However, this strategy can prove problematic as some documents which are based on UK web servers may not necessarily contain the word UK in their URLs (for example: the UK internet service provider ClaraNet which has the URL http://www.clara.net).
A number of search engines have therefore been developed which offer a much more focused approach to searching the web for UK and European material.
Some of these tools are enhancements of existing global search engines, whereas others are databases of purely UK or European material.
This article reviews two services which offer searching for UK and European material EuroFerret and Excite UK.
EuroFerret EuroFerret [1] is a database of European web sites aimed at member countries of the European Union.
There are currently (August 1997) around 5 million documents in the database.
The EuroFerret search engine is based on Muscat technology, which uses intelligent indexing and searching agents to provide interactive analysis of web documents.
Detailed information about how this works is available at Muscat [2].
The user-interface for EuroFerret is quite straightforward; you simply type your search keywords into the form on screen and click on the button marked Find.
You can also choose to restrict your search to a particular country by choosing it from a pull-down menu on the home page.
The default for searching by country is Any which enables you to search across the entire database of European web sites.
Options are also available for searching the database in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian or Swedish.
EuroFerret doesn’t offer options for performing Boolean searching, and the (fairly limited) help information which is available states that ‘the power of the search is greatly enhanced by using several words [3].
EuroFerret does automatic relevancy ranking on the documents that match your query so that those which contain the most frequent incidences of the word(s) you have chosen are pushed towards the top of the list of search results.
The lack of Boolean operators for searching means that EuroFerret doesn’t have the flexibility or power of searching that a tool such as Alta Vista can provide.
I decided to put EuroFerret to the test by trying out a search for some information about the new Oasis album which has had a lot of coverage recently.
I expected that there would be quite a lot of UK material available on the web on this subject.
A EuroFerret search on the keywords Oasis new album retrieved over 1000 documents matching one or more of these words.
A list of hits is then displayed on screen giving a relevancy ranking for each document, and showing how many of the keywords were matched in the document.
My first ten hits all have a relevancy ranking of 100% and match all three of my chosen keywords.
A closer look at a couple of these documents brings up a few anomalies: my first hit turns out to be a Norwegian web page about the group The Charlatans, which includes a passing mention of Oasis, and includes both the keywords new and album, but in separate sentences.
There is, however, one document in the list of the first 10 hits which has Oasis in the title.
Having identified this document, it is now possible to refine my search.
This can be done by selecting the relevant document or documents by placing a cross in a checkbox which appears next to each hit.
I can then click on a button marked Expand and get a list of words taken from the selected documents which I can add to my search in order to refine it.
Possible words include: noel.
definit.
morn.
interview.
EuroFerret informs me that the words it is displaying have been ‘suffix-stripped’ so that, for example, match will also find matches and matching.
I can select some words which appear to be relevant to my query and then re-run the search.
The perceived relevance of the results is re-assessed in the light of the further information that I’ve provided about my needs, and then a new set of results is displayed.
I’m now being pointed towards more documents which are focused on Oasis, and a few which mention a new album.
This process of selecting relevant documents and refining the search can be repeated as necessary.
Comparing this search against a search for similar information on Alta Vista immediately reveals some of the weaknesses of the EuroFerret approach.
Using Alta Vista I can express my query in much more precise terms for example: +Oasis +“new album”, which tells Alta Vista straightaway that I only want documents which contain both the word Oasis and the phrase “new album”.
This should avoid the problem noted with EuroFerret whereby documents were being returned which contained the words new and album in separate sentences.
The Alta Vista search finds 696 documents [4].
I can then further refine this search by restricting it to UK material by adding +url:uk.
This brings the search results down to 87 documents [5].
This gives me a much more manageable set of results in about half the time it takes to refine the EuroFerret search, and a quick glance at some of the documents retrieved shows that the relevance of the material found using Alta Vista appears to be greater.
A further problem with the results retrieved from the EuroFerret search appears to be the level of currency of the material.
Quite a few of the documents appear to be referring to the previous Oasis album, not the current one.
It is difficult to get a picture of how up to date the documents are as a date is not included in the information given about the hits on screen.
The provision of dates would be a nice enhancement of the service if this were made available.
A new EuroFerret interface is currently under development, and a preview of this can be tested on the EuroFerret web pages [6].
This is an enhancement of the intelligent agent technology currently being used in EuroFerret.
The agent service provides an instantaneous analysis of all the documents it retrieves from a search.
Categories of words are then generated from this analysis and a list of words which can be used to refine the search is given on screen above the search results.
The user can then choose between selecting words from this list to refine the search, or selecting particular documents which appear to be relevant.
A further service, known as Agent Briefing, is also currently under development.
It is necessary to register with a username and password to use this service.
The Agent Briefing service is a news service which enables you to search for news items over a given period of time.
Once an initial search has been performed it can be saved as a ‘working brief’ which the agent can then use again in the future to run further searches on the topic.
This brief can be refined over time as your information needs become more defined.
Overall, EuroFerret is a useful tool with a number of impressive features and some exciting-looking developments on the horizon.
It could be vastly improved with the addition of some of the features I’ve mentioned above.
Excite UK This is a new UK version of the popular Excite search engine, and this version offers the choice between searching UK sites, European sites or worldwide sites [7].
The full database consists of approximately 50 million web sites, although the UK and European sections will be considerably smaller than this.
Excite UK uses a technology known as intelligent concept extraction (ICE) [8] to find relationships between words and concepts.
Like EuroFerret, it will automatically analyse the results of your search and generate a list of key words and concepts which frequently appear in the documents which make up your results.
You can then refine your search by selecting from this list of words.
Excite UK takes this a step further by intelligently linking together related topics.
An example of this is given on the Excite web pages: an example search for “dog care” will also find material on the related topic of “pet grooming”[9].
Excite UK makes use of the + (plus) and (minus) sign for Boolean searching, and phrase searching is also possible using quotation marks around phrases.
Thus, we can perform our search for information on the new Oasis album as follows: +Oasis +“new album”.
This search generates 157 results when restricted to the UK only section of the database.
Excite UK also makes use of relevancy ranking, so our results are sorted according to the frequency of occurrence of our required words.
Excite UK also provides an extremely useful option for viewing the results of a search by web site.
This is useful in seeing how many pages in our results are infact sub-sections of pages from the same web site.
The option is then available for going directly to the home page for that web site rather than trawling through the subpages listed.
Excite UK also provides a More like this.. option.
Once you have identified a relevant document you can click on the More like this.. link next to it to find other, similar documents.
Unfortunately again, Excite UK doesn’t provide a date for each document it retrieves from a search.
This would be a welcome addition to the functionality of the service.
Excite UK is an extremely useful service with powerful facilities for efficient searching and for finding UK and European resources.
It provides the functionality of a tool such as Alta Vista, with the flexibility of limiting the search to UK and European material.
References [1] Euroferret http://www.muscat.co.uk/euroferret/ [2] Muscat http://www.muscat.co.uk/chd/amusfram.htm [3] EuroFerret Help, http://www.muscat.com/ferret/nouveau/help.html [22 August 1997] [4] Alta Vista search, http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&kl=XX&q=%2BOasis+%2B%22new+album%22 [26 August 1997] [5] Alta Vista search, http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&kl=XX&q=%2BOasis+%2B%22new+album%22+%2Burl%3Auk&search.x=53&search.y=9 [26 August 1997] [6] Muscat Agent, http://www.muscat.co.uk/cgi-bin/fx?DB=ferret.dup [22 August 1997] [7] Excite search engine http://www.excite.co.uk [8] Excite Help Using Excite Search and Directory http://www.excite.co.uk/info/how_to.html [26 August 1997] [9] Excite: What’s New?
http://www.excite.co.uk/whatsnew.html [26 August 1997.]
Author Details Tracey Stanley Networked Information Officer University of Leeds Library, UK Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/people/TSStanley/TSStanley.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 5 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 5 Buzz data metadata browser copyright provenance research Citation BibTex RIS The editor introduces Ariadne issue 5.
So why is this issue of the Web version of Ariadne so big, then?
…was a question asked by several people who have watched this issue being constructed.
The answer is, in one word, "awareness" (Ariadne does reside in the Training and Awareness section of the eLib programme).
In a possibly noticeable change of direction, the Web version of Ariadne (WVA for short) will have a significantly heavier bias towards making its target audience aware of relevant and useful services and resources.
For example, in this issue we have a section devoted to Web-based journals of interest to librarians and information specialists/scientists, with detailed descriptions of D-Lib, the Katharine Sharp review, Provenance, Cause/Effect and MC Journal (The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship) by the people who edit and publish them.
There are also contributions from the maintainer of the most popular clickable map of UK academic sites, and the builder of the PICK resource (an index of online library and information science resources that has gained much favourable comment), as well as a review of Infoseek Ultra (a search engine with a bigger index than Alta Vista and Lycos) and a brief overview of UKERNA training courses (which is of interest to managers of sites hooked up to JANET).
Also, the new Web interface for BIDS is described, while a description of the Web4Lib mailing lists, a debating/help forum dealing with many aspects of the Web being integrated into Libraries.
So, it's all about services and resources, then?
No, far from it.
In this issue, the research elsewhere section has several interesting pieces, most of which concern research/work not just in the UK.
The IIELR (International Institute of Electronic Library Research) is described, as is the European Libraries Programme, the Surf foundation (a major IT co-ordination service for the Dutch academic sector), and Desire, a project designed to "solve the problems which currently hamper the use of the World Wide Web as a means of giving researchers access to research data".
In the same section is an article on the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, it's design, and a discussion of some of the issues behind the approach that this journal takes to the process of scholarly review.
In addition, Ian Tilsed describes the building of the main Exeter University subject tree, or index, of Internet Resources.
What about the material in the parallel print version of Ariadne?
Oh, that's all there, as usual.
For example, the cover story deals with the new JISC 5 year strategy, where the main article from the print version is by Amy Friedlander, who looks at, and towards, some of the benefits of the Web and digital technology when it comes to doing and present research.
In addition, the Down your way column investigates the networking setup at Edge Hill College, the Interface column describes what public libraries are doing on the Internet at the moment, while in Around the Table, Sheona Farquar looks at Web sites for the Science and Engineering community.
The eLib section in both the print and Web versions of Ariadne carries articles describing the Helix, Open Journals, Skip and NewsAgent for Librarians projects.
In addition, Dan Fleming describes the Formations project and looks at some of the issues involved in adding value to a pre-prints by using groupware such as Lotus Notes.
Its getting a bit big, then… There's more.
The Get Tooled Up section contains the regular From the Trenches column from Jon Knight, where the security of Web-based fill-in forms is examined.
Brian Kelly, in the article for Netskills Corner he will be providing before moving to UKOLN to become the UK Web Focus Officer, provides advice on the design of the underlying directory structure of Web sites, while Paul Miller describes the Dublin Core metadata set and ways in which it can be implemented in online data.
Charles Oppenheim, in Copyright Corner, provides us with brief reviews of the more useful Web sites for legal/copyright information.
In a new column, British Library Corner, Graham Jefcoate provides his Libtech lecture on "Text and the Internet".
In the Public Libraries Corner, Sarah Ormes examines the advantages and disadvantages of having commercial "cyberstations" or internet points in Public Libraries, while Sue Welsh in the new OMNI-Corner section examines the pitfalls of using the Internet as a replacement for your friendly family practitioner.
…erm, how do you expect us to… Don't interrupt!
; there is also the regular cartoon, poem, the caption competition (spot the eLib project manager!
), the sideline article, and several other pieces.
In addition, there is a survey form which people can fill in through their Web browser.
This would be very appreciated, as the feedback would help us in deciding the most appropriate future for Ariadne posteLib funding.
…read all of this, then?
Well, if you did manage to read all of this issue of Ariadne on the Web, then you either have little or no social life (that sounds depressingly familiar {-) or a job with a suspiciously large amount of free time (which means you probably don't work in academia or in libraries!).
Pick and choose the more interesting bits, leave the rest.
However, you do have a good point… The Web version of Ariadne changes to the format From the next issue (number 6, in mid-November 1996), articles will be appearing more frequently, in that some articles will appear in updates between issues.
Basically, this means that the main issue, on launch, will contain all of the articles, reviews, items also found in the print version, as well as a number of items unique to just the web version (but a smaller number than in this issue).
In the two months between the launch of that issue and the next one, there will be one or two major updates, consisting of several items in each.
So instead of having one lump of over 50 things to read every two months, with nothing till the next issue (apart from the regular news clippings update section), you will have around 35 to 40 articles to read initially, with another 5 to 15 spread over one or two mid-issue updates.
The Editor's Favourite In an indulgent mood, I've decided to pick my favourite article out of each edition of the Web version of Ariadne (having said that, I wish to stress that many of the articles in Ariadne are of great interest; this can be a drawback when editing/proof-checking, when you find yourself reading the articles out of interest instead of executing editorial duties on said articles instead).
For this issue, I've chosen the article by Jadranka Stojanovski on "Croatian Libraries: The war is behind us, what brings the future?".
This is a fascinating piece on the evolution of networking in Croatia and Croatian libraries since the recent war, where many of the libraries were severely damaged or destroyed (this puts the problems we have in the UK with libraries into sharp perspective, in comparison).
Jadranka has been a key motivator in several areas of the library and networking redevelopment in Croatia, as well as raising four children at the same time!
We hope you find many things of interest/enjoyment in this issue of the Web version of Ariadne.
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Interface Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface Buzz rae research Citation BibTex RIS Derek Law talks to Lyndon Pugh about the print / electronic transition, networking, eLib and other matters.
There are a number of ironies to be savoured while talking with Derek Law at Kings College London.
The library of what was a well known religious institution preparing Anglicans for teaching and the church is now run by a scion of a Scottish Presbyterian family.
Known for its strengths in the humanities, the College has produced five Nobel Prizewinners in topics including X rays, DNA and beta blockers.
The route to Derek’s room passes the chapel, where the sound of a requiem mass filtered out.
Against this background, the conversation ranged across the print/electronic transition, networking, eLib and the Research Assessment Exercise.
We began with the current research programmes in information science and librarianship, where optimism is tempered with caution: “There are threats.
One is that we will spend a lot of time ignoring research outcomes and reinventing wheels, because we are not always linking practitioner-relevant research and the libraries.
I think this is because we take a narrow view of what is relevant and in particular ignore groups working in the areas of business information and health information research.
Practitioner research cannot only be done in research centres.
Major research initiatives such as eLib also have a human cost.
We create work for people, but offer them no long-term future.
It is appropriate that anyone who wants to do research, has a valid project, is good enough and can find the funding, should be allowed to do so.
But what happens when the programme ends?
We will have a large number of well trained people without jobs.
The talent is there but there is a danger we will waste it.
In this respect the old BL R&D Department evinced a healthy approach to closing research centres and opening new ones to ensure that expertise moved around.” The debate also encompassed the impact of eLib, much of which would be considered to be research if it had been funded by anyone else: “The influence of JISC in general and eLib in particular has been seminal.
Critics may say that many eLib projects have not delivered on time or have not delivered what they set out to do within their original budgets.
Some of them have come back and asked for more money to do what they were first commissioned to do.
Nevertheless, the impact on professional thinking in a time of transition has been massive.
Everyone gains, and we now have an enormously richer set of resources with a well of experience.
The hybrid library projects in particular will be crucial.” Q: Do you think we’ve reached a consensus on how we manage our organisations?
A: “Convergence will wax and wane, but I doubt that there will be a wholesale return to the old patterns.
One thing that intrigues me is why convergence is largely a UK phenomenon?
I think the big issue is integration lower down the structures, and things might not have been helped by the fact that there are often local and ad personam reasons for converging.” Some institutions are taking things further, and virtual university projects are appearing in eLib and in strategic plans.
I asked Derek how he viewed this: “I look at it with a degree of ambivalence when based in a university which will recruit highly qualified school leavers into the foreseeable future.
For me distance learning equals out of the line of sight.
The typical university, if there is one, has four campuses.
Is remote teaching between sites distance learning?
I don’t think that the university as a physical place will vanish, although there is a different argument that says there are too many universities and we should get rid of some.
By extension, although it used to be said that all you needed to run a medical library was a pad of ILL forms and a telephone, the library will also survive as a physical entity.
The role of the library as a social space is much undervalued” The issue of skills is bound up with the changes we discussed, and here Derek is firmly upbeat.
He considers it unlikely that the burgeoning use of IT skills will lead to a loss of influence for librarians: “Mediators will be needed to filter information, just because there’s so much of it.
The old gag, that half of my library is useless but I don’t know which half, applies to the net too.
The information user link is not strong if it is simply bilateral; it is influenced by the institutional background.” He believes that the old professional skills will still be needed in new forms.
Where he does see a change is in the requirement to “restyle training and user support.
We also need to understand that training in the use of electronic sources of information will involve a radical departure from current practice and here Dearing’s Institute for Learning and Teaching might play a role.
Our professional bodies should be lobbying for information managers and information management skills to be included.” There have been times in the past when Derek Law has been acerbic about public librarians.
I asked him if he wished to consider the matter again: “That’s true, but my comments have always been well meant and intended to be supportive of the public library service.
I’m critical of the apparent realignment of public libraries with leisure services, but in the last 18 months things have changed, although I’m not totally clear on the vision that encompasses the public libraries.
Things like EARL and The People’s Network obviously make a difference, and the message that is now being understood in many public libraries is that the Internet is the window on the world.” We started with High Anglicanism and had arrived at the WWW.
This seemed an appropriate place to stop.
Author details Derek Law is Director of Information Services and Systems at Kings College London.
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A Brief History of the American Library Association Web Site Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Brief History of the American Library Association Web Site Buzz html database graphics gopher research Citation BibTex RIS A brief history of the American Library Association Web Site: Rob Carlson, Internet Coordinator of the ALA, introduces us to the acclaimed Web site of the largest Library Association in the World.
The American Library Association's (ALA) web site [1] is a large and growing part of the Association's five-year plan, dubbed ALA Goal 2000, to focus its resources on the public's right to a free and open information society.
As part of a larger project to improve and increase the use of information technology at ALA headquarters and provide support for members' use of technology in the conduct of Association business, I was hired as "Internet Coordinator" (a title that prompted a woman at one of our Annual Conferences to stop me and declare how glad she was that ALA had finally hired someone to clean up that messy Internet!)
in April of 1995.
Shortly thereafter, a new director of the Information and Telecommunications Services (ITS) unit was hired, as was a LAN administrator.
With these human "building blocks" in place, we began to design an in-house information and communications system.
Before this time the Association was not completely without the use of information technology.
For several years prior, ALA purchased dial-up email accounts, discussion list support, and gopher space from the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC).
Our plans for information services at ALA were growing so rapidly, however, that we felt we could no longer depend on a largely "handshake" agreement with UIC for the kinds of services we would soon be demanding, and so decided to go solo.
We owe a great debt of gratitude for the services of UIC and its staff (especially Nancy John and Sharon Hogan of the UIC library), since much of what we wanted to do with our own systems was conceived, built, and debugged on their systems.
Their knowledge and assistance in our eventual move to our in-house system were also invaluable.
Because member and staff interest in a web site was so high, we started building the web site on a commercial server some six months before our own web server was actually installed.
With minimal HTML skills and some graphics support from ALA's (print) Production Services unit, I set out to create a site that would serve our three perceived audiences, namely, ALA members, non-member librarians and library staff, and the general public.
While it would have been easier to model the web site on the bureaucratic structure of the organization, I felt at the time (and still do) that the web site should develop more along the subject-oriented lines of ALA's areas of interest and activity.
Experienced ALA members might know that a particular document pertaining to, say, intellectual freedom came from the IF committee of a particular division, but a member of the general public, possibly someone concerned about censorship attempts at her child's school library, would neither know nor care about such details, and would most likely not be able to find what could prove to be a very valuable document.
Thus, gathering documents in subject areas, regardless of their source from within the organization, became a guiding principle for the future development of the web site In keeping with this subject orientation, then, I used an overview of ALA (produced by ALA's Public Information Office) which described general areas of ALA endeavor such as "Conferences," "Advocacy," "Intellectual Freedom" as the basis for the original page.
Links were made from this file to gopher files already mounted on the UIC server, a few more HTML files were created to fill gaps in the gopher coverage, some not-too-sophisticated graphics were added, and voila!
ALA's home page went live on June 18, 1995.
This was definitely a "learn-as-you-go" proposition, and anyone who saw some of the earlier iterations of our site will know why we privately referred to it as our "homely page."
Progress on the web site was rather slow during the rest of the summer and early fall of 1995, as more and more of my time and energy were devoted to the selection and installation of our new systems.
I was extremely grateful, therefore, for the arrival in October of that year of Helen Conroy, a recent library program graduate from Manchester with experience in developing web sites.
Helen volunteered her time to work on the web site while she and her husband were stationed in the Chicago area due to his work.
We were able to devote most of Helen's time to development of some high-priority web site additions such as a directories of library-related web sites and ALA Chapters and Affiliates.
After many months of preparation and consultation, ALA's "Internet server" (a Compaq Proliant server running BSDI Unix, and serving our gopher and web files, discussion lists, etc.)
was installed in November of 1995.
Our massive gopher file structure was moved over from UIC first, and then, once we were sure the server was stable (well, stable enough...), web files were moved from the commercial server to our server in December.
Web site development really took off around this time, especially with the loan of Dan Lewis from Production Services.
Dan worked feverishly with Helen and me to present a new face to our web site in time for ALA's Midwinter Meeting in February of 1996.
In May of 1996, Dan and his position were moved to ITS long-term to help with development of the web site.
With two full-time staff now devoted to web site development, emphasis has shifted from basic organization to content and feature development and refinement of style.
I receive all "mailto" and feedback form responses intended for the webmaster, and from these derive priorities for content and feature additions based on user demand.
ALA units have been uneven in their enthusiasm for making their materials available through the web site, but pressure from members and others is mounting, and more and more units are working with us to get their units represented on the site.
The ALA web site has proved extremely popular as an information delivery system for ALA members, as an informative resource for others, and is a good public relations tool for the Association.
It is expected to become even more so following Dan's and my move from ITS to ALA's newly-formed Communications Department in September of 1996.
The majority of the new system issues having been resolved by that time, we felt this was a good time to more closely align web site development with other Communications Department units such as our monthly magazine American Libraries, the Public Information Office, and Public Programs.
Comments from visitors are by and large positive, with those not-so-positive being more along the lines of "why is there nothing here about..." (which, as mentioned earlier, I take as a call for further content development) than "what a crummy little site" (as was much more common in the early days...).
In fact, the large majority of comments I receive are of the "where can I get more information about this..." variety than comments or questions about the web site per se.
A large contingent of visitors continues to conceive of our library association site as a general library site, so I'm constantly forwarding reference questions ("What's the GDP of Mali?")
to our Library and Research Center.
But it comes with the territory, and I'm glad for these continuing indications of need for traditional library services in the wired world.
We have tried to make the web site the online equivalent of the Association, in all its size and complexity.
This is at times a daunting task, and of course there's no pleasing everyone.
Numerous ALA units and outside organizations continue to struggle for greater visibility through better placement on, and connections from, the ALA site -the price of popularity, perhaps?
Web site development will continue to be driven largely by user demand, but we have also recently formed an in-house steering committee to wrestle with questions of policy.
We are hoping this committee can develop a number of widely-agreed-upon policies that will remove the burden of case-by-case content and connection decisions from web development staff.
Later this month (January 1997), we will unveil a new design and begin increasing the number and type of interactive database applications on the site.
The addition of these features, we hope, will allow us to continue to keep the ALA web site a lively and, above all, useful element in the Association's mission to improve information services for all.
References [1] American Library Association Web site, http://www.ala.org  Author Details Rob Carlson is the Internet Coordinator of the American Library Association Email: rcarlson@ala.org Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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From MERCI to DESIRE: European Digital Library Projects Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From MERCI to DESIRE: European Digital Library Projects Buzz data framework dissemination infrastructure video cataloguing multimedia cache videoconferencing url research x.500 Citation BibTex RIS Dave Hartland writes the Netskills Corner column for this edition.
In it, he provides a brief overview of some of the EU-funded Telematics for Research projects.
We all know that the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are wonderful.
However there are still major problems to be overcome in making them easier and more efficient to use.
The European Union, as part of its fourth framework programme (1994 1998), is trying to address some of these problems in its Telematics Applications Programme.
Within the Telematics Applications Programme there are 13 project areas, these include Telematics for Transport, Education, Health Care, Libraries and the Environment.
This article will focus upon the Telematics for Research area, which has particular relevance to the UK higher education community.
Since most of the projects have now been up and running for some time it seems appropriate to have a brief look at what they offer; some are working at a basic networking level and are trying to improve the network bandwidth; others are looking at the problems of searching for and retrieving information while some hope to improve the use of the Internet as a means of communication and collaboration.
Having reviewed all of the projects I have put together a very brief description of each and provided a URL for you to further investigate the projects that interest you.
ADVISER [1] aims to promote the development of networked relationships between universities, laboratories and science parks by developing a structured information model.
This model, based on the WWW and the X.500 directory service, hopes to make the transferring of results from research to production more efficient and user friendly.
A prototype service has been developed allowing the user to search for information in a number of areas such as research projects, deliverables and calls for proposals.
ADVISER has partners in Italy, Ireland and the UK.
Leeds University is one of the lead partners in the project.
ATRE: [2] The ATM and Telecollaboration for Research and Education project is working on how Internet based applications, which use IP (Internet Protocol) ca be integrated into the developing high speed ATM network in Europe.
There is a particular focus upon the use of multimedia and video conferencing services.
Partners include CERN, where the WWW was first developed.
CoBrow [3] aims to establish a new form of collaborative work on the Internet.
It will extend the current use of the World Wide Web as an information retrival system by introducing the concept of Meeting Places.
Meeting Places allow users to share Web pages and communicate and collaborate using videoconferencing and application sharing tools.
CoBrow have developed a prototype service which allows the user to remotely control, in real time, a model railway system and view the results via video.
Lancaster University Computing Department is one of the partners in CoBrow.
DESIRE [4] is a large project with over 20 partners across Europe.
Some of the UK partners are closely associated with the eLib programme, these include Netskills, ROADS and SOSIG.
DESIRE has taken as its brief the problems which researchers encounter when using the Internet.
Partners are working in areas which include indexing and cataloguing, security, caching, home study, information tools and training.
The aim is to develop an integrated multimedia information service by using existing tools, and adding to these where necessary.
DESIRE was featured in an article by Klaas Wierenga in Issue 5 of Ariadne.
EuroDemo [5], as the name suggests, provides high quality facilities which allow for the demonstration of the deliverables for the Telematics Application Programme projects.
Technical reviews and dissemination of project results are also supported by EuroDemo.
ICE-TEL [6] aims to address the problems of security on the Internet.
It will develop and deploy security toolkits and infrastructure, and support users on a variety of platforms (UNIX, PC, Macintosh).
The toolkits and infrastructure will allow security to be built into many new services and will be based upon public key certification.
Partners include; University College, London and the University of Salford JAMES (Joint ATM Experiment on European Services) [7] brings together 18 European network operators to work together on providing an infrastructure to provide a high speed ATM pilot network.
BT are the UK partners in JAMES.
MANICORAL [8] is a CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) project which aims to make research more effective by enhancing access to scientific methods, results and raw data.
To demonstrate this work MANICORAL uses radar altimetry data for climate related studies and detection of submarine earth resources.
Partners include the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
The MERCI [9] project is working in the area of multimedia collaboration and is building upon the early EU-funded project, MICE.
It aims to provide integrated, high quality videoconferencing facilities which will be easy to use without special training.
These facilities provide cross-platform support for UNIX workstations, PCs and MACs.
Partners include the Department of Computer Science at University College, London REMOT [10] aims to develop techniques to allow researchers to access and control remote scientific experiments and facilities.
This is demonstrated by allowing astronomers to perform observations by remotely controlling and monitoring a telescope and associated instrumentation in real time.
SCIMITAR [11] provides support for the projects in the Telematics for Research area by, for example, providing an information point for dissemination of all results arising from the projects.
SCIMITAR maintains a number of Web pages giving descriptions and regular updates on the progress of the various projects.
SCIMITAR is based at TERENA the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association.
TEN-34 [12] is a consortium of 16 national research networks which aims to connect the research networks in Europe at 34 Mbps using ATM and the Internet Protocol (IP).
This will greatly improve network speeds between European countries, many of which already provide similar network speed nationally.
UKERNA, the provider of JANET, is part of this consortium.
Web4Groups [13] aims to establish a multimedia group communication service.
This will include the use of multimedia email and the WWW to link discussion groups.
It provides support for multilingual discussions, inquiry tools, intelligent filters and security features.
All of the projects mentioned have mailing lists associated with them [14].
While each project was proposed on a “stand alone” basis, they have been drawn together in a general overview [15] http://www.scimitar.terena.nl/projects/overview.html (If anyone can understand this diagram, I’d be pleased to have it explained to me :-) ) Many of the projects are planning to give papers and demonstrations at this year’s Joint European Network Conference (JENC) in Edinburgh (12-15 May) [16].
References ADVISER Web Site, http://adviser.csata.it/adviser/ The ATM and Telecollaboration for Research and Education project, http://www.cea.fr/~aristote/atre.html CoBrow Web Site, http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~cobrow/ DESIRE Web Site, http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire/ EuroDemo Web Site, http://www.iihe.ac.be/EuroDemo/ ICE-TEL Web Site, http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/ice-tel/ JAMES (Join ATM Experiment on European Services) Web Site, http://www.labs.bt.com/profsoc/james/ MANICORAL Web Site, http://www-geomatics.tu-graz.ac.at/manicoral/ MERCI project Web Site, http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/merci/ REMOT Web Site, http://www.laeff.esa.es/~tcpsi/ SCIMITAR Web Site, http://www.scimitar.terena.nl/scimitar/ TEN-34 Web Site, http://www.dante.net/ten-34.html Web4Groups Web Site, http://www.web4groups.at/ Details of mailing lists associated with projects, http://www.scimitar.terena.nl/scimitar/infolists/ Overview of how the projects integrate, http://www.scimitar.terena.nl/projects/overview.html Details of Joint European Network Conference (JENC), http://www.terena.nl/conf/JENC8.html Author Details Dave Hartland Netskills Training Manager, Email: D.W.Hartland@ncl.ac.uk Netskills Web Site: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ Tel: 0191 222 8087 Address: Netskills, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Corner: Moving Up the Ranks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Corner: Moving Up the Ranks Buzz html database usability browser graphics visualisation url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley looks at how search engines rank their results.
Previous articles in this column have concentrated on how you can get the best out of search engines when trying to track down information on the web.
However, it is also possible to use search engines as tools to promote your own web sites and pages to a wider audience; ensuring that others can effectively find their way to your information.
A recent survey from the Georgia Institute of Technology claimed that some 86% of web users use find web sites using search engines as their main tool [1].
Furthermore, a large search engine such as Alta Vista can boast that it can attract some 19 million hits [2] to its web site every day.
Obviously this means that search engines are a major resource which you can use to draw users to your web site on a global scale.
Most search engines use relevancy ranking to distinguish between the many thousands of sites which they retrieve in response to a set of keywords provided by the user.
Relevancy ranking is important because it helps to provide some semblance of order over the millions of possible sites which can be retrieved.
Thus, those sites which contain a high incidence of the specified keywords, or have those keywords in certain places within the document will receive a higher relevancy ranking than those which don't.
Search engines list the sites they retrieve in terms of their relevancy, so it is important to get your site as high up the relevancy ratings as possible if you want it to get seen.
As search engines typically display the results page by page, perhaps 10 hits at a time its important to get your site into that all-important first ten.
Many users will tend perhaps to look at only the first page of results they get from a search engine, rather than scrolling through pages and pages of hits.
How Do Search Engines Rank Search Results?
Search engines use a wide range of methods in order to rank your search results.
These are some of the most common devices: frequency of your specified words in the document specified words appearing in the title of a document specified words appearing in meta tags in the document positioning of specified words within the document i.e.
: specified words which appear in the first paragraph of a document will give it a higher relevancy rating than those same words appearing in the last paragraph Improving Your Relevancy Ranking Unfortunately there is no standard set of criteria for relevancy ranking, so there is no way of ensuring you can get a high relevancy ranking in all of the major search engines.
There are, however, some tricks which you can try in order to maximise your success in as many search engines as possible.
The Title Tag The title tag is used by many search engines as an indexing tool.
Alta Vista, for example, enables you to restrict a search to documents which contain your specified words in their titles.
The reasoning behind this is that a document which contains your words in its title is more likely to be relevant than one which simply mentions your keyword somewhere towards the end of the last paragraph.
The title tag appears in the head of a html document and defines the information which appear in a web browser title bar at the top of a screen.
It is structured as follows: <head< <title>Put the title of your document in here</title> </head> The tag is often ignored or overlooked by web authors.
Quite often it is left blank, or a fairly generic title for a page is used; such as 'Index Page' or 'Home Page'.
However, it can be a useful tool in helping to get your site adequately indexed by the search engines.
Thus, if you have a description of your site in your title tag this can be utilised by the search engine, and aid people trying to find your site.
Think carefully about the title of your document: a title such as 'Peter's home page', for example, isn't going to be very meaningful when it gets indexed by a search engine.
If your page is actually all about vegetarian cookery, nobody is ever going to find it unless you provide them with some sensible information to make this a bit easier.
You should prepare a brief, descriptive title for your site; keep this short, and make sure that it conveys your topic effectively.
Meta Tags Meta tags are used in the head of a document in order to convey some descriptive information about that document.
This can include the author of the document, keywords associated with the document content, date of last update and description of the site in general.
Certain search engines will use meta tags, if they encounter them in a document, in order to index that document.
Search engines which support meta tags include HotBot, Alta Vista, InfoSeek and Webcrawler.
The most important meta tags for search engine indexing are the description and keyword tags.
If a search engine can't find any other information it will simply index all of the words which appear in your document, and will use the first few words of your document as a short abstract.
However, if you provide meta tags in your document search engines can then use these instead to index your document.
If you make your meta tags as meaningful and comprehensive as possible this will aid people in finding your document.
The meta description tag can be used to provide your own description of your document this is likely to be more useful and meaningful than the first few words of your document which search engines will otherwise use as an abstract.
For example, if you have a document which covers hints and tips for web searching you could use the following type of description in the meta description tag: <meta name="description" content="Hints and tips for using search engines.
"> Your description should clearly describe your site in a single sentence if possible.
You can also include the meta keyword tag to provide some keywords to be associated with your document, e.g.
: <meta name="keywords" content="search engines, hints, tips, help, examples, advice, web searching"> Alta Vista allows you to provide a description and keywords in the meta tag up to the length of 1,024 characters [3], and it will then use the description tag as an abstract for your document.
It's worth sitting down and brainstorming a number of keywords which will accurately reflect the content of your site.
You should include the basic concepts, but also expand on these to cover related information as well.
Some search engines Hot Bot, for example will actually weight documents higher for relevancy if they use meta description tags and the relevant keywords are found in those tags; so the meta tag can be extremely useful in improving your relevancy rating.
Meta tags have often received a bad press because of the practice of some web authors to use a technique known as keyword spamming (see my earlier article on this for more information [4]).
However, because of this practice many search engines will now actually give you a lower relevancy ranking if they detect that keyword spamming is occuring on your pages!
In some cases the offending site might even be removed from the database altogether.
As a result of keyword spamming some search engines are refusing to use meta tags at all for indexing purposes.
Excite, for example, doesn't have any plans to introduce the meta tag for indexing of the documents in its database.
Excite claim that there is too much evidence of spamming occuring to make it worth their, or their user's whiles to use meta tags for indexing and searching [5].
Organisation of Information on Your Web Page The way that information is organised on you home page can also make a great different to the success that others have in finding your site.
Some search engines will give a document a higher weight for relevance if specified keywords appear in the first paragraph of that document: the reasoning behind this is that a document is more likely to be relevant if the required words appear in the first paragraph than if they appear somewhere near the end of the document as a passing reference.
Hence, its often a good idea if you can organise your information to ensure that you cover, or at least mention, the key concepts contained in your document in your first paragraph.
For example, a home page for a University Chemistry department might cover something similar to the following in its first paragraph:   Welcome to the Chemistry Department at the University of Poppleton.
This page contains information about our undergraduate and postgraduate courses, funding and research opportunities, lists of our staff, our links with industry and resources for chemistry on the Internet.
Thus, anyone searching for information on Chemistry at Poppleton, for courses, funding, research opportunities, staff, links to industry or other chemistry resources on the web should be able to track down this page.
If you are using an image on your home page you should ensure that you use alt in your image tag to provide some text information about the image.
Search engines will index this text; so if a large image appears at the top of your home page you should think carefully about the text information you associate with this image, for example, a picture of a chemical structure should perhaps include the name or type of the structure in the alt information provided.
You should try not to put information which isn't directly relevant to your main topics on your home page; so, for example, it wouldn't be helpful to quote a line of poetry at the top of your home page as this would be indexed by search engines.
Submitting Your Site to a Search Engine You can submit your site to a search engine database manually simply by following the links on the home page of the search engine.
Alternatively, you can use an automated submission service such as Submit It [6].
Submit It enables you to automatically add your web site to around 20 search engines.
A few pointers are worth bearing in mind when submitting a site to search engines: Look out for specialised search engines which focus on a particular subject area.
For example, if your web site is about mathematics you might want to submit it to the Mathsearch search engine [7] hosted by the University of Sydney.
Conversely, don't attempt to include your site in every search engine database.
If your site is about British television, it isn't appropriate to submit it to a search engine dedicated to engineering.
Consider submitting your site to a search engine which boasts that it can add you to the database straight away.
InfoSeek offers a service called "real-time URL indexing" [8], which promises to add your site to the database as soon as you submit it.
Some of the large search engines may have huge backlogs of sites waiting to be added to the database.
you might also consider using a Link Exchange service.
These services work by encouraging reciprocal links between web documents with similar content.
References [1] Graphic, Visualisation and Usability Centre, Georgia Institute of Technology.
GVU's Seventh User Survey http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1997-04/bulleted/use_bullets.html, April 1997.
[2] Alta Vista, About Alta Vista Search http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/content/about_our_story_3.htm, 2 November 1997.
[3]Alta Vista, Alta Vista Search: Adding an URL http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/content/addurl_meta.htm, 2 November 1997.
[4] Stanley, T. Keyword Spamming: Cheat Your Way to the Top, in Ariadne, issue 10 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/search-engines/, July 1997.
[5] Excite, Excite Help: Getting Listed http://www.excite.com/Info/listing.html, 2 November 1997.
[6] Submit It Web Site http://www.submit-it.com/ 2 November 1997.
[7] Mathsearch Search Engine http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au:8000/MathSearch.html 2 November 1997.
[8] InfoSeek Web Site, InfoSeek: Results http://www.infoseek.com/AddUrl?pg=DCaddurl.html, 2 November 1997.
Author Details Tracey Stanley Networked Information Officer University of Leeds Library, UK Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/people/TSStanley/TSStanley.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz software database infrastructure jena copyright opac multimedia copac licence research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Government response to New Library: The People’s Network.
On April 16th the Government issued its response to New Library: The People’s Network.
Accompanied by statements by Tony Blair and Margaret Beckett, the statement was generally welcomed by the LIC and the LA.
“New Library: The People’s Network” the Government’s Response identified the potential library service contribution to some major policy objectives.
These included education, public access to information, social inclusion and the modernisation of public services.
To these ends the thrust of the document is to help libraries to develop a national IT network based on a partnership of the private sector, local authorities and government.
This partnership will embrace some existing initiatives such as the IT for ALL programme and The University for Industry.
The LIC will continue to play a major role in developments.
As a declaration of intent based on the LIC proposals for a public library network, the objective of connecting all public libraries to the National Grid for Learning by the year 2002 has been set.
This will include the training of public library staff.
The LIC proposal for a development agency has not been accepted in the first instance.
In its place there will be an Implementation Committee set up by the LIC.
This will discharge an all-embracing remit for the network.
A total of £50 Million Lottery funding will be provided to create digitised content.
This material will focus on lifelong learning and education in its broadest sense.
Training in new technology for library staff will be funded to the level of £20Million for all 27000 public library staff.
Co-ordinated by the LIC, the DfEE, TTA and BECTA will take forward the training of librarians in IT.
In creating the infrastructure, the government has suggested the development of a partnership between the public and private sectors, and offered as an option the possibility of linking the public library network with the National Grid for Learning in schools.
As a pump-priming exercise, the DCMS-Wolfson Public Libraries Challenge Fund will support the vital infrastructure developments to the level of £6Million up to the year 2000.
This is for England; funding for the Celtic nations is to be considered separately.
There is also an intention to negotiate terms with the telecommunications providors and Oftel in order to reduce costs.
It is hoped that this level of funding will attract investment from private sector partners, and also “encourage local authorities to commit their existing resources to the development and delivery of services to a wider cross-section of the population.” The government’s response can be found on the DCMS website at http://www.culture.gov.uk/new-library .htm and the UKOLN website has the LIC response at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/full.html   The Mapplethorpe case at UCE Although the stories in the newspapers have dried up, the case of the West Midlands police, the University of Central England and a possible obscene publication, namely the Mapplethorpe book, is still rumbling on.
UCE, led by the Vice Chancellor, are taking a determined stand against the suggestion that the book is obscene and should be destroyed rather than remain on the Library’s shelves.
Refusal to destroy the book could ultimately led to the imprisonment of the Vice Chancellor under the Obscene Publications Act.
In an emergency meeting of Senate on 20th March, Senate resolved that they supported the Vice Chancellor in his defence of freedom of inquiry as essential to higher education and his refusal to allow the destruction of University property The latest news is that after the emergency meeting of Senate, the University has written to Secretaries of State for Education and Employment and for Culture, Media and Sport and to the local Member of Parliament, Jeff Rooker, MP.
Rooker in turn has written to Chris Smith, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, expressing his support for UCE’s stance.
UCE have a rather impressive set of web pages which gives a day by day account of the whole affair and links into the University’s official media releases, letters of support and comments and related sites for background information.
The site is at http://www.uce.ac.uk/.
Whether the West Midlands Police will continue to press their case has yet to be seen, but given the press coverage and the letters of support received by UCE, opposition to their case will still remain strong.
Higher Education Resources On Demand (Heron) A consortium of universities, including Stirling and South Bank, along with Blackwell Retail and Blackwell Information Sources, have been awarded more than £45,000 in funding for the Higher Education Resources On Demand (Heron) project.
The project’s aim is to develop a national database and resource of electronic texts to be used by lectureers and students in Higher education.
It will carry forward the work of the Scope (Scottish On-Demand Publishing Enterprise) elib project and is set to begin in August.
National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI) The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils has appointed a consortium of Swets & Zeitlinger and Manchester Computing at the University of Manchester as Managing Agent for the UK National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI), subject to the completion of formal contracts.
NESLI is an initiative to deliver a national electronic journal service to the UK higher education and research community and is a successor programme to the Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI).
The Managing Agent will undertake negotiations with publishers, manage delivery of the electronic material, and oversee the day-to-day operation of the programme to ensure that it provides value for money through cost effective operation.
The contract took effect from May 1st 1998 and journal delivery will commence from January 1999 for a three year period.
The Consortium’s NESLI Web site will be launched in late June and will provide full information on the programme and services.
The two partners have different, but complimentary backgrounds: http://www.swets.nl/.
Manchester Computing is part of the University of Manchester, providing local computing services and specialist dataset services via MIDAS to the UK HE community.
MC also hosts the COPAC (Consortium of University Research Libraries OPAC) project and the eLib SuperJournal Project.
Further details can be found on the web at http://www.midas.ac.uk/ The Consortium’s NESLI Web site will be launched in late June and will provide full information on the programme and services.
In the meantime, for further information e-mail nesli-ma@man.ac.uk IN-TELE Conference The IN-TELE conference is a European conference on educational uses of the internet and European indentity construction to be held in Strasbourg, France on 24-26 September 1998.
The conference is being organised by the Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg, France, the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, the University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom the Information Technology Development Unit, Umea University, Umea, Sweden and the Institute of Applied Software Technology, Munich, Germany.
All five institutions are projects leaders for IN-TELE (Internet-based teaching and learning), a pan-European project supported by the Educational Multi-Media Force Initiative of the European Commission.
The main purpose of IN-TELE is the development of new solutions for Internet teaching and learning.
As such, the conference has been designed to offer the opportunity to present and discuss educational and scientific research, and to bring together IT-vendors (Information Technology vendors), educational local structures, and education authorities.
Main topic areas for the conference are: Educational uses of the Internet (advantages and disadvantages) Internet-based construction of social identity Representations of the Internet: expectations and fears National experiences and differences User differences on Internet-based teaching and learning versus traditional lectures Learning with Hypermedia Lifelong learning Partnerships between educational structures Educational projects with multimedia industries, editors and users Exchanges and partnerships resulting from the dynamic created by the European Community The languages of the conference will be English, German, and French with some simultaneous translations available.
The conference web site is http://in-tele.u-strasbg.fr/ Grasmere 1998 Who owns learning?
The 27th Annual Conference of the NATFHE Library Section (open to both members and non-members)will be held on Friday 6th Monday 9th November 1998.
The conference aims to consider the different ways in which learning is affected by the range of vested interests and to identify possible ways forward to meet the conflicting demands which each of these vested interests makes on Library services.
Conference inputs will cover government initiatives, institutional perceptions, the wider social implications, collaboration and co-operation, learning and teaching.
The programme balances both formal inputs with practical, idea generating sessions focusing on implications for learning resources provision.
There will also be seminar sessions on items of current interest, outside the main conference theme, and an exhibition of current products and services.
For further information contact: Kay Moore, Information Specialist, Learning Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, Collegiate Crescent Campus, Sheffield S10 2BP, Tel: 0114-225-2473. e.mail: k.m.moore@shu.ac.uk The Declaration on Academic Writers and Academic Rights The Declaration on Academic Writers and Academic Rights was launched by the Higher Education and Academic Libraries Project of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) on 7th April in London.
It is a statement of issues and an agenda for action on behalf of the academic writing community.
The Declaration was initially drafted last November by delegates at the first National Consultation for academic writers and it is proposed to hold a second National Consultation early next year to review the progress of initiatives resulting from the Declaration and to propose further actions.
The full text of the declaration can be read at http://www.alcs.co.uk/DECLARATION.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Around the Table: Health and Medicine What Can Medics Get Out of the Internet?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Around the Table: Health and Medicine What Can Medics Get Out of the Internet?
Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Sue Welsh of the eLib OMNI project visits some of the medical sites.
The key medical sites described in this article are only the tip of the iceberg.
To use the Internet effectively for medical information it is necessary to search the subject-based gateways.
These sites do some of the hard work for you, by seeking out, evaluating, describing and indexing resources.
OMNI Organising Medical Networked Information [1], is the eLib funded biomedical gateway.
It offers access to more than 1300 resources in health, clinical medicine, allied health and related areas.
Medical Matrix [2] a US based gateway is particularly good for clinical medicine.
Health on the Net [3], a new venture based in Geneva, is also well worth a visit.
There is so much good medical information on the Web that picking a few sites is very tricky.
However, here are some 'must have' sites in clinical medicine, health promotion and news.
The various agencies of the [4] provide an unparalleled collection of information, reflecting the size and stature of the organisation: The Federal Defence Agency's Bad Bug Book [5] provides a handbook of basic facts about foodborne pathogenic micro-organisms and natural toxins.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produce an AIDS Daily Summary [6], giving news about HIV and AIDS compiled from various press and news agencies.
The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research [7] has a document server which contains many clinical practice guidelines.
A more modest offering from our own Department of Health (DOH) [8] has attracted much praise.
Completely searchable, the DOH pages contain a wealth of official information, such as white papers and press releases.
Medical intervention based on evidence is the key concept said to be driving many health service and medical education reforms.
The Cochrane Collaboration Web Site [9] in Canada is a key resource in this area.
In the UK, we have the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) [10] publicises its various programmes and centres through a very impressive series of pages.
Like the US Department of Health and Human Services, each WHO organisation produces its own pages, which are then linked together to form a distributed but easily navigated collection.
Keeping up with breaking news in medicine can be tricky.
The Reuters Health Site [11] can help news items are searchable, and the service is updated on a daily basis.
For a fuller review of news services relevant to health and medicine, see OMNI Newsletter No.
4 [12].
With all this exciting and free information available, we should not forget traditional sources.
The printed journal is still the most likely place to find peer reviewed research articles.
Many commercial secondary services can however be used via the Internet though.
The UK HE sector has Embase and BIOSIS from BIDS [13] and [14] respectively, and the British Medical Association operates a dial-in Medline service for its members.
In addition many journals are now going on-line.
You can read selected material from The British Medical Journal [15], The Lancet [16] and The New England Journal of Medicine [17] on the Web.
OMNI produces a booklet listing around 50 high quality medical sites, together with information about OMNI, which we post free to all UK addresses.
Multiple copies, for training purposes, can be supplied (up to a limit of 50).
Please e-mail your request to leaflets@omni.ac.uk stating your full postal address and the number of leaflets you require.
References [1] OMNI Health/Medical Subject Gateway, http://www.omni.ac.uk/ [2] Medical Matrix Gateway, http://www.slackinc.com/matrix/ [3] Health on the Net Web site, http://www.hon.ch/ [4] US Department of Health and Human Services, http://www.os.dhhs.gov/ [5] Federal Defence Agencys Bad Bug Book, http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~mow/intro.html [6] CDCP AIDS Daily summary, http://198.77.70.131/cdcnac/cgi/databases/news/adsdb.htm [7] Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, http://text.nlm.nih.gov/ [8] UK Department of Health, http://www.open.gov.uk/doh/dhome.htm [9] Cochrane Collaboration Web site, http://hiru.mcmaster.ca/cochrane/default.htm [10] World Health Organisation, http://www.who.ch/ [11] Reuters Health site, http://www.reutershealth.com/ [12] OMNI Newsletter No.
4, http://omni.ac.uk/general-info/newsletter/nl4.html [13] BIDS Web site, http://www.bids.ac.uk/ [14] EDINA Web site, http://edina.ed.ac.uk/ [15] British Medical Journal Web site, http://www.bmj.com/bmj/ [16] The Lancet, http://www.thelancet.com/ [17] The New England Journal of Medicine, http://www.nejm.org/ Author Details Sue Welsh is the project officer of OMNI, an eLib project Email: swelsh@nimr.mrc.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Monash University Library Electronic Resources Directory Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Monash University Library Electronic Resources Directory Buzz data software html database repositories cataloguing hypertext marc lcsh telnet cd-rom url Citation BibTex RIS Lisa Smith describes a system which can be used to help people locate the electronic resources of Monash University Library The Electronic Resources Directory [1] of Monash University Library is a tool specifically designed for locating the electronic resources of the Library.
As such, it both provides information about these resources, as well as direct links to them where appropriate.
Its coverage extends to those resources which are deemed to be “electronic” in format (excluding kits of which the electronic medium is only one part e.g.
a disc accompanying a book) and are catalogued by the Library.
The Technical Services Division of the Library has been cataloguing a wide variety of electronic resources for some time, ranging from the by now customary CD-ROMS and diskettes, to online services, electronic journals and monographs, and, more recently, WWW sites.
As catalogued resources, these items all qualify for inclusion in the Electronic Resources Directory of the Library.
The nature of the Directory, then, is to act as a format-specific subset of the more comprehensive library catalogue, Sesame2 (PALS).
It is intended, as described on the Monash Library Home Page [2], to be “the fast track to Monash Library’s electronic resources”.
The Electronic Resources Directory is the final outcome of what was initially known as the Virtual Shelf Project, which began with the writing of an Issues Paper by the then Network Librarian Deidre Lowe in mid-1996.
The impetus for the Project was a desire to achieve greater bibliographic control over, and improved access to and publicity of, the Library’s growing number and range of electronic resources, comprising online services, networked and stand-alone databases, electronic journals, etc.
[3] This type of material poses new challenges for all types of libraries, with non-conventional formats and modes of access proving problematic for traditional mechanisms of control.
Like many other university libraries, Monash was faced with a burgeoning array of such materials, with only an out-dated printed index to guide users to specifically electronic resources as a supplement to the Library catalogue.
The need for more than an updated printed guide was apparent, as was the requirement for ongoing, largely automated maintenance of the end product in order to avoid repetition of the current situation.
It was also apparent that individual Branch Libraries were increasingly using WWW pages to both publicise and provide links to a wide range of electronic resources, often replicating effort across the Library in a non-systematic approach.
With this in mind, and desiring that staff and students, regardless of their physical location, should have ready access to information about the electronic resources of the Library and links to those resources where possible, the WWW, via the Library’s site, seemed the obvious home for a new electronic resources locator.
Further incentive for a Web-based solution was that Sesame2 had such an interface in existence already, and was widely used by staff, students and the wider community for remote access to the Library catalogue [4].
It was envisaged that the Virtual Shelf Project could ultimately reduce the need for individual branch maintenance of electronic resources information on the WWW, and could produce html documents (e.g.
title lists) for branch library home pages.
The Issues Paper, presented by Deidre Lowe in September 1996, recommended the establishment of a database, from which could be generated Web pages and various reports as required.
The cornerstone of this databases was to be the Library catalogue, Sesame2, from which desired fields would be taken to create database records.
These would then be enhanced with additional fields or information of relevance to users seeking access to the Library’s electronic resources.
Given this utilisation of the catalogue record to create the basic database record, non-catalogued resources were automatically excluded from the database.
Thus, there would still be a need for Branch Library WWW pages to indicate sites “of interest” to their users, or to point to short-term trials, such as those run by CAUL [5].
Further recommendations included some changes to the Library catalogue to enhance overall control over and access to the electronic resources of the Library.
Prototype Database Subsequent to this report, a group of staff [6] worked on the creation of a prototype set of 10 electronic resources records, and related changes to the Library catalogue records.
A series of meetings were held during which decisions were made about the specific MARC fields to include in the database record [7], additional manual entry fields to be included [8], and resource type categories which should be used [9] Part of the prototype development involved consideration of the potentially various methods of access to the electronic resources information of the Library a typical scenario for a large, multi-campus university such as Monash with a diffuse user population and that it be meaningful to users regardless of the method of access.
In keeping with this aim, changes were made to the catalogue record with a view to achieving greater uniformity in the cataloguing of electronic resources, to the specific advantage of users limited to remote telnet access to Sesame2 only.
Figure 1: Screen image of Librarianship section Firstly, a decision was made to use “electronic resource” as the location for such resources in the searchable call number field of the catalogue record.
Secondly, it was decided to display MARC field 259 and not the 856 field, including desired URL information in the former field and not displaying the myriad URLs often contained in field 856 as a shared data field.
Both of these decisions directly reflected a desire to reduce the confusion often associated with access to electronic resources, and to simplify the provision of information to only that which is deemed useful to users of Monash Library services.
Telnet users would, then, be able to search via call number on “electronic resource” to retrieve such records, and note the URL or other electronic location of the resource.
In the absence of WWW access, these users would not, of course, be able to directly connect to the resource, where applicable.
The second method of access to the electronic resources records would be via the WWW interface version of Sesame2.
Again, users would be able to search via call number on “electronic resource”, with the advantage of direct access to appropriate resources from a hypertext-linked URL.
It was decided to provide this link from both the catalogue record (since it needed to at least appear here for telnet users to view) and the new electronic resources record.
Users of the WWW Sesame2 interface would simply click on a “More Information” button at the bottom of the catalogue record to retrieve the electronic resources record containing additional information for such resources to that provided by Sesame2.
The final mode of access to electronic resources records would be via an Electronic Resources WWW home page, which would offer not only searching but also browsing by subject category [10], resource type, and other browsing options as appropriate.
It would also be possible to link back to the Sesame2 record from the electronic resource record for a particular resource, as the system would be able to automatically link the record number from one record type to the other.
Early November saw the launch of the 10 prototype records, viewable via the Sesame2 WWW interface.
A Web site entitled “Electronic Resources Database” was launched in mid November 1996, from which Library staff could also view the prototype product and component records.
Electronic Resources Directory Following extensive feedback from Library staff, including branch staff and those involved in reader services, work progressed on the requirements of the fully fledged system.
A number of staff offered quite critical responses to the prototype and, indeed, to the overall concept, which hopefully enabled a better final product to be developed than would have otherwise been the case.
Important areas of concern, of relevance to all libraries contemplating such projects, were the need for a separate database at all, and the related question of maintenance.
Clearly, there needs to be sufficient justification to break away from the library catalogue as the one, central repository of information for the resources of any library.
The mere fact of resources being in a different, and perhaps newly fashionable format, here “electronic”, is not in itself sufficient cause for such a move.
However, at Monash it was felt that the advantages of fast-track, succinct access often to the actual electronic resources themselves, coupled with a more centralised approach to the provision of information about these resources, were sufficient to warrant the creation of a supplementary resource locator to that of the library catalogue.
These advantages were, however, predicated upon the equally important need for both minimal human intervention in the creation and ongoing maintenance of the database and a reduction in current work by Branch Libraries on such information provision via the WWW.
As far as maintenance requirements are concerned, the team involved in both the prototype and the fully-fledged project were very conscious of the need for automation wherever possible, and minimal extra work where it was not.
To this end, the interlinking of records by bibliographic ID number between Sesame2 and the electronic resources database was paramount, enabling minimal human intervention through automated, periodic updating of both systems.
This automatic linking of catalogue and database record data by the bibliographic record number would also allow for non-synchronous input of data, to be later automatically linked by this mechanism.
Thus, cataloguers, whose role it would be to input the resource type and subject descriptor database record information, would be able to complete this activity at the point of cataloguing, rather than having to revisit the electronic resources database record after its creation from the Sesame2 catalogue record.
Similarly, the branch notes and subject librarians comments fields, these to be completed by specific staff within individual branch libraries, could be added or amended as required, again using the bibliographic number of the record concerned.
The adding and updating of all such fields would be completed via a Web page interface, where a combination of simplicity of design and use of drop-down menus to minimise typing, would also minimise the amount of work needed to maintain the database.
A list of new titles added to the database, again displayed via the WWW home page, would further assist staff to efficiently update the database.
It was perceived from the outset that Technical Services staff are clearly in the key position to play a fundamental role in the ongoing maintenance and development of the system, with not only cataloguing staff involvement but also that of specific staff within the Division involved in electronic resources activities.
Indeed, involvement of staff across the Library is intrinsic to the continued success of the enterprise, from the ongoing targeting of new electronic resources, and forms of these resources, for inclusion, to effective communication between staff in Reader Services areas and Technical Services and Systems Support areas.
During the final stages of system development, it became apparent that the Library would be able to offer WWW access to its networked (basically CD-ROM and diskette) resources, a service hitherto not available, which would greatly enhance the application of the Electronic Resources Directory and “global” access to these resources by Monash users.
It was decided that such networked resources would be referenced from the electronic resources record with a URL created for direct access.
It had also been decided to add direct linkage to resources, where applicable, from the Directory listing, obviating the need for users to go to the electronic resources record unless they specifically sought further information.
“GO” and “I” buttons were subsequently created to this effect on the WWW Electronic Resources Directory home page.
The direct linking to networked resources is still under development, but it is envisaged that, ultimately, the only resources listed which will not have such capability are the non-networked, stand-alone resources of the Library.
Following these several months of further work on system details and database content, during which time some 170 additional records were added to the database, the Electronic Resources Directory was officially launched in early March 1997.
System Details The Library’s PALS catalogue, entitled Sesame2, is the key component of the Electronic Resources Directory.
It is from the catalogue that the basic directory entry and record is constructed, to be enhanced by manual intervention where appropriate.
It is also this interrelationship which enables a user who has searched the WWW version of Sesame2 to directly link to the electronic resources record for that resource, and vice versa.
Resources to which a location of “electronic resource” is allocated by Technical Services are automatically tagged for inclusion in the Directory, with pre-determined data, from specified MARC fields, being drawn from Sesame2 at defined intervals (roughly fortnightly to coincide with catalogue updating, although more frequent updating of the Directory may be desired in special cases).
During the cataloguing process, and thus prior to the records appearance in either the catalogue or the Directory, cataloguers are able to key in the PALS bibliographic record number and then select “resource type” and “subject descriptor” fields for later incorporation into the directory record.
The means of achieving this subsequent automated matching of information is the bibliographic record number, which is the device used to match data retrieved from Sesame2 with information manually added by Library staff.
NonTechnical Services staff are able to add branch specific notes fields (containing such details as pointers to further assistance, hypertext links to help screens on the WWW, etc), as well as a much shorter subject librarians comment field (this last field appears only in the list of short titles, not in the record itself).
The original concept was for the creation of a separate database, using a software package such as Microsoft Access, from which html documents could then be produced and mounted on the Library’s Web server.
However, following creation of the prototype, and during development of the fully operational system, it was decided that the WWW would suit the needs of the Library without the additional creation of a separate database.
Effectively, this decision removed the need for an intermediary step between the database and the Web front-end of the system, whilst remaining unchanged for staff interacting with the system who, it was anticipated from the beginning of the prototype development, would use WWW pages for such activity.
Future Developments The Electronic Resources Directory is an ongoing development of the Library and, as such, is in a similar state of flux to that of the Library catalogue.
It is also true that a substantial amount of retrospective work needs to be completed by Technical Services staff during 1997 to accurately reflect the current electronic resources of the Library.
It should be added that priority is given to new resources, with this retrospective activity supplementing the ongoing cataloguing of new resources rather than replacing it temporarily.
The use of the WWW for the Directory has obvious advantages for a University where global access to resources is a key issue.
As noted above, the development of WWW access to networked resources is continuing, and is a key initiative for the Library as a whole.
It is also true that, with the use of the WWW, comes far greater attention from the wider library and university community, thereby necessitating the need not only for these activities to be seen to be successful, but also for a professional look to such “front-end” services.
With this in mind, a short-term goal of the staff involved in the Project is the appointment of a professional designer to enhance the “look” of the Directory to users, wherever they may be located.
Ideally, this will see a marrying of informed and relevant content with an elegant, professional image.
The Library is also increasing the profile of the WWW Sesame2 interface, most noticeably by replacing telnet only “dumb” terminals with PCs in branch libraries.
These PCs not only use the WWW interface for the catalogue but also allow full functionality of the Electronic Resources Directory via the WWW.
Potentially, it is anticipated that the Directory may ultimately replace other forms of database interface currently used within branch libraries, although this will be a staged process.
Clearly, the desire for both “one-stop shopping” and a common user interface will continue to drive such projects both at Monash and in other University Libraries.
Project Information Further information about the Project may be had by contacting Lisa Smith, or for system details, Sue Steele, of the Library.
Judy Boyle and Joan Gray of the Library’s Technical Services Division may also be contacted for technical services related information [11].
References and Footnotes Electronic Resources Directory Web Site, http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/er/ Monash University Library Web pages, http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/ As noted previously, and in keeping with the decision of the Issues Paper, resources such as CD-ROMs accompanying other material are excluded from the Electronic Resources category.
See Web page below for Sesame2 via the Web http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/wwwlib/ Council of Australian University Librarians http://charlotte.anu.edu.au/caul/ Staff involved with the Project, including development of the Prototype and the final system, were primarily Lisa Smith, Sue Steele and Judy Boyle, with extensive input from Joan Gray, and Stephanie Foott.
A wide range of other Library staff were also consulted during the various phases of the Project, and provided additional input to the Project’s development.
MARC field and subfield tags included in the database records are: 059; 100; 110; 245 (a b n p); 259 (g); 505; 508; 520; 546; 580; 650; 651.
Ultimately, it was decided to include the following additional “manual entry” fields in the database records: Resource Type Subject Descriptors; Branch Notes; Subject Librarians Comment.
The following Resource Types were finally decided upon, although as with the subject descriptors, these are subject to change over time: Databases; Electronic Books; Electronic Journals; Non-networked Resources; Web Sites.
The subject category field is additional to the LCSH fields also included in the electronic resources record, its use being to offer a broad spectrum subject approach to access which would complement the narrow, specialised focus of LCSH.
Ultimately, the descriptors were structured around the Monash Faculties and Departments, thereby offering a distinctly “Monash view” of the world of our electronic resources.
Reader services staff, led by Stephanie Foott, largely compiled this listing, which is subject to change as the need for new or amended categories arises.
Contact Details Lisa Smith: email lisa.smith@lib.monash.edu.au; phone 613 990 51516 Sue Steele: email sue.steele@lib.monash.edu.au; phone 613 990 52663 Judy Boyle: email judy.boyle@lib.monash.edu.au; phone 613 990 59102 Joan Gray email joan.gray@lib.monash.edu.au; phone 613 990 52681 Author Details Lisa Smith, Information Services Librarian email: lisa.smith@lib.monash.edu.au Tel: 613 990 51516 Address: Library, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, Victoria, 3168, Australia Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Infopolecon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Infopolecon Buzz data html database infrastructure digitisation standardisation browser copyright cataloguing multimedia z39.50 passwords licence rae cd-rom url research Citation BibTex RIS John Lindsay comments on the evolution of the UK network infrastructure, and the problems arguably generated along the way.
Jeremy Bentham coined the term 'panopticon' in his proposal for a circular prison, whose cells were exposed to a central well in which the warders were located, allowing the prisoners to see all other prisoners and to be observed at all times without ever knowing when they were being watched.
Bentham also promoted the idea of political economy as the greatest good for the greatest number.
Drawing on his terminology as the basis for this article, I therefore propose the new term 'infopolecon' to describe the political economy of information.
I start with a problem.
What do I mean by the term 'information'?
The word is used to describe the objects on which data is coded and structured, the codes and structures themselves, the resources, and the process by which users of these resources use them.
In itself it is now so general as to be of no use to us at all.
I want to limit discussion to a specific class of problem information systems design.
By looking at the design, we can formulate an information practice which shows a political economy.
Let us take an undergraduate.
Any undergraduate will do.
There are about a million of them in Britain at the moment.
Each undergraduate undertakes a module in which there is an assignment.
They do about ten of these in a year.
An assignment starts with a problem definition which defines a search space, an information deficiency, which has to be satisfied by the writing of a document.
This is called learning.
They perform this process within an infrastructure called the world of learning.
Their teachers populate the search space with documents which they themselves have written, their careers patterned by the relative influence or frequency of these documents.
All of these documents now are electronic, virtual, and digitised at beginning and at end, though they might go through various transformations, including appearing as ink squeezed into dead trees.
Some of the documents are understood to have a beginning and an end, some to be in collections assembled according to rules, known or unknown.
Some are called books, some journals.
Some are called libraries.
Others are files, and others, URLs.
Part of what the undergraduate has to learn is how to navigate this search space.
But where are the maps to this world of learning?
Where the blueprints?
At a more primitive layer still, what is the physics, the chemistry and the biology of this world?
What are its atoms and its particles and its organisms?
How does our undergraduate understand it?
Then, let us take a university.
Any university will do.
There are about a hundred of them in Britain.
They cost about ten billion pounds a year to run, and they hold all together about a million undergraduates, each producing around ten documents a year.
This is the organisational form which the world of learning takes.
In each university there are teachers, who structure courses, set and mark assignments, write teaching materials, produce papers, referee one another's papers and edit journals in which these papers are published.
In any one university, or in the world of learning as a whole, how are these papers organised?
And for the production of one paper, as a process, how is it systematised?
By re-engineering the process of systematisation, can the unit cost per activity be reduced?
But the product is not the physical form, the paper it is the activity, the learning, of which the written assignment is only a representation.
The organisational form these documents coagulate around either hinders or facilitates learning.
The question is which?
And if we can tell which, can we then improve the process?
Three elements are missing from the world of learning modelled thus so far.
The first is the publishers.
Some were established by the universities and are owned by them, some were speculative enterprises intended to generate a profit for their owners.
They risk capital in order to produce a document, a print run.
They will realise that risk through sales and revenue.
When hot metal presses and compositors and galleys were involved the capital and the risk was high.
Now there is none.
The second is the secondary publisher, the publisher of 'information' about what publishers have published.
The third element is the library.
In the university this was from the beginning a collection of documents shared by the university as a whole, rather than the collection which belonged to an individual teacher or student.
It produced its own type of professionals who knew how to organise it as it grew.
And in some sense they could organise a community of libraries where the sum of the system as a whole was greater than the sum of its parts.
The libraries produced catalogues, so that the reader could know not only that the document was, but where it was.
Yet libraries, which provide the publications of primary and secondary publishers, still do not give learners all they need.
What is missing is aboutness, for both reader and document.
What is the reader about?
What do they need to know?
And what is the document about?
How can it satisfy the information deficiency?
And where to look, since the virtualised, digitised electronic collection of all documents which now constitutes the world of learning has not the concrete form or appearance of a library, a catalogue, a shelf and a book?
So it is not surprising that our undergraduate might be disoriented.
How have the denizens of this world of learning responded to this virtualisation?
How are we constructing this new virtual reality so that learning might occur?
Well we, the teachers, are carrying on much as before, writing papers, producing courses and marking assignments.
Precious little has changed on that front, which is surprising.
What has changed, though, is the number of students per teacher, which means that the proportion of the teacher's time given to each student has fallen.
In fact, such is the massification that individually students hardly exist at all.
How has the library changed?
Surprisingly little too.
It still spends most of its budget on books and journals which are stored on shelves.
Nor have publishers changed in any significant way.
They are still printing books, journals and catalogues.
The prices of student textbooks have fallen, the quantity of print increased.
Colour has been added with falling prices.
New media have arrived, though there are few truly multimedia publications.
The change is in the network.
When computers were first built they were big and expensive though in their time so too were books.
But where books were owned by scholars and universities, paid for out of their own funds almost from the beginning in this country, computers were paid for by a central organisation of the state.
As computers were linked together, networking was provided out of top-slicing the budget of the universities of Britain as a whole.
A most uncharacteristic British thing.
And they had to intercommunicate, which meant standardisation.
This was driven by the Computer Board which allocated funding bid for from the Treasury.
The internetworking was enabled by a suite of protocols called the Joint Academic Network Colour Books onto which was layered a transition to the Open Systems Interconnection strategy required by European Commission directive.
Meanwhile the US had DARPANET and TCP/IP.
The Computer Board subsequently became the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) ,the club of Directors of Computer Centres called itself the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), the Joint Academic Network became the United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association (UKERNA), and X.25 became TCP/IP.
But the teachers have not been involved in any of this at all.
Since academic networking began, there has been a tension between the running of the network itself, and what it was for.
My experience of trying to raise issues in regional and national JANET user groups is that there is an endless fracture between conduit and content.
The Follett report, which started from libraries and the impact of information technology, rather than from questions of what higher education is for and how it should be delivered, was disappointing in its narrowness and lack of imagination (though I must declare an interest as I had been commissioned to write a paper on the information economy).
The development of BIDS, NISS and then the deal with ISI were all precursors of what was to come.
At every stage expediency was the excuse for short-term fixes followed by institutionalisation of the result.
And from this has grown the JISC datasets policy, the eLib programme and the whole horror show with which we are now confronted.
For, whatever the infelicities of the actual deals with the dataset providers, the added complexities of both nationally-provided services and local organisation (where power struggles are now common between the managers of computing and library services) mean that today's undergraduate has very little grasp of how to perform an information search or answer a question.
The problem is not confined to higher education.
The British Library recently produced a gimmicky interface to its Catalogue of Printed Books, while it still has no plan for the digitisation of its vast collection.
Meanwhile TCP/IP with HTML begat Mosaic, Mosaic begat Netscape, and Netscape with Z39.50 produced Common Gateway Interfaces (CGIs).
But the nationally-provided services were slow to take up the opportunities offered by the Internet and so each university implemented library-based solutions in different ways, resulting in the worst of a centrally-organised top-sliced resource, and a locally-provided idiosyncratic one.
Our predicament is one which I have called elsewhere 'Mrs Thatcher's handbag modem'.
We are the victims of the state's taxing and top-slicing, and our local institutions' multiplicities of management layers.
The state brought us 'uk.ac'.
Local organisation brought in a proliferation of CD-ROMs, databases, licence agreements, passwords and log-on procedures.
In large part the fault must lie with the Librarians of the universities who have had for many years an organisation, SCONUL, which would have been capable of exercising considerable muscle against the publishers.
But in larger part the fault must lie with the funding agency which has the power of the control of the finances of the system as a whole.
The absurdity of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is clear to most of us.
But imagine if the RAE input had been URLed, as I suggested in a paper to the JNUG in 1994.
There would then be a major research database as an output of what otherwise has been a huge waste of resource.
The fault must also lie with the teachers and professional associations which have played little part in the process at all.
There has been a failure of analysis, of engineering and of theory.
Returning to our world of learning, where do we go from here with these ten million design exercises?
I think it is still possible for higher education to form a power block to force through the implications of the new information and communication technologies.
It is possible for the one hundred universities to create better learning environments.
In the meantime information systems designers have been given a rich laboratory of examples of what not to do and how not to do it.
What we have created, then, is an infopolecon in which in every cell the learner can see everything and everywhere, but has no structure to understand what any of it means.
As virtualisation and digitisation accelerate, the need increases for concrete codes, structures and notations.
These have to be taught.
This is where we must start.
Response from Jon Knight to this article Let's play spot the inaccuracies and confused bits, shall we?
Here goes: > All of these documents now are electronic, virtual, and digitised at > beginning and at end, though they might go through various > transformations, including appearing as ink squeezed into dead trees.
Not all documents are "electronic, virtual and digitised at beginning and at end".
There's still an awful lot of stuff that still only exists on dead trees (my publishing chums make no bones about still prefering cut'n'paste of real photos to manipulating image files).
So chalk that one up as factual inaccuracy #1.
> Part of what the undergraduate has to learn is how to navigate this > search space.
But where are the maps to this world of learning?
Where > the blueprints?
At a more primitive layer still, what is the physics, > the chemistry and the biology of this world?
What are its atoms and its > particles and its organisms?
How does our undergraduate understand it?
What's this bit about chemistry, physics and biology all about?
And are there any answers to these in the paper?
Or even attempted answers?
Because if there are I missed them.
Towards the end the article bad mouths JISC, Elib, Librarians, teachers, professional societies and, erm, most everybody else in HE (except the poor students thankfully) but it then just says (paraphrased) "oooh, we could do good stuff using IT in HE".
Maybe I missed the thread somewhere along the way?
> Yet libraries, which provide the publications of primary and secondary > publishers, still do not give learners all they need.
What is missing is > aboutness, for both reader and document.
What is the reader about?
What > do they need to know?
Often the readers don't really know this themselves so knowledge illicitation for the information system could be a tad tricky.
> And what is the document about?
How can it satisfy > the information deficiency?
And where to look, since the virtualised, > digitised electronic collection of all documents which now constitutes > the world of learning has not the concrete form or appearance of a > library, a catalogue, a shelf and a book?
So it is not surprising that > our undergraduate might be disoriented.
Erm, isn't that what OPACs, robot generated indexes, quality assessing SBIGs and all the other fun stuff we're all working all about?
And are undergrads really that disoriented?
The undergrads I come into contact with don't seem too disoriented and indeed many are keen to use IT (which is more than can be said for library services as a whole.
Many undergrads seem scared of libraries and librarians, much of which I put down to bad/non-existent experiences in school/public libraries before entering HE).
> Well we, the teachers, are carrying on much as before, writing papers, > producing courses and marking assignments.
Precious little has changed > on that front, which is surprising.
Hmmm, what about the staff that are making their lecture notes and reading lists available over the net?
What about teaching staff that are generating a whole new set of course material and teaching aids based on web technologies in order to support distance learning (as well as enriching the learning experience for students at the institution)?
What about staff and students who use personal email, mailing lists and USENET groups for discussing coursework and related topics?
Factual inaccuracy #2 > How has the library changed?
Surprisingly little too.
It still spends > most of its budget on books and journals which are stored on shelves.
Which is usually what the departments have asked for.
Lots of stuff is still only available on bits of dead tree unfortunately.
> Nor have publishers changed in any significant way.
They are still > printing books, journals and catalogues.
This is probably because the old publishers are still running a bit scared; don't forget that the web is still relatively new technology and they're still prodding it to work out how (if) they can make money from it.
At the same time millions of new publishers have appeared, putting their papers, books and programs on the net for anyone to pickup freely.
So publishing has changed.
> The prices of student textbooks > have fallen, the quantity of print increased.
They have?
I must have missed the bargain bucket in Waterstones or Dillons then... > When computers were first built they were big and expensive though in > their time so too were books.
But where books were owned by scholars and > universities, paid for out of their own funds almost from the beginning > in this country, computers were paid for by a central organisation of > the state.
Hmm, this should carry a "broad generalisation" warning.
For one thing, lots of early machines were paid for by the State for military reasons and still others were funded out of departmental or personal coffers.
However by the late 50's/early 60's, when many of the old Universities were contemplating building or buying their first machines, lots of things were being centrally controlled and purchased by the State.
Of course the Universities were taking more and more students that would previously not have been able to afford to go to into HE, so its swings and roundabouts.
> Since academic networking began, there has been a tension between the > running of the network itself, and what it was for.
My experience of > trying to raise issues in regional and national JANET user groups is > that there is an endless fracture between conduit and content.
That's true but that's because running the network was (and in some cases still is) in and of itself a research issue.
From my point of view, the tension is between network research and running a production network.
The production network is there to support other, non-networks research and, recently, teaching.
> The Follett report, which started from libraries and the impact of > information technology, rather than from questions of what higher > education is for and how it should be delivered, was disappointing in > its narrowness and lack of imagination Really?
I would have said that the report was something that was desperately needed; until it was written there was no national programme specially for electronic library development projects.
Sure, BLRDD did the best they could but they just didn't have the financial clout that the Follett Report generated.
> And from this has grown the JISC datasets policy, the eLib programme and > the whole horror show with which we are now confronted.
Do I take it that Mr Lindsay isn't too chuffed with centrally funded datasets and a national programme looking at how we can best use IT in libraries?
Without BIDS and EDINA every institution would still be negotiating its own contracts with the dataset providers.
Without Elib we'd be stuck with doing a few local projects, a few BLRDD/Research Council funded projects and stuck with making do with products designed for commercial desktops rather than academic libraries (we still have lots of the later, but at least Elib is providing a few rays of community developed hope).
There may well have been problems with both but at least they're there.
> The problem is not confined to higher education.
The British Library > recently produced a gimmicky interface to its Catalogue of Printed > Books, while it still has no plan for the digitisation of its vast > collection.
Hmm, if "gimmicky interface" is a webopac (or similar) then the development effort is likely to be _considerably_ less than "digitisation of it's vast collection".
I'd rather have some decent services now rather than wait for the Perfect Digital Library(tm).
Short term think _is_ network thinking because on the web real time is compressed into ever shorter "web years".
What's the cool, in, happening technology today is commonplace next month, old hat in six months and obsolete in a year.
I hope that the BL are carefully weighing the best approach to digitisation whilst treading carefully through this technological minefield (and dealing with copyright issues, etc).
Good job that Elib is undertaking some small scale digitisation projects (such as the ACORN project here at Loughborough) which will test the water and highlight some of the problems that the BL can expect.
> Meanwhile TCP/IP with HTML begat Mosaic, Mosaic begat Netscape, and > Netscape with Z39.50 produced Common Gateway Interfaces (CGIs).
Excuse me?
"Netscape with Z39.50 produced Common Gateway Interfaces (CGIs)"?
I don't think so.
CGI was developed by a group of different HTTP server authors lead by Rob McCool at NCSA.
This was way before Netscape was a gleam in Jim's eye.
CGI has little to do with Z39.50 (aside from Isite's Z39.50 CGI gateway) and Netscape has even less to do with Z39.50 (try typing a z3950r URL into your Netscape browser.
Does it work?
I doubt it).
Major fact deficiency here me thinks; factual inaccuracy #3.
> But the nationally-provided services were slow to take up the > opportunities offered by the Internet and so each university implemented > library-based solutions in different ways, resulting in the worst of a > centrally-organised top-sliced resource, and a locally-provided > idiosyncratic one.
Many of library systems were originally deployed well before the DoDAG and the Shoestring project looked at the provision of TCP/IP on JANET.
For example BLCMP was set up in the early 70's when even the original ARPAnet was a tad on the under developed side and the Coloured Book based JANET wasn't around.
Different sites had different systems because different sites had different needs that were met by the different products.
These were the days before Microsoft and the One True Gatesian way.
We didn't know where we wanted to go tomorrow (and in some cases still don't.
Such is life).
> Our predicament is one which I have called elsewhere Mrs Thatcher > handbag modem.
I always knew that Mrs T was a hip and wired funster at heart.
Now I discover that she had a pocket modem in her handbag and my gut feelings are confirmed.
:-) > We are the victims of the state's taxing and top-slicing, > and our local institutions' multiplicities of management layers.
The > state brought us 'uk.ac'.
Local organisation brought in a proliferation > of CD-ROMs, databases, licence agreements, passwords and log-on > procedures.
Local organisation has to deal with the demands of the teachers that ask for odd products and of publishers that each demand different licensing arrangements (which in turn lead to different user interfaces, etc).
I agree that CD-ROM user interfaces often stink but the publishers are often deaf to the problems, either because they have poor communication with the libraries using their products or because they realise that the libraries have to put up with what they've already produced because there are no alternatives (or the academics demand a particular product).
I must admit to being a tad confused by now.
Mr Lindsay doesn't seem to like the idea of top-slicing for national developments like SuperJANET or the JISC datasets.
At the same time he doesn't appear to like locally developed idiosyncratic systems.
I wonder what he would like?
Surely not completely decentralised information provision by the teachers themselves as that really would end in chaos.
> In large part the fault must lie with the Librarians of the universities > who have had for many years an organisation, SCONUL, which would have > been capable of exercising considerable muscle against the publishers.
What form does this "considerable muscle against the publisher" take exactly?
Would they have threatened to withhold purchasing from publishers that didn't capitulate and provide digital copies (which I assume from the subtext is what Mr Lindsay is after).
I bet lots of the publishers would have been quaking in their shoes at losing 100 purchases from libraries when students will purchase thousands of copies.
Not to mention the hoards of ****ed off teachers that would be pounding on the Librarians office doors demanding to know why the cash that their departments paid to the library wasn't being used to buy the books that they wanted their students to read.
> The fault must also lie with the teachers and professional associations > which have played little part in the process at all.
There has been a > failure of analysis, of engineering and of theory.
Teachers are interested in teaching.
It's only in the last couple of years that the Net has been friendly enough to present to non-technical users for teaching purposes.
It's also only recently that having IR and IT skills have been something that is worth training everyone in.
Some teachers _are_ getting involved now (and have been for some time) and we're already seeing systems based on this (both funded by programmes like TLTP and also developed locally by interested individuals and departments).
And as Mr Lindsay points out, teachers now have more students to deal with and so they surely must have less time available for contemplating information systems.
> Returning to our world of learning, where do we go from here with these > ten million design exercises?
I think it is still possible for higher > education to form a power block to force through the implications of the > new information and communication technologies.
It is possible for the > one hundred universities to create better learning environments.
In the > meantime information systems designers have been given a rich laboratory > of examples of what not to do and how not to do it.
Isn't creating "better learning environments" what we're all doing?
Isn't that what elib and SuperJANET and all the other neat technology we get is there for?
Isn't learning how to building the information systems that HE needs itself an exercise in continuing learning that we all take part in?
> What we have created, then, is an infopolecon in which in every cell the > learner can see everything and everywhere, but has no structure to > understand what any of it means.
As virtualisation and digitisation > accelerate, the need increases for concrete codes, structures and > notations.
These have to be taught.
This is where we must start.
I have absolutely no idea at all what this paragraph means.
Response from Graham Jefcoat to this article Far from having no plans, The British Library has recently announced its Digital Library Development Programme, to be led by the Research and Innovation Centre.
This Programme entails establishing digital information services based on the content in the British Library's unparalleled collections and developing the capabilities to work with these collections in new and exciting ways.
The aim is to improve access for all its users.
More information on the Centre's web pages at: http://portico.bl.uk/ric/digilib.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Libtech '96: eLib goes to Libtech '96 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Libtech '96: eLib goes to Libtech '96 Buzz data digitisation copyright e-learning ejournal research Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir gives a brief overview of the eLib presence at the Libtech '96 event.
Libtech International '96 has a set of Web pages at: http://www.herts.ac.uk/Libtech/libtech.htm Libtech International is organised by the the Library & Media Services department of the University of Hertfordshire and held on the University's Hatfield Campus in September each year.
The event consists of a large exhibition and a conference programme, which consists of various seminars, lectures and workshops.
Entry to Libtech '96 itself is free to attend; some of the seminars and workshops charge a nominal fee for admission.
Many of the Electronic Libraries Progrgramme projects are presenting or have personnel speaking.
Below we list just those eLib related events, confirmed as of July 15th check the Libtech Web pages for the latest additions and any scheduling alterations.
eLib events Access to network resources 10 pounds Wednesday morning The eLib projects which are developing resources and subject based gateways on the Internet report on their work.
The meeting will be chaired by Derek Law.
Subjects include Medicine, Social Sciences, Urban Design, Engineering, Conflict Studies, Art & Design, and History.
Search and Deliver!
Free (advance registration essential, non FIL members 5 pounds) Wednesday afternoon.
Organised by the Forum for Interlending (FIL) Where do you find it?
How do you get it?
Electronic ways to locate the item you require and get it delivered.
Speakers: J. Eric Davies, Loughborough University, FIDDO (Focused Investigation of Document Delivery Options).
Bridget Powell, SWRLS, Unity Networking.
British Library new Inside service.
NetLinkS : collaborative professional development for networked learner support Free (advance registration essential) Wednesday afternoon Networked learner support (NLS) is a new professional activity, involving the use of networked strategies to provide end-user training and help in the exploitation of networked information resources.
NetLinkS, an eLib project, aims to support the development of this new practice.
BAILER Annual General Meeting followed by LIS Schools and the Electronic Libraries Programme Wednesday afternoon Free (advance registration essential) An assessment of the research contribution being made by Library and Information Studies School and Departments to the Electronic Libraries Programme.
Speaker to be announced.
On-demand publishing for learning materials eLib On Demand Publishing and Electronic Reserve Projects Wednesday afternoon, repeated on Thursday afternoon Free (advance registration essential) A presentation and workshop by eLib Projects concerned with on demand publishing and electronic reserve, designed to illuminate the range of approaches being undertaken towards on demand technologies for the production of course readers, study packs and similar learning materials.
DIAD: a digital dilemma DIAD Project Thursday morning Free (advance registration essential) How do you satisfy the needs of visually sensitive and literate users of art and design journals, within the confines of a pilot digitisation project?
What are their needs?
How do you clear copyright when the page layout (including every advertisement) is as important as the content?
Subject services ROADS to the future Thursday morning 10 pounds for Association for Learning Technology members (fourty pounds non-members) This workshop will focus on two projects which are extending the availability of information resources: the Arts and Humanities Data Service at King's College, London, and Resource Organisation And Discovery in Subject-based Services (ROADS).
With Nicky Ferguson and Daniel Greenstein.
UK eJournals on the Internet eLib Electronic Journals Projects Thursday afternoon 10 pounds Four hours crammed with diversity, entertainment and discussion.
An introduction to eLib and the present state of nine UK electronic journals by those who actually produce them.
Time also for discussion about the future of electronic publishing!
Other Events The Banquet This year's 'banquet' on the Wednesday evening, a regular feature of Libtech International, will be held at Knebworth, the home of the Lytton family since 1490.
The Reception in Knebworth House is sponsored by EMOS Information Systems who have also donated ten free places at the dinner.
The Libtech International Guest Lecture This year's Guest Lecture will be given by Professor Mel Collier, Head of the Division of Learning Development at De Montfort University and Chair of the International Institute for Electronic Library Research.
He is taking as his theme electronic library strategy, a topic we should all be considering as we approach the next millennium.
The Guest Lecture will be preceded by a Reception and is generously sponsored by Automated Library Systems.
Attendance is free but advance booking essential.
Registering Register for the exhibition now to save time on arrival and to receive a copy of the newsletter, Offline News in August together with your visitor's badge.
Getting there The event is held on the University of Hertfordshire's Hatfield campus, which is next to the A1(M) three miles north of the M25.
There is parking for 1,000 cars.
Trains take about half an hour from London, and there is free transport from the train station to the event.
Accomodation Accomodation in Campus residences is 19.50 per night plus VAT.
There are also several hotels in the near vicinity with a variety of standards and prices of accomodation.
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The SURF Foundation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The SURF Foundation Buzz data software database infrastructure digitisation standardisation copyright video cataloguing multimedia cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Jaqueline Pieters describes the evolution of the SURF Foundation, a major IT co-ordination service for the Dutch academic sector.
The SURF Foundation was established in 1987 to co-ordinate the implementation of a multi-year plan for the improvement of the application of information technology (IT) in Dutch universities, schools for higher vocational education and research institutes.
In the course of its activities SURF has become a nationwide supplier of services.
These services are primarily provided through its operating subsidiaries: SURFnet bv and SURFdiensten bv.
SURFnet manages the computer network of the same name.
SURFdiensten deals with licensing agreements in the fields of software, hardware and information services.
During the past few years, intensified co-operation with Pica (Centre for Library Automation) and the Royal Library has substantially broadened the provision of information services on the network.
Scientific Information Supply Today, information technology is integrated in research in all fields of science.
For most of the applications a basic infrastructure is sufficient.
There is one area where higher education and research are confronted by enormous challenges: the supply of scientific information.
In recent years, the main effect of IT in the supply of information has been one of substitution: existing functions were carried out more efficiently.
This applied to online catalogues which replaced card indices and microfiches, but it also applied to data storage on CD-ROM, to optical character recognition and electronic document transmission via e-mail, file transfer and fax.
Publishers and libraries were very keen to use these tools as they are easily integrated into existing processes.
Their advantages are indisputable and easily measured.
Business process redesign It is quite a different matter when it comes to the transformation effect of IT.
This involves significant changes to the organisation of information supply, known as business process redesign.
In principle, digitisation makes all traditional information carriers superfluous.
This not only goes for paper, but also for photographs and film, audio and video tapes.
All kinds of information can be converted into bytes enabling it to be combined with multimedia or should we say unimedia' documents.
Secondly, such digital information is independent of time and place thanks to the worldwide infrastructure which extends to the workplace.
Researchers need no longer leave their desks to search for and consult the literature.
The information supply chain This transformation has had a different impact on each of the five parties that can be distinguished in the present information supply chain: Author, Publisher, Intermediary, Library, Researcher/Student.
The advantages for scientists in their role as researchers and authors are self-evident: not only do they have faster access to vast amounts of information which, in addition, is available in much 'richer' formats, but their own publications also benefit from these innovations.
Digitised information can lead to an identity crisis in scientific libraries.
Traditionally, libraries derive their right to existence from their own collection, but shortly end-users will be able to get their information from America just as easily as from their local institutional library.
This also weakens the university's position.
In addition, publishers and national centres are increasingly assuming those tasks which were performed by libraries (title descriptions and subject retrieval).
On the other hand, owing to the abundance of information, end-users will require intensive support.
The libraries will be able to provide such support.
Not only scientific, but vast economic interests are involved in the availability of information selected on quality and relevance.
This is clearly demonstrated by the turnover and profit figures of the large scientific publishers like Elsevier Science.
The high cost of their publications are mainly due to the fact that publishing is a peoples business and therefore expensive.
IT will not essentially alter this, even when paper is substituted by bytes on a large scale.
In their turn, publishers are entering into partnerships with media corporations while software companies are starting to offer information services.
As yet it is unclear where these developments are heading, but no doubt the market mechanism will be playing an increasingly significant role in the information supply chain.
The situation in the Netherlands In 1991, in the first Dutch trend report on information technology of the Scientific Technical Board of SURF the writers warned Dutch university libraries that they would become the "book museums of the 21st century" if they did not respond effectively to the opportunities and threats of IT.
Now, four years later, a great deal has been achieved.
Libraries and computer centres are co-operating much more closely within the institutions so that requesting and retrieving literature at the workplace has become quite normal.
Moreover, Pica offers virtually transparent access to the collections of all scientific libraries.
In this way, the purchasing of books and subscriptions can be coordinated.
The SURF Foundation and SURFdiensten are working on transparent and affordable access to the databases of third parties.
After library data, full text material is also becoming more readily available electronically, so that the ideal of complete documentation at the workplace is gradually becoming reality.
All this combines to give shape to a virtual Netherlands Scientific Library.
In 1993, at the same time when in UK an investigation was undertaken into how to deal with the pressures on library resources caused by the world-wide explosion in academic knowledge and information which resulted in the "Follett" report, a steering committee on this subject was founded in The Netherlands, first as an autonomous Committee, later as a committee of the SURF Foundation.
The Stuurgroep Innovatie Wetenschappelijke Informatievoorziening [Steering Committee for Innovation in Scientific Information Provision] (IWI), which is elected from board members of the universities, the Royal Library, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Royal Scientific Academy, has presented last year a number of innovative proposals in its 1996-1998 Planning Report which will contribute to this.
The present facilities appear to fulfil a distinct need of the users, as the rapid increase in SURFnet traffic is mainly due to searching on-line catalogues, databases and information servers.
The Stuurgroep IWI aims at the stimulation of the innovation of the supply of scientific information.
This stimulation effects: innovation of national services encouragement of innovative local and discipline projects encouragement of technical innovation and standardisation encouragement of international cooperation and participation quality improvement of the supply of scientific information transfer of knowledge policymaking and protection of interests in fiels of common interest.
WI Planning Report 1996-1998 In November 1995 the multi-year plan of IWI came out.
The plan presents a number of innovative projects in different fields.
The budget of IWI is 4 million a year: 2 million of the Ministry of Science and Education and 2 million of the participants National projects Completing of the national catalogue Central Cataloguing of Internet Resources National Depot of electronic publications Electronic collection building.
Support projects Instruction, training and information Development of a benchmark for library services Research on copyrights on scientific publications Licensing agreements Co-operation with Dutch scientific publishers on document delivery issues International participation.
Institutional projects Local services Making publications of the institute electronically available Storage of electronic publications Technical innovation and standardization Trends and tools for access, retrieval and delivery Authorisation and clearance.
From September 1st 1996 six national projects, three support projects and seventeen institutional projects will be executed.
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SKIP: Skills for New Information Professionals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SKIP: Skills for New Information Professionals Buzz software portfolio research standards Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod reviews the Skills for new Information Professionals project The SKIP (Skills for new Information Professionals) Project Report, summarising research by the University of Plymouth Academic and Information Services in 1996-1997 is now on the UKOLN Web site at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/skip/.
The project looked at the changing learning environment and the impact of information and communications technology on staff in higher education library and information services.
Around 200 staff in 18 institutions, from Heads of Service to Library Assistants, took part and the report incorporates many of their views on issues ranging from skills requirements and training needs to organisational cultures and structures.
A literature review reflects thought and opinion garnered from practitioners, lecturers, and researchers within the information field in the United States, Australia and Europe.
The project took a holistic approach in that library and information services are seen as part of a changing learning environment, demanding adaptation and re-skilling.
SKIP found considerable variation in the IT skills required by staff, and their institutional roles.
Key determinants were the extent to which IT had become part of the learning environment, and also the role of information services in providing an integrated information and IT environment in support.
The research found that many staff operate in a culture which inhibits change and innovation, and blocks the establishment of good working relationships between services or departments.
Separate computing and library cultures persisted even in integrated or converged services.
But cultural change had sometimes been affected as a result of strong, focused leadership.
There was also a confirmation that information professionals are adopting roles in teaching and training, learner support and liaison with faculties or departments.
IT skills are relevant, but they need to be updated to keep pace with change.
Personal qualities, such as flexibility and communication skills were more highly valued by many senior managers.
The IT skills required depended on the needs of the post, but all new staff should have skills in standard applications software.
Staff providing front-line support to student workstations required additional skills.
Influences are: the growth in student centred independent learning, distance learning, and technology-supported learning; increased use of the Internet; partnerships with other information providers; and a gradual erosion of discrete roles for teaching, computing, research and information staff.
The report concludes that information professionals need a portfolio of skills, including Web authoring, accessing and evaluating resources on the Internet and an awareness of the Importance of communications and information technology in higher education.
Professional qualifications may become less important as managers seek staff with the appropriate skills, knowledge, and expertise to do a specific job, with the personal qualities and attitudes which are crucial to success in the modern service environment.
Author Details Penny Garrod, SKIP Project Research Officer, Phone: 01752 232343 Fax: 01752 232293 Email: pgarrod@plymouth.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OMNI-Corner: LA 97: 'I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore, Toto!'
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI-Corner: LA 97: 'I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore, Toto!'
Buzz data database copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Sue Welsh, the globe-trotting OMNI project manager, presents a report of the 97th Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association of the U.S.A, held in Seattle from 24 – 28 May, 1997.
I have never been to any US city that is anything like Seattle.
This is not as impressive as it sounds at first as I have only ever been to one other US city, and that was Washington DC, but I feel confident that Seattle is something out of the ordinary.
It has weather worthy of comparison with the British summer.
It has an efficient and friendly bus service, free within the downtown area.
It has coffee shops that sell strawberry flavoured coffee.
It has the Space Needle, with the best collection of tacky souvenirs outside Blackpool.
In May this year it was also host to the annual Medical Library Association meeting.
A typical MLA will be attended by 1-2,000 librarians and information scientists, not only from all over the United States but from many other countries as well (with a particularly strong UK contingent).
Generally well organised, the conference offers a diverse Programme: a commercial exhibition, poster sessions, several streams of contributed papers and invited speakers.
Dashing from one stream to another to catch all the papers I had chosen to see (obviously no two were in the same room one after another) I thought I knew what the conference theme, “Committed to Change, Ready for the Challenge!” meant, but in fact it referred to the problems of information management in the face of rapid technological progress and political upheaval.
The invited speakers in the plenary sessions tackled the conference theme with gusto.
William Stead, MD (Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University) spoke about “Positioning the Library at the Heart of the Biomedical Enterprise”, focusing on the need to integrate the Library into the curricula and the rapidly changing skill sets required by librarians and library users.
Do “Medical Librarians Save Lives”, as Naomi Broering, MLA President, in her welcome address suggested, as she stressed that we are now often serving patients as well as practitioners?
The Janet Doe Lecturer for 1997, T. Mark Hodges stayed with the theme of change with an entertaining meander through MLA meetings past from “Ninety-eight to Date”.
The parallel sessions are more informal, but an excellent opportunity to share research results, project work and just general experience, and this part of the Programme is the most variable.
Hidden away in the lists of short (half hour) presentations are the answers to your thorny problem whatever it is, but it’s essential to go through it and work out a plan of action.
It’s even more important to stick to it, and not remain in a room when the paper you really want to see next is next-door, just because you have to climb over fifty people to get out.
The most useful papers from my point of view this year were an excellent description of setting up and running an email focus group (Paula Palmer, Lake Washington Technical College) and a summary of research into using the Internet to meet the information needs of nurses in remote areas, from our own Amanda Richardson and Jane Farmer of the Robert Gordon University.
Lunch, as we know, is for wimps and medical librarians Stateside are not excepted from this general rule.
MLA “Lunch and Learn” sessions can be the most practical and informative parts of the Programme.
They consist of short presentation on the latest developments from database vendors, subscription agents and national organisations.
In fact, so may organisations take up the opportunity that there are usually five or more “Lunch and Learn” sessions running in parallel during any one session.
As a consequence, you always feel that it might have been good to go to many more sessions than there are lunchtimes to accommodate them.
Although the Programme itself contained lots of interest, I was not in Seattle only to listen, but to make contacts in a US audience for OMNI, for the first time.
The Poster Sessions, well attended (perhaps due to its excellent location adjacent to the main Exhibition) afforded us an opportunity not just to speak at an audience but to meet and chat with many visitors as individuals.
In any conference, the people you meet are more important than the papers you hear, an the Poster Session was, for me, the most useful and productive part of the meeting, not solely because OMNI was itself involved, but due to the generally high quality of the other exhibits.
I would recommend anyone thinking of attending an MLA meeitng to consider participation in this part of the meeting.
Abstracts for this year’s posters can be seen on the MLA web site [1].
MLA also offers excellent pre-conference educational opportunities for delegates.
This year, workshop topics covered web authorship and design, negotiating skills, patient records, evidence based medicine, clinical event data and of course, copyright amongst many other topics.
Most workshops are a day or half day long.
The Survey design course I attended was a good solid introduction to this topic and from this and previous experience of MLA educational opportunities I can heartily recommend them.
Leaving Seattle for the twenty hour journey home, having taken twice the recommended number of sleeping pills and still being wide awake, I wondered was it all worthwhile.
But as the impressions made by grueling journey fade, the memories of salmon roasts and the strawberry coffee, the boat trips and the Pike Street Market stay fresh.
Oh, and the MLA conference too, I almost forgot…..
The next MLA is in Philadelphia, and to help you decide if this is the year you go, there is already information on MLANET [2].
References [1] Posters from this years conference, http://www.kumc.edu/MLA/MLA97/program/posters.htm [2] Details of 1998 MLA conference, http://medstat.med.utah.edu/mla98/ Author Details Sue Welsh, OMNI project manager.
Email: sw@omni.library.nottingham.ac.uk Tel: 01159 249924 ext.
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Biz/ed Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Biz/ed Buzz data database cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Catherine Sladen describes an information gateway for Business Studies and Economics.
Building upon an already self funding project, delivering networked resources and primary materials to students and teachers in the schools and colleges, eLib funding has enabled biz/ed [1].to expand and meet the needs of the students and lecturers in higher education.
The project seeks to identify these needs through a series of partnerships and evaluation sessions.
Partnerships with both the academic community and the business world enable biz/ed to provide quality resources which meet the needs of students and teachers at all levels.
Working primarily with the Association of Business Schools (as well as CTI Economics and The Economics & Business Education Association), biz/ed has located subject experts who will identify quality educational resources to support the teaching and learning of business and economics.
These resources will then be added to a database, based on the ROADS system, working along similar lines to SOSIG.
The use of remote, distributed cataloguing by subject experts (who have been trained and fully supported with both paper based and on-line documentation) enables the profession to "own" the content of the database of resource descriptors; adding quality descriptions according to their own individual subject expertise.
Biz/ed's extensive and comprehensive searchable database forms the centrepiece of the project and will be publicly available from February.
But this is not the only aspect of the project which is of interest to higher education users: the location of materials, which whilst not necessarily meeting the quality criteria required for entry into the database are, nonetheless, useful resources for both students and lecturers.
For example, biz/ed has searched for journals available on the Internet.
The quality of publication and extent of the information displayed is varied.
However, consultation with lecturers has revealed that listings of journals, whatever the quality, are useful, particularly if biz/ed can briefly describe the contents.
Listings of useful contacts, contained in a searchable database, of both people and organisations, is another way in which biz/ed can bring together widely distributed networked information and make it available in a user-friendly format.
Nationally recognised providers of data, such as Penn World Data and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have given biz/ed access to datasets, enabling students to choose and manipulate data, simply and quickly, to the extent that the chosen variables can be exported into a spreadsheet package for further analysis.
Biz/ed is committed to the development of existing and new on-line datasets, both quantitative and textual.
Biz/ed has also negotiated with well known plcs such as The Body Shop and Unilever to provide Company Facts, to provide the answers to frequently asked questions; case studies are also made available.
Links to FTSE 100 companies and to other well known Plcs have been organised by sector, to make it as simple as possible to find company websites.
Primary materials for assessment, the expansion of the online glossary of technical terms, a "talkback" feature and experiments in virtual classrooms are just a few of the project's promised deliverables.
Biz/ed is still developing its new resources and would welcome feedback and comments by interested parties.
References [1] Biz/ed Web Site, http://bized.ac.uk/ Author Details Catherine Sladen is the Biz/ed Research Officer at the ILRT in Bristol Email: Catherine.Sladen@Bristol.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: Internet Activity in Public Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: Internet Activity in Public Libraries Buzz data software database infrastructure digitisation mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes on Internet activity in the Public Libraries domain.
Current public library Internet activity can be divided into four main types: Initial Experimentation and Exploration Public Access Civic Information Cooperation This is a relatively small range of topics and gives an indication of the lack of resources available to libraries with which to undertake research.
Whereas the eLib programme has allowed academic libraries to explore a whole range of topics ranging from electronic documentary delivery to digitization to on demand publishing, public libraries are concentrating on much more fundamental issues.
Initial Experimentation and Exploration Here I group a number of projects which are providing libraries with their first experience of using the Internet.
These are typically low scale projects involving one or two members of staff and using a dial up connection.
It was this type of low scale activity that the Library and Information Commission survey clearly identified as typical of most public libraries with Internet access.
The libraries are using these connections to experiment and evaluate the Internet to become familiar with it and see what it is about and explore how it can be integrated into existing services.
The Croydon Library Internet Project (CLIP) is the largest scale project of this type.
It is externally funded by both BLRDD and Croydon Borough Council and is using the Internet to answer reference queries, to look at issues of how to manage public access and to discover the best type of connection model.
It has received considerable media attention and its final report is due to be published shortly.
CLIP has a larger budget than many other public library projects, and consequently was able to use a leased line to connect to the Internet.
By looking at all these projects as a whole there appear to be three questions that most libraries initially want answered Can the Internet be used to answer reference questions?
Can we manage public access?
How much will this cost?
These small scale projects represent public libraries first stage of Internet activity and it is possible that in time they might metamorphoses, when funding is available, into larger scale operations.
But for the time being the most typical Internet activity taking place in public libraries involves a dial up connection, a small number of staff and an exploration of very immediate concerns.
An important point to note is that public libraries do not have access to a network like JANET.
JANET is centrally funded: libraries in higher education do not currently see any direct cost associated with its use.
It, and SuperJANET, provide a developing infrastructure which supports a range of services and research projects pervasively throughout the sector.
To some extent, academic libraries can take the network for granted.
This is far from the case for public libraries.
Currently, they have to directly finance a connection from an Internet Service Provider.
The low level nature of these connections limits the services that can be provided.
Public Access Public access is a concern of these 'introductory' projects but for the majority of them this is a long-term aim rather than an immediate goal.
However, the idea of the public library as Internet access provider is becoming more pervasive.
There has been considerable discussion, particularly in the USA, that public libraries should act as an 'information net'.
As we move to a society where access to networked information becomes more important it will be essential that everyone, whatever their circumstances, will be able to access networked information.
People could become actively disadvantaged if they are unable to be a part of this new electronic world.
Public libraries, it has been suggested, should act as their safety net or information net and provide free access to those that otherwise would be disenfranchised.
This will help prevent the creation of an 'electronic underclass' and maintain the public library ethos of providing information access to all.
So public access projects are not just about teenage boys playing Dungeon and Dragon games but potentially have a centrally important role to play in society.
ITPoint was one of the earliest projects to offer Internet access as part of a more wide-ranging project remit.
The project was set up with a BLRDD grant and aimed to explore how the public would use a library if it was fully equipped with the latest IT.
The project was deliberately located in an area of high unemployment and social deprivation.
This was an area that had been identified as being information poor.
The project was very successful and heavily used.
It proved not only that the public would use Internet access if offered but that such a service could be managed.
Originally ITPoint was free but charging was introduced at a later date.
The South Ayrshire Cyber Project aims to make available 15 Internet workstations for the public in June 1996.
Integral to the project is also a staff training programme which will allow the staff to learn to incorporate the Internet into all information services they offer.
This project is fairly unusual in that it will be solely funded by the library service and the local council rather than an outside funding body.
The project is still in its very early days and it will be interesting to see how it develops.
Cybershack also offered public access and was set up by Hounslow library service.
A room in the library was quickly converted into an Internet centre with some help with a couple of local computer companies.
Four terminals were made available to the public.
It was again very successful and heavily used by the public.
It was originally designed to run for six months only but due to its success this is to be extended.
These projects are very good examples of how public libraries can effectively run access services and how they are likely to be successful.
However, the Library and Information Commission survey showed that under 1% of public libraries were offering public Internet access and so projects like these are still highly unusual.
One development in this area has been partnerships between some authorities and private companies.
Input/Output, for example, is a private company which offers a percentage of their profits in exchange for space in libraries to set up a computer centre.
They offer charged access to wordprocessing, desk top publishing, some computer packages and the Internet.
Commercial partnerships like this involve no investment from the library other than space and actually bring in income.
For librarians with static or decreasing budgets this is an attractive proposition and these type of centres seem set to become more familiar.
Interestingly, Input Output themselves state that the Internet should be available for free within the library and are currently testing offering free access within some of their centres.
In comparison, practically all public libraries managing their own service are charging.
It appears that Internet access will not free but an additional extra like videos and tapes although some authorities such as Suffolk are committed to providing free access.
This of course flies in the face of the concept of the public library as the last resort of the information 'poor'.
If people are to be charged for the service it immediately puts it beyond the reach of some would-be users.
But for libraries operating in today's economic climate there appears to be little that libraries can do as they must either cover their costs or make cuts elsewhere.
In January 1995 Chris Batt, the head of Croydon Library Service, quoted a figure of £11,500 as the cost of a state of the art connection to the Internet for a year.
In his words, this meant that 'someone without a growing budget may have to sacrifice the money for a library assistant for Internet access' (Batt, 1995).
So although libraries may be committed to the concept of free access, it is an ideal that is not being attained.
It just cannot be afforded.
Civic Information on the Internet The area where there has been the most activity has been in the realm of Civic Information.
Civic information is council information, details of local clubs and societies, news of local events and so on.
It is continually changing data that needs to be easily updated and simple for the public to access.
Computers have been used for several years to make civic information accessible to the public because they manage these tasks very easily.
The most typical systems used are known as videotext or viewdata.
These use 'low scale' networking technology to link a dumb terminal to the civic information database usually over leased or ISDN lines.
The quality of the information presentation compares to teletext.
Terminals are placed in prominent public sites such as libraries, council offices or even on street corners.
Some Councils manage the service themselves using the library service only to host the terminals.
However, in other areas it is the library service that is responsible for it.
Most civic information services have been very interested in the opportunities that the World Wide Web offers them to improve their service.
At present most videotext systems can only be accessed from dedicated terminals, though a few do offer dial-in access.
The WWW in comparison makes the information available to anyone with Internet access.
The WWW is also a more flexible and usually more attraction method of information presentation.
It also could allow the services to link to other useful WWW sites that are located outside of the service, county or even country.
It therefore has the potential to allow civic information projects to be more accessible, more attractive to use and more comprehensive.
There are two areas of development in this area.
WWW civic information services are either being set up from scratch or existing videotext/viewdata services are being converted to a WWW format.
Local County Councils/City Councils have become very keen to develop a WWW information system based on their area and get on the Internet bandwagon.
It disseminates information about them around the world, and is also good for their image as organisations on the 'cutting edge'.
Such services are very good and positive publicity for the Council as well as, of course, providing an information service for the inhabitants of that area.
Surrey, Barnsley, Somerset, Liverpool, Manchester are a few examples of authorities that have developed an Internet site that acts as a local information system.
Cambridge Online is example of one of these systems.
If it had been initiated even just three years ago it would probably have been videotext-based.
It provides information about Cambridge that is of use to Cambridge citizens it not a tourist service.
It still has kiosks at public sites in the city but the information is presented using the WWW.
This makes it possible to access the information from any computer that has an Internet connection rather from just the dedicated terminals.
The information being provided has not been changed, the purpose of the system has not changed, but the way in which it is stored, presented and provided has altered radically.
Leeds City Council Internet Project is another similar Internet based local information system.
It gives information on the Council, tourism, business and education in Leeds.
It has received considerable funding and is very high profile.
You can find out who your local councillor or MP is, click on their picture and send them an e-mail.
This is an attractive course for local authorities and they are currently investing considerable resources in developing these services.
But the majority of these services are generally not being run and/or developed by the library service.
Leeds and Cambridge's Internet services are unusual in the fact that they are library-managed.
This is a worrying development as this is the sort of new service that would seem to be a natural development of traditional public library purpose as information providers.
Existing viewdata systems such as CAPITAL INFORMATION are also developing an Internet service.
At present the system still operates using the more traditional videotext software but it is also converting it into WWW format.
Hertfordshire and Hereford and Worcester's systems have also developed in a similar way.
This is a trend that is appearing around the country.
With one software company offering to convert 10,000 Viewdata frames into WWW format within two days this is an area that will undergo even more rapid expansion.
The WWW could soon commit traditional viewdata/videotext systems to the realm of the obsolete and the outdated.
So where libraries already have the necessary information in computer form they are beginning to move very quickly to make it Internet accessible.
It is the one area where there is rapid development.
However when the service needs to be created from scratch public libraries are losing out.
Local governments are not viewing the library authority as an organisation that could manage this type of service.
This is possibly due to their lack of expertise and experience.
This is the first indication that public libraries' lack of experience is causing services to be left behind.
Use by the Profession Academic libraries have already discovered that the Internet is ideal for allowing geographically dispersed organisations to cooperate and share resources.
Many of the eLib projects are either looking at how to develop this cooperation further or are using the Internet to facilitate cooperative research and services.
A whole professional support system has developed with services such as NISS, BUBL and mailbase.
For example, Lis-link, one of many e-mail discussion lists, has become the academic librarian's forum for discussing professional issues and more importantly a way of seeking advice and help.
One of the final conclusions of the ASLIB Public Library Review was that public libraries must collaborate together on a greater scale.
Public libraries are now beginninging to explore the possibilities that the Internet offers them for cooperation.
Information North and SLAINTE are two projects looking at putting this support system in place.
Information North is aiming to create an Internet accessible bulletin board for National Heritage professionals including public libraries.
SLAINTE is a WWW directory for and about information professionals in Scotland.
Both projects show how the Internet can allow easier discussion between geographically dispersed professionals.
Even the most far flung librarian will be able to access and contribute to the latest professional issues and so be better informed in much the same way that many academic librarians are already doing.
Project EARL, however, is the major drive for cooperation.
EARL is a consortium of public libraries that have joined together to coordinate the public library response to the Internet.
EARL believes that by coordinating effort, public libraries will more effectively create, manage and maintain Internet services.
It will offer advice, help train staff, coordinate activities and by gaining a critical mass of authorities be able to lobby and bargain with possible Internet/Cable service providers.
EARL also maintains a WWW server that makes information about library authorities available to the public.
As of May 1996, 62 authorities had joined.
(Before current local government reorganisation there were 167 public library authorities in the UK.)
EARL has the potential to becoming the public library eLib programme (minus the funding of course) and has set up special interest groups to explore areas of research such as digitalisation, staff training and children's Internet services and so on.
EARL has recognised that before public libraries can start to offer more complex services research will need to be done.
Again they will be small scale compared to eLib but it is a positive and proactive move.
Conclusions Public libraries are interested in the Internet but do not have the available resources to dedicate to exploring its usefulness.
It is unfortunate that the Internet has become an issue when public libraries and funding bodies are facing budget crises.
Many libraries simply cannot afford to investigate the potential of the Internet on a large scale having, instead, to concentrate their resources on maintaining the more traditional services.
This lack of funding is the explanation for the low level of activity recorded in the survey it is not a lack of enthusiasm or commitment on the behalf of public libraries.
The project described above show that libraries are trying to become more active and more involved but this is proving to be an uphill struggle.
Full scale public library Internet services will require investment in infrastructure, equipment and staff training.
Whereas most academic libraries are now involved in researching how to exploit the Internet, the vast majority of public libraries do not yet have access to it.
The staff are as enthusiastic and committed as academic librarians; they are simply not as well resourced.
It is in this context that public library Internet activity should be understood.
From existing activity we can draw the following conclusions about the future of the Internet in public libraries.
Public libraries will offer Internet access either in partnership with a private company or as a cost covering service.
Community Information systems will become far more WWW based and consequently will be accessible to a greater number of people.
There is a danger that new services will no longer be the remit of the library authority but other council departments.
Finally, there will be a move to greater cooperation and this is the area where the most effort needs to be concentrated.
Public libraries have no one championing their rights in the age of the Internet and so they are going to have to do it themselves and to do this effectively they need to do it together.
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SIGIR '97 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SIGIR '97 Buzz data database metadata visualisation wordnet algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS David Nichols reports on the follow-on conference SIGIR '97.
SIGIR is a well established technical conference and a little daunting for those hangers-on from Digital Libraries ‘97 who did not have a background in information retrieval.
It was good, therefore, that the opening Salton Award lecture by Tefko Saracevic of Rutgers University made us feel at home with a talk entitled Users Lost.
He described the history of the field and, what he felt, was a split in the early 80s between the technical algorithm-based side and the user-oriented side.
(He also felt the funding had overwhelmingly gone to the technical side.)
He criticized the large number of papers that included the phrase ‘this has implications for system design’ but never actually spelt out what it was or went on to design systems that took note of the implications.
He estimated about 3 or 4 of the papers at both Digital Libraries and SIGIR had reports of actual users doing a search, or similar activity.
Although Saracevic criticized ‘Intelligent Agents’ for having ‘as much intelligence as my shoelace’ he did say that Information Retrieval should ‘plead guilty’ to losing sight of the users.
A second plenary address came from George Miller of Princeton describing the use of WordNet [4] a lexical reference system to aid information retrieval systems.He reported some success using synonyms that had one meaning to help clarify terms that had several possible meanings.
After these two presentations the bulk of the conference was what I had suspected ‘hard’ computer science that is probably of limited interest to most readers of Ariadne (with titles like ‘Almost-constant-time clustering of arbitrary corpus subsets’).
However, there were some relevant papers.
Raya Fidel reported on users’ perception of a profile-based filtering system for news articles delivered by email.
Interestingly, users thought that they weren’t missing many relevant items that the articles they were receiving contained all of the things they were interested in.
In fact, this was not the case at all.
It appeared that because the sets of filtered articles they were receiving contained many non-relevant articles (the precision was low), they thought they were looking at all the relevant ones!
In addition Fidel reported that several of the expressed criteria were related to the form (e.g.
was it a case study) of articles rather than the textual content.
This suggests that filtering on appropriate metadata can be a valuable approach when constructing profiles.
The UK representation at the conference was dominated by the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group [5] including Mark Dunlop’s presentation on an alternative evaluation approach for information retrieval systems.
He proposed an expected search duration measure, as opposed to the prevalent recall and precision graphs, that takes account of interface effects along with the underlying algorithms.
This seemed to be in accord with other opinions about the value of traditional evaluation measures several people commented that precision (getting relevant results) was more important than recall (getting all the relevant results) in many real-world applications.
In addition there seemed to be a lack of papers about interfaces in general, when it seems to some non-IR people that interface effects could easily swamp some of the reported effects of improved algorithms.
One exception to the dearth of interfaces was a description of the Cat-a-Cone system [6] by Marti Hearst (formerly of Xerox PARC and now at UC Berkeley).
The Cat-a-Cone is a 3D browsing tool for very large category hierarchies such as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
It builds on previous work on the Cone Tree [7] visualization interface and integrates viewing the hierarchy and the results.
There have been no user studies reported to date with Cat-a-Cone and it will be interesting to see whether real users can cope with such a complex 3D interface.
The most lively session at SIGIR was a panel on ‘Real Life Information Retrieval: Commercial Search Engines’.
Doug Cutting from Excite [8] produced some interesting statistics on their Web search engine: they have 100s queries / second $0.02 revenue / search an estimated $0.0001 / query for hardware costs 1996 average query length 1.5 words 1997 average query length 2.2 words Cutting suggested that this may mean the users are learning that longer queries give better results 1997 average query length in Europe is 1.5 words maybe we’re not learning fast enough!
use of boolean operators is low at about 10% Cutting’s morals for Web search developers were to ‘keep the interface very simple’ and ‘optimize the default experience.’ Jan Pedersen from Verity [9] posed 2 questions to the SIGIR community: ‘how do you rank documents with 1 or 2 words queries?’ and ‘where are all the papers on the Web?’ Karen Sparck-Jones raised the point that it is hard to get practical evaluation methodologies on the Web.
Terry Noreault from OCLC [10] predicted that cross-database searching was the next big trend and that in general the SIGIR papers didn’t inform him much at all.
Matt Koll (formerly from PLS [11]) claimed that commercial systems had made significant progress in many areas (including scaleability, summarization and federated searches) without the aid of SIGIR people.
He also criticized the ‘effect size’ the community was discussing and accused them of overanalysing the same data.
Needless to say the question session was quite interesting, the response led by Bruce Croft who detailed the successes of Information Retrieval including the dominance of a ranking approach to result presentation.
After so many sessions in the same room the conference finally finished and those of us who’d stayed for both Digital Libraries and SIGIR were thoroughly conferenced-out.
SIGIR was much less relevant than Digital Libraries but it is worth watching the proceedings as a source of interesting research.
Next year SIGIR is in Melbourne Australia [12].
The author is very grateful to the British Library Research and Innovation Centre for financial support which allowed him to attend Digital Libraries ‘97 (and then stay on for SIGIR).
References [1] SIGIR ‘97 http://www.acm.org/sigir/conferences/sigir97/ [2] Doubletree Hotel, Philadelphia: http://www.doubletreehotels.com/DoubleT/Hotel61/79/79Main.htm [3] The home page of Digital Libraries ‘97: http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~diglib97/ [4] WordNet a Lexical Database for English: http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/ [5] The Information Retrieval Group of the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/ir/ [6] The Cat-a-Cone system: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hearst/cac-overview.html [7] For an example of a Cone Tree: http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~j2carrie/cone_tree.html [8] Excite: http://www.excite.com/ [9] Verity: http://www.verity.com/ [10] OCLC: http://www.oclc.org/ [11] PLS: http://www.pls.com/ [12] SIGIR98: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/sigir98/ Author details David Nichols, Research Associate, Cooperative Systems Engineering Group, Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR Email: dmn@comp.lancs.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ACORN Implemented Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ACORN Implemented Buzz data software html database infrastructure browser identifier sql copyright opac windows linux passwords perl ocr adobe solaris samba telnet authentication standards Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight and Richard Goodman describe the technical implementation of the ACORN system.
The Project ACORN [1] is an eLib [2] funded project looking at the provision of electronic short loan reserves in a University library environment.
The project has three main partners; Loughborough University [3], Swets & Zeitlinger b.v. [4] and Leicester University [5].
This paper provides an overview of the ACORN system and a description of the technical implementation of the system in the Pilkington Library at Loughborough University.
ACORN System Model The ACORN system model is the abstract model behind the real implementation.
The model contains a number of separate modules that communicate with one another in order to provide the services required of the ACORN system.
Figure 1 shows the various components in the system model and how they inter-relate with one another.
Figure 1: The ACORN system model ACORN really has two distinct user interfaces.
There is an interface for the librarians and systems staff see that allow them to enter and remove works, record copyright clearance data and retrieve usage statistics, and there is also the interface that the end users see to allow them to actually make use of the ACORN system.
For a work to appear in the ACORN system, it must first appear on a reading list provided by a member of academic staff.
The details of the work are entered into the copyright clearance database (CLEAR) and a librarian then attempts to gain a copyright clearance from the copyright holder of the work (usually a publisher).
The database contains details of which works have had clearances given to them and under what conditions.
As different publishers impose different charges and access restrictions, it is important that the copyright clearance database is fairly flexible in what it accepts.
Once cleared, the original work is digitised and is placed in the main ACORN database.
It is now possible for an end user to gain access to it.
However these end users must pass through an authentication system to ensure that they are allowed to access the requested documents.
If they are, the system will allow them to view the documents and/or print them.
Viewing a document is simply a matter of returning an electronic copy in a suitable format to the end user’s machine and then recording the date, time, user and document details in the main ACORN database.
Printing is a little more complicated.
The abstract model includes a print system that the user must interact with in order to choose an appropriate printer.
This print system then checks that the user is allowed to use the chosen printer and if they are, generates a print job for the requested document and then submits it to the print system on the user’s behalf.
The main ACORN database also maintains a record of what pages of a document an end user has printed and when, so that statistics can be gathered and publisher’s copyright terms obeyed when they charges based upon the number of pages printed.
The following section will now give a more in depth technical explanation of how the ACORN system model has been realised at Loughborough.
It should be noted that this is just one possible implementation of the model; its purpose is to show that the model is reasonable and to provide a working service at Loughborough.
If the ACORN system model is used at another site, different choices may need to be made based on the existing information systems infrastructure within which the system must operate.
CLEAR Copyright Database CLEAR (Copyright-Licensed Electronic Access to Readings) is the Project Acorn Copyright Management system, which was developed by the project team, using Microsoft Access.
The system is used on a PC running Microsoft Windows 3.11.
The system has been designed to handle all the aspects of Copyright Management relevant to the project, ranging from storing information about reading list articles, the modules that they come from and the tutors who teach those modules, to generating reports and graphs of management information about the electronic articles and their usage.
The system was used in conjunction with Microsoft Word to produce permission request letters to publishers, and was also used to produce address labels for the envelopes.
The information from the CLEAR database is uploaded into the Sybase database, and usage data is downloaded from the Sybase database to be analysed by the CLEAR database.
Main Sybase Database The main ACORN database has been implemented using Sybase running on a SPARC station 5 under Solaris 2.5.1.
Sybase was chosen as it is the underlying database technology used in the campus Talis OPAC, and therefore there was already local experience and tools available to make use of the database.
The server itself physically lives in the Computer Centre machine room, along with the OPAC machines, where it can be easily backed up along with the other central services machines.
The main ACORN database actually has a relatively simple entity relationship model and this was mapped out on paper before the appropriate tables were created within Sybase.
Obviously if the ACORN system was implemented at another site, Sybase may not be the best choice.
It is relatively expensive, especially if used outside of the educational community, and other sites may already have another relational database available.
To aid portability, the Loughborough implementation of the ACORN system model has shyed away from using any of the special features of Transact-SQL and has stuck instead to the standard aspects of the ANSI-SQL query language.
An ER diagram for the initial ACORN service was created to capture the needs of the main database.
This diagram explicitly states that it is journal articles that are being considered and separates the details that apply specifically to that form of work from the other information needed by the system.
This separation has subsequently allowed us to easily add to the ER diagram to support other types of work such as book chapters and examination papers.
It is hoped that the later of these will be actually implemented at Loughborough sometime in the near future.
In the main database, the primary key used to deal with actions occuring to a work is the WORK_ID.
This is a unique numeric identifier that is identical to the WORK_ID’s that are used inside our Talis OPAC’s database.
Using the Talis WORK_ID’s is convenient as it means we do not have to generate these ourselves and it also makes linking into the ACORN system from our Talis WebOPAC relatively straight forward.
Of course if ACORN is ported to another site, Talis and it’s WORK_ID’s may not be present.
If another library OPAC is in use, it is likely to have functional equivalents nonetheless, and these should probably be used as the primary access keys to facilitate easier linking between the OPAC and the ACORN system.
If no OPAC is in use, the unique primary keys would have to be generated by the ACORN software at some point the CLEAR database already does this for all the articles that are entered in to it.
Web front end to the Sybase Database Once the data detailing works is in the Sybase database, the end users must be provided with some way of accessing it.
In the Loughborough implementation of ACORN, the front end is provided by a web browser and an Adobe Acrobat PDF file viewer.
The user interacts with the main Sybase database through a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script that generates and processes HTML forms.
The CGI script is written in the Perl programming language as this is ideally suited to the I/O processing, string handling and database interaction that is required in this instance.
The use of the web as a front end means that the end users can make use of familiar, common tools and the amount of work that the system developers have had to make on generating the front end is quite low.
The end user has two entry points into the initial ACORN system installed at Loughborough.
Firstly, they can come in via the web pages of their particular department, from the main University Web Pages.
This provides an HTML document listing departments that run modules that have works in the ACORN system.
From this document they can then get to other HTML documents that allow them to select first the module that they are interested in and then the actual work that they want.
The other way of getting in to the ACORN system is via the library’s existing Talis WebOPAC by following a link from the work detail document.
This link is generated from a note held in the Talis OPAC that points out that there is an electronic version of the document available.
Note that either method can be used by lecturing staff to provide their own sets of links in online course material, thus allowing ACORN to be integrated in the teaching material presented to the students.
Whichever way the user comes into the ACORN system they will have to supply authentication information if they wish to view or print the work.
This is needed to comply with many of the publishers copyright clearance requirements and also to allow usage of the system to be tracked.
In the Loughborough implementation of the ACORN system model, it was decided to implement a simple security mechanism based on that which was deployed in the Talis WebOPAC prototype.
The authentication information that the ACORN system requires is the user’s central services username and password.
These are only prompted for at the user’s initial contact with the ACORN system, or if they spend too long between interaction.
The usernames and passwords are currently sent in plaintext, but as this how they are transported using telnet anywaay, this is not currently a great concern.
If this did turn out to be a problem in the future, the web server could easily be converted into using something like SSL to provide an encrypted transport for the HTTP transactions.
Once the script on the main ACORN server gets a username and password it encrypts the password using the crypt(3) and compares it with the encrypted password from the Central Services password file.
If they match, the script generates a cryptographically secure session identifier.
It is this identifier that will be returned from all the subsequent forms and contains enough information for the recieving script to be able to authenticate the user, check that the session has not timed out and ensure that the session identifier has not been tampered with.
The need to provide time limited sessions is important to bear in mind; many common web security mechanisms assume that once authenticated, a user can come back to the server at any time in the future (usually until the browser is restarted).
One environment in which the ACORN system is used at Loughborough is with public web browsers and so it was important to use an authentication mechanism that inherently provides support for “timing out” sessions.
This is to prevent unscrupulous users from using other people’s account details to gain access to works or to print to printers that they are not themselves entitled to.
Once authenticated, the user is presented with three basic operations that they can perform; they can view the document online, print it out on paper or exit the system.
Viewing a document is easily achieved by returning a PDF version of the document.
These PDF documents are generated from scanned images by Swets.
Many of these PDF documents have actually been OCR’ed from the original scans, as this reduces file size and increases the quality of the on-screen output.
Unfortunately, it has been found that generating OCR’ed PDF is very time consuming, as the current Adobe OCR (Adobe Capture) software often introduces several OCR errors in every page which means that detailed proof reading is required.
The volume of documents that even the initial production ACORN service at Loughborough requires has meant that some non-OCRed PDF documents have had to be used.
This is worth bearing in mind when attempting to port the system to another site as the Loughborough initial service only covers 24 reading lists from three departments, giving just over 220 articles !
It should be noted that one feature of PDF that the Loughborough implementation of the ACORN system model has made use of is the ability restrict the use of the cut’n’paste and print operations from within the Adobe Acrobat readers.
This forces the user to use the print system provided by the ACORN system and therefore permits the printed form of the document to be stamped with the time it was printed and the user it was printed for and also records printing details within the main ACORN database for latter analysis.
Printing within the System Printing from the ACORN system is somewhat more complicated than simply viewing the document online.
When the user elects to print a work, it is the CGI script on the main ACORN server that prepares and submits the print job on the user’s behalf.
In the Loughborough implementation of ACORN, the ACORN print system has to be able to deal with both the “standard” Computing Services UNIX and PostScript based print system and also private departmental printers.
These latter printers have a restricted set of permitted users and may use Netware or AppleTalk to access their printers and use PCL rather than PostScript as a page description language.
The first stage in the print process is to get the end user to select the printer that they wish to use.
They are presented with an HTML form containing a selection list of all the available printers, including both those provided by Computing Services and those handled by the departments’ own systems.
The form allows the user to elect to print a range of pages from the article rather than the whole thing and the script also calculates the cost to the end user of printing the whole article on a Computing Services printer (students are currently charged 5p per page for printing to a Computing Services black and white A4 laser printer).
When the user’s choices are returned to the CGI script, the script looks up the printer name in a table on the system that tells it where to locate another file of Perl script that can be used to access that printer.
These Perl files are then dynamically “required” into the running CGI script to provide the appropriate interface to the selected printer.
The ability of Perl to dynamically bring in and execute new blocks of code at run time is very valuable here, as in some other languages either all printers would have to be included in the CGI program at compile time or another program would need to be forked off to handle the print request.
The former option limits the flexibility and modularity of the system and the later increases the resource requirements of the system.
If the user decides to print on a Computing Services printer, the CGI script brings in a standard subroutine that allows it to submit a job to the central campus print server.
It then generates a PostScript document from the PDF using the pdftops program from the XPDF distribution [6], and then inserts some more PostScript code into this new document that inserts a light grey username, timestamp and attribution on every page of the document that is printed.
The script then uses a “hacked” version of the normal lpr(1) program (built from the freely available LPRng printing toolkit) that allows the script to actually submit the print job under the end user’s central services username, despite the fact that the script itself is running as an unpriviledged, non-root user on the ACORN server.
If on the other hand the user chooses to print on a departmental printer, the code brought into the CGI script varies depending upon which department and printer is used.
The first thing that the code does in these cases does is check whether the user is entitled to use the printer that they have requested.
The authenticated username used for access to ACORN as a whole is the basis of this check, though the actual check varies from department to department.
For example in one department the end user can print as long as they are a member of the department (which can be deduced from the first two letters of the username) whereas in another, the script has to check with another password file supplied by the department to ensure that the end user has paid a departmental printing subscription.
One departmental printer uses the HP PCL page description language rather than PostScript.
In this case, the PDF is converted to PostScript and has the timestamps inserted as described above, and then GhostScript is used to convert the resulting PostScript document in to a PCL file.
This particular printer and some of the other departmental printers are not available via the standard UNIX printing system.
This is a problem as the main server machine is a Solaris machine that can only print to a UNIX style print service.
To get round this, another machine is used as a multiprotocol printing gateway.
This machine is an AMD586-133 based PC with 8MB of memory running Linux 2.0.27.
Linux is a free UNIX like operating system that is capable of dealing with UNIX, Netware, SAMBA and AppleTalk style printing using freely available tools.
The Linux box hosts a number of UNIX print queues that can only be seen by the main ACORN server.
These queues allow the ACORN CGI script to submit the departmental print jobs using the normal UNIX lpr(1).
Each queue has an input filter that takes a print job from the queue, connects to the appropriate remote print server and then submits the job to that print system.
As this is a fairly simple task for Linux, a small PC is more than capable of handling it.
It is a different matter if the backend script has to do the PostScript to PCL conversion as well as gateway it into the other print system, as was discovered during the implementation.
The GhostScript program used to do the conversion can make a fairly heavy demand on the memory of the machine, which would be made worse if more than one print job is underway at once.
For anyone considering implementing the ACORN system model at another site it is worth taking note that dealing with the variety of printing mechanisms that are in use in many Universities can be a bit of a nightmare.
Luckily the modular approach taken with the initial implementation at Loughborough allows new printers to be brought online without rewriting the rest of the system.
Also once code for one departmental printer is written it is sometimes possible to reuse the basic code for other similarly configured printers.
The ACORN CGI script also records in the main Sybase database who requested the print job, what document was presented and when the job was submitted to the print system.
This information can then be used by the librarians and ACORN Project staff for calculating royalties due to publishers, identifying popular works and capacity planning for future use of the system.
Conclusions This document has attempted to provide a concise overview of the abstract ACORN system model, and also a more detailed explanation of the initial production implementation of an ACORN service based on that model at Loughborough.
The ACORN system model is intended to be transportable, so that the basic idea behind the system can be applied at other sites.
It may be that some parts of the Loughborough implementation will be useful as they stand at other sites.
For example, some interest has already been expressed in the CLEAR database implementation by other libraries.
Other elements are obviously very much depended on the existing local infrastructure in use.
The print system is the classic example of this, but as has been seen other parts of the Loughborough implementation such as the Talis style WORK_ID’s may require altering to fit in with local needs at other sites.
In order to test how transportable the ACORN system model really is, there are plans to investigate the ease with which the ACORN system can be implemented at Leicester University.
This system will be working in a different library environment, with different printing systems available and possibly with a different main database package.
This will demonstrate both whether the ACORN system model can fit in with the needs of different libraries and also which parts of the implementation of the system can be “packaged” and which need to be rewritten for each installation.
The initial production implementation of the ACORN system at Loughborough is currently in use by students studying a variety of modules hosted by the departments of Geography, Human Sciences and Information and Library Studies.
Initial reactions seem fairly positive and, aside from some teething problems with the PostScript to PCL conversions for departmental printing, it seems to be operating fairly smoothly.
References [1] ACORN Project Web site, http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/ [2] eLib Programme Web site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ [3] Loughborough University Web site, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ [4] Swets & Zeitlinger b.v.
Web site, http://www.swets.nl/ [5] Leicester University Web site, http://www.leicester.ac.uk/ [6] Derek B. Noonburg XPDF distribution, http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/dn0o/xpdf/xpdf.html Author Details Jon Knight ROADS Technical Developer Email: jon@net.lut.ac.uk Own Web Site: http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/People/jon.html Tel: +44 1509 228237 Richard Goodman ACORN Project Technical Officer Email: R.Goodman@lboro.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OMNI Corner: New Societies for the Exploitation of Medicine on the Internet Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI Corner: New Societies for the Exploitation of Medicine on the Internet Buzz software mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Sue Welsh looks at developments of interest to medics publishing on the Internet.
The British Medical Internet Association One Saturday morning last December I found myself on an early train bound for Birmingham Airport, one of the more soulless destinations offered to the Intercity traveller.
Working for OMNI, weekends have long since ceased to be sacrosanct, but on my way to the Midlands, I felt I had more than the usual cause to sigh heavily as the train was, inevitably, delayed.
However, the trip was proved to be well worth the effort, as it offered the opportunity to meet the movers and shakers and witness the birth of the British Medical Internet Association.
The British Medical Internet Association (BMIA) seeks “the advancement of health care through the application of Internet technologies” and is committed to a cross-disciplinary membership from all with an interest in the application of Internet technologies in health care.
Formed by a small number of regulars from the gp-uk [1] mailing list on Mailbase, in September 1996, the Association officially launched on 17th February this year, with a constitution, a working process and 35 members.
Fostering partnerships and collaborative working is a key aim of the BMIA, and they have launched with some proposals already in place.
(One involves collaboration between OMNI and BMIA to build reviews of Internet resources; combining the experience of OMNI in this field and the expertise of BMIA members [2].)
BMIA may also make recommendations of Internet issues relevant to medicine, “when general consensus has been reached among the membership”.
The BMIA recommendation on quality standards for medical publishing on the Web is already available and provides an sensible basis for quality assurance for medics currently involved in writing and publishing on the Internet [3].
More information about joining BMIA can be found on the BMIA Web site [4], which offers a good selection of information about the association, work in progress and plans for the future to non-members, as well as a private section available to members only.
If you want to hear more before you part with your membership fee, the BMIA will be out in force at the Healthcare Computing 1997 conference in Harrogate in March.
MedNet/The Society for the Internet in Medicine In the middle of October last year a large multi-national and multi-disciplinary group of delegates gathered in Brighton on the south coast of England to take part in Mednet 96, the European Congress on the Internet in Medicine.
Delegate Ramsey Badawi comments: “It was an exciting event to participate in it is rare that such a varied group of medical professionals assemble in one place with such a common purpose.
Aside from the scientific programme [5] perhaps the most significant step taken at the conference was the creation by the delegates of the Society for the Internet in Medicine.” The avowed purpose of the Society is to “promote the education of the public and the medical community in the application of the Internet and related technologies in the fields of medical science, practice and management”.
The Society’s efforts so far have focused on organisation of Mednet 97, and this will take place in Brighton again on 3-6 November this year.
Mednet 97 will include a parallel virtual conference, and the Internet community will be able to participate directly in discussions on the presented work.
More information is available on the Web [6].
The Society home page will go live in the next couple of weeks.
It will contain, amongst other things, a guide to searching the Internet for medical information written by OMNI’s own Frank Norman.
The Society will also be producing a quarterly web-based journal about the Internet in medicine, the first issue of which will be out by April 30th 1997.
As well as providing a forum for interested professionals, the Society aims to assist the general public in making the most of the medical resources on the Internet.
The Society also has an international focus, and people from over 30 countries have already expressed interest.
Currently negotiations are proceeding with the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) regarding collaborative projects aimed at helping developing countries to make the most of Internet technologies in medicine.
Membership of the Society is open to both professionals and members of the public it is also open to organisations, institutions and companies interested in furthering its aims.
More information about membership can be found at the Mednet Website [7].
References GP-UK mailing list; this facilitates discussion on new ideas, research, workshops, seminars, conferences, grants, education, software development etc for the UK General Practice (Family Medicine) community, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/gp-uk/ British Medical Internet Association Working Groups; Web Reviews section, http://www.bmia.org/document_park/wg_reviews.htm BMIA-REC-Quality Standards for Medical Publishing on the Web7/12/96, http://www.bmia.org/document_park/standards.htm British Medical Internet Association Web Site, http://www.bmia.org/ Schedule for the European Congress of the Internet in Medicine Conference, http://www.mednet.org.uk/mednet/mednet96.htm#topics World Congress of the Internet in Medicine Web Site, http://www.mednet.org.uk/mednet/mednet.htm Society for the Internet in Medicine Web Site, http://www.mednet.org.uk/mednet/ Author Details Sue Welsh Project officer, OMNI eLib project.
Email: swelsh@nimr.mrc.ac.uk Tel: 0181 959 3666 ext 2536 Web pages for OMNI: http://www.omni.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: David VandeLinde Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: David VandeLinde Buzz dissemination intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Isobel Stark interviewed Professor David VandeLinde about the Dearing Report.
An electrical engineer specialising in communications, Professor VandeLinde was cautious about the general impact of Dearing: “It’s early days to talk about the real impact….It encourages HE to take advantage of new technologies, in particular in the delivery of tuition to students…also it is talking about the dissemination of information more broadly.
My perception is that this is beginning to take off independently of Dearing, after the work done and funded by the HEFCs in computer assisted teaching through TLTP….We are near the point with the Web, Internet and Intranet where they are going to make a difference in the next decade.” Even so, the Professor does not see the paper library or personal tuition disappearing: “I think we are a long way away from the virtual university and…I don’t think Dearing is telling us to do that.” Q: “ What is Dearing’s general message?” A: “Make sure you take positive, aggressive advantage of these tools where appropriate and do it the more classical way where that is appropriate.” Dearing’s general vision for the future, with every student owning a laptop, is also addressed soberly: “Maybe what it means is that not everyone will have their own state of the art laptop but they will have their own machine/word processor and their information access terminal if you will… you can’t put 6000 computers in a building on campus for everyone.
We will also have to cut the cost of communication for students off campus.” The changes advocated by Dearing have a potential impact on research as well as teaching.
I asked Professor VandeLinde if he felt that using IT in teaching would create any extra time which could be used for research: “It’s always a catch up game.
Lecturers can use their teaching time to greater advantage by using computers for what they are good at, so over the next decade we might see IT doing more of the one to one drill type learning leaving the lecturers with more time to work with the students in groups.
Much of the learning process is group interaction which is what lecturers are very good at.” Professor VandeLinde carries this balanced view over into the impact of IT on distance learning, supporting again the selective application of technology: “If we can use IT where appropriate I think we will see more and more of it for communication between tutors and students, just as the OU does.
Will IT have the potential to allow students to learn just as well at home?
I think the answer to that is in limited areas yes, but in lots of areas, no.
We often forget that the major cost of education is the time students invest in it.
The question is what is the best way of delivering remotely?” The human element in the learning process is vital, and although he sees IT contributing in a large measure to the process, if it can be efficiently and economically applied, he still attaches a premium to the personal interface: “I am clearly an advocate of using the technology.
But getting the student and the lecturer there so they can see each other’s body language is a vital part of the process.” The competition brought to education by large commercial interests is also contemplated with equanimity: “There are a number of major corporations as well as small independent companies that are trying to do a better job than the classic open university.
On the margin, they’ve been successful…what I don’t think they’ll be able to do is replace the entire learning experience…they don’t build a community of scholars which generates new ideas.
They are good at disseminating a fixed set of knowledge, but there is more to a university than the given wisdom.” On the question of costs, David VandeLinde sees little to be gained by regarding IT as a force for economy.
Technology is much more to do with quality: “To some degree it’s saving money when we compare what students need to learn today with what they needed to learn 20 years ago, but as far as IT saving money and reducing the cost of education I don’t see that happening.
IT will allow us to keep up with that demand for a greater breadth and depth of education.” The question of quality permeates the professor’s view of the issue.
Bath has a number of national services where he sees a potential benefit to the wider community: “…the services that we have serve the community very well and the university is proud of them.
In the near future we will look at how we can make the services better and add value to the campus.
If we do it well it will bring like minded people to the campus.
If we don’t do it well we won’t see them.” Finally, on the 24 hour opening of the university library, David VandeLinde is equally uncompromising: “Educational experience should be available on demand when the students want to use it, not when we want to provide it.
If the students want to work at 2 am, why not?” Why not indeed?
Author details Isobel Stark Web Officer, UKOLN i.a.stark@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Interface Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface Buzz mobile software java html copyright licence mailbase research Citation BibTex RIS Interview with Jill Foster, director of Mailbase and Netskills.
So then, Jill; in the beginning… Well, I came here as part of the Network group, and was involved in writing assembler programs for the machines that actually helped to run the network on campus.
I wrote the user interface part so I tended to be the one that documented how the network worked as far as local users were concerned.
When it came to the JANET regional user groups being set up I was then the one who got collared to go to some of the meetings.
I got involved in national networking as it was then, then chaired my regional user group and then was vice chair of the national user group.
Also, I was the one who had to deal with people who wanted to transfer files to Bitnet and back, and in helping them I set up some mailing lists for World Health Organisation diabetes researchers, on the Irish LISTSERV in Dublin.
Basically, I felt that the network could really be of much broader use to the academic community than just to computer science people, physicists and networking people which were really the people that were using it at that time.
The other thing that was happening at that time (circa 1987) was that the JNT (Joint Network Team) were basically the purseholders as far as Networking was concerned, on campuses.
They tended to be the people who gave down wisdom, and at that time there were a lot of people who were developing quite a lot of expertise within the community, but there wasn’t really a forum for people to share that experience.
They (the JNT) didn’t have a mechanism that encouraged people to talk to each other electronically.
So, I pointed this out through the regional user groups and the national user groups and they said “speak at the annual JANET Networkshop (in 1988)” which I did, and after that they said “write a proposal for a mailing list service”.
This I did, and it was accepted, and we had a look at what was available worldwide; LISTSERV, though the best around, was only available on IBM mainframes at that time.
There were a few smaller mailing list software packages, but nothing that would really run on Unix workstations; so, having looked around, we decided to write our own code for Mailbase, and that’s how it all started.
Mailbase really started in 1989 to 1991.
The first two year project was a pilot and the first group of lists that we ran happened to be for librarians; they set up a few lists, CHEST also set up a few lists and then there were a few other lists for other groups such as some of the CTI subject centres as well.
We got various people on campus interested and they set up national lists within their own disciplines.
Originally, we said that we wouldn’t set up any computing science lists, because it was a fairly small operation, and we wanted to be proactive in pushing networking out to places where networking hadn’t been before.
So, originally, we didn’t hold any networking lists or computing science lists, because we felt that those people could help themselves and had the means as well.
With the people we were looking at, Usenet news would have been no good, because news tended to stay around for a couple of weeks on campus and then get ditched, and these people were occasional network users.
Lis-link is one of the biggest mailbase lists; how did that start?
That was one of the first groups, yes; Peter Stone was very much instrumental in lis-link being set up.
He was the person who helped set up most of the library lists.
He was very active in giving us feedback and was very keen to get the UK library community working together and discussing issues.
We actually had a national advisory group from day one, and we had people from NISS on it, UKERNA Phil Jones to start with, then Shirley Wood, and Peter Stone and a couple of others.
Peter and the CHEST people were the first major groups of people who had lists on Mailbase.
When you started off Mailbase and its associated mailing lists, how large did you think it/they would get?
Well, I had a slightly different view of it; I wanted it tied up with promoting networking within subject groups and the second bid for the next phase of Mailbase after the prototype was to fund networked information officers for particular subject groups around the UK, connected with some of the subject funding councils and to have individual mailbase machines dotted around the country, running their collection of mailing lists.
The Computer Board, which it was at the time, turned it down and said “no; we’ll fund you supporting groups and a Central Service, but not the individual information officers go to the individual funding councils and ask them to fund the personnel”.
ESRC was the only one that bit the bullet, and it has come out of it extremely well, with Nicky Ferguson and all he has achieved with SOSIG, and it has been quite a flagship from their point of view; ESRC appear as the forward looking research council.
So the original idea was to have a lot of mailbases around, hosting a small number of lists for a particular group, as opposed to hosting one large service.
But it soon became apparent that people didn’t want the hassle of running their own service; they didn’t mind list administration, but they didn’t actually want to run the machines or software themselves.
Therefore, we upgraded the machine a couple of times to cope with the increase in growth, but yes, it has grown, a lot; the original specification for the second chunk of money (the first chunk was for two years for a pilot), for the next three years, specified a machine and said that the funding we were requesting would be sufficient to host around about 500 mailing lists.
We actually reached the 500 mark a couple of months before the end of the 3 years, so completely by chance we were pretty much spot on.
What about the future of Mailbase?
Well, you know the story of “Wells Fargo” their mission is security they used to have these stagecoaches, which carried bullion, and now, after time, they are into security and banks and driving money and gold around in secure vehicles.
Well, Mailbase is about people communicating encouraging people to use the networks to communicate.
At present that’s by mailing lists, but in 5 or 10 years time, it may be by some other technology.
We also are not completely wedded to the mailbase software; what we do is provide value-added service for supporting groups that want to communicate by mailing lists.
Periodically, we look at other mailing list software to see whether they can provide us with a heavy duty mailing list service because we get a heck of a lot of traffic through mailbase and a lot of transactions on the lists.
Netskills where and how was the idea for that conceived?
Very much at Mailbase, really, because Mailbase has never been just the mailing list side; it’s been about supporting groups and communicating and making use of the network.
We used to run training sessions for subject based groups (we still do); and we ran training for social scientists with Nicky Ferguson; we also held hands-on sessions at and before the annual JUGL conference each July.
We also ran courses for university administrators at the AUA conference, as well as other courses; it was going quite nicely.
That wasn’t just about Mailbase, that was about most JANET and Internet services.
Last year, we ran three general courses; this was our first general training course, open to anyone, regardless of subject.
We had 70 people on that; that was “Mailbase: Exploring the Internet”, an introductory workshop, and that went really quite well.
Same format as the current 2 day Netskills sessions; overnight stay, with demos in the evening.
We were then asked by JISC to run two more for new sites connected to JANET, which we did, in February 95 and March 95.
We were already involved in running workshops for developing countries for NATO and the Internet Society.
The first was in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
This allows us to help that country develop its own networking training further.
This also allows us to raise the flag for eLib and JISC services; by explaining and showing how UK initiatives such as these work, it helps them develop their own networking strategies, resources and training.
It also helped us as this was a real trial by fire for our training methods.
We also benefited from close contact with experienced trainers from other countries.
How many people ae you expecting to train over the current lifespan of Netskills?
It depends what you mean by train, because there are presentations and training sessions, the presentations being of different lengths.
What we are doing is to provide statistics on the various courses that we are running, and also the types of people that are being covered.
We have already hit, if you like, a thousand people, but some were for example, “JANET user’s workshop” there were probably 150 there, and that was a 40 minute talk as opposed to a hands-on workshop.
As you saw today [the interviewer was in attendance at the Netskills training session] , the feedback from people we have trained is pretty good so far [the most used word to describe the 2 day training session was “Excellent”].
However, the project has a long way to go, but we are confident, and constantly working towards maintaining quality, well-received training When training people in a fast changing subject area as information networking, there are two main approaches courses seem to take with post-course training.
Either the trainee is retrained at a later date, to bring him/her up to date with new skills, or the trainee is “enpowered” with enough basic skills to keep up with, and teach themselves about, new developements within this field.
Which approach does Netskills take?
Both, really.
We see one role as keeping current on behalf of the training community, so we can keep the materials current, and so people can take updated materials and use them to train others.
We also have the Web-based materials, which can be used by individuals to update their knowledge.
There will be people who will want to come on refresher courses, and there will be people who want to progress from the basic course to an intermediate course or an authoring or service provision course.
So there is really a mix of approaches to what happens to someone after their initial Netskills training.
How do you see the role and place of Netskills within the Training and Awareness section of the Electronic Libraries Programme?
Do you see any problems with overlap between any of the projects/services within this area?
I was worried to start with, but I’m not so worried now.
Edulib is much longer term.
The point was raised that we were overlapping with EduLib in training trainers, but it’s a matter of scale.
They are looking at a much longer term qualification and accredited course, and we are looking at skills training rather than education, if you like.
What we’ve got is a short focused skills based session; we’re looking at giving them the tools and materials to train, as well as showing them how to tailor those materials.
They will get a workshop pack, with for instance checklists of the equipment they need, registrations forms and all that, wheras Edulib is at the other end of the scale, for people who feel that they want to go further than that and take a professional qualification in the pedagogic side of it.
I don’t think there is overlap; rather that it is complementary.
TAPin I was worried about, in that they were talking about developing materials, training people to use the networks, training librarians to be trainers.
They very much overlapped with EduLib and with Netskills, but we’ve been doing quite a bit of the training for TAPin; we sent Brian to do their first workshop.
They have two more sets of workshops, and we are we are definitely doing the next two day ones for them, which will be an introduction to the internet, very similar to the one we have just done now.
There are so many people to train that there is no point in being monopolistic about it; there will be people who have got their own training styles, their own training material and want to carry on doing that.
We don’t have a problem with that, and I was quite happy for TAPin to carry on and do that, but at the same time we wanted to make sure that they knew that if they wanted to make use of us they could do, and that’s what they are doing.
Ariadne; again complementary (or should that be complimentary :-).
We obviously try also, as a by-product of what we are doing, to raise the awareness of the funded services in the UK, because we are trying to give people good networking skills and a lot of investment has gone into Bids, mailbase and the elib projects for example, so that we are just really another vehicle, but we aren’t the main vehicle, for publicising other services.
If we could publicise Ariadne as well, that really kills a lot of birds with one stone.
Is time officially allocated within the Netskills team for keeping up to date with new technologies and the like, or does everyone just keep their “eyes and ears open” with regard to developments in the networking world?
Depends what it is; there is a certain amount of time allocated within the original project plan for keeping current and up to date.
Brian and Donal are the ones that keep up with e.g.
VRML, the Java side of things and so on, and they feed back on it to the group.
What we’ve done in the past, and we’ve done it with Mailbase as well, is to have a demo morning or afternoon, where we’ve each said that we will demo to the rest of the group something that we’ve found, or something that is fairly old hat from the our point of view but for the new trainers is actually quite new.
Things like moos and muds, webchat, vrml and java, worldchat, so that people knew what was going on.
Out of the more recent networking concepts, such as frames, java/mobile code, VRML, developments with HTML and so forth, which ones interest or excite you the most?
As far as Java itself is concerned, this is quite exciting.
Maybe not Java itself, but mobile code is an interesting development, particulary from the training point of view of downloading interactive tutorials and running them locally.
Our policy on Netscape extensions (to HTML), and also on draught versions of the HTML specification, is to keep a watching brief and to alert people to them, as well as alerting people to the problems of proprietary tags such as the Netscape extensions that are currently around.
Any thoughts on what happens to Netskills after the current funding runs out?
We have to look at Netskills as a three year project, which is what we are funded for.
So in our business plan, and in our project plans, particulary towards the end of our second year, we need to be looking at how to generate income to become financially self-sustainable if necessary.
There are various ways of doing this.
We currently make our training materials free, for academic use; we may have to licence them and to charge a small amount of money to cover updates (in other words to cover staff effort to update the materials).
Similary, our workshops; we cover direct costs but our staff costs are covered by the budget, so we may have to make a larger charge for workshops in order to cover staff time as well.
So there are ways in which we could generate income.
It will probably take a year or so before we can tell if there will be a continued market for network training; my gut feeling at present is that there will be; it is changing all the time, people need updating all the time.
In addition, the population, or user community is expanding all of the time.
In one way the network is becoming easier to use, so therefore there is a less of a need to train people.
On the other hand there are other possibilities; for example, a year or so ago not many people wanted to author; now, a lot of people are wanting to put teaching and research materials out there.
The network itself is becoming easier to use, but their expectations of what they should be able to do are rising.
A personal view is that this is something that will be required after the end of the project, but how it is funded needs to be sorted out.
Depends as well on the current funding and political climates.
Do you think that the eLib programme, as it stands now and as it is moving forward, is fulfilling its role in realising some of the requirements that came out of the follett report?
I suspect that some of the projects really won’t get anywhere, but some of them will.
Some won’t get anywhere?
That seems to be part of the philosophy of it; until you fund what is effectively in some areas an experiment, you can’t tell whether it’s going to be successful or not, but that doesn’t mean to say that it’s been a waste of money in doing that.
I certainly welcome the concerted effort in looking at the issues of copyright and charging for electronic journals and things like that.
We are really ahead of other countries in areas such as information gateways; this, for example, was something championed by Nicky (Ferguson) and taken up by quite a few others with funding from Follett, and I think that that in itself is really going to be of benefit to a large part of the academic community.
As Lorcan once said “What we currently have is a flea market, and what we need is a Department store”, and that is currently what eLib are doing; we had a sort of flea market on the network, with bits and pieces of information, some of it good, some of it bad, and people had to rummage around to find useful bits.
What you wanted to do was to go in and say “right; third floor: SOSIG here’s all the social science information, all neatly packaged, labelled and priced; second floor: humanities and history” and so on.
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View from the Hill Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill Buzz video research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl quizzes John Kelleher of the Tavistock Institute about the E-word.
The main reason why the eLib projects are so aware of the need to evaluate what they do is that the Follett Implementation Group in Information Technology (FIGIT), in establishing the programme, commissioned the Tavistock Institute [1]to assist projects in the preparation of self-evaluation strategies.
Founded in London in 1947, the Tavistock is an independent notfor-profit organisation which combines social science research with professional practice.
At around the time that it was setting up its Evaluation Development and Review Unit (EDRU) about six years ago, John Kelleher a social science researcher who had done some European-sponsored research and development work into technology transfer moved from County Cork to the Tavistock.
"I think I was hired because I was considered to know something about technology."
But technology is not what interests him.
"What we find time and time again is that technology is the pretext for organisational change.
That's what I find really interesting."
The EDRU was closely involved with eLib in the early months of the programme, producing guidelines for projects to follow in preparing their evaluation strategies, running workshops around the country and offering free clinics at the Institute's base in Tabernacle Street.
"I would hope that by now there is no one involved in an eLib project who has been untouched by evaluation, or who will look upon evaluation in quite the same way again."
Having done the work of empowerment, Kelleher and his colleagues in the EDRU have now taken what he calls a "supporting, back seat role".
Programme-level evaluation is still to take place, but the Tavistock does not expect to be involved in that.
"We're probably too close to the programme now to be the best choice" he remarks.
His knowledge of academic library culture is impressive, as is the eloquence with which he speaks about the distinguishing characteristics of the eLib programme.
"I think eLib represents a break from older models of higher education funded programmes" he comments.
"These often became quite autarchic once the grant was made.
FIGIT was much more directive about what it wanted.
There is a real emphasis upon the programme rather than just a basket of projects.
ELib has an architecture."
Some of the features of that architecture have come in for criticism.
What does he feel, for instance, about the consortium approach?
"It has strengths and weaknesses.
Certainly the overheads are enormous, in the costs of meetings and in the investment in time required by project managers.
But ultimately the products and services which result have a greater generalisability, and are less idiosyncratic."
The legacy of eLib, Kelleher believes, will be not only organisational change, but sectoral cultural change.
Perhaps there has been an assumption, not very successfully borne out in practice, that a programme like eLib will take advantage of communications technologies to overcome the project management difficulties of consortia?
Video-conferencing seems an obvious example.
Kelleher is wary of overstating the role of technology.
"I have a colleague who believes that video-conferencing is unsatisfactory because the participants cannot smell each other, which at a subliminal level has a real influence on the way we interact emotionally and cognitively.
He's thinking of patenting a 'scratch and sniff' device for video-conferencing suites."
More seriously, the communication difficulties experienced by consortia should not be blamed upon the limits of e-mail or video-conferencing.
"It's to do with cultural and organisational differences, with the fact that people are coming from organisations with different perceptions and ways of doing things."
For Kelleher, it is crucial that evaluation does not happen in a way that is detached from the main activity of projects, and he sees it linking vitally to the production of business cases and exit strategies.
Many projects are producing products and services which will require investment if they are to be lifted out of the R&D phase into stable implementations.
At an early stage, projects need to think about whether they are producing something genuinely likely to have a market.
"Behavioural change in the community is what it's all about and one of the most effective indicators of behavioural change is the decision to invest in something new."
But what about those projects which will fail to persuade anyone to put their hands in their pockets and pay for what they have produced?
Is it not that very fear that makes project personnel so wary about evaluation?
Kelleher admits that this is the difficulty.
"We all hate failure.
But eLib is an innovative programme.
If no project failed, the only conclusion you could reach is that the programme should never have been funded in the first place.
It is unfortunate" he continues "that in our culture we look upon evaluation as a punitive thing.
If things are going awry, then it's time to stop and think, 'OK let's do it differently. '
That, after all, is what FIGIT wants to read in the project annual reports.
Not that everything is perfect."
He has been impressed by the "instinctive tendency to collaboration" which he has found in working with librarians, in sharp contrast to academics, whose approach is much more competitive.
Could it be a survival strategy?
Does he see the products of eLib hastening the end of the profession?
"Not at all.
What they do will change, but their role will not.
And the same goes for publishers.
It's an academic fantasy to say that we can cut out the publisher.
I find that sort of rhetoric deeply boring."
Ultimately, in Kelleher's view, the Electronic Libraries Programme is not about electronics or libraries.
It's about people and behaviours.
And this is reassuring.
References [1] Tavinstock Institute Web site, http://www.tavinstitute.org Author Details John Kelleher works for the Tavinstock insititute, significantly on evaluation within the eLib programme.
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The Access Catalogue Gateway to Resources Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Access Catalogue Gateway to Resources Buzz software database metadata browser cataloguing opac windows z39.50 ddc licence gopher ftp cd-rom interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Terry Hanson explores how libraries might develop effective ways of indicating their access arrangements to their users.
Libraries are developing the access model of information provision and questions are raised regarding the method by which users discover the resources to which they have access.
The traditional holdings model depended wholly upon the traditional catalogue.
Conceptually it was a simple task to catalogue a library’s physical stock.
It is clear, with the access model, that even when limited to traditional scholarly information the task of informing users of the resources to which they have access is huge.
When the concept of information is broadened to include sources such as websites and discussion lists we find ourselves trying to harness the entire Internet.
Libraries cannot compete with the main search engines or with the specialist subject gateways.
So they will need to develop effective ways of indicating their access arrangements to their users.
What they create might be called their “access catalogue” as distinct from their traditional “holdings catalogue”.
Library websites: the story so far Libraries have been constructing websites since the advent of the WWW, and before that the Gopher software was used to provide a gateway to the Internet.
The typical library website fulfils two functions.
It provides information about the Library and its services, and it acts as a gateway to networked information resources.
Initially this paper is limited to conventional library resources such as bibliographic databases and electronic journals.
Most libraries have adopted a fairly common approach to the gateway issue.
A distinction is made between locally owned electronic resources (the holdings) and those that are available via the Internet (the access arrangements).
The grey area in between includes resources such as the BIDS and EDINA databases, but nevertheless the general distinction has been maintained.
A typical arrangement would be to list electronic information services in one area of the website and to list selected Internet resources in another.
Resources that involve formal subscription or purchase are normally considered as owned.
They would include CD-ROM databases and also major electronic journal sites on the Internet.
Anything that is free to everybody would not be included in this category.
This distinction was examined during a recent and ongoing redesign of Portsmouth University Library’s website.
An informal survey of library sites in the UK was conducted to see how the Internet Movie Database was listed.
The reasoning was that this resource, as a good example of a high quality database would probably have been bought by most libraries, and therefore included in their holdings list had it not been on the Internet and free.
In all the websites visited, the IMDb, if listed at all, was among the selected Internet resources.
Any distinction by source, cost, or technology was considered to be unhelpful.
Portsmouth adopted an integrated approach with the sole criterion for inclusion of any item being: is it any good (assuming we could afford it if it was not free)?
Thus a listing of bibliographic databases would include the IMDb and PubMed (a free version of Medline), locally networked services such as PsycLIT or ABI-Inform, and the various JISC-funded services from BIDS, EDINA and Midas.
A listing of reference sources would integrate a locally networked OED on CD-ROM with an Internet subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica and with the many free dictionaries on the Web.
A list of electronic journals would include subscribed titles and free titles .
What about the networked CD-ROMS?
If the access catalogue exists to indicate all of those resources to which the users have access behind a single web-based interface the first problem is the local CD-ROM network.
Though many databases published on CD-ROM now have a web client (such as those from Silver Platter when mounted on an ERL server) the majority of such products may be accessed only via local campus networks using either Novell Netware or Windows NT.
The most elegant solution to this problem is called Winframe from Citrix which will enable Windows applications to be accessed in terminal mode, where all the processing takes place on the (NT) server.
This arrangement makes it possible to extend the life of otherwise redundant 486 PCs acting as terminals.
Microsoft has now adopted this technology and incorporated it, under the name of Windows Terminal Server (formerly Hydra), in the upcoming Windows NT version 5.
However, it is the ability to access Windows applications across the Internet using Citrix’s ICA (Independent Console Architecture) client that is of prime concern here.
The client can be used either alone or as a plug-in to Netscape.
In the latter mode it becomes possible to present an integrated list of databases regardless of technology.
The user would only need a web browser to be able to access any available networked database.
There are, however, licence as well as technical considerations.
Database producers and publishers will often require separate agreements and/or additional licence fees for off-campus access.
Some, such as PsycLIT, may not be accessed off campus at all.
What else to include?
The access catalogue will need to include more than just bibliographic databases and electronic journals.
The main questions concern the policy for providing access to websites and other Internet resources such as discussion lists, newsgroups and FTP sites.
Virtually all library websites provide a select list of Internet resources.
A typical arrangement is to use subject librarians to maintain collections related to local needs.
The main debating points are the extent of this local work and how much they should rely on subject gateways or general search engines to provide access.
As a minimum library websites should point to these gateways and search engines, and to other general resources.
But the library should go beyond this and provide a more extensive collection of resources, tailored to local needs and presented in an integrated manner.
There is also the broader question of the general online learning environment that will be effective in integrating information resources within the general processes of teaching, learning and research.
Here, information resources will be available in a variety of ways and not just via the access catalogue.
Reading materials associated with particular courses could be linked directly from that course’s home page to course announcements, lecture notes, exam papers, course-based discussion lists and so on.
The access catalogue is conceived as the principal interface to selected information resources.
But there would also be customised views of resources based on the interests, or access rights, of staff and students.
Access would be controlled by information contained in the login script of each user.
The undergraduates, for example, might see a listing of their current courses linked to appropriate information resources.
This in turn raises interesting questions about exposing students to the totality of available information and is reminiscent of the debate about undergraduate libraries.
Building the access catalogue Building the access catalogue is perhaps the most difficult issue.
How will it be created?
More specifically, should it be built by using, for example, the library’s OPAC capabilities or by using software designed for creating Web gateways?
Or perhaps a local solution may be preferred?
The OPAC is one tool that provides access to information in the modern library.
It has the specialist function of describing local physical resources.
Notwithstanding the possibility of placing URLs in the record and configuring the welcome screen, it could be said that the OPAC is not necessarily the right tool for the job.
The access catalogue, as a gateway to networked resources, needs to use traditional cataloguing but it will also benefit from being designed for its own particular purpose.
The OPAC is one component of the available information within the hybrid library.
The access catalogue is conceived as the complete picture.
The latter includes the former, not the other way around.
The access catalogue and the OPAC might be linked, or integrated more tightly, by means of the Z39.50 protocol.
However, it should be stressed that the model discussed here is based on integration mainly at the presentational level.
Higher level integration issues, such as a single interface to interrogate all available databases regardless of source, are a logical next step but outside the scope of this paper.
Search and browse?
Books and journals are resources that will normally be searched for by the known elements of author and title.
Reference materials will not typically be known about in advance.
Users will benefit from being guided to these materials and the access catalogue should have this as one of its prime functions.
The same can be argued for other materials such as websites, discussion lists and electronic journals.
A good model for the access catalogue is that of the searchable directory, such as Yahoo.
Structured browsing is, in other words, as important as searching, especially when the user is not sure what he or she is looking for.
OPAC systems are not designed to provide this approach.
They can meet part of the need, namely for searches limited by resource type.
But the hierarchical browsable directory that is now a standard feature of most Internet search engines and eLib subject gateways is, I believe, not possible with the current generation of OPACs.
Within the access catalogue all resources would be categorised by type.
When searching, these categories would be available as qualifiers.
They would also be available when browsing by subject.
At the appropriate subject level in the hierarchy, resources would be presented in these categories.
Access cataloguing If we are to develop the access catalogue we should do so with the same professionalism that we bring to the holdings catalogue.
In practice this means that resources should be recorded properly and consistently.
It appears that most current contents of selected Web sites are not formally catalogued or well maintained.
The cataloguing function should be extended to the access catalogue though the implications of this for workloads will need careful consideration.
There is another question: should the metadata record contain classification keywords or notation (e.g DDC), or should subject retrieval be based on free text searching of the title and descriptive text?
It should be noted that a descriptive text element is not common in the holdings catalogue but is common in web gateways.
As for the structure of access catalogue records the options are to develop a home grown system or adopt a networked resource description (or metadata) format such as Dublin Core.
The advantage of Dublin Core lies in the potential for interoperability with other standards such as Z39.50 Conclusion The purpose of this article has been to argue for an integrated approach to the presentation of electronic information resources regardless of location, technology platform, or cost.
The notion of the access catalogue has been proposed as the vehicle for this combined collection and some of the practical issues relating to its construction and management have been considered.
References Reference: Dempsey, L. and Heery, R. (1998) Metadata: a current view of practice and issues.
Journal of Documentation, 54(2), 145-72.
Author details Terry Hanson is the Psychology subject librarian at Portsmouth University Library and is responsible for the redesign of Portsmouth’s website.
He is also a member of the ARIADNE editorial board.
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Charging Ahead?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Charging Ahead?
Buzz copyright multimedia Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Jenkins summarises Richard Lucier's Follett Lecture Series talk on charging in HE Libraries.
Librarians in Higher Education will become market-oriented product and service developers operating in a partially commercial environment within the next few years, according to Richard Lucier, Librarian of the University of California at San Francisco.
He believes that libraries can no longer afford to subsidise full access to information for all users.
Lucier's Follett Lecture, presented at Leeds in June, described how his library had coped with major cuts in central funding, accompanied by significantly higher prices for scientific information.
Charging users directly for some services has become essential, he argues.
External users of the library at UCSF pay to view the special collections, for training sessions in library use and for a growing array of other library services traditionally provided free to patrons.
In 1991, 90% of the library's funding was received centrally from the university.
Now, that proportion has fallen to 75%, and by 1999 it may be as low as 50%.
Librarians need to be hard-headed about the way they make their services available.
"Ask yourselves who your primary clients are, what their information needs will be and what technologies will satisfy those needs" said Lucier.
The stress is on the word needs.
"We don't do anything any more because it's nice to do".
Lucier argues that there is no intrinsic conflict between charging and service after all, information services were never really free before.
"The choice is to charge or to cut back on services to our primary clientele".
Charging for services, he noted, can lead to higher customer expectations and improved service.
Yet Lucier is passionate about the value of libraries.
"We must distinguish ourselves with unexpected service".
He cited examples of such service provided by certain department stores.
Libraries need to emulate these, "putting the customer first", and to engage in product marketing.
"We need intuitive products which form an integral whole."
An example is UCSF's GALEN II digital library service, which provides access to current journal articles, and services like Medline, through a Web interface.
It has been well received by academics, partly because of its convenience for those who work from home and partly because they find it easy to use.
The only complaint mentioned by Lucier was that, once they'd tried it, the academics wanted all journals to be available this way.
The aim with GALEN II is to provide something which is as logically laid out as a well-planned library building.
Lucier's library is publishing parts of its special collections in various formats, and beginning to charge users for access.
An example is its collection of tobacco industry documents, which is in constant demand.
The commercialisation of such a collection opens it up as a resource to users far beyond the academic world.
The library also provides an AIDS information service.
This raises a potential ethical dilemma which Lucier acknowledges.
Should it charge AIDS sufferers?
Policy is still in formation.
"We shall work to balance health promotion for the public with the need to generate funds."
Finally, Lucier has confidence that universities and their libraries are more powerful than they imagine, and should utilise their bargaining powers in dealings with publishers.
At UCSF, academics are reconsidering assignment of intellectual property rights to publishers, and are taking active steps in the multimedia arena to maintain and exploit these rights.
The Library is rejecting the high prices being set for access to electronic versions of journals.
Lucier urges other librarians to do likewise.
"Don't accept these initial terms they will set precedents."
It is a message which some of his users may find ironic.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Lesly Huxley writes about a new Internet service for social scientists.
Planet SOSIG has a new satellite: the Social Science Research Grapevine.
Grapevine provides an interesting compliment to the range of social science Web services hosted at the ILRT at Bristol, including SOSIG, REGARD and Biz/ed.
The service is now also included in social science workshop modules offered by the ILRT joint services Internet training team.
What does Grapevine offer?
Grapevine is a new and unique online source of career development opportunities for social science researchers which was officially launched at the (IRISS’98) conference in March.
It has received development funding from the ESRC and has the support of a wide range of social research organisations from all sectors.
It is run as a not-for-profit service supported by subscriptions from advertisers of relevant career development opportunities.
Some of the SOSIG team have been involved in Grapevine’s development and registered users are provided with a personalised view of SOSIG based on their Grapevine research profile.
Grapevine is the one place that social science researchers should look for jobs, training, careers and collaborations.
Rather than having to connect to the individual Web sites of employers and training providers in the academic, government, voluntary and commercial sectors to find opportunities of interest, social science researchers can hear it all on the Grapevine!
Services for advertisers and researchers Since the start of its development phase in October 1997, Grapevine has carried a wide range of advertisements from all sectors.
Annual subscription rates compare very favourably with traditional print media and, once subscribed, advertisers can place an unlimited number of advertisements without further charge during the subscription period.
Grapevine is particularly suited to short-term contract vacancies which are rarely advertised in the national press because of high costs.
Employers can also browse and search CVs Online and Likeminds for details of researchers seeking work or opportunities for collaboration.
CVs Online and Likeminds allow researchers to publicise their research and professional interests free of charge.
CVs Online present research skills, qualifications and experience in a formal way and provide an opportunity to specify preferred work regions and sectors.
Likeminds offer a personal profile of research disciplines and subjects of interest plus a text message for details of work, information, or collaboration sought, announcements or descriptions of work in progress.
It is this profile which provides the personalised view of SOSIG.
Work is also in progress on creating similar personal links to REGARD.
Future Development Grapevine offers potential for the development of focused user services based on research profiles.
Work is already underway on creating an optional email notification system whereby registered users could receive an email update of new Grapevine entries matching their specified interests.
There is potential to extend the notification system to new additions to other services such as SOSIG or REGARD and/or the creation of an online ‘My Grapevine’ view of jobs, training opportunities and resources from other services.
Feedback and Further Information Feedback about the existing service has already been very positive, from advertisers and users alike.
If you would like to make a comment or suggestion about Grapevine, please use the online feedback form available from any of Grapevine’s pages.
Further information about the service, including terms and conditions for advertisers, is available online in Grapevine’s About Us … section.
If you would like to distribute fliers, receive a copy of the Grapevine newsletter or publicise the service in some other way, please send your request via the feedback form, by email to grapevine-info@bris.ac.uk or to the Grapevine team at ILRT.
Author Details Lesly Huxley Grapevine Project Manager Institute for Learning and Research Technology 8 Woodland Road Bristol BS8 1TN Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Elvira 4: May 1997, Milton Keynes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Elvira 4: May 1997, Milton Keynes Buzz data software framework database infrastructure identifier copyright video cataloguing opac windows hypertext multimedia cache ocr licence privacy algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Bloor reports on the recently held Elvira (Electronic Library and Visual Information Research) event.
As regular readers of ‘Ariadne’ will know, the fourth annual ELVIRA conference has just taken place at Milton Keynes.
The following article is based on my general impressions of the event.
A more detailed and complete account can be found in the collected papers, which have been published by Aslib [1] .
The ‘extended abstracts’ originally submitted for review are online at the ELVIRA Web site [2].
In the keynote address to the conference, Brian Cook (Griffith University, Queensland, Australia) identified the issues facing people working in the electronic (aka digital/virtual) library field.
The list appears daunting: the growing information needs of all levels of society; the impact of the increasing involvement of new players (the entertainment industry, cable and satellite companies) in the provision of electronic information; technological issues (including the need for standards); issues relating to the changing roles of information creators and providers; the lack of consensus in the areas of electronic publishing and copyright.
Nevertheless, Professor Cook’s presentation was upbeat and positive.
Many existing problems could be solved by a collaborative approach.
He urged a greater synergy across research projects, and the establishment of consortia (for example, Australian Universities have combined to negotiate a single license agreement with a publisher for an electronic version of one of its journals).
Above all, greater attention should be given to users.
Researchers should ensure that developments are not purely technology driven, and that they relate closely to real information needs.
The conference provided evidence that there is already movement in this direction.
The variety of papers indicated a wide range of research activity from initial exploratory studies to mature, large scale projects.
Technological issues were covered, but also legal and economic issues, and many papers focused on user needs.
A number of papers described the development of new systems where the study of users and their requirements is playing an integral part in their development.
The MUMLIB project (Deirdre Ellis-King, Dublin City & County Public Libraries) involves a user centred approach to the design of multimedia resources.
This has been applied to the development of the Wordsmiths CD, which profiles a number of contemporary authors from Denmark, Ireland and Portugal.
The process began with user trials of similar products.
The findings from these informed the development of a prototype: for example, a basic Help facility was created for users who were not familiar with Windows conventions, and browse facilities were developed because it was seen that most users preferred browsing to query-based searching.
User trials were also used to evaluate the prototype.
This led to several amendments of the system, though the overall assessment was very favourable.
A clear, well designed interface and good content were seen as prerequisites to a good system.
This welcome focus on user-centred development was also strongly evident in other projects’ presentations, such as those of PATRON [3] and SuperJournal [4] (both ‘eLib’ projects).
Christine Baldwin’s SuperJournal presentation discussed the findings of a baseline study to examine stakeholders’ initial expectations of the system.
The prospects of improved access, full-text searching and the use of multimedia were welcomed.
At the same time there were some concerns, over (for example) the possible influence of the electronic format on writing style, and the problem of identifying the good quality sources of information from the rest.
Brian Whalley (Queen’s University, Belfast) described the setting up of a new electronic journal, Glacial Geology and Geomorphology [5].
Surveys of potential users were carried out to identify how the electronic format could best provide added value.
The rapid publication of papers (including colour diagrams) and correspondence were seen as definite advantages.
As in the SuperJournal project, there was some uncertainty over the quality of much Web-based material, so publication by an established publisher and (in particular) a system of peer review were seen as important.
Clearly, user studies are also essential to monitor and evaluate services once they are running.
Caroline Lloyd (London School of Economics) gave an excellent presentation on one such study, for the DECOMATE project (Delivery of copyright material to end-users).
A variety of quantitative data (from interviews and focus groups) and qualitative data (from electronic questionnaires and analysis of log files) was collected and analysed.
David Zeitlyn and Jane Bex (University of Kent) used a micro-study technique which examined key stokes and video recordings of clients using a library OPAC.
Breakdowns in the interaction between user and OPAC were examined closely.
The analysis called into questions some of the assumptions made by both system designers and librarians about the extent to which users actually understand such systems.
Zeitlyn and Bex’s double-act presentation brought out the need to ground our high technological aspirations in the reality of users’ technical competence and training needs.
David Nichols and Martin Twidale (Lancaster University) described an attempt to give library users an opportunity to make contact with other users who were interested in the same materials (“collaborative browsing”).
The research was directed at printed materials in the library so that it could be conducted without the necessity of amending library system software, but the authors hoped the principles could be applied to electronic systems.
In order to participate in collective browsing, users have to provide details about themselves.
In this study, their reluctance to give up this element of their privacy outweighed any benefits they perceived in the scheme.
In fact, with refreshing honesty, Dave Nichols bravely described how this particular piece of their research had produced little data, and had thus in itself highlighted incorrect assumptions in the research paradigm.
There is a long-heard complaint that researchers only report the successful, not the unsuccessful studies, thereby missing the chance of sharing the ‘learning experience’, so perhaps such reports are to be encouraged (though maybe within workshops rather than plenary paper sessions).
Other papers examined the effectiveness of particular electronic library systems an important issue for library managers, who increasingly have to choose between alternative technologies for delivering the same information.
Ann Morris (Loughborough University) described the FIDDO project (Focussed Investigation of Document Delivery Options) which will evaluate a number of electronic document delivery services.
Christine Dugdale (University of the West of England), in a paper based on evaluative research carried out during the ReSide Electronic Reserve [6] project challenged the assumption that electronic libraries necessarily provide equality of access to their users.
While the electronic library overcomes many of the limitations of paper-based resources, particularly in the type of high demand material included in the ReSide system, the ability of users to access material can be affected by a number of factors.
These include the IT infrastructure, the level of expertise and training of the individual user, and copyright restrictions (which may bias a collection towards resources where no copyright problems exist).
The issue of copyright was, as always, a recurring theme at the conference, and the subject of one of its workshops.
In the absence of an explicit legal framework for electro-copying of copyright material, negotiations between publishers and libraries and authors still tend to be on a case-by-case basis and limited to the duration of a particular project.
Looking on the hopeful side, there is a growing body of experience and examples of good practice in this area.
Leah Halliday (University of Stirling) reported on the negotiations with publishers on behalf of the Scottish Collaborative On-demand Publishing Enterprise (SCOPE), which is developing a resource bank of teaching and learning materials for a consortium of 13 Scottish higher education institutions.
A SCOPE [7] model contract has been developed.
The related issue of charging was also discussed: how, and whether, the various costs should be passed on to library users.
George Pitcher (Napier University) discussed the security and reporting aspects of the SCOPE system, features which can reassure publishers that their material is properly protected and managed.
The system includes encryption of documents, user identification, logging of transactions, and “watermarks” on all printouts, giving details of the individual printing the document, and the date.
Documents are stored in PDF format, which publishers generally seemed to prefer because of the protection it offers against copying and altering.
There are additional complexities for some projects dealing with different materials, as Elizabeth Lyon’s paper on the PATRON project showed: their negotiations also had to cover performing and recording rights.
Quality was another frequently mentioned term.
Biz/ed [8] (Catherine Sladen, University of Bristol) is a subject-based information gateway (SBIG), which provides a range of users (14-19 year olds, higher education students, teachers and lecturers) with links to quality assured Web-based sources of Business information.
Resources are inspected and catalogued by a distributed team of academic subject specialists from different institutions throughout the country.
To be included in the gateway, resources have to meet five quality criteria: scope, content, form, process, and collection management.
Biz/ed is an example of a project which has benefited from collaboration.
It has close links with a number of other SBIGs, sharing the same software (the ROADS database).
The conference also covered a range of other technological ideas and developments.
Michael Emly (Leeds University) discussed the technical issues raised in the Internet Library of Early Journals project [9] , which is producing a digitised version of a number of widely used 18th and 19th century journals.
Pages are scanned, then OCRed.
Scanned pages can then be retrieved by free text searching of the OCR text.
The OCR text contains errors, but these are partly overcome by fuzzy search algorithms.
Some improvement in accuracy could be obtained by completely re-keying the journals, but the chosen method is the most cost effective.
Two papers described strategies to combat problems caused by the huge scale of the WWW.
The volume of material now accessible on the WWW means that if users want to retrieve information from one of the large WWW search engines (like Lycos) they need to be able to carry out complex queries.
Gary Mooney (De Montfort University) described the application of fuzzy logic and user modelling to assist users in this.
A fuzzy modelling query assistant was developed, which gathers information about the user and their needs, and then builds an appropriate query.
John Kirriemuir (UKOLN, University of Bath) described the techniques of mirroring and caching which aim to reduce bottlenecks on the WWW by creating copies of heavily used resources.
These raise technical issues, particularly when copying complex sites containing indexes and dynamic pages and also issues of responsibility and rights.
The paper included recommendations for a service level agreement between an originating site and the mirroring site.
Christian Schloegl (Karl-Franzens-Universitat Graz, Austria) described a prototype of hypertext library catalogue (HyperKGB), which provides users enhanced browsing capabilities, and could be offered as an additional option to the traditional query-based method of searching.
A number of studies (including MUMLIB, mentioned above) have suggested that most users prefer browsing as a means for retrieving information, so more intelligent browsing facilities are clearly to be welcomed.
I should also mention the other ELVIRA delegates, who ensured that the discussions which followed from the papers were lively and informed an important ingredient to the success of any conference.
With most other information available on the Web these days, it is good to know that stirring from your desk can still bring non-digitisable rewards.
A wide range of organisations was represented, as well as several overseas countries, though there were not many people from public libraries something which can hopefully be rectified next year.
References ASLIB Web Site, http://www.aslib.co.uk/aslib/ Elvira Web Site, http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/ELVIRA/ELVIRA4 Patron Web Site, http://www.lib.surrey.ac.uk/eLib/Patron/Patron.htm Superjournal Web Site, http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/sj/ Glacial Geology and Geomorphology Journal Web site, http://ggg.qub.ac.uk/ggg/ ResIDe Web Site, http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/itdev/reside/ Description of project SCOPE, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/scope/ Biz/ed Web Site, http://www.bized.ac.uk/ Internet Library of Early Journals Project, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ Author Details Ian Bloor Email: ipb@dmu.ac.uk Tel: 0116 255 1551 ext.
8049 Address: International Institute for Electronic Library Research, Gateway House, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Short Loan Projects Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Short Loan Projects Buzz digitisation copyright multimedia research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl discusses some of the issues involved in the digitisation of short loan collections.
Short Loan Collections have long been a necessary evil in academic libraries.
Sometimes called 'Reserve' or 'Heavy Demand' collections, they were developed as a compromise solution to the problem of providing sufficient copies of undergraduate texts to meet the demands of large numbers of students all requiring access to the same texts at the same time.
Among the latest group of eLib projects to be funded are four in the new 'Electronic Reserve' area.
ERCOMS, based at De Montfort, concentrates on copyright management.
ACORN, at Loughborough, will use a commercial partner as an agent in negotiating copyright clearance.
ResIDe, led by the University of the West of England, will base its pilot system on the Web, and will in addition consider the supply side by providing a means for academic staff to publish their material directly into the system.
Web access is also the interface favoured by PATRON, at the University of Surrey, which will concentrate on a collection of multimedia materials in the performing arts.
The problem of copyright clearance for digitisation, so prominent in the On Demand Publishing area, is here too the most difficult bridge to be crossed.
The aim of each project is to identify the most heavily-used material in particular fields, negotiate copyright clearance with publishers, and then provide access to a digitised version of it.
None of the projects is beginning with book material, even though multiple copies of undergraduate text-books are the mainstay of most short loan collections.
The three text-based projects will focus upon journal articles, tackling the 'fair dealing' clause in the Copyright Act head-on.
Fair dealing permits a single copy of a chapter or journal article to be used for private research.
Libraries traditionally police this by warning students of the conditions of use by means of notices.
With electronic copies available, however, the policing becomes more difficult, and the ability of the user to make copies much easier.
ResIDe is using electronic forms based around an 'honour' system.
ERCOMS will take a different approach, investigating tracking technologies.
Success in this area may be crucial in determining the future of fair dealing in copyright law.
Copyright in the performing arts field is most complex of all.
Liz Lyon of the University of Surrey comments "With a musical recording, collecting societies, the record company, the performers and the composer may all be involved in the copyright clearance procedures."
But the very idea of an 'electronic reserve' collection is something of an absurdity.
Materials which libraries reserve in their short loan collections are there simply because the library cannot meet the demand for a single text object.
Reservation assures a fair and equitable system of access.
But the same object, once digitised and made available on a server, is no longer reserved.
Short loan collections have often been accused of imposing poor study habits upon students, forcing them to concentrate on 'important' sections of material without an appreciation of context, and steering them towards superficial learning styles because of the time limitiation upon the material.
They have been criticised for 'spoon-feeding' students with lecturers' own choices of the 'best' material available.
The Electronic Reserve projects aim to revolutionise a situation in which students are served up small chunks of high-demand material for short periods.
Unrestricted access, 24 hours per day, without any time limitation, is the aim.
If it succeeds, this could be one development in which the arrival of the electronic library provides a real benefit to the learning styles of students.
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10th Annual Anglo-Nordic Seminar Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 10th Annual Anglo-Nordic Seminar Buzz software framework infrastructure archives metadata schema copyright cataloguing opac hypertext z39.50 marc unicode ftp research Citation BibTex RIS Kelly Russell from the eLib programme describes this seminar, which heavily featured speakers and current issues relevant to the UK digital libraries movement.
On 11-13 October 1996 I was fortunate to be invited to participate in the 10th annual Anglo-Nordic Seminar, held in Lund, Sweden.
This annual event is co-organised by the British Library and their Nordic colleagues at NORDINFO.
Each year the seminar is based on a particular theme and this year it was Networking.
The event was preceded by an all day session called a "Metadata Information Day".
As a result, metadata was a thread woven through the rest of the two day seminar; however, in an international environment, standards issues inevitably rise to the top of the agenda.
In an increasingly global academic community, the success of such an event serves to highlight the increasing importance of collaboration and sharing in an international context.
Lund is a lovely, quiet little town at the southern tip of Sweden it is actually much closer to Copenhagen than it is to Stockholm.
We flew from London City airport into Malmo.
Having never been to Sweden I'm sure I am left with a somewhat distorted view because I'm sure the calm and tranquillity of Lund can't possibly apply to Stockholm!
It's cobblestone streets and ivy covered brick buildings are an irresistible invitation to simply sit in a cafe and read a novel.
As the home of the oldest university in Sweden, Lund is an intellectual focal point and as such provided a wonderful backdrop for.....a weekend of discussions on networking!
Fortunately our Nordic hosts arranged our schedule to allow for time to visit the cathedral as well as attending a reception and tour of the Skissernas Museum (The Museum of Sketches).
The weather in Sweden was lovely so, despite having an intense programme for the two days, the UK delegates were provided with opportunities to enjoy their Swedish surroundings… [ed right, that's enough to make us jealous, now get on with the work!].
A METADATA INFORMATION DAY The Metadata Information Day was an open day, intended to provide some background and explanation of metadata and specifically the implementation of the Dublin Core.
Rachel Heery has provided a succinct survey of metadata issues; and some background on the Dublin Core can be found in a recent article by Paul Miller in the last edition of Ariadne.
The day was open to delegates from all over the Nordic Countries and provided an effective forum for disseminating information about metadata.
The plain fact is that people won't use the Dublin Core unless they KNOW about it.
Stuart Weibel from OCLC ran most of the Information Day and provided an excellent backdrop for introducing the Dublin Core.
As developers and implementers of the electronic library some of us forget that there are a great many folk who have difficulty in conceptualising a librarian's role in cyberspace, never mind debating the relative merits of different metatdata formats.
Even for those deeply involved in electronic libraries development, the day provided a refresher course in why we do what we do.
The Nordic Metadata Project The Metadata Information Day finished off with a presentation by Juha Hakala from the Helsinki University Library on the Nordic Metadata Project.
This relatively new project is funded by NORDINFO.
The main tasks of the project include: evaluation of existing metadata formats enhancement of the existing Dublin Core (DC) specification and making any necessary modifications to accommodate the Nordic Classification System creation of a DC-MARC conversion system (making use of an already existing prototype which converts DC into NORMARC), as well as a reciprocal system to convert MARC into DC development of a "metadata" aware search service development of user support and a metadata production environment Day One of the Anglo-Nordic Seminar Rachel Heery opened the first official day of the Seminar with a presentation on the Metadata schemes in the ROADS, DESIRE, and BIBLINK projects.
ROADS is a project with is developing the underlying software infrastructure for subject based information gateways.
The project is currently making use of the WHOis++ search and retrieve protocols and using IAFA templates (Internet Anonymous FTP Archive) to catalogue Internet resources.
The DESIRE project is a large multi-national European project of which UKOLN is one partner.
Work at UKOLN for the DESIRE project include enhancing the ROADS software for a European context and incorporating Harvesting facilities into future versions of the software.
UKOLN is involved in this aspect of the project as well as with colleague in Sweden to develop an automated indexing robot.
Work to improve bibliographic control of electronic publications is ongoing in the BIBLINK project which also involves colleagues at UKOLN.
Work in the BIBLINK project is divided into two distinct areas.
The first is National Libraries assessing requirements etc., while the second is work with publishers to investigate the format of publisher's electronic documents, explore options for metadata and to nurture consensus building.
Following Rachel Heery, Sigfrid Lundberg of Lund University Library's NetLab, introduced the Nordic Web Index which has as one of its main objectives, the creation of a "metadata aware" robot based search service.
Sigfrid described two different types of metadata that exist now: what he called "inherently unreliable" author or publisher supplied metadata which is currently easily recognised by a robot; and secondly, the hopefully more reliable third party metadata.
For the first type of metadata, Sigfrid's statistics show the vast majority of records, for which metadata exists, use the IAFA template.
Embedded metadata, like the Dublin Core, is rare and generally of very low quality.
Of the more "reliable" third party metadata, the most common are ubiquitous link collections and the "annotated URLographies" (e.g.
SBIG's).
After coffee the seminar moved away for the focus on searching and metadata to a more content-oriented focus.
The title of the session was Electronic Journals and included a presentation by Steve Hitchcock of the eLib Open Journal Framework project (Southampton University), which was followed by a discussion panel.
Steve began the session with a presentation of OJF which encouraged us to think about journals in a different way in a more interactive, non-linear, on-line way.
Steve suggested that in the same way in which glue binds together the contexts of a print journal, so the hypertext link is the binding agent of an online journal; in order for us to move beyond the fixed notion of a journal we must think about it as a "live" journal.
Steve's presentation was followed by an hour discussion lead by a policy panel.
The panel members were: Steve Hitchcock, OJF Anne Leer, Oxford University Press Lars Davies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, Information Technology Law Unit Leif Andersen, The National Library Authority, Denmark Kelly Russell, The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) The afternoon session on Saturday moved into another important area of networked information distributed systems and the OPAC.
Mogens Sandfaer of DTV Denmark began the afternoon by describing the problems inherent in a distributed collection.
In the Nordic countries libraries have used a union catalogue but even with the advantage of such a system, a user must still learn to use a different interface in order to search the catalogue.
The Web offers the potential of a simple click to search different catalogues and, with the introduction of Z39.50, the ability to search remote catalogues through one's local OPAC interface.
Mogens briefly described the work done in the Europegate project which allows multi-thread searching, and project UNIVERSE which will tackle the challenges of language and character sets using UNICODE.
Next, Lorcan Dempsey, Director of UKOLN, described the eLib funded MODEL's project which is ongoing at UKOLN.
Lorcan provided an overview of the 3 MODEL's workshops which have tackled areas of distributed library services.
MODELS work has been designed around 5 workshops covering the following topics: Distributed article discovery and retrieval Network resource discovery and metadata National resource discovery for printed scholarly material Access to mixed media and multi-domain resources Managing access to distributed library resources These workshops, 3 of which have now taken place, have highlighted the need for an integrated approach rather than separate isolated services or projects.
Reports from the early MODELS workshops are available on the web.
Clare Davies of the Institute of Electronic Library Research at De Montfort University kicked off a session after tea which focused particularly on the users.
She gave an overview of the different perspectives which converge in digital library research.
While information scientists may focus on what users do when conducting an on-line search, psychologists may explore how a users information processing skills reflect a particularly unique "information schema", developed according to one's own personal experiences and background.
These multifarious perspectives all beg different key questions which need consideration if we are to provide systems which reflect an understanding of user behaviour.
Day 2 The second and final day of the seminar began bright and early on Sunday morning.
It seemed especially early as most of the delegates were out late Saturday night in Malmo for the conference dinner, enjoying the generous hospitality of our NORDINFO colleagues!
Fortunately the morning was devoted to issues of "cultural change" in libraries in this new electronic environment.
Catherine Edwards gave an overview of the IMPEL2 project the Impact on People of the Electronic Library project.
We were reminded of the very appropriate words of T.S.
Eliot who suggested that "Culture is not merely the sum of several activities but a way of life".
As if to prove theory with practice, Terje Hoiseth spoke next about his experiences as the first head of a converged library and computer centre service in Scandinavia.
The University Library at Lulea (I am told this is the northernmost city in Sweden) amalgamated the library and computer centre in the last two years and Terje maintains that the most important element in making a smooth convergence was simply having a shared coffee room.
No kidding.
He suggests that this shared space meant a great deal of discussion and sharing was possible and people from both departments could go through the growing pains together.
One of the most interesting facts about this new converged service is its management structure which is almost totally flat.
Terje is the director of the service but management is mainly through TQM (total quality management) techniques such as teamwork.
There was much debate about the possibility of incorporating such a structure into our own organisations.
The seminar concluded with three presentations on "national strategy".
Nigel McCartney, head of Research and Innovation Centre at the British Library, asked first if it were possible to have a national strategy.
He thought it was, but suggested that a great deal of investment was necessary and this sort of strategy involved players from many different sectors including government, Higher Education, Public Libraries and increasingly the private sector.
He emphasized the mutual benefit that could come of partnership with the private sector and encouraged us to investigate different and innovative models for supporting a national strategy.
Frans Lettenstrom from the National Library of Sweden, described in detail the main projects in which the national library is involved; these included increasing free access to public information, providing legal statutes and proceedings via the WWW, and material dealing with Swedish cultural heritage.
The final presentation of the seminar was given by Annikki Hyvarinen from the Helsinki University Library in Finland.
Although there is no national network strategy as such in Finland, the number of hosts connected to the network in Finland is higher than in any other Nordic Country.
Standards issues are important in Finland but, much to the envy of many colleagues in the audience, Finnish libraries all use the same software: VTLS have provided software for the entire country and this of course makes access to distributed collections much less difficult.
Annikki has only been in post for a short time but she suggested to us that very soon Finland would have both a national collection and service policy.
Thus concluded the 10th annual Anglo-Nordic Seminar.
The event was very successful , well organised and interesting.
Both Graham Jefcoate of the BL and his colleagues at NORDINFO did a splendid job of organising both the formal and informal programmes.
The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly the UK delegates enjoyed a wonderful dose of Nordic hospitality!
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Planet SOSIG: The New SOSIG Interface Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: The New SOSIG Interface Buzz data software database portfolio archives thesaurus identifier cataloguing url Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Hooper describes the new interface and features of SOSIG, the premier Web-based subject gateway for the Social Sciences.
On 1 July, the SOSIG Team [1] launched the service’s new Interface [2].
This has been the first major overhaul of the SOSIG service since February 1996 and provides a number of ground-breaking new features and enhancements thanks to the introduction of a new version of ROADS [3] and the expertise of our development team.
The new look builds on the successes of the earlier interface, retaining and refining the button bar and providing much more online information about the service as well as extensive help.
The long list of browsable subject headings has been restructured to provide more options for browsing including geographical parameters: users can now search and browse by subject AND by geographical regions.
Search facilities have also been refined and extended and now include a Thesaurus derived from the HASSET [4] Thesaurus which was developed by The Data Archive [5].
SOSIG is now using ROADS version 1 for the first time.
This is a key milestone for ROADS, meaning that in early July version 1 will become the recommended public release, superseding version 0.2.5.
The added functionality of this latest version of ROADS is used to the full on the new search and browse interface, as well as behind the scenes for the creation of records and the description of resources.
An alpha release of version 2 is expected shortly afterwards.
This will allow true cross-searching across multiple gateways with indexing based on the concept of centroids.
Nearly all the features requested in version 2 of ROADS have now been completed.
The number of high quality resources accessible through SOSIG is rising and now stands at around 1750.
This figure should increase steadily with the introduction of our Section Editors [6] a team of social science librarians from universities across the UK, each of whom will take responsibility for the identification, evaluation and cataloguing of resources under one or more SOSIG subject headings.
This will not only increase our coverage but also allow the service to benefit from more focused subject expertise.
In addition to the 1750 key resources, a completely new catalogue of social science departments has been created.
Here’s a brief tour of the ‘new look’ SOSIG.
The SOSIG Home Page New features on the Home Page include an updated button bar the UK and World Resources buttons have been replaced by a single Browse SOSIG button this reflects the ability to browse a European catalogue of resources in addition to the original UK and World catalogues.
Other buttons include a link to extensive help and guidance through the service and a What’s New section which will contain details of new resources plus other newsworthy information.
Figure 1: The new SOSIG Home Page The links at the bottom of the page provide detailed information about SOSIG itself and our European Colleagues [7].
The SOSIG Training [8] link provides details of our portfolio of workshops, current bookings and a complete set of downloadable workbook documents to allow users and support staff to run training workshops themselves.
One major change to the SOSIG catalogue is the creation of a separate departmental database [9].
This database contains links to UK university social science departments these pages may not be world class resources in themselves but will provide very useful contact and project information for users of the service.
The database currently contains UK departments only.
To catalogue every social science department in the world would be a massive task so we are relying on users to submit their details to us [10] for inclusion in the database.
Browsing SOSIG A new page for browsing the SOSIG catalogue has been created which replaces the UK and World browsable sections.
The resources have been catalogued into broad subject areas and then into sub-sections beneath each area.
Users can choose either to browse all subject areas and sub-sections within a particular region (World, Europe or UK) or to browse a single subject area and sub-sections.
Figure 2: Browse SOSIG Catalogue form The sub-sections have been created by restructuring and reclassifying the resource descriptions held on the SOSIG catalogue this will allow the catalogue to grow without creating the long subject listings which had begun to appear on the old interface.
The subject areas are also browsable by region.
This is currently limited to World, European and UK resources and reflects the work with our European partners on the DESIRE [11] project.
Individual European countries will become searchable once sufficient resources have been catalogued.
Emma Worsfold wrote in detail about our work with European Correspondents in the last edition of Planet SOSIG [12].
Searching SOSIG The new SOSIG search looks very similar to the previous version and if more than one word is entered, the default is still to combine them as an implicit AND search.
Enhancements include the ability to perform phrase searches (compare the results of entering public records as a search term as opposed to “public records”).
Field-specific searching is now also available for title, description and keyword fields.
You can now also search for hyphenated words.
Figure 3: SOSIG simple search form Additional extended search options include the ability to search by region again this feature will be extended when sufficient country-specific resources are added to the catalogue.
A link is provided to the new Thesaurus from both the simple and extended search screens.
If the search term results in no matches the user is taken directly into the Thesaurus to help find alternative and related search terms.
The display of search results has been redesigned using the configurable ROADS software.
The number of results matching the search term is now displayed our users had told us that this was an irritation on the previous interface as they either had to scroll through the resource descriptions or choose to display titles only to get an idea of the number of matches.
Users can now connect to the resource from either the title or the URL at the bottom of the resource description.
Figure 4: Typical SOSIG search results SOSIG Thesaurus Another significant enhancement to the SOSIG Interface is the introduction of the Thesaurus.
SOSIG has recently obtained agreement from the UK Data Archive to use the HASSET Thesaurus developed there.
Evaluative work has shown that users often use a single search term and may not be particularly adept at considering alternative terms.
The Thesaurus should significantly increase the precision of searching and facilitate the location of resources via SOSIG.
SOSIG will be working with the UK Data Archive, IBSS [13] , the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE [14] and Qualidata [15] to establish a social science Thesaurus based on HASSET.
Keywords used by the contributing services which are not currently held in HASSET will be submitted as candidate terms which can then be included in updates of the Thesaurus, thereby increasing the value of the Thesaurus to all users of the various services and avoiding duplication of effort.
Figure 5: Typical SOSIG Thesaurus form We expect most users will encounter the Thesaurus when their search term returns no matches.
At this point the user will be sent directly to the Thesaurus where they can look up alternative terms.
If the Thesaurus finds alternative terms they will be listed within related, broader and narrower sections.
Clicking on the hyperlinked terms will take the user to the catalogue records containing those terms.
The Thesaurus will also be very useful when a user gets too many hits with a search term as it will allow rapid focusing on narrower terms.
Your feedback is welcomed During the design of our new Interface we consulted both our Section Editors and User Group [16] and their feedback was invaluable.
We are always looking for user feedback this comes mostly from workshops and conferences but we would welcome comments both positive and negative from our users.
Feedback on the new interface should be sent to sosig-info@bris.ac.uk References [1] The SOSIG Team, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/contact.html [2] SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway), http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ [3] Resource Organisation And Discovery in Subject-based services (ROADS), http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/ [4] HASSET Thesaurus, http://biron.essex.ac.uk/services/nhasset.html [5] The Data Archive, http://dawww.essex.ac.uk/ [6] SOSIG Section Editors, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/contact.html [7] SOSIG European Collaboration, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/europe.html [8] SOSIG Training, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/training/ [9] Social Science Departmental Database, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/depts.html [10] Add a resource to SOSIG, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/sosig/cgi/newurl.pl [11] DESIRE Project Web pages, http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire/ [12] Planet SOSIG Ariadne Issue 9, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/planet-sosig/ [13] IBSS Online, http://www.bids.ac.uk/ibss [14] Centre for Economic Performance, http://cep.lse.ac.uk/index.html [15] Qualidata, http://www.essex.ac.uk/qualidata/ [16] SOSIG User Group, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/usergroup/ugroup.html Author Details Tracey Hooper, SOSIG/DESIRE/REGARD Training Officer, Email: t.a.hooper@bristol.ac.uk Web Page: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/tracey.html Tel: 0117 928 8472 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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SKIP: Skills for new Information Professionals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SKIP: Skills for new Information Professionals Buzz html cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod reports on the changing skills profile in LIS.
This article is an extended version of that which appears in the print edition of Ariadne.
The SKIP project (SKills for new Information Professionals) [1] is drawing to a close.
Based within Academic Services at the University of Plymouth, SKIP received JISC funding for one year within the Training and Awareness strand of the eLib Programme.
The project team comprises Ivan Sidgreaves, Dean of Academic Services, Project Director, and Penny Garrod, Researcher.
A Project Advisory Group has been set up to evaluate and advise SKIP, and is currently looking at effective ways of disseminating the research findings.
The main aim of the project has been to evaluate the impact of IT on the skills of staff working in LIS within higher education.
This sounds relatively straightforward but the size of the task has grown, and it is impossible to deal with skills in isolation as there are implications for training, professional education and ultimately the future of the profession.
Information professionals are not excluded from the general imperative to re-skill and update existing skills.
In addition, staff are having to adjust to new ways of working in an era of change, and rapid technological innovation.
The general trend is towards continuing professional development and lifelong learning, but this is less easy to put into practice in relation to IT skills, which can become redundant before they are even mastered.
The hierarchical organisation, in which everyone had a place and a clearly defined role, is no longer viable in a world of constant change.
New matrix structures are slowly being introduced, with staff working in teams, and taking on several roles concurrently.
We interviewed around 150 staff at 18 institutions.
We talked to heads of service, senior managers, and staff at all levels, and tried to define the gap between current skills, and desired or required skills, bearing in mind that for many staff the electronic library has yet to become a reality.
The 18 institutions involved in the project were quite diverse in terms of type, size, geographical distribution, and the level of technological development.
At the time of the SKIP visits (October 1996 to March 1997) many information services were undergoing changes involving re-structuring or convergence.
However, the main catalyst for change was the ‘electronic library’ itself, and several institutions had new purpose-built accommodation promising a brave new world of wall-to-wall workstations, and unlimited access to a range of networked resources.
These buildings had opened recently, or in some cases were still being built, and there were often stark differences in the level of service on different sites within the same institution.
A number of trends were identified during the course of the interview programme.
There was a focus on the role of the information or help desk to support users of workstations located in the library.
There were two different approaches to staffing these information desks: either to use computer services and library staff to cover both IT-based and subject-based enquiries, or to employ ‘hybrid’ staff who have both IT and information-based skills.
Managers were concerned that staff should have critical thinking ability and problem solving skills.
They saw IT skills as something which could be learnt or taught.
They were also concerned with the personality of staff and wanted flexibility, customer orientation, and an outgoing personality.
There was considerable evidence of staff taking on a teaching and training role.
User education is no longer an annual trudge round the library, but is geared to student assignments, and focuses on their specific information needs.
The role of academic liaison, too, is increasingly being adopted by subject specialists.
It requires staff to have an in-depth knowledge of the faculty and department and its teaching methods to enable them to act as link people.
More and more posts, especially in small institutions, are a composite of several roles and tasks.
Another trend is for para-professional staff to be doing the work of professional staff.
Tasks are being shunted ‘down the line’ as professional posts diminish, and remaining professional staff take on new roles and additional tasks.
Para-professionals are often the first port of call for users, and they report feeling isolated, exploited and inadequately trained.
Staff are also unhappy with the plethora of interfaces on CD-ROM, and the rate at which new CD-ROMs are being added to stock.
By contrast they report few calls for assistance in the use of the Internet.
Web page authoring, and the selection and evaluation of Internet resources for inclusion on campus information networks is becoming widespread.
Staff are attending HTML courses, such as those offered by Netskills, in order to acquire the basic skills.
Yet they are confused as to where their responsibilities lie in relation to IT support.
The situation in many institutions is akin to looking through a kaleidoscope: the pattern is constantly changing as managers seek new ways to make diminishing resources go further.
It must be emphasised that many of the institutions were in an interim phase, in which changes had either recently been implemented or were imminent.
Staff were either settling into new roles, or anticipating changes to their roles and responsibilities.
Our conclusion is that there are many opportunities opening up for information professionals, provided that they do not cling to a professional identity which has its roots in the past.
SKIP talked to staff who saw potential involvement in distance learning programmes and courseware development.
The way forward is through collaboration with colleagues from teaching and computing services, with more team working on projects, such as Web site development and resource-based learning programmes.
In general staff were confident of a continued role for information professionals into the future, and they felt that traditional library skills were transferable to the networked and electronic environment.
A belief in a continuing demand for the book is strong, and, ironically, staff commented that electronic information resources, whilst extremely popular with students, had led only to increased demand for printed resources.
References [1] SKIP: SKills for new Information Professionals http://www.plym.ac.uk/faculties/research/skip1.htm Author Details Penny Garrod, SKIP Project Research Officer, Phone: 01752 232343 Fax: 01752 232293 Email: pgarrod@plymouth.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Burnside Writes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Burnside Writes Citation BibTex RIS John Burnside confesses that the electronic page does not provide the experience he wants as a writer or for his readers.
Last week I attended a talk given by Alec Finlay, publisher and guiding spirit of the Morning Star Folios for the last several years.
The discussion centred on the book as an art form, as a beautiful object in itself, as something more than the sum of its parts.
I was there for interest, partly because I am currently engaged in a collaboration with an artist, but mainly because I love books and knew there would be a fair number of fine examples to look at and handle and enjoy.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I have no argument with electronic publishing: it fulfils many functions social, political, educational, even aesthetic; it has the capacity to inform, enlighten and entertain; it is immediate, highly flexible, and may be interactive in ways a book cannot begin to be.
And not to sound too pessimistic a note, I would also say that the future of the art book is also safe.
There will always be those who want to make or own fine books, just as there will always be printmakers, painters, sculptors, poets and artistic catalysts, like Alec Finlay, to encourage and foster collaborations between artists.
What I do have reservations about, however, is the ascendancy of all things electronic.
For myself, I write poetry to appear on a page, in as finely-produced a book as the economics of publishing allow: I want the materiality of the book and the intimacy that comes with it; I want the feel and smell of the paper, the look of the page and even, in spite of a tendency to feel dissatisfied with past work, the fixed and unalterable quality of the book.
A good book is an all-round sensual experience; quite simply, electronic messages are too lacking in physicality to compare.
Traditionally, a library was a depository for books: the very name implies that.
In the future, I can see that this role will decline, as libraries continue to develop their role as information centres.
Politically, economically, socially, this is what is being demanded of librarians.
I do not believe it is worthwhile to resist such necessary change, even though I am chilled when I hear of (at least one) educational establishment which discards any book that has not been borrowed over a certain period.
By focusing resources on electronic media, libraries can solve a multitude of logistical problems, as well as hugely widening their scope.
The boundaries to the free flow of information, (and misinformation), are dissolving and, in spite the opportunities it offers to Nazi apologists and pornographers, amongst others, any improvement in communications must be welcomed.
All I would ask, from hard-pressed librarians everywhere, is that they keep a space for the book as object, quaint and old-fashioned as it may be, for those of us who just want to take it down from the shelf and open its foxed or dust-scented pages to a favourite well-thumbed page, and read, in the full sense of the word.
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Caching In?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Caching In?
Buzz data software infrastructure copyright linux cache url research Citation BibTex RIS George Neisser describes the National JANET Web Caching Service.
The UK JANET Web Caching Service, managed jointly by the Universities of Manchester and Loughborough, provides an efficient, state-of-the-art, caching facility for the UK Academic and Research community.
Its primary objectives are to reduce unnecessary duplication of network traffic between the community and the Web, and to minimise the time taken to download Web pages from remote sites.
The former results in a more cost-effective use of limited and expensive bandwidth; whilst the latter facilitates a more productive use of the Web.
To-date the JWCS has made its biggest impact in reducing the amount of Web traffic across the Atlantic to the USA, (Web traffic amounts to approximately two thirds of the total JANET transatlantic traffic), which has delivered significant financial savings.
Since the inception of the JWCS, a JANET caching infrastructure has been developed.
This has been achieved by encouraging all universities and other eligible organisations to establish their own local site caches and to link them in to the JWCS.
We now have in the UK one of the most developed caching infrastructures in the world, the benefits of which will become increasing obvious in the coming years as demand and traffic levels continue to increase unabated.
We now describe very briefly the actual service and some of the development work being currently undertaken.
Future articles will describe the various components of the JWCS in more detail and report on new developments.
The JWCS The JWCS is supported by approximately 17 machines located at Manchester and Loughborough.
Most of these are Intel based with 256MB of memory and approximately 25GB of disk capacity per machine, running FreeBSD and Linux, and the 'Squid' Web caching software.
The service also comprises a Web site and machine dedicated to the production and analysis of cache statistics and associated reports.
At the last count we had some 150 organisations registered to use the service a number that is likely to increase significantly as more eligible organisations join the service.
Most of these sites run their own local caches which 'peer' with the JWCS in 'parent' mode, resulting in a 2 level cache hierarchy across JANET.
The JWCS currently handles approximately 20 million requests and transfers around 150GB per day, making it one of the largest Web caches in the world.
Since the current service began on 1st August demand has increased tenfold, and we expect a further two or threefold increase by the summer of 2000.
Our 'hit-rates' (the percentage of requests for Web pages actually cached) fall between 25% and a respectable 40%.
This means that if, on a given day, the JWCS transfers 100GB of data to clients, with a hit-rate of 40% the bandwidth saved is 40GB.
In a 'charging' environment where institutions have to pay for their use of bandwidth, the potential cost savings are obvious.
Development of the JWCS Part of our remit is to ensure that the JWCS utilises the best technologies and methodologies available to deliver the best possible service to the community.
Our overall objectives are to maximise the cost-effectiveness of caching and minimise Web page retrieval times.
Areas currently under investigation include: The improvement of the performance of the individual caching machines, by ensuring, where possible, we use the most reliable and fastest technologies.
The improvement of inter-cache cooperation of the individual machines to minimise page retrieval times and improve hit-rates.
The establishment of caches supporting particular content or domains by utilising 'content smart' switchs.
For instance 'domain' caches based on Internet domains such as '.com', '.edu' and so on, may be expected to significantly improve hit-rates and reduce retrieval times.
Introduction of very high speed machines capable of replacing several of our individual caches.
How to incorporate Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) and regional MANs into the national caching infrastructure.
How best to develop the national caching infrastructure to take advantage of the latest developments in technology and methodology.
Conclusion The JWCS is a rapidly expanding service with an emphasis on the evaluation of new technologies and methodologies to ensure it delivers the best possible service to its users, the UK Academic and Research Community.
Future articles will explore individual areas of caching in more detail.
In the meantime we would encourage you to visit the JWCS Web site at: <URL: http://wwwcache.ja.net/>.
If you have any comments or suggestions please email: support@wwwcache.ja.net Author Details George Neisser Manchester Computing University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL Email: george.neisser@mcc.ac.uk Web site: http://wwwcache.ja.net/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: Birkbeck Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: Birkbeck Buzz html database copyright cataloguing opac research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne interview with Philippa Dolphin at Birkbeck, about how IT issues are tackled there.
Birkbeck College An institution owing its origins to a 19th Century Mechanics’ Institute, yet with 40% of its work at postgraduate level, a high research rating and only 5% of its fte drawn from full time students is a place where you might reasonably expect a pragmatic mix of the old and the new in its attitude to widening access.
You would not be disappointed as Philippa Dolphin begins to describe her approach to the issue.
“All of our students are highly motivated, and the majority are in full time employment.
The pressures on them are those of time and studying in the evenings in addition to everything else.
Some of our approaches, particularly the way we combine conventional access measures with a developing an IT based strategy, will be of interest.” It is clear that the approach is not ideological or dogmatic in any way.
“We still currently have a traditional view of teaching, with an emphasis on face to face classroom teaching, and this is sometimes reflected in our support services.
Until comparatively recently our two open access libraries were predominantly hard copy collections with no audiovisual material and very little electronic information.
Our extra mural courses are still supplied with book boxes and these are serviced from a separate closed access library which ideally would be merged with our other collections.” The things you would expect to find in an institution which teaches from six to nine every evening are there: as well as the book boxes there are the long opening hours and an experimental postal learning service for distance learners.
This supplies books, articles and searches.
Alongside there is a developing IT based approach.
There is remote access to several databases including BIDS, Uncover, Index to Theses, and CD ROM databases via Silver Platter’s ARC system.
The library catalogue can also be accessed remotely, and using the Horizon system, controlled by a Pin number, allows online renewal and reservation.
From the start of next session there will be a CD ROM network which will enable users to dial up to access a Web based interface.
The heart of the strategy, however, lies in OPEL.
“I think our OPEL (Organisational Psychology Electronic Library) Service might be unique, certainly outside eLib.
It delivers copyright material electronically to students who are learning at home via computer conferencing.” Designed to support Masters courses in Organisational Psychology and Occupational behaviour, and Diploma courses in Careers Counselling and Consultancy, the database contains examination questions and model answers by lecturers, journal articles and information about the course modules.
The intention of the library is to extend it to other courses.
“There are financial problems, but we’ve got to be flexible and implement new services.
A heavily decentralised system such as ours creates many pockets of excellence, but it can result in the marginalisation of central services.
Academics are starting up new Web based courses whose students cannot benefit from traditional library services, so we need to devise ways of providing for them, otherwise we will become redundant.
The cost of OPEL is about 37.5K per year, from College Development Funds.
Without a database manager, Birkbeck buys in any expertise they need, and existing staff resources are mainly used to deal with copyright clearance, scanning and proof reading.
HTML is currently used in order to reduce downloading and printing time, but the Project ACORN team, which recently assessed the service, are recommending a change to PDF Text.
Their report also said that Birkbeck has been able to “explore many of the issues surrounding the electronic delivery of high-demand course materials to distance learners.
Indeed, it has been particularly successful in negotiating permission for remote usage of materials.” This is done through direct negotiation with the publishers, and is helped by the fact that many of the academics in the Department of Organisational Psychology are on editorial boards of the main journals and are also retaining the right to supply copies of their material to their students.
For the future, a number of improvements are planned.
The electronic resources will be catalogued and made available from the Horizon Web OPAC when it is instituted.
OPEL will then be integrated into the mainstream library activities, it will be seen as a library service, and its use will increase when it is accessible by subject and keyword searching.
Dolphin is clear that this is only the beginning of major change.
“We have a new Master who is enthusiastic about the use of IT in teaching and learning, and sees the digital library as central to this strategy.
All the Library staff have PCs on their desks and the majority are fairly IT literate, but we will still have to buy in skills and we will be looking over time at the development of design skills and perhaps CD ROM production skills.
Apart from setting up electronic collections for other disciplines such as geography, where a new Web based Masters is under development, and absorbing the closed access library into the Malet Street Library, we’d also like to see an extension of the distance learner service to include other groups such as disabled students, and an improved telephone enquiry service.
Providing support services for part time students is seen as a pragmatic and refreshingly theory-free zone.
At Birkbeck there is a simple and effective strategy based on a number of approaches.
Central to this are a range of focus groups, surveys, feedback forms, departmental questionnaires and what the Library calls “dialogues” with users.
They know what the users want and what the implications are for the library.” emphasis on flexibility, the front line, good publicity, an increase in business, possibly charges, and learning from other businesses.” References The Birkbeck College website is at: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/Departments/Library Author details Lyndon Pugh, Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries, Public Support?
the Mission Behind Buildings, Books and Bytes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries, Public Support?
the Mission Behind Buildings, Books and Bytes Buzz data research Citation BibTex RIS Laura Weiss outlines a major American survey that looked at the disparity between key librarians views of the future, and what the public who used those libraries really wanted.
With more and more Americans turning to their desk-top computers for information, American libraries have been struggling to redefine their role.
Numerous library leaders, aware of the seismic impact of the digital revolution, have crafted visions for their field that include cutting edge, building-without-walls, digital libraries, as well as partnerships with other public service information providers, such as schools and public broadcasters.
But little has been known about the public's willingness to subscribe to an expansive vision of libraries as technology leaders in the digital age.
Numerous public opinion surveys over the years had documented Americans' special affection for their public libraries.
But how far is the public willing to go to extend to libraries a leadership role in the digital age, and what challenges will libraries face in communicating to the public their drive to create a leading role for themselves?
To begin to address these issues, the W.K.
Kellogg Foundation asked the Benton Foundation to conduct a study that would measure the distance between a group of library leaders' visions for the future of their institution and the public's willingness to support that vision.
Specifically, the Kellogg Foundation wanted to help its Human Resources for Information Systems Management (HRISM) grantees -which included institutions as diverse as community freenets and the American Library Association -pinpoint where the public supported or failed to support libraries as they confronted the digital era.
More broadly, the two foundations -led by Tom Reis at Kellogg and Susan Bales and Larry Kirkman and Benton -sought to identify specific communications challenges for libraries as they endeavored to stake out a new identify.
The result of this exploration was "Buildings, Books and Bytes," a study released in November that has elicited widespread, positive reaction from the library community -both individual librarians and professional associations alike -as a needed call to action to a profession struggling to carve out a meaningful role for itself in a rapidly changing information landscape.
Briefly, the study found significant gaps between library leaders' expectations for their profession and those of the public.
The public lends libraries a degree of overall support rarely enjoyed by other American public institutions.
Yet, Americans are not yet ready to cede to libraries the role of technology leader.
And, in a finding that shocked many members of the library community, Americans appear to have low regard for librarians as a cadre of skilled, highly trained information professionals, believing that volunteers can staff libraries just as well -and for fewer tax dollars.
Thus, the public's message to the library world was clear: "do not simply assume that if you say 'we are now technology leaders, follow us,' we will follow.
We need to be convinced. "
The report apparently struck a responsive chord in the American library community.
In November alone, all or parts of "Building Books and Bytes" was accessed over 4600 times from the Benton Foundation website [1].
Over 650 copies of the report have been mailed out to libraries, librarians and other interested individuals worldwide.
In addition, the American Library Association distributed 20,000 copies to its members.
Communications Daily, a highly-regarded communications trade publication, covered the release of the report, as have other U.S. media outlets.
Indicative of the library community's receptive response was a September editorial by Library Journal, which urged its readers to take seriously the report's finding that "despite years of promoting library advocates, the profession has failed to convince, or even communicate to a significant number of Americans the idea that librarians are highly skilled professionals needed for a capable of leading them anywhere."
The president of the Public Library Association, Ginnie Cooper, praised the report for "making a fine contribution to our understanding of how people view libraries."
Individual librarians weighed in as well with reactions to the report; a librarian based in a suburb or Washington, DC expressed anguish at the report's finding -mirroring her own personal experience -of the public's apparently low regard for librarians' ' professional status.
Genesis of the Report When the report was originally conceived in the winter of 1996, both the Benton and Kellogg foundations believed that libraries needed to clarify where they stood with the public as growing numbers of Americans turned to their desktop computers for information.
Library leaders over the years had develop and enunciated a set of policies and visions for their profession.
Yet the public will to support these policies was unclear and the intensity of that backing untapped.
Recent American history has been replete with examples of opinion leaders, pushing reform agendas, who had failed to pay sufficient heed to the public's stake in and understanding of their mission.
Attempts in the early 1990s to reform the American health care system had met with public resistance at least in part because of leaders' failure to take into account fully enough how their desire for change conflicted with some of American's long held views and values.
Thus, the methodology for "Buildings, Books and Bytes, " was designed explicitly to ferret out discordance between the public and library opinion leaders.
The methodology was modeled on studies conducted over the last several years by the Public Agenda Foundation that measured the difference in public and elite opinion in two key areas of American public policy: health care and education reform.
The studies found significant gaps between opinion and policy leaders' views on what reforms should be undertaken and the public's willingness to subscribe to and support those initiatives.
Thus, the Benton and Kellogg foundations strove to help libraries understand public sentiment toward them as they waded into the tumultuous waters of the digital age -and perhaps through a carefully constructed communications campaign, avoid some of the pitfalls that had thwarted the goals of other policy leaders as they attempted to sway the public toward their views.
To begin the process, the Benton Foundation analyzed the written vision statements of the HRISM grantees to develop an overview of library leaders' visions for the future of their institutions.
Leigh Estabrook, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, then conducted telephone interviews with each of the grantees to tease out a fuller understanding of some issues -including budgetary constraints -that were only glimpsed in the written statements.
To probe the public's views, the Benton Foundation secured the services of two nationally-recognized public opinion firms: Lake Research of Washington, DC and The Tarrance Group, a survey research firm based in Alexandria, Virginia.
The firms and Benton Foundation staff (Susan Bales and Laura Weiss) designed a survey questionnaire to assess Americans' general support for libraries and their reactions to libraries as technology leaders.
The national survey, which was conducted in the April 1996, consisted of a random sample of 1,015 Americans.
Additional survey data was obtained from the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut.
One focus group was conducted.
Residents of a suburb of Washington, DC, all of whom were library users, participated in the focus group.
Andrew Blau at Benton placed the report's findings in the context of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and other communications policy issues, and Larry Kirkman, Benson's Executive Director, provided oversight of the project.
In May, the HRISM grantees met in Washington, DC to observe the focus group, debate the draft findings of the report and discuss the possibility of crafting a communications campaign that would reposition libraries as pivotal community information providers.
The participants discussed several positive findings from the poll.
These included a finding that families with children are much more likely to have computers at home and also to use their local public library, suggesting a strong nexus between children, computers and libraries.
The participants also reflected on some challenges unearthed by the survey research.
They debated how to contend with the apparent lack of support for several library services and roles among younger Americans, those in the 18-24 age group.
(Libraries may be able to take advantage of the support families with children lend to their libraries and their relatively heavy use of computers.
A 1995 Public Agenda study on public attitudes toward educational reform, "Assignment Incomplete," found that eight in 10 Americans now consider computer skills part of "the basics," along with reading, writing and arithmetic.)
The notion of libraries as "community information brokers" possesses even greater salience today than it did last spring when the HRISM grantees first explored the possibility of a communications campaign built around this concept.
The Federal-State Joint Board, which makes recommendations to the Federal Communications Commission on implementing the 1996 Telecommunications Act, recommended in November that libraries and schools be granted significant discounts on monthly services charges and on the costs of installing telecommunications hardware.
The implicit recognition of libraries as pivotal players in the public service information world, and the economic resources which libraries will now be able to bring to the table, could give them a substantial leg up in the emerging digital marketplace.
Moreover, as a forthcoming Benton/Libraries for the Future publication, "Local Places, Global Connections" will document, libraries are already using digital technology to create vital community partnerships with other information providers.
This report, due out this winter, details libraries' collaborations and alliances nationwide -from Washington state to Vermont -with educational, small business and other community institutions.
The report provides practical and theoretical models for constructing these alliances -using computer technology and digital collections -in communities across the US.
But additional work needs to be done before a communications campaign for libraries can be unveiled.
More focus groups will have to be conducted nationwide.
The apparent skepticism about libraries' role as cutting-edge information providers signals to libraries that the public is lagging behind the profession's forward looking visions for its future.
Clearly, one focus group can only hint at where the public is heading on this vital issue.
Thus, additional research is critical to flesh out the language and messages that will help libraries understand where the public is coming from -and how to respond to the public's most strongly felt values and attitudes.
Libraries have their work cut out.
But unlike many other US public institutions, which today are greeted with considerable public skepticism, libraries start their campaign from a tremendous base of popular support.
Witness the enthusiastic public reception to new public libraries in Phoenix, San Francisco and elsewhere.
Libraries are being touted as a vital partner in attempts to revitalize central city cores.
Indeed, libraries are ahead of many professions in moving toward a communications campaign and repositioning that takes into account the tumultuous effect of the digital age.
Many other institutions in American society are just waking up to the fact of the digital revolution, and that fundamental changes may be required.
In this sense, libraries are already way "ahead of the curve".
References [1] Benton Foundation Website, http://www.benton.org/ Author Details Laura Weiss is the author of "Buildings, Books and Bytes" Email: lauraw@benton.org Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Around the Table: Film and Cinema Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Around the Table: Film and Cinema Buzz database archives video preservation cataloguing standards Citation BibTex RIS Frank Parry discusses some of the many possible sources for Internet information on film and cinema.
For many, love of the world of film can be an all-consuming passion.
There are literally thousands of sites to visit.
Because of the very nature of this subject, however, many sites will be content-rich and patience in downloading information may be the order of the day.
Making a start: the major players A good place to start is the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) [1].
Its primary function is to give information about individual films cast, crew, production details etc.
with hot jumps to biographical and other related information.
The extent of its filmic referencing system means that IMDb is fast becoming the default site for authoritative information.
IMDb also provides useful links to other sites.
Screenshot of the results of an IMDb search There are three other sites worthy of note in this category.
Each has its strengths and weaknesses and there is much overlapping of content.
Yahoo’s Entertainment: Movies and Films [2] provides an extensive subject listing of notable sites including at the last count 2663 on actors and actresses alone!
CineMedia [3] does very much the same job though it is noticeably better at listing organisations.
Omnibus-Eye [4] claims to be the best media index on the web.
It certainly contains a very impressive index of film sites though while checking some I found quite a few defunct addresses and is comprehensively indexed and cross-referenced with good search facilities.
It is geared more to the academic and professional user than the other major sites.
This is reflected in the prominence that subjects such as film history, education, museums, bibliographies, industry and production is given.
Magazines and News CineMedia [3] offers the best index in this category, although, as in the other categories, you may have to cross-refer to the other major players.
Yahoo [2] rather oddly divides its listings between journals and magazines.
Perhaps more appropriately we can make a division between those which are designed for the web and those which are, by and large, designed as tasters for a print version.
Empire [5], Premiere [6] and Flicks [7] are all fine examples of taster magazines advertising a print product.
It can appear that in some respects the web version scores above the print.
Reviews are posted more frequently, film news, gossip and business is pretty much as it happens, all offer links to other sites and Flicks and Empire offer such titbits of information as top grossing films, what’s showing at local cinemas etc.
Entertainment Weekly Online [8] is also a taster magazine but with far greater full-text content.
It also has links to business information, news and extensive archive material.
Images [9] is a fine example of a web magazine with a good mixture of scholarly articles and reviews.
Other magazines, such as the well-respected Film Culture [10] offer very little other than subscriber information, although it does provide a few extracts and a full index of articles dating back to 1955 which could prove useful for the researcher.
Specialist magazines are also well catered for.
Hong Kong Film Magazine [11] and Bollywood Pictures [12] are good examples.
The Journal of Film Preservation [13] has full text articles and is an excellent scholarly journal.
As can be expected, most news services are heavily American based.
The Hollywood Reporter [14] offers a daily news service with archives.
It does, however, also cover news from farther afield than its name suggests.
Reviews, Film Finders and Cinemas Review sites leave the user spoilt for choice.
Current films can be found in Empire [5], Flicks [7] and the Movie Emporium [15] which also has an archive of older reviews.
Films are normally released in America sooner than anywhere else.
This means that you are likely to find a good choice of reviews before a particular film has even reached Europe.
The Movie Review Query Engine [16] for instance, lists 66 reviews for the English Patient, almost a month before its UK release.
IMDb [1] contains links to reviews and critical studies.
Since this is a site with an historical bias, there is plenty of scope to build up a decent archive of reviews.
‘What’s showing’ sites are common world-wide.
IMDb has a country by country index.
In the UK, Yell’s Film Finder [17] gives regional information and also uses the Yellow Pages database to suggest other local services such as taxis, restaurants, pubs.
It is not so good on the independent cinema scene.
For this you might like to try Freepages [18].
Many independents are developing their own sites.
The Metro in Derby [19] is one example and there is a homepage for the National Film Theatre [20] which so far, however, doesn’t give any programme information.
Film Studios, Business, Organisations and Education All the sites mentioned in the major players category have good links here.
As film companies open, merge, expand or fold the amount of information is likely to change.
Historically, little except current wares are promoted, although some with large back catalogues like Sony [21] advertise classic collections.
For history you could try the appropriate category in Omnibus-Eye [4].
Some sites are better than others but you have to remind yourself that these are all commercial sites with businesses to run!
Of these, the prize for the homepage with the most tie-ins must surely go to Disney [22].
Many sites provide sound or video clips.
Again, Sony [21] is a good example.
However, if you do not have the right equipment or a bank balance capable of paying for downloading time, you might want to skip these optional extras.
Omnibus-Eye [4] has good links to industry, business and education as does Yahoo [2] to a lesser extent.
Movienet [23] has something called Film Finders Buzz which gives excellent film industry news, company and personality profiles.
It also provides substantial information on the European film scene.
Entertainment Weekly Online [8] is also useful here.
IMDb provides a section on business on each individual film which relates to the amount of money each film makes at the box office.
Movie Ticket Sales [24] does pretty much the same though with slightly more information and on a wider historical scale.
Ecran Noir [25] is a French Canadian site with worldwide coverage.
It is patchy, however, and tends to concentrate on the top films.
CineMedia [3] has a good page of links to organisations.
The American Film Institute [26] which plays host to CineMedia has an excellent homepage.
The British Film Institute [27] has a page though it is still under construction.
For an understanding of how the American film industry regulates itself and how film companies are expected to behave, take a look at the Motion Picture Association of America [28].
The Directory of Film, Video, Communication Schools and Programs [29] contains probably the best directory of its kind.
Individual Films and Fan Pages IMDb [1] is again the standard bearer for information on individual film information.
It normally contains links to both official and unofficial sites.
The entry for Alien, for example, contains links to studio pages, scripts and well thought-out fan sites.
The studios are increasingly providing behind-the-scenes glimpses at the making of new releases.
The remastered Star Wars trilogy [30] and Bound [31] are interesting examples.
Usenet and mailing lists are useful for keeping up to date with emerging new sites.
Yahoo [2] and Omnibus-Eye [4] both make recommendations for the best newsgroups to scan.
Awards and Festivals IMDb [1] has a link to known forthcoming festivals, but as sites often change from year to year, you will need to return to this source at regular intervals.
Elsewhere, the best and most comprehensive site is the Film Festivals Server [32].
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [33] is probably the most well-known awards organisation.
Yahoo’s awards category has a link to BAFTA which turns out to be BAFTA Cymru [34] the ‘English’ version is also worth visiting!
[35] References [1] Internet Movie Database, http://uk.imdb.com/ [2] Yahoo!
Entertainment: Movies and Films, http://www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Movies_and_Films/ [3] CineMedia, http://ptd15.afioline.org/CineMedia/cmhead.html [4] Omnibus-Eye, http://omni-eye.com/links/ [5] Empire Web site, http://www.erack.com/empire/ [6] Premiere Web site, http://www.premieremag.com/hfm/index.html [7] Flicks Web site, http://whyy.org/flicks/ [8] Entertainment Weekly, http://pathfinder.com/@@x3u6OQYAfo@kkLCx/ew/ [9] Images: a Journal of Film and Popular Culture, http://www.qni.com/~ijournal/ [10] Film Culture Web site, http://www.arthouseinc.com/filmculture/ [11] Hong Kong Film Magazine, http://www.hkfilmmag.com/ [12] Underground Network (Bollywood Pictures), http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/k/Prince.Kohli/Bollywood/pictures.html [13] Journal of Film Preservation, http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/FIAF/Journal/index.html [14] Hollywood Reporter Web site, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ [15] Movie Emporium Web site, http://www.filmcritic.com/ [16] Movie Review Web site, http://www.cinema.pgh.pa.us/movie/reviews/ [17] Film Finder Web site, http://www.yell.co.uk/yell/ff.html [18] Freepages Web site, http://www.freepages.co.uk/cinema.htm [19] Metro Cinema Web site, http://www.derby.ac.uk/cinema/metro/metro.html [20] National Film Theatre Web site, http://www.kidsnet.co.uk/arts/nft.shtml [21] Sony movie Web site, http://www.spe.sony.com/Pictures/SonyMovies/index.html [22] Disney Web site, http://www.disney.com/_index.html [23] Movienet Web site, http://www.movienet.com/movienet/filmfhp.html [24] Movie Ticket Sales, http://www.interlog.com/~odin/Gross/ [25] Ecran Noir Web site, http://www.volute.qc.ca/ecran-noir/boxoffice/liste.htm [26] American Film Institute Web site, http://www.afionline.org/home.html [27] British Film Institute Web site, http://www.worldserver.pipex.com/bfi/ [28] Motion Picture Association of America Web site, http://www.mpaa.org/ [29] Directory of Film, Video, Communication Schools and Programs, http://thunder.ocis.temple.edu/~ddoyon/schools.html [30] Star Wars Web site, http://www.starwars.com/home.html [31] Bound Web site, http://spider.media.philips.com/PFE/bound/bound-home.html [32] Film Festivals Web site, http://www.filmfestivals.com/ [33] Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, http://www.ampas.org/ampas/ [34] BAFTA Cymru Web site, http://bafta.org/ [35] BAFTA Web site, http://www.thebiz.co.uk/bafta.htm Author Details Frank Parry, Academic Librarian, Loughborough University Email: F.Parry@lboro.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: Elvis Is Alive and Well and Selling Library Management Systems in Kansas City Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: Elvis Is Alive and Well and Selling Library Management Systems in Kansas City Buzz software database opac url research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes reports from the American Public Library Association conference in Missouri.
In March 1998 I attended the 7th American Public Library Association National Conference in Kansas City, Missouri.
The conference took place over three very cold days (the temperature reached –30·C) and was entitled "Vital, Valuable, Virtual" [1].
This is probably one of the biggest public library conferences in the world and was attended by over 6,900 people.
The conference didn’t have one theme but had 10 separate lecture tracks which in total consisted of over 100 presentations.
The themes of these lecture tracks ranged from children’s services to marketing to library buildings to policy issues to technology.
All the programmes took place simultaneously and so each session meant choosing just one paper out of ten to listen to – this could be frustrating when two interesting sounding papers clashed.
I concentrated mainly on attending the technology presentations.
Talking to American librarians at the conference certainly gave the impression that most libraries there were already making use of the Internet and everyone seemed to have their own e-mail address.
Public Internet access seemed very commonly provided and was seldom charged for.
Indeed, it has been estimated that by May 1998 approximately 86% of public libraries in the USA will have an Internet connection and that these libraries will serve 97% of the American population [2].
This higher level of connectivity and lack of charging may be indicative of the comparatively low cost of computer hardware, the very low telecommunication costs and the high awareness of the Internet in national culture in America.
Indeed it was impossible to avoid references to the Internet in America as it seemed that all adverts, packaging and television programmes contained an URL.
Practical Experience What was very striking about the conference was the large amount of practical experience that many librarians already have of offering Internet services.
Discussions were not based on ‘what ifs’ but on actual experience that has been developed over several years.
This kind of hands-on experience is being developed here in the UK but is still at an early stage.
One of the presentations where this development of experience came across most clearly was given by Sarah Mack of West Bloomfield Township public library [3].
She discussed the way in which her library had been trying develop their library web site so it can provide 24 hour access to as many library services and resources as possible.
To this end the library has worked with local organisations to make community information available, worked with local schools to make homework resources available on the web site, the library’s OPAC is web-accessible and library users can even e-mail in reference queries.
The library also decided to become an Internet Service Provider for the area.
Library users who connect to the library using this service can also access a number of online databases which the library subscribes to.
The library has moved away from buying CD-ROMs to subscribing to online Internet databases instead.
This means that these databases are accessible to library users through the library’s web site outside of library hours.
Databases included in this service are the Magazines Database, Newsbank Online and Encyclopaedia Americana.
This has provided to be a very popular service with the library’s users and really is a step towards the development of truly virtual library services.
Another very practical presentation I attended was given by Karen Schneider about filtering.
Rather than discuss the rights and wrongs of filtering this presentation was about assessing how effective the filters actually were.
The presentation described the different types of filtering software available, how they work and what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they could be improved.
It was a very pragmatic and useful introduction to the topic which was based on many librarians’ experiences of using filters.
Anyone interested in learning more about her work can do so by visiting her web site which gives details about the research and a downloadable version of this presentation [4].
Funding Funding problems seem to be common to all public librarians irrespective of their geographical location.
As in the UK American public libraries are having to develop Internet services in addition to their traditional ones without an increase in their budget.
It was with interest therefore that I attended a presentation given by the Gates Library Foundation [5].
(Interestingly this presentation was one of more low-tech one I saw.
Microsoft’s PowerPoint up until this point had been used by all presenters and this was the first one I saw were the presenter used OHPs).
The Foundation has been set up by Bill and Melinda Gates to help public libraries across America and Canada to provide networked services to the public.
It helps libraries buy hardware and provides access to technical support once it is in place.
It has a budget of $400 million and so obviously been the source of much interest for public librarians in the US.
The Foundation is still in its early days of development and is initially focusing on supporting libraries in low income areas only.
Already it has given grants to 97% of public libraries in Alabama which could soon be the first State with 100% public library connectivity.
The Foundation has the potential to have a big impact on the development of networked services in public libraries in America and it will be interesting to see how it develops.
Other presentations that I attended explored how libraries can develop community information services on the Internet, what technology issues libraries need to be aware of when providing public access services, how to measure networked services success and a polemic against corporate America by Michael Moore (admittedly not much to do with public libraries and the Internet but very entertaining nonetheless).
In addition to the lecture programme there was a large trade exhibition to wander around and collect the obligatory pens from.
It was here that I had my greatest surprise of the conference because I can now confirm that Elvis isn’t dead after all – he now does promotion for a library security system.
Having my photo taken with The King himself definitely was an unexpected highpoint!
Overall the conference was a fascinating opportunity to gain an insight into American public libraries.
American libraries seem very well resourced and developed in terms of networked services.
There is obviously much that UK libraries can learn from the American experience so far.
But I soon became aware that there was little discussion at the conference about how to manage networked public library services on a national level.
There was no equivalent of the New Library: The People’s Network [6] report providing a national vision of the kind of content-led services libraries should aim to develop.
There was no sense of a co-ordinated approach to developing Internet services at either a national and/or local level and there was no American version of EARL.
In general there seemed to be little collaboration and co-operation in the development of public library Internet services.
In the long term, I feel, this lack of collaboration may seriously limit the development of networked library services in the US.
References [1] American Public Library Association 1998 Conference Web site http://www.pla.org/conf98-index.htm [2] Bertot, J.C. and McClure, C.R.
Policy issues & strategies affecting public libraries in the national networked environment: Moving beyond connectivity.
Washington, D.C.: National Commission on Libraries and Information Science.
Available: http://www.nclis.gov/what/publibpo.pdf [May 7th 1998] [3] Mack.
S. Beyond Web 101: Its Content that Counts.
http://metronet.lib.mi.us/WEST/web101.html [May 7th 1998] [4] Schneider, K. The Internet Filter Assessment Project http://www.bluehighways.com/tifap/ [May 7th 1998] [5] Gates Library Foundation http://www.glf.org/ [May 7th 1998] [6] Library and Information Commission.
New Library: The People’s Network [online].Place of Publication: UKOLN Available from: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/ [May 7th 1998] Author details Sarah Ormes Public Library Networking Research Officer at UKOLN e-mail: s.l.ormes@ukoln.ac.uk.
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Eurotext Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Eurotext Buzz database copyright Citation BibTex RIS In these days of European integration, Freda Carroll, Eurotext project coordinator, describes a project that will make European Union documents accessible online.
Even in university libraries with a European Documentation Centre (EDC), students frequently experience difficulties in identifying and locating official publications on European Union (EU) policies.
Competition between students for a single copy often leads to theft and vandalism.
Fewer than half of the universities in the UK have an EDC and a database of the texts of the key documents for each EU policy would be a major contribution to teaching and learning about the European Union.
The principal aims of the Eurotext [1] project, whose partners are the universities of Hull, Ulster and Lincolnshire & Humberside, are to create a database of the texts of key documents on the EU, appropriate to students' needs and selected by academics; to make them available on the Internet; to facilitate access to a difficult category of material; to encourage the use of electronic resources for European studies and to develop a national service by the end of the three year project September 1998.
The policy documents selected for inclusion are principally taken from the European Commission's COM Documents series as these include most of the documents relevant to the development of policies: green papers, white papers, action programmes and reports.
Copyright was not expected to be a problem as it is the established policy of the European Commission to encourage re-use of its copyright material.
Reproduction of most publications, except for commercial purposes, is freely allowed, provided that the source is acknowledged.
The one restriction, that texts taken from the Official Journal and the COM Documents series must not be in facsimile, means that we cannot use PDF format for the documents.
As the original documents are often of poor quality variations in print density on re-cycled paper with columns or tables to contend with scanning, editing and checking have proved to be a very labour-intensive feature of this project.
The policies for which a wide range of texts are now available on Eurotext are: the environment, transport, transEuropean networks and European integration.
Currently being added, for the EU's social policy, are documents on the Social Charter, health and safety at work, employment/unemployment, public health (including AIDS, cancer, drug abuse, smoking), social protection, women and equality, the disabled, the elderly etc.
which will bring the number of pages converted and uploaded to around 5,000.
Economic and monetary union, regional policy, agriculture and fisheries are the next policies we will cover.
A frames-based interface, with one frame for navigation buttons and the other for the texts, facilitates movement between the various sections of Eurotext which include texts of documents, search options, links to other Internet resources and project information.
Students generally like the interface.
Individual documents can be retrieved in 3 ways: lists of documents for each policy area, a bibliographic search (by title, document number, policy, etc.)
or by keyword search.
While the number of texts available is growing at a steady rate, the interface is in the process of development and project staff have benefited considerably from the input of users.
Focus groups of students are the principal ways in which the appearance, content and user-friendliness of the database are being assessed.
Meetings have been held with students from the universities of Hull, Lincolnshire & Humberside (both the Hull and Lincoln campuses), Leeds and Ulster (Coleraine campus).
Improvements have been suggested and implemented; specific problems are being addressed.
Further work is needed on both the keyword and bibliographic searches as some students have either found them confusing or are not confident about the results of their searches.
A structured Help section is now being developed.
Further evaluation activities will involve librarians in assessing the potential value of Eurotext in the context of other electronic resources available for European studies, and academics in assessing whether there is evidence, in students' work, of educational benefit.
Eurotext is now accessible to the UK academic community.
References Eurotext Web Site, http://eurotext.ulst.ac.uk/ Author Details Freda Carroll, Eurotext Project Co-ordinator email: W.M.Carroll@lib.hull.ac.uk Tel: 01482 465966 Fax: 01482 466205 Address: Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull, Hull, HU6 7RX Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CEDARS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CEDARS Buzz data software framework usability archives metadata digitisation copyright video preservation windows research Citation BibTex RIS Kelly Russell explores the main deliverables of the CEDARS project: recommendations and guidelines, plus practical, robust and scaleable models for establishing distributed digital archives.
In recent years, libraries have been fortunate to have increasing access to new and innovative digital resources.
A number of factors contribute to this trend: advances in networking technology and the growth of the JANET network mean that UK libraries can deliver more information more quickly directly to their end-users; an influx of funding following on from the Follett Report has provided libraries with an opportunity to experiment with and integrate new technologies into the services they provide; the emergence of consortium purchasing (i.e.
The Cooperative Higher Education Software Team (CHEST)…) and the prevalence of nationally negotiated dataset deals (e.g.
BIDS ISI) which grant better and cheaper access to a wide variety of commercially produced digital products.
Libraries in the UK over the past few years have certainly benefited from new funding, technology and business approaches.
Relatively speaking it has happened very fast and consequently our reliance on these resources is growing exponentially This article will begin with some background and "scene setting" related to digital preservation, move into consideration of some of the challenges for providing long-term access to digital resources, and consider briefly the three main "strategies" for preserving digital resources.
Digital Preservation is a complex and exciting area – this article will merely skim the surface of what is a very big pond.
Further reading is recommended below for more detailed consideration of many of these issues.
As has been suggested above information and networked technologies have provided libraries will new opportunities to provide faster and easier access to a wider range of scholarly information.
Our is not the first generation to experience such as boom.
If we cast our minds back to an earlier period in our history when a new technological innovation allowed cheaper and faster information delivery: the mid19th century saw the introduction of acidic paper.
This was a cheaper and faster method for producing paper products.
At the time few would realise the long-term implications of this new approach – the paper decayed dangerously quickly and could be reduced to dust within the century.
Eventually, to compensate for the alarming speed with which much 19th century paper was deteriorating, there was a significant co-ordinated movement to try and raise awareness about this critical situation.
In the 1980’s (i.e.
130 years after the introduction of acidic paper) the Commission for Preservation and Access commissioned a short film called Slow Burning Fires to try and bring the issue of brittle books to the fore.
Fortunately a great deal of time and effort has been dedicated to alleviating this problem and the video contributed to this effort enormously.
Most research libraries in the US now have Brittle Books programmes working to conserve/preserve fragile books by reformatting (to microfilm or, more recently, to digitised images).
If we compare this to present day we too are inundated with resources produced on a new medium.
Libraries now rely increasingly on digital resources, many of which do not have a print equivalent.
Examples include new electronic journals, web-based information gateways or electronic courseware.
Since the introduction of digital material (over the last decade), the technologies through which a great deal of digital resources are delivered have continued to evolve, mutate and develop.
In fact a great deal of the technology we used in the 1980’s is already obsolete.
In 1997, (i.e.
within a decade after the introduction of digital scholarly resources into libraries) the Commission for Preservation and Access commissioned another film, this time entitled Into the Future in an attempt to facilitate discussion about the implications of dependence on relatively unstable and unreliable technologies.
It is estimated that within 2 years over 75% of the US governments information will be available only in digital formats.
Libraries in the UK have pursued relatively conservative collections management policies, and continue to retain print journals where there are new electronic versions.
However, electronic journals (even those in parallel) are beginning to include technology-dependent content such as animation, sound or video which is simply not available/possible in the print version.
Although the Research Libraries Group (RLG) is currently funding a study to support this assumption, it is unlikely that many libraries in the UK have policies which address the long-term access to and preservation of electronic materials.
Our investment in digital resources and our reliance on them unfortunately extends far beyond our current capacity to preserve and integrate them.
We will need not only need to confront the changing technology and adapt to it but make adjustments in our organisational and management structures to allow us to do so indefinitely.
Despite this potential gap, libraries continue to invest in digital resources that may not have a print equivalent and funding continues to be poured into digitisation projects without a clear understanding of the future of the digital files.
In research libraries, preservation of material has always been a priority.
Indeed research libraries (and in particular the UK copyright deposit libraries) are largely responsible for preserving access to our most valued UK scholarly resources.
However, as has been illustrated above, the urgency with which we must address this responsibility is not paralleled in a print world.
Where it might take 50 years for book printed on acid paper to decay, a digital resource dependent on specific technology could be inaccessible in a matter of 5 years or less.
It is probably the case, that libraries already contain material which is inaccessible.
One needs only to think of print resources which were produced over the last decade with a digital supplement (e.g.
a floppy disk).
Imagine that the information contained on that disk was in a proprietary file format and was created to run in a specific (now possibly obsolete) technical environment.
Would a library be able to deal with an 8" floppy disk (or even 5-1⁄4") presented to a member of staff on the help desk?
Although arguably not a common problem, concern about technological obsolescence and loss of resources is a growing concern for libraries.
What is more, libraries do not usually possess the know-how necessary for addressing such problems.
The Cedars Project Although much of current digital libraries activity may have happened anyway in the fullness of time, there has been a surge of new funding (both in the UK and abroad) for the creation and application of new technology in libraries.
Most notably in the UK, the eLib Programme has overseen the establishment of over 70 different projects and studies in the UK in digital libraries (this work has involved over 100 different higher education institutions directly).
As a result of this, eLib has recognised that some investment into the problems of long-term access to digital resources was probably wise.
The Cedars project is funded as part of eLib Phase 3.
It is administered through the Consortium of University Research Libraries and stands for "CURL exemplars in digital archives" (Cedars).
The main objective of the project is to address strategic, methodological and practical issues and provide guidance in best practice for digital preservation.
The project will do this by work on two levels – First, through practical demonstrator projects which will provide concrete experience in preserving digital resources and secondly, through strategic working groups based on broad concepts or concerns which will articulate preferences and make recommendations of benefit to the wider community.
The main deliverables of the project will be recommendations and guidelines as well as practical robust and scaleable models for establishing distributed digital archives.
It is expected that the outcomes of Cedars will influence the development of legislation for legal deposit of electronic materials and feed directly into the emerging national strategy for digital preservation currently being developed through the National Preservation Office of the British Library.
What is digital preservation?
Digital preservation is a process by which digital data is preserved in digital form in order to ensure the usability, durability and intellectual integrity of the information contained therein.
Although a list of working definitions is still evolving, the project has agreed a more specific definition for digital preservation which is "storage, maintenance and access to digital objects/materials over the long term.
this may involve one or more digital preservation strategies including technology preservation, technology emulation or digital information migration."
According to Hendley, at a basic level, digital preservation involves the following tasks: Preserving the digital medium that holds the digital information by storing it in the correct environment and following agreed storage and handling procedures Copying the digital information onto newer, fresher media before the old media deteriorates past the point where the digital information can be read or becomes so obsolete that we can no longer find a storage device to read it on (referred to as refreshing Preserving the integrity of the digital information during the copying process.
Cedars is most concerned with digital preservation beyond this basic level to ensure that the information can be retrieved and processed in a meaningful way in the future and is therefore useable.
Defining the Terms The relative novelty of digital preservation as an issue for libraries, and the fact that expertise in this area resides in other sectors (e.g.
electronic records management) means that defining what we mean by specific terms is sometimes contentious.
Where librarians, archivists, records managers and computing technologists assemble, the term "archive" can (and does) mean very different things.
Definition of terms continues to be an issue within the Cedars project.
Outside of Cedars there are also some misconceptions that need rectification.. For example, there is some specific confusion within the wider HE library community about the differences between digital preservation and digitisation (converting analogue material into digital) as it is used in libraries as a preservation measure.
Cedars needs to make clear that digital preservation involves the maintenance and long-term access to digital files.
This may include digital image surrogates taken from a physical original (e.g.
a manuscript) but "digital preservation" it is by no means limited just to digitised material.
Digital preservation includes many materials for which there is no print equivalent – these materials have been referred to as "born digital".
Indeed it is the latter which present the most complex problems of preservation because they are often inextricably linked to the technical environment in which they are produced.
Digitised images may need routine "refreshing" (see above), but will generally not require disentangling from a technical environment which is often necessary with a ‘born digital’ object.
Although Cedars in its proposal to JISC has specified that it is concerned primarily with preserving the intellectual content of the resources and not the physical medium, this distinction is not always easy to make in practice.
The waters are muddied by digital objects where they are intertwined with their technical environment and it is sometimes unclear where the intellectual content of the object stops and the technical environment begins.
In a product like Microsoft’s Encarta, it may be nonsensical to imagine disentangling bits of sound, image and text in order to preserve them when the intellectual content of the object involves a specific technical manifestation of these different components.
However, how far do we extend our considerations in this area?
Although we can understand the interdependencies within a digital object at the conceptual level what does this mean practically?
Does it mean, in the case of Encarta, preserving a specific copy of a version of Windows 3.1 and a copy of a specific version of the DOS operating system?
If this depends on a specific PC with a particular configuration, do we preserve that as well?
And if so, how?
Strategies for Digital Preservation 1) Technology Preservation Preservation of the technical environment by conserving copies of the software and specific hardware is referred to as "technology preservation".
For some digital objects this may be the best solution – at least in the short-term – because it ensure the material is accessible by preserving the access tools as well as the object itself.
However, longer term this is more problematic.
For example, issues of space and maintenance for hardware as well as costs may make this an impractical solution for the long term.
2) Technology Emulation There are other options however which focus on preserving the environment for a digital object.
It is possible in the case of something like Encarta to preserve data about how the technical environment was created in the first place in order to re-create a new technical environment which mimics the original.
If we preserve enough information about Windows 3.1 then instead of preserving it, we can simply re-engineer it again when we need it.
This option is called "emulation" and is probably the most complex option for preserving digital resources.
This relies on a robust system for preserving the metadata which describes the technical environment.
In an emulation situation, like the case described above, nothing is done to the original object (it is left simply as a bitstream) and it is the environment which is re-created.
The costs of emulation are as yet unknown and it is expected that the costs of re-creating complex technical environments could be astronomical.
However, unlike the technical preservation model, the costs fall further along in the resource’s lifecyle.
Instead of spending money now and for the foreseeable future, by preserving both software and hardware, emulation loads the costs at the far end.
If a resource is needed in future, only then are resources required to emulate the necessary technological environment.
Emulation is more like the "just in time" option where technology preservation means we will have the necessary soft/hardware "just in case".
(However, this option also requires a leap of faith in terms of the power of future technologies and in the abilities of future software engineers).
3) Migration Where the two options described above, focus on the environment of the object and preserving the resource through re-creating or preserving the necessary operating environment, another strategy for digital preservation is what has been called "migration".
A report commissioned by the Research Libraries Group and the Commission for Preservation and Access in the US, helpfully distinguishes between migration and what has been termed refreshing" (mentioned above).
The reports suggests that ….migration is a broader and richer concept than "refreshing"….Migration is a set of organized tasks designed to achieve the periodic transfer of digital materials from one hardware/software configuration to another, or from one generation of computer technology to a subsequent generation.
The purpose of migration is to preserve the integrity of digital objects and to retain the ability for clients to retrieve, display, and otherwise use them in the face of constantly changing technology.
It is this last strategy in which many libraries and archives are already involved and many believe that this is the most practical approach, at least for the short and medium term.
For objects like Encarta or electronic journals where they contain bits of sound and video the issue of migration is not a simple one.
The costs of migration may, in the long run, exceed those costs necessary for preserving either the technology itself or the detailed technical specification which will allow future emulation.
It is clear, even at this early stage in the Cedars project, that costs are a key component for providing guidance to libraries on digital preservation.
The strategies described above all require resources.
When and how these resources are deployed will depend on the perceived value of the digital object.
Through its demonstrator projects, Cedars aims to explore the strategies described above and make recommendations on cost implications.
This article has not addressed the issue of selection – that is, what resources are selected for long term preservation and how these decisions are reached.
This is a critical issue.
The exponential growth of digital resources and our dependence on them together with the speed with which technology changes means that assessing the value of digital resources can be much more difficult Conclusions This article has attempted to provide a simple overview of digital preservation and the issues with which libraries will be increasingly concerned.
This is not the first time libraries have been confronted with technical innovation but the urgency with which we need to address it may be unprecedented.
There are strategies available.
However long term solutions to the problems will require cooperation across traditional boundaries to include the experience gained outside of the library, including university computing services, university archives, electronic records managers, data suppliers and others both within and without of the public sector.
Cedars will work to build these partnerships and to produce robust guidance for HE libraries as well as scaleable practical models for distributed digital archives.
More information about the project can be found on the Web at: http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects.shtml.
Further Reading Web Sites 1.
The Arts and Humanities Data Service Digital Preservation Resources 2.
Preserving Access to Digital Information maintained by the National Library of Australia Other Resources 1.
Preserving Digital Information Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by The Commission on Preservation and Access and The Research Libraries Group.
1996 2.
JISC/NPO Preservation Studies (available from on the Web at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib): A Framework of Data types and Formats, and Issues affecting the Long-term Preservation of Digital Material, by John Bennett A Strategic Policy Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections, by Neil Beagrie and Daniel Greenstein Comparison of Methods and Costs of Digital Preservation, by Tony Hendley Digital archaeology?
Rescuing neglected or damaged digital collections, by Seamus Ross and Ann Gow Responsibility for Digital Archiving and Long-term Access to Digital Data by David Haynes Associates 3.
Building the digital research library: preservation and access at the heart of scholarship.
P.S.
Graham.
Follett Lecture Series, Leicester University, 19 March 1997.
4.
Ensuring the longevity of digital documents.
Rothenberg J.
Scientific American, 272 (1), 1995.
5.
Guidelines on Best Practices for Using Electronic Information.
DLMForum Luxemburg: Office for Official Publications of the European Commission, 1997.
6.
Intellectual preservation: electronic preservation of the third kind.
P.S.
Graham.
Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1994.
7.
Preserving the intellectual record: a view from the archives.M.
Hedstrom.
in Networking and the Future of Libraries 2: Managing the Intellectual Record.
Mowat et al (eds).
London:Library Association Publishing, 1995, 179-191.
8.
Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).
Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, 15 April 1998 (http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html) 9.
Report of the First National Consultative Meeting on the Management of Australian Physical-Format Digital Publications National Library of Australia, October 1997 10.
The Electronic Information Initiative, Phase 1 Final Report: The National Agricultural Library 11.
Digital preservation: a time bomb for Digital Libraries M. Hedstrom http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/hedstrom.html Author Details Kelly Russell CEDARS Project Manager Edward Boyle Library University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT Email: k.l.russell@leeds.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
Before we retrained for the electronic library, I was the Chief Librarian Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ECMS: Electronic Copyright Management Systems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ECMS: Electronic Copyright Management Systems Buzz data software infrastructure copyright ecms authentication cookie privacy Citation BibTex RIS Pedro Isaias considers Electronic Copyright Management Systems (ECMS).
The theme covered by this article is currently a matter for discussion in the digital library arena.
Since the birth of the first digital libraries, publishers, authors and information consumers have been debating the best ways to manage access to information.
It is within this context that this work is intended to make a small contribution.
It illustrates the following points in an objective way: Copyright issues and Electronic Copyright Management Systems (ECMS); Advantages and disadvantages that result from the use of ECMS; Some conclusions and future perspectives.
Copyright and the emergence of ECMS On the one hand, ECMS are a way of giving answers to worries about copyright questions, and on the other, a way of systematising document information management processes such as: access control, author feed-back and availability of information.
The appearance of ECMS (not exactly named as such) has happened in parallel to several digital library initiatives (USA) and electronic libraries (Europe).
It is obvious that digital/electronic libraries cannot exist without copyright issues being managed.
The question nowadays lies in the legal protection of these systems [1].
There has been a lot of discussion in the USA and Europe [2] about this.
Should legislation be reinforced or even newly created, or should ECMS be developed and used as a natural way to impose copyright ?
[3] In the USA, the Clinton administration has produced a report on "Intellectual property and the national information infrastructure" [4], the well known NII report which did make explicit reference to the protection of ECMS.
In Europe there have been several debates about protecting or not protecting ECMS.
One of the arguments against protecting them is that they don't solve all the problems, since they impose financial barriers and access restrictions.
[5] Since no legislation protects ECMS, nothing stops someone who wishes to circumvent these systems of actually doing it, without any legal sanctions.
But even if ECMS are not explicitly protected by law, one has to point out the role which they can perform in imposing and applying copyright.
ECMS can enable the following: the control of the number of copies; printing and undertaking any other actions upon a work; what can be done with a work (for example: only permission to view); not to change a work (without permission).
Advantages and Disadvantages The initiative of an author to authorise his work to be digitised can have benefits and also carry risks.
Among the benefits are the opening up of new markets and new opportunities to publicise the work (and offer better access to it).
Among the risks are the danger of unauthorised copies and unauthorised use of the work.
In the context of document information management, we can view ECMS as a necessity and an imposition.
However, ECMS have advantages and disadvantages.Advantages are: ECMS gives authors feed-back from statistics for reading/searches of their work in real time This makes it possible to have in a organised and systematic way statistics on how many people accessed a certain paper, for instance, or an image or diagram in a specific work.
This can ultimately help the author to determine the success or failure of his work and in this way be an incentive (or not) for the author to produce further works; New source of revenue for authors In the absence of ECMS, authors would publish their works in the traditional way (i.e.
paper magazines, scientific journals) or on the Web, making them available mostly free of charge.
With the emergence of ECMS, authors can have a new source of revenue that can be complimentary to traditional publication; Incentive not to copy Quite often, due to the small imprints of certain works, there are many works with limited numbers of printed copies in the face of what is really required by the market, and they therefore sell out quickly.
As a result of this, the unauthorised copy will necessarily occur because people won't be able to access these particular works.
With ECMS, the works are always available and this problem won't occur; Access control ECMS invariably involves an element of security and access control, which enables the restriction of who uses what information.
This makes it possible to stop unauthorised use (without prior consent) of the works; More and better contents There is a tendency with ECMS for authors to produce more (and better) contents once they know that their works may have some sort of compensation (academic and/or financial); Editorial control quality Since most of the information available through these systems must be paid for, one has to necessarily guarantee its quality this can be assured by referees.
The use of ECMS also has some disadvantages, which will now be outlined: Restrictions on information access Once the access and use of the information must be paid for, ECMS are tacitly restricting access to it, since there are several people that will be unwilling (for several reasons) to pay for the information, and thus to be granted access to it; Implementation and running costs ECMS implementation has several costs, from which the following are taken: Personnel costs informatics professionals to implement and run the service, and referees to select the works present; Costs of hardware and software to these costs one must add the costs of developing specific application software and the possible acquisition of complimentary modules to the system.
Payment systems not secure Nowadays there are still reservations regarding some payment systems.
A good option is to implement a system where a payment is made in the first place and the corresponding amount is credited into the personal/corporate account that will be used in the future[6].
Another possibility is to go for electronic payment systems (directly or indirectly connected to credit cards), and some of these are still not regarded by certain users as being safe; High complexity of some access control and payment means Some of the available options of access control and some of the available payment mechanisms are complex to use, which in practical terms may deter some people from using them, or of using them incorrectly; No privacy Most of the ECMS include a user behaviour control component: what they acquire; preferred contents/works; rates of usage of the system.
This data may be transmitted to publishers and/or to authors, and in this way, break users' privacy.
In this context, the identity of the users should be anonymous; but this raises questions related to certain payment systems which require user authentication, for instance.
Conclusions and future perspectives Several questions arise when considering ECMS.
In my opinion, most of the important ECMS issues are still not resolved completely.
In the copyright arena, as a whole, ECMS are a very complex issue and it is my belief that it should be ECMS that makes copyright be implemented and not copyright that protects ECMS in the future.
The advantages and disadvantages of ECMS were discussed.
From the advantages listed in this article, one can conclude, however, that it is far better to implement and use the ECMS reality widely.
Some of their disadvantages, like the non-trustworthiness of some payment systems and their complexity in some cases, are a reality that will certainly evolve into more reliable and easy solutions it is a matter of time.
The privacy issue is, in my opinion, by far the most difficult to solve but nowadays when we have cookies and intelligent agents sensing and recording our behaviour on the Net, will this still be a problem?
References [1] Oppenheim , C. (1996): "Legal Issues associated with Copyright management Systems", Ariadne Issue 2 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue2/copyright/ [2] European Commission (1995): "Green Paper Copyright and Related Rights in an Information Society" [3]Angell, D. (1997):"The Copyright Question Making the Net Safe and profitable for Copyrighted Content", Internet World magazine vol.8 nº 1 http://www.internetworld.com/ [4] Working Group on intellectual property rights, information infrastructure task force.
Green Paper: Intellectual property and the national information infrastructure (September 1995) [5] it is common that users reject the use of complex computer systems [6] an example of this system is the INFOLINE system from the Portuguese National Institute of Statistics (INE) Author Details Pedro Isaias European projects manager at ISEGI New University of Lisbon and Professor at Portuguese Open University Email: pisaias@mail.telepac.pt Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner: Stories from the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner: Stories from the Web Buzz framework research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes talks about an exciting new BLRIC funded children's library project.
Background to the Project Children’s libraries have always had a crucial role in the educational development of children.
However, they are now potentially in danger of appearing outmoded and potentially irrelevant to their readers.
Leisure and some home-environments are becoming technology-rich: libraries may appear ‘dull’ in comparison.
Increasingly children’s libraries are going to be dealing with readers who will be familiar with and could want to use networked computers.
Children’s libraries need to begin to explore how they can integrate this technology into their traditional literature and literacy services if they are to remain current.
In issue six of Ariadne [1] I described the Treasure Island Web site [2] which UKOLN had developed.
This site was an experiment by UKOLN to explore, on a very small scale, one possible way in which libraries could manage this integration.
As an experiment it was very successful with the site being heavily used and winning a number of ‘site of the week’ awards from prestigious educational Web sites around the world.
Its success encouraged UKOLN to begin to develop a full-scale project which would evolve a transferable service model for the integration of the Internet into children’s library services.
In early 1996 UKOLN became partners with the library services of Birmingham [3], Bristol and Leeds [4] in developing such a children’s project.
Over the course of the rest of the year the project partners developed a detailed proposal for a project called ‘Stories From the Web’.
This proposal was submitted to the British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC) [5] in January 1997 as part of the centre’s Digital Library Research Programme call [6].
The proposal was accepted by BLRIC and the project is due to begin in autumn 1997.
It will run for two years and will be managed on a daily basis by a specially recruited project officer.
The project is being headed by Birmingham City Libraries and the project officer will be based at the Centre for the Child in Birmingham.
What is Stories from the Web?
Stories from the Web aims to explore how children’s libraries can stimulate the imagination of children and encourage them to explore, read and enjoy stories in a geographically distributed, collaborative network environment.
This will be achieved through the development of a service model and technical framework for the use of the Internet in children’s libraries.
The project will use networking technology such as the WWW, E-mail and real-time communication tools to allow children in the three partner libraries to explore stories, communicate and work with each other and interact with both authors and publishers.
It is aimed at children between the ages of 8-11.
The three main components of the project will be the Web site computer clubs interactive events The Web site The Web site will be at the heart of the project and will be initially hosted on the UKOLN server.
It will consist of pages which will allow children to explore literature in an Internet environment.
Firstly, there will be a set of pages based around an existing piece of children’s literature.
Secondly, there will be a set of pages based around a short story which has been written specifically for the project.
This, hopefully, will be written by a well-known children’s author.
Finally, there will be an interactive story which will either be written as the project proceeds through a process of feedback from the children to the author and publisher or a version of the same story will be written by children in parallel to the author’s.
In order to allow the children to interact with these Web pages and encourage them to explore the stories more fully they will have the opportunity to comment on the stories.
Children will be encouraged to e-mail comments and reviews by a bulletin board on all the stories and also respond to other children’s comments.
They would be given the opportunity to write their own Web pages and consequently mount their own reviews, opinions and home pages on the Web.
In this way they both explore the literature and also develop electronic literacy skills such as using e-mail and writing WWW pages.
Children will also be encouraged to e-mail their comments and reviews to publishers allowing an unique opportunity for direct contact between publisher and reader.
Publishers would also be encouraged to provide links to their own Web pages from the project’s Web site.
The project will monitor this relationship and explore the feasibility of the library acting as a mediator/connection point in such a way.
The Computer Clubs Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds will run their own computer club.
Through these clubs children will be guided through the project and access will be managed.
Statistics will be kept about their success and attendance as the programme of work develops.
The children will be encouraged to enter comments into a logbook at the end of each club session detailing what they have learnt or achieved each week.
At the end of the project these logs will provide a unique record of the development of the project through the eyes of those who have taken part in it.
These clubs will meet once a week for approximately two hours.
Each library will have up to three of these clubs in place meeting on different days of the week.
These clubs will be managed and organised by staff and special sessional workers at each library.
Interactivity By developing a programme of interactive author events the children and the library will be able to explore the manner in which networking technology makes not only resources but also people more accessible.
These events will typically consists of a question and answer session taking place over the Internet in real time through the means of facilities such as Internet Relay Chat or a MOO.
(These are both Internet facilities which allow communication to take place in real time involving a large number of people).
Events of this kind will only take place with children involved in the computer clubs so that they can be more easily organised and managed.
Other Activity The impact of the project on the children involved, their parents and the libraries involved (e.g.
on their staff’s skills, morale and the way in which the library is perceived by its users, local media and funding council) will also be recorded.
This will done through the use of focus group interviews at the beginning, middle and end of the project.
Particular attention will be paid to female staff and their reception and use of the Information Technology.
(Mentions of the project in the local and national media and in council meetings will also be recorded).
The number of books each child involved in the computer clubs borrows will be monitored in order to assess how the project has impacted on their reading habits.
Deliverables The project will provide an extensive body of information on how children’s libraries can make use of networked computers in their services.
The main two deliverables will be a working service model including a technical framework and a British Library research report detailing the findings of the project.
Another major deliverable of the project will be the project’s Web site.
This will be openly available to anyone and other libraries will be able to make use of its resources.
The only online resources that are likely to be restricted to use by the project partners only will be the online interactive sessions with authors and publishers.
Through out the lifetime of the project articles and papers will be produced by the project officer and will be made available through professional literature and events.
This material will also be made available on the project’s Web site.
Conclusion Stories from the Web is an exciting and potentially high profile project which will help develop children’s library services of the future.
It will be an excellent example of geographically dispersed public librarians co-operating together.
Already it has generated a lot of interest in the public library sector and this is indicative of both the imaginative nature of the project and its potential importance for future library services.
References [1] Treasure Island Web site description in issue 6 of Ariadne, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue6/public-libraries/ [2] Treasure Island Web pages, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/treasure/ [3] Birmingham libraries Web page, http://www.earl.org.uk/earl/members/birmingham/ [4] Leed City libraries, http://www.leeds.gov.uk/library/library.html [5] British Library Research and Innovation Centre, http://portico.bl.uk/ric/ [6] British Library Digital Library Research Programme, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/bl/digital-library-research-projects/   Author Details Sarah Ormes, Public Libraries Officer, UKOLN Email: lisslo@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: WebWatching UK Universities and Colleges Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: WebWatching UK Universities and Colleges Buzz data software java javascript html apache metadata browser windows hypertext pics gif research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly describes the WebWatch project.
About WebWatch WebWatch is a one year project funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC) [1].
The main aim of WebWatch is to develop and use robot software to analyse the use of web technologies with various UK communities and to report on the findings to various interested communities.
Other aims of WebWatch include: Evaluation of robot technologies and making recommendations on appropriate technologies.
Analysis of the results obtained, and liaising with the relevant communities in interpreting the analyses and making recommendations.
Working with the international web robot communities.
Analysing other related resources, such as server log files.
WebWatch Trawls UK Public Libraries The WebWatch robot was launched on the evening of Wednesday, 15th October 1997 the day of the launch of the LIC’s ‘New Library: The People’s Network’ report [2].
The robot trawled UK Public Library websites, as defined in the Harden’s list [3].
The aim of this initial trawl was to audit the size of public library websites on the day of the launch of the New Library report.
UK Universities and Colleges Home Pages The second WebWatch trawl took place on the evening of Friday 24th October.
This time the robot analysed UK Higher Education Universities and Colleges home pages (i.e.
the institutional entry point), as defined by the HESA list [4].
The WebWatch robot stored the following information for subsequent analysis: HTML elements A count of all HTML elements used in the institutional entry page and details of element attributes.
This includes: Metadata Details Use of the <META> element and of the type of metadata used.
Link Details A count of the numbers of links and details of the destinations of the links.
Image Details A count of the numbers of inline images and details of the <IMG> attribute values (e.g.
WIDTH, HREF, etc).
Script Details A count of the number of client-side scripts.
Header Information HTTP header information, including: Server Software The name and version of the server software used.
File Size The size of the institutional HTML entry page.
Modification Date The modification date of the institutional entry page.
Figure 1 illustrates the raw data file.
Gatherer-Time{24}: Fri Oct 24 19:21:00 1997 File-Size{4}: 2323 CRC{9}: 200 (OK) Message{3}: OKD Date{20}: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 18 Server{13}: Apache/1.1.3 … Type{4}: HTML total-count{2}: 69 p-count{1}: 3 a-count{2}: 15 center-count{1}: 1 b-count{1}: 5 title-count{1}: 1 head-count{1}: 1 br-count{2}: 17 .. img-60-attrib{61}: width=13|src=../gifs/redgem.gif|height=13|alt=*|nosave=nosave a-48-attrib{30}: href=/www/schools/schools.html … Figure 1 Portion of the Raw Data Collected by the WebWatch Robot The first part of the data file contains the HTTP header information.
The second part contains a count of all HTML elements found in the home page.
The final part contains the attribute values for all HTML elements.
Analysis of UK Universities and Colleges Home Pages A total of 164 institutions were included in the input file.
The WebWatch robot successfully trawled 158 institutions.
Six institutional home pages could not be accessed, due to server problems, network problems or errors in the input data file.
Page Size The average size of the HTML page is 3.67 Kb.
Figure 2 gives a histogram of file sizes.
Figure 2 Histogram of HTML File Sizes versus Frequency It should be noted that the file sizes do not include the sizes of inline or background images.
This histogram therefore does not indicate the total size of the files to be downloaded.
HTML Element Usage The average number of HTML elements on institutional HTML pages is 80.
Figure 3 gives a histogram of the numbers of HTML elements.
Figure 3 Histogram of Numbers of HTML Elements versus Frequency Note that this data is based on counts of HTML start tags.
It will omit implied element usage (such as text following a head element which have an implied paragraph start tag).
Also note that in a web document consisting of several frames the numbers of HTML start tags will only cover the tags included in the page containing the information about the frames, and not the documents included in the frames.
The most frequently used HTML element in the sample was the <A> element.
Figure 4 gives a summary of the five most popular HTML elements.
Figure 4 The Five Most Widely Used HTML Elements Examination of Particular HTML Elements Usage of a number of particular HTML elements was examined in greater detail.
A total of 104 out of the 158 institutions surveyed (66%) made use of the <TABLE> element.
A total of 12 out of the 158 institutions surveyed (7.6%) made use of the <FRAME> element.
A total of 11 out of the 158 institutions surveyed (7%) made use of the <SCRIPT> element.
Note that does not include use of Javascript event handlers.
A total of 16 out of the 158 institutions surveyed (10.1%) made use of client-side maps.
One institution made a single use of an inline style defined in the HTML BODY and one institution made a single use of an inline style defined in the HTML HEAD.
In addition it was observed that there were no occurrences of Java in institutional home pages.
There was one occurrence of a page with background sound.
A number of metadata attributes were analysed, including: The GENERATOR attribute which defines the tool used to create the HTML page.
This attribute is created by software such as Microsoft FrontPage and Netscape Gold.
The NAME=“Description” and NAME=“Keywords” attributes which are used by the Alta Vista search engine.
PICS metadata.
Dublin Core metadata.
The REFRESH attribute, used to refresh pages and to automatically load other pages.
A histogram of use of these <META> element attributes is shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5 Histogram of META Attributes versus Frequency Software used to create the home page included various Netscape authoring software (15 occurrences, 9.5%), Microsoft Front Page (12 occurrences, 7.6%), Internet Assistant for Word (3 occurrences, 1.9%), Claris HomePage (3 occurrences, 1.9%) and PageMill (1 occurrence, 0.6%).
The “REFRESH” attribute was used to refresh the page (or send the user to another page) in 5 institution home pages.
Of these, two used a refresh time of 0 seconds, one of 8 seconds, one of 10 seconds and one of 600 seconds.
Dublin Core metadata was used in two institutions.
PICS content filtering metadata was used in two institutions.
Numbers of Links The average number of links on institutional HTML pages is 17.
Figure 6 gives a histogram of the number of links.
Figure 6 Histogram of Numbers of Links versus Frequency This histogram includes links contained in the following HTML elements: <A>, <APPLET>, <AREA>, <EMBED>, <FRAME>, <BASE>, <IFRAME>, <IMAGE>, <LINK>, <MAP> and <OBJECT>.
It does not, however, include links used in server-side active maps.
Note that the histogram shows the total number of links in some cases links may be duplicated, such as links provided by client side maps and repeated as simple hypertext links.
Also note that the WebWatch robot does not obey the HTTP REFRESH method, and so the numbers of links for the small numbers of institutions which make use of REFRESH will be underestimated.
The WebWatch robot retrieves the initial HTML file specified in the input file.
If this file contains a FRAMESET element the robot will only analyse the data contained in the original file, and will not retrieve the files included in the frames.
This means that the numbers of links for the 12 institutions which uses frames will be underestimated.
Server Usage The most popular server software was Apache, used by 49 institutions (31%).
Figure 7 gives a chart of HTTP server software usage.
Figure 7 HTTP Server Software Usage Interpretation of Results The results summarised in this article should be of interest to institutional web teams, as they will help institutions to compare their web site with others in the community.
Institutions face the conflicting pressures of ensuring that the resources can be accessed by a wide community, using a variety of different browsers on a variety of platforms, and making their institutional entry point attractive and distinctive from other institutions.
The analysis provides useful information on how the community is facing up to these conflicting pressures.
Institutional Home Pages The analysis of institutional web pages shows a normal distribution for the size of the HTML page, with two significant outliers (Figure 2).
On examination of these two pages, it is the use of Dublin Core metadata in one case, and extensive use of Javascript in the other, which appear to add to the size of the HTML file.
The size of the HTML file is not likely, however, to be indicative of the time needed to download the page, since this is likely to be dominated by the size of images, which were not analysed in this survey.
The analysis of the number of HTML elements also shows a normal distribution with three outliers.
In each of these cases tables were used extensively to provide control over the appearance of the page.
The chart of the most popular HTML elements (Figure 4) shows the <A> (anchor) element to be most widely used, with 2,641 occurrences (an average of over 16 hypertext links per institutional home page).
The next most widely used element was <TD> (table data), which is indicative of the popularity of tables.
The third most widely used element was <IMG>, with almost 1,500 occurrences (an average of 9.4 images per institutional home page).
Examination of use of the <META NAME=“GENERATOR”> element attribute shows that Netscape and Microsoft are battling for the most widely used authoring tool.
However it should be noted that the GENERATOR attribute is only used in 23% of the home pages, perhaps indicating that the majority of home pages are produced by other software packages or by hand.
The REFRESH attribute is used in 5 institutions to refresh a page after a period, or to send the user to another page.
It is used to display an eye-catching page, and then take the user to the main institutional menu page.
It should be noted that since the WebWatch robot does not make use of this attribute, the data collected by the robot will reflect the HTML page containing the REFRESH attribute and not the final page viewed by the end user.
Over 50 institutions make use of the metadata popularised by the Alta Vista search engine.
However it is perhaps surprising that more institutions do not provide such information.
Clearly both PICS and Dublin Core metadata have not yet taken off within the community, with only two institutions providing PICS information and two providing Dublin Core metadata.
The histogram of numbers of links (Figure 6) shows a normal distribution, with a number of outliers.
Examination of the outliers shows that a small number of institutions provide large numbers of links to their resources, whereas most institutions have a more minimalist set of links.
Almost two thirds of the sites surveyed made use of tables, indicating that table support is taken as standard by the majority of sites.
Only 7.6% of the sites made use of frames, indicating, perhaps, that institutions felt that the level of browser support of frames was too low.
Little use is made of client-side scripting languages, with only 7% of the sites made use of JavaScript in their institutional entry page.
No sites made use of ActiveX.
Only 10% of the sites made use of client side maps in their institutional entry page.
Only two institutions have made use of style sheets, and even this use is minimal.
Institutional Server Software The analysis of server software shows that, as may have been expected, the Apache software is the most popular.
This is followed by the NCSA and CERN software which were the original HTTP servers used by most institutions.
It is perhaps surprising that these servers are still so popular, as NCSA and CERN are no longer significant players in the web software development circles and the CERN server, in particular, suffers from performance problems.
Netscape servers are popular, with an even split of 10 apiece between the Netscape Communications and Enterprise servers, and 3 occurrences of the FastTrack server.
Microsoft lags behind Netscape, with 12 institutions using the Internet-Information-Server software, and, surprisingly, one using the MS Windows 95 Personal Web Server.
Other server software products are used by one or two institutions.
WebWatch Futures Further Analyses Of UK HEIs The initial analysis of the data has provided some interesting statistics, and also indicated areas in which additional information is required.
It is planned to modified the WebWatch robot slightly in order to enable inline images and background images to be analysed.
Additional analyses will be carried out including: A detailed analysis of hypertext links to build a profile of hypertext linking from institutional home pages.
Analysis of HTML conformance.
Analysis of broken links on institutional home pages.
Analysis of modification dates of institutional home pages.
Analysis of client-side scripts.
Analysis of documents using frames.
Working With Other Communities An important aspect of the WebWatch project is liaison with various communities.
We intend to give presentations of our findings at a number of conferences, workshops and seminars.
In addition, we would like to work closely with particular communities, in identifying resources to monitor, interpreting the results and making recommendations to relevant bodies.
If you would be interested in working with the WebWatch project, please contact Brian Kelly (email B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk or phone 01225 323943).
References BLRIC, http://www.bl.uk/services/ric/ New Library: The People’s Network, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/ UK Public Libraries, http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/square/ac940/ukpublib.html HESA List of Higher Education Universities and Colleges, http://www.hesa.ac.uk/hesect/he_inst.htm Acknowledgements The WebWatch robot software is a version of the Harvest software suite which was modified by Ian Peacock.
Ian, who was appointed to the WebWatch post on 28th August 1997, was also responsible for running the robot software, processing the data and producing the statistics and graphs.
Ian can be contacted at the email address I.Peacock@ukoln.ac.uk Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus, Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323943 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Access for the Disabled Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Access for the Disabled Buzz software java database archives copyright cataloguing graphics opac gopher research Citation BibTex RIS Cathy Murtha outlines the problems that audio-visually impaired people encounter when trying to use network-based resources.
If it is true that patience is a virtue, blind people must be the most virtuous people on earth.
Waiting is omnipresent in a blind persons life.
The simple act of reading a newspaper can be a major undertaking.
However this seemingly simple task is accomplished, it requires waiting; waiting for a family member or friend to be available, or waiting for the next scheduled meeting with a paid reader.
Now, however, another option is available, this new innovation in the lives of the blind has provided something that is so intriguing that many blind and print impaired individuals have to "see" it to believe it!
The Internet has brought about a new era for this population.
Newspapers, magazines, research materials and more are now available at the touch of a button.
Public Libraries, once thought to be the haven of the sighted, are now within reach of the blind and print impaired as well.
The keys to the world lie within the stacks and archives of our public libraries.
Great works of art and literature can now be made available to an entire population who is eager to embrace the opportunities that the general population has enjoyed for generations.
The blind and print impaired, for the first time, can now take advantage of the opportunities for enlightenment and enrichment that Public Libraries have to offer.
Computer technology and accessible Internet services are the tools which will bring the blind and print impaired into the mainstream of library patronage.
What seemed impossible a generation ago is now a reality.
With a little ingenuity and planning, libraries can allow the blind and print impaired to have nearly complete access to their stacks and archives.
Libraries, as a rule, generally circulate printed materials about upcoming events and functions.
Flyers arrive in mailboxes and advertisements scroll across a silent TV screen while muzak plays for the enjoyment of a sighted audience.
Unless a blind person takes the extra step of making a phone call to the library or asking a sighted companion to peruse the accumulation of advertisements for pertinent materials, they may be unaware of the important functions that are happening within their own community.
The thought of actually crossing the threshold of a public library can be an overwhelming thought for many who suffer from vision impairments.
Entering a library is akin to entering a foreign land for a blind or print impaired individual.
Even having called ahead for an appointment, one cannot be sure that the librarian or research assistant will not be overwhelmed by a sudden onslaught of patrons requiring special attention.
Students who need assistance researching a term paper for school can find themselves feeling more and more uncomfortable as a harried librarian apologizes for the delay while attempting to do his or her best to provide the assistance the blind person needs.
The blind person is aware of the fact that the librarian does not mind answering some questions over the phone.
The student most assuredly understands, and is grateful for the fact, that the librarian is working diligently to find that needed research material and does not begrudge the blind person's inability to perform these activities.
Yet the blind person grows frustrated and feels a sense of embarrassment.
You see, the blind desire the ability to access these materials themselves.
They long for the day when libraries will open their doors figuratively and literally by providing access which is readily available but little used.
Research assistance and community activities can be brought to the blind if a library desires to do so.
Imagine the empowerment these individuals would feel if community activities and research assistance were available in an accessible format.
It is possible to provide assistance to the blind and print impaired, while at the same time allowing the librarians the time they need to perform the requested functions.
By using the tools that may already be at the libraries disposal the time of the librarian can be used to the best efficiency and the embarrassment and frustration felt by both parties can be alleviated.
Access to research in an accessible format is a fond fantasy that dwells within the heart and soul of every blind person, but it is also a reality that lies within the capability of every library to one degree or another.
The use of e-mail can help to bring this information to the blind and print impaired.
E-mail lists and research assistance can be offered to those who may be interested.
Simple distribution lists can be formed to keep patrons updated on local community and library activities.
This would not only assist the general population in keeping up to date on functions they may find of interest, but these lists would also have the added advantage of providing information to the blind and print impaired in an accessible format.
Research could be offered to those who cannot access needed materials in any other fashion.
E-mail could assist the blind immeasurably in this arena.
Blind and print impaired individuals who need information for work or school could submit a request via e-mail to research assistants who could search the archives of information that might not be accessible.
Newspaper and magazine archives and other types of printed materials could be searched for the pertinent information.
This information could then be relayed to the blind individual in the format of their choice.
All types of information, from basic text to graphics can be relayed via e-mail to virtually any part of the world in a matter of seconds.
A student in Lodi, California could receive a file of information, on the history of textiles in England, from a library in London in a matter of minutes.
Information can also be made available, via the Internet, to the general population and print impaired as well.
The ability to search for a particular book or periodical from home would greatly alleviate the strain placed on librarians who may spend much of their time assisting patrons in the use of the OPAC (online public access catalogue) systems.
By providing Internet access and on site work stations that are accessible to the blind, libraries have an opportunity to truly provide access to all.
Many libraries are on the Internet and are providing a limited amount of services through this medium.
Some have considered the possibilities that lie within their grasp, but few have actually taken the steps to implement them.
The Internet provides nearly endless opportunities to welcome new patrons into their fold.
Research assistance, catalog access, database information, local and state information, phone listings, electronic texts that lie within the public domain and books that are published with the copyright holders permission can all be placed on the Internet.
These services may be used by all, but will benefit the blind and print impaired beyond all comprehension.
Most libraries already offer OPAC services.
A sighted person can sit down at a computer terminal on the libraries premises and search for their favorite novel or needed research materials.
By placing this same information on the Internet, the library offers this service to an entire new population of individuals, the blind and print impaired.
This catalog of books, however, can be just the first step!
In addition to providing database responses on materials that may lie within the walls of the library, information on related web sites could also be offered.
A search for information on The Gross National Product of Brazil could also yield a listing of associated web sites on the Internet.
Sites who may feel they meet the criteria for inclusion in the database could be encouraged to write to the researchers and submit their site for inclusion.
Searchable databases provide almost unlimited possibilities.
These few I have mentioned can be expanded with time and used to bring, not only the blind, but others who may be severely disabled or home bound into the mainstream of library patronage When providing this access to the Internet it is important to not only consider the variety of services provided, but also the format in which they will be offered.
Graphics are making their presence known on the Internet, with the advent of java script, shockwave, and other fancy bells and whistles, more web sites are leaning toward pages which are anchored by large graphical displays.
Although these graphics may be lovely to look at they are, unfortunately, totally inaccessible to the blind and print impaired.
Screen readers (software which converts text to speech) cannot interpret the images; therefore, a site that is based on graphical design will be akin to a closed door to the blind and print impaired.
Many web designers do not realize that it is possible to provide these bells and whistles while, at the same time, considering the needs of the blind and print impaired.
If a graphical page is what is desired, there is a way to provide the access to the blind while still providing the eye catching graphics which many believe will make or break a web page.
Some of these tips and tricks are available on the Internet; my own Web site contains a detailed explanation of how one can keep those eye catching graphics and still provide a page that is accessible to everyone.
The gift of access is the greatest gift any individual could hope for.
This access does not have to end with Internet access, there is still more that can be done to help bring the blind and print impaired closer to our public libraries.
It is an unfortunate fact that a minority of the blind population currently has access to the Internet.
Public libraries can help to bring this technology to the general population of blind individuals.
In house work stations would allow the blind to access the Internet from within the walls of the library.
By offering access to the Internet from within the library, the blind would have the opportunity to browse the libraries catalog and other databases, which may be placed on the Internet.
By providing Internet access in the library, the need to provide access to the OPAC service that is enjoyed by the sighted patrons would be eliminated.
Many times the OPAC may be of a graphical nature and involve mouse manipulation.
The blind and print impaired would have the opportunity to browse the database and acquire the same information as the sighted.
These work stations could be equipped with a stand alone scanner which would scan printed material and convert it into speech; a computer which would be equipped with speech synthesis and allow the blind and print impaired to access the Internet; a braille printer for printing out information from the databases as well as topics of interest on the Internet; tape recorders for recording information from the scanner and taking verbal notes; other types of materials such as braille writers, slates and styluses and braille paper could also be included in this area which would be designed to specifically serve the needs of the blind and print impaired and provide complete access.
Taped and braille instruction manuals and tutorials could be offered as well as special classes to help the blind and print impaired acclimate themselves to these new services.
There are a variety of companies that can assist organizations who wish to provide access to the blind and print impaired.
They not only offer the technology and supplies that libraries can use to help provide access, but most of these companies provide excellent technical support of their products.
The average library can provide a fully functioning, state of the art, work station for the blind for under $10,000, some companies will donate equipment to libraries who show an interest in providing access to the blind and print impaired.
Providing e-mail support, Internet access to library catalogs and archives, and in-house work stations will not only allow the blind to access the valuable information stored within the physical walls of the library, but it will also allow librarians the time they need to do what they enjoy most, help those who truly need it to acquire the knowledge they are seeking.
The keys to knowledge are placed in the trust of our public libraries.
The blind and print impaired are hoping that more libraries will consider unlocking the door and allowing them to walk through into this world in which dreams reside and futures are designed, for it is only through knowledge that one can grow.
There are mailing lists which are specifically geared toward helping libraries create a presence on the Internet.
Here are two such lists with information from the listowners about their mission.
The Digital Librarian List The DigLibns electronic discussion is for the discussion of issues relating to digital librarianship.
Although the discussion is primarily aimed toward librarians and library staff involved in building digital collections or maintaining digital services, anyone is welcome to join the discussion.
to subscribe send a post to: listserv@sunsite.berkeley.edu in the body of the send: Subscribe diglibns your name The Digital Library List An Internet mailing list for librarians, information scientists, and other information professionals to discuss the constellation of issues and technologies pertaining to the creation of digital libraries.
We encourage individuals and organizations from around the world who are creating or providing electronic access to digital collections to participate in knowledge sharing about current developments in digital library research.
To subscribe send an e-mail to: listserv@infoserv.nlc-bnc.ca in the body of the message: subscribe diglib your name     Sites to visit for more information on Internet access and technology Technology links   GW Micro -Makers of Vocal Eyes and Window Eyes screen http://www.gwmicro.com/ Arkenstone -Specializing in Scanning and computer technology http://www.arkenstone.com/ The Outpost -Technology and blindness resources on the web http://users.deltanet.com/~tdb/ Access and research links   EASI Equal Access to Software and Information gopher://SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU/11/disabled/easi/ Trace Research & Development Center http://www.trace.wisc.edu/world/web/index.html Magical Mist Creations -Free advice on, and assistance in, bringing access to the Internet http://www.wwwebit.com/magical-mist/ Cathy's Newstand -Web Access information http://www2.cdepot.net/~mist/ Author Details Cathy Murtha is interested in Web Access for the disabled, and has a set of Web pages on these issues.
Email: mist@pumpkin.cdepot.net Web Pages: http://www2.cdepot.net/~mist/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The British Libraries Private Finance Initiative Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The British Libraries Private Finance Initiative Buzz data framework opac research Citation BibTex RIS The British Library's Digital Library Programme gives Ariadne an exclusive on its Private Finance Initiative.
The Digital Library Programme [1] has been set up by the British Library following the progress made during the widely publicised Initiatives for Access [2] programme which examined the application of new technologies to the Library.
The Programme comprises a number of activities across the Library aimed at providing the Library with the capabilities to acquire, store, preserve and access collection materials in digital form.
The Digital Library is the widely accepted term describing the use of digital technologies to acquire, store, conserve and provide access to information and material whether originally published in digital form or digitised from print, audio-visual and other forms.
The aim is to improve, for all its users, access to collections maintained by the BL.
The Digital Library will involve a number of partner organisations who will contribute expertise and resources to the project.
The remit of the Digital Library Programme is a broad one and encompasses a wide range of development activities.
Because of its developmental nature, the Programme has a limited life and has as an objective the integration of the digital library activities with the totality of the Library's operations.
The Programme comprises the following: The Digital Library Development Project a Private Finance Initiative [3] (PFI) based partnering project seeking development in the digital library area through private sector involvement.
A series of pilots and demonstrators related to the Digital Library objectives.
This includes: The Digital Datastore Development Project; The Trial Electronic Data Store demonstrator for the Inside [4] service Digital Library Programme As the Digital Library Programme is composed of several constituent projects, of which the PFI is only a part, information is presented below at the project level.
The PFI Project The Digital Library Development Project aims to provide the Library with the capabilities to acquire, store, preserve and access collection materials in digital form.
It is expected that these developments will be achieved through partnering with the private sector, using the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
As a first step, the Digital Library Programme Board has approved the placing of a Notice [5] in the Official Journal of the European Communities (OJEC), advertising a market sounding exercise.
This Notice will be officially published by 17 February 1997.
A market sounding exercise involves wide-ranging discussion with the private sector on the broad requirements which the Library has and will specify in the OJEC Notice.
This market sounding is undertaken in order to enable the Library to obtain a view of the private sector's likely response to the ideas put forward, and to allow time for the Library to develop a full statement of its requirements before the official tendering phase.
The market sounding exercise will last a number of months.
Following the market sounding phase, the next step in the PFI process is for the Library to go to full competitive tender; this is done again by means of a Notice in the OJEC.
The tendering process will sift responders and shortlist a small number with whom detailed negotiations will then take place.
This negotiation process will result in the award of a contract.
This phase could last up to one year.
The Digital Datastore Development (3D) The 3D Project was begun in 1995 in an attempt to define the business and technical requirements for the Library in developing its use of digital data.
A substantial amount of work was carried out by contributors from across the Library in the second half of 1995 on defining business requirements.
The 3D Project has the following aims:   To supply the Digital Library Development Project with sufficient information about the Library's business and technical requirements to enable it to produce a comprehensive specification.
To ensure that the existing digital material within the Library's collections continues to be maintained, preserved and made available for use.
To provide a suitable corporate framework for the continuing development of digital library activity at a directorate level which will accord with the Library's strategic developments.
To consolidate and develop the technical expertise already present in the Library to ensure that it maintains its position as a major player in the national and international LIS world.
During 1996 a number of initiatives for the use of digital material were under way or planned.
Some, such as that for the [6] Document Supply Centre, emerged as part of their business plan.
Others came forward as opportunities revealed themselves, either through the exploitation of data created under the Initiatives for Access [2] programme, or as a greater understanding of the potential of the technology permeates the organisation and potential partner institutions.
The Development Project Team The Library has recently created the new post of Director, Digital Library Development Programme.
This post is occupied by David Inglis [7].
There is a team of 7 staff including David Inglis.
Two other projects are led by the Team the Legal Deposit of Non Print Material [8] and the Network OPAC for Europe.
The Team is based in the newly designated Research and Innovation Centre in Sheraton Street, London.
The Centre's Director, Nigel Macartney, has overall responsibility for steering the project.
Supervision for the Digital Library Project comes from the Programme Board, chaired by David Russon, Deputy Chief Executive of the Library, and from a number of other directors which all have a major stake in the success of the project.
In addition, staff from the Document Supply Centre [6], SRIS [9] and the Historical Collection areas [10] are beginning to become involved.
Two advisers have been appointed to the Digital Library Development Programme.
KPMG [11] will be acting as the Financial Advisor in investigations into a PFI.
Denton Hall [12] will be providing legal advice for the Programme on both PFI and aspects of intellectual property rights.
For further information please see the Digital Library homepage [1], or contact   John Draper Project Manager Digital Library Programme British Library 2 Sheraton Street London W1V 4BH United Kingdom Email John Draper on digitalprogramme@bl.uk   References [1] British Library Digital Library Programme http://www.bl.uk/ric/digilib.html [2] Initiatives for Access Programme http://www.bl.uk/access/overview.html [3] Private Finance Initiative Web pages http://www.open.gov.uk/citu/pfi/pfihome.htm [4] The "Inside" service, mounted on Portico http://portico.bl.uk./inside [5] Notice advertising a market sounding exercise http://www.bl.uk/ric/notice.html [6] British Library Document Supply Centre http://www.bl.uk/dsc/ [7] The British Library Research and Innovation Centre news column http://www.portico.bl.uk/ric/news.html [8] Legal Deposit of Non Print Material http://portico.bl.uk/ric/news.html [9] The British Library Science Reference and Information Service (SRIS) http://www.bl.uk/sris/ [10] The British Library Historical Collection http://www.bl.uk/guide.html [11] KPMG Web site http://www.kmpg.co.uk/ [12] Denton Hall Web site http://www.link.org/ukr895.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Teams Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Teams Buzz portfolio Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh argues there are signs we are hung up on multi-skilling...
The future roles of information professionals are being questioned at a time when boundaries between users, librarians and different kinds of library staff are becoming more blurred than ever.
The future may be one where academic libraries will be plagued by delayering, by restructuring and rationalisation; the growth of technology will ensure unpredictable outcomes; student control of their own learning will undermine the mediator function of librarians.
At the same time, the actual situation in most universities reveals a vast preponderance of conventional resource use ; a similar preference for the printed form over the electronic, given some differences between disciplines; a liking for conventional organisational forms; a not-unexpected reaction against change on the part of some staff.
The use of labels like "multi-skilled" and "multi-talented" is increasing, but we are beginning to realise that this involves more than the acquisition of technical skills by traditional librarians.
This is healthy, given the possibility that future services may put a premium on staff who can occupy the middle ground by one stratagem or another.
Some of the changes identified are not new.
Librarians have always espoused the "training of users in transferable information retrieval skills" and subscribed to the idea of making users as self-sufficient as possible in their use of information.
Most librarians who have worked in small academic libraries, and some not so small, will also testify that the overlap between the professional and non-professional, and the emergence of the para-professional, were going on long before the first computer appeared.
There are signs that we are hung up on competencies.
Creating and sustaining across the board competencies is being challenged.
Elsewhere there is a growing acceptance that spectacular achievement can co-exist alongside monstrous incompetence in the same person.
Training needs to focus on high achievement in areas of individual excellence, while relying on other things to overcome individual limitations.
One of the devices that can be deployed to do this in organisations is a team.
A recent paper on the development of new roles took 32 pages to describe an awesome range of skills that should be taught to new professionals so that they could confidently take their places in the new world.
It might be possible to pass this sort of thing off as a typical library school lecturer’s exercise it takes a former one to know one but it is a good example of the thrust of the new roles and skills debate.
It is unreal.
Of course information service staff need a basic understanding of IT, and need to be able to use the basic skills.
But we do not know yet what organisational forms will emerge to support the electronic library, the digital library and the hybrid library.
What we have now is inadequate and out of date even for conventional services.
To handle the new roles issue properly we will do better to look at organisational structures, because we will never succeed in multi-skilling or re-skilling to the level we need to make things work.
The best examples of converged information services now demonstrate the kind of multi-talents which are not technologically based, but are about changing attitudes and developing managerial abilities where they might not have existed so clearly before, among other things.
They are to do with combining traditional skills with the ability to work alongside staff from what were separate services.
New roles is a team issue, and is part of structural change.
So let us stick to specialisation but learn how to integrate in an organisational sense.
For a long time we will need the traditional librarian alongside the IT specialist, but maybe not in the same person.
New roles will only come out of organisational change, not from attempts to graft disparate skills onto the existing body of knowledge.
It is to the dynamics of teams that we must look for this.
Teams make real multi-skilling possible and it is this that should illuminate the direction we take, not the need to create information workers with a vast portfolio of skills.
Author details: Lyndon Pugh Managing Editor, Ariadne Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Librarian of Babel: The Self-Citation Machine Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Librarian of Babel: The Self-Citation Machine Buzz html metadata cataloguing hypertext url research Citation BibTex RIS The Librarian, talking to Mike Holderness, uncovers the true purpose of the World-Wide Web.
Good morning, and welcome back to the Library of Babel.
Today’s tour will focus on some of the issues raised by our unique acquisitions policy.
[1] As you probably know, our Mission statement enjoins us: To make accessible to all the totality of human knowledge and we aim, towards this end, to collect all possible texts.
We have been greatly assisted in this by the work of Tim Berners-Lee [2] and Robert Caillau [3] without whom our enterprise might have remained forever a pipe-dream.
[4] [5] This work has also, however, made our comprehensive task significantly more difficult.
Naturally, the Library must seek to collect all translations of Shakespeare, including those into Xingu and the original German.
Recent developments in cultural theory have left us with the alternately depressing and gigglesome task of collecting the script and cast photos of the stage musical based on the Disney cartoon of the film of the play of the book of whatever folk-tales inspired the Quasimodo industry.
And all the intermediates, and their reviews, and the Web pages inspired by each.
[7] There are, of course, notorious problems with the rigorous referencing of the latter class of material, which we have informally dubbed “the mood-ring literature” to reflect its tendency to change from grey to black and back with temperature and the phase of the moon.
[9] In an attempt to remedy this situation, the Library has recently begun a process of translation of World-Wide Web pages into the Harvard Reference System.
Technical progress has been surprisingly swift.
Our prototype cataloguing engine examines all hypertext references in a document, and assigns a date and lead author to each referenced document.
Clearly, this task will be very significantly facilitated by the adoption of common metadata standards.
However, we are sadly of the opinion that it will be a number of years before these are widespread, and we are therefore developing a parser for Web pages.
This, within certain restrictions, will recognise those documents such as CVs and resumés which contain an author name.
In searching for such pages it constructs a relationship tree which assigns proper bibliographic references to the pages which form its nodes.
The results are interesting: Arno Valdez’s Home Page Hi.
I am a postgraduate at the University of Kesteven, (Regents 1977a) in the Department of Psychosomatic Metallurgy.
(Regents 1977b) I graduated from the Ross Ice Shelf Institute of Technology (RIT 1997a) in 1994.
Some of this is personal stuff: some pictures, (Valdez 1997a) some notes on the music I like, (Valdez 1996a) and my resumé.
(Valdez 1997b) This month’s High Internet Weirdness is this: (Devil) {deletia} My publications: Some effects of molybdenum nitride inclusions in stressed lithium-sarium sinter-castings (Valdez 1997q) Tin Sickness: a non-directive Adlerian approach (Valdez 1997r) This page lovingly hand-crafted in vi; last updated 30 June 1997.
Devil, A Great Daemon story, http://www.tocnet.com/~ankh/public/devil_does_unix Regents (1977a) Regents of the University of Kesteven, Mire-under-Wold: http://www.bogstandard.net.uk/~uniKesteven Regents (1977b) Regents of the University of Kesteven, Mire-under-Wold: http://www.bogstandard.net.uk/~uniKesteven/DPM/ RIT (1997a) Ross Ice Shelf Institute of Technology [10] http://www.rit.aq Valdez (1996a) University of Kesteven, Mire-under-Wold: http://www.bogstandard.net.uk/~uniKesteven/DPM/avaldez/choons.html Valdez (1997a) University of Kesteven, Mire-under-Wold: http://www.bogstandard.net.uk/~uniKesteven/DPM/avaldez/pix.html Valdez (1997b) University of Kesteven, Mire-under-Wold: http://www.bogstandard.net.uk/~uniKesteven/DPM/avaldez/resume.html {deletia} Valdez (1997q) University of Kesteven, Mire-under-Wold: http://www.bogstandard.net.uk/~uniKesteven/DPM/avaldez/MoN-LiSa.html Valdez (1997r) University of Kesteven, Mire-under-Wold: http://www.bogstandard.net.uk/~uniKesteven/DPM/avaldez/sicktin.html We tentatively conclude that the so-called World-Wide Web is evolving into a self-citation machine.
In an academic environment increasingly driven by productivity measures which appeal to the souls of accountants, this must have significant effects.
We have anecdotal evidence of authors competing for the higher number of Web citations of their work.
In the current state of the art, this is either an approximate or a labour-intensive undertaking.
We have been told by one visiting author [11] that an initial search showed 431 references but that 157 of these turned out on manual inspection to be the same article, which appeared with a different URL each time the indexing robot visited the site.
It cannot be long, though, before the gradual rise of electronic publishing of refereed papers lends credence to the concept of a Web citation index joining the paper citation index in research review processes.
In order to monitor this phenomenon, the Library Administration Research Department is currently considering a proposal to convert the Harvardized Web pages back into HTML.
This will enable us to make use of automated indexing and cataloguing facilities.
It will, we hope, allow us to detect and filter some instances of self-citation; we are alarmed however, that the innocent self-citers will be more heavily adjusted than the malicious, who may simply spread their Web sites across multiple servers in order to defeat our first-level author-identity parser.
The Harvardization programme also leads to the intriguing or frankly alarming prospect of a shadow-Web in this form.
This, however, is entirely in the spirit of the Library of Babel.
We look forward to rising to this new challenge, and to those which our responses to it will, it seems, inevitably generate.
Thank you for lending your attention to this brief presentation.
Please feel free to take a copy of our petition to the Joint Universities Group Underwriting Library Administration Research as you leave.
References [1] See for a brief introduction: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/babel/ [2] Home page of Robert Cailliau (do not address Robert in French), http://www.cern.ch/CERN/People/Robert/PersonalData.html [3] Home page of Tim Berners-Lee the first implementer of the Web, http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ [4] Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the Xanada project, http://www.aus.xanadu.com/xanadu/faq.html [5] To demonstrate both how incomplete is the state of exploration of the Library and how comprehensive it is, note that at the time of this visit the only English-language document among the 11 returned by an AltaVista [6] search for the phrase “in xanadu did kublai khan” was this: http://www.redcat.org.uk/~matt/html/think.html [6] AltaVista search engine, http://altavista.digital.com/ [7] You thought I was joking?
See: http://www.publicnews.com/issues/733/film.html.
[8] [8] Wait, there’s one more already: http://www.oitc.com/Disney/WDW/25th/ETicket.html [9] See for example: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk [10] Nyahhh, we have a much shorter URL so we must be cool!
[11] Web pages of Mike Holderness, purveyor of fine memes(?
), http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/ Author (channel?)
details Mike Holderness, Freelance Journalist, Email: mch@cix.compulink.co.uk Mike Holderness: The Internet for Journalists Web pages at: http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/lecture.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The DISinHE Centre Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The DISinHE Centre Buzz software accessibility copyright e-learning url research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Webb introduces the DISinHE centre.
There is a growing need for teaching and learning technology to be more accessible to students and staff with disabilities.
The changes in the DSA (Disability Discrimination Act) which will come into force in October this year and the new European Human Rights Legislation which will be with us by the year 2000 all makes it imperative that designers of educational web sites, CD ROM software and all other technological developments take note of this new (at least to the UK) wave of legislation.
Not forgetting that there is the possible removal of educational exclusion from the DDA in the year 2004.
The current situation is that of rapidly changing technology.
There is a great deal of significant development buts its of a variable quality and its not co-ordinated.
There are few standards or guidelines and for many institutions it is seen as an add on extra or even worse as a charitable activity.
The purpose of the Disability Information System in Higher Education or DISinHE [1] is to facilitate the exploitation of computing and information technology for everyone in the higher education sector.
We are not a research project but are a JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) [2] funded project, which is hopefully due to become a JISC service in the year 2001.
Our philosophy is to see that accessibility is embedded in the sector.
We are trying to ensure that we have collaboration across the higher education sector.
We are sensitive to the challenges in higher education that produce university graduates and we are active in advocating positive change.
We are also creating close links between teaching, research and the service provision.
Awareness raising of the project within the Higher Education disability community, the commercial sector, and within the wider Higher Education community is an important part of the project.
Members of the team have attended more than thirty conferences and formal meetings, at twenty of which either a full presentation of the DISinHE project has been given, or a description of the project has been given as part of a more general presentation.
As illustrated in Figure 1, DISinHE also hosts a web site.
Figure 1: The DISinHE Home Page Technology in fact is often one of the most disabling parts of the environment, it is important that we realise the diversity of the human population.
It is no longer good enough to talk about our students and staff with disabilities as people, with the implication that this gives a sufficient description of their characteristics.
Including people with obvious disabilities makes this point very forcefully, and should also lead to educationalists considering less diverse cases as different and worth giving attention to.
The advances in current technology can either be used to support people with special needs or put them at an even greater disadvantage.
Barriers created by inaccessible technology keep people with disabilities from their full potential as individuals.
A widespread effort has been underway for years to break down these barriers but we must recognise that by looking at improved access for everyone we are ensuring better provision for people with disabilities and this leads to better provision for everyone.
Higher quality learning materials come from ensuring that they are accessible to all.
Providing an improved learning support environment will help the success rate of all students.
Figure 2: Members Of The DISinHE Team References DISinHE, Project Home Page <URL: http://www.disinhe.ac.uk/> JISC, Home Page <URL: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/> Author Details Ian Webb, Development Officer DISinHE Centre Department of Applied Computing University of Dundee Dundee, DD1 4HN Email: ian@disinhe.ac.uk Web site: http://www.disinhe.ac.uk/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Preserving Oral History Recordings Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Preserving Oral History Recordings Buzz data software archives metadata digitisation accessibility copyright preservation cataloguing multimedia research standards Citation BibTex RIS Colin Webb and Kevin Bradley look at some of the practical realities, and implications, of introducing digital technology into the sound preservation functions of the National Library of Australia.
Like many national, regional and research libraries, the National Library of Australia (NLA) is actively facing a wide range of challenges associated with using digital technology to improve access to its collections.
In at least one area this is not discretionary: the Oral History collections are intrinsically affected by technological change and without moving to digital, access to the collections will be lost as analogue audio technology loses market support.
The NLA is implementing a strategy to bridge the difficult transition between fully analogue and fully digital environments.
The Oral History collections cover a wide range of material collected (with varying levels of activity) over the past 50 years.
In recent years the focus has been on biographical interviews with prominent Australians, social history projects and folklore collecting.
Currently holding about 30,000 hours of original recordings on reel to reel analogue tape, the collection is important and well housed, but inadequately preserved.
Only about a quarter of the material had been copied to acceptable preservation standards by the end of 1995, with similarly low levels of transcription and cataloguing.
If preservation is ultimately about accessibility, we had (and have) very large challenges even without an enforced change in the technology base of the collection.
This responsibility is managed by our Sound Preservation and Technical Services unit (SPATS) part of our Preservation Services section using a combination of inhouse facilities and expertise, and outsourcing where it is cost effective to do so.
With the collection growing at around 1,000 1,500 hours per year, just keeping up with each year’s new acquisitions has stretched resources to the limit.
The investment required to move to digital technology has acted as a catalyst on a range of issues that will improve the way we manage these collections.
This paper does not attempt to present all the background and details of these changes, described more fully in three existing papers on the NLA Web site [1], [2], [3].
While covering some of the same ground, this paper tries to take a more evaluative approach, looking at the objectives and roles which the changes are meant to support; the principles we have used and how they have been affected by digitisation; why the changes were made; comparisons with what is happening in other comparable institutions; costs and benefits; what it has to teach us about handling other digital info; and some implications and possibilities.
Roles SPATS has two major and overlapping roles: preserving the audio component of the collections generated or acquired by the Oral History program, and providing technical support to the Oral History section.
These roles address an overall objective of supporting the Oral History program’s collecting, access and archiving intentions.
SPATS’ preservation responsibility is to ensure that acquired audio information remains accessible for as long as it is judged by the Library to be needed and in a form judged to be the most appropriate.
This is addressed mainly by: copying selected recordings to stable carriers and providing access copies storing recordings in protective environments researching and keeping up to date on causes of deterioration and preservation methods repairing and restoring damaged recordings ensuring standards are used that will facilitate long term preservation training and advising Oral History staff, collectors and interviewers on achieving appropriate standards of recording and handling of sound recordings.
In addition, SPATS performs a technical support role, ensuring that the acquisition and access intentions are most efficiently and effectively supported with appropriate equipment and expertise.
This is addressed mainly by: recording studio interviews to an appropriate standard for inclusion in the collections purchasing and maintaining appropriate equipment managing the availability of equipment and facilities for studio and field recording providing access copies providing editing, pre-mastering, and if necessary recording, services for publication projects providing soundscapes for exhibitions.
All of these functions have been impacted on by digitisation.
Changes in technology and archiving procedures Tapes in the collection are streamed into categories for action depending on their technical requirements, ranging from recordings made by NLA on studio equipment, through field recordings that may or may not be recorded to standards, to acquired collections with some problems, to material that is unplayable.
The intended outcome for all categories is basically the same, namely to produce a preservation copy, a working copy, and a service copy for access purposes.
(This is similar to the approach taken with microfilm produced in the Preservation Reformatting Unit.
In both areas, the approach is intended to protect the Library’s considerable investment in producing the copy; with sound archiving, however, there is the added imperative that one of the copies is the original if it is lost, the information is lost as well as the investment.)
This approach has been a standard one in sound archives world wide.
It aims to achieve the following: to preserve the recorded information as accurately as possible on a reasonably long lasting carrier that can be stored securely; to provide a back-up copy in case of unexpected damage to the preservation copy.
(This is a standard approach with other kinds of electronic information as well, of course.)
For efficiency’s sake, we use the back-up as a working copy which may be filtered and used to produce publication and access copies if required; to provide an inexpensive, easy to use access copy that can be duplicated almost automatically for sale or distribution.
Until 1992, analogue technology was used for recording and preservation copying.
From 1992 we have increasingly used DAT (digital audio tape) for recording, especially in the field.
This produces a high quality but short lived digital master that needs recopying or migrating for archival uses.
We have copied DAT to analogue tape for preservation.
The CD-R (CD-Recordable)-based digital technology we have adopted since 1996 retains most of these principles, because they are useful principles for archiving such vulnerable material.
We now produce: a CD-R, as both a working copy and as the copy from which we will make later digital transfers (so in some ways it is our preservation copy); a safety copy on analogue reel to reel tape; a service copy cassette (either analogue, or DAT if that has been produced in the original recording).
The recordings are processed in two ways using this technology: analogue originals are converted to digital on the hard disk of a Sonic Solutions Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), and an analogue reel and cassette are made simultaneously.
The digital copy is processed with the necessary indexing codes added.
A CD is then burnt in the background while the DAW is used to record the next analogue tape; DAT recordings are processed via a stand alone CD recorder with automatic index coding.
The same digital signal is converted to analogue and a reel and cassette are made simultaneously.
We are still making analogue back-up copies to give us a different medium from the preservation copy: experience with degrading sound carriers has shown us the risks of putting all one’s preservation eggs in the one basket.
This is probably an interim measure while we satisfy ourselves that CD-R is reliable and we learn more about how it deteriorates.
We expect to drop the analogue safety copy from the process eventually and produce two digital copies, although we are not sure when it will be necessary, and safe, to take that step.
We are also not sure whether both digital copies will be on CD-R. We are still making analogue service copy cassettes because they are cheaper than CDs to produce, and because we have the equipment to do it quickly and easily.
At some stage in the future when equipment needs to be replaced or the demand for CDs outstrips the demand for cassettes, we expect that access will be given from digital sources, either on CDs, or via inhouse or wider networks.
The basic change in principles here is very small: we are recording to the best standard we can afford, and ending up with 3 copies with similar functions in both analogue and digital environments.
However, the inputs and the outcomes (and potential outcomes) have changed greatly.
On the input side different equipment, procedures, and skills have had to be acquired and developed, while changed outcomes and possibilities include the ease of copying, indexing, searching, automating retrieval, error correction, networked access, mass storage, editing, manipulation, and convergence with other data, along with different migration intervals.
This explains why we are fairly comfortable with the changes: we can see the principles that still apply, allowing us to explore the areas that genuinely do need to change.
Three major areas of investigation still haven’t been resolved.
One concerns the CD testing regimes we need to put in place so that we can keep track of errors and deterioration that are not immediately apparent.
We are involved in international discussion of the most cost effective ways of building testing into archiving systems.
The second research focus, which we have decided is down the track a little way for us, is a future move to a digital mass storage system.
This will again require careful thought and investment.
The third area of investigation is the access options that digitisation offers us.
This is being actively pursued right now, and is discussed later.
Why were these changes made?
The point of this process is to maintain accessibility in the face of technological change both in the short term and in a future of ongoing change.
The technology was also chosen, after an extensive and rigorous investigation of options, to offer some improvements in our services and to be cost effective.
The anticipated loss of support for analogue equipment and tape among suppliers and technicians meant we had to go digital at some fairly early stage or lose access to the collection.
The longer we stayed with an analogue-based technology the larger the backlog of material eventually having to be copied to digital at real time.
We chose CD-R because it is a widely used, successful technology likely to be supported for a relatively long time.
Some of the alternatives offered better performance but with very poor chances of being supported.
CD-R is also expected to have a reasonably long carrier life (likely to outlive the technology itself), and can be used flexibly either as a bridging strategy to a mass system, or as part of a mass system.
Technologically, the 16 bit linear Audio CD format is appropriate to the standard of material we hold.
The sonic and dynamic range of the CD is roughly equivalent to that of a DAT, our present field recording medium, and is unlikely to be exceeded in any meaningful way by that of a standard analogue reel recording.
It is unlikely that we will have the resources to repeat this analogue to digital transfer.
By using this format we may be sacrificing some detail that could be picked up by other digital formats, which could have been used later to remove minor speed variations inherent in all analogue recordings.
Given the penalties for not beginning the transfer of a large collection, this is a compromise we are willing to make.
At this stage, our digital strategy is based on migration.
The Library is also actively exploring archiving and preservation of other digital information such as online publications and in-collection items like floppy disks and CD-ROMs, where we are also assuming migration will be the only viable preservation path.
For most of this material the oft-praised perfect cloning of digital data seems an ironic joke: fancy formatting and legal constraints both mean that we maybe able to copy the bits but not the pieces.
For our digital sound recordings we expect no such difficulties: we have much greater control over the formats and standards that we use and the rights to reformat the information, so we are reasonably assured that migration will work.
Approaches being used elsewhere There are many local and state organisations involved in oral history and folklore recording programs in Australia, but in most cases they have limited archiving aims.
The number of institutions performing a national sound archiving role in this country is small.
The following comments reflect what we believe is happening in an almost random selection of overseas and local institutions with comparable collections and responsibilities to NLA: all are either using digital technology or planning to do so, and most are using CDRs; a number are producing both CD-R and analogue copies.
Berlin Phonogrammarchiv.
A collection of ethnomusic/folklore with related oral and social testimonies supporting the material.
Have been writing CDs for nearly two years.
Sudvestfunk (German Public Radio Archive).
A very large collection of unique analogue reel recordings and also a collection of published material.
CDs have been written for around three years.
Now carrying out a major pilot project using mass data storage and online access using a purpose built network.
CDs are still used for some distribution but will probably be phased out.
National Sound Archive, British Library.
A very large collection of ethnomusic, commercial, historic, oral history and folklore recordings with a variety of unevenly implemented standards.
Have made digital recordings for many years, using a number of now-superseded media.
Recordings now made on CD-R as well as other more experimental digital formats.
Also make analogue reel copies.
Prepare the CD using a SADiE hard disk editing system.
Discoteca di Stato (State Sound Archives of Italy).
Large collection of oral history, folklore and ethnomusical materials, as well as a collection of published materials.
Using Sonic Solutions (like NLA) and make two CDs, one analogue reel and a cassette in accordance with current International Association of Sound and Audio-Visual Archives (IASAVA) Technical Committee recommendations [4].
The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum.
Large collection of folklore material from the eight counties as well as material from the BBC in Northern Ireland.
All unique original recordings.
Write CD, analogue reel and cassette using stand-alone CD writers.
US Library of Congress.
Are still making two analogue copies, though experimenting with many digital systems including CD-R. As their collection is probably the largest and most varied in the world, there are difficulties in making one system meet all their archiving needs.
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has decided to provide CDs for access copies.
They also write multimedia CDs containing image and audio for Aboriginal communities.
They are presently actively preparing a program to transfer their entire sound collection to a digital format, probably CD-R. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
Producing CDs, DAT, and analogue reels for preservation copies.
Currently investigating the use of digital mass storage systems.
With the exception of Sudvestfunk, all have developed their systems from a previous two analogue reel preservation system.
What costs have been involved in the transfer to digital technology: 1: in absolute terms?
We have yet to evaluate the project, detailing all the costs, but we know we have spent approximately $A130,000 on equipment specifically for this, covering our network of digital audio workstations, CD writers, and digital adaptation of existing equipment wherever possible.
We know we still need to upgrade some other existing equipment and to install CD testers.
We also know we have spent about $A40,000 on digital studio and field recording equipment since 1990 most of it purchased before we entered this project.
In terms of future costs, we know we will need to maintain the analogue equipment we are still using for the transfer to digital data; we will also need to invest resources to support the increased accessibility that becomes possible through networks, publications and exhibitions.
Much more significant will be the costs associated with future technological change: at some stage the CD-based equipment will need to be replaced.
It is likely that a mass storage system will be feasible within the next 10 years, although it is impossible to say when it will be, how much it will cost, and to what extent it can be integrated with other data storage in the Library or with other institutions.
The switch from analogue to digital has always been planned to happen over a number of years to take advantage of relatively reliable technology when it is available, and to spread the cost of the conversion.
2: in comparison with staying with analogue technology?
Savings that can be quantified and are available immediately are as follows: recording media used in the studio one CD-R replaces one analogue reel in the case of speech, or two analogue reels in the case of music.
On the basis of current costs this represents a saving per hour preserved of 22% and 25% respectively.
recording media used in the field a single DAT cassette replaces two analogue reels, resulting in a saving of about 50% per hour recorded.
studio equipment if the DAWs had not been purchased the Library would have needed to replace two analogue studio recorders at a cost approaching that of the digital equipment.
The preferred studio replay machine, Studer A820, is now only available as a custom made piece of equipment.
field equipment the program uses a range of DAT recorders according to the particular recording situation.
The cost of the DAT recorders is only about 25-30% of the cost of equivalent analogue field recorders.
storage space eight CDs can be stored in the same space as one analogue reel.
If the shelving was reorganised to optimise CD storage, a space saving of 56% could be realised.
Shelving them side by side in existing shelving still realises a space saving of 25%.
Other savings are less immediate and harder to quantify: the time taken to record and process digital and analogue are similar, so there are not significant short term efficiencies in processing.
However, when the recordings have to be migrated to a new system, the savings will be very significant as the digital-to-digital transfer can be largely automated and done at faster than real time speeds.
some of the benefits listed later imply longer term, as yet unquantified, savings.
Other benefits The major benefits already discussed can be summarised as maintaining preservation effectiveness, providing some ongoing productivity gains, and preventing the further build up of a backlog of real time analogue duplicating needing to be done in the future.
Some of the other benefits that can be expected from our digital system are these: it gives us more choice about the timing and options for moving to a mass storage system; the system has been designed with migration in mind: software upgrades are included as part of system maintenance; the system is modular, minimising replacement costs and allowing a flexible response to technological changes; upgrading to the next system can be done in steps, and the core Sonic Solutions system can be retained for other carriers when CD-R has been superseded; the system is internally networked, allowing staff and equipment to be used more flexibly; the ability to check data quality eventually automatically may help us to take more of a ‘just in time’ rather than a ‘just in case’ approach to preservation; the standard of work by contractors becomes easier to monitor; the ability to include metadata on disk should allow us to automate more of the procedures for migration and for retrieval, with possible linking to the catalogue record; it should be possible to link audio to transcripts or summaries, making access to the material much more flexible than at present; this may also reduce the number of full transcripts needed if summaries can be successfully linked; the system provides the basic foundation for networked access to the collection, initially in-house and later externally; digital data is also easier to prepare for public use it is easier to locate, duplicate, and clean up on demand; we can also expect to develop skills in handling digital media and systems that will be useful in evaluating larger mass systems for the Library; finally, there is also some benefit for interviewers in digital media and equipment that allow longer recording times, lower weight machines and higher quality audio, while for the Library there are lower battery and freight costs for field equipment and supplies.
Implications We have already indicated that the project is yet to undergo a formal evaluation process, but there has been much informal explanation, discussion and evaluation of its implications.
This is part of the normal accountability process, but people have also begun to recognise the possibilities for improving the way the collections are managed and used.
Our formal evaluation will look at questions like what we think of the technology, what it is delivering, what users think, problems encountered and overcome, costs and benefits, along with crucial questions of what our objectives were, whether they were achieved cost effectively, whether they were still worth achieving, whether we could have done it better any other way, what value it has provided to the Library, its users, and the community, what we have learned from it, and problem areas still needing attention.
Recent discussions in the Library have highlighted a number of issues and comments that will be relevant: what we think of the technology.
The technology was specifically selected not to be a dead end; time will tell if we were wrong, but it is still looking good in terms of delivering what we want of it.
It looks flexible enough to be managed in ways that suit the Library, and open enough to migrate well.
Longer term the technology needs to provide more efficient data storage, more feasible networking, and automated migration, but these will almost certainly evolve.
what users think of the outcomes.
Because we are still providing access via analogue cassettes, most end users have not had direct contact with the digital output.
At this stage we are assuming they will appreciate increased rates of access and improved retrievability when we can provide them, although we are really only beginning to explore questions of how users will want to use digital sound.
Specialised users such as broadcasters, publishers and exhibition curators have responded positively to our ability to fit in with their largely digital systems.
problems encountered.
There have been few teething problems with the technology itself.
Technological change often comes with human problems and challenges involved in making and justifying decisions, winning organisational and staff support, clarifying expectations and developing expertise.
We have experienced some aspects of all of these, though perhaps their tractability has been more remarkable than their existence.
At a purely practical level, the use of a hard disk to manage recorded data has marginally added to conflicting demands on our facilities, as we need to process the data before we can handle the next studio interview.
There have also been design problems to overcome in that we are operating in both digital and analogue domains.
We have also had to convince our contractors to install compatible systems for work that we want to outsource.
what is the project delivering?
The system has been working well for some months, producing the quantity outputs, and we believe the quality outputs, that we aimed for, although we cannot be certain of that until we have full CD testing arrangements in place.
It is delivering some of the benefits we looked for, though many of them remain in the future.
It hasn’t immediately increased our capacity to collect and manage material, but it should longer term.
The system itself does not solve workflow problems.
We still need to make procedures as streamlined and effective as possible.
At the same time as we are changing technology a lot of attention is being given to improving the information that is available for managing the collection, rationalising procedures, prioritising material for attention, and identifying material that should not be in the collection or should not be digitised.
Apart from the sound files, the main deliverables so far seem to be the possibilities that the system is opening up, with implications that reach throughout the Oral History program and beyond.
Because it has helped us to focus on how we can better manage the collections and provide access to them, it has influenced us to look at a raft of issues including: what goes into the collections; what preparation work and what post-interview work is required from interviewers; what is needed for effective cataloguing; what material should be transcribed; whether we can link the catalogue record (which has been digital for a long time), the transcript (which is already in a digital form or could be easily scanned) and sound; what gets preserved and how; how much we try to digitise and how quickly; who looks after the digital sound files; how completely and seamlessly digital audio can be integrated with other Library digital collections; managing accountability; staff skills and succession planning.
We have already started on many of these.
Working groups have been set up to look at redefining the collection development policy, sorting out priorities for preservation and other collection management strategies, and future access options.
For the latter we are exploring ways of linking indexing points in the sound file with indexing points in either the transcript or a detailed summary.
We are also looking at the technology and investment that would be required for networked access in the Library building and beyond.
We are collaborating with Australia’s CSIRO to adapt its FRANK software, developed for moving images, for use with audio files [5].
There are other options for cooperation that are also being explored, sharing research and information, working together on standards and guidelines, sharing equipment and even data storage facilities.
Collaboration and convergence raise a number of dilemmas including a tension between technological perspectives (which see sense in putting all data together), and a client service perspective (which seeks to make it possible for users themselves to bring data together easily, while retaining the context value added by institutions and professionals who organise their material in particular ways, maintaining levels of choice for the client).
It costs a lot of money to create and acquire the Library’s Oral History collections and to maintain access, and it will continue to be an expensive process.
All electronic information collections that are vulnerable to carrier deterioration and technology obsolescence are expensive to maintain for ongoing access.
The digital systems that have been installed seem to offer good benefits for the costs, many of which are unavoidable if the collection is to continue to be available.
It is important that the Library’s investment continues to be managed in an accountable manner, making the best use of the resources involved, while defining and taking advantage of the right possibilities.
References Colin Webb, 1996.
Stairways to digital heaven?
Preserving Oral History Recordings at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, National Library of Australia, http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/cwebb2.html Kevin Bradley, 1995.
Preservation of the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection.
Text and images prepared for a display at the 2nd National Preservation Office Conference: Multimedia Preservation Capturing the Rainbow, in Brisbane, Queensland, 28-30 November 1995, Canberra, National Library of Australia.
http://www.nla.gov.au./nla/staffpaper/npokb.html Colin Webb, 1995.
Transfer from Analogue to Digital: Selecting a System.
Paper presented at the 2nd National Preservation Office Conference: Multimedia Preservation Capturing the Rainbow, in Brisbane, Queensland, 28 30 November 1995.
Canberra, National Library of Australia Available from: http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/npocw.html ‘The Technical Committee members discussed what advice they could give to collections facing the need to make preservation transfers of decaying audio documents.
CD-Recordable is increasingly being used by collections for making access and preservation copies of audio documents.
In the absence of a digital medium with a better proven format stability, it has been widely accepted as a digital target format.
The consensus was that CD-R offered, with some reservations, the best digital solution at the moment.
CD-R is not an ideal solution but a “least-worst” solution.
The making of a parallel analogue preservation copy of a 1⁄4 inch polyester tape should also be considered.
The cost of the tape is low compared to the additional security gained: ‘Any archive using CD-R disks for preservation copies is strongly urged to monitor the condition of the collection by checking sample recordings at regular intervals using a suitable CD tester.’ IASAVA Technical Committee, Annual Committee, Annual Conference, Perugia, August/September 1996, Minutes of working meeting, p.5 CSIRO Division of Information Technology DIMMIS homepage.
A Web site describing the Distributed Interactive Multimedia Information Service (DIMMIS) Project, including the FRANK project.
http://www.syd.dit.csiro.au/projects/dimmis/ Author Details Colin Webb / Kevin Bradley Email: cwebb@nla.gov.au or kbradley@nla.gov.au Phone: +61 6 262 1111 Fax: +61 6 257 1703 National Library of Australia Home Page: http://www.nla.gov.au/ Address: National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Canberra ACT 2600, AUSTRALIA Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Ways of Exploiting New Technologies Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Ways of Exploiting New Technologies Buzz data software java javascript html database xml urn css doi browser identifier png cache gif php gopher mathml algorithm intranet url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly discusses Intermediaries: Ways Of Exploiting New Technologies.
Since February 1998 HTML 4.0 [1], CSS 2.0[2], the Mathematical Markup Language MathML [3] and the Extensible Markup Language XML [4] have all become W3C Recommendations.
These web protocols, all of which are concerned with the way in which information can be represented and displayed, were initially Working Drafts which were developed by the appropriate W3C Working Group.
The Working Drafts were then made publicly available as W3C Proposed Recommendations.
Following a review period the Proposed Recommendations were voted on by W3C member organisations.
Following a successful vote, the Proposed Recommendations became Recommendations.
But how widely used are these new web protocols?
Today’s web community, being so large and consisting of a majority who probably have little interest in the underlying web technologies, is reluctant to upgrade to new versions of browsers, due to a lack of knowledge, interest, technical skills or resources.
More experienced web users remember the “browser wars” and the problems of being an early adopter of technologies.
What are the implications of this conservatism?
Can we simply ignore these new technologies?
Revisiting the recommendations and looking at the new features they provide it would appear that we cannot afford to ignore these technologies if we wish to develop richer, more elegant and more maintainable web services.
Conservatism in adopting new technologies is probably due to the following factors: Lack of tools to create resources using the new technologies.
Time and resources needed to purchase and master tools once they become available.
Low uptake of browsers which support the new technologies and concerns over the interworking of new technologies with existing systems, such as old versions of browsers.
The lack of tools and the costs of deploying new tools will be addressed by the marketplace.
But how are backwards compatibility issues to be addressed?
This article considers this point.
Current Browser Usage Trends Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox article published in March 22, 1998 [5] gave an analysis of browser usage.
The results indicated that every week, about 2% of the users switched from previous releases to the new release.
Moving most of the users to the new version would take a year (about 50 weeks at about 2% per week).
Figure 1 shows the changes in the profile of browsers accessing a national UK web service between July 1997 and June 1998.
Although there has been a steady growth in the number of users using version 4 of a browser in that period, there are still only 30% of the hits coming from the latest versions of the browsers.
Figure 1a User Agents Accessing A National UK Web Service Browser July 1997 Sept 1997 Oct 1997 Nov 1997 Jan 1998 Mar 1998 May 1998 Jun 1998 ie 2 0.6 0.5 0.6 0.6 0.4 0.6 0.3 0.3 ie 3 6.6 6.3 5.6 5.9 7.0 6.5 6.9 5.6 ie 4 0.3 0.6 1.2 1.3 2.5 2.3 4.3 6.4 ns 0/1 7.1 5.2 4.5 5.0 4.7 2.6 2.0 2.0 ns 2 26.6 22.3 21.4 19.0 18.0 18.1 14.8 10.8 ns 3 53.5 54.6 58.4 58.0 53.0 55.3 51.8 49.9 ns 4 4.2 9.31 7.8 9.0 13.0 14.0 19.4 24.2 Figure 1b Browser Usage in Tabular Format Although, of course, these figures are open to interpretation (they indicate “sessions” and not users, for example) they do show that a significant minority of users are still using “old” browsers (version 2 and earlier) and less than a third are using the latest generation.
Web Deployment Decisions Given the range of versions of browsers in use and the slow rate of upgrade to newer versions, how can a web developer exploit new technologies which may enable the developer’s service to add useful new features, better and richer interfaces or improved performance?
Possible solutions include: Do nothing Move to new technologies Deploy new technologies in a backwards-compatible way Provide end users with options for choosing between technologies Deploy technologies on web server Deploy technologies on client Make use of content negotiation Make use of user-agent negotiation Let’s look at these options in some more detail.
1.
Do Nothing Perhaps the simplest option, which can be a deliberate choice or the default choice through inertia, is to continue with existing working practices.
This may be the cheapest option (in the short term at least) since no new tools are needed, there are no new training requirements and a consistent service is provided for the end user.
On the other hand this decision may simply delay a transition, and add to the maintenance work when the transition eventually takes place.
2.
Move to New Technologies The opposite to doing nothing is to move completely to the use of new technologies.
This approach may be applicable for developing an Intranet service in which the developer has knowledge of and control over the local systems or for providing a proof-of-concept.
However providers of mainstream services are unlikely to wish to adopt this approach.
3.
Deploy New Technologies in a Backwards-Compatible Way New technologies may be deployed in a backwards compatible way.
Web protocols are intended to be backwards compatible, wherever possible, so that, for example, new HTML elements and attributes are ignored by older browsers.
In this article, for example, inline style sheets have been used to change the colour of the heading of this paragraph.
If you are using a browser which support style sheets (such as version 4 of Netscape or Internet Explorer) the heading will be displayed in brown, whereas other browsers with display the headings in the default colour.
Unfortunately due to bugs in the browsers (if you believe in the cock-up theory) and inconsistencies in the ways in which Netscape and Microsoft have interpreted new technologies (if you’re a believer in conspiracy theories) not all new technologies are implemented consistently or degrade gracefully.
It will, unfortunately, be necessary to test how new technologies work on a variety of systems which may not be easy if, for example, you do not have access to Netscape on a Macintosh or Internet Explorer on a Unix workstation.
4.
Provide End Users with Options for Choosing Between Technologies A third alternative is to provide the end user with a choice of options.
We have probably all seen pages containing links such as “Click here for a non-frames version”, or “Click here if you have the Macromedia Plugin”.
This option is not particularly suited to access by naive users who may not know what functions their browser supports or what a plugin is.
In addition the information provider will have multiple versions of the resources to maintain.
This can be expensive, although some authoring systems, such as NetObjects Fusion [6] can maintain multiple versions of resources automatically.
5.
Deploy Technologies on Web Server Technologies can be deployed on web servers and made seamlessly available to the client.
For example the following button can be used to validate this document using an HTML validation service running in the US.
Although we are familiar with surfing the web to access information from a variety of servers, the notion of using third party applications does not appear to have taken off with the UK Higher Education community.
However we could envisage a model in which, say, an institutional or even national intermediary service transformed a richly structured resource (using, say, XML) into a resource which can be processed by the browser on the user’s desktop.
The intermediary service could be invoked in a variety of ways, such as by configuring the browser appropriately (e.g.
use of the resource’s MIME type or using the client’s autoproxy function) or perhaps in some cases through end user action.
For example see the (”Printer Friendly version” option which can be used to reformatting a framed page to a form suitable for printing at the C|Net web site (<URL: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C23074%2C00.html?dd.ne.tx.ts.>).
Figure 2 Web Resource Which Can be Reformatted for Printing 6.
Deploy Technologies on Client Rather than deploying new technologies on the server, they could be deployed within the browser by using, for example, a scripting language on the browser.
Such techniques were mentioned in the What Is XML?
article in Ariadne edition 15 [7] which included an example of how XML document could be displayed in a browser which did not support XML by using a script to convert from XML to HTML, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 XML Deployment Using JavaScript 7.
Make Use of Content Negotiation The elegant way of deploying new formats which was originally envisaged by developers of web protocols was through transparent content negotiation (TCN) [8].
It was originally intended that browsers would send a list of the file formats that it could accept and that if multiple formats of the same resource were available the server would sent the most suitable (according to some algorithm, such as the smallest file size).
The World Wide Web Consortium make use of TCN on their home page.
As shown in Figure 4 if you access their home page with an old browser which does not support the PNG graphical format you will be sent a GIF image.
If, on the other hand, you are using a browser which does support PNG, such as Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4, you will be sent the PNG file.
Figure 4 Netscape 3 shows a GIF logo but Netscape 4 shows a PNG version Unfortunately transparent content negotiation does not appear to be widely deployed, in part due to lack of awareness of the feature, but also due to the lack of support available in authoring tools and the poor implementation of TCN in browsers.
Although Holtman has proposed [9] that content feature negotiation could enable new features, such as new HTML elements, to be deployed in a way in which clients and servers could transparently negotiate over use of such features, it is by no means certain that this proposal will become standardised within the IETF or implemented by the software vendors.
8.
Make Use of User Agent Negotiation A less elegant way of deploying new technologies is through User Agent Negotiation.
Rather than browsers sending a list of formats it supports, this requires web administrators to have a knowledge of formats and technologies supported by different browsers and by different versions of the same browser.
Some large web sites make use of this technique, as illustrated in Figure 5 which shows that the different interfaces to AltaVista [10] presented to Internet Explorer 4 and NCSA Mosaic.
Figure 5 Alta Vista as displayed by NCSA Mosaic and Internet Explorer 4 In this example rich content, including use of tables, images and active maps, is sent to Internet Explorer, whereas NCSA Mosaic is sent very simple content.
User agent negotiation has a number of advantages.
For example complex client side scripts to check the functionality of the browser are not needed.
Unlike the policy of requiring the end user to make use of a specified browser (e.g.
using the “Best viewed in Netscape” icon) the content is designed for the browser the end user is using.
Indeed the page could legitimately contain an icon saying “Best viewed in your browser”.
Critics of user agent negotiation argue that the maintenance of different pages for not only different browsers, but also different versions of the same browser together with corresponding feature lists and possibly bug lists is likely to be difficult.
In practice, however, it is unlikely that most service providers would want to support every version of a browser.
In addition the latest generation of document management systems, such as PHP [11], Microsoft’s Active Server Pages [12] and Vignette’s StoryServer [13], provide server-side scripting capabilities which can automate the management of customisable web pages.
An example of user-agent negotiation is hosted by the World Wide Web Consortium.
A series of core style sheets are available from <URL: http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/>.
As described in the development interface page [14], the styleserver service makes use of “browser sniffing” its name for user agent negotiation.
This service omits certain style sheet options from particular browsers in order to avoid certain known implementation problems.
The systems mentioned above can create what are known as dynamic pages.
Although the pages may look static if they are created based on the browser the user is using, they may be created dynamically.
This approach may cause problems with caching the resource, since dynamically-generated content can either be marked as uncacheable, or marked for immediate expiry, or marked for expiry after an hour, a day, or whatever.
This caching problem can, in principle, be overcome if the server management system enables cache times to be set and if the HTTP/1.1 protocol features to allow caching of negotiated responses is properly implemented.
Intermediaries A paper on Intermediaries: New Places For Producing and Manipulating Web Content [15] presented at the WWW 7 conference proposed that, rather than letting web servers produce web content, intermediaries, processing systems which are located between the web server and browser, can provide new places for producing and manipulating Web data.
The paper describes a programmable proxy server known as WBI (Web Browser Intelligence) [16] which stands between your browser and the web and enables intermediary applications to be developed.
Sample WBI applications include sophisticated history management and notification systems.
For example WBI can annotate web pages to highlight text that might be of particular interest or to add hyperlinks to related pages that you or others have seen.
A number of other examples of intermediaries were given in the What Is XML?
article in Ariadne edition 15 [7] which described how XML support could be provided by intermediaries running on the client such as Javascript, ActiveX or Java applications.
In the June 1998 edition of D-Lib [17] Andy Powell describes how URNs (Uniform Resource Names) based on DOIs (Document Object Identifiers) can be deployed using an intermediary based on the Squid proxy caching server.
Figure 6 illustrates use of this approach, by which Netscape can access a resource which has the URN urn:doi:10.1000⁄1.
Although Netscape cannot normally resolve an address of this form, by configuring the Netscape autoproxy appropriately the URN can be forwarded to the Squid system which can resolve the address.
Figure 6 Resolving DOIs Using an Intermediary A similar approach to the use of intermediaries has been taken by the Open Journal eLib project [18] based at the University of Southampton.
In this project a Distributed Link Service provides an external means of storing hyperlink information.
The link data is merged with the document when the document is viewed, as illustrated in Figure 7.
Figure 7 Open Journal Before and After Links Merged The Future What is the future for the deployment of new web technologies?
Some argue that new technologies will be so clearly superior that users will discard their old browsers an upgrade in a short period of time and give the example of the rapid migration from Gopher clients to Web browsers.
However the resources needed to upgrade browser software especially if it has been installed on individuals PCs rather than on a server may, unfortunately, rule out this option.
Rather than ruling out deployment of new technologies completely, content negotiation, user agent negotiation and intermediaries may enable new technologies to be deployed while maintaining compatibility with existing browser technologies.
Figure 8 illustrates a model for the deployment of new technologies.
Figure 8 A Model for the Future In Figure 8 it is envisaged that data will be stored as HTML or XML resources or in a backend database.
The backend server scripting interface can process the data, such as converting the file format or customising the output.
A proxy server, implemented as a national service or within an institution, a desktop proxy, or a browser extension (implemented in, say, JavaScript or Java) could then provide functionality not provided natively by the browser or server.
Some scenarios for the use of intermediaries are given below: Deploying URNs An institutional proxy service resolves URNs of popular resources into the URL of a “nearby” mirror of the resource.
XML Deployment A client-side intermediary, implemented in JavaScript, converts XML resources into HTML Extended Browser Functionality An desktop proxy service updates the view of documents it receives, so that broken links are flagged, and an indication is given of resources which have recently changed.
Your Feedback What do you think of this article?
Questions, comments, criticisms are gratefully received.
Please send email to b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk.
References HTML 4.0 Specification, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40> Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2 (CSS2) Specification, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2> Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 1.0 Specification, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-MathML> Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 Specification, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml> The Increasing Conservatism of Web Users, Alertbox <URL: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980322.html> NetObjects Fusion, NetObjects <URL: http://www.netobjects.com/> What is XML, Ariadne Issue 15 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue15/what-is/> Transparent Content Negotiation in HTTP, Koen Holtman <URL: http://gewis.win.tue.nl/~koen/conneg/> Content Feature Tag Registration Procedure, Koen Holtman <URL: http://www.imc.org/draft-ietf-conneg-feature-reg> Alta Vista <URL: http://www.altavista.digital.com/> PHP <URL: http://www.php.net/> ASP, Microsoft <URL: http://www.microsoft.com/NTServer/Basics/WebServices/Features/FeatContMgmt.asp> StoryServer, Vignette <URL: http://www.vignette.com/Products/0,1056,0,00.html> StyleServer Development Interface, Verso Inc. <URL: http://style.verso.com/styleserver/> Intermediaries: New Places For Producing and Manipulating Web Content <URL: http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1895/com1895.htm> WBI, IBM <URL: http://wwwcssrv.almaden.ibm.com/wbi/> Resolving DOI Based URNs Using Squid, D-Lib, June 1998 <URL: http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/june98/06powell.html> Open Journal Project <URL: http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/> Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus, Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323943 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Using the Web to Promote Your Web Site Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Using the Web to Promote Your Web Site Buzz software rdf html database apache archives metadata accessibility copyright preservation cataloguing mailbase url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly expalins how to promote your web site.
Many readers of this article will be involved in setting up new web sites, possibly for European or nationally-funded projects, for internal, institutional projects or perhaps for community projects.
As the size of the web grows there is an increasing awareness of the need to be pro-active in promoting web sites we can no longer simply sit back and expect visitors to arrive at our new site.
This article describes a variety of approaches which can be taken to the promotion of a web site.
The article is based on a presentation on "Promoting Your Project Web Site" [1] given at the "Consolidating The European Library Space" conference [2].
Submission to Search Engines Many visitors to a web site will find the web site through use of a search engine.
Although search engines can find new web sites automatically as they become linked into the web from existing web sites the growth in the size in the web is making it increasingly difficult for indexing robots to keep up.
It is probably desirable to be proactive and submit resources to search engines when a web site is launched.
Many of the main search engines provide an option to "Submit a Resource".
Figure 1 illustrates the interface for submitting a resource to AltaVista.
Figure 1: Submitting a Resource to AltaVista Since there are a number of popular search engines and the search engines may limit the number of URLs which can be submitted it may be desirable to make use of a submission application or web service.
A large number of submission programs are available including WebPosition [3], NetSubmitter [4], RegisterPro [5], Engenius [6] and the Exploit Submission Wizard [7].
In addition to the submission programs there are a number of web-based submission services including Broadcaster [8] and Submit-it [9].
An illustration of one of these products (Web Position) is shown in Figure 2 (click to view enlarged image).
Figure 2: Web Position The products for submitting resources to multiple search engines typically provide other functions as well, such as analysing your pages, reporting on your position in search engines, creating metadata, etc.
Web Directories Web directories such as Yahoo!
are an alternative to search engines.
They also provide a popular location for searching for resources.
Unlike search engines web directories are compiled manually.
Web directories also provide an interface for submitting resources, as illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Submitting a Resource to Yahoo!
A number of the submission programs will automate the submission of resources to web directories as well as search engines.
Possible Problems Can we solve the promotion of our web site by simply purchasing a submission program?
Unfortunately not.
Due to the sheer size of the web search engines and directory services do not attempt to index all resources they find.
A sample of a web site may be indexed Although the coverage of commercial search engines, for commercial reasons, tends not to be fully documented, it is believed that a number of search engines will only index a small sample (say 500 pages) of a web site.
A robot may only index to a limited depth Indexing robots may only index the "surface" of a web site and not follow resources which are located deep in the hierarchy.
The user interface may present a barrier to the robot software A number of indexing robots cannot process framed web sites or web sites with "splash screens".
A robot may not index certain URL strings URLs containing questions marks (e.g.
http://www.foo.com/get.asp?record=1) may not be indexed.
A directory service may only catalogue complete web sites and not individual projects It is believed, for example that sub-domains have difficulties in getting into Yahoo!
Possible Solutions Some possible solutions to the challenges listed above follow.
Domain Name If a project has its own domain name it is more likely to be catalogued by a directory service such as Yahoo!
In addition it is more likely to be fully indexed by a search engine than if it was part of a large web site.
The Robot Exclusion Protocol Since search engines are likely to index only a small part of a web site it may be desirable to control the areas of the web site which are indexed.
For example you may wish to exclude personal information, draft resources or experimental work from being indexed.
The Robot Exclusion Protocol (REP) enables a web site administrator to specify areas of the web site which should not be indexed.
The REP makes use of a robots.txt file located in the root of the web server.
A typical robots.txt file is shown in Figure 4.
User-agent: * # Following apply to all robots Disallow: /cgi-bin/ # Don't index /cgi-bin directory Disallow: /tmp/ # Don't index /tmp directory Figure 4: A Typical robots.txt File The robots.txt file has a simple format and can be managed by hand.
However a number of tools are also available to help you manage this file, such as RoboGen [10].
Robot Exclusion in HTML Although the Robot Exclusion Protocol is conceptually very simply, in practice it may be difficult to exploit since updating the robots.txt file is likely to be restricted to the web site administrator.
Fortunately there is now a HTML feature which enables authors of HTML pages to control access to their pages.
The following HTML element located in the HTML HEAD: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> will prevent robots from indexing the resources and following links within the resource.
Further information on the Robot Exclusion Protocol and Robots META tag has been produced by Martijn Koster [11].
Web Site Design Avoid use of frames and splash screens in your web site design.
As well as enabling indexing robots to access resources on your web site this also has additional accessibility benefits (visitors with browsers which do not support frames will still be able to access your web site).
Improving Search Results Once the key pages in your web site have been indexed by a search engine you might expect a sensible query to retrieve the resources.
Unfortunately the resource may fail to be located near the top of the search results.
How can you improve the ranking?
Metadata Metadata may help to improve the ranking.
Simple keywords and description metadata, as illustrated below is desirable since this metadata is used by a number of search engines, including AltaVista: <meta name="keywords" content="exploit, web magazine, TAP, telematics"> <meta name="description" content="Exploit Interactive is a .."> Dublin Core metadata provides a more comprehensive and standardised approach to metadata for resource discovery.
Unfortunately it is not yet widely support by the major search engines.
It is probably worth implementing Dublin Core metadata if you can make use of it to enhance local searching and you can address the maintenance of the metadata.
An example of an approach of the use of metadata to enhance local searching and the architecture to manage the metadata can be seen in the Exploit Interactive web magazine [12].
The search interface is illustrated in Figure 5.
Figure 5: The Exploit Interactive Search Interface As illustrated in Figure 5 the search facility can be used to search the full text of articles, the author of an article (using the DC.Creator Dublin Core attribute) or the description (using the DC.Description Dublin Core attribute).
The metadata is stored in a neutral format (as variables in an "Active Server Page").
A server side include (SSI) is used to transform the metadata to the appropriate format.
Currently the metadata is transformed into <meta name ="DC.Creator" ...> and <meta name ="DC.Description" ...>.
However in order to provide the metadata in, say, RDF, it would simply require a single update to the SSI script.
The approach taken by Exploit Interactive provides enhanced searching for visitors to the web site, Dublin Core metadata which could be used by third party applications and an architecture which helps to minimise ongoing maintenance.
Citation So far we have considered techniques which will ensure that a web site is indexed and ways of improving the ranking.
We should also take into account the citation of web sites for example URLs which are included in articles (both online and print), used in publicity materials or spoken (e.g.
when giving talks or presentations or on the phone).
Domain Name The domain name for the web site can affect promotion of a web site in a number of ways.
For example short and memorable domain names: Are easy to remember.
Can be easily used in promotional materials.
Are more likely to be indexed by search engines and directory services (as described above).
UKOLN uses the name www.exploit-lib.org and www.ariadne.ac.uk for its Exploit Interactive [12] and Ariadne [13] web magazines.
Both of these domain names are short and easy to remember.
Use of separate domain names or qualified domain names sometimes used by departments (such as http://www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/) and sometimes for a particular function (such as Student Home Pages at Loughborough University see http://www-student.lboro.ac.uk/) appears to be on the increase.
This is probably due to (a) the ease and low cost of obtaining domain names and (b) the increase in expertise and knowledge of running web servers.
URL Conventions As well as having a short, memorable domain name it is also desirable to make use of short URLs.
Before releasing your web site it is useful to develop guidelines for URL naming conventions.
Some suggestions are given below: Scalable Naming Conventions You should ensure that your naming conventions are scalable so that a re-organisation of your directory structure is not needed in, say, two years time.
Avoid Unusual File Extensions You should try to avoid use of unusual file name extensions.
For example files ending in .asp, .cgi and files which contain question marks (e.g.
get.asp?record=1) are difficult to cite and may fail to be indexed by indexing robots.
It should be noted that this suggestion make conflict with information management requirements (e.g.
it may be desirable to store information in a backend database).
If resources are accessed using a CGI script or a similar method, it is advisable to try to ensure that URLs which appear to be static are provided.
A number of techniques, such as Apache rewrites, can be used.
Make Use of Directory Defaults Use of the default file names for directories can help in shortening the length of URLs and avoiding ambiguities in file extensions.
For example the URL for an article could be referred to as http://www.exploit.org/issue1/pride/article.htm but this could easily be confused with http://www.exploit.org/issue1/pride/article.html.
If the article has a file name which is the web server's default file name when a directory is requested (such as into.htm or into.asp) not only with this ambiguity be resolved, but the URL will be shorter.
Avoid Citation of Binary Files When referring to, say an individual document or presentation it is advisable to cite a HTML resource.
For example URLs of the form http://www.foo.org/presentations/talk-dec1999.ppt should be avoided as (a) not all potential readers will have access to a PowerPoint viewer; (b) it is not possible to provide links to alternative versions of the resource and (c) it will be difficult to provide additional information related to the presentation.
Jakob Neilson's AlertBox column provides some valuable comments on the "URL as UI" [14].
Giving Away Your Web Site As well as the various suggestions on ways in which you can enhance the visibility of your web site you may also wish to consider giving the web site away!
For example you could: Give parts of your web site away.
We have seen how metadata provides structured information about your web site which is given away to robot software.
Give parts of the user interface to your web site away.
Give your entire web site away.
Figure 6 shows an interface for searching for medical information on the web which is available on the OMNI web site [15].
Figure 6: The Interface for Searching for Medical Information on the Web at OMNI This type of interface is probably more likely to generate search requests than a page simply containing links to the remote search interface.
There are dangers in encouraging remote web sites to install a search interface to you web site search engine, in particular change control if you decide to introduce a new or updated search engine.
However this is an option you may wish to consider.
You may wish to give your entire web site away.
A mirror of your web site may enhance its visibility.
If this is an option for your web site you may need to structure your web site so that it can easily be mirrored.
This will include using directories to delineate areas of your web site which are to be mirrored, appropriate use of relative URLs and, if possible, ensuring that, if you use server-side scripting for management purposes, you hide (or rewrite) unusual URLs.
Although these days sophisticated mirroring and replication software is available it will probably make the mirroring task much easier if the site has been developed with mirroring in mind.
It should also be noted that this may also help in the digital preservation for a web site.
Publications This article has described submission engines to search engines and web directories and described web architectures which will help to make web sites more accessible to search engines.
In should be noted that articles about your web site can help in its promotion.
Articles in print and web publications should obviously raise the visibility.
In addition web magazines may submit their pages to search engines and links in the pages may be harvested.
Web magazine may also be made available on CD ROM, in free text systems, citation reports, etc.
As an example a number of Ariadne articles have been cited in Current Cites [16] and Ariadne itself features in PubList's Internet Directory of Publications [17].
Evaluation If you have followed the various suggestions given in this article how can you evaluate the effectiveness and assess the benefits against the resources used?
Monitoring Links to Your Web Site One suggestion would be to monitor the number of links pointing to your web site.
The LinkPopularity.com web site [18] enables the numbers of links, as recorded by a number of large search engines, to be measured as illustrated in Figure 7.
Figure 7: The LinkPopularity.com Web Site Monitoring the number of links to your web site, and the growth of the number of links will be useful in evaluated the impact of your web site.
It can also be of use if you wish to sell advertising space on your web site.
As Roddy McLeod, manager of the EEVL gateway [19] mentioned in a posting to the lis-elib Mailbase list: "I tried [LinkPopularity.com], pointing out to a potential advertiser that EEVL had, according to HotBot, 1099 sites linking to it, whilst there were only 18 sites linking to their site, and suggested that what they needed was more exposure.
It seems to have worked, as they have agreed to buy an ad on the soon to be released new design EEVL site."
[20].
Analyse Your Web Statistics Analysis of your web statistics can help in measuring the effectiveness of your web promotion strategy.
A more thorough report on web statistics will be published at a later date.
In this article mention will be made of analysis of access to web sites by robot software.
The BotWatch software [21] can produce reports on access to your web site by robot software, as illustrated in Figure 8.
Figure 8: BotWatch Conclusions Ideally you will think about the promotion of your web site before the web site has been launched.
A number of technical decisions which can help with web site promotion should be made before the launch as changes to a running service will be difficult to implement.
However even if your web site is well-established many of the suggestions in this article will still be relevant.
Many of the suggestions given in this article on web site promotion will have additional benefits in other areas.
For example: Robots and people with disabilities (e.g.blind users) have similar characteristics e.g.
can't follow images, may not be able to access framed sites, etc.
Indexing programs may index alt attributes in img elements.
Sensibly-structured web sites can be more easily archived and mirrored.
Metadata for general resource discovery can be reused for other applications (e.g.
current awareness services).
Further Information Additional useful information on web site promotion is provided by Deadlock Design [22], SearchEngineWatch [23], VirtualPROMOTE [24], Pegasoweb [25], did-it [26] and Yahoo!
[27].
Book reviews for "Poor Richard's Internet marketing and promotions: how to promote yourself, your business, your ideas online" [28] and "How to promote your Web site effectively" [29] have been published in the Internet Resources Newsletter.
Checklist A checklist of the points mentioned in this article follow.
Short domain name   Short URL naming conventions   Use of Robot Exclusion Protocol   Short domain name   Metadata provided in key areas   Architecture to implement and deploy metadata more widely   Web site submitted to search engines   Architecture to submitted to new resources to search engines   Procedures to produce web statistics   Procedures to make use of web statistics   Procedures to produce web statistics for robots   Procedures to make use of web statistics   Site designed to be easily mirrored References Promoting Your Project Web Site, Brian Kelly http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/concertation/libraries-nov99/ Consolidating The European Library Space Conference, DG Information Society Cultural Heritage Applications Unit http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/events/FP4CE/agenda.html WebPosition Gold, http://www.webposition.com/ Net Submitter Professional, http://www.netsubmitter.com/ Register Pro, http://www.registerpro.com/ Engenius, http://www.pegasoweb.com/engenius/ Exploit Submission Wizard, http://www.exploit.com/wizard/ Broadcaster Website Promotion, Broadcaster http://www.broadcaster.co.uk/> Submit it!
: Web Site Promotion and Marketing, Submit it!
http://www.submit-it.com/ Robogen, http://www.rietta.com/robogen/ Robots Exclusion, http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/exclusion.html Exploit Interactive, http://www.exploit-lib.org/ Ariadne, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ URL as UI, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html Searching for Medical Information on the Web, OMNI http://www.omni.ac.uk/other-search/ CurrentCites Bibliography on Demand (search for Ariadne), CurrentCites http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/bibondemand.cgi?query=ariadne Ariadne Main Information Page, PubList http://www.publist.com/cgi-bin/show?PLID=4931361 LinkPopularity.com, http://www.linkpopularity.com/ EEVL, http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ lis-elib archive, Mailbase http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1999-11/0015.html BotWatch, http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~sxw/robots/botwatch.html Art of Business Web Site Promotion, Deadlock Design http://www.deadlock.com/promote/ Search Engine Submission Tips, SearchEngineWatch http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/ Web Site Promotion, VirtualPROMOTE http://www.virtualpromote.com/promotea.html Web Site Promotion, PegasoWeb http://www.pegasoweb.com/ did-it, http://www.did-it.com/ Yahoo!, http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Information_and_Documentation/Site_Announcement_and_Promotion/ Recent Internet Books in Heriot-Watt University Library, Internet Resources Newsletter, Issue 58, July 1999 http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/irn58/irn58d.html#recent Recent Internet Books in Heriot-Watt University Library, Internet Resources Newsletter, Issue 59, August 1999 http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/irn59/irn59d.html#recent Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Showing Robots the Door Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Showing Robots the Door Buzz software html passwords perl authentication privacy url standards Citation BibTex RIS Ian Peacock explains how web robot access to your site can be controlled.
What is Robots Exclusion Protocol?
The robot exclusion protocol (REP) is a method implemented on web servers to control access to server resources for robots that crawl the web.
Ultimately, it is up to the designer or user of robot-software to decide whether or not these protocols will be respected.
However, the criteria defining an ethical robot includes stipulation that a robot should support REP.
This article refers to the established REP [1] acredited to Martijn Koster [2].
This involves creating a server-wide set of directives contained within the top-level /robots.txt plain-text file (e.g.
corresponding to http://my.server.foo-domain/robots.txt).
The currently deployed protocol allows multiple Disallow fields, one per-line, to be followed by a directory path.
Robots parsing a /robots.txt file will not retrieve any resource with a URL path below the path specified by the Disallow directive.
A Disallow field without a value is interpreted to mean no restrictions.
Groups of Disallow directives must be associated with a particular User-agent (corresponding to the HTTP User-agent request header, which a robot should use to identify itself).
This is done by inserting a User-agent field above the directives associated with it.
The values for the User-agent field are allowed to be a particular user-agent (e.g.
RogueRobot/v3.0), a list of user-agents or ‘*’ which specifies all robots.
Figure 1 gives an example of a /robots.txt file.
# This is an example robots.txt file for the site # http://my.site.ac.uk/ # Note that you can insert comments by preceeding them with a hash # and that blank lines are also valid.
User-agent: * # All user-agents (except others specified in this file) Disallow: /cgi-bin/ # Dont look at stuff in http://my.site.ac.uk/cgi-bin/ User-agent: WebWatch/v3.0 Disallow: # The WebWatch robot is allowed to look at everything :-) User-agent: BadRobot1, BadRobot2 Disallow: / # These BadRobots are denied access to everything User-agent: IndexingRobot Disallow: /cgi-bin/ # Binaries are no good for indexing Disallow: /images/ # Images are no good for indexing Disallow: /home-pages/ # Privacy issues with home-pages??
Disallow: /site/admin/stats/webstats # Web stats are no good for indexing (they may also be #sensitive) Figure 1 An example robots.txt file UK Universities and Colleges /robots.txt files The WebWatch project has recently undertaken an analysis of the /robots.txt files of UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) main web sites, as defined by the list of institutional web services [3] maintained by NISS.
From a list of 163 institutional web servers, 53 /robots.txt files were retrieved by a WebWatch robot.
This is around 33% of the servers we looked at; the remaining servers did not have a /robots.txt (i.e.
the server returned a 404 response code) or the connection timed-out.
The robot wrote each robots.txt file to disk for subsequent analysis.
This was achieved with two Perl scripts, one to produce analysis information on the file, and another to perform basic error-checking.
The first script output records containing the following information: File-size in bytes File-size as total number of lines Number of lines starting with a comment Number of lines containing a comment Number of Disallow directives corresponding to each User-agent Number of Allow directives corresponding to each User-agent Total number of User-agent fields where a line break was defined as NL.
The Allow directive is not strictly part of the currently deployed protocol but was checked for.
The error-checking script scans for common errors.
This has been subsequently been made into a web-based service for server administrators to check their own /robots.txt files.
Analysis of UK Universities and Colleges /robots.txt files Size of file The mean size of a /robots.txt files is around 427 bytes.
This corresponds to a mean total number of lines of about 15.
Figure 2 shows the distribution of the total number of lines of text in a /robots.txt file.
Figure 2 Distribution of total number of lines in our sample of /robots.txt files.
The distribution of size in bytes is roughly the same shape as Figure 2.
The two measurements of size are approximately proportional, the average number of bytes per line being about 28.
Figure 2 indicates that the majority of files contain less than 22 lines, with the outliers each representing one or two sites containing more.
The large intervals between these corresponds to a visual inspection that the “average” robots.txt contains “typical” lines such as Disallow: /cgi-bin and Disallow: /images and a small number of sites list large (site-specific) lists of directories.
It will be interesting to monitor the shape of this distribution as sites tailor robots.txt files to reflect their own web site.
The range of total number of lines is from 0 lines (an empty robots.txt, of which there were 2 cases) to 101 lines.
Stripping the /robots.txt file of comments and blank lines and comparing this to the original, indicated that a large number were similar i.e.
many files contained few comments or blank lines.
For those files that contained no comments and no blank lines, over 80% contained less than 6 lines in total.
There were no cases of files containing only comments.
On average, 21% of a /robots.txt file is composed of non-parsed lines.
Further analysis indicates that this corresponds to an average of approximately 1 blank line and 2 comment lines per file.
The distribution of the total number of non-parsed lines is of roughly the same shape as the size distribution of the /robots.txt file.
This suggests that comments and blank lines grow in rough proportion to the total number of lines contained in a file.
Use of User-agent The mean number of User-agent fields included in a /robots.txt file is just over 1.
There were no cases of multiple user-agents referred to by a single User-agent field.
The distribution of number of User-agent fields per file is spread over 0, 1, 2, 3 and 7 occurences.
Those /robots.txt files with 0 occurences are syntactically incorrect since each file must contain at least one reference to a User-agent.
Use of directives The mean number of directives per line is around 9.
These were all Disallow directives no Allow directives were found.
Figure 3 shows a frequency distribution of the number of directives found per file.
Figure 3 Distribution of number of directives per /robots.txt file Figure 3 shows that most sites are using less than 12 directives per file and that the most frequent number of directives is actually two.
This is due to the large number of “standard” /robots.txt files which Disallow a couple of “standard” locations (e.g.
/cgi-bin and /images).
Note the logical correlation between the outliers in Figure 3 and in Figure 2 the larger files contain more directives.
There were 4 cases of 0 directives.
These correspond to the zero-length files, and two invalid /robots.txt files.
Calculated from the above approximate means, the number of directives per User-agent is approximately 9.
Further analysis shows this is closer to 8 and the distribution is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4 Distribution of number of directives per User-agent field Note that in Figure 4 compared to Figure 3, some outliers have shifted left.
This implies that the shifted outlier sites had their /robots.txt file organised into more than one User-agent field.
The static outliers contain only one User-agent field with many directives, showing that the site administrators dont recognise individual robots.
This is wise unless the administrator can keep up with additions and changes to the current pool of robots.
Error checking The second script performed some simple error checking on each of the retrieved /robots.txt files.
The common errors are shown in Figure 5.
Errors #Occurences User-agent field without value 5 No User-agent value corresponding to Disallow 5 No Disallow fields corresponding to User-agent 2 Warnings   Unknown fields 4 CR DOS-style end of line 4 Empty file 2 Optimise   Multiple User-agent fields refering to the same value 1 Figure 5 Errors encountered in /robots.txt files The three errors shown here are strictly illegal, each non-zero-length file must contain at least one User-agent field with a corresponding value and at least one Disallow directive.
The latter error was triggered by the files that also triggered the “Unknown field” warning mentioned below.
Interestingly, there were no cases of a file without an attempt at inserting a Disallow directive (apart from those of zero-length, which is valid).
The unknown fields warnings refer to a field that is not one of User-agent, Disallow or Allow.
Closer examination of these warnings reveals that two sites put spaces or tabstops at the start of a line, before otherwise valid fields.
The remaining cases failed to postfix valid fieldnames with a colon.
DOS end of lines are valid, but are mentioned because some UNIX robots may have problems with this.
The optimisation remark refers to a file which uses multiple User-agent fields referring to the same user-agent.
All directives referring to the same user-agent can be inserted under the one field.
Conclusions Almost all of the ‘mainstream’ robots (i.e.
those run by the major search-engines) and many other ethical robots respect REP.
This means that having a site /robots.txt file will control access to your server for many robotic visitors.
It is recommended that sites implement REP, if possible, in order to exercise some degree of control over server accesses and corresponding server load.
Implementation will also aid the production of useful index-spaces on the web and cut-down on the proportion of ‘spam’ that is indexed.
There are also benefits for the users of robots.
Site administrators may direct indexing robots away from irrelevant material and point out ‘black-holes’ and other stumbling blocks for robots.
As REP becomes ever-more widespread, the number of robots implementing the standard will probably increase.
It should be borne in mind that REP relies in the cooperation of a (possibly unethical) robot user.
More reliable exclusion can be enforced via HTTP authentication or lower-level access controls.
The open nature of the /robots.txt file means that it should not contain confidential information (directly or indirectly).
Disallowing a robot to index material stored in certain directories should not be an indication that the material contained within is ‘secret’ or sensitive.
The protocol is not a security mechanism.
In cases where material must be protected from indexing, password-protection should be used.
For information not-requiring particularly fascist protection, it is worth remembering that a URL not-linked anywhere on the site (or other sites) will not be stumbled upon by a robot.
Also within HTML forms, submit buttons are rarely followed by robots.
The design of a /robots.txt file should direct task-specific robots away from areas that are irrelevant to their work.
For example, a hyperlink maintenance robot needs access to the whole site, except perhaps ‘black-holes’ and CGI scripts (most of the time you should Disallow indexing of scripts).
An indexing robot, on the other hand, needs access only to relevant indexable documents (i.e.
you should also Disallow things like images).
Our observations show that there tends to be a ‘standard’ /robots.txt file similar to that shown in Figure 6.
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /images/ Figure 6 A typical /robots.txt file This file is fine, though does not address the characteristics of the web-space served.
There is almost certainly other material which is unsuitable for indexing, for example, collections of web-logs.
There have been some reports of very large /robots.txt files causing errors when parsed by some robots.
One disadvantage of the /robots.txt method is that it is server-wide and should be maintained by an individual on behalf of the servers information-providers.
Note that it is not valid in terms of the protocol to have a /robots.txt file in a subdirectory of the root (‘/’) directory, although employing this technique may be a useful strategy in maintaining a cross-departmental (or similar) exclusion file, perhaps with a script collecting all of these and forming the top level file.
A recent, less widely supported exclusion protocol [4] overcomes the problem mentioned above, but is restricted in other ways.
The method involves directives embedded within HTML documents and allows the page author to specify whether the page should be indexed and/or followed (parsed for hyperlinks or links to inline objects).
This method is implemented with the HTML META element using the NAME=“ROBOTS” attribute-value pair.
The CONTENT attribute of the META element then includes a list of non-conflicting directives that should be implemented by a robot.
The possibilities are INDEX or NOINDEX and FOLLOW or NOFOLLOW.
Alternatively, the convenience keywords ALL= or NONE= may be used to preceed a list of directives that should all be set on or off respectively.
Example 1 <META NAME=“ROBOTS” CONTENT=“NOINDEX,FOLLOW”> This document should not be indexed, but should be parsed for links.
Example 2 <META NAME=“ROBOTS” CONTENT=“ALL=INDEX,FOLLOW”> This document should be indexed and parsed for links.
The current /robots.txt exclusion protocol is currently being revised and written as an internet draft [5].
This draft clarifies a number of points originating from the previous defining document and gives a more detailed description of the relationship between robot and /robots.txt file.
From the server administrators point of view, the new directive Allow is added.
Our above analysis would indicate the lack of Allow directives to imply that this revision has not yet been widely adopted.
It is not a recommendation to do the draft is, at present, uncompleted.
The error-checking script used in the above analysis has been turned into a WebWatch service so that site-administrators can check for common errors in their own /robots.txt files.
The service runs as a CGI script at <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/services/robots-txt>.
An example session is shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7 The WebWatch /robots.txt checking service We hope to continue monitoring the use of /robots.txt files as part of the WebWatch project.
References Koster, M:A Standard for Robot Exclusion Koster, M: m.koster@webcrawler.com NISS-maintained List of UK HE Campus Information Services HTML Author’s Guide to the Robots META tag Koster, M: Internet Draft specification of robots.txt Author details Ian Peacock WebWatch Email: i.peacock@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 323570 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata: E-print Services and Long-term Access to the Record of Scholarly and Scientific Research Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata: E-print Services and Long-term Access to the Record of Scholarly and Scientific Research Buzz data software database dissemination infrastructure archives metadata accessibility tagging identifier repositories eprints preservation graphics marc ftp interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day looks at the long-term preservation implications of one of the OAI protocol's potential applications e-print services.
In the April 2001 issue of D-Lib Magazine, Peter Hirtle produced an editorial highlighting the potential for confusion between the standards being developed by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) [1] and the draft Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) [2].
He noted the frustration that can ensue when words that have a clearly understood meaning in one domain begin to be used by others in a different way.
Hirtle ended his editorial with a suggestion for an OAIS-compatible OAI system that would offer “assurances of long-term accessibility, reliability, and integrity” [3].
While acknowledging the potential value of such a system, this column will confine itself to a preliminary investigation of the long-term preservation implications of just one of the OAI protocol’s potential applications, i.e.
e-print services (or archives).
As the OAI Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Web page states, the use of the term ‘archive’ “reflects the origins of the OAI – in the E-Prints community where the term archive is generally accepted as a synonym for [a] repository of scholarly papers” [4].
This appears to be a development of the way computing scientists have used the term to refer to the creation of secure backup copies for a fixed period of time a usage included in the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [5]: In computing … to transfer to a store containing infrequently used files, or to a lower level in the hierarchy of memories.
The main problem with this usage is not just that it excludes connotations of “long-term value, statutory authorization and institutional policy” (to quote the OAI FAQ again) but that it might encourage complacency, subconsciously implying that all long-term digital preservation issues have been resolved.
E-print Services E-prints are seen as a catalyst for the freeing of the scholarly and scientific literature from the cost barriers imposed by journal publishers.
Supporters of the self-archiving concept (as it is sometimes known) argue that the easiest, fastest and cheapest way for authors to make their papers available is to store electronic copies of these (both pre-prints and reprints) on e-print servers.
The successes of the arXiv e-print server [6] based at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and other e-print services are cited as exemplars of how authors’ distribution of e-prints can start a revolution in scholarly and scientific communication [7].
The LANL-based service initially gave access to e-prints in the domain of high-energy physics [8], but has since expanded to cover other areas of physics, mathematics and computer science.
Stevan Harnad has recently noted that the Los Alamos physics service holds over 150,000 papers (and is currently growing by about 30,000 papers per year), is mirrored on over 14 sites world-wide and gets about 160,000 user hits each weekday at its US site alone [9].
The arXiv e-print server and services like CogPrints (the Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archive) [10] and WoPeC (Working Papers in Economics) [11], are examples of a centralised discipline-based service.
Harnad initially suggested an alternative approach based on authors self-archiving their papers on their home pages or on institutional servers.
The core of Harnad’s original ‘subversive proposal’ was the establishment by authors of publicly accessible ‘archives’ of their own papers [12].
It is a simple subversive proposal that we would make to all scholars and scientists right now: if from this day forward, everyone were to make available on the Net, in publicly accessible archives on the World Wide Web, the texts of all their current papers (and whichever past ones are still sitting on their word processors’ disks) then the transition to the PostGutenberg era would happen virtually overnight.
The main problem with this model was that papers distributed across many Web pages or FTP archives could not be collectively searched or retrieved.
So, back in 1994, Paul Ginsparg argued that creating a distributed ‘database’ was technically possible, but not at that time logistically feasible [13].
The standards under development by the OAI, however, now mean that the distributed model can now be made to work.
Harnad has argued that widespread implementation of the OAI standards would enable e-prints stored on both distributed institution-based servers and centralised services like arXiv.org to be harvested into a single virtual archive [14].
The new breakthrough is agreement on metadata tagging standards that make the contents of distributed archives interoperable, hence harvestable into one global virtual archive, all papers searchable and retrievable by everyone for free.
OAI-compatible software is available from initiatives like eprints.org.
[15] The broad concept of e-print services received a boost in 1999 with the US National Institutes of Health’s proposal for a service called PubMed Central that would give free online access to published material in the biomedical sciences [16].
The original proposal suggested the creation of two separate services, one that would publish papers with peer-review from the editorial boards of journals that would be participating in the initiative, and a second one for papers that had not been refereed.
The proposed service received considerable criticism, partly based on the possibility of adverse impacts on public health or medical practice from papers published in the non-peer-reviewed section [17], but also motivated by suspicion of a government-controlled monopoly on scientific publishing [18].
In the event, the initial version of PubMed Central, officially launched in January 2000, only contained the peer-reviewed section of the proposed service [19].
It is being developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM).
Journals currently participating in PubMed Central include the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and the BMJ.
A separate service, tentatively known as PubMed Express, is planned to allow biomedical researchers to publish non-peer-reviewed work after some preliminary screening [20].
Following the establishment of the PubMed Central service, some authors have stepped up their campaign for the creation of services that give free access to all published papers.
A number of scientists have appealed to journal publishers in the life sciences to co-operate with initiatives like PubMed Central by making their content available to publicly accessible e-print services a set time after publication [21].
In order to help bring this about, a group known as the “Public Library of Science” has been inviting scholars to sign an open letter.
Signatories pledge their future intention (from September 2001) only to publish in, undertake peer-review for and serve on the editorial boards of those serials that will make papers freely available six months after publication.
This initiative moves far beyond a general support for author self-archiving initiatives.
It is using authors to put pressure on journal publishers to “give away” their content to publicly funded e-print initiatives.
The Public Library of Science group argue that not only will this help to facilitate free access to the scientific literature but also suggest that open e-print archives could continue the historical role of research libraries with regard to preservation.
They strongly argue that this should not be the function of publishers [22]: We believe … that the permanent, archival record of scientific research and ideas should neither be owned nor controlled by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be freely available through an international online public library.
What the letter does not say is how this preservation role would be undertaken, and how it would be co-ordinated.
Occasionally, proponents of the self-archiving concept imply that digital preservation is just a technical issue with few organisational or economic implications.
Harnad once said that nothing was simpler and more natural than to arrange for the continuous “systematic uploading and upgrading pari passu with ongoing developments in the medium” [23].
The harsh reality of the situation is that while technical strategies available for digital preservation do exist, there is less certainty with regard to questions like who should be organisationally responsible for managing the preservation process and the likely cost implications of undertaking the role.
This is especially true of e-print services, whose models tend to be concerned more with the rapid dissemination of current research than with ensuring continuing access to the record of scholarship [24].
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, only that the proponents of e-print services need to be seen to be addressing the preservation issue seriously.
This is not always the case.
With reference to PubMed Central, the editor of the journal Academic Medicine noted that many of those who had supported the move to electronic publishing had “not recognised the expense and long-term difficulty of assuming the role previously played by libraries as the science community’s archivists” [25].
A recent paper on the arXiv service has demonstrated a growing awareness of some preservation issues.
For example, it notes the importance of having multiple mirror sites around the world.
The service also date-stamps all of the different versions of each paper deposited in the repository and ensures that all of these can be retrieved.
There is also a hint at an awareness of the challenge and potential cost of migration strategies [26]: … there are clearly cost issues surrounding the issue of constantly migrating technology and content formats … merely preserving the article itself cannot capture the value of an electronic article.
Rather the value is in the associated contextual links, associated graphics, multi-media and connecting databases that have become intrinsic parts of modern scientific literature.
In theory, it would be easier to develop preservation strategies for centralised services like arXiv than to ensure the preservation of a ‘virtual database’ of e-prints stored on a large number of distributed Web servers.
Initiatives like the OAI may need to investigate the production of tools that are able to harvest the content (rather than just metadata) of distributed e-print services into centralised repositories for preservation.
This would, however, raise complex questions about who would have permission to do this and how the intellectual property rights of both authors and institutions would be respected.
Some Digital Preservation Issues In short, digital preservation raises several issues that need to be considered by the proponents of e-print services.
Firstly, there would be the general issue of who should be responsible for preserving the record of scholarly and scientific research.
The Public Library of Science group assumes that this is a role best carried out by publicly funded initiatives like PubMed Central rather than by publishers.
Some publishers disagree.
For example, Elsevier Science declare in their licenses their intention to maintain the digital files of the ScienceDirect service in perpetuity, and commit themselves to transferring them to another depository if they find that they are unable to do so [27].
Others maintain that libraries will still have an important role in ensuring the preservation of the scholarly and scientific record, including e-prints.
This may be facilitated, for example, by developments in some nations’ legal deposit legislation or through co-operation between research libraries and particular e-print services.
Another preservation issue is that of ensuring the continuing authenticity of the scholarly and scientific record.
It will be important that users can be sure that a paper is what it claims to be and has not been accidentally or deliberately changed.
In the digital world, it is possible to frequently update papers in order to take account of new data, more recent research or the comments of other scientists or scholars.
This is one advantage of digital publication but, as Clifford Lynch notes, is culturally opposed to the traditional view of the scholarly record as comprising “a series of discrete, permanently fixed contributions of readily attributable authorship” [28].
The date-stamping mechanisms used by services like arXiv may help with the identification of particular versions, but ‘proving’ authenticity may need to depend more upon the consistent deployment of cryptographic technology [29].
Conclusions There is no space in this column for a complete assessment of the digital preservation implications of the growing use of e-print services.
It is hoped, however, that this contribution will help fuel a wider debate about e-print services and the long-term preservation of access to the scholarly and scientific record embodied in them.
However, whether it will be possible to develop an OAI-based system compatible with the OAIS model remains to be seen.
References OAI: http://www.openarchives.org/ Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), CCSDS 650.0-R-1 (1999).
http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html Peter Hirtle, “OAI and OAIS: what’s in a name?” D-Lib Magazine, vol.
7, no.
4, April 2001. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/04editorial.html OAI Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.openarchives.org/faq.htm Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, vol.
1, pp.
614-615. arXiv.org e-print server: http://www.arxiv.org/ Stevan Harnad and Matt Hemus, “All or none: no stable hybrid or half-way solutions for launching the learned periodical literature into the post-Gutenberg galaxy,” in: Ian Butterworth, ed., The impact of electronic publishing on the academic community, London: Portland Press, 1998. http://tiepac.portlandpress.co.uk/books/online/tiepac/session1/ch5.htm Paul Ginsparg, “First steps towards electronic research communication,” Computers in Physics, vol.
8, no.
4, 1994, pp.
390-396.
Stevan Harnad, “The self-archiving initiative,” Nature, vol.
410, 26 April 2001, pp.
1024-1025. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm CogPrints: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ WoPEc: http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/WoPEc/ Stevan Harnad and Jessie Hey, “Esoteric knowledge: the scholar and scholarly publishing on the Net,” in: Lorcan Dempsey, Derek Law and Ian Mowat, eds., Networking and the future of libraries 2: managing the intellectual record, London: Library Association Publishing, 1995, pp.
110-116, here p. 114.
Paul Ginsparg, “ Who is Responsible?” in: Ann Okerson and James O’Donnell eds., Scholarly journals at the crossroads: a subversive proposal for electronic publishing, Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1995. http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/sub03.html Stevan Harnad, “The self-archiving initiative,” p. 1025. eprints.org: http://www.eprints.org/ Harold Varmus, PubMed Central: an NIH-operated site for electronic distribution of life sciences research reports, Bethesda, Md.
: National Institutes of Health, August 30, 1999. http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/pubmedcentral/pubmedcentral.htm Arnold S. Relman, “The NIH ‘E-biomed’ Proposal a Potential Threat to the Evaluation and Orderly Dissemination of New Clinical Studies,” New England Journal of Medicine, vol.
340, no.
23, 10 June 1999, pp.
1828-1829.
Floyd E. Bloom, “Just a minute, please,” Science, vol.
285, 9 July 1999, p. 197.
PubMed Central: http://pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ Richard Horton, “The refiguration of medical thought,” The Lancet, vol.
356, 1 July 2000, pp.
2-4.
Richard J. Roberts, Harold E. Varmus, Michael Ashburner, Patrick O.
Brown, Michael B. Eisen, Chaitan Khosla, Marc Kirchner, Roel Nusse, Matthew Scott and Barbara Wold, “Building a ‘GenBank’ of the published literature,” Science, vol.
291, 23 March 2001, pp.
2318-2319.
Public Library of Science: http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ Stevan Harnad, “On-line journals and financial fire walls,” Nature, vol.
395, 10 September 1998, pp.
127-128. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html Christine L. Borgman, From Gutenberg to the global information infrastructure: access to information in the networked world, Cambridge, Mass.
: MIT Press, 2000, p. 91.
Addeane S. Caelleigh, “PubMed Central and the new publishing landscape: shifts and tradeoffs,” Academic Medicine, vol.
75, no.
1, January 2000, p. 4-10, here p. 9.
Richard E. Luce, “E-prints intersect the digital library: inside the Los Alamos arXiv,” Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, no.
29, Winter 2001. http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/01-winter/article3.html Karen Hunter, “Digital archiving,” Serials Review, vol.
26, no.
3, 2000, pp.
62-64.
Clifford A. Lynch, “Integrity issues in electronic publishing,” in: Robin P. Peek and Gregory B. Newby, eds., Scholarly publishing: the electronic frontier, Cambridge, Mass.
: MIT Press, 1996, pp.
133-145.
Peter S. Graham, “Long-term intellectual preservation,” in: Nancy E. Elkington, ed., Digital imaging technology for preservation, Mountain View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, 1994, pp.
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Author Details Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Regular Columns: E-print Services and Long-term Access to the Record of Scholarly and Scientific Research” Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/metadata/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 20 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 20 Buzz software metadata digitisation copyright graphics windows z39.50 licence ecms mailbase Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter introduces Ariadne issue 20.
Welcome to the newly redesigned Ariadne.
The new interface was created to improve the appearance of Ariadne both on screen and when printed: the latter is particularly important now that Ariadne is published only in electronic format (since issue 19).
The old 1996 design was generally very servicable from the point of view of structure and navigation, but it had a number of features which, with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, introduced un-necessary complications to the editorial process: these have now been redesigned.
There are fewer buttons on the pages, but you can still get around the magazine in the same way as before: the page structures have been minimally modified to make the new appearance possible.
The new Ariadne banner echoes the design which used to grace the paper edition, and uses the same 'minoan' colours.
The graphics, the layout, and the new navigation structure were designed by myself.
I am pleased to say that the former editor of Ariadne (up to issue 11), John Kirriemuir, author of this issue's OMNI column, was instantly happy with the result.
The changes which have been made represent only the initial and most graphical of those planned for Ariadne.
Details of these improvements will be announced as they occur.
From issue 21 for instance, each article will contain detailed citation information brought into the text by SSI's, so that users referring to a saved file or a print copy of an Ariadne article will know exactly where it came from, and how we would prefer it to be cited in other articles and publications.
Brian Kelly, the UK Web Focus has recently returned from the WWW8 conference in Toronto, and his report appears in this issue.
The 'next big thing' for this year's conference was... that there is no 'next big thing' for this year.
This has been greeted with something like relief, since the pace of technological change during the past three or four years has been vertiginous and disorienting (if you haven't felt disoriented you haven't been paying proper attention to what is going on): the slowdown in pace of development is perhaps (and hopefully) a sign of a growing maturity among the web community.
This issue features a number of articles on Clumps type-projects.
Of these I think the article by Juliet Dye and Jane Harrington, Clumps in the Real World: What do User's Need?
is the most significant.
As Derek Law has observed recently, users needs are rarely directly considered in the design of new services: Juliet and Jane take a close look at evaluation procedures for the UK eLib Programme CLUMPS projects.
As they point out, many users want to search for resources independently, but also want guidance as to how to do this: it is up to providers of services to make this independence practical, otherwise the take-up of the services will not reflect what the users actually want.
This paper is based on a key presentation at the CLUMPS day held in the British Library on the 22nd March 1999.
Mick Ridley has contributed an article to this issue on his BOPAC system this is a practical Z39.50 project, originally funded by the British Library, designed to investigate the problems of large and complex retrievals from Z39.50 searches from multiple targets (Practical Clumping).
Continuing the focus on users, John Kirriemuir has contributed a revealing article on the state of Internet access in the UK National Health Service.
One of the Ariadne editors recently worked in it too, and the article seems to reflect fairly accurately how it is in some parts of the Service.
The editor had no Internet access at all in the lab, but then the unit had just moved six floors within the building to facilitate the removal of 1950's asbestos lagging.
In general within the university hospital's medical faculty access was good, however, the fact that two parallel networks exist throughout the NHS (to maintain patient confidentiality) with its implications for duplication, is bound to lead to arguments by some that the newcomer network is surplus to requirements.
The OMNI survey is informal, but may lead to a more substantial study in the future (OMNI column).
Other articles with a pronounced user focus are: 'Smart card people are happy people', an article in which Sally Rumsey outlines Tolimac: a pilot electronic document delivery service at the University of Surrey Library.
In our DISinHE column, Alan Newell explores technological solutions to support staff and students at Higher Education institutions with disabilities; and Elaine Blair describes Mailbase services, ten years on, as the organisation prepares for the possibility of becoming a commercial enterprise.
Among the regular columns we have one by Rebecca Linford (Web Editor), which gives a realistic picture of life behind the scenes of an HE web service.
Outsiders have a false picture of how tidy things can be this early in the development of the craft (which is what it is).
A number of the UK JISC supported subject gateways contribute reports: for Planet SOSIG, Karen Ford writes on 'The Resource Guide', which aims to provide staff and students in HE with an overview of electronic services; in EEVL Eye on Engineering , the EEVL Team explore patent information web sites, the latest EEVL news, etc.
; for Biz/Ed Bulletin, Chris Mitchell introduces the Advice and Answers section of the CTI Economics Web site; and Kate Sharp explores Green Resources on the Web for Economics and Business.
In the new JISC Content column Alicia Wise describes the UK National Electronic Site Licence Initiative; and in JISC ASSIST, Jane Williams describes the nature and function of the JISC awareness unit.
The Public Libraries column features an exchange between Frank Webster and Lorcan Dempsey, on modernisation, libraries and public policy, and whether or not we have been down this road before.
On a more technical front, in ECMS, Pedro Isaias has contributed an article on Electronic Copyright Management Systems: this will be followed up in issue 21 with a look at the technology of the systems.
In Search Engines, Phil Bradley looks at the engines which can be used to trace people rather than documents; and in the Web Mirror column, Sally Hadland writes about the new New National Mirror Service, which ought to bring more order into mirroring practices.
The Unix Column this month features an article on 'chroot Sandbox'.
Written by Ian Peacock of Netcraft (tanning himself in Barbados as I write), it looks at the increasing concerns about security arising from the proliferation of network software, and explores 'restricted perspectives,' which might prove to be a practical antidote to the problem.
Switching operating systems, Brett Burridge (Windows NT Explorer) tells us about Active Server Pages (ASP) one of the most useful facilities provided by Windows NT server.
Tracy Gardner reports on two IMS workshops held recently, and provides a good analysis of what it all means.
This issue's Metadata column is by Michael Day and Andy Stone, who report on the 'Third Metadata Workshop in Luxembourg'; and Agnès Guyon alsos reports from Europe on Bibliotecas Universitárias em Consórcio, a seminar in Aveiro, Portugal, held on the 26th and 27th April this year.
Finally, the Newsline column provides updates on News and Events, including news of the Mellon Digitization Scoping Study in Oxford, which is due to report soon.
Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter 16 June 1999 Addendum, 09 July 1999: The article in this issue by John Kirriemuir (OMNI column) on the provision of Internet access within the UK National Health Service, has been reviewed in the British Medical Journal by Douglas Carnall.
Responses to the review are also available.
The Editors of Ariadne are: Philip Hunter Information Officer UKOLN University of Bath Claverton Down Bath BA2 7AY Tel: +44 (0) 1225 826354 Fax: +44 (0) 1225 826838 Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Bernadette Daly Information Officer UKOLN University of Bath Claverton Down Bath BA2 7AY Tel: +44 (0) 1225 323343 Fax: +44 (0) 1225 826838 Email: b.m.daly@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 29: Key Technologies for the Development of the Digital Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 29: Key Technologies for the Development of the Digital Library Buzz mobile rss portal archives metadata rslp interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter with the editorial for Ariadne 29.
As we suggested in issue 28, we have the first detailed information on the new post of Collection Description Focus, in the form of a short article by Pete Johnston and Bridget Robinson.
Launched on 1 June 2001, the Focus will provide support both for UK projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work.
The Focus is located within UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath.
The post is jointly funded for a twelve-month period by the Joint Information Systems Committee/Distributed National Electronic Resource (JISC/DNER) , the Research Support Libraries Program (RSLP) and the British Library.
The Focus aims to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors.
The lead article in this issue is by Tracy Gardner, who gives the IBM perspective on 'Web Services'.
Those who have been running Web Services for years might be disturbed to find that the phrase now means something else in addition to the running of institutional Web pages.
Tracy gives a clear description of what is now meant by this phrase: boiled down to a single sentence it signifies 'self-describing applications which can be discovered and accessed over the web by other applications'.
'Web Services' covers both the architectures and technologies necessary to make the fully tailored and personalised delivery of accurate, up-to-date information efficient, practical and user-friendly.
Related to this, Paul Miller supplies an article titled: 'Architects of the Information Age'.
This is a report on an event (a one-day colloquium) held at the office of the e-Envoy in the UK, the Cabinet Office unit responsible for driving forward the UK's e–Government initiatives.
As he points out: Across an increasing number of initiatives and programmes, there is a growing recognition of the need for common 'architectures' within which truly useful applications and services may be constructed.
Partly, these architectures form a philosophical basis within which developments may be undertaken.
Further, ... such architectures in their broadest sense may include the specification of a common technical basis for working ..., [and] consideration of shared middleware services ..., as well as often detailed technical specifications.
It remains important that such architectures not be driven forward solely in a technological context, but that their design, implementation and evolution continually be informed by institutional and user requirements and aspirations.
Paul also writes that: Many of the problems facing those building the DNER are also faced by the architects of the Government Portals, or of Culture Online, or the National Grid for Learning.
There are also similarities with commercial service developments, and the different communities have a great deal to offer one another, and a great deal to learn, assuming we can weaken the barriers of language, working practice and financial model which keep us apart.
Interoperability Focus and others already work to actively cross some of these barriers, especially within the relative familiarity of the public sector.
There is certainly scope for more to become involved in this work, and for its active extension into the commercial sphere.
One of the technologies which might be used to make educational and research resources visible in the first instance, and which might provide a suitable way to cement the architecture of distributed electronic services is open archives compliant metadata.
Ariadne 29 features a report on a meeting held in London in July, 'Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives'.Catherine Grout, Director of Development at the DNER gave the opening presentation at this one-day event, and outlined the JISC/DNER interest in this area: The DNER investment over the next few years will be dedicated to building an Information Environment appropriate to the needs of learners, teachers and researchers in UK HE and FE.
There is considerable investment which needs to take place in a range of middleware, fusion and portal services to support this development.
At the moment we have a number of different services delivering content and presenting them to end users by a variety of different interfaces.
Our challenge is to develop the Information Environment in such a way that we considerably advance the coherence with which these services are offered to end users.
Our ultimately goal for this development is the seamless searching of rich relevant resources which the DNER vision enshrines.
The JISC also has an interest in exploring the use of Open Archives as a key way of disclosing metadata about the resources held by our services, and of particular significance here, by members of the higher and further education community.
Some JISC Services, for example RDN and MIMAS, have already been working to look at making their metadata OAI compliant Judith Clark, in her article on 'Subject Portals', describes part of the DNER development programme (the RDN portal projects).
She suggests that, implicit in the description of the Web by Lorcan Dempsey as a 'pervasive social, research and business medium, home to the full reach of intellectual product', is a complexity driven by a whole range of emerging uses of information resources.
User-driven activity ultimately defines what the portal does, but what makes any portal project so unpredictable is that as the content and context are changed, new behaviours are enabled.
The RDN portals are primarily concerned with technologies that broker subject-oriented access to resources.
Effective cross-searching depends on consistent metadata standards, but these are still under development and although the RDNs collection is governed by sophisticated metadata schemas, this is not the case for many of the other resources targeted by the portals.
.... Further portal functionality is being developed using RSS (Rich Site Summary) and OAI (Open Archives Initiative)... 'User-driven activity ultimately defines what the portal does' equals 'the user is king'.
Otherwise the technology doesn't make any sense.
The technology has to support what the user wants to do; and the standards have to make that possible.
And, to make 'the full reach of intellectual product' available to the user, the standards in place have to be interoperable.
As Paul Miller says, 'the architectures [must] ...continually be informed by institutional and user requirements and aspirations.'
Ariadne also features an article by Stephen Pinfield on key issues for electronic library services: 'Managing electronic library services: current issues in UK Higher Eductation institutions'.
This is a thorough overview, which should be read by everyone with an interest in the subject.
Also in this area, we have an article by John Kirriemuir, former Ariadne editor and sometime manager of the OMNI eLib project, who outlines some of the issues for the actual establishment of digital library centres in UK Higher Education institutions.
Lorcan Dempsey being digitized during a presentation at Strand Bridge House in London And so much more in this issue!
Rather than delay Ariadne any longer, you will have to find the other treasures for yourself.
Just time to note Lorcan Dempsey's move to OCLC in Dublin Ohio, where he has become Director of Research.
Ariadne and UKOLN wish him well.
Ariadne draws the attention of interested readers to the caption competition, which features a photograph taken after the dinner marking his departure from the DNER, in a small side street just off the Strand in London.
Finally, Ariadne notes the departure of UKOLN's events manager, Joy Fraser, to pastures new.
Joy is not leaving Bath however, and UKOLNers will still see her at the informal reading club established some time ago.
Ariadne never saw Joy in anything resembling a flap (even when her mobile phone looked as though it was about to enter meltdown :-).
Always good-humoured, calm and collected, and thoroughly practical.
Joy has Ariadne's and UKOLN's best wishes: she will be a tough act to follow.
Joy Fraser finds that long-lost string of pearls inside her palmtop computer Thanks again to Shirley Keane (for assistance with the Newsline section), and to Marieke Napier for help with important bits and bobs along the way.
Thanks also to those who supplied trip reports from the summer conference season, enabling us to put together a substantial 'At the Event' section for this issue.
Suggestions for articles for issues 30 to 32 are now being considered.
Article proposals should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 29: Key Technologies for the Development of the Digital Library" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Knowledge Management in the Perseus Digital Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Knowledge Management in the Perseus Digital Library Buzz data software html database xml tei stylesheet metadata thesaurus digitisation tagging browser identifier vocabularies xsl namespace cataloguing sgml dtd hypertext visualisation gis adobe url standards Citation BibTex RIS Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox on the Perseus Project's new knowledge management and digital delivery tools.
Digital libraries can be an extremely effective method of extending the services of a traditional library by enabling activities such as access to materials outside the physical confines of the library [1].
The true benefit of a digital library, however, comes not from the replication and enhancement of traditional library functions, but rather in the ability to make possible tasks that would not be possible outside the electronic environment, such as the hypertextual linking of related texts, full text searching of holdings, and the integration of knowledge management, data visualization, and geographic information tools with the texts in the digital library.
One of the challenges in building this type of system is the ability to apply these sorts of tools in a scalable manner to a large number of documents tagged according to different levels of specificity, tagging conventions, and document type definitions (DTDs).
To address this challenge, we have developed a generalizable toolset to manage XML and SGML documents of varying DTDs for the Perseus Digital Library.
These tools extract structural and descriptive metadata from these documents, deliver well formed document fragments on demand to a text display system, and can be extended with other modules that support the sort of advanced applications required to unlock the potential of a digital library.
What is Perseus?
The Perseus digital library is a heterogeneous collection of texts and images pertaining to the Archaic and Classical Greek world, late Republican and early Imperial Rome, the English Renaissance, and 19th Century London.
[2] The texts are integrated with morphological analysis tools, student and advanced lexica, and sophisticated searching tools that allow users to find all of the inflected instantiations of a particular lexical form.
[3] The current corpus of Greek texts contains approximately four million words by thirty-three different authors.
Most of the texts were written in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., with some written as late as the second century C.E.
The corpus of Latin texts contains approximately one million five hundred thousand words mostly written by authors from the republican and early imperial periods.
[4] The digital library also contains more than 30,000 images, 1000 maps, and a comprehensive catalog of sculpture.
Collections of English language literature from the Renaissance and the 19th century will be added in the fall of 2000.
Building Documents In developing this collection of SGML and now XML documents, we have benefited from the generality and abstraction of structured markup which has allowed us to deliver our content smoothly on a variety of platforms.
The vast majority of our documents are tagged according to the guidelines established by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
[5] While we have had a great deal of success with these guidelines, other digitization projects have found other DTDs more useful for their purposes.
[6] As XML becomes more widely used, more and more specifications for different subject fields and application domains are being created by various industries and user communities; a well known and extensive list of XML applications includes a wide variety of markup standards for different domains ranging from genealogy to astronomy.
[7] Customized DTDs ease the encoding of individual documents and often allow scholars to align their tags with the intellectual conventions of their field.
At the same time, they can raise barriers to both basic and advanced applications within a digital library.
To take a simple example, a programmer wishing to extract all of the book titles mentioned in a collection of documents marked according to more than one DTD might may have to look for a <cit> tag in some documents and a <title> tag in others, whose DTD might use the <cit> tag to mean a piece of quoted text.
More importantly, a document's structural metadata, which is intended to allow access to logical parts of the document, is tied to specific concrete element names.
In order to find "chapter 5" in an XML document, the user or system implementor must know something about that document's markup --whether the DTD and encoding conventions favor counting to the fifth <chapter> tag or searching for <div2 type="chapter" n="5">.
[8] To address this problem, our system allows digital librarians to create partial mappings between the elements in a DTD and abstract structural elements and then produces an index of the elements so mapped.
What is encoded as <div1 type="scene"> in one document and as <scene> in another is presented to the system as an abstract, structural "scene".
Identifier attributes on XML elements, such as 'ID' or 'N', are also indexed, and occurrences of each structure within the document are sequentially numbered.
A mapping may also specify that some of the document's content, such as section titles or dates, be recorded and passed on to other resource discovery or visualization modules within the system.
Finally, not every element in the DTD need be mapped.
This allows the digital librarians to focus attention on the structural features of the texts.
After this structural element map is created for the DTD, an unlimited number of documents written in conformance with this DTD can be parsed and indexed by the system.
Document Delivery One of the primary benefits that we derive from this system is the ability to display any number of documents tagged according to the same DTD very quickly.
In previous instantiations of the Perseus Digital Library, after a text was tagged, it was necessary to write a custom specification to transform the archival SGML text into a form that could be delivered to end users to read.
We also were required to add the document to both our catalog and our searching programs by hand.
This process not only added extra time to the process of publishing a document, it also was prone to error.
It was possible, for example, to publish a document that was not indexed or included in the searching interface.
Likewise, it was possible for an uncataloged document to exist in the digital library and only be accessible by knowing and typing in the exact URL required to display the document.
In the new system, cataloging information is automatically extracted from the document headers and included in the table of contents and other searching interfaces.
This has enabled us to cut dramatically the time required to include new documents in the Perseus digital library; in fact, since we released this software on our production servers in the spring of 2000, we have been able to add substantial collections of Latin texts and commentaries on Greek texts to the digital library.
[9] In addition to facilitating our own work, this system has also allowed us to collaborate more effectively with other projects.
For example, we have been conducting experiments with the SGML documents created by the Library of Congress American Memory project and the documents on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae CD ROM.
[10] In internal experiments, we have been able to integrate large numbers of texts from these collections into the Perseus Digital Library with very little custom programming and gain the benefits of all of the advanced modules in this system.
One of the modules in our system allows us to create custom display templates for different documents or collections.
When a user requests a document, our display system locates the XML file and its associated metadata, uses the abstracted mappings to determine which portion of the file contains the desired text section, applies appropriate styling rules, and presents the text to the end user in HTML.
The styling rules are controlled by templates that allow us to create a custom look and feel for different texts or collections of texts within the digital library.
Currently, this template is written in HTML with place-holders for variable display elements and the text itself.
We can also apply these templates to objects in the digital library: images, maps, or searching tools.
We produce HTML output because our current primary delivery mechanism is the World Wide Web.
Our display system can produce other formats, notably Adobe's Portable Document Format and raw XML.
[11] As browser support for XML becomes more robust, we expect to exploit XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) or other XML styling tools to produce attractive direct XML displays in this module.
Knowledge Management Tools The advantages of this toolset extend far beyond the practical issues related to displaying, cataloging, and indexing documents for end users.
Because this system abstracts the metadata from the text, we are able to develop scalable tools for linguistic analysis, knowledge management, and information retrieval within the digital library, thereby allowing users to work with documents in ways that would simply not be possible outside the digital environment.
The tools in the currently existing system include sophisticated full-text searching tools, the creation of live links among documents in the system, extraction of toponyms and the automatic generation of maps, discovery of dates and the dynamic display of timelines, the automatic implicit searching, discovery of word co-occurrence patterns, and linkages to morphological analysis.
A great deal of traditional scholarship involves tracking down footnotes and discovering what others have said about a text.
Our toolset allows us to display links to other texts that cite the document currently being displayed.
A simple example is a commentary, which explicitly talks about another text.
For example, when a reader views the text of Thucydides or Homer's Iliad, we are able to show notes from several commentaries about these texts.
Much more exciting, however, is the ability to display citations from texts that are not explicitly related to each other.
For example, a reader of Andocides 1.57 might be interested to know that this passage is cited in section 2017 of Smyth's Greek Grammar.
The reader can follow an active link to this Smyth passage and read the discussion there about the usage of the word eipon and compare other passages also cited by Smyth to illustrate this point.
Because this 'citation reversal' happens automatically each time a text is added to the system, it becomes even more valuable as the digital library expands.
This system also reveals unexpected links among texts, which scholars might not have been aware of.
A reader of Homer might be surprised to find that Iliad 8.442 is cited in the Variorum Edition of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, V.i.
Another module automatically scans the English language texts in the digital library for place names.
These names are linked to a Geographic Information System (GIS) that allows users to generate a map of the places mentioned in the entire document, in the section currently being displayed, or in a larger logical unit, for example a book or an act.
[12] Moreover, the map serves as a gateway into the collection, since users can move from a spot on the map to a document that refers to it.
The tool can also be used to map all of the places mentioned in a collection of documents.
For example, a map of the American Memory texts shows that most of the documents in this collection describe places in North America, while a map of our collection of documents about 19th century London shows very few discussions of places in North America.
While these examples are relatively obvious, they illustrate how this tool might be used to show a new user the characteristics of the collections within the digital library.
At the same time, the digital librarian need not add metadata describing the geographic and temporal extent of a collection.
For this tool, our abstraction of structural and descriptive metadata is more important than the markup of the individual documents: place names are discovered by an information extraction system after the documents have been indexed.
[13] Because the XML back end described above presents all documents to the information discovery module in a uniform way, the GIS programmer need not be aware of the details of the DTDs or of the markup conventions used in the texts.
A third tool automatically extracts date information and uses this information to generate timelines of the dates mentioned in texts.
The dates in this timeline are active links, leading to the passage in the text that contains this link.
This means that the reader of a text who is interested in events that happened in 1666 can quickly locate these passages on the timeline.
Likewise, a reader can use this timeline to locate other passages that describe the date in question.
This tool, like the mapping tool, can also be applied to collections of documents, allowing users to gain a sense of what time frame the documents cover.
For example, when this tool is applied to our Greco-Roman collection, users can quickly see that we have much greater coverage of the Classical period than of the Hellenistic period.
We have exploited this abstraction in other information extraction systems we have written, one of which is the creation of automatic hypertexts for implicit searching.
[14] Important subject terms within the domain area are recognized and linked to other documents within the digital library that contain the term.
These links are provided automatically for every document when it is displayed.
This makes it easy for readers to get fuller information about important ideas, to contextualize unfamiliar vocabulary, and to explore related documents in the digital library.
Because subject terms are linked to dynamic hypertexts, not to simple glossary or dictionary entries, readers can explore types of material they might not have thought relevant (or even have known of): historical texts, site plans, art works, or the like.
Further, as the library expands, new documents appear on these pages without any additional programming.
In addition to helping users explore large domains, we also have modules that help users explore the smallest details of the language.
These details include morphology and word co-occurrence.
Every word of Latin or Greek is passed through a morphological analyzer and the resulting analyses are placed in a database.
When Greek or Latin text is displayed, each word is checked against this database, and links are generated between words and their analyses.
These analyses, in turn, are linked to a suite of dictionaries and grammars, allowing users to read texts in languages they do not yet know well.
Another module that operates at the level of the word identifies words that regularly co-occur.
Abstracted indices are used to scan texts and calculate word frequencies and co-occurrence ratios.
Highly significant word pairs can be presented along with lexical information, or in independent tabular displays.
While it certainly would be possible to develop many of these tools without the document management system described here, this document management system makes this task much easier.
The abstraction of the varying tagging systems in these documents allows programmers to focus on interesting tasks instead of dealing with different tagging systems on an ad hoc basis.
Further, because these tools function as 'modules' within the Perseus digital library rather than stand-alone programs, we can apply these tools to every text that is added to the library without any additional programming.
This allows us to begin to meet the challenges involved in the scalable creation of a digital library that does not simply replicate and enhance the tasks of a traditional library, but rather renders it possible for a large number of people to study texts in ways that would not be possible outside the electronic environment.
References Chavez, Robert F. 2000.
"Using GIS in an Integrated Digital Library."
Proceedings of the 5th Annual Digital LIbrary Conference 250-251.
Crane, Gregory.
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"Generating and Parsing Classical Greek."
Literary and Linguistic Computing 6:243-245.
Crane, Gregory.
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"New Technologies for Reading: The Lexicon and the Digital Library."
Classical World:471501.
Crane, G. 1998b.
The Perseus Project and Beyond: How Building a Digital Library Challenges the Humanities and Technology.
D-Lib, January, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january98/01crane.html.
Crane, G. 2000.
Designing Documents to Enhance the Performance of Digital Libraries: Time, Space, People and a Digital Library on London.
D-Lib, January, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/crane/07crane.html.
DeRose, Steven J. , and David G. Durand.
1994.
Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime.
Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Mahoney, Anne.
2000.
"Explicit and Implicit Searching in the Perseus Digital Library."
Eleventh ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, June 2000, pre-conference workshop.
http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~einat/info_doors/ Smith, David, Gregory Crane, and Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox.
2000.
"The Perseus Project: A Digital Library for the Humanities."
Literary and Linguistic Computing 15 (1).
Smith, David, Anne Mahoney, and Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox.
2000b.
"Management of XML Documents in an Integrated Digital Library."
Proceedings of Extreme Markup Languages 2000 Sperberg-McQueen, C., and L. Burnard.
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Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.
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Usdin, Tommie, and Tony Graham.
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"XML: Not a silver bullet, but a great pipe wrench."
Standard View 6 (3):125-132.
Mueller, Martin 2000.
"Electronic Homer", Ariadne Issue 25 http://www.ariadne/issue25/mueller/ [1] A version of this article that focuses much more on the technical details of the system described here will appear in Smith (2000).
The work described here was supported by the Digital Library Initiative, with primary support from the NEH and the NSF.
[2] Various aspects of the Perseus Digital Library are described in Crane (2000), Smith, Crane, and Rydberg-Cox (2000), Crane (1998b), and Crane (1998a).
[3] The Greek parser is described in Crane (1991).
[4] Yale University Press has published the Greek materials and morphological analysis tools on several CD ROMs and all of the most current materials are freely available on the World Wide Web at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.
We also have two European mirrors, one at Oxford University at http://perseus.csad.ox.ac.uk and one in Berlin at http://perseus.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.
The audience for these texts and tools in an integrated digital library does exist and it is larger than one might expect.
The past four years have seen remarkable increase in the use of the Perseus web site.
Usage has grown from just under three thousand hits on its first day in July of 1996 to two hundred fifty thousand hits on peak days during the current academic year.
From July 1996 until May 2000, Perseus servers have delivered more than one hundred ten million pages of primary source material.
[5] Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard (1994).
[6] Usdin and Graham (1998).
[7] See http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xml.html.
[8] Although much work has been done on XML Namespaces to encourage markup reuse and minimize duplication of semantic structures, it is unlikely that all marked up documents will eventually use tags such as <ns:title> for book titles.
[9] See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/PR/latin.ann.html and http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/PR/greek.com.ann.html.
[10] See http://memory.loc.gov/ and http://www.tlg.uci.edu.
[11] Our current production system does not, however, allow users to request outputs other than HTML.
[12] See Chavez 2000.
[13] Editors may also choose to mark place names.
[14] See Mahoney 2000.
Author Details   Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox Assistant Professor Department of English University of Missouri at Kansas City Email: jrydberg@perseus.tufts.edu Web site: www.perseus.tufts.edu   Robert F. Chavez Programmer Perseus Project, Tufts University Email: rchavez@perseus.tufts.edu Web site: www.perseus.tufts.edu   Anne Mahoney Programmer Perseus Project, Tufts University Email: amahoney@perseus.tufts.edu Web site: www.perseus.tufts.edu   David A. Smith Programmer Perseus Project, Tufts University Email: dasmith@perseus.tufts.edu Web site: www.perseus.tufts.edu   Gregory R. Crane Professor of Classics Winnick Family Chair in Technology and Entrepreneurship Editor-in-Chief, Perseus Project Tufts University Email: gcrane@perseus.tufts.edu Web site: www.perseus.tufts.edu Article Title: "Knowledge Management in the Perseus Digital Library" Author: Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox; Robert F. Chavez, David A. Smith, Anne Mahoney, Gregory R. Crane.
Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/rydberg-cox/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DiLIS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DiLIS Buzz data authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Debbie Lock introduces a new service, Distance Learners Information Service (DiLIS), from the University of Surrey Library and Information Services.
The University of Surrey Library and Information Services has launched a new Distance Learners Information Service (DiLIS).
The DiLIS initiative is a twelve month Continuing Vocational Education (CVE) funded project that encourages both library staff and distance learning students to use a wide range of information services and resources.
DiLIS provides access to a mixture of paper and Internet-based facilities that utilise both academic and commercial information services.
It is anticipated that the promotion of different types of information services will enable distance learners to become innovative and competent information seekers regardless of where they might live.
DiLIS has been developed in response to the findings of the CVE funded Library Support for Distance Learners project which ran from Oct ‘97Mar ‘98 and was based at the George Edwards Library (GEL).
The aim of the study was to investigate the information needs and resource requirements of the University’s distance learners, using a sample frame of 520 off-campus students.
Data was collected through a postal survey, focus groups and on-line interviews via e-mail for distance learners based overseas.
The findings confirmed that distance learners regularly encounter obstacles that prevent them from accessing the information required to support their studies.
Although distance was the determining factor that prevented many of the students from visiting GEL, there was considerable evidence of deliberate non-usage by the UK based students and a general lack of awareness of the library’s resources amongst students living overseas.
The underlying causes of non-usage were the type of services being offered, which were primarily geared towards the on-site student, and the belief of many students that it is necessary to physically visit a library to use the resources in it.
The services that DiLIS will offer over the next twelve months have been developed to address the key issues raised by the students, and to ensure that they use the resources available in GEL to their full potential.
DiLIS provides: A postal loan service (restricted to UK & NI residents): a document delivery service for items held in stock; for articles not held at GEL commercial document delivery services are used: a staffed help line, which is available via telephone, e-mail and an Internet enquiry form: a web site which promotes the services available at GEL, directs students to new electronic information sources and resources that can be used to support their studies, and provides an information service for a wide range of subject-related issues: a mediation service to help with negotiating access to other academic libraries.
A limited amount of the DiLIS budget has been ring-fenced to support individual access applications.
Recipients of the access support fund are selected by GEL management, DiLIS staff and distance learning course providers.
However, to improve access to library services for non-UK based distance learners, it is anticipated that during the next eighteen months the library will develop links with overseas Higher Education Institutions through a system of agents.
The guidelines for the library’s first overseas agent, who is based at the Health Sciences Library at Nicosia General Hospital, are currently being formalised.
Once the system is operational, students following the distance learning programmes in Cyprus will have their library and information support provided by the agent.
Remote access to literature searching facilities will be through the ATHENS authentication service.
A parallel paper-based service has also been introduced to meet the needs of distance learners who do not have access to a PC or modem.
In such cases DiLIS staff will undertake literature searches requested by distance learners.
Search results will be posted, faxed or e-mailed directly to the student.
In addition to the document delivery service, the DiLIS students will also be participating in the library’s EBSCO Online trial.
This is a full text electronic journal service that provides access to an on-line version of the library’s journal subscriptions.
The main benefit of EBSCO Online for the University’s distance learners is that it enables users to access full text electronic journals irrespective of their residential location, with authorisation being controlled through their IP addresses.
Until DiLIS the Library had no defined policy aimed at supporting distance learners.
They had access to the same services and facilities as their on-site counterparts without the benefits of permanent physical or electronic access them.
DiLIS is the first step towards redressing the balance between library services for off-campus and on-campus students.
It provides a foundation on which to build a flexible client-orientated service as well as offering an excellent example of how research can be effectively translated into action.
Author Details Debbie Lock DiLIS Project Officer George Edwards Library University of Surrey Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Setting Priorities for Digital Library Research Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Setting Priorities for Digital Library Research Buzz dissemination copyright cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Graham Jefcoate outlines the rationale of the British Library Research and Innovation Centre's Digital Library Research Programme.
The British Library Research and Innovation Centre’s Digital Library Research Programme aims to help the library and information community formulate an appropriate and effective response to the challenge posed by the ‘digital library’.
It also seeks to address the issues raised by rapid technological change for library staff and users, and to assess its relevance for the information needs of the wider community.
We believe that few greater challenges face libraries and information services today.
The Centre has already played a significant role in supporting pilot projects and other initiatives in the field.
Among examples are the ELINOR (Electronic Library Information Online Retrieval) project at De Montfort University’s International Institute for Electronic Library Research.
Other projects have included studies on the use of online journals; retrospective catalogues in the non-academic sector; an automated reference service for health information; and an online thesis service.
In addition, the Centre continues to support an important programme of initiatives in public library networking; EARL and Croydon Online are among the best known examples.
Our support for UKOLN, the UK Office of Library Networking, one of the key research centres in the field, is well known.
To stimulate further imaginative and innovative research, the Centre began planning a Call for Proposals in the summer of 1996.
The process was steered by a small, representative panel led by the present author as the Research Analyst responsible for the Digital Library Research programme.
In preparing the Call, the Centre sought to consult widely within the research community.
A ‘brainstorming’ session in October 1996 brought together representatives of key organisations in the UK, including the Library and Information Commission (LIC), JISC and its Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) and the British Library’s own digital library projects.
We intend to continue stimulating debate, a recent example being a panel session at the ELVIRA conference on Setting priorities for Digital Library Research.
A major aim of the consultation process was to focus the call for proposals by soliciting projects that would complement those of other national programmes.
The Centre needs to be able to target its limited resources in areas that would not necessarily be covered, for example, by the eLib programme.
The Call itself was announced in December 1996, placing particular emphasis on the needs of users (including information providers) and on cooperation across domains.
It also stressed that proposals from the local authority sector and ‘cross-sectoral consortia’ would be especially welcome.
The Call posed a number of key questions that applicants might wish to address: How can access to networked resources be widened to include the whole community?
How can digital information resources be integrated more effectively into library and information services?
How can networking technology aid cooperation between different sectors in the library and information community?
What skills will information professionals and users need?
How can they be acquired?
What will be the principal economic models for the digital library?
What technical standards or evaluation methods will apply?
Despite the limited time available (the Call closed on 31 January 1997), some 34 substantive proposals were received representing all library sectors and every part of the UK.
Details of successful projects under the Call can be found at [1] The projects stimulated by the Call will be managed with existing RIC-funded projects as a coordinated programme.
The resulting Digital Library Research Programme could be said have three broad thematic ‘strands’: Access Impact Community These three ‘strands’ (and others as appropriate) will be used for dissemination purposes over the next two years, especially as themes for presentations, conferences and publications.
The call process challenged the library and information community to propose itself the priorities that should be set in the next phase of digital library research.
The resulting projects, however, need to be set in a wider context.
The session at the ELVIRA [2] conference referred to above: Setting priorities for digital library research.
In this, I described the process and outcome of the RIC call for proposals and challenged some of the leading players in the field each to name up to five priority areas for the next phase of digital library research.
I introduced the discussion by mentioning the issues of access, impact and community described above, clearly emphasising issues of social impact and cultural change.
Chris Rusbridge, the director of the eLib programme, felt we should rather concentrate on technical issues, particularly those that might lead to sustainable solutions.
Mel Collier, chair of the Research Sub-Committee at the Library and Information Commission, set out the LIC’s vision as outlined in its 20⁄20 document.
The LIC hopes to create an “enabling environment” in which the vision might be realised.
Three key elements of the vision are: connectivity (including universal access); content (a digital library based on the UK’s documented heritage); and competences (ensuring we have the skills we need in the global information society).
Mel’s priorities are therefore: the creation of a national superhighway; establishing the UK as a global leader in the digital library developments; creating a national, distributed digital resources; breaking down cross-sectoral barriers to cooperation.
Ylva Lindolm-Romantschuk, the secretary general of the Nordic Council for Scientific Information, provided an international viewpoint and a yet further perspective.
She identified economic issues (business models for the electronic library); copyright; collaboration across sectors and domains; and interfaces (human-computer interaction) as her priority areas.
Despite some “clear blue water” between some of these lists of priorities, a great deal a agreement appears to exist among national and international agencies active in the field.
Marilyn Deegan, summing up our deliberations from the chair, was able to synthesise them, identifying three main strands emerging from the discussion: Components: technologies, content, information, people, organisations; Issues: policy, economics, ownership, culture, standards, collaboration; Actions: research, development, use, sustainability.
This seems to me to provide us, in very broad outline, with an agenda for the next phase of digital library research.
If it serves no other purpose I hope it will stimulate a continuing and widening debate.
References [1] Successful calls under the project proposal, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/bl/digital-library-research-projects/ [2] ELVIRA 4 Conference Web site, http://ford.mk.dmu.ac.uk/ELVIRA/ELVIRA4/ Author details Graham Jefcoate, Research Analyst, British Library Research and Innovation Centre Email: Graham.Jefcoate@mail.bl.uk Tel: 0171 412 7109 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Patient Education: A Role for Multimedia Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Patient Education: A Role for Multimedia Buzz software multimedia e-learning cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Garrud discusses the potential for on-line patient education multimedia.
Multimedia has been used as a learning resource in HE for a few years now.
Whilst some early products were little more than books-on-CD-ROM, current material commonly uses the additional functionality that multimedia offers e.g.
animation.
Programs intended primarily for higher education, however, still mostly lack the appeal of commercial “edutainment”.
Yet one shouldn’t neglect the presentation and visual impact of educational packages because they engage the user’s motivation, attention and aesthetic sense.
Stephen Heppel, Director of UltraLab [1] , often argues that: “…interactive media should delight.” After all, it is up to the learner whether or not they use this sort of resource.
When one considers health education needs, there are some striking similarities.
It’s critical to get the audience interested and to maintain their attention.
The advantages of interactive media over the ubiquitous printed leaflets that festoon clinics and waiting rooms are self evident.
There’s another important feature in common.
Effective multimedia uses much less text than books; and while this has dangers for a scholar in HE, it is spot on for many patients.
(Have you tried reading an entire drug information leaflet supplied with a prescribed medicine?)
There are now several examples of health education multimedia.
One, concerned with educating children about their bed wetting, was produced as part of the King’s Fund [2] Promoting Patient Participation initiative.
This has produced a suite of programs About Nocturnal Enuresis that is being evaluated in Nottingham and Leicestershire clinics [3], [4].
Early results show that after using the program there are reliable increases in children’s knowledge about enuresis, which are preserved a year later, that there is very good take up by patients (over 90%), and that the users are positive about the medium.
Work is now going on to discover what effect the package has on clinical outcomes and children’s self-esteem [5].
This is just one example of a general trend in using multimedia for health education, targeted at those people for whom it is relevant.
The approach utilises the attractiveness of a new medium, with its added functionality, to engage patients’ interest and promote effective learning (about preventive behaviour, treatment, prognosis and so on).
It is also using multimedia with people for whom it is relevant and who perceive it as relevant, thus avoiding the counterproductive consequences of “stuffing it (the message) down people’s throats”.
In the enuresis example, the multimedia package is set up at a specialist clinic and the patients attending are invited to use the program by one of the clinic staff.
Other mechanisms to achieve the same end might be prescription by a doctor (e.g.
your GP advises you to look at a program because you are at higher than average risk), information from a special interest group, or just an enquiring patient.
The other key component of this trend is the delivery.
Over the next five years, the delivery mode will almost certainly change from local CD-ROM to telecommunications networks.
The programs will be stored at one site and down loaded when the user wants to run them.
The equipment will be simpler and cheaper (than an interactive kiosk) and it will be available for many different purposes.
Health centres as well as libraries will have strong incentives to invest in terminals and software producers will be able to maintain educational material easily at a central site.
In this scenario there are some real challenges.
One can already get lost on the Web, so a patient wanting to learn something specific will need clear, direct guidance to the right resource.
The link (to that resource) needs to give a brief outline about its contents and an indication of the time required to use it.
Curriculum management software may help here [6] .
Other vital concerns are disappearing pages (e.g.
the Health of the Nation pages on skin cancer), and the validity of WWW information, though the latter is being met by peerreview processes operated at some sites [7] .
A last one for debate is giving freedom to a patient to surf beyond the initial domains.
There are advantages in health education to an approach which allows someone to discover both sides to a question, but would one want a queue for the computer as well as the physician?
References Stephen Heppel, Director of UltraLab the learning technology research centre at Anglia Polytechnic University, http://sol.ultralab.anglia.ac.uk/Pages/ULTRALAB/Team/stephen/Stephen_home.html The King’s Fund, a UK medical charity which promotes good practice and policy initiatives in health care http://websurg.avonibp.co.uk/bui/misbeh/kings.htm All about Nocturnal Enuresis, Details of the King’s Fund project at Behavioural Sciences, University of Nottingham.
http://www.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk/~mczwww/enuresis.htm Garrud, P., Collier, J., Crook, I., Evans, J., MacKinlay, D. and Redsell, S. (1996), Using multimedia for patient information the nocturnal enuresis project for children.
CTICM Update, CTI Centre for Medicine, Bristol, 7, 6-7.
Contact: Jacqueline.Collier@nottingham.ac.uk for further details.
Curriculum management software, produced under the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme by Joe Smyth at Dundee University http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/tltp/catalogue/phase1/tom14601.htm America’s House call Network, a health information source set up by the American Association of Family Physicians.
http://www.housecall.com/index.html Author Details Paul.Garrud Senior Lecturer in Behavioural Sciences, the University of Nottingham Medical School / Manager, Applying Behavioural Sciences To The Teaching And Training Of Health Professionals (TLTP Project 61) Email: Paul.Garrud@nottingham.ac.uk TLTP Project Web Pages: http://www.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk/~mczwww/tltp.htm Tel: 0115 970 9114 Fax: 0115 970 9495 Address: Department of Psychiatry, University of Nottingham, Queens Medical Centre, A Floor, South Block, Nottingham, NG7 2UH Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: The Web On Your Phone and TV Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: The Web On Your Phone and TV Buzz mobile software html database wireless xml xslt css xhtml browser windows linux flash ebook mp3 sms ecms mailbase url ldap Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly looks at the Web Beyond the PC.
What's the future for Web browsing?
Is it the PC running some flavour of MS Windows?.
Will the Linux platform take off on the desktop?
Or will the Macintosh come back into fashion?
Many statistics on browser usage would suggest that the MS Windows platform has won the battle.
The proportion of platforms illustrated in Figure 1 (which shows accesses to the Cultivate Interactive by graphical browsers) is probably not too untypical (information available at [1]).
Figure 1: Platforms Used To Access Cultivate Interactive As well as thinking about the hardware platform (which can affect the design of graphical images) many Web designers will also ask the question "Which browser should we design for Netscape (probably still widely used in the academic community) or Internet Explorer (the leader in the market place)?
A related issue is whether to make use of file formats which require browser plugins.
Should interfaces make use of Macromedia's Flash technology?
Should we provide documents in PDF format?
Although the answer should be to develop device-independent Web services, in practice this can be difficult to do authoring tools may introduce browser-specific extensions, HTML or CSS standards may not be implemented fully or correctly in Web browsers, end user requirements may necessitate the use of proprietary file formats, etc.
But there are issues other than the browser and platform wars to be taken into account.
What about non-PC access to the Web?
This article looks at how the mobile phone and TVs can be used to access the Web and considers their use within an academic context.
Mobile Phones WAP All Web users will, no doubt, have heard the hype about WAP the Wireless Application Protocol.
A WAP-enabled phone will allow you to access, if not the full range of Internet services (as the BT advertisements misleadingly imply), but a range of WAP sites almost "anytime, anyplace, anywhere" (as the old Martini advert used to say.)
If you have not bought or looked at a WAP phone, you can try it out using a WAP emulator.
A popular WAP emulator is Gelon's Wapalizer [2] which is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2 shows the news provided by the Guardian's WAP site using Gelon's emulator of the Ericsson mobile phone.
One criticism of WAP which has been made is the need to learn a new markup language, WML (the Wireless Markup Language) and the extra resources which will be needed to create and maintain a WAP site.
This, however, need not be a significant concern.
Use of database-driven technologies or content management systems should enable Web and WAP sites to be created by generating HTML and WML as appropriate from a single source.
In addition there are various ways in which WML can be converted from other formats: for example XSLT may be used to convert XHTML to XML.
Alternately proxy gateways can be used to convert existing Web sites to WML formats.
As well as using a WML emulator to view a WAP site, it is also possible to view Web sites on a WAP device.
Figure 3 illustrates use of the Yospace emulator [3] to view an article from the Ariadne Web magazine.
It should be noted that the conversion from HTML to WML shown in Figure 3 is carried out by a HTML-WML conversion service which is provide the Google search engine [4].
Potential For Use In UK HE Is anyone currently using WAP in the UK Higher Education community?
The University of Teeside provides a WAP service [5] [6] as described in a presentation given by Andy Price at the Fourth Institutional Web Management workshop in Bath in September 2000 [7].
Also in the north-east of England Sunderland University provide a WAP service [8] [9] and host a WAP site for the JISC RSC (Regional Support Centre) of the North [10].
These WAP sites are illustrated below.
Note that clicking on the link enables you to view the WAP sites using the Gelon Wapalizer WAP emulator.
Figure 3a: Teeside's WAP Site Figure 3b: Sunderland's WAP Site Figure 3c: JISC RSC of the North Try it Try it Try it Examples of services which may be of use within the academic community include directory services and location services.
Surfnet provide a directory service based on an LDAP to WAP gateway [11].
This service is likely to be of interest to the academic community as many universities provide LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) gateways and providing WML output in addition to HTML would not be a significant software development exercise.
Another example of a useful service for the academic community would be location services.
For example visitors to a University may find it useful to be able to find out, while travelling on a car, bus or train, the location of the University, the location of nearby accommodation, pubs, etc.
and the times of trains.
As illustrated below, examples of directory service, location services and travel information services are currently available.
Figure 4a: Directory Service Figure 4b: UpMyStreet Figure 4c: Railtrack Try it Try it Try it Implications For Use In UK HE The WAP debate will continue.
Some will argue that the costs of access, the slow connection speeds and the poor user interface will mean that WAP will fail to take off (for example, see Jakob's Neilson's recent Alertbox article [12].
Others will point out that similar criticisms were made of the Web in the early days of Mosaic: indeed Jakob Neilson himself points out similarities between the Web in 1994 and WAP today and many developers of Web services in the HE community in 1993 and 1994 were confident that the limitations of Mosaic and Web technologies themselves would be resolved.
There are, I am sure, lessons to be learnt by making comparisons with the development of the Web.
Just as the Web grew through use by enthusiasts, we will see enthusiasts setting up WAP sites.
And as the enthusiasts lost their enthusiasm or left the institution (perhaps graduating) we can expect to see ghost WAP sites.
But, as we know, ghost WAP sites, like ghost Web sites, will continue to be linked to and found in search engines.
We have also learnt from our experience in providing Web sites, that content is king.
The WAP site which contains helpful information such as bus and train times will rapidly become out-of-date, unless resources are provided for managing the content and / or automated techniques for providing the information for a single source are provided (as with, for example, SURFnet's directory service).
There are also issues about the domain and directory naming conventions which would be useful to consider.
Should a University's WAP site be available at <wap.university.ac.uk> (as at <wap.tees.ac.uk>) or will this be a HTML page which describes and links to the WAP site, which may be located at <www.university.ac.uk/wap/> (as at <www.sund.ac.uk/wap/>).
In addition there is the issue of the core content which should be provided on a WAP site.
Can agreement be reached on the core content which should be accessed from a University's entry point on its WAP site?
If the Higher Education community chooses not to devote resources to the development of WAP sites it may find that its user community will make use of commercial alternatives and the commercial sector has already begun to develop information services aimed at the student market.
For example by using the Excite service to search for WAP sites [13] the wap4students.co.uk was amongst the results found.
This service describes itself as "the UK's first Web/WAP site for all students" [14] [15].
Do we really want the provision of this type of service to be provided by the commercial sector?
Of course, even if we fail to provide institutional WAP information services, we will probably find that enthusiasts within departments with do so in any case, as can be seen from the ECMS WAP site at the University of Southampton [16] (as shown).
SMS And The Mobile Phone Although much hype is associated with the WAP phone the traditional mobile phone should not be ignored.
As we can see by walking around campus, mobile phones are very popular with students.
The use of SMS (Short Message Service) has taken off to an extent which surprised many (including myself).
SMS is widely used to send short messages (of up to 160 characters) to one's friends.
Although SMS messages were initially sent from the mobile phone (typically costing between 5p 12p per message) there are now a number of Web-based services which can be used to send SMS messages for free, such as Excite [17] as illustrated in Figure 6.
Another approach to use of the Web to send SMS messages is to embed the SMS sending service into your own Web page.
Quios [18] provide an example of this type of service.
This could be used, for example, by a service which wishes to provide an SMS text messaging service to complement its email and telephone Help Desk services.
The current version of the Quios service is slow to download, so it is available in a new window As well as using such Web services to send SMS messages for free (with the business model probably based on users viewing adverts on the Web site or brief adverts being included in the SMS message indeed a recent message sent using Quios contained the text 4gr8 deals on beer clickbeer.co.uk)) it is also possible to make use of SMS alerts for Web events.
For example WatchMyServer [19] will monitor your Web server and send an SMS message if the server is unavailable, as illustrated below.
Figure 7: WatchMyServer It will also be possible to use email-SMS gateway services, such as those provided by Genie to redirect email alerts to be sent as an SMS message to a mobile phone.
To do this you would register for a Genie email address and then configure your Genie account so that messages are forwarded to your mobile phone.
You could use this technique with services such as Netmind [20], Informant [21] and SpyOnIt [22].
Once you have registered a Web page with one of these services you will receive SMS alerts when the page changes.
It is also interesting to observe the development of information services based on SMS.
iobox [23] provide an interesting example.
Once you are registered you can send commands by SMS, such as I ON WBRISTOL which activate the weather channel for Bristol.
As well as receiving information, there are also facilities for sending SMS messages to groups of users, sending and receiving email, setting up and using chat rooms, downloading icons and ringing tones, etc.
This type of interface should be familiar with users of Mailbase / JISCmail mailing lists.
There are a number of SMS server products available.
One which may be of particular interest due to the availability of the source code is 3G Lab's Alligat Open Source Mobile Internet Server [24].
Implications For Use In UK HE Since students seem to have a higher proportion of ownership of mobile phones than the general public there may be a role for SMS in providing information to students.
Would the University Library find it useful to be able to send SMS alerts when reserved books are available or books are overdue?
Should students be able to obtain their exam results by SMS rather than having to wait for snail mail to arrive or having to travel to campus?
Would use of the mobile phone client reduce the pressures on use of PCs on campus, allowing them to be used for word processing and other applications which mobile phones cannot currently be used for?
Jim Aiton, a lecturer in the School of Biology, University of St Andrews thinks so.
In a message to the author Jim reported that: I e-mailed my students and in a class of 80 around 90% use mobiles within 24 hours 50% of the class said they would like to receive course alerts by SMS (easier to use than Pine!!)
since it means that they get the message anywhere (including the hostelries) [25] The Web On Your TV Let us move on from devices which we carry around with us to those which can be found in our homes.
ONdigital provide access to the Web (and email) through their ONnet service [26].
In addition several companies have announced products which can be connected to TVs, such as Bush's Internet Set Box (available from Toy's R Us for £78.97 [27]).
In the USA, Canada and Japan WebTV [28] provides a similar service for accessing Web resources from a TV.
A WebTV emulator program is available [29] which enables you to view how Web sites will look on WebTV.
An example is shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8: The WebTV Emulator Viewing the UKOLN Home Page Implications For Use In UK HE Students are well-known for their interest in the TV and programmes such as The Teletubbies became cult viewing in my student circles.
Will access to the Web and email using a TV take off amongst the student community?
There would be advantages to Universities, since the TV could be regarded as a thin client, being easier to maintain and support than a PC.
Rather than providing PC clusters in halls of residences, arguably Universities should consider installing TVs with network boxes.
Conclusions Will mobile access to the Internet take off?
Is the WAP phone a suitable device for providing access to the Internet?
Will people make use of the TV for accessing the Web?
The jury is still out.
Within our academic community we will no doubt see developments by the enthusiasts and criticisms from the sceptics.
The experienced Web manager and developer should be aware of the importance of the use of open standards and the need for resources to be developed in a maintainable way, such as using databases to store resources in a neutral format.
If this approach is taken we should be in a position to deploy services to WAP phones, digital TVs and whatever other new devices (e-Books, games machines, MP3 players, PDAs, wearables, etc.)
may appear relatively easily.
New Mailing List: People who are interested in WAP technologies may wish to subscribe to the new wap-support JISCmail list.
To subscribe see details on the wap-support JISCmail pages.
References Count Meter Counter and Statistics Tracker, http://www.sitemeter.com/statsapp4/default.asp?action=stats&site=sm4cultivate&report=19 WAP Browser @ Gelon.net, Gelon http://www.gelon.net/ Welcome to YOSPACE, Yospace http://www.yospace.com/ Wireless Google, Google http://www.google.com/options/wireless.html University of Teeside WAP Service, University of Teeside http://www.tees.ac.uk/wap.cfm University of Teeside WAP Service, University of Teeside http://wap.tees.ac.uk/ WAP device needed View using Web browser Report On the "Institutional Web Management: The Joined-Up Web" Workshop, Ariadne, issue 25 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/web-focus/#price The University of Sunderland WAP sites, University of Sunderland http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/wap/ University of Sunderland WAP Service, University of Sunderland http://wap.sund.ac.uk/index.wml WAP device needed View using Web browser RSC North WAP Service, University of Sunderland http://wap.rsc-north.ac.uk/rsc.wml WAP device needed View using Web browser SURFnet CAB, SURFnet http://search2.surfnet.nl/cgi-bin/wap2ldap WAP device needed View using Web browser WAP Field Study Findings, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, 10 December 2000 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001210.html Excite WAP Search For "University", Excite http://www.excite.co.uk/mobile/search/?st=10&search=university& WAP4Students, WAP4Students.com http://www.wap4students.co.uk/dream/intro.htm WAP4Students, http://www.wap4s.com/ WAP device needed View using Web browser EDMC, University of Southampton http://www.ses.soton.ac.uk/wap/edmc/index.wml WAP device needed View using Web browser Excite UK Channels: Mobile, Excite http://www.excite.co.uk/mobile/sms/ Quios, http://www.quios.com/ WatchMyServer, http://www.watchmyserver.com/ Netmind, http://www.netmind.com/ The Informant, http://informant.dartmouth.edu/ SpyOnIt, http://www.spyonit.com/ iobox.com WAP & SMS services, iobox http://www.iobox.com/iobox Alligata Server, 3G Lab http://www.3glab.com/products/ Useful programme (sic) for SMS, Jim Aiton, email message, 30 October 2000 News ONdigital, ONdigital http://62.172.196.242/news_1.html BUSH INTERNET SET TOP BOX, Toys R Us http://www.toysrus.co.uk/SN_engine.cfm?shopid=1&cat=1&frames=yes&function=showproduct&SKN=870102 WebTV, WebTV.net http://www.webtv.com/ WebTV Viewer, Developer.WebTV.net http://developer.webtv.net/design/tools/viewer/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Focus: The Web On Your Phone and TV" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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My Humbul: Humbul Gets Personal Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines My Humbul: Humbul Gets Personal Buzz data metadata cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Randy Metcalfe describes new functionality available for users of the Humbul Humanities Hub.
Humbul helps humanities professionals access relevant online resources.
Employing a distributed network of subject specialist cataloguers across the UK, the Humbul Humanities Hub (http://www.humbul.ac.uk/), based at the University of Oxford, is building a catalogue of evaluated online resources that enables teachers, researchers and students to find resources that make a difference.
Humbul is a service of the nationally funded Resource Discovery Network (RDN) (http://www.rdn.ac.uk/) which co-ordinates the development of evaluated resource catalogues across the subject spectrum for UK higher and further education.
[1] My Humbul With the launch of My Humbul, Humbul has made access to relevant online resources even easier.
For the first time, Humbul’s users will no longer need to visit Humbul’s website in order to discover whether new records relevant to their research interests have been added – Humbul will come to them.
Moreover, this development is a direct response to the needs expressed by users.
My Humbul personalises the user’s experience of Humbul.
A simple and free registration with My Humbul is all that is required to access the My Humbul environment.
[2] My Humbul Alert!
Humbul’s users will be well aware of the ability to search Humbul’s records for online humanities resources that will be relevant to their research or teaching.
Within the My Humbul environment users have the option of saving their searches.
Saved searches remain active until the user chooses to delete them.
Saved searches also automatically trigger My Humbul Alert!
Now, if any new record is added to Humbul’s catalogue that matches the user’s search criteria, an email notification is sent.
My Humbul users can save as many searches as they like.
A single notification is sent – weekly – of the new records that match the saved searches.
An alert includes the title of the newly catalogued online resource and a link to its Full Record View in Humbul.
[3] For example, a search in Humbul for records using all of the following terms poetry American women currently will call up four records.
My Humbul users who have logged in will see an additional option along with the records – the option to Save This Search.
Select that option and the next time the user returns to their My Humbul Account page, they will find their saved search recorded in My Searches.
(There is a link from every page within the My Humbul environment to the My Humbul Account page.)
Now the user can go away and forgot about Humbul, with the confidence that should a new record be added to Humbul that contains the terms poetry American women they will be sent an email notification.
It is worth noting that even though Humbul is constantly adding to its catalogue of records it is possible that a search in Humbul will return a null result.
No longer is that empty set the end of the story.
Simply save the search in My Humbul.
As and when records are added to Humbul that do match the criteria in question, a notification will be sent.
My Humbul users may also choose to be notified when any record within one or more of Humbul’s subject areas becomes live.
From the My Humbul Account page, select Change Subject under My Subjects.
Select from the full range of subjects supported by the Humbul Humanities Hub.
Selecting Update, the user is returned to their My Humbul Account page; the subjects selected are listed under My Subjects.
Now, the user will receive a weekly email notification of any records added to Humbul in the subject or subjects of their choice.
The user can choose as many subjects as they like.
They can choose subjects in addition to their saved searches or instead of using saved searches.
The way you choose to use Humbul is now in your own hands.
Not surprisingly My Humbul Alert!
is merely the first step down the road of making Humbul’s data increasingly accessible and its delivery increasingly customisable.
My Humbul users can look for the following developments over the next few months: record selection within a saved search so that users will save only the records they specially want rather than all which match their criteria; data export facilities to enable My Humbul users to export their saved searches in a variety of formats.
Ultimately, My Humbul users will be able to select specific records, provide their own annotations (perhaps to make the description course specific), export their preferred selection of metadata from the record, and embed that selection dynamically into their own web pages.
Clearly there is a long way to go, but this journey is now well underway.
[4] Humbul’s Aim Although cataloguing online resources may serve some esoteric purpose in and of itself, for Humbul it is merely a means to an end.
Humbul is a service and the service it provides is to make access to relevant online humanities resources as straightforward as possible.
To accomplish this end there are clearly two crucial components to Humbul’s work: 1) the development of the catalogue, and 2) the access to the catalogue.
The first component is taken care of by Humbul’s dedicated distributed network of subject specialist cataloguers in partner organisations and institutions across the UK.
Partners include the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York, the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, and the LTSN Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds.
But these dedicated cataloguers are also supported by an ever-increasing number of public submissions of online resources to Humbul.
Public submissions are vetted and their records completed by the subject specialist cataloguers.
Access to the catalogue, the second crucial component in Humbul’s work, is primarily through the search engine accessible on every page in Humbul’s site.
(Access is also available through the Resource Finder search box on the RDN site at http://www.rdn.ac.uk.)
Our task is to disentangle the particular process currently in place for accessing Humbul’s data from the data itself.
In effect, we want to separate form and content, and put the user directly in touch with the content irrespective of the form we happen to have chosen.
This strategy, of course, fits in well with the Arts and Humanities Portal (AHP) being developed by Humbul with the Arts and Humanities Data Service (http://www.ahds.ac.uk).
[5] Conclusion My Humbul is clearly only a beginning.
But it is a positive start, putting the users and their expressed needs to the fore.
As Humbul develops and grows it will continue to concentrate on the needs of its users, and the service it provides to humanities professionals in UK higher and further education.
Footnotes Humbul is principally funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) Centre.
It also receives support from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB).
Register with My Humbul by following the My Humbul Login link on http://www.humbul.ac.uk/.
The Full Record View in Humbul provides users with title and web address of the online resource as well as a description from a subject specialist cataloguer evaluating the resource’s usefulness for UK higher and further education.
This and further data supplied is derived from the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set with local qualifiers.
Each record in Humbul also identifies its cataloguer, with a link to a description of the cataloguer.
My Humbul users will be notified of these development on their My Humbul Account page.
The AHP is being developed as part of the RDN subject portals project.
See http://www.portals.ac.uk/.
Author Details   Randy Metcalfe Information and Publications Officer Humbul Humanities Hub randolph.metcalfe@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk http://www.humbul.ac.uk/ info@humbul.ac.uk Article Title: “My Humbul – Humbul Gets Personal” Author: Randy Metcalfe Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/myhumbul/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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r·cade: Resource Centre for Access to Data on Europe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines r·cade: Resource Centre for Access to Data on Europe Buzz data software database archives preservation cd-rom rdbms research Citation BibTex RIS Sharon Bolton describes r-cade, an interdisciplinary resource centre that helps researchers and analysts to identify and acquire data for the European Social Sciences.
In spite of closer European integration and significant and rising levels of interest in European information and data from users in all sectors, especially higher education, the supply of information is still sporadic, and access is often difficult.
Certain research funds within the social sciences are increasingly now targeted towards comparative research projects which cover at least three European countries, so availability of suitable statistical data and other information has become essential.
The r·cade project was set up to improve access to these European (and other international) data, and address the surrounding issues, for example: the negotiation of contracts with data providers, the acquisition, documentation and preservation of data, and the development of suitable documentation for data users.
The lack of cohesion within the field of European data had been previously noted at an international level, and this helped form the rationale behind the establishment of r·cade: “The European data base is not well integrated; large scale research is hardly co-ordinated; measurement instruments and data representation lack compatibility; data access and data protection regulations differ, and even information about the availability of information is not easy to obtain.
In short, the criteria for efficient organisation of data bases have hitherto been defined from a national perspective, and, even within nations, there is little co-ordinated data resource management.” European Science Foundation, 1992 Setting up the r·cade project The r·cade project was established in January 1995.
It is funded by the ESRC, and is a joint venture between two centres of expertise: The Data Archive [1], at the University of Essex, and the Centre for European Studies, based at the University of Durham.
The Data Archive acquires, stores and disseminates computer-readable copies of social science and humanities datasets for further analysis by the research community.
It currently holds over 5000 datasets, and is committed to improving the quality of data and their secondary analysis, via the provision of information and the various activities (such as workshops and user groups) it sponsors.
The Centre for European Studies[2] is a new interdisciplinary research centre.
It is involved in substantive research into the European labour market and the European economy.
Linked to the Centre is the National On-line Manpower Information System (Nomis)[3] which disseminates on-line considerable quantities of labour market statistics to over 600 sites in the UK.
Nomis users span central and local government, academia, and the private sector.
The r·cade project directors are: Professor Denise Lievesley, of The Data Archive, Professor Ray Hudson of the Centre for European Studies, and Mr. Michael Blakemore, director of NOMIS.
An Advisory Board has been established for r·cade, which meets twice yearly, under the chairmanship of Prof.
The Hon.
David Sieff, of Marks & Spencer PLC.
Membership of the Board is drawn from academia, research, and the business sector.
r·cade’s objectives The objectives of the r·cade project are as follows: to establish a central collection of European statistical data drawn from a wide range of different sources; to provide researchers, teachers and other users in government and the private sector, with an easily accessible and rich source of data and accompanying documentation; to work towards preservation of the increasing number of data sets which are being created in this field, so that users can access historical material; to supplement data documentation particularly in relation to data quality; to keep track of and document changing definitions and geographies.
Help for data users The r·cade service can help users to find out whether required data exist and where they are located; we negotiate on behalf of data users to obtain access to data collected by a wide range of organisations throughout Europe and further afield, and aim to provide access to the data in common formats over the electronic network and on other media.
So far, r·cade have made significant achievements with data acquisitions, and negotiations for data are continuing with major international organisations.
Consultancy work has been undertaken by leading academics on behalf of r·cade in the areas of crime and law, health and the environment to verify the needs of data users and to locate relevant data sources.
Suggestions for suitable data from researchers in all major subject areas across economics and the social sciences are welcome, and will assist r·cade to set priorities for acquisition.
r·cade aims to be a user-led organization, so please contact the r·cade office (details below) with your comments.
Current r·cade data holdings At present, r·cade hold data from three major providers: Eurostat (the Statistical Office of the European Communities) [4], UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), [5], and ILO (International Labour Organization) [6].
Eurostat have provided r·cade with their NewCronos database, which comprises statistical information over a wide range of subjects economy and finance, population and demographic data, energy and industry, agriculture, employment and labour, transport and research & development.
This is a popular database, well-used by researchers in government, academic and business sectors in many European countries.
UNESCO have provided their Education Database, which covers education at all levels from pre-primary to higher, educational expenditure, and ‘foreign’ students.
Again, this is an important and popular database, provided by the world leader in the field of education.
ILO data includes part of their Laborsta database, covering a wide range of employment and labour-related issues.
The ILO have developed and promoted international standards for the collection of labour statistics, which are widely used by other statistical organizations.
This database is a comprehensive and high-quality time-series.
Screenshot of the r·cade site Data processing and documentation Once r·cade receive data from a provider, each data set undergoes extensive checking and ‘data cleaning’ where necessary, to prepare it for addition to the r·cade on-line system, and any queries may be raised with data providers at this stage.
Data are then added to the internal development database, and are thoroughly checked and tested by the whole team.
Data notes and warnings are added at this stage.
Documentation is then prepared and added to the on-line system, linked to the data set, and again tested for functionality and suitability.
The primary source for data set documentation is always material produced by the data provider to accompany that particular data, and this may be supplemented where necessary for further detail, usually from the data provider’s related publications.
Primary documentation standards vary widely between data providers, but every effort is made to provide as much detail as possible about the data added to the r·cade on-line system, and present it in a ‘user-friendly’ manner.
Once checking and documentation are complete and the team are satisfied that the data set is of acceptable quality as far as possible, it is released to the r·cade on-line system and becomes available to outside users.
r·cade do everything possible to ensure the data released is of good quality, and generally succeed, but sometimes circumstances are beyond the team’s control for example the original data may be very sparse, or the original data providers may have experienced problems inherent in the collection of cross-national data, such as lack of international comparability or a lengthy delay between data collection and data set production.
Data supply to users on-line and off-line Using the process noted above, r·cade have made much of the data so far acquired accessible via a custom-built on-line system.
However, we are also able to supply data from holdings not yet available on-line.
These data may be provided either as whole datasets or by subset, via a range of media CD-ROM, or floppy disk, for example, or even hard copy in some circumstances.
Whilst users are encouraged to become registered subscribers to the r·cade on-line service, which allows them to access the system when and where they need (see next section), r·cade do supply data to off-line users on an ad hoc, one-time basis and are able to quote a price before supply, taking into account the nature of individual requirements and circumstances.
r·cade welcome enquiries from all types of data user, whether they wish to subscribe or not.
Data will also be available via The Data Archive [1] , for those users who wish to obtain bulk data and process it at their convenience.
Potential users should note that charges are made for all data supplied by r·cade, but efforts are made to keep costs as reasonable as possible depending on user status, the amount of data supplied, whether the user is a registered r·cade on-line system subscriber and charges imposed by the original data provider.
Please contact the r·cade office for further details.
The r·cade on-line system and user registration r·cade’s software development team have built an on-line system for the service using Oracle RDBMS technology.
The interface is designed to be easy to use, even for the novice computer user, and is available via JANET, over the Internet, or via modem using BT’s global network switching (GNS) system.
Interested parties may apply to become registered subscribers to the on-line service whilst this is not free of charge, r·cade aims to keep costs to the minimum.
Registration has many benefits for those who may use a lot of data they may use the on-line system at their convenience rather than having to make repeated requests for data to the r·cade office, and additional benefits such as detailed user manuals and data set guides are supplied automatically on registration.
These documents are updated regularly, and provide much more information about the data and data providers than may be practically included on-line or via the r·cade web site.
The on-line service was officially launched on October 1st 1996, and the number of subscribers is currently rising weekly.
This has enabled r·cade to maintain a healthy regular customer base, and to build a rapport with them user feedback on all aspects of the system is encouraged, and means the r·cade team can plan and provide an effective service, which responds to user needs and concerns, both technically and with regard to broader issues.
The r·cade World Wide Web site The r·cade web site has undergone considerable development since it was established it is a major access point for the service, and has produced a greater volume of enquiries about data and the more general aspects of the project than other publicity material or conference presentations, etc.
In this sense it is an extremely important marketing tool for the r·cade project, and every effort is made to keep the information held there as current as possible.
Interested parties can learn a lot about the data r·cade hold from this web site, without the expense of subscription to the service.
All on-line documentation which accompanies data sets available via the r·cade system is held on the web pages, including details of data set coverage and available variables, though of course not data itself at this stage.
Enough information about each data set is available via the web site to enable potential data users to make a decision !
about suitability of a particular data set for them, though (as mentioned above) more detailed documentation is available to registered subscribers.
Links to other international organizations and data providers are also to be found at the web site, along with background information about establishment of the project and its progress.
The r·cade web site is at : http://rcade.essex.ac.uk [7] The r·cade team Besides the three project directors, the r·cade team is divided between Essex and Durham three software developers and the r·cade secretary complete the Durham team, based with Michael Blakemore at the Mountjoy Research Centre, University of Durham, whilst the Essex team includes a project manager, web site/software developer and information officer, based with Professor Lievesley at The Data Archive, ensuring a spread of expertise between the twin project sites.
References [1] The Data Archive Web site, http://dawww.essex.ac.uk/ [2] Centre for European Studies Web site, http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcm0www/eurostud.htm [3] NOMIS Web site (currently under construction), http://www-nomis.dur.ac.uk/ [4] Eurostat Web site; this is a huge site with plenty of information about Eurostat’s activities, currently searchable in English, French or German, http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/eurostat/ [5] UNESCO Web site; a huge site with plenty of information about UNESCO’s activities, not just their statistical collections.
Mostly English, some pages available in French or Spanish.
http://www.unesco.org/ [6] ILO Web site; lots of information about ILO’s activities within the field of labour and employment.
Includes a searchable database and is available in English, French or Spanish.
http://www.ilo.org/ [7] Rcade Web site, http://rcade.essex.ac.uk/ Author Details Sharon Bolton, r·cade Information Officer, The Data Archive, University of Essex.
Email: sharonb@essex.ac.uk Tel: 01206 872569 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Eye on Engineering Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Eye on Engineering Buzz copyright cataloguing url Citation BibTex RIS The EEVL Team explore patent information web sites, the latest EEVL news, etc.
Following the success of the subject gateways, developed as part of the eLib programme, JISC will fund a three-year programme which will expand the subject gateways model to cover all subject areas on a broadly faculty-hub basis.
As part of this Resource Discovery Network (RDN), EEVL [01] and Heriot-Watt University successfully bid to establish an Engineering, Mathematics and Computing (EMC) 'Hub' (a focused collection of gateways).
The EMC Hub, which will be funded from 1st August 1999, will develop services in these three subjects, expanding existing services and bringing online new ones.
The EEVL service currently provides a searchable, browsable catalogue of over 4,350 quality engineering resources, and various targeted engineering search engines.
The existing EEVL Catalogue will be further expanded to include Aerospace and Defence Technology, working in partnership with Cranfield University.
Separate services will be created for Mathematics (in partnership with Birmingham University) and Computing.
The services will build on the experiences learned from developing the EEVL services and will provide quick and easy access to quality Internet resources in the three subject areas, with the possibility of developing cross-searching across the different subject areas.
The initial work of the Hub will involve integrating the resources already present in the aerospace and defence part of Cranfield University Internet Site Explorer (CRUISE) [02] into an expanded section of EEVL.
Reviews of currently available Mathematics gateways in the UK and elsewhere will contribute to the development of the Hub Maths gateway.
Possibilities for this gateway include mirroring or collaborating with other services.
More information about the EMC Hub is available [03], or contact Roddy MacLeod, EMC Hub Co-ordinator, <R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk> The UKOLUG Meeting, Engineering Information Sources: Provider & Consumers is taking place on the 23rd of June 1999.
The meeting will be held in the Wolfson Technology Resource Centre, Edinburgh University Library, George Square.
Speakers include Dr Alan Bridges, of Strathclyde University, talking about Construction Industry Information Sources, and Dave Wilson, Webmaster of the Engineer Online.
EEVL will also demonstrate its new cross-search service, EEVL's All-in-one Search on the Internet for Engineering Resources (EASIER).
More information and a booking form are available from the UKOLUG web site.
[04] References EEVL <URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/> CRUISE <URL: http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/cils/library/subjects/webinfo.htm> The EMC Hub <URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/emc.html> Engineering Information Sources: Provider & Consumers <URL: http://www.ukolug.co.uk/meetings/engineering.htm> Author Details Linda Kerr Library, Riccarton, Edinburgh EH14 4AS Heriot-Watt University Email: L.Kerr@hw.ac.uk Linda Kerr is EEVL Services Officer, based at Heriot-Watt University Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Are XLink and Xpointer?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Are XLink and Xpointer?
Buzz html xml infrastructure browser copyright hypertext xpointer xlink mathml url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly explains XLink and XPointer.
Background The What Is …?
article in the last edition of Ariadne gave an introduction to XML, the Extensible Markup Language [1].
XML has been developed to overcome HTML’s lack of extensibility with XML you will be able to define your own element tags.
We have already seen a variety of communities defining element tags for use within their community, such as MathML [2] and MusicML [3].
Besides lacking extensibility, HTML is also limited in its hyperlinking functionality.
XLink and XPointer are currently being developed in order to address these limitations.
XLink In HTML hyperlinking is normally achieved using the <A> (anchor) element.
This provides a simple uni-directional link: normally clicking on a hypertext link will cause the current document to be replaced by a new document.
XLink [4] provides much richer hyperlinking functionality which the hypertext community have argued is needed in order to provide a richer web infrastructure.
XLink enables multiple destinations to be provided.
For example consider the XML portion illustrated below.
<p>What is an <a xml:link=“extended”> <locator href=“glossary.xml” role=“Glossary definition”> <locator href=“http://www.w3.org/TR/" role=“XML Link specification”> <locator href=“tutorial.xml” role=“Tutorial”> <locator href=“quiz.xml” role=“Quiz”>XLink?</a></p> This could be rendered by a conforming XML browser as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Multiple Link Destinations XLink also enables a variety of link behaviours to be specified, including embedding the resource in the original document, replacing the original document and creating a new window.
For example: <a href=“xlink-def.xml xml:link=“simple” show=“embed”> What is XLink?</a> will result in the contents of the XML file xlink-def.xml being displayed in the original document, immediately following the hypertext link.
<a href=“xlink-def.xml xml:link=“simple” show=“replace”> What is XLink?</a> will result in the contents of the XML file xlink-def.xml replacing the current document.
This example is equivalent to conventional HTML hyperlink.
<a href=“xlink-def.xml xml:link=“simple” show=“new”> What is XLink?</a> will create a new window containing the definition.
Three <show> attributes can be defined.
In addition the <actuate> attribute can be used to define when the link traversal should occur.
<actuate> can have two values: actuate=“auto” link traversal occurs when the resource is loaded) and actuate=“user” link traversal occurs on user action, such as clicking a link.
The <show> and <actuate> attributes can be used in combination.
For example using show=“embed” actuate=“auto” in combination with a link to an image will result in the image being embedded in the document when the document is loaded.
This is equivalent to the HTML <IMG> element.
XPointer XLink provides a much richer hyperlink mechanism than is currently provided in HTML.
HTML is also deficient in allowing the destination of the link to be processed.
All that can be done using the <A> element besides pointing to the top of the document is pointing to a pre-defined internal anchor.
This link, for example points to references in this article.
In enabling this link to be defined, an internal anchor name had to be explicitly defined.
It is not possible, for example, to point to the references for the What Is.. column in the last edition, as no internal anchor was defined.
In addition it is not possible to process portions of a document.
XPointer [5] addresses these deficiencies.
With XPointer it is possible to link to arbitrary locations in an XML document, even if the author has not provided internal anchor.
In addition it is possible to point to portions of an XML document.
For example you could point to a relevant paragraph in an XML document.
A conforming XML browser could highlight the linked portion of the document.
XPointer makes use the tree structure in XML documents.
For example if you wish to link to the second item in a list which has the unique ID of “interesting-facts” you could use the following XML link: <a href=“http://www.foo.com/bar.xml#id(interesting-facts).child(3,item)"> Figure 2 illustrates the (simplified) tree structure for an XML document.
Figure 2 XML Tree Structure Using the XPointer language portions of the tree can be identified, such as the third paragraph of the first section in the first chapter.
Status Of XLink and XPointer What is the status of the XLink and XPointer proposals?
These two proposals are currently available as working drafts.
The proposals are being developed by working groups within W3C.
However the proposals are still at an early stage.
Although the XLink draft is relatively stable we may see substantial changes before the proposals, in particular the XPointer proposal, are submitted as W3C Proposed Recommendations.
As well as the technical work which the working groups are addressing there are a number of legal issues which may have to be addressed.
We have already seen a number of legal cases associated with hyperlinking on the web [6].
With a richer hyperlinking infrastructure we may well see even more disputes.
If I provide a pointer to MacDonald’s website and I use XPointers to point only to the content and my XML browser only displays this content, and I am breach of copyright?
Further Information Further information on XLink and XPointer is available at the following locations: “XLL XML Linking Language” at <URL: http://www.sil.org/sgml/xll.html> “XLink: The Extensible Linking Language” by James Tauber at <URL: http://www.xmlinfo.com/xlink/> The XML home page at <URL: http://www.xml.com/> References 1.
What Is XML?, Ariadne Issue 15 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue15/what-is/> 2.
MathML, W3C See <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-MathML> 3.
MusicML, The Connection Factory <URL: http://www.tcf.nl/trends/trends6-en.html> 4.
XML Linking Language (XLink), W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xlink> 5.
XML Pointer Language (XPointer), W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xptr> 6.
Intellectual Property Rights Overview, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/IPR/> Author details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath E-mail: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
The Scholarly Journal in Transition and the PubMed Central Proposal Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Scholarly Journal in Transition and the PubMed Central Proposal Buzz data database dissemination archives metadata digitisation accessibility repositories copyright preservation cataloguing multimedia url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day discusses the scholarly journal in transition and the PubMed Central proposal.
In my opinion, there is no real question that completely paperless systems will emerge in science and in other fields.
The only real question is “when will it happen?” We can reasonably expect, I feel, that a rather fully developed electronic information system … will exist by the year 2000, although it could conceivably come earlier. F.
Wilfrid Lancaster (1978) [1] Predicting the future is very dangerous.
Wilfrid Lancaster’s 21 year old comment may seem unduly optimistic when it mentions the arrival of ‘completely paperless’ systems, but the Internet and the World Wide Web would appear (almost) to be his ‘fully developed electronic information system’.
The Internet is increasingly being used for scholarly and scientific communication and it is often suggested that its use for the dissemination of research findings may mean the end of the traditional printed scholarly journal.
An important debate on these issues was triggered when in March 1999, Harold Varmus, Nobel Prize winner and director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), began to circulate a proposal for an online service that would give free access to published material in the biomedical sciences.
A more detailed proposal was published in April and appeared on the NIH Web site on the 5th May, with an addendum published on the 20 June [2].
Following extensive discussion and debate, a service to be known as ‘PubMed Central’ was announced on the 30 August [3].
This paper will take a brief look at the development and role of printed journals and how developments in electronic communication may effect this.
It will then look in more detail at the NIH proposal and some of the objections it received.
The paper will end with some discussion of the role of libraries in this new environment.
Journals and scientific communication Historical background It must first be noted that printed journals have played a distinguished role in scientific communication for over three hundred and thirty years.
The first scientific periodicals (the Journal des sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) were first published in 1665 and provided a practical way for scientists of the day to communicate with each other.
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the nature of journals slowly changed, resulting in a relative decline in the importance of learned society proceedings, and the successful creation of more specialised journals, reflecting the fragmentation of knowledge into more specialised disciplines [4].
By the end of the nineteenth century, features like the peer-review of submitted papers had begun to become standard in many disciplines.
Scholarly and scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals remain what Maurice Line calls “the established medium of record and dissemination” [5].
The role of printed journals Despite this, there is a growing feeling that in the Internet age the printed journal may not be able to survive as a primary means of scholarly communication for much longer.
The Internet offers, for example, an extremely convenient and efficient way to disseminate scholarly papers to their audience.
Research projects back in the 1980s first proved the technical feasibility of electronic journals [6].
However, they failed to ‘take-off’ at the time because computer networks were immature, user interfaces were poor and developers only had a vague idea about the different functions that the printed journal carries out.
Too much time was spent considering the integration of new interactive or multimedia features rather than considering the real reasons why authors publish in existing journals, and why libraries and other consumers are prepared to spend large amounts of money on them.
For example, Cliff McKnight has recently commented that unless readers (and by extension authors) can do “at least the same things and preferably more with electronic journals as they do with paper, what incentive is there for them to change?” [7].
We need, therefore, to remind ourselves why the printed journal has been such a successful part of scholarly communication.
It is, in part, because the peer-reviewed journal has fulfilled a number of different requirements.
The following list is based on those identified by Fytton Rowland in an Ariadne article published in 1997 [8].
Dissemination publication of a paper in a peer-reviewed journal allows an author to disseminate important research findings to the wider research community and beyond.
It is important to recognise, however, that the content of many published papers will previously have been discussed informally, reported on at conferences and distributed as pre-prints.
Quality control editorial processes (when consistently applied) can help to ensure a high written standard of papers, but the core quality control process is the peer-review of all submitted papers.
Establishing priority one of the most important functions of the printed journal, especially in the STM disciplines, is to be able to establish priority over a particular discovery or advance.
Jack Meadows considers this to be the ‘basic motivation’ of authors in many cases, and much more important than being read or cited by their peers [9].
Frank Close in his book on the 1989 cold fusion controversy agrees [10].
Usually in science there is a great pressure to be first, to win the race and gain the honour of discovery.
That honour requires acceptance by the community of science which in turn needs refereed publication of all the details necessary for the successful replication of the discovery by other scientists.
Only then will the claimed discovery be agreed upon and the credits come your way.
All research is geared towards eventual publication; gaining funding to support your research is arguably the only venture whose urgency approaches that of getting the results onto paper and staking a claim to priority.
The recognition of authors in addition to being able to establish priority, authors would also value publication in refereed-journals as a means of raising their profile and (hopefully) to be able to gain further research contracts or promotion.
The creation of a public domain archive once published, journal papers are (by definition) in the public domain and research libraries can collectively act as a distributed archive, preserving the knowledge embodied in them for current and future scholars.
The peer-reviewed printed journal currently fulfils most of these needs rather well.
Printed journals are particularly good for helping establish priority and for creating an archive available for long term use.
Any electronic communication system developed to replace the printed journal will have to take account of all of these requirements.
The end of printed journals?
There are still those who argue, like Lancaster, that the distribution of the vast majority of scholarly and scientific information will soon go completely electronic.
The Internet has had a great impact on scholarly communication, and the decline of the traditional printed journal is being predicted once more [11].
In 1995, for example, the mathematician Andrew Odlyzko argued that most printed journals would be likely to disappear within the next ten to twenty years.
He predicts that scholarly publishing will soon move to electronic delivery mechanisms for two reasons the “economic push of having to cope with increasing costs of the present system and the attractive pull of the new features that electronic publishing offers” [12].
Many journal publishers are aware of these factors and have begun to set up Web-based services that give access to electronic versions of existing printed journals, often using the Portable Document Format (PDF) which maintains the typography and layout of the printed version.
For some more radical proponents of electronic communication, this does not go far enough.
They ask why the status quo in paper journals should simply duplicate itself in the new medium [13].
They see self-publishing (sometimes called self-archiving) through the Internet as a means of returning the responsibility of ownership and distribution of scholarship to its creators [14].
The most prominent proponent of this idea is Stevan Harnad, director of the Cognitive Sciences Centre at the University of Southampton.
One of Harnad’s key assumptions is that when scholars and scientists publish in peer-reviewed journals they are not primarily interested in monetary reward which in any case would probably not be forthcoming but in having their work read, used, built-upon and cited [15].
In the ‘Gutenberg era’, authors had to perpetuate what Harnad calls a ‘Faustian bargain’, made between authors and commercial publishers, whereby authors trade the copyright of works in exchange for having them published [16].
He argues that this type of bargain made sense when publishing remained a exclusive and expensive domain, but has no relevance in the electronic era when scholars can publish their own papers at little or no personal cost.
In addition to the benefits of improved accessibility, an increased speed of publication and possible financial savings, Harnad suggests that network publication would enable authors to interact better with their peers, for example published articles could be open to immediate comment and response, i.e.
what has been characterised by the term ‘scholarly skywriting’ [17].
In order to facilitate the post-Gutenberg era, Harnad, Odlyzko and others have formulated what they refer to as a ‘subversive proposal’ to bring down the ‘paper house of cards’ [18].
They suggest that all authors of non-trade works should make available the texts of all current papers on the Internet and that readers would rapidly form the habit of accessing the free electronic version of a paper rather than a more expensive paper version published much later [19].
The most frequently cited model of the ‘subversive-proposal’ in action is the ‘e-print archive’ set up by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) [20, 21].
Ginsparg’s original service, which went online in August 1991, gave electronic access to pre-prints in the domain of high-energy physics.
It very quickly became the primary means of scholarly communication in its subject area and has since expanded to cover the whole of physics, mathematics and computer science.
An physicist was quoted in 1994 as saying that the archive had completely changed the way people in the field exchanged information: “the only time I look at the published journals is for articles that predate the Los Alamos physics databases” [22].
The original NIH proposal It was partly the success of Ginsparg’s physics e-print server that inspired the original NIH proposal.
Varmus also shares Harnad’s assumption that the publishing that scientists do is quite different from trade publishing [23] … what scientists are about is generating results, typically paid for by public or private funders; the scientists’ objective is to get results of the research seen by as many people as possible.
We have no interest in making money by publishing our results.
We want to get them out where everyone sees them.
It’s good for our careers, it’s good for the development of our science in our community, and it’s good for achieving our ultimate goal of learning more about biological systems and achieving progress against disease.
The initial NIH draft was entitled E-biomed: a proposal for electronic publications in the biomedical sciences, and suggested that the NIH, through the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), should “facilitate a community-based effort to establish an electronic publishing site”.
Varmus wrote: In the plan we envision, E-biomed would transmit and maintain, in both permanent on-line and downloaded archives, reports in the many fields that constitute biomedical research, including clinical research, cell and molecular biology, medically-related behavioral research, bioengineering, and other disciplines allied with biology and medicine.
A core part of the proposal was that submission to E-biomed could take two different paths, one with a formal peer-review process, the other with minimal review a bit like the Los Alamos e-print archives.
With peer review authors would submit reports electronically into the E-biomed server, requesting peer-review by the editorial board of a particular co-operating journal.
If the paper were accepted for publication, it would immediately be made available through the E-biomed repository and afterwards from the publishers.
If the paper is not accepted however, the authors could either re-submit it to another editorial board or accept its publication in some other form.
Without peer review authors would submit reports directly into the E-biomed ‘general repository’.
Instead of a formal peer-review, each report would only require approval by ‘two individuals with appropriate credentials’.
These credentials would be established by the E-biomed Governing Board and would “be broad enough to include several thousands of scientists, but stringent enough to provide protection of the database from extraneous or outrageous material”.
Access to the archived reports in the server would be available immediately to any user with Internet access and would be searchable by a single search engine.
It was also hoped that the proposed service would contribute to the development of new ways of presenting the results of research, help speed up the dissemination of information and help to reduce the current high cost of scientific journals.
In the initial proposal, it was suggested that authors would retain copyright to reports deposited in the repository.
The proposal was also careful to stress that the NIH would only provide financial, technical and administrative support for E-biomed, and that it would neither ‘own nor operate’ the repository [24].
The NIH proposal was intended to stimulate wider discourse about the effective use of electronic communication methods for the dissemination of the results of biomedical research.
It immediately generated a large amount of comment, some of it supportive [25, 26], some of it very critical.
Reactions to the proposal Criticisms of the proposal concentrated on four main issues: The importance of peer-review.
There was a particular concern about the quality of papers that would be submitted to and published in the non peer-reviewed ‘general repository’ part of E-biomed.
One US-based biochemist was quoted as saying that the repository would “inevitably become a massive repository of taxpayer-supported junk” [27].
Arnold S. Relman, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote an important editorial in that journal describing the NIH proposal as a “potential threat to the evaluation and orderly dissemination of new clinical studies”.
Acknowledging the journal’s self-interest, the editorial argued that there were basic differences in the publication needs of clinical medicine and other scientific fields and suggested that the NIH proposal might threaten the public interest [28].
The best way to protect the public interest is through the existing system of carefully monitored peer review, revision, and editorial commentary in journals, and by timing public disclosure to coincide with the date of journal publication.
Mistakes, inaccuracies, and misinterpretations in clinical research pose a far greater risk to health and the public welfare that do errors in basic-science research.
In an e-mail response to Relman, Harnad considers these objections to E-biomed to be unjustified.
He points out that papers submitted to the refereed sector of E-biomed will still be peer-reviewed and that there is no reason why simultaneous editorial commentary could not also be arranged, if it is required.
The difficulty with timing public disclosure to coincide with the date of journal publication is described as ‘nonsense’ and “the unfortunate retardation of a bygone papyrocentric era” [29].
If it is not merely a reflexive bid to safeguard journal primacy and revenue … then it is merely an expression of a superstitious adherence to completely irrelevant and obsolete features of the print-on-paper era for journal publication.
However, some of the most prestigious general medical journals have had long-standing rules forbidding the prior release of any information before publication.
The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, has a policy known as the Ingelfinger Rule (named after the editor who promulgated it) that will not permit the publication of a manuscript whose substance has already been submitted (or reported) elsewhere.
The rule is intended to prevent the journal being ‘scooped’ by its rivals and uphold the conventions of the biomedical research community by promoting the orderly dissemination of information.
Franz Ingelfinger commented that the average researcher is not too pleased if a competitor bypasses these conventions “to gain publicity, and perhaps priority, by presenting unpublished results at press conferences or by interviews with reporters” [30].
The New England Journal of Medicine exempts from the rule, however, all presentations made at scientific meetings and all published abstracts, although it discourages the prior dissemination of any more detailed information than was originally presented [31].
This discouragement of prior-publication persists in the Internet age, especially with regard to non-refereed pre-prints.
Back in 1995, a New England Journal of Medicine editorial stressed that any study is incomplete unless it has been peer-reviewed, revised accordingly and published, and that this applies equally to electronic pre-prints [32].
Thus, posting a manuscript, including its figures and tables, on host computer to which anyone on the Internet can gain access will consititute prior publication.
This position has been subject to some criticism.
Ronald LaPorte and Bernard Hibbitts claim that it interferes with scientists’ rights to do what they like with their work, even before the copyright of the article has been transferred to the publisher [33].
It certainly may impede the development of a successful eletronic pre-print culture in the biomedical sciences.
A recent BMJ editorial, however, took a more moderate stance than its Boston-based counterpart suggesting that electronic pre-prints might be analogous to conference presentations or abstracts.
Tony Delamothe suggested that the existing exceptions applying to these forms of dissemination might be extended to apply to pre-prints [34].
Varmus addressed the quality issue in his addendum of the 20 June, which acknowledged that the non-reviewed component of E-biomed might tempt some to disseminate “information of marginal value or accuracy”, but that “few scientists would knowingly put such information into the public domain, because it would soon diminish their reputations”.
The role of the NIH Despite Varmus’s assurance that the NIH would only act as a facilitator of a community-based effort, some criticism of the proposal centred on what was seen as the extension of the power and influence of the US Federal Government.
The editor of Science, Floyd E. Bloom, asked whether “a monopolistic archive under government control by the major research funder enhance scientific progress better than the existing journal hierarchy?” [35].
Others thought that the NIH’s proposed role was “intrusive” [36].
Michele Hogan, executive director of the American Association of Immunologists, commented that the NIH “could become the sole supplier of scientific content, and would have to assume responsibility for the publication peer-review exercise”, thus the community would “lose peer-review independent of the government” [37].
Varmus responded to this criticism by noting that the proposed system would not be owned by the NIH and that it would only work if the international scientific community was “broadly represented in its operation and governance”.
Harnad has further noted that there will be no monopoly [38].
Multiple journals indeed the entire hierarchy that currently exists will continue to exist for authors and readers.
Nor will it be government controlled.
(As always, quality will be controlled by peer reviewers, who, like the authors, do their work for free!
…) Competition with existing journals Much criticism of the NIH proposal centered on its potential to compete with and undermine existing journals.
A report in Nature noted that several observers had said that it “might create an unhealthy monopoly, erode the diversity of existing journals, and reduce competition between journals for the best papers” [39].
Varmus responded by saying that he would encourage journals, and especially those “with strong reputations for rigorous reviewing and careful editing, to become part of the system”.
Finance Some of the most important criticisms of the E-biomed proposal concerned its vagueness on financial matters [40].
Suggestions that the repository would undermine the viability of scientific societies who currently publish journals (and depend on their income) met with the response that they should look for other ways of generating funds [41].
… societies should not be seen as slowing a revolution in publishing that could make all journals more accessible.
As for the questions of how much the repository would cost and who would pay for it, the proposal was still vague.
If access to the submitted reports were to remain free at the point of use, payment would have to be through some other mechanism, possibly from fees levied on authors.
Varmus suggested that: One straightforward strategy would be the imposition of fees for authors perhaps a small fee at the time of submission and a larger one at the time of acceptance.
PubMed Central At the end of August, a revised proposal for a service now to be known as ‘PubMed’ Central emerged from NIH.
PubMed Central will be integrated into the existing PubMed biomedical literature database but will form just one component of an expanded electronic repository for the life sciences.
The repository is due to ‘go live’ in January 2000 [42].
The PubMed Central announcement took into account some of its critics concerns and recognised the legitimacy of publishers’ concerns.
While the original draft proposal suggested that reports would be added to the repository immediately upon their acceptance, the PubMed Central announcement stated that the submission of content “can occur at any time after acceptance for publication, at the discretion of the participants”.
It was also less radical on copyright, effectively side-stepping this difficult issue by saying that copyright would “reside with the submitting groups (i.e.
the publishers, societies, or editorial boards) or the authors themselves, as determined by the participants”.
The role of libraries Initiatives like PubMed Central are very attractive to libraries if they result in reduced spending on journal subscription and processing costs and if they aid the ‘free’ dissemination of information.
However, they also provide new challenges.
Like publishers, libraries are merely intermediaries in the scholarly and scientific communication process.
If scholars and scientists are able to devise successful electronic communication systems that effectively bypass the library, surely there will be very little left for them to do?
However, this is being overly pessimistic.
For one thing, the increased use of electronic technologies for the dissemination does not mean that printed information will immediately disappear.
Odlyzko points out that printed collections will still need to be maintained at least until their eventual digitisation, and that this process is likely to take a long time [43].
In any case, while scholarly journals may indeed go electronic; other forms of printed information are likely to survive for a long time to come.
The historian Robert Darnton, for example, expresses the opinion that electronic technology will act as a supplement to, and not a substitute for Gutenberg’s invention [44].
Libraries will probably also have a role in acting as gatekeepers for a range of electronic information services, including journals.
For example, libraries (or library consortia) have had to get used to negotiating electronic content licences with publishers rather than just purchasing hard-copy [45].
This type of activity is likely to become even more important.
Resource discovery and metadata One area where libraries and other information professions will have an interest is in ensuring that the wide variety of scholarly publications available online can be discovered and accessed by users.
PubMed Central will only be one part of a much wider information landscape, even within in the field of biomedicine.
While Varmus is confident that all reports filed in PubMed Central would be searchable by a single search engine, it might be desirable to create new services that combined searches of PubMed Central with library catalogues and Internet information gateways.
In any case, a PubMed Central search engine would need to give access to a extremely large and constantly growing resource.
The American Society for Investigative Pathology has suggested that “effort and attention be directed to novel approaches to create search engines that will assist researchers in navigating the material” [4].
Long-term preservation Another potential role for research libraries, albeit a more problematic one, would be to help ensure the long-term preservation of the papers stored in services like PubMed Central and the Los Alamos e-print archives [47].
We have seen that with printed journals, libraries collectively act as a distributed archive, preserving the knowledge embodied in them.
Varmus has said that the danger of losing vast quantities of published data from PubMed Central would be remote as the service would be “mirrored”, and would be backed-up on tape, CD-ROMs or ‘long-lived paper’ at more than one site.
At first sight this appears secure, but without any stronger institutional commitment to preserving the material submitted to PubMed Central NIH after all are only supposed to be contributing technical assistance and financial support and this may not be enough.
At the very least, repositories like PubMed Central and e-print servers should adhere to best-practice in ensuring the long-term integrity of their service.
Conclusions The NIH proposal for a PubMed Central service has certainly focussed the biomedical community’s mind on the potential of electronic networks for the dissemination of information.
The debate that followed the publication of the draft proposal, however, revealed serious divisions within the community and important concerns about its implications for the quality of published papers.
The debate also demonstrates how cautious one should be when equating the practices of physicists (with regard to their use of the Los Alamos e-print archives) and other disciplines.
As Edward Valauskas has noted, “comparing scholarly communication in the fast-paced world of high-energy physics to the mere academic deliberations of humanists, social scientists, and non-physics scientists is dangerous” [48].
It will be interesting to wait and see what effect PubMed Central will have upon scholarly communication in biomedicine.
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<URL:http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/316/7134/794> 35.
Floyd E. Bloom, ‘Just a minute, please.’ Science, 285, 9 July 1999, p. 197.
36.
Robert Pear, ‘NIH plan for journal on the Web draws fire.’ New York Times, 8 June 1999, pp.
F1, F6.
37.
Michele Hogan, ‘PubMed Central and beyond.’ HMS Beagle: the BioMedNet Magazine, 61, 3 September 1999.
<URL:http://hmsbeagle.com/hmsbeagle/61/viewpts/page3> 38.
Stevan Harnad, ‘Floyd Bloom’s SCIENCE Editorial about NIH/E-biomed.’ E-mail to lis-elib mailing-list, <lis-elib@mailbase.ac.uk>, 28 July 1999.
<URL:http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1999-07/0069.html> 39.
Declan Butler and Meridith Wadman, ‘Mixed response to NIH’s web journal plan.’ Nature, 399, 6 May 1999, pp.
8-9.
40.
Meridith Wadman, ‘Critics query financing of proposed ‘E-biomed’.’ Nature, 400, 15 July 1999, p. 200.
41.
Harold Varmus, quoted in: Robert Pear, ‘NIH plan for journal on the Web draws fire.’ New York Times, 8 June 1999, pp.
F1, F6.
42.
Tony Delamothe, ‘NIH website of original research to start in January.’ British Medical Journal, 319, 11 September 1999, p. 657.
<URL:http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7211/657/a> 43.
Andrew M. Odlyzko, ‘Competition and cooperation: libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals.’ Journal of Electronic Publishing, 4 (4), May 1999.
<URL:http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-04/odlyzko0404.html> 44.
Robert Darnton, ‘The new age of the book’.
New York Review of Books, 18 March 1999.
<URL:http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19990318005F> 45.
Ann Okerson, ‘Scholarly communication and the licensing of electronic publications.’ In: Ian Butterworth (ed.
), The impact of electronic publishing on he academic community.
London: Portland Press, 1998.
<URL:http://tiepac.portlandpress.co.uk/books/online/tiepac/session5/ch2.htm> 46.
Vinay Kumar, The American Society for Pathology response to the NIH E-biomed proposal [letter].
Bethesda, Md.
: ASIP, 13 May 1999.
<URL:http://asip.uthscsa.edu/varmus.html> 47.
Michael Day, ‘Online serials: preservation issues.’ Serials Librarian, 33 (3⁄4), 1998, pp.
199-221.
48.
Edward J. Valauskas, ‘Waiting for Thomas Kuhn: First Monday and the evolution of electronic journals.’ First Monday, 2 (12), 1 December 1997.
<URL:http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_12/valauskas/index.html> Author details Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “The scholarly journal in transition and the PubMed Central proposal” Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/pubmed/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ROUTES Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ROUTES Project Buzz software database archives metadata copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Una O'Sullivan describes the Open University ROUTES project.
ROUTES is a gateway developed by the Open University Library as part of the Network Access Project (NAP).
The project is funded by the Open University’s Office for Technology Development, and will run until April 2000, whereupon the work will be integrated into normal Library functions.
ROUTES is part of the OU Library’s strategy to develop electronic library services, and is one of several Library research projects which aim to exploit new technologies and applications.
The principle aim of ROUTES is to bring librarians and academic staff together to select Internet resources for OU students.
The selection criteria are as strict as those for any of the eLib Access to Networked Resources (ANR) gateways, but with the extra requirement that the websites chosen must be directly relevant to Open University courses.
In practice this means that selected resources do not represent the full range of high quality websites in any subject area.
It is preferable to maintain a smaller targeted collection which the students know will yield useful and relevant information, and thus will be a justifiable investment of their time and communications costs.
A second, though equally important, aim of ROUTES is to unite academic and library staff in the business of resource selection.
In the tradition of the Open University, it is essential that the information sent to students is of the highest quality and tightly controlled, therefore, academic approval is essential for ROUTES resource selection.
The academics judge the value of a website, and in a complementary way Library staff deal with the indexing and retrieval of the resources, and with the issues of access, copyright and performance.
One of the benefits of ROUTES will be the closer working partnership between academic and information specialist, rather than the more traditional client/provider relationship.
ROUTES is using the ROADS [1] software to store, index and manage its links.
The decision to use ROADS was taken after observing how other ANR services such as SOSIG [2] and OMNI [3] were using it with considerable success.
The co-operation amongst ROADS users, evident from the archives of open-roads [4] and roads-hackers [5] lists, was especially attractive given that we wanted ROUTES to exist in the context of other ANR services.
In early meetings with the ROADS team, we agreed that ROUTES would offer a useful opportunity to test the scalability of ROADS; the Open University has upwards of 150,000 students.
The fact that ROADS is customisable was particularly attractive.
One of the aims of the OU Library’s research programme is to enhance students’ learning experience by using networked environments to create a feeling of belonging to the University.
Thus the facility to create an OU "look and feel" is important.
Together with the interactive opportunities afforded by a web-based service, we hope to give the students a sense of ownership of ROUTES.
They will be encouraged to submit resources for inclusion in ROUTES, to offer feedback, and in some cases, will be asked to participate in the evaluation procedures.
ROUTES is evolving as a suite of services.
The services to students will include quality control, academic approval of resources, a feedback mechanism, search and browse facilities and a reliable maintenance procedure.
Students will be encouraged via ROUTES to develop their critical skills; they will be able to read the selection and evaluation criteria for their particular subject areas, and make recommendations for additions to ROUTES.
ROUTES offers a range of services to OU academic staff.
Academics value the contributions that the Library can make to the selection and evaluation of Internet resources.
Link management is also particularly attractive.
By keeping up-to-date with ROADS developments and related electronic library initiatives, the Library is also offering a degree of technical maintenance; we are able to assure users that current standards on issues such as metadata, cross-searching and Internet classification systems will be observed.
We plan to offer a current awareness service as well, by monitoring new links on various subject-based gateways through the Scout Report [6], In Site [7] and other current awareness sites.
This is important as it will demonstrate that ROUTES is a dynamic resource, and one which will be worth visiting frequently.
In offering ROUTES to OU academic staff and students, the Library needs to consider the implications of introducing the Internet to this group of users and integrating into OU teaching and learning.
We need to be continually conscious of the isolation which affects so many OU students, and to take care that we offer appropriate and comprehensive help files and guidelines.
Getting the students to the resources is the first step, but they also need guidance on how they are to process and use this information.
ROUTES will work with the Open University Library on addressing this need; we have already produced guidelines on evaluating information on the Internet, managing information and managing membership of mailing lists.
All these guidelines are tailored for Open University students, and have been written in consultation with academic staff members.
At the first ROUTES focus group meeting, held on 10th March, training was highlighted as one of the highest priorities.
In addition to familiarising course teams with the service, we also need to offer training to regionally-based tutors, who are the academic contacts for OU students.
The Library is currently developing a pilot programme of training in electronic information resource discovery, and it is through this programme that we will offer ROUTES training and awareness.
Year 2 of ROUTES has just started.
In this year, we aim to build on the work of the first year and bring in more course teams; pilot ROUTES on at least two student groups (representing roughly 600 users), refine the database itself and publicise the project.
We will bring the Library’s Subject Information Specialist teams into the project as the link between the academics and the ROUTES specialist and this will enable us to embed the service easily with the Library’s existing range of electronic services.
We are also planning a ROUTES event in the Open University, which will bring people together to discuss quality control on the Internet.
ROUTES represents in many ways the new responsibilities that the Open University Library is taking: management of electronic resources; training and awareness of the networked environment; continual monitoring of research and development in librarianship and information science; and developing systems for delivering these new services to a large student body.
Further information on OU Library research is available from our website at http://oulib1.open.ac.uk.
Enquiries about ROUTES may be addressed to Una O’Sullivan, Project Officer, Open University Library, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA., email u.osullivan@open.ac.uk References 1.
ROADS: Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-based Services.
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/ 2.
SOSIG: Social Science Information Gateway http://sosig.ac.uk 3.
OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information http://www.omni.ac.uk 4. open-roads archive http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/lists/open-roads/ 5. roads-hackers archive http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/lists/roads-hackers/ 6.
The Scout Report http://wwwscout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/ 7.
In Site http://www.mcs.com/~jcr/INSITE.html Author details Una O’Sullivan, Project Officer Open University Library Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA e-mail: u.osullivan@open.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial introduction to Issue 19: Ariadne's Thread Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial introduction to Issue 19: Ariadne's Thread Buzz software apache metadata accessibility copyright video windows linux cache php research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter and Bernadette Daly introduce the articles for Ariadne issue 19.
This is the first issue of a purely electronic Ariadne, which has been produced without the assistance of a print editor (Lyndon Pugh) and production manager (John MacColl), both of whom contributed substantially to the commissioning side of the operation.
In addition, UKOLN is this month launching a second electronic magazine, Exploit Interactive.
We are therefore grateful to Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) for a good deal of editorial assistance for this issue, in addition to his usual contribution, and also to the many contributors who supplied material well ahead of the deadline.
There are four main articles in the current issue.
Mary Rowlatt describes SEAMLESS, an Essex based project concerned with the production of community information.
Matthew Dovey outlines an Object Oriented approach to metadata in Meta-Objects.
And the former Production Manager of the print arm of Ariadne John MacColl explores the IMS (Instructional Management Systems) concept in the context of the SELLIC project.
We also feature an article on Web Research.
This summarizes work being carried out at the University of West of England, in conjunction with Hewlett Packard laboratories, to develop automated techniques for browsing video content.
The content used to illustrate the piece comes from “The Wrong Trousers”, the second Wallace and Gromit film (unfortunately no Feathers McGraw, but fans of the automatic toastmaker sequence will not be disappointed) This edition of Ariadne contains a number of new “Regular Columns”.
Ian Webb of the DISinHE Centre introduces a column which will feature accessibility and IT issues with a description of the DISinHE Centre an initiative funded by JISC.
George Neisser describes another JISC service the JANET National Web Cache.
George’s Caching In column will cover a variety of issues related to web caching.
Continuing the technical theme, Brett Bailey introduces the “Windows NT Explorer” column by describing Microsoft’s Site Server indexing tool.
Tony Grant won’t be using Site Server: in the “Minotaur” column Tony explains why a former Macintosh fan has embraced Linux and the Open Source Software movement.
The view of a Web Editor is provided by Stephen Emmott, while in the Unix Corner Brian Kelly describes how open source software such as Apache, PHP and IMP can be used to provide web-based access to email (incidently we welcome contributions to both the Web Editor and Unix Corner columns for future issues of Ariadne).
In this edition we have also extended our coverage of the Subject Gateways.
Planet SOSIG continues and OMNI returns, but both have a broader remit to include news on developments on the Internet relating to Social Sciences and Biomedical Engineering respectively.
In addition we welcome Biz/Ed Bulletin and the EEVL Eye On Engineering which feature news of the Biz/Ed and EEVL information gateways and more general news on Internet developments in Business and Economics and Engineering.
We are continuing to produce a number of our established “Regular Columns”.
Brian Kelly’s Web Focus article describes how to extend web browsers.
In what is likely to be the final WebWatch article Ian Peacock and Brian Kelly review the project and summarise the main findings.
Following changes to Tracey Stanley’s responsibilities we welcome Phil Bradley to the Search Engine Corner.
In addition, there are two at the events reports: one by Christine Dugdale on the BOBCATSSS conference earlier this year in Bratislava; and another by Philip Hunter on the eLib Information Ecologies conference in York which took place just before the publication of Ariadne 18, and which explored a number of hybrid library, subject Gateway and copyright control issues.
Enjoy the issue.
Author Details Philip Hunter Ariadne Web Editor UKOLN University of Bath Bath Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk   Bernadette Daly Ariadne Web Editor UKOLN University of Bath Bath Email: b.m.daly@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Management of Content: Universities and the Electronic Publishing Revolution Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Management of Content: Universities and the Electronic Publishing Revolution Buzz data software html database xml archives repositories cataloguing sgml e-learning url research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter attempts to throw some light on the low take up of content management systems (CMS) in the university sector.
A publishing revolution on the Web?
Just three or four years ago the Web community was getting used to the idea that the way we would work in future would be radically different from the way we work now.
The world of coalface flatfile html markup would begin to disappear in favour of collaborative working, managed workflow, document versioning, on the fly pages constructed out of application independent xml chunks, site management tools and push-button publishing via multiple formats html, xml, pdf, print, etc.
Text appearing in more than one context would be stored in a central repository and repurposed according to particular requirements.
In the UK Higher Education sector, this doesn’t seem to have happened.
Worldwide in the university sector, it doesn’t seem to have happened.
Site management tools are being used here and there, and there are now decent text editors both available and widely used this means that Web Editors are no longer expected to deal with basic markup chores all day every day.
Some sites put together pages on the fly, using SSIs or ASP chunks.
There are sites which interface with backend databases to provide user requested data in a user friendly format.
However you will have to look hard for a Higher Education sector site which uses all of these techniques and which yokes them together with collaborative working and managed workflow.
Higher Education is not using content management systems as a matter of course, and is not making use of the most sophisticated systems available.
In other words, whatever publishing model underlies the development and maintenance of large scalable Web services in the Higher Education sector, it isn’t fully realised in the technology used to deliver the services.
Much of what is delivered via the Web still involves a good deal of manual activity.
This half-way house position isn’t a place where Web Managers and Editors want to be.
So it is quite odd that this is where we are, among a community which has been so intimately involved in the early development of the Web.
It is not easy to explain how the HE community in the UK in particular has found itself in the position where its Web pages are the product of a sophisticated cottage industry.
This article will attempt to cast some light on the reasons behind the current position in the university sector, and to suggest some ways in which the community might seek to move forward.
The Technology behind the new publishing revolution Are content management systems available?
Are they available in numbers from different software houses?
Are they available in a form customisable for use by Higher Education institutions?
The answer is ‘yes’ to each of these questions.
We might ask how long content management systems have been around, since if they are new on the block, this might explain why academia isn’t using them.
The answer is, at least in terms of Web publishing, quite a long time.
They weren’t always called content management systems, but they always were designed as publishing tools.
And they began to have the capacity to publish to the Web by (at the latest) the second half of 1996.
Content Management Systems are arguably close equivalents of the tools of the publishing revolution of the 15th century, in that they are publishing tools which revolutionise both the assembly and the delivery of information.
One major difference between this and the earlier technology, of great importance, is that the current revolution depends heavily on the separation of content from its appearance and layout.
This allows the possibility of customised text delivery according to user requirement (either within or outside the institution running the system), on the fly and without human intervention.
For organisations such as the modern university, with its central administration surrounded by semi-autonomous faculty and departmental units, all requiring to deal with the same body of information, content management systems offer huge potential benefits in terms of the streamlining of the adminstration, and the timeliness and accuracy of the institution’s published information.
Content management systems use application independent markup formats (SGML, XML etc), which means that, for example, a text presented in a Gothic Blackletter typeface can as easily be adapted to another font and presentation style.
Text is stored and maintained in one place, and published to wherever it is required (perhaps the apotheosis of the15th century dream).
These tools are already used to a large extent in the commercial publishing community, and to a lesser extent in industry.
A Whirlwind History of University Publishing up to 1550 To understand some of the reasons why academia appears to be slow off the starting blocks in electronic publishing it is instructive to look back at how things shaped up during the first hundred years of printing.
This article doesn’t contain an in-depth analysis of the role of universities in the first publishing revolution, but its intention is to suggest that the comparison with the development of publishing to the Web is a legitimate one (Oxford University Press’s Web site begins its own history of the institution by saying that it ‘had its origins in the information technology revolution of the 15th century’), and that, despite the current eminence of our older universities in the publishing world, it is a mistake to imagine that they were necessarily eminent in the earliest days of printed texts.
Printing did not radically change the concept of the book itself, though it did lead (during the following centuries) to a development and formalisation of the ways text might be displayed, as well as the concept of an ‘edition’.
By contrast the technology of printing stayed pretty much the same up until the nineteenth century.
Thus the history of printing is often written in terms of the history of typography.
In the case of this earlier publishing revolution, the content and the form in which it finds expression were closely woven together.
Publishing underwent radical changes triggered by the introduction of moveable type, the reduction in unit costs, and the increase in the scale of production (in the first hundred years of printing, some nine million volumes were printed).
The initial period of printing ran from 1450 until well into the 16th century, and only began to settle down around 1550.
In the earliest days both the printing and the retailing were done by the same firms: the roles of bookseller, publisher and printer were not clearly differentiated (consider the uncertain definitions of ‘Web Editor’ and ‘Web Master’ in our time).
The whole hundred years up to 1550 represents a period of change and development, similar to our own, even if happening at a much slower rate.
OUP deals with its own early development by compressing the first two hundred years into a single paragraph.
The Press … had its origins in the information technology revolution of the late fifteenth century, which began with the invention of printing from movable type.
The first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, only two years after Caxton set up the first printing press in England.
Despite this early start, the printing industry in Oxford developed in a somewhat haphazard fashion over the next century.
It consisted of a number of short-lived private businesses, some patronized by the University.
But in 1586 the University itself obtained a decree from the Star Chamber confirming its privilege to print books.
This was further enhanced in the Great Charter secured by Archbishop Laud from King Charles I which entitled the University to print ‘all manner of books’.
The University first appointed Delegates to oversee this privilege in 1633.
Minute books recording their deliberations date back to 1668, and OUP as it exists today began to develop in a recognizable form from that time.
[1] S. H. Steinberg points to the essentially commercial basis of the spread of printing in the 15th century: the printers were craftsmen and business men; they wanted to make a living; and they readily adapted themselves and their art to the conditions of international trade.
Until printing had firmly established itself as an everyday commodity, that is to say, until well into the beginning of the sixteenth century, a map showing the places where printers had settled down is virtually identical with a map showing the places where any commercial firm would have set up an agency.
[2] Steinberg also points out that, from the beginning of the craft, ‘Individual patrons….
were not enough to guarantee the printer a livelihood and to secure the sale of his books.
…The printer was faced by the alternative, unchanged ever since, of basing his business on the support of organized institutions or of relying on the fairly stable market of a literate, book-loving, and book-buying clientele of sizeable dimensions.’ Steinberg lists these institutional supporters of the trade, and these were then (and still are) governments, churches, schools, and the private patronage of the educated urban middle class.
The aristocracies of Europe were by contrast not well-disposed to printed editions and (perhaps astonishingly) continued to use the services of scribes to create copies written with the pen.
Steinberg also tells us that, strangely, while printing presses were established across Europe in quick succession, university towns as such ‘had no attraction for printers: learning and diligence is no substitute for ready cash’.
Those university towns which did attract printers (Basel, Cologne, Paris, Seville, Naples, etc) did so ‘because they were thriving centres of trading, banking, and shipping, and seats of secular and ecclesiastical courts’.
As for the role of the Church in the economic life of early printers, it is the case that the patronage of the church was insufficient to maintain a steady income.
As Steinberg says, the ‘intellectual impetus and economic power had long since become the property of the laity.
It was the big towns and the world of industry and commerce which became the mainstay of book-production’.
In short, the current importance and wealth of a number of very prestigious university presses does not reflect the share of the booktrade held by university presses during the early years of the development of publishing technology.
Yet Cambridge University Press correctly describes itself as the world’s oldest printing and publishing house.
This does not mean that it was active at the start of printing in fact it has been operating as a printing and publishing institution only since 1584, more than 130 years after the invention of printing with moveable type (Oxford University Press issued its first publication in 1585).
It owes its status to the fact that all of the printing firms successful in the early years have since gone out of business.
The landscape of the first hundred years, as Steinberg indicates, was one in which universities played no significant part in the business of publishing and printing.
This might seem surprising.
Even slightly shocking.
The current status of the largest and oldest university presses is due not to the fact that they were in at the beginning, but rather to the fact that the universities create the possibility of a longevity rare in the commercial world: It is in fact very hard for an ordinary firm, especially a family firm, to last for that kind of time.
The family may die out; more probably the firm is taken over by another family or firm, or in modern times becomes part of a great industrial or commercial complex and in losing its independence loses much of its identity.
Only if it is owned and run by a corporate entity which cannot itself be taken over in that way can it survive for hundreds of years, and there are not many such bodies.
[3] Is History repeating itself?
From the perspective of academia, this looks to be a very unlikely proposition.
The Web (though not the Internet) was an idea created entirely within academia.
Its initial implementation and development took place within academia.
The organisation which has been created to oversee its development, W3C, is headed by an academic, Tim Berners-Lee, and has its principal base in MIT in Cambridge, Massachussetts.
[4] It seems therefore absurd to propose that the role of the academic world in the development of the Web, and more precisely, in Web publishing, is minimal and perhaps diminishing.
But nevertheless the early history of printing does ring some bells.
If we look out on to the Web, we can see that commercial companies are the organizations which have begun to exploit the full range of opportunities presented by the new medium.
The principal members of W3C are commercial companies with an interest and stake in the future development of the Web Oxford University as such has no representation on W3C for example.
Despite the collapse of the dotcom bubble, there are still many players out there on the field, jostling for the best positions.
And they are in general not finding themselves in competition with university publishers, except in a number of very restricted areas (Oxford University Press is an important exception).
[5], [6], [7].
It may be that, from the perspective of four centuries further on, the development of publishing on the Web will come to seem to be a field in which the Universities were conspicuous largely by their absence of involvement.
Unless something is done very soon.
What follows is a simplified version of my own view of why university publishers are not out in front when it comes to exploiting the new possibilities for publishing.
It isn’t a straightforward story, just as universities themselves are not straightforward entitities to describe.
A Whirlwind history of the Web When the Web began there was no intention to create a system which would contain rich mark-up, and which would be an equal partner with paper publishing.
The point was instead to create a simple and flexible system for linking and distributing files.
It was necessary to develop three things: a transport protocol, a scheme for addressing file locations, and a markup language.
[4] These things were created, and once the system broke out of CERN with the spread of client browsers on users desktop machines, the Web (as we know it) began to take off.
The first Web site was of course info.cern.ch, soon followed by others, mainly in academic institutions.
As the range of sites increased, so the diversity of organisations and content increased.
Eventually by late 1994 or early 1995 the idea of the Web service possibly turning out to be the most accessed face of the organization began to spread through other levels of the university, and some enthusiastic volunteers added the responsibility for departmental or project pages to their existing activities.
Many of these responsibilities have now been formalised, so that Web site development is part of the job descriptions of individuals in different parts of the university.
XML was announced in November 1996, in response to the perception that publishing on the Web was going to be very important, and that the Web required a much more sophisticated mark-up language similar to that already used by the print community (SGML).
Likewise, tools similar to the publishing systems used by print publishing houses, for the same reason, have to be implemented for the Web.
However the understanding that the use of XML is essentially about the systematic use of electronically published resources a species of publishing, and a very new kind of publishing altogether has not yet found fertile soil among those who run universities.
Top-Down or Bottom-up?
Universities, by their very nature, develop very largely in a top-down fashion, whereas the Web owes its success to the fact that it can also grow bottom-up.
If content was the province of a purely central administration, there wouldn’t be as much of it as there is, since a good deal of it is the result of personal enterprise.
The top-down approach has deep historical roots in the university system: universities are collective enterprises, run by committees, which take the long view (someone pointed out recently that very few other institutions can contemplate signing 300 year contracts).
On the other hand, they are organisations also devoted to a breadth of interest and activity, which need to leave institutional spaces for the the development of both the university curriculum and the individual development of the members of the university.
This grass-roots approach to development is as old and as necessary as the institution of the university senate, and is a characteristic of the university system which has provided the the institutional space for the initial development of the Web.
What the university is, is perhaps a maintained contradiction.
A bit like the Web itself.
The upshot of this maintained contradiction is that radical steps of any kind are difficult for the institution to take except at the level of the individual.
Radical steps are discouraged by the actual make-up of the institution, largely because of the way institutional politics are (and have to be) reflected in committee structures.
Plus the university institution is, by virtue of its size, complexity, and age, bigger than any individual interest, and sometimes (in the case of venerable institutions), bigger than the collective interest of its current members.
It is fairly easy to retroject this picture of the nature of the university institution into the publishing revolution of the 15th century, and the behaviour of the universities of the time fits the model.
Universities committed to the services of commercial printing houses where desirable, but did not commit their institutions to in-house publishing facilities until it became obvious that to do so would not be a drain on finances, and that it would be the cheaper option.
(Though it is very odd that it took universities nearly 130 years to realise the principal attraction of printing for their institutions: the creation of editions over which they had critical control.
Individual scholars pioneered this use of text, not the institutions to which they belonged).
Fast tracking University Publishing Is there a solution?
Again this is a personal view, but it is a considered perspective on the challenge of the Web and the actual response of universities over the past few years.
I would argue that is both un-necessary and unreasonable to look to the reconstruction of the university as an institution as a solution to this problem: the institution of the university is what it is for good reason, and it mostly benefits from an inbuilt reluctance to throw large amounts of its resources in any one direction (at least one college in Oxford still regrets having been foolish enough to pick either of the sides in the English Civil War).
A change which I think is required however is that a) the Web service of a university has to be understood by its ruling body as the technical and cultural equivalent of a publishing house   and, perhaps paradoxically, also understood that the service is   b) not a conventional publishing enterprise.
The speed of development on the Web is such that dog years are often invoked as a comparison (one year on the Web equals about seven real years).
Using this as a rule of thumb, we are just leaving behind Web incunabula, and entering the second fifty years of the publishing revolution.
If we push this parallel further, we ought to expect university Web publishing to become a properly integrated university activity sometime around 2008 or 2009.
By this I don’t mean that universities will be publishers of Web pages, since they do that already.
I mean instead that the process underlying Web publication ought to have by then some technical maturity, that universities should not be involved in publishing as a cottage industry.
This means that appropriate technology should be in place; also that every significant aspect of the process should be properly understood within the context of an appropriate business model, and that the whole enterprise should be adequately resourced.
What is University Publishing?
Here I should expand on why universities ought to consider their Web services to be publishing institutions, if of a different stripe to those which have gone before.
In simplistic terms, not all universities have been formal publishers in the past.
Some very prestigious universities have functioned entirely without an official university press: the LSE doesn’t have one, Imperial College London doesn’t have one, and University College London didn’t have one either until relatively recently.
Their formal publishing activity was confined to the university calendar, the various prospectuses, and suchlike.
The members of these universities, did and do publish of course.
Their work might appear either on a not for profit basis in academic journals run by commercial publishers, or as authors for other universities’ presses, or private publishing houses.
However, the picture is more complicated than this apart from formal publications, universities both now and also in earlier centuries, ‘published’ many other more ephemeral works, which fall under the now familiar heading ‘grey literature’ sometimes produced by the university as a whole, or otherwise by faculty, school, department, institute or laboratory.
These might be working paper series, conference proceedings, departmental histories and yearbooks, guides to the architecture of the university, proto-journals, papers compiled for the students attending the department of continuing education, etc.
The contents of university Web pages are often close cousins to these documents.
(Two articles elsewhere in this issue of Ariadne one by Michael Day [8] and the other by Stevan Harnad [9] deal with some of the issues surrounding e-prints and the self-archiving initiative).
All of these categories are in flux.
The technology of the Internet means that Universities potentially now face competition from all other universities on the planet.
All universities with a Web site can already advertise their institution to would-be students worldwide.
They also have the potential to sell courses delivered electronically, to students anywhere in the world, via distance learning packages and ‘e-learning’ tools.
Given that this competition is already happening, and is likely to intensify over the next few years, all universities not dependent on a secure supply of local students perhaps ought to alter their perception of themselves, if they are going to survive.
Now that universities see their futures bound up to some extent with e-learning initiatives, delivered at a distance, perhaps all such institutions ought to consider themselves as a species of publisher.
The Web will not only deliver the ‘brand’ (the concern of the marketing department), but also part of the curriculum, which is (or ought to be) a purely academic responsibility.
The mediation of the curriculum to the public outside the lecture room has hitherto been the responsibility of the university publishing house.
The publishing house has also had responsibility for licensing issues, and matters relating in general to dealings with other publishing institutions.
If in future much of a university’s transactions are taking place on the Web, then these matters have to be dealt with by a similar institution, with similar scope.
Publishing to the Web also involves the development and deployment of a publishing process.
This bears many similarities to the print publishing process.
Content Management Systems have adapted the print publishing process to the electronic environment, not least because the systems were originally designed to streamline the former.
The whole enterprise can be understood as a business process, which, in the case of print publishing companies, has to give proper account to the cost of staff, plant and machinery, overheads, capitalisation, licensing, etc.
This perception of publishing to the Web as a whole business process is currently weak in most university administrations.
Many working within existing Web services are aware of the need for this view of Web publishing, but the concept of a Web service as a industrial-strength process has yet to find acceptance among many university decision-makers.
Some departmental heads still have the idea that if they send their administrative staff on half-day courses they will return equipped to create and maintain their departmental Web site.
In tandem with the mistaken notion that the Web is already a mature technology, the idea that publishing on it is not as serious an activity as print publishing, is a recipe for long-term disaster.
This underlying view is responsible for the fact that realistic resources are not being allocated to university Web services: since the perception is that expensive proprietary tools are neither desirable nor necessary, the budgets remain small.
The argument of this article is not meant to suggest that university Web services should be passed over to the university publishing house, where one exists already.
It does mean that the future function of university Web services might be best regarded as a species of publishing, and that many aspects of the print publishing model are, despite some key differences, applicable to the future development of these services.
Content Management Systems make industrial-strength university publishing possible, and in future are likely to be regarded as an essential component of the business of being a university.
References History of Oxford University Press: http://www.oup.com:8080/about/history/ Steinberg, S.H: Five Hundred Years of Printing, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1955 (Third revised edition by Moran, J.H.
1974).
Introduction to: Black, Michael: A short History of Cambridge University Press, CUP, Cambridge, 1992.
Berners-Lee, Tim: Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its inventor, Orion Business Press, London, 1999.
Juliet New’s article on the Oxford English Dictionary Online in Ariadne 23 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-online/ Pete Cliff’s review of the Oxford English Dictionary Online in Ariadne 23 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-review/ Laura Elliot’s article on the technical background of the Oxford English Dictionary Online in Ariadne 24 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/oed-tech/ Day, Michael: ‘E-print Services and Long-term Access to the Record of Scholarly and Scientific Research’ Ariadne 28 June 2001: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/metadata/ Harnad, Stevan: ‘Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online: A Comparison’ Ariadne 28 June 2001: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/ Printing and Publishing at Oxford: the Growth of a Learned Press 1478-1978 (Bodleian Library Exhibition Catalogue, Oxford, 1978) Feather, John: A History of British Publishing, Routledge, London, 1988.
Author Details   Philip Hunter Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Information Officer UKOLN Bath Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Article Title: “The Management of Content: Universities and the Electronic Publishing Revolution.” Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/cms/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Mirrors: Building the UK Mirror Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Mirrors: Building the UK Mirror Service Buzz data software xml apache usability archives copyright z39.50 linux rfc cache samba ftp url standards Citation BibTex RIS Report on the UK Mirror Service by Mark Russell.
On 1st August 1999 the UK Mirror Service [1] replaced HENSA as the JISC [2] funded mirror service for the UK academic community.
The new service is run by the same teams at Kent and Lancaster that supported the HENSAs, but it is not merely a revamp of the HENSA sites; there are some fundamental changes.
This article takes a look at the implementation of the service and our plans for the future.
A Distributed Service We decided at the outset to locate the service at both Kent and Lancaster, so that the service could survive the loss of either one of the sites.
Our experience was that individual sites do occasionally fall off JANET for various reasons (network outages, power cuts, router upgrades etc).
These events are infrequent, but happen often enough that there is a real gain in availability of service from the two-site approach.
The service is also distributed over a group of machines at each site.
Incoming Web and FTP requests are handled by a array of front end hosts.
These forward the requests to back ends which contain the mirrored data.
The front ends cache data from the back ends, but operate independently of each other there is no attempt to avoid duplication of material between the caching front ends.
While this costs some disk space, it does mean that the system scales well to handle the peak demands that occur when new releases of well-known packages appear.
The key advantage of this arrangement is that it is scalable.
As the load increases we can simply add more front ends.
The front ends are cheap Intel boxes running Linux [3] and Apache [4].
As the front ends contain only cached data they do not need to be backed up, and setting them up is a trivial process.
Mirroring We use a locally developed system called Cftp [5] to handle mirroring of FTP and Web sites.
This had been in use at HENSA Unix since 1997, and has grown robust over the years to handle the vagaries of FTP servers that crash, provide listings in odd formats and violate the FTP RFC [6] in various interesting ways.
We needed to change Cftp to support mirroring to both the Kent and Lancaster sites.
Our first attempt at this was a master/slave model: Cftp at the master site completed all its updates, then propagated the changes to the slave site.
But this meant that updates were lost if the two sites lost network connectivity, and also that the slave site's updates were lost if there were problems at the master site.
Our second (and current) solution was to make each site carry out mirroring independently, but for each site to look 'sideways' at the other.
The mirroring process works like this at each site: We build an index file describing the current state of the origin site (the site we are mirroring).
We use the index file to compare our local copy with the current state of the origin site.
If we need to update a file, we first look at our peer site to see if it already has an up to date copy.
If so, we fetch it from the peer rather than the origin site.
To avoid both sites working in lock step, one traverses the tree forwards and the other backwards.
To handle more than two cooperating sites we would need to use a random order or some other scheme.
This scheme has worked well in practice.
Although the two sites are handling mirroring independently, there is very little duplicated copying of resources.
Mirror Status Information A problem with most mirror sites is that you have no idea how up to date they are.
Most sites attempt an update at least daily, but the mirroring process is vulnerable to various failure modes at the origin sites, the mirror site or the network.
Typically the user has no way of knowing whether a mirror site is up to date, and we felt that this was a significant factor deterring people from using mirrors.
We therefore decided to label each mirrored directory with last mirrored information.
This includes the time the index file was generated and when the directory itself was compared with the origin site.
Cftp maintains this information in a status file stored in each directory.
We felt it was important to timestamp each directory individually rather than just keeping a 'last mirrored' timestamp for each origin site, because mirroring can fail part way through an update.
The mirroring process also maintains other information in the status file, including when each file in the directory was last copied, error messages for attempted updates that failed and total size information for directories.
Currently this information is only used to show last updated and total size information via the web interface, but we plan to extend this soon.
For example, we will make the FTP server show directory timestamps that indicate the last modified time of the most recently changed file anywhere below the directory.
We also plan to use the status files to indicate which files have not been copied.
Mirror sites are traditionally more or less selective about what they copy, but again users have no way of knowing what has been left out.
Because of this the UK Mirror Service has up to now been fairly conservative, typically mirroring everything except files that are duplicated elsewhere in the archive.
Explicit labelling of what has been skipped will let us omit 'dead' items old releases of software for example that are not often accessed.
The Web interface could display these items as links to the origin server copies (we could also do this under the FTP interface).
Configuration Under HENSA we maintained various configuration files which controlled the mirroring process and the Web and FTP servers.
Adding a new mirror involved updates to all of these files.
The UK Mirror Service uses a different approach: all the information about a mirror is contained in a single per-mirror XML [7] file.
Among other things this file contains: A description of the site Contact information Where the site should appear in the Web and FTP trees How the site should be mirrored These files are used to generate the configuration files for the Web and FTP servers, which are then automatically propagated to the front and back end servers.
The use of XML means that we can easily extend the mirror description files with additional information (for example, if we wished to use an alternative method of mirroring).
Searching Searching at HENSA was implemented with in-house tools, and had different implementations and user interfaces at the Unix and Micros sites.
For the UK Mirror Service we are using Zebra [8], which is a Z39.50 [9] based indexing system.
Locally developed scripts handle the extraction of index information (e.g.
descriptive text from Linux RPM [10] files) and the construction of a single search index for the whole site.
We view effective search support as critical to the usability of the UK Mirror Service.
We have concentrated up to now on building the foundations for a powerful search system, but the user interface is at present far from ideal (frankly due to the pressure of time).
In particular many users have complained of the lack of a platform-based search facility.
Thus work on the searching user interface is a high priority at present.
The first step is to add basic platform-specific search support.
After that we plan to extend the extraction of descriptive text from the various package formats; for example README files and the like from software distributions.
Also planned is intelligent handling of multiple versions of packages usually the current version of a package is the only one of interest.
Future work We have a number of projects planned for the short and medium term.
Right now we are working on improvements to the searching user interface as described in the previous section.
We are also looking at extending our coverage, particularly of material outside the traditional area of software packages.
We are currently looking at ways to making the Mirror Service work with the National Janet Web Caching Service [11].
There is obvious scope for the UK Mirror Service to satisfy requests for FTP URLs.
We are in the early stages of collaboration with the National Web Cache to develop support for this.
The archive is currently accessible via the Web or by FTP.
We would like to add NFS [12] and Samba [13] access, but this will need some software development to support effectively.
Because the archive is distributed over several machines we cannot use standard software to support NFS access, but we should be able to modify freely available NFS server software to do the job.
We would like to offer added value for popular items, such as prebuilt binary versions of some source packages, and perhaps UKor mirrorspecific help for some very popular items (e.g.
'How to install Linux from the UK Mirror Service').
We also plan substantial enhancements to our tutorial information, including additional help on things like file formats and software installation.
A slightly longer term project is to set up a user forum to allow people to review resources, as well as provide helpful information.
This would require careful nurturing and steering if it is to succeed, but we think it would be extremely useful.
As well as these externally visible improvements, there is much internal work to do.
For example, we would like to implement automatic failover between the front end Web servers, so that if one machine fails another immediately takes over its IP address.
We would also like to make the front end hosts automatically handle failure of a back end server by switching to the alternative host.
Another mundane but important area of work is in improved processing of access logs.
As can be imagined we generate large amounts of log files, and buried in there is valuable information about what is popular, who is using the service, etc.
In conclusion, please try out the service and let us know what you think.
We particularly welcome suggestions for resources or facilities you would like to see added to the site.
Our aim is to provide what our users need, and to do that we need feedback from you.
References The UK Mirror Service http://www.mirror.ac.uk/ The Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ The Linux operating system http://www.linux.org/ The Apache web server http://www.apache.org/ Cftp: A Caching FTP Server Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30 (1998) 2211-2222 RFC 959: File Transfer Protocol ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc959.txt XML: Extensible Markup Language http://www.w3.org/XML/ The Zebra Server http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra/ Z39.50 http://www.cni.org/projects/z3950/z3950dir.html The RPM software packaging tool http://www.rpm.org/ The National JANET Web Cache http://wwwcache.ja.net/ The NFS Distributed File Service http://www.sun.com/software/white-papers/wp-nfs/ The Samba file and print service http://www.samba.org/ Author details   Mark Russell Technical Director, The UK Mirror Service M.T.Russell@ukc.ac.uk Article Title: "Building the UK Mirror Service Foundations First" Author: Mark Russell Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/web-mirror/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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An Introduction to Web Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines An Introduction to Web Services Buzz software xml infrastructure metadata copyright soap wsdl uddi authentication interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracy Gardner introduces web services: self-describing applications, which can be discovered and accessed over the web by other applications.
What are Web Services?
The term web services has gaining visibility in recent months, there has been a W3C workshop on web services [1] and the big industry players such as IBM, Microsoft and Sun have been announcing their web services strategies.
So what’s it all about and should you be involved?
This article aims to be a starting point for answering these questions.
Well, the term web services is fairly self-explanatory, it refers to accessing services over the web.
But, there’s more to it than that, the current use of the term refers to the architecture, standards, technology and business models that make web services possible.
In this article we will use a definition of web services taken from an IBM web services tutorial [2]: Web services are a new breed of Web application.
They are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web.
Web services perform functions, which can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes.
In other words, web services are interoperable building blocks for constructing applications.
As an example, we can imagine a distributed digital library infrastructure built on web services providing functionality such as distributed search, authentication, inter-library loan requests, document translation and payment.
These web services would be combined by a particular digital library application to offer an environment for reaching information resources that is tailored to its particular user community.
Where the current web enables users to connect to applications, the web services architecture enables applications to connect to other applications.
Web services is therefore a key technology in enabling business models to move from B2C (Business to Consumer) to B2B (Business to Business).
Web Services Architecture There was a reason for choosing a distributed digital library as our example, as well as being a problem domain that is well suited to the web services approach, the architecture of a digital library is very simular to the architecture required to support web services.
The digital library community is used to applying verbs such as publish and locate to documents.
The web services architecture applies such verbs to applications.
In fact, the web services infrastructure can be thought of as a distributed digital library for services rather than information.
This means that many of the issues that the digital library community has been looking at, such as metadata for discovery, authentication and authorisation, and business models for accessing intellectual property, are also applicable to web services and must be addressed within a web services context.
The web services architecture has the additional problem of interacting with services once they have been accessed.
This is somewhat of an issue for electronic information resources, you need to know how to present the resource to a user, but the infrastructure for this is well established, you can send a MIME type with a document and then use an application that knows how to deal with that document type.
The problem with services is that there are potentially many more types of service than types of document and that the interactions with web services are more complex.
It’s not currently realistic to imagine that an application can discover a completely new kind of service and start interacting with it in a complex manner.
The web services architecture therefore requires clients to know in advance the type of service that they will be talking to, but they can dynamically discover a particular implementation of that service.
This is like a cross-searching application that combines the results of multiple search-engines that support a particular search protocol, the protocol is known in advance but the particular search-engines could be selected dynamically from a search-engine registry.
The cross-searching application is able to use services from applications that didn’t even exist when it was written, provided they use the same protocol and can be discovered via a registry.
IBM has published its web services architecture [3] which captures the infrastructure required to support web services in terms of three roles service provider, service requestor and service registry and the verbs describing the interations between them: publish, find, bind (Figure 1).
Bind is the step that allows an application to connect to a web service at a particular web location and start interacting with it.
Figure 1: IBM web services architecture In this architecture a service is an implementation of a service description and a service description is the metadata describing the service.
This metadata must include sufficient information for a service requestor to access the service it describes including its interface and location; resource discovery metadata such as classification may also be included.
A service provider publishes a service description to a service registry.
A service requester then finds the service description via the service registry, the services description contains sufficient information for the service requestor to bind to the service provider to use the service.
(The architecture does allow the restricted case where a service requester has access to the service description via some other means such as hard-coding so that it can go direct to the service provider.)
The interface part of the service description is known to an application developer so that the application can be implemented to communicate with services of that type.
This is like the developer of a meta search service knowing the search protocol used by the search services it aggregates.
The protocol would be captured via a web service interface.
However, the specific implementations of the interface, the actual services, are discovered at runtime via a service registry possibly through the use of resource discovery metadata contained in the service description.
For example, a meta search engine for the medical domain might use a service registry to dynamically find medical search services that implement the required interface.
The matching service descriptions obtained from the service registry would include sufficent information for the meta search engine, the service requestor, to bind to each of the service providers in turn and access the search service according to the interface (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Web services meta search engine example Web Services Standards Although the web services architecture can be considered independently of any particular standards, clearly interoperability is required for largescale adoption of the architecture.
A number of key industry leaders have been working to develop a set of XML-based open standards that enable the web services architecture to be implemented.
Firstly, a standard way of capturing service descriptions is necessary.
The web services description language (WSDL) [4] has been developed for this purpose.
WSDL describes a service as a set of ‘ports’ which group related interactions that are possible between the application (service requestor) and the web service (service provider).
The interactions that are possible though a port are described as ‘operations’ which may have an input message and optionally a resulting output message.
Each operation describes a potential interaction with the web service.
This may be a request from the application to the web service.
It could also be an interaction that can be initiated by the web service for which the application needs to take action.
Interactions in either direction can be one-way or can require a response to be sent.
For example a digital library search service might offer a search port with operations for keyword search (input message contains a simple text string) and advanced search (input message contains a number of field-value pairs), in both cases the output message would contain a list of matching result descriptions.
There are two different kinds of user for WSDL documents.
During development of an application that will use a web service, the developer needs to know the interface to the service that the application will bind to.
When the application is running it needs details of a specific implementation of that service so that it can bind to it.
WSDL can be used to specify both interfaces and their implementations.
We won’t look at the format of WSDL here, although if you are familiar with XML you can probably guess roughly what it looks like.
WSDL describes a service in terms of possible interactions with it.
A WSDL document provides the potential information content of interactions with a web service but doesn’t explain how to communicate that information between an application and a web service.
For this purpose, WSDL allows a ‘binding’ to be specified, in practice this is likely to be another XML-based standard, SOAP [5].
The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a standard for XML-based information exchange between distributed applications.
Although other transports are possible, SOAP is typically transmitted over HTTP providing a platform for communication with/between web services.
In our digital library example, we know, from the WSDL decription, that the search service offers a keyword search operation which takes a text string as its input message.
SOAP allows an application to invoke this operation with the specific text string “web services” by sending a SOAP message and to get the result.
SOAP specifies the format of the request and response XML documents which are sent over HTTP.
There is a standard way of encoding WSDL messages in SOAP to achieve interoperability.
With WSDL and SOAP in our toolkit we can describe web services and use web services from an application.
But, how did we know what web services were available in the first place?
This is the purpose of Universal Discovery, Description and Integration (UDDI) [6].
UDDI is a specification for distributed registries of web services.
A UDDI web services registry is itself a web service which can be accessed via SOAP from an application that wishes to discover web services.
UDDI specifies interfaces for applications to publish web services (as WSDL documents) and to discover web services (via their WSDL documents).
A UDDI entry actually contains more that just a WSDL interface and implementation, it can also include further metadata such as quality of service parameters, payment mechanisms, security and keywords for resource discovery.
With these standards we have the infrastructure to publish (WSDL, UDDI), find (WSDL, UDDI) and bind (WSDL, SOAP) web services in an interoperable manner.
Where to Find Further Information This article has provided an overview of the web services architecture and associated standards.
If you want to implement a web services based solution then you will need further information.
A good starting point is the IBM Developer Works site which hosts a number of web services articles by various authors [7].
References World Wide Web Consortium Workshop on Web services Web services – the Web’s next revolution IBM Web services Conceptual Architecture Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1 Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1 uddi.org IBM developerWorks Web Services Zone Author Details   Tracy Gardner Advisory Software Engineer IBM United Kingdom Laboratories (Hursley) Email: tgardner@uk.ibm.com Web site: www.hursley.ibm.com Copyright IBM Corp. 2001 Article Title: “An Introduction to Web Services” Author: Tracy Gardner Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/gardner/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Print Editorial: Introduction to Issue 8 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Print Editorial: Introduction to Issue 8 Buzz infrastructure metadata cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl with the editorial for the Print version of Ariadne issue 8.
The impact of the eLib programme [1], now two years old, is becoming increasingly apparent in the electronic library infrastructure of the UK and beyond.
The significance of the work of the MODELS [2] project in designing a national system of resource discovery, is recognised by the new Call for proposals from JISC’s Committee for Electronic Information.
As our cover article [3] indicates, with physical and virtual ‘clumps’ of the national metadata resource actively being sought, the electronic catalogue infrastructure of the UK, begun several years ago when the first university library OPACs were connected to the JANET network, appears to be coming of age.
Elsewhere, our Interface with Jane Core [4] reveals that the EduLib project is now running workshops to skill LIS professionals as higher eucation teachers.
And the JEDDS project [5]proves that international collaboration among HE funding bodies is developing a document delivery service for the global research community.
Yet the electronic library still faces the persistent scholarly journal dilemma.
Stevan Harnad gives his views on ‘skywriting’ in this issue [6] .
If librarians could collaborate to resolve the polarisation created by this issue, no doubt they would.
We’d like to thank those of you who responded to our survey at the end of last year.
Results are summarised [7] in the Web version of Ariadne.
References eLib Web Site, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ MODELS eLib project article, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/models/ CEI Looks for Bold Response, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/cover/ Interface Jane Core, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/interface/ JEDDS eLib project article, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/jedds/ The Paper House of Cards (and why it’s taking so long to collapse), http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/harnad/ Results of the Ariadne survey, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue8/survey-results/ Author Details John MacColl Managing Editor, Ariadne Email: lbajam@tay.ac.uk Phone: 01382 308861 Address: Information Services, University of Abertay, Dundee Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way: University of Abertay Dundee Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way: University of Abertay Dundee Library Buzz data software database infrastructure video windows cd-rom intranet standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne visits the University of Abertay Dundee's new library.
The University of Abertay Dundee's new library building is situated in the heart of the city centre.
Recently voted Scotland's Best New Building in the Scottish Design Awards 1998, the four story structure of sandstone, steel and glass opened its doors to its users in February this year, and was formally opened by HM Queen on 30th of June.
During the 18-month construction period, on billboards, and in the national press during the opening, the University proclaimed its ambition to be a Higher Education Institution 'for the Digital Age', with the library as physical manifestation of this ambition.
Alison Kilgour travelled to Dundee to see the award-winning design for herself and to investigate whether the building is the flagship that the University envisioned.
There can be no doubt that it is an impressive edifice and, rising four floors above Dundee's Bell Street, a spectacular addition to the City Centre.
A visually arresting curved steel and glass energy wall fronts the building, providing a vast window into a world of learning for the passing public and a controlled environment for the users within.
The energy wall sweeps elegantly round to meet an impressive stone tower, an architectural feature reminiscent of a Stone Age broch.
Old and new also sit comfortably inside, with leather bound law reports nestling beside IT clusters.
The spine of the building on which the glass belly hangs is a stone built rectangular block, the nerve centre for the IT and Library facilities as well as housing the staff work areas.
Figure 1: Abertay Dundee's New Library Helen Foord, Assistant Head (User Support) of Information Services, explained the origins of the building.
The old library, had not been purpose built, but "cobbled together" over the years from teaching and laboratory space, "We burrowed up and down within the building to create accommodation, but it was clear to all that it was not a satisfactory long term solution."
Pressure became particularly acute as the former Dundee Institute of Technology strove for University title, awarded in 1994.
A library barely able to cope with a student community of 2000 now found itself having to cater for over 4,000!
The unique position of Abertay was recognised by SHEFC who awarded the highest share of government funding given to any of the Scottish universities, half of the £8m required to build the only new purpose built University Library in the country.
If the new building were to be judged on study facilities alone then it would be an undoubted success the quality of the environment has been immeasurably improved and usage of the library is up by 50%.
The new premises are almost three times as big as the previous accommodation and provide 300 more study spaces.
Also on offer are two fully equipped seminar rooms for teaching information and IT skills, six group study rooms, the Centre for language Learning and Self Study and a European funded IT training suite.
In addition, a specialist law library, developed in co-operation with the city's Faculty of Procurators and Solicitors, was recently opened by Lord Hardie, Scotland's Lord Advocate.
But what is the evidence for a digital future?
The University's commitment to communications and information technology to support teaching and learning is certainly evident in the attention to networked IT.
Abertay's network infrastructure was completely upgraded in 1996, with over 50 miles of new cable being installed to create a robust, reliable high speed network/server configuration.
Partly funded by the SHEFC use of MANs initiative (UMI), broadband high-speed fibre-optic technology now links all the major campus buildings, including more remote sites such as Dundee Graduate Business School at historic Dudhope Castle, and connects them to a new backbone with ten times the capacity of its predecessor.
These facilities are already allowing users to share documents and programs more effectively, while a link to the Fife and Tayside Metropolitan Area Network (FatMan) can provide extremely high quality simultaneous video-conferencing, audio, data and still image transmissions to and from other institutions.
On a tour of the building Jim Huntingford, Information Manager, showed me the PC facilities which the infrastructure supports.
170 new Pentium 166 MMX PCs are distributed between four open-plan IT clusters and two seminar rooms.
As it stands, this represents the largest single IT resource in the University with over 1,000 PCs, but there are already plans to increase this still further.
In fact, the building was specifically designed to allow all 700 study spaces to be developed into IT workstations and the cabling and network points are already in place.
All the PCs in the University operate with a common desktop , currently consisting of the Windows NT operating system and Office 97 Professional application software.
As Huntingford explained "Using IT at University will be the first step towards a lifetime habit.
It is therefore important that we provide an opportunity for our students to work with industry standard facilities, a PC environment that students can expect to meet in the workplace."
But with all this emphasis on IT facilities isn't the name library a misnomer?
Why call it a library at all?
Foord answered, "People's concept of a library is changing and the students still call it a library, while recognising the enhanced facilities.
"Also, as Huntingford elaborated, "It would be a mistake to think that the central importance of information delivery had been forgotten."
Instead, the building was planned to take into consideration the fact that traditional methods of delivering information are being increasingly superseded by digital technologies.
A far smaller percentage of floor space is given over to shelving than in more traditional libraries.
All PCs have access to the Internet and locally networked resources, including over 40 CD-ROM databases.
As evidence of a very real paradigm shift towards access rather than holdings, Huntingford cited the recent cancellation of approximately £9000 of paper journals and the subscription to their electronic equivalents on full text electronic databases such as Emerald and IEEE Computer Society Digital Library.
Figure 2: A view of the inside But how had all of this been achieved?
What is the single most important factor?
Huntingford replied, "The library development is the central component of the implementation of the University's Information Strategy."
Published in 1995 and produced by a Working Group drawn from across the University, it was one of the first university information strategies to be produced in the UK.
The vision of the Information Strategy was of a cost-effective, centrally managed set of information services to support the academic and administrative needs of the University.
Information Services, the combined Library and Computer Centre, was created in 1996 with the Media Centre integrated a little later.
This new corporate service already has its own strong identity within the University and the Information Strategy remains at the heart of policy making and planning within Information Services.
A fundamental aim is to ensure that technology is employed in an educationally sound manner, which will enhance the quality of and access to teaching and learning.
Finally, what of the future?
What are the most important issues for Information Services to deal with?
Key IT priorities are currently the development of the University's Intranet, and the training of users in baseline IT skills.
Within the Academic Support Division of Information Services three key IT training posts have been created.
This IT training team now delivers skills training to the vast majority of first year students in a course specifically designed for this purpose.
A major programme of training in the standard desktop for all staff will soon be underway.
The Academic Librarians are also heavily involved in delivering Library and Information Skills to students, again within integrated modules.
The University has announced its intention to implement a policy of the 'Use of Communications and Information Technologies in Internal Communications', with the aim of facilitating use of the Intranet, shared network drives and e-mail rather than paper, in all non-verbal communications.
Again, responsibility for ensuring that all staff possess and develop the skills and confidence to implement such a policy rests with the Information Services.
Information Services recognise, however, that there is no room for complacency.
A systematic approach to determining user perceptions of the services and facilities has been adopted, with a survey of staff perceptions of service standards already completed and a survey of all students planned for early next semester.
These surveys are one of the ways in which the Service hopes to enhance user involvement in the provision and development of services that they are responsive to users' needs and views.
To this end, Service Level Agreements are also being developed across all areas, in IT, Library and Media, so that user expectations can be mapped onto quality, but realistic, deliverables.
The new library at the University of Abertay is certainly an architectural triumph, and the IT and library facilities are undoubtedly impressive, but I left Dundee with a sense that the real story has only just begun.
The completion of the new library project at Abertay is an achievement of which the University can be justifiably proud, but the interest now lies in how the technology will be used in innovative ways to support teaching and learning, on campus and beyond.
Helen Foord is Assistant Head (User Support) Email: h.foord@abertay-dundee.ac.uk Jim Huntingford is Information Manager (User Support) Email: j.huntingford@abertay-dundee.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Interoperability: What Is It and Why Should I Want It?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interoperability: What Is It and Why Should I Want It?
Buzz data software framework dissemination portal archives metadata thesaurus identifier vocabularies repositories video cataloguing z39.50 gis ict interoperability mailbase e-government foi intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller explains what interoperability is and why you should want it.
Together with terms like "metadata" and "joined-up thinking", this word is increasingly being used within the information management discourse across all of our memory institutions.
Its meaning, though, remains somewhat ambiguous, as do many of the benefits of "being interoperable".
This paper is an attempt, written from the doubtless biased perspective of someone with the word in their job title, to explain some of what interoperability means, and to begin stating the case for more active efforts towards being truly interoperable across a range of services.
interoperable adj.
able to operate in conjunction interoperability n. (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 9th Edition) interoperability [...] is the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without special effort on the part of the customer.
Interoperability becomes a quality of increasing importance for information technology products as the concept that "The network is the computer" becomes a reality.
For this reason, the term is widely used in product marketing descriptions.
(whatis.com) Both JISC [1] and Resource: the Council for Museums Archives and Libraries [2] recognise the importance of interoperability, as demonstrated by their shared commitment to funding the Interoperability Focus [3].
Elsewhere, too, we see grand statements relating to Joined-Up Government [4] and the technical implications of making this vision real [5], shared access to valuable information resources [6, 7], a breaking-down of the barriers which prevent us realising the full potential of software tools in the workplace [8], and more.
Across a whole range of ICT-related initiatives, in various countries and multiple domains, new emphasis upon openness, sharing, and access is requiring detailed consideration as to how previously private — and often proprietarily monolithic — systems can be opened up.
More often than not, the term chosen to describe this process is "interoperability", but the meanings implied (they are rarely, if ever, stated) for this term vary quite significantly.
This paper offers one view of what interoperability might be, what it means for the primarily public sector readership of Ariadne, and how we set about becoming more interoperable than most of us currently manage.
What is Interoperability?
A definition To begin, let me offer a definition.
Although not perfect, this comes closest to capturing my view of interoperability, and is informed by conversations over the past few years with people too numerous to name, all of whom have helped to refine the ideas behind these words: to be interoperable, one should actively be engaged in the ongoing process of ensuring that the systems, procedures and culture of an organisation are managed in such a way as to maximise opportunities for exchange and re-use of information, whether internally or externally.
Based upon this definition, it should be clear that there is far more to ensuring interoperability than using compatible software and hardware, although that is of course important.
Rather, assurance of effective interoperability will require often radical changes to the ways in which organisations work and, especially, in their attitudes to information.
Flavours of interoperability Given such a wide scope within the suggested definition, it becomes useful to further subdivide the notion of interoperability, as follows (based upon [9]): Technical Interoperability In many ways this is the most straightforward aspect of maintaining interoperability, as there are often clear 'right' and 'wrong' answers to be found.
Consideration of technical issues includes ensuring an involvement in the continued development of communication, transport, storage and representation standards such as Z39.50 [10, 11], the work of the World Wide Web Consortium [12], etc.
Work is required both to ensure that individual standards move forward to the benefit of the community, and to facilitate where possible their convergence, such that systems may effectively make use of more than one standards-based approach.
To paraphrase Sarah Tyacke of the UK's Public Records Office, this is the junk which enables the people (users) to get at the stuff (rich content) they want.
Chris Rusbridge, formerly of JISC's Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) also used metaphor to disguise the true horror of technical interoperability, referring to the plumbing behind a successful application.
Semantic Interoperability Semantic interoperability presents a host of issues, all of which become more pronounced as individual resources — each internally constructed in their own (hopefully) semantically consistent fashion — are made available through 'gateways' and 'portals' such as those from the Archaeology Data Service [13], SCRAN [14], or the UK Government [15].
Almost inevitably, these discrete resources use different terms to describe similar concepts ('Author', 'Creator', and 'Composer', for example), or even use identical terms to mean very different things, introducing confusion and error into their use.
Ongoing work on the development and distributed use of thesauri such as those from the Data Archive [16], English Heritage [17] and the Getty [18] is one important aid in this area, and worthy of further exploration.
The report [19] of a recent MODELS [20] workshop provides an introduction to a number of the major issues in this field.
Political/ Human Interoperability Apart from issues related to the manner in which information is described and disseminated, the decision to make resources more widely available has implications for the organisations concerned (where this may be seen as a loss of control or ownership), their staff (who may not possess the skills required to support more complex systems and a newly dispersed user community), and the end users.
Process change, and extensive staff and user training are rarely considered when deciding whether or not to release a given resource, but are crucial to ensuring the effective long-term use of any service.
Recent government emphasis [21] upon the social exclusion issues of widespread IT-based dissemination of information are also highly relevant concerns here.
Inter-community Interoperability As traditional boundaries between institutions and disciplines begin to blur, researchers increasingly require access to information from a wide range of sources, both within and without their own subject area.
Complementing work in the research library sector, important initiatives are also underway in related information providing communities such as national [22, 23] and local [24] government, public libraries [25, 26], museums [27] and archives [28].
In many cases, both goals and problems are similar, and there is much to be gained through adopting common solutions wherever feasible.
The Advisory Committee for Interoperability Focus [29], Chaired by Ray Lester of The Natural History Museum, is one forum in which practitioners from across these sectors meet and discuss a range of issues.
Recent changes within the European Commission and in the make-up of the Non-Departmental Public Bodies responsible for Museums, Libraries and Archives in parts of the United Kingdom [2] are also serving to bridge community divides.
There is clear value, though, in continuing to actively seek partnerships and common solutions across sectors, to the long-term benefit of the sectors concerned and, more importantly, to the benefit of the end-user, who routinely behaves in a cross-disciplinary manner, and is often hampered by unnecessary institutional barriers.
Legal Interoperability The decision to make resources more widely available is not always freely taken, with the legal requirements of Freedom of Information Legislation in several countries a significant factor in the dissemination of public sector resources.
The impact of enforced disclosure of this form may soon be seen in the UK, with the much-criticised Freedom of Information Bill in the final stages of its passage through Parliament [30].
Even in cases where organisations wish to disclose information, there are legal implications to their decision.
In the UK Public Sector, the most obvious are the newly strengthened Data Protection Act [31] with its strict stipulations over use and publication of personal data, and the checks placed upon Government to protect civil liberties, which have the added effect of reducing Government's ability to exchange certain types of data in the most effective manner.
Where resources have been compiled from different sources (Local Authority land use information plotted on an Ordnance Survey map, for example), the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of those providing the background sources also need to be protected.
An allowable use of Ordnance Survey maps, for example, within an organisation may not be permitted on the World Wide Web where anybody conceivably has access.
International Interoperability Each of the key issues identified, above, is magnified when considered on an international scale, where differences in technical approach, working practice, and organisation have been enshrined over many years.
Although already a factor in some areas of the United Kingdom, issues related to the language in which resources are provided and described become increasingly significant when dealing with those delivered from or provided for other countries.
Cultural issues, too, are magnified on an international arena with usage practices, expectations, and requirements varying from country to country.
Why be Interoperable?
So; why do it?
For many years, now, organisations have hoarded data, building complex repositories for everything from personnel details to the holdings of a large museum.
Access to these data has been restricted to a select few, with a wall of paperwork and bureaucracy separating them and their data from those who might wish access.
For anyone intending to integrate data from different locations, there has often been no alternative to manually translating and re-keying data off printouts from incompatible systems.
In today's Information Age, there is a recognition that these repositories have an innate value; that the knowledge to be gained from mining these resources can be measured in a similar fashion to the wealth potential of steel and coal in the previous Industrial Age.
For access to these data to be feasible, the systems within which they are stored must be capable of interoperation with those around them.
At the most mundane, this interoperability might enable members of staff within an institution to view their own personnel details on an Intranet, correcting details such as their home address following a move.
At a higher level of sophistication such as that proposed for JISC's DNER [6], the learner should be able to search across and retrieve resources from a wealth of conforming systems, gaining access to maps, full-text content from journals, census data, images and video, and more.
Increasingly, users of the DNER will expect the resources with which they deal to be available in this interoperable fashion.
Other JISC-negotiated content, however excellent, is likely to become marginalised as users turn away from products requiring use of proprietary tools or interfaces, and more and more often towards those visible through the institutional, subject or resource-centred portals of the DNER.
By joining the trend towards interoperation and openness, resource holders gain the ability both to better utilise their own information internally, and to become visible to an increasingly sophisticated user community, no longer satisfied with ringing up, writing to, physically visiting, or working on-line with the proprietary interfaces of a host of providers.
In this new environment, the interoperable organisations will be visible, usable and customer focused, whilst still maintaining their own unique branding within the Portals through which their content is available.
How to be Interoperable?
As with many questions of this nature, it depends.
As outlined above, there are several aspects to consider in moving towards interoperability, of which the most usually cited one of technology is normally the most straightforward to solve.
Work is underway to address a whole host of specific interoperability problems, resulting in solutions that are intended to be widely applicable and reusable.
On the technical front, for example, the investment of JISC and others in the Bath Profile [32] is serving to make Z39.50 [11] realise its potential as a truly valuable tool in linking distributed resources.
Here, too, the ongoing efforts of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative [33] and domain-specific organisations such as CIMI [34] are improving the manner in which a wide range of resources may be described and discovered.
With semantics and terminology control, too, the MODELS outcomes [19] and work within the international NKOS group [35] offer important steps forward.
Across other areas, such as the legal and human practicalities of becoming interoperable, progress is also being made and experience gained.
Key demonstrators of the integrated whole are now beginning to emerge, with the DNER [6], UKOnline.gov [15], and the People's Network [36] well worth watching in the coming months.
Conclusion Being seen to "be interoperable" is becoming increasingly important to a wide range of organisations, including central and local government, the back-end administrative systems underpinning the work of our universities, museums and their collection management systems, and the catalogues of the major publishing houses.
In each case, and in others, undeniably valuable information is being made available to a wide range of users, often for the first time.
In some cases, this new openness is as part of a requirement for accountability to voters, staff, or shareholders.
In others, it is a business decision taken in order to harness knowledge and gain advantage over competitors.
Whatever the reason, this drive towards interoperability will necessarily lead to changes in the way that the organisation operates.
A truly interoperable organisation is able to maximise the value and reuse potential of information under its control.
It is also able to exchange this information effectively with other equally interoperable bodies, allowing new knowledge to be generated from the identification of relationships between previously unrelated sets of data.
Changing internal systems and practices to make them interoperable is a far from simple task.
The benefits for the organisation and those making use of information it publishes are potentially incalculable.
References The Joint Information Systems Committee's web site is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ The Resource web site is at: http://www.resource.gov.uk/ The Interoperability Focus web site is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ The UK Government's White Paper, Modernising Government, is at: http://www.citu.gov.uk/moderngov/whitepaper/4310.htm The UK Government's Draft Interoperability Framework is at: http://www.citu.gov.uk/interoperability.htm Adding Value to the UK's Learning, Teaching and Research Resources: the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), JISC's vision for the DNER, is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/dner_vision.html The National Geospatial Data Framework's (NGDF) Data Locator will be launched during July, when it will be available at: http://www.askgiraffe.org.uk/ The Microsoft TechNet section, Interoperability, is at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interop/ An introductory flier, UK Interoperability Focus, is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/about/ The Z39.50 Maintenance Agency web site is at: http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ More information on Z39.50 is available in the paper, Z39.50 for All by Paul Miller, at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/z3950/ The World Wide Web Consortium web site is at: http://www.w3.org/ The Archaeology Data Service's on-line catalogue is at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) is at: http://www.scran.ac.uk/ A pilot of the UK Government's integrated portal development, currently dubbed UKOnline.gov, is due to be unveiled later in the Summer.
It is likely to be at: http://www.ukonline.gov.uk/ [In fact it can be reached at https://www.gov.uk/  Editor (9 July 2014)] The Data Archive's HASSET thesaurus is at: http://155.245.254.46/services/zhasset.html English Heritage's On-line thesauri are at: http://www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/thes_splash.htm The Getty Vocabulary Programme is at: http://www.getty.edu/gri/vocabularies/ The outcomes of the MODELS 11 workshop are reported in the paper, I say what I mean, but do I mean what I say?
by Paul Miller, at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/metadata/ The MODELS workshop page is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/ The UK Government's Social Exclusion Unit is at: http://www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/seu/index.htm The UK Government's e-Government Strategy is at: http://www.iagchampions.gov.uk/Strategy.html The recommendations of the Digital Scotland Task Force are at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/digitalscotland/ A Local Government perspective on [22] is presented in Implementing e-Government: Guidelines for Local Government, at: http://www.iagchampions.gov.uk/guidelines/localgovernment/guidelines.html The report, New Library: the People's Network, is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/ The report, Building the New Library Network, is at: http://www.lic.gov.uk/publications/policyreports/building/index.html A Netful of Jewels: New Museums and the Learning Age is at: http://www.s-keene.dircon.co.uk/netful/index.html Archives On-Line: the establishment of a United Kingdom Archival Network, is at: http://www.archives.org.uk/onlinepubs/archivesonline/aolintro.html The Interoperability Focus Advisory Committee's web pages are at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/advisory/ The UK Government's Freedom of Information Bill is at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldbills/055/2000055.htm The UK Government's Data Protection web site is at: http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/ The Bath Profile: an international Z39.50 specification for Library applications and Resource Discovery is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/activities/z3950/int_profile/bath/draft/ The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative web site is at: http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/dc/ The Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) web site is at: http://www.cimi.org/ The NKOS web site is at: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/ The People's Network web site is at: http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/ The issues raised in this paper, and others, are occasionally discussed on the electronic mailing list, interoperability .
To join this list, send a message to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk where the body reads join interoperability Your First Name Your Last Name stop For example join interoperability Paul Miller stop Author Details   Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN c/o Academic Services: Libraries University of Hull HULL HU6 7RX United Kingdom Email: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Article Title: "Interoperability.
What Is It and Why Should I Want It?"
Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/interoperability/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Finding Images on the Internet Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Finding Images on the Internet Buzz database browser copyright video graphics multimedia gif jpg url standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley offers his latest look at the search engine marketplace.
In one of my earlier columns I looked at the different ways in which it was possible to find information about individuals on the Internet.
I thought that for this issue I'd revisit the concept of finding a particular type of information, but instead of looking for people, I'd look for images instead.
When I refer to 'images' here, I'm not really talking about small icons, coloured balls or page dividers that web designers like to use on their websites; there are thousands of such libraries available for this purpose, and they can easily be located simply go to one of the many Yahoo!
categories and take your pick.
Perhaps a good place to start would be their section on Arts>Design Arts>Graphic Design>Web page design and layout [1] and take a peep into some of the sites listed; I'm sure you'll find more images, icons, buttons, balls and arrows than you could use in a lifetime of designing pages!
When talking of images in this article, I'm referring rather more to photographs, and to photographic libraries and resources instead.
Semi-legal disclaimer As the Internet acrynym goes IANAL, which is the shorthand version of 'I am not a lawyer'.
I probably don't need to say the next bit, but I suppose I should when someone creates an image, or takes a photograph and makes it available on the Internet (or indeed anywhere else), they or their organisation will own the copyright on that particular image.
Just because you see an image on a web page it doesn't mean that you can simply copy it and use it on your own page, or in any other document you create since that will most likely breach copyright.
So, if you're in any doubt about using an image, it makes sense to email the web page author or company first and ask for permission.
Types of images you'll find Having got that out of the way, let's now turn to the types of images that you can find on the 'net.
There are essentially two different types of image .gif or .jpg.
There are a small number of other file types that are slowly becoming more popular, but I'd be prepared to say that 99% of all the images you find will be in one or other of these formats.
Photographs are generally to be found as .jpg images, while icons and cartoon type pictures with lots of block colour will be found as .gif images.
For the most part, you can ignore this, although it may be important if you want a specific type of image for use on a web page as an icon.
You'll probably find it helpful to focus your search on .gif images in that case.
Alternatively, if you're looking for photographs they will most likely be found as .jpg images.
However, this is not a hard and fast rule, so while limiting to a particular file type may give you a smaller number of hits, you may be excluding other images that would work perfectly well for whatever your purposes happen to be.
Using standard search engines to find images AltaVista There are two methods of finding images at Altavista [2]; the first is to use the switch 'image:' to locate any images that have a specific name.
Consequently, if you are searching for images of the ship the Titanic, you could run a search like this image:titanic and that will return hits of web pages that include any images called 'titanic' on them.
You could focus your search a little more closely by doing a search for image:titanic.jpg to try and retrieve mainly photographs.
The problem here of course is that there is no saying that an image called 'titanic' is going to be of the ship it might be a still from the film, or indeed anything that the web author thinks deserves the name titanic.
Indeed, when I tried this search myself, the first hit that AltaVista displayed was of a very simple homepage from someone who had put an advertising link into the film site, which would have been of little value to most people.
Consequently, you will probably want to use the image; switch in conjunction with some other search terms.
In this example, I would probably try and narrow my search down to something more specific by doing a search on AltaVista such as: image:titanic ship iceburg "maiden voyage" which should go a long way to excluding references to other types of 'titanic'.
The second way of searching for images at AltaVista is to use their picture finder.
This is a specialised search engine which looks for images on web pages, and is a reasonably useful search engine.
You can find this by looking at the left hand side of their opening page for 'Multimedia search' and the option 'Images'.
(Please note that this is the way you can find this link at the time of writing, but since AltaVista changes its interface so often this may well have changed by the time you read this article!)
At this point I would caution you to consider using the filtered version of this image finder you might be amazed at the number of undesirable images that it is possible to unearth with even the most innocent of words!
You can locate this filter by looking at the top of the search box for the words 'Family Filter' and it will be either off or on.
You can also choose to search the Web for images or AltaVistas partner site the Corbis Collection.
The interface is simple and straightforward to use, and you have the choice of looking for photos, graphics, colour or black and white images.
(If you require moving images, AltaVista provides another open under 'Multimedia search'.)
Once AltaVista has returned the hits to you, it's simply a case of paging through them until you find the one that is suitable for your purposes.
If you chose to search the web, by clicking on the image you will be taken to the website that contains that particular image, while if you chose the Corbis Collection database to search in you'll be taken to a new screen with the image, together with information about it, and the option of sending the image to a friend, printing it, or licensing it for professional use.
HotBot I found HotBot [3] rather irritating when it came to searching for images.
One of its options is to run a search and tick the option 'Pages must contain' and one of the options given is 'images'.
However, this doesn't allow you to search for images called 'titanic', simply to find web pages that contain the term, and which have images on them!
This is pretty nonsensical in my opinion, since most pages have images on them anyway, so it doesn't really add very much to the search.
Lycos The Lycos search engine [4] was much more helpful.
The main page includes an option to run a multimedia search, with options for All, pictures, audio, video and parental settings.
Once you have found your image you can click on it, but rather than being taken to the appropriate webpage as with AltaVista, a larger version of the image is displayed for you, with a 'view images' watermark embedded in it.
I found this rather irritating, since I couldn't find very much more information about the particular image, and was only given options to view next/previous, or to puchase the print.
However, further investigation showed that with some images you could actually go directly to the website that contains the image, but it does seem to be a rather hit and miss approach.
Yahoo!
As well as various categories for images as previously described, Yahoo!
has an image finder, although it's perhaps not immediately apparent.
You can find it by looking at the top of the opening Yahoo!
screen and run your eye along the line starting 'Personal' until you get to 'Photos' [5].
This option is mainly used by people who have registered with Yahoo!
and allows you to add photographs to any Yahoo!
communities you belong to, but there is also a link to the Corbis Collection, and by clicking on this link you can run searches to find images in that collection.
Ixquick Readers who remember back to Issue 23 will recall how much I rave about this particular multi search engine, and I was pleased to see it come up trumps for me yet again.
The opening page at Ixquick [6] gives people the option of searching for pictures, rather than web pages, and it then runs a search across the different search engines it uses, then displays the image along with details about the web page that contains that particular image.
Other standard search engines I spent some time wandering around other search engines and in general I have to say that I was very disappointed with what I found.
Many of the engines didn't have any option for searching for images at all, while others simply linked back to other search engines they partner with.
I think it's really an area that the majority of them could do an awful lot better in, to be honest.
Image specific search engines Stopstock This site [7] gives access to 11 different commercial image providers, and their databases can be accessed through the Stopstock front end.
You can search through either one database, or multiple databases, which overcomes a problem that the engine used to have.
However, when I chose to search using the multiple option I was horrified to see the engine spawn 5 extra versions of my browser, rather than combining all the results into one page.
I can understand why it works this way, but nonetheless, it's irritating and a bit worrying the first time it happens!
The Amazing Picture Machine I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it 'amazing' myself, but the search engine [8] is simple, quick and easy to use.
I suspect that their database is on the small size, since my search for 'titanic' only came up with two images, but they were both on-topic.
After the search has been run you are provided with a summary of the results, and you can then choose to click on one in order to view the image.
This is a nice touch, since it speeds up the whole process and if your search yields a great many results it's a quick and easy way of browsing through them, without having to wait for all the images to load.
The Sunsite ImageFinder This is a collection [9] of thirteen individual image search engines which between them provide you with access to perhaps the biggest total collection of images on the Internet.
There tends to be a bias towards America, such as images on Californian history, the American Memory and the Smithsonian, but it should also be noted that there are also large collections of Architectural images, 13,000 images from the Australian National Library and a link to the NASA images library server.
Conclusion My explorations of the Internet this issue were not extensive, only taking a few hours, and I suspect that I could have spent twice as long, if not more so, but I think that using some of the sites mentioned above will give you a pretty good chance of finding the image or images that you need to find.
Inevitably the whole process is something of a hit and miss affair since most engines rely on either the name of the image or the text surrounding it for example, and this will result in false drops much more often than when doing searches for web pages.
I was disappointed that so many engines had very little on images, or no options at all to search for them, but since I'm quite cynical about search engines generally, it came as little surprise to me.
I certainly think that it's an area that requires a lot of work before we can jump onto the Internet and find the image(s) that we need without doing considerable work on it.
References 1.
Yahoo!
<URL: http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Design_Arts/Graphic_Design/Web_Page_Design_and_Layout/> 2.
AltaVista <URL: http://www.altavista.com> 3.
Hotbot <URL: http://www.hotbot.com> 4.
Lycos <URL: http://www.lycos.com> 5.
Yahoo!
Photos <URL: http://photos.yahoo.com/> 6.
Ixquick <URL: http://www.ixquick.com> 7ShopStock <URL: http://www.1stopstock.com/> 8The Amazing Picture Machine <URL: http://www.ncrtec.org/picture.htm> 9The Sunsite ImageFinder <URL: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ImageFinder/> Author Details   Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens, Feltham, Middlesex.
Email: philb@philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independent Internet Consultant.
Article Title: "Finding images on the Internet" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/search-engines/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Corner: Keyword Spamming Cheat Your Way to the Top Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Corner: Keyword Spamming Cheat Your Way to the Top Buzz html archives Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley shows how metadata can be abused to enhance the search engine ranking of Web pages.
In the increasingly market-driven environment that is the web, it is becoming ever more important to ensure that your site gets seen by as many people as possible.
In particular, corporate and organisations who are trying to attract advertising revenue to their web sites need to ensure that they can show potential advertisers that placing an advert on their pages is likely to achieve maximum exposure.
Under such competitive circumstances, web authors are increasingly beginning to rely on underhand techniques to ensure their sites get seen.
One emerging practice is that of keyword spamming doctoring the content of a web site to ensure that it hits the top of a list of results retrieved from a web search engine.
When you do a search on a search engine such as Excite or Alta Vista you might type in a keyword such as London.
What happens next is that the search engine will check for documents that include your requested keyword and the document will be ranked depending on how many times your keyword appears in the text, and where it appears.
Thus, the results you get back will be ranked for their relevancy, and their placing in your list of results will depend on this relevancy ranking score.
A search engine will typically display your results page by page, perhaps 10 hits at a time.
Many users will tend perhaps to look at only the first page of results they get from a search engine, rather than scrolling through pages and pages of hits.
Therefore if you want to get people to see your web site it’s all-important to get into that top 10.
Keyword spamming in action can be seen if you take a look at the HTML source of a document.
Search engine spiders will index documents using a range of different strategies.
Some will simply index the entire text of a document, making full-text searching possible, but making it a little difficult to achieve high relevancy in your searches.
Others will rely on meta tags in documents tags in the head of a document which can be used to provide information on ownership and content.
Alta Vista will use meta tags for indexing if these are present, in preference to indexing the first hundred lines of the document.
Meta tags, which have been discussed in detail by other Ariadne contributors, are used quite legitimately for indexing of web documents, and where used appropriately they can be an extremely useful indexing tool which can make it easier for searchers to find materials which are relevant to their needs.
Devious web authors, however, can exploit and abuse the use of meta tags in order to push their sites up the relevancy ratings.
A classic example of keyword spamming could be seen at the Heaven’s Gate web site the web site of the San Diego cult who committed mass suicide recently.
This example is taken from an article in Macworld [1].
The Heaven’s Gate web site used keyword spamming in a number of ways.
Keywords which were shown to have a high incidence of people running searches against them were embedded in meta tags.
An example of this is shown below [2]: meta name=“keywords” content=“Heaven’s Gate, Heaven’s Gate, Heaven’s Gate, Heaven’s Gate, Heaven’s Gate, Heaven’s Gate, ufo, ufo, ufo, ufo, ufo, ufo, space alien, space alien, space alien, space alien, space alien, space alien, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, millennium, millennium, millennium,millennium, millennium, millennium, millennium, misinformation, misinformation, misinformation, misinformation, misinformation, misinformation, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, second coming, second coming, second coming, second coming, second coming, second coming, angels, angels, angels, angels, angels, angels, end times, end times, end times, end times, end times, end times, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, God, God, God, God, God, God” As can be seen, each keyword is repeated a number of times in order to force the site higher up a search engine’s list of hits.
People searching on subjects such as millennium or extraterrestrial would have been likely to find this site near the top of their set of results.
Another method used was that of hidden text.
Black text was used against a black background near the bottom of the web page.
This didn’t show up on screen as it was effectively masked by the background.
However, it was visible in the HTML source of the document, where it was picked up and indexed by search engines.
A huge number of keywords were slipped into the web site by stealth using this method.
An archived copy of the Heaven’s Gate site is available [2].
Another common technique is the use of words in the meta tags which don’t actually appear in the main body of a page.
This effectively gives you two bites of the cherry and a wider number of keywords under which your page might get picked up.
A slightly more worrying development is the tendency for web authors to include keywords in their documents which bear no relation to the subject of the document.
One increasingly common trick is for web authors to fill their meta tags with keywords relating to sex and pornography, even if their site doesn’t actually contain this type of information.
Thus, if someone runs a search against one of these keywords the site is included in the list of hits, even though it isn’t actually covering this topic, and the unsuspecting web-user who follows the link is mislead into thinking they have found relevant material.
As searches against sex-related keywords are extremely common on the web this is actually quite an effective way of boosting the hit rate of a site.
Some search engines are beginning to take active measures against keyword spamming by ignoring keywords which appear more than six or seven times in a row.
Lycos in particular is now beginning to give lower priority to pages with long strings of repeated words.i However, web authors can get around this by sorting their keyword so that instead of having a list of keywords such as London London London hotels hotels hotels they might instead have London hotels London hotels London hotels.
This would fool the search engine into letting the page through.
Abuse of keywords is likely to become an increasing problem on the web as content continues to grow and web authors feel the need to adopt increasingly aggressive strategies in order to market their sites and get them seen by as wide an audience as possible.
References [1] Getting to the Source: Is it Real or Spam, Ma’am, Liberatore, K., Macworld, 2 July 1997 http://www.macworld.com/features/pov.4.4.html [2] Archive of the Heaven’s Gate Web Site, http://www.sunspot.net/news/special/heavensgatesite/2index.shtml [3] Cheaters never Win, K. Murphy, Webweek, 20 May 1996, http://www.webweek.com/96May20/undercon/cheaters.html Author Details Tracey Stanley, Networked Information Officer, University of Leeds Library, UK Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/people/TSStanley/TSStanley.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Distributed National Collection Access, and Cross-sectoral Collaboration: The Research Support Libraries Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Distributed National Collection Access, and Cross-sectoral Collaboration: The Research Support Libraries Programme Buzz data database infrastructure archives digitisation preservation cataloguing rslp url research Citation BibTex RIS Ronald Milne, Director of the programme, with an overview of the objectives for the Research Support Libraries Programme.
The Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP), a £30m initiative funded by the four UK higher education funding bodies, has spawned 53 projects and a number of studies and other activities.
This brief overview aims to give a flavour of the Programme.
Articles relating to particular projects will appear in future issues of Ariadne.
But first, some background: RSLP derives from the deliberations of the Follett Review (1993)1 and the associated Anderson Report (1996).2 Although not directly related to the Specialised Research Collections in the Humanities (NFF) programme or eLib, RSLP learned much from each of these initiatives in its set-up stages.
RSLP is managed (ie interventionist), attempts to take a holistic view of library and archive activity in the UK, and has a strategic vision, central to which is the concept of distributed national collections of library research resources (the ‘DNC’ or ‘Distributed National Collection’).
Why work towards a ‘Distributed National Collection’?
Quite simply because no library can these days hope to collect comprehensively across all fields of knowledge.
We are all aware of the huge increase in the number of hard-copy titles being published, and of journal price rises greatly in excess of inflation.
Therefore, in order to optimise the library research resource in the UK, and access to it, we need to work together to share information about collections among ourselves and users, come to agreements about who is going to collect in what area, and create an infrastructure which allows researchers to access the material they require with ease.
There has, therefore, been a strong focus on collaborative work in RSLP, in particular among higher education institutions (HEIs), but also between HEIs and other libraries with research collections, notably the British Library and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales.
Among the other non-higher education partners participating are the Public Record Office, Glasgow City Council Libraries and Archives, the Brighton and Hove Museum and Art Gallery, English Heritage, the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland, the Tate Gallery, Westminster City Archives and the Wellcome Institute.
Cross-sectoral projects highlight the funding difficulties associated with joined-up activity, and colleagues have quite justifiably asked how we can really begin to fulfil the vision of distributed national collections in particular groups of disciplines or types of materials when RSLP can fund only higher education institutions.
Where it has been possible, some institutions, such as the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, realising the potential for the Common Good, have funded their own participation in RSLP projects.
However, the number of organisations in this enviable position is small.
We have got round the hurdle (and it really has been ‘round’ and not ‘over’) by providing complementary funding for, or co-funding cross-sectoral projects with funding agencies such as the British Library Cooperation and Partnership Programme (BLCPP), Re:source and SCRAN.
It has also been possible for RSLP to fund the higher education element of eight proposals submitted to BLCPP.
But what is really needed is an independent body funded by central government that takes a holistic view of UK library collections, both print and electronic, and which is able to make substantial grants for cross-sectoral activity including access arrangements.3 Most of the projects funded by RSLP are discipline oriented, although one or two focus on a format.
The Programme is concerned with material that is of value to researchers, wherever it is held; whether in one of the major research libraries such as the Bodleian or the Rylands, or in the libraries of one the newer universities, such as Manchester Metropolitan University or London Guildhall.
RSLP projects are mainly dealing with traditional library materials but, in almost every case, creating an electronic resource.
These take the form of bibliographic and archival records, collection descriptions, digitised images and texts, and web directories and portals.
There are as many as twenty-one partners in a project consortium, many of the projects are multi-faceted, and are working in a number of Programme areas.
Academic fields where the projects are expected to have a particularly significant impact include archaeology, art history, art and design, business studies, geography, history, non-European languages and area studies, the performing arts, theology and church history (including Hebraica and Jewish Studies), veterinary science and women’s studies.
There are major collaborative collection management projects for Asian studies and for Russian and East European studies, and projects that seek to facilitate access to such diverse materials as pamphlets, aerial photographs, early manuscript and printed maps of Scotland, cartoons and architectural drawings.
As ever, the library and archive professions have been ingenious in inventing acronyms!
Amongst the projects RSLP is funding are: SCONE (Scottish Collections Network Extension project), EGIL (Electronic Gateway for Icelandic Literature), OASIS (Online AcceS to the Index of archaeological investigationS), NAHSTE (Navigational Aids for the History of Science, Technology and the Environment), HOGARTH (Helpful Online Gateway to Art History), PADDI (Planning Architecture Design Database Ireland), and RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally).
There are a considerable number of other RSLP projects which are likely to be of interest to Ariadne readers: For example, LSE is the main partner in a project which has provided an online guide to the papers of Charles Booth, the social investigator, by retroconverting existing catalogues and creating online digitised versions of Booth’s Maps descriptive of London poverty and the police notebooks which informed the Inquiry into the life and labour of the people of London.
Enhanced indexing allows users to navigate the data and to link the results of searches to locations on the maps.
‘Charting the Nation’ is providing sophisticated electronic access to digitised early manuscript and printed maps of Scotland, and associated material.
Because many of the map and archive sources relating to the cartographic history of Scotland are fragile and rare, holding institutions have often not been able to make them as widely available to researchers as they might wish.
The wide dispersion of the maps throughout the UK, and the fact that many related textual archives are located in different institutions hundreds of miles away, has also hindered research in the past.
Architectural drawings and their associated records are important to many academic disciplines including history, geography, engineering and planning, as well as for the study of design, art and architecture.
‘The Drawn Evidence’, a Dundee University-led project, is scanning and cataloguing a core section of circa 10,000 selected Scottish architectural drawings and related textual archives and associated material and making them accessible through a dedicated single web-based search interface.
Another large-scale digitisation project, ‘The Visual Evidence’ aims to provide access to the very substantial and important photographic archives at universities of Aberdeen, Dundee and St Andrews.
The ‘AIM25’ project, led by King’s College London, provides a single point of networked access to descriptions of the archives and manuscript collections of the principal colleges and schools of the University of London, of other universities and colleges in London and the surrounding area bounded by the M25 motorway, and of some of the principal royal colleges and societies of medicine and science based in London.
The archives of more than fifty institutions are covered.
The overall purpose of the project is to make it much easier for researchers from a wide variety of academic disciplines to locate information about archival collections held in London and the M25 area, and to assist in cross-disciplinary use of archives.
These examples merely serve to give a taster of the diversity and interest that Ariadne readers will find in RSLP projects Do look at the RSLP website <http://www.rslp.ac.uk> for further information.
You will find hotlinks to project websites from the RSLP site.
Mapping and co-ordinating collections and their acquisition, cataloguing, subject-indexing and preservation is only worthwhile as part of a national strategy if readers who need access can obtain it.
But there are real additional costs attached to providing access to research collections for users who are ‘external’ to the institution holding the resources.
Major holdings libraries within the UK higher education sector have until very recently received no compensation for the ‘burden’ imposed by visiting research-active staff and students from other UK higher education institutions.
The RSLP Access strand (worth £5m per annum) seeks to compensate major holdings libraries for extra costs incurred in providing access and services for ‘external researchers’.4 One view that was consistently voiced in the focus groups that formed part of the consultation exercise during the early days of RSLP, was that the availability, on the Web, of descriptions of collections would be very valuable.
There was a desire within RSLP, that if descriptions were going to be produced for the Web, then they should be created in a consistent manner.
The collection description work undertaken for RSLP by UKOLN aims to enable projects to describe collections in a consistent and machine-readable way.
Although, within RSLP, the main benefits are being felt by those wishing to describe print collections, it was intended that the results of the project should be applicable to physical and electronic collections of all kinds, including library, art and museum materials.
This activity has gained some considerable momentum and RSLP, JISC and the British Library are now jointly funding the ‘Collection Description Focus’ service, the purpose of which is to provide authoritative advice and guidance on collection description implementation to the UK library, information, archive, and cultural heritage, communities.
An account of the work of the Focus may be found elsewhere in this issue of Ariadne.
RSLP has funded, or co-funded, a number of important studies.
Together with JISC and the British Library, for example, it commissioned the Feasibilty Study for a UK National Union Catalogue.
Further scoping work for SUNCAT, a national serials union catalogue is currently underway.5 The RSLP-funded study, Barriers to Resource Sharing in Higher Education Libraries, 6 reported at the beginning of February this year.
With JISC, the Programme is, in addition, co-funding a study entitled The DNER and the DNC – the Human Element,7 which is examining human resource issues relating to project work.
RSLP is also running a series of seminars on ‘Experience of running collaborative projects’ in order to learn what managing collaborative projects has really been like, at the sharp end.
These studies, and reports of RSLP activity, are helping inform the deliberations of the new Research Support Libraries Group (RSLG), chaired by Sir Brian Follett.
Among other matters, it is expected that the RSLG will review the operation of the RSLP access model to recommend options for a long-term scheme to support integrated access to resources of national importance; consider further development of a co-ordinated strategy for and provision of materials in printed and electronic form, and assess how best to use the resources of JISC and the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) team to facilitate this strategy.
The very fact that we have such a group augurs well for the future and one can but hope that the bedrock that RSLP has helped create will provide a solid foundation for future developments.
References 1.
[Follett Report] Joint funding councils’ libraries review.
Joint Funding Councils’ Libraries Review Group: report (1993).
Available at <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/> 2.
[Anderson Report] Joint funding councils’ libraries review.
Report of the Group on a National/Regional Strategy for Library Provision for Researchers (1996).
Available at: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/anderson>.
3.
Cross-sectoral funding arrangements are discussed more fully in: Ronald Milne.
‘Joined-up funding: promoting and facilitating collaborative work’ in Stella Pilling and Stephanie Kenna (eds) Co-operation in action.
London: Library Association Publishing, 2002.
4.
For a full account of the survey which provided the data on which the RSLP Access strand annual allocations for the academic years 1999-2000 to 2001-2002 were made see: Ronald Milne and Gill Davenport.
The Research Support Libraries Programme Access Survey.
New review of academic librarianship, vol.
5 (1999), 23 – 39.
5.
The final report of the UK National Union Catalogue study , and the serials workpackage, is available at <http://www.uknuc.shef.ac.uk>.
6.
The Barriers to Resource Sharing report is available through the ‘Publications’ section of the RSLP website, <http://www.rslp.ac.uk>.
7.
The Invitation to tender for the Human Element study is available through the ‘Publications’ section of the RSLP website, <http://www.rslp.ac.uk>.
The study is expected to report in July 2002.
Author Details   Ronald Milne Director, Research Support Libraries Programme Article Title: “The ‘Distributed National Collection’ Access, and Cross-sectoral Collaboration: the Research Support Libraries Programme” Author: Ronald Milne Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/rslp/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data dissemination usability archives metadata copyright video preservation cataloguing multimedia research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Multimedia Archive Preservation a practical workshop Organised by IASA, FIAT, PRESTO, ECPA … and more!
22-24 May 2002 in London, UK Overview: 80% of audio and video archive content is at risk, according to the results of EC project PRESTO.
Unless preservation procedures are funded and implemented quickly unique heritage and commercially valuable material will be lost.
This workshop will provide, in a concentrated three days, the combined experience of ten major European broadcast archives, and the new technology developed by PRESTO.
What we will cover: Funding: sources of funding; a model business case; benchmark costs Selection: criteria; prioritisation; life expectancy and condition monitoring.
The preservation factory: how to process the most material with the least labour; how to control quality; how to manage metadata; what to include and (exclude) during preservation to maximise access and future use Sustainability: the ‘total cost of ownership’ of archive material; technology for automation of quality monitoring and data update; media life expectancy; what formats to choose Online and Internet: how to build new technology into a preservation project without blowing the budget The small archive: how to be efficient on small-scale projects; special funding for private and historical collections; sources of support, advice and resources; out-sourcing options Commercial resources: information on technology and facility houses specialising in multimedia archive preservation; comparative costs; how to manage quality and cost; do’s and don’ts of working with contractor New technology: advances in mass storage, process automation, automatic quality control, and asset management; what it is, what it really can and cannot do, costs and benefits.
Also new technology developed by PRESTO and by related EC projects.
More information and registration details can be found at: http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/calendar.html#presto [November 2001] The Bridgeman Art Library welcomes the Charmet Archive into its collection The Bridgeman Art Library, the world’s leading source of fine art images, is delighted to announce its exclusive representation of the Charmet archive.
Assembled over thirty years by Jean Loup Charmet, the archive comprises an unparalleled collection of over 400,000 images covering events, culture, science, people and places from every era, with special focus on France.
This representation strengthens The Bridgeman Art Library’s holding of French photography and follows the acquisition of Giraudon earlier this year, one of France’s oldest and most prestigious picture libraries.
Founder and Director Harriet Bridgeman commented; “ The Charmet archive is renowned, not only for the quality of its images, but also for the craftsmanship of its assembly.
Subjects as diverse as exploration, theatre and dance, industry and food are represented, enriching a collection already renowned for its cultural scope and complementing the service we are developing for specifically for French-speaking clients through Bridgeman Giraudon, our new Paris office.” Picture researchers and creative professionals can now request Charmet images through Bridgeman’s offices in London, Paris and New York or through the company’s searchable website catalogue at http://www.bridgeman.co.uk.
Expert picture researchers, all art historians, are on hand to offer research guidance or to make selections of images on clients’ behalf.
[6 November 2001] >Official Launch of CASS Collaborative Academic Store for Scotland Project SCURL (Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries) has received funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland to undertake a 6 month study from November 2001 to determine the optimal model for a collaborative storage and delivery service for valuable but low-use research materials held in Scottish university libraries.
CASS (Collaborative Academic Store for Scotland) aims to address pertinent library issues in terms of reducing storage costs, re-allocation of space, enhancing access, preservation, and increasing co-operation between academic and, if feasible, public libraries and archives, to benefit the research community.
Key deliverables will include the wide dissemination of project findings in the form of a final report and a detailed business plan for a collaborative facility.
CASS will enable the viability of a collaborative storage facility within Scotland to be identified.
Information Professionals and members of the research community will provide CASS with the majority of its findings.
Additional study will focus on literature reviews and similar collaborative ventures in Europe, Australia and America.
Project documentation, resources, and general information will be disseminated via the CASS web site at http://scurl.ac.uk/projects/cass/index.html [November 2001] Oxford adds new dimension to the dissemination and pursuit of knowledge Finding answers to tricky questions in Oxford’s famous reference works will soon take just seconds.
In March 2002 Oxford University Press will publish its core language and subject reference dictionaries online for the first time.
A two-year collaborative project between OUP Oxford and OUP New York will make 100 titles available as a subscription service to academic, corporate, and specialist libraries, schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and government offices around the world from San Francisco to Sydney.
Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection comprises well over one million dictionary definitions, facts, figures, people, places, sayings, and dates from 100 of Oxfords central English and bilingual dictionaries, usage, quotations, and subject reference books all combined to create one integrated knowledge resource.
A key benefit of the service will be regular updating from Oxfords extensive programme of new references and regular new editions of works on core subjects.
With around 30 new and revised works due between now and 2004 on subjects such as statistics, tourism, sport, archaeology, and business, expanding a reference collection and keeping it up to date will be quicker and simpler than ever before.
It will also be safer.
With so much unchecked information on the internet, the fact that every Oxford reference work is written by experts and extensively checked for quality before publication, will be an additional reason to Ask Oxford.
For more information visit the ORO web-site at http://www.oxfordreference.com [November 2001] JISC Call for Proposals Pre-announcement: Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Programme (FAIR)   A Call for Proposals will be issued in early January 2002 with expected closing date in late February 2002.
This pre-announcement alerts the HE/FE community to the call and allows institutions to explore possible partnerships or consortium proposals in advance of the call being issued.
The JISC is establishing a new programme in which a number of projects will be funded to disclose and deposit digital assets held within the higher education and further education community.
The programme will also allow intelligence to be gathered about the technical, organizational and cultural challenges of these processes.
It is intended that this programme Focus on Access to Institutional Resources will contribute to developing the mechanisms and supporting services to allow the submission and sharing of content generated by the HE/FE community.
An important source of inspiration for this programme is the vision of the Open Archives Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org) that digital resources can be shared between organisations based on a simple mechanism which allows metadata about those resources to be harvested into services.
For example in the e-prints community this is realised through data providers who mount the e-prints and then disclose their metadata to service providers who are able to organise and present this information for users: The FAIR Programme is interested in proposals for projects in the following areas: * Support the disclosure of institutional assets, including institutional eprint archives and other types of digital collections, and to explore the use of emerging protocols in this area, particularly the OAI (the Open Archives Initiative protocol) Explore the usability of metadata disclosed and issues of harvesting institutional assets into subject-based and other services for example the Resource Discovery Network and the Arts and Humanities Data Service Through deposit or disclosure of relevant resources, to augment existing collections which have proven learning, teaching or research value * Experiment with the embedding of JISC collections and services in local institutional portals and how well they can be presented in conjunction with institutionally managed assets Investigate the collections management, technical, organizational and cultural challenges of institutional asset disclosure and deposit, including issues relating to the establishment and administration of institutionally provided services for digital collections It is hoped that all this work will lead to a much better understanding of the efficiency with which research and learning resources can be made more accessible and their visibility increased, and to explore the support and resources needed at a national and local level to allow this to take place as a core activity in the longer term.
Higher and further education institutions funded via the UK funding bodies will be eligible to submit proposals.
Proposals both from single institutions and consortia of institutions will be welcomed.
As guidance, proposals for projects of from 1 to 3 years duration and with budgets ranging from £10,000 to £300,000 will be considered.
The programme will commence in April/May 2002, though project start dates can be staggered and projects starting after July 31st 2002 will also be considered.
This programme is part of the JISC Information Environment Development: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/IEstrategy.html [December 2001] Eurographics UK Conference 2002 | Call for Papers This is a call for papers for the 20th Eurographics UK Conference which will be taking place at De Montfort University, Leicester, Tuesday June 11th 13th Thursday June 6th 2002.
The initial deadline for completed papers is 4th February 2002.
For more information go to: http://www.eguk.org.uk/DMU02/index.html and details of call for papers are at: http://www.eguk.org.uk/DMU02/cfp.html This year the conference themes are in Art & Design focusing on: Next generation web design and e-commerce * Digital Arts * Computer Animation and Games * Web Based Learning and design for interactive TV and 3G phones * Virtual Heritage and in Technology focusing on: * 3D/2D displays and holographic presentations * 3D/2D image creation and processing * Next generation HCI [December 2001] Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: FAST, the Biggest and Best Yet?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: FAST, the Biggest and Best Yet?
Buzz data database copyright video mp3 ftp url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley explains how 'FAST' has recently been launched as the most comprehensive of the search engines, and this article compares the FAST results with those of AltaVista and Northern Light.
FAST new but better?
FAST Fast Search and Transfer ASA was established on July 16th 1997 and the search engine (1) arose out of a project initiated at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim.
Their system is powered by Dell Systems and they have an impressive grouping of partners, such as 3Com, CompuServe, Corbis, Lycos, and almost inevitably, Microsoft and Sun.
The aim of FAST is to index the entire web by the end of this year; they expect to be able to index one billion documents and beyond.
Their byline is ‘All The Web, All The Time TM’.
The FAST database currently holds in the region of 200,000,000 webpages, which compares very favourably with AltaVista (2) (150,000,000) and Northern Light (3) (160,000,000), although if we accept figures of 800,000,000 webpages currently available, they still have a long way to go in their quest to index all of them.
However, be that as it may if you’re looking for a single search engine and you require comprehensiveness in your searching, it is certainly worth taking a look at.
At first glance the interface is plain, simple and uncluttered it looks like all other new search engine interfaces before they start to get involved with portals, free email accounts and links to commercial offerings such as Amazon.
It certainly makes a refreshing change from the overly busy (some might say messy) opening pages that other search engines have.
There is the usual ‘search for’ box, with a pull-down menu offering to search for any word, all words or a phrase search.
It’s at this point that I began to have one or two misgivings about the ability of the search engine, so I immediately headed over to the ‘Help’ option.
It is a shame to have to report that I might as well have not bothered it consists of information that anyone who has ever used a search engine will be familiar with double quotes for a phrase search, + sign to include and sign to exclude, with a couple of examples.
In this it performs badly in comparision with other search engines which do provide valuable and informative help screens.
This is a theme that I’ll be returning to in this article simply because a search engine has a large database doesn’t mean that it’s going to be a good and effective way of searching the Internet.
Returning to the search screen I was intrigued to note a link through to the FA Premier Division website (4).
I have no idea why it’s there, and I couldn’t find out, but it’s there!
Returning to the search box, I ran a quick search and have to say that I was impressed with the speed; the results were returned faster than any other search engine I’ve ever used.
FAST claims that it can search through all 200,000,000 web pages in less than a second and on the evidence of the searches that I ran I’m not going to contradict them!
They also say that they can rebuild their document index in 12 hours, leading to fresher results than search engines that take days or in some cases weeks to do the same thing.
Let’s now turn to look at the results that were returned, and compare them with those of the other two heavyweights, AltaVista and Northern Light.
I did a number of quick searches and have included the results in the table below.
All the searches were conducted at the same time and since FAST does not deferentiate between cases, they were all done as lower case searches.
Search terms FAST AltaVista Northern Light ariadne 47,615 58,490 33,478 +dyslexia +adult -children 1,520 3,995 2,034 “I wandered lonely as a cloud” 967 625 536 “uk office for library and information networking” 2,546 990 1,600 “phil bradley” 1,065 651 803 “phil bradley” -porn 979 (9⁄10) 622 (7⁄10) 724 (2⁄10) The results generally do suggest that FAST is more comprehensive than its two main rivals, at least in the area of database size, though it did fare badly with the dyslexia search.
However, it doesn’t appear to be as far ahead of its rivals as it perhaps might like to be seen, and I found the ‘ariadne’ example particularly telling!
In case you’re wondering about the last search that I did, for my sins I have a namesake in the US, who was a gay porn star, so after running the first search I ran a second to try and eliminate some of those references.
I then checked them to see how many of the first ten returned pages were mine or about me.
This isn’t really a fair test, since I didn’t give the engines any more to work with than that, but once again FAST came out on top.
At this point I could of course stop and summarise by saying that FAST is comprehensive, and as its name suggests, that’s exactly what it is.
Relevance seems to work well, with an emphasis on finding words in the title of the web pages, rather than (for example) on links, repetition of key words and so on.
If you wanted to introduce FAST to your novice users who wanted to do quick and dirty searches you could do a lot worse.
However, how does the search engine stack up against the others when we begin to delve a little bit further?
The answer has to be ‘not very well’, I’m afraid to say.
The only search options that you get are the ones that I’ve already mentioned.
I looked and tried in vain for truncation, searching using upper case, searching in titles, URL and host.
Admittedly FAST do have options to search for FTP and MP3 files, (which actually links through to the Lycos search engine), but it does not come close to offering the same facilities as AltaVista for example, which provides much greater variety in terms of images and video clips for example.
This is perhaps a slightly unfair criticism, but no-one ever said that the Internet was a fair place; in order to compete search engines have to offer more than the ability to search web pages.
Both AltaVista and Northern Light have been in the business for much longer than FAST, and they have been capitalising on that by adding all the extra facilities.
Both have their own unique selling points Northern Light with its special collection and custom created folders provides access to data otherwise difficult to get hold of, and AltaVista has very sophisticated search options.
FAST has a large database, and returns results with blistering speed, but is this enough in the short term to challenge for the top spot?
The lack of extra features is a real drawback to its use, and although I may well use it in addition to my current favourites, it isn’t going to displace them.
In the longer term however, if these issues are addressed, and it can continue to index a larger database of web pages then it will be difficult to ignore it.
References FAST AltaVista Northern Light FA Premier League Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Article Title: FAST: The biggest and best yet?
Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/search-engines/intro.html   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ALA '98 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ALA '98 Buzz html database usability doi browser identifier copyright cataloguing licence telnet privacy research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Ian Winship reports on electronic library related activity at this year's American Library Association Conference in Washington D.C. "I pressed F1, but you didn’t come over to help."
"If they are clicking they are looking for information.
If they are typing we tell them to stop because they are using Hotmail."
"The most important issue in electronic delivery is printing."
…Just a few quotes from the American Library Association conference in Washington DC at the end of June.
Why was I at ALA?
Well, like a lot of you who go to the Online Exhibition in December I entered various free draws without much thought for them.
Thus I was surprised a little later to get a call from Information Access Company to say I’d won their draw, but even more so to learn the prize was not the usual bottle of champagne but a trip to the ALA Conference.
This event is not like the typical UK conference with a couple of hundred people on a university campus and with a general theme.
It attracts around 20,000 people and has hundreds of events in various venues across the city, organised by the divisions and interest groups of the ALA and covering all aspects of librarianship.
Some events start as early as 7.00 (not the ones I went to!
); others don’t finish till 10.00 or later in the evening and there are dozens happening simultaneously.
Though there is a thick printed programme some activities are known only to members of the particular groups involved and it is really only possible to sample the conference.
This report similarly is illustrative of a range of presentations, poster sessions, discussion groups and so on.
Usability and user studies Some interesting work at the University of Arizona [1,2] brought familiar conclusions: users don’t read instructions or subject guides; their needs are not what librarians think they are; explanatory text on pages may be ignored; there must be incentives to participate in focus groups, with a going rate of $10, or a free lunch for faculty.
Other points of interest were: graphical icons can substitute for words, so a picture of a magazine or newspaper can stand as a link to indexes; the positioning of options on a screen may imply their relative importance; have a "where to find" drop down menu, for example where to find maps.
At the University of Wisconsin [3] they used the QUIS questionnaire, while a study of the JSTOR full text journal collection at the University of Michigan using Web Assisted Self Interview (WASI) showed: a decrease in use over two years (though it was accepted that meaningful longitudinal studies are difficult); higher use by economists than historians because more of their core journals were included; printing was important, but difficult to achieve because of poor technical support; users like the search facilities.
A study on the preference of library school students for the Web or telnet interface to the Dialog system used the concept of emotive aspects of searching [4] stress, frustration, surprise as a way of evaluating interfaces.
It showed familiarity with techniques and skill levels as being more important than the actual interface, as long as support is given.
Hotbot’s Marketing Coordinator told of their extensive user testing, based on observation, focus groups, online questionnaires, e-mail feedback and query logs.
He concluded that: people don’t know how Web search engines work and this earned a cheer of agreement from the audience; the average query uses 1.7 terms; the ‘Expert’ label had deterred people, so was changed to ‘More options’; people do not use the help files; and it is hard to get an interface that will satisfy all 8 million users.
An overview paper on methods divided them into those like usability labs, interviews and surveys which are largely retrospective, and those like transaction logs and content analysis which are more real time.
Most studies rely on the former.
A general issue that arose from the session was of privacy violation in identifying users from transaction logs.
One study logged IP addresses but gave each a random number in order to track usage, but without knowing who the users were.
A plea for more user based online help suggested a need for hints, examples, error details and auto detection word processors can detect spelling errors so why cannot search services?
In addition librarians should provide roving assistance.
Although users may seem to be coping, they are often just reluctant to ask for help, so staff should be more proactive.
Other user studies are cited in the bibliography [5].
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) The librarians who spoke on this topic were sceptical.
One urged the audience to call them "publishers’ DOIs", although the Director of the International DOI Foundation [6] suggested "authors’ DOIs" was more appropriate.
The Foundation now has offices, one member of staff, has raised some money from members such as publishers, abstracting services, Microsoft and copyright bodies and will soon issue a White Paper.
Other world bodies like ISBN International, ISO, NISO and Internet organisations are also getting involved.
There were a number of queries raised: about what is unique HTML and PDF versions would be different; how usable DOIs will be; is it all about rights management?
; can DOIs cope with the same information in different locations, such as an electronic journal?
There were also assurances that free publications, such as those from governments, could be accommodated.
The project is huge given the potential number of objects.
Time Inc has a collection of 20 million digital images, but in 3 years only 500,000 have been catalogued.
Mmovies are analysed for every 5 seconds of image and music.
Given the size of the task, retrospective processing may be limited.
What will be the impact on libraries?
the answer was how do libraries want to use them?
The Virtual Library The talks dealt with collaborative projects statewide and in other ways where the aim, at least at present, is to make the partner library catalogues available to all (usually with OCLC SiteSearch) and to have general access to things like core full text journals and FirstSearch databases, rather than to bring into one institution the range of national and local material that UK hybrid library projects are attempting.
Galileo in Georgia [7] is the longest established and covers universities, public libraries and schools.
Key to its development has been political support from the State Governor and $10m from the Georgia Lottery.
CIC, or the Big Ten [8], is an upper Mid West collaborative scheme with similar features to Galileo.
They set up a Centre for Library Initiatives to coordinate development and saved $1m by negotiating licence fees centrally.
A third presentation was on MnLINK [9], a project in Minnesota which is still at the planning stage.
Other noteworthy items The Library of Congress Web page has a feedback facility.
Questions range from the sensible to the ignorant: send me a catalogue of everything you have; Isn’t everything in the Library electronic full text?
It was also stated that as enquirers can be impatient, sometimes mailing again after 10 minutes to see how their enquiry is progressing, the scope and limitations of such services should be made clear to users.
There were also: a comparison of the coverage of full text journals by different services [10]; two attempts at guiding users through the information research process [11,12]; an outline of a programme to promote electronic resources within a university [13]; the tale of the university library director who did not know how to maximise his browser window in Windows95.
And just to show it wasn’t all PCs, the recently restored domed reading room at the Library of Congress is wonderful.
References Testing for usability in the design of a new information gateway restricted http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/library/teams/access9798/usability_studies/ltf2.htm Focus group transcripts restricted http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/library/teams/access9798/focus_groups/ QUIS questionnaire http://lap.umd.edu/QUISfolder/quisHome.html TENOPIR, C., 1994 The emotions of searching.
Library journal, 119 (14), 134-136 Current user research bibliography http://www.lib.muohio.edu/~shocker/mars/bib.html International DOI Foundation http://www.doi.org GALILEO http://galileo.galib.uga.edu CIC Virtual Electronic Library http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/cli/accessvel.html MnLINK http://www.heso.state.mn.us How full is the full in full-text?
http://www2.potsdam.edu/LIBR/franckcr/ALA.html Research QuickStart http://research.lib.umn.edu SFITS.
Searching for information: the steps http://www.rwc.uc.edu/library/sfitsweb/sfits.htm Promoting electronic resources at the University of Central Florida http://library.ucf.edu/ref/promoting.htm Author Details Ian Winship Electronic Services Manager University of Northumbria at Newcastle Email: ian.winship@unn.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IMS Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IMS Workshop Buzz software rdf database xml metadata standardisation identifier vocabularies schema copyright lom interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracy Gardner reports on a meeting held in March in the Francis Hotel, Bath.
“IMS is a global coalition of academic, commercial and government organizations, working together to define the Internet architecture for learning.” Excerpt from the IMS project website [1].
IMS was originally a US-based organisation but now wishes to be seen as an international effort.
In the UK, the JISC is an investment partner and a UK IMS centre has been set up [2].
Recently, I attended two UK IMS events: the IMS Developer Workshop (March 23 24 1999, Bath) and the IMS/eLib Concertation Day (May 4 1999, London).
This article provides an overview of these events from a technical perspective.
I went along to the events wanting to find out what action developers of (learning/library) information systems should be taking at the moment and what plans we should be making for the future.
The IMS Metadata specification is discussed in more detail since it is currently one of the most complete specifications and a public draft is available.
What is IMS?
IMS is a set of specifications which will allow learning management systems to interoperate both with each other and with external support systems such as administrative databases.
A discussion of learning management systems and their relationship with IMS can be found in a previous Ariadne article [3].
IMS is not an application in itself, it is a set of specifications (which will undergo standardisation) to which applications can conform.
It does not make sense to say that a system is simply IMS compliant.
But it would make sense to state that a search engine robot IMS Metadata v1.0 compliant.
IMS currently contains a number of specifications including: Packaging Specification for grouping together content into deployable units (e.g.
a course) and the information required to use it (e.g.
table of contents, launching details).
Metadata Concerned with developing a standard set of IMS metadata elements; also recommended vocabularies; implementation issues such as transport format(s); and mechanisms for extending IMS metadata (registries).
Questions/Tests Specification for creating reusable questions and tests.
Profiles Specification for sharing user profile information such as preferences and educational performance.
The specifications are intended to feed into open standards through appropriate standardisation committees.
Is IMS a good thing?
It may seem that building systems to standards which may be overly complex for your local requirements is an unnecessary burden.
This may be true if your systems are relatively simple and self contained.
If however, you wish to start sharing content, user information or system components with external systems then the benefits of standards become apparent.
Additionally, systems often develop beyond their original complexity, if you have implemented your system to support a thoroughly considered standard then incorporating new user requirements should turn out to be much less painful.
As the IMS standards develop and are (hopefully) supported by free and commercial software it should become possible to take an existing tools and combine them with components developed to suit local needs.
This will allow developers to focus on the interesting aspects of a system without having to reinvent all the basic parts.
Standards like IMS promote such scenarios and prevent the proliferation of multiple incompatible approaches or the domination of the proprietary approach of a single company which has no desire to support interoperability.
Can I start implementing the specifications?
The final IMS version 1.0 specifications should have started to appear in April this year (packaging and metadata) with further specifications following throughout 1999.
Unfortunately there has been some slippage on these dates.
Only a draft version of the IMS Metadata specification has been made public to date.
Public versions of specifications will be made available from the specifications area of the IMS website [4].
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that if you are a developer or investment member of IMS then you can access draft versions of the specifications before they are released.
The JISC is an investment member of the IMS and this entitles all UK HE and FE institutions to have access to the IMS Technical Development Site [5] which contains, amongst other things, internal documents such as current versions of specifications.
Lisa Rowlands at Bangor (l.rowlands@bangor.ac.uk) is the UK contact for getting access to the private areas of the IMS website.
Should I start implementing the specifications?
If you have an existing system for which some of the IMS specifications would be applicable and the system is currently stable and in service then you probably don’t need to be in a hurry to rewrite it to comform to IMS specifications.
In this case it is probably better to wait until the IMS specifications have been publicly released and have stabilised.
Even then you will need to consider which aspects of your system need to be IMS compliant.
If you have a system that is currently undergoing further development then the advice is slightly different.
You will probably want to concentrate on IMS compliance at the boundaries of your system.
For example, if you need to export metadata to another system then you may wish to do this using the IMS metadata specification.
If on the other hand you are about to start a new project then the IMS specifications may provide a useful starting point.
If, for example, you need a way of packaging up learning resources into deployment units then you should probably make use of the IMS Packaging specification .
Even if interoperability is not a current requirement after all there is currently very little that you could be (IMS) interoperable with you will save yourself the effort of coming up with a home-grown solution.
Most of the IMS specifications have not yet stabilised.
This has both negative and positive aspects, the specification may change and you may need to update your application to remain compliant but on the other hand you may be able to feed into the specification development process to ensure that your requirements are met.
The UK IMS Centre is keen for UK developers to start implementing the IMS specifications in their applications if you have an interest in doing this you should get in touch with them (initially via Lisa Rowlands who will be able to put you in touch with an appropriate person).
Which specifications should I focus on initially?
The metadata and packaging specifications are currently the most complete.
These specifications are a good place to start if you intend to begin implementing the IMS specifications and metadata and packaging are relevant to your application.
IMS Metadata specification Since a draft version of the IMS Metadata specification is publicly available it’s possible to describe to provide an overview here to give an idea of what it would take to make an application IMS Metadata compliant.
The scope of the IMS Metadata specification is (from developer workshop): Support discovery Support retrieval of learning resources Provide information for run-time of resource Enable extensibility Support localization Be easy to use Be interoperable Provide stability The basic idea behind the IMS metadata specification is that all applications should support a stable base schema for metadata which contains a number of mandatory and optional elements, applications should be able to specialise and extend this schema for their own purposes, such extensions need not be supported by other applications but where there is agreement shared extensions can be facilitated by registries.
IMS metadata is based on the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) v2.2 standard [6] which was developed by IMS and ARIADNE.
The IMS master metadata schema corresponds to the IEEE LOM and is organised into a hierarchy with the following metadata categories at the top level: general, characteristics, life cycle, metametadata, educational, technical, rights, relation and annotation.
The IMS metadata specification defines four levels of obligation for metadata elements: mandatory, optional, conditional (must appear if another element is included) and not allowed (used when specialising an optional element in a local schema).
In addition metadata elements may be non-repeatable, or may have an ordered or unordered list as a value.
The mandatory elements form the IMS Base Metadata Schema which all IMS metadata compliant systems must support.
Mandatory metadata elements include: General.Identifier; General.Title; Characteristics.Language; Characteristics.Description; Lifecycle.Version; Lifecycle.Create.Date; Lifecycle.Publish.Organisation; Meta-metadata.Create.Person; Technical.Format; Technical.OSRequirements.OperatingSystem.
Extensions of the base schema for describing items, modules and tools are also provided, these draw on the master schema.
The role of the Dublin Core [7] element set for resource discovery has been considered in the development of the IMS metadata element set.
IMS metadata subsumes the Dublin Core in its descriptive power but, unfortunately, there is no direct inclusion of the 15 Dublin Core elements.
The IEEE LOM includes a mapping from the Dublin Core element set to the LOM/IMS element set, all Dublin Core elements can be mapped onto LOM/IMS elements but the correspondance is not 1-1.
An IMS metadata record does not point to a Dublin Core record for the same resource, instead it includes the information that would have been entered into a Dublin Core record.
If for example, you wish to embed both IMS metadata and Dublin Core metadata into the same resource then there will be duplication of information.
The IEEE LOM includes a mapping from the Dublin Core element set to the LOM/IMS element set all Dublin Core elements can be mapped onto LOM/IMS elements but the correspondance is not 1-1.
An XML representation of IMS metadata is used throughout the IMS metadata specification but it is not the only way that IMS metadata could be interchanged.
Other representations including alternate XML representations (e.g.
using RDF) might be used in practice.
Appendix D, the non-normative implementation guide, is currently empty.
For early adopters of IMS metadata the focus should be following the IMS schema rather than exchanging IMS metadata in a standard way.
‘Hard-coding’ of metadata in a particular XML representation is not the best approach.
It is better to generate XML from a database so that it can be exported in a variety of formats if necessary.
Conclusion The IMS specifications are at a stage where proof-of-concept implementations are required.
It’s not the right time to rewrite all of your applications to be compliant to the appropriate IMS specifications but if you are reimplementing them for other reasons or you are developing new software then you should consider the IMS specifications both for your own short term gain (no need to reinvent existing specifications) and for the long term (interoperability).
If IMS takes off and it has the backing of many major players who could make that possible then you’ll be ahead of the game if you have already considered the relevance of IMS to your systems.
References [1] The IMS Project website http://www.imsproject.org [2] The UK IMS Centre http://www.imsproject.bangor.ac.uk [3] SELLIC: Learning Management and the Library http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/ims/ [4] IMS Specifications http://www.imsproject.org/specifications.html [5] IMS Technical Development Site http://www.imsproject.org/dn/techdev/ [6] IEEE P1484.12 Learning Objects Metadata Working Group http://www.manta.ieee.org/p1484/wg-12.htm [7] The Dublin Core http://purl.oclc.org/dc/ Acknowledgements Thanks to Ian Upton from the BUILDER eLib project for useful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Author Details Tracy Gardner Technical Development and Research, UKOLN E-mail: t.a.gardner@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 28: Ariadne's Thread Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 28: Ariadne's Thread Buzz software database xml metadata accessibility preservation graphics e-learning personalisation svg rslp url research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Napier reviews recent developments on the cultural front and the contents of issue 28.
Here in the UK we are living in the aftermath of the recent General election.
Although apathy was the order of the day and few seats actually changed hands, important changes have been made that are worth mentioning here in Ariadne.
In a Cabinet reshuffle the government has replaced the previous Culture secretary, Chris Smith, with Tessa Jowell, formerly a minister of state in the Department for Education and Employment.
Working alongside her in the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) will be Tessa Blackstone, also a previous minister in the DFEE.
Baroness Blackstone is to take over as minister of state for the arts with responsibility for the arts, crafts, museums, galleries and libraries.
In her preceding role she was responsible for the government's commitment to "lifelong learning".
Some links to interesting assessment of the online election coverage are given in this issue's Planet SOSIG column.
Closer to home UKOLN is now hosting the UK Collection Description Focus service.
The service, which is funded by the UK Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP), JISC/DNER and the British Library, will "provide advice and guidance on collection description implementation, with the objective of developing consensus in order to ensure consistency and compatibility of approaches".
Ariadne hopes to have more detailed coverage on the Collection Description Focus's work in the next issue.
In this issue we feature an interesting and relevant article from David Duce on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML that is under recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium.
David Duce is a Professor in Computer Science at the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Oxford Brookes University and has been working in the computer graphics field since 1975.
He has been involved in the SVG initiative since its origination in 1998.
With interest in e-learning on the increase we are featuring two articles that look at different projects that have been set up in this area.
Derek Morrison's article on Project Gold (Guidance Online for those Learning at a Distance) describes one of the first e-learning projects that attempted to address the issues raised by the creation of distance and online learning software.
Sarah Currier's piece introduces a new JISC project, INSPIRAL (INveStigating Portals for Information Resources And Learning), which investigates further virtual and managed learning environments (VLEs and MLEs) by joining them with digital libraries to create a fully integrated online learning experience.
The article from Michael Breaks providing an overview of the Hybrid Library Projects winds up coverage of the eLib projects, though Ariadne will continue to report on the 5 remaining projects BUILDER, AGORA, MALIBU, HeadLine and HyLife for as long as they run.
Other feature pieces include insight into two new projects: The Reading Experience Database Project, a new web-based project designed to collate evidence for changing reading habits through history, by Alexis Weedon.
And the Information for Nursing and Health in a Learning Environment (INHALE) Project described by Margaret Weaver.
Alison McNab, a former regular editorial co-ordinator for Ariadne, also provides a review of the wealth of resources available for trainers provided by the information service and content providers within JISC-supported services.
Some of you may have noticed by now that Philip Hunter, Ariadne's usual captain, is not the editor of this issue.
No need for alarm, Philip remains fighting fit and here at UKOLN.
He has used the 'time out' from editing this issue to produce an article on Universities and the Electronic Publishing Revolution which compares the involvement of universities in electronic publishing with their role in the earlier publishing revolution of the 15th century.
This issue is almost UKOLN heavy with a number of other articles from UKOLN authors.
Monica Bonett, who works principally on the Imesh Project, gives a detailed overview of personalization on the World Wide Web.
Her article discusses how these ideas could be development within current resource discovery systems.
Leona Carpenter reports on the key issue of accessibility that was covered at the Seattle Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, and also provides a round-up of sources of further information.
And in a follow up piece to last issue's Encoding OpenURLs in Dublin Core metadata Andy Powell describes UKOLN's OpenResolver, a freely available demonstration.
In the Metadata column this issue, in response to a D-Lib Magazine editorial written by Peter Hirtle, Michael Day considers the long-term preservation implications of one of the OAI protocol's potential applications e-print services.
UK Web Focus, Brian Kelly attended the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, held in Hong Kong on 1-5 May 2001 and has written a review of 'what's hot' this year with the Web for his Web Focus column.
In his Web Watch column Brian looks at the size of institutional top level pages, work which hopefully be taken further at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2001 held at the Queens University Belfast next week (25-27 June).
There are three at the event write-ups in issue 28.
John Kirriemuir gives his account of fluorescent t-shirts, phone conferencing and tutorials ago-go on the Edinburgh stage of the launch of the Resource Discovery Network's Virtual Training Suite.
Sandy Shaw reports on a seminar bringing together experts in the field of linking technology for JISC's JOIN-UP Programme.
And I attended the mda's 'Beyond the Museum' colloquium held in the Oxford Union Debating Chamber in April.
Thanks again to Shirley Keane (for assistance with the Newsline section), and to Philip for all his help (though the words 'mother hen' come to mind regarding his concern for Ariadne!)
To his relief, Philip will be back at the helm next issue, relaxed and freshened after his break.
Suggestions for articles for issues 29 to 31 are now being considered.
Article proposals should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Enjoy the issue.
Marieke Napier Ariadne Editor Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 28: Ariadne's Thread" Author: Marieke Napier Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Corner Buzz database vocabularies copyright url standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley reviews 'Northern Light', which offers features not available elsewhere.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//SoftQuad//DTD HoTMetaL PRO 4.0::19971010::extensions to HTML 4.0//EN” “hmpro4.dtd”> New search engines appear all the time on the web.
Usually there is little to choose between the tools available other than the largely cosmetic differences of interface design However, every so often a new search engine comes along which seems to promise to take us to the ‘next level’ of web searching in terms of capability and functionality.
Northern Light is the latest contender to emerge in the battle for your searching custom.
Northern Light is a search engine with a couple of interesting extra features which set it apart from many of the other search engines currently available on the web.
First of all Northern Light offers access to not only web pages but to a collection of on-line journal articles and other materials which would usually only be available by subscription.
It is possible to search just the web, just the special collection or both when using the search engine.
Northern Light also offers an interesting feature which claims to improve the ease with which you can sort out useful and relevant information from a set of search results.
Results are automatically sorted into custom search folders which are created dynamically according to the most frequently occurring subject areas in your search results.
In terms of ‘look and feel’ Northern Light is pretty similar to most other search engines currently available on the web.
It has a simple search form on the home page [1] into which you type your search terms.
There are no advanced searching options available at present, which is a bit disappointing as it makes it difficult to combine more than a couple of terms in a search, or to restrict a search by language or date.
Apparently Northern Light are planning to introduce a ‘power search’ option in the near future, and this will include options for field searching, truncation and stemming and full Boolean searching.
[2] The searching language is very similar that currently used by other search engines such as Alta Vista or Hot Bot.
Search terms can be combined by using the plus sign (i.e.
: +holidays +Scotland to find documents containing both the words holidays AND Scotland).
Boolean OR and NOT are actually supported (i.e.
: holidays not Scotland to find information about holidays which are not in Scotland, holidays or Scotland to find information about either holidays or about Scotland).
Phrase searching is also supported, using quotation marks (i.e.
: “holidays in Scotland”).
Northern Light also uses relevancy ranking in order to sort your results and display them in relevancy order on screen.
This again, is similar to other popular search engines available on the web.
The real difference between Northern Light and other search engines emerges when you see what it does with your search results, especially in its use of custom search folders.
Custom Search Folders Northern Light builds your search results and categorises them into folders according to subject and type of resource which are created on the fly.
This enables you to see at a glance the different sorts of results that your search has retrieved.
These folders might include educational sites, commercial sites, personal pages and FAQ lists.
This can be useful in assessing the likely quality, value and relevance of sites retrieved from a search at a glance.
Custom search folders appear on the left of the screen when your search results are displayed.
In order to explore the value of custom search folders I performed an example search on the topic of Scotland.
This returned over 288,000 documents, sorted into the following custom folders, according to category: Special Collection documents Personal pages Government sites www.hmso.gov.uk Educational sites Gay men henge1.henge.com Scottish history www.cadvision.com members.aol.com Questions & Answers Macbeth all others At a glance it is possible to see the sorts of sites which are being retrieved from this search.
There are a number of documents from the Special Collection (more about which later on), plus other educational, personal and governmental sites.
There is also a collection of pages from specific web hosts (e.g.
: www.hmso.gov.uk) and some other miscellaneous topics (e.g.
: Macbeth).
If I was interested in government information about Scotland I could take a look at the government folder.
This folder opens up to display a number of subfolders covering related topics: www.hmso.gov.uk www.dundeecity.gov.uk Pensions Copyright www.hmis.scotoff.gov .uk www.hmc.gov.uk www.ncga.state.nc.us Criminal procedure Arbitration www.open.gov.uk www.doh.dot.state.nc .us all others… This is quite a useful way of ‘drilling down’ through a large number of search results in order to find relevant information.
At each level I am informed how many documents have been retrieved in that category, and this can potentially save time in wading through hundreds of search results in order to find useful and relevant information.
However, I am a little unsure about the categorisation.
How, for example, would I find information about tourism in Scotland using these folders?
Sites about tourism might be scattered across a number of different folders including government, personal pages, educational pages, Scottish history etc.
Finding information on this topic would not be immediately obvious from using the custom folders, and I might find it necessary to do quite a bit of guessing in order to track this down.
If I instead perform a search on +Scotland +tourism I get more sensible results.
This search retrieves 8,724 documents, sorted into the following folders: Special Collection documents Commercial sites Personal pages Non-profit sites users.colloquium.co.uk www.scotland.org www.uklocalpages.com Bed & Breakfasts Questions & Answers Burns, Robert works, studies & biography Business law Ecology all others..
This gives me a mixture of commercial, personal and tourist organisation web sites, as well as a separate category for Bed and Breakfast accommodation.
As with all search engines, it does seem to help improve the value of your results if you can be fairly precise about your information needs.
I’m intrigued by the inclusion of business law in this list; looking in that folder reveals a number of sites offering business information searching which don’t seem to have any direct relevance to my search.
I’d imagine that each of these sites contains an instance of the words Scotland and tourism, but in separate contexts.
In order to categorise information by subject, a hierarchy of over 200,000 subject terms has been put together by librarians working for Northern Light.
This provides a standard vocabulary which is used in sorting the sites.
Subject terms are applied automatically to web resources as they are indexed in the database, so human intervention is not involved at this point.
Documents have also been sorted by source both by top level domains such as educational, government and country, and by individual hosts where a substantial number of pages from a single host have been found.
The ‘personal page’ sites are identified by the presence of a tilde (~) in the URL, or by a name-like subdirectory.
It isn’t clear whether or not a record can appear in more that one folder if it is relevant to more than one category.
For example, a document from the School of English at the University of Edinburgh might contain information about Macbeth.
Would this document be categorised as an educational site, or a site about the subject Macbeth?
Proficient use of the custom folders, and competency in navigating around them effectively will probably take a bit of practice.
However, it is worth spending some time becoming familiar with this potentially extremely useful feature as it helps enormously in tracking down useful resources from a mass of search results.
The Special Collection This is a collection of over 3,400 magazines, journals, books, newspapers and newswires from a range of content providers.
It is possible to search this collection at the same time as searching the web, or you can search it separately.
The titles in this collection are mainly American trade publications and the collection is strong in business and finance publications such as banking .
There are also some academic titles, including: British Journal of Criminology British Journal of Political Science British Medical Journal Shakespeare Quarterly Abstracts from these articles are available for free; however, the full text articles themselves need to be purchased on-line before they can be viewed.
Prices range from $1 to $4 per article and there is an alternative subscription option which enables you to purchase up to 50 articles a month for $4.95, from a selection of titles.
This has to be paid in advance.
As a further enticement to buying articles on-line, customers have a guarantee that they can get their money refunded if an article which they have purchased doesn’t in the end meet their needs even if it has been printed or downloaded.
As long as a refund is requested within 30 days of purchase the customer account can be recredited.
This is an interesting approach to document supply, and an additional incentive for first time users to try the service.
The pricing for articles also seems to be pitched competitively, although I’m a little unsure as to how useful the sources will be for UK academic users as a large proportion of them seem to be targeted at American business users.
The service is, in fact being supported through sale of articles, rather than through advertising revenue.
It remains to be seen how much revenue article sales will generate, and whether this will be enough to ensure that Northern Light still around in a year or so.
References [1] Northern Light home page , http://www.northernlight.com [2] Notess, G. Northern Light: New Search Engine for the Web and Full Text Articles, in Database 21 (1): 32-37, Feb-Mar.
1998. http://www.onlineinc.com/database/awards/award2.html Author Details Tracey Stanley Networked Information Officer University of Leeds Library, UK Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/people/TSStanley/TSStanley.htm Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: A Survey of Institutional Web Gateways Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: A Survey of Institutional Web Gateways Buzz software java html database portal copyright cataloguing cd-rom mailbase url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly surveys institutional web gateways.
In September 1999 the author ran a 90 minutes hands-on session on Managing Your Institutional Web Gateway [1] at the JANET User Support Workshop which was held at the University of Plymouth.
The materials for included a series of exercises in which the participants were asked to go to their own institutional home page, find the main page which contains links to external web resources and comment on the resource.
After reviewing their own web site, they were then asked to look at a number of other university web sites and repeat the exercise.
The feedback from the participants was very interesting.
A number of people commented that they would have to address some of the deficiencies on their web site when they returned to their office.
It was clear from the feedback from the session that participants were interested in obtaining further information on approaches to the provision of gateways to web resources within the community and to have the opportunity to discuss the issues associated with the provision of a quality gateway.
This article aims to give a preliminary assessment of gateways to external web resources provided in the UK higher education community.
Comments on a number of interesting approaches are provided.
The article concludes by discussing some of the issues which emerge from the survey.
The Survey On 18th October 1999 a message was sent to the website-info-mgt Mailbase list asking for the URL of institutional "web gateways" [2].
A small number of replies were received, but not enought to provide the location of significant numbers of web gateways.
As a result a manual search of web gateways was carried out, using the list of UK University and Collages entry points maintained by HESA [3].
This was followed by a request for information which was sent to the webmaster email address.
This survey was more difficult to carry out that the surveys of UK University 404 pages [4] and institutional search engines [5].
The 404 error messages were very easy to find and institutional search engines were often located on and linked from the main entry point.
Institutional gateways to external web resources typically could not be found on the main entry point.
It required the time-consuming process of following likely links, often under areas maintained by the institional Web Team or the responsibility of the Library, Information Services or Learning Centre.
As a result of the difficulties in finding the institutional web gateways this article provides only a incomplete study.
The author invites readers to provide details of their institutional web gateways which will be used in a follow-up report.
Details of the institutional web gateways to external resources found in the survey are available [6].
Interesting Examples From UK Universities The Users' View The University of Southampton provides a well-designed gateway to web resources [7] which is reminiscent of the early days of Yahoo!, as can be seen from Figure 1.
Figure 1: University of Southampton Gateway As well as grouping resources under a number of categories (over 30) a complete alphabetic listing is available, together with details of newly-added resources.
Over 1,000 resources are available.
The gateway provides information about the community pages which states that "The pages consist of links to other sites which may be useful to the staff and students of the University and focus on services and resources geographically based in the area around Southampton but a number of county based links are also included as are a selection of national information services which are thought to have a useful "local component" [8].
An interesting approach to the user interface was provided at Oxford University.
OLIG (Oxford University Library Gateway) [9] uses a frames-based interface to resources, which are grouped under a number of subject areas (sciences, social sciences and Humanities).
The frames interface also provides access to a small number of search engines and library catalogue interfaces.
Figure 2: OLIG (Oxford University Library Gateway) An impressive interface (especially if your screen display matches the output) is provided by the Library at the University of Warwick [10].
Figure 3: Links to Electronic Resource at the University of Warwick As can be seen from Figure 3 the gateway, which has the title Electronic Resources, provides access to (electronic) journals, databases (available on CD-ROM or on the web), newspapers (available on the web), library catalogues and general references resources available on the web.
The gateway provided by the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education [11] uses a frames interface to provide an integrated user interface to external web resources and internal library catalogues.
Figure 4: 'Search For Information' at NEWI Behind The Scenes A small number of institutions appeared to make use of back-end link management systems.
The universities of Leeds [12] and Cranfield [13] use the ROADS software [14].
This enables the institutions to provide a searchable index as well as a browsable list of resources, as illustrated below.
Figure 5: 'Search for Selected Web Sites' at the University of Leeds The University of Sunderland's gateway [15] also makes use of a back-end database to manage the link records.
Figure 6: 'Web Links' at the University of Sunderland This gateway makes use of a Microsoft database.
The University of Sussex's PIER gateway [16] uses the Ultraseek indexing tool to provide searching of the catalogue records as illustrated below.
Figure 7: Using Ultraseek to Search the PIER Gateway A Tour Of Web Gateways A "web tour" of the gateways found in the survey has been produced [17].
As illustrated in Figure 8 the web tour provides a running display of the gateways, with each gatways being displayed for a few seconds.
Figure 8: A Tour Of Web Gateways It is intended that this tour will provide an useful way of comparing the various approaches taken within the community.
Issues A number of email replies to requests for information appear to indicate recognition that the gateways provided by UK Universities are less than ideal.
Some of the comments received are listed below.
"We don't really have [a gateway] really.
I suppose the nearest thing is a page done a few years ago, but it isn't maintained and I know several of the links no longer work.
...
The library have a page linked from their own site which is more useful."
"[Our] "home pages", which are maintained by our Publicity and Marketing department, do not appear to include a list of external links.
An old list, which dates back to the time when Computing Services maintained the "home pages", is still online ... but has not been updated for a considerable time."
"I'm afraid we haven't been maintaining [the web gateway] page.
Our out of of date and feeble effort can be seen at : [URL deleted] No one has touched it since May!
Shame on us!"
Management The survey confirmed the sentiments expressed in the first two quotes: the responsibilities for managing the gateway are not always clearly defined.
In a number of institutions a number of central gateways may be maintained, perhaps by the computing services or the institutional web team and also by the library.
As indicated in the second quote, publicity and marketing departments may not give a high priority to the provision of gateways to external resources.
QA and Scoping Policies Related to management issues are the need for quality assurance and scoping policies.
Cranfield's CRUISE gateway includes a link to its scoping policy [18].
This scoping policy is based on the one developed by OMNI [19].
The eLib subject gateways (which have recently evaolved into RDN hubs) have taken a leading role in the development of scoping policies and associated quality association procedures.
A valuable reference, based partly on the experiences of the eLib subject is the Information Gateways Handbook, which has been published by the DESIRE project [20].
Link Management Software What link management Software should be used to manage a gateway?
It is becoming increasingly clear that simply creating links in HTML pages is no longer a satisfactory solution for a quality gateway.
Storing links and catalogue records in HTML pages makes it difficult to re-use the information in other applications, manage the links or provide rich functionality to the end user (e.g.
sort the display links in say, title order, order of destination, etc.)
A number of institutions make use of the ROADS software (a list is maintained by ILRT [21]).
As mentioned above the University of Sunderland and Kingston Public Library use a Microsoft database solution for managing the links.
Kingston Public Library illustrate how use of a backend database makes it possible to implement a value-added service, such as a Top 10 list [22].
Institutions could choose to make use of an open source solution, such as ROADS, or develop their own system based on a relational database.
Examples of institutions which make use of these two approaches have been described in this article.
A third approach would be to purchase a link management system.
LinkBank [23] is an example of a web-based link management system (note the LinkBank.net web site should not be confused with LinkBank.com which provides a Java-based bookmark manager).
LinkBank is a "programming-free way to add a searchable directory of links" to a Web site.
Features it provides include daily link-checking, search facility, slideshows, email notification of changes and the ability to display links based on popularity, date and rating.
Administrative facilities include bulk upload of links and provision of statistics.
An example of services which make use of LinkBank are available on their web site [24].
An additional example, from the UK HE community [25] is shown below.
Figure 9: LinkBank As an evaluation of LinkBank the links to UK HE institutional web gateways and UK HE search engines which featured in this article and the previous WebWatch column are being added to a LinkBank page [26].
Other example of link management systems include HyperSeek [27], Links by Gossamer Threads [28], Plumtree's Corporate Portal software [29] and Inktomi's Directory Engine [30].
Other Technical Issues If institutions choose to make use of link management software a decision they will have to make is whether to opt for a shrink-wrapped solution, open source software or a home-grown solution.
The shrink-wrapped solution may have the least requirements for local technical expertise, but will have a capital cost and may make it difficult to implement local enhancements.
Open source software such as ROADS, together the IMESH initiative [31] should provide a solution, based on open standards, which is extensible.
However there is likely to be additional demands for technical expertise.
Conclusions This article has described a survey of institutional gateways to external web resources, and has outlined a number of issues.
One issue which has not been addressed is whether institutions should even consider using their scarce resources to provide such gateways.
Since JISC, through the RDN [32], provides funding for a number of subject gateways, is it desirable for institutions to duplicate work which is already being done?
Should institutions, instead, aim to complement the work which is being done nationally by, say, providing links to local resources an approach taken at Exeter [33], University of London [34] and UWIC [35]?
If you do decide that you wish to provide your own comprehensive gateway to web resources it seems clear from this survey that the gateway will have to be adequately resourced, with scoping and QA procedures defined.
The question of the software (and model) used to provide the gateway is an interesting one.
The website-info-mgt Mailbase list [35] is a useful forum for discussing such issues.
The author looks forward to an interesting discussion on this list.
References Managing Your Institutional Web Gateway, Brian Kelly http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/jusw-sep1999/workshop/ Survey of institutional web gateways, Posting to website-info-mgt Mailbase List, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt/1999-10/0009.html Higher Education Universities and Colleges, HESA http://www.hesa.ac.uk/links/He_inst.htm WebWatch: UK University Search Engines, Ariadne issue 21 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/webwatch/ WebWatch: 404s What's Missing?, Ariadne issue 20 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/404/ Survey Of UK HE Institutional Web Gateways Autumn 1999, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/uk-he-gateways-dec-99/ Southampton University Community Information, University of Southampton http://www.soton.ac.uk/services/commun.html About the Community Pages, University of Southampton http://www.soton.ac.uk/services/local/about.html Oxford Libraries Internet Gateway, University of Oxford http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/olig/ Electronic Resources, University of Warwock Library http://www.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/electronicr/electronicr.html Search for Information, NEWI http://www.newi.ac.uk/iss/search/search.htm Selected Web Sites, University of Leeds http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ROADS/web.htm CRUISE (Cranfield University Internet Site Explorer), University of Cranfield http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/cils/library/subjects/webinfo.htm ROADS: Resource Organisation And Discovery in Subject-based Services, ILRT, University of Bristol http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/roads/ Information Services Home Page, University of Sunderland http://www.library.sunderland.ac.uk/default.asp Sussex Internet Gateway: The Pier, University of Sussex http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/pier/ Web Tour, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/uk-he-gateways-dec-99/web-tour/ Collection development policy for Internet resource selection, University of Cranfield http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/cils/library/subjects/colldev.htm OMNI Guidelines for Resource Evaluation, http://www.omni.ac.uk/agec/evalguid.html Information Gateways Handbook, DESIRE http://www.desire.org/handbook/ Services Using ROADS, ILRT, University of Bristol http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/who/ Top 10, Kingston Public Library http://www.kingston.gov.uk/libs/ref/topsites.asp LinkBank, LinkBank http://www.linkbank.net/ Full Working Demo, LinkBank http://www.linkbank.net/examples.html Institute of Education, University of Sussex, LinkBank http://www.linkbank.net/get_links/default/usie/ WebWatch, UKOLN, LinkBank http://www.linkbank.net/get_links/default/ariadne/ The Hyperseek Search Engine, Hyperseek http://www.hyperseek.com/ Links, Gossamer Threads http://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/links/ Plumtree Software Products, Plumtree http://www.plumtree.com/products.html Inktomi Directory Engine, Inktomi http://www.inktomi.com/products/portal/directory/ The IMESH Toolkit, IMESH http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/ RDN (Resource Discovery Network), RDN http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ The South West, University of Exeter http://www.ex.ac.uk/thesw.htm London Links, University of London http://www.lon.ac.uk/london.htm Local Links, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC) http://www.uwic.ac.uk/local_links.htm website-info-mgt, Mailbase http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 18 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 18 Buzz software html database xml metadata preservation cataloguing sgml uri research standards Citation BibTex RIS The web editors, Bernadette Daly and Philip Hunter, introduce Ariadne issue 18.
This is sadly the last of the parallel print and web publication of Ariadne for the moment, at least.
Ariadne will however continue as a web magazine.
The print edition has finished in some style, with a publication twice the size of all earlier copies.
Attendees at the eLib "Information Ecologies" conference in York earlier this month already know this, since we arranged for advance copies to be available for that event.
The Web version is correspondingly large, as might be expected, though it doesn't quite rival the scale of the web version of issue 5.
We wish to thank both John MacColl (Production Manager) and Lyndon Pugh (Managing Editor) for their excellent contributions to the Ariadne enterprise John (one of its prime movers) since its inception in late 1995, and Lyndon since the beginning of 1997, and for the efforts of the support staff in Abertay during the same period (principally Alison Kilgour and Alison Ure up to the spring of 1998, and Alison Ure to date).
Lyndon Pugh supplies this issue's cover article, Teams and argues that we might have higher expectations of the human element in the organisational structures of the upcoming "information society" than is reasonable.
John Kirriemuir, former editor of Ariadne, supplies us with eLib: Was it good for you?
: a personal view of the eLib programme.
One small non-eLib related detail in his article has become invalid since submission: the university which he takes to task for its SCR admissions policy has now opened its doors to its rank and file :-).
Stephen Pinfield, who contributed one of the best presentations to the "Information Ecologies" conference (finding an Old Testament precursor of the "stuff" issue), here writes about Hybrid Libraries for Ariadne, describing the role of Hybrid Libraries and Clumps in the development of coherent electronic library services.
In "Knowledge Management", Sheila Corrall asks if this is a new phrase in place of 'information management', or a new concept altogether.
Chris Batt contributes I have seen the Future and it Works: as Director of Libraries and Museums in Croydon, a particularly well wired locale, his article is worth close attention.
He examines the nature of the Information Society and asks: is it just a marketing fad or a real social revolution?
He also defines some of the indicators of change along the route, and some examples of those changes in action.
Don Revill, formerly Head of Information Services at Liverpool John Moores University, contributes Looking Back in Anger in which he argues that little has changed over the years.
The problems the library profession faced in the 50s and 60s are still with us.
and recognition of the librarian's contribution to the educational process is still not common.
"Before" and "after" photographs are included.
The users of services all too easy to forget as the wired grapple with the technical issues involved get some airtime with Internet Detective: BA students get on the case: Emma Worsfold and Debra Hiom, introduce their "Internet Detective" online tutorial, and BA students from the final year Information Management BA at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh, review the site.
There is also news about BIDs in BIDS adopted by ingenta On the 21st September, the University of Bath concluded an agreement to sign over the ownership of BIDS to a new organisation known as ingenta ltd (definitely lower-case), while still retaining a 24.9% share.
Terry Morrow looks at the implications of the change, and reviews the latest developments in the services offered.
Bernadette Daly looks at a variety of electronic publications as part of the research phase in the delivery of a new Web magazine, in Launching an Electronic Magazine: an overview of value-added features and services.
Kelly Russell, a panel member on digital preservation issues at the York conference, explores the main deliverables of the CEDARS project: the development of recommendations and guidelines, plus practical, robust and scaleable models for establishing distributed digital archives.
Among the regular columns we have Down Your Way, in which Ariadne visits the University of Abertay's brand new Library.
The Metadata column, written for this issue by Ann Chapman, Michael Day and Debra Hiom, considers the issues around Cataloguing Theory and Internet Subject-based Information Gateways: how comparable are library cataloguing concepts and the creation of ROADS "Templates"?
In Minotaur this month, "When computer knows best?"
Harold Thimbleby criticises the urge to upgrade and gives a wholly personal view of standard word-processing software.
Back on Planet SOSIG Stuart Macwilliam, the SOSIG section editor for Sociology, gives an overview of the resources likely to be found in his section.
This is preceded by news of some 'mutual mirroring' across the Atlantic, involving SOSIG and the Internet Scout Project.
For public libraries wishing to provide their users with access to the Internet there are a number of difficult policy decisions that need to be made.
For example, do they provide Internet access for free?
If they charge how much do they charge?
Do they use filtering software?
How long can people use the Internet terminals for?
What level of services (e.g.
e-mail or not) will they provide?
Policy decisions of this type are currently being faced across the country by public library managers who themselves may only just becoming familiar with networked services.Sarah Ormes and David Potts write about shed light on the what exactly the Networked Policy Taskgroup does.
(A version of this paper has previously appeared in Library Technology, Vol 3 (5) November 1998) in Public Libraries Corner: In Search Engines, Walter Scales responds to Dave Beckett's article in issue 16; Brian Kelly in Web Focus corner examines "The Role of a Web Editor" and asks, does "web editor" means Unix guru or an HTML coder?
For tech-heads there is What is a URI?, where Ian Peacock explains the concept in plain English.
There are also a number of at the event reports, including Stephen Emmott on SGML, XML and Databases, a one day meeting on held in the Brunei Gallery of SOAS in London.
Plus Michael Day reports on Metadiversity, a Biodiversity conference in the States interested in the uses of Metadata.
Enjoy the issue.
Author Details Bernadette Daly Ariadne Web Editor UKOLN University of Bath Bath Email: b.m.daly@ukoln.ac.uk Philip Hunter Ariadne Web Editor UKOLN University of Bath Bath Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: The Digital Factor in Information and Library Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: The Digital Factor in Information and Library Services Buzz metadata digitisation mets url research Citation BibTex RIS Book review by Bruce Royan.
There is something about the phrase “International Yearbook” that makes the reviewer’s heart sink.
It conjures up an image of an arbitrary assemblage of re-cycled conference papers in indifferent English, cobbled together at random and in haste with minimal editorial control and no critical apparatus to speak of.
Having some familiarity with series editor Gary Gorman’s timely and practical contributions to the literature of information services, from Qualitative Research (1997) to Information Resource Management (2001) however, this reviewer was hopeful that the annual International Yearbook of Library and Information Management (IYLIM) series might buck the trend.
To judge by this, the third volume in the series, that hope has not been in vain.
All the authors have been selected by a strong international advisory board, every paper is refereed, and each volume in the series has been constructed around a current unifying theme.
For 2000, that theme was Collections Management and for 2001 Information Services provision, and both volumes filled gaps in the professional literature of their respective topics, which had tended to lag somewhat in describing the effect of matters electronic.
The theme for 2002, predictably enough, is the impact of digital initiatives on library and information management.
The volume is arranged in 6 parts.
Part One sets the scene under the provocative heading ‘In praise of the digital revolution?’ In it, Marilyn Deegan lays down general principles and working definitions for digital objects and digital libraries, while Lorna Peterson compares and contrasts digital and print formats and underlines the continuing need for both in information provision.
Part Two looks at institutional models, starting with Peter Brophy’s masterly review of the possible new models of the library that are emerging in the digital era.
Simon Tanner concludes by examining the economic choices that need to be made by the library manager in taking account the costs and benefits of going digital.
The needs of the user and the digital packaging of information are considered in Part Three, with essays by Catherine Sheldrick Ross on the effect of digital media on reading, by Shirley Hyatt on the need for new structures and metaphors to support users in the location and utilisation of electronic texts, and by Denice Adkins on the particular needs of younger users.
This leads us to an extended section on digital reference services.
Stephen Mutula and Sherry Shiuan Su each contribute chapters on the provision of web-based reference services, while Judith Clark points out a very significant trend; the convergence of digital libraries with Managed Learning Environments.
Amid all this excitement we are brought down to earth in the chapter “It’s just a click away, or is it?” in which Diane Kresh characterises the current “digital divide”, and suggests how libraries might begin to bridge it.
Part Five is devoted to collection management, with Alastair Smith on evaluating digital collections and David Dawson on digitisation programmes, while Part Six looks at standards and technology, including Dan Dorner’s guide to metadata, Christopher Brown-Syed’s speculations on future tends in network resource discovery, and Shadrack Katuu’s exploration of the tension between access and security in the provision of networked information services.
Gorman is based in New Zealand, but the volume includes contributions from Australasia, North America, Asia, Europe and Africa (in the year that Kay Raseroka was elected as President of IFLA, it is particularly pleasing to see two excellent contributions from the University of Botswana).
Being published in London, one might have expected a UK bias, but the contributions from Peter Brophy, Marilyn Deegan, David Dawson and Simon Tanner have each taken pains to chose examples from around the world to illustrate the points they make.
£60 does seem an awful amount to pay for 16 articles, but it has to be admitted that the quality of the finished product is high.
There is a consistency of layout and reassuring lack of typos that smacks of strong editorial control, the references at the end of each chapter are well researched and current (the majority being web based resources accessed in early 2002).
The index is professionally done and comprehensive, though this does throw up the puzzling omission of a few key current concepts in the field: IMS and METS come to mind.
Who would buy this book?
Although explicitly not a textbook, I am sure it should be considered for purchasing by every school of library and information management in the English-speaking world.
But its real target audience is what Gorman refers to as “the reflective practitioner”: practising information services managers could do worse than beg, borrow or (let’s suggest, buy) a copy in support of their continuing professional development.
Author Details   Bruce Royan Email: bruce.royan@concurrentcomputing.co.uk Concurrent Computing Ltd http://www.concurrentcomputing.co.uk/ Article Title: “The Digital Factor in Information and Library Services” Author: Bruce Royan Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/royan/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JASPER Further Education Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JASPER Further Education Meeting Buzz cache aggregation e-learning ict url research Citation BibTex RIS Martin Hamilton reports on the recent JASPER one day meeting on the expansion of JISC services to cover the FE community.
The goal of this event was to introduce the operators of JISC services to the main bodies in Further Education (FE), and to discuss the issues which will be involved as JISC services are rolled out to FE sites.
In addition to the delegates from JISC and JISC services, UKERNA and major national FE organisations (e.g.
BECTa, FEDA and NILTA) were also represented.
A number of points of general interest came up during our discussions, which this article attempts to summarise.
Perhaps the most significant of these was the sheer number (for many people, including your correspondent ;-) of new acronyms encountered.
A glossary (for both HE and FE readers) of the main acronyms has been included in this article, along with associated URLs where appropriate.
According to John Brown, Director of Lifelong Learning at BECTa, there are currently some 426 FE institutions, with 4 million students and 140,000 staff.
By comparison, HE has some 112,000 staff and just under 2 million students.
As of April 1st 2000 JISC services are available to both HE and FE, although (at the time of writing) there were still some licensing issues to resolve.
Alicia Wise, the JISC/DNER Collections Manager, told us that the plan was to deal with these as they arose for the time being to gauge the scale of the problem.
JISC is also (via UKERNA) arranging for all FE institutions to be connected to the JANET network at 2 Megabits/second or above, to form the National Learning Network.
A budget of 74 million pounds over three years has been set aside for this under FEFC circular 99⁄18 with completion of the initial connections component expected by March 2001.
It has been decided that FE institutions will not be subject to JANET usage charges for the next two years.
Although it appeared to be a commonly held belief that FE sites would be heavily dependent on the HE sector for advice on local and wide area networking issues, we were reminded by Bob Powell (Head of FE at BECTa) that 80% of computers in FE are networked to something!
Previously many FE sites were connected to the Internet via other means (e.g.
via RM’s network), but JANET access is being provided at no cost.
This represents a major cost saving for many institutions, but has to be considered in conjunction with the additional services which the site may have to put into place.
Peter Harding, ILT manager at South Cheshire College, noted that firewall and content filtering services had been provided as part of the overall RM package.
Since some of these value added services (in particular content filtering) were not typically offered by HE institutions, there would in any case be only limited scope for the HE sector to offer advice in these areas.
To pick up on the content filtering example FE institutions have a legal responsibility (duty of care) with regard to their students who are also minors.
Peter Trethewy, Director of Learning Resources at Bromley College, gaves us a flavour of the scope of FE activities his site has students with learning difficulties, HE affiliated students (including some doing PhDs :-), an 86 year old studying IT, and also some students who were previously excluded from school.
This led to a lively discussion of concerning the fraction of FE institutions which are a) internally networked, and/or b) connected to the Internet i.e.
what proportion of FE sites are likely to need assistance and in which areas.
As it happens, both Peters had been operating Websites since 1996, but those present were unclear as to whether these sites were the exception or the rule.
However, there are a number of surveys which have been conducted recently (by BECTa and others) which may shed some light on this.
Both of these sites had connected external sites of their own and related organisations, e.g.
South Cheshire was acting as ISP for some 15 small to medium sized businesses, 12 primary schools, 3 feeder schools and several other parties using DHCP for dynamic addressing to avoid renumbering problems.
It follows that HE institutions (even those involved in metropolitan/regional area networking) may turn out to have less experience dealing with third party connections than many FE sites!
HE sites may also not have been forced (as yet) to deal with issues such as renumbering of their staff/student IP addresses due to retaining a single ISP (JANET) or “owning” their own netblock for sites which registered before global route aggregation began.
Of course in practice the JISC services would be unlikely to deal with queries about basic TCP/IP networking, since this is within the scope of the recently announced FE Regional Support Centres.
Conversely, many people wondered, what might the RSCs be expected to know about the JISC services in order to sensibly answer queries?
There were several comments to the effect that hierarchical support structures for JISC services may be overstretched if RSCs are inserted between the subscribing site and the services themselves.
Several representatives of JISC services noted that there had already been some take up of their services within FE, and this had been noted as part of their reporting to the MAU and TAU.
There were several broad conclusions to the day’s discussions:   Need to clarify the relationship between the JISC services, the RSCs and the end user FE sites.
Need for a coordinated approach to publicising JISC services within FE, due to the size of the community, and the danger of information overload resulting from multiple simultaneous promotional activities by different services.
Specialist contacts need at FE sites to be identified, as done with existing HE sites.
Electronic fora such as mailing lists may provide an efficient way to link service providers with the relevant FE personnel.
Discussions have been largely focussed on the existing services, whose development has been driven by HE.
FE is unlikely to make the same demands of the same services.
Acronym Alert!
Acronym Meaning URL BECTa British Educational Communications and Technology agency http://www.becta.org.uk/ FEDA Further Education Development Agency http://www.feda.ac.uk/ FEFC Further Education Funding Council http://www.fefc.ac.uk/ FEILTC FEFC ILT advisory committee   FENTO Further Education National Training Organisation http://www.fento.co.uk/ FERL FE Resources for Learning http://ferl.becta.org.uk/ HEFCE Higher Education Funding Council for England http://www.hefce.ac.uk/ HEFCW Higher Education Funding Council for Wales http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefcw/ JANET Joint Academic Network http://www.ja.net/ JISC Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ JASPER JISC Academic Service Providers to Education and Research http://www.jisc.ac.uk/services/ learndirect Ufi’s flagship service http://www.learndirect.co.uk/ LSC Learning and Skills Council to replace FEFC and the TECs.
There will be 47 local LSCs and a national one.
MAU Monitoring and Advisory Unit of the JISC http://www.mau.ac.uk/ NILTA National Information and Learning Technologies Association http://www.nilta.org.uk/ NGfL National Grid for Learning http://www.ngfl.ac.uk/ NLN National Learning Network http://www.nln.ac.uk/ QUILT Quality in Information and Learning Technology http://www.feda.ac.uk/Quilt/ RSC Regional Support Centre http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/c06_99.html SFEFC Scottish Further Education Funding Council http://www.sfefc.ac.uk/ SHEFC Scottish Higher Education Funding Council http://www.shefc.ac.uk/ TAU Technical Advisory Unit of the JISC http://www.tau.ac.uk/ TEC Training and Enterprise Council   Ufi University for industry see learndirect http://www.ufiltd.co.uk/ UKERNA United Kingdom Education & Research Networking Association http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/ It may also be useful to bear in mind the use in FE of the following terms: IT PCs on desks ICT networked IT ILT using ICT for learning and teaching …and that the post-Dearing HE jargon “C&IT” is equivalent to ICT.
Author Details   Martin Hamilton JANET Web Cache Service development coordinator, Computing Services, Loughborough University martin@lboro.com http://wwwcache.ja.net/ Article Title: “JASPER Further Education Day” Author: Martin Hamilton Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/jasper-fe/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Buzz database url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley's regular column on search engine technology.
As we’re all aware, the world of the search engine is constantly changing; sometimes in my courses I refer to using search engines as being akin to trying to dance on quicksand.
However, in the last few months there have been a lot of changes, even more than usual, so rather than concentrate on a particular engine, or specific subject I thought that in this column I’d try and pull together some of the things that have been happening with the major engines for you.
Excite.
[1] Many of you will know that Excite has been in deep financial trouble and it looked as though it was going to close down completely.
However, InfoSpace bid $10 for certain of its assets, such as the domain names, trademarks and user traffic associated with the Excite.com web site.
Most users will find little difference when they use it in future (although some of the personalised features may well look rather different), though ‘under the bonnet’ InfoSpace’s Dogpile metasearch is going to replace Excite’s crawler.
Consequently, searchers will find that they end up with the same results if they use either Excite or Dogpile.
Other elements of the site, such as news and television listings will also be powered by iWon.
More details on the sale can be found at ISP News.
[2] Google [3] Google has finally taken a step forward with regards to stop words, and it is now possible to search for them if they are included within quote marks.
You can try this for yourself by going to the search engine and doing a search for the individual words to be or not to be and you’ll find that you get a nonsense set of results, since the only word that Google will be interested in is ‘not’.
However, if you re-run the search as “to be or not to be” (making sure to put it in quote marks) Google will actually do the search that you’re expecting.
It’s still not a very good set of results since only one hit in the first ten results relates to the Shakespearian quote, but this comes as little surprise since I’ve never found that phrase searching at Google works particularly well.
Google is also interested in getting feedback on the results of the searches that it performs.
When you’ve done your search for the quote, take a quick look at the very bottom of the page, where you’ll see a link entitled “Unsatisfied with your results?
Help us improve.” If you follow this link, it takes you to a feedback form where you can tell Google exactly what you think of the series of results you’ve obtained.
It will be interesting to see if this results in any long term improvement to the results!
Yet another interesting feature at Google is Google Zeitgeist [4] which is regularly updated to provide us with information on the searching habits of users.
On this page they detail the top ten gaining/declining searches, languages used to access the search engine, web browsers and operating systems that users have installed and some information on image searches that have been performed.
Lycos [5] Lycos has come up with a new and interesting twist on the whole filtering problem.
I’ve never been a great fan of filtering systems, as I find them clumsy, and I dislike the idea of passing control of my searches over to some anonymous system somewhere that I can’t control.
Lycos has however now introduced a feature called Lycos SearchGuard [6], which allows users to decide what sort of content they filter – current options include filtering material for pornography, information on weapons, violent and hate material.
I don’t believe that there will ever be a perfect filtering system, but if it’s important to you to filter out unpleasant material, it may well be worth taking a look at.
Allsearchenginesuk [7] A new search engine has been launched which attempts to focus on UK resources.
It’s a multi/meta search engine that passes queries out to 6 major engines that have a UK component Lycos, Overture, MSN, Yahoo!, Mirago, and AltaVista.
If you are interested in doing regional based searching you may want to take a look at it, though I must confess that when I visited it and tried it out I was completely underwhelmed by it; the results didn’t appear to have been de-duplicated and the ranking system seemed based on the concept Ixquick [8] uses (ranking by number of search engines that find a page and position within the top ten), but without being as effective.
Personally I’ll be sticking with Ixquick – I know it makes sense!
AltaVista [9] For many years, AltaVista was my search engine of choice – fast, effective, it had a large database and one that was frequently updated.
Diligent readers of my column will however remember that I finally said goodbye to it, since I was dissatisfied with the results that I was getting.
However, even I was surprised at the extent to which it was being vilified at the Online conference held last December; the only time that it was referred to was in tones of sadness and several speakers openly derided it.
AltaVista has obviously tried to overcome its problems, but sad to say that its done what it always does – changed the look of the interface once again.
It has returned to the look that it had several years ago, with clean lines, a tabbed interface and lots of white space.
I think it looks much better, so I was keen to see if it had done anything else.
The easiest way to check to see what a search engine is doing is to do a search on a popular term (I tend to use ‘internet’) and choose the limit by date option.
I did this with AltaVista, by limiting to the last month, and found a miserable 634 references.
In comparison, Alltheweb[10] had a massive 22,506,697 references!
As you can imagine, I’ve not been tempted back, nice clean looking interface not withstanding.
A closing miscellany For those of you who read the various articles that I write, you’ll know that I have a rather cynical approach to search engines, best summarised by the statement ‘They don’t work’.
Cruel and extreme, I’ll grant you, but it’s a position I’m happy to back up if necessary.
I was therefore very interested to read that two computer scientists from the City College of New York have reached the conclusion that the results from search engines can be biased, particularly if the search that’s been conducted has not been well thought out.
The article, in Information Processing & Management is freely available, although you do have to register with the site [11] before you can read it.
Following on from this concern is another one that I know concerns a lot of people, and that is the thorny issue of paid placement.
Search engines do not exist for free – they have to make money the same as all of us, and just being an excellent search engine doesn’t impress a bank manager.
One of the methods that more and more search engines are using to make money is by selling (or if you prefer ‘emphasising’) certain websites, for a price.
Do a search for a well known term, and you’re likely to find that the top hits are for sites such as eBay or Amazon.
They will have bid for the use of keywords in order to direct people to their sites, and will pay search engines a certain amount of money for each time someone clicks on the link.
This is all well and good as long as it’s made perfectly clear in the list of results that the top site isn’t the most relevant but has paid the most, but unfortunately, it’s not always clear cut.
For a more extensive discussion than I’m able to provide here, you might want to take a look at an article provided by Mercury News.
[12] [1] http://www.excite.com [2] http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article/0,,8_921261,00.html [3] http://www.google.com [4] http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html [5] http://www.lycos.com [6] http://searchguard.lycos.com/ [7] http://www.allsearchengines.co.uk [8] http://www.ixquick.com [9] http://www.altavista.com [10] http://www.alltheweb.com [11] http://www.elsevier.com/cdweb/journals/03064573/samplecopy/viewer.htt [12] http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/personal_technology/2806431.htm   Author Details   Phil Bradley Email: philb@twilight.demon.co.uk Article Title: “‘Search Engines’” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Speaking Electronic Librarian Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Speaking Electronic Librarian Buzz api database tei browser identifier vocabularies cataloguing opac windows ict interoperability algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Markos Dendrinos with a proposal for an interface system, based on speech recognition and synthesis technologies, for automatic library services.
The design of a speech agent for automatic library services is presented in this paper.
The proposed system will be based on speech recognition and synthesis technologies, applied to the library environment.
The client of the library can have access to various automatic electronic services through a sophisticated interface, making use of the embedded technologies.
The access to OPAC, the loaning process, the database access and the resource retrieval are some of the services that could be greatly facilitated through the use of the system.
The speech interface is considered as a factor that contributes greatly to the global access initiative, giving equal opportunities to the individuals with special needs.
Presentation of the speaking librarian system The system is designed to consist of a speech synthesis and a speech recognition module co-operating with various library services concerning resource catalogues, bibliographic / full text databases and communication facilities (fax, e-mail etc.)
The system requirements are: a moderate PC system, e.g.
a Pentium at 1.7 GHz with 256 MB of RAM, Windows environment and a standard compatible sound card.
Under these specifications the system executes the various services in real time.
The components of the system are shown in Figure 1.
The user can give his command through the microphone or the keyboard.
In case of speech input, the speech recognition module is required in order to transform the physical speech flow into a series of electronic commands.
Then each command is passed to the library service, where it is processed, concluding either in the execution of the command or in the informing of the user about inadequate input.
The user takes all the information either in speech or in a monitor display.
The first step for the speech output is the definition of the language (Greek, English, etc.
), next the transcription of text into phonetic items and lastly the dictation of the phonetic text in the selected language.
Additionally, the system gives to the user the capability of help topics either presented in the monitor or dictated by synthetic speech.
Various speech synthesis systems used for facilitating the services of the citizen in the information society have been suggested [1].
More information about the speech recognition and the speech synthesis modules are presented in Appendices A and B correspondingly.
Fig.
1.
The speaking librarian system Candidate library services to be embedded in the speaking librarian system Some library services that seem to be suitable to be performed in coordination with the speech processing facilities are the access to the OPAC (On-Line Public Access Catalogue), the loaning process, the use of the inter-library loan system, the access to a bibliographic or full-text database, the selection or retrieval of a database resource and the selection or retrieval of a hard-copy or virtual resource of the library.
All these services are performed through the speech processing or the typical Input / Output interface.
The library services mentioned above, the content requested in the frame of these services and the response actions in each case are given below in a tabularised form : Library service Request content Response actions 1.
Access to OPAC Subject category selection through microphone or keyboard 1a.
Transition to the requested category 1b.
Speech confirmation that the action has been completed (necessary for visually impaired persons) 2.
Access to OPAC Item selection through microphone or keyboard 2a.
Transition to the required item 2b.
Dictation through a speech synthesizer of all the text information related to the item with parallel scrolling on the screen 3.
Access to inter-library loaning Library selection through microphone or keyboard 3a.
Transition to the required library loaning service 3b.
Speech confirmation that the action has been completed (necessary for visually impaired persons) 4.
Access to a database Database selection through microphone or keyboard 4a.
Transition to the required database 4b.
Speech confirmation that the action has been completed (necessary for visually impaired persons) 5.
Resource selection / retrieval in the frame of a certain database Resource selection / retrieval through microphone or keyboard 5a.
Transition to the required resource 5b.
Dictation of the text information content of the resource (in case of digital resource) 6.
Loaning process (hard copy resource retrieval service) Resource selection through microphone or keyboard and filling in an application form with the information of the borrower and the mailing or faxing command 6a1.
Confirmation of the availability of the resource given through speech and written on the screen 6a2.
Offer of an identity number for the monitoring of the process OR 6b.
A negative message declaring the current unavailability of the resource 7.
Information about the retrieval status Asking for the status of a request through microphone or keyboard Dictation through speech synthesizer of the information concerning the related mailing or faxing process with parallel scrolling on the screen 8.
Virtual resource retrieval service Speech command for downloading or selection of the ‘download’ button through the mouse Periodical informing through synthetic speech that the process is in progress and declaration in the end that the process has been completed Table 1.
Library services with the corresponding user requests and the system response In all the above cases some words are isolated from the natural dialogue request through a word-spotting algorithm.
The means for the word isolation is the identification of a natural dialogue word with a word in the catalogue menus or the dialogue-box buttons or the contents of file lists or in general in any text element of the working window.
All of these words are available in the system, since they can be captured through Applications Program Interface (API) of the Windows environment.
Any word contained in the natural dialogue having a distance below a certain threshold from some of the active words of the current window (from a pattern matching view) is considered as a selection command of the user.
The state of the art in the area of the interfaces of visually impaired persons A Section of Libraries for the Blind (SLB) was established in 1983 as a forum for libraries for the blind.
SLB participates in the annual IFLA conference and also in a bi-annual pre-IFLA conference for the Section.
In the 2001 pre-conference, which took place in Washington, many interesting articles were presented, focused on increased information choices through web-based technologies, future library services for blind students, digital delivery for the blind and mainstreaming library services for blind and print disable users [2].
Despite growing technological developments in the information and communications area, only a small percentage of documents are actually made available to the blind in accessible formats including speech output, braille output, tactile devices or even simple adjustments to a browser[3].
Integration of blind and visually impaired persons into schools, universities and training centers is being considered through projects such as BrailleNet [4].
BrailleNet concerns document delivery in the frame of Internet and aims to achieve integration through Web accessible assistive technologies and teaching materials.
The delivery of these special books is further enabled through co-operation with publishers, adaptation centers and printing centers.
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress (NLS) is making use of the Internet to deliver a number of its services [5].
A continuously growing number of Web-Braille titles (3800 titles now) has been made available to 1500 users.
What must be stressed here is the great importance of the speaking librarian system for the visually impaired persons.
Speech input / output through speech recognition / synthesis correspondingly, is the most user-friendly interface for offering information in the case of visual inefficiencies, contributing greatly to a more efficient interoperability of the previously mentioned initiatives.
Conclusions An agent based on speech processing technologies is present in this article to be applied to a library environment.
Many library services can be greatly facilitated in the form of a virtual librarian, who serves and helps either the user visiting physically the library or the user having a remote access to the library from his home.
Such a system is useful for all the user groups familiarised with the basic computer use and it is of great importance in the case of visually impaired persons, helping them to address their commands through the microphone and take the system response in synthetic speech.
These sophisticated interfaces are coordinated with a great tendency for global access to the information and communication technologies (ICT).
Appendix A.
The speech recognizer Large progress has been made in speech recognition technology over the last few years, especially in Large Vocabulary Recognition (LVR).
Current systems are capable of transcribing continuous speech from any speaker with average word error rates of between 5% and 10%.
The best policy is to allow speaker adaptation.
In that case, after 2 or 3 minutes of speech, the error rate will drop under 5% for most speakers [6].
The speech recognition module to be used is a unit of continuous speech recognition based on acoustic and linguistic models.
The acoustic models are related to the minimal phonetic units, which are modeled in the learning phase.
These models are used next as reference patterns for the recognition of the phonetic units of the continuously introduced speech stream.
The comparison of the unit to be recognised to the available patterns can be based on Hidden Markov Models (ÇÌÌ) methodology.
The linguistic models are related to the structure of each written language and improve the efficiency of the recognition system by using context information.
A key-factor of a language model is the number of words used in the examined word-strings, the so-called N-grams.
The performance of the large vocabulary recognisers is greatly improved in case of speaker adaptation.
Adaptation can be supervised or unsupervised, and it can be performed additively as the speaker is talking or off-line at the end of the session.
Unsupervised additive adaptation is the least intrusive technique from the user view.
Another essential feature of the large vocabulary recognisers is their robustness in noisy environments.
There are a variety of approaches to dealing with noise [7].
Noise can be removed at the front-end from the speech, alternatively noise-robust features can be used, the noise can be masked or the features can be mapped.
The problem of noise presence still remains important since all the features derived for the compensation of noise are based on the global statistics of the noisy signal instead of the noise itself.
The noise elimination is a necessary component of the total recogniser, since without any form of compensation the recognition performance drops dramatically.
A representative system of the current generation of recognition systems is the Cambridge University HTK system, which will be used in the speaking electronic librarian.
The HTK error rate reduces with an increase of the used vocabulary and an increase of the length of the word-string N-gram.
An error percentage of nearly 7% can be reduced more in case of speaker adaptation.
Two scenarios can be adopted in the case of the incorporated speech recogniser, the first one without speaker adaptation focused on the service of any client and the second one addressed for a certain client, increasing his performance as much as possible.
In the first approach, a greater number of errors is allowed in expense of serving any new client.
In the second approach the recognized are substantially eliminated but this superior performance needs an extra time for the adaptation process.
The acoustic models of each customization case are stored and retrieved for use of the specific client.
After the recognition of the phrases of the speech stream, the location of the key-information words follows through word spotting technology.
These located and isolated words are the commands introduced to the system for the execution of the various library services.
Whether an error occurs there are two possibilities.
The first one is that the false word has a distance from the active words of the window, which exceeds the threshold, thus it is not selected as a command word.
The second possibility is that the false word is relatively near to one of the active words, leading in this way to an action not actually requested by the client.
Such false alarms can be eliminated, if a voice or written confirmation message is inserted at the beginning of the service, avoiding a subsequent spending of time.
Appendix B.
The speech synthesizer A number of commercial and laboratory prototype systems have been presented for text-to-speech synthesis.
The majority of them are based on one of the three most popular paradigms: · Rule-Based Speech Synthesis [8].
· Speech Synthesis based on Time-Domain Techniques [9], [10].
· Speech Synthesis based on Articulatory Models of the human speech production system.
Each of these methods possesses quite different characteristics, which render it more suitable for specific application areas.
In case that speed of execution is mainly concerned, a time-domain technique is the prime candidate.
On the other hand, for memory-sensitive application environments, formant-based techniques present a distinct advantage.
Modelling the human speech production system is a very demanding task, since the incorporated articulatory models require intense calculations.
This fact severely inhibits the implementation of articulatory models into real-world commercial applications.
Time-domain text-to-speech conversion (TD-TtS) relies on a large database of pre-recorded natural speech segments, which are then appropriately concatenated to obtain the speech transcription of arbitrary text [11].
By employing sophisticated algorithms for seaming the discrete segments one can achieve synthetic speech of high naturalness [12], [13], [14].
Rule-based text-to-speech conversion (RB-TtS), on the other hand, models the human speech production system more closely, requiring a more profound examination and a direct modelling of all the phenomena involved.
A number of high-quality state-of-the-art systems based on RB-TtS have been presented confirming the value of this method.
Synthetic speech quality, especially naturalness, is largely dependent on the sophistication of the prosodic modelling and prosodic rules employed.
On the other hand, detailed prosodic implementation increases substantially the intelligibility of the system even at segmental level.
The majority of TtS systems are based on sentence-level prosody, which provides various degrees of intelligibility but hardly any quasi-natural output from a prosodic and thus a phonetic point of view.
Thus, the main directions for improving the naturalness of synthetic speech involve studying (i) the synthetic signal quality as well as (ii) the prosodic modelling of natural speech.
Both aspects are the subject of intense research activity for improving the naturalness of synthetic speech [15].
Porting an existing speech synthesiser to a different language is a task requiring language-specific resources.
Focusing to a TD-TtS approach, the creation of a highquality speech synthesiser consists of developing an ensemble of modules for the target language.
These may be divided into the areas of (i) linguistic processing and (ii) digital signal processing, and are briefly described as follows: · Text-to-Phoneme Module: Converting written character complexes into phonemes to be dictated; · Segment Database: Creating a database of segments (and associated corpus) that covers sufficiently the target language; · Deriving an algorithm for decomposing text into segments; · Prosodic Modelling: Creating a prosody generator for the target language that provides the desired synthetic speech quality; · Speech Corpus: Obtaining an adequate corpus of pre-recorded utterances, which will provide the basis for defining speech segments in various environments to be concatenated during synthesis; · Synthesis Algorithms: Designing the algorithms that join the segments so as to generate the synthetic speech signal.
· Unit Selection: To improve the speech quality, multiple instances of each segment, possessing different prosodic properties, may be provided in the database.
An algorithm is then used to select the unit that most closely resembles the prosodic characteristics dictated by the model, thus minimising the audible mismatches [16], [17], [18].
References Raptis, S., Malliopoulos, C., Bakamidis, S. and Stainhaouer, G., “A Speech Agent for Remote E-Mail Access”, The 4th IEEE workshop on Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications and ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Applications of Speech Technology in Telecommunications, September 29-30, Torino, Italy 1998 Jenny Craven, “The development of digital libraries for blind and visually impaired people”, at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/ifla/ (access date 27/2/2002) Miesenberg, K., “Future library services : developing research skills among blind students” in Digital libraries of the blind and the culture of learning in the information age, Conference proceedings of the IFLA SLB Pre-Conference, Washington DC, USA, Aug. 13-15, 2001, IFLA/SLB, 2001 Burger, D., “BrailleNet: digital document delivery for the blind in France” (as in Ref.
2) Sung, C., “The future of lifelong learning in the next generation of library services” (as in Ref.
2) Steve Young, “Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition : A Review”, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 13(5): 45-57, 1996 Haton J-P, “Automatic Recognition of Speech in Adverse Conditions : a Review”, IEEE Speech and Audio, SAP 276, 1994 8.
Conkie, A & Isard, S, “Optimal Coupling of Diphones”, in Progress in Speech Synthesis, Van Santen, J., Sproat, R, Olive, J.
& Hirschberg, J.
(eds.
), pp.
279-282, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1997.
9.
Conkie, A et al, 1997, op.cit., pp.279-282.
10.
Moulines, E., & Charpentier, F., “Pitch Synchronous Waveform Processing Techniques for Text-to-speech Using Diphones”, Speech Communication, Vol.
9, No.
5, pp.
453-370, 1990 11.
Dutoit, T., An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis.
Kluwer Academic Press, Dordrecht, 1997.
12.
Dutoit, T. & Leich, H., “Text-to-Speech Synthesis Based on a MBE Resynthesis”, Speech Communication, Vol.
13, pp.
435-440, 1993 13.
Stylianou, Y., Harmonic plus Noise Models for Speech, combined with Statistical Methods, for Speech and Speaker Modification, Ph.D. Thesis, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications, 1996 14.
Stylianou, Y., “Removing Linear Phase Mismatches in Concatenative Speech Synthesis”, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Vol.
9, No.3, pp.
232-239, 2001.
15.
Keller, E., Bailly, G. Monaghan, A, Terken, J.
& Huckvale, M., “Improvements in Speech Synthesis” COST 258: The Naturalness of Synthetic Speech, John Wiley & sons Ltd., Chichester, England, 2002.
16.
Conkie, A et al, 1997, op.
cit.
pp.
279-282.
17.
Founda, M, Tambouratzis, G, Chalamandaris, A.
& Carayannis, G, Proceedings of the Eurospeech-2001 Conference, Vol.
2, pp.
837-840, 2001.
18.
Klabbers, E.A.M & Veldhuis, R. (1998), “On the Reduction of Concatenation Artifacts in Diphone Synthesis”, Proceedings of the ICSLP 98 Conference, Vol.
5, pp.
1983-1986.
Author Details Markos Dendrinos Ass.
Professor of the Dept.
of Library Studies in Technological Educational Institution of Athens (TEI-A) e-mail : mdendr@teiath.gr Researcher of Speech Technology Dept of Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) e-mail : mark@ilsp.gr Web site : http://www.ilsp.gr/homepages/dendrinos_eng.html Athens Greece Article Title: “A speaking electronic librarian” Author: Markos Dendrinos Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/dendrinos/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Policy Context: eLib and the Emergence of the Subject Gateways Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Policy Context: eLib and the Emergence of the Subject Gateways Buzz data software framework portfolio infrastructure archives digitisation identifier copyright cataloguing cache copac interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Derek Law and Lorcan Dempsey outline some of the features of the policy environment which led to the setting up of the influential 'subject gateways' as part of the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
This brief paper outlines some of the features of the policy environment which led to the setting up of the influential 'subject gateways' as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme.
It has the modest and partial ambition of putting some of the discussions of the time on record.
It should be read as a companion piece to two other articles.
The first, Law 1994, develops the historical context for the emergence of the data centres, a central component of JISC information infrastructure, and collaterally discusses the broad thrust of JISC's developing informational activity.
The second, Dempsey 2000, upon which this piece is partly based, provides a broad discussion of the emergence of the subject gateways and the historical trajectory which led to the setting up of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), which now provides an umbrella for JISC-funded subject-gateway activity.
This article has a particular focus: it looks at some aspects of the policy background which led to the funding of the subject gateways.
It does not discuss emerging services and approaches that also influenced developments.
There is a very much wider picture.
A useful starting point for filling in this picture is the special issue of Online Information Review in which the second article above appears: this includes a range of contributions, and references to be followed.
The Ariadne archive also contains many contributions about individual gateways (Ariadne).
The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) was an initiative of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils, following the publication of the Follett Report on libraries.
Its first phase saw the setting up of projects during 1995 in the following programmatic areas: electronic document and article delivery; digitisation (of backruns of journals); on-demand publishing; training and awareness; and access to network resources (ANR).
The subject gateways were funded as part of the ANR area.
A variety of other initiatives was developed in concert with eLib.
These included the funding of an Arts and Humanities Data Service (following a joint British Academy/British Library report and a commissioned study on how such a service would operate), the commissioning of work on retrospective conversion needs, and the funding for wider use of the union catalogue of the Consortium of University Research Libraries, COPAC.
These activities were in turn part of a larger, developing JISC information agenda begun in 1991, which included the setting up of up to five national data centres (which managed access to licensed bibliographic and other data sets), advisory and communication services, and other shared services.
Together, this growing portfolio of activity was a result of a belief in the utility of shared action in the construction of academic 'information infrastructure'.
In the same way as the network infrastructure was centrally procured and managed, it was felt that a significant part of shared information resource and supporting services could be so managed.
(See Law, 1994, for a discussion of the data centres in the context of wider academic information infrastructure.)
A call for expressions of interest to develop the eLib programme strands was released by the JISC in August, 1994 (JISC, 1994), and the programme was extended in subsequent calls (eLib).
The programme ambition and scope have been quite influential, and it has been discussed in detail elsewhere (Rusbridge, 1998).
In this way, the subject gateways can be seen as continuous with other initiatives which were looking at 'academic informaton infrastructure' at around this time in other countries, although the particular approach adopted here anticipated developments elsewhere.
The call characterises the aim of the ANR strand as "to consider funding through the JISC to encourage the development of networking navigation tools and the growth of local subject based tools and information servers".
An annex describes the aim in more depth.
It suggests that "The main outcome will be to raise awareness of networked information resources, to explore the issues associated with running large scale services, and to ensure community involvement in developments at national and international levels."
It furthermore suggests that the intention was not just to fund R&D which would lead to the production of demonstrator services: "It is therefore intended that a series of centrally funded initiatives should be taken with the aim of creating a national infrastructure capable of generating significantly more widespread use of networked information resources."
Several areas were highlighted which might deliver such an aim: "the creation of an organisational framework within which sustainable services can develop".
(this was to include the setting up of a "national entry point and registration agency" responsible for registering HE network services, monitoring use of overseas services and making recommendations for mirroring and caching, promotion of guidelines and standards, coordination with interested UK organisations.)
"the initiation of projects aimed at improving the design and availability of resource discovery and access systems, and of associated systems.
A small number of subject based services will be funded in order to test the problems of scale associated with offering a community wide service.
These projects will be expected to work together to explore standards and other common issues" "the promotion of preferred software solutions within the HE community by means of disseminating information on the development of resource discovery and access systems within the mainstream Internet environment, and through the provision of advice on technical issues relating to networked information and the planning for its development to individual HE institutions and to the funding councils and their various committees" "collaboration in the pursuit of these objectives within the international community as represented by organisations such as Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the proposed Multinational Information Framework (MIF) and the European Commission, as well as with information service providers and other interested parties in the UK" "the development of guidelines and standards to help raise the quality of registered information services".
Work was to be taken forward in three ways.
Following some consultation, bids to provide subject services would be invited.
This led to the funding and establishment of the eLib subject gateways.
These were SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) (which slightly pre-dated eLib, and in some ways acted as a model for other gateways), EEVL (Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library), OMNI (Organised Access to Medical Networked Information), History, ADAM (Art, Design, Architecture and Media information gateway), and Biz/Ed.
The ROADS (Resource Organisation and Discovery for subject-based services) project, which provided systems support for the gateways was also supported here.
Together with some more content-oriented projects these formed the Access to Network Resources strand of eLib (ANR).
It was believed that while the community might afford and sustain a series of services at "Faculty" level, that this would not be true at individual "subject" level.
The choice of subjects was intended to test this, as well as whether there were discipline specific issues.
Second, a study would be commissioned to advise on how to take forward the "national centre" envisaged in the document.
This resulted in a report commissioned from George Brett II, who had been influential in developing analogous systems in the United States of America, which proposed the setting up of an agency which combined some of the responsibilities of the US organisations, CNIDR (Clearinghouse for Network Information Discovery and Retrieval), CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) and Internic (Internet Information Centre).
And, third, a study of higher education participation on relevant committees would be commissioned which might provide recommendations on relevant activities (in the area of standards, etc).
These latter two strands were not taken forward in the way proposed, though, as noted below, many of the concerns identified have been taken up in later development.
The topics of the call, as described above, leaned heavily on the recommendations of the ANIR report which had been commissioned the previous year (ANIR).
Both the Follett IT Implementation Group (FIGIT) and the Information Services and Systems Sub-Committee of JISC were working on closely related themes and, in a Byzantine structure understood by few, effectively sub-contracted areas of responsibility to each other, as seemed appropriate.
Thus the Access to Networked Information Resources (ANIR) working group was established to advise the Information Systems and Services Sub-committee of JISC on sensible approaches to networked information, recognising the potential importance to the conduct of research and learning of emerging network information services.
Looking at the call above alongside the ANIR report one can identify some particular concerns: A conviction that the effective use of information resources in learning and research depended on creating access, discovery and other supporting services.
This was coupled with a recognition that these services are related and should be coordinated where helpful to support a cohering 'network use environment'.
A belief in the utility of central activity within the relative coherence of the UK higher education community and what was the relatively controlled environment of the academic network.
An awareness that significant development depended on being a part of wider standards and service development, which could be influenced through participation but which was increasingly various, energetic and unpredictable.
This in turn led to an aspiration to engage with centres of energy, whether these be institutional services, international standards or consensus-making activities, or development initiatives, and to provide structures through which this could happen.
This was in the hope that UK higher education participants would become more actively involved in helping shape the development of viable information and systems.
In practice some of these concerns have been partly addressed.
However, the pace of development has been greater than was anticipated.
The thinking was very much formed in the context of early academic and research information infrastructure.
It is notable, for example, that the Follett report, the document that released the eLib funding, makes no mention of the Web.
(Follett, 1994) And some proposed developments the manual, central registration of network services in a 'national entry point', for example were quickly being overtaken by events, and seem to belong to an earlier stage of development, characterised by a much more sparsely populated network information environment.
However, some of this early thinking is evident in the current range of JISC services.
(JISC) For example, there are now national mirroring and caching services, who plan to work with the Resource Discovery Network to optimise the use of available bandwidth.
There are a range of advisory and facilitating services, including for example, TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images), based at the University of Bristol, and the Interoperability Focus and Web Focus, based at UKOLN, who work to influence practice and inform policy in their respective areas.
The JISC is a member of international consensus making groups (for example, the World Wide Web Consortium, The Digital Object Identifier Foundation, and the Instructional Management System Centre).
It is an open question whether the central organisation envisaged in the call would have delivered the benefits it proposed, or would have been capable of sustaining sensible impetus in the flux of recent years.
Undoubtedly, several of its proposed roles have been variously carried out by other means.
However, it is interesting to note that the subject gateways within the RDN are now very much seen as central components of a wider Distributed National Electronic Resource, a 'managed environment for accessing quality assured information resources on the Internet'(DNER), which aims to deliver a richer research and learning information infrastructure.
Note Derek Law was chair of ISSC when the subject gateways were being set up.
Lorcan Dempsey, then at UKOLN, was a member of the ANIR working group, and, with Peter Stone, acted for ISSC in discussions with the gateway proposers.
The ANIR group was chaired by Ken Heard, and latterly by Richard Heseltine.
References (ANIR, 1994) Report on the Working Group on Access to Networked Information Resources ISSC(94)21.
[commissioned Autumn 1993; submitted Spring 1994].
(Reprinted in Journal of Information Networking, 2(3), 1995, p. 223-235).
(ANR) Access to network resources eLib projects.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/ (Ariadne) The Ariadne Magazine.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ (Dempsey, 2000) Lorcan Dempsey.
The subject gateways: experiences and issues based on the emergence of the Resource Discovery Network.
Online Information Review, 24(1), 2000. p. 8-23.
Also available at http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/ior-2000-02-dempsey/ (DNER) Committee on Electronic Information Content Working Group.
An integrated information environment for higher education: developing the distributed, national, electronic resource (DNER).
December 1997. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/cei/dner_colpol.html (eLib) Electronic Libraries Programme website.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ (Follett, 1994) Report of the Joint Funding Council's Libraries Review Group, chair Professor Sir Brian Follett.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ (JISC) The range of JISC services can be seen from the JISC informational web pages http://www.jisc.ac.uk/.
(JISC, 1994) JISC Circular 4.94: Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology: framework for the development of the initiative.
3 August 1994. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/circulars/4-94/ (Law, 1994) Derek Law.
The development of a national policy for dataset provision in the UK: a historical perspective.
Journal of Information Networking, 1(2), 1994, p.103-116.
(RDN) Resource Discovery Network website.
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ (Rusbridge, 1998) Chris Rusbridge.
Towards the hybrid library.
D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1998. http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/july98/rusbridge/07rusbridge.html Author Details   Derek Law, Librarian and Director of Information Strategy, University of Strathclyde (d.law@strath.ac.uk) and Lorcan Dempsey, DNER Director, King's College London (lorcan.dempsey@kcl.ac.uk) Article Title: "A Policy Context: eLib and the Emergence of the Subject Gateways" Author: Derek Law; Lorcan Dempsey Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/subject-gateways/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Update Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Update Buzz database cataloguing graphics mysql url research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod and Linda Kerr provide news about the EEVL service EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is a free service, and is funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Service News Logo graphic for links to EEVL A small graphic featuring the EEVL eye is now available for those sites who wish to place a link to EEVL.
The graphic is shown in the main heading above and can be copied from the EEVL web site [1].
Free Book Promotion EEVL's £5,000 worth of free engineering books promotion, which was mentioned in the last issue of Ariadne [2], closed at the end of April.
It was a resounding success, and we would like to thank all those who helped to distribute fliers and emails.
The response was rather overwhelming as there were over 4760 valid entries.
These came from 3145 unique email addresses, with 908 people from the .ac.uk domain entering (the largest number of entries came from Nottingham Trent University).
Winners have been chosen randomly by the sponsoring publishers (Kluwer, Academic Press, Springer and Palgrave).
For those who entered but did not win a free book, we understand that some of the publishers involved will be offering the selected titles at a discounted price.
Affiliate Programme An affiliate program involves offering a product or a service of another company on a web site, normally by adding a simple banner with a link to the other company site.
The affiliate then receives commission from the company for sales or leads.
In theory, the affiliate can benefit not only from commission, but also from increased site traffic, credibility from partnership with other organisations, and added content.
Just how relevant are affiliate programs to services such as EEVL?
To tell the truth, we have no idea!
The best way to find out if these things work is to try them, and this is what EEVL is doing.
An arrangement has been made with Justengineers.net [3], a popular recruitment agency which provides access to job searches, career advice, email alerts and newsletters.
For a trial period, a Justengineers graphic and link has been placed on about 10 EEVL pages (for example, the Manufacturing Engineering browse page [4]), and for every person who clicks on this graphic and subsequently registers with Justengineers, the Hub will receive a small fee.
This affiliate scheme will be carefully monitored, and if it proves popular, it will be retained.
Of course, our involvement in this affiliate scheme does not imply any special endorsement by EEVL of Justengineers.
Industry News Hot Link The Hot Link has been completely updated [ 5].
As well as many more links to sources of industry news, this page now includes links to a number of Moreover news feeds [6] giving today's news headlines for important engineering disciplines.
Now that so many newspapers and periodicals are available online, and with the capabilities of modern search technology, the potential of news clipping services has really been transformed.
By visiting EEVL's Engineering Industry News page, you can now get the latest news headlines for technology policy, the aerospace and defence industry, the construction sector, transport industries, robotics, telecoms, the engineering industry in general, and several more subjects and sectors.New Engineering Images Hot Link Regular users of EEVL mayhave noticed a new Hot Link to Engineering Images [ 7] .
This link provides access to those resources included in EEVL's catalogue of engineering resources which have been identified as containing significant collections of images.Database The EEVL technical officer, Geir Granum, is working on a MySQL database, which will replace the bespoke database currently powering the EEVL catalogue of engineering resources.
As the EEVL service will, from September 2001, cover mathematics, computing and engineering, it is essential that the new catalogue should allow searching within specific sections of the catalogue as well as across the three subject areas.
The new service will be launched on September 12th, at a champagne reception in the Museum of Scotland, alongside the ALT-C conference being held in the University of Edinburgh [8].
Virtual Training Suite launch The biggest news, by far, in this issue is the launch of the RDN Virtual Training Suite [ 9].
EEVL co-ordinated the development of seven of these tutorials: Civil Engineering, Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, Health and Safety Engineering, Materials Engineering, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, and Petroleum Engineering, which have been added to the Internet Aviator tutorial developed last year [10].
Michael Breaks, University Librarian and Director of EEVL, launched the VTS at a reception in Edinburgh University.
Champagne (or an approximation) and a buffet lunch were enjoyed by around 40 people.
Guests included four tutorial authors, subject librarians from Scottish and North of England universities, and representatives from the Scottish-based Learning and Teaching Network Centres (LTSN), the Scottish Further Education Unit, a Regional Support Centre, EDINA, the Edinburgh College of Art and the Centre for Digital Library Research.
Many thanks to ILRT for the development and management of this project.References The EEVL logo can be downloaded from http://www.eevl.ac.uk/images/eevlb.gif Shoestring marketing: examples from EEVL, Roddy MacLeod and Lesa Ng, Ariadne 27, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/eevl/ Justengineers.net at http://www.affiliatewindow.com/cgi-bin-local/a.pl?justengi&5934 Manufacturing Engineering browse page at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/manuf_eng.html Engineering Industry News Hot Link at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/newsfeed.htm Moreover news feeds at http://w.moreover.com/ Hot Link to Engineering Images at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/cross/new-search.pl?page=1&query=engineering+images&submit=Search&phrase=on&glocat=frk&resourcetype=ALL+RESOURCES ALT-C conference being held in the University of Edinburgh http://www.ed.ac.uk/altc2001/ Virtual Training Suite at http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ A new Ariadne 'At the Event' Article is available at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/vts/ EEVL Tutorials: Civil Engineering at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/civil/ Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/elec/ Health and Safety Engineering at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/healthandsafety/ Materials Engineering at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/materials/ Mathematics at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/maths/ Mechanical Engineering at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/mechanical/ Petroleum Engineering at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/petroleum/ Internet Aviator at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/aviator/ Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Linda Kerr EEVL Coordinator Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: L.Kerr@hw.ac.uk Article Title: "EEVL Update" Author: Roddy MacLeod and Linda Kerr Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Eye on Engineering Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Eye on Engineering Buzz data software javascript database archives preservation cataloguing graphics hypertext gis adobe ejournal licence url research Citation BibTex RIS The EEVL Team explore Internet Resources in Petroleum Engineering and Electronics, take a glance at engineering resources in Australia and South East Asia and give the latest news from the EEVL service.
Here are four updates relevant to the EEVL project.
EEVL Update Linda Kerr, EEVL The Offshore Engineering Information Service [1] hosted by EEVL [2], provides details of meetings and conferences in petroleum and offshore engineering, and a bibliography of recent accessions in those areas to Heriot-Watt University Library.
The Web pages were previously free only to UK academics, and are now free to all users.
An article on engineering resources in Petroleum appears in this column, written by Arnold Myers, who runs the Offshore Engineering Information Service.
Roddy MacLeod here begins the first of his “Round the World” articles, focusing in this issue on quality engineering sites in Australia and South East Asia.
This article is co-written by Gulcin Cribb, from The University of Queensland Library.
Gulcin is involved in the recently-funded Australian Virtual Engineering Library (AVEL) [3], which aims to provide engineers with access to quality engineering Web-based materials in that region.
There are close links between EEVL and AVEL, which may extend to include cross-searching facilities between the two services.
EEVL is already exploring the possibility of cross-searching Compendex and the EEVL catalogue, in collaboration with EDINA [4].
Developing searching across different collections of resources is fast becoming the new brown (or grey) in the resource discovery world, and, by the time you read this, EEVL’s All-in-one Search on the Internet for Engineering Resources (EASIER)[5], should be fully operational.
This allows users to search across the EEVL Catalogue, UK engineering Web sites and engineering newsgroups using one search box, giving quick and easy access to around 100,000 Web based items.
Results are ranked, displaying the most appropriate results from each database.
EASIER should make life…easier for users by combining searches which previously had to be carried out using different search pages.
The EEVL Catalogue now includes over 4,000 records, and with increasing amounts of data, some queries require more advanced search options eg filtering results by resource type and location.
For this reason, the individual search pages for the UK Engineering Search Engine, the EEVL Catalogue and the Newsgroup Archive will still be available.
In addition, the popular bibliographic database Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) [6], hosted by EEVL, has undergone a number of improvements to the search and results interface.
RAM is produced by the Library and Information Services Department at The Nottingham Trent University, and contains abstracts from over 500 leading journals in manufacturing.
References Offshore Engineering Information Service, EEVL <URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/offshore/> EEVL, Home Page <URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/> Australian Virtual Engineering Library Home Page, <URL: ttp://www.library.uq.edu.au/avel/> EDINA, Home Page <URL: http://edina.ed.ac.uk/index.shtml> All-in-one Search on the Internet for Engineering Resources EEVL, <URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/> Recent Advances in Manufacturing, EEVL <URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ram/index.html> About The Author Linda Kerr, EEVL Project Officer Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: L.Kerr@hw.ac.uk Phone: 0131 451 3572 Fax: 0131 451 3164 Linda Kerr is Services Officer for EEVL, with responsibility for service development and training.
Electronic Engineering Resources on the Internet Nicola Harrison The Internet includes a large number of electronic engineering resources.
In some ways there is a problem with an excess of information.
Compared to some disciplines, finding high quality, relevant resources can be very time consuming.
A search using a popular search engine, for “electronic engineering” produced 30 million hits.
If we assume that one can check each site to a reasonable depth in about half an hour then it would take over a thousand years to investigate them all.
Any attempt to produce a list of the best electronic engineering Web sites is bound to be subjective, however, the following sites are all substantial, and have several useful features.
There are many sites which provide information on particular electronics topics.
A few examples are: EMC Net [1] EMC Net aims to provide free and unbiased information on electromagnetic compatibility and electromagnetic interference related topics.
A wide variety of full text technical papers are available.
The What’s New [2] section includes information on updates to international electromagnetic compatibility standards.
EMC conversion data and formulae are provided in JavaScript format.
EMC Infobase [3] has links to various resources including design guidelines and listings of books, periodicals, standards and other resources in addition to conferences and exhibitions.
A Products & Services section allows a user to search for contact details of suppliers of selected EMC products.
The site is clearly laid out, and does not use frames so that it is quick and easy to navigate.
The Chip Directory [4] The Chip Directory (UK mirror) is a resource which contains a variety of different lists relating of semiconductor chips.
Chips are listed in numerical order, by function, by name or by family.
An A-Z listing of chip manufacturers and a geographical listing of distributors are also provided.
There is cross referencing between the lists and information on how to read chip numbers and extract useful data from them on a “Chip Spotting” [5] page.
The site doesn’t use lots of graphics or frames, so it works quickly.
The way in which the information is presented isn’t always easy to follow, and not all the cross references and internal links actually lead to substantial information, but it’s not a bad starting point.
The Chip Directory has a range of mirror sites all over the world and many of its pages offer an option for users to move to a faster mirror site.
HITEN [6] The High Temperature Electronics Network provides useful information on aspects of high temperature electronics.
It also provides links to companies specialising in different areas of the subject.
Recent news items are available freely, but a news archive is restricted to members only.
The freely available information on the site gives a good introduction to the topic and some of the companies which links are given for have more detailed information available.
Data Bookshelf [7] The Data Bookshelf is a list of links to companies’ product data sheet pages.
The site gives direct links to the data sheet pages.
The advantage is that a user doesn’t have to navigate through sales and corporate information on the company sites to find the data sheets.
Not all companies provide product data sheets online, so a list of those which do is a valuable resource in itself.
The site is simply an alphabetical list, with no descriptions, so unless you know which companies make the kind of semiconductor products you are looking for it’s rather tricky to use.
eg3.com [8] The Electronic Engineers Toolbox provides an index of free electronics related resources, particularly those dealing with digital signal processing, embedded systems, industrial computing, microcomputers and microprocessors.
There is an alphabetical list of companies.
The search facility provides links to the web sites of companies which supply specified products.
News items relating to new technological developments are provided.
There are links to newsgroups, FAQs, new books, universities with relevant research projects and conferences as well as product suppliers.
Parts of the site seems to be designed to look as if it uses frames, but doesn’t actually use them.
The layout is somewhat complicated, and the descriptions of links within the site (for example the heading “ee hunter”) may not be obvious to anyone who has not used it before.
Users can submit their email address to receive free update information and reports, but all areas of the site are freely available without the need to register or subscribe.
It is made clear that the site includes advertising information.
It is based in the USA, so not all the information provided is relevant to UK users.
A wide variety of papers and journals are available through universities, Institutions and commercial sites.
Whilst abstracts are nearly always freely available, access to full text papers and journals may be restricted to subscribers, which is very frustrating.
The Technical Report Search Service [9] at Hensa can be searched for information on more than 4000 technical reports, masters theses, PhD theses, conference proceedings and books which are provided by 44 UK and worldwide institutions.
The subject area is general, not specifically electronics, but it can be a convenient starting point for a search for papers.
Many electronics related magazines have online versions, with additional features such as glossaries.
For example New Electronics Online [10] is an e-journal version of the magazine “New Electronics” includes a reference page from which a full text of technical articles from previous issues can be downloaded in pdf format.
A Technology section at provides links to press releases on specified technical topics as well as another route to the full text articles.
A dictionary of acronyms used in electronics is also provided.
Only a table of contents (without abstracts) is given for the current issue of the magazine, but there is a lot of other information available on the site.
Technology News [11] is another e-journal.
It provides articles on a variety of subjects with links between related ones.
Articles are divided up by subject area.
A Technical Encyclopaedia [12] allows a user to search for terms or ask for a random definition.
At the end of each definition a list of the terms just before and just after it in the encyclopaedia are given, links to related topics may also be included.
Definitions include text and often diagrams to illustrate them.
Company information can be searched.
There is a listing of events and also reviews of products.
The site uses frames and also carries adverts which take up some of the screen space and mean that more scrolling is needed to read text and diagrams.
Circuit Cellar INK [13] is a magazine based in the USA.
The online version includes articles relating to practical embedded systems problems and articles illustrating unique applications through complete projects, practical tutorials and design techniques.
There are articles on technical problems and possible solutions to them.
A suppliers directory and an index of back issues are available.
Commercial company Web sites often include product specifications, data sheets and manuals.
They may also incorporate directories and glossaries of technical information as a value added component of the site.
A couple of good ones are: Amplicon Liveline Ltd’s site [14] includes datasheets and specifications for many of its products in pdf format, including a guide to CE marking http://www.amplicon.co.uk/ceguide.html Harris Semiconductors [15] in the USA provides product data sheets as well as reliability white papers.
There is a description of How Semiconductors are Made, which is followed by a glossary of electronics related terms.
University sites may include undergraduate course material, and often also give information on the types of research being undertaken, plus lists of publications from research groups.
The Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Surrey [16] includes descriptions of the department, its courses and research projects.
There are also some more detailed sets pages on particular project interests such as Worldwide TV Standards A Web Guide [17].
This substantial guide includes an explanation of how the different television standards evolved and describes the various technologies being used to convert between them.
There is a map showing where the different standards apply and practical advice for people wishing to convert videos between different standards.
References EMC Net, Home Page <URL: http://www.emcnet.com/> What’s New, EMC Net <URL: http://www.emcnet.com/serv04.htm> EMC Infobase, EMC Net <URL: http://www.emcnet.com/serv05.htm> Chip Directory, Home Page <URL: http://www.shellnet.co.uk/chipdir/chipdir.htm> “Chip Spotting”, Home Page <URL: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ganswijk/chipdir/spotting.htm> High Temperature Electronics Network, Home Page <URL: http://www.hiten.com/guests/> Data Bookshelf, Home Page <URL: http://chaos.crhc.uiuc.edu/databookshelf/> eg3.com, Home Page <URL: http://www.eg3.com/ebox.htm> Technical Report Search Service, HENSA <URL: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/search/techreps/index.html> New Electronics Online, Home Page <URL: http://www.neon.co.uk/> Technology News, Home Page <URL: http://www.techweb.com/> Technical Encyclopaedia, Technology News <URL: http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.cgi> Circuit Cellar INK, Home Page <URL: http://www.circellar.com/> Amplicon Liveline, Home Page <URL: http://www.amplicon.co.uk/> Harris Semiconductors, Home Page <URL: http://rel.semi.harris.com/> University of Surrey, Home Page <URL: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/> Worldwide TV Standards A Web Guide, University of Surrey <URL: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Contrib/WorldTV/> Author Details Nicola Harrison, EEVL Database Assistant Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: N.J.Harrison@hw.ac.uk Nicola Harrison has a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Brunel University.
She worked as an editor and coder for patent information providers Derwent Information specialising in imaging and medical electronics from 1990.
Since October 1997 she has been Project Assistant at Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library.
Round the World: Australian and South East Asian engineering resources Roddy MacLeod, Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library, and Gulcin Cribb, The University of Queensland Library Locating Australian engineering Internet resources is likely to become much easier once the Australian Virtual Engineering Library (AVEL) [1] develops into a fully-fledged service.
Currently progressing beyond the planning stages, and with a Web site which already includes links to a number of engineering resources, AVEL is a partnership between The University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC), the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales, Monash University, the Institution of Engineers, Australia, and the Centre for Mining Technology and Equipment (CMTE).
The aim of AVEL is to provide engineers of all kinds with efficient access to relevant, quality Australian Web-based materials through a searchable catalogue of resources.
Better organised access to Australian engineering Internet resources is necessary for several reasons.
The size of the engineering sector in that country makes it important in global terms, but other factors include the rapid uptake of new technology within the country (one of the highest in the world, with impressive growth of Internet use), and the importance that the Australian Government has placed on developing a national strategy for information and communications services.
At the present time, however, finding major Australian and South East Asian engineering sites is not particularly easy.
The large Australian search engines and directories, such as Yahoo!
Australia & NZ [2], Web Wombat Australian Search Engine[3], Sofcom’s Web Directory [4], ANZWERS [5], and Excite Australia Channels [6] are only a little better for this purpose than their international equivalents.
There are occasional gems which partly make up for the present lack of a central access point, and one of these is undoubtedly the Asia Pacific Trade Publications site being developed by ASIA Pacific Energy Business Publications Pte.
Ltd, who are based in Singapore [7].
Their home page includes a dreaded ‘under construction’ warning, but is nevertheless worth investigation.
At first glance, it looks as if there is little more here than some as yet undeveloped home pages for various print trade journals such as Hydrocarbon Asia, FDN Asia, and an online version of PetroMin, the upstream oil and gas magazine currently celebrating its twenty-fifth year of publication.
With tables of contents, the editorial, and selected full text articles from the printed version of PetroMin freely available, plus an archive of past issues (only a few issues available at the present time), a calendar of forthcoming events, and an email mailing list offering industry news, promotions, and links, this is a useful site for a fairly specialised market (the printed version of PetroMin has a circulation of just over 7,000), but what makes the resource worth a return visit is the ‘Petromin / Hydrocarbon Asia OnLine Oil & Gas Directory’ page with its selection of oil and gas Industry links.
This is a version of the more detailed printed PetroMin Hydrocarbon Asia Oil & Gas Directory, which can be ordered from the Web site, and is a very useful tool for locating the Web sites of over 800 companies, government sites, products, services, associations, universities and research institutes.
The searchable and browsable directory includes resources which are located both within the region and elsewhere, which is a little disappointing, as a more localised focus might perhaps be more useful, but many of the Australasion resources included are worth visiting, and the directory’s descriptions are informative and well-crafted.
A typical example of a well designed engineering company Web site which can be found through the directory is that of BHP [8].
BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited) is one of the oldest mining companies in Australia, having been incorporated in 1885 when it was formed to develop a mine in western New South Wales.
By 1888, it was already supplying a significant proportion of the world’s silver, and in the years following it expanded its operations to include copper, coal, petroleum, power, transport, ferrous minerals, steel products and information technology.
The company now has interests and activities in 18 countries, and is Australia’s largest listed public company.
The site is full of interesting facts and figures and the occasional more in-depth analysis or helpful glossary, but much of the information is aimed at the interested lay-person, student, job prospector, or financier rather than researcher or practicing engineer.
However, often the facts themselves are fascinating.
Did you know that BHP Petroleum, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BHP, is the 18th largest oil and gas company in the world in terms of reserves?
Or that BHP Coal-managed operations have proved reserves of 817 million tonnes of metallurgical coal, or that the company produces 40 per cent of the world’s supply of copper concentrates?
References Australian Virtual Engineering Library, <URL: http://www.library.uq.edu.au/avel/> Yahoo!
Australia & NZ, <URL: http://www.yahoo.com.au/Regional/Countries/Australia/Science/Engineering/> Web Wombat Australian Search Engine, <URL: http://www2.webwombat.com.au/> Sofcom’s Web Directory, <URL: http://www.sofcom.com/Directories/> ANZWERS, <URL: http://www.anzwers.com.au/> Excite Australia Channels, <URL: http://au.excite.com/> ASIA Pacific Energy Business Publications Pte.
Ltd, <URL: http://www.safan.com/> BHP, <URL: http://www.bhp.com.au/> About The Author Roderick MacLeod, Senior Faculty Librarian Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Phone: 0131 451 3576 Fax: 0131 451 3164 Roddy MacLeod is Senior Faculty Librarian for Engineering at Heriot-Wat University Library, and Services Manager for EEVL.
He also edits the Internet Resources Newsletter.
Gulcin Cribb is Manager, Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences & Engineering Library Service, The University of Queensland Petroleum Technology on the Web Arnold Myers, Heriot-Watt University Abstract The oil industry is notoriously conservative, and the provision of web-based information resources has been slower than in some other fields.
Nevertheless there is now much substantial information available.
The emphasis on conference papers rather than journals is evident in electronic provision as it has been in paper publications.
This article gives a few signposts to some of the better services.
Article The petroleum industry would appear to be well placed to exploit to the full the advantages of World-Wide Web publishing: its operations are truly world-wide, extending from the tropics to the arctic, the use of a single language (English) predominates, and developments in technical, commercial and political matters are rapid.
However, the industry seems in many instances to prefer old-fashioned products which are reliable and familiar.
For example, the technical standards used internationally are those of the American Petroleum Institute [1]; although new editions are produced fairly frequently, there is no web version and even the wealthiest oil company is forced to rely entirely on paper publications.
The trade directory used by the upstream industry around the North Sea is Miller Freeman’s Offshore Oil and Gas Directory excellent in paper and on CD, but non-existant on the Web.
Although the industry can act in unison in many ways, its information provision is largely left to free enterprise which continues to find print media profitable.
The material of most interest to academic engineers is, as in other fields, published in conference papers and journals.
Substantial accounts of industry experience tend to be presented at conferences rather than written up for journals, and the resulting publications are not always picked up by indexing and abstracting services.
Academic contributions appear in both the conference and the journal literature.
The coverage of the petroleum industry in electronic journals is still meagre examples such as Proceedings Institution of Civil Engineers : Water maritime and energy [2] include only a small fraction of the relevant literature.
The situation may well improve, and it is always worth checking the current position in the Engineering E-journal Search Engine [3] for full-text electronic journals.
The most active organisation in publishing conference papers electronically is the Society of Petroleum Engineers [4].
The SPE organises conferences all over the world, and controls the publication of the papers very systematically.
The website has the SPE Technical Paper Index which allows searching by author, title, year, publication, or paper number of the 30,000 references in the SPE archive from 1951 to date.
The full electronic text of recent papers is offered, but not free of charge.
A service called SPE Masterdisk available (by modest subscription) online through the web gives abstracts in addition to indexing, but can be frustrating in practice since the licence is only for use at a single computer.
There are several useful news services on the Web, such as Financial Times Energy Publishing [5].
The site contains about 20 full-text stories from current newsletters as well as information about the extensive range of energy publications from FT Energy Publishing.
Although the full text of all publications is not available free of charge, sample issues of newsletters and executive summaries of many management reports can be downloaded.
The Offshore Engineering Information Service [6] maintained by the present author includes a regularly-updated (at least every three months, often more frequently) cumulative bibliography of petroleum and marine technology which supesedes the one in the Petroleum and Marine Technology Information Guide (Spon, 1993).
Access to the service is free.
The service also includes a bulletin of new publications and a calendar of forthcoming meetings in petroleum and marine technology which is more comprehensive (130-150 announcements) than other free services, and has a back file.
A further good service giving announcements of meetings is the Subtech Petroleum Events Calendar [7]: a listing of forthcoming events (conferences, seminars, exhibitions etc) related to the petroleum industry with a bias towards North Sea related activities.
The calender is a single page listing of events in chronological order.
One of the best-maintained and most user-friendly sites is that of the Institute of Petroleum [8] whose website includes news, publications lists, forthcoming meetings etc and an impressive array of links.
The The American Association of Petroleum Geologists whose website Geobyte [9] contains articles from recent bulletins as .pdf files, viewable using an Adobe Acrobat reader software.
The website also contains abstracts from past and future conferences and a large publications list.
An unusual feature is a searchable database of students who are readily available to help with petroleum and geological needs.
AAPG is an international organization of more than 31,000 members in 115 countries The International Association of Drilling Contractors [10] promotes commitment to safety, preservation of the environment and advances in drilling technology.
Membership is open to any company involved in oil and gas exploration and production, well servicing, oil field manufacturing and other rig site services.
The server contains information on membership, a publications catalogue, text of the newsletter Drill Bits Online, accident statistics, a weekly rig count and news of meetings and conferences.
The IADC document service offers a list of publications of interest to the drilling community.
The site has some full text .pdf documents.
The site give up-to-date statistics on worldwide drilling and accidents.
EEVL: Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library [11] is the British gateway to engineering Internet resources, especially UK-based resources.
Web resources are carefully inspected and only included if they contain substantial material likely to be of use to engineers.
There are 164 such sites described and linked at present.
The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate [12] server, with pages in English and Norwegian, gives information on production, safety legislation applicable to the petroleum industry and details of research projects.
The legislation is available free of charge through the Web.
One of the most substantial free databases, OIL [13], contains all of the references in Oljeindeks (Oil Index) from 1974 to date, approximately 50.000 references and covers both English-language and Norwegian language material of nordic origin.
The United Kingdom Offshore Operators Association [14] is the representative organisation for the British offshore oil and gas industry.
Its members are the companies licensed by HM Government to explore for and produce oil and gas in UK waters.
This site offers information about the organisation and its publications, and includes a glossary, a history of North Sea oil, information about safety policy and organisation, statistics, and press releases from the organisation.
There is a large amount of background information, case studies, and briefings about the industry.
The Oil Industry International Exploration and Production Forum [15] (E & P Forum) represents the interests of the upstream oil and gas industry with international regulatory bodies.
At this site is information about the Forum, its mission, structure, members, and representatives.
An on-line catalogue of Forum Reports is available, along with the full text of a Position Paper on decommissioning, plus links to pages about the work of the E&P Forum Standards subcommittee, and the E&P Forum Committee for Physical Oceanography and Meteorology.
There is one substantial freely-available industry directory, the Pegasus Oil & Gas Directory [16] which is searchable by company name, location and keyword.
Many company sites are more concerned with presenting an image and appearing to be at the cutting edge than in conveying information in an efficient way.
These sites, which are probably most impressive when presented by their designers to company management on local equipment, merely tax the patience of remote users who have plough through successive pages full of graphics and frames but low on useful information.
Too often the design tries to emulate the impact of turning over a magazine page to be struck by a striking and colourful layout, an experience which the web rarely delivers effectively, rather than exploiting the indexing and data organizing characteristics of hypertext which are the web’s strong feature.
Schlumberger Oilfield Services [17] is one of the more informative company websites.
Among other features there is a form one can complete for on-line assessment of chances in a job application.
It also contains the remarkable sci.geo.petroleum [18] page of internet resource live links, maintained by William F. Quinlivan.
References American Petroleum Institute, <URL: http://www.api.org/> Proceedings Institution of Civil Engineers, <URL: http://www.t-telford.co.uk/JOL/index.html> Engineering E-journal Search Engine, <URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/> Society of Petroleum Engineers, <URL: http://www.spe.org/> Financial Times Energy Publishing, <URL: http://www.ftenergy.com/> Offshore Engineering Information Service, <URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/offshore/> Subtech Petroleum Events Calendar, <URL: http://www.subtech.no/petreven.htm> Institute of Petroleum, <URL: http://www.petroleum.co.uk> The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, <URL: http://www.geobyte.com/index.html> International Association of Drilling Contractors, <URL: http://www.iadc.org/> Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library, <URL: http://eevl.ac.uk/ > Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, <URL: http://www.npd.no/index.html> OIL database, <URL: http://www.interpost.no/oil> United Kingdom Offshore Operators Association, <URL: http://www.ukooa.co.uk/> Oil Industry International Exploration and Production Forum, <URL: http://www.eandpforum.co.uk/> Pegasus Oil & Gas Directory, <URL: http://www.pegasusoil-gasdirectory.co.uk/default.html> Schlumberger Oilfield Services, <URL: http://www.slb.com/> sci.geo.petroleum, <URL: http://www.slb.com/petr.dir/> Author Details Dr Arnold J. Myers Information specialist: Petroleum and Offshore Engineering, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: A.J.Myers@hw.ac.uk Arnold Myers is Senior Faculty Librarian for Petroleum Engineering at Heriot-Watt University Library.
He also runs the Offshore Engineering Information Service, which offers an information service to subscribers, and a current awareness service of bibliographic information and conference details, freely available to all.
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JISC ASSIST Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC ASSIST Buzz framework database infrastructure accessibility copyright licence authentication privacy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jane Williams on the JISC awareness unit.
JISC ASSIST (Activities, Services and Special Initiatives Support Team) is an “awareness raising” unit set up because the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)[1] recognises that “the opportunities presented by IT are outstripping the ability of the sector to assimilate and exploit them.”[2] This article is by way of an introduction to what will be a regular feature of ARIADNE which will highlight current, and future, JISC plans and activities and how these are assisting HEIs grapple with the many information and technology related challenges that are influencing the shape of HE for future generations.
JISC is probably best known for putting in place a communications network to support HE known as JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork).
In addition, JISC negotiates access to electronic resources and content on behalf of and for use by the higher education community, funds a varied programme of research and development projects exploring the potential of new and emerging technologies and commissions studies looking at the human and organisational issues involved with implementing and using information systems.
JISC ASSIST acts as a focal point for all information pertaining to JISC and associated initiatives and has an ambitious programme of PR activities.
JISC ASSIST, however, is more than an awareness raising unit and actively engages with the community through workshops and meetings with senior management and other targeted groups to discuss and understand the needs of the community.
Finally JISC ASSIST will be providing feedback to all parts of the JISC and the community it serves to ensure its work remains relevant and enable us to plan future work that is responsive to user requirements.
Our plans over the next 12 months or so include: an ambitious programme of PR activities including the continuation of the Senior Mangement Briefing Papers and other targeted materials a new JISC WWW site providing a single point of access to all JISC information and activities including a fully searchable database of all JISC papers, reports, projects, resources, etc.
The site will employ current standards and demonstrate those that are new and emerging and use technological developments funded by JISC working with JISC funded services and projects to ensure maximum uptake and exploitation of their products and services continuing to run workshops and other discussion forums on strategic issues relating to communications and information technology (C&IT) meeting with the community through institutional visits, user groups, etc.
to work together to understand the barriers impeding the uptake of C&IT and JISC resources and products using a subject based approach experimenting with a variety of promotional activities and monitoring uptake (see below) commissioning small projects on issues of generic importance across the whole of HE e.g.
JISC ASSIST has recently commissioned an update to the SIMA [3] report “A comprehensive survey of the legal issues relating to the development and use of the World Wide Web technology at education sites” (see below) evaluation of JISC ASSIST including user consultation to inform future work plans A key aspect to the work of JISC ASSIST is developing partnerships with other key players, organisations and initiatives.
What to look out for: Resource Guide for the Social Sciences Funded jointly by the ESRC and JISC the key focus of this project is on promoting and coordinating the type of social science electronic information and resources and the range of services available.
The project is not about promotion for promotion’s sake; rather it is about aiding Social Scientists realise the type and range of internet services (and in particular those funded by the JISC and ESRC) available from a single point so that they can use them as appropriate to their needs.
The Resource Guide Adviser is Karen Ford.
Karen is based alongside the Subject Gateways for Social Science (SOSIG) and Business and Economics (Biz/ed).
JISC ASSIST is exploring the potential of expanding this model to other subject areas based on JISC’s collections policy [4] and has been working with Karen to ensure that the framework developed is one that could be adopted by other subject areas.
For further details of the resources and help available take a look at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/subject/socsci/ A survey of the legal issues relating to the development and use of intenet related technologies at educational sites.
An update to the JISC funded document “A comprehensive Survey of the Legal Issues Relating to the Development and Use of the World Wide Web Technology at Education Sites” [5] has been commissioned.
JISC ASSIST has come across a number of instances where up to date advice is needed.
The report is being updated and developed to reflect both the changes in law over the last 3 years, and the expanding number of uses to which Internet Technology is being put by HE institutions.
As part of the report: a draft strategic plan and checklist for HE to use in structuring the administration of its provision of Internet resources including practical solutions and a set of draft regulations, guidelines, and other supporting documentation for use in conjunction with the strategic plan are being produced.
This work is of importance to a number of information related activities: the Information Strategies Initiative [6] and in particular that of information security and the BS7799 pilot work (see below).
The report will be produced end of November 1999 with a draft report presented at the third annual UK WWW focus workshop [7] in September for discussion.
Accessibility of WWW sites JISC ASSIST is working with the DISInHE [8] service (see elsewhere in this issue) to carry out an audit of a range of JISC service WWW sites to assess their accessibility by all staff and students.
The results will be available as a set of case studies to the community.
This is of particular relevance given the current legislation and the new European Human Rights Legislation which will be with us by the year 2000 (see ARIADNE Issue 19 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/disinhe/ for further details) Workshops The following workshops are being planned for the next academic year: Information Security: results of the BS7799 pilot investigating the appropriateness of this information security standard for HE A C&IT infrastructure for research: what do we need in the way of network developments, resources, tools, training, etc.
to continue to support researchers Other titles are under discussion including workshops on a Distributed National Electronic Resource for Education and the costs of implementing C&IT Institutional Visits If your institution is interested in a visit from members of JISC to discuss institutional needs and how can JISC help please contact JISC ASSIST, contact details below.
Next Issue In the next issue, as well as updating you on JISC activities, we will reporting on work being carried out as part of our annual theme: Security: Authentication, Authorisation, Privacy and other security issues.
With the growing importance of electronic information it is essential that it is appropriately protected.
It should only be available to authorised users, and users must have confidence that the information has not been illegally altered.
HEIs may also wish to restrict access to external information, either because it is inappropriate for users to access it or because there are charges associated with it.
JISC is funding a number of projects in these areas looking at how this can be done cost effectively.
[9] A number of other security related activities are also underway and will be reported on in the next issue.
Please visit JISC at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk and send your enquiries or thoughts to JISC ASSIST: assist@jisc.ac.uk.
Elsewhere in this issue of Ariadne there are reports on other JISC supported projects, including the National Electronic Site License Initiative, the subject gateways (BIZ/ED, SOSIG, EEVL), DISinHE, and also the CLUMPS projects run as part of the UK eLib Programme.
References [1] Joint Information Syastems Committee: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ [2] Joint Information Systems Committee Five Year Strategy 1996-2001 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub/strategy.html [3] SIMA reports: http://www.agocg.ac.uk/sima.htm [4] JISC Collections Policy: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/collections/ [5] A comprehensive Survey of the Legal Issues Relating to the Development and Use of the World Wide Web Technology at Education Sites: http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/mmedia/legal/title.htm [6]Information Strategies Initiative: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/info_strat/ [7] UK Web Focus: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/ [8] Disability Information System in Higher Education or DISinHE: http://www.disinhe.ac.uk/ [9] JISC funded projects in security issues: http://www.jtap.ac.uk/projects/Security.html Author Details Dr Jane Williams Head of JISC ASSIST Joint Information Systems Committee Computing Service University of Bristol Tyndall Avenue Bristol BS8 1GU Email: assist@jisc.ac.uk Web: http://www.jisc.ac.uk Tel: 0117 954 6850 Fax: 0117 9291576 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata: BIBLINK.Checksum Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata: BIBLINK.Checksum Buzz data software html stylesheet metadata browser identifier sgml marc perl doc ftp authentication algorithm url research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Peacock and Andy Powell describe a proposed algorithm for calculating a checksum for Web pages.
BIBLINK [1] is a project funded within the Telematics for Libraries programme of the European Commission.
It is investigating the bi-directional flow of information between publishers and National Bibliographic Agencies (NBAs) and is specifically concerned with information about the publication of electronic resources.
Such resources include both on-line publications, Web pages, electronic journals, etc.
and electronic publications on physical media such as CD-ROMs.
The project has recently finalised the Functional Specification for the ‘BIBLINK workspace’ a shared, virtual workspace for the exchange of metadata between publishers, NBAs and other third parties such as the ISSN International Centre.
The workspace will allow publishers to ‘upload’ metadata about electronic publications using email or the Web.
NBAs and third parties will be able to ‘download’ this metadata, enhance it in various ways and then ‘upload’ the enhanced metadata back to the workspace.
The intention is that NBAs will use the enhanced metadata as the basis of a record in the national bibliography if appropriate.
Finally, publishers will be able to ‘download’ the enhanced metadata for use in their own systems.
The metadata will be stored and exchanged in several syntaxes, including HTML, SGML, UNIMARC and the national MARC formats of the participating partners.
Development of the software for the BIBLINK workspace and a demonstrator based on it will begin in the near future.
The software development for the workspace has been sub-contracted to Jouve, Paris.
BIBLINK metadata As part of its background research, the project has identified the metadata requirements of publishers and NBAs in the scenario described above.
The BIBLINK metadata set [2] comprises most of the Dublin Core [3] plus several additional elements.
As with the Dublin Core, BIBLINK metadata can be embedded into Web pages using the HTML META element.
The project was especially concerned with ensuring the long term authenticity of the bibliographic records that are created using the BIBLINK workspace [4].
A working definition of authentication was developed: BIBLINK shall take ‘authentication’ to mean the guarantee that a piece of metadata actually describes a given electronic publication, and only that publication.
In other words, there is a one-to-one relationship between an electronic publication and its metadata and this relationship can be authenticated.
To achieve this level of authentication, one of the BIBLINK metadata elements is used to hold a checksum (or message digest) of the resource being described.
It is known as the BIBLINK.Checksum.
By storing a checksum as part of the metadata, it is possible to determine if a resource has been modified since its metadata was created.
What is a checksum?
A checksum is a computed value which depends on the contents of a ‘block of data’.
(The block of data is often referred to as a ‘message’).
A common use for simple checksums is to validate data integrity after transmission or storage, by calculating a checksum before and after transmission and comparing them.
One-way hash functions (such as MD5 [5]) are a type of checksum which have additional properties (such as being difficult to reverse) that are usually used within cryptography.
Some common uses of checksums are: To provide authentication a good checksum should be dependent on the message from which it is generated and infeasible to generate from other messages.
This provides a method of validating whether a message is the same as the one that the checksum was generated from.
To provide a unique identifier for a message this can be useful for indexing and so on.
A hash function such as MD5 will produce a statistically unique fixed length digest corresponding to every message.
Such digests are easy to produce and are easy to verify due to their fixed length.
To provide a method of checking integrity of content when transmitted, the checksum of an object can be used to check for corruption.
To produce digital signatures if the checksum for a message is encrypted and sent with the original message, then recipients of the message may verify that the message is authentic as sent by calculating its checksum and comparing with the decrypted checksum.
A number of algorithms are in use for creating checksums including CRC-32 [6], DES-MAC [7], MD4 [8] and MD5.
The MD5 checksum Created in 1992 by Ron Rivest for RSA Data Security Incorporated, the MD5 cryptographic hash function is widely used by applications requiring calculation of message digests.
MD5 refers to a type of hash function, i.e.
a function that takes a variable length input and returns a fixed length output.
The MD5 algorithm produces a digest of 128 stochastically independent bits that have no calculable relation to the original input, for this reason it is known as a ‘message-digest’ or ‘checksum’.
Such a digest represents the original message from which it was generated.
BIBLINK.Checksum algorithm The project chose to base the BIBLINK.Checksum on the MD5 hash function.
This was primarily because MD5 is widely used in other applications and there is source code available for it in the public domain.
For example, there is an MD5 module available for Perl [9].
The algorithm described here can be used to compute an MD5 hash for HTML pages on the Web.
Inline objects Although some Web pages simply consist of a single HTML file, many are composed of a number of ‘inline’ objects.
These objects are stored separately but are retrieved along with the HTML and displayed by the Web browser to form a complete document.
Examples of inline objects are images, applets and ActiveX controls.
Inline objects form an inherent part of a resource.
If a diagram in a document changes, one typically considers that the document itself has changed.
Other ‘linked’ resources require some action on behalf of the user to be retrieved, such as a mouse click.
Examples of linked resources include web pages that are hyperlinked to the original page or that require clicking a button for display.
The BIBLINK.Checksum algorithm defines a set of inline objects that are included in the checksum calculation.
They are: <APPLET> <EMBED> <OBJECT> <IMG> <IMAGE> <LINK rel="stylesheet"> Other externally linked resources are not involved in the calculation.
The algorithm The following algorithm is proposed: Retrieve the HTML page from the Web.
Remove all the <META> elements from the HTML, including any surrounding white space (space, tab and end-of-line characters).
Compute MD5 hash.
Retrieve any inline objects referenced by the page (see above).
Compute MD5 hash for each.
Combine all hashes by concatenating them together in the order that they appear in the page (the page’s MD5 hash first).
Compute MD5 hash of the combination.
By computing the BIBLINK.Checksum for a Web page and comparing it with the previously computed checksum stored in the metadata for the page, it is possible to check whether the page has been modified since its metadata was created.
Although a simple check of the last modification date of the Web page might give the same information, this does not check whether any of its inline components have changed.
Issues A number of issues arise in connection with calculating a checksum for documents on the Web.
Dynamic content generated within pages via CGI or Server Side Includes (SSIs) could mean that the document is different when accessed at different times.
This would result in a different checksum even where the dynamic content is insignificant, such as a current date or retrieval time.
Currently HTML frames are not dealt with as might be expected.
BIBLINK.Checksum calculates the checksum on the HTML page containing the FRAMESET element and FRAME SRC elements.
This approach means that the contents of the frames, as would be seen within a browser, are not used in the checksum calculation.
This may be rectified in the future if we consider the individual frame sources as inline to the frameset page.
Automatic refreshes triggered via HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" within an HTML META element are ignored by the algorithm.
If it is desirable then HTTP-EQUIV URLs could be treated as inline objects.
Generating a BIBLINK.Checksum A Web CGI based tool has been developed to implement this algorithm [10].
The code for the tool is available separately [11].
By selecting the button below you can use the CGI tool to generate a BIBLINK.Checksum for this Web page.
References [1] BIBLINK Web pages http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/biblink/ [2] BIBLINK Metadata elements http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/biblink/wp8/fs/bc-semantics.html [3] Dublin Core http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core [4] Titia van der Werf, Authentication Deliverable D6.1 of BIBLINK, LB 4034, 1997 http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/biblink/wp6/d6.1/ [5] MD5 [RFC5325] http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc1321.txt [6] CRC-32 [ISO3309 and within RFC6560] http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc1510.txt [7] DES-MAC [ANSI X9.9 (http://test.team2it.com/rsa/faqref.htm#ANS86a), ISO8731] [8] MD4 [RFC8320] http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/rfc/rfc1320.txt [9] MD5 Perl module ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/CPAN//modules/by-module/MD5/ [10] BIBLINK.Checksum CGI-based tool http://biblink.ukoln.ac.uk/cgi-bin/bibcheck.cgi [11] Perl source code for BIBLINK.Checksum CGI-based tool http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/software-tools/#bibcheck.cgi Author Details Ian Peacock Technical Development and Research, UKOLN Email: i.peacock@ukoln.ac.uk Andy Powell Technical Development and Research, UKOLN Email: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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TAPin Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines TAPin Buzz data dissemination copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Kay Flatten outlines the aims of the TAPin project, which is now approaching the publication of its "Impact Study".
TAPin is now in the final stages of a wide dissemination process, culminating in the publication of The Impact Study.
The main aim of the project was to enhance the expertise of academic staff in the exploitation of networked information resources while also underpinning the network competencies of library and academic staff.
The IT cultures within specific disciplines were researched, and the extent and nature of IT resources in the collaborating institutions were then established as a means of facilitating the development and delivery of materials.
The TAPin model has a Development Side and a Delivery Side.
In the former, the major elements were training and marketing.
The latter emphasised one to one support with librarians and academics working together to provide subject specific information at the academic’s place of work on his/her own machine.
The crucial areas to be investigated during the project were the impact the TAPin model had on academic staff; the growth in awareness and use of network information; IT infrastructures supporting the designated disciplines; the perceptions of networked information, library services and librarians’ roles on networked campuses.
A number of changes in the use of computer networks and library services by academic staff were mapped.
Between 1995 and 1997 the use of books, BUBL, data hosts and CD-ROMS fell while the use of email and the web rose.
There was a greater acceptance that the use of IT offered a more efficient means of access to wider and more diverse sources of information.
Acceptance of document delivery and global communication also increased.
At the same time, changes in the interaction with the library were also identified as libraries were increasingly seen as part of the networked information revolution occurring on campus.
This was part of the development side of the model and was set against a backgound of changing institutional strategies.
The exit strategies now being implemented all involve the continued use of the model for in-house training.
There will also be a Strategic Audit which applies the theory of learning organisations to all sectors in the Project.
http://www.uce.ac.uk/tapin References Flatten, Kay et al: TAPin:Training and awareness programme in networks: the impact study.
Centre for Information Research and Training, faculty of Computing and Information Studies University of Central England in Birmingham, 1998. isbn 090435413x Author Details Kay Flatten Kay.Flatten@uce.ac.uk University of Central England Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Open Archiving Opportunities for Developing Countries: Towards Equitable Distribution of Global Knowledge Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Archiving Opportunities for Developing Countries: Towards Equitable Distribution of Global Knowledge Buzz data software framework infrastructure archives metadata repositories eprints copyright ejournal ict interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Leslie Chan and Barbara Kirsop explore some of the implications of using the OAI Protocol.
Although the World Wide Web is less than a decade old, it already has had a profound impact on scientific publishing and scholarly communication.
In particular, open standards and low-cost networking tools are opening many possibilities for reducing and even eliminating entirely the cost barriers to scientific publications.
(1) One development that has great potential value for poorly-resourced countries is “open archiving”, or the deposition of scholarly research papers into networked servers accessible over the Internet.
(2) This process allows scientists in the south to retrieve research results from the north through an online interoperable mechanism.
Equally, it allows scientists in the south to contribute to the global knowledge base through participation.
The purpose of this article is to inform scientists and publishers in the developing world about this and related initiatives and so allow informed decisions to be made about participation.
Our intention is not to provide technical details about electronic publishing and the set up of “eprint” servers for open archiving, but rather to focus on the strategic significance of open archiving for scientists from developing countries.
Since 1991, researchers in high-energy physics around the world have been connected through an eprint archive set up by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Research Laboratory in New Mexico.
Since its inception, the scope of the archive (now known as arXiv) has expanded to include many areas of physics, mathematics and computer science and archived papers can now be accessed free of charge from over a dozen world wide mirror sites (3).
The eprint archive receives two-thirds of its two million weekly hits from institutions outside the United States, including many research facilities in developing regions.
The archive has become indispensable to researchers world wide, but in particular to research institutions that would otherwise be excluded from the front line of science for economic and sociological reasons.
(4) The success and wide adoption of arXiv has prompted new thinking about the reform of scientific publishing in other disciplines.
Scientists have become aware of the many benefits conferred by open archiving, such as the removal of the cost barrier to high-priced journals, the reduction of time in announcing research findings, and the provision of access to all with Internet capability.
As a result, other e-servers have been set up (5) and the movement to free scientific publishing from financial restrictions has been growing steadily.
(6) Among the best known proponents of these developments is Stevan Harnad’s advocacy for authors to self-archive their published papers (postprints) which, if adopted widely, would lead to the ultimate removal of cost barriers for the exchange of publicly funded research information.
(7) These developments have generated much debate and a number of international initiatives have evolved to refine and standardise the archiving procedure.
One important international movement is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which aims to develop and promote the use of a standard protocol, known as the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAMHP), designed for better sharing and retrieval of eprints residing in distributed archives.
(8) With the OAI harvesting protocol, articles in OAI compliant servers will form a global library that facilitates searching, data retrieval, cross-linking, as well as stable long-term archiving.
(9) Types of Archiving There are various forms of open archiving.
The term ‘self archiving’ is often used to refer to the process whereby individual authors submit their own papers to a server or archive of their choice.
There are ‘institutional archives’, where authors submit eprints to a server administered by an organisation or scholarly society, commonly their university or research institute; there are also discipline-based archives and other speciality archives.
(10) An important example of a speciality archive is the Electronic Research Archive in International Health (ERA), set up by the long-established international medical journal, The Lancet.
(11) This archive allows medical researchers to deposit papers of special relevance to health issues met in many developing countries.
Papers submitted are reviewed before acceptance and are thereafter archived and available online free to all.
Benefits for developing countries Archiving initiatives described above are of great importance to all scientists, but particularly for those in the developing world.
Free access to research information from the north would have incalculable benefits for local research.
(12) Of equal importance is the opportunity for researchers in these countries to contribute to the global knowledge base by archiving their own research literature, thereby reducing the south to north knowledge gap and professional isolation.
(13) Equally, there now exists an increasingly available means to distribute local research in a way that is highly visible and without the difficulties that are sometimes met in publishing in journals (e.g.
biased discrimination between submissions generated in the north and south).
A key benefit for developing country scientists is that global participation could take place without further delay.
The academic communities in poorer countries can take advantage of servers anywhere in the world offering OAI services, without the need to set up their own independent servers or maintain them.
Establishing partners, either S/N or S/S, can minimise infrastructure costs, share expertise and readily become part of the international interoperable effort.
Common misconceptions Some of the recently established archives have not been as well supported as was hoped because of a number of misconceptions about the nature of the archives and the professional consequences of collaboration.
Since any individual could ‘publish’ material online, there is a concern that self-archiving could lead to ‘vanity press’ that has not undergone quality control procedures.
However, scholarly archives, while possibly containing both refereed (postprints) and non-refereed material (preprints), nevertheless provide clear options for readers to selectively retrieve material.
(14) The experience of physicist/mathematicians who have used open archiving for a number of years shows that quality of research is not jeopardised by the process, since researchers that submit material are concerned with their reputation and professional credibility and their work is open for review by their peers around the world.
Therefore, ‘vanity publishing’ by individuals must be distinguished from the institutional or author-archiving of preprints of papers submitted for peer review.
Another concern is that the volume of material available online makes it more difficult to find and retrieve required material.
However, efforts such as the OAMHP, with its emphasis on common metadata standards, are designed specifically to address the issues of accurate and efficient retrieval and interoperability with other OAI-compliant servers(15).
It should be mentioned that there are a number of large-scale initiatives, such as PubMedCentral,(16) offering free access to papers that are not using the OAI protocols and are therefore not necessarily interoperable with the OAI-compliant archive.
But increasingly, these open access archives are moving towards becoming OAI-compliant as the power of interoperability is now widely recognised.
(17) Indeed, due to the growing popularity of the OAI movement, commercial publishers are adopting the OAI protocols in some cases so that their publications are interoperable with free-to-all archived documents.
Unlike true open archives, access to such servers are restricted to those who can afford the high cost of subscription, which creates access barriers even for some of the research institutions in the north.
It is therefore important to remember that “open” archive does not necessarily mean that the content is available free of charge, as “open” refers to the open technical framework and the open architecture of the archive that promotes easy exchange of information between compatible servers.
(18) Copyright is also seen by many as a major concern.
In the paper era, researchers routinely sign away their copyright to publishers in exchange for the opportunity to make their research known and to gain career advancements.
However, in the electronic era authors are becoming increasingly aware of their rights and professional need to distribute their own research as widely as they can for maximum impact, while retaining academic credibility through peer review.
Authors in developing countries who wish to publish in printed journals should ensure they retain the rights to submit to archives, either at once or subsequently.
Some authors who are unable to obtain such rights from their preferred journal have elected to publish elsewhere,(19) and increasing numbers of major journals are relaxing their restrictions on author self-archiving or institutional-archiving.
(20) Increasingly, authors archive the pre-print before submission to their chosen journal and, if archiving rights are not obtained, the linked corrigenda.
Limitations For scientists in poor countries, a major obstacle to participating in these developments is the lack of awareness of the availability of the different mechanisms for distributing and accessing research documents.
Since most of the developments and services are on the Internet, the lack of awareness is caused mainly by the lack of telecommunications infrastructure in the developing world.
However, there are major international and local efforts to invest in the infrastructure and there is growing optimism that with time this problem of ‘digital divide’ will be resolved.
(21) Additionally, the development of telecentres, way stations or staging posts, radio communication and similar efforts will help regional development and encourage participation.
(22) Another cause of the lack of awareness is a lack of concerted effort from the archive institutions and the development agencies to inform and promote the new practices regarding the use of the technology.
It is therefore important that the information in this short briefing is distributed as widely as possible.
Where are we now?
The OAI is widely consulting with institutions and library communities in refining standards and protocols that serve the researchers needs.
New open archives are becoming established in many universities and libraries that will ultimately become part of the network of archives accessible to all [see directory of archives at www.openarchives.org].
Open source and free software have been developed and are currently being improved for use by institutions wishing to set up their own archives in an interoperable way.
(23) While this international movement is spreading rapidly and its potential is increasingly recognised, the process is at an early stage.
Active testings of many of these developments are ongoing and it is important that the needs of developing countries are considered during the refinements.
Conclusion This is an encouraging time for scientists everywhere as means of communication improve.
Opportunities are great, but to ensure that the needs of academic communities in the developing world are not left out, further awareness, consultation and partnership building are required.
We recommend that scientists keep aware of these initiatives, keep all publishing options open and inform colleagues of opportunities now underway through regional discussions.
The EPT will continue to monitor progress and post new developments on its web site.
(24) An experimental server has been set up by one of the EPT Trustees and is ready for evaluation.
(25) The issues involved in open archiving and the movement to free scholarly literature are hotly debated on several online discussion fora hosted, for example, by American Scientist and Nature, the past contributions of which are archived and all available online.
(26) Readers who wish to familiarise themselves with these issues may wish to consult these archives and the references provided below.
(1) Declan Butler, ‘The writing is on the web for science journals in print’.
Nature 397, 195 200 (1999).
(2) Networked servers are often referred to as “repositories” or as “archives”, hence the term open archiving.
However, the servers are not archives in the technical sense or the library community’s understanding of repositories or archives.
(3) Los Alamos Preprint Archive (arXive): http://www.arxive.org.
Note that this archive moved to Cornell University in July 2001.
(4) Subbiah Arunachalam has written extensively on the obstacles scientists face in developing countries.
See “Accessing information published in the Third World: Should spreading the word from the Third World always be like swimming against the current?� Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, 53, 408-417.
1994.
(5) RePEc (Research Papers in Economics, http://www.repec.org/), CogPrints (for cognitive science, http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/), Economics and the PhilSci Archive (for philosophers of science, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/).
(6) The Free Online Scholarship (FOS) newsletter published by Peter Suber is a highly useful source for keeping up to date with developments in all areas related to the electronic scholarly publishing: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm (7) The many informed writings by Steven Harnad on the movement to free the refereed literature is available on his personal website: http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.html.
Read in particular his more recent paper, “For Whom the Gate Tolls?
How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now.� http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm (8) See key documents on the OAI web site: http://www.openarchives.org (9) See Lynch, Clifford (2001) Metadata Harvesting and the Open Archives Initiative.
ARL Bimonthly Report 217 August 2001. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/217/mhp.html (10) Op cit.
(11) The Lancet’s NetPrints for Clinical Medicine and Health Research: http://clinmed.netprints.org (12) Godlee et al.
Global information flow: Publishers should provide information free to resource poor countries.
BMJ 2000; 321: 776-777 ( 30 September ).
Online: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/321/7264/776 (13) Canhos et al.
“Close the South-North knowledge gap”, Nature, Vol 397, pg.
201, Jan. 1999 (14) See for example the Open Citation (OpCit) project at the University of Southampton: http://opcit.eprints.org/.
See also Hitchcock and Hall, “How Dynamic E-journals can Interconnect Open Access Archives.� Online: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~sh94r/elpub01-online.html (15) see 9.
(16) PubMedCentral: http://www.pubmedcentral.org (17) Two notable services that recently announced their compliance to the OAI protocols are BioMedCentral http://www.biomedcentral.com, and the Chemistry Preprint Server http://preprint.chemweb.com/ (18) See the FAQ on the OAI web site: http://www.openarchives.org (19) The ‘Public Library of Science’, http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition supported by the Association of Research Libraries, are significant movements that are hastening significant reforms in scholarly publishing and lowering and removing barriers to access to publicly funded research results.
See http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/ for details.
(20) The prestigious journals Nature and Science, and the American Psychological Association have all recently relaxed their policies regarding author self-archiving.
(21) The United Nation has been greatly concerned about the imbalance in access to communication facilities.
An ICT Task Force of the United Nations has recently been set up by Secretary-General Kofi Annan “to find new, creative and quick-acting means to spread the benefits of the digital revolution and avert the prospect of a two-tiered world information society.� See http://www.unicttaskforce.org (22) Telecentres, Waystations/Staging Posts: http://www.waystations.org (23) The free ‘eprints software’ released by The University of Southampton, http://www.eprints.org, is designed to run centralised, discipline-based as well as distributed, institution-based archives of scholarly publications and ‘Kepler’ is a simple OAI repository tool that claims to allow individual researchers to participate in the OAI with a minimum of effort.
Details about Kepler and how it is implemented can be found at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/maly/04maly.html (24) The EPT web site: http://www.epublishingtrust.org.
See also The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT): putting developing country journals online.
Proceedings of Scientific Communication & Publishing in the Information Age.
1999.
Online: http://www.inasp.info/psi/scpw/papers/kirsop.html (25) The eprint server is located at: http://eprints.utsc.utoronto.ca (26) American Scientists forum on freeing the refereed scientific literature: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html.
Nature’s Forum on future e-access to the primary literature: http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/ Author Details   Leslie Chan, Centre for Instructional Technology Development, University of Toronto at Scarborough; a Trustee of the EPT and is also the Associate Director of Bioline International which distributes journals from developing countries.
Email: chan@scar.utoronto.ca   Barbara Kirsop is the Secretary of the EPT and an advisory board member for Bioline International.barbara@biostrat.demon.co.uk, Article Title: “Open Archiving Opportunities for Developing Countries: towards equitable distribution of global knowledge” Author: Leslie Chan and Barbara Kirsop Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/oai-chan/i Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: WebWatching eLib Project Web Sites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: WebWatching eLib Project Web Sites Buzz data software html dissemination apache xhtml digitisation accessibility browser preservation dtd windows linux solaris flash url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly is WebWatching the eLib Project Sites.
This issue of Ariadne has the theme of eLib Projects.
It is therefore timely for the regular WebWatch column to survey eLib project Web sites.
The aim of the survey is to use a number of Web-based tools to provide information on the entry points for eLib project Web sites and the Web sites themselves.
The findings may be of interest to the eLib projects themselves and users of eLib projects.
Perhaps more importantly, the findings may be of interest to new JISC-funded programmes.
The Survey On 1st November 2000 a number of Web-based tools were used to survey the Web sites provided by eLib projects.
The following tools were used: Analysis of eLib project server software and operating system using Netcraft The Netcraft service [1] was used to record the type of Web server software and the platform used to host the Web service.
Analysis of eLib project home page using Netmechanic The Netmechanic service [2] was used to analyse link, HTML and browser compatibility errors on eLib project home pages.
Analysis of popularity of eLib project Web sites using LinkPopularity The LinkPopularity service [3] was used to measure the numbers of links to eLib project Web sites as recorded by the AltaVista, Infoseek and HotBot search engines.
Pages Indexed By AltaVista AltaVista service [4] was used to report on the the number of pages on eLib project Web sites which are indexed by AltaVista Accessibility of eLib project Web sites using Bobby The Bobby service [5] was used to report on the accessibility of eLib project Web home pages.
Popularity of eLib project Web sites using Netscape Netscape's What's Related service [6] was used to report on the popularity of eLib project Web sites.
Survey The survey took place between 2nd and 5th November 2000 using the list of eLib project Web sites [7].
Information on the popularity of the Web server, the number of pages on the Web sites and the number of links to the Web site were recorded.
Links to the What's Related service for each institution are provided in the survey data, allowing the current information to be obtained.
Findings The findings of the survey are available in Appendix 1.
Additional summary information is given below.
Availability of Project Web Sites Of the 71 project Web sites which were surveyed, 3 Web sites (PPT, ACORN and ERIMS) are no longer available (i.e.
the domain no longer exists) and 2 Web entry points (On Demand and TAPIN) are no longer available (i.e.
the domain exists but not the project entry point).
In addition 4 projects appear never to have had a Web site.
Web Server Software A summary of the Web server software used on project Web sites is given in the following table.
Table 1: Web Server Software Web Server Software Platform Number Apache Unix 45 Apache MS platform 2 IIS MS platform 7 Netscape Unix platform 2 NetPublisher MS platform 1 Lotus Domino MS platform 1 CERN Unknown platform 1 Stronghold Unix platform 1 Zope Unix platform 1 WebSTAR Macintosh platform 1 Discussion of Findings The Netmechanic analysis recorded the number of broken links from the home page of eLib projects, together with information on the HTML quality.
As many of the eLib project Web sites are no longer being maintained broken links from project entry points may not be unexpected.
The number of HTML errors and browser compatibility errors may reflect a lack of concern for the importance of HTML standards compliance when project Web sites were set up or may simply be a consequence of use of HTML authoring tools which impose proprietary extensions.
On the other hand (although perhaps lass likely) this may be a reflection on the HTML DTD which the Netmechanic validates to.
As alternative devices for accessing Web pages grow in popularity, compliance with HTML and XHTML standards is likely to grow in importance, since automated tools for processing files for use on other devices are likely to require compliant resource in order for format conversion to work properly.
Recommendation: Entry points for project Web sites should compliant with appropriate HTML standards.
The LinkPopularity analysis provides information on the number of links to project Web sites, using the information held on the AltaVista, Infoseek and HotBot search engines.
Links to Web sites is often an indication of the perceived quality of a Web site.
It is also a mechanism for driving traffic to a Web site.
The importance of this metric can be gauged from its use in search engines which make use of citation analysis, such as Google.
The eLib project Web sites with over 2,000 links to them (according to AltaVista) are SOSIG (7,076), OMNI (5,830), EEVL (3,865), History (2,605), Netskills (2,363) and Ariadne (2,144).
Recommendation: Projects should record the numbers of links to their Web site and monitor trends.
The information may be used to assist in dissemination plans.
The analysis of the numbers of resources indexed by AltaVista may simply be a reflection of the size of the Web site being indexed.
However if only a small proportion of a project's resources are indexed this may indicate problems with the architecture of the Web site for example, the Web site may contain frames (which can act as a barrier to indexing robots) or may contain URLs which are not indexable (for example, Web sites containing a ?
character).
The Bobby accessibility analysis reports on accessibility problems for project entry points, such as missing ALT attributes for images.
Finally Netscape's What's Related analysis reports on the popularity of the project Web site together with the numbers of pages indexed and the number of links to the Web site.
In order to interpret this information you should read the What's Related FAQ [8].
It should be noted that this information is based on all resources on the Web site, as defined by the domain.
If a project Web site is hosted on an organisational Web server the information will be misleading.
Web Tour of eLib Project Web Sites To accompany the survey of eLib project Web sites a "Web Tour" has been produced [9].
The Web Tour provides a rolling demonstration of the Web sites, with a new project Web site being displayed automatically after a few seconds.
Sitemap of eLib Project Web Sites A sitemap [10] and list of URLs of eLib project Web sites [11] has also been produced to support this survey.
References Netcraft, http://www.netcraft.com/ Netmechanic, http://www.netmechanic.com/ LinkPopularity, http://www.linkpopularity.com/ AltaVista, http://www.altavista.com/ Bobby, CAST http://www.cast.org/bobby/ About What's Related, Netscape http://home.netscape.com/escapes/related/ eLib Projects, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/ What's Related FAQ, Netscape http://home.netscape.com/escapes/related/faq.html Rolling Demonstration of eLib Project Web Sites, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/site-rolling-demos/elib/ Site Map of eLib Project Web Sites, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/web-watch/elib-sitemap.html URLs for eLib Project Web Sites, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/web-watch/elib-urls.html Appendix 1: Survey Results Table A1: Information On eLib Project Web Sites   Project Server Netmechanic Analysis Link Popularity Pages Indexed By AltaVista Accessibility (Using Bobby) What's Related (Netscape) Hybrid Libraries 1 Agora http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/ agora/ Apache/1.2b8 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 4.01 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 47 Infoseek: 30 Hotbot: 53 Try it 190 Try it 1 P1 errors 1.96 secs download time Total file size = 7.06 Kb Check Popularity: In top 197,175 Number of pages on site: 672 Number of links to site on web: 695 Try it 2 BUILDER http://builder.bham.ac.uk/ Microsoft-IIS / 4.0 Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 8.71 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 124 Infoseek: 95 Hotbot: 75 Try it 1,394 Try it Not known Check Popularity: In top 786,043 Number of pages on site: 220 Number of links to site on web: 196 Try it 3 HEADLINE http://www.headline.ac.uk/ Apache / 1.3.12 (Linux) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 2 errors Load time: 26.25 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 48 Infoseek: 16 Hotbot: 60 Try it 335 Try it 1 P1 errors 24.31 secs download time Total file size = 87.50 Kb Check Popularity: In top 2,782,060 Number of pages on site: 19 Number of links to site on web: 75 Try it 4 HyLiFe http://hylife.unn.ac.uk/ Microsoft-IIS / 4.0 Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 1 errors Load time: 4.94 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 2 Infoseek: 0 Hotbot: 4 Try it 0 Try it 1 P1 errors 4.44 secs download time Total file size = 10.59 Kb Check Popularity: In top 2,108,244 Number of pages on site: 2,228 Number of links to site on web: 1 Try it 5 Malibu http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ humanities/cch/malibu/ Apache / 1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 4 errors Load time: 16.42 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 22 Infoseek: 13 Hotbot: 47 Try it 68 Try it 0 P1 errors 7.94 secs download time Total file size = 19.57 Kb Check Popularity: In top 24,007 Number of pages on site: 7,774 Number of links to site on web: 7,805 Try it Large Scale Resource Discovery (Clumps) projects 6 Cairns http://cairns.lib.gla.ac.uk/ Apache / 1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 1.94 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 50 Infoseek: 28 Hotbot: 75 Try it 9 Try it 0 P1 errors 7.94 secs download time Total file size = 19.57 Kb Check Popularity: In top 3,081,184 Number of pages on site: 7 Number of links to site on web: 37 Try it 7 M25 http://www.M25lib.ac.uk/ M25link/ Apache / 1.3.9 (CompaqTru64) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 3 problems HTML check: 16 errors Load time: 5.85 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 30 Infoseek: 15 Hotbot: 34 Try it 0 Try it 0 P1 errors 19.74 secs download time Total file size = 56.46 Kb Check Popularity: In top 993,776 Number of pages on site: Not known Number of links to site on web: 800 Try it 8 Musiconline http://www.musiconline.ac.uk/ NetscapeEnterprise / 3.6 SP3 (MS platform) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 13 errors Load time: 23.61 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 42 Infoseek: 25 Hotbot: 75 Try it 32 Try it 0 P1 errors 31.11 secs download time Total file size = 77.79 Kb Check Popularity: Not available Number of pages on site: Not available Number of links to site on web: Not available Try it 9 Riding http://www.shef.ac.uk/~riding/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 5.25 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 64 Infoseek: 24 Hotbot: 63 Try it 40 Try it 0 P1 errors 5.16 secs download time Total file size = 11.36 Kb Check Popularity: In top 7,238 Number of pages on site: 26,865 Number of links to site on web: 32,723 NOTE: Institutional server Try it Digital Preservation 10 CEDARS http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/ Netscape-Communications / 1.1 (Solaris) Check Link check: 2 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 5 errors Load time: 4.00 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 105 Infoseek: 49 Hotbot: 91 Try it 557 Try it 1 P1 errors 2.44 secs download time Total file size = 5.19 Kb Check Popularity: In top 17,160 Number of pages on site: 14,675 Number of links to site on web: 19,920 NOTE: Institutional server Try it Access to Network Resources 11 ADAM http://www.adam.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 3 problems HTML check: 7 errors Load time: 10.20 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 336 Infoseek: 161 Hotbot: >500 Try it 51 Try it 1 P1 errors 14.54 secs download time Total file size = 28.93 Kb Check Popularity: In top 157,069 Number of pages on site: 63 Number of links to site on web: 1,677 Try it 12 Bized http://www.bized.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 9.34 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 1,290 Infoseek: 667 Hotbot: 1,500 Try it 500 Try it 0 P1 errors 13.73 secs download time Total file size = 22,43 Kb Check Popularity: In top 26,060 Number of pages on site: 2,730 Number of links to site on web: 3,300 Try it 13 CAIN http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.6 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 19 errors Load time: 13.88 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 1,014 Infoseek: 888 Hotbot: 1,400 Try it 1,828 Try it 1 P1 errors 19.88 secs download time Total file size = 42.78 Kb Check Popularity: In top 110,337 Number of pages on site: 651 Number of links to site on web: 1,361 Try it 14 Catriona http://catriona2.lib.strath.ac.uk/ catriona/ Page redirects to http://wp269.lib.strath.ac.uk:5050/Cat2/ NetPublisher / 1.10.020 (MS platform) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 2.06 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 49 Infoseek: 30 Hotbot: 37 Try it 0 Try it 0 P1 errors 0.54 secs download time Total file size = 0.13 Kb Framed site Check Popularity: In top 113,806 Number of pages on site: 337 Number of links to site on web: 3,811 Try it 15 EEVL http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.6 (Solaris) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 12 problems HTML check: 1 errors Load time: 11.54 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 3,865 Infoseek: 1,762 Hotbot: 4,200 Try it 194 Try it 2 P1 errors 33.31 secs download time Total file size = 78.50 Kb Check Popularity: In top 80,366 Number of pages on site: 328 Number of links to site on web: 3,413 Try it 16 IHR-Info http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ CERN/3.0 (Unknown platform) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 134 errors Load time: 10.14 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 2,605 Infoseek: 1,308 Hotbot: 1,000 Try it 1,449 Try it 1 P1 errors 13.73 secs download time Total file size = 29.64 Kb Check Popularity: In top 87,355 Number of pages on site: 1,235 Number of links to site on web: 3,796 Try it 17 OMNI http://omni.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.6 (CompaqTru64) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 3 problems HTML check: 6 errors Load time: 21.02 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 5,830 Infoseek: 1,312 Hotbot: 4,800 Try it 1,226 Try it 1 P1 errors 32.25 secs download time Total file size = 67.52 Kb Check Popularity: In top 53,476 Number of pages on site: 1,291 Number of links to site on web: 11,222 Try it 18 ROADS http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ roads/ Zope (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 17.39 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 299 Infoseek: 157 Hotbot: >200 Try it 197 Try it 0 P1 errors 30.11 secs download time Total file size = 54.41 Kb Check Popularity: In top 197,682 Number of pages on site: 758 Number of links to site on web: 2,535 Try it 19 RUDI http://www.rudi.net/ Apache/1.3.6 (Linux) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 8.56 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 0 Infoseek: 0 Hotbot: 47 Try it 0 Try it 0 P1 errors 7.51 secs download time Total file size = 23.44 Kb Check Popularity: None available Number of pages on site: None available Number of links to site on web: None available Try it 20 SOSIG http://sosig.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 2 problems HTML check: 2 errors Load time: 9.04 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 7,076 Infoseek: 2,482 Hotbot: 2,700 Try it 583 Try it 0 P1 errors 13.12 secs download time Total file size = 23.85 Kb Check Popularity: In top 34,831 Number of pages on site: 6,362 Number of links to site on web: 10,460 Try it Digitisation 21 Internet Library of Early Journals http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ Apache/1.3.6 (Apache) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 37.85 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 676 Infoseek: 196 Hotbot: 1,200 Try it 25 Try it 2 P1 errors 39.66 secs download time Total file size = 119.39 Kb Check Popularity: In top 67,209 Number of pages on site: 443 Number of links to site on web: 5,684 Try it 22 DIAD http://tdg.linst.ac.uk/tdg/ research/diad/ Apache/1.3.2 (IRIX) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 9 problems HTML check: 3 errors Load time: 27.14 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 14 Infoseek: 8 Hotbot: 9 Try it 3 Try it 1 P1 errors 0.57 secs download time Total file size = 0.25 Kb (Framed site) Check Popularity: In top 299,195 Number of pages on site: 1 Number of links to site on web: 254 Try it Electronic Document Delivery 23 EDDIS No project Web site             24 SEREN http://seren.newi.ac.uk/ user/seren/ Apache/1.2.4 (Linux) Check Robots barred fom Web site Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 19 Infoseek: 5 Hotbot: 11 Try it 1 Try it 1 P1 errors 6.13 secs download time Total file size = 14.87 Kb Check Popularity: In top 3,427,676 Number of pages on site: 1,606 Number of links to site on web: 12 Try it 25 JEDDS http://jedds.mcc.ac.uk/website/ Apache/1.3.4 (Solaris) Check Link check: 2 bad links Browser compatibility: 7 problems HTML check: 57 errors Load time: 29.16 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 7 Infoseek: 9 Hotbot: 5 Try it 8 Try it 1 P1 errors 34.66 secs download time Total file size = 90.58 Kb Check Popularity: In top 7,057,740 Number of pages on site: 594 Number of links to site on web: 7 Try it 26 LAMDA http://lamdaweb.mcc.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.4 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 7 problems HTML check: 7 errors Load time: 6.50 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 29 Infoseek: 8 Hotbot: 11 Try it 190 Try it 0 P1 errors 0.84 secs download time Total file size = 1.24 Kb NOTE: Flash interface Check Popularity: In top 2,518,481 Number of pages on site: 1 Number of links to site on web: 75 Try it 27 Infobike http://www.bids.ac.uk/elib/ infobike/homepage.html Apache/1.3.9 (Solaris) Check Link check: 2 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 5.18 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 22 Infoseek: 10 Hotbot: 44 Try it 1 Try it 0 P1 errors 5.18 secs download time Total file size = 11.44 Kb Check Popularity: In top 17,181 Number of pages on site: 986 Number of links to site on web: 6,866 Organisational Web site Try it Electronic Journals 28 CLIC http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/clic/ Apache/1.3.6 (Irix) Check Link check: 9 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 44 errors Load time: 9.45 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 153 Infoseek: 71 Hotbot: < 200 Try it 190 Try it 1 P1 errors 10.32 secs download time Total file size = 22.74 Kb Check Popularity: In top 110,190 Number of pages on site: 5,985 Number of links to site on web: 7,873 Try it 29 Internet Archaeology http://intarch.ac.uk/ Not known Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 3 problems HTML check: 10 errors Load time: 12.21 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 1,241 Infoseek: 324 Hotbot: 1,600 Try it 427 Try it 0 P1 errors 14.34 secs download time Total file size = 28.21 Kb Check Popularity: In top 108,715 Number of pages on site: 302 Number of links to site on web: 2,060 Try it 30 PPT http://ppt.geog.qmw.ac.uk/ tibg/ppt_hom.html Web site not available     AltaVista: 9 Infoseek: 7 Hotbot: 8 Try it       31 Superjournal http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/ sj/ Apache/1.3.4 (Solaris) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 4.39 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 187 Infoseek: 57 Hotbot: > 200 Try it 120 Try it 1 P1 errors 3.54 secs download time Total file size = 7.36 Kb Check Popularity: In top 104,218 Number of pages on site: 625 Number of links to site on web: 2,078 Try it 32 Electronic Stacks http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/ journals/stacks/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 3 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 5.57 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 7 Infoseek: 10 Hotbot: 9 Try it 0 Try it 0 P1 errors 4.53 secs download time Total file size = 12.72 Kb Check Popularity: In top 625,360 Number of pages on site: 550 Number of links to site on web: 631 Try it 33 Electronic Seminars in History No project Web site             34 Electronic Reviews in History No project Web site             35 Epress http://www.epress.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 10 errors Load time: 6.64 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 30 Infoseek: 13 Hotbot: 41 Try it 21 Try it 2 P1 errors 7.14 secs download time Total file size = 16.70 Kb Check Popularity: In top 6,225,035 Number of pages on site: 1 Number of links to site on web: 36 Try it 36 Deliberations http://www.lgu.ac.uk/ deliberations/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 2 problems HTML check: 14 errors Load time: 7.77 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 1,267 Infoseek: 273 Hotbot: 1,300 Try it 443 Try it 0 P1 errors 11.41 secs download time Total file size = 19.49 Kb Check Popularity: In top 65,144 Number of pages on site: 2,056 Number of links to site on web: 3,824 Try it 37 Newsagent http://www.sbu.ac.uk/ ~litc/newsagent/ Apache/1.3.12 (Compaq Tru64) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 2 problems HTML check: 2 errors Load time: 13.98 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 90 Infoseek: 44 Hotbot: 37 Try it 7 Try it 1 P1 errors 6.73 secs download time Total file size = 18.83 Kb Check Popularity: In top 34,391 Number of pages on site: 3,196 Number of links to site on web: 4,942 Try it 38 JILT http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/ Microsoft-IIS/5.0 (MS Windows 2000) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 3.75 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 1,424 Infoseek: 458 Hotbot: 69 Try it 2,337 Try it 1 P1 errors 23.11 secs download time Total file size = 65.18 Kb Check Popularity: In top 177,722 Number of pages on site: 418 Number of links to site on web: 2,345 Try it 39 Open Journal http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Apache/1.2b7 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 2 errors Load time: 5.00 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 897 Infoseek: 324 Hotbot: > 300 Try it 714 Try it 0 P1 errors 4.43 secs download time Total file size = 10.56 Kb Check Popularity: In top 531,512 Number of pages on site: 679 Number of links to site on web: 714 Try it 40 Sociological Research Online http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/ socresonline/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 2 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 5 errors Load time: 17.81 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 408 Infoseek: 174 Hotbot: > 400 Try it 0 Try it 1 P1 errors 25.31 secs download time Total file size = 56.92 Kb Check Popularity: In top 190,222 Number of pages on site: 19 Number of links to site on web: 3,280 Try it 41 Learned Societies Support Service http://journals.eecs.qub.ac.uk/ WebSTAR/1.2.4 ID/12958 (MacOS) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 4.37 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 464 Infoseek: 108 Hotbot: 0 Try it 204 Try it 0 P1 errors 4.37 secs download time Total file size = 8.54 Kb Check Popularity: In top 503,812 Number of pages on site: 112 Number of links to site on web: 503 Try it Electronic Short Loan Projects 42 ACORN http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/ Web site not available     AltaVista: 98 Infoseek: 45 Hotbot: < 100 Try it       43 ERCOMS http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/ Projects/ERCOMS/ Apache/1.3.9 (AIX) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 2 errors Load time: 5.57 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 26 Infoseek: 18 Hotbot: 11 Try it 10 Try it 1 P1 errors 5.57 secs download time Total file size = 12.87 Kb Check Popularity: In top 1,120,964 Number of pages on site: 46 Number of links to site on web: 82 Try it 44 PATRON http://www.lib.surrey.ac.uk/ Patron/Patron.htm Microsoft-IIS / 4.0 (MS Windows) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 6 problems HTML check: 3 errors Load time: 16.13 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 7 Infoseek: 4 Hotbot: 6 Try it 0 Try it 2 P1 errors 11.50 secs download time Total file size = 19.82 Kb Check Popularity: Not available Number of pages on site: Not available Number of links to site on web: Not available Try it 45 ResIDe http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/ itdev/reside/ Apache/1.2.0 (Solaris) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 7.37 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 31 Infoseek: 27 Hotbot: 50 Try it 27 Try it 1 P1 errors 14.01 secs download time Total file size = 18.05 Kb Check Popularity: In top 81,456 Number of pages on site: 1,637 Number of links to site on web: 1,657 Try it Images 46 DIGIMAP http://digimap.ed.ac.uk:8081/ Apache/1.3.14 (Solaris) Check Robots banned Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 44 Infoseek: 15 Hotbot: 56 Try it 1 Try it 1 P1 errors 0.58 secs download time Total file size = 0.28 Kb (Framed site) Check Popularity: No information available Number of pages on site: No information available Number of links to site on web: No information available Try it 47 HELIX http://www.helix.dmu.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.9 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 4 problems HTML check: 32 errors Load time: 15.83 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 213 Infoseek: 84 Hotbot: < 200 Try it 6 Try it 1 P1 errors 0.71 secs download time Total file size = 0.76 Kb (Framed site) Check Popularity: In top 948,201 Number of pages on site: 10 Number of links to site on web: 187 Try it 48 MIDRIB http://www.midrib.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.9 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 5.13 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 52 Infoseek: 50 Hotbot: 60 Try it 30 Try it 1 P1 errors 4.13 secs download time Total file size = 11.28 Kb Check Popularity: In top 2,843,108 Number of pages on site: 9 Number of links to site on web: 22 Try it On Demand Publishing 49 eON http://eon.unn.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.3 (Compaq Tru64) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 2 errors Load time: 5.39 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 34 Infoseek: 40 Hotbot: 7 Try it 28 Try it Information not available Check Popularity: In top 384,787 Number of pages on site: 44 Number of links to site on web: 18 Try it 50 Phoenix http://www.hud.ac.uk/schools/ phoenix/pages/homepage.htm Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 14 errors Load time: 23.00 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 11 Infoseek: 6 Hotbot: 7 Try it 1 Try it 1 P1 errors 26.00 secs download time Total file size = 75.60 Kb Check Popularity: In top 71,840 Number of pages on site: 2,360 Number of links to site on web: 3,105 Try it 51 Edbank http://www-edbank.open.ac.uk/ edbank/ Apache/1.3.6 (Solaris) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 2 errors Load time: 9.87 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 8 Infoseek: 18 Hotbot: 4 Try it 0 Try it 1 P1 errors 10.87 secs download time Total file size = 28.33 Kb Check Popularity: In top 7,221 Number of pages on site: 6 Number of links to site on web: 6 Try it 52 HERON http://www.stir.ac.uk/ infoserv/heron/ Apache/1.3.14 (MS platform) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 1 errors Load time: 2.49 secs Not checked fully Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 53 Infoseek: 20 Hotbot: 44 Try it 28 Try it 1 P1 errors 0.95 secs download time Total file size = 1.61 Kb Check Popularity: In top 41,227 Number of pages on site: 1,840 Number of links to site on web: 7,296 Try it 53 On Demand http://www.livjm.ac.uk/ on_demand/ Web page not found     AltaVista: 31 Infoseek: 12 Hotbot: 37 Try it       53 SCOPE http://www.stir.ac.uk/ infoserv/scope/ Apache/1.3.14 (MS platform) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 5 errors Load time: 8.33 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 68 Infoseek: 32 Hotbot: > 100 Try it 101 Try it 1 P1 errors 9.83 secs download time Total file size = 22.80 Kb Check Popularity: In top 41,227 Number of pages on site: 1,840 Number of links to site on web: 7,296 Try it 55 ERIMS http://erims.temp.ox.ac.uk/ erimsproj/ Web site not available     AltaVista: 2 Infoseek: 1 Hotbot: 2 Try it       56 Eurotext http://eurotext.ulst.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.3 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 4 problems HTML check: 30 errors Load time: 38.40 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 304 Infoseek: 82 Hotbot: > 200 Try it 146 Try it 1 P1 errors 13.73 secs download time Total file size = 27.84 Kb Check Popularity: In top 2,089,799 Number of pages on site: 5,051 Number of links to site on web: 198 Try it Pre-prints 57 CogPrints http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.12 (Linux) Check Link check: 2 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 10.36 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 898 Infoseek: 422 Hotbot: 2,000 Try it 811 Try it 1 P1 errors 10.86 secs download time Total file size = 30.08 Kb Check Popularity: In top 234,162 Number of pages on site: 316 Number of links to site on web: 1,257 Try it 58 Education-line http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ Netscape-Communications / 1.1 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 3.39 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 1,232 Infoseek: 321 Hotbot: 1,000 Try it 430 Try it 1 P1 errors 4.39 secs download time Total file size = 4.99 Kb Check Popularity: In top 17,160 Number of pages on site: 14,675 Number of links to site on web: 19,920 Try it 59 Formations http://formations.ulst.ac.uk/ Lotus-Domino (MS platform) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 6 problems HTML check: 8 errors Load time: 5.72 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 25 Infoseek: 8 Hotbot: 12 Try it 8 Try it 1 P1 errors 5.22 secs download time Total file size = 13.39 Kb Check Popularity: In top 828,414 Number of pages on site: 8 Number of links to site on web: 35 Try it 60 WoPEc http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/ WoPEc.html Apache/1.3.4 (Solaris) Check Link check: Information not available Browser compatibility: Information not availables HTML check: Information not available Load time: Information not available Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 349 Infoseek: 126 Hotbot: 1,500 Try it 1 Try it 2 P1 errors 10.66 secs download time Total file size = 22.16 Kb Check Popularity: In top 49,277 Number of pages on site: 25,916 Number of links to site on web: 117,309 Try it Quality Assurance 61 ESPERE http://www.espere.org/ Microsoft-IIS / 4.0 (MS platform) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 4 problems HTML check: 5 errors Load time: 13.04 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 15 Infoseek: 13 Hotbot: 41 Try it 17 Try it 2 P1 errors 9.39 secs download time Total file size = 14.01 Kb Check Popularity: No information available Number of pages on site: No information available Number of links to site on web: No information available Try it Supporting Studies 62 MODELS http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ dlis/models/ Apache/1.2b8 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 3.56 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 97 Infoseek: 67 Hotbot: 78 Try it 327 Try it 0 P1 errors 3.01 secs download time Total file size = 7.23 Kb Check Popularity: In top 66,007 Number of pages on site: 4,056 Number of links to site on web: 9,835 Try it 63 IMPEL2 http://ilm.unn.ac.uk/impel/ Microsoft-IIS / 4.0 (MS platform) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 4 problems HTML check: 8 errors Load time: 40.23 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 70 Infoseek: 18 Hotbot: 53 Try it 22 Try it 1 P1 errors 15.41 secs download time Total file size = 46.47 Kb Check Popularity: In top 1,969,595 Number of pages on site: 23 Number of links to site on web: 143 Try it 64 FIDDO http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ departments/dis/ fiddo/fiddo.html Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 5.61 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 34 Infoseek: 18 Hotbot: 63 Try it 1 Try it 1 P1 errors 3.96 secs download time Total file size = 8.87 Kb Check Popularity: In top 35,073 Number of pages on site: 4,554 Number of links to site on web: 12,331 Try it Training and Awareness 65 Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Apache/1.2b8 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 1 problems HTML check: 1 errors Load time: 6.51 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 2,144 Infoseek: 1,010 Hotbot: 2,200 Try it 934 Try it 2 P1 errors 10.07 secs download time Total file size = 27.23 Kb Check Popularity: In top 160,068 Number of pages on site: Not available Number of links to site on web: 1,849 Try it 66 CINE http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ projects/cine/ Apache/1.3.12 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 18.02 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 33 Infoseek: 12 Hotbot: 34 Try it 21 Try it 0 P1 errors 17.48 secs download time Total file size = 57.52 Kb Check Popularity: In top 40,600 Number of pages on site: 7,774 Number of links to site on web: 7,805 Try it 67 EDULIB http://www.tay.ac.uk/edulib/ Microsoft-IIS / 4.0 (MS platform) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 4 problems HTML check: 4 errors Load time: 14.70 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 11 Infoseek: 2 Hotbot: 12 Try it 103 Try it 1 P1 errors 16.97 secs download time Total file size = 34.10 Kb Check Popularity: In top 509,759 Number of pages on site: 147 Number of links to site on web: 833 Try it 68 Netways http://netways.shef.ac.uk/ Stronghold/1.3 (Compaq Tru64) Check Link check: 1 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 14 errors Load time: 11.61 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 300 Infoseek: 162 Hotbot: < 200 Try it 290 Try it 1 P1 errors 15 secs download time Total file size = 30.62 Kb Check Popularity: In top 1,069,011 Number of pages on site: 243 Number of links to site on web: 221 Try it 69 Netskills http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ Apache/1.3.9 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 2 problems HTML check: 1 errors Load time: 8.74 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 2,363 Infoseek: 589 Hotbot: 1,800 Try it 298 Try it 0 P1 errors 14.69 secs download time Total file size = 24.07 Kb Check Popularity: In top 144,657 Number of pages on site: 201 Number of links to site on web: 3,104 Try it 70 SKIP http://www.plym.ac.uk/ faculties/research/skip1.htm Apache/1.3.3 (Solaris) Check Link check: 0 bad links Browser compatibility: 0 problems HTML check: 0 errors Load time: 7.12 secs Try it Check up to 20 pages AltaVista: 6 Infoseek: 4 Hotbot: 7 Try it 1 Try it 1 P1 errors 7.32 secs download time Total file size = 19.15 Kb Check Popularity: In top 187,409 Number of pages on site: 655 Number of links to site on web: 3,374 Try it 71 TAPIN http://www.uce.ac.uk/tapin/ Web page not available     AltaVista: 70 Infoseek: 19 Hotbot: 34 Try it       Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Watch: WebWatching eLib Project Web Sites" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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eLib: How Was It for You?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eLib: How Was It for You?
Buzz copyright cache mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir reviews the eLib programme "The Vice Chancellor may take some time in replying to your query regarding the effectiveness of cultural change, as I have to print out his email, and transcribe and re-key the reply for him.
Health and safety regulations here mean that we dissuade him from using his computer whenever possible" That quote isn’t a snippet from this weeks Laurie Taylor column on the back of the Times Higher, but my favourite email from three years of being involved with eLib.
Interestingly, the person who sent it moved rapidly up the career ladder in an IT department, while the VC quietly "retired" to tend his roses; draw your own conclusions.
Cultural change.
It’s an odd phrase; part ‘new age’, perhaps ‘touchy feely’, and possibly part 90’s management speak.
Several other articles in Ariadne have tackled the issues surrounding CC; looking back, it is interesting to re-read the article in issue five (over two years ago) by Kelly Russell which touched on this subject.
Has eLib changed the culture?
Well, arguably "yes", though probably "perhaps" is more accurate.
Cultural change is difficult, if not impossible, to measure.
"Good news from eLib: Cultural Change is up by 2.3% this week"; we think not.
It is easy to see, from extreme examples, when CC clearly hasn’t happened, or has been ignored or resisted.
However, it is more difficult to spot many of the subtler changes in approach and attitute.
In UK academia, "things take time"; at least one university still bars "secretaries and typists" from the senior (read: staff) common room, many years after this elitist edict was introduced.
Like the Marylebone Cricket Club admissions policy, that which many of us adapt to overnight, takes others decades to accept.
With eLib, many of the resultant ripples of cultural change may have no effect for years and decades, and may never become explicitely apparent.
But who has eLib definitely influenced?
Well, it has touched on most university Librarians.
Those University Vice Chancellors whose secretaries do not overzealously filter their post will have received, and in some cases read, and in a fewer cases even still understood, Ariadne.
Accesses to the subject gateways continue to climb.
Netskills and other eLib projects have trained thousands of people (roughly 1 for every 2,500 people in the United Kingdom).
And so forth.
In addition, there are the hidden benefits.
eLib projects have directly employed several hundred people, and indirectly several hundred more.
Many of these people now work in useful positions in museums, universities, colleges, publishers and other organisations, with the skills, contacts and knowledge gained through their eLib days.
Many universities are more aware of electronic copyright issues and laws (or at least of the associated pitfalls).
And many universities have come to, if not fear, then at least have a little more (sometimes grudging) respect for their "Library and Information Services".
But what of the future?
eLib has resulted in a body of projects maturing to the point where they could be arguably labelled "services", or be well on the way to such status.
How will eLib take the next, and most difficult step, ensuring that these projects turn into high-profile, well-used services, rather than ending up as an appendix in some consultancy report gathering dust on a shelf in north Bristol?
The bottom line is money.
Dosh.
Funding.
Sponsorship.
Unrestricted Educational Grants.
Call it what you like, but money is the key.
No money, no staff, no services.
But with the future coffers of our funding bodies seemingly as empty as the trophy room at West Bromwich Albion, where else will the money come from?
Advertising or being sponsored, while appearing not to lose your independence, is a tricky balancing act.
Who are suitable sponsors of currently JISC-funded services?
Perhaps Dewhurst the butchers could sponsor the Visible Human Mirror, or Shane MacGowan sponsor Derweb, the Dental resource?
Perhaps not.
With little research, two main models of funding services become more apparent.
On the one hand, find one benign, benevolent funder to write one large cheque per year; good, as there is less administration and hassle; bad, as the image of the service is tied closely to that of the sole funder.
One the other hand, a basket of sponsors may be better, as your service needs less money from each of them, and the image of your sponsors is more diffuse; however, dealing with a large number of funders (cooks?)
may prove to be more hassle than it is worth.
But what of the Universities?
Charge them an average of 50K a year each (writes "Anonymous or I’ll be lynched"), which is the cost of one department manager.
"Pick your least effective manager; would you swap him or her for continued use of Mailbase?
I would!"
exclaims our socialist bard; the resulting millions could bear the cost of many of the service-oriented projects funded by JISC.
Or what of the charges incurred through using the transatlantic link as of next August?
Should the universities be persuaded (or perhaps forced?)
to use the subject gateways, such as EEVL, OMNI, SOSIG and Biz/ed, as well as the national Caching service, in order to reduce network costs.
And should these services therefore benefit from the financial savings?
Discuss.
Carefully.
However, is the culture sufficiently changed within UK universities for possibilities such as these to be widely comprehended?
Try ordering work-related equipment through the Web, and then claim it back through the finance system of your University; the chances are 2 in 3 that you will have more problems than usual (and in some cases, be met with a flat refusal no initially university generated order number, no refund).
Individual email access for every academic who wants it?
Still hasn’t happened.
And don’t ever telephone a certain Hampshire university switchboard and ask for the webmaster, as you will be swiftly connected to the zoology department… Perhaps we still have some way to go before the ripples of cultural change have lapped onto the most distant shores of our academic institutions.
Author Details: John Kirriemuir OMNI service manager, Greenfield Medical Library, Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham, NG7 2UH Email: jk@omni.ac.uk URL: http://omni.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Bringing Coherence to Networked Information for the New Century Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Bringing Coherence to Networked Information for the New Century Buzz framework database infrastructure archives digitisation copyright preservation cataloguing opac z39.50 visualisation licence ecms interoperability privacy url research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Gillian Austen reports on the JISC-CNI conference at Stratford, UK, 14-16 June 2000.
The conference was opened by Professor Maxwell Irvine, Chair of the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), who extended a familiar transport metaphor to talk of the route maps and driving instructors needed to ensure the effective use of the information superhighway, observing that the JISC's DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) can be seen as the "overall integrated transport policy".
He went on to highlight the international collaboration and partnerships which will be needed to bring true coherence to networked information.
He was followed by Mike Lesk of the National Science Foundation (NSF), who emphasised the importance of international digital libraries, especially now that statistics show that there are about 20 web searches made for each visit to a library.
The JISC/CNI conference followed a two-day meeting of the US Digital Libraries Initiative 2, within which six DLI2 projects jointly funded by the JISC and the NSF.
The NSF has similar calls for tender out in Asia, Germany and with the European Union, with plans for others such as Japan and France.
Concluding the opening session, Reg Carr, Bodley's Librarian and Chair of the JISC Committee for Electronic Information, focused on the UK HE international agenda.
Acknowledging the economic pressure to sell UK HE in the global marketplace, he described the types of international JISC activity as: promoting UK know-how; making common cause; formal programmes and alliances; developing standards and interoperability; and buying in content for the DNER.
The opening session was followed by a range of informative presentations over the subsequent two days.
Highlights included Ken Klingenstein, Project Director of the Internet2 Middleware Initiative, who spoke on "Middleware and Advanced Technologies".
In a lively talk which, as promised, relied heavily on well-chosen cliches, he talked of the basic amorality of technology and the need for us as humans to question it.
In particular, he asserted that the passive protection of privacy we currently consider adequate is failing and that there is a need to be more active in that area.
Citing a recent article in the Boston Globe, he pointed out that it was possible to identify individuals by taking publicly available datasets and throwing them against "sanitised" (ie purportedly anonymous) medical records.
As some of these individuals are in public office, the rethinking of privacy policies is now likely to be a matter of some urgency.
Further highlights were the presentation by Kevin Guthrie of JSTOR, the electronic journal storage project, who described the challenge of meeting the need for both preservation and access over time.
To date, JSTOR provides access to more than 831,000 articles under 117 titles in 15 disciplines, totalling 5 million pages.
Six hundred of the 748 participating libraries are in the US, making it a very successful exemplar for international collaboration.
Another interesting presentation was given by Lynn Norris of ingenta, who described EASY, the new pilot for interlibrary loans which is due to go online in September.
The draft EASY licence is similar to the current understanding of "Fair Use", being based on the JISC/Publishers' Association licence (as is NESLI, the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative), but with the ability to retain an electronic copy.
Copyright was a recurrent theme, and Professor Charles Oppenheim described the new draft EU Directive on Copyright, which had reached a "common position" (the most important stage in a directive's progress) only a few days before the conference.
This directive has been controversial, since its original wording would have created a situation where licence agreements would have become the norm in a quite crippling way and so it has generated much lobbying on both sides.
The draft, which is likely to be approved in the European Parliament in the autumn or winter, includes a brand new law which makes it a criminal offence to bypass or eliminate technical measures (ECMS) or copyright management information, which is sure to be good news for electronic archivists and rightsholders alike, without restricting the rights or practice of legitimate users.
A plenary session concluding the second day brought together all the delegates to hear an address by the incoming Chief Executive of the British Library.
Lynne Brindley, whose appointment has been warmly welcomed across the electronic library community in the UK, talked of the context in which the British Library will operate: of the importance of collaboration and international developments and especially of coherence in its strategies for digitisation and related initiatives.
The main themes emerging in her early considerations are developing an "e-strategy", supporting the changing role of curators, widening public access, increasing collaboration and partnership and the British Library 's potential contribution to the DNER.
At the core of the British Library's mission is legal deposit, and Lynne Brindley outlined her concern for developing a framework for this, as well as practical solutions, as a part of the British Library's "e-strategy".
Observing the need for legislative time in Parliament to deal with some of the issues around legal deposit in the electronic age, Lynne Brindley was nonetheless able to outline an inspiring vision for the British Library.
The issue of procuring a digital infrastructure is a vital first step, and the successful tender for this will be announced shortly.
In relation to digital preservation and an overall digital strategy, new collaborations with scholars and teachers will be a necessary part of renewed efforts to repurpose content on an international scale.
She observed that such an expansion of its role would not in any way compromise its standards, but would help to make the British Library a "library for all UK citizens."
Lynne Brindley paid tribute to the Research Libraries Group in raising awareness and helping to redefine the role of curators.
They have an important contribution to make to the "e-strategy" and to supporting widening access, but also to international scholarship and research partnerships.
She particularly noted the ECAI (Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative), which uses geographical systems as a major form of the display of information.
In its third year, the ECAI is now a global collaboration on visualisation producing very rich content.
Another new partnership is FATHOM, providing access to e-course content and similar materials.
In its very early stages, FATHOM is working on a range of business models and could be an early model for an e-university.
The British Library's digital strategy will provide high quality content as part of its potential contribution to the DNER and Lynne Brindley was able to announce an important step forward in relation to this.
From September, all UK HE and FE institutions will have free access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC) database, which lists the titles of almost 15 million journal articles and conference papers.
From today, UK students and staff are able to use its inside alerting service free of charge, using the web or Z39.50.
Funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), the ETOC database will be made available through MIMAS at Manchester University.
The ETOC database complements the British Library's Online Public Access Catalogue OPAC, which is also available on the web free of charge.
On the final day Lorcan Dempsey the new Programme Director of the DNER, gave a glimpse of the overall shape of this major initiative.
The DNER is both a managed collection of resources, in order to ensure its relevance, and an integrated environment for service delivery, to ensure what he called "systemic coherence".
The DNER "collections" are informed by the JISC Collections Policy, which is in process of being revised, to ensure its relevance to FE and the National Learning Network.
Lorcan acknowledged the challenge facing the DNER: it is a difficult task, especially winning over hearts and minds to new ways of doing things, but the DNER promises to be the "real service environment" that UK HE and FE and the research community require.
The conference closed with an informal talk by Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the CNI.
He noted the differences in the JISC and CNI agendas since the last combined meeting in 1997 and spoke of new themes, paralleled in the UK and the US: the new focus on coherence, following rapid and experimental growth; of the importance of international links; of the strong reconnection of networked information to teaching and learning; and of archiving, which is now a large area for international effort.
Specific challenges will include the move from research into practice ("if everything works, we're doing bad research!")
and the need to assess and understand the impact of the new environment.
One of several interesting observations was the prevalent focus on arts and humanities, which prompted the thought that science might be going its own way, independent of librarians and information scientists.
In an age of interdisciplinary science, extending to combinations of science and social science, this is striking.
Finally, he applauded the success of the conference, highlighting the importance and benefits of the dialogue it promoted throughout the week.
Author Details   Gillian Austen JISC ASSIST Bristol Email: gausten@impresa.u-net.com Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Bringing Coherence to Networked Information for the New Century" Author: Gillian Austen Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/jisc-cni/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
According to our computer-designed survey, 50% of staff use the Internet every day, 35% once a week, 10% are afraid of it, and the other 10% can't even add up.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 33: Exploring the Information Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 33: Exploring the Information Environment Buzz html database xml portal archives metadata xhtml standardisation repositories cataloguing ebook interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter with the editorial for Ariadne 33.
Welcome to the September/October issue of Ariadne.
The concept of the 'Information Environment' is now one which appears often in Digital Library literature.
While it is not a vague concept, it is still one which is undergoing development.
Implementing an Information Environment is therefore currently a problematic exercise.
Those interested in undertaking such an implementation therefore will be interested in a number of articles featured in this issue of Ariadne.
Issue 33 opens with an article which fills in some of the background to OCLC's acquisition of netLibrary ('Utilizing E-books to Enhance Digital Library Offerings') [Shirley Hyatt and Lynn Connaway].
Before the acquisition of netLibrary, OCLC was noted principally for providing cataloguing, metadata, Interlibrary loans, reference, and other services.
OCLC's WorldCat, an online bibliographic resource, now contains more than 49 million bibliographic records, covering more than 800 million library holdings.
This by itself is a massive and extremely important resource.
However a key target for OCLC is now the integration of information resources under the same interface as the bibliographic metadata for these resources.
In the past WorldCat provided location information which enabled users to find resources matching the records.
During the past ten years of Internet development the notion of what might be provided has changed, and now web-accessible full-text electronic documents can be offered via links within metadata records (as they are currently with the ARC e-prints Service, and others).
When it was announced that OCLC had acquired netLibrary, the implications were obvious as the authors say: OCLC is supplementing its rich metadata repository with a digital library offering..... netLibrary provides additional opportunities for an enhanced information environment with a sound navigation and information architecture to make the entire environment function as a seamless and friendly package of resources for end-users.
They will be able to not only access full-text journals, but also a collection of full text monographs and reference materials from one interface In our second article Andy Powell offers a '5 step guide to becoming a content provider in the JISC Information Environment'.
This looks particularly at the technical steps that content providers need to take so that their systems are interoperable within the JISC-IE technical architecture.
The JISC-IE technical architecture has been designed with the requirements of that Information Environment in mind, but any such environment will have features in common which will be of interest beyond this particular project.
Powell describes the architecture as specifying 'a set of standards and protocols that support the development and delivery of an integrated set of networked services that allow the end-user to discover, access, use and publish digital and physical resources as part of their learning and research activities'.
Powell gives an overview of the kind of activities supported by the architecture these include: integration of local and remote information resources with 'discovery' services; seamless linking from 'discovery' services to 'delivery' services; integration of information resources and learning object repositories with Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs); and open access to e-print archives and other systems for managing the intellectual output of institutions.
His intention is to show that the technical side of providing content for the JISC-IE 'is not overly difficult, [and] that in many cases it will be in line with the things that content providers are doing anyway that it is compatible with other initiatives and general Web trends'.
This article follows on from a general introduction to the technical architecture of the JISC-IE which was published in Ariadne 31 ('The JISC Information Environment and Web Services').
A related article, 'Student searching behaviour in the JISC Information Environment', penned for us by Jill Griffiths and Peter Brophy, looks at the EDNER project, which was created to provide evaluation services for the JISC-IE.
This is a serious study of the factors involved in user behaviour.
One of the results which emerged (there, as elsewhere), distressing to the designers of portal services and information environments, is that students prefer to locate information or resources via a search engine above all other options.
And Google, of course, is the preferred option (this is known as the 'googling phenomenon').
Maybe this shouldn't be so surprising.
Librarians have known for years that a common characteristic of most new students is that they know almost nothing about libraries and how they work.
It takes a while before they can use the services properly.
Google is an easy solution if you don't know what it can't find for you.
There are numerous other highlights in this issue of Ariadne, including 'Portals, Portals everywhere' (Ian Dolphin, Paul Miller and Robert Sherratt), and Pete Johnston's report on the 'New Directions in Metadata' conference held in Edinburgh in August ('Collaboration, Integration and "Recombinant Potential"').
Markos Dendrinos looks at a technical structure for speaking librarian services, based on speech recognition and synthesis technologies.
Brian Kelly in his Web Focus column suggests that web managers should 'Get Serious About HTML Standards' Though he advises standardisation on XHTML 1.0 as the ideal, if possible, since it is a reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0.
This means that XML tools can be used to process resources, allowing a certain degree of future proofing.
Liz Lyon provides a brief trip report from a Digital Libraries conference in Beijing.
Brett Burridge describes his 'Index Server Companion', an application which allows Microsoft Index Server to index content from remote websites and ODBC databases.
'Climbing the Scholarly Publishing Mountain with SHERPA' (John MacColl and Stephen Pinfield) explores the SHERPA project which is concentrating on making e-prints available online.
Plus (of course) we have the usual regular columns from EEVL (the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library) and SOSIG (the Social Science Gateway).
Penny Garrod's regular article looks at the current state of the changing environment for the Public Library sector.
We were saddened to hear that Ian Mowatt, Librarian at the University of Edinburgh, was killed in a hill-walking accident in Scotland shortly after participating in the 'New Directions in Metadata' conference (reported on elsewhere in this issue).
Ian was a well-known figure in the Digital Libraries field in the UK, and will be much missed.
Ariadne would like to extend grateful thanks to Shirley Keane, who not only put together the Newsline column as she has done before, but also did most of the initial markup for the issue.
Suggestions for articles for issues 34 and 35 are now being considered.
Article proposals and books for review should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Establishing a Digital Library Centre Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Establishing a Digital Library Centre Buzz data database dissemination infrastructure archives metadata digitisation copyright cataloguing e-learning rslp rae ict url research standards Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir outlines some of the issues for the establishment of digital library centres in UK Higher Education institutions.
This article discusses some of the issues that arise when an academic department, unit or institution moves from possessing a few digital library projects and services, to possessing an integrated digital library centre.
The article is based on: the experiences of the author, who has worked in four digital library centres (according to the definition in the next section) in UK higher education.
replies from various people who have been employed by digital/electronic library projects and services over the past decade, to emailed questions about various aspects of digital library centre culture examples of incidents or case studies of things that have occurred within UK digital library centres It does not prescribe a 'one model fits all' plan for all budding digital library centres.
There are many factors and variables, some constantly changing, that influence a successful or unsuccessful centre; this article touches on a selection.
Having said that, large consideration is given to the issues of staffing and funding, which (along with the struggle for accommodation) appear to be the main issues that preoccupy people involved in running digital library centres.
Defining the Digital Library Centre Before proceeding, it is necessary to define what a UK higher education-based digital library research centre is.
As one reply to this question put it: "It's one of those things that is obvious when you see it you can quickly say whether something is a digital library research centre or not.
Trying to define an authorative catch-all definition that every centre and non-centre is happy with, is another thing altogether..." By its very title, such a centre is a place where research into 'the digital library' is carried out.
However, both 'research' and 'the digital library' are themselves vague, all-encapsulating terms; the phrase 'digital library' alone signifies remarkably different things to different people [1].
In addition, it could be argued that many university, and some FE college, departments carry out some kind of digital library research.
For example, identifying the right database system to store information relevant to the subject domain of a department could constitute 'digital library research', as could designing a web site in order to provide access to content produced by the department, or providing department-wide access to a range of third-party electronic information services.
Because of the fuzziness of terminology, and the pervasiveness of digital library technologies in most aspects of education and information systems, acceptable synonyms of 'digital library centre' could include 'electronic library centre', 'information management centre', 'virtual library unit', 'learning technology unit' and many others.
However, there are a number of groupings and departments in UK academia that explicitly promote themselves as digital (or electronic, networking, learning technology or IT) research, development or service-oriented centres.
These include centres such as the CDLR [2], CERLIM [3], CIRT [4], ILRT [5], LITC [6] and UKOLN [7].
There are also distinct groupings of projects within UK higher education departments of information science (more commonly known as 'library schools') such as the Information Management Research Institute [8], which promote themselves as some variation of a 'digital library (research)' centre.
We looked at a number of these centres and groupings in order to identify the activities they conducted.
The ten most common were: digital library services creation, maintenance, enhancement.
evaluation of digital library projects, services and programmes.
consultancy in digital library matters.
developing digital library demonstrators usually, but not always, as part of a funded project.
research in a variety of aspects of digital/electronic library matters.
training in some aspect of ICT, or digital library usage.
fund raising for the centre.
digital library project and service coordination either as the sole partner, or as the lead partner of a consortium.
digital library centre, service and project-oriented publicity and promotion.
organising and promoting digital library events.
As an added complication, it could be argued that there are a number of centres carrying out most of these activities that do not market themselves as digital library (research) centres.
For example, EDINA [9] provides a wide range of electronic data-oriented services, in addition to events, service coordination, promotion and so forth.
In addition, the JISC-funded Resource Discovery Network [10] coordinates a number of 'hubs' i.e.
centres that provide a range of internet resource discovery and related electronic services in specific subject domains; these are either based around a long-established service, such as EEVL [11], OMNI [12] and SOSIG [13], or are based around newly established resource discovery systems.
These hubs, though service-oriented as opposed to research-oriented, are typically involved in seven or more of the aforementioned ten activities.
In addition, as one subject gateway research officer put it: "...even though we maintain a service, we still need to carry out research on a continuous basis.
Better interfaces, methods of integrating our service with the RDN and others, faster information download, techniques to increase recall and precision, monitoring usage..." For the purpose of this article, we will drop the word 'research', so as to include those centres that provide mainly digital library services, therefore leaving us with the 'Digital Library Centre', or DLC for short.
We will define the DLC somewhat unscientifically as being: 'A centre containing two or more digital library-oriented services or projects, where the services and projects interact in technical, personnel, promotional or other ways, and where the majority of activities in the aforementioned list of ten are carried out.'
The benefits and the drawbacks What are the benefits of running a DLC?
the skills and experience of staff can be used across a range of projects, and the non-project components of the centre, as opposed to being used on one discrete project.
This benefits both the development of the staff, and the development of projects and services.
the centre will have a higher profile than a disconnected collection of projects, therefore (theoretically) attracting potential funders and skilled staff.
the more staff there is, the greater the pool of contacts and collaborators (through those staff), and the more people who may become aware of the more obscure sources of funding.
proposals can be submitted for work based on previous or current work in the centre, therefore increasing the chances of those proposals being funded.
the centre should have more 'clout' within the host institution, and is therefore able to fight for better/adequate accommodation and other institutional resources.
with good (and independent) financial management, there is more flexibility in moving monies between projects, services, initiatives and other budgets within the centre.
some activities can be carried out more efficiently; for example, a number of closely-related projects or services could carry out joint dissemination activities.
Obviously, there are drawbacks to establishing a DLC; otherwise, most HE institutions would possess one, and all DLCs would succeed and prosper.
Significant problems encountered by such centres include: funding non-project staff, such as centre administrators and directors; many conventional funding sources will only fund staff directly employed on a project or service, and will expect the bidding centre or institution to provide appropriate administration, directorial and other non-project based staff out of its own funds.
in the same vein, funding non-project activities, such as centre-oriented PR (web site, leaflets, presentational expenses).
finding increasing amounts of funding in order to retain staff who are increasing in experience and skills.
accommodation.
This really should not be a problem; a successful DLC can bring in substantial funds to the host institution, raise the institutional profile, provide a range of services and information to other units within the institution, and assist in raising the RAE rating of several departments.
You would therefore assume that Higher Education institutions would happily provide sufficient accommodation.
This is not the case; most UK HE DLCs have fought a permanent struggle to gain satisfactory accommodation of anywhere near the standard of similarly sized units in the same institution.
you will need to speculate before you can accumulate.
Before hiring staff who will secure funding, the aformentioned accommodation has to be located for them, in addition to desks, PCs, stationary and the like; this will easily run into several thousand pounds of spending before any member of staff of the new DLC actually starts to write the first funding application or proposal.
The 'vision' of the centre Before establishing a DLC, you essentially need some kind of vision, agenda, remit or plan.
This is useful when dealing with sponsors, funders, incoming staff, PR-related issues and so forth; it is not enough to mumble "we do digital library stuff" and leave it at that.
The vision of a DLC is usually oriented around one or more of the following: some subject domain or spectrum.
For example, a centre could offer a range of services including electronic journals, resource discovery access and internet training in a specific subject.
some type of digital library service.
For example, a centre could specialise in providing services, research and consultancy in various aspects of electronic journal creation, maintenance, access and charging.
a geographic area.
A centre could aim to become the main higher education institution based centre of digital library research activity within its particular region of the country.
a particular funding source or 'seam'.
some particular user domain.
For example, a centre could research digital library issues applicable to teachers, lecturers, librarians, schoolchildren or some other type(s) of user.
The vision will be partially determined by the existing projects (and proposals for future projects currently submitted) which will form the new centre.
In addition, the skill set and experience of staff who will work in the centre can be a significant factor in the scoping of the vision, as well as those digital library-related resources and services (usually within the host institution) on which the centre can rely.
The vision (which needs to be updated as projects and services come and go) can be used to provide the basis of the centre mission statement and several other PR elements.
Funding the centre Unless your centre has several projects that involve large amounts of digitisation work, or invests in some hugely expensive specialist piece of hardware, then the large majority of expenditure will be on staff wages.
Focusing on the 'vision' or the 'money' The two extremes of funding a digital library centre seem to be: carefully evaluating the resource, skill and funding requirements necessary to fulfil a well-defined digital library centre vision, followed by locating and pursuing the appropriate funding sources.
throwing together a speculative proposal for every call or tender that contains a phrase similar to 'digital libraries'.
Most centres fall somewhere between these two extremes; if you work in a senior position in a DLC, it is an interesting exercise to (honestly) see what proportion of proposals submitted in the last year more closely match either of the two extremes.
In an ideal world, a DLC would firmly adhere to the first extreme.
However, the culture in which typical DLCs are embedded is based upon short-term contracts, where there is a constant quest to find funding to keep individual staff members 'on' for as long as possible.
Therefore, unless your DLC has managed to develop a successful financial mechanism for retaining significant reserves, it may need to step outside of the 'vision' and acquire funding via whatever means in order to retain key staff.
As one ex-director of a DLC replied: "I felt like a hamster on a wheel; as soon as funding was secured to extend the contract of one member of staff, it was time to secure funding for another.
And before long, I was back to the first member of staff.
So, we would 'squeak' to various funders on a regular basis, and every now and then one of them would throw us a bit of cheese to give us the energy to carry on running a while longer.
That's quite a cynical way of looking at it, isn't it?
Four whole years of my life and it reads like the lyrics of a Radiohead song."
In addition to acquiring funding to retain key staff, there is also the burden of perpetually funding a continuous service.
Whereas a research project usually has some finite end, digital library services carry on until they are either sold, bought out or taken over, or are integrated into some other service, or become financially unviable.
In addition, services can become obsolete in terms of either the content or the supporting technology, though this should not happen in a DLC which sufficiently maintains and upgrades its services.
Even if a service is discontinued in some manner, there is often a need to make available some publicly-accessible archive of the content, which in itself raises issues of continuous maintenance and cost.
This is not always considered by people who submit proposals to create digital library services.
The diversification of funding sources One of the more interesting aspects of studying digital library developments in UK HE is that of seeing where the funding comes from.
This is relatively easy, as most funders demand branding or mentions of themselves in the publicly-accessible deliverables of the project or service.
Looking at the completed projects and services of DLCs from the last decade, we see that the large majority were funded from three sources: the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) [14] funded a large number of research-oriented projects, as well as a smaller number of more service-oriented developments.
Many of these projects were funded under large programmes such as eLib [15] and JTAP [16], through which much of the funding was awarded to groups working in HE institutions.
public organisations and bodies concerned with library and library-content development, such as the British Library.
European funding programmes.
However, a cursory examination of recent and current projects and services in the more successful DLCs in the UK (in terms of personnel growth) indicates that funding now comes from a more diverse array of sources, many of which were not targeted explicitly at higher education institutions.
For example, recently funded projects in DLCs include 'providing ICT services aimed at benefiting disadvantaged communities', 'providing training for staff in public libraries', and 'providing work packages for secondary school ages'.
Non of these needed to be provided by HE institutions in particular and were not advertised as such, being open calls to any appropriate public or private organisation.
So, why are DLCs now locating funding from a wider range of sources?
Some of the more sensible answers put to this question were: the change in focus of traditional sources of funding.
A key example is the JISC; though the JISC still fund a number of exploratory and research-based projects, the focus of many calls has moved to developing and sustaining integrated services, through initiatives such as the Distributed National Electronic Resource [17].
the increase in collaborative ICT and digital library funding for, and work with, Further Education.
This is a drive encouraged by a number of organisations including the JISC.
The FE sector brings with it a range of characteristics starkly different to those of HE; for example, the number of institutions involved, the subject domains and qualifications, the network configuration, and the skill-set of staff.
These and other factors often present interesting challenges when HE and FE organisations work together on digital library and ICT initiatives.
more commercial project sponsorship.
Companies are realising that providing funding for projects involving computers, training, networks, digital information and education reflects positively on themselves.
For example, the BT-sponsored 'Lifelong Learning Awards' [18] aims to "support lifelong learning projects which use ICT to promote access, innovation and teamwork".
same cake, more slices.
There are an increasing number of organisations not all of them DLCs applying for the same grants and pots of money: "...maybe it's just me getting older, but there seems to be many more people bidding for the same funding nowadays".
Several funders now process proposals and responses to tender in a multi-stage manner; this is partially so all of the unsuccessful bidders do not have to submit a final, full (and time consuming) proposal, but also so that the funding organisation does not have to judge a large number of these full proposals in one go.
A holistic approach to funding So, what are these diverse sources of funding that the more successful DLCs seem to be tapping into?
The rest of this section lists eleven types of income; the more established DLCs use most, if not all of these in some form or other.
Source 1: conventional digital library project and service funders There are a surprisingly large number of funding organisations [19] who either issue calls or tenders with a fixed deadline, or who take a 'submit whenever you want for consideration' approach.
Though the competition for funding from many of these sources is quite steep, they are worth considering, especially if you can argue your case around relevant experience (through completed works or through staff).
However, beware of creating your own tight deadlines on calls and tenders: example: leaving it to the last meeting A DLC became aware of a call with a closing date seven weeks distant.
As this was more than a month away, the call was not deemed to be 'urgent' and did not make the AOB section of several strategy-related meetings.
With three weeks to go, a meeting was called the following week for people interested in submitting a proposal to the call.
At this meeting, all of the attendees stated that short term commitments ruled them out of writing part or all of the proposal.
Eventually, the DLC director cancelled three external meetings, wrote a proposal overnight without the help of the more knowledgeable staff, and the proposal did not succeed.
Source 2: European funding European funding proposals can result in substantial amounts of money, and lead to working relationships and trips abroad to interesting cities and countries.
However, such proposals often require an preposterous amount of paperwork; it is common for a member of staff to spend the best part of a month, and often more, working solely on such a proposal.
Source 3: own institution There may be sources of funding within your own institution, especially if the project or service either raises the profile of the institution, or has a real chance of attracting future income.
The summative evaluation [20] of phase three of the eLib programme (findings, point 16), states "Some of the eLib phase 3 projects have become self sustaining with funding provided by the host institutions themselves".
Source 4: e-commerce: sell things on the net While lagging behind the more commercial sectors, there is an increasing awareness, and use of, e-commerce systems in higher education [21] .
This leads to two opportunities for DLCs; either to use e-commerce to sell whatever they can, or to build, advise on, research and maintain the digital library components of such commercial systems within their own institution.
Source 5: training ICT and digital library-related training has been carried out within and by academic departments and projects for many years.
Currently, public libraries and schools by the thousand are currently being connected to the Internet, resulting in a need for training.
In addition, the recent emphasis on life-long learning, and the large increase in public PC ownership, should result in a substantial demand for good quality training in these areas for some time to come.
Source 6: consulting If your DLC contains staff that specialise in a particular subject, technology, user type or sector, then there are possibilities for offering their services on a consultancy basis.
Academic consulting has the advantage of often being short-term, and therefore a contract-filler (and staff retainer) between longer periods of project or service funding.
Source 7: commercial funding Most universities actively forge links with commercial organisations, especially those based nearby.
The resident 'business opportunities' unit should indicate which commercial organisations that the university are chummy with would be interested in funding digital library research or services.
Source 8: advertising and affiliate funding This relatively controversial approach to fundraising is usually referred to in the context of placing advertisements and banners on web-based services and resources.
A steadily growing number of UK higher education based services raise revenue in this manner.
However, a recent JISC-commissioned report [22] on advertising on JANET highlights concerns at institutional and other levels regarding the implications of this approach, as well as the realistic amounts of revenue that could be generated.
Source 9: sponsorship Sponsorship is a more acceptable form of visible commercial involvement, whereby an organisation does not necessarily plaster your web site with adverts in return for monies.
Sponsorship can take many forms, such as sponsoring a piece of equipment, a session at an event, part of the salary of one member of staff, or print-based PR materials.
Source 10: hosting events Workshops, seminars and conferences can generate profit, though generally not substantial amounts especially when the final amount of staff resource used by an event is calculated.
Unsurprisingly, the key factor in many profitable DLC organised events seems to be whether the host institution has appropriate facilities that can be hired at attractive rates.
However, events hosted by a DLC can be a great showcase for the projects, services and products produced by that centre.
Source 11: the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) The RAE occurs every four years.
Very generally speaking, departments submit details of research they have undertaken, from which a panel in the subject area decide on a research rating (from 1 to 5 and 5*).
This rating determines the amount of core research funding that is awarded to the department.
One of the main determining factors in the last few RAE exercises has been the amount of output published by researcher in peer-reviewed journals.
Therefore, various DLCs that are part of, or affiliated to, information science departments have often entered those staff who have published several such papers into the RAE, so as to maintain or increase their RAE rating and secure more core research funding.
Staffing the centre The required staff As indicated throughout this article, a wide range of staff roles need to be filled in order to maintain a fully-functioning digital library centre.
The core staff of a DLC may include: a director, with optional 'vision', who acts as a figurehead and 'public face' of the centre.
project management and coordination staff.
technical staff, for individual system and service maintenance, and PC and networking maintenance.
administration staff.
financial administration staff.
centre promotional staff i.e.
people to create the centre web site, leaflets and so forth.
staff familiar with copyright and IPR issues.
staff experienced in fund raising and proposal writing.
…and, of course, staff to work on the individual projects and services.
It is important not to 'scrimp' on administration staff: example: "The director is busy emptying the bins" A DLC centre submitted a number of proposals for funding.
Non of these included an element for administration staff; in addition, the centre had no dedicated staff due to budget cutbacks passed down from higher authority in the host institution.
Most of the projects were funded, but immediately fell behind as the research staff, mostly unskilled in administration, had to carry out these tasks.
The (highly paid) director of the centre spent an increasing amount of time dealing with tasks such as emptying bins and rectifying the lack of paper in the toilets, when ideally he should have been negotiating with potential funders of the centre.
The situation was exacerbated by several research staff leaving, partially as they viewed doing administration tasks as a demotion.
Analysis of staff roles and numbers in UK DLCs indicate that, for every non-admin staff member, between 3.5 and 5.5 admin staff are required to fulfil core, project and financial administration roles in order for the centre to function at these levels.
Hiring staff Most digital library projects and a large number of services within the UK HE sector directly employ a very small (4 or less) number of people.
Therefore, just one member of staff can have a large positive or negative effect on the progress of a project/service.
Hiring staff is therefore a risky business.
These issues are not new; various projects in programmes such as eLib [15] suffered delays due to difficulty in obtaining, and retaining, staff with sufficient technical abilities.
These and related issues will be analysed by 'The Human Element' [24], a study which aims '...to learn about the issues surrounding the recruitment, development and retention of project staff in UK HE libraries and archives, with special reference to RSLP and JISC projects.'
One ex-DLC co-director referred to staff hiring as: "…Russian roulette with five bullets, and the funders insisting you pull the trigger because the clock is ticking on the project and you cannot afford a further delay in order to re-advertise if all of the candidates are disappointing.
What else can you do?"
The digital library officer skill set In August 2001, I asked a number of people who have been involved in selecting staff for DLCs to identify the most important criteria for a good member of staff working within and across a Digital Library Centre.
The criteria mentioned by several different people were: a 'team player', at both (a) the level of the centre and (b) the level of the projects that they work on.
does their job with the minimum of supervision, and with no disruption to their (project and centre) work colleagues.
a networker.
uses their skills to help other projects in the centre even ones with which they have no connection even if it does not benefit their own project.
promotes the centre as part of his/her project.
does not object to travel and overnight stays.
good communicator.
can produce good written and verbal English.
produces what they are supposed to produce, and on time.
identifies and 'grabs' opportunities for the centre as they arise.
is genuinely productive or as one reply stated, "…spends more time working than talking about working…".
is correctly motivated i.e.
is politically oriented to support their project and the centre, as opposed to solely advancing their own career and reputation.
It is interesting to note that most of the criteria are concerned with communication, both within the centre and beyond.
Burrowing deeper: identifying the correct staff Several people suggested techniques that can be used to identify the correct staff with a greater degree of accuracy.
These include: taking more time over the interview stage.
This is a somewhat controversial measure, as several people strongly objected to spending "time I do not have" on long interview procedures.
The counter argument to this is "hire in haste, carry someone at leisure" more time spent selecting the correct candidate can avoid the aggravation caused by hiring an unsuitable person.
interviewing as a group (in additional to individual panel interviews), over half or most of a day.
As the aforementioned skill list has shown, communication is valued highly within DLCs.
There are many scenarios where DLC staff have to deal directly with strangers, often with little or no warning; for example, meeting a potential funder at a conference.
In addition, staff within a DLC typically have to negotiate and work with other staff in the centre, on the same project and different projects, and a range of people within the host institution of the centre.
Therefore, interviewing in a larger group, and involving group activities such as role-playing or a meal, can provide a better indication of relevant communication skills.
asking direct non-abstract questions, as opposed to traditional questions such as "Where do you see yourself in five years time".
For example, if someone has worked for a period of time on a research project, then ask what they contributed to the project in terms of resource or effort.
giving the candidate some opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of relevance to the post that they are applying for; it is surprising how infrequently this occurs.
For example, if a candidate is being interviewed for a post in a metadata registry service, then ask questions about metadata, contemporary metadata standards, where metadata research appears to be heading, and so forth.
asking other people who know the candidate, or their work.
The digital library community in UK higher education is highly people-network oriented, and it is common to encounter current or previous work-colleagues of a specific person at an event such as a conference or workshop.
If the timing is right, ask their opinions though be careful not to break the confidentiality of the job application procedure, for obvious legal and moral reasons.
Do not feel under pressure to take the 'best available' if none are suitable.
This can be difficult, when dealing with a short-term project for a funder with whom you wish to forge a reputation for reliability.
Have a back-up plan and schedule for quick re-advertisment of the post.
Keeping good staff Good staff usually want to increase their experience and skill set, take on more senior roles in coordination and management, and see a subsequent increase in salary levels.
Keeping good staff is vital, not only in terms of progressing the services and projects that they work on, but in terms of bringing in new funding most conventional digital library funding calls demand the CVs of relevant staff.
Techniques for keeping good staff include: visibly rewarding good staff.
If someone is producing a good piece of work, encourage them to produce a paper concerning the work and submit to a digital library conference.
An all-expenses paid trip to e.g.
San Francisco in 6 months time can help to encourage staff to stay :-).
In addition, such publications can count towards the RAE (thus increasing chances of funding through this route), and postcards from staff in exotic locations can often make other staff think "How can I get some of this conference action?"
ensuring that staff roles in proposals have some element of flexibility.
A real example is that of a proposal for a resource discovery service, where the deliverables and schedule were based on staff doing nothing but cataloguing (at speed) 8 hours a day.
Subsequently, the service had a relatively high turnover of staff, partially as the cataloguing staff had no opportunity to develop new skills through undertaking other tasks or roles.
supporting and encouraging staff to write proposals.
Ideally, details of calls which may be of interest to staff should be circulated on internal mailing lists.
Staff (especially those nearing the end of their contracts) should be supported via administration, training, and/or extra time to write proposals in subjects which interest them.
This has the advantages of sustaining staff, bringing more funding into the centre, and staff moving onto projects and services in which they are directly interested.
having a flexible work culture.
Two DLC director, on my first day of work, informed me that (paraphrased) "I don't care what hours people keep, so long as they get the job done".
This is healthy, as to many people one of the attractive elements of academic research is the informality; most of the time you do not need to wear a suit, do not need to be sitting at your desk at 9am sharp, and do not need to schedule coffee or meal breaks (or, compared to some call centres, need to put your hand up when you want to use the toilet).
Accentuate this culture.
The relationship with the host institution While most, or all, of the funding for projects and services in a DLC will come from outside the host institution, the relationship with that institution is often the most important one for the DLC to cultivate.
Unless the DLC manages to acquire large amounts of excess revenue (this is unlikely), it will rely on the host institution for a diverse range of services and facilities, such as accommodation, financial system support, networking support, electricity, sanitation, interlibrary loans, and so forth.
Or, as one ex-DLC director put it, "...all the things that you don't notice while you are working in a digital library centre, until they break, leak, explode, go missing or become unavailable without notice..." Good relationships between the DLC and various units within the host institution are therefore essential.
It is recommended that key DLC staff forge good working relationships with key staff in the following support units: estates for everything to do with building, infrastructure and accommodation.
finance for receiving timely and detailed information about the financial state of projects and services, and answering financial queries.
external relations for publicising the DLC in university publications.
print and reprographics for producing PR materials.
computing services for networking issues that impact on your digital library services.
catering so people at meetings, workshops and seminars are fed and watered.
room booking for space and facilities at meetings, workshops and seminars.
core institutional management senior principles, heads of departments and faculties so that people who make the key strategic decisions are aware of your centre, and it doesn't miss out on any internal digital library related work.
security especially useful when you start to possess expensive servers and other hardware.
personnel for contract renewal issues, and hiring new staff.
the library for journal and book needs, as well as being a source of new staff who want to move into all things digital.
business opportunities for locating commercial partners and opportunities.
research support for project and service proposal approval.
Publicising the DLC throughout the institution on a regular basis is a wise option, as: digital library work in various departments may come your way, if these departments are aware of you.
other departments are dissuaded from setting up such a centre if the university already hosts one.
Acknowledgements I wish to thank the various people throughout the UK (and a few in the US, Scandinavia and Australia) who took time out to respond to my email questions especially as it was, as several pointed out, the summer holiday/recess period, which is the only time that some people have to get away from the issues raised in this article.
Most people replied to what were often awkward or vague questions thanks.
Thanks also to Phil Hunter (editor of Ariadne) for his patience while this article went through several manifestations, and to Simon English for checking the article to ensure that nothing libelous was left in.
References Borgman, C.L., What are Digital Libraries?
Competing Visions, Information Processing and Management, 1999, 35, p227-243 The Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR), based at the University of Strathclyde, is at: http://cdlr.stath.ac.uk/ The Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), based at Manchester Metropolitan University, is at: http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/ The Centre for Information Research (CIRT), based at the University of Central England, is at: http://www.cie.uce.ac.uk/cirt/index.htm The Institute of Information and Learning Technology (ILRT), based at the University of Bristol, is at: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ The Library Information Technology Centre (LITC), based at South Bank University, is at: http://www.litc.sbu.ac.uk The UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN), based at the University of Bath, is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ The Information Management Research Institute [IMRI], based at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, is at: http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/faculties/art/information_studies/imri/ Edinburgh Data and Information Access (EDINA) is at: http://edina.ed.ac.uk/index.shtml The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) is at: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ The Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) is at: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ The OMNI gateway, part of the BIOME RDN hub, is at: http://www.omni.ac.uk/ The Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) is at: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ The eLib programme is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ The JTAP programme is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/jtap/ The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ The BT Lifelong Learning Awards site is at: http://www.groupbt.com/ict/bt_lifelong_learning_awards/index.html A list of funding sources for digital library projects and services is at: http://www.ceangal.com/basket/funders/ ESYS plc, Summative Evaluation of Phase 3 of the Elib Initiative: Final Report, is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/summative-phase-3/elib-eval-summary.pdf Aird, Andrew, E-commerce in Higher Education: can we afford to do nothing?, is at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/e-commerce/ McDonald, D., Breslin, C., A Study into Advertising on JANET, is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub01/advertising.doc Pinfield, S., Moving forward: lessons from eLib phase 3, is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/pinfield-elib/elibreport.html The DNER and the DNC: The Human Element is at: http://www.rslp.ac.uk/news/2001/human.htm Author Details   John Kirriemuir Freelancer Ceangal Email: john@ceangal.com Web site: http://www.ceangal.com/ Article Title: "Establishing a Digital Library Centre" Author: John Kirriemuir Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/kirriemuir/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill Buzz data standardisation visualisation e-learning licence standards Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh interviews Anne Mumford, head of JISC ASSIST.
Following a very long period of involvement in the development and delivery of C&IT, Anne Mumford has recently become Head of JISC ASSIST.
From her base in Computing Services at Loughborough University she has the responsibility of supporting and encouraging "those charged with a C&IT; strategic brief in UK HE institutions" so that they "meet the objectives of their information strategies."
This covers assistance with the delivery of C&IT on campus, the preparation of briefing papers for senior management, the impact of JISC services within subject areas, training and awareness and the development of JISC's communication channels with the academic community.
Out of this vast area, she is sharply focussed on the use of C&IT as a support for the delivery of teaching and learning.
From this, she has developed an intriguing slant on the nature of organisational change in academic support services.
This is reflected in her work for JISC on management patterns in computing and AV services[1].
Commenting on the uncertainty surrounding management models and structures, she says "There is no such thing as a standard institution.
No single model exists."
In Anne's view the connection between the computing service and audio visual and media services will become an increasingly important factor: "The sector has focussed on library/computing convergence.
This has benefited the development of strategy for the delivery of online resources and services.
Most institutions now have closer links than existed five years ago, but no less important is the need to strengthen links with av and media services.
The traditional skills in those services will be increasingly important as we move to support distance and flexible learning.
I have always held this view and the results of my survey suggest that an increasing number of institutions are recognising this important link as skills are needed to support the development of learning technology resources.
The discrete skills of computing, av and media services can be harnessed in the implementation of teaching and learning strategies.
It's interesting to note that this seems to be of low importance in many discussions on the development of information strategies on campus, yet the production and delivery of image based resources and the associated design skills needed are already there.
The politics of library and computing convergence are certainly very different."
JISC ASSIST is currently working on a series of case studies around the theme of lecture room services in the computer age.
They are investigating the management issues, skills, staff development matters and a range of complications arising from these areas.
This is clearly going to have a positive effect on how services are delivered, but I asked Anne how she felt some of the practical reservations of librarians could be overcome, particularly the suggestion that user requirements on the ground were far more basic.
Her reply was : "Use reflects the mix of courses and the institutional character, which will cover a wide spectrum.
It will also depend on the institutional strategy surrounding the support of distance and flexible learning.
There is also a great potential for the use of visualisation tools to support data analysis, and these are very much underused, for example in the social sciences where some case studies are being developed through JISC and ESRC funding.
The use of virtual laboratories to replace or enhance the laboratory experiment and field work is only beginning to be shown to have advantages in supporting increasing student numbers.
The use of virtual design studies is yet another very important example of the use of computers."
I suggested that another problem in bringing together the various parties was the idea that somehow IT had been deliberately mystified.
She said "I don't honestly know of a computing service that does not wholeheartedly support standardisation.
It is often the case that incompatibility and complexity is user-induced, in that people will insist on continuing to use their own old favourites, and so resist the idea of standardisation.
Things like Site License deals and CHEST have helped, but you could say the problem can be at the other end."
Some of the recurring themes of our conversation were training, awareness and people skills, and in trying to sum up JISC's achievement, Anne came back to these matters: "JISC has facilitated an exchange of knowledge and experience within and across institutions.
The various groups have had to learn to understand each other much better.
Institutions have had to look at how teaching is delivered, and in many cases this has led to various forms of collaboration.
I'm not certain we've been that good yet at developing effective information strategies.
Many institutions have computing strategies, and I don't think I would recognise them as information strategies, but we are beginning to grapple with ideas about information flows and the underlying resource needs."
The discussion drew to a close with an assessment of the strength of JISC's contribution to the development of services: "Much of the work of JISC and JISC ASSIST is to do with facilitating effective partnerships.
I think JISC is much more aware that it needs to concern itself with the human aspects, with staff development issues, with getting people to feel comfortable with the technology and with using it.
JISC ASSIST is a response to this, and it is supporting HE in the UK by developing a facilitator role."
References 1: Mumford, A.M: A report on the management of information services in higher education, Axis vol 4 no 2 p17-20, 1997.
Author Details Lyndon Pugh email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Phil Cross reports on a recent workshop for subject gateways in Europe and Dave Boyd look forward to developments within the Geography section of SOSIG.
Renardus the European Subject Gateways Project Renardus is a collaborative project funded through the European Union’s Information Society Technologies Programme (IST).
It aims to improve academic users’ access to a range of existing Internet-based information services across Europe.
Renardus partners are drawn from European library and other information-related communities who work at the forefront of developments in quality-controlled subject gateways.
The aim of the Renardus project is to provide users with integrated access, through a single interface, to these and other Internet-based, distributed services.
The Renardus project organised a workshop in Denmark, 15-16 November, for potential future participants in the service, who could join the nine major subject gateways already provided by existing partners.
The event was held at the Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark (DTV), Lyngby, just outside Copenhagen.
Of the 53 who attended, over 30 were from subject gateways and national funding bodies that have previously had no participation in the project.
There was a large Scandinavian presence, with many people from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, as well as delegates from Hungary, Lithuania and Estonia, who gave an Eastern European perspective.
The workshop was an opportunity to describe and demonstrate the Renardus service to new and existing gateways, with the intention of interesting them in joining the service at a future date.
The first day included a demonstration of the cross-searching/cross-browsing system (now with access to over 62,000 records) with an opportunity for the participants to explore the service for themselves.
There were also presentations by project members on the background to Renardus and benefits of participation, and the second day included presentations on the informational, technical, and organisational requirements for Gateways wishing to join the service.
A useful session at the end of the second day consisted of presentations by some of the invited participants themselves on their own services, some of them newly developed, which gave fascinating insights into the approaches of different services around Europe.
Opinions were sought from participants at all stages of the workshop, and we finished with a discussion considering the next steps that both Renardus and interested Gateways need to take to develop this fruitful cooperation between European gateways further.
(It will not be possible to include further services before the end of the project in June 2002, by which time we will have finalised our business plan for continuing the service).
The workshop was of great value to the project through gaining valuable feedback from other gateways around Europe, and it seems as though participants valued the opportunity to get together and discuss common issues.
It has indeed been suggested that this should be an annual event.
Content from the workshop will be available on the Renardus Web site in the next couple of weeks.
Renardus web site: http://www.renardus.org/ Information Society Technologies Programme (IST): http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cultural Heritage Language Technologies: Building an Infrastructure for Collaborative Digital Libraries in the Humanities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cultural Heritage Language Technologies: Building an Infrastructure for Collaborative Digital Libraries in the Humanities Buzz data software framework html xml infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus browser vocabularies repositories preservation cataloguing sgml hypertext multimedia visualisation provenance interoperability algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox describes the work of the Cultural Heritage Language Technologies consortium, a research group funded by the European Comission Information Society Technologies program and the United States National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative.
The field of classics has a long tradition of electronic editions of both primary and secondary materials for the study of the ancient world.
Large electronic corpora of Greek and Latin texts are available from groups such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the Packard Humanities Institute, and the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, and in the Perseus Digital Library [1].
Because such large collections of primary texts have already been digitized, it is now possible to devote concerted effort to developing new computational tools that can transform the way that humanists work with these digitized versions of their primary sources.
Further, with the emergence of digital libraries, it is possible for these computational techniques to be available not only to individual scholars, and not just as generic tools that are not packaged separately from the texts upon which they operate, but as an integrated part of a digital library system.
The development of these sorts of tools for Greek, Latin and Old Norse texts are the core goals of Cultural Heritage Language Technologies project.
Cultural Heritage Language Technologies is a collaborative project involving eight institutions in Europe and the United States.
The partners in Europe include The Newton Project and the Department of Computer Science, Imperial College, the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University, the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa, and the Arnamagnaean Institute, University of Copenhagen.
In the United States, the partners are the Classical Studies Program and Department of English, University of Missouri at Kansas City, The Perseus Project, Tufts University, The Stoa Consortium, University of Kentucky, Scandinavian Section, University of California at Los Angeles.
The funding for this project has been provided by the National Science Foundation and the European Union International Digital Library Collaborative Research Program.
The consortium has three major goals for its research.
First, we want to adapt discoveries from the field of computational linguistics and information retrieval and visualization in ways that are specifically designed to help students and scholars in the humanities advance their work.
Second, we hope to establish an international framework with open standards for the long-term preservation of data, the sharing of metadata, and interoperability between affiliated digital libraries.
The ultimate goal of all of this work is to lower the barriers to reading Greek, Latin, and Old Norse texts in their original languages.
Core Digital Library Infrastructure and Corpora The core digital library technology for this project will be the one used by the Perseus Digital library based at Tufts University.
The Perseus system provides a general environment that can take any SGML or XML encoded text and present it to end users in HTML or other formats such as PDF.
The system is a proven production environment that currently delivers approximately 8.5 million pages a month over the web.
This system is also integrated with several knowledge management routines that identify elements such as geographic entities, dates, common word collocations and proper names and, it automatically generates maps, timelines, and hypertexts allowing users to explore relationships between texts in the system from many different perspectives.
The digital library system also includes an integrated reading environment where all Greek and Latin words in the system are parsed and an automatically generated hypertext shows the lexical form of each word along with links to dictionaries, grammars, frequency, and search tools.
The design of this system allows for new applications to be written as modules that can easily be integrated into the core architecture.
At the outset, the project will have several large testbeds that will be supplemented by new corpora that partner institutions will create in the course of this project.
Our primary testbeds will be the parallel Greek-English and Latin-English corpora contained in the Perseus Digital Library.
The Greek-English corpus for this study contains three hundred and thirty-four works written in Greek aligned with English translations.
These works were written by thirty-three different authors and contain approximately 6.4 million words.
Most of the texts were written in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., with some written as late as the second century C.E.
representing a wide range of genres, dialects and styles.
The Latin-English corpus contains sixty-two works or 4.4 million words aligned with English translations.
The Perseus Digital Library also provides a morphological analysis tool for the Classical Greek and Latin texts that can provide the lexical form for any instance of a Greek or Latin word within the corpus and also ‘unabridged’ lexica for both of these languages.
At the same time, the Archimedes Digital Library Project – a research project jointly sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and by the National Science Foundation to digitize early modern texts in the history of mechanics – have generously made their corpora available as a testbed for this project.
In addition to these substantial corpora, three of our partners will also be digitizing new collections of texts for use in this project.
The Newton Project at Imperial College is creating a corpus of Netwon’s theological and alchemical writings; the Stoa Consortium at the University of Kentucky will be digitizing a substantial body of early modern literary texts written in Latin; the University of California at Los Angeles and the Arnamagnean Institute will be creating diplomatic transcriptions of Old Norse texts that will be linked to high-resolution images of the original manuscripts.
Collaborative Infrastructure A collaborative digital library environment involves co-operation among scholars and also among their software systems.
In this project, we will create an infrastructure for collaboration between software systems based on the Open Archives Initiative protocols to make different collections from various digital libraries work together as easily as the texts within a single library [2, 3].
The technological platform for metadata sharing is the Open Archives protocol, developed by the Open Archives Initiative (www.openarchives.org) [4].
We propose to use the OAI protocol to share not only basic Dublin Core metadata, but also the more detailed metadata used in our digital library systems.
For each text in a digital library, we must store catalog-level facts – title, author, and so on – as Dublin Core fields whose values are drawn from the header of the XML or SGML text.
In addition to these fields, we add cataloging information about what abstract ‘text’ a particular version instantiates or comments on (e.g., is it an edition of Homer’s Iliad?)
Thus, when a reader requests “Homer’s Iliad,” we can offer a choice among all available editions and translations of the text from any library that confirms .
We are also able to supply notes from all available commentaries in all of the libraries in our consortium.
In our system, these notes and citations are converted to hyperlinks so that when the referring text is displayed, and the cited text is in the same digital library, we simply make a direct link.
When the cited text is displayed, we offer the reverse citation as a comment or footnote.
(This system is described in [5] and [6].)
We propose to extend this mechanism to texts in co-operating digital libraries.
To do this, we will augment the existing citation metadata with “location” or “provenance” information, then distribute the metadata using the standard OAI protocol.
When we make a link to a remote text, we will use the location information to construct the hyperlink in the correct form for any collaborating digital library that provides appropriate metadata via the OAI protocols.
Language Technologies and Scholarly Collaboration Natural language processing is a mature field with well known effective algorithms for exploring linguistic features and extracting information from unstructured texts.
Many of these technologies, however, are designed with a focus on commercial applications (i.e.
amazon.com’s features that suggest other items that a purchaser might find interesting) or national security concerns (i.e.
the Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization program funded by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIDES.htm).
Given the presence of effective tools for other domains, the question we face as computational humanists is, which of these technologies are language dependent and, therefore, need to be optimized for cultural heritage languages and which of these technologies are most useful for users in the humanities?
A baseline technology for these inquiries are morphological analysis tools.
Simple stemming techniques (e.g.
Porter’s algorithm) are not precise enough.
In highly inflected languages, lexical normalization is required in order to have enough data to obtain statistically significant results.
As noted above, the Perseus project already has these facilities for Classical Greek and Latin while the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa will develop a system for early modern Latin.
and the University of California at Los Angeles and the Arnamagnaean Institute and will create a parser for Old Norse.
With parsers and corpora in place, the areas where we see the most potential benefit for students and scholars in the humanities are in the fields of information retrieval and visualization and in the study of vocabulary in context.
One of our first areas of investigation will be in the areas of multi-lingual information retrieval and visualization.
Multi-lingual information retrieval can be an extremely useful technology for non-specialist scholars and students who know a little bit of Greek, Latin, or Old Norse, but who are not able to form intelligent queries in the original language.
People studying Homer, for example, could be very interested in the concept of heroic fame and reputation that plays such an important role in the Iliad.
Working with only an English version of the text, they depend on a translator and the consistent translation of Greek words relating to fame and reputation.
A multi-lingual information system, on the other hand, would allow them to locate important words, such as the Greek kleos, and then study the passages where these words appear without relying on translations.
Given the state of our corpora and core technologies, we will focus our initial efforts on Classical Greek and Latin.
A fundamental concern as we move forward, however, will be to develop common indexing formats so that we can scale these tools to Old Norse and early modern Latin as parsers and corpora for these languages come on-line.
Indeed, a generalizable indexing format such as this one will allow the tools to easily scale to other languages and corpora that are outside the scope of our current project.
Closely related to our tools for multi-lingual information retrieval are facilities for information visualization.
In digital libraries and library catalogs, search results are most frequently presented in a list that is either unranked or sorted by a metrics that are opaque and confusing to the end user.
We therefore plan to develop a system that automatically identifies keywords; uses clustering algorithms to sort the repository subset into groups; labels those groups accordingly; visualizes them; and enables the user to focus on sub-clusters in the task of narrowing down a search.
As seen in the figures below, this strategy shifts the user’s mental load from the slow thought-intensive process of reading lists to the faster perceptual process of pattern recognition in a visual display.
By shifting the texts and query terms that are used with these tools, students and scholars can study, and draw conclusions from, the change in use of a particular word within a context over time, and even hope to detect the emergence of new concepts [11].
A second area where we see great potential benefit is for the study of words in context.
With a parser that can reduce inflected forms to their possible lexical forms, we can develop applications that help users study texts more effectively.
Even extremely simple applications such as word lists linked to a search engine can be useful for non-specialist users who are trying to study a text.
The calculation of other measures such as word frequency, relative frequency, tf x idf scores, and measures of lexical richness can make these tools even more useful.
To take only one example, the definition of a tf x idf score is designed to locate words that regularly appear in one document that do not appear very often in other documents within a collection.
From the point of view of an information retrieval specialist, these are words that help uniquely identify queries and documents.
If examined from the point of view of a language student, a list of words with a high tf x idf score contains the words that they are not likely to know from another context and that are, therefore, worthy of extra attention as they the read the text.
These simple tools are just the gateway to more complex and interesting tools as well.
For example, we plan to develop a collection of tools that will allow for the discovery of subcategorization frames and selectional preferences of Greek, Lain, and Old Norse verbs within our corpora.
Selectional preferences show the type of subjects and objects that usually appear with a certain verb.
In English, for example, the verb “drive” often has an automobile or other passenger vehicle as its subject while the verb “drink” tends to take a liquid as its object.
We can see potential selectional preferences in some of our co-occurrence data.
For example, collocation data shows that the noun presbus (“old man, elder, or ambassador”) regularly co-occurs with the verb pempo (“to send”).
What we cannot discover from co-occurrence data is the selectional relationship between this noun and verb.
Are the elders sending things or are they the ambassadors being sent?
Several algorithms for English should be adaptable so that we can make these sorts of determinations about Greek texts as well.
Closely related to the discovery of selectional preferences of Greek verbs is the discovery of their subcategorization frames, or the syntax that regularly appears with a particular verb.
While information about syntactic structures is sometimes included in dictionaries, grammars, and textbooks, it could be quite useful for readers to have a way to discover this information for any verb they might encounter in a text.
Computational methods can also be used to indicate if words or syntactic structures are associated more closely with a genre, an author, or even a work.
We can see the value of these distinctions in both the frequency and collocation data that we already gather in the Perseus Digital Library.
For example, the frequency data show that the word kleos (“honor, glory”) is used far more frequently in poetry than in any other genre of Greek literature and that Homer uses the word far more frequently than any other Greek author.
Similarly, collocation calculations show interesting variations when different authors and genres are considered.
For example, in Greek rhetoric, by far the most significant collocation of aner (“man”) is the word Athenaios (“Athenian”), pointing very strongly to the idiomatic way that speakers address juries in Athenian rhetoric, andres Athenaioi.
This combination, however, is not at all significant in other genres such as drama or poetry and far less significant in other prose works.
Similar distinctions can be made for calculations of selectional preferences, subcategorization frames, and semantic similarity, thereby providing richer datasets for the study of Ancient Greek vocabulary.
While these sorts of systems can produce a great deal of interesting information for users of the digital library, these results will never be entirely accurate.
Further, scholars studying a specific text or topic will frequently want to correct, annotate, or extend the results of automated analysis.
Although a few digital library systems allow for simple annotation or note taking, most systems require users to print search results or copy them to a word processor and then make their annotations by hand.
Every time a scholar does this they are creating new data that has the potential to improve automated knowledge discovery procedures within the system; the new data thus created, however, is lost to the system because there are no mechanisms for reintegrating it into the system.
This situation is untenable; the system should be constructed so that this expert knowledge can be used to improve the performance of the system.
Therefore, our research partners at Cambridge will work with these linguistic tools as part of their work on a new Greek-English lexicon.
We will create a system to capture their corrections and use this data to augment the digital library as a whole.
Conclusion Our consortium is thus poised to take advantage of the large digital corpora of important cultural heritage texts that have been created in the past twenty years.
We will create tools that will facilitate the reading of these texts, thereby, making it easier for large general audiences to read them.
We will also create tools that will enable students and scholars to ask and answer questions about language usage that would be difficult or impossible to answer outside of an electronic environment.
Funding from this grant will enable us to realize our vision of two new models for collaboration.
These models are: a network of shared resources via the OAI at very low levels beyond metadata, and a model where the expert knowledge of user communities can contribute to and improve the tools within a digital library.
References See http://www.uci.edu/~tlg, http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/ and http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.
Andreas Paepcke, Chen-Chuan K. Chang, Terry Winograd,and Hector Garcia-Molina.
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Developing services for open eprint archives: Globalisation, integration and the impact of links.
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Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel.
The Open Archives Initiative: Building a low-barrier interoperability framework.
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Knowledge management in the Perseus digital library.
Ariadne,25, 2000. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/rydberg-cox/.
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In Proceedings of Extreme Markup Languages 2000,page s 219�224, Montreal, August 2000.
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“Keyword Extraction from Ancient Greek Literary Texts.” Literary and Linguistic Computing (2002) 17.2:231-244.
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“A Prototype Multilingual Document Browser for Ancient Greek Texts.” National Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (2001) 7:103-114.
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“Vocabulary Building in the Perseus Digital Library.” (with Anne Mahoney) Classical Outlook (2002) 79.4:145-149 Peter Au, Matthew Carey, Shalini Sewraz, Yike Guo, and Stefan M. Ruger.
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Author Details   Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox Co-Director, Classical Studies Program Assistant Professor, Departments of English and Religious Studies University of Missouri, Kansas City Cockefair Hall 106 5121 Rockhill Road Kansas City, MO 64110 USA Email: rydbergcoxj@umkc.edu Web site: http://r.faculty.umkc.edu/rydbergcoxj Article Title: “Cultural Heritage Language Technologies: Building an Infrastructure for Collaborative Digital Libraries in the Humanities” Author: Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/rydberg-cox/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Secondary Homepages in Mathematics Initiative Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Secondary Homepages in Mathematics Initiative Buzz software url research Citation BibTex RIS Greig Fratus, MathGate Manager, supplies information about the Secondary Homepages in Mathematics initiative set up by Math-Net.
An initiative of Math-Net [1], the Secondary Homepage is a template that aims to sort the types of information usually found on departmental websites in mathematics into standardised sections and labels.
By offering a user-friendly navigation and search, the Secondary Homepage overcomes the problem of significantly differing departmental homepages.
As implied by the name, the Secondary Homepage is not meant to replace the department's homepage but rather to offer users another way of accessing information that is available on the department's website.
MathGate [2] is attempting to coordinate the UK version of this.
Math-Net is an Internet Information Service for mathematicians, and the Secondary Homepage is only part of what they do.
They also offer a searchable index for German mathematical resources (SIGMA), a searchable index of preprints from several countries including Austria, France and Germany, a collection of links to mathematical web resources, Persona Mathematica which allows the user to find German mathematicians, and a software search.
The Math-Net charter has been endorsed by the International Mathematical Union's Committee for Electronic Information and Communication [3].
The Secondary Homepage is divided into six sections and each of these six sections is divided into "labels" that relate to information about the department: General About Us, Organisation, Beginner's Guide, Math and School, Service for Visitors People Faculty / Staff, Students, Associates / Visitors News Schedule of Events, Communications, Positions Research Research Groups, Preprints / Publications, Projects, Software Teaching Curricula, Lectures, Course Materials Information Services Libraries, Journals, Bibliographic Search In making a Secondary Homepage, the links would be made from each of the labels to the relevant information.
The page would also contain a prominent link to the department's actual homepage and to the institution's homepage.
There is also the option of putting in a search box and linking to other information providers such as MathGate or Math-Net.
When created, the page is placed in a folder on the department's website and is maintained by the department.
Currently in the UK there are thirteen secondary homepages in existence.
The information provided by these institutions can be seen on the Math-Net website in the UK region, and they are listed below along with their URLs.
For more information about Secondary Homepages in the UK please contact Greig Fratus, MathGate Manager, Tel: 0121 414 2758, email: G.J.Fratus@bham.ac.uk UK Secondary Homepages URLs London Mathematical Society The University of Birmingham University of Brighton University of Durham University of Exeter University of Liverpool Keele University Kings College, London University of Manchester Oxford Brookes University Sheffield Hallam University University of Sussex University of Ulster References Math-Net at http://www.math-net.org/ MathGate at http://www.mathgate.ac.uk/ International Mathematical Union's Committee for Electronic Information and Communication at http://www.mathunion.org/ Author Details Greig Fratus MathGate Manager Main Library Information Services The University of Birmingham Edgbaston, Birmingham Email: G.J.Fratus@bham.ac.uk Article Title: "The Secondary Homepages in Mathematics Initiative" Author: Greig Fratus Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/eevl2/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BIOME Buzz database portal z39.50 url Citation BibTex RIS Paula Manning reports on feedback received on the BIOME Service and how the service will develop in response.
Since going live last Autumn we have sought and received a great deal of feedback on the BIOME health and life sciences Internet service.
The BIOME launch event I reported on in the last issue of Ariadne was particularly important in providing the opportunity to gain users' comments and suggestions about the Service.
We are delighted that people view the service and indeed the entire Resource Discovery Network [1] as providing a valuable internet tool.
However we are conscious that BIOME needs to develop further and we are keen to respond to the needs of our user community.
Over the last few weeks we have collated all the feedback and used it as the basis of our service plans for the coming year.
The following paragraphs summarise some of the requests and suggestions received and how we intend to develop the service in response to them.
Service feedback 1.
Browsing Browsing for relevant resources using MeSH (Medical Subject) headings has traditionally been more popular with OMNI gateway users than the search box facility.
We are very aware that this is a vital part of the service.
Feedback indicates that the current browse facility is not prominent enough on any of the BIOME and gateway pages.
In response to this, we will include a browse button next to the search box.
Some subject headings from the browse structures will also be displayed on the main BIOME home page and on each of the five gateway home pages, providing a directory function.
2.
Searching Requests for enhancements to the search functions included the ability to search for more than one resource type (eg.
mailing list) within the advanced search page and to allow searching of specific fields of the database.
Relevance ranking of search results was also a requested feature.
It is our intention to implement all of these over the coming year.
We will also be reviewing our current list of resource types to improve the range and display of the listing and include new resource types such as 'images'.
3.
Descriptions The inclusion of descriptions of the key features of each resource was considered useful.
However, the length of descriptions was sometimes considered too long, necessitating lots of scrolling to view large numbers of resources in search results.
Suggestions were to display the first line only with a clickable button to view the full description or just a display of the URL title and keywords with a button to view the description.
We will therefore investigate putting one of these solutions in place.
4.
Service structure The concept behind the organisation of BIOME was to offer searching across the entire life sciences subject field, but also offer focused searching in specific subject areas within the life sciences.
The structure of the web service reflects this concept.
The BIOME home page provides a search box for the entire life sciences collection.
The five gateways offer searching of a specific subject area.
For example, Vetgate offers searching for only veterinary medicine and animal health resources.
Unfortunately this structure is not helping some users to search in the appropriate place to find relevant resources.
A brief investigation of the search logs also illustrated this issue.
We will therefore be providing more navigational guides within the Service to emphasise the collection scope of BIOME and its five gateways.
As mentioned above, this will include the display of some subject headings on the home pages.
The feedback we requested was not just confined to the public aspects of the Service.
BIOME is provided by a consortium of partners whom all provide content using the database management system.
We found that the separation of Internet resources by gateways is also proving an issue behind the scenes.
Although a collection scope document exists for each of the gateways, there is an inevitable overlap in the subject fields.
Currently Internet resources of relevance to more than one gateway community are entered twice, albeit with different thesauri and classification codes.
Duplicates are then suppressed from the BIOME wide searches.
To improve this, we are planning to re-design the structure of the system to integrate all records into one area.
One record only will be created for a resource.
This will then be assigned thesauri terms and classification marks from the relevant subject schemes so that it can be retrieved from different gateways.
5.
Cross searching other collections Requests for cross searching with other collections will soon begin to be realised through our Portal Development Project.
As I reported in the last issue of Ariadne, we are taking part in the Resource Discovery Network Subject Portals Development Project, involving the development of proto-type portal services.
Following the prototype and testing stage, cross-searching will then be integrated into the main BIOME service.
One of the developements which has already taken place as part of this project is that the BIOME collection is now searchable using Z39.50.
If you would like to access our Z39.50 service, please contact Bob Parkinson, Technical Manager at rwp@biome.ac.uk.
We are always keen to hear views and suggestions on the service.
If you have any comments, please send them to Paula Manning, BIOME Service Manager at the email address below.
References 1.
The Resource Discovery Network Home page is at: http://www.rdn.ac.uk Author Details   Paula Manning BIOME Service Manager University of NottinghamEmail: pm@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk Article Title: "BIOME: responding to community needs" Author: Paula Manning Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/biome/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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An Overview of Subject Gateway Activities in Australia Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines An Overview of Subject Gateway Activities in Australia Buzz data software framework html database archives metadata thesaurus identifier schema repositories copyright cataloguing z39.50 aggregation lcsh pics ejournal telnet ftp interoperability algorithm url research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Debbie Campbell looks at how the original criteria proposed for an IMesh map against these Australian initiatives.
This information paper was written by the National Library of Australia to describe the scope and intent of four of Australia's national subject gateways: Agrigate [2], the Australian Virtual Engineering Library (AVEL) [3], EdNA Online the website of the Education Network of Australia (EdNA) [4], and MetaChem [5].
The four criteria shaping subject gateway development were identified as an operational framework, standards & guidelines, quality of service delivery, and scope.
They have been mapped to the characteristics of the Australian subject gateways as described below.
The characteristics were developed by the National Library of Australia to elicit information of maximum value to the inaugural IMesh workshop held in June 1999 [6].
The information was provided by the subject gateway owners.
Additional observations have been provided by the National Library in consultation with the gateway owners.
An operational framework The framework was defined as "a comprehensive guide to what is available and where.
This will be an essential tool for identifying resources that already exist and who to approach as potential partners."
[1].
The development of the framework may be measured by examining: 1. gateway coverage,   2. the quantity of resources and their update strategies,   3. the percentage of Australian and non-Australian content,   4. the ability to cross-search gateways simultaneously,   5. current partners,   6. plans for expansion within Australia, and   7. planned international partnerships.
1. gateway coverage Agrigate is an agricultural subject information gateway for resources, both online and offline, of high quality research materials.
The AVEL gateway comprises a database of quality sources of engineering and Information Technology information on the Web.
Due to the practical and applied nature of their subject, the information needs and information seeking habits of engineers and information technology professionals often differ from other disciplines.
AVEL is designed to help them save time and find relevant information on the Web quickly.
EdNA is a network in several senses.
EdNA Online is a Website pointing to thousands of resources identified and contributed by Australian educators.
It also networks the bodies responsible for Australian education.
Discussions and noticeboards are offered on the site, making it a meta-network of Australian education practitioners.
It services and creates communities of educators online further networks.
The site is organised around Australian curriculum, its tools are free to Australian educators and it is funded by the bodies responsible for education provision in Australia all Australian governments.
Through EdNA fora, the Australian education systems and sectors collaborate on a range of online education, communications and information technology issues a powerful network.
MetaChem is a single Web-based focal point for access to chemistry information resources of all kinds.
The gateway provides access to Internet information such as electronic chemistry publications and databases, research projects, data sources, software, online teaching modules, directories, and conferences.
The need for a complete set of subject gateways providing the research information landscape in Australia is still under discussion synergies with international gateways need to be further explored to resist duplication of effort.
2. the quantity of resources and their update strategies Agrigate: contains 150 items to August 1999; in 13 broad subject categories.
Its update strategy is three-pronged: (a) use of the update information associated with the Web pages on the fly (a feature for identifying URL materials that have been modified as well and then send an alert back to the webmaster that attention is required); (b) notification by users; (c) use of the administrative review element and report functionality.
AVEL: has 100 items to August 1999.
Gathering software is likely to be added at a later stage to pull in sites identified by accredited contributors.
The update strategy will be three-pronged: (a) the use of the ADMIN Core to signal expired resources; (b) the use of a link package to identify broken links; (c) feedback from users.
EdNA Online has 8,500 evaluated items to August 1999; in 1,000 detailed categories.
These evaluated sites form the basis from which a further 230,000 linked items are indexed.
Its update strategy is an indexing process for the 230,000 sites identified above that is a cyclic, semi-automated process.
Complementing this is a customised robot which has been developed to harvest metadata-enriched content from accredited contributors' websites.
MetaChem: has 645 items to August 1999.
A gatherer has been used to pull in sites which already contain recognisable metadata.
The addition of new resources is likely to slow down after the initial gateway establishment.
Its update strategy consists of (a) software for broken link checking is being assessed; (b) random checks by contributors as a result of the selection process.
3. the percentage of Australian and non-Australian content Agrigate is largely Australian at this point.
Relationships with other gateways on other continents, such as AgNIC in the United States, will be implemented as links in the first instance.
AVEL will be largely Australian initially, but is also investigating the addition of resources for South East Asia and the Pacific Rim.
EdNA Online has global content, tailored to the target group.
Statistics indicate around 63% Australian content, reflecting a focus on local content.
An optimum mix of Australian and non-Australian resources has not yet been identified.
MetaChem has very little Australian content currently local contributions are expected to increase as liaison with Chemistry Departments in Australian universities increases.
4. the ability to cross-search gateways simultaneously Agrigate will examine the possibility of using Z39.50 in the future.
In the interim, sites will be linked to until more items become available.
AVEL is considering the feasibility of mirroring EEVL in Australia.
In addition, there are three possible cross-searching options: (i) the use of HotOil with EEVL and EELS.
No relevance ranking algorithm is applied by ranking one gateway against another.
Rather, the results are interleaved by removing duplicates, and then listing the results alphabetically.
(This is a simple option to apply when the ranking algorithms of individual sites are not accessible or are unknown.)
The criteria for removing duplicates are: (a).
If Web-based resources, a match on URLs; (b).
If Z39.50 accessible (and therefore mostly print-based), then a match on ISBN/ISSN and title.
(ii) it is possible to activate three different searches simultaneously, using the query language expected by each database, then combining the results into one set.
An extension to this is ranking: (iii) in the EEVL software, results are ranked according to different criteria (due to the different software and records being searched, it is unfortunately impossible to rank them in exactly the same way), however the end product is usually to rank the most useful records first.
The EEVL catalogue does not count the instances of search words (which may be random) but weights them according to where they appear.
EdNA Online is enabled by a combination of centralised searching through the transference of metadata from distributed sites or the addition of metadata to a central repository hosted by EdNA Online.
Z39.50 searching is being considered as an enhancement, particularly by the higher education sector.
MetaChem is experimenting with the use of Sherlock (a MAC server tool) permits non-Z39.50 search and retrieval of distributed sources, including the gateway, library catalogues, and personal files [7].
For international sites, mirroring is preferred in order to overcome network response time difficulties.
This is more of an issue for MetaChem than the other Australian gateways given the high percentage of non-Australian resources.
The decision should be based on knowledge of the target audience.
The need for an ability to conduct searches across gateways is based on an assumption that none of the gateways will host content.
Rather they will host it as part of a separate service (and therefore the content will be linked to in the same way as if it were remote) where the content is instantly accessible.
The ability to support other strategies, such as mirroring of gateway resources or centralised searching options have not yet been decided, but issues such as best response times, technical content maintenance, refresh/update rates and synchronisation of data transfer will need to be considered by the gateway owners.
The needs of target audiences should be reflected in the decision to incorporate other gateways' resources.
As a secondary process, the gateways would like to explore the viability of delivering content by other technical means such as intelligent agents.
The Australian gateways utilise the Dublin Core metadata standard as a baseline and this could be used as a data exchange format to support interoperability.
Agrigate and EdNA Online are underpinned by relational database technology, MetaChem and AVEL are using tailored versions of the Distributed Systems Technology Centre's HotMeta product [8].
Queries are managed via HTTP.
ROADS software is used in Australia, but not by these subject gateways.
5. current partners Agrigate's partners are the University Libraries of Melbourne (lead), Adelaide, Queensland and the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
AVEL's partners are the Universities of Queensland (lead), Queensland University of Technology, Melbourne, University of New South Wales, and Monash University, the DSTC, the Institution of Engineers in Australia, and the Centre for Mining Technology and Equipment (CMTE).
EdNA Online is owned by the Vice-Chancellors of all Higher Education institutions, the Commonwealth Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA), CEO's of all State and Territory Systems, and all Education and Training Ministers.
Managed by Education.Au Limited http://www.educationau.edu.au, a non-profit company owned by MCEETYA (Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training, and Youth Affairs).
MetaChem's partners are the University of New South Wales (lead), including the Australian Defence Force Academy (host); the Universities of Melbourne, Monash, Sydney, Macquarie, Newcastle, Queensland, the Australian National University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the DSTC.
6. plans for expansion within Australia Agrigate is arranging discussions for potential collaboration with State-based Departments of Agriculture and other agricultural centres.
AVEL has been approached by several other Australian universities: the University of Western Australia, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the University of Adelaide.
These are still under consideration.
A link to the Australian Digital Theses project will be considered [9].
EdNA Online provides a 'meta-network' for all education networks and gateways.
The subject gateways initiatives within Australia have a natural affinity, and EdNA provides them with an opportunity for added value through aggregation.
The MetaChem gateway is considering a link to the Australian Digital Theses project [9].
7. planned international partnerships Agrigate's partnerships are still being explored.
An e-mail exchange has begun with NOVAGate (Scandinavia) and AgNIC (United States).
There has been further dialogue with the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI) re the subject areas on their website.
Potential connections with the US-based National Agricultural Library and Agricola will also be pursued.
AVEL has commenced collaboration with the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL); is considering possible cross-searching with EELS, an approach to Project ISAAC is planned, and expansion into South East Asia and Hong Kong is also being considered.
EdNA Online is in discussion with the SCOUT Project's proposed ISAAC Network [10].
There are several international subject gateways available for chemistry research.
MetaChem has made contact with its German equivalent at http://destille.chemie.de:8080/metachem and plans to liaise with BUBL and Project ISAAC [10].
Within Australia, each gateway has been strengthened by its collaborative nature.
In addition, IMesh is considered to be essential for development and continued synergy possible with strong partnerships.
The Australian projects are considered national by virtue of the breadth of their participants, but are committed to both sharing and learning from the expertise and experience of the longer-established gateways in other countries.
Standards and guidelines The guidelines (including Evaluation) were defined as: "the wealth of experience in creating and managing Internet gateways, and the costs of these activities, which exists in the community."
[1].
The standards and guidelines are reflected in: 8. the metadata schemas used for resource description,   9. solutions for technical issues arising in the establishment of the gateways, and   10. the evaluation criteria for the gateways.
8. the metadata schemas used for resource description Agrigate's schema includes the Dublin Core, the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS), EdNA-specific elements, AGRIGATE-specific elements, the A-Core; and Alta Vista style metadata for the home page.
[11] AVEL uses the Dublin Core, AGLS, and the A-Core.
In addition, it will mirror the EEVL standard where possible.
AltaVista-style metadata and the PICS schemas have also been included.
[12] EdNA Online uses Dublin Core and EdNA-specific elements.
AGLS is planned for addition in 1999.
EdNA has also reconvened its metadata working group to investigate harmonisation with the IMS schema, and specifically address the pedagogy element.
[13] MetaChem uses the Dublin Core, AGLS, EdNA-specific elements, the A-Core, and PICS-style schemas on the home page.
AltaVista-style metadata is applied to the home page.
Chemistry specific qualifiers are under discussion.
The DC-Chem schema, proposed by Henry Rzepa, of the Imperial College Cambridge, is also being investigated.
[14] Each of the schemas is based on the Dublin Core.
Although this standard permits the elements to be optional, each gateway has chosen to recommend a minimum subset mandatory, to ensure the consistency of search results.
The addition of metadata to support the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) ratings scheme has been raised as a concern.
A suggested recommendation was that capacity for a single element or a standard HTML statement be provided with a content rating equivalent of 'no blocking required', which would be applied to all resources.
It may be necessary to provide an HTML statement for each ratings system to be supported in Australia, for example, RSACi, SafeSurf and www.adequate.com.
9. solutions for technical issues arising in the establishment of the gateways Agrigate is aware that competition for resources on a LAN network could prove to be a bottleneck in accessing data in the future.
Current systems are fine, in that Melbourne University maintains a large institutional network within which Agrigate is located.
Other institutions may find competition for resources to be a concern.
AVEL is building on the experiences of the University of Queensland where training people in the use of an editor has not been easy.
The best success has been achieved with the use of the State Library of Tasmania's generic editor that permits full-text content creation simultaneously with its metadata.
However, this tool is restricted to embedding the metadata in the original resource or a digital surrogate of the resource.
Currently, EdNA Online development work is focused on a closer integration of search and browse information retrieval methods which is also being complemented by customisation tailored to specific groups in the first instance and then individual user profiling.
The technical architecture proposals that form standards within the IMS (Instructional Management systems) project http://www.imsproject.org are being watched closely.
EdNA Online has also adopted a distributed administration model that is in transition toward LDAP implementation.
Metadata tools are being developed to assist stakeholders in enriching their own sites by integrating creation processes into workflows wherever possible.
MetaChem has had some difficulty in establishing creation tools suitable for Apple MAC platforms.
10. the evaluation criteria for the gateways Agrigate's evaluation criteria are: (i) researcher perception of Agrigate, its usefulness for finding resources of value to their work, and the ease of use of the interface;   (ii) the 'hits' measures for the site including amount of use of defined categories and searching facilities;   (iii) the range of material types that are included in the gateway, such as documents, data sets, visual information [mapping, charts, illustrations], multi-media formats;   (iv) the identification of categories not included in the pilot that would be of benefit in future expansion of the site;   (v) ease of maintenance and reliability of the software; and   (vi) perceptions of the reference group regarding the governance and management model used for the development, implementation, and future direction.
AVEL's evaluation is scheduled for 2000.
The criteria are under development.
EdNA Online has set the following criteria: (i) the close matching of the 'natural architecture' of the enabling technology (the Web) with the architecture of the stakeholder base;   (ii) a commitment to facilitating bottom-up 'ownership' of the process of building the service;   (iii) a commitment to community-building;   (iv) quality assurance standards; and   (v) making explicit the potential to minimise duplication of effort.
MetaChem is planning a full evaluation later in 1999.
The following criteria were identified at the start of the project: (i) excellence of the researchers and the research activity to be supported by the Project;   (ii) the effectiveness of cooperative arrangements between institutions including access and resource sharing;   (iii) financial commitment to the proposal by each institution; and   (iv) the need and level of demand for the proposed equipment or facilities in Australia.
Quality of service delivery The quality of service delivery has been defined as: "issues regarding quality assessment and agreements over quality criteria."
[1] The quality of service delivery is enhanced by applying: 1. selection criteria for gateway content, and   2. thesauri for metadata creation, for searching and browsing by keyword.
1. selection criteria for gateway content Agrigate's selection criteria cover the areas of content; scope and treatment; format; arrangement and special reasons that make a resource unique and valuable for exposure [15].
AVEL's criteria are based in principle on the Agrigate categories for inclusion, and the AVEL-specific criteria address core engineering and IT topics [16].
EdNA involves collaboration between schools, the Vocational Education & Training (VET) sector, & Higher Education.
At this stage, the schools & VET sectors have developed their own sector-specific quality assurance standards.
The university sector assumes that quality assurance operates at the individual institutional level [13].
MetaChem selection is based on the experience and knowledge of the science librarians and chemists assessing the resources.
The selection criteria were determined collaboratively by the participants of each Australian gateway project, and are based on their collective experience as librarians and subject matter experts.
In addition, the Agrigate project conducted extensive literature reviews of the success factors of Web sites with long-term viability.
The selection criteria of similar U.K.-based subject gateways were also examined, including EEVL, BUBL, OMNI, SOSIG (DESIRE), and AHDS.
In addition to the selection criteria, each gateway utilises a combined human/system editorial or gatekeeper function to control the quality of resources nominated for inclusion by non-participants.
Suggestions are provided via standard templates which encourage the creation of a modicum of metadata.
2. thesauri for metadata creation, for searching and browsing by keyword Agrigate applies both the CAB International Agriculture Thesaurus, from the UK; and Agterms, developed by the Kondinin Group, which is an Australian extension to CABI.
The thesauri are used for both metadata creation, and search/browse access.
A full list of the terms used, combined with a quick-find index of the type A-B-C, also gives a snapshot of gateway coverage.
AVEL will base its thesaurus application on the EEVL thesaurus, and strengthen it in the area of specific Australian engineering industries such as mining.
The use of the Library of Congress Subject Headings is also being considered.
EdNA Online is considering the use of the Australian SCIS (Schools Catalogue Information Service), for both metadata creation and navigation.
The higher education sector is also actively investigating the potential to broaden thesaurus usage and is considering usage of the thesaurus provided by the Australian Council for Educational Research.
The category tree (of evaluated items) is classified according to 1000 categories developed collaboratively, and, as such, acts as a mini multi-faceted thesaurus.
Work is underway to extract from this a finer grained superset of categories from which an EdNA thesaurus (one which caters to all sectoral needs) may emerge.
MetaChem is considering the use of Chemical Abstracts; and the BUBL categorisation, for both metadata creation and navigation.
Concerns re the application of any thesaurus chosen are consistency of use and sustainability.
Scope Scope was defined to reflect the expected audience for the gateway services, as follows: "most resources so far have been collected for use in research in higher education.
Some countries want resources which are relevant and accessible to all levels of education, not just higher education.
Mechanisms for widening the user base successfully and the funding implications of these additional activities will need to be fully articulated."
[1] The scope of the subject gateway projects is determined by: 1. the types of resources described,   2. the intended gateway audience,   3. promotional activities,   4. guidelines for linking to the gateways, and   5. long-term strategies.
1. the types of resources described Agrigate provides web sites as its highest priority; other electronically available information sources as a second priority (databases, telnet sites, ftp stores); niche information solicited from Australian researchers third (information not previously placed on web sites); and non-electronic materials last or later (real objects such as specimen collections, printed materials).
AVEL will provide access to all material types including commercial sites.
As well as library catalogues, company Web pages, and e-journals, AVEL will include such resources as product information, patent information, industry news, standards and specifications, technical data, software, and physical property data.
EdNA Online includes value-added (evaluated), educationally useful content (websites & pages) for teaching & learning purposes; research-based resources; aggregated indexes; information about Australian education and training, both generally & specifically related to each sector; archived discussion lists; noticeboards of events & collaborative projects; and, services such as news concerning education.
MetaChem places web sites as a top priority; other electronically available information sources as a second priority (databases, telnet sites, ftp stores); niche information solicited from Australian researchers third (information not previously placed on web sites); electronic theses available through the Australian Digital Theses Project Web site; and non-electronic materials last or later (research reports, print-based theses etc).
Each gateway has predominantly focused on the discovery of electronic resources which may be hosted by the participants, or hosted by another site where there are no access or copyright restrictions.
Agrigate, MetaChem, and EdNA Online have chosen not to point to library catalogues, print materials (unless rare or otherwise inaccessible), or commercial information suppliers.
AVEL will provide links to the latter source.
MetaChem and AVEL are also exploring the possibility of including links to chemists and engineers in the field, as in some cases, contacts rather than research are the more important connections.
In Agrigate, each partner organisation is allocated a subject area to identify resources in the area, and ensure an even spread of specific subject matter as much as possible.
For EdNA Online, resource discovery and information retrieval are complemented by interactive services and network facilitation.
2. the intended gateway audience Agrigate supports those participating in Australian agricultural research and those interested in research areas being pursued in Australia.
AVEL's clients are (in priority order) researchers in universities, research centres, companies, and government departments; undergraduate and postgraduate students; engineers and IT professionals; libraries; overseas researchers; general public.
EdNA Online encompasses the schools, vocational education and training, adult community education and higher education sectors.
MetaChem provides resources for chemistry researchers, both public and private; research & development sectors; policy managers.
3. promotional activities Agrigate has deployed the following promotional strategy: (a) presentations of papers at national IT, and library conferences;   (b) notification to agricultural, metadata and IMesh discussion lists;   (c) articles in agricultural journals such as AGRIIA; and   (d) inclusion of the Web site address in international search engines [Yahoo, Altavista, etc.
], as well as major Library websites' subject lists.
Agrigate has recently been selected and reviewed in the Scout Report [17], and in the Internet Resources Newsletter [18].
AVEL's promotional strategy will be developed over the next few months, as the gateway develops.
This will include representation at engineering conferences such as AAEE.
It was recently described in Ariadne [19].
In addition, engineering students at the University of Queensland are instructed on the use of authoritative sites such as EEVL as part of their coursework.
EdNA Online provides a 'What's New' service and News & Views features offers a weekly reminder of the validity of the service.
Within EdNA itself a marketing group exists and activities are planned right throughout the year.
EdNA has also created 6,000 CD-ROMs for distribution to schools.
MetaChem was released to Professors and Heads of Departments of Chemistry (PHODS) in January 1999, and presented to the Royal Australian Chemical Institute at their annual council meeting in May 1999.
All of the gateways are promoted through two National Library of Australia sites: MetaMatters [20], and the Australian Libraries Gateway [21].
The latter has adapted the PINAKES site as a model [22], with the addition of draft selection criteria for inclusion.
4. guidelines for linking to the gateways Agrigate is considering the following options.
(a) a standard email to selected sites, with some key pieces of information that indicate the presence of the gateway and its suitability for linking; and (b) an acknowledgement of a resource selected for inclusion in Agrigate, by sending a note to the resource owner telling them their material has been included in Agrigate, inviting them to take a look and also sending along the Agrigate icon, to incorporate in their page as a 'badge of honour' that says their materials are in Agrigate.
AVEL is exploring possible strategies such as cross-gateway searching.
EdNA Online derives added value and mutual benefit through ongoing negotiation.
MetaChem has adopted a practice of acknowledgement similar to Agrigate's processes.
Based on his earlier successes and failures with subject information networks, Professor David Green of Charles Sturt University has suggested accreditation as the most effective means of encouraging relationships between gateways.
This would be effected along the lines of the Agrigate processes outlined above.
Relationships may also be mandated by Australian government policy.
For example, the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) is an initiative of Australian governments across all three tiers: local, state and federal [23].
The AGLS metadata set is the standard schema for describing Australian government resources, to facilitate their discovery.
The subject gateway owners need to consider the provision AGLS metadata to the home pages for their services, but not the resources contained within the gateway, in order to meet this requirement.
5. long-term strategies Agrigate commenced in 1998, and additional Australian Research Council funding was received in 1999.
The partnership between all participants and sponsors will remain to sustain the gateway beyond existing project funding.
A business plan is planned for release at the end of 1999.
AVEL commenced in 1999.
Collaboration will be sought from commercial ventures to ensure future funding, for example, with Engineering Information Inc. EdNA Online has ongoing funding support by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, and all State and Territory Education Departments.
Each year, Education.Au develops a Business Plan for the coming year.
Other revenue streams to support the service will become operative by July 1999.
The partnership established between all MetaChem participants and sponsors will remain to sustain the gateway beyond existing project funding.
The subject gateway owners do not intend to apply (electronic) commerce functionality to any of the gateways at this time.
Copyright management of the resources described will be achieved through the application of metadata.
There is no intention by the gateway owners to archive the full-text content of resources.
Issues of concern for the future In addition to the observations discussed above, the Australian subject gateways are also keen to address issues which, when solved, will help to solidify the investments made.
Two major issues already identified are firstly, the sustainability of the gateways how to ensure longevity and the return on investment and secondly, the intellectual property rights associated with resource provision, i.e., how to protect the investment in metadata and metadata schemas while continuing to enable cooperation.
Conclusion Inspired by the IMesh workshop, the National Library of Australia is also trying to develop a sustainable national framework for subject gateway development [24].
As the subject gateways stabilise, Australia looks forward to resolving the issues with the assistance of national and international partners providing resource discovery services.
Acknowledgements Lorcan Dempsey, Director, The UK Office for Library and Information Networking   Cliff Law, Director, Coordination Support Branch, National Library of Australia International contacts For Agrigate   Dorothea Rowse SCIENCES LIBRARIAN Brownless Biomedical Library University of Melbourne Melbourne, 3001, Victoria, Australia tel.
+61 3 9344-5717 d.rowse@lib.unimelb.edu.au   For AVEL   Gulcin Cribb, Manager Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences and Engineering Library Service The University of Queensland St Lucia Brisbane, 4072, Queensland, Australia tel: + 61 7 33653828 G.Cribb@Library.uq.edu.au   For EdNA   Jon Mason Senior Consultant Education.Au Ltd 178 Fullarton Rd Dulwich, 5065, South Australia, Australia tel: +61 8 8334 3207 jmason@educationau.edu.au   For MetaChem   Alan Arnold School of Chemistry & Director Flexible Education University College (University of New South Wales) Australian Defence Force Academy Canberra, A.C.T.
2600 Australia tel:+61 2 6268 8080 apa@adfa.edu.au   For Australian involvement in IMesh   Debbie Campbell Metadata Coordinator Coordination Support Branch National Library of Australia Parkes Place Parkes, A.C.T.
2600 Australia tel: +61 2 6262 1673 dcampbel@nla.gov.au References [1] Identifier: International Collaboration on Subject Based Internet Gateways Written by: Norman Wiseman, October 1998 Available from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october98/10clips.html#GATEWAYS   [2] Identifier: Agrigate Owner/Maintainer: the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Available from: http://www.agrigate.edu.au/   [3] Identifier: AVEL Owner/Maintainer: the University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia Available from: http://www.library.uq.edu.au/avel/ (temporary) http://www.avel.edu.au (intended)   [4] Identifier: EdNA Owner/Maintainer: Education.Au, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia Available from: http://www.edna.edu.au   [5] Identifier: MetaChem Owner/Maintainer: the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, ACT, Australia Available from: http://metachem.ch.adfa.edu.au/   [6] Identifier: International Collaboration on Internet Subject Gateways Owner/Maintainer: Dan Brickley, ILRT Available from: http://www.desire.org/html/subjectgateways/community/imesh/   [7] See http://www.apple.com/sherlock/overview.html for more information.
[8] For further details on HotMeta and HotOil, see http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/   [9] Identifier: Australian Digital Theses project Owner/Maintainer: the University of New South Wales Library Available from: http://www.library.unsw.edu.au/thesis/thesis.html   [10] See http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/index.html for more information.
[11] The Agrigate metadata schema is described at http://www.agrigate.edu.au/metadata.html   [12] The AVEL metadata schema is at http://www.library.uq.edu.au/avel/manual.html   [13] The EdNA metadata schema is available at http://www.edna.edu.au/metadata   [14] The MetaChem metadata schema consists of the following elements: Mandatory elements Identifier, Title, Date   Optional elements Author or Creator, Subject and keywords, Description, Publisher, Other contributor, Resource type, Format, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage, Rights management, Availability (AGLS), User Level (EdNA), Review (EdNA)   [15] The Agrigate selection criteria are available at http://www.agrigate.edu.au/selection.html   [16] The AVEL selection criteria are at http://www.library.uq.edu.au/avel/resource.html   [17] The Scout Report, 23 July 1999 Identifier: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/1999/scout-990723.html   [18] Internet Resources Newsletter, August 1999 Identifier: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/irn59/irn59b.html   [19] Identifier: Round the World: Australian and South East Asian engineering resources Owner/Maintainer: Ariadne, at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk   Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/eevl/#australia   [20] Identifier: MetaMatters.
The site provides an introduction to the principles and practices for the application of metadata, with links to tools and implementors around the country.
Owner/Maintainer: National Library of Australia Available from: http://www.nla.gov.au/meta/sg/gateways.html   [21] Identifier: The Australian Libraries Gateway.
The Gateway aims to be the best place to start for anyone in Australia or overseas wishing to find information about libraries across Australia.
By August 1999, there were links to more than 5,100 libraries.
Owner/Maintainer: National Library of Australia Available from: http://www.nla.gov.au/libraries/   [22] Identifier: PINAKES, A Subject Launchpad.
Owner/Maintainer: Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland Available at: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html   [23] Further information about the Australian Government Locator Service is available from http://www.naa.gov.au/GOVSERV/AGLS/user_manual/contents.htm   [24] Identifier: A National Framework for the Development of Australian Subject Gateways Owner/Maintainer: National Library of Australia Available from: http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/sg/ Author Details Debbie Campbell, Metadata Coordinator, Coordination Support Branch National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Parkes, A.C.T.
2600 Australia Tel: +61 2 6262 1673 dcampbel@nla.gov.au Article Title: "An overview of subject gateway activities in Australia" Author: Debbie Campbell Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/subject-gateways/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Catalogues for the 21st Century Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Catalogues for the 21st Century Buzz data software database portal archives browser cataloguing windows z39.50 marc aacr2 interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne reports on a one-day Workshop presented by the eLib Clump Projects at Goldsmiths College in London on the 3rd of March Last year’s CLUMPS meeting took place in a large purpose built lecture theatre in the new British Library building at St Pancras.
This was very handy for those of us arriving from Bath, since it is only 3 tube stops or so from Paddington to St Pancras/Kings Cross.
This year the meeting is split into two events, and the first of these was arranged to happen at Goldsmiths College at New Cross in South East London.
This is way out east for those coming from way out west (though amazingly still in zone 2).
Not the most glamorous part of London: all the ground-level panes of glass in the frontage of New Cross tube station were shatter stressed and/or smashed through, and held in place by a layer of polythene, apparently as a a semi-permanent arrangement.
Those who travelled to the event by the Jubilee line and its extension had the thrill of an uncharacteristically smooth journey on the last leg before changing to a train at Canada Water, and experience of the Godard ‘Alphaville’ type tube stations with their suicide proof (and probably shatter proof) glass platform-edge walls and gates.
The oddest thing was the absence of posters and advertising.
The weather was very good: there were clear blue skies for most of the day.
The college assembly hall used at Goldsmiths is large and airy: it admits large amounts of natural light through ceiling windows, and the effect can be seen in the accompanying photographs of the event.
There were some problems during the day with poorish sound (accoustically I would guess that the hall functions better at right angles to the arrangement of speakers and audience used), but the hands-on facilities made available by Goldsmiths were first-class, with around a couple of dozen networked machines ranged around two edge walls.
Unfortunately Ariadne arrived in New Cross a little later than expected, and so missed the welcome address by Chris Batt.
A number of remarks he made however resurfaced later in the course of the day: one of these was (apparently) a concern that he didn’t know precisely what a CLUMP was.
This is of course a major problem in the selling of the idea to those who may benefit from the wider implementation of CLUMPs type systems.
Ariadne too is sometimes perplexed about what is going on, and particularly by the precise implications of the terminology used by projects.
And at one point in the proceedings was bemused by the unexpected yoking of the ‘meta’ prefix with the term ‘clump’.
As in ‘meta-clump’ (of which more later).
CAIRNS Project Helena Gillis spoke on behalf of the CAIRNS project, which is a Scottish clump.
CAIRNS has successfully implemented a working gateway for cross-searching sixteen Scottish catalogues.
This is returning valid results, including circulation and holdings information.
It also has a mechanism which CAIRNS refers to as the ‘dynamic clumping mechanism’ which allows users to identify databases which meet their subject interests, prior to making a broadcast search to those targets.
The achievements of CAIRNS were set against the issues raised by the project, which must be addressed in order to allow the distributed union catalogue to be extended to other Scottish and UK sites and to operate as efficiently and coherently as a single centralised catalogue.
Issues, explored by this presentation which require further investigation, in order to achieve this goal, include: local cataloguing and indexing practices which affect the results presented by CAIRNS; the issue of how to provide a navigational mechanism to assist users in identifying suitable targets to search; non-standard implementation of Z39.50 in library catalogues; interface design and the need to identify the best client and server software for the clumps.
Ultimately, this presentation saw the future for CAIRNS in the provision of a cross sectoral, cross-domain, user-adaptive union catalogue for Scotland, integrating with a UK catalogue.
The M25 Project The M25 project presentation was a two-hander, with Leona Carpenter talking about interoperability and the stakeholder environment, and Fraser Nicolaides on on Bib1 Profiles and blueprints.
Fraser also gave the concluding remarks.
On the subject of technical interoperability it was pointed out that Clumps use IP addresses these now represent one of the basic building blocks of interoperability – but a computer needs to know the relevant port on which a system listens.
In the case of Z39.50 this is port 210.
If this port was generally adhered to as the one for Z39.50 transactions, it would be possible simply to approach port 210 on any system for a potential Z39.50 type conversation.
Another well-known issue is the fact that in practice Marc is not interoperable, since it has (as it were) different dialects.And as for Z39.50, it is not a protocol designed to address user interface issues.
So far the end-users of the M25 services are librarians, Z39.50 software developers, and outfits such as UKOLN, ZIG, etc.
Searching in the M25 project is done using Z39.50, using the Bib1 bibliographic set.
This is a set of six basic fields: these were outlined as: ‘use’, ‘relation’, ‘position’, ‘structure’, ‘truncation’, and ‘completeness’.
There are 99 of these fields altogether, so this represents a small subset of those available.
The various community profiles in use were explored, these include the ATS-1 (Author, Title, Subject – the minimal useful set).
This is no longer under development in its own right, but is part of a more complicated set; and, as an aside, it was pointed out that it may be that the implementation of a single universal set is a dream only.
There is also the National Library of Australia’s Union Catalogue Profile; The Bath Profile, developed at UKOLN; GILS, etc.
Fraser also talked about the MODELS profile, which has 4 different levels.
The first of these is the minimal ATS-1 set – at least one each of UK or US MARC or SUTRS (both of which are record formats) must be supported to fulfill this profile (visitors to CLUMPs events are used to the high hourly acronym count.
Most were expanded and explained as they arose, but it is difficult to say how much can be retained by the non-specialist after leaving the event).
The second level contains the first level, plus attributes for structure and use.
The third level is not yet implemented, and contains options added to level two.
The fourth level is similarly not yet implemented, and consists of an additional ‘explain’ option added to level three.
Also discussed was the Bath Profile, which was first published in August 1999, with contributions from the European, Australian, and North American communities.
It is hoped that this profile will receive ISO recognition in the summer of 2000.
The M25 project has adopted this profile, and other eLib projects are planning to adopt it also.
He pointed out that it may be necessary to for projects to summarise which features of the profile are to be implemented, if a genuinely interoperable CLUMPs type service is to be possible.
Lunch was available with a voucher in a number of refectories and cafeterias in the building.
Ariadne ate in a functional, daylight-lit cafeteria on the same floor as the assembly hall, and managed to put together a tasty salad from the options available.
Afterwards coffee and biscuits was available in the conference hall while the attendees chatted amongst themselves and to the project personnel standing by the rows of computers.
These offered hands-on access to the CLUMPS project facilities, and were well-used throughout the day.
There were also a number of software vendors in the hall, available for a chat in between presentations.
These included SIRSI, Fretwell Downing, Endeavor, etc., whose products are relevant to the CLUMPS projects.
The RIDING Project Verity Brack spoke on behalf of the RIDING project, focussing principally on Riding’s supply of ‘added-value’ services from an ILL (Inter-Library Loan) gateway.
The project uses a Windows administration client for the ILL: this is not on the web and is not available for users (this of course has implications for the development of the project as long as they use this administration client).
They have a new access policy to encourage the uptake of their services: they are offering free reference access, and free reciprocal borrowing.
This applies on the basis of research ‘need’, and users are validated at their home institution.
This of course involves a degree of trust.
The scheme is running as a pilot till the 30th of September.
So far there have been a large number of registrations without the scheme being widely advertised.
Why are these services based around one protocol (Z39.50)?
Principally because the protocol allows cross-searching.
Fretwell Downing’s VDX software underpins the RIDING service (this software is also at the heart of the Agora project).
The added value services address the issue that not everybody in a university has access to ILL.
However it was necessary to develop a new access policy, agreed with other institutions, for the reason that Universities don’t want their students going out to other institutions and being refused access.
Hence the importance of a harmonised access policy requirement.
The project has added borrowing to its policy as an extra improvement.
The changes were based on the premise that there would be no significantly increased workload for library staff (who understandably did not want to be flooded out with registrations by students from other institutions).
The negotiations about the RAP (the RIDING access policy) threw up some interesting insights into the sector: there are clear differences which emerge between old and new universities, between the HE and public sectors; institutions with different funding sources, etc.
Other issues which surfaced were: The development of the RIDING service is dependent on the software and extra effort from the staff.
There have been software problems, revolving around migration from their host institutions use of Windows 3.1 through Windows 95/98/NT, and problems with the installation of the administration client.
There are also hidden costs of moving from one system to another.
An ILL Questionaire was sent out: all institutions who replied said they use BLDSC (the British Library Document Supply Centre), as the first or only supplier of ILL services, and 9 out of 10 expressed satisfaction with the existing facilities.
There is very little interlending going on between institutions.
A lot of time was spent in explaining the same things to different interested parties.
All have different levels of understanding, and the same things mean different things to different groups of staff.
General questions about developing integrated services.
Music Libraries Online Marion Hogg/Matthew Dovey (Music Libraries Online) This project is linked by subject, rather than geography as in the case of the other projects.
The project has a more or less full UK-wide coverage The original idea was one-stop search options for music across the UK for performers, students, academics.
Marion Hogg dealt with the management side of the project in this two-handed presentation.
There were 9 music colleges in the UK, with similar collections of user groups and aims.
These have a selection of library systems, which were discussed in the powerpoint presentation.
5 different systems are involved altogether: Talis, Unicorn, Olib, Geac Advance, Dynix & Voyager.
However it turned out as the project developed that in fact there is ‘no such thing’ as a music library.
Instead, there are conservatoire libraries, university music departments, public libraries with music collections, broadcasting libraries, composer archives, etc, each with its own agenda, policies, etc, which makes the practicality of interlending problematic.
One of the necessary criteria for secondary partners who wished to become involved in the project was that their library automation system must have the potential to support Z39.50, or to do so in a way compatible with access via the Internet.
Plus the partners have to be in a position to fund their own involvement, etc.
MLO project management requirements involved subject expertise and technical expertise, user representation, etc.
Issues which arose in the course of the project were: Bibliographic Standards.
Specialist material usually requires specialist cataloguing.
Local Practices.
Author title search is often not adequate.
Variety of formats.
Music cataloguing is not always catered for by AACR2 and often subject to local interpretation.
Variety of formats scores, parts, CDs, etc.
Matthew Dovey then discussed the technical side of the project.
He recalled that earlier in the day Chris Batt had mused about where the word CLUMP came from: Matthew had the answer, and said that it had emerged from an MIA (Models Information Architecture) Workshop organised by UKOLN.
He then discussed the basic architecture of a CLUMP.
At its most basic it involves a browser, a Z39.50 proxy, and a Z39.50 target.
However the concept has now been extended so that various tiered architectures exist (in theory at least, if not yet implemented).
For instance there is a 4 tiered architecture which involves splitting off the ‘http’ part, and using your own Z39.50 client.
Matthew introduced the concept of ‘meta-clumping’, (mentioned earlier as bemusing to Ariadne) which is a feature of the 3+1 or 4+1 tiered architectures.
He also equated ‘meta-clumps’ with the term ‘portal’: this is of some significance, since it this is a usage and concept specific to the JISC funded projects involved in CLUMPS development.
One of the (apparent) implications of meta-clumping is that it should be possible to search on the Bath Profile, even though some of the targets don’t use the Profile.
Matthew pointed out that many librarians had bought systems which mentioned Z39.50 ‘on the box’ as it were, because it is clearly ‘a good thing’.However Z39.50 compliance is more complicated than that.
There was a brief question and answer session, as for each of the presentations.
Someone asked about problems with portals connecting to targets, and asked if ‘pre-indexing was a good idea.
Matthew said this was probably the case.
Netskills Presentation There was a session from Dave Hartland of Netskills, who gave an overview of Netskills history and what they had learned along the way.
He emphasised how important it had been for the project to make it clear to their host institution that they were not costing the university money.
They had made the case for funding supported by key groups in the community.
He said that the project had been almost overwhelmed by the demand for their services, and now they are offering twice as many training places as 3 years ago.
He mentioned a number of efficiency gains which had been made, such as a database of contacts at every HEI for marketing and community liason, an online booking form, etc., with all the information feeding into the database.
Netskills is of course not a CLUMPs project, but much of what they have learned in their existence is of relevance to other JISC/eLib projects and proposed services.
And cross-searching is a skill which will have to be taught in the future, just like the the efficient use of the web.
Closing Remarks Peter Stubley began his summary of the day’s events by reflecting on the transience of terminology wondering if we would still be using the word ‘clump’ in fifteen years time before drawing similarities between the outgoing statements of UKLDS (the United Kingdom Library Database System ) in 1984 and the work of the clumps projects in 2000 (UKLDS started in 1981 and was an initiative of the Cooperative Automation Group, a national union catalogue was its aim, utilising a physically distributed model.
The project fell apart, essentially because of a lack of central funding.
There was a conflict between commercial interest of the holders of data, and the users non-commercial interest).
Using the earlier presentations as a starting point and combining these with some of his own thoughts, he then took delegates through a consideration of clump achievements and drawbacks, concluding with a brief overview of outstanding considerations.
A number of questions were proposed, which we should try to answer.
Such as: what have we learned?
What have the CLUMPS achieved?
What do CLUMPS do well?
What do they do less than well?
What remains to be done?
etc.
Just then the alarms in the building went off and everyone had to troop outside to obey the regulations.
This unexpected wailing noise followed by a 20 minute hiatus in the front yard of the College unfortunately broke the impact of the day’s final talk, since the delay meant the conference-goers were already thinking about catching trains home.
However Peter’s full presentation can be found elsewhere in this issue of Ariadne.
Title: ‘What have the CLUMPs ever done for us?‘   Author Details   Ariadne UKOLN University of Bath Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Catalogues for the 21st Century” Author: Ariadne Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/at-the-event/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Guidelines for URI Naming Policies Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Guidelines for URI Naming Policies Buzz software java framework javascript html database rss xml apache usability infrastructure css xhtml browser identifier graphics hypertext multimedia png gif perl uri smil php svg licence ftp mathml interoperability e-government url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly with some guidelines For URI naming policies in his regular column.
“Cool URIs” What are “cool URIs”?
This term comes from advice provided by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium).
The paper “Cool URIs don’t change” [1] begins by saying: What makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don’t change: people change them.
All Web users will, sadly, be familiar with the 404 error message.
But, as W3C point out, the 404 error message does not point to a technical failure but a human one hence the warning: “URIs don’t change: people change them.”.
In order to minimise the numbers of 404 error messages on their Web site organisations should develop URI naming guidelines which aim to minimise (or, ideally, eliminate) the need to change URIs.
This article provides advice on URI naming policies.
At this point you may be confused with use of the term URI; surely I should be using the term URL?
As the W3C document on “Web Naming and Addressing Overview” makes clear: URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) refers to the “generic set of all names/addresses that are short strings that refer to resources” whereas URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is “an informal term (no longer used in technical specifications) associated with popular URI schemes: http, ftp, mailto, etc.” [2] This article uses the term URI.
However readers may regard it as a synonym for URL (although this is not strictly correct).
Advice Organisations should aim to provide persistent naming policies for resources on their Web sites.
This is to ensure that visitors to your Web site do not get 404 error messages after you have restructured your Web site.
Why should you wish to restructure your Web site?
Possible reasons for this include: Your organisation has restructured (e.g.
departments merged or shut down) The initial structure of your Web site was not scalable.
You have moved from a distributed Web server environment to a centralised one (or vice versa).
All of these are possible scenarios, especially within the Higher Education community.
There is little a Web manager can do about organisational restructuring.
However the knowledge that this is a possibility should be taken into account when developing a URI naming policy for a Web site.
One possible solution would be to use URIs which reflect the functionality of the service, rather than the organisational structure which provide the service.
This is, of course, fairly standard advice for the design of the interface and navigational structure of a Web site however it is even more important for URI naming as you can’t provide alternative views as you can with the user interface (e.g.
an interface based on the organisation’s structure together with site map which gives a user-oriented view).
If you need to restructure because the initial structure of your Web site was not scalable then you will have learnt the importance of spending time on planning and designing your URI naming policy.
As well as issues of the design of a scalable structure for URIs on your Web site (which may be difficult to solve and for which it is difficult to give anything but fairly general advice) there are also issues about the technical infrastructure.
For example: You have changed the backend architecture used to provide your Web site.
You have replaced a backend application.
You wish to make use of a new file format.
You wish to provide automated options for resources, based on the end user’s environment or preferences.
You wish to provide a bilingual Web site.
Usability testing shows that your existing URI naming policy causes problems for end users.
Ideally URIs on your Web site should be independent of the backend technologies used to deliver the Web services.
The Office of the E-Envoy’s paper on “E-Government Interoperability Framework” [3] invites readers to “consult the web site for the latest version of the e-GIF specification at http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/interoperability/egif.asp”.
This URL is clearly dependent on Microsoft’s ASP (Active Server Pages) technology.
If the E-Envoy’s Office chose, at some time in the future, to deploy an alternative backend technology (such as PHP, Java Server Pages, Cold Fusion, etc.)
in all probability it would be forced to make changes to the file extension.
As well as avoiding dependencies on backend server scripting technologies it is also desirable that resources which are generated from a database have persistent and, ideally, static-looking URIs.
The URI of the E-Envoy’s paper mentioned above is: http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/rfc/rfc_document.asp?docnum=505 As well as the dependency on ASP technology this resource appears to be number 505 in the backend database and is identified in the database by the name docnum.
If the database is reorganised, so that entries get a new unique identifier or the names of field in the database change this URI will no longer be valid (or, even worse, it could point to a different resource).
At least the URI mentioned above did not include the name of the database software (SQLServer, MS Access, or whatever).
URIs should aim to be independent of the application which provides a service.
Recent surveys of search engines used to index Web sites in UK Universities [4] show how often software can change.
All to often institutions provide a URI for a search facility in the form http://www.foo.ac.uk/htdig/.
It is interesting to note that a number of institutions which have changed the search engine have moved to a neutral URI, such as http://www.foo.ac.uk/search/.
It is also advisable to avoid the use of cgi-bin directory names in URIs.
W3C’s document on “Cool URIs Don’t Change” [1] gives the following example: NSF Online Documents http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/pubsys/browser/odbrowse.pl Although this is meant to be the main location for looking for documents, the URI does not look as it it will be particularly persistent.
If they wish to use an alternative mechanism for managing access to their documents they will probably have to change the name of the odbrowse.pl script (a Perl script).
They may also have to remove the cgi-bin directory name as a service which currently makes use of CGI technology could be replaced by an alternative technology (e.g.
PHP scripting, Apache modules, etc.)
In this example we can see the danger of file name suffix the functionality of the odbrowse.pl script could be replaced by a script in another language.
In general there is a danger with file name suffices today’s popular file format may become tomorrow’s legacy format.
Ideally you should avoid providing a link directly to a proprietary file format.
For example if you wish to provide access to a PowerPoint file you could point to a HTML resource which has a link to the PowerPoint file and to a HTML derivative of the file.
The use of a HTML intermediary allows you to provide additional information, such as the file size (users at home may not wish to download a large file), the PowerPoint version (there is no point in downloading a Power pont 2000 file if you only have PowerPoint 4 locally), etc.
The dangers of file suffices which reflect a particular scripting language or a not-native, proprietary file format have been mentioned.
It should also be pointed out that there are also dangers with HTML files!
Unfortunately there is no consistency in whether HTML files have the extension .html or .htm.
Although links can be checked there can be a danger if users write down a URI.
One solution to this problem is to make use of directories and the directory default name for resources.
For example this article has the URI http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/.
This has the advantage of being less prone to errors than http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/article.html (or …/article.htm).
This form also has the advantage of being shorter.
It should be noted that it will be important to refer only to the name http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/ and not to http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/intro.html as the latter not only not only is longer and potentially prone to errors, it is also reliant on a server configuration option which uses intro.html as the default file name for directories.
Other servers sometime use other names, such as welcome.html or index.html.
We have seen that it is sensible to avoid use of file name suffixes for scripting languages, as this provides extra flexibility.
It may not be obvious that we may wish to have the flexibility to migrate away from HTML files!
Will HTML still be around in 20 years time?
Possibly.
Will a replacement for HTML be around in 20 years time?
Certainly, I would say.
XHTML is W3C’s current preferred version of HTML.
It has the advantage of being an XML application.
We are likely to see much greater use of XML in the future, and not only at the server end (with XML resources transformed into HTML for delivery to the user).
At the user end we can expect to see XML formats such as SMIL for synchronous multimedia [4], SVG for vector graphics [5], MathML and CML [6] [7] for use in specialist disciplines.
In order to integrate these different applications in a reliable way it will probably be necessary to make use of a modular form of XHTML.
As well as XHTML we could also see other XML applications being delivered to a Web browser and displayed through use of CSS.
It is already possible to do this in Internet Explorer as can be seen if you use a recent version of this browser to view, say, the RSS news feed provided by W3C’s QA group [8].
How can you possibly avoid using a .html suffix, even if this could be of some use on the long term?
One way is to make use of directory defaults as described previously.
Although this has some advantages, it is not probably practical to store every HTML resource in its own directory.
An alternative is to make use of content negotiation.
In simple terms you create a resource labelled foo.
When a user follows a link to foo the server will say something along the lines of I’ve got foo.html and foo.xml.
I see your browser supports XML, so I’ll give you the XML version.
The W3C use this approach to provide alternate versions of images.
Examining the source of the W3C home page you will see that the image tag has the form: “<img alt=“World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)” … src=“Icons/w3c_main” /> Further investigation shows that W3C provide a GIF image (at http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_main.gif) and a PNG version of the image at http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_main.png).
In this example W3C have future-proofed themselves against the need to reorganise their Web site if, say.
they are forced to remove GIF images (as could happen as use of GIF requires that you use a properly licensed graphical tool to create GIF images or you pay a licence fee [09].
As well as using this approach with images, it can also be applied to HTML resources.
For example W3C’s HyperText Markup Language Activity Statement [10] has the URL http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity.
Further investigation reveals that this is not a directory (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity/ does not exist).
In fact the physical resource is located at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity.html.
W3C do not point directly to this file instead they make use of content negotiation to access the file.
So if they decide to provide access to, say, a http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity.xhtml or http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity.xml or even (although unlikely on the W3C Web site) http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity.pdf they can do so without breaking existing URIs.
It should be noted that this approach can also be taken to making different language versions of resources available.
So a link to http://www.foo.ac.uk/prospectus could be used to serve http://www.foo.ac.uk/prospectus.en.html (the default English version) or a French version at http://www.foo.ac.uk/prospectus.fr.html to a user who’s browser was configured to use the French language as the default (see [11]).
Details of using content negotiation will not be included here.
Further information is available on using content negotiation in Apache is available [12] [13].
Technical Issues It could be argued that getting URIs structure correct in the first place is not really an issue, as you can always use redirects to point users to a new structure.
Redirects can be achieved in a number of ways.
Within a HTML page authors can add a <meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=“10;URL=http://www.foo.ac.uk/"> tag to their page.
In many (but not all) browsers this will redirect to the specified URL after the specified time (10 seconds in this case).
It should be noted that the HTML 4.0 specification states that “Some user agents support the use of META to refresh the current page after a specified number of seconds, with the option of replacing it by a different URI.
Authors should not use this technique to forward users to different pages, as this makes the page inaccessible to some users.
Instead, automatic page forwarding should be done using server-side redirects.” [14].
Another client-side alternative is to make use of JavaScript code such as: <body onload=“document.location=‘http://www.foo.ac.uk/'"> However both of these approaches have their limitations: this is not a scalable solution which can be used for hundreds of files; a redirect time of 0 will cause the back button to stop working; they are browser dependent or require use of JavaScript; they may not work for certain user agents, such as indexing robots.
Further comments are given at [15].
Server redirects would appear to provide a more useful solution.
A redirect is an Web server directive (command) which maps one URL into another.
The new URL is returned to the browser which attempts to fetch it again with the new address.
As an example the University of Southern California have used this approach to provide shorter or more logical URLs on their Web site [16].
The Apache documentation describes how to provide server redirects [17] and a third party tutorial provides further information [18].
A third-party product is available which provides similar functionality for the IIS server [19].
So does this provide an answer to the problems of reorganising our Web site?
The answer, unfortunately, is no or more correctly, it will solve some problems but may cause some new ones.
Server redirects work by sending the address of the new location to the browser.
The browser then sends the new location back to the server.
Although most modern browsers will support there is a danger that other user agents may not.
Also use of server redirects means that a definition of the structure of the Web site is held in a server configuration file.
A tool which processes the underlying file structure will not be aware of the Web view and so will provide incorrect information.
This could affect indexing tools, auditing tools, etc.
A related issue is that it will be more difficult to mirror the Web site.
If a Web site is mirrored, the mirroring of the redirect information may be difficult to manage (although this depends on the way in which the Web site is mirrored).
Conclusions There is probably no simple technological fix to providing stable URIs for resources.
It will therefore be necessary to go through a process of developing a URI naming policy which will address the issues mentioned in this article.
When formulating a policy it may be helpful to see the approaches taken by other institutions.
A search on Google for “url naming polices” (and variations) obtained information from the Universities of Bath [20] and Oxford [21] and the University of Vermont [22].
The final thoughts should be left to the W3C.
In their policy on URI persistency they provide a brief summary on their approaches to persistent URIs and describe what will happen if the W3C ceases to exist [23] A similar statement has been made by SWAG (Semantic Web Agreement Group) [24].
Long term persistency of URIs will become of even greater importance in the future.
It will not only be users who are frustrated by 404 error messages, but, unless this problem is addressed, automated Web services will fail to work, and scholarly resources and legal documents will be lost.
The clever technological fix (PURLs, URNs, etc.)
has clearly failed to deliver a solution for mainstream Web sites.
The onus is on ourselves, as providers of Web services, to take the problem of persistency seriously.
References Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don’t change, W3C http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html Web Naming and Addressing Overview (URIs, URLs, ..), W3C http://www.w3.org/Addressing/ e-Government Interoperability Framework Part One (draft for public consultation), Office of the e-Envoy http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/rfc/rfc_document.asp?docnum=505 Synchronized Multimedia Home Page, W3C http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/ Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), W3C http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/ W3C Math Home, W3C http://www.w3.org/Math/ Chemical Markup Language (CML), XML-CML.org http://www.xml-cml.org/ QA News Feed, W3C http://www.w3.org/QA/Overview.rss Burn All GIFs, http://burnallgifs.org/ HyperText Markup Language Activity Statement, W3C http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity Debian Web Site in Different Languages, Debian http://www.debian.org/intro/cn Apache Content Negotiation, Apache http://httpd.apache.org/docs/content-negotiation.html Content Negotiation Explained, Apache Week http://www.apacheweek.com/features/negotiation HTML 4.01 Specification, W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.2 The Bad Way (using <meta>), OpenSourcePan http://www.opensourcepan.co.uk/texts/apacheredir/part1.shtml Authoring: Server Redirects, USC http://www.usc.edu/uscweb/authoring/redirects.html Module mod_alias, Apache http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_alias.html Avoiding Broken Links and 404 Errors, OpenSourcePan http://www.opensourcepan.co.uk/texts/apacheredir/ IIS Rewrite, Qwerksoft http://www.qwerksoft.com/products/iisrewrite/ University URL Policy, University of Bath http://internal.bath.ac.uk/weac/url-pol.htm Introduction to User Web Pages, University of Oxford http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/web/intro/ Policy for Assigning Names on UVM’s Web Site, University of Vermont http://www.uvm.edu/cit/?Page=policies%2Fnamingpolicy.html&dir=policies W3C URI Persistence Policy, W3C http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Persistence SWAG URI Persistence Policy, SWAG http://swag.webns.net/persistence Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: “Web Focus: Guidelines for URI Naming Policies” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Mar-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC Content: NESLI Implications Outside the HE Community Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC Content: NESLI Implications Outside the HE Community Buzz data api database archives standardisation identifier copyright opac passwords copac licence authentication url research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Alicia Wise discusses NESLI.
Most readers from within the UK Higher Education (HE) community will no doubt be aware of the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative.
However, for readers from outside this sector who do not yet know the full details, and for readers who do not know the latest news about the Initiative, the first part of this article seeks to detail NESLI’s aims and objectives, and achievements so far.
Although the Initiative is primarily focused on the UK HE community, the second part of this article seeks to discuss the possible benefits which may accrue for the library and information community as a whole.
NESLI is in some senses the successor to the Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI) which began in January 1996, and effectively ended in December 1998.
The PSLI provided government funding to reduce the unit cost of information, and concentrated primarily on paper based information.
As the three-year initiative drew to a close, however, it was clear that many issues concerning the use, access and purchase of electronic journals remained to be addressed.
With these issues in mind, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) advertised for, and selected a consortium of Swets & Zeitlinger and Manchester Computing at the University of Manchester as Managing Agent for NESLI, a new self-financing initiative which will run for three years from 1st January 1999.
The role of the Managing Agent is satisfied by two main functional units, which are managed through the Consortium Management Board.
Strategic and policy advice is provided through an "Advisory Board", comprising respected members of the HE community, content providers and the consortium.
The Managing Agent works closely with the JISC NESLI Steering Committee and reports on all developments and statistical findings during the term of the project.
The aim of the Initiative is to address some of the issues preventing widespread take-up of electronic journals.
These include technical issues of access control, both for on-site and "remote" users, cost, site definitions, and archiving issues.
Key to the development of the initiative has been the partnership between Swets & Zeitlinger, with its long experience of providing an innovative journal subscription service to libraries, and of negotiating with publishers, and Manchester Computing.
Manchester Computing hosts MIDAS, a JISC-designated national datacentre hosting more than 40 strategic datasets including the JSTOR electronic journal archiving project, COPAC (Consortium of University Research Libraries OPAC) and the eLib SuperJournal Project.
Manchester University and Swets will be working together to make SwetsNet the single point of access for all the journals included in the initiative.
Publishers may either store all their electronic data on Swets’ server, or mount it on their own servers with a link from SwetsNet.
Full text delivery is currently either in PDF or Catchword’s RealPage format, and there are currently over 1,400 full text titles included.
Technical issues Questions of authentication and remote access have already been addressed by Manchester University and Swets in partnership.
Tables of contents, abstracts, and full-text articles in SwetsNet can be accessed directly from Web OPACs and from a number of secondary database services, using IP based access control and linking URLs.
However from the outset, feedback received from the HE community made it abundantly clear that further work on technical issues of access and authentication would be a high priority for the Initiative.
Whilst the IP validated access already available on SwetsNet was suitable for campus LANs and WANs with recognisable IP address ranges, there was clearly a problem for the growing number of off-site users and distance learners who used dial-up Internet connections with dynamically assigned IP addresses.
In addition, the "user specific" functions within SwetsNet, such as SDIs and TOC alerting were not available to users accessing the service via IP validation only.
Technical staff at Manchester University and Swets therefore co-operated to build the already established ATHENS authentication system on to the SwetsNet NESLI delivery service.
ATHENS control has now been tested successfully, and will be available as an option for any institutions wanting to control access for their readers in this way.
ATHENS provides HE institutions with a unique and effective way of providing their staff, students and researchers with a single password for all the electronic resources they are entitled to access.
Each separate password can be set up with access rights to different combinations of services, appropriate to the individual’s subject interests and level of study or research.
The mechanism implemented is best explained as consisting of three elements: authentication, reconciliation and connection.
The user enters their ATHENS username and password on the login screen and these are authenticated against the ATHENS system for the resource type of 'NESLI'.
The call to ATHENS is made by the server hosted at Manchester and uses the 'C' Application Programmer Interface (API).
Once authenticated, the ATHENS identifier and resource type is converted to SwetsNet account data, again on the Manchester server.
This data is then passed to the SwetsNet server, based in Netherlands, and a user session is initiated.
Other customization work has been carried out on the SwetsNet service, to provide an interface "tailored" to NESLI, and reflecting the feedback received from library and information staff in the HE community about what their end-users would like to see, and which options they would prefer not to show!
The NESLI interface will continue to be revised and amended in the light of comments and suggestions received by the Managing Agent.
A Help Desk at the University of Manchester will be available for end-users and librarians who experience difficulty accessing the service.
The linking of SwetsNet with ATHENS, and the construction of the "NESLI version" of SwetsNet, ensures that the burgeoning number of off-site users will not be excluded, now that negotiations with publishers by the Managing Agent have started to bear fruit.
Publisher negotiations The Managing Agent has the remit to negotiate on behalf of the HE community value for money agreements with publishers of electronic journals, if possible by encouraging them to offer separate deals for print and electronic versions of their journals.
As part of this remit, the Managing Agent is also mandated to explore with publishers the possibilities for deals on subject-based clusters, pay-per-view, and standardized licensing terms and conditions.
Fundamental to this part of the Managing Agent’s work is the NESLI Model Licence.
The Model Licence (based on the JISC / PA Model Licence) seeks to standardise publishers’ approaches to issues such as site definition, inter-library loan, "walk-in" users, continuing access to subscribed-to material once a subscription has expired, inclusion of subscribed-to material in course packs and users’ rights to save and print articles etc.
All publishers are being encouraged to accept the terms and conditions of the Model Licence with minimal modifications.
The Managing Agent has already done a great deal of work to push the Initiative forward in this respect.
Negotiations have focused on the publishers whose material is most in demand by UK HEIs.
In determining the priorities for negotiations, the views of library and information professionals in the HE community expressed via the NESLI listserver and via a series of regional seminars have been given high priority.
At the time of writing (May 1999), over 40 UK Higher Education Institutions are accessing titles from publishers participating in the initiative either on a subscription basis, or as part of a trial.
Blackwell Science are making 130 of their electronic journals available to NESLI at a special package price, with the acceptance that a single educational institution can be considered a "site", regardless of the number of physical locations it actually occupies.
All users within an institution are allowed access, and archival files are available for 3 years via the Managing Agent, and thereafter subject to any archiving solution explored by the Managing Agent.
In addition, all new titles published during 1999 will be included in the NESLI offer free of charge.
Johns Hopkins University Press has offered two options involving "unbundling" print and electronic subscriptions to NESLI.
The first option is a full year subscription to all Johns Hopkins electronic journal titles for a fixed fee with discounts according to the number of sites.
The second option is a three-month free trial to all their electronic journals, with offers of substantial discounts for access during the remainder of the year.
Each site will pay a maximum of 50% of the full subscription price for 1999, and there may be further discounts, depending on the number of sites participating.
Blackwell Publishers have offered the HE community the option paying a flat fee for a combined print and electronic subscription including access to a year of backfiles to journals not currently purchased.
Orders will be invited shortly.
The Company of Biologists is offering electronic only access to the current issue and to the complete backfiles of their main title Development for a special price.
Feedback about this offer has so far been positive, and it is likely that the title will be available on an electronic only basis in 2000.
HighWire Press is offering discounts, according to the number of participating sites, on 29 electronic only titles from the 9 publishers in the HighWire Marketing Group.
At the time of writing, discussions are also underway with Elsevier, Kluwer, Mary Ann Liebert, NRC Press and Academic Press.
Offers are now likely to be valid for the year 2000, and it is expected that many more will be forthcoming.
However, what will the benefits be for library and information professionals, and the users they serve, outside the HE community?
The development of licences that deal realistically with the question of "offsite" access for members of organizations is, it is to be hoped, something that will benefit all subscribers to and users of electronic journals.
There is certainly relevance to commercial and other multi-site or trans-national organizations, many of which also have a large number of staff who need to gain access to electronic journals while they are working at home, or away from their normal "base".
It is clear that the development of a standard and more liberal definition of "site" is something that can only be positive.
Clarification and standardization of licences in general is something which should benefit all electronic journal subscribers.
It is unlikely that publishers agreeing to new standard licences for HE institutions will still insist on a bewildering range of different texts and conditions for other subscribers.
Work for both subscription agents and subscribers in recording licences and ensuring compliance with their conditions should therefore, over time, become easier.
The development of separately available print and electronic journals will also increase the choices available to all information professionals, allowing them to tailor the services they offer much more closely to the specific needs of the information user communities they serve, and to their budgets.
The initiative will also be a useful test of the versatility of the ATHENS authentication system.
The system now adopted in all HE institutions has already proven particularly useful for "offsite" members of such organizations, such as distance learners.
If and when ATHENS becomes more widely available outside the HE community, it may give useful answers to questions of secure offsite access for members of all types of institution.
In addition to the above, it is likely that, over time, the Initiative will also address other issues holding back the widespread adoption of electronic journals, notably archiving.
Finally, of course, the development of a true "one-stop" point of access for all electronic journals will be to the advantage of all library and information professionals and the users they serve.
This service, which already links to library OPACs, also has a growing number of links from secondary information sources.
Management information on electronic journal usage provided by the system will encourage the development of information services truly targeted at the specific needs of information users and maximum efficiency in the use of financial resources.
In conclusion then, the benefits of the Initiative should flow outside the UK HE community, and those benefits are likely to be: A resolution of technical and licensing problems for site, multi-site, and offsite access, clarification and standardization of licence terms and conditions, separation of print and electronic subscriptions, and the further development of a single seamlessly linked electronic journal delivery system.
Developments over the next few months will be crucial in determining the extent to which these benefits appear.
Crucial to the success of the Initiative so far have been the complimentary strengths of Swets & Zeitlinger and Manchester Computing.
The latter’s technical expertise and the former’s long experience as an intermediary between publishers and information professionals has helped to achieve a great deal in a comparatively short space of time.
If NESLI is to continue to work, however, it will depend to a very great extent on the flexibility, imagination and willingness to experiment of the publishers of scholarly journals.
The Managing Agent will be actively encouraging them to participate in the scheme and to offer value for money packages for their electronic journals.
Whilst NESLI is fundamentally an electronic journals initiative, it is recognised that separating the print and electronic product cannot necessarily be achieved overnight.
Publishers are still considering their options.
Many are unprepared for "unbundled" deals at the moment, and are still uncertain about the commercial subscription model to use.
However, although these are early days, it does seem that NESLI is helping publishers to understand the requirements of user communities and that publishers are seeing the benefits of participating in the Initiative.
It may even eventually help them to consider alternatives to the subscription model, such as "pay-per-view".
Further progress seems likely.
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JSTOR Usage Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JSTOR Usage Buzz database archives adobe ejournal licence url jstor Citation BibTex RIS Alison Murphy reports on the JSTOR electronic journals project continuing success.
JSTOR (Journal STORage) is a unique digital archive of over 100 core scholarly journals, starting with the very first issues.
The collection covers material from the 1800s up to a ‘moving wall’ of between 1 and 8 years before current publication.
It covers 15 subjects at present, mainly in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
JSTOR is made available to academic institutions around the world on a site-licence basis.
Users at participating institutions can search, browse, print and save any article from the collection.
JSTOR started as a pilot project in the United States, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The aim was to provide a solution to the increasing costs to libraries of storing back runs of journals.
The project proved so successful that a full service was launched in January 1997 in the US.
JSTOR is now an independent, non-profit making organisation.
Usage Following the success of the full service in the US, March 1998 saw the launch of the UK JSTOR Mirror Service, maintained by MIMAS (Manchester Information and Associated Datasets) on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
Since the launch, 41 UK and 7 Eire higher education institutions have subscribed to the service.
[1] The UK service started with 48 journal titles online, covering 138,000 full-length articles (382,000 including letters, reviews etc.)
from 14,000 issues.
As of January 2000, there are 117 titles available online [2], containing 307,000 full-length articles from just under 30,000 journal issues.
This amounts to over 4.7 million pages of journal literature.
Usage of JSTOR has increased dramatically.
During April 1998, the first full month of operation, there were 11 subscribing institutions.
These institutions conducted 821 searches and printed 236 articles; a total of 2,376 pages from 849 articles were viewed online.
By April 2000 there were 50 subscribing institutions conducting over 34,000 searches, printing nearly 15,000 articles and viewing 93,000 pages from over 32,000 articles.
Figure 1 below illustrates the rise in use since January 1999.
Figure 1: JSTOR usage, Jan 1999 Apr 2000 Looking at usage by subject, Economics journals receive by far the most use.
In the first four months of 2000, there were 295,000 accesses of Economics journals compared to 300,000 in the whole of 1999.
So far this year, 34.4% of all access have been to Economics titles.
Finance (10.1% of accesses), History (8.4%) and Political Science (10.0%) journals are also very well used.
This follows a similar pattern of use in 1999.
Figure 2 shows the percentage of accesses to each subject cluster in 2000.
Figure 2: Accesses to each subject cluster, Jan Mar 2000 Since they subscribed in 1998, Oxford University and the London School of Economics have consistently been the heaviest users of JSTOR.
On average, institutions made 27,000 accesses each to JSTOR in the whole of 1999, compared to 24,000 so far in 2000.
For subscription purposes, institutions are placed into one of four bandings: very small, small, medium and large.
On average, large institutions, of which there are 33 subscribers, made 25,000 accesses to JSTOR in the first four months of 2000, compared to 22,000 from medium sites (10 subscribers), 11,000 from small sites (3 subscribers) and 8,000 from very small sites (3 subscribers).
In 1999, 76,288 articles were printed from the database.
In the first four months of 2000, there have been 77,132 print outs.
JSTOR offers three options for printing articles: JPRINT, JSTOR’s own helper application Adobe Acrobat Reader Postscript printing Printing with Acrobat Reader is the most popular option.
In 1999, just over 53,000 articles were printed using Acrobat Reader 70% of all articles printed.
This year the figures are slightly higher 55,000 articles (71%).
Printing using JPRINT accounts for around 25% and postscript printing just over 4%.
MIMAS is very excited about this trend in usage and is positioning the service to be upgraded prior to the new semester.
It is vital that the quality of service to the subscribing institutions is maintained at its current high level.
References A list of all these participants can be found at: http://www.mimas.ac.uk/jstor/jaccess.html A complete list of titles, including years covered by the database, is available at: http://www.jstor.ac.uk/about/content.html Author Details   Alison Murphy Ejournal Support (JSTOR/NESLI) MIMAS University of Manchester Email: alison.murphy@man.ac.uk Web site: www.jstor.ac.uk Article Title: “JSTOR Usage” Author: Alison Murphy Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/jstor/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Instructional Management Systems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Instructional Management Systems Buzz data software database dissemination metadata repositories cataloguing opac personalisation rae cd-rom webct intranet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl explores the IMS concept in the context of the SELLIC project.
Background At the University of Edinburgh, the Science and Engineering Library, Learning and Information Centre (SELLIC)[1] combines a physical learning resource centre development with the introduction of a learning management system for the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
The new building, which will meet the demand for a science library for the University of Edinburgh which was first expressed over forty years ago, and has grown more insistent every since, will open its first phase for the beginning of session 2001⁄2.
The learning management system ‘SELLIC Online’ will be trialled in the course of session 1999-2000, with the intention that it should be introduced into more and more courses over time, and provide a major service to students and staff of the Faculty by the time the building opens.
Two sources of impetus drive the SELLIC Online project.
One is the Edinburgh University Library agenda for the development of digital, hybrid library services.
The other is the Faculty agenda for the development of web-based learning materials to the point at which the use of these is integrated within all of the courses of the Faculty.
It is of course possible to view these requirements as entirely separate.
Within the SELLIC Project, however, our approach is to suggest that they are complementary, and should be delivered within a single system.
Several factors account for this view.
The CATRIONA project[2], funded by eLib, reported last year on a survey of electronic courseware in use in Scottish universities, and its management as a resource.
The conclusion from this project was that libraries ought to be the managers of courseware, in order that students can gain coherent access to resources produced by their departments alongside the learning resources to which the library has traditionally provided access.
‘There was general agreement amongst project group members and other participants that managing access to research and teaching materials created in educational organisations is an extension of the existing role of the University Library in the management of learned information, with expertise of particular relevance being found in the organisation of information for efficient and effective retrieval and the management of support services.’[3] This view challenges the practice which many university libraries have implemented, of treating ‘courseware’ in the broadest sense, encompassing printed materials as well as digital or audiovisual, as ephemera.
Inherently difficult to handle, collect and administer, it has been largely ignored, or left to the originating departments to steward.
But as libraries claim for themselves a more central role in the learning process, it becomes apparent that this practice could be considered a dereliction of duty.
If the learning materials produced by departments in the form of lecture notes, handouts, reading lists, worked examples and other materials, are critical to student learning, can we reasonably trust departments to manage these materials efficiently?
Is it fair to expect them to assume that responsibility?
Learning management systems In designing SELLIC Online, we have looked at the emerging range of learning management systems now on the market.
These include systems such as WebCT, developed by the University of British Columbia, Lotus Learningspace, SCT’s Campus Pipeline, WBT’s TopClass and Oracle Learning Server.
At Edinburgh, although many of these have been considered in different contexts, the only one which has been adopted for real course delivery has been WebCT, which is used by the Department of Physics & Astronomy in the delivery of a 1st Year Physics course based upon a published CD-ROM text.
This course is still so new that it has not yet been formally evaluated.
The course design emphasised added value, however, and certainly in its first year it increased the workload of the course team substantially.
Nevertheless, students appeared to enjoy working with the material, a lot of work was done in integrating it into the overall course design, with lectures referencing the text and the accompanying practical exercises, and the use of the web as the delivery medium posed few problems.
In general, the systems currently supplied by third party vendors do not seem to us to be sufficiently aware of the resource dimension to learning.
Functionally, many are strong in the areas of communication, between lecturers and individual students, between lecturers and entire classes, or between students themselves.
Course management is well-handled in respect of provision for pages of content, test creation and automatic assessment.
But any link to the library system seems to be missing.
Naturally, this can be added in assuming a web OPAC, in the same way that any web resource can be integrated via http linking.
In our view, however, this identifies the main drawback with most of these systems at present.
Ultimately, they are so customisable that it can be difficult for a university at least to justify their purchase at all.
If the value-added benefits they confer derive mostly from customising the look and feel often to remove either the corporate or US college campus affinities to fit the institution in which they are to be planted, and from adding in links to local resources and systems, and if the software engineering required is based within the open standards environment which surrounds the web, then perhaps a homegrown solution is at present the most economical and appropriate?
While we all agree with the need to avoid reinventing the wheel, it may be that in this case we should recognise that what must not be reinvented is the publication and delivery environment, the web and its standards architecture, but that within that environment we require the freedom to design solutions to our own heterogeneous institutional forms.
Put simply, the systems on the market presuppose a ‘black box’ which arguably does not exist in a university environment.
The set of problems which a learning management system sets out to solve is not equivalent to the set of problems which a library system sets out to solve, although even in that arena the boundaries around ‘library system’ are being challenged by the new synergies presented by the web.
We believe that the library resource database, its OPAC, must be an essential component of the learning management system, fully integrated with it in the same way that the student record system requires to be fully integrated.
A third major contributor is the course website where it exists the equivalent of the course handbook produced by course teams and all too often, in the past at least, unconnected with the library and its support for the same course.
Institutional context SELLIC aims to assist the introduction of supplementary web-based teaching generally across the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
This is the largest Faculty in the University, consisting of some 16 core departments, with a number of centres promoting collaboration and interdisciplinary research.
Of the fourteen relevant units of assessment in the last Research Assessment Exercise, nine were ‘five’ or ‘five star’ rated.
Teaching is based within a research culture, and it is important to the university that that approach is maintained.
There is a strong tradition of good undergraduates remaining at Edinburgh to pursue research.
One of the objectives of teaching, therefore, is to generate a link between undergraduates and academic researchers, in order to foster an interest in the research process itself.
In a university like Edinburgh, innovation is introduced organically, finding its way into academic endeavour at points which seem appropriate, rather than by any attempt to impose new ways of working upon academic staff.
The very availability of learning management systems, in an age of open standards in which the web is beginning to offer a universal operating environment for publishers of information in all formats, users of it, and communication among all parties, tantalises universities with the prospect of conversion of teaching materials into an ‘open university’ format.
At the same time, it frightens them with both the cost of such an enterprise on a comprehensive scale, and the prospect of piracy of intellectual property.
Gradually, more and more universities are declaring institutional positions on ‘openness’.
Some are making concerted efforts to convert courses into web-deliverable formats for selling both domestically and overseas.
Many are selecting particular courses frequently in management and business studies which suggest available markets for conversion to a distance delivery mode.
Use of the web to enhance existing teaching is less glamorous, but nevertheless is easily the most common application, based as it is in the working habits of most students and lecturers in most departments.
In this latter case, there seems no need for an institutional policy: departments have begun to publish course information, lecture notes, animations and reading lists upon the web almost without thinking about it.
The ‘grey intranet’ In the SELLIC Project, it is our contention that this widespread and ‘natural’ use of the web contains a danger in the prospect of inefficiency.
It is a danger not always apparent to academics, for whom the citing of a URL in the course of a lecture, or as a footnote to a course handout, would suggest itself as sufficient.
To libraries, the material which has always been most difficult to control, emerging from non-official publishers with no legal deposit process or else so ephemeral that legal deposit would be futile, is called ‘grey literature’.
To take the example of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Edinburgh, the consequence of 16 departments adopting the web as a publication medium is the emergence of a vast ‘grey intranet’.
Is this a problem?
As suggested above, in pre-web days, most university libraries were forced to define, or attempt to define, the boundary between the university’s own ‘official’ resource information, and the institutional grey literature.
Typically, the former would include all bibliographic items which were purchased for student use, and held in libraries, and a number of categories of departmentally generated material, which might include course handbooks (reference material), lecturers’ notes (coursepack material) and exam papers (heavy demand material).
These are only the most prominent categories, but librarians will instantly recognise them as troublesome.
Their collection and dissemination required an interface with departments which was always hard to establish and harder to maintain.
Such material is essentially fugitive.
It frequently flies off a lecturer’s word processor into student hands via a photocopier before the library even knows it exists, thereby requiring libraries to collect much of it retrospectively.
With so much of it of only short-lived currency, the retrospective collection and dissemination effort could become impossible to justify as efficiency, and as a result many libraries declared that the onus on collection lay with departments.
Libraries would disseminate only what they were given.
This was a pragmatic response to a near impossible dilemma, and generally not one libraries ever felt easy about, suggesting as it did an abrogation of the responsibility for collection which belongs to the library.
In some instances, however, so great was the problem that libraries simply refused even to accept the material at all, since the dissemination effort, involving cataloguing, labelling and display, was too large to be justified.
How does the web alter the picture?
Learning management is the key, whether or not we purchase or create a ‘learning management system’ to control it.
The emergence of learning management as a concept has occurred with the arrival of the web because of the suggestion that we now have a single tool which can replace the several tools which have traditionally been available.
After all, ‘learning management’ of itself is a business universities have always been in, but physical print, organised functionally into purchased textbooks and journals, and ‘grey’ categories such as assessment, course information and administrative information, could not be fully organised in a single system at the granular level of the document, or object.
Learning management therefore was a generic concept, achieved by the common operation of the teaching, academic support and administration of the institution.
The very idea of ‘learning management’ in that environment, had it been suggested, would have been considered either tautologous or nonsensical.
The student at the centre Yet, to take a student-centred view, it is an ideal.
Students want all relevant information to their courses to be available to them as quickly and easily as possible.
A relatively large university like Edinburgh is confusing enough, particularly for new undergraduates, without the web increasing the confusion.
The physical geography is typically less of a problem than the course geography, in which advisers of studies act as referees between subjects in an environment which aims to provide tailored solutions to thousands of individuals.
In this complex geography, academic and administrative aims frequently collide, and pragmatic solutions, however regrettable, are required.
Our universities have become adept over the years at providing timetabling solutions, but the course ‘package’ which is finally delivered to a new student is still a more complex burden than is often recognised by the departments involved, the academic support services or the administration, and can be a source of considerable stress, particularly for first year students.
In the recent eLib SCOPE Project (‘Scottish Collaborative On-Demand Publishing Enterprise’), the production of ‘course packs’ of core readings was explored.
Proof of the additional utility to students of the inclusion of ‘grey’ material comes in this comment from the SCOPE Final Summary Report: ‘students on factual courses such as Engineering may receive more in the way of handouts than students on courses such as Sociology … Students, naturally enough, have a different perception and in questionnaire responses a number of them asked for lecture notes and handouts to be included in course packs’[4] SELLIC Online will aim to assemble time-dependent information for users with authenticated access.
The time-dependency of the system is a key distinguishing feature from other web services available.
The system will not be a data repository, but rather will interrogate a number of databases at the back end, presenting collocated information which provides a ‘moving window’ onto a course for an individual student of lecturer.
As each user logs in, the system will query its range of associated databases to ascertain who the user is, what course or courses they study or teach on, and what information and resources are relevant to them over the following, say, four weeks.
‘Discourse tools’ email, chat and bulletin board services will be provided on a group basis, using the existing functionality of the University’s standard communication tools, operating optionally within the group working environment for which SELLIC Online is designed.
In addition to discourse, lecturers will be able to attach resources such as book and article citations, computer-based learning packages and multiple choice tests directly to courses.
Tools for the creation of such resources, a link tool to identify library materials, shells for the creation of multiple choice tests, and so on, will be provided within the system.
Structured feedback forms will be another feature both for staff feedback on student work, and for student feedback on courses.
Over time, we would expect that the ‘core’ system will expand functionally, incorporating services developed by individual departments.
These are likely to include, for example, grade tables for the use of staff, based in spreadsheet software, assignment submission tools for student use, online timetabling systems, and other services which will emerge after the initial roll-out.
Four first year courses will trial the system in the course of Academic year 1999-2000.
The Instructional Management Systems Project In the course of our work, we have inevitably become aware of the work of the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Project[5], and its standards development activity in the areas of metadata and ‘packaging’.
We shall endeavour to ensure that SELLIC Online complies with IMS, once we have the Version 1 specification (due out later this year).
However, to date the involvement of the library community in IMS developments seems slight.
Very few library systems suppliers feature in the list of companies who have signed up as IMS Project Developers Network members.
Learning management systems currently on the market do not seem to be aware of the need to integrate with library catalogue databases, and offer instead their own templates for resource description.
The library community needs to make the case for its role in resource description, whether in the creation of metadata which points at physical objects (the traditional library catalogue role, which will still account for the vast majority of all metadata in most academic libraries), or of metadata which is added to or linked to digital resources.
In the UK, libraries have become interested in IMS since the establishment of the UK IMS Centre[6], funded by JISC.
In asserting the claim of HE in general upon the IMS specification (in order to counterbalance the tendency to date for it to be oriented heavily in the direction of corporate training needs), we must ensure that academic libraries are involved in the development.
Digital Library Services SELLIC Online will also serve the needs of researchers in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, in conjunction with the University Library.
We are monitoring the work of the eLib hybrid library projects in order to stay abreast of emerging standards in the area of distributed environments.
The facility for undergraduates to cycle search requests through a range of local and remote hosts must be provided, and this is clearly a requirement for researchers.
Data mining is the issue here, and a range of new tools are emerging which will allow libraries and information services to deliver personalised services based upon sophisticated user profiling across a spectrum of sources ranging from the local OPAC, via locally networked CD-ROM sources, to aggregated primary and secondary content bases on the web.
These include systems such as SilverPlatter Information’s KnowledgeCite Library, UCSD’s Database Advisor, Pharos, developed by the California State University, and Northern Light.
[7] This development territory belongs to the library (although very useful synergies with the computer science and artificial intelligence communities must be explored), while the development of learning management systems is less clearly mapped onto a single service.
Both, however, share the goal of service personalisation, and both require the integration of the library catalogue database in the personalised systems which they develop.
Both also require the expansion of the OPAC to include supplementary learning material.
Conclusion SELLIC Online, as a prototype learning management system at the University of Edinburgh, will provide a value-added service.
Although the Project also has a role to stimulate the production of computer-based courseware in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, its chief deliverable will be a system which does not of itself generate data, but which presents data intelligently from a range of different university systems.
This will provide a personalised service for students and the course tutors who deal with them.
Services to researchers who are frequently also taught students and teaching staff will be developed by the Project in conjunction with the Library.
As products emerge to provide solutions to the challenges of learning management and comprehensive information retrieval in a heterogeneous information ecology, the critical library functions of a university resource database creation and acquisition, and interpretation of user requirements must adapt and adjust to a higher education environment already considerably transformed by digital technologies.
[1] http://www.sellic.ed.ac.uk [2] http://catriona2.lib.strath.ac.uk/catriona/ [3] Nicholson, Dennis; Dunsire, Gordon; Smith, Martin [et al] Should Universities Manage Services Offering Institutional or Extra-Institutional Access to Locally-Created Electronic Teaching and Research Resources?
Final Report of the CATRIONA II Project, 1998 [4] SCOPE Final summary report, July 1998, p.5 http://www.stir.ac.uk/infoserv/scope/docs [5] http://imsproject.org/ [6] http://www.imsproject.org.uk/ [7] See Huwe, Terence K. ‘New search tools for multidisciplinary digital libraries’, Online (March/April 1999, 67-74) http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag Author details John MacColl, SELLIC Director Darwin Library, University of Edinburgh The King’s Buildings, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JU john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Managing Technostress in UK Libraries: A Realistic Guide Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Managing Technostress in UK Libraries: A Realistic Guide Buzz html database vocabularies copyright cataloguing cd-rom url research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Harper analyses in detail a familiar disease.
Defining Stress “Stress” has become the defining malaise of modernity.
Until around twenty years ago, the term was used exclusively to refer to the “fight or flight” mechanism in a specific medical context.
Today, however, the word has undergone radical semantic widening.
Like “nerves” in the nineteenth century, “stress” is now used by individuals to explain a huge number of maladies and by journalists, advertisers and cultural pundits as a convenient hook upon which to hang any number of social ills.
In short, the enemy is everywhere.
The social ubiquity of stress is reflected in our everyday parlance: “stress” is now commonly used as a verb as well as a noun, as in the popular injunction: “don’t stress.” Yet the proliferation of discussions of stress in the popular culture of today often hinders, rather than helps, serious discussion of the phenomenon.
In Angela Patmore’s view (1998-99), the popular wresting of “stress” from its original medical meaning has allowed a cynical stress management industry to exploit a “culture of helplessness” for financial gain.
Patmore’s is a salutary and in many ways insightful analysis: unscrupulous “stress managers” doubtless exist; and their definitions of stress may not always withstand close scrutiny (in particular, the “causes” and “symptoms” of stress are often inadequately distinguished).
Nevertheless, there is nothing radical about denying the existence of problems that are commonly experienced by workers in library and information services.
Responsible managers must develop an awareness of the specific medical and legal consequences of a rapidly changing working environment, whether or not these are regarded as manifestations of stress.
In view of the semantic problems raised above, two points must be made clear before stress – or indeed technostress can be discussed without confusion.
First, stress in the most general sense can be a force for good or ill.
While most commentators make a distinction between adaptive and maladaptive stress, some appear to confuse the two.
Having correctly recognised the positive, as well as the negative, potential of stress, Atherley (1996: 20) goes on to describe “anticipatory interview nerves” as a negative form of stress.
In fact, stress in such situations may have a useful, galvanising effect; for the purposes of this article, however, stress is taken to mean unproductive stress.
Second, it is important to distinguish stress from pressure.
The former is subjective, the latter objective; and there is not necessary a causal relationship between the two.
Many busy employees do not suffer stress; others become stressed apparently without reason; individual circumstances must therefore be considered.
Nevertheless, common sense says that stress, in many employees, increases in relation to pressure, whether from variations in workload, physical environment, or even from travelling to work.
In conclusion, stress is not an illness in itself, but rather the term given to a maladaptive response to pressure.
Thus the word stress may be used as an umbrella term covering all of an employee’s physical and emotional problems.
Despite their steadfastly conservative image, there is no reason to suppose that librarians are less susceptible to such problems than other professionals.
Of course all librarians and information workers suffer temporary frustrations at work; in order to take stress or technostress seriously, therefore, these problems must have been encountered over a period of time.
Technostress: a Brod definition Like the term “stress”, “technostress” has been defined in so many ways – sometimes by the same authors that its utility as a concept is in doubt (Fisher 1996).
The original and still popular definition is that of Craig Brod, who describes technostress as “a modern disease of adaptation caused by an inability to cope with new technologies in a healthy manner” (Brod 1984:16).
Brod’s definition certainly requires closer scrutiny than it has often received.
While it may be spurious to call technostress a disease, the second clause provides a working definition: “technostress” covers that range of chronic human psychological and physiological problems that may result from the use of automation.
This sounds a broad enough definition; yet an even wider definition is possible if we understand “techne” in its original Greek sense of “skill”.
While Brod talks of “new technologies” (the phrase already sounds dated), what of a librarian struggling to adopt the procedures involved, for example, in the use of a library circulation system that uses cards and tickets, such as the Browne system?
For such an employee, even a manual issuing system might be a new technology – new, that is, to the employee.
Although the word itself is a neologism, “technostress” is hardly a new concept.
On the contrary, the belief that Westerners are subject to a psychologically devastating rate of technological change may have its origins nineteenth-century responses to the Industrial Revolution (for a survey of these see Rosen 1968).
But how does technostress affect modern librarians and information workers?
The increasing body of literature on the subject certainly presents no firm evidence of an “epidemic” of librarian technostress.
As Fisher, in one of the best articles on the subject, writes: “there are sufficient problems with Brod’s original definition of the term as to render it unreliable… Most commentators within the library and information field have built unwisely upon these unsteady foundations and asserted rather than proved the existence of technostress” (1996:13-14).
Nevertheless, common sense and a growing body of anecdotal evidence suggest that the explosion of automation in libraries poses some particular problems for librarians – these, for our purposes, may be said to fall under the rubric of technostress.
While various in nature, these problems – physical, psychological and organisational are a little easier to identify than the those caused by stress generally.
Physical Forms of Technostress Heavy use of computer technology, in particular, may result in eyestrain, headaches and backaches as well as: Repetitive Strain Injuries Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, whose symptoms include pain, tingling and numbness in the hand, wrist and arm, can be caused by continuous rapid use of the fingers, and is common among those whose use keyboards frequently.
Overexposure to Visual Display Units (VDUs) Headaches and muscular dysfunctions may result from overexposure computer terminals, while electromagnetic radiation produced by VDUs has been linked to miscarriages and to serious medical conditions including cancer (Coghill 1990: 123-40).
The heat and static electricity produced by terminals may also lead to fatigue and general debility (Graham and Bennett 1974:89).
Older VDUs are likely to radiate more than newer ones.
Psychological Forms of Technostress Psychological forms of technostress – which may have physical consequences – are rather more complex in nature.
Technostress may be environmental in origin: poor ergonomics at computer workstations, for example, may leave staff feeling drained.
Employees may also struggle to cope with the skills demanded by new technology, as in the case of many rural public libraries which are only now becoming automated; on the other hand, many staff overidentify with technology.
Other factors include: “Information Overload” In large libraries, the introduction of automated circulation, networked catalogue systems, online and CD-ROM information retrieval systems and telecommunications technologies (e-mail, telefaxing, teleconferencing and interactive television) can lead to a situation where employees feel overwhelmed by information (Bartlett 1995).
Underwork and Routine Jobs Many staff become frustrated when underemployed or when the work they are doing involves only routine operations; this can happen when employees spend long hours with automated systems.
While a certain amount of routine work is to be expected by librarians, managers must be aware of the proportion of time employees spend performing a single task.
Job Insecurity and Demotivation Recent massive investments in automation in the UK ILS sector may contribute to a fear that computers are usurping human roles.
Job insecurity may be compounded by jealousy among co-workers when levels of technological competency differ.
Over a prolonged period, this may lead to loss of motivation and team spirit.
More specifically, it may also lead to an erosion of trust among staff, as more “technologically aware” employees become reluctant to share their skills and knowledge, in the paranoid belief that by so doing they are making themselves more indispensable than technical novices.
This kind of “skills hoarding” prevents effective communication within an organisation.
Uncertainty about Job Role Where automation is introduced to replace other technologies, the job roles of employees may be unaffected.
Sometimes, however, staff may find that they are spending increasing time working with new technology; this may lead to uncertainty about job role.
A librarian working more and more with computer technology, for example, may soon find herself doing the job of a systems librarian.
Consequences for Organisations Workplace technostress may have consequences for organisations as well as individuals.
Certainly, organisations failing to tackle the problems of technostress can expect to experience high levels of absenteeism and staff turnover.
Managers who suggest that employees must simply cope or leave the organisation may not realise the potential costs of retraining new staff in the technology skills required.
At the same time, far-sighted UK library managers must look to the United States, where employees have increasingly been litigating against organisations on the grounds of work-related stress (Goss 1994:134-35).
At the same time, European Union law is increasingly affecting UK managers’ demands on staff; a recent example is the EU Directive on maximum working hours, whose introduction may have a bearing on work-related stress litigation.
Bartlett (1995:229) suggests that increased use of automation has led to a flattening out of the pyramidal organisational structure “allowing people to self-manage in smaller groups”.
Certainly, library managers must accept that employees typically favour participatory management style in the implementation of automation, as Winstead (1997:19) has shown in her study of three academic libraries in the US.
Managers may find that top-down communications are less well received, if not less effective, when automation is being introduced.
Solutions for Technostress The Employee Responsibility Before considering senior management solutions for technostress, it should be emphasised that employees have a responsibility for managing their own reaction to technological change.
Employees must remember that it is not necessary to “know it all”: few librarians can be expected to be familiar with every feature of the ever increasing number of databases or computer applications.
Nevertheless, responsible librarians must attempt to adapt to new technologies.
In doing so they fulfil a duty both to the library and to themselves, since technological skills are an important part of most library and information jobs today.
There is undoubtedly a two-way relationship between employees’ attitudes towards technology and physical or psychological damage technology is said to cause.
Thus Staufer’s study of older first-time technology users found that those who regarded technology as a threat, rather than a challenge, showed “the highest amount of health-related complaints” such as visual strain, headaches, and lack of concentration (Staufer 1992:49).
The Management Responsibility It will be important for UK managers to come up to speed on the problems that can accompany the introduction of new technology in libraries.
Osif and Harwood’s review of the literature on the subject (1996) is a useful starting point.
To reduce employee technostress, library managers must lead by example, showing an enthusiastic commitment to learning new technologies, as well as giving adequate warning to staff about planned technological changes: involving employees at the planning stage is always a good idea.
In the short term, it may be necessary simply to increase management presence where appropriate.
It will also be necessary to emphasise the importance of technological adaptability to job candidates at the recruitment stage (Clark and Kalin 1996:31).
The speed with which automation programmes are implemented is also crucial; Bartlett (1996:228) describes how her school library introduces new technology at a slow enough rate to allow mastery of each element as it is introduced.
It is also the job of managers in networked libraries to ensure that there is a sufficient number of employees and competent staff to install, manage, troubleshoot and repair equipment (Clark and Kalin 1996:32).
All of this must be included in comprehensive policies for the implementation of technology.
Managing Technology To protect employees, managers should be aware of the hazards of VDUs, especially older models, and consider employee safety when ordering new equipment.
Many suppliers produce low-radiation screens which use a high refresh rate; amongst others benefits, this may help to keep extra low frequencies (ELFs) from interfering with brain functions (Coghill 1990:134-35).
Older VDUs might be made safer by any of the anti-radiation devices now on the market.
VDU operators, meanwhile, should be given practical advice on ways of minimising their exposure to EMRs, such as positioning themselves at safe distances from computer terminals.
Some UK library managers might dismiss staff fears about the safety of automation as excessive or hypochondriacal.
This would be both unfortunate and foolhardy, since employers are obliged to follow the EU Directive incorporated as amendments into the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
This includes responsibilities to analyse such things as workstations and keyboard designs and remedy any health and safety problems discovered, to ensure that employees working with VDUs receive adequate rest and a varied role and even to provide employees with regular eye and eyesight tests (Graham and Bennett 1974:320).
On the other hand, managers who concentrate only on the ruinous effects of technology may overlook the advantages of new technologies to increase the wellbeing of employees.
While technostress may be caused by the introduction of computer technology, it may be reduced by further technological developments.
Many libraries, even in the cash-starved public sector, are beginning to introduce self-issue terminals.
Clearly, the major advantage of introducing self-issue terminals is to reduce the amount of time staff need to devote to the routine task of issuing books and other materials; but a side benefit is the reduced risk of repetitive strain injuries among staff.
Redesigning Jobs and Organisational Structure Staff who are spending an increasing amount of time working with new technology may feel that the nature of their work is changing.
An important point for management to establish is whether job roles have been altered significantly by automation; if so, there will be need to draw up new job descriptions and possibly to review salaries and wages.
Where staff experience serious difficulties in adapting to new technology, there may be a reason to redesign jobs.
Organisational restructuring at the Western Kentucky University’s Helms-Cravens Library resulted in the centralisation of several service points into one Reference Centre (Etkin 1995-96).
This led to “information overload” among many reference librarians, who may be the most prone of all librarians to technostress (Kupersmith 1992).
The solution was to provide a new training programme stressing core knowledge for electronic information services among all reference desk personnel.
There may be lessons here for public libraries in the newly formed UK local authorities, as they struggle to provide adequate standardised computer training for their staff.
Complementary Medicine and Ergonomics Technostress might be included in management development programmes.
As well as training both managers and employees to acknowledge technostress (which is still a relative newcomer in the UK vocabulary), advice might be offered on means of combating it through meditation or ergonomics.
Solutions might include those posited for stress in general, such as the workshops run by organisations such as Mindstore, relaxation techniques, reflexology, aromatherapy, kinesiology, colour and nutrition therapy.
Such solutions, which are increasingly discussed in library and information circles, would obviously have to be provided by trained practioners.
Even so, the health benefits of some of them have not been demonstrated conclusively and much more scientific research into these areas is required.
For these reasons budgets for such solutions must be carefully justified.
This might be done by keeping records of stress-related absenteeism.
It might be wiser, one feels, for library managers to concentrate on offering more rational, “targetted” solutions to technostress problems.
Specific remedies for technostress would be aimed at reducing the physical discomfort associated with the use of automation.
Recent research suggests that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, for example, may be reduced through the use of a lowered keyboard holder on a preset tilt away from the user.
This keeps the operator’s wrists in a low-risk, “neutral” position (Lang 1995:10).
Technology-based Training Identifying the training needs of employees suffering from the psychological forms of technostress may be difficult, since employees may be embarrassed about their lack of confidence or ability to cope and seek to hide their deficiencies.
This will be particularly common where staff have had no contact whatsoever with computer technology, such as those working in the many rural public libraries still not automated.
It is therefore important to cultivate an open atmosphere in the workplace, so that staff are willing to discuss their difficulties.
Moreover, training should never be made compulsory.
Technology-based training is now common in libraries of all types, with most libraries keeping costs low by using staff members as instructors.
A disadvantage of in-house training is that the trainer must reschedule her duties for a given period of time.
Moreover, external courses offer the advantages of better technological facilities and the opportunity for staff to learn away from the distractions of the library.
Even using outside instructors, however, training may not always be easy to organise.
For example, low staffing levels, especially in rural libraries, may reduce employee availability for training (Jones and Sprague 1999:97).
In such cases training may have to be “on the job”.
Nevertheless, training clearly reduces anxiety about technology.
While highly specific IT training may be desirable in some cases, it is not always necessary.
UK academic libraries might wish to follow the example of Pennsylvania State University in the United States, which runs a mandatory 12-hour Automation Skills Training course designed to reduce the anxiety of new employees around technology rather than provide training in specific applications.
Flexibility is the key.
In environments where relationships among employees have suffered as a result of variations in technological competence, it may be important to introduce elements of group work.
As well as offering training in those areas central to the organisation, it will be useful to stress the opportunities for personal professional development offered by services such as library discussion groups on the Internet.
Moreland (1993) advocates the use of the psychometric Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to determine the most suitable style of technology training for individuals.
Without scientific corroboration, however, not all managers or employees will be willing to accept the Myers-Briggs premise of sixteen possible personality types.
What is clear from Moreland’s article is that managers must be sensitive to different styles of learning: some staff will learn better from formal and traditional instruction, others from a more hands-on or self-starting approach.
One-to-one training may be best for those with very little technological confidence or skill.
Library managers must consider the most appropriate form of technology training for each of their staff.
In all cases, however, adequate time should be allocated for practice and reinforcement of skills (Clark and Kalin 1996:32).
The effectiveness of any training scheme may be assessed through oral feedback, group conversation or questionnaires; managers should also monitor the employees’ job behaviour level before and after training.
Conclusion Rather than worrying excessively about the definition of stress, managers must be aware that UK libraries are undergoing increasingly rapid technological change and that this change will have consequences at every level of an organisation, all of which must be managed.
Just as the symptoms of technostress reach beyond the individual and extend to the organisation as a whole, so the solutions managers must adopt will range from addressing technical and health issues to being prepared to review job descriptions and roles.
If the professional literature is any guide, solutions such as stress management may become more common in the treatment of technostress, especially as managers realise the potentially enormous losses to an organisation in terms of lost working hours resulting from stress-related absenteeism.
Specific remedies for technostress are now being developed, however, which seem to offer more quantifiable results.
Technology-based training, for example, is still probably the most useful way of making employees more comfortable with new technology and more aware of its dangers.
Copyright Stephen Harper 1999.
References Atherley, Rosemary, “Hidden Resources”, Scottish Libraries 10 (5) 59, September/October 1996, 19-21.
Bartlett, V., “Technostress and Librarians”, Library Administration and Management 9(4) Fall 1995, 226-30.
Brod, Craig, Technostress: the Human Cost of the Computer Revolution (Reading, Mass.
: Addison-Wesley, 1984).
Clark, Katie and Sally Kalin, “Technostressed Out?
: How To Cope in the Digital Age”, Library Journal 121 (13) August 1996, 30-32.
Coghill, Roger, Electro Pollution: How to protect yourself against it.
Wellingborough: Thorsons, 1990.
Etkin, C., “Creating a core knowledge for electronic reference services”, Tennessee Librarian 48 (1), Winter, 1995-96, 16-28.
Fisher, D., “Technostress and the librarian: a critical discussion”, Education Libraries Journal 39 (2), Summer 1996, 9-14.
Goss, David, Principles of Human Resource Management.
London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Graham and Bennett, Human Resources Management.
7th ed.
London: Pitman, 1974.
Jones, Bronwen and Mel Sprague, “Enabling staff to learn IT skills”, Library Association Record 101 (2), February 1999, 97-98.
Kupersmith, John, “Technostress and the reference librarian”, Reference Services Review 20 (2), 1992, 7-14.
Lang, Susan S., “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Protection”, Computers in Libraries 15 (2), February 1995, 10-12.
Moreland, Virginia, “Technostress and Personality Type”, Online 17 (4), July 1993, 59-62.
Patmore, Angela, “Stress is no illness”, Living Marxism 116, December/January 1998-99. www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM116/LM116_Stress.html.
Rosen, George, “Some Origins of Social Psychiatry: Social Stress and Mental Disease from the Eighteenth Century to the Present”, in Rosen ed., Madness in Society.
London: Routledge, 1968, pp.172-94.
Staufer, Michael, “Technological change and the older employee: implications for introduction and training”, Behaviour and Information Technology 11 (1), 1992, 46-52.
Winstead, Elizabeth B., “Staff Reactions to Automation”, Computers in Libraries 14(4), April 1994, 18-21.
Author Details   Stephen Harper University of Glasgow sharp001@udcf.gla.ac.uk http://www.gla.ac.uk Article Title: “Managing Technostress in UK Libraries: A Realistic Guide” Author: Stephen Harper Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/technostress/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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SGML, XML and Databases Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SGML, XML and Databases Buzz data software java html database xml browser schema repositories sgml dtd hypertext cd-rom rdbms standards Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Emmott reports on a one day meeting in London It was clear from the crowd gathered in the reception area of the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre that SGML’s appeal is far reaching.
From grey suits to combat trousers, the first of the day’s 180 attendees represented at a glance the diversity of domains into which SGML extends.
The conversation evident before the opening talk confirmed the cooperative spirit underlying the phenomenal growth of SGML’s prodigies HTML and XML.
That this was happening now, amid academic and commercial circles, indicated the meeting’s true agenda XML.
For the W3C, XML is a replacement for SGML.
It uses angle-bracketed tags as popularised by HTML but allows the author to create their own tags.
Content can be labelled as the author sees fit rather than as constrained by the tags available.
By dictating how each tag is to be used (through the DTD), a web browser or any other piece of software equipped to interpret XML will manipulate the content as the author intended.
Moreover, it is possible for the author to be a machine.
The day’s six talkswere split into a morning of the theoretical and descriptive followed by an afternoon of case studies.
While a steady stream of London’s traffic victims filed to their seats, the SGML UK Chapter began another well organised though relaxed event.
John Chelsom from CSW Informatics opened with An Overview of SGML/ XML and Databases.
Although SGML structures content into documents, databases are required to manage their build, storage and generation.
Crucially, this production fits within an overall workflow “the wider context”.
It is here that XML stands out from SGML like HTML did before it.
XML is flexible, portable and accessible to newcomers thereby creating the wider context.
And XML doesn’t suffer one of HTML’s primary limitations, the ‘page horizon’.
With HTML we talk and operate in units of one or more pages whilst XML allows us to talk and operate in units of any size from one character to entire collections.
Although this is more complex to manage hence databases XML reveals the document as just one way to gather content together as Alex Brown from Griffin-Brown Digital Publishing Ltd revealed.
Given that XML can work in terms of fragments of content, Alex revealed in Using Databases in the SGML/ XML Production Lifecycle that the databases required must be more flexible than traditional RDBMS.
Instead, OODBMS are required (a fact supported by at least one vendor of such databases exhibiting during the breaks).
The model presented placed XML at the centre of the process a repository of fragments.
From it documents are produced: a paper document, an on-screen presentation, a web-site, a CD-ROM, etc.
That the document is no longer the absolute container for content as dictated by the wordprocessor or the spreadsheet emerged as a central theme for the day.
The power of the database to enable its content to be reshaped is now as valid for papers and articles as it is for invoices and inventories.
But Alex called for caution.
XML promises many uses whether ideally suited to them or not.
Specifically, XML isn’t designed for encoding data.
Its designers have reverse engineered its suitability.
“XML is just one solution” when dealing with fragments of content.
For Daniel Rivers-Moore of Rivcom, this isn’t a concern.
XML is a simple, powerful and easy to implement ‘version’ of SGML, well suited to encoding content.
With the strengths of HTML but non of its weaknesses, XML opens up the possibility for structured information management on the WWW.
In XML, Schemas and Industrial Data, Daniel’s concern was that language by itself isn’t enough for communication: shared schemas are also required (i.e., shared by both sender and receiver).
For a document-centric view of the world, the DTD is sufficient.
But XML offers alternatives to the document-centric view, including application to application contact e.g., passing data from one database to another.
Daniel argued that with a sufficient schema, XML is suitable for encoding data.
Daniel demonstrated a schema that enabled an XML file to be used as a miniature address book.
His view is supported by activity at the W3C particularly DCD lifting XML to the status of “lingua franca”.
The afternoon’s talks took the audience through three case studies that in many ways teased out the issues raised during the morning: * Philip Ward (Technical Support Operations, Ford of Europe) Technical Information Publishing in a Distributed Enterprise revealed how he and his team were adapting to the documentation needs of a multi-national organisation by offering solutions that change the way the organisation operates.
Document production exists within a wider context that is too complex for any one piece of software.
Instead, a localised solution is required using widely available tools.
Primary technology: XML, databases, Java, and CORBA.
* Tony Swithenby (Infrastructures for Information): Information Delivery Using SGML, XML and Databases showed that XML could be used to bind disparate teams within an organisation.
A suite of applications was shown to share data through a single XML file.
Using a scaled model of a shop-floor robot, Tony demonstrated how team members could share data and effect updates to the robot’s movements.
Primary technology: XML.
* Tom Catteau (SGML Technologies Group) :SGML and Database Technology for the European Union’s Budget.
The EU’s budget is published in 11 languages 3 times a year.
With multiple authors and translators this presents a tricky version control problem.
By operating on selective parts of the document, multiple versions could be generated.
Primary technology: SGML and databases.
By the end of the day there appeared to be three identifiable groups in the audience those who’d been involved with SGML for many years; those who work with databases; and those who’d come into contact with one or both via HTML and/ or XML.
Whilst the vocal part of the audience appeared to be primarily concerned with SGML, it appeared that for many the speakers had presented XML as a way forward something to be taken away and applied.
References 1.
Extensible Markup Language (XMLTM)http://www.w3.org/XML/ 2.
SGML UK Home Page http://www.sgml.org.uk/ 3.
Some Background on SGML for the World-Wide Web http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/drafts/html-essay.html 4.
The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee-Bio.html/1996/ppf.html 5.
W3C Data Formats http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-rdfarch 6.
Zooleika: sgml uk conference report http://www.zooleika.org.uk/tech/sgml/sgml_uk.htm Abbreviations DCD Document Content Definition DTD Document Type Definition HTML Hypertext Markup Language OODBMS Object-oriented Database Management System RDBMS Relational Database Management System SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language WWW World-wide Web XML Extensible Markup Language Author Details Stephen Emmott Web Editor Press & Public Relations Office rm 4.14, Waterloo Bridge House 57 Waterloo Road, London SE1 8WA http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ tel: +44 (0) 171 872 3342; fax: +44 (0) 171 872 0214 .gamut Web Editors’ forum: http://www.gold.ac.uk/gamut/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz gif Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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Why Give It Away?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Why Give It Away?
Buzz infrastructure rae research Citation BibTex RIS David Haynes, Elizabeth Lyon and David Streatfield explore the mysteries of devolved budgeting.
A British Library funded research project at the University of Surrey Library is using a questionnaire and a number of case studies to investigate devolved budgets.
The work is being carried out in collaboration with David Haynes Associates and Information Management Associates.
A full report will be published shortly, but some interesting issues have already emerged.
What is meant by devolved budgeting?
One of the fundamental points that has arisen from the study is the varied understanding of what devolved budgeting actually means.
Bearing in mind that each institution is different, one of the early challenges was to identify some working definitions on which the research could be based.
The approach to this has been to propose a number of structural models.
These range from a scenario where there is devolution of complete responsibility for buying library materials and services from the institutional centre directly to the schools, to the model where the library itself devolves financial responsibility for the purchase of resources to schools or faculties .
The models can be viewed on the project web site: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/Library/Devbudgt.htm What drives devolved budgeting?
Directors of information services and chief librarians have always been interested in money: where it comes from, where it goes and how it has been spent.
A number of factors have strengthened the need for this sort of financial information to be more widely available, in an open and transparent manner, within organisations.
In recent years, some academic libraries have implemented a process of devolved budgeting in collaboration with academic schools and departments within their institutions.
It is possible to speculate on the driving forces behind these initiatives: a direct response to institutional funding allocation reviews; in response to national assessment procedures such as the Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA) and Research Assessment Exercises (RAE); parallel developments in increasingly competitive internal/external markets; or simply to satisfy perceived needs to improve internal budgetary mechanisms, provide accountability and ensure that library resources are allocated to appropriate cost centres in a democratic but effective manner.
The results so far indicate that the main reasons for the introduction of devolved budgeting were to establish a partnership between academic departments and libraries, to provide a transparent allocation methodology and to provide financial accountability.
Some other more questionable reasons included making life easier for the librarian, and fashion.
Not surprisingly, there were some equally valid and persuasive reasons for not introducing this form of budgeting.
The favourites were to do with institutional policy, the need to retain budgetary control at the centre, and the potential for damaging services.
How are budgets allocated?
Resource allocation methods based on FTEs with some historical precedents were common.
A formulaic approach was used frequently and comments suggested that this was an extremely complex area which is currently taxing a great number of people!
The project found that budgets for textbooks, periodicals, abstracts and indexes and electronic resources were most likely to be devolved.
The survey suggested the problem areas were multi-disciplinary resources, academic mismanagement or indifference, the arbitrary nature of allocation criteria and materials of general interest.
The case studies have confirmed that these are important issues but have also highlighted some other pitfalls.
Providing materials for self-funding courses was seen as a difficulty.
Even more complex issues arose with split funding of courses such as health sciences where some funding may come from NHS Trusts.
Electronic resources, especially the networking element of the cost, brought their own specific dilemmas.
Strategic planning The project team also investigated whether devolved budgeting was perceived to have any effect on strategic planning.
Some informative responses demonstrated both positive and negative feelings.
On the positive side devolved budgeting was seen to underpin agreed policies such as an emphasis on access rather than local holdings and was also seen to aid planning for new services.
Some negative comments suggested that devolved budgeting undermined the effectiveness of planned development of the whole collection and inhibited a strategic approach to the acquisition of electronic resources.
There were also some mixed views.
One institution reported that on the positive side devolved budgeting has demonstrated the library’s commitment to open and transparent resource allocation, while the downside is an increasingly poor fit with the hybrid print/electronic environment.
Effective liaison is the key to success During the case studies a selection of people, including academic staff, finance managers and a range of library and information personnel, were interviewed.
The case studies have all shown that an overarching element in the effectiveness of devolving budgetary responsibility is the success of the liaison between the appropriate library or information staff and the academic staff.
This is clearly a critical aspect which libraries must get right if an effective partnership is to be achieved with the schools/faculties.
The roles of subject/liaison librarians are changing from being occupied with traditional duties such as book selection and classification to more dynamic and proactive functions.
The tutor/trainer elements are rapidly developing and librarians are adopting more of a consultative approach to providing information.On the other side of the fence, being a library representative within a department has traditionally had low status.
This is changing, especially with the move towards converged services in some institutions and the increased responsibilities of the library committee.
Within a collaborative and professional working environment, mutual respect is essential.
The library staff have the opportunity to influence and promote the concept of an academic library agent, representative or working group (not an old-style committee) as the main channel for communication, negotiation, information and discussion.
This is not a new idea but simply the extension and development of an existing one to provide vital infrastructure support for the devolved budgeting process.
The importance of a detailed management accounting system has been stressed on several occasions during interviews and this also is vital in providing sound financial information to all parties.
Although the Final Report is currently being drafted, the overall picture that is emerging from the research is that devolved budgeting can be a productive way of working in partnership with academic schools/faculties but that a resilient infrastructure in terms of liaison mechanisms and accounting procedures is vital for success.
References Project web site: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/Library/Devbudgt.htm Author Details David Haynes David Haynes Associates Dr. Elizabeth Lyon Information Services, University of Surrey Email: E.Lyon@surrey.ac.uk David Streatfield David Streatfield Associates   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Concept of the Portal Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Concept of the Portal Buzz software java javascript html database portal personalisation uportal interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller gives his personal view of the portal and its varieties, both in the wild and on the drawing board.
portal [...] a term, generally synonymous with gateway, for a World Wide Web site that is or proposes to be a major starting site for users when they get connected to the Web or that users tend to visit as an anchor site.
There are general portals and specialized or niche portals.
Some major general portals include Yahoo, Excite, Netscape, Lycos, CNET, Microsoft Network, and America Online's AOL.com.
Examples of niche portals include Garden.com (for gardeners), Fool.com (for investors), and SearchNetworking.com (for network administrators).
(whatis.com)   portal [...] network service that provides access to a range of heterogeneous network services, local and remote, structured and unstructured.
Such network services might typically include resource discovery services, email access and online discussion fora.
Portals are aimed at human end-users using common Web 'standards' such as HTTP, HTML, Java and JavaScript (RDN Terminology) The portal is an increasingly common sight on the Web, and an important aspect of the evolving Architecture [1] for the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
For users who connect to the Internet via a service provider such as MSN [2], their service provider's portal is likely to be the first thing to greet them on the Web, and there is a real desire that it be sufficiently 'sticky' for the user to remain nearby, making use of content in the portal, or provided by one of its' numerous partners.
It is useful to take a moment to explore some components of a portal, using the MSN home page (on 4 December 2001) as an example.
Figure 1: the MSN portal home page, as viewed on 4 December 2001 (© Microsoft and its suppliers, 2001) According to the RDN definition of a portal, above, portals typically include resource discovery functionality.
In a portal such as MSN, this is evident in a number of ways, both through a plethora of 'Search' boxes, and via their Channels of pre-classified resources.
Figure 2: Various search options on MSN (© Microsoft and its suppliers, 2001) The "email access and online discussion fora" of the RDN definition are also well catered for in a portal such as MSN, with links out to related services such as Hotmail and MSN Messenger.
A portal such as MSN is an excellent example of the way in which content from various sources can be brought together on a single site, with users even able to personalise the information they receive to a degree.
MSN — and others like it — fail, though, to manage the degree of 'deep linking' and personalisation that we might wish to see.
Within the MyMSN personalisation options, for example, I can choose to receive weather forecasts for a city; but not for two.
I can choose to receive UK News Headlines from the Guardian (Figure 3), but then get all of the headlines in the feed, rather than being able to select certain topics of interest.
Further, the very plethora of search options (partially illustrated in Figure 2) is both a strength and a weakness; a strength as it offers users access to a wide range of material, yet a weakness as it runs the risk of overwhelming users with the number of choices, and as it demonstrates the low degree of integration between resources behind the scenes.
Figure 3: Personalising a news feed in MyMSN, and the resulting News (© Microsoft and its suppliers, 2001) Away from the commercially-financed portals such as MSN, and closer to the world of Ariadne, the current generation of portals is somewhat different.
As a rule, they concentrate far more upon resource discovery and upon gathering of information on a topic.
Good examples for this type of portal are HERO and the 24 Hour Museum.
Figure 5: The HERO Portal (© HERO, 2001) Figure 4: The 24 Hour Museum (© 24 Hour Museum, 2001) In both cases, the emphasis is upon offering a single port of call for those interested in a given topic, and in ensuring that high quality information is available to meet the needs of the user.
Neither offer options for personalisation, nor give their users email and the like.
Individual institutions, too, are beginning to build portals for their users, either based around commercial portal software such as Jasmine (now called CleverPath) [3] or, increasingly, exploring the Open Source potential of uPortal [4].
Figure 5: Demonstrator for uPortal at the University of Delaware These institutional portals seek to fulfill a range of functions, providing news feeds of interest to the institution, perhaps linking to management systems in order to track fees payments etc., and integrating to a degree with back-end databases handling timetabling, room bookings and the like in order to remind students where they need to be and when.
The missing link(s) As well as a growing emphasis upon institutional portals, which seek to offer unified access to a range of essentially local services and resources, there is also work underway to portal-ise national offerings from organisations such as the JISC.
The Resource Discovery Network (RDN), for example, is working to add access to a number of external resources [5], as well as the quality-assured resource descriptions for which they are already well known.
The DNER Architecture [1], too, concerns itself with the ways in which content from different locations might be 'surfaced' through user–focussed portals, wherever they might be.
We have, then, a number of related developments, some of which certainly have the potential to compete in the near future: freely available commercial portals such as MSN, trying to be as sticky as possible, and providing access to a range of useful proprietary services (email, etc.)
and some prescribed content (news feeds, reference material...) emerging institutional portals, principally focused upon providing access to local functions and services, but capable of pointing to external content portal-isation of nationally provided content Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and Managed Learning Environments (MLEs) Consensus remains elusive on, amongst other things, how portals relate to VLEs, and whether the focus of community portal-building effort should be institutional or national in nature.
It is also unclear whether or not portals from the educational community can really compete in any meaningful way with the likes of MSN.
If they cannot, should we not simply concern ourselves with other things?
For the user, a portal is surely only useful if it meets a real need that they have, and in a way with which they are comfortable.
As such, the portal needs to do more than any of the current offerings manage.
To facilitate this, there is need for continued work on ensuring interoperability of systems along the lines being pursued by the DNER Architecture [1], the uPortal [4] and OKI [6] initiatives, and by JISC's MLE group [7] , to name but a few.
We also need better interoperability of content, and a far better understanding of the very different things our users actually wish to do.
Some of this work has begun, but we need to move much further forward in numerous areas before we can begin to build truly useful portals.
Portals have come a long way.
How much further do we need to go in order to realise a vision in which 'the Portal' becomes the flexible working environment of choice for members of our universities and colleges; offering truly integrated means of locating and interacting with both local and remote resources from email and room timetables to chat facilities, payment functionality, authenticated access to subscription–based resources, and deep links into fully customisable content from a wealth of providers?
Is such a portal institutional, 'commercial', national, or some new hybrid?
Is this something that people even want?
References The DNER Architecture.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/.
MSN.
http://www.msn.co.uk/.
Jasmine/ CleverPath.
http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/SubSolution.asp?ID=305.
uPortal.
http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/.
RDN Subject Portals Development Project.
http://www.portal.ac.uk/.
Open Knowledge Initiative.
http://web.mit.edu/oki/.
JISC Managed Learning Environment Steering Group.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/jciel/mlesg/.
Author Details   Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/  Article Title: "The Concept of the Portal" Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/portal/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: The 7th World Wide Web Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: The 7th World Wide Web Conference Buzz data mobile software java rdf framework html database xml infrastructure metadata css browser schema sgml hypertext multimedia cache marc pics opera xpointer xlink gopher interoperability privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly is interviewed about the 7th World Wide Web Conference upon his return from Brisbane.
Australia is a long way to go for a conference.
What were you doing there?
I attended the conference in my role as UK Web Focus and the JISC representative on the World Wide Web Consortium.
Attendenance at the World Wide Web conference provides me with an opportunity to monitor the latest Web developments and keep the community informed.
What were the highlights of the conference?
In a three letter acronym RDF!
RDF, the Resource Description Framework, was the highlight of Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote talk (which, of course, is available on the web [1]) as well as being covered in a panel session and on developer’s day.
In slightly more than three letters can you describe what RDF is and why it’s important?
My colleague Rachel Heery gave a summary of RDF in Ariadne recently [2].
Metadata has been described as the missing architectural component of the Web.
We’ve got transport (HTTP), addressing (URLs) and a data format (initially HTML and now XML).
But, so far, we’ve only had a very limited mechanism for providing “data about data”.
RDF is intended to provide that infrastructure.
RDF is a framework for managing a variety of types of metadata?
That’s right.
We’re currently reaching limitations imposed by the lack of extensibility of web protocols.
PEP (Protocol Extension Protocol) is being developed to provide an extension mechanism for HTTP, just as XML provides an extensible markup language, which is not restricted to the fixed element set provided by HTML.
RDF provides a similar extensible framework for metadata.
So RDF will enable me to define my Dublin Core metadata and my MARC metadata.
I can understand how this will help with finding and managing resources.
But can RDF do anything else?
Sure.
RDF is a general metadata framework.
RDF applications which are being developed by the W3C include digitial signatures (so you have a verifiable and potentially legally-binding signature giving not only the owner of a resource but also assertions about the resource), rating schemes (based on the PICS work) and privacy applications.
RDF can also be used by various communities to develop their own application, without the need for a centralised agreement.
We are already seeing the development of a sitemapping schema which has been implemented in Mozilla, the source release of the Netscape browser.
I’ve heard the term knowledge representation used.
What does this mean and how does it relate to RDF?
The term knowledge representation has been used by Tim Berners-Lee for some time.
At present we have marked-up information stored on the Web.
Once XML becomes more widely deployed information will be marked up in a richer way.
However we still have no “knowledge” about the information.
RDF is based on a mathematical model in which relationships can be defined.
As Tim Berners-Lee described in his talk, this will enable questions such as “Is there a green car for sale for around $15,000 in Queensland” and “What was the average temperature in 1997 in Brisbane?” to be answered and not simply provide a list of resources which contain the keywords.
In issue 9 of Ariadne [3] you reported on the last WWW conference.
You stated that “The major new talking point was XML, the Extensible Markup Language.” Has XML taken off yet?
Has XML developed since last year?
There are three things to consider: (a) XML applications, (b) XML protocols and © XML tools.
Over the past year or so a number of XML applications have been developed or proposed including the Maths Markup Language (which became a W3C Recommendation in April 1998), Chemical Markup Language (CML), Channel Definition Format (CDF), etc.
These have been developed by companies such as Netscape and Microsoft which is, of course, significant.
We’ve also seen many developments to the XML protocols.
Although XML itself hasn’t changed much, we’ve seen significant changes to the hypertext linking proposals, with the XLink (previously known as XML-LINK), together with the XPointer working draft, being released in March 1998.
XLink will provide a rich form of hyperlinking, including support for external links databases and links which can replace the existing document (similar to HTML’s <A> element), be embedded in the document (like the <IMG> element) or create a new window.
XPointer aims to provide a mechanism for addressing the internal structures of XML documents However although the demonstration of an application which made use of external links databases was impressive, such new features are only likely to be widely deployed once they are incorporated by the major browser bendors.
Microsoft announced their support for XML a year ago, and provided limited support for XML with the CDF application in Internet Explorer 4.0.
Although Netscape have not been renowned for their support for SGML (to put it mildly) Mozilla does appear to support XML.
version 5 of the netscape browser is eagerly awaited.
Where does this leave backwards compatibility?.
Does the web research community care about this?
Analysis of many server log files shows that many people are still using very old browsers.
This is a question I regularly ask Web developers.
Some argue that the new generation of browsers will be so clearly superior that everyone will willingly upgrade.
This is, of course, what happened with Gopher.
Since web protocols are designed to be backwards compatible, it should be possible to introduce new tecnhologies without breaking existing browsers.
For example, cascading style sheets can be deployed without harming browsers which are not aware of style sheets.
Sadly, however, commercial pressures have forced browser vendors to release software with badly implemented features, which will cause interoperability problems.
It’s perhaps worth mentioning, however, that there are developments taking place which will help organisations which have large numbers of old PCs or would finding the upgrading of browsers a major task.
In his keynote talk James Gosling, the father of Java described Sun’s Activator technology which aims to develop a Java Virtual machine (JVM) for 486 PCs.
This should enable the functionality provided by Java applications to be accessible to 486 computers.
As an aside it’s worth mentioning that many of the ideas described in papers at the conference were implemented in Java.
Of relevance to the backwards compatibility issue was the paper on “An Extensible Rendering Engine for XML and HTML” [4] which describes how support for new XML elements could be provided by downloadable Java applets (known as Displets), rather than having to upgrade to a new version of a browser.
We should also see developments in the market place there’s potentially a vast market for web tools which will run on 486 PCs.
The next release of the Opera browser (a browser designed to run on 486 PCs), for example, will provide support for style sheets.
Dave Raggett, a W3C staff member and one of the editors of the HTML recommendation, gave a talk on mobile computing.
The Japanese appear to be leading the world in developing networked mobile computers, including mobile phones, PDAs and laptops which can access web resources.
The Dearing report, of course, mentioned the importance of portable computers for students.
Finally there is the role of intermediaries ways of providing new functionality by adding new computational elements between the client and the server.
This is often achieved by making use of a proxy.
For example support for URNs (Uniform Resources Names) could be deployed in a proxy cache until native support is provided in browsers.
A paper at the conference on “Intermediaries: New Places For Producing and Manipulating Web Content” [5] introduced the term “intermediary” and gave a number of examples.
Was there much of interest to the UK HE community at the conference?
A number of papers analysed the major search engines.
“What is a Tall Poppy Among Web Pages?” [6] used a variety of statistical techniques to reverse engineer Lycos, Infoseek, Alta Vista and Excite.
They build decision trees for the search engines based on a number of factors, such as the number of times the keyword occurs in the resource, the title, meta fields and in headings, the length of the document, etc.
They concluded that Excite had the most complex decision tree.
This was potentially a dangerous paper to publish, as the findings will no doubt be of interest to “index spammers”!
“A Technique For Measuring the Relative Size and Overlap on Public Web Search Engines” [7] also used statistical techniques to measure the coverage of the main search engines.
They concluded that AltaVista had the largest coverage (160 million resources), followed by HotBot (100 million), Exite (77 million), Excite (32 million) and Infoseek (27 million).
Based on their analysis they estimated that the static Web contained 200 million resources in November 1997.
“The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” [8] described a prototype large-scale search engine known as Google which makes use of hypertext structure to improve searching results.
The system is available at <URL: http://google.stanford.edu/>.
There were a number of papers of interest to the teaching and learning community including “Web-based Education For All: A Tool for Development Adaptive Courseware” [9] which described a toolkit known as InterBook for developing courseware and “Delivering Computer Assisted Learning Across the WWW” [10] which described the development of multimedia medical teaching applications at Aberdeen University.
Several short papers and posters also covered teaching and learning on the web.
I was particularly interested in “Gateway To Educational Resources (GEM): Metadata for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval” [11], which made use of Dublin Core metadata with educational resources.
Another paper from the UK HE community described how “Hypermedia Learning Environments Limit Access to Information” [12] Were there many papers from the UK?
As well as the one’s I’ve mentioned there were two short papers, as well as contributions to two panel sessions from Southampton University.
The Arjuna research group from the Computer Science department at Newcastle University were another group who have given papers at several WWW conferences.
Finally Dave Whittington from the Computer Science Department should be mentioned by name.
Not only did Dave run a workshop on Teaching and Learning on the Web, but his short paper on “Task-based Learning Environments in a Virtual University” [13] won a prize for the best poster.
Congratulations Dave.
Any final comments?
WWW8 will be held in Toronto (see <URL: http://www8.org/announce.html> for further details).
It would be good to see some more contributions in the conference from the UK.
The submission date for papers will probably be 1 December 1998.
I should also add that a more detailed report on the conference is available at <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/www7/> Thank you My pleasure.
References Evolvability, Tim Berners-Lee’s Keynote Talk at WWW7 http://www.w3.org/Talks/1998/0415-Evolvability/overview.htm What Is RDF?, Ariadne issue 14 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue14/what-is/ Web Focus Article, Ariadne issue 9 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/web-focus/ An Extensible Rendering Engine for XML and HTML, WWW 7 Conference http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1926/com1926.htm Intermediaries: New Places For Producing anbd Manipulating Web Content http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1895/com1895.htm What is a Tall Poppy Among Web Pages?
http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1895/com1895.htm A Technique For Measuring the Relative Size and Overlap on Public Web Search Engines http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1937/com1937.htm The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm Web-based Ediucation For All: A Tool for Development Adaptive Courseware http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1893/com1893.htm Delivering Computer Assisted Learning Across the WWW http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1876/com1876.htm Gateway To Educational Resources (GEM): Metadata for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval http://www7.conf.au/programme/posters/1897/com1897.htm Hypermedia Learning Environments Limit Access to Information http://www7.conf.au/programme/docpapers/1941/com1941.htm Task-based Learning Environments in a Virtual University http://www7.conf.au/programme/posters/1848/com1848.htm Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus, Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323943 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL: Email Newsletters Examples from Engineering Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL: Email Newsletters Examples from Engineering Buzz software html portal graphics privacy url standards Citation BibTex RIS Jim Corlett explains how email newsletters can benefit you.
The "e" revolution has brought immediacy and opportunities hitherto undreamt of to companies looking to market themselves and their products.
One often overlooked promotional avenue is the email newsletter.
IDG List Services [1] has summarised the benefits of email newsletters neatly on their Industry Standard Newsletters page: "E-mailing your message is a new and exciting direct response medium.
The advantages are numerous: Quick lead generation: E-mail has quick output and quick response for lead generation.
Selectivity: E-mail offers the same list selectivity as traditional list rental.
Media reinforcement: E-mail can be an adjunct to any media to quickly reinforce a message, product announcement, seminar date or trade show.
Cost effective: E-mail is extremely cost effective on a cost per contact basis for customer acquisition.
Higher response: Overall responses may be higher as only relevant materials will be sent which assures a more receptive audience to the offer.
Lower costs: There are no production, paper or postage costs only the cost of the E-mail server companies.
Privacy issues: Subscribers choose to receive E-mail solicitation through a positive option given upon subscribing.
Subscribers are also aware of the source of their name and are always given a choice to opt-out.
This addresses the privacy issue directly and again assures a responsive audience.
Customer dialogue: As an interactive medium, E-mail establishes a dialogue with new and present customers.
Repeated messages can create an effective brand awareness or a continued response from and conversation with the customer.
Trackable: E-mail is also a trackable medium as you can direct responders to answer through many types of response vehicles.
No postal undeliverables: Undeliverables are quickly identified and an effort is made to correct them and resend."
Email newsletters are inexpensive, and their potential to reach people is huge.
Email is a popular medium.
It is also a simple way of getting a message across.
As has been highlighted elsewhere, people don't read graphics; they read text [2].
Colin Lloyd, outgoing president of the Direct Marketing Association, was quoted as saying: "Email is an incredible tool, but its importance has been sadly overlooked.
I have found no better (or easier) way to get my ideas across to people from around the world" [3] There are other cases which back up this assertion: "Internet software developed Perseus Development Corp. has marketed itself through trade show promotion, public relations, Web banner ads and direct marketing.
But when it comes to generating immediate sales, nothing has worked as well as e-mail marketing…[which, after just 6-9 months] accounts for one-third to one-half of the company's sales leads" [4] Email newsletters not only allow companies to stay in touch with their customers, which is vital in itself, but they also have a high 'pass-along' rate.
An email newsletter will also keep a company in the forefront of people's minds.
This can be useful in a number of ways.
It can not only sway their own purchasing decisions, but also influence their recommendations to friends, colleagues and contacts.
Allied to this, it keeps people informed.
Not only is a company showing that it is still aware of its customers' continued existence, but it is also able to provide them with useful information on a regular basis (providing that the newsletter is a newsletter and not just a sales letter).
A further key factor is that email newsletters can be highly targeted.
However, people may like reading email, but Spam (unsolicited mail) is unlikely to endear a company to potential subscribers.
Opt-in or opt-out are the choices.
Opting-in means that people have to consciously agree to continue receiving a newsletter, otherwise they get no more; opting-out signifies that they must consciously request not to receive more, otherwise they will just keep coming.
Here is a sample of email newsletters from the field of engineering which illustrate many of the above points.
There are basically two types of newsletter: the company/group newsletter, and the general news-reporting newsletter (i.e.
service which reports on product releases, news stories, events, etc.
from a range of sources rather than being confined to reporting these areas in the context of a single company or group).
Company newsletters are many and varied.
Typical examples are the Porsche Newsletter [5] and Ricardo's New Engine News [6], which appears monthly and is offered in paper format or by email in Word format.
Of the more general sources, in the UK, Engineeringtalk [7], and its sister publications Manufacturingtalk [8], and Electronicstalk [9], provide product news direct to the desktop on a weekly basis.
News is summarized and individual stories can be requested and are delivered immediately by email.
Feedback is provided to those who have submitted news stories or articles.
The US-based Manufacturing.Net [10] offers a selective email newsletter that highlights the latest additions to the site.
Product releases, news stories, and tradeshow information sent out match each user's profile.
The newsletter is weekly.
A similar service from Australia, IndustrySearch [11], "Australia's leading manufacturing portal", does not offer the profile option, but does offer to put breaking news in your inbox daily.
The Manufacturing Times [12] is an example of a dual service site.
Its monthly issues covering news articles, contracts awarded and contract prospects are available both on the Web and as a monthly email newsletter.
For specific manufacturing areas, Cahners Business Information [13] is a case where a publisher of online magazines on particular engineering topics offers a free email product alert newsletter with each magazine.
Titles include: control engineering, design news, industrial maintenance and plant operation, medical device technology, metalworking digest, modern materials handling, etc.
Another example is the Surface Finishing.com [14], which not only offers an email newsletter (with HTML, AOL, and text options), but also email bulletins in other areas (jobs, supplier announcements, training and education, bookstore).
For standards, specifications and technical documentation, a good example comes from Global Engineering Documents [15].
They offer a number of separate email newsletters, apart from their main Global Engineering Journal (formerly TechSavvy Journal).
The individual sectors covered are: automotive, aerospace and aviation, electro, government and military, and telecom.
GlobalSpec.com [16]provides instant access to over 450,000 electrical, mechanical and optical components.
Its newsletter gives updates on the newest suppliers and product areas as they are added to the company's web site.
Not only commercial operations offer this type of information.
Fieldbus Online [17], part of the not-for-profit Fieldbus Foundation, offers users the ability to sign up to be kept informed of the latest fieldbus news.
Similarly, the Remanufacturing Institute [18], a US voluntary organisation, provides the Reman Bulletin, a bi-weekly newsletter.
The existence of these and other newsletters (as well as other Web resources) can be uncovered on the EEVL [19] gateway site.
References IDG List Services at http://www.idglist.com/ Pirillo, C., 1999.
Poor Richard's e-mail publishing.
Lakewood: Top Floor Publishing Marketing, 15 Feb 2001, 15 Briones, M.G., 1999.
Perseus makes connection interactive.
Marketing News, 15 May, 11-12 Porsche Newsletter at http://www.porsche.com/english/dialog/newsletter/ Ricardo's New Engine News at http://www.ricardo.com/pages/newengnews.htm Engineeringtalk at http://www.engineeringtalk.com/ Manufacturingtalk at http://www.manufacturingtalk.com/ Electronicstalk at http://www.electronicstalk.com/ The US-based Manufacturing.Net at http://www.manufacturing.net/registration/newsletter.html IndustrySearch at http://www.industrysearch.com.au/ The Manufacturing Times at http://www.manufacturingtimes.co.uk/ Cahners Business Information at http://www.cahners.com/products/thelist/ Surface Finishing.com at http://www.surfacefinishing.com/ Global Engineering Documents at http://www.global.ihs.com/news/ GlobalSpec.com at http://www.globalspec.com/ Fieldbus Online at http://www.fieldbus.org/ Remanufacturing Institute at http://www.remanufacturing.org/ EEVL gateway site at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ Author Details Jim Corlett CADE, Boots Library Nottingham Trent University E-mail: jim.corlett@ntu.ac.uk Article Title: "Email Newsletters Examples from Engineering" Author: Jim Corlett Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/eevl3/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Exploring Charging Models for Digital Cultural Heritage Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Exploring Charging Models for Digital Cultural Heritage Buzz data archives digitisation preservation cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan discuss charging models.
This article will describe the results of a study to investigate some of the underlying financial and policy assumptions being made in the move from previously analog photographic services into the realm of digital capture and delivery in cultural heritage institutions.
The study focussed upon libraries, archives, museums and galleries with particular emphasis upon investigating how marketable, cost efficient and income-stable the new digital services and resources are in comparison with previous methods.
Cultural heritage institutions in the UK were investigated, with some other European institutions included—in total, 51 institutions were surveyed and 15 were interviewed during 2002.
As far as the author is aware this is the only study to explore and report upon the pricing practice and policy for the transition to digital for a wide range of cultural and heritage organisations.
The Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS)(1) was invited to carry out the research study on behalf of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation(2).
Through interviews and comparative modelling of costs and fees charged, it was possible to see the differences in practice for analog versus digital formats.
From this investigation the questions of why these should be different and what drives the pricing policy can be answered.
This article will present those results.
Cultural institutions which hold valuable and unique/rare artefacts have been creating surrogate representations of these for centuries.
Since the development of photo-reproduction methods, these institutions have made available a whole range of secondary images for many purposes: for scholarship, teaching, public enjoyment, publication, etc.
Most large libraries, museums and galleries promote reproductions of their own images as mass consumer goods such as postcards or posters.
Many institutions also offer on-demand services to create and supply very high quality photographs for scholarship and publication.
With the development of top-of-the-range digital cameras and scanners, digital reproductions which rival in quality even the best of photographic images can now be supplied.
So many cultural and heritage institutions are now turning to digital capture for some or all of their services.
Throughout this article, the photographic reproductions are referred to as ‘analog’ and are compared with the newer ‘digital’ formats.
The study also only dealt with cultural and heritage artefacts with significant image content, so contemporary text based formats (such as printed books and journals) were excluded from the focus of the work.
This article will show that: The most powerful deciding factor for price was the perceived market value of the item (as defined by what similar organisations are charging) rather than the actual cost of creation and provision.
Digital is considered a cheaper product to create and distribute than analog, because of the low consumable costs in creating multiple copies.
None of the interviewed institutions were fully recovering the cost of creation, management, storage and service provision solely from the sale of the digital item itself.
Only those institutions that accounted for the revenue raised from the sale of commercial rights to use the materials as a part of their operation showed an actual surplus or profit.
All organisations surveyed placed their duty to provide low cost access to materials to the public above the need to make a profit from those materials.
The provision of services is driven by the public's desire to have access to the unique, rare and valuable collections available in European cultural and heritage institutions.
No institution was able to quantify accurately the cost of digital preservation and thus consider mechanisms to sustain the service in the sale price of the digital item.
The full report of this study is available at http://heds.herts.ac.uk/mellon/charging_models.html Method The method was firstly to use an email and web survey to identify and record information about services delivered digitally throughout the cultural heritage sector.
HEDS then investigated these services to find the cost and pricing information that was publicly available.
A number of institutions were then approached for a more detailed structured interview.
This looked at how they came to their pricing policy and what their internal costs were in relation to the prices at which services were offered.
The following numbers and types of institutions were surveyed and interviewed: 51 institutions were surveyed in total – of these 9 were surveyed through the Internet only.
15 institutions were interviewed in detail (4 were from mainland Europe).
The breakdown of institutions: Type of Institution Surveyed (excluding interviews) Interviewed University Library 16 3 Public Library 6 3 National Library 2 4 Museum and Gallery 7 5 Picture Library 1 0 County Council or Archive 4 0 Survey findings The results from the 51 institutions give some indication of the overall maturity of the market for the sale of analog and digital items in the heritage sector.
It also shows the state of the technical provision and integration of the business process with wider institutional goals.
Obviously many services offer multiple methods of payment.
Payment options explored   Number of institutions Percentage Payment in advance 36 71% Payment on delivery 8 16% E-commerce 5 10% Credit card 16 31% Cheque/bank transfer 24 47% Invoice 18 35% Cash 15 29% Other 2 4% There are 20 institutions (39%) that do not state anywhere in their literature, on the Internet, via their price list or by any other means what payment methods are acceptable.
This demonstrates an interesting lack of basic information to their user base.
It is not possible to draw many conclusions from this negative result, apart from to state that public and national libraries are proportionately better at informing their users of the payment methods than the other sectors.
Those that accept e-commerce as a mechanism of payment may again indicate a level of sophistication and the lead demonstrated by national libraries and museums in providing e-commerce does appear to be an indicator of market sophistication and possible future trends.
Further measures of sophistication of the service level were also made in terms of how the consumer could select the items they wanted and also what the turnaround time offered to the consumer was.
74.5% of services required the consumer to select either from the library catalogue or from knowledge of the collection.
25.5% of services offered the consumer a thumbnail or other Web view of the item in the collection to enable selection of the item.
72.5% of services had a website offering the service in some manner.
The average turnaround time from order to delivery offered to the consumer in was 13 working days.
However, 47% of the services surveyed did not offer any guidance on the turnaround time at all.
Cost study findings Cost information was gathered from the survey.
This was obtained by reducing the price offered to the non-commercial client to its core value by filtering out delivery charges, format costs and taxes for instance.
The following results were found: The average price of an analog item = £18.57 (from 48 responses) The average price of a digital item = £17.09 (from 42 responses) The average price differential = -10.51% (from 40 direct comparisons possible digital is cheaper than analog) Digital is ~10% cheaper than the comparable analog item, based on the price offered the consumer.
The ranging of the prices for digital and analog are shown in Figure 1.
It is worth noting that 15 of the 40 responses show a 0% difference in price.
Therefore in 37.5% of comparable cases, the consumer was offered a choice of delivery medium without having to consider the economic ramifications of that choice.
Figure 2 shows the range of price differentials between analog and digital.
In 82.5% of cases digital is either the same price or cheaper for the consumer than the analog equivalent.
Results and Conclusions The Business Case Many institutions felt that they were being pushed into massive changes without the systems to support them being properly considered.
Very few institutions seemed to have a full appreciation of overall institutional strategies for the move to digital, with less than 30% of the institutions appearing to have done detailed planning or implemented the significant organisational change required for the move to digital delivery and access.
The maturity of business practice in the interviewed institutions seemed to divide neatly along the lines of the national libraries, museums and galleries having the clear lead, with public libraries and university libraries just starting to significantly develop their practices in this area.
There is however a marked lack of clear commercially led business planning and control in most institutions surveyed.
This is not to suggest they are badly managed, but that the financial exploitation of the medium is not the foremost priority.
The statistical results of the survey indicates a definite pricing trend, which suggests that digital items will continue to become cheaper for the consumer to purchase than the analog equivalent.
There are several reasons suggested by this study for this: The institutions are deliberately trying to encourage the consumer to purchase digital rather than analog.
This may be because the cost of creation (although not necessarily quantified) is perceived as being cheaper for digital than for analog.
The cost of making a copy for delivery of a digital item is distinctly cheaper to the institution than the consumable costs involved in delivering analog items.
Smaller institutions are entering the market for the first time because the option to create surrogates via digital means has become viable due to reducing equipment costs at the entry level.
They can respond to consumer demand for the first time at lower cost.
Digitisation projects and external funding for digitisation are leading to a body of digital images being available for the first time, which can then be exploited with almost no additional outlay.
For analog items every copy means a consumable outlay.
The institutions are not yet passing on the cost of data storage or digital preservation as these are not yet understood well enough to become part of the financial accounting chain.
The Web Case The fact that 72.5% of the surveyed institutions had a website offering the service in some manner and that 25.5% are showing thumbnail views to aid consumer selection is an indication of the growing confidence in the Internet and digital means of delivering services.
This seems bound to expand and to mature with better information for the consumer available online to aid their purchase decisions and possibly more e-commerce to speed the sale of items.
Indeed the provision of images on the Web does not seem to reduce the potential income of those interviewed, but has been beneficial to the sale of rights to use and to the user base in promoting the cultural collections of the institution.
The results clearly suggest that digital provides a better platform to promote the collection to a wider national and international audience than analog.
Most institutions interviewed planned to increase the number of thumbnail or screen sized images available at no cost to the user.
Co-operative strategies between institutions was also promoted as a way forward.
All were concerned to retain the rights to the high quality, high resolution images and to assert their rights in any items available on the Internet.
Amongst the clearest conclusions it is possible to draw from this study is that for a service unit to operate at a surplus they have to account for the sale of rights as part of their operation.
Very few of the institutions interviewed made more money from the sale of the medium, whether analog or digital, than it cost in creation, management or service provision.
The only apparently profitable part of the transaction was the sale of the right to use the material in a commercial publication.
All institutions sold rights, but only a few allowed that revenue to be directly linked to the actual service provision of creating, managing and delivering the media to the consumer.
This suggests that, at least in financial terms, the message is more valuable than the medium.
The full report of this study is available at http://heds.herts.ac.uk/mellon/charging_models.html About HEDS The Higher Education Digitisation Service is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and run by the University of Hertfordshire.
HEDS was initially established in September 1996 as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), and following a successful period as a project, HEDS became a JISC Service in August 1998.
The Service provides advice, consultancy and a complete production service for digitisation and digital library development.
HEDS serves not only the education sector, but also provides services to public libraries, museums, archives and other non-profit making organisations.
See http://heds.herts.ac.uk for more information.
References (1) http://heds.herts.ac.uk (2) http://www.mellon.org Author Details Simon Tanner is Senior Consultant for HEDS at the University of Hertfordshire.
Marilyn Deegan is Director of the project 'Forced Migration Online' at Oxford University.
Simon and Marilyn are co-authors of the successful book, Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age which was recently reviewed in D-Lib Magazine (see http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/04bookreview.html).
Article Title: "Exploring Charging Models for Digital Library Cultural Heritage" Author: Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/tanner/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: Update of a Survey of the Numbers of UK University Web Servers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: Update of a Survey of the Numbers of UK University Web Servers Buzz data software database url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly updates a survey of the numbers of UK university Web servers.
How many Web servers are there in use within the UK higher education community?
What is the profile of server usage within the community do most institutions take a distributed approach, running many servers, or is a centralised approach more popular?
A WebWatch survey was published in June 2000 [1] which aimed to provide answers to these questions.
The survey has been repeated recently in order to see if there has been any significant changes.
Using Netcraft's Web-Based Service Netcraft [2] is a company based in Bath which carries out surveys of Web server software.
The Netcraft survey is very comprehensive, with over 36 million sites having been polled.
Netcraft publish monthly reports on their surveys [3].
Netcraft also provide an interface which enables details of the Web server used at a site to be obtained.
The service also provides a search facility which can be used to list the Web servers used within a domain (or part of a domain).
This facility can be used to, for example, list the Web servers which have .microsoft in the domain name.
The Netcraft interface is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Netcraft interface This service has been used to analyse Web servers used in UK Universities.
The results are provided in Appendix 1 of this article.
Why Carry This Survey?
The aim of the initial survey was to profile the server usage within the UK HE community.
Knowledge of the server usage within the community has a number of possible benefits: for example, knowledge of server profiles will help developers of robot software.
The survey has been repeated in order to detect interesting trends: are we, for example, seeing a growth in the numbers of servers due to use of personal Web servers and desktop computers?
Or are we seeing a reduction in the numbers, due to institutions taking a more centralised approach to use of Web servers?
Caveats A number of caveats to this survey should be noted: Web servers which are not publicly available, such as Intranets, will not be reported.
Duplicate names for Web servers may be included in the reports.
The report does not differentiate between real and virtual servers.
The survey is reliant on the quality of the data obtained from Netcraft.
Summary of Findings The total number of Web servers found on 1 May 2000 was 3,986.
Excluding institutions for which Netcraft reported 0 Web servers, an average of 19.4 servers per institution was found.
When the survey was repeated on 5 June 2000 the total number of Web servers had reduced to 3,773, with an average of 24.2 servers per institution.
For the most recent survey the total number of Web servers had increased to 4,571, with an average of 28.6 servers per institution.
A histogram of the results is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Histogram of Results As can be seen, most institutions have a small number of publicly-accessible Web servers, with 73 institutions running between 1 and 9 servers (79 in May 2000) and only 11 running more than 100 (9 in May 2000).
Discussion There has not been a major change in the profile in the numbers of Web servers used across the community.
We have seen a increase, small in many cases, although there have been a number of substantial jumps (e.g.
Stirling with a growth from 26 to 87 and Strathclyde from 46 to 110).
After the previous survey was published there was speculation that we would shortly be seeing a substantial jump, as broadband networks became available, which would allow home computers to be "always on", allowing users to run Web servers from home.
There was an exception that this change, which would be accompanied by enhanced personal Web server tools, would influence the profile of server usage within institutions (with the accompanying challenges of management, security, etc.)
However this change has not happened, and we are still awaiting the widespread deployment of broadband networks.
We also do not appear to be seeing significant changes in institutions moving from a small number of centrally managed servers to a distributed environment or, alternatively, from a distributed environment to a centrally managed one.
References A Survey Of Numbers of UK University Web Servers, Ariadne issue 24, June 2000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/web-watch/ Netcraft, http://www.netcraft.com/ Web Server Survey, Netcraft http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ Appendix 1: Survey Results The Netcraft service was used to count the number of web servers used by UK Universities.
The survey was initially carried out on 1 May 2000 and repeated on 5 June 2000.
The data given below was obtained on 11 March 2002.
The following table contains details of the survey.
Column 1 gives the name of the institution and a link to the institutional Web server.
Column 2 gives the number of Web servers found within the university's domain.
Note the following limitations in the survey: Domain Name Variants The survey will not detect unusual domain names variants used within an institution: e.g.
a link from www.lse-maths.ac.uk will be included in the numbers of servers in the domain lse.ac.uk.
Short and Link Domain Names Institutions which make use of a long and short form of their domain name (e.g.
www.bham.ac.uk and www.birmingham.ac.uk) will have misleading results.
IP Numbers Servers which use an IP number rather than a domain name will not be included.
Netcraft Limitations The database used by the Netcraft service may be incomplete.
Table 1: Numbers of Web Servers In UK HEIs Institution No.
of Servers 1 May 2000 No.
of Servers 5 June 2000 No.
of Servers 12 March 2002 Current No.
of Servers Aberdeen 26 24 23 Try it Abertay 7 6 17 Try it Aberystwyth 8 9 15 Try it Anglia Polytechnic University 43 41 35 Try it Aston 22 18 35 Try it Bangor 19 20 35 Try it Bath Spa 1 1 2 Try it Bath 12 9 16 Try it Belfast, The Queen's University of 28 33 50 Try it Birkbeck 13 12 10 Try it Birmingham NOTE: Used <www.bham.ac.uk> and not <www.birmingham.ac.uk> 66 64 122 Try it Bolton Institute of Higher Education 21 17 20 Try it Bournemouth University 15 15 22 Try it Bradford 47 47 39 Try it Bretton College 1 1 1 Try it Brighton 33 38 20 Try it Bristol 54 48 40 Try it Brunel 13 8 8 Try it Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College 1 1 1 Try it Cambridge 338 318 369 Try it Canterbury Christ Church 1 1 1 Try it Cardiff NOTE Used <www.cardiff.ac.uk> and not <www.cf.ac.uk> (which has 9 sites) 2 1 2 Try it Cardiff, University of Wales Institute (UWIC) 5 5 5 Try it Central England, University of (UCE) 13 12 20 Try it Central Lancashire 3 2 4 Try it Central School of Speech and Drama 1 1 1 Try it Cheltenham and Gloucester College of HE 3 3 5 Try it Chester College Used .chester to avoid confusion with Manchester and Chichester 4 4 2 Try it Chichester College 2 2 2 Try it City 37 32 29 Try it College of Guidance Studies 1 0 1 Try it Coventry Not known 27 25 Try it Cranfield 21 21 20 Try it Dartington College of Arts 1 1 1 Try it De Montfort (DMU) 61 57 61 Try it Derby 3 3 8 Try it Dundee 32 28 35 Try it Durham 2 2 1 Try it East Anglia, University of (UEA) 20 20 28 Try it East London 10 9 12 Try it Edge Hill 5 5 5 Try it Edinburgh Used .ed.ac.uk to differentiate from Bized and RCSED 265 259 243 Try it Essex 31 30 25 Try it Exeter Used .ex.ac.uk to differentiate from essex 1 12 14 Try it Falmouth 1 1 2 Try it Glamorgan 14 13 8 Try it Glasgow Caledonian University 22 22 29 Try it Glasgow School of Art 2 2 3 Try it Glasgow 182 174 186 Try it Goldsmiths College NOTE <www.goldsmiths.ac.uk> and not <www.gold.ac.uk> (which has 17 sites) 5 4 3 Try it Greenwich 15 13 21 Try it Harper Adams 1 1 1 Try it Heriot-Watt 35 33 33 Try it Hertfordshire 25 23 15 Try it Huddersfield 3 2 8 Try it Hull 43 42 42 Try it Imperial Used .ic.ac.uk and not ic.ac.uk to avoid confusion with uwic.ac.uk in March 2002 survey 155 146 189 Try it Institute of Education 4 5 5 Try it Keele 10 10 11 Try it Kent 15 15 21 Try it Kent Institute of Art and Design 2 1 1 Try it King Alfred's College, Winchester 5 4 4 Try it King's College London (KCL) 33 32 35 Try it Kingston 3 3 5 Try it Lampeter 2 2 3 Try it Lancaster Note initially used lancaster.ac.uk and not .lancs.ac.uk 3 2 1 40 Try it (Lancaster) Try it (Lancs) Leeds 106 101 132 Try it Leeds Metropolitan University (LMU) 3 2 5 Try it Leicester Used .le.ac.uk to differentiate from Newcastle, Bournville, Skelmersdale, Isle and Keele 16 16 18 Try it Lincolnshire and Humberside 2 1 1 Try it Liverpool 22 23 39 Try it Liverpool John Moore 17 15 18 Try it Liverpool Hope 1 1 1 Try it London Business School 7 5 1 Try it London Guildhall 1 1 3 Try it London Institute 8 6 8 Try it University of London (Institutes) 6 6 7 Try it London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) 19 16 23 Try it London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine 3 3 3 Try it Loughborough Note <www.lboro.ac.uk> and not <www.lut.ac.uk> 24 22 48 Try it Luton 6 8 11 Try it Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) 66 59 66 Try it Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) 43 41 35 Try it Manchester 152 142 159 Try it Manchester Business School 1 1 1 Try it Medicine, University of Wales College of 2 2 4 Try it Middlesex 46 38 46 Try it Napier 33 32 29 Try it Newcastle 49 41 65 Try it Newman 3 3 2 Try it Newport 5 5 5 Try it North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education (NEWI) 2 2 6 Try it North London (UNL) 8 8 10 Try it North Riding College Higher Education Corporation 1 1 1 Try it Northampton, University College 1 1 1 Try it Northern College of Education 10 10 13 Try it Northern School of Contemporary Dance 1 1 1 Try it University of Northumbria at Newcastle (UNN) 13 14 19 Try it Norwich School of Art and Design 1 1 1 Try it Nottingham Trent 28 22 37 Try it Nottingham 28 27 43 Try it Oxford 247 235 333 Try it Oxford Brookes 0 0 4 Try it Paisley 15 2 15 Try it Plymouth 31 28 14 Try it Portsmouth Used .port.ac.uk to differentiate from Newport 32 31 34 Try it Queen Margaret University College 1 1 2 Try it Queen Mary and Westfield College 69 62 7 Try it Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication 1 1 1 Try it Reading 89 89 78 Try it Ripon and York St John, College of 2 2 1 Try it Robert Gordon University 6 4 6 Try it Roehampton 3 2 3 Try it Rose Bruford College 1 1 1 Try it Royal Academy of Music 1 1 1 Try it Royal College of Art 16 13 16 Try it Royal College of Music 1 1 3 Try it Royal Holloway 42 41 30 Try it Royal Northern College of Music 4 4 3 Try it Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama 2 2 0 Try it Royal Veterinary College 1 1 1 Try it St Andrews 37 38 52 Try it St George's Hospital Medical School 8 5 14 Try it St Mark and St John, College of 3 3 2 Try it St Mary's College 1 1 1 Try it Salford 31 31 35 Try it School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 1 1 3 Try it Scottish Agricultural College 3 3 4 Try it Sheffield Hallam University 15 16 11 Try it Sheffield 28 25 32 Try it South Bank University 19 18 39 Try it Southampton 160 162 185 Try it Southampton Institute 3 2 4 Try it Staffordshire 5 5 11 Try it Stirling 30 26 87 ** Try it Strathclyde 49 46 110 ** Try it Sunderland 22 19 32 Try it Surrey Institute of Art and Design 2 3 3 Try it Surrey 23 21 30 Try it Sussex 15 16 16 Try it Swansea Institute of Higher Education 1 1 1 Try it Swansea 30 26 32 Try it Teeside 13 13 10 Try it Thames Valley 15 15 18 Try it Trinity and All Saints 1 1 1 Try it Trinity College of Music 1 1 1 Try it Trinity College, Carmarthen 1 1 2 Try it Ulster 25 3 29 Try it University College London 117 110 117 Try it Warwick 41 40 55 Try it Welsh College of Music and Drama 1 1 1 Try it West of England, University of (UWE) 14 11 21 Try it Westhill College 1 1 1 Try it Westminster 7 7 7 Try it Wolverhampton 67 63 65 Try it Worcester, University College 0 0 1 Try it Writtle College 1 1 1 Try it Wye College 0 0 1 Try it York 26 22 36 Try it Total 3,985 3,773 4,878   Note One institution was reported as having no Web servers (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama).
This is believed to be due to an error in the data collection.
The data for the initial survey of Coventry University was lost.
The initial surveys of Lancaster Universities used the domain name .lancaster.ac.uk.
This survey also provides findings for .lancs.ac.uk.
Table 2 gives a summary of the top 5 web sites with the largest number of web servers as reported by Netcraft.
Table 2: Top 5 UK HEI Web Sites With The Most Number of Web Servers Institution No.
of Web Servers (1 May 2000) No.
of Web Servers (5 June 2000) No.
of Web Servers (12 March 2002) Current Value Cambridge 338 318 369 Try it Oxford 247 235 333 Try it Edinburgh 248 244 243 Try it Imperial 155 149 189 Try it Glasgow 182 174 186 Try it Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Watch: Update of a Survey of the Numbers of UK University Web Servers" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Mar-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Digital Preservation Coalition Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Digital Preservation Coalition Buzz data software dissemination portal infrastructure archives digitisation preservation foi foia url research Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie reports on proposals to establish a Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK.
1.
Introduction Electronic resources form an increasingly large part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.
In addition to electronic publications, the Web, and e-commerce, there is an array of new UK initiatives and legislation, from Modernising Government to the Freedom of Information Act, which is putting an onus on public organisations to provide access to, manage and archive their information in electronic form.
In the research arena, there are also significant developments particularly in the sciences towards very large primary research data sets in electronic form e.g.
in genomics or earth sciences.
There are significant challenges associated with ensuring access and preservation of these materials into the future.
Electronic resources regardless of whether they are created initially through digitisation or are "born" digital are threatened by technological obsolescence and physical deterioration.
With content from international publishers, increasing globalisation and sharing of resources, and the involvement of a range of libraries, archives, services, and cultural heritage organisations, our ability to preserve access to these electronic resources into the future depends on the collaboration and engagement of a wide range of stakeholders.
National institutions and services, and individual local institutions increasingly need to raise awareness of digital preservation, and develop capacity, skills and expertise to administer or manage for the long-term intellectual and cultural assets they have developed in digital form.
These institutions have recognised the value of collaboration in addressing digital preservation.
Establishment of a Digital Preservation Coalition was the principal recommendation of the Warwick II digital preservation workshop held in March 1999, which had representation from a wide range of sectors, institutions, and practitioners in digital preservation.
There are a number of reasons why institutions at Warwick wished to establish a Coalition.
First, attendees recognised they needed a collaborative effort to get digital preservation on the agenda of key decision-makers and funders in terms that they will find persuasive and understand.
Secondly, projects and initiatives are proliferating and the institutions themselves felt there would be significant value in developing the umbrella organisation to help coordinate and keep a watching brief and monitoring role on their behalf.
Thirdly, despite sectoral differences it was felt that most of the technical and some organisational issues remain the same for all organisations.
There are therefore significant synergies and mutual self-interest in collaboration.
At the same time the efforts of individual institutions and sectors can be leveraged and co-ordinated through collaboration to achieve wider national benefits.
Finally, it was felt that the Digital Preservation Coalition could tap additional skills and funding and help address and contribute to development of national strategies, infrastructure and skills in digital preservation.
Concrete action towards the establishment of the Coalition is now in progress.
In June 2000 JISC established a post within the DNER and appointed Neil Beagrie to provide a focal point for digital preservation activities within JISC and the higher and further education communities, and to help establish and support the Coalition proposed at Warwick.
Although the exact remit, shape and programme for the Coalition will be resolved in consultation with proposed members, a draft outline of the Coalition and its remit and work was discussed at a digital preservation summit held in London on 16th January 2001.
2.
Outcomes from the Summit Participants representing a range of national, university and public libraries, archives, data archiving services, publishers, research councils, museums and government bodies unanimously endorsed the need for co-ordinated work on digital preservation and for the establishment of a Coalition.
Participants recognised that the subject is bigger than any one institution or sector.
It was agreed that the aim of the Coalition will be to develop a UK digital preservation agenda within an international context.
The Coalition was seen as operating on four levels: activities undertaken individually by member institutions and sectors but accomplished and co-ordinated in line with their commitment to the principles of openness and dissemination in the draft manifesto; core coalition activities of common interest and benefit to all its members supported by resources from its membership; collaborative projects and programmes which would be taken forward with project funding drawn from a variety of sources.
the creation and further development of a national digital archiving infrastructure in the UK.
Suggestions for core activities and first programmes included: awareness raising amongst key funders and stakeholders; development of a digital preservation portal incorporating the Preservation Management of Digital Materials Workbook, in collaboration with international partners; establishing a dialogue with software and hardware manufacturers; developing standards to support digital preservation; training and addressing the skills and competencies needed for digital preservation; applied practical research and development in member institutions and sharing experience; archiving of commercial e journals; web archiving; Funding and the most effective organisational model for the Coalition were discussed, and JISC and the BL agreed to continue and widen discussions with potential partners in the Coalition and to co-ordinate its establishment.
Further general information and news on the Coalition will be disseminated via the digitalpreservation email list on JISCmail (to subscribe to the list or view its message archive see the Web pages at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/digital-preservation.html ).
Wider discussion and participation on proposals for the Coalition from individuals and institutions are welcomed.
Enquiries about the Coalition can be addressed in the first instance to Neil Beagrie at: preservation@jisc.ac.uk, JISC office, King’s College London, Strand Bridge House, 138 –142 Strand, London WC2 1HH.
Author Details Neil Beagrie email preservation@jisc.ac.uk JISC office, King’s College London, Strand Bridge House, 138 –142 Strand, London WC2 1HH.
Article Title: "Towards a Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK" Author: Neil Beagrie Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/digital-preservation/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Information Ecologies: Report of the eLib Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Information Ecologies: Report of the eLib Conference Buzz framework standardisation preservation research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter reports on the eLib conference in York in December 1998, which explored a number of hybrid library, subject Gateway and copyright control issues.
Conference Themes I arrived late for this eLib conference held at the beginning of December at the Viking Moat House Hotel, York.
Because of an incident on the Bristol to York line, I therefore missed the opening keynote address by Jim Michalko.
However the main themes of the eLib conference soon became clear.
There were three main strands, reflecting both the development of the programme since 1995, and the current preoccupations of the phase three projects.
These were: preservation issues, the development of hybrid library services, subject gateways.
Funding Issues There was a strong focus on practicalities: hence also a good deal of discussion of current funding opportunities (the EU Fifth Framework Telematics Programme; the US/UK NFS/JISC collaboration; etc).
Tim Owen discussed the New Library Programme, and the Government’s funding committment, and there were also several presentations on rights issues.
The economics of electronic scholarly publishing was also discussed in a panel session, and another session explored opportunities for university libraries to benefit from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
There was also an opportunity to hear the latest information about BLRIC’s transfer of research activity and funding to the Library and Information Commission.
International Outlook A number of Phase 3 eLib projects were featured in conference sessions, (BUILDER, CEDARS, HERON, etc): however the conference focus was squarely on the issues of international significance which these projects have been funded to address, rather than the projects themselves.
There were several speakers from the US: Susan Calcari of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and the Internet Scout Project), gave a presentation on International subject gateway collaboration; Michael Freeston, Alexandria Digital Library Project, University of California (and now also of the University of Aberdeen), gave a US view of future digital library developments, as well as a view of the US digital libraries programme which has been running in parallel to eLib.
Academic Publishing One of the highlights of the conference was the closing plenary keynote address by Paul Kobulnicky, of the University of Connecticut and a Member of the SPARC Steering Committee, who explained how the international academic community could use the actual economics of serials publishing (as opposed to the established publishing community’s view of the matter) to reduce the annual costs incurred by libraries by introducing real competition into academic publishing.
Reduction of costs is one of the aspects of electronic publishing and library provision which is most easily communicable to outside interests (governments, funding bodies and taxpayers): if the academic community can show that it can do this for itself, it is more likely to be trusted to make far-reaching decisions about the disposition of scarce resources than it would be otherwise.
Rights Issues   Another interesting presentation was by Keith Hill of the New Technology Division, MCPS-PRS Alliance: the music industry has been distributing electronic information for longer than most, and his presentation made it clear that the industry is well aware of the wider implications of rights issues outside the music business.
This practical experience of licensing, distribution, standardization of delivery formats, and functioning in the market environment, is part and parcel of the development of any information market depending on electronic delivery.
The library and information services community can learn much from this experience.
Co-ordination of the Subject Gateways There was a lot of interest in the presentation (given by Dan Greenstein, Director of the AHDS) about the RDNC, the Resource Discovery Network Centre, which will coordinate the further development of the eLib subject gateways.
The presentation was general, pragmatic and cautious, but delivered with Greenstein’s characteristic elan.
This is an experimental development, which, unlike the millennium dome, cannot expect to have unlimited funds pushed in its direction.
There will be limitations in what it can undertake and achieve, but nevertheless the RDNC is clearly a major development which may set the pattern for managing subject gateways internationally for many years to come.
Impact Information Ecologies was well-attended by participants with a direct interest in electronic libraries from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as a substantial number of people (as I discovered at lunch, coffee and at dinner) who are not directly involved in such projects, but are aware that the issues being discussed are likely to impinge more and more on their own institutional strategies.
I don’t think the attendees saw a lot of York during the conference (though I managed one minute inside York Minster while we were on our way to a restaurant on the evening set aside for exploration): all bar the last of the sessions (the vale after lunch, just prior to the dash for train and plane) were very well attended, and some were standing room only.
Further Reading A more detailed report on the conference will appear soon on the eLib site, together with links to all of the available PowerPoint presentations.
Author details Philip Hunter Information Officer UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Milestone for Mailbase: Ten Years Value-Added Service to UK Higher Education Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Milestone for Mailbase: Ten Years Value-Added Service to UK Higher Education Buzz html archives copyright mailbase url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Elaine Blair discusses Mailbase services ten years on.
The Millenium will also mark the tenth anniversary of the Mailbase Service which is the premier provider of mailing lists for the UK HE community.
Mailbase began in 1989 as a pilot project to help and encourage non-technical staff to use computer networks.
It now provides the best current "push" communication technology (email messages) combined with an up-to-date and continually up-dated interface to services such as searching, archiving and owner interaction/control via the Web.
The first Mailing lists were set up in early 1990.
Mailbase now has over 2,300 lists and 165,000 members worldwide with members at every UK HEI.
While Mailbase staff provide the core service, they are helped in the day-to-day administration and management of a list by volunteer list owners.
There are over 2,000 of them providing much of the ‘front line’ support.
They are responsible for publicity, queries, dealing with failed mail and stimulating discussion.
In this article, one such list owner reflects on her experiences in running the physio list.
Mailing Lists The first group of lists on Mailbase was for librarians and they and other information professionals continue to be enthusiastic users of the service.
There are now over 100 library lists on Mailbase, which range from general news and discussion (lis-link), to specialist lists for user education (lis-infoskills) and inter-library loans (lis-ill).
As Mailbase has developed, its lists now cover a wide range of academic and support areas such as radio-studies, mining-history, web-support and teaching-on-line.
Case studies of how three particular communities (eye-pathology, allstat and history-child-family) use Mailbase can be found at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/docs/case-studies.html More than just mailing lists Mailbase is, however, more than a simple list hosting service.
It offers value-added features such as the Helpline, support for list owners, training sessions and training materials.
Mailbase relies on volunteer effort from list owners, who frequently form the first point of contact for users.
Support effort is therefore concentrated on list owners to help them administer their lists.
Regular workshops are held in Newcastle and London and all new list owners are offered additional help with their list.
This 'handholding' could involve a member of the Mailbase team co-owning a list until the new owner is confident enough to go it alone.
There is a specific list for Mailbase list owners, which is used by the Mailbase team to convey important messages.
Peer support is available through the owner-talk list, which list owners can use to discuss Mailbase and list ownership.
The Helpline staff deal with around 800 e-mail queries per month such as requests for help with using Mailbase, queries from list owners about list management and notification of e-mail address changes.
Training is also available to groups of users and Mailbase has recently offered ‘regional’ promotional seminars in Yorkshire, North West England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Midlands.
Training materials which can be used by local trainers or as self-study material are available at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/docs/support.html These include presentations and quizzes for users and list owners and practical exercises in using Mailbase.
Web service The Mailbase Web service began in 1994 and hypermailed archives were piloted on the library lists in 1995.
Hypermail is a program which converts e-mail messages into web pages and URLs in these messages into live links.
Searchable hypermailed archives of list messages are now available for all public lists.
Each public list on Mailbase has its own standard home page with links to message archives, files, joining and leaving details etc.
List owners can upload files such as conference proceedings and reports, for members to retrieve by e-mail or from the web.
By adding a collection of html files to a list, the list owner can in effect provide a mini web-site for members.
To assist list owners, Mailbase has recently developed a web interface (http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/admin) for list administration.
This interface enables list owners to, for example, add and remove members and files.
Owners of closed lists can choose to have password protected web pages for their lists.
The Mailbase Web also provides extensive documentation on Mailbase and related items such as dealing with junk mail, copyright issues and guidelines on using lists.
From the Front Line Heather Upfield writes: Physio For the past 5 years, I have been listowner of Physio, a Mailbase list for physiotherapists, which was created in 1993.
[1]Throughout its existence, physiotherapists have supported the list energetically, and it is regarded throughout the profession as a quality list and plays a major role in physiotherapy education worldwide.
As the focus within physiotherapy (along with medicine and other healthcare sciences) is directed totally at patient care whether in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, research, or out in clinical sites at all levels, improvements in healthcare are the primary concern.
The dynamic of the list blends the academics' need for the input of the clinicians (who have access to the patient population, and can advise the academics on which areas are requiring research), and the clinicians' need for the expertise of the academics, who are bringing improvements in patient care to the front line, with an immediacy not possible in traditional paper methods.
The inclusive nature of the list, supporting as it does the breadth of cultural experience, and different geographical locations of PHYSIO's list members, brings unique interpretations of Physiotherapy theory and practice to inform both teaching and research List Owners’ Workshops Twice a year, Mailbase runs Listowner Workshops at Newcastle, to inform new and potential listowners on how to run a list, using presentations and hands-on sessions.
These informative workshops are a prime source of support for listowners and give them the opportunity to learn firsthand from the Mailbase team and to discuss listowner issues and problems with them and other listowners.
The workshops ensure that all listowners have regard for the quality of the lists that they run.
Management of a list can be a permanent source of anxiety for many listowners (even the very experienced!)
How many messages will I get?
How much time will it take?
What do I do with arcane failed-mail messages?
Most listowners are not 'techies', but academics, who are fitting in listowner responsibilities around a busy working schedule.
On several occasions, as a [supposedly!]
experienced list-owner, I have been invited to give a session on 'How to get a list going' at these workshops, and I have enjoyed meeting other list-owners, from very different disciplines, and being able to share list management hints.
There is always something to learn, and these workshops provide an ideal link between Mailbase and Client.
MBUG The Mailbase User Group meets with the Mailbase team at Newcastle, two or three times a year, to discuss issues about Mailbase from the point of view of the users of the service, both listowners and members.
As an MBUG member since 1994, I have been privileged to have been a party to the growth and development of Mailbase, from behind the scenes.
I have watched staff come and go, the birth of Netskills, the development of the WWW interface, the increasing value-added Mailbase support role and, with some admiration, have seen a very small and dedicated team develop Mailbase over the years, into the service it is today.
Further information If Heather has inspired you to start a list or if you’d like to know more about Mailbase, then check out the Web site at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/ where you'll find all the information you need.
Or else contact the Mailbase team at mailbase-helpline@mailbase.ac.uk, or write to: Mailbase University Computing Service University of Newcastle NE1 7RU References [1] Upfield, H and Salter, P,(1998).
Physiotherapy in the Global Village: 5 years of PHYSIO, Physiotherapy, 84, (12), 592-597 Author Details E. Blair, Mailbase University of Newcastle Email:e.h.blair@newcastle.ac.uk H. Upfield, (list owner 'PHYSIO') Dept of Physiotherapy Queen Margaret University College Edinburgh Email: h.upfield@shore.qmced.ac.uk J. Whitaker (Chairman of the Mailbase Users Group) IT Support Manager Academic Office University of Birmingham Edgbaston Birmingham B15 2TT Email: j.s.m.whitaker@bham.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DEDICATE Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DEDICATE Buzz framework Citation BibTex RIS Nancy Fjaellbrant and Philippa Levy DEDICATE, the European Telematics project for online professional development in information literacy and user education, descended from eLib NetLinkS.
Meeting the education and training needs of users of information resources in higher education is an increasingly challenging task.
In a rich and complex networked environment, academic information services face widespread and diverse awareness-raising and also skills development needs.
The rapid pace of change, including the emergence of new, networked methods of course delivery and support, means that academic liaison and learner support staff must engage in continuous up-dating and professional development activities tailored to their responsibilities and institutional circumstances.
DEDICATE (Distance EDucation Information Courses with Access Through nEtworks) is an EU-funded project to develop a flexible model of networked professional development in information literacy and user education.
The model will be piloted at four university libraries in Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania, and at the International Centre for Information Management, Systems, Services in Torun, Poland.
The project is being led by Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, in partnership with the University of Sheffield, UK, and the Universities of Technology at Linkoeping, Sweden, and Helsinki, Finland.
The course will be based largely on a number of Web-based user education and training resources developed by the EU Telematics for Libraries Third Framework project, EDUCATE (1994-7).
The resources, called Into Info, are designed as self-paced learning materials in the selection and use of information sources in Physics, Energy and Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
They can be used for self-instruction, as a resource for formal campus-based or distance learning courses, and as rapid access tools for information sources.
Participants in the programme will draw on Into Info to enhance their own resource awareness and skills in information seeking, and will then consider how the programmes might be used within their own training initiatives, or might provide models for similar, “home grown” learning resources in other subject areas.
The DEDICATE course will offer an initial induction period followed by three core modules extending over a four-month period, covering information resources and searching in a selected subject area, methods and models of information literacy support, and project work involving planning and design of an information literacy course for a specific user group.
We anticipate that participants’ courses will combine face-to-face and Web-based learning methods.
Discussion, structured feedback and group projects offer collaborative activities.
Groups at each of the five libraries will work, both face-to-face and on-line, on a number of small scale projects and on the design of their information literacy courses.
Sheffield’s role in DEDICATE mainly involves input into curriculum design, the design of the Web site, selection and integration of conferencing facilities, and technical support for participants during the course.
For all of these, we are drawing extensively on the experience of delivering a 17-week, distance learning, on-line professional development course on networked learner support, which was offered between September 1997 and February 1998 by the Sheffield-based eLib training and awareness project, NetLinkS.
The pedagogic and technical design of the NetLinkS course was based on principles of distance and computer-supported collaborative learning, experiential learning, and constructivist approaches to Web-based instruction.
Constructivism emphasises the importance of offering learners the chance to engage in active, self-directed, authentic learning activities, and in co-operative interaction with peers and tutors.
A key concept underpinning the technical model for the NetLinkS course was support for active, collaborative and independent learning based on an integrated Web application, offering easy access to distributed facilities and resources.
Stemming from this, key features of the DEDICATE course are: a frames-based Web environment, for easy orientation and navigation within the site.
The frames interface also provides a conceptual “anchor” for participants, and helps reduce the problems of “getting lost in hyperspace” which are frequently encountered on the Web; access to conferencing facilities for group discussion and tutorial and technical support.
The main discussion facility will be Focus, a UK Web product which supports Web-based, asynchronous conferencing and e-mail messaging.
A Web-based, synchronous chat facility will also be offered as synchronous conferencing is especially suited to co-ordination of tasks between distributed group members, updating and tutorial sessions, and brainstorming; access to the Into Info programs and to a structured knowledge base, comprising annotated links to external Web documents with links to full-text recommended readings held on the DEDICATE project servers, and references to off-line documents; access to technical support in the form of links to information about using the discussion tools and other technical aspects of participating in the course, as well as e-mail links to the technical support team; easy access to all individual participants, tutors, and groups, as well as to information about them, and to work generated by them during the course.
The DEDICATE course will run from October 1998 to March 1999.
We hope that the professional development activity and creation of user education programmes at participant sites will stimulate wider-scale development of learner support initiatives within their countries, and that the DEDICATE model for networked professional development will be transferable to university library and information services throughout Europe.
The team can be contacted at: http://educate.lib.chalmers.se/DEDICATE/dedindex.html An evaluation of the NetLinkS course model can be found at: http://netways.shef.ac.uk/about/nlsdoc.htm Author Details Dr. Nancy Fjaellbrant Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden Email: nancyf@chalmers.se Phillipa Levy Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield Email: p.levy@sheffield.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Broadband TV Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Broadband TV Buzz archives video preservation multimedia cache streaming asx url standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter links to broadband streaming video resources now emerging on the Internet.
In the last issue of Ariadne I explored available streaming video on the web (Tiny TV, Ariadne issue 22, December 1999), looking at the phenomenon particularly according to the geographic and subject distribution of resources.
Things are moving very fast: by the time the article was published the version of RealPlayer (G2) had been replaced, and my written map of available resources was much narrower than the range of materials which I knew to exist.
Many more films and TV shows are available, mostly at cable modem speeds of transmission, and a number of servers appear to have stopped broadcasting, at least from the addresses which were valid and active in December 1999.
Most of what I explored was lowband: video streams arriving at rates between 8 kilobits per second, up to 60 kilobits per second.
These are services which (by and large, with occasional pauses to replenish the buffer) can be received and played adequately via a 56k modem on a computer with a greater than 100khz chip.
Some items listed in the article however, particularly the film resources, come in at up to 250 kilobits per second.
I included these because they were available resources, though not every reader of the article would be able to play the streams.
The Tiny TV article was written in November, and before it was completed I became aware of a number of servers which were distributing broadband streaming video, at speeds in excess of 300 kilobits per second, and sometimes well over 400 kilobits per second.
These were not included in the article, partly because of pressure of time, and partly due to a delay caused by some of the streams arriving on port 554, which is one which, here at least, was closed by default.
If you have a machine and a network connection capable of handling these higher rate bitstreams (ISDN, cable modem access, T3 connection, etc), but get an error message saying that the port is closed, you will have to ask your system administrator to open the port.
The quality of these transmissions is very high.
The default window size is around twice what was enjoyed in the Tiny TV experience, and the window size can often be doubled again without the image becoming unpleasant to watch.
Full screen display is just a bit too much, and your computer is not likely to handle the screen redraws necessary, unless it is top of the line.
I used a two year old 233 mhz Pentium II, which worked fine with the fastest streams, with the screen window set at 200 per cent.
For the purposes of this article, broadband is defined as anything streaming at a rate in excess of 56kbs.
The fastest available I have seen so far is 700kbs.
Everything above 56kbs is broadband, since ordinary modem users will not be able to see the streams as intended.
So 56kbs is a reasonable definition of where broadband starts.
Some items are available at various speeds from 20kbs up to 250kbs, so users interested in broadband should not neglect the lowband listing, since what you are looking for might be there.
No items listed arrive faster than 420kbs.
I’ve listed only items which seem reliable and which come up fairly fast.
Anything which is intermittent or slow I’ve omitted from the lists.
Most of what is available at these higher speeds is either commercial film and television (of a certain vintage), or music video (usually modern).
There is also some academic material of very high quality.
It doesn’t make much sense to make news programming available in broadband (not at the moment at any rate), so there isn’t much of that around.
But there is some.
Most of the material comes from a handful of servers, mostly based in the United States.
The categories used are as follows: Broadband : Europe; North America; South America; Asia; Middle East; Africa; Drama; Archive Television; Other Educational Resources; Financial Services; Religious Broadcasting; Sport; Commercial Film; Art Film; Music.
Lowband follows the same arrangement, with the addition of a ‘miscellaneous’ section.
The coverage in this article is uneven, since I don’t have unlimited amounts of time to survey available content and to check the reliability of links.
I haven’t included as many commercial films as I did in the last article, but by following up the addresses of the main listings you should be able to find these easily enough.
Where I haven’t found anything worth mentioning in a particular category, I’ve linked back to the Tiny TV article in issue 22, and/or to the Broadband/Lowband section of this article, as appropriate.
The Archive TV links from Earthstation1 have been repeated in this issue, since the directory structure of the original location has been altered, breaking the links in the Tiny TV article.
Have fun!
Broadband: Europe BBC World.
One of the highest quality .asx feeds available, at two speeds -100kbs: http://idirector.media.ibeam.com/netshow/v2/onair/BBC/BBCworld_100k.asx and also 300kbs (awesomely good picture and sound): http://idirector.media.ibeam.com/netshow/v2/onair/BBC/BBCworld_300k.asx TV3 Dublin, Ireland http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/tv3news_000209_56.asx 56kbs feed; and one at 100kbs.http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/tv3news_000209_100.asx North America Broadband on-demand clips from Fox News.
Regularly updated selection of items.
http://foxnews.com/partners/windowsmedia/index.html MSNBC live broadcast stream.http://www.msnbc.com/m/lv/default.asp?o=10&s=0&p=2 Items can be selected from the page: http://www.msnbc.com/m/lv/default.asp AmericaOne Television, broadcasting at 28kbs and 300kbs http://playlist.broadcast.com/makeasx.asp?id=108711http://playlist.broadcast.com/makeasx.asp?id=142171 Information about the channels movie content is at: http://www.americaone.com/movies/index.htm, and the TV listing is at: http://www.americaone.com/schedule/index.htm NASA streaming video, lowband and broadband (up to 300kbs), is available from: http://www.broadcast.com/events/nasa/.
At the time of writing, the mission to map the earth was running (February 2000), and a live streaming feed from the shuttle was available with three camera views in a single frame, with inline text indicating which feature of the surface was being mapped at that moment.
Audio from the shuttle was also supplied.
Nectar and ambrosia.
The streams feature items related to current NASA projects and events.
The NASA home page is at http://www.nasa.gov/ where an archive of streaming video programming can be found.
South America Checkout the Tiny TV article in issue 22 for lowband streams.
Asia Chinese TV at: http://www.wcetv.com/ie_default.htm (did not seem to be operational at time of writing, except for the ads), and http://www.cts.com.tw/nlist/netchannel.asp and http://www.foreigntv.com/allchina/index.html.
see also:http://www.foreigntv.com/foreignfilm/index.html CCTV (China Central Television) programming, at 56kbs to 100kbs : ‘Around China’ (documentary programming about China)http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/aroundchina_000207_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/aroundchina_000207_100.asx China Today: http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/cctvchinatoday_000203_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/cctvchinatoday_000203_100.asx ‘China This Week’ CCTV programming (on demand streaming, 30 minutes approx)http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/cctvthisweek_000207_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/cctvthisweek_000207_100.asx CCTV programme ‘China Business Guide ‘http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/china_businessguide_000208_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/cctvbusiness_000208_100.asx Chinese Cooking (CCTV)http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/chinesecooking_000201_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/chinesecooking_000201_100.asxplus:http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/chinesecooking_000124_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/chinesecooking_000124_100.asx China Through Foreigner’s Eyes (CCTV) http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/cctvforeignereyes_000131_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/cctvforeignereyes_000131_100.asx Sunday Topics (China): http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/sundaytopics_000124_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/sundaytopics_000124_100.asx CCTV News (30 minute on-demand summary): http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/cctvnews_000208_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/cctvnews_000204_100.asx Middle East Jordan TV news at two speeds: http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/jtvnews_000210_56.asx and http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/jtvnews_000210_100.asx Future TV, Lebanon.
http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/futuretvnews_000210_56.asxhttp://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/futuretvnews_000210_100.asx Africa Algerian TV (Canal Algerie).
Broadcasts in English.
On-demand stream, just under 10 minutes running time.http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/algerianews_000210_56.asxhttp://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/algerianews_000210_100.asx ZBC News from Zimbabwe.
On-demand stream, lasting just over 21 minutes.
Rebroadcast of the national news programme ‘News at Eight’.http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/zbcnews_000118_56.asxhttp://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/zbcnews_000118_100.asx Drama http://www.liketelevision.com/web1/movies/entertainer/ ‘The Entertainer’ starring Sir Laurence Olivier and Albert Finney.
Available in five parts only, from LikeTelevision.
Arrives at 220kbs.
The film versions of John Osborne’s first two plays are now available on the web (‘Look Back in Anger’ is available via the ‘Tiny TV’ article in Ariadne 22).
Archive Television Some episodes of the Lucy Show from the 1960’s are available from http://www.liketelevision.com.
This was the first site which I found broadcasting on port 554, at the end of November 1999.The show at: http://ltvreal.liketelevision.com:8080/ramgen/classic2/lucy1.smil features John Wayne in an episode which has the kind of structuralist purity you just don’t get in TV shows anymore.
And another, http://ltvreal.liketelevision.com:8080/ramgen/classic2/lucy2.smil, which features Sheldon Leonard.
The available materials from this site range all the way from culturally barbaric wildlife documentaries from the 1930s, entertaining low-budget serials from the same epoch and later, up to film and TV of very high quality.
Checkout the following for classic examples of tight writing for sixties sit-coms: Episodes of the Dick van Dyke show are available from LikeTelevision.com.
These arrive at 220kbs.
The show ran from 1961 to 1966. http://ltvreal.liketelevision.com:8080/ramgen/classic2/dickvd1.smil Night the Roof Fell In; http://ltvreal.liketelevision.com:8080/ramgen/classic2/dickvd2.smil Never Wave a Duck http://ltvreal.liketelevision.com:8080/ramgen/classic2/dickvd3.smil The Hustler Six episodes of the Beverley Hillbillies.
The first, ‘The Clampetts strike Oil’, is at: http://ltvreal.liketelevision.com:8080/ramgen/classic2/bevhill1.smil Other Educational Resources Checkout the Tiny TV article in issue 22, and the lowband supplement lower down this page.
Financial Services http://www.bloomberg.com/videos/broadband/wm/LiveBTV100.asx http://www.bloomberg.com/videos/broadband/wm/LiveBTV300.asx Religious Broadcasting It was disappointing not to be able to link to anything more than a test card at the Vatican in the Tiny TV article.
There is however some on-demand programming available via Foreign TV.
The 23 minute news magazine programme is called ‘Octava Dies’ (Eight Days).
When I first ran this, the Pope was opening the new underground car park near St Peter’s square and beyond.
The sort of detailed coverage difficult to find from other sources.
http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/vaticanmag_000210_56.asxhttp://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/vaticanmag_000210_100.asx Sport Checkout the lowband supplement lower down this page.
Commercial Film The Reporter Minutes: info on Hollywood and upcoming films.
Available at Cable DSL streaming rate (T1 connection): http://www.aentv.com/broadband/ram/thrminutes.ram Also try www.eonline.com for the same kind of thing.
Has a searchable multimedia gallery at: http://www.eonline.com/Multimedia/?multimedia with film clips and interviews, available at bitstream speeds of 56kbs up to 300kbs.
Trailers also available from: http://movies.eonline.com/index.html Music Programming: Billboard Minutes, available from AENTV (news and updates on the music business).
http://www.aentv.com/broadband/RAM/BBminutes.ram http://www.universalstudios.com/showcase The Smallest Show on Earth starring Peter Sellers.
A young couple inherits a rundown movie theatre.
And the eccentric staff.
Peter Sellers, is Mr Quill, the aging projectionist who likes Dewars White Label.
A:.
http://www.liketelevision.com/web1/movies/smshow/ available in four parts.
Art Film 1955 version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at: http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/lady_chatterly_300.asx see: http://www.foreigntv.com/foreignfilm/index.html for info.
Paris Documentary 1934 (just over 2 minutes in length, constructed from classic photographs by: Fred Stein 1909-1967).http://tm.intervu.net/template/smirror/frnvideo/paris_1934_300.asx Three speeds available New York Documentary 1943 (just over 2 minutes in length, constructed from classic photographs by: Fred Stein 1909-1967).http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/new_york_1943_300.asx.
Three speeds available.
Music Films in English: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page promo video for ‘Most High’.
215kbs.
Main referring page: http://realguide.real.com/broadband/http://realguide.real.com/RGI/RG.
(/broadband/).center.txt..RGI/musicnet/hurl.rxml?url=rtsp://real.launch.com/videos/208000/208996.rm Checkout the Tiny TV article in issue 22, and the lowband supplement below.
Lowband Supplement: The amount of material now available on the web seems to have quadrupled since last November.
I’ve picked out the most interesting items, given top-level links to the sites which list and serve the video streams, so that you can explore for yourself.
The list is split up intogeographic groups for standard TV news and general broadcasting.
The geographic categories are: Europe; North America; South America; Asia, and the Middle East.
The Middle East category covers (for the purposes of this article) both the familiar geographic area and the wider Arabic speaking World.
Then a listing by subject area: Drama; Archive Television; Other Educational Resources; Financial Services; Religious Broadcasting; Sport; Commercial Film; Art Film, and Music.
Europe Moscow TV, Channel TV6.
This live feed is apparently only available via a Realcom redirect the principal referring page is at http://realguide.real.com/http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.(/stations/?find=Y&format=&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&x=12&y=8).list-1.txt.st-12276.RGX/www.tele.ru/tv6.ram.
And try Channel TV6 Moscow Live: a page at: http://www.tele.ru/live.html where this streaming feed should run inline, but so far I haven’t seen it work properly.
Home page:http://www.11channel.dp.ua/real/tv.html.
Stream from: http://www.11channel.dp.ua/real/tv.ram Difficult to categorise this one geographically.
Culturally in two camps, and applying for European Union membership, so listed under ‘Europe’.
Turkish television (NTV) On-demand transmission in English (approx 15 minutes long).
Good technical quality.http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/ntvnews_000210_56.asx http://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/ntvnews_000210_100.asx Televenezia (Venice, Italy).
English dubbing of a news programme about Venice, with about 8 minutes running time.
http://www.media.globix.net/asx/foreigntv/vtvnews_000209_56.asxhttp://tm.intervu.net/smirror/frnvideo/vtvnews_000209_100.asx http://www.kypros.org/real/6pm.ram http://www.kypros.org/Real/english.ram http://www.kypros.org/Real/turkish.ram http://www.kypros.org/Real/ora.ram http://www.kypros.org/Real/prizma.ram http://www.kypros.org/Real/actualite.ram http://www.kypros.org/Real/saturday's.ram http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.
(/stations/?find=Y&format=&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&x=33&y=12).list-8.txt.st-4121.RGX/www.nirvanet.com/sat/ram/cbt-1.ram http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.
(/stations/?find=Y&format=&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&x=33&y=12).list-12.txt.st-6120.RGX/206.97.55.8:8080/ramgen/encoder/klasweb.rm http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.
(/stations/?find=Y&format=&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&x=33&y=12).list-17.txt.st-3858.RGX/www.psb.co.kr/real/ram/tv_live.ram http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.
(/stations/?find=Y&format=&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&x=33&y=12).list-15.txt.st-4441.RGX/www.oberfranken-tv.de/4archiv/filme/livestream.ram Spanish Television (RCTV).
Live video stream at 80kbs.http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.
(/stations/?find=Y&format=&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&x=33&y=12).list-18.txt.st-9948.RGX/200.30.8.12:8080/ramgen/encoder/rctvnet.rm http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.
(/stations/?find=Y&format=&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&x=33&y=12).list-20.txt.st-9752.RGX/realav.siol.net:8052/ramgen/encoder/tevepika.rm http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.
(/stations/?find=Y&format=&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&x=33&y=12).list-2.txt.st-4014.RGX/www.americasvoice.com/watchnow/live.ram http://www.broadcast.com/television/ksbt/ http://www.11channel.dp.ua/ http://realguide.real.com/RGX/RG.
(/stations/?start=41&find=Y&country=&state=&city=&language=&type=tv&format=).list-1.txt.st-11791.RGX/www.br-alpha.de North America American Internet-only TV network: http://www.streamingusa.com/ http://cnn.com/videoselect/netshow/# Internet TV http://www.itv.net.net/station/station.htm.
Eight Internet TV channels running 24 hours a day, with two broadcast rates (28.8 and 56kb per second.)
Live webcasts are available at: http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/itvlive28.asx?channel.asx http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/itvlive56.asx?channel.asx South America Checkout the Tiny TV article in issue 22 Asia Checkout the Tiny TV article in issue 22 Middle East Official TV from Saudi Arabia: http://www.saudiembassy.net/RealVDO/live.ram Lebanese Broadcasting Company, at: http://www.lbcsat.com.lb/ News broadcast (live stream) on the web (inline RealPlayer) at 8pm local time.
Oman TV, broadcasting at: http://www.oman-tv.gov.om/ Omani feed at:http://www.oman-tv.gov.om/oman-tv.ram, worldwide feed theoretically at: http://www.oman-tv.gov.om/rtsp://207.152.153.254:554/split/206.49.101.158:3030/encoder/audio.rm, but delivers a ‘bad request’ message at the time of writing.
Africa Nothing interesting found, but checkout the Broadband section on Africa for Zimbabwe TV, etc..
Drama Nothing interesting found this time around.
Checkout the Tiny TV article in issue 22 Archive Television Microsoft’s ‘Earthstation1’ (webmaster James Charles Kaelin) site broke some of my Tiny TV article links in Ariadne issue 22, by changing the file structure (dropping ‘simplenet’ from the domain name, and changing ‘kennedy’ to ‘Kennedy’, and suchlike).
This practice (I suppose) encourages links to the top level of the site rather than to individual items on pages.
Which presumes that the best advertisement for the content of your site is… your own site.
Sadly not always the case.
Earthstation1 pages are slow to load and heavy with repetitive advertising links.
Here are the items I referenced in the earlier article, fixed (for as long as they last).
This is just a sample of what you can find there, rather than a substitute for a visit.
And it is well worth visiting.
Just that the pages are annoying.
At: http://www.earthstation1.com Apollo 11: countdown to lift-off and the ascent to orbit.http://www.earthstation1.com/Apollo11Files/Apollo11Liftoff.ram Prelude to the the Apollo 11 moonwalk by Neil Armstrong, 21st July 1969:http://earthstation1.com/Apollo11Files/Apollo11MoonWalk.ram JFK’s famous television broadcast on civil rights in the USA: http://earthstation1.com/Kennedy/JFK630611CivilRightsSpeech.ram Marilyn Monroe sings ‘Happy Birthday’ to JFK: http://earthstation1.com/Kennedy/MarilynMonroe's'HappyBirthday'ToJFK1962.ram Lee Harvey Oswald explaining himself to a reporter in New Orleans: http://earthstation1.com/Kennedy/LeeHarveyOswaldNewOrleans6308.ram Out-takes from JFK’s Senate Race political broadcasts (short):http://earthstation1.com/Kennedy/JFKSenateRaceTVOuttakes1952.ram The recorded TV coverage of the Dallas assassination (several hours available): http://earthstation1.com/Kennedy/JFKTVCoverage631122a.ram Other Educational Resources The National Geographic’s Web Events Archive:http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/archive/index.html, which contains the following lectures, among many others.
Most streams are pitched between 35 and 56kbs.
Thebes of the Pharaohs.
October 21, 1998 Reigning as the Pharaonic capital of New Kingdom Egypt, the ancient city of Thebes boasts some of the most famous archaeological sites in the modern world.
Dr. Kent Weeks traced the history of Thebes and its excavations, and explored the future of its ancient past.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/98fall/av/weeksn28play.htmlhttp://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/98fall/av/weeks56.ram.
One hour and 26 minutes.
Referring page at: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/98fall/weeks.html Secrets of the Pyramids.Zahi Hawass, who serves as Egypt’s Undersecretary of State for the Giza Monuments, sheds light on one of Egypt’s most important recent archaeological finds—the discovery of a large unlooted cemetery filled with well-preserved gold-masked mummies of Roman Egyptians whose remains were entombed some 2,000 years ago.
Dr. Hawass also provides updates on ongoing restoration work at the pyramids, the excavation of the tombs of the pyramid builders, and the mysterious tomb of Osiris at Giza.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/av/egypt.ram.
One hour and ten minutes.
Referring page at: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/egypt.html.
Sound much poorer than the first lecture.
Our planet is currently home to more than 5,000 indigenous cultures rooted in history and language and attached by myth and memory to a particular place.
For Wade Davis, anthropologist, explorer, and author of The Serpent and the Rainbow and One River, the continued existence of numerous, distinct cultures is proof that there is more than one way to think about and live with the Earth.
But economic and population pressures, along with the increased globalization of culture, have threated to overwhelm these unique societies.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/av/davis.ram http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/davis.html Tuesday, December 14, 1999 5:30 p.m.
ET.
Africa in the Wild (Masters of Photography Series).
Despite the charisma and prowess of Africa’s wild dogs and swift cheetahs, the human inhabitants of southern Africa have, until recently, seen them only as competition.
Photographer Chris Johns has spent two years documenting the struggle for survival by these endangered species.
Experience the wild wonder of Africa and learn about the conflicts that rage—and solutions that may emerge—as humans compete with wildlife for habitat.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/av/johns.ram.
One hour and ten minutes running time.
Referring page: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/johns.html Inca Mummies of the Andes.
(November 10, 1999).
In 1995 high-altitude archaeologist Johan Reinhard made headlines worldwide when he discovered the frozen mummified body of a teenage Inca girl on Peru’s Mount Ampato.
In 1999, at an elevation of 22,000 feet (6,706 meters) on Argentina’s Mount Llullaillaco, Reinhard made what is perhaps an even more important find—three frozen mummies, two girls and a boy, in an unprecedented state of preservation, as well as a cache of pristine artifacts.
Buried under five feet (1.5 meters) of rock and earth, relics of an Inca sacrificial ritual appear as if they were just buried.
Begins with four minutes of empty podium (skip forward).http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/av/andes.htmlhttp://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/av/andes.ram One hour and thirty-five minutes.http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/andes.html Cyprus: Crossroads of the Mediterranean.
October 20, 1999.
Located in a strategic position in the Mediterranean Sea and rich in the copper from which it derives its name, the island of Cyprus has long been a point of contact between East and West.
In this fascinating look at a crucial thousand-year period of ancient history, Vassos Karageorghis describes the island’s role as a crossroads for ancient cultures—from the pharaonic Egyptians, with whom Cyprus had a flourishing copper trade, to the preclassical Greeks, whose citizens colonized the island in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C., to the Phoenicians, who attempted to conquer the island during their age of empire.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/av/cyprus.ramhttp://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/av/cyprus.html.
Running time: One hour and five minutes.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99fall/cyprus.html Feathered Dinosaurs: June 16, 1999 7:30 p.m.
ET In June, 1998 a startling discovery rocked the scientific world—fossils from China that all but confirmed an evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.
Philip Currie offers a provocative look at the amazing specimens that most paleontologists now regard as proof of a dinosaur-bird connection.
You’ll examine fossils of both primitive flying birds and flightless feathered dinosaurs and learn how their anatomy supports the theory that flight evolved among ground dwellers rather than denizens of the trees.
.
This discovery was the cover story of the July 1998 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99spring/av/currier.ramhttp://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99spring/av/currien.html.
One hour and twenty-seven minutes.http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/99spring/currie.html Wildlife channel at: http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/wildlife56.asx?channel.asx http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/wildlife28.asx?channel.asx Brain Candy Channel at: http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/braincandy56.asx?channel.asx http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/braincandy28.asx?channel.asx Financial Services Nothing interesting found this time around.
Checkout the Tiny TV article in issue 22 Religious Broadcasting Nothing interesting found in lowband.
Checkout the Tiny TV article in issue 22, or the Broadband section of this article.
Sport Xtreme Sports Channel from www.itv.net.http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/extremesports56.asx?channel.asx http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/extremesports28.asx?channel.asx Commercial Film http://www.nichetv.com/classichorror/index.html Art Film Flicks and Festivals Channel (Art Films) http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/flicks56.asx?channel.asx http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/flicks28.asx?channel.asx Animation Channel: http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/animation28.asx?channel.asx http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/animation56.asx?channel.asx Music.
Not everyone’s cup of tea.
The Residents perform ‘Wormwood’.
The Quality of the video and sound is not wonderfully high at the lower speeds, but high enough to give the flavour of the Residents’ extraordinary shows.
Eyeball friendly.
Home page at: http://www.kah-bonn.de/ei/mmf99/theresidents.htm http://www.kah-bonn.de/tv/media/residents45kb.ram http://www.kah-bonn.de/tv/media/residents20kb.ram http://www.kah-bonn.de/tv/media/residents-g2.ram ‘Brian Eno live im Internet’ http://www.kah-bonn.de/1/27/live.htm Donnerstag, 27.
August 1998, 2h 35 min: A High-Altitude-Food-Performance with Incidential Music by Slop Shop and Brian Eno.
Also features Holger Czukay.
Excellent Stereo image.http://www.kah-bonn.de/tv/media/BrianEnoTeil1.ram Samstag, 29.
August 1998, 2h: Public Talk Brian Eno: Conversation with Umbrella, Tape Recorder, Record Player, Overhead-Projector and Michael Engelbrecht.http://www.kah-bonn.de/tv/media/BrianEnoTeil2.ram Beastie Boys ‘Alive’.http://www.capitolbroadcasts.com/musicvideos-nov/beastieboys_g2dialup.ram (80kbs) Music and Fashion http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/music56.asx?channel.asx http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/music28.asx?channel.asx Flights of Fantasy Channel (28.8kbs only) http://www.itv.net/cgi-bin/pull-new.cgi/flightsoffantasy28.asx?channel.asx Fashion programming (?)
at: http://www.foreigntv.com/worldlifestyle/index.html PopCast Channel at: http://www.popcast.com Miscellaneous St Moritz TV at: http://www.foreigntv.com/stmoritz/index.html http://www.nichetv.com/ NicheTV com.
World News Index (WorldNewsTV.com) http://www.foreigntv.com/worldnews/index.html http://www.broadcast.com/video/bitscreen.html Need to register for chalkboard.broadcast.com http://chalkboard.broadcast.com/video/registration/login.asp?URL=%2Findex%2Easp http://www.broadcast.com/video/centralpark/ Author Details Philip Hunter Information Officer and Editor of Ariadne UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Broadband TV" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/broadband/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The ExamNet Project at De Montfort University Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The ExamNet Project at De Montfort University Buzz data software api html database archives zip metadata copyright cataloguing windows latex jpeg perl ocr tiff adobe e-learning ftp authentication url standards Citation BibTex RIS David James Houghton introduces the ExamNet Project, which offers access to past De Montfort University examination papers in electronic form.
Abstract The ExamNet project offers access to past De Montfort University examination papers in electronic form.
Exam papers from the past three semesters have been scanned and indexed and are available to all students, members of staff and researchers within De Montfort University via the World Wide Web.
This article discusses why and how the system was implemented and offers guidelines for library and information systems developers at other educational institutions who may be considering setting up a similar service.
Motivation The key motiivating factor for setting up an electronic exam system was to: reduce the time spend by librarians dealing with exam paper queries avoid the loss or damage of exam papers improve access to the exam papers provide powerful easy to use search facilities Previous to the ExamNet project being set up, the library received paper versions of past examination papers from the Exam Office as a continuous stream as opposed to a bulk transaction and then processed them.
This process involved cataloguing and indexing the papers on a stand alone computer, printing the complete record database and then placing a copy at a suitable location in the library.
The whole system from exam writing to archiving could take several months and several steps, each step introducing the potential for errors and misfiling.
It was therefore clearly advantageous for the university library to develop an electronic approach that would, where possible, automate these procedures.
It was also desirable to have a networked version to allow easy access for users across the various DMU sites.
Each School and department within the university has its own favoured electronic format(s).
Within the School of Computer Science, for example, Word6 for Windows, Word7 for Win95, AMI-Pro, LaTeX and Mac Word 2 are all used.
At a rough estimate about 50% of exams are delivered to the school office in electronic format.
The conversion of formats to an acceptable standard was regarded as being inappropriate due to time and effort.
A typical conversion from AMI-PRO to Adobe Postscript involves the following steps: Load from School server (this presently via floppy) Load into Ami Pro on a networked PC Select print option and print to the SiMX driver Save the file as filename.prn Exit AmiPro and transfer the file to a UNIX server Ensure Netscape client has a PostScript viewer Helper Application (ROPS is a reasonable one Clearly this was unacceptable.
The Library recognised that the only feasible solution to the problem was to use scanning and Optical Character Recognition software in conjunction with a local database to register parametric data that could be used at a later date for refined searching.
Scanning and OCR Experiments carried out in Centre for Educational Technology on scanning and OCRing showed that there were two reasonable packages available.
These were OmniPage and Adobe Capture.
Both packages were available for PCs and Macs and both produced very good results on the test samples provided.
These test samples included text (including handwritten), tables, mathematics, images and symbols.
OmniPro 7 can be configured in a number of ways that include : Scanning only to produce TIFF Gp 4 FAX Manual Scan, Zoning, Text and save Auto Scan, Zoning, Text and save Batch Images may be OCRed in batch with manual intervention.
Images may be scanned at a wide range of resolutions and saved in a variety of formats.
The scanning of each page takes between 30 and 60 seconds.
The Adobe system also produced very good results and used the widely accepted Portable Document Format that is favoured by many publishers.
The Adobe Capture system became the preferred option.
Points for implementors : Handwriting is NOT recommended as the number of errors detected proved to be difficult to cope with.
University stamps that are superimposed on the paper confuse the OCR package.
Version without stamps were thus made available.
If papers include a lot of images then manual intervention may be required to define zonal regions.
The quality should be good enough for the system to at least recover enough information for metadata selection.
The system The figure below shows a schematic diagram of the components with the ExamNet system.
The major sub-systems are Scanning, Database WWW server and CGI search.
Scanning A collection system was set up in the library short loans section that comprised a high performance PC, a scanner and a high volume portable disk drive (Zip).
Instructions for the use of this system were issued and made available to library staff who were on duty at the short loans section.
These instructions accompanied a log book in which a record was kept of what documents have been scanned, by whom and when.
At the end of each day (approx.)
files are downloaded from the PC to the Zip Drive in compressed form.
The Zip drive is then removed from the library and brought to the Digital Library office where the scanned files are loaded onto another PC for proofing.
This step was eventually eliminated when the Library PC was fully networked and files could be transfered via FTP.
Each file needs to be looked at individually to ensure that no two pages have been scanned under the same file name.
At this point any misspellings of filenames would also be rectified.
The next step was to run each scanned image through the TextBridge OCR package.
To check each scanned file for separate images within the scan and block/zone them accordingly.
However, it should be noted that if images such as tables appear in the middle of text, once saved as HTML, the image is always saved as a JPEG at the end of the file.
Once the images have been OCR’d they need to be saved as (HTML) files.
The original scanned papers are in PDF.
The files were then copied to the UNIX server, where they were sorted into directories via a Perl script.
Originally PDF’s were generated by importing scanned TIF files in Acrobat Exchange and then using the Capture plug-in to OCR the text.
However, this process had to be done manually (i.e.
one Exam at a time) and was extremely time consuming, as well as monopolising the resources of the computer being used for this purpose.
In order to accelerate the process, the full version of Adobe Capture was purchased.
The object being to batch the existing TIF’s and therefore eliminate the need for individual processing.
However, the Capture program was unable to accommodate the existing file structure containing the TIF’s.
Fortunately, Capture did include a standard API (Application Programmers Interface) to access Capture’s OLE capabilities.
This feature allowed our placement student to re-program the Capture OLE server in order to accommodate our needs.
This was achieved through the following steps: Files are renamed dynamically to accommodate Capture’s insistence on files being inserted in alpha-numerical order; Folders containing TIF’s were traversed beforehand to detect for possible missing TIF files.
The program decides which TIF’s should be contained within each folder be deriving their names from the folder name and the number of TIF’s contained within it; Logs errors to an output report file, as Capture’s default action is to halt the process.
The amended program overrides this default setting allowing the process to continue and the user to check the resulting output file for errors at a more convenient time.
Once the amended program had been tested, it was then necessary to download the existing TIF files from storage on the main Digital Library System (DLS) to the PC in order to run the new Capture OLE.
This process was hampered by problems encountered when FTP’ing files from the DLS to the PC.
This was due to fact that when files were being FTP’d, space on the DLS would be claimed in order to allow the files to be copied, when the existing space considerations were exhausted, file copying would halt.
It was therefore necessary to ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’ the existing files from the DLS to the PC.
This was achieved by the writing of a script to copy the files from the DLS to a DEC workstation and then retrieve the files via FTP from the workstation.
The reason for this copying to an interim machine was due to space considerations on the PC.
Finally the Capture program was run on the files producing PDF and text files on an overnight basis in order to maximise resources on the PC during the day.
The resulting PDF and text files are then available for use on the Digital Library System.
Points for implementors : Scanning rate is approximately 6 exams per hour, Average exam has 10 pages, There are 4-5 hours of scanning per day, 800 exam papers will take roughly 26 days or five weeks.
The database The project co-ordinator maintained a record of the scanned exam papers within a Microsoft Access database.
There was, at the time, no method available to connect the scanning process to this database and so regular cross check reports were required to ensure the Access database did not get out of synchronisation with the information held on the Digital Library System.
The interface to Access was programmed via a support specialist who also ensured that exported databases would be produced with an ‘’ as the field deliminator.
This latter step was necessary in order that the DLS Perl script could handle complicated titles and codes, as the ‘’ character was not used elsewhere.
Once the data was entered in the database it was exported to a text file which was transfered to the DLS.
This transfer occurred after cross checking and after new batches of scans had been recorded.
The WWW server The Digital Library System at De Montfort includes several large scale World Wide Web servers, one of which is for the main DMU library.
The ExamNet system was integrated into the library pages as part of the electronic collections section.
The main advantages of the DLS are that is is has a high storage capacity, it is a high performance machine with a 256 Megabyte RAM, and is on a fast Ethernet network that operates at 100MB/sec.
These features are desirable when offering a system to a large number of potential users that may be distributed over several locations and ensures a reasonable response times.
The CGI search A set of HTML pages were written for browsing and building the ExamNet search query, The search query page requests the user to enter a query based on the fields of interest and is shown in Figure 2.
The script that runs behind this interface is a Perl CGI program that uses regular expression to search over the copy of the exam database file.
Access to the entire system is restricted via the HTTPD Authentication HTACCESS mechanism [1] to ensure that only DMU and trusted users can view the information.
The papers may be found by searches over the following fields that formed the parametric data : For example: if one wanted to search for all exams within a certain year or semester then one would click on that year and semester and then on "Submit".
If the user knows the actual Exam Serial number then this can be used instead.
The usage of the system The project was launched in April 1998 and logs of access has been kept to discover the popularity of certain exams and the frequency of usage.
The graph below shows the usage of the system over a 12 month period.
In order to help users take full advantage of the system a help guide was written, published and placed in strategic areas all around the library.
A copy of this is included with this article.
Typical comments received from users relate to the following areas: Speed The DMU library provides access to the Internet via 200 networked PCs.
When the network is fully loaded users may experience unacceptable delays.
There is little the ExamNet system can do about this.
Search query The search interface has been designed to mirror the database entry system.
Although there may be a short learning curve to negotiate, the majority of users find the system acceptable due to its compactness and flexibility.
Bad data Due to the nature of the data scanned and the different scanning staff involved in the project, numerous problems were discovered with mathematical formulae and images, and with exams that had been scanned incorrectly.
This was anticipated and errors discovered normally initiate a rescan where appropriate.
Access Although copyright has not been an issue regarding exam papers, access to the system has been restricted to DMU users.
User authentification is established by computer .dmu.ac.uk domain addresses.
If computers are not registered or access is required from machines at users’ homes then this is currently not possible.
Conclusions Although the main aim of the project was to automate provision and facilitate access of exam papers to the DMU community it was also motivated by the need to reduce staff involvement in managing a past examination paper service.
A cost benefit analysis has shown that the time spent by staff administering ExamNet compared to the old paper version is significantly reduced.
However, having stated this, new skills are required by library staff in scanning, OCRing, database and Internet technologies.
The time taken for staff to acquire these skills will offset the cost benefit, although it is estimated that as the system becomes more widely adopted and understood by librarians the cost benefit will become more noticeable.
From the users’ perspective the ExamNet offers an opportunity to browse and search for subject matter that is relevant to the individual.
Whilst there is a learning curve to negotiate the practical benefits over the old paper based system are soon apparent.
There is no longer the need to queue at library points, the system is available from anywhere in the campus and at any time of the day.
Printing selected exam papers can be done locally or within the university library.
Searching is fast and flexible over the entire database or individual exams.
Feedback from users have shown that the system is popular and is becoming more popular as news of its existence becomes known.
The system at present relies upon a single server processing many client requests.
If an access fault occurs to the server then the service will become unavailable and this is obviously an unacceptable situation.
Although there is little to be done if the fault lies in the network, a degree of resilience can be ensured by mirroring the main server data.
Investigations are currently underway at DMU to study the implications of such a fall-back system strategy.
The methods adopted to solve the problems faced in providing an on-line past exam papers system may appear to be numerous and technically challenging.
This is because the problems of providing such a system are non-trivial.
There is no easy way of moving from one medium to another.
In an ideal world exam papers might well be produced entirely in an electronic format that would make the conversion to the target PDF format relatively simple and straight forward.
In the real world this would involve establishing constraints on faculties and departments to monitor quality assurance, restrict software usage and ensure staff are computer literate.
This is neither practical nor desirable in a decentralised establishment such as a modern university.
We have demonstrated that with careful thought, planning and training a system can be designed and implemented that is beneficial to the library and to users.
References and Contributions The work on the ExamNet system at DMU was undertaken by numerous people from with the library, the digital library group and others.
The working system could not have been achieved if it had not been for the contribution from multiple disciplines of librarianship, information systems and computer science.
The following people are responsible for making ExamNet work : Owen Williams our systems administrator and UNIX guru Adrian Welsh our Adobe Capture and PC expert Louise Taylor our librarian who did all the documentation and got us to see the user perspective Kirsten Black our library systems manager who did the organising John Knight our hard working placement student from computer science who did the API programming for the Adobe Capture system Nick Hunter our database expert Pete Robinson for inspiration Numerous librarians who learnt the scanning system and spent any number of hours scanning and recording their efforts for the database.
[1] HTTP Access: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs-1.5/tutorials/user.html   Figure 3: The User Interface Author Details David James Houghton Project Manager, ExamNet The Library The Gateway Leicester LE1 9BH Tel: +44 (0) 116 250 6349 Email: djh@dmu.ac.uk URL: http://www.dlib.dmu.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Is XML?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Is XML?
Buzz software java rdf framework javascript html xml metadata css standardisation browser xsl graphics sgml multimedia gif dom xpointer xlink smil url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly elucidates another infuriating three letter acronym: XML.
About XML What is XML?
XML stands for the Extensible Markup Language.
XML has been designed to address a number of deficiencies in HTML.
Which deficiencies in particular?
HTML is not extensible.
Submitting proposals for extensions to HTML can be a very lengthy process.
Browser software vendors can short-circuit the standardisation process by introducing their own extensions, but this has caused problems, as we have seen with controversial extensions such as Netscape’s <BLINK> and Microsoft’s <MARQUEE> elements.
In addition the browser vendors have shown little interest in supporting specific communities such as the mathematical and scientific communities who would like to make mathematical formulae, chemical symbols, etc.
available on the web, without having to resort to the use of images.
How does XML help?
XML is designed to be extensible.
If you wish to design an office application you can markup a memo thus:   <MEMO> <TO>John Smith </TO> <FROM>Jane Brown </FROM> <GREETING>Hello John </GREETING> <CONTENT> Thanks for the information about XML.
It was very useful.
</CONTENT> </MEMO> Notice that the structural elements of the document are described, not the appearance.
This will enable the information to be used in a variety of ways.
For example a collection of memos could be viewed using the TO or FROM fields (as you can do in many email programs), structured searching can be carried out or a browser for the visually impaired could communicate the information in a meaningful way.
But how is the appearance of the memo defined?
Using XSL, the XML Style Sheet Language.
Just as HTML can be used to define a (very limited) set of structural objects (paragraphs, headings, etc.)
leaving CSS to describe the appearance of these objects, XML defines the structure leaving XSL to describe the appearance.
Browser Support Do browsers support XML?
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 4.0 provides partial support for XML.
It supports an XML application called CDF, the Channel Definition Format which is used to “push” information to users.
Microsoft have said that Internet Explorer version 5 will provide more complete support for XML.
Netscape have also announced support for XML in version 5 of their browser, as illustrated below.
Figure 1 Rendering an XML Document in Mozilla The example shown in Figure 1 is taken from <URL: http://www.mintert.com/xml/mozilla/> The source code of the document is illustrated below: … <album> <artist>Jackson Browne</artist> <title>Running on empty</title> <tracklist> <track>Running on empty</track> <track>The Road</track> … <track>Stay</track> </tracklist> <label>Asylum Records</label> <year>1977</year> </album> The definition of the layout is given is a linked style sheet file.
In this example we can envisage applications which search for the artist, title or tracks, count the number of tracks, etc.
In an XML-aware browser it could be possible to click on a record title to display the tracks.
All of these applications would, of course, be very difficult to implement in HTML.
But I’ll have to wait until such browsers become widely used before providing my information in XML format?
Not necessarily.
Figure 2 shows a screen image of an XML document which has been rendered in Internet Explorer.
Figure 2 Rendering an XML Document in A Web Browser In this document, which is based on one available at <URL: http://www.hypermedic.com/style/tips/tipindex.htm> the resource contains an XML document which is illustrated below: <document> <to>To: John Smith</to> <from>From: Jane Brown</from> <greeting>Hello John</greeting>Thank you for your message.
<insult>Your suggestion is <emphasis>very<extraem> very</extraem></emphasis> useful!</insult> Let’s talk.
<!–a comment–> </document> A Javascript program converts the XML document to HTML with a style sheet on the fly.
(Note that unfortunately this example only works with Internet Explorer because Netscape supports a non-standard document object model).
This example converts the XML document to HTML at the client, using JavaScript.
Another approach is to use Java to render XML elements.
We are also likely to see XML to HTML conversion happening at the server or using intermediate proxy gateways.
XML Applications You’ve described how structured documents can be stored in XML format.
What other applications are available?
As an example the Math(s) Markup Language (MML) [1] is an XML application which became a W3C Recommendation recently.
Although most browsers do not yet support MML, a number of Java and ActiveX applications have been developed which can display MML documents, as can be seen in Figure 3.
Figure 3 Use of MML to Represent A Mathematical Formula The use of Java and ActiveX to render XML applications is another way of deploying XML with the current generation of browsers.
A paper [2] at the WWW 7 conference suggested Java applets known as displets as a way of rendering XML documents.
An example is illustrated below.
Figure 4 Using Java applets known as Displets to render XML elements You can download the Java application yourself, together with some example applications from <URL: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~fabio/displet/>.
What other applications are available?
A number of XML applications have already been developed including: CDF (Channel Definition Format) [3] The Channel Definition Format is an XML application which has been developed by Microsoft and submitted to the W3C.
CML (Chemical Markup Language) [4] The Chemical Markup Language, developed by Peter Murray-Rust, Nottingham University.
PGML (Precision Graphics Markup Language) [5] A proposed 2D imaging model in XML of the PostScript language and the Portable Document Format (PDF).
RDF (Resource Description Framework) [6] A framework for describing metadata applications.
OSD (Open Software Description) [7] A suggested XML application for automated distribution and updating software.
SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) [8] An XML application which enables independent multimedia objects to be integrated into a synchronized multimedia presentation.
SMIL is a proposed W3C Recommendation.
What should I be doing to prepare for XML?
If you are an information provider on the Web you should follow the following tips: Quote all attribute values e.g.
use <IMG SRC=“logo.gif”> and not <IMG SRC=logo.gif> Be consistent in use of case in HTML element names e.g.
don’t use <H1> in one part of the document and <h1> somewhere else.
and definitely <STRONG>don’t</strong> use different case for start and end tags.
Ideally you should define guidelines covering use of case within your organisation.
Ensure that you validate your documents, or use an authoring tool which creates valid HTML.
You can expect to see a variety of tools which will correct errors in HTM documents and convert them to XML format.
Dave Raggett, of the W3C, has written a utility called Tidy [9] which may be useful.
However it is probably advisable to try to ensure that your documents are created correctly in the first place you cannot guarantee, for example, that the owner of a badly-formed document will be available to make corrections.
If you’re developing software you should ensure that your software follows these guidelines.
What else do I need to know?
This article has given a brief introduction to XML.
Further information on XML is given below.
However as well as XML there are a number of related protocols which you need to be aware of.
XSL [10], the XML Style Sheet Language, will describe the appearance of XML resources.
XLink [11] will provide a rich hyperlinking mechanism.
XPointer [12] will provide access to components of XML resources.
Further information on XSL, XLink and XPointer will be given in a future “What Is?” column.
Further Information How do I find out more?
Further information on XML is available at the following locations: W3C’s XML home page at <URL: http://www.w3.org/XML/> The XML home page at <URL: http://www.xml.com/> Frequently Asked Questions about the Extensible Markup Language <URL: http://www.ucc.ie/xml/> The XML Specification, W3C.
Proposed version December 1997.
<URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-xml.html> The Annotated XML specification at <URL: http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html> The SGML / XML web pages at <URL: http://www.sil.org/sgml/xml.html> James Tauber’s XML page at <URL: http://www.jtauber.com/xml/> Tim Bray’s XML tutorial at <URL: http://www.textuality.com/WWW7/> BUILDER.COM’s 20 Questions on XML at <URL: http://www.cnet.com/Content/Builder/Authoring/Xml20/> References 1.
MML, W3C See <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-MathML> 2.
An Extensible Rendering Engine for XML and HTML, Ciancarini, Rizzi and Vitali See <URL: http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1926/com1926.htm> 3.
CDF, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-CDFsubmit.html<> 4.
CML, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences See <URL: http://www.venus.co.uk/omf/cml/> 5.
PGML, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/Submission/1998/06/> 6.
RDF, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/RDF/> 7.
OSD, W3C, <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-OSD.html> 8.
SMIL, W3C, <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/PR-smil-19980409/> 9.
Tidy, Dave Raggett, <URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy> 10.
XSL, Summer Institute of Linguistics, <URL: http://www.sil.org/sgml/xsl.html> 11.
XLink, Summer Institute of Linguistics, <URL: http://www.sil.org/sgml/xll.html> 12.
XPointer, W3C, <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xptr-19980303> Author details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath E-mail: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
Metadata: I Am a Name and a Number Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata: I Am a Name and a Number Buzz mobile database portal metadata doi browser identifier cataloguing windows rfc solaris uri frbr interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller on Digital Object Identifiers.
People, places, and things are identified in any number of different ways.
I, for example, have a National Insurance Number, a staff payroll number, several bank account numbers, and assorted frequent flyer programme membership numbers, all of which are the handles that certain groups of people use to identify me.
I also have a name and, associated to me, three telephone numbers and at least two e-mail addresses.
Neither telephone number nor e-mail address truly identifies me the person of course, but they might well be seen as equally useful a means of 'retrieving' me as my name or any other associated identifier.
Each of these is used by some one at some time to identify one particular facet of Paul Miller, whether in my guise as the taxpayer, the member of staff, the bank customer, or whatever.
None of them is particularly good for identifying Paul Miller the person over any extended period of time, however.
I might take a job somewhere nice, sunny and far away from the London Underground, thus rendering National Insurance and payroll numbers effectively useless.
I might change bank account or airline, and I'll almost certainly change phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
Even my name isn't a sure way of identifying me on its own.
Registered as Andrew Paul, yet called Paul from birth so far as I'm aware, I face a constant tide of confusion from officialdom the world over as they try to associate Paul the flesh and blood with A.P.
the faceless statistic in their databases... And then there's the long-held feeling that maybe I should change my surname to Aardvark-Miller, just to appear first in bibliographies... With the digital resources we make use of in our learning, work, or research, too, there are a plethora of different identification forms available.
This paper looks at a few of them, and considers ways in which consistent and reliable identification will help to make JISC's Distributed National Electronic Resource [1] (DNER) reality.
What are you talking about?
There is a lot of quite theoretical debate around the use of identifiers, much of which is over-specific for Ariadne.
Elements of it, though, are worth repeating here in order to make it clearer as to why some of the debates are even worth having.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that of what is actually being identified by one of these identifiers, and this is most usefully illustrated with an example... Umberto Eco's excellent The Name of the Rose is a work of fiction.
Using terminology from IFLA's Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [2], it exists as a 'work'; an act of intellectual creation on the part of Umberto Eco.
Identifying this work unambiguously is, perhaps, more difficult than it first appears, especially as the title by which most Ariadne readers know this work is not that which its Italian author would use.
Quickly scanning Amazon [3], it is a simple task to find four different paperback 'manifestations' of the book in English (ISBNs 0749397055, 0156003708, 0156001314, 0436204223), one 'expression' in audio (ISBN 0753104865), and a German translation (ISBN 3423105518).
There's also the Sean Connery film, of course ([publisher's?]
Catalogue Number 0842303), the original publication in Italian, and presumably many other versions in hardback or in other languages.
For publishers, distributors and resellers, the differentiation between these products is of vital importance.
For someone wanting to read the book in English, however, the four ISBNs are a positive hindrance, and for the Renaissance Man (should such a beast still exist), differentiations between form, language and medium are doubtless an irrelevance.
In this case, the commonly cited identifier refers to a particular imprint of the work, which itself remains essentially unchanged across most of these different identifiers.
The identifier hasn't actually helped the end user much, and may even mislead in a number of situations.
Imagine asking for ISBN 0749397055 at your local Waterstone's and being told they haven't got it.
You leave, never knowing that your branch actually stocked the Harcourt version (ISBN 0156001314).
Like the ISBN, other common identifiers often fail to identify a particular work or expression.
The well-known URL, for example, which is now a common feature of academic citation lists, cereal packets, and advertising hoardings, doesn't actually identify any content at all.
Rather, it points to an individual computer file, on a specific computer, within a named domain.
The contents of that file today may be very different from the contents of the same file on the day I cite it to you.
News [4] and 'Portal' [5] sites, are particularly bad for this, but even the home page of a highly respected organization [6] is unlikely to remain static for very long these days.
Increasingly, therefore, passing on a URL to friends and colleagues is the equivalent of saying "You're likely to find something interesting here" rather than — the possibly intended — "Take a look here at this interesting fact/article/whatever".
These, and other, examples illustrate that identifiers may be applied in the identification of many different classes of object or resource.
To be most useful, it's arguable that identifiers should be consistently applied (so that an ISBN always identifies a manifestation, and never a work, for example).
If I only had a brain... A further important consideration in defining identifiers is whether or not the numbering scheme used should be 'intelligent' or 'unintelligent' [7].
Put simply, an unintelligent identifier is just a number, and is totally meaningless without reference to some central database or list.
An intelligent identifier has some meaning, and can be unpacked to a certain degree.
A UK telephone area code for example has some intelligence.
If it starts '01' or '02', you know it's a normal telephone line.
If it starts '07', you know it's a mobile phone, etc.
Extending the intelligence somewhat, if the code is '01904' you know it's in York, and if it's '020 7' you know you're calling Central London.
ISBN's, despite appearing pretty opaque to most of us, are actually intelligent too.
The first part of an ISBN identifies the country, language or geographic area in which the book was published.
The second part identifies the publisher, and the third is the number of the title itself.
On the surface, intelligent identifiers appear quite useful, as they allow the user to work things out for themselves to some extent.
There are, however, problems.
Firstly, things change.
If a book is published by HarperCollins, its ISBN will contain an explicit reference to Collins as publisher.
If the publisher sells rights for this book to a second organization, or is taken over by that organization, the ISBN should really change to reflect this.
However, such a change may take several years to occur.
Secondly, intelligent identifiers generally reflect a single world view.
UK telephone numbers, for example, are broken down by geography.
Might it not be more useful to have all business numbers start '01' and all domestic numbers '02'?
Extending this, might all banks not have a number starting '011' and plumbers '015'?
Imagine if double glazing companies all had numbers starting '013', and you could program your phone to refuse their calls all by itself?
That benefit alone surely has to be worth the inconvenience of restructuring the entire phone numbering system!
With ISBN's, the group identifier used to specify country, language, or geographical area isn't as useful as it sounds.
The prefix '0' or '1' is given to books published in Australia, the English-speaking parts of Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, the United States and Zimbabwe!
The use of any intelligent scheme of identification forces the classification needs of a particular community upon all those who make use of the identifier.
For most users, this doesn't matter particularly (how many of you knew what you've just learned about ISBNs?
I certainly didn't until I started reading for this article, and have managed to use ISBNs for years in a state of blissful ignorance).
For some users, the classification is a positive boon (whilst it remains current and relevant, at least), for some a minor inconvenience, and it probably only has an adverse impact upon a relatively small proportion of users.
The problems begin in earnest, though, when anyone places too much faith in what the numbers say... ("The publisher code in the ISBN tells me this book is published by HarperCollins, so it must be...").
Despite these, and other, issues with their use, it remains important to be able to identify objects in a whole range of different ways, and for a multitude of purposes.
In an on-line environment such as that proposed for the UK's Distributed National Electronic Resource [1] unambiguous identification of resources from a variety of providers for a plethora of users and uses is essential.
Without it, the structure of the DNER is unsustainable.
The Digital Object Identifier [8], or DOI, is a clear mainstay of this strategy, certainly with respect to digitally offered bibliographic material and possibly more widely.
It is for this reason that JISC has joined the International DOI Foundation [9], and looks forward to exploring the ways in which DOIs might be deployed across the range of JISC content.
The Digital Object Identifier The DOI is both a persistent identifier, and a system which processes that identifier on the Internet to deliver services.
The DOI identifies Creations (products of human imagination or endeavor in which rights may exist; intellectual property).
It is not an identifier of all Internet "resources", as defined in URL, URI, etc.
[10] Formed in 1998, the International DOI Foundation (IDF) is a membership organization comprising many of the world's major publishers as well as those, such as JISC, with a significant interest in this area.
The IDF works to develop "a common and well understood approach to referencing objects [and recognises that this] is essential to the evolution of services" [11].
A DOI is a wholly unique number, used to unambiguously label a piece of intellectual property.
In principle, a single DOI can be resolved to multiple physical manifestations of that intellectual property, overcoming the difficulty of identifying and describing the existence of a resource at more than one location.
It is also possible to associate metadata with a DOI, providing additional contextual information of use both to human users and to automated tools acting on the user's behalf.
The DOI metadata structure is currently quite simple, and based upon the work of the European <indecs> project [12], but significantly increases the value of the DOI itself.
The DOI itself follows a structure similar to that of the common web URL and other Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) [13].
Prefix   Suffix   Scheme   Directory Code   Registrant's Code       doi :// 10 .
1045 / december99-miller       doi://10.1045/december99-miller   The Scheme, 'doi', is used to inform the browser as to how the subsequent identifier should be resolved.
Standard web browsers do not understand the doi scheme by default, and need to be supplemented with the Handle System Resolver plug-in from CNRI in the United States [14].
This simple addition to the web browser makes it possible to follow DOIs in the same was as the more common URL.
The DOI Prefix comprises two components, and is specified by the International DOI Foundation; a directory code and a registrant's code.
The directory code identifies the naming authority, and is currently '10', denoting the DOI Foundation.
The registrant's code is a number assigned by the DOI Foundation to the publisher or other body assigning identifiers.
In the example, the registrant's code of '1045' identifies D-Lib Magazine, and JISC could conceivably have its own registrant's code in this way.
The final component of a DOI is the suffix, and this part is outside the direct control of the International DOI Foundation.
The number making up the DOI suffix may be either intelligent or unintelligent in form.
DOIs on the web site of the International DOI Foundation [9], for example, are unintelligent; their home page simply being doi://10.1000/1.
Others, such as the D-Lib Magazine example above, make use of intelligent numbers to build the DOI suffix.
D-Lib Magazine builds the suffix based upon the month and year of publication, combined with the surname of the first author.
This suffix can also be built from formal numbering systems such as an ISBN or, as the rather daunting doi://10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199806)49:8<693::aid-asi4>3.0.CO;2-O from Wiley demonstrates, a SICI [15].
Despite extensive deployment of DOIs in publishers' back-end database systems, I was unable to find any web-visible examples of an ISBN being embedded in a DOI as with this SICI example, but the parallel is obvious.
If Wiley had published one of the editions of The Name of the Rose discussed earlier, their DOI might simply be doi://10.1002/(ISBN)0749397055.
Resolution Whatever their structure, DOIs are always 'resolved' with reference to an external service.
When a document is assigned a DOI by a publisher, it is the responsibility of the publisher to lodge the DOI, the URL to which it points, and associated metadata with the resolution service.
A user entering a DOI will have it automatically resolved, and will be pointed to the URL at which the document can be found.
If the URL changes for some reason, the entry in the resolution database is simply changed and the DOI remains unaltered, ensuring a degree of permanence to the underlying intellectual content which the user is looking for.
References A document describing the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/dner_desc.html The report, Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records, is at: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm Amazon.co.uk is at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/ The BBC News site is at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ Yahoo's Portal for the UK and Ireland is at: http://uk.yahoo.com/ UKOLN is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ The paper, Unique Identifiers: a brief introduction by Brian Green and Mark Bide, is at: http://www.bic.org.uk/uniquid.html Draft standard Z39.84, Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier, is at: http://www.niso.org/Z3984.html, and is due for formal publication during 2000 The International DOI Foundation is at: http://www.doi.org/.
The DOI for this page is doi://10.1000/1 [note].
The Digital Object Identifier is introduced at: http://www.doi.org/about_the_doi.html.
The DOI for this page is doi://10.1000/7 [note].
The paper, Digital Object Identifier: implementing a standard digital identifier as the key to effective digital rights management by Norman Paskin, is at: http://www.doi.org/doi_presentations/aprilpaper.pdf.
The DOI for this page is doi://10.1000/174 [note].
The <indecs> project is at: http://www.indecs.org/ Request for Comment (RFC) 2396, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax, is at: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc2396.html CNRI's Handle System Resolver plug-in is at: http://www.handle.net/resolver/index.html The Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI) standard is at: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SICI/ JTAP report 42, Information Object Numbering Systems, and Cliff Lynch's Identifiers and their role in networked information applications were also used in preparing this article.
They are at: http://www.jtap.ac.uk/reports/htm/jtap-042.html and http://www.arl.org/newsltr/194/identifier.html.
Note: To resolve DOIs cited in this article, you will need to download and install the Handle System Resolver plug-in for your web browser.
The plug-in is currently only available for various flavours of Windows, with MacOS and Solaris versions due later in the year.
Download the plug-in from http://www.handle.net/resolver/index.html.
A number of examples in this article made use of a LinkBaton to look up ISBNs for books at your favourite book provider.
Visit http://www.linkbaton.com/ for more information on LinkBatons and the ways that you might soon be able to use them.
Author Details   Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN c/o Academic Services: Libraries University of Hull HULL HU6 7RX United Kingdom Email: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Article Title: "I am a name and a number" Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/metadata/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Unix: What Is mod_perl?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Unix: What Is mod_perl?
Buzz java api javascript html database apache usability infrastructure archives browser repositories copyright python windows cache perl dom uri php personalisation ecmascript mysql authentication interoperability cookie intranet url standards Citation BibTex RIS Ian Peacock explains mod_perl technology for supercharging the Apache Server.
mod_perl [1] has to be one of the most useful and powerful of the Apache modules.
Beneath the inconspicuous name, this module marries two of the most successful and widely acclaimed products of OSS, the Apache Webserver [2] and Perl [3].
The result is a kind of Web developers Utopia, with Perl providing easy access to, and control of, the formidable Apache API.
Powerful applications can be rapidly created and deployed as solutions to anything from an office Intranet to Enterprise level Web requirements.
Note that although this article discusses mod_perl from a Unix perspective, both Apache and Perl will run on a number of different platforms, including Win32.
Apache Insight Many readers will have at least heard of the Apache project.
The highly popular [4] Apache Webserver has established itself as one of the protagonists of the "open source revolution".
Designed to be extensible, the basic server core is complimented by various modules which supply functionality.
For such a modular approach to be successful, the core must embody a comprehensive and well thought out API.
The Apache API [5] provides just this access to nearly all of the server's internal processing, so that custom steps may be introduced at any stage of the request process.
Examples of such modules include the standard distribution mod_cgi [6], a module for executing CGI scripts, and the third party module mod_gunzip [7] for uncompressing files on-the-fly.
However, until a couple of years ago, the power of the Apache API could only be tamed using the 'C' language.
The overhead of writing and testing a module written in C has meant that modules have been limited to the core server package, and for those requiring the performance benefits of C (e.g.
when a CGI-based quick hack will not suffice).
Fortunately, the introduction of mod_perl in 1996 by Doug MacEachern [8] changed things.
By having a Perl interpreter within a module, an interpreter also becomes embedded within the server.
This can mean significantly increased performance for perl CGI scripts, but the primary benefit is that mod_perl supplies Perl programmers with a direct line to the Apache API via Perl objects and method calls.
The outcome is that server-side Perl programs can offer far more versatility over traditional CGI scripts that cannot interact with the server at different phases of the request process.
Why Perl?
Q: What is Perl?
A: Perl is a language for getting your job done.
The above explanation opens the preface of Programming Perl [9] and strikes me as a very suitable synopsis.
In the Unix world Perl enjoys a huge popularity and has been adopted as standard on many systems.
The reasons for its success are many and include a scripting language/programming language duality, usability, support and the fact that it is free (open-source).
It is a language eminently suitable for rapid application development, where it may assume a programming language role, or for smaller projects such as a CGI application, where it may be treated more as a scripting language.
Results are generally easy to achieve with Perl ("you don't have to know all about Perl to work with it") and it is flexible enough to suit the needs of many different types of application.
Support for Perl is vast.
A glance at CPAN [3] shows modules that can provide everything from TCP network support to cryptography.
There are also many script repositories, discussion groups and mailing lists covering Perl and Perl specifics.
A full treatise on the benefits of the Perl programming language is the subject of numerous articles and books [10].
What can you do with mod_perl?
mod_perl is more than a scripting language.
It is a unification of Apache with Perl, meaning that much of Apache can be controlled from Perl (including its configuration meaning that configuration can be dynamic!).
Although Perl can be embedded within HTML documents (through ePerl, mod_perl extended Server Sides Includes or other methods), mod_perl is usually used to supply the functionality that allows Apache extension modules to be written in Perl.
The benefits of choosing mod_perl are the cojoined benefits of using Perl and Apache.
There is a great deal of support available for mod_perl, though mailing lists and through repositories of code.
Through the Apache, Perl and mod_perl communities, a valuable (and free) knowledge base is available.
Portability is another advantage since a mod_perl system can be installed on virtually any flavour of Unix, and on Microsoft Windows systems, and when installed operates in an efficient and stable way.
The reliability and stability of Apache is widely recognised [11].
As an open-source project, code undergoes constant review and fixes and upgrades are frequently produced, keeping a mod_perl system in touch with current trends and technologies.
In order to appreciate how mod_perl can extend the server, it is useful to know the different processing states that Apache undergoes when a request is received: URI translation phase [work out what the URI refers to (a physical file, a virtual document or a document generated by a module)] Access control phase [from where does the request originate?]
Authentication phase [who is making the request?]
Authorisation phase [who is allowed to perform this request?]
MIME type checking phase [what is the document's type?
-Select an appropriate content handler to deal with it Response phase [who will generate the content for this document?]
Logging phase [who will log this transaction?]
Cleanup phase [who's going to clean up?]
External modules can define custom 'handlers' to enhance or supersede Apache's core behaviour at each phase.
With mod_perl installed, these modules can be implemented in Perl.
Some examples of what different kinds of handler could achieve are given below.
Example 1: transparently uncompress HTML on-the-fly Handy for server administrators who are running out of disk space.
This module would be a content handler acting as a file processor.
This handler would be called on request for an HTML file, example.html, if the HTML files exists it would decline the request and allow apache to deal with it as usual.
If the file does not exist, it will look for example.html.gz, ungzip it on-the-fly, and sent it back to the user (who think they have retrieved a static HTML file).
If neither files exist, the handler declines the request to let Apache dish out a 404.
This module is in operation on parts of the Netcraft site [12].
Example 2: access control based on client attributes A number of modules exist that allow different kinds of access control: Time-based, where access to parts of the site are restricted at certain times Browser-based, where parts of the site are restricted to certain user-agents Speed-based, where the site enforces a requests/sec limit and bans clients breaking this limit for a short length of time Example 3: cookie-based access control The Apache::TicketAccess module was designed to handle the situation where user authentication is expensive.
Instead of performing full authentication each time the user requests a page, the module only authenticates against a relational database the first time the user connects.
After successfully validating the user's identity, the module issues the user a 'ticket' an HTTP cookie carrying the user's name, IP address, expiration date and cryptographic signature.
Until it expires, the ticket can be used to gain entry to the site under the control of Apache::TicketAccess.
Example 4: Embedded scripting Apache::ASP provides an Active Server Pages port to the Apache HTTP server with perl as the host scripting language.
Running Perl CGI scripts under mod_perl Although CGI scripts can work as-is when mod_perl is installed, if they are written in Perl, they can be run through Apache::Registry for performance increase.
The Apache::Registry module allows legacy CGI perl scripts (that the maintainer has no time to convert to modules) to be run under mod_perl.
A CGI environment is emulated, and the CGI script is compiled and cached, ready in executable form whenever a request comes in.
CPAN [3] contains a wide range of Apache Perl modules.
What is the difference between mod_perl and ...?
ActiveX Based upon Microsoft's COM and DCOM ([Distributed] Common Object Model) architectures, ActiveX provides a container for dynamic link libraries, called an ActiveX control, which can be created using the likes of Visual Basic or C++.
Such controls can be downloaded to the client and run on the client machine.
COM is an architecture supported only by only a few operating-systems and browsers, making ActiveX suitable for a known supported client, or homogeneous intranet.
ASP Microsoft's Active Server Pages [13], are for the IIS Web server [14], a similar offering to PHP on Apache.
Although ASP has been ported to other platforms and Web servers, these account for few of the sites deploying ASP.
The full benefits of ASP are likely to be reaped within a Microsoft environment, where there can be integration with other windows applications, for example, ASP access to an ISAPI [15] filter.
ASP is the most widely used solution for providing server-side technologies using Windows NT (almost invariably with IIS).
CGI The Common Gateway Interface [16] is not a language but a protocol that describes how a Web client and server should interact when the client needs to send small amounts of information to the server via HTTP (the results of filling in a form, for example).
Any server-side processing technology should be able to deal with CGI .
An ASP enabled server, a mod_perl enabled server or a standalone script executed by the web server with output sent back to the client (a 'traditional' CGI program) should all be able to process the information sent via CGI.
Javascript/VBScript Javascript [17] (or ECMAScript [18] as it should now be known) and Microsoft VBScript [19] are examples of client-side scripting languages (actually, there is a server-side Javascript, but the client form is far more popular).
These are languages that are embedded within the document source and processed by the Web browser rather than by the server.
This means that the browser parses the document for the script and executes it (unlike a server-side embedded script, which may be included into HTML source via pseudo HTML elements which are removed when the server processes the document).
The browser must also know how to execute the script (Netscape for example will not parse VBScript).
To perform useful tasks, the scripting language must interface with the browser.
Whereas server-side languages may interact with the server via an API, a scripting language will offer an API to the browser.
The standard defining just what the API should be able to achieve is called the Document Object Model (DOM) [20].
There is sometimes a choice over whether to use server-side or client-side scripting, a few of the pros and cons are shown below: Client-side scripting Server-side scripting Have to make assumptions about client browser Client browser does not affect processing Client processor load increases slightly Server load may increase significantly at times of high activity Script needs to be downloaded Script remains on the server (private) Client can view script source Client cannot view script source Server side and client side scripting can often be used in a complimentary way.
For example, a client-side script may check that the contents of an HTML form conform to certain rules before submitting the information to a server to be processed by a server-side script.
Java servlets According to Sun, A servlet can almost be thought of as an applet that runs on the server side -without a face.
Sun's Java Servlet [21] API supplies 'hooks' via which server side applications can be created.
Servlet's are embedded into a JavaServer [22] web server where applications use the API much the same as Apache modules use the Apache API.
The Jakarta project [22] is an Apache working group dedicated to providing a pure Java Servlet and JavaServer implementation for use in the Apache Web Server.
Until the fruits of this project are reaped, Apache Jserv [22] is a project that will create an extension module that will allow other extension modules to be created in Java (rather than C or Perl).
mod_pyapache For those sites scripted in Python, mod_pyapache [23] embeds a Python interpreter into the server.
mod_pyapache does not provide a Python interface to the Apache API.
PHP PHP [24] is an open source Apache module allowing scripts to be embedded within HTML which will be processed by the server.
PHP scripts may also occupy their own file.
At a certain stage of the request cycle, mod_php will be called to deal with embedded PHP code, substituting it with output if necessary.
PHP is a powerful scripting language with syntax borrowed from 'C', Perl and Java.
It has good support in various areas such as database interaction.
As a script processor, PHP does not offer the wider functionality of mod_perl, but is a lighter weight and creditable solution for problems that can be solved using embedded scripting.
With careful configuration, both mod_perl and mod_php can be installed on the same server.
The July 1999 Netcraft Web Server Survey [25] shows that from 6,598,697 IP addresses, 8.7% (574433 sites) were running PHP.
The growth in the use of PHP recently has also exceeded the growth of the Apache server itself (see 'Who uses mod_perl' for further discussion).
Script co-processing mod_perl increases performance of perl script by keeping a perl interpreter in the server and using this to deal with pre-compiled scripts.
An alternative performance booster is to keep scripts running as a co-process and have the web server communicate with that process when the script needs to be run.
Two examples of script co-processing include FastCGI [26] and mod_jserv [27].
SSI Server Side Includes are a feature of many Web servers.
They are designed for simple tasks, such as including a footer in HTML pages, or stamping the date.
They lack the power of a scripting language, but can be very useful for simple tasks.
An option when using mod_perl is to extend the standard Apache SSI mechanism to call perl subroutines.
Others There are numerous other embedded scripting solutions, for further details see see the references section.
When choosing a particular solution for server technologies, developers should be aware the strengths and weaknesses of the various products, relative to their requirements.
Proprietary products may work well with other proprietary products, but interoperability outside that may be weak.
On the other hand, open standard solutions may interoperate well, but not offer the required functionality.
Who uses mod_perl?
The July 1999 Netcraft Web Server Survey [25] found that from 6,598,697 IP addresses, 56% were running Apache.
Of these, some 5% (202,081) were using mod_perl.
Since January 1999, the average monthly growth rate of Apache has been around 9%.
Within the usership of Apache, we find that the average monthly growth for mod_perl to be around 16%.
The conclusion is that the increasing number of sites using mod_perl is not simply due to the increasing use of Apache, going from 3.7% of Apache installations in January 1999 to 5.4% in July 1999.
The increase in take-up of mod_perl likely reflects the current trends shown in e-commerce, commercial, and other large sites to move beyond using a vanilla Web server to serve static pages.
These trends are based on the requirements to support ideas such as personalisation, e-commerce and banner advertising.
Underlying server technologies are responsible for instantiating these concepts, and "behind the scenes", a server will be expected to offer support for things like custom authentication & access control, secure transactions, content negotiation and dynamic content (including database interaction and server-side scripting).
mod_perl has been chosen by many sites to provide the server technologies required by a modern web site.
Examples include: The Internet Movie Database [28] mod_perl has been used to make efficient interactive database queries through a query cache.
Also supports language negotiation.
Metacrawler [29] All requests to this popular metasearchengine are routed through a perl module.
O'Reilly and Associates [30] Access control to the online books site is provided through mod_perl.
HotBot [31] mod_perl is used for the HotBot mail and HotBot homepages application.
Slashdot [32] Slashdot.org news for nerds is powered by Perl and MySQL.
CMPnet [33] CPMnet is a technology information network.
mod_perl is used to generate 70% of its pages (half a million hits per day).
The CMPnet network includes TechWeb and FileMine.
Lind-Waldock & Co [34] The world's largest discount commodities trading firm uses mod_perl under Stronghold [35] to generate live and delayed quotes, dynamic charts and news.
The system is integrated with a relational database used for customer authentication and transaction processing.
It is hoped that the above examples will provide some insight into the performance and scalability of mod_perl (since I didn't have enough time to write that section!).
Summary mod_perl is a serious contender as a solution to providing a modern and feature-full website.
Many of the benefits of a mod_perl system derive from the open-source licensing of Perl, Apache and mod_perl.
This has ensured that all three products have evolved, through the scrutiny and review of experts and end-users alike, to embody the functionality and performance required of such products in today's Web space.
Portability, scalability, efficiency and good security are all well-known features of the three products.
Of course, a significant benefit for many web administrators is that the product is available without charge for all.
The integration of Perl with Apache provides the Web administrator with a route that will allow the rapid development of complex web applications, that can operate efficiently and have the potential to scale, and are free from the hindrance of any proprietary caveats such as usage licenses and best operation within a proprietary system.
Of course, any solution must be considered on the basis of exact requirements and available resources (including any existing electronic infrastructure).
However, in many cases, full consideration should place mod_perl on the short list.
References The Apache/Perl Integration Project http://perl.apache.org/ The Apache Server Project http://www.apache.org/httpd.html CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network http://www.cpan.org/ The Number One HTTP Server On The Internet http://www.apache.org/httpd.html Apache API Notes http://www.apache.org/docs/misc/API.html Module mod_cgi http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_cgi.html Module mod_gunzip http://sep.hamburg.com/ Doug MacEachern mailto:dougm@pobox.com Programming Perl http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl2/index.html Google search for 'perl' http://www.google.com/search?q=perl Apache Performance Notes http://www.apache.org.uk/docs/misc/perf-tuning.html Netcraft http://www.netcraft.com/ ASP Technology Feature Overview http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/server/asp/aspfeat.asp Internet Information Server http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/web/default.asp Writing ISAPI Filters http://www.microsoft.com/MSJ/0498/IIS/IIS.htm The Common Gateway Interface http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/ ECMAScript Language Specification http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/ JavaScript Developer Central http://developer.netscape.com/tech/javascript/index.html Microsoft vbscript http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/default.htm?/scripting/vbscript/default.htm The Document Object Model (DOM) http://www.w3.org/DOM/ The Java(tm) Servlet API http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/index.html The Java Apache Project http://java.apache.org/ PyApache http://www.msg.com.mx/pyapache/ PHP http://www.php.net/ July 1999 Netcraft Web Server Survey http://www.netcraft.com/survey/Reports/9907/ FastCGI http://www.fastcgi.com/ mod_jserv http://java.apache.org/jserv/index.html The Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/ Metacrawler http://www.metacrawler.com/ O'Reilly and Associates http://www.oreilly.com/ HotBot http://www.hotbot.com/ Slashdot http://www.slashdot.org/ CMPnet http://www.cmpnet.com/ Lind-Waldock & Co http://www.lind-waldock.com/ Stronghold http://www.c2.net/products/sh2/ Author Details Ian Peacock Netcraft email address: ip@netcraft.com Article Title: 'What is mod_perl?'
Author: Ian Peacock Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/unix/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ACM / IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ACM / IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Buzz data software java framework database xml portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation identifier vocabularies schema repositories eprints copyright video preservation cataloguing graphics multimedia z39.50 visualisation gis copac personalisation ebook drm biometrics gopher authentication interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl reports on a selection of the papers given at this conference in Roanoake, Virginia, June 24-28 2001.
This report covers a selection of the papers at the above conference, from those which I chose and was able to attend in a three-strand conference held over three days (with two additional days for workshops, which I did not attend).
It includes the three keynote papers, as well as the paper which won the Vannevar Bush award for best conference paper.
The conference was held in Roanoke, Virginia, in the Roanoke Hotel and Conference Center, which is owned by Virginia Tech (located in Blacksburg, some 40 miles away).
Ed Fox of Virginia Tech was the Conference chair.
It was the first ever joint ACM and IEEE digital libraries conference.
Previously, the two organisations have held separate conferences on the same theme.
The opening keynote was given by Brewster Kahle, President of Alexa Internet & Director of the Internet Archive: Public access to digital materials: roles, rights and responsibilities of libraries.
He began inspirationally by telling us ours was the best profession to be in at the present time due to technological advances.
The universal control aspirations of libraries can finally be realised, in our time.
However, we have battles to fight.
A lot of publishers think libraries should not exist, and in particular, Pat Schroeder, President of the American Association of Publishers, had recently called libraries ‘the enemy’ in an article in The Washington Post.
Alexa is a for-profit company, alexa.com, now wholly-owned by amazon.com.
The Internet Archive is a not-profit, with a contract with alexa which ensures that everything in the Internet Archive is passed to alexa 6 months later, for preservation purposes.
Brewster Kahle admitted to having made a fortune in selling alexa.com.
He is using this income to support the Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive archives two snapshots of the web – over 40Tb of data, with over 4 billion pages.
It is a ‘large-scale ephemera’ archive, and runs various services.
It provides rudimentary cataloguing of the web, and also allows analysis of web sites’ ‘relatedness.’ An important service is in maintaining the history of the web.
One service it provides is to keep copies of web sites as they used to look.
It has also stored web sites of all the political parties in the 2000 US election, so that they can now be ‘replayed’ for political science students.
Kahle is keen to have the Internet Archive used for serious research.
The Archive is large, but has holes.
Its developers are still catching up with indexing, and many graphics from the early history of the web have not been stored.
The service has respected robot exclusions, and so kept out of trouble.
Anyone who complains about being captured by the Archive can have their pages purged.
Indeed, the ‘purge the complainer policy’ is now in common use in web archive projects.
As Kahle put it: ‘If someone wants out of the archive, you simply remove them – and they’re history.
Or rather, they’re not history.’ The digital environment is ideal for archiving because storage is cheap (currently $4k per terabyte) and scanning is also cheap ($0.10) per page.
At that price, we can have both archival and access copies.
We should therefore be identifying resources to archive on the net now.
Can we replicate ILL in the world of digital materials?
This is being proposed for licensed materials.
Kahle’s thesis is that ‘libraries are special’, so should be able to develop digital ILL ‘without crushing the publishing system.’ He also looked at loaning digital materials, citing NetLibrary, which offers such a system.
It sounds absurd, but it conforms to publisher business models, and perhaps we should be working with the publishers to develop it.
In general, Kahle accuses libraries of having been ‘too wimpy’ about retaining their traditional role in the face of rights worries.
We need to ramp up our collection, cataloguing and lending of digital materials.
People expect it of us.
Libraries need to be more assertive.
Can the Internet Archive be preserved?
The key, says Kahle, is replication, and in time he would hope to see copies of the Internet Archive mirrored across the globe.
Jean Laleuf, Brown University, gave a paper entitled A component repository for learning objects: a progress report.
Laleuf used the term ‘exploratory’ for the work his group are doing.
They have created about 40 Java applets, made available from their web site.
His contention was that there are very few collections of well-designed, reusable software components in education.
In educational software, ‘components’ usually means applets (or ‘learning objects’) which are coarse-grained.
The Brown team use it to mean components at a range of levels of granularity, e.g.
down to button sliders, etc.
They have developed a component repository by using techniques which they call ‘full-grained decomposition’ and a ‘component classification strategy’.
Full-grained decomposition involves a very large effort, but is well worth it when establishing a component repository.
It involves breaking objects down into smaller and smaller parts.
The ‘component classification strategy’ employs a matrix which classifies components into three categories: application components, support components and core components.
Within these categories, each is ranked according to domain independence, reusability, importance of design, granularity and audience.
The goal is to have a full library of components eventually.
The team are looking at metadata schemes at present, to allow indexing and harvesting.
Gene Golovchinsky, FX Palo Alto Laboratory presented an excellent paper with the title Designing e-books for legal research.
This paper was the runner-up in the Vannevar Bush award.
The project designed software to allow ebooks for legal students to be produced, based upon the characteristics of legal students’ study behaviour.
Generally, students would use it to read scanned legal documents, and navigate from link-to-link by means of a stylus.
Students can annotate the sections they wish, as with a marker pen, and then see a composite view of just those annotated paragraphs.
Re-annotation can then occur, narrowing down the set of relevant paragraphs.
It provides very useful software for students not only of law, but potentially of any subject in which a quantity of legacy printed material is required.
A notebook function exists too, so that annotated sections can be added in alongside other comments.
Annotations and comments can also be pasted in to a Word document.
In testing, students were very positive about the interface.
This is fascinating technology, which is likely to result in a hybrid laptop/ebook device.
Ray Larson, of UC Berkeley, discussed Distributed resource discovery: using Z39.50 to build cross-domain information servers.
This project has been supported by an NSF/JISC International Digital Library grant, and features, from the UK, the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester, De Montfort University, the Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS), the Natural History Museum and CURL.
Databases include the Archives Hub, the AHDS suite and COPAC, together with the Online Archive of California, the Making of America II and the MASTER project for recording manuscripts.
The Archives Hub is at the heart of the project, as is its Cheshire information retrieval software.
The problem addressed is that Z39.50 hits a scale problem as it copes with hundreds or thousands of servers in a distributed environment.
The project is looking at how to constrain, and how to discover, the servers to be searched.
They are approaching it by using two Z39.50 services: identification of database metadata using Z39.50 (‘Scan’) extraction of distributed indexes using Z39.50 (‘Explain’) This is a very efficient approach, since full, usable collection descriptions of databases can be created in seconds.
Carl Lagoze, of Cornell University, gave a presentation on The Open Archives Initiative.
The decision to extend the protocol beyond eprints came from a criticism that the initial approach was conflating politics with technology.
It uses ‘deploy now’ technology: Lagoze said they wanted to get something working fast, and so they wanted to use ‘well-baked’ tools.
Those they chose were HTTP, XML Schema and DC unqualified.
They adopted the ‘80/20 rule’ (only 20% of the work should be new development: 80% should use existing technologies).
There are around 35 data providers now registered.
The museum community, through CIMI, is doing some very interesting OAi work.
A key to understanding OAi is that it is not trying to achieve mass coverage: it is about specialisation, not homogeneity.
It is not trying to create a new Google.
Lagoze is worried about the range of new schemas appearing, and that it might impact upon the size of the OAi cookbook, which might then become too large for implementers.
Lagoze said that the view which used to be held, that popular search engines don’t work, is no longer true.
It is accepted that Google, for example, does a very good job.
But OAi is able to include resources (such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory arXiv, for example) which keep the main search engine robots out.
My paper was entitled Project ANGEL: an open virtual learning environment with sophisticated access management.
The slides have been posted on the ANGEL web site.
Peter Brophy of Manchester Metropolitan University gave a paper entitled Evaluating the Distributed National Electronic Resource.
This work is at an early stage, but the approach is interesting.
CERLIM are using a number of metaphors as frameworks for evaluation: these include seeing the DNER as a library, a museum, a publisher, a digital library, a hybrid library, a gateway, a portal, a managed learning environment, and a dot.com.
They are also using a technique known as ‘quality attributes’ which attempts to break down quality into measurable determinants.
The perspective taken by the project is primarily pedagogical.
Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins University presented the results to date of his project, the Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials (CAPM) prject.
This is examining robotic retrieval and digitisation of store materials at Johns Hopkins.
There are over one million items in an offsite library shelving facility.
In doing the economic feasibility, the project looked at the cost of a page-turner robot, which has not yet been built and is a major challenge for the project.
The retrieval robot has already been built.
The cost-per-use for digitising works from the shelving facility was identified to a range from c $2.00 to c $37.00.
This compares with the cost per item for interlibrary loan supply, which was encouraging for the project.
Interestingly, there was no mention of copyright, which will be a real issue for the real implementation of this system.
I attended a panel session on SMETE, the ‘Science, Mathematics, Engineering & Technology Education’ digital library.
This developed out of the Digital Libraries Initiative in NSF, under which it ran during 1998-99.
It emerged as the National Digital Science Library (NDSL) in 2000, and to date has had two competitive programs.
The idea is to have a SMETE digital library by the autumn of 2002.
The management of the SMETE programme wanted to get away from the idea of a library, which they thought had some of the wrong connotations.
This is a slightly controversial notion, and did not conform to the prevailing view, as I inferred, that digital libraries are learning environments.
The vision is to meet the needs of learners in both individual and collaborative settings; that it should be constructed to enable dynamic use of a broad array of materials for learning, primarily in digital format; and that it should be actively managed to promote reliable ‘anytime anywhere’ access.
The content is a mix of analogue and born digital material.
Much of the material will be free.
In 2002, they have requested a budget of $24.6m, with a proposal deadline expected to be mid-April.
The announcement is at http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/HER/DUE/programs/nsdl/.
The programme web site is at http://www.smete.org/nsdl.
The vision is: A network of learning environments and resources supporting students and teachers at all levels An organisation supporting contributors and users in a far-reaching virtual SMETE community A test-bed for application and ongoing research in digital libraries, education, evaluation, IT, etc One of the ‘shared values’ of the programme is that the library is also a human network.
Requirements for further work are in the following areas: Technical collaboration.
There is a need for an inventory of services.
Collections and evaluation.
They need to track emerging pedagogical practices.
They also need access services, particularly in the mixed landscape of fee vs free services.
There is also a need for a protocol to deal with approaches from potential collection providers.
A repurposing approach to learning objects must be developed.
There is a need to identify ‘cutting edge’ services, such as visualisation tools.
There must also be orientation services, though it is not yet clear what these are.
In our environment, we have very heterogeneous content.
Is any of the content in our learning management systems going to be reusable?
Resources must be usable with all pedagogies and deliverable via all technologies.
Open standards provide ‘discovery stability.’ It was suggested that we need a ‘carefully architected anarchy’ – like Napster.
The history of the technology has moved from gopher, via the web, to ‘peer-to-peer’ systems, like Napster.
There will be massive online learning communities, which are self-sustaining through collaborations, with expertise distributed among members, and authentic learning contexts and motivations.
We were given the mantra ‘Electronic Digital Libraries by the people, for the people’ and urged to ‘think Napster, Freenet and Gnutella.’ The second keynote of the conference was given by Pamela Samuelson of UC Berkeley, Digital rights management: what does it mean for libraries?
In the introduction to Pamela Samuelson by Christine Borgman, she informed us that Professor Samuelson is a professor in both the Faculty of Information Science and the Faculty of Law at Berkeley, and that she was recently listed among the top 100 lawyers in the US.
Her paper looked at commercial digital rights management (DRM) systems, to examine the differences between them and the systems we are developing.
These DRM systems have been designed to enable fine-grained control over commercial distribution of digital content.
Most are still in the design and development stage.
What they are leading to, however, is the ‘disintermediation of libraries’.
Publishers are eager to ‘cut out the middle man.’ Publishers can define the range of authorised uses and build this into code, e.g.
‘this work can be looked at, annotated, printed, downloaded, copied or shared’ – but all for different prices.
Is this the publishers’ nirvana, asked Samuelson.
The relevant quotation in the legal world is ‘code as code’ (i.e.
the publisher sets the rules and technology enforces them).
Another quotation is ‘the answer to the machine is the machine’ – i.e.
if machines enable free copying, other machines can stop it.
This is ‘Star Wars’ technology for the world of IP.
In the music industry there is now an organisation called SDMI, which has developed watermarks for digital music, to encode the rights information and conditions.
DRM systems can build in user monitoring systems for marketing purposes, pricing strategies (different prices can be charged to different people) and the sale of user profiles.
Authentication systems were mentioned, including biometric measures such as ‘retinal scans.’ Illegal use can trigger the self-destruction of applications.
Publishers in the current environment, implied Samuelson, are completely paranoid.
They worry that bits are ‘too copiable’ and prone to hackers.
They also feel that authors are too greedy, and librarians are the enemy, since they want to give users access to content for free (this was another reference to Pat Schroeder’s Washington Post article).
Customers are would-be thieves and computer manufacturers collude in this.
Before DRM systems, copyright was a fairly limited set of rights.
There was no legal right to control uses or access to works.
The ‘first sale’ doctrine made lending legal.
Fair use and library and archival exceptions to copyright promoted learning and the preservation of information.
Copyright expiry means that derivative uses are possible from out-of-copyright works (and, ironically, from the publishers’ view, this abuse of their ‘property’ arose largely from the tax on them which is legal deposit).
Also, copyright law never reached private conduct.
We sing in the shower and use other people’s intellectual property in all kinds of private ways, for free.
The recent DRM copyright law white paper gives owners the right to control temporary copies, even in computer memory, which thus gives them absolute rights over information.
The first-sale doctrine does not apply, since digital works always require copies to be made.
Fair use should disappear because all use is licensed.
The notion of ‘public domain’ in the eyes of publishers, is that it is an artefact of bad technology.
It could be argued that ‘out of copyright’ is too, since publishers ought really, if the technology permitted it, to be able to eliminate all material once copyright ends.
Deposit, archiving and ILL are outmoded and should disappear.
Intermediaries, such as libraries, should function as copyright police (and would therefore be liable for infringement).
All of this is, at least potentially, the way the world of digital rights is moving.
There are other things to fear.
UCITA is a proposed law to enforce mass market licences.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) created two new IP rights: anti-circumvention rights; and a prohibition on removal of copyright declaration information.
Worryingly, for libraries, preservation is not a valid exception to anti-circumvention.
DMCA appears to allow no right to interoperate with data; no fair use; no linking to possibly illegal material; no exceptions for publishers (or digital libraries, which of course often are publishers); and potentially no interactive software.
One implication is that digital libraries would have to purge all material which demonstrated weaknesses in systems.
Reminding us of our mission, after having scared us rigid, Samuelson suggested we think of digital libraries as an alternative model for distribution of digital content which is more user-centred and more service-oriented than DRM systems.
Might we offer publishers useful lessons here?
Indeed, might we provide competition to publishers?
She also advised academic authors not to sign away their copyright to publishers.
Almost all publishers will accept amended conditions.
Copyright is a ‘much thicker right’ than it used to be, so must never be signed away lightly, particularly when fair use as a concept is in danger of disappearing.
She recommended that we should remember that law is a social construct, not a given.
So are DRM systems.
The US Constitution sets a goal for IP policy which is that it should ‘promote the progress of science and the useful arts.’ DRM copyright law diverges from this because publishers have united behind only one vision of the future.
What alternative vision of IP and information policy can we devise for an information society we’d want to live in, and how can we make it happen?
The final conference keynote was by Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information: Interoperability: the still unfulfilled promise of networked information.
Lynch is a philosopher of information science, and this was a typically thougtful treatise.
There is great consensus behind the notion that interoperability ‘ is a good thing.’ However, we have no means of measuring it, nor do we even know whether it is ‘a binary thing, or something more graduated.’ Interoperability should be about expectations.
We should have the right to expect systems to interoperate – and interoperability is a lot more than simply engineering round a problem of incompatibility between two systems.
Email has achieved the interoperability expectation.
But at the ‘upper levels’, however, things become ‘much shakier.’ Interoperability means much more than simply ‘federated searching.’ The next major challenge is to achieve ‘semantic interoperability’.
We need to think also about architecture when we discuss interoperability, and there has been a lot of work done on architecture, but it is mostly top-down.
We need to address architecture ‘from the ground up’ stated Lynch.
We have done well with the basic engineering – TCP/IP, HTTP etc.
We have done well with navigation too, the reason being that, in addressing navigation, ‘humans are in the loop.’ The web is a navigation triumph, and delivers interoperability, but really only to ‘the human perception apparatus.’ It does not deliver semantic interoperability, which is the dream which will allow us to have machines properly work for us and make decisions based on our experiences and objectives.
Lynch encouraged us to study failures.
We don’t do enough of this, and it is important that we do.
Research into failure is unglamorous.
‘How we designed a protocol and screwed it up’ is not the sort of paper most of us would wish to write.
But the Z39.50 community, to its credit, has done this.
We need to look at case studies.
In the case of Z39.50, the mechanism of retrieving results works fine.
But Z39.50 bundles together mechanism with semantics: it attempts to incorporate the semantics of search.
This is contrasted with the Open Archive Initiative protocol, which tackles the easier problem simply of harvesting metadata into a centralised database.
Despite its problems, Lynch implied, Z39.50 with its bold (and hitherto unrealisable) objective might be the more future-ready protocol.
Dublin Core identified a lowest common denominator set of fields to permit interoperability, but many data providers have found it too insipid to be of use to them.
This led to the development of specific qualifiers which can be grafted on to the basic elements in order to make the standard useful for certain groups of users.
The DC community thus achieved the successful use of the ‘graceful degradation’ (or ‘dumb-down’) principle.
This is a very important contribution made by the DC community to interoperability.
The idea is that, even if one does not require or understand the qualified DC element, one will still receive some utility from the unqualified element.
Lynch then turned to the Berners-Lee proposal for ‘the semantic web.’ This will be a very important case study for interoperability.
There are a number of entities in the information universe which are ready to move, as email has, into true interoperability.
Identity is one – unique identity is on the way.
Another is reputation (on which recommender systems, for example, will be based).
Vocabularies, authority files and gazetteers are other instances.
One of the key challenges for the next few years is whether we can move these entities out of closed systems and into general infrastructure.
Commercial systems talk about ‘stickiness’, i.e.
keeping the customer in the system.
They want systems to be closed systems, and so are opposed to interoperability.
For example, many of them tried to keep email within a closed system.
An interesting perspective on the new DNER architecture emphasis on middleware and infrastructure is that ‘stickiness’ is almost an unworthy objective for an academic system to have.
Amazon.com, for example, delivers a significant quantity of personalised service to customers in order that they will not move to competitors.
The challenge for our community is to move personalization into infrastructure, at least in the academic world.
We in the academic world should do this for the world of learning and research.
One of the key ideas to emerge from the presentation, and it is one which the funding agencies must address, is the urgency of developing the unglamorous elements of the information landscape.
Am example of this, supported by both Lynch and Carl Lagoze, is the (too extensive) attention currently being given to OAi, in distinction, say, to universal naming standards like the Universal Resource Name and Digital Object Identifiers.
We all assume these latter will come along with the infrastructure in due course.
But they need to be worked on.
Kathleen McKeown of Columbia University, gave one of the more interesting presentations entitled PERSIVAL: a system for personalised search and summarization over multimedia healthcare information.
This system exploits the online patient record in building a clinical information system.
The aim is to provide a system which allows a clinician – and ultimately a patient – to ask queries about information they find in the patient record.
The system integrates with the other information sources, e.g.
journal articles and consumer health information – available at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.
Users can pose queries, or the system can generate them automatically, based on previously asked queries.
The system provides automatic answers to user queries (based on sophisticated semantics) and suggests specific queries based on individual patient record information.
The project is developing a ‘metasearcher’ to enable queries to be run over heterogeneous resources.
The PERSIVAL team are also developing automated classification techniques for hierarchical topic generation using a ‘trainable’ rule-based classifier.
Terms are converted to semantic concepts, which are then matched against patient record concepts.
The system will match the concept profile from the patient record against journal articles with similar concept profiles.
The system is also developing content-based echo video search tools.
In general, it appears to lead to a rich resource of information about their own condition for patients – something which they have not in the past normally enjoyed – as well as an important information source for clinicians.
The system assembles the retrieved information and summarises it for the user, selecting sources by ‘genre’ (e.g.
for clinicians the summary would be based on the medical journal article, whereas for patients, the summary would be based upon consumer health information).
They have also developed a medical dictionary tool using reliable sources.
The echo video information can also be extracted and associated in the summary.
Gregory Crane’s paper, Building a hypertextual digital library in the humanities: a case study on London, won the Vannevar Bush award for best conference paper.
It described a new humanities digital library collection: a large textual resource and 10,000 images representing books, images and maps on pre-20th century London.
This collection is available in the Perseus Digital Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu).
The inspiration came from a special collection of material on London and its environs at Tufts, which the university had acquired in 1922.
The team set out to see how time and space could be used as axes along which to organise the materials.
They began with the premise that reference works are a logical starting place for building digital library collections.
An interesting point made by Crane is that digital libraries are intrinsically related to the way information has been organised since earliest times.
The team was interested to see how the information organisation in the printed material supported the automatic generation of links and visualisation interfaces.
Crane calls attention to the difference between ‘literary reading’ and ‘utilitarian reading’ – reading for a specific purpose – which is the type of reading most usually done by users of libraries.
His contention is that those who ‘historicise’ documents, seeking to experience them as clues to past cultures – have to read in both modes at once.
In Crane’s view, generalising from the work he has done on the London collection and also on the more extensive classical digital library he has developed in Project Perseus, digital libraries exist to deepen the knowledge of their users on particular subjects, but also to improve their approaches to problems generally.
Their utility cannot be measured either by financial gain or by volume of site traffic.
Crane touches also upon the granularity question, which was significantly to the fore throughout this conference.
Document-to-document links are not enough.
He argues for ‘span-to-span’ links connecting arbitrary subsections of documents.
He also emphasizes the need for as many links to related materials as possible.
The objective, he states, is recall rather than precision in humanities research.
One of the themes of the paper is the need for automatically-generated links.
He cites the New Variorum Shakespeare as a work which is very well supplied with ‘hand-crafted’ links.
However, it is so labour-intensive that each new edition is instantly out of date with current Shakespeare scholarship.
To support scholarly reading, therefore, requires that each document can be connected to a hypertextual digital library.
London tags Latin and Greek words, which were much more extensively used by the writers of the time than they are today, to linguistic support tools.
It also tags name references (to people, places and topics) to a range of reference works.
What is particularly interesting about the London approach is the pragmatic compromises made by the development team.
In creating support material for place-names, for example, Crane admits that ideally they would have used one unified authority list (instead of several), but they didn’t have the resources to do this, so made do with several indexes which contain lots of name variants, leaving it to the scholars to deal with the ambiguities.
This perhaps illustrates the different approach taken by academics to that likely to be advocated by librarians.
What is also clear is that the reference support material has to be customised to the collection.
The team mined gazetteers and dictionaries, using out-of-copyright reference works and negotiating with Bartholomew’s for vector map data in order to create this specialised reference resource.
In all, the collection contains 284,000 automatic links (roughly one word in every forty).
These are generated at runtime.
In terms of web design, Crane admits that this is not graceful – but as a scholarly resource it is invaluable.
The team were particularly interested in the integration of GIS systems.
They used a modern GIS to align their historical maps of the city.
Crane admits that they need to do a lot more work on London.
In time, it should have a unified authority index.
There is also a lot more ‘mining’ of sources to be done to increase the value of the index through disambiguation, but this requires a lot of laborious work through many contemporary sources.
Other areas requiring further work are the mining of tabular information (e.g.
by visualising statistical information in a GIS) and aligning monetary information to the time axis to show how prices changed over time.
Another feature which will be capable of being added in time is ‘temporal spatial query’ (e.g.
one will be able to ask the system to provide all documents relating to St Paul’s from the 1630s).
Crane anticipates that, in time, the resource will link to third-party services via ‘open citation linking’, and that third-party sources could also filter their data via London’s visualisation tools.
He is unworried about the reference tools developing over time, since they will be added more slowly than the general collection of non-reference materials, and will ‘catch up’.
In conclusion, Crane urges anyone contemplating the creation of such collections to start with reference works, and also to use XML not only for its ability to map document structure, but also because it can help to resolve ambiguous referents.
This was a very stimulating conference, with some important contributions to the key themes in digital library research and development over the next few years.
I was delighted to be able to attend it, and am very grateful to the DNER Programme Office for its support in allowing me to travel to Roanoke.
John MacColl, Director of SELLIC University of Edinburgh Email: j.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Website: http://www.ed.ac.uk Article Title: “ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Roanoke, Virginia, June 24-28 2001” Author: John MacColl Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/maccoll/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Buzz software digitisation accessibility ebook ict url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod's first outing in Ariadne as Public Libraries Focus.
My predecessor, Sarah Ormes, in her final ‘Public Libraries’ column for Ariadne, owned up to having spent five and a half years at UKOLN.
Coincidentally, I too have just concluded five and a half years at the University of Plymouth.
This led me to speculate, as one does in those brain numbing moments when awaiting yet another delayed train on a drafty platform in grey November (yes, its ‘leaves on the line’ season again folks), whether, after five and a half years in a post, some of us need to regenerate, like ‘Seven of Nine’, the ice maiden in the current Star Trek series -Voyager.
I pondered as to whether failure to move on or ship out, could result in mental ossification, and, if it did, would anyone notice?
Or, heaven forfend, one could become so institutionalised, so ‘adapted’ (sorry, back in Voyager land again), to the thinking and behaviour patterns of the organisation, that one is rendered incapable of that prerequisite for survival today ‘joined up’ thinking.
The insertion of a new mental motherboard, by way of a new job, might be the only way to negate in-house thinking and force one’s brain to think outside of the box.
Well, dear readers, here I am, bright eyed and fairly bushy tailed, after my first few hectic months at UKOLN, hoping to engage your hearts and minds on a regular basis in this column.
I also plan to get the thinking cap on, and pen articles on topics which I hope will be of interest, and which, with a bit of luck will stimulate debate.
I am particularly pleased to have taken on the mantle of Public Library Networking at a time when so much is happening at local, regional and national level.
The People’s Network continues to roll out, and will continue to do so until December 2002.
By then every public library will be connected to what used to be referred to as the information superhighway a term which seems to have slipped out of use, perhaps since Al Gore lost the presidential election.
Examples of good and innovative practice which exploit the opportunities presented by ICT and networking, are springing up all over the place, and I plan to look at some of these in more depth over the coming year.
More on this next time.
My reason for mentioning the timeliness of my UKOLN appointment, and my involvement with the public library sector, is best explained by my bnefly summarising my recent background.
For the past eight years I have worked mainly in research and development in library and information services within the higher education sector.
I was involved in two projects within the Joint Information Systems Committee’s (JISC) Electronic Library Programme, and, before that, with a British Library funded project to evaluate the viability of benchmarking for the library and information services sector.
At the time (1994) people felt benchmarking was strictly for the manufacturing industry – amazing to think how widely it has now been adopted, and in such a short time.
I cannot, therefore, avoid drawing parallels with the situation for public libraries at the moment, in terms of rapid change and the emergence of new roles and services.
Universities and HE colleges have ‘been there and done that’, and now take for granted their ability to connect to global information networks.
Email is often the mode of communication of choice for most staff in the HE sector, given the fact that people are away from their desks for a lot of the time, either teaching or in meetings, or are otherwise unable to take phonecalls.
Electronic discussion lists are also widely used in the HE sector; discussion lists enable individuals to seek help and advice within a known user community; they also provide useful contacts and generally act as an informal communication channel and mutual support system.
I have now taken over as manager of the JISC mail “lis-pub-libs” discussion list, and have been pleased at the number of people joining the list.
For those wishing to avoid email overload there is a weekly digest option, which is available on JISC mail lists.
It has been suggested to me by a colleague (thank you to Andrew Poole of Instant Library Limited), that a brief guide to using the lis-pub-libs mail list might be welcome?
This I will do, whilst acknowledging that JISC mail already provides online help for those wishing to join or leave lists.
If a new guide reaches the parts that JISC mail cannot reach thereby encouraging more people to join the public libraries list by saving time and effort, then it is worth doing.
To return to me and my experiences again, I have, albeit in a modest way, contributed to the University of Plymouth’s staff development programme, by developing and delivering a course on effective use of the Internet and search tools.
My interest in staff development and training remains strong, and led to my recently acquiring a teaching qualification – a PGCE (Post Compulsory education) something which I now feel was well worth the time and effort, even though it did not always feel like it at the time (attending class for one night a week for a year).
Staff in public libraries might like to consider a teaching qualification themselves given their new learning support role.
A local education authority grant was available for my course, and for the Certificate in Education (for those without a first degree), but you will need to check this out, as the situation is constantly changing (witness the demise of the individual learning account).
Immediately prior to taking up my post here at UKOLN, I worked on a project to develop a new postgraduate qualification for staff working with disabled students.
The implications of the new disability and human rights legislation for education providers, was just one facet of a highly complex subject, which staff need to understand, and which forms the basis of one module.
This might have already been evaluated in relation to public libraries and the learning agenda, for example for those public libraries with Learndirect centres, but I am unsure?
Having worked alongside staff who assessed the needs of students in relation to the provision of enabling technology (supported by the Disabled Student Allowance) I hope that some of the knowledge I acquired will come in useful in the public library sector.
I note from the December edition of Managing Information [1] that some public libraries are using the People’s Network to focus on the provision of enabling technologies to make ICT fully accessible to people with a range of disabilities.
This brings me on, albeit briefly in this context, to the topic of Digital talking books, which are an interesting development in the convergence of ebook and audio technologies.
The DAISY consortium (Digital Audio-based Information SYstem) has been formed to establish a world standard for the next generation of information, which includes digital talking books and braille.
Standards are the key to genuine accessibility, and the digitisation of audio resources will benefit those who are print disabled, as well as those with visual impairments.
This includes people with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, and people with particular mobility problems, who experience difficulty holding and using printed books.
Talking of books – you remember them.
They smelt wonderful when new, were good to have and to hold, and looked superb on shelves.
Well, forget all that.
Ebooks sit on virtual shelves; you need hardware and software to read them; they can be read in bed with the light off (very partner friendly), and have been the central theme of a multitude of recent events.
I have gone from 0 to 60mph in a very short time, in an attempt to get my ebook knowledge up to speed for the two events at which I was invited to present in November 2001 [2].
I have also attended a third event on this fascinating and complex topic – and all of this in the space of several weeks – evidence that ebooks are current flavour of the month.
[3] Like porridge – ebooks are hard to nail to the wall, partly due to the fact that they are not tangible objects, and partly because they comprise digital texts, software to read the texts, and hardware on which to load the software to read the texts and that’s just for starters.
Further afield, in Australia the Public Libraries conference 2001 featured a paper on ebooks [4], and in November in the US the National Institute of Standards and Technology held a conference entitled: Ebook 2001 authors, applications and accessibility on ebooks [5].
Both the US and Australia are much further down the ebook road in terms of implementation in both public (and academic) libraries.
For those of you wanting practical examples of the issues facing those who have already implemented ebooks in public libraries, I would recommend reading the special edition of Public Libraries – the US Public Library Association journal dated September/October 2001.
[6] However, I will be writing at greater length on this topic, as much water has passed under the bridge since Sarah Ormes produced her useful issue paper on ebooks [7].
I will try to capture and summarise the wealth of experience and opinion I encountered at the events I attended, and also build on my own research into ebooks.
Well, at this point I must end my first epistle.
I have missed the deadline, and hear the thud of the editor’s boots echoing down the UKOLN corridors as he comes in search of my modest offering.
To quote the words of the late Douglas Adams: “ I love deadlines.
I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly past.” [8] References "New chapter for Libraries".
Managing Information, December 2001. p.22 E-books and Public Libraries.
CPI seminar.
29 November 2001.
The George Business Centre, Stamford, Lincs.
E-books seminar.
East Midlands Group of the Universities, Colleges and Research Group.
Derby University, 22 November 2001.
JIBS User Group AGM and E-Books workshop.
King’s College London, 30 November 2001. http://www.alia.org.au/conferences/public/2001/papers/hutley.joseph.saunders.html http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/ebook2001/agenda/MondayAgenda.html E-Libraries.
Supplement to the September/October 2001 issue ofPublic Libraries.
Ormes, S. An ebook primer.
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Student Searching Behaviour in the JISC Information Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Student Searching Behaviour in the JISC Information Environment Buzz data rdf framework database xml usability infrastructure cataloguing opac hypertext z39.50 e-learning cd-rom intranet url research standards modelling Citation BibTex RIS Jill R. Griffiths and Peter Brophy report on work in progress and air some initial findings on the EDNER project, which undertakes evaluation of the developing JISC Information Environment.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Information Environment (IE, a development from the DNER Distributed National Electronic Resource) is intended to help users in the UK academic sector maximise the value of published information resources by developing a coherent environment out of the confusing array of systems and services currently available.
The EDNER Project (Formative Evaluation of the DNER,< http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/edner>) is funded to undertake ongoing evaluation of the developing IE over the full three years of the JISC 5/99 Learning & Teaching and Infrastructure Programme period i.e.
from 2000 to 2003.
The EDNER Project is led by the Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) at the Manchester Metropolitan University; the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT) at Lancaster University is a partner.
This paper reports on work in progress and initial findings of the evaluation team.
User behaviour studies General studies There is a considerable body of research on user behaviour in respect of information retrieval (IR) systems, although research on retrieval from the World Wide Web is not as advanced.
However, surveys of web usage give some sense of what the average web searcher is doing and point to differences between web searches and queries with traditional IR systems.
Observations of the average web searcher (Spink et al, 1998; Ellis et al, 1998) point out that ineffective use may be caused by lack of understanding of how a search engine interprets a query.
Few users are aware of when a search service defaults to AND or OR and expect a search engine to automatically discriminate between single terms and phrases.
Also, devices such as relevance feedback work well if the user ranks ten or more items, when in reality users will only rank one or two items for feedback (Croft, 1995).
Koll (1993) found that users provide few clues as to what they want, approaching a search with an attitude of 'I'll know it when I see it', which creates difficulties in formulation of a query statement.
Larsen (1997) is of the opinion that Internet search systems will evolve to meet the behaviour of the average web searcher.
Thus it can be seen that there has been a shift towards the introduction of search features that appear to respond to the ways in which users actually search these systems, e.g.
search assistance, query formulation, query modification and navigation.
The notion that improved interaction may be key in improving results is attractive in principle but not necessarily true in reality.
Nick Lethaby (Verity Inc) paraphrased in Andrews (1996) states "users don't want to interact with a search engine much beyond keying in a few words and letting it set out results".
This can also be seen from the Devise results (Johnson et al, 2001) where the Interaction dimension had the weakest correlation with users' overall rating of satisfaction (where Efficiency had the strongest correlation, followed by Effectiveness, Utility and then Interaction).
It can thus be assumed that most users do not use advanced search features, or enter complex queries, or want to interact with search systems.
As a consequence, systems such as search engines are now trying to automate query formulation, shifting the burden of formulating precise or extensive terminology from the user to the system.
Spink et al (1998) conducted a study in which 357 Excite users responded to an interactive survey in which they were asked about their search topics, intended query terms, search frequency for information on their topic and demographic data.
Search topics were spread across 16 topic categories.
Most respondents searched on a single topic as determined by their query terms and search topic statements.
Search terms are those that the participants intended to use, rather than what was actually used.
The mean number of terms was low at 3.34.
Many of the terms were clearly meant as a phrase but there was no indication that quotation marks were used.
Excite requires quotation marks to indicate a phrase search, otherwise they are linked by the Boolean operator OR.
Few queries included explicit Boolean or other operators.
Jansen et al (2000) analysed transaction logs containing 51,473 queries posed by 18,113 users of Excite and from this argued that "while Internet search engines are based on IR principles, Internet searching is very different from IR searching as traditionally practised and researched in online databases, CD-ROM and OPACs" (p.208).
They found that web users are not comfortable with Boolean and other advanced means of searching, and do not frequently browse the results beyond the first page.
Other studies also show that most web searchers do not view more that the first 10 results (Hoelscher, 1998; Silverstein et al, 1999).
In addition, Jansen et al.
found that the mean number of queries per user was 2.8 with a number (not specified) of users going on to modify their original query and view subsequent results.
The actual queries themselves were short in comparison to searches on regular IR systems, on average a query containing only 2.21 terms.
Further to this Jansen (2000) ran analyses that compared query results with use of advanced techniques on the one hand to results without on the other, and found that on average only 2.7 new results were retrieved.
From this he posits, "use of complex queries is not worth the trouble.
Based on their conduct, it appears that most web searchers do not think it worth the trouble either."
He also points out that the behaviour of web searchers follows the principle of least effort (Zipf, 1949).
This has also been recorded by Marchionini (1992) who stated, "humans will seek the path of least cognitive resistance" (p.156) and Griffiths (1996) "increasing the cognitive burden placed on the user … can affect successful retrieval of information.
Where an application required fewer actions from the user, greater success was achieved as there was less possibility for a user to make an error" (p.203).
Student studies A number of studies have been conducted into use of electronic resources by students.
From their research Cmor and Lippold (2001) put forward a number of observations from their experiences of student searching behaviour on the web.
These findings can be summarised as: 1) students use the web for everything; 2) they will spend hours searching or just a few minutes; 3) searching skills vary and students will often assess themselves as being more skilled than they actually are and, 4) they will give discussion list comments the same academic weight as peer reviewed journal articles.
Navarro-Prieto et al.
(1999) sought to develop an empirically based model of web searching in which 23 students were recruited from the School of Cognitive and Computer Science, University of Sussex.
Ten of these participants were Computer Science students and thirteen were Psychology students.
Their findings highlight a number of interesting points: 1) whilst the Computer Science students are more likely to be able to describe how search engines develop their databases neither of the two groups have a clear idea of how search engines use the queries to search for information; 2) most participants considered their levels of satisfaction with the results of their search to be 'good' or 'OK' and, 3) most participants cannot remember their searches, and tended to forget those search engines and queries that did not give any successful results.
From their research Navarro-Prieto et al.
were able to identify three different general patterns of searching, thus: 1) top-down strategy, where participants searched in a general area and then narrowed down their search from the links provided until they found what they were looking for; 2) bottom-up strategy, where participants looked for a specific keyword provided in their instructions and then scrolled through the results until they found the desired information.
This strategy was most often used by experienced searchers and, 3) mixed strategies, where participants used both of the above in parallel.
This strategy was only used by experienced participants.
Twidale et al (1995) conducted a study that considered the role of collaborative learning during information searching which informed the development of Ariadne.
Quoting relevant literature they identified common problems as: retrieving zero hits, retrieving hundreds of hits, frequent errors, little strategy variation and locating few of the relevant records.
The only specific searching issue addressed was that of 'errors made in searching', which described how simple typing errors in a sound strategy led to few hits and subsequently led to the strategy being abandoned.
More general observations revealed a number of collaborative interactions between students which were noted, thus: 1) students will often work in groups (2-4) around a single terminal, discussing ideas and planning their next actions; 2) groups working on adjacent terminals, discussing what they are doing, comparing results and sometimes seeming to compete to find the information; 3) individuals working on adjacent terminals, occasionally leaning over to ask their neighbour for help and, 4) individuals working at separate terminals monitoring the activity of others.
JISC User behaviour monitoring and evaluation studies JUBILEE and JUSTEIS The JISC Circular 1/99: Monitoring and Evaluating User Behaviour in Information Seeking and Use of Information Technology and Information Services in UK HE sought to develop a Framework which would complement the work already undertaken by JISC through its Technical Advisory Unit (TAU) and Monitoring and Advisory Unit (MAU).
The Framework specifically focuses on the development of a longitudinal profile of the use of electronic information services (EIS) and the development of an understanding of the "triggers and barriers that affect such use" (Rowley 2001, p.A2).
The JUSTEIS project (JISC Usage Survey Trends: Trends in Electronic Information Service) was contracted to undertake Strand A and C of the Framework and the JUBILEE project (JISC User Behaviour in Information Seeking: Longitudinal Evaluation of EIS) Strand D. Strand A of the JUSTEIS project is an annual survey which "seeks to measure and evaluate the overall awareness, uptake, usage and usefulness of information technologies and information services" in HE in the UK (Rowley 2001, p.A2).
This survey was conducted by telephone interview, email and paper-based questionnaire.
Strand C is a general survey of EIS provision which aims to develop profiles of current and planned service provision.
Data was gathered via a Web survey of resources access provided by individual HEIs supplemented by telephone interviews with senior LIS managers.
The JUBILEE project, which is undertaking Strand D, focuses on qualitative longitudinal monitoring of the information behaviour, needs and opportunities for both specific academics and student communities and academics and students in general.
Questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, electronic communication and feedback on case study reports formed the basis on which this survey was conducted.
In summary the work of JUBILEE and JUSTEIS found that: Undergraduate students use EIS mainly for academic purposes (connected to assessment) but also for leisure reasons, Use of SEs predominates over all other type of EIS, Research postgraduates' pattern of use differs to that of taught postgraduates, Some postgraduates use JISC-negotiated services and specialist EIS more than undergraduates, Use of electronic journals by academic staff and postgraduates is relatively infrequent, Some students have more than one email address, Patterns of EIS vary among disciplines, Academic staff exert greater influence over undergraduate and postgraduate use of EIS than LIS staff.
Friends and colleagues are also influential and there is a suggestion that patterns of use of EIS become habitual, Different models of information skills provision and support can be found in different institutions and different disciplines.
This work is continuing into a third cycle which will focus on a broad based survey profiling user behaviour and factors influencing it (Strand A); a survey of purchase intentions supplemented by a focussed survey of web provision (Strand C); a discipline based programme of qualitative monitoring of the development of EIS in HE (Strand D) and, synthesis in which integration of all strands will occur (Strand E).
Whilst there are some similarities in the aims of EDNER and JUSTEIS and JUBILEE there are significant differences.
EDNER is particularly interested in whether and how JISC projects aim to influence practice and the extent to which they succeed in so doing.
It is perhaps not surprising that many of the findings from EDNER are different to those of JUSTEIS and JUBILEE, due to the different aims, foci and approaches taken.
The following sections discuss a brief outline of the methodological approach adopted by the EDNER user study and presents some of the major findings.
Methodology The aim of the EDNER study reported here was to develop understanding of users' searching behaviour in the IE by asking them to assess the quality of DNER services according to a range of defined criteria (Quality Attributes, see section 3.1).
This was achieved by firstly establishing a quality attributes methodology, with appropriate revisions and adaptations for its use in this context.
This approach is based on the classic definitions of 'quality' such as 'fitness for (the user's) purpose' or 'conformance to (the user's) requirements' (Brophy and Coulling, 1996) but seeks to probe beneath the surface to explore the different dimensions of quality (see Section 3.1).
Test searches were then designed (one for each of the services to be used by the participants, fifteen in total).
These searches were designed so that they would be of sufficient complexity to challenge the user without being impossible for them to answer.
Participants were recruited via Manchester Metropolitan University's Student Union Job Shop and twenty-seven students from a wide course range participated.
Each student was paid for his or her participation.
One third of the sample consisted of students from the Department of Information and Communications and were studying for an Information and Library management degree, while the remaining two thirds of the sample were studying a wide variety of subjects and all were at various stages of their course.
No restrictions were placed on them having computer, searching or Internet experience.
Testing was conducted in a controlled environment based within the Department of Information and Communications.
Each participant searched for the fifteen test queries and completed questionnaires for each task undertaken.
Data gathered via the questionnaires was analysed in two ways, 1) quantitative data was analysed using (SPSS Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), and 2) open response question data was analysed using qualitative techniques.
It should be stressed that this study focussed entirely on user-centred evaluation.
EDNER is also concerned with expert evaluation, but this aspect of the work will be reported elsewhere.
Quality Attributes The use of Garvin's Quality Attributes has been applied to information services by Brophy (1998).
Garvin (1987) identified eight attributes that can be used to evaluate the quality of services, and with some changes of emphasis, one significant change of concept and the introduction of two additional attributes (Currency and Usability) they apply well to ILS.
They are: Performance is concerned with establishing confirmation that a service meets its most basic requirement.
These are the primary operating features of the product or service.
For example, a library which claimed to offer a 'quality' service would be expected to provide some minimum set of services a catalogue of its holdings for example.
The most basic quality question is then 'Does this catalogue exist?'.
Today, most users would also expect that part of the minimum would be that the catalogue was available online and covered all of the library's core holdings.
These are performance attributes.
With Conformance the question is whether the product or service meets the agreed standard.
This may be a national or international standard or locally determined service standard.
The standards themselves, however they are devised, must of course relate to customer requirements.
For information services there are obvious conformance questions around the utilisation of standards and protocols such as XML, RDF, Dublin Core, OAI, Z39.50 etc.
It is worth noting that many conformance questions can only be answered by expert analysts since users are unlikely to have either the expertise or the access needed to make technical or service-wide assessments.
Features are the secondary operating attributes, which add to a product or service in the user's eyes but are not essential to it.
They may provide an essential marketing edge.
It is not always easy to distinguish 'performance' characteristics from 'features', especially as what is essential to one customer may be an optional extra to another, and there is a tendency for 'features' to become 'performance' attributes over time direct links from the catalogue to full text are an example of a feature currently developing in this way.
Users place high value on the Reliability of a product or service.
For products this usually means that they perform as expected (or better).
For information services, a major issue is usually availability of the service.
Therefore broken links, unreliability and slowness in speed of response can have a detrimental affect on a user's perception of a service.
Garvin uses the term Durability, defined as 'the amount of use the product will provide before it deteriorates to the point where replacement or discard is preferable to repair'.
In the case of information services this will relate to the sustainability of the service over a period of time.
In simple terms, will the service still be in existence in three or five years?
Again, this is more likely to be assessed by experts in the field than by end users, although they may have useful contributions on the assessment of the attribute based on comparisons with similar services.
For most users of information services an important issue is the Currency of information, i.e.
how up to date the information provided is when it is retrieved.
Serviceability relates to when things go wrong.
How easy will it then be to put them right?
How quickly can they be repaired?
How much inconvenience will be caused to the user, and how much cost?
For users of an electronic information service this may translate to the level of help available to them at the time of the search.
So the availability of instructions and prompts throughout, context sensitive help and usefulness of help will be important.
Whilst Aesthetics and Image is a highly subjective area, it is of prime importance to users.
In electronic environments it brings in the whole debate about what constitutes good design.
In a web environment, the design of the home page may be the basis for user selection of services, and this may have little to do with actual functionality.
You may have a great information service behind that home page, but do the users ever find it?
Perceived Quality is one of the most interesting of attributes because it recognises that all users make their judgments on incomplete information.
They do not carry out detailed surveys of 'hit rates' or examine the rival systems' performance in retrieving a systematic sample of records.
Most users do not read the service's mission statement or service standards and do their best to by-pass the instructions pages.
Yet, users will quickly come to a judgment about the service based on the reputation of the service among their colleagues and acquaintances, their preconceptions and their instant reactions to it.
The addition of Usability as an attribute is important in any user-centred evaluation.
User-centred models are much more helpful when personal preferences and requirements are factored in so, for example, usability to a blind person may mean something quite different to usability to a sighted person.
The approach also maps well to many of the quality assurance approaches which government (in the UK) is sponsoring for example in public libraries the talk is now of 'Best Value'.
In European business circles, the talk is of 'business excellence' and the European Foundation for Quality Management has re-titled its annual award as 'The European Award for Business Excellence'.
One aspect of this that has become important recently is its emphasis on the satisfaction of all the stakeholders.
Results of the EDNER user study The study was concerned with two questions: 1) How do students discover and locate information and, 2) How do services (and aspects of services) rate in a student evaluation and what criteria are most important to them?
To this end the study was split into two days of testing, the first of which was concerned with how students discover and locate information and second with evaluation of IE services.
The following section presents a selection of the results of the research.
Discovering and locating information How students search: where they go first and why Students were asked to find information on fifteen set tasks, designed to be typical of information seeking in an academic environment, completing a questionnaire after each.
Every time they started a new task we asked them where they went first to try to find relevant information.
The following presents the most frequently cited starting points: 45% of students used Google as their first port of call when locating information; The second most highly used starting point was the University OPAC, used by 10% of the sample; Next comes Yahoo used by 9% of the students as the first source they tried; Lycos was used first by 6%, and AltaVista, Ask Jeeves and BUBL were all used as a first resource by 4% (each) of the sample of students.
From these results it is clear that the majority of participants use a search engine in the first instance.
This concurs with the JUBILEE and JUSTEIS results which found that use of SEs predominates over all other types of EIS.
Search engines are liked for their familiarity and because they have provided successful results on previous occasions.
Individual search engines become "my personal favourite" and phrases such as "tried and tested", "my usual search engine" and "trusted" were frequently given by the students when asked why they chose this source first.
Many reasons for students confidence in Google were given, such as "Couldn't think how else to start a search", "Google is always my first choice", "I used Google because of the site's reliability", "I think it is the easiest search to use", "Its better to look on Google than on the library journal search for this one as I wasn't sure of the exact name of the journal".
Of those students who were able to locate a website which provided them with the information they required only 12.4% had heard of the website prior to the task, with 57.4% never having heard of it before and 30.2% being unable to find any information.
Perceptions of use: Ease of use Students were asked how difficult or easy they found each of the tasks: 50% responded that they found it easy to locate the required information 35% found it difficult 15% had no view either way Perceptions of success Students were asked how successful they had been in locating the information: 70% responded that they were successful 30% responded that they were unsuccessful Even when users can find information it is not always an easy task.
This may have serious implications for developers of services as a number of studies (Johnson et al, 2001) have shown that users will often trade performance for the path of least cognitive resistance (minimum effort and time).
How long it takes students to search and why they stop Students were asked to search for as long (or short) a time as they wanted, with a maximum of 30 minutes to be spent on any one task.
The time taken by the majority of participants looking for information was between 1 and 15 minutes.
Other research (Craven and Griffiths, 2002) also found that the average time taken to search for information was between 15 19 minutes.
The DEvISE project (Johnson et al., 2001) also found that Efficiency correlated most strongly with General Satisfaction, with Effectiveness second, which may suggest that the amount of time and effort required from the user matters more than the relevance of the items found.
Reason for stopping Students were asked why they stopped trying to locate information, reasons given were: Found information = 70% Unable to find website within time allowed = 15% Couldn't find a website and gave up = 12% Technical problems affected search = 3% One respondent gave a very simple reason for stopping 'Teatime!'
Individual service evaluation Results show varying degrees of satisfaction across each of the services and each of the Attributes.
The following figures present a selection of the results across six of the 5/99 Programme projects' available services, designated A to F to preserve anonymity.
Figure 1 Graphical representation of the Performance Attribute results, 5/99 Projects   Figure 2 Graphical representation of the Aesthetic Attribute results, 5/99 Projects   Figure 3 Graphical representation of the Usability Attribute results, 5/99 Projects Users expressed an increase in post-search Perceived Quality on Service A and Service C, coupled with high levels of Satisfaction Overall and across each of the Attributes.
High levels of satisfaction were recorded across many of the Attributes for both of these services and this appears to have a positive impact on the preconceptions of the users.
On Service D Perceived Quality pre and post searching remained static despite high levels of satisfaction with Performance.
In conjunction with this Performance score, satisfaction with Usability and Aesthetics were lower (Figures 2 and 3) and Overall Satisfaction was also low.
This seems to indicate that users' perceptions of quality are driven by factors other than just the performance of a system.
It also raises interesting questions as to how fixed preconceptions about quality may affect the results of the evaluation of a system or service.
In each instance Satisfaction Overall corresponded closely with post-search Perceived Quality.
Use of the Quality Attributes as evaluation criteria allows investigation of what happens in-between perceptions of quality of service before and after use of the service.
This allows for improvement of services by targeting areas that have scored lower.
Therefore, this approach allows service providers and developers to identify specific areas for improvement.
In IR terms, performance would traditionally be measured by recall and precision, and in a Web environment it may be measured by user satisfaction (Johnson et al 2001).
These results seem to demonstrate that other measures play an important role in user evaluation.
Using a Quality Management approach, we can demonstrate that users' preconceptions play a major role in their evaluation of a service and can be hard to shift an example is Service D where Pre and Post perceived quality did not change despite the fact that users were satisfied that required information was found.
However, where a service performs well across all attributes user perceptions can change through use of the service (for example Service C).
This raises interesting questions about how services are developed, how users are trained and how services are marketed.
Final issues that have arisen as a result of this research may be summarised by the following: Attributes that gave rise to the most comment from users were Features, then Usability and Aesthetics.
This may indicate that users rate ease of use, user friendliness and the look of a service at least as highly (if not more) as actual Performance, Users demonstrated confusion as to what is meant by quality different users had very different definitions of what quality is, Many users exhibited a preoccupation with search engines and search boxes, focusing on this even when they found information by clicking on links, Users like good visuals, clean uncluttered screens and interesting extra features such as the tours offered by Service A and Service C. Many comments were about speed: 'quick', 'fast', 'straight to info' were typical.
This is an interesting criteria that has been shown to be important by other studies (Johnson et al, 2001).
Users seem to be adopting a 'get in, get information and get out' approach.
This will be different for those services offering tutorials.
Users did comment on the Help feature and the availability of Instructions and Prompts not many participants used help but those that did reporting mixed feelings on the usefulness of it.
Some attention is therefore needed to develop Help into a feature that actually assists users.
Users reported some good feedback on the availability of Instructions and Prompts when this feature was available and made sense.
Conclusions Two results in particular raise very interesting and important issues: Students prefer to locate information or resources via a search engine above all other options, and Google is the search engine of choice and, Whilst 70% of participants felt that they were successful only half of these thought that it was easy to locate information.
Students either have little awareness of alternative ways of finding information to the search engine route or have tried other methods and still prefer to use Google a situation we now refer to as the Googling phenomenon.
Further to this, even when students are able to locate information it is not always easy (even when using Google), and with a third of participants failing to find information, user awareness, training and education needs to be improved.
If the IE is truly to be embedded and integrated into learning and teaching further work needs to be done to equip students with the awareness and skills to use electronic resources other than Google.
In addition, use of Quality Attributes as evaluation criteria allows investigation of what happens to perceptions of quality of service before and after use of the service.
This allows for improvement of services by targeting areas that have scored lower.
Therefore, this approach allows service providers and developers to identify specific areas for improvement.
In IR terms, performance would traditionally be measured by recall and precision, and in a Web environment it may be measured by user satisfaction (Johnson et al 2001).
These results are early indicators from work in progress but seem to demonstrate that other measures play an important role in user evaluation.
Using a Quality Management approach, we can demonstrate that users' preconceptions play a major role in their evaluation of a service and can be are hard to shift.
This raises interesting questions about how services are developed, how users are trained and how services are marketed.
As the IE develops further it provides a tool for evaluating its products from a user perspective.
In particular it is capable of identifying specific areas that may benefit from further attention.
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Reading MA: Addison-Wesley.
Author Details Jill R. Griffiths and Peter Brophy Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM), the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Article Title: "Student searching behaviour in the JISC Information Environment" Author: Jill R.Griffiths and Peter Brophy Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/edner/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Meta-Objects Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Meta-Objects Buzz data software java rdf database metadata tagging schema windows interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Matthew Dovey outlines an Object Oriented approach to metadata.
In the last few decades, notions of computer science have undergone a number of paradigm shifts.
Underlying the majority of these is the concept of object-orientation, namely the recognition that the decoupling of data and the code that acts upon them, is based on an artificial distinction, and that models which combine the data and code into distinct "objects" offer both more intuitive and a functionally richer conceptual entities.
This paradigm shift can be particularly seen in three areas: programming languages, databases and user-interfaces.
Within programming, the evolution has been from procedural based languages where the code was encapsulated within procedures and kept separate from the data, to object-oriented languages where the program is built up of self contained "objects" which encapsulate both the data and the actions of the items being modeled.
A similar shift has occurred in database development, where it has been recognized that it is often not appropriate to separate the data from the business processes that act upon them, and it is better to store the processes with the data, not least for preserving integrity of the data.
Both of these paradigm shifts have occurred at a level not usually perceived by the end user, but these have, however, provided the foundations for a shift in the metaphors of the user interface, namely the move from application-centric to object-oriented, or more descriptively, document-centric user interfaces.
Whereas in the past the user was aware of both the data, in the form of files or documents, and the tools required to work with that data, in the form of applications, in a document-centric user interface, the user is merely aware of the documents, and the document itself is responsible for running the code or application appropriate to the nature of the data and the task in hand.
There has always been a gray area between what is hardware, and what is software, as anything that can be done in hardware can be emulated in software, and to a certain degree vice versa.
Hardware and software in fact form two ends of a continuum.
In recent years the rapid increase in processing power, when not being eaten by superfluous user interface "enhancements", have lead to more emphasis on emulating other platforms, for example running MS Windows software on a Macintosh platform and vice versa.
This has ultimately lead to the concept of the virtual machine, realized in the form of the Java VM, which aims to achieve the nirvana of writing code that can run anywhere, independent of platform.
This concept when applied to object-oriented code, leads to "objects" which can run their code anywhere, and ultimately to agent-oriented systems, where the object encapsulating both data and code can take autonomous actions as they move (or are moved) across the network, independently of the platforms through which they move.
However, despite these changes in computer science, there has been no corresponding change in the concepts underlying metadata.
Currently the data is "tagged" to indicate its construction and content.
The paradigm behind this approach is application centric in that the recipient of the data is expected to have an application that can parse and interpret the metadata tags.
This can result in interoperability problems between different metadata standards and also between different variants of modifications of the same standard.
The recent RDF proposals attempt to address this issue by constructing a hierarchy of tagging schemas, so that an application which does not "understand" a particular schema can make educated guesswork based upon other schemas in the hierarchy.
As can be appreciated there are limitations with this approach, and questions as to how feasible such an approach is in practice.
There are also issues which the RDF proposals do not address in the maintenance of these schema hierarchies.
The application of the object-oriented or document-centric paradigms to current metadata practices leads to the concept of intelligent documents, where the document not only contains the metadata tags detailing the construction and content of the document, but also the application code for interpreting and manipulating this metadata.
In effect the document is introspective in that it understands itself.
The use of virtual machine concepts would enable such application code embedded in the document to be platform independent, and agent-oriented paradigms would enable the document to take autonomous action.
Some applications of such intelligent documents include: * Platform and application independent metadata "tagging" in that the document "understands" itself and its own construction and content.
* The document can autonomously assist the user in navigating, understanding and even manipulating its own content * The document could autonomously communicate with other intelligent documents, for example in automatically organising themselves when placed in an object-oriented database or container, or in dynamically establishing and maintaining links with other relevant documents (relevance being defined within the context of the users requirements) All the above however is only a vision.
Whilst it may sound an attractive concept in theory this may not necessarily mean that it works well (or at all) in practice.
Even given that such an approach can be achieved and offers advantages over other approaches, there are still practical issues that would need to be addressed.
It may be that current technology is not yet mature enough for such a vision to be realized; there are still question marks over the future of the Java virtual machine technology.
The blurring of data and code, which is rapidly occurring in many areas, also brings with it, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes justified concerns as regards security.
However in conclusion, I think that this is a direction which warrants some investigative research.
Author details Matthew J. Dovey Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Project GOLD: Supporting Distance Learning Students Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Project GOLD: Supporting Distance Learning Students Buzz software xml infrastructure archives xslt video multimedia e-learning vle url research Citation BibTex RIS Derek Morisson describes an e-learning project which was the antithesis of the current trend towards multifunction, and invariably expensive, Virtual Learning Environments and sophisticated Managed Learning Environments.
In the Beginning Way back in 1998 the University of Bath’s Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning became part of a three institution consortium responsible for the TLTP Phase 3 ‘Project GOLD’ [1].
GOLD stands for Guidance Online for those Learning at a Distance.
The lead partner was the Royal College of Nursing Institute (the Higher Education arm of the RCN) supported by the Open Learning Foundation and the University of Bath.
Project GOLD as its full title suggests was about supporting distance learning students using technology and who could not enjoy the level of support and relatively sophisticated IT infrastructure of full-time campus based students.
The RCN has mature part-time students studying for first and higher degrees in many countries but for the purposes of Project GOLD we focused on Masters students based in the UK, Ireland and Iceland.
It’s pertinent to this article that readers remember that 1998 was aeons ago in Internet time since much that we take for granted now just did not exist at that time or was considered highly novel, e.g.
free ISP connection and services, the availability of PC’s preconfigured with ISP accounts, toll free access, the now ubiquitous nature of sub £1000 multimedia capable PCs.
It’s also pertinent to this article that readers are aware that Project GOLD supplemented, and not replaced, the style and format of an established course.
As a result all students were volunteers and, for the sake of equity, non-participating students were provided with paper-based accounts of any course information/dialogue arising from Project GOLD.
GOLD Components So what were the incentives for students to become part of Project GOLD?
First of all we would loan them a multimedia and Internet connected PC for the three years of the project.
Second we would provide students and tutors with conventional (paper-based) learning materials which would build confidence in using IT.
Third we would provide them with an multimedia CDROM which would teach them fundamental and more advanced Internet skills.
The CDROM called Digging for GOLD required minimal internet access; an important consideration for users paying their own telephone bills.
Fourth we would connect them to a project Web site which would offer both information and be the access point for discussion fora related to the course.
Individual forums would be managed by their course tutors, whom we would train, most of whom were academics distributed over a broad range of HE institutions in the UK, Ireland and Iceland.
Let’s now consider what the rationale and what was required to deliver the above components of Project GOLD.
A Turnkey Solution for E-learners?
When we started Project GOLD in 1998, unlike now, you couldn’t walk into a BT Shop or even some supermarkets and order a PC complete with internet account, so our first, and what proved to be an almost insurmountable, task was to get a mainstream PC supplier to provide the PC/ISP package as a turnkey solution.
We considered a turnkey solution to be essential since we didn’t want technology getting in the way of what we wanted to use the technology for, i.e.
facilitating learning.
For the same reasons we did not want the three institutions becoming embroiled in the setup and ongoing support of the technical infrastructure; hence the principle of contracting a commercial company to do so.
Much project effort was expended in finally achieving this objective which in the end did require the consortium to become directly involved in arranging ISP accounts in the UK and Ireland, and the PC supplier contracting out the ISP configuration of the PC to a major facilities management company.
The lesson here is that even today a PC is still not a commodity item which you just turn on and use like a television.
Campus based students are shielded from most of this complexity by sophisticated technical and support infrastructures not available to distance students.
Project GOLD went for a highly interventionist approach where we tried to control many of the variables that would otherwise make participation complex.
We partly succeeded but only at the cost of considerable additional input from the consortium.
Technology has marched on, semi-turnkey solutions are now available and so we would probably opt for publishing a specification for participation, highlight some potentially suitable PC/ISP packages but not become directly involved in facilitating such a turnkey solution again because of its expense, lack of scalability and complexity of implementation for distance students in a number of different countries.
Computing for the Terrified Providing technology is useless unless potential users have the confidence and competence to make use of it.
For those students and tutors who lacked the prerequisite knowledge and skills for making use of the CD and interacting over the Web we produced a comprehensive self-instructional workbook called Computing for the Terrified and Not so Terrified.
Our detailed project planning had programmed the delivery and installation of the Internet capable PC’s many weeks before the start of the student’s semester so that they could orientate themselves free from course pressures.
Our well planned and humane approach was frustrated, however, by the difficulties our PC / ISP supplier had in meeting our requirements and so many weeks were lost in ensuring all students and tutors had been given the resources and connections to participate.
Our initial planning had allowed for a generous ‘play time’ but in reality this time became a buffer for solving distribution problems prior to the start of the semester.
Preparing the Tutors Like many distance learning programmes RCNI distance learning courses are dependent on the contracted services of part-time course tutors.
Since these tutors would be a key part of Project GOLD, preparation for their enhanced role as online tutors would be critical.
To achieve this we brought the tutors from all over the UK and Ireland to Bath for a long-weekend workshop in the technologies and techniques of supporting online learners.
The workshops were highly successful and motivating events for the participants but again were compromised by PC distribution problems so that some tutors had received their PC and ISP connection whereas others had not.
For some tutors this meant a large gap between the workshop and being able to practice online communications and roles with their colleagues prior to the start of the semester.
Some tutors were happy to explore the possibilities offered by the technologies whereas others were less comfortable with a role they could see either required the development of new skills sets or which had the potential to extend their working week in already busy professional lives.
Our tutors learned a number of lessons from this including that online tutoring is not an easy option and that the flexibility required can place considerable demands on them either to acquire the knowledge and skills required of the new role or to sustain responsive tutorship thereafter.
Our experiences suggest that we have a considerable way to go before we experience the input of what Squires calls PETs, i.e.
Peripatetic Electronic Teachers [2].
Far from being PETs our tutors invariably ‘belonged’ to their academic institutions and for most their online responsibilities were perceived as an extended role and which was significantly different from their ‘day jobs’.
The part-time nature of the tutors also presented another problem to which we could find no easy solution during the lifetime of the project.
Whilst the face-to-face preparation of a limited number of tutors was feasible for Project GOLD this just would not scale for a large distance learning initiative where part-time tutors come and go.
A dependence on part-time tutors when this is not their primary employment raises interesting questions with regard to investment in their preparation for extended roles such as online tutoring.
There needs to be investment in the development of such individuals but who should contribute, the individual tutor, the primary employer, the part-time employer?
Learning about Online Offline We considered certain internet knowledge and skills to be prerequisite to becoming effective e-learners.
However, this presented a conundrum in that the best way of learning about the online world is to be online but again for distance learners all is not so simple.
Would be e-learners pay for their time using the telephone and since all were using modems time online learning how to be efficient online can be a major disincentive to learning.
Our solution was to develop Digging for GOLD a multimedia CD which played back high fidelity high resolution narrated video clips of actual internet interactions.
These narrated video clips formed the basis of student activities thus requiring students to actively engage with the clips and not treat them as a resource with which they could be passive (fig 1).
Figure 1: A Digging for GOLD activity with associated video clipProducing these narrated high resolution clips was technically challenging but gave a very satisfactory result in the end.
A significant part of Digging for GOLD was devoted to basic and more advanced search techniques using proprietary search engines.
At the time Alta Vista was a major player in this area and so it was chosen as the example search engine.
If we were repeating the exercise today we would probably have used Google as an example of a general search engine and then explored use of the Resource Discovery Network [3].
The above, however, illustrates one of the difficulties of producing meaningful resources for e-learners.
Technologies advance so rapidly that today’s meaningful examples can quickly become tomorrow’s historical curios.
Producing resources such as Digging for GOLD on CDROM was the right decision for this audience but in a truly wired broadband world it would be more efficient and cost-effective to develop a Web-based variant of Digging for GOLD without users having to worry unduly about how much it was costing them to do so.
I would argue, however, that the distribution costs of CDROM, are not the major issue here it is how the multimedia examples and accompanying narrative can be kept up-to-date in a period of such rapid obsolescence.
Nevertheless, we are fairly happy that Digging for GOLD provided a novel and effective solution to learning about the online world whilst offline.
The GOLD Web Site Digging for GOLD was designed to prepare the way for Web interaction and included graphical links to the GOLD Web site and online discussion fora.
While providing initial advantages, we had some difficulties weaning students and tutors away from the Digging for GOLD interface to the Web facilities.
Digging for GOLD provided an attractive, but static, graphical signpost to Web functions (fig 2) and when we made later adjustments to the Web site the graphical signpost was no longer in sync.
Figure 2: Digging for GOLD signpost to online forums and other facilitiesNevertheless this was an interesting discovery because we had assumed that students and tutors would ‘outgrow’ the CDROM and so all of our interactions could then take place on the Web.
We eventually achieved this transition at a later stage of the project.
We set out to construct a rich Web site complete with resources, Frequently Asked Questions, Glossary, online manuals and discussion fora +++.
Our software engineers thrived on the challenge of automating the production of this beast using XML, XSLT and auto image generating software (fig 3).
Figure 3: The Original Project GOLD Web SiteRather than build our own online conferencing facility we trawled the Web looking for Web-based conferencing systems that could be integrated within our site thus saving us software engineering months developing our own.
In the end we integrated WebBoard conferencing system mainly because it was developed and supported by the major software company O’Reilly.
Although all the functional elements we desired were present in the Web site our review at the end of the first year indicated that we had become too complex and that we needed to refocus and simplify and so we made the radical decision to reverse our conceptual model from one where the Web site encapsulated the discussion fora to one where the discussion fora encapsulated the main Web site.
Thus was born Online Events which presented a truly minimalist interface to scheduled online discussion which were either interviews with experts or were opportunities for interaction with tutors (fig 4).
Figure 4: The minimalist Project GOLD Web interface for Online EventsNote the difference in the model here, the discussions were scheduled and were similar to synchronous internet chats (although we were still using WebBoard’s asynchronous conferencing technology for archiving purposes).
We based the design of Online Events on a calendar with one or more events scheduled per month.
We had two main themes for our Online Events.
First was Research Methods and second was Leadership.
Each event was supported by downloadable documentation which we tried to publish a week before the actual event.
The downloadable documentation was the briefing, reading material, or other resources in preparation for the event.
The switch to a minimalist interface proved to be the correct one since it was intuitive, focused on the task and removed any extraneous visual ‘furniture’.
We also provided a dedicated virtual ‘café’ for non-course and unscheduled discussion.
An online event would typically run from 7.30 pm-9pm.
During a typical Online Event the leader for the night would lead the discussion whilst the Bath project team would log in from home and monitor for anyone becoming lost in another forum and if so guide them to the appropriate virtual venue.
WebBoards ‘paging’ facility was very useful because it enabled short private text messages to be sent to any participant without breaking into the flow of group conversation.
In this way a group leader could have several threads of conversation going in a way that would have been very disruptive on the telephone.
Swiss Army Knives or Dedicated Tools?
What should be noticed from the above account is that we didn’t opt for a Virtual Learning Environment.
Why not?
We didn’t want a ‘swiss army knife’ solution but instead wanted to focus on the provision of information and the opportunity for discussion.
We felt we could achieve these aims without the extra interface and functional elements of a VLE.
Although today we now support other projects using a VLE, in some cases this can be overkill which arguably places unnecessary cognitive loading on students and tutors, incurs unnecessary expense for institutions and reduces flexibility in designing a custom environment.
The search engine Google has show us the virtue of minimalist design although we had to learn this lesson for ourselves.
The current generation of VLE’s are the equivalent of the venerable Swiss Army Knife which has a tool for every job wrapped up in the corporate clothing of the respective vendor.
Perhaps the most important function the VLE vendors can provide us with is that which enables us to disable and hide many of their tools so that we can limit what is exposed to the student and tutor until there is an actual need.
At VLE demonstrations the VLE vendor will dazzle us with the superb number of tools available and show buttons and icons scattered across the screen when in many cases starting with a blank screen and configuring in components would be a more powerful and appropriate approach.
Despite the many VLE and MLE’s now available our experience with Project GOLD suggests there is still a place for something less standardized, less complex and focused to a limited number of purposes.
Perhaps the solution here is a component-based solution instead of the VLE equivalent of a Microsoft Office?
Embed or Dead?
In conclusion, we need to address one important aspect of Project GOLD.
On the one hand the project was a ‘value added’ initiative and on the other it was required to fit within the structure and processes of an approved existing course.
The project could not afford to destabilize the existing course or to provide enhancements or adopt alternative processes that would disadvantage students who were unable to participate.
Project GOLD, therefore, was not embedded and was totally reliant on the goodwill of both students and tutors.
It’s perhaps unreasonable to expect more than this for a pilot project which is meant to inform later decision making.
However, if campus-based students nowadays are reasonably busy people who tend to be experts in time management then part-time mature distance learning students who are managing busy professional and personal lives are ‘ultra-expert’ in time management.
People with very limited time tend to concentrate on the ‘essentials’, look occasionally at the ‘desirables’ and ignore the ‘would be nice’.
Whilst we may wish that the only motivator was a total belief in education for education’s sake (in which case all activities and resources would come into the ‘essentials’ category) the reality for most students is surely ‘what do I absolutely have to do to get through this part of the course’.
So things (resources and activities) which are categorized as ‘non-essential’ tend to get time-managed out of existence.
This bodes ill for activities and resources which are not embedded in a course since it will be perfectly possible to succeed by bypassing them.
Arguably, in many ways it’s like the busy student taking a traditional distance learning course based on workbooks with integral activities.
Despite all the entreaties of the course designers that the activities are important, if its possible to get through the course without completing activities then that’s what will happen.
Whereas if the outcome of the activities fed into another part of the process, e.g.
assignments or assessments, then they will be rapidly recategorised as ‘essential’.
GOLD has no such advantages and as a result on a few occasions it could be like preparing for a party for 100 guests to which only a few of the ‘usual suspects’ turned up.
There has been a lot written about embedding technology in learning with perhaps a good starting point still being the July 1997 edition of Active Learning [4].
GOLD Finish So after this rapid overview of Project GOLD what’s the key messages?
Well the first is certainly encapsulated by the phrase ‘Keep it Simple’, ensure the technology helps to keep you and your students on task.
As stated earlier perhaps the most important function whatever tools or environments you are using is that they allow you to configure things out as well as in.
Second would be to design for obsolescence since today’s leading edge example is tomorrow’s has been.
The more sophisticated the content, the longer the time it will take to prepare and the less likely it will be updated.
Think beyond the project phase.
Third design processes and procedures which will scale; again think beyond the project phase.
Fourth give your students a very good reason for being there by embedding your technology in your educational processes.
Hold a party where everyone feels they will be missing something crucial if they don’t come!
Fifth, think outside of the relative luxury of the campus context; meeting the needs of the lifelong learner demands this.
References Project Gold Web site at http://www.bath.ac.uk/Departments/dacs/gold/ Squires D, 1999 in Squires D Conole G and Jacobs G 2000 eds The Changing Face of Learning Technology, ALT, pp 167-179 Resource Discovery Network at http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Active Learning at http://www.ilt.ac.uk/public/cti/ActiveLearning/al6.html Author Details Derek Morrison Director, Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning University of Bath Email: d.s.morrison@bath.ac.uk Article Title: “Project GOLD: Supporting Distance Learning Students” Author: Derek Morrison Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/gold/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way Buzz software database research Citation BibTex RIS Kathryn Arnold on the electronic university and the virtual campus.
With over 30,000 students on 10 campuses, De Montfort is an institution where technology and web-based teaching, parts of the armoury of distance learning, are delivery mechanisms for campus-based students.
De Montfort is developing the virtual university to underpin its on-campus learning: in time the techniques will be applied to off-campus students.
The initiative is an important development in creating opportunities for new learners and supporting lifelong learning, where flexibility of access time, place, pace is a key factor.
Kathryn Arnold, the Head of Library Services in the Division of Learning Development, set out the issues.
De Montfort faced the usual problem of the need to teach more students at a lower cost while still maintaining a level of contact with them.
Added to this was the local situation of 10 campuses spread over 150 kilometres, with a degree of academic duplication.
"It was recognised at an early stage that building up the earlier local resources was not a sustainable option, and that was where the earlier electronic library initiative came from."
There is a strong belief that the use of technology leads to a focus on learning rather than teaching, and encourages deliverers to think more carefully about how they they structure materials and activities, thus enhancing the quality of the learning process for the student.
From the early work with the ELINOR (Electronic Library and Information Online Retrieval) project, the university is now developing the electronic campus "where not just passive information sources will be available electronically but where interactive courseware will come on stream."
This experience of electronic delivery will help to prepare students for the information age where technology will be embedded in most forms of employment.
The electronic library was a first step, and much of the groundwork proved valuable.
"We were the first to go down that path, and I believe that the contribution at a national level was an important one.
Itis probably true that the direct impact of that first project on learning experiences was limited, but what we’re doing now has been informed by what we did then."
There were also useful general lessons in approach to be learnt from the electronic library project.
There has been a conscious effort to "get the academics on board at a very early stage; they are the key to the process.
At the time of ELINOR, which began in 1992, they were possibly not aware of the potential of the project."
The experience gained has now gone into the shared research project with IBM, which is testing IBM’s digital library software and is making available, via the University network, material such as short loan offprints and digitised examination papers.
A common interface is being developed for these web-accessible databases, and the SP2 processor will be the main host for the courseware for the electronic campus.
"The aim is to change the culture and embed the concept of online courseware".
All faculties are involved, and there is variety of content and scale.
Both courseware and assessment management software is being developed.
The extent of electronic delivery varies from entire modules to one or two sessions.
Some modules span campuses and some are localised.
In a university with cross-campus faculties, virtual modules mean that the same materials can be accessed across campuses and across programmes where there is a general applicability.
This is the future and Arnold set out the implications for the library.
"There are major debates going on in the university involving this Division and Information Services and Systems.
Storage and access are major issues.
It is a contradiction in terms to say this is the electronic campus, but you’ve got to go to the library to use it.
There’s a tension that must be resolved."
One of the difficulties surrounds learner support, where help desks in libraries will face a complex mix of issues.
"We have an Electronic Campus Operational Group which is flagging this issue up for the faculties and the library.
At the moment we’re liaising to establish how the faculties propose to address this but our concern is to ensure that our frontline delivery instaff have appropriate skills to support students at the point of delivery in this new environment."
Technical problems are another issue.
"We don’t know where the line has to be drawn between technical support and professional information support.
"Arnold also felt that there could be a further blurring of boundaries between librarians, IT specialists and academic staff.
She felt there was another looming clash of interest, between the electronic campus and traditional IT use, particularly for students who for a very long time would still need things like basic word processing facilities.
De Montfort have appointed an Electronic Services Development Manager, whose responsibility will be to develop a library IT strategy across all campuses.
This will begin to answer these questions.
Part of the solution is seen as multiskilling.
"We’ve given it a great deal of thought.
It is reasonable to expect all staff to have a particular core set of skills.
Beyond that common core of skills, you need to place people according to their strengths.
We never want staff to say ‘this isn’t my problem, you need an IT person’, but they must know when to pass a problem on.
From a student perspective, it’s not acceptable simply to say ‘I can’t help’ when there’s nobody else there who can."
Ownership and acceptance are crucial in cultural change.
"The electronic campus belongs to the faculties.
It’s made up of their modules, it’s their courseware.
The library is here to help them deliver it in the way they feel most appropriate."
Author Details Kathryn Arnold k.arnold@dmu.ac.uk Library Manager The Library De Montfort University, Milton Keynes http://www.dmu.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
"With all the new skills we've learned, we've become a university within a university and we're declaring UDI" Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Interfaces to Web Testing Tools Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Interfaces to Web Testing Tools Buzz javascript html apache metadata css xhtml accessibility browser opera ejournal dom url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly looks at interfaces to Web testing tools, and in particular at Bookmarklets simple extensions to browsers which enhance functionality.
In the last issue of Ariadne the Web Focus column encouraged Web developers to "get serious about HTML standards" [1].
The article advocated use of XHTML and highlighted the importance of documents complying with standards.
Many authors of Web resources would agree with this in principle, but find it difficult to implement in practice: use of validation tools seem to require launching a new application or going to a new location in a Web browser and copying and pasting a URL.
This can be time-consuming and so is often not carried out.
This article describes ways in which the validation of Web resources can be easier to carry out and how the approaches described can be extended to a number of other areas.
Bookmarklets "Bookmarklets" are simple extensions to browsers which enhance the functionality of the browser.
Bookmarklets are implemented using JavaScript.
As the name suggests bookmarklets are related to convention Web bookmarks; however rather than simply moving to a Web resource, bookmarklets will pass the URL of the page being viewed to a Web site (such as a HTML validation service) which can process the page and display the results.
As well as simply processing the URL of the page being viewed bookmarklets can make use of the browser's Document Object Model (DOM) which provides a description of the HTML (and other) elements of a page, and allows the elements to be interrogated and changed.
Bookmarklets have grown in popularity since they became available.
A Google search for "Bookmarklets" provides access to a number of useful directories of bookmarklets which include the "Bookmarklets Home Page" [2], "Jesse's Bookmarklets Page" [3] and "Bookmarklets for Power Users" [4].
Bookmarklets can be used not only with Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers; "Bookmarklets for Opera" provides access to bookmarklets for the Opera browser [5].
In addition to these resources Webreference provide advice on how to create your own bookmarklets [6].
Included in the lists are bookmarklets which can be used to: Validate the HTML of the page being viewed Validate the CSS of the page being viewed Check the accessibility of the page being viewed Switch off display of images An example of use of a HTML validator bookmarklet in the Phoenix browser (a lightweight browser based on Mozilla) is illustrated below.
In this example use of a HTML validator bookmarklet obtained from Gazingus [7] is shown (click on an image for an enlarged view).
Figure 1: Use of an HTML validation bookmarklet An example of use of a bookmarklet in the Opera browser is illustrated below.
This bookmarklet will list any images which do not have an ALT attribute.
The bookmarklet is available from Yourhtmlsource.com's list of accessibility bookmarklets [8].
Figure 2: Use of an accessibility bookmarklet It is interesting to note that increasingly providers of Web-based testing services document use of their service using bookmarklets.
An example is the new version of the WAVE accessibility testing tool which describes how to integrate the service with the Internet Explorer, Netscape and Opera browsers [9].
Limitations Of Bookmarklets Bookmarklets appear to be very powerful.
They can be extremely useful to Web developers, and are also useful to end users.
But deploying bookmarklets on a large scale will have resource implications: Bookmarklets are often dependent on browser versions.
Bookmarklets require use of JavaScript.
Bookmarklets often make use of a remote service.
If the service is unavailable (e.g.
network problems) or changes its interface or licensing conditions the bookmarklet may cease to function.
Maintaining functional bookmarklets may be difficult if they are widely deployed across an institution.
Bookmarklets are recommended for professional Web developers who are prepared to maintain their own bookmarklets.
However there is an alternative approach which is not reliant on browser technologies.
URL Interface To Tools Rather than adding extensions to browsers an alternative approach is to provide an interface to tools which can be accessed by appending an argument to the resource's URL.
An example is shown below.
Figure 3: Use of a URL Interface to a HTML Validation Service In this example the user is viewing the QA Focus resource at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/.
The users appends ,validate to the URL.
This passes the URL of the page being viewed to W3C's HTML validation service.
The results are then displayed.
This approach will work for any resource on the UKOLN Web site.
The approach has been implemented to allow a number of validation checks to be carried out.
The list below gives a summary.
Table 1: Key Checking Tools With a URL Interface Tool Function Comments ,validate HTML validation Uses W3C's HTML validation service ,rvalidate Recursive HTML validation Uses WDG's HTML validation service ,cssvalidate CSS validation Uses W3C's CSS validation service ,dcvalidate Validates embedded Dublin Core metadata Uses UKOLN's DCdot tool ,bobby Checks accessibility of page Uses Watchfire's Bobby tool ,wave Checks accessibility of page Uses PAIT's WAVE tool ,checklink Link checker Uses W3C's HTML link checker ,rchecklink Recursive link checker Uses W3C's HTML link checker As well as these tools which provide a simple interface to a range of checks which HTML authors may be expected to use which creating or updating a resource a number of additional tools are available: Table 2: Further Tools With a URL Interface Tool Function Comments ,tablin Linearises tables Uses W3C's table lineariser service ,text Displays a text version of the page Uses W3C's text service ,link-extractor Extracts HREF links from the page Uses the Webmaster's Toolkit's LinkExtractor ,link-extractor-src Extracts HREF links from the page Uses the Webmaster's Toolkit's LinkExtractor A list of the tools which can be used on the UKOLN web site can be obtained by appending ,tools to any URL on the UKOLN Web site.
Implementing This Approach The approach described in this page makes use of Web server redirects.
In this case redirects are given in the Apache Web server configuration file.
For example for the ,validate option the following redirect is added to the configuration file: RewriteRule /(.
*),validate http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/$1 [R=301] The same approach can be used if the testing service requires additional arguments.
For example the ,bobby tool is configured so that it tests compliance with WAI AA guidelines using the following redirect configuration option: RewriteRule /(.
*),bobby http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/bobbyServlet?advanced=true&URL=http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/$1&gl=wcag1-aa [R=301] If you wish to implement this technique on your own Web site you should note that the order of the redirect options may be significant: for example ,bobby should be defined before ,bobby-a in order to ensure that the correct redirect is followed.
If you wish to implement this technique on a Microsoft IIS platform the approach is slightly more tricky.
You will need to write an ASAPI filter or use a customised 404 ASP script.
The approach has been implemented for UKOLN's Cultivate Interactive e-journal and, as on the main UKOLN site, appending the argument ,tools to any URL will give a list of the tools supported and a brief summary of how the technique can be implemented [10].
Discussion Bookmarklets would appear to provide a very useful tool, particularly for dedicated authors who wish to ensure that pages comply with standards and best practices.
Bookmarklets may also be useful for end users; for example as a way of making resources for accessible.
However there are maintenance and deployment issues to be aware of.
The URL interface to tools addresses some of maintenance and deployment issues.
This approach is also usable from any browser so that if you are in a cybercafe, for example, you can still access a range of testing services.
This approach is also more maintainable.
If the testing service changes its interface or licensing conditions (or even goes out of business) all that is needed is a single update to the Web server's configuration file.
Web managers may be convinced by these arguments and wish to deploy this approach for their own Web site(s).
This can clearly be done relatively simply and Web managers may wish to use their own terminology for the tools.
However it may be advantageous if there is consistent use of the terminology, in order to ensure a common user interface.
Web managers may, of course, wish to chose the services they wish to link to: in the case of HTML and CSS validation services, for example, the W3C validation tools are available as open source [11] [12] as is WDG's recursive HTML validation service [13].
These utilities could be installed locally and adapted to suit local preferences.
The following suggestions are made for standard terminology for URL interfaces to testing tools.
Table 3: Suggestions for Standard ,tools Names Name Details ,validate HTML validation ,rvalidate Recursive HTML validation ,cssvalidate CSS validation ,checklink Link checking ,rchecklink Recursive link checking ,accessibility Accessibility checking The conventions could be extended to include other validation tools such as dcvalidate for validating Dublin Core metadata, rdcvalidate for recursive validation of Dublin Core metadata, etc.
References Let's Get Serious About HTML Standards, Ariadne issue 33, Sept 2002 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-focus/ Bookmarklets Home Page, Jesse's Bookmarklets Page, http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/ Bookmarklets for Power Users, http://javascript.about.com/cs/bookmarklets/ Bookmarklets for Opera, http://www.philburns.com/bookmarklets.html Bookmarklets, Webreference http://www.webreference.com/js/column35/ Validation Bookmarklets, Gazingus http://www.gazingus.org/js/?id=102 Bookmarklets | Add Extra Functionality To Your Browser With These Simple Scripts, http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/accessibility/bookmarklets.html The WAVE Web Accessibility Validator , http://www.wave.webaim.org/ Web Site Validation and Auditing Tools, http://www.cultivate-int.org/,tools Source Code Availability For The W3C MarkUp Validation Service, W3C http://validator.w3.org/source/ CSS Validator Version 2.0 : Download, W3C http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/DOWNLOAD.html WDG HTML Validator Source Code, WDG http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/source.html Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Focus: Interfaces to Web Testing Tools" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata: Workshop in Luxembourg Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata: Workshop in Luxembourg Buzz data rdf framework xml usability urn infrastructure archives metadata doi digitisation standardisation identifier schema copyright preservation cataloguing multimedia pics provenance purl interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day and Andy Stone report on the Third Metadata Workshop in Luxembourg.
The Metadata Workshop held in Luxembourg on the 12 April was the third in an ongoing series of such meetings.
The first Metadata Workshop was held in December 1997 and included a tutorial on metadata provided by UKOLN, some project presentations and break-out sessions on various metadata issues [1, 2].
The second workshop, held in June 1998, concentrated more on technical and strategic issues [3].
Around 50 people attended the third workshop, mostly drawn from organisations involved in European Union funded projects supplemented by a few Commission staff.
Following a brief welcome from Axel Szauer (Deputy Head of DGXIII/E2), Makx Dekkers (PricewaterhouseCoopers) gave an overview of the two previous workshops and highlighted important events that had occurred since the second one.
He noted that the DC-6 workshop held at the Library of Congress in November 1998 had resulted in the establishment of an explicit governance structure for the Dublin Core metadata initiative [4].
He also pointed to the development of a metadata model and framework by the CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata for Multimedia Information, ongoing standardisation developments relating to Dublin Core within ISO, NISO and CEN, and the involvement of rights holders in current Dublin Core discussions [5, 6].
Luxembourg, April 1999 Metadata models, digital identifiers and legal deposit The first presentation was by Godfrey Rust (Data Definitions) who outlined his views on metadata issues from the perspective of rights owners and with extensive reference to ongoing work being carried out for the Info2000 INDECS project [7].
Rust introduced an INDECS metadata model that has a focus on describing ‘events’ rather than just ‘objects’ [8].
After noting the current growth and diversity of metadata standards and initiatives, Rust also noted that 1999 would prove to be a crucial year for the development of metadata standards.
He felt that convergence between initiatives (and the avoidance of unnecessary duplication) was possible, but that this opportunity would not be available if there was any delay.
The second session, which was on digital identifiers, concentrated on the two most well known initiatives.
Norman Paskin (International DOI Foundation) gave a presentation on the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that first explained that the DOI was a combination of a unique identifier and a resolution system [9].
Paskin saw no reason why in time the DOI should not become a standard identifier for any type of e-commerce activity.
Juha Hakala (Helsinki University Library) reported on the current status of the Uniform Resource Name (URN) initiative of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
He noted that the IETF standardisation process was almost complete.
In the final paper of the morning session, Leif Andresen (Danish National Library Authority) described the INDOREG (Internet Document Registration) project that aimed to investigate and assist the bibliographic control of Danish Internet documents [10].
The project recommended the use of Dublin Core as a self-registration project and had provided tools a DC creator and a PURL server to facilitate this.
From January 1998, Danish publishers have had a legal obligation to register ‘static’ electronic publications by the use of an electronic application form.
XML/RDF applications After lunch, there were two presentations on metadata implementations using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) based Resource Description Framework (RDF) being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Dan Brickley (Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol) started off with a paper describing the main features of RDF and giving insights into its interaction with related initiatives like Dublin Core and PICS.
Brickley noted that the RDF Model and Syntax Specification has been since February 1999 a W3C Recommendation while the RDF Schema specification is, as of March 1999, a W3C Proposed Recommendation [11, 12].
This was followed by a description of an application of RDF in the Göttingen Digitisation Centre (GDZ) by Winfried Mühl (SUB Göttingen) where XML/RDF is being used to describe paper documents that have been digitised as collections of images [13].
Metadata for digital preservation The final session of the day concerned metadata for digital preservation.
Michael Day (UKOLN) introduced the subject of preservation metadata with a presentation based on work carried out for the Cedars (CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives) project [14, 15].
He noted the growing recognition that metadata can have important roles in the ongoing management and preservation of digital resources.
He argued that metadata could be useful for recording the technological context of a resource’s origins, for recording (and managing) rights management information, for preserving the authenticity and reliability of resources as well as for resource discovery.
He followed this with a brief introduction to the reference model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) being developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems as part of an ISO initiative [16].
Titia van der Werf (KB) followed this with a presentation on the EU-funded NEDLIB (Networked European Deposit Library) project.
She first gave a brief overview of the project, which aims to construct some of the basic infrastructure upon which a networked European deposit library could be built [17].
The project is focussed on the activities of national libraries and the project partners include eight European deposit libraries and the National Archives of the Netherlands.
The NEDLIB project has already published some functional requirements for a Deposit System for Electronic Publications (DSEP) [18, 19] and van der Werf explained that a DSEP would require metadata for a variety of purposes: for cataloguing, for resource installation and de-installation, for access and for preservation.
This preservation metadata would support management activities like checking the integrity of files, and help manage tasks like media refreshing and reformatting and long-term preservation strategies like format migration and emulation.
In December 1998 at a meeting in Paris, the NEDLIB project made a decision to adopt the OAIS reference model as a basis for the design of a DSEP.
They have since begun to map their initial functional metadata categories to OAIS concepts.
NEDLIB has also begun to address issues relating to the strong links between metadata requirements and preservation strategies.
If a migration-based strategy is followed, the metadata will constantly change (and grow) over time and will need to be available to users so that they can make judgements about a resource’s context and provenance.
With an emulator-based strategy, on the other hand, the metadata would be of a different more stable nature and would not need to be made available to users.
NEDLIB will be developing a test-bed using material from three academic publishers (Elsevier Science, Kluwer Academic and Springer-Verlag) to test emulation-based strategies.
References 1.
EC Metadata Workshop, Luxembourg 1-2 December 1997: <URL:http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/ec/metadata-1997/> 2.
Metadata Workshop, Luxembourg 1-2 December 1997: <URL:http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/metadata.html> 3.
Report of the Metadata Workshop held in Luxembourg, 26 June 1998: <URL:http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/metadata2.html> 4.
Stu Weibel, The State of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, April 1999.
D-Lib Magazine, Vol.
5, no.
4, April 1999.
<URL:http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/04weibel.html> 5.
CEN/ISSS Metadata for Multimedia Information Workshop: <URL:http://www.cenorm.be/isss/Workshop/MMI/Default.htm> 6.
David Bearman, Eric Miller, Godfrey Rust, Jennifer Trant and Stuart Weibel, A Common Model to Support Interoperable Metadata: Progress report on reconciling metadata requirements from the Dublin Core and INDECS/DOI Communities.
D-Lib Magazine, Vol.
5, no.
1, January 1999.
<URL:http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/bearman/01bearman.html> 7.
INDECS project: <URL:http://www.indecs.org/> 8.
Godfrey Rust and Mark Bide.
The <indecs> metadata model.
Indecs project, April 1999.
<URL:http://www.indecs.org/pdf/model1.pdf> (in PDF) 9. International DOI Foundation: <URL:http://www.doi.org/> 10.
Poul Bergstrøm Hansen and Jytte Hansen, INDOREG: INternet DOcument REGistration: project report.
<URL:http://purl.dk/rapport/html.uk/> 11.
Ora Lassila and Ralph R. Swick, eds., Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification.
W3C Recommendation, 22 February 1999.
<URL:http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222> 12.
Dan Brickley and R.V.
Guha, eds., Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema Specification.
W3C Proposed Recommendation, 03 March 1999.
<URL:http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/PR-rdf-schema-19990303> 13.
Göttingen Digitalisierungs-Zentrum (GDZ): <URL:http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gdz/index.var> 14.
Cedars project: <URL:http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/> 15.
Kelly Russell, CEDARS: long-term access and usability of digital resources.
Ariadne, no.
18, December 1998.
<URL:http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue18/cedars/> 16.
Lou Reich and Dan Sawyer, (eds.
), Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).
Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, White Book, Issue 5 (CCSDS 650.0-W-5.0).
Washington, D.C.: CCSDS Secretariat, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, April 1999.
<URL:http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html> 17.
NEDLIB project: <URL:http://www.konbib.nl/nedlib/> 18.
José Borbinha and Fernando Cardoso.
Functional specification for DSEP.
NEDLIB project deliverable D1.2.1, 15 October 1998.
<URL:http://www.konbib.nl/coop/nedlib/func-spec/doc0000.htm> 19.
José Borbinha.
High Level Design.
NEDLIB project deliverable D1.2.2, 28 September 1998.
<URL:http://www.konbib.nl/coop/nedlib/high-level-design/doc0000.htm> For the official report of the workshop, see: Third Metadata Workshop, Luxembourg, 12 April 1999: <URL:http://www.echo.lu/libraries/en/metadata/metadata3.html> Acknowledgements Cedars is a Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) Project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK higher education funding councils through its Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
UKOLN is funded by the Library and Information Commission, the JISC, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath, where it is based.
Author details Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk   Andy Stone Cedars Project Officer Oxford University Computing Service 13 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6NN, UK E-mail: andy.stone@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Institutional Web Management Workshop The Joined Up Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Institutional Web Management Workshop The Joined Up Web Buzz data mobile software java html database dissemination rss xml portal browser xsl repositories python e-learning mis php mysql vle authentication mailbase intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on the "Institutional Web Management Workshop: The Joined-Up Web" event, held in Bath.
“One of the best workshops I’ve ever been at” “Excellent!
One of the best workshops I’ve ever been at“ “I return because it is by far the best way for me to find out what I need to do in the coming year at my site“ “The workshop gets better every year and I never fail to learn something new.“ “A good mixture of web/techie people and communications/PR people.
Important to have both for this type of event“ As can be seen from the quotes given above the Institutional Web Management workshop was very highly regarded by the workshop delegates.
But what is this event and why do people keep coming back?
The annual Institutional Web Management workshop is the main event organised by UK Web Focus.
It is aimed at members of institutional Web management teams in the UK HE (and now FE communities) and provides an opportunity for delegates to update their technical skills, find out about developments within the HE/FE community and on Web developments more widely and engage in discussions with their peers within the Web management community.
This year’s event was the fourth in the series.
Details of the workshops is given in the following table.
Date Venue No.
of Participants Workshop Report 16-17 July 1997 KCL 95 Ariadne, issue 11 15-17 September 1998 Newcastle 100 Ariadne, issue 17 7-9 September 1999 Goldsmiths College, London 124 Ariadne, issue 21 6-8 September 2000 Bath 148 Ariadne, issue 25 Institutional Web Management: The Joined-Up Web The theme of this year’s workshop was “The Joined-Up Web”.
The workshop aimed to ensure that institutions used “joined-up thinking” in the provision of their Web services.
This should include joined-up thinking at a strategic level within institutions (are groups which are evaluating Content Management Systems and Virtual/Managed Learning Environments working together, or do they not know they each exist); at a technical level (are you developing systems which will interwork with other systems, are you using open standards, such as XML?
); at a national level within HE / FE (are you exploiting centrally-funded developments such as those provided by JISC) and at a national level with other groups (are you aware of related development in the public sector, or within your region).
In addressing these issues the workshop included talks giving an overview of national developments and case studies of innovative Web services which provide evidence of joined-up thinking.
The workshop attracted 148 participants the limited imposed by the size of the lecture theatre.
Over a dozen people were on the waiting list in case of last-minute cancellations, which provided an indication that there is scope for the workshop to grow to perhaps 200 participants.
The Talks A brief summary of the presentations is given below.
Note that access to the slides can be obtained from the workshop Web site [1].
In general a summary of the talks will not be given: readers are encouraged to view the speakers’ slides.
Where possible, quotes from the workshop evaluation forms will be given.
John Slater opened the workshop by reviewing E-Learning Developments [2].
John was described as a “Good speaker.
An interesting session with many good points”.
His talk provided “Useful insight to the likes of JISC”.
Chris Harris continued the overview of national initiatives by describing HERO [3].
Chris provided background information on the need for a high-profile portal to UK Universities.
Unfortunately the live demonstration of a prototype of the HERO portal could not be given due, it was later discovered, to reconfiguration of servers at EPIC (the company who are developing HERO).
A brief demonstration was provided on the final day (with, amusingly, a mobile phone ringing in the middle of the summary announcing that the service was now available again) which appeared to convince at least one delegated who initially said commented “Good presentation but topic not new surely just another gateway?” but after seeing the Web site added “Once I saw the demo I changed my mind not just another gateway!”.
Following the two opening talks which described important new national initiatives, we then heard from two speakers who reported on innovative developments within their institutions.
Andy Price’s talk entitled From Shredded Trees To Mobile Phones, The Awful Truth About Digital Convergence!
[4] gave an entertaining insight into the holy grail of digital convergence.
By this Andy, the Head of Corporate Communications at the University of Teeside and former Head of New Media at North East Evening Gazette, was referring to the use of backend databases to provide a single neutral storage of content which could then be reused in multiple media (print, Web, WAP-enabled mobiles, phones, etc.)
without significant manual effort.
“Don’t employ a ‘repurposer’!” to manually convert electronic information from one format to another, Andy urged us.
Andy made us aware of difficulties in deploying this approach, such as cultural barriers and pockets of resistance within our institutions, and encouraged us, as did several speakers in the workshop, to win the support of senior management.
This support appears to be the case at Teeside, who were an early (and possibly the first) UK HEI to have a significant WAP presence [5] (illustrated below).
Figure 1: The University of Teeside’s WAP Site Although Andy is new to the HE community and was attending his first Institutional Web Management workshop, his talk was much appreciated by the workshop delegates: in the evaluation forms he scored the equal highest rating of 4.14 (1=poor, 5=excellent) with no fewer than 24 marks of 5 and 21 of 4.
Thanks for your contribution Andy!
The next speaker, Cliff Sanders, gave a talk entitled The Personalised University [6] which was also based on an innovative institutional development to their Web service.
As shown in Figure 2, the University of Ulster provide a personalised interface to their Web site.
Figure 2: University of Ulster Web Site The service relies on use of a central database to store course information, news, etc.
Plans for the future include integration with other media (such as WAP, digital TV, etc.)
and deployment of the Zope content management system.
Mary Rowlatt, the final speaker of the first day, reported on developments in the public sector and considered synergies with the HE and FE communities.
In her talk, entitled Local Authorities and HE/FE: Finding Common Ground on the Web [7] Mary described how Tony Blair’s aspiration to ensure that everyone has access to the Internet by 2005 will impact both central and local government.
The second day of the workshop began with a local speaker, Greg Smart, talking about Self Evident Applications [8].
Greg, who works for the MIS department at the University of Bath, argued the need for ‘self evident applications’ which can reduce the local support requirements by being obvious to use, specific to local requirements and useable by a Web browser.
There is a need for a single repository for the data and to separate the business logic from the data.
At Bath this is being achieved through use of JSP (Java Server Pages) and EJB (Java Beans).
Use of XML and XSL enables the data structure to be made independent of the presentation.
This approach has been used to access the local finance system and will be used shortly for an ambitious online registration project.
Later on in the morning Tony McDonald described a Newcastle Case Study [9].
Four consortium partners are working together to develop a networked learning environment (NLE) for their medical / biomedical schools.
The NLE is based on the Zope content management system and makes extensive use of open source software, including Python, PHP and MySQL.
In order for the system to be scalable integration with student and course information held by the MIS department is essential (indeed helpful lecturers who provide course information in HTML format can cause difficulties).
Two speakers made a case for not attempting to provide every aspect of Web site development in-house.
The author of this report, Brian Kelly, gave a A Controversial Proposal [10] which suggested that use of externally-hosted Web services could provide valuable resources for over-worked and under-resourced Web teams.
Although some delegates were concerned that such an approach could result in wholesale out-sourcing of the Web development team or that dependency on externally-hosted services could be problematic for mission-critical services, there appeared to be an awareness that such services could be valuable, and, indeed, that, though use of JISC-funded services such as Athens and Mailbase, the HE community has been using externally-hosted services for some time.
On a related subject Martin Belcher gave a talk entitled Out To Tender: Commissioning A Web Site [11].
Martin made the case for buying-in expertise for Web site development in order to make use of expertise which may not be available in-house and in order to concentrate on your Web team’s strengths and institutional priorities.
An update on developments in the area of security and authentication was given by Alan Robiette, JISC’s programme director for JCAS (JISC Committee for Authentication and Security).
Alan’s talk on Security and Authentication Issues Where Are We Heading [12] reviewed developments in these areas which are of critical importance for a joined-up Web which embraces several communities and provides access to confidential information such as student records.
Unfortunately Alan did not deliver any solutions!
He described how current systems such as Athens have provided valuable solutions, but in limited areas.
JISC have a working party which is looking at a more flexible, standards-based solution, with the code name Sparta.
In addition JISC are closely monitoring developments in the US and in areas such as digital signatures.
Finally mention should be made of Professor Ian Halliday’s talk on The WEB and the GRID: Science and Society [13].
Although initially asked to talk about deployment of electronic forms between Universities and Research Councils, delays in the release meant that it was not possible to give a talk on this subject.
Instead Professor Ian Halliday gave a fascinating review on developments in networked services in the particle physics community since CERN first invented the Web.
The Parallel Sessions In all four of the Institutional Web Management workshop the parallel sessions have always been very highly regarded.
The parallel sessions provide an opportunity for participants to participate actively in the proceedings, through discussions, group exercises or hands-on exercises.
In last year’s workshop feedback indicated that participants welcomed more opportunity for discussion group and hands-on sessions.
In response to this suggestion this year in addition to four half-day sessions, we also provided four sessions which lasted for 90 minutes.
Participants could choose either one half-day session or two 90 minutes ones.
The Content Management Systems half-day session [14] was led by Paul Browning (University of Bristol) and Mike Lowndes (Natural History Museum).
This was the most popular of the parallel sessions, attracting no fewer than 35 participants (although the limit was meant to be 25!).
The aims of the session were to: (i) gain a better understanding of Content Management Systems (CMS); (ii) highlight pros and cons of buying proprietary software or developing solutions in-house; (iii) review the criteria which influence the choice of a CMS and (iv) see if there is consensus for packages for which CHEST can negotiate deals for the HE/FE community.
The main recommendations which emerged where: Web developers should be aware than CMS is a concept, not a product The community should specify its needs/expectations of a CMS system and focus on the most appropriate products/solutions A consortial deal should be considered in association with CHEST These issues should be the subject of a working party, possibly a UCISA Software Group evaluation project The Joined-Up Web half-day session [15] was led by Greg Newton-Ingham (University of East Anglia), Justine Kitchen (RDNC, Kings College London) and Pete Cliff (UKOLN).
In order to provide a “Joined-Up Web” there is a need: To improve communication of needs, of experience and of evaluation across the community For cultural change at some levels For cross-searching across a range of dispersed databases/ data providers To join up the real world of students e.g.
Hotmail with the academic world of information provision, assessment and administration To address technical issues for joined-up systems include plug-ins, software versions, operating systems, etc.
To recognise user feedback such as (i) multiple sign-on is a turn-off; (ii) users don’t want or need to see the workings of joined-up systems and prefer invisible, seamless interfaces; (iii) user choice, familiarity, brand loyalty, direct access are still desirable, and there is a need for parallel routes to resources and (iv) since branding oftens reflects quality, there is a danger that seamless interfaces which could render resources ‘brandless’ will devalue the users’ perception of quality resources The main recommendations which emerged where: A need for dissemination of information on relevant projects to the Web management community.
A need for a Web site containing information on projects, initiatives, case studies, etc JISC should continue development of Sparta.
JISC should ensure that dissemination on joined-up technologies is widely disseminated.
JISC should continue development cross-searching mechanisms.
The Implementing E-Learning Using A Virtual Learning Environment half-day session [16] was led by Mark Stiles (Staffordshire University).
The workshop began with a presentation of the issues involved in implementing the use of a VLE (or Learning Management System) at an institutional level and was followed by small group discussions which discussed the issues as they affect the delegates’ their own situations.
The interest in this session can be gauged by the hour’s extension at the end of the 3.5 hour session during which the delegates looked at the COSE system.
The Selling Mugs to Masters’ half-day session on e-commerce [17] was led by Andrew Aird (Goldsmiths College).
In the session potential uses of e-commerce within institutions were identified.
This was followed by a report on a pre-workshop e-commerce survey which indicated much interest in e-commerce but only two examples of use of an automated on-line payment system.
A case study of an online payment and booking system for a conference at Goldsmiths College was given.
This was followed by a presentation from TrustMarque who build online payment systems.
The session concluded with a group exercise in which participants designed an e-commerce site for use in HE.
The main recommendations which emerged where: There was a strong sense of the need for co-ordination at a national level There may be a need to issue digital certificates to HEIs centrally There may be a need for an education kitemark as a seal of approval for e-commerce activities There may be a need to set good practice guidelines There may be a need to create a portal on the lines of HERO There may be a need to establish joint ventures e.g.
‘The UK Uni Trading Co’ There may be a need to provide statistics on e-commerce activities within the community There may be a need to address fraud issues The Working With HERO 90 minute session [18] was led by Brian Kelly (UKOLN).
Sarah Austin and Quentin North, the producer and technical architect from EPIC, the company which has been commissioned to develop the HERO portal to UK University Web sites, reported on developments to HERO and gave a demonstration of the user’s view of HERO and a summary of the different ways in which information providers will be able to upload and manage their own institutional information.
The 20 participants in this session very much appreciated the opportunity to see a prototype of the HERO portal.
The main recommendations focussed on the need for more communications between EPIC, HERO and the Web management community, who will have a key role in ensuring that institutional information is provided by HERO in a timely and resource-efficient manner.
The main recommendations of the session were: Web managers should find out who their institutional HERO contact is and establish communication channels.
EPIC’s details of information requirements for HERO should be made available online as soon as possible, and institutional Web managers should be made aware of its location.
Institutions should make themselves aware of the various ways of providing information to HERO and the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches.
Epic and HERO plc should look to arrange additional events aimed at the Web Management community,possibly on a regional basis.
The Automated News Feeds 90 minute session [19] was led by Andy Powell (UKOLN).
In the session participants reviewed the requirements for news information both within their institution and external news.
Andy Powell then described the role that RSS (Rich Site Summary) could have in providing an open standard for defining news feeds.
In a hands-on exercise the participants created simple RSS files which described news resources on their own institutional Web sites.
A UKOLN-developed script then processed these files to create a Web page contained links to these resources.
Towards the end of the session, Brian Kelly demonstrated how a simple RSS file could be processed by a service such as My.Netscape.
The session concluded by reviewing the unstructured and manual approaches which is currently taken to the provision of news in many organisations.
RSS was proposed as a solution and it was suggested that a discussion about its potential should take place on the website-info-mgt Mailbase list.
The final two sessions complemented each other by addressing management and resourcing issues for institutional Web sites.
The Anarchy Versus Control in Web Site Management 90 minute session [20] was led by Malcolm Raggett (SOAS).
The session was attended by 25 people.
Malcolm Raggett gave a 10 minute presentation then led a discussion on management issues faced by the delegates.
The issues raised were: Communication and Coordination Many delegates felt isolated and found it difficult to communicate with their departmental Web coordinators.
Mailing lists and meetings were noted as only partially effective.
Costing Many institutions do not attempt to quantify or cost their Web work.
It was felt that this led to it being undervalued and invisible.
If senior management support is to be forthcoming then a more business-like approach would be needed to managing the Web site.
Strategy An institution-wide strategy towards Web development is lacking in most institutions, however locally-produced authoring guidelines are increasingly in use.
Maintenance of Sites The size of institution sites is growing to the point where maintenance is becoming very difficult with existing resources.
Some areas are moving to a database driven approach to ease site maintenance and allow a site to become more scalable.
The need for a database to be structured was noted, with a potential advantage that this could impose a useful discipline on some users!
Nobody could identify a totally data driven institution; each had a mixture of database and HTML files.
Pull versus Push Information It was acknowledged that, as intranet sites grew, the expectation that users would explore and find the information they want was not being met.
Some form of “push” approach to providing information is becoming necessary.
Perhaps a form of “My Intranet” (a technology discussed on Day 1 of the Workshop) is increasingly needed.
But how is it designed and implemented effectively?
Management Practice A number of management issues were raised concerning the demotivation of staff working on Web sites.
The need to maintain individuals’ commitment, the need to consult staff, the style of management, how to handle users who don’t agree with an imposed page style, individuals’ time management, and getting senior management support within the institution were all discussed.
It was felt that training would help all of these issues.
In particular, the issue of senior management support was believed to be a serious brake on successful Web development.
Institutional Mind-set A number of delegates reported the difficulty of changing the attitude and approach of those staff, especially academic staff, who have been producing Web pages for a number of years; their approach often being to continue working in the same way rather than adopt newer technologies and practices.
In particular, it was felt that the principle of process re-engineering should be taught.
It was also felt that the idea of publishing initially in electronic form and re-purposing this should get more credence.
All of the recommendations are for training to be made available, by JISC Assist or others, as follows: Senior management need training in assessing the benefits of electronic delivery of material Senior management need training in devising strategies for institutional Web/e-publishing Middle management need training in general management principles (training that is often available locally) as well as Web-specific training in costing and making a business case Webmasters need training in communication skills, promoting teamwork in a distributed environment, and time management skills The “Princes, Paupers and Progress” Resourcing Your Web Site 90 minute session [21] was led by Miles Banbery (University of Kent at Canterbury).
Initial talk by Miles Banbery outlined how to (a) get more money; (b) use that money well; © gain user support by providing a professional service; (d) set up unconventional deals with others.
Three discussion groups then discussed (1) professionalism; (2) efficiency and productivity and (3) financial resources.
Recommendations for further action were: Establish a set of incremental or modular qualifications for Web/e-publishing professionals Issue guidelines of Good Working Practice for Web/e-publishing professionals and offer training Offer middle-management training in communications, teamwork, customer relations and project management Offer training in creative ways of getting and using financial resources, including writing bids and proposals, negotiation skills and sources of information about funding Exhibition An accompanying exhibition was held on the morning of the final day of the workshop.
As described in the exhibition details [22] a small of commercial vendors were present, together with stands from a number of JISC services.
Although the exhibition provided a useful opportunity for the delegates to find out about the latest developments from JISC services (including the new JISCMail service [23]) and obtain information on software products of interest to Web Managers, the evaluations forms indicated that delegates felt that the exhibition had not developed since last year’s event, and it might be more useful if it provided more live demonstrations, and perhaps greater involvement from the delegates themselves, giving, say, brief presentations of interesting work at their institutions.
Conclusions Andrew Aird, the chair for the final day, asked me to summarise what I considered to be the three most important aspects of the workshop.
These were: We need to work smarter and we are We need to move away from a file-based and HTML approach to Web site development and make greater use of Content Management Systems and backend databases for storing data in a single, neutral format.
Speakers such as Andy Price and Tony McDonald have shown how institutions are making use of this approach, and the benefits are becoming apparent.
We shouldn’t try to do everything ourselves don’t be afraid of outsourcing We have limited resources available and need to prioritise use of those resources.
We should not be afraid to consider buying in expertise or make use of externally-hosted Web services.
We have a strong community let’s build on it The UK HE Web Management community has a very strong sense of identity and community, as can be seen from the support provided on lists such as website-info-mgt and the contributions which have been made at the Institutional Web Management series of workshops.
Let us build on that.
Thanks I would like to give my thanks to my colleagues on the workshop organising committee.
Paul Browning (University of Bristol) and Andrew Aird (Goldsmiths College, University of London) not only helped in organising the workshop content and identifying speakers (with Paul coming up with the theme of the workshop and the name “The Joined-Up Web”), they both also found time to act as facilitators for two of the half-day parallel sessions.
Helen Sargan (University of Cambridge) also helped in organising the workshop content.
Unfortunately Helen (a speaker and workshop facilitator at last year’s event) could not attend this year.
Finally special thanks to Joy Fraser, UKOLN’s Events Manager, who worked so hard behind the scenes in ensuring that the workshop ran smoothly.
References Workshop Programme, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/programme.html E-Learning Development, Presentation by John Slater http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/slater/ HERO, Presentation by Chris Harris http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/harris/ From Shredded Trees To Mobile Phones, The Awful Truth About Digital Convergence, Presentation by Andy Price http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/price/ WAP Service, Teeside http://wap.tees.ac.uk/ The Personalised University, Presentation by Cliff Sanders http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sanders/ Local Authorities and HE/FE: Finding Common Ground on the Web, Presentation by Mary Rowlatt http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/rowlatt/ Self Evident Applications For Universities, Presentation by Greg Smart http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/smart/ The Joined up Web Newcastle University, a case study, Presentation by Tony McDonald http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/mcdonald/ A Controversial Proposal, Presentation by Brian Kelly http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/kelly/ Out To Tender: Commissioning A Web Site, Presentation by Martin Belcher http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/belcher/ Security and Authentication Issues Where Are We Heading, Presentation by Alan Robiette http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/robiette/ The WEB and the GRID: Science and Society, Presentation by Professor Ian Halliday http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#halliday Content Management Systems http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#a1 The Joined-Up Web http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#a2 Implementing E-learning Using A Virtual Learning Environment http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#a3 Selling Mugs To Masters http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#a4 Working With HERO http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#b1 Automated News Feeds http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#c1 Anarchy Versus Control in Web Site Management http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#b2 “Princes, Paupers and progress” Resourcing Your Web Site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/sessions.html#c2 Workshop Exhibition http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/materials/posters.html JISCmail http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: “Web Focus: Institutional Web Management Workshop The Joined Up Web” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/web-focus/intro.html   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collection Description in Focus Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collection Description in Focus Buzz data dissemination archives metadata thesaurus schema copyright rslp url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Clare McVeigh and Dierdre Wildy: A Report on the Collection Description Focus Workshops, Nov 2001-Mar 2002 With the increasing emphasis being placed on improving access to the content of research resources in the UK, the importance of collection description as a means of ensuring that access has received a great deal of attention in recent years.
The resultant debate that has surrounded the concept of collection description has been particularly fuelled by the work of the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and the many projects it has sponsored over the past three years [1].
The UK Collection Description Focus set up in June 2001 was established to add form and structure to this growing debate by co-ordinating collection description activities in the UK and further contributing to international discussion on the subject on behalf of the national interest [2].
In its first 12 months, the Collection Description Focus has, through a very full and pro-active programme of events and publications, successfully established itself in this role.
Fundamental to this achievement has been the series of three workshops organised and held by the Focus for practitioners and other interested parties in the period from November 2001 to March 2002.
The following paper intends to comment in more detail on the value and experience of these workshops from one practitioner’s point of view.
Expectations When it was first announced in September 2001 that the Collection Description Focus was to organise and facilitate a series of workshops, a great deal of excitement and trepidation was generated in the RASCAL Project office.
RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally) is a two year RSLP Project based at Queen’s University Belfast, charged with the creation of a web-based directory of research and special collections in Northern Ireland [3].
Providing unprecedented access to information about the full range of research materials available to researchers in the region, the compilation of collection descriptions has been an essential element of the Project with individual entries prepared using the RSLP Collection Description Schema recommended for Project use [4].
By September 2001 when news of the workshops first transpired, RASCAL was already fairly well into the process of collection description and therefore anxious to interact and learn from the experiences of other collection description initiatives.
We were also particularly interested to hear more about the reasons behind some Projects’ decisions to forego use of the RSLP standard in favour of other standards.
Although we had been happy with this standard, the thought that maybe we had been too naïve in our decision did occur and were thus somewhat reticent about what to expect from the workshops and whether or not our prospective resource would make the grade.
The Workshops Based primarily on issues arising out of the Collection Description Focus Briefing Day held at the British Library in October 2001 [5], the three workshops were organised on a regional basis taking the collection description debate outside London to ensure a wide representation of opinion, interest and experience from practitioners and information professionals in the UK more generally.
Each workshop followed a similar format with mornings packed with interesting and at times intriguing presentations from those involved in current collection description activities at both theoretical and practical levels and across professional domains.
Afternoon sessions were dedicated to discussion on related topics through break-out groups and a general feedback session.
A member of the Collection Description Focus then ended the event with a résumé of the day’s findings which were to be used to inform future developments and thinking on collection description.
The first workshop, held on 1 November 2001 at UMIST in Manchester, entitled “Thinking Collectively: approaches to collections and collection description,” took as its starting point the concept of the collection [6].
Providing a useful introduction to the world of collection description, the day was spent exploring the different interpretations adopted by information professionals across domains and the ways in which these had been deployed.
Emphasis was placed on the emergence of networked and web-based resources and the value of collection description as a means of facilitating resource discovery by researchers in the digital environment.
Case studies on the Archives Hub, the RSLP Backstage Project and the Natural History Museum were particularly instructive and enlightening as examples of how collection description can be used to great effect within professional domains [7].
The need to look beyond the confines of these individual spheres towards the virtual integration of resources was also stressed and so the relative value of the different schemas and methods adopted by these case studies were discussed.
The second workshop on “Multi-purpose metadata for collections: creating usable Collection Level Descriptions” took place at the Aston Business School in Birmingham on 8 February 2002 [8].
Building on the previous event, this workshop took a wider look at how and why collection descriptions were being created in the UK and the issues that needed to be considered to ensure that, once created, descriptions could be re-used for other purposes or in different contexts.
A number of practical considerations were highlighted throughout the day with the need for standards at both technical and theoretical levels particularly emphasised to facilitate the process of resource discovery and data exchange between institutions and/or projects.
The granularity of collection descriptions, copyright restrictions, user requirements and the need for greater dissemination between collection description initiatives were also stressed throughout the day.
The third and final workshop in this series was held at the University of Edinburgh on 21 March 2002 [9].
Entitled “Raising Standards for Collection Description: Subject and Strength in Collection Level Descriptions,” this event concentrated on the issues of content standards and terminological control in collection description activities and the value of collection strength indicators.
Presentations covered a diverse range of project and institutional experience including that of the HILT (High Level Thesaurus) Project, SCONE (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network), the Performing Arts Data Service (PADS) and CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) [10].
Particular problems and practicalities encountered by each of these ventures were highlighted and discussed throughout the day with cross-domain standards and user needs again coming high on the agenda.
Realisation After having attended all three workshops, were our initial expectations in the RASCAL Project then realised?
Based in Northern Ireland, one can at times feel quite cut off from developments in the rest of the UK and it can be difficult to keep pace.
Certainly during the opening months of the RASCAL Project when we were attempting to find our feet, the practical implications of implementing the RSLP Collection Description Schema appeared particularly daunting.
Of course, a system and method of collection description eventually evolved, but it would have been easier if a group like the Collection Description Focus had existed earlier.
In the absence of this support, our attendance at the workshops was then based on a desire to secure some sort of approval or vindication for the route we had decided to take.
These initial expectations were in fact common with other participants.
During the first workshop in Manchester, a general atmosphere of apprehension was apparent throughout the day with projects’ quick to defend and justify their work.
However, as the series progressed, so participants became more relaxed and willing to listen and learn from what they heard and, more importantly, contribute to the growing debate.
Indeed, all three workshops proved to be particularly constructive in this respect and so allowed all participants the opportunity to have their say and to help shape the development of future collection description activities in this country.
From RASCAL’s point of view, the workshops were not only useful for dispelling initial fears, but they also provided a valuable open forum in which to meet and discuss common concerns.
Indeed, the networking opportunities that the workshops afforded can be highlighted as one of the overriding benefits of the series, particularly for the development and encouragement of cross-sectoral and cross-domain working.
It has to be said, it is not often that archivists, librarians and museologists find themselves together in the one room debating the same issues!
Finally, the workshops have also proved themselves a useful source of dissemination and publicity for the various initiatives, institutions and projects that were invited to speak.
RASCAL was one such project and we presented during the second workshop at Birmingham [11].
Having not had much previous experience in this sort of thing, the opportunity was gladly welcomed not just for the practice it gave us, but also for allowing us to bring news of the RASCAL Project to a wider audience and thus promote the wealth of resources available to researchers in Northern Ireland which colleagues may not hitherto have been aware.
Conclusion The series of workshops organised and held by the Collection Description Focus from November 2001-March 2002, have greatly advanced and facilitated the growing debate on collection description within the United Kingdom.
Bringing together archivists, librarians, museologists and other information professionals, they have provided a valuable opportunity for practitioners to come together to discuss and highlight matters of common concern.
Although a little late for many RSLP funded projects, which were, by then, already well established, the workshops did, nonetheless, provide an important, open platform for all those interested in collection description activities and will undoubtedly serve to benefit future initiatives in this area.
References http://www.rslp.ac.uk http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/.
http://www.rascal.ac.uk.
See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/bd1/.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws1/.
Archives Hub http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk; RSLP Backstage Project http://www.backstage.ac.uk; Natural History Museum http://www.nhm.ac,uk.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws2/.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws3/.
HILT (High Level Thesaurus) Project http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/; SCONE (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network) http://scone.strath.ac.uk/; Performing Arts Data Service (PADS) http://www.pads.ahds.ac.uk/; CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) http://www.curl.ac.uk.
See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws2/programme.html.
Author Details   Clare McVeigh and Deirdre Wildy RASCAL Project Queen’s University Belfast Main Library Belfast BT7 1LS Email: rascal@qub.ac.uk URL: http://www.rascal.ac.uk Article Title: "Collection Description in Focus" Author: Clare McVeigh and Deirdre Wildy Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/collection-workshops/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Internet Detective: BA Students Get on the Case Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Internet Detective: BA Students Get on the Case Buzz software usability browser graphics passwords cookie url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Emma Worsfold and Debra Hiom introduce their "Internet Detective" online tutorial, and BA students from the final year Information Management BA at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh, review the site.
In July 1998 we launched “Internet Detective” an informal but comprehensive online tutorial designed to teach the skills required to critically evaluate the quality of information found on the Internet.
The tutorial includes interactive quizzes, worked examples and practical hint and tips.
It can be accessed via the World Wide Web from: http://sosig.ac.uk/desire/internet-detective.html Who created Internet Detective?
The tutorial has been developed by staff at The Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol.
It uses the TONIC-ng software developed at Netskills at the University of Newcastle and is hosted at Netskills.
The tutorial was funded by the European Union as part of DESIRE, a project in the Telematics for Research Programme.
What are the aims of the tutorial?
Internet Detective aims to alert people to the questionable quality of the information that is freely available over the Internet.
After completing the tutorial users will: be aware of the key factors that affect the quality of Internet information have learned practical hints and tips for evaluating the quality of an Internet information resource have seen a comprehensive list quality criteria have seen practical examples of the evaluation process have tried out the evaluation process for themselves on a sample of Internet resources Who is the tutorial aimed at?
Internet Detective can be useful for anyone using information found via the Internet.
It is designed for people who have already acquired basic skills needed to use the Internet and who are now able to focus on the information they find.
It is likely to be of particular relevance to those working with Internet information: information professionals librarians It will also be particularly relevant to those using the Internet for academic purposes: researchers teachers students How long does it take to complete the tutorial?
The tutorial may take three to four hours to complete fully.
However, users select a login name and may use this to work over a number of sittings the login will take them directly to the part of the tutorial at which they left off, and will keep a record of their quiz scores.
Who can use the tutorial?
Internet Detective is available on the WWW and is freely available for anyone to use.
(Users will need to access the tutorial using a Web browser that understands frames and accepts cookies).
Users will need to login and remember their username for re-entry at a later date.
How do I start?
Internet Detective is now freely available from the following URL: http://sosig.ac.uk/desire/internet-detective.html So please feel free to "get on the case" :-) Review of Internet Detective by final year BA (Hons) Information Management students at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh Internet Detective describes itself as “an interactive, online tutorial which provides an introduction to the issues of information quality on the Internet and teaches the skills required to evaluate critically the quality of an Internet resource.” The tutorial claims that it has been designed with information professionals and librarians in mind and will also be particularly relevant to researchers, teachers and students.
A group of fourth year Information Management students at Queen Margaret College thought it might be interesting to apply the criteria introduced by Internet Detective to the site itself, thereby judging it in accordance with its own standards.
The following description and evaluation are the products of collated individual assessments and group discussion.
Internet Detective allows the user to complete the tutorial in either a single session or a number of split sessions.
It does this by allowing users to register a login name and password.
The tutorial records the users’ progress and saves their position for the next session.
Users are reassured that any part of the tutorial can be repeated at any time.
Initially the site seems well presented.
The text is clear, the graphics although a tad bland are not over-used, and everything seems to be set out in a sensible fashion.
To the left side of the screen is a contents/navigation menu showing where the user is located within the site and the various sections one may jump to.
During the tutorial, coloured markers appear beside the contents to show user progress.
The main area of each page makes good use of space and the sections of the tutorial (each on a separate page) contain just enough information for the users not to feel they are being force-fed too much at once.
There are occasional quizzes at the end of sections which allow users to test their new knowledge.
When users give an incorrect answer in response to a quiz question the system provides an explanation.
This is a nice touch which helps users learn why they went wrong, instead of where.
Be warned however: using Netscape 3 at Queen Margaret College we find that the processing of the answers can take a little time and you may be tempted to hit the “Reload” button.
One might say a little patience is a system requirement although, generally, the rest of the site is up to speed.
Before evaluating the actual content, a note about the use of frames.
Under Netscape 3, where the Contents/navigation menu might be better with a separate frame, here it is actually part of the main page and consequently scrolls off the top of the screen when the user reads text further down the page.
(One student who tested this using Internet Explorer 4 from his machine at home, however, found this not to be a problem.)
This is not a major issue, but raises a question of usability all the same for particular browser users.
While this concern relates more to design than content, remedying it would improve the pages.
Content-wise, the tutorial begins with some excellent tips on general site navigation and the nature of URLs.
The information is aimed at beginners and would form a useful part of any “introduction to the Web” class.
Bearing this in mind, it is nice to see that the site takes pains not to use jargon.
Some knowledge is assumed but, since the users have already loaded their browser software and navigated their way to the site, this is not unreasonable.
Before progressing to the sections on criteria for evaluation, the tutorial introduces the issues of resource types, formats and, among other things, the difference between primary and secondary information.
The first short quiz follows, which is very simple if the user has paid attention to the preceding pages.
The second section of the tutorial considers criteria for evaluating web site content.
Bearing in mind that the purpose of this site is to introduce criteria for evaluating web sites, Internet Detective certainly matches its own content criteria.
The group feels that the site is genuine, well-researched, unbiased.
It includes enough references, statements of sources and aims, and we support its claims to be considered valid, although perhaps not exhaustive.
Despite a few typographical errors the site is judged as accurate.
All the work contained therein seems to be original and the authors freely give their credentials on the welcome page.
All the information required in the tutorial is held on a single academic server, going some way to boosting confidence about the credibility of the quality of the tutorial.
The group was pleased to see that no area of the site was “under construction”.
There seems to be no missing information at all.
The third tutorial section considers form criteria.
This relates to issues of navigation, user support and technology.
The group decided that, when compared to the form criteria, Internet Detective falls a little short of the mark.
The site offers no single downloadable file for perusal off-line (despite recommending users to search for such a thing).
It was also felt that navigation is not to a standard which could be achieved with a little more design flair.
The final section on evaluation criteria introduces process criteria.
The group agree that Internet Detective once again meets its own criteria.
The site is judged as durable and reliable, its content is unlikely to lose its relevance for a substantial period of time and although the site does not mention when it was last updated, such updates are unnecessary given the nature of its content.
The tutorial ends its list of criteria and proceeds with some worked examples.
These examples make perhaps the best use of graphics in the tutorial.
The following Try It Out section allows the users to test their new skills.
Users are invited to evaluate (by answering questions) an electronic journal, a mailing list and a subject-based web-site.
The Quality Controlled Services page points users towards some reliable Internet resources established for the academic community.
When the users reach the end of the package they are presented with a “congratulations” page and told they may now call themselves “Internet Detectives”.
Despite being let down slightly by lack of design flair (in terms of presentation as mentioned above), the group judges this site as a worthwhile and informative introduction to evaluation criteria for web sites.
Internet Detective can be found at: http://sosig.ac.uk/desire/internet-detective.html Evaluation team: Freda Brodie Nicola Coutts Chris Coutts Shona Drummond Rhonda McLean Lynda Murray Steve Parker Fraser Raitt Mhairi Scobbie Gillian Swanney Alison Wilson Author Details Emma Worsfold DESIRE/SOSIG Research Officer ILRT, University of Bristol, UK Telephone: +44 (0)117 928 8443 Email: Emma.Worsfold@bristol.ac.uk Web: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/emma.html Debra Hiom DESIRE/SOSIG Research Officer ILRT, University of Bristol, UK Telephone: +44 (0)117 928 8443 Email: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Web: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/debra.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 17 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Editorial: Introduction to Issue 17 Buzz metadata algorithm Citation BibTex RIS The web editors, Philip Hunter and Bernadette Daly, introduce Ariadne issue 17.
We would like to thank all of the readers who participated in the Ariadne Web Survey, part of an evaluation of the Ariadne project being carried out by Dr. Anne L. Barker, Department of Information and Library Studies at the University of Wales Aberystwyth.
The results of the survey will be of particular interest to those of us involved with the development and delivery of upcoming electronic publications.
One such publication will be 'Exploit Interactive', the UKOLN deliverable in the Exploit project, funded under the EC Telematics for Libraries programme.
This pan-European magazine will be available around the turn of the year.
In this issue's, A New Publication for a New Challenge, John MacColl and Lyndon Pugh discuss their proposal for a web and print magazine for Information and IT professionals in UK Higher Education.
They invite interested parties to discuss this proposal and help define a strategy encompassing the entire design, management, editorial remit and production process.
The articles in issue 17 are in keeping with the theme of organisational change; a process within which many of us have found ourselves, and may now accept as the norm.
In View from the Hill, Mark Clark reminds us that "Change won't go away.
It is an opportunity, not necessarily a threat, and adjusting to it is essential.
To do otherwise may carry greater risks."
In Why Give it Away?, David Haynes, et al.
give a preliminary report on some interesting issues that have emerged in their investigation of devolved budgets.
Clive Field introduces some of the basic issues and concepts of organisational change in Building on Shifting Sands: Information Age Organisations.
Nicola Harrison, Project Assistant at Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), describes her experience of teleworking in her article, Teleworking from Home.
The eLib Update reports include: DEDICATE: a European Telematics project for online professional development in information literacy and user education, and VERITY, a European Telematics project.
In the Metadata column, BIBLINK.Checksum, Ian Peacock and Andy Powell describe a proposed algorithm for calculating a checksum for Web pages.
The BIBLINK project is funded within the Telematics for Libraries programme of the European Commission.
It is investigating the bi-directional flow of information between publishers and National Bibliographic Agencies (NBAs) and is specifically concerned with information about the publication of electronic resources.
In his regular columns, Brian Kelly introduces document management systems, and also reports on the recent Netskills Institutional Web Management Workshop from Web Focus corner.
The workshop programme included presentations from twelve members of the UK Higher Education community, together with a presentation from a member of the British Council and a commercial design company.
Tracey Stanley looks at Ask Jeeves : the Knowledge Management Search Engine.
Down Your Way looks at the electronic university and the virtual campus; De Montfort's 30,000+ students on 10 campuses, it is an institution where technology and web-based teaching are delivery mechanisms for campus-based students.
In 'Interface' read about The IT man's Tale; Phil Brady's approach to managing a service that contains the contradictions, contrasts and variety of a modern academic information service is based on a few solid principles.
Planet SOSIG continues its review of the main SOSIG subject sections, highlighting the resources that the Internet can offer to those working in the different fields of the social sciences.
Reports from the recent conferences include Ian Winship's article about electronic library related activity at this year's American Library Association Conference.
Included are a few quotes from the conference that you'll want to remember: "I pressed F1, but you didn't come over to help."
"If they are clicking they are looking for information.
If they are typing we tell them to stop because they are using Hotmail."
"The most important issue in electronic delivery is printing."
Also included are reports from the UKOLUG 20th birthday conference, and Information Ecosystems about UKOLN conference held in Bath University.
Enjoy the issue.
Author Details Bernadette Daly Ariadne Web Editor UKOLN University of Bath Bath Email: b.m.daly@ukoln.ac.uk Philip Hunter Ariadne Web Editor UKOLN University of Bath Bath Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL: Resident EEVL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL: Resident EEVL Buzz html database xml browser cataloguing graphics uml url standards modelling Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod provides an update on the EEVL project.
Among other things he explains how the EEVL cross-search facility can be run from user pages.
EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
EEVL On-Line Bookstore I have long had a fascination with the connections between the online and the print world.
One of the earliest informative sources about the Web was the Internet magazine a print publication, the first issue of which came as a supplement to What Personal Computer magazine.
It was quickly followed by many other magazines about the Internet, some of which have survived to this day.
Some of the earliest Web directories were printed works.
Then everyday magazines, journals and even newspapers began to have sections and regular features about the Web and its resources.
Nowadays, business cards, poster adverts, T-shirts and even aeroplanes have Web addresses printed on them.
One of the Internet's biggest success stories is Amazon a company which sells books (amongst other things).
Not exactly in the same class, but relevant to this column and to EEVL's user community is EEVL's latest venture an online bookstore.
Thanks to an arrangement with Pearson Education, publishers of academic books, EEVL users can now benefit from large discounts on some excellent computing books from IT-minds.com.
To get to the online bookstore, go to the Computing section of EEVL.
EEVL has worked with Pearson Education in the past, notably on the Free Book promotion, which gave away £7,500 worth of engineering, mathematics and computing books.
Interesting titles which are on offer from the bookstore include: Inside XML, by Steve Holzner, UML Distilled A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, by Kendall Scott and Martin Fowler, and PostgreSQL Essential Reference by Barry Stinson.
Not all of the books are technical, though.
Also available is How to use the Internet, by Rogers Cadenhead.
These titles are available at prices less than at Amazon.
Resident EEVL?
I had intended to watch the film 'Resident Evil', find a thread in its plot, and then relate that thread to a subject I could write about in this EEVL column of Ariadne.
Unfortunately, most of the people I spoke to who had seen the film advised against it.
I am therefore left with rather a convoluted connection between the title of this article and its content.
The connection is that, thanks to the work of the EEVL Development Officer, it is now possible for users to remain resident in one site, perhaps their own institutional pages, and search the EEVL cross-search.
In other words, you can now add the powerful EEVL search box to your own site.
If you add the search box shown above to your Web site, it will give your site more functionality, and will also help your visitors by enabling them to search EEVL, but at the same time easily return to your site.
The search box could be inserted into library Web sites, Engineering, Mathematics or Computing departmental pages, or into subject pathfinder guides, or intranets, or any page that currently links to EEVL via a normal text link.
Instructions are available which show how to copy the code into your HTML browser.
You can try out the search box above to test what happens when you search for an engineering, mathematics or computing term.
News section completely revamped and redesigned EEVL's News section has been completely revamped and redesigned, making it much easier to find the latest news headlines from the top engineering, mathematics and computing news sources.
Links from all main pages on the EEVL site now provide access to subject views of the latest industry news, as well as news from the EEVL service, news of new additions to the EEVL service, and news and events in Learning & Teaching.
The News hot links in the top right corner of each page provide options for viewing the Latest News in Engineering, the Latest News in Computing, the Latest News in Mathematics, and Science and Technology News.
For Engineering news, you can jump straight through to sector specific news sources, for example Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering news, or Mechanical Engineering and Related Industries news.
There are links to News from the EEVL Service, and the New Additions to the EEVL Catalogue which gives details of the latest 15 additions to EEVL's Internet Resource Catalogue.
The News and Events in Learning and Teaching links provide news from various relevant Learning & Teaching Support Networks (LTSN).
Using these links is an excellent way to keep up to date with what's happening in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
As well as the latest daily headlines gleaned from services such as Moreover and MagPortal, there are also direct links to some of the best sources of industry news, including the news sections of numerous top trade journals, plus some specialist news services.
A reminder Did you know that those institutions who subscribe to the Edina Compendex service can automatically cross-search EEVL with Compendex?
Cross-searching a very large database like Compendex, with a relatively small database like EEVL can sometimes give unexpected results, but it is a very handy way to 'kill two birds with one stone'.
For researchers looking for papers in their areas of interest it can often highlight relevant Web sites of interest which might otherwise be missed.
The image above shows a search in the most recent part of the Edina Ei Compendex database, for the term 'CAD Management' being cross-searched in the EEVL database.
The results are 229 hits from the Compendex database, and 10 hits from the EEVL Internet Resource Catalogue.
Results from the EEVL Catalogue include links through to the sites in question.
EEVL Poster now available An attractive A3 size EEVL poster is now available.
Featured above, copies of this poster have been mailed to members of the University Science and Technology Librarians Group (USTLG), for whom EEVL provides a searchable directory.
If you would like copies of the poster, please contact me at the address below or by email to: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Author Details   Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4ASE-mail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: "EEVL: Resident EEVL" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data software database archives thesaurus digitisation preservation jpeg gis gif wav realaudio mp3 licence url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Foraging for a Good Read: Book Forager Goes Live It is August 2000; the UK is enjoying the driest, sunniest summer this century.
You are in the library trying to find a book which isunorthodox, very realistic but also quite funny, set in Spain.
You go over to the public access terminal and input details of the kind of read you need to match your mood, and the computer comes up with ten suggestions for you to try.
None of the above is fantasy except, of course, the bit about the weather!
Book Forager has been developed as part of the Society of Chief Librarians’ Branching Out project and is freely available on the Web for everybody to use from May 2000.
Book Forager has been developed by Applied Psychology Research and it is a wonderful synergy between the disciplines of reader development, psychology and computing.
Books and computers are sometimes seen as antagonists.
Branching Out is committed to demonstrating that they can work together.
Helping people choose something different People choose what they know.
They will tend to find writers/genres they like and stick with them, reading the same kind of books over and over again.
By helping readers analyse exactly what it is they are looking for in a read, Book Forager cuts across the genre categories that many readers box themselves into.
Instead of asking for a crime novel, a reader can say, ‘I want a book which is unpredictable, very romantic and a little sad.’ The range of titles Book Forager suggests might include science fiction, a translation and a collection of poems.
Readers might not have a specific need in mind when they first come to Book Forager, they can play around, stretching boundaries, until they get a combination/title which interests them.
Aside from helping individuals choose, Book Forager is about developing the audience for new, unknown writers.
Branching Out is committed to buying and promoting recent fiction and poetry from categories identified as underbought by public libraries and of particular appeal to the 18-30s.
Forager could be applied to any books and may eventually include bestsellers as well, but within Branching Out it has a particular purpose to take people to books they might not otherwise find.
What you’ll see on the screen Book Forager offers the reader up to 20 million different variables to define the read they are looking for.
The following are some of the options available:   Sliders allow you to choose how much or how little of something you want in your read, for example, gentle-violent, conventional-unorthodox, no sex-sex.
There are twelve sliders and they are not absolute choices, ‘want/don’t want.’ You can use the slider to decide how much of each ingredient you want in your final choice.
Plot you can decide which plot shape you would prefer from a list of seven, including ‘success against the odds’, ‘lots of twists and turns’, and ‘revelation.’ Character you can choose the gender, age group, race and sexual orientation of the lead character in the book.
Country of setting for armchair travellers wanting to visit specific locations.
Results Book Forager will display a list of books starting with a best match for your requirements, and moving onto good matches, and a few which match some of the qualities.
It will give details of title, author, ISBN and date published and also include a short comment by a previous reader, some suggestions of other books with a similar feel and a short extract from each book chosen.
There are plans to make the site interactive so that readers will be able to input their own comments about the books featured.
Try it out at www.branching-out.net/forager/ The Book Forager has been developed as part of Branching Out, an initiative from the Society of Chief Librarians, supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of England, in partnership with BfS and the University of Central England.
Branching Out is a project managed by Opening the Book Ltd. For further information please contact Rachel Van Riel, tel: 01977 602188 email: rachel@openingthebook.com   LC National Digital Library Program announces American Folklife collections The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program announces the release of two new online collections from the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.
“NOW WHAT A TIME”: BLUES, GOSPEL, AND THE FORT VALLEY MUSIC FESTIVALS (1938-1943) at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftvhtml/ Audio recordings from what may be the first folk festival created by and for African-Americans are featured in the latest addition to the American Memory online collections of the Library of Congress.
“Now What a Time”: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943 is a folk music collection consisting of approximately one hundred sound recordings and related documentation such as song lists and correspondence created during trips to the Fort Valley State College Folk Festival in Fort Valley, Georgia.
These recordings, were made in 1941 and in March, June and July 1943.
Recorded at a historically black college founded in 1895, the recordings include blues and gospel songs recorded by John Wesley Work III, Lewis Jones, and Willis Laurence James, with the support of the Library’s Archive of American Folk Song, now known as the Archive of Folk Culture.
The recordings include both choral and instrumental works performed by artists such as Will Chastain, Buster Brown, the Silver Star Singers, and Traveller Home Singers.
As the Fort Valley Music Festivals took place during World War II, this collection also provides a unique opportunity to feature the Center’s wartime collections documenting soldiers’ songs and other folkloristic material growing out of the war.
In addition to preserving blues and gospel songs of the time, ‘Now What a Time’ also documents the topical re-wording of several standard gospel songs to address the wartime concerns of those performing at the festival.
Users will enjoy listening to the music and will learn more about the impact of World War II on the people within the African-American community.
Digitizing the Sound Recordings The sound recordings in the Fort Valley online collection were taken from disc recordings in the Library’s collections.
When original discs were unavailable, preservation tapes were used.
The analog audio from the discs and tapes was transferred to Digital Audio Tape (DAT) to produce a master source for digitization.
Some surface noise and scratching may be apparent on the recordings, since they have not been enhanced or altered in any way from their original state.
WAVE, MP3, and RealAudio versions have been supplied for each recording.
The WAVE files were created from the DAT tape at a sampling rate of 22,050 samples per second, 16-bit word length, and a single (mono) channel.
The MP3 and RealAudio files were derived from the WAVE files through digital processing and were created for users who have at least a 14.4 modem.
“FIDDLE TUNES OF THE OLD FRONTIER: THE HENRY REED COLLECTION” at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/hrhtml/ This unique American music collection, released on the 116th anniversary of his birth in Peterstown, West Virginia, features traditional fiddle tunes performed by Henry Reed.
Recorded in Glen Lyn, Virginia, by folklorist Alan Jabbour in 1966-67, when Reed was over eighty years old, these tunes represent the music and evoke the history and spirit of the Appalachian frontier.
Many of the tunes presented in this collection have enjoyed new popularity during the fiddling revival of the later twentieth century, and are performed today by a new generation of musicians.
The online presentation includes 184 sound recordings, available in WaveForm, MP3, and RealAudio formats; Jabbour’s fieldnotes; and sixty-nine musical transcriptions.
New descriptive notes on tune histories and musical features accompany the sound recordings, and an extensive listing of related publications and a glossary of musical provide further avenues for exploration.
An essay by Alan Jabbour (with photographs by Carl Fleischhauer, Karen Singer Jabbour, and Kit Olson) discussing Reed’s life, art, and influence accompanies the collection as a special presentation.
Digitizing the Sound recordings The sound recordings in Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection were transferred from the original 7-inch, 7.5 ips (inches per second) analog tape reels to digital audio tape (DAT) to produce a master source for digitization.
Some transfers were made by the American Folklife Center, and by the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division Laboratory, using their customary and conservative practices of level, equalization, and noise reduction.
WaveForm (.wav), MPEG 2, Layer 3 (.mp3), and RealAudio (.ra) versions have been supplied for each recording.
The Wave files were created from the DAT tape at a sampling rate of 44,100 Hz per second, 16-bit word length, and a single (mono) channel.
The RealAudio files were derived from the Wave files through digital processing and were created for users who have at least a14.4 modem (8-bit).
The RealAudio G2 files were created for users who have at least a 24 modem.
The MP3 files were derived from the Wave files in a batch-conversion process using the MP3 plug-in of Sonic Foundry’s SoundForge software.
Some surface noise may be apparent on the recordings, and tracks may start or end abruptly, as on the original recordings.
Minimal adjustments to volume were made to certain tracks, and, on the advice of the consultant-collector, some snippets of conversation and fragments of music have been deleted.
Digitizing the photographic prints JJT Inc., of Austin, Texas, the Library’s pictorial image scanning contractor, produced the digital images in this collection.
The company’s scanning setup brings together a digital camera manufactured in Germany with JJT’s custom software.
An uncompressed archival or master file was produced for each photograph, as well as three derivative files.
The level of resolution employed for the Library’s archival pictorial-image files is now ranging from 3000x2000 pixels to 5000x4000 pixels, depending on the types of original materials.
A thumbnail GIF image is displayed for each pictorial image, and a medium resolution JPEG file (at a quality setting that yields an average compression of 15:1) can be displayed by clicking on the image.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftvhtml/ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/hrhtml/ Please direct any questions or comments about these and other American Memory collections to ndlpcoll@loc.gov More test sites for CACTUS The EC funded CANDLE project has chosen more test sites for its exciting digital library management system, CACTUS.
The University of Thessaly Library, Greece, Technical University Kosice, Slovakia and Cranfield University, United Kingdom are to install and trial the software.
It is already undergoing trials at the partner sites in London, Athens and Florence.
The system gives librarians the tools to understand how electronic resources are being used, the ability to mange usage at a very precise level and the knowledge they need to refine their electronic subscriptions.
It collects detailed statistics showing which electronic resources are really in use, by which user groups.
It also simplifies access to resources for end users after their first secure log on connections to a range of resources are all handled automatically and transparently by the software, a form of Single Sign On.
The CACTUS system also gives users access to licensed resources from a machine anywhere on or off campus.
It is expected that many more libraries from all around Europe will take the opportunity to use the software.
“Mark Pierce, a Technical Director of the Spanish software company, Enware and Project Coordinator said: “We are interested in working with any special libraries that would like to trial the software.
We believe that the benefits of the system will be relevant to all sorts of libraries, helping them to rationalise their spending on electronic resources.
We know what it is what they want to do now they have a tool to help them do it.” John Akeroyd, Director of Learning and Information Services at South Bank University, London, who originated the CACTUS concept and are a primary test site said “CACTUS makes it easier for users to access resources, even if they are working off campus.
It also promises to give us the information we need to channel our spending onto those electronic resources our users really want to have.
It will change the way we manage electronic resources.
This is the core of a library management system for the electronic library.” The feature rich software also offers: Customisation of users’ desktops.
The ability to effectively ration the usage of resources on LANs Real time messaging between administrators and users, e.g.
to announce end of day close down.
The software is also applicable to any resource centre trying to manage and deliver a mixture of electronic services; it could be used in learning centres, in Internet cafes.
The consortium are interested in finding more test sites though this would be on a zero funding basis.
Publishers will get the benefit of a more secure environment in which only people who should be able to can access material.
They will also benefit from improved understanding of how electronic resources are being used.
Swets Blackwell are one of the project partners.
The Candle web site is http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/candleFor more information please contact Andrew Cox, LITC, South Bank University, +44 (0)20 7815 7058, coxam@sbu.ac.ukor Mark Pierce, Enware, Nunez de Bilbao, Madrid, +34 91 576 02 45,makis@enware.es News and features from the LA’s popular Library techology supplement are now free on the Webhttp://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/lt/ltcover.htmlAndrew Cox, Senior Researcher, LITC, South Bank University, +44 020 7815 7058 Bibliographic Database Free on the Web The Soybean Insect Research Information Center (SIRIC) database is now available for the first time via the Web.
http://insectweb.inhs.uiuc.edu/Soy/Siric This bibliographic database was established in 1969 by the Illinois Natural History Survey’s Center for Economic Entomology to collect and index the world’s research literature on soybean-related arthropods.
The literature is carefully indexed according to a thesaurus prepared by professional entomologists.
The database may be of interest to those in Agriculture, Crop Science, Entomology, Integrated Pest Management, Natural History and Biology.
Lynn Hanson, Librarian Soybean Insect Research Information Center Illinois Natural History Survey Center for Economic Entomology 1101 West Peabody Drive #144 Environmental and Agricultural Sciences Building MC-637 Urbana IL 61801-4723 217-244-1274 siric@uiuc.edu URL: http://insectweb.inhs.uiuc.edu/Soy/SIRIC   Low cost access to the new Oxford English Dictionary Online for Further and Higher Education Institutions in the UK and Ireland The crown jewel of reference works – the Oxford English Dictionary Online – will be available at a significantly reduced cost to all further and higher education institutions in the UK and Ireland.
From 1 June 2000, students and staff at subscribing institutions will benefit from unlimited access to “the internet’s biggest, most prestigious reference work” (The Guardian).
This opportunity comes as a result of a special 3-year pricing arrangement negotiated by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the further and high education funding councils and Oxford University Press (OUP).
Special funding from the Further Education Funding bodies via the JISC, together with special pricing from OUP, means that a network licence to OED Online will cost colleges just £85 including VAT in the first year of the 3-year deal (compared with a standard list price of £600 plus VAT).
This is the first time that further education colleges have been able to take advantage of a JISC-negotiated deal.
This is all part of the strategy to enable students and staff in colleges to participate fully in the government’s lifelong learning agenda by enabling access to high quality learning resources via the Internet.
The Oxford English Dictionary Online will join other high quality resources delivered via the Internet through the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
CHEST will manage this agreement on behalf of the JISC.
Please see http://www.chest.ac.uk/datasets/oed/ for full details.
For more information please contact:   Dr. Alicia Wise JISC Collections Manager Old Library King’s College London Strand London WC2R 2LS (020) 7848 2556 (020) 7848 2937 Alicia.Wise@kcl.ac.uk   Susanna Lob Marketing Manager, Oxford English Dictionary Online Oxford University Press Great Clarendon St. Oxford OX2 6DP 01865 267229 lobs@oup.co.uk   Further Information about the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) This is a JISC strategy for adding value to the UK’s learning, teaching and research resources.
The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is a managed environment for accessing quality assured information resources on the Internet which are available from many sources.
These resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections.
More information is available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/dner_vision.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz software archives metadata digitisation copyright adobe ebook url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Publication of the Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonweal th Agencies The Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies is now available on the National Archives of Australia Website at: URL: <http://www.naa.gov.au/govserv/techpub/rkms/intro.htm> This standard describes the metadata that the National Archives of Australia recommends should be captured in the recordkeeping systems used by Commonwealth government agencies.
Compliance with the Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies will help agencies to identify, authenticate, describe and manage their electronic records in a systematic and consistent way to meet business, accountability and archival requirements.
The standard is designed to be used as a reference tool by agency corporate managers, IT personnel and software vendors involved in the design, selection and implementation of electronic recordkeeping and related information management systems.
It defines a basic set of 20 metadata elements (eight of which constitute a core set of mandatory metadata) and 65 sub-elements that may be incorporated within such systems, and explains how they should be applied within the Commonwealth sphere.
Adrian Cunningham Director, Recordkeeping and Descriptive Standards National Archives of Australia SOURCE: Aus-Archivists, AGLS Working Group, metadata-l mailing lists DraftOpen eBook 1.0 Specification includes Dublin Core Metadata Draft Open eBook 1.0 Specification, Version 0.9b, May 24, 1999 The recommendation can be found at: URL: <http://www.openebook.org/> The draft recommendation for the Open Ebook Standard, released May 24, 1999, includes Dublin Core as the metadata standard for ebooks.
Open eBook Initiative supporters include Microsoft, Adobe, Bertelsmann, WarnerBooks, HarperCollins, the Association of American Publishers, and NIST.
The metadata reference can be found in section two of the standard.
Scoping the Future of Oxford’s Digital Collections Readers of Ariadne may be interested in a project currently underway at the University of Oxford.
The project is entitled ‘Scoping the Future of Oxford’s Digital Collections’ and has been funded by the A W Mellon Foundation.
It’s completion date is the end of July 1999.
The study is being conducted by Stuart Lee, seconded from the Humanities Computing Unit at the University Computing Services.
The report aims: to document, analyse and evaluate Oxford’s current digitization activities, as a basis for assessing the effectiveness of the various methodologies used; to investigate the possibilities for building on the existing project-based work and for migrating it into viable services for library users; to develop appropriate selection criteria for creating digital collections in the context of local, national, and international scholarly requirements for digital library products and services; to make recommendations for further investment and activity within the Oxford libraries sector and potentially within the UK research libraries community.
The study will be expected to deliver two outcomes: it will identify specific tasks for phased funding and further development; it will provide the University with an integrated set of practical and achievable objectives, amounting to a strategic plan for future investment in the digitization of its library collections.
To date the study has produced an article on ‘Assessing Collections for Digitization’ and has performed in-depth interviews with digitization projects both within Oxford and external to it.
In the near future the project will be mounting a series a decision matrices, workflows, and a study of the issues currently surrounding digitization.
Further issues of Ariadne will include more details of the project.
In the meantime readers should point their browsers to URL: <http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/scoping/> or e-mail Stuart.Lee@oucs.ox.ac.uk.
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Building ResourceFinder Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Building ResourceFinder Buzz data software framework database xml archives metadata identifier repositories cataloguing z39.50 perl php mysql ftp interoperability Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff looks at how the RDN has utilised the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol.
The RDN is a collaborative network of subject gateways, funded for use by UK Higher and Further Education by the JISC (though it is used much more widely).
Each subject gateway, as part of its service, provides the end user with access to databases of descriptions of freely available, high quality, Web resources.
As each resource described in the database is hand picked by subject specialists, following well developed guidelines, it is hoped that a resource discovered through the RDN will be of great value to an end-user.
RDN resource descriptions are held in metadata records that conform to the RDN cataloguing guidelines [1].
We provide a number of ways to access the records.
A researcher with a specific subject in mind would probably want to visit one of the RDN gateway sites [2].
If they had a broader remit they may try using ResourceFinder [3], the RDN’s cross searching service that collates results from all of the gateways.
Experience suggests that end users wish to use both approaches when using the RDN.
This article discusses the technology behind the RDN ResourceFinder service.
Approaches to cross searching Each RDN gateway maintains one or more databases of metadata records.
There are two possible approaches to providing a multidisciplinary cross search of all these databases: a distributed search, where a "broker" sends the same request to each of the databases in turn, retrieves results from them, and presents the whole set back to the user.
a single database, where the records from each of the databases is pulled into a central store and indexed and served from there.
ResourceFinder initially used a distributed search approach, based on WHOIS++ and later Z39.50.
Recent developments have seen a move away from the distributed search and ResourceFinder now uses a single "union" database of all RDN records.
Why a single database?
ResourceFinder is intended to provide a seamless search across all the gateway databases and present a mixed bag of results from any subject area.
Because ResourceFinder merges all results from all databases the distributed model significantly slows response times.
This is because any search is limited to the slowest database or network connection.
In addition, because ResourceFinder has to wait for all the results from a given database (not, say, the first ten) and locally rank the complete set there is a processing overhead.
It is hoped that a single database would facilitate additional RDN services, the ability to start offering advanced search functions and a consistent cross browse interface across the RDN.
For instance, by mapping the gateway specific resource types to the RDNT-1 [4] type list, we hope to be able to provide "Search by Resource Type" searches.
ResourceFinder The current ResourceFinder architecture looks like this: Figure 1 Each of the gateways maintains a live database that serves their Web interfaces.
In addition to this they build a separate ‘repository’ of their records for gathering by the RDN.
Records are gathered from each gateway to a single RDN repository.
The records are then indexed and made available via ResourceFinder using the Cheshire II [5] software.
Towards a single database There was a need within the RDN to switch to a single database supporting ResourceFinder fairly quickly.
The main driving force was the slow response times we were experiencing from a distributed search.
In addition, new gateways were starting to come online and were concerned at the technical effort involved in creating a Z39.50 target, essential for inclusion in ResourceFinder’s cross search.
The proposed solution was the creation of a single database.
Around about the same time the RDN started to think about building a central database, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) released a draft version of the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI protocol).
The timing couldn’t have been better as this protocol provided the RDN with a ready made, standards based approach to its own metadata harvesting needs: "The goal of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (referred to as the OAI protocol in the remainder of this document) is to supply and promote an application-independent interoperability framework that can be used by a variety of communities who are engaged in publishing content on the Web.
The OAI protocol described in this document permits metadata harvesting…" [6] UKOLN developed the Perl implementation of an OAI repository that is now in use across the RDN [7].
It consists of two scripts: one to covert the records from the gateway database format (ROADS, MySQL tables, etc.)
to DC XML records, and the other an OAI front end to that repository.
In this implementation, a repository consists of one or more directories on the local file system, containing metadata records as individual files.
This approach makes generating a repository very easy as there is no need to interface with databases or the like.
This approach (an approach similar to the way some RDN gateways provided Z39.50 targets by exporting all of their data into Zebra [9] databases) was adopted because of the need for rapid deployment at the gateways.
RDN gateways use diverse database technologies: SOSIG, for instance uses (a fairly customised) ROADS, EEVL is based on its own MySQL/PHP solution.
It would have taken time and effort for each of the gateways to develop their own OAI front-ends to their database.
Much simpler to develop a simple script to export their data, especially when scripts existed in kind with the tools already developed to export data to Zebra.
Part of the RDN OAI software included a sample ROADS to DC XML conversion script.
It is not ideal however as it results in two copies of the data at each gateway: the live data, and the OAI repository data (see fig 1).
Because of this there may be some inconstancies between the live data and the OAI data.
Data inconsistency is unlikely to be any worse than the cross searching approach because Zebra indexes may not be updated in line with the live databases either.
In practice the data inconsistencies are small and have a minimal impact on the quality of the service and what we lose through data inconsistency by creating a single database, is gained through the ability to make result sets more consistent with the gateways than was previously possible with a Z39.50 based cross search.
Exporting the data into an OAI repository means we could (though currently do not) enhance or adapt the metadata as part of the export process.
For instance we could make different attributes available in different OAI repositories for different audiences or licensees of RDN data.
In the future there may be some convergence where the live database provides both Web and OAI protocol interfaces.
Metadata Harvesting Once the data is in the repository it is a simple matter for the RDN’s metadata harvester to access those repositories and retrieve all of the RDN records.
This process is made even simpler by the OAI protocol and the open source tools developed to exploit it.
The metadata harvesting process is automated by the RDN OAI gatherer developed using the OAI Perl libraries developed at the University of Southampton [10].
The Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol The Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting protocol provides a mechanism for sharing metadata records between co-operating services based on HTTP and XML.
The OAI Protocol allows metadata records to be shared between data providers (repositories of metadata records) and service providers (services that harvest metadata from the data providers).
The protocol defines only six requests (known as verbs): GetRecord Identify ListIdentifier ListMetadataFormats ListRecords ListSets GetRecord and ListRecords support the retrieval of records from a data provider.
Each record comprises three parts: header including a unique record identifier and a datestamp metadata metadata about a resource in a single format about metadata about the record Data providers are allowed to support multiple XML metadata formats (provided they are encoded as XML).
ListSets supports the grouping of records within a repository into logical groups.
Records can be selectively harvested based on these sets or by the service provider asking for records corresponding to a particular range of dates.
[8] The gatherer runs once a week at present, as the gateways update their own repositories with similar frequency.
It may be that the frequency of harvesting increases if it inconsistencies between RDN and gateway result sets become too large.
Recent experience suggests this only becomes a problem if a gateway adds lots of records in response to some world event and the records associated with it need to surface in ResourceFinder immediately.
Situations like this are rare however, and can be managed manually.
The OAI protocol only allows for the retrieval of identifiers and associated records from the remote repository.
It does not provide for local management of the gathered files.
Because of this the RDN OAI gatherer provides additional functions to manage the removal of records.
The gatherer has access to a list of local identifiers and compares that to the list from the remote service.
Where identifiers exist locally, but not remotely, it is assumed that the remote site has removed that metadata record and so it is deleted automatically.
Metadata Indexing The OAI protocol does not attempt to provide a searchable interface to a repository.
In order to provide the ResourceFinder service the RDN has to index the metadata records and make the single database available via the Web.
The RDN has adopted the Cheshire II system for this purpose.
You will notice from Fig.
1 that we have two copies of the repository and indexes.
Only one of these repositories and indexes is live at any one time, the other being updated and rebuilt in the background.
This is because we wanted to ensure that ResourceFinder remains live while we index the records.
Our Web interface works with a virtual index that points at either one of these sets of indexes.
The indexing process is simple and fully automated.
A script chooses the correct database to update and then deletes and adds records as necessary using the RDN OAI gatherer.
We then run the Cheshire II indexer over the resultant repository (Cheshire II handles the native DC XML records without any processing) and this creates a set of index files.
If the gather and indexing is successful the pointer is transferred from the live set to the updated set.
ResourceFinder itself is a CGI that uses Cheshire’s webcheshire Tcl interpreter to interface directly with the indexes of RDN records.
A Single Database Having gathered all RDN records into a single database, the RDN is now in the position to offer both an OAI repository and a Z39.50 target to all of the RDN data or subsets of it.
While we do not make our OAI repositories available outside of the RDN it is envisaged that we could offer access to RDN partners, and perhaps, the world.
Although we are using open standards, we are working in a closed environment; it would seem the OAI protocol is ideal for internal data sharing as much as "publishing" metadata.
References RDN Cataloguing Guidelines, Michael Day and Pete Cliff <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/cat-guide/> See: BIOME <http://biome.ac.uk/> EEVL <http://www.eevl.ac.uk/> Humbul <http://www.humbul.ac.uk/> PsiGate <http://www.psigate.ac.uk/> SOSIG <http://www.sosig.ac.uk/> See: ResourceFinder at the RDN <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/> RDN Resource Types, Compiled by Pete Cliff <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/cat-guide/> See: Cheshire II Project Homepage <http://cheshire.lib.berkeley.edu/> The Open Archives Inititive Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, ed.
Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze <http://www.openarchives.org/OAI_protocol/openarchivesprotocol.html> Available at: ftp://ftp.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/tools/rdn-oai/rdn-oai.tar.Z Protocol summary taken from An OAI Approach to Sharing Subject Gateway Content, Andy Powell <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/www10/oaiposter.pdf> See: IndexData’s Zebra <http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra/> OAI-Perl Library, Tim Brody <http://sourceforge.net/projects/oai-perl/> Author Details Pete Cliff RDN Systems Developer UKOLN Email: p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.d.cliff/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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E-Books for Students: EBONI Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines E-Books for Students: EBONI Buzz data software dissemination usability browser video hypertext multimedia ejournal ebook url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Wilson on how the EBONI project will investigate the usability of e-books through user evaluations.
Electronic journals are playing an increasing role in the education of students.
The ARL Directory of Scholarly Electronic Journals [1] lists nearly 4,000 peer-reviewed journal titles and 4,600 conferences available electronically, and many academic libraries now subscribe to ejournal services such as those provided by MCB Emerald, Omnifile and ingentaJournals.
In comparison, electronic books have been slow to impact on Higher Education.
Initiatives such as Project Gutenberg [2] and the Electronic Text Centre [3] have, for many years, been digitising out-of-copyright texts and making them available online.
However, up-to-date academic textbooks and the technology to deliver them to students have only recently become available: lecturers are beginning to mount their publications online (see http://eboni.dis.strath.ac.uk:8080/search for an indication of the work being conducted in this area); Taylor and Francis [4] will shortly become the first English language publisher to digitise its entire library of book titles, many of them academic, for sale in e-book format via the Internet; MetaText [5], a division of netLibrary Inc., is creating Web-based digital textbooks that provide students and lecturers with a range of learning tools including multimedia content, chat rooms and self-grading quizzes; and goReader [6] have produced a prototype portable electronic device designed specifically for university students which can hold more than 500 textbooks and weights just five pounds.
However, despite the obvious technical and financial advantages of producing books electronically (such as the storage of multiple titles in a small space, the rapid production and worldwide dissemination of material, and the ability to exploit multimedia and hypertext capabilities), the concept has faced much criticism from the end-user point of view.
People read about 25% slower from computer screens than from printed paper [7], and many opt to print-and-read digitized material rather than scroll through large chunks of text while sitting in front of a “humming monster of a machine” [8].
Morkes and Nielsen addressed this usability issue in a series of studies in 1997 and 1998 [9, 10].
They demonstrated that users’ ability to retrieve information from Web publications, and their subjective satisfaction with those publications, can be improved by up to 159% by altering the on-screen design of the text.
These findings were applied, in the WEB Book study [11], to an electronic textbook available on the Internet and led to a 92% increase in usability, indicating the positive impact of focusing on the appearance of the content when preparing an academic text for publication on the Web.
It is essential that this matter is explored thoroughly in order that the latest e-book developments are fully informed from a design, as well as a content and technology perspective, and are delivered to the end-user in a form which maximises their usability.
EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface) [12] has been funded under the JISC DNER [13] Learning and Teaching Programme to investigate this very issue, and aims to produce a set of best practice guidelines for publishing electronic textbooks on the Web which reflect the usability requirements of students and academics throughout the UK.
The methodology EBONI will employ to arrive at these guidelines is outlined below.
Methodology EBONI will look into the importance of design issues on the usability of e-books through one large-scale user evaluation in one academic discipline, and several satellite studies in other disciplines.
In this way, students and lecturers from a range of disciplines and backgrounds will be involved in evaluating electronic textbooks available on the Internet.
To this end, the Project Team have developed an “E-book Evaluation Model”, to be implemented in varying degrees by each study (depending on the specific objectives of the study, feasibility, and availability of resources) and which will ensure that the results of each evaluation are comparable at some level.
This evaluation model, or methodology, comprises various options for selecting material and participants and describes the different tasks and evaluation techniques which can be employed in an experiment.
These range from simple retrieval tasks measuring participants’ ability to find information in the material to “high cognitive skill” tasks set by lecturers to measure participants’ understanding of concepts in the texts, and from Web-based questionnaires measuring subjective satisfaction to one-to-one interviews with participants discussing all elements of interacting with the test material.
As such, it offers comprehensive and wide-ranging methods of measuring the “usability” of e-books, incorporating traditional IR concepts such as speed and accuracy of retrieval, as well as measures which reflect the complex requirements of learners and teachers in Higher Education.
Some of the elements in this methodology are derived from the work of Morkes and Nielsen and Spool et al [14].
Variously, they employed retrieval and memory tasks and techniques including covert observation and subjective satisfaction questionnaires to evaluate the usability of online technical white papers, Web sites with tourist information, and popular Internet sites.
Clearly, this material differs in content, style and scope from the educational material that EBONI aims to evaluate, and the techniques we derived from their methodologies have been refined accordingly.
In particular, the TILT project’s expertise in conducting evaluation studies of teaching software across a wide range of disciplines at Glasgow University has provided a useful reference point in designing elements of the methodology particularly concerned with measuring educational aspects of the test material [15].
Each phase of EBONI’s e-book evaluation model is outlined below.
Phase 1.
Selection of material Central to any comparative evaluation, and fundamental to the development of a methodology, is the selection of the objects (or experimental material) to be evaluated.
This process will be directed by the particular objectives of the investigation and it is important that the chosen material will enable those objectives to be met in full.
In an e-book evaluation, texts may be selected for comparison according to three parameters: Format/appearance Content Medium For example, the Visual Book experiment [16] studied the application of the paper book metaphor to the design and production of electronic books, particularly focusing on the role of visual components.
Its evaluation, therefore, compared the same text in electronic and paper media.
The WEB Book experiment, on the other hand, focused on the impact of appearance on the usability of textbooks on the Web.
To this end, two electronic versions of the same text, each of which exhibited different styles of presentation (or formats), were selected as the material for evaluation.
EBONI’s core study builds on the experience of the Visual Book and the WEB Book, and the texts selected for evaluation vary according to two parameters: appearance and content .
Like the WEB Book, it aims to measure the impact on usability of various design techniques evident in books on the Internet, but it has a broader focus and is concerned with evaluating a wide spectrum of styles evident in the online textbooks of, in the first instance, one academic discipline.
As such, several texts (different in content), each of which represent different styles, have been selected for evaluation, all of which are aimed at the same level of students in the same discipline.
In all, the possible combinations of objects selected for comparative evaluation in an e-book usability study include: The same text in electronic and paper formats Different electronic versions of the same text Different electronic texts exhibiting different styles/techniques, in the same discipline Different electronic texts exhibiting similar (or the same) styles/techniques, in different disciplines The same electronic texts on different monitors or hardware devices (such as portable e-books) Phase 2: Selection of actors The next stage in developing a methodology is the selection of the key actors who will play a role in the process of evaluating the chosen material.
In an e-book usability study, four main roles, or possible actors, can be distinguished: The participant who will interact with the selected texts and whose feedback, derived through a variety of techniques (see below), forms the results of the experiment.
The evaluator who devises the evaluation techniques, arranges and supervises the evaluation session(s), and conducts interviews and think-aloud sessions.
The task developer who devises and sets tasks for the participant to carry out, using the selected texts.
The assessor who accumulates and interprets the evaluative data provided by the participant.
Preliminary questionnaires can be used to glean more specific information about participants.
They can help to distinguish between different “groups” of participants, identify significant differences in population samples, and record any other user needs, characteristics or abilities which may affect the results of the experiment.
The information gathered as a result of a pre-questionnaire will usually be factual and, in the case of electronic book evaluations, is likely to fall into two broad categories, both of which may be relevant when interpreting results: background information about the user, and details of the equipment he or she is using to conduct the experiment.
Phase 3: Selection of tasks Engaging participants in performing tasks using the selected material enables the evaluator to collect comparable quantitative data which can be used to measure both the "effectiveness" and "efficiency" aspects of the usability of the text.
Three types of task, each of which measures different aspects of usability, are outlined below.
"Scavenger Hunt" The Scavenger Hunt is suggested by Spool et al [17] as a means of discovering how quickly and/or accurately participants can find information in an electronic text.
Participants are involved in hunting through the material selected for evaluation in search of specific facts without using the browser’s “Find” command.
Questions should be chosen to which participants are unlikely to know the answer automatically, to ensure that they are fully engaged in the experimental process.
A judgement task can be included in which the participant first has to find relevant information, then make a judgement about it and, if resources allow, the length of time it takes participants to complete all these tasks should be measured.
Scavenger Hunts are appropriate in all cases where it is important to the goals of the experiment to determine the accuracy and/or speed with which information can be retrieved from the test material, and the level of difficulty of tasks set will change according to the level of knowledge and expertise of the participants.
The results of the Scavenger Hunt will feed directly into two measures of usability: Task time: the number of seconds it takes users to find answers to the search tasks and one judgment task.
Task success: a percentage score based on the number of correct answers users give in the search tasks.
Memory Tasks Memory tasks are suggested by Morkes and Nielsen as a method of measuring a participant’s ability to recognise and recall information from an electronic text, after spending a specified amount of time reading it [18].
Data gathered from such tasks can be used to infer how the appearance of information on screen affects users’ ability to remember that information.
Memory tasks involve the participant reading a chapter or a chunk of text for a short period of time, learning as much as possible in preparation for a short “exam”.
The exam will comprise a set of multiple-choice questions (measuring recognition) and a question asking them to recall a list of items.
These tasks will comprise two more measures: recognition and recall.
Recognition memory: a percentage score based on the number of correct answers minus the number of incorrect answers to the multiple-choice questions.
Recall memory: a percentage score based on the number of items correctly recalled minus the number incorrectly recalled.
High Cognitive Skill Tasks These differ from the Scavenger Hunt and memory tasks in that they are intended to measure participants’ ability to engage with the selected material in a manner which requires a higher degree of cognitive skill than simple retrieval and memory tasks.
This type of task is suggested by the EBONI Project Team for e-book evaluations that require a more complex measure of the usability of the text to be made, which reflects the requirements of learners and teachers in Higher Education.
Lecturers in the appropriate discipline are asked to read the test material and to assign tasks, the results of which will indicate students’ understanding of the concepts in that material.
These "high cognitive skill” tasks should reflect the more complex uses to which HE material is often put and measure the effectiveness of the electronic textbook in enabling participants successfully to engage in processes involving skills appropriate to their Higher Education course.
A lecturer will also be asked to assess the results of these tasks.
Adoption of the same marking scheme across all evaluations which implement high cognitive skill tasks will enable results from different experiments to be compared easily and effectively.
Phase 4: Selection of evaluation techniques (Procedure) Each e-book study will be different in terms of the procedures it adopts to evaluate the selected material.
The various techniques that can be employed are as follows: Subjective Satisfaction Questionnaire Along with effectiveness and efficiency, satisfaction is one of the key aspects of usability, as defined in the ISO standard, part 12.
This is measured after participants have used the test material and carried out any tasks which form part of the experiment, so that their responses are informed and based on experience.
Questionnaires are one method of determining participants’ satisfaction.
They have the following advantages: All participants are asked identical questions, so that: Responses are easily comparable Interviewer bias is not an issue Questions can be asked which involve a long list of response categories Questionnaires can easily be incorporated into evaluations conducted online Morkes and Nielsen’s subjective satisfaction indices for measuring Web site usability are a useful reference point when creating questionnaires specific to an e-book study.
They used the following four indices to measure satisfaction: Quality of the site, comprising four items: accurate, helpful, useful, and the question "How satisfied are you with the site’s quality of language?"
Ease of use of the site, comprising five items: easy to use, and the questions "How easy is it to work with the text in this website?
", "How easy is it to find specific information in this website?
", "Compared to what you expected, how quickly did the tasks go?
", and "How hard was it to concentrate on searching for information (because of distractions)?"
(this item was reverse-coded).
Likability of the site, comprising six items: entertaining, interesting, likable, engaging, fun to use, and boring (reverse-coded).
User affect, comprising three items (all reverse-coded): "How tired do you feel right now?
", "How confused did you feel while working in this site?
", and "How frustrated did you feel while working in this site?"
However, it is important to remember that Morkes and Nielsen were concerned with evaluating technical white papers and Web sites with tourist information.
Therefore, some of their measures (e.g.
"entertaining", and "how satisfied are you with the site’s quality of language?")
will be irrelevant to measuring users’ satisfaction with academic material and should be omitted.
In addition, studies especially concerned with learning and teaching aspects of the test material (such as those employing high cognitive skill tasks) may find it appropriate to engage the help of a lecturer in the relevant discipline in devising the questionnaire; he or she may be able to advise, for example, on items to include in an index measuring participants’ satisfaction with the educational elements of the test material.
Covert Observation Covert observation involves watching a person, or group of people, without their knowledge and recording their behaviour as faithfully as possible.
It can be used in e-book evaluations to examine closely the interaction between users and the test material.
While interviewing and think-aloud procedures discover information about participants’ thoughts, views and opinions, and heuristic evaluation involves speculation by evaluators as to the cause of confusion or difficulties, covert observation enables participants’ physical behaviour to be studied and draws attention to specific problems.
As Bernard notes, covert observation is increasingly used as part of a mixed-method strategy, as researchers combine qualitative and quantitative data to answer questions of interest [19].
Using video as an observation tool will enable the evaluator to investigate interaction issues that are not easily studied by any other method, and will therefore provide additional data to that derived from other evaluation techniques.
Observation is appropriate to investigations which are particularly concerned with HCI issues.
Think-aloud The "think-aloud" technique involves at least one participant in thinking aloud to explain what he or she is doing at each stage of performing the tasks, and why, to at least one evaluator.
Having participants give a running commentary as they are proceeding through the tasks provides valuable insights into the problems that they may encounter with the material selected for evaluation.
Think-aloud sessions provide qualitative information about participants’ cognitive processes, can reveal their learning strategies, motivations and affective state, and will deconstruct the steps taken to complete tasks.
Because participants are revealing their thoughts as they work on a particular task, it can be assumed that the thought processes directly correspond to that task, thus generating very specific information about the test material.
Of primary interest will be the participant’s explanation of how he or she is navigating the test material, reasons for errors, difficulty or hesitation, and comments on various aspects of the material.
The information uncovered can support or contradict results of other evaluation techniques, or uncover unexpected thought processes.
Evaluators may interact with the participant during the test, asking questions to clarify areas of confusion, or suggesting new avenues of exploration, but this is generally kept to a minimum.
The evaluator can also observe the participant’s behavior at the time of the task, which adds another source of data.
Interviews The subjective satisfaction questionnaire is a form of structured interview, where participants are asked to respond to as nearly identical a set of stimuli as possible.
In this type of research, the input that triggers each person’s responses is controlled so that the output can be reliable compared.
Semistructured interviews, on the other hand, use a "script" or set of clear instructions and cover a list of questions in a predetermined order, but the interviewer and respondent are free to follow leads [20].
Patrick Dilley suggests structuring the flow of questions to lead the conversation pointedly yet comprehensively toward the larger research questions of the study.
Even if the interviewer deviates from the script later, a printed list of questions serves as a guide to return to should he lose his way in the course of listening to answers [21].
They can, therefore, be used to elicit full feedback on selected aspects of the experiment, and to follow leads on additional themes raised by the participant.
As Dwyer notes, interviews can draw out information “not only about what an individual does or thinks about but also about the how and why of behaviour” [22].
Interviews will be conducted on a one-to-one basis after any tasks have been performed and the subjective satisfaction questionnaire has been completed.
Guidelines EBONI’s core study will implement all of the above tasks and techniques, making it a relatively expensive experiment.
Some of the satellite studies, however, will be smaller in scale and only implement certain of the tasks and techniques, depending on the availability of resources.
Thus, the total expense of each experiment will vary across two dimensions: task complexity (ranging from simple retrieval tasks to more complex high cognitive skill tasks); and technique complexity (from inexpensive questionnaires to interviews requiring time and expertise).
EBONI’s hypothesis is that very expensive experiments derived from this e-book evaluation model, with unlimited resources, can be “mapped” to simple, unsophisticated experiments employing only one task or technique.
Following this logic, the results of EBONI’s core study and the various satellite studies will all be comparable at some level.
The results of all user evaluations will feed directly into a set of best practice guidelines for producing educational material on the Web.
Available in January 2002, these will be sent to relevant organisations, targeting publishers of electronic material, similar or related programmes, libraries and museums involved in digitizing collections and interested parties in the HE community in general.
In addition, they will be available from the project Web site, together with an example of a text on which they have been implemented.
EBONi is based at the Centre for Digital Library Research [23], University of Strathclyde.
The project welcomes feedback at all stages, and interested parties are invited to join the project mailing list [24].
References [1] Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Directory of Scholarly Electronic Journals and Academic Discussion Lists http://dsej.arl.org/ [2] Project Gutenberg http://promo.net/pg/ [3] Electronic Text Centre, University of Virginia http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ [4] Taylor and Francis Group http://www.tandf.co.uk/ [5] MetaText http://www.metatext.com/ [6] goReader http://www.goreader.com/ [7] Nielsen, Jakob.
Electronic books – a bad idea.
Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox.
26 July 1998. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980726.html [8] Schuyler, Michael.
Will the paper trail lead to the e-book?
Computers in libraries.
18 (18).
September 1998. p40.
[9] Morkes, J. and Nielsen, J.
(1997).
Concise, SCANNABLE, and objective: how to write for the Web.
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/writing.html [10] Morkes, J. and Nielsen, J.
(1998).
Applying writing guidelines to Web pages.
URL http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/rewriting.html [11] Wilson, R. (1999).
The importance of appearance in the design of WEB books.
Glasgow: Department of Information Science of the University of Strathclyde (MSc Dissertation) [12] EBONI: Electronic Books ON-screen Interface http://eboni.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ [13] DNER: Distributed National Electronic Resource http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ [14] Spool, Scanlon, Schroeder, Snyder and DeAngelo.
(1999).
Web site usability: a designer’s guide.
California: Morgan Kaufmann.
[15] TILT: Teaching with Independent Learning Technologies.
http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/TILT/TILT.html [16] Landoni, M. (1997).
The Visual Book system: A study of the use of visual rhetoric in the design of electronic books.
Glasgow: Department of Information Science, University of Strathclyde (PhD Thesis) [17] Spool et al.
op.
cit., p5 [18] Morkes, J. and Nielsen, J.
(1997).
op.cit.
[19] Bernard, H. Russell (2000).
Social research methods: qualitative and quantitative approaches.
London: Sage Publications.
pp 376-493 [20] ibid., pp 189-225 [21] Dilley, Patrick.
Conducting successful interviews: tips for intrepid research.
Theory into Practice.
39 (3).
Summer 2000. pp 131-7 [22] Dwyer, D.K.
(1996, August).
Questioning between heartbeats: The interviewing techniques of journalists.
Performance Improvement, 35(7), pp 16-19 [23] Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk [24] For details of how to join the EBONI mailing list, see the JISCmail Web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/open-eboni.html Author Details Ruth Wilson EBONI Project, CDLR, University of Glasgow http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk Article Title: "E-books for students: EBONI" Author: Ruth Wilson Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/e-books/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 32: The Grid -The Web Twenty Years On?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 32: The Grid -The Web Twenty Years On?
Buzz software wireless archives metadata url Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter with the editorial for Ariadne issue 32.
Issue 32 features a broad range of articles, including a second implementer perspective on setting up an e-prints server, following on from the one which appeared in the last issue.
This time the experience at the University of Glasgow is featured (William Nixon).
There is a related article by John MacColl on ‘Electronic Theses and Dissertations: a strategy for the UK’, and a brief Ariadne report on the first Open Archives Forum workshop, held in Pisa in May.
The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting continues to gather momentum recently ingenta announced that they wish to become involved in the commercial development of e-prints software.
Historically Netlab is one of the most important organisations in the development of the idea of the digital library (Netlab had a WAIS server in a library before anybody else did).
To mark their tenth anniversary Ariadne commissioned two articles.
The first of these is an overview of the history of Netlab.
This was contributed by Anders Ardö, Sigfrid Lundberg and Ann-Sofie Zettergren.
The second is a report by Jessica Lindholm on the conference held at Lund University Library: ‘Netlab and Friends: Tribute and Outlook after 10 years of digital library development’.
Both of these articles illuminate the continuing importance of the work towards the digital library done in Sweden.
Brian Kelly reports on another successful Institutional International Web Management Workshop held this year at the University of Strathclyde.
This event is now up to number six.
We were also lucky enough to get a report by Libby Miller of ILRT on the WWW2002 meeting, held this year in Waikiki, Hawaii (‘Tourist Hell’, according to Libby).
Interesting to see the way wireless networks are taking off in the conference environment, and underpinning audience feedback to the organisers (the last three events attended by Ariadne were running temporary wireless networks, allowing everyone direct access to the internet from their seats).
Other reports on events include an interesting one from John Paschoud, who attended the Internet 2 Spring Member meeting in Arlington, Virginia.
Plus reports on a Web Archiving event, and a one-day Grid workshop in Edinburgh at the end of April.
The last of these was notable for the fact that the Web Services community and Grid people are visibly coming together as it becomes clear that many of the issues faced are similar.
And most of them revolve around the need for quality metadata.
As Malcolm Atkinson put it on the day, metadata is ‘ridiculously important stuff’.
During the proceedings, one of the speakers articulated the idea (which Ariadne is sure has occurred to many) that when we are talking about the Grid, in many ways we are talking about a successor to the Web.
And when we talk about the Semantic Web, we are really talking about the Grid.
We also have a user review of Oxford Reference Online by Pete Dowdell, of UKOLN.
This follows on from the article in the last issue by the Director of the project, Dave Swarbrick.
There are numerous other interesting contributions to this rather fat edition of Ariadne.
Too numerous to mention in detail.
Those interested in library tools (Nick Lewis) and campus publishing software (Jonathan Maybaum) will not be disappointed.
Those interested in the BBC’s recent entry into the search engine market won’t be disappointed either (Phil Bradley).
No cartoon for this issue I’m afraid.
Ariadne’s excellent and popular cartoonist Malcolm Campbell has a new job as a medical statistician.
Shirley Keane assisted once again with the Newsline section, for which we are grateful.
Finally, Jessica Lindholm, who was seconded to UKOLN for five months, has recently returned to Netlab in Sweden.
While here Jessica was working on the Renardus and ARCO projects, and for the duration of her stay she had on her desk a framed piece of embroidery which said simply (and profoundly): ‘Metadata Rules’.
Jessica will be much missed in UKOLN, and we look forward to her visiting Bath again sometime soon.
Suggestions for articles for issues 33 to 35 are now being considered.
Article proposals and books for review should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Article Title: “The Grid: the Web twenty years on?” Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata: Image Retrieval Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata: Image Retrieval Buzz data software framework html database usability archives metadata video preservation multimedia provenance url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reports on combining content-based and metadata-based approaches.
Introduction Image-based information is a key component of human progress in a number of distinct subject domains and digital image retrieval is a fast-growing research area with regard to both still and moving images.
In order to address some relevant issues the Second UK Conference on Image Retrieval the Challenge of Image Retrieval (CIR 99) was held in Newcastle upon Tyne on the 25 and 26 February 1999 [1].
Participants included both researchers and practitioners in the area of image retrieval.
Content-based Image Retrieval The conference opened with an overview of the state of the art of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems by John Eakins of the Institute for Image Data Research (IIDR) at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle.
This presentation was based on a review of CBIR technologies being prepared by Eakins and Margaret Graham (IIDR) for the JISC Technology Applications Programme (JTAP).
Traditional image retrieval techniques for both digital and non-digital images have used text-based systems.
In these, human cataloguers create metadata about images and text retrieval software can then be used to retrieve them [2].
This process can be highly labour-intensive and inconsistent.
CBIR techniques, by contrast, aim to recognise and retrieve information based on the content of images themselves [3].
Eakins noted that the majority of current CBIR systems have been designed to retrieve by what can be called ‘primitive’ features like colour, texture and shape.
Research has been undertaken into more sophisticated CBIR techniques that might be able to recognise particular types of objects or scenes but the systems developed are currently not mature enough for practical applications.
CBIR techniques based on ‘primitive’ features, however, can be used in particular specialist applications.
For example, CBIR can be used for automatic shot boundary detection in video retrieval systems.
They are also used by a variety of organisations in some very specialised domains, e.g.
crime prevention, the analysis of satellite images or for comparing trademark images [4].
Eakins noted that there had been very little systematic evaluation of CBIR or of traditional retrieval systems from a user perspective and stressed that image retrieval research needed to take serious account of user needs.
He also noted that there was evidence of a growing synergy between traditional text-based and content-based retrieval techniques and noted that the development of systems that combined the two may yield better results.
Image retrieval on the World Wide Web Michael Swain (Audio and Video Search Project Team, Cambridge Research Laboratory, Compaq Computer Corporation) developed similar themes in his keynote presentation on “Image and video searching on the Web”.
Swain has been working in the CBIR area for a number of years and has previously developed techniques for colour-based retrieval [5].
His paper at CIR 99 described work carried out at the University of Chicago and at Compaq’s Cambridge Research Laboratory for developing image search services, stressing the extremely large (and growing) amount of images and multimedia that exist on the Web.
Swain was previously director of the team at the Department of Computer Science at University of Chicago that developed an image search engine for the Web called WebSeer [6].
WebSeer was a system that retrieved images from the Web using information from two sources: the text that relates to the image and the image itself.
Most images on the Web are part of documents structured in HTML.
Search engines, like WebSeer, therefore can base image retrieval on cues taken from text associated with images from things like image file names, captions and HTML ALT= text entries [7].
WebSeer, in addition, analysed the images themselves in an attempt to distinguish between photographs and other computer or human generated images.
The WebSeer research also utilised face-finding and horizon detection techniques and experimented with identifying sectors of images by colour and texture analysis.
Swain is now continuing facets of this work in connection with the AltaVista Photo Finder service [8].
This search service has similar features to WebSeer but includes the option to search for visually similar items and operates a so-called ‘Family Filter’ based on the analysis of surrounding text and reference to external sources that prevents certain inappropriate images from being retrieved [9].
Research at Compaq’s Cambridge Research Laboratory is also proceeding into indexing multimedia (primarily video images) as a means of studying the problems related to delivering video and audio through networks.
CBIR user studies Several other presentations at CIR 99 covered practical CBIR applications and user studies.
Robert van der Zwan (Open University) described an evaluation of the Informedia Digital Video Library system at the Open University [10].
The Informedia video retrieval system was developed at Carnegie Mellon University as part of a NSF/NASA/ARPA Digital Libraries Initiative project and is designed to facilitate multimedia retrieval [11].
The Open University creates and holds large amounts of video based information, primarily in the form of video recordings of television programmes.
A subset of this collection has been digitised, segmented and indexed at Carnegie Mellon using the original tapes and transcripts provided by the Open University.
The paper described a user study carried out at the Open University into the use of the Informedia system that indicated that there was some potential for its use within the university for a variety of applications.
P.M. Hayward (Applied Science & Technology Group, IBM UK Laboratories) described a user study of CBIR carried out as part the European Union funded Electronic Library Image Service for Europe (ELISE) project.
The ELISE project is concerned with the issues that surround building a complete digital image service [12].
The paper described a usability study carried out by the Applied Science & Technology Group at IBM UK Laboratories using IBM’s QBIC (Query By Image Content) technology that used images of cultural artefacts from ELISE [13].
The results of the study were positive but suggest that more work is required into the design and evaluation of image search interfaces.
Content filtering applications Richard Harvey (School of Information Systems, University of East Anglia) delivered an illustrated paper on research work being carried out at the University of East Anglia (UEA) to identify and block images that contain pornography.
Harvey first outlined the legal and commercial issues that relate to the downloading and transfer of pornographic images through the Internet.
Research into using CBIR techniques to identify skin-tones and shapes that could indicate the presence of naked human bodies had already been successfully carried out in the U.S. by David A. Forsyth of the University of California at Berkeley and Margaret M. Fleck of the University of Iowa [14].
Harvey reported on work carried out by an UEA research team that used CBIR techniques for skin-tone recognition which was then combined with text-based analysis to form the basis of a prototype system that could help filter inappropriate material.
Standards The conference ended with three papers that discussed standards with relation to image retrieval.
Alan Lock (Technical Advisory Service for Images, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol) introduced issues relating to standards for image formats and its associated metadata, for the technical quality and provenance of images and for intellectual property rights.
This was followed by a paper that described Dublin Core and other current metadata initiatives and which noted the importance of integrating image retrieval into a distributed and heterogeneous digital landscape.
The paper also introduced work being carried out by cultural heritage organisations, primarily museums, in this area [15, 16].
The paper additionally stressed the importance of creating and maintaining technical and rights metadata for the secure management of digital images and for the long-term preservation of digital information [17, 18].
The final paper, given by Edward Hartley (Distributed Multimedia Research Group, Computing Department, University of Lancaster) was a review of progress with MPEG-7.
The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has been working since 1996 to develop a standard ‘Multimedia Content Description Interface’ that would enable the discovery and retrieval of information from audio-visual content [19].
MPEG-7 provides a framework that allows the creation of standard descriptions (metadata) of audio-visual content.
This might include structured descriptions of the content, information on coding schemes, intellectual property rights information, content ratings and information on the context of a recording.
A working draft of the MPEG-7 standard is due at the end of 1999 and it is planned that it will become an international (ISO) standard before the end of 2001.
Conclusions CIR 99 was an useful means of bringing together researchers and practitioners from a wide range of subject domains to discuss the retrieval of digital images.
Certain common themes emerged.
The importance of developing and adopting appropriate standards for digital images was stressed and much interest was expressed in the ongoing development of the MPEG-7 framework.
Another area that was highlighted by the conference was the comparative lack of relevant user studies.
The real challenge of image retrieval would appear to be to develop implementations that were truly user-led rather than technology-led.
David Harper (School of Computer & Mathematical Sciences, Robert Gordon University) suggested that addressing this issue meant that user evaluation needed to be built into projects and image retrieval implementations and that research was needed into important areas like interface design.
Another common theme was the essential complementarity of image retrieval based on text (or metadata) and CBIR techniques.
Many current image retrieval services, like the AltaVista Picture Finder, depend upon the use of both CBIR techniques and analysis of the accompanying text structure.
It is clear that with current technologies, systems that combine image retrieval based on structured text descriptions (metadata) with CBIR techniques may offer the best way forward.
References CIR 99 The Challenge of Image Retrieval: <URL:http://www.unn.ac.uk/iidr/conference.html> Enser, P.G.B.
‘Progress in documentation: pictorial information retrieval’.
Journal of Documentation, 51, 1995, pp.
126-170.
Eakins J.P. Techniques for image retrieval.
Library & Information Briefings, 85.
London: South Bank University, Library Information Technology Centre, 1998.
Graham, M. and Eakins, J.
‘ARTISAN: a prototype retrieval system for trade mark images’.
VINE, No.
107, 1998, pp.
73-80.
Swain, M.J. and Ballard, D.H. ‘Color indexing’.
International Journal of Computer Vision, 7(1), 1991, pp.
11-32.
WebSeer: <URL:http://infolab.ils.nwu.edu/webseer/> Frankel, C., Swain, M.J. and Athitsos, V. WebSeer: an image search engine for the World Wide Web.
Technical Report 96-14.
Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago, Computer Science Department, 1 August 1996.
<URL:http://infolab.ils.nwu.edu/webseer/> AltaVista Picture Finder: <URL:http://image.altavista.com/cgi-bin/avncgi> AltaVista Family Filter: <URL:http://jump.altavista.com/cgi-bin/FF> Open University, Interactive Open Learning Centre & Media Archive : <URL:http://oulib1.open.ac.uk/lib/iolcma/iolcma.htm> Informedia: <URL:http://informedia.cs.cmu.edu/> Eyre J.
Distributed image services.
VINE, 107, 1998, pp.
65-72.
IBM QBIC: <URL:http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com/stage/index.html> Stix, G. ‘Finding Pictures on the Web’.
Scientific American, 276 (3), March 1997.
<URL:http://www.sciam.com/0397issue/0397lynchbox1.html> Blackaby, J. and Sandore, B.
‘Building integrated museum information retrieval systems: practical approaches to data organisation and access’.
Archives and Museum Informatics, 11, 1997, pp.
117-146.
Bearman, D. and Trant, J.
‘Unifying our cultural memory: could electronic environments bridge the historical accidents that fragment cultural collections?’ In: Dempsey, L., Criddle, S. and Hestletine, R., (eds.).
Information landscapes for a learning society.
London: Library Association, 1999 (forthcoming).
Besser, H. ‘Image databases: the first decade, the present, and the future’.
In: Heidorn, P.B.
and Sandore, B., (eds.).
Digital image access and retrieval.
Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 1997, pp.
11-28.
Besser, H. Image Standards Needed.
Prepared for Napa CIMI Meeting.
<URL:http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Imaging/Databases/Standards/napa.html> MPEG-7 Context and Objectives: <URL:http://drogo.cselt.stet.it/mpeg/standards/mpeg-7/mpeg-7.htm> Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Margaret Graham and John Eakins of the Institute for Image Data Research at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for their kind invitation to speak at CIR 99 and for their kind hospitality in Newcastle upon Tyne.
The Tyne Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne.
UKOLN is funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK higher education councils, as well as by project funding from several sources.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath, where it is based.
Author details Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Cache: Clashing with Caching?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Cache: Clashing with Caching?
Buzz software javascript portfolio browser copyright passwords cache ejournal authentication mailbase cookie url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Jenkins explores some cache related issues for Library and Information Services Why are UK universities using Web caches?
Whenever a student or academic tries to connect to a Web page, there is a significant chance that another person has already viewed the same Web page in the not too distant past.
If a Web page is based on a US machine, it can be slow and expensive to load directly from the US, so it is worth saving a copy of the Web page on a UK-based ‘Web cache’ (which is sometimes called a ‘proxy cache’, to distinguish it from the cache on the user’s hard drive).
Then, the next person wishing to use the same page may access the cached copy more quickly and easily than they could access the original.
George Neisser, of the UK JANET Web Caching Service, estimates that between 25% and 45% of the pages requested via the national cache have previously been requested and are therefore cached.
[1] Web caches are used by UK universities for the following reasons: To reduce unnecessary duplication of network traffic (particularly between JANET and the US) and therefore to save money.
To minimise the time taken to download Web pages from remote sites so that use of the Web is more productive Because many IT support staff both within universities and outside them agree that Web caching is ‘vital to the future scaling of the Web’ (as Jon Knight puts it [2]).
Because universities are following a national strategy, as outlined in JISC Circular 3⁄98 ‘Usage-related Charges for the JANET Network’[3], which encourages use of the National Cache.
Clearly, there are major advantages to using Web caches.
Many organisations now recognise this and Web caching is now widely used by universities and other organisations.
However, many academic librarians are very aware that there can be a clash between Web caching and providing access to the electronic information resources to which their institutions subscribe.
The problems are outlined below and some suggested solutions are given.
It is important that we all get this right, otherwise it reflects badly on caching and on electronic information resources in general.
Users who run into difficulties accessing a particular service or e-journal may avoid trying to access that resource in future or they may try to avoid using the cache in future.
They will not necessarily ask for help.
Caching and IP address authenticated subscription services Most academic librarians in the UK first encountered problems with using Web caches when the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) launched its electronic journal service.
The IOPP e-journal service was originally accessed via user name and password, but IP address based authentication began to be used in 1995, to save users having to remember passwords.
At that time, many Web browsers in UK HE were set up to use the HENSA Web cache in all cases where the hostname of the service did not include ac.uk The hostname of the IOPP e-journal service was www.iop.org, so calls to this service went via the cache.
This meant that the user’s IP address appeared to be the IP address of the HENSA cache and not the IP address of the user’s machine, and therefore the user was not allowed to access the service.
Back then, many librarians simply advised users of the IOPP e-journals service to configure their browser to the ‘no proxies’ setting, so that the national cache would not be used and the IP address based authentication would work.
These users then lost the advantages of Web caching.
It would have been possible for people to configure more advanced browsers so that the cache was not used when the user was trying to connect to IOPP, but was used at other times.
Unfortunately, however, the method of doing this varied from browser to browser and it would have required a higher level of technical knowledge than many users and librarians possessed at that time.
Since then, many other Web-based electronic subscription services have become available and many of them have made use of IP address based authentication so that users could avoid having to remember passwords and/or to establish that users were accessing the services from a campus.
Daniel Feenberg, of the National Bureau of Economic Research, sums up the view of many service providers when he says, ‘The advantage for us – minimal clerical effort – is also an advantage for our customers’.
[4] At the same time, the use of Web caching has also grown.
The old HENSA cache has now been replaced by the national UK JANET Web Caching Service (JWCS), which is based at Manchester Computing Centre, Loughborough, and the University of London Computing Centre.
There has also been an increase in the use of smaller Web caches based at individual HE institutions.
And, as with the IOPP e-journals service, there is an inherent conflict between Web caching and IP address based authentication.
For example, if a user tries to connect to a Web-based service via the national cache, then that Web-based service will ‘see’ the IP address of the cache rather than the IP address of the user’s computer.
The Web-based service may then deny the user access on the grounds that the user does not appear to be based on the campus of a subscribing institution.
Should we abandon IP address based authentication?
Some of the ‘cachemasters’ (staff who manage Web caches) on the wwwcache-users mailing list[5] have suggested that IP address based authentication should be abandoned, and that we should revert to having usernames and passwords for each service.
Apart from the conflict with caching, they say, IP addresses are too easy to forge and it is foolish to restrict services to campus users when more and more staff and students need to connect from home.
However, librarians and service providers would not be keen on having a separate password for each service, because: there is a huge administrative load caused by having multiple passwords to issue; users cannot easily remember or keep track of multiple passwords; and passwords can be circulated between authorised users and unauthorised ones.
It is also worth noting that some institutions subscribe to over 100 electronic journal services and other services which use IP address authentication.
It would be very difficult to re-negotiate acceptable alternative methods of authentication with each of the service providers concerned, especially given that many of those service providers specified that they wanted access to be restricted to users based on campus.
We could, however, work to ensure that future authentication arrangements are made with an awareness of caching.
Is ATHENS the solution?
We could try to encourage more publishers and service providers to use the ATHENS authentication system, which does not rely on IP address based authentication if users have personal usernames and passwords.
This would have the following advantages: The ATHENS system is now established, and is beginning to have ‘brand recognition’ amongst university staff and students.
Users will only have to remember their ATHENS username and password, rather than usernames and passwords for each service.
This will enable those users who have personal ATHENS usernames to access services from home.
However, ATHENS passwords would not be a complete solution for the following reasons: ATHENS is a proprietary standard, which publishers have to pay to use, and this is a deterrent to wider use.
Some publishers and service providers may be uncomfortable about users accessing their services from home.
More users will require personal usernames and passwords and some institutions have so far tried to avoid individual user names and passwords, because of the administration involved.
There is some concern from IT support staff that ‘single sign on systems’, where the same password is used for a large number of different services, pose a big security risk.
Incidentally, self-registration for ATHENS personal usernames and passwords is IP address authenticated, but this should not be a problem if all .ac.uk calls are sent direct by the browser or the site cache stage.
Sending requests direct without going via a Web cache We can no longer encourage users to ‘switch off’ the Web cache every time they wish to access an IP address authenticated service because this would require users to understand their browsers, and to know which services use IP address authentication.
There is also the risk that users will not bother to reconfigure their browsers to switch the use of the Web cache back on – with consequent charging implications for the institution.
Also, some institutions force all calls though the site cache, so users cannot ‘switch off’ use of the cache.
However, we can configure our site caches and our Web browsers to send requests to IP address authenticated services directly to the appropriate Web sites without going via a cache.
The following notes describe what we do at Birmingham.
[6] (This is also illustrated in figure 1.)
Suppose we have a Web browser configured to use the Site Cache, and a Site Cache configured to use the National Cache, whenever the Web browser is asked to retrieve a Web object, the following decisions will be made by the Web browser and the Site Cache: The Web browser decides whether or not to retrieve the Web object directly from source or via a cache.
In particular, the following directives are used; Web objects located at Web sites using Hostname or IP Address authentication schemes are retrieved directly from source.
This is because the required Web object may be restricted to callers using a particular Hostname or IP Address at a subscribing institution.
Web objects at Web sites whose Hostnames end with ac.uk (i.e.
Higher education Web Sites in the UK Domain) are retrieved directly from source.
All other requests are sent to the Site Cache If the Site Cache is down, all Web objects are retrieved via one of the National Cache machines.
If all of the National Cache machines are down, all Web objects are retrieved directly from source.
Figure 1: Summary of the decisions taken to decide whether to use a cache or send the request direct   The above directives can be encoded in two places: a Proxy Auto Configuration File (or PAC file); a JavaScript program which supplies rules to the browser on how to retrieve a Web object.
an Access Control List (ACL) file in the Site Cache itself These PAC and ACL files effectively contain a list of hostnames of services which check IP addresses (such as www.janet.idealibrary.com and abstracts2.rapra.net) for which requests for Web pages should be sent direct.
Using ACL files is the most effective method, because this avoids potential problems with browser incompatibility or port blocking.
This approach works reasonably well most of the time, and many universities have worked out how to do something similar.
However, it is not without its problems.
For one thing, this cannot be done centrally by the UK JANET Web Caching Service.
The request has to be sent direct before it reaches a national (UK JANET Web Caching Service) cache.
This means that universities or departments within universities must use a properly configured site cache rather than going straight to the UK JANET Web Caching Service.
Setting up an ACL file in the site cache and/or a PAC file in the Web browser can be done by the local cachemaster.
In most cases this is a trivial task for the local technical support people – the slow and difficult bit may be ascertaining which sites need to be accessed direct.
Currently, each individual university has to maintain a list of the services to which this applies, and keep up-to-date with the new services and changes.
And each site is coming up against problems with some services whose hostnames ‘jump about’ (see the section on ‘Mirror Sites’, below, for more details) or which have other peculiarities.
To a certain extent, it is reasonable to expect Universities to maintain their own lists of hostnames for which requests should be sent direct, because each Universities subscribes to a slightly different portfolio of services.
However, we ensure that we all share the information and solutions we have found, rather than reinventing wheels, particularly when a major service is launched or changes hostname or develops a quirk.
This exchange of information has begun to happen already.
People have sent e-mails on this topic to the wwwcache-users, lis-link, lis-jibs-users and arl-ejournal electronic mailing lists, for example.
Also, Martin Hamilton has now created a ‘What should I do about IP address based Authentication?’ section in the JWCS Frequently Asked Questions Web pages.
(This includes a useful example ACL list containing many of the hostnames of subscription services used by UK universities, which people are welcome to suggest additions to.)
We should build on this.
Not surprisingly, there can sometimes be a problem communicating about caching across the ‘librarian-techie divide’, but this is not insurmountable.
What is the cost of sending requests direct?
Some Universities may be concerned at the prospect of sending requests direct, especially to US Web sites, because one aim of Web caching is to save money.
However, cachemasters estimate that IP address authenticated services only constitute a small proportion of total Web use.
[5] Incidentally, requests for dynamically generated pages, of which there are an increasing number, are usually sent direct.
By default the ‘Squid’ software, which governs most university caches, fetches pages containing ‘cgi-bin’ or ‘?’ direct (and doesn’t cache them) because such pages are frequently generated ‘on the fly’ or related to forms etc.
This means that most electronic journals and other subscriptions services are not very cacheable anyway.
Mirror sites Another way to avoid conflict between IP address based authentication and caching is to create UK-based mirror sites for subscription services which have their main server outside the UK.
If the mirror site has a hostname ending in ac.uk, most university site caches will send the request direct.
One example of this is the CatchWord mirror.
This is what CatchWord have to say about this (at http://figaro.catchword.com/janft.htm) Web users originating from within the UK academic community (‘JANET’ users) are increasingly employing the JANET web proxy cache in order to reduce their internet traffic costs.
Site-wide subscriptions to CatchWord material are best set up using registrations that employ IP address recognition: this avoids the need for users to memorise and enter username/password combinations.
A web request that reaches CatchWord via the JANET proxy server will have the wrong IP address and will therefore be incorrectly recognised.
CatchWord therefore runs a server within the JANET network, kindly hosted by Birmingham University.
The address of the server is http://pinkerton.bham.ac.uk/.
All UK academic users should use this server, and UK librarians setting up CatchWord links on their OPAC pages should point to this server.
Not only will page access be more rapid (since no intervening cache will be employed) but, being within the JANET network, no international internet traffic charges will be incurred.
If mirror services are successful, they must be complete and up-to-date in every respect.
There have been some problems, for example, with the Highwire and IDEAL mirror sites which are not complete replicas of their partner sites.
When some of the search features on these mirror sites are used, the journal articles retrieved are sometimes delivered from the parent site instead of the mirror site.
The hostname of the parent site is different from the hostname of the mirror site, so both the parent site hostname must be added to the PAC and/or ACL files.
Changes of hostname When JournalsOnline became ingentaJournals the hostname became www.ingenta.com.
This change of hostname was very unpopular.
As well as having to update links on our Web pages, librarians also learned that it was necessary to ask our cachemasters to add this new hostname to our local PAC/ACL files (especially in this case, because the new hostname did not end in ac.uk).
When hostnames change site caches also can be configured to redirect calls from the old address to new one, which could potentially save users a lot of frustration.
Obviously, this works best for those sites which force users to use the site cache.
Again, it is crucial that there is good communication between service providers, librarians and cachemasters.
Meeting the needs of off-campus students Demand from students wishing to access electronic subscription services from home is increasing all the time.
This is partly due to the increase in students who are studying part-time or at a distance but conventional students are also increasingly likely to have home PCs connected to the Internet.
Some services use IP based authentication for on-campus users but will accept usernames & passwords as an alternative method of authentication for off-campus users.
Other services use ATHENS authentication and students with personal ATHENS usernames and passwords can access those services from home.
Warwick and some other institutions are also using the site cache itself to enhance access to services for off-campus users.
These users can access the site cache via any Internet Service Provider they like, by entering a username and password into a pop-up box.
Once they have their browser at home set up to use the site cache, they can then connect to any of the IP address authenticated services that they can access on campus.
The IP address authenticated service ‘sees’ the IP address of the site cache.
At Warwick, there is a special ACL file in the Squid program which makes this work.
This approach requires further negotiation with publishers to check that they are happy to allow this kind of off-campus access to their services, and that the authentication is secure enough to be acceptable.
JANET National Dial-Up Service Some members of the UK HE community are dialup JANET users using the ‘JANET national dialup service’ (JNDS), which was outsourced to an Internet Service Provider called U-Net.
JNDS users get a dynamically allocated IP address which changes with every session.
This causes problems with all the services which use IP address based authentication.
The only way around this is offer users an alternative way to connect to these services, perhaps using a similar approach to that used at Warwick (as described in the previous section).
The ‘Via’ header As an alternative to IP address based authentication, we could encourage publishers to use header information to ascertain the origin of the call.
Calls which go via a site cache will have details about the cache in the ‘Via’ field of the header information.
It looks like this … Via: 1.0 gadget.lut.ac.uk:3128 (Squid/2.2.STABLE3+martin) or this… (when multiple caches are involved) Via: 1.0 gadget.lut.ac.uk:3128 (Squid/2.2.STABLE3+martin), 1.0 panic.wwwcache.ja.net:8080 (Squid/2.1.PATCH2) The publisher can ascertain where the request is coming from by looking at the first cache in the Via: list.
Daniel Feenberg of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Martin Hamilton, of the UK JANET Web Caching Service, have suggested that this could be investigated further.
[7] Pros: Many publishers would find this relatively simple to implement The ‘Via’ header is a standard feature of the HTTP protocol (unlike the X-Forwarded-For: header, which some publishers are using for IP address based authentication) Cons: Header information is not completely reliable, because it can be forged very easily (but this also applies to IP address) Institutions who do not have their own site cache cannot use this approach.
This idea has not been properly tested.
Using a local site cache to IP address authenticate users Michael Sparks, from Manchester Computing Centre, has suggested that IP address authentication could be done by an ACL file in a local site cache rather than by the service provider [8].
This would mean that requests would not have to be sent direct to the service provider.
An ACL file on the site cache could be used to ensure that only users with a certain range of IP addresses could access a particular service, and that all other users would be directed to the service provider’s ‘access denied’ page instead.
This would, of course, have to be done with the agreement of the service provider.
Load balancing and cookies When ProQuest users at the University of Warwick reported that they could no longer use the service, the problem was traced to ‘load balancing’ system used there.
‘Load balancing’ is a way of sharing the load between multiple site cache machines.
Warwick staff and students are forced to use a site cache, but, because the use of local caching is so high at Warwick the site cache consists of several machines, each with a different IP address.
Each time a user tries to retrieve a Web page, the call is sent to whichever site cache machine is the least busy at that moment.
The ProQuest service tracks the behaviour of users by sending cookies back and forth with each transaction, this process was being confused by the fact that several different machines with different IP addresses were involved.
This particular problem was solved by restricting all calls to ProQuest to a designated cache.
Both the use of cache balancing by universities and the use of cookies by service providers are likely to increase, so we will need to watch out for similar problems which may occur elsewhere in future.
Conclusion The implications of Web caching for the users of Web-based subscription services are complex.
But the advantages of caching are such that is worth trying to solve the problems it can cause for access to subscription services.
Librarians need to keep themselves informed of developments with national strategy and local strategies concerning both caching and authentication, and to make sure that these strategies develop in such a way as to reduce the clash rather than increase it.
There is obviously a need to keep service providers informed too.
Finally, strong communication between librarians and cachemasters is vital if we are to ensure that access to subscription services is maintained.
Thanks to Alison McNab, Jon Knight and Martin Hamilton at Loughborough University Roy Pearce and Chris Bayliss at the University of Birmingham Chris Tilbury and Hywel Williams at the University of Warwick Michael Sparks at Manchester Computing Centre This article is based on a paper originally written for the JIBS User Group.
References George Neisser, Caching In: The National JANET Web Caching Service (JWCS).
Ariadne, No.
19, March 1999. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/cache/ Jon Knight and Martin Hamilton, Wire: Interview via email, Jon Knight and Martin Hamilton in session.
Ariadne, No.
9, May 1997. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/wire/intro.html JISC Advisory Committee on Networking, JISC Circular 3⁄98 Usage-related Charges for the JANET Network London: Joint Information Systems Committee, March 1998. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub98/c3_98.html Daniel Feenberg, Transparent Caching and IP Address Access Lists http://papers.nber.org/cache.html The wwwcache-users mailbase list, archived at http://www.mailbase.ac.uklists/wwwcache-users/archive.html (the February 1999 thread about ‘ACLs for routing direct to problem sites’ is of particular interest) Roy Pearce, University of Birmingham Site Web Cache Project Web pages http://www.cache.bham.ac.uk/ Daniel Feenberg (26 Feb 1999), Re: Authentication and Site Licenses and the Janet Cache arl-ejournal mailing list, message archived at http://www.cni.org/Hforums/arl-ejournal/1999/0055.html Michael Sparks (michael.sparks@mcc.ac.uk) (25 June 1999) Re: Caching Paper.
E-mail to Martin Hamilton (martin@net.lut.ac.uk).
Author Details Ruth Jenkins Engineering Liaison Librarian / BUILDER Project Co-ordinator Information Services University of Birmingham Edgbaston Birmingham, B15 2TT Email: r.jenkins@bham.ac.uk Article Title: “Clashing with Caching?” Author: Ruth Jenkins Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/subject-gateways/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Hacking the Net Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hacking the Net Buzz data database xml accessibility browser cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS David Nicholas looks at the Internet phenomenon from the point of view of the Media.
The Internet comes wrapped up with so much hype and vested interest that it is difficult to gauge whether it is changing much in the libraries, workplaces, and industries around the country.
This makes it fertile ground for researchers.
The Media was chosen as the area to study the phenomenon because it seemed likely that it would be hit very hard, one way or another.
Furthermore, it seemed from the statements pouring out of the industry that nobody really had a clue about the outcome.
On the one hand Simon Jenkins of The Times claimed that The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of the lesser media (Prestel, CD-ROM).
On the other Victor Keegan of The Guardian said that the Internet will almost certainly be the twentieth century’s greatest technological legacy.
Now, both are eminent and well respected journalists, but which one should we believe and how could they be such poles apart?
It was such violent disagreements and extreme positions amongst journalists and media watchers that fuelled the search for the academic truth about the Internet and its impact upon the media .
And from this, maybe, there was the possibility of gleaning what would happen in other industries not so close to the information front-line.
Research in this area is difficult: the waters are muddied by huge vested interests, wishful thinking, lack of data and poor methods.
There is also an undue reliance on what is happening in the States, where it is said, for instance, that newsrooms are "flocking" to the net and that The WWW has become the online resource of choice at US daily newspapers.
A lot of the so-called research in the field is of very dubious quality.
Typically much research has been done on the back of questionnaires usually online ones, which are characterised by leading, ambiguous and shoehorning questions that reflect little more than the researcher’s own preoccupations and biases.
Instead, for this project around 250 interviews were conducted with journalists, editors, systems people, freelancers, student journalists, media librarians from newspapers national and regional, magazines, new media companies and broadcasting organisations.
The situation at The Guardian was investigated in some depth.
The vast majority of interviews were of the open ended, unstructured sort in which the interviewee could determine the nature and direction of the discussion.
The research found out what they thought, rather than encouraged them to echo the researchers’ thoughts.
This produced very different, and arguably more accurate, results.
The levels of Internet use were not quite as suggested by the industry commentators.
Plainly use has been talked-up because it was found to be low and patchy, varying from one in ten journalists in the regional press, through one in three journalists in the national press to ten out of ten journalists in the new media companies companies who were responsible for Web based news products.
It tended to be the old hacks, editors, subject specialists, new media journalists and it is nice to report media librarians who were the heaviest users.
There were good reasons for the poor and variable take-up.
Limited access to Internet terminals was the biggest.
By and large the editorial systems from which the journalists worked were not capable of accessing the Internet.
Shared, stand-alone PCs often without printers were not an acceptable substitute for most journalists.
The other reasons were: a shortage of time; the richness of existing sources of information; the fact that journalists were catching up on the previous rounds of IT (FT Profile, internal databases etc.
); and some suspicion as to the worth of the Internet and that it was not all what it was cracked up to be.
It was possible to divide journalists in to seven categories on the basis of their use and attitude towards the Internet: Net worshippers.
These are the young, computer generation IT whizz kids who have embraced every aspect of the Internet, and are culturally committed to it.
They often work in new media, at places like VirginNet, or earn their money as freelancers.
The economically-driven.
These people work in small newspapers with no library (e.g.
Sunday Business), and are attracted to the Internet for the wealth of free information it provides for what they regard as little time expenditure.
The pragmatists.
This group have readily incorporated the Internet into their array of general information sources.
They do not regard it as having heralded a fundamental shift in society, or, less spectacularly, see it as an excellent way to reduce company bills, but they do appreciate the convenience, power and above all else its accessibility.
They are not behind in calling it into action.
The great majority of information professionals and librarians fall into this category, as do most of the senior journalists.
Another characteristic of this group is that they are heavy information users per se.
The occasional dippers.
This group includes a large number of journalists who use the Internet only when other sources do not solve their information problems.
The majority of Internet end-users in the national and local press fall into this category, but only a small minority of librarians (largely those working for the tabloids).
Generally their low use is not down to any dislike of the Internet for in many cases they would use it more if they had either better access or training (or, more generally, both).
Enthusiastic novices.
These are journalists who do not know exactly what the Internet offers, but are intrigued by what they have heard, and express interest in using the system themselves once given a demonstration.
The bulk of this group is formed, interestingly, by both older (50+) and younger journalists.
They generally blame time constraints for not mastering the system.
None of them claimed that their age was a barrier or that, nearing retirement (some interviewees were in their late fifties) it wasn’t worth the effort of learning.
The non-believers.
The group is made up of journalists who are basically not interested in the Internet.
They have a variety of practical reasons for their abstinence, and would be unlikely to adopt the system even if they had desktop access.
Apart from problems of time constraints and job status, the biggest problem for this group is that of authenticating Internet data.
The resentful dinosaurs.
This group exclusively journalists and lead by the iconoclastic Simon Jenkins represent the polar opposite of the Net Worshippers.
They see the Internet as a threat to their privileged access to information, and are not in the least interested in empowerment or democratising the news.
The whole ethos of the Internet as a conduit for the free exchange and sharing of information is anathema to them.
On the whole the use of the Internet was mundane and simple; very similar in fact to the use of commercial online services.
It was mainly the Web that was being searched there was very little use of newsgroups or e-mail for instance.
Bookmarking was all the rage, search engines were little understood.
The main types of activity were: searching Web newspapers.
The Washington Post was a very favoured site, and, interestingly few journalists searched their own web sites.
searching official/government sites, especially by medical and scientific journalists.
searching for the obscure or offbeat.
Contrary to expectation it was mainly librarians who did this, probably because these searches were more difficult to conduct.
searching entertainment sites, favoured by features journalists.
using the Web as a giant contact directory.
The Internet issues and concerns Overload Scare stories about the dangers of information overload abound.
For media librarians this was seen to be beneficial as they saw possible job opportunities arising as a result of overload, in that there would be an enhanced filtering role for them.
However, many journalists were not really worried about overload and its attendant problems.
It was largely a case that only those who did not use the Internet were worried about this, overload being one reason why they did not use it.
For the rest, having more information was a cause for celebration.
There were specific reasons why the Internet and its infinite information and communications capabilities held no fears for journalists.
First, wallowing in information was nothing new and it was something journalists were quite prepared for; the extra material yielded from the Internet was relatively small compared to what was already available; it was worth hunting through trivia to find valuable information; unlike the phone the Internet is unobtrusive; the ease of access to documents on the Internet more than compensated for any problems associated with finding too many.
Journalists were, however, as one when it came to where they saw the real overload threat coming from, and that was e-mail.
In consequence few provided their e-mail addresses to readers or became members of discussion groups or lists.
Quality issues The quality of much of the data on the Internet is held to be suspect and a potential barrier to its use.
Some non-using journalist saw it this way but for the majority this was of little concern.
Indeed, some journalists were happy to have increased their supply of suspect material: journalists, unlike academics, are not always seeking the truth and there is plainly a demand for the controversial, gossip and dirt.
Of course journalists spend much of their time authenticating data anyway so there was nothing new here.
However, attitudes did vary according to role and position.
Those in authority, subject specialists and librarians were most concerned.
Experience was also a factor, in that those with most of it were least concerned.
Quality problems were usually, and easily, circumvented by choosing trustworthy sites (there was a very good trade in these) and by double checking.
Interestingly, journalists actually had serious quality concerns but these were not directly related to Web obtained data.
It was felt by many that the large amount of information that journalists had to deal with, combined with the speed with which they were expected to process this data and submit it, was leading to a weakening of the journalistic process.
Displacement With such a powerful and pervasive information or communication system as the Internet will not other communication forms and information sources suffer and get elbowed aside?
Well, the answer appears to be no.
This is because: the Internet fills gaps in the coverage of others sources; the data obtained still needs checking with other sources, leading to an increase in their use; and there is still a doubt over the permanence of some Web-held data.
In the case of the library there appeared no threat whatsoever.
Indeed, the Internet, that so-called end-user tool, was creating all kinds of new opportunities for information professionals, and increasing their status as a result.
By contrast, the position of the commercial online host seems far less secure.
Existing online users, both librarians and end-users, are increasingly playing the information field.
They are becoming increasingly canny when it comes to online choices and are taking some quite sophisticated value for money decisions like using the Net for free access to foreign newspapers.
Significantly, too, the hosts’ biggest customers are also becoming the biggest users of the Web.
As if that was not bad enough information providers who were once happy to supply their information exclusively to the hosts (and accept the royalties), have declared a form of independence hitherto unknown and are now putting some of their data up on their web sites and freely swapping data amongst themselves.
Conclusions It would seem that as always technological hype and anecdote precede reality by some margin.
Most models of technological change indicate that it’s never that quick, never that straightforward and never that revolutionary.
And that is very much the case with the Internet.
It is best to look to the past, rather than the future as a guide to technological take-up.
Few journalists use the Internet but even fewer have made their mind up about it.
Things are changing all the time and there is still a lot of technology in the pipeline so this subject will be returned to next year.
The really big concerns to emerge from the project were the future of the hard-copy newspaper if and when news reporting migrates to the Web, and the technological dilution of the journalistic process.
So it would seem that, so far, Simon Jenkins has been right about the Internet in that it is a niche information player.
But the really interesting question is for how long will he be right?
Reader Response: by sterling stoudenmire: sstouden@thelinks.com "seems to me the article ignores the unprecedented growth in net related delivery technologies.. from xml to broadcast over the net just five minutes ago the national hurricane center in Miami intercepted (broadcast) a tropical depression message to my netscape browser.. the message replaced the netscape page i was viewing in my browser… that is the beginning of a ubiquitious media."
References [1] Jenkins, S. No plugs, no wires, no rivals.
The Times 4th January 1997, p16.
[2] Nicholas, D. and Fenton, D. The Internet and the changing information environment.
Managing Information, vol.
4, no.
1⁄2, Jan/Feb 1997, pp.
30-33.
[3] Nicholas, D. and Frossling, I.
The information handler in the digital age.
Managing Information, vol.
3, no.
7⁄8, July/August 1996, pp.
31-34.
[4] Nicholas, D. , Williams, P., Martin, H. and Cole, P. The changing information environment: the impact of the Internet on information seeking in the media.
Online Information 97: proceedings.
Learned Information, 1997.
[5] Nicholas, D., Williams, P., Martin, H. and Cole, P. The Internet: the users’ story.
Managing Information, vol.
4, November 1997, pp28-31.
[6] Project Web site: Journalists and the Internet research project.
City University, 1998.
<http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~pw/ji_lit.html> Author Details Dr. David Nicholas, Email: Nicky@newbury.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): Vector Graphics for the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): Vector Graphics for the Web Buzz data html xml xslt metadata css standardisation browser namespace schema video graphics jpeg png marc gif adobe xlink svg vml url standards Citation BibTex RIS David Duce discusses the World Wide Web Consortium's Scalable Vector Graphics markup language for 2 dimensional graphics.
To view the Scalable Vector Graphics in this article you will need a viewer.
The Adobe® SVG Viewer is a plug-in that will allow your Web browser to render SVG and is available free from the Adobe Web site.
Introducton The early browsers for the Web were predominantly aimed at retrieval of textual information.
Whilst Tim Berners-Lee's original browser for the NeXT computer allowed images to be viewed, they appeared in a separate window and were not an integral part of the Web page.
The <img> tag was introduced by Marc Andreessen in the Mosaic browser in 1993 and this provided a way of adding raster images to Web pages.
In 1994 Dave Raggett developed an X-browser that allowed text to flow around images and tables.
Images then became a firmly established component of Web pages [1] , [2].
The only image format supported by all the early browsers was the GIF format developed by CompuServe.
Later support for the JPEG format (an ISO/IEC standard) was added and in order to overcome some patent issues with the compression technique used in GIF, a new image format, PNG (Portable Network Graphics), was developed [3].
However, there are some major drawbacks to the use of images for representing 2D graphics in Web pages: Image size: The size of an image is defined by its width, height and the number of bits allocated to each pixel in the image.
The effectiveness of compression depends on the particular compression technique used and the type of image, but for line drawings there is usually a large amount of information to transfer across the Internet.
The transfer of images is a major bottleneck when accessing Web sites.
It is also not possible to interact with the image without sending a new image.
Fixed resolution: Once the image has been defined at a specific resolution, that is the only resolution available.
Zooming into the image will not reveal more detail.
In order to obtain more detail, the image has to be regenerated at a higher resolution.
Binary format: Image formats are typically binary formats, which can make it difficult to embed metadata in the image format and for other components of Web technology to access metadata about the image.
Minimal animation: The GIF format allows several images to be defined in one image file (so-called "animated GIFs"), but each image is a static image.
To do better than this requires the use of a video format.
Hyperlinking: Web pages depend on hyperlinking.
To introduce hyperlinking into images requires the use of image maps defined as part of the enclosing HTML page.
An image map essentially associates hyperlinks with particular geometrical (polygonal) regions of the image.
Image maps only allow links from regions of the image, not from particular components of the structure of the objects from which the image is derived.
Transformation: there is increasing interest in the use of transformation techniques (based on XSLT, for example) to generate presentations of information from descriptions in higher level XML languages, for example a graphical presentation of stock market data or a tabular presentation of the same data.
Since image formats are not XML-based, it is not possible to use technology such as XSLT for this purpose.
Scalable Vector Graphics results from the requirement to address these limitations of images.
Instead of describing an image as an array of pixel values, vector graphics instead describes a picture as a structured assembly of drawing primitives such as lines, polygons and text.
Such descriptions are frequently more compact than images (though this is not necessarily always the case) and admit to manipulation, especially if described using an XML markup language.
Standardization of vector graphics formats is not a new activity.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) first published the Computer Graphics Metafile for the storage and transfer of picture description information (CGM) standard in 1987.
CGM [4, 5] enabled pictures to be described as a collection of elements of different kinds, representing, for example, primitives, attributes (controlling the appearance of primitives) and control information.
CGM was enhanced through a number of revision cycles, acquiring more and more functionality in the process.
As the richness increased, it was decided to introduce profiles (restrictions on the set of elements that could be used to describe a picture) for specific application sectors.
The Air Transport Association defined a particularly useful profile for the aerospace industry and this formed the basis for a profile for web graphics, WebCGM, which was issued as a W3C Recommendation (standard) in 1999 [6].
The WebCGM profile meets many of the requirements for 2D vector graphics on the Web and it is widely used in the CAD (Computer Aided Design) community for representing engineering drawings.
The profile provided facilities to enable pictures to be divided into a set of graphical layers, to group text elements together (which might be scattered across the drawing) for searching purposes, and for linking between parts of pictures.
However, CGM is not expressed as an XML markup language and it is not possible to interact with a piece of CGM text displayed in a browser through a Web scripting interface.
The Scalable Vector Graphics activity in W3C was triggered in March 1998 by the submission of a proposal for using XML to represent 2D schematic diagrams, called Web Schematics, submitted by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) and INRIA (France).
This was quickly followed by two submissions from industry consortia, Precision Graphics Markup Language (PGML) from a consortium led by Adobe Systems and Vector Graphics Markup Language (VML) from a consortium led by Microsoft.
A fourth proposal, DrawML, a constraint-based higher level langauge appeared later that year.
W3C quickly set up a Working Group to develop SVG and after an initial requirements gathering phase, SVG began to take shape.
At this point in time (May 2001), SVG [7] has reached the stage of Candidate Recommendation in W3C.
It is expected to be published as a full Recommendation later this year; the differences between the Candidate Recommendation and Recommendation are expected to be slight.
The work to develop SVG has taken some time, not least because dependencies on other W3C work have emerged, and it was realized that rather than develop specific functionality for SVG, it would be more worthwhile in the longer term to generalize some of the functionality in other Recommendations.
The next part of this article looks briefly at the major functionality in SVG.
An Overview of the Functionality of SVG A simple SVG document and the corresponding picture generated are shown below.
<svg viewBox="0 0 320 220"> <rect width="320" height="220" fill="white" stroke="black" /> <g transform="translate(10 10)"> <g stroke="red" stroke-width="3" fill="lime"> <path d="M 0 112 L 20 124 L 40 129 L 60 126 L 80 120 L 100 111 L 120 104 L 140 101 L 164 106 L 170 103 L 173 80 L 178 60 L 185 39 L 200 30 L 220 30 L 240 40 L 260 61 L 280 69 L 290 68 L 288 77 L 272 85 L 250 85 L 230 85 L 215 88 L 211 95 L 215 110 L 228 120 L 241 130 L 251 149 L 252 164 L 242 181 L 221 189 L 200 191 L 180 193 L 160 192 L 140 190 L 120 190 L 100 188 L 80 182 L 61 179 L 42 171 L 30 159 L 13 140Z"/> </g> </g> </svg> Above: Test picture 1 requiring a plug in.
Available free from the Adobe Web site.
The picture could be incorporated into a HTML page using the object element, for example: <object width="320" height="220" data="myfirstsvg.svg" alt="A simple SVG drawing" type="image/svg+xml">Please download Adobe Plug-in to see SVG diagram</object> Above: Test picture 1 not requiring a plug in This illustrates some key features of SVG.
The width and height attributes on the object tag establish a viewport (320 pixels wide by 220 pixels high) on the display into which the picture will be drawn.
The viewBox attribute of the <svg> element establishes a coordinate system for the picture which is mapped onto the viewport.
The origin of the coordinate system is the top left-hand corner, rather than the bottom left-hand corner favoured by mathematicians and computer graphics programmers alike!
The coordinate system goes from 0 to 320 in x across the page and 0 to 220 in y down the page.
SVG does allow coordinate systems to be defined in more complex ways using units other than pixels and gives control over how the region defined by the viewBox should be mapped into the screen viewport when the two do not have the same aspect ratio, but that goes beyond the scope of this simple introduction.
SVG has two basic drawing primitives, path and text.
The outline of the duck is drawn using the path primitive.
To represent simple shapes such as lines, polylines, polygons, rectangles, circles and ellipses using the path element is tedious and hence shorthand elements are introduced for these shapes.
The use of the <rect> element is illustrated above, to draw the background to the picture.
The path element has an attribute, d, that defines the geometry of the path.
It would have been possible to define geometry as the content of the element using XML markup, but this would have resulted in verbose descriptions and hence the decisions were made to define geometry as an attribute and to introduce another little language to describe shapes.
That language uses single letter drawing commands, for example M, meaning moveto, L meaning lineto and Z meaning close the path (ie join the last point to the first).
The language also contains commands to describe cubic and quadratic Bezier splines, horizontal and vertical line segments, and elliptic arcs.
There are some syntactic simplifications that can be applied to path descriptions that help to reduce the number of characters necessary to define a path.
Thus a rich range of shapes can be defined in an economical way.
The example illustrates one way of controlling the appearance of shapes, using attributes on the drawing elements.
The aspects of appearance that can be controlled in this way include: colour of the interior and the border of shapes (either as RGB values or as one of 149 different colour names); opacity: of the border and interior of shapes, from opaque to transparent; clipping: any path or closed drawing element can serve as a clip path, only the portion of the primitive inside the region defined by the clip path is displayed; line width, style, join and end characteristics: the attributes that control these characteristics are reminiscent of the attributes defined in the PostScript language; fill rules (even-odd and non-zero): there are different ways in mathematics to define the inside and outside of a shape, and for some kinds of shapes they give different results; painting borders and areas using gradients or patterns.
The example above illustrates the use of some of these features.
Gradients and patterns provide rich ways in which to paint shapes.
Both linear and radial gradients can be defined, and images can be used as patterns with which to fill the interior of a shape.
This functionality can be used to good effect to achieve compact representations of pictures.
Visual appearance can also be controlled by styling.
The example above could be rewritten: ... <rect width="320" height="220" style="fill:white; stroke:black"/> <g transform="translate(10 10)"> <g style="stroke:red; stroke-width:3; fill:lime"> ...
The style attribute is now used to define appearance.
The syntax is that of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) [8].
The <g> element is used to group drawing elements.
Two uses of this element are seen in the example.
It is easier to explain the second use first!
The element <g style="stroke:red; stroke-width:3; fill:lime"> is used to control the appearance of a group of drawing elements.
In this instance there is only one drawing element within the group, but were there to be more, they would each have the visual appearance specified by the attributes of the <g> element, unless overridden locally.
There is an inheritance mechanism at work here, though the full details are too complex to go into in this short overview.
The first <g> element defines a transformation, in this case a translation by 10 units in x and 10 in y, which is applied to all elements in the group.
The full range of 2D transformations can be specified, and there is a syntax that allows compound transformations to be specified, for example: <g transform="translate(10 10) scale(0.2) skewX(0.2)">-</g> The text element, <text>, enables text to be included in a picture.
A simple example is shown below.
<g style="stroke:none; stroke-width:1; fill:red; font-family:Verdana; font-size:20"> <text x="20" y="30">A simple text string</text> <text x="20" y="60">Illustrating <tspan style="font-size:24; fill:green">tspan</tspan> in action</text> </g> <g style="stroke:red; fill:none"> <path id="mypath" d="M 25 200 C 115 50 205 50 295 200 Z"/> </g> <g style="stroke:none; fill:green; font-family:Verdana; font-size:20"> <text> <textPath xlink:href="#mypath"> Illustration of text on a path </textPath> </text> </g> Above: Test picture 2 requiring a plug in.
Available free from the Adobe Web site.
The text element alone does not allow the attributes of the text to be changed within a string.
The tspan element provides independent control of both the rendering and geometric positioning of a part of a text string.
The textPath element enables a text string to be displayed along an arbitrary path.
(The "C" component of the path in the example specifies a cubic Bezier spline, the three points following being two control points and the end point.)
Having rendered a part of a picture, it is then possible to pass an image processing filter over it.
This is advanced functionality, but it does enable complex visual effects to be described with fairly minimal markup, and is likely to be useful for pictures of the kind found in graphics art.
SVG also has facilities for describing animation of graphical objects.
A simple example is given below.
<svg viewBox="0 0 320 220"> <rect width="320" height="220" style="fill:white; stroke:black; "/> <circle cx="160" cy="110" r="50" style="fill:red; opacity:1"> <animate attributeType="CSS" attributeName="opacity" from="1" to="0" dur="5s" /> </circle> </svg> The visual effect of this is to change the opacity of the red circle from 1 (fully opaque) to 0 (fully transparent) over a period of 5 seconds, starting from when the page completes loading.
Metadata can be included within SVG content, a metadata element is provided for this purpose.
The content of the metadata element is provided by elements from other XML namespaces, for example the Dublin Core schema might be used.
Metadata may be provided both at the outermost <svg> element and in association with many of the other SVG elements.
In this short space it has only been possible to give a flavour of the functionality of SVG.
The major areas of the functionality have been introduced, though much detail has been omitted.
It is hoped that the reader has gained an impression of the power and versatility of the language.
Implementations and Tools Adobe have implemented an SVG plug-in, which is freely available from their web site [9].
At the present time, this is the only browser plug-in for SVG.
In addition to the Adobe plug-in, there are a number of stand-alone SVG viewers available, for example from IBM Alphaworks, CSIRO and Batik.
Plug-ins are also available for a number of illustration packages to generate SVG.
Rather than give details here, the reader is referred to the W3C SVG web site, where an up-to-date list of SVG products can be found [10].
References J. Gillies and R. Cailliau, How the Web was Born, Oxford University Press, 2000 T. Berners-Lee and M. Fischetti, Weaving the Web, HarperCollins, 1999 G. Roelofs, PNG, The Definitive Guide, O'Reilly, 1999 L. Henderson, A. Mumford, The CGM Handbook, Academic Press, 1992 ISO/IEC 8632:1999, Information technology Computer graphics Metafile for the storage and transfer of picture description information WebCGM Profile, World Wide Web Consortium, 1999.
Available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-WebCGM/ Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification, World Wide Web Consortium, 2000.
Available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/ Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (CSS2) Specification, World Wide Web Consortium, 1998.
Available at: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ The Adobe SVG plug-in is available from: http://www.adobe.com/svg/ The W3C SVG Web page can be found at: http://www.w3.org/ Author Details David Duce Professor in Computing Institution Oxford Brookes University Email: daduce@brookes.ac.uk Web site: http://wwwcms.brookes.ac.uk/~p0072753/daduce.htm Article Title: "Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): Vector Graphics for the Web" Author: David Duce Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/graphics/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JSTOR Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JSTOR Buzz data software database archives digitisation preservation ocr adobe licence url research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Daniel Holden reports on his trip to the United States to visit colleagues at JSTOR, a not-for-profit organisation creating a digital archive collection of scholarly journals In August I was fortunate enough to spend a week visiting the JSTOR offices in the United States.
This invaluable experience provided me with the opportunity to discuss the progress being made since the launch of the UK JSTOR Mirror Service [1] at Manchester Information Datasets and Associated Services (MIDAS) [2] and to plan future developments.
History and Background If you have not heard of JSTOR before: it is an electronic journal collection of core research titles.
JSTOR is an acronym for Journal STORage and the focus is on older volumes rather than current issues.
The coverage starts from first issues and runs up to between 1 and 7 years before current publication.
In the case of some titles users can browse and search over 100 years worth of material (see Figure 1).
JSTOR was developed from a Mellon Foundation [3] funded project which had been designed to test whether it was possible for libraries to save space by digitising back-runs of journals.
The libraries that tested the prototype database were so enthusiastic about the project that a full service [4] was launched in January 1997 in the US.
JSTOR is now an independent, charitable organisation dedicated to helping the academic community and publishers make the most of new information technologies.
JSTOR aim to: * Build a reliable and comprehensive archive of important research journals * Improve access to these journals * Help fill gaps in existing back-runs * Address preservation issues such as mutilated pages and long-term deterioration of paper copy * Reduce long-term capital and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage and care of journal collections * Assist scholarly associations and publishers in making the transition to electronic modes of publication * Study the impact of providing electronic access on the use of these scholarly materials Staff and students from over 300 North American institutions use the database regularly and in the US, JSTOR logged approximately 20 million hits in the first half of this year.
Figure 1 Volumes of The Philosophical Review Available for Browsing UK Mirror Service Universities and colleges in the United Kingdom have been able to access JSTOR, on a site licence basis, since March 1998 when the UK Mirror Service was launched as a result of negotiations between JSTOR and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [5].
Based at MIDAS, it is JSTOR’s first overseas mirror and is their first step towards becoming a global resource.
It also marks the start of a long-term relationship with the JSIC.
MIDAS are responsible for providing user support, documentation and training for the UK audience.
I learnt during my visit that JSTOR’s second overseas mirror will be located at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.
It is being established with support from the Soros Foundation [6] and the Open Society Institute and will service institutions in Central and Eastern Europe.
I also learnt that universities and colleges in South America are testing the two servers in the US (located at the University of Michigan and the University of Princeton) to determine whether the level of performance is sufficient to facilitate their inclusion in JSTOR.
JSTOR Production Process During my visit I spent time at the JSTOR offices in New York and the University of Michigan.
The business administration is based in New York and includes the Publisher Relations and Library Relations teams.
User Services, Production Services and Technology Support and Development are based in Michigan.
There is also a JSTOR office at the University of Princeton where other Production Services and Technology Development staff are based.
The workforce totals 35, the largest department being Production Services with a staff of 18.
Visiting both New York and Michigan allowed me to follow the production process from initial journal selection through to the addition of new titles to the JSTOR collection.
JSTOR select journals on the basis of 4 criteria: * Citation impact factor data * Ranking by experts in the field * Number of institutional subscriptions * Length of run Once titles have been chosen, publishers have generally been keen to collaborate with JSTOR because of the new interest it generates in their older materials.
In addition, it will soon be possible for publishers to link their current electronic issues with the digitised back-runs so users can search seamlessly through entire journals.
At the moment 54 publishers are participating in JSTOR.
After an agreement has been reached, JSTOR acquire the back-run and each page is scanned at 600 dots per inch (dpi) resolution.
The resulting images are then processed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to create text files.
The text files (which are reviewed with spell-checking software) and table of contents files (which are double keyed) enable browsing and full-text, author, title and abstract searching.
When an article is retrieved by a user it is delivered as page images (GIFs), which are stored as TIFFs.
In order to reduce the size of the TIFFs the Cartesian Perceptual Compression (CPC) format, developed by Cartesian Products [7], has been adopted.
An overview of the technical aspects of JSTOR will be available on their Web site in the near future.
Articles may be printed using Adobe Acrobat, JPrint (which is a helper application developed by JSTOR) or as a PostScript file.
The new data is added to the servers on a monthly basis.
JSTOR have this taken this unique approach to the storage and delivery of journals to ensure that the appearance of the electronic copy exactly matches that of the printed equivalent (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 Sample Page from Political Science Quarterly Phase I JSTOR is currently in Phase I of development.
The aim is to include 100 titles by the end of 1999, in 15 subject clusters: African-American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, History, Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Sociology and Statistics.
The database is weighted towards the arts, humanities and social sciences because JSTOR recognised that these areas were not as well served by electronic journals as other disciplines.
Ninety-seven journals in all subject clusters have been signed so far and 61 are available in the database.
As progress is ahead of schedule, JSTOR are already planning Phase II and I was able to witness some of these preparations.
Phase II Phase II will involve the addition of extra subject clusters.
Users from participating sites in the US were recently surveyed to determine which new clusters they would like and which existing clusters they want strengthening.
The results of the survey make interesting reading.
In the arts and humanities the fields that received the greatest number of ‘Essential’ and ‘Important’ responses were: * Literary Criticism * Literature, Literary Journal * Latin American Studies In the social sciences: * History * Economics * Psychology * Political Science In the sciences: * Ecology * Biology * Chemistry * General Sciences JSTOR plan to open out this survey in the US to include non-participants but I discovered that the first two new subject clusters in Phase II will be General Science and Botany/Ecology.
The criteria by which the new journals will be chosen will be based on the scheme used for Phase I.
One of the first titles that will be available to American users is Science published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
During Phase II institutions in the US will also be able to select and licence the clusters that are most appropriate to their needs.
Feedback from Librarians has indicated that this would be more popular than the blanket licensing arrangement devised for Phase I.
In order to be ready for Phase II and to keep ahead of schedule for Phase I, JSTOR is expanding its production capacity.
Extra office space has been acquired in Michigan, a new Production Services department has been opened at Princeton and a second scanning vendor is being sought.
Although over 2 million pages have been processed so far and 14 new journals have been released online since the UK Mirror was launched, JSTOR are aiming to increase their digitisation rate from 100,000 to 300,000 pages per month by Christmas 1998.
Conclusion The launch of JSTOR’s first overseas mirror has been quite an experience.
It was extremely useful to finally meet my colleagues face-to-face and discuss all that has happened and plan for the future.
They were particularly keen to hear how the mirror had been received and what extra support they could provide for MIDAS.
Much of what JSTOR have learnt in the UK will be applied to the development in Budapest.
I will be following this very closely and look forward to working with my colleagues at the Central European University.
It will be interesting to see how their experiences compare with mine and also which countries participate in JSTOR next.
It will also be interesting to see how Phase II is received in the US and which subject clusters are added after General Science and Ecology/Biology.
The many developments taking place at JSTOR meant that I had a hectic visit.
However this fact, together with the warm welcome I received, made the trip thoroughly enjoyable.
Sources of Further Information The primary source of information regarding JSTOR are the JSTOR About Pages on the JSTOR Web site.
JSTOR documentation and details about training and user support are available on the MIDAS Web site.
References [1] UK JSTOR Mirror Service http://www.jstor.ac.uk/ [2] MIDAS http://www.midas.ac.uk/ [3] The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation http://www.mellon.org/ [4] JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/ [5] JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ [6] Soros Foundations Network http://www.soros.org/ [7] Cartesian Products, Inc. http://www.cartesianinc.com/ Author Details Daniel Holden JSTOR Information Officer MIDAS Email: Daniel.Holden@mcc.ac.uk URL: http://midas.ac.uk/jstor/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Information Ecosystems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Information Ecosystems Buzz archives metadata privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl follows up last issue's breakdown of papers with his reflections on the UKOLN conference held in Bath University at the end of June.
The third UKOLN international conference devoted to Networking and the future of libraries was the place where decontextualisation met rechaoticisation.
Inhabiting a world of URLs, it seems, has given us a taste for lengthy character strings.
The conference was held in Bath, which triumphed as always as a venue, from 29 June 1 July.
In the report which follows, shortage of space requires that not every paper from this fascinating conference can be discussed.
Decontextualisation was what Richard Heseltine (University of Hull) railed against in his opening keynote paper.
Virtual libraries, he argued, repeat the error of physical libraries in separating information from its context in teaching, learning and research.
Using a clip from Jurassic Park to prove that the generations of learners now growing up are very comfortable with virtual environments, he cited MODELS as a development capable of reuniting work space with information space.
But how does MODELS serve to eliminate the virtual library?
Surely libraries, whether virtual or real, unite information with learning?
Lorcan Dempsey (UKOLN) also drew attention to the MODELS Information Architecture (MIA), with its key aim of ‘hiding differences from the user’.
The great danger with a virtual library is that what it yields on the surface may only appear to satisfy an information query.
Dempsey worried about the ‘BIDS factor’ ‘if it’s not in BIDS, it doesn’t exist’.
MIA’s aim is to take users deeper into layers of resources which are useful to their queries.
Already, by the second paper, we had realised that the "landscape" of the conference title (Information Landscapes for a Learning Society) was an inadequate metaphor.
David Kay of Fretwell-Downing Informatics expanded upon the MIA theme.
He argued for the role of virtual libraries as brokers across curatorial traditions, subject domains and media types.
The acknowledgement of different curatorial traditions was particularly appropriate at a conference which provided a platform for speakers from the worlds of cultural heritage (museums and national archives) and public libraries, as well as academic libraries.
A critical link between the information and learning contexts has always been in the metadata supplied by libraries.
To Kay, "metadata is king", key to the efficient exploitation of a virtual world of "atomic information objects" which can be repackaged and repurposed endlessly to suit user needs provided that the rights problems can be overcome.
Peter Lyman (University of California Berkeley) described "an ecology of learning", and it was clear by now that ecology evoking dynamic processes and interconnectedness was the metaphor at the heart of the conference.
Lyman challenged us to dispel the caricature of the "Net-nerd".
Real, supportive communities inhabit digital space, and learning communities derive great value from it.
For years the cry has been that the Internet is full of junk "but somebody loves that junk".
Andrew Blau, of the US Benton Foundation, does not.
His paper addressed the social changes arising from the rise of a "richly networked society", and considered the Internet as a "solvent", which was creating the "rechaoticisation of the information space".
Information on the Net is out of control, a predator, preying on us.
In his world, the ecology of public communication is in a state of serious malfunction, flooded with information which cannot be processed.
Frank Webster (Oxford Brookes University) had a similar theme.
Far from "loving that junk", Webster claimed that what the Internet provides is "worthless and noxious information".
Ray Lester, of The National History Museum, was concerned less with the value of the available information, than with the means of controlling it.
Looking at information from the opposite end of the telescope from Peter Lyman, he asked "Who’s in command?"
To those for whom the landscape has only begun to be explored, the future looks bright.
John Dolan of Birmingham Metropolitan District Council, and Grace Kempster of Essex County Council, both welcomed the learning age and the UK government’s funding of it with open arms.
Sunderland and Sheffield also made claims, via Andrew McDonald (University of Sunderland) and Biddy Fisher (Sheffield Hallam University), to be "learning cities", with FE, HE and public libraries working in partnership to enfranchise citizens with learning opportunities.
However, Bob Fryer of Northern College, author of the report of the National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, took a less optimistic view.
"We are nowhere near the learning age" he stated, and our approach to creating it is "full of hubris and danger".
We need to wake up to the social dangers lurking in the great education failure rate of our schoolchildren.
In this bleak scenario, lifelong learning had become much too little, much too late.
Clifford Lynch (US Coalition for Networked Information) gave the closing keynote address.
Ranging fluently and thoughtfully over a number of issues, Lynch spoke of the need to preserve in the digital age the traditional library users’ expectations of privacy and anonymity in their use of information.
The library community in the US, he stated (perhaps because it had not received government money on the scale of that now on offer in the UK) had been active in raising questions about the direction of information access in the age of the Internet.
Citing examples of commercial sharp practice, such as word-stuffing, metadata spamming and other dirty tricks designed to fool the commercial search engines, themselves engaged in a "modest arms race", Lynch spoke of the role of libraries as "trusted third parties" in description.
Echoing David Kay, he saw the way forward as lying in partnerships between public and commercial information providers.
Having charted the landscape and analysed many of the interlocking systems in the new information ecology which is changing society, according to one speaker, even more radically than the Industrial Revolution, we finished a provoking and at times disturbing conference on an eco-friendly note.
Author Details John MacColl Project Director, Ariadne Email: john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: A Survey of Web Server Software Used by UK University Web Sites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: A Survey of Web Server Software Used by UK University Web Sites Buzz software apache browser windows linux pics php interoperability cookie privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly with an update of his survey of server software used by central Web sites in UK Universities.
A survey of Web server software used on UK University Web sites was carried out in October 1997 and the findings were reported in Ariadne issue 12 [1].
The survey was repeated in September 2000 and the updated findings published in Ariadne issue 21 [2].
The survey was repeated in November 2002 and the findings are published in this article.
Current Survey The survey was carried out on 21th November 2002.
This time the survey made use of the HTTP header Wizards tool provided by the University of Dundee [3].
Unlike the Netcraft tool used in the previous survey the University of Dundee's tool provides live access to the Web server being analysed.
The tool also provides an attractive display of the findings, as illustrated below.
Figure 1: The University of Dundee's HTTP Header Analysis Tool Current Findings A summary of the findings is given in the following table.
Table 1A: Server Summary Apache 96 58.9% MS IIS 57 35.0% Netscape 4 2.5% (Novell) Netware 2 1.2% Mediasurface 1 0.6% WebSite 1 0.6% NCSA 1 0.6% Not Given 1 0.6% TOTAL 163 100% Table 1B: Version Summary Apache v1.3.
* 86 52.8% Apache v2.
* 4 2.5% IIS v3.
* 2 1.2% IIS v4.
* 23 14.1% IIS v5.
* 32 19.6% Other 16 9.8% TOTAL 163 100% Table 1C: OS Summary Unix 90 55% Microsoft 59 36% Other/Unknown 14 9% Discussion Web Server Software The Apache Web server software is still the most widely used server.
This is not surprising, and reflects the global popularity of the Apache software.
Since the Web server software surveys began usage of Apache has grown from 48 in October 1997, 62 in July 1998, 95 in 2000 and now 96.
Microsoft's IIS Web server software has shown a steady growth in popularity, from 13 in October 1997, 20 in July 1998, 40 in 2000 and now 57.
The growth in the popularity of Microsoft since the last survey has been at the expense of older server software such as CERN, SWS and WebStar (which are now not longer in use) and NCSA and WebSite (each used by one institution).
Use of the Netscape server has also shown a significant decrease, from 13 in October 2000 to four today.
The findings reflect the global findings reported in the Netcraft's regular surveys of Web server software usage [4] although usage of Microsoft Web server software appears to more popular in the HE sector (58.0% compared with 28.7% in Netcraft's November 2002 survey).
Versions Of Web Server Software Version 1.3 of the Apache Web server software is still the most widely used (86 occurrences); the latest version, version 2.0, is used in only four institutions.
In contrast users of Microsoft's server software are making use of the latest version: version 5.0 is the most widely used (32 occurrences) with 23 using version 4.0 and only two using version 3.0.
Analysis Of HTTP Headers A summary of unusual HTTP headers was recorded during the survey.
Six organisations were using Web server software which supported the HTTP/1.0 protocol, rather than the well-established HTTP/1.1.
One organisation sends PICS information in the HTTP headers.
PICS can be used to provide machine-understandable information on use of content which is inappropriate for children.
One organisation sends P3P information in the HTTP headers.
P3P can be used to provide machine-understandable information on the Web site's privacy policies.
In six cases the HTTP message "X-Pad: avoid browser bug" was sent.
This was an unannounced change to Apache version 1.2b9 which provided a fix for a bug in Netscape versions 2.x, 3.x and 4.0b2.
Twenty-one servers set a cookie in the HTTP headers.
In one (and possibly two) cases the HTTP header was not properly terminated (by two carriage return/life feed characters).
This may cause interoperability problems e.g.
indexing software treating the entire Web page as a HTTP header, and not indexing any content.
Appendix 1: Full Findings A summary of the findings is given in the following table.
Table 2: Web Server Analysis Of UK University Entry Points   Institution Web Server Software Comments Try It 1 Aberdeen Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.2.2 mod_ssl/2.8.6 OpenSSL/0.9.4   [Check] 2 Abertay Dundee Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Sets cookies [Check] 3 Aberystwyth Apache   [Check] 4 Anglia Polytechnic University Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.2.1   [Check] 5 Aston Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.2.3 mod_ssl/2.8.11 OpenSSL/0.9.6g   [Check] 6 Bangor Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) mod_jk/1.1.0 PHP/4.1.1 mod_ssl/2.8.6 OpenSSL/0.9.6a Sets a cookie [Check] 7 Bath Spa Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Gives PICS label [Check] 8 Bath Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 DAV/1.0.2   [Check] 9 Queen's University of Belfast Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.3 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g   [Check] 10 Bell College Microsoft-IIS/3.0 Uses HTTP/1.0 [Check] 11 Birkbeck College Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 12 Birmingham Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a DAV/1.0.3 PHP/4.2.3   [Check] 13 Bishop Grosseteste College Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 14 Bolton Institute Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) Chili!Soft-ASP/3.6.2 PHP/4.2.2 mod_perl/1.24 ApacheJserv/1.1.2   [Check] 15 Arts Institute at Bournemouth Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 16 Bournemouth Apache/1.3.9 (Unix)   [Check] 17 Bradford Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.2 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6e   [Check] 18 Brighton Apache/2.0.42 (Unix) Uses Apache 2.0 [Check] 19 Bristol Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_auth_pam/1.0a mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6c   [Check] 20 Brunel Apache/2.0.39 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.39 OpenSSL/0.9.6e Uses Apache 2.0 [Check] 21 Buckinghamshire Chilterns Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 22 Cambridge Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_perl/1.24_01   [Check] 23 Institute of Cancer Research Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.0.4pl1 mod_perl/1.24_01   [Check] 24 Canterbury Christ Church Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 25 Cardiff Apache   [Check] 26 University of Wales Institute, Cardiff Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 27 University of Central England Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 Has message saying X-Pad: avoid browser bug [Check] 28 University of Central Lancashire Apache/1.3.6 (Unix)   [Check] 29 Central School of Speech and Drama Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 30 Chester College Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 mod_layout/3.2   [Check] 31 University College Chichester Apache/1.3.20 (Win32) Apache on Windows platform [Check] 32 City University Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 33 Courtauld Institute of Art Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 PHP/4.0.0   [Check] 34 Coventry Apache/1.3.6 (Unix)   [Check] 35 Cranfield Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.1 mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9 Provides P3P file [Check] 36 Dartington College ?
Not specified [Check] 37 De Montfort Apache/1.3.27 Sets cookies [Check] 38 Derby Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 39 Dundee Apache/2.0.39 (Unix) Uses Apache 2.0 [Check] 40 Durham Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.9 OpenSSL/0.9.6g   [Check] 41 East Anglia Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) AuthPostgreSQL/0.9.5 mod_perl/1.21_03   [Check] 42 University of East London Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 43 Edge Hill College Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2   [Check] 44 Edinburgh College of Art Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.5 OpenSSL/0.9.6 mod_perl/1.24_01 mod_throttle/3.1.2   [Check] 45 Edinburgh Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/3.0.18 mod_perl/1.27   [Check] 46 Essex Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 47 Exeter Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2   [Check] 48 Falmouth College Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 49 Glamorgan Apache   [Check] 50 Glasgow Caledonian Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) FrontPage/3.0.4.2   [Check] 51 Glasgow School of Art Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 52 Glasgow Apache/1.3.12 (Unix)   [Check] 53 Gloucestershire Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 54 Goldsmiths College Apache/1.3.26   [Check] 55 Greenwich Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_perl/1.24 ApacheJserv/1.1.2   [Check] 56 Harper Adams Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 57 Heriot-Watt Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.5 OpenSSL/0.9.6 DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.24 mod_throttle/3.1.2   [Check] 58 Hertfordshire Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 59 Huddersfield Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0RC2   [Check] 60 Hull Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) Resin/2.1.1 PHP/4.2.2 mod_ssl/2.8.9 OpenSSL/0.9.6d   [Check] 61 Imperial College Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 62 Institute of Education Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 63 Keele Apache/1.3.26   [Check] 64 Kent Institute of Art and Design Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 65 Kent Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 AuthMySQL/2.20 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g   [Check] 66 King Alfred's College Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 67 King's College London Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 PHP/4.0.0   [Check] 68 Kingston Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 69 Lampeter Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 70 Lancaster Apache/1.3.26   [Check] 71 Leeds Metropolitan University Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) PHP/4.0.5 mod_perl/1.21   [Check] 72 Leeds Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6   [Check] 73 Leicester Netscape-Enterprise/6.0   [Check] 74 Lincoln Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 75 Liverpool Hope NetWare-Enterprise-Web-Server/5.1   [Check] 76 Liverpool John Moores University Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 77 Liverpool Apache   [Check] 78 London Business School Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP2   [Check] 79 London Guildhall University Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 Dispays X-Pad: avoid browser bug message [Check] 80 London Institute Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) (SuSE/Linux) mod_perl/1.21 PHP/4.2.3 mod_ssl/2.6.2 OpenSSL/0.9.5   [Check] 81 University of London Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 82 London School of Economics Apache   [Check] 83 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.24_01   [Check] 84 Loughborough Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 85 Luton Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 Dispays X-Pad: avoid browser bug message [Check] 86 UMIST Apache/1.3.23 (Unix)   [Check] 87 Manchester Metropolitan University Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6   [Check] 88 Manchester Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) Debian/GNU PHP/4.0.3pl1 AuthMySQL/2.20   [Check] 89 University of Wales College of Medicine Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 90 Middlesex Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 91 Napier Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Sets cookies [Check] 92 Newcastle Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2   [Check] 93 Newman College Apache/1.3.14 (Win32) Apache on Windows platform [Check] 94 Newport Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 95 North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education Novell-HTTP-Server/3.1R1   [Check] 96 University of North London Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 97 University College Northampton Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.1.0   [Check] 98 Northern School of Contemporary Dance Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 99 University of Northumbria Mediasurface/4.0 Uses HTTP/1.0 [Check] 100 Norwich School of Art and Design Microsoft-IIS/3.0 Uses HTTP/1.0 [Check] 101 Nottingham Trent University Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Uses HTTP/1.0 [Check] 102 Nottingham Apache   [Check] 103 Oxford Brookes NCSA/1.5.2 Uses HTTP/1.0 [Check] 104 Oxford Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) Debian GNU/Linux   [Check] 105 Paisley Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 106 Plymouth Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 107 Portsmouth Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 108 Queen Margaret University College, Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 109 Queen Mary and Westfield College Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)   [Check] 110 Ravensbourne College Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 111 Reading Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.26 mod_ssl/2.8.11 OpenSSL/0.9.6g   [Check] 112 University of Wales, Registry Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 113 Robert Gordon University Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets cookies [Check] 114 University of Surrey, Roehampton Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 115 Rose Bruford College Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 116 Royal Academy of Music Apache/1.3.19 (Unix)   [Check] 117 Royal Agricultural College Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 118 Royal College of Art Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 119 Royal College of Music Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 120 Royal Holloway Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 121 Royal Northern College of Music Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 122 Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama Apache/1.3.20a (NETWARE) Apache on Netware [Check] 123 Royal Veterinary College Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Server failed to terminate HTTP headers correctly [Check] 124 St Andrews Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)   [Check] 125 St George's Hospital Medical School Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.0   [Check] 126 College of St Mark and St John Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 127 St Martin's College Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) AuthMySQL/2.20 PHP/4.2.2 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6a   [Check] 128 St Mary's College Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 129 Salford Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.2.3   [Check] 130 School of Oriental and African Studies Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.2 Displays X-Pad: avoid browser bug message [Check] 131 School of Pharmacy WebSite/3.1.11 Uses HTTP/1.0 [Check] 132 Scottish Agricultural College Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 133 Sheffield Hallam Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_auth_pam/1.0a mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6c   [Check] 134 Sheffield Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a PHP/4.1.2 mod_fastcgi/2.2.8 mod_ssl/2.8.9 OpenSSL/0.9.4   [Check] 135 South Bank University Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 136 Southampton Institute Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 137 Southampton Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.2.2   [Check] 138 Staffordshire Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 ApacheJServ/1.0 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g   [Check] 139 Stirling Apache/1.3.26 (Win32) Apache on Windows platform [Check] 140 Strathclyde Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 141 Sunderland Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)   [Check] 142 Surrey Institute of Art and Design Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 143 Surrey Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.1 Displays X-Pad: avoid browser bug message [Check] 144 Sussex Apache/2.0.43 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.43 OpenSSL/0.9.6g PHP/4.2.4-dev Uses Apache 2.0 [Check] 145 Swansea Institute Microsoft-IIS/4.0   [Check] 146 University of Wales, Swansea Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.2 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510   [Check] 147 Teesside Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Sets cookies [Check] 148 Thames Valley University Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP2   [Check] 149 Open University Netscape-Enterprise/4.1   [Check] 150 Trinity College of Music Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 151 Trinity College, Carmarthen Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 152 Trinity and All Saints College Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 153 Ulster Apache/1.3.26   [Check] 154 University College London Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6b   [Check] 155 Warwick Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.0.5 DAV/0.9.15 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6d mod_perl/1.27   [Check] 156 Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.6.6 OpenSSL/0.9.5a mod_perl/1.24   [Check] 157 University of the West of England (UWE) Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.0.5   [Check] 158 Westminster Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 159 Wolverhampton Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 Displays X-Pad: avoid browser bug message [Check] 160 University College Worcester Apache/1.3.6 (Win32) Apache on Windows platform [Check] 161 Writtle College Microsoft-IIS/5.0   [Check] 162 York St John College Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Sets a cookie [Check] 163 York Apache/1.3.26   [Check] The information in the table was collected on 21st November 2002.
References WebWatching UK Universities and Colleges, Brian Kelly, Ariadne Issue 12, Nov 1997 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/web-focus/ A Survey Of Web Server Software Used In UK University Web Sites, Brian Kelly, Ariadne Issue 25, Sept 2000 Somis Web Wizards, University of Dundee http://www.somis.dundee.ac.uk/general/wizards/fetchhead.html Netcraft Web Server Survey, Netcraft http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Watch: A Survey of Web Server Software Used by UK University Web Sites" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Jan-2003; Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from the Resource Discovery Network Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from the Resource Discovery Network Buzz data javascript ejournal url Citation BibTex RIS Simon Jennings and Philip Pothen with the latest on developments at the RDN.
Put the RDN on your Web pages The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) has launched a new service called RDN-include[1].
This allows ResourceFinder, the RDN search engine, to be added free of charge to higher and further education institutions’ Web sites.
The RDN developed this technology in reponse to requests from users and in recognition of developments underway with Virtual Learning Envornments at many institutions.
By including the RDN’s search box and the results it retrieves on an institution’s Web site, students and staff can now use the RDN search facilities and discover high-quality Web resources while remaining within the familiar look-and-feel of their university or college’s Web site.
It also means that users can now access the resources provided by their own institution alongside those that are nationally-provided.
A good example of how this facility is used can be seen at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Library[2].
Here results from the RDN are presented alonside a search facility for local e-journals for occasions where RDN results contain references to online articles.
The RDN has endeavoured to make the service as simple as possible to install and configure.
There are two versions available, on which uses a cgi script and an even simpler JavaScript-based version which just requires the webmaster to paste a few lines of code into their page.
We are also able to offer versions of RDN-i which search results from selected hubs only and plan to further develop ways in which the Webmaster using RDN-i can configure the service to suit local needs (e.g.
the ability to search EEVL and Psigate data alone).
Over the next few months the RDN will be making more of its content available for inclusion on UK University and College Websites.
First and foremost in our plans is the Behind the Headlines service[3].
Behind the Headlines offers easy access to background information on the latest news headlines via preset searches of RDN data.
The service was developed following analysis of RDN search logs from the height of the Foot-and-mouth crisis these showed large numbers of users looking for current affairs related information.
More recent topics to feature in the service have included Osama Bin Laden, Deep Vein Thrombosis and assisted suicide.
The service has proved very popular, particularly in the further education sector and we are keen that it should also be made available through institutional web sites as well as on the RDN’s own pages.
References RDN-include homepage: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rdn-i RDN-include at Manchester Metropolitan University: http://www.mmu.ac.uk/services/library/rdni/rdnisearch.html RDN Behind the Headlines: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/news/headlines/ Author Details   Philip Pothen Communications Manager Resource Discovery Network King’s College London Email: philip.pothen@kcl.ac.uk Web site: www.rdn.ac.uk   Simon Jennings Manager Resource Discovery Network King’s College London Email: simon.jennings@kcl.ac.uk Web site: www.rdn.ac.uk Article Title: “News from the Resource Discovery Network” Author: Simon Jennings and Philip Pothen Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/rdn/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Architects of the Information Age Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Architects of the Information Age Buzz data software framework database xml portal infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus doi digitisation identifier vocabularies video preservation cataloguing gif uri personalisation dcmi authentication interoperability e-government url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller reports on a recent UKOLN-organised event at the Office of the e-Envoy, and explores the need for an architecture to scope what we build online.
In July of this year, Interoperability Focus [1] organised a meeting at the Office of the e–Envoy [2], the Cabinet Office unit responsible for driving forward the UK’s e–Government initiatives.
Across an increasing number of initiatives and programmes, there is a growing recognition of the need for common ‘architectures’ within which truly useful applications and services may be constructed.
Partly, these architectures form a philosophical basis within which developments may be undertaken.
Further, though, such architectures in their broadest sense may include the specification of a common technical basis for working (such as the New Opportunities Fund’s Technical Guidelines [3]), consideration of shared middleware services (such as the ATHENS [4] service which controls access to a range of resources within further and higher education), as well as often detailed technical specifications.
It remains important that such architectures not be driven forward solely in a technological context, but that their design, implementation and evolution continually be informed by institutional and user requirements and aspirations.
This one day colloquium [5] sought to encourage an open discussion of the issues related to a number of emerging architectures, with a view to informing those at an earlier stage in their deliberations, encouraging an information flow between more established infrastructures, and hopefully serving to reduce the potential for duplication of effort and the adoption of unnecessarily different solutions to essentially similar problems.
The proceedings were introduced by three presentations on quite different approaches; the DNER Architecture being developed by UKOLN for the UK’s Further and Higher Education sector [6], the e-Government Interoperability Framework 7 mandated across the UK Public Sector, and the Department of Culture, Media & Sport’s (DCMS) vision for Culture Online [8].
The presentations themselves are available online [5].
Rather than discuss them, this paper seeks to draw out a number of the issues raised in the presentations and the ensuing wide–ranging discussion.
In most cases, it is only possible to flag issues in need of further study, rather than to offer concrete solutions.
Architectures… Various uses of the term ‘architecture’ are increasingly to be found in association with consideration of various information systems, and meanings for the term often vary quite markedly from application to application.
In this paper, I broadly divide architectures up into four types, using definitions of my own, as below.
A technical architecture is often sketched out for individual systems, or small clusters of systems.
Such an architecture will invariably detail specifications for components of the whole, and address such issues as the protocols to be used for communication between one component and another.
In most technical architectures, softer issues such as the purpose of the system or the manner in which users will interact with it are invariably implicit at best or, more often than not, far from fully considered.
A functional architecture, such as that developed through the MODELS series [9], instead takes a process–driven view of the system.
Through such a view, the architecture will often address the functions that such a system is expected to fulfil (allow discovery of records, allow a request to be made for the associated resource, etc.)
or the functions that a user may wish to use it to undertake (discover records, request the associated resource, etc.).
The two may appear similar in many cases, but functional architectures need to remain clear as to whether they are system– or user–focussed, or attempting explicitly to encompass both viewpoints.
Such clarity from the outset makes understanding more complex aspects of the architecture simpler at a later date.
Perhaps less well developed is the idea of a landscape architecture.
This serves to bound the realm of possibilities, to define what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’, and to (ideally unambiguously) describe the relationships between users, resources, and technical systems.
A landscape architecture might, for example, model large scale IPR issues and other relationships.
The extent to which many of these relationships can be modelled and expressed at an architectural rather than individual system level is a question requiring further work.
The combination of all three, and more, is the information architecture.
Such an architecture scopes the systems, data model, content, machine–machine (m2m) and machine–user interactions, and the environment within which interactions and transactions occur.
Although there are many documented information architectures, few if any manage the totality of this definition today; although some, at least, are working towards it.
Terminological issues One issue that comes up with great regularity in practically all domains is that of terminology [10].
People wish to increase the precision of description and discovery, and see the application of constrained sets of labels to this process as one means of solving current problems.
Superficially, it appears an easy problem to solve.
As the work of the High Level Thesaurus Project (HILT) [11] has shown, a wide range of existing, incomplete, terminologies, category lists, classification schemes and thesauri are already in use, and there is marked reluctance to give any of them up, despite their faults.
HILT proposes piloting a mapping agency, to look at the feasibility of allowing systems and users to cross–search resources catalogued using different schemes, but it is likely to be some years before the benefits of any such project are seen.
More immediately, there appears to be growing consensus on the need for a number of quick win solutions, with users in further and higher education, the cultural sector, government and beyond calling for someone to provide them with answers.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether the same answers will suit all of these communities.
Crudely, the areas in which terminological control are most sought may be characterised as categorisation of level or audience grouping for resources; a small set of broadly applicable subject terms; a small set of broadly applicable resource types; and a (potentially extremely large) set of names for geographical locations.
In some cases, the best solution may be to point to an existing resource and, despite its faults, suggest or mandate that it be used in preference to other existing resources.
In this way, projects funded by the New Opportunities Fund [12], say, might be encouraged to select subject terms from the UNESCO Thesaurus [13] for all of the content they create, as well as using any locally preferred terminological controls.
In this way, the individual projects gain the precision and detail of their local systems, whilst ensuring a degree of interoperability and cross–search capability across the body of NOF material.
In other cases, there is a need for a small group to simply create a new resource, filling a gap in existing provision, and solving a widely recognised problem.
Where we consider creating new resources, we are quite explicitly not suggesting the construction of something approaching the size or complexity of the existing UNESCO Thesaurus [13] and its equivalents from other sectors.
Rather, we are attempting to fill quite tightly defined gaps in existing provision, often by providing new resources comprising no more than a few hundred terms.
Audience and Level Often, a resource will be intended primarily for a particular category of user.
A government resource might be aimed at civil servants, or the general public, or tax payers, or school children.
An educational resource might be aimed at pupils studying Key Stage 2 History in the English National Curriculum.
Adding complexity, a Physics text book on superstring theory may be considered to be introductory in nature, provided the reader has a degree–level general awareness of Physics.
Increasingly, people are identifying the need to categorise the audience of a resource, but the approaches they wish to use in practice are often incompatible.
The simple examples, above, show how quickly this area becomes complex.
Within the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [14] alone, both the Education and Government working groups have called for an extension to handle notions of Audience.
Even when granted, the terms they choose to fill this new element with will be far from interoperable in most cases.
In advance of any overarching set of terms to describe aspects of Audience — were such a thing even feasible — the Metadata for Education Group (MEG) [15] here in the UK is working on a document to define a controlled set of terms to describe UK educational levels.
Similar work is required for other audience categories, and to explore the feasibility of joining such resources together, either within the UK or internationally.
Subject Terms Despite the existence of large and often complex subject thesauri and classifications, such as those examined by HILT, there remains a perceived need for a single higher–level set of terms, ideally as small as is feasible.
Such a set would not be intended to describe subject–specific detail, but rather to allow subject or domain–spanning services such as the Resource Discovery Network [16] to place resources in some form of context.
To borrow an example used in several instances by HILT, such a set of terms would allow the user searching for Lotus to know whether resources being returned to them were concerned with engineering, biology, or computer software.
The set would probably not contain the detail required to further specify automotive design for sports cars, a particular genus or species of flower, or to denote that Lotus 1–2–3 is a spreadsheet program.
In services, such as the RDN, that attempt to aggregate existing bodies of material, the greatest need is often for terms which denote what would be — within a single service or resource — almost ridiculously obvious.
In the early development of the Arts & Humanities Data Service [17], for example, a great need was to be able to say unambiguously that resources being delivered to the central cross–domain portal from the Archaeology Data Service were about archaeology, that resources coming from the Performing Arts Data Service were music, film, etc.
For those visiting the websites of each service provider directly, such statements were largely redundant; of course resources actually on the web site of the Archaeology Data Service were about archaeology, and because of this these ‘obvious’ statements were, initially, rarely made.
On the service provider sites there were similar problems, albeit at a different level of detail.
Whilst all resources on the Archaeology Data Service might be about archaeology, visitors to the site needed to know that all resources returned to them from a search of English Heritage’s Excavation Index were one type of excavation or another, or even that they were all in England; facts that would be ‘obvious’ to someone interacting directly with the Excavation Index itself, but which are much less so when searching a catalogue containing a wide range of archaeological resource types from countries all over the world.
There is, then, a need for a single set of high level terms — a genuine High Level ‘Thesaurus’ — upon which a wide range of communities might draw.
Services with a clear need for this, such as the Resource Discovery Network, the Arts & Humanities Data Service, the New Opportunities Fund Digitisation Programme, the National Grid for Learning, the University for Industry and others have expressed interest in working towards some common solution.
As elsewhere, the feasibility of agreeing the detail, rather than the high–level ideal, remains to be seen.
Ideally, such a resource would follow the model proposed for the new Government Category List [18], which is a set of a few hundred terms developed to describe resources of interest to the citizen and delivered by all branches of UK local, regional and national government.
This Category List is not intended to replace the detail of existing departmental thesauri, but instead sits above all of them and provides a degree of cross–departmental interoperability.
The Government Category List currently comprises 2–300 terms, clustered under twelve main headings.
Interest has been expressed in any cross–sectoral high level list being even smaller; perhaps no more than twenty terms in total.
The reality of meeting even the needs of those services listed above is likely to result in a somewhat larger set, but decisions will need to be made early in the process about just how large any such set should become before it ceases to be High Level in any meaningful sense.
Resource Type Resources are of many types, and take many forms.
Resources can be physical or digital, and may be (either physical or digital) books, videos, audio recordings, etc.
Information about the Type of a resource is important, and has implications for storage, usage, and preservation.
Type is also closely bound up with format in many practical instances; the resource may be classified as being of the Type “video”, and therefore of interest to the searcher, but stored in a North American rather than European Format on the tape and consequently unplayable.
Resource Type has long been identified as important to enumerate within the work of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative [14], with a list of Types [19] being one of the first they produced.
It remains unsatisfactory, though, and intermittently a source of much debate.
Although unliked, and widely considered to be far from useful, no one has yet managed to appease all of the interested parties and propose a replacement to which they are all happy to subscribe.
As our portals become increasingly Hybrid, accessing a wide range of physical and digital multiple media resources, useful enumerations of Type become ever more important, and this is yet another area in which the funding of a focussed piece of work would be of great potential benefit to the community.
Geography Finally, place.
Here, too, there is a need to be able to consistently and unambiguously describe the location that is being described.
Is a resource about “Hull”, for example, actually about the properly named Kingston–upon–Hull in England’s East Riding of Yorkshire, about Hull in Quebec, Canada, or about one of the myriad other Hull’s there must be in the world?
One solution is to tie all such placenames to sets of co–ordinates, such as a UK National Grid Reference, or a latitude and longitude.
This is not ideal, though, as complex or large features such as rivers and countries cover extensive areas and would be expensive to describe in this way, and less defined geographical concepts such as “The West Country” or America’s “Mid–West” are actually quite difficult to place boundaries around.
Time adds a further complicating factor.
“Strathclyde” was, at one time, a territory stretching from western Scotland all the way to Wales.
Between the boundary changes of the 1970’s and 1990’s it was a unit of Local Government in western and south–western Scotland.
Now, it doesn’t exist, except in the names of a few quasi–public sector services left after the last round of boundary reforms.
Similarly, the city of York has had a number of names over the past 2,000 years, all with approximately the same centre, but covering very different areas.
How do we cope with these changes in ways that both reflect that which is ‘correct’ (Cumbernauld really isn’t in Strathclyde anymore) and the (probably different) ways in which people view the past and present Geographies around them?
Geography is, as the paragraphs above can only begin to demonstrate, a complex problem.
There are those who would argue that we should only implement a solution if it works for all the complexities of spatial and temporal fuzziness, and that as to do so even for the needs of UK Further and Higher Education would be prohibitively expensive, we just shouldn’t bother.
As elsewhere in this paper, though, I’d argue that there are things we can do, relatively easily and cheaply, that go some way towards a solution.
To begin with, we could all use a single authoritative list for naming modern places in the UK.
Although only containing around 250,000 terms, and therefore far from complete, the existing 1:50,000 scale Ordnance Survey gazetteer might offer just such a list.
It includes the names of places mapped on Ordnance Survey’s 1:50,000 scale maps, and provides each name with a grid reference, locating it to a point within 1 kilometre of its position.
Might ‘the community’ enter into discussion with Ordnance Survey about the feasibility of this resource entering the public domain, ensuring a degree of consistent naming, and acting as a far–from expensive advert for Ordnance Survey products and good will?
The great success of the recent collaboration between JISC and the British Library, through which MIMAS were able to deliver ZETOC [20] to the Further and Higher Educational sectors, is a good example of the way in which products previously considered as revenue generators can be freed up to a broad community of users, very probably reaping financial gains through other avenues (such as Inter Library Loan requests in this case) downstream.
Beyond this quick win, further work is needed in working with agencies such as Ordnance Survey, the Post Office/ Consignia, the Office of National Statistics and others to explore the extent to which existing — extremely comprehensive — databases of place names and their hierarchical relationships to one another can enter more widespread usage.
Persistence Things change.
People reorganise websites and whole organisations.
Publishing houses buy other publishing houses, and absorb their titles into the catalogue of the parent.
Local government boundaries alter, and the academic world reaches new consensus about the ways in which species are categorised, or the Dynasty to which a particular Egyptian Pharaoh belonged.
All of this is a not unwelcome fact of life.
These changes become a problem, though, when the wholly unnecessary changes made by others threaten the distributed philosophy at the heart of the architecture deployed by many current web–based services, and so central to the web–of–association notions of the Semantic Web [21].
To take a few simple examples, each of which is apparently obvious, and each of which is flouted again and again by those who should know better; why should the URI of a significant and oft–cited document change, just because the Service hosting it has decided to reorganise their web site?
why should the fact that a project has ended, and transferred its results to a third party for archiving and continued provision, mean that users need a whole new set of references for documents and resources?
why should e–mail addresses and web site URIs across Government change overnight, just because of a Cabinet restructuring?
why should a reappraisal of scientific data, leading to a completely different interpretation, result in a report with the same identifier as its predecessor, making it impossible for others to compare the two interpretations as the reinterpretation effectively overwrites its predecessor on the Web?
At the heart of all of these, of course, is the requirement for appropriate persistence, and a need for information architects everywhere to devise solutions that separate the identification of the resource itself from the logical (and changeable) location in which it is made available.
The solutions to many problems of persistence are relatively straightforward: implementers should be required to think about the implications for others of changes that they introduce greater attention should be paid to available solutions, such as the Digital Object Identifier [22] project funding bodies such as the JISC should be encouraged to include clauses on the transfer of URIs and the resources to which they resolve to designated archives at the end of projects, if appropriate.
Certification, Identification, and the like As services increasingly provide access to resources over which they do not necessarily have control for users from whom they are geographically and contractually remote, there is a growing need for more reliable identification of the components in any transaction, and certification that the identifications are accurate and authentic.
Building the Web of Mistrust When dealing face–to–face with supposedly knowledgeable people, or entering the Bricks and Mortar premises of an allegedly reputable organisation, we are well equipped to make (admittedly sometimes wrong) judgements about the bona fide nature of those with whom we are dealing.
Online, it becomes much harder to reach realistic judgements based simply upon the appearance of a web site or the contents of an e–mail message.
How many, for example, were duped by deplorable scams to obtain money from concerned individuals around the world, supposedly to assist in the relief effort in New York?
It is, it unfortunately appears, only common sense to mistrust online content, unless persuaded by some means to accept that which you see.
Content, assertions, goods for sale, payment for goods, individuals, organisations and more all need to be unambiguously identified, and all of the identifications need to be certified by a trusted third party to whom the cautious or aggrieved can turn for assurance or redress.
This is the possibly misnamed Web of Trust so essential to the further commercial expansion of the Web, but also increasingly important in cultural and educational contexts, where services and the very resources to which they point may be devolved to many players.
In identifying organisations, the commercial sector has made some progress in the development of digital certificates and certification agencies.
In UK and European law, a suitable digital ‘signature’ on an electronic document is considered binding.
Identifying people, transactions and individual resources is proving a greater problem to solve.
Civil rights concerns, whether real or unfounded, prevent unambiguous ubiquitous identification of individuals.
Early ideas within government of using the National Insurance number to identify citizens interacting online with government have been dropped, and attention is now turning to the use of task– or purpose–oriented identifiers, such as a student number for educational interactions, a National Insurance number for claiming benefit, etc.
In a number of local authorities, trials are underway in the use of smartcards that identify and authenticate users for participation in a number of transactions with local government.
It is important to remember, though, that these identifications and authentications of users should serve a defensible purpose.
It is unreasonable, for example, to require users to identify themselves and log in just to view your web site, or to interact with resources over which there are no relevant usage restrictions.
Further, any system of identification must be capable of identifying all potential users, and should not add to the problems of the socially excluded.
How many people in the UK, for example, might not have a National Insurance number, or even know it if they have one?
It is also illegal, of course, to make use of a users’ identification or registration information for other purposes (such as marketing) without their permission.
Although it seems unlikely that the current public mood will tolerate the creation and application of a single identifier for individuals, there may well be scope for the development of a single standard for gathering, storing, and utilising such identifications, building upon existing developments within education (such as ATHENS [4] and its successor) and beyond.
Being inclusive Many of the problems facing those building the DNER are also faced by the architects of the Government Portals, or of Culture Online, or the National Grid for Learning.
There are also similarities with commercial service developments, and the different communities have a great deal to offer one another, and a great deal to learn, assuming we can weaken the barriers of language, working practice and financial model which keep us apart.
Interoperability Focus and others already work to actively cross some of these barriers, especially within the relative familiarity of the public sector.
There is certainly scope for more to become involved in this work, and for its active extension into the commercial sphere.
Discovering what the user wants Information architects, and others, always make sweeping assumptions about what users want, often based upon their own behaviour or upon unrealistic expectations of the ‘typical user’, were such an individual to exist.
Only rarely do we engage actively in finding out what users really want, and this is one area in which Government and its focus groups have made valuable progress.
The rest of the community has much to learn from these focus groups, and there may be potential for harnessing them to the benefit of a broader set of service builders than simply those within central government.
The SuperHighway Code The e–Government Interoperability Framework (e–GIF) [7] serves as a blueprint for services provided by Government, and for those parts of external services which wish to interact with Government.
At its heart, the e–GIF mandates a set of commonly deployed Web and industry standards, and selects XML as the syntax of choice for exchanging data.
In many ways, this document is a first step towards a sort of ‘Highway Code’ for the public sector.
Analagously to the Highway Code for road users in the UK, which doesn’t specify what colour your car should be, how many wheels it should have, or how big its engine should be, but which does make sure we all drive on the same side of the road, give way to vehicles coming from the right, and generally interact with other road users relatively painlessly, the e–GIF doesn’t specify software, hardware, or day–to–day working practice, but does ensure the viability of efficient information transfer.
There would appear to be scope for taking a document such as the e–GIF as a model, and seeking to develop it into some form of SuperHighway Code for ‘responsible’ providers of Information Age services, whether in the public or private sectors.
Such a document might move beyond the topics covered in the e–GIF into notions of Persistence and some of the other issues raised in this paper.
It would be interesting, indeed, to see if sufficient interest and support could be gathered to make such a notion real.
Towards a shared infrastructure?
The DNER Architecture [6] introduces the useful notion of Shared Services.
These services are aspects of Middleware that are provided by some third party for the benefit of the community as a whole, rather than embedded within each content service in turn.
Such Shared Services might be provided once (ATHENS [4] supports users across Higher Education) or might be federated in some fashion, with individual institutions conceivably taking responsibility for certifying their own members to those services they wish to use, for example.
Within the DNER Architecture, ATHENS is the only existing example of such a service, but clear uses are identified for shared Collection Description Services, Authentication Services, Authorisation Services, Service Description Services, and even others such as Personalisation and Preference Services.
This is an area of ongoing development for the DNER, but is equally of value to other communities.
It would be valuable, at an early stage, to broaden at least the intellectual debate to include other viewpoints (as is already happening, to the extent possible with current funding), and ideally to begin exploration of the potential for shared services across domains, or at least for the establishment of similarly structured services within domains, that might communicate at a later date if required.
Conclusions An effective and useful Information Architecture is a complex proposition, requiring careful planning and design, and an awareness of many different issues.
It seems that we have a good understanding of technical architectures, with many of the necessary building blocks essentially in place.
Functional architectures, too, are increasingly well developed, especially from the perspective of the system.
There is still scope, though, for more work to understand the functions that real users actually wish to perform.
The areas in need of most work — and those concentrated on in the body of this paper — fall much more readily under the less well undersood landscape architecture, and within the overarching information architecture itself, as components that make the technical and functional substructure genuinely useful rather than merely technically elegant.
As in the real world, information architectures need to be driven by real world requirements, rather than merely the research interests and obsessions of their designers.
Many an elegant and technically sophisticated building has been loathed by its unfortunate occupants who find it impossible to inhabit, and the same is all too true of information systems.
As a plea from someone who grew up in one, please, let us not build the Internet equivalent of a New Town…!
References The Interoperability Focus Home page is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ The Office of the e–Envoy’s Home page is at: http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/ NOF’s Technical Standards and Guidelines are at: http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/nof/technicalstandards.html The ATHENS Home page is at: http://www.athens.ac.uk/ The Colloquium on Emerging Information Architectures’ Home page is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/activities/events/architectures/ The DNER Architecture Home page is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/ The e–Government Interoperability Framework is at: http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/interoperability/egif.asp The Culture Online Home page is at: http://www.cultureonline.gov.uk/ The MODELS Home page is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/ I say what I mean, but do I mean what I say?
is at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/metadata/ The HILT Home page is at: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ The New Opportunities Fund Home page is at: http://www.nof.org.uk/ The UNESCO Thesaurus is available at: http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/ The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Home page is mirrored at: http://uk.dublincore.org/ The Metadata for Education Group Home page is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/ The Resource Discovery Network Home page is at: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ The Arts & Humanities Data Service Home page is at: http://ahds.ac.uk/ The draft Government Category List is available for review at: http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/ The DCMI Type Vocabulary is at: http://uk.dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/ The ZETOC Home page is at: http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ The Semantic Web Activity’s Home page is at: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ The DOI Foundation’s Home page is at: http://www.doi.org/ Author Details Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Article Title: “Architects of the Information Age” Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/miller/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: A Survey Of Web Server Software Used In UK University Web Sites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: A Survey Of Web Server Software Used In UK University Web Sites Buzz software bsd apache windows linux solaris php url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly A Survey Of Web Server Software Used In UK University Web Sites.
What Web server software is used within the UK Higher Education community?
What trends are there?
How can I find out which institutions are using the same software as mine?
Am I running a dated version of the software, compared with the rest of the community?
This survey aims to provide answers to these questions by surveying the server software used on the main institutional entry point.
Using The Netcraft Service Netcraft [1] is a company based in Bath which carries out surveys of Web server software.
The Netcraft survey is very comprehensive, with the survey in May 2000 successfully polling over 15 million sites.
Netcraft publish monthly reports on their surveys [2].
Netcraft also provide an interface which enables details of the Web server used at a site to be obtained.
The Netcraft interface to this service is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Netcraft interface This service has been used to analyse the Web server software used by UK Universities on the main institutional Web site.
The results are provided in Appendix 1 of this article.
Summary of Findings As expected the Apache server was the most widely used server software.
In second place came Microsoft's IIS.
A histogram showing the results is given in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Histogram of Number of Web Server Software 70% (111) of Web servers appear to run on Unix platforms, with 26.25% (43) on a Microsoft Windows platform.
The remaining 3.75% of servers run on Novell Netware (3), Apple Macintosh (2) or DEC VMS (1) platforms.
There were a small number of unusual hardware / software combinations, including two occurrences of Apache running on MS Windows and one occurrence of IIS running on Unix.
In addition to the Apache and IIS server software, the Netscape server software was used at 13 institutions (10 on a Unix platform, two on Novell Netware and one on MS Windows), followed by CERN (3), NCSA and WebSTAR (two each) and one occurrence of the SWS, Novell, OSU, Vegserver and WebSite Pro software.
As well as Unix and MS Windows operating system environments, there were two occurrences of the Apple Macintosh platform and one of the Digital Alpha/VMS platform.
Comparison With Previous Survey in October 1997 the WebWatch robot was used to survey UK University Web sites.
The results were published in Ariadne [3].
A pie chart illustrating the findings and a comparison with the current findings is shown below.
Figure 3: Chart of Web Server Software Usage in 1997 and 2000 Since 1997 many of the less well-used server software (such as WN, BorderWare, Purveyor, HTTPS and Roxen Challenger) are no longer used.
Use of the NCSA, CERN and Netscape server software has decreased.
The only server software to show an increase is Apache and Microsoft.
Please note that additional surveys were carried out in July 1998 [4] and November 1998 [5].
References Netcraft, http://www.netcraft.com/ Web Server Survey, Netcraft http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ WebWatching UK Universities and Colleges, Ariadne, issue 12, November 1997 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/web-focus/ Trawl Of UK University Entry Points July 1998, Appendix 4 of "WebWatching UK Web Communities: Final Report For The WebWatch Project", UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/reports/final/rtf-html/report-Appendix-4.html Third Trawl of UK Academic Entry Points, UKOLN, November 1998 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/reports/hei-nov1998/ Appendix 1: Survey Results The Netcraft service was used to record the Web server software used on the main institutional Web server in UK Universities.
The survey was carried out on 28 July 2000.
The following table contains details of the survey.
Column 1 gives the name of the institution and a link to the institutional web server.
Column 2 gives the name of the Web server software found within the university's domain.
Column 3 enables the Netcraft service to be used to check the current status.
Table 1: Web Server Software Used In UK HEIs Institution Server Software 20 July 2000 Current Server Software Aberdeen Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) PHP/3.0.15 mod_ssl/2.3.11 OpenSSL/0.9.4 on Solaris Try it Abertay Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Aberystwyth Apache/1.3.0 (Unix) on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Anglia Polytechnic University Apache/1.2.4 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Aston Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.0 mod_ssl/2.6.4 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on Solaris Try it Bangor Netscape-Enterprise/3.5.1 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Bath Spa Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Bath Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Belfast, The Queen's University of Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Birkbeck Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Birmingham Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/3.0.14 on Solaris Try it Bolton Institute of Higher Education Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP2 on Solaris Try it Bournemouth University Apache/1.2.4 on HP-UX Try it Bradford Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Bretton College Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Brighton Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Bristol Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on IRIX Try it Brunel Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_perl/1.20 on Solaris Try it Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Cambridge Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Canterbury Christ Church Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Cardiff Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Cardiff, University of Wales Institute (UWIC) Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Central England, University of (UCE) Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Central Lancashire Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Central School of Speech and Drama Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Cheltenham and Gloucester College of HE Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) on Linux Try it Chester College Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/3.0.15 on FreeBSD Try it Chichester, University College Apache/1.3.1 (Unix) on Linux Try it City Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it College of Guidance Studies CERN/3.0A on Solaris Try it Coventry Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Cranfield Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.5.0 OpenSSL/0.9.4 PHP/3.0.14 mod_perl/1.21 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Dartington College of Arts NCSA/1.5.1 on IRIX Try it De Montfort (DMU) Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Derby Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Dundee Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_perl/1.19 on Solaris Try it Durham Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/3.0.16 on Solaris Try it East Anglia, University of (UEA) Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.21_03 on Solaris Try it East London Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Edge Hill Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Edinburgh Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) PHP/3.0.16 mod_perl/1.21 on Solaris Try it Essex Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Exeter Apache/1.2.6 on IRIX Try it Falmouth Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Glamorgan Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Linux Try it Glasgow Caledonian University Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) FrontPage/3.0.4.2 on Solaris Try it Glasgow School of Art Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Glasgow Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Goldsmiths College Vegserver/3.0.0 on Solaris Try it Greenwich Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Harper Adams Apache/1.2.5 Cobalt on Linux Try it Heriot-Watt Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.5.0 OpenSSL/0.9.4 on Linux Try it Hertfordshire Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Huddersfield Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0RC2 on Solaris Try it Hull Apache/1.2.5 on Solaris Try it Imperial Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Institute of Education Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Keele Apache/1.3.12 on BSD/OS Try it Kent Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) PHP/3.0.13 on Solaris Try it Kent Institute of Art and Design Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it King Alfred's College, Winchester Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it King's College London (KCL) Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.0 on Solaris Try it Kingston Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Lampeter Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) mod_perl/1.21 mod_ssl/2.5.0 OpenSSL/0.9.3a on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Lancaster Apache/1.3.12 on Solaris Try it Leeds Netscape-Communications/1.1 on Solaris Try it Leeds Metropolitan University (LMU) Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) PHP/3.0.5 on Solaris Try it Leicester Netscape-Enterprise/3.5.1 on IRIX Try it Lincolnshire and Humberside Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on FreeBSD Try it Liverpool Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Liverpool John Moore Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Liverpool Hope Netscape-Enterprise/3.5-For-NetWare on NetWare Try it London Business School Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP2 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it London Guildhall Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) on Solaris Try it London Institute Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it University of London (Institutes) Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Linux Try it London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Loughborough Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Luton Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Apache/1.3b3 on Solaris Try it Manchester Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) Debian/GNU PHP/3.0.16 AuthMySQL/2.20 mod_perl/1.21_03-dev on Linux Try it Manchester Business School Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Medicine, University of Wales College of Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Middlesex Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Napier Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Newcastle Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.1pl2 on Solaris Try it Newman Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) Debian/GNU on Linux Try it Newport Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education (NEWI) Novell-HTTP-Server/3.1R1 on NetWare Try it North London (UNL) Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP1 on Solaris Try it North Riding College Higher Education Corporation Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Northampton, University College Apache/1.2.6 on Solaris Try it Northern College of Education SWS-1.0 on Solaris Try it Northern School of Contemporary Dance Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it University of Northumbria at Newcastle (UNN) Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) PHP/3.0.12 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Norwich School of Art and Design Microsoft-IIS/3.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Nottingham Trent Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Nottingham Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.0 PHP/3.0.16 on Solaris Try it Oxford Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) on Linux Try it Oxford Brookes NCSA/1.5.2 on Solaris Try it Paisley Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris Try it Plymouth Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Portsmouth Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Queen Margaret University College Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Queen Mary and Westfield College Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Reading Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/3.0.16 mod_perl/1.21 on Solaris Try it Ripon and York St John, College of Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Robert Gordon University Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Roehampton Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Rose Bruford College CERN/3.0A on Solaris Try it Royal Academy of Music Apache/1.2.4 on Linux Try it Royal College of Art Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Royal College of Music Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Royal Holloway OSU/3.3b Try it Royal Northern College of Music Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_perl/1.19 PHP/3.0.7 on FreeBSD Try it Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama Netscape-FastTrack/3.02 on IRIX Try it Royal Veterinary College Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it St Andrews Netscape-Enterprise/4.1 on Solaris Try it St George's Hospital Medical School Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it St Mark and St John, College of Apache/1.3.0 on FreeBSD Try it St Mary's College Microsoft-IIS/3.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Salford Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) WebSTAR/4.2(SSL) ID/77067 on MacOS Try it Scottish Agricultural College Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Sheffield Hallam University Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Sheffield Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) AuthMySQL/2.20 PHP/3.0.16 on Solaris Try it South Bank University Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Southampton Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on IRIX Try it Southampton Institute Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Staffordshire Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.0 PHP/3.0.12 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX Try it Stirling Apache/1.3.12 (Win32) on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Strathclyde Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Sunderland Apache/1.2.0 on Solaris Try it Surrey Institute of Art and Design Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Surrey Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Sussex Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.1pl2 mod_ssl/2.6.4 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on Solaris Try it Swansea Institute of Higher Education Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Swansea Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 on Solaris Try it Teeside Apache/1.3.1 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Thames Valley Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP2 on Solaris Try it Trinity and All Saints WebSitePro/2.3.7 (Using iHTML/2.17) on NT4 or Windows 98 Try it Trinity College of Music CERN/3.0A on Solaris Try it Trinity College, Carmarthen Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris Try it Ulster Apache/1.3.12 on Solaris Try it University College London Apache/1.2.6 Try it Warwick Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) mod_perl/1.21 DAV/0.9.15 PHP/3.0.16 on Solaris Try it Welsh College of Music and Drama Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) on Linux Try it West of England, University of (UWE) Apache/1.2.0 on Solaris Try it Westhill College Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 on Solaris Try it Westminster College WebSTAR (could not be determined by Netcraft) Try it Westminster Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on Solaris Try it Wolverhampton Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.0 on Solaris Try it Worcester, University College Apache/1.3.6 (Win32) (could not be determined by Netcraft) Try it Writtle College Netscape-Enterprise/3.5-For-NetWare on NetWare Try it Wye College Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris Try it York Apache/1.3.9 on Solaris Try it Table 2 gives a summary of the Web server software usage, by institution.
Table 2: Web Server Software Usage By Server Software Server Software No.
Institutions Apache 95 Unix platform (93) Aberdeen Aberystwyth APU Aston Bath QUB Birkbeck Birmingham Bournemouth Bradford Brighton Bristol Brunel Cambridge Cardiff UCE Central Lancashire Cheltenham and Gloucester Chester Chichester City Coventry Cranfield DMU Dundee Durham UEA East London Edge Hill Edinburgh Essex Exeter Glamorgan Glasgow Caledonia Glasgow Greewich Harper Adams Heriot-Watt Hertfordshire Huddersfield Hull Keele Kent KCL Kingston Lampeter Lancaster LMU Lincolnshire Liverpool London Guildhall LSE London School of Tropical Medicine Loughborough Luton MMU Manchester University of Wales College of Medicine Newcastle Newman Northampton UNN Nottingham Oxford Plymouth Queen Mary and Westfield Reading Royal Academy of Music Royal College of Art Royal Northern College of Music St George's Hospital Medical School St Mark and St John Salford SHU Sheffield SBU Southampton Staffordshire Strathclyde Sunderland Surrey Sussex Swansea Teeside Trinity College, Carmarthen Ulster UCL Warwick Welsh College of Music and Drama UWE Wolverhampton Wye York MS Windows platform (2) Stirling Worcester, University College IIS 40 MS Windows platform (39) Abertay Bath Spa Buckinghamshire Chilterns Bretton College Canterbury Christ Church UWIC CSSD Derby Falmouth Glasgow School of Art Imperial Institute of Education Kent Institute Liverpool John Moore King Alfred's London Institute University of London (Institutes) UMIST Manchester Business School Middlesex Napier Newport Scarborough Northern School of Contemporary Dance Norwich School of Art and Design Nottingham Trent Portsmouth Queen Margaret University College Ravensbourne College Ripon and York St John Robert Gordon Roehampton Royal College of Music Royal Veterinary College St Mary's College Scottish Agricultural College Southampton Institute Surrey Institute of Art and Design Swansea Institute Unix platform (1) Westminster Netscape 13 Unix platform (10) [Details] Bangor Bolton Leeds Leicester University of North London Paisley RSAMD St Andrews Thames Valley Westhill MS Windows platform (1) [Details] London Business School Netware platform (2) [Details] Liverpool Hope Writtle CERN 3 Unix platform College of Guidance Studies Rose Bruford College Trinity College Of Music NCSA 2 Unix platform Dartington Oxford Brookes SWS 1 Unix platform Northern College WebStar 2 Macintosh platform SOAS Westminster College Novell 1 Netware platform NEWI OSU 1 Digital Alpha/VMS platform Royal Holloway VegServer 1 Unix platform Goldsmiths Website Pro 1 MS Windows platform TASC Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Watch: A Survey Of Web Server Software Used In UK University Web Sites" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur: From Mac to Linux and Back?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: From Mac to Linux and Back?
Buzz data software database apache browser copyright graphics windows linux adobe photoshop cd-rom intranet standards Citation BibTex RIS Tony Grant on why a former Macintosh fan has fallen for Linux.
There are several questions, which have been puzzling me since July 1997.
That was the month I started using OSS (Open Source Software) and I have to thank Apple for pushing me in that direction.
Apple was not making stable operating system software then.
So, along with several thousands of the faithful, I jumped ship.
Didn’t move to the evil empire having already found that by avoiding Microsoft products you did not create too many problems for yourself!
Coming from the Macintosh world and being very GUI-dependent what other choice was there?
After a couple of days on the Web I had learnt all that I needed to know.
You could have your GUI and a Photoshop clone for free (or the cost of a CD-ROM).
Various reasons are advanced to discourage one from taking the path to OSS however: “It is too hard to install and set up”.
There are several colourful expressions in the English language in response to such a claim.
Any person who can run a Microsoft NT/IIS server is much more capable of running an OSS file and/or web server.
The only application that is difficult to set up and administer is sendmail and even that a militant non geek managed to do with documentation found on the WWW.
All system administration is done through a GUI or in a “standard” web browser.
Server administration can be done from any Macintosh or Windows machine on the LAN should the need arise.
Changing network settings does not require inserting a CD-ROM and rebooting every five minutes, for example.
One does wonder where all this rubbish about hard to install’ came from in the first place.
Wasn’t that part of the Microsoft propaganda when they launched Windows NT?
You really believed that?
“But we need a standard” one may complain.
Standards are fine when they do not lead to abuse and monopolies.
Standards are fine while they are “real” standards that do not change every six months to please marketing departments.
Our in house file server runs AppleShare and SMB for Windows.
Our test web server is FrontPage extension capable AND CGI ready for about six different scripting and programming languages.
The workstation can read Macintosh and Windows disks.
We have no problems with files that come from other operating systems.
Now what was that about standards again?
“OSS is not ready for the desktop and the end user”.
Well sorry!
Wrong again!
There are free “for non commercial use” office suites.
Not caring much for suites, we have opted for individual applications.
“There are no serious applications for OSS”;.
Where have you been these last six months?
Netscape Communicator, WordPerfect 8, Wingz 3 are the tip of an iceberg.
Major database systems all have OSS versions most with free licences for non-commercial use.
Of course the web browser is the preferred interface for interacting with the database.
That is what a “standard” really is: data accessible from machines running different operating system software.
Now can someone please explain how higher education drifted into the arms of expensive, proprietary and bug ridden commercial software?
Because it was easier to use?
Cartoon by Paul Mounter.
Copyright IT Week.
We are grateful to IT Week for permission to use this cartoon.
The writing is on the wall for general purpose commercial operating systems.
The danger is OSS with a quality/cost ratio that cannot be beat.
Apple may just scrape through with MacOS X a UNIX kernel with a powerful GUI.
Windows 2000 may-well become available within the first couple of years of the new century.
If it has as many bugs and is as stable as its predecessors, it will take a lot of marketing clout to make people buy it.
This is not to mention the cost of the “upgrade”… For server software the battle is already over.
OSS won!
Don’t believe me?
Check the stats at Netcraft!
I cannot say that I have not looked back one does not simply trash 10 years of experience in graphics software.
Nowadays my Macintosh usage is limited to about twice a week at the office and I no longer own one.
Our money will stay on OSS, but we will not hesitate a second to switch again if something else comes along which better serves our needs.
Are you listening Apple?
Software List Our current software list includes: Operating systems Redhat Linux 5.1 (kernel 2.2.0) Window manager Window Maker (OpenStep clone) with TkDesk Applications WordPerfect 8, Wingz 3, Netscape Communicator 4.5, Adobe Acrobat Reader 3.0, PostgreSQL, The GIMP, Apache 1.3.3 Author Details Tony Grant, Internet/Intranet consultant Anima Productions 4 rue d’Alger 44100 Nantes France Email: tg001@dial.oleane.com Tony Grant is an Internet/Intranet consultant for Anima Productions.
He also teaches Internet related subjects part time at various institutions in Nantes.
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Convergence of Electronic Entertainment and Information Systems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Convergence of Electronic Entertainment and Information Systems Buzz mobile software database wireless zip standardisation browser copyright video graphics windows multimedia visualisation gis mp3 dvd authentication privacy url research standards Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir explores the technology and impact of expanding internet access.
The past Video games have been around for a lot longer than most people realise.
Many people can remember playing games on their ZX Spectrum (1982), or even their cartridge-based Atari VCS (1978).
However, before these systems came into being there had already been a decade of video game development, mostly based in the US and Japan.
The first recognised games console was the Magnavox Odyssey [1] in 1972.
This US-produced machine sold around 100,000 units in three years, and at the time was considered to be revolutionary.
Despite the lack of colour and sound, and the limitations of the system resulting in a maximum of three basic graphics on the screen at any one time, imaginative software led to the Magnavox being widely acknowledged as the first true games console.
As the seventies progressed, several games consoles were launched with varying degrees of success.
A recurring factor in the success (or otherwise) of many of these consoles was the actual software support that they received.
Many consoles, despite being superior in power and capability to others on the market at the same time, generated disappointing sales due to the lack of games.
Surprisingly (or depressingly), this situation still occurs today, and has indirectly led to the Playstation becoming the clear market leader over the last two years.
In the late seventies, Atari launched the VCS system, which can be considered to be the first mass-market dedicated games console.
As well as bringing in-home gaming to the masses, the console also caused the emergence of several games-related companies and enterprises that are still going strong today, most notably Namco.
Also in the late 70’s, (Sir) Clive Sinclair appeared on the scene.
Fresh from producing some of the first digital watches and calculators, Sinclair moved into the small home computer market.
The first mass-market Sinclair computer was the ZX80 (based around the ZX chip, which was named after…well, look at the two letters in the bottom left corner of your keyboard).
The ZX80 possessed less than 1K of memory and extremely limited visuals, but still proved popular.
Surprisingly, a close version of the same 8-bit chip was used inside the Nintendo Gameboy, the world’s most successful handheld games console, which still sells strongly today.
In 1981, the predictably named ZX81 was launched, to adverts claiming that the computer could run a nuclear power station.
The machine, which resembled a rather fat door wedge, possessed 1K of memory, a membrane-based keyboard, and visuals that were still limited but could be manipulated into surprisingly good (black and white) graphics.
Several companies produced software and hardware, thus enabling people to attach a keyboard and a memory expansion pack offering a “massive” 16K of memory.
Consensus at the time in our school playground was that no-one was ever going to write something that would fill 16K of memory and thus the add-on was a waste of money.
In 1982 Sinclair launched the Spectrum [2], and home-based gaming was changed forever.
The machine came in two flavours, 16K and a “massive” 48K.
The machine was a huge success, and is still many people’s first clear memory of video gaming at home.
Despite the rubber keyboard, the basic “variations on a bee trapped in a jar” sounds available, the official printer consisting of a device which “burned” text onto a silver-coated paper, and the fact that games took up to five minutes to load from a tape recorder, the Spectrum was a runaway success.
It is notable that many of the top games designers and developers of the last half a decade from the UK and Europe first cut their teeth on a Spectrum.
The format was supported by a wide range of established and new games producing companies.
Perhaps the most celebrated of these was “Ultimate (Play the Game)” [3], who produced a string of hugely popular titles, including Jetpac, Manic Miner, Atic Atac [4], Lunar Jetman and UnderWurlde.
Many thousands of children managed to persuade their parents that the Spectrum could help them with their schoolwork, whereas on purchase it was used almost exclusively as a games machine (this trend probably continues today).
It is notable, in these days of games costing between 30 and 60 pounds, to remember the outrage when the price of games for the Spectrum “broke through” the 5 pound barrier.
There are many fan sites dedicated to the Spectrum out there on the Internet.
One of the best is the Jasper ZX Spectrum Emulator site [5], which allows you easily to play faithful conversions of Spectrum games through your Web browser on your PC.
However, the Spectrum did not have it all its own way.
The US company Commodore launched the VIC-20, followed by the C64.
This had a “ridiculously excessive” 64K of memory and better, though far fewer, games than the Spectrum.
However, with purists, some games developers, and people who wanted to use a proper keyboard, the C64 was the preferred option in the early eighties.
By this time, a large number of games companies were thriving in the UK, Japan, the US and to a lesser extent mainland Europe.
Many of these companies would last less than two years, due to the constant need to produce and market large quantities of titles.
Even with the limited capabilities of the machines of the day, games were taking an increasingly large amount of time to develop.
Throughout the first half of the eighties, games-based machines from a range of companies were launched to varying degrees of success.
Some proved popular due to the quality of their graphics and key titles being emerged for them; others, most notably the Acorn BBC micro [6], proved popular due to their perceived educational capabilities.
The BBC micro, despite being nearly 400 pounds, was extremely popular, largely as it was used widely in schools and actively supported by the BBC.
The BBC micro also spawned several well-known software titles, including possibly the first UK game that truly became part of a mass publicly-aware culture: Elite [7].
This was a fusion of outer space trading, “shoot ‘em up” and wandering, in an extremely non-linear fashion, through a beautifully rendered and vast 3D universe.
However, around 1984, the video games console market took a dramatic downturn, as machines more oriented to “practical work” became much more popular, especially in the US.
Large numbers of people moved away from purchasing straight games-only consoles to machines on which they could use simple word processing, spreadsheet and other applications.
In the UK, Amstrad in particular started to produce machines that genuinely combined games playing with work and business applications.
These machines possessed full and proper keyboards, and tape recorders or disc drives that were integrated into the machine to form a single piece of hardware.
In addition, the early to mid eighties saw the marketing of machines by two Japanese companies in particular which were emerging in this field, namely Nintendo and Sega.
Throughout the latter half of the eighties, established console and computer manufacturers such as Atari, Sinclair and Amstrad launched new machines in order to try and gain a decisive market edge.
Hardly any of these machines are in widespread use today, though some are still fondly remembered by many people; these include the Amiga, which is ferociously defended and supported by a small but passionate number of users and developers to this day, the Sega Mega Drive and the Nintendo SNES.
In addition, by this time certain characters and brands were starting to become established and used across an “ancestry” of consoles; these included Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mario (as in Donkey Kong).
Into the nineties, still more consoles appeared.
By this time, consoles were becoming increasingly complex, but most still achieved only limited success due to the lack of supporting software.
Handheld machines also became widespread, most notably the Nintendo Gameboy which was sold with Tetris (to many games experts, arguably the most addictive game invented to date).
Around the mid-nineties, Sony released the Playstation [8], the machine that was to become the closest yet to an “industry standard games console” in the world.
Nintendo followed towards the end of the nineties with a 64-bit machine, the unimaginatively named Nintendo 64, while the end of the decade saw the launch of Sega’s Dreamcast.
Which brings us to the present… The present The computer and video games industry can be considered to be relatively mature, and comparable, in terms of trends, growth and turnover, to the music industry.
In the UK, over 2 million games for consoles and the PC were sold in the week before Christmas last, generating some 50 million pounds in turnover.
Console sales continue to rise, and characters from the gaming world, such as Lara Croft, have entered popular culture alongside pop and sports stars.
Games of today People who have not played or seen computer and video games in the last few years are in for quite a surprise when they see the standard of graphics, detail, playability and speed in some of the leading games of last year and this.
Each console has at least a handful of games that could be considered classic, or defining.
These include a trio of shooting / stealth games, namely GoldenEye (Nintendo 64), Half Life (PC) and Metal Gear Solid (Playstation); and role playing games and fantasy adventures, most notably the Zelda series and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo, and the Final Fantasy series on the Playstation.
In addition there are fighting games, most notably the breathtakingly beautiful Soul Calibur [9], on the Dreamcast, and racing car games and simulators, of which Gran Turismo and Gran Turismo II on the Playstation are streets ahead of the rest (excusing the pun).
Multiplayer games continue to be popular.
Clones of games such as Doom proliferate on both PCs and games consoles, though only on PCs can such games be played either remotely, or (as is more often the case) across a university or business network.
There is a school of thought that argues that remote playing of such games is a purer experience, as you cannot see what the other players can see, as you would if you were huddled around the same console and television.
However, an opposing point of view argues for the increased enjoyment that can be derived from beating someone who is in the same room, or sitting next to you.
Games consoles of today There are currently three main games consoles that dominate the market: in ascending order of processer power, these are the Sony Playstation, the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Dreamcast.
The Sony Playstation The Sony Playstation has been in existence for roughly half a decade and is by far the most popular games console in the world.
Sales of the Playstation have passed 6 million in the UK alone, which equates to roughly one in every four households.
Despite lacking the power of the other two contemporary rivals, the Playstation still outsells them both.
In 1999, it sold over half a million units in the UK, compared with just over 50,000 Nintendo 64 consoles and nearly 90,000 Dreamcast consoles (though the latter was not launched until October).
The Playstation is a CD-based machine, complete with a library of games numbering some several thousand.
However, of these games, the vast majority are of a poor quality, or are sequels or clones of particular genres.
Football manager simulations in particular are frequently launched on this platform.
The Nintendo 64 The Nintendo 64 [10], has been in existence for roughly three years.
Sales of the console have paled in comparison to those of the Playstation, despite the 64 being a superior machine.
This is mainly due to the lack of games produced by Nintendo and third party developers.
Frequently during its lifespan, several months have elapsed between the release of software titles which could be considered to be “classic” or “very good”.
Despite this lack of key titles, those that were released are often considered to be amongst some of the best games ever released.
It is especially notable that Edge magazine (considered to be the UK gaming magazine of distinction), in its “Top 100 games of all time” listing in the January 2000 issue, selected Nintendo 64 games for all top three places.
These were, in ascending order, GoldenEye, Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Despite a relatively poor uptake in the UK (the US being the only country with respectable N64 sales), the console has many fans, and classic titles are still being produced on an occasional basis.
The “sequel” to GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, is especially awaited.
The console itself is cartridge based, as opposed to CD based.
This has several advantages, namely the elimination of game loading times and the need for memory cards to save game positions.
However, it has several disadvantages, the most notable being the higher cost of development and the higher cost of the overall game to manufacture and purchase, as opposed to games for the Playstation and the Dreamcast.
The Sega Dreamcast The Dreamcast [11] is the newest console, launched worldwide last year, with a UK launch taking place in the autumn of 1999.
Many people, including the author of this article, saw Soul Calibur in action on the Dreamcast and immediately handed over 200 pounds.
This bought a standard CD based console with one controller.
The console generated wide excitement at the time of its launch, due to its capabilities and the visual splendour of some of the games being developed for it; however, an infrequent release of quality games for this console has resulted in a loss of some momentum in the last few months.
The Dreamcast comes complete with a built-in modem, though this offers a relatively slow rate of online access equivalent to two-thirds the speed of contemporary PC modems.
Despite the launch of the Dreamcast being delayed in the UK for three weeks while the online service was optimised, users have still to see any games which can fully exploit the online capabilities by allowing people to play against someone else in the same country (or even abroad).
The Dreamcast has several interesting add-ons, including a keyboard (which is not essential, but makes using the in-house developed and supplied web browser much easier to use!)
and VMUs.
The VMU (visual memory unit) allows game positions to be saved, and also allows mini-games to be uploaded and downloaded from the console, or even from a select few arcade machines.
The Dreamcast is similar to the Nintendo 64 in that despite the lack of games releases, it boasts several titles that can be considered to be leading edge or classic.
These include the previously mentioned Soul Calibur, Shenmue, and Crazy Taxi.
Handhelds The handheld game console market is still dominated by the Nintendo Game Boy, which has been gradually upgraded over time.
The newest incarnation is a version with a colour display [12].
The Gameboy has been recently joined in the marketplace by the Neo-Geo, a handheld console with more detailed and faster graphics.
However, the large library of games already available for the Gameboy ensures that it remains the market leader in this particular sub-division.
In addition, Nintendo hold the rights to Pokemon [13], a game that combines the fun of collecting football cards (except that you collect pocket monsters) with the combat scenario of games such as Top Trumps (in that your monster has to beat your opponent’s monster for you to capture it).
The Gameboy hosts two Pokemon games, Blue and Red; to complete the game, users need either to buy both versions, or compete with someone holding a different version through a connector cable that attaches Gameboy units for multiuser playing.
Not surprisingly, Pokemon is, to the average six to twelve year old, an incredibly addictive game, and with marketing tie-ins such as clothing, songs, movies, collector cards and other ephemera, the income generated from Pokemon and Gameboy alone should ensure that Nintendo is active in the games console and software market for several years to come, irrelevant of other circumstances.
The PC Conspicuous by its absence from this article so far has been the PC.
This is not to say that the PC has not been used for gaming purposes: indeed, it has been a major games machine for the past decade and more.
However, the PC has one extremely major flaw which has meant that many of the top games software houses in the world have shied away from it as the platform of choice: instability.
The PC can come in many flavours, with many different levels of graphics capability, memory capability, hard drive capacity, and other variables.
Producing games for the PC requires a difficult balance between producing a game that will work on as wide a variety of machine permutations (and therefore a wide target market) as possible, while still being “cutting edge” enough to look impressive against other contemporary releases.
Therefore, the PC loses out to games consoles with regard to stability and the homogenous nature of said console for developing software.
For example, with the Nintendo 64, there is one console with two options for the memory; either normal, or with an expansion pack.
The games developer knows that developing a game that will work on one Nintendo 64 will work on any other.
In addition, a games console is ridiculously easy to use, compared to a PC: Put game into console Turn console on Play game Compare this to a PC, where there is often an installation procedure, as well as patches to cover bugs and to ensure that the game operates on a wider permutation of machines.
For ease of use, the console wins hands down.
But… The PC has several advantages over the games console.
These include: a hard drive, on which large amounts of information can be exchanged.
Compare to a games console, which usually has no hard drive, and memory cards are bought and used to hold “saved positions” (apart from the Nintendo 64, which stores saved positions within the games cartridge).
non-games software, which can exploit the hard drive and enable people to carry out tasks in addition to playing games, such as word processing, spreadsheet work, and programming.
a keyboard!
Simple, but very relevant.
As the PC has a keyboard, large numbers of strategy games which require text or other complex commands have been produced for it.
These include flight simulators (the Microsoft series in particular being well known), battle simulators, business and political simulators (most notably Sim City) and similar games.
nowadays, PCs are usually either attached to a network or to the Internet via a modem.
Within Higher Education, this has been the case for several decades, hence the use of PCs for online gaming of varying complexity and popularity, from within Higher Education institutions, for several years.
Until the Dreamcast was launched, games consoles were usually “stand alone” devices, being unable to connect to each other or the Internet.
The future In this final section, we examine some of the hardware that will be available in the next year or two, and identify a few topics of relevance to UK Higher Education.
Playstation II The Playstation II was recently launched in Japan to a fanatical reception [14].
Despite heavy production of the console in preceeding months, many shops and stores received insufficient supply.
The number of units sold is still unknown, though Sony were hoping to sell over a million in the first weekend of launch.
The console contains a DVD player, as opposed to the CD player of conventional consoles.
Therefore, people can play DVD’s and CD’s on the console, as well as play games.
Previews and demonstrations of games in development hint strongly at effects, graphics and (hopefully) gameplay as yet unexperienced on any games console or arcade platform.
For example, the effect of ripples through water has been detailed to such a degree that it nearly impossible to distinguish from video footage of real water.
However, the line-up of games at the launch of the console has received mixed reviews, with the main game (Ridge Racer V) being a “safe” sequel to an established family of games, as opposed to being especially innovative or original.
In addition, the launch of the console did not go without incident, as playing certain games on the console can lead to it not being able to play DVD’s, a problem currently being addressed by Sony.
The strategy for the Playstation II is heavily centred on online capabilities and opportunities.
In 2001, Sony intends launching its own broadband network, through which Playstation II owners will be able to download games, movies and music.
The extent to which this will occur is difficult to judge at the moment, as will be the time when it takes off in the UK.
This is because the console manufacturers, and many of the overseas games manufacturers, tend to launch their hardware and software in Japan, then the US, then several months later in Europe.
The current estimated date for the launch of the Playstation II in the UK is the end of September 2000.
Dreamcast The Dreamcast looks likely to gain steady but unspectacular support over the next year.
With conversions of several key arcade games taking place, and the US and European launch of Shenmue at some point in 2000, there are some positive things to look forward to.
However, the online capabilities of the Dreamcast are currently disappointingly underused; in the UK, it is not yet possible to play a Dreamcast game against someone (remotely) elsewhere via the modem.
During 2000, several additional hardware devices, including a ZIP drive, digital camera and a microphone will be launched for the Dreamcast, thus increasing the non-gaming use of the console.
In addition, Sega plan to allow games to be downloaded directly to the console, which theoretically will make games more affordable for the Dreamcast.
Several key games for the Dreamcast will emerge throughout the year, thus enabling it to have a viable future for at least 18 months to 2 years.
However, competition from the Playstation II my prove particularly tough for the Dreamcast, and there is an increasing view that it will take a combination of several more classic arcade conversions and the full potential of the online capabilities being realised if the Dreamcast will survive well into the new century.
Dolphin The Dolphin will be the next console to be launched by Nintendo.
Various dates for its launch have been mentioned or rumoured, but it looks most likely to be launched at some point in 2001.
With the continual problem of the lack of games for the Nintendo 64, there are some doubts as to how much of an impact the Dolphin can make on the games market, especially as the Playstation II will probably be an established platform at the time of the launch.
There is no firm news on what, if any, online capabilities the Dolphin will possess.
However, Rare, producers of many of the top games for the Nintendo 64, are already hiring people to work on Dolphin related games.
The involvement of Rare alone, developers of GoldenEye and Banjo Kazooie, will be a significant boost to the credibility and anticipation surrounding this particular console.
The X-Box Microsoft has recently distributed press releases about its own entry into the games console arena, named the X-Box [15].
The X-Box is due to appear in the autumn of 2001 [16].
Details of the console or PC are currently still sketchy, though a brief technical specification has been released.
The X-Box will try and combine the best of both worlds, in that it will provide a stable and homogenous environment for games developers to work on, while offering some of the practical non-game features of a PC, such as a hard drive.
With the backing of the wealth and marketing acumen of Microsoft, and the widespread interest shown in the gaming industry, the X-Box can be viewed as a potentially significant machine.
Interestingly, Microsoft already have some experience in the games console market, as they produce Windows CE, the operating system installed on the Sega Dreamcast.
The PC As the years move on, so the PC becomes more powerful and cheaper.
Despite the problems about the lack of standardisation within PCs mentioned earlier in this article, the platform is still used heavily, and developed for, as a games machine.
An ad in the newspaper today from a well-known own-brand PC supplier gives details of a PC for sale for 1300 pounds.
The package contains the usual peripherals, such as a colour scanner, printer and joystick.
In addition, it includes a DVD drive, a 19 inch colour monitor, a TV tuner with teletext, decent loudspeakers for playing music and a video camera.
Software allows you to watch TV programmes on the monitor, and record them onto the hard drive or a disc through an optional CD re-writer.
In addition, there is a modem which, of course, allows you to download music, multimedia and other files… Convergence In the hardware described in the last section, we have an example of where the PC has converged with the television programme delivery and recording mechanism (making the video recorder partially redundant), and doubling as a CD and DVD player (also making those pieces of equipment redundant).
While most of these features have some drawbacks as opposed to their stand-alone equivalents e.g.
the DVD player in most PCs is not as high quality as most DVD players bought purely for that purpose, the “bundling” of this hardware is of some interest.
For example, a student may be watching an Open University programme on a window in the corner of their monitor.
As the presenter explains the migratory wanderings of whales, the student could be manipulating a model of said whale, in a 3D visualisation plug-in, through a web browser.
The student could record the programme onto disc and watch it later, pausing and rewinding at important moments.
A web search [17] then reveals new web sites and resources concerning the particular type of whale; the student could also listen to a CD of whale songs through the console CD player, and integrate some of the music, along with stills from the recorded TV programme, into a web-based report that she is writing.
Finally, after the page is mounted on a web server running from the console, for light relief the student relaxes by downloading and playing a game of “Whale Attack”.
How much of the aforementioned scenario will become reality in the next few years, and how much of this reality will be caused by the push of the games console industry, is impossible to say.
As well as the inevitable technical problems, there are also major problems regarding copyright and licencing, which may hinder “true” convergence (where material supplied in one format e.g.
music on a DVD, can be converted and integrated into some other format or resource e.g.
a web page or a programme).
While convergence will mean a reduction in the number of “gadgets” and pieces of hardware in the house, there could also be conflicts of interest.
For example, in a typical household, young Johnny may want to play the latest Prodigy DVD, while Dad Bob wants to look for Web-based information on Rock Climbing.
Meanwhile, Ruth may want to play Soul Calibur online against a friend in Barbados, while Jane may want to find and book a holiday in Norway.
Clearly there is a situation where the ideal of one piece of hardware covering all of the “infotainment” options in the house is not enough; every person really needs their own converged system.
Issues for Higher Education There are several issues directly or indirectly relating to the convergence of electronic information and gaming systems that UK Higher Education needs to consider.
Three of these of particular relevance in the next year or two are briefly described below.
Use of the networks The first and the most serious implication of the convergence of games consoles and contemporary electronic information service access “consoles” i.e.
the PC, is that of the use of the networks.
The use of the networks for online gaming is in no way new; to various extents, online gaming has been in existence in UK academia for some twenty years.
One UK University Librarian recently disclosed that 40 per cent of the internal university network traffic is suspected of being accountable to online and other games playing.
Add to this potentially unethical uses e.g.
online pornography, the large increase in down and up-loading mp3 music files (especially since Napster was created) and there is a situation where only a minority of the network traffic within a typical university could be either indirectly or directly work related!
As online gaming becomes both more sophisticated in terms of the games (thus impacting on the amount of bandwidth used), and more popular in terms of the number of people who are aware and participate in this genre, so the amount of bandwidth eaten up by gaming will increase.
How this will impact on JANET as a whole is difficult to predict over even the short term; however, several key online games releases this year, most notably Black and White by the Lionhead games house, will put the capabilities of the academic network to the test.
The use of esoteric browsers Rightly or wrongly, the interfaces of many electronic information services are based around what looks acceptable through both Internet Explorer and Netscape.
However, if large numbers of people start accessing and using these services and resources through new and alternative browsers, such as those available with newer online compliant consoles like the Dreamcast and the Playstation II, then problems may occur.
For example, the Dreamcast browser, while adequate for email and basic web browsing, is not able to support (or absorb) some of the newer multimedia viewers and applications, thus rendering some web sites and web based resources either illegible or not at all.
With the advent of mobile phones and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) based technologies, there may therefore be issues regarding what browsers are used to access resources and services.
The conventional approach, of nearly all accesses being through variations of Netscape and Internet Explorer, may have to be revisited and re-examined, possibly in the next year and certainly within the next two.
In addition, some browsers may encounter problems with authentication systems, such as those used to provide access to various bibliographic databases supported by the JISC.
Having said that, there is a counter-argument that questions whether games consoles without the addition of large scale storage devices such as hard drives can be taken seriously as electronic information access points.
Location of access points Four factors in particular are currently creating a rapid shift from networked access mostly occuring in a place of work such as an office, or a university computing laboratory, to the home or study room.
It is possible that the use of WAP through mobile phones may soon produce a fifth factor, but this is unlikely in the next year or two.
The four factors are: the advent of low-cost consoles that can provide online access (although only one, and with some limitations, does so at the moment).
There is strong evidence that a substantial number of people who have bought the Dreamcast, especially those in the over 50’s age range, did so as it is by far the cheapest piece of hardware that can provide online access.
the continuing fall in price of the PC.
the continuing fall in the cost of online access, to the extent that several companies now offer free online access and phone charges, albeit usually with some conditions attached.
the networking of the halls of residence in many Universities, thus offering students the ability to connect to the network in the privacy of their own room (essential for some non-work pursuits) with their own PC or console.
How this factors will affect the design of electronic information services and the networks through which these services will operate is unclear.
What is clear is that the concept of the “Desktop PC at work” being by far the predominant method of accessing electronic information is becoming rapidly outdated; instead, the concept of “The user will access resources from the physical environment, such as the home, that is most comfortable and convenient for them” is fast becoming significant.
Here in the newly-formed Centre for Digital Library Research [18] in the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, the majority of staff own (and use) a games console or machine, be it a PC, Dreamcast, Playstation or Nintendo 64.
We are quite keen to experiment with this technology, especially those consoles providing networked access such as the Dreamcast and the Playstation II, to see how they can impact on the use of electronic library services, resources and information.
Through representation on the JISC Technology Change Group, we look forward to contributing our experiences to the JISC Strategy Working Group, and working with other stakeholders in this rapidly developing area; contact us if you are interested.
References Magnavox Odyssey information page http://www.iaw.on.ca/~kaos/systems/Odyssey/ The World of Spectrum http://www.void.demon.nl/links.html Ultimate http://www.rare.co.uk/retro/ultimate/ Atic Atac http://www.rare.co.uk/retro/ultimate/aticatac/ Jasper emulator, enabling people to play Spectrum games on their PC through their web browser http://www.spectrum.lovely.net/ BBC Micro retro page http://www.arrgh.co.uk/hardware/bbc/index.html Elite web site maintained by one of the original game authors http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/clara.net/i/a/n/iancgbell/webspace/elite/ Sony Playstation http://www.playstation.com/ Soul Calibur web site, including mpeg clips of some of the characters in exhibition mode http://www.soulcalibur.com/ Nintendo European Web site http://www.nintendo.de/ Sega Europe http://194.176.201.21/english/se_frameset.htm Game Boy Colour official Web site http://www.nintendo.com/gb/ Pokemon Web page http://pokemon.com/games/redblue.html BBC news item regarding the launch of the Playstation http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia%2Dpacific/newsid%5F665000/665765.stm Microsoft X-box http://www.xbox.com/ BBC news item regarding the release of the X-box http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid%5F671000/671973.stm A successful search for quality Internet-based resources concerning whales http://link.bubl.ac.uk/ISC8041/ CDLR: Centre for Digital Library Research http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Author Details   John Kirriemuir, Funding and Public Relations Co-ordinator, Centre for Digital Library Research, Andersonian Library, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow Email: john.kirriemuir@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Acknowledgements The author thanks Jane Barton, Abdul Jabbar, Bob Kemp and Ruth Wilson from the Centre for Digital Library Research, University of Strathclyde, as well as Martin Hamilton from the University of Loughborough, for useful comments that helped to shape and direct this article.
Article Title: “Convergence of Electronic Entertainment and Information Systems” Author: John Kirriemuir Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/convergence/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Buzz javascript html database rss cataloguing intranet url standards Citation BibTex RIS Roddy Macleod on EEVL's engagement with RSS channels.
Background EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Hear ye!
Hear ye!
Hear ye!
News about news.
In the last EEVL column I mentioned the fact that an RSS channel is available which includes additions to EEVL’s Internet Resource Catalogue.
There is now a second RSS channel, called ‘EEVL News’ which provides the latest news from the EEVL Service.
Information about both RSS channels is available from the Working with EEVL pages.
For those who understand RSS and how it works, this is probably enough detail to enable the embedding of these channels into relevant Web sites.
For the rest of us, what does this actually mean?
The best way to explain this is to actually do it right here.
So, I will include the following HTML code relevant to the latest additions to EEVL’s internet resource catalogue into this Ariadne article: <!–New on EEVL.
Latest 15 RecordsRSS–> <script src= “http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rss/viewer/?rss=http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-on-eevl.rss"> </script> <!–End RSS –> and the result will be what appears immediately below: The above is a ‘live’ feed of the latest 15 records which have been added to EEVL’s Internet Resources Catalogue.
It will automatically change every time a new record is added to the catalogue.
This sort of news feed might be useful for inclusion in an intranet, or a departmental or faculty Web site, or in a library Web site.
To show the new EEVL News feed, I will include the following HTML code into this Ariadne article: <!–News from the EEVL Service RSS–> <script type=“text/javascript” src= “http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rss/viewer/?rss=http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss/latest-news.rss"> </script> <!–End RSS –> The above is a ‘live’ feed of news from the EEVL service.
If we at EEVL add a new item of news, then the list above will change the next time anyone views this Ariadne page.
This news feed might be useful for anyone with a subject specific service which wanted to allow its users to see the latest happenings at EEVL.
Using these two RSS feeds allows EEVL to distribute news about the new records being added to the Internet Resource Catalogue, plus news about the service.
These developments will shortly be reflected in a redesigned ‘News’ section on the EEVL site.
For those who might want to know more about RSS in general, UKOLN maintain a RSS-xpress site which provides an RSS channel editor and a directory of UK RSS channels.
Other News There is a new feature on EEVL’s Websites Search Engine.
This search engine searches the full text of the Web pages of the sites listed in the EEVL Catalogue of quality Internet resources in engineering, mathematics and computing.
The Websites search engine therefore allows more in-depth searches than the EEVL Catalogue, and is a useful fall-back for instances where no results are found in the EEVL Catalogue.
The new feature is that each search result now includes a link to the EEVL record which was originally gathered by the search robot.
As an example, searching the Websites Search Engine for the word ‘landfill’ results in a number of hits.
One of these is: Quarries & Landfill Geotechnical (CAN The Home of Rope Access) score: 9 http://www.can.ltd.uk/geotech/quarry.htm Quarries & Landfill CAN Geotechnical have worked extensively on both active and exhausted quarries.
Active The requirement for stabilisation work in active quarries is limited.
In most cases, if a rock mass is causing concern it can simply be rem Gathered from: CAN Ltd The above result indicates that the word ‘landfill’ will be found (nine times as indicated in the ‘score’) on the page http://www.can.ltd.uk/geotech/quarry.htm and that this page was ‘gathered’ or harvested, for the Websites search engine, from the EEVL Catalogue record for CAN Ltd. EEVL’s two specialist databases, the JET Impingement Database and the Liquid Crystal Database, have recently been incorporated into the standard EEVL site.
As mentioned in the last issue of Ariadne, scoping of community-based services in engineering and mathematics is continuing.
If you are interested in taking part in focus groups to discuss engineering community services, please contact the EEVL Hub Development Officer, Malcolm Moffat, at M.Moffat@hw.ac.uk.
New Virtual Training Suite tutorials for Further Education Building on the success of the 40 higher education tutorials launched last year, new “teach yourself” Web tutorials aimed specifically at users in further education have been launched.
These tutorials have been written by FE practitioners from colleges around the UK.
Three of these new tutorials cover subjects relevant to EEVL.
They are: Internet for Construction, Internet for Engineering (General and Automotive) and Internet for Information and Communication Technology.
The tutorials offer step-by-step instruction in Internet searching and information skills, such as critical evaluation.
Online quizzes and interactive exercises lighten the learning experience and there is a glossary of Internet terms and a “Links Basket” to collect a personal list of useful Web links.
SearchLT Engineering In the last issue of Ariadne I reported on the new SearchLT Engineering service which is helping lecturers select and access learning and teaching resources.
I also explained how SearchLT is automatically cross-searched from the Engineering Section of EEVL.
A number of new records have since been added to SearchLT, and a press release detailing the service is now available.
The FAILTE Team, who developed SearchLT, are currently evaluating the service and collating the responses they have received from academics.
This will shortly be published as a report.
Record response to EEVL’s £7,500 book give-away The response to EEVL’s recent Free Book Promotion was fantastic.
At more than 12,500, the number of entries was more than double that of last years’ equivalent event, which itself was commended in the LA/Emerald PR & Marketing Awards 2001.
Books are now being sent to the winners by the publishers.
EEVL would like to thank all entrants, everyone who helped by distributing fliers, and also the following sponsors for their support: Butterworth-Heinemann, Kluwer, Pearson, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Computer Bulletin, Engineering magazine, E2 the career guide, and Mathematics Today.
A press release about the promotion is available.
Author Details   Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: “EEVL: Hear Ye!
Hear Ye!” Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Windows NT Explorer Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Windows NT Explorer Buzz data software javascript html database browser sql copyright cataloguing windows hypertext linux perl php licence cookie intranet url ldap x.500 Citation BibTex RIS Brett Burridge discusses Active Server Pages (ASP) one of the most useful facilities provided by Windows NT server.
This column is intended to bring users' attention to the value of employing Windows NT server technology within their institution.
This issue covers Active Server Pages (ASP) one of the most useful benefits of having a Windows NT based web server.
Most web developers will encounter ASP through its inclusion with Microsoft's Internet Information Server [1] the most popular Windows NT web server software.
Internet Information Server is free, although you have to purchase a licence for Windows NT Server.
However, ASP is by no means confined to Microsoft web servers or operating systems; a product from Chili!Soft [2] called Chili!ASP allows ASP to be run in a variety of non-Microsoft environments.
What are Active Server Pages?
ASP pages are HTML documents that usually have a .asp file extension, and have server-side scripting nested around the HTML source.
When an ASP document is requested from the server, the ASP scripting is interpreted, and the script output, together with the HTML contained within the document, are sent to the client's browser.
This makes ASP similar to PHP3 [3], or, to some extent, the Server-Side Includes that are a feature of most web servers.
ASP commands are usually inserted in the HTML markup between <%%> tags.
So a basic ASP-enabled web page might look like this: <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>A simple ASP web page</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <%Response.Write("<H1><FONT COLOR=red>Hello World!</FONT></H1>")%> </BODY> </HTML> In a web browser, this basic web page will be displayed as shown in Figure 1.
Since all ASP code is executed on the server, it can also be used as an alternative to client-side JavaScript for those everyday functions such as validating the input from forms.
This is useful because the ASP scripts will be completely browser independent.
Figure 1: The simple ASP web page as displayed in a web browser The advantage of using embedded scripting is that you can write the embedded ASP code in the HTML editing mode of your website creation application, then switch to a WYSIWYG page layout view in order to work on the appearance of the page.
FrontPage 98 is one such application that allows easy switching between the WYSIWYG and HTML source view, and as long as you are aware of its idiosyncrasies, it won't mess up your ASP scripting.
Alternatively, Visual InterDev [4] or EasyASP [5] are two specialised ASP editors that are worth considering.
Figure 2: Visual InterDev 6 is a specialised ASP editor What can ASP be used for?
Out of the box, ASP contains six objects that can be referenced in web pages: The Application object contains several methods for controlling web based applications.
Using these methods it is (for example) possible to ensure that certain scripts are executed on the server whenever a client requests a document in a specified part of your website.
The ObjectContext object allows ASP to be integrated with Microsoft Transaction Server (useful in the creation of robust web based applications).
The Request object is used to retrieve information that the client sends to the server during a HTTP request.
This object makes it straightforward to retrieve HTTP headers, cookies, and information sent either through the query string, or from a web form.
The Response object is used to send information back to the client.
This includes text, images, cookies, HTTP headers and other information.
The Server object can be used to create instances of other server components, which are of use in the creation of web applications.
There are also invaluable methods for converting strings to URL encoded text (which should be used when passing information between web pages using query strings).
Finally, the Session object allows state to be maintained between concurrent HTTP transactions from the same client machine.
This saves having to keep passing certain variables between web pages by use of forms or querystrings.
The Session object is particularly useful when creating complex web applications, or sites where users have to log in before gaining access to the content.
As well as these objects, ASP is a complete scripting language in its own right.
The default scripting language is Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript); a subset of Microsoft's Visual Basic.
VBScript is the most popular language for writing ASP, and the vast majority of sample websites and printed books use this scripting language.
Internet Information Server is also supplied with the facility for writing ASP scripts in JScript (a relative of the popular JavaScript scripting language).
If you install ActivePerl [6] on your server, you will also be able to use PerlScript, a version of the popular Perl scripting language.
PerlScript extends the functionality of ASP considerably most existing Perl scripts can be ported to PerlScript, and it is also useful to be able to use the large number of Perl modules available.
Web applications A common use of ASP is to link websites to other applications or services.
This is usually achieved through the use of server components.
Components can be rapidly created using a programming language such as Microsoft's Visual Basic.
Alternatively, there are plenty of existing components that can be used.
To get you started, Internet Information Server comes with a few these can be used for database access, content rotation, finding client browser capabilities etc.
Alternatively, a wide variety of 3rd party components are available [7], many of which have been released as freeware.
One area where ASP is particularly strong is in the area of database connectivity.
The ability of Internet Information Server to link a website to any ODBC compliant database (and this includes Microsoft Access and SQL Server databases) through the use of a server component is arguably the most desirable feature of ASP.
The feature is particularly welcome, given the strong rise in demand for database driven Intranet and Internet sites.
It is also possible to use server components to connect ASP to Exchange Server.
The Outlook Web Access supplied with Microsoft Exchange Server uses ASP to create a completely web-based version of Outlook 98: Figure 3: Outlook Web Access a sophisticated web application that makes extensive use of ASP Resources There is an abundance of great resources for ASP developers, and the online ASP community is flourishing.
The following websites are good starting places: 15 Seconds [8], activeserverpages.com [9], and the ASP Alliance [10].
Wrox Press Inc. [11] publish some of the best printed books about ASP.
Some of their recent offerings ([12], [13]) cover emerging technologies, such as combining ASP with the Active Directory Services Interfaces [14].
Summary and Conclusions The web has always allowed the use of server-side scripts or executable files to provide the ability to extend the functionality of websites.
Although some impressive applications can be created this way, development times can be long, and a great deal of technical expertise is required.
By contrast, ASP has two major advantages over these development schemes; speed of development and ease of use.
By basing ASP on VBScript, Microsoft has opened up the world of server-side web development to the millions of Visual Basic developers out there.
One major downside with ASP is that specialist ASP developers are hard to come by, and for many Unix/Linux experts, adjusting to Windows NT systems can be problematic.
That said, ASP documentation is excellent, and in my opinion is far better than anything written about creating server-side scripts using Perl on Unix systems.
A few people are also sceptical about the abilities of ASP.
But the fact that ASP is now used on plenty of high profile websites should give people confidence to use ASP within their institution.
Examples of ASP users include Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), Tesco (www.tesco.co.uk), Compaq (www.compaq.com) and UEFA (www.uefa.com).
At Essex in particular, ASP technology is proving to be an essential tool to have in the web technology toolbox.
Several of our users are starting to explore the potential of directly linking databases to the web, and ASP is proving to be invaluable in the provision of facilities to link databases to the web.
Current uses for ASP at Essex include*: The Essex web search facility [15] relies on ASP to provide the web front-end to the Site Server search catalogues.
ASP provides a web interface to several Exchange Server Public Folders, allowing email mailing lists to be read through a web browser.
ASP validates many web based forms, preventing the entry of spurious or inaccurate data.
Lots of small ASP scripts have been created for doing routine tasks, like automatically adding the name of the document author to all the web pages within the Computing Service website.
* Many of these examples are on "Intranet" sites that have access restrictions contact me if you are interested in viewing such examples.
Some future uses that have been discussed: Active Directory Services Interfaces and ASP could be used to replace the X.500 web phonebook with a more user friendly solution based on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
The integration of ASP with Internet Information Server and hence the Windows NT security model could eventually allow students to view lecture timetables, book places on courses and check examination results through a web browser.
References Microsoft's Internet Information Server, website <URL: http://www.eu.microsoft.com/ntserver/web/> Chili!Soft, website <URL: http://www.chillisoft.com/> PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, website <URL: http://uk.php.net/> Microsoft Visual InterDev, website <URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vinterdev/> EasyASP, website <URL: http://www.optweb.net/ebanker/easyasp/> ActivePerl is available from the ActiveState Tool Corp. website <URL: http://www.activestate.com/> Component section of 15seconds, website <URL: http://www.15seconds.com/component/default.htm> 15seconds, website <URL: http://www.15seconds.com/> activeserverpages.com, website <URL: http://www.activeserverpages.com/> ASP Alliance, website <URL: http://www.aspalliance.com/> Wrox Press Inc., website <URL: http://www.wrox.com/> Hahn, Steven.
ADSI ASP Programmer's Reference, Wrox Press Ltd. <URL: http://www.wrox.com/Store/Details.asp?Code=169X> Freidlitz, Mikael & Mondor, Todd.
ADSI CDO Programming with ASP, Wrox Press Ltd. <URL: http://www.wrox.com/Store/Details.asp?Code=1908> Active Directory Service Interfaces Overview, technical resources from Microsoft's website <URL: http://www.eu.microsoft.com/windows/server/Technical/directory/adsilinks.asp> Windows NT Explorer: The Microsoft Site Server Search Facility, Brett Burridge, Ariadne issue 19 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/nt/> Author Details Brett Burridge University of Essex Computing Service Wivenhoe Park Colchester Essex, CO4 3SQ Email: brettb@essex.ac.uk Brett Burridge is a Systems Programmer in the Computing Service at the University of Essex.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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5 Step Guide to Becoming a Content Provider in the JISC Information Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 5 Step Guide to Becoming a Content Provider in the JISC Information Environment Buzz data rdf database rss xml portal archives metadata doi identifier repositories eprints oai-pmh z39.50 passwords gis marc aggregation purl soap uri openurl srw authentication interoperability cookie url research sfx Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell describes steps which content providers can take to integrate their resources into the JISC IE.
This document provides a brief introduction to the JISC Information Environment (JISC-IE) [1], with a particular focus on the technical steps that content providers need to take in order to make their systems interoperable within the JISC-IE technical architecture.
The architecture specifies a set of standards and protocols that support the development and delivery of an integrated set of networked services that allow the end-user to discover, access, use and publish digital and physical resources as part of their learning and research activities.
Examples of the kind of activities supported by the architecture include: Integration of local and remote information resources with a variety of 'discovery' services (for example the RDN subject portals [2], institutional and commercial portals and personal reference managers) allowing students, lecturers and researchers to find quality assured resources from a wide range of content providers including commercial content providers and those within the higher and further education community and elsewhere.
(Examples of the kinds of content that are available through the JISC Information Environment include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, learning objects, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, Internet resource descriptions, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections).
Seamless linking from 'discovery' services to appropriate 'delivery' services.
Integration of information resources and learning object repositories with Virtual Learning Environments (for example, allowing seamless, persistent links from a course reading list or other learning objects to the most appropriate copy of an information resource).
Open access to e-print archives and other systems for managing the intellectual output of institutions.
A general introduction to the technical architecture of the JISC-IE is available in The JISC Information Environment and Web services, Ariadne issue 31 [3].
The architecture itself, as well as other supporting material, is available through the JISC IE technical architecture Web site [4].
This document is based on a short presentation given to the PALS conference: Delivering Content to Universities and Colleges in June 2002 [5] (on a day that was somewhat sad for English football [6]).
The technical architecture specifies four broad classes of service components within the JISC-IE.
In the provision layer, content providers make their content (bibliographic resources, full-text, data-sets, images, videos, learning objects, etc.)
available to other components.
In the fusion layer, brokers and aggregators take metadata from one or more content providers and combine it together in various ways, making the resulting metadata records available to other components.
In the presentation layer, service components interact with content providers, brokers and aggregators to provide services targetted at real end-users.
It is probably worth noting that the technical architecture tends to use the word 'portal' when refering to components in the presentation layer.
This is possibly somewhat misleading.
There will be a large number of different kinds of services in the presentation layer (some of which we haven't thought of yet!
), including subject portals, portals offered by publishers and commercial intermediaries, reading list and other tools in VLEs, library portals (e.g.
Zportal or MetaLib) [7], SFX service components, personal desktop reference managers, etc.
Finally, a set of shared services support the activity of all the other service components, for example, by providing shared authentication, authorisation and service registries.
However, there are no firm boundaries between these classes and it is often the case that service providers will offer a mix of the components outlined above.
In addition, it must be stressed that content providers will usually want to support both human-oriented Web site access and machine-oriented access to their content.
The remainder of this document is targetted at technical staff and service managers in institutions and organisations who have content to make available to other service components.
So if you are a book or journal publisher, or the administrator of an institutional eprints archive, or if you look after a learning object repository, or digital image archive, or you have some other kind of material of value to the UK HE/FE community to make available, please read on... What do you need to do?
The main focus of the technical architecture is on the standards and protocols needed to support machine to machine (m2m) interaction in order to deliver resource discovery services.
Most content providers will already offer a Web site through which end-users can access their content.
To be a part of the JISC-IE, content providers also need to support machine oriented interfaces to their resources.
It should be noted that this is very much in line with the general trend towards supporting 'Web services' [8] (although some of the protocols and standards in the JISC-IE technical architecture may not be considered as true 'Web service' standards currently) and is compatible with the specifications being developed by the IMS Digital Repositories working group [9].
Note that you do not need to follow all five steps (though it would be nice!).
Following just one of the steps below will significantly increase the integration of your content with other services in the JISC-IE and with other developments taking place outside the UK HE/FE community.
Step 1: Expose metadata about your content Make the metadata about your content available to other service components by making it available for distributed searching or harvesting (you can do both if you like!).
Support searching using Z39.50 Support distributed searching of your content by remote services by offering a Z39.50 target compliant with functional area C of the Bath Profile [10].
In other words, use Z39.50 to expose simple Dublin Core metadata [11] about your content.
Note that Z39.50 is sometimes not seen as being a very Web-friendly protocol!
In the future it is anticipated that SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) [12] will be used to support distributed searching, perhaps based on SRW [13].
Support harvesting using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Enable remote services to gather your metadata records by offering an Open Archives Initiative repository using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [14].
In other words, use the OAI-PMH to expose simple DC metadata about your content.
Step 2: Share news/alerts using RSS If you support news and/or alerting services, consider offering them in a machine-readable format.
News and alerts might typically include: service announcements, list(s) of new resources.
Use RDF Site Summary version 1.0 (RSS) [15], a simple XML application, to share your news feeds.
Use RSS in addition to existing email alerting if appropriate.
Step 3: Become an OpenURL source If your Web site supports the discovery of bibliographic resources, e.g.
books, journals and journal articles, adopt open, context-sensitive linking by adding OpenURLs [16] into search results.
This is often, somewhat misleadingly, referred to as 'adding SFX buttons' next to each result (because the original OpenURL resolver was SFX from Ex Libris).
In order to embed OpenURLs in search results you will have to support some mechanism for associating a preferred OpenURL resolver with each user e.g.
by using cookies or a user-preferences database.
Step 4: Become an OpenURL target If your Web site provides access to bibliographic resources, allow links back into your services from OpenURL resolvers.
To do this you need to publicise your identifier-based 'link-to' syntax, e.g.
the fact that you support ISBN-based, ISSN-based or DOI-based URLs.
This implies that you must support deep-linking to resources, either: direct to each resource, or indirect via an abstract page for each resource.
Publicising your 'link-to' syntax allows OpenURL resolvers to generate URLs for your resources based on metadata (typically identifiers) extracted from the OpenURL.
Step 5: Use persistent URIs Z39.50, OAI-PMH and RSS expose your metadata to other services.
As noted above, you should allow deep-linking from your metadata (e.g.
from your search results) to your resources.
Your deep-linking URLs should be unique and persistent.
For example, they may be based on DOI [17] or PURL [18] technologies.
This will ensure long-term use of your URLs, in course reading lists or embedded into other learning resources for example.
Some issues Various issues need to be considered when adding machine-oriented interfaces to your content and metadata.
Authentication and access control Many content providers maintain some level of control over who can access their content.
Typically this is done using Athens [19], local usernames and passwords, IP address checking or some combination of these.
Similar controls can be placed in front of your machine-oriented interfaces.
However, it is important to distinguish between controlling access to your content and controlling access to the metadata that describes your content.
Furthermore, it is important to note that where the user is interacting with a remote portal that is then performing a cross-search of your metadata, the portal is likely to have challenged the user for authentication information.
There will probably have to be some level of trust between you and the portal provider in determining who has rights to search what.
The ZBLSA project [20] has specified a lightweight mechanism by which portals can ask content providers if a particular end-user (or class of end-user) is likely to be able to gain access to a particular resource.
In all cases, you retain ultimate control over access to your content at the point that the end-user selects a link in search results or OpenURL resolver, irrespective of how and where the user has obtained the link.
Furthermore, you retain control over the richness of the metadata records that you expose to other services, either for searching or for harvesting.
Branding vs. visibility There is some concern that exposing metadata to external services may lead to a loss of branding.
However, this may not be a significant problem.
External services can be expected to carry the original content provider's branding as a 'quality stamp' on the content.
For example, each RSS channel carries the content provider's name, URL and logo.
Furthermore, following URLs in search results leads the end-user direct to the content provider's Web site and so should ultimately result in more visibility rather than less.
Information flow The JISC-IE is not just about a one way flow of information from 'publishers' to 'consumers'.
As indicated above, most service providers will offer a number of service components.
Many publishers are developing (or have developed) 'portal' offerings.
Such portals will be able to interact with content made available within the UK HE/FE community (and elsewhere) using the standards described above.
For example, the RDN offers Z39.50 access to almost 60,000 Internet resource descriptions (and hopes to offer a SOAP interface fairly soon) [21].
Similary, metadata about the publications being deposited in institutional eprint archives can typically be freely harvested by anyone using the OAI-PMH.
Advertising your collection(s) So, you have some content (a collection of resources) to make available and you've done the work to support Z39.50 and/or the OAI-PMH.
How do brokers, aggregators, portals and other presentation services know that your metadata is available for searching and/or harvesting?
This is actually a two-fold problem.
Services (and end-users!)
need to know something about the content of your collection (subject coverage, resource types, media formats, etc.)
and some technical details about the particular network services that you offer to make that collection available (protocol, IP address, port number, etc.).
The JISC IE architecture describes the use of a 'service registry' to provide access to collection and service descriptions.
MIMAS are currently being funded by JISC for one year to develop a pilot JISC IE service registry to investigate some of the issues of running such a service.
Richer metadata Typically, the metadata you hold about your content will be significantly richer than simple Dublin Core.
Given the architecture described above, you will need to map your rich metadata to simple Dublin Core in order to make it available for searching and/or harvesting.
You may also choose to expose your richer metadata as well.
For example, you may choose to make MARC records available using Z39.50, or you may allow people to harvest your IMS metadata records using the OAI-PMH.
Alternatively, you may expose simple Dublin Core metadata to support discovery of your content, but deliver content 'packages' that include both the resource and some richer metadata about the resource at the point that end-users or other services access your content.
For example, a learning object repository is likely to use IMS metadata [22] internally.
It may map each IMS metadata record to simple Dublin Core and expose them for harvesting using the OAI-PMH.
At the point people access the learning objects (by 'clicking on the links' in search results), an IMS content package [23] may be delivered that includes both the learning object and the full IMS metadata about that object.
Conclusion This article has summarised five steps that content providers can take to more fully integrate their content within the JISC Information Environment, and discussed some of this issues that are associated with doing so.
The intention has been to try and show that the JISC IE is not overly difficult, that in many cases it will be in line with the things that content providers are doing anyway, that it is compatable with other initiatives and general Web trends and that integrating access to content within the JISC IE should result in more visibility and use of the high quality resources that are being made available to the UK higher and further education community.
References Information Environment: Development Strategy 2001-2005 (Draft) <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/IEstrategy.html> The RDN Subject Portals Project <http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/> The JISC Information Environment and Web services Andy Powell & Liz Lyon, UKOLN, University of Bath <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/information-environments/> JISC Information Environment Architecture Andy Powell & Liz Lyon, UKOLN, University of Bath <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/> 10 minute practical guide to the JISC Information Environment (for publishers!)
Andy Powell PALS conference: Delivering Content to Universities and Colleges <http://www.alpsp.org/PALS02.htm> Brazil end England's dream BBC Sport <http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport3/worldcup2002/hi/matches_wallchart/england_v_brazil/newsid_2049000/2049924.stm> Library orientated portals solutions Andrew Cox and Robin Yeates, LITC, South Bank University <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/techwatch/reports/index.html#libportals> An Introduction to Web Services Tracy Gardner, IBM United Kingdom Laboratories (Hursley) <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/gardner/> IMS Digital Repositories Specification <http://www.imsproject.org/digitalrepositories/index.cfm> The Bath Profile Maintenance Agency <http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/bath/bath-e.htm> Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description <http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/> Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1 <http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/> Search/Retrieve Web Service <http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw.html> The Open Archives Initiative <http://www.openarchives.org/> RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0 <http://purl.org/rss/> OpenURL Overview <http://www.sfxit.com/openurl/> Digital Object Identifier <http://www.doi.org/> Persistent URLs <http://purl.org/ Athens Access Management System <http://www.athens.ac.uk/> The JOIN-UP Programme <http://edina.ed.ac.uk/projects/joinup/> Working with the RDN Pete Cliff, Pete Dowdell & Andy Powell, UKOLN, University of Bath <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/workingwithrdn/> IMS Learning Resource Meta-data Specification <http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/index.cfm> IMS Content Packaging Specification <http://www.imsproject.org/content/packaging/index.cfm> Author Details Andy Powell UKOLN, University of Bath a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "5 step guide to becoming a content provider in the JISC Information Environment" Author: Andy Powell Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/info-environment/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 27: The Digital Library Jigsaw Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 27: The Digital Library Jigsaw Buzz software dissemination usability archives metadata doi identifier video preservation multimedia streaming ebook openurl interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter opens the box and looks at some of the choicest pieces of Ariadne issue 27.
Sarah Ormes, the UKOLN Public Libraries Focus is taking a short career break.
Sarah has been with UKOLN for five years, which makes her positively antidiluvian in terms of web years.
During that time both her role and her activities have expanded.
Among other things Sarah was instrumental in the setting up of the hugely popular children's web site 'Stories from the Web', and in the last two years has run a very successful conference on Web Management issues for Public Librarians.
Her column in this issue 'Lights Out, Silver Boots On' contains a selection of well-informed predictions about the next five years of wired Public Libraries.
None of them seem likely to be wide of the mark, but of course time will tell.
Ariadne and UKOLN wish her well in her future, and we hope to feature more articles by her in due course.
In this issue we feature an important proposal from Neil Beagrie, head of Digital Preservation at the DNER, who here floats the idea of a Digital Preservation Coalition, as a collective body for practitioners.
Digital Preservation is now emerging as an area of key importance in a world which is going to be ever more dependent on the availability of documents in electronic form.
It isn't something which, so far, is making much of a stir in the newspapers and broadsheets, and there isn't yet a genre of documentary television focusing on the preservation of electronic records nevertheless Digital Preservation is an issue which requires to be addressed by academic and government institutions.
Unless we can preserve the important aspects of the past even the very recent past there isn't much point in looking to the future.
Archaeology has done much to bring aspects of the past within reach, and in recent years television has added to these efforts (if not always successfully), making a knowledge of our ancestors available to a wide slice of the lay public.
However television, though it reaches a wider audience than the written word, is constrained by its format to treat the subject in particular ways.
The web is not so limited, either by its format or by a limited broadcast reach anyone with a suitable machine and a reasonable attention span now has access to very interesting resources.
Paul Jacobs has written about aspects of the Lahav Research Project, illustrating some advantages of the multimedia approach, both in terms of dissemination and the actual conduct of an excavation.
Part of the preservation exercise is creating and retaining enough metadata to know what a thing is.
There are several mysterious objects from the 1st millennium BC lying in museums, in numbers sufficient to indicate how ubiquitous they were in their day, which have no obvious purpose.
No description of their function has come down to us, and the context of their discovery supplies no unambiguous clues as to their use.
The place of discovery of some is not recorded.
So we have in our museums objects about which we can say virtually nothing, except that they are objects made of wood/bone/stone/ceramic, and that they date from the first millennium.
Metadata therefore is in a sense coequal with issues of preservation; knowing where a thing is, or how to find it, is just as important as the description of a thing.
Andy Powell contributes an interesting article on the Encoding of OpenURLs in DC metadata, which represents some kind of a solution to the problem of the changing locations of digital objects: The OpenURL provides a mechanism for encoding a citation for an information resource, typically a bibliographic resource, as a URL.
The OpenURL is, in effect, an actionable URL that transports metadata or keys to access metadata for the object for which the OpenURL is provided....
The citation is provided by either using a global identifier for the resource, for example a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), or by encoding metadata about the resource, for example title, author, journal title, etc., or by some combination of both approaches.
It is also possible to encode a local identifier for the resource within the OpenURL.
In combination with information about where the OpenURL was created, this allows software that receives the OpenURL to request further metadata about the information resource... this article focuses on the OpenURL metadata encoding mechanism ...
There are two Metadata columns in this particular issue.
The second is by the UK Interoperability focus Paul Miller, who describes the work of the UK's new Metadata for Education Group, known as MEG.
In the article he calls for widespread support of the MEG Concord as a first step on the road to a broad consensus on educational metadata.
In a related article, heading up this issue of Ariadne, Pete Johnston of the UKOLN interoperability focus office debuts in our pages.
In his article, he reviews the implications of recent proposals to develop virtual learning in the UK Higher Education and Further Education sectors, in terms of support from libraries, archives, and museums.
Continuing our coverage of user issues, Ruth Wilson of the Centre for Digital Library Research contributes an article on e-Books from the perspective of the EBONI project.
Ruth explains how EBONI will look into the usability of e-books through user evaluations using students and lecturers from a range of disciplines and backgrounds.
We conclude our recent coverage of the UK eLib Hybrid Libraries projects with articles on both the HEADLINE and HYLIFE projects.
We also have a report on the one day conference held in Edinburgh University Library in February, on a day when the city was heavily carpeted with snow, and the task of finding a taxi to anywhere was a tall order.
There was another event in Manchester a week earlier, and three presentations from that day (HEADLINE, HYLIFE and the DNER/Hybrid Libraries presentation) plus two of the question and answer sessions, can be found via the 'At the Event' section of the magazine.
The streaming speeds are pretty high (more than ten times faster than 56k modem access speeds), so only those users with high-band access to the Internet will be able to view the streaming video.
In future we will do our best to ensure presentations are also available at modem friendly speeds.
Phil Bradley returns with his Search Engines column, and in this issue he looks at how site maintainers can tell if their access statistics are being warped by the visits of the most popular search engines.
In this connection, we looked at Ariadne's access statistics for Christmas Day 2000.
We discovered to our surprise that we had around 650 user sessions.
This was received within UKOLN as an unexpectedly high figure, and the question of the interpretation of the statistics arose.
Around 30 per cent of the accesses seemed to be accounted for by search engine robots, which fitted well with what we normally would expect the total accesses for the day were around half the average week day accesses, and the usual proportion of search engine robots buried in that average weekday total is normally in the vicinity of fifteen percent.
It was also possible for us to identify Internet Explorer search agents which might have skewed the figures there were not many of these.
It would not be unreasonable therefore to say that Ariadne had more than 400 human user sessions for Christmas day.
This might be looked at as evidence of some kind of cultural shift, and a shift of some importance to the designers of web services: not everyone has highband access, and the proportion of lowband users is increasing (i.e., modem users logging in from home rather than the office).
In Europe this is likely to be the situation for some time to come, until highband access is easily and cheaply available.
Other parts of the world will be relying on lowband access and lowband services for much longer.
Finally, researching our own past, we find some interesting developments in our access statistics over the year between January 2000 and December 2000.
During two months of the year we took more than half a million hits in each month.
In only two months did we receive less than a third of a million hits per month.
During the whole year the number of raw hits received by Ariadne was around 5 million (5,057,897 in this analysis), and this gives an average hit rate per day of 13,857.
User sessions are of course more important and more reliable as a measure.
The total for the year was just under half a million (467,093), of which, as indicated above, fifteen per cent is accounted for by accesses by search engine robots.The statistics in the table below were compiled from monthly UKOLN Systems Group reports, on 18 Jan 2001.
Figures vary slightly according to the way they are compiled, but the general trends indicated remain consistent, and it is the illustration of the general trend which is the purpose of the table.
Ariadne stats (issues 1-25) from January 2000 to the end of December 2000 Month Hits per month Hits per day Page Views per month Page Views per day User Sessions per month User Sessions per day Average User Session Length January 2000 333,800 10,767 103,235 3,330 27,945 901 12:31 February 2000 317,971 10,964 109,436 3,774 29,581 1,020 17:18 March 2000 392,962 12,676 114,949 3,708 39,086 1,260 13:34 April 2000 329,005 10,966 101,252 3,375 34,019 1,133 12:51 May 2000 348,276 11,234 116,449 3,757 35,798 1,154 16:04 June 2000 348,183 11,606 106,841 3,561 34,128 1,137 11:22 July 2000 360,175 11,618 125,463 4,047 37,892 1,222 12:50 August 2000 366,590 11,825 120,070 3,873 38,979 1,257 13:16 September 2000 457,346 15,244 140,011 4,667 44,331 1,477 11:12 October 2000 540,441 17,433 181,721 5,862 54,672 1,763 10:39 November 2000 505,384 16,846 182,216 6,074 51,122 1,704 10:59 December 2000 409,581 13,212 175,188 5,653 39,540 1,275 10:37     Thanks to all of those who took the trouble to fill in the Ariadne 26 questionnaire.
The feedback from users is extremely valuable, and helps us to tailor the magazine more closely both to the users and our own requirements.
We will be collecting information from this web form for at least the next two issues, so it is still worth the time taken to fill it in.
Thanks to Shirley Keane (for assistance with the Newsline section), and Ariadne's co-editor, Marieke Napier, recently returned from Australia.
Suggestions for articles for issues 28 to 30 are now being considered.
Article proposals should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Books for review should be sent to: The Editor Ariadne UKOLN The Library, University of Bath Claverton Down Bath BA2 7AY United Kingdom Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 27: The Digital Library Jigsaw" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The eLib Hybrid Library Projects Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The eLib Hybrid Library Projects Buzz software dissemination portal infrastructure multimedia z39.50 authentication url research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Breaks provides an overview of BUILDER, AGORA, MALIBU, HeadLine and HyLife The five Hybrid Library projects – BUILDER [1], AGORA [2], MALIBU [3], HeadLine [4], and HyLife [5] form part of the eLib Phase 3 developments and they build on the work of the first and second phases of eLib by investigating issues surrounding the integration of digital and traditional library resources.
They are very different projects, but they all aim to provide some of the basic building blocks to create new models of library services, in which our users can create and sustain personal information spaces, and libraries can manage these spaces as part of their daily service delivery.
The projects have been discussed fully in previous articles in Ariadne, but it is worth reminding ourselves of the essence of each of the projects.
The BUILDER Hybrid Library, based at the University of Birmingham, has looked at the impact of the developing model of the hybrid library on a range of stakeholders in higher education including students, academic staff, senior institutional managers and library and information professionals.
It has attempted to base itself fully in a service environment, by providing the enabling technical infrastructure for hybrid services and has built links into the Talis Library Management System.
BUILDER’s development has coincided with the development of Managed Learning Environments, which aim to create personal learning spaces for students, and through common authentication could mesh together the information and the learning spaces.
The core aim of AGORA, which is a consortium-based project led by the University of East Anglia, has been to develop a ‘proof of concept’ Hybrid Library Management System.
This has been achieved by defining in detail the concepts ‘search, locate, request and deliver’ and then building a working system, in conjunction with Fretwell Downing Informatics.
The hybridity lies in the integration through Z39.50 of these previously separate functions and their delivery to the user through the AGORA web interface.
The intention of the project has been to allow the user to select from a wide range on information resources both text and multimedia, and both local and remote search across these resources and see not just the references to the content, but obtain the content itself via document delivery, if necessary.
MALIBU, based at King’s College London, has created a number of models of hybrid libraries and has focussed on the humanities.
Through the implementation of these models, the project has examined the management implications of how these new services might be supported, and the project has aimed to create a common understanding of the concepts of the hybrid library in a service environment.
The process began with users, who helped to create a User Scenario which could be mapped onto both a Service Model and an Organisational and Management Model.
In the latter, the implications for organisational change and staff development and training could be examined.
The HeadLine Project, based at the London School of Economics, has developed the concept of the Personal Information Environment (PIE), which is aimed at providing a single interface to both print and electronic information resources and services through portal-type technology.
The PIE can be customised by the user and can be shared with other users with common interests, such as a class or research group.
Like AGORA, HeadLine also provides a delivery function to print-only resources and this is through the RLG Ariel software.
HyLife, at the University of Northumbria, has focussed on the organisational, social and educational issues rather than technology, in order to understand the operating practices of the hybrid library.
HyLife can be seen as being rooted in northern ‘common sense’ and one of the outputs has been the Hybrid Library Toolkit, which includes 10 Practical Steps to Implementation [6], which is all about embedding the library and its new hybrid services within an institutional context.
What then is the Hybrid Library – is it defined by the sum of the output of the projects or can we define it outside the projects as some sort of Weberian Ideal Type?
One definition that I like is from HyLife “The Hybrid Library is one where 'new' electronic information resources and 'traditional' hardcopy resources co-exist and are brought together in an integrated information service, accessed via electronic gateways available both on-site, like a traditional library, and remotely via the Internet or local computer networks.
The hybrid library is different from a typical library web-site in two ways.
One is the permanent and equal inclusion of print information sources alongside the electronic.
A second is the attempt to focus and interpret the whole service subject-specific and generic elements for a particular group of users in a scaleable fashion.
The philosophical assumption underlying the hybrid library is that libraries are about organised access, rather than local collections which become just a part of the means of delivery.” However, there is a danger that we believe that somehow the Hybrid Library exists as the output of these five projects, and that by implementing most of what is in them we could have one in our institution.
The term ‘hybrid library’ is only a label to help our thinking of how libraries are developing and our growing need to integrate print and electronic for the benefit of our users.
The five eLib Phase 3 projects complement, rather than duplicate each other, and taken together they do point the way forward for libraries by identifying and addressing the big issues and showing how they might be tackled.
For me, the important next step is how do we take forward the substantial investment that has been made in these projects and use the lessons, concepts and tools in working services?
Equally important, how do we integrate (and not reinvent) the outcomes of these projects into the developing DNER, which has been itself described as a national hybrid library [7]?
We will also need to see how we might integrate these ideas and new service models into the local library management system (LMS), which is at the heart of a library’s daily operations.
Is the LMS the initial entry point for the user, or is it the local hybrid library gateway, or is it the developing subject portals?
There will be a struggle to be the first point of entry for the user, and certainly most institutions will not want to lose that battle.
Some of the projects have worked with LMS suppliers or with commercial developers, and this could be one way in which the ideas could be encorporated into a working system.
For these projects, and in fact all library project developments, one of the key issues for their lasting success is first library staff buy-in, and then institutional buy-in.
It is obvious that without library staff ‘buy-in’ to the output of all these projects, they will be seen as perhaps interesting but marginal to the daily routine of ‘getting the books to the chaps’ as one University Librarian defined the role of libraries.
Librarians are always sensibly cautious of new ‘toys’ and are always concerned that any new inititative has to be capable of being supported, sustained and integrated into a service environment.
With such a pragmatic approach, there has perhaps not been the scale of take-up of eLib outputs in terms of obvious service additions, but what has been achieved from the programme is a significant shift in thinking, imagination and above all confidence within higher education libraries.
There has already been good dissemination of the outcomes of the projects through publications (bring back the printed Ariadne!
), web pages and roadshows, but often these are read and attended by the converted.
A final thought is that we are now in a ‘search-box culture’, where an often crude commercial search engine defines the information landscape for our students, or where ‘Amazon is now the Library’.
They lack the appreciation of, or are too busy to listen to, the distinction between web content and quality refereed academic information, but the next phase of eLib (JISC 5/99 projects) are aiming to create an authenticated information space where students can be ‘captured’ and can roam and move seamlessly between references, full-text articles and other quality digital information resources.
Unless we create this enclosed information space, the danger is that by having to explain it all, we overcomplicate the information-seeking lives of our users and so we cease to be of interest.
This is the challenge for the National Hybrid Library – to integrate, but above all to simplify.
For a fuller overview of the whole of the eLib Phase 3 projects, I would recommend Stephen Pinfield’s review paper Lessons from Phase 3 of the Electronic Libraries Programme [8], in which he provides an ‘inside’ view of the programme, with recommendations for further work to embed the lessons learnt.
References BUILDER Project, Birmingham University at http://builder.bham.ac.uk/ AGORA Project, University of East Anglia at http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora/ MALIBU Project, King’s College London at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/malibu/ HeadLine Project, London School of Economics at http://www.headline.ac.uk/ HyLife Project, University of Northumbria at http://hylife.unn.ac.uk/ HyLife Project Toolkit, at http://hylife.unn.ac.uk/toolkit/ The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and the hybrid library, Stephen Pinfield and Lorcan Dempsey, Ariadne Issue 26 at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/dner/ The Electronic Libraries Programme at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ Author Details Michael Breaks University Librarian of Heriot-Watt University m.l.breaks@hw.ac.uk Phone: (0131) 451 3570 Fax: (0131) 451 3164 Article Title: "The eLib Hybrid Library Projects" Author: Michael Breaks Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/hybrid/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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How the Oxford English Dictionary Went Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines How the Oxford English Dictionary Went Online Buzz data software java html database xml standardisation tagging graphics sgml dtd windows ascii aggregation gif url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Laura Elliot explains the use of SGML in the management of the OED text.
Ariadne has already described the long-term task of revising the Oxford English Dictionary and reviewed OED Online at its launch in March this year, but the editor judged, rightly, that there must be a hidden story on the making of the web site.
This article sets out to tell that story, describing what was technically involved in turning a twenty-three volume print work into an online publication, and recording how this generation of publishers benefited from visionary groundwork undertaken fifteen years ago which meant that the hardest part of going online preparing the content was three-quarters done before they’d heard of the Web.
From hot metal to computer OED Online is the latest fruit of longstanding and far-sighted efforts to make the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) "machine-readable", efforts that began in the mid-1980s for an entirely different motive.
In the eighties, Oxford University Press (OUP) decided to publish a Second Edition of the OED which would integrate the original twelve-volume edition with its later supplement volumes.
A consolidated text was necessary to allow future revision on an economic scale.
The task was going to require computerization of the text and the whole editorial process.
The first step was to get the text on to a computer: at that stage the original edition was still being printed with hot metal.
Scanning was impossible given the quality of the print and the numerous unusual typefaces.
So the text was keyed on to computer over eighteen months by a team of 150 typists in Florida.
Those typists were simply asked to identify different typefaces as they entered the data, but back in Oxford, with the help of computer scientists from IBM and from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, the next imaginative move was made: the typefaces were converted automatically to codes identifying the various components of the Dictionary including headwords, numbered sense definitions, etymologies, quotations, and cross-references.
Using this information, it was then possible for computer programs to interpret the Dictionary well enough for the contents of the supplements to be integrated with the twelve original volumes.
The results needed editorial correction, which for the first time in the history of the OED could be done using screen editing software, but the work involved was nothing in comparison with the alternative of re-editing the text on paper from scratch, and in this way the Second Edition was successfully published in 1989.
Generalized markup language and SGML The computer scientists used "generalized markup language" for the codes identifying the various text components.
The history of this way of dealing with text on computer will be familiar to some of you, but it may still be interesting to see how it’s illustrated by the history of publishing the Oxford English Dictionary, from the Second Edition in 1989 through to OED Online in 2000.
To anyone familiar with HTML but perhaps not with its antecedents, the style of coding used since the mid-80s will still look familiar.
The dictionary headword abbot would be coded <hw>abbot</hw> and a cross-reference to ABBEY, which OED prints in small capitals, would be coded <xr>abbey</xr>.
OED also prints author names in small capitals, but these were coded to distinguish them from the typographically identical cross-references, so DICKENS would be coded <a>Dickens</a>.
This work of the mid-80s illustrates rather well the idea behind "generalized markup language": the meaning of different text components, conveyed in print by different typefaces but also dependent on context understood by the reader, should be recorded unamibiguously with codes easy for humans to interpret but also recognisable by a computer.
Editors can read the resulting text on screen, but at the same time enough information is hidden in the text for a computer to read it accurately.
There are other advantages to such a coding system.
It removes the need for anything but standard ASCII characters, which makes the data much more transferable between different computer systems.
In addition, it allows you to change very easily how you want to print or display text components in future, because typographical styles are not embedded in the text.
OUP has seen all these advantages of "generalized markup" pay off handsomely over the last ten years of the publication history of the OED.
At the same time that the OED was first being put into "generalized markup language", an international standard was being developed for so-called Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
This standard laid down what was permissible in text coding and defined generalized rules (called the DTD or Document Type Definition) to express the structure of a SGML-coded text.
This move allowed commercial software packages to be written for editing, validating and formatting text coded in generalized markup language, provided it followed the SGML standard.
Projects such as the Text Encoding Initiative produced DTDs for various document types, and some of these DTDs became international standards in their own right.
The OED did not follow the move towards standardization and SGML.
The mood of the mid-80s was that a DTD should express the structure of a text with the accuracy and completeness of a chemical formula.
This proved impossible for the OED given its unique content and long evolution of editorial style; even today OED is revised using its own variant of generalized markup language, which requires custom-built software tools.
When OUP went out to tender in 1998 for the construction of OED Online, we realised that it would complicate the project considerably not to provide the text in a standard form, as this would force suppliers to grapple with the idiosyncratic legacy of OED’s composition.
Therefore, we produced an alternative version of the OED in "proper" SGML, altering the markup for publication so that it concentrated on identifying the main features of the Dictionary which would be needed for online searching.
The SGML markup clearly identifies Dictionary definitions, pronunciations, variant spellings, etymologies, quotations and their dates, titles and authors of cited works.
The DTD rules are relatively simple, as, fortunately, views on the significance of the DTD have become less purist since the mid-80s.
From the online OED’s DTD, a computer can interpret the text adequately for the needs of the web site.
On the other hand, an archaeologist in the year 3000 couldn’t reconstruct every aspect of the electronic text of the OED from just the DTD and a set of tattered print volumes.
We consider that to be a reasonable compromise, allowing us to publish OED online without having to resolve a long-standing debate in SGML philosophy.
Were there alternatives to SGML?
For those of you planning electronic text storage with a view to online publication, it might be useful for me to comment on options we chose not to take.
First off, we never seriously considered supplying the text for online publication as HTML.
We knew from ten years of editing the OED on screen how helpful it was to be able to search the text using the information on structure stored in the generalized markup language: for example, we had found it useful to search for a word just within etymologies or just within illustrative quotations.
We wanted our online readers to have similar search facilities.
All that useful information on text structure would be lost if we converted the text to HTML, because HTML is only good at storing information about format (bold, italic, etc) and about links to other web pages OED’s authors and cross-references, quotations and definitions, would all have disappeared back into an undifferentiated blur of text distinguished only by typeface.
Having dismissed HTML, we did have heated debate about databases.
Some potential software developers assumed that the whole text should be held divided up within a database, to gain the advantages of re-sequencing and fast search retrieval that database software can provide.
We were not convinced by the proposals, as our experience of OED text was that there was always a rump of data which would not fit easily into any given quasi-mathematical model, and that you could spend inordinate effort dealing with dictionary entries that obstinately refused to conform.
We could see this tripping up developers and wasting our time.
It may be that one day we will revisit the database question, but for the moment we have satisfactorily published online without restructuring the whole text as a database (though a database is used behind the scenes, as I’ll explain later).
Other potential software developers suggested that the OED text used in the web site should be coded in XML rather than SGML.
For those unfamiliar with these distinctions, XML is in the same family as SGML and HTML, but a later development.
It has the benefits of SGML in that it allows you to apply codes for text structure in ways appropriate for your particular data, but it allows for the demands of formatting web pages, which SGML was developed too early to accommodate.
When we went out to tender for OED Online construction in 1998, the perfectly sensible proposals to use XML weren’t actually matched by track records of implementing web sites that used it.
We went for a supplier who had a track record in using SGML.
But for you in 2000, the situation might already be different, and XML should be seriously considered.
XML remains a strong candidate for the next generation of OED editorial revision facilities and as the future basis for online publication.
Prototyping OED Online in libraries Content preparation may be the overriding task in getting ready to publish online, but there are other major issues.
To our surprise, user interface design ultimately took place largely within OUP, using the experience of lexicographical and technical staff.
The consultants we’d expected to depend on for design were helpful, but the OED is exceptional in so many ways, and viable ideas for online presentation are so intimately tied to knowledge of OED’s content, that it proved more satisfactory for prototypes to be developed by insiders.
The prototypes were used for pre-publication workshops with librarians, academic staff and students, to make sure that we were preparing a reference site that libraries would actually want.
Touring libraries with our prototypes certainly brought out some issues that we had got wrong and that we were able to put right in the published version.
We were, on the whole, encouraged by librarians to keep the user interface simple and not to overload the site with features.
Feedback from libraries where the web site is now in use will continue to guide us on further improvements.
The workshops also answered some of our questions on the technical specification that should be met by OED Online.
Libraries we visited had a mixture of hardware and web browsers, of varying ages.
We had it emphasized to us that we should keep life simple for technical support services.
We therefore set out to avoid the need to download any software or fonts on to the end-user’s computer, and succeeded in that aim.
We also tried to ensure that we could support Netscape and Internet Explorer in old versions on Windows, Macintosh and UNIX environments: in the end we were able to support Netscape 3 and above, and Internet Explorer 4 and above, but we found that to support even older versions was impossible because it so severely compromised the search and display functionality we could provide.
Partnership with HighWire Press   Early in 1999, the supplier chosen by OUP to construct and host OED Online was Stanford University’s HighWire Press (www.highwire.org).
HighWire is a leading not-for-profit aggregator of electronic-based academic journals, started in early 1995 with the online production of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
The online production company, which is now the leading aggregator of scholarly life science publications, is currently responsible for the production and upkeep of 190 sites online and over half a million articles.
HighWire’s central technical approach to online publication is to convert all the content it receives to SGML, so an SGML version of OED was a good starting point for the technical partnership between HighWire and OUP.
HighWire’s systems architect Adam Elman confirmed at the end of the construction of OED Online just how helpful OUP’s work on the text structure had proved.
"OED is very consistent in its SGML structure.
That’s one of the aspects of working with them that really impressed us.
We were working with good data to start with, and that’s really important.
The generic tagging in the source files greatly simplified certain aspects of production."
OUP provided the Dictionary to HighWire as SGML source files.
Over the course of 1999, HighWire built a new system in Java for OED Online.
The system searches the Dictionary using Verity’s K2 search engine and produces pages via HighWire’s own SGML-to-HTML style-sheets and conversion routines.
Each entry is preserved as a whole in SGML, but these whole entries are stored in a Sybase database that separately records each entry’s identity and its relationship to other entries.
When the reader makes an enquiry, Verity searches its indexes on the SGML text, but the matching Dictionary entry is brought to the screen more quickly than it would be otherwise because the software can rapidly "check out" the entry from the Sybase database.
Pages of background and marketing information are input by OUP using HighWire’s standard software for this purpose, first designed for journals publishers.
It is helpful for OUP that as well as developing the web site, HighWire also hosts OED Online and oversees its maintenance.
Technical challenges The Verity search engine can interpret SGML, but a major technical hurdle was tuning this software to run at an acceptable speed given the volume of data in combination with the search behaviour that OUP required.
Adam Elman summarizes the problem like this: "One of the issues we faced is that Verity is very well designed to find documents that match a particular search phrase.
OUP had a very different idea of how searches should work.
What OUP wanted was something that would count every instance of a word in the Dictionary, but show the results in the context of entries."
What HighWire did was to chop the text up into small paragraph-level pieces, so that each quotation looks like a separate document to the search engine.
Because of the size of the Verity search "collection" and the granularity of the pieces, performance became a cause for concern, Adam Elman and his team had to enlist the aid of several Verity engineers to tweak the system until it ran fast enough to put online for a large volume of simultaneous users.
A related challenge was highlighting the search terms in the results.
HighWire had to write its own routines for highlighting search terms in the web pages for each Dictionary entry this involved generating the new HTML on the fly from the SGML.
Special characters also posed a significant challenge.
SGML and HTML both record special characters as "character entity reference" codes.
But choosing the unique codes for the thousand special characters in OED only addresses a fraction of the technical problem.
How are you going to display special characters like an Assyrian H or an astrological moon symbol that aren’t part of the standard HTML set for display on web pages?
Some web sites offer downloadable fonts, but this was something we wanted to avoid in order to keep the site simple and unobtrusive for readers to use.
HighWire were experienced at rendering these characters as inline GIF images.
But the OED contains many more special characters than most journals, and HighWire found OUP very particular about presentation.
"Most journals are concerned that it looks right and accurate.
Oxford was concerned that it looked good as well" Adam Elman commented.
For example, if an entry appears in a quotation, it appears in a smaller font in blue, but if it appears in a definition, it appears larger and in black.
To handle all the variations, OUP commissioned 2,500 hand-drawn images to handle the display of a thousand or so special characters as they occurred in different contexts in the dictionary.
Once the images were drawn, the quality of OED’s SGML smoothed the production process; HighWire could easily match the character entity reference codes to the corresponding GIFs using software they had developed for journals, but it took several weeks to display the images correctly inline with the rest of the text.
It was worth the effort, as the results are excellent; to the untrained eye it appears as though the special characters are part of the text.
For example, accented Greek is not available in HTML: in the entry for charism, you can see the inline GIFS provided for accented Greek blend seamlessly with the surrounding text.
The next challenge is to update the Dictionary reliably every three months.
The next update will be on 15 June.
Then we will start work on visible and behind-the-scenes improvements to the web site based on our experience of live publication since March and the feedback we’ve received from readers.
The technical costs of putting OED online The software development work cost US$400,000.
OUP spent roughly US$1 million more on market research and prototyping, graphic design work, consultancy and so on.
An issue which may be more relevant to you is that for all my advocacy of generalized markup language as an excellent basis for online publication, you may have heard that SGML and XML are expensive options which can only be afforded by well-funded or commercial enterprises.
I can see where this view comes from.
For example, SGML software suppliers and consultants have historically worked for government departments (largely defence departments), huge engineering contractors (famously Boeing, which put its technical documentation into SGML), large healthcare operations and global publishing corporations: these organizations could absorb charges out of the reach of many librarians and smaller (or more parsimonious) publishers.
However, if you can see the value of marking up your content to a standard set of rules, with the advantages for web publication that I’ve described, then nowadays the PC-based software to allow you to do this (from suppliers such as SoftQuad and ArbotText) is not ruinously expensive.
In the ten years that I’ve been involved in publishing using SGML and similar coding systems, it has become understood that this need not be the preserve of highly technical experts.
Freelance editors have gradually begun to branch into SGML and XML, coping without dozens of technical support staff.
HTML has helped here: that’s something in which many of us dabble, whether "raw" or in the context of FrontPage or DreamWeaver.
The skills needed to encode in SGML or XML are in the same league: the added ingredient necessary is real understanding of the structure of the text, but that is not usually all that complicated.
You may have a great deal to gain by branching out into SGML or XML to record the underlying intellectual structure of your documents for online publication, something that HTML simply can’t do for you.
A free trial of OED Online?
If you want to organize a free trial of OED Online for your library, for the UK, and anywhere else outside North or South America, please contact Susanna Lob through worldinfo@oed.com.
For the USA, Canada, and all countries in South America, contact Royalynn O’Connor through americasinfor@oed.com.
Further information on the cost savings available through USA regional networks is available at: http://www.oup-usa.org/epub/oed/networks2.html.
General information on subscriptions is available at http://www.oed.com/public/subscriptions Author Details   Laura Elliott lelliott@oup.co.uk Oxford English Dictionary Online Article Title: "How the Oxford English Dictionary Went Online" Author: Laura Elliot Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/oed-tech/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Interface: The IT Man's Tale Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Interface: The IT Man's Tale Buzz vocabularies video Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh talks to Phil Brady at the University of Wales.
Phil Brady is one of a small band of computer managers who have made the transition to managing integrated information services.
As such his views on the organisational and human issues offer a counterbalance to much that has been written about this area, and indeed to much that is near to becoming conventional wisdom.
Brady’s approach to managing a service that contains the contradictions, contrasts and variety of a modern academic information service is based on a few solid principles.
Six months into a new post, he is conscious of some of the dangers that lie behind ideas that are easily expressed but not always rigorously scrutinised: things like multi-skilling, job enrichment and job enlargement are subjected to a beady gaze.
"If the system puts staff at whatever level into a position where they deal with areas outside their training and expertise, there’s a problem as they will be uncomfortable and feel their skills are undervalued."
At the same time it is obvious that users are increasingly demanding a "seamless service" presenting the broad spread of information formats from print through multi media to electronic.
So how can this be managed in away which makes sense to the organisation, the us staff?
The answer is a very pragmatic one.
It relies on specialisation, structure, an open management style, the use of technology, devolved decision making, and some careful development of multi-skilling in crucial areas of the organisation.
Brady believes first that a structure based on conventional specialisation rather than relying on boundary spanning devices used as integrating mechanisms is likely to be more effective in practice, at least in the early stages.
Managing the ambiguities in information services creates further ambiguity, and structures must balance support and reassurance with flexibility and the ability to adapt quickly.
Structure needs to be clearly understood by all, and this cannot be said of organisational forms that cut across the boundaries between computing services and library services.
Specialisation is underpinned and encouraged by the "delegation of clearly defined parts of the service to staff with appropriate experience and backgrounds", decisions are devolved to staff who are closest to the problems, and the approach is predicated on the further development of existing strengths, whether these come from individual expertise or from effective and congruous working arrangements.
Teams do not often feature in Brady’s vocabulary, although they are seen as conceivable for help desks, but neither are they ruled out as a way of coping with future change and providing answers to some of the dilemmas of modern information services.The inevitable questions were what was the point, and where were the benefits, if traditional structures and specialisations were to be retained?
The answer was first that a traditional structure is "obvious and clearly understood, line management is clear, and this is an even greater benefit in rapidly changing organisations, and expertise and background information is applied".
At the same time, there is an acknowledgement that all of the services need to coalesce at the front desk.
Here the ideas of multi-skilling and teams are possibilities.
"The first contact must be with an all rounder, to field most questions at entry point, to refer the problem elsewhere, to seek management support or the help of a specialist.
But the truth is that we don’t know how or whether we can integrate help desks.
The technology of distance delivery, and in particular video links, might help, but as yet we don’t have an answer."
The other area where Brady sees multi-skilling as vital is at senior management level.
This is where the corporate perspective has to be developed and where individuals with traditional service backgrounds have to develop an integrated view.
"It is at the point of customer contact where the barriers are broken down, and where an Information Service viewis inculcated and expressed".
There is a growing corpus of literature on the cultural differences between IT specialists and librarians.
Brady’s obviously devolved and participative management style stems partly from his view of this.
"There is a huge cultural difference.
I see librarians as working more with certainties, while IT involves unpredictability, uncertainty and to some extent trial and error.
Most IT people will admit to an incomplete understanding of their craft, and there is maybe a greater need to rely on the expert knowledge of others.
I think this might have led to differences in management styles.
"This uncertainty might also extend to the hypothetical case of the ITmanager taking over an integrated information service.
"Of course it does, and the only way to deal with this is by encouraging openness and comment.
Devolved management is crucial, and so is breaking down barriers.
Managers need to be out there with the people they manage and the people they serve.
"One of the ways of managing integrated information services involves massive organisational engineering.
Brady’s way avoids this kind of step-change, and relies on an evolutionary process based on recognising existing strengths, redrawing the boundaries in some parts of the organisation, protecting the specialisations in others, and flexibility.
"Change can be pushed too hard, to quickly and too soon.
Involve people, present it as a challenge not a problem, and it can succeed.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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XML 2000: New Tools, New Vendors Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines XML 2000: New Tools, New Vendors Buzz data software java html database xml xslt metadata xsl video sgml dtd multimedia syndication e-learning unicode e-business prism url standards Citation BibTex RIS Dianne Kennedy reports on the latest XML conference in Paris.
XML Europe 2000 was held at the Palis des Congres de Paris June 13 to 15, 2000.
The XML Show, hosted by IDEAlliance provided attendees with the largest exposition of XML tools ever held in Europe.
Fifty two (52) booths filled the show floor.
The breakdown of participants was: XML Publication Software (8) XML Editing/Authoring (5) XML Data/Content Management (7) XML eBusiness Solutions (7) XML Middleware (4) XML Services (4) XML Workflow (2) XML Organizations (4) Miscellaneous (11) Highlights Infoteria is a middleware vendor in the B2B market space.
Infoteria showed a family of tools built upon their IPEX XML engine.
Tools included imessenger, iconnector, and ixslt.
Infoteria is providing a free XSTL engine written in C++ with a command line interface.
This is an ideal tool to download and use to learn more about XSLT.
You can find the free download on the Infoteria Web site by clicking on "Products".
IXIASoft showed TEXTXML Server, an XML database server for developers and integrators who need an XML database at the heart of their XML application.
The database, designed to be imbedded, provides a low cost alternative to other XML databases.
Kinecta Corporation was located in booth #43.
Kinecta provides a Java-based, XML/ICE compliant content syndication solution known as Kinecta Interact.
ICE is the Information and Content Exchange specification hosted by IDEAlliance.
Softquad Europe announced the latest version of their XML authoring environment known as XMetal V2.0.
XMetal has roots in both the SGML (Author/Editor) and HTML (HotMetal Pro) worlds.
This enables Softquad to provide a robust, yet easy-to-use XML authoring environment.
Advances in XMetal V2.0 include well formed editing (no DTD required), a structured view, as well as expanding the authoring environment to include inline active X controls, a script editor and a forms editor.
XMetal V2.0 also boasts Unicode support.
Next Solution came from Tokyo to show DSSSLPrint 2.0, a DSSSL-based formatting engine.
This engine performs batch processing of SGML/XML files and outputs PostScript or PDF.
Next Solution will provide XSL support in upcoming versions.
Maris Multimedia, Ltd. introduced the XML community to Edugen, an open standards based technology for the development and delivery of educational courses known as XML-based e-learning.
The Edugen™ engine is modular and delivers specific functions such as planning, reporting, and tracking.
IDEAlliance at XML Europe 2000 The IDEAlliance booth highlighted activities of the groups it hosts.Members of the ICE (Information and Content Exchange) authoring group were present to explain the new ICE Version 1.1 and to invite participation in the ICE Network.
Also present in the booth were the co-chairs of the PRISM working group (Publishers Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata).
A demonstration of PRISM metadata was one of the highlights of the PRISM presence.
Also featured were the new CPExchange working group (Customer Profile Exchange) and the Independent Consultants Cooperative (ICC).
Show attendees could view the video, "Introduction to XML" from SynthBank at the IDEAlliance booth as well.
This video provides an introduction to XML from the editors of XML Version 1.0.
Jean Paoli, Tim Bray, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, and Jon Bosak explain the motivation and history behind the development of XML.
IDEAlliance also highlighted upcoming shows in the booth.
Extreme Markup 2000, eb-Implement, and XML 2000 were featured.
You can find out more about these shows on the home page of the GCA web site.
Author Details Dianne Kennedy, Executive Director, IDEAlliance email: kennedy@xmlxperts.com www.xmlxperts.com Article Title: "XML Europe 2000; New Tools, New Vendors!"
Author: Dianne Kennedy Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/xml-europe/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Web Editor: 'Abzu and Beyond' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Web Editor: 'Abzu and Beyond' Buzz data html xml archives metadata copyright cataloguing sgml url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Charles Jones muses on the history of the Internet presence of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute.
I work in a discipline where scholars are as likely to be interested in a three-quarter-century-old article written in an obscure journal with a circulation of a thousand copies as they are in a lavish and masterly new publication of an international exhibition of never-before-seen artifacts.
The archaeologies of scholarship on the ancient Near East are complex and arcane.
The skills required to interpret them are taken for granted on the assumption that university students should already know how to use a library (as any schoolboy knows...).
Those who have completed the apprenticeship and have found themselves lucky enough to find employment or (and) time to engage in research, take justifiable pleasure and pride in their ability to demonstrate mastery of the procedures of scholarship to articulate an idea and to build a context and an argument from the fragments of primary data and scholarly commentary.
Books with footnotes numbering in the thousands are routine.
Once published, these books or articles become artifacts for the next generation of scholars.
At the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, books of fundamental importance in fields like Archaeology, Assyriology and Egyptology were originally published in editions of five hundred copies, while more popular and less technical works could expect to yield a thousand copies.
Seventy years after these standards were set up, the situation remains essentially the same a print run of five hundred copies is routine, a thousand copies is rare, more is practically unthinkable.
[1] It is perfectly reasonable to think that there were canonical literary works circulated in antiquity [2] in more copies than their scholarly decipherments in this century.
In another universe the public imagination of the ancient Near East produces a parallel set of publications.
Radically different in their style of writing, documentation and presentation, they offer interpretations of the same civilizations to a far larger and more disparate audience.
Indeed they even offer the rare opportunity for scholars to be paid for their writing!
Occasionally, though not often, writers for the academic audience also produce for the popular market.
Occasionally, but not often, consumers of popular writing also read in the academic literature.
Least frequently of all, a book written for the academic world finds its way to, and sells to, a popular audience.
When, in 1992, my colleague John Sanders (who operates the Oriental Institute's Computer Laboratory) [3] and I began to fantasize about how this institution could make more productive use of electronic resources and communications media, we were both aware that the emerging tools had the potential to blur the distinctions between the scholarly and the popular, as well as apprehensive of their potential to blur the differences between the knowledgeable and the merely assertive.
More importantly, we were convinced that electronic media offered the opportunity on the one hand to make interesting material available to a much larger audience, and on the other hand, that they offered, really for the first time, the opportunity to produce elaborate editions of publications for which print based publication would be economically untenable.
We also understood that the institution we represent had (and has) a reputation for careful scholarship, sober analysis, and thoughtful presentation of the cultures of the ancient Near East.
Having the opportunity, the content and the authority already at our disposal, we developed a model under which we would provide three kinds of service as a beginning towards these goals.
Communication by means of a mailing list[4] Publication providing edited text, primarily existing print publications[5] Recommendation building an index of publications available through electronic media.
[6] The first of these components to appear publicly (in Summer of 1993) was the ANE [Ancient Near East] list.
We planned that ANE would be an alternative to the kinds of open discussion available at the time in such forums as usenet.
We planned that it would be, primarily, a forum for public dialogue among professionals and secondarily, a forum for interested lay folk to engage in discussion of issues of concern to them.
In actual practice, the emphasis shifted very quickly to one in which generic issues of interest to the general public became the normal topics of conversation, with serious debate of substantive issues generally sloughing off into private channels of communication.
A small catalogue of topics tends to repeat itself in various permutations, and a circumscribed cadre of voices is generally the most evident.
Fortunately, participants for the most part retain a sober view of issues, and with a generous dose of moderating personae, the ubiquitous sniping and catcalling which has come to characterize so much e-mail based discussion is kept to a minimum.
Despite such ups and downs, which have included a period when the list was closed entirely for several months, ANE has remained true to its initial goals.
Large numbers of scholars working professionally in ancient Near Eastern studies retain subscriptions to the lists, lurking quietly and responding privately when appropriate.
The subscriber base varies seasonally as the academic year waxes and wanes, but has remained consistently between 1350 and 1400 for the last two years.
Following the temporary closing of the lists in 1996 (which was caused by an excess of zeal on the part of a small group of both amateurs and professionals) we reopened the list with a strict set of behavioral guidelines and a moderated option in which only items of news and information are distributed.
I believe that it is this component of the traffic on the list which is the most useful and has had the most impact.
In the Spring of 1994 we inaugurated the Oriental Institute's Web Server.
Initially residing on borrowed space in a friendly University of Chicago computer laboratory[7], we went entirely independent in November of the same year, adapting and expanding the hardware as it became available to us from other sources.
It was our initial intention to provide only on-line versions of preexisting publications of the Oriental Institute.
This absolved us of the responsibility to provide editorial control a task which neither of us had the time for yet it allowed us access to a fairly large body of initial text and images.
A collection of annual reports and quarterly newsletters each including articles describing the progress and results of larger collaborative projects as well as individual research concerns, were reorganized from their paper-based presentation, and set up to allow the reader to navigate through the documents by way of a multitude of pathways.
For the first time in a single 'publication' it was possible to follow the progress of archaeological projects across time, and to see the relationships of the staffs and interests of archaeologists and philologists while moving among the projects in which they are involved.
It has been interesting to watch.
Members of the staff were pleased with the results and began to think about their reports in different ways.
One of the stellar examples is an article on Egyptian Royal Mummies[8], originally printed in a newsletter with a distribution of about two thousand copies, published on-line in June 1995, now is read (or at least looked at) between five hundred and a thousand times each and every week now for more than four years!
In a site with a fairly complex but logical structure, it has also been possible to monitor the kinds of use, and the pathways by which visitors were progressing through the site, and to develop useful and interesting gateways and directories at the places where visitors were actually entering it.
Much work of this type remains to be done.
[9] The third component of the site is a directory of resources on the internet which relate to the study of the ancient Near East.
In my role as the Librarian of a specialized collection, I had been collecting and attempting to organize such links since the beginning of the nineties.
At about the time we moved our Web site to an independent server in the Autumn of 1994, my list had sufficient volume to appear as a separate entity.
Named Abzu (after the subterranean swamp of Sumerian mythology; the source of raw materials, "...where the life influencing powers reside and where their results, as well as the means to influence their effects, originate.
")[10], it was the our first web publication not to have a print version.
The building of Web directories has been an enormous, and mostly interesting challenge over the last five years.
Anyone who has been watching web publication knows how frequently sites appear and disappear, and more frustratingly, how often they change their basic structure.
Keeping up with such changes takes a great deal of time and energy frequently more than I am actually able to justify (or am willing to admit).
One of the primary problems, as I understand it, is that the source of much web-published material has developed from traditional sources within the administrative structures of organizations: consequently the nature of the materials themselves reflect the traditional roles played by those structual units.
Oceans of web sites, for example, are produced by the public relations departments of large organizations.
In the world of Museums, for instance, the print-based media are still the standard under which many public relations personnel operate: they produce brochures, flyers, handouts, tear-off sheets, for example, which are designed, printed and distributed until they are gone, after which they are redone.
None of these things are intended to be kept, or looked at again, except, perhaps as a souvenir of a visit.
Sadly, those same documents, which are all too often the only well illustrated and regularly published documentation for parts of displays and collections, appear and disappear on the Web, or appear on the web while current, and then are shoved aside, URLs changed, into an archive, making way for the next brochure.
More and more frequently they appear and then disappear without the traditional print analogue having ever been produced.
For those of us with the challenge of trying to bring such things to the attention of interested readers, or trying to contextualize them, or actually even "collect" them, their rapid disappearance is distressing.
It requires us to catalogue such a site on the most simplistic of levels, because detailed cataloguing will only end in dead links.
[11] Such difficulties notwithstanding, there remain large quantities of immensely useful documents accessible on-line.
I manage to add between 750 and a thousand new links to Abzu each year.
I'm much more circumspect about the quality of the sites I accept than I used to be.
I could certainly spend all my working hours on this project alone without being able to complete the task.
Among the interesting consequences of developing Abzu, has been the collaboration with other projects.
Argos, "the first peer-reviewed, limited area search engine (LASE) on the World-Wide Web"[12], sought the collaboration of a number of projects cataloguing resources in ancient studies.
It's principle is simple.
It searches and indexes the text of each member of a corpus of associate sites as well as each of the sites indexed by the associate sites.
In this way it allows a reasonably comprehensive search of the data selected by a cadre of designated experts, and excludes much probably most of the dross and dead ends we so frequently encounter when using the larger searching tools.
Because the corpus is smaller, it also allows for more frequent crawls of the datasets, which yield more up-to-date findsets.
Anthony Beavers, who developed Argos, has also produced Hippias, a parallel search engine for Philosophy.
[13] More recently, Abzu has been selected to be included in the University of Chicago's component [14] of the Cooperative Online Resource Catalog [CORC] project.
[15] The project is designed to help libraries and OCLC [16] deal more effectively with the sharing of metadata relating to the huge amounts of material becoming available on the World Wide Web.
As a consequence, an increasing number (probably out of proportion to their "proper" share) of ancient Near Eastern entries appear in Horizon, the University of Chicago's On-line Public Access Catalogue.
[17] The participation and collaboration of Abzu in such larger projects requires a reassessment of its selection practices and goals.
It's not yet clear what directions Abzu will take in the future, but it is certain we will have to face the application of more rigorous (and explicit) standards, as well as design and implementation of a more sophisticated interface.
While the three-headed structure of the electronic resources we provide at the Oriental Institute remains intact, and while we continue to feel that it serves the purposes for which it was intended, we have no doubt that the future will bring changes for which we, and the structures we've imposed on the site will be unprepared.
Among the more interesting developments are the production of publications which make integral use of the media in which they are written.
The Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions Project [18], for instance, was designed as a prototype for the Web publication of ancient documents.
It is an ambitious experiment in unifying the publication and display of texts in three (ultimately four) different ancient languages and scripts, and the reestablishment of each of the texts within an archaeological and architectural context, allowing for the interpretation and interplay of each of these contexts with the other in a way not heretofore possible.
We are now engaged in the process of connecting the data in that project with the corpus of more than a thousand archival photographs from the Oriental Institute's expedition to Persepolis and other sites in Iran in the 1930s [19] a corpus which was previously available only in a microfiche edition (and therefore for practical purposes unavailable).
Two final points and a note about the future.
We are stunned by our success.
At the height of the academic year in May 1999 we were getting more than eleven thousand user sessions and delivering more than two hundred thousand documents per week.
In a field such as this, these numbers are almost incomprehensible.
They require us to rethink all forms of publication, on all levels.
The maintenance of facilities of this kind need to be institutionalized in the academy and developed with the benefit of adequate resources.
Recent progress in the development of standards for the use of XML in the manipulation and display of both archaeological and textual data, particularly with regard to the complex and varied scripts in which the languages of the ancient Near East were written, is encouraging.
Many scholars who have been hesitant to encode (or to present) data with markup which they rightly consider to be substandard or outright unacceptable,[20] now show renewed enthusiasm for the process of establishing standards, and for the tasks of data encoding.
A conference workshop at the the Oriental Institute in October 1999 seeks to establish a working group bringing together researchers who have begun working on electronic publication in various ways using such tools as SGML, HTML, and XML, or who are interested in exploring these techniques.
[21] With luck and persistance, I believe that we will shortly see the emergence of research tools for ancient Near Eastern Studies comparable to those already existing in such fields as Classics [22] and French Literature.
[23] Notes [1] Catalogue of the publications of the Oriental Institute http://www-oi .uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/PUB/CATALOG/Catalog.html [2] See for example the catalogues of Sumerian texts at Oxford's Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/ [3] The Oriental Institute Computer Laboratory http://www-oi.u chicago.edu/OI/DEPT/COMP/Computer_Lab.html [4] Home page of the ANE lists http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/ OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html [5] Home page of the Oriental Institute http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ default.html [6] Home page of Abzu http://www-oi.uchica go.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/ABZU.HTML [7] University of Chicago Computer Science Department's Macintosh Computer Laboratory http://csmaclab-www.uchicago.edu/ [8] Edward F. Wente , Who Was Who Among the Royal Mummies.
(The Oriental Institute News and Notes, No.
144, Winter 1995) http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IS/WENTE/NN_ Win95/NN_Win95.html [9] Points of entry to the data we provide tend to cluster at the more popular documents (which are not always in expected places).
Some of these are guides themselves, such as Abzu (cited in [6] above), or Alexandra O'Brien's Death in Ancient Egypt http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/DEATH.HTML Demotic Texts published on the World Wide Web http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/DEMOTIC_WWW.HTML Egypt and the Ancient Near East: Web Resources for Young People and Teachers http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/YOUTH_RESOURCES.HTML.
The Giza Mapping Project http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/GIZ/Giza.html The Oriental Institute Museum http://www-oi.uchicago.e du/OI/MUS/OI_Museum.html, though the latter site has not developed as rapidly as it might have if the Museum's staff had not been consumed for several years with the total renovation of the Museum's gallerys and work spaces (http:// www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/INFO/LEGACY/Leg_Current_Events.html) Others are pages relating to particular projects or departments of the Oriental Institute such as [10] As defined in the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu:80/psd/ a nd quoted in the Abzu Colophon http://ww w-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/ABZU_MEANS_WHAT.HTML [11] Abzu includes a (by no means exhaustive) sub directory of Museums with collections including significant holdings in ancient Near Eastern artifacts, or whose Web sites are of particular use http:// www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/ABZU_MUSEUM_INDEX.HTML [12] Argos: Limited Area Search of the Ancient and Medieval Internet http://argos.evansville.edu/ [13] Hippias: Limited Area Search of Philosophy on the Internet http://hippias.evansville.edu/ [14] The U of C/CORC Project http://www.lib.uc hicago.edu/TechInfo/TechSvcs/corc.html [15] CORC--Cooperative Online Resource Catalog http://www.oclc .org/oclc/research/projects/corc/index.htm [16] OCLC: Online Computer Library Center, Inc. http://www.oclc.org/oclc/menu/home1.htm [17] Horizon: The University of Chicago Library Catalog http://webpac.lib.uchicago.edu/webpac-bin/wgbroker?new+-access+top [18] The Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/ARI/ARI.html [19] Persepolis and Ancient Iran: Catalog of Expedition Photographs http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/PA/IRAN/PAAI/PAAI.html [20] Though some strides have been made in the display of of such scripts as Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and standard transliteration schemes (see for instance the documentation on this for the on-line journal TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism http://scholar.cc.emory.edu/scripts/TC/TC-main.html#encoding ), the problems encountered with the encoding of various cuneiform scripts and Egyptian Hieroglyphs have not yet been solved (though for the latter see also the Center for Computer-Aided Egyptological Research http://www.ccer.ggl.ruu.nl/ccer/ccer.html ) [21] Conference Announcement: Electronic Publication of Ancient Near Eastern Texts.
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, October 8th & 9th, 1999 http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/INFO/XML_Conference_1999.html [22] Perseus Project http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ [23] ARTFL Project, University of Chicago: Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html Author Details Charles E. Jones Research Archivist bibliographer The Oriental Institute University of Chicago 1155 East Fifty-Eighth Street Chicago, Illinois, 60637-1569 USA Email: ce-jones@uchicago.edu Web site: http://www-oi.uc hicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/Research_Arch.html Article Title: 'Abzu and Beyond' Author: Charles Jones Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/web-editor/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Windows NT Explorer Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Windows NT Explorer Buzz software java html database browser schema cataloguing windows linux adobe doc url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brett Burridge introduces his regular column on Windows NT with a description of Site Server's search facility.
In this new column, I hope to bring users' attention to the value of employing Windows NT server technology within their institution.
While Windows NT has its fair share of problems, there is no denying that the quality of server-side software available for this platform has improved enormously in the last 12 months.
Kicking off, this article examines the use of Microsoft's Site Server 3.0 [1] to provide a sophisticated web based search solution for your institution.
Crawling Websites One problem that many institutions have is the proliferation of web servers.
These are almost certainly to be based on a range of Unix, Linux and Windows systems.
Consequently, this makes it difficult to employ many search systems that use the file system to catalogue documents.
Furthermore, some servers will almost certainly contain restricted access areas, obsolete pages, development pages, and other items that should not really be catalogued.
Site Server avoids these problems by employing a sophisticated web robot (the Gatherer) to catalogue documents.
The Gatherer will therefore enter a website via the 'front door', and will only be able to index documents that a normal user would be able to gain access to (unless you specifically want it to index restricted documents).
Although the Gatherer can be used to crawl websites, file systems, databases and Exchange Server Public Folders, crawling websites is its most common role.
The Gatherer is controlled from either the Microsoft Management Console (MMC see Figure 1), or via a Java compatible browser using the Web-based Administration interface (WebAdmin see Figure 2).
There are plenty of options to control the behaviour of the Gatherer.
To prevent website and/or network overloads, there is the ability to alter the frequency that documents are requested from the remote servers.
The Gatherer also obeys the proposed Robots Exclusion standard [2], as well as the 'robots' <META> tag embedded within individual pages.
If you aren't able to use robots.txt files on certain sites, there is also the ability to prevent the Gatherer indexing specific paths, but I have found this to be fairly time consuming to configure.
During the crawling process, the admin interface can be used to check on the progress of the crawl (Figure 1).
There is also an extensive logging facility, which assists with troubleshooting.
You can of course schedule the Gatherer to update Catalogues at specific times (this uses the standard Windows NT Task Scheduler).
Figure 1: The Microsoft Management Console is used to manage the Search facility Catalogue Generation and Propagation Once the Gatherer has trawled a site, it will generate a new Catalogue for that site.
Site Server supports a maximum of 32 Catalogues per machine (although a single Catalogue can store details about more than one site).
The size of these Catalogues obviously depends on a number of factors, but as a example, the Catalogue for our main web server (2,500 documents) takes up approximately 22 Mb of disk space.
The Catalogue contains information about a large number of document properties (e.g.
title, description, size, MIME type), most of which are user-configurable via the Catalogue's Schema (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Configuring a Catalogue Schema using the WebAdmin interface If you have more than one machine running Site Server, it is also possible to propagate Catalogues between machines.
This saves having to repeatedly crawl the same documents.
Customising the Search Interface One problem with many 'off the shelf' web search facilities is that they do not always look like they actually belong to your site.
At Essex that was certainly the problem with our original search facility (which used Excite for Web Servers [3]).
By contrast, the search pages for Site Server can be completely customised to reflect your site's corporate image.
I created the Essex search facility [4] in Microsoft FrontPage 98 (see Figure 3), although if I was writing the page again I would consider using something like Visual InterDev [5] or EasyASP [6].
An advantage of FrontPage 98 is that it allows easy switching between the WYSIWYG and HTML source view, and as long as you are aware of its idiosyncrasies, it won't mess up your scripting.
Figure 3: FrontPage 98 was used to create the search page There are plenty of sample Active Server Pages (ASP) supplied with Site Server, and the documentation (in HTML format) is excellent.
Since the examples are all in Visual Basic (Scripting Edition), this is the recommended language for creating server-side ASP search facilities.
One useful facility is the fact that you are able to search the Catalogues through the MMC or WebAdmin interface, so you don't have to create your own search facility before you can determine that the Gatherer has worked as intended.
The documentation and samples make it fairly straightforward to create a huge variety of search pages.
There is also some excellent information available from third party websites, such as the Site Server section of 15seconds [7] and SiteServer.com [8].
Creating pages that show a certain number of records per page isn't too difficult.
I also worked out how display a small icon to indicate the MIME type of the document (e.g.
HTML, PDF, DOC etc.
), and also to give a graphical display of how closely the document matched the search term.
For users wishing to create sophisticated search pages, Site Server allows you to narrow down results by document properties.
For example, the Essex search facility allows searching of the title, description, or the entire document.
There are also options to specify which server is searched, and also to find documents modified within a certain time period.
Site Server also supports some other advanced features that I haven't yet incorporated into our search page, such as the facility to do plain English searches, restrict search results to those documents containing a specific <META> tag, and extensive foreign language support.
One plus point is the ability of Site Server to index a wide range of documents.
Out of the box it has the ability to catalogue web pages, text files and Microsoft Office documents.
Additional filters (called IFilters) can be added if required.
Adobe have a filter for Acrobat PDF documents available for free download from its website [9].
There is also a filter available for Corel WordPerfect documents [10].
If these types of documents are to be indexed, the Gatherer has to be specifically instructed to catalogue the appropriate file types (identified by file extension).
Other Issues So far, the Site Server search facility has caused few problems.
Site Server can be quite resource intensive, and for large institutions wanting to catalogue many resources, it may be worthwhile to purchase a dedicated machine.
It is also unfortunate that search pages written to use Microsoft's Index Server without Site Server (such as the University of Essex Computing Service website search page [11]) need extensive code modification if they are to be used with SiteServer.
Summary and Conclusions One thing that came out of the Institutional Web Management workshop held in September 1998 [12] was the need for institutions to establish effective site searching tools.
I have found Site Server to fulfil this requirement perfectly it is fast, relatively easy to use, reliable, and access statistics show it is consistently in the top ten most frequently requested pages on our servers.
References Microsoft Site Server, website <URL: http://www.eu.microsoft.com/siteserver/> Proposed Robots Exclusion standard, web page <URL: http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots-rfc.html> Excite for Web Servers, website <URL: http://www.excite.com/navigate/> University of Essex (search facility), web page <URL: http://www2.essex.ac.uk/search/> Microsoft Visual InterDev, website <URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vinterdev/> EasyASP, website <URL: http://www.optweb.net/ebanker/easyasp/> Site Server section of 15seconds, website <URL: http://www.15seconds.com/focus/Site%20Server.htm> SiteServer.com, website <URL: http://www.siteserver.com/> IFilter for Adobe Acrobat documents, web page <URL: http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/ifilter.html> Corel IFilter for WordPerfect documents, web page <URL: http://www.corel.com/support/ftpsite/pub/wordperfect/wpwin/8/cwps8.htm#wpifilter> University of Essex Computing Service (search facility), web page <URL: http://www2.essex.ac.uk/cs/search/> Report on the "Institutional Web Management" Workshop, Brian Kelly, Ariadne issue 17 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue17/web-focus/> Author Details Brett Burridge University of Essex Computing Service Wivenhoe Park Colchester Essex, CO4 3SQ Email: brettb@essex.ac.uk Brett Burridge is a Systems Programmer in the Computing Service at the University of Essex.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz software portfolio xml tei archives metadata digitisation identifier copyright sgml aggregation adobe e-learning ebook drm mobi authentication interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
JISC publishes three important documents The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) promotes the innovative application and use of information systems and information technology in Higher and Further education across the UK.
The JISC has published three new documents.
These are the draft 3-year Collection Strategy, the Collections Development Policy and the Final Report from the JCEI (JISC Committee for Electronic Information) Charging Working Group Collection Strategy The JISC will continue to procure and make available on a subscription basis a collection of high quality electronic resources of relevance to learning, teaching, and research in higher and further education.
In addition the JISC will expand its activities to create high quality electronic resources through digitisation and development of discovery tools for important collections residing in institutions.
The full document can be read at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/collections/strategy.htm Collections Development Policy This document is the Collections Development Policy for the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and covers four key stages in the lifecycle of DNER collections: identification of potential resources, their selection as collections, evaluation of the impact of collections, and resource de-selection or renewal.
This policy is a working document that will change over the next three years as collecting practices for the DNER develop and as more volatile selection criteria (e.g.
agreed standards) change.
The full document is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/collections/coldev_policy.htm Charging Policy This is the final report from the Charging Working Group established by JISC’s Committee for Electronic Information (JCEI), to review the current arrangements for dataset charging and to make recommendations on a revised charging model, to better suit the needs of small institutions and FE Colleges.
The full document is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub01/charging.html Comments are invited on the Strategy and Development Policy document by the end of August as detailed in JISC Circular C2/01 C3/01 available on JISC website.
[August 2001] RNIB Techshare 2001 Conference The Techshare 2001 conference is for professionals who have an active interest in technology and the role it plays in learning, work, and in society at large.
We are currently calling for papers and if anyone would like to submit a paper then there is more information available on the techshare website at: http://www.techshare.org.uk.
[August 2001] Launch of eBookstore London & New York-Taylor & Francis Group plc, the academic publishers whose imprints include Routledge, Garland Science, Psychology Press and Europa, are pleased to announce the launch of the Taylor & Francis eBookstore http://www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk eBook buyers are able to browse, select and download from an initial list of over 400 of the company’s most popular titles.
By September, the list will expand to include over 1,000 titles, and it is expected that more than 2,500 titles will be available by the end of the year.
Three eBook formats are available at http://www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk: Microsoft Reader (for PC and Pocket PC use only) Adobe eBook Reader (for use on PC and Mac) Mobipocket (for use on Palm Pilot, Psion, PC) Commenting on the eBookstore, Christoph Chesher, Sales Director, said: “We at Taylor & Francis are delighted to have our eBookstore open.
It is too early to predict demand but I am encouraged by the increasing interest for academic material.
As content providers we have to make our information as accessible as possible, and this is the next step in a strategy that will ensure that our growing eBook list is available to the widest possible audience, including through a number of independent e-retailers.” Roger Horton, Managing Director, added: “We feel that this will have an overwhelmingly positive impact on our core audience, the academic marketplace, and we are convinced that many will both experiment and adopt this new medium .” In order to encourage Taylor & Francis’ core audience-consisting of academics, students, and general readers of intellectual non-fiction-to experiment with this new medium, a number of leading titles are available on the site for £1£10.
Building on two centuries’ experience, Taylor & Francis has grown rapidly over the last two decades to become a leading international academic publisher, with offices in the US, UK, Scandinavia, Singapore and India.
The Taylor & Francis Group publish over 800 journals and around 1,300 new books each year, with a backlist in excess of 20,000 titles.
[July 2001] Review draft of TEI Guidlines Released The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C) today announced release of the official review draft of version 4 of Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.
The third edition, known as “P3”, has been heavily used since its released in April of 1994 for developing richly encoded and highly portable electronic editions of major works in philosophy, linguistics, history, literary studies, and many other disciplines.
The fourth edition, “P4” will be fully compatible with XML, as well as remaining compatible with SGML (XML’s predecessor and the syntactic basis for P3).
XML-compatible versions of the TEI DTDs have been available for some time by means of an automatic generation process using the TEI “pizza chef” on the project’s website at http://www.tei-c.org/pizza.html.
The first stage in the production of P4 has been to remove the need for this process; accordingly, a preliminary set of dual-capability XML or SGML DTDs was made available for testing at the ACH-ALLC Conference in New York in June (now available from http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/DTD/).
The next stage was to apply a series of systematic changes to the associated documentation, which is now complete: the results may be read at http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/index.html (HTML format) or http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/reviewdraft.pdf (PDF format) Over the summer, it is planned to carry out a complete review of this text, aiming to treat XML equally with SGML throughout.
Detailed work is required to revise the treatment of character sets and writing systems, as well as in rewriting the chapter “A Gentle Introduction to SGML”, and is already underway.
The TEI Consortium solicits assistance in the review of all other parts of the new draft.
For information on how you can participate in this review, please go to http://www.tei-c.org/TEI/P4X/Status/ Comments are due to the editors by mid-September, and it is hoped to complete the first publication of the new draft in time for the first TEI Members Meeting scheduled for November of this year.
E-Book 2001 Join us November 5-7 in Washington, DC for E-Book 2001!
If you’re wondering how to incorporate E-Book technology into your life, your work, or your organization, youll find much to think about at the 4th Electronic Book Conference.
Sponsored by NISO (http://www.niso.org and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, E-Book 2001 brings together the key players in the E-Book world: the technology experts (hardware, software, DRM), the content providers (publishers and aggregators, authors and agents), and the users (educators, librarians, readers) to examine how this new technology can change the way we think about books.
Conference exhibits will feature the top companies supporting E-book technologies.
This is a conference that will expand your boundaries.
Check out the conference web site to learn more about the program and to register: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/ebook2001/ If youre interested in exhibiting, get more details at: http://www.niso.org/ebook00.html or contact Jane Thomson, email: jthomson@niso.org Nordic Interactive Conference 2001 Digital Visions and User Reality 31 October 2001 to 3 November 2001, Copenhagen, Denmark NIC 2001 is a biannual conference initiated by Nordic Interactive, a new pan-Nordic network for leading Nordic IT research institutes and companies in interactive digital technology.
The first significant landmark of the network is NIC 2001, featuring entrepreneurs and visionary leaders from industry and academia, artists and performers as well as a number of international keynote speakers.
The conference provides a rich set of formats for interaction, presentation and discussion of the latest results and developments.
NIC 2001 presents a four-day program consisting of five tracks, tutorials, informal workshops, expo (also open to the public), art gallery, job fair and a competition for postgraduate and doctoral students.
Why NIC 2001?
There has been a growing focus on research and development as the core competencies of the Nordic countries.
The Nordic countries occupy unique research and development positions in areas closely connected to development and use of interactive digital technology, especially in the areas of user centred design, social context relations and mobility.
At NIC2001 we aim at bringing the Nordic capacities in this broad and multidisciplinary field together, to present and discuss contributions from scientists, artists, developers, business, educators, and computer enthusiasts.
Conference topics will relate to science, education, games, design, communication, interaction, work, daily living and society.
Leaders and visionaries from industry, academia, research and government will discuss the key technology advances that will impact our daily lives now and in the future, and how that may change the way we interact.
The goal of NIC 2001 is to provide a highly interactive and engaging forum, where attendees can meet to exchange and discuss ideas.
We wish to strengthen the Nordic relations and networks, to consider the form, role, and impact of future interactive digital technology.
The conference will present some of the latest technological developments, and discuss issues and challenges facing the Nordic R&D environment in this area, as we move into the 21st Century.
Our speakers, panellists and presenters are all deeply involved in various areas of research, development, creation and use of interactive digital technology.
Conference themes are: 1.
Living in intelligent environments 2.
Nomadic computing 3.
Learning in a distributed world future pedagogical practices 4.
Touch, hear, see 5.
To be announced!
Online registration and the preliminary conference programme is now available at http://www.nic2001.org E-mail enquiries: secr@nic2001.org Website: http://www.nic2001.org [July 2001] Research Division of LASER joins LITC, South Bank University When LASER transforms into the Laser Foundation this autumn its substantial portfolio of research activities will be moving to LITC, the long standing centre at South Bank University undertaking Research, Consultancy, Training and Publishing for the Information Profession.
Robin Yeates, LASER’s Assistant Director, Research and Development and previously a Senior Researcher at LITC, will also move to South Bank.
LASER’s current research ventures include COVAX, a project in the European Commission’s IST Programme and Longitude, an EARL/CIPFA project funded by Resource and CAPITAL, a BLC&PP project, analysing coverage, retention and future partnerships in monographic provision.
LASER is also a partner in several successful NOF digitisation projects.
LITC has a portfolio of active research chiefly funded by the JISC and the European Commission.
Among the important active research is EASEL a project concerned with educational metadata and interoperability; and Angel looking at authentication and the successful integration of services across library resources and online learning.
Among other research interests are alerting agents, information security, digitisation and copyright, content management and e-libraries.
LITC is a publisher for the profession with among others the journal Vine and LTWorld.
LITC also organises events such as the recent E-Books 2001 conference, and offers consultancy services.
John Akeroyd, Director of LITC comments that “There are many natural synergies between the two research units.
We both have a strong interest in metadata, interoperability and e-learning, for example.
Not surprising as these are key issues that the whole information profession needs to address.
At the same time LASER’s research expands the scope of our activities.” Robin Yeates commenting on the merger said: “It was a natural move to join up LASER’s and LITC’s research.
The profession needs more cross sectoral research and the merger will further extend LASER’s activities across public libraries, museums and archives to encompass LITC’s greater stress on HE and Health.
Our research will be for the benefit of the whole information profession”.
Andrew Cox remains Associate Director of LITC and Centre Head.
For any queries please contact:Frances Hendrix, E-mail frances@laserfoundation.org.uk.
Please note that this e-mail is not available until 1st October until then please use frances@viscount.org.uk.
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Metadata Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata Corner Buzz data software framework database archives metadata digitisation copyright video preservation multimedia url research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reports from Tomar, Portugal, on the DELOS6 Workshop.
Since 1996 the DELOS Working Group [1] has organised a series of workshops with the intention of promoting research into the further development of digital library technologies.
Castelo dos Templários, Tomar The sixth workshop in the DELOS series was held in the Hotel dos Templários, Tomar (Portugal) on the 17th 19th June 1998 [2].
Tomar is a small town about 140 km.
north of Lisbon and is famous for its Templar castle and the magnificent Convento de Christo, an UNESCO World Heritage Site [3].
The workshop was jointly organised by the DELOS Working Group and project NEDLIB (Networked European Deposit Library), a project that is funded by the European Commission’s Telematics Application Programme [4].
It had about 40 attendees, mostly from Europe but including some speakers from the United States and Australia.
Local organisation of the workshop was undertaken by INESC (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores) [5] and the Portuguese National Library [6], with the support of the Central Library of the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Lisbon [7].
Previous DELOS workshops had covered issues like metadata, multilingual information retrieval and image indexing.
The sixth workshop concerned the preservation of digital information and the workshop presentations provided a good overview of current initiatives and projects in this area.
Strategic issues Two introductory papers described strategic approaches to preservation being developed in the US and UK.
Hans Rütimann, International Program Officer of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) [8], introduced work carried out under the auspices of the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) and the Digital Library Federation.
His paper, for example, summed-up the main conclusions and recommendations of the 1996 report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned jointly by the CPA and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) which has done so much to set the agenda for current work on digital preservation [9].
There are three main strategies for digital preservation: migration across changing software and hardware platforms, emulation, and preserving obsolete hardware and software.
Currently migration is the strategy most commonly proposed.
Rütimann reported that Jeff Rothenberg had argued that over longer time periods, emulation was likely to be more effective and CLIR had funded him to further develop and test his ideas on emulation as a preservation strategy.
His report should be available from the CLIR website later this year.
There was also a viewing of the important CLIR videotape "Into the future: on the preservation of knowledge in the electronic age" which clearly outlines the scope and importance of the digital preservation problem [10].
"Into the Future" has been widely shown on the public service TV channels in the US and has led to US press coverage of digital archiving issues, for example in The New York Times [11].
CLIR is also the administrative home of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) whose primary goal is "to establish the necessary conditions for creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving a distributed collection of digital materials accessible to scholars and a wider public" [12].
Neil Beagrie introduced a study produced by the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) on developing a strategic policy framework for the creation and preservation of digital resources [13].
This had been funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK higher education funding councils as part of a series of studies commissioned by the Digital Archiving Working Group (DAWG).
The study (amongst other things) noted that different stakeholders become involved at different stages of the life-cycle of digital resources and that this has a significant effect upon the potential for (and the cost of) preserving these resources.
Data creators, for example, very rarely consider how the resources that they create should be managed in the long-term.
Organisations concerned with digital preservation, on the other hand, often have virtually no influence over how resources are created.
It is important, therefore, for all stakeholders to be aware of how their own activities will impact on the life-cycle of a particular resource and will also need to understand the interests and involvement of other stakeholders.
It is particularly important to raise awareness of preservation issues at the data creation stage of the life-cycle.
The study also emphasised the importance of co-operative activity in the field of digital preservation, noting that "no single agency is likely to be able to undertake the role of preserving all digital materials within its purview …".
Metadata issues There is currently a growing awareness of the importance of metadata to digital preservation [14].
This demonstrates that the library and information community are beginning to see the usefulness of metadata not just for resource discovery, important although that is, but as a help to the ongoing management of digital (specifically networked) resources including long-term preservation.
For example, it is important to identify what metadata would be needed to enable the emulation of digital information created on obsolete software and hardware platforms.
Collecting metadata would also be important part of migration strategies.
Evidence of the growing interest in metadata and digital preservation is the recent publication of the final report of a RLG Working Group on the Preservation Issues of Metadata [15].
Several papers at the workshop covered these issues.
Michael Day (UKOLN) introduced the UK CEDARS (CURL Exemplars in Digital ARchiveS) project that is funded by JISC under the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme [16].
His paper gave a brief outline of the project aims and described in more detail the work that CEDARS propose with regard to preservation metadata.
Alan R. Heminger of the US Air Force Institute of Technology proposed the adoption of a Digital Rosetta Stone (DRS) model.
He proposed the creation of a meta-knowledge archive (or archives) that would maintain sufficient knowledge about how data had been stored and used in order to enable the future recovery of data from obsolete storage devices and file formats.
Heminger attempted to demonstrate the theory behind the model with an example based on obsolete 8-track punched paper tape.
The DRS approach, if applied consistently to all new technologies, would be one way of being able to reconstruct information from obsolete storage devices and file formats but Heminger himself admits that the development of a meta-knowledge archive would be a time intensive and expensive task.
Dave MacCarn (WGBH Educational Foundation) outlined the concept of a Universal Preservation Format (UPF) for digital video and film which proposes the use of a platform-independent format that will help make accessible a wide range of data types [17].
Interestingly, in his presentation, MacCarn advocated storing digital data on an extremely compact hybrid analogue media (like the HD-ROSETTA disks [18] developed by Norsam Technologies) for long-term preservation.
The stored information would include metadata that would describe how to recover the data stored on the medium and to enable the construction of reading devices.
Collection management issues The workshop also raised issues about collection management policies with regard to digital preservation.
In the digital information environment it is far from clear who should be responsible for implementing collection management policies and the precise criteria that these policies should include.
Some Internet subject services or gateways, for example, use defined quality criteria for selecting what is included in their databases [19], but it is unlikely whether these criteria would be suitable for (say) a national library’s preservation policy.
With current Web technologies, it is possible to bypass the selection issue altogether.
Brewster Kahle, for example, has founded the Internet Archive Foundation that takes periodic snapshots of all parts of the Web that are freely and technically accessible [20] [21].
It is a relatively easy task to develop (or adapt) software robots which are able to collect the entire Web or at least particular domains of it.
At Tomar, a paper by Inkeri Salonharju (Helsinki University Library) and Kirsti Lounamaa (Centre for Scientific Computing) revealed that the Finnish EVA project [22] is using technology developed for the Nordic Web Index (NWI) [23] to harvest and index all Web documents located in the Finnish domain.
Copyright considerations mean that there is currently no public access to the archive produced by EVA, although it is hoped that in the longer-term legal deposit legislation for digital publications might provide for this.
The Swedish Royal Library’s Kulturarw3 project has a similar approach [24].
The project’s basic idea is to automate as much as possible and build robots to download ‘everything’ following Kahle’s Internet Archive model.
Kulturarw3 has chosen this approach partly because of the difficulty of devising suitable ‘futureproof’ criteria but, like EVA, is aware that implementing selection policies is currently expensive in terms of time and personnel.
By contrast, the National Library of Australia’s PANDORA project [25] started with the principle of selectivity.
The workshop paper delivered by Judith Pearce (NLA) noted that no attempt was being made to capture the entire Australian domain.
PANDORA, therefore, used selection guidelines developed by a Selection Committee on Online Australian Publications (SCOAP) [26].
These guidelines clearly state that networked publications that are not authoritative or do not have reasonable research value would not usually be selected for preservation.
PANDORA is, however, only currently collecting electronic publications that are in the public domain.
The project is aware, however, that the NLA needs to consider the issues surrounding the management of commercially published digital information.
Currently the library would view commercial publications held in the PANDORA archive as ‘secondary resources’; i.e.
that these archived publications should be used only when they are no longer available from the publisher.
The NLA is aware that this policy may have to be modified once major Australian publishers move into the Internet publishing market.
There is, therefore, some conflict between the automated gathering models proposed in the Nordic digital preservation projects and the NLA’s development of appropriate collection management policies.
The comprehensive Nordic approach may work in relatively small domains but other projects, including CEDARS, will work on developing collection management strategies for preservation.
Developing and applying appropriate collection management policies may be time-consuming and expensive in the short-term but attempting to collect all digital documents may not be sustainable (or even desirable) in the longer-term.
Digitization issues Some of the other workshop papers described projects or programmes related to digitisation.
These projects are primarily interested in giving access to digitised objects rather than in digital preservation itself.
For example, Milena Dobreva of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences outlined the current situation with regard to the creation of digitised collections of cultural heritage resources in Bulgaria.
Kostas Chandrinos (Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (ICS-FORTH) [27], Greece) described the Web-based architectures being used in the ARHON (A Multimedia System for Archiving, Annotation and Retrieval of Historical Documents) project.
Other presentations were concerned with the digitisation of audio-visual resources.
Digital "salvage archiving" and e-mail records The most entertaining paper was by David Wallace of the University of Michigan School of Information on the US PROFS-related litigation concerning the archival preservation of electronic mail records emanating from the US National Security Council and the Executive Office of the President.
This case followed on from investigation of the "Iran-Contra Affair" and the discovery of important e-mail communications between Oliver North and National Security Adviser John Poindexter [28].
One of the interesting outcomes of the long legislative battle (which is still continuing) was that in 1993 the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) [29] was told to take immediate action to preserve the electronic records that had been the subject of the case.
The material consisted of around 5,700 backup tapes (in various formats) and over 150 hard disk drives from personal computers.
These materials eventually found their way to NARA’s Center for Electronic Records (CER) where despite many problems they were mostly successfully copied.
Wallace pointed out that this success was, however, at the cost of the rest of the work of the CER.
The time and resources spent on PROFS "salvage" work meant that CER had to temporarily stop accessioning electronic records from the rest of the government.
Wallace concluded that digital "salvage archiving" would probably require resources, both technical and economic, that would not be available in most institutions concerned with preservation and that it would not be an effective way of proceeding unless substantial additional resources are able to be concentrated on the salvage effort.
Another interesting outcome from this litigation is that it is now accepted in the US that electronic mail software can produce official government records.
It has been shown that computer systems will need to accomodate an electronic record-keeping functionality during the systems design stage if later archival processing and preservation is to be accomplished in a cost-effective and timely manner.
It has also demonstrated that policies that rely on printing selected e-mail records to paper can omit significant systems metadata and could violate US public records legislation if the printout is then treated as the official record and electronic versions deleted.
Conclusions Inevitably other issues were raised over the three days of the workshop.
There was a widespread acceptance that the preservation of digital information does not just involve solving technical problems but requires scalable solutions to organisational, economic and political problems as well.
Such solutions will require a strategic approach and collaboration between institutions at a national and international level.
Convento de Christo, Tomar The conference ended after lunch on the 19th June.
Transfers were arranged to Lisbon where some of the workshop attendees got the opportunity to visit Expo 98 [30] or the capital city itself.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Kelly Russell (CEDARS Project Manager) and the CEDARS project for helping to fund Michael Day’s participation in the DELOS workshop.
The authors have also produced a shorter review of the same workshop in the July/August 1998 issue of D-Lib Magazine [31].
References DELOS Working Group URL: <http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/DELOS/> Sixth DELOS Workshop: Preservation of Digital Information URL: <http://crack.inesc.pt/events/ercim/delos6/> Luís Maria Pedrosa dos Santos Graça, Convento de Christo.
Lisboa-Mafra: Edição ELO, 1994.
Project NEDLIB URL: <http://www.konbib.nl/nedlib/> INESC: Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores URL: <http://www.inesc.pt/> Biblioteca Nacional URL: <http://www.biblioteca-nacional.pt/> Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) URL: <http://www.ist.utl.pt/> Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) URL: <http://www.clir.org/> Preserving digital information.
Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group.
Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, May 1996.
URL: <http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/> Into the future: on the preservation of knowledge in the electronic age.
A film by Terry Sanders, produced in association with the Commission on Preservation and Access (a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources) and the American Council of Learned Societies.
URL: <http://www.clir.org/programs/otheractiv/intro.html> Stephen Manes, Time and technology threaten digital archives.
Science Desk.
New York Times, 7 April 1998.
URL: <http://archives.nytimes.com/archives/> Digital Library Federation URL: <http://www.clir.org/programs/diglib/diglib.html> Neil Beagrie and Daniel Greenstein, A Strategic policy framework for creating and preserving digital collections.
Final draft.
London: Arts and Humanities Data Service, July 1998.
URL: <http://ahds.ac.uk/manage/framework.htm> Michael Day, Extending metadata for digital preservation.
Ariadne, No.
9, May 1997.
URL: <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/metadata/> RLG Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata, Final report.
Mountain View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, May 1998.
URL: <http://www.rlg.org/preserv/presmeta.html> CURL Exemplars in Digital ARchiveS (CEDARS) URL: <http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/> Universal Preservation Format URL: <http://info.wgbh.org/upf/> Norsam Technologies, HD-ROSETTA Archival Storage System.
URL: <http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.htm> Paul Hofman, Emma Worsfold, Debra Hiom, Michael Day and Angela Oehler, Specification for resource description methods: 1.
Selection criteria for quality controlled information gateways.
DESIRE Deliverable 3.2 (2).
Bath: UKOLN, May 1997.
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/desire/quality/> Brewster Kahle, Preserving the Internet.
Scientific American, Vol.
276, No.
3, March 1997, pp.
72-73.
Peter Lyman and Brewster Kahle, Archiving digital cultural artifacts: organizing an agenda for action, D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1998.
URL: <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/07lyman.html> EVA the acquisition and archiving of electronic network publications URL: <http://renki.lib.helsinki.fi/eva/english.html> Nordic Web Index (NWI) URL: <http://nwi.lub.lu.se/?lang=en Kulturarw3 URL: <http://kulturarw3.kb.se/html/projectdescription.html> Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia (PANDORA) URL: <http://www.nla.gov.au/pandora/> Selection Committee on Online Australian Publications (SCOAP), Guidelines for the selection of online Australian publications intended for preservation by the National Library.
Canberra: National Library of Australia, January 1997.
URL: <http://www.nla.gov.au/scoap/scoapgui.html> Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (ICS-FORTH) URL: <http://www.ics.forth.gr/ICS_home/> David Bearman, The implications of Armstrong v. Executive of the President for the archival management of electronic records.
American Archivist, Vol.
56, 1993, pp.
674-689.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) URL: <http://www.nara.gov/> Expo ‘98, Lisboa URL: <http://www.expo98.pt/en/homepage.html> Michael Day and Neil Beagrie, Sixth DELOS Workshop Preservation of digital information, June 17-19, 1998, Tomar Portugal.
D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1998 URL: <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/07clips.html#DELOS> Author details Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web page: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Neil Beagrie Collections and Standards Development Officer Arts and Humanities Data Service Executive King’s College London London WC2R 2LS E-mail: neil.beagrie@ahds.ac.uk Web page: http://ahds.ac.uk/bkgd/exec.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The DISinHE Centre: Web CT Accessibility Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The DISinHE Centre: Web CT Accessibility Buzz software java accessibility windows webct url Citation BibTex RIS Murray Rowan examines WebCT from the point of view of accessibility.
WebCT’s interface is aimed at the non-programmer and allows easy organisation of media and resources for the delivery of web-based courses.
It is very popular with academics throughout the world and UK Higher Education.
However, because courseware development software is highly automated, and is a relatively new field, most courseware development software currently available has some accessibility difficulties.
With the impending removal of the education exclusion from the Disability Discrimination Act and new Human Rights legislation, courseware that is produced using these products may become potentially illegal.
WebCT is aware of these issues and intends to include more accessibility features in version 3 of their product which will be available in June 2000.
Until then, it is recommended that these products be used with care.
A review of the accessibility issues concerning the currently available versions 1 and 2 of WebCT is given below.
WebCT V1 This version uses a frames format which makes both the student view and the designer view potentially inaccessible to users of adaptive technology such as a screen reader.
The navigation system in the course content has no text link equivalent and the bulletin board system also uses frames.
Because of these problems, designers have to create alternative navigation and bulletin board systems to ensure accessibility.
WebCT also relies on Java applets, which makes the interface inaccessible to users of assistive technologies.
Accessibility is further compromised by the lack of opportunity to include ALT text in pages generated by the courseware.
The bulletin board/mail systems have a complex three-frame structure that is fairly awkward for anyone to use and even more difficult for users of screen readers.
The chat is java-based and also inaccessible.
WebCT V2 Version 2 reflects some improvement, but there is much work still to be done.
To this end, WebCT is targeting Version 3, which is to be released in June 2000 for additional changes to improve accessibility.
In the meantime, educators should use WebCT Version 2 with caution regarding accessibility.
Version 2 allows the designer of the course to add ALT text to images generated by the courseware.
The new site map feature has been added to help users with navigation and the new mail tools provide pop-up windows as an alternative to frames.
New strategies to improve the access to student tools / navigation are currently being developed.
Hopefully we will see more in Version 3 in June.
There is still a long way to go before WebCT is completely accessible, as is the case with all of the major courseware packages of this type currently on the market.
However, WebCT acknowledges the accessibility issues, and seems to be actively pursuing development of a more accessible interface.
References For more information on disability and information systems in UK Higher Education see the DISinHE web site at: http://www.disinhe.ac.uk/ A brief explanation of adaptive technology followed by a list of simple tips and techniques to make your WebCT output more accessible is available on the WebCT site at: http://www.webct.com/v2/help/access/accessibility.html More information on the accessibility of version 2 of web CT, and on the plans for the release of version 3 can be found at: http://about.webct.com/v2/access_v2.html WebCT, the web based CBL (Computer Based Learning) courseware package is available at: http://www.webct.com/ Author Details   Murray Rowan Project Officer Digital Media Access Group University of Dundee DD1 4HN Email: mrowan@computing.dundee.ac.uk Web site: www.computing@dundee.ac.uk/projects/dmag/ Article Title: "Web CT Accessibility" Author: Murray Rowan Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/disinhe/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Buzz data software framework database cataloguing hypertext url research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod and Lesa Ng with some useful tips on Shoestring Marketing for projects.
EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is a free service, and is funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Marketing on a tight budget One of the findings of the Rowley Report on JISC User Behaviour [1] was that subject gateways, although providing very useful services, are underused by academics.
Using a variety of methods to gather information, including interviews and questionnaires, the research which led to the Report found that relatively few students and staff in UK higher education were aware of the existence of gateways as Internet retrieval tools.
The Report concluded that gateway marketing had been deficient.
As one of the Resource Discover Network (RDN) Hubs, EEVL's main remit is to create a subject gateway for engineering, mathematics and computing.
The subject of engineering has been covered by EEVL since 1996, and in the summer of 2001 a new service will be launched which will also cover mathematics and computing.
Over the past few years, extensive efforts have been made to promote EEVL, and these have met with some success as is shown from current statistics of use.
EEVL receives over 35,000 visitors each month, who generate about 250,000 page views.
However, the potential market for EEVL is much larger.
There are about 210,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students currently studying engineering, mathematics and computing at UK universities (over 11% of the total student population) [2], an unknown number of students in further education studying the same, or related, subjects, and several thousand more potential users amongst academic members of staff.
In addition, EEVL's market includes library and information professionals, a large number of practicing professionals working in the engineering and computing industries, plus members of the public who want to locate quality-assured Internet resources in the subject covered by the Hub.
The findings of the Rowley Report on use and awareness would appear, therefore, to be applicable to EEVL.
With such a large target community, an appropriate marketing strategy with an adequate budget is essential for ensuring that potential users are aware of the EEVL service.
For a number of reasons, stemming largely from the fact that EEVL started life as a research project which subsequently turned into a service, and also because it is funded out of the public purse, resources available for promotional purposes have always been limited.
It has been possible to allocate about three per cent of the budget to marketing, which is much less than many commercial companies would expect to spend on promotion.
It is therefore perhaps not surprising that much of EEVL's promotional work has had to be fairly imaginative in order to make up for financial restrictions.
A variety of low cost 'Guerrilla marketing' techniques have been used to promote the service (guerrilla marketing means achieving conventional marketing goals with unconventional methods, especially in terms of investing time and energy instead of money).
These have included manual submission of the site to numerous search engines, occasional press release postings sent to newsgroups and mailing lists, requests for links from other sites and suggesting to webmasters of sites included in EEVL that they create links to the service.
Other promotional activities have included writing online articles for LIS and engineering publications, press releases sent to relevant publications, and the distribution of attractive, but flimsy A5 fliers to university libraries and academic departments.
Efforts have also included more traditional, and relatively expensive, methods such as the distribution of promotional calendars, pens, post-it notes, and stickers to intermediaries such as LIS professionals and departmental heads of department, seminars and demonstrations, and the occasional presentation at a conference.
[3] Co-operative marketing Another way to promote a service, if funds are limited, is to get someone else to pay for it.
EEVL has had two promotional campaigns that have been supported by third parties the 'EEVL Challenge', which was held towards the end of 1999, and the '£5,000 worth of free engineering books' promotion, which is running at the time of writing.
Of course, in order to leverage external financial assistance, something must be offered in return.
With 35,000 visitors producing 250,000 page views each month, EEVL is able to offer a relatively wide user base and considerable exposure within a focused subject community to organisations wishing to participate in joint promotional efforts.
The EEVL Challenge promotion was reasonably successful.
It involved the distribution of a large number of fliers advertising a competition based at the EEVL Web site.
Entrants were invited to answer a series of online questions based around the services offered by the sponsoring organisations.
The prizes, consisting of three Palm Pilots, £500 worth of books, a free Web site design, sweatshirts and posters, were quite desirable.
Contributing to the promotion were rswww.com, the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), Software Echo (a publication of Scottish Enterprise which has since ceased), TWI, Edina and the Federation of Master Builders (FMB).
Some of the contributors sponsored prizes, and others distributed fliers.
The promotion generated a large number of hits to the competition Web site, and thereby helped to raise awareness of the EEVL service and the services of the contributors.
However only about 1,000 entrants completed the set of questions.
On reflection, it is obvious that the promotion was rather complex and required too much effort on the part of entrants.
The current free book promotion is much simpler and has already attracted far more entrants.
How does it work?
Each of the four participating publishers, Kluwer, Palgrave, Academic Press and Springer, has donated a retail value of £1,250 worth of books, plus a sum to cover administration costs which include Web page design and flier production.
Engineering magazine and E2 magazine have distributed fliers (shown above) advertising the promotion as inserts in their monthly publications, and EEVL has also sent quantities of fliers to University Science and Technology Librarians Group (USTLG) members, engineering departments, and other parties such as relevant Learning and Technology Subject Network (LTSN) Centres.
Visitors to the competition pages are invited to select, via hypertext links to the publishers' Web sites, a book title of their choice, and, on returning to the EEVL site enter brief details and their e-mail address.
Selections are automatically emailed to the relevant publisher, and all entrants receive an acknowledgement by email.
At the end of the promotion, the publishers will pick winners at random, and then send the winners a copy of their chosen book, until the accumulated cost reaches £5,000.
For those entrants who have selected a book title but who have not been chosen, EEVL is encouraging the publishers to offer the title at a much discounted price.
The direct cost of the free book promotion to EEVL has been minimal.
Through it, EEVL has raised its profile within its target community, and several hundred entrants will receive free books..
But what have the participating publishers received for their money and effort?
They have gained exposure via their their logos on 70,000 fliers which have been distributed widely throughout the academic and trade communities.
Their logos have also featured on the competition Web site, which has received many thousands of hits.
The exercise has associated them with both a highly regarded non-profit academic service and two popular engineering trade magazines, and they have also been seen as a facilitator of books for their prime customer community of academics, students, and engineers.
Visitors to their Web sites, and in particular their book catalogues, will have increased.
They will be able to glean data as to which are their most desirable book titles, and they will also be able to compile a contact database of email addresses of consenting participants.
In addition, their names have been mentioned in email messages sent by EEVL advertising the competition to various lists and newsgroups, and in press releases featured in publications such as Information World Review and the Library Association Record.
The trade magazines Engineering and E2 have gained similar benefits, and their publisher will also receive a copy of the email contact database.
Conclusion Shoestring marketing has low direct costs, but it is expensive in terms of staff time and effort.
Both the EEVL Challenge, and the free book promotion have, for example, required more effort than originally anticipated.
For educational services with tight budgets, shoestring marketing can be an effective method of profile-raising, and it can also encourage and strengthen links with the commercial world, however it is not a proper alternative for an adequately funded marketing strategy.
Perhaps one of the outcomes of the Rowley Report will be that more resources are provided for such a purpose.
References 1.
Rowley, Jennifer JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework First Annual Report, August 2000 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub00/m&e_rep1.html 2.
Students in Higher Education 1998/99.
3.
MacLeod, Roddy EEVL "not a success" Ariadne, issue 21, Septamber 1999. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/eevl/ Author Details   Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4ASE-mail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Lesa Ng EEVL Information & Cataloguing Officer Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: L.Ng@hw.ac.uk Article Title: "Shoestring marketing: examples from EEVL" Author: Roddy MacLeod and Lesa Ng Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz data database archives url research Citation BibTex RIS Heather Dawson with news of the recently merged Social Science Librarians Group.
Social Science Librarians Update 1999 was a momentous year for the ASLIB Social Science Librarians Special Interest Group.
In April 1999 it was decided to merge with ALISS (Academic Librarians in the Social Sciences), a professional grouping of information workers based in UK university libraries, in order to create one national body.
The past year has seen a great deal of negotiation behind the scenes with ASLIB and the interim committee members in order to establish a firm foundation for the group and a renewed programme of activities.
The preparation period has culminated in the relaunch of the group under the new name ASSIGN (ASLIB Social Science Information Group and Network).
This reflects its aim to be a group for all Social Science information workers, regardless of their geographical location or sector of work.
Indeed the new committee is composed of members from academic libraries, government libraries and charitable foundations.
They also include individuals from Wales, Warwick, Surrey and London and we are committed to promoting further regional events and membership.
The final step towards the creation of the new group was made at our AGM at the beginning of May when it was decided to merge the financial accounts of the two groups.
We also recruited new regional committee members to reflect the new national focus.
The full committee list now includes: Richard Cheffins (British Library Social Policy Information Unit) Chair Heather Dawson (British Library of Political and Economic Science, the LSE Library) Secretary Yasmin Adeeb/ John Naylor (University of Warwick) Treasurers Nicola Hilliard (National Childrens Bureau) Jennifer Treherne (University of Surrey) Angela Upton (National Institute of Social Work) Melanie Pfeffer (Department of Health) Helen Mackin (Barnados) Thelma May (Anglia Polytechnic University) Angela Sabin (SOAS) Michele Davies (University of Wales, Swansea) Eileen Tilley(University of Bangor) Tony Holbrook (University of Bath) Under the new programme events which have taken place include: Visits – These are regularly organised to important social science collections.
Recent trips include the Wellcome Institute, where we were able to learn about the range of electronic databases offered free of charge to the public, and a visit to the British Library Inter-Library Loan operation at Boston Spa.
Also notable was a trip behind the scenes at the Social Policy Unit of the British Library.
This proved particularly popular as we were able to observe a working reading room in action and view the massive book storage area in the basement!
TalksThe recent AGM included an interesting presentation from Hazel Woodward, Librarian of Cranfield University, on the issues facing librarians when managing electronic journals.
The powerpoint slides for this can now be viewed on the ALISS home site at http://www.blpes.lse.ac.uk/other_sites/aliss/ .
Training Events – In December 1999 we organised a Social Science Resource Guide Workshop which enabled ASSIGN members to learn more about and sample a wide range of publicly funded electronic services for Social Scientists, including electronic journals, data archives, information gateways and teaching and learning resources.
A listing of the services can be seen on the Social Science Resource Guide web site at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/subject/socsci/ Study ConferencesASSIGN is also committed to organising annual study conferences with speakers and demonstrations where members can exchange ideas over a longer period of 2-3 days.
In June 1999 the University of Bangor hosted a successful event on issues relating to library support for distance learners.
We are currently arranging a conference on information access in Northern Ireland for June 2000.
As financial and time restraints will necessarily limit the extent to which ASSIGN members are able to travel to events, regular communication between group members will take place via lis-social science where events and mailings will be posted.
Archived messages and instructions for signing up can be viewed at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-socialscience/.
ASSIGN also has its own website where details of events, contact names and important documents can be found.
http://www.blpes.lse.ac.uk/other_sites/aliss/.
However, ultimately a special interest group only exists to serve its members .
FUTURE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH: Support, Strategy and Direction A one-day conference on September 14th 2000 hosted by REGARD at the University of Bristol Will good research ever be at the heart of policy?
What price peer credibility versus political agendas?
How can research help build new information landscapes?
How will technology transform research?
It is generally agreed that, at the turn of the century, the UK social science community is more healthy and optimistic than it has been for some time.
At the same time the development of the Internet and other technologies is allowing unprecedented public access to research to the researchers and to the results of that research.
Technologies are also changing the landscape for researchers new working methods and tools will influence their work alongside the challenges that closer links with policymakers imply.
Beneath a superficial feeling of having “come in from the cold” some difficult and provocative questions remain.
Was it easier to retain peer credibility in a hostile environment?
Does the fact that the current government is prepared to listen to social scientists mean that the social science agenda has been expanded or restricted?
How acceptable is social science enquiry and endeavour which produces unpopular and unwelcome results?
Does the current emphasis on evidence based practice mean an overdue shift to providing a solid foundation for nebulous theory or does it mean selecting the evidence you like and ignoring anything that doesn’t fit in?
How will social science be supported in the early years of the twenty first century?
Successive administrations have used phrases like “exit strategies” and “seedcorn funding” to avoid committing to long term support facilities.
Is it a myth that any support service worth funding should be able to earn its own keep?
This conference will identify strategies and support mechanisms to answer these new challenges.
The programme will attract anyone who is interested or involved in the production or application of social science research, from the academic, government, voluntary and business sectors.
The conference will be opened by Dr Gordon Marshall, Chief Executive of the ESRC, who will unveil the new, re-designed and enhanced REGARD service.
Speakers will include: Professor Roger Jowell, Director, National Centre for Social Research.
Helen Roberts, Head of Research and Development, Barnardo’s Sally Wyatt, ESRC Virtual Society?
Programme Roger Sykes, Head of Research, Local Government Association Melanie Wright, Director of User Services, The Data Archive An optional hands-on workshop will also be available throughout the day.
Delegates will be able to investigate a wide range of online social science resources, including REGARD.
Discounted booking until the end of July.
For further information please visit : http://www.regard.ac.uk/conference/   Email: regard-conf@bristol.ac.uk Tel: (0117) 928 7194   Author Details   Heather Dawson, ASSIGN Secretary.
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25 Southampton Buildings London WC2A 1PH Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Heather Dawson Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/planet-sosig/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Reference Books on the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Reference Books on the Web Buzz data software framework database xml schema copyright cataloguing dtd aggregation algorithm url standards Citation BibTex RIS Adam Hodgkin explores the range of electronic reference tools.
Reference books have been ‘published’ on the web for some years.
Several hundred dictionaries are freely available.
Many specialist encyclopaedias and subject reference works have been converted to become experimental web services(1).This wave of reference publishing follows no concerted plan.
There is no formal market for these services and perhaps there never was an expectation of profit.
The early development of the web has been like this.
Most of the notable achievements lacked a clear commercial motivation and this has led to the extraordinarily rich and varied choice that the web provides.
But unfettered innovation has its downside.
Although there are many good reference books on the web, the experimental and haphazard fashion in which they have been launched means that they are not as useful or as ‘findable’ as one might wish.
The lack of system is particularly wasteful in the case of reference resources.
The web could provide a more useful, reliable and consistent reference service.
The commercial publishers see the potential of web delivery.
Several of them have converted their most important reference works into web-based reference services, backed by professional promotion and customer support.
There have already been some notable achievements: The Oxford English Dictionary, the Grove Dictionary of Art, and the large reference works published by the Gale Group are pioneers in this gradual mobilisation of reference resources to the worldwide web.
So far all the clear-cut commercial successes have been large books, which in their web implementation are offered to subscribers (mainly institutions with libraries) for an annual subscription.
But most reference books are much too small, and individually of insufficient value to end-users, to warrant the investment and promotion needed to create a bespoke subscription service for web delivery.
The calculation is approximate but a book with a library market value ‘per edition’ of less than $4 million (or a publisher investment in origination of less than $2 million) is unlikely to merit investment in a specific and dedicated web subscription service.
A dedicated web service in the reference arena is unlikely to cost less than $500,000 per annum in promotional, technical, administrative and support costs and a publisher will be reluctant to invest a sum of this order with the prospect of annualised subscription revenues from institutions of less than $1 million per annum(2).
The overwhelming majority of useful books fail to meet this condition.
What should be done about these smaller reference books (by the standards of Grove and the OED almost every book is a small book)?
One way of tackling the problem of the ‘smaller’ books is to develop an aggregation service.
Aggregation has worked in creating value and efficient distribution in cognate domains where diverse sources of information need to be collected and served throughout the web.
‘Weather’, ‘news’ and ‘share price’ information are obvious examples of data-types which benefit from centralised aggregation services.
There are precedents for aggregating published reference works: Infoplease and Bartleby are both examples of popular consumer-oriented web services pioneering a method of reference aggregation(3).
But aggregation on its own may not be enough to create compelling user benefits.
Aggregation becomes compelling when the user is able to use a web service to do things which cannot be done with the content in its traditional format: for example the best share price services offer powerful tools for charting share prices and customising these charts.
Nothing of the kind can be achieved with the traditional data distribution channels (wire service, teletext or ticker tape).
xrefer is a company specialising in reference works on the web and the founders of xrefer took as their mission the creation of reference services which aggregate and integrate reference works.
In the context of reference works aggregation involves bringing diverse works together into a common web site and then providing users with a search engine which executes searches on the complete aggregated library of reference content.
Aggregation leads to efficient distribution (users get to know that a collection of reference works can be found at one source) and it also enables ‘power searching’ across a range of titles, but integration would ensure that the whole collection of reference material would contain signposts which relate entries found in disparate sources.
A compelling integration strategy would lead to improvements in browsing and navigation.
xrefer’s mission was to develop a method which would strengthen the aggregation approach by building a framework of navigation and links that permits smarter browsing,.
It was felt that it should be possible in a web environment for a user seamlessly to navigate from an entry in one reference source to an entry in any other source which treats of the same subjects.
Citations, cross-references and xreferences What is a reference book?
We can probably recognise one when we use it, but any definition is messy.
Examples of reference works include: dictionaries, phrase books, grammars, thesauri, catalogues, chronologies, encyclopaedia, atlases, gazetteers, travel guides, bibliographies, directories etc.
This is a very heterogeneous grouping and it is not easy to see the common factors.
We might consider two operational definitions.
The ‘cheating’ definition is to say that a reference book is a book that the librarian will put in the reference section of the library, which leaves us with the question ‘What is the reference section?’.
The apparently tautologous definition is not completely empty.
The point is that librarians and users do treat reference books differently from other books and even in private libraries, reference books are usually grouped together.
To classify a book as belonging to a library’s reference section may also mean that the book will not be available for borrowing and is available for the readers to consult while they are in the library.
A reference book is the kind of work that a user consults rather than reads from cover to cover.
‘Consults’ is an important word.
A reference book is a book a reader will use while reading another book, a book that does not need to be read at a stretch.
If we switch modes from the domain of bibliography and volumes printed on paper, a reference service on a network is liable to be needed throughout the network, its use will be episodic and somewhat unpredictable, but it is also liable to warrant centralised management.
In network terms, reference works are resources most efficiently deployed on the server side(4).
This is a pragmatic and behavioural definition but it is valuable in pointing us to the fact that reference works on the web need to be maintained and may need to be consulted from any context.
A second definition is that a reference work is a book comprising multiple entries that contains a network of ‘cross-references’ as opposed to citations or page references.
This is really too narrow a definition because atlases, catalogues and bibliographies are clearly reference works although they may not contain cross-references.
At xrefer we like this over-narrow ‘definition’ of reference works, because these are the kinds of reference books (internally cross-referenced or self-referenced) that are particularly amenable to our technology.
But an atlas is certainly a reference book and an atlas is not usually cross-referenced (except via a gazetteer or index), so we are left with the point that some reference books have cross-references and others do not.
As it happens, reference books also may or may not contain citations.
But citations and cross-references are different.
What hangs on the distinction between a citation and a cross-reference (or an index entry, or a table of contents)?
All of these various literary devices can be rendered as hyperlinks if they are transferred to the web.
Citations are most like the classic hyperlink on a web page.
Most references in published literature are citations (ie references to a previously published document to which the writer wishes to draw attention), they are typically to works by another author in another publication.
The form of a citation enables the reader to determine its target (publication, date, page etc).
The typical citation is very like a hyperlink, especially in being a one-way reference to a prior publication(5).
Cross-references as they appear in reference works are different.
They are references to the same work and they are unusual in that the form of the cross-reference tells the user what the link is about, as well as enabling her to locate it.
It is the inherently ‘semantic’ quality of a cross-reference that makes it possible for xrefer’s system to build navigational links between books.
Books may use very different typographic conventions to demarcate the cross reference (‘Wittgenstein*’, ‘the enlightenment’, ‘Higgs boson’) but the user will understand that the reference is to the same book and she will know that the subject or topic of the cross-reference is variously Wittgenstein, the Enlightenment or Higgs bosons.
The typical citation has no content, it is all about location, location, location; but a cross-reference in the sense we are interested in has meaning and content.
It tells the reader that two entries are linked by a specific topic and that the editor or compiler of the reference work thought it important that the link should be marked.
If we look at the body of an entry on Higgs bosons in the Penguin Dictionary of Science (see Figure 1), we can see that the editor of that book, felt that it was relevant to point the reader to related topics ‘boson’, ‘W boson’ ‘Z boson’, ‘weak interaction’, and ‘standard model’.
Each entry in a cross-referenced reference work gives a little conceptual map of related concepts, and of course each entry is distinct and different.
Figure 1: An entry from the New Penguin Dictionary of Science with five cross-references.
(Note that some of the xreferences appear in the column on the left).
One can think of each reference book (in the sense of a book with cross-references) as being composed of a collection of entries, and running through the whole collection is a pattern or network of cross-references, connecting entries in the book in topic-specific relationships.
In web terms these cross-references are easily translated to navigable hyperlinks, but it is a remarkable fact that many reference works have been transferred to the web without this basic feature being implemented.
Each book in an aggregated collection of reference works will have its own network or pattern of cross-references.
And at xrefer we are of the view that it is extremely helpful for the the user of one work if she is able to explore the connections and topics which might be relevant to her interest in any other work in the collection; we call these xreferences.
A cross-reference is a reference through a topic-link (the word on which the link is anchored gives the topic); an xreference is a reference to another entry in a different reference work through a topic-link.
The ‘standard model’ cross reference in the body of the ‘Higgs boson’ entry takes the reader to the ‘standard model’ entry in the book she is consulting, whereas an xreference to ‘standard model’ will typically take her to an entry on the ‘standard model’ in another book, eg the Macmillan Encyclopaedia (see Figure 2).
An individual reference work has its own pattern of cross-references and a collection of cross-referenced reference books has its own pattern of xreferences.
Figure 2: 9 xreferences from the’ Higgs boson’ entry in a Penguin book xrefer was founded with the aim of building a collective reference resource which as well as aggregating diverse reference works also provided a browsable (integrated) network of xreferences between them.
In practice it has been feasible to build a system which is highly scalable (in the sense that it should accommodate thousands of titles) and which also seems to get better, in some important respects, as more content is added to the system.
If a wide range of reference works can be mobilised for web deployment in a consistent and common framework, users have a highly searchable and browsable reference engine – better in practice than any physical library.
Implementation and technical development In designing a system which would aggregate and integrate a large number of reference works we made some crucial early strategic decisions.
a.All the books would share a common DTD (document type definition).
b.The system would be built on XML (in the end we decided we needed our own DTD which we call RML – Reference Markup Language).
Our encoding system has grown and will continue to be improved: the current version supports about 50 tags(6).
c.We would attempt to capture as much as possible of the implicit structure as can be deduced from the typographical and stylistic encoding of a published book.
We have content experts who analyse every new book to this end.
We are careful not to ‘throw away’ structure even if we can see no way of currently using it.
d.We outsource almost all the data capture and parsing involved in upgrading publisher-supplied texts to the polished, RML encoded, version.
e.We developed software which validates any RML file to check that all the references are properly matched (very often reference books have ‘hanging’ cross references).
f.We developed software (a suite of algorithms) which allows us to generate appropriate and validated xreferences connecting entries in different books.
g.The finished texts and the cross-references and xreferences are held in a relational database which is used to build a range of web services.
h.The system has some business logic at the foundation level.
For example: we manage and build the system using the individual books as components.
But the books themselves are collections of entries and every entry is explicitly associated with the copyright line appropriate to the book from which it is derived.
Also each entry will have a group of xreferences which are specific to that entry, but we are careful not to present the xreferences as part of the entry.
They are a property of the xrefer system and the system should not interfere with the entries as they were conceived by the original compiler or editor.
It was also a requirement of the system that it should be a scaleable system.
This meant, in particular, that the process of building xreferences should be entirely driven by software and database systems.
Each book gets individual attention and care when it enters the production system, but once the RML file has been built the process of generating cross-references and xreferences should be completely automated.
If the system depended on human editorial effort to build xreferences it would gradually slow down and seize up as more content was loaded into it.
Navigation, searching and classification In building the xrefer system we have concentrated on techniques for developing enhanced navigation within collections of reference works.
Developing systematic ways of navigating reference material improves ‘searching’ and leads to a rich system of classification of the data, but these are by-products of the system.
The ‘searching’ technology in xrefer is no better than we can find in the best ‘off the shelf’ search engines.
As it happens, the first generations of xrefer’s service have used the RetrievalWare search engine from Convera(7), but this is not an essential feature of the system.
It would be possible to use another search engine – if there are clear advantages in doing so.
‘Classification’ is another important aspect of reference material on the web.
Indeed classification systems have been important to compilers of reference works from the seventeenth century.
Many reference works are built on the framework of an agreed classification system.
The original task that inspired xrefer might have been tackled using an existing classification schema (eg the Open Directory).
So, one might find a method for sorting entries from different books into the most relevant node in the Open Directory(8).
In fact, we took an early decision to be completely agnostic about ‘classification systems’.
Classification systems matter to xrefer only to the extent that every reference book is in effect a way of classifying its subject matter.
A musical dictionary will contain the names of musicians and is therefore an implicit way of classifying famous persons as musicians, and a Biographical dictionary of scientists will be a way of grouping scientists.
The xrefer system will absorb these classifications without ‘requiring’ that ‘persons’ are classified in any specific fashion.
All reference works use classification systems and xrefer is committed to capturing the information in these systems without giving any of them an over-arching priority.
So xrefer uses classification systems and they are very important to the users of xrefer services, but the classes of objects that the system ‘knows about’ are all derived from the collection of books that have been processed.
A different collection of books would have produced a different system of classifications.
xreferplus and customisable reference services for libraries xrefer was launched in June 2000 as a free (advertising and sponsorship backed) reference resource at xrefer.com.
This free resource remains as a shop-window and demonstrator of the xrefer technology but it was never likely that specialised reference works could be viably distributed through an advertising vehicle and personal subscriptions or micropayments still appear to be a distant prospect on the web.
In the course of 2001 the company has been developing a significantly larger and ‘higher value’ collection of major reference resources which will be offered as a library subscription from December 2001. xreferplus is a collection of over 100 reference works which should form a valuable and broad starting point for any library’s on line reference resources(9).
The collection is deliberately broad (with sections for history, art, biography, language, literature, music, science and technology), as well as a dozen or so large general reference encyclopaedias, quotations books, thesauri, dictionaries etc.
There is some temptation to carry on adding books into the system and we fully intend to succumb to the temptation; but it is also clear to us that there will be even more value in creating increasing opportunities for librarians and information specialists to build their own selections of reference resources from a palette provided by xrefer.
The xreferplus collection is probably already too rich and specialist to be entirely suitable for school subscribers; and there is scope for regional selection and customisation.
Although we have started by offering a common global solution for any English language libraries, it is clear that librarians who use an integrated reference service will come to prefer a solution which they can fashion to suit the needs of their own clients.
To take some examples of books which xreferplus currently lacks: Who’s Who in Canada is likely to be one of the most valuable reference works for Canadian libraries, but it may not be a top priority for librarians in Coventry or Melbourne.
A field guide to British birds will be a sought after resource in British public libraries, but it will not be prime pick in San Diego.
The case for differential offerings and customer selection is at its strongest in the case of languages other than English.
The production and database system developed by xrefer is in no respect an ‘English language’ system and it is now a priority to develop links with publishers of reference material in the other European languages.
For many libraries and most users a comprehensive coverage of reference material in the major European languages may be more than is needed; but the possibility of selecting the appropriate combination of language materials will be important to many users and many educational and corporate subscribers.
A multi-lingual xrefer will be the next challenge.
More generally, although aggregation and integration lead to powerful reference resources, the ability to customise and select particular collections for specific contexts is also important.
Scalability is a key requirement for a large reference resource, but a truly scaleable solution will be one that can scale down as gracefully as it can scale up.
References (1) Yourdictionary.com lists 1,800 dictionaries covering 250 languages http://www.yourdictionary.com/index.shtml (2) The OED online development cost $1.4 million before any marketing or support costs are taken into account see ‘How the Oxford English Dictionary went online’, Laura Elliott, Ariadne 24, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/oed-tech/ (3) Infoplease has been acquired by the Pearson group and is now part of the learning network.
http://www.infoplease.com/ .
Bartleby is a mixed reference and full text resource strong in literature and history http://www.bartleby.com/ (4) Microsoft’s Bookshelf, now withdrawn, an offering which was a collection of reference books designed to help in the task of writing was a client-side solution (5) The issue of aggregating and integrating citations is of great importance in electronic publishing and a significant start has been made on creating a solution by the publishers’ consortium CrossRef http://www.crossref.org/ (6) RML can be inspected from the source of any entry in xrefer services.
The specification is also freely available to interested parties.
(7) http://www.convera.com/ (8) Google has developed the technology for linking web searching and web classification (using the Open Directory as the classification system).
It might be interesting to ‘integrate’ a reference collection with the Open Directory in a similar fashion and xrefer’s collection of xreferences would be one means of doing this.
(9) The contents of xreferplus are at http://www.xreferplus.com/allbooks.jsp Author Details   Adam Hodgkin Managing Director xrefer.com Email: adam.hodgkin@xrefer.com   Article Title: “Reference books on the web” Author: Adam Hodgkin Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/ref-books/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OMNI: Accessing the Internet Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI: Accessing the Internet Buzz data copyright cataloguing multimedia url standards Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir writes about an informal survey of Internet Access in the NHS.
This article describes some of the findings of an informal study of access to the Internet for information professionals working within the UK public funded health sector e.g.
hospital libraries, NHS trusts, and other public funded medical libraries.
The problem The OMNI service [1] receives a steady number of inquiries from a large and diverse number of people.
Many of these inquiries are from members of the public requiring medical and health information; in these cases, as we are not medically qualified or legally covered, we have to politely point out that services such as OMNI are meant to complement their General Practitioner, not to replace him or her.
We also point people in the direction of the large amount of patient or public information resources that we catalogue.
However, an increasing number of enquiries are from people who work in hospitals, hospital libraries, general practices and NHS trusts.
These people frequently want details of where to find health and medical information, for their own work-related purposes, or how to find such information.
What we have found interesting is how these people, within the UK public funded health sector, have contacted us.
Some use email either their work email system, or email through an Internet Service Provider, usually from home.
Many people within this sector either telephone OMNI, or even send a fax.
In some cases, queries come to us through the University of Nottingham or the Queens Medical Centre, as people do not have Internet access and therefore find it difficult to get precise contact details.
We have also had two letters addressed simply to OMNI, University of Nottingham.
What we found interesting was why do so many people working in the UK public funded health sector not use email, the quickest mechanism, in order to contact us?
Our interest deepened as we spoke to some of the people who had used non-Internet methods of communication, about why they had used the post, telephone or fax.
Some of the reasons given were: we cannot send uninitiated email; we can only reply to email if we want Internet access, then we have to use the cybercafe across the street only managers are allowed to have Internet access in order to send email people who deal with users are apparently a security risk we are on the NHSnet, I think, and email is a nightmare.
I cannot even send email to the person sitting next to me, let alone to Nottingham University Out of these comments was born the idea of writing a short article for a publication on access to the Internet.
With our obligatory article for Ariadne needing to be done, we thought that we would kill several birds with one stone.
In addition, perhaps we could come up with some ammunition for people who were having difficulty in getting Internet access to use.
Surveying the unsurveyable Our main problem was identifying and contacting people who, by the nature of the problem, were difficult to identify and contact!
This was done by putting various emails on lists, in the hope of locating either people who were forced to access the Internet from home, or friends or colleagues of people who had problems with access.
In addition, colleagues and collaborators sent out mini-postal surveys of people who they thought may have a problem.
It was made clear that confidentiality would be strictly respected.
In total, we received some 140 pieces of correspondence from around 100 different people.
Ten recurring themes Ten themes emerged from the responses that we received.
By theme, we mean that at least two people (in most cases, many more) gave the same answer or part answer as someone else.
1.
Computers and IT are prohibitively expensive This was mentioned by several people as the official reason that they were given.
In terms of kitting out a full room full of multimedia PCs, all with Internet access, the cost can indeed be great, even with the price of PCs falling all of the time.
However, three people pointed out that their direct or indirect managers had state of the art PCs, with full Internet access; two of the three indicated, upon further contact, that their managers had little or no contact with endusers.
In one case: ‘My line manager never sees a user, and has expressed a strong desire to never see one.
However, we have users who ask about things they have found on the Internet, or how to find things about the Internet.
As I do not have access, I cannot answer their query, which often annoys the user and demoralises me.’ 2.
The security excuse An oft-repeated reason for not allowing Internet access is that ‘the security of patient records will be compromised’.
However, several people noted that they worked in units, or institutions, that did not keep patient records!
In one particular case, a correspondent told us that: ’…if we are given access, then we will hack into the Department of Health and cause problems.
I cannot even use Word because the hospital refuses to fund IT training, yet they reckon that we are all super-hackers.’ 3.
Productivity will slump Several people quoted people higher up in their institution who had devised internal policy blocking Internet access.
In two cases, this was due to isolated incidents involving single members of staff or students ‘…for which we are all seemingly punished’ (unquote).
Two other anecdotes under this theme, both from hospital libraries, are as follows: ‘Our manager has told us, quite seriously, that the Internet is proven to corrupt and that instead of handling inquiries, we will be drawn into looking at pornography all day.’   “People will spend all day looking at sports scores’ this was from a manager who promptly left to watch cricket for the rest of the day.’ 4.
No standards or deadlines for access Several people, often using the word inertia, commented on the lack of any deadlines for access within their own institution or organisation.
All of these people commented that without a firm deadline, preferably from some source of funding, it was unlikely that there would be any change to the status quo.
‘No-one seems to be giving the Trusts deadlines and decent standard to meet… and they will certainly drag their feet if they are allowed to.’ 5.
Access good.
Support bad.
Some places did have some level of access, but the staff were left on their own in terms of support and working out how to use the Internet to the best of their advantages: ‘We have had access to the Internet for some time, but didn’t really know what to do with it.
We used these search thingies, and couldn’t find anything useful… eventually, the 7 year old daughter of the head librarian showed us how to find useful stuff.
We have never looked back.’ 6.
Problems with email A variety of problems, both technical and political, were quoted that prevented people from being able to use email effectively and with confidence: ‘I cannot send an email to someone off my own back; I can only reply to an email’ (this point was quite common) ‘We are sent an email, every week, informing us that the IT department has the right to monitor emails that it deems to be of a suspicious nature; it is somewhat intimidating.’ 7.
Climate of fear It may seem an odd, or paranoid, statement to make, but in some areas of the public funded health sector, there is often a noticeable fear of ‘whistleblowing’ or ‘kicking up a fuss’, as it is felt that this may have a negative effect on your career prospects.
‘We would like Internet access, and we know that the network services are lying through their teeth with the excuses they give, but to complain around here would make you a marked person when it comes to the annual budget review i.e.
cost cutting exercise’ 8.
Communication There were comments about the problems of communication between departments who needed Internet access, and departments (such as IT departments) who were supposed to supply it: ’…IT department doesn’t answer our queries, as they have publicly stated that the library and librarians are not a serious or professional activity or people’ ‘IT matters are poorly communicated within Trusts’ Personal problems with communication can also impede access to the Internet: ‘My manager has a problem with speaking to women.
As all bar two of the staff that he manages are women, you can imagine the problems that this causes’ 9.
The ‘you are not important enough’ excuse Overlapping with several of the other themes, some people noted how their status counted against them: ’…within our organisation, there are no links to the NHSnet unless you are a senior manager.’ ’…our manager doesn’t deal with any users.
And he has Internet access.
Users come to us after hearing about how great the Internet is.
And we don’t have access.
I have had enough; I’m leaving to work in a University.’ 10. Who defines the policy of what information you can have access to?
Several variations on this statement were provided: ‘Our IT department determines information policy.
This doesn’t make sense surely the library, which deals with the information needs of the users, should have a say in what information is needed.
It is surely up to the IT department to provide the electronic access to that information.’ Why help the unconnected… So we have a problem.
There are a number of people who do not have a reasonable degree of Internet access but how do we help them?
And should we bother?
From the purely selfish point of view of OMNI, one reason would be to help people get on line, which in turn would boost the number of users that we have and give us more leverage with funders and sponsors!
On a less capitalistic basis, users are good for OMNI, not just to bump up our access statistics, but to submit resources of use to fellow users.
Taking a wider perspective, it is important to get everyone on board, with regard to full Internet access, sooner rather than later.
If we do not, then when major initiatives such as the National Electronic Library for Health [2], or the Resource Discovery Network [3], take off, then there will be a class-like system, with people either in the ‘well connected’ class or the ‘information [access] poor’ class.
Those in the former class will be able to develop, in terms of skills, knowledge and contacts, at a more rapid pace than those in the latter class.
This could lead people without Internet access, or the means of getting it, to effectively become ‘de-skilled’, with reduced opportunities for IT development, job prospects, and becoming part of a larger, UK health Informatics community.
Helping the unconnected… So how do we help these people?
A combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches have been suggested; we haven’t thought of one solution to the whole problem yet, and welcome suggestions.
Approach 1: Top down (1) The NHS could send out a questionnaire to all NHS Trusts, Hospital Libraries, and other organisations, asking: do your information services (e.g.
library) staff have reasonable access to the Internet?
if the answer to the previous question is No, then when will they be provided with reasonable access?
Approach 2: Top down (2) The NHS could get in touch with people on the ground i.e.
the actual library staff, and ask them about what access they have.
Ways in which they can help themselves to obtain better Internet access could be formulated and passed directly to the staff.
An official NHS support unit, with senior backing, could assist people in getting better access at their place of work.
Approach 3: Top down (3) The NHS could send out a policy statement, requiring that all units that it funds: provide reasonable (and free) access to email for their staff provide reasonable (and free) access to the Web for their staff resource and awareness literature (even if it is just a few Internet introductory books) provide access from the desktop (in other words, not from a building on the other side of the campus or site) provide the above by a fixed, unmovable date, or come up with a reasonable reason why such access and facilities cannot be provided As one correspondent noted: ‘Maybe a model Internet [NelH] access policy for IT managers would be helpful’ Approach 4: Bottom-up attack Do you have friends or colleagues on other sites who are having access problems?
Then give them a hand!
give them literature to help their cause i.e.
details and information on access policy at your place of work, or some other public-funded UK health service show them useful stuff on the Internet, either at your own place of work, or at home, a cybercafe, or some other point of access.
Inspire them and inform them get them to find out which of their work colleagues has access from home.
Encourage that colleague to monitor relevant mailing lists, bring in printouts of relevant information, and locate other Internet access points nearby Further Work Though the survey described in this article has been very informal, and somewhat anecdotal in data, this does not mean that it has no merit.
It is clear that a number of people within the UK public health sector do indeed have problems in getting reasonable access to the Internet, for work related reasons.
However, what is unclear is just how many of these people there are, and therefore what is the best method of helping them.
We have therefore decided to carry on with this work, and have proposed a more formal investigation, involving e.g.
the Regional Librarians group, in order to quantify how bad the problem is.
The work of the Regional Librarians Group to date has, from some of the comments received, obviously assisted with the problems connected with accessing the Internet within this sector; without their work to date, then the problem would be much more serious.
It is hoped that we can determine the extent of the problem, and any clusters of people (either geographically, or with the same underlying problem that is hindering reasonable Internet access).
This will assist us (OMNI, the Department of Health) in alleviating their problem, so that they can enjoy the full benefits offered by Internet access, and services such as OMNI and the National Electronic Library for Health.
Acknowledgements I wish to thank all the people who sent in comments, queries, stories, anecdotes and other material that helped in this article.
I also wish to thank Veronica Fraser, Library Advisor from the Department of Health, for invaluable support and advice.
References [1] OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information.
Available from: URL http://omni.ac.uk/ Last checked 07/06/99 [2] NelH: National Electronic Library for Health.
Available from: URL http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/ Last checked 07/06/99 [3] The Resource Discovery Network Centre’s approach (Dan Greenstein).
Available as a set of powerpoint slides from: URL http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/events/informationecologies/ppt/greenstein.ppt Last checked 07/06/99 Author Details John Kirriemuir Service Manager Omni Greenfield Medical Library, Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham, NG7 2UH web site at: http://www.omni.ac.uk Email: john.kirriemuir@omni.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Knowledge Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Knowledge Management Buzz data software framework database dissemination infrastructure thesaurus repositories copyright cataloguing hypertext multimedia e-learning ark intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Sheila Corrall asks if 'knowledge management' is a new phrase in place of 'information management', or a new concept altogether.
Over the last twelve months Knowledge Management (KM) has become the latest hot topic in the business world.
There has been a phenomenal growth in interest and activity, as seen in many new publications, conferences, IT products, and job advertisements (including a post advertised by HEFCE).
Various professional groups, notably HR professionals, IT specialists, and librarians, are staking their claims, seeing KM as an opportunity to move centre stage.
People often used to describe librarianship as the organisation of recorded knowledge, so perhaps our time has come?
KM does not seem to have been had much impact on the higher education sector so far, but there is some evidence of involvement: the Universities of Leicester and Warwick are undertaking research on behalf of the Institute of Personnel and Development on HR roles in KM initiatives; the Open University has a Know-How project, which involves its Knowledge Media Institute, Institute for Educational Technology, and Library; and the University of Leeds is part of a Knowledge Management Consortium formed by the Centre for Exploitation of Science and Technology along with Abbey National, Allied Domecq, BG Technology, DTI, IBM, Shell and TI.
(1,2) Figure 1: Sheila Corrall Confusion arises over what KM is, and what it involves.
Some people view it as just an up-market label for information management, and therefore something our profession should naturally embrace.
Others see KM as a useful term to signal the more complex work involved in organising access to networked information resources, and thus equate it with subject gateways.
Cynics dismiss KM as the latest management fad yet another effort by management consultants and IT vendors to sell their 'solutions' to desperate business people, who ought to know better.
These are all fair comment up to a point, not least because there is still quite a gap between KM theory and KM practice.
There are numerous definitions of KM to be found at conferences, in print, and on the Web.
The following are a representative sample, beginning with one of the most widely cited, "...a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, managing and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets.
These information assets may include databases, documents, policies and procedures, as well as previously unarticulated expertise and experience resident in individual workers."
(Gartner Group Inc, October 1996) "Knowledge management is the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge and its associated processes of creating, gathering, organising, diffusion, use and exploitation.
It requires turning personal knowledge into corporate knowledge that can be widely shared throughout an organisation and appropriately applied."
(3) 'Knowledge' in this context is also a somewhat elusive concept, defined in various ways by the different gurus.
Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak offer the following pragmatic description of knowledge in organisations, "Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information.
It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers.
In organisations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organisational routines, processes, practices, and norms.
"(4) Davenport and Prusak distinguish 'knowledge' from 'information', and information from 'data', on the basis of value-adding processes which transform raw material (for example, transaction records) into communicable messages (such as documents) and then into knowledge and other higher-order concepts.
(For convenience, they include 'wisdom', 'insight', etc.
in their working definition of organisational knowledge.)
These value-adding processes include in the first instance contextualisation, categorisation, calculation, conversion and condensation; and in the second, connection, comparison, and conversation.
Other commentators notably Thomas Stewart dismiss the notion of a data-to-wisdom hierarchy as bogus and unhelpful in this context, on the grounds that "one man's knowledge is another man's data".
(5) A more important distinction which is fundamental to the concept of knowledge management is that between 'explicit' and 'tacit' knowledge, explained by Ikujiro Nonaka, "Explicit knowledge is formal and systematic.
For this reason it can be easily communicated and shared, in product specifications or a scientific formula or a computer program.
Tacit knowledge is highly personal.
It is hard to formalise and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to communicate."
(6) Tacit or implicit knowledge (also referred to as 'experimental' knowledge) is thus both unrecorded and unarticulated.
Intellectual Capital is a related concept, based on the view that the real market value of a commercial enterprise consists not only of its physical and financial assets (its 'book value') but also its intangible assets created through intellectual activities, ranging from acquiring new knowledge (learning) and inventions to creating valuable relationships.
Intellectual assets thus include things such as patents, copyright and other forms of intellectual property, which are often estimated to be worth many times the book value.
Leif Edvinsson, Director of Intellectual Capital at Skandia, the Swedish insurance company, defines intellectual capital as "the possession of knowledge, applied experience, organisational technology, customer relationships, and professional skills that provides Skandia AFS with a competitive edge in the market".
(7) The Skandia value scheme divides intellectual capital into 'human capital' (which is 'rented') and 'structural capital' (which is 'owned').
The concepts of Intellectual Capital Management and Knowledge Management overlap and complement each other, but there are differing views of their precise relationship.
The choice of term is often determined by the emphasis given to measuring (rather than managing) knowledge assets, with intellectual capital being more closely associated with the former.
Irrespective of the terms used, the practical management objectives are similar: to convert human capital (individual learning/team capabilities) to structural capital (organisational knowledge or 'what is left when people go home', such as documented processes and knowledge bases) and thereby move from tacit to explicit knowledge, and reduce the risk of losing valuable knowledge if people leave the organisation.
Loss of 'corporate memory' as a result of downsizing is one of the prime reasons given for adopting formal KM practices.
Other factors often mentioned include global competition and the pace of change; organisations see KM as a means of avoiding repetition of mistakes, reducing duplication of effort, saving time on problem-solving, stimulating innovation and creativity, and getting closer to their customers.
KM is not 'new' in that it has grown and developed from existing practices, and it is already well established in many organisations notably, the 'know-how' services in big city law firms.
KM can be presented as a convergence of ideas promulgated over the past decade, including core competencies and resource-based theories of the firm, 'info-mapping' and information resource management, the 'balanced scorecard' and intangible/intellectual assets, the learning organisation and 'communities-of-practice', total quality management and business process re-engineering, the networked organisation and the 'boundaryless firm.
'(8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17) However, while KM is arguably an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary development, there are several aspects of this current phenomenon which taken together represent a significant change in the way organisations manage people, processes and information.
KM involves taking a more holistic view of information, not only combining internal and external information previously practised in some corporate libraries, relatively rarely in other sectors but also co-ordinating planning and control (monitoring) information, and consolidating informal ('soft') and formal ('hard') information.
KM also requires a strategic focus on valuable knowledge, concentrating on knowledge that will contribute to the improvement of organisational performance.
Also, although all the gurus stress that KM is a people-and-process issue and should not be viewed as an expansion of the IT function, they also acknowledge the significant contribution of technology, including features not widely available until relatively recently.
The ability not only to disseminate information rapidly around the organisation, but to develop knowledge bases incorporating contextualised information with links to contributors and multimedia enhancements has opened up new possibilities for capturing and exploiting know-how, and encouraging inter-departmental collaboration.
In addition IT has the potential to change culture by cutting through traditional structures, inspiring an informal style and fostering the social networks which underpin knowledge-sharing.
KM initiatives generally have several strands, but usually involve the selection of priority areas for initial effort, and a combination of making formal/explicit knowledge more visible and usable and making informal, private and tacit knowledge explicit, public and useful.
Converting informal personal contextualised knowledge to formal systematic organisational knowledge is the key objective, exemplified by creating databases of frequently asked questions (FAQs) searchable by both employees and customers, and compiling lists of what went right and what went wrong in projects (lessons learned) as guidelines for similar future undertakings.
In addition to improving the visibility of knowledge, another aim is to develop its intensity, by creating a climate to encourage generation of ideas within workgroups, and (eventually) generalisation to other areas.
At the same time, as organisations are concerned about information overload, a further objective is to achieve a better balance between 'pushing' and 'pulling' it, by giving people just-in-time access to knowledge, allowing the need to know to be determined by the information user (not the 'owner').
Applications typically fall into the following broad categories: Knowledge databases and repositories (explicit knowledge) storing information and documents that can be shared and re-used, for example, client presentations, competitor intelligence, customer data, marketing materials, meeting minutes, policy documents, price lists, product specifications, project proposals, research reports, training packs; Knowledge routemaps and directories (tacit and explicit knowledge) pointing to people, document collections and datasets that can be consulted, for example, 'yellow pages'/'expert locators' containing CVs, competency profiles, research interests; Knowledge networks and discussions (tacit knowledge) providing opportunities for face-to-face contacts and electronic interaction, for example, establishing chat facilities/'talk rooms', fostering learning groups and holding 'best practice' sessions.
Examples can be found in all sectors of business and industry, especially among professional service organisations.
The large accountancy and consultancy firms have led the way in launching formal knowledge management initiatives, closely followed by IT companies.
In some cases the project involves establishing a central physical presence, for example Ernst and Young has set up a Centre for Business Knowledge (replacing a corporate library, with the introduction of new knowledge management functions).
Booz Allen and Hamilton's KOL Knowledge On-Line and Price Waterhouse's KnowledgeView both involve information specialists in managing content and providing services to consultants.
These efforts must be supported by building a knowledge management infrastructure, including both technical and organisational aspects systems and processes for capturing, structuring, diffusing and re-using knowledge; roles and responsibilities for making things happen; and a culture and style that promotes communication and sharing.
Although a culture of teamwork and trust is more important than the technological infrastructure, a consistent and reliable organisation-wide communications and IT infrastructure is essential (incorporating security, standards and support for users).
IT thus provides the network for sharing at a technical level; it is a necessary condition, but not sufficient in itself to ensure successful KM.
Commentators perceive the technical issues as relatively straightforward, and mostly utilising established technologies.
The key technologies are online databases, document management systems and groupware, with corporate intranets the fastest growing area.
The typical approach is a suite of tools based around groupware (Lotus Notes) and/or an Intranet-based web, with Lotus Notes favoured for discussion-based applications (eg lessons learned) and database management (especially where there is a need for database replication for remote disconnected use) and the web for hypertext-linked knowledge, publishing across multiple platforms and multimedia databases, generally supported by a specialised search engine (eg Verity) and online company thesaurus.
More sophisticated systems use intelligent search agents, case-based reasoning (notably for customer service/help desk applications) and neural networks (for data mining).
With library management systems moving to web-based catalogue access, it becomes easier to combine published and internal/informal information.
In the US several corporate libraries have installed new systems based on Lotus Notes, designed to support their integration into the corporate information infrastructure: NOTEbookS library automation software and NORMA records management software allow users to view details of library/records collections alongside intellectual capital databases.
(18) KM requires a mix of technical, organisational and interpersonal skills: the mix and emphasis varies according to responsibilities, but everyone involved needs to be able to understand the business, communicate effectively and have at least basic competence in handling information and using IT.
Although LIS people are not always prominently involved at the outset of KM initiatives, many organisations have brought them in at a later stage, when the ongoing management of content usually emerges as the major technical challenge.
The need to structure and codify information, to have a common language, and to manage selective dissemination of information, has highlighted information specialists' skills in indexing systems, thesaurus construction, and user profiling for customised alerting.
Some corporate libraries are being reinvented as knowledge centres, often with bigger budgets (for example, in the 'big six' consultancies).
Nevertheless, their future is by no means assured as there is no shortage of other people ready to take on these tasks; librarians' traditional reluctance to move beyond the information container towards analysis and interpretation of its contents has resulted in organisations overlooking their potential contribution, even in areas where their competence should be obvious.
Information professionals are seen as serviceoriented, but not valueoriented they don't understand the impact they can have on the business.
Both the British Library Research and Innovation Centre and the Library and Information Commission are concerned about the profession's role in KM, and are sponsoring investigations of skills needs to influence curriculum development for professional education and the continuing professional development of practitioners.
So what about KM in HE?
As indicated above, there are few formal KM initiatives at present, but many institutions are already using intranets to manage some types of explicit knowledge, such as minutes of meetings, lecture notes, etc.
There is possibly scope for more routemaps and directories, in the form of expert locators and other resource guides, and most HEIs could probably make much better use of the skills of their information professionals if they viewed information holistically and applied the professional expertise of content specialists to managing the wide range of information which underpins institutional operations and decisions instead of assuming that only academic-related information requires this sort of treatment.
A particular issue for HEIs arises with the types of knowledge associated with academic institutions: academic (subject) knowledge and administrative (organisational) knowledge need to be viewed and managed in different ways a point which does not seem to have been adequately addressed in the JISC Information Strategies initiative.
It makes sense to formalise processes for capturing best practice in course administration and grant applications within an institution, but knowledge networks for discipline-related discussions are more likely to be inter-institutional.
One of the questions here is how to link academic networks with their library counterparts.
In summary, knowledge management involves connecting people with people, as well as people with information.
It is a management philosophy, which combines good practice in purposeful information management with a culture of organisational learning, in order to improve business performance.
The core skills of library and information professionals are both relevant and essential to effective knowledge management, but they are often under-utilised and under-valued.
Surely it is our job to put this right!
Sheila Corrall is University Librarian at the University of Reading.
References Minding the gap.
People Management, 4 (16) 1998, p46 Library Association Record, 100 (3) 1998, p124.
Skyrme, D. Knowledge management: making sense of an oxymoron.
1997 (Management Insight, 2nd series, no 2) Web page ref http://www.skyrme.com/insights/22km.htm Davenport, T. H. and Prusak, L. Working knowledge: how organizations manage what they know.
Boston, Ma: Harvard Business School Press, 1998 (p5) Stewart, T. A.
Intellectual capital: the new wealth of organizations.
London: Nicholas Brealey, 1997 (p69) Nonaka, I.
The knowledge creating company.
Harvard Business Review, 69 (6) 1991, 96-104 Edvinsson, L. Developing intellectual capital at Skandia.
Long Range Planning, 30 (3) 1997, 366-373 Prahalad, C. K. and Hamel, G. The core competence of the corporation.
Harvard Business Review, 68, 1990, 79-91 Barney, J.
Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage.
Journal of Management, 17 (1) 1991, 99-120 Burk, C. F. and Horton, F. W. InfoMap: a complete guide to discovering corporate information resources.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988 The Hawley Committee.
Information as an asset: the board agenda / a consultative document for chairmen, chief executives and boards of directors developed on behalf of the KPMG IMPACT Programme by a committee under the chairmanship of Dr Robert Hawley.
London: KPMG [1995] Kaplan, R. S. and Norton, D. P. The balanced scorecard measures that drive performance.
Harvard Business Review, 70 (1) 1992, 71-79 Brooking, A.
Intellectual capital: core assets for the third millennium enterprise.
London: International Thomson Business Press, 1996 Senge, Peter.
The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization.
New York: Doubleday, 1990 Brown, John Seely and Deguid, P. Organizational learning and communities-of-practice.
Organizational Science, 2 (1) 1991, 40-57 Deming, W. Edwards.
Out of the crisis.
Cambridge, Mass.
: MIT Press, 1982 Hammer, Michael and Champy, James.
Reengineering the corporation: a manifesto for the business revolution.
London: Nicholas Brealey, 1995 Information World Review, June 1998, (p26) Further reading Articles Broadbent, M. The phenomenon of knowledge management: what does it mean to the information profession?
Information Outlook, 2 (5) 1998, 23-36 Klobas, J. E. Information services for new millennium organizations: librarians and knowledge management.
In: Raitt, D (ed) Libraries for the new millennium: implications for managers.
London: Library Association, 1997, 39-64 Periodicals Knowledge Management.
Case-study based journal.
Ark Publishing (tel 0171 795 1234, e-mail ark@dircon.co.uk) Knowledge Management.
Practitioner-oriented magazine.
Learned Information (tel 01865 388000, e-mail customerservice@learned.co.uk) Web Knowledge Connections (David Skyrme Associates) Home Page.
http://www.skyrme.com Offers briefings, published articles (citations/abstracts/full texts) and links to other resources.
References Author Details Sheila Corral University Librarian Reading University Library Whiteknights, PO Box 223, Reading, RG6 6AE, UK Telephone: 0118 931 8772 Email: S.M.Corrall@reading.ac.uk URL: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/libweb/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Evolution of an Institutional E-prints Archive at the University of Glasgow Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Evolution of an Institutional E-prints Archive at the University of Glasgow Buzz data software java html xml apache archives metadata browser schema repositories eprints copyright oai-pmh cataloguing graphics lcsh perl solaris mysql url research standards Citation BibTex RIS William Nixon with some practical advice based on the Glasgow experience.
This article outlines the aims of the e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow and recounts our initial experiences in setting up an institutional e-prints archive using the eprints.org software.
It follows on from the recent article by Stephen Pinfield, John MacColl and Mike Gardner in the last issue of Ariadne [1].
The Open Archives Initiative [2] and the arguments for e-prints services [3] need little introduction here and have been ably covered by previous articles in Ariadne and elsewhere.
The focus here is on the implementation of an eprints.org archive in an HEI and the various decisions taken as the archive evolved from beta test site to a publicly available service.
E-prints archive at the University of Glasgow Information Services at the University of Glasgow began working with the ePrints.org software in early 2001 when we installed the beta release and then moved to version 1.0 in April of that year.
A Demonstrator version was released in November 2001 and from April 2002 became our live service.
We have not yet upgraded to version 2.0x of the eprints.org software.
These installations provided us with a range experience not just on the mechanics of the installation of the service but as a sounding board for beginning to explore the range of cultural and technical issues which need to be addressed to ensure that our institutional service is relevant and is used.
We have begun with some 30 papers, pre-prints and reports in the archive.
We are lining up a considerable collection of additional content from published papers and technical reports to working papers and theses which will be added to our e-prints service.
We have found that many departments are interested in making working papers and technical reports available.
An excellent example of such a service is the recently launched eScholarship repository [4] by the California Digital Library at the University of California.
Its initial focus is on working papers in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of California.
This service provides us with an excellent showcase to demonstrate the international interest in this area and the potential for institutional archives to effectively disclose scholarship.
Aim of the e-prints archive at Glasgow The aim of the e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow is to provide an effective [further] means of ensuring the disclosure of, and access to the scholarly work and research of this institution.
The term "scholarly work" is intended to include peer-reviewed journal articles as well as theses, chapters, conference papers and grey literature such projects reports.
Our core range of goals includes: Contribute to the liberation of scholarship through the development of Open Archives services locally and nationally Disclose the scholarship of the University Published (peer reviewed) papers Pre-prints, working papers and technical reports Grey literature Theses Getting the mix right Our experience at Glasgow has shown that there are two key elements required for the development and launch of successful Open Archives services: The support, endorsement and most critically, the content produced by our academic colleagues and partners The resources [staff, equipment, expertise] to ensure that it is developed, marketed and launched properly Implementation The implementation of our eprints.org archive has been a joint piece of work between the Computing Services department and the University Library.
The service is hosted on a Computing Services server and was installed by Computing Services staff.
The Library has been responsible for its "look and feel", administration and promotion.
This split seems to have been very successful and the technical expertise which Computing Services could provide was essential in getting the archive up and running.
This technical expertise has included: Unix Solaris, Perl, MySQL and Apache.
The eprints.org v.2.0 documentation notes: "Setting up an archive is not a trivial task.
The biggest problem is actually deciding what you need.
I would suggest setting up a demonstration version very close to the default configuration and having the manager/committee who [will] decide on what is needed have a quick play with it and comment what should be added or removed."
[5] This was very much our experience with version 1.0x and the reason we went through a number of revisions of our archive from the early beta release to the version which is now live.
The pilot service was made available to a variety of information Services staff for comment and they were provided with accounts to deposit papers and provided us with our initial feedback.
The installation of the simple default version of eprints.org is straightforward but many sites want much more than this and the recent volume of traffic on the eprints-tech [6] list is testament to this.
[Figure 1: University of Glasgow ePrints Service] Version 2.0 of the eprints.org software was released in March 2002 and has been substantially rewritten, so much so that there is no upgrade path to version 2.0 and eprints.org recommend a clean install.
With our live service in place we are now looking at the implications of migrating our archive to eprints.org v.2.0 and making the transition as seamless as possible for our users.
The user records and content will be imported into a new eprints.org archive which will be switched over to the same web address.
Metadata decisions The eprints.org software is OAI compliant and will produce the necessary Dublin Core metadata for harvesting by service providers, it is however up to individual implementers to make decisions about document types, formats and subject schema.
Library of Congress Subject Headings The most fundamental change we made to our archive was to create a subject listing based on the Library of Congress Classification Outline [7].
The pilot service subject listing was based solely on our faculties and departments and while we felt that this would be very useful for local use we wanted to use an established subject scheme which would provide some degree of consistency for future cross-searching.
We already use Library of Congres Subject Headings (LCSH) in our library catalogue and have classification tools such as Classification Plus available so LCSH seemed the logical choice.
The broad multi-disciplinary nature of our archive limited us, on the whole to the main classes from A General Works to Z Bibliography.
Library Science.
Information Resources and the main subclasses beneath them.
This was done to ensure that the listing did not become to complex or overlong.
It was necessary in some instances though to go a bit deeper to ensure that various disciplines such as Computing Science, which is classified under Mathematics were represented.
We reviewed the University's list of departments and also added the necessary subject headings from LCSH, for example RC1200 Sports Medicine and RC0254 Oncology, both of which are part of RC Internal Medicine.
It is intended that these additional sub-headings will make it easier for individuals to select an appropriate subject when they come to self-archive their paper.
They will also have the opportunity to suggest additional subjects which they would like to see added.
[Figure 2: Library of Congress Subject Headings] Faculties and Departments After the implementation of the LCSH listings it became apparent that it would still be very useful to provide a listing of papers deposited by Faculty and Department.
The clustering of papers by department provides a ready reckoner to the number of papers an individual department/faculty deposited.
eprints.org v.1.0 can only support one subject listing (which we are using for LCSH) so we created a parallel web page of papers arranged by faculty.
This had links to pre-configured searches which would list the papers deposited by faculty.
All of the papers which are deposited into our archive must be associated with a faculty and we provide a drop down box of these for the user to select from.
This was made a mandatory field and a paper will not be accepted for deposit unless a faculty is selected.
[Figure 3: ePrints by Faculty] eprints.org v.2.0 provides support for multiple listings so that this index will be much easier to manage.
Look and Feel Pinfield notes that "It will be interesting to see how institutional archives begin to appear.
Institutional design policies (which often promote the use of graphics and Java-script) are likely to have an influence on institutional e-print server presentation and lead to a departure from the arXiv ethos."
[8] Institutional design polices have had an impact on the "look and feel" of our archive and we have tried to ensure that it has the same consistent look and feel as our existing resources such as the catalogue.
The ePrints home page reflect this and mirrors the the layout and options available from the the Library's Information gateway MERLIN [9].
We embedded the Title / Author / Keyword search box in the ePrints home page and, with a small piece of Java-script had the cursor automatically appear there to enable users to start searching immediately.
The intention here is ensure that the "look and feel" is so familiar to our users that it becomes transparent and enables them to focus on searching for the content and not re-learning the interface.
We are also exploring value-added services such linking records for material in our catalogue (Innopac) to the full text version available in our ePrints archive.
This will enable us to provide full text links, in particular to our theses which are all listed in our catalogue.
[Figure 4: Link to ePrints from the library catalogue] Additional information fields The decision to offer a mix of different e-prints spanning published (peer reviewed) material to project reports and theses presented us with the issue of how best to allow users to easily identify the kind of content which was on display and its status e.g.
Published, In Press or Unpublished.
The archive can be searched by publication status or document type but this information was not displayed in the record screen.
The flexibility of the eprints.org software enabled us to add these fields to ensure that they are displayed.
[Figure 5: Record display with status and ePrints type fields] These are all elements which will be ported to our eprints.org v.2.0 archive.
OAI Registration and Compliance A key component in making our service publicly available was to ensure that it was OAI compliant and registered as an OAI compliant data provider.
We registered in November 2001 as "glasgow" and this has enabled us to subsequently register with individual service providers such as ARC using our OAI registered name.
This has enabled us to demonstrate the real, cross-archive searching potential of our archive to members of the University and to provide a wider research context beyond Glasgow.
Self-Registration and self-archiving At the time of writing our ePrints archive has some 30 registered users, some of whom have self-archived material in our archive and some who have set-up e-mail alerts.
A key component in moving from the Demonstrator version to "live" version was that users should be able to self-register.
We accept that in an institution as diverse as Glasgow, as in other HEI's not all of our users will wish to self-archive their material for a variety of reasons from time constraints to technical ability but we felt that it was vital to provide this as an option.
Our early adopters (in disciplines such as Music, Life Sciences and Computing Science) have had little difficulty in uploading their material into the archive, in a range of formats and they have been very positive about the experience.
Enabling self-registration and self-archiving has given us into an insight into the administrative implications of managing our archive.
In the pilot phase, the only content added was by staff responsible for the archive and the focus was on some initial content.
Now that the self-archiving is available it is necessary to check if content has been deposited into the submission buffer on a daily basis (content can only be made publicly available by the e-prints administrator) at present there is no e-mail notification when material has been deposited for review.
The ePrints Administrator will review the submitted paper and approve or reject it.
They will also enhance the record as appropriate with additional subject headings, keywords or further information.
In eprints.org v.1.0 anyone can register with the archive and then submit content.
We had one instance of papers being submitted from a non-University of Glasgow member and we had to respectfully decline them.
e-prints.org v.2.0 will allow us to manage this much better since it will provide us with more control over who can submit papers to the archive.
We have also had some very keen colleagues suggest publisher produced PDF files which we also cannot accept until we have had approval from the publisher.
These are examples of some of the cultural and organisational issues which must be addressed as the service becomes more widely used.
Feedback from staff using the service, for the purpose of depositing material has been very positive and has driven the addition of new document formats such as XML or ways to handle the deposit of multiple PDF files which need to be linked together.
This was done by adding an intermediate HTML file to act as an index.
[Figure 6: Multiple document formats] [Figure 7: Multiple PDF files with an HTML frontpage] The role of the Library At the University of Glasgow, the Library is the standard bearer for the advent and implementation of e-prints archives and Open Archives services.
To ensure the successful implementation of this service the Library has a number of distinct roles beyond its technical provision and maintenance.
These include: Encouraging members of the University to deposit material into the ePrints archives.
At Glasgow we have started an Advocacy campaign to demonstrating that this service has a broader context beyond Glasgow [10].
A recent event to raise awareness about the issues of Scholarly Communication provided us with an opportunity to launch our e-prints service and to raise its profile Providing advice to members of the University about copyright and journal embargo policies for material which they would like to deposit in our archive, and as appropriate liaising directly with the Journal in question.
This will become a pivotal role in the acceptance of our e-prints service since copyright is the number one question which members of the University ask about Converting material to a suitable format such as HTML or PDF for import into the archive.
It may also be necessary to ensure that HTML which is submitted is properly formatted and cross-browser compatible Depositing material directly on behalf of members of the University who do not, or cannot self-archive their material.
In instances in which we have deposited papers on behalf of individuals, we have created a new account for them and used that to submit their content.
This has allowed us to take advantage of the eprints.org feature of displaying the number of paper an individual has in the archive.
Individual can then use this to embed links on their own home or departmental web page which will list their deposited papers.
When the paper is submitted the individual is notified and we provide them with their account details which they can use to set-up e-mail alerts or to submit further content themselves Reviewing the metadata of content which has been self-archived to maintain the quality of the record and to add any additional subject headings and keywords as appropriate.
Beyond e-prints: FAIR and DAEDALUS The JISC-funded FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) Programme was announced in January 2002 "to fund a number of projects to support access to and sharing of institutional content within Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) and to allow intelligence to be gathered about the technical, organisational and cultural challenges of these processes."
[11].
FAIR was inspired by the vision of the Open Archives Initiative and will fund 14 projects with partnerships across 50 institutions [12].
The University of Glasgow has been awarded funding for a three year FAIR Project entitled DAEDALUS (Data Providers for Academic E-content and the Disclosure of Assets for Learning, Understanding and Scholarship.
DAEDALUS will build upon our experience in setting up this initial e-prints archive and will establish a network of Open Archives compliant University of Glasgow Data Providers.
These providers will be used to unlock the scholarly output of the University and will include: Published (peer reviewed) papers Pre-prints, working papers and technical reports e-Theses Research Resource Finding Aids (Archives and Special Collections) Institutional Management, Policy and Regulatory documents In addition to registering these repositories with the increasing number of service providers available we will also set-up an institutional service provider which will enable members of the University and the wider academic community to search across these resources.
DAEDALUS will explore a range of OAI-compliant software packages in addition to eprints.org and examine the technical, cultural and organisational issues involved in their implementation.
Conclusion Philip Hunter talked about an e-Prints Revolution in the last issue of Ariadne [13] and the technical revolution is here.
The OAI have just released version 2.0 of the Open Archives Initiative-Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-PMH) [14] and there is an increasing range of software choices beyond eprints.org for setting up institutional archives.
The challenge, ultimately will not be the technical implementation of an e-prints service but rather the cultural change necessary for it to become embedded and commonplace in the activities of the institution.
That change will be assisted however by national programmes such as FAIR and international declarations such as that of the Budapest Open Access Initiative [15].
At Glasgow the development of our e-prints service has been incremental but we have made steady progress and have been encouraged by the enthusiasm for such an archive which our early adopters have shown.
We will build on this initial service and, with DAEDALUS will implement a range of new services and, more importantly continue to nurture an e-prints / open access culture.
Bibliography (1) Stephen Pinfield, Mike Gardner and John MacColl, "Setting up an institutional e-print archive".
Ariadne, Issue 31.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/> (2) Open Archives Initiative <http://www.openarchives.org> (3) Stevan Harnad, "For whom the gate tolls?
How and why to free the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving, now" <http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm> (4) California Digital Library eScholarship Repository <http://repositories.cdlib.org/> (5) EPrints 2.0.1 Documentation Introduction <http://www.eprints.org/docs/php/intro.php> (6) ePrints-tech mailing list archive <http://www.eprints.org/tech.php/> (7) Library of Congress Classification Outline <http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco.html> (8) Stephen Pinfield "How do physicists use an e-print archive?
Implications for institutional e-print services".
D-Lib Magazine, 7, 12, December 2001.
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/pinfield/12pinfield.html> (9) MERLIN Glasgow University Library's Information Gateway <http://merlin.lib.gla.ac.uk> (10) Create Change: Challenging the Crisis in Scholarly Communication [at Glasgow] <http://www.gla.ac.uk/createchange> (11) JISC FAIR Call <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c01_02.html> (12) Successful FAIR bids <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/programmes/fair.html> (13) Philip Hunter, "An e-prints revolution?"
Editorial, Ariadne Issue 31.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/editorial/> (14) Open Archives Initiative Release Version 2.0 of the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting <http://www.openarchives.org/news/oaiv2press020614.html> (15) Budapest Open Access Initiative <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml> Author Details   William J Nixon w.j.nixon@lib.gla.ac.uk William is the Deputy Head of IT Services, Glasgow University Library and Administrator of the Glasgow ePrints Service Article Title: "The evolution of an institutional e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow" Author: William J Nixon Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/eprint-archives/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Utilizing E-books to Enhance Digital Library Offerings Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Utilizing E-books to Enhance Digital Library Offerings Buzz data software database archives metadata digitisation accessibility browser repositories preservation cataloguing marc aggregation ebook cd-rom authentication interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Shirley Hyatt and Lynn Silipigni Connaway, describe the rationale and background of OCLC's acquisition of netLibrary, the information environment that is being pursued, and the resulting benefits that libraries may experience.
On January 24, 2002, OCLC Online Computer Library Center acquired netLibrary, a major electronic books (e-books) company.
OCLC's acquisition includes the e-book Division of netLibrary, which OCLC has integrated as a division of OCLC, and netLibrary's MetaText eTextbook Division, which has become a for-profit subsidiary of OCLC.
This article describes the rationale and background of the acquisition, the overall vision of the information environment that is being pursued, and the benefits that libraries may experience as a result.
Donald Hawkins, Clifford Lynch, and Ruth Wilson, among others, have each published excellent overviews of the e-book arena, and so this information is not replicated here [1][2][3][4].
Nevertheless, a few definitions are in order.
There are three major components that contribute to the e-book reading experience: content, hardware, and software.
In this article, we use the term "e-book" to represent content that has been made available digitally and electronically.
The term, "reading appliances" refers to the hardware one uses for reading e-books.
There are three general models of e-book reading appliances in the marketplace today: portable dedicated devices such as the Gemstar REB 1200; portable, small, multi-use devices such as personal digital assistants like Palm, handheld PCs, Tablets; and desktop computers or laptops.
netLibrary is presently PC and laptop based.
The final component of the reading experience is software that facilitates the searching, navigation, font appearance, functionality, and presentation of information.
We refer to this as "reading software".
Some e-book companies require the use of proprietary client-side reading software to view and manage their books independently of the Web.
netLibrary has experimented with several models and its e-book reading software today is browser based and its content is hosted centrally by netLibrary and distributed via Web technologies.
E-book publishers' respective combination of hardware and software components undoubtedly impacts e-book consumers' selection of content and usage patterns of the content.
It is, for example, a different matter to read something on one's PC or laptop surrounded, perhaps, by neatly organized piles of paper representing the user's accompanying active cognitive engagements, as opposed to reading material that can be carried in, say, one's purse without the intellectual annex that a desk represents [5].
The present netLibrary model facilitates learners, scholars, and teachers who are working at their desks or on a portable desk--the laptop computer--and who are searching, studying, researching, printing, and copying portions of text, and reading, generally with academic intent.
Why e-books?
The advantages of e-books in this context are straightforward and include: easy access to content; on-demand availability (accessible anytime from anywhere at anytime); capabilities to search within a book and across a collection of books; links to other resources, including dictionaries and thesauri; no risk of loss, damage, theft, or misplacement; no physical space requirements; no device requirements for access to the content; accessibility to content using standard web browsers; customizable search interfaces; and ease in transportability.
Many books --especially reference works--already have a long history of electronic usage.
In fact, one of the earliest applications of computers was for automated literature searching, replacing cumbersome print indexes.
Since then, thousands of reference books, from general encyclopedias and dictionaries to specialized sources, have been digitized and are commonly used online or as a CD-ROM.
There are strong indications in libraries during the last two to three years that circulation is down, reference questions are down, and in-library printing is down.
With the advent of the Web, students are organizing their materials and looking for information differently from before.
They are using the Web from their homes for a significant amount of their research activity.
By all reports, patrons will stop seeking when they have gathered the minimum amount of information that achieves their needs.
This has come to mean that users will settle for the items conveniently available as full text electronic documents while ignoring robust paper-based information sources.
Some patrons have also expressed the belief that everything is available via the Web.
Recognition of this puts more pressure on libraries to integrate paper and electronic collection catalogs, and to ensure that paper resources are as conveniently available as electronic.
Because few monographic books have been made available electronically, monographs have not been part of the Web distribution revolution.
They have been neither part of the surface web nor the deep web; they have not been on the web at all.
Use of journal full-text content has predominated over monographic books, in the context of the students' activities described above.
The emergence of e-books is necessary to ensure that books have a presence in the Web world, and a presence in students' emerging research behaviors.
According to a Forrester report published in 2000, e-book technologies indicate significant promise for the textbook industry as an enabler for publishers, faculty and students [6].
Publishers will be able to make last-minute changes to content, and will be able to tailor the content to reflect regional preferences.
Teachers will be able to compile and tailor their curriculum materials, using interactive functionality, and provide enhanced levels of detail by linking to added content on the web.
Students, in lieu of toting multiple heavy, large, hardbound textbooks across campus, in the future will need to only tote a lightweight reading appliance loaded with electronic textbooks.
Distance learning--one of the fastest growing educational business areas in the U.S.--requires getting information to students who do not always have ready access to university libraries, and e-books are looked to as a major solution.
The e-textbook area is predicted to have a $7.8 billion potential by 2005 [6].
In this new e-textbook environment, libraries may be better integrated into the courseware and instructional material environment than heretofore, as types of information (textbook, "learning objects", primary sources, secondary sources, various media) become linked and moving between them becomes seamless in the workflows of faculty and students.
A recent study by Columbia found that "scholars read relatively little of most of the books that they review for their work…The introduction, a few pages to a couple [of] chapters, and the bibliography, footnotes, and index are browsed or read in some other books…Only a few books are read at great length…They want to be able to flip between pages, to follow the line of reasoning, to move from reference to footnote, from index to text easily…They feel that given navigational flexibility, speed, and design that takes advantage of interactivity, as well as substantial collections, scholars would increase their use of online books" [7 cited in 8].
From a collection management standpoint, the e-book affords libraries a rich storehouse of usage information previously unavailable.
The e-book's content management system can potentially enable one to track not merely what is being circulated, but also what parts of books are used for what lengths of time.
One can provide access to e-books more efficiently, since the usage of high-demand texts can be interleaved between patrons much as usage of high demand items is today optimized by a reserve desk.
E-books have also prompted new interest in patron-initiated acquisition models.
Commonplace in interlibrary loan, several consortia are experimenting with a demand, then acquire workflow in the e-book arena and have reported success.
At a recent ALA workshop, one library director made the point that, given the shortage of funds and the predicted shortage of librarians, one might usefully forgo subject bibliographer salaries for patron-selected electronic books [9].
E-book management systems would facilitate the evaluation of these approaches.
Coupled with normal approval and selection programs, the approach can reduce the number of unused titles warehoused by libraries.
Why netLibrary?
netLibrary has been dedicated to providing electronic book services to the library community since it began operations in July 1998.
It is committed to encouraging the creation of the electronic version of the monograph, and to serving these up through libraries.
netLibrary provides academic, public, special/corporate and school libraries with solutions for the purchase, management, and use of digital learning content, specifically e-books.
It digitized its first e-book in January 1999, launched its Web site in March 1999 and sold its first title in May 1999.
Today, netLibrary's e-book offering is the most broadly adopted in the market, representing the content of 315 publishers and serving more than 6,700 libraries, with a catalog of more than 41,000 titles.
netLibrary has experimented with various roles in the electronic book arena during its life span.
Though primarily focused on the library market, for a brief period it owned Peanut Press, a company devoted to the publication of retail e-books for PDA devices using proprietary reading software.
(netLibrary subsequently sold Peanut Press to Palm, which changed the name of the software to Palm Reader.)
netLibrary has also provided conversion services to publishers, to reduce entry barriers that publishers might otherwise encounter.
It continues to do so, though increasingly publishers are able to manage these conversions themselves.
netLibrary has also experimented with several reading software models, only recently discontinuing PC-based proprietary reading software in favor of a browser-based, centrally-hosted, model.
netLibrary's e-book offering presently includes: an integrated catalog of more than 41,000 titles which grows daily, for which netLibrary has acquired content distribution and management rights from publishers, a collection management platform, a suite of content support services The publisher of the content determines the e-book price, but the majority of the e-book titles are the same price as the hard copy book.
An access fee is charged to libraries and institutions to cover the costs of maintaining a digital library, such as use of search capabilities and related Web-based features.
The access fee can be paid as a one-time charge for ongoing access to the e-book title, or can be paid on an annual basis.
The latter allows libraries to deselect the titles, and may be of interest to non-research libraries for technology and computer science titles that become outdated.
TitleSelect™, netLibrary's online collection development tool, allows librarians to access netLibrary's entire e-book catalogue.
This useful interactive instrument allows the selection of individual titles, to create title lists and to order e-books that best fit specific library needs.
TitleSelect, also offers an ownership-awareness feature that can help librarians quickly identify owned titles within their collections.
netLibrary provides a variety of usage reports, as well as reports of titles that are not used, which enable librarians to monitor and adjust their collection strategies and circulation models.
It is possible to assign circulation periods by title and/or collections and to access netLibrary's collection development tools for reviewing and acquiring new content.
TitleDirect™ is a new collection development tool that helps libraries with large e-book collections more efficiently and effectively manage the e-book selection and review process.
Offered for libraries with expanding e-book collections of 3,000 or more titles, TitleDirect provides automatic notification of new titles matching library-specified content profiles.
netLibrary has continued to balance the needs of libraries with the needs of publishers, to ensure that libraries continue to be empowered in the e-book world.
netLibrary also continues to focus on 1) utility; 2) integration with libraries' existing systems; and 3) ease of use, for the library community.
netLibrary enhances the utility of learning content through digital functionality, content management tools, and a suite of content support services.
The e-book solution enriches the underlying value of learning content through online features such as search and bookmark.
netLibrary customers are able to use the same distribution vendors for e-books as they do for print publications.
They can continue to use the same library automation software systems for netLibrary items as they do for the rest of their content collections.
netLibrary supports remote patron authentication, so patrons need not visit a library building to search the library's collection or to check out a netLibrary title.
netLibrary's e-book metadata records can be integrated with the library's online catalog for linked access to the title.
netLibrary had an agreement with OCLC several years prior to OCLC's acquisition of netLibrary, to enable netLibrary customers to acquire OCLC MARC catalog records, to set their netLibrary holdings in WorldCat (if they were OCLC member libraries), and also to enable netLibrary subscribers to opt for an escrow agreement to preserve their purchases should netLibrary encounter problems.
Awareness and accessibility of e-book content is crucial to usage and many libraries have found that within three weeks of integrating MARC records into the online public access catalogue for their e-books, circulation for e-book titles triples [10].
This suggests that e-books should be integrated into library processes, policies, and services, and not isolated or treated as a different format than other content, especially when the e-book content can be accessed through the online catalog in a web-based environment, requiring no additional hardware or software.
A comparison of circulation of identical titles available at the University of Pittsburgh in e-book and print book format indicates that e-book circulation is higher than print book circulation.
During a four-month period each e-book title was accessed an average of 3.7 times compared to an average of 1.4 accesses per print book title.
Thirty percent of the titles in the e-book collection were accessed during this period while only ten percent of the print collection was accessed [11].
Some e-book content is in more demand.
These include current subject matter within certain disciplines and content that is generally not read in its entirety, i.e., scholarly, professional, and reference content.
Current netLibrary e-book usage patterns suggest highest subject usage within the economics and business; computer science; literature; medicine, health and wellness; technology; history; education; sociology; and religion collections.
These e-book content areas are similar to those identified by librarians.
In June 2001, netLibrary emailed questionnaires about e-book content to 1900 academic, public, and special librarians.
The sample was equally distributed among the three types of librarians.
One hundred eighty-one responses were returned.
Eighty-four percent of the responses were from academic librarians, fourteen percent were from public librarians, and two percent were from special librarians.
Business, medicine, computer and information science, technology, and career content were the highest ranked subject areas for e-book collections.
Digital reference content was also ranked highly [10].
netLibrary acquires content from publishers to provide to libraries and institutions, rather than directly to end-users.
The resources and services available through netLibrary are developed to integrate into library systems.
netLibrary's focus on providing content and services to libraries strongly complements OCLC's member-based services.
Why OCLC?
Prior to the acquisition of netLibrary, OCLC's offerings have predominantly consisted of four service areas that help librarians manage their collections and provide services to end users: cataloguing and metadata; interlibrary loan; digital preservation and access; and reference.
Libraries and OCLC cooperatively build and maintain WorldCat, which includes more than 49 million bibliographic records and more than 800 million library holdings.
FirstSearch also serves as an interface for end users to journal databases.
The goal in offering FirstSearch has long been to leverage the membership's investment by providing an end-user interface to WorldCat (recently augmented with decision support such as cover art, reviews, tables of contents, and so forth), and to further leverage that investment by integrating access to other information databases under the same interface.
In short, OCLC's goals for its end-user service have been: increase availability of library resources to users of libraries, reduce library costs, provide end-user access to WorldCat, integrate bibliographic information (monographs, serials, journal articles, etc.)
under one interface, integrate information resources under the same interface as their bibliographic metadata surrogates.
Though the WorldCat database has traditionally housed metadata records representing books, serial titles, maps, manuscript and archive collections, realia, and so forth, it did not historically provide access to the full text of documents.
Like other bibliographic databases, the WorldCat metadata provided location information enabling users to find the item, which was separate from the metadata.
This changed gradually over the last 10 years, as OCLC's Internet Cataloging project and then OCLC's CORC (Cooperative Online Resource Catalog) project explored and facilitated cataloging of electronic materials.
Powered by the World Wide Web, free web-accessible electronic documents such as web pages could be just a click away from the bibliographic record.
The entire WorldCat database, with cataloging records for electronic documents available on the Web, is available both to OCLC catalogers, and to end-users under the FirstSearch interface.
Full text electronic documents are accessible through FirstSearch whenever permitted by the content publishers.
OCLC, like other journal aggregators, has been able to make free web pages, and electronic journal articles rights to which have been negotiated, available to the public through libraries under these sorts of interfaces, but not monographs.
Journal full-text items have of course predominated because e-books have not yet achieved parity in the marketplace.
OCLC is supplementing its rich metadata repository with a digital library offering.
Its acquisition of netLibrary is another step in this direction.
netLibrary provides additional opportunities for an enhanced information environment with a sound navigation and information architecture to make the entire environment function as a seamless and friendly package of resources for end-users.
They will be able to not only access full-text journals, but also a collection of full-text monographs and reference materials from one interface.
OCLC has longtime experience in archiving its WorldCat database of 49 million records with accompanying transaction records.
Since 1991, OCLC has provided preservation services, including contract microfilming and digitization services, delivered to the library with accompanying metadata.
It is anticipated that OCLC's stewardship of netLibrary e-books content will be handled just as responsibly.
If libraries are to thrive in an electronic world, an e-book company focused on the needs of libraries is requisite.
Libraries are a different audience from that of consumer electronics, and have different priorities.
They have a higher dependency on standards than retail customers because they serve a wide variety of patrons, publishers, distributors, and locations, under ADA guidelines, and must do so at an extremely cost-effective level.
They also have a stronger need for standards-based technologies to ensure that the goals of open scholarly exchange and learning can be met between user communities and between institutions.
Academic researchers need to rely on authenticity and integrity of content; e-book content should match any print content and include all its elements (text, graphs, and illustrations).
Content needs to be separable from access and manipulation features, and needs to be transferable, in a non-proprietary format, into a variety of reading appliances.
Interoperability of files between systems is important, as is digital rights management software to enforce control over intellectual property [12].
All of these specialised needs foretell an e-book service by libraries and for libraries.
Librarians are facing significant challenges in providing information in this digital age.
These include, but are not limited to, shrinking budgets; limited shelving and space; reduced or no funding for additional space and new buildings; rising costs to repair or replace damaged, lost, or stolen books, some of which are out of print; users' dependence upon and demands for resources in electronic format; the rising costs of interlibrary loan services; the increased need for developing resource-sharing and purchasing groups to increase buying power; and the demand to support distance or distributed learning and other remote users.
The relationship between netLibrary and OCLC offers many benefits.
The first and most immediate benefit is, of course, preserving libraries' investment in their netLibrary agreements.
Another benefit is further integration of information resources under the same interface as their bibliographic metadata surrogates--including electronic journals, and now also monographs.
A final, and perhaps most important benefit is that, by coming together as a collective to own netLibrary, members can more effectively safeguard libraries' institutional role of managing information collections on behalf of their funding institutions, regardless of format, even as traditional information transforms into electronic form.
netLibrary's integrated content linking capabilities strengthens OCLC's integrated data and content services to do just that on behalf of its members.
References and Bibliography References [1] Donald T. Hawkins (2000) "Electronic Books: A Major Publishing Revolution: Part 1: General Considerations and Issues," Online, 24 (July/August 2000): 14-28 [2] Donald T. Hawkins (2000) "Electronic Books: A Major Publishing Revolution: Part 2: The Marketplace," Online, 24 (September/October 2000): 18-36 [3] Clifford Lynch (2001) "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World", firstmonday 6 (6), 1-49.
[4] Ruth Wilson (2001) "Evolution of Portable Electronic Books", Ariadne Issue 29, October 2, 2001.
Available: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/wilson/ [5] Malcolm Gladwell (2002) "The Social Life of Paper: looking for method in the mess", New Yorker, March 25, 2002.
[6] Forrester Research (2000).
"Books Unbound" Available: www.forrester.com [7] M. Summerfield (1999), "Online Books Evaluation Project", a memo, available at: <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/digital/olbdocs/focus_spring99.html> [8] Carol Ann Hughes and Nancy L. Buchanan (2001).
"Use of Electronic Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences", Library Hi Tech 19, (4), 368-375 [9] Unnamed Respondent (2002), attended the session, "eBook Access Trends: Exploring Alternative Models", ALA Midwinter Conference, January 20, New Orleans, LA.
[10] Lynn Silipigni Connaway (2001).
"A Web-Based Electronic Book (eBook) Library: The netLibrary Model" Library Hi Tech 19, (4), 340-349.
[11] Lynn Silipigni Connaway (2002).
"The Integration and Use of Electronic Books (E-books) in the Digital Library" in Computers in Libraries 2002: Proceedings.
Medford NJ: Information Today, 18-25.
[12] Lucia Snowhill (2001) "E-books and their Future in Academic Libraries", D-Lib Magazine 7 (7/8).
Author Details Shirley Hyatt Communications and Business Transitions Director Office of Research, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Dublin OH, USA.
Email: shirley_hyatt@oclc.org Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D. Vice President of Research and Library Services netLibrary, a Division of OCLC, Inc. Boulder CO, USA <http://www.netlibrary.com/about_us/academic/lynn_connaway.asp> Email: lynnc@netLibrary.com Article Title: "netLibrary" Author: Shirley Hyatt and Lynn Silipigni Connaway Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/netlibrary/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Features in a Portal?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Features in a Portal?
Buzz data software java javascript html database portal archives zip browser copyright opac e-learning mis ejournal personalisation sms url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Geoff Butters analyses the features found in various types of portal, and includes a comparison with the planned features for the JISC Subject Portals.
EDNER the formative evaluation of the UK higher education sector's Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is a three-year project being undertaken by the Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) at the Manchester Metropolitan University and the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT) at Lancaster University.
One strand of the project is to undertake an evaluation of the JISC Subject Portals.
As part of that work a systematic investigation of portal features was undertaken in the summer of 2002 to help develop a profile of features of JISC, institutional, and commercial portals.
Within the EDNER Project the term 'Portal' has a fairly tight definition as prescribed by the JISC 5/99 Programme and subsequently the Portal Development Programme.
The 5/99 Programme Call documentation, and more particularly the 'Town Meeting' held in London after the Call was announced, suggested that in essence:"A portal accepts requests from users and itself interrogates information services it believes may hold appropriate resources.
It sends queries to those services and accepts result sets.
It then processes those result sets (for example, by removing duplicates) and presents them to the user.
In essence the user never leaves the portal."
[1] This has subsequently been expanded to:"Technically, a portal is a network service that brings together content from diverse distributed resources using technologies such as cross-searching, harvesting, and alerting, and collates this into an amalgamated form for presentation to the user.
This presentation is usually via a Web browser, though other means are also possible.
For users, a portal is a, possibly personalised, single point of access where searching can be carried out across one or more than one resource and the amalgamated results viewed.
Information may also be presented via other means, for example, alerting services and conference listings or links to e-prints and learning materials."
[2].
In the wider community the term 'portal' is used far more freely to describe Web sites with varying degrees of functionality; for example:" Systems which gather a variety of useful information resources into a single, 'one stop' Web page, helping the user to avoid being overwhelmed by infoglut, or feeling lost on the Web."
[3] " .
.
an organising principal that brings like-minded businesses and customers together, to their mutual benefit.
Information is obtained, ads are seen, products are purchased, and everyone's happy."
[4] However, the thinking is changing, and the JISC definitions have developed over time.
One draft considered by the JISCfunded Subject Portals Project (SPP) [5] suggested: " a portal is an online service that provides a personalised, single point of access to resources that support the end-user in one or more tasks (resource discovery, learning, research etc.).
The resources made available via a portal are typically brought together from more than one source."
[6] Another suggests that a portal is a: " network service that provides access to a range of heterogeneous network services, local and remote, structured and unstructured.
Such network services might typically include resource discovery services, email access and online discussion fora.
Portals are aimed at human end-users using common Web 'standards' such as HTTP, HTML, Java and JavaScript."
[7]   For the purpose of this study a loose interpretation of the term has been accepted so as to be as inclusive as possible.
Methodology An extensive sample of the literature on the subject of portals was scrutinised to gain an insight into what was being considered as the functionality that differentiated a portal from a simple Web page.
Examples of the most relevant literature consulted are included in the list of references [3-4] [ 8-25].
An initial list of features that might be found in a portal was then compiled from the features suggested in the literature.
Those features consisted mostly of what might be expected in a commercial portal as provided by popular search engines such as AltaVista, Excite and Yahoo!, or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AOL, Freeserve and MicroSoft Network(MSN), plus some from specialist (or vertical) sites such as iVillage, LibraryHQ and Zdnet, and academic sites such as MyLibrary @ NCState (North Carolina State University) and MyUCLA (University of California at Los Angeles).
Added to this were portal features contained in a survey [26] conducted on behalf of the JISC-funded Subject Portals Project (SPP) [5].
The survey results included features suggested by academic information professionals for inclusion in an academic subject-based portal, and as such included several items deemed desirable but not necessarily yet provided in existing portals.
The resultant list of features was edited for duplication under different names, i.e.
where different terminology had been used to describe the same feature.
Putting an interpretation on what someone had meant by a particular term, and whether they meant the same thing as another person using a similar term, was quite a difficult task, and some value judgements had to be made in order to avoid, as far as possible, ambiguity.
The problem of interpreting terminology arose again when actually checking sites for features where each site's meaning for a term could differ somewhat.
Again value judgements were made so as to be as consistent as possible.
However, there was one instance where the offerings of different sites were hardly the same: the feature 'travel news' in most instances consisted of news items about holidays or the prospects for national and international travel.
One US university site, however, didn't offer that kind of news, but under the title 'travel news' offered real-time up-to-the-minute traffic and public transport news for the local area.
This illustrates how terminology can be used with different nuances of meaning.
The features were grouped where possible into similar types.
Some groupings were fairly obvious:  e.g., the features 'chat', 'chat channels', 'instant messaging', 'computer conferencing', 'newsletter', 'message boards', 'discussion groups', 'ask an expert' and 'collaborative working'  all readily fell into the group 'Community Communication';  several varieties of news  'general', 'local', 'world', 'sport', 'weather', 'stock market',  could all be grouped under 'News'.
In some cases, though, the grouping of the features was somewhat arbitrary and thus fairly meaningless, so the groupings are of limited significance:  the important matter was that a feature was listed for investigation.
During the investigation, several additional features were found that were deemed to be worth noting and added to the list as 'Additional features found'.
It is somewhat surprising that some of the features listed here had not previously been in the list, e.g.
'Job search' and 'Calendar of events', but their omission could again be the result of mis-interpretation of terminology.
Other additions are perhaps newer features, e.g.
'SMS text messaging' and 'TV listings'.
It should also be noted that sites add features from time to time.
Based on the literature review, a list of portals for possible analysis was produced.
The list included what various authors suggested were portals, whether or not the site owners described them as such.
Each of the sites on the list were subjected to a brief initial investigation to confirm their existence and suitability for inclusion in the analysis, as a result of which some sites were excluded.
For example, one site was excluded because it was no longer what it had used to be, (a site that was about pets in general had been taken over by a pet supermarket chain as their own); one had recently been taken over by another; the extent to which shopping malls offered services from the features list was found to be so very limited that they would not provide a useful comparison to the other sites; and some ISP sites (e.g.
MSN) could not be thoroughly analysed without actually becoming a paying subscriber.
MyLibrary@NCState is the name given to software that was developed by Eric Lease Morgan [27] and originally implemented at North Carolina State University.
It has since been implemented at a number of other sites, and nine of these were included in the initial investigation.
As all of these were very similar to the original implementation, and all of them offered only what the underlying university library site offered, (albeit organised in a different manner), no others were included in the final list.
MyLibrary Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is not an implementation of MyLibrary@NCState, having been developed independently at VCU, and was included.
That initial investigation resulted in a shorter list for thorough analysis.
Sites chosen were categorised into four types:  Search engine-based (six); Internet Service Provider (ISP) based (three); specialist (vertical) (six); and academic (four).
Where there was a UK and a US version of the site, the UK one was listed.
It was noted that UK and US versions are often somewhat different.
A matrix was constructed of the features list against the final sites list, and each site systematically investigated to find which of the features it offered.
For the most part particular features were available within the site itself, but in some cases a feature was offered but took the user out of the site  i.e.
to another site.
This was indicated in the matrix.
However, this was only applied to features that were actually offered within the portal; having moved to another site using a link in the portal, other features found on that site were not indicated as available from the portal.
Other cases arose where it was unclear whether a feature exactly matched something in the features list, and this too was indicated in the matrix.
A few cases were found where it could not be firmly established whether a feature was or wasn't there, and again this was indicated in the matrix.
As previously noted some additional features were found that were deemed to be worth noting and added to the list.
A new feature having been found on one site, previously checked sites were re-checked for that additional feature in case it had been overlooked.
The analysis took place between the first week in June and the first week in October 2002.
Finally, for the purpose of comparison, a fifth category of portal was added:  the JISC-funded Subject Portals Project (SPP) [5] planned features.
Analysis of portal features The sites that were investigated, are categorised into four types:Search Engine (SE) sites AltaVista (UK) http://uk.altavista.com/ Excite (UK) http://www.excite.co.uk LookSmart (UK) http://www.looksmart.co.uk/ Lycos (UK) http://www-uk.lycos.com/ Netscape (UK) http://www.netscape.co.uk/ My Netscape http://my.netscape.com/index2.psp Internet Service Providers (ISPs) sites AOL (UK) http://www.aol.co.uk/ BTopenworld http://www.btopenworld.com/default Freeserve http://www.freeserve.com/ Specialist (vertical) sites Fool.com (UK) http://www.fool.co.uk iVillage  http://www.ivillage.co.uk/ LibraryHQ.com http://www.libraryhq.com Zdnet (UK)http://www.zdnet.co.uk/ 24 hour museum http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/ HERO http://www.hero.ac.uk/ Academic sites The four academic portals are actually two 'MyLibrary' sites  My Library (Virginia Commonwealth University)  http://www.library.vcu.edu/mylibrary/ MyLibrary @ NCState (North Carolina State University) http://my.lib.ncsu.edu/ and two 'institutional' sites  My UW (University of Washington) http://myuw.washington.edu/ MyUCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) http://www.my.ucla.edu/ This distinction is important in some cases and has been made in the analysis when considering some of the features.
The Subject Portals Project planned features category was added for comparison.
Features offered by the sites analysed Sites differed considerably in what they offered, perhaps indicating that they were each aimed at a specific target market.
The full matrix is included as Appendix 2 [Excel spreadsheet].
A summary of the availability of features on the sites is as follows: Utilities Channels/Categories See figs 1, 2 and 3 in Appendix 1.
Some sites offer a vast array (e.g.
over 40), others offer only a handful: All the Search Engines(SEs) except Excite, which is purely a directory service, all ISPs and specialist sites, one institutional site and one MyLibrary site.
MyLibrary @ VCU and MyUCLA do not.
Is included in SPP planned features.
Browseable Hierarchical Directories (See figs 4 and 5 in Appendix 1): Most SEs and ISPs, one specialist site (iVillage), but none of the academic sites.
Email account facilities: Some SEs, all ISPs, one specialist site (iVillage), both institutional sites, but not MyLibrary sites.
Address Book: Some SEs and ISPs, none of the specialist sites, both institutional sites, but not MyLibrary sites.
Bookmark Manager: One (surprisingly) of each of the SEs and ISPs and none of the specialist sites, but all of the academic sites.
Calculator: Two of the SEs and MyLibrary @ NCState (where it is available on the underlying library site).
Calendar: One each of the SEs, ISPs and specialist sites, two institutional and MyLibrary @ NCState (where it is available on the underlying library site).
Currency Exchange Rates: Some SEs and ISPs, none of the specialist nor academic sites.
Diary/Planner: Only one ISP and one institutional site.
Internet Telephony: Only one ISP offered this directly at the time of the survey.
Access to Geographical Maps: Three of the SEs, all ISPs and MyLibrary @ NCState (where it is available on the underlying library site).
People Finder: One SE, one specialist site, both institutional sites and MyLibrary @ NCState (where it is available on the underlying library site).
Personal Information Storage Space: Only MyUCLA offered this directly as a service to the user, as distinct from some of the other sites that requested personal information for their own purposes.
Language Translation (of Web pages) : Only one SE (Alta Vista).
Web Space (for creating own Web site) : Some SEs, all ISPs and one institutional site.
Zip Code/Post Code look-up: One each of the SEs, ISPs and specialist sites (iVillage).
User Profiling / Content Filtering Family Filtering (restricting access to material deemed unsuitable, especially for children) : Some SEs and ISPs.
Specialist and academic sites would tend not to need this because of their specialisation.
Creation of User Profile(s) of interests: Only MyLibrary @ VCU and MyUW offered this directly, and it is included in SPP planned features.
However, sites that offered some personalisation (see below) maintained settings between sessions, and so could be considered to be keeping a personal profile.
Personalisation (changing various aspects to suit oneself) : Two SEs, two ISPs, one specialist and all academic sites offered this to some extent, and it is included in SPP planned features.
The need to do so for specialist sites is limited by the fact that they have a specialism.
The most common personalisable aspects are content, channels displayed, type of news, and display appearance.
Personalisation of links is most common in academic sites, and the capability to create a 'my journals' list is a feature of only MyLibrary sites.
Resource Discovery Subject-specific (portal's specialisation) : All the specialist sites offer some sort of resource discovery for their specialism, and it is included in SPP planned features.
This feature is not to be expected in other types of site.
Single Sign-on Access Management (automated access to all services for which a user is authorised through a single login to the portal) : Not offered by any of the sites in this study, except MyLibrary @ VCU which offers a very limited kind.
Is included in SPP planned features.
This is a matter being addressed widely in the academic and commercial sectors.
Many solutions are being introduced in a variety of situations.
For example, the finance company egg plc now offers a single sign-on facility for all other bank accounts of their customers, and several portal products from commercial vendors offer a form of single sign-on.
Resource Descriptions: One SE (LookSmart), all ISPs to some degree, some specialist sites and three academic sites.
Is included in SPP planned features.
Selected (Quality Assured (QA)) content: QA is specifically claimed by one SE, two ISPs, three specialist sites, three academic sites and is included in SPP planned features.
However, some further explanation is necessary: The SE LookSmart says in its help pages "Each Web site is reviewed for quality .
.
", but this may only apply to specially selected sites and content, the presence of which is sometimes paid for by the resource provider: many other search results are from are from the web via Google and as such probably have not been reviewed by LookSmart.
ISP BTopenworld takes its search results from LookSmart and so by inference has the same QA.
Freeserve refers to partners being chosen because of their commitment to quality.
MyUCLA does not specifically claim any QA but the nature of the host institution infers QA to the user.
Browse Resources: One SE (LookSmart), two ISPs, three of the specialist sites and three of the academic sites.
Search Bibliographic database: The SEs do not provide this, but ISPs AOL and Freeserve have partner or associate sites that offer it.
Three of the academic sites offer it, and although UCLA does not offer it directly, it does allow access to the library site which does.
Is included in SPP planned features.
Search Citation Databases: Only three of the academic sites, and is included in SPP planned features.
Search the local Web site (or in-house) : Only available from one each of the SEs and ISPs, but is available from all but one specialist sites and all academic sites.
Search the local OPAC: Fairly obviously only offered by the academic sites, and even there only indirectly through the institutional library site.
Search e-Journals: The SEs do not provide this, but again ISPs AOL and Freeserve have partner or associate sites that offer this, and all the academic sites offer it.
Is included in SPP planned features.
Search Tables of Content (TOCs) : Offered only by three of the academic sites, and is included in SPP planned features.
Cross-search multiple resources (a single search carried out across many resources simultaneously) : Not offered by any sites in this study, except indirectly and in a very limited way by MyLibrary @ NCState via the underlying library site.
Is included in SPP planned features.
Search WWW: With the exception of three of the specialist sites, all other sites offered this directly.
Often a third-party search engine is used.
In some cases the third party's search box is provided on the host site and it is obvious that the third party is being used.
In other cases, though, only when the results set is returned does it become obvious that some or all of them are from the third party.
In the case of LookSmart, (and thus BTopenworld whose search results come from LookSmart), a number of hits in the search results are from 'featured' or 'selected' (possibly paid-for) listings that have been ' .
.
reviewed for quality'.
They are followed by 'related' results from Google.
Locate, Access/Request, and Deliver/Procure: These are concepts that do not fit well with SEs, ISPs or most specialist sites because they are terms peculiar to the information profession.
Consequently, of the sites in this study, 24 Hour Museum and the academic ones offer these features most obviously, and they are included in SPP planned features.
However, almost all sites offer some sort of access to resources.
Alternative Search Engines (access to search engines other than the site's standard one) : Eight of the sites offered an alternative search engine to their standard one.
News/News Feeds In the News/Headlines: All but one of the SEs, all ISPs, but only one each of the specialist and academic sites.
Is included in SPP planned features.
General news world: All but one of the SEs, all ISPs, but only one each of the specialist and academic sites.
General news local: Only MyNetscape and MyUW.
As MyNetscape is US-based, even when subscribed to and accessed from the UK, all the news is 'local' to the USA.
Subject-specific (portal's specialisation) news: This is, and can only be, offered by the specialist sites, although both MyUW and MyLibrary Library @ NCState offer news specific to their respective institutions.
Is included in SPP planned features.
Weather forecast: Offered by most SEs and ISPs plus specialist iVillage, and academic MyUW as part of its local news.
Weather news: Some of the sites that offer a weather forecast also provide other weather news.
Stock market prices and stock market news: These are offered by half of SEs, all the ISPs, and specialist Fool.com whose specialism is financial, but not by the rest of the specialists nor by the academic sites.
Sports results: Offered by two each of the SEs and ISPs, none of the specialists and only MyUW of the academic sites.
Sports news: Surprisingly, this feature is offered by three each of the SEs and ISPs; that is one of each offers sports news but not sports results, presumably because 'news' does not have to be as up-to-the-minute as 'results'.
Entertainment news: Offered by most SEs in some form, all ISPs, and specialist iVillage, but not the academic sites.
Travel news: General travel news is offered by three SEs and two ISPs.
Under this heading, MyUW offers local traffic and public transport news.
Job vacancy ads/announcements: This feature was available on a few of the non-academic sites.
What was more common was a 'Job Search' facility, which is described under 'Additional features found' below.
Message of the day: This was only offered as such by MyNetscape, although other headline-type features could be considered to be similar to this on many of the sites.
Alerting Service (to new or updated resources) : Offered only by MyNetscape (but news feeds almost all US-based), HERO, both MyLibrary sites, and is included in SPP planned features.
Each of these services was selected by user profile, and alerts were sent by email or Web site message.
Community Communication Chat (real-time) (Internet Relay Chat) : Three SEs, all the ISPs, specialist iVillage and academic MyUCLA.
Chat Channels: The same three SEs and ISPs, but not by iVillage or MyUCLA.
Instant Messaging: Only two SEs and all ISPs.
Computer Conferencing: Not offered as such by any, but could be construed as just a specific use of 'Chat'.
Newsletter / eZine / Ijournal: One SE, one ISP, three specialists and one Institutional site.
MyUCLA offered access to a newsletter not actually run by the site.
None of these had any peer review process.
Bulletin / Message boards: One SE, two ISPs, three specialists and one each of the MyLibrary and Institutional sites.
Online Discussion Groups / NewsGroups: No SEs, all ISPs, three specialists and one Institutional site.
Find / ask an expert: Offered as such only by iVillage.
Collaborative working: Not offered by any of the sites in this study.
Subject-specific (portal's specialisation) (By definition, this category is more likely to be offered by the specialist sites.)
ePrint archive: Not offered by any site in this study.
FAQs: Specialist site (HERO).
Funding sources: Two specialist sites (LibraryHQ and HERO)   Glossary of subject terms: One specialist site (HERO).
Links to related Web sites: Three specialist sites.
Register of Research: Offered indirectly only by one specialist (HERO).
Software Plugins: No subject-specific software offered.
Subject idiosyncrasies: Only offered by one specialist (Fool.com).
Advertising Adverts general: Carried by all SEs and ISPs, two specialists, but no academic sites.
Adverts Subject-specific (portal's specialisation) : Only applicable to specialist sites, and three of those carried them.
Adverts classified: Only carried by one SE and one specialist.
Conference announcements: Only two specialists (LibraryHQ and HERO), and is included in SPP planned features.
Other (non-leisure) events announcements: Only two specialists (LibraryHQ and HERO), one academic site (MyUW), and is included in SPP planned features.
Entertainment events announcements: Provided specifically only by three SEs, one ISP and MyUW.
Education-based Courses / Course announcements: Indirectly by one ISP (BTopenworld) and one specialist (HERO), and directly by one specialist (Zdnet (UK)) and one Institutional site (MyUW).
Web-based learning resources: Indirectly by one ISP (Freeserve), directly by one specialist (HERO) and one Institutional (MyUW), and is included in SPP planned features.
'Courseware ' course-specific information: Not offered by any sites in this study.
Library account, Library borrowing record, and ILL requests access: Only applicable to academic sites of which three offered access to these, directly or indirectly.
Leisure Horoscopes: Two SEs, all ISPs and one specialist (iVillage).
Online Shopping: Most SEs, all ISPs, and three specialists.
Interviews/chat with celebrities: One ISP and occasionally by specialist iVillage.
Miscellaneous services Book reviews: None.
Online surveys: None.
Budget-management software – corporate, personal: Something similar by specialist Fool.com Organisation chart: Indirectly by MyLibrary @ NCState.
Press release submission: None CV submission: By one SE, two ISPs, two specialists, but no academic.
e-Commerce: Only by Zdnet Online banking / finance: One SE, two ISPs, and one specialist.
Assistance with site use Support and guidance and immediate help / help pages: Almost all of the sites provided this in some form or other.
In many cases the on-screen instructions were sufficiently clear (for example, there was an explanation as to what will happen on clicking a link to count as this feature); sometimes assistance was available via a chat or instant messaging system; and sometimes via a telephone help line.
Also in many cases help pages were immediately available, and are included in SPP planned features.
However, in the cases of one SE (Excite) and one specialist (24 Hour Museum) neither of these features could be found.
Your Librarian (access to a librarian specialising in the users' subject area) : Not really applicable to SEs, ISPs or specialists.
Provided by both MyLibrary sites and indirectly by MyUW.
Site map: Not provided by any of the SEs nor the academic sites.
Only one ISP (Freeserve), and five of the specialist sites (24 Hour Museum being the one that doesn't) do specifically provide a site map.
Feedback option: Offered specifically by almost all sites in this study, and is included in SPP planned features.
Those that did not (LookSmart, Netscape (UK) and Freeserve) had contact details, but did not actually encourage feedback as such.
Additional features found not listed above Job search: Two SEs, three ISPs and three specialist sites, but not by the academic sites, which did not offer job vacancy advertising either.
SMS text messaging: One the SEs, two ISPs and one of the specialists.
This is a relatively new feature and may well be introduced by other sites after this study;  in fact one of the ISPs introduced this feature during the period of this study TV listings: Three of the SEs, all the ISPs, one specialist site (iVillage) and indirectly by MyUW.
Online resource submission (the ability to suggest or submit online resources for inclusion in the portal) : Only specialist 24 Hour Museum.
Games: Three of the SEs, all of the ISPs and two of the specialist sites.
Searching via a map: One of the SEs and two of the specialist sites.
Calendar of events: Two specialist sites and one each of the MyLibrary and institutional sites.
Counselling on-line: An innovative feature offered by MyUCLA.
Conclusions A very few years ago portals were seen as promising to realise the idea of a one-stop shop, where users would opt for the one portal of choice.
However, it was noted during this study that the more features a site offered, the more congested the screen could be.
It is not intended to discuss this further here except to note that some sites dealt with this matter better than others.
However, it is likely that if a portal was to attempt to provide 'all things for all people'  -  and certainly if it attempted to provide the majority of the functionality listed here  -  there might be too much on one screen and too many channels to choose from.
Thus no single portal is likely to serve all purposes.
Different portals will require suitable sets of features as appropriate to the job in hand.
Chris Awre and Alicia Wise remark: 'Portals are seen by many as the way to open doors on the Web to information and knowledge.
Alongside this consensus of sorts, though, the debate on what a portal is and how portals can best be developed continues.'
[28] Clearly the concept of portals is still developing and there remains a lot of uncertainty as to the products which will, in the end, attract and keep the interest of users.
References JISC Circular 5/99: Developing the DNER for Learning and Teaching (and the subsequent Town Meeting) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=circular_5_99 Joint Information Systems Committee (2002) Portals: Frequently Asked Questions http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=ie_portalsfaq Portals in Higher Education, EDUCAUSE Review 35, no.4 July/August 2000, p.30 in Personalized library portals as an organizational culture change agent, Lakos, A, Gray, C, Information Technology in Libraries, 19(4) December 2000, p.169-174.
O'Leary, M, Grading the Library Portals, Online, 24(6) November/December 2000, p.38-44 Subject Portals Project (2002) http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/ Stuckes, J.
(2002) Avoiding portal wars: a JISC view.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/ Miller, P. (2002)The concept of the portal.
Ariadne, 30. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/portal/ Guenther, Kim, Customized data delivery through Web portals, Online, November/December 1999.
Hane, P.J., Dialog announces Info Pro Portal, Information Today, 17 (1), January 2000.
Lakos, A, Gray, C, Personalized library portals as an organizational culture change agent, Information Technology in Libraries, 19(4) December 2000.
Minkel, W, Portal Combat, School Library Journal, May 2000.
Jacso, P, Portals, Vortals and Mere Mortals, Computers in Libraries, 21 (2), February 2001.
What is a Portal, Anyway?, Judith Boettcher interviews Howard Strauss, CREN Tech Talk Series, January 2000. http://www.cren.net/know/techtalk/trans/portals_1.html Bradley, P, Internet portals, Records Management Bulletin, 98 (16), August 2000.
Goodman, A & Kleinschmidt, C, Frequently Asked Questions about Portals, Traffick.com, March 2002. http://www.traffick.com/article.asp?aID=9 Rowley, J, Portal Power, Managing Information, 7 (1), January/February 2000.
Ketchell, D. S., Too Many Channels: Making sense out of portals and personalisation, Information Technology in Libraries, 19(4) December 2000.
Swisher, Bob, UCLA Gives Students a Personalized Contact With School, it-fyi email list, September 1998. http://www.ou.edu/archives/it-fyi/0357.html Stoner, M, Getting Personal, Currents, March 2000. http://www.case.org/currents/2000/March/Stoner.cfm Wetzel, K A, Portal Functionality Provided by ARL Libraries: Results of an ARL Survey, ARL Bimonthly Report 222, June 2002. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/222/portalsurvey.html Parapadakis, G, Collaborative, Corporate and Enterprise Portals, Information Management & Technology, May/June 2001.
Geenstein, D and Healy, L W, Print and Electronic Information: Shedding New Light on Campus Use, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2002.
Deans, K R and von Allmen, A, Poo Poo Portals At Your Peril, AusWeb02, July 2002. http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw02/papers/refereed/deans/paper.html White, M, The ins and outs of portals, Information World Review, March 2001 Clark, J, Subject portals,.
Ariadne, 29. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/clark/ Mathematics Portals Project (2002) Portal development.
http://www.mathgate.bham.ac.uk/mathsportal/Developments.asp Eric Lease Morgan, University Libraries of Notre Dame http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/ Awre, C and Wise, A, Portal progress, CILIP Library and Information Update, 1 (6), September 2002.
Author Details Geoff Butters Senior Research Fellow CERLIM Dept of Information and Communications Manchester Metropolitan University.
Email: g.butters@mmu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/main/staff.html   Article Title: 'What features in a Portal?'
Author:Geoff Butters Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/butters/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Future Is Hybrid: Manchester Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Future Is Hybrid: Manchester Buzz browser video multimedia rtsp url Citation BibTex RIS Jim Strom and others provide streaming video of some of the sessions from 'The Future is Hybrid' day in Manchester held in February 2001.
This page provides links to five multimedia presentations from the Hybrid Library event in Manchester, held on the 20th of February 2001.
Thanks to Jim Strom and associates for making these multimedia materials available to Ariadne.
If you have RealPlayer configured to launch when you click on a realvideo resource (.ram; .ra, .smi, etc), then clicking on the links below should start the player and the presentation (after a shortish delay).
You will need real player (version 7 or 8) to view them.
A free copy of’ the player + browser plug in is available from www.real.com (look for the ‘free’ player rather than the version that costs money).
The video streams are available with the slide presentations, and are synchronised.
The sections are bullet pointed so that you can jump to particular points in the presentation.
Users should note that the streams come in at speeds around 500 to 900 kilobits per second.
Both of these speeds are pretty fast, and the slowest stream is still ten times faster than a 56k modem will be able to handle.
Users with a direct connection to the internet should have no problem with these streams, but other users will not be able to access these streamed presentations.
Both Ariadne and Jim Strom would be interested in feedback about these presentations.
Morning session: Headline Project presentation: http://khalibar.mcc.ac.uk:8080/ramgen/Hybrid/Headline/Headline.smi; Hylife Project presentation: http://khalibar.mcc.ac.uk:8080/ramgen/Hybrid/HyLife/HyLife.smi ; Question and Answer session: http://khalibar.mcc.ac.uk:8080/ramgen/Hybrid/Q&A/Q&A1.smi.
Afternoon session: Stephen Pinfield’s presentation on Hybrid Libraries and the DNER: http://khalibar.mcc.ac.uk:8080/ramgen/Hybrid/DNER/Pinfield.smi; Second Question and Answer session: http://khalibar.mcc.ac.uk:8080/ramgen/Hybrid/Q&A/Q&A2.smi.
Alternatively, if you have problems with this method, you can view the clips directly from the Real Video player by missing out “:8080/ramgen” and changing “http” to “rtsp” in each line, and entering (for example): “rtsp://khalibar.mcc.ac.uk/Hybrid/DNER/Pinfield.smi” in the location window.
Materials put together by: Jim Strom Project Director: Advanced Telematics Centre University of Manchester jim.strom@man.ac.uk Article Title: “The Future is Hybrid (Manchester event, February 2001): Multimedia Presentations” Author: Ariadne and Jim Strom Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/hl-multimedia/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Information Skills and the DNER: The INHALE Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Information Skills and the DNER: The INHALE Project Buzz java javascript html database infrastructure metadata browser video cataloguing windows perl flash ejournal quicktime vle interoperability webct url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Margaret Weaver describes the work of the Information for Nursing and Health in a Learning Environment (INHALE) Project team.
The Information for Nursing and Health in a Learning Environment (INHALE) Project [1] at the University of Huddersfield is one of forty-four projects supported nationally by the JISC as part of the DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) learning and teaching development programme [2].
INHALE is creating portable, interactive learning materials for nursing and health students for use within a virtual learning environment such as Blackboard ©.
The two year project, which commenced in September 2000, is using the ubiquity of the web to produce a series of units, each of which will help users to acquire the necessary skills to find and use quality information sources.
The first phase of the project is concerned with identifying relevant subject modules and academics with whom to work, specifying and developing the interface, and examining the functionality of the materials.
An underlying principle which has emerged in the early stages of the project is that the materials will use live (rather than screengrabbed) DNER content such as BIOME and the Virtual Training Suite as well as locally available databases such as Cinahl.
As new DNER services become available the materials will also incorporate these, ensuring currency and a cycle of continuity.
Phase two of the project will concentrate on transferring the INHALE methodology and system architecture to other subject areas such as business.
Evaluation is a key project deliverable and two partner institutions Leeds Metropolitan University and Manchester Metropolitan University are working with Huddersfield on this aspect of the project.
Huddersfield University has forged links with the regional network of Post Graduate Medical Education libraries, and colleagues in the NHS will also have the opportunity to review the materials from a practitioner viewpoint.
This multi-perspective view will be of interest to CERLIM (Centre for Research in Library and Information Management) [3], who are evaluating projects at programme level An essential requirement is that project learning is shared with the higher/further education community so that institutions wishing to adapt and use the materials will have the necessary support.
Templates and proformas will therefore be provided with the materials and the INHALE exit strategy includes the creation of a learning objects database containing disaggregated INHALE materials, freely available for use elsewhere in the FE/HE sector.
User testing will include the use of the INHALE units from within the Blackboard © and WebCT © learning environments and issues of interoperability and portability will be addressed and documented.
The DNER projects are clustered so that similar project focuses can work together to solve problems or celebrate success.
INHALE is part of the Infrastructure and Virtual Learning Environment cluster.
The other projects in the cluster are: ANGEL (Authenticated Networked Guided Environment for Learning).
Led by London School of Economics [4].
ICONEX (Interactive Content Exchange).
Led by the University of Hull [5].
VDML (Virtual Departments for Minority Languages).
Led by University College London [6].
The team has been working closely with the JISC Programme Officer, Dr. Caroline Ingram, to clarify certain elements of the project such as the amount of relevant, free DNER resources which are currently available and which can be used by INHALE.
It is acknowledged for example, that DNER content is likely to increase over the timeline of the project and therefore new resources will be incorporated as they become available.
Many of these are being developed within the same programme for example NMAP (Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Gateway) [7].
As the materials are transferred to other subject areas this will also widen the information content covered by INHALE.
Because students should be able to create realistic learning landscapes, the materials will also integrate key local electronic material (such as the Catalogue and locally subscribed databases and e-journal deals).
It is worth noting however, that the more localised the information content is, the less transferable the materials become.
INHALE is examining ways to deal with these limitations.
The project team is currently assembling impact factors which will measure the effect of the materials on users including quantitative and qualitative mechanisms.
Indicators such as the take-up and use of DNER elements, the skill level of students and academics, and the functionality of the INHALE interface will be tested using questionnaires, observation logs and focus groups.
Evaluation processes are linked to iterative lifecycle development of the materials.
The project evaluation plan [8] sets out in detail how this will operate.
So far testing has begun on five units of materials in use by two cohorts of students in the School of Human and Health Sciences at Huddersfield.
Each unit concentrates on a different theme in the information retrieval cycle as illustrated below; DNER elements which have been used so far are shown in parentheses: Developing your internet skills (The Online Netskills Interactive Course TONIC) [9] Search strategy Keywords (BUBL) [10] Web Directories and search engines (National Information Services and Systems NISS) [11] Subject Gateways (BIOME/OMNI) [12] Evaluation (Resource Discovery Network (RDN) Virtual Training Suite) [13] The first trial of the materials has taken place via the Blackboard Learning environment.
This was facilitated by a link to the INHALE server which was a desirable maintenance feature and was a robust means of testing the first prototype interfaces.
So although the first phase of testing did not perhaps exploit the full functionality of the virtual learning environment (VLE), this is an aim for the next iteration.
The use of WebCT © at partner institutions will also clarify this aspect.
Other constraints on the INHALE interface design have been the very limited screen area available for users as a result of the current layout of the Blackboard interface.
To maximise the display we therefore launched the materials in a new window using JavaScript.
A further challenge has been documented during the trial – that of working with live web sites.
Students with higher level searching skills tend to do their own searches on the web sources rather than “sticking” to the INHALE materials.
As the source is live this action is impossible to determine; from a practical point of view the only way that this could be achieved would be for html pages with simulations to be used instead.
The project is committed to the use of live web sites in the INHALE materials because the interactivity afforded is so much greater.
This innovation will therefore ultimately be of more benefit to the community.
Progress on technical aspects of the project have included the setting up and securing of the INHALE server (within the University firewall) including cgi capability and the creation of Perl cgi scripts which will generate the HTML interface.
The INHALE materials make use of a frameset to contain both the instructions and the resource to which the instructions refer.
This ensures that the student has access to the live information resource and the necessary guidance without having to move between windows.
During this first phase we have concentrated on iterative interface design rather than tight integration with the functionality of the learning environment.
To maximise interoperability, design of the INHALE materials has been dependent on two assumptions.
Firstly that the user will have access to a web browser that supports frames, dynamic HTML and Java, and secondly that that the user will not have access to third party plug-ins such as Flash or QuickTime.
Adoption of these technologies is desirable and may be possible in the future depending on the outcome of further investigation.
It is planned that the INHALE materials will be accessible from a central DNER server.
There are several reasons why this seems to be the most appropriate approach to take for the location of the resource.
Firstly, it is highly desirable from a maintenance point of view.
Secondly, since it is intended that the materials will be extensible by users, the single central location approach means that we will not end up with several divergent versions of the INHALE resource at different institutions.
The resource will have two major parts.
The first is a set of generic stand-alone INHALE materials available across the Internet which can be linked to (or launched from) the user’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
These materials will also provide value for users who do not have access to a VLE Secondly, there will be a central database of learning objects which are available for download so that users can create custom content within (and using the features of) their own VLE.
As mentioned above, one of the aims of the INHALE project is that the materials should be easily extensible.
In order to achieve this, it is intended that the materials will be based around a standard template for content in order to allow users to update and add to the INHALE materials.
In order to make this easy for even the relatively inexperienced computer user, the template will be in the form of a set of perl scripts which generate INHALE-style course materials based on user input (via a simple web-based interface).
The INHALE resource will also allow addition to and extension of the database of learning objects that will be available for use in materials presented by the user’s VLE.
Of course, this approach requires a rigorous approach to the security and integrity of the INHALE materials and server, and also to making sure that appropriate metadata is supplied when content is added to the INHALE resource.
Dublin Core [14] is the metadata specification which we are considering for the INHALE resource, perhaps with minor extensions to allow closer-focussed searching of the INHALE database.
The next phase of development includes the deeper embedding of the materials into the Blackboard © and WebCT © learning environments and also building in more interactivity based on user feedback.
The INHALE content will be also be extended to include the use of other rich media such as video clips, audio and images.
Full details of the project can be found on the project web site or by contacting the Project Director.
References INHALE Project (Information for Nursing and Health in a Learning Environment).
University of Huddersfield at http://inhale.hud.ac.uk/ JISC (1999) DNER Programme JISC Circular 5/99 Developing the DNER for Learning and Teaching 5 November 1999 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/c05_99.html INHALE Project, University of Huddersfield at http://inhale.hud.ac.uk/ CERLIM – Centre for Research in Library and Information Management: EDNER : Formative Evaluation of the DNER at http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/projects/edner.htm ANGEL (Authenticated Networked Guided Environment for Learning).
Led by London School of Economics at http://www.angel.ac.uk/ ICONEX (Interactive Content Exchange).
Led by the University of Hull.
VDML (Virtual Departments for Minority Languages).
Led by University College London at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/epd/herdu/vdml/ NMAP Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Gateway, Resource Discovery Network at http://nmap.ac.uk/ INHALE Project, University of Huddersfield.
Evaluation Plan, 2001 at http://inhale.hud.ac.uk/eval/ TONIC, Netskills, University of Newcastle at http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ BUBL Information Service, Centre for Digital Library Research, Strathclyde University, at http://www.bubl.ac.uk/ NISS (National Information Services and Systems) at http://www.niss.ac.uk/ BIOME/OMNI, Resource Discovery Network, University of Nottingham at http://biome.ac.uk/ RDN Virtual Training Suite, Resource Discovery Network at http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ Dublin Core Metadata Initiative at http://dublincore.org/ Author Details Margaret Weaver INHALE Project Director University of Huddersfield email: m.weaver@hud.ac.uk web site: http://inhale.hud.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Information Skills and the DNER the INHALE Project" Author: Margaret Weaver Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/inhale/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Good, the Bad and the Useless Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Good, the Bad and the Useless Buzz data software java database browser copyright passwords copac licence cd-rom url Citation BibTex RIS Judith Edwards evaluates Internet resources.
The latest estimate of the number of Web sites worldwide is almost 2.25 million [1].
It is part of the job of many of us librarians or information managers to select what our users will find useful from this mass of information.
How do we decide whether or not to add details of an Internet site to our resource guide or Web page?
What criteria should we use when recommending Internet resources to an individual or class?
How can we judge the quality or appropriateness of a resource for a particular query or user?
Although many of the traditional principles of collection development of printed materials will still apply to online resources, other factors come into play when considering the electronic medium.
This article is a compilation of the best advice and practice I’ve found “out there” on the Internet itself, and refers mainly to Web pages.
There are 3 main aspects of the process of evaluation access, quality, and ease of use.
I’ve put these in order of importance before we can evaluate anything, we must be able to get access to the resource.
Quality comes before ease of use users may be prepared to struggle with a less-than-perfect interface if the content is really worthwhile.
Access How reliable and stable is the site?
Downtime should be infrequent, short in duration and announced in advance.
COPAC [2] and EDINA [3], for example, are very good about announcing disruptions (anticipated or unexpected) on various e-mail lists.
How long do pages take to download, at different times of day?
Has the URL changed in the past?
If so, was there a link to the new page?
Is it likely to change again?
What hardware and software specification is your intended audience likely to be using?
Memory, speed and support for colours will probably be at a low level on, for example, public PCs for student use, which are also unlikely to have the latest versions of Web browsers.
Is the site usable by any browser?
Does it use Java, proprietary extensions, frames or tables?
Beware of sites which say “Best viewed with …”.
(One shining exception here is the Carnegie Mellon Online Books Page [4], which says “Best viewed with any browser”.)
Are any special plugins or helper applications required?
What does the site look like using Lynx, or if you use your browser with the images turned off?
This is important for users with a visual impairment, but also for those of us who speed up access by not downloading images.
Are colour-blind users likely to be disadvantaged by an injudicious use of forced text and link colours?
If you wish to recommend a site to which access is limited by a licence, such as an electronic journal, check that the licence includes all your intended users.
If a password is required, consider how you will distribute it to users.
If access is limited to your geographical site (by IP address), make sure that users are aware of this.
Quality The question of quality of an Internet resource can be divided into the two main issues of authority (who is responsible for the site?)
and content (the quality of the material itself).
Authority The responsibility for an Internet resource is usually apparent from its main entry point, and often from page headers.
If not, you can often establish where it comes from by analysing the URL.
(The Netskills TONIC course [5] explains how to do this).
What’s the reputation of the organisation?
What are the credentials of a personal author?
You may need to consult colleagues with relevant subject knowledge, or perhaps find out what other materials the author has written.
One recommendation may be that the site has been selected by and linked from other responsible sites but beware of just copying other people’s list of resources!
Be careful of what you find via search engines remember that they are mindless robots which cannot distinguish the good from the bad.
Is the material available in other forms, such as CD-ROM or print?
If so, does the Internet resource offer the same material, or more, or less?
Is the material archived or indexed by other responsible sources?
This will become increasingly important with, for example, new electronic-only journals.
The site should have the confidence to offer a feedback facility such as a form, preferably with e-mail and postal addresses as well.
If copyright is an issue for the particular resource, the site should include the name of the copyright holder.
Content Your intended customers (such as readers of a Web page or students attending a class) may have certain expectations of the scholarly nature of the material which you are recommending.
Is it peer-reviewed, or is there some other form of quality control?
Users will expect that a scholarly journal article includes citations, and perhaps a bibliography.
Is the information accurate, and are sources for factual information listed?
The site must be free from grammar and spelling errors, which are an indication of sloppiness which may be reflected elsewhere in the site.
If tabular or graphical data is included, it should be clearly labelled and easy to read.
Is the content of the resource objective?
The information may be provided as a public service, in which case it is less likely to be biased than that from a commercial site (but not necessarily!).
If there is advertising (which may help to fund the resource), it should be clearly differentiated from the information itself.
Is the information current?
Does a Web site give the date that pages were created, and/or that of the last update?
Online versions of books are often the out-of-copyright old editions, which may not matter as long as you are aware of this.
Does the site compare well with other sites on the same subject, or is it something unique?
The information must be relevant to your users, and at the appropriate level for them.
Most Web sites will include links to other Internet resources do these links work?
It is helpful to users if the links are annotated or described in some way.
Ease of use Being able to navigate a Web site easily is of prime importance.
Is there a site map or table of contents, and an easy-to-use Search facility?
Is it easy to navigate the entire site?
Every page should have a link back to the beginning of its section and/or to the Home page.
Do essential instructions appear before links and interactive portions?
For interactive sites, such as databases and search engines, it is vital that ‘Help’ on how to use the system is readily available.
If you don’t find the site easy to use, it’s unlikely that your users will!
Is the resource intuitive to use, and does it have a ‘friendly’ feel?
Users are likely to visit a site again only if they enjoy using it.
Good design of Web pages will assist their use, and may make the difference between recommending a resource and rejecting it.
What you think of the design is to some extent down to personal preference, but there are some general features to bear in mind.
Is the page concise, or do you have to scroll up and down a lot or, even worse, from side to side?
Is the structure clear?
It’s rare to find a Web site without any images do they add anything to the information or ease of use?
If the site uses Java, frames or plugins, are they essential and do they make the site easier to use?
Is the site usable with a text browser?
Are the colours and background easy on the eye, or do they make the text harder to read?
Is the “look and feel” that of an academic resource, or does it seem too commercial?
The list of evaluation criteria above may seem very long, but with experience of looking at Web pages, many decisions become almost instinctive.
Subject knowledge is, as with the selection of any other type of material, a great help.
More institutions are developing collection development policies for electronic materials, which further help the process of evaluating and selecting resources to offer your customers.
References 1.
Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v3.3 <URL: http://www.isoc.org/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html > 2.
COPAC (Consortium of University Libraries) <URL: http://copac.ac.uk/copac/> 3.
EDINA (Edinburgh Data and Information Access) <URL: http://edina.ed.ac.uk/> 4.
Carnegie Mellon University Online Books Page <URL: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html> 5.
TONIC (The Online Netskills Interactive Course) <URL: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/TONIC/> (Go to The Global Internet: Domain names section).
Bibliography 1.
Collection development policies for electronic materials <URL: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/collections/policy.html> <URL: http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~rrichard/RUSA/policies.html> (several examples) <URL: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/criteria.html> (Scout Report Selection Criteria) <URL: http://www.netfirst.ac.uk/mission.html> 2.
Bibliographies on evaluating Internet resources <URL: http://refserver.lib.vt.edu/libinst/critTHINK.HTM> <URL: http://www.iat.unc.edu/guides/irg-49.html> (includes evaluation checklist) <URL: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/finding/finding_quality.html> <URL: http://info.wlu.ca/~wwwlib/libguides/internet/eval.html> 3.
Guides to evaluating Internet resources <URL: http://www.science.widener.edu/~withers/webeval.htm> <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/desire/quality/> (for eLib subject gateway projects) <URL: http://www.kovacs.com/evaluating.html> <URL: http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/instruct/critical.htm> <URL: http://lme.mankato.msus.edu/class/629/cred.html> <URL: http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/webeval.html > <URL: http://www.albany.edu/library/internet/evaluate.html> Author details Judith Edwards Sub-Librarian, Reader Services University College London URL: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Library/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Building on Shifting Sands: Information Age Organisations Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Building on Shifting Sands: Information Age Organisations Buzz archives copyright aggregation research Citation BibTex RIS Clive Field draws on his experience at the University of Birmingham to explore the issue of creating a flexible organisation.
This article does not tackle its subject from the theoretical perspectives and careful evaluation of the merits and demerits of different organisational models, such as one might find in a textbook on management.
Rather does it seek to introduce some of the basic issues and concepts by drawing on the experience of organisational change at the University of Birmingham, where a fully converged Information Services has been in operation since October 1995, with an annual turnover of £12 million and 270 fte staff.
Some earlier accounts of that process may be found in: “Implementing convergence at the University of Birmingham”, SCONUL Newsletter, No.
9, Winter 1955, pp36-37; “Converging academic information services; the Birmingham experience”, Open Access, Vol 40, No1 March 1997, pp1-2; and “Convergence in academic support services”, BLRIC Report No.
54, 1997, pp50-62.
Imperatives for Flexibility It is hard to imagine that higher education in the UK has experienced a quinquennium of such far-reaching change, challenge, opportunity and instability, with the promise of yet more to come, as the years 1993-98.
The Follett, Dearing and other governmental and sectoral reports have clearly set out the financial and structural pressures facing higher education in the UK, identified the need for organisational, cultural and pedagogic change in the sector in the light of emerging technological and market opportunities, and identified the ways in which library and information services should underpin that change.
As a result, the sector is now subject to a degree of central admonishment, guidance and audit which would have been hard to imagine a few years ago and which is much greater than in many comparable first world countries.
In addition to this national context, individual higher education institutions have often redefined their missions and modernised their academic and financial managements along lines that have profoundly affected the planning and delivery of library and information services.
This has been notably so at Birmingham which, since the late 1980s, has been at the forefront of the sector in its quest to simplify institutional decision making and optimise financial and academic outturns.
Developments include a complex process of delayering, devolved budgeting/management, internal accountability/quality assurance, and exploration of new teaching and research markets.
The end result has been a long list of imperatives for change which would find echoes in much of the sector.
The list includes: a substantial growth in taught and research student numbers but with declining units of resource, resulting in built-in and on-going targets for efficiency savings; a diversification of the student body with more part-time, more distance-learning, more overseas, more mature, more fee-paying and more self-financing students; a growing emphasis on resource-based/independent learning and on the acquisition of study, IT and other generic skills, necessitating enhanced learner support; a customer base more knowledgeable about its needs and rights, and more demanding, with a growing propensity to challenge (in law on occasion) those who fail to provide it with educational and support services; the emergence of pseudo-internal markets, consequent upon devolved budgeting models, with greater pressure on information providers to demonstrate accountability/value for money; more searching processes of audit, both internal and external, in respect of assuring and enhancing the quality of teaching and research and in ensuring business continuity; the increased functional overlap between existing information providers through growing dependence on IT and more integrated planning of learning resources, eroding traditional service boundaries and necessitating hybrid managers and multi-skilled staff, with consequent changes in work practices; the proliferation in the volume, range and cost of information resources disproportionate to budgetary increases, resulting in declining purchasing power, especially when taking into account the complexities of copyright clearance, the costs of digitising and archiving existing paper-based information, and now the need to fund incrementally the cost of remote network access; the emergence of regional and national agendas for collaboration, including cross-sectoral and cross-domain, supported by a variety of sectoral funding programmes such as eLib, the Non-Formula Funding Programme and the LAN/MAN Initiative, and Government initiatives like the National Grid for Learning and the University for Industry, but without any lessening of the competitive market situation between individual institutions.
This concentration of pressures has been of such a range and magnitude as to be generally impossible to contain within traditional structures for libraries and computing, at least as they have applied in the old university sector.
It therefore typically requires an organisational response which is more than just purely iterative and which, since the underlying local and national situation is so dynamic, builds in from the outset a flexibility which can accommodate future changes.
Building a flexible organisation Any single institution’s scope for redirecting library and information services may be constrained by factors outside the management of those services.
Such factors could include the inability (or unwillingness) of institutional senior management to fund change; the ability of the cautious and disaffected to inhibit change and limit the autonomy of service managers to implement it by exploiting over-bureaucratic institutional decision-making processes; and patterns of building distribution which are historic and therefore usually fragmented, illogical and inherently inefficient.
It is suggested that some fundamental prerequisites for the successful implementation of change, especially sustainable change, will always apply: reliable and up-to-date intelligence about the client base to be served, the programmes to be supported and the intended modes of delivery of those programmes.
This presupposes: excellent two-way reporting and feedback links with individuals and agencies responsible for institutional planning and with representatives of the user population; sensible and flexible deployment of all the resources available to service providers, in particular financial, spatial and human resources.
With regard to financial resources, the maximum possible amount of virement authority for service providers is desirable, subject to appropriate checks and balances on them, the agreement of a rolling service plan, and suitable audit trails.
This applies, for example, to the balance between capital and recurrent expenditure, between staff and non-staff expenditure, between expenditure on libraries and other services, and between expenditure on different information formats.
In an ideal world, service providers should have the ability to manage the totality of the direct and indirect costs for their service, within a prescribed budget, and to vire between the different budgetary heads.
At Birmingham substantial progress has been made towards realising this ideal, with a single budgetary process now applying to most centrally-provided learning resources, and with all major income and expenditure now managed through Information Services.
The major current exception is heating costs, but those will come in time.
So there is considerable but incomplete, especially in terms of capital, flexibility in the way in which we allocate financial resources.
For instance, in respect of information sources, we have not for some years been constrained by historic subdivisions between formats.
We have a unified information fund which subsumes all formats and holdings/access mechanisms.
Similarly, we can freely manage our staff resources without reference to any notion of historic establishments, creating or deleting posts (including changing the balance between professional and support posts) within budget according to our operational requirements.
So far as spatial resources go, the achievement of the greatest possible amount of aggregation of services is advantageous, based around as much open-plan (generally new) building as can be afforded, in order to keep the fullest number of options open for the future.
The distributed model of learning resource space, which is a rather flattering way of describing the unplanned way in which the estates of most long-established universities have developed, is generally inefficient in the use of resources (especially staff) and results in inconsistent and lower than necessary levels of service provision between sites.
It also fails to exploit the synergies between different providers by limiting the potential to shift from one service to another in response to changing technologies and learning styles.
The Birmingham situation, with 13 centrally-managed university libraries, 75 student computer rooms, 70 lecture theatres, and hundreds of other teaching and seminar rooms scattered the length and breadth of a large campus, is a managerial nightmare and wholly inconsistent with a strategic approach based upon integrating the planning and delivery of learning resources and upon the seeking of efficiency savings.
Institutional management at Birmingham is now committed in principle to moving, doubtless over a very long time span, towards a model based upon five principal learning resource centres where library, computing and teaching accommodation will be incrementally co-located, to facilitate cost-effective changes of function.
We are currently working on the design of a west campus learning resource centre, the first phase of which is due to open in 2000.
With our partners in Westhill College of Higher Education, with whom we have recently entered into a strategic alliance, we are determining how its existing Orchard Learning Resources Centre, which also serves the Selly Oak Colleges as a whole, may best be utilised to fulfil the needs of both institutions.
The efficient and creative use of human resources is arguably the most critical of the three principal forms of resource management.
Creating flexibility in a large-scale, and, in terms of the underlying academic culture, still relatively conservative environment, is problematic.
The careful way in which we have planned and implemented a series of interlocking reforms of human resource processes and structures is fundamental to what we and external commentators judge to be Birmingham’s relative success in implementing a root and branch convergence.
In particular, we feel we owe much to our implementation of a management model which consciously eroded traditional boundaries between library, computing, media and other services and brought together in five divisions (collection management, information and computing systems, learning and research support, planning and administration, and public services) the management of like functions, regardless of location, subject or past service providor.
The model encouraged non-hierarchical approaches based upon the creation of teams of individuals from a variety of information backgrounds, working as necessary, on a project basis, with teams in the same or other divisions.
This philosophy has been underpinned by a series of actions to improve ownership of the service by all staff working within it.
These include: balancing consensual and directive leadership; systematic attempts to develop team leaders as a middle management cadre; establishing universal channels for internal communication and consultation; establishing a universal staff training and development policy which addresses the requirement for both specialist and transferable skills; establishing universal appraisal and development review schemes; establishing and publicising criteria for promotion and annual review; establishing and publicising through a staff manual, service-wide procedures; ensuring that all posts have a job and person specification, individual or generic and are correctly graded according to university or local grade criteria; introducing quality enhancement circles; maintaining a dialogue with representatives of the three principal trade unions (AUT,Unison, MSF); carrot and stick measures designed to tackle the small minority of disaffected staff.
The inherent flexibility of this overall approach has already been proved by Birmingham’s ability to integrate new service functions, including the management of teaching space and language laboratories, without radical revision of the underlying structure.
The litmus test of its long-term sustainability will doubtless be our ability to shift service delivery on campus to a more aggregated learning resource centre model, and to apply structures primarily designed for a single-campus institution to one whose learning and teaching mission will increasingly be discharged at other locations in the regions, of which Westhill College is but one example.
Conclusion This article outlines some of the imperatives for change and flexibility in the organisation of library and information services within UK higher education.
It identifies some of the key attributes of flexibility, not least adaptable approaches to resource management.
In describing how one university has reorganised its services to respond to current needs and prepare for ready modification in the face of future changes in technology, markets and politics it does not claim that the Birmingham experience is a blueprint for other institutions to follow.
However, it is believed that the process which Birmingham has undergone in the past few years has identified most of the principal structural and cultural issues involved in managing change and demonstrated how they can be tackled in a relatively radical way whilst enhancing and not compromising the quantity and quality of service to end-users.
Author Details Dr. Clive Field Librarian and Director of Information Services University of Birmingham Email: c.d.field@bham.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OMNI Corner: Information or Hysteria, "Talking sensibly" in the Biomedical Field Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OMNI Corner: Information or Hysteria, "Talking sensibly" in the Biomedical Field Buzz data software java database archives metadata cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir outlines current areas of concern in: Information or Hysteria?
"Talking sensibly" in the biomedical field.
Defining the subjects Here at OMNI, our subject gateway essentially covers all of the health studies subjects in scope (basically medicine and health), and various biomedical aspects of the life sciences, such as molecular biology research, clinical psychology and sports medicines.
Of late, it has struck us that most of the national controversies that tend to fill the tabloids (and other newspapers) are sprung directly from these subject areas.
In this section, we outline six examples most applicable to the UK; for countries such as the US, there would be a similar array of issues, including abortion as an issue of high public profile.
1.
Dolly the sheep and cloning Dolly entered the media spotlight in a blaze of glory a few years ago, when the Roslin Institute [roslin] announced the cloning of a sheep.
Since then, speculation has increased on the ethical use of cloning, focusing especially on the ability to clone people.
This issue covers both the life and health sciences, as well as impinging on agricultural areas of concern.
2.
BSE BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) [bse] is the major crisis to hit the animal farming industry in the UK in the last twenty years.
The condition is found in cattle, and has been linked to the food products that they ingest.
However, BSE is also heavily linked to the human condition of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome, therefore again making the wider issue of BSE something that straddles several areas within the health, medical and life sciences.
3.
Genetically modified food At the time of writing, the major public debate concerns the use of genetically modified ingredients, such as soya, in foods.
This “debate” quickly spawned off a myriad of smaller debates, including: labelling of food ethics of inclusion of genetically modified ingredients effects on the environment of growing GM foods third world issues relating to GM foods medical implications from consuming GM foods testing and safety procedures for GM foods and ingredients As is evident, the wider issue of GM foods covers many areas of the life and health sciences, as well as environmental and political issues [bio].
4.
Use of cannabis for medicinal purposes The issues regarding cannabis include whether it should be legally administered in cases where it assists someone with a serious medical condition, such as multiple schlerosis.
There are periodic attempts to make use of cannabis legal in this way; thus, the issue is one that is frequently in the news [welsh].
This subject covers both the health and medical sciences, as well as biological research (why makes cannabis good?
), and political and legal issues.
5.
Euthanasia Euthanasia is an issue which covers both the health studies areas, and the area of law.
As well as being a controversial area, with an accompanying array of lobbying groups and emotive web sites, the law and common practise (not always the same) differ from one country to another.
6.
Alternative/allied and complementary medicine The issues surrounding alternative and allied medical practises are ones which seem to inspire more heated debate within medical circles than any other.
At a recent OMNI seminar, a lively debate enraged between a speaker, who was justifying the need for a gateway to quality allied and complementary health resources, and one of the delegates, a GP with experience of dealing with patients who had been given incorrect alternative medical advice.
The tabloid and newspaper treatment of this area often verges towards the “hippy, josh stick and crystal magic” stereotype, wheras allied and complementary medicines cover a much wider field than most people think; herbalism, homeopathy, reflexology, chiropractise, and so forth.
There is a growing movement of people, and increasing medical support and recognition, for many of the areas within this field [nih].
However, due to its nature, it is liable to be a controversial area for many years to come.
Defining the issues Examination of the subject areas above draws out two particular issues: cross-subjectional interest.
If a subject is controversial, for whatever reason, then it tends to cover a number of subject areas.
For example, most of the subjects mentioned above have some elements of law and politics involved, as well as health and medical interests information quality.
All of the subjects mentioned above are emotive to certain groups of people, who also have their own interests and agendas.
This usually results in a lessening of reasonable debate, with a consequential drop in accuracy of data and information put into the public domain We will examine these two areas more closely, in the context of resource discovery systems.
Cross subjectional interest As we can see from the examples above, some topics and issues, especially those of high public interest, can cross several subject areas.
With regard to subject-based internet resource discovery systems, this raises several issues.
The primary issue is whether a resource that is cross-subjectional should be catalogued in just one subject based system e.g.
biomedical, or several e.g.
biomedical and law.
The experiences of the subject gateways to date indicate that in most cases, the preferred method is for the resource, if it passes all of the evaluation and relevance criteria, to be catalogued in both gateways.
This means that the resource description can be targeted at the core audience for that gateway.
For example, a document on the legal implications of smoking may be described from a legal perspective for entry into a legal resource discovery system, while it could be described from a medical perspective for entry into a medical resource discovery system.
This leaves us with the problem of cross searching.
To date, some limited work on cross searching across multiple gateways has been carried out, by projects such as ROADS [roads].
A demonstrator, allowing people to search across a range of subject-based gateways, with the results subsequently integrated into one uniform results listing, was produced.
However, we are now entering the age of the Resource Discovery Network, and Hubs.
The RDN is a venture which will capitalise and build on the experiences and successes of the established subject gateways, such as EEVL, OMNI and SOSIG [rdn].
It will seek to create eight faculty level hubs, covering broad areas such as medical and biological sciences, the social sciences, the arts and industries, and so forth.
Each hub will probably consist of a number of collections (gateways) of resource descriptions, distributed or centralised in some manner according to the nuances of the particular hub.
This is where things get interesting.
Someone is interested in the legal implications of smoking and lung cancer.
Should they search the hub containing law, or the one containing biomedical resources?
Or maybe, cross search both hubs and look at all of the results?
Or even better, just cross search those bits of the two (or in some cases, more) of the hubs that are of relevance to the query?
Alternately, should they just search across all of the gateways/description collections in all of the hubs in one go (high recall, low precision)?
For the user to be offered the best search will mean one or more of the following: the user being able to cope in selecting the correct search mechanism and permutation amongst the options available, and devising a search query appropriate to that mechanism.
There was an interesting mini-debate on the issues of user capability on lis-elib in January 1998 [elib] storing some kind of “profile” of the user, so that the permutations of resource databases offered to them are optimised, and reducing the chances of the user making an incorrect selection of database.
some combination of both approaches limiting the search option combinations available It will be interesting to see how the Resource Discovery Network, and other collections of gateways that are starting to band together in consortia arrangements, tackle the issue of cross subjectional interest.
Information quality Unless you have strictly restricted your media and news coverage to some of the more cerebral outlets over the last few months, you cannot have failed to notice the hysteria over genetically modified foods.
The question that arises is: what is newsworthy, and what is information?
One persons viewpoint may not be factually accurate, but does that mean that if they create a resource around that viewpoint, then should not be excluded from, or catalogued in, a “quality resources only” gateway?
Two parallel examples: 1) an establised political party may have odd views, that are patently unrealistic and ulterior, on some issues.
For example, they may be funded by the nuclear industry, and believe that “if you ignore nuclear pollution, then it goes away over time and is harmless”.
However, most resource discovery systems that covered politics would still probably catalogue the party, geographic relevance and content willing, despite its partisan views.
2) a medical company has a web site, where it promotes its drugs as being “the only solution”.
Again, a partisan view, and many biomedical resource discovery systems of repute would avoid the resource.
Therefore; do we need different evaluation criteria for different subject areas, possibly even within the biomedical arena itself?
Should we treat commercial company products that have been rigorously tested in the same way as we treat some alternative health products, which are less dangerous, but less tested in a scientific manner?
Thankfully, we don’t have to make up these decisions as we go along.
Criteria has been developed via which people can assess Internet-based resources, for inclusion into resource discovery systems.
We outline some places where you can find such criteria, or discussions about criteria.
AGEC Advisory Group for Evaluation Criteria The OMNI advisory group on evaluation criteria helped to develop the core evaluation criteria via which the OMNI service operates.
The group has also produced a number of papers and presentations on the issues surrounding resource evaluation and quality.
The OMNI service hosts a section on which the evaluation criteria, and several papers, are reproduced [agec].
Comparison of Health Information Megasites This was a substantial comparison and study of a large range of biomedical resource discovery systems, carried out by a consortium of three US university libraries, in May 1998.
The project looked at a large range of criteria pertaining to resource discovery, with issues of quality being prominent within those criteria.
One of the products of the project was a listing of “Print and Internet Resources on Web Design and Internet Resource Evaluation” [megasites]; this contains references, and links, to many articles and papers of interest.
DESIRE The DESIRE project, coordinated by the Institute for Learning and Research Technology in Bristol, UK, has been instrumental in building software tools, reports and guidelines pertaining to resource discovery, especially at a pan-European level.
The DESIRE Web site contains reports regarding research into quality and selection criteria issues, as applied to resource discovery [desire].
(Re)developing criteria Looking back at archives and printouts of resources that were developed a few years ago reveals some interesting characteristics of biomedical resources on the Web: * resources were generally smaller in size, consisting often of one page.
With such resources, people would catalogue or index just the page simple.
Nowadays, with resources often being huge and spread across several servers, we have the issue of whether it is best to catalogue the whole resource, just one part, various sections, and so forth * resources were simpler; no frames, java, embedded movies and so forth.
Also, advanced trickery, such as subtle redirection of the users, or the use of misleading metadata, was much rarer * companies were slow to use the Internet, and most of the information in the first wave of web sites was produced by keen technically minded academics.
Gradually, more formal academic and research material became available over the Web in larger quantities.
In the current wave, commercially funded resources make up an increasingly large proportion of new sites; these require closer vetting than academic and research sites, in terms of impartiality and quality.
What these and other characteristics indicate is that there is a strong argument for the constant review and development of evaluation criteria as applied to resource discovery systems.
This especially true in the biomedical field, where controversies such as those mentioned at the start of this article lead to people trying more complex ways of getting their viewpoint across over the Internet.
As Internet-based technologies become more complex, and people and organisations use these technologies in more advanced ways (sometime not ethically), so the criteria must be frequently revised, to keep up with these developments, if the gateways are to retain their status as subject based quality filters.
References [agec] OMNI Advisory Group on Evaluation Criteria http://omni.ac.uk/agec/ [bio] Biotechnology in our food chain http://www.jic.bbsrc.ac.uk/exhibitions/bio-future/index.htm [bse] BSE enquiry home page http://www.bse.org.uk/ [desire] DESIRE http://www.desire.org/results/discovery/ elib ebate on internet searching http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1998-01/0079.html [megasites] Print and Internet Resources on … Internet Resource Evaluation http://henry.ugl.lib.umich.edu/megasite/bibl.html [nih] National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine http://altmed.od.him.gov/nccam/ [omni] OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information http://omni.ac.uk/ [rdn] Resource Discovery Network posting to lis-elib http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1999-01/0039.html [roads] ROADS: Resource Organisation And Discovery System http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/ [roslin] Roslin Institute http://www.ri.bbsrc.ac.uk/ [Welsh] Arthritis-sufferer jailed for using cannabis http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid%5F285000/285148.stm Author Details John Kirriemuir Service Manager Omni Greenfield Medical Library, Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham, NG7 2UH web site at: www.omni.ac.uk Email: john.kirriemuir@omni.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Goodbye Alta Vista, Hallo AllTheWeb Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Goodbye Alta Vista, Hallo AllTheWeb Buzz data software database video multimedia mp3 ftp url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley's regular column.
We all have our own particular favourites, be it football team, car or brand of tea.
The same can also be said of search engines, and for many people at the moment it seems to be Google.
On the courses that I run I usually ask the question ‘what’s your favourite search engine?’ and the two that are most often mentioned are Google and Yahoo!
I also have a little questionnaire on my site [1], and that’s one of the questions I ask there.
The current results are: AltaVista [2] 9.23% Google [3] 60.77% Yahoo!
[4] 12.31% Ixquick [5] 8.46% None of the above 9.23% These figures also illustrate the same results, and while it’s interesting that Google is so far out in front, it also shows quite clearly that information professionals are now making less and less use of AltaVista.
At the Online Conference [6] in London recently I attended several talks on search engines and workshops regarding them, and AltaVista was barely mentioned.
However, even just a couple of years ago AltaVista was highly regarded as perhaps the best of the free text search engines; it had a large database which was regularly updated, it was also constantly updating and adding new features and its search syntax was very flexible.
Yet now it’s being seen as an also ran and on at least one newsgroup that I take (alt.internet.search-engines) the majority of web authors say that they hardly pay any attention to it.
Is this disenchantment justified, and if so, is Google the only alternative that information professionals should move to?
A quick and very unscientific series of searches produced a slightly confusing picture, as can be seen from the following table:   Search term AltaVista AllTheWeb Google Internet 114,353,308 55,183,553 99,100,000 mp3 15,422,080 6,309,504 14,500,000 “Everton Football Club” 2,930 4,454 5,060 +”Christmas hamper” +turkey +domain:uk 22 287 37 Pages including ‘internet’ added in the last month 16,923 112,854 88,000 AltaVista still appears to out perform both AllTheWeb and Google on a couple of the very large searches, but for a smaller, more specific phrase search, and on a very specific multi term search with a country qualifier, it was beaten into third place and significantly so by AllTheWeb.
Finally, it did very poorly when looking at the number of new or updated pages in the last month.
However, none of the three engines that I looked at appeared to be the out and out winner, but the result that gave me greatest cause for concern was the final one; a search engine is only as good as its results, and if these are not updated on a regular basis it really does become necessary to start considering alternatives.
I chose to look at AlltheWeb’, otherwise known as 'FAST‘rather than Google, if for no other reason than many people are already aware of what Google can offer, and I thought it would be more interesting to concentrate on a slightly lesser known search engine, but one which is increasingly being mentioned these days.
AlltheWeb is owned by Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST), a Norwegian company.
FAST claims that it has over 625,000,000 web pages indexed, which is certainly an acceptable size and is comparable to AltaVista and Northern Light, but still lagging some way behind Google (also demonstrated in my quick searches listed in the table above).
However, it is making considerable claims for both the freshness of it’s data – it claims a rate of between 9-12 days, though Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch [7] disputes this, though not by much, which puts it way out in front of the other major engines – and for its news stories, claiming in a press release “Indexing up to 800 news stories per minute and real-time indexing of news stories from over three thousand online sources, AlltheWeb is twice as fresh as Google, with six times more news.” [8] The main search page is very clear and uncluttered, consisting of a single screen, which makes a change from the confusing approach taken by AltaVista, while providing more immediate functionality than Google.
The user has several immediate options; a choice of language to search in (almost 50 different languages), the search box itself to enter terms, a tick box to tell the engine to search for the exact phrase, and options to search for web pages, new, pictures, videos, MP3 files and FTP files.
The search box can be customised to change the default data set searched (from web pages to news for example), from languages to search type (any, all, phrase search), language settings, an offensive content reduction filter that can be turned off or on, query re-writes (the software can take the input query and re-write it to achieve more accurate results, which could prove very useful for novice searchers) highlighting search terms, and opening results in a new window.
However, this is only a partial list – AllTheWeb has one of the most customisable interfaces I’ve seen in a very long time.
Advanced search features were less impressive however, although to be fair no worse than most, but I think Northern Light [9] still reigns supreme in this particular arena.
Advanced search options include word and domain filters, page restrictions and display options.
Many of these ‘advanced search features’ could be achieved using either the simple search function or the customised options.
The Help facilities are fairly basic as well; very little more than a guided tour of the interface, which to be fair was very clear, and would be of use to a novice, but it was not comparable to the extensive facilities one can find at AltaVista for example.
The search results page more than make up for some of the other less exciting features.
The screen is clear and uncluttered, with none of those ‘featured sites’ that are becoming increasingly common with other search engines, such as AltaVista.
At the very top of the list of results are a number of ‘Beta Fast Topics’ which are a dozen or so specific topics related to the results retrieved – rather like the Northern Light customised search folders, and which provide the same function – a quick way of narrowing a search down to a smaller tightly focussed group of pages.
AllTheWeb provides a brief summary of the page returned, the size, and if appropriate, the opportunity of retrieving more hits from that specific site, using the same approach that AltaVista uses.
Another nice feature is that even if the user does a search for web pages, a small box pops up on the right hand side giving the results of a multimedia search, with an indication of the number of hits found for images and video.
In conclusion therefore, AllTheWeb combines many of the best features of other search engines, with few of their disadvantages.
That combined with the freshness of its data does make it look a very attractive alternative to Google, and worryingly for AltaVista, a very viable replacement for their own offering.
I suspect that in the coming few months I shall be paying rather more visits to AllTheWeb, and rather less to AltaVista.
[1] Phil Bradley’s website http://www.philb.com [2] AltaVista http://www.altavista.com [3] Google http://www.google.com [4] Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com [5] Ixquick http://www.ixquick.com [6] Online Information 2001http://www.online-information.co.uk/online/ [7] Search Engine Watch http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd0725-fast.html [8] FAST press release http://www.fastsearch.com/press/press_display.asp?pr_rel=106 [9] Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com Author Details   Phil Bradley Email: philb@twilight.demon.co.uk Article Title: "‘Goodbye AltaVista, hallo AllTheWeb’" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/search-engines/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ZOPE: Swiss Army Knife for the Web?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ZOPE: Swiss Army Knife for the Web?
Buzz data software rdf html database xml apache browser sql python windows hypertext linux passwords perl solaris soap samba php mysql ftp authentication url standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Paul Browning looks at this multiple authoring environment.
Motivation I would be surprised if most people don’t feel a sense of achievement when they author their first Web page.
It’s the first thing you ever made which potentially the rest of the world can see.
Others learn about your new skill and before you know it you’ve become the departmental webperson and are buried in an avalanche of other people’s content to “put on the Web”.
The chore of document conversion and the burden of information maintenance quickly dispel the euphoria of your first experience of authoring for the Web.
You are in an “ongoing Forth Road Bridge painting-type situation” having worked through the information tree for which you are allegedly responsible, a year has passed, and much of the information needs updating again.
This state of affairs may still describe the Web editions of many university prospectuses.
It certainly described that at Bristol.
Revised content would arrive from academic departments as e-mails, faxes, bits of paper, annotated versions of the previous year’s entry.
This would be re-typed into a monolithic Word document by the Admissions Office which would be in turn passed to the Information Office to be prepared in a desk-top publishing package to be sent for printing.
Only after the printed version of the prospectus had been produced (involving a further iteration of checking with academic departments) was the monolithic Word document then reverse-engineered into a set of several hundred manually authored Web pages.
Needless to say this all took a long time and was error prone.
Now, thanks to a Web-enabled database, the process as been reversed.
The pages of the Web prospectus are created dynamically “on the fly” and reflect the current content of the back-end database.
The database is edited via Web forms.
When an edition of the paper prospectus is required the entire content of the database is simply dumped to a monolithic “snapshot” file and this is used as the raw material for the paper publishing process.
The secret, of course, has been to separate the information content from the design the exception rather than the rule for manually created Web pages.
FileMakerPro was the Web-enabled database software employed.
Although originally low cost and easy to Web-enable (you don’t need any other server software or middleware), under Windows NT it has proved less than robust (various ruses have had to be employed to run it as an NT service and to stop this service hanging every few days).
Somewhat late in the day we have now started to Web-enable our corporate Oracle databases and it now makes sense to look for an alternative middleware solution which will integrate well with this technology (or at least SQL databases) and which might be supported by our service departments generally.
There is also a need to identify a technology (or mixture of technologies) that allow us to automate (or at least devolve extensively) the management of relatively unstructured information (conventional databases tend not to be good at this).
Zope what is it?
Zope (which stands for Z Object Publishing Environment) is an open source Web application platform from Digital Creations.
Zope is freely available [1] for both NT and Unix and will interoperate with Web servers such as Apache and IIS.
It competes with middleware products such as Cold Fusion, Netscape Application Server, PHP, mod_perl, Frontier and Vignette.
Zope is written in Python [2].
Figure 1: The Zope Architecture [3] There are many components to the Zope architecture (Fig.
1) and this article will not attempt to cover them all.
Instead I will concentrate on those aspects of which I have first hand experience and which should also be regarded (in my view) as key to the efficient running of any Web: Transparent publishing Devolved content management Access to existing data sources Integration with existing services Transparent publishing If your Web is going to be useful then it must not be just a “read-only” medium for end-users.
Publishing information on the Web has to be as easy as word-processing.
Zope, via the ZServer component (Fig.
1), offers several publishing mechanisms “straight out of the box”: FTP Any ftp client can upload files into Zope (by default ZServer uses port 8021 rather then 21 so unless you change this you need to configure your ftp client accordingly).
Use client software like WS_FTP Pro [4] or Internet Explorer 5 and this publishing method becomes an intuitive drag-and-drop process for the end-user.
HTTP Naturally ZServer knows about http (by default it uses port 8080 rather than 80) but it also supports the put method.
This means that browsers like Netscape (via Composer) and Amaya [5] can be used to author content no additional software is required.
WebDAV Possibly the most exciting development in this area recently.
WebDAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a protocol [6] providing an extension to HTTP and which brings the concept of “workflow” to the Web.
Fully compliant WebDAV clients are thin on the ground at present but for a partial demonstration try Internet Explorer 5 (make sure you install the “Web Folders” option).
For those of you who have used Samba [7] to connect to a remote Unix file server the experience will be familiar drag-and-drop copying of files from your desktop to ZServer.
In fact you don’t copy files to ZServer this is merely an interface to the Z Object Database (ZODB).
Zope is all about objects (which can be files, folders, database connections, program methods, many things) and they all reside in the ZODB (which is in turn one, possibly very large, file in your conventional NT or Unix file system).
The cunning thing is that, to an ftp or WebDAV client, the ZODB looks and behaves like a file system.
Devolution of content management If you wanted you could stop there.
The ZServer component gives you a compact and high performance Web-cum-ftp server that is simpler to set up than Apache or IIS.
However, it likely that at the very least you will want to be able to create and administer user accounts and folders.
This is all done via a Web browser appending “manage” to any URL brings up an authentication box and, providing you have an appropriate username and password, will take to the management screen (Fig.
2) for that level in the object database hierarchy.
(Just as a URL traverses the directories below a “document root” in a conventional file system, the interaction of a URL with the ZODB happens in the same way with some added magical properties.)
Figure 2: Zope management screen Zope is based on a business model of “customers who have customers who have customers ….”.
The security architecture is nicely explained in the Zope Content Manager’s Guide [8], from which the following account is largely derived.
A fundamental idea in Zope security is that administration should be turned over to others as you traverse the folders in a URL.
The administrators at each level can define new administrators below their folder, thus passing the work down the hierarchy.
To do this effectively, one must understand the four key components of Zope security: Users People (or groups of people) who interact with Zope are represented by Zope “users”, or “user objects”.
Zope user objects provide management of authentication information and the kind of access people have.
Roles Roles represent kinds of responsibility and authorization, such as “Manager” or “Author.” Roles provide the linkage between authentication and authorization.
They are functionally similar to “groups” in other security systems.
Permissions Permissions represent like operations on objects and provide an organized mechanism for setting access control on objects.
Permissions correspond to the high-level permissions, like “read,” “write,” and “execute,” found in file systems.
However, permissions are specific to objects.
Different types of objects can provide different, object-specific permissions.
Acquisition Acquisition is the mechanism in Zope for sharing information among objects contained in a folder and its subfolders.
The Zope security system uses acquisition to share permission settings, so that access can be controlled from high-level folders.
The User Folder object (called “acl_users” in Fig.
2) can be defined in any folder within the hierarchy and is the starting point for managing users.
(Note that only a user having a role for which the permission “Add User Folders” is enabled is allowed to do this.)
Opening this reveals the User Editing view (Fig.
3) in which user names and passwords can be set, roles allocated and restrictions on access according to IP domain applied.
Additional views are available via the Security tab (Figs.
2 and 3) which allow roles and permissions to be modified or added.
Figure 3: User Editing view The “user objects” discussed so far are internal to Zope and are based around the http AUTHENTICATED_USER variable.
It is possible, however, to create custom User Folders that can be used to interface with external user management systems such as directory servers see the “Integration with services” section below.
Access to data sources If you wanted you could stop there.
You’ve now replicated a basic Web-cum-ftp server which has a superior security model to Apache or IIS.
It is superior because it is finer-grained, based on a hierarchy whose administration can be devolved and which exists entirely within the “sandbox” environment of Zope (it knows nothing about and can’t interact with the security model of the NT or Unix file system that actually hosts Zope).
For me, though, stopping here would mean that you missed out on one of the most compelling features of Zope the ability to integrate with existing data sources.
One of the biggest problems facing organizations (large or small) is the problem of multiple instances of information.
A student’s term-time address might be held in the Registry’s student record system, the Library’s management system, the Chemistry department’s Access database, the Hall of Residence’s card index system.
No-one knows which one is right, there is no mechanism to synchronise the instances, and the person most affected by the information being wrong (and is arguably the best person to maintain it) can’t help because s/he can’t see any of the instances.
The solution, of course, is an information strategy that says “we will only have one instance of information” and a locally supported middleware environment that encourages other organisational units to reference (rather than copy) that instance of information.
For structured information hosted by relational databases Zope achieves this end by another sort of object the Database Adapter.
These come in many flavours [9].
The Gadfly, Oracle, Sybase, Solid and ODBC adapters are supported by Digital Creations.
Database adapters contributed by members of the Zope community extend this coverage to include PostgreSQL and MySQL.
Note that not all adapters are available for both NT and Unix in particular ODBC is NT-only and Oracle is Unix-only (though you can connect to Oracle databases from NT via ODBC).
The Gadfly (a simple relational database system implemented in Python and based on SQL) database adapter is the only one available “out of the box” the others must be downloaded separately and installed as separate “Products”.
Installing new products is straightforward under either NT or Unix: stop Zope if it is running, unzip or untar the product into the top-level of your Zope installation, restart Zope and then find the new product under the Available Objects pop-up menu (Fig.
2).
What do you do then?
There are essentially three steps and I’ll illustrate them below with screenshots which are restricted to the right-hand frame of the relevant management screen at each stage.
In this example I’ll use the ODBC adapter (on NT) to connect to a remote Oracle database (which happens to be running under Solaris) using the standard issue scott/tiger training account and associated employee database (though bear in mind that I could just as easily be accessing the contents of an Excel spreadsheet or Access database hosted by a NT system).
Make the database connection I add a Z ODBC Database Connection object called “vine” (Fig.
4).
The data source “koi” has already been configured via the NT ODBC control panel.
The Oracle driver has also been installed and SQLNet configured (i.e.
tnsnames.ora has an entry for “koi”).
Figure 4: Adding an ODBC Database Connection Construct a database query I add an Z SQL Method object (Fig.
5) called “select” which uses the database connection object “vine”.
I can interactively test my SQL statement in the management screens.
The argument “deptno” is inserted in the query string by using the DTML syntax (see “Some of the bits I’ve missed” section below).
The sqltest tag is used to test whether an SQL column is equal to a value given in a DTML variable, in this case “deptno” (the argument and the database column must have the same name).
Figure 5: Adding an SQL Method Build a search interface Lastly, the Z Search Interface wizard (Fig.
6) helps me build a Web form which I can make available to end-users.
The wizard builds two DTML Methods, “report” and “search”, which control the appearance of the Web form and the presentation of the output.
Figure 6: Adding a Search Interface This takes less than five minutes by which time the management screen for the folder in which these various objects have been created (“vinedemo”) looks like Fig.
7.
Figure 7: Management view of the vinedemo folder What does the user who points their browser at the object “search” now see?
The Web form and resulting output is given in Fig.
8.
Figure 8: The Web form and resulting report This is not that pretty.
No matter if you have a modest grasp of HTML you can customize either the “search” (Figs.
9) or “report” (Fig.
10) methods via the Zope management screens.
(Figs.
9 & 10 show the default DTML produced by the Z Search Interface wizard.)
<dtml-var standard_html_header> <form action=“report” method=“get”> <h2><dtml-var document_title></h2> Enter query parameters:<br> <table> <tr><th>Deptno</th> <td><input name=“deptno” width=30 value=“”></td></tr> <tr><td colspan=2 align=center> <input type=“SUBMIT” name=“SUBMIT” value=“Submit Query”> </td></tr> </table> </form> <dtml-var standard_html_footer> Figure 9: The DTML method “search”   <dtml-var standard_html_header> <dtml-in select size=50 start=query_start> &lt;dtml-if sequence-start&gt; &lt;dtml-if previous-sequence&gt; &lt;a href="&lt;dtml-var URL&gt; &lt;dtml-var sequence-query&gt;query_start= &lt;dtml-var previous-sequence-start-number&gt;"&gt; (Previous &lt;dtml-var previous-sequence-size&gt; results) &lt;/a&gt; &lt;/dtml-if previous-sequence&gt; &lt;table border&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;th&gt;EMPNO&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ENAME&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;JOB&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MGR&lt;/th&gt; &lt;th&gt;HIREDATE&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;SAL&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;COMM&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;DEPTNO&lt;/th&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;/dtml-if sequence-start&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td&gt;&lt;dtml-var EMPNO null=""&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;dtml-var ENAME null=""&gt;&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;&lt;dtml-var JOB null=""&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;dtml-var MGR null=""&gt;&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;&lt;dtml-var HIREDATE null=""&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;dtml-var SAL null=""&gt;&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;&lt;dtml-var COMM null=""&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;dtml-var DEPTNO null=""&gt;&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;dtml-if sequence-end&gt; &lt;/table&gt; &lt;dtml-if next-sequence&gt; &lt;a href="&lt;dtml-var URL&gt; &lt;dtml-var sequence-query&gt;query_start= &lt;dtml-var next-sequence-start-number&gt;"&gt; (Next &lt;dtml-var next-sequence-size&gt; results) &lt;/a&gt; &lt;/dtml-if next-sequence&gt; &lt;/dtml-if sequence-end&gt; <dtml-else> There was no data matching this <dtml-var title_or_id> query.
</dtml-in> <dtml-var standard_html_footer> Figure 10: The DTML method “report”   This rich mix of database adapters clearly provides access to a wide range of “structured” data sources, but what about collections of more loosely structured information like that residing in conventional file systems?
No problem install the Local File System product [10] in to any Zope folder and you will be able to define a “base path” into any level within your local file system.
URLs referencing the Zope folder containing the Local File System product can then be simply extended to point to any file or directory sitting below the node in your file system defined by the base path.
Integration with services If you wanted you could stop there.
You’ve essentially replicated what IIS and Active Server Pages or Apache, mod_perl and Perl/DBI (or PHP, or quite a long list of other middleware options) can do (only it takes significantly less time to install and configure Zope).
But there’s yet more you can do to integrate the Zope environment with existing (and future) services.
(From this point on I’m going beyond the state-of-my-art but others have made these options work.)
One thing you want to avoid is the overhead of maintaining a separate username/password space that is local to Zope.
There are multiple ways of avoiding this via Zope products like etcUserFolder (authenticates against Unix password file), NTUserFolder (NT domain server), LDAPAdapter (LDAP directory service) or MySQL User Folder (passwords held in MySQL database) [11].
Another interesting product is IMAPAdapter giving access to an IMAP mail store.
MailHost is a product installed by default which allows you define an SMTP server to be used by the dtml-sendmail tag.
Some of the bits I’ve missed Document Template Markup Language (DTML) is a facility [12] for generating textual information using a template document and application information stored in Zope.
It is used in Zope primarily to generate Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files, but it can also be used to create other types of textual information.
For example, it is used to generate Structured Query Language (SQL) commands in Zope SQL Methods [13].
It used to have a server-side include syntax but now exists in an XML-like form (see Figs.
9 and 10).
I find some aspects of DTML pretty cryptic.
Some people say “skip DTML and use Python External Methods instead”.
I find Python less cryptic but would be concerned about letting users out of the “sandbox” that is Zope (for the same reasons you don’t give Tom, Dick and Harriet access to your cgi-bin directory).
The perfect compromise may have arrived in the shape of Python Methods a product that allows you to code Python within Zope apparently some instructors are considering teaching a first course in programming in this way ….. Zope is XML-aware [14] and will export collections of objects in this format.
The XML Document product allows you to use XML objects in the Zope environment; you can import or create documents within Zope and format, query, and manipulate XML.
The Confera product gives you the makings of threaded discussion facility though it would require further customisation before it could be used on any sort of scale.
Squishdot is a news publishing and discussion product.
It creates a place in your Web site where people can post short articles, news items, announcements, etc.
as well as hold threaded discussions about them.
Use of the Zope management screens for editing source files quickly becomes a bit tedious (though one can understand the motives for “doing it all in the browser”) and alternatives involving ftp-aware editors are must-haves for anyone contemplating significant development work.
Two interesting developments, therefore, are the ZIE (Zope Internet Explorer) project [15] and the Zope Mozilla Initiative [16] which seek to offer within-browser editing of Zope objects (and whole lot more in the case of Mozilla).
Concluding remarks I still haven’t covered all aspects of Zope cyber-buzzwords like XML-RPC [17], SOAP [18] and RDF [19] could have been included.
Visit www.zope.org for the full story.
I hope this article goes some way to encouraging people to look beyond IIS or Apache.
Zope is an alternative to either Web server but it also can be highly complementary (via FastCGI or PersistentCGI, see Fig.
1).
You don’t need to know Python to use Zope but it helps.
You don’t need to code DTML but it also helps.
Just a smattering of SQL and a familiarity with HTML will get you a long way (it did for me).
Is the reality as perfect as the article suggests?
The main problem is that the hectic pace of development has outpaced the maintenance of documentation.
This is not a problem if you’re a Python hacker (“the code is the documentation, man ….”) but can be frustrating if you’re not.
Happily there is a vibrant community of users on the Zope mailing list (where I serially lurk to find the answer to everything Zopeish) and many individual and group attempts to write HOW-TOs and the like [20, 21, 22].
A big question with any application server or middleware offering is “Will it scale?”.
I don’t think there’s any question over the capacity of Zope to perform as a departmental server and there are a growing number of impressive and busy Zope-powered sites [23, 24] which are cutting it in the big time Web.
Would you bet your “enterprise” on it?
Maybe, but perhaps you should have a look at the non-free Zope Enterprise Option (ZEO) alternative first [25].
Zope positively bristles with gadgets to connect to other sources of content and to process content which, in my view, justifies the title of this article.
I commend Zope to anyone who wants to work smarter rather than harder with the Web.
References http://www.zope.org http://www.python.org http://www.zope.org/ZopeArchitecture http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/WS_FTP http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ http://www.webdav.org/ http://fi.samba.org/ http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Guides/ZCMG-HTML/ZCMG.html http://www.zope.org/Products http://www.zope.org/Members/jfarr/LocalFS http://www.zope.org/Products http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Guides/DTML-HTML/DTML.html http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Guides/ZSQL-HTML/ZSQL.html http://www.w3.org/XML/ http://www.zope.org/Members/johanc/ZIE/ZIE-demo http://www.zope.org/Resources/Mozilla/ http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/01/xmlrpc/index.html http://www.digicool.com/News/integrate http://www.zope.org/Resources/Mozilla/Projects/RDFSupport/ http://www.zope.org/Documentation/How-To http://weblogs.userland.com/zopeNewbies/ http://zdp.zope.org/ http://www.zope.org/Resources/CaseStudies http://weblogs.userland.com/zopeNewbies/zopesites/ http://www.digicool.com/Solutions/ZEOFactSheet.pdf Acknowledgements Ann French and Maggie Shapland (University of Bristol), Phil Harris and Joe Nicholls (University of Wales College of Medicine), Tony McDonald (University of Newscastle) and the participants of zope@zope.org.
Updates Gain Zope Enlightenment By Grokking Object Orientation Boy, I wish this had been around sooner on my Zope voyage.
I think I now understand what Classes are for.
WorldPilot The Zope-powered killer application?
The Jargon Lexicon I wasn’t aware (honest) that Perl has been described as a “Swiss Army Chainsaw” when I came up with the title for this article.
Gadfly I might give the impression that the Gadfly database needs to be installed before you can use the Gadfly Database Adapter.
This is not the case as the Z SQL Methods User’s Guide [13] makes clear the the Zope Gadfly product is provided for demonstration purposes.
It is only suitable for learning about Zope SQL Methods.
Database operations are performed in memory, so it should not be used to create large databases.
Rewriting the script on app servers I found this article quite insightful.
An extract:“If you want a state-of-the-art website then you’ve got two basic choices,” says Vignette’s Pearson.
“Option one is you get about 60 per cent of the work done by hiring a slew of programmers, locking them in a room for six months, and hoping for the best.
Option two is buying in software which gives you all the basic work plus tools which allow you to customise.” Option two doesn’t, however, have to be Vignette’s Storyserver (as the earlier bits of the article make clear in discussing the open source options).
Content Management Systems For Linux?
Leaving aside the question of just what exactly is a CMS, this looks to be an interesting thread comparing many of the candidates.
(I hadn’t realised there were problems with mod_perl.)
ArsDigita Community System Funny how you forget stuff.
My Web-enabled database journey had an early visit to Philip Greenspun’s excellent but opinionated Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing but I somehow only re-discovered ACS just recently.
Seems to be the only other open-source contender for a Content Management System.
It’s very complete in terms of all the off-the-shelf applications that are available.
Author Details   Paul Browning The Library Tyndall Avenue University of Bristol Bristol BS8 1TJ UK paul.browning@bris.ac.uk Article Title: “Zope a Swiss Army Knife for the Web?” Author: Paul Browning Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/zope/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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LONGITUDE: The Users in the Digital Landscape Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines LONGITUDE: The Users in the Digital Landscape Buzz software framework infrastructure archives e-business url research Citation BibTex RIS Linda Berube on the Longitude project, designed to test a toolkit of qualitative survey methodologies to assess user needs in the digital library.
“May you live in interesting times.” I think we in library-land, and particularly public library-land, can lay claim to our share of those.
On the national level, we have infrastructure, content creation, and training, all activity that the roll out of the People’s Network will require.
In addition, regional strength and co-operation ensures participation and development on all levels.
We have the opportunity to more than adapt to the changing information and communication environment: we can build on our traditional skills of networking, communication, organisation, and customer relations to create something truly innovative.
In essence, we have the opportunity to re-vision the profession, the professionals, and the information environment.
And, although these interesting times might, at certain moments of a frantically digitised day, seem more a sentence than an opportunity, we know that we are extensible (and we were even before the mark-up languages were).
But, let’s look on the other side of the reference desk for a moment.
Are our public library users as extensible as we are?
We probably have an inkling, based on observation, about certain user group reaction or interaction with electronic resources, but there are obvious risks attached to such informal observation, especially when the acquisition of expensive equipment and software is based on it.
Unfortunately, professional literature cannot provide much in the way of support in developing an understanding of our users as they navigate the digital landscape.
It is with this concern in mind that EARL, the Consortium for Public Library Networking with members from 75% of local authorities, has embarked upon an 18-month study to develop and test a toolkit of long-term longitudinal qualitative survey methodologies.
Longitude, the Library Networking Toolkit for a User-Driven Environment, designed specifically for public library implementation, will not only look at the behaviour, over a period of time, of users in a digital library environment, but will also offer a practical method for measuring that behaviour.
Funded by the Library and Information Commission, now RESOURCE: the Council for Museum, Archives, and Libraries, Longitude will benefit from partnership with CERLIM (which is making its own contribution towards this body of research with VITAL, a “snap-shot” study of users and IT)1 and CIPFA PLUS.
The process will also be informed by JISC’s User Monitoring and Evaluation Framework2, a three-year study of “the impact of IT networks and electronic information services and sources on academic information users.” Other important references include The Digital Library Research Review prepared by Professor Peter Brophy of CERLIM3, EARL’s own READINESS project4, the EC Libraries Programme project PUBLICA5, and the LIC-funded Stories from the Web6.
Information about user groups at Luton Borough, Norfolk County, and Westminster Libraries will be gathered through a variety of methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, user logs, and direct observation.
This process will provide the basis for a toolkit, which will then be tested for reliability.
Such a toolkit will provide the kind of knowledge of users that will contribute to a digital decision-making process that builds on a human understanding.
E-business lives and dies by just such a knowledge.
Public libraries, all decked out with the latest technology, while not exactly subscribing to the commercial means, must take a lesson from the end.
References (as below) The Value and Impact of IT Access in Libraries (VITAL) is at: http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/cerlim/projects/vital.htm From JISC’s User Monitoring and Evaluation Framework report.
For further information, contact Professor Jennifer Rowley, JISC Scientific Advisor at Rowleyj@edgehill.ac.uk or Jennifer.Rowley@tesco.net The Digital Library Research Review by Professor Peter Brophy is at: http://www.
lic.gov.uk/research/digital/review.rtf The executive summary of READINESS is at: http://www.
earl.org.uk/news/execsums/readines.htm The PUBLICA website is at: http://www.croyden.gov.uk/publica Stories on the Web is at: http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/stories Author Details   Linda Berube Development Co-ordinator EARL: the Consortium for Public Library Networking Email: linda@earl.org.uk Web site: www.earl.org.uk/ Article Title: “Longitude” Author: Linda Berube Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/pub-libs/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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So You Want to Build a Union Catalogue?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines So You Want to Build a Union Catalogue?
Buzz data software database archives cataloguing opac z39.50 aacr2 copac algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Matthew Dovey looks at various models of virtual union catalogues in addition to those adopted by the clump projects, and other models of physical catalogues.
In the not so distant past, if a group of libraries wished to offer a single online catalogue to their collections, they had to adopt a physical union catalogue model: i.e.
they would have placed their catalogue records into a single searchable database.
More recently there has been much work in virtual union catalogues, whereby the user interface offers integrated access to multiple catalogues as if they were a single catalogue.
Neither of these approaches is a panacea, however – both have certain pros and cons, which makes the decision of which to adopt dependent on circumstances.
Before I begin to look at the different models (both physical and virtual), I would like to cover a few element of information retrieval theory.
There are two major concepts: recall and precision.
Recall illustrates the confidence that a search returns all the information you are interested in.
For example, if you searched a bibliographic catalogue on the term “Tchaikovsky”, you would get low recall if the catalogue was inconsistent on the spelling of “Tchaikovsky” (using “Chaikovsky” and other variants) and did not use any cross-references between the different spelling forms.
Precision, on the other hand, is the confidence that the results of your search are relevant.
For example a search on “Cyril Smith” would have a low precision if it contained a large number of results for the politician, whereas you were interested in the pianist.
Typically, web users are now used to low precision and recall, as web search engines can be quite poor in this regard.
However, this is not surprising as achieving high precision and recall when searching unstructured or semi-structured data is a very difficult task.
Some would argue an impossible task, since the issues in achieving this are very closely related to artificial intelligence (to achieve high precision and recall the algorithms must demonstrate some understanding of both the query and the data being searched).
On the opposite side of the coin, librarians and library OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogues) users are used to very high precision and recall, especially recall.
This is due to the great care and consistent rules (such as AACR2) applied in creating what are sometimes very elaborate structured catalogue records.
The physical models preserve high precision and recall by offering a single database, with an agreement of cataloguing rules and a single indexing policy.
I will briefly elaborate on that latter point.
Even though two library systems may contain records created according to the same cataloguing rules (and interpretations of those rules), the indexing between them may differ: one system may group together both ISSN and ISBN’s into the same index, whereas another may index them separately; one system may include authors in the subject index; one system may separate out primary and secondary responsibilities into separate indexes etc.
A typical user will get used to its quirks (such as knowing how to spell Tchaikovsky in order to get all results as opposed to no results!
), and will consistently achieve high recall often with high precision.
The problem with the physical models is their maintainability.
There are at least four models of how to populate such a physical catalogue: In the first model he union catalogue is the main catalogue for the participating libraries.
This is the case with the Oxford University Union Catalogue (OLIS).
The Bodleian Library, along with the libraries of the colleges, departments, and University dependents all (well about two thirds of them) subscribe to a single library system and catalogue.
This has a number of benefits, it that it centralises the cost of technical support rather than each library tackling the same problems independently, but clearly this approach would hit problems in merging libraries which already have their own library systems, and now wish to adopt a new one.
It also would require a greater degree of collaboration in terms of cataloguing and indexing policies that some consortium would be willing to accommodate (although I will argue that the virtual union approach may not offer an alternative).
Even so, if the libraries building a new union catalogue do not have existing systems, have little local IT support, and “get on well,” this model is still an effective one worth considering.
The increase in network speed and reliability make this appropriate even for geographically dispersed unions.
However, this model does not support situations where a library may be a member of more than one union catalogue.
In the second model records are exported from local catalogues to the union catalogue – this, as do the following two models, assumes that the union members have their own online catalogues or library systems.
This is the model adopted by the COPAC service in the U.K. An increasing number of UK University libraries send their records to a centralised database.
Adding a new library is not a trivial matter since mechanisms for doing the export need to be established, and this may require record conversion.
However as the union grows this becomes less difficult as the new libraries are likely to be using the same or similar library systems to those already in the union.
Again it centralises the support needed, so can be suitable where there is little local IT support for the union members.
It cannot fully address the consistency of the records being imported although it can try to insist on minimal standards.
It can however adopt a consistent indexing policy.
A major issue with this model, is the latency between an item being catalogued in the local catalogue and its being represented in the union catalogue, and this would depend on how often the exports were performed.
It must be remembered that in the case of all but the smallest of libraries there is already a large discrepancy between the actual holdings and the online catalogue (collections still needed to be catalogued, new acquisitions taking a few days before they can be fully catalogued etc.)
that the extra few days difference between the local catalogue and the central one, may not be a major problem.
Deletion or amendments of records from the local catalogue and how to replicate to the central catalogue are also issues, but there are solutions for handling this.
However, the local IT support requirement may increase if the library becomes a member of  large number of such union catalogues.
One issue that this model cannot address is locally volatile information such as circulation information (e.g.
whether the item is on loan) – but this can always be obtained by a separate search on the local catalogue (possibly automated and transparent to the user).
In the third model, records are catalogued on the central catalogue and imported to the local catalogue.
This is the model adopted by OCLC, in particular in their CORC project.
In this case Internet resources are catalogued centrally (using a web interface) by participating members, and then periodically imported into the local catalogue.
This has the advantages in that both cataloguing practice and indexing policy is determined centrally, but it still allows individual members of the union to use their own systems.
It also provides an easy means for a member to decide which records should only be local (as would be the case if a library which covered a variety of subjects was a member of a subject specific union catalogue).
It does impose the need for a greater degree of local IT support, as typically importing into the local catalogue is a local problem; and it still requires agreement between the union members as to the cataloguing policies used.
This model also does not directly address local volatile information, such as circulation status, although there are work-arounds.
A final model is to dynamically update both local and central catalogues simultaneously, i.e.
distributed cataloguing.
The Z39.50 protocol (which I will mention in more detail shortly) offers a catalogue update service.
This could be used by a suitable cataloguing client (and there are a growing number which now support this) to send the catalogue update (either an addition, deletion or modification) to a proxy server which would either send the updates to both local and central catalogues, or queue them if the catalogues where unavailable at the time.
Alternatively updates to the local catalogue could trigger replication to the central catalogue in real-time or be queued.
In both cases there may be a need for on the fly modification of the records using the same solutions as for the import or export models above.
Many major commercial distributed database systems work on this model.
This would offer the consistent indexing of the COPAC model, but without the latency issue of updates, and could even include updates of local volatile information such as circulation status.
The technology for doing most of this already exists and so the local and central IT costs would be similar to that of the COPAC model.
However, to date I have not seen this approach adopted in practice.
More recently we have seen the emergence of virtual models, known within the UK eLib community as “clumps” – a coin termed more by accident or design.
The underlying model here, is that the user is presented with a single user interface which “cross-searches” the participating catalogues in parallel and merges the results back to present the user, as if it were a single catalogue.
There is a general opinion that this approach is more cost effective, more resilient and more easily scalable than the physical models.
Whilst I would not argue that the virtual approaches can be all of these, it is not however automatically guaranteed that this approach is cost effective.
Indeed a recent study of the COPAC service reported that it was more cost-effective for it to remain as is, rather than adopt a physical model.
Z39.50 is often used as the protocol for achieving this due to its adoption within the library world.
There are several good introductions to Z39.50, but in very brief terms it is a generic protocol for allowing a client piece of software (typically a web gateway for the clump project) to query a database (typically a library catalogue) and get results back.
It was originally designed to search a single database at a time, but lends itself well to search multiple databases in parallel.
However, the main issue, in virtual union catalogues is that we are searching databases with different cataloguing policies and different indexing policies.
In this respect they are often mistakenly viewed to be easier to set up since they do not require conformance or agreement on such matters.
However, we immediately hit a problem in computer science known as “searching semantically heterogeneous databases” – this is especially prevalent when we move to searching across different domains (e.g.
archive and museums as well as libraries).
The problem is once again obtaining good recall and precision (especially recall), and the issues are very similar to achieving these for unstructured data.
Technology can give us good results but not as good as those achieved from being consistent in indexing and cataloguing practice.
Many of the clump projects have discovered this.
Moreover, whereas a user can become accustomed to quirks in individual OPACs, these are much harder to learn and accommodate when searching multiple OPACs in parallel, each with individualist quirks.
Adding a new catalogue to a virtual union clump can be fairly easy – provided however that the new library catalogue supports Z39.50 and has good local IT support.
However, if the union consists of small libraries with little or no local IT support, just establishing that the library system supports Z39.50 can be a major task.
The virtual approach is therefore more cost-efficient in the former case than the latter.
Also although getting the catalogue onto the virtual union clump can be fairly straightforward and quick, configuring it correctly so that it returns reasonable results, in particular with good recall and precision, is a difficult task.
In fact this part of the task can be as difficult as adding a new library to a physical union catalogue.
There is additional difficulty if a library belongs to two virtual union catalogues requiring different configurations, but there are international initiatives such as the Bath Profile attempting to prevent this.
Another advantage claimed by the virtual models is that they are more resilient, in that it is cheaper to run multiple gateways than to run multiple physical databases, and that the gateway will still be searchable even if not all the collections are available.
This is true: however, whether this is an advantage depends on your view of the importance of recall.
In the physical union catalogue, you have all or nothing (if the catalogue is unavailable) – whereas the virtual catalogue may not receive results from all the union members because a particular catalogue was unavailable, slow to respond, etc.
It is a moot point, which is “better” for the user.
A user trying to locate every copy of a particular item within a union catalogue may find the “resilience” of the virtual catalogue more irritating than a blessing.
Scalability is another major question in terms of virtual union catalogues.
Physical union catalogues can scale almost ad infinitum providing the central resources are available.
Virtual union catalogues are not restricted by central resources, but are restricted by more fundamental concerns such as network bandwidth.
There is mixed opinion on how many databases can be effectively parallel searched – the experts’ opinions vary between 10 and 100!
This is not helped by the fact that there are two different ways of doing such a parallel search.
The commonest approach is to not only perform the search in parallel but also to retrieve the results in parallel.
In this case if you cross-search ten catalogues each returning one hundred records, you are in effect pulling a thousand records over the network.
Clearly this does not scale very well, but it does allow the interface to sort the results (e.g.
by author).
Another approach is to perform the search in parallel but only pull the records back as needed.
This is more scaleable but makes it harder to display results sorted by anything other than by catalogue.
Z39.50 does support catalogue-side sorting (i.e.
you can send a search request, ask the catalogue to sort results and then pull the results back as needed) which would solve this problem but few library systems support this yet.
A solution to the scalability problem is to look at forward knowledge, i.e.
pre-select the individual catalogues within the union according to what the user is looking for.
There are a number of approaches to this.
One is to present the user with information as to the collection strengths of the individual catalogues.
Another is to encode this in a machine readable form, possibly automatically generated from the indexes, and let the gateway select the catalogues based on the query and this information.
These approaches need further investigation, but seem to be less effective for subject based unions (which would have very similar collection strengths) than for regional or geographical unions, but it any case they clearly detract from obtaining good recall.
The mechanisms for automating this forward knowledge is not far removed from centralising the indexes.
This gives rise to another model of union catalogues not yet investigated.
You still have multiple catalogues, indexed locally, but you also index these centrally.
The user searches the central indexes, then retrieves the records from the individual catalogues directly.
This would only be of benefit over the other models mentioned if the amount of data in a record was much larger than that indexed, and would be of particular benefit if that information was volatile (such as circulation information).
There are still technical issues in the virtual union catalogues.
The vendor support for Z39.50 is increasing but still has a long way to go.
Some still do not see it as important, most do but have minimal support (for example do not support features such as sort).
There are still issues within the standard – the method for the return of holdings information has only recently been decided by the agency behind the standard, and hence it is very hit and miss what holdings or circulation information systems return (if they return any at all).
Issues of scalability and forward-knowledge still need to be addressed.
However, not all the problems are technical and many of them such as cataloguing and indexing practice are important and need to be addressed whatever model you choose to adopt – technology alone cannot solve all problems.
That does leave the question of which model to choose if you are about to embark on building a union catalogue.
These depends on partly on who the members are – if they are fairly small libraries who have little local technical support, I would recommend adopting a physical union model.
This has a larger centralised IT cost, but overall the cost is not that much different from that of the virtual model.
The virtual models distribute the cost (as well as the searching) onto the local libraries and therefore is more applicable to those using larger library systems with good local IT support.
Another issue is the requirements and expectations of the users.
If you want recall and precision comparable to OPACs, the physical models have clear lead, and this is unlikely to change.
However, most users accustomed to web searches may be perfectly happy with less than perfect searching.
References Details on the eLib Clump projects are at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/ Details on the Oxford Union Catalogue are at: http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk Details on COPAC are at: http://www.copac.ac.uk The study looking at the feasibility of Z39.50 for the COPAC service is at: http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects/z3950.html Details on CORC are at: http://www.oclc.org/oclc/corc/index.htm A good introduction on Z39.50 is at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/z3950/intro.html An article on the Bath Profile is at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/at-the-event/bath-profile.html Some articles on searching distributed heterogenous databases are: “Federated database systems for managing distributed, heterogenous and autonomous databases”.
Sheth and Larsen (1990).
ACM Computer Surveys No 22.
“Impact of Semantic Heterogeneity on Federating Databases”.
R. M. Colomb (1997).
Computer Journal, British Computer Society, Vol 40, No 5.
ISSN 00104620.
Author Details   Matthew J. Dovey Research and Development Manager Libraries Automation Service University of Oxford Email: matthew.dovey@las.ox.ac.uk Web site: www.lib.ox.ac.uk Article Title: "So You Want to Build a Union Catalogue?"
Author: Matthew Dovey Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/dovey/intro.html   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Learning Objects and the Information Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Learning Objects and the Information Environment Buzz data software framework api xml portal usability accessibility repositories multimedia flash vle cd-rom interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Ian Dolphin and Paul Miller discuss the place of Learning Objects in the wider environment of learning.
The Iconex project [1] at the University of Hull was funded under the JISC's 5/99 Programme to demonstrate the value of small, portable, pieces of digital content in assisting student learning.
The project is creating a repository of exemplar interactive Learning Objects, many of which are already available for use and reuse.
This repository is intended to stimulate cross-fertilisation between disciplines to develop generic views of types of interaction, and to encourage the reuse of Learning Objects.
In this paper, we explore some of the more wide-ranging issues which have arisen during the project, and attempt to demonstrate why consideration of Learning Objects and their role is relevant to all readers of Ariadne, not just to Learning Technologists.
What is a Learning Object?
Learning Object any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning (IEEE) The IEEE definition of a Learning Object is, perhaps deliberately, somewhat broad in scope, and could quite easily be applied to everything around us.
The definition is therefore helpful in reminding us that we continue to learn throughout our lives, and that every interaction we undertake is a potential learning experience, but less helpful when trying to tie down some concepts in order to progress discussion in this area.
The Iconex project worked with a narrower, non-exclusive, conceptualisation of the Learning Object, specifically considering three related categories of object, all of which are digital; Generating Objects (Objects which produce interactions) Connective Objects (Objects which can be connected together to produce richer interactions) Adaptive Objects (providing for example, enhanced accessibility where appropriate by accessing a student profile) Each of these is defined in terms of their behaviour with respect to the learner, and there is a presumption that these Objects become progressively more complex to create, more Interoperable, and of greater value to both Learner and Teacher as we move from Generating to Adaptive.
Passive Objects (those which simply deliver content of some form to a non-participating Learner) are not a specific focus within the Iconex framework, although they do have a continuing, and significant, role to play in the learning process.
Figure 1: A working example of a Generating Object from the Iconex Repository [connection lost -Ed.
], created in Flash   For readers able to view Flash objects*, Figure 1 illustrates a simple Generating Object, drawn from the Repository.
It was designed by educators in UK Further Education for use in the area of Basic and Key skills.
As with other objects in the Repository, the generating object represents something of a work in progress.
The current development version of the object is, for example, perhaps overly enthusiastic in providing immediate feedback on your work before you've finished!
Nevertheless, it serves to illustrate a very simple tool for reinforcing Basic and Key Skills, and which is suitable for embedding by the teacher in a variety of learning contexts.
Learning Objects such as this have traditionally been expensive to produce.
They are typically defined and specified by educators, with this domain specific expertise then translated into software and polished by teams of multimedia developers.
Although such developers re-use code from object to object, the production of even small interactive learning objects is labour intensive.
The larger the object, the greater the expense involved.
Some such objects have in the past formed almost entire systems delivered on CD-ROM.
In producing exemplar objects, Iconex has taken a distinctive approach, working with educators to develop specifications which ideally may be used in more than one context, and delivering implementations where key informational content is abstracted from the object, and provided in an external data (in fact, XML) file.
This approach has several advantages.
By obtaining information from an external data file, the object becomes effectively a rules-based rendering engine, and can provide a variety of instances by referencing different data files, without a need to re-write the object multiple times.
In this context re-usability becomes a very practical proposition.
The object can store user information — such as results — in an external data file.
In addition to presenting different information, the object can reference external data files which modify its presentational form.
The same object can therefore be used to demonstrate its concept in a different language, or in an optimal format for those with disabilities.
Such objects tend to be small, focussed, and easy to deliver over the web.
The fine granularity of such objects acts as a further stimulus to re-use.
Such objects are clearly not designed primarily to stand alone (although there is nothing to prevent an educator using them in this manner if so desired), but to be integrated with what have become commonly termed Virtual Learning Environments (VLE).
A Flash object such as the above may of course be played from any web page, whether within a VLE or not.
There are problems, however, of a large and small nature in establishing meaningful placement of such objects into VLEs.
Many of the first generation VLEs currently in use were developed whilst specifications and standards were little more than drafts.
They have a tendency to be monolithic and resemble “black box” solutions — difficult both to integrate into broader systems, and to integrate externally generated Learning Objects within.
This difficulty is compounded by the tendency of the first raft of relevant specifications and standards to be data centred, rather than focussed on how these data might usefully be connected (although we had to start somewhere!).
For this reason, consortia such as the Open Knowledge Initiative [2] are currently focussed on defining application programming interfaces, or APIs, which are designed to enable systems to communicate with one another in standard ways.
The OKI are collaborating with IMS [3] to push specification and standards development in this direction.
When learning environments not only store data, but transmit those data in standard ways, the meaningful integration of interactive learning objects becomes at least possible.
There is clearly a large amount of work to undertake before that potential becomes a reality.
A key element of the Iconex project has been the engagement of project staff with significant areas of the community; whether those involved in providing and packaging content, those developing VLEs, or those involved in the specifications and standards process.
This engagement with the community is central to both anchoring and driving the development of learning objects.
Collaboration, and collaborative frameworks are also crucial to success.
Iconex is in the early stages of dialogue with the US-based Merlot Project [4].
The projects have much in common, with some interesting differences of emphasis.
Merlot aims fundamentally to establish a learning object (not necessarily interactive learning object) "community of use", and has been successful in attracting over 7,000 objects and nearly 9,000 registered community members (plus many thousands more who benefit from using the objects) in the five or so years of its development.
Such communities of development and use — and the overlap is significant — provide the potential for interdisciplinary communication and cross-fertilisation, and a context within which to generalise developments.
The nurturing of such communities in the UK is an obvious next step in further aiding the development and take-up of learning objects, and Iconex is keen to learn from the Merlot experience and facilitate similar growth here.
It is significant also that these developments come at a time when university communities are drawing together systems, processes and expertise to create institutional portals — which are rapidly becoming viewed as the essential step in providing coherent experience for both off and online learners and staff.
It is important that in joining up institutional systems to provide what is fundamentally a horizontal portal, this portal does not then become a portcullis, and developments in industry such as Sun's Open Net Environment [5] (encompassing portal, learning environment, and more) are of obvious relevance here.
We must retain the perspective that online expressions of communities of use — whether regarding LOs or other vertical issues — can be integrated into this development as seamlessly as possible, and ensure that the product we offer reflects the real needs of a real community, rather than a whim of the developer.
References The Iconex Home page is at: http://www.iconex.hull.ac.uk/ The Open Knowledge Initiative Home page is at: http://web.mit.edu/oki/ The IMS Home page is at: http://www.imsglobal.org/ The Merlot Home page is at: http://www.merlot.org/ The Sun ONE Home page is at: http://wwws.sun.com/software/sunone/ * If you can't, and want to, the Flash Player plug-in may be downloaded from http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/.
Author Details Ian Dolphin Head, Academic Services Interactive Media University of Hull Email: i.dolphin@hull.ac.uk Web site: www.iconex.hull.ac.uk/ Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Article Title: "Learning Objects and the Information Environment" Author: Ian Dolphin and Paul Miller Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/iconex/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Hybrid Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hybrid Libraries Buzz data software database metadata digitisation cataloguing opac z39.50 aggregation copac personalisation authentication interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Pinfield describes the role of Hybrid Libraries and Clumps     What is a hybrid library?
A hybrid library is not just a traditional library (only containing paper-based resources) or just a virtual library (only containing electronic resources), but somewhere between the two.
It is a library which brings together a range of different information sources, printed and electronic, local and remote, in a seamless way.
So, as we are all used to dealing with resources of various media, does this mean that we are already working in hybrid libraries?
Well, in one sense, ‘yes’.
We are all already working in a hybrid information environment.
But the term ‘hybrid library’ is normally used to convey the idea of greater integration of the different media as well co-existence.
As Chris Rusbridge puts it, the hybrid library should be “designed to bring a range of technologies from different sources together in the context of a working library, and also to begin to explore integrated systems and services in both the electronic and print environments.”[1] This means that hybrid library development is not working towards a single, easily definable technical goal but is rather an ongoing process of trying to achieve greater integration.
The point of this is to encourage users to look at the best information source for their needs regardless of its format.
At present, people wanting to use resources in different formats have to go to different places or use different equipment or switch between different proprietary interfaces.
A lot of time is wasted doing this and many users are put off completely.
But within the hybrid library access to a range of resources should be made seamless, so that people use the resources which best suit their needs rather than those which are simply more easily available.
And clumps?
A clump is an aggregation of catalogues (or other databases).
The point of a clump is to enable large-scale resource discovery so that users can search for resources they want across a number of different catalogues.
[2] Clumps fall into two categories: physical clumps and virtual clumps.
The first of these is a union catalogue which brings together the data from a number of different sources and holds it in one place.
A well known example of a physical clump is the COPAC database, which is the joint catalogue of the CURL libraries.
[3] This database is held and managed at Manchester Computing.
COPAC currently contains records from 11 institutions which it has uploaded onto a single database available on the Web.
On the other hand, virtual clumps are not centrally managed databases at all.
Rather, they are distributed databases which can be aggregated for the purposes of a search.
This aggregation may be ‘fixed’, so that users can always search a pre-determined group of catalogues; or it may be ‘dynamic’, so that users can themselves form a clump of particular catalogues (or parts of them) at a particular time.
The latter is in many respects the ideal of clumping and would create major benefits for users.
The key technology involved in the formation of virtual clumps is Z39.50.
Z39.50 is a network protocol which allows bibliographic databases to talk to each other using a predefined set of rules.
A query is sent by a user to a Z39.50 client (‘origin’) which can then be forwarded to a Z39.50 server (‘target’).
The target database is then searched and the results returned via Z39.50 to the user.
Several different databases may be searched simultaneously and a single results set returned to the user.
One of the main advantages of Z39.50 is that it allows the user to carry out searches simultaneously on a number of target databases using a familiar, local user interface.
What has eLib got to do with it?
eLib is currently funding a number of projects which are developing hybrid libraries and clumps.
These are part of eLib Phase 3 which has as its watchwords ‘implementation’ and ‘integration’.
The eLib projects are listed in Tables 1 and 2.
Most are consortia of different HE institutions and other partners who are co-operating to develop models and exemplars of the hybrid library and clumps.
Most of the projects began in January 1998 and are due to end in 2000.
Of course, eLib projects are not the only people working in this area.
In the UK, there are a number of EU and other projects with similar or related aims.
Outside the UK, an even larger number of people are working on hybrid libraries and clumps, even if they don’t call them that.
So what are the projects doing?
What are the clumps projects doing?
The eLib clumps projects are all aiming to set up working clumps, using Z39.50, which will operate amongst the partner institutions.
To begin with, this involves a number of technical stages.
Firstly, a server needs to be installed to which users can send their queries.
Some projects are installing more than one server in different locations.
Music Libraries Online and RIDING are using software on their servers produced by Fretwell-Downing Informatics who are involved as technical consultants in the projects.
FDI are also producing a user interface (now available in prototype) which the different projects will be able to tailor to their needs and deliver on the Web.
CAIRNS and M25 Link are currently investigating the software options, and are looking at products, such as Europogate and GEOWEB, in addition to the FDI software.
Then, of course, all of the participating libraries have got to ensure that they have Z39.50 compliant catalogues which can receive requests and send back results.
All of the projects consist of participating institutions which between them have lots of different library systems.
[4] One interesting part of the projects will be looking at how the different systems cope (or can be made to cope) with Z39.50.
Z39.50 is in many respects a complex series of rules about how databases can talk to each other.
One very important aspect of the projects is agreeing on a particular set of rules (a ‘profile’) which all the participants can use.
This will enable their systems to interoperate.
The precise arrangements the projects decide to make will differ.
Music Libraries Online, for example, is looking into a range of issues which are unique to music resources, which may require specialised treatment.
Other projects may find that agreeing on a profile may not be possible, at least in the short term.
An alternative arrangement, planned for example by RIDING, would be to configure the central server so that it can deal with a variety of profiles and so communicate with catalogues configured in different ways.
But whatever they decide, all of the projects will have to go through a lengthy series of tests to achieve interoperability.
It is envisaged that within clumps systems will talk to each other on different ‘levels’.
Before users search a clump at the level of individual records, they will want to know whether it is worth their while searching these databases at all.
For this reason, the clumps projects are working on the idea of ‘collection level descriptions’ (CLDs).
These will provide ‘forward knowledge’ of collections of individual items to users, so that they will be able to decide whether to search them for particular sorts of items or not.
It is hoped that this development will help to minimise the number of fruitless clumps searches being made which could potentially use up valuable system time or network capacity.
The format of CLDs is currently being worked out.
CAIRNS is using an existing CLD scheme, the Scottish RCO (Research Collections Online) conspectus database.
Most of the clumps projects are regional groupings based on existing regional co-operative arrangements.
CAIRNS is based on the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), M25 Link is based on the M25 Consortium of Higher Education Libraries and RIDING is based on the Yorkshire and Humberside Universities Association (YHUA).
They see clumping as a natural extension of their existing co-operative arrangements.
On the other hand, Music Libraries Online is the only subject-based (rather than regional) clump.
But it is also based on a network of well established institutional relationships.
These institutional relationships are at the heart of clumping developments.
All of the projects have it within their remit to investigate the policy implications of enhanced institutional co-operation implied by clumps.
Making large-scale resource discovery easier will inevitably increase demand to look at the resources discovered.
How will the various partner institutions deal with this?
They may allow more physical access, or improve inter-lending.
There are even possibilities of co-ordinated acquisitions.
This question is especially interesting as several clumps involve public library sites.
What are the hybrid library projects doing?
The hybrid library projects’ activities are more difficult than the clumps to pin down.
There are a number of important similarities between the hybrid projects but they are all approaching the problem of integration from slightly different angles and all have a different set of emphases.
Some, for example, are concentrating on technical issues, others are focusing on user issues.
[5] The HyLiFe project is looking at the hybrid library from a user perspective.
It is concentrating on interface design for a variety of client groups.
MALIBU is investigating the needs of humanities scholars in particular.
It is working towards creating a number of specialised hybrid library prototypes in specific subject areas.
HeadLine is working in the area of Business and Economics to create a hybrid library environment involving a wide range of different resources.
BUILDER is looking at similar issues but from an institutional perspective, and is also considering issues of digitisation management.
Agora is developing a Hybrid Library Management System which will provide access to a range of discovery, location, request and delivery services for users and will facilitate the effective management of the hybrid library for information professionals.
Whilst it perhaps too early to talk about particular technologies which are being used by the different projects, it is clear that a number of key themes are emerging.
Firstly, there is authentication.
All of the projects are looking at this issue to a greater or lesser extent.
Just as many libraries allow only authorised users to set foot in their buildings, so electronic libraries must control access to their virtual spaces.
In the hybrid library, both are important.
Investigations are being carried out by a number of the projects on how to achieve more streamlined and less intrusive authentication processes which will allow users access to a variety of resources.
Working with services such as ATHENS is obviously crucial here.
Another key theme is interconnectivity.
Projects are investigating the technologies and tools which allow access to different databases to be interlinked.
Z39.50 is important here, as are a number of other technologies.
The Agora approach to this is based on the MODELS Information Architecture (MIA) produced as a result of the MODELS workshops.
[6] Other projects have been informed by this approach.
Most of the projects are working with external data providers on this issue.
The whole idea of improving the environment within which the user carries out the information seeking process is also important.
There is a move towards a greater ‘personalisation’ of this environment.
A number of the projects are investigating ways in which different views of the ‘information landscape’ (more buzz words) can be shown to different users or groups of users.
This involves managing metadata about sources and also authorisation data about users in such a way that they can be made to interact; so that users can be matched with the kind of information sources they may need.
All the projects are also interested in cultural and skills issues, both from the point of view of users and information professionals.
All of them are carrying out evaluation activities to gauge views about the hybrid library and its different elements.
It is hoped that these studies will contribute to a better understanding of the current position and how it is likely to change in the immediate future.
What will the impact be?
Hybrid library and clumps projects are looking at issues which will have a real impact on libraries and information professionals in the near future (if they are not already).
They will have an impact on the services that libraries deliver and also on the kind of skills information professionals need to develop in order to manage these services.
They also imply the development of partnerships amongst HE institutions, and also between HE institutions and commercial partners, such as data providers.
Library and information services should be active in developing and implementing these services; it is only then that we will be able to shape them in the way that is best for us and our users.
Acknowledgements Thanks to the eLib hybrid library and clumps project managers for giving me their comments on drafts of this article.
[1] Chris Rusbridge “Towards the Hybrid Library” D-Lib Magazine July/August 1998.
URL: http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/july98/rusbridge/07rusbridge.html .
See also Jon Knight “The Hybrid Library: Books and Bytes” Ariadne 11, September 1997.
URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue11/knight/ [2] More details about clumps can be found on UKOLN’s MODELS Web site, URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/clumps .
The term ‘clump’ was actually coined at the MODELS3 workshop, URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/models3 [3] COPAC stands for CURL Online Public Access Catalogue; the OPAC of the Consortium of University Research Libraries, URL: http://copac.ac.uk/copac [4] See http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/M25Link/clumpssuppliers.html [5] See Stephen Pinfield et al “Realizing the Hybrid Library” D-Lib Magazine October 1998.
URL: http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/october98/10pinfield.html.
[6] MODELS (MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services).
See Lorcan Dempsey et al “Managing access to a distributed library resource: report of the fifth MODELS workshop” Program, 32, 3, July 1998, pp.
265-281.
Hybrid Library Projects     Project Stands for Web site Lead site Consortium partners Other partners Agora   http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora University of East Anglia UKOLN CERLIM Fretwell-Downing Various HE test sites and commercial organisations BUILDER Birmingham University Integrated Library Development and Electronic Resource http://builder.bham.ac.uk University of Birmingham   Universities of Oxford, Wolverhampton, Westhill College of HE, Birmingham Central Library, BLCMP.
Plus other HE and commercial organisations HeadLine Hybrid Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment http://www.headline.ac.uk London School of Economics London Business School University of Hertfordshire   HyLiFe Hybrid Library of the Future http://www.unn.ac.uk/~xcu2/hylife Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) at Manchester MU University of Northumbria at Newcastle University of Newcastle Library, University of Newcastle Centre for Urban and Regional Development, Universities of Plymouth, Central Lancashire, and the Highlands and Islands Various HE institutions MALIBU MAnaging the hybrid LIbrary for the Benefit of Users http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/malibu King’s College London University of Oxford University of Southampton Arts and Humanities Data Service, CTI Centre for Textual Studies, NFF-Specialised research collections in the Humanities, NISS, and Office for Humanities Communications.
Plus various HE test sites   Clumps Projects     Project Stands for Web site Lead site Partners CAIRNS Co-operative Academic Information Retrieval Network for Scotland http://cairns.lib.gla.ac.uk University of Glasgow Strathclyde University 16 Scottish sites, comprising all 13 universities (Glasgow, Strathclyde, Aberdeen, Abertay Dundee, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow Caledonian, Heriot Watt, Napier, Paisley, Robert Gordon, St. Andrews, Stirling) plus the National Library of Scotland, Queen Margaret College and East Dunbartonshire Public Libraries M25 Link   http://www.lse.ac.uk/blpes/m25 London School of Economics Universities: City, Greenwich, Middlesex , Westminster, and Queen Mary and Westfield College Music Libraries Online   http://www.musiconline.uce.ac.uk Trinity College of Music Birmingham Conservatoire, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Leeds College of Music, Royal Academy of Music Royal College of Music, Royal Northern College of Music, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Welsh College of Music and Drama, Fretwell-Downing (technical consultants) RIDING   http://www.shef.ac.uk/~riding University of Sheffield Bradford, Huddersfield, Hull, Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan, Lincolnshire and Humberside, Sheffield Hallam, York, BLDSC, Leeds City Libraries, Fretwell-Downing (technical consultants)   Author details Stephen Pinfield E-mail: s.pinfield@bham.ac.uk Project Leader BUILDER Information Services Main Library The University of Birmingham Edgbaston Birmingham B15 2TT   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data html database archives metadata copyright privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
The Copyright & New Media Law Newsletter For Librarians & Information Specialists Now in its second year of publication, The Copyright & New Media Law Newsletter For Librarians & Information Specialists covers issues such as privacy for web sites, copyright collectives and print and electronic copying, the European copyright scene and reviews of copyright web sites for libraries, museums and archives.
A print newsletter, with email alerts between issues, subscribers are also entitled to a free subscription to the electronic newsletter Copyright & New Media Legal News.
For further information, visit the web site at: http://copyrightlaws.com or email at libraries@copyrightlaws.com CBIR research and development in the UK As part of an initiative on content-based image retrieval (CBIR), JISC has commissioned research from the Institute for Image Data Research at the University of Northumbria.
The Institute will review the current state of the art for CBIR research and development in the UK, and is consulting with researchers and users on a world-wide basis.
They are particularly interested in researchers’ views on what questions the research should ask and what the technical and human barriers are.
They also want practitioners’ ideas on the capabilities of existing CBIR systems and how useful the techniques might be for managing image data.
Anyone interested is invited to contact: Dr. John Eakins: john.eakins@unn.ac.uk or Margaret Graham at margaret.graham@unn.ac.uk Unveiling of EDINA’s remodelled web site As well as recently unveiling its remodelled web site, EDINA (the JISC funded national Datacentre based at Edinburgh University Data Library), has also combined with Ovid Technologies to host INSPEC, again as a JISC Authorised INSPEC Service Provider (JAISP).
INSPEC, produced by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, is the premier database for access to the world’s leading scientific and technical literature in a very broad range of disciplines.
http://www.iee.org/publish/inspec/ The new arrangement strengthens EDINA’s position as a host for specialised databases for many academic fields.
http://edina.ed.ac.uk/ For further information contact Ovid Technologies contact Alex Lankester at alexl@ovid.com or for EDINA contact Margaret Tubby at m.tubby@ed.ac.uk Nordic metadata final project report now available in HTML format The Nordic metadata project has been completed, and the final project report is now available in HTML format at http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/nmfinal.htm A printed version will be published in September.
Conference: Information Ecologies: the impact of new information ‘species’ Information Ecologies: the impact of new information ‘species’ 2-4 December 1998 Viking Moat House Hotel, York.
This 3 day, 2 night residential conference, organised by the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme and UKOLN, will look at the impacts of the new ‘information ecologies’ on libraries and universities today, at the nature and economics of some of these, and at how we should plan in order to cope with our new environment in the future.
Such issues will be addressed with particular reference to the experiences of eLib projects, and set in the wider context of the international community.
To be held in York, this international conference features a range of distinguished speakers.
Further information is available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/elib-conf-98/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Windows NT Explorer: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Windows NT Explorer: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Buzz data mobile software javascript html database xml apache sql windows passwords perl soap php e-business wsdl uddi authentication url Citation BibTex RIS Brett Burridge investigates the use of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), the XML-based protocol that is taking a leading role in the emerging area of Web Services.
Previous Windows NT Explorer articles featured in Ariadne have looked at some of the essentials tools and technologies for web development on the Microsoft Windows platform, namely Internet Information Server [1] and Active Server Pages [2].
The focus this issue is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
The protocol is a core technology in the provision of web services across the Internet.
While SOAP is not a Microsoft specific technology, the protocol is being embraced by the company as it focuses effort on the provision of web services.
Indeed, web developers who create solutions on the Windows platform are going to be hearing a lot about web services.
Microsoft’s initiatives such as .NET [3] and HailStorm [4] are helping to transform it from a software development company to a services company.
Additionally, the latest release of their development environment, Visual Studio.NET, allows developers to create and use web services in their own applications.
What is SOAP?
SOAP is a means by which distributed software applications can communicate using the open standards of HTTP and XML.
The protocol was developed by a consortium of industry experts, including those from Microsoft, IBM, IONA, Ariba, DevelopMentor and others [5].
The XML format used by SOAP to describe web services is termed the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
During May 2000, the SOAP 1.1 specification [6] was submitted to the W3C consortium.
Distributed computing has been possible on Windows based systems for a while now, using an extension to COM, called the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), or COM+ as it is referred to in Windows 2000.
Using DCOM, it is possible to install objects on one server that are able to call objects on other servers.
In a multi-tier architecture model it would therefore be possible to place the user, business and data objects on separate servers.
The downside to using DCOM is that unless you have very large budgets, it is essentially a Microsoft Windows-based solution.
Furthermore, there are practical problems in using DCOM through firewalls, and there is a high network connectivity overhead.
It is also not really a suitable technology for use over the Internet.
Because SOAP has been built on the existing protocols of XML and HTTP, it is particularly suitable for building distributed applications that use multiple servers running different operating systems and/or development environments.
In this respect it offers far greater flexibility to DCOM.
Microsoft have already embraced SOAP, but as is described later, a number of other platforms and development environments also support SOAP.
Using SOAP on Windows SOAP will be an integral technology in Microsoft’s .NET platform for web services [3].
Until .NET and its associated development tools are officially released, Microsoft have made available the SOAP Toolkit [7].
This toolkit adds support for SOAP to the Internet Information Server web server on Windows NT (Internet Information Services on Windows 2000) and the Visual Studio 6 development environment.
It is particularly useful for allowing COM objects to be used from remote servers in much the same way as DCOM.
Another valuable reason for using the toolkit is that it hides much of the complexity of WSDL files, as well as producing and interpreting the XML data necessary to invoke and return output from web services.
The SOAP Toolkit The SOAP Toolkit contains a number of items, many of which will be described in further detail.
The WSDL/WSML Generator is a Wizard-like utility for generating the required WSDL XML files for exposing COM methods through SOAP.
An ISAPI filter (or alternatively an ASP page) allows requests for .WSDL files to call the appropriate DLL on the server.
Several COM objects provide a high level interface to SOAP, which allow the developer to use SOAP without having to directly program either HTTP or XML parsing routines.
The toolkit’s tracer utility is used for intercepting SOAP calls during debugging.
There are also a number of sample files (mostly for Visual Basic and Visual C++), and some high quality documentation, including a complete, searchable SOAP reference guide.
Figure 1.
The SOAP Toolkit contains extensive documentation in HTML Help format Exposing COM methods through SOAP by use of the WSDL/WSML Generator Generating the required XML for exposing SOAP services can be time consuming.
Thankfully, the SOAP Toolkit has a WSDL/WSML Generator that can help generate the XML from registered COM DLLs.
The use of the Generator can be illustrated by using it to expose methods in an example COM object.
The example object called NorthWind.dll, was developed using Visual J++ 6.0.
The object contains code for connecting to the NorthWind Microsoft Access database via ODBC (this database is the sample database supplied with Microsoft Access).
There are two methods within the COM object: getProducts and getProductDetails.
getProducts returns a list of all of the data in the Products table of the NorthWind database.
The getProductDetails method takes a parameter of a ProductID, and returns details of that individual product.
In the example screenshot below, the WSDL/WSML Generator is being used to expose the getProducts and getProductDetails methods in the DLL: Figure 2.
Using the SOAP Toolkit’s WSDL/WSML Generator to expose methods in a COM DLL Note that the Wizard allows you to specify which of the methods you want to make expose through SOAP.
Once the .WSDL and .WSML files have been generated, they are placed in a publicly accessible web folder.
The SOAP client can then be pointed to these files in order to access the methods exposed by SOAP.
Support for SOAP in web servers The XML files generated by the WSDL/WSML Generator describe the methods that can be accessed through SOAP.
Once these files have been uploaded to the web server, the server needs to know how to interpret requests for these documents.
SOAP calls are made by the client machine using HTTP POST to send the XML required to call a method on the web server.
The web server then needs to know how to interpret this request and send back the result (which is returned in XML format).
The SOAP Toolkit supports two types of “SOAP Listeners”.
The first type of listener is an ISAPI filter for IIS that allows the web server to forward requests for .WSDL files to the filter.
The filter then calls the appropriate COM object and returns the result as XML.
The SOAP Toolkit also supports an ASP SOAP listener.
This is useful when you aren’t an administrator on the server so can’t install the ISAPI filter.
Calling SOAP methods from within Active Server Pages Calling a SOAP method on a remote server is a process of sending and retrieving XML via HTTP.
Although it is possible to directly use HTTP protocol and XML parsing routines, the SOAP Toolkit contains a number of COM objects that provide high level programmatic access to SOAP, hiding some of the complexities behind SOAP.
Of particular value is the SoapClient object, which allows a SOAP method to be called and the method’s output to be returned.
The object’s use is demonstrated in the sample ASP code below, which calls the getProductDetails method and displays the output from this method: <% On Error Resume Next Dim oSoapClient Dim sProducts ‘Creates an instance of the SoapClient object Set oSoapClient = CreateObject(“MSSOAP.SoapClient”) ‘Initialises the SoapClient object by pointing it to the ‘Web Services Description Language file describing ‘the object that contains the method to be called Call oSoapClient.mssoapinit(“http://127.0.0.1/SOAPServer/NorthWind.WSDL", “NorthWind”, “”) ‘Call the getProducts method of this web service sProducts = oSoapClient.getProducts() ‘The SoapClient returns full details of any errors encountered while accessing the method If Err <> 0 Then Response.Write(“Error Description =” & Err.Description & “<br>”) Response.Write(“FaultCode =” & oSoapClient.faultcode & “<br>”) Response.Write(“FaultString =” & oSoapClient.faultstring & “<br>”) Response.Write(“FaultActor =” & oSoapClient.faultactor & “<br>”) Response.Write(“FaultDetail =” & oSoapClient.detail & “<br>”) Else ‘No errors, so display the list of products returned by the method Response.Write(”<pre>” & sProducts & “</pre>”) End If ‘Release SoapClient object Set oSoapClient = nothing %> The SoapClient object contains some error handling functionality.
Further debugging is made easier when use is made of the SOAP Trace Utility that is also a part of the SOAP Toolkit.
The code shown above can be contrasted with the code for calling the getProducts method using DCOM, where the method is in a COM object installed on a server called ComponentServer: <% On Error Resume Next Dim oNorthWind Dim sProducts Set oNorthWind = Server.CreateObject(“NorthWind.NorthWind”, “ComponentServer”) sProducts = oNorthWind.getProducts() If Err <> 0 Then Response.Write(“Error Description =” & Err.Description & “<br>”) Else Response.Write(”<pre>” & sProducts & “</pre>”) End If Set oNorthWind = nothing %> As can be seen from these code samples, invoking remote methods via SOAP is fairly straightforward.
Being non-platform specific does have a few drawbacks though, most notably in the fact that it is not that straightforward to send and retrieve complex data types.
Workarounds are possible; it is, for example, possible to send and retrieve ADO Recordsets by converting them to and from XML between the SOAP client and server [21].
The SOAP Trace Utility A useful utility included with the SOAP Toolkit is the SOAP Trace Utility.
This is used to intercept and examine the XML files transmitted between the SOAP client and the server over HTTP.
A screenshot is shown in Figure 3 below this shows the result of intercepting a call to the getProductDetails method of the example DLL.
The top right pane shows the XML transmitted by the SOAP client, detailing the method to be called (i.e.
getProductDetails), together with a parameter of 3, which corresponds to the third product in the Products database table.
The bottom right pane shows the XML transmitted back by the SOAP server.
In this instance it is the details of product 3 (in this case Aniseed Syrup).
Figure 3.
The SOAP Trace Utility is used to intercept the XML files transmitted between the SOAP client and server Using SOAP with other development environments and web servers SOAP is based on the open standards of HTTP and XML, so it can potentially be used with any development environment or programming language that supports these.
In order to speed development times, a number of environments have direct support for SOAP.
Support for SOAP in Microsoft development environments through the SOAP Toolkit has already been described in some detail.
The latest version of ActiveState’s ActivePerl for Windows NT [9] has built-in support for SOAP through the inclusion of the SOAP::Lite module [10] alternative SOAP modules for Perl are available.
To demonstrate the fact that SOAP can be used in a variety of development environments, the following Perl code can be used to successfully call the getProductDetails method of the sample DLL installed on the IIS server demonstrated earlier.
As with the VBScript ASP code shown earlier, it displays the details of the 3rd product in the Products database table.
use SOAP::Lite; $SOAPLite = new SOAP::Lite ->service(‘http://127.0.0.1//SOAPServer/NorthWind.WSDL'); $ProductDetails = $SOAPLite->getProductDetails(3); print $ProductDetails; The recently released version 6 of Borland Delphi also offers SOAP support [8].
Curiously there appears not to be any support for SOAP within the current version of PHP 4.
This is unfortunate, as PHP would be an ideal environment in which to use web services.
It is also helpful if the web server you are using supports SOAP.
Support for SOAP in Microsoft’s IIS through the addition of the SOAP ISAPI filter or ASP listener has already been mentioned.
The popular Apache web server also has support for SOAP through the use of Apache SOAP [11].
Products such as IBM’s WebSphere Application Server and iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions’ iPlanet Application Server also support SOAP.
SOAP in Action 1: HailStorm Microsoft’s HailStorm [4] is a set of .NET services designed to integrate user services on the web.
It builds on the Passport user authentication scheme used an increasing number of Microsoft and non-Microsoft offerings on the web [14].
HailStorm will supply common user details, address books, calendars and payment methods.
These details can then (subject to user approval) be accessed by sites making use of HailStorm.
The advantages for the website developer is that by making use of the HailStorm services, things like accepting payment for a service would simply be a matter of building the appropriate SOAP and XML connectivity required to communicate with the HailStorm service.
eBay Inc. will be one of the first 3rd parties to make use of HailStorm [15] [16].
eBay’s auction services will be made available to users of Microsoft’s products.
For example, users will be able to see the status of their auctions without having to log into the eBay website.
Obviously these are early days for HailStorm, and it obviously has to gain user acceptance.
But it would go a long way toward solving the problem of having to remember dozens of different passwords for subscription services, and having to log onto several accounts to check all your email.
It also demonstrates that Microsoft has a firm commitment to the use of SOAP in the creation of web services.
SOAP in Action 2: UDDI The growing number of web services available has lead to the introduction of Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registries.
These allow organisations to publish information about their web services to a publicly accessible registry, thereby allowing current potential trading partners to find out about their web services.
At the present time, both Microsoft [12] and IBM [13] allow read and write access to the UDDI Business Registry.
UDDI itself is an emerging technology, but already some organisations are making use of it.
For example, the airlines Continental Airlines Inc. and Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) have web services available through UDDI that can be used to track the status of their flights.
Other services that could benefit from UDDI are those that track parcels and assets across the World, weather reporting and news/financial information services.
The advantage of UDDI is that because the descriptions of the web services are publicly available, the web developer wishing to interface to the service is easily able to gain access to all the information required to integrate the service.
Over the next few months UDDI will hopefully gain critical mass, with a far greater selection of web services being available.
Resources A few online SOAP tutorials are available, such as VBXML.com’s <soap:workshop/> [17], and there are a range of articles accessible from XML.com’s SOAP tutorials section [20].
The SOAP::Lite website [10] also has a large number of links to SOAP resources.
A few books covering SOAP are also available, including Understanding SOAP: The Authoritative Solution [18], and Professional Windows DNA: Building Distributed Web Applications with VB, COM+, MSMQ, SOAP, and ASP [19].
Summary and Conclusions SOAP is a core technology in the provision of web services, and demonstrates the value of XML in platform independent machine communication.
While there is no guarantee of the success of any emerging technology, SOAP has support from a large number of high profile organisations.
The inclusion of SOAP within the latest generation of software platforms and development tools ensures that developers will be well placed to take advantage of the technology.
References Windows NT Explorer: Internet Information Server, Ariadne issue 21 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/nt-explorer/ Active Server Pages, Ariadne issue 20 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/nt/ .NET Defined, Microsoft website http://www.microsoft.com/net/whatis.asp Building User-Centric Experiences An Introduction to Microsoft HailStorm, a Microsoft white paper http://www.microsoft.com/net/hailstorm.asp Microsoft Submits SOAP Specification to W3C, Microsoft press release http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2000/May00/SoapW3CPR.asp Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1, W3C Note 08 May 2000 http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/ Microsoft SOAP Toolkit, Microsoft Developer Network website http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/nhp/default.asp?contentid=28000523 What’s New in Delphi 6, Borland Software Corporation website http://www.borland.com/delphi/del6/whatsnew.html ActivePerl, ActiveState Tool Corp. website http://www.activestate.com/ SOAP::Lite, SOAP::Lite website http://www.soaplite.com/ Apache SOAP, website http://xml.apache.org/soap/ Microsoft UDDI registry, website http://uddi.microsoft.com/ IBM UDDI registry, website http://www-3.ibm.com/services/uddi/find Microsoft Passport, website http://www.passport.com/ ‘Hailstorm’ Virtual Pressroom, Microsoft press release http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/events/hailstorm/ebay.asp eBay and Microsoft Announce Strategic Alliance to Expand Global Online Presence, Microsoft press release http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/press/2001/Mar01/03-12ebayPR.asp VBXML.com’s <soap:workshop/>, VBXML.com website http://www.vbxml.com/soapworkshop/ Understanding SOAP: The Authoritative Solution by Kennard Scribner, Mark C. Stiver, Kenn Scribner.
Sams Publishing.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672319225/brettbcom Professional Windows DNA: Building Distributed Web Applications with VB, COM+, MSMQ, SOAP, and ASP by Christopher Blexrud et.
al., Wrox Press.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861004451/brettbcom XML.com’s SOAP tutorials section, XML.com website http://www.xml.com/pub/rg/153 Returning ADO Recordsets with SOAP Messaging, Microsoft Developer Network website http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/articles/soapguide_ado.asp Author Details Brett spent two years working in the University of Essex Computing Service, before moving to The Internet Applications Group in the Autumn of 1999, where he developed e-Business applications for a range of corporate clients and dot-com start ups.
Brett is presently working as a freelance web developer, and would be interested in any development projects you might have available.
Brett’s specialist areas are in the development of web applications, primarily using Microsoft technologies such as ASP, Visual Basic, and SQL Server, but also using JavaScript, PHP, Perl and SOAP!
Terms of employment and rates are negotiable, and fixed price contracts are available.
No job is too small!
…Further details.
Brett Burridge Email: brett@brettb.com Web: http://www.brettb.com/ Mobile: +44 (0)7775 903972 Article Title: “Windows NT Explorer: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)” Author: Brett Burridge Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/ntexplorer/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Down Your Way Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Down Your Way Buzz software video research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes visits a public library in Huyton, Liverpool, England.
Knowsley Library Learning Resource Centre, Knowsley Library, visited by Sarah Ormes, is a light and airy building which still smells of fresh paint and new carpets.
Just six months old, the £2.5 million building is situated in the centre of Knowsley, in the Merseyside Metropolitan Borough of the same name.
It was built when the previous library building was sold to make way for a supermarket car park extension.
The finance for the Learning Resource Centre came through an imaginative combination of internal funding and a mix of Capital Challenge and Urban money and the European Union’s Single Regeneration Budget (SRB).
Additional funding for the new building came from internal sources and also from the sale of the old library.
Users have benefited not only from easier parking but also from a new library which probably offers among the most extensive range of free public IT services in any public library in the country.
Although many academic libraries are now familiar with being Learning Resource Centres and hosting banks of computers, public libraries are just beginning to develop such services.
Knowsley Library, having moved well beyond the basic stage and developed its own Learning Resource Centre, is generating a lot of interest amongst users and librarians.
Knowsley’s Learning Resource Centre is on the first floor of the library.
It has 40 PCs and is usually staffed by 3 or 4 full time learning resource coordinators.
One of these coordinators, Anna Forsyth, explained that the centre is open whenever the library is open and is always staffed.
The learning resource coordinators are on hand to provide help, advice and encouragement to the centre’s users.
All the PCs are equipped with standard Microsoft Office software and have access to over 40 networked CD-ROMs (with another 200 due to come online in the near future).
Twenty of the PCs also have full Internet access via a high speed network connection.
Filtering software designed to prevent people viewing pornography has been installed on the main server.
In its first six months the Centre has proved to be very successful with an average monthly use of over 3000.
The Internet workstations in particular are extremely popular and always heavily used.
The Centre’s users include children in the library’s homework club, people who have retired and even mothers keeping in e-mail contact with children away at university.
Although there are no separate statistics, use is also made of the facility by students from local colleges and universities, usually for word processing, with research being both book and Internet based.
The Centre has also had an impact on the lives of some of its users in other ways.
A number of promotional days were organised in the local Job Centre and people were encouraged to come to the library to learn new skills and try searching for work on the Internet.
Web pages linked to relevant job information such as The Guardian recruitment pages were also developed.
Staff in the Centre then helped work seekers to use these resources and to produce CVs and letters of application.
In this area the Centre sees its role as essentially supportive helping beginners to overcome their distrust of IT, helping users make a start on computer based learning packages and keyboard skills, and enabling users to share experience with each other.
A series of specially designed tasks and worksheets are used to introduce basic IT skills.
Later this year it is hoped that the learning achieved by adults in this way will be accredited through the Open College Network.
A similar approach is adopted to the preparation of CVs for job seekers.
"We often need to give a lot of support but do draw the line at producing them for customers.
Often people recognise their skills shortage and return to improve them" said Nick Chandler, Learning Resource Manager.
Staff appointed to work in the Centre are all prepared to work in this way, and some of them have teaching qualifications, although as Nick said "Teaching gives the impression of formal courses, and we don’t offer that at the moment, but we do give adults and children a lot of support in using the facilities."
The intention is that staff involved in these activities will be offered an Open Learning Tutor Award comprised of a package of TDLB units.
Knowsley Libraries Service wants to develop these services rather than just become a place for surfing the Internet.
There is a firm belief that part of the library’s future role must be to support the development of IT skills.
The short term development plans focus on the accreditation of learning and the introduction of video conferencing and swipe card technology.
The other priority is the development of an effective network linking schools, council departments and library service points.
All this will of course depend on money, and Nick Chandler’s response to the funding question was upbeat.
"I don’t know where it will come from, but we have invested very heavily in the Centre, it has won national recognition and is seen as a flagship within the authority, so I believe the political will is there to maintain funding."
Author Details Sarah Ormes Public Libraries Officer,Officer, UKOLN Email: lisslo@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 826711 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz data framework database dissemination copyright url research Citation BibTex RIS Karen Ford examines The Resource Guide, which aims to provide staff and students in HE with an overview of electronic services.
The Resource Guide for the Social Sciences http://www.jisc.ac.uk/subject/socsci/   Karen Ford describes the new Resource Guide for Social Scientists, which aims to provide a user-friendly overview of the electronic services available for UK social scientists.
The Resource Guide for the Social Sciences is a pilot project funded jointly by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
The project aims to provide staff and students in higher education with an overview of the exciting but often overwhelming range of electronic services available to them and to promote effective use of the resources for research and learning purposes.
These resources include bibliographic, reference and research information, online publications, data services, Internet gateways, and resources for learning and teaching.
The project is based at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol.
Individual resource providers currently provide excellent training opportunities for the resources they manage.
However, until now, coordination between services and joint promotion have been undertaken on an informal basis only.
The Resource Guide for the Social Sciences represents the first formalised move toward developing a subject-based approach to awareness-raising and training activities.
It is hoped that lessons learned from the pilot will help inform any similar joint promotional initiatives in other subject areas.
Figure 1: The Web site for the Resource Guide The project’s activities have been divided into four overlapping phases: information gathering, pilot, main phase and evaluation.
Throughout the first phase, resource providers were consulted to determine how an overview of the range of resources might best be presented to the social science community in a clear, concise and relevant way.
In the interests of avoiding user confusion and focusing on the benefits of using the resources, a decision was reached to promote the resources by function rather than provider.
The first step toward achieving this was the development of a framework which describes and categorises the resources according to their function from the user’s perspective.
This framework was used to develop a variety of promotional materials: an overview flier and presentation which were tested throughout the pilot phase, and a promotional postcard.
A range of approaches were also piloted to use in conjunction with the flier and presentation including meetings with key faculty and departmental staff members, presentations to students and staff in departments and support services, and informal chats.
The QUESTICARD was also developed during the pilot phase.
A combination of a questionnaire and further information request card, the QUESTICARD allows users to request information about specific resources of interest and to indicate an interest in overview or resource specific training events.
Data from the QUESTICARD is entered into a database which has been designed to automate the emailing of user requests for information directly to the relevant resource provider.
The QUESTICARD is attached to the flier as a ‘tear off and post’ section and is also available as an online form from the Resource Guide Web site which includes an online version of the flier.
The project is now entering the main phase which involves a number of activities, including the distribution of the promotional materials through mail drops and personal visits to Universities, giving overview chats at meetings, presentations, seminars and coordinating workshops.
To spread the word as widely as possible, the Guide is focusing on working directly with staff and students in their departments in addition to providing support to, and working with, information specialists and support services.
Where possible the Guide hopes to ‘slot ’ activities into existing departmental and institutional activities such as staff meetings, professional development events, conferences, seminar programmes and postgraduate training events etc.
Because this is a pilot project, there is an opportunity to try out new approaches and ideas, and to respond directly to the specific needs and interests of staff and students in the social sciences.
If you are a member of a social science related department in higher education in Britain, the Social Science Resource Guide has been set up to help you and your colleagues make effective use of the electronic resources available to meet your research and learning and teaching needs.
We offer a variety of free overview events and we are particularly responsive to enquiries from staff and students who are not familiar with the Web or are unsure how to get started with electronic resources If you would like to find out more about the Guide and what we can offer, you can visit our Web site or contact Karen Ford (Resource Guide Adviser): Author Details Karen Ford Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH UK Telephone +44 (0)117 928 7056 Fax +44 (0)117 928 7112 Email: k.e.ford@bris.ac.uk   A New Librarians Group for the Millenium The World of the information worker in the late 1990s is undeniably one of rapid evolution, in which changing working patterns and clientele combine with multiplying forms of electronic media to demand that we respond proactively in order to provide an efficienct and effective library service.
In this situation Librararians support groups are crucial for the dissemination of knowledge and sharing of experience.
We can all learn from each other.
This is why the creation of a new Social Science special interest group from the merger of the existing ASSIG and ALISS organisations presents an exciting prospect for strengthening ties in the Social Science community.
On the 9th April 1999 the first steps towards the creation of such a group were taken at the ASSIG AGM when it was provisionally agreed to create a larger inclusive group to cater for the needs of all Social Science librarians and information workers.
What is ASSIG?
ASSIG [01] is the Social Science Special Interest Group of ASLIB[02], The Association for Information Management.
It has been running for a number of years and its membership is constituted by academic libraries, government libraries and special information units, including charities.
The active membership has traditionally been based in London.
The group has benefited from its connection with the ASLIB organisation which has provided administrative support and much needed meetings rooms!
One of its key activities is the publication of the journal ASSIGnation[03] which appears quarterly and contains articles and reviews of subjects relevant to the Social Sciences.
Areas featured in past issues include: digital libraries, knowledge management and professional development.
Other activities arranged by the group have been visits to leading Social Science libraries in London, including the Kings Fund and the London Research Centre.
A workshop on improving Internet skills and finding government information on the Internet was also recently organised for members.
What is ALISS?
ALISS [04] stands for Academic Librarians in the Social Sciences.
It is a forum for Social Science Librarians in UK further and higher education institutions to discuss issues of common importance.
The group was originally formed in the early 1990s and has been growing in strength since a revival meeting held in 1996.
ALISS membership [05] includes representatives from University and college libraries from all regions of the UK.
ALISS also manages a leading Social Science email discussion list lis-socialscience which is used by information workers and academics to disseminate information and discuss issues relevant to the Social Sciences.
Due to the wide spread geographical locations of its members, ALISS meetings [06] tend to focus around themed events with an overnight stay, although single day participation is always available.
The 1998 annual AGM was held at Warwick University and focused on issues surrounding electronic journals.
Speakers included Fytton Rowland on recent developments in academic publishing and a representative of Chadwyck Healey on new services being developed by the company.
This was then followed by a visit to the Modern Records Centre at the University.
A 1999 AGM is being planned to take place at the University of Bangor on the theme of distance learning and libraries.
Why is a New Group Needed?
The most basic reason is of course to strengthen the membership.
The more active participants an organisation has, the more services it can provide for its members.
There is also considerable overlap between the existing two groups.
The basic aim of both is to provide a framework for discussion between Librarians working in the Social Sciences.
While this is a wide ranging field, encompassing many subject areas, a core of interests and resources are shared between workers in the academic, special and government sectors.
This is especially true as distinctions between the different types of libraries are not always clear cut, with many universities increasingly setting up self-funding research centres which contain information units and academic style research being conducted by users of libraries run by pressure groups and charities.
Sharing membership will enable both groups to broaden their geographical range and help them to overcome the common problems associated with special interest groups, namely the potential falling membership due to financial and time restrictions.
As a result, during 1998 both the ASSIG and ALISS memberships voted for a trial period of working together.
This has included shared particpation in activities such as the Internet Cybercafe and workshop which took place at the British Library of Political and Economic Science in February 1999.
In April 1999 ASSIG formally voted for a move towards a full merger and it is anticipated that this will be finally confirmed by the ALISS AGM which is due to take place in June 1999.
The Arrangements It has been provisionally agreed (subject to ALISS AGM confirmation) that the new group will be an Aslib Special Interest group in order to continue to take advantage of ASLIB support and facilities.
The membership of the existing two committees will merge to form an interim committee.
This will be headed by Heather Dawson (British Library of Political and Economic Science) whi is an active member of both groups, with the support of John Naylor (University of Warwick and ALISS Chairman) and Richard Cheffins (British Library and ASSIG Chairman).
Elections for a new committee will occur in the year 2000.
In addition, there will also be a steering group which will consider such issues as the name, constitution and subscription details for the new group.
This will be composed of Norma Menabney (Queens University Belfast), Heather Dawson (British Library of Political and Economic Science), Richard Cheffins (British Library), Yasmin Adeeb (University of Warwick), Tony Holbrook (University of Bath) and Helen Rebera (Aslib).
What Does the New Group Intend to Do?
To increase membership across the whole of the UK To offer a wider range of activities for its members both inside and out of London.
Suggestions have included more library visits and course on issues such as electronic resources and Library training skills.
To increase discussion of current Social Science issues.
Suggestions have included the wider promotion and use of the lis-socialscience mailing list and the possible creation of a newsletter of Social Science library news which could be distributed by paper or email.
What Can you Do?
If you are not a member then consider joining us Help us think of a new name that sums up the aims of the group Provide us with suggestions for new activities.
Offer suggestions on how to promote the new group effectively.
If you would like to make any comments on the new Social Sciences Librarians group or would like further information, please contact Heather Dawson at the address below.
References ASSIG <URL: http://www.aslib.co.uk/sigs/assig/index.html> ASSIGnation <URL: http://www.aslib.co.uk/sigs/assig/assignation/index.html> ALISS <URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/blpes/aliss/> ALISS membership <URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/blpes/aliss/reps.htm> ALISS meetings <URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/blpes/aliss/news.htm> Author Details Heather Dawson Subject Librarian British Library of Political and Economic Science 10 Portugal Street London WC2A 2HD Email: h.dawson@lse.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collection Description Focus Showcase: Mapping the Information Landscape Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collection Description Focus Showcase: Mapping the Information Landscape Buzz data database portal infrastructure archives metadata identifier schema cataloguing ead copac rslp interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Verity Brack reports on this one-day showcase of Collection Description projects and services held at the British Library, London, 25 March 2003.
The national Collection Description Focus is based at UKOLN [1] and funded by the British Library [2], the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [3] , the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) [4] and Resource [5].
It aims to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors.
The Showcase Event There is an increasing emphasis on mapping and managing information resources in a way that will allow users to find, access, use and disseminate resources from a range of diverse collections.
JISC’s vision of a managed “information environment” and new programmes of digital content creation have highlighted the role of collection-level description.
This one-day event focussed on the challenge of bringing together distributed content and how collection-level description can help to facilitate the process.
The programme included input from several major strategic initiatives including the New Opportunities Fund portal (EnrichUK) [6] , JISC’s Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) [7], the CC-Interop (COPAC/Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation) project [8] and the Natural History Museum’s Collection Level Description project [9] .
The day also featured demonstrator and pilot services from a wide range of collection level description services.
Programme Chris Batt, Director of the Libraries and Information Science Team at Resource, welcomed us to a day of ‘acronym heaven’, and this proved to be a remarkably accurate forecast.
The day started with a presentation by Chris Anderson, New Opportunities Fund, and Pete Dowdell, UKOLN, who are collaborating on the development of EnrichUK, a portal for cultural, social, artistic, and historical material from the UK.
The NOF-Digi project, the largest publicly funded content creation project in the world, has created a huge amount of digital material 1 million pages of text, 400,000 images, and thousands of film and audio clips.
150 websites linked to 500 contributors have been developed and the EnrichUK portal will bring these together in a ‘one-stop content showcase’.
Unlike many other collections of digital material, these are aimed at the informal, casual learner not the educational sector.
The EnrichUK model takes a simple approach with three main descriptions: project, collection and agent.
For collection description they have produced their own very simple schema, based on the RSLP work, and renaming some of the RSLP fields e.g.
‘subject’ is now called ‘topics’.
Controlled terms are used for subject, geographic coverage, collection type, and language.
The user interface has been designed to provide easy browsing and searching, while the input interface for collection description contributors is also simple.
Despite the simplicity, errors in data input are still found, often due to a misunderstanding of the concept i.e.
what a collection is.
Neil Thomson of the Natural History Museum followed with an insight into biodiversity collections and the work being carried out at national and international levels.
Biodiversity collections come in several different types preserved specimens in museums, observational data, and living collections, for example, in gardens.
The type of user varies widely also, from academic researchers, through naturalists and natural history societies, to the general public.
To be able to cater for all these is a quite a challenge.
Collection Navigator is the museum’s new resource discovery tool, allowing access to the Natural History Museum’s 70 million specimens, 10,000 archive items, and over 1 million titles.
BioCASE, a European funded project, is bringing together collection records from national nodes in 31 countries, and developing a collection-level profile.
This profile is based on a simplified version of the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) schema and uses a variation of Dublin Core known as Darwin Core (a profile for search and retrieval of natural history collections and observation databases).
The challenges arising from this development, apart from actually obtaining the data, were already sounding familiar the problem of names, particularly acute in the natural history field where items have scientific names and common names, as well as synonyms, and the problem of names for geographic locations, particularly ‘fuzzy’ names, e.g.
the Mediterranean Basin.
The third presentation was by Dennis Nicholson and Gordon Dunsire of the CC-Interop and SCONE projects (among others).
CC-Interop developed from the e-Lib Clumps projects and is looking at interoperability with COPAC.
Two of the clumps, CAIRNS and RIDING, are being used with the SCONE collection level description service to investigate collection description standards requirements, and to compile cataloguing and indexing standards in the clumps.
They have surveyed and compared clumps, collection description services, and draft schemas; the resulting report includes a comparative data dictionary for the schemes so that levels of metadata structure can be compared and mapped.
All the schemes were then compared with the RSLP model, finding that there is a high degree of structural compatibility.
However, there is less compatibility in content standards, one of the issues being that of granularity (what is a collection).
Other interoperability issues were discussed: collection identifiers, names, physical location data elements, date ranges (there is confusion between what is meant: the date of collection, the date of production, or the subject date?
For example, what is the date of a collection of 18th century books about classical Rome that were collected in the 19th century?).
Service-level description is a necessary partner to many collection-level descriptions, but is still at an embryonic stage (and probably complex).
Future development with SCONE would involve using additional attributes and data elements such as agent administrator, language of audio material, education level of content, and classification or subject scheme used.
Finally, we were reminded that interoperability applies to people as well through a complicated diagram of co-operative infrastructure for Scotland, incorporating at least 18 acronyms!
Fourth came Susi Woodhouse and Nick Poole from Resource to give us a national perspective on collection-level descriptions, including EnrichUK, Cornucopia [10], with over 2500 collections from the cultural sector, Cecilia [11] from the music sector, currently with 1500 collections from 500 institutions, and Crossroads [12], a pilot project in the West Midlands incorporating pottery collections from Stoke.
Development of collection-level descriptions centred on the RSLP schema with the additional issues of legacy terminology and interoperability between these different projects.
User issues were not forgotten, as these services are aimed at a wide audience, and the concept of a ‘Google for Collections’ was suggested most users just want a quick answer and are reluctant to search in depth, a point picked up later in the discussion.
The final session before the lunch break saw Rachel Bruce, from JISC, describe middleware for the JISC Information Environment.
Currently, an end user of JISC services has to access them separately and via differing interfaces, but in the near future the Information Environment aims to provide integrated access.
Middleware will provide machine-readable information about services, content, rights and users to enable a user interface, such as a portal, to interact appropriately.
Collection descriptions are part of this middleware, and the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) [7] is a pilot project set up to explore and develop collection and service metadata for the Information Environment.
It is the intention that the IESR will be used both by machines and by humans, and again the RSLP schema is being used as a basis for the collection descriptions.
Lunchtime gave us the opportunity to try out so many of the Showcase demonstrator and pilot projects that little time remained to stoke up for the afternoon sessions!
The afternoon kicked off with Bridget Robinson and Ann Chapman, of the Collection Description Focus, presenting a potted history of the development of collection level description, from its beginnings in the e-Lib programme through the development by the RSLP, to the current situation.
The RSLP analytical model of collections and their catalogues has formed the basis of much current work.
Obviously, applying a theoretical model to real-life situations means that modifications are required, and there are still several issues with RSLP that need addressing, such as missing elements, difficulties with element labels, and lack of detail in some elements.
Input from end users should tell us how the scheme could be developed and refined further.
They ended by reminding us that it is still early days in the development of collection-level descriptions, and end users have yet to become familiar with the concept of a description for a collection rather than a single item.
To assist this development the Collection Description Focus have developed an Online Tutorial, and a prototype version was displayed.
A second version of this will made be available after Easter for feedback and suggestions.
Finally, the day was rounded off with a short presentation on the future development of collection descriptions by Paul Miller of UKOLN, and a discussion panel.
The main emphasis of the event, at least to the reporter, was the overwhelming reliance on the RSLP schema and the fact that everyone feels they have to simplify it.
There are many good reasons for this of course, but perhaps an ‘RSLP Core’ is one way to go.
The problems with terminology just won’t go away, and work with end users has scarcely begun!
This was an interesting and informative day, and I look forward to more.
References UKOLN Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ The British Library http://www.bl.uk/ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ The Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) http://www.rslp.ac.uk/ Resource The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries http://www.resource.gov.uk EnrichUK http://www.enrichuk.net JISC Information Environment Service Registry http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/ CC-interop: COPAC / Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation Project http://ccinterop.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ The Natural History Museum http://www.nhm.ac.uk Cornucopia http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/ Cecilia http://www.cecilia-uk.org/ Crossroads http://www.crossroads-wm.org.uk/ Author Details   Verity Brack Institute for Lifelong Learning University of Sheffield Email: v.brack@shef.ac.uk Web site: http://www.shef.ac.uk/till/ Article Title: “Collection Description Focus Showcase Mapping the Information Landscape: A Showcase of Collection Description Projects and Services” Author:Verity Brack Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/cd-focus-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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INSPIRAL: Digital Libraries and Virtual Learning Environments Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines INSPIRAL: Digital Libraries and Virtual Learning Environments Buzz identifier e-learning vle ict url research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Currier introduces the JISC project INSPIRAL, which is investigating what's involved in joining digital libraries and VLEs to create a fully integrated online learning experience.
INSPIRAL (INveStigating Portals for Information Resources And Learning) [1] is a research project funded by JISC [2], [3] to spend six months examining the institutional challenges and requirements involved in linking virtual and managed learning environments (VLEs and MLEs) with digital and hybrid libraries [4].
The needs of the learner are paramount to INSPIRAL, and the focus is higher education in the UK, with an eye to international developments.
The ultimate aim of INSPIRAL is to inform JISC’s future strategy and funding of initiatives in this area; we hope that the research process itself will benefit stakeholders by facilitating discussion and co-operation.
The project runs from 1 May to 31 October 2001, and is based at the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) and Centre for Educational Systems (CES).
VLEs/MLEs and digital/hybrid libraries are important current developments in e-learning.
Their evolution has thus far proceeded along largely separate paths.
Librarians and information scientists have concentrated on bringing their professional skills to bear in the new electronic environment, continuing a long and honourable history of bringing people together with the knowledge they seek.
Educators have followed their own path in finding ways to use new technologies to enhance learning at all levels, in response to ever-evolving understandings of how and why people learn, and the expectations of an increasingly busy and information saturated society.
However, these professionals and their institutions are now beginning to look at ways to integrate these learning tools, for the benefit of their end-users: the learners.
The potential for useful convergence of these developments presents many challenges, some obvious, some probably waiting in the wings to surprise us.
JISC, through its MLE [5] and digital/hybrid library projects and initiatives, has identified a need for thorough analysis of the relevant issues in order to proceed with strategic planning and investment in this area.
While the technical problems of integrating VLEs and digital libraries are being investigated in other JISC projects, INSPIRAL is focusing on the organisational problems and requirements for meeting the HE learner’s needs through a seamless integrated online learning experience.
The needs of the FE institution and learner will also be touched on, with the intention of providing a basis for similar work in that sector.
Casting the INSPIRAL Net Wide: Capturing the Issues INSPIRAL’s aim is to identify and critically analyse issues with regard to linking or integrating VLEs/MLEs and digital/hybrid libraries, from the perspective of the UK HE learner.
The initial phase of uncovering these issues has begun with identification of relevant stakeholders and stakeholder communities.
Within three days of announcing INSPIRAL, there were about eighty subscribers to the project’s open discussion list.
Clearly it was not going to be a matter of hunting out those interested in linking VLEs and digital libraries, but of trying to cull down a representative sample to begin our initial interviewing process!
JISC’s interest in this issue is obviously timely, and INSPIRAL, in catching the crest of the wave, is offering some great opportunities for synergy between the various interested professional groups, funding bodies, learners, system vendors and content providers through our research methodology.
Come One and All and Integrate: INSPIRAL’s Research Methodology INSPIRAL’s methodology begins with stakeholder identification and contact, proceeds through issue capture, and finishes with analysis and the presentation of recommendations to JISC for future of developments in this area.
The issue capture phase will involve: Interviewing key stakeholders in order to identify relevant issues and discuss experiences and visions for future developments.
Holding two initial Forums (12 June & 3 July) and one larger Workshop (25 June) in order to further bring out and discuss the issues raised in the interviews, with a view to bringing together interested parties from all professional groups as well as learners.
Workshops and Forums will be held throughout the UK to ensure maximum participation.
Gathering responses from learners via an online questionnaire on the INSPIRAL web site.
Carrying out a literature review.
Identifying appropriate case studies, including one based in the US, and possibly one based in Australia.
The interviews with key stakeholders have already commenced and are throwing up some interesting perspectives.
The first five interviewees have included: A librarian working with a wide ranging consortium of HE, FE and public libraries to create a digital library; An academic specialising in teaching HE staff to use C&IT in their own teaching; Two university managers involved in their institution-wide MLE projects, one a librarian, one an ICT professional; A learning technology expert (not a librarian) involved in developing a digital resource centre of granular teaching and learning materials.
While each viewpoint expressed was of great interest and value, it became clear that something entirely new might evolve out of bringing together these professions who normally stick to their own turf to discuss their ideas and concerns.
Mixing it Up: INSPIRAL’s Analysis and Presentation of the Their Results The analysis phase of INSPIRAL will involve: Analysing the initial stakeholder interviews, literature review and initial Forums and Workshop.
Executing the case studies.
Holding two final Workshops and one final Forum, with an emphasis on analysing issues previously raised.
Developing best practice guidelines.
Writing and disseminating the final INSPIRAL Report.
We hope that those taking part in INSPIRAL’s research process will gain immediate, useful insights and ideas for further developments of their own work.
However, this project by its nature is dipping its toes into what some might see as a fairly intractable swamp.
Already issues have been raised around: grappling with the predominance of project-based funding rather than long-term service-based funding; the politics within HE institutions and between institutions, funders, and professional bodies; the distance that is sometimes found between librarians and academics even within an institution; the resistance to digital developments sometimes found in both professions; the exponentially increasing morass of projects and initiatives and acronyms that noone really believes they can keep abreast of.
These types of problems are often the swamp that visionary ideas get bogged down in, and those of us who work at the coal face know it, and struggle with it, and attempt to produce something beneficial to our users anyway.
A project that is specifically looking at the institutional challenges involved in any electronic initiative is forced to confront the swamp, listen to people’s hopes and fears, and come out the other side with some way forward.
The needs of the learner are paramount to INSPIRAL’s remit, so we hope that we can shed some light on how to keep these needs in mind and produce online learning environments that the learner will be able to use so easily that they won’t ever guess what went into making it happen!
Some Preliminary Issues Raised It’s very early in INSPIRAL’s research; at the time of writing only five stakeholder interviews and some literature review had been carried out.
However, here is a brief smattering of some interesting issues to think about: Who in a given institution will control the funding and management of these wonderful new online learning experiences?
How will academics, librarians and IT professionals begin to work together as partners in these endeavours?
Is a reassessment of everybody’s role and remit necessary, and, if so, how may it best be facilitated?
Issues of resourcing: Is it true that these initiatives will save money for institutions, or do they require more investment of resources to provide an improved learning experience?
If they don’t save money how do we convince those at the top to fund and support them properly?
How do we deal with short-term project based funding being used to develop potentially long-term services?
Issues of support and training for staff using these systems in their work: The systems must be very easy to use, not just for the learner but also for the academic or librarian creating or contributing to the resource.
Do academics think that digital and hybrid libraries mean human librarians will become redundant?
Do students think that developments in VLEs and MLEs mean that human teachers will become redundant?
How can we overcome these ideas and promote and use the skills developed by these professions to enhance e-learning experiences?
How can we prevent using these systems as a spoon-feeding technique and integrate them fully into the wider activities and goals of the institution?
How can we use them to ensure that learners come out the other side of their experience more information literate, i.e.
better able to find the information they need, and better able to evaluate its worth?
Is it a good use of staff time to be creating their own content when they wouldn’t be writing a new textbook for each traditionally presented course?
If not, how do we ensure the production of high quality content to be used in VLEs, MLEs and digital and hybrid libraries?
These are but a few issues that have been raised with INSPIRAL so far.
If you would like to participate in any way in INSPIRAL’s research, or tap into our results, read on.
INSPIRAL: How to Take Part Join our open discussion list on JISCmail, and be updated on upcoming events, information gathered and research results, as well as using the list to take part in INSPIRAL discussions: visit http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/inspiral.html or e-mail Sharron Brown, INSPIRAL Research Assistant at sharron.brown@strath.ac.uk Visit our web site to see what we’re up to and what we’ve found out so far: http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Come to one of our Forums or Workshops: see http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/news/news.html Let us know of any initiatives, projects or research you are involved in of relevance: contact Sharron Brown, INSPIRAL Research Assistant, sharron.brown@strath.ac.uk or tel.
: 0141 548 4753 Link to our learner questionnaire for students from your own VLE or MLE (contact Sharron Brown at sharron.brown@strath.ac.uk for guidelines): http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/questionnaire/questionnaire.html References The INSPIRAL web site is at http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ JISC’s Request for Proposals for a critical analysis of the issues around linking VLEs and digital libraries is at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub01/vle_lib_rfp.html The Tender which was accepted and became the INSPIRAL Project is at http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents/proposal.html INSPIRAL’s working definitions of the terms VLE, MLE, digital library and hybrid library are at http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/about/defs.html Information about JISC’s other MLE projects can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/mle/ Author Details Ms Sarah Currier Research Fellow INSPIRAL Project Centre for Digital Library Research Andersonian Library, University of Strathclyde Tel: +44 (0)141 548 4586 Fax: +44 (0)141 548 2102 Email: sarah.currier@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Article Title: “INSPIRAL: Digital Libraries and Virtual Learning Environments” Author: Sarah Currier Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/inspiral/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Report on "Institutional Web Management Next Steps" Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Report on "Institutional Web Management Next Steps" Workshop Buzz data mobile software java rdf html database xml portal apache archives xslt metadata css accessibility browser repositories copyright video windows hypertext multimedia opera solaris flash smil e-business authentication mailbase intranet url research ldap Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on the latest "Institutional Web Management Workshop," this year called: "The Next Steps."
The "Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps" workshop took place at Goldsmiths College, London on 7-9 September 1999.
This was the third annual event for institutional web managers which has been organised by UK Web Focus.
The first workshop was held over 2 day (16/17 July 1997) at Kings College London.
As described in the workshop report published in Ariadne [1] the event attracted a total of 95 participants.
The workshop provided a valuable opportunity for web editors to meet their peers at other institutions and compare experiences.
Although the event proved popular, a number of delegates commented that future events should last longer.
In response to these comments last year's workshop, which took place at Newcastle University, lasted for 3 days, from 15-17 September 1998.
The extra time enabled more speakers to be timetabled, but, more importantly, enabled a half a day to be allocated to discussion group sessions, in which issues such as Web Design, Web Server Management, Metadata and Management Issues could be discussed in more detail.
As described in the workshop report published in Ariadne [2] the analysis of the workshop evaluations forms showed that the changes were very appreciated: the overall rating for the event was 4.45 (on a scale of 1 [for poor] to 5 [for excellent]).
Interestingly a number of participants requested even more time for participative sessions.
This year's event had the title "Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps" to emphasise that it is building on the previous events.
It had a similar format to last year's workshop (presentations on the first afternoon and the morning of the second day, with parallel sessions on the second afternoon).
An innovation this year was the exhibition, which featured commercial vendors, and, from the Higher Education community, national services and projects and displays and demonstrations from the delegates themselves.
This year's event also included a popular social event a boat trip on the River Thames to view the Millennium Dome.
The social event provided an opportunity for the delegates many of whom have encountered each other electronically on the website-info-mgt Mailbase list [3] to put a face to the email address.
The Workshop Participants A total of 124 delegates registered for the event.
The majority (almost 100) were from UK Universities and University Colleges.
In addition there were ten delegates from JISC services, two from overseas universities, one commercial delegate (one of the speakers) and fourteen from other organisations (including UCAS, CSU, the British Council, the Natural History Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the British Film Institute and LASER).
The Presentations There were a total of eleven formal presentations during the plenary sessions.
A brief summary of each of the talks follows.
1 Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Beast?
John Slater, the Pro Vice Chancellor for Learning and Teaching at the University of Kent at Canterbury gave the opening talk [4].
At previous workshops have made recommendations that senior management needs to be made aware of the strategic importance of the web and the need for appropriate levels of awareness.
John Slater's talk responded to this by arguing that senior management have become aware that the web manager is being asked for additional financial resources, but corresponding savings elsewhere are not being offered.
John had been asked to open the workshop by giving a provocative talk.
He succeeded in doing this and helped to ensure that the opening talk provoked many questions from the floor.
John argued that: Web Editors are misfits but that's not necessarily a bad thing, as misfits are needed at periods of radical changes within organisations.
Web Editors are located in a wide variety of departments within organisational structures.
Again, at a period of major changes, this is probably no bad thing.
Wed Editors probably miss-sell themselves if they simply ask for more resources because: they are over-worked; they are stressed; we simply must make use of XML/RDF/etc.
; the University of Poppleton provides X (e-commerce, personalised services, etc.)
and we have to as well.
After teasing and insulting the audience (especially the librarians) John reminded us that we have been here before.
In the 1950s it was felt that the UK only needed three mainframe computers.
In the early 1980s some Universities felt that networking was almost "solved" and so there was no need to employ network staff on permanent contracts.
A similar scenario existed for PC support in the late 1980s.
Within the web area, we have heard predictions that technologies such as Java will make things better and that web technologies are about to stabilise.
History tells us that we should expect to see the position of web editor be treated seriously (i.e.
permanent posts on realistic salary scales) within institutions.
John concluded by arguing that web editors should be proactive within their institutions.
Recent funding initiatives in areas such as teaching and learning provide a useful opportunity for web editors to make a case for additional resources in areas of clear strategic importance to institutions.
2 Building Relationships Online Joe Passmore, head of Corporate Marketing at the University of Ulster, built on some of the issues raised in the opening talk [5].
Joe argued that for many university web sites it was unclear what value is added to the university's main activities.
Many web sites exist because it can be done or because everyone else has one.
We should be building web sites based on customers expectations and requirements, and we should find out what the customers want by asking them.
The term Relationship Marketing has been used to describe this concept.
Properly applied relationship marketing can be used together large amounts of data about customers, which can be used to develop personalised web sites.
We are familiar with personalised interfaces in many spheres for example when you visit your bank (especially telephone banks such as First Direct) you aren't always asked if you'd like to open a new account instead you are told about products you may be interested in based on your profile.
Personalised web sites would enable simpler (and appropriate) interfaces to be developed a confusing array of icons labelled "Click here for New Students"; "Click here for Existing Students", etc.
can be avoided.
Examples of personalised web sites exist in the commercial world.
Many of these provide not only web interfaces, but also deliver personalised email messages as users of Amazon are probably aware.
Within the academic world, personalised web interfaces have been developed at UCLA [5], Miami [6] Washington State University [8].
Figure 1: The UCLA Personalised Interface Although relationship marketing may be expensive or difficult to implement today, we can expect to see a move from the experimental services available today to more mainstream use in the near future.
There are many challenges: technical, managerial and legal (such as the Data Protection Act).
However we need to have an idea of the direction in which we wish to travel in order to get there.
3 Beyond Brochureware Building Functional University Websites David Christmas and Ian Roddis of the Open University gave the final talk of the first day [9].
It is summarised here as it follows on from Joe Passmore's talk.
The speakers argued that four classes of web sites could be identified: Indie Sites Webmaster Sites Embedded Sites E-Business Sites We will all be familiar with indie sites.
Although "vanity pages" are typical of indie sites, they can also used to provide useful information.
Indie sites are created by individuals.
Their target audience may be unclear.
Many indie sites make use of a variety of technologies, such as Flash and Shockwave.
Webmaster sites are often developed under the guidance of a committee.
They typically provide a corporate service.
They tend to avoid use of plugin technologies, and typically consist simply of HTML pages containing images.
University corporate home pages are typical of Webmaster sites.
Embedded sites also tend to provide corporate information services.
However they make use of backend databases.
They are technically more sophisticated than webmaster sites.
Figure 2 gives an example of an embedded website.
Figure 2: Open University Web Site An e-business website uses the web as an essential component of the institution's corporate functions.
An organisation has to reengineer its information flow processes in order to implement an e-business web site.
The Open University are moving away from Webmaster web sites and towards embedded and e-business web sites.
A key point about this kind of site is that the embedding is not purely a technical issue: it has to be integrated into an organisation in terms of functionality, managerial involvement, aims, objectives and audience.
It must also be recognised that developing sites of this kind will change an organisation.
4 Multimedia and the Corporate Web The first day of the workshop included two talks on the next generation of web services we can expect to see (personalised web sites and web sites which reflect institutional business requirements).
In addition there were two talks which described aspects of multimedia.
Greg Newton-Ingham, UEA gave a presentation of the potential for multimedia on institutional web sites [10].
Greg began his talk with a video clip from the latest Star Wars movie.
Greg pointed out that this was the most popular video clip ever downloaded from the web.
This is an indication that many people who have an interest in Star Wars (including teenagers who are likely to go to University) probably have PCs capable of displaying this type of multimedia.
They will have high expectations when they go to University.
Demand for multimedia on corporate web sites is probably not driven by web editors or their main customers.
Instead it is probably led from top-down initiatives such as the JISC Moving Image Pilot Project and the CEI Working Group on Moving Images.
The development of services based on multimedia faces a number of challenges including technical challenges (computational power, disk storage and network bandwidth) and organisational and legal challenges (in particular rights issues).
5 SMIL and the World Smiles With You Michael Wilson, Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, followed on from Greg Newton-Ingham's overview of multimedia, to describe one emerging new technology [11].
SMIL (Synchronised Multimedia Interchange Language) is a W3C Recommendation.
A SMIL player will enable a variety of components to be played.
For example one window may display a video clip.
After a specified period of time, a second window may be opened.
One of the windows may be accompanied by a synchronised caption (perhaps for the deaf).
Each of the windows may have hypertext links associated with areas on the screen.
However the link areas may change with time.
A number of companies have already developed SMIL authoring tools and SMIL players some of which are available free-of-charge.
Unfortunately Microsoft are not supporting the SMIL recommendation.
They have proposed a solution known as HTML+Time.
HTML+Time is supported in Internet Explorer v5.0.
SMIL is a declarative language, and is easy for novices to master.
HTML+Time, by contrast, is procedural and programmers will find that it is extensible.
W3C are currently looking into extensions for SMIL v 1.0.
We may find that a future version of SMIL merges the best of SMIL with HTML+Time.
However for now the uncertainties will make it difficult for institutions to commit significant resources to the development of synchronised multimedia services based on use of SMIL or HTML+Time.
6 Browser Management Brett Burridge, University of Essex, began the second day with a talk on Browser Management [12].
Brett argued that as we have policies on the provision and support for many software packages (e.g.
word processors, spreadsheets, etc.)
we should introduce similar policies for web browsers.
He quoted research from Zona Research showing that increasing numbers of commercial companies have introduced browser policies over the past two years.
Institutions also need to monitor the browsers accessing institutional web sites.
This can help to inform browser policies, and also help web developers and designers in choosing appropriate architectures for their services.
An analysis of the Essex website during four days in August 1999 showed that the most popular browser was Internet Explorer (62% of local users and 66% of remote users) and the most popular operating system was Microsoft Windows.
These figures were very similar to ones published by commercial companies.
Brett then reviewed the main browsers which are available.
Internet Explorer and Netscape will be familiar to most.
The Opera browser is small and has good accessibility features.
However it is a licensed product and no administration kit is available.
Mozilla is based on the Netscape source code.
Although it seems to be rich in functionality it is rumoured to be buggy and its release date is uncertain.
Other types of browsers include those available on PDAs, mobile phones and WebTV.
It is not yet clear whether these are gimmicks or will have an important role to play.
Browser administration kits have a role to play in minimising the support and maintenance requirements.
Both Netscape and Internet Explorer provide administration kits which are freely available.
Brett argued that if you have a large number of browsers to support you will need a browser administration kit.
7 Content Management Systems In contrast to a number of talks, Stephen Emmott (KCL) gave a more theoretical presentation on content management systems [13].
Stephen argued that as web services move away from what David Christmas described as "Brochureware" and provide not only static information, but also multimedia resources and data supplied by backend databases, we need to move away from our concepts of information and to think about content.
Content is (or should be) authored, stored and published in a digital format.
It can therefore be replicated, archived, distributed and re-purposed.
Content management systems will help to provide these functions.
We need to think about the web site's unit of granularity.
A file-based view can place limits on the functionality and maintainability of our services.
It may be desirable to adopt an object-oriented view of our web sites.
Stephen concluded by arguing that we need to think deeply about the architectural model for our web sites, the standards we use (and Stephen felt that XML and RDF are probably the key standards) as well as the software products we use.
8 Experiences with XML: Beyond the Hype James Currall (Glasgow) described how XML is being used at the University of Glasgow [14].
He described the limitations of HTML and how XML can be used in specialist applications such as Maths.
He then went on to describe a more mainstream application a committee document system.
There is a need to provide a long-term archive of decisions made within the University.
XML is the ideal format, as it is open and extensible.
An MS Word "wizard" has been developed so that authors will not have to master a new package.
The wizard makes use of MS Word styles.
These can be converted to XML tags, such as <ACTION&;gt;.
The structured information enables new functionality to be developed such as looking for actions.
In his presentation James demonstrated use of XML in his slide show.
He uses a home-grown system (based on XML and XSLT) for storing his slides.
These are converted into HTML and CSS.
The output was very professional, and the multiple-hierarchical interface provided a useful feature which is not easily achieved in PowerPoint.
James concluded by arguing that XML was an ideal format for use as an information repository; for application to application transfer and for display natively in the browser.
Currently only IE 5 has good support for XML, although Netscape 5 is expected to.
Until such browsers are widely deployed we can use XML as an information repository, and convert to HTML.
9 Web Security Andrew Cormack (UKERNA) reminded the delegates that we still need to think about the security of our web sites [15].
Since October 1997 there have been eight CIAC bulletins about the security of the Solaris operating system and eight about Windows NT.
Andrew concluded his talk by reminding us we should that aim to keep the web server host computer simple: don't install software that isn't needed; keep up-to-date with patches and pay attention to log files.
10 Indexing Your Web Server(s) Helen Varley Sargan (Cambridge) described approaches to providing local searching across web sites [16].
Her talk was informed by the survey of UK higher educational institutional search engines published elsewhere in Ariadne.
She asked if users of Excite (used at 19 institutions) were aware of the Excite security concern and that its development seems to have ceased.
Helen also pointed out that the free version of Muscat (used at one institution) is no longer available.
She asked us all if we were aware of how our sites would be indexed if we didn't make use of the robots.txt file.
Helen listed some of the requirements to consider when looking for an indexing tool (e.g.
platform; numbers of servers to index; number of resources to index; file formats to be indexed; extent of use of dynamic data; type of search interface required; etc.)
Helen pointed out that possible solutions included free indexing services, free indexing software and commercial indexing software.
She then gave three case studies: Essex Uses Microsoft indexing software on Windows NT platform.
Indexes 16 servers and about 11,500 resources (including MS Office files and HTML).
Incremental updating is possible.
Free with Windows NT.
Requires NT expertise to manage.
Oxford Uses ht://Dig indexing software on Unix platform.
Indexes 131 servers and about 43,500 resources (including MS Office and HTML files).
Incremental updating is possible.
Free.
Requires Unix expertise to set up and run effectively.
Cambridge Uses Ultraseek indexing software on Unix platform.
Indexes 232 servers and about 188,000 resources (including PDF and HTML files).
Incremental updating is possible.
Relatively expensive.
Very easy to install and maintain.
11 Getting Your Web Site Listed Danny Sullivan (SearchEngineWatch) gave the final timetabled presentation [17].
Danny outlined techniques for getting your web site listed by search engines such as AltaVista and directory services such as Yahoo.
One simple technique for ensuring that a web page is indexed by a search engine is to use the service's "Submit A URL" page.
Typically the page should be indexed from within a few days to two months.
A number of search engines allow multiple URLs to be submitted using an email interface.
Go allows hundreds of URLs to be submitted, whereas HotBot allows up to 50 submissions per day.
AltaVista allows 5 submissions per day.
Within a University context, however, it is probably unlikely that such submission services will be used to any significant extent.
We will normally rely on a search engine to crawl our web site.
Search engines normally index about 500 pages from any one site, so it is desirable to split up a web site if the site contains more resources than this.
A simple but effective way to split sites is to make use of subdomains.
For example instead of using <www.bath.ac.uk/maths/>, <www.bath.ac.uk/english/> etc.
it would be better to use <maths.bath.ac.uk/> and <english.bath.ac.uk/>.
Frames should be avoided if you want your web site to be indexed, as many search engines cannot get past frame interfaces.
Dynamic web pages which include a ?
in the URL (such as <http://www.nike.com/ObjectBuilder/ObjectBuilder.iwx?ProcessName=IndexPage&Section_Id=11200&NewApplication=t>) also act as barriers to search engines.
You should look for workarounds (such as the Apache rewrite module).
Danny concluded by suggesting that interested delegates should visit his SearchEngineWatch web site.
The Parallel Sessions A total of seven parallel sessions were held.
A brief summary of the sessions is given below.
1.
Intranets and Extranets This session was over-subscribed, indicating a clear interest in this topic area.
The session was led by James Currall (Glasgow) who also gave a report on the session [18].
The session provided a useful opportunity for the 24 participants to share experiences.
It was found, however, to be difficult to define the term Intranet, which added complexity to the session, as not everyone was talking about the same thing.
The session included a report on a MIMEO JTAP project [19].
The session identified that authentication was a big issues, and that intranets were more complex than traditional web sites.
The recommendations of the session were: Need for clarification of the term Intranet Need for more events on this topic Need to promote example of best practice Need for guidance on authentication issues including CAs, digital certificates, smart cards, LDAP, etc.
2.
Web Site Navigation Participants completed several exercises including an analysis of (a) UK HEI search engines and (b) 404 error pages (which were based on article published in Ariadne issue 20 [20] and 21 [21]).
The recommendations of the session were that participants would like: One stop web site of useful information and briefing sheets Rerun of session, possibly on regional basis 3.
Metadata The session entitled Metadata: Has The Time Arrived?
used the HE Mall (which will be a portal to UK Higher Educational institutions) as an example of a metadata-driven service to address several issues: The need for the HE Mall.
The difficulties in providing structured information for application-application use.
Technical solutions.
The main recommendations from the session were: HE Mall developers need to be aware of potential difficulties within institutions.
Institutions would like software to help manage their metadata.
Institutions would like case studies illustrating how institutions approach participation in the HE Mall.
4.
Design, Access and Accessibility This session addressed the design of institutional web sites, and how design could help or hinder the accessibility of the web site.
The main recommendations of this session were: The W3C Quicktips card [22] proved very useful for authors and for training.
The community should consider bulk distribution and printing distribution of these (centrally or within institutions).
Training for authors is important.
It should not be treated as a separate issue to general design, but an integral part of the process.
The RNIB/WAI video [23] is very helpful and could be used as a training resource.
New material/web interfaces should be designed with access in mind, and checked with the Bobby tool.
Training materials that raise access issues is vital.
Policy makers should provide funding so that accessible web material can be developed.
Web community needs advice on where funding may be available to redress poor design / access.
It is important for web managers to know what their institutions disability policy is, and who can help them.
5.
Legal, Decent, Honest and True Session addressed three topics: 1.
AUPs You need one If it's based on JANET AUP, remember it has changed Think about your concerns (being sued, bad publicity, etc.)
2.
Data Protection Likely to be part of Web Editor's job New act comes into force in March 2000 3.
Copyright New EU directive out soon You should assert your copyright You should trademark your logo You should probably trademark name variants (e.g.
oxford-university.com is up for grabs) 6.
Web Tools This session looked at two topics: (1) Browsers and Browser Administration Kits and (2) Middleware.
Browsers and Browser Administration Kits: Opera is lightweight and has good support for accessibility, but it's licensed, has no development kit and its Java support is poor.
Web pages may look OK in WebTV browsers under certain circumstances.
If WebTV takes of it may have many implications for us.
Agreement that browser administration software is desirable, but there may be (political?)
difficulties in implementation.
Middleware: Zope is an open source middleware system which is used at Newcastle and Bristol [24].
Paul Browning gave a brief presentation about Zope [25].
Lycee is a commercial content management system [26].
It claims to release webmaster from mundane chores.
It aims to enable non-technical people to publish.
Lychee is under trial at Kings College London and Liverpool Universities, with the possibility of a CHEST deal.
Lotus Notes is used at City University Business School.
7.
Web Editor This session was led by Miles Banberry.
A report on the session was given by Damon Querry [27].
The session addressed four main topics: (1) Getting A Job; (2) Managing The Job; (3) being Supported and (4) Being A Professional.
The "Getting A Job" session was based on an analysis of jobs which had been advertsied within the UK HE sector over the past few years.
It was found that there was a wide range of job titles and wide pay scales.
This led to the conclusion that employers did not know what they wanted.
The "Managing The Job" session looked at the location of the web editor post within the organisation, and attempted to define the ideal web management team.
Having recognised that web editors were located in a range of depertments within instituional organisational structured, it was recognised that it was important to consider support infrastructures.
The "Being Supported" session felt that there was a need for national accreditation, and for support to be provided through regional groups and mailing lists.
The "Being A Professional" session looked into national and international professional bodies which can help set standards for the profession.
These included bodies such as the British Computer Society (BCS) and the Institute of Information Scientists (IIS).
The Exhibition An exhibition was available on the third day of the workshop.
The exhibition included commercial vendors of web software, JISC services and JTAP projects, together with contributions from the workshop delegates.
The commercial vendors demonstrated products and services which were relevant to many of the themes discussed at the workshop.
They included Netcentric Solutions [27] (who demonstrated their Lychee content management system), Redleaf [28] (who demonstrated Netobjects and Colfusion web development products), Open Objects [29] (who demonstrated the Ultraseek indexing software), Highlander [30] (who demonstrated the Cold Fusion), Softquad [31] (who demonstrated the HoTMetal and XMetal authoring tools) and Thames Digital Media, a website design and production company.
In addition to the commercial vendors, the Institute For Information Scientists also provided a stand [32].
Over a dozen displays and demonstration from national services and projects, and institutional activities with the higher education community were provided.
Further details are available [33].
Feedback At the time of writing the workshop evaluation forms are still being analysed.
The initial findings indicate that, on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) the overall content of the workshop was given a rating of 4.08 and the organisation was given a rating of 4.35.
Seventeen people gave the content a top rating of 5, with 32 people rating the content at 4 and 12 at 3.
The ratings for the organisation were even more impressive, with no fewer than 30 scores of 5, 24 of 4 and 8 scores of 3.
There were no rating of less than 3 for the overall content or organisation.
The organising committee is very pleased with this feedback, which reflects the hard work and dedication< of the members of the organising committee, the speakers and parallel session leaders, and, of course, the enthusiasm which was shown by the conference delegates.
A more detailed report on the evaluation will be published shortly [34].
Conclusions The workshop clearly succeeded inits aim of addressing a range of new issues of concern and interest to the web management community.
Plans are already in progress for repeating the workshop next year.
The recommendations from the parallel sessions and other comments included on the evaluation forms will be analysed in order to identify and prioritise further activities.
Many of the topics raised are likely to be discussed on the website-info-mgt Mailbase list [35] which provides the main mailing list forum for the UK HE web management community.
References Running An Institutional Web Service, Ariadne, Issue 11 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue11/web-focus/ Web Focus Corner: Report on the "Institutional Web Management" Workshop, Ariadne, Issue 17 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue17/web-focus/ website-info-mgt archive, Mailbase http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt/ Who will rid me of this troublesome beast?, John Slater http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/jslater/ Building Relationships Online: ... the road ahead or the road less travelled by?, Joe Passmore http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/passmore/ UCLA, http://my.ucla.edu/ Miami, http://www.muohio.edu/ Washington, http://cougnet.wsu.edu/ Beyond Brochureware Building Functional Websites, David Christmas and Ian Roddis http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/ou/ Multimedia and The Corporate Web, Greg Newton-Ingham http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/multimedia/ SMIL and the World Smiles With You, Michael Wilson http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/smil/ Browser Management, Brett Burridge http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/browser-management/ Content Management Systems, Stephen Emmott http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/content-management/ Experiences With XML: Beyond the Hype, James Currall http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/xml/ Web Site Security, Andrew Cormack http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/security/ Indexing Your Web Server(s), Helen Varley Sargan http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/indexing/ Getting Your Web Site Listed, Danny Sullivan http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/materials/dsullivan/ Report on Intranets and Extranets session, James Currall http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/parallel/intranet/report-back/slide.html Content Tools: Build or Buy?, Sarah Larder, Edge Hill College http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/parallel/intranet/mimeo/ Web Watch: 404s What's Missing?, Ariadne, Issue 20 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/404/ WebWatch: UK University Search Engines, Ariadne, Issue 21 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/webwatch/ WAI-Quick Tips, W3C http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/QuickTips.html RNIB video shows how to net millions of new surfers, RNIB http://www.rnib.org.uk/whatsnew/pressrel/wtw.htm Zope: a smart way to devolve the management of a dynamic Web site, Phil Harris, Tony McDonald, Joe Nicholls & Paul Browning http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/zope/iwm99abs2.htm Zope, Paul Browning http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/zope/zope/sld001.htm Netcentric Lychee, Netcentric Solutions http://www.netcentric-solutions.com/product.html Report on "Web Editor" Session, Damon Querry http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/parallel/web-editor/report-back/ Lychee, Netcentric http://www.netcentric-solutions.com/product.html Redleaf, http://www.redleaf.co.uk/ Open Objects, http://www.openobjects.co.uk/ Highlander, http://www.highlander.co.uk/ SoftQuad, http://www.softquad.co.uk/ Institute For Information Scientists, http://www.iis.org.uk/ Poster Displays, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/posters/ Evaluation of "Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps" Workshop, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/evaluation/ website-info-mgt, Mailbase list http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Focus: Report on the "Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps" Workshop" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 23: Ariadne's Thread Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 23: Ariadne's Thread Buzz software database portal archives copyright video cataloguing z39.50 streaming url Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter introduces Ariadne issue 23.
Readers of this issue may have arrived expecting to read an article on the forthcoming DNER service; an article which was heavily trailed in issue 22.
My apologies to you if you are among them.
However, the pace of development of the DNER over the past few months has been so great that we decided, late in the editorial process, to postpone the publication of an article on the subject until issue 24.
This is also in the interests of accuracy and detail.
In the editorial for issue 22 I mentioned that the DNER, which is to be launched during the next academic year, has as its ultimate goal (to be implemented in stages) the provision of customisable interfaces for individual users, so that they will always have easy and quick access to the resources they need most frequently.
The article will address the question of what such an access 'portal' might actually look like in the context of the DNER.
The lead article for this issue is Matthew Dovey's 'So you want to build a Union Catalogue?'
It used to be the case that, if a group of libraries wished to offer a single online catalogue to their collections, they had to adopt a physical union catalogue model, i.e.
they would have placed their catalogue records into a single searchable database.
More recently there has been much work in virtual union catalogues, whereby the user interface offers integrated access to a multiple number of catalogues as if it were a single catalogue.
Neither of these approaches is a panacea, however – both have certain pros and cons, which makes the decision of which to adopt, dependent on circumstances.
Matthew is one of the few people who can give an intelligible presentation on Z39.50 using less than 72 powerpoint slides, and is the technical specialist for the Music Libraries Online project (which uses the Z39.50 protocol.
It uses Z39.50 because it allows cross-searching of remote databases of bibliographic information).
His article gives a theoretical overview of the issues involved.
We have two articles on the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary: one from Juliet New, who is involved in the project, and a user review by Peter Cliff (of UKOLN and the RDN).The online version was launched successfully on the 14th of March.
So far the main downside to its availability is the staggering cost for individual users.
Hundreds of pounds of annual subscription seems a bit over the odds, and the general view seems to be that they might get millions of individual takers if they charged something more like ten or twenty pounds for the privilege of individual access.
We have no idea how they worked out the economics of the online versions availability, but surely there has to be another model.
Imagine the success or otherwise of Amazon, if you had to pay a standing charge of 400 dollars before you could access their databases and buy things.
John Kirriemuir (former editor of Ariadne) has contributed an interesting article on the convergence of games consoles and other information access systems, which contains as an introduction a good overview of the history of games consoles since the early 1970s.
The article contains the astonishing statistic that one in four households in the UK owns a Sony Playstation.
Given the nature of current developments therefore, it could be that in a very short time most Internet access in the UK may occur via a games console, rather than the traditional PC.
Peter Stubley gives his current view of the CLUMPs projects with the benefit of a large helping of historical perspective.
This is based on the remarks he gave in his closing address to the CLUMPs conference in Goldsmiths College, London on the 3rd of March.
A report on the conference, with photographs, has been provided by Ariadne and is available in the At the Event section of the magazine.
Paul Miller reports on the latest MODELS workshop (now up to number 11 in the series).
I have followed my 'Tiny TV' article in issue 22 with another on Broadband video streams available on the Web (ranging from 56kilobits per second up to 420kbs).
It covers only a part of what is available, given the enormous speed of change in the world of streaming video, but it contains a number of interesting sites, particularly for those interested in foreign news broadcasting, and educational resources.
Stuart Peters writes about EPRESS text management software tools, which are designed to streamline publication of electronic documents on the web.
The final article in the Main Articles section is by Eddie Young, who spent Christmas day 1999 wiring up a computer in Honduras, in a wooden house on stilts.
The article contains some of the thoughts provoked by the experience of connecting a remote community to the World Wide Web.
This issue also contains the usual Regular Columns section, and the Get Tooled Up section.
This month the latter section contains two articles by Brian Kelly: one on the use of third party web services; and the other is a survey of links to UK university web sites.
The Odds and Ends section (which I'm thinking of renaming 'Review' shortly), contains the usual cartoon, the caption competition, plus two book reviews, as well as access to the old Checkout Archive.
Enjoy Ariadne issue 23.
Philip Hunter Editor of Ariadne Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 23: Ariadne's Thread" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz archives digitisation accessibility copyright graphics e-science ict e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Following the success of the previous two Public Library Web Managers Workshops, UKOLN is proud to announce the third workshop to be held at the University of Bath in November 2002.
This event offers the chance to step back, look at the bigger picture, and see how public library websites fit into the government's plans to make all services electronically available by 2005.
To quote the DTLR consultation paper: e-gov@local, e-Government is about 'putting citizens and customers at the heart of everything we do' .
Speakers will include Maewyn Cumming, Office of the E-envoy, Danny Budzak, Head of Information Management and E-Government, London Borough of Lewisham and Nick Poole, ICT Adviser, Resource.
The event will have a strong practical theme, and will offer plenty of opportunities to discuss and debate issues with speakers and other delegates.
The speakers are keen to share their experiences of developing web sites and e-services to meet the needs of the e-citizen.
This will be of relevance to those working towards the Information Consultant and Information Manager Advanced roles which form part of the New Opportunities Fund ICT Training for Public Library Staff Programme as part of delivering the People's Network.
It will offer an opportunity to hear from the policy makers and implementers on issues such as analysing users needs, information design and presentation, understanding regulatory and legislative requirements and content creation.
Further information can be found at: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/public-workshop-02/> Are these the 12 most beautiful old libraries in the world?
[24 September 2002] The 2003 edition of the Renaissance Library Calendar features 12 of the most beautiful old libraries in the World, dating from 1570 to 1926.
Chetham's Library in Manchester, UK is one of the 12, as selected from nominations by information professionals all over the World.
Its Reading Room has been chosen as the image for the calendar's cover.
Founded in 1653, Chetham's Library is regarded as the oldest surviving public library in continuous use in English speaking countries.
It celebrates its 350th anniversary in 2003.
The other 11 libraries featured in the calendar, in full colour, are from Australia, Austria, France, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, the UK and the USA.
These wonderful old libraries have proved very popular with book lovers in nearly 40 countries.
Each library photo is accompanied by a brief history and a description of items of special interest.
They include Redwood Library and Athenaeum, in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest lending library in the USA, dating from 1747; two wonderful old abbey libraries in Austria Altenburg and Kremsmuenster; and the magnificent Long Room in Trinity College Library, Dublin; The calendar is published by ISIM in Sweden.
Copies can be obtained at their website at <http://www.renaissancelibrary.com> or from: Stuart Urwin, ISIM, Stora Vastergatan 45, SE-271 35 Ystad, Sweden Tel.
++46 411 121 70 Fax: ++46 411 121 10 Email: urwin@isim.org www.isim.org UK and Netherlands reach agreement on Leading Edge Technologies [30 September 2002] Delivering state of the art networks and electronic services to higher education is benefiting from a growing level of international collaboration.
Both the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the SURF Foundation supply such services to higher education and the research community in the UK and The Netherlands respectively.
They also promote innovation and development of new uses for information and communications technology in education, research and the management of universities.
A recent joint event held in Oxford explored the opportunities for joint working between the two organisations, and led to an agreement for closer collaboration.
Involving experts from the UK, the Netherlands, and also the USA, the event established a strong foundation for closer cooperation in developing an optical network between JISC, SURF and the US-based Internet2 to create a London Amsterdam Chicago optical testbed that will enable research into leading edge networks and applications.
The benefits for the education sectors of all countries could be immense in terms of the creation of internet resources for students, lecturers and researchers, greater access to these resources, wider and more secure networks, and the pooling of both countries' considerable experience in network research and development.
In addition these developments will benefit the development of the e-Science and Research grid programmes in the UK.
JISC and SURF will continue to meet on a regular basis to share ideas about future strategies.
These meetings will identify opportunities for shared development programmes and services, and will work towards common objectives, such as resolving Intellectual Property Issues with publishers and the establishment of international technical standards, leading, it is hoped, to even greater international collaboration.
Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary of the JISC, said: "This collaboration will significantly improve the value of the work both our organisations fund, and help maintain the UK and Netherlands position at the forefront of modern education."
Wim Liebrand, Director of the SURF Foundation, also expressed great satisfaction at the prospect of closer working between the two countries.
He said: "This agreement creates a base of excellence in the application of technology to science and teaching in Europe.
It will be of immense benefit to the education sectors of both countries."
The RDN Virtual Training Suite a new look for a new season [1 October 2002] As the new term begins in universities and colleges across the country, we are pleased to announce that we have upgraded all of the tutorials in the RDN Virtual Training Suite to take advantage of new features, functionality and design, initially created for 11 new FE tutorials launched in June this year.
In response to popular demand (i.e.
feedback received via the Web site and workshops) our tutorials now have the following: A NEW LOOK AND FEEL with the new Web design and graphics created for the FE tutorials NEW LINKS BASKET FUNCTIONALITY you can now view, print or email yourself your selected links; add a comments box to make notes about the links you've saved or turn the Links Basket off to see live links in the tutorial AN ENHANCED PRINT-FRIENDLY OPTION providing a print-optimised version of the tutorial pages, designed to make high quality printouts suitable for handouts.
IMPROVED ACCESSIBILITY in line with W3C recommendations A NEW SYSTEM FOR UPDATING TUTORIALS a Web-based editing system now enables the RDN hubs to regularly update tutorials remotely via the Web.
A more detailed insight into our new technical architecture can be found in a paper written by Paul Smith, VTS Web Manager, which he will be presenting at the ASCILITE 2002 conference.
A pre-print is available at <http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/reports/ascilite02.html> The Virtual Training Suite team will now be focusing their efforts on a new project, funded under the JISC Exchange for Learning programme.
This work include creation of five new FE tutorials; case-studies modelling effective use of this resource in teaching; and development work that explores the potential of the use of these tutorials within Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).
We will keep you informed of new developments as they appear.
Simon Jennings Manager Resource Discovery Network Centre King's College London 3rd Floor, Strand Bridge House 138 142, The Strand London WC2R 1HH Email: simon.jennings@kcl.ac.uk Visit the Resource Discovery Network at <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/> Collection Description Focus [10 October 2002] Collection Description Focus invites you to attend the fourth in a series of workshops aimed at practitioners, technical and project staff.
The event will be held on Friday 8 November 2002 at the University of Newcastle, Castle Leazes Halls of Residence.
Collection-Level Description and Collection Management Tool for the trade or information trade-off?
The workshop will explore the relationship between collection-level description and collection management with specific reference to the needs of professional information managers within the context of 'Distributed National Collection'.
The workshop will bring together views from a range of professionals involved at different stages of the collection management process.
The workshop will explore how collection-level description can be used in the collection management process both as a tool for information managers and an effective means of disclosure and discovery for users.
The event is aimed at practitioners working in this area, including those describing collections or developing and implementing services which utilise such descriptions, and those with an interest in the development and deployment of standards in this area.
There is a special emphasis on the requirements of information managers There is no charge for this event.
Further details and a booking form are available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ Launch of Visugate on World Sight Day [1 October 2002] The Visugate website <http://www.visugate.org>, funded by the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) and managed by the National Library for the Blind (NLB), will go live on World Sight Day (10 October 2002).
For the first time in the UK both visually impaired people and professionals working in the sector will be able to use a single website to find comprehensive, high quality information on visual impairment.
'The present situation with multiple agencies all holding different information is very confusing for people, especially for those who had recently lost their sight and were seeking advice' explains Dave Egan, Visugate project manager at NLB.
'Visugate will change that.'
'The aim of Visugate is to create a single point of entry on the Web to information from organisations across the sector that can be easily searched by anyone with an interest in visual impairment.'
Visugate allows searches by keyword or via one of a number of subject headings, including transport, education, employment and safety.
Users also have the option of a more detailed search.
'Visugate is designed so that the user is provided with straightforward search facilities that give them what they want quickly', said David Egan.
'We want to avoid the problems of 'information overload' that people can face with search engines.
Hundreds of irrelevant links often hide the really useful resources that people are looking for'.
The Visugate project also provides online access to information on visual impairment that may never otherwise have been made available on the web.
Working in partnership with more than 20 organisations, including RNIB, Action for Blind People, the University of Birmingham and the International Centre for Eye Health, NLB has been co-ordinating the digitisation of some 65,000 pages of print material.
This digitisation work has been ongoing since October 2001 and these resources are now freely available and searchable via Visugate.
'We will continue to add links to high quality information resources as the service grows so that Visugate offers its users both scope and depth of information.'
'The initial emphasis will be on information from UK based sources, but this will be extended to the best information internationally over time,' The content of the site is subject to strict quality control to ensure that the information provided is accurate, up to date and accessible.
NLB has drawn on best practice from the academic world in developing the approach to the selection and retention of information for Visugate.
The site and contents will be monitored closely by NLB on a regular basis to ensure the information provided remains current.
Visugate is a fully accessible service that complies with the WAI accessible design guidelines.
Further service developments over the forthcoming months include the introduction of customisable services to ensure that users can tailor Visugate to their own preferences.
Dave Egan hopes to see the Visugate website develop into the meeting place of an online community where people interested in visual impairment can discuss ideas and issues, keep up to date with news and events and browse products and services that are relevant to them.
'Over the next 12-18 months we will add a variety of features to Visugate including a series of special interest networks that will address key issues facing visually impaired people.'
The Visugate project has been funded with the support of a grant from the New Opportunities Fund, a National Lottery good cause distributor, through the Fund's nof-digitise programme.
Visugate is also supported by Vision 2020UK.
For more information and to view the Visugate website visit <http://www.visugate.org>.
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Print Editorial: Introduction to Issue 16 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Print Editorial: Introduction to Issue 16 Citation BibTex RIS John Maccoll, Assistant Director of Information Services, University of Abertay, introduces Ariadne 16.
ARIADNE readers will be aware that this publication has been fully supported since its inception by JISC through the Electronic Libraries Programme.
Initially funded only for two years, we were successful in obtaining a third year of eLib funding, allowing the publication to continue with its mission of featuring developments in networked information in the HE community and commissioning writing from key figures in the field.
In the three years of our existence we have provided coverage of all of the major developments which have emanated from the Programme’s many projects, and provided a forum, both in print and on the Web, for individuals and teams working on projects to describe their work.
ARIADNE’s dual role made it unique within the Programme.
In addition to exploring the role of parallel publication in the provision of professional awareness (the ‘project’ role, which is currently undergoing summative evaluation as the project lifespan nears its end), it also provided a reliable service to the HE LIS community, monitoring and reporting on developments from January 1996 until the present time.
ARIADNE has appeared on schedule every two months.
As a publication with a readership to respect, ARIADNE has been more than an experiment it has been a real publication which, our feedback suggests, made a considerable impact upon the professional literature.
In order for that rigorous schedule to be met, thanks are due to the editors of both print and Web editions, the Editorial Board and the people involved in the production chain, who have worked hard to ensure that quality and timeliness have been delivered with each successive issue.
Unfortunately, ARIADNE cannot be fully funded by JISC beyond this year, and so the November issue (number 18) will be the last.
But the experience we in the ARIADNE team have gained over the last three years has convinced us that a parallel format magazine-style publication is a viable prospect.
Accordingly, we are currently planning for a new, ambitious publication, which will serve networked information users both within and beyond the library.
This publication will require to be established on a commercial basis, charging subscriptions, raising income through advertising, and seeking sponsorship.
The planning and consultation phase is now well underway, and more information will appear in our next issue.
Author Details John MacColl Email: lbajam@tay.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: The Relevance of Underpants to Searching the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: The Relevance of Underpants to Searching the Web Buzz data metadata thesaurus browser widget algorithm url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley explores search engine ranking techniques.
In the courses that I run on Internet searching people often express concern, surprise or plain puzzlement at the way in which search engines relevance rank the results that they return.
Consequently, I thought that it might be interesting to cover this subject in the column.
Why rank pages?
The search engines that are what I call 'free text' search engines will, in general terms, be much more comprehensive than those that provide access to websites via a directory or index.
Consequently, good examples are AltaVista [1], HotBot [2], NorthernLight [3] and so on.
These will commonly index many millions of pages (this isn't the time to go into detail about just how many pages they do or don't index, but suffice to say most people would agree on figures of between 200-300,000,000).
As a result, even relatively obscure terms are going to be found on a fair number of pages.
If you do a search on a more common term engines will retrieve thousands of hits.
Let's take the word 'underpants' for example, which is the term that Lycos are currently using in their television advertisements.
A search for that term will retrieve 4,537 on Lycos [4], 22,442 on Northern Light and 23,192 from AltaVista.
(As an aside, I hate to think about what context the term has been used in, since I didn't dare look!).
Now, there is very little point in just returning the webpages in no order at all, so all the search engines will try to decide what is the most appropriate, or relevant of the pages, to try and give the user the 'best' of them first.
As a result, they will use a series of algorithms to work this out.
Unfortunately, search engines tend to view these as one of their secret weapons; lots of them play on the fact that they give you the 'best' results, so it's not in their interests to make much information on how they rank publicly available.
It's up to individuals to look at the results that get returned, examine the pages and try and work out for themselves why page 'a' is ranked higher than page 'b'.
The advantages and disadvantages of ranking.
It's clearly obvious that pages have to be ranked; if they weren't it would be impossible to find the most useful page out of many thousands.
However, there are a number of disadvantages.
Perhaps the major of these is that the engines can only be as good as the data they've been asked to find.
Imagine that a client comes into your library or information centre, looks at you and just says 'Underpants' apart from thinking they need medical help it's almost impossible to help them.
Do they want a history of underwear, or a list of suppliers, or references to underpants in the news, or something else entirely?
Search engines have the same problem; unless users put their requests into some sort of context they have very little to work with.
Consequently, the knack of doing a good search is to add in more terms to provide an appropriate context, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you how to do that.
A second, almost as big disadvantage is that users are at the mercies of the authors abilities to write a web page that will get a good ranking by engines.
Most people can write a reasonable page or site; one that loads quickly, is content rich and can be navigated easily.
However, the problem arises that if they don't understand how search engines work it is going to be a matter of good luck if they get a good ranking.
Of course, the opposite is also true, in that if you know how the engines work you can get a good ranking for your site almost regardless of its content how many of us have done a perfectly straightforward site, only to end up with one or more pornographic sites being in the top ten?
This isn't the fault of the search engine, or even the person doing the search, it's down to the fact that pornographers are very good at getting high rankings, and they spend a lot of time tweaking their sites to ensure this happens.
I don't blame them for that, although I accept it is an annoyance for those of us who don't have a particular interest in such sites, but I think that it's a shame that authors of sites and pages don't go the extra mile to get good rankings.
What do search engines take into account?
By necessity, this section is going to be vague, since I don't know exactly what one search engine will regard as an important weighting when deciding relevance.
However, I can tell you some of the things that they take into account, and I hope you will find this useful for two reasons.
Firstly, if you are a searcher, it should help you to construct a better search strategy, and to understand why you retrieve what you retrieve.
Secondly if you're writing a web site for yourself, an understanding of relevance ranking may come in handy when you're designing your pages.
1.
Words in the title.
By title, I don't mean what you see in the main body of the screen, I mean what you see at the very top of the browser screen, or when you bookmark/favourites a site.
Some search engines will pay very great attention to the words that they find in the title element of a web page, and to once again use my slightly bizarre search term, the first page retrieved by AltaVista is for 'DryNites disposable absorbent underpants', while the first entry for Northern Light is entitled 'It's all about the underpants' (I'm honestly not making any of this up, incidently!).
In fact, at Northern Lights at least the first 80 entries contained the word in the title element (and probably more besides, but I couldn't cope with looking at more results!)
while back at Alta Vista the same can only be said of 2 of the top ten entries.
Interestingly, although Northern Light also indexes the DryNites site, it doesn't appear in it's own top ten at all.
Consequently, it's clear to see that Northern Lights pays more attention to words in the title than does AltaVista.
2.
The number and position of search terms input.
Most of us are aware that if we put several terms into a search the engines will usually do an OR search, which will result in a large number of references, and they will rank web pages that contain all of those terms higher than those which contain a smaller number of them.
It therefore makes sense to give search engines more to work with, rather than less.
However, what many people don't realise is that search engines will often (but not always) pay attention to the position of words as you have input them.
For example, the search: cars car automobile jaguar and jaguar cars car automobile look as though they are the same search.
However, if you run these two searches on Alta Vista and Northern Light you will get totally different sites in the top ten, and paradoxically it seems that the first search returns rather better references than the second.
I'm not going to pretend that I follow the logic behind this because I don't all that I can assume is that both engines seem to think that most people will put their preferred term last in the list, rather than at the beginning.
I would however strongly suggest that you run a couple of test searches on your own preferred search engine(s) to see if the same holds true of those as well.
3.
Words in the < H1 > ... < /H1> header If you don't author pages yourself, the above will seem like gibberish.
However, < H1 > and < /H1 > are the opening and closing tags used by authors to give greater prominence; rather like chapter headings.
It is therefore logical that if a search engines finds two pages that include the same words, but in one they are in the < H1 > ... < /H > tags it will give a higher ranking over and above the one which doesn't.
Consequently, if you're an author yourself, it's worth while working out what your keywords are, and giving them extra prominence on your pages.
4.
Repetition.
This used to be a key way in which search engines ranked pages, because if a page mentions 'widgets' seven times, it has to be more relevant than a page that only mentions 'widgets' twice, surely?
Logically that is the case, but unfortunately, this idea was picked up very early on by some web site authors, and a favourite trick was to chose a background colour for a page and at the end of each page, in a small font size and with text the same colour as the background repeat keywords over and over again.
The search engines would see the words but the casual viewer would simply see half a screen of so of apparently blank screen.
Search engines caught onto this trick very early on however, and so they tend to either ignore repetitions such as widget widget widget widget widget widget (etc) or they will downgrade or even remove such pages from their indexes.
However, some engines may well still pay attention to repetition throughout a page if it's done correctly.
5.
Proximity Pages that contain the words that you have asked for in your search where the words are close together are generally ranked higher than those pages where the words are spread throughout the page.
Consequently, even if you don't do a phrase search (which is always a good idea), pages with the words 'white' and 'underpants' will rate higher when the terms are found next to each other.
6.
Unusual or rare terms If you search for the two words 'bloomers' and 'underpants' because 'bloomers' is a more unusual term (though I have to admit this is an assumption on my part; I've not actually checked this) web pages that contain 'bloomers' will rank higher than those which contain 'underpants' and pages that contain both will rank higher again.
Therefore, when running your searches, simply be aware that usual unusual terms will affect the ranking you get.
7.
Meta tags These are tags that can be added to the web page by the author and which will give extra emphasis to certain terms.
Some (but not all) engines look for the meta tag element (which is not visible on the page, but you should be able to see them if you View/Source).
Once again however, you are at the mercy of the author here; if she remembers to put them in it will greatly affect the ranking, but if they are left out, the ranking may be lower.
8.
Links Some engines pay particular attention to the number of other pages that link to the pages that it retrieves, and they work on the assumption that if lots of people link to a page it will in some way be a 'better' page than if very few people link to it.
(The flaw here of course is that new pages will have fewer links than older pages in many cases).
Google [5] is a good example of a search engine that utilises this technique, and many people find that it gives particularly good results.
9.
Density.
If a web page is say, 100 words long and repeats 'underpants' 5 times, that's a 5% density.
If another web page is 1000 words long and contains the same word 10 times (giving a density of 1%) although the second page has more occurrences of the word the first page may well rank higher since the word is, relatively speaking, more common and therefore the page has a higher ranking.
10.
Paying for placement.
Some search engines have tried using this in the past, but because people don't particularly like this (since it distorts the results they retrieve) the majority of engines have dropped this idea, preferring instead to make their money by linking appropriate advertisements to the searches the user is running.
Conclusion As you can see, it's a very confusing area, so if you've ever been puzzled as to why one page ranks higher than another, you're not alone!
Ranking is a complicated process, not helped by the fact that engines all do it differently.
That's the polite way of looking at it.
The more blunt view is that it's a total mess and is compounded by the secrecy surrounding ranking.
However, for those engines that use this process (rather than the Index/Directory based approach favoured by Yahoo!
among others) it's the best that we can hope for.
Ideally a controlled thesaurus of some sort (along the lines of the Dublin Core [6] for example) would help bring some order to chaos, at least in the area of meta tags.
However, I'm not going to hold my breath on this one since agreeing to any sort of standards on the Internet is akin to trying to herd cats.
All that I can suggest is that if you're trying a search and it doesn't work on one engine, it's not necessarily because you've done a bad search, it might just be that the ranking process just doesn't reflect your own ideas of relevance, so try another engine and run the same search again, and you may be lucky!
Oh yes, if you ever have to do a search for underpants you have my sympathy, because there are a lot of weird sites out there thanks Lycos!
References 1.
AltaVista <:http://www.altavista.com> 2.
HotBot < http://www.hotbot.com> 3.
Northern Light < http://www.northernlight.com> 4.
Lycos < http://www.lycos.com> 5.
Google < http://www.google.com> 6.
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative < http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/dc/> Author Details Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens, Feltham, Middlesex.
Email: philb@philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independent Internet Consultant Article Title: "The Relevance of Underpants to Searching the Web" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/search-engines/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: Internet Resources for Social Scientists Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Internet Resources for Social Scientists Buzz data software archives cataloguing mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Pete Maggs discusses finding high-quality Internet resources for social science and methodology, based on his experience as a SOSIG Section Editor.
The Social Sciences General, Methodology Section of SOSIG With such a broad remit, this section of SOSIG clearly has the potential to describe an almost endless number of Internet resources.
As editor of the section, my aim has been twofold to include as many multi-disciplinary high quality international resources as possible that contain useful information in their own right, as well as identifying Internet sites that complement and expand upon those included in the more specific sections of the gateway.
Clearly this can be, on occasion, a difficult balance to get absolutely right but as editor I’m always keen to receive feedback on the section and am happy to explore all suggestions for sites that users feel should be included.
Please feel free to contact me directly at the email address <p.r.maggs@exeter.ac.uk> or use the link from the SOSIG page [3].
Figure 1: The SOSIG browsing page for the "Social Science General" section Nearly all of the sites I include provide information that is freely available.
However, if I feel a site is of particular value even if perhaps some sort of subscription cost may be involved its details will also been added.
It is left to the discretion of the user if they actually then wish to subscribe to the data being provided by the host site.
What follows is a selection of some of the most useful and interesting sites from this section.
Types of Internet Resources Available With the new version of SOSIG you now have the choice to browse resources in each section either under an alphabetical listing, or by Resource Type (see the option on the top left of each browsing screen).
Figure 2: The option for selecting different views of the SOSIG browsing section Browsing by resource type gives you a clear indication of the nature of each resource listed, which can save you a lot of time and effort.
I’d like to highlight the following types of resources in my section: Organisations Datasets Books and Directories Electronic Journals, Working Papers and Pre-prints Mailing Lists and Mailing List Archives 1: Organisations Many of the important social science organisations now have a home page.
These can be found by browsing under the following headings: Organisations / Societies Research Projects / Centres You will find the following types of important organisations listed: Research bodies of international standing across a whole range of fields such as the Centre for Health Economics [5] or Centre for Policy Studies [6] Smaller bodies concentrating on more localised concerns for example, the Centre for Rural Social Research at the Charles Stuart University in Australia [7] Special interest, single-issue groups such as Housingnet [8] an independent organisation that aims to utilise the World Wide Web for the benefit of all those concerned with social housing.
2: Datasets The Internet is increasingly used as a means of storing and accessing social science data.
SOSIG has a browsing category for data, which vary in format from: Full-text resources for example, the South African Data Archive (SADA) [9] a non-profit national resource centre aimed at providing and promoting machine-readable research data and documentation to all research organisations in South Africa, other African countries and all other countries internationally.
Alternative European sources could perhaps include CESSDA [10] which is an integrated data catalogue for mainly European social science archives To bibliographies such as the Social Science Bibliography of Northern Ireland 1945-1983 [11] 3: Books and Directories The Internet is throwing up its own version of books.
These include digitised versions of printed books but also new "book equivalents" where a Web site provides primary access to original content held locally, created by a single author or corporate body, and relating to a single topic.
Again, these vary considerably from: Highly subjective personal writing for example, the personal diary of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (1989-present) [12] is a prize-winning, regularly updated and highly personal photo-diary of life on the West Bank following the Oslo agreement.
It is maintained by Nigel Parry who is a journalist employed as a Public Relations Officer at Bir Zeit University.
To official directories such as The Guide to European Funding Opportunities for UK Social Science [13] which provides a set of information sheets written to describe the various sources of European funds available for social science research.
4: Electronic Journals, Working Papers and Pre-Prints When it comes to academic publishing on the Internet, there is a huge amount of variance in online information provision, ranging from full-text electronic journals, to sites that only list Tables of Contents; and from sites that point to single articles, to sites that point to vast collections of articles.
SOSIG now has created new categories to help users to identify very quickly exactly how much information they will be able to access online from a site: Journals (full text) Journals (contents and abstracts) Articles/Papers/Reports (individual) Articles/Papers/Reports (collections) There are many resources in this area and everyone has their own individual favourites.
Perhaps some of the most popular include: The International Social Science Journal [14] published by UNESCO, which like many titles, continues to publish in print format, whilst offering online access to contents pages and journal abstracts.
The fully online, interactive and peer-reviewed journal Public Administration and Management [15].
The ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change [16] (or British Household Panel Survey) which brings together and publishes the abstracts of working papers of researchers from across the range of Social Science disciplines.
5: Mailing Lists and Mailing List Archives You can find a number of generic social science mailing lists in this section of SOSIG.
Again the range of services here is wide.
Some you can use to follow the thrust of ongoing discussion e.g., Economics and social sciences lists [17], which provides a listing of all relevant, current mailing lists at Mailbase.
Others might be used more as a current awareness service e.g.
: The esrc-international mailing list archive [18] which provides access to regular ESRC updates on international research co-operation in the social sciences.
Social Science Methodology / Research Methods and Tools The SOSIG browsing sections often have sub-sections or related sections which point to you to further lists of Internet resources.
Within this section of SOSIG you will find sub-sections for Social Science Methodologies which in turn has sub-sections for Quantitative Methods and Qualitative Methods.
There is also a related section called Research Methods and Tools.
(you can access sub-sections by selecting the links at the top of each browsing page).
Figure 3: Some of the sub-sections available under "Social Science general" This is a fast expanding area.
Examples of the variety of resources already added to the gateway include: Articles such as: "How to Put Questionnaires on the Internet" [19] Full-text online resources like: the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation [20] Useful, very specific, email discussion lists: for example, the multilevel-analysis mailing list archive [21] for people using multilevel analysis (multilevel modelling; hierarchical data analysis) and any associated software (e.g.
MLn, HLM, VARCL, GENMOD).
The SOSIG Subject Guides This has been a brief summary of the collection.
SOSIG has produced Subject Guides for each of its subject sections, which suggest ways in which researchers and academics might use Internet resources to support their work for example to support literature searches, to maintain current awareness and to find teaching resources.
I’ve written the guide called "Social Science and Social Science Methodology on the Internet" available on the SOSIG Web site [22] and you are invited to read this for further information on this topic.
Figure 4: Index for the SOSIG Subject Guides References SOSIG (The Social Science Information Gateway) <URL: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/> Social Science General (section of SOSIG) <URL: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/roads/subject-listing/World-cat/gen.html> SOSIG Section Editor for General Social Science/Methodology <URL: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/profiles/social_science_general.html> Social Science (general) and Methodology on the Internet a SOSIG Subject Guide <URL: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/subject-guides/social_science.html> Centre for Health Economics, University of York <URL: http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/che/> Centre for Policy Studies <URL: http://www.cps.org.uk/> Centre for Rural Social Research <URL: http://www.csu.edu.au/research/crsr/centre.htm> Housingnet <URL: http://www.housingnet.co.uk/basehelp.htm> SADA <URL: http://www.hsrc.ac.za/sada.html> CESSDA <URL: http://www.nsd.uib.no/Cessda/IDC> Social Science Bibliography of Northern Ireland 1945-1983 <URL: http://www.cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/nissbib.htm> Personal Diary of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (1989-present) <URL: http://www.birzeit.edu/diary/> Guide to Funding Opportunities for UK Social Science <URL: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/eu/esrclh.html> International Social Science Journal <URL: http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/asp/journal.asp?ref=0020-8701> Public Administration and Management <URL: http://www.hbg.psu.edu/Faculty/jxr11/> ESRC Resource Centre on Micro-Social Change <URL: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/> Economics and Social Science Lists <URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/category/L.html> ESRC-International Mailing List Archive <URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/esrc-international/> How to Put Questionnaires on the Internet <URL: http://salmon.psy.plym.ac.uk/mscprm/forms.htm> Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation <URL: http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/JASSS.html> Multi Level-Analysis Mailing List Archive <URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/multilevel/> SOSIG Subject Guides <URL: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/subject-guides/index.html> Author Details Pete Maggs Subject Librarian Exeter University Library Stocker Road Exeter Devon EX4 4PT Email: p.r.maggs@exeter.ac.uk Peter Maggs is a Subject Librarian in the University Library at the University of Exeter.
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Continuity and Collaboration: The Online Bach Bibliography Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Continuity and Collaboration: The Online Bach Bibliography Buzz data database usability accessibility cd-rom url research Citation BibTex RIS Yo Tomita introduces the single most important online resource for the study of the composer J.S.
Bach.
For the majority of musicologists, bibliography is not their main subject of research, but a tool for research, an essential tool to gain quick access to the information with which to pursue their own subject of interest.
Bibliography concerns everyone; it is crucially important that we find successfully the most relevant literatures at the earliest possible opportunity, and that we do not miss out any significant research works carried out by other scholars in the field, so that we can get on confidently with the work of our main research interest.
However, there is no definitive bibliography as such that will satisfy the needs of every scholar, and hence we all have to make considerable efforts to be knowledgeable in the bibliography of our own specialised areas of research interests in order to guard our own scholarly integrity.
In an ideal world, we can perhaps do away with this laborious process, and move straight on to deal with the adequately short-listed literatures.
While few would deny that electronic search techniques mitigate some of the difficulties mentioned above, problems will always remain.
The subject of this article concerns the viability of this ideal in general and the ways in which it might and has been achieved with the Online Bach Bibliography.
Before discussing how this can be achieved, it will be necessary to identify recent developments in bibliography with respect to my particular project and subject area – namely, Bach and to discuss future plans to create a more powerful tool that will hopefully appear in the next few years to benefit us all.
Historical Background Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is perhaps the most intensely researched composer of Western music.
This is clearly reflected in the flood of new publications that deal with his life and works.
Taking the tercentenary year of 1985 as an example, there are 751 references that are currently known to me; this means that Bach literatures were appearing then at the rate of two per day.
Owing to Bach’s global popularity, research is becoming increasingly specialised and fragmented to the extent that even an established scholar would often find it hard to keep up with the latest developments in research, let alone those assertions and reports of discoveries made many years ago.
Needless to say, it is impractical to manage the sheer quantity of information in this way, especially since a new publication now appears at the rate of one per day.
An electronic publication is therefore much better suited for this particular type of project, for only electronically can we maintain quickly and cost-effectively the most up-to-date information, whilst at the same time benefiting from advanced search facilities often available to sift through the vast amount of data The Online Bach Bibliography and its Strengths The Online Bach Bibliography was first launched on the Web in May 1997, and ever since it has been updated regularly.
It is now being mirrored at the Performing Arts Data Service (PADS) web site at http://www.pads.ahds.ac.uk/bachbib During this period after 1997 many improvements were made to the usability of the bibliography’s facilities, whilst over two thousand new records were added to the database.
At present, it contains over 16,400 records of bibliographical references that are considered useful for the scholarly discussions of Bach’s life and works; currently I receive various forms of contributions from fifty scholars from all over the world.
Today the Bach bibliography is by far the largest reference resource of its kind, when compared with some of the other main bibliographical resources.
Indeed, if we look at the comparative statistics in Table 1 showing the Online Bach Bibliography’s coverage alongside earlier attempts to cover the Bach literature, we see to what extent the online version eclipses those previous attempts.
Table 1: Comparing the scope of bibliographical data on ‘J.
S. Bach’ Bibliographical Reference Items Coverage Notes The on-line Bach Bibliography 16,400 1800-2000 plus c.700 of pre-1800 refs ‘Bach-Schrifttums’ series in Bach-Jahrbuch 8545 1800-1990 see Error!
Reference source not found.
for details rilm online (via OCLC FirstSearch) 4531 1967-2000 keyword search ‘Bach, Johann Sebastian’ IIMP CD-ROM (reviewed in 1998) 1588 1920-1995 keyword search ‘BACH’ The New Grove, J. S. Bach (1983) 559 1737-1980 carefully selected ArticleFirst (via OCLC FirstSearch) 436 1990-2000 keyword search ‘Bach’ There is no subscription fee to use the Bach Bibliography and it is relatively straightforward to operate the system.
To find out the books and articles you need for your study, you can simply key in some keywords—be it the name of the author, or keywords or a short phrase in the title: if you are looking for Bach’s influence on Mozart, for example, what you need to do is simply to type “Mozart” in the title field.
In response, the Bach Bibliography will report to you a list of more than 130 literatures.
It also offers some advanced facilities which greatly enhance the speed and usability of information retrieval.
With its ‘complex search’, you can smartly short-list the literatures by simply specifying the genre, specific works, or the aspect of discussion, or a combination of these.
So you can now search the literatures which exclusively deal with the ‘analytical’ discussion of the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ or a ‘theological’ inquest into ‘St Matthew Passion’.
This is made possible by including some additional fields in the database as shown in 2, the features not found in other electronic bibliographies: Table 2: Additional fields made available in each record Field Notes Genre general classification of genre, i.e.
vocal, keyboard, instrumental, etc.
Music Specifying Bach’s works (in 3-letter abbreviation) discussed; see ‘complex search’ Aspect Specifying the aspect of discussion in 3-letter abbreviation; see ‘complex search’ Publication type book, article, thesis, facsimile, music, unpublished paper, review Language used Specifying with 3-digit telephone codes: 001=English; 049=German; 033=Dutch...
Reviews list of its reviews or author’s own summary in separate publication Created date on which the record was first created Modified date on which the record was last modified Memo reserved for future use for feedback, comments, etc.
So within the ‘complex search’, you can also combine the search with other filters such as ‘language’ and ‘publication types’.
If you are looking for all the facsimile edition of Bach’s vocal works, for instance, what you need to do is to click on ‘vocal’ genre under ‘Music Search’, and then scroll down to find ‘Publication Types’ and click on ‘Facsimiles’.
Within a few seconds after pressing the ‘Begin Search’ button, you will see a list of 36 facsimile editions appear on the screen.
When the result of your search is displayed, you can do several things: you can view the record with further details by clicking on ‘full view’ from where many additional information about the publication can be learnt; you can list the author’s other publications by clicking on his or her name, which might highlight the related publications by the author that are not picked up by the previous search; you can search all the other articles in the same volume by clicking the ‘series’, which may show the broader context in which the article was published.
The facilities described so far deal with the information about older literatures that one can retrieve from the database.
I also created two other modes of information browsing, namely ‘Essential Collections’ from where you can check both contents and bibliographical details of reference editions and important series and periodicals, and ‘New Publications’ where you learn the news of latest and forthcoming publications.
Associated with this is the ‘On-line Review’ of newly published books, which I started from January 2000.
The review was conducted in the ways the prospective readers would be able to decide whether or not they should obtain the book for their own study.
Unlike rilm where authors’s own summary is given (see Table 1), my review provides a summary of its scholarly contribution with a full list of the works discussed, followed by a critical assessment of the book in 500–1000 words.
Some Faults ?
As this project develops, it is clear that the search engine is an area to be looked into, since there is clearly considerable potential to improve the search techniques currently used by the Bach Bibliography.
(1) While it already provides some of the useful facilities outlined above, it does not offer a number of other functions that are also considered helpful, such as the ability to sort the search result alphabetically or chronologically, or to narrow or widen the search, let alone in the order of relevance to the query.
As the data grows larger continually, it is essential to implement not only these more sophisticated functions but also more effective searches driven by Artificial Intelligence techniques to offer more intuitive and powerful facilities that emulate the way experts react to the bibliographical information, for example, how they might predict which literatures are more important than the others.
In order for an AI program to draw an answer, we need to consider a range of issues that become the basis to build its knowledge, which are tentatively listed in Table 3.
Table 3: Knowledge required for measuring the significance of its scholarly contribution by an AI-driven search category of knowledge about the author about the book about the article Knowledge extractable from the existing database publication record participation in NBA project publisher’s prestige by its history of continuity page numbers year of publication number of reviews prestige of the journal by its history of continuity page numbers Knowledge to be assigned (either manually or by vote) into database specialisation education posts held specific scholarly contributions the number of citation by others prestige of the journal by referee status specific scholarly contributions the number of citation by others Finally, there is the question of wider accessibility.
The Bach Bibliography was currently made available on the Web alone.
The Queen’s University Belfast, where the database was stored and the searches carried out, is connected to the rest of the world through the Web by a single JANET connection via Manchester.
Though serviceable, the connection could and did fail from time to time.
Now that the bibliography is mirrored at the Performing Arts Data Service at the University of Glasgow, the Online Bach Bibliography is ensured its continuing availability, but also improved accessibility whilst also ensuring a faster service for everyone’s benefit.
Future Directions, AI and the Question of International Collaboration Having identified and examined its main facilities and the areas for further improvements, it is clear there needs to be clear plans for the future to enhance the quality and accessibility of the Bach Bibliography.
In order to carry out a major overhaul, a research grant has been sought.
If the bid is successful, the work will commence from next spring focusing on the following points: 20.
The expansion of the main bibliographical data by systematically covering the important periodicals published between 1800 and 1900 that have not been properly catalogued in the past, while compiling a critical bibliography of those appeared during the nineteenth century and making it available on-line as ‘special collection’ of the Bach Bibliography where the articles, reviews and advertisements that are considered to be useful for Bach studies will be extracted, critically commented, cross-referenced and indexed.
21.
With the aid of an AI programmer (who will be recruited for the duration of two and a half years), the current search engines will be replaced by more sophisticated AI-based modules.
22.
A full mirror service will be established from the USA and Japan, in addition to the service at the PADS, whilst also producing a CD-ROM version for those who have no Internet access.
In terms of resource value, the systematic coverage of an important collection of nineteenth-century materials, especially rare items dating from before 1850, will be a hugely significant contribution to scholars who would otherwise have no convenient means of learning about the existence of such source.
The selection of periodicals will be carefully made, and advice will be sought from three external advisers to ensure the successful completion of the original objectives.
(2) The incorporated data will appear rapidly on the on-line resource via the Web.
The search techniques gained from this project will also be made available on-line as well as in CD-ROM form in order to aid scholars working on many similar projects using text-based applications.
With the improved search engine, the searches can be conducted much more efficiently and intuitively.
The production of the CD-ROM version will also give access to those not able to use the resource via the Web.
Quite separately, another discussion with a research institution is under way to develop a further extension to this ‘special collection’ by linking the database of early edition with a sample of digitised images.
There will be many other possible ways to extend the research resource network in the future, and I am always looking for ideas to do so.
These major renovation works on the Bach Bibliography will surely bring greater benefit to music scholars; yet the project could not have reached anything near success without the collaboration and contributions off the community of Bach scholars everywhere, adding their own resources, knowledge and expertise and with the aid of technology, providing a resource of immense benefit to that community, and one that provides something of an exemplar to ambitious and non-commercial collaborative projects everywhere.
If, to address our first question, the perfect bibliography is always something to be aspired to but never perhaps to be attained, it is technology, collaboration and an open and questioning spirit that will at least set us on the path to providing a resource that will be of immense benefit to, in this instance, music scholars worldwide.
(1) The present search engine was developed in 1997 by Malcolm Vincent of Computer-Based Learning Unit at Queen’s University Belfast, to whom I am extremely grateful.
(2) I am grateful to Professor Christoph Wolff of Harvard University, Dr Peter Wollny of Bach-Archiv Leipzig, and Dr Michael Kassler, specialist in the English Bach Movement in the 19th century, for agreeing to act as external advisers for this project.
Author Details   Dr Yo Tomita y.tomita@qub.ac.uk Lecturer, Queen’s University Belfast Article Title: "The Online Bach Bibliography" Author: Dr Yo Tomita Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/bach/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Hylife: Ten Steps to Success Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hylife: Ten Steps to Success Buzz data database browser copyright graphics vle authentication ict url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Peter Wynne, Catherine Edwards and Maureen Jackson, on some important aspects of running a Hybrid Library Project.
HyLiFe (The Hybrid Library of the Future), one of the five Hybrid Library Projects in eLib’s Phase 3 formally ended as a project at the end of 2000.
Distinctive features of HyLiFe include its diverse consortium, its non technological approach and its emphasis throughout on evaluation.
By drawing on evaluation findings in HyLiFe’s six partner sites, it has been possible to identify ten steps which need to be observed en route to successful Hybrid Library implementation.
This summary of recommendations is intended as a practical guide for practitioners planning a hybrid service model, and is presented here in full.
The “10 Steps to Success” were first presented at the HyLiFe Hybrid Library workshops (September to December 2000) and were first presented in the form reproduced here at the eLib Phase 3 conference The Future is Hybrid: Libraries in the 21st Century held at the British Library, 1 November 2000.. 1.
Secure the support of senior institutional managers and heads of departments (especially the Head of Library and Information Services).
The experience of the project at all of HyLiFe’s six implementation sites has demonstrated the crucial importance of securing senior management backing for the introduction of hybrid library services.
The hybrid library brings with it the possibility (indeed, the likelihood) that all the library’s stakeholders experience of its services will be changed, as will interactions among groups of stakeholders.
In the case of a project which will deliver such far-reaching change, it is simply unrealistic to believe that successful implementation is possible by, for example, a small project team acting in isolation.
The hybrid library ‘brand’ needs to be seen to be endorsed by senior management within the library, and with other learning support departments, such as computing services, on which the library draws.
This endorsement should be formalised by the establishment of a body – a working party or steering committee – to focus support on the hybrid library development.
On this committee should be represented the managers of the departments already noted, as well as university management and faculty personnel.
The committee will advise on strategy, set goals and monitor the progress of the implementation team.
Furthermore, there is much to be said for the project management technique common in the United States of having a ‘Project Champion’.
The Project Champion acts a sort of figurehead for the project.
He or she is a senior individual of high visibility, who regularly mixes with other opinion formers within the project’s host institution and beyond.
In this capacity, the Project Champion can publicise the project in a wide range of fora and can by so doing ensure a continuing high level of familiarity with (and, it is hoped, acceptance of) the project’s objectives among affected stakeholders.
An appropriate Project Champion for a hybrid library venture would of course be the University Vice-Chancellor.
For a Project Champion to offer the maximum benefit to a project, he or she should be someone who does not have a direct interest in the work and is seen by others as neutral.
2.
Work collaboratively.
Bringing different perspectives and experience together with a common purpose reaps dividends.
The need for close working between LIS, technical and academic staff, along with senior management support has been highlighted.
The pressure for groups to collaborate is well recognised, having been made more acute by such factors as the growth in Information & Communications Technologies and the increase in resource-based learning methods1.
It has been noticeable over the three years that the project has been running, that Hybrid Library models such as HyLiFe are heavily dependent upon collaboration for their success.
It seems that merely coining the term ‘Hybrid Library’, and thereby clarifying the concept in people’s minds, has focused attention on the role of the library in the educational process.
There has been an increased awareness of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) over the project’s lifetime.
The VLE, like the Hybrid Library, draws on advances in Information & Communications Technologies to create an integrated package of educational tools accessible via a single web browser interface.
The boundaries between the Hybrid Library and the VLE have become blurred and it is no longer possible to consider these in separate contexts.
New Hybrid Library services are able to extend the remit of the ‘traditional’ library which was often perceived as peripheral to the educational process.
Collaboration between groups such as teachers, learners, information specialists, web designers, technical and educational development staff will be a key to Higher Education in the future.
Establishing a degree of convergent thinking between such groups and individuals is the first step.
3.
Establish strong links with academic staff and get them involved.
Students follow the recommendations of their tutors.
As noted above, acceptance of the aims of the hybrid library strategy will certainly be enhanced if senior faculty personnel are included on the working party or steering committee.
However, it has been found even more important to secure the engagement of the research staff and the teaching staff who have regular contact with the students at whom the hybrid library will be aimed, as students tend to follow the advice of teaching staff as to which resources to use.
It will be important to include course leaders, module leaders and year tutors.
Before co-operation can be secured, interest in the hybrid library must first be awakened.
The HyLiFe project has noted that the most effective way of engaging the initial interest of teaching staff is to show them a skeleton interface.
This should include easily navigable links to a small range of resources relevant to courses or units on which they teach.
The key point is that such a demonstration should not be of a finished, glossy and technically impressive interface to comprehensive resources: such an interface may well impress, but it will not engage the interest and involvement of the academics.
An outline service is much more effective in this regard, as lecturers can be invited to suggest complementary or even alternative resources to those demonstrated, and may even volunteer them unprompted.
In this way academic staff can be drawn into the project and can develop real ownership of the interface 4.
Consider scalability from the beginning not at the end.
This will save much time and effort.
Scalability is an important but often overlooked aspect of new information services design.
It is altogether too easy, when designing an experimental service for a research project, to produce a finely-wrought and complex model which is simply impossible to extend into an operational service.
Usually, the main factor which limits scalability of experimental services is staff resources, but other resource limitations may equally well be encountered.
The danger is that service designers see the limited applicability of the experimental model as a safety net: as the model has only to serve a limited user base for a limited period, resource-intensive solutions are proposed which cannot be sustained on a larger scale.
This concentration on the model itself can cause the research team to be heedless of the requirement that the best test of their experiment is not that it works in its own terms, but that it can be subsequently applied more broadly and with similarly successful results.
The problem of scalability arose at one of HyLiFe’s implementation sites, and the experience of the project team in this case also illustrates HyLiFe’s findings in respect of interface differentiation in the hybrid library.
The partner in question opted to design an interface to hybrid resources for undergraduate Geographers.
The main characteristics of this user group are that they tend to be full-time, on-site students of the traditional 18-21 undergraduate paradigm.
This undergraduate Geography course is modular, with around 40 study modules.
The project staff designed an interface which was itself modular, in response to the course structure: the student using the interface was prompted for details of the module he or she was currently studying, and resources proper to that module were presented to the user by the interface.
This approach certainly maximised the chances of the user locating relevant information, and minimised the chance of time being wasted through exploring resources which were not relevant to their module, but it was found that the model simply was not scalable by virtue of being very time-consuming and labour intensive.
The few modules completed were very well received but it rapidly became apparent that it would be impossible, in resources alone, to extend the interfaces to all the Geography modules for the three-year course, let alone to other disciplines.
There is, however, no need to fall back on the entirely opposite approach of “one size fits all” which is apparent in many university (and library) home pages.
Other HyLiFe sites found that by identifying customer groups with broadly similar interests, and by constructing the interface from standard component pages which link dynamically to backing databases, it is possible economically to maintain a limited number of customer-group-specific interfaces which meet user needs.
5.
Secure effective technical support from the start by making detailed agreements as to who, what, when, where and how often.
This point is closely connected to that of securing senior management support already discussed.
Tasks such as interface design, access and authentication management and the networking of new services all require intensive input from personnel with highly developed ICT skills.
In converged LIS environments, appropriately skilled personnel are likely to be already present, but their workloads will probably preclude the straightforward inclusion of the strategic redesign and lengthy testing of fundamental ICT services which the hybrid library frequently requires.
Where services are not converged, and the library manager needs to draw on a university-wide Computing Services department over which he has no de facto jurisdiction, the position is commensurately worse.
Not only can the manager not allocate ICT development resources according to his or her own priorities, but a pan-institutional ICT department will generally have even greater pre-existing demands on its capabilities.
In both cases, success will be far more likely if computing services managers are included in the university’s hybrid library development steering committee.
Membership of this body by ICT personnel will facilitate a clear view early in the implementation of the other institutional demands with which the hybrid library must compete, and will give hybrid library development personnel a clear view of the issues and restrictions which may be imposed by institutional ICT policies and capabilities.
In the case of a converged service this view will enable the information services director to re-order his or her priorities.
In the case of a non-converged service, much can be achieved by mutually agreed collaborative working guidelines and service level agreements.
Above all, informal ‘grace and favour’ arrangements, whether or not they enjoy the endorsement of senior management can certainly never be recommended.
6.
Concentrate on resolving authentication and copyright issues The twin issues of authentication and copyright are arguably the greatest barriers to exploiting the potential of hybrid or electronic libraries.
Essentially, authentication procedures ensure that would-be users are who they say they are, and have a right to access at least some of the library’s services.
Authorisation procedures are necessary to prevent individuals (authenticated or unauthenticated) from gaining access to information to which they are not entitled.
Copyright regulations are designed to protect the property and moral rights of those who have created or who own the copyright of original works.
These are more difficult to interpret and regulate in an electronic environment than in traditional environments, since copying is so much easier to undertake.
Very often electronic information access is governed by contractual arrangements rather than by copyright law, since there is no effective provision in law for electrocopying.
HyLiFe’s contact with users of the service has shown overwhelmingly that the concepts of authentication (and authorisation) and copyright are poorly understood and therefore resented.
When licensing restrictions are added into the equation, it can appear that it is the library service itself which is causing problems.
For off-campus learners (and teachers) the frustrations are even greater than for those on main sites and it is the remote learner who is potentially the greatest beneficiary of the Hybrid Library.
When developing new hybrid services, local solutions need to be sought to enable easy access to electronic resources and also to raise the level of understanding of limitations to access.
7.
Devise policies on the provision of services such as loans, photocopying, document delivery etc.
As in the case of authentication and copyright, local plans for supplying documents should be implemented, in order to support the new hybrid service.
This is particularly pertinent in view of the increase in distance students currently engaging in Higher Education; these students have been shown in the past to be disadvantaged in terms of learning resources2.
The ultimate aim of the Hybrid Library, because it can be accessed electronically, would be to provide equality of information support for all learners, regardless of location.
Indeed, recent years have seen very many full-time students spending a lot of their time studying off-campus.
They have been able to do so because Internet access is now so widespread.
This equality of support raises questions of financial and staff resources which need to be addressed early at the strategic level, particularly as user expectations are likely to be increased by the promise of the Hybrid Library.
At Northumbria, for example, a new service for distance and part-time learners has been developed using HyLiFe as its model3.
The service includes a six week postal book loan period, a range of electronic request forms and an article photocopying service.
8.
Promotion should be vigorous and ongoing.
Face to face promotion is the most effective.
Tell people what is in it for them.
The importance of promotion was underestimated in the early stages of HyLiFe.
It is an area of LIS activity which has grown enormously as new services and systems have proliferated in libraries.
In the bygone days of the print-based library, the ‘goods on offer’ were clear to see, their benefits relatively well understood.
Nowadays, with so much change and innovation in both what is on offer and how it is offered, many library users may be forgiven for fighting shy ‘I don’t need this;’ ‘It’s too difficult to work;’ ‘I’ll stick to what I know.’ The task for LIS staff in overcoming this reaction and indeed, in raising awareness of their services across the board, is immense but vitally important.
Maureen Jackson’s paper in Vine 4 explores some of the essentials of promotion highlighted by HyLiFe, starting with the quality of the product or service to be promoted, which must be high if it is to be worthy of attention.
Next comes identifying the audience(s) to be targeted, for example institutional managers, departmental managers, academic staff, LIS staff, students, researchers.
Our hardest task was to reach academic staff; here the best approach was to demonstrate ‘what was in it for them.’ This could include selling the Hybrid Library interface as a good way of disseminating reading lists or as evidence of good practice for QAA.
Timing was crucial, the best time to promote being when the potential user had a definite need of the service.
Methods of promotion included the usual posters, leaflets and newsletters but small business cards and e-mail had proved useful.
No method was found to be as effective as face to face communication, whether with individuals or small groups.
In addition, promotion needs to be an ongoing activity, a rolling process aimed at reaching the target population whenever possible.
9.
Focus on content rather than design, ensuring that what is delivered is useful, not just attractive.
A set of well-designed Web pages is a must for a hybrid library and can be as pleasing to the eye as a well-produced book or journal.
However, there is nothing more guaranteed to provoke strong and differing reactions among web-cognoscenti (e.g.
computing and library staff) than the design and tools used in web sites.
Individual responses to web design are extremely subjective, no doubt prone to multiple influences related to aesthetics and learning styles.
HyLiFe has preferred a user-centred rather than a highly technological approach and chose to test out its new Hybrid Library interfaces in the real world as speedily as possible.
The interfaces themselves, therefore, are relatively simple in appearance and the content heavily influenced by the needs and wishes of their users as identified through user needs analysis.
Evaluation by means of live observations, questionnaires and interviews shows that the naïve user (i.e.
the majority of our target user groups) are less concerned with the appearance of the web site than with the resources available through it.
They have little to say about colours, graphics or layout; their use of the site tends to be driven by need (my dissertation, my presentation).
They are impressed by the range of resources the service presents; they want the service to be quick and easy to use.
There is, of course, no tension between ‘content’ and ‘design’ unless, that is, the design in some way acts as a barrier to locating and retrieving resources; indeed, the purpose of good design is to facilitate those activities.
Our policy has been, therefore, to ‘keep it simple and give users the best resources possible for their purposes.’ At Northumbria, for example, this approach has been fruitful.
A simple template was first developed for Health Studies students (HyLiFe for Health) then adapted for Geography undergraduates (HyLiFe for Geographers).
By next Easter, this broad subject approach will be adopted by 35 subject areas across the University; library subject specialists undertaking this task do not find it arduous.
10.
Plan training and support for users and ensure that they have the confidence to use information technology.
This is a seemingly obvious pre-requisite for success but one which, in HyLiFe’s experience, is frequently neglected.
It is also an issue which will reap ample dividends if properly addressed, as HyLiFe’s evaluation data contains ample evidence that students follow their tutors’ recommendations as to effective information services.
Indeed, undergraduate students are far more likely to act on a tutor’s suggestion of a suitable information service than a librarian’s endorsement of the same service.
Hence, it will be readily seen that if students are being recommended to use hybrid library services by their lecturers, but are hampered from doing so by lack of confidence or by poor or insufficient training, a valuable stimulus to prompt take-up of the hybrid service may be lost.
Worse still, its loss may not be readily apparent, as HyLiFe’s evaluation also shows that, although students will heed their tutors in seeking out relevant information services, they do not feed back their obstructions and frustrations to the lecturers in attempting to do so.
For example, some tutors interviewed at one HyLiFe evaluation site stated that they encouraged use of BIDS services by their students, and assumed that these services were being used.
In reality, barriers such as login procedures and unfamiliarity with the interface were proving enough to deter many students from using the services.
This experience, and others like it during the project, have led the HyLiFe team to conclude that a properly implemented evaluation can substantially change LIS professionals’ views of how effective their services really are.
The planning of training and support should be responsive not only to their existing level of expertise, but also to their circumstances.
HyLiFe has amassed a considerable body of experience in extending services to user who, for various reasons, find it difficult to get access to the library on a main campus site during normal teaching hours.
These students may be on franchised courses at off-campus sites; they may be on work placement away from the university or they may be part-time students whose on-campus attendance is wholly taken up by taught session, leaving no time for library visits.
Appropriate training and support under these circumstances may entail sessions scheduled out of hours (including the availability of ‘drop-in’ and ‘one-to-one’ sessions, as well as group training), sessions delivered at off-campus sites, and the inclusion of training sessions in teaching time.
Where users are on a part-time course, which is coupled with career and domestic commitments, and where teaching time is at premium, outstanding relations between faculty and LIS are indispensable if this last technique is to be successful utilised.
Conclusion The HyLiFe project’s “10 Steps to Success” were derived from the experience of developing hybrid library services in a wide variety of often challenging environments.
But it would not have been possible to reach these conclusions without an intensive programme of evaluation, which placed each development under the microscope and subjected it to scrutiny.
The Evaluation Officer monitored and evaluated the progress of the project, the performance of the interfaces, and the impact of the services.
While funding within eLib required the team to engage in such activities, they were of immense value to out learning.
It is recommended that when such developments are undertaken as part of service development in institutions, a similar programme of evaluation – if possible undertaken by staff outside the immediate project team – be undertaken.
Feedback from successes and failures then enables services to be tuned to meet real needs in realistic ways.
References Edwards, C., Day, J. M. and Walton, G.
(eds.).
Monitoring organisational and cultural change: the impact on people of electronic libraries: report of the IMPEL2 Project.
London; Library Information Technology Centre, April 1998.
Wynne, P. M., Butters, G. and Brophy, P. ‘Delivering the library to its users: from the BIBDEL Project to the Virtual Academic Library of the North-West’.
Interlending and document supply, 25 (4), 1997, pp.
166-174. http://unn.ac.uk/central/isd/subj/distl.htm Jackson, M. ‘Promoting your website: some findings from HyLiFe’.
Vine 113 part 1, 1999, pp.
32-37.
Author Details   Peter Wynne, HyLiFe Project Manager Catherine Edwards, HyLiFe Assistant Project Manager Maureen Jackson, HyLiFe Evaluation Officer HyLiFe URL: http://hylife.unn.ac.uk Article Title: “Hylife: Ten steps to Success” Author: Peter Wynne, Catherine Edwards, Maureen Jackson Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/hylife/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Exploring Planet SOSIG: Law, Statistics and Demography Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Exploring Planet SOSIG: Law, Statistics and Demography Buzz data software database archives microdata foi url research Citation BibTex RIS Planet SOSIG: Exploring Planet SOSIG: Law, Statistics and Demography: Janette Cochrane, Sue Pettit and Wendy White.
Planet SOSIG continues its review of the main SOSIG subject sections, highlighting the resources that the Internet can offer to those working in the different fields of the social sciences.
(Planet SOSIG continues its review of the main SOSIG subject sections, highlighting the resources that the Internet can offer to those working in the different fields of the social sciences.
In this edition, we describe two sections of SOSIG: 1) the Law Section and 2) the Statistics and Demography Section.
Sue Pettit is a law librarian at the University of Bristol and is the Law section editor for SOSIG.
Her article gives an overview of the resources likely to be found in the law section and a glimpse at the selection criteria she employs.
Wendy White and Janette Cochrane are librarians working in the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton.
They have been developing the Statistics and Demography Sections of SOSIG (with help from colleagues) for a few hours each week since May 1997.
Wendy concentrates on statistics resources and Janette concentrates on demography resources.
Their article describe the types of resources users can expect to find in their respective sections 1) The Law Section of SOSIG There is much legal information available on the Internet and, before looking at the detailed subject breakdown on SOSIG, it may be helpful to consider the main types of information provider.
Governmental, non-governmental and academic organisations have a strong presence, and legal publishers are also using the Internet as a means of delivering information.
Only sites that provide useful information free of charge are added to SOSIG, e.g.
Casebase [1], where transcripts of cases can be freely searched after one month but a subscription must be paid to access the most recent material.
In general, the link on SOSIG is to a specific free service offered by a publisher, not to its home page.
Listings by publisher’s name can be found via the large link sites e.g.
Hieros Gamos [2].
There are many commercial sites being produced as law firms start to use the Internet as a means of advertising.
These will be included where they are likely to be of use to researchers, e.g.
articles or journals are available on the site.
Legal resources on the Internet are described and assigned a subject classification within the Law section of SOSIG.
There is a general Law section [3], plus narrower sections such as International Law and Human rights.
Some of these sections have been subdivided further, e.g.
Criminology appears as a sub-section of Criminal law.
The laws of particular jurisdictions are available to differing extents on the Internet, reflecting in part the varying approaches to freedom of information in different countries.
UK legislation and law reports can be found in the Law section.
All other jurisdictions are placed in the Individual jurisdictions section.
EC law can be found under European Union law, whereas law of the individual European countries is under Individual jurisdictions.
Resources under the Law heading include:   Full Text Primary Sources for the United Kingdom Acts of Parliament [4] Statutory Instruments [5] Statutory Rules of Northern Ireland [6] House of Lords judgments [7] Transcripts of Court of Appeal and Crown Office cases (Casebase) [1] Journals Some are full text electronic journals, e.g.
Web Journal of Current Legal Issues [8], while others give details of contents, abstracts, contact details, e.g.
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization [9].
FINDLAW [10] gives listings of a wide range of electronic journals (select Law reviews) Organisations Official bodies, e.g.
Law Commission [11] gives general information plus full text publications Academic and research organisations, e.g.
NCLE (National Centre for Legal Education) [12] provides information about UK legal education.
Professional bodies, e.g.
Law Society [13] Current Awareness and Indexing Sites Law-index@swarb.co.uk [14] has an index to cases since 1995.
Directories Directories of legal firms within the International Centre for Commercial Law site [15] and of practitioners, e.g.
the Bar Directory available through the Bar Council site [16].
Mailing List Archives A way to keep up to date on recent developments (to filter your search use the SOSIG extended search option “Type of resource” and look for “MAILARCHIVE”).
Link Sites A few of the most important link sites are included for use when a particular resource has not been added to SOSIG, e.g.
Sarah Carter’s Law Links [17] and Legal Information Institute, Cornell University [18].
Future developments planned for the Law section of SOSIG include a more detailed subject breakdown of the browsing pages and more links to individual full text documents.
If you have any views on these developments, or have other suggestions on ways to improve the Law section, please contact me References [1] Casebase http://www.smithbernal.com/casebase_frame.htm [2] Hieros Gamos http://www.hg.org/hg.html [3] Law section of SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk:80/roads/subject-listing/World/law.html [4] Acts of Parliament http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts.htm [5] Statutory Instruments http://www.hmso.gov.uk/stat.htm [6] Statutory Rules of Northern Ireland http://www.hmso.gov.uk/srni.htm [7] Judicial Work of the House of Lords http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld199697/ldjudgmt/ldjudgmt.htm [8] Web Journal of Current Legal Issues http://webjcli.ncl.ac.uk/ [9] Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization http://www.oup.co.uk/jleorg/ [10] FINDLAW http://www.findlaw.com/ [11] Law Commission http://www.gtnet.gov.uk/lawcomm/homepage.htm [12] National Centre for Legal Education http://www.law.warwick.ac.uk/ncle/default.html [13] Law Society http://www.lawsoc.org.uk/ [14] law-index@swarb.co.uk http://www.swarb.co.uk/ [15] International Centre for Commercial Law http://www.icclaw.com/ [16] General Council of the Bar http://www.barcouncil.org.uk/ [17] Law links http://www.ukc.ac.uk/library/netinfo/intnsubg/lawlinks.htm [18] Legal Information Institute, Cornell University http://www.law.cornell.edu/ Author details: Sue Pettit Subject Librarian Law, University of Bristol Sue.pettit@bris.ac.uk   The Statistics with Demography Section of SOSIG Statistics Resources on SOSIG Accessing Resources The most effective way of finding statistics material on a particular topic is to use the search facility.
Regular users of SOSIG should find the “what’s new” section a good way of locating new resources.
As well as trying to provide overall coverage of a range of statistical sources I also try to be topical, so if a world event is likely to promote interest in a particular area I do try to strengthen this element in the database.
Any suggestions for additions are always very welcome and help to provide a picture of research activity (whw@soton.ac.uk).
The current categories for browsing material are international statistics, local statistics, national statistics, official statistics, regional statistics and statistical theory.
Just as I find it helpful to browse books in sections in bookshops I also find it helpful to browse subject gateways.
If I want to buy a book on cookery I don’t want to have to look through poetry to do it.
It seems to me that at the moment we are asking you to do just that.
As government statistics are increasingly collected by a variety of agencies, contractors and businesses, how helpful is a division between “official” and “national” statistics”?
Any country reporting on exports, tourism or banking is automatically giving “international” information.
I am looking to restructure this facility to save search time and lead to more relevant information.
It seems more sensible to talk of country information e.g.
“I am looking for unemployment figures for the UK”.
I will want an authoritative source which I can choose from a range of providers.
Also it may be better to browse by resource format.
I know I am looking for a mailing list to join which posts discussions about statistical theory so I would much rather look at mailing lists than wade through journals, organisations etc.
If you have a view on restructuring the browse facility please let me know (whw@soton.ac.uk).
Types of Resource Country Information Most countries have an official statistics site which carries basic economic indicators, socio-economic statistics and cultural information.
Some sites are very detailed and carry a host of tables, reports and graphs e.g.
Statistics Singapore [1] which is typical of the diversity of information carried: press releases, statistical standards, latest annual indicators, historical data series and a business directory.
The U.S. has a number of agencies connected to government departments e.g.
Bureau of Economic Analysis (US) [2] is linked to the Department of Commerce.
This prepares estimates on aspects of the U.S. economy.
Organisations There are, of course, a host of these.
I will just emphasise two growth areas.
There are an expanding number of banks that have useful websites with the range of financial infomation that you would expect e.g.
Central Bank of Jordan [3] includes a monthly statistical bulletin and a directory of financial institutions.
Subject based societies are also common e.g.
American Cancer Society: cancer statistics 1998.
[4] This has statistics by cancer type, new cases, deaths, risk factors, survival rates, age and sex as well as special sections on smoking and diet.
University Initiatives University departments offer a range of information from research outlines to publications.
A site at the Nanyang Technological University, Statistical Data Locators, [5] provides access to country based data from around the world with clear geographical sections.
Data Archives e.g.
Data Archive (UK) [6] which houses the largest collection of accessible computer-readable data in the social sciences and humanities in the United Kingdom.
Publications/Discussion Papers/ Journals Again there are a range of these.
One key publication is the OECD Observer.
[7] This bi-monthly publication covers world economic and social issues and carries an annual supplement “OECD in figures” with over 60 pages of statistical information.
Mailing Lists There are discussion lists and current awareness lists e.g.
bopcas-statistics mailing list archive.
[8] This is an alerting service which delivers you a list of recent UK offical publications.
This is an end-user service, but to what ends?
I feel service providers, including us, still know too little about the range of research needs.
How can we improve communication so that there is a constant cycle of provision, utilisation and improvement?
As a section-editor I would like to develop closer links with those of you using the section in order to make effective alterations and additions.
The medium of the web makes for easy access and quick links but the “added value” of SOSIG, the organisation and selection of resources, will only be effective if we are prepared to share in its interactive potential in a personal as well as a technological way.
Demography Resources on SOSIG Demography is a sub section of the Statistics section in SOSIG.
It is not easy to sum up the wealth of demographic resources in a few paragraphs.
Whole articles have been devoted to describing demographic web resources (McCracken 1996, Gryn 1997, Malsawma 1997).
Types of Resources within Demography At present there are around 140 Web sites in SOSIG’s demography section covering a range of demographic resources.
The resources described here attempt to illustrate this range.
Guides to Demographic Resources World Wide Web Virtual Library Demography and Population Studies [9] This Web site maintained by the Australian National University (ANU) is selective and aims to “keep track of leading information facilities of value and /or significance to researchers in the field of demography.” Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (Nidi) [10] This Web site aims to provide a comprehensive overview of demographic resources on the web.
Population Research Centres in Universities A wide range of such centres is included in the Demography section.
A typical Web site will include details of research being carried out, staff of the Centre and facilities available, details of publications including working papers, and often extensive lists of links to related Web sites.
Two examples: Center for Demography and Ecology University of Wisconsin-Madison [11] Centre for Population Studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [12]  (This Web site includes extensive well-organised lists of links.)
Bibliographic Resources Population Index on the Web [13] This is the online version of Population Index.
It covers all fields of interest to demographers from 1986 onwards.
It can be searched in a variety of ways in addition to free text searching.
Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Demography [14] Produced at the Population Studies Centre at the University of Western Ontario covers research into Canada’s population In addition to the sites highlighted above there are also sites devoted to:   Demographic data, for example Integrated Public Use Microdata Series ( IPUMS 98 ) [15] This contains samples of American population data Software to manipulate data, for example DDViewer [16] Organisations and Societies, for example Population Association of America [17] Plans for the Future In addition to continuing to seek out suitable demographic sites, we will be looking at ways of dividing up the “browse section” (which at present is one long alphabetical list of sites) in ways most helpful to users of the site.
If there are any sites which you would like to see added or if you have ideas about dividing up the browse section we would be pleased to hear from you.
References Paper References: McCracken,K (1996) Resources for Population Studies on the World Wide Web.
Issues 37, p. 47-53 Gryn,T ( 1997) Internet Resources for Demographers.
Population Index 63 (2), p. 189-204 A Web version is available at: http://popindex.princeton.edu/current_items/internetpaper.html Malsawma, Z ( 1996): A guide to population-related home pages on the World Wide Web, Population Today 21 (10), p. 4-5 URL References [1] Statistics Singapore http://www.singstat.gov.sg/ [2] Bureau of Economic Analysis (US) http://www.bea.doc.gov/ amended to http://www.bea.gov/ 7 November 2012 [Editor].
[3] Central Bank of Jordan >http://www.cbj.gov.jo/ [4] American Cancer Society: cancer statistics 1988http://www.cancer.org/media/fact.html [5] Statistical Data Locators http://www.ntu.edu.sg/library/statdata.htm [6] Data Archive (UK) http://dawww.essex.ac.uk [7] OECD Observer http://www.oecd.org/publications/observer/index_en.html [8] bopcas-statistics mailing list archive http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/bopcas-statistics/ [9] World Wide Web Virtual Library Demography and Population Studies http://coombs.anu.edu.au/RESFacilities/DemographyPage.html [10] Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) http://www.nidi.nl/links/nidi6000.html [11] Center For Demography and Ecology University Of Wisconsin-Madison http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/ [12] Centre For Population Studies at the London School Of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/eps/cps/cpsintro.htm [13] Population Index on the Web http://popindex.princeton.edu/ [14] Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Demography http://titan.sscl.uwo.ca/popstudies/abcd/ [15] Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS -98) http://www.ipums.umn.edu [16] DDVIEWER http://plue.sedac.ciesin.org/plue/ddviewer/ [17] Population Association of Americahttp://www.popassoc.org/ Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the help we have received from our colleagues at Southampton SIMON BRACKENBURY and GAIL McFARLANE in the development of the Statistics with Demography site.
SOSIG is available at http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Author Details Wendy White Hartley Library University of Southampton Email whw@soton.ac.uk Tel: 01703 593451 Janette Cochrane Hartley Library Highfield Southampton SO17 1BJ Email jec@soton.ac.uk Tel:( 01703 ) 593893   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing an Agenda for Institutional E-Print Archives Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing an Agenda for Institutional E-Print Archives Buzz data software framework html database dissemination xml portal infrastructure archives metadata repositories eprints preservation z39.50 marc rae authentication interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter, John MacColl and Marieke Napier report on a one day Open Archives conference on OAI compliant metadata and e-print issues.
Held at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, London.
11 July 2001.
A one day Open Archives event co-ordinated by the DNER, CURL and UKOLN was held on Wednesday 11th July at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Birdcage Walk, London.
Birdcage walk is in a very impressive part of London, circumscribed by Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament.
Lucky for us the hot sun added to the splendor of the location.
Catherine Grout giving the opening presentation The Institute of Mechanical Engineers building itself is also very grand.
After registration and coffee we all moved into the lecture theatre, a striking room filled with impressive art work and the most comfy lecture theatre seats most of us have experienced.
The chair for the day was Sheila Corrall, Director of Academic Support Services at the University of Southampton.
She explained that the aims for the day were to come up with a list of recommendations for JISC on ways that they could encourage OAI uptake.
A general introduction to OAI was then given by Catherine Grout, Assistant Director (Development) of the DNER.
She began with the quotation from Wallace Stevens ‘the whole, the complicate, the amassing harmony’.
She felt that the quote (initially used by Lorcan Dempsey) sums up what the OA initiative is all about.
The JISC/DNER perspective is that open archiving provides a technology for cementing the DNER architecture.
The DNER investment over the next few years will be dedicated to building an Information Environment appropriate to the needs of learners, teachers and researchers in UK HE and FE.
She argued that: there is considerable investment which needs to take place in a range of middleware, fusion and portal services to support this development.
At the moment we have a number of different services delivering content and presenting them to end users by a variety of different interfaces.
Our challenge is to develop the Information Environment in such a way that we considerably advance the coherence with which these services are offered to end users.
Our ultimate goal for this development is the seamless searching of rich relevant resources which the DNER vision enshrines.
The JISC also has an interest in exploring the use of Open Archives as a key way of disclosing metadata about the resources held by our services, and of particular significance here, by members of the higher and further education community.
Some JISC Services, for example RDN and MIMAS, have already been working to look at making their metadata OAI compliant.
JISC has also funded the open sourcing of the eprints software at Southampton, and is supporting the Open Citations project.
Tools, guidelines, best practice case studies and pilot projects are all likely to be the sort of initiatives which JISC will wish to fund in the future.
JISC will also be interested in projects involving a range of members of the HE and FE community as part of moving forward in this area.
Catherine emphasized Shelila’s point that today’s meeting was mainly about leveraging the community resources in support for institutional agendas for using OAI for e-print archives.
Her priorities were to find out what institutions can do and what service providers can do (where central funding can genuinely add value) and come up with practical ideas in the form of tools, guidelines, best practice case studies and possible pilots.
Following Catherine was Michael Nelson, recently of the University of North Carolina, but now working for NASA Michael Nelson at the podium .
His entertaining talk was entitled OAI past, present and future.
Michael started of by saying that Distributed searching, the computing science hammer to the interoperability nail, is hard to do.
There were many attempts in the mid-90s, which failed.
But metadata harvesting, proposed instead by Van de Sompel (recently appointed the e-director of the British Library), Nelson, Lagoze and others, also turned out to be difficult.
Every archive had its own different format; for example, repositories which were included at the beginning included arXiv (physics), Cogprints (cognitive science), NDLTD (theses) and RePEc (economics).
OAI separated out data providers from service providers.
Data providers must provide methods for metadata harvesting.
The objective was to achieve ‘self-describing archives.’ Nelson described OAI as a generic bulk metadata transport protocol.
It is only about metadata – not full-text.
It is also neutral with respect to the source of the metadata.
Commercial publishers are interested too.
The protocol, launched in January/February of this year, has been frozen for 12-15 months to allow services to be built on a stable platform.
Nelson explained the difference between OAI and OAIS (Open Archival Information System), which is a developing standard for digital preservation.
Coffee Break The protocol was initially a subset of the Dienst protocol, then it defined its own OAI-specific protocol.
Now this has been dropped in favour of unqualified Dublin Core (over-simple and with questionable semantics, but then so was the OAI-specific protocol).
It supports multiple metadata formats.
It also employs flow control, in order to deal with very large data sets.
The intention is that existing data sets should be capable of being made OAI-compliant with very little effort.
Much of the protocol is optional, and DC is very accommodating (even a null record is DC-compliant).
This is important for author-contributed metadata.
DC is a ‘lowest common denominator’ format, supporting parallel metadata formats, including MARC (Nelson suggested we shall soon see ‘the revenge of MARC’ in a return to ‘thousand flowers blooming’ metadata sets).
The protocol developers very much want a range of community-specific metadata formats to develop.
It also uses XML, which has lots of advantages (e.g.
schemas to determine compliance).
But it is unforgiving, so that harvesting in small batches is recommended.
It is however a good disciplinarian in that it forces clean metadata.
The OAI protocol is always a front-end for another dataset: it has no interface for record input or deletion.
Eprints, for example, is an archiving system with the OAI protocol built in.
It also supports no terms and conditions restrictions.
It is, however, possible to set up public and private OAI servers, which feed a source database.
Service providers decide how regularly to poll archives and extract metadata, and thus update us as users in respect of updates, additions and deletions.
The protocol also supports ‘sets’ to partition archives, e.g.
by discipline.
Stevan Harnad on the potential of institutional eprint archives Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton, then gave a paper on The potential of institutional eprint archives.
He explained that although OAI started with a dedicated focus this has widened as people realized the potential of sharing metadata.
Stevan’s intention was to narrow this focus back to the original publication type, something he now calls the ‘Self-Archiving Initiative.’ He began by firstly pointing out that Southampton is developing a ‘quick and simple’ version of ‘industrial strength’ e-print software which makes installation much simpler.
After negotiation with Chris Gutteridge, also of Southampton, Stevan stated that the software should be available by the end of the month.
Cornell will also soon produce a registration tool to make non-registered archives registered as simply as possible.
Stevan believes that all peer reviewed journals should be freely available in an interoperable electronic format.
He argued that while we fail to have all articles available research itself will be the biggest looser.
Currently over 20,000 refereed journals publish over 2 million articles a year and most researchers cannot access them.
Stevan argued that Institutional libraries need to be rethought of as outgoing collections, which give as well as take.
The incentive is at the level of institutions, since institutions lose when their own researchers’ work lacks impact, as it does because peer researchers in other institutions are debarred from access due to high subscription costs.
Stevan advocates that all research universities should mandate a CV with all published papers linked to an institutional archive.
There is therefore an explicit link there to RAE methodology, which could make the RAE redundant (the impact would be measured by ‘continuous assessment.’) He has been trying to persuade a group of Provosts of elite US universities to do this.
In the UK, the people we need to persuade are the Funding Councils, in order to change the methodology for research assessment(1).
After the presentation there were a number of questions about the effect of self archiving on the publishing industry.
In response Stevan volunteered a page entitled ‘Zenos Prima FAQs’ that had an answer for every apprehension expressed.
The matter of digital preservation was raised by a number of people and there seemed to be a consensus that there is a lot more to electronic publishing than just text and how we deal with this material is a serious issue.
The other area that people were keen to discuss was whether the move forward for OAI should be domain or institutional based.
Throughout the day there were many arguments raised for both sides.
After lunch, Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services at UCL, spoke on Why research libraries need open archives.
He began by referring to the ‘serials crisis’, which Stevan Harnad had told us we should not describe in such terms.
Yet his graph proved that there is a crisis.
The cumulative increase in the RPI since 1986 is c. 50%; that in periodical prices is nearly 300% while at the same time library funding in real terms has dropped by about 1% over the same period.
He mentioned that the NESLI deals which have been brokered have proved difficult for CURL, since they have been based on traditional spend on print journals.
This is effectively a ‘tax on research.’ CURL wants to lobby for a general review of STM publishing by the Director of Fair Trading.
CURL will produce advocacy packs for its member institutions for next academic session, to alert Principals and Vice-Chancellors of the problems.
As Chair of the relevant CURL Task Force, Paul advocated the establishment of OAI servers in institutions – though consortial or regional models may also be appropriate.
Libraries should lead this.
He outlined the risks, however.
VCs will cavil at the ‘multiple costs’ involved in ‘speculating to accumulate.’ We still will have to pay for print.
He asked about the costs of OAI, in terms of staffing, metadata and infrastructure.
There is also the need to clarify the ownership of IPR.
In the action plan he suggested, Glasgow, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Southampton and Strathclyde are all setting up archives: could JISC fund an evaluation of these?
Can JISC funding also be provided to support the establishment of archives in all institutions?
Charles Oppenheim mentioned in the Q&A that JISC is setting up an IPR committee under Brian Fender, and including Charles.
This will address many of the issues which Paul had raised.
Chris Rusbridge on setting up an institutional eprints archive The next paper was given by Chris Rusbridge and William Nixon of the University of Glasgow: Setting up an institutional eprints archive: what is involved?
The Glasgow model is inclusive of all types of scholarly publication, including reports, conference papers, monographs and book chapters.
They had hoped to invoke their archive in the current RAE, but could not get things established in time.
They were explicit about long-term digital preservation not being part of the aim.
The Glasgow server has 15 papers at present – all by Chris’ own staff!
Some of the formats supported by the eprints software were questioned by Chris (Word and HTML, for example).
Glasgow has added PDF and planning for XML.
Being able to link in to the authentication structures of the institution (as in single sign-on) would be a good thing.
Links to Reference Manager should be supported, and a better audit trail is required, as in submission date.
He also asked whether any quality checking should happen.
Can we be sure that the papers submitted are indeed submitted by our own academics?
Computing Services at Glasgow did the installation, rather than Library staff.
Chris Rusbridge spoke of his wish to set up an e-theses service at Glasgow, possibly using NDLTD (and he mentioned the interesting fact that City University is the only UK university in membership of NDLTD).
NDLTD is likely to increase use of these by 400%, according to Virginia Tech figures.
One of the comments after the presentation was that a bulletin board should be available so that people setting up OA software could share ideas online.
Chris Gutteridge explained that there is a mailing list that deals with technical issues but there remained a feeling that there should be a mechanism available for people to discuss wider cultural issues.
Rachel Heery on the Open Archives Forum The final paper was by Rachel Heery, Assistant Director for Research & Development at UKOLN on European support for Open Archive activity.
She introduced a new European project, the Open Archives Forum, an Accompanying Measure funded by the EC IST programme.
It includes Humboldt University and IEI-CNR in Pisa.
Rachel explained that the last question on the possible creation of a bulletin board had been very apt when considering the role of the Open Archives Forum.
Some of the main project objectives are to provide a focus for dissemination, encourage collaborative working and exchange of information.
The OA Forum will also explore some of the relevant business models and evaluate the OAI protocol technologies, comparing the protocol with HARVEST and Z39.50, for example, and asking the question whether DC is sufficiently rich as a metadata format.
Registration of interest was invited.
After a coffee break the meeting led into an open discussion moderated by Jan Wilkinson, University Librarian at the University of Leeds.
Jan pointed out again the need to let JISC know what we wanted from them.
She suggested we try to gain a certain level of commitment at an institutional level and discuss barriers to progress, be they at an institutional, service provider or funding level.
Gordon Dunsire made a plea for the initiative to cover all scholarly material.
That point, however, had already been granted.
There was a suggestion that an XML cleanser be provided to the community.
Ronald Milne presented the case for disciplinary rather than institutional archives, echoing a point made earlier by Peter Brophy.
This did not receive too much support, though the point was made that most papers these days are written by authors from several institutions.
Charles Oppenheim made the point that institutional frameworks can help junior researchers.
I suggested that JISC should fund a pilot study in a small group of institutions to assess research impact differently, by requiring that researcher CVs are deposited online with links to papers in a local open archive, as Stevan Harnad had suggested in the morning session.
This should also assist in filling archives.
I reckoned that it might be necessary to make academics ‘hate their institutions’ in order to get the archives filled (several people said that academics do not want their institutions to impose on them; Les Carr of Southampton said he ‘hated’ his university, as an academic.)
There was some support for this notion of a pilot initiative funded by JISC, from Paul Ayris.
This connected with Catherine Grout’s reminder that there is a research contract obliging this in the case of some research councils.
Fred Friend also supported the notion of tackling the Funding Councils on this.
Chris Rusbridge suggested that JISC may make such deposit a condition of any grant it awards.
Thomas Krichel suggested the creation of a disciplinary archive in library and information science.
Sheila Corrall then concluded the meeting with a summing-up.
She highlighted the need to create cultural change.
We want funding from JISC to allow us to build on existing projects and to experiment.
A ‘side by side’ institutional/disciplinary approach seems to be the most positive route, since the two are not mutually incompatible.
She then suggested that JISC invite bids for imaginative suggestions for populating archives, of either type.
They should put the funding up and invite us to bid imaginatively for it.
CURL and the DNER were thanked for initiating the event.
References [1] Minotaur: Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online: A Comparison by Stevan Harnad, 22-June, Ariadne Issue 28 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue28/minotaur/intro.html An archive of presentations from the conference is available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/open-archives/open-programme.html Author Details   John MacColl Email: j.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Marieke Napier Email: m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk Philip Hunter Email p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives” Author: John MacColl, Marieke Napier, Philip Hunter Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/open-archives/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: Virtual Library False Dawn?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: Virtual Library False Dawn?
Buzz data mobile database dissemination infrastructure archives copyright video authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Frank Webster and Lorcan Dempsey exchange views on virtual libraries.
Dear Lorcan It is my view that, to appreciate what is happening in libraries today, we need to keep two contextual factors firmly in mind.
Though these are telling on the library world, it is far too easy to underestimate their significance if we limit ourselves to consideration only of library matters.
The first is an apparently inexorable shift away from public towards private provision of goods and services throughout society.
There are lots of reasons for this (Thatcherism, globalisation, the end of the Cold War in victory for the West), but it is crucial for librarians to acknowledge the consequences of what has been called the ‘neo-liberal consensus’ for their long (and short)-term future.
The effects are palpable in utilities such as gas and electricity (privatisation, liberalisation and so forth); they are evident too in higher education (it is increasingly self-funded, with students defined as ‘customers’ who must take responsibility for their ‘investment’ in degree programmes); and they are clear too in television where subscription and pay-per-view advance at the expense of public service broadcasting (and where the BBC has determined to re-invent itself as a competitive entrepreneur well capable of matching the commercial opposition for markets as well as in hard-nosed management).
And the pressures are telling too in the library realm, with provision from general taxation increasingly unpopular, budgets continually reduced (even if the euphemism ‘efficiency savings’ is preferred), and the model of information dissemination increasingly that of the Blockbuster video chain: let customers determine book choices, only the most popular choices will be stocked, and let borrowers pay on the nail for what it is they want.
The second factor is a recurrent enthusiasm for new technology, which always, but always, seems set to turn the world upside down, but yet promises to result in overall improvement so long as it is embraced rather than resisted.
Twenty years ago it was the ‘mighty micro’ that was going to transform everything and we were all ordered, accordingly, to get ‘computer literate’.
Now it’s the Internet (or the ‘information superhighway’, ‘digitalisation’, or ‘cyberspace’) that is going to bring about the ‘knowledge society’, so we must all, accordingly, become ‘networked’.
Because association with the leading edge technologies has an undeniable allure, then perhaps it’s not surprising that many a librarian, aware that the profession has something of a fusty image, eagerly endorses information and communications technologies, enthuses about the ‘virtual library’, agrees there is a pressing need to get ‘on-line’, and looks hopefully to the day when his or her library is a true ‘information centre’ equipped with row upon row of computer terminals.
When one takes these two contextual features and sets them alongside the recent history of libraries in Britain, then three observations may be made.
First, there was a sustained laissez-faire attack made on the very concept of public libraries during the 1980s, one spearheaded by the Adam Smith Institute, that charged libraries were an unjust tax levied disproportionately on the poorer sections of society (who use libraries least), most of which revenue was then spent by librarians on their own salaries, and then these employees had the gall to select books for the public rather than directly address the latter’s needs as expressed by the ranking of its borrowings.
The library profession was never able to offer an adequate retort to this attack, not least because it was cowed by a second development which was a corollary of the free market assault – continuous and ongoing cuts in library budgets.
Unappreciative politicians who more or less eagerly endorsed the market philosophy administered much of these, so most librarians must have cheered with relief when the Blair government was elected in May 1997.
The abrasive language went, and a supportive minister, Chris Smith, came to office.
Undoubtedly the political climate improved for those in the library world.
However, it must also be said, the neo-liberal consensus has remained firmly in place, cuts in book budgets have continued, and the wider informational domain – publishing, broadcasting, electronic services etc – has gone on being marketised wherever possible and developed by private corporations firmly along commercial lines.
Nonetheless, one thing did change, and this leads me to my third observation.
The Blair government willingly endorsed New Library: The People’s Network, a report actually commissioned by John Major, but strikingly consonant with Mr Blair’s concern to be up-to-date in everything.
The dominant refrain of the Blairites is ‘modernisation’, and so too was it with New Library.
Applied to libraries, this meant a good deal of tut-tutting about old-style habits (the dreaded library silence which so puts off the young, an over-reverence for books which inhibits the take-up of digital information, poor décor…).
But it also promised a few more resources being made available on condition that the library got up to date and modernised.
There was extra money to be made available for staff training, for buying some more computers, for connecting electronically (thanks to a special deal done with British Telecom), and above all for making available the Internet to the wider public.
Libraries might also be advised to paint their rooms in bright and welcoming colours, since who wants to sit at a terminal amongst beige walls?
I am deeply sceptical of those librarians who have seized on New Library and its high tech enthusiasm to present a profession long on the defensive as at one with the future.
In my view, it would be far preferable were librarians to foreground the Association’s founding principles about information being made available to the widest possible public without financial barriers to individuals.
These are old-fashioned public service ideals, I know, but they seem to me much more pertinent than hooking up a few terminals to the World Wide Web.
I am not, I insist, anti-technology (in my work I am surrounded by the latest technologies, which I use routinely, though I am not dazzled enough to argue that these are crucial to being an effective teacher in the late twentieth century).
What I want, however, is a more judicious prioritisation of concerns – when it comes to libraries that means I put public service well above technological innovations (especially when, as I suspect, these will rapidly be commercialised and when they are introduced while book budgets continue to be reduced).
Moreover, the wider factors – the commercialisation of just about everything and the rhetoric that technology is the master key to change – lead me to be cautious and conservative when it comes to libraries.
I worry that the ‘information grid’ may lead to libraries being by-passed, to librarians being displaced, and to information being charged at a metered rate as an individual rather than as a public good.
The result of that, I believe, will be an information-saturated and simultaneously ignorant public.
Frank Webster Dear Frank I agree that to view libraries in isolation is to miss what is most significant about their purpose and future.
I also agree that most discussion about the ‘information society’ does little to further our understanding of current change.
In fact, much of it is literally rhetorical: its purpose is not to inform or to explain, but to persuade, to influence the ultimate release of funds, whether expressed as policy or as advertising.
I agree with much of what you say about public services.
Indeed, the routine comparison between today’s changes and those of the Industrial Revolution connects today’s learning agenda directly with original public library motivations as an institutional response to social change and uncertainty.
This is true whether one focuses on the utilitarian aspect, where social and economic benefits are emphasised, or on the idealistic aspect, where personal fulfilment through cultural and social engagement is emphasised.
However, it is precisely this belief in the reclaimed role of a strong public service in support of learning and development opportunity that leads me to disagree completely with your conclusion.
Let me try to say why.
I would like to work towards some more specific points by way of two assertions.
The first is that ‘technology is on the inside’.
I too am surrounded by technology, but I do not think about it as technology.
I have options for communicating with people, for finding out things, for writing and reading, for shopping.
More widely, the flow of data drives the flow of goods around our roads, and into our shops; it drives the operations of markets; and it generates much of our post.
Our sense of the world, or of other people, even of ourselves is increasingly technologically mediated as communications and computing technologies become pervasive, mobile and integrated.
Computing and networking are a part of the visible and invisible fabric of our working and living.
Technology is on the inside, part of the services, practices and institutions that shape what we do and who we are.
This is the case in the home, in work, in the shop, in the school.
So we need to say that choices are not about technology, they are about how best to support people as they work, learn and live.
I would suggest that this raises at least four issues for public libraries.
First, libraries have always supported the development of communication skills: readers and writers have worked unobtrusively, unobserved, at their own pace.
The entry costs are now higher.
Do people have to buy machines or go on courses, or go back to school to develop these skills if they want to keep up with their children, to become more employable, to use Amazon.com, or to investigate flight prices?
Second, libraries need to improve and extend their ability to deliver their services.
To discover copies of books held elsewhere and to order them.
To communicate with suppliers.
To respond to enquiries.
To share staff and other resources effectively.
Third, what is a public library service without access to the most current reference and business information, to government information, to listings resources, to developing research, scientific and other data, to burgeoning grey literature in all fields, to the developing cultural resource?
A service such as this betrays the public service vision, because it is a partial service, increasingly marginal to large classes of informational, learning or other needs, and thus marginal to many of their readers’ real interests.
Finally, and critically, people spend large parts of their lives in the converging network spaces of broadcasting and the Internet.
Are we really saying that such spaces should lack the civilising presence of libraries, archives, museums?
That libraries should not try to enrich such spaces with learning opportunity, should not disclose the history of communities there, should not support reading and access to cultural resources?
This leads into my second assertion, which is that ‘the message is the message’.
The reader interested in pottery glazes wants what is of most use or interest, whether this is a searchable database in California or a book on the local shelf.
The student interested in natural history will benefit from the local library or museum collections, but also from the ability to reach into the remote resources of the Natural History Museum or the Smithsonian.
A library provides imaginative and learning experiences, it answers questions and guides the enquirer to what is most appropriate to their needs.
A library is about opening doors, not closing them because of some arbitrary decision that electronic resources are less authentic or of less value.
The library is a place where the print, the digitised and the born digital can be presented as complementary parts of the fabric of knowledge, and which works to make the medium of delivery support the learning, imaginative or informational experience, rather than determine it.
And so to ‘New Library’.
Why do I think such a programme is important?
There are two broad reasons.
First, the creation of new services will be a challenge, despite the ready rhetoric.
Major issues will emerge in relation to the introduction of network infrastructure and management of content.
Consider three content issues.
We have little sense of the long-term ownership costs of digital materials.
They are fragile and subject to format or medium obsolescence, presenting serious, barely explored issues of access over time.
How do you secure the current investment in digital materials?
Second, the variety of services in this new shared network space could become confusing and add effort for the user or developer who has to discover what is available, cope with many different interfaces, negotiate different authentication systems, work out terms and conditions, use different payment systems, and manage different results.
This is an inhibitor to use and a major part of the library role is to develop discovery and integration services which save the reader’s time and release the value of resources in active use.
Third, economic and business models are immature.
For many resources we buy rights to use ‘content’, for particular communities and for particular purposes, rather than buying the ‘content’ itself.
How do you support public and publisher interest in a changed context?
We need to move to stable solutions for these and other issues if the legacy of the programme is not to be a thousand websites built on a house of cards.
And New Library is important because whether or not you think it is degraded political rhetoric, it connects libraries to their original purposes in the wider context of the government’s aspirations for learning and for social inclusion.
It challenges libraries to assert their public service role, to make the links with education, with cultural institutions, with public service broadcasting, and to demonstrate their real value as physical and virtual assembly places.
A life-long learning agenda cannot be realised without public institutions that support equitable access to the ‘stuff’ of learning.
This case needs to be made and supported by visible services, print and digital.
Library values make them such institutions; they need to ensure that their practices do also.
Frank Webster is Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham.
F.WEBSTER@bham.ac.uk Lorcan Dempsey is Director of the UK Office for Library and Information Networking.
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Metadata: Cataloguing Theory and Internet Subject-based Information Gateways Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata: Cataloguing Theory and Internet Subject-based Information Gateways Buzz data mobile software java framework html database archives metadata thesaurus identifier video cataloguing marc lcsh adobe aacr2 isbd research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman, Michael Day, and Debra Hiom compare library cataloguing concepts and ROADS Template creation.
Introduction: cataloguing and the Internet Modern descriptive cataloguing theory and practice has developed over the past 150 years as a means of organising information for retrieval in libraries.
Library catalogues typically consist of a collection of bibliographic records that describe published materials, usually as the name implies in the form of printed books but also including cartographic materials, music scores and manuscripts.
The standards and cataloguing codes originally developed to support this activity have expanded to include a range of newer publishing media, typically: sound recordings, microforms, video recordings, films and computer files.
In response to the current widespread (and increasing) use of computer networks primarily the Internet for publishing, bibliographic standards and the formats associated with them have also been adapted to describe this type of material.
However, the increasing use of the Internet as a publishing medium has led to a reassessment of the usefulness or validity of the traditional cataloguing approach in this new environment.
In 1995, Vianne T. Sha outlined three broad approaches to Internet resource discovery [1].
The development of search services using robot-based search engines to index Web pages, an approach exemplified by services like Lycos and AltaVista.
The "manual subject guides" approach where human intelligence is utilised to identify and evaluate Internet resources.
These are typically subject-based guides that take the form of HTML lists.
Examples include the various WWW Virtual Library sites and the subject-guides listed by the Argus Clearinghouse [2].
The library cataloguing method, creating bibliographic records for Internet resources in library catalogues.
The classic example of this approach is OCLC’s InterCat project [3].
Sha favours the third, traditional, approach where bibliographic records for Internet resources are catalogued using existing library standard formats, primarily MARC.
Researchers will then need to go to only one place the local library to access all formats of information resources.
Cataloguing records of the resources also give detailed descriptive information to help the researchers identify whether the resources are what they really need, saving the researchers a tremendous amount of time wandering on the Internet to browse through the information.
[4] This is a laudable aim, but one could sensibly wonder whether the relatively heavyweight codes developed for traditional library cataloguing are really suitable for the mobile and ephemeral resource that is the Internet?
Perhaps better solutions would not involve the use of traditional cataloguing codes or formats at all but would combine information professionals’ expertise of selecting and evaluating resources with a resource discovery system that makes use of a relatively simple metadata format.
Internet resources can be adequately described, for example, using the fifteen elements in the Dublin Core metadata element set [5].
Another relatively simple approach is embodied by the subject-based gateways that use the software developed by the eLib funded ROADS project [6].
These services use information specialists to evaluate and select Internet resources and to create a metadata record for each resource using a ROADS template, a simple metadata format that uses attribute-value pairs.
This paper will attempt to compare traditional library cataloguing practices with the approach taken by subject-based gateways using SOSIG (the Social Science Information Gateway) [7] as a particular example.
What is a catalogue?
A traditional library catalogue is typically a list of books or other items.
Catalogues are often based on the physical location of items (and in particular the library in which the items reside) but can also be based on other criteria like the date of publication or language of the items being described.
Library catalogues record, describe and index the resources of a collection or group of collections.
Each entry within the catalogue has a reference identifier to enable the item to be found, and sufficient details to identify and describe the item itself.
In the older forms of catalogues – guard books, printed catalogues and card catalogues – the list is arranged in some definite order (e.g.
by author, title or subject).
In catalogues held as computer files the catalogue records are not held in any order but can be output on request in selected forms of order.
A catalogue record comprises a number of elements.
The description records information about an item – its title, who created it, who published it and when, the type of material it is (book, serial, etc) and what physical characteristics it has.
In modern catalogues, this description is often based on a International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD).
The description entry is then indexed (given access points) so that a number of different approaches will lead to the item.
The indexing terms are referred to as headings and take the form of subject terms, personal and corporate author names, classification scheme numbers and item titles.
Rules for the creation of catalogue records, including bibliographic description (usually based on ISBD) and the allocation of headings (access points) are contained in published cataloguing rules like the 2nd.
edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2).
In order to be able to collocate all entries for specific headings but still allow items to be found via alternative terms or variant names, some form of authority control is required.
Authority control establishes a form to be used and then references can be made from alternative terms or variant names.
The catalogues of ROADS-based Internet subject gateways are superficially similar.
The catalogue records contain both descriptive information and access points for author names, subject terms and classification numbers.
Authority control is also used (to a limited extent) for things like language codes or keyword terms.
However, the operation of these catalogues do differ in significant ways from the traditional library catalogue.
The following sections will attempt to show these differences.
Selection In libraries, the selection of items for stock is a separate exercise from cataloguing the items acquired and so, apart from in very small libraries, selection and cataloguing processes are carried out by different people.
In academic libraries, library staff with subject knowledge and (sometimes) academic staff carry out the task of selection.
For public libraries, branch librarians will often be the selectors of stock, while users may be able to suggest particular items.
In special libraries selection may be a departmental and not a library task.
The selection procedure for Internet resources involves the additional tasks of discovery and quality evaluation.
This location and filtering process would already have taken place in traditional libraries through the use of publishers’ catalogues and other acquisition aids.
The selection process for Internet subject gateways is typically carried out by subject specialists and information professionals who are often also responsible for cataloguing the resources as well.
SOSIG employs a team of core staff based at Bristol and a distributed team of academic social science subject librarians based at institutions around the UK.
These librarians are known as Section Editors and are responsible for a specific subject area of the catalogue.
The ‘Add a New Resource’ form in SOSIG allows users to suggest items which could be added to the catalogue.
Selection policies are based on the subject knowledge of gateway staff coupled with quality guidelines and evaluation procedures to help ensure consistency across the service [8].
Description Library cataloguing rules contain rules for the description of library materials.
These descriptions typically include (these are taken from AACR2 1.0B1): Title and statement of responsibility Edition Publication, distribution, etc.
Physical description Series Note Standard number and terms of availability Description, therefore is concerned with both the intellectual content of an item (its title, its creator(s), the series to which it belongs, etc.)
and its physical nature.
In library catalogues, the materials described, however, virtually always take the form of physical objects.
AACR2 1988 rev., for example, gives rules for the description of books, cartographic materials, sound recordings, computer files and three-dimensional artefacts (among other things).
An important part of the description in these cases relate to the physical characteristics of an item – for example: the size, pagination and existence of illustrations for books and pamphlets; the type of carrier and playing time for sound, film and video recordings; and what particular items comprise a mixed media unit.
This type of information is less useful with relation to networked resources.
Cataloguing codes are, however, being adapted to be able to describe networked objects.
For example, in 1997 IFLA have published an ISBD for electronic resources [9].
The templates used by ROADS-based gateways can contain most of the same descriptive information as traditional catalogues and are relatively rich in terms of the information they can record about a resource.
The templates can (if required) include over 60 fields or attributes (although most of these are optional and others are automatically created).
The ROADS DOCUMENT template-type, for example, has specific attributes for titles (Title, Short-Title and Alternative-Title) and USER clusters for authors and publishers.
ROADS-based gateways, however, do not need to (and in general are not able to) describe Internet resoures in a physical sense.
Library cataloguing rules usually specify the chief sources of information for creating bibliographic descriptions.
For example, the title page is the chief source of information for a printed book or pamphlet.
In the case of Internet resources, however, identifying prescribed sources of information is more problematic.
There is, in general, little bibliographic data available from the resource itself and the process of creating a descriptive record requires an element of detective work on the part of the cataloguer to find out who is responsible for the information, etc.
In compensation, however, the Description attribute of ROADS templates allows for the provision of a much fuller free text description of a resource than can traditional catalogue records.
This description can help the user decide whether or not a resource is of use to them before they connect to the resource itself.
In SOSIG the description generally provides some (or all) of the following information: The nature of the resource e.g.
an electronic journal, collection of reports, etc.
Who is providing the information (author, organisation, etc.)
The subject coverage or content of the resource Any geographical or temporal limits (e.g.
that it covers only German language texts from 1994) Any form or process issues that might affect access or ease of use (charging, registration, need for any special software, etc.)
If the resource is available in any other languages Part of the function of the ISBDs and cataloguing rules based on them (like AACR2) is to help provide a standard framework for the description of bibliographic items.
ROADS-based gateways like SOSIG have also developed cataloguing rules to help maintain consistency throughout their catalogue.
Some consistency is also desirable for cross-searching with other ROADS-based gateways.
With this in mind, the ROADS project has developed some generic cataloguing guidelines [10].
Headings (subject terms, classification, main entry) Headings are the access points to a catalogue entry.
For a book, the access points can be author(s), subject heading terms, classification scheme numbers, etc.
For other forms of material other access points are needed.
For music sound recordings, soloists and conductors may be noted as well as composers.
Likewise for films, the leading actors and the director can be noted.
Access points into ROADS catalogues are generally by title, author, category (type of resource), subject keywords, or words from the description, however these are flexible depending on the type of resource that is being described and the requirements of the users of the gateway.
Authority control (personal and corporate authors, uniform titles, subject terms) Authority control establishes preferred forms of names and terms.
Alternative forms of names and terms are used to refer to the preferred forms and to provide alternative points of access.
The need for this is twofold.
The use of a single preferred term for entry allows searches to bring together all items by a specific author, or all editions of a specific work.
The alternative points of access mean that searchers are not disadvantaged by only knowing the non-preferred form of name or subject term.
Bibliographic records currently exist in large numbers in catalogues and national bibliographies and are regularly exchanged and bought.
A number of authority control systems are in place for use by those creating records.
These include the British Library Name Authority List (BLNAL), the Anglo-American Authority Files (AAAF), the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
Use of such standards means that there is consistency of practice within the community.
Authority files also have a place within Internet cataloguing not only to help with consistency within a single service but also to facilitate the process of cross-searching other gateways and catalogues.
Internet subject gateways, for example, can use subject headings like LCSH or MeSH.
SOSIG uses authority files for assigning values to the country and language fields (these make use of ISO codes) and the Humanities And Social Science Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET) [10] for assigning keywords.
Holdings and Access information In library catalogues, questions about access are often related to holdings information.
After users have found items in a catalogue, they will ask questions like: ‘where do I find it?’, ‘can I borrow it?’ and ‘what equipment do I need to use it?’.
Often a classification number or call number identifies its physical location within the library (unless it is on loan).
An indicator code or phrase shows whether the item is available for loan and for what time periods or whether its use is restricted to the library building itself.
The catalogue description should also indicate any required equipment by stating, for example, if a videocassette is VHS or Betamax, or if a sound recording is a vinyl disc, an audiocassette tape or a compact disc.
Internet gateways differ in that they are primarily concerned with access rather than holdings.
As a general selection rule the ROADS-based subject gateways only catalogue information that is freely available over the Internet.
In some cases restrictions may apply; this may be in terms of technology (e.g.
the use of Java, PDF, etc.
), cost (e.g.
fee-based resources) or registration requirements.
Where restrictions exist the catalogue description will include appropriate information for the user e.g.
that a PDF file will require the use of an Adobe Acrobat Reader.
A subject gateway has a ‘virtual’ or ‘linked’ collection; only the catalogue records describing these resources are kept on the server (the resources themselves are held on computers around the world).
The volatile nature of the Internet requires that the catalogue records have to be constantly checked to make sure that resource descriptions are kept current and that links to the resources are still working.
An automated ‘link checker’ runs weekly over the SOSIG catalogue; this generates a list of dead links which then have to be updated or deleted from the database.
SOSIG has a formal Collection Management Policy to help monitor the development of the collection and to provide guidelines about the selection and deselection of resources from the catalogue.
Conclusion There are strong similarities between traditional library cataloguing practice and the creation of by subject gateways of ROADS templates to describe Internet resources.
The creation of both are (in general) carried out by information professionals.
The ROADS templates themselves have been designed to be compatible (where possible) with library cataloguing standards and formats and mappings between ROADS templates and formats like MARC have been produced to allow records to be transferred to different formats or cross-searched [11].
However, these comparisons can only be taken so far.
Traditional libraries tend to have very demarcated responsibilities.
Selection, acquisition, cataloguing and classification often are seen as four separate roles.
Subject gateways tend to involve all of their staff in the discovery, evaluation, selection, cataloguing and classification of resources (although some of the SOSIG Section Editors have chosen to adopt the more traditional split of roles between selection and the cataloguing process).
Cataloguing rules and authority files are used in the creation of Internet catalogue records but these rules tend to be created and employed locally.
There is as yet no set of widely adopted standards and guidelines in the area of Internet cataloguing to compete with the likes of AACR2.
The ‘moving target’ nature of the Internet requires that the metadata itself needs to change to reflect constantly changing resources.
There is always an element of risk in choosing to spend time creating a catalogue record for a resource that may not exist in three months time or may have changed beyond recognition.
Whilst the Internet subject gateways have based much of their practice on library traditions, they have necessarily adapted these to deal with the very different nature of this new media.
References Vianne T. Sha, "Cataloguing Internet resources: the library approach," The Electronic Library, 13 (5), October 1995, pp.
467-476; here p. 467.
Argus Clearinghouse.
http://www.clearinghouse.net/ InterCat.
http://purl.org/net/intercat Sha, "Cataloguing Internet resources," p. 468.
ROADS (Resource Organisation And Discovery in Subject-based services).
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/ Dublin Core initiative.
http://purl.oclc.org/dc/ SOSIG: Social Science Information Gateway.
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ e.g.
: Paul Hofman, Emma Worsfold, Debra Hiom, Michael Day and Angela Oehler, Specification for resource description methods.
Part 2: Selection criteria for quality controlled information gateways.
Deliverable 3.2 for Workpackage 3 of DESIRE Project, May 1997. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/desire/quality/ ISBD(ER) International Standard Bibliographic Description for Electronic Resources: revised from the ISBD(CF): International Standard Bibliographic Description for Computer Files.
Recommended by the ISBD(CF) Review Group.
(IFLA UBCIM Publications, New Series, Vol.
17).
München: K. G. Saur, 1997.
HASSET (Humanities and Social Sciences Electronic Thesaurus).
Developed by The Data Archive at the University of Essex.
http://dasun1.essex.ac.uk/services/zhasset.html Michael Day, Mapping between metadata formats.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/interoperability/ Author details Ann Chapman Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK E-mail: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Debra Hiom Research Officer Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH, UK E-mail: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide Buzz multimedia privacy url Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho reviews a practical guide to the Internet.
The chapters in this book were first published as columns in "Internet Express" and retain this stand-alone quality.
What brings them together is the personality of the author and this comes through in a most engaging way.
Her approach is individual, entertaining and fun, unlike so many how-to books on this topic.
The book is American in bias but there are a range of sources and what really counts is the enthusiasm which this books encourages in the reader.
Before becoming an information professional, the author was a comedienne and theatre director and maybe this explains her highly interactive approach.
The breadth of the topics covered is vast from using the Internet as a reference tool to teaching related skills.
All the wisdom gathered in here is based on the author's practical experience at the reference desk of a public library.
However, it would be wrong to assume that this is a book for those working in public libraries, or even for librarians alone.
There is something for everyone it is simply an indispensable and wonderful reference tool.
Its approach and the energy of the author can inspire even the most seasoned Internet user and there is so much to learn.
The author sets her objectives clearly: "to offer you, in an easily digestible format, some of the lessons I have learned using the Web at work and at play".
The chapters are not simply lists of sites with comments, there are opinions, stories and gems of information you didn't even know you wanted to hear, but you do.
A good librarian always tries to include this extra bit of knowledge, not always entirely relevant, but a pity to waste.
There are chapters on searching and meta-searching; using the web to find people, news, quality reference, sites for kids, full text, medical, financial and shopping information.
It is all there, side by side, with common-sense advice on how to approach a search and what is a 'reasonable' time to devote to it.
There are stories about the author's family and friends but they do not dilute the text, just make it more readable.
The author tells us how to evaluate pages, how to register a domain name, and how to cover up our tracks.
There are general resources and portals for the humanities, social sciences, economics and politics, business, law and science, engineering and medicine.
She also covers full-text sources including literature, non-fiction and even the psychology of shopping.
Librarians have views on everything: access, use policy, system security, multimedia use, privacy, censorship, and the Web debate has just made them more vocal.
There are resources listed that we know and like, but never quite understood why they work so well.
Irene McDermott explains why.
There are those we never even thought we needed but she persuades us we do and we will be going back to them.
The last six chapters cover teaching clients about the Internet and are suitable for both those who believe in supporting users for self-help and those who like more traditional approaches to user education.
The chapter on web page creation is encouraging to the beginner and provides tips on everything from editing to use of colour and even a glimpse of Unix especially for librarians.
There are tips on how to keep up to date.
and on troubleshooting.
The advice is simple, straightforward and always full of this librarians-can-do-anything attitude.
There are even ideas on how to clean up your mouse and keyboard without putting them in the dishwasher.
When a colleague of mine saw the book on my desk, he remarked that he never understood why people write about the Web, since everything is so transient.
To me that seems as obvious as asking why people write about politics.
My answer is because they feel passionately about an issue and need to share their views and because what comes tomorrow very much depends on what happens today.
There is a lot of stability on the Web and good sites remain where they were yesterday and in the meantime might have become even more exciting.
As any book which covers a wide range of topics, this one only scratched the surface.
The author is the first to admit that as she agrees that the only constant on the Internet is change.
Nevertheless, this is as good a start to the subject as any I have seen in some time.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian The British Medical Association Email: lina.coelho@bma.org.uk  Article Title: "The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide: Strategies for the High Tech Reference Desk" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/coelho-review/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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WebWatch: UK University Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines WebWatch: UK University Search Engines Buzz software html database archives copyright opac z39.50 ascii licence mailbase url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly explores the search facilities used by UK university Web sites.
In the previous issue of Ariadne an analysis of 404 error messages provided on UK University web sites was carried out [1].
In this issue an analysis of indexing software used to provide searches on UK University web sites is given.
Although the WebWatch project [2] has finished, UKOLN will continue to carry out occasional surveys across UK HE web sites and publish reports in Ariadne.
This will enable trends to be observed and documented.
We hope the reports will be of interest to managers of institutional web sites.
Survey An analysis of search engines used by University and Colleges web sites as given in the HESA list [3] was carried out during the period 16 July 24 August 1999.
Information was obtained for a total of 160 web sites.
The most popular indexing software was ht://Dig.
This was used by no fewer than 25 sites (15.6%).
This was followed by Excite used by 19 sites (11.9%), a Microsoft indexing tool was used by 12 sites (7.5%), Harvest was used by 8 sites (5.0%) Ultraseek by 7 sites (4.4%), SWISH/SWISH-E by 5 sites (3.1%), Webinator by 4 sites (2.5%) Netscape Compass and wwwwais were both used by 3 sites (1.9% each).
FreeFind was used at 2 sites (1.3% each).
Glimpse, Muscat, Maestro, AltaVista (product), AltaVista (public service), WebFind and WebStar were used by single sites (0.6% each).
Six sites used an indexing tool which was either developed in-house or the name was not known (3.8%).
No fewer than 59 sites (36.9%) did not appear to provide a search service or the service was not easily accessible from the main entry point.
Details for one site (0.6%) could not be obtained due to the server or search facility being unavailable at the time of the survey.
A summary of these findings is given in Figure 2.
The full details are available in a separate report [4].
Figure 1 Usage of Indexing Software About The Search Engines A brief summary of the indexing software mentioned in this article is given below.
Please note that some of the details have been taken from Web Developer.Com Guide to Search Engines [5].
This book was published in January 1998.
Some of the details of the indexing engines may have changed since the book was published.
ht://Dig [6] ht://Dig was originally developed at San Diego State University.
It is now maintained by the ht://Dig Group.
The software is freely available under the GNU General Public Licence.
ht:Dig uses a spider to index ("dig") resources, although it can also index resources by trawling the local filestore.
It can be used to index multiple web servers.
The latest version is 3.1.2.
Excite [7] Excite, also known as Excite For Web Servers (EWS), was developed by Excite, one of the global searching services.
Excite is available for free.
Excite trawls across a file structure, rather than using a spider.
This means that the benefits of HTTP access are lost.
For example all files will be indexed, even if they are not linked in to the web site.
Also Excite indexes only HTML and ASCII files.
The EWS web site provides a security warning regarding EWS v1.1.
The information was released in January 1998.
This seems to indicate that the software is not being actively developed.
Ultraseek [8] The Ultraseek Server indexing software has been developed by Infoseek.
Although a free trial version is available, it is a licensed product.
Microsoft Microsoft produce several tools for indexing web sites.
FrontPage 98 provide a "webbot" which can be used to provide a simple indexing capability to a web site [9].
The IIS server provides a more sophisticated indexing tool [10].
However the SiteServer software probably provides Microsoft's most sophisticated mainstream indexing tool [11].
Webinator [12] The Webinator indexing software has been developed by Thunderstone.
This software is available for free.
Harvest [13] The Harvest software was originally developed as part of a research project in the US.
It is now being maintained by a research group at the University of Edinburgh.
The Harvest software continues to be available free-of-charge.
Glimpse [14] The Glimpse software was developed at the University of Arizona.
The GlimpseHTTP software has now been replaced by WebGlimpse.
This software is available for free.
SWISH-E [15] SWISH-E (SWISH-Enhanced) is a fast, powerful, flexible, and easy to use system for indexing collections of Web pages or other text files.
Key features include the ability to limit searches to certain HTML tags (META, TITLE, comments, etc.).
The SWISH-E software is free.
Maestro [16] Maestro has been developed for the OS/2 platform.
This software is available for free.
Muscat [17] Muscat claims to have advanced linguistic inference technologies.
Isearch [18] CNIDR Isite is an integrated Internet publishing software package including a text indexer, a search engine and Z39.50 communication tools to access databases.
Isite includes the Isearch component.
Try Them Interfaces to examples of each of the indexing packages is given below.
They are listed in order of popularity.
Feel free to try them.
A default search term of web is given.
Move the cursor to the field and press the Enter key or click on the Go button to initiate a search.
Name Institution Link to Location Search ht://Dig Bath Site Search   Ultraseek Cambridge Local & Internet Search   eXcite Birmingham eXcite Web Page Search   Microsoft (SiteServer) Essex Search the University of Essex Web   Microsoft (Index Server) Manchester Business School Search Manchester Business School   Microsoft (FrontPage-bot) Paisley Welcome Pages Text Search   Webinator Newcastle Search   Netscape (Web Publisher) Bangor Search the University Web Site   Netscape (Compass) UCL Search UCL Web Servers   SWISH-E KCL KCL: Search   Harvest De Montford DMU: Search   Glimpse Leeds Search the University of Leeds central pages   Maestro Dundee SOMIS   Muscat Surrey Search the University of Surrey Web Site   Freefind Northampton College Web Site Search Engine It is left as an exercise for the reader to compare the different services.
Which To Choose?
If you have tried the various searching services shown above you should have a feel for the various interfaces provided by the different products.
Did any of the products have a particular impressive interface?
As well as the interface provided to the user, other issues to consider when choosing an indexing package include: Costs.
Is the software available for free or do you have to pay for it?
Are the costs justified in order to provide extra functionality?
Number of resources to be indexed.
Will the software index the resources you currently have on your web site?
Will the software index resources as thr web site grows?
Open Source vs. Shrinkwrapped.
Is the source code available?
Do you want to have access to the source code?
Formats to be indexed.
What formats can be indexed (e.g.
MS Word, PDF files, etc.)?
Mainstream solution.
Should a mainstream solution be adopted, or would you be happy to use a unusual solution if it provided the necessary functionality?
Functionality.
What functionality is provided by the software?
An alternative to installing an indexing package on your local system is to make use of a third party's index of your site.
A number of companies will offer to do this.
For example, Thunderstone [19], Netcreations [20], Freefind [21], Searchbutton [22] and Atomz [23], all provide a free search engine service.
As shown in the table above, Northampton College make use of the Freefind service to provide an index of their web site.
A second alternative is to embed access to a global search engine within your web site, and limit the search so that only resources held on your web site are retrieved.
Although this type of search service is very easy to implement (and the public AltaVista service is used for the Derby web site) there are a number of disadvantages to this approach e.g.
you have little control over the resources which are indexed, users are sent to a remote site with its own interface (and usually contains adverts), etc.
Searching Across University Web Sites This article has reviewed the search engines used on UK university web sites.
However as an awareness of the capabilities of the current generation of search engines grows, institutions are likely to consider additional uses of the packages.
As well as indexing one's own web site, it is possible to provide links to indexes of remote web sites, index remote web sites, and search across several sites.
A number of examples of these types of applications is given below, followed by a discussion of several issues which should be considered.
Links to Indexes Of Remote Web Sites A increasing number of web sites provide embedded search boxes which enable users to submit search terms to remote web sites.
This article contains several examples.
Another example can be seen in Figure 2 which illustrates OMNI's collection of search boxes for medical-related services [26].
Figure 2 The OMNI Search Interface Searching Across Multiple University Web Sites The OMNI interface shown above provides a single page containing multiple search boxes for searching a range of services.
However each search query has to be submitted individually.
It would be nice to be able to submit a single query and search multiple services.
The Universities for the North East web site provides a search interface which enables searches of several web sites to be submitted [27].
The interface is illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3 The Unis4ne Cross-Searching Interface This interface makes use of the public AltaVista service.
It provides a front-end to AltaVista's advanced searching interface.
As it searches AltaVista's centralised index it should not really be classed as cross-searching although from the end-user's perspective, this is what it seems to provide.
Indexing Remote Web Sites The UCISA TLIG (Teaching Learning and Information Group) hosts a document archive [28] which provides links to computing documentation provided by computing service departments.
The documents have been indexed using ht://Dig to provide a searchable archive, as illustrated in Figure 4.
Figure 4 The UCISA TLIG Document Archive This is an illustration of how an index across remote sites can provide a useful service to a specialised community.
Issues Before providing pages with embedded search boxes for a range of services or downloading the latest version of an indexing tool and setting up indexes of local services and selected remote services (or trying to index the entire web!)
there are a number of issues to consider.
The following issues relate to embedded search boxes.
Copyright Issues Although the large search engine vendors encourage use of embedded search boxes, and organisations such as OMNI use them, it could be argued that this should not be done unless permission has been granted.
Organisations could argue that they provide value-added services on their web site and expect users to follow links to their search page.
A counter-argument is that the form is used to simply create a URL which contains the input parameters which is sent to the server, and one should not be able to copyright a URL.
Change Control If an organisation changes its search engine interface, it may cause remote interfaces to break.
Framing If the search results are displayed in a frame, an organisation could attempt to pass off the service as belonging to them.
Note that there are technical solutions to prohibiting or managing such interfaces.
Examination of the HTTP header fields for the Referer (sic) field should indicate if the search was initiated remotely.
If necessary, searches initiated from remote search boxes could be prohibited, redirected to another page or the output results could be tailored accordingly.
The following issues relate to indexing remote services.
Performance Issues Indexing remote web sites will require you to provide extra disk space and processing power locally.
It will also add to the load and network bandwidth demands on the remote service.
Maintenance Will your index become out-of-date?
Duplication of Effort Will you simply duplicate other search services?
Within the commercial world, there is much interest in indexing of remote services.
This can be used, for example, to index competitor's web sites.
Within the Higher Educational community, there is more likely to be interest in indexing local community web sites (e.g.
institutions within the regional MAN) or related subject areas (e.g.
particle physics web sites, or, as described above, computing service document archives).
Conclusions This article does not provide a Which-style recommendation on the best indexing software.
Rather it describes the packages which are currently deployed within the community.
The main recommendation is that institutions should, from time to time, review the indexing packages which are available and deployed within the community in order to avoid being left behind.
A search engine provides a very valuable tool for visitors to a web site.
It is arguably more important that a modern, sophisticated search engine is provided on a web site than the web site look-and-feel is updated to provide a more modern-looking interface.
In the longer term we are likely to see interest in the functionality of search engines focus not only on the interface provided, file formats indexed, etc.
but also on how reusable the results returned are and the ability to search across non-web resources.
Why should we expect results only to be used directly to link to a resource?
What if the results are to be stored in a desktop bibliographical management package, or automatically included in a standard way in a word-prcessed report?
And wouldn't it be nice to be able to search across the institution's OPAC, as well as the web site?
The use of remote indexing services, such as the public AltaVista or the FreeFind service may have a role to play.
Such services may provide a simple solution for institutions which have limited technical resources for installing indexing software locally.
They may also have a role to play in providing a search service if the local facility is unavailable (e.g.
due to a server upgrade).
The author welcomes comments from managers of web services, and invites them to send comments to the website-info-mgt Mailbase list [29].
Further Information If you are interested in further information on indexing software see Builder.com's article on Web Servers: Add search to your site [30], Searchtools.com's article on Web Site Search Tools [31], or SearchEngineWatch.com's Search Engine Software For Your Web Site [32].
References WebWatch: 404, Ariadne issue 20 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/404/ WebWatch, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/ Higher Education Universities and Colleges, HESA http://www.hesa.ac.uk/links/He_inst.htm Survey Of UK HE Institutional Search Engines Summer 1999, UKOLN http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/webwatch/survey.html Web Developer.Com Guide to Search Engines, ISBN 0-471-24638-7 Further details available at the Amazon web site ht://Dig, ht://Dig http://www.htdig.org/ EWS Home, Excite http://www.excite.com/navigate/ Ultraseek, Infoseek http://software.infoseek.com/products/ultraseek/ultratop.htm Web Workshop FrontPage 98: Adding a Search Form to your Web Site, Microsoft http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/languages/fp/dev/search.asp Index Server FAQ, Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/NTServer/fileprint/exec/feature/Indexfaq.asp SiteServer: Implementing Search in the Enterprise, Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/SiteServer/site/30/gen/searchwp.htm Webinator, Thunderstone http://www.thunderstone.com/webinator/ Harvest, University of Edinburgh http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/harvest/ WebGlimpse, University of Arizona http://donkey.cs.arizona.edu/webglimpse/ SWISHE-Enhanced, Digital Library SunSITE http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SWISH-E/ Search Maestro, Dundee http://somis.ais.dundee.ac.uk/general/maestroabout.htm Muscrat empower, Muscat http://www.muscat.com/corporate/empower.html CNIDR Isite, CNIDR http://vinca.cnidr.org/software/Isite/Isite.html Free Search Engine Service, Thunderstone http://index.thunderstone.com/texis/indexsite/ Pinpoint, Netcreations http://pinpoint.netcreations.com/ FreeFind Search Engine, FreeFind http://www.freefind.com/ FreeFind Search Engine, Searchbutton http://www.searchbutton.com/ Atomz.com Search Engine, Atomz http://www.atomz.com/ iSeek Search Applications, Infoseek http://infoseek.go.com/Webkit?pg-webkit.html Help | Tools, HotBot http://www.hotbot.com/help/tools Searching For Medical Information on the Web, OMNI http://www.omni.ac.uk/other-search/ Search Universities for the North East, Unis4ne http://www.unis4ne.ac.uk/webadmin/search.htm UCISA TLIG Document Sharing Archive, UCISA http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/TLIG/docs/docshare.htm website-info-mgt, Mailbase http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt/ Web Servers: Add search to your site, Builder.com http://www.builder.com/Servers/AddSearch/ Web Site Search Tools Information, Guides and News, Searchtools.com http://www.searchtools.com/ Search Engine Software For Your Web Site, SearchEngineWatch.com http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/resources/software.html Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "WebWatch: UK University Search Engines" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BIOME News Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BIOME News Buzz data dissemination url research Citation BibTex RIS Paula Manning with a brief report on the official launch of BIOME at the Royal Society on the 2nd of November 2000.
BIOME and Bananas We were delighted that, despite terrible weather and transport conditions, many people attended the official launch of the BIOME Service at The Royal Society on 2nd November.
Some interesting facts were presented at the launch.
In addition to an introduction to our new Service, http://biome.ac.uk/ by Karen Stanton, Director of Information Services at Nottingham University, delegates were informed that not only were they 98 percent related to chimps, but that their genes show 60 percent similarity to bananas!
We were presented with these facts during an entertaining talk by Professor Steve Jones, renowned geneticist and author, who illustrated the importance of the internet in scientific research, especially with regard to dissemination of sequence data such as that obtained from the human genome project.
Michael Wills, Minister for Learning and Technology gave the key note speech, presenting his vision of the developing role of the Internet in the delivery and support of education and knowledge and Dr Denis Blight , Director General of CAB International spoke about information management within the agricultural and veterinary sectors.
The afternoon session of the launch consisted of workshops aligned with the subject areas of the five BIOME gateways and we are extremely grateful for the valuable input from participants.
The comments and suggestions provided will play an important part in our development planning.
Posters and A5 leaflets are now available, both for BIOME and for each of the five subject-specific gateways (OMNI, Vetgate, BioResearch, Natural Selection and AgriFor) within the BIOME Service.
To request copies, please email Jenny Hall at jh@biome.ac.uk.
Looking Ahead… Looking forward to the New Year, BIOME will be proto-typing new services as part of the Resource Discovery Network, Subject Portals Development Project.
Facilities such as cross searching other information sources, and community services will be explored and tested.
The Project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the 5⁄99 call for proposals and forms part of the programme to deliver the Distributed National Electronic Resource [1] for the further and higher education and research communities.
References (as below) The Distributed National Electronic Resource Home page is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ Author Details   Paula Manning BIOME Service Manager pm@biome.ac.uk Article Title: “Biome News” Author: Paula Manning Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/biome/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The JOIN-UP Programme: Seminar on Linking Technologies Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The JOIN-UP Programme: Seminar on Linking Technologies Buzz data rdf framework database rss portal infrastructure archives metadata doi standardisation accessibility browser identifier namespace repositories cataloguing opac windows multimedia z39.50 marc aggregation ejournal ebook openurl cd-rom authentication interoperability url research standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Sandy Shaw reports on a seminar bringing together experts in the field of linking technology for JISC's JOIN-UP Programme.
This seminar brought together experts in the field of linking technology with participants in the four projects which constitute the JOIN-UP programme, for exploration and discussion of recent technical developments in reference linking.
The JOIN-UP project cluster forms part of the DNER infrastructure programme supported by the JISC 5⁄99 initiative.
Its focus is development of the infrastructure needed to support services that supply users with journal articles and similar resources.
The programme addresses the linkage between references found in discovery databases (such as Abstracting and Indexing databases and Table of Contents databases) and the supply of services for the referenced item (typically, a journal article), in printed or electronic form.
Four individual projects have been combined in the JOIN-UP Programme: Docusend (Kings College, London); ZBLSA and XGRAIN (EDINA); ZETOC (British Library).
These projects will work together to contribute separate but compatible, and inter-operable, parts of the four-part DNER functional components of discover, locate, request, and access.
The aim of the seminar was to develop understanding of recent developments in reference linking and to build consensus among the JOIN-UP partners on the adoption of common solutions.
The seminar timetable grouped the eight excellent presentations into three sessions with ample time for discussion among the thirty participants.
Ann Bell, Director of Library Services, King’s College London, chaired the first three sessions.
Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA, chaired the closing discussion session.
The presentations may be found on the JOIN-UP Programme Web site [1].
Setting the Scene: Background and Purpose Lorcan Dempsey, the Director of the DNER, welcomed the participants and set the context of the seminar within the wider ambitions of the DNER.
Recent work on the DNER has recognised the distinction between content (the information resources themselves) and environment (the means by which these resources are accessed and managed).
The major challenge is to bring together the disparate types of information resources into a unified information environment that enables them to be used in an integrated way.
Integration of this framework with local institutional services is a further requirement.
Current DNER development activity is due to report shortly, and should result in a completed strategy framework by Summer 2001.
A new round of implementation activity for new service developments will follow.
Andy Powell, UKOLN, discussed recent work on development of the DNER architecture.
In addition to the four functions, discover, locate, request, and access, there is a need for services supporting information creation and collaboration among the creators, providers, and consumers of information.
Rather than existing as a collection of stand-alone services, the DNER should function as an integrated whole: for example, the user should be able to discover material of interest held by a range of content providers, and move directly to the content.
To enable the development of portals which will provide access to these multiple services, the services will need to expose their content and metadata for machine to machine access (m2m).
Many different types of portal will be required (subject, data centre, institutional, learning), using either of two broad approaches: thin (shallow linking) or thick (deep linking).
Thin portals will provide searches over HTTP on content description and service description services.
Thick portals will provide advanced services for searching, sharing, and alerting using additional technologies for each function.
Cross-searching services will make use of Z39.50 and the Bath Profile to access Z-targets.
Sharing may be achieved by use of the Open Archives Initiative harvesting protocol.
This allows repositories to share with external portals the metadata records corresponding to their holdings.
Alerting services may be provided by use of RSS (Rich/RDF Site Summary) technology.
A key problem with the use of URLs, both as identifiers for information objects and as locators, is that they lack persistence (dead links are a common feature of the web).
A ‘discovery’ action should produce metadata about an object that is persistent, and that identifies it unambiguously.
The user then needs to be able to resolve this metadata, to determine a location where an instance of the resource may be found.
In order to locate an ‘appropriate copy’ of the resource, i.e.
a copy that the user is able to, and authorised to access, the resolution process may take account of the user’s identity, rights, and location.
A mechanism that has been proposed for handling metadata records of this type is the OpenURL, which encodes metadata for a resource (effectively, a citation) as a URL.
A portal which assists a user in the discovery of a resource may refer information about the resource (in the form of an OpenURL) to a resolution server, possibly local to the requesting user, to determine the location of an appropriate copy.
In summary, the emerging DNER architecture model anticipates that the glue between presentation services (portals) and content will be provided by a set of middleware/fusion services that will manage authentication, authorisation, collection description, service description, and resolution.
Interesting times lie ahead!
Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA, gave an overview of the JOIN-UP programme, which brings together four projects, commonly related in developing the DNER infrastructure for the provision of journal articles: Docusend, Xgrain, ZBLSA, and ZETOC.
In applying the four ‘demand-side’ verbs, discover, locate, request, and access, to the provision of journal articles, there is a clear need for the use of common identifiers to communicate information reliably between the services providing these four functions.
The present offerings in the DNER, while providing services that implement each function, do so in isolation from one another.
Hence the user is obliged to treat each step of the process as a distinct activity, to be undertaken separately.
The aim of the JOIN-UP programme is to create a framework within which the four ‘demand-side’ activities can inter-operate.
While not insisting that this would operate ‘seamlessly’, Peter was at pains to stress that the final product would at least be ‘well-seamed’.
Of the four JOIN-UP projects, Docusend and ZETOC were originally conceived as end-to-end services for document delivery, and Xgrain and ZBLSA as functional brokers for discovery and location, respectively.
The difference in nature of the four projects provides the opportunity to investigate how heterogeneous services can work together to form key infrastructure components of the DNER.
The ZBLSA project aims to develop a pilot service that acts as a locate broker for articles on behalf of the various DNER portals.
Given a reference to an article, and information about the requesting user, ZBLSA will enumerate a list of the most appropriate resources that can supply services on the article to that user.
In general, the ZBLSA broker will act as a ‘Rosetta Stone’ directing requests from different types of portal (A&I, ToC, Subject RDN, local library, L&T OLE), to different types of content provider (library, aggregator, publisher, document delivery service, open archive).
Defining the Problem: Scope and Purpose of Linking In the first of two talks, Jenny Walker of Ex Libris presented a general review of linking, defined briefly as the problem of deriving from the information present in a standard citation, the location of an instance of the object itself.
The early solutions to the problem made use of static links (as used in ISI Links, IOP).
These links are precomputed and hard-wired into citation lists and A&I records.
They are not ‘context-sensitive’, in that they are invariant, taking no account of the affiliation or status of the requesting user.
While they are highly reliable, they may be generated only by an agent which has full control over the information environment in which the objects are stored.
Static linking solutions are built round a central database holding unique identifiers and associated metadata.
They provide search facilities taking metadata input and deriving the corresponding identifier; in turn these identifiers may be resolved by a central service to locate the full text object.
While these products bring great advantages to users, they suffer from a serious limitation: in failing to take account of the context of the requesting user, they do not identify the most ‘appropriate copy’ for that user.
The same journal may be available from many different sources, such as aggregators, local library mirrors, or ‘free with subscription’ copies.
The appropriate copy for a given user has more to do with who the user is than what the journal is.
So, the original definition of the problem may be restated: given the information in a citation to an article, how does the user find an appropriate copy of the article?
What is required is a scheme that generates links dynamically, according to the rights status of the requesting user.
A further limitation of some existing linking frameworks is that they consider only the delivery of the full text object.
Since links, in this case, are determined by a remoter service provider, the local librarian has no means of supplying additional links to other related services, such as abstracts, citation databases, or OPAC and union catalogues.
Given this additional requirement, the problem can be refined further: given a record of bibliographic metadata, how does one deliver appropriate services for it?
Albert Simmons of Open Names Service, OCLC, gave a presentation on naming as a key component of robust link resolution.
Firstly, it is important to be clear about the meaning of names.
As mentioned by Jenny Walker, some useful distinctions have been drawn within the model developed by IFLA.
The object of interest may be a distinct intellectual or artistic creation itself, i.e.
a work such as Romeo & Juliet.
The specific realization of the work is called an expression (e.g.
original text, revised text, performance).
The physical embodiment of an expression of a work is called a manifestation (e.g.
CD-ROM).
A specific copy of a manifestation is called an item.
Any naming framework must distinguish between works, expressions, and manifestations in assigning names.
Numerous naming schemes exist for different types of object (e.g.
ISBN, ISSN, ISMN, ISAN, BICI, SICI, DOI etc.).
Each has its own function, naming authority, and rules of application.
Equally, numerous metadata definition schemes exist (e.g.
INDECS, Dublin Core, MARC).
Rules for interoperabilitiy are required, especially to handle the growing market in multimedia products.
Albert outlined some of the issues of handling digital objects within just one of these naming schemes, the ISBN, such as the need to extend the name space (by assigning additional digits to the ISBN); the absence of agreed core metadata; the authority to assign ISBNs to ebooks; the definition of who is a publisher (everyone?).
Clearly, much work will be required to resolve all the issues surrounding digital objects within all these naming schemes.
OCLC has identified the need for an Open Names Service that will act as a general-purpose name resolution service to handle transactions in e-commerce and digital rights management.
A single interface will handle all link types, and will redirect enquiries to sites according to the type of name.
The base service will maintain customer profiles and will manage authentication.
Additional services will include trusted third party activities, collaborative development, and service profiling.
The service is scheduled to go into production in January 2002.
Appraising solutions Matthew Dovey, Oxford University, JAFER project, gave a presentation on Z39.50: Old Criticisms and New Developments.
Z39.50 is a substantial client/server protocol with an extensive range of facilities.
In typical use, a client will send a search request which specifies items of bibliographic information; the server will identify a matching set of bibliographic records within its database, and permit the user to selectively retrieve these in an agreed format.
Z39.50 clients may reside on a user’s desktop machine, but more commonly exist on web Z39.50 proxies, which users access over HTTP.
A number of problems have arisen in the practical use of Z39.50 services for various reasons: weakness in implementation, vendor ignorance, and unrealistic expectations.
Rightly or wrongly, a substantial number of negative perceptions are also commonly held: commercially irrelevant; overweight and expensive; resistant to integration.
Various initiatives have attempted to redress these problems: the Bath Profile, which sets a clear standard for implementers to observe; Z39.50 embedded in Windows; the JAFER project.
This project has undertaken a number of developments: Client Beans is a JavaBean encapsulation of a Z39.50 client; Server Beans is a Z39.50 front end with a set of pluggable back-end data handlers for different data environments.
Further facilities have been developed to enable non-programmers to handle data using Z39.50.
These implementations are all available as open source.
So whereas Z39.50 has had its critics, a number of developments are now underway to improve its accessibility and reliability.
In her second presentation, Jenny Walker used the example of the Ex Libris SFX model to describe the use of OpenURLs for context-sensitive reference linking.
This addresses the ‘appropriate copy’ problem by divorcing the generation of links from the information resources that provide the citation metadata.
Rather than linking directly from the OPAC or A&I database, links are directed to a resolution server local to the user.
This server is configured with knowledge of the rights of local users (such as subscriptions) and can therefore identify the location of services which will provide that user with full text or other services relevant to the metadata record.
While Ex Libris are vendors of the SFX resolution server, the technology is essentially open, and other types of resolution server may be deployed.
The enabling technology for this open linking approach is provided by the OpenURL draft standard, which is currently proceeding through the NISO standardisation process as a fast track work item.
The OpenURL has two parts: a base-URL which identifies the user’s local resolution server, and a content component which contains elements of metadata associated with the information object of interest.
An information service which supports open linking must be able to determine whether a requesting user employs a local OpenURL resolver (using one of several possible methods), and, if so, must provide OpenURL links for each reference object (e.g.
citation) it holds.
If a user consulting such an information service clicks one of these OpenURL links, the user’s browser is directed to the local resolver where the associated metadata is resolved.
The resolver then presents the user with a choice of extended services relevant to the information object: full text, abstract, author information, local library holdings, or other.
Many types of information service may provide OpenURL links: A&I services, ToC, OPACs, e-journals.
An attractive feature of the approach is that the local resolver is under local control, and provides the librarian with a single point of administration, and the means to implement service access policies.
Work has been done to demonstrate how the SFX approach and the CrossRef approach (described below) can operate in a complementary manner.
Richard O’Beirne of Blackwell Publishing gave a presentation on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and CrossRef.
Blackwell publishes a substantial number of scholarly journals and has worked on the Crossref Initiative since its inception, together with other major STM publishers.
Publishers had recognised that while adding internal cross-linking capabilities to their electronic full text publications provided a useful service, what users really wanted was full linking across the range of all publishers’ journals.
Solving this problem by means of bilateral agreements becomes impractical as the number of participating publishers grows.
The CrossRef solution was to establish a single resolution service for journal articles.
Each participating publisher embeds persistent links from their article references to the cited articles held at other publishers’ sites.
CrossRef uses DOIs for this purpose.
Resolution is supported by the DOI/Handle resolution system which maps a DOI to the location of the corresponding content.
While DOIs themselves are persistent, the use of the resolution system means that links will still work, even if a publisher reorganises its URLs internally, or a journal moves to a new publisher altogether.
When publishing an article, the publisher deposits metadata for the article (including its DOI) with CrossRef.
In addition, for each reference within the article, the publisher queries CrossRef to discover the corresponding DOIs, and embeds these as reference links in the online journal article.
When a user clicks one of these reference links, the DOI contained within it is resolved by the Handle system, and the user is automatically redirected to the cited article on the responsible publisher’s site.
While CrossRef has enjoyed much success (used in over 3 million published articles by 2001), substantial revisions to the technology are underway.
The existing ‘one-to-one’ model (one DOI resolves to one URL) will be replaced by a ‘one-to-many’ approach, so that functions other than simple full text location can be provided.
A requirement will be made that standardised metadata is supplied whenever a DOI is registered.
This will extend the range of possible uses of DOIs, and will enable the multiple resolution goal.
The issue of the ‘appropriate copy’ problem has been recognised, and a prototype which addresses this has been developed in collaboration with DLF, CNRI and IDF.
Implications for JOIN-UP Peter opened the final discussion session with a reminder of the ‘Rosetta Stone’ model for a general-purpose locator/broker.
In the context of JOIN-UP, the locator function will be investigated and demonstrated by the ZBLSA project.
This will deliver a pilot facility designed to meet the needs of portals in the DNER.
Given a metadata record describing an article, and information about the requestor, ZBLSA will identify a set of services on the article available to the user.
The importance of identifiers of different types was discussed, particularly with regard to the historical base of print journals.
It was noted that for journal articles, the ISSN has particular significance.
There was some opinion that a lower priority should be given to the role of Z39.50 in the ZBLSA project.
The OpenURL is becoming widely accepted as a mechanism for the encapsulation of object metadata over HTTP, and should be seriously considered as the main mechanism for conveying simple service requests to ZBLSA.
Acronyms A&I Abstracting and Indexing BICI Book Item and Contribution Identifier CNRI Corporation for National Research Initiatives DLF Digital Library Federation DNER Distributed National Electronic Resource DOI Digital Object Identifier IDF International DOI Foundation IFLA International Federation of Library Associations INDECS Interoperability of Data in E-commerce Systems IOP Institute of Physics ISAN International Standard Audiovisual Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISMN International Standard Music Number ISSN International Standard Serials Number MARC Machine-Readable Cataloging NISO National Information Standards Organization OCLC Online Computer Library Center OLE Online Learning Environment OPAC Online Public Access Catalogue RDN Resource Discovery Network SICI Serial Item and Contribution Identifier STM Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers ToC Table of Contents References JOIN-UP Programme Web site at http://edina.ac.uk/projects/joinup/ Author Details Sandy Shaw EDINA University of Edinburgh Email: S.Shaw@ed.ac.uk Article Title: “The JOIN-UP Programme Seminar on Linking Technologies” Author: Sandy Shaw Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/join-up/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EPRESS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EPRESS Buzz data software html database apache archives metadata browser sql copyright cataloguing graphics sgml rtf passwords gif perl ftp authentication url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Peters on EPRESS text management software tools, currently in development.
The Electronic Publishing Resource Service (EPRESS)[1] is developing an online database system to aid the administration of electronic journals and make information available to a distributed Editorial team.
Having identified labour as the greatest contributing cost toward electronic journal publication, EPRESS aims to reduce the burden by automating many of the functions of the Editorial Assistant and the publisher.
This article demonstrates the scope of journal services and illustrates the ways in which the administrative chores are reduced to increase the efficiency of the publishing process.
The Rationale behind EPRESS It is the view of some electronic journal producers that the perceived cost reductions of publishing electronically are an unattainable myth.
The 'first copy' costs of traditional publishing do account for a large proportion of the overall production costs (Odlyzko, 1997[2]; Fishwick et al, 1998[3]).
However, electronic publishing can become more cost efficient than traditional print publishing by adopting economies of scale.
Experience of Sociological Research Online,[4] an electronic journal set up under Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) funding, demonstrated that the major costs involved with electronic journal production are for labour and marketing.
Marketing is a black hole that will consume a budget of any size.
Traditional paper marketing plays an enormously important role even for electronic journals.
While weband email-based marketing can be achieved with virtually no budget, limiting to electronic media will not bring new users who have otherwise not considered electronic journals.
Of the two major costs contributing to electronic journal production, EPRESS set out to reduce the labour costs.
EPRESS is the Electronic Publishing and Resource Service, funded for two years by eLib.
At the heart of EPRESS is a system aimed at reducing the time required for administrative tasks.
The process of publishing scholarly refereed material is largely one of communication.
Correspondence is exchanged between the editor, authors, referees, editorial boards, reviewers and so on, all facilitated by an Editorial Assistant (see Peters (1999)[5] for an analysis of these exchanges).
The Internet offers a rapid communication medium, so it seems obvious to exploit that potential.
Sociological Research Online developed a series of tools aimed at speeding up administration and at sharing information with the distributed editorial team.
These tools had been put together speedily on a 'just in time' basis, were not 'industrial strength' and were often cumbersome.
For example, article information was stored in an offline database, data exported and turned into static web pages; those pages were then uploaded to the web.
This meant that the Editor was always working with slightly historical data and putting the information online was an enormous task.
Furthermore, the original database only recorded information it did not assist the processes in any other way.
The first task of EPRESS was to take the article and other databases and convert them into live web databases.
EPRESS has been developed in PERL, ideal for rapid development, which interacts with an SQL database (PostgreSQL) through a web (Apache server, any browser) interface.
Theoretically the system should be platform, operating system and application independent meaning that any SQL database, web server and browser could be used.
EPRESS includes four main databases (one for articles, reviews, people and book publishers) as well as databases for additional journal services (subscriptions, noticeboard, discussion forums etc.).
Each database can be searched, browsed and edited through a standard web browser thus allowing data to be accessed from anywhere in the world.
With the main databases in place, it is fairly straightforward to add reporting features to allow the Editor to see how many articles are coming in and how quickly they are being turned around.
This can be achieved simply by creating a SQL query and returning the data as a table or GIF graph representation.
Amongst PERL's many freely available modules are several to produce dynamic web graphics.
The publishing processes of Sociological Research Online are similar to those of any traditional academic journal.
Although EPRESS was developed with one journal in mind, the system should suit any peer reviewed journal.
Print journals increasingly use electronic methods for the refereeing process and EPRESS could easily be adapted to output print correspondence rather than electronic messages.
There are clear advantages to using electronic communication as the databases are integrated with the communication medium something that is not possible with a paper based system.
'Two Click' Administration EPRESS introduces many shortcuts aimed at 'two click administration'.
For example, when an article arrives and is logged, the author is emailed an acknowledgement and the Editor informed of the new article.
The Editorial Assistant achieves this by clicking a button that drafts an email, customised to the new author, and a second click to send this message and one to the Editor.
Between the two steps is the facility to edit the email should the Editorial Assistant wishes to add any specific comments to the author.
Once the proposed referees have been entered into the article record, they can be invited to evaluate the article with another single click.
The database performs a look-up in the 'People' database to find their email addresses, prepares the customised email telling them where the article is to be found and sets up the messages to be sent with a second click (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Inviting referees to review an article Referees added to article record Email drawn up Email sent Email arrives with referees   When all the reports are back, the Editorial Assistant can email them straight to the Editor with another single click.
At each step, additional information is logged automatically so that the database tracks the status of an article (whether it is with the editor, author, referees etc), the dates on which correspondence is sent and so on.
Preparing an email automatically may not seem particularly groundbreaking, but this is a remarkably time-consuming task when it has to be done by hand.
Even though email clients allow 'stationery' for standard correspondence, it is still time-consuming preparing multiple messages with information pulled together from several fields of a database.
In addition, all these actions then have to be logged manually.
This integrated approach not only speeds up the process significantly, but also diminishes the chance of 'human error' creeping in when actions aren't logged.
Whereas sending a reminder of a forthcoming issue to 30 or 40 book reviewers once took a whole morning, this now takes two 'clicks' to send a personalised message, including bibliographic details, to all overdue reviewers.
As an alternative to automatic emails, the database system can instead produce Rich Text Format (RTF) documents, formatted to the journal's requirements, and then printed onto headed paper.
This is necessary in order to produce letters to be sent to reviewers when books are sent out and could easily be adopted for paper based journals that correspond with paper.
Sociological Research Online asks authors to assign copyright to the journal and again with a single click, an email is drawn up, it is sent with a second click and includes a fully customised RTF attachment containing the copyright agreement to be signed and posted back.
Good Practice By using automated processes, 'good practice' can be built into the publishing process.
New publishers can therefore adopt good standards without the need to acquire specialist knowledge and EPRESS can encourage the adoption of new standards.
Once the refereeing process has been completed, if an article is accepted , the record should hold all the metadata required for publication.
At this point an HTML template can be retrieved containing all the information about the article: the author details, issue numbers, year and date of publication, abstract, keywords and URL.
As well as appearing visibly in the article, this information is also embedded as Dublin Core metadata.
The Editorial Assistant then inserts the text of the article and marks it into the journal style (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Publishing a book review via HTML template for Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.
[6] Article record contains full information HTML template drawn up in colour coded RTF Review text added and marked up, article ready for publication   Journal data can be compiled in different formats for different purposes.
Meta-data for Sociological Research Online is available as comma delimited data for an abstracting agency, SGML for a subscription agent and as ReDIF[7] for the Open Archive Initiative[8].
This can be done automatically or on demand, and the resulting files can be emailed automatically or transferred by FTP.
Automatic Data Entry EPRESS is looking at ways to reduce administrative tasks as much as possible.
If data could be entered automatically, then EPRESS would do so.
There is one aspect of journal administration where this is already possible.
When books arrive for review, the bibliographic details are stored in the database.
This information is required not only for administrative purposes, but so that bibliographic information can be inserted automatically into the HTML review template, and a list of 'Books Received' can be published with each journal issue.
The online book services' catalogues can be used as free bibliographic databases.
EPRESS has developed a system to query book details by ISBN and return a record if already in the database or, failing that, to query one of the online book services.
If details are returned, the results are parsed and a record automatically created with the bibliographic details in place.
As publishers generally make bibliographic data available to the online book services prior to publication, this information is often available by the time the book arrives for review.
Journal Services Many journal services can be administered through online databases.
Notices are stored in a database that records start and expiry dates so that each notice displays on the web site only when relevant.
This ensures that the noticeboard only includes current notices.
The search engine and journal indexes are controlled from the background administration system so that they are updated when a new issue is published.
Background databases allow for the discussion forums to be monitored and edited as necessary.
The link directory is controlled by a database so new links can be added with ease, and old ones removed if they expire.
A recent major addition to the EPRESS databases is an integrated facility to handle subscriptions.
The database controls access to subscription issues so that when a new subscription record is entered into the system, access is granted with immediate effect.
On occasions when subscription agents have telephoned with an urgent request to set up a subscription on behalf of a client, it has been possible to arrange access before the end of the telephone conversation.
Sociological Research Online adopted an unusual subscription model whereby access via institutional networks is by paid subscription only, but access is granted freely via commercial Internet Service Providers.
The two main advantages of this model are that the journal does not need to handle many individual subscriptions, thus reducing overheads, and readers who cannot persuade their institution to subscribe still have a way to continue reading the journal.
Authentication is by network or domain so there is none of the administration associated with username and password systems.
Readers can request a free subscription via a web form, the results are written directly to the subscription database along with additional details about the network they submitted from.
The subscription can be activated as soon as the network has been checked as one belonging to an Internet Service Provider and that opens access to all other users on that network.
The subscription database can check for expired subscriptions and a facility to draft invoices will be developed shortly, as well as tools to track payments.
Step-Through Management Other facilities, some recently added to EPRESS whilst others are still being developed, introduce issue management tools.
When an issue is published, there are a number of 'standard' pages that need to be published alongside.
These include content pages for articles, reviews and other special features, a list of 'Books Received' for review, subscription access files, a list of contributors and an updated 'Home Page' to reflect the arrival of a new issue.
A number of tasks must also be undertaken immediately following publication: the status of article and review records needs to be changed to reflect that they are published, data must be sent to subscription and abstracting services, the search engine and journal indexes must be updated, an email notification sent out to readers and copies of book reviews sent to the book publishers.
These tasks can all be prompted by a step-by-step series of actions, taking the administrator through the processes and reducing the need for technical knowledge about the underlying procedures.
For example, building the content pages for an issue is achieved through a 4-step process.
First, the administrator selects which issue to create the content page for.
Second, a list of the articles for that issue is presented, and beneath that, a list of additional articles that are also almost ready to be published.
Articles can be added or removed from the upper list until it contains all the articles to be included.
The third step presents the list of articles for the issue with a text input box.
The administrator puts an index number into each box to reflect the running order.
When this is finally submitted, a content page is produced (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Drawing up a contents page for Sociological Research Online Assistant chooses volume and issue number Assistant selects which articles are to be included Running order 'index' applied to each article Table of contents returned   Total Integration EPRESS offers a totally integrated solution that takes publishing from the point of submission, to the point of publication.
All information is available immediately through a web browser, therefore making it available from almost anywhere in the world.
The Editorial Assistant, Editor, Review Editors or other authorised 'players' can access the state of submissions, subscriptions, information about the authors, referees, potential reviewers, the emerging issue, historical data, readership statistics, the performance of reviewers, referees, book publishers and any of the journals' electronic services.
Data is entered once throughout the system and becomes available in many different ways.
No special hardware or software is required in order to access information, only a computer networked to the internet and capable of running a web browser.
EPRESS Availability EPRESS is funded until October 2000.
New users are invited to examine the system and evaluate it for their purposes, and anyone wishing to adopt the system is welcome to do so.
A fully working demonstration of the major databases is available from: http://www.epress.ac.uk/demo Users wishing to take advantage of the demonstration databases should contact Stuart Peters for a username and password, and direct any further enquiries to him.
Although the demo database is not a cut down version of the complete system, some of the facilities will not be available because there is no live journal behind it.
References EPRESS is at: http://www.epress.ac.uk/.
Odlyzko, Andrew (1997) 'The Economics of Electronic Journals', First Monday, 2, no.
8, ht tp://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_8/odlyzko/index.html.
The report 'Economic implications of different models of publishing scholarly electronic journals for professional societies and other small or specialist publishers' to the Joint Information Systems Committee by Francis Fishwick, Louise Edwards and John Blagden is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/ta vistock/scholarly-journals/cranelib.html.
Sociological Research Online is at: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/ .
Peters, Stuart (1999) 'EPRESS: changing the way electronic journals work', Vine, 111: 31 36.
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation is at: http://www.soc.sur rey.ac.uk/JASSS/JASSS.html.
ReDIF is at: http://openlib.
org/acmes/root/docu/redif_1.html.
Open Archive Initiative is at: http://www.openarchives.org.
Author Details   Stuart Peters EPRESS Technical Officer Department of Sociology University of Surrey Web site: http://www.epress.ac.uk/ Editor's note: Although Stuart Peters has since moved from University of Surrey, any readers interested in EPRESS can contact Nigel Gilbert on n.gilbert@soc.surrey.ac.uk Article Title: "EPRESS: Scaling Up Electronic Journal Production" Author: Stuart Peters Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/epress/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Information Grid Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Information Grid Buzz data software framework database rss xml portal infrastructure archives metadata identifier schema preservation cataloguing provenance ontologies e-science authentication interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne reports on a one-day workshop on 'an interoperable environment to support research, learning and teaching' held at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh, April 30, 2002.
Many of the issues faced by the e-Science Programme and the Digital Library community world-wide are generic in nature, in that both require complex metadata in order to create services for users.
Both need to process large amounts of distributed data.
Recognition of this common interest within both communities resulted in this invitation-only one-day workshop at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh.
It brought together interested parties from both the digital library and e-Science communities, and kicked off detailed discussion of the way forward for both.
About 80 people congregated in the e-Science Institute on Tuesday 30th of April.
The day was grey and wet (no surprises there for veterans of the Edinburgh conference scene).
The Institute turns out to be located in a former church in South College Street, just opposite the Old Quad of the University.
The interior has been purpose designed for the Institute, but the framework of the building and its initial purpose have been respected: parts of the original structure are visible throughout.
The main part of the Institute is based on decking running the full length of the body of the church, from the vestibule to the nave, at several levels.
There is a lot of glass within the building, giving a sense of spaciousness to both offices and to the decks (also making it easy to see that it was still raining outside).
The main lecture theatre, where the presentations were given, is right at the top of the building, and the original roof design arches over it.
The presentations: Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, chaired the opening of the workshop.
She gave a brief overview of what was expected from the day: the opening of a dialogue between the two communities about shared issues.
The Director of the e-Science Programme, Tony Hey, gave the opening keynote presentation: He began with some background to the programme.
The initial idea for the programme came from John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils (UK Office of Science and Technology).
The essence of the programme he gave in a single sentence: e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science, and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.
The amount of money invested in the programme is significant: around 130 million pounds.
The funding is about the people to create it, since the hardware funding comes from a different pot of money.
Matching funding is required from industry, and currently particle physics gets the lion's share.
As an illustration of the scale of the kind of data-processing which is proposed he mentioned a Geneva based project which will generate petabytes of data, distributed around the planet.
Hey then described 4 projects as a way of illustrating the nature of the Grid Comb-e-Chem, Astro-Grid, MyGrid, and the Discovery Net Project.
The last of these involves the creation of a Discovery process mark-up Language, and may involve a new research methodology.
Formerly, he argued, science was based on theory and experiment; in the late 20th century scientific simulation was developed as a procedure to add to theory and experiment.
In the future, he suggested, there will be yet another layer of process that will add to scientific knowledge: this is 'collection based research'.
Knowledge will be derived from the systematic data-mining of very large datasets, often widely distributed around the world.
This way of discovery can be characterised by the terms 'reduce', 'mine' and 'sift' Hey mentioned that there is an existing architecture for the Grid, and a toolkit (the Globus Toolkit, which has emerged as the international de facto toolkit), however there is much missing functionality.
Turning to related developments in the Web arena, he discussed Web Services technology as a way of adding to and developing Grid functionality.
Hey felt that this way of doing things has a similar service-oriented architecture as the Grid, where everything is seen as either a provider or consumer of services exemplified by the 'publish', 'find', and 'bind' triangle.
For the development of the functionality of the Grid as much as for the future of the development of the Web, "interoperability is what it is all about," and the Web Services model is a good one on which to base the technical development of the Grid.
There is already an Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
Hey mentioned two independent studies which warmly endorse the idea.
The architecture will exploit the synergy between the Commercial Internet (IBM and Microsoft are both interested in the Web Services idea) and Grid Services, and the OGSA is a key middleware area for the UK e-Science programme.
Metadata and ontologies are, he said, key to higher level Grid Services, since e-Science data and archives need to interoperate with conventional scientific literature in digital libraries.
We need support for data federation as much as straight computational power.
The resulting services will be very much like digital libraries.
He concluded by quoting the originator of the Grid idea in the UK: "e-Science will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken."
There are 'big wins' available.
The JISC Information Environment and Architecture was next on the agenda, and the presentations were given by Alicia Wise and Andy Powell.
Alicia Wise gave a general intro to JISC Collections and Services.
JISC is about funding research and development programmes (Information Environment development, eLib, the DNER, etc).
This work has involved the creation of many important partnerships, though she noted that JISC Collections do not yet amount to Petabytes of resources!
JISC has built a lot of access points, but so far 'they haven't come'.
The resources are in practice difficult to find.
JISC is trying to solve this problem with the development of the Information Environment.
There are lots of visible synergies with the Grid idea.
The challenge for both is to change the way in which researchers work and collaborate.
We need new tools for this.
Certain kinds of activity need to be managed, within a secure high quality network.
However currently users turn first to Google and Yahoo, rather than the more sophisticated resource discovery tools.
Andy Powell talked about the technical infrastructure of the Information Environment, but deliberately avoided detailed discussion about the underlying protocols and standards.
Much of what he said was based on the DNER Information Architecture study (of which he is the co-author), published in 2001 on the UKOLN Web site.
Both Tony Hey and Alicia Wise had already used some of Powell's own slides, so where appropriate he merely recapped matters already discussed.
He looked at the 'problem space' from the perspective of the data consumer, and suggested that the driving characteristic of the architecture is that the user needs to interact with multiple data collections.
Few cross-collection tools and services are available, and some stuff is part of the 'Invisible Web' [the 'Invisible Web' being those materials which are available on the Web in theory, but which, in practice, are not easy or even possible to find currently using conventional finding aids, since for example some resources live in databases and are published only in response to queries arriving from specific interfaces].
The user has to manually stitch resources together, since the material is human-readable and human-oriented and not amenable to automated processing.
The 'portal problem' being addressed by JISC is 'how to provide seamless discovery across multiple content providers'.
The solution is the Information Environment.
Portals are based on the four key concepts of: 'Discover, access, use, publish'.
This is the principal target of the architecture, and subsequently the development of services which bring can bring stuff together.
This can be achieved if services make their metadata available for searching, and/or harvesting, and also if there are alerting tools, indicating that services have resources available.
In the Information Environment, access services are often referred to as 'portals'.
(Alerting might be via RSS site summary).
There are also fusion services ('brokers').
We need to join up discovery services.
We also need localised views of available services (Powell suggested this was an area in which OpenURLS might be important).
Infrastructural services for the Information Environment include the following: Service registry, authentication and authorization, resolver services, user preferences and institutional profiles, terminology services, metadata schema registries, and citation analysis.
All of this is based on XML and DC, and all are based on the idea of metadata fusion so we need a shared view of how this metadata is going to be used.
Powell suggested that subject classification, audience level, resource type, and certification, are the four key areas of shared practice.
In conclusion Powell pointed out that Instructional Management Systems (IMS) digital repositories diagrams are similar to the slides illustrating the architecture of the Information Environment, since the problems the architectures are intended to solve are essentially generic.
The European Perspective was given by Keith Jeffery, of CLRC-RAL.
Jeffery spoke on work going on or in prospect in the European Union, (EU), related to Grid ideas.
He distinguished between GRID and GRIDS: the first of these is based on an American idea, floated in a book by Foster and Kesselman, the GRID Blueprint.
In the European model of the information Grid there is (by contrast) a layered architecture.
'Data knowledge' in the Grid model connects major information sources, like the Information Environment interfaces.
He suggested that this was very similar to the Information Environment definition of a portal.
The 'Knowledge Grid' utilises knowledge discovery in a database (the KDD).
This provides interpretational semantics on the information, partly for the purposes of data mining.
Suitable security controls are required, and these have to be appropriate to the source and to the accessor.
It is also necessary to deal with IPR issues and Rights access.
KJ has been discussing this Grid architecture within W3C.
So the original US idea of the Grid has been linked with the Web Services concept, which, if implemented, should be able to handle the requirements.
The key to all of this is metadata, which is, as he said, 'ridiculously important stuff'.
Interestingly, not for the first time in this workshop a speaker subdivided metadata into different types with different functionality.
He pointed out that metadata could be broken down into three different types: schema metadata; navigational metadata; and associative metadata.
One of the advantages of DC metadata is that it is difficult to find another format which doesn't intersect with its fields.
But it is insufficiently formal and unambiguous for machine understanding.
Jeffrey then looked at how the European Union now frames the guidelines under which Grid type project proposals are solicited.
The sixth Framework Programme no longer contains some work areas which have become familiar to those who made proposals under the Fifth Framework Programme.
The relevant area for proposals is now FP6 ERA (European Research Area).
There are new instruments (EU jargon for how the programme will achieve its goals) for this framework, and GRIDS technology is prominent in the thinking of EU officials.
The key phrases in documents which prospective applicants for funding might look out for are: 'Information Landscape' (a Lorcan Dempsey coinage of several years ago, roughly coincident with the idea of the 'Information Environment') and the 'Knowledge Society'.
Jeffrey also talked about ERCIM, which is planning large scale activities in the area of GRIDS (large scale distributed systems) for the citizen, which is essentially the context of ERA.
This has some relevance to JISC activities, in that FP6 plans to build on (and also build across) existing national initiatives.
GRIDS (not GRID) he argued, provides an architectural framework to move forward.
The US view was given by Reagan Moore, Associate Director, San Diego SuperComputing Center.
(National Partnership for advanced computational infrastructure).
Moore's presentation was aimed more squarely at the interests of the computing community.
It was about running applications in a distributed environment and interfaces between systems; about brokerage between networks; essentially about a particular vision of what is technically possible within Grid (or Grids) architecture distributed computing across platforms and operating systems, rather than the business of searching for research data held in various formats across domains within a platform-independent environment.
In both metadata needs to be a key feature of the architecture, whether we are talking about finding and running software applications in a distributed computing environment, or the management of textual data.
Moore talked about Data Grids: these he defined as possessing collections of material, and providing services.
So essentially a Data Grid provides services on data collections.
This is, he said, very close to what is proposed for the architecture of digital libraries.
The problem is that service providers are faced with the problem of managing data in a distributed environment (i.e., the services and collections are not running on a single server).
Data Grids offer a way of working over multiple networks, and are the basis for the distributed management of resources.
Issues which need to be addressed he listed as: Data Management Systems; Distributed Data Management; and Persistent Data Management.
What needs to be managed is: Distributed Data Collections; Digital Libraries; and Persistent Archives.
Digital Entities in Moore's terminology are 'images of reality,' and are combinations of Bitstreams and structural relationships.
'Every digital entity requires information and knowledge to be correctly interpreted and displayed'.
He made some interesting differentiations between data, knowledge and information.
The former he allocated to digital objects and streams of bits.
Knowledge was allocated to the relationship between the attributes of the digital entities, and 'information' is 'any targeted data'.
The terminology used by Moore was different from that used by the UK speakers in a number of respects, though he was clearly speaking about very similar concepts (his information architecture slides made this clear).
We'd been in the lecture theatre for two hours by the time he began his presentation, and probably it would have been fatal to an understanding of what he meant by 'abstraction' and 'transparency' to have missed the beginning of his talk by answering a call of nature.
Ariadne was unlucky in this respect.
An interesting question came up in the Q&A session afterwards about the giving of persistent identifiers to objects, and how a separate instance of a resource might be indicated (within a Data Grid context), which a researcher might choose to access.
If identifiers are given locally or institutionally, then the identifier for two separate instances of a resource within the reach of the Data Grids (anywhere around the world) might be quite different (since the service provider might only have knowledge of the one to which they added a persistent identifier, until a researcher links the second resource with the first).
In other words, two instances of a resource (perhaps different editions) might have the same identifier, or else have totally different identifiers.
Which to some extent would defeat the object of giving resources persistent identifiers.
Breakout session reports 1) Digital Preservation: do scientists give a damn about preservation?
Perhaps society as a whole cares, and those who pay for the services.
May issues are management and procedural, as well as technical.
Also, do we have the technical solutions for the implementation of policy decisions, and vice versa, and do we have the policy making structures for the implementation of the technically possible?
Issues of scale were raised there comes a time when the scale of the enterprise affects the nature of the solution.
Is there a business model?
(there appears not to be).
Maybe this question needs to be allocated to a couple of economics Ph.Ds for a study.
On the issue of repurposing, it was pointed out that the community will be collecting data for the Grid without knowing how the data will be repurposed.
This means associated information is extremely important.
It was suggested that annotations are a driving purpose for an archive.
As for life-cycle issues,: it was suggested that the community cannot trust the creators of data resources to make appropriate decisions on preservation.
But it was suggested that the self-archiving process might function as an enabler of serendipity, since the automation of the process of 'discovery' might be seen to be squeezing this out.
2) Metadata and Ontologies.
Process capture for data analysis and new methods of design and exploration, resulting in large quantities of stats.
We need tools for provenance and rollback, as well as automation of the discovery process.
The example of combinatorial chemistry was used making haystacks to find needles.
The process involves data mining the library of information created by the research.
Some info stays in the lab (the associated metadata which makes it possible for the experiments to be repeated): this information needs to be preserved, and scientists need to understand the importance of this younger scientists especially need to learn to record associated metadata while they are working in the lab.
Virtual data a request for missing data may be met by simulation.
That is, the characteristics of a particular molecule might be inferred from its place in an array of known molecules and their properties.
This raises questions of the provenance of data, since the actual properties of the molecule are not actually known, but inferred.
There are various kinds of metadata: descriptive, annotative, etc.
We have to understand what kinds of metadata are required for making the Grid viable.
It was mentioned that the persistence of the data might be less important the the persistence of the system used to underpin the Grid (hardware, software, etc).
Also that we might need to build in a look-ahead time for system design because of the rapid development of the technology.
The question of the propagation of underlying data into derived data products was raised.
A piece of derived data which turns out to be based on faulty primary data is naturally also false.
If the derived information is arrived at as part of an automated process, then mechanisms for automatic correction of the data and even automatic publication of the new data might be desirable.
In other words, changes in primary data need to be reflected upwards (again this raises the issue of provenance of data, and also the tracking of changes, or rollback).
The Semantic Grid has as its aim the bridging of the gap between current endeavour and the vision of e-science.
Ontologies are required for the automation of Grid processes.
The conclusion is that scientific data and the associated information need to be closely defined within the context of the Grid and its processes.
Plus we need better tools for creating metadata.
We also need to have good processes for working within collaborative workspaces, and the implementation of clear standards.
3) Data Movement: this group found themselves trying to catalogue the differences between the JISC Information Environment, the e-Science initiative, and Tim Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web.
There was discussion of resource discovery, and what the minimum requirements of a researcher are to make a resource discoverable.
They also considered the question: what does the publication of data on the Grid actually mean?
(Possibly a job for a working party to analyse).
It was suggested that there would be more inclination to create complex metadata if it was easy to do this, and it was clearly understood how metadata should be created.
If there was kudos associated with the production of good associated metadata, 'they'll do it'.
We need carrots, sticks, and clearly stated requirements.
If we want our information to be accessed via a JISC Information Environment portal, we also need the provision of tools to help the application of subject classification.
And an important issue is the maintenance of quality.
On the issues of semantics and authenticity, it was argued that users want transparency.
There are technical gaps to be filled.
Digital Library and the Grid communities are starting from different places.
Both communities should use the same authentication solution(s), which is better from the point of view of the user, as well as for creating a defined position for 3rd parties and making the business of negotiation easier.
Digital certificates were felt to be the 'right idea'.
Authorisation was felt to be a more complex issue, and multiple solutions are required.
There were three action points which resulted from the session.
The first was that we should explore the digital certificate solution to the authentication issue and its sensitivities.
Second, we need joint projects in authorization issues possibly JISC/e-Science collaborations.
Third, we need collaboration with among other programmes, the New Opportunities Fund (NOF), etc.
Conclusion The event was wound up by Malcolm Atkinson.
He pointed out that collaboration is expensive.
Howevere instant total collaboration immediately is not what is wanted.
So which points should we pick out?
He hoped the community will 'crystallize-out' some special interest groups.
There is a buzz and some dialogue between both sides, and we shouldn't let this go, he said.
Someone in the audience brought up the question of a notional timescale for collaboration, in terms of an impact date, and suggested that the community work to a six month framework, otherwise there may be good intentions only.
Atkinson responded by suggesting that if interested parties are going to do something, it will be stuff done in the next month, but we need the results of working together in the next twelve months.
He also indicated that the Programme was open to ideas about what we might do from the community itself.
Author Details   Ariadne, UKOLN, University of Bath E-mail: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "The Information Grid" Author: Ariadne Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/information-grid/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Content Management Systems: Who Needs Them?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Content Management Systems: Who Needs Them?
Buzz data software java rdf framework javascript html database wireless rss xml portal archives xslt metadata css xhtml accessibility browser xsl sql repositories python opac cache perl provenance syndication adobe mis soap php personalisation e-business crm ftp authentication interoperability e-government intranet research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes explore the CMS concept and look at the available tools.
Content management?
That’s what librarians do, right?
But we’ve already got a library management system (LMS) – why should we consider a content management system (CMS)?
The second initial is perhaps misleading – “manipulation” rather than “management” might better summarise the goals of a CMS.
Content creation and content re-purposing are fundamental aspects which tend to lie outside the current LMS domain.
Actually, from the point of view of workflow (and to lesser extent content re-purposing), the CMS and LMS have much in common.
With an LMS acquisitions staff use Web-based templates to create records for new stock.
Cataloguers add value to the record (with less experienced staff being subject to an approval process).
Metadata is recorded automatically detailing who entered/modified content and when.
A subset of the record is then re-used in several ways as a page on the Web OPAC, as paper recall notice or an e-mail recall notice.
It will be interesting to see whether the content re-purposing demands of accessibility legislation will be readily met by the LMS; any CMS worthy of the name should have no problems automatically generating Web pages in large fonts, or in the right mix of colours or in text-to-speech optimised ways.
So, if an LMS is capable of workflow and modest content re-purposing, then it must be the content creation aspects of a CMS that are the principal discriminant.
But librarians don’t do content creation, right?
They sit lower (or is it higher?)
in the food chain.
Well, it rather depends on your view of what libraries and librarians will be doing in the future.
Job descriptions and system specifications are rapidly blurring.
We are all hybrid now.
The boundaries of the CMS space are fuzzy.
Substantial overlaps exist with document management systems, knowledge management systems, enterprise application integration systems, e-commerce systems and portals.
There are also significant (but as yet not generally recognised) overlaps with intranet groupware and virtual learning environments.
Indeed, it may turn out that one institution’s ‘managed learning environment’ is another’s CMS.
The hybrid librarian embracing things like the Open Archives Initiative or Virtual and/or Managed Learning Environments cannot avoid becoming involved in the process of content creation.
Will the LMS enlarge its feature set to cater for the demands of content creation?
It seems more likely (and greatly preferable) that the growing demand for products based on open architectures will lead to the right hooks and sockets being provided so that interoperability between systems can be achieved.
Hybrid librarians would do well to maintain a watching brief on the CMS space so that they are in a position to cherry pick the most appropriate features in the future.
The Concept A Content Management System (CMS) is not really a product or a technology.
It is a catch-all term that covers a wide set of processes that will underpin the ‘Next Generation’ large-scale web site.
The pervasive nature of the Web means that it has become the preferred vehicle for content delivery.
‘CMS’ should therefore be read as ‘Web Content Management System’.
Institutions have no shortage of ‘content’ be it data, information or knowledge.
When the creation and publication of content is well managed then the organisation functions more cost-effectively; it is also likely to lead to better decision making.
Process/Benefit Prospectus example Engendering the re-use of information by allowing the ready integration of data from diverse sources.
A Web prospectus page describing a programme might draw together information from such sources as the student record system (for curriculum data), the personnel system (for details of teaching staff ) and an imagebank (containing attractive pictures).
Permitting the efficient re-purposing of information.
The same prospectus page might be rendered a PDF (for high quality hard-copy), as plain text (to be sent as an e-mail message) or optimised on screen for a partially-sighted user.
Allowing information maintenance to become devolved but at the same time preserving central control.
The prospectus entry can be devolved to its academic director but, before going live on a pre-assigned date, a member of the marketing department would first check the amended text for factual and stylistic consistency.
Ensuring presentational consistency by separating the design of Web pages from the content they display.
The academic director would be provided with a template to enter the information about the programme ….
De-skilling the task of putting information on the Web.
….
which reduces the task to no more than ‘filling in the boxes’ on a Web form or a word-processor document.
Facilitating good information management practice so that appropriate metadata are captured at the time of content creation or modification.
The relevant prospectus page is ‘stamped’ with the name of the maintainer, the creation or modification date, an expiry date (which would later cause the automatic generation of e-mails to the maintainer of the information at regular intervals before this date) and incorporation of keywords to ensure indexing by search engines.
Permitting some past state of the Web site to be re-created or restored.
The edition of the prospectus from two years ago can be re-constructed.
Table 1: The business benefits of a CMS The key goal of a CMS is the increased integration and automation of the processes that support efficient and effective Internet delivery.
The means by which this is achieved, placed in the context of a university prospectus, are summarised in Table 1.
We limit the scope of this report to those features that might be regarded as ‘mandatory’ for a CMS in the HE/FE sector.
This feature set can be expected to change in the near future.
There are several related applications that are often included in the feature lists of content management software.
We will not cover e-commerce systems, though several large-scale commercial CMSs are essentially e-commerce management packages.
We will not discuss post-deployment applications such as Web site personalisation, searching, noticeboards, guestbooks, etc.
The present report therefore concentrates on the content management issues relevant to the ‘outward facing institutional Web’.
It is ironic that, because of the growth of intranets, the outward facing Web will become a quantitatively minor part of the institutional Web (Fig.1).
However, in the context of current challenges and risks, the outward facing Web will continue to exercise the minds of senior managers in the medium term.
Figure 1: The evolution of the Institutional Web Within this scope, we have placed the functions of a CMS into four categories: Authoring, Workflow, Storage and Publishing (Fig.
2).
A CMS manages the path from authoring through to publishing using a scheme of workflow and by providing a system for content storage and integration.
Authoring is the process by which many users can create Web content within a managed and authorised environment, whether it be a simple line of text (e.g.
‘The University administrative offices will be closed next Monday’) on a ‘What’s New?’ page, an entry in an online course discussion group, or the entire Postgraduate Prospectus.
Figure 2: functional scope and the content life-cycle (after Ort [1] and Vidgen et al.
[2]) Workflow is the management of steps taken by the content between authoring and publishing.
Typical steps could be link checking and review/signoff by a manager or legal team.
If workflow has existed at all in traditional Web site management it has been an off-line affair and not built in to software processes.
Storage is the placing of authored content into a repository.
Beyond this it is also the versioning of the content, so that access conflicts between multiple authors cannot arise and so that previous versions can be found and restored if required.
It can also mean breaking down content into structured, meaningful components such as <job title>, <course> or <description> which are stored as separate elements.
These can be stored as records in a database or as Extensible Markup Language (XML) files.
Publishing is the process by which stored content is delivered.
Traditionally this has meant ‘delivered to the Web site as HTML’.
However, it could also mean as an e-mail message, as an Adobe PDF file or as Wireless Markup Language (to name but a few).
In the near future multiple delivery mechanisms will be required, particularly as accessibility legislation starts to bite.
We have summarised the advertised features of CMSs into a ‘CMS Feature Onion’ (Fig.
3).
The feature sets typical of the different styles of CMS are reviewed in greater depth below.
The Issue Institutions are struggling to maintain their Web sites.
Out of date material, poor control over design and navigation, a lack of authority control and the constriction of the Webmaster (or even Web Team) bottleneck will be familiar to many in the HE/FE sector.
The pre-millennial Web has been characterised by highly manual approaches to maintenance; the successful and sustainable post-millennial Web will have significant automation.
One vehicle by which this can be achieved is the CMS.
The concept of ‘self-service authoring’, whereby staff do not need special skills to edit the content for which they are responsible, can be regarded as a major step towards acceptance of the Web as a medium for communication by non-web specialists.
Providing this is the key advantage of a CMS.
As local information systems integrate and become more pervasive, self-service authoring extends to the concept of ‘write once, re-use anywhere’, in which the Web is treated as just another communication channel along with email, word processor files and presentations, etc.
Figure 3: The CMS Feature Onion The market place is very crowded and continues to grow (Faulkner Information Services estimates the market will grow to $65 billion by 2003 [3]).
A list of 98 products claiming to offer a CMS (or components of one) was compiled in September 2001.
The preceding year saw a number of new products and the loss or re-orientation of many others, although the number of products available continues to increase and diversify.
Currently, therefore, investing in a CMS is potentially more of a risk than for other, more mature categories of information system.
This state of affairs, however, should not dictate inaction.
The core features offered by most CMSs are sufficiently well developed to make the conversion of a traditional web site an undertaking that should be welcomed by all stakeholders, without the fear of having to re-engineer the web site again in the future.
The boundaries of the CMS space are blurred.
Substantial overlaps exist with document management systems, knowledge management systems, source control systems, enterprise application integration systems, e-commerce systems and portals.
We also contend that there are significant (but as yet not generally recognised) overlaps with intranet groupware and virtual/managed learning environments.
Indeed, it may turn out that one institution’s ‘managed learning environment’ is another’s CMS.
Products The core features of a CMS In order to provide the functionality required by a complex, large scale, multi-author anddynamic web site then many features are desirable.
Some CMSs try to contain them all, but it is unlikely that everything you may need will be available in a single product.
It is the authors’ experience that a pragmatic ‘buy and build’ approach is best for the HE/FE sector [4].
The features likely to be of interest to the HE/FE sector are displayed in the ‘Feature Onion’ (Fig.
3).
To be called a CMS a product or set of tools will, in our view, provide three core functions: Versioning, so that groups of individuals can work safely on a document and also recall older versions.
Workflow, so that content goes through an assessment, review or quality assurance process.
Integration, so that content can be stored in a manageable way, separate from web site design ‘templates’, and then delivered as web pages or re-used in different web pages and different document types.
This core feature set is augmented by a list of additional functions that varies significantly from product to product.
These additional CMS features can be grouped into the five major categories shown in Table 2.
A complete product – feature matrix is beyond the scope of this report, though others have attempted this [5, 6, 7].
The CMS product marketplace There is a tendency for those new to the technology to lump all CMSs together.
In some comparative reviews of CMSs, products with widely different origins, functionality and goals are compared as like with like, often because not enough information about the systems is readily available.
Category Description ‘Standards’ User Management Assigning a role to a user, providing access rights and perhaps the level of interaction with the system.
This can often use existing authentication schemes.
LDAP, Active Directory, ACAP User Interface Preferably a browser-based application for both content provision and CMS and/or web site administration.
HTML, Javascript, Java, HTTP, FTP, WebDAV Data Sources These include the managed storage of created content, plus external data in so-called ‘legacy systems’ (Word or Excel files, for example, could come under this heading) or other CMSs.
Storage methods can be file systems, flat file databases, relational databases, and more recently, object oriented databases and XML files.
The key is in the flexibility of the system to cope with its intended use.
Storage also requires that the data itself is described.
This is known as metadata, and creating it should be a requirement of storing content.
SQL, XML, Dublin Core, RDF Applications These integrate the content with existing data and authentication systems, and perform specific software manipulations on the content to aid consistency, simplicity and management.
The key application is usually a form of ‘templating’ allowing control of web site ‘look and feel’ to be centralised and making style and navigation changes simple to implement.
It can also include the ‘middleware’ that connects database records to dynamically created web pages.
Perl, PHP, Java, Python, ASP, XML-RPC, SOAP, ODBC, JDBC Deployment Publishing the web site to the live web server(s).
Some CMSs do not distinguish between development and production servers, running the web site itself from the same software as the development system, creating pages dynamically on demand.
Popular pages can be built in this way and then ‘cached’ in memory or on disc, speeding up future retrieval.
Other systems have a strict partitioning of ‘staging’ and ‘public’ environments requiring separate web servers, often residing on separate machines.
In this case the entire structure may need to be replicated if all pages are dynamically created.
In other cases, certain elements of pages are pre-rendered and published as static content, with only specific dynamic content being accessed via the public server.
It can be said that there are almost as many different methods of live publication as there are products available.
HTML, CSS, XHTML, XSL, XSLT, RSS Table 2: Non-core CMS feature categories and related ‘standards’ Type Origin Strengths Examples Document Management Systems Software designed to manage the storage and internal publication of ‘corporate’ information Document lifecycle workflow, metadata, document translation Documentum, Panagon 2000, ChangingPages Electronic news/magazine publishing Tools developed to aid online publishing of magazines and news websites, and electronic discussion groups Simple workflow, speedy publication of simple content, authoring tools, information management (structure), timed delivery Eroom, Expressroom, Conversant, SlashDot, Frontier E-business / E-commerce Software underlying online shopping and electronic customer relationship management Simple database management, website personalisation, built in transactional systems Vignette, Broadvision, ATG Dynamo, Open Market Source / versioning management control Software engineering process control/source control among groups of programmers Roles-based authoring and version control, workflow, templating systems.
Content Management Studio, Interwoven TeamSite ‘Middleware on steroids’ Tools for dynamic web site creation from filesystem and database assets.
E.g.
PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, JSP.
Products such as WebObjects, Cache Objects for the Web and Tango 2000 Asset management, dynamic delivery and simple authoring environments.
Enhydra, Midgard (PHP), Dmind DSM (ColdFusion), SiteGenesis, Obtree.
Web content management frameworks ‘Second generation’ tools, built from the ground up for dynamic website creation and management.
Can have very diverse conceptual grounding.
Variable, most try to cover all functions.
ACS, eGrail, Engenda, Mediasurface, NetObjects Fusion, Spectra, Xpedio, Zope XML processors A ‘third generation’ of CMS products appearing based upon XML technology.
Granular control and re-use of content.
Though many of the above systems can now utilise XML, these products are written specifically to create websites using XML to store data, and related technology (XSLT, RDF) to manage and deliver it.
Cocoon, Interwoven TeamSite Templating, Lychee, Rhythmix, Tamino, POET Table 3: Different CMS types Vendor literature is generally over-hyped and jargon-ridden.
Terms like ‘personalisation’, ‘syndication’, ‘asset management’ and ‘re-purposing’ abound.
This can cause confusion among those who are confronted with major technological and financial decisions.
However, it is possible to define several generic types of CMS based on their apparent provenance, and this can help in assessing their suitability for a particular use.
Feature sets are converging, though products are often aimed at different markets.
Table 3 provides a list of the broad approaches that appear to have been taken by CMS developers and gives selected examples.
Which of these could be a best fit for the HE/FE sector?
Given the diverse nature of content that an institutional web site must deliver, it would be misguided to consider a product with a specific focus on e-commerce, or with a single database as content repository for all applications.
Similarly systems with a document management provenance are likely to be tuned for intranet usage rather for the outward facing institutional Web.
Generally, more ‘open’ and framework-like products are more likely able to handle the broad range of content a HE/FE institution wishes to communicate.
Care should be taken to examine the ‘out-of-the-box’ features as this will define how much post-purchase customisation is needed.
The experience of mainstream business is that many large scale CMSs cost more to implement than to purchase.
It is never a case of simply ‘buy’, but ‘buy and build’.
Developments The large number of competing products in the CMS space has already been noted.
Many analysts see a market shake-out as inevitable (not unlike that which occurred as the relational database market matured).
The recent acquisitions of NCompass by Microsoft and Allaire by Macromedia are perhaps the start of a pattern, which will be repeated by other big players.
Once this happens it will be hard for minnows to compete if they have an orthodox business model.
An alternative approach to web content management is to build a CMS from scratch using ‘middleware’ plus other component tools (only some of which are listed in Table 3).
This option has been fuelled by the open source movement (and some high profile expensive failures [8] of CMS projects using ‘market leading solutions’).
It has led to the emergence of a new business model (which is perhaps exemplified by Digital Creations the providers of Zope) in which a company ‘gives away the family jewels’ but then generates revenue from consultancy work.
As well as the ‘buy’ and ‘build’ routes, a third option is also available ‘rent’.
The ‘application service provider’ (ASP) model has attempted to get a foothold in many sectors and the CMS space is no exception.
However, the same issues (e.g.
security of information, vulnerability of service) that have led to a slow embrace of the ASP option in other sectors, applies equally to CMSs [9].
Standards in this area are still forming, with no clear ‘winner’ beyond the consensus that XML will be an important framework for inter-application communication.
XML and XSLT can be used to separate content from presentation, but are far from universally accepted, as they require a fundamental restructuring of ‘legacy’ content.
On the authoring side, few tools are yet available for easy creation of XML content.
For new content initiatives however, the ability to use XML as a ‘container’ for content will be desirable.
We can also expect interesting developments that are driven by a maturing WebDAV standard and the commercial mainstreaming of object databases.
The UK government has recently made recommendations for metadata in the public sector, using the Dublin Core [10], and we expect this endorsement to accelerate developments in this area.
Assessment and Recommendations The pre-millennial Web can’t scale.
The Webmaster bottleneck has been replaced by a Web Team bottleneck and our information systems are hard to join-up.
The CMS can allow users to bypass the Web Team bottleneck and allow integration and re-use of information.
We feel that at the core of any CMS one should find a robust set of tools for content versioning, content integration and process workflow.
This core feature set will augmented by a list of additional functions that varies significantly from product to product.
Typical future uses within HE/FE are easy to identify.
At a workshop run by the authors [4], participants identified the following as the most desirable features of a CMS: Template-based self-service authoring for non-technical content providers (‘frictionless publishing’) Roles-based security Workflow management – submit, review, approve, archive Integration with existing data/databases and user authentication systems Metadata management Flexible output – write once, publish many times We recommend that these functions form an initial set of global requirements through which prospective CMS systems can be filtered.
In an immature market place the risks to investment are substantial.
If you ‘buy’ you cannot be sure whether your vendor will survive or whether the product will turn-out to be a technical cul-de-sac.
If you ‘build’ (and smaller institutions may not have this as an option) you carry the overheads and risks of recruiting and retaining specialised staff.
At present it appears unlikely that a single product will cover the requirements of a complex organisation.
There seems little argument that the solution will be a mixture of ‘buy and build’.
The key issue is one of balance ‘How much must be built before we get what we need?’.
Institutions will also be exercised by the question of ‘Who builds it?’ We detect resistance within traditional campus computing services and MIS departments to the concept of the CMS (and indeed the need for an automated, post-millennial Web).
Fundamentally a CMS devolves control over content to the owners of that content (rather than the technician), and then scales without increasing management overheads.
The investment can run to a six-figure sum if the perceived market leading systems (e.g.
from Vignette, Broadvision and Interwoven, though the former two are heavily biased towards commercial applications and thus, perhaps not a good fit) are considered, though many more modest (and indeed no-purchase cost) products are available.
The emergence of ‘portal frameworks’ (open source or otherwise) has done much to highlight the overlap and convergence of document management systems, knowledge management systems, enterprise application integration systems, e-commerce systems, intranet groupware, virtual/managed learning environments and CMSs.
There is a pressing need, in our view, for institutions to think holistically (reinforced by their work on information strategies) and to invest in and develop open and extensible information systems.
Senior managers need to be aware of the costs and consequences of not embracing the post-millennial Web.
The cost of investing in a CMS can be on a par with procuring a student record system but which, in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, is likely to give the biggest return on investment?
In fact, there is no choice, because both will be essential items.
But we suspect, in terms of competitive advantage, it will be the CMS (perhaps as part of an overarching portal framework) that will be more important in terms of differentiating institutions.
We know that readers of this report would prefer if Table 4 were more exhaustive.
A proper evaluation of a CMS, as with any information system, is a major undertaking.
Moreover, pricing information is notoriously hard to come by [11].
As it stands Table 4 is based on anonymised feedback from participants in the CMS Parallel Session at the Fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop held at Queens’ University, Belfast during June 2001.
Each vendor or product had been investigated (however briefly) by at least one of the participants’ institutions.
In terms of what the sector might do next in the area of CMS, participants voiced support for: Funded case studies of CMS evaluation exercises (or at least funding to encourage institutions that had already undertaken such exercises to share their findings with the sector) The formation of both formal and informal consortia A mailing list to facilitate the formation of consortia and over which UK experiences could be shared A generic template which might be used in invitations to tender The purchase on behalf of the sector (in the manner that was done for reports on information security) access to reports on CMSs from consultancies such as Gartner Group or Forrester Research Price range Vendor/Product Evaluated by College/University X £0-20000 Communique (£2k) Frontier (£99) NetObjects Fusion (£10k) RedDot (£20k) Zope (£0k)   £20-50000 Communique (£30k) Obtree (£40k)   £50-200000 ATG (£200k) Communique (£100k) Interwoven (£120-200k) Mediasurface (£170k) Diagonal (£120k) Radius (£120k)   >£200000 Interwoven (£200-500k) Vignette (£500k)   Table 4: The information HE/FE needs Two resources are highly recommended if you want to stay up to date in this rapidly evolving field.
Probably the best actively maintained list of CMS vendors and products is Clueful Consulting's Content Management Systems Directory [12].
The mailing list cms-list is a relatively low volume, high quality resource and which is generally free of vendor-speak [13].
Acknowledgements Rob van Buuren, Richard Vidgen, Geoffrey Ford, Barry Taylor, Bruce Dupee, Stuart Brown, James Currall, Darren Chapman, Amanda Wheatley, Jethro Binks, Jacki Hargreaves, the participants of the CMS Parallel Sessions at the Fourth and Fifth Institutional Web Management Workshops and contributors to the cms-list.
References Ort, E. (2000) Ten Things to Know About Selecting a Content Management System, Dot-Com Builder, http://dcb.sun.com/practices/howtos/selecting_cms.jsp Vidgen, R., Goodwin, S., & Barnes, S., (2001) Web Content Management, In: O'Keefe, R., Loebbecke, C., Gricar, J., Pucihar, A., & Lenart, G., editors, Proceedings of the 14th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference, Bled, Slovenia, June 2001, pp.
465-480.
Faulkner Information Services, http://www.faulkner.com/ Doyle, L. (2000) Content Management Systems Workshop Report, Fourth Institutional Web Management Workshop, University of Bath, http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/cms/summary.htm Barrett, C. (2000) Content Management Systems http://www.camworld.com/cms/ Rapoza, J.
(2001) Get A Grip On Your Site, PC Magazine http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2688945,00.html Thomas, M. (2001) CMS decision matrix http://www.cornerconsulting.com/wcm/ (cited at http://cms.filsa.net/archives/cms-list/2001/Feb/0225.html) Walker, D. (2001) Content management systems: short-lived satisfaction http://www.shorewalker.com/pages/cms_woes-1.html Sweeney, T. (2000) ASPs Answer The Security Question http://www.informationweek.com/789/asp.htm e-Government Interoperability Framework http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/egif/home.html Kontzer, T. (2001) Vendor Selection: Beyond The Hype http://www.informationweek.com/839/online_cmside.htm Clueful Consulting's Content Management Systems Directory http://www.clueful.com.au/cmsdirectory/ CMS-List Archives http://cms.filsa.net/archives/cms-list/ This article is a revised and abridged version of JISC Technology and Standards Watch Report TSW 01-02 Content Management Systems which was published in September 2001 (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/techwatch/reports/index.html).
Author Details   Paul Browning Information Strategy Co-ordinator, University of Bristol E-mail: paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk   Mike Lowndes Web Manager, The Natural History Museum, London E-mail: mikel@nhm.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Access: Archives in the New Millennium Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Access: Archives in the New Millennium Buzz data software html database dissemination archives metadata digitisation copyright preservation cataloguing sgml dtd ead ulcc foi foia research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reports from Kew on the Public Record Office view of the Brave New World of online archives.
Introduction A conference on Electronic Access: Archives in the New Milennium was held at the Public Record Office (PRO) [1], Kew, on 3-4 June 1998.
The Conference was held as part of the UK Presidency of the European Union.
Present (over the two days) were about one hundred and twenty delegates representing a large number of organisations based in the European Union, countries in east-central Europe and the Russian Federation.
The conference opening speech was given by Geoff Hoon MP who is Parliamentary Secretary to the Lord Chancellor.
His presentation introduced some of the challenges and opportunities faced by archivists in the information age [2].
Amongst other things, Hoon commented that the Public Record Office would have a major part to play in implementing the proposals of the UK Government’s White Paper on a Freedom of Information Act [3].
He hoped that society would be moving away both from a culture of secrecy and a world in which only elites have access to public documents.
This concern with governmental transparency and freedom of information was also shared by the second speaker, David Lipman of the European Commission Secretatriat-General, who mentioned the 1994 Commission Decision on public access to its documents [4].
This recognised that enabling the widest possible public access to Commission documents is an important factor in ensuring greater openness and transparency within the European Union.
This new emphasis on freedom of information and public access meant that archives had to be aware of their important role in ensuring that relevant information was delivered to the public.
Giving access to heritage records would remain important for the archives profession, but these changing policies would give archivists also a vital role in upholding governmental transparency and accountability [5].
The Public Record Office, Kew A UK Archival Network At the conference, the National Council on Archives (NCA) launched its report Archives on-line proposing an United Kingdom Archival Network [6].
Nicholas Kingsley (Birmingham Central Library and Secretary of the NCA) introduced the report with a paper explaining the background to the study and outlining the scope of the proposed network.
The report had originated in the Into the Ether: Vision or Void?
workshop held at King’s College London in November 1996 which was organised by the NCA and the Joint Information Systems Commitee (JISC) of the higher education funding councils.
The report is a contribution to a continuing debate about the need for improved public access to information technology and networked information.
It, therefore, builds on the Library and Information Commission (LIC) report on public libraries, New Library: the People’s Network [7] [8], and other initiatives from the higher education community (a National Agency for Resource Discovery [9], the Anderson Report [10]) and the Department for Education and Employment (the National Grid for Learning [11]).
Archives on-line recommends the creation of a network that will link all UK archives and form a gateway to all archival finding-aids.
This network could be based on that proposed for public libraries in the New Library: the People’s Network report with additional funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other sources.
The successful creation of a UK archival network would, however, depend upon the widespread adoption of national and international description standards like ISAD(G), the General International Standard Archival Description [12] and ISAAR(CPF), the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families [13].
The report outlines the data standards, technologies and management strategies needed for the proposed network.
Comments are invited on the report before 30 September 1998.
Public Record Office initiatives and projects The conference gave an opportunity for a variety of European projects and initiatives to be introduced.
Some of the most interesting are those originating at the Public Record Office itself.
Archives Direct 2001 (AD 2001) Meg Sweet and David Thomas gave a presentation on the PRO’s Archives Direct 2001 (AD2001) Programme [14].
The programme is a series of projects working on improving electronic access to the resources and services of the PRO.
Programme aims include the facilitation of online resource discovery through the digitisation of finding-aids, enabling online advance document ordering and mail-order services and the creation of a “virtual museum” with digitised images of selected PRO records.
Work is currently in progress on PROCat the retrospective-conversion of the PRO’s paper-based finding-aids.
These documents could not easily be scanned (due to inconsistencies in formats and cataloguing rules) so they are currently being re-keyed by contractors in Mauritius.
The converted entries are input into an Inventory List Database available at the Family Records Centre in central London.
The PROCat system, when finally developed, will use the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) [15], a Document Type Definition (DTD) of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), to give Web access to the database.
The Core Executive Pilot [16] tested the use of EAD with regard to finding-aids of selected records of the central policy-making departments of British Government since 1916.
The EAD encoded finding-aids can either be interrogated using a SGML viewer like Softquad’s Panormama or converted ‘on-the-fly’ into HTML for Web browser use.
UK National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) Kevin Ashley (University of London Computer Centre) introduced the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) [17].
NDAD is intended to preserve and, where possible, provide access to public records that take the form of datasets.
These are public records, usually originating from Government departments and agencies, and which will remain in the legal custody of the Keeper of Public Records at the PRO.
The data itself, however, will be managed by external contractors, the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) and the University of London Library (ULL).
Appraisal and selection of the records will continue to be made by government departments in conjunction with the PRO.
The datasets will then be transferred to NDAD who will accession the data, create relevant metadata (including tracking-down relevant documentation) and convert the datasets to formats suitable for long-term storage.
Electronic Records in Office Systems (EROS) programme Another PRO initiative introduced during the first day of the conference was the Electronic Records in Office Systems (EROS) [18] programme.
EROS is a series of projects which are primarily concerned with the large amounts of electronic documents which are created in the course of government.
The programme’s overall goal is to ensure that electronic records of long-term value are available for future access.
Work within EROS involves, for example, working with government departments and providing best practice guidelines.
For example, some “Guidelines on the Management of Electronic Records from Office Systems” [19] had been produced in April 1998.
Case studies charting the experience of particular goverment departments have also been published.
Other EROS initiatives includes work on standards and appraisal.
A pilot project using documents from the Cabinet Office (the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life) was used to test some of the practical issues of appraisal, preservation and ensuring access.
Material was received in a variety of formats and made accessible in PDF.
Electronic records The second day of the conference mostly concerned electronic records and recordkeeping.
It started with a short reflection by Roy Dibble of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on the challenges of electronic records in government departments.
He commented that the use of electronic systems in government had not (despite widespread predictions) alleviated the vast growth of paper, so electronic recordkeeping systems would need to integrate with paper in “hybrid” systems for the foreseeable future.
Andrew Holt and Steve Wells of the Department of Health followed this with a description and demonstration of a electronic records management solution being implemented by that Department.
The DLM-Forum and European initiatives The remainder of the day mostly related to European Commission initiatives, and in particular the work of the DLM-Forum on electronic records.
Hans Hofmann (European Commission, Secretariat-General) outlined the ten follow-up points [20] established at the 1st DLM-Forum on electronic records held in Brussels in December 1996 [21].
Ian Macfarlane (PRO) described the work of a DLM-Forum working group on electronic records management systems which is producing a draft specification for software suppliers.
Claes Gränström (National Archives of Sweden) followed this with a pessimistic review of proposed European Union directives concerning data protection and copyright.
The remaining sessions considered training issues in a European context.
Maria Pia Rinaldi Mariani (Ministry of Cultural Assets, Italy) outlined the work of the DLM-Forum Working Group on Training Matters and Michael Wettlinger (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz) described the “core competencies” for electronic recordkeeping formulated by this Working Group [22].
There followed descriptions of training programmes being implemented in Glasgow [23] and the Netherlands.
Conclusions The Electronic Access conference brought up many issues and generated a lot of interesting comment and questions.
In particular it gave an opportunity to introduce several European initiatives, including important work being carried out at the PRO and the activities of the DLM-Forum.
Several issues were brought up more than once during the conference.
Some of these are discussed below.
Dissemination.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Internet is an important dissemination medium for archives.
The DLM-Forum Web site [24] was commended as an information resource throughout the conference.
In addition, a recent EU Summit in Berne, hosted by the Swiss Federal Archives, had proposed the establishment of a European archival network which would provide links between the Web pages of all European national archives.
On the other hand, very little work had been done evaluating whether the Internet information that is currently produced by archives is of actual use to archive users [25].
Changing demand patterns.
Much current work is concerned with the digitisation of finding-aids (metadata).
However, the way in which the easy availability of these finding-aids would affect demand on and the use of archives remains to be properly considered.
Content creation issues, e.g.
the digitization of ‘traditional’ records, also needed consideration.
The importance of guidelines.
It is possible that the development and publishing of guidelines may be of more importance than standards development.
An example of what was required was the recently published DLM Guidelines on best practices for using electronic information (1997) [26].
Software requirements.
Identifying functional requirements [27] and best practice guidelines for electronic recordkeeping.
Training issues.
The existence of electronic records means that the archives profession needs to address its training needs with relation to digital materials.
Any such training will need to be periodically renewable.
References Public Record Office.
http://www.pro.gov.uk/ Geoff Hoon MP, Conference opening speech, Electronic Access: Archives in the New Milennium, Public Record Office, Kew, 3 June 1998. http://www.pro.gov.uk/news/eurohoon.htm Your right to know: the Government’s proposals for a Freedom of Information Act.
Presented to Parliament by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster by Command of Her Majesty, December 1997.
Cm.
3818.
London: The Stationery Office.
http://www.national-publishing.co.uk/document/caboff/foi/foi.htm Access to Commission Documents: a citizen’s guide.
Brussels: European Commission Secretariat-General.
http://europa.eu.int/comm/sg/citguide/en/citgu.htm For an US view on the challenges that electronic records pose to freedom of information, see: Thomas Elton Brown, The Freedom of Information Act in the information age: the electronic challenge to the people’s right to know.
American Archivist, Vol.
58, no.
2, Spring 1995, pp.
202-211.
Archives on-line: the establishment of a United Kingdom Archival Network.
National Council on Archives, 1998. http://www.archives.org.uk/onlinepubs/archivesonline/aolintro.html New Library: the People’s Network.
Library and Information Commission, 15th October 1997. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/ Department for Culture, Media and Sport “New library: the people’s network”: the Government’s response.
Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport by Command of Her Majesty, July 1998.
Cm.
3887.
London: The Stationery Office.
http://www.culture.gov.uk/new-library.htm Peter Brophy, Shelagh Fisher, Geoffrey Hare and David Kay, Towards a National Agency for Resource Discovery: Scoping Study.
British Library Research and Innovation Report, 58.
British Library Research and Innovation Centre, July 1997. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/bl/blri058/ Joint Funding Council’s Library Review: Report of the Group on a National/Regional Strategy for Library Provision for Researchers (The Anderson Report), 1996. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/anderson/ Department for Education and Employment, Connecting the Learning Society: The Government’s consultation paper on the National Grid for Learning: a summary, 1997. http://www.open.gov.uk/dfee/grid/ International Council on Archives, ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description.
Ottawa: ICA, 1994. http://www.archives.ca/ica/cds/isad(g)e.html International Council on Archives, ISAAR(CPF): International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families, Ottawa: ICA, 1996. http://www.archives.ca/ica/cds/isaar_e.html.
Archives Direct 2001 (AD 2001).
http://www.pro.gov.uk/ad2001/ Encoded Archival Description.
http://lcweb.loc.gov/ead/ Core Executive Pilot.
http://www.pro.gov.uk/finding/coreexec.htm National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD).
http://ndad.ulcc.ac.uk/ Electronic Records in Office Systems (EROS).
http://www.pro.gov.uk/government/eros/ Ian Macfarlane, Richard Blake, Stephen Harries and Alun David, Guidelines on the management and appraisal of electronic records.
Kew: Public Record Office, April 1998. http://www.pro.gov.uk/government/eros/guidelinesfinal.pdf DLM-Forum, Ten follow-up points on the DLM-Forum.
http://www2.echo.lu/dlm/en/plans.html Proceedings of the DLM-Forum on electronic records, Brussels, 18-20 December 1996.
INSAR (European Archives News) supplement II.
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1997. http://www2.echo.lu/dlm/en/proceed.html Michael Wettengel, Core competence for electronic recordkeeping, 4 June 1998. http://www.pro.gov.uk/news/euro11.htm University of Glasgow, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, MPhil in Digital Management and Preservation.
http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/Courses/DigitalMPhil/index.html DLM-Forum Electronic Records.
http://www2.echo.lu/dlm/en/ Richard J. Cox, Access in the digital information age and the archival mission: the United States.
Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol.
19, No.
1, 1998, pp.
25-40.
DLM-Forum, Guidelines on best practices for using electronic information, updated and enlarged ed.
INSAR (European Archives News) supplement III.
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1997. http://www2.echo.lu/dlm/en/gdlines.html University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences, Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping project.
http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/ Author Details Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Buzz database personalisation Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley writes about "Ask Jeeves", a search engine which processes natural language enquiries.
Search engines are getting more sophisticated all the time.
It’s likely that we’ll soon be seeing the rapid emergence of more ‘intelligent’ search tools which offer features for personalisation and tailoring, more effective searching synatax and more effective methods of tracking down information on large databases.
Such tools are already starting to emerge in the search engine market in response to users’ needs for more sophisticated tools to help them make sense of the growing morass of information on the Web.
One such tool is a meta-search engine called Ask Jeeves.
Ask Jeeves[1] has attempted to cross the divide between large automated indexes such as Alta Vista and Excite, and the smaller hand-crafted services such as Yahoo!
by offering a meta-search tool which utilises human intelligence in the filtering and organising of resources.
Search Ask Jeeves on a particular topic, and you’ll get a list of search results.
However, what you’ll also be presented with is a question.
For example, if you search Ask Jeeves for information your favourite novellist it will come up with a large set of results, as would usually be expected from a meta-search engine.
However, what Ask Jeeves will then do is preface these results with a number of questions; for example, “where can I find a review of the latest Iain Banks novel?” or “where can I get hold of a copy of The Crow Road?”.
Selecting one of these questions will take the user to a collection of web sites that seek to answer the question perhaps an online bookstore or a literary electronic journal thus helping a user refine their search effectively without too much hard work or effort.
These questions, and their answers, have been manually selected by human editors who scan resources on the Web on a daily basis to build up a knowledge base of information about sites which might be used to answer common questions.
The questions and the web pages which answer them are then stored as a series of templates in the Ask Jeeves knowledge base, and keywords and concepts in a search string are matched against them in order to retrieve the questions, and their corresponding web sites.
Ask Jeeves represents a clever model of an application using knowledge management techniques in order to better organise disparate information sources.
It draws upon the expertise of experienced human web searchers, and encapsulates this expertise in a database so that it can be put to use by others.
Ask Jeeves uses Natural Language Processing for searching, which means that questions or search keywords can be typed in plain english (for example, “where can I find reviews of the latest films” rather than +“film reviews” +latest which might be required by the more traditional search engines).
This should make it easier and more intuitive to use than many other search engines.
Ask Jeeves claims that, in contrast to the hundreds of thousands of irrelevant sites retrieved by most web search engines, users of their service will be directed to at most two or three relevant sites[2], thus cutting down dramatically on the time spent trying to track down relevant information sources.
Ask Jeeves can also interact with a user in order to better define a question that is too general or vague to provide an immediate answer from the knowledge base database.
For example, a question such as “what is the email address of Bob Brown” might result in a question asking where Bob Brown lives which would help to narrow down the results.
References [1]Ask Jeeves http://www.askjeeves.com [2]Ask Jeeves, Help Pages http://www.askjeeves.com/docs/HelpFrame.html Author Details Tracey Stanley Networked Information Officer.
Library, Computing and Media Services, University of Leeds UK Telephone +44 113 233 5569 Email: T.S.Stanley@leeds.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DELOS CEE Event: Current Trends in Digitisation in Central and Eastern Europe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DELOS CEE Event: Current Trends in Digitisation in Central and Eastern Europe Buzz software archives metadata digitisation video cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter reports on this meeting held in snowbound Torun, Poland, 3-4 February 2003.
Getting there was not easy on a budget ticket my flight was cancelled, and I was rescheduled to fly to Warsaw on a flight seven hours later.
So I spent an unanticipated night in Warsaw before travelling on to Torun by train , some 150 miles further north (outside temperature around -12 deg.
C, but amazingly warm inside).
Torun is a small city of about 200,000 people with a surviving mediaeval core.
It used to be on the border of Poland, and now it is in the centre, due to the redrawing of boundaries after WWII.
The DELOS meeting took place mainly in an imposing tower in part of the city wall, just next to the remains of a castle formerly occupied by the Teutonic Knights portrayed in Eisenstein’s ‘Alexander Nevsky’ wearing heavy Ned-Kelly style bucket helmets.
The theme of the conference was ‘Current Trends in Digitisation’.
Chief Librarians (or often their deputies and spies, as one deputy observed) from all over the CEE region attended the meeting, including Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland (of course), Macedonia, Hungary and Latvia.. One speaker came from Italy, to represent the MINERVA project.
There were also several heads of projects, who spoke in detail about these on the second day.
All in all about 40-plus attendees.
Some countries represented don’t actually have digitisation programmes or projects under way (their presentations indicated this), but they had turned up to the meeting because they recognise that things are happening which they need to know about, and they wish to become involved.
The first day’s presentations addressed mainly theoretical and organisational issues.
The Open Archives Forum presentation looked at the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH) as a tool for improving access to all kinds of digital objects.
Later on there were some informal discussions about how this technology might be applied to existing and proposed digitisation projects.
The second day revealed that there is quite a lot going on in the digitisation arena from Poland eastward and southward, and a good deal of it is interesting and useful.
Most of it is aimed at making digital versions of Slavonic texts available (as might be expected), but there are others.
One of the most interesting and useful projects has digitised the extremely accurate and detailed maps made by the Soviets which were ‘lost’ by them shortly before they left.
There is also a good deal of material in Latin held in collections in eastern Europe which is of interest to scholars in the West, as well as in the East, and this is being digitised too.
During the meeting there was an outing to the Nikolaus Copernicus Library in Torun, where we were shown a number of rare books, including a first edition of the ‘De Revolutionibus’.
This has been digitised, and is now available on a CD-Rom.
After the main part of the meeting there was a general discussion about issues of interest in digitisation.
The most striking thing about what was said here was that the main problems the CEE countries are having with their programmes (not all of which are necessarily funded by the EU) are very similar (nearly identical in fact) to those we have in the West that it is often difficult to communicate to funding organisations what the real problems and issues are.
Funders generally see tasks in terms of technological issues hardware, software, networking, websites,etc.
When in fact organisational issues (often issues of design and service structure) are now much more important in terms of the creation and maintainance of services.
As a networking opportunity this meeting was first class.
There were several dinners and lunches, which gave ample scope for one-to-one discussions.
There were only three native English speakers at the event (unless I miscounted), but much of the networking was conducted in English too.
The event was also featured on Torun television (which we discovered later at the time we thought it was just a person from the host institution ICIMSS wandering about with a video camera.
Well worth the effort of getting there.
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Windows Explorer: The Index Server Companion Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Windows Explorer: The Index Server Companion Buzz data mobile software html database apache css browser sql cataloguing windows linux rtf perl adobe doc samba php e-business mysql url standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Brett Burridge describes the Index Server Companion, an application he has created that allows Microsoft Index Server to index content from remote websites and ODBC databases.
Microsoft’s Index Server is a service supplied with the Windows NT 4.0 Server and Windows 2000 Server products.
The service indexes HTML and other content residing on the file system.
These indexed files may be queried using a number of techniques, but of particular relevance to web developers is the ability to build completely customised search facilities based on Active Server Pages (ASP) by making use of Index Server’s Component Object Model (COM) objects.
A limitation to Index Server is that it can only be used to index files via the file system.
Furthermore, integrating file and database searches isn’t always straightforward.
This article looks at how the Index Server Companion overcomes these limitations, enabling Index Server and ASP to form the basis of some sophisticated web applications.
An Overview of Index Server Index Server is one of Microsoft’s most useful server products.
On the administrative side of things, it is easy to install, performance while indexing content is good, and once installed maintenance tasks for the systems administrator are minimal.
The development of customised search applications using ASP is also made fairly straightforward through the use of the Query and Utility server components [1].
Figure 1.
Index Server is administered through an easy to use interface The main limitation of Index Server is that it can really only be used to index content hosted on servers on the same machine (or network) as the machine hosting the Index Server service.
Although it is possible to set up a share to a Unix or Linux web server using a file sharing solution such as SAMBA, this isn’t always satisfactory because Index Server is not case sensitive with respect to filenames, so this can cause problems when displaying search results.
The Apache web server’s spelling module, modspelling [2] can correct some case-sensitivity issues, but not all servers will have this module installed.
Added to this problem is the fact that organisations such UK academic institutions will often have web content distributed over a number of web servers that may be hosted on a number of different operating systems.
For example, the University of Essex where I once worked had at least 15 web servers with a substantial amount of content hosted on them, and it isn’t by any means the largest University in the country.
Another issue is that it can be a chore to prevent Index Server from indexing certain content.
Since it indexes the file system, it has no concept of the Robots Exclusion Standard specification’s robots.txt files [3].
It also has no concept of the ‘robots’ meta tag.
Although Index Server can be prevented from returning files with specific filenames and/or paths, it can get quite fiddly, as can be seen from this example from the search facility of my personal website: ” AND NOT #path ASPAlliance AND NOT #path ** AND NOT #path download AND NOT #path images AND NOT #path adm AND NOT #path backgrounds AND NOT #path dbase AND NOT #path test AND NOT #path script AND NOT #filename *.class AND NOT #filename *image.asp AND NOT #filename *.asa AND NOT #filename *.css AND NOT #filename redirect.asp AND NOT #filename *postinfo.html AND NOT #filename readme“ Finally, an increasing amount of data accessible via the Internet is stored in databases rather than HTML.
A comprehensive search facility should ideally return search results from both static HTML content as well as content stored in databases.
Extending the Functionality of Index Server Retrieving and indexing content from a web server by use of a web robot solves many of the problems Index Server has.
The web robot is able to mimic a web browser, starting at one page in the site and traversing the links in the site until it has retrieved all of the pages of the site.
The robot will potentially be able to retrieve content from any web server, regardless of the platform it is hosted on.
Two products that allow you to do this are Microsoft’s Site Server 3.0 and the author’s own Index Server Companion.
Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Microsoft’s Site Server 3.0 software suite has a Search application that enhances Index Server by allowing you to (amongst other things) retrieve and index content from remote websites using an integrated web robot.
For an overview of Site Server 3.0 Search, take a look at a previous article on Ariadne [4].
Unfortunately Site Server 3.0 Search has a few shortcomings, including: Site Server 3.0 isn’t the easiest of applications to install, especially if SQL Server is installed on the same machine.
The product wasn’t designed for Windows 2000 Server.
It is no longer in active development.
Few third party hosting companies support Site Server 3.0.
Even with academic licensing discounts, Site Server 3.0 costs a lot of money, which cannot always be justified if you only want to use the Search application of the software suite.
Index Server Companion The Index Server Companion is a cost effective method of retrieving content from remote webservers for Index Server to index.
Furthermore it also allows retrieval of content from ODBC databases which can be subsequently indexed by Index Server.
Features of the Index Server Companion The main features of the Index Server Companion are: Enables Index Server to allow searching of potentially any web server or ODBC compliant database.
Integrated web robot extracts content from websites.
Includes support for robots.txt files and robots meta tags.
Robot can negotiate sites using HTML Frames.
An optional mode allows Query Strings to be treated as distinct URLs (e.g.
treat http://www.aspalliance.com/brettb/WebJobMarket.asp?Skill=ASP as being a distinct URL from http://www.aspalliance.com/brettb/WebJobMarket.asp?Skill=JSP).
Ability to retrieve binary files from servers, including Adobe Acrobat PDF, Microsoft Office documents and even images.
Support for full or incremental project updates of both web and database content, meaning that Index Server only has to re-index content that has changed.
Configuration of the Index Server Companion is through the editing of a plain text configuration file.
Index Server Companion can be run from the command line, and scheduled using the Windows Task Scheduler.
Full reporting of activity to an external plain text log file.
Flexible output options mean that administrative access to Index Server is not necessarily required.
Fully documented VBScript examples show how to make use of the Index Server Companion in ASP pages.
Detailed documentation in Microsoft’s HTML Help format.
Fully documented source code.
Access to product updates and technical support.
Figure 2.
The Index Server Companion contains fully searchable documentation in Microsoft’s HTML Help format System Requirements The Index Server Companion is written in Perl 5 for Windows NT or 2000.
Although any version of Perl 5 could potentially be used to run the ASP Documentation Tool, it has been specifically developed using ActiveState’s ActivePerl.
ActivePerl is available as a free download from the ActiveState website [5].
It also requires a server running either Index Server on Windows NT 4.0 Server, or the Indexing Service on Windows 2000.
The Index Server Companion does not have to be run from the machine on which the Index Server is installed.
Configuring and Running the Index Server Companion The Index Server Companion is a Perl script that needs to be run from the Windows command line.
There is a single mandatory parameter, which tells the script which configuration file to use.
So to run the Index Server Companion for the Sample Project, an MSDOS Command Prompt is opened in the folder where the Index Server Companion files are installed installed and the following is typed: IndexServerCompanion.pl –c=“SampleProject/SampleProject.ini” It is of course possible to run the Index Server Companion from .bat scripts, which can then be scheduled using the AT command or the Windows Task Scheduler.
This makes it straightforward to update the Index Server’s index of website and database content at specific times and frequencies.
The configuration file is a plain text file containing a number of settings.
A sample configuration file is shown below: [ProjectName] = ASPArticles [CreateLogFile] = yes [LogFileDir] = Samples/ASPArticles/Logs [InfoStoreDir] = Samples/ASPArticles/InformationStore [OutputDir] = Samples/ASPArticles/Output [Verbose] = yes [StartURL] = http://www.aspalliance.com/brettb/Default.asp [BaseURL] = http://www.aspalliance.com/brettb/ [UserAgent] = Index Server Companion 1.1 (admin@server.com) [UseRobotsTextFile] = yes [UseRobotsMetaTag] = yes [UseURLQueryStrings] = no [CrawlType] = incremental [MaxURLSize] = 1024 [MaxNumberOfURLs] = 4096 [URLExtensions] = .htm .html .asp .aspx .jsp .php .cfm [FileExtensions] = .doc .pdf .rtf [AddURLToTitle] = yes [CaseSensitiveServer] = no [AddRowToTitle] = no [RefreshAllRows] = no The Index Server Companion is supplied with full documentation in Microsoft’s HTML Help format that describes each of the configuration settings.
When the script is run, the Index Server Companion will display details of its status in the Command Prompt window.
A detailed log file is also created.
How the Index Server Companion Works The Index Server Companion script contains a fully functional web robot that is able to extract the content from all of the required pages of the specified website.
It contains support for the Robots Exclusion Standard specification [3], and support for the robots meta tag contained within individual pages.
Each file extracted from the website is modified to contain a special meta tag that give the original URL (for web content).
It is then saved to disk from where it can be indexed by Index Server.
The contents of these special meta tags can then be used by the ASP page displaying the results of a web search, so that clicking on a search result item will display the original URL.
Unfortunately Index Server will not allow you to retrieve the content from custom meta tags without making a minor modification in the Index Server’s Microsoft Management Console (MMC), so there is also a special mode in the Index Server Companion that appends the original URL into the page’s HTML <title> tag.
Searching Web Content with the Index Server Companion Index Server Companion allows content from remote websites to be retrieved and consequently indexed by Index Server.
A working example of this may be seen [6].
This is a search page running on Internet Information Server 4.0 (Windows NT 4 Server) that allows you to search my ASPAlliance site, together with the articles I have written for Ariadne.ac.uk and ASPToday.com.
Since I don’t have administrative access to the Index Server on the machine hosting the search page, I have used the feature of the Index Server Companion that allows the document’s original URL to be appended to the original title.
For example the <title> tag of the ASPToday article “ASP Documentation Systems” at http://asptoday.com/content.asp?id=1435 is modified in the file saved to read: <title>ISC_URL=http://asptoday.com/content.asp?id=1435 ASP Documentation Systems</title> The URL and original title are separated by a tab character.
The search results page then contains a small piece of ASP code to split this title back into the article’s URL and original title: <% ‘Extract the document’s URL and title If Instr(oRS(“doctitle”), “ISC_URL”) > 0 Then ‘Split the doctitle at a tab character DocumentInformation = Split(oRS(“doctitle”), chr(9)) ‘The document’s URL is the first item in the array sDocumentURL = DocumentInformation(0) ‘Remove the “ISC_URL=” text in the document URL sDocumentURL = Replace(sDocumentURL, “ISC_URL=“, “”) ‘The document’s title is the second item in the array sDocumentTitle = DocumentInformation(1) End If %> The entire ASP code for the sample search page is available online [7].
Searching Binary Files with the Index Server Companion Index Server is able to index content from a range of non-HTML content.
This includes Microsoft Office documents, and once Adobe’s IFilter is installed, Adobe Acrobat PDF files.
The Index Server Companion is able to retrieve any binary files that it may encounter while crawling a website.
A configuration option specifies which binary file types are retrieved.
The filenames of the saved files are modified to include the original URL in the filename.
So for example, the Adobe Acrobat PDF document at: http://www.aspalliance.com/brettb/downloads/TheIndexserverCompanion.pdf Will be saved with the filename: Ohttp^c^b^bwww.aspalliance.com^bbrettb^bdownloads^bTheIndexServerCompanion.pdf If the file appears in search results, the original URL can be retrieved using the following ASP VBScript: <% ‘Extract the URL for other files (e.g.
PDF and DOC files) If Left(oRS(“FileName”), 2) = “o” Then sDocumentTitle = oRS(“doctitle”) sDocumentURL = CreateURLFromFileName(oRS(“FileName”)) End If %> The CreateURLFromFileName function will return the original URL: <% ‘Non-HTML files like Adobe Acrobat PDF files and Word ‘documents are stored with their original URLs partially ‘encoded in their filenames.
This function will return the ‘original URL of the file.
‘The encoding done by the Index Server Companion removes ‘characters that cannot be present in Windows filenames ’(these are: \/:?”<>|) Function CreateURLFromFileName(FileName) ‘Remove o_ prefix from URL FileName = Mid(FileName, 3, Len(FileName) 2) ‘Remove other encoded characters FileName = Replace(FileName, “^f”, “\“) FileName = Replace(FileName, “^b”, “/”) FileName = Replace(FileName, “^c”, “:“) FileName = Replace(FileName, “^s”, “”) FileName = Replace(FileName, “^q”, “?”) FileName = Replace(FileName, “^d”, Chr(34)) FileName = Replace(FileName, “^l”, “<”) FileName = Replace(FileName, “^g”, “>”) FileName = Replace(FileName, “^p”, “|”) CreateURLFromFileName = FileName End Function %> Unfortunately Index Server stores the URLs of other files as lower case, but a workaround will hopefully be included with the next release of the Index Server Companion.
URLs with Query Strings There is an option within the Index Server Companion to treat URLs containing Query Strings as distinct URLs.
This means that it is possible to index custom built web applications that use the Query String to store data.
For example, if an online phone book application had a form that allowed the user to search for users by forename, surname and department, the search results page for a specific user might be accessed using the URL: http://www.awebsite.ac.uk/phonebook/showresults.php?forename=John&surname=Smith&dept=Law The entire phone book could be indexed by the Index Server Companion if it was presented with a start page containing a hyperlink to every user.
The advantage of this is that users would be able to see search results of people as well as other content in an integrated search results page.
There may also be performance benefits, as searching LDAP directories can often be very time consuming, whereas Index Server returns search results almost instantaneously.
Searching Databases with the Index Server Companion The Index Server Companion is able to index content from database tables, queries (Microsoft Access) and stored procedures (SQL Server).
Database connectivity is achieved through the use of Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), the technology that allows Microsoft Windows to transparently connect to any database that has an ODBC driver.
Microsoft Access and SQL Server naturally have ODBC drivers, as do many non-Microsoft databases such as Oracle and FileMaker Pro.
It is of course possible to search databases using Structured Query Language (SQL), but by making use of Index Server Companion, it is possible to integrate database searches with search results from web page searches.
There are also other advantages: Index Server contains sophisticated pattern matching syntax, and it is a lot faster at returning search results than an equivalent SQL statement would be when using a database such as Microsoft Access.
The Index Server Companion makes it possible for Index Server to index databases by retrieving the rows of a specified database table and creating an HTML file containing the data from a specific database row.
Index Server can then be used to index these HTML files.
In search results pages, it is possible to extract the details of the table and row from which the data originated, so that the search results page can be modified to point to the original database data.
A sample page produced from the SQL Server sample pubs database is shown below: <html> <head> <meta name=”ISC_title_id” content=”MC2222“> <meta name=”ISC_title” content=”Silicon Valley Gastronomic Treats“> <meta name=”ISC_type” content=”mod_cook “> <meta name=”ISC_price” content=”19.99“> <meta name=”ISC_pubdate” content=”6/9/1991 12:00:00 AM“> <meta name=”ISCnotes” content=”Favorite recipes for quick, easy, and elegant meals.“> <meta name=”description” content=”Favorite recipes for quick, easy, and elegant meals.“></head> <title>Silicon Valley Gastronomic Treats</title> <body> </body> </html> In this example, the value of the title table column is optionally used to give the page an HTML title tag, and the notes table column is used for the description meta tag.
Each of the custom ISC prefixed meta tags can be queried using Index Server, although to retrieve their contents a minor configuration change to Index Server is required.
The Index Server Companion can also modify the HTML’s <title> tag to include the table name and row ID, e.g.
: <title>ISC_Table=titles ISC_KeyField=title_id ISC_RowNumber=MC2222 Silicon Valley Gastronomic Treats</title> The following ASP code shows search results for database rows where the ISC_type meta tag (and hence the type column) is “mod_cook”: <%@ Language=VBScript %> <% Dim oQuery Dim sDataRow Dim sDataRow_Table Dim sDataRow_Keyfield Dim sDataRow_RowNumber Dim sDataRow_RowTitle Dim sQueryText sArticlesPath = “Titles_Simple\SampleContent“ sQueryText = “#path ” & sArticlesPath & “ AND NOT #path _vti “ ‘Search for content in the specified folder which also have the isc_type meta tag equal to “mod_cook” sQueryText = sQueryText & “ AND @isc_type mod_cook” Const SEARCH_CATALOG = “www.brettb.com” Set oQuery = Server.CreateObject(”IXSSO.Query”) ‘A column must be defined for each custom meta tag that is returned in the search ‘results RecordSet oQuery.DefineColumn “isc_type (DBTYPE_WSTR) = d1b5d3f0-c0b3-11cf-9a92-00a0c908dbf1 isc_type” oQuery.Catalog = SEARCH_CATALOG oQuery.Query = sQueryText oQuery.MaxRecords = 200 oQuery.SortBy = “rank[d]” oQuery.Columns = “vpath, doctitle, FileName, Path, Write, Rank” Set oRS = oQuery.CreateRecordSet(“nonsequential”) %> <HTML> <HEAD> <META NAME=“GENERATOR” Content=“Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0”> </HEAD> <BODY> <% If oRS.EOF Then Response.Write “No pages were found for the query <i>” & sSearchString & “</i>“ Else Do While Not oRS.EOF If Instr(oRS(“doctitle”), “ISC_Table”) > 0 Then sDataRow = Split(oRS(“doctitle”), chr(9)) sDataRow_Table = sDataRow(0) sDataRow_Keyfield = sDataRow(1) sDataRow_RowNumber = sDataRow(2) sDataRow_RowTitle = sDataRow(3) sDataRow_Table = Replace(sDataRow_Table, “ISC_Table=“, “”) sDataRow_Keyfield = Replace(sDataRow_Keyfield, “ISC_KeyField=“, “”) sDataRow_RowNumber = Replace(sDataRow_RowNumber, “ISC_RowNumber=“, “”) End If Response.write “<b>Database Table:</b> “ & sDataRow_Table & “<br>“ Response.write “<b>Database Key Field:</b> “ & sDataRow_Keyfield & “<br>“ Response.write “<b>Database Row Number:</b> “ & sDataRow_RowNumber & “<br>“ Response.write “<b>Database Row Title:</b> “ & sDataRow_RowTitle & “<br>“ ‘Construct a URL that can be used to view the database data Response.write“<b>View Row URL:</b> <a href=““DisplayData.asp?ID=” & sDataRow_RowNumber & “””>” & sDataRow_RowTitle & “</a><br>“ %><hr><% oRS.MoveNext Loop End If %> </BODY> </HTML> <% Set oRS = nothing Set oQuery = nothing %> The disadvantage to using the Index Server Companion to index databases is that it cannot really be used for data that changes frequently, or for very large amounts of data.
In these kinds of situations it is possible to use more advanced techniques, such as combining Index Server and SQL search queries using the linked servers feature of SQL Server [8].
Resources The Index Server Companion is available for online purchase [9].
An evaluation version and the user documentation are also available.
The colour coded and syntax highlighted ASP code in this article was created using the ASP Documentation Tool [10].
Summary and Conclusions Index Server is a useful solution for creating website search facilities, but has a number of limitations that restrict its effectiveness.
Although Site Server 3.0 Search greatly enhances the functionality of Index Server, it is expensive and no longer actively supported by Microsoft.
The Index Server Companion is a low cost solution for allowing Index Server to index content from remote websites and ODBC databases, thereby assisting with the development and implementation of comprehensive website searching facilities on the Windows platform.
References Searching Index Server With ASP, ASPAlliance.com http://www.aspalliance.com/brettb/SearchingIndexServerWithASP.asp mod_speling Apache httpd module, Apache documentation http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_speling.html Robots Exclusion Standard, specification http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html The Microsoft Site Server Search Facility, Ariadne Issue 19 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/nt/ ActivePerl, ActiveState Tool Corp. website http://www.activestate.com/ Index Server Companion, sample search facility http://www.winnershtriangle.com/w/Products.IndexServerCompanion.SampleSearch.asp Index Server Companion, source code of sample search facility http://www.brettb.com/ASPAlliance/IndexServerCompanion/Sample_Web_ASPCode.html Creating Combined SQL Server and Index Service Queries, Avonelle Lovhaug http://www.asptoday.com/content.asp?id=295 Index Server Companion, website http://www.winnershtriangle.com/w/Products.IndexServerCompanion.asp ASP Documentation Tool, website http://www.winnershtriangle.com/w/Products.ASPDocumentationTool.asp Author Details Brett spent two years working in the University of Essex Computing Service, before moving to The Internet Applications Group in the Autumn of 1999, where he developed e-Business applications for a range of corporate clients and dot-com start ups.
Brett is presently employed as an Internet developer and technical writer through his own company, Winnersh Triangle Web Solutions Limited.
The company produces a number of innovative products, including the popular ASP Documentation Tool and the Index Server Companion.
The company is also available for web application development, primarily using Microsoft technologies (ASP, Visual Basic, SQL Server) but also using open source technologies such as PHP, MySQL and Perl.
Specialist services include development of search solutions using Microsoft’s Index Server and Site Server 3.0 Search.
As well as Ariadne, Brett has written technical articles for Wrox’s ASPToday, and ASPAlliance.com.
Brett Burridge Web: http://www.brettb.com/ Mobile: +44 (0)7775 903972 Article Title: “Windows Explorer: The Index Server Companion” Author: Brett Burridge Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/nt-explorer/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Managing Digital Video Content Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Managing Digital Video Content Buzz data software framework database infrastructure archives metadata accessibility video cataloguing multimedia soap drm odrl mpeg-2 mpeg-4 mpeg-1 url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Manjula Patel reviews the two-day workshop on current and emerging standards for managing digital video content held in Atlanta, Georgia, 15-16 August 2001.
“Managing Digital Video Content” [1], a two-day workshop on current and emerging standards for managing digital video content took place on 15-16th August, 2001, in Atlanta, Georgia.
The workshop was sponsored by ViDe, the video development initiative [2], the Southeastern Universities Research Association, SURA [3], Internet2 [4] and the Coalition for Networked Information, CNI [5].
Approximately 180 delegates attended, the majority from the States, peppered by one or two from Europe and Australia.
Note that most of the presentations are available from the workshop web site [1].
Standards-Based Content Management The theme for the first day was “standards-based content management”.
The workshop kicked off with an overview of ViDe digital video initiatives [2] by Jill Gemmill, current chair of the video development group.
This was followed by an overview of SURA and Internet2 digital video initiatives by Mary Fran Yafchak, IT Program coordinator for SURA [3] and co-chair of the Internet2 [4] digital video work group.
The keynote address for the day was entitled “Globally sharing information assets” and was given by Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the CNI [5].
The major themes running through the keynote were the lack of experience in handling video assets in terms of metadata, rights management, delivery of video and infrastructure components.
Lynch highlighted the fact that video assets are a lot more complex than the conventional textual materials that we are accustomed to dealing with, and that technology is only just reaching the point where it is becoming feasible to do things with video.
Although tools for creating (bad) video are now widely available, the real issue in managing digital video is that of stewardship.
Capturing of events such as workshops, conferences and seminars is fairly common nowadays, however it is often done with a blatant disregard fir IPR and rights issues –too many events are recorded in an ad-hoc manner.
Lynch argued that libraries are well-placed to exercise stewardship over digital video assets given their experience in this area.
However, it will require a significant change in mindset, for example they would have to be aware of activities on campus and take an active role in capturing them.
The next presentation, “Putting the pieces together”, was given by Grace Agnew, Assistant Director for systems and technical services, Georgia Technology Library and chair of the ViDe working group on digital video access working group [6].
People tend not to use video as a “normal” information object, so that there is a real danger of “ghetto-ising” video assets.
Agnew called for the immersion of moving images into mainstream information.
Also, many image archives are small, often home-based without a web presence at all, hence data interchange is a critical aspect.
In addition, there is a tremendous amount of analogue material which needs to be taken into account.
XrML [7], ODRL [8], MPEG-7 [9] and MPEG-21 [10] are likely to become important for rights metadata, while SOAP [11], OpenURLs [12] and open video bucket architecture [13] could feasibly provide “smart transport” for such information.
Jean Hudgins, Georgia Tech Library and Dan Kniesner, Oregon Health and Sciences University Library –both members of the ViDe digital video access working group then provided an overview if the ViDe Dublin Core application profile for digital video[6].
This is based on qualified Dublin Core[14] with extensions for video.
Lunch was followed by a session on digital video accessibility by Chris Hodge, University of Tennessee.
There are a whole host of issues which need to be addressed in this area.
Although research is being undertaken in various areas such as speech recognition and automatic captioning, there is currently no system available that would be adequate on the scale required.
Mairead Martin, Advanced Internet Technologies, University of Tennessee and Doug Pearson, Indiana University then spoke on the relative merits of XrML [7] and ODRL [8] in the context of rights metadata.
Also, multimedia in an object-oriented MPEG-4 space implies that permissions would be required for each object, raising issues with regard to the granularity of descriptions.
We should also bear in mind that Digital Rights Management (DRM) is not just about enforcing restrictions, but also about managing interactivity, reuse and reproduction of digital assets.
The rest of the afternoon was taken up by three concurrent breakout sessions: “Applying DC to digital video assets”; “Applying rights metadata to digital video assets” and “Implementing OAi using the ViDe DC database”.
It was refreshing not to have to choose which ones to attend and which to miss out on, since all three sessions were run three times to provide all the opportunity to attend all three –although this was somewhat hard on the people involved in running the sessions!
Emerging Technologies and Asset Management Implementations The second day began with Michael Nelson, University of North Carolina, talking about the Open Archives Initiative [15] –OAi : Past, Present and Future.
It appears that distributed searching which was in vogue a few years ago, is now falling out of favour.
In a typical internet environment, difficulties are encountered when the number of nodes reaches 100 or more.
The OAi protocol is concerned with harvesting metadata (not full-text).
Content editing, input and deletion of records are all outside the scope of the protocol and must be handled in the back-end systems.
The second keynote address was given by Jane Hunter, Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC), Australia.
She spoke about “MPEG-7: Transforming digital video asset description”.
A comprehensive coverage was provided of the MPEG-7 ISO/IEC standard [9] being developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) [16].
The standard is due out in September 2001.
MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are mainly concerned with compression, whereas MPEG-7 focuses on metadata.
The richness and complexity of MPEG-7 made it apparent, to me at least, that there is scope for an MPEG-7-Simple template.
Hunter also gave a brief overview of MPEG-21 [10] which provides for a multimedia framework and covers content management and usage as well as IP management and protection, amongst many of its other facets.
Following on from Jane Hunter’s coverage of MPEG-7, Anna Benitez, University of Columbia, described several interesting applications which involve making use of MPEG-7 implementations.
The applications are research projects being undertaken by the Digital Video and Multimedia group [17].
During the rest of the afternoon, attention turned to other implementations for managing digital video.
Jim DeRoest, Research Channel and University of Washington, described the high-end UW MediaWeb Project, followed by Jon Dunn, who spoke about digital music and audio projects at Indiana University [18].
Kathy Christensen of CNN News archives, then detailed issues relating to digital asset management at CNN, where they are investigating face and voice recognition, for example to identify or search for reports by a particular reporter.
The development of footage.net [19], which claims to be the largest union catalog of footage on the web, was then described by its founder, John Tariot.
He explained that neglect of standards had resulted in difficulties with performing cross-searching, fielded searching and sorting, for example on dates.
The workshop closed with a vendor panel comprising representatives from Virage[20], Blue Angel Technologies [21] and Ascential Software [22], all of whom had been demonstrating their systems throughout the workshop in an adjoining room.
Conclusions The workshop proved very successful, all credit due to its organisers.
The two day programme was packed full of interesting and informative presentations and discussions, which generated a definite “buzz” throughout its duration.
The major theme to watch out for in the future is that of digital rights management (DRM) –an area touched upon by many of the speakers and one which needs a lot more attention.
References [1] http://www.vide.net/conferences/ [2] http://www.vide.net/ [3] http://www.sura.org/ [4] http://www.internet2.edu/ [5] http://www.cni.org/ [6] http://gtel.gatech.edu/vide/videoaccess/ [7] http://www.xrml/org/ [8] http://odrl.net/ [9] http://www.cselt.it/mpeg/standards/mpeg-7/ [10] http://www.cselt.it/mpeg/standards/mpeg-21/ [11] http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/ [12] http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/vandesompel/03vandesompel.html [13] http://open-video.org/ [14] http://purl.org/dc/ [15] http://www.openarchives.org/ [16] http://www.cselt.it/mpeg/ [17] http://www.ee.columbia.edu/dvmm/ [18] http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/ [19] http://www.footage.net/ [20] http://www.virage.com/ [21] http://www.blueangeltech.com/ [22] http://www.ascentialsoftware.com/ Author Details   Manjula Patel, Research Officer at UKOLN Email: m.patel@ukoln.ac.uk Website: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Managing Digital Video Content” Author: Manjula Patel Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/patel/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Adaptive Developments for Learning in the Hybrid Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Adaptive Developments for Learning in the Hybrid Library Buzz data software java database dissemination infrastructure metadata vocabularies cataloguing opac multimedia marc e-learning vle authentication webct url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Wilma Alexander on the SELLIC Project and its aim to support the use of electronic resources in teaching science and engineering.
The Science and Engineering Library, Learning and Information Centre (SELLIC) [1] Project at the University of Edinburgh has seen rapid changes in the context in which it operates.
The project itself has therefore changed its emphasis in response to some of the challenges of the rapidly-evolving education environment.
Staff at SELLIC are engaged in a number of projects, all of which are directed at some aspect of hybrid library development and aim to bring together library and academic interests in determining how new developments should be applied within the institution.
Electronic library developments The electronic library is no longer a new concept, but achieving a high level of service in electronic formats remains a challenge for a large, historic and research-oriented establishment such as the University of Edinburgh.
Senior staff have been examining the implications of developing electronic library provision, in terms not only of financial and staffing resources, but also in terms of meeting changing user demands and needs.
The University of Edinburgh, like all UK HE institutions, is suffering at present from central funding allocations which represent a budget cut in real terms.
In addition Edinburgh has a huge and rather unwieldy estate, including historic buildings which are costly to maintain, and a number of commitments to new build work which cannot be postponed.
In the light of this, work on the SELLIC Library building will not now begin before 2001, and therefore planning future library services for the Faculty of Science and Engineering must take this into account.
Within the University Library as a whole the role of online services has become more prominent.
The Library website, Library Online, is seen as a major development area and it is envisaged that it will become the first and main port of call for all standard library activities and services such as book requests, loans and renewals, OPAC searches and delivery of full-text copies of articles.
Library staffing and responsibilities are being restructured to take this changing emphasis into account.
A new Online Services Division, headed by the SELLIC Director John MacColl, will take responsibility for a range of online developments: the development of Library Online services; overseeing the University's main website; and developing a coherent and effective structure for the diverse websites created and maintained by faculties, schools, departments and course tutors.
Within such a large and diverse institution, this is no trivial task.
SELLIC’s expertise in applying metadata standards will assist in the exploration of existing sites and the creation of a coherent information management structure for the University web sites collection.
There are many departments and courses which have long experience of using and creating electronic resources for teaching and learning.
However there are also many which have only recently started to make use of these tools, and within all departments there are some staff with little or no experience of electronic resources.
It is in this area that the Library can assist teaching staff in developing effective policies for the introduction and use of electronic learning resources.
The SELLIC project, in catering for the Faculty of Science and Engineering, is seen as a vanguard for this type of developmental support.
The Faculty of Science and Engineering is the largest in the University, and in its diversity offers a challenge and opportunity which mirrors the University as a whole.
Arguably the teaching and learning requirements of different subject areas within the Faculty require different approaches to the use of learning technology.
The very varied development paths taken by different departments has led to a situation where the technology in use for teaching is in some cases incompatible with current technological infrastructure.
In more than one department Computing Officers are maintaining systems written in languages long since superseded by more user-friendly systems, and one challenge facing developers is to find cost-effective ways of updating or upgrading this material.
The learning environment ‘SELLIC Online’ was designed with these factors in mind.
By late 1999, when the staff programmer for SELLIC left the project, the focus had shifted to encouraging staff to make use of existing technology in such a way as to ensure future compatibility and ease of updating.
A number of developments elsewhere in the University influenced this decision.
The central service for Learning Technology formed in 1998 as part of the Media and Learning Technology Service, is rapidly developing an expertise in the use of individual learning technologies and in the deployment of virtual learning environments (VLEs).
This has culminated in the purchase of licenses for two VLEs.
WebCT can reasonably claim to be one of the market leaders in this rapidly-expanding field.
The IVLE (Internet Virtual Learning Environment) developed by the National University of Singapore is a newer product which has the advantage of being extremely easy to use, for those new to the concept of managed learning environments.
The University of Edinburgh is also the lead partner in an innovative project funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council to create a Student-Centric Web-based Educational and Information Management System (SCWEIMS Project).
The vision of this project is to provide each student with on-line access to the key pieces of information held about them by their University through a personalised web environment.
When a student logs on they enter a space that provides information that is specific to them.
As the student is best placed to see whether the information held about them is correct, they may also be allowed to make changes on-line or a standard route will be provided to inform the University that a change is necessary.
This interface will also provide access to information and learning materials for each course the student is taking, via one of the VLEs if appropriate.
Students will also have access to personal workspaces where they can keep notes, personal resource listings, and compile materials for assignments.
In the light of these developments, the SELLIC Online environment will not be developed past the prototype stage.
This prototype, which illustrates all the key features of a VLE, has been made available through the SELLIC Website and feedback on the interface and facilities offered is being collected.
This feedback will inform future developments of the SCWEIMS interface and the implementation of the VLEs.
The SCWEIMS Project and developments such as Library Online will depend for their success, in large part, on the availability of authenticated, high quality information about resources.
Within a library environment with multiple sites scattered across the city, against a background of purchase funds under pressure, and an uncontrolled growth of learning resources, good, bad and indifferent, available via the Internet, ease of access is becoming a key factor in determining whether students will actually use a resource, in whatever form it is provided.
A great deal of SELLIC’s work is therefore directed at improving access to resources of various kinds.
Metadata SELLIC is developing experience in the use of a number of standards for describing and managing non-traditional electronic resources via the library catalogue.
Metadata is used to describe a whole variety of different types of material from printed books to videos, web sites and even museum objects.
With the advent of the WWW it has now become feasible and desirable to be able to find multimedia resources side by side in one search rather than having to carry out a number of searches on different sources with varying sets of rules and vocabularies.
Another advantage is that resources or digital surrogates may be linked directly to their metadata.
It is on this basis that SELLIC is currently undertaking an experimental project to convert part of the Cockburn Geology Museum collection records into both MARC and Dublin Core format.
This conversion will allow the records to be incorporated into the Library’s Voyager catalogue so that records for geological specimens will sit beside records for related printed material.
This should provide greater visibility to the collections themselves, and at the same time prepare the necessary resource descriptions for the later availability of digitised and scanned images of museum specimens, linked directly to their metadata.
The usefulness of having such records in the Library’s OPAC will be evaluated to establish if it should be extended to include other University museum collections.
A small trial set of records has undergone conversion with the aid of the "Data Magician" software package.
The software is capable of converting records between a variety of formats, in this case dBase to MARC communication files.
Once the desired settings have been configured the process of converting the records is very quick, making it an efficient tool for large scale conversions.
The trial records will shortly be imported into the Library’s Voyager Catalogue with the help of the Library’s Systems Team where they will be evaluated by the Metadata Editor and the Cockburn Geology Museum curator, Peder Aspen, before the remainder of the records are processed.
It is expected that a small amount of editing will be required to add subject headings and location information to the records once in the Library’s OPAC.
SELLIC's Metadata Editor is also involved in a project to catalogue departmental websites throughout the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
These sites are described using Dublin Core standards which have been mapped to US MARC in order for them to be incorporated into the Library’s Voyager OPAC.
This work has been progressing using the tools provided by our membership of the Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC) Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) Project [2].
As an extension of this work, departments and webmasters are given the opportunity to incorporate this metadata in the web pages themselves, enhancing the site's utility by improving search engine access to them.
A further planned development will enable course organisers to submit individual items of courseware for the creation of a catalogue record.
This provides the Library with the opportunity of developing the OPAC into a comprehensive gateway to teaching resources regardless of medium.
The IMS project and its recently-published standards are the basis for developments here.
Supporting learning technology SELLIC also took the decision to create a new post within the project, that of Learning Technology Officer (LTO).
This post has the wide-ranging remit to encourage and support the use of learning technology within the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
The LTO aims to ensure that any special requirements for teaching in these subject areas are taken into account in the development and implementation of courseware and learning environments.
As a ‘bridge’ between the library and academic staff, the LTO can also help to ensure that information management issues are identified at an early stage of learning technologies implementation, and ensure that existing library expertise is appropriately exploited.
This new post follows a trend within Scottish Higher education in general, where the growing number of learning technology posts can be found within a very wide range of central and devolved departments.
There is no single model for institutional developments for learning technology support, and certainly no single model for the range of skills and expertise required in these posts [3].
The University of Edinburgh is already richly endowed with staff who have the full range of technical expertise required to create and maintain programmes which provide some form of computer-assisted learning.
The present SELLIC LTO has focused her efforts on issues surrounding the integration of learning technology with existing traditional teaching and learning methods, and of course this often means ensuring that materials are selected and used appropriately, to help staff achieve the desired learning objectives.
All of the projects in which SELLIC is currently engaged are looking to future issues surrounding the use of learning technology in HE.
These issues will have more to do with access, authentication, management and integration than with technical matters.
One of the aims of creating detailed metadata about learning technology resources and loading this into the OPAC is to encourage staff to re-use available resources.
There are inevitably some problems to be overcome in encouraging re-use of materials in this way.
There are problems of technical compatibility, which, while they are lessening with the emergence of recognised standards for web-based materials, and with the increasing use of platform-independent languages such as Java, have by no means disappeared.
There is also the more complex issue of appropriateness of materials.
When examining the uptake and use of materials created through the Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network projects (TLTSN), the committee chaired by Marilyn Atkins observed that one obstacle to the use of such materials is the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.
[4] While this observation was directed mainly at the use of products from other institutions, within the University of Edinburgh the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the products of other departments and subject areas.
Metadata, however, can promote reusability, and encourage academic staff to view electronic resources in a similar light to more traditional library resources.
By providing detailed descriptions of sufficient granularity, it should then be possible for any course organiser dealing with aspects of e.g.
statistical methods, to find and make use of those parts of a statistics course which meet their needs, whether the course is designed for first year biology students, final year psychology students, or part-time students on the Edinburgh MBA.
As part of the University’s Development Trust Funding, SELLIC has been successful in obtaining a small award which will assist staff in creating course materials in electronic form which is suitable for delivery via one of the VLEs.
Eight projects will be completed over the summer months, from departments across the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
These range in scale and type from the simple creation of linked web pages and a glossary (for a course which has made no use of electronic materials before) to a project which aims to create simple generic tools to generate web pages from text and image databases, for use throughout a department and possibly the Faculty.
In addition to having real products which will be in use in courses delivered in the Academic Year 2000/2001, these projects will help to encourage the use of learning technology, especially web-based tools, throughout the Faculty.
Information Dissemination SELLIC aims to lead the University in dissemination of information about learning technologies and the management of applications.
Two university-wide fora have been established, with the aim of bringing together academic and non-academic staff with common interests.
The first, the Learning Technology Forum, holds a meeting each term in a seminar format.
Each has a selected theme with invited speakers and ample opportunity for discussion and (on occasion) debate.
To date meetings have been held examining examples of learning technology currently in use in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, and discussing Virtual Learning Environments, focussing on the two currently available within the University.
The next meeting will consider the unglamorous but crucial area of metadata.
The second Forum is the Academic / Library Forum on Electronic Information, which also meets each term.
To date meetings on the themes of scholarly publishing of electronic articles and the use of search engines for academic research have been held.
Both fora also have low-volume electronic mailing lists to facilitate discussion stimulated by these meetings.
Reports of the meetings are published on the SELLIC Website [5].
These fora can do more than publicise technologies available.
They form a valuable part of the staff development activity necessary for any innovations in learning and teaching to succeed.
Over the last decade in particular the ways in which learning technology can be used in the context of Higher Education have proliferated, and there is no reason to expect a diminution in this growth rate for some time to come.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone but a specialist devoted to full-time consideration of learning technologies to keep track of the opportunities available.
The task of assisting and supporting academic staff in using learning technology becomes one of information management: providing appropriate and easy-to use information about what technologies are available, how they may be used, and crucially, how they have been evaluated for both cost and educational effectiveness.
Library staff, if provided with the appropriate tools, are well-placed to advise on and assist with the selection of existing applications and materials, evaluating them in the context of the other more traditional resources available and using the same principles which apply to any selection process.
Bringing subject librarians into the picture requires an additional staff development effort on the part of the Library.
To assist in this process the SELLIC Website is being redesigned to include straightforward and concise information on how to establish parameters for selecting and evaluating learning technologies.
This development should be seen in the context of the increasingly important role the Library plays in assisting staff and students alike in selecting, evaluating and managing information regardless of medium.
It is here also that SELLIC aims to be in the vanguard for the University as a whole, providing course organisers with access to information about available courseware through such current projects as the CITADEL database, through dissemination and application of evaluation methodologies such as those being developed by the FOCUS Project [6] and through support for staff development in the use of communications and information technology (C&IT), taking into account institutional models and resources already available through, for example, some of the centrally funded C&IT staff development projects [7] and the EFFECTS Project [8].
Collaborative Projects SELLIC is also participating in a major JISC-funded project led by the London School of Economics, under its programme call to develop the DNER for learning and teaching.
Project ANGEL ('Authenticated Networked Guided Environment for Learning') will address those problems of providing managed access to hybrid library resources for students.
Edinburgh will be working on the authentication component of this project, and will ensure that the resulting tools are compatible with the SCWEIMS environment.
On a more modest scale, SELLIC will be working with a participant in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre’s Summer School programme on the development of a Dynamic Reading List Tool which will allow course tutors to compile lists of resources associated with their courses through a direct link with the Library’s Voyager system.
Once the system is populated with appropriate catalogue entries staff will be able to link directly to references and to the full text of articles, to web sites and functioning software.
SELLIC and the University Library as a whole are partners in some other areas of activity both within the University and outside.
The University will be a test site for a new software product which will help in the detection of plagiarism in submitted coursework.
It is also participating in evaluation of hybrid library management systems.
SELLIC’s experience of multimedia materials for teaching and learning, and of metadata standards for describing non-traditional materials will provide a sound basis for selecting and evaluating pilot applications.
The unavoidable delay in building work has been disappointing, but has resulted in accelerating SELLIC’s work in the virtual dimensions of the Project.
The loss of momentum in this area has been compensated for by the unanticipated speed at which the University is moving in introducing VLEs across the institution, leading to a change of focus in SELLIC from creation of learning technology to its evaluation and use.
The environment changes rapidly, and SELLIC has to adapt and move with it.
At the same time, it insists on the traditional principles of librarianship: that resources must be properly described and arranged within information retrieval systems, and it is working to assert the Library’s role in managing the learning resources of the University.
Although still a very small project, its value to the Library is as a special unit capable of responding quickly to new challenges and acting as a test bed for a wide range of electronic developments which impact on the Library and its plans for the future.
References [1] http://www.sellic.ed.ac.uk/ [2] CORC Project http://www.oclc.org/oclc/corc/ [3] Alexander, W (1999) TALiSMAN review of staff development courses and materials for C&IT in teaching, learning and assessment.
Heriot-Watt University.
Also available from the TALiSMAN website at http://www.talisman.hw.ac.uk/ [4] HEFCE (1998) An evaluation of the Computers in Teaching Initiative and Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network.
Report of a Committee (chaired by) Dr M. Atkins.
HEFCE Report 98/47.
"The Atkins report".
Summary available on the Internet at http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefce/pub98/98_47.html [5] http://www.sellic.ed.ac.uk/reports/ [6] FOCUS Project Website http://www.focus.port.ac.uk/ [7] SHEFC C&IT Initiatives Website http://www.scotcit.ac.uk/index.html [8] EFFECTS Project Website http://sh.plym.ac.uk/eds/effects/ Author Details   Wilma Alexander SELLIC Learning Technology Officer Science and Engineering Library, Learning and Information Centre The University of Edinburgh.
Web Site: http://www.ed.ac.uk/ email Wilma.Alexander@ed.ac.uk Article Title: "Adaptive developments for learning in the hybrid library" Author: Wilma Alexander Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/sellic/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: 'Finding Me, Finding You' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: 'Finding Me, Finding You' Buzz data database copyright mailbase url standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at the search engines that can be used to trace people.
Finding people The Internet is about a great many different things, but when it really comes down to it, the Internet is about people.
People creating websites, putting up content, writing emails, posting to newsgroups and interacting with each other.
Since that the basis on which the whole of the Internet works, I thought it might be quite interesting to have a look at ways we have of being able to find all of these people, using a variety of different types of search engines.
Consequently, I spent a few interesting hours trying to find myself (in the context of searching, rather than New Age) using a variety of different resources, and I hope that you’ll be interested in the results.
Not particularly of how easy it is to find me, of course, but by extrapolating a little to see how easy or difficult it is to find you, your partner or your friends.
There are basically four different ways of looking for people on the Internet.
You can use the standard search engines to just look for references to someone’s name, and then visit the website(s) that are returned to you, you can use search engines that look for a name and relate that to an email address, you can use a ‘People Finder’ to look for particular individuals, or finally a small number of very specific resources.
In this article I’ll cover all these methods, and try and assess (in a very non-scientific way) how useful each of these happens to be.
Standard Search Engines First of all, I tried doing some searches for ‘Phil Bradley’ using AltaVista [01], HotBot [02], Lycos [03], and Northern Light [04] just to see what turned up.
The results were as follows; the first number indicates the number of web pages returned, the second number in brackets relates to the first time that ‘my’ ‘Phil Bradley’ turned up.
AltaVista 595 (1-9) HotBot 420 (2) Lycos 100+ (1-7) Northern Light 872 (8) This was a pretty reasonable result I felt.
All four engines worked well, and since I write my webpages so that AltaVista in particular picks up my name it wasn’t surprising that I did so well with that engine.
If course, if you don’t know me in any detail, it will mean that you’ll have to spend some time visiting the returned webpages before you can find me, which shouldn’t be that difficult since I’m neither a Baseball player, or a gay porno star!
Consequently, I thought this approach worked reasonably well, though it would be less effective with a slightly more usual name such as ‘John Smith’, but further search terms should reduce the number of hits returned.
Email search engines There are a number of search engines which, as the name implies, are simply databases of names matched to email addresses.
They collect their data from a variety of sources from USENET newsgroup postings, from web pages, and from people who register directly with them.
Some of these are independent engines, while others are associated with the more general search engines.
For example, HotBot has a list of over 15,000,000 email addresses and when I did a search for my name it returned 9 hits, the third of which was mine.
HotBot makes use of a third party engine called Switchboard, which is also used by AltaVista’s people finder, which I’ll be talking about later.
It does also have the ability to search for email addresses and it turned up a total of 9 Phil Bradleys, with my email address being number 3 in the listing.
Both the global Yahoo!
[05] and the UK version [06] used the same search engine, listing 45 email addresses each, with mine being 11th.
They give a little more information, but limited to general geographic information (you only learned that I’m based in the UK for example).
There are some specific engines that you might find it worth trying; Bigfoot [07]has been going longer than most engines of this type and it returned a total of 32 Phil Bradley’s, with me being 9th in the list.
The results are basic, just giving email addresses, although it sometimes also returned a rough guide to the physical location of the individual, such as the name of a particular city in which that individual lives.
Reasonably comprehensive, though short on information.
The Internet @ddress Finder [08] only returned 4 results (mine being the 2nd on the list), and it did not give any further information, but it worked, though it could scarcely be called comprehensive.
People Finders These are rather more common than email search engines, and they attempt to provide users with rather more information than just an email address.
When possible they will also give you telephone numbers, street addresses and in the case of US residents even maps of how to get to someone’s home; all rather spooky.
They are usually connected to other services, allowing you to send virtual cards, or even gifts to the people you find.
Once again, the big name search engines come back into the picture here.
AltaVista has a people finder, but the emphasis is on the United States; you can either do a global search or limit to a US city or state.
The global search that I ran gave me a total of 151 hits, but they were all versions of Phil Bradley (Phil, Philip, Phillip, Phillippa) in the US, so no luck there.
Lycos [03] was rather better, in that it found over 100 references to Phil Bradley, but unlike most of the other engines, it also gave me a chance to look for books about, Web pages of, Pictures and Sounds.
The mind boggles for what it would have returned for the last two options if I’d been looking for the porno star!
Lycos also has a ‘Whowhere’ people finder [09]which listed 10 namesakes, with me being 7th on the list.
It also gave quick and easy access to searching for phone numbers and addresses (US only) and web pages (which didn’t work when I tried it).
Excite also has a People Finder [10] at which allows people to search its own member database, AT&T white pages and also email addresses.
Consequently, it is of limited value, unless the person you’re trying to locate is based in the US or you happen to know that they are registered with Excite.
192.com [11] attempts to give a comprehensive coverage of people based in the UK, by using information from a variety of different sources, both from the net and from other listings.
A search for Phil Bradley returned 77 results, with addresses and telephone numbers, but none of them were for me.
They also have an email search facility which oddly enough did locate me twice, once near where I used to live (it listed Croydon instead of Sutton), and where I currently live (Feltham), but was unable to give my full address or telephone numbers.
It did however work perfectly well in providing my email address.
I have to admit to some concerns here, since it would be quite possible to track people down to their home addresses, or to find all the people called ‘Jane Smith’ in Birmingham, and while I’m sure that almost everyone would use this information for legitimate purposes, I do have some nagging doubts about it.
I also think this is recognised by 192.com, since they do provide an option to either correct or remove the data from their database but of course you need to know that it is there in the first place!
Populus [12] is described as the ‘Intelligent People Locator’ and provides facilities to search by name/email address/personal interests/college or university/date of birth.
However, it is very US biased and only listed American colleges and universities.
However, it did find me, giving a total result of 10 Phil Bradleys, but with a lot of duplication the first 8 email addresses were all mine, and the same one!
Four11 [13], like Bigfoot has been around for several years and it uses the Yahoo!
search facility, giving the same results.
Another engine, called Anywho [14] again offered information on a large number of namesakes, but once more these were all in the US.
I did locate a number of other search engines, but these all seemed to be commercial services, offering the ability to search through public records databases (American once again), university records and so on.
The charges were very reasonable, at about $1 upwards a search, but of no use to individuals searching for people outside the US.
However, if you’re interested, you could visit: The Ultimate People Finder [15] or Find a Friend [16] but have your credit card handy!
Specific resources Running a search at Yahoo!
for ‘people finder’ or ‘email addresses’ does return a variety of other search engines, but these tended to be very specific indeed, such as Celebrity email addresses, contacts for US government officials, people lost in the Balkan war and so on.
If those are the kind of people that you’re looking for, it is certainly worth while having a look at them, but I chose two other ways of finding people.
The first was to go to our old friend Mailbase [17] in order to see if I could find references to myself.
Mailbase does have a search facility for finding people, and it did turn up three references to myself (one for each list I’m a member of), although I believe that you can request to be kept off this service.
However, if you’re either looking for an academic, or for a library/information person, it would be a good place to start a search.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, some people post to newsgroups, so my final port of call was to DejaNews, or to be correct its new name ‘Deja’ [18] to see what there was to see.
I used the power search to look for my name, and ended up with 700 matches, either with the name embedded in the body of a posting, or as the name of the author.
Clicking on the author then allowed me to do a search for the authors posting profile and I could see the newsgroups that I’d posted to, and read posts that I’d forgotten I’d sent, going back several years.
What it didn’t do was really indicate that I was the ‘Phil Bradley’ you might be looking for, so it would be very possible to jump to the wrong conclusions there were certainly namesakes who were posting in entirely different newsgroups about things I know nothing about!
Conclusions Well, there is no single perfect search engine that I feel I could recommend.
Most of them either gave a large amount of information on Americans, or scant information about people located in the rest of the world.
Moreover, most of the databases appear to be limited in size and you would need to search several of them if you wanted to be comprehensive.
It does of course depend on the type of information you want to find out about someone; if you just want their email address you may be better off in terms of speed to use one of the specialised search engines, but if you wanted more general information as well, you’d need to consider using a people finder.
If really pushed, I’d go for AltaVista, since it gives a variety of approaches and does seem to be reasonably comprehensive, although I still think it falls short of the mark.
References Altavista <URL:http://www.altavista.com> HotBot <URL: http://www.hotbot.com> Lycos <URL:http://www.lycos.co.uk> Northern Light <URL: http://www.northernlight.com> Yahoo.com <URL: http://www.yahoo.com> Yahoo UK <URL: http://www.yahoo.co.uk> Bigfoot <URL: http://www.bigfoot.com> Internet @ddress Finder <URL: http://www.iaf.net> Whowhere <URL:http://www.whowhere.lycos.com> Excite People Finder <URL: http://www.excite.com/reference/people_finder> 192.com <URL: http://www.192.com> Populus <URL: http://populus.net> Four11 <URL: http://www.four11.com> Anywho <URL: http://www.anywho.com> The Ultimate People Finder <URL: http://www.search3.knowx.com> Find a Friend <URL: http://www.findafriend.com> Mailbase <URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk> Deja <URL: http://www.deja.com> Author Details Phil Bradley http://www.philb.com Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Heron: Higher Education Resources Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Heron: Higher Education Resources Online Buzz software copyright Citation BibTex RIS Carolyn Rowlinson outlines the aims of the Heron eLib project.
In August 1998, the HERON (Higher Education Resources Online) project will begin to create a resource bank of teaching and learning support materials for higher education.
Funded by eLib and overseen by the CEI (Committee on Electronic Information) the entire resource will have copyright clearance and will be based on a consortium of the universities of Stirling, Napier and South Bank, with Blackwell’s Information Services and Blackwell Retail Ltd.
It will draw on the combined technical, marketing and project management skills of both the university and the private sector.
JISC is providing £462,000 funding.
Quick and effective copyright clearance procedures will be put in place with the co-operation of the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Rights holders will also be properly compensated.
The intention is that all Higher Education Institutions will be invited to become subscribers.
For their subscriptions they will have access to material in the resource bank, with copyright clearance.
New material can be digitised on request, and any member institution will be able to deposit their own electronic materials.
Royalties will be paid for the use of these resources.
Material will be distributed through a number of channels.
Institutions can provide local electronic storage with print facilities, or various arrangements can be made with bookshops, so that if necessary the entire process can be handled externally.
Publisher liaison and marketing will be the responsibility of Blackwell Retail Ltd and Blackwell’s Information Services.
They will also be heavily involved in system development.
The HEI’s will create the digital resource bank and represent the interests of higher education in matters to do with rights.
The project is seen by the publishing industry as an initiative which will enhance teaching and learning, develop the use of electronic storage and delivery and also ensure fairness for copyright holders.
The publishing sector will contribute academic market expertise and software innovation to the partnership with the universities.
The challenge is seen by Peter Kemp, Director of Information Services at the University of Stirling, as an opportunity to resolve the final permissions issues, to underpin the existing eLib projects and to stimulate on demand printing and electronic resource creation.
“Our priorities will be to maintain the momentum of the current eLib projects, to achieve a breakthrough in the remaining copyright clearance blockages, to represent the needs of HE to rights holders, and to encourage the expansion of on demand printing and Peter Kemp, Director of Information Services at the University of Stirling commented “Our priorities will be to maintain the momentum of the current eLib projects, to achieve a breakthrough in the remaining copyright clearance blockages, to represent the needs of HE to rights-holders, and to encourage the expansion of on-demand printing and electronic reserves throughout universities in the UK.
We look forward too the challenge.” Author Details Carolyn Rowlinson, Associate Librarian, Information Services, University of Stirling, Email: cagr1@stirling.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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SEAMLESS: Introduction to the Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SEAMLESS: Introduction to the Project Buzz data html database dissemination zip metadata thesaurus doi tagging identifier vocabularies schema copyright video cataloguing jpeg z39.50 ascii marc purl uri cd-rom interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Mary Rowlatt describes SEAMLESS, the Essex-based project.
SEAMLESS is a two year research project, funded by the British Library, which aims to develop a new model for citizens’ information one which is distributed, and based on partnerships and common standards.
The objectives of the SEAMLESS project are to: build strong and sustainable partnerships between the various information providers operating in the region develop and implement common standards (technical and informational) so as to achieve interoperability between their systems and data develop a SEAMLESS interface which will allow simultaneous querying of distributed information sources (whether stored in a database, made available on a website, or in word processed documents) and return all the information back to the user in a unified list facilitate electronic communication between the information providers and their customers, and between the various participating agencies develop a current awareness/alerting service for users (second phase) Currently the project team (Essex Libraries, Fretwell Downing Data Systems Ltd. and Education for Change Ltd.) are working with 29 organisations in Essex (national government departments, County Council departments, District Councils, Health authorities, business organisations, educational establishments, CABs, voluntary and charitable groups etc.)
to develop the necessary standards and set up a prototype system.
The application of metatags and the creation of a common thesaurus are being investigated.
Once the system has been tested, modified, and proved viable, it is hoped that the system will be opened up to all information providers in the region, and that it will form the basis for the development and delivery of citizen’s information in Essex in the future.
Why do we need a profile for citizens’ information?
Developments in three discrete, but inter-related areas are converging to create a need for a new profile, or standard attribute set, for citizens’ information which will support greater interoperability, help to improve resource description and discovery, and act as a basis for the development of new e-services: a growing emphasis on joint working and partnership arrangements, often described as ‘joined up thinking’ or ‘joined up government,’ amongst organisations which provide services to the public.
Increasingly, this includes cross-sectoral initiatives involving players from the public, private and voluntary sectors.
Examples include: Health Action Zones, Employment Action Zones, Regeneration (Pathfinder) Projects, social exclusion initiatives, Local Agenda 21 projects, the implementation of the Crime and Disorder Act, the development of a National Childcare Strategy and implementation of Early Years Development Plans, Lifelong Learning, University for Industry, and the setting up of Regional Development Agencies.
All depend on strong local partnerships and in this context the ability to share information effectively is a key requirement, one which in turn rests upon the development and adoption of suitable standards.
a concern for the users of local services, and the difficulties they face in trying to access the services and information they need in an increasingly complex and fragmented information environment.
In order to live their lives and play their full part in society people need information from a wide range of public, private and voluntary sector organisations, nationally and locally.
Most of these organisations produce information in a variety of printed and electronic formats, many of which are available in the public library.
Users are confused by a multitude of overlapping information sources, with a multitude of different search interfaces, which act as a barrier to easy access.
Although this approach is gradually being upgraded to a www based environment, which allows access to an increasing amount of information, it still produces ‘information ‘islands’ which can only be bridged through superficial high level hyper-links.
Another problem, which is well recognised by information professionals, is that the current state of indexing and description of documents and resources on the web is inadequate, which means that searches tend to favour recall at the expense of precision.
There is a need for further development, and practical application, in areas such as the use of metadata, and automated techniques based on harvesting and web crawlers, in order to improve this situation.
* the publication of the influential report on the future for Britain’s public libraries ‘New Library the Peoples’ Network’ [1] http://www.lic.gov.uk/publications/newlibrary.html has highlighted the need for public libraries to be linked up to a high speed, high capacity digital network.
Attention now is turning to the content and services that public libraries will be able to deliver over that network.
The provision of citizens’, or community information, has traditionally been one of the public library’s core functions and there is considerable interest the question of whether and how citizens’ information resources held locally can be aggregated, or made available, as a national resource.
Related research The British Library funded CIRCE project (http://www.gloscc.gov.uk/circe/index.htm ) has been investigating the potential for networking public library community information databases.
The fundamental difference between CIRCE and SEAMLESS is that the SEAMLESS team do not see a long term future for public library community information databases as such.
Rather they take the view that there is a danger that public libraries may become marginalised as information providers unless the twin ‘threats’ of competition from other information providers and the trend to remote access to information encouraged by the development of the www are addressed.
The SEAMLESS project proposes to develop, test and evaluate a new model for citizens’ information provision in which the public library becomes the facilitator, co-ordinator and standard setter for a distributed system (made up of the information resources of a network of local information providers) and provides expertise and training on demand.
Two basic, but crucial, pre-conditions underpin this new model.
The first is that a substantial degree of co-operation is needed between the various information providers in any given locality: no one organisation can provide a successful citizens’ information service in isolation.
The second is that some common technical and information standards need to be developed and adopted in order to facilitate successful co-operation and to enable the necessary sharing of data between partners and efficient dissemination of data to the wider public.
One of the key aims of the SEAMLESS project is to test whether some of the large body of previous research into interoperability and metadata could beneficially be applied to a new domain that of citizens’ information.
(See www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/, www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ and www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/metadata/matahome.html for more information on a number of European Union (EU) and Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) projects funded under the Telematics for Libraries and Electronic Libraries (e-Lib) programmes.
Interest in this area continues to grow and JISC and BLRIC (British Library Research and Innovation Centre) have recently established UK Interoperability Focus to explore, publicise and mobilise the benefits and practice of interoperability across diverse information sectors (www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/).
Extant profiles Standard attribute sets are a useful starting point for considering data representation in any area.
A number of these either currently exist or are emergent in the area of citizen’s information.
The SEAMLESS team studied existing standard attribute sets and compared their elements and possible application.
The team also looked at a variety of sources describing the general application of metadata.
[2] [3] [4] http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/desire/overview [5] [6] US MARC Community Information Format This is the extension of the US MARC attribute set that covers cataloguing of community information.
Further details about this attribute set are available at the Library of Congress website (http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/community/eccihome.html).
Dublin Core The Dublin Core seeks to establish a way to describe documents and “document-like objects” such as web pages, in a way which will enable search engines to index and retrieve them.
Further information is available from the website ( http://purl.org/dc/ ).
GILS The Government (or Global) Information Locator Service is the result of an international agreement (based on original work among government departments in the US) to provide a standard for locating information, whether held in libraries, data centres, or published on the Internet.
The standard adopted for this service is ISO 23950, also known as (ANSI) Z39.50.
[7] Further information is available from the website ( http://www.usgs.gov/gils/ ).
CIMI Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information.
Since 1990 CIMI has made substantial progress in the development of standards for structuring museums’ data and enabling widespread search and retrieval capabilities.
Further information is available from the CIMI website ( http://www.cimi.org ).
IMS Instructional Management Scheme.
The IMS Project is developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online activities such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance and exchanging student records between administrative systems.
Further information can be found in the IMS website (http://www.imsproject.org/what.html ).
Development of the SEAMLESS profile SEAMLESS was established with the intention that a wide range of types of organisation should be included, so it was important to ensure that the final system would be hospitable to different types of information and that it would meet the needs of varying types of organisation and the particular needs of their customers.
In setting out to define a common information profile (attribute set) the project team contacted a wide variety of potential partner organisations, selected to include some who had expressed interest following the launch conference, some who had worked with the library service before, and some whom it was felt would enhance the variety of information challenges for the pilot project.
Meetings were held with each organisation during Spring 1998 to give them more information about SEAMLESS and to collect information about their role and services, and a workshop was held in April.
An Information audit was carried out during June and July 1998 to analyse the organisations’ information products and systems in detail and to assist them in the selection of information sets to make available for the pilot project.
This information was then collated and there followed an iterative process of developing a set of information attributes which were both broad enough to encompass the range of domains represented and suitably constrained so as to be manageable in the real world working environment of the organisations concerned.
Following the research into existing standards the team undertook a detailed analysis of the sample data supplied by partner organisations during the Information Audit.
The team identified and mapped the various elements within each data set to establish overlaps and common terms.
Research staff from Essex Libraries, Education for Change and Fretwell Downing then met to discuss the various options.
The original proposal for the SEAMLESS project postulated a information profile based upon the Dublin Core.
Initial research within the project indicated that GILS provided a better basis for development.
It was felt that it provided a more hospitable attribute set for the elements identified within the sample data than Dublin Core, while being less complicated to apply and offering more potential for accommodating future developments than USMARC.
It is also compliant with the international standard for information searching, ISO 23950 (Z39.50) which is used in the project.
Having decided that GILS might be the standard to use, the research team then undertook detailed matching of the data obtained from partners in the Information Audit to the full GILS Core Elements.
The profile had to be able to cope with elements from three data formats: data bases where every field would need to be tagged in order to be displayed, web pages where only searchable elements were required and word documents where again searchable elements were needed but where substantial editing might be required to produce useable data.
This work proved that the majority of data would fit into the GILS Core Elements.
The major gap was for information relating to educational courses where there seemed to be nowhere to include information about entry requirements, resulting qualification, target audience or the duration or type of course.
The team therefore reconsidered the other extant standards and decided that the IMS profile included elements which would plug this gap.
Following advice from Fretwell Downing four IMS elements were included in the SEAMLESS Information Profile as a Learning Provision Subset.
In addition, discussions with the participating information providers indicated a desire to incorporate the Alta Vista format for the keyword and description attributes.
These therefore appear in the SEAMLESS profile without the SEAMLESS prefix (se.
), the intention being that these tags can be recognised by the Alta Vista robots as well as by SEAMLESS.
Matching also showed that for the majority of the data currently included in the project, the full GILS Core Elements was not required.
GILS includes some quite complicated nested tags and requires some expertise to implement correctly.
The intention is that partner organisations will add the tags themselves and the team was conscious that the process had to be simplified as much as possible.
The workload involved in manipulating data for SEAMLESS had already been identified as a potential problem by many of the organisations and it was felt that any long and complicated tagging process might cause some organisations to drop out of the project.
After discussion with GILS experts at Fretwell Downing and Sebastian Hammer of Index Data, Denmark, the team developed a set of 33 SEAMLESS information attributes (the ‘SEAMLESS Information Profile’) which can for the most part be mapped directly onto the equivalent GILS Core Elements.
Details of the SEAMLESS profile The 33 elements are (mandatory elements in bold type): Element No.
Name Description 1 title assigned title or description of the resource 2 source the organisation or provider who is making the information available to SEAMLESS 3 date-last-modified in the form DD/MM/YYYY 4 channel term(s) from the SEAMLESS Channels list 5 keywords term(s) from the SEAMLESS thesaurus 6 originator the body primarily responsible for the intellectual content of the information.
7 contact-name the person to contact for more information 8 contact-organisation the name of the organisation to contact for more information 9 contact-address the address of organisation to contact for more information 10 contact-network-address Email address to contact for more information 11 distributor This element will apply mainly to bibliographic items 12 cost cost information 13 begin-date in the form DD/MM/YYYY 14 end-date in the form DD/MM/YYYY 15 time-textual Time/date expressed in words 16 linkage Show URL, URI, SICI, PII, DOI, PURL, ISBN, ISSN etc.
here 17 linkage-type e.g.
HTML, MIME, plain text etc.
18 medium e.g.
CD-ROM, Book, Video etc.
19 place one term plus it’s post town, e.g.
Chelmsford 20 description a textual description relating to the general nature and content 21 contributor e.g.
co-author 22 date-of-publication-structured in the form DD/MM/YYYY 23 date-of-publication-textual date expressed in words 24 language language of the intellectual content of the resource 25 general-constraint e.g.
copyright, use & reuse, intellectual property etc.
26 control-identifier any local reference number that uniquely identifies the resource within its domain 27 record-review-date in the form DD/MM/YYYY 28 supplemental-information a field to map miscellaneous information 29 body Body text (where appropriate).
Basic formatting (white space) is preserved.
Learning provision sub-set   30 ims.prerequisite entry requirements for courses 31 ims.educationalobjective qualification or intended learning result of course 32 ims.level the target audience or level of the course 33 ims.duration length of the course and/or the type of study e.g.
full time, part time etc.
Mapping of SEAMLESS Profile Attributes to GILS Core Elements The mappings are as shown in the table below.
Note that where GILS provides several groupings of sub-elements, the decision was taken within the SEAMLESS project to provide a “flat” (i.e.
non-nested) schema, which it was felt would ease the process of data preparation across a wide variety of locations and by staff with varying levels of technical understanding.
SEAMLESS Element No.
Name GILS Element No.
Equivalent GILS Core Element 1 title 4 Title 2 source 1019 Record source 3 date-last-modified 1012 Date of last modification 4 channel 2074 Controlled Subject Index sub-group: Controlled term 5 keywords 2074 Controlled Subject Index sub-group: Controlled term 6 originator 1005 Originator 7 contact-name 2023 Point of Contact sub-group: Contact Name 8 contact-organisation 2024 Point of Contact sub-group: Contact Organization 9 contact-address 2025 2029 Point of Contact sub-group: Contact Street Address Contact City Contact State or Province Contact Zip or Postal Code 10 contact-network-address 2030 Point of Contact sub-group: Contact Network Address 11 distributor 2006 Availability sub-group: Distributor Name 12 cost 2055 Order Process sub-group: Cost Information 13 begin-date 2072 Availability sub-group: Beginning Date 14 end-date 2073 Availability sub-group: Ending Date 15 time-textual 2045 Availability sub-group: Available Time Textual 16 linkage 2021 Availability sub-group: Linkage 17 linkage-type 2022 Availability sub-group: Linkage Type 18 medium 1031 Availability sub-group: Medium 19 place 2042 Spatial Domain sub-group: Place Keyword 20 description 62 Abstract 21 contributor 1003 Contributor 22 date-of-publication-structured 31 Date of Publication sub-group: Date of Publication Structured 23 date-of-publication-textual 31 Date of Publication sub-group: Date of Publication Textual 24 language 54 Language of Resource 25 general-constraint 2005 Use Constraint 26 control-identifier 1007 Control Identifier 27 record-review-date 2051 Record Review Date 28 supplemental-information 2050 Supplemental Information 29 body None None Learning provision sub-set     30 ims.prerequisite None SEAMLESS/IMS specific sub-group 31 ims.educationalobjective None SEAMLESS/IMS specific sub-group 32 ims.level None SEAMLESS/IMS specific sub-group 33 ims.duration None SEAMLESS/IMS specific sub-group Mapping of SEAMLESS Profile Attributes to Dublin Core Elements During discussion several partners expressed concern about implementing a SEAMLESS attribute set which would not provide additional retrieval advantages in the wider web community beyond those systems already recognising GILS.
There was some feeling particularly in the academic organisations that they did not wish to cut themselves off from the Dublin Core community.
The team therefore decided to include a mapping of SEAMLESS attributes to Dublin Core Elements as part of the system.
This is shown in the following table.
For details of similar work see the ‘Dublin Core/MARC/GILS crosswalk’.
[8] http://www.loc.gov/marc/dccrocc.htm   SEAMLESS ELEMENT Purpose DUBLIN CORE ELEMENT Purpose title The assigned title or description of the resource.
Title The name Given to the resource by the Creator or Publisher.
originator To identify the organisation(s) or person(s) responsible for the creation of the resource.
Creator The person(s) or organisation(s) primarily responsible for the intellectual content of the resource.
keywords To specify the subject or topic of the resources using a controlled vocabulary that describes its content for resource description and discovery purposes.
Subject The topic of the resource, or keywords or phrases that describe the subject or content of the resource.
description A textual description relating to the general nature and content of the resource.
Description A textural description of the contents of the resource, including abstracts in the case of document-like objects or contents descriptions in the case of visual resources.
distributor To identify the entity responsible for making the resource available in its present form such as a publishing house, university department or corporate entity.
Publisher The entity responsible for making the resource available in its present form, such as a publisher, a university department, or a corporate entity.
contributor To identify other significant contributors to the intellectual content of the resource in addition to the originator.
Contributor Person(s) or organisation(s) in addition to those specified in the Creator element who have made significant intellectual contributions to the resource but whose contribution is secondary to the individuals or entities specified in the creator element.
date of publication To show the date the resource was published.
Date The date the resource was made available in its present form.
medium To specify the physical format and data representation of the resource.
Type The category of the resource, such as home page, novel, poem, working paper, technical report, essay, dictionary.
linkage To provide the location or address of an automatic linkage to an electronic resource.
Identifier String or number used to uniquely identify the resource.
linkage type To identify the data content type associated with the electronic resource e.g.
HTML for a web page, PDF for a Portable Document Format file.
Format The data representation of the resource, such as text/html, ASCII, Postscript file, executable application, or JPEG image.
None at present (GILS: SOURCES OF DATA)   Source The work, either print or electronic, from which this resource is derived, if applicable.
language To indicate to the user the language of the intellectual content of the resource.
Language Language of the intellectual content of the resource.
None at present (GILS: CROSS REFERENCE RELATIONSHIP, CROSS REFERENCE LINKAGE)   Relation Relationship to other resources.
begin-date end-date time-textual place To indicate any start or end dates associated with the resource; to indicate the expression of dates and times in words; to indicate the location where the activity occurs Coverage The spatial locations and temporal durations characteristic of the resource.
general constraints To indicate if any access constraints pertain to the use of the resource.
Rights The content of this element is intended to be a link ( a URL or other suitable URI as appropriate) to a copyright notice, a rights-management statement, or perhaps a server that would provide such information in a dynamic way.
The intention of specifying this field is to allow providers a means to associate terms and conditions or copyright statements with a resource or collection of resources.
No assumptions should be made if such a field is empty or not present.
Searchable attributes For the initial implementation the following attributes will be searchable: keyword, subject, name, place and date.
Comments please The SEAMLESS team would welcome comments on the proposed citizens’ information profile as outlined above from colleagues active in the fields of metadata and interoperability research and from public libraries and other organisations providing information to the public.
Please contact either Mary Rowlatt (maryr@essexcc.gov.uk ) or the SEAMLESS team (seamless@essexcc.gov.uk ).
References: [1] New Library the Peoples’ Network Library and Information Commission, 1997 Available from: http://www.lic.gov.uk/publications/newlibrary.html [2] Dempsey, Lorcan and Heery, Rachel Metadata: a current view of practice and issues Journal of Documentation, Vol.
54(2), March 1998, p145 172 [3] European Commission, DGXIII -E4 Report of the Metadata Workshop held in Luxembourg, 1st and 2nd December, 1997 [4] Dempsey, Lorcan and Heery, Rachel, with contributions from Martin Hamilton, Debra Hiom, Jon Knight, Traugott Koch, Marianne Peereboom and Andy Powell A review of metadata: a survey of current resource description formats DESIRE 1, deliverable 3.2(1), March 1997 Available from: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/desire/overview/ [5] Younger, Jennifer A Resource description in the digital age Library Trends, Vol.
45(3), Winter 1997, p462 487 [6] Heery, Rachel Review of metadata formats Program, Vol.
30(4), October 1996, p345 -373 [7] ISO 23950 1998/ANSI?NISO Z39.50 1995 Information retrieval (Z39.50): application service definition and protocol specificationISO, 1998 [8] Dublin Core/MARC/GILS crosswalk Network Development and Marc Standards Office, last updated 04/07/97 Available from: http://www.loc.gov/marc/dccrocc.html Author details Mary Rowlatt Information Services Manager and Project Leader for SEAMLESS maryr@essexcc.gov.uk Cathy Day Research Assistant SEAMLESS project seamless@essexcc.gov.uk Jo Morris Research Assistant SEAMLESS project seamless@essexcc.gov.uk Kevin Atkins Network Services Consultant Fretwell-Downing Data Systems Ltd. katkins@fdgroup.co.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur: A Comparison of Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: A Comparison of Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online Buzz software archives metadata eprints copyright licence interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Stevan Harnad argues for the self-archiving alternative.
Roberts et al., in Building a "GenBank" of the Published Literature [1] argue compellingly for the following three pleas to publishers and authors: It is imperative to free the refereed literature online.
To achieve this goal, the following should be done: Established journal publishers should give away their journal contents online for free.
(In the biomedical sciences, they can do this by depositing them in PubMedCentral [2]) Authors should submit preferentially to journals that give their contents away online for free (even boycotting those that do not).
In place of established journals that do not give away their contents online for free, new journals (e.g., BioMed Central [3]) should be established that do.
The goal of freeing the refereed literature online is entirely valid, optimal for science and scholarship, attainable, inevitable, and indeed already overdue [4].
But Roberts et al.
's proposed means alas do not look like the fastest or surest way of attaining that goal, particularly as there is a tested and proven alternative means that will attain the very same goal [5], without asking journals to do anything, and without asking authors to give up anything: (i) There is no reason journals should pre-emptively agree to give away their own contents online at this time.
If researchers wait until many or most journals find a reason for doing so, it will be a very, very long wait.
(PubMedCentral has only twenty willing journals so far, out of many thousand refereed biomedical journals).
(ii) Asking authors to choose which journal to submit their research to on the basis of whether or not the journal agrees to give away its contents online for free rather than on the basis authors currently use -journal quality, reputation, impact factor -is again an unreasonable thing to ask, and will result in a long, long wait.
More important, it is an unnecessary thing to ask, as there is already a means for authors to achieve precisely the same goal immediately without having to give up anything at all: by self-archiving their refereed articles themselves, in interoperable, University Eprint Archives [6].
(iii) Creating new journals, without track-records, to draw away submissions from the noncompliant established journals, is another long uphill path, and again it is not at all clear why authors should prefer to take that path, renouncing their preferred established journals, when they can have their cake and eat it too (through self-archiving).
In an editorial response to Roberts et al.
's article, entitled "Science's Response: Is a Government Archive the Best Option?"
[7], AAAS has announced itself willing to free its contents one year after publication (see my critique [8]).
(The New England Journal of Medicine [20] plans to follow suit, and undoubtedly other journals will soon do so too).
In the service of the same objective as that of Roberts et al., Sequeira et al., in PubMed Central decides to decentralize [9] announce a new policy from PubMedCentral (PMC).
PMC already accepts contents from publishers who are only willing to free them 6-12 months after publication.
Now PMC is ready to accept just the metadata from those publishers, linking to their toll-gated websites, if they agree to give away their contents on their own websites 6-12 months after publication.
This is another path that is likely to take a very long time to reach its objective.
And even then, can research really be called "free" if it must wait 6-12 months to be released in each instance?
Scientists don't rush to make their findings public through PUBLICation in order to have free access to them embargoed for 6-12 months [11].
Free access to refereed research a year after publication is better then no access, but it's too little, too late.
And there is no reason the research community should wait for it.
Delayed release is just as inadequate a solution for this anomalous literature -written by its authors solely for its research impact, not for a share in the access-blocking toll-gate-receipts (for which the majority, royalty/fee-based literature is written) -as lowered subscription/license tolls are [10].
Lowered tolls, like delayed release, are better than nothing, and welcome in the short-term.
But they are neither the long-term solution, nor the optimal one, for research or researchers.
Currently there are six candidate strategies for freeing the refereed research literature: Authors paying journal publishers for publisher-supplied online-offprints, free for all readers [12] is a good solution where it is available, and where the author can afford to pay for it, but (i) most journals don't offer it, (ii) there will always be authors who cannot afford to pay for it, and (iii) authors self-archiving their own eprints accomplishes the same outcome, immediately, for everyone, at no expense to authors.
Electronic offprints for-fee require authors to pay for something that they can already do for-free, now (as the authors of 150,000 physics papers have already done [13]).
Boycotting journals that do not agree to give away their contents online for free [19] requires authors to give up their established journals of choice and to switch to unestablished journals (if they exist), not on the basis of their quality or impact, but on the basis of their give-away policy.
But if authors simply self-archive their papers, they can keep publishing in their established journals of choice yet still ensure free online access for all readers.
Library consortial support (e.g.
SPARC [11]) for lower-priced journals may lower some of the access barriers, but it will not eliminate them (instead merely entrenching unnecessary fee-based access blockages still more deeply).
Delayed journal give-aways -6-to-12+ months after publication [14] -amount to too little, too late, and further entrench the unjustifiable blockage of access to new research until it is not new [21].
Giving up established journals and peer review altogether, in favour of self-archived preprints and post-hoc, ad-lib commentary (e.g.
[15]) would put both the quality standards and the navigability of research at risk (Harnad 1998/2000) [22].
Self-archiving all preprints and postprints can be done immediately and will free the refereed literature overnight.
The only things holding authors back are (groundless and easily answered) worries about peer review and copyright [16].
(1) (5) all require waiting for policy changes and, even once these are available, all require a needless sacrifice on the part of authors.
With (1) the sacrifice is the needless author offprint expense, with (2) it is the author's right to submit to their preferred journals, with (3) it is (as before) the author's potential impact on those potential users who cannot afford even the lowered access tolls, with (4) it is the impact of the all-important first 6-12 months after publication, and with (5) the sacrifice is the quality of the literature itself.
Only (6) asks researchers for no sacrifices at all, and no waiting for any change in journal policy or price.
The only delay factor has been authors' own relative sluggishness in just going ahead and doing it!
Nevertheless, (6) is well ahead of the other 5 candidates, in terms of the total number of papers thus freed already, thanks to the lead taken by the physicists.
It is high time for all the other disciplines to follow this lead, rather than to wait, contemplating needless sacrifices and nonexistent obstacles.
Interoperable archive-creating software is available, free for all universities to install and their researchers to fill [6].
Just go ahead and do it!
The details of the self-archiving initiative for freeing the entire refereed corpus now (including questions about copyright and embargo policies) are fully described in Harnad (in prep) [17].
A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of freeing access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum , [18].
References Roberts et al., Building A "GenBank" of the Published Literature at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318a PubMedCentral at http://pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ BioMed Central at http://www.biomedcentral.com/ Stevan Harnad, How and Why To Free All Refereed Research From Accessand Impact-Barriers Online, Now, at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm Stevan Harnad, The Self-Archiving Initiative Freeing the refereed research literature online at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/naturenew.htm University Eprint Archives at http://www.eprints.org/ Roberts et al.
's article, Science's Response: Is a Government Archive the Best Option?
at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318b Stevan Harnad, AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318b Nature Web debates Future e-access to the primary literature at http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/ SPARC The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition at http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/ Harnad, S. (2000) Ingelfinger Over-Ruled: The Role of the Web in the Future of Refereed Medical Journal Publishing, Lancet Perspectives 256 (December Supplement): s16.
at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.lancet.htm Nature Web debates Authors willing to pay for instant web access at http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/walker.html arXiv.org e-Print archive at http://arxiv.org/ Science Magazine Is a Government Archive the Best Option?
at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318b A concrete proposal for an automatically refereed scholarly electronic journal at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/427333.html Prima-Facie FaQs for Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, "I worry about self-archiving because..." at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8 Harnad (2001).
A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of freeing access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum at http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html Harnad, S. (2001) For Whom the Gate Tolls?
How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now.
at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm Science Magazine Building A "GenBank" of the Published Literature at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318a New England Journal of Medicine at http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/344/22/1710?ijkey=GOhd24UhGnM26&keytype=ref&siteid=nejm Harnad, S. (2000) E-Knowledge: Freeing the Refereed Journal Corpus Online.
Computer Law & Security Report 16(2) 78-87.
[Rebuttal to Bloom Editorial in Science and Relman Editorial in New England Journalof Medicine].
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.scinejm.htm Harnad, S. (1998/2000) The invisible hand of peer review.
Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html Author Details Stevan Harnad Department of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton Email: harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Web site: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Article Title: "Minotaur: Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online: A Comparison" Author: Stevan Harnad Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Wired Honduran Christmas Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Wired Honduran Christmas Buzz software infrastructure windows multimedia url Citation BibTex RIS Eddie Young hooks up to the global network, with some improvised electrical plumbing Christmas eve we wrapped up a few simple presents, a couple of polystyrene aeroplanes, some puppets, an alphabet colouring book and a kite.
We also wrapped up a clockwork Torch.
Very useful around here.
In the morning we were picked up by motor boat and driven over to the house.
We left the hotel and passed through the village.
Here the islanders all live on the coast.
Since the tide doesn't rise much more than a few feet the houses are safely built on stilts, actually over the sea.
I'm not sure the reasons for this, maybe its because the island becomes very steep, very quickly, and its hard to find a flat piece of land.
Maybe its simply so that the toilet at the end of the jetty isn't too far away.
Besides, being a predominantly a fishing community, you have to live by the sea.
We travelled along the coast, past the wooden homes, some of which were brand new, standing proudly next to the remains of the previous home that was destroyed by a hurricane last year: wooden sticks pointing blackly out of the sea, collapsed roofs, and slumped porches.
Then through a mangrove channel and past a river taxi: one of the large wooden canoes (dories) powered by lawnmower engines and driven by entrepenurial locals.
Then around to the house: a large, wooden, but very homely and cosy hut on stilts.
Christmas was great to spend with the kids.
Not much to do at the house, except gaze out across the crystal blue sea, at the beach on the other side of the bight; at the other houses in the village; and at boats chugging or speeding past.
But not many.
It is quiet here, incredibly quiet.
At night the stars are as bright as they can be, even though the island has electricity.
Everywhere you go you can see the masses of posts and cables lining the sides of the roads.
The power goes almost everywhere, except right at the far end of the island, a few miles away, where people still live pretty much as they used to a hundred years ago.
Our host helped provide the power to the island: he supervised the planting of the posts and the rigging of the wires.
He had an almost mystical connection with the system: sometimes at night he would wake up, knowing that something was wrong at the power station, turn on a light, and then watch it die.
Then he would get in the boat, speed over to the road, then drive to the power station to fix it.
Last year they got a telephone too.
If you try, its not too difficult to imagine what life looked like without electricity; or at least what it looked like here.
It can be incredibly dark.
Often the moon provides the only light, and on a moonless night you can't see your hand in front of your face.
But not now.
Dim house-lights line the shore, and at this time of year people decorate their houses with astonishing Christmas-light displays.
Electronic ice crystals hang from the roofs and around the windows; and flashing fairy-lights festoon palm trees and gardens, transforming a shambling town by day into Disneyland at night.
The air is thick with the smell, smoke and sounds of firecrackers, people shouting, and a boat chugs slowly past, with a gospel choir on board singing 'Go Tell it on the Mountain' with lots of passion, all through Christmas night.
But the power supply isn't perfect: it has its surges and ups and downs, though never down for long.
But sensitive equipment needs protecting from these fluctuations.
I spent Christmas morning nailing pieces of wood around a butane cylinder to make it secure, so that we could eat a Christmas dinner.
I have no idea how far that cylinder had come to get here.
Then, after we opened our presents, I helped set up the computer with the intention of connecting it to the Internet.
It wasn't quite what I had in mind for Christmas day, but it was nice to be able to help out and pay back some of the hospitality.
We unpacked the multimedia computer: it came with an Interrupted Power Supply, monitor, mouse, keyboard and modem.
Since the power on the island fluctuates, every PC supplied is always coupled with an IPS.
This ensures that any spikes in the voltage don’t affect the running of the computer.
We plugged all the various peripherals.
This was interesting.
The guy who supplied the equipment had supplied only one power lead.
When you live miles away from shops in the nearest town you learn to improvise; so we cut one of the other cables open, then had to fashion a plug by cannibalising the plug and cable from a hairdryer.
Success.
Finally we connected the modem.
Everything worked, except for the modem: the door to the rest of the world.
We checked the phone line by plugging a phone into it.
That was OK. We checked that the modem was seen by the software, and by the software configuration.
That was OK.
But no dial tone.
It seemed that we weren’t going to get the machine connected on Christmas day after all, which was depressing after having triumphed over the disappointment with the power cable.
But then we checked the sockets at the back of the computer.
Sure enough, as is often the case, we had plugged one of the modem cables into the wrong place.
We plugged in the modem correctly this time and we were online.
We sent a few emails, and had a quick surf of the web.
Eyes widen as the Yahoo search engine returned pages and pages of information and images about the Boer War, from all over the world.
The kids now can potentially learn so much from the web, they will see sights from other parts of the world they would never have seen before, they can read stories, draw pictures, send emails to their granny in the UK, and look at maps: all there in two-dimensions on the screen.
Outside, snorkelling the coral reef we swim in a three-dimensional world; among parrot fish, cuttle fish, zebra fish, and barracuda; amid the breath-taking coral architecture, sea weed and jelly fish.
All there in incredible colour and age: coral takes one year to grow a square centimetre, and there are acres and acres of reef here.
Its the contradictions that strike me the most.
A very basic house, without running water, with a pretty untrustworthy phone-line, on a remote island in the Caribbean that now has internet access.
Which is, after all, only information.
It's not practical in itself: it doesn't do anything other than present facts (some of dubious accuracy).
It won't build houses or water pipes for you.
It won't lay power lines, or catch fish.
It might tell you a hundred different ways in which you might be able to do these things for yourself.
Who knows what opportunities this will bring to the kids in the house?
Will it make them more restless than they already are?
Will it educate, inform and improve their lives and the lives of the community there, or will it send them away from the island to the mainland?
But at the moment they don't even have running water, and I would have thought that clean water should come before the information highway or before TV for that matter... but then purifying water isn't half as interesting as playing on a world-connected computer, with infinite possibilities.
But perhaps I’m just seeing all this through western eyes.
It seems strangely ironic to me too, that it is 'backpacker' tourists who have really brought the internet here, travelling light and cheaply so that you can avoid the tours, and get close to the actual local culture.
Backpackers brought internet cafes, which then spawned computer shops, which then lead to supplying houses with the internet-connected PC's which dramatically change everything.
But the locals don't see it that way.
They see it as a replacement to TV I think, or at least an addition to it, and a way to send messages to granny in the UK.
We have the privilege of having been through the whole development of the technology; but the islanders here are making a huge leap; missing out on an existing infrastructure: the mistakes, the successes, and the pollution that a developing technology produces.
Maybe having no IT infrastructure inhibits their ability to make good use of the technology.
To some a wired island seems a paradise.
You can now sit on a beach, anywhere in the world, with white sand all around, palm trees, go windsurfing or snorkel the coral in the morning, then connect through a modem to work in the afternoon, without ever leaving your sun lounger.
Real Estate is big business here.
It seems a few people bought up land a few years ago as quick as they could, and now sell it for a big profit.
A couple of individuals have cornered this market locally.
They now live in the biggest houses with the best views, or in the best resort.
By contrast, just down the road is a Spanish shanty town: kids play around in the dust by the side of the road; drunks stumble around or sleep at noon; and tired women put washing out to dry in the dust of the day.
On the way back, after the Millenium turn over, the news in the region is full of stories from Argentina: another developing country.
Since there have been so few worldwide Y2K problems, they feel cheated: they spent a huge amount of money that they could barely afford, fixing something that turned out not to be a problem, and they are not the only people in the region who feel that way.
Would that money have been better spent elsewhere?
or is it simply a good thing that they now have up to date computer systems, despite the update having been unnecessary?
So that was Christmas 1999.
The brave new Millenium promises more gadgets and scientific toys, more information, more and more of everything, and the poorest countries of the developing world will have to make greater and greater leaps to make to try to stay afloat.
Will web-connected computers help them to achieve that?
Or will it simply be an expensive fad, that ends up collecting dust and cockroaches, rusting in the corner for more important and immediate concerns such as collecting water, or farming the land in that basic fight for survival?
Author Details   Eddie Young Network Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.young@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "A Wired Honduran Christmas" Author: Eddie Young Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/honduras/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Building on BUILDER Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Building on BUILDER Buzz data software java database infrastructure metadata sql python cataloguing windows linux perl adobe authentication url Citation BibTex RIS Ian Upton explores the achievements of this Windows NT server based project.
Developing the Builder Products: Infrastructure The project plan detailed a number of different products, or technology demonstrators, that BUILDER would develop as part of its researches into an ‘institutional hybrid library’.
Initially each of these products was seen as a separate development having a unique set of needs and technological problems to solve.
This view soon changed!
As we started to look at implementation common strands started to appear.
These strands included: authentication, profiled interfaces, secure delivery of files (Adobe Acrobat documents for example) and communication with databases.
With hindsight BUILDER has not so much produced a number of separate ‘products’ but rather developed a rich environment in which ‘web applications’ can be created.
This environment contains many of the common elements required to host web based hybrid library services with facilities such as ‘authentication’ being simply ‘available for use’.
Using What Is Available (part one) It was clear that many BUILDER hybrid library products would be data driven.
Initially we imagined BUILDER creating, housing and being responsible for large amounts of data.
This belief was so strong that end we even went so far as to set up an SQL Database server to meet our perceived data management needs.
As we got deeper into the project it became clear that we did not necessarily have to store the data.
Much of the data we needed already existed in other institutional systems, the Library Management system for example.
We also became aware of other ways of generating data using search engine technology to create journal indexes for example.
An early project decision was to attempt connect and use data in existing systems rather than duplicate and modify existing datasets ourselves.
This, initially, was a hard decision to take.
Connecting to someone else’s data-set entails far more effort than ‘knocking up’ our own demonstration database.
That said, we believe we made the right decision.
Using BUILDER infrastructure as glue, joining and integrating information from other sources, rather than using BUILDER as a data source in its own right has paid dividends both in the experiences gained and the potential for scaling.
And what happened to our SQL server?
We have not used it.
Three years on we have found we can meet all our data needs by tapping into existing datasets and using harvester software.
Iterative Methodology BUILDER has employed an iterative methodology.
Rather than spending time developing a paper specification and defining the final product ‘on paper’ and before any code commences, BUILDER would create something quickly and show it to the customers.
This initial demonstrator may not be fully functional or completely polished but would be sufficiently developed for people to look at and, more importantly, comment on.
We would follow a process of consultation, development and user feedback.
We would then repeat this process as many times as necessary.
As the project progressed the development would become more solid to the point where it became releasable as a public demonstrator (or in some cases even a service in its own right).
This iterative approach has enabled BUILDER to create demonstrators relatively quickly.
Our products have benefited from lots of user feedback which, we believe, are more focused and useable products through the use of this approach.
To be fair, the BUILDER products have complimented this approach being small and relatively well defined.
Not all applications would fit this criteria where a full specification is an essential tool.
That said, the approach has worked for BUILDER and arguably would have a place in institutional developments of similar scope.
Using What Is Available (part two) Project member experience dictated that BUILDER would be developed using Microsoft Technology.
We have had lots of previous experience with this platform and felt confident we could develop BUILDER products using it.
Using the Windows NT platform and the Internet Information Server (IIS) provided much of the functionality we as a project required (for more details on the technology we have used see ‘BUILDER Architecture’ below).
The IIS environment is relatively easy to set-up and is quite extensible.
The project did look at alternative platforms Linux in particular but given our tight schedule and limited experience with the platform it soon became clear we would not be able to consider seriously developing on Linux.
Our central computing services were not to happy with us playing with Linux either.
As inexperienced users we apparently could create all sorts of gateways into the campus.
Given these issues, Linux was felt inappropriate for the needs of our project.
There is a lot of free software components available for IIS.
You can also develop your own using Visual Basic, C++ and Java.
We spent time looking at what was available for free and the potential of writing our own.
Both were rejected.
Using free and existing code modules, crafting these to meet our needs cost a lot of time and resource.
In the end it turned out to be cheaper to simply purchase a professional ‘sixty dollar’ IIS component than spending a week constructing a similarly functional unit using ‘free software’ on our own.
We learned a lot from the sixty dollar component experience.
since then the project has always looked to use ‘off the peg’ where possible.
The most costly and scarce resource we had to hand was staff time.
Lessons Learned Looking back at the project there are things that have worked well and things that have not worked so well.
Some of these are described below: Off the peg solutions Windows NT and IIS provides a lot of the functionality required ‘out of the box’.
It is possible to extend the already rich functionality by purchasing components.
BUILDER comprises a virtually vanilla IIS installation coupled with two purchased components.
This infrastructure has proved both robust and transferable.
At its peak, our Exam Paper Database product delivered 2500 Adobe Acrobat papers in a day (most over lunchtime).
Even under this extreme pressure the service was robust.
Both the University of Birmingham (through the Academic Office) and the University of Oxford (through the OXAM service) have implemented the BUILDER solution.
Transferring and adapting the technology in both these cases has proved straightforward.
Iterative development An iterative development methodology has worked for BUILDER.
We have produced focused and useable products swiftly and effectively.
We would argue that typical BUILDER scale web applications benefit from this approach.
An interesting issue is now we are scaling there is a clear resistance to an iterative approach.
Iterative is felt OK for ‘a project’ but a ‘proper service’ needs to be specified!
Using the simple solution BUILDER has always attempted to find the simple solution.
If there is an easy way of doing it we have attempted to do it that way.
We have also been fairly ruthless about the scope of our projects.
When brainstorming it is often easy to over-specify and get hooked into ‘special cases’.
The iterative approach has allowed us to develop the obvious first and address special case issues ‘in the next release’.
Our experience has shown that often perceived ‘issues’ disappear when confronted with a live and kicking iteration one product.
Often implementing 10% of the grand scheme will satisfy 90% of our users needs!
Hybrid products flourish in a rich environment In any hybrid library provision of a rich, available, infrastructure is essential.
The BUILDER environment is rich and has allowed the easy development of hybrid library products.
The issues we are facing now with scaling is the big institutional web servers are Unix and designed for static page serving.
Although there are moves to provide richer interactive web spaces these do not exist now and will need investment to provide.
Skills Although our BUILDER environment is a relatively straightforward arena, given the sophistication of what is achievable, it still requires appropriately skilled staff to work with.
The role of the hybrid library technologist is not one readily found amongst traditional computing or library staff.
If the University of Birmingham wanted to exploit BUILDER developments it would need to find or develop appropriately skilled staff and that costs money.
Product Showcase The Hybrid Library Demonstrator So far this paper has talked about BUILDER as a collection of ‘products’.
The project has always been tasked with creating a demonstrator of the Hybrid Library.
The BUILDER Hybrid Library Demonstrator uses the experiences and techniques developed through the BUILDER technology demonstrator products to present a possible view of an institutional hybrid library.
The library can be experienced as a number of different users: a fresher, a final year student, a medical student, a lecturer and a mature student.
The Hybrid Library can be found on: http://www.builder.bham.ac.uk/hld Metadata Index Built on the BUILDER developed Talis Toolbox, the Metadata Index looks to provide centrally stored and administered ‘subject resource lists’.
Currently students are presented with all sorts of lists from all sorts of sources, subject librarians and tutors alike.
Typically these resources will be presented on a web page, useful stuff for your course etc.
There are many such pages and lots of duplication.
Maintaining these resources takes a huge effort.
The Metadata Index provides a single collaborative application that uses and enhances actual catalogue records to provide subject resource lists.
Subject librarians can identify and ‘mark-up’ useful resources.
The index can then output suitable ‘lists’ for dynamic rendering into a number of applications.
Our demonstrator includes a ‘select your department’ list and examples of a library resources page and an academic course support page.
The big issue here is the data is all coming from the same central ‘expert’ resource.
As resources change all the pages containing lists automatically reflect this.
The Metadata Index along with supporting documentation can be found on: http://builder.bham.ac.uk/mdi More information on how we have extended the library Management System can be found on: http://builder.bham.ac.uk/ttd Builder Architecture The infrastructure that BUILDER has developed products is seen as key to the project.
This technical section describes the BUILDER Infrastructure.
Hardware BUILDER lives on a dedicated server box.
This box was purchased at the beginning of the project and represents a medium powered server of the time.
The server comprises an Intel Pentium II 233 processor, 128mb memory and two 4gb SCSI drives mirrored to yield 4gb of storage.
The box has a DAT tape and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to enable a clean shutdown in the event of power failure.
By today’s standards this box is obsolete.
That said it still continues to serve us well.
If we were to specify a server today we would consider spending around the same amount of money (in the order of £2000) which would buy us a similarly specified box but with a more powerful processor (probably an Intel Pentium III 750) and more memory (ideally 512mb).
Improvements here would provide a box that was more robust under load and scale to serve an institutional user base.
Software BUILDER is Microsoft Windows NT based.
As well as the basic operating system we have added the NT Option Pack, which provides Internet Information Server 4.0 (IIS) and have applied Service Pack Six.
Again this system serves us well but if we were to develop a new server today we would specify Windows 2000 server which includes IIS 5.0 We would also apply Service Pack One.
This new system provides a richer web serving environment with IIS 5.0 which includes more ‘objects’ (see below) that can provide additional functionality.
Environment IIS provides an environment called ASP.
As well as being able to serve traditional pages, ASP can support a number of scripting languages including VBScript, JScript, Perl and Python.
The environment also contains a number of instantiatable objects that can provide functionality accessible through script control.
Objects include: Session (for tracking and associating variables with a user on a trip through a web site) and database connectivity (enabling access to any ODBC compliant data sources).
BUILDER has also purchased two ServerObjects components that provide HTTP functionality and SOCKET functionality.
For more details of ServerObjects components check out: http://www.serverobjects.com Author Details   Ian Upton ian.upton@bham.ac.uk http://www.builder.bham.ac.uk/ Article Title: “Building On Builder” Author: Ian Upton Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/builder/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Internet 2 Spring Member Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Internet 2 Spring Member Meeting Buzz data software framework html infrastructure zip metadata standardisation browser identifier namespace video jpg shibboleth authentication interoperability url ldap Citation BibTex RIS John Paschoud reports on an Internet2 meeting, Arlington, Virginia, 6th – 8th May 2002, which discussed Networks, Applications and Middleware.
Internet2 is a consortium framework organisation (a bit like JISC in the UK) within which a large number of projects are cultivated and coordinated.
Members are mainly US universities, US government agencies, and significant commercial partners such as IBM and Cisco Systems.
Its' purpose is as its' title suggests: to foster the implementation of the "next generation" Internet.
A meeting for all members is normally held each spring and autumn.
Internet2 projects divide into 3 main strands: · Networks including implementation of IPv6 the successor to the fundamental communications protocol (the "IP" in "TCP/IP") of the Internet.
This will tackle the problem (amongst others) that currently (using IPv4) there is address-space for 'only' about 4 billion directly-connected devices (IPv6 will increase this to 8 x 10^17, or approximately 1,564 IP addresses per square metre of the Earth's surface, which should last us for another few years).
Applications of which tele-immersion, virtual laboratories and distributed instruction are just a few examples, involving a comprehensive list of subject disciplines ranging from health sciences to performing arts.
Most of these would, if widely used, totally overload the bandwidth capacity of our current networks.
Middleware the software 'glue' between the network and the applications.
This software provides services such as identification, authentication, authorisation, directories, and security.
In today's Internet, applications usually have to provide these services themselves, which leads to competing and incompatible standards.
By promoting standardisation and interoperability, middleware will make advanced network applications much easier to use.
Inevitably (only US institutions can have full member status in Internet2 JISC/UKERNA is one of a small number of foreign affiliates to the programme) there is a strong bias towards the requirements of the US academic community, and a certain sense that we are picking up the crumbs that fall from their lavishly budgeted and groaning tables; but these are big crumbs!
(The network equipment and total bandwidth capacity installed, temporarily, in the hotel meeting venue would turn the IT departments of many moderately sized UK universities green with envy!
It's diagrammed at www.internet2.edu/activities/files/spring02networkdiagram.jpg in case you'd like to compare it to your own).
The JISC ANGEL Project (www.angel.ac.uk) is tasked with evaluating the Internet2 middleware project Shibboleth, as one possible model to meet the Sparta requirements for a next generation resource access management service for the UK Further and Higher Education community (www.jisc.ac.uk/pub00/sparta_disc.html).
The LSE Library is also being supported by a separate JISC grant to undertake the first beta installation of Shibboleth software, outside of the United States, for trials with pilot groups of users and resources.
Significant commercial providers of library resources, including EBSCO and Elsevier, have expressed interest in using Shibboleth and the JISC data service provider EDINA is also likely to be involved in UK beta testing.
As I was supposed to be at the Spring Member meeting to gain familiarity with the Internet2 middleware agenda, and to discuss aspects of the Shibboleth middleware project with the development team, I concentrated my attention on the sessions in that strand from a programme packed with more than 80 separate sessions (and, of course, not much food and beer at all!)
over three days.
The event is partly an opportunity for the widely distributed teams that normally work together via email and voice or video conferencing to meet face to face twice a year.
I started the first day by attending an open working group meeting of the Shibboleth team, which turned out to be a poor introduction for 'outsiders', comprising as it did mainly the verbal continuation of a discussion between 5 or 6 'insiders' that had been developing on their email list for the past few months.
However, strenuous efforts were made to be inclusive one of the reasons for opening these meetings is to ensure an element of peer review in the process.
And one of the reasons for involving non-US participants in standards development projects like Shibboleth is to try and moderate the emergence of 'global' standards for things like people directories which might otherwise insist that everyone must live at an address with a Zip-code.
There were many more traditional presentation and tutorial sessions that assumed little prior involvement, including "Internet2 101" (which I badly needed!).
A session on the CREN initiative to establish an in-house Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Authorities was highly relevant to the current JISC consultation on future authentication for JISC services (www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/ar1/future_auth.html).
The live demonstrations of development work-in-progress, particularly those involving applications of bandwidth-hungry multiway video were very impressive, but the middleware projects all suffer from the same problem of 'undemonstrability' that we have discovered in ANGEL users on the end of a Web browser are only aware of middleware when it stops working!
Rather strangely, the 'opening plenary' session was held on the second day of the event, following a host of parallel 'working breakfasts' that provided opportunities for various project teams to meet, and the less-involved of us to discover universities we'd never have suspected the existence of.
I had a fascinating conversation over breakfast with a lady from the University of Las Vegas (which, also surprisingly, isn't famous for teaching probability theory).
A session on Directories included announcement of the release for public review of version 1.5 of eduPerson, which defines an LDAP object class to include widely used person attributes in higher education and is closely related to the work ANGEL is doing to define a Roles Namespace for HE and FE in Britain.
Current PKI work (both policy and technical aspects) was reviewed.
A presentation session on Shibboleth announced the recently agreed participation of EBSCO, Elsevier and a number of other major e-publishers in the project, and also covered related projects like WebISO (Web Initial Sign-On).
Ken Klingenstein presented an overview of the NSF Middleware Initiative, with which (it is rumoured) there may be forthcoming JISC calls for collaborative project proposals on offer in the near future.
The closing plenary session focussed on network security issues, with presentations on current work by Howard Schmidt, Vice-Chair of the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, and Mike Roberts, Chair of the joint Internet2 EDUCAUSE Systems Security Task Force.
It wasn't surprising to hear that the heightened American preoccupation with domestic security in general is raising awareness of the potential threats of e-terrorism.
There was at least a hint of a suggestion that US Government attitudes are shifting away from the previous, "if anyone wants to send a private (i.e.
secure) message, they must be doing something wrong, and we must be able to intercept it" of the Carnivore era, and that US politicians feel the need to be better informed about these technologies.
Currently (although it includes digital libraries as one of the applications strand topics) Internet2 seems to be almost exclusively the province of those 'techies' in the networking and IT infrastructure trades.
Of over 600 delegates at the Spring meeting, I didn't encounter one who admitted to being a librarian.
However, there is clearly an increasing focus of this massive project on middleware, directories and similar issues, all of which could be classified as dealing with metadata about either electronic resources or the people and organisations that use, produce or curate such resources.
Luckily, I can still successfully disguise myself as a geek (the older sort, with a beard).
But this is the strand of Internet2 that brought me to Arlington, and this is why more people in the library and information management professions need to start taking an active interest in what Internet2 is doing it will dominate the world!
Details of all Internet2 activities can of course be found at the 'obvious' URL of: www.internet2.edu Author Details   John Paschoud is an InfoSystems Engineer working in the Library of the London School of Economics & Political Science, and is the Project Manager of ANGEL.
Article Title: "At the event: The Internet2 Spring Member meeting" Author: John Paschoud Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/internet2/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Ancient World, Digital World: Excavation at Halif Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Ancient World, Digital World: Excavation at Halif Buzz data database dissemination archives identifier graphics windows adobe mis quicktime photoshop url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Jacobs on how field and research strategies were impacted significantly by the use of digital technology in the 1999 field season at Tell Halif, Israel (the Lahav Research Project).
The 1999 excavation at Tell Halif in southern Israel by the Lahav Research Project was the culmination of a long development in our approach to primary research in the ancient world under the influence of digital technologies.
Like other excavation projects in the region, the Lahav Research Project, too, had turned already in 1977 to record-keeping and maintenance of databases by means of "portable" computers.
And while the introduction of the computer to our excavation and recording procedures was an important step, it was not until the 1999 season that we found it necessary to change our field procedures significantly in order to make use of the broader capabilities of digital recording.
That is, our experience with digital recording in the field leads us to believe that the equipment itself has altered significantly the way material is (ought to be) recovered, recorded, and reported.
Both that conclusion about the changes digital equipment brings to the discipline and the gradual movement by the Lahav Research Project to full use of digital equipment in doing archaeology are based on factors that characterize the field of study in general.
The first of these is that excavators at ancient near eastern tell sites suffer from a wealth of data; for example, even the moderate-sized Tell Halif consists of some seventeen major occupation strata, one built atop another to a depth of more than six meters.
Since all the depositions that make up the mound of Tell Halif resulted from human activity, a seven to thirteen acre site (size variations in different periods) will yield thousands of artifacts in a single six-week field-season.
Even extracting from consideration the most common artifact at a tell site, the potsherd, which in our system is treated separately from other artifacts, nonetheless, the wealth and diversity of artifacts may be overwhelming to a recording and reporting system.
Indeed, some older excavation reports do little more than indicate the number of artifacts of a given type with no further analyses presented or attempted.
In the past, archaeologists–even the most responsible ones–have found it imposible to do more than to publish representative examples from the large numbers actually recovered.
A second factor–clearly related to the first–is that final reports in this branch of archaeology are often delayed by decades.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for twenty years or more to elapse between final excavation season and final publication.
Often there are good reasons for the delays; time is needed to process materials in laboratory settings, and many project directors earn their wages not from archaeology directly but from teaching and administrative positions in universities.
Yet, the delay in the availability of excavation data means that other scholars cannot make use of information critical to their work.
A third factor in our exploratory use (for archaeologists) of digital technology is that costs associated with standard means of publication prohibit even the best-intentioned archaeologist from displaying data in but the smallest or representative way.
And the selections of materials to exhibit in monograph or journal will likely be those that are the "most interesting" or "rare," skewing unintentionally the depiction of the data towards those interesting or rare and away from the common.
One of the unfortunate results of this limitation of print media is that the main body of collections remains essentially unavailable to scholars and to alternate interpretations.
Recognizing these factors the Lahav Research Project, first under the direction of Dr. Joe D. Seger, engaged in a type of experimental "pre-publication" of raw data via a website titled DigMaster.
In the wake of the 1992 and 1993 seasons, in which some 545 artifacts of just one type (ceramic figurine) were recovered in Field IV, DigMaster was created to allow the early display in graphic format of all of the data, not the figurines alone, from these two seasons.
As a result some 1895 color photographs, 331 ink drawings, 85 QuickTime VR movies, 68 plans and soil profiles (sections), as well as summary reports for each of the fifteen 4 m. X 4 m. excavation units were placed on-line as early as 1995.
While this effort does not represent "final publication" of the field data, it does make available all of our data in an early "pre-publication" stage.
The DigMaster project successfully demonstrated that early distribution of data is possible and that it could be done in such a way that the resulting "database" was not skewed by selective publication schemes; we also concluded that early distribution or "pre-publication" of "raw" data is an obigation to the field of research.
Nonetheless, we also came to see that the DigMaster "pre-publication" we employed was dictated by the fact that we, too, had not been prepared to manage successfully such a large number of artifacts; only "after the fact" did it occur to us that we had an obligation to make all of the data available and to do so early in the processes of analysis.
That recognition led to the experimental season of 1999.
PART I.
A Digital Season.
In the 1999 season, then, we determined to test the limits of the digital equipment and our newly devised recording system in a modest-sized field season, a "digital dig."
Based on past experience and the numbers of finds during the 1992 and 1993 seasons, as well as on needs for additional stratigraphic and architectural information, we selected a few small segments to excavate in Fields I and IV.
In doing so we planned to establish digital stations at several places on the tell in order to learn more about various strata.
I had estimated that we would (in a shortened, four-week season) recover perhaps as many as 125 examples of the ceramic figurines in Field IV and as many as 100 other artifacts, such as flint blades, from Field I.
We intended to have all artifacts processed (photographed, drawn, and described), all architectural drawings and profiles/sections inked and scanned, and a final field summary prepared by the end of the fifth week.
In addition, our plans called for us to make regular postings of data, photos, and drawings on our website, so that experts not in the field could scrutinize and evaluate work as it appeared on daily postings.
The benefits of this digital digging proved highly beneficial, recommending the procedures to other excavation projects, though not without significant alterations to planning and approach to a field season.
Of course, while much of what we planned was successful, in reality the experiment was somewhat adversely affected by the failure of communications via modem from the field in Israel to the server located in the Cobb Institute of Archaeology in Mississippi; we were unable to make daily postings as we had planned, because older equipment at Kibbutz Lahav broke transmission after 7 minutes on-line.
Furthermore, contrary to expectations, we actually discovered more than three times the predicted number of artifacts; the numbers of artifacts created a backlog in processing that was not completed until our return to the United States.
The first benefit to be realized is that of a "paperless excavation"; team supervisors recorded all data on laptops which were, in turn, hard-wired to a laptop-server that assured shared information at all the various stations and assigned registration numbers as required.
A typical entry by a team supervisor includes description of the activity undertaken, three-dimensional location of the activity (or artifact/object, feature, soil layer), standardized technical descriptions, and a list of relationships between the soil layer, feature or architectural element and others (below, above, abuts, cuts, etc.)
These–and others were available to the supervisor on drop-down windows in the Microsoft Access application written by Christpher Holland.
Record-keeping became simpler, in part because the on-screen report form provided all of the "blanks" that needed to be completed, as well as options to fill the blank or box, but also because within a few days most of the students and volunteer excavators had been trained on the entry of data.
(An unanticipated benefit of the digital recording on laptops was that the newly trained students soon learned to look for relevant data as they excavated.)
More importantly, the freshly entered data was immediately available to all wired locations in our excavation system: field, lab, photo studio.
Because the manual entry of data–even using a laptop computer–involves inadvertent recording errors, we also needed some check on the procedures that would reveal problems while the excavation teams were still in the field, indeed while excavation of a feature, architectural element, soil layer, or object was still in process.
The creation of a three-dimensional grid by John Vander Zwaag served this purpose exceptionally well.
His program (called by him "DigDug") automatically retrieved data as it was entered and represented them as points (for objects recorded in situ) within three-dimensional field and area grids, or as three-dimensional cubes, lenses or spherical or globular shapes, depending on whether the excavated locus (three-dimensional entity) was a layer of soil, a pit, a wall, a floor, etc.
From moment to moment the on-screen representation of all of the excavation procedures would appear as most recently recorded or changed.
By looking at the available screens at any laptop in the system, one would know activity occurring at any other place in the field, just as one could know the disposition of an artifact, for example, since team supervisors, lab personnel, photographers, and artists entered data into the common database controlled and distributed by the server to all other stations simultaneously.
Similarly team supervisors could determine immediately if incorrect measurements were entered, since "DigDug" would represent the mis-measurement as actually keyed; a soil layer that appeared on-screen a meter above the actual surface of the tell informs the supervisor that an error in addition or in entry had occurred.
With zoom and rotating capabilities built in, "DigDug" became a vital on-line aid to accuracy in recording, but also to the process of excavation.
An added, unanticipated benefit of the three dimensional plotting of the locations of artifacts (visible on-screen by types, represented by color assignments) was the fact that it became possible to "predict" the discovery of artifacts of the same type based on the "clustering" of artifacts that appeared on-screen.
For example, as a result of observing the clustering of a large number of ceramic figurines along the western limit of Area J7 (a 4 m.X 4 m. unit of excavation) we predicted that a still larger number would be found in the same soil deposit immediately to the west; expansion of excavation into that soil layer verified the prediction.
(A screen of DigDug is displayed at the left of this page, above.)
Furthermore, because some of the laboratory activities were moved to the tell itself, a minimum amount of data entry (e.g., artifact type, field identification, sizes, etc.)
was completed even before the objects were sorted for assignment to the conservationist, photographer, artist, etc.
The photographer, or other staff member, could then see the number and types of material that would soon appear at her station for treatment, just as supervisors could determine that photography of an artifact had been completed, because photographs were posted in the same database and were seen at all other stations, including those in the field.
The immediate availability of all data was an important gain for the field procedures of the season.
Part II.
The Site Tell Halif, whose ancient name is unknown, is a medium-sized, 7.5 acre site in southern Israel, with a history of occupation which began in the Chalcolithic era (ca.
3500 BCE) down to the modern settlement of Kibbutz Lahav (founded in 1963 CE).
This record of occupation is marked, significantly, by long periods of abandonment, which correspond to the re-settlement of nearby Tell Beit Mirsim (8 km to the north.)
Human exploitation of the resources of the territory surrounding Halif and Beit Mirsim, particularly throughout the Bronze ages, attests that the region was environmentally incapable of supporting more than one major settlement at a time, at least until external national government support (specifically the kingdom of Judah) maintained both Halif and Beit Mirsim as fortified border towns; during the Bronze Ages, human settlement alternated between the two sites.
Because the town was located at the juncture of the Judaean hills, the Shephelah and the Negev, people at Halif (and at Beit Mirsim) faced annual rainfall of 300 mm., a fact which necessitated dry-farming techniques and, when crops failed, temporary abandonment of the environmentally marginal region.
At other times the destruction of Halif or Beit Mirsim resulted in abandonment and precipitated movement to the sister site across the valley.
Early and Late Bronze Halif: Excavations in Field I The importance of Halif resides, then, in large part in the levels and means of adaptation to environmental and political conditions.
Occupation of the mound site began with the construction on virgin soil of a heavily fortified town of the Early Bronze III (Stratum XV), though an earlier village settlement (Stratum XVI) of some size, ca.
15-20 acres, had been located at the foot of the hill on which Halif was later founded; this non-fortified Chalcolithic-Early Bronze I village had been abandoned already for some three centuries before new arrivals to Halif began to clear soil to bedrock in order firmly to foot the heavy stone and brick fortification walls which they built to protect the newly established town.
The curtain wall, still standing 4 m. high when exposed in Field I, varied in thickness from 3.5 m. to 7 m. and was incorporated into a protective system of outer walls and a sloped ramp of crushed limestone (to the full 4 m. height of the fortification’s stone base.)
At places an additional 1.2 m. of brick superstructure survived atop the stone base.
This heavily fortified town, founded probably to engage in the production and trade of lithic tools, nonetheless suffered destruction by fire less than a century later.
The Stratum XV fortified town was succeeded by three non-fortified villages (Strata XIV-XII) on the tell, eventually to be abandoned until the beginning of the Late Bronze (Canaanite) era, ca.
1550 BCE.
In the 1999 season a house of the final Early Bronze III town (Stratum XII) was excavated as part of the experiment in digital recording and reporting.
The house sat on one the highest of a series of three terraces that had been built to take advantage of the eastern slope of the tell.
The terrace-wall was also the retaining wall for a narrow street that led up the slope between houses.
Houses stood well above the street and were constructed of fieldstone walls topped with a brick superstructure.
The compacted earth floors were covered with pottery and other household objects smashed in place in the destruction of the house.
A deep stone mortar A11105 set into earth floor A11104 attests to domestic, food-production activity.
In order to establish patterns of activities in these 24th century BCE houses, artifacts were plotted on all floors.
In situ objects were photographed as discovered, often drawn in place by an architect.
Each artifact was then assigned a unique, identifying number and was sent the the Object Registrar to begin the process of description, photography and drawing, all on-site.
The same treatment was afforded architectural features–photography, drawing, measurement and description of physical characteristics.
Following a destruction by fire of the final Early Bronze settlement (Stratum XII) the tell appears to have suffered abandonment, remaining essentially uninhabited for the next eight centuries, while neighboring Tell Beit Mirsim reflects an active settlement throughout the Middle Bronze era.
Finally, Tell Halif was once again the center of occupation following the burning of Beit Mirsim, probably at the hands of avenging Egyptians.
This Late Bronze (Canaanite) village, non-fortified throughout its long history (Strata XI-VIII), soon reflected the dominance of Egypt, which controlled all of southern Syria-Palestine as part of its northern empire.
The final Late Bronze occupation of Halif marked in itself a major change in the nature of the architecture and of the function of the site.
Strata XI-IX contained houses typical of the era, whereas the architecture of Stratum VIII consisted primarily of stone-lined silos sunk into a specially-prepared, deep fill of wet clay, loess, and general debris.
In Late Bronze IIB (str.
VIII) Tell Halif functioned as a depot for the collection and redistribution of grain, probably as taxation to be used to support the royal city of Gaza, some 35 km.
to the west.
Iron II and Persian Halif: Excavations in Field IV In the 1999 season excavation was also conducted on the western edge of the tell in Field IV, where in earlier seasons substantial remains of the 8th century BCE Judahite town were uncovered beneath soil layers rich with hundreds of ceramic figurines which derived from a 5th century Persian age cultic site once located there.
In late Iron II (8th century BCE) Tell Halif, probably the Biblical site "Rimmon", served the kingdom of Judah as a border-fortress.
The heavy fortifications (including casemate wall and stone-covered glacis) enclosed approximately 7 acres, a limitation which forced houses to be built against each other or to share walls.
In Field IV a row of three pillared houses were first uncovered in the 1992 and 1993 seasons, and more fully exposed during the 1999 season.
The houses were destoyed probably in 701 BCE by a raiding party from the main army led by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in siege against nearby ancient Lachish.
That destruction sealed in these three houses, beneath fallen bricks, roofing material, and support beams, nearly two hundred whole and restorable ceramic vessels, household items such as loom weights and stone tools, metal weapons, two iron plows, balance scale weights used in local commerce, beads and other jewelry, as well as thousands of samples of animal and fish bones (plus a few fish scales), charred grain and grape pips, legumes and other cereals as evidene of the diet.
Finally, the "long room" of the northernmost pillared house enclosed a ‘house shrine,’ which featured the molded head of a ‘pillar figurine’ (the goddess ‘Asherah), two carved limestone blocks (possibly ‘masseboth’), and an incense stand.
In the debris layers above the Iron II houses of Stratum VI, just as encountered in earlier seasons, in 1999 we recovered another large corpus of ceramic figurines that belong typologically to the Persian era of the 5th c. BCE.
Though they were found in soil that had been long ago disturbed by people seeking buried building stones, they nonetheless attest to an active religious ritual at Halif.
Similar to rituals practiced elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, that represented by the figurines at Halif probably found the ceramics useful as votary objects to stand in the presence of the deity or deities.
The figurine finds from the 1999 season range from horse and rider to fragments of feet and pedestals.
The entire corpus of figurines may beviewed on the DigMaster site.
Part III: Conclusions The value of the 1999 experimental field season, however, derives less from the physical discoveries, and more from the insights this experience with digital equipment in the field bring to the processes of recovery of past cultures.
Though the 1999 season was both experimental and limited to four weeks, several observations and conclusions may be drawn from it.
We believe that these should be generalized for other excavation projects.
For the first time in the history of modern archaeology it is now possible to manage and to report successfully relatively large numbers of artifacts and data.
The "wealth" of artifacts the excavator encounters may now–with modern digital technology–be recorded in increasingly sophisticated ways and displayed as graphic illustrations in databases readily available to numerous people simultaneously.
We conclude that, because it is possible at a relatively inexpensive fare, it is also obligatory that the excavator report data-sets fully.
But, in fact, the potential of digital recording/reporting also changes one’s perspectives on the entire excavation-collection process.
Because so much more is possible, so much more is necessary; how and what one collects is genuinely affected, as it should be.
Even how one sees the soil layers and the collectionof data is altered by the capacities to record and report so much more.
Technology, in this instance, necessarily structures field and research strategies.
The objection that bodies of material are sometimes too numerous to record and report fully should, we believe, bring pause to the excavator to reconsider priorities.
If we take as axiom that it is the responsibility of the excavator to report fully, the converse is that this obligates the excavator to plan in order to be able to record and to report fully.
The gains in digital management, recording, and reporting, while simplifying some aspects, actually lenthens the recording aspects.
Digital photography, for example, shortens delivery time of the image and eliminates costs of film; it also makes possible/necessary that much more photography be made part of the plans of an excavation season.
The LRP photographic record, for example, increased by thousands in the 1999 season over those of pre-digital seasons.
And, while digital photography permits considerable latitude in documentation, it is also true that most often each digital image requires manipulation in a computer program (such as Adobe Photoshop), sizing for easy transmission or for appropriate appearance on monitors, and archiving.
In addition, our VR movies consist of a minimum of 36 still photographs, all of which receive batch and individual preparation prior to processing to a VR movie.
The second conclusion from the attempts of LRP in managing its excavation data is that the projects also are obligated to ‘pre-publish’ data.
The era of holding information for decades must end; the responsibility to reveal data before final interpretation has arrived with decisive force in the application of digital technologies to archaeology.
No longer may important collections of material disappear into archives scarcely ever to be seen again or to be available to alternate interpretations.
Early dissemination (‘pre-publication’) of excavation data and graphic illustrations of artifacts will assure the usefulness of the excavation and will add dramatically to archaeological databases; such early and full publication will also address a significant need in near eastern archaeology, the virtual inaccessibility of comparative material because they are hidden behind necessarily limited traditional publications or may be found only with extreme effort in the archives of countries of origin.
Digital databases, though not as ‘good’ as the objects in hand, offer a workable solution to the problem.
Finally, the capabilities and the demands that digital recording/reporting bring to the excavation project require a staff that are knowledgable about various aspects of digital technology.
For example, in the 1999 season, two staff members were full-time computer facilitators.
However, the project needed another full-time computer person (even though the team numbered only 37) and twice the six laptop computers for daily work.
Staff makeup must change to include technical people to maintain digital equipment, and start-up costs must dedicate sufficient funds for basic digital tools.
References Abel, M. 1938.
Geographie de la Palestine.
II.
Paris.
Aharoni, Y.
1967.
The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography.
London: Burns and Oates.
Kloner, A.
1980.
Hurvat Rimmon, 1979, Israel Exploration Journal 30: 226-228.
Seger, J.D.
1984.
The Location of Biblical Ziklag: An Identity Crisis, Biblical Archaeologist 47: 47-53.
Author Details Dr. Paul F. Jacobs Cobb Institute of Archaeology Mississippi State University Email: pfj1@ra.msstate.edu Website: www.cobb.msstate.edu Article Title: "Ancient World, Digital World: Excavation at Halif " Author: Paul F. Jacobs Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/jacobs/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Teleworking from Home Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Teleworking from Home Buzz mobile software html database cataloguing standards Citation BibTex RIS Nicola Harrison, Project Assistant at Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), describes her experience of teleworking.
Teleworking involves working at a distance from a usual place of work, often passing work between locations through the Internet.
Work may be sent from one office building to another, from a worker’s home to a central location, from a telecottage, or from a mobile location such as a salesman’s car [1].
Home working is working from one’s own home, and can involve anything from hand-knitting jumpers to installing a high technology workshop in your garage.
The number of people involved in this section of the workforce is growing, with an estimated 563,000 teleworkers in the UK in 1994, making up 1.21% of the workforce [2].
Several associations, both national and international, have been formed to represent the sector [3,4] and various awareness programmes have been produced [5,6,7].
One key aim of these is to reduce pollution by reducing commuting.
The advantages of teleworking to employers are well known [10,11,12,13,14].
Employers save on space, heating and lighting and there is a significant improvement in overall productivity.
Skilled employees can be retained by offering them more flexible working conditions, including teleworking.
The disadvantages to employers can include difficulties in installing and maintaining appropriate equipment in diverse locations, and the potential for poor communications between employers and teleworkers.
Existing managers may resist moves towards teleworking because of the fear that their positions will become redundant.
The advantages to teleworkers themselves include avoiding travelling to work every day.
People can live where they choose, without the worry of having to move towns and break up social and family networks in order to find suitable employment.
It allows people with disabilities or care responsibilities to work when they would otherwise be unable to.
Where teleworking is combined with the freedom to choose ones own work schedule it has the additional advantage that work can be fitted around other activities.
Teleworkers can find it useful to spend some time at a central base.
This is useful for getting to know colleagues and feeling involved.
It also provides an opportunity to make informal suggestions and bounce ideas off people.
Potential problems teleworkers experience can include not having the appropriate facilities available to allow the work to be done.
There is also the risk that isolated employees may be exploited in an environment where they can’t easily get support from co-workers or unions.
Self employed teleworkers are obviously much more vulnerable than those who are employees.
A code of practice for companies using teleworkers has been suggested [15].
Teleworking does not suit everyone.
Teleworkers have to be able to motivate themselves to work without supervision.
It is necessary to have space available at home to set up computers and other equipment.
Also, anyone working at home may need to have some ability to deal with equipment faults without the back up which would be available in an office.
I first began teleworking from home in 1993, after previously having had an office-based full-time job since graduating from university.
Working from home was originally intended as a temporary measure while I was trying to find a suitable job in the area where I wanted to live.
I became a self-employed technical writer for a company based in London, sending and receiving documents and computer discs by post.
A year later, when my first child was born, home working became a much more desirable long term option for me, allowing me to be at home with my children while continuing to work in an interesting field.
In October 1997, I joined the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) [9] as a part-time member of staff working mainly at home.
I currently work 14 hours a week at home and a further three hours (one morning), at Heriot-Watt University Library, where the EEVL Project is based.
EEVL has used teleworking since the start of the project in 1995, with subject specialist librarians from five universities around Britain completing templates for inclusion in the EEVL database, using the EEVL HTML template interface.
This model was extended in 1996 to include a teleworker (the former Project Officer) in New Zealand, who added and edited database templates very successfully from the University of Waikato.
This distributed model does require central co-ordination, and support for the work of the subject librarians is co-ordinated by 2.8 full-time staff working within Heriot-Watt University Library and the Institute for Computer-Based Learning in Edinburgh.
My job at EEVL involves reviewing Internet sites providing engineering information and selecting them for inclusion into the virtual library on the basis of their technical content, quality and availability.
I then write descriptions of sites which are to be included, classify them, and also check descriptions and classifications supplied by the specialist librarians.
Some new web sites to be considered for inclusion are selected by the Project Officer and details are sent to me by e-mail for reviewing, and others I find for myself, often from the links in the sites I review.
I input the reviews onto a standard template through a commercial Internet provider.
The main technical task is monthly link checking.
Software is run by the EEVL Technical Officer which checks all of the links listed in the Virtual Library (with nearly 3000 records, many of which include more than one link, manual checking is not feasible).
Any errors found are printed out and are then checked manually.
About half of the three hours I spend in the office is devoted to attending meetings, and much of the rest is currently devoted to receiving training on different aspects of the job.
The other members of the EEVL team are librarians or computer specialists, whereas I am an engineer and my background therefore enables me to appraoch the project from a different perspective.
An internal e-mail list and a manual of procedures is essential to maintain contact between all parties, as are regular meetings.
Other electronic libraries use the distributed cataloguing model, using staff based at remote sites on a paid or voluntary basis.
For example, SOSIG (the Social Science Information Gateway) has a similar system to EEVL and employs a number of section editors, who are academic librarians paid to contribute a few hours a week to the project, and who are responsible for a particular subject area.
SOSIG also has European Correspondents, academics or librarians who are invited to contribute resources to SOSIG on an informal basis.
[16] Teleworking as part of a distributed cataloguing model, in EEVL’s experience, works very successfully both with a homeworker and workers in other institutions.
It is essential that enough time is given to training, and the teleworker feels part of the culture of the project and is involved in project meetings and decision making.
EEVL has both volunteers and funded employees contributing resources, and it is important to emphasis that while volunteers have contributed a great deal to the project, no service can rely totally on volunteers.
Teleworking has the potential to help in solving a lot of problems such as traffic congestion and pollution, as well as allowing employers and employees to benefit in various different ways.
However, there are drawbacks as well as advantages which need to be evaluated in individual situations.
References [1] What is Teleworking http://www.eto.org.uk/faq/defn_tw.htm [2] Telework: Penetration, Potential and Practice Korte and Wynne, IOS Press 1996, ISBN 90 5199 255 6 [3] The Telework, Telecottage and Telecentre Association http://www.tca.org.uk/ [4] International Teleworking Association http://www.telecommute.org/ [5] Telecommute America!
http://www.att.com/Telecommute_America/ [6]European Community Telework / Telematics Forum.
Site was at: http://www.telework-forum.org/ [link no longer valid].
[7] European Telework Online (ETO) http://www.eto.org.uk/ [9] Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ [10] Berry, Simon.
Teleworking today.
Computing & Control Engineering Journal, 7 (1), February 1996, 4-10.
[11] Nissen, Richard.
Teleworking and the virtual organisation.
Computing & Control Engineering Journal, 7 (1), February 1996, 1115.
[12] Page, Barnaby.
In search of the bottom line.
Flexible Working, 2 (2), January 1997, 4-5,22.
[13] Murray, Bill, and Cornford, Dominic.
Teleworking in the UK, 1996.
Flexible Working, 2 (3), May 1996, 4-7.
[14] Huws, Ursula, Korte, Werner B. and Robinson, Simon.
Telework: towards the elusive office.
Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1990.
[15] Trade Union Perspective: Teleworking code of practice for employees http://www.eto.org.uk/faq/faq01.htm [16] SOSIG http://sosig.esrc.bris.ac.uk/contact.html Author Details Nicola Harrison Project Assistant at Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) EEVL web site: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Beyond the Online Tutorial Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Beyond the Online Tutorial Buzz framework url Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne reports on a one day JISC workshop in Edinburgh on pedagogical issues for projects developing resources for the DNER.
(30 August) ‘Beyond the Online Lecture’ was a one day workshop held in the University of Edinburgh Library on a rainy August day, which considered the pedagogical issues for projects which intend to supply the DNER with resources.
Caroline Ingram chaired the event and Sheila Webber and Bill Johnston were the specialists in educational issues who took the bulk of the workshop.
Caroline opened the event by outlining the DNER as it is, and moved on to a description of what the service might be at some point in the future.
The first workshop session was on Teaching, Learning and Assessment (TLA) and its relevance to the DNER strategy.
Essentially the various kinds of partners in the creation and usage of resources were divided up, which illustrated that they have different interests and requirements.
Those who need to create resources need to be able to assess what the students do with the resources, because that is the nature of the education game.
The educational packages have to make educationally assessable sense.
It is also necessary to look at the strategies which students use to get through educational courses, in order to design these so that they work properly, and also in order that the students requirements are met (not all students study because they are interested in the subject of study).
There was also discussion of the learning design process, used in the creation of educational materials.
The main afternoon session was on Information Literacy, and looked at the various models which have been developed.
This is another framework to help the packaging and promotion of resources to meet the needs of the market.
The concept of Information Literacy is a key one, because how the resources might be used is as important as the resources themselves.
I.e., students don’t just need information, they need to know how to use information.
Content and how things are taught are mutually permeable (Bill Johnston).
The SCONUL ‘7 Pillars’ model surfaced for discussion because of its relevance to the linking of resources with learning and teaching issues.
Peter Burnhill dropped by for part of the day and, among other contributions, offered something from the UKOLN MODELS workshops: the notions of ‘Discover, locate, request, access’ these concepts relate to the information literacy question.
After each of these workshops there was a breakout session, where the issues were discussed in groups of six or so.
The final session was on improving integration and impact, and was in fact a brainstorming session where the participants came up with ideas for improving or creating DNER type services.
The results of the session were then reported back to the whole group.
The workshop was very useful, particularly because it covered in detail an aspect of the creation of the visionary DNER (and that kind of service) which is at least as important as the technical architecture which lies behind the vision, and it is an aspect which hasn’t been much addressed in public.
The workshop is evidence that these issues are now a significant and necessary part of the agenda.
Author Details   Ariadne staff UKOLN University of Bath ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Beyond the Online Tutorial “ Author: Ariadne Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/pedagogy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Mobile E-Book Readers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Mobile E-Book Readers Buzz mobile software html wireless xml browser graphics linux gif ebook mp3 sms licence vt100 i-mode algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, writes about Mobile E-Book Readers in his regular column.
Over the past 30 years or so we have seen a wide range of computer devices.
Those of us over 40 may have distant memories of paper tape and punch cards.
Over time these were replaced by terminals, followed by VDUs.
Although the VT100 terminal became a de facto standard developments still continued, especially in the area of graphical devices.
In the early 1980s personal computers came along.
Within the UK the BBC microcomputer and various offerings from Sinclair had some degree of popularity.
But it wasn't until the IBM PC compatible microcomputer came along that there was some stability in the marketplace.
There have been a number of devices which appear to have failed to gain acceptance in the marketplace.
As well as various microcomputer systems these include X terminals and Network Computers (NCs).
Although the PC appears to be all-pervasive on the desktop, albeit with possible threats from Linux systems, alongside the Apple Macintosh in a niche market, there are a whole host of new devices which are beginning to appear.
These include the WAP phone (and its i-mode competitor in Japan), digital TV, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), kiosks and e-Book readers.
Lessons We Should Have Learnt What lessons should we have learnt over the past 30 years of computer devices?
We should recognise that market leaders will not necessarily continue to dominate the marketplace: IBM's fall after its failure to spot the growth of the PC market is clear testimony to this.
We should be aware of the dangers of developing applications which are locked to a particular device: there will be many CBL (computer-based learning) applications which were developed for the BBC microcomputer which are no longer accessible.
And we should not forget the BBC Domesday project which not only used the BBC microcomputer, but also used videodisk technology which is now obsolete.
There are also lessons to be learnt concerning security devices.
As the PC grew in popularity, software vendors became concerned about pirating of software.
One solution developed during the 1980s was the dongle a hardware device which had to be physically connected to the PC in order for the software to work.
However the dongle failed to gain acceptance due to its lack of scalability and the growth of networked applications, which could be used by any PC on the local area network.
The Web and Deviceand Application-Independence The Web was developed in order to provide device and application-independent access to resources through use of an open file format HTML.
In theory we should be able to use any Web browser on any device to access a Web resource.
During the 1990s the Web community experienced difficulties as Netscape and Microsoft competed with each other in developing browser-specific extensions.
Although the browser wars are now over, we are still finding that vendors are developing proprietary file formats, which can be accessed through browser plugins.
Although vendors claim that their proprietary file formats are needed in order to introduce new functionality, the use of proprietary file formats as many dangers such as vendor lockin, vendor ownership of the format and its future development, application and device dependences, etc.
An example of these dangers can be seen by looking at the GIF graphical format.
This format, which is widely used on the Web, is based on a patented compression algorithm.
After the ownership of the compression algorithm passed from CompuServe to Unisys, Unisys, imposed licensing conditions on use of GIF, requiring Web site owners pay them $5000 or more to use GIF graphics if the software originally used to create the GIFs was not covered by an appropriate Unisys license.
[1].
What's Different Today?
We have seen some of the devices which have been used over the past 30 years or so and lessons that we should have learnt.
So what is so different today?
We are living in an information-hungry society in which many people have access to large numbers of TV channels, for example.
We are living in a society in which networking is becoming pervasive.
Access to the Internet is no longer restricted to the academic and research communities, but is now widely used in homes, schools and businesses.
The growth in the numbers of mobile phone users and SMS messaging, and the usage of phones everywhere is another facet of the pervasiness of networking.
We are also living in a society in which we are becoming aware of the needs of people with disabilities and of the benefits that specialist devices may have in supporting the information needs of, for example, the visually or physically impaired.
Finally we are living in a society in which increasing numbers, especially amongst the young, are computer literate and have familiarity with a range of devices, such as PCs and games machines.
New Devices These factors would appear to predict growth in the use of new devices, and in particular mobile devices.
Although the WAP phone has failed to live up to its hype, we are seeing consumer use of devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and digital cameras.
We are also seeing use of digital TV (such as ITVDigital formerly OnDigital in the UK) to provide interactive services.
So where does the e-book reader fit in with this scenario of pervasive networking and an information-hungry society?
The Mobile E-Book Reader The e-Book reader has been designed as a mobile device suitable for reading text.
Popular e-Book readers include the Rocket eBook and the Franklin E-Bookman.
Although the first generation of e-Book readers provided only dedicated e-Book functionality (creating bookmarks, adding annotations, etc) the current generation of PDAs and hand-held computer now appear to be using their e-Book reading capability as an important marketing feature.
We are also seeing the development of software and Web services to support the information browsing capabilities of PDAs and handheld computers: handheld computers have e-Book reading software bundled with the device and Web services such as AvantGo [2] allow Web pages to be transformed into a format suitable for viewing on PDAs.
Figure 1: Mobile E-Book Readers (Rocket eBook, Palm and Franklin E-Bookman) We also appear to be seeing some convergence in mobile devices: mobile and WAP phones are beginning to provide calendaring functionality and PDAs can now play music in MP3 format.
E-Book Standards In the first generation of e-Book readers each vendor developed its own proprietary format which its device would support.
The end user community is now, however, reluctant to purchase devices when there is competition amongst the formats consumers have learnt lessons from the VHS vs Betamax wars.
Fortunately the e-Book community appears to have accepted that the size of the market will grow if the community agrees on an open format for e-Books.
The OpenEBooks format, an XML application, has been agreed [3].
What Is An E-Book?
Although there is an OpenEBooks format there is no clear agreement as to what an e-Book is.
The term is sometimes used to refer to any book-like object which is available on the Web, often in PDF or MS Word format.
The term is also used to refer to a book-like object which uses a proprietary file format.
The term can also refer to book-like objects which can be read on an e-Book reader.
The inconsistent use of terminology may cause confusion within organisations if a University department purchases an e-Book publishing tool it might expect the resources it produces using the tool to be accessible on an e-Book reader.
Unfortunately this is not necessarily the case.
The University As A Publisher of E-Books Within the UK many of the e-Books seminars which have been organised recently have been arranged by the Library community [4] [5] [6].
It would appear that policies on e-Books are regarded as being the responsibility of the Library.
It terms of providing access to conventional textbooks in electronic format, making deals with publishers and intermediaries such as netLibrary [7] and Questia [8].
In addition to the role of the library in providing access to books, journals, etc.
in both hard copy and electronic formats, the University is also likely to have a role in producing e-Book resources.
As has been mentioned, we may see students purchasing mobile devices, perhaps for playing music or managing calendars.
Students may also wish to exploit such devices to support their studies.
If this happens, institutions should welcome this as the institutions will not be responsible for the purchase and maintenance costs of the devices.
Let us consider two possible scenarios for the use of e-Book readers.
Student Use: A student is in the Student Union bar on a Friday night.
A friend tells him of some resources which will be useful in his assignment, which needs to be handed in on Monday.
The student takes out his PDA and, using the wireless LAN within the Student Union building, accesses the resource and downloads it onto his PDA.
Research Use: A researcher is about to travel to a conference by train.
Being aware of the unreliability of trains, she copies a key Web site onto her e-Book reader, and sends her time reading the pages while her train is delayed.
Approaches To Publishing We have seen two possible scenarios for use of mobile e-Book readers within an educational context.
Although e-Book resources from third parties would be needed in these scenarios (and access to such resources would probably be provided by the Library) we should also expect that institutions will wish to publish their own e-Book resources.
This does not seem unreasonable as we have seen with the Web itself, although initially there was interest in finding resources on the Web, now most institutions will prioritise publishing its own resources, whether they be marketing, teaching and learning or research publications.
There are lessons to be learnt from our experiences with publishing for the Web.
We have learnt the dangers of publishing for a dominant browser.
Increasingly institutions are now looking to provide a single master digital source of information, from which other formats can be derived.
Tools are available for creating e-Book resources from, say an MS Word document.
However adoption of this approach would probably cause a repeat of the problems encountered in using MS Word as a master source of Web documents: use of proprietary HTML extensions; a bottleneck in bulk conversion; reliance on structured use of MS Word style; etc.
Tools are available which enable richer e-Book resources to be created.
However many of the tools in the marketplace simple create a proprietary file format.
The Need For Dialogue As has been seen, the initial interest in e-Books has been from the Library community.
Perhaps this is unsurprising: we should expect Libraries to have an interest in the "Book" aspect of e-Books.
However there is also an "e-" component to e-Books which needs to be addressed.
There is a clear need for institutions to address the impact of mobile devices on their work practices.
The mobile device which has both a communications and networking function and the ability to support information requirements could have a tremendous impact within an educational environment.
A danger we should be alerted to is the development of an e-Book strategy by the Library, though a deal with a e-Book vendor, which is incompatible with an e-Book strategy on publishing teaching and learning or research resources, which is itself incompatible with a deal through the University Computing Service with a preferred vendor of mobile products!
Within the UK the EBONI project [9] is working on the development of "a set of recommendations for publishing educational works on the Web which reflect the needs of academics and a diversifying population of students throughout the UK" [10].
They have recognised that "Arriving at a definition of 'electronic books' has emerged as an important preliminary goal for EBONI."
[11].
However the EBONI project has limited its view on the e-Books they will be evaluating in recognition of the limited time it has available during its 18 month funding.
Conclusions We have seen how different communities may have very different views of the role of the e-Book within an educational context.
There is a need for a clear definition of the term.
Of equal importance is the need for the various communities with an interest in the broad area of e-Books to establish dialogue.
Finally there is a need for organisations wishing to publish e-Book resources to have a publishing strategy which supports the reuse of resources.
References Burn All GIFs, http://burnallgifs.org/ AvantGo, http://avantgo.com/ Open eBook Forum, http://www.openebook.org/ Ebooks: What's In Them For Us?, Seminar organised by SCURL and SLAMIT, 7 June 2001 http://www.slainte.org.uk/SLAMIT/slambook.htm E-Books 2001, 20th March 2001.
Seminar organised by LITC and JISC http://litc.sbu.ac.uk/ebooks2001/ An Introduction to eBooks and netLibrary, UC&R Welsh Section.
26 April 2001 http://www.swan.ac.uk/lis/uc&rwales/eng/pastevents.htm NetLibrary, http://www.netlibrary.com/ Questia: An Online Library Of Books And Journals, http://www.questia.com/ EBONI, Electronic Books ONscreen Interface, http://eboni.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ CDLR Projects: EBONI, http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/projects-eboni.html EBONI: Defining Electronic Books, http://eboni.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents/definition.html Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath.
Article Title: "Web Focus: Mobile E-Book Readers" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Jan-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 35: The Art and Craft of Portalage Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 35: The Art and Craft of Portalage Buzz data framework portal archives metadata repositories eprints e-learning copac rslp rae authentication research standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter provides an editorial introduction to Ariadne 35.
Welcome to the March/April issue of Ariadne.
This issue of Ariadne focuses on the Portal concept.
The term 'portalage' (the making of portals) crept (unforced) into a discussion of the portal concept held on the 25th April at the University of London Library (Gateways to Research and Lifelong Learning: Portals in Perspective).
A good question for anyone to ask is: 'What features in a Portal?'
since it is an area still lacking in consensus.
Geoff Butters analyses the features found in various types of portal, and includes a comparison with the planned features for the JISC Subject Portals.
These results come from the EDNER project a three-year project being undertaken by the Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) at the Manchester Metropolitan University and the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT) at Lancaster University.
One strand of the project is the evaluation of the JISC Subject Portals.
As part of that work a systematic investigation of portal features was undertaken in the summer of 2002 to help develop a profile of features of JISC, institutional, and commercial portals.
The EDNER Project defines 'Portal' fairly tightly, as prescribed by the JISC 5/99 Programme and subsequently the Portal Development Programme.
This is a particular view of what a Portal is, but the definitions discussed in this article are likely to be useful to those building portals for other communities.
User access to portals is an important issue which has many layers In 'Access Management, the Key to a Portal' Francisco Pinto and Michael Fraser report on the experience of the UK Subject Portals Project, which is being developed in a distributed environment based on the RDN (Resource Discovery Network) hubs.
The project deliverables will allow each hub to customise a portal for its domain-specific needs.
It is intended that the SPP will provide single access points with common functionality, including access management, user-profiling, cross-searching, all of which will be supported within a portal framework.
This core functionality will provide users with streamlined access to subject-specific datasets.
Access Management (AM) for the portal will allow users to be authenticated via several authentication mechanisms against different AM Systems (AMS) and scenarios (e.g.
Athens).
Thus users logging in from anywhere will be able to have personalised services and obtain authorisation to access protected remote resources.
There is an increasing recognition that digital resources of all kinds are eminently suitable to repurposing and reuse, and developments such as the Open Archives Initiative explicitly recognise the value of sharing metadata about resources with any number of service providers in order to raise visibility, and draw greater attention to the underlying resources.
As 'portals' continue to gain ground across the community, there will be an increasing requirement for reusable content of all forms, whether drawn from within the organisation building the portal or gathered from elsewhere.
In 'Syndicated content: it's more than just some file formats' Paul Miller takes a look at issues arising from the current enthusiasm for syndicating content to portals or other web sites.
Work on the PORTAL Project, funded under the JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme, is raising issues relating to the reuse and reintegration of digital resources of various forms, specifically in the context of 'surfacing' these resources within institutional portals.
This article explores a number of these issues, and offers some guidelines for good practice.
The national Collection Description Focus is based at UKOLN and is funded by the British Library, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and Resource.
It aims to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors.
There is an increasing emphasis on mapping and managing information resources in a way that will allow users to find, access, use and disseminate resources from a range of diverse collections.
JISC's vision of a managed "information environment" and new programmes of digital content creation have highlighted the role of collection-level description, and this one-day event focussed on the challenge of bringing together distributed content and how collection-level description can help to facilitate the process.
The programme included input from several major strategic initiatives including the New Opportunities Fund portal (EnrichUK), JISC's Information Environment Service Registry (IESR), the CC-Interop (COPAC/Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation) project and the Natural History Museum's Collection Level Description project .
The day also featured demonstrator and pilot services from a wide range of collection-level description services.
Verity Brack reports on this event held at the British Library (London, 25 March) in her article 'Collection Description Focus Showcase: Mapping the information landscape'.
In 'Functionality in Digital Annotation: Imitating and supporting real-world annotation' Richard Waller (of whom more later) looks at concepts of annotation, with a view to how annotation tools might be used in the subject-gateway environment.
This article examines the the uses and characteristics of what we might term "pre-digital" or hand-written annotation before comparing them with the approaches in design that can be made in digital annotation.
It is possible that the characteristics of analogue annotation may challenge the design of its digital equivalent, leading to a consideration of annotation functionality from the standpoint of users.
Finally the article considers the basic design of straight-forward annotation tools.
Recently, around 80 staff and students at five tertiary education institutions around the UK participated in interviews and focus groups dealing with their expectations, needs, likes and dislikes with regard to institutional portals.
The participating institutions included an institute of higher education, an FE college, a 'new' or post-1992 university, a research institution and a red-brick university.
Participants included teaching staff, undergraduates, postgraduates and FE students, senior managers and administrators.
The qualitative data collected at the research sites was augmented by the results of an online survey.
While the 'official' survey period ran from November 2002 – February 2003, the success of the data collection method, which employed a reusable Learning Object from the Iconex repository, has led to the survey remaining available.
It can be accessed via the project Web site and remains available to provide a rolling view of user needs and, potentially, to track changes over time.
The survey was completed by a total of 557 respondents, of whom some 265 were students.
In her article 'Apart from the weather, I think it’s a good idea': Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals: Liz Pearce takes a look at the results of this survey.
Other articles which stand out in an information-rich issue are 'ePrints UK: Developing a national e-prints archive' by Ruth Martin.
This article describes the technical work of the ePrints UK project, and outlines the non-technical issues (the organisational issues) that must also be addressed if the project is to deliver a national e-prints service.
And also 'Mandated online RAE CVs linked to university eprint archives: enhancing UK research impact and assessment,' in which Stevan Harnad, Les Carr, Tim Brody and Charles Oppenheim make a case for maximising the advantages and the UK's pre-eminence in the Research Assessment Exercise.
We also welcome back Phil Bradley whose popular 'Search Engines' column has been missing for a few issues now.
There is our usual complement of regular columns, plus 'At the Event' reports, and book reviews.Once again Shirley Keane kindly put together the Newsline column.
This is my last contribution to Ariadne as its Editor, after five and a half years.
It has been a rewarding experience.
We've had more than our fair share of clear writing on difficult subjects over the past few years, and I'd like to thank all the authors and contributors to the magazine from around the world during my time in the editorial chair.
Also I'd like to thank in particular the contributors from UKOLN, who have given valuable time and advice where necessary, in addition to writing of a very high standard.
Though I'm leaving behind editorial responsibility for the magazine, I hope to continue to contribute articles to the magazine on an irregular basis.
I'm still working for UKOLN, but have moved from the Information and Communications Team to the Research Team.
I'm now leading the Open Archives Forum project <www.oaforum.org/>.
From Issue 36 onwards, the Editor of Ariadne will be Richard Waller, author of the article on digital annotation mentioned earlier.
Some of you will know him from his work on the later issues of the magazine Cultivate Interactive.
Richard has in fact co-edited this issue (and performed most of the labour).
Suggestions for articles for issues 36 and 37 are now being considered.
As usual, article proposals and books for review should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Tolimac: 'Smart Card People Are Happy People' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Tolimac: 'Smart Card People Are Happy People' Buzz database copyright cataloguing adobe authentication privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Sally Rumsey explains a pilot electronic document delivery service at the University of Surrey Library.
As networked information services continue to expand, libraries need to reinforce their key intermediary role between information providers and end users to achieve a double objective: facilitate user access to electronic services distributed through the Internet and guarantee payment to providers.
TOLIMAC (Total Library Management Concept) is designed as a management tool that allows libraries to manage and control user access to electronic information.
It enables electronic information providers to agree institutional contracts based on actual use of their services, as it provides guarantees on request authentication and on payment for information delivery.
Authentication and payment is managed by use of a smartcard.
The TOLIMAC system is being developed by a European consortium of five partners: Université Libre de Bruxelles Département Informatique Service Cryptographie et Securité Informatique (Belgium); Xafax SA (Belgium); INIST (Institut de l’Information Scientifique at Technique) (France); Absec Ltd (UK); the University of Surrey (UK).
The project has been partially funded by Commission of the European Communities.
Evaluation of the pilot system was performed at the George Edwards Library, University of Surrey during March and April 1999.
The evaluation comprised the testing of the system on users, both library staff who would manage the system and end users.
The system has two discrete parts; a client interface which allows searching for, ordering, payment and retrieval of documents plus an administrator interface which allows library staff to control finances, supplier information, categories of users and their access to the system.
The client is issued with a smart card that allows them to access the system.
Their details are held on a database on the administrator system.
By inserting the smart card into a reader connected to the PC and entering a PIN, the client may search for documents.
During the pilot tests documents were supplied by INIST in France, but it is planned that it would be possible for users to search information supplied by other information providers such as publishers, library catalogues and other document delivery centres.
Searches can be performed by input of information such as author, title, keyword(s) etc.
If the search is successful, the user is presented with a screen listing the titles, authors, language and the journal where the article(s) appear.
They may view the abstract of articles at this stage if they wish.
It is at this point that the user has the option to order and pay for one or more articles.
Payment is possible because of the use of the smart card.
Each user has access to two electronic purses on their smart card; a professional purse that would probably be credited by the institution and a personal purse that would probably be credited by the users themselves.
It may be possible for purses to be credited by use of credit cards or cash machines as well as by the administrator.
This method of payment means that the supplier is guaranteed payment.
Once payment has been made either: i) the document is available to be opened, saved and/or printed immediately or ii) the document will be available the following day when the user may return to retrieve it ie it will be ‘scanned on demand.’ Documents are displayed in PDF format by use of Adobe Acrobat.
Personal privacy is protected and use of the card as a tracking device is minimised because the library acts as an intermediary between user and document supplier.
All transactions on the Internet are secured by means of the smart card through authentication and encryption techniques.
Use of a smart card not only allows for payment of documents, but also other applications.
By connecting a smart card reader to the photocopier it is currently possible to use the card to pay for photocopies, but it could be used for services such as access control to buildings etc.
Libraries can customise use of the system to their own criteria.
Each library is able to apply its own electronic information access, charging policy and categories of users.
All these aspects are managed using the administrator system.
During the evaluation, testers found both the client and administrator systems straightforward to use.
They liked using the smart card and having two electronic purses.
Users also liked the idea of being able to pay for other applications such as photocopies with the smart card.
Many of the test users thought that they would make use of a ‘scanned on demand’ system such as TOLIMAC if it were available.
Some issues were raised as needing further attention.
These included page formatting, some aspects of searching and the inclusion of a history of transactions for the client.
Testers were unanimous that such a system would be advantageous and all liked the speed of delivery of the documents.
Such a system would have an impact on the Inter-library Loans service in a library, but all testers, including library staff thought that use of the TOLIMAC system could only benefit the library and its readers.
Although there were suggestions for alterations/additions to the system by testers, reaction was very positive.
The consortium is now taking decisions concerning the way forward for TOLIMAC.
Author Details Sally Rumsey Research Assistant George Edwards Library University of Surrey Guildford, UK Email: s.rumsey@surrey.ac.uk Further details of TOLIMAC can be found at http://tolimac.ulb.ac.be/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OCLC-SCURL: Collaboration, Integration and Recombinant Potential Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OCLC-SCURL: Collaboration, Integration and Recombinant Potential Buzz data software api database archives metadata vocabularies schema repositories eprints preservation gis ontologies soap personalisation rslp vle mets interoperability privacy url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Pete Johnston reports on the New Directions in Metadata conference, 15-16 August, in Edinburgh The problem of "navigating a rich and complex information landscape" took on a new dimension as I traversed Edinburgh's High Street on a bright Thursday morning at the height of the Festival.
Fielding a barrage of enthusiastic invitations to attend a bewildering range of performances, I headed across town to the University for the "New Directions in Metadata" conference [1], organised jointly by OCLC [2] and SCURL [3].
Michael Anderson (Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Edinburgh) welcomed delegates to Edinburgh, and made an appeal for us to bear in mind that the true value of the services we build around metadata will be measured by how well they meet the requirements of the user.
The Research Support Libraries Programme, for example, had been driven by the needs expressed by the academic research community.
In his welcoming address, Jay Jordan (President and CEO, OCLC) emphasised that OCLC's work was informed by a global perspective, and their activities were underpinned by a co-operative and collaborative approach.
The keynote paper, "Metadata in a distributed environment: interoperability as recombinant potential", was presented by Lorcan Dempsey (Vice President, Research, OCLC).
Lorcan argued that metadata provides the vital "intelligence" to allow both software tools and human users to "behave smarter" and to deliver richer, more useful information services.
If in the past the emphasis had been on creating and using metadata to support resource discovery, the attention given to specifications such as Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) [4] highlighted that we had now moved firmly into a phase where we were exploring the metadata requirements for a wide range of operations associated with the full "life cycle" of a resource with a recognition that those operations may require richer, more complex metadata.
Lorcan sketched three scenarios: · the provision of "utility" services providing access to commonly useful metadata to support discovery of, access to and use of distributed resources as exemplified in the shared services planned for the JISC Information Environment [5], a context to which several presenters would return in the course of the conference; · the lifecycle approach to digital content management, with a recognition that metadata was critical both in minimising the long-term costs associated with maintaining and preserving digital assets and in maximising the return on investment in digital content creation by ensuring assets were usable; · exploiting distributed metadata to enhance the value of digital resources through collaborative efforts such as the Eprints-UK project [6] In each case, metadata was creating a new potential for adding value to resources and delivering more useful services.
Further, that metadata may be provided from diverse and distributed sources, with the enhanced value delivered through infrastructural components that enabled the effective integration of those sources: the whole could be very much more than the sum of the parts.
The three presentations given during the remainder of the afternoon developed various elements of this introduction.
John MacColl (Edinburgh University Library) explored the challenges presented to librarians by the use of Virtual Learning Environments, and particularly how the present approaches to VLE implementation and use might threaten the role of librarians as skilled mediators of information.
The challenges are both organisational and technological.
The ANGEL project, funded under the JISC DNER development programme, seeks to address the latter by building middleware services to improve integration between VLEs and library systems with metadata (about resources, licenses, and access rights) at the core of those services [7].
Chris Rusbridge (University of Glasgow) emphasised the great potential of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting [8] for resource disclosure.
Obstacles to implementing an institutional repository were typically organisational and cultural rather than technical, including the "chicken-and-egg" problem of achieving the critical mass of contributions that led academic authors to recognise the usefulness of submitting their work to the repository.
The Daedalus project at Glasgow (funded under the JISC FAIR programme) will explore some of these issues in developing a network of institutional repositories [9].
Chris also suggested that the capacity for metadata to provide the "intelligence" in the system was critically dependent on the quality of that metadata, and in a context where metadata was created by authors rather than expert cataloguers that quality may be lower.
In the final presentation of the first day, Stuart Hunt (OCLC PICA) presented a critique of the "application profile" model [10] of metadata schema implementation from the perspective of structural linguistics.
Stuart presented the view that, if metadata schemas were languages, and individual terms or elements were "signs" within those languages, the value of an individual sign derived at least in part from its context and its relationship with other signs.
The premise that a sign can be placed in a new context without changing its value ignores, or at least undervalues, this structural aspect of language.
The second day opened with a session on collection-level description.
I gave an overview of the area from the perspective of the Collection Description Focus, looking at how the idea of the collection had been used by different information management traditions, the work done within the Research Support Libraries Programme on modelling collections and their description [11], and examining briefly how collection-level metadata was being used to support resource disclosure and discovery in various contexts, particularly in the JISC Information Environment.
Dennis Nicholson (Centre for Digital Library Research, University of Strathclyde) and Gordon Dunsire (Napier University) reflected on the application of the RSLP model in the SCONE project [12].
Gordon explored the adoption of the "functional granularity" approach to defining a "collection", and highlighted similarities and differences in the nature of collection-level and item-level metadata.
Dennis stressed the human and community aspects of the work, particularly in mediating areas such as the description of collection strength, where the potential for subjective judgement is high.
Marie-Pierre Détraz (CURL) reported on CURL's experience of using OCLC/Lacey's iCAS automated collection analysis service for the holdings of six UK libraries, to explore the usefulness of this tool in supporting collaborative collection management [13].
Marie focused particularly on the challenges of using automated methods to classify records that did not include standard classification numbers.
This process had increased the percentage of records analysed by iCAS, but the results suggested that its use for specialist libraries may require some refinement.
The following session, titled "Making Common Sense", included three presentations under the broad area of classification and ontologies.
Peter Burnhill and David Medyckyj-Scott (EDINA) presented an overview of the value of referencing by place and the enhanced potential for location-based searching if referencing is based on a co-ordinate system rather than on a "controlled vocabulary" of place names.
The Geo-Crosswalk project, also funded under the JISC DNER development programme, is exploring the usefulness of the approach in the context of a prototype digital gazetteer service within the JISC Information Environment [14].
Diane Vizine-Goetz (Office of Research, OCLC) argued that until now many valuable services built on classification schemes and ontologies had been embedded within particular metadata systems or applications.
Web services technologies provide a basis for making such services available in more flexible modular forms.
Both Google and Amazon have recently provided SOAP interfaces to their metadata databases, and these are already being exploited by third parties to build new services [15].
The potential of existing rich bibliographic metadata resources might be exploited through the provision of services such as automatic classification (or verification of existing classification) and classification mapping to enhance the value of metadata records.
Paul Miller (UKOLN) argued that the capacity for "personalisation" was an increasingly important factor in the interfaces that service providers offer to users.
To deliver such features effectively, systems require more information on individual users and their preferences.
Taking an example from the context of describing educational resources, Paul described the challenge of categorising the "level" at which a learning resource is aimed, with, in the UK alone, several overlapping schemes in operation [16].
Storing data for personalisation may also raise significant issues of privacy.
Deborah Woodyard (British Library) surveyed current activity in the area of metadata for digital preservation, and the efforts to create practical implementations to test the high-level models such as the Open Archive Information System (OAIS) [17].
Deborah argued that the automated generation of preservation metadata was an area which required further research.
Richard Ovenden (University of Edinburgh) presented an entertaining reflection on the themes of the seminar and suggested that the emphasis on describing collections as well as items, on a "lifecycle" approach which recognised the long-term value of the resource, and on curatorship as well as access, were all evidence of a (belated?)
recognition of the archival approach to resource management.
Organisational change is both reflecting and encouraging an end to the historical compartmentalisation between the information management professions.
In his closing comments, Ian Mowatt (University of Edinburgh) traced a number of tensions which had emerged during the conference, while sounding a note of pragmatism.
He noted the impossibility of predicting everything the researcher might want from a system, and the importance of balancing what may be "best" in theory against what is "achievable" in practice: from the user viewpoint, something may be better than nothing if it is available when required.
Ian returned to the opening theme of collaboration and co-operation and suggested that the potential for truly valuable services would be realised on the basis of partners sharing their separate human and informational resources through collaborative ventures.
The conference covered a broad range of topics within a relatively short time.
It revealed a sense of cautious optimism that specifications like the OAI harvesting protocol and the various Web Services specifications were beginning to form the basis of useful services.
Many of the more difficult challenges to be faced were cultural and organisational, with agents either reasserting the importance of their "traditional" roles in new contexts or adapting their approaches to new circumstances.
The argument for collaborative approaches was a compelling one, and one which the participants appeared to welcome.
References [1] The conference programme is available at <http://www.oclc.org/events/ifla/preconference/> [2] Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC) <http://www.oclc.org/> [3] Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL)< http://scurl.ac.uk/> [4] Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)<http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/> [5] Documents on the Information Architecture for the JISC Information Environment are available at: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/> [6] Eprints-UK <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/> [7] ANGEL <http://www.angel.ac.uk/> [8] Open Archives Initiative (OAI) <http://www.openarchives.org/> [9] The Daedalus project <http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/index.html> [10] Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel, "Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas", Ariadne Issue 25 (Sep 2000) <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/> [11] RSLP Collection Description project,<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/> [12] The SCONE project <http://scone.strath.ac.uk/> [13] The CURL iCAS Collection Analysis project <http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects/icas.html> [14] The Geo-Crosswalk project <http://edina.ac.uk/projects/crosswalk.html> [15] Details of the Google Web services API are available at <http://www.google.com/apis/> Details of the Amazon.com Web Services API are available at <http://associates.amazon.com/exec/panama/associates/join/developer/resources.html> For an example of a service using these APIs, see <http://mockerybird.com/index.cgi?node=book+watch> [16] MEG Educational Levels <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/documents/ed-level.html> [17] Open Archives Information System (OAIS) Reference Model <http://www.ccsds.org/RP9905/RP9905.html> Author details Pete Johnston Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath p.johnston@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Collaboration, Integration and 'Recombinant Potential'" Author: Pete Johnston Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/oclc-scurl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadiversity Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadiversity Buzz data rdf framework database dissemination infrastructure metadata standardisation accessibility cataloguing z39.50 gis adl interoperability taxonomy research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day on a Biodiversity conference in the States interested in Metadata.
Introduction and context First, we simply need to be moving faster to coordinate the information that already exists, on file cards and computers, scattered around the world’s major and minor museums and other collections.
… Second these databases must be widely available and ‘customer friendly’.
We need to accelerate current efforts for international cooperation and coordination, so that common formats are increasingly agreed and used.
Robert M. May (1994) [1].
Biodiversity information management The management and exchange of information is an important part of the ongoing management of biodiversity and ecosystems.
This point was emphasised in a report produced in March 1998 by the US President’s Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems [2].
The authors of the report suggest that research should be carried out into the development of information systems that can combine the large amounts of data relevant to biodiversity.
We need … mechanisms that can, for example, efficiently search through terabytes of Mission to Planet Earth satellite data and other biodiversity and ecosystems datasets, make correlations among data from disparate sources, compile those data in new ways, analyze and synthesize them and present the resulting information in an understandable and usable manner (Section IV).
The PCAST report also suggested the creation (and funding) of a “next generation” National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII-2).
Its ambition would be to provide a ‘research library system’, an “enabling framework that could unlock the knowledge and economic power lying dormant in the masses of biodiversity and ecosystems data that we have on hand” (Section IV).
Metadiversity the symposium The PCAST report was the catalyst for the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS), under a co-operative agreement with the Biological Resources Division of the United States Geological Survey (USGS/BRD), to organise a symposium that could discuss the challenges posed by biological diversity information.
Thus in mid-November 1998, delegates representing a variety of different communities, including biological and environmental information specialists, museum curators and librarians, began to gather at Natural Bridge, Virginia described as one of the seven natural wonders of the world.
Natural Bridge, Virginia.
Concepts of biodiversity ‘Biodiversity’ is a contraction of ‘biological diversity’, a concept that been recognised for a long time in a variety of biological and ecological contexts.
The contraction was originally coined for a meeting, the ‘National Forum on BioDiversity’, held in Washington, D.C. in September 1986 and was used as the title of its published proceedings [3].
J.L.
Harper and D.L.
Hawksworth point out that the term is usually used to refer to biological diversity at three distinct levels: genetic (within species) diversity, species (or organismal) diversity and ecological (or habitat) diversity [4].
The much cited Article 2 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) defines biological diversity as follows: … the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems [5].
Biodiversity is seen as important because it is moral imperative … also may be the source of the raw materials for human exploitation, including medicines, food and other products [6].
The conservation of biodiversity is seen as important because it might help counter the global decline of biological diversity due to human impacts in the form of habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, over-exploitation of resources, global climate change and other factors.
Conservation practice is based to some extent on the availability of information about biodiversity.
Inventorying biodiversity is important because, as Nigel Stork points out, it can “go some way towards providing a clear view of the magnitude of diversity on Earth and its rate of loss” [7].
Inventorying can also help with developing sustainable approaches to the utilisation of natural resources and the discovery of ‘new’ substances which can be used by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
Metadata, interoperability and biodiversity information management The Metadiversity symposium subtitle, “Responding to the grand challenge for biodiversity information management through metadata”, emphasised the importance of metadata issues to biodiversity information.
Metadata is generally understood to mean ‘structured data about data’ and in the biodiversity context can relate to a wide range of information types including bibliographic data, specimen data from museums, taxonomies developed by systematic biologists and the products of research and geospatial surveying.
For this reason, participants in the conference included representatives of many relevant communities; including museums, database producers, biological systematics, libraries, etc.
The metadata concept was introduced by Stu Weibel (Online Computer Library Center) who gave a presentation on the ‘metadata landscape’ with particular reference to the Dublin Core initiative [8].
In so doing, he defined three separate levels of interoperability: semantic, structural and syntactic.
Weibel also outlined concepts of modular extensibility with regard to metadata that would enable the addition of metadata elements for discipline-specific requirements including elements tailored for rights management data or biological specimens.
This modular-type architecture would enable the invention of new semantics and their integration into systems being built now.
As an example of this, Weibel described the Resource Description Framework (RDF) being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a metadata framework for the Web [9].
In his paper on ‘Building digital libraries for metadiversity’ Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information) probed the meaning of words like ‘digital libraries’, ‘interoperability’, ‘federation’ and ‘infrastructure’.
He noted the difficulty of creating interoperable systems that cover a wide range of data types.
He stressed that this was not just a technical issue, but also included solving methodological and economic differences between the diverse communities that ‘own’ biodiversity information.
Carl Lagoze (Cornell University) additionally pointed out that traditional metadata creation methods (e.g.
cataloguing) are neither appropriate nor sufficient in the networked information environment.
Frameworks and infrastructure Initiatives for biodiversity information management systems exist at a number of different levels: global, national, regional and local.
Part of the challenge for biodiversity information management is ensuring that these initiatives work in co-operation with one another.
A variety of presentations at the Metadiversity symposium outlined some of these initiatives and associated infrastructure issues.
The Clearing-House Mechanism of the Convention on Biological Diversity The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is an initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and was opened for signature at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the “Earth Summit”) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
The CBD, which has been signed by over 150 countries, contains provisions relating to a wide range of issues, including the need to establish educational programmes, to promote research, to encourage technology transfer and to facilitate the exchange of information.
Article 17 states that: The Contracting Parties shall facilitate the exchange of information, from all publicly available resources, relevant to the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, taking into account the special needs of developing countries.
The convention specifies that this information should include the exchange of the results of technical, scientific and socio-economic research and should, where feasible, include the repatriation of information.
It is up to national signatories to decide their response to these particular articles in the CBD.
The UK Government, for example, produced a Biodiversity Action Plan that proposed the setting up of a Biodiversity Steering Group that reported in 1995.
Among its recommendations, the report suggested improving the quality and accessibility of data and biological reporting by maximising the use of existing data, developing a United Kingdom Biodiversity Database (UKBD) and developing locally based biodiversity information systems [10].
A UK Biodiversity Group has been set up with an Information Group which aims to improve the “accessibility and co-ordination of existing biological datasets, to provide common standards for future recording and to facilitate the creation of a UK Biodiversity Database” [11].
Article 18 of the CBD specifically articulates the need to create a ‘clearing house mechanism’ (CHM) to promote and facilitate technical and scientific co-operation, including the exchange of information [12].
At the Metadiversity symposium, Beatriz Torres (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, UNEP) introduced this CHM and explained that it embodied a transparent and decentralised approach to disseminating information.
US initiatives: NBII, FGDC, etc.
The United States has also had a longstanding interest in developing a national focus for biodiversity information.
Natural Heritage Data Centers, usually based on individual States, have existed since the 1970s [13].
The creation of a co-ordinating national centre for biodiversity information has been suggested by a variety of US organisations over the past few years [14].
The 1998 PCAST report has noted the importance of this task and suggested that it should develop out of the existing National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII).
NBII is co-ordinated by the USGS and consists of an electronic gateway to biological data and information maintained by US government agencies at federal, state, and local levels and other partners [15].
A key component of NBII is the NBII Metadata Clearinghouse, a database of descriptions of biological databases and information products developed and maintained by the USGS and NBII partner organisations [16].
Two presentations at the Metadiversity symposium specifically concerned the NBII.
Dr. Anne Frondorf (USGS/BRD) outlined some of the challenges involved in developing and implementing metadata standards for the diverse data types and information products that need to be included within NBII.
She also stressed the importance of linking with parallel infrastructure efforts, for example in the spatial data community and, in particular, the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC).
The NBII Metadata Clearinghouse uses metadata in the form of a Biological Profile of the Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata developed by the FGDC.
With reference to NBII-2, James L. Edwards (National Science Foundation) outlined the NBII Framework Plan, described as a “roadmap for interoperable sharing of biodiversity information”.
NBII-2 would, of necessity, be a distributed facility which would require the development of interoperable systems that would permit the simultaneous searching of diverse types of data and which would also present this data in a visually useful way.
NBII would be a nationally-based gateway to a variety of locally and regionally based biological data but would also need to interact with global gateways like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) being proposed by the Biodiversity Information Subgroup of the OECD Megascience Forum [17, 18] John Moeller (FGDC) described the infrastructure issues that related specifically to geographic information from the perspective of the US National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).
One key to the successful implementation of a NSDI has been the development of metadata standard in the form of the (recently revised) FGDC Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata [19].
The FGDC is also working with International Standards Organisation (ISO) Technical Committee 211 (TC-211) Working Group 3 on the development of an international standard for geospatial metadata (ISO 15046-15) [20].
The NSDI’s current implementation of a distributed resource discovery system (based on FGDC metadata) is called the Clearinghouse [21].
Clearinghouse uses Web technologies for the client side and ANSI Z39.50 for querying, searching, and the presentation of search results to the Web client.
The NBII Clearinghouse is one of the ‘participating nodes’ in Clearinghouse.
Metadata challenges The symposium largely consisted of a series of presentations outlining the metadata challenges of biodiversity information in a variety of different contexts.
Many of these described particular projects.
Wayne Moore (Stanford University) described an implementation of the Lightweight Directory Application Protocol (LDAP) developed for managing flow cytometry data at Stanford’s Herzenberg Laboratory [22].
The session on libraries included a brief description of the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) project by Linda Hill (University of California at Santa Barbara) [23].
ADL is concerned with the creation of a distributed digital library for georeferenced information.
Hill described ADL’s concept of a gazetteer consisting of indexes of geographical names, containing attributes for names, spatial co-ordinates and categories.
Using a gazetteer like this, links can be made between spatial co-ordinates and indirect names (geographic names).
Other presentations related to particular aspects of biodiversity information management relating to species or ecosystems diversity.
Biological (species) information and museum data One approach to helping conserve biodiversity is surveying and inventorying the diversity of life that exists on the planet.
Edward O. Wilson says that biologists are hampered in this task because they have “only the faintest idea of how many species there are on earth or where most occur” [24].
Current estimates of the number of extant species on the planet are between 5 and 30 million, although the figure may be much higher, while only about 1.5 million species are currently known [25].
In addition, Robert May suggests that it is possible that half of all extant species will become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years if current rates of tropical deforestation continue [26].
It is, therefore, important that something is done now.
In this context, biological systematists have long been aware of the potential role of automation in the creation of an international integrated database of species or a taxonomic information system [27].
Stephen Blackmore of the Natural History Museum, for example, has noted that “foremost amongst the basic details needed in biological information systems are the names and the systematic relationships of all known species” [28].
An additional problem is that the sources of this information are themselves diverse and in different formats, both manual and digital.
Any system would need to take account of the large amounts of legacy data (and metadata) that exist in the world’s museums, botanical gardens and libraries [29, 30].
A number of initiatives exist in this area and some of these were described at the Metadiversity symposium.
Frank Bisby (The University of Reading) outlined progress on an ambitious project called Species 2000.
This is attempting to create a distributed index of all the world’s known species [31, 32].
Species 2000 aims to create stable taxonomic indexes for individual groups of organisms.
These indexes would be produced by a number of global species databases (GSDs) that would define a species index for a particular taxon or region.
Examples of GSDs currently operating within Species 2000 are the International Legume Database and Information Service (ILDIS) [33, 34] and the Zoological Record from BIOSIS UK [35].
Projects based on specific locations or regions offer a potentially scalable approach to the wider biodiversity information problem.
This is an approach taken by the Discover Life in America initiative.
John Pickering (University of Georgia) described an initial project concerned with creating a comprehensive inventory of all life forms in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park called the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) [36].
This project utilises both specialists (taxonomists and ecologists) and many other partners including educational institutions, museums, government agencies and volunteers to attempt to create a publicly accessible inventory of the estimated 100,000 species in the Park.
Dr. Bruce Collette (National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Systematics Laboratory) described ITIS (Integrated Taxonomic Information System) a relational database of scientific and common names for plants and animals [37].
Collette explained that ITIS was designed to replace the list of scientific names maintained by the US National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) and currently contains over 266,000 names of plants and animals.
Museums of natural history contain many biological and palaeontological specimens (and their associated metadata) which relate to biodiversity.
The Natural History Museum in London, for example, has approximately 68 million biological specimens [38].
Dr. Julian Humphries (University of New Orleans) commented that the management and wide dissemination of museum-created metadata about specimens had traditionally not been seen as important as conserving and managing access to the specimens themselves.
The use of microcomputers by museums had resulted in the creation of a variety of disparate information systems.
The challenge for museums is to make these heterogeneous systems interoperable and to be able to add metadata that is currently either in analogue form or non-existent.
Dr. Ray Lester (Natural History Museum) followed this by asking important (and neglected) questions about who should pay for the creation (or retrospective conversion) of this potentially expensive metadata.
Ecosystem information The ecological level of biodiversity is as important as species or genetic diversity.
Large amounts of scientific data relating to ecology are currently gathered from a variety of sources: for example, from land stations, oceanographic surveying, satellites and remote sensing devices.
Also, economic, social-economic and demographic data can also be relevant.
This data can, collectively, be used to monitor ecosystems and to provide information for policy making.
One major problem for integration is that different systems use different spatial units.
Dr. Roberta Balstad Miller (Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University) commented that remote sensing data, for example, is usually based on grids while social-economic data typically use political or jurisdictional boundaries.
One challenge is integrating data access and dissemination via interoperable metadata systems.
CIESIN itself has provided some metadata guidelines and also provides a gateway that gives access to GILS records describing information resources and data access systems available from CIESIN, and from its international co-operative partners [39, 40].
CIESIN is also developing a ‘Unified Metadatabase’ to integrate CIESIN’s diverse data, metadata, and document resources [41].
The remainder of the presentations on ecosystem information management consisted of descriptions of particular initiatives and services.
Lola M. Olsen (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) described NASA’s Global Change Master Directory (GCMD), a metadata based directory of data sets of relevance to global change research [42].
The metadata format used is called GCMD’s Directory Interchange Format (DIF) [43].
DIF records can, if necessary, also be output as FGDC or GILS-type records.
Eliot Christian (USGS) followed this with an account of international work being carried out on a prototype service being developed as part of the Environmental and National Resources Management project of the G-7 Global Information Society Initiative (G7-ENRM).
The service is called the Global Environmental Information Locator Service (GELOS) and uses a minimum set of metadata elements developed by the G7-ENRM Metainformation Topic Working Group (MITWG) [44].
In GELOS the metadata element set is be used in conjunction with the ANSI Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol to demonstrate the integration of different types of environment and natural resources information held in numerous locations world-wide [45].
Stefan Jensen (Niedersächsischen Umweltministerium, Hannover) described the European Environment Agency (EEA) founded European Topic Centre on Catalogue of Data Sources (ETC/CDS) [46].
CDS supports the operation of the EEA-EIONET (European Environment Agency Environmental Information and Observation Network) by giving access to metadata (‘meta-information’) relating to European environmental resources.
The CDS core data model is based on an extended GELOS metadata elements set.
Gerald S. Barton (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) outlined recent work carried out by the Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS) of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS).
WGISS aims to help improve the accessibility of earth observation data, to enhance its complementarity, interoperability and standardisation and to facilitate the easier exchange of this data through networks [47].
A Task Team within WGISS is developing a Catalogue Interoperability Protocol (CIP) to facilitate the access, searching and retrieval of earth observation data [48].
Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia Summing up The Metadiversity symposium demonstrated the extremely wide range of initiatives and projects that currently exist in the area of biodiversity information.
The important role of metadata was noted by virtually all of the speakers.
The importance of interoperability and distributed (federated) systems was also seen as a key challenge for the future management of biodiversity information.
The final sessions were devoted to smaller working groups that built on the challenges identified by the speakers and began to suggest some solutions.
What follows is a summary of some of these points.
It was noted that many different communities were represented at the symposium.
This was felt to be useful.
Successful biodiversity information management will depend upon this diversity of organisations and individuals talking to one another and sharing challenges and proposed solutions.
This will need some degree of leadership.
At least two of the working groups suggested the creation of an organisation that could co-ordinate work in this area, an international association of biodiversity data providers and users.
Funding biodiversity information services, including funding the ‘retrospective conversion’ of existing manual data, was seen as another major challenge.
It was suggested that progress could be made in this area by encouraging cross-community linkages and with the co-operation of the information industry and the support of professional and learned societies.
There was a level of confidence that the technology existed (or was being developed) which would allow the creation of distributed and interoperable systems.
However, ensuring the related ‘cultural change’ was more problematic.
It was noted several times that interoperability is not just a technological problem but also needs to be applied to the professional cultures of various communities.
The Metadiversity symposium was a good opportunity for a wide range of people interested in biodiversity information management to meet and learn about ongoing projects, common problems and the role of metadata.
The longer-term success of the symposium, however, depends on what comes next.
It is important that the wide range of organisations involved in biodiversity information find ways to ensure continued communication and co-operation.
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Greenbelt, Md.
: Global Change Master Directory, March 1998. http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/difguide/difman.html Global Environmental Information Locator Service (GELOS).
http://ceo.gelos.org/ G7-ENRM Metainformation Topic Working Group, ENRM Metadata Element Definition Paper, 21 July 1997. http://unfccc.gelos.org/free/REPORTS/Attribute.html European Topic Centre on Catalogue of Data Sources (ETC/CDS).
http://www.mu.niedersachsen.de/cds/ CEOS Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS) http://193.36.230.105/wgiss/ CEOS Protocol Task Team, Catalogue Interoperability Protocol (CIP), 13 July 1998. http://harp.gsfc.nasa.gov/~eric/cip-page3.html Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Dr. Dick Kaser (Executive Director, NFAIS) for his invitation to participate in the Metadiversity symposium and for help with travel expenses.
A copy of the paper the author delivered at the Metadiversity symposium can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/metadiversity/.
Author details Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY, UK Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Text Encoding for Interchange: A New Consortium Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Text Encoding for Interchange: A New Consortium Buzz data software framework xml usability tei metadata preservation cataloguing sgml dtd marc provenance interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Lou Burnard on the creation of the TEI Consortium which has been created to take the TEI Guidelines into the XML world.
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was originally established in 1987 with the goal of creating a community-based standard for text encoding and interchange.
It came into being as the result of a perception in many different parts of the academic research community that the rising tide of digitized media (largely known, in those distant days, as "electronic" or even "machine-readable" texts) threatened to engulf everything in a war of competing formats and encoding systems.
Scholarship has always thrived on serendipity and the ability to protect and pass on our intellectual heritage for re-evaluation in a new context; many at that time suspected (and events have not yet proved them wrong) that longevity and re-usability were not high on the priority lists of software vendors and electronic publishers.
Even before the World Wide Web, it was clear that one of the striking virtues of converting resources into a digital form was the consequent ability to integrate resources of different kinds and from different places into one.
At the end of the eighties there was a real concern that the entrepreneurial forces which (then as now) drive information technology forward would impede such integration by the proliferation of mutually incompatible technical standards.
Between 1987 and 1994, nearly two hundred different people from research and teaching establishments on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere in the world, collaborated on a rather unusual research project.
The aim was to achieve two contradictory goals: to agree and codify common practice in the digital representation of the texts which form the raw material of scholarship, while at the same time defining a mechanism which could be expandable to encompass the full range of scholarly encoding practices.
It might well have been a recipe for chaos.
In practice however, thanks to the enthusiasm and skill of the technical experts who contributed their services to this pioneering effort, the TEI's Guidelines were not only published, and widely adopted, but still stand as one of the most complete surveys ever undertaken of the nature of textual structures.
In his preface to a collection of working papers about the TEI published in 1995 (Ide and Veronis, 1995), Charles Goldfarb, inventor of the SGML standard, remarks with typical prescience "The vaunted "information superhighway" would hardly be worth travelling if the landscape were dominated by industrial parks, office buildings and shopping malls.
Thanks to the Text Encoding Initiative, there will be museums, libraries, theatres and universities as well."
The TEI Recommendations have been endorsed by the American National Endowment for the Humanities, the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Modern Language Association, the European Union's Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering Standards, and many other agencies that fund or promote digital library and electronic text projects.
Recognizing its importance in the emerging digital library community, a workgroup sponsored by the Library of Congress has produced guidelines for best practice in applying the TEI metadata recommendations for interoperability with other standards, notably MARC.
(See TEI/MARC Best Practices; see also Pouchard, 1998) Today, the TEI is internationally recognized as a critically important tool, both for the long-term preservation of electronic data, and as a means of supporting effective usage of such data in many subject areas.
It is the encoding scheme of choice for the production of critical and scholarly editions of literary texts, for scholarly reference works and large linguistic corpora, and for the management and production of detailed metadata associated with electronic text and cultural heritage collections of many types.
The TEI website maintains a list of about a hundred currently active TEI projects, ranging from small research applications to major encoding ventures (see The TEI Applications Page).
But, it is reasonable to ask, does it have a future?
is its work complete?
has the scholarly community assimilated or outgrown it?
Bespoke Guidance As first published in 1994, the TEI Guidelines took the form of a substantial 1300 page reference manual, documenting and defining some 600 SGML elements which can be combined and modified in a variety of ways to create specific SGML document type definitions (DTDs) for particular purposes.
A minor revision of this document and its modular DTD framework was produced in 1998, and is available online at a number of sites (TEI P3, 1998).
From the start, however, it was recognised that specific customizations of this dauntingly large document would be needed for particular user communities.
One such customization (known as TEI Lite) was developed specifically to address the needs of the group forming a TEI core constituency, in electronic text centres and digital libraries.
A measure of the success of this customization is the number of translations which have been produced of it independently of the TEI (for details, see The TEI Lite Home Page 1999); this DTD is probably the most widespread TEI application, and for many people is almost synonymous with the TEI itself.
It is important to remember, however, that TEI Lite is only one view of the TEI scheme, not necessarily the best fit for every application.
Many -perhaps most -serious TEI applications have found it necessary to build their own customization of the full scheme in some way.
Using one of the culinary metaphors which permeate the TEI mind set, the construction of an application-specific view of the TEI encoding scheme has been compared to the construction of a Chicago pizza.
The designer reviews the available tagsets (collections of semantically related element definitions) choosing how they are to be combined.
Individual elements may be renamed, ommitted, or modified, subject to some constraints, in the same way as a pizza can be ordered with a specific combination of toppings, subject only to some simple architectural constraints.
In a pizza, there must be a single base, and there must be cheese and tomato sauce, but there need not be mushrooms and you can add your own alfalfa if you insist.
Similarly, in a TEI application, you must choose a single basic framework for your documents, you must include the TEI header, but you don't have to use the tags for marking editorial uncertainty, and you can add special tags for marking irony, if you insist.
This metaphor has been instantiated in a much used set of TEI web pages, known inevitably as the Pizza Chef (TEI Chef 1999) which goes some way towards simplifying and automating the design process.
A free-standing version of the underlying application is also in preparation.
It is a testimony to the power and flexibility of the TEI design that exactly the same mechanism is used to modify the underlying SGML definitions to produce XML conformant document type definitions.
The Pizza Chef is more than just a way of simplifying the construction of SGML DTDs however.
It makes clear that the lasting achievement of the TEI lies, not in its DTD, but in the creation of the intellectual model underlying it, which can continue to inform scholarship as technology changes.
When the TEI was first thought of, it was by no means clear that SGML would be its sole form of expression; it was agreed early on to adopt that metalanguage so long as it remained the tool best suited to the purpose.
Fifteen years on, with the emergence of new equally expressive XML tools that have far greater market acceptance than SGML ever did, the TEI is poised for metamorphosis.
From research project to consortium In January of 1999, the University of Virginia and the University of Bergen (Norway) presented a proposal to the TEI Executive Committee for the creation of an international membership organization, to be known as the TEI Consortium which would maintain, continue developing, and promote the TEI.
This proposal (TEI Consortium, 1999) was accepted by the Executive Committee, and shortly thereafter, Virginia and Bergen added two other host institutions with longstanding ties to the TEI, Brown University and Oxford University.
Over the past year, these four hosts have established a new domain-name for the TEI at tei-c.org, and started work on a new TEI web site, to include all the material formerly hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago, and more besides.
The new site is currently being developed at Oxford University (a beta version is visible at http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/) and will shortly be mirrored at the other three host sites.
The four hosts have provided modest support of the TEI in cash and in kind, continuing editorial work on the DTD, promoting the use of TEI in various conferences and projects, and producing and distributing CDs with TEI documentation and examples.
However, their major achievement over the last year has been to define a new constitutional framework for the TEI, as a membership consortium.
The goal of the new TEI Consortium is to establish a permanent home for the TEI as a democratically constituted, academically and economically independent, self-sustaining, non-profit organization.
This will involve putting the Consortium on solid legal and organizational footing, developing training and consulting services that will attract paying members, and providing the administrative support that will allow it to continue to exist while income from membership grows.
In the immediate future, the Consortium will launch a membership and publicity campaign the goal of which is to bring the new Consortium and the opportunity to participate in it to the attention of libraries, publishers, and text-encoding projects worldwide.
Its key message is that the TEI Guidelines have a major role to play in the application of new XML-based standards that are now driving the development of text-processing software, search engines, Web-browsers, and indeed the Web in general.
The Future of TEI The future usefulness of vast collections of electronic textual information now being created and to be created over the coming decades will continue to depend on the thoughtful and well-advised application of non-proprietary markup schemes, of which the TEI is a leading example.
We may expect that in the future some of the more trivial forms of markup will be done by increasingly sophisticated software, or even implied from non-marked-up documents during processing.
As XML and related technologies become ever more pervasive in the wired world, we may also expect to see a growing demand for interchangeable markup standards.
What is needed to facilitate all of these processes is a sound, viable, and up-to-date conceptual model like that of the TEI.
In this way, the TEI can help the digital library, scholar's bookshelf, and humanities textbooks survive into a future in which they can respond intelligently to our queries, can combine effectively with conceptually related materials, and can adequately represent what we know about their structure, content, and provenance.
References Ide, Nancy and Véronis, J.
(eds) 1995 Text Encoding Initiative: Background and Context Kluwer TEI/MARC "Best Practices": November 25, 1998 Available from http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/ocu/teiguide.html Pouchard, Line Cataloguing for Digital Libraries: the TEI and the TEI Header Katherine Sharp review VI, (Winter 1998).
Available from http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/review/6/pouchard.pdff Text Encoding Initiative The TEI Applications Page.
Shortly to be available from http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/Applications/ Sperberg-McQueen, C.M.
and Burnard, L. (eds) 1994.
Guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange (TEI P3) Chicago and Oxford: ACH-ALLC-ACL Text Encoding Initiative.
Revised Reprint available from http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/Guidelines/ Text Encoding Initiative The TEI Lite Home Page.
Available from http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/Lite/ Text Encoding Initiative The TEI Pizza Chef: a TEI tag set selector.
Available from http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/pizza.html Text Encoding Initiative 1999 An Agreement to Establish a Consortium for the Maintenance of the Text Encoding Initiative.
Available from http://www.tei-c.org/consortium.html Author Details   Lou Burnard Manager of the Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford University Institution (European Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative since 1990).
University of Oxford Email: lou.burnard@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk Web site: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/ Article Title: "Text Encoding for Interchange: a new Consortium" Author: Lou Burnard Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/tei/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Z39.50 for All Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Z39.50 for All Buzz data software rdf database xml zip cataloguing opac z39.50 passwords ascii gis marc authentication interoperability standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller looks at the Z39.50 standard and attempts to extract some meaning from the mass of associated literature.
Z39.50.
Despite certain nominative similarities, it's not a robot from that other blockbuster of the summer, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, but rather the cuddly and approachable name for an important standard of relevance to many working with information resources in a distributed environment.
In this particular summer blockbuster (Ariadne, to which I'm sure many readers frequently refer in the same paragraph as Star Wars), I'll attempt to remove some of the mystique surrounding this much-maligned standard, and illustrate some of what it can be used for.
Z39.50 quick facts The current version of Z39.50 is more properly known as North American standard ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995, Information Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification [1], or as the matching international standard ISO 23950:1998, Information and documentation — Information retrieval (Z39.50) — Application service definition and protocol specification.
The current release is version 3 of the ANSI/NISO standard, and dates back to 1995.
Version 3 is the dominant version of Z39.50 utilized in Europe, although a number of North American sites continue to use the earlier version 2.
The formal home of the standard is the Z39.50 Maintenance Agency [2], hosted by the United States' Library of Congress [3].
Continued development takes place within an informal group of implementors and developers known as the Z39.50 Implementors Group, or ZIG.
The work of the ZIG is progressed on an active mailing list [4], and through two or three face-to-face meetings each year, the most recent of which was held in Stockholm in August 1999.
These meetings are open to all, with the next one scheduled for January 2000 in San Antonio, Texas [5].
Despite a common misconception to the contrary, Z39.50 is not simply used by libraries, although the library sector is one with a clear and long-held need for Z39.50-type functionality.
In the cultural heritage sector, for example, the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) worked to develop a Profile meeting the needs of cultural heritage practitioners [6].
In the world of government and community information, too, the Government Information Locator Service (GILS) Profile [7] makes use of Z39.50 to link a wide range of resources internationally.
There is a huge amount of information available on the web relating to Z39.50.
A basic search for the term on 6 September produced a daunting 2,863 hits from Alta Vista [8], a scary 23,002 from Northern Light [9], and a positively mind-numbing 27,651 from FAST [10].
See Phil Bradley's Search Engine article [11] in this issue for some more information on these search engines.
It is, of course, difficult to navigate meaningfully through such a mountain of information, but two sites repeatedly prove useful first stops.
These are the Maintenance Agency's own web site [2], and Dan Brickley's Z39.50 Resources page at ILRT [12].
Biblio Tech Review's technical briefing on Z39.50 [13] is also valuable, especially as an overview.
What does Z39.50 do?
Z39.50 is designed to enable communication between computer systems such as those used to manage library catalogues.
This communication could be between a cataloguer's PC (or an OPAC terminal in public use) and the library catalogue itself, running on a Unix server in the basement, and equally it could be between a user browsing the web from Hull (East Yorkshire), a library OPAC in Hull (Quebec), a GILS database in Hull (Florida), and a museum collection management system in Hull (Texas)!
Although the former is undeniably useful to those individuals who have to update things such as library catalogues, it is the latter application and others like it which represents much of the potential of Z39.50 in today's distributed network environment.
Real examples of this type of distributed search include the Gateway to the Arts & Humanities Data Service [14] in the UK, and the Melvyl® system of the University of California [15].
Arts & Humanities Data Service The AHDS Gateway [16], physically based in London, uses Z39.50 to query five totally different databases containing information on archaeology (York), history (Colchester), the performing arts (Glasgow), the visual arts (Newcastle), and textual studies (Oxford).
The databases describe different data types according to different cataloguing standards.
They are driven by different database management software and run on a variety of hardware platforms.
Nevertheless, despite these differences, the combination of Z39.50 and Dublin Core elements is sufficient to enable meaningful searches across the five sites.
Figure 1: Arts & Humanities Data Service Gateway Advanced Search The results of a query across the services are summarized and presented to the user as shown in Figure 2.
The status bar at the bottom of this figure illustrates progress of the query against each of the five targets.
In the case shown here, both the Archaeology Data Service and Performing Arts Data Service have yet to respond.
Figure 2: Results from a search on the AHDS Gateway Melvyl® The University of California's Melvyl® system allows users to submit searches across the distributed libraries of the University of California (University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of California at Irvine, etc.).
Melvyl® is just one resource within the California Digital Library [17], which describes itself as ...(the) tenth library for the University of California (UC).
A collaborative effort of the UC campuses, organizationally housed at the University of California Office of the President, it is responsible for the design, creation, and implementation of systems that support the shared collections of the University of California.
http://192.35.215.185/mw/mwcgi?sesid=0904727006&Cecho(home/intro)&Zbookmark#cdl Figure 3: The California Digital Library Figure 4: An Author search of Melvyl® Where is it hiding?
Both Melvyl® and the AHDS Gateway make use of Z39.50 in order to create a single, virtual, resource.
In both cases, the data themselves remain distributed and under the control of those with the knowledge and expertise to most effectively maintain, update, and add to the resources already present.
By using Z39.50, these obvious benefits of distributed data management are combined with the equally valuable benefits of unified data access, which allows the user to submit a single search across multiple resources, regardless of their physical proximity to one another or to the user.
Like a large number of other applications of Z39.50, the technology is effectively hidden from the user in both these examples; despite what the informational screens on the web sites might say, so far as the user is concerned they're simply searching one great big database.
Z39.50 also crops up behind a large number of other services with which readers may be familiar, although some are possibly more unexpected than others.
The United Kingdom's JISC-funded Mirror Service [18], for example, makes use of Z39.50 internally in managing the services that it mirrors.
This increasing invisibility of Z39.50 is all very well for the end user, but makes it difficult to sell to people who will all too often claim that Z39.50 isn't used any more.
It most definitely is.
Developers have simply become good — possibly too good, given their need to raise awareness in order to sell future products?
— at hiding it.
How does it do it?
Everyone following along OK so far?
Well, unfortunately this is where things get a little — but hopefully not too — complicated... Clients and Servers versus Origins and Targets Z39.50 follows what is known in Computing as a client/server model, where one computer (the client or, in Z39.50 parlance, the 'Origin') submits a request to another computer (the server or, to Z39.50, the 'Target') which then services the request and returns some kind of answer.
As we saw above with queries being sent to multiple databases simultaneously, there can be more than one server/target, although the user will normally only be sat in front of one client/origin at any given time.
Facilities and Services Z39.50 is divided into eleven basic structural blocks, known as Facilities.
These Facilities comprise Initialization, Search, Retrieval, Result-set-delete, Browse, Sort, Access Control, Accounting/ Resource Control, Explain, Extended Services, and Termination.
Each Facility is divided into one or more Services, and it is these Services that people usually talk about.
A Service facilitates a particular type of operation between the Origin and the Target, and Z39.50 applications select those Services which will be needed in order for them to fulfil their function.
Of all the Services, the three most basic are Initialization (Init), Search, and Present, and all of these should be found in the majority of Z39.50 applications.
Init is the first step in any query process, and involves the Origin making itself known to the Target, and agreeing a few 'ground rules' for the manner in which subsequent queries will be handled.
Systems which require passwords will also exchange authentication details at this stage.
Search is where the majority of the work is done, as it is this Service which enables the Origin to submit queries to the Target.
These queries may range from the very simple right up to quite complex Boolean queries (AND, OR, NOT, >, <, etc.).
Although Profiles (see below) often make statements about the Services to be supported by any conformant application, the bulk of many Profiles is given over to specifying the attribute combinations for meaningful use of Search.
Present is used to control the manner in which results are returned to the user.
Within Present, a user could ask for the first ten records of a large result set, or request that the data be returned in a different Record Syntax; UKMARC instead of USMARC, for example.
Although these are the main Services, there are a further ten, summarized below.
More detail may be found in Section 3.2 of the ANSI/NISO document for Z39.50 version 3 [1].
Facility Service Initialization Init Search Search Retrieval Present Segment Result-set-delete Delete Browse Scan Sort Sort Access Control Access-control Accounting/ Resource Control Resource-control Trigger-resource-control Resource-report Explain uses the Services of Search and Retrieval Extended Services Extended-services Termination Close Pardon?
OK, let's try explaining it with an example...
Simplifying hugely, Init might be seen as a greeting from the Origin ("Hello, do you speak English?")
and a related response from the Target ("Hello.
Yes, I do.
Let's talk").
Without this positive two-way dialogue, the session cannot proceed.
A Search request is then transmitted from the Origin ("OK — can I have everything you've got about a place called 'Bath'?
"), and is responded to by the Target ("I've got 25 records matching your request, and here are the first five.
As you didn't specify anything else, I've sent them to you in MARC format, so I hope that's OK").
Finally, the Origin uses Present to ask for the data they want ("25, eh?
Can I have the first ten, please.
Oh, and I don't really like MARC.
If you can send me some Dublin Core that would be great, and if not I'll settle for some unstructured text (SUTRS)"), resulting in the transmission of the records themselves from the Target.
Ah... Now I understand... That's all very well, and probably even appears pretty straightforward.
However, there's just a little more that needs to be covered before you can join the ranks of the Z-cognoscenti.
Attribute Sets The manner in which the Search process is governed is closely linked to the Attribute Sets being used by both Origin and Target.
An Attribute Set is, as the name suggests, a set of attributes.
Each of these attributes can have one of several values, and these values govern the manner in which a search proceeds.
Perhaps the best known Attribute Set is Bib-1 [19], an Attribute Set originally designed for bibliographic resources but now commonly used for a wide range of applications.
Bib-1 comprises six groupings of attributes, or Attribute Types.
These are   Use Attributes, which define the access points for a search (title, author, subject, etc.)
Relation Attributes, which determine how the search term entered by the user relates to values stored in the database index (less than, greater than, equal to, phonetically matched, etc.)
Truncation Attributes, which define which part of the value stored in an index is to be searched (the beginning of any word in the field, the end of any word in the field, etc.).
i.e.
on a search for 'Smith', does the stored value start with 'Smith', end with 'Smith', or something else entirely?
Completeness Attributes, which specify whether or not a search term can be the only value in an index.
Position Attributes, which specify where in an index field the search term should occur (at the beginning, anywhere, etc.)
Structure Attributes, which specify the form to be searched for (a word, a phrase, a date, etc.)
Attention normally only focuses upon discussion of Use Attributes, but it is important to correctly set values for the other five attribute types as well if a search is to have maximum value.
These other attribute types are frequently interpreted differently by the suppliers and specifiers of Z39.50 systems, making it difficult for users to interoperate with 'unknown' systems from a vendor with which they are unfamiliar.
Work on Profiles such as the Bath Profile (see below) has gone some way towards standardizing the setting of all these attribute types, thus increasing the likelihood of reliable searches across a wide range of Z39.50 systems.
Record Syntaxes Once the user has undertaken a search, and discovered that there are a number of records meeting their search criteria, the next decision to be made is how the data are transmitted back for display.
Z39.50 has a notion of Record Syntaxes, and the Origin is able to request that data be transmitted in one of these Syntaxes.
If the Target is able to comply, it will do so.
If it cannot, it is possible for the Target to send the records back in some other format that it is capable of.
Given the widespread adoption of Z39.50 in the library world, almost every Z39.50 Origin or Target is capable of handling at least one of the flavours of MARC.
USMARC is commonly supported, often with regional support for UKMARC, DANMARC, AUSMARC and others, depending upon where the vendor is based, and who they see as their key market.
Z39.50 is not simply used for transferring MARC records, and other Record Syntaxes exist to meet a variety of other requirements.
These syntaxes include SUTRS (Simple Unstructured Text Record Syntax; a raw ASCII text file, lacking in any formatting or structure), GRS-1 (Generic Record Syntax; a flexible structure within which almost any database structure can be replicated), and XML (the World Wide Web Consortium's eXtensible Markup Language; another flexible structure, and one with which web applications and developers will be familiar).
Profiles Profiles in Z39.50 tend to be used in order to gather a particular suite of Attributes, Record Syntaxes, and other factors together in order to meet the needs of a particular community, whether that be subject, area, or application based.
As can be seen from the Maintenance Agency's list [20], Profiles span a wide range of task areas, including a Profile for the Geospatial community, one for Government Information, one for the Cultural Heritage sector, and others.
These Profiles are often developed within the community with a requirement for them, with the ZIG and the Maintenance Agency serving in an advisory and support role.
Towards the future: the new Attribute Architecture As mentioned above, the Bib-1 Attribute Set was originally intended for use in searches for bibliographic resources such as books.
Over the years, however, other communities have increased their use of Z39.50, and have tended to add new Use Attributes to Bib-1, rather than creating wholly new Attribute Sets.
This gradual accretion of Use Attributes into Bib-1, together with a number of overlaps between this Attribute Set and those few which had been created by other communities led members of the ZIG to realize that a restructuring was called for before matters became any more complex.
The new Attribute Architecture [21] attempts to solve these, and other, problems by recognizing that certain collections of Attributes are likely to be common to many applications, whilst others will be quite specialist and specific.
It is intended that the commonly used attributes should be collected together in new core Attribute Sets which can be used by all applications, regardless of the area in which they are focused.
These applications can then add functionality from localized and domain-specific Attribute Sets without duplicating the common functions offered by the core sets.
Along with other improvements, the new Attribute Architecture changes the Attribute Types familiar from Bib-1; New Attribute Type Roughly corresponding Type from Bib-1 Access Point Use Semantic Qualifier new Attribute Type Language new Attribute Type Content Authority new Attribute Type Expansion/ Interpretation Truncation and some of Relation Normalized Weight new Attribute Type Hit Count new Attribute Type Comparison most of Relation and part of Completeness Format/ Structure Structure Occurrence Completeness (more or less) Indirection new Attribute Type Functional Qualifier new Attribute Type A lot of work remains to be done on the Attribute Architecture, but two key components are now more or less complete.
These are the Utility Attribute Set [22], which relates to the description of records, and the Cross Domain Attribute Set [23], which relates to the description of the resources those records describe.
Despite ongoing work by a number of vendors (e.g.
Hammer, pers comm.
), it seems likely that the new Attribute Architecture will take a number of years to establish itself and to become fully integrated within a new generation of tools.
Z39.50 and the DNER Given the range of functions for which it was designed, Z39.50 is likely to play an important role in the initial phases of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) being constructed in the UK by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
This DNER is seeking to link existing services for the Higher Education Community (such as AHDS, the Data Centres at Edinburgh, Bath, and Manchester, the Electronic Libraries' Programme Clumps and Hybrid Libraries, etc.)
in order that users both gain a greater awareness of the range of resources available to them and gain enhanced access to the contents of those resources.
The DNER will also seek to provide access to resources from beyond the UK Higher Education community.
The resources to be linked by the DNER are highly diverse, and Z39.50 currently appears to be the only viable means by which access to as many of them as possible can be achieved.
Under this model, the individual resources would be associated with a Z39.50 Target.
Origins such as the one already in place for the AHDS [16] could be established at a variety of levels, perhaps including nationally (a JISC Gateway to its content), by faculty (the AHDS model), by data type (a Gateway to moving image data), and locally (the University of Hull's Gateway to services it has bought access to, whether within the DNER or independently from suppliers such as SilverPlatter).
As has been mentioned, above, there is a wide range of Profiles available to cover some of the services making up the DNER.
There is also room for interpretation within and between these Profiles as to how certain Attribute Types are best handled for particular queries.
Such ambiguity makes a model like that proposed for the DNER extremely difficult to implement without a high degree of communication and control between participants.
An evolving development known as the Bath Profile, however, offers a means by which the DNER's needs can be met; every conformant Origin and Target will, to a certain degree, be visible to every other conformant Origin and Target, and queries will be formulated and responded to in a standardized manner with the result that users can place greater reliance upon the answers being returned.
Adoption of the Bath Profile does not prevent Origins and Targets also making use of other Profiles more closely related to their particular community or data form.
The Bath Profile This Profile, currently known as The Bath Profile: An International Z39.50 Specification for Library Applications and Resource Discovery has been evolving for some time under the guidance of Carrol Lunau at the National Library of Canada.
It specifically addresses the need for a relatively simple Profile in which the values of all Attribute Types are closely regulated, such that all conformant systems may be expected to behave in a particular manner in response to a small number of defined query types.
The Profile is suitable both for library applications and for searches across a number of non-bibliographic domains.
Long-running discussion on the ZIP-PIZ-L mailing list and in a series of teleconferences culminated in a meeting held in Bath during August of 1999 [24].
At this meeting, the authors of a range of existing Profiles gathered along with a number of vendor representatives and finalised their ideas on the Profile.
It is currently expected that a draft of the Profile will be made widely available for comment towards the end of September 1999, and this draft will be announced on various electronic mailing lists once it is ready, as well as being linked to the meeting web site [24].
A number of those present at the meeting have already stated that the Profiles for which they are responsible will be modified to align directly with the Bath Profile.
In these cases, the Bath Profile will become the core of a larger Profile which will also include extra functionality to meet local requirements.
Conclusion Z39.50 is often attacked on a variety of levels by those who see it as overly complex, old fashioned, not sufficiently web-like, or simply no match for the latest 'great idea' (currently, this 'great idea' is usually cited as being some combination of XML and RDF).
It is undoubtedly true that Z39.50 has quirks and limitations, some of which have been outlined in this paper.
This is true, though, of most standards, and the very fact that Z39.50 has been extensively used for long enough to be criticized as old fashioned is surely a testament both to its robustness and to the lack of any viable alternative.
New technologies such as XML and RDF certainly fulfil aspects of the information discovery and retrieval process better than basic Z39.50, but work is underway to capitalize upon this, and to tie such technologies more closely to Z39.50.
It appears for the moment that, whatever its limitations, Z39.50 remains the only effective means of enabling simultaneous queries upon distributed heterogeneous databases, and this remains something that the broader user community wants to be able to do.
Glossary A number of the principal terms and abbreviations used in this paper are defined, below.
Attribute Set A collection of Attribute Types (Use, Relation, Completeness, etc.
), gathered together to address a particular purpose.
The best known Attribute Set is Bib-1.
DNER The Distributed National Electronic Resource.
The DNER is being built by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils in the United Kingdom, and will link users to the wealth of resources provided for them by JISC-funded Data Centres and others.
GILS The Government Information Locator Service.
This was developed in the United States as a distributed collection of 'gateways' providing public access to information from government.
GILS has since been widely adopted in other countries around the world, and a closely related Global Information Locator Service was initiated under the auspices of the G7 countries.
The GILS Profile [7] for Z39.50 is one way in which these distributed gateways may be searched.
Origin A piece of software responsible for submitting a user request to one or more Targets.
The term might also be applied to the user him/herself or to the computer at which they are sitting.
More commonly known outside the Z39.50 community as a 'client'.
Profile A specific interpretation of the manner in which Z39.50 — or a subset thereof — should be used to meet the needs of a particular application (the GILS Profile for the Government Information Locator Service), function (ATS-1 for author/title/subject searches), community (the CIMI Profile for cultural heritage), or environment (the CENL Profile for European National Libraries).
RDF Resource Description Framework.
See http://www.w3.org/RDF/ for the text of the standard and related information.
Service One of the basic building blocks of Z39.50.
These Services include Init(ialisation), Search, Present, Explain, etc.
Target A piece of software responsible for passing requests from an Origin to the database on top of which it sits.
The term might also be applied to the database itself or to the computer on which it resides.
More commonly known outside the Z39.50 community as a 'server'.
Use Attribute A Use Attribute specifies an 'access point' onto the underlying database with which a Target is associated.
Use Attributes include such things as 'title', 'author', 'subject', etc., and they are normally mapped onto similar fields in the underlying database.
XML eXtensible Markup Language.
See http://www.w3.org/XML/ for the text of the standard and related information.
Z39.50 ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995, Information Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification and ISO 23950:1998, Information and documentation — Information retrieval (Z39.50) — Application service definition and protocol specification.
Use of the term in this paper always refers to version 3 of the standard, except where otherwise specified.
ZIG The Z39.50 Implementors Group, an informal body of suppliers and developers through which continued development of Z39.50 takes place.
References ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995, Information Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/1995doce.html Z39.50 Maintenance Agency http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ Library of Congress http://lcweb.loc.gov/ How to subscribe to the ZIG listserv http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zig/listserv.html Future ZIG meetings http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zig/meetings.html A Z39.50 Profile for Cultural Heritage Information http://www.cimi.org/standards/index.html#THREE Application Profile for the Government Information Locator Service (GILS), version 2 http://www.gils.net/prof_v2.html Alta Vista http://www.altavista.com/ Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com/ FAST Search http://www.alltheweb.com/ Phil Bradley, FAST the biggest and best yet?
Ariadne, No.
21, September 1999 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/search-engines/ Dan Brickley, Z39.50 Resources http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/z3950/resources/ Z39.50.
Biblio Tech Review http://www.gadgetserver.com/bibliotech/html/z39_50.html Arts and Humanities Data Service http://ahds.ac.uk/ Melvyl http://www.melvyl.ucop.edu/ AHDS Gateway http://prospero.ahds.ac.uk:8080/ahds_live/ California Digital Library http://www.cdlib.org/ UK Mirror Service http://www.mirror.ac.uk/ Bib-1 Attribute Set http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/defns/bib1.html Z39.50 Profiles http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/profiles/profiles.html Z39.50 Attribute Architecture http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/attrarch/attrarch.html Z39.50 Utility Attribute Set, Draft 3 http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/attrarch/util.html The Z39.50 Cross-Domain Attribute Set, version 1.4 http://www.oclc.org/~levan/docs/crossdomainattributeset.html UKOLN Interoperability focus : Z39.50 Interoperability Profile: Drafting Meeting, 15-17 August 1999 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/activities/z3950/int_profile/bath/ Author Details   Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN c/o Academic Services: Libraries University of Hull Hull HU6 7RXEmail: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Acknowledgements UKOLN is funded by the Library and Information Commission, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
Interoperability Focus is based at the University of Hull, and receives additional support from this institution.
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Search Engine Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engine Corner Buzz data software database copyright video Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley reviews recent developments with search engines.
Internet Sleuth It’s always an interesting challenge writing a new column for a magazine, be it an electronic or hardcopy publication, particularly if the column itself isn’t new, as is the case here.
I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader of the things that Tracy Stanley (previous regular contributor to this column Editor) has written, and I’ll do my best to also bring you something of interest.
I’d like to begin by pointing you towards a search engine that I use on a regular basis, called the Internet Sleuth (to be found at http://www.isleuth.com/) but strangely, it is one that few other people seem to have discovered, so I’d like to put that right.
The Sleuth is an interesting search engine, which falls into the category of a multi or meta search engine.
That is to say that you can input your search criteria, choose your search engines, and it will then go off, run the search for you and display the results for you in search engine order.
In this respect, it is reasonably limited, since unlike some other search engines it does not de-dup the sites it returns, and it doesn’t put them into some sort of sensible order in the way that Inference Find does for example.
However, it does list search engines in a variety of different categories, which does allow the user to focus a search much more closely.
These categories include: Web search engines and directories (allowing the user to search Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos Yahoo!
and the other usual suspects); Reviewed Sites and What’s new, which is really useful if you want to keep up to date with new sites that are coming out; News and by this they mean current affairs and events, linking into CNN News, Yahoo!
news and a couple of others; Software which only has two search engines available, but since these are shareware.com and Simtel it’s not exactly a disadvantage; Usenet, enabling you to find out what your friends are writing, and to what groups!
; iSleuth marketplace ensuring that you can find just the product you want to buy from over 300 merchants.
Consequently, it is a useful place to begin your search if you’re not entirely sure of which of the many search engines is the best one for you.
Importantly, this engine works quickly, and I really do mean quickly; it has an option for how long it should take interrogating the search engines you choose, from 10 seconds to 2 minutes, with the default at 1 minute (which is the option that I go with), but I’ve usually got results on my screen in about 15-20 seconds.
Results are returned arranged by search engine, and a downside of the Sleuth is that you really do need to pick your way slowly through the page it returns, since it can be quite long if you choose to search a lot of engines in one go.
A little navigation bar wouldn’t go amiss, but as the search results are returned so quickly I’m already ahead of the game, so I won’t miss those extra few seconds it takes to scroll through the page.
Figure 1: The Internet Sleuth Interface So far, so good.
Nothing spectacular I hear you say.
True enough, but let’s move on a little.
The real power of the Sleuth is in the fact that it can provide you with access to over three thousand different search engines.
No, that’s not a typo on my part, I really did write ‘over three thousand different search engines’.
If you visit the site, pay particular attention to the left hand side of the search screen.
This lists subjects arranged in a Yahoo!
type approach, starting with Arts and Humanities, Business, down through Government, Health, Internet and finishing up with Society and Culture, Sports finally and Travel.
Under each of these major categories you will find more specific divisions, and in some cases it is possible to drill down several levels.
Just looking at the Business section, you can choose to move down to Business Directories/Finance/Markets & Investments/Company reports & News and then have eleven different search engines to choose from!
Now, at this point, I really should make the point that these search engines do tend to be limited to just one single site, rather than searching across the range of web pages that you would expect something like AltaVista to do.
However, that isn’t necessarily a disadvantage, since a lot of the data held on these site specific databases isn’t going to be indexed by AltaVista and the like anyway.
Consequently, the Internet Sleuth allows you to quickly locate search engines in particular fields and to find the information you require, even if you didn’t know about the existence of the engines two minutes before starting your search.
The value of the Sleuth doesn’t end there however.
The site encourages people to establish their own bulletin boards or ‘assemblies’ in Sleuth talk.
I have to admit this is not a service that I’ve personally used, but I can see how it could be very useful, particularly if linked into an existing web page.
Other features are also available: a useful (if somewhat short) page on search techniques referring to Alta Vista, HotBot, Infoseek and WebCrawler, shopping facilities and the ubiquitous free email facility.
If you’ve not tried the Sleuth, please do I can almost guarantee that you’ll find at least one or two new search engines that will be of value to you that you never knew existed before!
Express Listing Service for Yahoo!
On to other matters now.
For those of you who find it difficult to get listed on Yahoo!
you might be interested in the fact that it has introduced an express service for listings, together with a suite of other utilities for small businesses.
The advantage is that a site will be reviewed within a week and given a yes or no response, with the disadvantage being that you may still not get listed, despite having paid out money!
Video Search Engine Buyouts, mergers and partnerships gather apace on the Internet, with search engines being right at the forefront.
AltaVista has bought a share in Virage Inc. which is a video search engine.
Once the software is up and running, it will mean that users of the system will be able to search for, find and then display portions of videos that they are interested in.
I prefer not to consider the copyright implications at this particular moment, thanks all the same!
This isn’t an entirely unexpected move, given that Alta Vista now has oodles of cash as a result of its purchase by Compaq.
"Sticky Sites" Finally, the jargon term of the month is ‘sticky site’ and they are something that you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the future.
The idea is to attempt to ensure that once someone visits your site they are going to stay for as long as possible.
Yahoo!
recently bought Geocities for $3 billion in order to link users more closely to Yahoo!
It certainly seems to be working, since users are now spending over an hour on average at Yahoo (per month) instead of 40 minutes.
It would be nice if search engines were attempting to become sticky by improving the sophistication of their search utilities, but perhaps that is hoping for just a little bit too much!
Author Details Phil Bradley is an Internet Consultant, Trainer, Web designer and Author.
His website is available at http://www.philb.com/.
His email address is philb@twilight.demon.co.uk.
Phil is author of The Advanced Internet Searchers Handbook published by LA Publications.
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ILL: Interlibrary Loan Protocol Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ILL: Interlibrary Loan Protocol Buzz data software cataloguing z39.50 copac Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh and Chris Rusbridge on the National Library of Australia's ILL utility.
The National Library of Australia has selected Fretwell-Downing’s OLIB VDX, the same product chosen by the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee’s LIDDA (Local Interlending and Document Delivery Administration) Project as the heart of the new interlending and document delivery support services for the nation’s libraries.
OLIB (Open Library Systems) is Fretwell-Downing Informatics’ library management system, consisting of a family of products of which VDX (Virtual Document eXchange) is the product supporting ILL management.
After trails in the DALI (Documents And Libraries Integrated) project for the European Commission the product was launched in late 1996.
It is already in use with LASER.
VDX complies with the ISO ILL Protocol (ISO 10160⁄10161).
Bronwyn Lee of the National Library of Australia reports that the ILL Utility will support the creation of requests, selection of suppliers, tracking and management of requests and the ILL payments scheme and will feature World Wide Web access and integration with AMICUS.
So National ILL Utility users will be able to search the National Bibliographic Database via Z39.50 and automatically include bibliographic and location data in ILL requests.
In addition it will integrate with the ILRS directory for supplier data.
There will be integration with the Ariel transmission system, support for multiple message protocols, centralised message services, ART for British Library Document Supply Service messaging and configurable email messaging.
An Internet connection will be required, and the ILL Utility will have a single VDX server at the National Library providing request management functions for library staff using a Web interface.
There will be close cooperation between the LIDDA and ILL Utility to ensure that the requirements of the two systems are compatible.
Both systems will use the VDX software.
LIDDA users will be able to search the NBD, route requests to ILL Utility users (and vice versa) and participate in the ILL payments scheme.
Customer Libraries will access the National ILL Utility via a Web interface.
Client software will not be distributed.
Users with LIDDA systems will be able to use the LIDDA client to access the NBD and communicate with the National ILL Utility.
This communication is enabled through the incorporation of the ISO ILL Protocol in VDX.
The new service will be implemented at the same time as Kinetica, which will come on stream according to schedule in the first quarter of 1999.
Chris Rusbridge (eLib Programme Director) writes: The LIDDA/ILL utility project gives a good idea of developments in another country which have been directly influenced by eLib developments.
The story starts with JEDDS, a joint eLib project between the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee and the National Library of Australia, cooperating with the RLG to develop a version of their ARIEL document delivery system which would work closely with an inter-lending management system.
JEDDS also worked directly with the eLib EDDIS project which is developing such a system, based on the Fretwell Downing VDX product, resulting in the system to be used in Australia in the LIDDA/ILL project.
Implementation of a large scale document delivery system of this kind is easier in Australia than here because of the availability of a national on-line union catalogue with holdings information (currently ABN, moving to a new system based on the Canadian AMICUS software shortly).
Here we are hoping that a combination of COPAC (http://copac.ac.uk/copac) and the various ‘clumps’ projects will begin to provide this information in a way more appropriate to the scale and structure of UK higher education.
We are expecting to negotiate licences for the software being used by the Australians to be available to UK universities.
However, a distributed national system on the scale indicated is still a long way off in the UK.
LAMDA (another eLib project developing into a service) is a parallel activity on a smaller scale; it will I believe be migrating to the product of the JEDDS project (released as ARIEL 2 by RLG).
A national system of this type may be more important in Australia because of the absence of a national service like the BL Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa.
I understand that the DSC will be providing services based on compatible implementations of the ILL protocol referred to above, ie there is a good chance of inter-operability with the software the Australians are using and which we hope to make available.
Author Details Chris Rusbridge Director, Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) Email: cudbm@csv.warwick.ac.uk Tel: 01203 524979 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UKOLUG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines UKOLUG Buzz software java xml archives copyright preservation multimedia visualisation ict intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Jacqueline Chelin reports on the UKOLUG 20th birthday conference.
Celebrating a significant birthday, this conference featured retrospection as well as prediction and picked up on some of the repeating patterns inherent in electronic information and retrieval systems.
Charles Oppenheim began with a retrospective on the birth and development of UKOLUG (Birth of a Generation), commenting on the importance of archives despite having been there himself his memory and the official record differing somewhat alarmingly.
He conveyed the sense of frantic activity during the early years of online and the ability that UKOLUG had to shape the emergent industry a theme picked up the next day by John December who was to challenge librarians to shape the web.
Oppenheim finished with two tantalising suggestions: to reassess the status of UKOLUG as a special interest group affiliated to the IIS, especially in the context of the possible IIS and LA merger; to review the activities of the group over the coming decade.
Karen Blakeman continued the historical theme by drawing attention to the way that, even in IT, history has a tendency to repeat itself (Advances in IT: History Repeats Itself).
Users are still grappling with computers that might have little processing power, PCs with insufficient RAM and disc space to carry out required tasks, examples of incomprehensible software, unreliable telecommunications and erratic transfer rates.
In a humorous swipe, Blakeman questioned how user friendly a GUI interface is to someone who has never used a mouse before.
Why should a GUI interface make complicated communications software easier to understand?
Even the Internet resembles the old days in terms of unreliable access, lack of robustness, dearth of security and poor error messages, to mention only a few issues.
Indeed, wherever hardware and processing speeds have improved, software has bloated to fill the space and can therefore slow down the system.
However, not all is doom and gloom.
Another thing that has not changed is the librarian’s ability to adapt to the situation and to exploit information as enthusiastically as ever.
Indeed, it can now be done from home.
Phil Holmes, as a publisher, posed the question: Is the information industry growing in the right way?
(Growth of the information Industry Growing in the Right Way?)
His answer was an admittedly personal perception.
Like information professionals he is concerned with quality and the fact that the huge quantity of material on the Internet can obscure the high quality material.
He is dismayed that search engines have been developed by IT professionals, with resultant poor performance.
On the subject of publishing on the Internet he maintained that the amount of free material of questionable quality has created a climate of expectation, so that any publisher wishing to put up material has to think carefully about how to add value to that material in order to justify charging for it.
This has resulted in a dearth of high quality published information.
He suggested a range of ways to exploit new media and to add value to information on the web.
As the delegates contemplated the task of reviewing the activities of UKOLUG, the repeating pattern of technological frustration and the importance of adding value in order to be valued and to survive in our profession, Richard Eskins smoothed furrowed brows by providing a Web cruise of Manchester.
He presented web sites that relate to or describe Manchester and its people, places and organisations, whilst commenting on their design and usefulness.
This conveyed the vibrancy of Manchester and created a desire to get out into the city to experience it.
Manchester’s priorities lie: in the support of learning provision for local services; economic development and inward investment; improving quality of life and becoming an internationally important city of the future.
This summer sees it taking on the role of Digital City and plans include the Manchester Telecommunications Network Partnership, development of the Electronic Village Halls, a multimedia centre at MMU to support SMEs, Manchester Community Information, and much more.
The morning of the second day saw the programme splitting into two strands.
There was an interesting double act from Amanda Wait and Cath Dyson on using the Electronic Village Hall schemes, already mentioned, to provide access to the information society for disadvantaged groups.
Wait and Dyson drew attention to the differences in how Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are conceptualised by groups like women, older people, black people and young male whites.
They highlighted the fact that availability of equipment is not always sufficient to entice women, the older generation or people with learning difficulties, for example, into using ICT.
Their motivation and confidence need to be addressed, and this can be done by putting computers into places, like libraries, Citizens Advice Bureaux or Asda, that form a familiar context for such people.
In order to develop their motivation, ICT must be made relevant to their needs.
Issues of language and literacy also need to be addressed.
The two speakers provided details of the Women’s EVH and the Chorlton EVH, the latter catering for disadvantaged groups including unwaged adults, people who speak English as a foreign language and the disabled.
The Electronic Village Halls provide child care, travel expenses and free admission.
Participants are introduced to computers, and the inculcation of a sense of ownership of the technology is crucial to success.
This was a particularly thought-provoking presentation to an audience for whom ICT is already well established in working and home environments.
Maintaining the caring theme, Kathy Bruckner presented the human issues for information managers in her paper Well -Being at Work.
She stressed the importance of people as a valuable resource in all organisations and the fact that working with technology necessitates flexibility and adaptability.
Bruckner drew attention to the psychological aspects of the design of IT based working environments, and the information overload which increased ICT within the workplace generates, as well as looking into the legislation (both UK and EC) concerned with the physical aspects of ICT at work.
She discussed the role of training in relation to IT and the value of a human factors strategy to an organisation.
One of the most visionary papers of the conference was given by Martin White on information industry trends.
Like all good forecasters, White first stepped back, to 1978 and 1988.
He described the current situation where the Web is dominant and is creating a radical shift in the fortunes of companies within the information industry.
Information cultures have created the situation where users’ perceptions are being shaped by the Web and where integration of external information into organisational information processes is particularly important for effective decision-making.
Intranets are having an even greater impact on the information industry than the Web.
Pricing models that work online do not necessarily work on the Web.
He mentioned the role of push and pull technologies suggesting that changes to these will take place in months rather than years.
However, White believes that the most substantial increase in the next decade will be in the home market.
He bravely listed his predictions for 2008, his conclusions being that the market for legacy systems is stagnant, that the office location is under threat, that branding of information products will be paramount, networks and channel management will increase in importance over and above content, but that technology must be used with discretion.
Sticking with the future theme, Adrienne Muir of BLRIC gave an overview of the future directions of library and information research in the UK.
The budget of £1.47M for 1998⁄99 represents a 10% cut on last year and drew misgivings from the audience about the government’s commitment to BLRIC and its aims.
Muir outlined the eight research programmes set up by BLRIC.
She then went on to indicate some of the possible future calls for research: preservation, including digital preservation and archiving; information retrieval via Internet searching, multimedia and image retrieval; providers and users, emphasising access for the disadvantaged; coping with information overload.
John Davies of BT Laboratories spoke about software agents for information management.
He touched on the benefits of Intranets, then the problems of information overload and, finally, the solution offered by information agents.
Jasper is an agent that holds an evolving personal profile of each user.
Its strength lies in working with a community of users, encouraging the sharing of information.
Jasper checks profiles and emails back any relevant information that matches the profiles.
Pro-Search, on the other hand, finds pages from the Web, Intranet, online news and usenet groups and clusters them into topic areas of interest to the user, eliminates duplicate results, sends out searches periodically and searches off-line, judges quality of documents against certain criteria, scores and sorts results and summarises each document/site.
Pro-Sum is a text summariser that picks out key sentences from documents, taking into account users’ personal interests, and gives a summary varying in length according to the specifications set.
The benefits of agent technology are: managing information overload; personalising information retrieval; sharing information to the benefit of the whole organisation.
This all adds up to better knowledge management.
Whilst information agents are fairly familiar to librarians, Davies then gave us a glimpse of some longer term research being carried out at BT on the use of visualisation, by means of colour and motion, to help people to organise and prioritise their information.
John December immediately assaulted audience sensibilities in his paper on Balancing Technology and Competence.
He advocated a proactive approach to the Web, expanding on the two main opportunities: to shape the information available on the web; to take leadership in setting standards.
In his discussion of technological determinism, December developed the theme of understanding the Web as a medium for human communication, and echoed Martin White’s plea to use technology appropriately.
He propounded the use of Java for interactivity and XML for meaning-making activities.
He suggested that professional library associations should lobby for document type definitions for XML since W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) is not likely to address this.
In throwing down the challenge to librarians to shape the information environment in which they work, he elicited several responses which were rather dubious about the power of librarians to do this.
The conference moved on to something clearer and more straight forward in Legal Issues of the Internet: Recent Developments from Andrew Charlesworth.
This was basically an update on the issues he had raised in a similar paper at the conference two years ago.
As Web technology is now more mature the Internet is more commercial.
Although there is more awareness of the rules, they are still broken.
The new kinds of legal disputes are about determining the future of the Web.
In terms of cases relating to copyright, like linking to other people’s images, linking to the information content on a web site and avoiding the advertising that sponsors it, the issues are more to do with how the Web is used, rather than actual content protection.
A subject which did not form a large part of his paper, two years ago, was that of spamming hijacking email servers to send out junk mail, for example.
This is an increasing area for concern.
From reminiscences to challenges and rallying cries, the 20 year birthday conference was a milestone on a long and inspiring route for the information professional.
Author Details Jacqueline Chelin IT Development Librarian, Library Services University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus Coldharbour Lane, BRISTOL, BS16 1QY Email: jacqueline.chelin@uwe.ac.uk Tel: +44 117 965 6261 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Do They Need to Know?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Do They Need to Know?
Buzz software passwords biometrics research Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Cox and James Currall on the issue of Web security.
Do users need to know about computer security?
The vast and growing literature of computer security suggests that solutions to most security issues are currently being sought purely through technology.
Humanity obtrudes into the literature primarily in the guise of hackers and disaffected administrators, in the debate over which is the greater threat.
The average user is strangely absent, like the labourer in eighteenth century landscape painting.
True, a little consideration has been given to the special problems of making security software useable, and some thought has been given to how to raise security awareness.
There must be something out of balance here, however exciting the subjects of encryption, biometrics and other cutting edge technology are.
For although a lot can be done to create a 'safe environment' for users, this will never be the whole answer.
It is marvellous to offer the user software to encrypt email, for example, but they need to know when to use it.
Policies and user education must be at the heart of any organisation's security strategy.
It is probably not appropriate for an organisation such as a University to give away too much about the methods it adopts to protect the network from external and internal attack.
But it is arguable that users should be told about the extent of such attacks.
They rarely are.
If they were, they might have a stronger sense of the value of computing services' work, and a greater appreciation of the value of a stable network which is increasingly taken for granted.
If they were they might see how dangerous the Internet can be.
In fact for them not to have a sense of the risks, leaves them very vulnerable when they go on to use computers in other settings, especially at home.
An appreciation of the security aspects of using computers is a life skill.
Knowledge at this level is important, but it is probably at a mundane practical level that security seems most pressing to users.
Users are concerned with such day to day security matters as back-ups, viruses and passwords.
Their main concern is to get the job in hand done.
Security measures can seem be an annoyance; but they are also mission critical.
How much do we really know about users' day to day experience of using computers?
Or about their attitudes to computers in general and security aspects of computing in particular?
We get a sense of what is going at the helpdesk; but helpdesk users are of course the minority, with a specific problem, that they choose to present to support officers.
A JISC workshop in June 1998 recognised the gap in understanding and an invitation to explore the topic was included in JISC Committee for Awareness, Liaison and Training Programme 4/99 call in November 1999 (1).
The project The result of the call was that LITC, South Bank University (2) and the University of Glasgow (3) were funded to conduct a study of the human and organisational issues associated with network security, during 2000.
A variety of methods of research were used including expert workshops and in-depth interviews.
But the primary method was a substantial questionnaire.
The questionnaire was trialed at South Bank and Glasgow, then given to staff and student users at a number of 'outer core' sites in HEIs around the country.
The respondents represent only a small group from the total potential population.
No controlled sampling took place.
The scene is rapidly changing due to changes in computer environments to arrive at a definitive picture of users' attitudes and time would have moved on by the time results were collated.
But the picture built up from responses that were received is plausible.
And the survey uncovered a number of interesting findings which service managers may wish to ponder in their own context.
Headline survey findings Users acknowledged feelings of uncertainty and ignorance.
One respondent commented: "I would never, if I could help it, put anything personal, private or financial to me, anywhere near a computer.
I do not have confidence in computer security at all."
The problem of course is that he or she cannot 'help it'.
Computers are central to how we work in HE today.
So the issue cannot be ducked.
For those running the network, winning the confidence of users by increasing their understanding of the nature of the risks, is surely as much part of providing a fundamentally sound service, as are reducing system down time and building a reliable network.
The survey found uncertainty, but not a lack of motivation for security or interest in the subject.
And if that motivation exists that is the basis for a security culture, comparable to a health and safety culture, with all protecting all.
A knowledgeable user can be first to notice and report issues to service administrators.
Another respondent remarked: "I don't feel I have ever been told ANYTHING about IT security here!"
Of course in a sense this is absurd.
Most computing services constantly issue advice and support to users, with an element or even stress on security.
All the relevant policies are publicly available on the Web.
Most training courses will involve something on security issues.
Having said this, it is probably not very surprising to the reader to discover that many people do not read policies.
Perhaps this reflects how they were written, as a simple list of DON'Ts, as much as anything.
But the fact that policies are seen quite negatively, and as existing primarily to protect IT staff is a dangerous state of affairs.
In some of the surveyed institutions there were distinctly negative views towards policies.
One aspect of attitudes that we were particularly interested in was users' sense of responsibility.
The results suggested that users did not always understand that the responsibility lies at least partly with them to protect themselves.
There was also a tendency to underestimate the effect of one's actions on others.
The survey asked a series of questions about security issues: viruses, backups, passwords.
A small number of respondents do get a lot of viruses, but on the whole people had few, and seemed to be positive about the importance of scanning, even if fewer actually do it.
There were marked differences in attitude between institutions, perhaps reflecting different computing and support environments.
Interestingly people were slow to acknowledge the cost of the virus problem to the University as an institution.
Users seem confused about backups: stressing their importance but not actually making them consistently.
A large number of people acknowledged that they had lost an important file because of accidental deletion or because it had become corrupted.
That is why saving important files to shared drives, that are backed up automatically is such an advance in security.
Is there, however, a knowledge gap that needs to be filled?
It is a key issue for students, are institutions doing enough to make secure practice easy?
Perhaps the most unsatisfactory attitudes are found when looking at passwords.
Risky password practices are quite common, especially writing down passwords and sharing them.
Perhaps this reflects practical realities of needing to remember multiple passwords.
The multiplicity of usernames and passwords was commonly cited as an irritation.
It might also reflect practical need where responsibilities are shared.
This suggests that advice that advocates, in the face of the practical reality, that people treat all their passwords as requiring the same level of protection.
without acknowledging that some matter more than others.
How well do users understand the risks implicit in what they do?
The responses to the questionnaire suggested that very serious, less obvious threats such as impersonation are underestimated risks.
Users rated the deletion of files above the sending of emails under one's name.
They were also confused about how they would know if their account had been tampered with.
Looking at general attitudes to the safety of the Internet; the survey indicated that people may not fully understand the risks of sending confidential information by email; while they are much more cautious, perhaps over cautious, about online shopping.
One respondent commented: "Important subject but I don't know much about it!"
Clearly there is a knowledge gap, that somehow needs to be filled.
It is too easy to say that users can't be bothered with security, because they have a direct interest in it.
They want to protect their work.
More needs to be done to raise awareness of their dependence on each other in maintaining secure environment for all.
It is true that security can be seen as not the work in hand, merely a precondition of safe completion of it.
There is no doubt that it is difficult to present the information they need at the right time and in the right way for users to take the trouble to absorb it.
However it is probably true though that draconian lists of dos but mostly don'ts is not the best way to express them.
Conclusions It is our conclusion that users are well motivated about security in their own use of computers, within reason.
They are not reckless in their practices.
For every question there was a small fraction of people with 'dangerous' attitudes.
But a majority viewed things responsibly and reflected apparently sensible behaviour, with some notable gaps in knowledge and a sense of generalised uncertainty.
As part of the project we began to explore a number of ways to increase awareness.
The survey suggested that there are relatively few clear cut links between role and attitude, so blanket education is required, rather than focussing on particular role based groups.
We examined three approaches that seemed to have some potential: Firstly a simple email message or web page drawing attention to common vulnerabilities and errors.
This is a simple, direct, scaleable way to raise awareness.
A quick way to reach a lot of people.
Secondly a discussion orientated awareness raising session, using items from the press to spark off discussion.
This proved to be a good way to explore awareness of policies and risks, on the side of those giving the session, as well as raising consciousness and awareness among attendees.
A third method is a series of scenarios presented to users as part of a forced password change session.
This is the approach taken by James Maddison University (4).
Some will see it as too intrusive.
User feedback is positive, though.
Perhaps this reflects James Maddison's philosophy of stressing the ethical dimensions of computer security, and not being heavily didactic.
Universities have particular problems in creating security awareness and disciplines.
The population of users is large and the turn over in them is rapid.
They are organisations that in their essence value discussion and debate.
They are not command organisations where instructions from the top are followed routinely without question.
A consensual security culture seems the most appropriate approach.
Further research is needed into the pattern of attitudes and behaviour and how to change them.
Our own questionnaire exists as a resource for reuse in local studies.
Some institutions were doing better than others, judged by attitudes and reported problems.
This suggests that there needs to be greater sharing of best practice.
Readers may be interested to note that JISC Assist are organising two workshops for JCAS in January 2002 (5).
We hope they will be an opportunity to take discussion further.
References http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/c04_99.html http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc http://www.gla.ac.uk/ http://raven.jmu.edu/~dixonlm/quiz/ Information Security: Policy and Culture: http://raven.jmu.edu/~dixonlm/quiz/ Author Details   Andrew Cox and James Currall Email (Andrew Cox): coxam@sbu.ac.uk     Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Free Full-text E-journals and EEVL's Engineering E-journal Search Engine Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Free Full-text E-journals and EEVL's Engineering E-journal Search Engine Buzz data software java html database portal infrastructure archives copyright cataloguing ejournal url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Nicola Harrison and Roddy MacLeod describe what EEVL has to offer in the area of e-journals.
EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
E-journals and EEVL EEVL's Engineering Section contains details of over 820 sites which contain full-text engineering journals.
EEVL's Mathematics Section includes over 80 sites with full-text mathematics journals, and the Computing Section includes over 120 full-text computing journals.
Quite a number of e-journals appear in EEVL's Top 100, which is a listing of the sites which are accessed most frequently via EEVL.
It comes as little surprise, therefore, that one of the most popular additional services provided by EEVL is the Engineering E-journal Search Engine (EESE).
At present, this search engine covers only engineering e-journals, however the hope is that not only may it be possible to develop similar search engines for the other two sections of EEVL, Mathematics and Computing, but that the functionality of the service could be considerably developed, and even extended to cover other subject areas within the RDN.
This article looks at some features of the EESE service, and discusses the various kinds of e-journals indexed by EESE.
It then looks at ways in which search engines for freely available e-journals, such as EESE, could be further developed in the future.
Engineering E-journal Search Engine (EESE) EEVL's E-journal Search Engine currently indexes the full text of over 100 engineering e-journals which are free, which offer all or most of the journal content as full text, and which are available without registration.
Most of the e-journals included in EESE are not indexed by other abstracting and indexing databases.
Figure 1: EESE is one of the Hot Links on the Engineering Section page of EEVL A limitation of the gathering software used to create the index means that it is only possible to include those e-journals where the root URL remains the same for each issue, and where articles and other pages to be indexed are HTML, PostScript, PDF or Word pages and not created by Java.
Because of these restrictions, EESE will never be able to include all of the 820 e-journals noted above (many of which either do not provide the complete full text of all articles, or require registration), but a number of new e-journals will shortly be added to the index.
The full text of nearly 100,000 Web pages is indexed by EESE, and a basic search facility, with filters for 'Exact word' and 'Title only' is available.
In addition, searches can be limited to 'Any' or 'All' search terms.
Figure 2: Typical EESE search result A typical record from an EESE search result is shown above.
It gives the title of the article, the URL, information about the article, and the title of the e-journal from which it originates (or was gathered).
Types of engineering e-journals An analysis of the titles included in EESE shows that several different types of freely available engineering e-journals can be identified.
These are discussed below, and in each case, the e-journal in question is indexed by EESE.
Scholarly e-journals Scholarly journals contain articles which either report research findings or which discuss theoretical issues.
They are peer-reviewed before publication, and include documentation in references and footnotes.
They do not, generally, contain advertisements.
Most scholarly journals are available only via subscription, however a few are freely available on the Internet, sometimes as a result of sponsorship, or as a means of publicising the research output and interests of a particular group, centre or academic department.
Examples of scholarly journals which are indexed by EESE include: Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction [1] This journal is sponsored by the Swedish Council for Building Research.
It covers academic research and industrial development in the application of information technology for the design, construction and occupancy of buildings and related facilities.
It is published every three months.
At the journal site, contents can be browsed or searched.
Full-text articles are available in either HTML or PDF format.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication [2] Published by the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, this journal covers topics related to human-computer interactions.
It is published every three months, often in the form of special issues which address a particular aspect of CMC.
The site includes the full text of articles in HTML format and can be searched by keyword.
Professional society e-journals Many journals published by engineering professional societies are subscription-based, and sometimes consist of multi-volumed scholarly proceedings containing the results of recent research.
A number of professional societies also publish less formal magazines or newsletters, and some of these are made freely available on the Internet.
Examples indexed by EESE include: ASRANet newsletter [3] This newsletter is published once a year and covers structural safety, risk and reliability.
Earlier editions are provided in html format, but the current issue (October 2002) is only in PDF format.
ASRANet has members from both industrial and academic organisations, and is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK.
Ecoal [4] This is the newsletter of the World Coal Institute, which is published four times a year.
It covers aspects of the coal and electricity industry worldwide.
Articles from current and previous newsletters are available in PDF format.
Company e-journals/newsletters Traditionally, some engineering companies produced printed technical journals which were made available to their members of staff, but were also sometimes sent to customers as a reasonably efficient form of advertising.
In their electronic form, of course, company journals or newsletters can easily be made available to any interested party.
Buyers may be happier with information which comes directly from technical staff at the company, rather than having been passed through a sales team.
In addition, such publications not only draw people to a company's website, but also promote their products.
Two examples indexed by EESE are: Reports Magazine [5] This is published by CH2M HILL, a company involved in project development, planning, design, construction, operations, and maintenance of public and private industrial facilities and infrastructure.
Their Reports Magazine features articles showcasing the company's projects.
MetalsWatch [6] This is a newsletter about the metals industry which is published every two months by Metals and Forge LLC, a speciality steel supplier based in the US.
Issues of the newsletter are provided in HTML format.
Government department e-journals Some government departments publish e-journals and make them freely available over the Internet.
They may do so in order to encourage public awareness in their areas of interest or to showcase relevant technical developments.
Examples indexed by EESE include: Energy Science News [7] This is provided by the US Department of Energy.
It aims to inform scientists, engineers, educators, students and the public about the progress of scientific research supported by the Office of Science.
Articles are in HTML format and the newsletter is published every three months.
Alternative Fuel News [8] This is the official publication of the Clean Cities Program and the Alternative Fuels Data Center in the USA.
It is published every three months and is available in HTML or PDF format.
Commercially published trade magazines Commercial trade magazines are normally produced by publishing houses and are funded mainly by advertising.
Advertising space is sold on the basis that the magazine is read by professional people, or others with purchasing power, and so the articles are usually of good quality, having been written by experts in the field on topics of practical concern.
They tend to include reports on industry issues, technical developments, applications and products.
Many have been made freely available on the Web, and those indexed by EESE include: The Engineer [9] This is published by Centaur Communications, and is one of a stable of engineering titles marketed as part of the E4 Network.
Other E4 titles include Design Engineering, Process Engineering, Metalworking Production, and What's New in Industry.
The online version of The Engineer includes articles, news, event notifications and product information.
ElectronicsWeekly.com [10] This is an online magazine with articles, news stories, classified advertisements, training material and a recruiting section.
There is a searchable archive.
Maintenence of EESE The content of an e-journal webpage changes each time a new issue is published.
E-journals which have been freely available may sometimes become subscription-based.
This may happen when a title which has been published free as a 'taster' is subsequently made available on a more commercial basis.
Titles, and even subject coverage, occasionally change.
A site may move from using standard HTML to Java.
The source e-journals indexed by EESE must be gathered on a regular basis.
When a new title is added, the editor or webmaster needs to be contacted.
For reasons such as these, EESE requires a fair amount of maintenance.
However, EESE is a very popular service.
According to Google, there are more than 800 links to it from other sites, and it consistently appears in the top 10 of all EEVL's pages according to usage statistics.
Future developments EESE covers only engineering e-journals, and its present interface and functionality are both fairly limited.
The subject coverage and functionality of EEVL's e-journal search engine service could be further developed in a number of useful ways, to allow, for example: Searching within e-journals from the other two main subject categories covered by EEVL (mathematics, and computing), or even other subject areas covered by the other RDN Hubs Searching within e-journals from narrower subject categories, such as subdivisions of engineering, or mathematics, or computing Searching within different categories of e-journals, such as the ones discussed above Specifying and saving of particular search landscapes of selected journal titles or categories Saving of searches, and the running of alerts based on saved searches Saving of records Limiting searches by date, or range of dates Truncation and use of wild characters Providing a subject based classification scheme to permit browsing of resources Providing links from search results to Internet resource catalogue descriptions All of the above developments are currently under consideration as part of the further development of the EEVL service which will arise out of the Subject Portal Project.
The Internet has enabled publishers of journals to make their content available electronically to a far larger audience than could be reached via traditional means.
Subscription-based e-journals are a major resource for academics, but freely available e-journals, whether scholarly or commercial, can also be a valuable source of information.
Because many freely available titles are not indexed by traditional abstracting and indexing databases, services such as EESE perform an important function and help to facilitate access to otherwise somewhat hidden content.
References Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction http://www.itcon.org/ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/ ASRANet newsletter http://www.asranet.com/Public/asranet newsletter selection page.html Ecoal http://www.wci-coal.com/web/list.php?menu_id=1.3.2 Reports Magazine http://www.ch2m.com/flash/AboutUs/Reports/Reports.htm MetalsWatch http://www.steelforge.com/infoservices/metalswatch/issuesidx.asp Energy Science News http://www.pnl.gov/energyscience/index.html Alternative Fuel News http://afdc3.nrel.gov/documents/altfuelnews/ The Engineer http://www.e4engineering.com/home.asp?pub=eng Electronics Weekly http://www.electronicsweekly.co.uk/   Author Details Nicola Harrison EEVL Cataloguing Officer Heriot Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: N.J.Harrison@hw.ac.uk Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Website: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: "Free full-text e-journals and EEVL's Engineering E-journal Search Engine" Author:Nicola Harrison and Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Aerade Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Aerade Buzz software html database archives identifier url research Citation BibTex RIS John Harrington, Karyn Meaden and Emma Turner introduce Aerade, an EEVL-related service.
AERADE has been developed by a team of information specialists from the Library at Cranfield and the Library at the Royal Military College of Science (RMCS), Shrivenham.
It has grown out of the aerospace section of the CRUISE (Cranfield University Site Explorer) subject gateway at Cranfield, which focuses on the subjects researched and taught at the Cranfield Campus, and DEVISE (Defence Virtual Information Service) at RMCS.
This provides users with access to military and defence Internet resources.
AERADE exists in two forms – AERADE at EEVL and AERADE at Cranfield.
AERADE at EEVL forms the aerospace and defence engineering section of the main EEVL database and includes engineering sources only.
Resource records within EEVL that have been provided by AERADE are stamped with the AERADE logo.
The AERADE team has been working closely with EEVL at Heriot Watt University to develop this capability.
The service forms part of a national initiative to establish a co-ordinated Resource Discovery Network (RDN) across all disciplines.
AERADE at EEVL is part of the Engineering, Mathematics and Computing (EMC) Hub of the RDN and is funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).
This hub will include three gateways – the existing Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), Aerospace and Defence Engineering (AERADE), MathGate (mathematics) and a computing service.
Its sister site, AERADE at Cranfield is a larger database and has a wider subject scope in recognition of the wider subject requirements of the aerospace and defence sectors.
It can be searched as a separate entity from its own website or by following the link from AERADE at EEVL.
Background to AERADE The need for more effective tools for the identification and location of relevant information sources was highlighted recently in a major DTI-funded study of the UK aerospace industry, which was carried out by a team from the Kings Norton Library at Cranfield.
The Aerospace Information Management–UK (AIM-UK) project [1] found compelling evidence of under-utilisation of electronic information resources by aerospace engineers and scientists.
This appears to be the result of a widespread lack of awareness of the availability and benefits of electronic resources.
The AIM-UK report recommended a number of information initiatives designed to raise awareness and improve access to useful resources, and to reduce the threat of information overload.
In particular, there was a call to establish an internet gateway for the aerospace and defence community which would act as a ‘jumping-off point’ for effective exploration and retrieval of information on the World Wide Web.
AERADE is specifically designed to meet this need.
AERADE is freely available to anybody who wishes to make use of it, whether they are in industry, commerce or academia.
It takes the form of a collection of Internet resources which have been selected and evaluated and are regularly monitored by subject specialists.
Each resource is described so its potential value can be assessed before it is visited.
It is also fully searchable and browseable with its own classification scheme, although AERADE at EEVL makes use of a slightly abridged version of the full scheme.
The scheme is based upon the NASA classification and the Military Science Index and each resource within the AERADE database has been indexed according to this scheme.
AERADE contains many different types of resource, including: Electronic journals, mailing lists and archives, online reports and papers, databases, directories, software, professional societies, research centres, government organisations, companies, recruitment agencies, university departments.
Examples of resources to be found on AERADE: Boeing current market outlook This site from Boeing provides an excellent introduction to the state of the current world air transport market free of charge.
The information available includes forecasts of traffic growth, an analysis of the state of the industry, worldwide aeroplane deliveries and an evolution of the world fleet overview.
RECON This is a database produced by NASA which contains over 1.6 million records.
These include bibliographic citations and abstracts for publicly available aerospace documents, journal articles, and conference proceedings.
It is part of the NASA Technical Report Server which provides recent full-text reports produced by the NASA centres.
The database is a selected portion of publicly available materials from the NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Database.
When will AERADE be available?
AERADE at EEVL was officially launched on the 19th of November this year at the launch of the RDN.
The service currently contains records under one of the browse headings – further records from AERADE at Cranfield will be added over the coming months.
In the meantime, visit AERADE at Cranfield to view the complete database of resources.
Further developments The AERADE team is a partner in the successful bid by the Institute for Learning and Research Technology for JISC funding to develop a range of subject-based online tutorials based around the RDN hubs.
They will be modelled on the Internet Detective online tutorial which was developed under the European Union’s DESIRE (Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education) project.
The AERADE team will have specific input into this project by creating a tutorial entitled the Internet Aviator.
This will be designed to help users find high quality Internet resources, get ideas for how to make effective use of Internet resources and to identify pertinent Internet resources in their subject area.
Addresses of Web sites mentioned in this article   EEVL http://www.eevl.ac.uk   AERADE at Cranfield http://aerade.cranfield.ac.uk   CRUISE www.cranfield.ac.uk/cils/library/subjects/webinfo.htm   DEVISE www.rmcs.cranfield.ac.uk/~devise/devise.html   Boeing current market outlook www.boeing.com/commercial/cmo/index.html   RECON www.sti.nasa.gov/RECONselect.html   For further information contact: John Harrington Information Services Manager Kings Norton Library Cranfield University Cranfield Beds MK43 0AL Phone 01234 754451 Email j.harrington@cranfield.ac.uk or Karyn Meaden Network Information Specialist Kings Norton Library Cranfield University Cranfield Beds MK43 0AL Phone 01234 750111 ext 3712 Email k.meaden@cranfield.ac.uk Reference [1] Hanley, K., Harrington, J., and Blagden, J.
(1998).
Aerospace information management (AIM-UK): final report.
Cranfield University Press, Cranfield.
Article Title: "AERADE" Author: John Harrington, Karyn Meaden and Emma Turner Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue22/aerade/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Unix Column: 'Sandboxes Using Chroot' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Unix Column: 'Sandboxes Using Chroot' Buzz data database apache copyright linux ftp url research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Peacock explains how the proliferation of network software brings increasing concerns about security, which can be countered by 'restricted perspectives'.
You've just obtained a new application that will run networked over an Internet.
How do you know its secure?
How do you know that its code doesn't contain any oversights that may lead to a system compromise?
You probably don't, especially if its a large application.
Unintentional holes may be introduced to applications with as little as a one line coding oversight, such as copying data between two memory locations without checking the bounds of the data first (such a crack can be leveraged through a so-called 'stack overflow' exploit).
An insecure but trusted application may by-pass firewalls, opening a potential entry point.
For example, an institution may have a strict firewall policy, but allow incoming HTTP connections.
The strength of a chain is as strong as its weakest link, and in this case, access to the underlying system could be obtained through the web server (for example, through an insecure CGI script).
This article discusses running applications in what can be thought of as a virtual environment.
The underlying idea is that a process is launched in a restricted environment that it believes to be a 'full' machine.
However, its view of the world is one that has been created to simulate the machine.
When an attacker gains access to the machine through an exploitable hole in some application, he can only damage the restricted environment.
The key to the whole idea is the chroot system call.
When a program calls chroot, it irreversibly changes its view of the filesystem.
The processes idea of the extent of the filesystem can be reduced to a much smaller directory hierarchy by reducing the position of root (/) lower down in the 'real' filesystem.
Some applications can operate in a specific chrooted mode, such as Acme Labs thttpd [1].
Other applications cannot, and have to be 'fooled' into believing that the environment in which they live is the whole machine.
Note that many applications utilise a chrooted environment, or may use chroot in some way, yet not offer the kind of security described in this article.
For example, wu-ftpd [2] can run in a chrooted environment for anonymous access, but the server at login runs non-chrooted (so that users can login and get to their home directories).
Chrooted environments are not a new concept and are used increasingly in connection with security policy.
Famously, chroot was used to build a 'jail' to contain and observe a malicious hacker, as described in An Evening With Berford [3].
A General Recipe The section gives an idea on how to set-up a fairly general secure environment.
It can be tailored to individual applications.
Specific details will depend on your flavour of Unix.
The secure environment operates as a kind of miniature Unix system.
Its construction consists of the following steps, creating a directory structure; creating appropriate symbolic links; building devices; including required system files.
These tasks would usually be automated via makefile or shell scripts.
When the environment has been built and installed, applications can be launched from within it.
Note that a number of files need be modified for the virtual environment such as user database files (passwd, shadow, master.passwd etc, which would contain minimal users) and device files.
1.
Creation of directory structure One approach to maintaining a miniature Unix filesystem, is to gather together a minimal filesystem which can later be copied into an appropriate parent directory (which will become the new root directory).
The result should be a stripped down version of your Unix installation.
For FreeBSD [4], the top level directory would contain the subdirectories, bin, dev, etc, sbin, src, tmp, usr, var.
2.
Creation of symbolic links When the basic filesystem has been created, a number of conventional symlinks need to be made.
Some of these will depend on your particular system.
Common examples include lib -> usr/lib and bin -> usr/bin.
3.
Building devices In general, it may be more secure to decide which devices to include based on the needs of your application.
The idea is to have the minimal devices necessary for the application(s) that will be run from the environment.
FreeBSD comes supplied with a MAKEDEV script that builds the /dev directory.
This can be altered to build the virtual /dev directory.
The contents of the devices directory in the test environment that I built, include the console, pseudo terminal devices, and memory devices.
4.
Copying files Key system files are likely to live under etc, usr/lib and bin.
Library dependencies for usr/lib can be discovered using the ldd command.
This process is likely to require a degree of experimentation.
5.
Running the application Running the application and restricting it to the environment could be as simple as: chroot <new root directory> <new root directory>/<full path to application>.
It is at this point that most errors are likely to occur, indicating the absence of application dependencies from the new filesystem.
A more elaborate "virtual machine" could be set-up to initiate a pseudo boot procedure based on /etc/rc startup files that also startup required application daemons.
This would require running a suitable startup script (perhaps from the real startup scripts of the real machine).
Example: Webserver This section looks at setting up Apache [5] in a chrooted environment.
Although the details here are more specific to the system that I am using, the principles should be the same for most Unices.
I have created a directory to contain the contents of the new root directory.
This has been pre-built so that the symbolic links are already in place.
drwxrwxr-x 2 root wheel 512 May 17 17:01 bin drwxrwxr-x 2 root wheel 512 May 17 17:01 dev drwxrwxr-x 4 root wheel 512 May 17 17:02 etc drwxrwxr-x 2 root wheel 512 May 17 17:02 sbin drwxrwxr-x 8 root wheel 512 May 17 17:03 src drwxrwxr-t 2 root wheel 512 May 17 17:03 tmp drwxrwxr-x 8 root wheel 512 May 17 17:04 usr drwxrwxr-x 3 root wheel 512 May 17 17:04 var This container directory also contains a Makefile, so that the virtual environment can be installed from this directory using make(1).
The Makefile to install the environment involves copying (or rsync'ing etc) the directories into a new root directory.
Then the device files will be built by running the customised MAKEDEV script.
My environment will run in its own disk partition which has been mounted at /var/virtual.
To build the environment in here I run make ROOT=/var/virtual/apache.
The next stage is to install Apache into the virtual environment.
Firstly, the compiled Apache and source tree needs to be copied to /var/virtual/src/apache.
I can then chroot /var/virtual "cd /src/apache && make install" which will install Apache into the virtual environment into the directories specified during its configuration.
My Apache configuration arguments included: PREFIX = /usr/local APACHE_CONFIGURE_ARGS = \ --prefix=${PREFIX} \ --with-layout=GNU \ --enable-module=rewrite \ --enable-module=auth_dbm \ --enable-module=most \ --sysconfdir=${PREFIX}/etc/apache \ --includedir=${PREFIX}/include/apache \ --logfiledir=/var/log \ --runtimedir=/var/run \ --datadir=${PREFIX}/www \ --proxycachedir=${PREFIX}/www/proxy \ --libexecdir=${PREFIX}/libexec/apache \ --without-confadjust \ --enable-shared=remain \ this means that my Apache data directory will be /var/virtual/usr/local/www as viewed from the "real" machine, or /usr/local/www as viewed from within the restricted environment.
If building a secure environment that corresponds to an IP address (see below), then obviously the Apache configuration should attempt to run services on this address only.
To ensure that Apache starts up when the machine boots, an etc/rc.d type startup file is put into place within the virtual environment.
For FreeBSD, this involves putting in file named something like 50apache.sh into /var/virtual/etc/rc.d.
This file looks like a conventional startup file: #!/bin/sh # this tool makes life easy :-) apachectl=/usr/local/sbin/apachectl # prevent runaway httpd's ulimit -t 300 # start if [ "x$1" = "x" -o "x$1 = "xstart" ] ; then echo -n 'Starting Apache' ${apachectl} start # restart if [ "x$1" = "xrestart" ] ; then echo -n 'Restarting Apache' ${apachectl} restart # stop if [ "x$1" = "xstop" ] ; then echo -n 'Stopping Apache' ${apachectl} stop else echo "usage $0 [start|restart|stop]" 1>&2 exit 1 fi exit 0 When the 'real' machine boots, the startup script /usr/sbin/runvirtual is called.
This is a script that 'boots' the virtual environment by emulating a part of the normal boot procedure.
The script also configures an IP address corresponding to networked applications running in the environment*, which is then securely configured using an IP firewall utility.
The host configuration information stored in system files within the secure environment lists only this address.
Apache should now be running from a virtual environment.
Should somebody gain access to the machine through the filesystem, they will find themselves in "chroot jail".
In the worst case a rm -fr / will result in the removal of the virtual environment.
The real machine should still be operational, and the environment can be rebuilt from its installation directory.
User home directories (~user corresponding to /userdir/user/public_html or similar) will not work, because Apache will not have access to the real filesystem.
One idea to enable these is to put a symbolic link from /userdir/user/public_html to /var/virtual/home/user, so that the user automatically writes to the virtual environment.
* Note that in order to assign an IP address to the virtual environment, two changes to the virtual machine's libc were necessary.
bind() was altered to associate IN_ADDR_ANY to only the virtual environment IP address.
gethostname() was altered to obtain the hostname as given in the virtual environment's etc/hostname.
Summary Running applications from virtual environments, where possible, adds an extra line of defence between your real machine and the malicious user of a network application running on the machine.
Such an environment can be thought of as a virtual machine, but there are important and security relevant differences between the strict idea of virtual machine and a restricted filesystem.
Perhaps most importantly is the fact that the virtual environment and real machine are running directly under the same kernel.
The implications are that kernel tables and other configuration are shared between both systems.
One simple exploitation of this could be filling the process table to capacity having gained access to the virtual environment, in order to incapacitate the real machine.
Improvements to the model described in this article include greater scrutiny regarding general security.
For example, resource restraints per user (or on the application process) could offer defence against resource exhaustion attacks as described above.
Access to the virtual environment, other than through applications, could be restricted; for example, by confining administrative access to authenticated users of a VPN.
Security policy should not be eased on the virtual machine because it is assumed to be at less risk.
Conventional security tools (such as TCP wrappers [6]) can still be run on the host machine.
Administrators should be careful not to defeat the object of the virtual environment (for example, by running another web server on the same machine, non-chrooted).
Relevant reading Many of the points mentioned are relevant to configuring virtual hosts/virtual services; readers may wish to explore this area further.
Safe and friendly read-only chroot jails for FTP and WWW,  URL: http://www.daemonnews.org/199905/chroot.html.
Virtual Services Howto (Linux), URL: http://metalab.unc.edu/linux/HOWTO/Virtual-Services-HOWTO.html References Acme labs thttpd, URL: http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/ wu-ftpd, URL: http://www.academ.com/academ/wu-ftpd/ An Evening With Berferd, in which a Hacker is Lured, Endured, and Studied, URL: ftp://ftp.research.bell-labs.com/dist/ches/berferd.ps FreeBSD.org, URL: http://www.freebsd.org/.
The Apache Web Server Project, URL: http://www.apache.org/ TCP Wrappers (JANET CERT mirror), URL: http://www.ja.net/CERT/Software/tcp_wrapper/ Author Details Ian Peacock Netcraft Bath email address: ip@netcraft.co.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Unix and the Web: Providing Web Access to Your Email Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Unix and the Web: Providing Web Access to Your Email Buzz software apache browser copyright windows linux passwords php licence telnet intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly introduces a regular column on Unix and Web issues by describing how a combination of Apache, PHP and IMP can make email folders available using a web browser.
Email Use at UKOLN UKOLN is a small research group based at the University of Bath.
Software used by UKOLN staff probably reflects staff usage through the University, and is probably not too dissimilar to usage at other UK universities most staff use a PC running MS Windows 95 or Windows NT and use Microsoft Office applications, although there are a number who prefer Unix systems are make use of X-Windows or Linux on their PC.
For some time Pine was the recommended email client at UKOLN.
Use of Pine, a command-line Unix program meant that telnet or Exceed had to be used to login to a Unix host.
For people used to the MS Windows environment, Pine appeared to provide a very dated interface: it was not possible to view multiple windows, copying and pasting was difficult, and many simple operations required use of arcane key sequences as an example, following a recent upgrade the command to exit the attachment viewer changed from E to < hardly the most intuititive of commands!
Typical Pine commands are illustrated in the help screen shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The Pine Interface Unfortunately we did not feel that we could deploy software such as Pegasus Mail for Windows since staff at UKOLN often made extensive use of email when away from their offices, either at home or when away at conferences.
Software such as Pegasus Mail for Windows uses the POP protocol which downloads email to the client machine.
This means that mail which has been viewed at work will be downloaded to the PC at work and will not be accessible when away from the office.
Recently a number of email clients for Microsoft Windows have become available which support the IMAP protocol, which leaves email messages on the mail server, thus enabling messages to be accessed from multiple locations.
Although limited in some respects, Microsoft’s Outlook Express, which supports IMAP, is now used within UKOLN.
Although use of Outlook Express means that email folders can be accessed when working at home or when away at conferences, it does require using telnet to login to the UKOLN server and use of Pine.
As Pine is now used less frequently, its idiosyncratic interface becomes even more noticeable, especially following the installation of a new version of Pine, with changes to the user interface.
In addition to the user interface issue, remote access to email requires access to Telnet.
This may not always be available.
For example a CyberCafé or Web kiosk at a hotel or airport may only provide access to a web browser, or a university may require users to login to a central server before telnetting off-campus.
In order to address these limitations, UKOLN has recently installed software which allows a web browser to access email folders.
IMP IMP [1] is an application of the PHP server-side scripting language [2].
As described on the PHP projects page [3]: “IMP is a set of PHP3 scripts that implement an IMAP based webmail system.
Assuming you have an account on a server that supports IMAP, you can theoretically use an installation of IMP to check your mail from anywhere that you have web access.
“ IMP has been installed on UKOLN’s Intranet so that UKOLN staff can access their email folders from anywhere that has a web browser.
The interface is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The IMP Interface The interface makes use of normal web conventions: clicking on highlighted subject lines to view the contents of messages and pull-down menus for selecting options such as the folder to view (as shown in Figure 3).
Figure 3: The IMP Interface A simple forms interface is used for composing message, as illustrated in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Composing a Message Using IMP This type of interface will be familiar to users of HotMail [4] Security When using a web browser to access email, security issues need to be considered.
In order to access your email you have to supply your username and password, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Logging On Running IMP over SSL prevents “sniffing” (of otherwise plaintext passwords) when IMP is used at remote sites.
Conclusions IMP appears to provide a very useful means of accessing mail folders using a web browser.
It can be used if organisations make use of the IMAP protocol for accessing email.
It requires the Apache server and the PHP scripting interface.
Both Apache and PHP are open source software, so there are no licence fees to pay, and are also widely used.
This would appear to be a service which universities should consider providing for their users although IMAP support will be required which not all universities currently provide.
References IMP, Home Page <URL: http://horde.org/imp/> PHP, Home Page <URL: http://www.php.net/> PHP3: Projects, PHP web site <URL: http://www.php.net/projects.php3/> HotMail, Home Page <URL: http://www.hotmail.com/> Author Details Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath.
Brian does not claim to be a Unix guru, but felt it would be worth sharing his experiences on the use of web-enabled email services in order to start off this Unix and the Web column.
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Planet SOSIG: A Spring-clean for SOSIG: A Systematic Approach to Collection Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: A Spring-clean for SOSIG: A Systematic Approach to Collection Management Buzz data database metadata identifier cataloguing perl url research Citation BibTex RIS Lesly Huxley, Emma Place, David Boyd, and Phil Cross report on a spring-cleaning exercise for SOSIG using a systematic approach to collection management.
The SOSIG collection The core of the SOSIG service, the Internet Catalogue, now holds over 21,000 structured metadata records describing Internet resources relevant to social science teaching, learning and research.
Established in 1994, SOSIG is one of the longest-running subject gateways in Europe.
Our section editors have been seeking out, evaluating and describing social science Internet resources, developing the collection so that it now covers 17 top-level subject headings with over 1000 sub-sections.
Given the dynamic nature of the Internet, and the Web in particular, collection development is a major task.
Collection management (i.e.
weeding out broken links, checking and updating records) at this scale can also be something of a challenge.
The SOSIG core team, based at ILRT in Bristol, devotes considerable resource to removing or revising records with broken links (human checks based on reports from an automated weekly link-checking programme).
Section editors, based in universities and research organisations around the UK, also consider durability and reliability of resources as part of the extensive quality criteria for inclusion in the Catalogue.
They regularly check records and update them: however, the human input required to do this on a systematic and comprehensive scale would be beyond current resources.
SOSIG has therefore recently embarked on a major ‘spring cleaning’ exercise that it is hoped will address this issue and keep the records current.
We describe below the method, and outcomes to date.
Why bother?
There are several reasons why such collection management activity is important.
User feedback indicates that currency of the resource descriptions is one of the most appreciated features of the SOSIG service.
SOSIG and other RDN hubs are promoted on the basis of the quality of their records: offering out of date descriptions and other details is likely to frustrate users and, in the long term, be detrimental to their perceptions and therefore use of the service.
Recent changes in data protection legislation also emphasise the obligation to check that authors/owners are aware of and happy with the inclusion of their resources in SOSIG.
Checking with resource owners also appears to have incidental public relations benefits and is helping to develop the collection by identifying new resources from information publishers and providers.
The approach How did we go about our spring-clean?
Each of the metadata records for the 21,000 resources catalogued in SOSIG contains a field for ‘administrative email’ the contact email address of the person or organisation responsible for the site.
We adapted an existing perl script (developed in ILRT for another project), which allowed a tailored email to be sent to each of these addresses.
The message includes the URL of the SOSIG record(s) associated with the admin email.
Recipients are informed that their resources are included in SOSIG and are asked to check the SOSIG record for their resource (via an embedded link in the message) and supply corrections if necessary.
They are also invited to propose new resources for addition to the Catalogue.
The script adds details of records processed to a copy of the database: the next time the script runs, it checks all unmarked records and sends the message to the next 2000 of these.
Once all 21,000 records have been processed, the script will run on a weekly basis to ensure that newly added records are also notified to their owners for checking.
Phasing the process We first considered a mass, simultaneous mailout covering all 21,000 records.
The script sends one message per minute to avoid swamping the servers.
However, we had no idea of the level of response likely to be generated and wanted to avoid swamping ourselves!
We therefore decided to phase the process, running the script against batches of 2000 records on a roughly monthly basis, in numerical order of unique record identifiers.
The process was run for the first time at the end of July 2002 and, on the basis of low-numbered identifiers, included records of resources first catalogued in SOSIG’s early days.
A second batch of 2000 records was processed in the last month.
Whilst Phil Cross oversaw the technical monitoring of the process, Emma Place and Dave Boyd have handled the personal responses, either dealing with change requests or passing on suggestions for additional resources to Section Editors responsible for specific subject areas on SOSIG.
Some interim results A range of responses To date we have received 239 personal responses (approximately 5%) from email recipients.
A further 1023 automated ‘bounced’ responses were received.
Those of us who are regular and long-term users of the Web are well aware of the fairly constant evolution of Web resource content and features.
The SOSIG spring clean exercise also highlights the extent of change in personnel associated with Web resources.
As mentioned above, of the emails sent relating to the first 4000 records, over a quarter ‘bounced’ back.
Although a very small proportion of these were automated ‘out of office’ replies, most were returned because the address was no longer in use.
The majority of the personal responses requested only one change: to the administrative email address recorded for their resource.
Many had stopped using personal email addresses and had turned to generic site or service addresses.
Others reported that they were no longer responsible for the resource.
As the first batches included older records, it will be interesting to see whether the proportion of bounced and changed emails reduces over time, or whether people are really more volatile than the resources.
We have to assume that the remaining 69% of email recipients have no cause for complaint or change requests.
In fact, we were very pleased at the overwhelmingly positive response the exercise has generated so far.
Many simply confirmed that their records were correct and they were pleased to be included.
Others noted minor corrections to descriptions, URLs and, as mentioned, admin email addresses.
Many also took the time to recommend new resources for addition to the Catalogue.
Only one or two concerns were raised about the inclusion of certain data in the recorded, although there were several queries which highlighted changes needed to the email message for the second and subsequent batches.
One of these arose as a result of the de-duplication process, which only operates within each batch of 2000 records.
Where the same admin email address is included in records excluded from that batch, the de-duplication process ignores it.
Some recipients therefore asked why we had apparently included only some of their resources, when they are actually on SOSIG, just not in that particular set of records.
The text of the message will therefore change for the third batch to make this clear.
Only one major issue was raised, that of deep-linking.
It seems that this is a problem for one organisation, and raises questions about the changing nature of the Web or perhaps some companies’ difficulty in engaging with its original principles.
Time will tell whether this is an issue for other organisations: to date it has been raised only once.
Handling the responses Spring-cleaning in domestic settings always involves considerable effort, and the SOSIG spring clean is no exception.
Emma and then Dave have spent about a week, full-time, dealing with the personal responses received after each batch of 2000 records were processed.
The first batch of messages all had the same subject line, so it was impossible to distinguish between responses appearing in the shared mailbox used for replies.
In the second 2000, the subject line includes the domain of the admin email address, which makes handling the responses much easier.
Bounced messages create the most work, because detective skills are then necessary to check resources ‘by hand’ and search for a replacement admin email address to which the message can then be forwarded.
Minor corrections take little time, but the recommendation of new resources leads to initiation of our usual evaluation and cataloguing processes which can be lengthy, depending on the nature and scale of the resource.
We realised that timing of the process could have been better: initiating it in the middle of Summer holiday season is likely to have resulted in more out-of-office replies than might be expected at other times.
It will be interesting to monitor this as the processing progresses over the next few months, to see whether this is actually the case.
Although time-consuming, the spring clean is still a more efficient way of cleaning the data than each Section Editor having to trawl through every single record and its associated resource.
Here we are relying on resource owners to notify us of incorrect data as well as new resources: they are the ones who know their resources best, and are best-placed to identify problems and changes.
Positive messages The spring-clean appears to have sent out and generated some very positive messages for SOSIG and resource providers.
The range of responses has also been very interesting, with very large organisations publishers, government departments in the UK and abroad, for example have responded just as positively as small units and individuals.
Messages have come from all over the world and most seem genuinely pleased to be included, indicating that SOSIG is held in some esteem.
The House of Commons, Channel4 and the Office of the President of Burkina Faso all took the time to respond.
Just a small selection of positive comments received are reproduced below: “Many thanks for your email and the courtesy of letting us know about your listing of our Web site” (Women in London) “I appreciate the listing and hope that your viewers will find the site to be both educational and enjoyable” (Ralph Frerichs, UCLA) “Thank you very much, that’s most encouraging.
We will try to maintain our contributions in accordance with the confidence you have shown us” (Michael Pye, Internet Journal of Religion) “Thank you for linking to our site.
You have a very interesting Web page and it’s great that you’ve compartmentalized all the links so well … keep up the good work” (Oula Ingero, Virtual Finland) “Thank you for the inclusion of “EuroPortal” in your SOSIG database.
I have also placed the SOSIG logo on the main menu page” (Gerhard Kenk, CrossWater Systems) There has clearly been a benefit so far in public relations, raising awareness of SOSIG and also establishing more direct contact with resource providers, who may remember to advise us of new resources or changes in the future.
Several confirmed that they had added a reciprocal link to SOSIG to their sites, which not only disseminates SOSIG’s name more widely, but also offers a potential new route to the service to an audience that might not otherwise have been aware of it.
As the processing continues, we shall monitor and analyse responses and expect to publish fuller details in the future.
Meanwhile, we hope SOSIG users will benefit from the much “cleaner” and more current data in our Internet resource catalogue.
Author details Lesly Huxley, Emma Place, David Boyd, Phil Cross SOSIG ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Article Title: “Planet SOSIG A spring-clean for SOSIG: a systematic approach to collection management” Author: Lesly Huxley, Emma Place, David Boyd, Phil Cross Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UM.Sitemaker: Flexible Web Publishing for Academic Users Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines UM.Sitemaker: Flexible Web Publishing for Academic Users Buzz data java framework html database usability infrastructure cataloguing graphics passwords j2ee authentication url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jonathan Maybaum explains how UM.SiteMaker was designed to fill an important gap in the array of tools to suit academic publishing.
In an article published in this journal last year [1], Editor Philip Hunter observed that the extent of use of web publishing systems in universities is surprisingly low, considering the technical sophistication of most academic environments, and he discussed some reasons that might account for this circumstance.
At the University of Michigan (UM), we have developed an infrastructure (UM.SiteMaker) that is aimed at facilitating the use of websites for personal and professional communication by ordinary (i.e., non-technical) academic citizens.
Although it has been only a few months since this system was opened for use on a campus-wide basis, we are very encouraged by the rate and pattern of acceptance by both users and local support staff.
To my knowledge, deployment of UM.SiteMaker represents the most extensive use of a database-driven system for publishing websites for individuals, at any academic institution.
In this article I review briefly the status of different types of web publishing that are characteristic of universities, and then illustrate how UM.SiteMaker was designed to fill an important gap in the array of tools to support academic web publishing.
A closer look at the various types of academic web publishing While it is probably correct that academic web publishing is an underdeveloped area in general, that is not to say that it is completely absent.
I view academic web publishing as consisting of at least three types, each of which is developed to a different degree.
Course websites A substantially developed type of academic web publishing comprises the construction of course websites, through the use of course management systems.
These are special-purpose applications focused mainly on activities that are common among undergraduate courses.
Owners of websites constructed with course management systems are typically able to include various functionality, including uploaded resources, course schedules, assignments, threaded discussions, interactive tests and quizzes, chat rooms and whiteboards.
Because of the need to protect intellectual property, entry to these websites usually requires authentication and authorization.
Although in most cases the owners of websites created with these systems have the ability to include or exclude specific features, they are generally not at liberty to make gross changes in the organization or appearance of their site.
A beneficial result of this enforced structure is that a predictable interface is presented to students who use the system for different courses within the same institution.
Many course management options are available for use at universities, in the form of both commercial and home-grown products, so an institution seeking to implement a course management system will not be limited by a lack of choices with appropriate functionality.
However, the total cost of operation of these systems can be quite substantial, as it must cover not only licensing (for commercial solutions) but also robust deployment, integration with institutional authentication and authorization systems, class catalogs and class registration lists, and the cost of user support and training.
Nevertheless, because course management is a highly visible and core function at universities, many institutional administrators now accept that the cost of course management has become a necessary expense of doing business, and are willing to support it.
At UM, an internally developed course management system named UM.CourseTools [2] has become the centrally supported resource for course websites, gaining wide acceptance by faculty and students.
Because of the availability and success of UM.CourseTools, UM.SiteMaker is not promoted routinely at UM as a solution for publishing course websites.
Nevertheless, directors of a few graduate level courses have decided to use UM.SiteMaker for their course websites, presumably because they wanted more control over the organization of their course websites, and did not need specialized course management features.
Unit websites Another frequent use of websites within universities is for schools, colleges, departments and other institutional units to communicate with their constituencies and with the general public.
Unit websites are more heterogeneous in design and purpose than course websites, but they still tend to have certain things in common with each other.
For example, a college or departmental website will usually contain publicly accessible pages to list their faculty, areas of scholarly activity, courses offered, contact information for people, press releases and other news articles, and resources such as departmental service units and libraries.
Also, the organization of content for a particular unit will be defined or approved by a unit administrator, as will the graphic design elements that denote the unit affiliation for pages in the website.
I am unaware of any applications that have been developed explicitly to support websites for academic units.
However, there are many general-purpose web publishing applications that could be used, including those contained in a recent summary of content management systems [3].
Use of these systems as a regular production service for unit website publishing is increasingly evident, and both commercial and open source products have been employed (Table 1).
While growth of the use of commercial products in the academic sector is likely to be limited by their cost, which is typically on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the product itself [3], open source content management systems will probably be adopted in an increasing number of academic settings, where a sufficiently sophisticated and stable staffing environment exists to ensure that local development, deployment and user support can be sustained.
Even though UM.SiteMaker lacks some content management features, and was not specifically targeted to host unit websites, it has nevertheless been adopted for that purpose in some areas.
More local growth in that realm is expected, as there are currently no plans to implement a content management system on a campus-wide basis at UM.
Individual and small group websites The third (and least developed) type of academic web publishing is for websites that contain information generated by individuals or small groups.
Despite the importance of the intellectual creations of individual faculty, students and staff, there is usually little institutional support for development of websites to showcase these creations.
The most common approach for publishing such websites is to provide users with a location within their home directory in a Unix system that functions as a webserver document root.
Many institutions offer training in HTML authoring and some supply methods to partially automate the production of HTML files, but I am aware of none that provide a dynamic, template-driven system for this purpose.
The result is that users who have the fewest skills and resources are charged with a variety of technical tasks (e.g., creation of graphics, layouts, navigation, and access controls) in addition to being responsible for the informational content of the website.
Because of the importance of individual websites in academia, and the lack of practical solutions to accommodate them, the design goals for UM.SiteMaker have been focused on serving this audience.
What distinguishes UM.SiteMaker from other academic web publishing tools?
From an architectural standpoint, the currently released version of UM.SiteMaker (2.5) is not strikingly different from other three-tier web publishing platforms.
It is written in Java, using Apple’s WebObjects 5.1 frameworks, and can be deployed on various operating systems, using either Apple’s WebObjects application server or a standard J2EE application server.
UM.SiteMaker does not require a specific webserver or relational database, although it does require a webserver that can rewrite URLs and a database for which a JDBC driver is available.
Instead, UM.SiteMaker is distinguished by its feature set and user interface, which were conceived to give paramount value to user autonomy and simplicity of operation, and to account for the implications of cultural factors that differentiate universities from corporations.
In this part of the article, I will illustrate how this philosophy has been translated into implementation in UM.SiteMaker.
Individual autonomy There is no privilege that is guarded more fiercely by academic citizens than autonomy.
In the context of academic web publishing, autonomy can be defined in both technical and operational terms.
For example, the scheme for web publishing that is the current norm at universities (described above) confers a high degree of technical autonomy, in that users have permission to deposit HTML pages and uploaded files as they wish, restricted only by space limitations.
However, the great majority of academic users do not have the technical skills needed to take advantage of this publishing method, nor do they typically have available the services of trained staff to perform the necessary creative and technical operations.
Therefore, their degree of effective autonomy is quite low.
In UM.SiteMaker we strive to maximize the effective autonomy of users by not only providing individuals with the tools to customize many aspects of their sites, but to do so by means of a user interface that requires little skill or training.
In some cases the result was to limit or eliminate certain features, if the user interface needed to control them was too complex.
Extension of user control beyond page content A fundamental concept in any database-driven web publishing system is to separate content from layout and graphic design of a page, through the use of templates.
In most implementations of such systems, ordinary users are intended to have control only over textual content of specific pages, whereas control over other aspects of website organization and appearance are normally reserved for developers or trained administrators.
Because this level of autonomy is insufficient to allow a user to design their own site, in UM.SiteMaker we gave site owners a simple interface to exercise direct control of some key aspects of site management beyond editing page contents.
The most important aspect of site management that we made available to site owners is the ability to define the organization of material in their site, which they accomplish by adding links within a self-configuring navigation bar, with each link representing a “section” of their site (Fig.
1).
By offering a small number of flexible section types, we have been able to maintain an interface that untrained users can use without consulting documentation [4].
In addition, site owners are empowered to specify the template that determines the graphics and overall layout for the pages in their site, by selecting from a list of choices that are associated with their organizational unit.
This feature derives from recognition that users in an academic culture respect the value of consistency, but they chafe at lockstep uniformity.
As a result, it is possible for sites within a particular unit to have some individuality in terms of accent colors or ornamental graphics, while still displaying essential elements of the unit identity, or “brand”.
The last item that I will mention here is “Embedded Sites”, which was developed in response to requests from pilot users who rapidly outgrew the limitations of a website with only a single level of navigation links, and who asked for a simple method for creating hierarchical sites.
Our solution was to allow sites to be “embedded” within one another.
In addition to providing users with a method for hierarchical content, it also gives them the ability to reuse content in multiple locations.
Sharing private resources Academic users routinely collaborate with colleagues both within and outside of their own institution, and often need to share information privately.
Despite the attractiveness of using a website for this purpose, access control for a conventional website is too complex to be practical for non-technical users.
In UM.SiteMaker, site owners are able to create and populate access groups, and apply them to website sections or uploaded files.
Internal (UM) people who are entered into access groups use institutional authentication, whereas external (non-UM) people use their Email address as their user ID, and maintain their own password through a mailback mechanism (Fig.
2).
In this way, we avoid the need for either site owners or administrators to manage user accounts or passwords.
Furthermore, we have implemented a feature to simplify the whole process of sharing private files, when attaching them to Email is undesirable or unsuccessful (e.g., due to size limitations or encoding problems).
Ordinarily, this would take several steps: upload the file, assign access control, make a link to the file, create a user account for the recipient, explain to the recipient how to log in and where to find the file for downloading.
Instead, UM.SiteMaker users can click once to bring up a screen that allows them to fill in the recipient’s Email address and generate a message that contains a link to the desired file, including a temporary key that substitutes for authentication and authorization (Fig.
3).
By this approach, we avoid the need to create a user account for the recipient.
Local administrative control In academia, autonomy is important for units as well as for individuals.
Therefore, we built into UM.SiteMaker the capacity for system administrators to easily create and modify a representation of an institution’s organizational hierarchy, thus permitting control of administrative functions to be delegated to staff in local units.
This benefits each unit by investing it with the authority to set policies for websites that are associated with it.
In addition, individuals within the unit are also helped by enabling them to call upon local staff when administrative service is needed.
It is important to note that we also took great care to simplify the interface used by local support staff for administrative tasks (Fig.
4).
These staff people are often key players in the decision-making process of individual users who are trying to determine if they should experiment with or adopt a system like UM.SiteMaker.
Obviously, they are more likely to recommend a product if it makes their job easier or if it provides value to their users without increasing their own burden significantly.
How UM.SiteMaker is being used Perhaps the best way to convey how UM.SiteMaker facilitates academic web publishing is to provide real life examples of its use.
Below are short descriptions of different kinds of websites that have been constructed with this application, along with a link to each site (which may, of course, change over time) and a link to a screenshot of each site’s home page, for archival purposes.
“CS2 Vector Resource” is owned and managed by Prof. Turner in the Biological Chemistry Dept.
His laboratory has created a series of molecular biology reagents (cloning vectors) that are frequently requested by other scientists.
This site is a public resource that contains various types of information about the vectors, including descriptions, maps and sequences.
(Live site) (Screenshot) “University of Michigan Trumpet Studio” was created by Prof. William Campbell in the School of Music.
This site is updated frequently with information regarding the day-to-day activities in the Trumpet Studio.
The form for comments on the home page and the guestbook section were added by Prof. Campbell, with advice from consultants in the UM Media Union.
(Live site) (Screenshot) “Christopher A. Thoms” is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Natural Resources and Environment.
This is one of a series of graduate student websites that are intended to serve as portfolios of each student’s progress towards their degree.
The local administrator facilitated creation of this site by creating an example website that contained sample information, and then cloning it for each student.
The students were then free to replace the sample information with their own, and to extend or modify the website structure as they felt was appropriate.
(Live site) (Screenshot) “The Way Some Japanese Live Now” was used by Prof. John Campbell to organize and promote a conference that was held at UM in January 2002.
The website remains online as an archival resource for materials from that conference.
(Live site) (Screenshot) “Victor Multilabel Plate Reader” is owned and managed by Prof. Richard Neubig, who uses this website as a means of communicating with local colleagues about a shared instrument that is located in his laboratory.
(Live site) (Screenshot) “Social Work Library Staff Manual” is a website owned by Karen Blackford, for the purpose of distributing materials privately, to library staff.
Most of the contents of this site are available only to members of an access group that Karen created.
(Live site) (Screenshot) What lies ahead for UM.SiteMaker?
Adoption of the service at UM and elsewhere The first version of UM.SiteMaker that was intended for campus-wide use became available in late November 2001.
Organized user support for the program was announced in mid-January, 2002.
Visits to UM.SiteMaker have increased steadily from about 600 per week in November (at which time there were 41 active websites made by pilot users), and are currently at a level of about 3000 visits per week, with 484 published websites (June, 2002).
Of these published websites, about 280 appear to be active, as defined by a minimum of 30 hits over a period of 14 days or longer.
We noted that this traffic spiked during the week following the announcement of user support and after each of two campus-wide promotional events (a sidebar item in the official university newsweekly and a campus-wide Email to faculty).
These observations are a reminder that the success of a service depends on not only its technical merit, but also on communicating with the target audience about the availability and purpose of the service.
In the case of academic users, this communication appears to be most effective when it is repeated regularly in a concise format.
Presumably, this is because the interest of any particular user in such a service peaks for short periods of time, when the need for it becomes acute, and is much lower when no “crisis” exists.
It is difficult to predict how high usage of UM.SiteMaker might climb, as we do not have any way to determine the number of personal or small group websites that are currently active at UM, or any model for estimating how many new individual websites might arise with the advent of a service to facilitate their construction.
In the absence of a model that applies specifically to this kind of service, we can consider what is known about the phases of technology diffusion, in general.
At this point, we appear to be in the “early adopter” phase of the diffusion process, during which time 2.5% to 13.5% of eventual use typically occurs [5].
If this is correct, then usage of UM.SiteMaker would be expected to increase about 7 to 40-fold over current levels.
Throughout the development of UM.SiteMaker we have been contacted on many occasions by people from other educational and non-profit organizations, who expressed interest in providing the service to their own users.
Because it would be impractical for our university programming staff to support other institutions, we considered other ways to facilitate the proliferation of UM.SiteMaker, and decided on a licensing strategy.
As a result, we made an agreement with Global Village Consulting (Vancouver, BC, Canada) by which they became the developer and exclusive licensee for the product, which they are now distributing under the name “GVC SiteMaker”.
Database functionality exposed to users through “Virtual Tables” The current feature set of UM.SiteMaker is derived largely from needs that were identified by faculty at the time that the project was begun.
However, one important need expressed by these faculty that is still unmet is the ability to create and manage simple databases through a web interface.
We are now in the process of adding that capability, in the form of a feature called “Virtual Tables”.
This name derives from the implementation strategy, in which data structures that appear to be database tables to the user do not actually correspond to tables in the underlying database, but instead are instances of “table” objects.
We believe that this approach (which is facilitated by extension of the Enterprise Objects Framework that is part of WebObjects) will give us much greater flexibility for further enhancing this feature in the future than if we had to create and modify real database tables.
Some obvious uses of Virtual Tables are for holding research data and laboratory inventories.
In addition, though, we also expect that Virtual Tables will also be used to produce address books, image galleries, biosketches, guestbooks and other types of functionalities that would otherwise be difficult for an individual or a small group to create in a shared, access-controlled manner.
Summary The use of websites for sharing public and private information generated by individual academic users is arguably the most important and yet least well served segment of academic web publishing.
UM.SiteMaker is aimed at filling this need, by providing these users with a system that allows them to create highly customized websites without needing to possess or to hire technical expertise.
Early evidence supports the idea that non-technical academic users, if supplied with a system that provides a sufficient degree of effective autonomy, will utilize it to create and maintain websites that are effective outlets for their creative activities.
UM.SiteMaker might therefore catalyze the kind of “bottom-up” efforts that Mr. Hunter suggested are necessary to make web publishing a way of life in universities, rather than a novelty.
Additional information about UM.SiteMaker is available at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/sitemaker.resources References The Management of Content: Universities and the Electronic Publishing Revolution, Philip Hunter, Ariadne, Issue 28, June 2001.
URL: <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/cms/> UM.CourseTools home page.
URL: <http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/> JISC TechWatch Report: Content Management Systems, Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes, September 2001.
URL: <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/techwatch/reports/tsw_01-02.pdf> SiteMaker Usability Study, Chassy Cleland, Liyu Cao, Yanyan Zhang, Project for SI-612, April 2002.
URL: <http://sitemaker.umich.edu/sitemaker.usability> (available from authors upon request) Diffusion of innovations, Everett M. Rogers, (4th ed.)
New York: The Free Press, 1995.
Author Details Jonathan Maybaum Professor of Pharmacology, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor.
Email: maybaum@umich.edu Article Title: “UM.SiteMaker: Flexible Web Publishing for Academic Users’” Author: Jonathan Maybaum Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/maybaum/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Museums: Braining Up Or Dumbing Down?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Museums: Braining Up Or Dumbing Down?
Buzz software framework archives identifier cataloguing multimedia url Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Napier went to find out at the mda's 'Beyond the Museum' colloquium.
On Friday 20 April 2001, the mda held a one-day colloquium entitled Beyond the Museum: Working with Collections in the Digital Age [1].
The event was jointly organised by the University of Oxford Humanities Computing Unit (HCU) and the mda.
It was the most recent in a series of events that include last year's Beyond Control, or Through the Looking Glass?
Threats and Liberties in the Electronic Age; 1999's Beyond Art: Digital Culture in the 21st Century; and 1998's Beyond the Hype.
The colloquium was held in the Oxford Union Debating Chamber, a building with beautiful décor but no substantive heating system.
As Stuart Lee from the HCU pointed out the debating chamber was a definite candidate for the coldest venue in Oxford (and possibly the planet).
It was going to take a lot of hot air to warm this place up!
After the initial welcome from Stuart Lee and Louise Smith of the mda Lynne Brindley, CEO of the British Library gave the opening plenary.
Lynne talked primarily about what joined-up culture means to those of us working in the digital world.
She began by attempting to define culture and chose the definition used by Lloyd Grossman: "everything that's not media or sport".
This all-inclusive interpretation of culture has added to both it's 'braining up' and 'dumbing down'.
The new wave of 'widening access' projects geared towards getting more people into museums have also been a contributing factor.
It has also caused an elitism versus anti-elitism climate.
Lynne spoke about the Culture online vision promoted by the government and how it is really only scratching the surface.
The hybrid library has made a move into integration of services but there still remain many issues: sustainability, a lack of clear business models for digital programmes (though more are starting to arise such as Fathom, SCRAN and QUESTIA) and a need for cultural change.
Lynne summed up by asserting that we are only just beginning to explore digital culture and start working in cross-institutional areas.
She suggested that in the digital revolution all possibilities still exist.
Are Museums are in Danger of Losing the Initiative in the Digital Revolution?
The first motion to be debated was ''This House believes that museums are in danger of losing the initiative in the digital revolution".
Four speakers were to put their case for or against the motion in a round table discussion.
The initial speaker was Mike Houlihan, the CEO of Ulster Museum.
Mike began by pointing out that he believed the motion to be an oxymoron because museums had never actually held the initiative; as he so kindly put it…"cutting edge, more like the bleeding edge".
Mike argued that the digital revolution isn't actually important to the library world.
To illustrate he quoted a colleague who tells his staff "the digital revolution…stay cool and it will go away."
Mike's feelings were that museums interests should stay rooted in the things that make them what they are: the objects.
He assured us that there remains no substitute for the real thing.
The issue of proximity was also considered.
A museum is not just a collection but a physical presence in a city; in places like Northern Ireland the neutral spaces offered by museums are essential to the local community.
Mike considers the digital revolution to be a relatively low priority for museums, who should be concentrating on educational developments.
He summed up by suggesting we should not be asking what is the role of musuems in IT but what is the role and place of IT in museums.
The second speaker was Bamber Gascoigne, Broadcaster, and director of HistoryWorld.net.
Bamber agreed with Lynne Brindley that it was still relatively early in the digital revolution and there remained everything to play for.
He commented on the resistance of certain museums to redesign of and improvements to their Web sites.
Many also refused to allow access to images.
Bamber concluded that in the real world museums and galleries had already lost control of images and needed to act now.
Ross Parry, a Lecturer in Museums and New Technology at Leicester University, took the stand as the third speaker.
Ross made the link between museums and communication, museums constantly look at new ways to present objects, new ways of communicating.
To tell a story of museums is to tell a story of the technologies they contain.
In reply to Mike Houlihan's comment that museums were not forerunners in IT he gave several examples of museums taking the initiative including Palm top gallery guides, Virtual reality fish, the 24 hour museum and SCRAN.
These technologies mean that now people can communicate with museums on their own terms, in their own time and in their own place.
Mike felt that if museums were in danger of losing any lead they had in the digital revolution it was hardly surprising because they have been in the vanguard for so long.
He felt that losing the initiative was not a crisis but a liberation that would allow museum workers to focus on local initiatives, improve skills and work on thoughtful applications of new media resulting in sustainability.
The final person speaking on the first motion was Chris Yapp, an ICL Fellow specialising in Lifelong Learning and the Information Society.
Chris talked about the digital revolution being the 'new renaissance' because of the break down of barriers between subjects.
He explained that it was more about connections than collections, connecting objects to stories.
If the Internet as a technology is used just to hold collections it becomes boring, if it's used to show links and relationships then it becomes interesting.
This model of connections would lead to every single object being given an identifier in a semantic Web.
Chris gave an example of the museum of English Language, a millenium commission idea that was not taken up.
The museum of English Language would give stories of language, not language itself.
Chris felt that the important areas of culture that we should be looking at were aspects that add value to what we already do.
We need to do more than just concentrate on the past, we need to record what is going on now.
Currently 30% of games software is written by British people, it is this kind of history that we are failing to catch.
Chris suggested that we need new frameworks that allow us to deposit and preserve these new objects.
Chris added that museums are losing the initiative because everyone can set up a Web site.
Museums used to be about power, but to survive the digital revolution a new age of popularist curators need to be trained who can take in the matter out there that people out there are creating.
Chris proposed that to survive museums needed to let everyday people take the initiative more.
He proffered an 'adopt an object' campaign, which would give people a vested interest in getting objects digitised.
Peoples should be able, with a museum's help, to create their own collections and exhibitions.
Museums should also be cataloguing the millions of Web sites out there and the rich information they contain.
Elitism versus Anti-elitism The round table discussion was then opened up to the floor.
Initial discussion was over the aforementioned current crisis in the museum community over professionalism and authority.
Some delegates felt that because curators have specialised knowledge, the practice of recording objects should be left solely to them.
Museums are about exceptional objects and although many people believe that a personal Web site can offer as much as a museum, the reality is that they can't.
Despite these feelings people were apprehensive to sit tight on their skills, non-action could result in the loss of the digital revolution initiative; Library and information people had already lost the initiative on search engines to the business world.
What was needed was possibly more risk taking.
Others felt that that museums needed to move out of the dark ages and leave this arrogance behind.
The only way museums could make this move was by learning to work more closely with other groups.
This argument was endorsed by the notion that the argument should not be about 'instead off' but 'as well as'.
Communities should join together, the creation of Resource and the current collaboration of museums libraries and archives demonstrates this.
Are the New Technologies Contributing to the Dumbing Down of Museums?
After an impressive buffet in the Macmillan Room of the Oxford Union, a walk around the exhibition and considerable continuation of discussion we delegates returned to the colloquium.
For the afternoon session the debating Chamber felt decidedly warmer and everyone seemed ready to proceed with further discourse.
The second motion being presented was 'This House believes that the new technologies are contributing to the dumbing down of museums.'
The second motion was to be discussed in a formal debate with two speakers arguing for the motion and two speakers against.
The second plenary was given by Christopher Brown, the Director of the Ashmolean museum.
Christopher presented a digital technology recently introduced at the National Gallery called the Micro Gallery.
He explained that there had been initial fears that the micro gallery would stop people from visiting the gallery but this hadn't happened and the release of the Micro Gallery had actually increased visits.
Christopher also spent some time detailing new digital developments at the Ashmolean including a touch screen console in the new Early 20th Century Paintings Gallery.
The first speaker arguing for the motion was Josie Appleton from Spiked-on-Line.
Josie proposed that new technologies were undermining the quality of the museum experience.
This problem was not due to the technologies themselves but their application.
New technologies being used to elucidate collections were undermining the value of reflection and learning and interaction was becoming an end in itself.
Josie felt that the problem was with the representation of knowledge as an experience, she gave the example of the 'real earthquake' you could try out in the Natural History museum.
She believes that giving people 'the whole picture' restricts their imagination.
With new technologies they are no longer able to decide for themselves what exhibits actually are.
Using new technologies appeared to be just a way for museums to get hip.
Unfortunately museums will always have to compete with Playstations when all they will ever be is a 3rd rate Nintendo [2].
The first speaker to argue against the motion was Stephen Heppell, the Director of Ultralab.
Stephen agreed with Josie that a lot of new technologies were 'tosh' and even gave a number of examples of poorly applied edutainment technology, however he felt that as usual the tendency was always to blame the tool.
This was born from the misunderstanding that technology delivers stuff to us, and we receive it in a very couch potato way.
He reminded us that when telephones were invented they were initially used by people to listen to plays.
People forgot that the best way to listen to a play is by going to see it!
Stephen explained that interactive was what his microwave was; what museums are is participative.
They allow users to play a part.
Stephen felt that many people had a misguided idea that content is king, when in reality community is king.
Stephen gave some examples of community achieved through new technologies which included Schoolnet 2000, a project in which UK school children of all ages built an Internet treasure chest of their ideas and discoveries about life in the UK, yesterday and today.
He felt that given the chance new technologies could set culture alive.
Gaby Porter, a freelance arts and heritage consultant, spoke next for the motion.
She explained how some applications allowed message and meaning to be determined, resulting in users not being able to argue back, and therefore being dumbed.
They were no longer being allowed to express another point of view.
The conflict and questioning that used to be part of a museum was lost.
Gabby saw objects and museums as a wonderful place for children and adults to make a mess and learn because they are not a neutral but an informal environment.
But unfortunately many new technologies used in museums are stuck in old paradigms primarily because Museums are not technical.
Museums still take 28 days to respond to an email!
There are just not many good models in the museums sector, especially when there remains this tendency to just dump stuff on the Web without thought for what it is acheiving.
Gabby questioned whether this was just a move to a medium where museums would never have to meet their public.
She felt that people cite hits like they mean something, surely it is better to build on really good projects than just to get clicks on a page.
In counter argument Shirley Collier, Head of Collections Management for the Imperial War Museum saw museums as becoming better educational institutions.
Shirley explained that the motion, by stating that new technologies were contributing to the dumbing down of museums, meant that education was being made easier and less challenging.
This idea implied a golden age when education was challenging.
Her own childhood experiences were of museums with 'no touch' signs and an air of formality.
Technology is in its infancy and naturally many mistakes will be made but people are just starting to become more articulate about what they want.
In a recent MORI pole children answered that what they wanted most in a gallery was multimedia.
Museums are not just about education they are also about entertainment.
Shirley had recently visited a Natural History museum in Bulawayo.
In the museum there were very few labels on objects, instead there were signs saying that names are important but not as important as looking and thinking.
In Bulawayo they know that it's not about being right, it's what you learn.
At the National history museum in England there is an interactive piece of software, which helps you identify a chosen insect.
The software teaches you about how to inquire, the user is given the role of researcher.
Shirley remonstrated that technology was putting into practice an experiential way of learning.
She felt that new technologies also helped communication.
They had introduced new touch screen information points in Bulawayo which had really helped communication.
They used to be able to talk to 60 people a day and could now deal with four times as many.
Shirley ended her argument with that well known quote "it's not the destination, it's the journey that counts".
Braining Up versus Dumbing Down The discussion after the formal debate focused in on braining up versus dumbing down.
Many delegates felt that widening access and increase of facilities for the public to access collections could only be a good thing and that new technologies have allowed people to become more articulate and participate more.
Others disagreed and protested that new technologies were stifling imagination.
There did seem to be a consensus that a lot of current use of technology is used for the wrong reasons.
Conclusion When the two motions were given out in the morning there were general mutterings around the chamber that the they were badly worded with more than several areas for debate.
This did not turn out to be a problem; throughout the day both motions were deconstructed and the actual votes almost became irrelevant.
The many debates running parallel and the multitude of suggestions given made it apparent that those in the museum community are very interested in Collections in the Digital Age, irrespective of what side of the fence they stand on.
References Mda magazine, Beyond the Museum at http://www.mda.org.uk/200102a.htm Josie Appleton's talk was published in the guardian online at http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=68339 Author Details Marieke Napier Information Officer UKOLN Email: m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Marieke Napier is Editor of Cultivate Interactive Web magazine and Deputy Editor of Ariadne.
URL: http://www.cultivate-int.org/ Article Title: "Digital Museums: Braining Up or Dumbing Down?"
Author: Marieke Napier Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/museum/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Theory and Practice of the Virtual University Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Theory and Practice of the Virtual University Buzz database infrastructure standardisation video mis url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Neil Pollock and James Cornford report on UK universities use of new technologies.
Abstract: This article reports on a two-year research project that is investigating the way in which UK universities are attempting to build new technologies into higher education.
In recent years there has been a phenomenal interest in the growth of what some are calling 'digital', 'online', or 'virtual' universities.
Indeed, today, it is commonplace to read that information and communication technologies are radically reconfiguring the landscape of higher education, changing the very 'nature' of the university[1].
You will already know the vision: a decrease in importance of the campus, as students 'login' from a distance to access 'courseware', new media technologies replacing traditional lectures, courses being delivered and assessed over the Internet, promising to make higher education available anywhere and at anytime.
Depicted as a solution to the increasingly demanding problems of higher education, all of this has fired the imagination of academics, policy makers, university managers, and educational specialists alike, the assumption often appears to be that institutions can move straightforwardly toward this vision[2].
Yet, our recent research conducted under the UK's Economic and Social Research Council's Virtual Society?
Programme suggests that the universities which we have studied have found the introduction of new technologies, alongside their more traditional methods of providing teaching and learning, extremely difficult and that the actual model of Virtual University which we have seen emerging bears little relationship to the vision.
What we have found is that the Virtual University works in theory but not in practice.
What are the difficulties of implementing the vision?
Basically, the bottom-up, course-by-course approach to constructing a virtual university is slow, labour intensive and prone to failure.
For example, we have followed the progress of a number of initiatives in one particular UK institution for over a year: there was a humanities degree course, where video-conferencing technologies were used to connect undergraduates based in the UK with students located in other parts of Europe, the idea being that they could present work and ideas to each other, and receive feedback, much like a traditional seminar; then there was the new 'Cyber Culture' course, available for credit as a self-study module over the Internet; and, finally, there was the 'Information Skills' module taught by library staff, which had also been translated into an online self-study module.
Week after week we sat in on technical sessions, planning meetings as the academic material was gathered, the technology was developed, and the actual form of these initiatives began to take shape.
Staff keen to be involved in the rolling-out of the projects were contacted, and possible groups of students willing to be part of the experiment were identified.
Yet, just a couple of months after everything had seemingly been put in place, each of the projects has for want of a better word 'stalled'.
The immediate reasons for this are varied: one of the partners pulled out of the video-conferencing project complaining of high telecommunication costs; only one distance student had enrolled for the Cyber Culture course; and library staff could not be convinced that the online version of the Information Skills course was sufficiently improved to warrant its introduction in place of their existing methods.
What is common to each of these stories, however, is the failure to enrol (or to keep enrolled) all of those aspects of the university necessary to make the projects work (academic staff, students, computer services departments, libraries, validation committees, partner institutions, etc.,).
Further, in the site that we studied, there were aspects of the University that were crucial for the success of the projects and that did not exist and therefore had to be built for instance, the University lacked procedures for validating online courses slowing the whole process.
In short, initiatives were confounded by difficulties in co-ordinating a wide range of actors across a large organisation made up of diverse and disparate entities (i.e., departments and service units).
It is, it seems, the very institution of the university which is at the heart of the problem.
This begs the question, if not this vision then what?
If we want to understand the ways in which information and communication technologies are affecting higher education institutions in the UK, perhaps we need to look at this issue from a different point of view.
And if the central problems of building the virtual university seem to relate to the university as an institution, then it is to this issue that we should perhaps redirect our attention.
The way in which universities are organised and operate is currently in a period of change.
The introduction of new forms of Management Information Systems (MIS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are crucial in all of this.
Traditionally, administrative computer systems have been kept within the domain of the centralised administration and have had little influence on the primary functions of universities and their 'chalk-face' workforce.
Most academic staff rarely comes into direct contact with these systems, and students are hardly aware of their existence.
The most obvious example here is the ill-fated UK University Funding Council 'MAC' initiative.
The computer system, through attempting to standardise the ways in which British Universities conducted their management and administration[3], seemed to reinforce divisions between departments and faculties and between those who managed and administered and those who engaged in academic work.
However, the new generation of MIS and ERP systems, through a process of standardising certain roles and relationships, are being consciously used to 'connect' and 'integrate' processes that have traditionally been kept apart.
In the words of one senior academic manager responsible for such a system, its function is 'to bind the university together'[4].
Let us focus on one example, that of students, and particularly how they are to be managed and administered.
Until recently, the students relationship to computer systems has been mediated by academic and support staff.
However, in one of the institutions that we conducted research, students are moving from being passive objects of administration to becoming the main groups of active users.
From the beginning of the next academic year, online registration for new and returning students will be introduced.
Students are to be provided with 'smart cards' that allow them to self-register for certain aspects of their degree course (i.e., to select options, and to enter personal information), and then, later, to validate the accuracy of other information (e.g., their academic results, their financial status, and so on).
In a later stage of the implementation, students will also be able to pay bills on-line, book accommodation, schedule meeting with their tutors, and so on all without coming onto the campus.
At one level, this is a rather mundane use for new information and communication technologies hardly worthy of the notion of a revolution within the university.
Yet, at another level, the practices, procedures, and processes, being laid down with the introduction of these new forms of management and administration systems have important consequences for the way in which the University is being reconfigured, and particularly the way in which certain key relationships are being developed.
Arguably, we might suggest, it is these systems constitute a true Virtual University in the sense that the complex databases and sets of procedures that constitute the core of these systems are a model or simulation of the university: they have the form of a University without the thing itself.
Instead of an organisation full of heterogeneous actors, with complex identities, everyone and everything is formalised, represented in a standardised form, with certain explicit roles and responsibilities towards the system.
Students, for instance, are simply 'users' with particular duties towards the inputting and maintenance of information.
It is well known that information and communication technologies provide a powerful incentive to standardisation.
It is for this reason that in our project -'Space, Place and the Virtual University' we have focused on the development and implementation of these systems, as well as more conventional technology-supported distance education.
Indeed, as we see it, the model of the university set down by these management and administration systems will underpin future developments in online learning and distance education technologies.
It is these management or administrative computer systems which may be able, by clarifying and making explicit the various roles and responsibilities within the university, to facilitate the complex process of enrolling the various actors required to implement online learning and distance education technologies.
While we think that this standardisation is, in itself, not necessarily a bad thing, there are some possible dangers.
To paraphrase the words of the sociologist, Phil Agre, the problems begin when we standardise the 'wrong thing'[5]http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~ics/ed/agre.html[)].
In this respect, when replacing the administrative apparatus, we risk destroying or submerging those interactions that are tacit, informal, flexible the very processes that might, for instance, offer important forms of support to students.
Just how might a student ask for an extension on the payment of a late rent bill?
Is this simply a matter of 'functionality' just waiting to be built into the system?
Might cases that do not quite fit be supported since we are now talking about computer systems and their users by the increasingly ubiquitous 'help desk'.
Alternatively, will these 'non-standard' requests simply fall between the inevitable cracks in the system?
It is, of course, very easy to get it wrong.
There are no adequate models to account for how an organisation as complex as a university is able to function.
Here, we are reminded of the story told by the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern of how a group of consultants, after an academic audit of Cambridge University, complained of the 'protean nature' of the University, and of how its academic structure and system of governance could not be captured by their 'managerial language' or 'organisational models'[6].
The University of Cambridge, it appeared, worked in practice but not in theory.
We should then be wary of the models (or visions) that we adopt and pay close attention not only to what is 'standardised into' the university but also that which is 'standardised out' of it.
The key issue, then, is whether these centralised computer systems the MIS and ERP which are reshaping the institution of the university will work as well in practice as they do in theory.
References [1] Cunningham, S., Tapsall, S., Ryan, Y., Stedman, L., et al.
(1998), New media and Borderless Education: A review of the Convergence between Global Media Networks and Higher Education Provision, Australian Government, Department of Employment, Education, training and Youth Affairs, Evaluations and Investigations Programme, Higher Education Division (http://www.deetya.gov.au/highered/eippubs/eip97-22/eip9722.pdf).
[2] Newby, H. (1999), 'Higher Education in the 21st Century: Some Possible Futures', Discussion Paper, CVCP, London, March.
[3] Goddard, A, D. and Gayward, P, H. (1994) 'MAC and the Oracle Family: Achievements and Lessons Learnt', Axix 1 (1): 45-50.
[4] Pollock, N. (forthcoming), 'The virtual university as 'timely and accurate information'', Information Communication & Society.
[5] Agre, P (1999), 'Infrastructure and institutional change in the Networked University', paper prepared for the conference on New Media and Higher Education, University of Southern California, October 23-27 (available at http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~ics/ed/agre.html).
[6] Strathern, M. (1997), '"Improving Ratings": Audit in the British University System', European Review, 5, 3: 305-321.
Author Details   Dr Neil Pollock is a Research Associate, and James Cornford is a Senior Research Associate, at the Centre for Urban & Regional Development Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU.
Telephone +44 (0)191 2225876.
Email: Neil.Pollock@newcastle.ac.uk.
More information on the 'Space, Place and the Virtual University' project can be found at www.brunel.ac.uk/research/virtsoc.
Article Title: "Theory and Practice of the Virtual University" Author: Neil Pollock & James Cornford Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/virtual-universities/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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AGORA: The Hybrid Library from a User's Perspective Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines AGORA: The Hybrid Library from a User's Perspective Buzz data software database xml metadata thesaurus schema repositories cataloguing dtd z39.50 rslp url research Citation BibTex RIS Bridget Robinson and David Palmer look at the Agora user studies.
Agora is one of the five Hybrid Library Projects that began in January 1998, forming part of phase 3 of the elib programme investigating issues surrounding the integration of digital and traditional library resources.
It is a consortium-based project, led by the University of East Anglia; partners are UKOLN [1], Fretwell Downing Informatics and CERLIM (the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management).
The project also works with several associate groups: libraries, service providers and systems developers.
The initial six months of the project concentrated on the development of a prototype HLMS (Hybrid Library Management System) based on Fretwell Downings VDX software.
The prototype was evaluated and the results fed into the system definition for the first "real" HLMS which emerged in the spring of 1999.
The document lays out the Agora vision of the HLMS, most explicitly in the requirements catalogue, which sets out over 145 detailed requirements.
[2] Prioritisation of these requirements was undertaken by the library associates and project staff to determine the functions to be included in Release 1 of Agora and those to be included in the later Release 2 version [3].
Once Release 1 had undergone compliance testing in the autumn of 1999, it was installed at the library associate sites ready for the next phase of the project the undertaking of case studies.
This article will look at the main focus of the case studies, summarise the results and evaluate how this work can be used to inform the future direction of the project and the ongoing development of the Hybrid Library concept.
Case Studies The case study proposals were submitted to the Agora Board in May 2000 and were accepted in principle at that stage.
Further progress and planning was aligned with both the training requirements of the library associates and the installation of a fully configured server at each of the case study sites.
Case Studies were to be undertaken at the four library associate sites, with a fifth study to be carried out by UKOLN, at the University of Bath.
The case studies were seen as a change of focus from the previous work of the project, moving away from a technology focus and towards a process and policy focus a human approach designed to inform the wider community of the reality of the hybrid library.
Four case studies took place in August-September 2000 and used the first release of the Agora HLMS.
University of East Anglia had some technical difficulties so delayed the start of their study until late September.
This resulted in UEA being able to migrate their case study to Agora Release 2.
Methodology Similar methodology was used across the case studies.
All the studies gathered data by way of a questionnaire.
The same basic questionnaire type was used by most with the addition of specific questions relevant to each associate site.
All the sites offered some form of introductory/training session, although the number, length and complexity of these sessions was determined locally.
Additional qualitative data was gathered using follow-up interviews and in one case the use of journals for interlending staff.
All users participating in the study were supplied with system documentation.
This documentation was prepared locally to meet the needs of the specific case study.
The case studies were varied in nature concentrating on users from a variety of different groups: Professional and paraprofessional library staff Academic and faculty staff Postgraduates/research students Distance Learners No undergraduates were able to participate as the studies took place during the summer vacation.
Case study results The case studies covered four major issues; the creation and use of landscapes, the utility of collection level descriptions as resource metadata, user reaction to, and use of, cross-domain searching, and the use of interlending as a document delivery mechanism within the system.
The case study process and experience also threw up some findings with regard to the possible implementation of such systems and the conduct of any further case studies.
Landscapes The concept of information landscapes is integral to the Agora HLMS.
The term is used to describe a way of presenting different views of information resources to users according to their interests and needs.
Evaluation of Release 1 by the library associates and the compliance testing process had revealed significant shortcomings in the interface to the system, particularly in relation to the creation and use of landscapes.
Whilst these shortcomings hindered comprehension and use, the associates were confident that users would be able to provide some evaluation of both the functionality and the appearance of the system as a whole.
The ultimate goal of the studies was to provide feedback on how the hybrid library concept worked in a library environment.
The case studies examined a number of different landscape options; A single pre-configured landscape put together to reflect the perceived user group requirements e.g.
subject specialisation.
A range of pre-configured landscapes Access to all resources with the ability for individual landscape creation All the case studies received feedback about the landscape function, and several common themes emerged.
Firstly, there was confusion about the meaning of the term landscape.
Users did not feel the functionality matched their conception of the term and that the term could be misleading.
Secondly, all users, be they professional librarians or students, found the landscape function over-complex and difficult to understand.
But, despite misgivings about the actual functionality, there was a general acceptance that with training, documentation, and extensive help within the system, landscapes could be more relevant and useful, particularly in the area of making users aware of new or undiscovered resources.
Landscapes were also seen as an important means of introducing users to a subject by exposing them to a wide array of resources, albeit at a shallow depth.
Thirdly, all agreed that more research needs to be undertaken to ascertain how best to describe the concept of grouping information in this way and how landscapes are used by different user groups.
Collection Level Descriptions In order to provide information landscaping it is necessary to match information about users, against information about resources.
This is done by surrounding the landscapes with descriptive metadata; Collection Level Descriptions which facilitate the discovery and organization of resources.
There were 58 CLDs in Agora Release 1 one CLD for each of the available resources which included catalogues (internet and library), subject gateways, commercial databases and other mixed media.
Reaction to CLDs was mixed.
It was acknowledged that CLDs were useful as a way of learning more about unfamiliar resources.and in assessing their relevance for inclusion in different landscapes.
However, there was a consensus that more work will need to be done to enrich the CLD content to provide more information about the different collections.
Further enhancement and refinement of the controlled language to aid searching is also felt necessary with special mention being made of the lack of a developed subject schema.
This conclusion tallies with a recent Dlib paper [4] authored by eLib project staff in which it was acknowledged that "use of controlled language," was one of the areas that would need to be addressed.
It is hoped that the RSLP and JISC-funded HILT (High-Level Thesaurus) project [5], in which Agora is a stakeholder, will provide a set of recommendations to facilitate cross searching by subject.
Cross-Domain searching There can be no doubt that the principle of cross-domain searching was proved in the use of Release 1 of Agora.
Users were pleased with the ability of the system to provide images, bibliographic records, URLs and full text.
However, the success or failure of searching was dependent on the construction of suitable landscapes and on the quality and reliability of the resources within the landscapes.
Large collections of unfocussed, poor quality resources inevitably led to numerous marginally relevant results.
There was some evidence that research students were happy with the wide range of resources accessed, but library staff members were more demanding in their requirements, wanting to create smaller landscapes of similar resources.
Cross-domain searching across a number of resources had the effect of highlighting the resources that were returning errors or were unavailable.
Continual error messages were disappointing for users and had a detrimental effect on their confidence in a particular resource.
This demonstrated how important it is for the Service Providers to keep all users of their systems up to date with planned downtime, changes in IP address or data structure, so that any interruption in supply can be minimised.
Ensuring that the ‘right’ resources are available proved to be as important as ensuring the reliability of the resources within the system.
Both in the context of discussions regarding landscapes and searching effectiveness, participants noted resources they wish to have added in order to make the concept and operation of the system as a whole more acceptable.
Regardless of the utility of landscaping, searching and delivery of results, lack of appropriate resources was seen as a significant disincentive to use of any HLMS.
Interlibrary Loans The integration of discovery and searching functionality with request and delivery functionality is a major step forward in the seamless integration of interlending as a delivery mechanism within the Agora HMLS.
Interlending requests can be generated by the completion of a blank request form within the interface or can be generated as a result of selection from a search hit list.
When this functionality was tested in a case study scenario it was reported as being easy to use and an improvement on the institutions own manual ILL system.
In fact it was interesting to note that users felt that the integration of search and locate with request and deliver was a natural progression.
They did not see interlending as a separate function from other forms of document delivery although most library organisational structures make this distinction.
In this sense the users readily accepted the hybridity that Agora offered.
Both users and administrators of ILL approved this integrated approach but felt that more work needed to be done to make the system ready for operational use.
Proper and extensive training on, and use of, the system were seen as crucial.
Process In carrying out the case studies, the Library Associates and Project staff also gleaned information about possible issues in the implementation of such systems and for the conduct of future case studies.
Perhaps the most important lesson in both cases is to have a stable system.
Whilst it is in the nature of new systems to have ‘teething’ problems, the unreliability of resources and problems with the system itself (both in local configuration and functionality) served to inhibit the gathering of results for the intended purposes of the case studies, even where a ‘negative’ result was deemed acceptable.
More importantly for the future of the HLMS, these difficulties proved to be a disincentive to use of the system, both within the case study itself and in regards potential future use.
Another, related lesson, was that proper configuration of the system is essential.
Whilst in some instances, such as the UEA case study, changes in the underlying software could not be anticipated, in most, proper time for configuration did exist.
The difficulty was the lack of training and knowledge on site to deal with local configurations and the need to rely on ‘bug-fixing’ at a distance.
Either more knowledge is required at each site, or future implementations might need to consider remote database installation and administration at the source of the system expertise.
Another issue was the extent of configuration required.
Agora/VDX is a complex, highly integrated system and requires a great deal of configuration.
Within a project , adequate resources to achieve such configuration are difficult to find therefore more time, if not resource, needs to be set aside for configuration within that context.
In an implementation scenario, one would assume that the commercial provider would be able to provide more assistance than was available within the current project.
Conclusions The case studies, though somewhat limited in time and scope, have provided valuable information about the way in which users have interacted with the Agora HLMS.
It has given the project team a chance to step back and reflect on the progress made so far and has offered a sense of direction for the work still to be done to define what the community requires from a hybrid library system.
A number of conclusions can be drawn.
Landscapes are a crucial part of the building blocks for the HLMS, however have proven difficult to explain to users.
There is an underlying assumption that users will know and understand the language that is being used, the reality is quite different.
This is a training and documentation issue, as well as a language issue the terms that are to be used in any hybrid library system must have a broad acceptance across library and user communities.
Users approach their information requirements from a range of different perspectives, expectations and experiences and, the success of any future HLMS system will depend on it being made understandable across the range of user types and user experiences.
One way to manage this variety of users and expectations is to by setting up a range of pre-defined interfaces offering different iterations of the HLMS specific to the needs of different groups.
This was successfully done in the case studies with the setting up of pre-defined landscapes.
It should also be noted that Agora Release 2 offers more sophisticated landscape options, allowing for the creation of group landscapes for differing user groups (eg.
in HE, faculties, different student groups, academic staff, tutorial groups).
This will help to simplify the perceived complexity of landscapes by offering simple default landscapes for the more naïve user or the full power of the functionality to the more expert user.
There are no firm conclusions to be drawn from the use of CLD's in the Agora HLMS.
However, there is evidence to indicate that CLDs need to be fuller and richer, providing more detailed information about each separate resource, and enhancing searching across CLDs for the purpose of resource discovery.
It may also be possible to place service availability information in the CLDs.
Users were enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by cross-domain searching and were generally pleased with the resources available.
However, users clearly identified additional resources that they would like to see incorporated in any future iteration of the hybrid library.
Prominent amongst these resources were internet search engines and commercial booksellers.
Development work by Fretwell Downing has now moved this forward so that non-z39.50 targets can be added including services such as Amazon and Alta Vista.
Ensuring that resources are high quality, reliable and the resources most needed, is crucial to the success of any HLMS, particularly as number of resources available increases.
In regards the maintenance of resources, there needs to be a structure in place to ensure that the HLMS is aware of all pertinent changes to access details.
This can be accomplished in a number of ways; all service providers could provide regular updates to any changes in their access details; the system could ‘poll’ supplier data; or there could be an agreed central repository of access data for consultation.
UKOLN's Z-directory is an example of a centralised directory of Z39.50 targets in the UK and has links to similar initiatives in other countries.
UKOLN plan to expose the configuration information contained in the directory using XML and the Explain-Lite DTD, which will allow Z39.50 brokers (and other clients) to configure themselves automatically.
In the future, it is anticipated that there will be a DNER service description service, either bundled with or complementary to a DNER collection description service, that will provide a similar function across the DNER.
[6] The examination of interlending offered evidence that users are very amenable to the further integration of document delivery with the discovery and searching of resources.
Indeed, most see interlending as merely another mode of document delivery to be chosen from a suite of options.
Certainly, even the basic interlending functionality offered to users within Agora was felt to be superior to current systems.
Interlending staff, however, added a note of caution, noting that the system as configured for the case study was incapable of supporting operational interlending despite its obvious potential.
In short, the users approved but some ‘plumbing’ needs to be done to render the system operational.
In all, the case studies showed that the users of library systems have embraced the concept of the hybrid library and are ready for an operational HLMS.
The problems seem to be, not so much rejection of the idea of the HLMS, but rather impatience that present systems, including Agora, cannot deliver the vision that the users themselves already possess.
In this regard, the evidence of these case studies offers the library community both hope for the future of the HLMS and a challenge to meet.
References [1] UKOLN UK Office for Library & Information Networking: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/> [2] The Agora system specification is available at http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora/documents/documents.html [3] Library Associates were: University of East Anglia, University of Hull, Heriot-Watt University and Bath Spa University College.
[4] Dr E.V.
Brack, David Palmer and Bridget Robinson "Collection Level Description the RIDING and Agora Experience" D-Lib Magazine September 2000 Volume 6 Number 9 http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/september00/09contents.html [5] HILT (High Level Thesaurus Project ): http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ [6] Z-Directory http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/zdir/ Author Details   David Palmer Assistant Librarian University of East Anglia David.Palmer@uea.ac.uk Bridget Robinson Agora Communications Coordinator UKOLN (UK Office for Library & Information Networking) b.r.robinson@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Agora: the hybrid library from a users perspective" Author: David Palmer and Bridget Robinson Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/case-studies/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Information Landscapes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Information Landscapes Buzz data database archives metadata repositories cataloguing multimedia z39.50 research Citation BibTex RIS Rosemary Russell, Sally Criddle and Sarah Ormes report on the UKOLN conference held in June 1998.
The third UKOLN conference in the series Networking and the future of libraries was held at the University of Bath, 29 June-1 July.
There were around 240 delegates, nearly a third of whom were from overseas.
Its central theme was the construction of information and learning landscapes.
The programme ranged from the exploration of distributed library architectures now being developed, to future gazing with the help of some visionary speakers.
The conference was opened by Brian Lang of The British Library, who welcomed the delegates to Bath.
The opening keynote address was then given by Richard Heseltine, University of Hull.
His multimedia paper saw the future of libraries not as ‘digital libraries’ but facilitators in an ‘information landscape’.
Library users will no longer compartmentalise their information needs into specific areas e.g.
work, study, leisure and expect to have to use different resources and services to fulfil each need.
These users will want to operate in a seamless information landscape which allows them access to electronic information and resources from a single interface.
Libraries need to come to terms with these new user needs and their new educational demands.
The first session addressed Information architectures: constructing the digital library and was chaired by Lynne Brindley of the University of Leeds.
Perhaps suitably, the first paper, on Moving to distributed environments for library services, was presented by Lorcan Dempsey of UKOLN.
The current situation was sketched, where information services exist as unconnected islands and users face a variety of problems in separately accessing heterogeneous resources.
The adoption of ‘broker’ architectures has been identified as one way of providing an integrated, managed service.
The MODELS Information Architecture approach is not library-specific, having equal relevance for archives and museum services.
Recognising that research is increasingly inter-disciplinary, Dan Greenstein of the Arts and Humanities Data Service then described their broker implementation which will provide integrated discovery, delivery and use, for five diverse services.
The ‘gateway’ service is based on the use of Dublin Core (for mapping local attributes to a common set) and Z39.50; even so, some unexpected search results can be returned, due to differing practices.
Delegates were privileged to see one of the first demonstrations of the working service.
Mike Stapleton of System Simulation provided a view of architecture developments in the museums world, where ownership of resources can be problematic.
Similarly to other domains, common semantics are an issue.
A number of the required technical building blocks are now in place (eg database repositories, gateways, brokers, protocols), but sound project management is recognised as a key enabler in networking cultural heritage services.
Finally David Kay of Fretwell-Downing Informatics looked at their experiences of implementing a general architecture in multiple domains.
The most important lesson learnt is that metadata is king!
The idea of ‘repurposing’ information to serve different needs was introduced.
There is an overall ‘big picture’ that needs to be addressed, but while a number of programmes and bodies are taking this forward (e.g.
eLib Phase 3, WC3, IMS) individual services must ‘think global, act local’, since the issues are too broad for any single group to resolve.
Session 2, Information landscapes: the accommodation of knowledge, was chaired by Bruce Royan of SCRAN.
Peter Lyman of the University of California Berkeley pointed out that landscapes may devolve into wildernesses, and vice versa.
The distinguishing feature of a landscape, is its sense of place; the challenge is to create this in libraries, by harnessing both technical and social architectures.
We should abandon the concept of user, in favour of learner; the focus should be on fostering ‘communities of learners’, since the creation of knowledge happens within groups, and not via individuals.
Hilary Hammond from Norfolk County Council discussed regional and cross-sectoral cooperation, in the context of non-traditional entry to HE, and the resulting increased demand for learning resources.
Partnership is seen as vital for building the required information landscape and involves public, HE and FE libraries, as well as archives and other information repositories.
Ray Lester of the Natural History Museum looked at the question of who is in command.
A variety of network architectures exist, since there is no-one directing strategic development, either within communities, or amongst funders.
It was argued that ‘leaving well alone’ is not advisable – the panoply of access and management issues will not solve themselves: a commander is needed.
The final landscapes paper was presented by Cris Woolston of the University of Hull, using film clips to illustrate the challenges to be addressed in creating learning environments.
He maintained that if emerging networked ‘places’ are to support rich learning experiences, then they must be designed, organised and managed in ways that make users comfortable.
HE currently only addresses reflective learning styles and not active.
Session 3, Information and the public sphere: an informed citizen, chaired by Chris Batt, the Director of Leisure Services for Croydon, moved the debate into the public library sector.
In his paper Floods won’t build bridges: rich networks, poor citizens and the role of public libraries, Andrew Blau, from the Benton Foundation in the US, argued that in a richly networked society the existing ordered information world will become re-chaosised resulting in a changing public sphere.
The traditional stable relationships between information providers and users will be undermined and new forms of social organisation will necessarily emerge.
In, Up hill and down dale: citizens, government and the public library, John Dolan, Birmingham Central Library suggested that new technology could assist in democratic renewal by making government more accessible and recognised the potential for public libraries to shape the communities they serve.
Having described the present distributed system of the national archive, Sarah Tyacke of the Public Record Office, in her paper Everybody’s Archives?
went on to describe how the PRO are taking advantage of technical and organisational developments to repurpose their service to meet future anticipated needs of both their present users and potential users.
In Joined-up thinking: strategic partnerships for lifelong learning, Andrew McDonald, University of Sunderland, provided a practical happening example of the successful cross sector partnerships between the University, City College and public library in Sunderland ‘a learning city’.
That this project was a success despite having to overcome many difficulties relied to a great extent on the attitudes of those involved.
They learnt to think ‘learner’ not library, an attitude of ‘just do it’ and ‘don’t look and wait for perfection’, prevailed.
Bob Fryer, the Northern College and Chair of the Government’s National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Life long Learning, presented the range of challenges that we face if we are truly to enter the learning age in Creating the learning age: challenges and opportunities.
He urged us to regard learning as truly lifelong, and not neglect the pre-16 or post-55 population or those that are not in paid employment but contribute to society by working, for example, in the community or voluntary sector or as carers.
He challenged us to produce reality not rhetoric.
The final session of the conference started with an exploration of the current issues that need to be addressed to ensure that library staff are trained to meet these new challenges.
The session was chaired by Monika Segbert, The British Council and DG XIII European Commission, and included papers by Lars Børnshauge, Technical Knowledge Centre of Denmark, Biddy Fisher, Sheffield Hallam University and Grace Kempster, Essex County Council.
Libraries will need to reassess both the roles of their staff and the way in which they provide their services.
There will need to be a greater emphasis on taking learning out to the user and ensuring that staff are prepared to meet the needs of lifelong learners.
Public libraries, it was suggested, will soon become the institution of choice for the general public for access to learning and education.
The final session of the conference was chaired by Richard Heseltine and looked to the future of libraries in this area.
David Bearman, Archives and Museum Informatics explored some of the issues involved with developing one-stop access to cultural resources currently held in institutions with different collection, provision and cataloguing traditions.
By developing an electronic common ground that could negotiate these differences it would allow our fractured cultural memory to be electronically unified.
The following paper by Frank Webster, Professor of Sociology at Oxford Brookes University was somewhat controversial.
He debunked the notion that the development of the ‘New Library’ would lead to a more democratic society.
He pointed to the lessons to be learnt from the early days of television and radio when they too were expected to lead to a more democratic society through public access to greater information.
He called for public librarians to assess the information value of the Internet carefully and wondered whether a more useful information source was not simply government institutions.
Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information presented the closing keynote address which looked at libraries as mediators in the digital culture.
He argued that ecologies, rather than landscapes, are more characteristic of the information world; a rich ecology or landscape is populated not just with resources, but also with business interests.
Strong expectations about information include the ability to ‘repurpose’ it and use without being tracked.
He suggested that there could be a higher degree of referral in future between libraries and commercial services such as bookshops – e.g.
if a user discovered an item of interest in a catalogue, they could be offered the opportunity to purchase it from an online bookshop (with some remuneration for the library as a result).
Services could be converged in novel ways, taking advantage of synergies.
A civic reception was held at the Roman Baths on the second evening, followed by the conference dinner at the Guildhall a very enjoyable evening, despite certain parallel World Cup events… Author Details Rosemary Russell MODELS Project Manager, UKOLN Email: r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk   Sarah Ormes Public Libraries Officer,UKOLN Email: lisslo@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 826711   Sally Criddle Resource Co-ordinator, UKOLN Email: s.criddle@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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After the Big Bang: The Forces of Change and E-Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines After the Big Bang: The Forces of Change and E-Learning Buzz data software framework portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation repositories copyright video cataloguing multimedia e-learning ebook licence interoperability privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Pete Johnston examines what recent developments in the area of "e-learning" might mean for the custodians of the information resources required to support teaching and learning.
After the Big Bang In her presentation to the JISC Technology Watch seminar in February, Dr Diana Oblinger of the University of North Carolina employed the metaphor of "the Big Bang" to characterise the impact of recent and ongoing rapid technological, social and economic change [1].
The last five years have witnessed major shifts in the way the commercial sector markets and delivers its products and services, and the results of those changes are only beginning to "coalesce" into recognisable patterns.
The emergence of the "dot com" sector businesses interacting with their markets primarily via the Web has brought with it challenges to the expectations associated with "traditional" business models.
Those same forces of change are making themselves felt in the education sector, creating not only new means of delivering teaching and training but also a constituency of potential learners with new requirements and new constraints on the way they meet their learning needs.
The message of the Technology Watch seminar was that UK Higher and Further Education institutions as providers of teaching services face the challenge of adapting to this new environment or watching as learners choose to meet their needs through other providers whom they perceive as having adapted better.
And just as "e-commerce" has challenged basic principles about the nature of business, the impact of "e-learning" may raise questions to established assumptions about the provision of teaching.
Much discussion of the area of "e-learning" has focused on the impact on the teacher and the learner.
What of its possible effects on the information managers librarians, but also archivists and museum curators who provide vital support for the teaching and learning process?
What role might these groups play in "e-learning" projects, and how might the growth of "e-learning" affect their work?
The forces of change and the "e-university" Developments in information and communications technology have made powerful computing tools available to a large sector of the population, and software applications can harness that processing power to the requirements of teaching and learning.
The expansion of communications networks, and particularly the prospect of cheaper, faster Internet connections for the UK home computer user, is providing a means for large numbers of people to access information over distance.
The increase in the range of devices used to access those information resources promises a growth in the functionality that can be delivered to the user by software applications.
These technological developments have, of course, had impacts on working practices beyond the education sector.
The continuing pace of change dictates that people must engage in continuing learning in order to gain the knowledge and skills required to remain employable, which may require updating existing skills or re-training for new career areas.
Increasingly such learning must be accommodated within patterns of work which demand flexible working hours and geographical mobility.
Such social change has inspired political demands for increased access to further and higher education, leading to a rapid increase in the size and diversity of the learner community.
At the same time, the economic model for higher education in the UK has shifted towards one in which the learner or their family more directly meets the costs of learning, through fees and/or student loans.
And since they are more conscious of meeting those costs, learners are taking greater responsibility for the construction of their own learning programmes, and are developing higher expectations of being able to find and choose courses which meet their own specific learning needs, in a form which suits their own context.
It is against this background that UK government initiatives such as the People’s Network [2], the National Grid for Learning [4] have emerged to provide some of the infrastructure (and the content) required to support "lifelong learning".
Technological advance is driving modernisation and creating new and increased demands for learning outside the UK too, and such changes are being felt in many countries from which UK HE institutions have traditionally recruited students.
However, there is increasing competition to provide teaching to this large (and growing) and valuable market of learner-customers, not only amongst established educational institutions.
Companies are implementing programmes to provide for their own staff development and new commercial enterprises are appearing to meet the new demand for education.
Other sources such as broadcasters and publishers, who have previously contributed to the educational function, now see opportunities to take a more direct role in the provision of learning resources.
Many of these ventures are adopting an approach based primarily or exclusively on virtual distance learning or "e-learning", using the capabilities made available by the new technologies to deliver learning resources to a globally distributed learner community via the Web.
They are targeting the entire spectrum of learners by supplying teaching ranging from postgraduate-level business education to short practical or leisure-related courses.
In the US, some private providers have developed powerful brand images by creating partnerships with leading universities, with the universities providing high quality content for the learning resources and the commercial partners providing the technical and commercial infrastructure for delivery.
In the UK, the HEFCE proposal for the creation of an "e-university" is a direct response to the threat posed by these new corporate and virtual universities to UK HE/FE institutions’ ability to sustain recruitment both of overseas students and of UK-based students seeking "continuing professional development" (CPD) and vocational qualifications [5].
It is also shaped by a recognition that traditional methods of teaching provision are unlikely to be able to meet the growing demand.
The proposed "business model" for the e-university [6] is that of a "facilitator" organisation or Application Service Provider (ASP) whose function is to support the development of learning resources created by educational institutions and other providers, and the delivery of those resources on a fee-paying basis to individual learner-consumers and to institutional users.
These materials would be provided as self-contained blocks with embedded tutorial and self-assessment features so that they are usable with minimum external support.
A "Committee for Academic Quality" [7] would evaluate all proposed materials, and a "navigator" function [8] would advise learners on the selection of resources and the construction of a coherent learning programme.
Information resources for learning For the student of the physical university, the primary source of the information resources used to support the learning process has traditionally been the university library.
For some subject areas, the learner’s requirements may extend to the use of other repositories: archives of historical records and special collections or manuscript libraries; the non-textual resources of museums, galleries and other multimedia collections; and data archives of primary qualitative data (historical, archaeological, scientific etc).
The resources held by such repositories are managed: their custodians select and acquire items; they ensure that they are appropriately stored, protected and conserved; and they make them accessible to users, typically by evaluating and describing resources promoting the existence of the resources and disseminating descriptive information about them providing tools to navigate complex or aggregated descriptions and giving training in the use of those tools assisting users in the interpretation of resources In some cases, demands for access must be balanced against restrictions imposed on the use of the resource, because of commercial licensing constraints, or considerations of privacy and confidentiality, or the physical characteristics of the resource.
Further, the archivist, museum curator and manuscript librarian vouch for the integrity and authenticity of the resources in their care.
The information manager is seen as an intermediary who performs an important quality control function.
In the context of support for learning, this quality control is manifested in co-operation between the librarian and the teaching staff in the selection and description of resources and the control of access to those resources.
The acquisitions policy of a university library is developed in conjunction with the interests of the teaching and research staff, and at a more tactical level, a librarian acquires multiple copies of "key" texts on academic reading lists and places lending restrictions on high-demand items.
For the librarian at least, the resources to which users seek access are increasingly digital resources, and there has been a shift from managing the physical ownership of resources to managing access to shared digital resources, often under the terms of a commercial licence.
This may extend to managing the access technologies such as e-Book readers [9].
The provision of quality control of resources, however, is more important than ever in the Web context, where the user requires guidance in the effective and efficient discovery and evaluation of relevant, high quality materials.
For the most part, the resources acquired and conserved by archivists, museum and gallery curators, and manuscript librarians continue to be unique physical objects.
Their custodians do, however, make use of digital channels to promote the existence of these resources and provide wider access to descriptions of the objects.
Increasingly, they make available digital surrogates of the originals.
Some of the resources coming into their care are now "born-digital": created and managed in digital form.
Qualitative data resources are almost exclusively digital.
How do these "traditional" management functions of acquiring resources, protecting them, and making them available to users fit within the requirements of e-learning initiatives?
Their relevance in the context of virtual learning depends on the nature, range and depth of the information resources to which learners require access, and this in turn depends on the nature of the learning model.
Models of learning and resource requirements The e-university business model document presents a high-level view of how "learning materials" might be designed, constructed and delivered to its students [10], including the provision of tutorial support.
However, it has relatively little to say about how learners subscribing to an e-university course might find and access the wider range of information resources which do not contribute directly to the learning objectives of a course, but which serve to broaden a learner’s knowledge of a subject [11].
Problem-oriented learning Some professional or vocational training has adopted a problem-oriented model of teaching and learning.
The units of learning to which a learner subscribes tend to be small and specific, and the learning objectives can be met with little or no reference to other resources.
If reference materials are required, their number and extent may be sufficiently limited that they can be incorporated within a "course-pack" which also contains embedded exercises for self-assessment.
However, there are hurdles to be overcome in implementing such a model by exclusively digital means.
Many publishers remain reluctant to permit the reuse of materials in this way or levy high charges for the right to do so [12].
They may be more willing to grant permissions for the use of their material in paper coursepacks.
The e-university’s projected model of a multi-provider "facilitator" reflects the functional separation seen in other e-learning initiatives between an agent responsible for the framework for delivery of learning materials to learners and those agents creating and supplying the learning materials themselves.
The ability of such delivery agencies to secure discounts or economies of scale in this area might be significant.
It may also be true that the expectations associated with the e-learning context make it easier to pass on these costs to the learner.
Many of the examples of successful private sector providers of e-learning are from subject areas that lend themselves to the problem-based approach.
For example, the Cardean University [13] concentrates on delivering high quality business/management courses, with the content provided by leading US universities; IT-related courses are also popular targets for virtual delivery.
It might be argued that the problem-oriented model translates well to a virtual learning environment precisely because it presents little requirement for learner access to an extended resource base.
The university approach to learning Increasingly, the problem-based approach does form part of the teaching repertoire within the physical university.
This reflects both a shift in approaches to teaching, inspired in part by the new functionality made available by technological developments, and also a necessary strategy for managing the expansion in student numbers and the demand to support more distance learning and part-time students.
However, it remains only a part of a model which continues to emphasise learning through a combination of formal lectures and interaction with other learners and with the teacher.
One of the aims of that interaction is to stimulate the learner to think beyond the "core" content of lectures and key texts and to reflect critically on it.
The notion of "reading around the subject" is vital to this process.
Through access to an extended information resource base, which includes resources not created specifically as learning materials, the learner is able to broaden and deepen their knowledge of a topic.
They encounter the conflicting viewpoints and debates that foster the development of a critical perspective, and they are stimulated to develop and pursue their own areas of investigation.
As noted above, for the student of the physical university, that resource has been provided primarily through the services of the university library, both through immediate access to its own holdings and to bibliographic resources describing materials elsewhere and the services such as inter-library loan and document supply which facilitate access to those external resources.
An increasing proportion of those resources both the content and the discovery materials is made available digitally.
However, the provision in digital form of an extended resource base of equivalent scope, currency and quality to that of the sector’s physical libraries (and other repositories) is one of the major challenges facing e-learning in general and the proposed UK e-university in particular.
E-libraries for e-universities?
Writing in the Guardian, Tim O’Shea emphasises that "great universities have extensive libraries" and that the e-university must be no exception [14].
The e-university business model document notes recent developments in commercial provision of access to digital texts (e.g.
Questia, netLibrary, ebrary) [15].
It is certain that these ventures will expand and will be joined by others.
However, they remain limited in the range and depth of their coverage because they rely on agreements with a limited number of publishers for permission to offer digital content.
The position is rather better for academic journals, where publishers have been more willing to provide digital access and there are established agreements with teaching institutions.
However, SCONUL’s discussion paper on the e-university is in little doubt: Replicating the richness and depth of even the less well founded academic libraries in virtual form is currently an impossibility in most disciplines.
There is, as yet, no virtual substitute for a real university library [16].
So, it seems unlikely that reliance on an exclusively digital information resource base could deliver the learning objectives which a traditional university course attempts to meet.
The depth and quality of coverage necessary would require some form of access to the holdings of existing physical libraries, probably to the holdings of university and college libraries.
It is conceivable that a venture such as the e-university could broker collaborative "common access" agreements amongst the course provider institutions within the HE sector, so that a learner has access to the library of an institution which is geographically close even if that institution is not providing the learner’s course of study.
For learners who are geographically distant from such an academic library, it may be possible to provide access to those resources through local public libraries, via an enhanced inter-library loan and document delivery service.
However, this will not meet the requirements of all learners.
There is clearly a problem of differential levels of access depending on the learner’s geographical location, which would translate into additional costs for the learner if, for example, a large number of inter-library loans were required.
The requirement for access to non-digital resources may be particularly disadvantageous for overseas students one of the target learner groups for the e-university who are likely to be located in areas outside the scope of any inter-institutional access agreements.
Looking beyond the published textual resources held by libraries to the holdings of special collections/manuscript libraries, archives, galleries and museums, the challenge of physical access is more significant.
Access to these unique physical resources is restricted to environments where it can be controlled and monitored by their custodians, usually within the repositories where the resources are stored.
Furthermore these classes of resource are typically those for which users rely on high levels of guidance and interpretation from their custodians.
While access to physical resources seems highly desirable in many cases, it is certainly true that access to a digital resource base of both textual and non-textual materials will be central to the success of e-learning initiatives.
Building the e-libraries With specific reference to the e-university, the SCONUL discussion paper offers three possible options for library service provision, which might be generalised to the context of other e-learning initiatives intending to deliver education at a similar level: a laissez-faire model in which learners are left to meet their requirements from their own selection of commercial providers.
This raises the problems of the present limited coverage and a lack of quality control.
an expectation that the course provider would provide access to the supporting information resources.
However, increasingly, there is a separation between the agency delivering e-learning and the agency providing the content of learning materials.
Further a course provider institution may be equipped to provide those resources on campus, but less able to deliver them to a virtual learner community.
an "e-library" which is integrated and presented to learners within the delivery framework, so that learners studying several different courses (possibly from different providers) have a single point of access (while allowing for the fact that the content of that resource base may be distributed over networks) Like its physical counterparts, such an e-library would have the responsibility of acquiring resources, or acquiring rights of access to resources held by third parties, and providing the tools to enable effective access to and use of those resources.
Furthermore, if e-learning initiatives are to offer access to the range of courses offered by the physical university then their "e-libraries" should aspire to be virtual repositories which extend their range to include the other classes of unpublished and non-textual resource held by archives, museums and galleries.
If e-learning is successful, it is likely that all of these resources will be used more frequently, by a wider range of learners and teachers, and in a broader range of contexts than their creators, publishers and custodians had anticipated.
The e-learning context brings with it the demand for flexibility and the ability to reuse, to "mix and match", across boundaries of media, provider, subject area.
Acquiring content For published printed materials, the major obstacles to the acquisition of digital content lie in the area of copyright and licensing, and how to meet the royalty costs associated with permissions to digitise, particularly when this is extended from textual materials into audio and video resources.
Where agreements are given, they are accompanied by restrictions on the access to and the use of the materials.
The experience of services such as Higher Education Resources On-demand (HERON) [17], which emerged from an eLib project and which seeks copyright clearance on behalf of the HE community and currently provides a resource bank of reusable materials, would be valuable to the e-university.
For unpublished content, which will include some of the other classes of resource mentioned above, the UK learning community will benefit from the vast pool of new digital resources which are being created by projects funded through the NOF-digitise programme.
Existing projects have already developed such resources.
The Scottish Cultural Resource Action Network (SCRAN) [18], funded by the Millennium Commission, has grant-aided digitisation in exchange for a non-exclusive licence for the educational use of the digital resources.
It has digitised selected parts of collections from the different curatorial domains of museums, galleries, archives and libraries in Scotland, and created extensive descriptive records of those objects.
Indeed, SCRAN is able to make available digitally representations of objects and descriptions of those objects which might not be accessible in the physical museum or gallery because of restrictions on exhibition space.
Providing access The work being carried out under the JISC Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [19] initiative is addressing some of the challenges of providing effective access to such a diverse and distributed resource.
The DNER seeks to integrate access to existing services and resources which may presently have separate points of access (perhaps by subject area, media type, information community, owner institution, individual project etc) so that users can identify, locate and use those resources easily, effectively and consistently.
As an example of what is possible, the existing Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [20] has been successful in providing unified access to a range of distributed, quality-controlled catalogues of internet resources containing descriptions created by, and tailored for, academic subject specialists.
The DNER architecture [21] is designed so that its shared services can be assembled to meet the needs of other information delivery services: if this goal can be realised, then the DNER could make a central contribution to the access infrastructure for the "library" services of a project such as the e-university and of other e-learning initiatives.
As a simple example of how this type of functionality might be provided, the RDN’s "RDN-Include" [22] service allows other web-based information services to embed access to the RDN query system within their own pages.
Furthermore, the DNER recognises that a large proportion of the digital resources developed and made available through previous JISC initiatives has been used primarily for research purposes.
The DNER has the goal of making such resources useful to learners and teachers, as well as to researchers.
The means of achieving this will vary depending on the nature of the resource.
The focus may be on supplementing resource metadata so that it is possible to match learning objectives with the resources available.
This is the model underlying the "curriculum navigator" functions provided by SCRAN and by the access functions of other projects such as the 24-Hour Museum [23] , where resources are classified according to their relevance and usefulness in the teaching of components of the National Curriculum.
Projects may also seek to construct other materials which make the primary resources useful in teaching.
For example, the Collection of Historical and Contemporary Census Data (CHCC) project [24] is seeking to enhance access to census data by creating reusable tutorials and exercises which can be embedded in learning materials and also by improving tools for data extraction and exploration.
The challenge of integration The new emphasis on the learner as the self-directed selecter-purchaser of their own learning materials brings with it the requirement for that learner to be able to identify, evaluate and compare learning materials from different sources and to be able to select and integrate components of those materials to meet their specific needs.
Elsewhere in this issue [25], Paul Miller outlines initiatives being taken to support the learner by removing some of the barriers to this process and encouraging the providers of those learning materials to rationalise their descriptive standards.
Similarly, for the information resources which support those learning materials, a collaborative approach will become increasingly important if the DNER vision of integrated access to those resources is to be realised.
That collaboration will require new levels of co-operation amongst the information mangers from different traditions.
It will also require those information managers to develop and maintain a dialogue with the providers of learning materials a group who in the future may include partners other than the "traditional" providers within academic institutions and with the agencies who provide the frameworks for the delivery of those materials.
Conclusions The age of e-learning is already here.
The interplay of technological developments and socio-economic change which has had such an impact on the commercial sector has already begun to change the processes of teaching and learning, and those tools and technologies are being used more and more widely within the sector.
The challenge now is to ensure that the framework within which they are deployed is adequate for the achievement of their educational objectives, and the provision of supporting information services is one facet of that challenge.
The "library" services which will be required to support e-learning ventures are "hybrid" in every sense: they must provide seamless, integrated access to a range of resources across boundaries of media and across boundaries of curatorial tradition.
The proportion of that resource base which is available in digital form continues to increase.
At present, however, the coverage of that digital proportion does not compare with the richness of the content of the physical repositories.
The success of the e-learning initiatives may depend on a dual approach of enhancing the scope and quality of the digital proportion of that information resource while also promoting the existence of, and providing effective access to, the valuable "non-e-" component.
References Slides from the JISC Technology Watch seminar "Helping to plan for the future of further and higher education" are at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/01/tech_watch.html The People’s Network site is at: http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/ The National Grid for Learning portal is at: http://www.ngfl.gov.uk/ The New Opportunities Fund NOF Digitise site is at: http://www.nof-digitise.org/.
See HEFCE Circular Letter 04/00 (14 February 2000), "e-University" Project, available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/Circlets/2000/cl04_00.htm ; see particularly the "Background and Objectives" section of Annex A at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/Circlets/2000/cl04_00a.htm HEFCE, e-University project: business model, HEFCE Consultation 00/43 (October 2000) at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/hefce/2000/00_43.htm and HEFCE, Business model for the e-University: PricewaterhouseCoopers report, HEFCE Consultation 00/44 (October 2000) at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/hefce/2000/00_44.htm See paragraphs 61-66 of Business model for the e-University: PricewaterhouseCoopers report.
See also HEFCE Circular Letter 02/01 (15 January 2001), e-University: invitation to nominate directors and committee members, available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/Circlets/2001/cl02_01.htm See paragraphs 102-109 of Business model for the e-University: PricewaterhouseCoopers report.
Ormes, Sarah.
"It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine) or How I learned to stop worrying and love the e-book", Ariadne, 26 (Jan 2001), at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/e-book/ See paragraphs 42-72 of Business model for the e-University: PricewaterhouseCoopers report.
See paragraphs 86-90 of Business model for the e-University: PricewaterhouseCoopers reportand paragraphs 113-117 of Annex 3: Learning products and services for the e-U See, for example, SCONUL.
Response to HEFCE’s consultation (00/43) on the e-University project: Briefing note on library issues, (November 2000), at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/bfgnote.doc and Appendix to the briefing note, (November 2000), at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/discppr.doc.
The Cardean University "offers next-generation business courses online to companies and individuals around the globe."
See http://www.cardean.com/.
O’Shea, Tim.
"e-asy does it", The Guardian, Tuesday 10 October 2000, at http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/story/0,5500,379675,00.html Questia is at: http://www.questia.com/; netLibrary is at: http://www.netlibrary.com/; ebrary is at: http://www.ebrary.com/.
SCONUL.
Response to HEFCE’s consultation (00/43) on the e-University project: Appendix to the briefing note, (November 2000), section 2.2.1.
Available at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/discppr.doc.
The Higher Education Resources On-demand (HERON) project is at: http://www.heron.ac.uk/.
The Scottish Cultural Resource Access Network (SCRAN) is at: http://www.scran.ac.uk/.
The JISC DNER home page is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/.
The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) is at: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/.
Pinfield, Stephen and Lorcan Dempsey.
"The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and the hybrid library ", Ariadne, 26 (Jan 2001), at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/e-book/intro.html For information on RDN-include, see: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rdn-i/.
The 24-hour Museum is at: http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/.
The Collection of Historical and Contemporary Census Data and Related Materials project is at: http://www.chcc.ac.uk/.
Miller, Paul.
"Towards consensus on educational metadata", Ariadne, 27 (Mar 2001), at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/meg/ Author Details Pete Johnston Interoperability Research Officer UKOLN Email: p.johnston@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Article Title: "After the Big Bang: forces of change and e-Learning" Author: Pete Johnston Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/johnston/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: Do We Want to Keep Our Newspapers?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: Do We Want to Keep Our Newspapers?
Buzz database digitisation url research Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod reviews a book on libraries published by Office for Humanities Communication Publications.
If you want to get people to read a set of conference papers, and to engage with the topic covered then pick a title in the form of a question.
Do we want to keep our newspapers?
anyone with an interest in the media, and the power of the press in particular, will want to dip in to this slim illustrated collection to find out what it’s all about.
Readers will want to know if there is a consensus about the retention of newspapers, why it is an issue, which newspapers are we talking about in this instance, and who is charged with keeping them, or failing to keep them.
Read this book and you’ll find out.
This book is a collection of papers from a conference which took place in March 2001 at the University of London, under the auspices of the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of United States Studies, and the Institute of Historical Research.
The conference was in response to the unearthing of a previously unknown fact namely “.. in the interests of economy and conservation, over the course of recent decades librarians had actively sought to destroy the printed record of much of the past century and a half, as reflected in ….the newspaper”.
“Shock, horror.
Librarians are vandals” might be a suitable tabloid headline for this revelation.
The American novelist and essayist, Nicholson Baker, was the person who discovered what was going on and published a long article in the New Yorker on 24 July 2000 dramatically entitled: “Deadline: The Author’s Desperate Bid to Save America’s Past”.
Baker is very angry, and does not pull any punches the current and previous heads of the British Library are criticised for sanctioning: “ a wave of book mutilation ….as digital money flows into libraries” (page 32).
The scanning of documents requires bindings to be undone, and original collections become fragmented.
The newspapers in question comprised roughly 7,000 volumes of original editions of American newspapers from the early part of the twentieth century.
These originals were microfilmed and disposed of in accordance with British Library criteria for the retention and conservation of foreign newspapers.
Microfilms, as many who have used them will testify, are poor black and white substitutes for original items especially when the originals are quality newspapers, lavishly illustrated in colour.
Baker illustrates the importance of these newspapers to researchers and historians: New York World in 1913 featured a series of articles which exposed the Ku Klux Klan, and also included snatches of Dorothy Parker’s memorable verse e.g.
“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”.
Baker argues that the claim that newspapers are hard to preserve due to the acidity of the paper on which they are printed does not bear scrutiny in this instance; New York World was printed on quality paper, and was therefore easy to preserve and well worth preserving.
From the particular to the general we discover that it is normal practice for major research libraries to manage newspaper collections through policies of de-accessioning and destruction.
The result is the permanent loss of primary sources to researchers and scholars worldwide.
David McKitterick, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, is refreshingly candid about the profession of which he is a member: “Most librarians do not like newspapers.
They are bulky, difficult to store and to handle, heavy, made of poor paper, expensive to bind and difficult to organise and manage in reading rooms.” (page 6).
Together, the papers in this collection represent the case for the prosecution, the defendants’ plea of “not guilty”, and a balanced summing up at the end.
Retention policies, the need to create space and poor communication, all led to the permanent loss of a series of newspapers of significant value.
The contributors challenge us to think about how we treat original editions of newspapers.
Why are they treated differently from other media?
Are simulations poor substitutes for the real thing in certain circumstances?
Does form convey meaning?
Are some newspapers well worth keeping, and should they be judged for content and quality on an individual basis, rather than lumping them all together?
Librarians at the British Library or the Library of Congress are custodians of vast national (and international) collections for the cultural enrichment of us all.
But they do not have infinite shelf space or resources, and the trend is towards digitisation for practical reasons.
However, the research community stands to lose resources of significant historical and cultural value as a result of policies of de-accessioning and destruction and the question as to whether such activities are legal is raised in the course of the debate.
Could it be that a society which knows the price of everything, does not recognise the value of certain media, especially those which are difficult to manage and conserve?
In the march towards online everything and 24⁄7 access, are we in danger of losing sight of the fact that, on occasion, there is no substitute for the original of a publication?
Oh, and by the way, some of the acronyms are superb: PADDI Planning Architecture Design Database Ireland, and HOGARTH Helpful Online Gateway to Art History.
In essence a thought-provoking read.
Author Details Penny Garrod Public Library Focus UKOLN Email: p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/ Article Title: “Do we want to keep our newspapers?” Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/garrod-review/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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I Say What I Mean, but Do I Mean What I Say?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines I Say What I Mean, but Do I Mean What I Say?
Buzz data framework database archives metadata thesaurus browser vocabularies schema udc z39.50 iconclass rslp interoperability e-government url taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller reports on the latest MODELS workshop, and looks at the need for controlled terminologies and thesauri.
"Interoperability is easy.
It’s a piece of cake.
Simply digitise (or create in digital form) a load of content and stick it on a web site.
To let people find it, use this cool stuff called metadata.
Basically, that means describing your stuff by writing a description of it inside some <META> tags."
Erm… Wrong!!!
The prevalence of this view — or views remarkably akin to it — is truly scary, even amongst the ranks of those such as readers of Ariadne, from whom we might reasonably expect better.
Whilst it appears that The Battle For Metadata might almost be won, with an increasing number of people bandying the word around in a meaningful fashion, a number of closely related issues such as terminological control appear a step too far at the moment.
In this paper, I’ll take a look at some of the issues surrounding the use of controlled terminology, report on the recent MODELS 11 workshop [1] which attempted to tackle some of them, and outline some of the recommendations for future work which arose from that workshop and a similar one held by the North American National Information Standards Organization (NISO) at the end of 1999 [2].
The need for control… Across the world, a wealth of information is being placed on the Internet and made potentially accessible to all.
Previously inaccessible offerings from memory institutions [3], government, and the private sector are being offered for access, with a presumption that users will find what they want within these resources.
The UK [4] is not alone in having a notion of ‘joined-up Government’, where the Citizen might conceivably expect seamless access to information of relevance to them, regardless of the particular Civil Service computer system from which the information originated.
UK Higher Education’s Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), too, envisages a similar picture for information relevant to the Higher Education community [5], and related ideas are increasingly prevalent elsewhere in the UK and overseas.
Figure 1: An example of what’s possible: the SEAMLESS Project will offer integrated access to information from a number of public sector bodies across Essex (© 1999-2000 Essex Libraries) At the heart of these visions there necessarily lie at least two things.
The first is the use of some mechanism for querying multiple resources simultaneously.
Here, Z39.50 is a prime contender [6].
The second, more relevantly to this paper, is some commonality of content or description across the information resources being made available for searching.
Figure 2: Expedia’s Fast Flight Finder tool (© 2000 Expedia Inc.) Even in a simple example, such as that illustrated in Figure 2, there is a need for commonality of both content and description for this service to work.
Here, the online travel service, expedia.co.uk, allows users to search multiple airlines and routes to find the most timely or cost-effective way from one place to another.
For such a service to work, all of the airlines and travel agencies must presumably either agree to describe airlines, aeroplanes and destinations using the same terminology, or else use differing terminologies with closely defined correlations.
Imagine the chaos if KLM, say, called New York City by its old name of New Amsterdam.
If I were then to search for — and book — a flight from my local airport to Amsterdam, I might unwittingly end up on the other side of the North Atlantic, rather than the other side of the North Sea as I probably intended.
A silly example, admittedly, but the opportunities for more realistic foul-ups are many and varied.
A further example, drawn from a memory institution, is that of plant and animal taxonomy.
Here, the original Linnaean system of taxonomy from the eighteenth century continues to be used and extended around the world as a means of naming flora and fauna.
Although there continues to be disagreement over minutiae, the system as a whole is widely recognised and adopted, and is invaluable in underpinning global biology and natural history.
Figure 3 shows an example from the Integrated Taxonomic Information System [7] for a bird (the class, aves).
This particular bird is a Pelecanoides urinatrix, which a quick web search discovers is commonly known as the Diving Petrel [8].
Figure 4 shows the same bird, but here the taxonomy is represented graphically, using a tool implemented by Dave Vieglais at the University of Kansas [9].
Figure 3: The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (© ITIS) Figure 4: A graphical view of bird taxonomy (© University of Kansas) What control gives us To ensure common meanings across applications, and between users and applications, the normal solution is to impose a degree of control upon the terms used by both parties.
At its most basic, this control will involve no more than defining a list of words, from which application and user have to select.
In more complex instances, fully formed thesauri may be employed, rich with hierarchy, synonyms and relationships.
In a distributed online environment lacking any form of control over terminology, users will of course still find things.
Search engines such as Alta Vista demonstrate this admirably, although the large number of hits they return (315,645 for a search on ‘thesaurus’), and the frequently irrelevant occurrences of the term for which you searched, clearly show their weaknesses.
In such an uncontrolled environment, users will consistently either use the wrong terms, or use the right terms in the wrong contexts.
They will also suffer from significant information overload, whilst potentially failing to discover a number of significant resources appropriate to their search.
In this same uncontrolled environment, the creators of resources face a number of problems, too.
In describing their resources, they will potentially use terms inconsistently; either using a single term to mean slightly different things, or else describing very similar objects using entirely different terms.
Without the adoption of hierarchically capable terminology resources, it will be extremely difficult to adequately convey hierarchical concepts.
A hierarchical thesaurus, for example, might represent the countries of the United Kingdom in a hierarchy, such that anything catalogued as being in or related to England would also automatically be in or related to the United Kingdom.
Hierarchies such as these are an important aspect of effective categorization, and their absence both greatly reduces effective recall and potentially increases data entry and storage requirements.
Finally, failure to adopt tools such as these make it potentially impossible to effectively integrate different resources from within a single institution, or across multiple institutions.
Without such underpinnings, visionary initiatives such as the DNER or Government Portals are much lessened, and potentially even worthless to many users.
Word lists, thesauri, and other tools So, if we recognise that consistent use of terminology is beneficial to both creators and users of our resources, how can we go about creating the terminologies with which to be consistent?
The set of terminology tools might loosely be divided into three groups; controlled vocabularies, alphanumeric classification schema, and thesauri.
The distinctions are not always wholly clear, however, and each of these groups has much in common with the other two.
Controlled Vocabularies Possibly the simplest of all, a controlled vocabulary is often little more than a list of words or phrases.
These terms may be offered to the cataloguer as they describe resources or, as with the SEAMLESS example in Figure 1, made available to the end user as part of the searching process.
Lists such as these may be created manually, or in the case of tools presented to the end-user, generated automatically by harvesting all of the keywords in a database.
In some cases, users will only be allowed to select one of these terms, whilst in others they will also be able to manually enter search terms of their own.
Alphanumeric Classification Schema Alphanumeric schemes are well known to most people who have used a library.
Whilst you might not intuitively know that a code of 060 refers to ‘General organisations and museology’, nor that 948 is the ‘History of Scandinavia’, many people do successfully navigate their libraries and locate books using this Dewey Decimal Classification scheme every day [10] Figure 5: Browsing through one of the Dewey Decimal classes in CORC.
Image taken from Diane Vizine-Goetz’ presentation to MODELS 11 workshop © 2000 OCLC Dewey Decimal is not the only such classification scheme in use.
The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) [11] is also used in libraries, and appears similar upon casual inspection.
Outside the library sector, well-known subject specific classifications of this nature include the art world’s ICONCLASS [12] and the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Computing Classification System [13].
These and other classification schemes are discussed in more detail in a deliverable from the European DESIRE project [14].
Thesauri Mention of a thesaurus is liable to make most readers think of the humble book resting on their bookshelf, probably next to their dictionary.
This book records words (synonyms) with meanings similar to that of a given word, and may also record a number of words (antonyms) with meanings opposite to that of the given word.
My Collins thesaurus, for example, lists synonyms of ‘terminology’ as ‘argot, cant, jargon, language, lingo, nomenclature, patois, phraseology, terms, and vocabulary’.
There are no antonyms given.
In the context under discussion here thesauri are far more, being the most complex terminological resources to be examined, with many of them including quite complex hierarchies, detailed scope notes to define each term offered, and rich inter-relationships across different branches of the whole.
Figure 6: English Heritage’s National Monuments Record has gathered a number of its thesauri together for easy online access (Image © English Heritage) As a rule, such thesauri follow the structural guidance laid down in international standard ISO 2788 (or ISO 5964 for multilingual thesauri).
It is also generally the case — as with controlled vocabularies and alphanumeric classifications — that depressingly few of these valuable resources are available online, making it difficult to build them into user interfaces.
A thesaurus structure is underpinned by three basic types of relationship; those of Equivalence, Hierarchy, and Association.
Additionally, the notion of a Scope Note is fundamental to any effective deployment of thesaurus-based terminology.
Equivalence The equivalence relationship essentially allows the thesaurus builder to offer synonyms for terms.
Importantly, it also enables the designation of a ‘preferred term’ from amongst these synonyms.
This preferred term is used differently by various systems, but might most usefully be considered as a display term, such that no matter which of the synonyms was entered in creating a record, it will normally be the display term that is initially shown to the user (who can, of course, search for this term or any of its synonyms and retrieve records catalogued by any of the synonymous terms).
For example, the Thesaurus of Monument Types [15] has Power Station as a preferred term for Electricity Plant and shows it, thus: Electricity Plant USE POWER STATION Hierarchy An important capability of thesauri is their ability to reflect hierarchies, whether conceptual, spatial, or terminological.
Individual entries in a thesaurus will often be linked to a broad class (denoted by the abbreviation CL), as well as to broader (BT) and narrower (NT) terms.
For example, a Bayonet is placed within a hierarchy in the mda Archaeological Objects Thesaurus [16], thus: BAYONET CL Armour and Weapons BT Edged Weapon NT Plug Bayonet NT Socket Bayonet This entry may be translated as saying that a bayonet is classed as being either armour or a weapon.
More specifically, it is a kind of Edged Weapon, and there are two special kinds of bayonet; the Plug and the Socket.
A search for Bayonets would also find resources indexed as being Plug Bayonets or Socket Bayonets.
Association In any sizeable thesaurus, there is likely to be a need to express relationships with terms in other branches of the overall hierarchy.
Related Terms (denoted by the abbreviation RT) are used to make these hierarchy-spanning associations.
For example, a Church might be related to the curtilage and to other examples of ecclesiastical structure mentioned in the Thesaurus of Monument Types [15], thus: CHURCH RT Churchyard RT Crypt RT Presbytery Scope Notes Thesaurus terms can often be terse, and extremely difficult to interpret for the non-expert.
Scope Notes (denoted by the abbreviation SN) serve to clarify entries and avoid potential confusion.
Importantly, especially for multilingual resources, they serve to embody a definition of the underlying concept, rather than any language-specific word.
For example, a Chitting House exists within the Thesaurus of Monument Types [15], but there are probably very few readers of Ariadne who could even begin to guess what one might be.
The Scope Note serves to make things clearer: CHITTING HOUSE SN A building in which potatoes can sprout and germinate Scope Notes also serve to clarify potentially ambiguous definitions, as in this example of a Ferry: FERRY SN Includes associated structures All together, now… This example, also drawn from the Thesaurus of Monument Types [15], demonstrates many components of the thesaurus structure: FERROUS METAL EXTRACTION SITE SN Includes preliminary processing {broadens the definition a bit} CL Industrial {is industrial in nature} BT Metal Industry Site {is a type of Metal Industry Site} NT Ironstone Mine {these mines are a type of Ferrous Metal Extraction Site} NT Ironstone Pit {these mines are a type of Ferrous Metal Extraction Site} NT Ironstone Workings {these mines are a type of Ferrous Metal Extraction Site} RT Ironstone Workings {see also Ironstone Workings} MODELS 11 English Heritage, mda, the British Library, and others in the UK have significant long-term expertise in the creation and deployment of terminological tools.
At the same time, an increasing number of projects and services are moving significant quantities of data into an online form, and hoping for users to search within and across these newly available resources.
It is widely recognised that some help is needed if the user is to have any realistic chance of discovering data across diverse systems, catalogued to different standards (where formal standards were used at all), and drawn from various curatorial traditions.
It is equally recognised that many of the large-scale services which are emerging lack access to existing expertise, and in a significant number of cases attempts are being made in isolation to develop new tools when existing ones might serve better.
It was in this environment of disjointed expertise and need that UKOLN and mda planned the eleventh workshop [1] in the MODELS Programme, with funding from eLib.
The intention was to outline many of the issues surrounding the construction of terminological resources, to assess the requirements of the emerging large-scale services, and to build bridges between the communities of expertise and need that currently exist within the UK.
In the end, nearly 50 people — drawn from Higher Education, the cultural heritage sector, government, libraries, and beyond — gathered at the Stakis Hotel in Bath for two days, and discussed a wide range of issues.
The discussion was informed by presentations from a range of experts from the UK and beyond.
As well as the scheduled presentations [17], the group received impromptu discussions of the issues from a number of participants, namely; Sandy Buchanan (talking about the experiences within SCRAN [18], and highlighting the importance of ensuring terminological consistency within individual SCRAN-funded projects, whilst outlining the difficulties of maintaining many standards across projects), Maewyn Cumming (who discussed current moves towards a set of government-spanning resources for both internal and public use [19]), Tanya Szrabjer (who discussed the significant problems of managing over one million records within the British Museum [20]), Damian Robinson (who highlighted the problems lack of control brings, with some 39 terms for the same time period within a single resource housed at the Archaeology Data Service [21]), Mary Rowlatt (who pointed to the experience within SEAMLESS [22] which showed that technically connecting resources was far easier than actually getting them to work together in any meaningful fashion), and Alan Robiette (who discussed the concept of the HE Mall [23] as a promotional showcase for the UK Higher Education sector, ideally drawing information from a host of institutional websites in a near-automatic fashion).
Workshop Outcomes The workshop incorporated some wide-ranging discussion, resulting in a number of tasks being identified for further work.
The bulk of these will be reported on the workshop website [1], with only the main points drawn out here.
There was widespread agreement amongst those gathered for the workshop that terminological issues were crucial to many of the developments currently underway to make complex information resources available online, and it was felt to be important that their significance be made known to a number of the influential bodies capable of directing work in this area (CITU for government, MLAC for memory institutions, and JISC for Higher Education).
UKOLN was tasked to approach these bodies.
A number of participants pointed to the apparent lack of venue for discussion of wide-ranging terminology issues, feeling that it might be useful to have a forum suitable for carrying on many of the workshop’s discussions.
It is certainly feasible to set up an electronic mailing list for such a purpose (thesaurus@mailbase.ac.uk ?
), and the author seeks thoughts from Ariadne readers on the value of such a list.
A stated aim of the workshop from the outset was to explore the value and practicality of creating a single high-level thesaurus which might be used across a wide range of on-line resources in order to facilitate a basic level of interoperability.
The University of Strathclyde and UKOLN agreed to take forward a recommendation for work in this area, and an expression of interest has subsequently been submitted to the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) to extend the current SCONE project.
Throughout the workshop, there were repeated examples of individuals mentioning highly relevant work or initiatives (such as NKOS, the Networked Knowledge Information Systems [24]) that were unknown to the majority of attendees.
It was strongly felt that some form of scoping study might usefully be funded in order to identify and synthesise a significant body of appropriate material.
Such a scoping study could then be used to inform work aimed at addressing gaps in knowledge and provision.
Extending this concept, it was also felt that a single first point of contact for those beginning to address terminological issues for their online resources might be valuable.
This might most usefully be placed within an existing organisation.
There was some discussion of automatic indexing and classification tools such as Autonomy [25].
These appear to have some potential, but it was felt that some formal evaluation work was required in order to compare these tools with the more traditional methods of manual classification.
It was recognised that no single thesaurus or other terminological tool will ever meet all the needs of all users.
It was therefore seen to be important to hold reliable and consistent information about a range of terminological resources in order to aid those searching across data catalogued according to more than one terminology to map effectively.
Such a registry would need to include information on quality, scope, degree of take up, and other aspects of a resource.
It was suggested that CIDOC’s [26] Standards Group were exploring the creation of such a registry, and this should be investigated.
The NISO workshop in November of 1999 [2] was also active in this area, discussing the need for a new NISO standard to provide guidance on the creation and deployment of electronic thesauri.
It seems sensible to move forward alongside NISO in this area.
Finally, it was recognised that there was a need to study user behaviour with respect to terminology.
Whilst a Local Authority, for example, might organise information by departments or directorates, the Citizen is unlikely to think in the same way.
Indeed, in many cases their need will span multiple departments, and they are therefore likely to be best served by information structures which differ from the underlying organisational structures.
It was suggested that work might usefully be done to capture and study the types of vocabulary that users utilise when presented with search interfaces, remembering that the searches they undertake may not be what they consider optimal, but rather what they expect to get the best results from a system in which they potentially have little confidence.
There was talk of moving towards a situation in which the system moved from being essentially a hindrance towards becoming an intelligent intermediary, akin to the human subject librarian who guides a reader towards their desired resources.
Conclusion Terminological tools such as thesauri are an important foundation in effectively creating, curating, and re-using rich information resources in an on-line environment.
In spite of this, their take-up has been slow and patchy, in part doubtless due to their perceived complexity, and to their relative lack of availability online or as part of off-the-shelf tools.
This workshop identified a great number of valuable uses for these resources, as well as a number of work items which will require attention before they can be widely deployed.
It is to be hoped that this workshop marks the beginning of a wider recognition of these resources and their value, and that terminological tools will become firmly established at the core of emerging services such as the DNER and the People’s Network.
Acknowledgements The MODELS 11 workshop was jointly organised by UKOLN and mda, and made possible by funding from the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
The meeting itself was Chaired by Gillian Grayson of English Heritage, with its smooth running ensured by Joy Fraser, UKOLN’s Events Manager.
Thanks are due both to Gill and to Joy, as well as to the speakers and attendees who made it such a worthwhile event.
Thanks again to Gill — and to Matthew Stiff of mda — for reviewing a late draft of this paper.
Thanks also to Neil Thomson of the Natural History Museum for pointing me towards Dave Vieglais’ Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) browse tool, and to the SEAMLESS Project team for letting me at a pre-release version of their Gateway.
Any errors or omissions remain my own.
UKOLN is funded by the Library and Information Commission, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
Interoperability Focus is based at the University of Hull, and receives additional support from this institution.
References The MODELS 11 workshop page is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/models11/ The report on NISO’s Electronic Thesauri workshop is at: http://www.niso.org/thes99rprt.html Scientific, Industrial, and Cultural Heritage: a shared approach.
A research framework for digital libraries, museums and archives explores the notion of memory institutions in the online environment.
It is available from: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/dempsey/ The Modernising Government white paper is at: http://www.citu.gov.uk/moderngov/whitepaper/4310.htm A description of the DNER is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/dner_desc.html The article, Z39.50 for All, provides an introduction to Z39.50 and is available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/z3950/ The Integrated Taxonomic Information System is at: http://www.itis.usda.gov/plantproj/itis/index.html The Diving Petrel occurs in and around the Antarctic, and appears upon at least two stamps which can be seen here: http://www.bird-stamps.org/species/13004.htm A graphical browser for bird taxonomy is at: http://habanero.nhm.ukans.edu/aves/default.htm OCLC’s homepage for the Dewey Decimal Classification is at: http://www.oclc.org/oclc/fp/ The British Standards Institution’s UDC in Brief booklet has been made available online by NISS at: http://www.niss.ac.uk/resource-description/udcbrief.html ICONCLASS, the art world’s iconographic classification system, is at: http://iconclass.let.ruu.nl/home.html The Computing Classification System is browseable at: http://www.acm.org/class/ Specification for resource description methods Part 3.
The role of classification schemes in Internet resource description and discovery is a deliverable of the European DESIRE project, and is available at: http://www.lub.lu.se/desire/radar/reports/D3.2.3/ RCHME’s Thesaurus of Monument Types was published in 1995, and is now available online from English Heritage at: http://www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/mon_types/default.htm.
Examples in text are drawn from the 1995 paper version.
The mda Archaeological Objects Thesaurus is available online from English Heritage at: http://www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/obj_types/default.htm Formal presentations given at the MODELS 11 workshop are at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/models11/presentations.html The Scottish Cultural Resources Network (SCRAN) is at: http://www.scran.ac.uk/ The Central IT Unit of the UK Government’s Cabinet Office is responsible for much of the movement towards electronic Government, and can be found at: http://www.citu.gov.uk/ The British Museum is at: http://www.british-museum.ac.uk/ The Archaeology Data Service is at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ The SEAMLESS Project is at: http://www.seamless.org.uk/ The HE Mall doesn’t exist yet, but is discussed on a mailing list at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/hemall-discussion/ The NKOS homepage is at: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/ Autonomy is at: http://www.autonomy.com/ CIDOC, the Documentation Committee for the International Council of Museums, is at: http://www.cidoc.icom.org/ Author Details Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Article Title: "I say what I mean, but do I mean what I say?"
Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/metadata/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: An Update On Search Engines Used In UK Universities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: An Update On Search Engines Used In UK Universities Buzz software javascript metadata browser cataloguing intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly with an Update On Search Engines Used In UK Universities.
In September 1999 we published our first report [1] on the search engines which were used to provide search facilities on UK University Web sites.
Since then we have updated our survey at roughly six monthly intervals.
Following a recent update, we will now discuss the findings and comment on the trends we have observed.
Latest Findings and Trends The latest findings have now been published [2] which contain details of the search facilities on UK University Web sites.
A summary of the findings of the first and most recent survey is given below.
Table 1: Summary Of Surveys in Sept 1997 and Dec 2001 Search Engine Sept 1997 Dec 2001 ht://Dig 25 49 eXcite 19 5 Microsoft 12 18 Harvest 8 1 Ultraseek / Inktomi 7 12 Google 0 13 Other 29 31 None 60 30 Total 160 159   Note 1 Figures for Inktomi also include Ultraseek.
2 Three instituions are included twice, as they provide both ht://Dig and Google.
3 A number of institutions no longer exist, due to mergers.
From this summary we can see that ht://Dig has consolidated its position as the most widely used search engine.
It is now used by about 30% of institutions a growth of almost 50% over the past two years.
The second most popular search engine is a Microsoft solution (which can be one of several, such as Microsoft's Index Server, the SiteServer Catalogue Server or the FrontPage indexer).
In third place is Google, which was not available two years ago, but is now used by thirteeen institutions (which includes three institutions which also use ht://Dig).
Closely following is Inktomi/Ultraseek (Inkotomi took over Ultraseek last year, so the figures are combined).
There are no other search engines which are in widespread use (the next most popular is eXcite, which is no longer being developed, followed by search engines which are used by only 1-3 organisations.
The number of institutions which do not have (or appear to have) a search facility has dropped by 50% to 30.
Discussion The Need To Update Facilities In the mid to late 1990s a wide range of search engines were used by UK Universities.
These included many which had been developed by the research community, such as Harvest, wwwwais, Isearch and SWISH.
However many of these tools are no longer adequate: the end user interface and functionality may be inadequate, limited functionality may be provided for the administrator or there may be security concerns.
Two examples of the interface provided by dated search engines are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Output From the eXcite and WAIS Search Engines It can be seen that the summary details provided by eXcite can contain JavaScript code, rather than the textual information end users will expect.
It should also be noted that a security bug in eXcite was reported in January 1998 [3] and the software is not believed to have been updated since then.
In contrast we can see the interface provided by more up-to-date search facilities such as ht://Dig and Google, which are illustrated below.
Figure 2: ht://Dig and Google Search Facilities It can be seen that the current generation of search engines display the context of the search term and provide extra functionality, such as searching for similar pages.
Type of Search Facility We have now reached a period of consolidation, with use of search engines such as Isearch, Harvest, etc.
limited to one or two institutions.
We can now see that most institutions are now taking one of the following three strategies: A well-used open source package ht://Dig is the only package which falls into this category.
A licensed package This includes one of the Microsoft packages and Inktomi/Ultraseek.
An externally-hosted search facility Google is the most popular example of a search facility which is hosted by a third party organisation.
ht://Dig is a safe solution, widely used within the community, and easy to set up, configure and to provide a local look-and-feel.
ht://Dig is an open source solution, which means that the software is free to use.
Being open source also means that the source code of the software is freely available, and can be modified and developed.
However there is little indication that developments to ht://Dig are being made.
A significant number of institutions have paid for a licensed solution, the most popular being Inktomi/Ultraseek or a Microsoft product(although it should be mentioned that the Microsoft search facility is probably bundled with the Microsoft server software and is not purchased separately.
The third most widely used approach is to make use of an externally-hosted search facility.
The most popular is Google, although this category also includes Atmoz and Picosearch.
It should also be noted that a small number of institutions are beginning to provide access to more than one search facility: for example ht://Dig and Google (e.g.
The University of Reading, as shown below).
Figure 3: University Of Reading Offer Two Search Engines No Search Facility Available As has been noted, the number of institutional Web sites which provide no search facility (or the search facility is not easily found) has decreased by over 50% in the past two years.
Although this trend is pleasing there are still 27 institutions whose users would benefit from such a service.
Externally-hosted search facilities such as Google can provide a search facility with very little effort or technical expertise required.
Contact will be made with Web managers at these institutions to inform them of this.
It has also been noted that a small number of institutions which previously provided a search facility, now no longer do so.
Typically such institutions provide a page containing a message along the lines of "The search facilities are currently being redeveloped.
A new, improved service will be available shortly."
Unfortunately 'shortly' can take a long time to arrive!
If search facilities are withdrawn (if, say, a search engine is found to have a security hole) it may be worth providing an externally-hosted search facility as an interim measure.
Changing The Search Facility Over the past two years many institutions have changed their search facility.
It has been noticed that when a new search facility is introduced many organisations will change the URL of the search page.
This is normally due to the name of the search facility forming part of the URL (e.g.
<www.foo.ac.uk/htdig/>).
It would not be surprising if we see more further changes: for example institutions moving to ht://Dig, providing multiple search options or moving from ht://Dig to search facilities which provide greater functionality (note, for example, that ht://Dig's support for metadata is very limited).
In order to minimise disruption when changes are made institutions are advised to ensure that the URL of their search facility is general and is not tied to a particular product.
The Future What developments can we expect to see in the future?
An important one is likely to be the use of hybrid search facilities which enable users to find resources which are located not only on an institution's Web site(s) but in other institutional systems, such as the University library catalogue.
This approach can be extended to address the end user's need to find a quality resource, wherever it may be located.
This is the approach which was taken by Hybrid Library projects funded by the eLib Programme (for example the BUILDER project [4] which developed a search facility which could be used to search across a number of distributed services.)
This approach of providing users with a search interface to a wide range of distributed quality resources is being addressed by JISC's DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) work [5].
Another development we may see is integration of the search interface with the browser.
This can already be done, using the Google toolbar [6].
As illustrated below this interface can be used to search not only the Web but also the Web site of the page currently being viewed.
Figure 4: Google Search Facility Can be Integrated With A Browser It should be possible to integrate the local search engine into the browser's toolbar, perhaps using the approach document by the Bookmarklets Web site [7].
Evaluating Search Engines In order to help institutions evaluate search engine software UKOLN has set up a page [8] which allow its Exploit Interactive Web magazine to be searched used a number of search engines, as shown below.
Figure 5: Search Engines To Search Exploit Interactive We would like to increase the range of search engines covered, to include not only search engines which are used within the community, but also search engines which may be of interest to the community.
We have begun work on this by providing access to the ISYS search facility [9].
Anyone who would be willing to index the Exploit Interactive Web site and allow us to host the search interface should contact Brian Kelly (email B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk).
Please note that in the case of licensed software, you will need to ensure that the licensing conditions allow you to index remote resources.
This page is complemenetd by a "Web tour" of the search engine interface provided on UK University Web sites [10].
Conclusions For an institutional Web service ht://Dig appears to provide a safe and popular choice.
It would appear that ht://Dig is popular because it is available free of charge rather than the source code is available.
Google is now an option not just for smaller institutions with limited technical resources but also for providing a search facility for large institutions.
We are also likely to see more institutions providing access to more than one search facility, probably a locally-installed product and an externally-hosted one.
This approach will provide the benefits of a search engine such as Google, while also providing a backup option if the external service is unavailable, as well as providing access to resources which an external search engine cannot access (e.g.
resources on the Intranet) or which will not be indexed in a timely fashion (e.g.
new resources which may not be indexed for a several weeks).
However even though well-used, mature search facilities are available we can still expect to see developments in this area.
Web managers would be advised to ensure that their search facilities can be migrated to new systems with the minimum of disruption.
References WebWatch: UK University Search Engines, Ariadne 21, Sept 1999 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/webwatch/ Survey Of UK HE Institutional Search Engines Dec 2001, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/uk-he-search-engines/2002-01/ EWS Download, eXcite http://www.excite.com/navigate/download.html CLUMPS Projects Search, BUILDER, University of Birmingham http://www.builder.bham.ac.uk/cps/ Welcome To the DNER, JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ Google Toolbar, Google http://toolbar.google.com/ Bookmarklets free tools for power surfing, Bookmarklets http://www.bookmarklets.com/ Search Exploit Interactive Using a Variety of Search Engines, Exploit Interactive http://www.exploit-lib.org/search/multiple.asp Search Exploit Interactive Using a Variety of Search Engines, Exploit Interactive http://www.exploit-lib.org/search/multiple.asp#isys Web Tour of UK HE Search Engines, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/uk-he-search-engines/web-tour/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Watch: An Update On Search Engines Used In UK Universities" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Jan-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur: When Computer Knows Best?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: When Computer Knows Best?
Buzz software windows standards Citation BibTex RIS Harold Thimbleby criticises the urge to upgrade.
"Problems over a baby’s eating often dominate the lives of whole families for months on end.
You can do a great deal to avoid them by cultivating a relaxed and accepting attitude now."
Penelope Leach, Baby and Child When I drive down the road in my 20 year old Land Rover and a fast car overtakes me almost everything overtakes me I don’t get overwhelmed with an urge to upgrade to a more modern car that can go faster or which is more comfortable.
Nor, when I do day dream about buying a replacement, do I worry that perhaps a new car would not be able to turn left at the roundabout just up the road from my house, something I currently do every day.
Most of us use cars and we expect them to be reliable and do a job.
The other day I was using Microsoft Word 98.
This is a leading word processor, and it is made by the leading software company in the world.
First, why did I upgrade from my old Word 5.1, which I had been happily using?
I had been getting text from people which I couldn’t read, and I was incompatible.
And Word 98 promised lots of new features for me.
I felt I was being overtaken by faster people!
I succumbed and bought Word 98 but I delayed a few weeks before I finally installed it.
You see, I was worried that perhaps it wouldn’t work, and I might lose some of my existing work.
If I had being thinking about buying a Toyota instead of my Land Rover, I would not have worried about whether I could still use the same route to work.
Cars are reliable.
Computer programs are unreliable.
Would you know?
My entire article (which I’m writing now) has just gone into italic everywhere!
Somehow we have got ourselves into a state of mind where we have to have the latest, yet almost completely useless, unreliable, expensive programs.
What is going on?
This culture we are in affects both us, as consumers of the products, and the manufacturers who don’t seem able to do any better.
The warranty that comes with Word makes you wonder whether they believe their product is worth having.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Microsoft disclaims all warranties, and they claim not to be liable for any consequential loss, and in any case to no greater amount than you spent on the software.
What would happen if you bought a car for £5000 and it went out of control and killed someone?
Would the car manufacturer say, well their liability was limited to £5000 (and then only if your car broke in the first 90 days)?
Moreover, Microsoft still say they are not liable, even if they have been warned about the possibility of problems.
That’s rather like car manufacturers saying they are immune from liabilities even if they have been warned that all their cars go out of control on sharp corners.
Car manufacturers are in fact far more responsible, and they make better products than Microsoft do, with better warranties.
I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but it is time we had an accident that exposed software warranties for the exploitative, unnecessary, pathetic things they are.
I’m not specially getting at Microsoft; they are the market leader and they are entirely typical of software manufacturers.
One might say they are an easy target because they are so pervasive.
The problem certainly isn’t all Microsoft’s fault.
Why do I buy software I don’t like?
Why does anyone?
hour before it crashes on me.
Why do I put up with it?
Why does anyone put up with such expensive technology that is clearly so unreliable?
I think humans are wired up to respond to helplessness.
When a baby screams in the middle of the night, you get up.
If you don’t go and sort out your baby, your genes aren’t going to last very long!
Disney make their films more appealing by using cartoon tricks, like giving the animals babyish faces, to make us go all sentimental over them.
Computer programs are like this.
They are helpless and they need help all the time.
One reason is lock-in.
If I don’t have the latest version of Word I can’t communicate with my colleagues.
So I am pressurised to buy upgrades.
In turn my slower colleagues now have my latest version to catch up with, so they upgrade ä and so on.
Microsoft know this, and Word 98, although it can read recent versions of Word, cannot read some older ones.
So now I am putting pressure on sensible people to upgrade so they can talk to me!
I find that I can use Microsoft Word 98 for about an If computer programs behaved like adults and still failed, you’d get them fixed like we get broken cars fixed.
But seeing as computers behave like babies, when they fail we help them, we cosset them, we put more RAM in their mouths, we buy new software for them, we get them a bigger disc to rattle.
Microsoft know this.
One of the most irritating features of Word is the so-called Assistant.
This is a cartoon character that pops up and makes inane comments.
It is draw in the best Disney tradition to make it look appealing I’m sure some people love it!
But it pops up and says "You look like you are writing a letter, would you like some help?"
And it doesn’t have a clue.
I want to get on with some work, and I have this idiot trying to out-wit me.
When I use Word, I spend more of my time fixing problems Word has created than doing my own work!
Here are some simple examples.
I am writing a notice to be pinned up.
I write the headline, and then start the next line.
As I type the second word of the second line, Word makes a clicking sound, and the first letter of the line gets capitalised.
I don’t want it capitalised, thanks!
That’s one of the simpler problems to explain.
It irritates me, but I understand what’s going on.
Paragraph indentation is a problem that really irritates me, and (despite having a PhD in computing science) I have no idea what is going on.
I can type a tab, and it doesn’t seem to be there, but the entire paragraph gets indented.
I can type a tab somewhere else on the screen, then drag it to where I want it, and it works.
But if I type the tab directly where I want it, weird things happen.
Or if I have a table, I can set tab stops, but I can’t actually type any tabs.
Instead, tabs take you to the next cell in the table.
Or if I type a World Wide Web address (you can find out more about where I work at http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk), Word spots it is a Web address and suddenly underlines it and changes it to blue, and then if I try to edit the address because it is mistyped, there’s a delay and Word tells me it can’t make a network connection.
It’s trying to be too smart, in my view.
My children are used to me complaining about idiotic computers, and they wondered whether I was just seething as usual, so I showed them how Word handles pictures.
In moments they were laughing: it is impossible to understand what Word is thinking of when it moves pictures around when you try and put them where you want them.
You get one thing right, and then Word thinks of a better place for something else to go to.
There’s a quirky noise, and your layout is ruined yet again.
It’s worth classifying bugs.
There are undeniable bugs like when Words starts flashing table cells in rapid cycles, and the entire computer stops working.
Or when it repeatedly puts up an error message and then crashes.
(I do wonder whether they tested the version of Word that I use.
It only took me minutes to have it dying in convulsions in front of me.
I would be embarrassed to sell software like this.)
Or you can ‘type behind’ windows because they won’t go away, and evidently Word has forgotten all about them.
There are inconsistent bugs, like the various schemes for setting colours: you can set a character to one of 16 colours (displayed in a column); you can set a paragraph to one of 40 colours (displayed in a rectangle); and the background colour you can set to anything out of around 16777216 colours (displayed in a hexagon or rectangle: you choose).
Why use different techniques?
Were the different parts of Word written by different people who didn’t talk to each other; or was Word designed by someone who thought variety was the spice of life; or is it just a big mistake?
Had the designers failed to read the standard user interface guidelines, which tell you how to do this sort of thing in a simple, standard way?
I tend to think that Microsoft have carefully worked out the minimal amount of effort to put into software so that they can still sell it at a profit; but as the standard aphorism goes, why suspect a conspiracy when incompetence is more likely?
I could easily go on, and on, and on.
You’d get bored, and I’d want Microsoft to pay me for my hard work explaining their bugs.
I’m sure some people who do routine tasks all day get used to it, and probably enjoy it.
That’s fine.
But how do people like me, who just want to type rather than play games, switch off all the smart ass features?
How do they work around the less satisfactory bits?
A salesman could easily learn how to make a very impressive demonstration of Word.
Suppose I practised writing a letter in just the right way so that Word’s idiot actually did the right thing well, the result would be very impressive.
You could watch a demonstration like that and say, wow I wish my word processor could help me write letters like that.
The problem, of course, is that Word can help you write letters like that.
Just that it obstructs you if you don’t want to write letters precisely like that.
Then there is cognitive dissonance.
The theory of cognitive dissonance is supposed to explain why people gamble.
You lose money, and no sane person would want to do that.
So you think to yourself: continuing to gamble, and losing money don’t make sense.
How can you save face?
Well, you think, you like gambling.
If you like gambling, then it’s alright to lose money.
If you like doing it, do it again!
Lose some more money ä and you’ve got more cognitive dissonance to sort out.
So you must really like gambling.
This line of reasoning spirals out of control for some people.
I like my Land Rover because I’ve put a lot of work into it that might be irrational and costly but I’d rather say I like the Land Rover than admit I’m wasting my time on it!
Microsoft Word catches out us the same way.
It’s such a silly and difficult to use program that we are stupid if we continue to use it.
But we’re not stupid, so we’d rather go around telling people how much we like Word.
Indeed, some experts on Word get so much satisfaction out of helping people that they confuse the satisfaction of helping people for the stupidity of anything creating the need for so much help in the first place!
Who needs help using a pencil and paper?
Something as basic as a word processor ought to be as easy to use as any other everyday tool.
I don’t need to keep ringing up the AA to ask how to get my car to turn left, and computers ought to be as easy as that.
"It is the patient mother who plods steadily on, never expecting too much of a mere infant, who has the greatest success; the strict disciplinarian who makes such a "to do" about a perfectly natural function takes far longer to train her baby and may make him feel unloved.
It is most important for a child to feel that he himself is loved although his behaviour may not be approved of."
Margaret Myles, Textbook for Midwives What sort of advice do advisors give us?
It is usually along the lines of "to do that, just press the control-twiddle key."
Gosh, it’s really easy when you know how and you are made to feel like a fool for not knowing something so utterly trivial.
You didn’t know which key to press!
But reflecting a bit, there was no way to know this piece of ‘trivial’ knowledge until you were told.
So, really, it isn’t trivial.
Microsoft have made Word deeply non-intuitive.
People who earn a living selling word processor advice exploit this, and we become dependent on them, because we don’t like to be thought fools.
We even go out an buy books called "Word for Dummies."
Are we dummies, or what?
When a baby cries, you give it a dummy.
And computers suck.
Worse is to come.
These word processor advisors get a reputation for knowing about word processors.
Next they are being asked by their bosses for advice on which word processor to standardise on.
Guess which they recommend.
"Babies can be fascinating to children."
M·ire Messenger Davies, The Breastfeeding Book Most people who complain just seem to have an axe to grind, and you are advised to stand well back from their ravings.
In my case, I have an axe to grind, and I have some trees to chop.
All software manufacturers could easily do a better job by adopting one very simple strategy.
If they wrote user manuals (you may notice that they are reluctant to do even this) and they find themselves explaining a feature with hedges and excuses, and "before you do that, do this" then they should try redesigning their program so that the manual can be written more clearly.
For example, page 39 of Word’s introductory manuals asks "Want to hide the Assistant?"
Yes I do!
The suggestion given is: "Hold down CONTROL, click the Assistant window, then click Hide Assistant."
Three steps?
The first of these steps isn’t obvious; why the control key; how are you supposed to work that out for yourself without reading the manual from cover to cover?
Why not say "click on the close box," like anything else you want to hide?
Then there is only one rule for everything.
Or the manual asks "Having trouble getting a grip on the margin boundary?"
Its answer includes the admission that "it’s easy to grab the markers by mistake."
So why did Microsfot make them so fiddly?
There are some things that are never properly explained.
For example, in the real world when you move something up, left, down, and finally back right you end up where you started.
This simple rule does not work in Word; you can move the cursor up, left down, right but you will be very lucky if you have any idea where it ends up.
(If you are at the end or start of a line, in a table or a tab, the cursor keys do different things.)
The full explanation of what is going on would take pages.
It is sheer, unnecessary complexity.
There is, however, a simple design solution that is easy to understand the cursor keys could work sensibly (in fact, this problem was identified and solved definitively twenty years ago).
But not for Microsoft.
Suppose Microsoft had decided to explain how the cursor really works.
I think they would have been embarrassed into making the behaviour a lot, lot simpler.
Or, if not, we would all have seen what an awful system it is, and they would have lost out to better competition.
The different colour choice mechanisms (mentioned above) is another example.
Why have so many mechanisms when one or two might do?
Why have any, when the computer has a standard approach that every other application uses?
Why have different approaches forced on you in different places?
The consequence is that the user manual has to be three times bigger than it need be.
If the people who programmed Word were remotely connected with writing its manuals, it would be a lot simpler to use because an honest and complete manual of the current design would embarrass them into seeing some sense.
Sadly, Word comes on a CD in a box big enough to contain several big books but no manual.
I suppose the rudimentary booklets that are put in the book were the best Microsoft could do, given that they probably used Word themselves.
Gosh, it is so easy to get cynical, once you start thinking about this collective insanity that gets us all so excited.
That Word has many colour choices when there is an established standard to do colour choices suggests many things.
First, Microsoft’s programmers are ignorant of the standard solutions, or they wilfully ignore them.
Secondly, they don’t talk to each other.
Thirdly, they do not care about consistency.
Fourthly, they waste time reinventing wheels another reason why Word is so expensive!
When you read a computer manual and it says silly things, please remember that it needn’t have been like that.
Somebody designed the program, and they did it a silly way.
Don’t be embarrassed that you can’t understand Word; it isn’t your fault, it’s theirs.
The way Microsoft Word works is not inevitable, and it could easily be made better if only we took a stand.
Trouble is, I’ve got no spare time now I’ve got a new word processor.
(Still, I’ll have a break from it all on January 1, 2000 when I’ll be glad I have Land Rover without computer-controlled emission systems.
Hopefully, the millennium bug will be that major problem that shocks everyone in to the real challenges of getting computers to grow up.)
Author Details Prof Harold Thimbleby Computing Science Middlesex University Bounds Green Road LONDON, N11 2NQ Email: harold@mdx.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Delivering the Electronic Library: The ARIADNE Reader Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Delivering the Electronic Library: The ARIADNE Reader Buzz data archives copyright ejournal url Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl on the new ARIADNE Reader.
The ARIADNE Project was born in September 1995, and the first meeting of the participants from the two partner sites of Abertay Dundee and UKOLN took place in a restaurant after a one-day meeting at the Library Association, in the couple of hours between the Dundee editors leaving the meeting and having to leave for the overnight train from King’s Cross.
In our time-limited discussion, we drafted out a shape for the print and web versions of ARIADNE, defining regular feature titles and listing ideas and contacts to be pursued.
The pressure was on immediately.
We had three months to produce the first issue, which was launched in January 1996 at the University of North London, at a launch party attended by Professor Sir Brian Follett.
Although the following three years saw the pressure relent to some extent, we never quite got away from the rushed meetings, often piggy-backed onto other events, which made a consortium based upon two distant sites develop quickly into one based primarily upon an active and successful virtual relationship.
Both forms of ARIADNE established themselves quickly.
We called it a ‘parallel publication’, but it was from the beginning really a single publication which appeared in two complementary formats.
The budget generously provided by JISC through the Electronic Libraries Programme could accommodate only 12 glossy printed pages for each bi-monthly issue, and therefore the web version became the ‘superset’, in which we published full-length articles which frequently had to be radically edited to fit the print version, together with articles for which the print version had no space, including a proportion of technical pieces which soon gained an enthusiastic readership among web site developers in libraries and information services in the UK and beyond – a readership which continues today.
The web version of ARIADNE has earned itself a distinguished place in the world of library web publications, and one which we hope will be maintained despite the schedule shift from bi-monthly to quarterly publication.
We are grateful to JISC for its continued funding of the web version of the publication.
The print version sought consciously to look different from other academic library and information journals, going for a glossy, multi-coloured approach, its distinctive appearance owing much to the wonderful illustrations of BiL Sedgwick.
While its length suggested ‘newsletter’ (and allowed it very easily to be picked up in staff rooms and slid into briefcases for reading on the train), its style suggested ‘magazine’, and the early issues included magazine touches such as a regular column by poet John Burnside, a cartoon, a ‘Sideline’ column offering off-guard views of professional life in librarianship and information work, and a poem culled from an Internet poetry source.
Over the life of the project, these elements lost the battle with the overwhelming mass of content competing for appearance in the pages of ARIADNE, only the regular cartoon by Malcolm Campbell surviving.
This may have been regrettable, but we had to keep reminding ourselves that ARIADNE was a project as well as a publication, and therefore had to remain open to change and the lessons of formative evaluation.
Obtaining content was never a problem.
The eLib Programme furnished it in plenty, and our problems lay more in what to exclude, particularly with a view to balancing eLib project coverage with other initiatives happening in the UK and elsewhere.
We also wanted opinion pieces, seeking the views of eminent professionals upon the massive change being experienced by their organisations and sectors.
We strove also to give some space to those with reservations about the wholesale flight of information to the net.
ARIADNE was a vehicle for debate as well as description, and we took a disciplined approach to promotion, limiting self-description of projects to summary form, in the knowledge that eLib had other routes for publishing project reports.
ARIADNE was well-supported by eLib.
We were quickly awarded additional funding to increase the number of printed copies per issue, and were granted a third, additional year of funding which allowed the publication to appear in both its forms until the end of 1998.
It continues now in web-only form, but we felt that the publication of a final printed item, this reader, would be an appropriate way of reminding the HE library and information community of the quality which the full print and web ARIADNE attracted as it kept pace with the developing eLib programme.
Much of the material published by the magazine deserves re-presentation.
Although all of the items gathered in this reader exist, at least in similar form, on the web at www.ariadne.ac.uk, they appear here as an edited subset, packaged for a purpose, rather analogous to the emerging role of library and information professionals in an age of digital information.
Our profession, now responsible for establishing a national resource discovery network, no longer simply provides, but now designs gateways, by sifting and resifting, presenting and re-presenting, like jewellers polishing stones from which our customers will make their choices.
In the metaphorical confusion, clear in ARIADNE, created by the need to liken the Internet to something recognisable, it may be appropriate looking back over four years to describe it as a very rapid geological age which has deposited layers of rock-like information, mined by our crawlers and robots, from which we pick out the rough jewels and refine them for discerning eyes.
We would like to thank many people for their efforts in making the ARIADNE project successful.
Lyndon Pugh took over the Managing Editor’s role from John MacColl for the third year, and is responsible for the careful selection of articles published in this reader.
Gratitude is due to those who laboured directly on the publication – John Kirriemuir, Alison Kilgour, Terry Burns, Isobel Stark, Alison Ure and Brian Kelly, not to mention Philip Hunter and Bernadette Daly who continue as ARIADNE editors.
The Project Board, chaired by Sheila Corrall and consisting of Dave Cook, Terry Hanson and Chris Pinder as well as Lyndon Pugh and the two of us, provided excellent advice and guidance throughout the lifetime of the project.
We benefited from a very strong Editorial Board, and particular mention must be made of the efforts of Alison McNab, who organised the web site reviews section.
Thanks are also due to the universities which hosted ARIADNE – Abertay and Bath, and to Edinburgh, which has been home to John MacColl over the final few months of the project’s life.
With the publication of this reader we therefore wrap up ARIADNE as a ‘parallel publication’.
The project evaluation, conducted by the Department of Information and Library Studies at the University of Aberystwyth, considered that we had met our aims and objectives in general, and had produced a publication in which high editorial standards were maintained from the outset, which appeared on schedule, and which had built up an enthusiastic readership.
Despite this, it has not been possible to sustain both forms of the publication, in a climate in which print journal publication is a very difficult financial undertaking, and the hybrid funding model which works in the US for a publication such as Educom Review does not at present appear to be achievable.
We have arranged our selection thematically, rather than chronologically, and have ignored any distinctions between the origins, whether in print or web form.
For obvious reasons, we have tried to choose durable pieces.
Four years is a long time in JISC history, let alone Internet history.
Some of the references – such as Derek Law’s mention of ISSC – now seem to belong to the very distant past, although his article on MANs is still relevant as the People’s Network is created.
Several authors mention the pilot site licensing initiative, providing an interesting tracking perspective upon an idea which blossomed and developed into a successful and significant landmark both in scholarly publication delivery and ‘joined up’ public and private service provision.
Other articles still feel hot off the press, such as Walter Scales’ admirable piece on web site design.
Others again suggest aspirations which may still be outstanding.
Did Lynne Brindley’s wish of three years ago for better evaluation of national data services ever come to pass?
We believe this reader provides a fascinating record of a period of accelerated change in the field of library and information work in higher education largely, but not exclusively, inspired by eLib.
We hope that all of the major initiatives of the last few years are mentioned – e-journals, national site licensing, e-reserves, e-archiving, MANs, convergence, new roles – and the standards and languages in development underneath them, together with the views of those who question their benefits.
Some strong themes emerge across the selection.
It is heartening to note that as a profession we consider that the human, learning and organisational issues are always more important than the technology – and we have strong reservations about the endless upgrade cycle which consumes our IT budgets just as much as journal publisher prices consume our materials budgets.
Faustian bargains make us uncomfortable even as digital technology promises to set our library services free from their old servitude to manual and pedestrian navigation of warehouses of print.
Producing ARIADNE was enjoyable and fulfilling.
In assembling this testimony to the skills and ingenuity of the designers of the electronic library age and the quality of thought of those who participate in and administer it, we hope that our expanding profession will continue to value quality publications, both in print and on the web, which provide awareness and analysis of the changing professional world they live in.
Author Details   John MacColl john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Lorcan Dempsey l.dempsey@ukoln.ac.uk August 1999 Article Title: "Delivering the Electronic Library: the ARIADNE Reader" Author: John MacColl Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/ariadne-reader/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Web Editor: Institutional Troubleshooter Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Web Editor: Institutional Troubleshooter Buzz rdf framework html database xml sgml adobe ftp url research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Emmott describes his experiences of content management at King's College London.
Maintenance problems signal a painful truth for Web Editors (or those occupying similar roles).
They need to change the institutions within which they work.
As I learn more about the institution within which I work I frequently encounter a recurring truism: those with the most to offer in terms of content are often the least able to publish it via the web.
Instead, they are skilled at managing a digital to print workflow i.e., from word-processor to printer; from printer to photocopier; from photocopier to manilla.
They are rarely skilled for digital to web.
When the need or desire arises for content to be published to the web, they are typically faced with three options: treat HTML as a one of the file formats offered by their word-processor; acquire the skills and/ or start using a web authoring program; delegate the task to somebody else.
Not only are these short-term solutions to institutional problems, they are the source of so many problems troubling web editors.
Each of these approaches produces web-sites whose parts are unreliable (is the content there or isn’t it?
), inaccessible (where is it?
), invalid (this is old, isn’t it?)
and of low quality (why does the background keep changing?).
These variables cannot be controlled when the providers of content are faced with barriers to the provision of content.
The struggle to maintain all four soon gives way to simply ‘getting it out there’.
On paper this might result in letters with the wrong margin or occasional pagination problems.
With web-sites, the effect is often more serious pages without navigational links, pages that skew the institutional template, pages that get uploaded but forgotten, pages that aren’t linked to the rest of the site.
In short, a lack of cohesion.
Multi-author environments don’t offer cohesion for free.
An institution’s web-presence (whether one or more sites; freely accessible or restricted) needs cohesion between its parts.
Meaningful connections between these parts underlies the distinction between a web-site and an ftp-site.
The connections between the parts are fine-grained and context sensitive, presenting parts that are greater than the sum of their parts.
An audience looking to satisfy a need must a least benefit from the knowledge that their need cannot be satisfied the minimum a web-site can offer.
A web-site needs to be structured with more than its content in mind to achieve this.
Cohesion extends to presentation.
The high standards set by print are often lost.
Why is speling punctuation typographyspacingattention to detail indexing so important especially in an academic environment?
They’re important because they support or even enable the relationship between the reader and the content.
That they’re hard to maintain reflects, in part, the quality of the institution providing the content.
This is as true for the web as it is for print.
Cohesion extends beyond the institutional web-site the site is part of the larger web and integration isn’t a given.
Forming connections with external content reflects a substantial part of what is often referred to a ‘Web Marketing’.
In fact we could take cohesion into many spheres, including legal.
Producing print documents (from an office printer) is [now] straightforward send the document to the printer.
The challenge is to offer the same simplicity for digital to web.
This is what content providers expect.
For the skilled, digital to web is still taxing.
But this skill-set needs to be constantly updated.
Either web publishing is work or hobby but for most content providers it is neither.
Web publishing is never whole; rather a hole.
For content providers, structure is frequently defined by presentation rarely through some received hierarchy.
The logical structure of a document is defined visually, typically through a hierarchy of headings (headings of different sizes or weights).
Others will use numbered headings to capture sub-divisions even to the level of organisation common to legal documents.
But even here, the structure is for the reader’s eye and not the machine’s ‘finger’.
As printing allows documents to be paginated the unit is the page organisation is often simple and linear.
If the linear order is lost it can be re-established using meta information on the page such as page numbers, chapter headings, author details, etc.
When this same document is instead published to the web, it requires translation a person [still] needs to map the document’s structure onto a series of web-pages by learning the structure from the presentation.
The key here is that the hardwork is not just in translating the content but also in translating its structure.
Authoring tools are still poor when it comes to translating content; hopeless at translating structure.
This will continue until structure is encoded during authoring.
Fitting documents into a web-site presents further difficulties.
Often this relies on the judgement of the Web Editor or local ‘web person’.
Again, the content will need to be interpreted to enable an appropriate position to be selected and then the connections both to and from the pages need to be manually inserted the patch needs to be threaded into the quilt.
Expectations dictate that an institution’s web-site should provide a wealth of content; that needs unrecognised by its architects must be satisfied, and often without its architects’ knowledge.
If the need for content can be met by the institution then it should be met by its web-site at least in part.
But satisfying these needs a copy of the postgraduate prospectus, a list of staff members in a department, knowledge of a peer’s research activities is not the role of the web editor.
It is the role of the institution employing the web editor.
The web editor’s role is to provide a framework within which this can occur, through the medium of the web.
This doesn’t exclude the web editor from participation: bravo those replies to requests for content not found; for web-pages written from knowledge gleaned.
The web editor is faced with a daily dilemma how to populate the web-site with content whilst having few resources to call upon.
This creates a constant battle between ‘do it yourself’ and marketing web strategies internally (you can’t just sell strategies to senior management; you have to sell them to departments as well).
The ‘wearing of several hats’ is not a description of the role but a comment on the singularity of resource.
The hats are destined for team members still to be employed/ obtained sharing the same space and pursuing common objectives.
Building the framework is the greatest challenge facing web editors.
Doing so alone or through some institutional norm of reciprocity is going to be more than hard work.
Of the three main resources people, time and money we all know which one expands.
The heart of the matter is that institutional web-sites need to be multi-author.
Typically each author works on specific, often minority, content (though still important).
Much institutional copy is produced by multiple authors on the other hand.
The web editor’s priority will inevitably be geared toward institutional content and its cohesiveness with the content produced by other authors.
Ultimately this results in being torn between the institution and its parts.
With content providers adopting the short-term strategies noted earlier, the web editor’s role moves closer to support of individuals to ensure cohesion rather than maintaining the big picture.
Getting content on-line often starts with a struggle to identify and enable the source the content provider.
Inevitably the web editor is drawn into issues of support and spending increasing amounts of time managing logistics.
Provision of content is dependent upon workflows outside of their control.
The winning strategy is one that allows anyone in the institution the ability to publish to the web as simply as to print but in such a way as to ensure that cohesion between contributed content is guaranteed.
The web editor must therefore be concerned with the flow of content from source (e.g., the content provider’s desktop) and not just with translation of existing or received copy.
The content needs to pass through a recognisable workflow that offers minimal barriers to contribution (and automates presentation) but constraints upon destination: can it go on-line?
who has authority for release?
where will it be positioned?
when does it need to be reviewed / updated?
Achieving this strategy is dependent upon content being authored in a format that either structures it at source (and that presentation follows on from this) or encapsulates the content.
XML (including RDF) and tools that use it promise a way to structure content at source to enable structure to be embedded as part of the authoring process and even to happen as a result of the authoring process.
PDF offers a solution to encapsulating content.
It is clear to me that a great deal can be done now to address cohesion using these two technologies.
PDF may not be ideal for web delivery but it at least enters the content into the workflow with minimal barriers, and therefore establishes the workflow.
If the tools mature, we may see content entering the workflow without the need for encapsulation.
As Philip Ward (Technical Support Operations, Ford of Europe) pointed out at the SGML, XML, and Databases meeting in October 1998, solutions to information (or content) management require the institution adopting them to change.
The workflow needs to adapt.
I believe this is as true for educational institutions as it for commercial institutions.
This is difficult to accept when one takes in the breadth of the institution’s focus teaching and/or research.
But isn’t this CAL?
And why are we dealing with it?
Further Reading At the Event: SGML, XML, and Databases, Ariadne, issue 18 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue18/emmott-sgml/> Content Management Tools, XML.COM <URL: http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/pt/Content_Management> Extensible Markup Language, W3C <URL: http://www.w3.org/XML/> Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, O’Reilly <URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/infotecture/> PDF / Acrobat , Adobe <URL: http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/main.html> Author Details Stephen Emmott, Web Editor Press & Public Relations Office Room 4.14, Waterloo Bridge House 57 Waterloo Road, London SE1 8WA Website: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ Email: stephen.emmott@kcl.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 171 872 3342; Fax: +44 (0) 171 872 0214 Stephen Emmott is the Web Editor at King’s College London.
He is a founder member of .gamut a forum for web editors in London.
Are you a web site editor?
Would you like to write an article for Ariadne giving your views?
If so, please send email to ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data framework html archives metadata thesaurus digitisation cataloguing graphics rslp e-government url research standards modelling Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Tessa Jowell, new Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has recently been appointed Minister for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) replacing Chris Smith.
Tessa has been a minister since Labour won its first landslide four years ago.
As minister for public health, Ms Jowell was embroiled in the Bernie Ecclestone affair, when the government gave Formula One motor racing an exemption from the ban on tobacco advertising after its boss, Mr Ecclestone, gave an anonymous £1m donation to the Labour Party.
The MP for Dulwich and West Norwood was moved after two years at the ministry of health to take over responsibility for implementing the New Deal jobs programme as minister of state for employment.
Ms Jowell, who has written articles on social policy, was given the extra task of heading up the government’s women’s unit alongside Baroness Jay.
[BBC Online, June 2001] Exploring the charging models for digital cultural heritage To explore the charging models for digital content of cultural institutions in the UK and Europe the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant to the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS).
HEDS will: study how pricing structures are determined for delivering digital versions of rare or unique items in libraries, museums, archives and similar public institutions investigate how these digital pricing structures compare to those used for the delivery of the same or similar resources in analogue form.
explore the thresholds that determine the point at which an organization charges for the sale of content and other rights to their digital holdings and the reasons given for such charges.
To discover the underlying motivation driving charging and rights policies, HEDS will use relative and comparative cost modeling with a framework of opinion-based research.
This work will help the community to compare and assess costs for delivering digital content against a realistic model.
HEDS provides consultancy and production services for digitisation and digital library development to all sectors of education, libraries, museums and other non-profit organizations.
Further information about HEDS can be found at http://heds.herts.ac.uk [HEDS is a service of the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils based at the University of Hertfordshire] Education where and when?
The NISS Campus web site provides a range of information of interest to the education community.
Our Education Editor reports here on two recent additions.
Distance Learning NISS has added a new resource to the “Colleges and Universities” area of NISS Campus: a page about Open and Distance Learning opportunities.
In keeping with our aims it provides a starting point for those wishing to find out about this area, by giving general information and then linking to the major sources of information about courses and their accreditation.
You will find the new page at www.niss.ac.uk/sites/open&distance.html Enquiries about NISS services should be made to niss@niss.ac.uk NISS is a division of EduServ.
Unless otherwise indicated, information and services mentioned above can be accessed via the NISS WWW server at the URL: http://www.niss.ac.uk/ NISS Advisor is distributed to the niss-news, lis-link, ucisa-tlig-newsletter and admin-news (all@jiscmail.ac.uk) mailing lists.
All editions of NISS Advisor can also be found at http://www.niss.ac.uk/about-niss/advisor/ Forty-Five Years of 20th Century Design On-line For the first time, the Design Council Slide Collection is available online via the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).
The collection includes nearly 3000 unique images of tableware, furniture, lighting, toys, domestic appliances, textiles, wallpapers, office equipment and engineering components.
It also features other areas of design from the last half of the 20th century such as architecture, town planning, interior design, graphic design and corporate identity.
Many of the images in the collection illustrate the aesthetic and technological developments of the period, and reflect the design history of various kinds of objects and new product types making it an invaluable on-line resource.
A large number of original images dedicated to the Design Council’s own activities are also included such as its annual design award scheme and various exhibition and events it organised or contributed to in the UK and abroad.
The Design Council Slide Collection is searchable online at http://vads.ahds.ac.uk.
VADS provides more than 9,500 visual arts images for use in research, learning and teaching.
VADS current on-line collections include Design Council Archive, London College of Fashion: College Archive, The Imperial War Museum Concise Art Collection and the Halliwell and Basic Design Collections.
The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) provides an on-line catalogue and archive of high quality digital resources for research, learning and teaching in the visual arts.
VADS also advises the visual arts community on good practice for the creation and management of digital resources.
e-Government Metadata Framework The e-Government Metadata Framework has been officially launched.
It is available at http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/egif/home.html under ‘metadata’.
Dublin Core is now the official, mandated standard for metadata for government information, and work is underway to develop the standard further.
The development of a Pan-Government Thesaurus has also been mandated.
[Maewyn Cumming, e-Envoy e-Government, May 2001] Collection Description Focus RSLP, JISC and the British Library are jointly funding the new Collection Description Focus, which will provide authoritative advice and guidance on collection description implementation to the UK library, information, archive, cultural heritage, government and learning communities.
The service will be located at UKOLN at the University of Bath, UK, and can be accessed from Monday 11th June via an advisory service email address: cd-focus@ukoln.ac.uk, or by telephone on 01225 323619.
Further information relating to Focus staff, documentation and events will be made available shortly.
The top level of the Collection Description Focus pages is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/ New Director of Operations and Services at the British Library The British Library has appointed Natalie Ceeney to the newly created post of Director of Operations and Services.
Natalie Ceeney will lead British Library services in support of the corporate sector and for science and industry.
The new directorate will bring together the Library’s remote document supply service and its STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) research, creating new opportunities for innovation.
[Extract from British Library Press Release, May 2001] Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Web Editor: From 'One Stop Shop' to Information Hierarchy Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Web Editor: From 'One Stop Shop' to Information Hierarchy Buzz software html database apache accessibility vocabularies copyright perl url Citation BibTex RIS Rebecca Linford discusses the web editor role: from 'one stop shop' to information hierarchy.
Information Science & Web Management When web services began in Higher Education institutions, the majority of those employed to manage them were technical people.
Experience in UNIX, CGI programming and Apache were prerequisites.
But as web sites have grown into huge vortexes of information, those with the skills to help identify & satisfy the information needs of client groups have become increasingly valued.
Recent adverts in the national press for web administrators/editors/masters have emphasised skills in ‘the gathering, analysis and presentation of information’ [1] ‘effective communication’, ‘team leadership’ and ‘information management’; skills either directly taught in or fostered by courses such as Information and Library Science (ILS).
Technical ability is increasingly seen as a skill that can be developed, and an enthusiasm to learn UNIX or Perl, or to get involved with web server maintenance, is often enough.
In a discussion of the disciplinary backgrounds of WWW information architects, Rosenfeld and Morville (1998) note, ‘We’ve found that our backgrounds in information science and librarianship have proved very useful in dealing with the relationships between pages and other elements that make up a whole site.
By definition, librarians deal with organisation of and access to information within information systems and are trained to work with searching, browsing, and indexing technologies.’ [2] The job outline for the position I now hold [3] encompassed many aspects studied in the context of more traditional media within a postgraduate ILS course [4].
The syllabus had covered subject specification (including search engines and indexing), operations and finance (useful if you are lucky enough to have a budget!
), policy (including formulation), databases (great for web site records), and development of computing skills (including HTML).
So how did this apply to an institutional web site?
The University web site I inherited in 1997 had just been redesigned, and was based on a relatively deep hierarchy of information, which is still used on the site in modified form (refer to figure 1).
Web pages had been organised into subject areas, and so users had to judge which area to choose at each level in order to find the desired information.
The previous homepage had been top-heavy all information published on University servers was linked from this central point and had become intimidating to new users, but replacing over 100 links with only 10 produced problems.
Figure 1: Hierarchical approach used on entry point It was evident from statistical analysis of the server logfiles, and from feedback both directly from users and via the form provided on the site, that further navigational aids were necessary for those requiring a known item.
Past users, familiar with accessing all web sites from the ‘one stop shop’ homepage were particularly reluctant to navigate the new structure.
As a result, the A to Z Index was expanded using a controlled vocabulary which reflected the relationships between terms, and later a search engine was added to improve accessibility of information.
Casual browsers on the other hand appeared to find the hierarchy much easier to use.
It encouraged them to consider their needs and fostered serendipity.
The advantages of the new structure, including functionality and better organisation, were heavily promoted via articles in the University magazine and presentations at University events, while staff development courses were run with the aim of enabling staff to find information.
More recently the web site was restructured using an audience approach to increase accessibility of the information.
The reliance on a hierarchy also necessitated effective use of terminology or ‘labelling systems’, and this was considered carefully when the web site was restructured.
Irrespective of the ease of navigation, finding that information is not available after working through a hierarchy, is extremely frustrating for users.
Analysing information needs (both internal and external) and the existing information provided on the site identified a number of gaps to be filled.
This was achieved by developing an understanding of the institution its mission, goals, current and potential audiences, and future strategy.
Liaison with members of staff, especially those involved with the institutional information strategy, student recruitment, and public relations proved invaluable.
Some of the ‘missing information’ was authored and published by departments, and so a great deal of work involved discussing information content and organisation of department web material.
The University’s Electronic Publishing Editorial Board, established in 1995 to influence the use and direction of electronic publishing, had already encouraged all departments to author their own pages, and this work was continued.
A template generator was provided to allow academic departments to easily use the corporate design if they so wished; the design was compulsory for administrative departments in order to ensure a cohesive and consistent identity on the top levels of the site.
The hierarchical nature of the design also encouraged departments to consider navigation and labelling systems.
The result is a de-centralised approach to information provision links are established from the top levels of the site into information provided at a department level.
At present [May 1999] only 5 departments (all academic) do not have a web site, and the number of unique computers accessing the web pages on the main web server alone has increased by 72% between February 1998 and February 1999 [5].
The web site now includes over 30,000 pages, and is visited by more than 40,000 unique computers per month.
Some of the corporate information that has been authored has included a Freshers’ web site, an external links site, and a comprehensive campus guide.
The Freshers’ site brought together all information useful to new students, including University support services, entertainments & daily events.
It was heavily publicised to new students via Admissions & Student Recruitment publications and Faculty Booklets, and hopefully encouraged students to return to the web site as a primary source of information.
The external links site was based on a similar philosophy the provision of a gateway to external resources on the Internet encourages University staff and students to adopt the University site as their gateway to the Internet.
The site included links to external search facilities, educational resources, and lists of subject resources on the Internet that are maintained by departments.
Conclusion Library and information scientists may bring core information skills to the job, but all web managers often find themselves in the uncanny situation of providing a one-stop shop editor, designer, technical specialist, user support person, trainer, marketing officer, development officer, and even minute secretary!
It quickly becomes a balancing act of deciding which skills to develop, and choosing a direction in which to branch, while the workload increases daily with user expectations and rapid technological growth.
However, tomorrows information and library graduates are likely to be even more suited to institutional web management.
Courses in library and information science now increasingly offer the opportunity to move into the technical arena.
The Robert Gordon University introduced a postgraduate course in Electronic Information Management in 1997, which included computer systems architecture [6].
Likewise Loughborough University, one of the most renowned institutions for library & information science training, has widened the curriculum to include Advanced Internet & Digital Libraries.
Computer-mediated communication by email, HTML mark-up, and running a WWW server as an information provider are key components.
It is anticipated that institutional web managers will increasingly work in teams, with people employed to fulfil individual roles in the creation and maintenance of institutional web sites, including information management.
However, increased emphasis on the departmental provision of information, web authoring and propagation of skills, may well result in a movement away from the ‘traditional’ central roles into a devolved structure, thus leaving the institutional web manager to concentrate on the organisation and communication of information.
A Day in the Life of a Web Administrator 8:30am You arrive at work early with the intention of finishing the online Graduate Prospectus.
You go to the College Shop for the morning paper (for the IT supplement), but the Vice Principal accosts you.
His counterpart at another University has spotted a web page on your institutional web site questioning how their students have such a high record of graduate employment.
You say you’ll sort it out.
8:45am Armed with a strong coffee you open your new mail folder…110 emails.
You see two hours disappearing….you’ll deal with it later.
9am The Press Officer reminds you that today is the deadline for the University magazine.
You had been asked to write an article about email misuse.
You’ll submit it later, and decide to answer some email!
9:30am You look for the web page mentioned that morning by the Vice Principal.
Searching the web site using the University’s search engine reveals no likely suspects.
You check the Careers site for good measure, but nothing dubious.
Perhaps it’s a student page?
You resort to good old UNIX and use the ‘find’ command on the webserver.
Still no luck.
9:45am You phone the Principal’s Office, only to find the Vice Principal is away for the rest of the week….
10am An email arrives from Administrator@somewhere.com.
One of your students is sending offensive mail to his school, but no other information is provided.
‘We take this very seriously’ you reply, ‘but can you please provide further information or a copy of the message this student sent?’ You also ask for confirmation of who he or she is no name is provided!
10:45am You finally get time to concentrate on the web version of the Graduate Prospectus.
You spend ten minutes editing html files, and then the web server crashes just before you save.
You’ll go back to it later.
11am Course tomorrow Introduction to the WWW.
Still course material to download from the Netskills web site.
You find the site, only to find your login is invalid….
You settle for the now out-of-date material used in the last course.
12 noon The web server is back.
You return to the Graduate Prospectus.
1pm You have lunch at your desk (between phone calls).
2pm You need to transfer ownership of a domain name.
You reach the Network Solutions web site, but spend 20 minutes navigating in circles, and filling in multiple forms.
Finally you find a normal email address and contact the “hostmaster”.
2:30pm A colleague from your department is having problems with her computer, and she comes to ask you for help.
You tell her to phone IT Services.
3pm You get a phone call about a copyright infringement.
An image is displayed on one of the University web servers showing ‘Jesus in a graveyard’.
The woman says it’s her photo.
‘We take this very seriously’, you say wondering what Jesus is doing on an institutional web site.
A few phone calls reveal the web site shouldn’t be there at all.
3:10pm You get a phone call from a member of staff who wants a web directory.
He says he sent a form two weeks ago.
You point out that you have 10 forms before his still to process.
He says he also wants his directory in the root of the web server.
So does everyone else, you tell him.
4:30pm A member of staff from a department calls.
He can’t get the corporate design to stay together on his web pages.
‘What software are you using?’ you ask.
He tells you its Microsoft Word.
You suggest he uses something else.
5pm A Head of Department phones.
He asks if you would like to speak about the web site at an event tomorrow.
You’re far too busy you say, and you loath public speaking.
But finally, after 10 minutes of pressure, you give in you do want to go home this evening after all.
5:30pm You leave the office, armed with your ‘homework’: a list of UCAS codes for the online Graduate Prospectus, and an article for the University magazine.
References Part-Time Web Development Officer, School Of Electronic Engineering & Computer Systems, University of Wales <URL: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobfiles/AO072.html> Morville, P. and RosenFeld, L., 1998 Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates Job Outline, Position of University Web Administrator (advertised summer 1997) <URL: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/main/webadmin/outline.htm> Information and Library Studies PgDip/MA/MSc <URL: http://www.rgu.ac.uk/prospectus/pm-lib.htm> Statistical Reports <URL: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/usage/index.html> Electronic Information Management PgDip/MSc <URL: http://www.rgu.ac.uk/prospectus/pm-eim.htm> Author Details Rebecca Linford Secretary’s Office University of Dundee Email: r.e.s.linford@dundee.ac.uk Rebecca Linford is the University Web Administrator at the University of Dundee.
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Law Vs Jordan Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Law Vs Jordan Buzz url Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Gough discusses: Who makes the best manager of a converged service?
This was the subject of an exciting and amusing, albeit tongue-in-cheek, debate that rounded off the “50 Years of Information Developments in Higher Education” conference held in Manchester from 16 18 June 1998.
The motion that “Librarians are Better Equipped to Run Merged Information Services” was proposed by Derek Law, Librarian at Kings College London and opposed by Andy Jordan, Director of Computer Services at Huddersfield.
Robin McDonough, Director of Information Services at Manchester University, seconded the motion and Chris Hunt, Librarian at Manchester supported Andy Jordan.
The debate was chaired by Clive Field, Director of Information Services at Birmingham.
The arguments, very personal at times, were highly amusing.
Law claimed that computer centre managers have no powers of conversation at all but, unfortunately, have not lost the power of speech.
He quoted a “survey” that showed that computer managers were losers, wore dirty macs, open shirts, open sandals and tank tops.
Computing he saw as a trade, not a profession.
He alleged that computer managers cannot count beyond one and the year 2000 problems show that programmers cannot count beyond 99.
Computer centre managers can be regarded much like a new PC.
“Shiny and showy till you get them home and, for safety, you always need a backup.” Law also criticised the URL system, claiming that it made the Library of Congress classification system look simple.
Computing people, living in a fantasy world, reading science fiction and creating MUDs, have no social skills: at library conferences delegates use Tai Chi and listen to poetry and laments during the evening meals but in contrast most delegates at computing conferences cannot remember what happened the previous evening: the tirade continued.
On the subject of management skills Law invited the audience to compare and contrast the MAC initiative and the Follett Report.
Converged services are now the norm in the UK : 6 out of 7 are run by librarians.
Computer centre managers are more familiar with the technology than with users.
Quoting from a computer manual Law found evidence to question their literary skills.
“Press any key to stop, any other key to continue”.
The response from Andy Jordan was just as well argued.
Whilst he saw librarianship as a worthy profession, the rapidly changing nature of information systems meant that specialists in this area are better equipped.
From having four computers to serve the nation in the early 50s there are now four in Jordan’s house alone.
Moving from a large investment in a central system to huge numbers of distributed computers connected by the network meant that computer centre managers were best placed to manage this development and plan for the future.
How many Librarians brought the Web and e-mail to their institutions?
Jordan was willing to acknowledge that librarians can cope with change.
“After all they successfully dealt with the move from clay tablets to papyrus”.
But this did not prove that they had the more appropriate skills to deal with the radical and rapid changes occurring in information services and teaching and learning.
Whilst librarians seem to be keen to act as mediators between the user and the information they wish to access, computing staff want to remove all intermediaries.
In conclusion Jordan commented on the fact that Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had cracked two ribs falling off some steps in a library, but it was impossible to imagine any self-respecting computer centre manager allowing Keith to fall off a PC.
Robin McDonough, arguing the case for librarians, suggested that it was simply an accident of history that the computer was invented after the book.
Had a young Bill Caxton invented the book a small, portable, easy to read alternative to reading information from computer screens he would have made a large fortune.
McDonough also pointed out that librarians have standing in universities: 15 computer centre managers are professors, only one librarian is; the librarians, being highly enough regarded, do not need the title.
Stability is also a notion foreign to computer centre managers.
They change things constantly (advisory to help desk to service desk to on-line FAQs and help), but librarians come from a background of 500 years of stability.
Chris Hunt, opposing the motion, pointed out that whilst computer centre managers have degrees in real subjects, librarians studied subjects like media studies and sociology.
Therefore computing people were more literate the better and numerate and had a greater grasp of reality.
As for who makes the the better manager, the final test is money.
“Computer centre managers will go for any money going and fight tooth and nail to get it.” The debate, whilst being a little vitriolic at times, was conducted with with good good humour throughout.
The result, hopefully not affected by the favourable ratio of librarians to computing staff attending the conference, was a landslide for the librarians 32 for the motion, 17 against with 1 abstention.
The serious business of the conference will be reported by Stephen, of Reading University Computer Centre Services, in the next issue of Ariadne.
Author details Stephen Gough Reading University Computer Services Centre Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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VERITY Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines VERITY Buzz data software database tagging browser cataloguing graphics opac windows hypertext z39.50 telnet ftp cd-rom interoperability algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Panayiotis Periorellis and Walter Scales writes about the VERITY European Telematics Project.
Abstract The majority of library enquiry systems usually consist of a non-graphical interface linked to a library catalogue (Online Public Access Catalog, or OPAC).
Graphics, animation and sound are usually sacrificed to speed up the enquiry process.
Some interfaces support the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and can therefore be accessed on the World Wide Web (Web).
Although they allow access using a number of keywords (author, subject, title, etc.
), they do not provide any help on how the catalogues are accessed, how to structure or refine a query or how to evaluate the responses.
To add to the confusion, there are many different manufacturers of OPACs.
Information Services at the University of Sunderland is currently developing an intelligent enquiry system that uses an interactive dialogue process to direct the user to information.
The system also includes a skills component based on the learning dialogue explaining the information seeking process, and finally a referral service that forwards unanswered queries to a transnational mediated special interest group (SIG).
Definition Verity is exploring new ways of providing virtual library services that are creative, stimulating and educational for young people in the 13-19 age group.
The aim is to design a system that helps those users with their information enquiries, in a context that encourages the development and understanding of their own information seeking skills.
Verity will teach young people to find and manage information held in libraries and on electronic networks.
Verity can be browsed through any (fairly recent) Web browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer).
One of Verity’s key challenges is the fact that it’s being developed as a multilingual application, and developed in parallel by five partners, the lead partner based in the UK and other partners in Finland, Germany, Greece and Portugal [1].
Why Verity?
Web-based query engines may well know about library catalogues which manage to appear on the Web, but they cannot actually directly query those catalogues they can only point the user at them.
The user then has to go off and learn which library to query, and how exactly to go about doing that, and then evaluate the results [2].
Verity demonstrates that the keywords behind a given library catalogue can be made available on the Web to be queried and accessed by a third-party enquiry engine (rather than the enquiry mechanism of that particular catalogue).
Verity doesn’t have to maintain such databases itself, it simply has to know about and be allowed to access those databases (or at least part(s) of them) that librarians and OPACs currently maintain as part of their own work.
After all, more and more academic libraries are placing their catalogues on the World Wide Web [3][4].
Scope of Verity There are many issues that Verity can actively tackle: the age range is significant in the design of Verity, not just as an issue of attractiveness but in terms of the resources it encourages young people to use.
The resources have to be relevant to their concerns, their educational imperatives, and address issues such as general suitability.
Any integration of a facility like Verity into school or college will encourage young people to find information, integrate higher-resourced or more traditionally research-based libraries into lower-resourced public and school libraries, and will also augment the role and standing of librarians and information providers.
The trend of libraries and information provision over the past five years has been towards better access at lower cost [5].
However, unless young people are skilled enough to find and incorporate the growing corpus of knowledge much of it will pass them by.
Verity has an integrated “Information Skills” component that will actively guide the user through a query and will furnish a set of results tailored to that user.
This is a trend already seen in search services [6][7], but Verity will include such an aspect as an integral interactive component of its service.
It will also incorporate a much more proactive approach towards developing the user’s skills.
The precise methodology to achieve such integration is described in Section 2.0, and Section 3.0 then looks more specifically at the particular challenges associated with offering a multilingual service.
Section 4.0 builds on those general technical and multilingual parameters in order to address specifically the protocols within which Verity must work.
Methodology The development life cycle process of Verity follows the same traditional route as most software engineering projects.
The initial investigations into the technical aspects suggested that the best way to develop and communicate the ideas inherent in Verity is to create a model of Verity’s components.
The first step was to assemble a methodology that would cover areas such as: parallel development of Verity’s components, in-house development, commercial software packages, and protocols.
The project ‘borrowed’ several diagrammatic notations from well established methodologies including IDEF:0 [8] and SSADM [9] as well as ideas and guidelines from general software engineering techniques.
The result was a methodology comprising five phases.
Context Diagram Context diagrams reveal the relationships of Verity vis-a-vis its own main components as well as its external links for example dependencies on entities such as the Internet or OPACs.
We treated Verity as a system with links and dependencies on other autonomous entities (systems that exist without Verity) in order to clarify the type of input to those entities and the type of output Verity expects.
We identified 4 major verity components: Information Skills, Enquiry, Referral and the so-called “Fourth Element” (a category which subsumes the necessary technology and software to make Verity work).
Data Flow Diagrams (DFD’s) These diagrams proved to be the best way of modelling each Verity component and at the same time distinguish between processes, states and storage.
The diagrams helped identify the links between each modelled component and the rest of Verity.
Figure 1.
Verity Architecture The approach was carried out for each of the 4 major components.
The end product was a list of activities, processes and storage.
Activities refer to the code or the algorithms we need to build in order to carry out the processes described in the DFD.
Storage boxes identified the needs of the system in terms of databases and files.
Entity Relationship Diagrams [10] The modelling proposal described in the previous paragraphs takes an information flow viewpoint of Verity.
For each one of the components, sub-components, activities and processes we need to identify the set of resources that will be allocated to them.
Such a diagram presents the physical view of the system.
In other words, the aim is to identify the software tools we need (languages, packages), databases, protocols.
Software Engineering The final phase of the methodology was to refine the databases and algorithms into their components using normalisation and pseudo-coding respectively.
Dictionary The dictionary should contain and explain all the technical terms used throughout the modelling process.
This is the modelling dictionary, not to be confused with Verity’s own dictionaries to handle multilingual input.
Technical Requirements An early step was to assess the language implications of the project.
According to the initial requirements, the system is required to accept a query about a subject in a natural language format, identify the language (English, Finnish, German, Greek, Portuguese), translate the query from any of the five languages into English keywords (default or target language), then extract those words that could be used as keywords to retrieve information from the Verity database, and finally display the findings on the screen.
That is, the process identifies words that can be used as keywords usually nouns with some verbs and adjectives.
When all these words have been identified, they need to be translated to an appropriate default language (in our case, English).
Dictionaries contain only the root of each word or its basic form when it has to do with verbs.
However, natural language queries will probably contain words in various forms and tenses.
In order to extract the root word, each word has to go through the process of stemming.
Both processes are described below.
Morphological Analysers Morphological analysers are software tools used to assist the process of identifying and extracting only these words in the query that can be used to retrieve information from a database.
During the process of tagging, each word of the query will be identified according to its function (e.g.
noun) and then tagged: Word in the query “find” Word after Tagging (Verb “find”) Word in the query “cat” Word after Tagging (Noun “cat”) Queries in a natural language form will certainly contain word in many forms i.e.
nouns in plural, verbs in their past tense etc.
Stemming is the process of identifying the root of each word of the query and returning that word: Word in the query “was” Word after stemming (“be+ed”) Word in the query “sitting” Word after stemming (“sit+ing”) Systems Architecture Figure 2 illustrates the systems architecture.
The system is currently being developed on a Windows NT server for Widows 95 clients.
Figure 2.
Query Processing Architecture Figure 2 shows the main processes that lead to the extraction of keywords before they are sent to the Internet, OPACs, or other resources.
Protocols Library catalogues are software specific, but generally most OPACs in libraries display the familiar command line “Telnet-like” interface.
For some time there has been a client/server (or “origin/target”) based Z39.50 [11] standard allowing the user of, say, a Dynix-based library catalogue to also search, say, a Unicorn OPAC.
Z39.50 is a standard by which different software products can talk to each other and exchange data.
The standard itself, of course, does not provide the user interface, that is up to the individual software house.
Z39.50 and SR (“Search and Retrieve”) are not quite synonymous.
Z39.50 can be taken to be a United States implementation, and SR the international standard in fact, a 1993 subset of the more functional Z39.50.
SR developments seem to be focussed mainly in Europe.
The two protocols overlap in many areas, and usually SR can ignore or step around the parts of Z39.50 that it doesn’t understand for example, the British Library structured its development plans during the late 1990’s on the understanding that Z39.50 version 3 would be accepted as SR Version 2 [12].
There are many European and other initiatives to develop Z39.50 integration further (e.g.
into the Web) three examples being the Europagate project, the integration of Z39.50 into LIBERTAS and in the UK the Z39.50/SR Pre-Implementors Group (PIG).
In the UK, there is a good body of general information on Z39.50 provided by, amongst others, the UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN) and by the British Library [11].
The experience in Germany is perhaps indicative of the difficulties of operating full Z39.50 integration: the German DBV-OSI II Project (Open Communication between Library and Information Retrieval Systems) is aimed at removing the present subtle differences between the several regional union catalogues.
A good example of collaboration in the Northern part of Germany is their regional union catalogue based on PICA which involves public libraries.
In other regions public libraries have their own catalogue systems.
It’s not that regional catalogues are particularly more complicated so far as technology is concerned, the difficulties are more to do with agreements amongst information providers about cataloguing standards (and this even though standardised cataloguing is used in Germany).
For these very reasons we think that such difficulties will be of less relevance in the future, when already so many libraries offer Internet (and specifically Web) access to their catalogues.
[3][4] So far as Verity development is concerned, this has encouraged us to decide that links to, say, OPACs can only be to those city and library OPACs which will be accessible via the Internet.
Web Based Protocols Internet protocols (Telnet, FTP, Mail and the Web protocol http) are well understood and accepted as a standard offering interoperability between platforms, domains and (perhaps most importantly!)
age-groups.
Verity is not about simply offering an interesting way to search a given family of library catalogues, it also offers the opportunity to search the Web in an integrated and educative way.
The idea is that an entire valuable and previously largely inaccessible corpus of quality information (academic and public library collections as well as more specialised library-based CD-ROM collections, or digitised library-based collections) should be made available to young users, at the very least helping them hone their acquisition of learning skills in a very rapidly changing environment.
Future Work The implementation of the project will be carried out during 1998⁄99.
The implementation has been divided into 5 phases including the development of the Natural Language Query Processing Algorithm Graphical User Interface Information Skills Content Protocols to link Verity with the Web Protocols to link current Library Catalogues to the Web.
During early 1999 the five Verity partners will develop national models based on the architecture described above.
During 1999 and into 2000 the partners will develop and roll out a unified Verity service, capable of being used on the Web or perhaps packaged on a CD for integration in a library’s or a school’s own information provision services.
Conclusions The aim of the Verity project is to assist users to find information fast and at the same time teach them the information skills required.
The system uses an attractive graphical user interface with animations and sounds associated with its options and navigation patterns, and will work through the user’s familiar Web browser.
Verity offers a low maintenance way of teaching and guiding users through the process of finding information.
References Verity Home Page http://www.library.sunderland.ac.uk/homepage/verity.htm Salampasis M Agent Based Hypermedia Digital Library, 1998 Thesis.
Sunderland University.
webCATS http://www.lights.com/webcats/ UK-based National Information Services and Systems http://www.niss.ac.uk/reference/opacs.html UK-based Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ Ask Jeeves http://www.askjeeves.com/ Firefly http://www.ffly.com:80/ IDEF Methods http://www.idef.com/ Skidmore S., Farmer R., Mills G. SSADM Models and Methods version, Blackwell NCC 1992 Yourdon E. Object Oriented Analysis and Design: Case Studies, Yourdon Press New Jersey 1994UK-based Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) Z39.50 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/z3950/ Library Information Technology Centre (LITC), Report No 7, Z39.50 and SR http://www.sbu.ac.uk/~litc/ Other report titles in the series include The World Wide Web in Libraries and Retrospective Conversion and Sources of Bibliographic Record Supply.
Grafenstette, G. (Ed).
Cross Language Information Retrieval, Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998.
Author Details Panayiotis Periorellis and Walter Scales University of Sunderland, Information Services Chester Road Library, Sunderland Email: cs0ppe@isis.sunderland.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The LEODIS Database Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The LEODIS Database Buzz data software javascript database archives digitisation browser identifier sql video cataloguing tiff purl jpg csv intranet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jonathan Kendal on the creation of LEODIS, a Public Libraries sector digitization and database project.
Personal Background To begin with, as this is predominantly a libraries publication I feel an introduction to my background may be helpful in understanding this approach to digitisation.
My relationship with the Leodis Database is as technical creator and manager and my background is purely technical.
I studied Printing and Photographic Technology for 3 years at Kitson College Leeds and then Computer Science for 3 years at Manchester Metropolitan University followed by 1 years research in Computer Modelling at Manchester Metropilitan University, Department of Mechanical Engineering.
I state this now as I firmly believe that it is important to realise that digitisation projects are quite technical and probably best led by qualified technical staff, rather than traditional library staff.
The process of indexing and placing of images online is relatively simple; it is the back end implementation which requires great consideration and technical knowledge in order to achieve a stable and future proof solution.
Project Background In 1996 Leeds City Council established the Internet Project Office with the goal of delivering The City of Leeds website (www.leeds.gov.uk).
The Internet Project Office was formed as a section of Leeds Libraries & Information Services, though corporately funded from the centre.
This office comprises 1 Project Manager, 1 Internet Programmer (yours truly), 1.5 Web Designers and 1 Administration Assisitant.
The website delivered was sub-divided into 6 key headings, one of which remains as Libraries.
The content under Libraries at this stage was considered a little ‘dry’ and the Internet Project Office team decided to create an ‘added value’ element to the site.
We contacted local studies and offered to represent the Local Historic Photographic Collection online.
Still in the early days of internet technology we hastily constructed an access database, indexed and scanned a selection of 200 images and put them online by way of a CSV (comma separated variable) file export, interrogated by cgi-bin program written in the C programming language.
The popularity of this basic service led to an increase in the online collection to 2,100 by October 2000. when the service was terminated and replaced by the Leodis Database (www.leodis.net) which had been under construction since January 1999.
The Leodis Database now holds some 9,500 images and forms the basis of a UK NOF (New Opportunities Fund www.nof.org.uk) bid to enable funding for the indexing of the entire Leeds Collection, 40,000 plus images, playbills and maps.
Technical Architecture The development and launch of the new Leodis Database stems from an early stage when it was obvious that the photographs were popular and that given the right vehicle we could publish the entire collection.
We had viewed others efforts and considered many inappropriate due to their closed architecture and proprietary approach.
Latterley, increased interest has come about because of the UK Government’s drive toward digitisation of archive materials held in public collections.
As an aside to the main thrust of our work on the City of Leeds website we began to investigate further: As a crucial element of the database we were to implement we sought open standards for a catalogue, image format (for true digitisation standard i.e.
300dpi) and a programming language with which to interact with the catalogue.
The use of open standards would guarantee that any efforts made today could be easily ported to new systems of the future – at the end of the project we aimed to have underlying transferrable data tied to platfrom independent images NOT a product of the day tied to a proprietary solution.
The results would also be published on the internet and necessitated a second image saved as a 72dpi JPG the most suitable type for the nature of our collection i.e.
continuous tone images.
Preliminary research resulted in the discovery of the Dublin Core (www.purl.org/dc/) as suitably open cataloguing standard, TIFF as a platform independent image file and SQL (Structured Query Language) as an open language by which to interact with a finished database.
We also noted that the Dublin Core was able to catalogue more than simple images – it held the possibility of cataloguing maps, movies, playbills etc.
To pilot stage; we had enough money in our Capital Budget to purchase an NT server with a large amount of disk space, fitted with Internet Information Server and MSSQL 7.0.
This affordable platform would form the basis for an ‘intranet’ pilot scheme.
The choice of MSSQL was an economically convenient choice – it is also well regarded.
Oracle would have served as well but it was considered too expensive for the pilot.
An MSSQL table was designed to match the Dublin Core Catalogue and methods of interaction with the databse were considered.
Client Software to interact with MSSQL can prove costly – and does not easily offer the kind of interface desired to enable easy upload of new material.
Internet Information Server offers the ability to engage in rapid development and deployment of intranet client based interfaces to MSSQL 7.0 databases via Active Server Page (ASP) server based applications.
These applications could be written in Javascript or VBScript – as VBScript is native to the platform where the solution was to reside we chose VBScript (there are no browser compatibility issues here as the applications are server NOT client based).
Realising this ability (cheap and rapid client development) it was decided to enable viewing and upload to the database via Internet Explorer (or Netscape).
Internet Explorer provided us with free clients, not requiring licenses to interact with MSSQL 7.0 – the envisaged user interface for uploading would be no more complicated than a Q and A form and allow anyone with little training to successfully and safely enter new records.
The result is a scalable database based on a respected cataloguing system, tied to 300dpi TIFF images (offline) and 72dpi JPG images (online).
Catalogue viewing is via the internet and upload via closed intranet.
The viewing and uploading applications are server based, written as Active Server Page applications in VBScript using embedded SQL to interact with the MSSQL 7.0 server.
We have maintained our aim of transferrable data and images.
The upload and viewing applications are today’s best offer, tomorrow may require another method of delivery and we feel extremely confident that the architecture we have in place will see our collection through the many changes in delivery that will no doubt be required.
Indexing the Images The indexing of the images in accordance with the Dublin Core (www.purl.org/dc/) is a separate maunal process undertaken by Local Studies staff.
The Internet Office interprets and advises use of the Dublin Core definitions to index the image collection and other media.
Each image has a label attached which is completed by knowledgable staff, this indexed image is then ready to enter the system.
In Practice In practice the system is proving extremely robust and practical.
Evidence of this is found in the ease with which Local Studies has employed and trained temporary staff to scan and upload images via the intranet client.
The process is basically a 4 stage process – Enter indexing data associated with image on to the database via Interent Explorer (IE) Form interface on Internet site.
Record the unique number returned by the IE interface and attach to the physical image for scanning reference.
Scan and save physical image as unique number TIFF and JPG in chosen directories.
Mirror Intranet changes to Internet Site www.leodis.net, upload database and transfer newly associated JPG images to site.
Record TIFF’s on suitable offline storage medium e.g.
CD In this way the Leodis Database has grown to some 9,500 images to date.
New Services The fact that the backend of Leodis is a database interfaced by SQL and that each record can be uniquely identified has enabled the addition of parallel tables to the database tied by each element’s unique identifier (Resource Identifier element of the Dublin Core) This ablility has enabled the rapid development of interactive features based on the existing catalogue.
We have so far developed : Web Cards to send chosen images to email recipients User Comments to actually add your own comments to photographs Personalised Photo Albums to collect preferred images in a personalised album.
Guided Tours, allowing further annotation to images formed into tours.
New Media Referring back to the Dublin Core and the mention that it has the ablility to catalogue more than simple images, we are now beginning to integrate new media: 3600 Panoramic Images (search on panorama for samples) Vivo Video (search on video for samples) Real Video (search on video for samples) PDF Documents (search on map for sample) You will note that display pages need to respond differently to each type of media they encounter for display – this is detected via the Dublin Core format field.
Using this field to predict the behaviour of each page displayed opens up the possibility of cataloguing any media file capable of view or download via the internet.
Current Usage The site has now been online as the Leodis Database Pilot since October 2000, though no marketing has been carried out aside from online registration via the main search engines.
Figures for access (compiled via MediaHouse Inc, LiveStats 5.0) are encouraging and the growth rate is steady.
October 2000 : 4503 Host Sessions November : 5467 December : 6014 January 2001 : 7201 In terms of the popularity of the added value services we are currently hosting : 165 Web Cards posted over the last 12 weeks 1 Photo Comments posted over the last 8 weeks.
16 Photo Albums – created over the last 4 days £1,340.00 in Photographic Orders since inception.
Conclusion The most valuable asset at the end of a digitisation program is the raw data and the images.
Ensure that this data is easily transferrable to new systems i.e.
can the native database system export to various other industry standard formats and, at the most basic level, to a CSV (Comma Separated Variable) file.
Ensure that images are retained safely at a high quality in a platform idependent format, from which new copies for future applications can be derived.
The user interface that goes on top to form the internet site is temporary and will need many changes over time though is important in creating a respectable image.
Use technically qualified staff to evaluate and implement solutions or to advise on the purchase of external solutions.
Ensure that the delivered database and image store product can be managed and updated by novice staff with basic training.
You will (probably) always require qualified technical staff to implement new interfaces to your data.
References Dublin Core: http://www.purl.org/dc/ Leodis Database: http://www.leodis.org Microsoft (IIS and MSSQL): http://www.microsoft.com/ Mediahouse LiveStats: http://www.mediahouse.com NOF (New Opportunities Funding): http://www.nof.org.uk Author Details   Jonathan Kendal Jonathan.kendal@leeds.gov.uk Internet Database Manager Leeds Library & Information Services Leeds City Council Article Title: “www.leodis.net the Implementation of a large scale Digitisation Project” Author: Jonathan Kendal Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/leodis/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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After eLib Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines After eLib Buzz data software dissemination archives digitisation copyright preservation cataloguing multimedia z39.50 rslp licence interoperability url research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Chris Rusbridge, the former Director of the UK Electronic Libraries Programme, with an assessment of its achievements and legacy.
Philip Hunter asked for an assessment of the achievements and legacy of the eLib Programme 5 years on.
It is a strange experience trying to summarise a huge enterprise, covering more than 5 years involving hundreds of people, and costing in excess of £20M, in a couple of thousand words.
I immediately abandoned any thought of comprehensiveness, any formalised evaluation, or even any serious attempt at history.
Instead this is a highly personal commentary on some of the highlights for me as Programme Director of the Electronic Libraries Programme (known as eLib) with a reflection on some of the less overtly successful things – again highlights where 20:20 hindsight showed we could have done better.
I will mention only a small proportion of the 70+ projects involved, with apologies to, but no intention of slighting those omitted.
Great work was done in very many different ways throughout the eLib programme.
Despite not wishing to start with a history, it may be useful to remind ourselves that eLib was not intended to be a digital library research programme, in the high technology sense of the NSF Digital Libraries Initiative.
Indeed it was not described as a research programme at all – JISC still tends not to acknowledge that its activities include a number of significant applied research and development programmes.
The FIGIT programme (as eLib was first called) was an exploration of ways IT could assist libraries, particularly in the context of the abolition of the binary divide and the creation of the 1992 universities.
I gather the outline of the programme was devised by Lynne Brindley, Derek Law, David Cook and others in a restaurant called the “Rusty Bucket”, near Washington DC while they were visiting the US preparing their contribution to the “Follett Report,” of which the eLib Programme was one major outcome.
In many ways the eLib programme was seen as distinct from the projects.
We had the notion that the programme could succeed even if all the projects failed – and vice versa in both cases!
This is because we were really aiming at a sea-change, a cultural shift: to see libraries taking up these new technologies in an enthusiastic way.
From this point of view, I believe the programme has been a major success (as have many of the projects).
A wide range of supporting technology is now deployed in libraries as a matter of course, a considerable part of it with its origins clearly in eLib.
One of the big issues from the start of the programme was that each project had to have a finite funded life of up to 3 years.
Services that might ensue beyond that point had to be self-sustaining i.e.
had to have an “exit strategy” that did not depend on continued injection of JISC funding.
Why 3 years?
Not because that is the time needed to make a cultural change or to establish an infant service so that the community will pay for it.
We now know that (ignoring the huge investments of dot.coms, many of which could eat the entire eLib programme budget for breakfast) it is nearly impossible to take an idea through prototype into real implementation to sustainability in just 3 years!
In practice, we managed to find ways of extending support in some cases for further transitional periods.
Perhaps the justification was merely bureaucratic: simply because JISC operated within the 3 year financial forward planning cycle operated by HEFCE.
Back to the Electronic Libraries Programme what were some of my favourite projects (I won’t say best; this is definitely a subjective list)?
The project of greatest personal satisfaction for me is CEDARS, the digital preservation project from Phase 3.
Ensuring the long term existence of digital materials was not an element of the Follett report, and this seemed a significant gap when I started thinking about applying for the job of Programme Director.
Others were also aware of the importance of this area, most particularly FIGIT's Chair, Lynne Brindley, now CEO of the British Library.
We still have CEDARS as an exploratory project piloting ideas rather than a full-blown digital preservation service; this is another example of the difficulty of taking even widely supported ideas through research into service.
It is also true that the technical problems in this area are not yet solved, but also that the real problems are organisational, political and financial rather than technical.
Nevertheless, CEDARS has made real progress on both national and international fronts.
A second favourite is in the area of the re-use of current copyright material in digital form for course readings.
The area was variously known as On Demand Publishing, Electronic Reserve Collections, etc.
The second generation project here is HERON, a great project battling against very difficult conditions to provide a valuable service to HEIs and to publishers.
Membership is growing rapidly, as is usage amongst members.
This is a genuine case where, after much hard work and many drafts of business models, a business strategy may have been identified.
The important thing here is to devise sustainable ways that copyright material can be used with clear, known and reasonable costs, and at short notice.
More successes?
From the Electronic Journals area, a journal which aimed from the start to get value from the technology rather than just using it to carry images of printed pages – this was Internet Archaeology.
Archaeology was clearly a discipline desperately awaiting the emergence of a medium like the electronic journal, which could do justice to its many-faceted multi-disciplinarity.
Sociological Research Online may not have quite fulfilled its promise of bringing multimedia into the forefront of the sociology publication arena, but the journal worked, became respectable and survived without further cash from JISC beyond its initial funded period – as comparatively few other projects did.
Between these and other Electronic Journals projects, and the Pilot Site Licence Initiative of the funding councils (and its successor, the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative, or NESLI), we can claim a considerable part of the credit for the rapid scholarly move towards wide-spread use of electronic journals.
In Phase 2 of eLib, we had a programme area dedicated to electronic pre-prints.
While all the projects were successful in their way, WoPEc and Cogprints, plus the latter's JISC/NSF successor, the Open Citation project can genuinely claim to be forerunners of the Open Archives Initiative.
This may turn out to be a crucial development in providing access to a much wider range of “grey” materials, and possibly helping to counter the debilitating effect of the scholarly journals price spiral.
Another favourite of a very different kind was Digimap (which became the award-winning EDINA Digimap service for Ordinance Survey map access), plus its little known follow-on project Digimap.Plus.
The latter is looking at the issue of changing landscape; that is, matching time-stamped maps over a long period (say 100+ years).
Some of the users of modern Ordnance Survey data in the original Digimap project, however, were thinking on a broad timeline too – one I remember was an investigation of sight-lines in the location of Roman forts, and another into the location of food dumps for Cromwell’s New Model Army!
There were also a number of projects which somehow did not quite meet our most ambitious aims.
These included document delivery projects, where both the software complexity and the business model were problems.
Despite these, Lamda has developed into a sustainable service doing quite a respectable volume of business.
In contrast, the document delivery project InfoBike may have failed in its original terms, but it mutated: first into the BIDS JournalsOnline service, which then provided the core of the spin-off company ingenta, now a £100 million publicly quoted company!
In this sense it was an extremely successful project, and one of which we can be justly proud, even if some parts of JISC are a little unsure of claiming such commercial success as an appropriate yardstick (unlike the NSF, which is proud to count successful spin-off companies as a performance indicator).
In digitisation and images we suffered from the indecision of the pioneer; although anything we did was valuable, nothing appeared of itself likely to justify the very high cost of digitisation.
This was an area where consistent belief in a vision of the increasing value of contributions towards a critical mass of digitised material is needed.
JSTOR sustained this vision; JISC is only now establishing the structures to support this.
At the time and now, it appears to me very important that JISC, with its significant digital library budgets, should put a consistent amount of money into digitisation (moving legacy information into the digital arena) every year.
Two of the later programme areas have yet to be as influential as we hope, through no fault of those working in them.
The so-called clumps projects have not been able to demonstrate that virtual union catalogues based on the Z39:50 protocol scale to provide reliable service on a national dimension.
The M25 Link project will connect the catalogues of almost 40 institutions, but despite important developments in interoperability such as the Bath Profile and Collection Level Descriptions, this appears pretty much at or slightly above the upper limit.
Perhaps their most important contributions will be seen to have been the promotion of co-operative agendas between libraries.
Meanwhile, the appropriate models for a national-scale union catalogue are being investigated through the UKNUC study funded by JISC, RSLP and the BL.
The hybrid library projects are described elsewhere in this issue.
Extraordinarily interesting in detail and exceptionally innovative in many aspects including their dissemination programmes, the ideas are only beginning to change the way university libraries operate.
However, these projects are just entering their final reporting stages, and some have conferences and workshops presenting their results very soon.
It was a source of some sadness to me that some kind of natural modesty persuaded most of the programme participants that they could not or should not mix it on an international stage.
Despite the 1980s Coloured Books problem (associated with hanging on to a defunct standard too long rather than being wrongly innovative) there is every reason to believe JISC and participants in its projects have much to offer.
There are certainly exceptions, including CEDARS and its JISC/NSF funded companion, CAMiLEON both with a high international profile.
Indeed, the whole programme jointly funded by JISC and NSF which paralleled the later stages of eLib has been an important stimulus to international co-operative activity.
Two other disappointments for me: one was the small number of projects involving library or computer science schools, together with the small amount of real hard digital library research done in UK academic circles (compared with the US where the NSF has funded some major developments on rather similar budgets).
Most eLib projects were based in practitioner groups (I know there were reasons for and benefits from this!).
Finally in this list, the difficulty of overcoming the barriers between JISC committees was a disappointment.
This was particularly so for example when the first phases of eLib had so raised the profile of the human and cultural issues (through the Training and Awareness area) that a separate JISC sub-committee was formed; from that point, it was harder to make progress on these important issues in the digital library area which had identified them!
This survey also ignores important non-project activities, like the very significant collaborative activities between the JISC and publishers, a wide variety of studies, various copyright and other guidelines, etc.
So what of the future?
For the early part of eLib we did not have a grand national plan linking the projects to other developments such as datasets.
Gradually, particularly through the MODELS workshops (a favourite I have held in reserve), and linked to the subject-based Internet gateways that were coming together in the Resource Discovery Network, plus the increasingly focused JISC collections of datasets, an idea began to emerge and coalesce.
This was referred to as the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), for want of a better name: it still is!
To me, the idea of the DNER is simple: consistent access to the widest range of stuff.
To make the DNER happen requires a new team with a new approach.
The construction task is led by Lorcan Dempsey (amongst a daunting array of other responsibilities); his ideas formed the basis of much of the design of the DNER.
My 5 years as eLib Programme Director was the best job of my life (so far), and I sincerely hope Lorcan will feel his job as exciting and satisfying.
We all owe him and his colleagues our full support.
Finally, in this brief tour which leaves so much more out than I would wish, a personal favourite has always been Ariadne, which has succeeded in entertaining while informing us for the past 5 years or so.
Long may she continue to do so!
References The Follett Report: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ The eLib Programme Web site, which gives access to individual project pages: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ CEDARS project: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/index.htm HERON: http://www.heron.ac.uk/ Joint Information Systems Committee Web pages: http://www.jisc.ac.uk D-Lib Magazine briefing on eLib, December 1995:http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december95/briefings/12uk.html Article on Hybrid Libraries in D-Lib, July 1998: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/rusbridge/07rusbridge.html Author Details   Chris Rusbridge c.rusbridge@compserv.gla.ac.uk University of Glasgow Article Title: "After eLib" Author: Chris Rusbridge Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/chris/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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First Impressions of Ex Libris's Metalib: Talking about a Revolution?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines First Impressions of Ex Libris's Metalib: Talking about a Revolution?
Buzz data software html database xml portal archives metadata sql repositories cataloguing opac hypertext z39.50 passwords copac ejournal licence authentication interoperability url research standards sfx ldap Citation BibTex RIS Nick Lewis outlines key issues in the implementation of a cross-searching portal using Metalib.
Since the advent of online databases there have been concerns about the different interfaces and software provided by publishers and suppliers.
In recent years, the growth in the number of databases and full-text electronic journal services has made this aspect of electronic resource provision even more challenging, particularly for Higher Education institutions.
Just as for the foreseeable future databases are likely to continue to be delivered through a variety of interfaces, it is equally likely that there will be increasing demands from users for simplified access.
If we do not find ways to deliver this, our users will continue to avoid using these kinds of databases, especially if there are easier routes for finding information.
The much-quoted findings of the JUSTEIS Project found that ‘…search engines and known sites are the first resort for most academic queries…’ and that there was ‘…a low take up for bibliographic checking throughout all groups’.
[1] The library community is not unaware of this problem and research has been taking place into how it might be overcome.
One of the aims has been to find a way to use a single interface for accessing a range of databases, despite the differences in their proprietary interfaces.
The idea has been to create a portal that can query different databases at the same time, bringing back the results and presenting them to the user in one unified format.
For example, the elib AGORA project [2] explored this idea as part of its aim to develop a prototype Hybrid Library Management System (HLMS).
This HLMS portal incorporated Fretwell Downing’s VDX software which enabled cross-searching of a range of databases, primarily by querying their z39.50 servers instead of their proprietary interfaces.
This way of searching across different databases is not a new idea.
The z39.50 protocol [3] was approved by NISO, way back in 1988, as a minimum standard for all databases to enable the exchange of information in a consistent format.
Seeing the potential value of this technology, a number of commercial library management system (LMS) companies have recently started to develop cross-searching products.
However, they have found that whilst z39.50 searching works well in theory, in practice the protocol has not been adopted consistently by database suppliers.
Some suppliers do not make their interfaces z39.50 compliant at all; others simply do not permit access to their z39.50 servers.
To overcome the limitations of z39.50, the LMS companies have moved the process forward by starting to develop cross-searching software that can work with other protocols, not just with z39.50.
If these alternative protocols have been published, like PubMed’s Entrez protocol, this process is fairly straightforward.
However in many cases these protocols are not published and so programs may have to be written to extract the data anyway.
One such technique is called ‘page-scraping’ or ‘screen-scraping’ and it involves ‘discovering a query’s syntax through trial and error’ [4] by analysing the URLs and the HTML pages of the proprietary database.
This ability to exploit HTTP, XML and SQL protocols opens up the possibility of making a much wider range of databases available for cross-searching.
Several of these cross-searching products have now been released in the UK.
Fretwell Downing’s Z-portal was presented for the first time at Online 2001 whilst Ex Libris has been signing up its first UK customers for MetaLib.
Other systems are available, including MAP [Millennium Access Plus] from Innovative and Encompass from Endeavor.
Here at the University of East Anglia (UEA) we have recently installed Ex Libris’s MetaLib, chosen because of its integration with SFX, and with our forthcoming library management system, ALEPH.
What is MetaLib?
MetaLib provides a single integrated environment for managing our electronic resources, whether these be abstracting and indexing databases, full-text e-journal services, CD-ROMs, library catalogues, information gateways or local collections.
Through this portal we can present our users with a choice of electronic resources ‘at a glance’, in a way that was not previously possible using our OPAC or static web pages.
If it is true that most users limit their use of electronic resources to those with which they are familiar, then MetaLib helps to address this problem by highlighting other resources too.
At the heart of MetaLib is its cross-searching functionality.
This allows the user to search a number of our databases simultaneously through a single interface.
The results from this broadcast search can be de-duplicated and presented side-by-side for comparison.
We have 13 cross-searchable resources from a range of suppliers including, for example, our OCLC databases (Psycinfo, Geobase and the MLA) and our Ebscohost ones (Academic Search Elite and Business Source Elite).
We can also include our existing Dynix library catalogue in this cross-searching functionality.
MetaLib also includes SFX, Ex Libris’s context-sensitive linkage software [5], adding an additional range of options that provide direct links to related full-text and other electronic services.
What functionality does MetaLib offer?
MetaLib offers two ways to access our electronic resources.
Firstly, all of our electronic resources may be accessed directly by clicking on their links, just as they would work on static web pages or from a link on our OPAC.
This provides ‘Link-to’ functionality through what Ex Libris refers to as the ‘Information Gateway’.
The second way of accessing resources applies to those resources that can be cross-searched using the ‘MetaLib Search’ interface.
These are referred to as ‘MetaLib Search’ resources and use what Ex Libris calls the ‘Universal Gateway’.
The resources that can be searched in this way still have the ‘Link-to’ functionality as well, so that users have the option of returning to the proprietary interfaces of the databases at any time.
These two ways of accessing our electronic resources are shown on the same screen, so that the resources available via the Universal Gateway and those available via the Information Gateway are presented in a unified way.
Users can start to use MetaLib by selecting one of the ‘Categories’ on the left hand side of the opening screen.
We have provided the following categories, mirroring what has previously been available on our electronic resources web pages: Arts/Humanities, Law, Libraries, Medicine/Health Sciences, Newspapers, Reference/General, Social Sciences, Sciences.
A list of relevant electronic resources is then presented to the user, with the resources that can use the ‘MetaLib Search’ functionality at the top of the page and those which only have the ‘Link-to’ functionality listed below them.
Adjacent to the title of each resource is an information button, shown as an ‘i’ icon.
When the user clicks on this they are shown additional information and metadata about the resource they have chosen.
The advantage of this is that the descriptions of resources do not clutter up the page.
This data is determined by the library and is entered by library staff using the MetaLib Administration module.
The user can now choose whether to link directly to each of the resources or use the MetaLib search interface to cross-search a selection of these resources.
Cross-searching on MetaLib To use MetaLib cross-search (its broadcast search facility), users click the check boxes adjacent to the resources of their choice.
They then enter their search terms in the ‘MetaLib Search’ boxes at the top of the screen.
Options are available to search all fields by keyword or specific fields such as title and author.
Boolean searching is also supported and a ‘refine search’ option is available after the first set of results has been received.
The results from the MetaLib search are presented initially with one tab for each database, along with a summary showing the number of hits per resource.
This allows the user to access summary results from one database even if the searches of the other databases have not yet been completed.
Once the searches have been completed, users click on the ‘Merge’ button to see merged and de-duplicated records (up to a maximum of 150 records).
The summary results are all presented in a unified way in the MetaLib interface.
A user will click on the chosen record to view the ‘Full Record’.
This full record also offers additional functionality including ‘hypertext linking’ and ‘SFX’, the latter being an integrated part of MetaLib.
In terms of hypertext linking, the user can click on the author, title or subject fields to move this data back to the MetaLib search interface, enabling further searches on related terms using this new data.
This facilitates further resource discovery.
SFX links provide the user with additional options specific to that record, including links to full-text electronic journal articles where available.
After clicking on the SFX button, the SFX menu will appear and this will show the services available for the record: for example, linking to full text journal article or abstract.
Other extended services offered by our SFX server include searches on COPAC, title searches on the Internet, and subject searching on the Resource Discovery Network gateways.
SFX takes the data from the original record via the Open URL standard and provides these extended services without the user having to retype the data.
Any electronic resource searchable using the ‘MetaLib Search’ interface can act as an SFX source, even if it is not normally SFX compliant.
At any stage during a cross-search the user will have the option to return to the proprietary interface.
For example, the tabulated summary results may indicate that only one of the chosen resources is really going to be relevant.
So the user may choose to link directly to that resource to continue their search.
This is yet another way in which MetaLib works as a resource discovery tool, pointing users to the most useful resource in comparison with others.
Users may select records from any of the databases they have cross-searched and transfer them to their ‘e-shelf’ for e-mailing, printing or saving at a later stage.
Search queries can also be saved and rerun later in the session or in another session.
Users may also create their own Category of resources, called ‘My Resource List’ that allows them to choose their own set of most frequently used resources.
This is particularly useful for those working across disciplines.
They can then use this list for all their future searches instead of, or as well as, the library-defined Categories.
MetaLib also has a ‘Locate Resources’ search function which allows users to search for appropriate resources by Subject or Type, for example, or to choose from a list of ‘All Resources’.
This is another way in for users to access the resources most relevant to their studies.
Configuration issues One of the main questions we had prior to the installation of MetaLib at UEA was: how much work has to be done to configure resources so that they can be cross-searched?
The good news is that much of the initial work in configuring resources has already been done by Ex Libris or other institutions.
This configuration information is accessed through the MetaLib ‘Knowledgebase’, which is essentially a central repository of downloadable configurations, linking rules and settings, which is shared by all MetaLib institutions.
As one institution adds a resource, the configuration details are then made available to the others.
For resources that are not available this way, Ex Libris also assists institutions with configuration of their resources as part of the installation training for MetaLib.
However, there is an expectation that institutions should learn how to configure their own resources, especially z39.50 ones, and this is likely to be a time-consuming process: ‘Because the encoding expected by the different z39.50 servers varies from one z39.50-compatible resource to the next, connecting to a large number of such resources requires meticulous configuration and numerous adjustments.’[6] This is because each database has its own underlying syntax and logical structure.
This means that any search query originating from MetaLib has to be adjusted so that it can ‘talk to’ the target resource.
Field mapping is particularly important, especially for author fields, where names and initials may need to be adjusted to take into account syntax differences.
The results that come back may also have different logical and cataloguing formats and these will have to be converted so they display correctly in the ‘MetaLib search’ interface.
In our experience, getting to grips with these configuration issues requires input from IT staff as well as librarians, and new technical and pseudo-technical skills may have to be acquired to maintain and develop the range of resources we can offer on MetaLib.
At UEA we have found the team approach to configuring resources the only way to make rapid progress, with library IT staff, two Assistant Librarians and the Senior Cataloguer all involved.
The other factor to bear in mind is that when adding resources for the first time, permission has to be sought from the database providers concerned along with information on how to access their servers.
Again the expectation is that the individual institution will take the lead in this.
Authentication In terms of authentication, MetaLib allows multiple levels of access to be set up.
This ‘group functionality’ provides authorisation for the use of certain resources depending on the profile of the user.
At UEA we have kept things simple at this stage by setting up just two options: ‘guest access’ and ‘login access’.
When library staff add electronic resources to MetaLib, they make distinctions between resources by cataloguing them as either ‘restricted’ or ‘free’ resources.
This ensures that the cross-search functionality of restricted resources will only appear to users on-campus or to users who have logged in, i.e.
those who are registered staff or students.
This is essential to comply with the terms of our license agreements.
The advantage of this authentication system is that it does allow our legitimate users to access the full cross-search functionality of MetaLib both on-campus (via IP) and off-campus (via a username and password).
The ‘link to’ functionality is retained for all resources.
So those logging in from off-campus as guest users will still be able to see all the resources that are available, including our restricted ones, but they will be challenged for ATHENS or other authentication as necessary.
Off-campus guest users will also be able to cross-search any free resources, such as library catalogues, PubMed, etc., but cross-searching options for our licensed databases will not show.
To avoid any need to issue users with yet another set of usernames and passwords, we are hoping to set up MetaLib to authenticate against our university-wide LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication system, so users can use their existing campus-wide usernames and passwords when logging in.
Challenges ahead The major outstanding problem is how to include electronic resources that can only be accessed via ATHENS and not via IP address recognition.
For example, the ISI Web of Science service cannot currently be included in ‘MetaLib Search’.
This is not because the database uses an alternative protocol, since we have already noted that such a limitation could be overcome.
Rather it is because, with no other server available, the only route to access the service is via its proprietary interface and that requires ATHENS authentication up-front in the UK.
Therefore a direct search cannot be done without having to login to the Web of Science using an ATHENS username and password.
So to include Web of Science, we will need to ask ISI to change their policy about not allowing IP-only access and then we will need their permission to exploit their database for cross-searching purposes.
It has been recognised for some time that ‘…effective provision of cross-searching services requires dialogue and co-operation between data provider and library service.’[7] As one of the first institutions in the UK to install MetaLib, we will no doubt be at the forefront of these kinds of negotiations, but it may be that in future this will be done at national level.
However, there are positive signs that other providers are beginning to allow their resources to be accessed for cross-searching purposes.
For example, in February 2002, Ovid Biomed expressed a willingness to enable access to their z39.50 servers, possibly from summer 2002.
This should allow us to use resources like Medline, CINAHL and EMBASE in ‘MetaLib Search’.
The other major issue is the ongoing maintenance of ‘MetaLib Search’ resources.
Any change by the supplier to database structure or, if relevant, the proprietary interface, may affect existing configurations.
This may happen without notice and put the resource concerned out of action as far as ‘MetaLib Search’ is concerned.
People can of course still link to the resource directly, but the cross-searching functionality is temporarily lost.
In our experience Ex Libris will help with trouble-shooting but it may take several days to resolve such problems.
Another limitation is the unreliability of z39.50 servers.
Many database suppliers impose limits on the number of users that can access their z39.50 server at any one time or limit the number of records that can be returned.
If this happens, the error messages that display in MetaLib are not very helpful to the user.
This is because they do not explain why the search has failed or indicate what the user should do to rectify the problem (e.g.
narrow their search).
We will also need to make users aware that cross-searching is likely to be less accurate than carrying out the same search via the proprietary interfaces.
In particular, author field conversions may be far from perfect.
However, as previously mentioned, MetaLib does encourage direct linking so that users can take advantage of the full functionality of the original database.
You will notice that the limitations outlined above have less to do with MetaLib itself than with the availability and reliability of the databases that can be used.
These challenges will have to be addressed by other cross-searching portals too.
Conclusion At the time of writing, feedback from Metalib preview sessions has been very positive and we have just opened up MetaLib to the whole university community for further evaluation and feedback.
By September, we hope to have fully implemented MetaLib, including integration with our new ALEPH library management system.
In terms of configuration, we are expecting the process to become less time-consuming as more institutions purchase cross-searching software.
Whether institutions choose MetaLib or other portals, the demand for compatible databases is likely to increase.
The greater this demand, the more likely it is that suppliers will open up their databases to be accessed in this way.
Hopefully the maintenance of z39.50 servers will also be improved, and any restrictions in terms of maximum numbers of users and records will be removed.
There is no need for suppliers to be concerned that their proprietary interfaces will be bypassed, because there is always the option for the user to return to these at any time.
Indeed the resource discovery functionality of MetaLib may well encourage increased usage of the proprietary interfaces as well.
Although it is early days for MetaLib in the UK, it is encouraging to note that interoperability issues are now on the list of criteria that JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) takes into account in negotiations for new deals.
The issues are also important to those charged with overseeing the integration of electronic resources into the DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource): ‘The aspiration here is to make more services available through structured protocols such as z39.50, LDAP, Open Archives Initiative.
In that way, their data is more directly accessible and manipulable for others to use.’ [8] Our next step at the University of East Anglia is to monitor our users’ impressions of MetaLib and respond to their comments.
In the meantime, we will continue to lobby publishers and suppliers at both individual and national level to open up their resources for cross-searching.
We are also looking forward to exploring the options that will come when MetaLib and SFX are fully integrated with ALEPH, our forthcoming library management system.
This will open up new possibilities, such as direct links from MetaLib to an inter-lending module.
It must be remembered that the implementation of any hybrid library product is going to be an ongoing commitment, requiring considerable technical and administrative resources.
However there is no doubting the ‘added value’ that a product like MetaLib provides, with its potential to transform the ways in which we have previously used and presented our electronic resources.
In this respect, we may indeed find ourselves talking about a revolution… References [1] Armstrong C.J., Lonsdale, R.E., Stoker, D.A.
& Urquhart C.J.
2000.
JUSTEIS: JISC Usage Surveys: Trends in Electronic Information Services, Final Report 1999/2000 Cycle.
Department of Information and Library Studies, University of Wales Aberystwyth and Centre for Information Quality Management.
The Executive Summary is at: http://www.dil.aber.ac.uk/dils/research/justeis/cyc1rep1.HTM [2] For further details about the Agora Project see: Palmer D., Robinson B., & Russell R. 2000.
Agora from information maze to market’.
Ariadne, 24 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue24/agora/ [3] The definition of z39.50 from the Library of Congress, the official z39.50 maintenance Agency, is: ‘Z39.50 is a national and international (ISO 23950) standard defining a protocol for computer-to-computer information retrieval.
Z39.50 makes it possible for a user in one system to search and retrieve information from other computer systems (that have also implemented Z39.50) without knowing the search syntax that is used by those other systems.
Z39.50 was originally approved by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in 1988.’ http://www.loc.gov/z3950/ [4] Sadeh T. MetaLib and SFX: Managing Heterogeneous Resources in the Scholarly Environment.
Conference paper given at CASLIN 2001: Library of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic and National Library of the Czech Republic, Hotel Na Ostrov, Na Ostrov 816, Beroun 3, Czech Republic, 27 31 May, 2001 http://www.caslin.cz:7777/caslin01/sbornik/MetaLib.html [5] For further details about SFX see Walker, J.
2001.
Linking is as easy as SFX.
Library Association Record.
103 (12), 744-746, or http://www.sfxit.com [6] Sadeh T. op.cit.
[7] Pinfield S, & Dempsey L. 2001.
The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and the hybrid library.
Ariadne 26 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue26/dner/ [8] ibid.
Author Details   Nicholas Lewis Electronic Resources Librarian University of East Anglia Email: nicholas.lewis@uea.ac.uk Article Title: "Talking about a revolution?
First impressions of Ex Libris’s MetaLib Author: Nicholas Lewis Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/metalib/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The World's Greatest Dictionary' Goes Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The World's Greatest Dictionary' Goes Online Buzz data software java html database accessibility sgml url research Citation BibTex RIS Juliet New explains the background to the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary, launched on the 14 March 2000.
On 14 March 2000 the Oxford English Dictionary Online will be launched on the world-wide web at www.oed.com.
On view will be the full text of the 20-volume hardcover dictionary 60 million words describing nearly three-quarters of a million terms used in English over the past thousand years, illustrated by more than 2.4 million quotations in a format developed for maximum accessibility.
The arrival of what many have called ‘the world’s greatest dictionary’ on the world-wide web is important news for scholars and researchers working in universities and libraries throughout the world.
But there is more to this story than just introducing the 150-year-old dictionary to 21st century technology.
The OED is currently undergoing a 20-year, £35 million/$55 million revision project the first complete revision since the OED was originally completed in 1928.
The first research findings from the project will be published, including a 1000-entry section (’M’ ‘MAH’) now fully revised, rewritten, and updated; plus more than 9,000 words researched over the last decade now included in the full text for the first time.
3,000 more words will be added to the OED Online at quarterly intervals during 2000.
Thereafter thousands more words will be added until the revision perhaps the world’s biggest humanities research project is completed in 2010.
Although it is still in its early stages, Chief Editor, John Simpson, believes that the revision could double the length of the Dictionary.
So what does the OED Online offer researchers and inquirers that the hardcover dictionary could not?
A traditional reference work is tied to searching by headword, whereas an online work provides a host of different ways of searching for useful information.
The complete 60 million-word text can be searched for any word, and synonyms can also be found.
It is as easy to search for John Lennon as Shakespeare, and you can look for rap lyrics alongside quotations from the Bible.
Look for 1066 and you will find 20 quotations for such words as ‘wardwite’ and ‘infangthief’.
Search for Urdu and more than 200 words will appear that are loanwords from that language.
Have fun with wildcards by entering zx and find how many words have both letters in that order a boon for crossword-lovers.
If you can think of something that you don’t know the word for, use the proximity search and you may be able to find it – discover that the spot on your shoulder blade that is sometimes difficult to scratch is called an ‘acnestis’.
Search for suffixes, and find new ‘isms’ and ‘ologies’.
And if you thought that ‘.. as a picture’ was the only way to be pretty, then look again you can be ‘pretty as a tickle-ass’ too!
OED Online has been created by a team of over 300 staff and others who contribute to the editing of the Dictionary around the world, including around sixty editors and research assistants based in Oxford, many freelance contributors, over 200 specialist consultants and advisers in universities and businesses, and staff in dictionary projects around the world.
All who create the Dictionary are in daily communication with others throughout the world, tracking the development of the language, and sharing information about it.
The arrival of the Dictionary online will create another dialogue that of the dictionary-makers with those who create and use the English language.
Six months ago OED editors initiated a new drive to acquire new words, and fresh information about etymology and the history and usage of the language, from scholars world-wide.
That appeal has already brought in more than 1000 submissions.
Editors are hoping that the online dictionary will put them just an email away from word-enthusiasts, scholars and others who are searching old texts and online databases, and who will be able to provide useful new information for the OED.
Ariadne readers who are interested in helping the OED can find a submission form on the web site at www.oed.com.
The cost of OED Online has been developed to take into account the type, size, nature, and geographical location of the institutional buyer.
List prices for higher education institutions, library authorities, organizations, and companies start from £1000/$1600 per annum for unlimited network access to the wealth of information contained in the OED, and four quarterly updates of at least 1000 new words.
However deals currently being negotiated with library and other institutional consortia will bring much lower prices.
The price of OED Online reflects the cost of keeping the Dictionary up to date, but the benefits of continual revision and multi-user access are considerable.
Different price bands will apply for institutions in non-English-speaking countries, and in developing countries; and licences for individuals accessing the service at home will be available, but most access to the dictionary will continue to be through libraries.
Accessibility has been the main aim of those whose task it has been to design the OED for the web.
Creating a web site that lets the reader navigate with ease through the wealth of material was the chief objective.
A page of the print edition of the Dictionary can appear very intimidating to a new reader.
In contrast, the internet offers unlimited space and the medium can be more than two-dimensional.
First appearances have been kept as simple and clear as possible the reader is led directly into the Dictionary content, and shown the meanings and descriptions of each word without any of the technical apparatus used by scholars.
It is still all there, but it does not intrude on the reader who wants relevant details rapidly.
For scholars we have made the various elements of the Dictionary’s content as accessible and as useful as possible.
Work on putting the Dictionary online began in during the mid 1980s, and the OED won the Applications Award of the British Computer Society in 1987.
The challenge was not the length of the Dictionary, but its complexity and the importance of maintaining the structure of this historically important, century-old text, rather than adapting it to make software design easier.
Aside from the huge number of characters (over 1,000) needed to cope with the hundreds of languages in the OED, normal computer-based rules for alphabetical order are too simple, so special rules had to be devised.
The OED Design and Production team spent two years devising different working models and testing them with potential users.
When the design was completely refined, HighWire Press, an enterprise unit of Stanford University Libraries, was brought on board as a technical partner.
Two years were spent in market research and testing designs with potential users in the USA and UK.
HighWire Press’s experience in giving technical support to the internet editions of over 170 scholarly journals has proved invaluable in creating OED Online.
The OED Design and Production team provided the data in SGML.
HighWire Press built a system in Java which uses the Verity search engine to search the Dictionary, a Sysbase database for data storage, and their own SGML to HTML parser to produce HTML pages.
After three years’ very hard work, our deadline has been met, and we launch on 14 March.
How can you look at the OED Online?
A free tour is available now on www.oed.com/tour.
We hope that the OED Online will be in your university and local library this year.
We are sure Ariadne readers will find OED Online useful, and would welcome your views.
Author Details Juliet New Oxford English Dictionary Marketing juliet.new@virgin.net Article Title: "‘The world’s greatest dictionary’ goes online" Author: Juliet New Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-online/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data database infrastructure preservation cataloguing hypertext licence authentication intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
ANBAR and CHEST reach agreement ANBAR and CHEST have reached agreement on the provision of Anbar Management Intelligence, Computer Abstracts and International Civil Engineering Abstracts to eligible institutions for a fixed five-year period starting on 1st January 1999.
Institutions can decide to join at any time during the term of the agreement and will be bound until the end of the agreement period.
If you would like to know more about Anbar Management Intelligence, Computer Abstracts, International Civil Engineering Abstracts or CHEST, please contact: Lynn Coulton Anbar Electronic Intelligence 60-62 Toller Lane, Bradford, West Yorkshire, BD8 9BY Email: anbar@anbar.co.uk URL: http://www.anbar.co.uk/anbar.htm For CHEST, contact: Emma Sudds CHEST University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY Tel: 01225 826982 Fax: 01225 826177 Email: Emma.Sudds@chest.ac.uk AHDS announce the ArchSearch Catalogue AHDS have announced a major new tool the ArchSearch Catalogue developed by the Archaeology Data Service.
This catalogue is accessible over the internet at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ and allows fast searching of records such as the National Excavation Index for England (contributed by RCHME); the Fife, Shetland, and Strathclyde sections of the National Monuments Record of Scotland (contributed by RCAHMS); and the Microfilm Index for England (contributed by RCHME).
The catalogue is also a gateway providing access to special collections such as the Society of Antiquaries of London library catalogue and to digital gateways serving communities interested in history, performing arts, text studies, and visual arts, via the Arts and Humanities Data Service catalogue.
AHDS is interested in receiving feedback from users of the new service, who can email any comments or suggestions, to info@ads.ahds.ac.uk BOBCAS: British Official Publications Current Awareness Service BOPCAS, the internationally acclaimed Web based British Official Publications Current Awareness Service enters the next phase of development by launching a new subscription service on 1 November 1998.
The service, a joint venture between Information Management International and The University of Southampton, will continue to use the well established BOPCAS format with many new enhancements to ensure the information is current and easy to access.
BOPCAS is a value-added, searchable, browsable and weekly updated current a wareness service giving details of British Official Publications in a World Wide Web database with backfiles to 1995.
A series of e-mail alerting services give up-to-date information on a choice of specific policy areas saving valuable searching time and reducing information overload.
While access to the bibliographic database is free, two subscription levels are available giving access to the value-added services.
Silver subscription allows far more flexibility with keyword searching, abstracts of full text documents with hypertext links, browsing by publication date, subject, corporate author or publication type and any two of the e-mail alerting services.
In addition to these, Gold subscription gives you up to 14 e-mail alerting services, the comprehensive Weekly Update and an Intranet/Network Licence allowing you to download data for internal distribution.
BOPCAS is available at http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bopcas/ For more information contact: Alan Weston Development Manager Aslib Tel: 0171 903 0000 Email: bopcas@aslib.co.uk Integrate, Co-operate and Innovate: eLib 3 A two-day non-residential conference, entitled Integrate, Co-operate and Innovate: eLib 3, co-ordinated by eLib’s Hylife Project, will be held at the Open University Conference Conference, 344-354 Gray’s Inn Road, London, on 15 and 16 December 1998.The conference, aimed at those involved in the delivery and/or management of library and information Services in a hybrid environment, and not restricted to the Higher Education sector, will provide an opportunity to identify and explore the implications and impacts of Hybrid Library, CLUMPS and Preservation developments in their broader context.
Details and booking forms are available from Maureen Dickson, who is Research Administrator, the Department of Information and Library Management at the University of Northumbria.
http://eon.unn.ac.uk/conferences/ Email: maureen.dickson@unn.ac.uk Tel: 0191 227 3222 fax 0191 227 3671 LASER: The Development and Networking Agency LASER welcomes the Library and Information Commission’s Report ‘Building the New Library Network’.
The three LIC Implementation Groups on the network infrastructure, the creation of content and training have succeeded in meeting the governments requirement of the LIC to produce firm proposals to translate the vision of the ‘New Library the Peoples Network: report’ into reality.
Implementing the Network The proposals for New Library recommend a regional approach to the roll-out of the network infrastructure.
LASER has already committed itself to a regional strategy in support of this.
We will work with member authorities in consortia arrangements and partnerships to help build the network infrastructure.
We support the pragmatic approach to the construction of the network, which includes a migration strategy to a dedicated broadband network when this is required.
The proposal for enabling local authorities to purchase kitemarked managed services around a core user specification which can vary according to local need is also welcomed.
Creating Content The proposals put forward for defining, creating and managing the resources available on the Network represent a challenging opportunity for the public library community.
LASER is pleased that the proposals also support the funding of finding aids.
Experience will show that more resources will be necessary in this area to develop networked resource sharing services, directory systems which supports resource, collection and service description, navigation of network services, authorisation and authentication.
We would hope that the New Opportunity Fund (NOF) and the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) would consult widely in this area.
Training Training and re-skilling public librarians to handle information and communication technology, access databases and online information and to take on new roles as guides and instructors provides an on-going challenge and training requirement.
The proposals outlined in this report begin that process.
The recommendations are right to recognise the special training needs of librarians and we applaud the proposal which will enable local authorities to specify their individual needs for advanced training of librarians.
LASER strongly supports the need for the benchmark approach to training needs analysis and the accreditation of training schemes.
LASER will support cross authority consortia at regional level and within the work of the EARL as the co-ordinating partner of the Consortium.
‘Building the New Library’ Report stresses the revolutionary nature of the programme of action proposed.
LASER supports the exhortation in the Report to approach these recommendations with "imagination and resolution" References 1.
Building the New Library Network http://www.lic.gov.uk/publications/building.html 2.
New Library: The People’s Network http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary 3.
The Government’s National Grid for Learning Challenge http://www.dfee.gov.uk/grid/challenge/index.htm For further information on LASER, contact Frances Hendrix, Director: Email:frances@viscount.org.uk Tel: 0171 702 2020 fax 0171 702 2019 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Managing Electronic Library Services: Current Issues in UK Higher Education Institutions Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Managing Electronic Library Services: Current Issues in UK Higher Education Institutions Buzz data software framework database portal infrastructure archives metadata schema eprints copyright preservation cataloguing opac z39.50 marc ejournal php personalisation ebook mysql rslp vle openurl licence authentication ict url research standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Pinfield surveys some of the key issues associated with delivering electronic library services.
Managing the development and delivery of electronic library services is one of the major current challenges for university library and information services.
This article provides a brief overview of some of the key issues facing information professionals working in higher education institutions (HEIs).
In doing so, it also picks up some of the real-world lessons which have emerged from the eLib (Electronic Libraries) programme now that it has come to a close.
These lessons have been highlighted in a number of recent reports coming out of eLib, including the formal eLib programme evaluation (1).
The issues discussed here are grouped under the following headings: Electronic library economics Systems and technical issues Collection development New initiatives in scholarly communication User issues Organisational issues Staff and skills This is a practical view of e-library issues.
The term ‘electronic library’ is being used here in broad terms to mean a collection of networked digital information resources and associated technical and managerial infrastructure.
The electronic library is assumed to include data and metadata in various formats which are created or assembled in order to provide a service to end users.
The terms ‘electronic library’, ‘e-library’, and ‘digital library’ are used as synonyms(2).
Electronic library economics Pricing models The e-library market is an immature one and pricing models have not yet stabilised.
Take e-journals for example.
There is enormous variation in how e-journals are priced – individually, in subject clusters, in ‘take-or-leave-it’ packages.
Pricing levels are often determined by complex formulae which are in many cases based on print subscriptions.
The complexity associated with e-journal pricing is not unique.
The criteria on which pricing models should be based for all electronic products is still very unclear.
Should price be based on use?
If so, how is use determined?
Should it be based on size of user community?
If so, how is size calculated?
The library and information community should perhaps be more proactive in developing clearer ideas of what it would regard as acceptable pricing models for e-resources.
Projects such as PELICAN can certainly help with this(3), but there should be a much wider debate on this issue.
We should not just leave this to the national agencies.
All too often information professionals react negatively to publishers’ deals without being able to suggest clear alternatives to replace them.
The e-library is expensive One thing is clear – developing the electronic library is currently not an easy way to save money.
It can often be forgotten that the Follett report (the publication of which in 1993 gave rise to eLib) was written in a context of rising student numbers and full library buildings.
It identified the e-library as a possible way of saving money and space, and eLib was set up partly to address these issues.
And yet eight years down the line, “one of the lessons of eLib as a whole….
is that electronic media do not save money or library space and are not likely to in the near future.”(4) As far as prices are concerned, a few examples illustrate the point.
E-journal deals often cost seven or eight per cent on top of existing paper subscriptions, and often prevent cancellation of the paper.
Digitised texts for electronic short loan, such as those provided by the HERON service, are clearly too expensive and involve too much of an administrative burden for HEIs to be easily scaled-up(5).
Emerging e-book services, such as NetLibrary, are quoting prices far in excess of paper prices(6).
There is also the added problem of VAT which is chargeable for electronic resources whereas printed publications are exempt (at least for the moment).
Institutional funding This situation needs to be emphasised to senior managers in HEIs who still often have a naïve view that increases in electronic resources should lead to immediate and clear reductions in expenditure.
The electronic library may create new and improved services for users but it is not cheap.
In fact investment in e-library facilities may for the foreseeable future require additional money.
This is especially true when libraries are often expected to maintain print-based services in parallel with the electronic.
All users in the institution can usefully be kept informed about pricing issues in order to gain their support for investment in resources.
Sometimes there is a surprising level of ignorance amongst users about how electronic resources are paid for (or even that they are paid for at all).
In a recent University of Nottingham library user group meeting, a postgraduate student asked the question, ‘what has Science Direct got to do with the library?
It’s on the Internet!’ This statement carries with it a raft of common misunderstandings.
First of all that the library and the Internet work in different domains.
Secondly, that the Internet always delivers information which is free.
Because the content is free at the point of use and easily accessible to users on campus, they often forget it comes at a price (in the case of Science Direct, a very large price).
More should perhaps be done to get this message across to help ensure the library is provided with funds to enhance resources.
But it is not just the level of funding but also the structure of the funding which is important.
Many libraries in HEIs allocate funds to different budget heads based on a formula, taking into account factors such as student numbers, staff numbers, and average book prices.
These formulae often divide up the available funds in an inflexible subject-based way.
Strict subject specificity is however often inappropriate in the electronic environment.
Many products come as cross-disciplinary packages of material and working out which subject pays (or part pays) for a particular resource can be unnecessarily complex.
Library funding allocation models need to be constructed to ensure that libraries have the flexibility to respond to the available deals on behalf of all of their users.
Priorities Libraries may need to reappraise their overall budgeting priorities and expectations in the context of the e-library.
As we moved from the ‘traditional library’ model to the ‘automated library’ model (where traditional library processes, such as cataloguing and circulation, were automated), librarians became used to spending large amounts of money on library management systems (LMSs) and on the staff to maintain them.
It has been commented, however, that in the new ‘electronic library’ (which provides access to extensive data and full text online) we are expecting to provide access on the cheap.
A new generation of e-library systems (such as cross-searching services) are currently being launched which complement the LMS but are often far more complex than an LMS module, and yet we expect them to be much cheaper.
There is an argument that priorities in staff time should also be re-examined.
Managers often expect staff to manage access to e-journal collections or catalogue web resources in their ‘spare’ time.
John MacColl argues that this has got to change.
“If we are to be persuasive in the world of digital information in which we now present our services as ‘hybrid libraries’….we have to be much quicker.” He goes on to say that “the cataloguing of ‘toll-gated’ electronic information – e-journals and e-books – should now be the highest priority for our cataloguing departments (or metadata units).”(7) Systems and technical issues Integration Systems and technical issues are major challenges.
The fundamental challenge is (still) integration – bringing the different components of the library together as a coherent whole.
This is the challenge addressed by the eLib ‘hybrid library’ projects, and some interesting and useful work has been done.
Some informative work has been carried out to conceptualise the role of the library in the hybrid information environment(8).
But the practical challenge has not gone away.
One specific practical question highlighted by the hybrid library projects is the relationship between the OPAC and the other elements of the e-library.
Is the OPAC at the centre of the hybrid or electronic library, or is it ‘just another database’?
For example, many libraries have developed their web sites to be gateways to information resources available to users.
They often contain direct links to e-journals, CD-ROMs, and quality web resources.
Does the library also put records for all of these items on their OPACs or are these items only accessible via the library web site?
Many libraries have developed databases behind their web site to provide access to these kinds of sources(9).
The web site has become a search tool in its own right.
With this and the fact web sites and web OPAC interfaces have increasingly been given a similar ‘look and feel’, the distinction between library web site and OPAC has become blurred.
Integration is also fast becoming a bigger problem.
Libraries are no longer just dealing with digital textual resources but a wide range of different types of data.
These include statistical, mapping, graphical, sound, and moving image materials to name a few.
The challenge of creating a navigable online library environment which allows users to move between and around key resources continues to be a big one.
Cross searching and linking Designing ways of navigating the wide range of resources is a major challenge.
The use of various cross-searching and linking technologies is now high on the agenda.
Z39.50 is a major facility in this area.
As a protocol designed for the exchange of bibliographic data, it is often seen as the most likely solution to the problem of integration.
But it is still not widely used in UK (or elsewhere).
The question is: does it work?
The eLib phase 3 ‘clumps’ projects were designed to “kick start” the use of Z39.50 in the UK HE sector.
They have certainly carried out some successful project work but it is clear (partly as a result of their work) that Z39.50 is far more complex to implement than was expected four years ago.
Some major problems remain, particularly with the exchange of holdings and serials data.
There are also issues to do with differences in the way the protocol is implemented (although the Bath Profile(10) should do something to improve this).
Perhaps one of the biggest problems is that there are major inconsistencies in the way in which MARC has been implemented in library OPACs.
When the source data is this inconsistent, the Z39.50 standard becomes a problem to implement in such a way that reliable results can be guaranteed.
So, does it work?
Perhaps it depends on what is meant by ‘work’.
Technical advances have been and are still being made.
In fact all of the clumps projects are continuing their work in one form or another even though the eLib funding has dried up.
Other Z projects are now also being funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.
But Z39.50 has not really proved itself as a ‘service-strength’ technology, as opposed to something used by projects.
It is interesting that the recent UK National Union Catalogue investigation, after carrying out extensive tests of Z39.50 has recommended that an NUC in the UK should not be a service with Z39.50 at its core(11).
Perhaps this demonstrates the jury is still out on the long term future of Z39.50.
New linking facilities are also beginning to emerge.
Many of these provide links between different datasets – most usefully between bibliographic and full text resources.
Services are now available from many database providers which allow these links to be set up for libraries.
However, these linking services are often laborious to create, difficult to maintain and patchy in their coverage.
Often the links provided by one data supplier do not correspond to the subscriptions of the library.
This so-called ‘appropriate copy problem’ has led to the development of the new technology of OpenURLs(12).
The practical value of this technology is still be investigated but it has the potential to play a crucial role in helping users navigate between accessible information resources(13).
It is the basis of the Ex Libris SFX product(14).
SFX is just one of a number of commercial products which deliver new cross-searching and linking possibilities and which have come on the market recently.
These include Ex Libris’ MetaLib which can be used alongside SFX(15), WebExpress / iPort from OCLC(16), and Fretwell Downing’s VDX/Agora product(17).
The last of these is of course partly based on work carried out on eLib projects, particularly the Agora hybrid library project(18).
They are all delivering ‘hybrid library like’ functionality which is available for the first time as commercial products rather than having to be developed in-house.
They create new possibilities for libraries in delivering integrated services.
It remains to be seen what kind of maintenance implications they have for individual libraries and whether they will be able to afford them in the first place.
One interesting alternative to cross-searching that has recently emerged is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol(19).
Rather than dynamically searching across different databases in response to a command from a user, the OAI protocol allows metadata to be harvested from OAI-compliant databases which can then be collected into a single searchable database.
It is difficult to predict at this stage how widely this technology will be adopted but it has potential.
Adoption may partly depend on whether a formal metadata schema for OAI-compliant datasets can be worked out in detail.
Content description schemas Metadata remains a crucial issue.
Some of the technologies and commercial products above create the potential to cross-search records produced according to different schemas – MARC (for libraries), ISADG (for archives), Dublin Core (for web sites).
The problem of the relationship between these different schemas however remains.
Can they be successfully cross-searched?
Some have suggested that collection level descriptions (CLDs) may partly address this problem.
Searching descriptions of collections of material may be a useful preliminary to searching at the item level.
UKOLN (the UK Office for Library and Information Networking) working with various partners has developed a preliminary standard for CLDs(20), and this has begun to be implemented, by some eLib and RSLP (Research Support Libraries Programme) projects(21).
This work needs to be continued and extended so that CLDs begin to make a difference in institutional, rather than just project, work.
Authentication, authorisation and personalisation Another major technical issue that has major service implications is security, authentication and authorisation.
The picture here is a complex one.
The nationally provided authentication system, Athens(22), has done a great deal to improve the situation in the UK, but is still not universally used by data providers.
It is also not flexible enough to be used to serve internal institutional needs.
It is hoped that the Athens-replacement, Sparta, will improve the situation.
If institutions could easily use Sparta for locally delivered services (such as an electronic short loan service) this would be a major step forward.
At the moment, we tend to fall back on IP-range authentication.
Whilst this is suitable for much use, it is not sufficient.
Off-campus access is becoming increasingly important to many users.
Some institutions have responded to this pragmatically by setting up proxy servers.
These allow off-campus users to appear to external data sources to be on-campus.
But this is only a temporary solution.
The issue remains a crucial one.
The place of authentication in a cross-searching world (where users want to use a number of data sources simultaneously), and the possibility of ‘quiet’ authentication (where authentication and authorisation information is passed behind the scenes without the user intervening) remain key questions.
The related issue of personalisation is also an ongoing challenge.
Many of the eLib hybrid library projects did some useful work in this area.
Much of this is now relevant for institutions beginning to look at developing portal-type facilities for their users to cover a wider range of services than just the e-library.
One key issue, as with personalisation for e-library services, is the extent to which user intervention is required.
Whilst users often respond positively to the suggestion that they should be able to tailor a service to their own needs, in practice most users do not do this to any large extent.
Tailoring can however be done at a system level for users, presenting them with key information and services which fit their profile.
Whilst this needs to be done sensitively, it is often more effective than services which require users to do it themselves.
Issues of security and data protection need of course to be considered here.
Collection development Policies Of course, the infrastructure is only there to deliver the content.
This leads on to collection development.
Much e-library development in HEIs has up until now been opportunistic and unsystematic.
Creating an integrated collection development policy which covers all media is then an important challenge.
Electronic acquisitions have to fit into the overall provision.
One major issue here is the balance between print and electronic services.
The question of substitution is becoming an urgent one for many libraries.
Should electronic sources replace printed ones?
This is a question that was addressed for bibliographic resources several years ago (who still takes the ISI Citation Indexes in print form?)
but is only now beginning to be faced for full text resources.
As the situation is moving all of the time, this issue needs constant monitoring.
It may however become more immediately relevant in particular areas.
Key teaching texts are an example.
It is conceivable that a combination of copyright cleared readings and e-books may in the relatively short term be used to replace multiple copies of printed text books in short loan collections.
The procedures for selecting and acquiring e-materials still need to be more settled in many institutions.
There needs to be clear criteria for selection.
What are the judgements which need to be made about the content and functionality of an e-resource?
A large number of issues need to be considered which range from technical requirements through content to training and support implications(23).
At the University of Nottingham we have tried to develop a clear protocol for selecting e-journals which involves a subject librarian analysing the deal against a set of criteria.
Such a system is often necessary if the library has some kind of electronic resources group which makes acquisition decisions.
Acquisition The selection and acquisition process itself is often far more complex for electronic materials and includes liaising with suppliers, organising trials and demonstrations, and formal evaluation.
Once a decision has been made, it is ironic that the acquisition of e-resources can often take longer the paper ones.
Sometimes just getting a price from suppliers can take several weeks.
Perhaps the reason for these delays is due to the inexperience both of publishers and libraries.
It can however sometimes frustrate the expectations of users.
Licensing The proliferation of electronic information materials means that the relationship between publishers and libraries is changing.
In broad terms, there is a movement from the use of resources being determined by public law (copyright and fair dealing) to private agreement (licences).
License agreements are private arrangements between two parties.
They place the provider in a much stronger position to specify how the information is used and who uses it.
Libraries in the UK have been helped to negotiate licences assertively since much of this is done through national agencies, CHEST (for software and datasets) and NESLI (for e-journals)(24).
These agencies are currently in a state of flux and it is important that whatever replaces them in the long term is able to maintain a robust stance with publishers.
In particular, the need for publishers to allow off-campus and multi-campus access to materials needs to be maintained.
The need for off-campus access is one of the clear lessons highlighted by many eLib phase 3 projects in their reports and is certainly the experience of those involved in day-to-day service delivery.
Management Once material has been acquired it needs to be managed.
The management of e-journals is, for example, a particular problem.
It is not possible to buy an e-journal package, make it available and then forget about it.
There is always an ongoing maintenance problem.
Packages seem to add and subtract titles on a regular basis.
Access problems occur very frequently.
Libraries have begun to develop in-house databases to streamline e-journal management for staff and delivery to users.
Commercial products are also now being released.
The most advanced one of these is TDNet(25).
Perhaps there is a role here for subscription agents.
Libraries will certainly welcome opportunities to hand over some of the laborious administration associated with e-journals to a reliable third party.
But whoever manages e-journal delivery, there is an argument that suppliers themselves should be providing a better service here.
Suppliers should provide regular updates on the contents of service, MARC records and assistance as standard.
Digital preservation Another important aspect of the management of e-materials is preservation.
In the main, electronic resources have been acquired by libraries to satisfy immediate need.
The issue of preservation of electronic materials has been side-stepped.
In many areas, libraries have continued to acquire paper in parallel with e-versions.
However, as the prospect of e-only versions of material becomes more immediate, the preservation issue becomes more pressing.
The eLib programme, through the CEDARS project(26), has made a significant contribution to the debate.
The DNER Office has also assigned a preservation responsibility to senior members of staff.
There is an important role for national agencies (including JISC and the British Library) to play in preservation.
However, the preservation question remains a key one for all libraries.
It will have an impact on the whole direction of local e-collection development policies.
Until the issue is nearer resolution, library managers will not have the confidence to move decisively from paper to electronic-only resources.
Content creation Of course, electronic resources are not only being acquired by libraries but also created by them.
Libraries are increasingly active in digitising materials both to preserve the originals and to add value to them.
Library staff are also increasingly involved in creating content for learning and teaching purposes.
Such activity needs to be built into general collection development policies of libraries.
Its importance needs to be recognised by library managers and academic staff.
New initiatives in scholarly communication The serials crisis Publishers have embraced the electronic future at different rates and with different levels of enthusiasm but most academic publishers are now operating in the electronic environment.
They are working to maintain (or increase) their market shares and profits in this new area.
In many ways, this has led to the same problems created in the print environment being transferred to the electronic.
Perhaps the most significant of these is the so called ‘serials crisis’.
Between 1986 and 2000 statistics produced for the Consortium of University Research Libraries show that journal prices have risen by 291% at a time when the Retail Price Index (the standard measure of inflation) has increased by less than 70%.
Journal price inflation is still running at about 8% per year.
E-journals have not helped alleviate this.
Although many e-journal packages provide access to additional titles, they typically involve at least 7% on top of existing print expenditure.
Publishers have shown determination to lock their content away in subscription-based databases.
And yet, paradoxically, this is content largely produced by members of HEIs who would like to see their work disseminated as widely as possible.
The situation is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
New publishing developments Library and information professionals can respond to this in a number of ways.
Negotiating vigorously with publishers is one way already mentioned.
Perhaps academics working as journal editors and editorial board members might also be encouraged to engage more with their publishers about the price of the journal.
At the same time support should also be given to initiatives such as SPARC which has led on a number of new publishing ventures which create more competition in the publishing market(27).
In some cases, SPARC has set up new titles specifically to compete ‘head to head’ with existing expensive titles.
As SPARC is soon to have a European base, UK libraries should be active in supporting it.
E-prints Another possibility is the e-print initiative.
Since this has the potential to create a new paradigm in academic publishing, it is appropriate to deal with it in a little detail here.
It is now possible to create cross-searchable databases of research papers and make them freely available on the web.
The Open Archives Initiative has created the technical standards to do this, and ‘eprints.org’ has now provided free software to install OAI-compliant ‘e-print archives’(28).
E-print archives are already well established in a few subject disciplines such as Physics (with the Los Alamos ArXiv service)(29) and Cognitive Science (the CogPrints archive)(30).
Some institutions have also begun to set up archives.
At the University of Nottingham, we have set up an experimental archive using the free software and are currently devising strategies to encourage academic staff to archive their papers(31).
One key issue here is copyright.
Some publishers allow authors to retain the copyright for their papers and permit them to deposit material in public archives.
Others do not.
Authors should be encouraged to insist on retaining copyright, at least to deposit a copy of their paper on a not-for-profit e-print server.
Where publishers do not allow this, it is now widely accepted that authors can deposit a pre-refereed version of the paper followed by post-refereed corrections on an e-print server without contravening copyright.
Such approaches have been championed by Stevan Harnad who has written widely on the subject and has been behind the setting up of the CogPrints archive and eprints.org(32).
Harnad is insistent that ‘self archiving’ can and should begin now.
Authors should be encouraged to continue to submit papers to peer-reviewed journals as well as place their papers on e-print archives.
He suggests that this will in the medium-term lead to a paring down of the role of publishers to become organisers of the peer review process and adders of value to the basic content.
It might also be suggested that the long term future of peer review remains a matter of debate.
At present it is wrapped up closely with the publication process but this need not be the case.
It is conceivable that in future peer review could be provided by professional or learned societies who might provide a ‘kite mark’ for a publication which could then be published on an e-print archive.
The role of the library Although the future shape of scholarly communication still remains unclear, what is clear is that library and information professionals have a key role to play here.
First of all, the library is the natural home for an institutional e-print service.
Libraries have traditionally managed the key academic information resources of institutions.
In the short term, librarians should be active in installing e-print servers locally and smoothing the path for academics to contribute to them.
Secondly, librarians should take the role of raising awareness about these issues amongst their academic colleagues and institutional managers.
As the professionals who currently interface between publishers and academics, library staff are in a good position to be well informed on the issues.
Strategies need to be devised to encourage academic colleagues to contribute to e-print archives.
A key question that needs addressing is: what is the hook?
How can academics be encouraged to contribute?
How can their fears that contributing to e-print archives threaten their ability to publish in high impact journals be allayed?
Librarians need to establish a dialogue with academics to address these issues.
Finding out what they want and need, and not just making assumptions how we think they ought to work.
Engaging with institutional managers is also important.
The more senior managers can be persuaded to embrace the institutional archiving concept, the more they will encourage staff on the ground to contribute.
Librarians have to take this advocacy role seriously.
User issues Marketing, training and liaison One of the concerns about electronic resources is ‘market penetration’.
To what extent are they actually being used?
Who is using them?
Who is not using them?
In order to help to ensure that quality resources are used widely and effectively it is important to have marketing strategies in place and also information skills training opportunities.
It is also essential to have good formal and informal liaison mechanisms set up to ensure that the resources purchased are the right ones and once they are purchased that they are used.
The complexity of the current information environment means that users more than ever need assistance in navigating the resources.
In particular, users need assistance in identifying high quality resources.
Whilst under-use of e-resources may be a problem amongst some users, for others, indiscriminate over-use is the difficulty.
Some of the recent results of research carried out by the JUSTEIS project show the extent to which students rely on information on the web(33).
All too often the information they are using is of a questionable quality when information in other places and in different formats may be better.
Some users (particularly some students) are not being critical enough about the information they are encountering on the web.
There is a crucial role to play here for information professionals in guiding and training users to help them find and use high quality (both free and paid for) resources.
Support Once resources are there, it is essential to have good support systems in place.
Universities are usually good at buying and making available resources but often do not invest in support.
At the University of Nottingham, a recent consultation exercise with heads of schools about their information needs demonstrated that by far the most popular stated requirement was more support for IT use.
This is of course a much broader requirement than just electronic library services but is nevertheless closely connected with them.
Many users feel they are not adequately supported in their use of IT-based resources and this means they are not using those resources, or if they are, they are not using them as effectively as they might.
Support can take various forms, including FAQ services, knowledge bases, well constructed feedback forms and so on.
But there is of course still no alternative to people.
As well as face-to-face help desks, telephone help lines are often popular with users for IT-based resources.
Some libraries are also experimenting with live online reference desks which use ‘chat room type’ functionality.
User needs and behaviour Provision and support has also to extend to off-campus use.
At Nottingham, we have a pilot electronic short loan service and the clear message coming out of evaluations is that students want off-campus access (something which we are now planning to do).
This message comes from full time ‘traditional’ students, as well as the growing numbers of ‘non-traditional’ students.
The need to support these latter students in their use of these resources is also acute.
The needs and behaviour of these and other users are often not fully known.
All too often the views of information professionals on user behaviour are little more than ‘best guesses’.
More could perhaps be done to acquire evidence about needs or at least monitor usage of resources more systematically.
Usage statistics are now available for many e-resources from suppliers.
At the same time, information professionals ought to perhaps try to ensure greater clarity and uniformity in these statistics across different providers.
At present, most usage statistics from web resources have to be treated with caution especially when trying to draw comparisons across different services.
This makes the production of reliable performance indicators for e-libraries a challenge, although useful work has been done in this area by groups, such as the SCONUL Advisory Committee on Performance Indicators and the EQUINOX project(34).
Quality assurance in the e-library remains a major issue.
Organisational issues Information services and convergence Many issues associated with the delivery of electronic library resources do not involve the library alone.
Libraries now more than ever deliver their e-services in the context of a wider ICT-based provision.
Electronic library delivery relies on the infrastructure, hardware and expertise provided by computing services in universities.
It is then essential that the library as an organisation works in close partnership with the computing service.
This partnership of these organisations can take a variety of forms ranging from organisational merger to strategic alliance.
It will vary from institution to institution.
But whatever form it takes it must be ‘an ever closer union’ if users are to be properly served(35).
Whether they are part of formally merged organisations or not, libraries as organisations need often to remould themselves to be able to better deliver electronic and hybrid library services.
Greater team and project working, flatter structures and improved communication channels are amongst some of the key developments which libraries are carrying out in order to do this(36).
The MLE and the e-library The importance of partnership between different information professionals is highlighted in the context of new campus-wide services which are beginning to emerge.
In particular the development of Managed Learning Environments are now at the top of the agenda for many institutions.
MLEs are systems which facilitate the learning and teaching process by providing resources and tools online.
They will normally include a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) tool, and integrate this with student record databases and other campus information systems(37).
As such they form a central part of the so-called ‘web enabled campus’ and the ‘e-university’.
One of the key strategic question that has to be addressed is what is the relationship between the electronic library and the MLE?
This is one of the key questions to emerge from eLib phase 3.
When the hybrid library and clumps projects were conceived it was seen as important to try to integrate various systems and services within the library provision.
As the projects progressed, it was becoming clearer that integration was a much bigger challenge than this.
As well as integrating services specifically within the remit of the library, it is also necessary to integrate these with other university systems.
But how?
This question is recognised to have been so important at a national level that JISC has funded the INSPIRAL project to investigate the concepts involved(38).
The ANGEL project is also working on some practical answers to the question(39).
Nevertheless, it is crucial that institutions are addressing this question at a local level as well.
In practical terms this often requires members of staff from the library to be actively involved in MLE development at various levels.
It is crucial to have senior members of library staff involved at a strategic level on the university MLE group (if one exists) and also have staff involved in particular implementations of MLEs working alongside teaching and technical staff.
All too often different people are involved in e-library and MLE development and this can mean that the connections are missed.
National and local relationships Local e-library development takes place in the context of ongoing national initiatives.
In particular, the development of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is important in e-library service delivery(40).
Many of the key strategic technical and content issues associated with the DNER have now begun to be addressed in detail(41).
As the DNER develops, the crucial question for institutions is what is the relationship between the national and the institutional provision?
How will institutions integrate DNER services with their own services?
This will be one of the key questions for library and information services to address in the next year.
An immediate example of this is the Resource Discovery Network, which co-ordinates the work of the various subject hubs (most of which began life as eLib projects)(42).
How do resources available through the RDN fit with locally-produced web gateways?
Perhaps we need some more exemplars in this area.
The national situation is also changing.
We are used to the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which funds the DNER, being active in e-library development.
But a new group funded directly by the Funding Councils has recently been set up.
This group, the Research Libraries Strategy Group, is chaired by Sir Brian Follett and it is expected that its work will have a significant impact on library (including e-library) provision in many areas alongside that of JISC.
It is expected, for example, that it will look at the possibility of taking forward a UK National Union Catalogue and also at ways in which the British Library can collaborate to a much greater extent with HEIs(43).
Staff and skills The right staff The implications of all of this for library and information services staff are profound.
Information professionals are now required to take on a wider variety of roles requiring a broader range of skills than perhaps ever before.
A number of eLib projects have helped to successfully highlight these issues in recent years.
Library managers need to address the issue of how staff are obtained, trained and retained in order to carry out this work.
Many eLib projects reported that they often had problems recruiting and retaining staff with the right skills and this is a general problem across the sector which needs to be addressed.
Thought also needs to be given to staffing structures which are often biased in favour of traditional library roles.
Electronic library roles are often tacked on to the side of organisations.
There may be a need in many organisations to review the fundamental organisational structure to see whether it is best able to deliver the wide range of services currently required.
Roles These services involve library staff taking on roles.
The librarian is now: Multi-media user – comfortable with a wide range of formats Intermediary – with a good knowledge of sources and user requirements Enabler – proactively connecting users with information they require Metadata producer – creating records of information sources in a variety of schemas Communicator – formally and informally liaising with users Team player – working with colleagues in library, IT services and academics Trainer / educator – taking on a formal role to teach information skills and information literacy Evaluator – sifting free and paid for resources on behalf of users Negotiator – dealing with publishers and suppliers Project manager – leading on development projects to enhance the service Innovator – not just following the routine but also looking at improved ways to deliver the service Fund-raiser – working for greater income from the institution and beyond Skills And these roles require a wide range of new or enhanced skills, including: Professional skills Technical and IT skills Flexibility Ability to work under pressure Ability to learn quickly Communication skills Negotiating skills People skills Presentation skills Teaching skills Team working skills Customer service skills Analytical and evaluative skills Subject skills Project management skills Vision Some of these are hard skills (such as technical knowledge) others are soft skills (such as vision).
All are important to have in the organisation.
Conclusion The last ten years has seen enormous change in library and information services.
National initiatives, such as eLib, have helped to facilitate rapid development.
But change is set to continue in the next decade.
Libraries are going to be expected more than ever to be fast-moving, innovative organisations which can still deliver stable services.
Achieving this will involve energetic technical and content development.
But it will also involve developing organisations with the right staff with the right skills working in the right structures.
It is in this way that we will be better able to support the needs of our users.
Acknowledgements This paper is based on a presentation first given to a CALIM (Consortium of Academic Libraries in Manchester) seminar in March 2001.
Thanks to those involved for their feedback.
Thanks also to Dr Mike Gardner, Dick Chamberlain, John MacColl and Philip Hunter for comments on drafts of the article.
References (1) Alan Whitelaw and Gill Joy Summative evaluation of phase 3 of the eLib initiative: final report.
Guildford: ESYS Consulting, 2001.
See also Stephen Pinfield Beyond eLib: Lessons from Phase 3 of the Electronic Libraries Programme, 2001.
Both reports are available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/intro.html#elib-evaluation.
In addition to these reports, many of the individual project final reports have also recently become available.
(2) For more systematic definitions of ‘digital’ and ‘electronic library’ see, for example, Christine L. Borgman ‘Digital libraries and the continuum of scholarly communication’ Journal of Documentation, 56, 4, July 2000, pp.412-430; and David Bawden and Ian Rowlands ‘Digital libraries: developing a conceptual framework’ The New Review of Information Networking, 5, 1999, pp.71-89.
(3) http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/disresearch/pelican/indexpage.html.
(4) Whitelaw and Joy op cit.
p.50.
(5) http://www.heron.ac.uk/.
HERON was originally funded under eLib3 and has received continuation funding from JISC.
Prices brokered by HERON are usually at least 5p per page per student.
At Nottingham, during the first year of the ESL pilot, the average cost of each text was £93.89.
For a detailed analysis of the economics of the HERON service see Leah Halliday and Charles Oppenheim ‘Economic aspects of a national electronic reserve service’ Journal of Documentation, 57, 3, May 2001, pp.434-443.
(6) http://www.netlibrary.com/.
NetLibrary prices are being quoted at 150% of the printed book (i.e.
the full price of the book plus electronic access fee of 50%).
(7) John MacColl ‘Virtuous learning environments: the library and the VLE’ Program, 35, 3, July 2001, p.237.
(8) See, for example, Peter Brophy ‘Towards a generic model of information and library services in the information age’ Journal of Documentation, 56, 2, March 2000, pp.161-184.
(9) See Mike Gardner and Stephen Pinfield ‘Database-backed library web sites: a case study of the use of PHP and MySQL at the University of Nottingham’ Program, 35, 1, January 2001, pp.33-42.
(10) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/bath/.
(11) See http://www.uknuc.shef.ac.uk/.
(12) Herbert Van de Sompel and Oren Beit-Arie ‘Open Linking in the Scholarly Information Environment Using the OpenURL Framework’ D-Lib Magazine, 7, 3, March 2001, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/vandesompel/03vandesompel.html.
(13) For a practical demonstration of the potential of OpenURLs see Andy Powell ‘OpenResolver: a Simple OpenURL Resolver’ Ariadne, 28, June 2001.
Available at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/resolver/.
(14) http://www.sfxit.com/.
(15) http://www.exlibris.co.il/.
(16) http://www.oclc.org/webexpress/.
(17) http://www.fdgroup.com/fdi/vdx/.
(18) http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora/.
(19) http://www.openarchives.org/.
(20) See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/.
(21) For RSLP see http://www.rslp.ac.uk/.
(22) http://www.athens.ac.uk/.
(23) For a detailed discussion of some of these issues see David J.
Price ‘The hybrid library and collection development’ The New Review of Information and Library Research, 4, 1998, p.129-139.
(24) http://www.chest.ac.uk/; http://www.nesli.ac.uk/.
(25) http://www.teldan.com/.
(26) http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/.
(27) http://www.arl.org/sparc/.
(28) http://www.eprints.org/.
(29) http://www.arxiv.org/.
(30) http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/.
(31) http://www-db.library.nottingham.ac.uk/eprints/.
(32) For a summary of Stevan Harnad’s ideas, see Stevan Harnad For Whom the Gate Tolls?
How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now.
Available at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm.
And ‘Self Archiving’ Nature: Debates.
Available at http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html.
(33) See Chris Armstrong et al ‘A study of the use of electronic information systems by higher education students in the UK’ Program, 35, 3, July 2001, pp.241-262.
(34) See http://www.sconul.ac.uk/performance_ind/index.htm and http://equinox.dcu.ie/.
(35) For an overview of the issue of convergence in the UK context see Clive D. Field ‘Theory and Practice: Reflections on Convergence in United Kingdom Universities’ Liber Quarterly, 11, 3, 2001, forthcoming.
(36) For a summary of some key issues (from a US perspective) see Barbara B. Moran ‘Restructuring the university library: a North American perspective’ Journal of Documentation, 57, 1, January 2001, pp.100-114.
(37) Some useful definitions of the terminology is provided on the INSPIRAL project web site http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/about/defs.html.
(38) http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/.
(39) http://www.angel.ac.uk/.
See also John MacColl ‘Virtuous learning environments: the library and the VLE’, Program, 35, 3, July 2001, pp.227-241.
(40) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/.
(41) For the DNER architecture, see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/.
For the collections strategy, see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/collections/strategy.htm.
(42) http://www.rdn.ac.uk/.
(43) See Sir Brian K. Follett ‘Just How Are We Going to Satisfy Our Research Customers’, Liber Quarterly, 11, 3, 2001, pp.218-223, forthcoming.
Author Details Stephen Pinfield is Academic Services Librarian at the University of Nottingham.
Before this he managed the BUILDER hybrid library project at the University of Birmingham.
He is acting as part-time Programme Consultant to the DNER Office, overseeing eLib Phase 3 projects.
Email: Stephen.pinfield@nottingham.ac.uk Article Title: "Managing electronic library services: current issues in UK higher education institutions" Author: Stephen Pinfield Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/pinfield/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Portals, Portals Everywhere Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Portals, Portals Everywhere Buzz data software java framework javascript html database rss xml portal infrastructure xhtml browser oai-pmh graphics opac z39.50 aggregation e-learning personalisation vle wsrp uportal interoperability webct intranet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ian Dolphin, Paul Miller and Robert Sherratt report on two conferences over the summer which explored the progress being made in deploying institutional portals of various forms.
Judging by the number of articles written and conferences organised around them, portals are undoubtedly a hot topic in higher education, and seem likely to remain so for some time to come.
This article reports on two portal-focussed conferences held in Canada and the UK during the summer of 2002.
It also introduces some of the work underway at Hull to build an institutional portal, and the way in which a JISC-funded project shared between Hull and UKOLN will demonstrate the role of institutional portals in bringing resources provided by the JISC and others to the attention of those working within an institution.
The conferences in question are the June 2002 meeting of the Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) [1, 2] in the Canadian city of Vancouver, and the Portals 2002 conference [3] organised by the University of Nottingham and JISC here in the UK.
Both events drew over 200 participants, predominantly North American in Vancouver, and predominantly British in Nottingham.
This year's Institutional Web Management Workshop [4, 5] also included discussion of 'portalisation', and by the time that this paper is published, a number of portal presentations will also have been delivered to EDUCAUSE [6] in Atlanta.
Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) According to their web site [1], "The Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) is an independent organization designed to increase the flow of information between educational institutions and companies involved in the development of administrative applications using Java technology.
Today, with the benefit of object oriented technology and Java, we have a great opportunity in higher education to do things better as colleagues.
The purpose of JA-SIG is, first, to share our experiences as we build applications with Java, and second, to develop a common infrastructure upon which we can build shareable components.
We welcome the participation of both educational institutions and commercial enterprises in this effort."
Despite the heavy emphasis upon administration in the name and mission, this may be considered a testament to the group's origins, and disguises the direct relevance of this effort to what readers of Ariadne might more comfortably consider to be digital libraries, e-Learning, and similar activities.
One major activity of the JA-SIG is the creation and ongoing development of the Open Source portal, uPortal [7], and it was discussion of this upon which the Vancouver conference focussed.
A clear message arising from the conference was that there is great interest in the technology and methodology, with a number of significant institutions including Columbia, Cornell and Princeton actively deploying uPortal.
Vancouver's University of British Columbia is also at the forefront of deployment, with the portal playing a key role in delivering services to both staff and students.
In the UK, deployment is currently on a smaller scale, with development work underway at Hull, Nottingham, De Montfort and — now — Bristol.
The emphasis in the UK is also different, with more consideration given to integration of external content, and models such as that proposed for the JISC's Information Environment [8].
Paul Browning at the University of Bristol maintains a useful register [9] of UK institutions and their progress towards implementing various portals.
He would welcome notification of any that he's missing!
Sun Microsystems has been a long-time supporter of the JA-SIG, and key Sun personnel were present, including their Chief Technology Officer responsible for iPlanet (now Sun ONE), their Chief Technical Evangelist (a title that beats Interoperability Focus any day), and others.
Sun and Java freebies were also much in evidence, marking a welcome bucking of the recent trend towards freebie-light events across our sector.
The Mellon Foundation, too, is supportive of the development of uPortal, having funded much of the current version's development.
Ira Fuchs, the Mellon's Vice President for Research in IT, presented the conference's closing Keynote.
Portals 2002 Conference This conference, hosted at the University of Nottingham, aimed to brief managers and decision makers from across UK Further and Higher Education on the role of portals within their institutions.
Presentations focussed upon generic issues, as well as including examples of both open source and commercial solutions [3].
Given interest in this event, and in portal issues in general, there is clearly scope for similar events in subsequent years.
As with the JA-SIG conference, the majority of presentations from Portals 2002 are online and available for viewing.
Portals 2002 also includes a web cast of the proceedings [10].
The Vancouver Sheraton, home to the conference Thick or thin, light or heavy, (tall or short, caf or decaf?)
There are as many definitions of a portal as there are purposes to which portals are put.
Our interest in Hull is focussed primarily upon the institutional portal as part of the Digital University Project [11].
Our working definition of an institutional portal is of; a layer which aggregates, integrates, personalises and presents information, transactions and applications to the user according to their role and preferences.
Such definitions differ somewhat from those that might be applied to the enterprise portals of big corporates, or to commercial Internet portals of various forms.
As thinking on both is at a relatively early stage of development, there are also occasional differences of perspective within Further and Higher Education between those with a predominantly institutional imperative, and those scoping the potential for portals at a national level.
See, for example, some earlier discussion of these in Issue 30 of Ariadne [12].
Within institutions, there has been something of a tendency to present the institutional portal as the universal solution to the problems of managing and presenting information and web-enabled applications to entire communities of users.
Experience of implementation tends to suggest that whilst the development of a portal is an essential component of that solution, it forms only one part of an interlocking range of services developed as part of an overall institution-wide strategy.
In terms of JISC's evolving Architecture for the Information Environment [8], there is the notion of portals (whether institutional or otherwise) that are either 'thick' or 'thin'.
In this context, and bearing in mind the Architecture's working definition of a portal; portal An [sic] network service that provides a personalised, single point of access to a range of heterogeneous network services, local and remote, structured and unstructured.
Portal functionality often includes resource discovery, email access and online discussion fora.
Portals are intended for (human) end-users using common Web 'standards' such as HTTP, HTML, Java and JavaScript.
In the context of the JISC IE, portals interact with brokers, aggregators and content providers using Z39.50, the OAI-PMH and RSS/HTTP.
(JISC IE Architecture Glossary) thin portals are seen as capable of providing a shallow degree of linking to external resources and services, possibly with reduced or limited functionality.
Thick portals, on the other hand, provide much richer capabilities, as well as deep linking and extensively integrated access to remote functionality.
Thick portals would, therefore, appear to provide more of the functionality that a user might actually wish; linking straight through to an Ingenta [13] article or incorporating Ingenta's search functionality, rather than providing a link to the Ingenta search page, for example.
Work beginning within the PORTAL project (below), ongoing in EDNER [14], and doubtless under consideration elsewhere, will be important, of course, in assessing whether assumptions such as these really match what users want.
Light is right In thinking about the functionality of the portal, there has been a marked tendency to aggregate functionality within the institutional portal itself.
Some institutions are effectively replacing departmental or section web sites by a series of nested portal implementations, in addition to providing an interface to back-end systems.
These "heavy" portals, which incorporate applications within themselves, may be contrasted with the (preferable?)
"light" portal, which attempts to aggregate and integrate access to a range of services and functions which remain independent of the portal itself.
The portal being built at Hull, for example, is intended to be as thick as possible, whilst remaining no more than a light layer between the user and a wide range of diverse applications.
When is an Intranet a Portal?
Many people now have experience of institutional intranets.
It is fair to say that the line between intranets and portal appears to be blurred.
Based on experiences at Hull we would suggest that an intranet should be considered a portal when it can aggregate and integrate diverse sources of information.
In addition it must provide its users with personalised content and the ability to control what content they see and how it is presented to them.
Content Management If, as seems likely, aggregation and presentation of information is one key function of the institutional portal, it is vital to consider the processes by which that information is produced.
Where a portal draws on existing software systems, such as those supporting the library or administrative databases, it is likely that processes exist, however imperfect, to enter and maintain the data contained in them.
The same is not always true of information contained in the institutional web space.
Indeed, the great variety of web providers within many institutions, and the unsystematic manner in which web content is often provided introduces huge variations in the quality of information presented.
For this reason Katya Sadovsky's presentation [15] at the JA-SIG conference highlighted the issue of web content management as a further central component of an Information Strategy currently being addressed by those institutions which have begun portal implementations.
If part of the portal's role is to aggregate information, including information from institutional web sites, a content management solution will at some point be required to ensure the validity of the information aggregated.
At Hull, too, the importance of the CMS has long been recognised, and effective implementation of this technology is seen as a vital strand in the building of the Digital University.
A key element of the Digital University Project has therefore been to source or develop a system of managing web based information which does not impose a huge time overhead spent learning complex software.
It should further remove the need for every individual maintaining web pages to become a web page and graphic designer, or information architect.
Such a system should be easy to use and present users with a familiar interface.
It should be supported by the storage of text-based web content in an online database.
Such a database-driven system will enable web sites to be built automatically in accordance with predetermined and predesigned templates.
A content management system opens the door to a range of possibilities, including the re-use of information for a range of audiences.
With text entered in a database, for example, a version of a web site can be published which is optimised for a standard web browser, and a version published simultaneously for screen readers which allows access to pages for users with impaired vision.
Investigation of commercial content management systems found them to typically be expensive, often created with the needs of business users in mind.
After evaluation of several such packages, the project team at Hull decided on an approach based around buying some components (the text editing tools embedded in the authoring and editing environment), basing data storage on the University's Ingres database software, and developing workflow appropriate to the circumstances of those providing the information.
Workflow diagram for the Hull Content Management System CMS Implementation at Hull The CMS is being built using the open-standard programming language Java All content is stored as XML (XHTML) for future-proofing Content is stored in the University standard Ingres database The CMS currently publishes content for the Staff Intranet, the Academic Services web site [16], and the online Student Handbook [17].
Integrate, Personalise (Portals, channels, portlets and Web Services) For a portal to effectively meet the needs of its users there is a need to move beyond rendering content, and to embrace the issues around integrating and aggregating a range of services and related functionality.
Importantly, these services are often closely matched to some of the core business processes of an institution, such as the efficient registration of students [18].
It is normal to assume, for example, that an institutional portal should be capable of allowing staff and students to query and interact with a range of information pertaining to them, as held in a variety of institutional databases.
You might also look for transparent logins to services on and off campus, with the portal handling the task of mapping various access rights, roles, usernames etc.
as required, and presenting the illusion of seamless access to the user.
Personalisation of the content selected for display — and the manner of that display — is also a commonly perceived requirement, and personalisation of various forms was touched on several times by speakers in both Nottingham and Vancouver.
Dinner table debates on the dangers of over-personalisation, and a consequent narrowing of scope and perspective to the detriment of the user, remained inconclusive, but this is an obvious area for research in the near future.
Are we distracting users by presenting them with a battery of personalisation options before they get to use a site for the first time?
Are we in danger of producing dangerously narrow views on the information landscape, in which a user is only presented with 'interesting' or 'relevant' resources that they have already classified as interesting or relevant, removing the possibility of serendipitous leaps off into related resources?
Should we build portals which, for their 'digital library' component simply offer two options; one that points to Google, and the other to the OPAC?
We can do more than that, surely?
Within the institutional portal, there are two main forms of personalisation available to the user; the definition of look-and-feel and selection of available channels within the portal framework itself; and personalisation within the various applications to which the portal facilitates access.
For uPortal, an important aid to the integration of these external legacy applications is CWebProxy, presented in Vancouver by Andrew Draskoy of Canada's Memorial University [19].
The screen shot, below, shows CWebProxy in use within the Hull portal to allow students to update their emergency contact details in a database managed by Corporate Systems.
This database certainly existed previously, but the portal offers a means by which students may be allowed to access and modify their own records, rather than having to pass changes through administrative staff or — more likely — not keeping such data current at all.
An example of a legacy system, embedded in the Hull portal Lectures, parties, and that pesky essay deadline As Greg Barnes from the University of Washington [20] suggested in Vancouver, the average member of a university is bombarded by date-dependent information from a wide range of sources.
Most of us need to track our social lives, our teaching (or learning, if we're students) commitments, deadlines for papers, coursework, etc., departmental events, university events, holidays, etc.
Much of this information exists online in course pages on the VLE, departmental notice boards or intranets, university almanacs and the like, but it is left to the individual to aggregate them, and to relate them to his or her personal engagements.
In an effort to manage this plethora of dates, Greg is working on an open source Calendaring channel for uPortal.
The Calendar is already deployed at the University of Washington, and is available for download [21].
Sharing channels In uPortal's terminology, discrete applications, services, or content feeds are known as 'channels'.
Thus, you might have a calendar channel, a channel displaying RSS-fed news from the BBC, etc.
Current industry effort around the development of shared standards for the exchange of these fragments of information (the JSR 168 Portlet specification from Sun and IBM [22], and OASIS' Web Services for Remote Portals [23]) refer to effectively the same thing as a 'portlet'.
Ken Weiner from Interactive Business Solutions and Jim Weaver of Learning Assistant Technologies spoke [24] about work they had been doing to develop mechanisms for sharing the definition of uPortal channels between different instances of uPortal.
As with much else in this arena, their work is tied to the emergent notion of Web Services [25], and they believe it has some similarities to the Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) specification, likely to be released by OASIS around the end of 2002.
It was suggested that the uPortal-specific technique they have developed will be migrated to full conformance with WSRP, once a stable specification exists.
Rima Patel, one of Sun's Technology Evangelists, spoke [26] about the evolution of portlets in general, rather than restricting herself to uPortal.
She spoke in some detail about the ongoing development of JSR 168 and WSRP, both of which are due to be released towards the end of the year.
The extent to which the two final specifications might overlap — or contradict one another — is as yet unclear, but hopefully a significant degree of shared membership between the committees will prevent too much divergence.
Rima also suggested that the related development of a Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) [27] within OASIS is worth keeping an eye upon.
Integration with Virtual Learning Environments Virtual Learning Environments have been important for a long time within the Further Education sector, and are becoming increasingly significant in Higher Education too.
As such, it is necessary for any portal that seeks to present itself as a serious contender to be the sticky first port of call for members of an institution to be capable of integration with the campus VLE (and other monolithic legacy systems, such as the library system).
Issues remain about the need to effectively disaggregate such behemoths, and embrace approaches such as those made possible by Web Services in constructing more modular applications, but the reality of most current e-Learning systems is somewhat different.
Are document upload facilities or chat rooms really a core function of a VLE, for example, or a shared service upon which the VLE, the departmental notice board, and the portal itself should be able to draw at will?
Recent work has made it possible to offer a degree of integration between uPortal and at least three VLEs; Campus Pipeline, WebCT, and Blackboard.
Papers in Vancouver from Mike Zackrison at Campus Pipeline [28] and David Rosenbaum and Ian Hyatt of WebCT with Wilson Lo from the University of British Columbia [29] demonstrated some of what is possible.
The WebCT paper, for example, showed the my.UBC portal [30] with a WebCT channel clearly displaying relevant information from the modules for which the student was registered.
The figure below, kindly provided by Wilson Lo of UBC, demonstrates the concept.
WebCT course information, displaying in the UBC portal.
Image provided by Wilson Lo of UBC.
Announcements from Blackboard [31] and WebCT [32] on the JA-SIG site show the extent to which this drive towards integration has been taken, and we look forward to further announcements in a similar vein.
Introducing PORTAL Academic Services Interactive Media at the University of Hull, working in partnership with UKOLN, has been successful in bidding to the Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) recent call for proposals under the FAIR Programme.
The project, Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL) [33], will run over 18 months, and is funded to explore issues around the deployment and use of institutional portals within the higher and further education community.
It has the potential to play an important role in shaping thinking on portals and their growing place in both the national and institutional information landscapes.
As well as exploring the surfacing of institutional content, a key aspect of PORTAL is the integration of external resources such as those provided within the JISC’s Information Environment.
The project will be working closely with the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [34] and will also seek to build relationships with other JISC services and external content providers.
The PORTAL project is closely aligned to the University of Hull’s ongoing Digital University Project [11].
Further, the project will enable the wider community to benefit from work on the issues surrounding the implementation of portals and the integration of information resources.
By the time this is published, all of the PORTAL staff will be in post, and more in-depth articles on PORTAL and its findings will appear in future issues of Ariadne.
Conclusion Institutional portals are here to stay.
At the University of British Columbia, probably one of the main adopters of uPortal to date, they are supporting some 25,000 registered users of their my.UBC portal [30], and seeing 15,000 logins per day.
The wide range of services available through my.UBC means that many of these users are spending some time in the portal.
On a purely financial level, Richard Spencer estimated during his keynote to the Nottingham conference [35] that users of the portal save 15 minutes per week in completing basic administrative tasks; a saving of $CAN 1,500,000 per annum to the institution already.
According to Ron Yanosky of the Gartner Group, speaking in Vancouver, the institutional portal is a key strategic resource for rationalising and personalising the online user experience.
He also pointed to a clear trend onwards from mere presentation of data towards meaningful integration.
The portal is not, though, a panacea.
Amongst other things, it offers a framework by which a range of back-room processes can be made more visible, and brought closer to those upon whom they directly impinge.
This very increase in visibility for these processes offers possibilities to challenge the assumptions upon which they are based, ultimately creating the potential to radically restructure the ways in which our organisations gather, store, and divulge information.
Controversial, definitely.
Terrifying, possibly.
A good thing?
Almost certainly.
Finally, it also worth remembering the remarks of Karen Stanton [36] at the Nottingham conference.
As with all technology projects, expectation management is as important as the development work itself; if you offer users the world, and only deliver them a broken form to register their interest in buying the university Christmas card, they are unlikely to be impressed.
Institutional portals do have great potential.
Other than a very few visionary institutions, the sector is a very long way from realising it.
Staying informed There are several mailing lists and web sites devoted to discussion of portal issues.
One that is extremely valuable for those working in UK Further or Higher education is the portals list on JISCmail.
To join this list, send a message to   jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk   with the body of the message reading   join portals Your_Firstname Your_Lastname -  e.g.
join portals Paul Miller -  References The JA-SIG site is at: http://www.ja-sig.org/ Presentations from the Vancouver JA-SIG conference are available at: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/isapps/jasig/2002summerVancouver/ The Portals 2002 conference site is at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/portals2002/ The Sixth Institutional Web Management Workshop site is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/ A report on the Sixth Institutional Web Management Workshop by Brian Kelly appears at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/web-focus/ The EDUCAUSE 2002 conference site is at: http://www.educause.edu/conference/e2002/ The uPortal site is at: http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/ The JISC Information Environment Architecture is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ Portals and Portal Frameworks, maintained by Paul Browning, is at: http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/projects/portal/portalbytes/ The Portals 2002 conference web cast is at: http://wirksworth.nottingham.ac.uk/WebCast/portals/portals.asp?
smovieheight=350&smoviewidth=351&smoviename=spencer The University of Hull's Digital University Project site is at: http://www.digital.hull.ac.uk/ The concept of the portal by Paul Miller is at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/portal/ The Ingenta site is at: http://www.ingenta.com/ The EDNER project site is at: http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/edner/ The slides for Integrating a Portal with a Content Management System — a case study using uPortal and eContent by Katya Sadovsky are at: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/isapps/jasig/2002summerVancouver/Presentations/uPortal%20and%20Content/ The Academic Services site is at: http://www.acsweb.hull.ac.uk/ The University of Hull's Student Handbook is at: http://student.hull.ac.uk/handbook/ The University of Bath's Online Course Registration system is at: http://www.bath.ac.uk/registration-on-line/ The slides for CWebProxy by Andrew Draskoy are at: http://www.ucs.mun.ca/%7Eandrew/cw/ The slides for An open source calendaring system for higher education by Greg Barnes are at: http://staff.washington.edu/gsbarnes/caltalk.ppt The University of Washington's Open Source calendar may be downloaded from: http://www.washington.edu/ucal/ Java Specification Request (JSR) 168: Portlet Specification is at: http://www.jcp.org/jsr/detail/168.jsp The Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) technical committee is at: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp/ The slides for Web Services and uPortal by Jim Weaver and Ken Weiner are at: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/isapps/jasig/ 2002summerVancouver/Presentations/Web%20Services%20and%20uPortal/ An introduction to Web Services by Tracy Gardner is at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/gardner/ The slides for What are Portlets and how do you implement them?
by Rima Patel are at: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/isapps/jasig/ 2002summerVancouver/Presentations/What%20are%20Portlets/img0.html The Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) technical committee is at: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsia/ The slides for Unifying the Digital Campus by Mike Zackrison are at: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/isapps/jasig/ 2002summerVancouver/Presentations/campus%20pipeline/img0.html The slides for WebCT and uPortal by David Rosenbaum, Ian Hyatt, and Wilson Lo are at: http://web2.ucs.ubc.ca/jasig/webct/ The University of British Columbia's portal, my.UBC, is at: http://my.ubc.ca/ The press release, Blackboard and uPortal to Collaborate for the Benefit of Community Development, is at: http://company.blackboard.com/press/viewrelease.cgi?tid=220 The press release, WebCT Extends Support for Open Standards in Higher Education, is at: http://www.webct.com/service/ViewContent?contentID=6614077 The PORTAL project site is at: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/ The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) site is at: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ The slides for An eStrategy for Universities and Colleges by Richard Spencer are at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/portals2002/RichardSpencer.ppt The slides for COMPASS — Building support for an integrated community by Karen Stanton are at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/portals2002/KarenStanton.ppt Acknowledgements Attendance at the JA-SIG conference in Vancouver was made possible thanks to financial support from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
The Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL — http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/) project is a joint activity of UKOLN and Academic Services Interactive Media at the University of Hull, funded under the JISC's Facilitating Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme.
Author Details Ian Dolphin Head, Academic Services Interactive Media University of Hull Email: i.dolphin@hull.ac.uk Web site: www.acsweb.hull.ac.uk/imedia/ Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Robert Sherratt Academic Services Interactive Media University of Hull Email: r.sherratt@hull.ac.uk Web site: www.acsweb.hull.ac.uk/imedia/ Article Title: "Portals, PORTALS Everywhere" Author: Ian Dolphin and Paul Miller, Robert Sherratt.
Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL:http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/portals/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The AIM25 Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The AIM25 Project Buzz data software rdf framework database dissemination infrastructure archives thesaurus schema repositories cataloguing sgml z39.50 lcsh perl ead mysql rslp interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Robert Baxter, Frances Blomeley and Rachel Kemsley present AIM25, a project providing electronic access to descriptions of archives held in various London institutions.
AIM25 (Archives in London and the M25 area), a project funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) [1], and led by King's College London, provides a single point of networked access to collection descriptions of archives held in 49 higher education (HE) institutions and learned societies in the greater London area.
The project has intended, where possible, to be comprehensive in its coverage of holdings by including deposited collections, in a wide range of subject areas, and also the administrative records of the participating institutions.
The latter have been a neglected historical resource, but are of value for a range of research topics, for instance biography, social mobility, and the history of individual academic disciplines.
AIM25 is thus encouraging greater awareness of all these archival collections, some of which have never been described before.
The project commenced in January 2000 and will run until July 2002.
Further details on the project, its partners and their archives are available on the AIM25 website.
[2] Methodology and technical infrastructure A central team, consisting of five peripatetic archivists, compiles descriptions in the HE partner institutions.
Participating institutions can also submit descriptions themselves.
The Project Coordinator also provides editorial support for descriptions submitted by 'external' (non-HE) partners.
The approach of using this regional cataloguing team has proved extremely beneficial: the team members' familiarity with data entry and cataloguing standards has produced consistent and high-quality descriptions.
Moreover this project methodology has permitted institutions with limited cataloguing facility to participate because it does not divert host staff from their other duties.
Smaller archive collections are covered by a single description.
Several descriptions are produced for larger collections (particularly institutional records), each covering a discrete sub-collection or series.
Descriptions conform to the ISAD(G) (General International Standard Archival Description) format.
[3] AIM25 data is held centrally at the University of London Computer Centre in a MySQL relational database [4], which interacts with a web interface via PERL scripts.
Collection description records can be input and edited via online templates or imported singly or in batch from a number of standard formats.
Records have been imported from proprietary cataloguing systems such as ADLIB, CAIRS, CALM and HDMS.
The database is also capable of exporting descriptions to these and other database systems in any specified format which can be mapped to ISAD(G).
Information retrieval The AIM25 website allows researchers to browse descriptions by repository, to conduct searches using keywords/text or to search using indexes of personal, corporate and place names and a subject thesaurus.
Personal and corporate names are formulated according to the National Council on Archives Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names (1997).
[5] Like other UK archival bodies such as the Public Record Office [6] and UK National Digital Archive of Datasets [7], AIM25 chose the UNESCO Thesaurus [8] as the basis for its thesaurus.
Indexing terms are linked to descriptions using the online editing functions, and each night new web pages are generated which list the terms currently linked to descriptions and the sources of the terms.
The selection of a term by the user retrieves a copy of the description.
Terms are listed alphabetically for personal, corporate and place names and for subjects, and following the UNESCO Thesaurus hierarchically for places and subjects.
Because of the wide range of subject specialisations of the participating repositories, the thesaurus also includes terms added from other sources, including specialised thesauri such as the British Education Thesaurus, the Australian Human Services and Health (HSH) thesaurus (which is a more concise version of the National Library of Medicine list of medical subject headings -MeSH), and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
The thesaurus also includes specialised groups of terms which have been developed by projects or services explicitly within the UNESCO framework to provide finer-grained indexing (the Public Record Office, SOAS Missionary thesaurus, and AIM25 itself).
The source of each indexing term is also recorded in the database, and used to indicate a term's thesaural origin in the thesaurus search pages.
An electronic version of the UNESCO Thesaurus is mounted in MySQL tables corresponding to the relationships within UNESCO (broader/narrower terms, related terms, and preferred terms), and these term-relationship associations are used to build the thesaurus hierarchy search pages.
Where non-UNESCO terms have been used, and those terms were developed as UNESCO extensions, the software generating the hierarchy search pages does not distinguish terms from different sources but produces a seamless listing of the combined set of indexing terms.
In the case of HSH and LCSH, the same applies if terms in those thesauri match exactly terms in the extended UNESCO hierarchy; where this occurs, the UNESCO-based hierarchy inherits any HSH/LCSH terms related to the matching term.
Where HSH or LCSH terms are required for indexing AIM25 descriptions but do not passively match terms in the extended UNESCO hierarchy, these are linked manually into the hierarchy by project archivists.
Interoperability AIM25 forms a strand in the developing UK National Archive Network (NAN) [9] envisaged by the National Council on Archives (NCA) in its reports Archives On-Line: the establishment of a UK archival network (1998) [10] and British Archives: The Way Forward (1999) [11].
AIM25 data is structured in such a way that it is platform independent and can be exported to other systems in a variety of formats and through a range of protocols to permit easy exchange of information and cross searching.
Interoperability is achieved in several different ways: AIM25 descriptions can be output in Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a form of SGML developed for encoding archival finding aids [12].
This will facilitate export of data to other strands of the NAN or to our partners, where they use systems which employ EAD as an import mechanism.
Collection descriptions originating in EAD (from CAIRS) have also been imported into AIM25.
AIM25 descriptions can also be exported in the RSLP Collection Description Schema [13] devised by UKOLN, which employs Resource Description Framework (RDF).
This will permit the sharing and cross-searching of AIM25 data along with collection descriptions produced by other RSLP projects.
AIM25 has already exported data for use by some of these projects, namely CASBAH (Caribbean Studies, Black and Asian History) [14], GENESIS (developing access to women's history sources) [15] and MUNDUS (Missionary Collections in the UK) [16].
AIM25 descriptions are linked directly to entries on the Historical Manuscript Commission's National Register of Archives (NRA) [17].
This means that researchers using the NRA can now click on a reference code and be taken directly to the relevant AIM25 collection description, where this exists.
Following a successful pilot scheme in 2000, AIM25 is working in conjunction with the M25 Consortium of HE Libraries [18] to enable the M25 library catalogues search facility, known as InforM25, to search AIM25 descriptions by keywords and subject terms using the Z39.50 protocol.
This will enable a user of InforM25 to extend their search of relevant resources to include archives as well as publications.
The AIM25 Z39.50 capability, currently restricted to interoperability testing with InforM25, will be extended to enable cross-searching with A2A and the Archives Hub.
A recent development is AIM25's adoption of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol [19], a US-based initiative to develop a harvesting protocol for digital materials.
Although the mechanism was originally devised for e-print archives (electronic texts), it is now being developed to promote the dissemination and cross-searching of other content, including archival descriptions [20].
Progress and development The AIM25 website currently hosts over 3,200 descriptions, with another 1,000 to be added during the course of March and April 2002.
In December 2001, AIM25, along with three other strands of the NAN (A2A, the Archives Hub, and SCAN) participated in a series of six joint user-evaluation exercises of their interfaces, funded by Resource (the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries) [21].
The findings are expected to be published on the Resource website in March 2002.
Following the evaluations, refinements have already been made to the AIM25 web interface which should increase ease of use.
Evaluation of the technical architecture will also be made before the project terminates in July 2002.
Usage of the website has increased from registering some 20,000 hits in February 2001 to nearly 80,000 hits (from some 42 countries) in January 2002.
References http://www.rslp.ac.uk http://www.aim25.ac.uk http://www.ica.org/eng/mb/com/cds/descriptivestandards.html http://www.mysql.com http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nca/title.htm http://www.pro.gov.uk http://ndad.ulcc.ac.uk http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco The other major strands comprise: A2A (Access to Archives) at http://www.a2a.pro.gov.uk ; Archives Hub at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk; Historical Manuscripts Commission at http://www.hmc.gov.uk; SCAN (Scottish Archive Network) at http://www.scan.org.uk http://nca.archives.org.uk/ONLINE01.HTM http://nca.archives.org.uk/brarchs.htm http://www.loc.gov/ead http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/ http://www.casbah.ac.uk http://www.genesis.ac.uk http://www2.soas.ac.uk/Mundus http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/nra2.htm http://www.m25lib.ac.uk http://www.openarchives.org Descriptions from AIM25 are, for example, available at http://arc.cs.odu.edu http://www.resource.gov.uk Author Details   Robert Baxter Project Co-ordinator AIM25 Project King's College London Email: robert.baxter@kcl.ac.uk   Frances Blomeley Technical Consultant University of London Computer Centre Email: f.blomeley@ulcc.ac.uk   Rachel Kemsley Project Archivist AIM25 Project King's College London Email: rachel.kemsley@kcl.ac.uk Web site: www.aim25.ac.uk Article Title: "The AIM25 Project" Author: Robert Baxter, Frances Blomeley and Rachel Kemsley Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/aim25/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Reflections On WWW9 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Reflections On WWW9 Buzz mobile java rdf html wireless rss xml usability infrastructure xslt metadata xhtml standardisation browser xsl blog dtd hypertext z39.50 aggregation gif soap dom xpointer xlink url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on the WWW9 conference, held in Amsterdam, in May 2000.
The Ninth International World Wide Web conference (WWW9) was held at the RAI Congress Centre in Amsterdam.
The main part of the conference took place from Tuesday 16th till Thursday 18th May.
A day of tutorial and workshops was held on Monday 15th May with the Developer's Day on Friday 19th May.
About 1,400 delegates attended the conference.
It was pleasing to note the large numbers of delegates from the UK about 100 in total, with about 50% from the Higher Education community (and about 9 people from Southampton University and another 9 from Bristol University).
The general consensus seemed to be that the conference was a great success although that may be influenced not only by the quality of the technical papers, keynote presentations and panel sessions but also by the attractions of Amsterdam!
The conference Web site is still available [1] although this year it appears that the papers are not available.
Conference Highlights The main theme of the conference was The Mobile Web.
Several Keynote speakers addressed this topic including Egbert-Jan Sol of Ericsson, whose talk on "Making the Internet Mobile for Everybody" predicted a bright future for users of mobile devices, citing statistics such as 100 million PCs versus 275 million mobile phones sold in 1999 and predicting that in the near future all new mobiles would be able to access the Internet.
In Europe we have a lead over the US thanks to use of a single standard (GSM) as opposed to the several standards (TDMA, CDMA, GCM, etc.)
used in the US.
Charles Davies Psion described the role of Wireless Information Devices.
Charles predicted a growth in a variety of devices including PDAs, mobile phones and PCs.
He felt that Bluetooth [2] would have an important role in providing temporary networking between a variety of devices.
Charles was clearly a fan of gadgetry.
Not only did he carry several PDAs and mobile phones, he also gave a demonstration of a simulation of a third generation mobile phone device.
An screen dump (taken from the TomTom Web site [3]) which illustrates the potential for WAP phones is shown below.
Figure 1: Example of a Mobile Phone Interface As might be expected more discussion occurred in the panel session on "Towards a WAP-Wide Web?".
Phone.com's Bruce Martin had to respond to criticism that a proprietary approach had been taken initially.
Bruce tried to deflect the criticism and argued that the WAP Forum [4] and W3C were now working closely together in the development of standards such as the WML family of protocols [5].
Although we can expect to see many arguments about the benefits of mobile Internet, access costs, performance, security, deployment costs, standards battles, etc.
[6] [7] it is clearly an area which cannot be ignored.
XHTML + XSLT = :-) Unlike 1997 (when XML was the technological highlight of the WWW conference) and 1998 (with RDF) this year's technological highlights featured a combination of the old and the new.
XHTML [8] is simply HTML 4.0 expressed as an XML application.
HTML authors should find mastering XHTML to be a simple task.
A simple comparison is given in the following table.
Table 1: XHTML and HTML Comparision Rule XHTML HTML Element names must be in lower case <p> <P> Elements must be closed <li>list item</li> <li>list item Attribute values must be quoted <table border="1"> <table border=1> Empty elements must be terminated <img src="logo.gif alt="logo" /> <img src="logo.gif alt="logo"> It was expected that expressing documents in XHTML as opposed to HTML would provide benefits such as ability to use XML tools and use of new XML-related protocols such as XLink and XPointer [9].
The development of XLink and XPointer protocols has proved to be more difficult than originally expected.
However XSLT has recently been developed and may provide the motivation for organisations to deploy XHTML instead of HTML.
XSLT (Extensible Style Language Transformation) [10] enables XML documents to be transformed into other types of documents.
Used in conjunction with XSLT transformation engines resources can be transformed from, say, XHTML to other XML applications.
XSLT has been promoted as the key to widespread deployment of WAP devices, by enabling XHTML documents to be converted to WML format without manually intervention.
As well as transforming elements (e.g.
<p> to, say, <card>) XSLT can also filter XML documents: for example, only the <h1> and <h2> headings could be converted.
XSLT shows potential in other areas: for example, it could be used to convert structured metadata into alternate forms.
Alison Cawsey, Heriot-Watt University presented a paper at the WWW9 conference which gave an example of how XSLT can be used to present tailored resource descriptions based on Dublin Core metadata [11].
Poster Session I was pleased this year to have two posters accepted for presentation at the conference.
"Approaches To Indexing In The UK Higher Education Community" [12] reviewed the indexing tools used to index institutional Web services in the UK HE community (as previously described in Ariadne) [13], described the limitations of a Web-centric approach, and concluded by mentioned developments within eLib and the DNER.
"A Lightweight Approach To Support Of Resource Discovery Standards" [14] described how Dublin Core metadata is being used to provide enhanced search facilities in the Exploit Interactive Web magazine.
Unfortunately due to my involvement with the two poster displays it was difficult for me to view many of the other displays.
However it was pleasing to note the number of contributions from the UK HE community, including: "People Power and the Semantic Web: Building Quality Controlled Portals" [15] by Martin Belcher and Emma Place, University of Bristol "Online Learning Evaluating the Learning Experience" [16] by Ray Thompson and John Steel, Sheffield Hallam University "Towards a Self-Organising Learning Environment" [17] by Jon Dron, Chris Boyne, Phil Silver and Richard Mitchell, University of Brighton "Search Interfaces for Handheld Mobile Devices" [18] by George Buchanan and Matt Jones, Middlesex University "A Usability Tool for Web Evaluation Applied to a Digital Library Design" [19] by Yin Leng Thng, Norliza and Harold Thimbleby, Middlesex University "An Ad Hoc Linkbase Generation Scenario" [20] by David De Roure, Danius Michaelides and Mark Thompson, University of Southampton "Web Scholars" by Simon Kampa and Les Carr, University of Southampton "Is The WWW Killing Hypermedia" by Les Carr, Wendy Hall and Timothy Miles-Board, University of Southampton "Where Do I Go From Here: A Multiagent System to Support Collaborative Web Browsing" by Samhaa El-Beltagy, David De Roure and Wendy Hall, University of Southampton Developers Day In the morning of the final day I attended the Semantic Web track.
This consisted of a mixture of theoretic presentations (such as Dan Connolly's talk about using Larch to provide formal proofs of W3C specs) and more pragmatic presentations on applications which make use of RDF.
Jose Kahan of W3C gave a talk about a W3C collaborative web annotation project [21].
It uses the Amaya browser/editor which can point to annotation servers.
Users can use Amaya to annotate pages.
The annotations (author, type of annotation, such as flame, date info, etc.)
is stored on the annotation server as RDF.
When another user browses the page, any annotations for the page which are held by annotation servers which have been selected will be flagged (the DOM is used to dynamically update the document after it has been downloaded from the web server).
Because the annotation is in RDF, the Semantic Web can be used to retrieve related resources.
The example given showed how choosing Tim Berners-Lee as author enables a photo of Tim to be retrieved.
Dave Beckett (formerly of the UK Mirror Service and now working at ILRT, University of Bristol) gave an excellent talk on "Getting There From Here Deploying RDF in a Large Scale Mirror Service" [22].
RDF is used in the descriptions of the mirrored files and also descriptions of the mirrors themselves.
Dave has defined a couple of RDF schemas it would be interesting to know if these will be standardised within the mirroring community.
Dave's talk was well-presented and gave a good example of a large service (about 200 mirrors, 440 Gb, 2-3 M files) using RDF in a production environment.
Lunch was billed as "Lunch with Tim Berners-Lee".
If Tim ever chooses to leave W3C he would walk into a job as a daytime TV host.
Tim walked around the audience, microphone in hand, making the occasional comment about the Web ("The Web is developing nicely, everyone is moving towards XML, ... Or the Web is broken, getting too difficult.
What do *you* think?")
and getting response from the audience.
One person pointed out that a number of computer gurus (such as Steve Job with Apple II) had produced something wonderful initially, but then failed with a followup (Apple III).
Would the Semantic Web be Tim's downfall?
No conclusion was reached, although it was interesting to note that W3C's involvement in developing the Semantic Web will be funded by a DARPA grant.
After lunch I attended the Web Publishing Tools and Techniques Track.
The first talk was by Michael Lars von Olleschik, who talked about the InfoSite system for managing content [23].
This was developed using ColdFusion (a Java version is to come) and provides a web-interface for managing websites.
David Winer then spoke about "Weblogs in Manila".
Manila is a "low-cost web-based content management systems aimed at the mass market [24].
It will cost $899 per (NT) server unlimited number of sites."
It seems an interesting applications especially as David Winer is active in web protocol developments such as SOAP, WML-RPC and RSS.
Manila can be used to create Weblogs.
Weblogs are described as "often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles."
[25].
It was interesting to observer that several participants at the conference used Weblogs to write their trip reports, as illustrated below.
Figure 2: Andrea's Weblog As well as Andrea's Weblog [26] David Singer [27] and Dave Winer [28] have also written Weblogs about the conference.
After coffee the theme of the track was XML Publishing Applications.
Simon Bosse of Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) spoke about use of XML within his library [29].
He described how a centralised approach to providing access to the wide range of services held at the Library is being taken.
In response to my comment on the distributed approach which is being taken in the UK., Simon responded that Z39.50 was difficult to deploy, although he acknowledged that a distributed approach had many advantages.
David Galbraith of MoreOver [30] spoke on "Using XML for News Aggregation and Delivery".
This was a very interesting talk which describes the behind-the-scenes working of MoreOver, A UK-based company which describes itself as "The world's largest collection of webfeeds".
The MoreOver home page is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Moreover Although the MoreOver service itself is interesting (as an aside, search for "WWW9" to get new storied about the conference) developers will be more interested to hear that the site uses XML, RDF and RSS to manage newsfeeds.
David mentioned that RSS (Rich Site Summary) [31] was being extended (DTD is limited to 15 items, but people are breaking this).
I asked about the ownership of RSS and responsibilities for standardisation.
RSS was originally developed by Netscape, but, following the AOL takeover of Netscape the ownership and responsibilities for future development of RSS are unclear.
However it was clear from the interest expressed that people are keen on RSS being developed further.
WWW10 Conference Next year's conference (WWW10) will be held in Hong Kong [32].
References 9th International World Wide Web Conference http://www.www9.org/ The Official Bluetooth SIG Website http://www.bluetooth.com/ TomTom http://www.tomtom.com/ WAP Forum http://www.wapforum.org/ WAP Forum Specifications http://www.wapforum.org/what/technical.htm Wireless Web Fight Gets Catty, David Sims, Wired http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,36051,00.html WAP: Dead or Alive?
http://MobylPinas.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$26 XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language, W3C Recommendation, 26 January 2000 http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ What Are... XLink and XPointer?, Ariadne issue 16 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue16/what-is/ XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0, W3C, 16 November 1999 http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt Presenting tailored resource descriptions: Will XSLT do the job?, Alison Cawsey, 9th International Conference on the World Wide Web, May 2000 http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~alison/www9/paper.html Approaches To Indexing In The UK Higher Education Community, Brian Kelly, Poster Proceedings, 9th International Conference on the World Wide Web, May 2000 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www9/indexing/ WebWatch: UK University Search Engines, Brian Kelly, Ariadne, issue 21 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/webwatch/ A Lightweight Approach To Support Of Resource Discovery Standards, Brian Kelly, Poster Proceedings, 9th International Conference on the World Wide Web, May 2000 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www9/resource-discovery/ People Power and the Semantic Web: Building Quality Controlled Portals, Martin Belcher and Emma Place, University of Bristol http://www.desire.org/w9-poster.html Online Learning Evaluating the Learning Experience, Ray Thompson and John Steel, Sheffield Hallam University http://service.shu.ac.uk/topclass/files/www9poster.htm Towards a self-organising learning environment, Jon Dron, Richard Mitchell, Chris Boyne, Phil Siviter, University of Brighton http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/jd29/www9poster.html Search Interfaces for Handheld Mobile Devices, George Buchanan & Matt Jones, University of Middlesex http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/mattjones/web9poster.html A usability tool for web evaluation applied to digital library design, Yin Leng Theng, Norliza Mohd-Nasir, Harold Thimbleby, Middlesex University http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/yinleng/www9-tool.html An Ad Hoc Linkbase Generation Scenario, David De Roure, Danius Michaelides and Mark Thompson, University of Southampton http://www.bib.ecs.soton.ac.uk/records/3423 The W3C Collaborative Web Annotation Project ... or how to have fun while building an RDF infrastructure, W3C Staff http://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/www9-annotations/ Getting There From Here Deploying RDF in a Large Scale Mirror Service, Dave Beckett http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/people/cmdjb/talks/www9/ Infosite, Sitepark http://www.sitepark.com/ What Is Manila?
http://manila.userland.com/ What Are Weblogs?
http://www.weblogs.com/about Andrea's Weblog: Four days in Amsterdam http://andrea.editthispage.com/amsterdam/english Defenestration Corner, David Singer http://dss.editthispage.com/AmsterdamDiary Scripting News, Dave Winer http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backIssues/2000/05/15 XML at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Simon Bosse http://www.kb.nl/persons/simon/kbc-en/ MoreOver http://www.moreover.com/ RSS resources, XMLTree http://www.xmltree.com/rss/ Tenth International World Wide Web Conference http://www.www10.org/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Reflections on WWW9" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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View from the Hill: Mark Clark Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines View from the Hill: Mark Clark Buzz dissemination copyright cd-rom authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Mark Clark risks the longer view.
50,000 years ago, so archaeological evidence says, Neanderthal Man carved on the tooth of the Woolly Mammoth.
In 2600 BCE scribes were employed in Egypt and the oldest existing document written on papyrus is from 2200 BCE.
In AD 105 T'sai Lun invented paper and by 600 books were printed in China.
By 765 picture books were printed in Japan.
By 950 folded books appeared in China and in Europe in 1453 Johannes Gutenberg used moveable type for printing.
Recently, people celebrated an event of 50 years ago at the University of Manchester when Williams and Kilburn executed the world's first stored program on the Mark 1 computer.
Neither could have foreseen the impact that this would have, nor the way the information industry would be revolutionised.
Most readers have lived through the rapid development of the computer and related networking.
In terms of raw power the cost of computing has fallen by a factor of a million in the past 20 years.
The IBM PC arrived in 1981 and the now ubiquitous CD-ROM first appeared in 1985.
The pervasive computer network as we know it has only a short history.
What does history tell us?
We overestimate what can happen in two years and underestimate how much will change in 10 years.
The challenge is that we can see but not accurately predict the impact of technology on our future.
Technology is a threat in all but a few sectors.
But we do have some certainties.
The new millennium requires new skills and embraces an information culture with both an information-rich and information-poor society developing.
The Internet phenomenon is certainly the largest IT development since the PC, and may be the largest IS development since the printed book.
It provides a communications revolution for the citizen and industry.
The levels of investment are very high and innovation is rapid.
The Internet is changing the shape of society, as the computer is also changing.
The next phase of the revolution begins with the so-called low-cost "set top box".
This will bring wide-screen, high-definition television to broadcast and interactive services.
It will provide access to Web based information services and a lightweight operating system for access to applications, games and services that may be down-loaded on demand.
Entry to an information-rich world will open up opportunities for new paradigms of learning delivery.
There has been a transformation in the profile of the student body in the HEIs.
Lifelong learning requires re-skilling and updating, and HEIs should make a significant contribution.
Yet the delivery of education is likely to be dramatically changed.
Universities will have to focus on the value for money and additional value that they can contribute to education content.
Considerable core material can and should be cost-effectively developed nationally for local and networked delivery.
The Internet is an ideal vehicle to support traditional mechanisms for the dissemination of content, and to operate as a vehicle for tutoring and mentoring.
As technologies develop and simulate many of the desirable aspects of campus based learning, distance students will be able to work as groups.
There are only two large world "industries": health and education.
Education at all levels cannot remain largely unchallenged by new providers seeking to develop their markets.
Universities have long competed but with artificial controls imposed on the competition itself.
There are numerous mechanisms for comparison ranging from league tables based on crude, dissimilar measures, to attempts to measure quality for teaching and research.
As with any crude comparison, and given the diverse missions of the institutions, the value-add for customers cannot be assessed.
Can UK universities or the government allow continued competition with its associated overheads?
It is timely to ask: with whom should we be competing and why?
Would university collaboration be better for UK Ltd?
Although there are threats like loss of identity or uniqueness, loss of ownership and loss of control, we must learn from the Japanese who extol the "collaborating to compete" approach.
Through collaboration, opportunities abound.
The difficulty is in moving from competition to collaboration and building on that.
This begs the question whether we know what we have to build.
Content and learner support will need teams of specialist academics, information specialists, and staff skilled in production techniques including presentation and what could be called the interaction technologies.
The role of the new "Information Professional" is going to change towards that of the knowledge mediator, a supporter of the learner committed to a partnership in meeting students' learning needs.
They must understand the academic/customer requirement and be competent in all the information technologies relating to access, processing and copyright issues.
The model for the partnership will be training rather than showing, skilling rather than doing.
The information professional must readily deploy technologies to support the distance learner and the campus based user.
Staff costs must be controlled and work assigned appropriately to the tiers within the profession.
Investment in user led activities will inevitably be beneficial with the obvious stock based services such as self-issue being relied upon.
The use of intelligent agents for assistance and remote automated help desk systems will grow as a route for the resolution of problems and requests for assistance.
The user and the institution will be looking to see what value-added benefit arises from the staff investment and how that compares with alternative investment strategies.
The advent of further service charges will lead to the need for cashless payment models for services.
The smart card is the obvious vehicle for this and other tasks including authentication of users.
Change won't go away.
It is an opportunity, not necessarily a threat, and adjusting to it is essential.
To do otherwise may carry greater risks.
We may not be able to predict the next 50 years but we can help shape the next decade.
It is for the information professionals to be brave in setting and implementing a change agenda that will help the profession to prosper.
Author Details Mark Clark Director of Academic Information Services University of Salford Email: m.j.clark@salford.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BIOME: Incorporating the OMNI Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BIOME: Incorporating the OMNI Service Buzz data database copyright cataloguing mailbase url taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Lisa Gray reports on recent developments with the BIOME hub.
The Hub for Internet Resources in the Health and Life Sciences, as part of the Resource Discovery Network (http://www.rdn.ac.uk/) Looking for quality Internet resources in the health and life sciences?
BIOME will provide access to quality resources in agriculture, food, forestry, pharmaceutical sciences, medicine, nursing, dentistry, biological research, veterinary sciences, the natural world, botany, zoology, and much, much more... Due to be launched in Spring 2000, BIOME will build on the experiences, skills and content of the established OMNI service, and expand to cover all areas within the health and life sciences.
The BIOME hub will consist of five subject gateways, which will be cross-searchable and cross-browsable at the BIOME level, as well as retaining their own individual identities.
Each gateway serves a particular community of people.
These five gateways are: BioResearch covering biological and biomedical research, including genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology.
Aimed at researchers, academics and scientists involved in biological research.
OMNI covering medicine, biomedicine, allied health, health management and related topics.
Aimed at clinicians, nurses and allied health professionals; the general public and patients; the drug and pharmaceutical industry; students, researchers and academics.
Natural Selection covering the natural world, including plant and animal life, fossils, ecology and the environment.
Aimed at anyone with a purposeful interest in the natural world: amateur enthusiasts; students and academics; researchers in botany, zoology, palaeontology, systematics and taxonomy.
VetGate covering all subjects related to animal health.
Aimed at veterinary surgeons, nurses and other veterinary professionals; animal health researchers, lecturers and students; producers and suppliers of veterinary goods, services and information.
AgriFor covering agriculture, forestry and the food sciences.
Aimed at farmers and others who grow crops or raise animals for food; the forestry community and industry; people involved in food production or the use of animals for food; academics, researchers and students; producers and suppliers of agricultural goods, services and information.
The service will be coordinated by the University of Nottingham, where OMNI is based, and will be a Hub within the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
The service will be consortium based, and OMNI is joined by a range of high profile partners and content providers from the UK health and life science sectors.
These are: The Natural History Museum, who will also host the Natural Selection component of the service CTI Biology, at the University of Liverpool The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons Oxford University Reading University BRIL the BBSRC Research Institutes Librarians organisation The Royal Free Hospital These partners will bring invaluable subject-based skills, expertise and profile, and are already participating in the development of BIOME.
Content of the five gateways will be added by specialist staff at the partner institutions who will provide descriptions of Internet resources across all the subject areas covered by BIOME.
In addition, a number of paid and volunteer staff will also provide content to the gateways.
BIOME will ensure the quality of the resources made available and employ rigorous evaluation criteria and quality control mechanisms across the hub.
If you are interested in submitting resources to BIOME or making suggestions for resources to be included please contact the general enquiries email address listed below.
BIOME will offer several different types of services: Catalogues of Internet resource descriptions that can be searched or browsed individually or across the five subject gateways.
Hosting of databases, collections of data and mirrors of appropriate resources (for example OMNI already hosts the CME database and the DERWEB image description catalogue).
Outreach and training activities to support the use of BIOME and the Resource Discovery Network.
If you have any questions or queries about BIOME, or would be interested in working with us, you can contact us at: BIOME Greenfield Medical Library Queens Medical Centre Nottingham NG7 2UH Phone: (+44) 115 9249924 x 42788 Fax: (+44) 115 9709449 General enquiries: webmaster@biome.ac.uk A discussion list has also been set up at the Mailbase service, for announcements and discussion about BIOME.
Please see http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/biome/ for details.
Editor Details   Lisa Gray OMNI/BIOME Team Manager BIOME Greenfield Medical Library Queens Medical Centre Nottingham NG7 2UH Email: lg@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk Article Title: BIOME incorporating the OMNI service  Editor: Lisa Gray Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/omni/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Mandated Online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Enhancing UK Research Impact and Assessment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mandated Online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Enhancing UK Research Impact and Assessment Buzz data software database dissemination archives metadata accessibility eprints copyright licence rae url research Citation BibTex RIS Stevan Harnad, Les Carr, Tim Brody and Charles Oppenheim make a case for maximising the advantages and the UK's pre-eminence in the Research Assessment Exercise.
Being the only country with a national research assessment exercise [1], the UK is today in a unique position to make a small change that will confer some large benefits.
The Funding Councils should mandate that in order to be eligible for Research Assessment and funding, all UK research-active university staff must maintain (I) a standardised online RAE-CV, including all designated RAE performance indicators, chief among them being (II) the full text of every refereed research paper, publicly self-archived in the university's online Eprint Archive and linked to the CV for online harvesting, scientometric analysis and assessment.
This will (i) give the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) far richer, more sensitive and more predictive measures of research productivity and impact, for far less cost and effort (both to the RAE and to the universities preparing their RAE submissions), (ii) increase the uptake and impact of UK research output, by increasing its visibility, accessibility and usage, and (iii) set an example for the rest of the world that will almost certainly be emulated, in both respects: research assessment and research access.
Figure 1: Predicting RAE Ratings from Citation Impact (Smith & Eysenck 2002) The UK already has a Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), every 4 years.
The RAE costs a great deal of time and energy to prepare and assess, for both universities and assessors (time and energy that could be better used to actually do research, rather than preparing and assessing RAE returns).
The Journal Impact Factor An important and predictive measure of research impact in many areas of research is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of the journal in which the article appears.
The JIF is the average number of citations per article per year.
The number of times an article has been cited (hence used) is an indication of the importance and uptake of that research.
For core journals in all subject areas the JIF can be obtained from the Institute of Scientific Information's Journal Citation Reports service, for which the UK has a national site license [2].
Figure 2: Predicting Citation Impact From Usage Impact (Physics ArXiv) The JIF figures only indirectly in the RAE: researchers currently have to submit 4 publications for the 4-year interval.
It is no secret that departments (informally) weight candidate papers by their JIFs in deciding on what and whom to submit.
Although it is always stressed by the RAE panels that they will not judge papers by the journals in which they appeared (but by the quality of their content), it would nevertheless be a strange RAE reviewer who was indifferent to the track record, refereeing standards, and rejection rate of the journal whose quality-standards a paper has met.
(For books or other kinds of publications, see below; in general, peer-reviewed journal or conference papers are the coin of the research realm, especially in scientific disciplines.)
Statistical correlational analyses on the numerical outcome of the RAE using average citation frequencies predict departmental outcome ratings remarkably closely.
Smith & Eysenck [3], for example, found a correlation of as high as .91 in Psychology (Figure 1).
Oppenheim and collaborators [4] [5] and Holmes & Oppenheim [6] found correlations of .80 and higher in other disciplines.
The power of the indirect journal-based JIF has not yet been tested for predicting RAE rankings, but it is no doubt correlated with the well demonstrated RAE predictive power of direct author-based citation counts (average or total).
Journal impact is the blunter instrument, author or paper impact the sharper one (Seglen [7]).
But a natural conclusion is that the reliability and validity of RAE rankings can and should be maximised by adding and testing as many candidate predictors as possible to a weighted multiple regression equation.
Figure 3: New Online Performance Indicators Nor is there any reason why the RAE should be done, at great effort and expense, every 4 years!
Since the main determining factor in the RAE outcome ratings is research impact, there is no reason why research impact should not be continuously assessed, using not only author and paper citation counts and the JIF, but the many other measures derivable from such a rich research performance indicator database.
There is now not only a method to assess UK research impact (i) continuously, (ii) far more cheaply and effortlessly for all involved, and (iii) far more sensitively and accurately (Figures 2-4), but doing the RAE this new way will also dramatically enhance UK research impact itself, (iv) increasing research visibility, usage, citation and productivity, simply by maximising its accessibility (Figures 5-8).
Figure 4: Time-Course of Citations and Usage (Physics ArXiv) RAE Online The method in question is to implement the RAE henceforth online-only, with only two critical components: (a) a continuously updated and continuously accessible RAE-standardised online CV (containing all potential performance indicators: publications, grants, doctoral students, presentations, etc.)
[8] for every researcher plus (b) a link from each CV to the full digital text of every published paper _ books discussed separately below _ self-archived in that researcher's university Eprint Archive (an online archive of that institution's peer-reviewed research output) [9].
(See the free, open-source software developed at Southampton to allow universities to create their own institutional Eprint Archives [10]).
Figure 5: Open Online Full-Text Access Enhances Citations Dramatically (Computer Science) Currently, university peer-reviewed research output _ funded by government research grants, the researcher's time paid for by the researcher's institution _ is given, free, by all researchers, to the peer-reviewed journals in which it appears.
The peer-reviewed journals in turn perform the peer-review, which assesses, improves and then certifies the quality of the research; (this is one of the indirect reasons why the RAE depends on peer-reviewed journal publications) (Figure 7).
There is a hierarchy of peer-reviewed journals, from those with the highest quality standards (and hence usually the highest rejection rates and impact factors) at the top, grading all the way down to the lowest-quality journals at the bottom [11].
The peers review for free; they are just the researchers again, wearing other hats.
But it costs the journals something to implement the peer reviewing [12].
Figure 6: The Vast and Varied Influence of Research Impact Partly because of the cost of peer review, but mostly because of the much larger cost of print on paper and its dissemination, plus online enhancements, journals make charges (subscriptions, licenses, pay-per-view) for access to researchers' papers, (even though the researchers gave them the papers for free [13]).
The effect is a great loss of potential research impact, because most institutions cannot afford to pay the access-tolls to most peer-reviewed journals, (there are 20,000 in all, across disciplines), but only to a small and shrinking proportion of them [14].
Opening Access Hence the second dramatic effect of revising the RAE -so as to transform it into online continuous assessment based on the institutional self-archiving of all UK peer-reviewed research output -will be to make all that UK research accessible to all those would-be users worldwide whose access is currently blocked by toll barriers (Figure 8).
If RAE mandates self-archiving, university departments will mandate it too.
See, for example, the draft Southampton self-archiving policy [15].
The UK full-text peer-reviewed research archives will not only be continuously accessible to all potential users, but the access will be continuously assessable, in the form not only of continuously updated impact estimates based on the classical measure of impact, i.e.
citations, but usage will also be measured at earlier stages than citation, namely downloads ("hits," Figure 2)[16] of both peer-reviewed "postprints" and pre-refereeing "preprints".
Many powerful new online measures of research productivity and impact will also develop around this rich UK research performance database (Figures 3-4), further increasing the sensitivity and predictiveness of the RAE analyses.
(See the online impact-measuring scientometric search engines we have developed at Southampton [17] [18]).
All that is required (Figure 9) is for the RAE to move to online submissions, mandating online CVs linked to the full-text draft of each peer-reviewed publication in the researcher's institutional Eprint Archive [19].
Reference link-based impact assessment engines like citebase and Web of Science [20] can then be used by RAE to derive ever richer and more accurate measures of research productivity and impact (Figure 3), available to the RAE continuously.
Universities could continuously monitor and improve their own research productivity and impact, using those same measures.
And the rest of the world could see and emulate the system, and its measurable effects on research visibility, uptake and impact.
What to Do about Royalty-Bearing Books?
Just a few loose ends: books are usually not give-aways, as peer-reviewed research is, so full-text self-archiving is probably not viable for book output, (apart from esoteric monographs that produce virtually no royalty revenue).
But even if the book's full text itself cannot be made accessible online, its metadata and references can be!
Then the citation of books by the online peer-reviewed publications becomes a measurable and usable estimate of their impact too.
And for disciplines where research and productivity do not consist of text at all, but of other forms of digital output, both online usage counts and citations by text publications can still be used to estimate impact; and there are always the further kinds of performance indicators in the standardised RAE-CV that can be used to design discipline-specific metrics.
Conclusions The UK is uniquely placed to move ahead with this and lead the world, because the RAE is already in place.
The Netherlands has no formal RAE yet, but it is about to implement a national system of open research archiving for all of its universities called DARE [21].
It is just a matter of time before they too realise that a marriage between a national network of DARE-style institutional Eprint Archives and CVs plus a national RAE-style research assessment exercise make a natural, indeed an optimal combination.
But although the naturalness and optimality _ indeed the inevitability _ of all this is quite transparent, it is a fact that research culture is slow to change of its own accord, even in what is in its own best interests.
That, however, is precisely why we have funding councils and research assessment: to make sure that researchers do what is best for themselves, and best for research, and hence also best for the supporters (and beneficiaries) of research, namely, tax-paying society.
The institutional self-archiving of research output, for the sake of maximising research access and impact, has been much too slow in coming, even though it has already been within reach for several years.
The UK and the RAE are now in a position to lead the world research community to the optimal and the inevitable [22].
We at Southampton and Loughborough, meanwhile, keep trying to do our bit to hasten the optimal/inevitable for research and researchers.
At Loughborough we are clearing the way for universal self-archiving of university research output by sorting out the copyright issues (and non-issues [23]).
At Southampton we are planning to harvest all the metadata form the submissions to RAE 2001 [24] into RAEprints, a "meta-archive" that is intended to demonstrate what RAE returns would look like if this RAE upgrade proposal were adopted.
Of course (i) RAEprints will contain only four papers per researcher, rather than their full peer-reviewed research output, (ii) it will only contain the metadata for those papers (author, title, journal name), not the full text and the all-important references cited.
But we will also try to enhance the demo by adding as much of this missing data as we can find – both from Journal Citation Reports [20] and from the Web itself – to give at least a taste of the possibilities: using paracite [25] an on-line citation-seeker that goes out and tries to find peer-reviewed full-text papers on the Web, we will "stock" RAEprints with as much as turns out to be available online currently _ and then we will invite all the RAE 2001 researcher/authors to add their full texts to RAEprints too!
We hope that the UK Funding Councils will put their full weight behind our recommended approach (Figure 9) when they publish their long-awaited review of the RAE process [26].
Figure 7: The Limited Impact Provided By Toll-Based Access Alone   Figure 8: Maximising Research Impact Through Self-Archiving of University Research Output   Figure 9: What Needs to be Done to Fill the Eprint Archives References 2001 RAE Submissions http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/submissions/ Journal Citation Reports Service for UK Education http://wos.mimas.ac.uk/jcrweb/ Smith, Andrew, & Eysenck, Michael (2002) "The correlation between RAE ratings and citation counts in psychology," June 2002 http://psyserver.pc.rhbnc.ac.uk/citations.pdf Oppenheim, Charles (1995) The correlation between citation counts and the 1992 Research Assessment Exercises ratings for British library and information science departments, Journal of Documentation, 51:18-27.
Oppenheim, Charles (1998) The correlation between citation counts and the 1992 research assessment exercise ratings for British research in genetics, anatomy and archaeology, Journal of Documentation, 53:477-87. http://dois.mimas.ac.uk/DoIS/data/Articles/julkokltny:1998:v:54:i:5:p:477-487.html Holmes, Alison & Oppenheim, Charles (2001) Use of citation analysis to predict the outcome of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise for Unit of Assessment (UoA) 61: Library and Information Management.
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/publications/infres/paper103.html Seglen, P. O.
(1992).
The skewness of science.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43, 628-638 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/10049716/START See (Draft Demo) Template for UK Standardized CV for Research Assessment (sample data only) http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi How can an institution facilitate the filling of its Eprint Archives?
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling GNU EPrints 2 http://software.eprints.org/ Journal Citation Reports Service for UK Education http://wos.mimas.ac.uk/jcrweb/ Peer-review Discussion Group Summary, 21 March 2001 http://agenda.cern.ch/askArchive.php?base=agenda&categ=a01193&id=a01193s5t11%2Ftransparencies%2F%2FDoyle-peer-review.pdf Harnad, S. (2001) For Whom the Gate Tolls?
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm ARL Statistics and Management Program http://www.arl.org/stats/index.html ECS Research Self-Archiving Policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html Both usage statistics and citation statistics are open to potential abuse.
See: Impact Health Warning to Authors and Users http://citebase.eprints.org/help/#impactwarning and Potential Metric Abuses (and their Potential Metric Antidotes) (mail) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2642.html .
The data nevertheless still have considerable signal value, its effect-size can be estimated, and ways of detecting and correcting for abuses will evolve as these new measures become more important.
citebase Search http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search The Open Citation Project http://opcit.eprints.org What can research funders do to facilitate self-archiving?
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#research-funders-do ISI Web of Science Service for UK Education http://wos.mimas.ac.uk/ DARE announcement http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2356.html Self-Archive Unto Others http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html Project RoMEO http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html 2001 RAE Submissions http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/submissions/ ParaCite experimental service http://paracite.eprints.org/ RA Review http://www.ra-review.ac.uk/ Further Reading Berners-Lee, Tim.
& Hendler, Jim.
(2001).
Scientific publishing on the "semantic web."
Nature, 410, 1023-1024 Garfield, Eugene (1979).
Citation indexing: Its theory and applications in science, technology and the humanities.
New York.
Wiley lnterscience Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative.
Nature 410: 1024-1025 http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html Harnad, Stevan, & Carr, Les (2000).
Integrating, navigating, and analysing open eprint archives through open citation linking (the OpCit project).
Current Science.
79(5).
629-638 Harnad, Stevan.
(2001) Research access, impact and assessment.
Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html Harnad, S. (2003) Electronic Preprints and Postprints.
Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science Marcel Dekker, Inc. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/eprints.htm Harnad, S. (2003) Online Archives for Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications.
International Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science.
John Feather & Paul Sturges (eds).
Routledge http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archives.htm Hodges, S., Hodges, B., Meadows, A.J., Beaulieu, M. and Law, D. (1996) The use of an algorithmic approach for the assessment of research quality, Scientometrics, 35, 3-13.
Jaffe, Sam (2002) Citing UK Science Quality: The next Research Assessment Exercise will probably include citation analysis.
The Scientist 16 (22), 54, Nov. 11, 2002. http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2002/nov/prof1_021111.html Ingwersen, P., Larsen, B. and Wormell, I.
(2000) Applying diachronic citation analysis to ongoing research program evaluations.
In: The Web of Knowledge : a Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield / Cronin, B.
& Atkins, H. B.
(eds.).
Medford, NJ: Information Today Inc. & The American Society for Information Science.
Oppenheim, Charles (1996) Do citations count?
Citation indexing and the research assessment exercise, Serials, 9:155-61, 1996.
Warner, Julian (2000) Research Assessment and Citation Analysis.
The Scientist 14(21), 39, Oct. 30, 2000. http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2000/oct/opin_001030.html Thelwall, Mike (2001) Extracting macroscopic information from Web links.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science 52(13) (November 2001) http://portal.acm.org/ Zhu, J., Meadows, A.J.
& Mason, G. (1991) Citations and departmental research ratings.
Scientometrics, 21, 171-179 Author Details Prof. Stevan Harnad Professor of Cognitive Science Southampton University E-mail: harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk Website: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Dr. Les Carr Senior Lecturer in Electronics and Computer Science Southampton University E-mail: lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk Website: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/ Tim Brody Doctoral Candidate in Electronics and Computer Science Southampton University E-mail: tdb01r@ecs.soton.ac.uk Website: http://citebase.eprints.org/ Prof. Charles Oppenheim Professor of Information Science Loughborough University E-mail: C.Oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Website: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/staff/coppenheim.html Article Title: "Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives" Author: Stevan Harnad, Les Carr, Tim Brody & Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Supporting Learners at a Distance Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Supporting Learners at a Distance Buzz data infrastructure copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Alan MacDougall on cost effective ways of widening access.
The imperative for widening access to educational opportunity and attainment shows no sign of abating if recent national reports inter alia : Dearing, Kennedy and Fryer are considered indicators of interest.
These reports, and government exhortation in United Kingdom, encourage delivery through vision, strategic thinking and resource application.
This, together with the Prime Minister’s announcement of an additional half million students in further and higher education by 2002, suggest it is timely to consider the role of the library support services.
Within the UK library world there has been debate and discussion about the possible contribution of libraries to this changing world.
A changing world where the convergence and progress of technologies in computing, broadcasting and communications, combined with the continued reduction in costs make it possible to offer prospective students the potential of access to a wide range of high quality learning resources no matter where they may be geographically situated.
Attention has been focused on the role of the 3 Cs : connectivity, content and competencies.
Research and development has followed this path too.
Mel Collier mentioned in Ariadne No 10, in his capacity as Chair of Library and Information Commission Research SubCommittee, that the Commission hoped to create an ‘enabling environment’ in its 20⁄20 vision document, and that his priorities would include ‘establishing the UK as a global leader in the digital library developments’.
The position and strategy is well expressed in the UK.
There is clearly a drive to ensure that the appropriate infrastructure is put in place.
This desire is well understandable as is the Joint Information System Committee (JISC) work in this area to ensure that vision becomes reality.
Those from less well resourced countries will look with interest at these developments, unable to match the resource investment yet wanting to ensure that culture, collaboration, partnership and standards are suitably in place to ensure a proactive contribution from the information rich rather than information poor society.
This paper addresses the potential for widening access through delivery of distance learning and the role of library support services from an international perspective.
It is looking from the outside into the UK : a valid approach since neither the UK, nor any other country, can deliver in this area without reference to a global information society offered by the advance of the Internet.
The issues which libraries and librarians will need to face in deriving policy and strategy are examined in the context of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the potential of an enhanced global access to education services as an international tradable commodity.
Reference has already been made to the 3 Cs (content, connectivity and competencies) which will be central to any successful delivery of distance education but there are a further 2 Cs which need to be recognised: circumnavigation (one can sail as well as surf!)
and competition.
As the content improves, the connectivity is guaranteed, and as the competencies of the individual are assured then the potential becomes even greater.
The ease of navigation around the world, guaranteed fast connect times and responsiveness will encourage the delivery of global information retrieval and global distance education courses.
Distance will truly be no barrier and, as a consequence, the choice of world wide courses will be readily available.
Competition will become the norm and issues of quality of courses, adequacy of information precision, reliability and level of information support will become increasingly important in evaluating the relevance and worth of courses.
The paper will concentrate on the institutional micro level rather than the national micro level.
Opportunities Currently in the UK over 40 percent of 18 year olds are not in any kind of training or education.
The UK government aspiration to attract another half million students into further and higher education by 2002 demonstrates the market potential.
Add to those figures the requirements of the private sector for relevantly qualified staff, the initiatives as outlined in University of Industry and the general thrust of lifelong learning.
And add to that, similar audiences in Europe and internationally then there is evidence of a huge unfulfilled target audience.
It suggests that there is a vast untapped market for which there are unlimited educational possibilities.
In an unchanging world institutions would be giving consideration to meeting the need through campus based education courses.
Sufficient resource, based on previous unit costings, would be made available (government of course) to meet the identified demand.
However, the world is changing: governments world-wide will be looking for educational targets to be met at the most cost effective price and prospective students will require different and varying patterns of study time.
It does not necessarily imply that local and regional courses will be guaranteed, it does not even imply that courses need to be delivered within any particular country boundaries.
Globalisation now offers the challenge to educational institutions to devise and market their courses world-wide.
It offers senior management the opportunity to target and deliver courses using information technology to overcome barriers to access.
The challenge for librarians, and for information specialists, is to rethink radically the level and type of distance information support that can be offered to support new modes of course delivery in a cost effective and efficient manner.
University librarians have continued to think more in the mould of the traditional mode of delivery, despite the advances of information technology, viz: as primarily providing information across the campus rather than at a distance within national boundaries or outside it.
The university librarian will have to rethink and reassess information strategy, offering alternative modes of delivery.
There will be a clear need to prepare a business plan, or in the old parlance, costings to show various modes of delivery and their cost effectiveness.
In this environment, the librarian will have to be a hybrid manager who can bring to bear professional knowledge of the discipline of information knowledge and information management, apply information technology to optimal service delivery and offer excellence in negotiating skills.
In so doing the librarian will articulate the needs of the distance learner, the types of service provision, as well as advocate the importance and cost benefit of investment in new modes of delivery.
The academic will lead the innovative course curriculum but librarians will also need to make their input into the preparation of the curricula design.
Further, the librarian will have to demonstrate the commitment to an expanded resource base, or shift of resource, and may have to reprioritise allocation of funding.
The challenge will be to convince institutions that an additional investment will maximise and add value to the resource already being invested.
In more tangible terms libraries will have to follow the lead given by those such as Sheffield Hallam University Learning Centre’s Distance Learning Support Service.
Described as ‘an impressive and relevant service’ in the Internet Resources Newsletter, it is showing the way forward in UK.
The service is fully described on the Sheffield Hallam University Learning Centre’s Homepage.
Specialist staff are dedicated to the provision of service (evidence of prioritising and shifting of resource).
Clear performance criteria are laid down and levels of service are thought through.
Types of delivery are offered, for example, searching of data bases by the specialist staff where the service is not yet available over the Net, free delivery of articles where it is not possible to get them from alternative sources, and (where possible) the purchase of external membership of other appropriate libraries.
An annual survey of service to distance learners is also carried out.
There is insufficient space to detail the fine level of support.
Sheffield Hallam University rightly claims to be a pioneer in the development of services designed to meet the information needs of distance learning students.
‘No other UK university provides service quite like it’, they claim.
Certainly this is a correct claim for a university which has a dual function of providing services to campus based as well as distance learners.
Those universities exclusively committed to distance education, for example The Open University and many universities across Europe, can more easily afford to concentrate their resources on their exclusive category of distance education students.
Outside the UK there are numerous examples of universities which have given equality of treatment to their distance education students as well as their campus based students, for example, in North America, and in Australia at places such as Deakin University.
Sheffield Hallam is in the vanguard of a paradigm shift.
It will be interesting to monitor the consequence of this development especially in terms of increased numbers of students and the perceived increase in quality.
For far too long equity in provision of library services has been preached but not necessarily delivered.
Fryer in his report on Learning for the 21st Century says, ‘libraries can enhance understanding, achievement and autonomy’, providing, it may be suggested that one does not think of a library as contained within four walls.
The challenge is apparent.
Strengths The opportunities for widening access and provision of distance education support services are perhaps self evident, although the challenges have not always been translated into reality in a European context.
The strengths of higher education libraries in the furtherance of the delivery of distance education are likewise self evident: talented staff for the information age, highly skilled in the information field, and influential in their area of expertise; the ability to apply their information management and information knowledge to the information technology.
Librarians and libraries have been networked for many decades and are comfortable in establishing and retaining collaboration and partnerships across the sectoral divide, including public libraries.
Perhaps the greatest strength of the library in this evolving new service delivery is that a significant proportion of the investment is already in place through library provision for existing campus communities.
Any influx of additional resource could be argued to be adding value to an already valuable resource.
Having extolled the opportunities and strengths that a university library service can lend to underpinning of distance education learning, an injection of a sense of realism is perhaps needed.
An appreciation of weaknesses and threats need to be contextually considered to move forward in a confident manner.
Weaknesses The challenge for librarians is to be advocates of change and service delivery within their institutions.
The weakness is that librarians and their libraries, as presently organised, may feel it unwise to undertake further expansion of service especially for the distance education sector, without some clear appreciation of institutional strategy and of overall resource commitment or priority.
In Europe the commitment to distance education over the Internet is not as well exploited as ,for example, in North America where the commitment to resource infrastructure has been of a higher level.
Lack of bandwidth and slow response times, cost of telecommunications, cost of equipment especially in the lesser favoured regions, lack of competencies, and copyright restrictions are all real issues to be faced.
The delivery of electronic solutions, even if achievable, might not reach the information poor.
There are however degrees of service as Sheffield Hallam University is demonstrating.
An essentially print based solution backed by voice mail and postal service together with the back-up resources of other libraries has a future certainly in the short term.
The complete delivery of distance education backed by a full information service over the Internet is still waiting to become commonplace in Europe.
The Threats The threats are enormous.
The delivery of distance education and appropriate support services will be a commonplace reality in the very near future.
This scenario is influenced by the sophisticated developments in the United States.
A university management failing to grasp the potential and reality of the move to distance learning and service delivery support may well find the sand shifting under their collective feet.
The lack of strategic positioning may lead to loss of market share which will be difficult to recapture at a later stage.
Undoubtedly investment is required.
The question to be resolved is whether institutions will be able to grasp this reality and react by infrastructure investment.
A glance at the United States which is targeting the European market should be understood.
The range and quality of distance course provision is enormous as is their information service support structures.
International qualification will become the norm.
Within Europe, the Community will grow ever closer, the currencies will merge and it will be a small step to enrol on courses in other countries.
There are those who have remained sceptical about the ability of distance education to deliver students who are equipped with skills for life, for example interpersonal skills, collaborative skills, and social skills.
However in a competitive society which is demanding knowledge skills, a productivie workforce and education at the lowest possible unit cost consistent with a prescribed level of quality, there will have to be an acceptance that distance education still has a valuable role in the education of society.
The librarians however, through the distance delivery of information support services at least will contribute to the students’ acquisition of the highly valuable information skills for life.
However the worst threat will be that of the unenlightened senior administrators and managers who completely ignore the importance of information provision in the rush to register students and minimise or reduce the unit cost.
The impoverishment to the student and society will be immense.
It is sad to report that there is some evidence to suggest in Europe that this has already happened.
In the headlong rush to provide economical distance education courses there has been some lack of interest in providing the student with a clearly costed quality information support environment.
In such cases the packs of information and spoonfeeding as substitutes for rounded information services seem to be accepted.
The ‘read this and remember it for the exam’ mentality is a concern.
The librarian will have to vigorously guard against this outcome.
The Way Forward The inevitable advance of information technology, convergence of communication technologies, reduction in costs, competition and globalisation will increase the potential for distance learning.
The drive for increased effectiveness and efficiency will ensure that unit costs are driven down with some possible detrimental consequences for delivery of support services.
These issues will have to be countered in a constructive manner.
The issues addressed in this paper will not go away.
The widening of access to education will partly be resolved by distance education provision.
The librarian’s role will to be to ensure the provision of a quality information support services as a right.
In that context the challenges for librarians will be to ensure: equity of treatment for all potential users, a strategy put in place which will guarantee a quality of service provision, including collaboration and partnership, and information technology applied in the best and most cost effective manner to the benefit of the student.
Author details Prof. Alan F. MacDougall Director of Library Services Dublin City University Email: alan.macdougall@dcu.ie Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Exploring Planet SOSIG: Sociology Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Exploring Planet SOSIG: Sociology Buzz cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS In this edition, Stuart Macwilliam, the section editor for Sociology, gives an overview of the resources likely to be found in his section.
This is preceded by news of some 'mutual mirroring' across the Atlantic, involving SOSIG and the Internet Scout Project.
Mutual Mirroring Speeds Access Internet users in the USA and Europe will be able to discover the best of the Internet much faster (and more cheaply) as a result of a new initiative launched this week.
Internet Scout, based in the USA, and SOSIG, based in the UK, will each host a "mirror" of the other’s site.
The arrangement will result in quicker access and reduced costs for users on both sides of the Atlantic.
The "mirror" is a complete copy of the original site, hosted on a server closer to home, so that users can cut down on the number of transatlantic connections they make.
The Internet Scout Project is based in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA.
The Scout Project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation to provide timely information to the education community about valuable Internet resources, and to develop new tools for effective resource discovery on the Internet.
Daily and weekly updates on highly selective resources are provided for K-12 and higher education faculty, staff, and students, as well as interested members of the general public.
In addition to the general Scout Report, three subject-specific reports focus on Social Science, Business and Economics, and Science and Engineering, and a catalogue of over 4,500 resources on these topics are searchable at the web site.
SOSIG (pronounced "sausage") is the Social Science Information Gateway, based in the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol, UK.
SOSIG is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to provide access to networked resources and training for social scientists that want to use the Internet.
Established in 1994, SOSIG was the first subject-based information gateway in the UK.
SOSIG has acquired a considerable reputation among social scientists and offers a catalogue of over 5,000 high quality resources that have been selected and described by subject specialists.
Further collaboration between the two services is planned in the future.
The UK mirror of the Scout Report can be found at: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/mirrors/scout/report/socsci/index.html The US mirror of SOSIG can be found at: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/mirrors/sosig/ UK users should use the local SOSIG service at: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ For further information please contact: Debra Hiom SOSIG Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol, BS8 IHH, UK Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7117 Fax: +44 (0)117 928 7112 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Citation BibTex RIS Ace Ariadne cartoonist Malcolm Campbell strikes again.
Apparently it's the earliest known example of a library without walls Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: SOSIG Expands into Europe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: SOSIG Expands into Europe Buzz database url Citation BibTex RIS Louise Woodcock introduces the new European Studies section for SOSIG and Helen Wharam provides an update on the Resource Guide for the Social Sciences.
SOSIG Expands into Europe SOSIG will soon be providing a new main subject section focussing on information to support European Studies.
The new section is due to go live in time for the start of the new academic session.
It is being maintained by a team of information staff based at the European Resource Centre at the University of Birmingham.
The new section will provide access to Internet resources about Europe as a region covering for example: EU enlargement International Relations & Security International Law Conflict prevention & resolution Migration Economics and Business Politics Culture Education Environment In addition it will cover individual European countries with a particular emphasis on countries currently under-represented in the database, for example those located in Central and Eastern Europe.
For more information contact Louise at the address below.
Update on the Resource Guide for the Social Sciences The Resource Guide for the Social Sciences has been funded by JISC and the ESRC since November 1998.
The Guide offers a range of FREE information and flexible awareness raising and training opportunities that reflect the time constraints and challenges faced by staff and students in the social sciences.
The objectives of the Resource Guide for the Social Sciences are to provide an overview of the key ESRC and JISC funded resources of relevance in the social sciences and to raise awareness of these as widely as possible (particularly to novice users).
We also aim to promote effective use of the resources by developing a range of information, documentation and training materials and opportunities in co-operation with resource providers (eg promotional materials, Web site, workshops, seminars, presentations etc).
The project is intended to support the work of information specialists (and others) who currently undertake the promotion of resources in their institution.
We meet our objectives by distributing promotional fliers and other materials across HE institutions through key academic support staff and directly to social science related departments and also offer a range of face-to-face activities to support the work of staff and students (eg workshops and presentations).
We are pleased that further funding has been made available for the Guide to continue after October 2001.
JISC is also considering rolling out a similar service for five more subject areas, using the model for promotion and training which has already been developed by the Resource Guides for the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities.
An event for Resource Guide providers was held recently in Bristol (funded by JISC Assist).
People from provider services whose resources are included within the current remit of the Resource Guide for the Social Sciences were invited, together with staff from JISC Assist and the Resource Guide.
The event offered a forum for providers to: Meet each other, Resource Guide and JISC Assist staff Review actions from and activities since the last event (March 2000) Contribute to the evaluation of the project Share experiences and concerns re: FE Consider and prioritise future Resource Guide and other promotional opportunities and activities.
A full evaluation of the Resource Guide for the Social Sciences is due to be completed by October 31, 2001.
Depending on the outcome of this evaluation, Resource Guide staff are planning to up-date promotional materials, continue to deliver workshops and attend conferences such as Online 2001 and UmbrelLA next year.
A mailshot of current promotional cards to university departments will be completed before the end of the evaluation phase, to coincide with the start of the new academic year.
Full details of the Resource Guide, including a report from the Providers’ Event, are available from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/subject/socsci/ Author Details Louise Woodcock Information Services, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Birmingham B15 2TT Email: l.a.woodcock@bham.ac.uk   Helen Wharam RGSS ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: helen.wharam@bristol.ac.uk Article Title: “SOSIG Expands into Europe” Author: Louise Woodcock and Helen Wharam Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Extending Your Browser Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Extending Your Browser Buzz data software rdf javascript html xml apache metadata css accessibility browser copyright doc uri telnet url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly on techniques for extending the capabilities of your browser.
The WebWatch project [1], which was based at UKOLN, involved the development and use of a variety of tools to analyse web resources and web servers.
During the early development of the software, individual summaries (particularly of outliers in the statistical data) were often required in order to check that the software was working correctly.
Initially summaries were obtained using simple Unix scripts.
For example the urlget script displayed the HTTP headers for a resource as illustrated below: % urlget www.ukoln.ac.uk HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 09:46:43 GMT Server: Apache/1.2b8 Last-Modified: Tue, 09 Feb 1999 12:24:10 GMT ETag: “3fd0-28ba-36c028ea” Connection: close Content-Type: text/html <HTML> … Figure 1: Use of the urlget Script The urlget script simply provides a simplified interface to the telnet command.
As more sophisticated scripts became needed, the command line Unix interface became more of a barrier, especially for the occasional Unix user.
In order to provide an improved user interface, and to develop a service which could be used outside UKOLN it was decided to provide a web interface to a number of the WebWatch tools.
WebWatch Web-Based Services Two web-based services have been produced by the WebWatch project.
http-info http-info provides information of the HTTP headers associated with a web resource.
doc-info doc-infoprovides information on the components of a web resource, including the size of the resource (the size of the HTML file, embedded objects such as images and the size of the HTTP headers), details of the server software used to serve each object, a summary of metadata contained in the HTML resource, a listing of hyperlinks from the resource (together with details of broken links), a summary of the HTML elements found, the time taken to access the resource and embedded objects, details of the cachability of the resource and embedded objects and details of any redirects.
The http-info service is available at URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk./web-focus/webwatch/services/http-info/> and the doc-info service is available at URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk./web-focus/webwatch/services/doc-info/> Use of doc-info is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Use of the doc-info Service Limitations of these Services Allow these web-based services provide a graphical interface to obscure command-line tools, and the web interface enables the services to be used by all web users, they still have a number of disadvantages: Using the service means “leaving” the page you are viewing.
Accessing the services requires the address of the service to be provided, typically using a bookmark or by typing in the URL of the service.
Once the service has been accessing, the address of the page to be analysed has to be supplied, either by typing it in or by copying it from the clipboard (assuming you remembered to copy the address in the first place!)
We have recently addressed these limitations.
The Netscape Personal Toolbar The Netscape Personal Toolbar is a little-known feature of the Netscape browser.
As illustrated in Figure 3 the personal toolbar enables the end user to add their own links to the top of the browser.
Figure 3: The Netscape Personal Toolbar In some respects, the personal toolbar provides a simple bookmark facility.
However the personal toolbar enables the Netscape browser to be extended through the use of simple JavaScript.
If the following code is added to the personal toolbar: javascript:void(window.open(’http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/services/http-info/httpinfo.cgi?everything=1&mode=auto&display_format=rdf&url=‘+escape(window.location))) clicking on the icon in the personal toolbar causes the http-info service (at the URL shown in red) to run in a new window, taking the address of the current page being viewed together with the pre-defined parameters (show in blue).
As an example click on the following link: javascript:void(window.open(‘http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/services/doc-info/info.cgi?everything=1&mode=auto&display_format=rdf&url='+escape(window.location))) A new window should be created, containing details of this page, as illustrated in Figure 4.
Figure 4: The doc-info Service The WebWatch Services page [2] provides access to the http-info and doc-info services.
In addition it enables the services to be added easily to the personal toolbar.
You simply have to click on the link and drag it to the personal toolbar.
Figure 5: Adding A Service to the Toolbar Once the service has been added to the toolbar, you can obtain details on any page you are viewing by simply clicking on the icon in the toolbar there is no longer any need to leave the page and go elsewhere, or copy and paste URLs.
Futures This article has described how a number of the WebWatch tools have been ported to the web and how use of the Netscape personal toolbar enables the tools to be used more easily.
It is possible to imagine a range of web-based services which could be integrated with a web browser as described in this article, such as: HTML Validation Enables the HTML of the page being viewed to be validated.
Spell Checker Run a HTML-aware spell-checker on the page being viewed.
Translate Translate the page into a predefined language Accessibility Report on any accessibility issues for the current page.
Validate XML Check the syntax of the XML page being viewed Validate CSS Check the syntax of the CSS (cascading style sheet) file linked to or embedded in the current document.
In fact many of these services are currently available, and can be integrated with your web browser.
Links to a variety of services including HTML analysis services at DrHTML and WebSiteGarage, a spell checker at WebSter, HTML validation services at HENSA and W3C, CSS2 validator at W3C, an XML validator at XML.COM, CAST’s Bobby service for checking accessibility and the Babelfish translation service at AltaVista are included in the list below.
To test these links, simply click on them a new window should be created containing the results of an analysis of this page.
HTML Validator (W3C) HTML Validator (HENSA mirror) CSS2 Validator (W3C) Websitegarage analysis of web page DrHTML analysis of web page WebSter’s Spell Checker Bobby accessibility check Babelfish’s Translation Service (into German) XML Validate (XML.COM) If you find the service useful, then simply drag the link to your personal toolbar.
The name and other properties can be edited using the bookmark editor, as illustrated below.
Figure 6: Editing Bookmarked Services Note that some of the services mentioned above, such as the Babelfish translator, load an intermediate page with the specified input data.
An extra step is needed to launch the service, as shown below.
Figure 7: Using the Babelfish Translator Issues Although it would appear desirable for web service provide to include pages containing links to web services which could be easily integrated with a browser, as described, in practice there are several issues which should be considered: Can examination of the underlying HTML code and reusing links to CGI scripts constitute a breach of copyright?
Can linking directly to a CGI script result in loss of visibility to the service?
What are the maintenance issues if the format of the script processing the CGI form changes?
If services wish to encourage use of their underlying service (and not just the font end to the service provided by the web interface) how should they announce this?
Services will, it should be hoped, address such issues at the design stage.
For example naming conventions for input parameters should be adopted so that new versions of services can be deployed in a backwards compatible manner.
In passing it should be noted that the HTML service mirrored at HENSA has moved to a new service (following the release of HTML 4.0 and the withdrawal of HalSoft’s mirroring service) but links to the original validation script continue to work (as illustrated below which shows use of the validation service for Jon Knight’s article in issue 1 back in January 1996 [3]).
Figure 8: Use of the HTML Validation Service in Ariadne Issue 1 In addition to designed the software to facilitate version control, thought should be given to output from the service.
For example output from the script should provide a link to the service’s home page, so that the user is provided with information on the service provider and can easily access other services on offer.
Seeking Permission To Use The Services The services mentioned in this article were approached and asked if they would be willing for their services to be used as described in this article.
A summary of the responses is given below.
Responses Service Comments HTTP-info and Doc-info (UKOLN) Agree to make the services available.
Have documented arguments to CGI script.
Bobby (CAST) “It’s a really good idea, and we’re happy to see you supporting the use of Bobby via this procedure.
… We have no current plans to modify the way Bobby handles URL-passed page check requests, and if we do we will make sure it continues to support the old way, so that should not be a concern for the foreseeable future either.” Michael Cooper, CAST CSS Validator (W3C) “I plan to make no change on the format of the script processing the CGI form and the current way will be always supported.
I encourage to link directly the CGI script result.
Your idea seems to be really good.” Philippe Le Hgaret, W3C.
HTML Validator (W3C) “Regarding version control, I intend to support any URIs used by the service forever.
… This is a great idea, by the way; I did something like this years ago with XMosaic’s “user-defined menu” using a .mosaic-user-defs file (an example of which is http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/XMosaic/ex.txt)“.
” Gerald Oskoboiny, W3C HTML Validation Service (HENSA mirror) Gave permission to use service XML.COM Awaiting response to message sent on 17 Feb 1999.
WebSter’s spell checker Link to copyright holder not available WebSiteGarage Awaiting response to message sent on 16 Feb 1999.
References WebWatch, web page <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/> WebWatch Services, web page <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/services/> HTML: Which Version?, Jon Knight, Ariadne issue 1 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue1/knight/> Author Details Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: The Oxford English Dictionary Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: The Oxford English Dictionary Online Buzz identifier multimedia gis url Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff previewed the electronic version of this standard reference, and gives a user's verdict.
Cultural history, encyclopaedia, etymological record of the English language, spelling aid… The Oxford English Dictionary is a number of things, and now it is a web site.
What was once evocative of dusty tomes, thumbed by wizened professors of English in the recesses of University libraries is embracing the information age and going online.
But how can this, the most traditional of traditional works of literature, benefit from modern technology?
An initial answer, in a word, is “revision”.
The Oxford English Dictionary, the record of the English language, took over forty years to complete the first time around; the first fascicle was published in 1884 and the last in 1928.
Since then several supplements have expanded its coverage.
In 1989, a second edition was published, consolidating all that had gone before but doing nothing so brave as to revise the text.
However, the English language, like the people who use it, is diverse and alive.
It changes, evolves, borrows from other languages (perhaps even more so now in this global culture).
Definitions change, and as historians reveal more about our past and scholarly thought matures, etymologies need to be revised.
In the last one hundred years much of the content of the OED has become ready for revision or updating.
In a time when national newspapers can cite new words and encourage their use each week, the Oxford University Press undertook to ensure the OED’s authoritative status and set about the much needed revision.
In the past an update of the text would have been a lengthy, if not impossible, task , and the result would be out of date by the time it was completed.
However, as more and more of the text was moved into an electronic format (as part of the 1989 edition), and computer technology developed, it became clear that modern technology could facilitate the revision process in a much shorter time scale.
Now, as the OED is launched into cyberspace, this revision is fully underway.
The revision process promises great things: new etymologies, taking into account modern thought and wider knowledge of diverse texts; revised or even new pronunciations; more and different examples of word usage, drawn from a various sources, many of which were unavailable to the original editors.
Revisions include the modernisation of definitions, taking into account usage from around the English speaking world, and will be at the rate of 1000 per quarter.
As sections of the text are completed, they will be incorporated into the online text and be accessible immediately, ensuring the most up-to-date dictionary of the English language available at all times.
This is a fundamental benefit, utilizing modern technology to provide functionality, rather than gimmicks.
Further however, modern technology adds greater value to the traditional text, in a number of other ways.
The display of the text has been updated and for the first time hyperlinks between related words are made available.
This significantly reduces page flicking, but perhaps inhibits browsing and the discovery of words by accident.
This is no minor complaint, because one of the joys of a dictionary is to browse through it and encounter some curiosity of the language.
With an online edition that only displays a single word with its definition, or a list of undefined words, this enjoyment is limited.
However, with a few very simple search methods (part of the electronic OED’s remit was to ensure a simple interface), including a full-text search, definitions, usage and all, the electronic OED can be put to good use.
There is the ability to display words in the chronological order of their introduction to the language.
A word can be shown alongside its contemporaries, perhaps allowing the identification of periods of influence in the language.
Words can be explored conceptually, making links across definitions (often revealing a few surprises that do allow for accidental discovery) with a simple search.
Interesting searches arise when famous names are entered in the search box, revealing all the words that a particular person may have contributed to the language, or are associated with.
Dates again make for interesting searches, allowing associations between words and events to be made.
A search on a similar word, or synonym, will often reveal the word you are looking for, and perhaps some alternatives that are better.
This is an invaluable aid for writers everywhere, be it for a novel or a formal report.
The electronic OED offers a search engine that can deal with wild cards, allowing searches such as “geo*” that would return a number of results that pertain to the earth and earth sciences (as well as several Kings!).
In the documentation that accompanied my test access to the OED online there was list of other ways in which the dictionary can be used.
I hope this list is included somewhere in the final version of the dictionary and one suggestion was in solving crosswords.
A search like ?a?c?r may seem odd, but could provide that vital clue to the one word between you and the peace of mind a completed crossword can bring.
This is perhaps even more useful if you create crosswords.
Further, for real word buffs, the OED’s wildcard searches can provide endless ways of spicing up Scrabble games try searching for ?x or ?z for some interesting ways to dispose of awkward letters.
This electronic edition of the OED offers a number of advantages over the traditional text, but it is not without its faults.
I have already mentioned the lessening of interesting discoveries by accident.
Also, interestingly, the search engine is unable to deal with phonetically or incorrectly spelt words.
Whereas my word processor’s spell checker can suggest “physics” from “fisics”, the electronic OED cannot.
This is perhaps an unfair comparison, but it seems to me that an excellent enhancement of this dictionary would be some form of word suggestion.
The electronic OED could perhaps also benefit from the introduction of sound.
While I am in no way suggesting the OED be developed into a multimedia dictionary, which might perhaps undermine its authority, one of the most awkward things about new words (especially for learners of a language) is their pronunciation.
In the past paper based dictionaries have had to be content with a “Key to Pronunciation” populated with a number of confusing symbols.
Here is a real opportunity to provide spoken guides to pronunciation.
This seems a missed opportunity for an online dictionary that fully utilises technology to provide for its functional needs.
Finally there is a question of access.
The OED is not a commercial venture, it has never made a profit for the OUP, yet it is being released as a subscription only service.
This is clearly to offset the costs of the monumental task of maintaining the dictionary, but it is a shame.
Here is an opportunity to bring the OED into the offices and homes of many people, making it the everyday tool that in its present paper form it cannot be.
Indeed many of the proposed uses of the OED online are suited more to these environments, than the academic uses of the past.
(I would gladly bookmark it and keep it on hand as another online reference guide).
Yet it is unlikely that the average home user will subscribe.
This is not a fault in the dictionary, nor with the OUP, but simply a lamentable fact.
To conclude then, the OED online is taking one of the greatest works of the English language, a collected record of our past, into the modern world.
It offers a number of tools that make it easy to use, yet it is exceptionally powerful at finding that elusive word, its history and some of those who used it.
Its only real fault it that some of the charm of several large volumes is lost.
However it is a dictionary for the future that will remain a consistent record of the language for years to come.
Author Details   Peter Cliff Systems Developer UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “The OED Online” Author: Peter Cliff Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-review/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Free ISP from the British Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Free ISP from the British Library Buzz software browser copyright cataloguing opac cd-rom url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kefford outlines the services available from the British Library.
The rapid growth in services offering free Internet access to users dialling into the Internet is well known.
The market leader, Freeserve, has signed up over 1.5 million customers and has been followed by TescoNet, WH Smith, Currant Bun, etc.
But did you know that in September the British Library launched British Library Net, the first free Internet service to be provided by a public sector body in the UK?
Why provide this service when it’s already being done by commercial organisations?
British Library Net provides the same level of Internet access service as other Internet service providers, but it is different because it provides direct links to library, information and cultural resources, rather than games, holidays and shopping.
It provides links to hundreds of library catalogues, to full-text books and journals, to publishers, to serious news sources, to museums and art collections, and to educational resources in general.
Unlike the commercial services, its home page is not full of garish images and cluttered with adverts!
While most academic users will access the Internet through JANET when on campus, off campus or at home they can now use an ISP which includes links to a wealth of research resources, including the recently launched Resource Discovery Network subject hubs.
British Library Net includes: Direct access to the British Library’s catalogue on the Web, "OPAC 97", and to hundreds of library Web sites and OPACs Direct links to all British Library Web services Easy access to a wide range of top quality information resources, from libraries, museums and art collections to global news networks and world-renowned journals.
As a bonus, there is a selection of free images from the British Library's Picture Library The British Library Net service offers: Local call access anywhere in the UK 24hr, 7 days a week technical support by telephone ISDN and V90 56k PSTN access Free CD-ROM with Internet software suite including Web Browser and fully functional Email client Free Web space for non-commercial use British Library Net has been developed in conjunction with Easynet, a leading UK Internet and telecommunications company, which will host and support the service.
Development of the service is being managed by the Online Services section of the British Library’s National Bibliographic Service, which regularly adds new links and other improvements to the site.
Suggestions for improvement or additional Web links are very welcome (to the e-mail address below).
Copies of the installation CD-ROM are available from the British Library at: Email: BritishLibrary-net@bl.uk Fax: 01937 546586 Tel: 01937 546585 Alternatively, sign up directly online at http://www.britishlibrary.net/registration.html Author Details Brian Kefford British Library Email: brian.kefford@bl.uk Article Title: "A Free ISP from the British Library" Author: Brian Kefford Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/bl-isp/intro.html   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC 2003 Conference Report Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC 2003 Conference Report Buzz framework preservation ict url research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Pothen reports on Secretary of State Charles Clarke's view of the importance of ICT in the education sector and the role of the JISC in its implementation.
At the JISC 2003 Conference the Rt Hon Charles Clarke MP, Secretary of State for Education and Skills, underlined the central role for ICT within the education sector.
In the conference’s keynote speech [1] , Charles Clarke said, “I’m passionate about the use of new technology in the classroom.
It goes right through the education system from early years to higher education and helps boost standards.
It can make a real difference to teaching and can engage and excite students of all ages.” Charles Clarke congratulated the JISC on its achievements [2], in particular its world-class high-speed network and the pioneering use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in learning and teaching.
He went on to say that the JISC’s key strength was its pivotal role in developing the use of ICT within the wider education sector, especially in the areas of lifelong learning and widening participation.
He saw the JISC network as a very important vehicle through which the schools and further and higher education sectors could be brought closer together.
During his speech, Charles Clarke set out the following key areas for the JISC’s future work: Extending the network to all of the post-16 education sectors with particular attention to content Developing the use of ICT to support learning and teaching at all levels of post-16 education Ensuring that there is closer collaboration and networking between schools and further and higher education Promoting research by: encouraging international collaboration providing better access to current research and its outputs making best use of knowledge transfer and how universities can inform and guide theUK community and its economy Encouraging international relationships in a range of different areas, particularly in distance learning, which if used properly could make a real difference to third world economies Professor Maxwell Irvine, Chair of JISC with Rt Hon Charles Clarke, MP and Dr Malcolm Read, JISC Executive Secretary JISC’s framework currently supports the government’s ICT priorities through its main activities: Funding the SuperJANET network, which provides secure and reliable broadband connections to all UK further and higher education institutions Making available the largest national educational online collection in the world Funding a range of support and advice services which give further and higher education access to the guidance they need in all aspects of the provision of ICT Funding a range of ‘production’ services hand-picked for their quality and for their use in learning and teaching.
Spearheading initiatives of wider cultural concern such as those in the field of digital preservation Funding hundreds of development projects, which work at the leading edge of the technical possibilities of the use of ICT in learning, teaching and research However, there is still much work to be done in promoting the use of ICT and as Charles Clarke has taken personal responsibility for ICT within the government, it will be a key priority area for the JISC and the education sector as a whole.
The JISC’s experience over ten years, as well as its commitment to innovation and expertise, will ensure that it plays its part in meeting the challenges of the future and remains responsive to the changing needs of the post-16 education sector.
References Text of Charles Clarke’s speech http://www.dfes.gov.uk/speeches/search_detail.cfm?ID=64 JISC press release http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=jisc_conf_pr Author Details Dr Philip Pothen Communications Manager JISC Executive Email: philip.pothen@kcl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Article Title: “Charles Clarke Highlights ICT as Central to National Education Priorities” Author: Philip Pothen Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/jisc-conf-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Report on the WWW 8 Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Report on the WWW 8 Conference Buzz data mobile software java rdf framework html xml usability infrastructure metadata accessibility browser repositories copyright cataloguing graphics hypertext multimedia visualisation cache xlink smil personalisation svg interoperability mailbase cookie algorithm url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly discusses WWW8 in Toronto, which took place in May 1999.
The Eighth World Wide Web Conference (WWW8) was on a smaller scale than in the past few years.
The numbers of delegates seemed to be down, and there was no accompanying exhibition.
The conference appeared to be refocussing on the web research community, with delegates from commercial companies more likely to be software developers than marketing types.
This refocussing also seemed to be reflected in the conference papers, which, as a number of people commented, seemed to be of a higher quality this year.
Unlike last year (in which RDF was the main conference highlight, as reported in Ariadne 15 [1]) and the previous year (with XML being the important new technology, which was also reported in Ariadne 9 [2], this year the general consensus seemed to be that no major new developments had been announced.
This is, perhaps, a consequence of the increasing complexity of the web.
The intricate inter-dependencies of new protocols and data formats, the resources needed to move along the development of the protocols and interoperable demonstrators, and various political barriers are inevitably slowing down developments.
Many web developers are no doubt pleased with this news!
Tim Berners-Lee still has a clear vision of the future of the web, which he described in his keynote talk on Challenges of the Second Decade [3].
In his talk he restated his original aims for the web (initially made 10 years ago [4]), and noted that a number of the aims, in particular universal writing has still not been achieved.
He acknowledged that this is a difficult problem to solve (although W3C work with their Amaya browser/editor and the Jigsaw server software seemed to working satisfactorily for W3C staff).
However he acknowledged the need for stability and to "slow down, get it right".
His final part of the talk outlined his vision for the "Semantic Web" (which he had previously described in his keynote talk entitled "Evolvability" at WWW7 [5]).
RDF is still regarded as the key to deployment of the semantic web.
In his keynote talk, Tim gave a personal view on the dangers of software patents to the development of the web.
His comments referred to three patent claims related to core web technologies: Intermind's patent (no.
5862325) [6] covers rights related to metadata control mechanisms which, according to Intermind, cover implementations of P3P.
Sun's patent (no.
5659729) [7] which covers technologies relevant to XLink.
Microsoft's patent (no.
5860073) [8] which covers technologies relevant to style sheets.
Hill ECatalog's patent (no.
5528490) [9] which covers technologies for online presentation of catalog materials.
The patent issue, together with related topics such as IPR and open source software, was brought up in many informal discussions at the conference.
I was told, for example, that although a "cold war" exists between the major computer companies (such as IBM, Sun and Microsoft) they are reluctant to use the ultimate weapon (company lawyers!)
as this will be costly for all (especially since these companies own so many patents that they are likely to be unknowingly infringing patents.
But the large computer companies are worried when patents are held by smaller companies or individuals, since they may not play by the "club rules".
Richard Stallman, who was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky award at the end of the conference (ironically a cash donation from Microsoft!
), alerted delegates to the proposals to legalise software patents in Europe and encouraged them to view the FreePatents web site [10] which also priovides details on the Intermind and Microsoft patent claims.
Papers A total of 48 technical papers were selected by the Programme Committee.
A brief summary of several of them is given below.
The papers themselves are available online [11].
In addition the Printed Proceeding are published by Elsevier [12].
There were three papers from the UK Higher Education community given at the conference (two of which are mentioned in this report).
Charlotte Jenkins et al gave a warmly-received paper on Automatic RDF Generation For Resource Discovery [13].
Automated tools for the creation of metadata are much-needed in order to implement enhanced seach engines.
As Nicky Ferguson commented in his trip report: Exactly the right paper at the right time [14].
The second paper from the UK was given by Rob Procter of Edinburgh University.
His paper on Improving Web Usability with the Link Lens addressed the human factors of a URL.
A link lens (a browser aid) provides information (metadata) associated with a hyperlink.
There were two other papers which described use of browser aids an area relevant to project work at UKOLN and ILRT, University of Bristol.
Visual Preview for Link Traversal on the World Wide Web [15] described the use of a proxy service which enables a visual preview of a website to be displayed, before the user "goes" to the website.
A live version of prototype is available (as described at [16]).
The third example was described in the paper on Surfing The Web Backwards.
In this example a Java-based browser aid was used to display "backlinks" links to the current page, based on the link information which can be obtained from HotBot.
Yoelle Maarek's paper on Adding Support for Dynamic and Focused Search with Fetuccino was her third paper presented at the last three WWW conferences.
Last year's paper described Capuccino a Java-based visualiser for sitemaps.
This idea has been developed into a Java-based tool for the visualisation of search results, as shown below.
Figure 1: Fetuccino A prototype of this service is freely available [17].
This application can be used to post-process results for a number of search engines.
In the light of comments made by search engine vendors at the Panel Session (see below) I asked Yoelle if she was concerned that her "parasitical" (as some would class it) application would not be appreciated by the search engine vendors.
She responded that the application emulates an end-user session and only processed relatively small numbers of the results set so this shouldn't be a problem.
(It was also pointed out that IBM have their own search engine Clever which could be used by Fetuccino).
After the session finished I discussed this issue with someone from Compaq/AltaVista.
His view was that the search engine vendors know when their results are being post-processed, and if this is being used in a production service, financial arrangements would have to be agreed.
Panel Sessions As well as the paper sessions, there were also several panel sessions.
At these sessions, several experts in a subject area would typically give brief presentations, which would be followed by general discussions and questions from the floor.
The panel sessions included Finding Anything in the Billion-page Web: Are Algorithms the Key?
[18], Mobile Computing and Accessibility [19], Web-Based Everything: are HTTP, DAV and XML Enough?
[20], and Agents vs Direct Manipulation: What's Best to Disentangle the Web?
[21].
I attended the first of these sessions.
The panel session on Finding Anything in the Billion-page Web: Are Algorithms the Key?
consisted of panelists from Yahoo!
(Udi Manber), Excite (Brian Pinkerton) and two from Compaq, the owners of AltaVista (Andrei Broder and Monika Henzinger).
There seemed to be some agreement amongst the panelists that hardware was not a significant barrier to the development of better searching service.
More sophisticated algorithms were felt to be of importance.
Perhaps understandably, the panelists refused to divulge their views on these algorithms in any detail, although citation analysis (such as Google [22], which featured in the report on last year's conference [2]) was mentioned.
Udi Manber also mentioned the need for search engines to understand the word not.
He illustrated this point with the example of a parent searching for web resources "suitable for children".
Unfortunately this currently retrieves documents which contain the words not suitable for children!
Other suggestions for areas in which we can expect developments include personalisation and user profiling, and specialist (rather than general purpose) search engines.
With a growth of specialist search engines, we can expect to see 2-layer searches (e.g.
find search engines which deal with medical resources, and then submit a search to the relevant search engines).
This model will be very familiar to the UK's subject based information gateways and the Phase 3 eLib projects.
Brian Pinkerton (Excite) also made a number of comments which will be of interest to the metadata and subject gateway communities.
He felt there was a need to construct "web collections" and to make use of "impartial" metadata which can include citations (as Google does, as mentioned above) as well as third party reviews.
Third party reviews of web resources is a good description of subject gateways, such as SOSIG, OMNI and EEVL.
It was pleasing to hear a major search engine vendor making these comments.
Poster Session In addition to the technical papers, conference delegates also received a copy of the Poster Proceedings.
The Poster Proceedings consisted of short papers (about 2 pages).
These papers were peer-reviewed.
The short papers were accompanied by posters, and the programme provided a 2 hour slot for participants to view the posters and talk to the authors.
The posters were available for casual viewing for the duration of the conference.
A list of the Posters and the authors is available on the WWW8 website [23].
A brief summary of several of the posters is given below.
Roddy MacLeod of the EEVL service and myself co-authored a poster on Subject-Based Information Gateways in the UK [24].
The aim of this paper was to ensure that the work of the subject gateways was documented for the web research community, and to identify areas of interest to the subject gateways for future work.
The short paper was accompanied by several colour posters, illustrated below.
As noted In Nicky Ferguson's conference report [14], the poster provided a valuable focal point for delegates with an interest in this area, and several useful contacts were made.
Southampton University's Multimedia Research Group were again present at the conference.
Their paper on A Distributed Link Service Using Query Routing outlined use of the whois++ and CIP protocols to integrate their Distributed Link Service with other link services.
The National Caching Service, and institutional proxy managers may be interested in the paper on WebTransformer: An infrastructure for Web content transformation.
This paper describes a proxy service for transforming web content such as converting images or removing adverts.
Their WebTransformer software has recently been ported to Squid.
This topic occasionally surfaces on the wwwcache-users Mailbase list, but as members of this list will be aware, there are significant legal and ethical considerations which need to be addressed.
The paper on i Proxy: An Agent-Based Middleware also described proxy software which could be used for transformation purposes.
This software is freely available from AT&T [25].
The paper on CyberGenre and Web Site Design used the random.yahoo.com website to return 96 random web sites, which were analysed.
Several categories (referred to as CyberGenres) were identified: 'Home Page,' 'Brochure,' 'Resource,' 'Catalogue,' 'Search Engine' and 'Game'.
Although this does not appear to be an adequate categorisation, their approach may be of interest to the metadata community.
The paper on ConfMan: Integrated WWW and DBS Support for Conference Organization will be of interest to anyone wishing to use a web-based tool for managing academic conferences.
The paper includes a review of conference management software [26].
The software described in the paper is also freely available [27].
An example of a US-based subject gateway was described in Efficient Web Spidering with Reinforcement Learning, which describes aspects of the Cora project (illustrated below) [28].
Figure 2: CORA The paper on Scientific Literature Indexing on the Web also described a prototype service which can be used to access scientific literature, known as ResearchIndex [29].
This project aims to produce algorithms and techniques that can be implemented in any digital library, and not just to produce another digital library of scientific literature.
A prototype web tracking service is described in the paper on Website News: A Website Tracking and Visualisation Service.
A number of websites are visited by a spider on a regular basis, and changes to the website are recorded.
This enables changes to a website over specified periods to be displayed, as illustrated below (changes to the Microsoft website between 1 April and 19 May 1999) [30].
Figure 3: "Website News The paper on jCentral: Search the Web For Java described jCentral [31], which is the largest repository of Java resources on the Internet.
This service has been available since summer 1997 (and was featured in Developer's Day at WWW7).
A new service called xCentral [32].
was announced in April 1998. xCentral provides a similar service to jCentral, allowing structured information on XML resources to be found.
As the press release states, xCentral is part of an emerging trend toward "specialized" search engines.
[33].
As noted elsewhere, the specialist search engine was a recurrent theme at the conference.
W3C Track W3C staff members gave several presentations during the conference on developments to web standards.
This talks covered the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), Television and the Web, an XML Update, HTML, Building Trust on the Web (P3P), Signed XML Documents, Query Languages, Style Sheets, SMIL (Multimedia for Everyone) and Web Characterisation.
The slides are all available on W3C's web site [34].
The most impressive demonstration of an emerging new W3C format was given by Chris Lilley in his talk on SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, although the term Sexy Vector Graphics has also been used!)
[35].
As the name implies SVG uses a vector rather than bitmapped graphical format.
This has several benefits including smaller file sizes and the ability to resize graphics.
Although such features are familiar to users of CAD packages, the ability to make use of such technologies on the web using open data formats is very exciting.
As always with new web technologies, there is always the question of deployment.
A W3C Note on Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP): A user side framework for content negotiation [36] may provide a solution.
The CC/PP protocol proposes an exchange mechanism between a web server and browser, by which the browser gives a description of its capabilities, such as sound and image capabilities, hardware attributes such as screen size, colours and CPU, support for cookies, scripting, etc.
Although it is still early days for this proposal, the protocol (which is based on HTTP's Extension Framework is worth tracking.
WWW 9 Next year's conference, WWW 9, will be held in Amsterdam on 15-19 May, 2000.
Further information will be made available (probably around August) at http://www9.org/ As the conference is being held so close to the UK it would be good to see plenty of contributions from the UK HE community.
For those who are interested the deadline for submission of papers is 22 November 1999.
Feedback The author welcomes feedback on this article.
Please send email to b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk.
Any WWW8 delegates who have written their own trip reports is encouraged to inform the author of this article so that a record of WWW8 trip reports can be kept.
References Web Focus Corner: WWW7: The Seventh International World Wide Web Conference, Ariadne, Issue 15 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue15/web-focus/> Web Focus Corner: Report on the WWW 6 Conference, Ariadne, Issue 15 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/web-focus/> Challenges of the Second Decade, Tim Berners-Lee, W3C <http://www.w3.org/Talks/1999/05/www8-tbl/Overview.html> The Original Proposal of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, W3C <http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html> Evolvability, Tim Berners-Lee, W3C <http://www.w3.org/Talks/1998/0415-Evolvability/overview.htm> United States Patent 5,862,325: Computer-based communication system and method using metadata defining a control structure , US Patent and Trademark Office <http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5862325'.WKU.&OS=PN/5862325&RS=PN/5862325> Also available at <http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US05862325__&language=en> United States Patent 5,659,729:Method and system for implementing hypertext scroll attributes, US Patent and Trademark Office <http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5659729'.WKU.&OS=PN/5659729&RS=PN/5659729> Also available at <http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US05659729__&language=en> United States Patent 5,860,073: Style sheets for publishing system , US Patent and Trademark Office <http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5860073'.WKU.&OS=PN/5860073&RS=PN/5860073> Also available at <http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US05860073__&language=en> United States Patent 5,528,490: Electronic catalog system and method , US Patent and Trademark Office <http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5528490'.WKU.&OS=PN/5528490&RS=PN/5528490> Also available at <http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US05528490__&language=en> Free Patents Protecting Innovation & Competition in the IT Industry, FreePatents.org <http://www.freepatents.org/> WWW8 Conference Refereed Papers, WWW8 <http://www8.org/fullpaper.html> Proceedings of the Eighth International WWW Conference, Journal of Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol.
31, May, 1999, Elsevier Automatic RDF Metadata Generation for Resource Discovery, Charlotte Jenkins <http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~ex1253/rdf_paper/> Report from WWW8 conference Toronto, Nicky Ferguson, ILRT, University of Bristol <http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~ecnf/www8.html> Visual Preview for Link Traversal on the WWW (Abstract), Theodorich Kopetzky and Max Mühlhäuser <http://www.tk.uni-linz.ac.at/~theo/publications/VisualLinkPreview_abstract.html> Visual Preview for Link Traversal on the WWW, Theodorich Kopetzky and Max Mühlhäuser <http://www.tk.uni-linz.ac.at/~theo/demonstrations/scientific/VPLT_Demo.html> Fetuccino, IBM <http://www.ibm.com/java/fetuccino/> P1 Panel Finding Anything in the Billion-Page Web: Are Algorithms the Answer?, WWW8 <http://www8.org/wed-details.html#P1> P2 Panel Mobile Computing and Accessibility, WWW8 <http://www8.org/wed-details.html#P2> P3 Panel Web-based Everything: Are HTTP, DAV and XML Enough?, WWW8 <http://www8.org/wed-details.html#P3> P5 Panel Agents vs Direct Manipulation: What's Best to Disentangle the Web?, WWW8 <http://www8.org/thurs-details.html#P5> Google home page, Google <http://www.google.com/> Conference Posters, WWW8 <http://www8.org/posters-final.html> Subject-Based Information Gateways in the UK, B. Kelly and R. MacLeod <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www8/> i Proxy: An Agent-Based Middleware, AT&T <http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/iproxy/> Summary of Conference Management Software, Rick Snodgrass, University of Arizona <http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/summary.html> ConfMan, UniK <http://confman.unik.no/> Cora, JustResearch.com <http://www.cora.justresearch.com/> ResearchIndex, NEC Research Institute <http://www.scienceindex.com/> Website News, AT&T Laboratories <http://www.research.att.com/~chen/web-demo/> jCentral, IBM <http://www.ibm.com/developer/java/> xCentral, IBM <http://www.ibm.com/developer/xml/> IBM launches first XML search engine, IBM <http://www2.software.ibm.com/developer/news.nsf/xml-current-bydate/5EFDFE286FA13522852567600054DBB2?OpenDocument> W3C Talks, W3C <http://www.w3.org/Talks/#1999> SVG, W3C <http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/> Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP): A user side framework for content negotiation, W3C Note, <http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-CCPP/> Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Future Is Hybrid: Edinburgh Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Future Is Hybrid: Edinburgh Buzz data software framework html database portfolio portal archives metadata browser copyright video cataloguing multimedia z39.50 flash personalisation cd-rom authentication url research ldap Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl and Philip Hunter report on 'The Future is Hybrid' project day in Edinburgh.
This 1-day conference was the third in a series of events organised by the Hybrid Libraries projects funded by JISC via the eLib Programme, and supported by the DNER.
The prior two events had been held at the British Library, in November 2000, and Manchester Metropolitan University, in the previous week.
The event was late in starting due to heavy snow having delayed several of the delegates.
Indeed, many of those who had intended being in Edinburgh had to call off altogether.
The absent list unfortunately included Peter Brophy of CERLIM (who was therefore unable to give the planned paper on HyLife), and Stephen Pinfield of the DNER, whose place in the schedule was bravely filled by Michael Breaks, Librarian of Heriot Watt University, who also opened the event with a brief introduction.
Bruce Royan, Chief Executive of SCRAN (the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network) then talked about the Hybrid Library idea, and gave a brief historical outline of the place of hybrid libraries in the development of the eLib programme, and where they stand in relation to other types of access to data on the web.
In an entertaining address, he used a bizarre composite illustration – a rabbit with tiger stripes – to convey the idea that ‘hybrid libraries’ are the outcome of a form of genetic engineering.
Extending this, we may find that the engineering turns full circle, so that we end up talking about ‘librarians’ once again – newly engineered to handle multimedia.
And perhaps at the same time our traditional ‘gatekeeper’ libraries will be reengineered into gateways.
Royan illustrated the challenges ahead for the hybrid library by displaying a succession of media types a slide of a painting by Salvador Dali, a video clip of John Logie Baird talking about his invention, an interactive multiview image of the Botanical Gardens in Glasgow, and a rotatable image of a skull.
Such things need to be made available via libraries.
We need to be able to deal with a diversity of data-types, interfaces and skill levels.
Royan finished his presentation by suggesting an architecture of hybrid library services within the UK.
At the top level is the DNER (now to be known as PORTFOLIO).
Key to PORTFOLIO are the subject hubs and the Data Centres – portal sites offering deep linkage between resources.
The CLUMPS services deliver mid-scale diversity, and provide a ‘stress test for Z39.50’ as a cross-search technology.
Three of them act as virtual regional union catalogues, and one provides a virtual subject union catalogue.
Then, at the local institutional level, we find hybrid library services.
Michael Breaks spoke next, describing the five different angles which he could see on the Hybrid Library: people, service, resources, organisation and learning.
Hybrid libraries are impacting upon library staff, who must be developed to cope with changing motivation, needs and expectations.
Similarly, the advent of the hybrid library is affecting the types of service we deliver, most notably in interlibrary lending and document delivery, which are becoming much more important.
At the same time, traditional circulation of books and journals will decline as more material is available over the network.
The most striking example of the shift from traditional circulation is in the move from short loan or reserve collections to ‘electronic reserve.’ The core resources with which our libraries deal are also changing.
Teaching materials are being delivered via managed learning environments.
The increasing attention being paid in HE to the quality of teaching materials (assisted partly by the funding merger with FE) requires that libraries become involved in the development of these learning environments.
At every stage, too, we must ask the economic question.
Rarely, at present, is it possible to view the switch from print to electronic resources and services as providing any cost-saving.
As organisations, we are changing our business processes, for instance in order to accommodate distance learning.
New partnerships are being developed, and even with publishers, with whom libraries frequently locked horns in the past, we are exploring new ways to the future.
Finally, changes in learning methods offer richer opportunities to the hybrid library, which needs to support learners as they ‘move out of the classroom’.
A coherent interface for teaching materials is required, and the library should be central to it.
Ian Upton’s presentation was on Builder: the DIY guide.
The Builder Project’s focus was upon the hybrid library within a single institution (the University of Birmingham).
Builder’s aim had been to run a number of hybrid library projects, and then to demonstrate these to the community, in order to illustrate to other academic libraries what was possible.
It was conceived as a process, not a product, and Upton made the point that hybrid libraries will change with changing technology.
A key concept for the project was ‘seamless access to resources’.
The Builder team were developing by analogy with the campus swipe ID card, which can give access to CDs, training materials, the help desk, etc.
In the hybrid library world, this implies authenticated access to services, which Builder has based on an ID card.
The team has also sought to make the interface seamless (i.e.
it only requires to be learned once), and maintains user profiles so that only appropriate selections of resources are presented to users.
Builder has produced a number of models to illustrate the components of the hybrid library.
These are: Electronic short loan.
The project digitised resources, cleared copyright and devised a way for students to access them securely.
Exam papers database.
Three years’ worth of University of Birmingham exam papers are now available on the web.
Originally students obtained permission to access the database on the basis of their IP address, but now they are using a person-based authentication system.
Ian Upton described this as a ‘frighteningly popular service’ (a recent log had shown 2,500 accesses in a single day).
Forensic linguistics and Midland history.
These are two journals published by the project.
Articles are made available in PDF format and fully indexed.
Subscribers can access the full text of articles.
Hybrid Libraries search engine.
This engine provides a search facility across most of the eLib Hybrid Library projects Agora, Builder, Headline and Malibu.
The search engine can index PDF, Word and Powerpoint files, as well as HTML pages.
Thin Client demonstrator.
This provides an interface to CD-ROM databases via a web browser from anywhere on the internet.
The thin client technology means that the platform of the CD-ROM is irrelevant.
TALIS toolbox demonstrator.
This was developed in conjunction with Talis, which supplies Birmingham University Library’s library management system.
The toolbox provides access to an Application Programmer Interface to TALIS, allowing the library to reuse TALIS data in various customised ways (for example, catalogue records can be extracted against profile information and presented to users alongside other personalised information).
Induction Packages.
These have been developed using Macromedia Flash.
They teach novice users how to use certain library and information services by ‘popping up’ at appropriate points.
Upton finished his presentation by stating that the work of the Builder project was now informing the development of the University of Birmingham portal.
Its iterative approach to development was somewhat at odds with the established culture, but its deliverables were sufficiently impressive to have gained widespread acceptance within the university.
Jessie Hay of the Malibu project then gave a presentation entitled Modelling the hybrid library: Aiming to give ’em what they want!
Malibu has particularly focussed on the humanities area.
Southampton, King’s College London and Oxford are the three major partners, working to produce ‘a generalisable framework and models’.
It has created a small number of prototype hybrid libraries, including one for the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford.
Malibu is particularly concerned with understanding user behaviour, and has held a number of end-user ‘walk through days’.
These examined the different approaches to authentication in use in the partner institutions, and asked the question ‘at what point in the navigation should the challenge come?’ They also sought to find out how teachers were using resources, and what they were telling their students.
Learning resources are considered to have a ‘cycle’ of use, and Malibu has been asking the question ‘at what points in that cycle should the library be involved?’ How has the advent of the hybrid library made library involvement possible now when it has not been in the past?
This has required that the project engage in an exercise in deconstructing traditional library functions.
Key to the whole new approach is staff development.
In contrast to Builder’s practical approach.
Malibu has found the use of models very useful.
Malibu has also produced a search engine prototype based upon identifying what resources people use, rather than starting with z39.50-compliant resources.
The target environment included Google, OPACs, archives and a number of different data types.
A ‘Global Information Gathering Agent’ communicates queries and requests with each target using the relevant protocol.
Users liked being able to reprioritise their targets (e.g.
to search a specific archive first, Google next, etc).
John Paschoud of the Headline project then gave a paper entitled Two million users?
Two million libraries: The Headline PIE hybrid library model.
The title is based on the fact that there are approximately two million users in UK HE.
Headline’s Personalised Information Environment (PIE) has become in many ways the focus of the project – though it did not start out that way.
But Headline’s user studies found that everyone wanted something different from the hybrid library, and therefore personalisation became important.
The project set out to achieve this by adopting the relational database concept of ‘views’ – with these being defined for users by means of profiling.
Users frequently collaborate in their information seeking (i.e.
they ‘hunt in packs’) and so a single view may be shared by a coherent group, such as students on a particular course.
However, Paschoud explained that the PIE does not go far enough.
Users want to share resources with each other and recommend resources to each other.
This is where the ‘open environment’ being developed by Project ANGEL will be beneficial.
ANGEL is one of the recently-funded DNER projects which builds upon Headline to some extent Paschoud admitted to stealing ideas shamelessly from the commercial exploiters of the web.
One of these is the personalised portal.
‘MyNetscape’ and similar offerings are rapidly become among the most popular web sites on the net, and achieve high degrees of customer loyalty.
So Headline decided to follow suit.
Paschoud explained that we know what users should be interested in from the courses they are on, and we know what rights of access they have.
Personalisation can proceed from there.
Headline has also produced a number of other useful hybrid library products.
‘Sherlock’ is a database-backed product which takes users from the shelfmark to an item’s physical location.
‘Smart bookmarks’ (whose URLs don’t break) are managed by the PIE for its users.
‘Authbroker’ is middleware which manages the interface between the PIE and licensed resources.
It is based upon an LDAP directory.
RDM (Resource Discovery Metadata) modules are bolted on to the back of the PIE.
These contain metadata for the PIE, managing discovery-to-access tools as well as resource metadata.
The project proposed that RDM editing should be ‘mainstreamed’ with library cataloguing operations in order to ensure quality metadata and avoid duplication.
The RDM modules also contain metadata describing how to search particular hosts, and serve the results.
Each of these developed packages are freely available open software, and – with their documentation have been available from January 2001.
David Palmer of the AGORA project then described AGORA: From Product to Research – and gave a live demonstration of the product in action.
The partners in the project have been the University of East Anglia, UKOLN, Fretwell-Downing and CERLIM – the Centre for Research into Library and Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The project has used a group of Library Associates Hull, Heriot-Watt, Bath Spa, East Anglia and Edinburgh (which joined later).
AGORA has commissioned Fretwell-Downing to develop a z39.50-based cross-search tool.
Palmer admitted that it was ‘by no means a perfect product’, and that it has received some criticism.
Nevertheless, it has steadily improved since the first prototype release, and Fretwell-Downing have adopted most of the suggestions made by the academic partners.
The concept of individualised ‘landscapes’ is employed.
Resources are divided into those which are remote and those which are local.
The product is designed to integrate with library’s interlibrary loan functions – a process Palmer described as ‘vertical integration’.
Search results can produce a web form which is pre-populated and allows a request to be despatched immediately.
Authentication has been a problem, however, and unfortunately it has not been possible to integrate Athens with the product’s authentication system in the time available.
The afternoon session was given over to workshops allowing delegates to try out the systems we had spent the morning hearing about.
This was an instructive day, despite the attempts of the weather to foil it.
It is clear that a lot of good work has been produced by these hybrid library projects, and a number of tools have emerged which can be picked up and used by HE libraries across the country in rolling out their own hybrid library services.
Predictably, a lot of work remains to be done – some of which is already underway in the latest round of projects funded by the DNER.
The hybrid environment in which our libraries seek to redefine themselves is hybrid in several ways: a hybrid of print and electronic, of open-source and commercial, and of information and learning.
As a community we should be glad of the investment made by JISC in helping us both understand this new environment, and accommodate our services to it.
Author Details   John MacColl Director, Science and Engineering Library University of Edinburgh j.maccoll@ed.ac.uk   Philip Hunter Information Officer UKOLN University of Bath p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "The Future is Hybrid: Libraries in the 21st Century: a one day workshop" Author: John MacColl and Philip Hunter Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/maccoll/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: A Survey Of Numbers of UK University Web Servers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: A Survey Of Numbers of UK University Web Servers Buzz data software database dns url Citation BibTex RIS How many web servers are there in the UK Higher Education community?
Brian Kelly provides some answers.
How many web servers are there in use within the UK higher education community?
What is the profile of server usage within the community do most institutions take a distributed approach, running many servers, or is a centralised approach more popular?
A WebWatch survey has been carried out recently in an attempt to answer these questions.
The Tools Available Netcraft [1] is a company based in Bath which carries out surveys of Web server software.
The Netcraft survey is very comprehensive, with the survey in May 2000 successfully polling over 15 million sites.
Netcraft publish monthly reports on their surveys [2].
Netcraft also provide an interface which enables details of the Web server used at a site to be obtained.
The service also provides a search facility which can be used to list the Web servers used within a domain (or part of a domain).
This facility can be used to, for example, list the Web servers which have .microsoft in the domain name.
The Netcraft interface is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Netcraft interface This service has been used to analyse Web servers used in UK Universities.
The results are provided in Appendix 1 of this article.
Why Carry This Survey?
The aim of the survey is to profile the server usage within the UK HE community and to detect interesting trends.
Knowledge of the server usage within the community has a number of possible benefits: for example, knowledge of server profiles will help developers of robot software, especially robots which are targeted at the HE / public sector communities.
Caveats A number of caveats to this survey should be noted: Web servers which are not publicly available, such as Intranets, will not be reported.
Duplicate names for Web servers may be included in the reports.
The report does not differentiate between real and virtual servers.
The survey is reliant on the quality of the data obtained from Netcraft.
Due to DNS and other configuration settings it is not possible to access all Web sites.
Summary of Findings The total number of Web servers found on 1 May 2000 was 3,986.
Excluding institutions for which Netcraft reported 0 Web servers, an average of 19.4 servers per institution was found.
The survey was repeated on 5 June 2000.
The total number of Web servers had reduced to 3,773, with an average of 24.2 servers per institution.
A histogram of the results is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Histogram of Results As can be seen, most institutions have a small number of publically-accessible Web servers, with 79 institutions running between 1 and 9 servers and only 9 running more than 100.
References Netcraft, http://www.netcraft.com/ Web Server Survey, Netcraft http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ Appendix 1: Survey Results The Netcraft service was used to count the number of web servers used by UK Universities.
The survey was carried out on 1 May 2000 and repeated on 5 June 2000.
The following table contains details of the survey.
Column 1 gives the name of the institution and a link to the institutional web server.
Column 2 gives the number of web server found within the university's domain.
Note the following limitations in the survey: Domain Name Variants The survey will not detect unusual domain names variants used within an institution: e.g.
a link from www.lse-maths.ac.uk will be included in the numbers of servers in the domain lse.ac.uk.
Short and Link Domain Names Institutions which make use of a long and short form of their domain name (e.g.
www.bham.ac.uk and www.birmingham.ac.uk) will have misleading results.
IP Numbers Servers which use an IP number rather than a domain name will not be included.
Netcraft Limitations The database used by the Netcraft service may be incomplete.
Table 1: Numbers of Web Servers In UK HEIs Institution No.
of Servers 1 May 2000 No.
of Servers 5 June 2000 Current No.
of Servers Aberdeen 26 24 Try it Abertay 7 6 Try it Aberystwyth 8 9 Try it Anglia Polytechnic University 43 41 Try it Aston 22 18 Try it Bangor 19 20 Try it Bath Spa 1 1 Try it Bath 12 9 Try it Belfast, The Queen's University of 28 33 Try it Birkbeck 13 12 Try it Birmingham NOTE: Used <www.bham.ac.uk> and not <www.birmingham.ac.uk> 66 64 Try it Bolton Institute of Higher Education 21 17 Try it Bournemouth University 15 15 Try it Bradford 47 47 Try it Bretton College 1 1 Try it Brighton 33 38 Try it Bristol 54 48 Try it Brunel 13 8 Try it Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College 1 1 Try it Cambridge 338 318 Try it Canterbury Christ Church 1 1 Try it Cardiff NOTE Used <www.cardiff.ac.uk> and not <www.cf.ac.uk> (which has 9 sites) 2 1 Try it Cardiff, University of Wales Institute (UWIC) 5 5 Try it Central England, University of (UCE) 13 12 Try it Central Lancashire 3 2 Try it Central School of Speech and Drama 1 1 Try it Cheltenham and Gloucester College of HE 3 3 Try it Chester College Used .chester to avoid confusion with Manchester and Chichester 4 4 Try it Chichester College 2 2 Try it City 37 32 Try it College of Guidance Studies 1 0 Try it Coventry Not known 27 Try it Cranfield 21 21 Try it Dartington College of Arts 1 1 Try it De Montfort (DMU) 61 57 Try it Derby 3 3 Try it Dundee 32 28 Try it Durham 2 2 Try it East Anglia, University of (UEA) 20 20 Try it East London 10 9 Try it Edge Hill 5 5 Try it Edinburgh Used .ed.ac.uk to differentiate from Bized and RCSED 265 259 Try it Essex 31 30 Try it Exeter Used .ex.ac.uk to differentiate from essex 1 12 Try it Falmouth 1 1 Try it Glamorgan 14 13 Try it Glasgow Caledonian University 22 22 Try it Glasgow School of Art 2 2 Try it Glasgow 182 174 Try it Goldsmiths College NOTE <www.goldsmiths.ac.uk> and not <www.gold.ac.uk> (which has 18 sites) 5 4 Try it Greenwich 15 13 Try it Harper Adams 1 1 Try it Heriot-Watt 35 33 Try it Hertfordshire 25 23 Try it Huddersfield 3 2 Try it Hull 43 42 Try it Imperial 155 146 Try it Institute of Education 4 5 Try it Keele 10 10 Try it Kent 15 15 Try it Kent Institute of Art and Design 2 1 Try it King Alfred's College, Winchester 5 4 Try it King's College London (KCL) 33 32 Try it Kingston 3 3 Try it Lampeter 2 2 Try it Lancaster 3 2 Try it Leeds 106 101 Try it Leeds Metropolitan University (LMU) 3 2 Try it Leicester Used .le.ac.uk to differentiate from Newcastle, Bournville, Skelmersdale, Isle and Keele 16 16 Try it Lincolnshire and Humberside 2 1 Try it Liverpool 22 23 Try it Liverpool John Moore 17 15 Try it Liverpool Hope 1 1 Try it London Business School 7 5 Try it London Guildhall 1 1 Try it London Institute 8 6 Try it University of London (Institutes) 6 6 Try it London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) 19 16 Try it London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine 3 3 Try it Loughborough Note <www.lboro.ac.uk> and not <www.lut.ac.uk> 24 22 Try it Luton 6 8 Try it Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) 66 59 Try it Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) 43 41 Try it Manchester 152 142 Try it Manchester Business School 1 1 Try it Medicine, University of Wales College of 2 2 Try it Middlesex 46 38 Try it Napier 33 32 Try it Newcastle 49 41 Try it Newman 3 3 Try it Newport 5 5 Try it North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education (NEWI) 2 2 Try it North London (UNL) 8 8 Try it North Riding College Higher Education Corporation 1 1 Try it Northampton, University College 1 1 Try it Northern College of Education 10 10 Try it Northern School of Contemporary Dance 1 1 Try it University of Northumbria at Newcastle (UNN) 13 14 Try it Norwich School of Art and Design 1 1 Try it Nottingham Trent 28 22 Try it Nottingham 28 27 Try it Oxford 247 235 Try it Oxford Brookes 0 0 Try it Paisley 15 2 Try it Plymouth 31 28 Try it Portsmouth Used .port.ac.uk to differentiate from Newport 32 31 Try it Queen Margaret University College 1 1 Try it Queen Mary and Westfield College 69 62 Try it Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication 1 1 Try it Reading 89 89 Try it Ripon and York St John, College of 2 2 Try it Robert Gordon University 6 4 Try it Roehampton 3 2 Try it Rose Bruford College 1 1 Try it Royal Academy of Music 1 1 Try it Royal College of Art 16 13 Try it Royal College of Music 1 1 Try it Royal Holloway 42 41 Try it Royal Northern College of Music 4 4 Try it Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama 2 2 Try it Royal Veterinary College 1 1 Try it St Andrews 37 38 Try it St George's Hospital Medical School 8 5 Try it St Mark and St John, College of 3 3 Try it St Mary's College 1 1 Try it Salford 31 31 Try it School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 1 1 Try it Scottish Agricultural College 3 3 Try it Sheffield Hallam University 15 16 Try it Sheffield 28 25 Try it South Bank University 19 18 Try it Southampton 160 162 Try it Southampton Institute 3 2 Try it Staffordshire 5 5 Try it Stirling 30 26 Try it Strathclyde 49 46 Try it Sunderland 22 19 Try it Surrey Institute of Art and Design 2 3 Try it Surrey 23 21 Try it Sussex 15 16 Try it Swansea Institute of Higher Education 1 1 Try it Swansea 30 26 Try it Teeside 13 13 Try it Thames Valley 15 15 Try it Trinity and All Saints 1 1 Try it Trinity College of Music 1 1 Try it Trinity College, Carmarthen 1 1 Try it Ulster 25 3 Try it University College London 117 110 Try it Warwick 41 40 Try it Welsh College of Music and Drama 1 1 Try it West of England, University of (UWE) 14 11 Try it Westhill College 1 1 Try it Westminster College 0 0 Try it Westminster 7 7 Try it Wolverhampton 67 63 Try it Worcester, University College 0 0 Try it Writtle College 1 1 Try it Wye College 0 0 Try it York 26 22 Try it Total 3,985 3,773   Note Four institutions were reported as having 0 Web servers (Oxford Brookes, Westminster College, Worcester University College and Wye College).
This is believed to be due to an error in the data collection.
The data for the initial survey of Coventry University was lost.
Table 2 gives a summary of the top 5 web sites with the largest number of web servers as reported by Netcraft.
Table 2: Top 5 UK HEI Web Sites With The Most Number of Web Servers Institution No.
of Web Servers (1 May 2000) No.
of Web Servers (5 June 2000) Current Value Cambridge 338 318 Try it Edinburgh 248 244 Try it Oxford 247 235 Try it Glasgow 182 174 Try it Southampton 160 162 Try it Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "A Survey Of Numbers of UK University Web Servers" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Minotaur: Widening Access Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Minotaur: Widening Access Buzz database Citation BibTex RIS Lyndon Pugh argues that there must be much more to widening access than changing rules and regulations.
Looking at the ACRL web pages I noticed that their set of guidelines for extended campus library services was drawn up in 1981, revised in 1988, approved by the ALA Standards Committee in 1990 and is still on their web site.
It is a noble and earnest document stuffed with investigation, assessment, profiling, planning, consultation, co-ordination, implementation, finance, personnel, services and standards.
I know that librarianship is essentially a practical calling.
I know also that one of our besetting miseries is over-management, but this seems to me to be symptomatic of a malaise that affects a lot of our activities.
We are too concerned with process and it is often a comfort to take refuge in the practicalities rather than indulge in a little bit of iconoclastic behaviour that might pay dividends in the future.
It is not surprising that the ACRL can post a document about distance learning support that is well into its second decade and might as well have been written by a Martian for all its awareness of some of the things that have been happening over the last 10 years or so.
Among the intriguing things about how we deal with widening access the most striking is a reflection of our almost terminal inability to understand the nature of change.
It is our great misfortune that along with the army of Ancient Rome, some of the Chinese dynasties and the Roman Catholic Church, libraries are bureaucracies sans pareil.
Until the recent past, there has never been an activity more suited to a bureaucracy than running a library service.
The army of Ancient Rome and the Chinese Emperors have gone.
In the case of the Roman Catholic Church it is too soon to judge its success, and it will in any case be set against a different kind of yardstick.
Widening access is a part of technological change, and the worry is that we will misjudge the nature of this process and its consequences for our organisations.
What is coming out of the flurry of activity over the last 18 months or so is to do with partnerships, sharing, new concepts of ownership, new roles, new skills, differentiation, potential competition, diversity and so on.
Although there are exceptions there is plenty of evidence to support the contention that our traditional and conventional organisations will trundle forward to deal with things that are unpredictable and present a serious threat to the status quo.
Technology itself offers us an opportunity to create flexible organisations that possess fast decision making processes and make the best of all the abilities of all the staff through structures that are flatter, more responsive and have power centres that are closer to the user.
If we are going to deal with disparate, often non-traditional groups of users, increasingly controlling their own learning, with different delivery mechanisms and tutorial functions, with minimal structural needs, and in a situation where the idea of the library as a physical entity does not make sense to an increasing number of people, then organisational change is needed on our part.
Widening access is also a campus issue.
The ACRL Guidelines for Extended Campus Library Services specifically excluded the use of distance learning delivery mechanisms on campus.
Yet the virtual library and the virtual university are upon us.
Coming along with them are a breed of super technicians emerging from the general development of on line services and the electronic and digital library.
Some of these new men, and women, are trained librarians; others are not.
This brings us to another problem with widening access, which is that we are horribly misjudging the future skills issue.
This one is different.
Until now, the professional skills of the librarian have always been esoteric: very few people, even the anoraks of the profession, actually used these skills outside work.
The skills of new technology will increasingly become a part of everyday life, and more and more of the information organisation, retrieval and exploitation skills will be done by machines following simpler and simpler command mechanisms.
Not only will users in general be able to control the supply and use of their own information needs, but so will academics.
It is increasingly possible in the new world of the web for teaching departments to set up, maintain and deliver their own databases related to their own courses.
The departmental library is coming back in a different guise, and the balance of power, aided by technology, is shifting away from centralised control and distribution.
By agreeing to crazy things like devolved budgets we have actually helped this process of decentralisation along, while at the same time we are trying to maintain the rigid organisation patterns that have worked for over 100 years but will not work for the next 100, or even 10.
Yet you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of serious and perceptive contributions to the skills debate in the professional press.
Widening access is going to be a key development for information services, but only if we look at it in its context.
This is as a part of organisational change equipping us to deal with the unpredictable and to cope with the unforeseen changes that will surely come as technology develops and patterns of study and learning change.
It will not be enough to tinker with borrowing regulations, use positive discrimination to assist groups with special problems, embrace customer satisfaction, wheel on focus groups and user surveys or extend quality assurance and quality control.
This, in the words of Basil Fawlty, is “ the art of the bleedin’ obvious.” We need something more.
Author details Lyndon Pugh, Email: lyndon@pewter.u-net.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Personalization of Web Services: Opportunities and Challenges Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Personalization of Web Services: Opportunities and Challenges Buzz data software framework html database wireless dissemination portal usability infrastructure archives zip metadata thesaurus accessibility browser identifier vocabularies cataloguing graphics passwords soap personalisation e-business rslp interoperability cookie privacy url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Monica Bonett gives an overview of personalization on the World Wide Web and discusses ideas for development within resource discovery systems.
World Wide Web services operate in a cut-throat environment where even satisfied customers and growth do not guarantee continued existence.
As users become ever more proficient in their use of the web and are exposed to a wider range of experiences, they may well become more demanding, and their definition of what constitutes good service may be refined.
Personalization is an ever-growing feature of on-line services that is manifested in different ways and contexts, harnessing a series of developing technologies.
It is the latest carrot being offered to woo the (so-perceived) fickle Web User and win over their loyalty of custom.
Will personalised service become part of users’ standard definition of good service?
If this is what users are expecting, how can resource discovery and learning services evolve in this direction so that they meet the challenge?
This article looks at some examples and products providing personalization, explains the terminology and the technology, and asks whether on-line services that support resource discovery and learning should be embracing this new concept, and how.
What is Personalization?
Personalization involves a process of gathering user-information during interaction with the user, which is then used to deliver appropriate content and services, tailor-made to the user’s needs.
The aim is to improve the user’s experience of a service.
In a marketing environment, the purposes of applying information technology to provide personalization are expressed by the Personalization Consortium [1] as to: Better serve the customer by anticipating needs; Make the interaction efficient and satisfying for both parties; Build a relationship that encourages the customer to return for subsequent purchases.
From other perspectives, personalization is described as being about “building customer loyalty by building a meaningful one-to-one relationship”[2].
The goal of creating customer relationships through personalised services in an on-line context is encouraged and promoted in [3], through reflections on the satisfactions, in the “real world”, of being known on an individual basis and treated as a familiar face.
Elsewhere, effective personalization is compared to “a delightful experience…like walking into a restaurant and being greeted by name, or having your favourite bookseller pull out a copy of a book they just know you’ll really like” [4].
User satisfaction is the ultimate aim of personalization.
It is motivated by the recognition that a user has needs, and meeting them successfully is likely to lead to a satisfying relationship and re-use of the services offered.
Beyond the common goal, however, there is great diversity in how personalization can be achieved.
Information about the user can be obtained from a history of previous sessions, or through interaction in real time.
“Needs” may be those stated by the customer as well as those perceived by the business [1].
Once the user’s needs are established, rules and techniques, such as “collaborative filtering”, are used to decide what content might be appropriate.
A distinction is often made between customisation and personalization [4],[5].
Customisation occurs when the user can configure an interface and create a profile manually, adding and removing elements in the profile.
The control of the look and/or content is explicit and is user-driven, i.e.
the user is involved actively in the process and has control.
In personalization, on the other hand, the user is seen as being passive, or at least somewhat less in control.
It is the website that monitors, analyses and reacts to behaviour, for example, content offered can be based on tracking surfing decisions.
This could be done in choosing adverts.
If the customer selects a product “A” and a product “B”, then the “special offer on product C” might be advertised.
A personalised service need not be based on individual user behaviour or user input [4].
The content of a website can be tailored for a predefined audience, based on previous research of a defined community, and providing different sections on the website for each audience identified.
This approach would give tailored content without explicitly building the one-to-one relationship that requires gathering knowledge on individuals.
The following are examples that show the different kinds of personalised services encountered.
They illustrate the features on some popular sites that represent the range of services currently on offer.
Information provision (including news), and purchasing, appear to be leaders in the field.
Services that allow great selectivity of the content coverage are typified by MyYahoo.
A specific application area, (customised television listings), is also described.
Using personalization features to assist in purchasing is illustrated by the website for GMBuyPower; the value of the service is that it supports the building of a detailed and specific one-time purchase.
For those who want to make a longer-term investment in using a personalised service, repeated purchases are supported by sites such as staples.com.
Finally, Amazon.com provides an example of how personalised recommendations are employed as a marketing tool.
My Yahoo [6] After registering, the user can customize a layout and select content from a choice of modules.
Modules include news items, stock prices, weather reports, TV listings, traffic reports and several others.
The user can control which modules are relevant to their needs, and the arrangement of content on the screen.
The content of the modules is updated – the frequency of updating can also be determined by the user.
Similar services for information provision are Wells Fargo [7] and the News Network Headline Feed Program [8].
The latter is a program to deliver chosen news headlines to a designated website.
The selection of content on the WellsFargo siteTelevision Listings PTV [9] is a personalised TV portal site targeted at the UK and Irish markets.
PTV offers full listings without requiring user registration and has themed guides which users can browse.
The themes include Comedy, Drama, Soap operas, Music, Sports, Kids, Games and Quizzes, and Food and Gardening.
Alternatively, personalised guides can be received after registering.
These are available either as HTML pages or as WML for WAP-enabled wireless devices.
In the personalised guide one can pick preferred viewing times, genre, programmes and channels.
PTV also learns about your viewing preferences over time, and using this information it automatically constructs a TV guide to match your viewing tastes.
Thus the user information is tailored to contain those programs that a user has explictly expressed an interest in (through their profile), as well as others that PTV suggests will be relevant to their tastes.
The user can provide an opinion on the suggestions by giving them a rating.
The daily guides can also be received by email.
The PTV system is discussed further in [10].
Screenshot showing the selection of themes on the PTV television listings siteGMBuypower [11] This site guides the user through the steps of buying a car – researching options, building up the description and locating a local dealer that can provide that choice of car.
Criteria for selecting a suitable car can be provided by first specifying make, body style and price range (all optional).
If a car that fits the general description is found, one can go on to choose the specifics: colour (interior and exterior) and exact model.
The system can then locate a nearby dealer given a zip code or city/state name or dealer details.
The system can also be used flexibly, for example to find a dealer for a make of car at a particular city.
Another feature allows the user to make comparisons of their chosen model with other makes of car.
The MyFiles facility allows the user to save information about vehicles that are being considered, customizations, messages from dealers (the site can be used as an intermediary to make ‘anonymous’ contact with dealers).
Using this last feature requires registration.
A user with a well-formed description of the vehicle desired can skip the researching steps and go directly to locating a dealer for that car.
Screenshot of the GMBuypower siteStaples [12] This is the US-based site for purchasing office supplies (the UK version states that it should support on-line buying in 2002).
The products that are bought most often can be composed into a list of favourite items.
Email reminders for reordering can also be requested.
Browsing can be customised by using the Favourite Aisles feature to create lists of the product categories that are visited more frequently.
Apart from individual profiles, group profiles can also be defined, for use by companies/organisations so that groups of people (e.g.
employees) can make use of commonly set up features.
A screenshot from the Staples site explaining the use of the Favourite Items featureAmazon [13] Amongst its other features, Amazon will make suggestions for products that should be of interest to the customer whilst they are browsing the site.
Amazon determines a user’s interests from previous purchases as well as ratings given to titles.
The user’s interests are compared with those of other customers to generate titles which are then recommended during interaction.
Recommendations for books that are already owned by the customer can be removed from the recommendations list if the customer rates the title.
Removing titles from recommendations list by giving ratings helps to generate new recommendations [14].
Screenshot of Amazon’s ratings facilityThe Science A look at the enabling technologies that determine what information is gathered and how it is used to deliver the above services.
The ability to deliver the experiences described above rests squarely on the acquisition of a picture of the user.
The user has attributes, interests, desires, needs – some or all of which need to be captured and processed.
The techniques used to complete the picture of the user are varied and, as mentioned, may engage the user to different degrees, directly or indirectly.
Futhermore, there are other differences in how the ‘appropriate content’ that matches the users needs is determined and delivered.
In this section we explain some of the technologies in use, describing some of their advantages and disadvantages.
Fill-in Profile A profile is built through active involvement of the user, typically through fill-in forms.
Users can often control the type of content provided, as well as the look and feel of the interface, by indicating their choices through their profile.
The picture of the user built through the profile may consist of generic information (such as age or area code).
It may also include explicitly stated choice of specific content, such as a general area of interest (e.g.
genre of television programes), or news for a particular football team or sports.
Users could also specify general preferences for low-graphics versions of sites and other characteristics of interaction with the site.
This style of customisation requires the users to exert most effort and make the initial investment; it depends on the motivation and the ability of the user to set up complex customization features.
If users are reluctant to spend time setting up complex personalization features [5] [31] the sevice may remain underutilised.
One advantage gained when users do fill in a profile is that the information is available upfront – it does not require the information to build up through repeated use.
However the profile may remain static and not change with the user’s changing needs (unless the user puts in the effort to update it and it is easy to do so).
Click-stream Analysis/ Web Usage Mining Systems This is the technique of collecting data about user movements on a website.
It can be used to record a track of the links visited, including where a user came from, their route through the website and their destination on exiting the site.
Link analysis can include observations of the links clicked and their associated position on the screen, time spent within a page and making connections between links visited and consequences (e.g.
purchase made).
This method of learning about users from their behaviour imposes the least extra work on the user.
However it is also the most subtle since it happens transparently.
The information gathered can be intensively processed, giving insight into the make up of visitors using the site.
It can be used for characterising users and segmenting customers.
Data collected by this technique and used for group profiling can be anonymised before analysis, so that an individual user’s privacy is protected.
Click-stream analysis can become part of a process where rule-based systems are built to determine what content to offer.
Delivery of content is automated according to rules, based on market analysis.
Collaborative Filtering This technique compares a user’s tastes with those of other users in order to build up a picture of like-minded people.
The choice of content is then based on the assumption that this particular user will value that which the like-minded people also enjoyed.
The preferences of the community of like-minded people are used to predict appropriate content.
The user’s tastes are either inferred from their previous actions (for example buying a book, or viewing a product is assumed to show an interest (or taste) for that product) or else measured directly by asking the user to rate products.
This method has an advantage of speed and efficiency in computation, thus delivering rapid feedback.
The reliance on a ‘critical mass’ of users can be a problem for collaborative filtering; a small sample population may lead to lower-quality recommendations.
The quality of recommendations increases with the size of the user population.
Another potential limitation is the inability to make a recommendation for an unusual user if a match with a like-minded set cannot be found.
Collaborative filtering may be less important as a technique when categories of users and preferences are already well-known and well-defined.
Cookies Cookies are not particularly new in Internet terms but they continue to be useful for personalization.
The cookie is a small data packet sent by a web site and stored on the browser side, that can be re-used on the server-side (the website that sent the cookie) as a unique identifier for a user.
Cookies provide a means of tracing users.
The can ‘tag’ the user, or rather the user’s browser files, so that the browser can be identified as a unique entity every time a return visit is made to the site that issued the cookie.
The cookie identifies the web user on a continuing basis within sessions and across user sessions.
The data about the user that is stored as cookies in their browser can be recalled by the issuing sites on subsequent visits.
It can be updated on repeat visits.
It can form the link to profile-specific information stored on the server (provider) side.
The cookie can be used to store other data about the user – this can be either data that the user has provided (such as through a fill-in form), the time and date of the last visit, or other session information.
Some Examples Personalized services in the educational information sector.
Personalization is a relatively new and challenging area of web content delivery.
Cliff Lynch [15] remarked on the apparent reluctance of libraries to take up personalization as an innovation, although they have usually been aggressive in adopting automation technology.
Librarians have traditionally acted as intermediaries in information provision.
They participate actively in the selection of information to be made available to their ‘customers’.
This role is continued in the selection of on-line resources.
There is a need to choose appropriate collections of digital resources for users (be they databases or subject-based internet resource catalogues).
Individual items can also be identified and described.
Personalization can be seen as a technology that empowers the user to become more participative in the process; it can be employed by the intermediaries as an assistive tool in the selection and filtering of information to provide the users with what they need most.
The following completed or on-going efforts provide evidence that there is already an awareness of and interest in the need for personalisation services.
Headline and MyLibrary are applications for libraries developed along the MyYahoo-style portals model.
Scholnet seeks to provide personalised email alerts on new resources to researchers.
Headline [16] Hybrid Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment (Headline) is one of the Hybrid Libraries projects funded under the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Phase 3 programme of the UK Higher Education Joint Information Systems Committee.
The aims are to design and implement a working model of the hybrid library, in actual academic environments.
The project presents the user with a wide range of library resources, regardless of physical form, via a common Web-based interface.
The HeadLine model for the hybrid library is based around the user, with a user-dependent managed environment as a fundamental part of the project design.
The project created the Headline Personal Information Environment (PIE) [17] to provide a tailored responsive service to its users.
The user has a ‘My PIE’ page where he or she can group favourite or most used resources from the other pages.
Users can also change the look and feel of the overall PIE.
Additionally, logos and links to institutional pages can be included to brand the PIE to its location.
The content can also be customised at institutional level and subject pages fixed by the partner site so that the user always has an accurate and up-to-date view of the recommended resources in a particular subject area.
The evolution of this service within the context of the DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) is revealed in [18].
Scholnet [19] Scholnet is a research and development project supported by the IST Programme of the European Union.
It aims to develop a digital library infrastructure to support the communication and the collaboration within networked scholarly communities.
The project investigated how to provide personalised information dissemination to users by alerting them when new information, corresponding to a profile that they had created, became available.
Through a questionnaire the investigators determined how the users preferred to receive the alert, and the timing of these alerts.
The majority of those questioned felt that an email would be a good means of receiving the alert.
This was the method suggested by the investigators.
There were also comments though that an email might be too intrusive, and a message that appears on logging onto the web page is better.
Having access to the alerts on-demand gives the user more control over the service.
Respondents indicated that their profile would consist of several topics, and they would prefer to have the option to use free keywords and not be restricted to a predefined classification scheme for expressing their topics of interest in their profile.
MyLibrary [20] MyLibrary is a user-centered front-end to the NCSU Libraries collection of Internet and information resources.
It provides a customisable interface to several types of information that include full-text databases, data sets, bibliographic databases, electronic texts of all kinds, ready reference materials and direct access to librarians.
After registering, the username and password can be used form any web browser to access the resources.
Customisable options are used to select which items should be displayed.
The system allows librarians to send messages or information (like lists of recently received books) on a regular basis, if these features are switched on.
Related to this project is a mailing list [21] supporting a community of people who want to discuss the development of personalized library interfaces such as but not limited to MyLibrary@NCState.
The mailing list archive [22] is publicly available.
Technical and other issues related to MyLibrary services are discussed in [23].
The Challenges How to provide personalization services so that they result in tangible benefits for the user, focusing on applications in resource discovery and learning environments.
Resource discovery and learning services that want to provide personalization features on their sites would like to do so with the confidence that users are going to notice the benefits when using them and that the service will consequently be more attractive as a whole.
Some of the challenges presented by personalization are quite general, and it is useful to learn from the experiences of other sectors, including those covered in the previous sections.
Looking at problems faced in different contexts may provide insight in the form of transferable solutions.
For example, buyers will exhibit information-seeking behaviour which may be similar to a student searching for on-line learning resources.
The Argus Framework The Argus Center for Information Architecture [24] proposes that a solid information architecture, based on user, content and business needs, will provide the foundation for all personalization efforts.
Their assumption for the study is that the system will apply business rules to profiles of users and content to provide a variable set of user interfaces.
They describe a framework [25] in which users and content meet at the user interface through the process of personalization.
The information architecture features three components: Users have profiles that represent their interests and behaviours; likewise content is profiled, based on a set of attributes that are assigned specific values; the business context has certain rules that govern how personalization happens.
These rules determine which content to display and how to present it, by matching attributes of the content with attributes captured in the user profile.
What is interesting is that subject gateways and other learning resource providers are very likely to have prepared a structured profile of their content in the form of metadata, already being used to provide better general searching services and descriptions of resources.
In building a personalised service around the framework, the two missing components that have to be completed are the profiles of the user and the rules to determine what content to present to which user and under what conditions, i.e.
the ‘business rules’.
The Argus framework describes the concept of a “vocabulary layer”, which supports a “profile” layer.
Profiles of content and users are descriptions of their characteristics.
The characteristics are expressesed as attributes and their possible values.
One method of providing control and interoperability of profiles is through controlled vocabularies, which determine the set of acceptable attributes and values.
Controlled vocabularies for describing the content to assist in resource discovery is a well studied subject, and the issues surrounding interoperability between them (such as use of thesauri) are also well documented as for example in [26], [27].
Also relevant is the work of HILT (High-Level Thesaurus) [28], a one year project jointly funded by the RSLP (Research Support Libraries Programme) and JISC (Joint Information Systems Commision).
The purpose of the project is to study and report on the problem of cross-searching and browsing by subject across a range of communities, services, and service or resource type.
Less well developed are the vocabularies for describing the profiles of users, and this is an area that deserves more attention in the development of systematic approaches to personalization services.
One notable development is the IMS [29] Learner Information Packaging specification [30].
Learner information is divided into eleven categories.
Amongst others, the interest category can contain hobby and recreational activity information; the accessibility category provides for physical (e.g.
large print) and technical (computer platform) preference descriptions.
Subject Gateways would also have to determine rules that describe how content is matched up to a user.
The information architecture framework proposed by the Argus Centre for Information Architecture provides a basis for discussion between the various stakeholders.
It can be used to focus discussion on what type of system is needed and how to support it.
Other significant issues have to be addressed and these are discussed below.
Establishing the User’s Needs Any service must start by deciding who the users are and by describing their needs.
It is generally a good idea to talk to the users.
Target groups must be determined as well as what content is appropriate for those groups.
There may be different criteria for grouping: by age or educational level (HE, primary etc.).
Some groups of users can be easily defined, but others will be unknown!
Resources can be studied and some could be classified as being more suitable for one group or another.
Subject gateway resources are of course, by definition, already grouped according to subject, but that is only one way of classifying them.
Additionally, different sectors (HE,FE) have different classification systems.
If the users are less well-known they may need more careful thought and study.
It is at this stage that the service has to decide if more individualised needs exist to make personalization on a per-user basis useful.
Indeed, a decision may be taken that the group is so well-defined that each user/customer does not need to be indiviually identified.
(Sometimes a simple implementation will be both possible and beneficial.
For example, a library may store user’s details so that they don’t have to be entered every time that they are interacting with the library system.)
Usability Personalization must be designed to be useful and usable.
Jakob Nielsen [5] stresses the importance of not using personalization as an excuse for poor design.
He emphasises that a web site should first of all allow users to use their natural intelligence to make choices.
This is made possible by providing comprehensive coverage and understandable options, so that the user can make an easy choice, best suited to their needs at that point in time, within a navigable, well-designed information space.
Nielsen advocates that making the choices available is preferable to second-guessing user’s needs at the expense of limiting their control.
Nielsen does admit that personalization can work in some cases, and explains where and how he thinks the Amazon.com service has been successful.
The developers involved in the Yahoo personalization services give their own insight on usability based on experience of a service introduced as early as July 1996 [31].
Their advice is to cater for those who want to do sophisticated customisation, as well as those who will do none.
Some users will decide not to put in the effort to use the customization features provided.
This may be for a variety of reasons.
Some users do not need complex customisations, others lack the confidence to experiment with different settings.
It is therefore necessary to provide adequate defaults to meet basic needs.
Conversley, some power users will use tools in unexpected ways, and as far as possible they should not be limited in what they can do.
Usage patterns can be studied to learn more about how the service is being used – this may reveal ways that the developers had not originally thought of and that could be developed and made more accessible to the less-savvy users.
Ethics (Privacy) Because much of personalization entails intensive collection and use of personal information there are implications for the respect of user privacy and protection of information supplied by users.
For active personalization, at least, the user must part explicitly with information in order to start benefitting from the service/features.
Once users see benefits, they may be more willing to surrender information, provided they know what’s going to be done with it.
Moreover, in the case of passive collection of information, the user may often be unaware of what data is being given away.
Guarding information involves not only encryption of passwords and sensitive data, but also (possibly external) evaluation of procedures [31].
A recommended practice is to declare a privacy statement (or disclosure statement) which describes exactly what kind of information is gathered and the policies about how that information is used and shared.
P3P [32] is a W3C proposal for controlling the use of personal information on websites.
P3P provides a way for websites to disclose how they handle user information, and for users to describe their privacy preferences.
P3P-enabled Web sites make this information available in a standard, machine-readable format.
P3P-enabled browsers can “read” this snapshot automatically and compare it to the consumer’s own set of privacy preferences.
The aim of P3P is to “communicate to users, simply and automatically, a Web site’s stated privacy policies, and how they compare with the user’s own policy preferences.
P3P does not set minimum standards for privacy, nor can it monitor whether sites adhere to their own stated procedures.” [33] Building Relationships One significant factor in web-enabled services is that clients are not tied to any physical location and deal online with organisations anywhere.
In the banking sector, several factors have led to the situation where customers in the personal and small business sectors do not have a personal relationship with their bank mangers.
Wells and Wolfers [34] propose that one function for personalization is to help recreate the human element that understands the customer and offers the personalized touch.
A parallel can be made for the distance learning and further education environment, where personal contact is limited by physical proximity.
The other side of the coin is where the emphasis is placed not on the one-to-one relationship between the service provider and the user, but on supporting communication amongst users.
The value is in the building of communities, facilitated by the service provider.
Such communities can be built on top of personalization.
Collaborative filtering, which already identifies matches between like-minded persons, could be used to support community building.
The principle is that of share-and-connect.
Measuring Success Measuring the effectiveness of a personalization web service involves defining metrics and feedback techniques [35].
To measure success it is first necessary to understand what success means.
Success is related to the goals of the service – relevant questions are what type of visitor is being attracted, what should the visitor be able to do, and what does the service want the visitor to do?
In e-business the click-through metric measures the frequency of clicks on a link after it is displayed (e.g.
an ad banner); the look-to-buy metric measures outcomes that result from display (e.g.
sales).
The use of these techniques is described further in [35].
Finally, what kinds of personalization features would you like to see developed?
We are eager to hear your ideas.
Email comments to imesh-toolkit@jiscmail.ac.uk References [1] The Personalization Consortium http://www.personalization.org/personalization.html [2] Riecken, D.
(ed.)
Personalized Views of Personalization, Communications of the ACM, 43 (8), August 2000, 27-28.
[3] Tebbe, M., Between the Lines, InfoWorld Electronic, 20 (16), 20 April 1998. http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchive.pl?/98/16/o13-16.136.htm [4] SIGIA-L mailing list archive http://www.listquest.com/lq/search.html?ln=sigia Subject: Customize vs. Personalize [5] Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for October 4, 1998: Personalization is Over-Rated http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981004.html [6] MyYahoo!
http://my.yahoo.com/?myHome [7] WellsFargo http://www.wellsfargo.com/ [8] News Network Headline Feed Program http://www.individual.com/network/headlines/ [9] PTV http://www.ptv.ie/ [10] Smyth, B and Cotter, P., A Personalized Television Listings Service, Communications of the ACM, 43 (8), August 2000, 107-111.
[11] GMBuyPower http://www.gmbuypower.com/ [12] Staples http://www.staples.com/ [13] Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/ [14] amazon.co.uk Instant Recommendations Help http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/instant-recs/instant-recs/help.html/026-3634968-0937225 [15] Lynch, C.A., From Automation to Transformation: Forty Years of Libraries and Information Technology in Higher Education, Educause Review, 35(1), January/February 2000, 60-68. http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/pp060068.pdf [16] Headline Project http://www.headline.ac.uk/ [17] Headline PIE http://www.headline.ac.uk/public/diss/ http://www.lita.org/ital/ital1904.html http://www.headline.ac.uk/public/diss/jp-PIE-HybLib-model/ [18] Paschoud, J., Making the PIE …GEL, Cultivate Interactive, 4, 7 May 2001. http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/pie/ [19] Scholnet http://www.ercim.org/scholnet/ [20] MyLibrary Project Page http://my.lib.ncsu.edu/ [21] MyLibrary mailing List Web Page (details about how to join) http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/development/mylibrary/mailing-list.shtml [22] MyLibrary mailing list archive http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/lists/mylib-dev/ [23] Lease Morgan, E., Personalized Library Interfaces, Exploit Interactive, 6, 26 June 2000. http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue6/libraries/ [24] The Argus Centre for Information Architecture http://argus-acia.com/ [25] Instone, K., Information Architecture and Personalization, Argus Associates, December 2000. http://argus-acia.com/white_papers/personalization.html [26] Hunter, J., MetaNet A Metadata Term Thesaurus to Enable Semantic Interoperability Between Metadata Domains, Journal of Digital Information, 1 (8), 8 February 2000. http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v01/i08/Hunter/ [27] Doerr, M., Semantic Problems of Thesaurus Mapping, Journal of Digital information, 1 (8), 6 March 2000. http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v01/i08/Doerr/ [28] HILT http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ [29] IMS Global Learning Consortium http://www.imsproject.org/ [30] IMS Learner Information Specification http://www.imsproject.org/profiles/lipbest01a.html#1.1 [31] Manber, U., Patel, A. and Robison, J., Experience with Personalization on Yahoo!, Communications of the ACM, 43 (8), August 2000, 35 39.
[32] P3P Platform for Privacy Preferences http://www.w3c.org/P3P/ [33] P3P 1.0 A New Standard in Online Privacy http://www.w3.org/P3P/brochure.html [34] Wells, N and Wolfers, J., Finance with a Personalized Touch, Communications of the ACM, 43 (8), August 2000, 31-34.
[35] Schonberg, E et al., Measuring Success, Communications of the ACM,43 (8), August 2000, 53-57.
Acknowledgements Research for this article was undertaken as part of the research activity for the IMesh Toolkit Project, a project for providing a toolkit and architecture for subject gateways, funded by JISC/NSF.
http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/.
The author acknowledges the valuable input of Rachel Heery (UKOLN , assistant director and Research and Development team leader) in developing the ideas for the article.
Author Details Monica Bonett Software Developer, Research and Development UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking) University of Bath Email: M.Bonett@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Personalization of Web Services: Opportunities and Challenges” Author: Monica Bonett Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/personalization/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Institutional Web Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Institutional Web Management Buzz data software rdf html database xml metadata css accessibility browser windows cache mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on the Netskills Institutional Web Management Workshop held in Newcastle.
In July 1997 a 2 day workshop on Running An Institutional Web Service was held at King’s College London.
As reported in Ariadne issue 11 [1] the workshop proved very successful.
Comments received on the workshop evaluation form indicated that participants would have likely a longer workshop and would have liked certain topics, including web design, database integration and management issues, to be covered in more depth.
In addition several participants would have likely more time to be devoted to group sessions.
This year’s workshop aimed at institutional web managers took onboard these suggestions.
The workshop, which was organised jointly by UK Web Focus and Netskills, was held at Newcastle University from lunchtime on Tuesday 15th September till lunchtime on Thursday 17th September.
An initial report on the workshop is given below.
Review "Brilliant!
Useful, informative, friendly.
Superlatives are appropriate.
I want to come to the next one.
We should have at least one a year."
just one of the many positive comments given on the workshop evaluation forms.
Other comments received included: "Well-organised.
Presentations were really interesting and useful.
I really appreciated the parallel sessions. "
"Renewed my enthusiasm for the Web" "Well worth attending.
It was useful to have the opportunity to discuss problems I thought were unique to my institution and to hear what is going on within the community.
I also learnt more about web developments which I just do not have the time to find out about while at work."
"Really useful – it gave me a great deal of enthusiasm & confidence in my job!
(It’s easy to get demoralised when trying to face all these web issues in relative isolation)."
These comments appear to reflect the majority of the participants’ views.
The initial analysis of the workshop evaluations forms show that the workshop content was given an overall rating of 4.45 on a scale of 1 (for poor) to 5 (for excellent).
No fewer than 28 participants gave the workshop the maximum rating of 5, with 25 giving it a rating of 4 and only 3 giving a rating of 3.
Nobody gave a rating lower than this.
So what impressed the participants so much?
A summary of the workshop programme is given below.
Workshop Programme: Presentations The workshop programme included presentations from twelve members of the UK Higher Education community, together with a presentation from a member of the British Council and a commercial design company.
Unfortunately the two presentations from commercial companies which were intended to open the workshop were cancelled about half an hour before the start!
What could have been a disastrous start was rescued by the flexibility of the workshop speakers who were willing to reschedule their talks.
Many thanks to Brian Lantz (UCE), Andrew Aird (Goldsmiths College) and Jon Wallis (University of Wolverhampton) for their flexibility in this matter.
A brief summary of the talks is given below.
‘Dumbing Down’ Making the UCE Web Site More Accessible [2] This talk by Brian Lantz (UCE) reviewed the recent redesign of the UCE web site which involved simplifying the website in collaboration with a commercial web design company.
The talk, which was updated a few days before the workshop in the light of decisions which had been made, commented on the success of this process and provided pointers to how UCE intend to develop the site, with commercial support over the next 18 months.
Does Web Content Grow on Trees?
[3] This talk by Andrew Aird of Goldsmiths College, described the reorganisation of the web site at Goldsmiths College into three separate "trees" for external information, internal communications and a teaching and learning web environment.
Publishing And Devolving Maintenance of a Prospectus [4] This talk by Paul Downing (University of Bristol) described the approaches to publishing the University of Bristol prospectus in print and online formats The talk included a demonstration of the system for displaying and managing the prospectus content, which is based on the Filemaker Pro database.
DataWeb: Three Worlds Collide [5] This talk by Victoria Marshall of RAL described Rutherford Appleton Laboratory’s DataWeb service, which uses Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) technology on a Windows NT server and a back-end relational database system.
The talk described the advantages and pitfalls of this approach.
Information Management and the Institutional Website Promoting and Supporting Organisational Change [6] This talk by Jon Wallis of Wolverhampton University suggested the need for a methodical approach to support (and survive) the process of organisational change required in providing information on an institutional website.
The talk was based on a combination of direct experience of running a University website and academic research into corporate information management.
"He Left the Course 3 Months Ago?
": Web-based Front-ends to Student Databases [7] This talk by Nick Gould of the University of Manchester described efforts to manage large student numbers by using Web-based interfaces to databases.
The system developed aim to allow teaching staff easy access to up-to-date student information such as tutorial attendance and work done records, thus allowing academics to spend less time on "paper-chasing".
The presentation discussed the development-time and techniques employed in developing Web-based systems and look at problems such as meeting user requirements.
Events Online [8] This talk by Stephen Emmott (KCL) presented an events database that uses server-side XML to let the events content publish itself.
Events submitted via either a form or free text are served to the browser in the College house-style allowing the institution to carry the publishing workload rather than the individual or their department.
The Use of Online Databases to Manage Student Support and Learning [9] This talk by Terry Brown of the Faculty of Medicine Computing Centre at the University of Newcastle focussed upon the use and development of Web interfaces to relational databases housing student information.
It demonstrated the effective use of current and emerging internet technologies such as HTML, CGI and DBMS and looked at the functions XML and SSL can play in facilitating remote administration and secure access to online databases to support students and tutors.
The talk highlighted examples from a number of University and National projects.
Deploying New Web Technologies [10] In this talk Brian Kelly (UKOLN) gave a review of the web architecture and described emerging web technologies (such as CSS, XML, RDF and HTTP/NG) which are addressing deficiencies in the web.
Brian suggested models for deployment of these new technologies, including the use of more intelligent server software and the deployment of intermediaries as described in the Web Focus Corner article in Ariadne issue 16 [11].
The DISinHE Centre Accessibility and the Web [12] This talk by Paul Booth of the recently established DISinHE Centre at Dundee University described the work of the DISinHE Centre.
Publish and be Damned?
Freedom, Responsibility and AUP [13] Caught between staff and students insisting on their rights to publish on the web and management concerns about appropriate material, what is a "Webmaster" to do?
This talk by Colin Work, Southampton University summarised the key areas of risk in putting material on the WWW, identified potential liability and suggested ways of running a WWW service which minimises the institution’s (and Webmasters!)
exposure while catering for the users requirements.
The British Council on the Web: An Overview [14] This talk by Paul Squires of the British Council described how the British Council face the challenge of managing a web service which is distributed across countries throughout the world.
The main themes which emerged from the presentations was the importance of backend databases for storing and managing structured information, such as prospectus and events information.
Colin Work’s talk entitled Publish and be Damned?
Freedom, Responsibility and AUP was given the highest rating in the evaluation forms, with an average rating of 4.58, with 35 people giving the highest score of 5 (excellent), 17 giving a score of 4 and 3 giving a score of 3.
Colin also achieved equal top scores for his talk at last year’s workshop, and was highly praised for the discussion group session he ran on Management Issues.
It is pleasing to report that the next highest-rated talk was Paul Booth’s presentation on The DISinHE Centre Accessibility and the Web.
Thirty-two people gave this talk the maximum score of 5 with 20 giving a score of 3.
These high scores would appear to reflect the importance place on the provision of accessible institutional web sites.
In third place was Jon Wallis with his comprehensive description (34 slides!)
of the use of a web service, warts and all, within an academic institution.
Brian Kelly, the author of this article, gave the next most highly-rated talk on Deploying New Web Technologies.
Workshop Programme: Parallel Sessions On the Wednesday afternoon five parallel session were held.
The aim of these sessions was to provide the opportunity for participants to address certain topics in some depth, and to allow all participants to have the opportunity to discuss and debate issues, and not simply listen to an expert.
Details of the parallel sessions are given below.
Web Design This session was coordinated by Andrew Aird.
The aims of the session were: To enable participants to discuss web design issues.
To identify a number of different approaches to web design.
To identify the pros and cons of using external designers.
To identify how to produce a design brief.
Metadata This session was coordinated by Andy Powell and Brian Kelly.
The aims of the session were: To identify why metadata is needed.
To review current metadata standards.
To discuss models for managing metadata.
To agree on steps forwards.
To provide an opportunity to see examples of metadata applications and metadata management software.
Web Server Management This session was coordinated by Andrew Cormack and Helen Varley Sargan.
The aims of this session were: To provide an opportunity for Web server administrators to discuss topics of interest.
To describe and discuss models and tools for institutional web indexing.
To describe and discuss web security issues.
To describe and discuss caching models and tools.
To discover how other institutions are managing their web servers.
Web Tools This session was coordinated by Dave Hartland and David Lomas.
The aims of this session were: To provide an opportunity for participants to try out a range of web tools which may be new to them.
To discuss issues related to the provision and support of various types of web tools.
To advise the UCISA-SG Web Tools group.
To try out some of the systems described by speakers during the workshop.
Management Issues This session was coordinated by Colin Work and Damon Querry.
The aims of this session were: To provide advice, guidelines and practical tips on managing a WWW service.
To identify key areas where further work can be done at a community wide level, and suggest some practical future activities.
Reports on the parallel sessions, including any conclusions reached, will be given in the workshop report which will be available shortly [15].
Workshop Conclusions A more complete workshop report and analysis of the feedback is still to be carried out.
For now the following comments are made, which are based on comments and suggestions made at the workshop an in the evaluation forms.
The workshop was clearly a great success and should be repeated next year.
The workshop should probably repeat its format, with a mixture of presentations and discussion groups, lasting over a three days.
Shorter, probably day-long seminars and workshops should be held, either on a regional or national basis, on a number of important topics which were identified at the workshop including: Acceptable Use Policies and related legal issues Information management Measurement of "web effectiveness" Accessibility Technical Issues, including web security and caching Indexing issues Database integration New web technologies, such as XML and RDF Metadata Web Design Web Tools Support should be given to the establishment of regional groups, such as .gamut [16].
If possible, there should be a mechanism for coordination of regional groups so that, for example, ideas for meetings and perhaps materials could be exchanged between the groups.
Possibly UCISA-TLIG [17] could act as a coordinating body.
More focussed Mailbase lists should be set up, which will provide a forum for detailed technical discussions on systems such as Windows NT server software.
Further discussion on the workshop, including announcements of the availability of the workshop materials and reports on the workshop will be made on the website-info-mgt [18] Mailbase list.
References Running An Institutional Web Service, Ariadne 11 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue11/web-focus/> ‘Dumbing Down’ Making the UCE Web Site More Accessible, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/uce/> Does Web Content Grow on Trees?, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/aird/> Publishing And Devolving Maintenance of a Prospectus, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/prospectus/> DataWeb: Three Worlds Collide, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/ral/> Information Management and the Institutional Website Promoting and Supporting Organisational Change, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/wolves/> “He Left the Course 3 Months Ago?”: Web-based Front-ends to Student Databases, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/manchester/> Events Online, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/events-online/> The Use of Online Databases to Manage Student Support and Learning, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/newcastle/> Deploying New Web Technologies, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/web-technologies/> Intermediaries: Ways Of Exploiting New Technologies, Ariadne 16 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue16/web-focus/> The DISinHE Centre Accessibility and the Web, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/accessibility/> Publish and be Damned?
Freedom, Responsibility and AUP, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/aup/> The British Council on the Web: An Overview, <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/british-council/> Workshop Report <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/reports/web-manage-98/> .gamut <URL: http://www.gold.ac.uk/gamut/> UCISA-TLIG <URL: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/TLIG/homepage.htm> website-info-mgt, Mailbase list <URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt/> Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323943 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collective Convergence: The Work of the Collection Description Focus Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collective Convergence: The Work of the Collection Description Focus Buzz data software rdf database dissemination xml archives metadata schema dtd ead rslp interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Pete Johnston and Bridget Robinson outline the work of the Collection Description Focus.
The UK Collection Description Focus (1) was launched on 1 June 2001.
It is a national post, jointly funded for a twelve-month period by the Joint Information Systems Committee/Distributed National Electronic Resource (JISC/DNER) (2) , the Research Support Libraries Program (RSLP) (3) and the British Library (4).
The Focus aims to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors.
The Focus will provide support both for UK projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work.
The Focus is located within UKOLN (5), which is based at the University of Bath.
The Focus is run jointly by Pete Johnston and Bridget Robinson with support from their partners in the CD Focus initiative, the Archives Hub(6) and the mda (7) .
It is informed by work carried out by other members of UKOLN, including the work of Andy Powell on the RSLP CLD schema, the broader activities on the effective exchange and reuse of information resources carried out by Paul Miller as Interoperability Focus, UKOLN’s work on the proposed technical architecture for the DNER, and its role in providing technical support to projects within the NOF-digitize programme.
The Focus also liaises with the Collection Description Working Group within the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and is working closely with the CIMI Consortium, who are surveying approaches to collection-level description within the museum community.
The CD Focus team is in the process of collecting information from relevant projects and “stakeholders”via questionnaires and visits.
The information gathered will help the Focus to pinpoint areas where guidance is needed.
Dissemination   The first CD Focus Briefing Day : Collected Wisdom managing resources and enhancing access through collection-level description, will take place at the British Library on Monday 22nd October (8).
Collection description and mapping are key elements of many RSLP projects and the integrated access envisaged for the DNER, the briefing day will highlight the value of collection description in these and other contexts.
The event is aimed at senior information managers who are developing and directing policy in this area.
Three regional workshops are scheduled to take place over the next 6 months.
These workshops are designed to meet the needs of practitioners working in the area, including those describing collections or developing and implementing services which utilise such descriptions, and those with an interest in the development and deployment of standards in this area.
The first Workshop will take place in November 2001 in Manchester(9) .
The workshop will explore the concept of the collection, and how it is interpreted and deployed within the different traditions of information management.
It will bring together practitioners from across the information management traditions and from different backgrounds and contexts.
It will explore how approaches to collection description differ and what they have in common.
It will examine how generic models and schemas have been implemented, and the challenges involved.
It will seek to highlight where practice can be standardised and to investigate where generic approaches must give way to domain-specific methods.
The other workshops are provisionally scheduled for January 2002 in Birmingham, and March 2002 in Edinburgh.
They will look at different aspects including subject descriptors, collection strength measurement, schema registries and other software tools as well as any other aspects that are highlighted as important during the course of the Focus work.
A series of Briefing Papers will be published during the course of the project starting with an “Introduction to Collection Description” in the autumn.
Subsequent paper will be published after the Workshops corresponding to the topics discussed.
Tools Where possible, the Focus will seek to provide simple tools to facilitate the creation and management of collection descriptions.
These may include: tools to support transformations between different collection description schemas; enhancements to existing data creation interfaces; support for the publishing and sharing of schemas for collection description.
As part of this activity the Focus has made available a Microsoft Access relational database implementation of the RSLP CLD schema, developed for UKOLN by Samsara Research, which includes a rudimentary Web search interface.
This is available for download at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/tools/ In order to improve interoperability between schemas for collection description, a draft mapping between the elements of the EAD DTD and the properties of the RSLP-CD schema has been published.
Andy Powell emphasised in the past that the RSLP CD schema was not intended as a replacement for richer archival description schemas such as ISAD(G) and EAD.
and that it might be seen as a schema for making relatively simple collection descriptions in a wide variety of contexts a ‘Dublin Core’ for collection description.
This mapping is designed to support this approach.
It provides the basis for a transformation tool that can convert an ISAD(G) compliant EAD document to an RDF/XML instance conforming to the RSLP CD schema (though such a tool will require customisation by individual projects to reflect local EAD encoding practice).
Similar mappings and transforms might be provided for other XML-based collection description schemas Collection description: access and management One of the most interesting aspects of the work of the CD Focus so far has been working with collection description projects.
In the first instance, these have been primarily, though not exclusively, projects working within the RSLP.
The collections which the projects describe are diverse in their nature and coverage.
They range from very specialist collections of physical items (including books, manuscripts, and archival records) in subject areas as varied as Music, Church History and Christian Theology, and Caribbean Studies through to the digital collections of the DNER, which provides 6 million people with access to over 200 different collections.
Whatever the size and nature of the collection, the overall aims are broadly similar: to extend access to resources, by increasing information about the location of collections and by improving the ability to navigate collections; to improve collection management, particularly in the area of collaborative arrangements between institutions.
The deployment of a consistent approach to the description of collections is critical to achieving both of these goals; through its activities in the coming months, the Focus will seek to build consensus on such a common approach.
References The CD Focus website is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/ The JISC/DNER website is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner The RSLP website is at: http://www.rslp.ac.uk/ The British Library website is at: http://www.bl.uk/ The UKOLN website is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ The Archives Hub website is at: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/ The mda website is at : http://www.mda.org.uk/ Details of the Briefing Day can be found at : http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/bd1/ Details of the Manchester Workshop can be found at : http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws1/ Author Details Pete Johnston and Bridget Robinson Collection Description Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK Email: cd-focus@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/   Article Title: “Collection Convergence The Work of the Collection Description Focus” Author: Pete Johnston and Bridget Robinson Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/robinson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz jpg Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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Public Libraries: United We Stand Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: United We Stand Buzz html archives cataloguing licence ict url research Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod on current developments in the Public Library world.
As I write schools have closed for summer, the volume of early morning traffic has temporarily subsided, and the tourists are out and about in vast numbers in Bath city centre.
The 'out of office' auto-replies drop into the email box daily as proof that some people have managed to unplug themselves from their computers to go on holiday.
It is also, alas, the 'silly season' time for the British media to devote column inches to vital matters such as the Prime Minister's sartorial taste, and how a certain blue shirt 'brings out the colour of his eyes'.
Yes, the obscure, the bizarre, and the just plain barmy, fill the vacuum so abhorred by nature and journalists alike.
However, in the world of public libraries there has been little sign of the pace slowing, and the current round of activity has widespread implications for the future of all UK library and information services, irrespective of sector.
First of all there is the regional agenda as outlined in the White Paper published in May this year by the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR) [1].
In a nutshell, this states that the Blair administration wants England to follow the examples of Scotland and Wales which, since 1999, have had elected assemblies (the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly).
Apparently England is alone in not having some form of democratic regional governance in accordance with the rest of the European Union.
The benefits of regional government are reputed to include: the chance to build on and celebrate regional diversity; greater local autonomy with more devolved decision-making on non-national issues; making regional government more accountable to the population they serve etc.
As for libraries well single regional agencies for museums, archives and libraries are to be set up in the nine English regions (this includes London, although London already has some devolved powers).
Three agencies are now in place: the North East Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (NEMLAC); the South East Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (SEMLAC) and the East Midlands Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (EMMLAC).
The remaining agencies will be in place by 2004.
In addition, Resource has appointed two Regional Strategic Advisors to work across museums, archives and libraries, and are co-funding the Regional Development Officer (RDO) post in partnership with the British Library and CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals)).
The RDO, Geoff Warren, has a libraries only remit if you want to know more he issues a very informative newsletter called 'lis-regions Update' which can be found on the British Library Concord website [2].
You'd be right to question what all this actually translates to in terms of library services, and we shall have to wait and see, but libraries should be in a stronger position if they establish effective links with new regional bodies such as the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs).
The RDAs when you can track down which government department is now responsible for which bit of them (you get redirected several times) are now part of the Department for Trade and Industry's remit and they state: RDAs agenda include regional regeneration, taking forward regional competitiveness, taking the lead on regional inward investment and, working with regional partners, ensuring the development of a regional skills action plan to ensure that skills training matches the needs of the labour market.
[3] Skills and labour markets public libraries can relate to this what with the People's Network programme providing ICT and Internet access and support to the general public; UKOnline Centres, providing access to news, information and online services e.g.
buying a TV licence or applying for a passport, and Learndirect centres providing online courses for all.
However, it is the learning agenda rather than skills which is of most interest to libraries.
The Government may be keen to ensure that UK citizens have ICT skills to meet the needs of the labour market, and thereby safeguard our economy and future prosperity, but libraries aim to encourage and support learning throughout life.
This learning can be formal or informal; life enhancing in the form of leisure pursuits, or for personal development; or it might mean acquiring a set of skills which enable you to secure that job.
Therefore, the recent announcement by Resource that it is to review its role vis à vis libraries, and will, in future, be focusing on the wider library sector, rather than just on public libraries, should complement the work of the regional agencies.
This shift of focus has been given the acronym WILIP Wider Information and Libraries Issues Project (chosen to rhyme with CILIP perhaps?).
With the People's Network programme nearing completion (over 70% of public libraries have ICT installed with 8780 public Internet terminals in total), Resource is now turning its attention to greater cross-sectoral collaboration in libraries and ensuring that libraries are seen as a single entity, like museums and archives, rather than the patchwork quilt of health, higher education, prison, schools, public libraries etc.
In the past, each sector has proclaimed its difference e.g.
each serves a different community with different needs and systems; each has separate funding mechanisms; each has a different culture and legacy systems and so on.
These represent a succession of hurdles all of which must be jumped if access to the wealth of resources 'out there' is to improve.
Projects like WILIP will benefit learners where ever they work, study or live.
It should facilitate the building of a shared information environment by identifying and mapping the wealth of resources which are available in each of the regions, and from this the pieces of the jigsaw can be assembled giving us an overall view of what's available nationally.
WILIP will also foster partnerships between libraries to improve access to regionally held resources, for example between higher and further education and public libraries.
The existence of learning communities as groups of people who are not necessarily learning within a defined formal education system was described in the report: Empowering the Learning Community, which was published in March 2000: Although much of our emphasis is on actions to be taken by local authorities or agencies, we define a 'learning community' very widely.
Natural communities vary and, for different purposes, a learning community may be local, regional, national, virtual or a community of interest.
[4] Reg Carr, Chairman of the Joint Information Systems Committee for the Information Environment, which is engaged in the building of an information environment designed originally to meet the needs of the higher education, states: Building the JISC Information Environment will necessarily require a collaborative effort between the many institutions and information experts within post-16 education and the academic research community.
But real and long-lasting benefit will only be gained through a close collaboration with the other strategic partners who are also committed to lifelong learning.
Together, we must aim to realise the full potential of the Internet, and the rich opportunities it brings for linking digital resources.
[5] The WILIP initiative to join-up libraries (with apologies for use of this over-used term), will not only improve access to learning and cultural resources, it will also help to raise the profile of libraries or what is now called 'advocacy'.
Politicians, of the local and national variety, need to be convinced, through action, that libraries are a force to be reckoned with, and above all are in the same business and speak with one voice.
Libraries need to demonstrate that they offer value for money and provide value-added services.
However, lets make no bones about it none of this is easy.
Users do expect the public sector to provide services which are on a par with those provided by top commercial players this was made quite clear in the Audit Commission report which I looked at in the previous edition of Ariadne (issue 32).
(it stated that public libraries could learn a lot from bookshops).
The question remains -can or should public libraries try to compete with companies like Amazon or the high street bookshops?
How far do they need to go down this road when resources are finite and council tax payers, and other stakeholders, are not able or prepared to foot the bill?
Well there are some excellent examples of public libraries which are managing to deliver innovative services and/or create great physical spaces which should be the envy of many bookshops.
For those of you interested in the challenges facing UK public libraries take a look at the 'Have your say' list of questions which John Dolan of Birmingham's Library and Information Services raises.
[6] Two of the questions jump out at me: how will digital access enable access, interpretation and enjoyment of unique collections, and how will we reconcile the virtual and the physical library with the virtual and the physical visitor?
Hmmm..
If libraries are in a different business to the book trade, for example in promoting and supporting lifelong learning, then John's questions require a lot of deep thinking to be done.
How do we promote the uniqueness of the library experience.
Do users want mediated access to reliable, evaluated, information and learning resources through a variety of media?
Will citizens actually use online local and national government services for example, to pay for services or find information?
Libraries offer both physical access to ICT facilities and tangible media (books, audio visual materials etc.
), and virtual access to library catalogues, community information, digital or digitised materials, and a host of portals and gateways aimed at making the process of locating and retrieving quality information resources as easy as possible for citizens and learners alike.
However, students in Institutions of Higher Education still prefer to use Google, rather than the subject based information gateways designed to make searching easier for them.
[7] You can only lead them to what's available you can't make them use it.
The bringing together of libraries must be a good thing after all time and technology wait for no man, and if we are serious about the role of libraries in delivering the cultural and learning agendas, and in sustaining that role, then it is in all our interests to work together.
However, one of the crucial issues, in my opinion, is skills; skills for staff and for members of the public.
ICT skills are just part of the picture and many people have cleared this particular hurdle, it is information handling skills which are vital.
Information skills tend to be invisible people don't even know they exist, let along that they should need them.
Staff have to be capable and confident in supporting Internet users and online learners.
Users need to be aware of what exists and whether it is relevant to their particular needs; if it isn't then they won't be interested in using it.
So marketing becomes the next issue to contemplate and so on... References [1] Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR).
Your Region, Your Choice: Revitalising the English Regions.
Summary.
14 May 2002 <http://www.regions.odpm.gov.uk/governance/whitepaper/summary.htm> [2] Regional Development Officer (for libraries in England): lis-regions update.
(PDF format): <http://www.bl.uk/concord/otherpubrdo.html> [3] General information on the Regional Development Agencies: <http://www.consumers.gov.uk/rda/info/> [4] Library and Information Commission (March 2000) Empowering the learning community.
<http://www.lic.gov.uk/publications/policyreports/empower/recommendations.html> [5] Information Environment: Development Strategy (draft) 2001-2005.
Preface.
<http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/IEstrategy.html> [6] John Dolan and Ayub Khan.
The Library of Birmingham.
Update.
August 2002 Vol.1 (5), pp.34-36 <http://www.cilip.org.uk/update/issues/aug02/article3aug.html> [7] An example of a subject based information gateway: SOSIG Social Science Information Gateway: < http://www.sosig.ac.uk/> Author details Penny Garrod UKOLN University of Bath p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Public Libraries: United we stand" Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/public-libraries/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner Buzz software framework archives identifier ict mailbase research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes and David Potts shed light on the what exactly the Networked Policy Taskgroup does.
The Work of the Networked Policy Taskgroup For public libraries wishing to provide their users with access to the Internet there are a number of difficult policy decisions that need to be made.
For example, do they provide Internet access for free?
If they charge how much do they charge?
Do they use filtering software?
How long can people use the Internet terminals for?
What level of services (e.g.
e-mail or not) will they provide?
Policy decisions of this type are currently being faced across the country by public library managers who themselves may only just becoming familiar with networked services.
It is not surprising therefore that many public librarians are keen to learn from other authorities experiences when developing networked services policy.
An example of this keenness can be seen in the regular messages to the UK public library discussion list LIS-PUB-LIBS [1] which ask for information about public access policies, the level of charges being implemented and hardware security issues.
However, other than discussion lists like this there are few places where librarians can easily find information about other authorities policy models.
EARL [2], the Library Association [3] and UKOLN [4] have become increasingly aware of the need for a simple way to share information about policy development, and then to learn from each others experiences.
Through the Networked Services Policy taskgroup the three organisations have been working to develop a body of resources which will be of use to those who are currently developing networked service policies.
These resources will help librarians to make informed policy decisions and to easily find and learn from policy models developed by other authorities.
The Work of the Taskgroup The work of the taskgroup is split into three main areas Identification and analysis of the main networking services issues for public library Development of a series of issues papers Development of an archive/resource bank of policies Identifying Networking Issues In order to explore the pressing needs in terms of networking service policy issues the taskgroup decided to survey the public library community during the Spring/early Summer of 1998.
The survey had three specific aims: to capture a snapshot of public library networking activity to gauge the relative importance of previously identified networked service issues to acquire source material related to networked services policy for the taskgroup web site The survey was sent out to every public library authority in the UK and answers were collected via the telephone.
Responses from ninety four authorities were collected.
The survey asked a mixture of questions which required both qualitative and quantitative answers.
This reflects the nature of the subject.
All participants were made aware that their replies would be disseminated to other library authorities to highlight the importance of sharing information.
Snapshot of public library networking activity At first glance the amount of public library networking activity seems very rosy with 90% of authorities having some form of staff Internet access (compared to the 1995 figure of 53%) and just under 70% providing some form of public Internet access (compared to the 1995 figure of 17%).
These statistics however become less heart warming when it is noted that these statistics refer to authorities rather than individual service points.
An authority may provide public Internet access in only one of their sixty branches.
A clearer picture is perhaps shown by Chris Batt’s 1998 survey [5] which was also published in 1998.
This survey showed that only 9% of all actual service points in the UK provide public access Internet services – a much more sobering figure.
The taskgroup’s survey explored what kind of connection methods authorities were using to gain Internet access.
Forty one percent of authorities still connect to the Internet via dial-up accounts, 35% use leased lines and 25% via ISDN lines.
Dial up access is therefore the most typical connection method.
This is a worrying statistic as dial-up is the most limited access method and severely limits the level and extent of service that can be made use of.
However, this could just be indicative of the developing nature of UK public library Internet services as dial-up is often used by an authority for its initial experiments with Internet access with the authority later migrating to leased lines and ISDN.
The survey also explored the number of public library staff who have access to and make regular usage of e-mail.
Generally the use of e-mail among staff members is very low.
Typically it is managers and other senior staff who have access to e-mail accounts.
It is also fairly common for library staff to share e-mail addresses e.g.
ref-lib@bloggshire.gov.uk.
Library web pages are becoming very commonplace.
Over 66% of library authorities have web pages and well over half are hosted on a local authority server.
However, many of these pages are very limited in scope and underdeveloped.
Public Internet services The survey clearly revealed a number of very pressing issues in terms of networked services for the public.
The most issue the survey identified was the inconsistency of service levels and practices from authority to authority.
Charges for basic Internet access range from free to £5 an hour (at every 50p denomination per 15 mins., half hour or hour).
There may be additional charges for e-mail services and printouts though not all authorities provide these services.
Some authorities use filtering software whilst others do not.
Despite authorities having made a decision whether or not to use filtering software, the adoption of Acceptable Use Policies/Disclaimers is patchy.
Some authorities offer assistance to users, others do not.
The number of Internet workstations available in a single library varies from between 1 and 20.
The quality and level of service for a member of the public who wishes to use the Internet in their local library is therefore going to be solely dependent on where in the country they live.
There is absolutely no minimum standard of service which is provided by all authorities.
The general lack of acceptable use policies and disclaimers reflects the lack experience many libraries have of developing networked service policies.
Issues and policy creation The survey asked respondents to identify the barriers they felt needed to be overcome to achieve more developed networked services.
Typically these were staff skills and time, financial resources, technical support, bandwidth, assimilation into corporate ICT policies, network provision/coverage, and general ignorance of networking issues.
Twelve Issues identified by the Taskgroup as key in the development of networked services were listed in the survey and their order of importance had to be indicated by the respondents.
The most important issues around the provision of networked services were “Equality of Access” and “Quality of Information”.
This reflects the traditional stance of professional public librarians in delivering socially inclusive high quality services.
Library authorities were also asked if they would be willing to share their networked services policies with other library authorities via the taskgroup’s website.
The most typical response to this question was that the authority was still in process of writing its policies and so currently had nothing they were able to share.
Overall the results from the survey showed that networking services in public libraries in the UK range greatly in their size and their level of development.
There is no common standard for service level and type and it is interesting to note that a considerable number of library authorities appear to be offering public access Internet services without having yet developed policies about these services.
These respondents, however, were very keen to develop such policies but were finding it difficult to do so because of a lack of shared information on these issues and a general feeling of being uninformed about all the relevant issues.
It is hoped that the issue papers and the web site which the taskgroup are developing will go a long way to helping address this.
The Issue Papers The taskgroup is producing a series of papers which will provide information on some of the main issues involved with the development of networked services.
It is envisaged that the papers will provide relevant information pertaining to each issue, including options for consideration, examples of best practice, legislative framework where applicable, and known authoritative views.
The aim of each paper will be to provide potential policy makers with enough impartial information so that they can develop informed policies themselves.
The first paper in the series looks at the use of filtering software in public libraries.
The paper explores exactly what is filtering software, how it works, how effectively it works and some of the pros and cons for using it.
The paper is not an argument for or against filtering but simply provides enough impartial information on the topic so library managers will feel confidently familiarised with all the issues involved when they make a decision.
The filtering issue paper was distributed for free to every UK public library chief in November 1998.
The full text of the paper is available on the taskgroup’s web site [6].
The web site also provide links to some of the resources mentioned in the paper, examples of existing library policies about filtering software and an opportunity to comment on the paper and the issues that it discusses.
The filtering paper is the first in what is expected to be a series of ten such papers.
The exact titles and topics of these papers is still under discussion but it is expected that the following topics will be covered Charging for public Internet access Security issues National policy context Equality of access Quality of Information Service Planning The production of the issue papers will be project managed by Sarah Ormes, UKOLN’s public library networking research officer.
The papers will be written by members of the taskgroup and although a few papers may be written by specially invited authors who have particular expertise or experience on a topic.
Online Archive The other strand of the taskgroup’s work will be the continual development of an online archive of existing public library networking service policy documents.
This online archive already provides access to the Internet acceptable use policies of the library authorities of Walsall, Suffolk and Brent.
It also holds the service development plans of a number of other authorities.
The aim of this archive is to allow authorities who are in the process of developing networked service policies to be able to easily find policies which have already been developed by other libraries.
At present the archive hosts a comparatively small number of policy papers but this is indicative of the developing nature of public library networked services policy.
It is hoped that this archive will grow rapidly as networked services in public libraries grow.
The taskgroup would therefore be interested to hear from any authority which has developed suitable policies and would be willing for the taskgroup to make them via the web site.
It should be noted that the archive will not be restricted to policies to do with the provision of public access services but will include any material concerning any aspect of networked services.
Summary Through its work the taskgroup aims to help those libraries which are having to develop policies for networked services.
The survey has shown that there is a great need for this kind of help.
Policy decisions that are made now may have a lasting impact on networked services and it is important that the best decisions possible are made.
It is hoped that the resources being developed by the taskgroup will inform this process.
Acknowledgements UKOLN is funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC’s Electronic Libraries Programme and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
References [1] LIS-PUB-LIBS http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-pub-libs/ To join LIS-PUB-LIBS send a message to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk and leave the subject line blank.
In the body of the message type join lis-pub-libs yourfirstname yourlastname [2] EARL http://www.earl.org.uk/ [3] Library Association http://www.la-hq.org.uk/ [4] UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ [5] Batt, C. and Pantry, S. (1998).
Information Technology in Public Libraries.
London: Library Association Publishing [6] Networked Services Policy Taskgroup http://www.earl.org.uk/taskgroups/policy/index.html Author Details Sarah Ormes Public Library Networking Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath BATH, BA1 3BU Email: s.l.ormes@ukoln.ac.uk URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/   David Potts Regional Libraries Telematics Officer WMRLS 2nd Floor Central Library Birmingham, B3 3HQ Email: d.potts@dial.pipex.com   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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NetLab's Digital Library Gâteau Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines NetLab's Digital Library Gâteau Buzz data software rdf framework rss xml portal archives metadata thesaurus digitisation browser identifier vocabularies namespace schema repositories copyright preservation cataloguing dtd z39.50 marc aggregation ontologies frbr dcmi interoperability rdfs intranet url research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Jessica Lindholm reports from the conference "NetLab and friends: Tribute and outlook after 10 years of digital library development".
The conference was held in Lund, Sweden 10-12 April 2002.
Every future must have a past How did you celebrate your tenth birthday?
Perhaps by making a nice birthday cake with all your favourite ingredients to share with your friends?
NetLab [1], the research and development department at Lund University Libraries [2], celebrated its tenth anniversary in April 2002 with a three-day conference in Lund, Sweden [3].
This gâteau consisted of topics on digital library development, divided into five pieces: “Semantic web and knowledge organisation”; “Interoperability and integration of heterogeneous sources”; “Visions, future issues and current development”; “The Nordic situation”; and the surprise session “Tension between visions and reality”.
When announcing a conference as a ten-year anniversary looks to the past must be expected, and yes, NetLab was duly celebrated with both flowers and nostalgia from speakers and participants.
There were 140 participants at the conference, from 23 countries.
The welcome speech was given by university librarian Lars Bjørnshauge (Lund University Libraries), with a warm welcome to all partners, colleagues and friends present.
Lars Bjørnshauge also gave a tribute to NetLab’s contribution to digital library related technology on the web, and in particular to the ongoing development of digital libraries and contiguous work carried out during the past ten years.
Visions, future issues and current development The opening and closing speeches were on the theme “Visions, future issues and current development”.
Evidently no bold predictions about the future were made, but speakers presented some of the topicalities that embrace the community.
Stuart Weibel (OCLC Office of Research) gave views from a standard community involved in development of metadata frameworks and vocabularies, i.e.
the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [4].
Stuart Weibel started with giving an overview on Dublin Core development, and then went onto experiences in workflows and business models for standard-building communities.
DCMI works as a consensus-building community, and consensus itself often leads to trying to find a balance between being really good and good enough: How do we keep a standard aiming at facilitating discovery of information resources both simple enough and rich enough to be useful?
DMCI struggles to achieve global consensus, which inevitably is not very easy to achieve.
DCMI at the same time encourages the discussions in order to maintain this balance of both being simple and rich enough in a sense better is the enemy of good enough.
Standard-building communities work from shared values: based on an idea of neutral models; collaboration with openness and monitoring of ideas; and building the work on trust.
These shared visions and motivations also means sharing common problems and objectives.
How does the business model for a standard building community work?
It is really hard to sell paper copies of your standard when you are on the Web.
The standards community sell a good idea, in this case the value of structured metadata and metadata management.
Stakeholders hopefully adopt the idea, and bring services and applications of the standard to the users.
The community that finishes the provided prototypes will be the ones to see “the light in the user’s eyes”.
It is the practitioners that make the tools useable, whereas too much researchers means risking making the ideas invisible.
This is a balance walk, the juicy stuff must also be kept, in order to keep the researchers interested and development ongoing.
Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC Office of Research) gave an overview of life in a shared network space.
The journey started off from the tradition of sharing which libraries fall back on; shared cataloguing (60s), shared resources (70s), and shared discovery and delivery (90s).
In the 00s the discussion and work is on collaborative reference, archiving, digitisation and scholarly communication.
As resources and services have become digital, libraries have progressively entered a shared workspace.
Being digital suggests reorganisation from vertical organisation around the collection, to horisontal organisation around the processes to best leverage individual and collective strengths.
As regards scholarly communication, we are moving from the chain author -> publisher -> distributor -> library to all actors being on the Web, where they potentially all are in contact with each other.
We find co-evoluted institutional forms for research, learning and cultural engagement in the services that are being offered: e.g.
in the digital library; the public website; the corporate intranet; the student intranet; and in lots of other services.
These represent some of the initiatives that could be better coordinated.
In many cases the overlaps have to do with the current organisational frameworks.
At the other end of the line, researchers produce material without knowledge of how their work is being aggregated by libraries.
What is today’s role for the library?
Lorcan Dempsey provided some discussion points.
Services like Google and Amazon make you believe that you access everything but do you really?
In a shared workspace we handle ‘non-published unique material’ (e.g.
preprints), but also the traditional ‘published non-unique material’.
Catalogues and search engines make ‘second order judgements’ more popular, and Google tends to be the judge of what people will use (a threat for librarians?).
There are many different models for future collaboration, but we can not really know which models will be sustained.
Also, as the environment so quickly changes the shared space calls for active reshaping in a new medium.
Libraries need to have organisational frameworks for how to provide specialisation in the networked environment.
Interoperability and integration of heterogeneous sources The next session focused on building and deploying services to provide interoperability.
The main focus for the speakers were on different ways of assuring the users’ access to information and providing reusable data: via e.g.
Z39.50; RDF (Resource Description Framework); and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).
Andy Powell (UKOLN, University of Bath) gave an overview on current digital library technical standards; ways those standards are being combined to support various initiatives; trends in portal developments; and the impact on development of digital library services.
One of many angles of approach in Andy’s presentation was regarding exposing metadata.
In order for discovery and access of resources, content providers need to make their metadata available either through searching (such as Z39.50), harvesting (such as OAI-MPH) and/or alerting (such as RSS (RDF Site Summary)) technologies.
One ‘collection description’ may have more than one service description, e.g.
OAI harvesting and a Z39.50 target.
Fusion services may be sitting between the actual provider and portals, such as brokers (searching) and aggregators (harvesting and alerting).
Andy Powell also discussed the possibilities in portlets.
Portlets provide ‘the building blocks for portals’, and typically, each portlet offers a small chunk of functionality, such as a cross-search or the display of a news channel (i.e the components endusers see within portal pages).
Sebastian Hammer (Indexdata) gave a presentation on the search and retrieval protocol Z39.50.
Z39.50 was once seen as the protocol to solve a lot of our problems for cross searching and accessing multiple collections.
But as things have evolved, Z39.50 remained within the library community.
The virtual union catalogue itself is no longer seen as a replacement of the union catalogue, rather as a supplement.
Z39.50 works well as to serve localised implementations.
Z39.50 is successful in communication between different services and platforms, but increased resources bring increased problems in reliability and availability.
Z39.50 solutions with e.g.
service specific profiles, such as the Bath profile, make the protocol valuable and useful.
The real problems is the semantics of the metadata; its cataloguing rules and editorial functions.
Libby Miller (ILRT, University of Bristol) gave an illuminating presentation on RDF and RDF Query.
Libby stressed that RDF is not the syntax, but the underlying informational model and that RDF describes graphs about data.
Libby Miller made her presentation by providing examples, such as her work with Squish, a RDF query language [5], to envisage how to access information that mirrors the flexibility of the RDF informational model.
As Libby herself pointed out “it is easy to do the demo, but harder to show you the fantastic possibilities, a typical example of the Semantic Web”.
Why use RDF as the structured data format and associated modelling strategies and tools (‘Semantic Web technologies’) ?
The answer Libby Miller gives, is that if you have and always will have control over your data, you do not need RDF.
By control is also meant knowing that it will not change over time, and knowing what you might want to combine your data with in the future.
RDF is instead useful with other people’s data (data which you do not own) and for reuse of data.
Distributed data is difficult to control, since you rely on other people to provide it.
The RDF model uses certain principles for modelling data which help with interoperability.
There are three principles for creating interoperable data: use RDF as the informational model; use universal resource identifiers (such as URLs); and define the structure of information (write schemas).
Libby’s paper “RDF Query by example” prepared for the conference is available from < http://ilrt.org/discovery/2002/04/query/>.
Peter Gietz (DAASI International) ended this session with a presentation on LDAP-based repositories (LDAP as a network protocol and an information model for accessing information in directories) with particular focus on metadata and ontologies.
Semantic web and knowledge organisation This theme focused on knowledge structuring and classification issues.
The overview was given in an inspirational speech by Diane Vizine-Goetz (OCLC Office of Research), outlining the Semantic Web vision, its core technologies and the need for knowledge organisation.
The vision was shown e.g.
by quoting Tim Berners-Lee:   The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.
Berners-Lee, T, Hendler, J & Lassila, O.
“The Semantic Web”, Scientific American, May 2001.; The key technologies are XML, RDF, XML namespaces (such as DC1.1), knowledge organisation systems (e.g.
Dublin Core) and ontologies.
Ontologies give for instance the definitions of terms, relationships and data structures.
The Semantic Web is a very compelling goal, but will no doubt cost extra effort and extra cost to pay.
Playfully, but with conviciton, Diane Vizine-Goetz says that it not only could, but also should be librarians carrying out and defining the task of getting the information well defined.
As this happens software agents will become more available.
Joseph Busch (Interwoven) also presented views on the Semantic Web; we are still in early days of this development, but there is interest in what is done (also from the industrial sector).
Joseph Busch was one of few speakers from the commercial sector, and introduced himself and his company as selling librarians’ thoughts in a commercial world.
Joseph Busch discussed XML DTD’s and other alternatives, such as the framework VocML (Vocabulary Markup Language).
One of the issues he stressed was that even though the structure may be important, more so is the content.
If we have control of the processes and resources we can use them, simplified: we need to have the content published, presenting the framework for describing this content and provide some applications.
Libraries must define their role in this process: to focus on being the transparent middle layer, assembling content in a seamless way (and not visible for the users).
Joseph also brought up the subject of NKOS registering vocabularies.
From such registries we can expect more issues to discuss, but also expect knowledge organisation schemes and lots of interest.
The state of the art is more reduced than we want it to be.
The two other presentations in this session gave further depth to the work at hand.
Martin Doerr (ICS-FORTH) gave a presentation on the challenge of semantic problems and aspects in thesaurus mapping.
“RDF Schema for Thesauri” was a presentation given by Phil Cross (ILRT, University of Bristol) on the interesting possibilities for storing and expressing thesaurus terms and thesauri in RDF Schema for Thesauri (a proposal) to leverage the thesaurus usage on the Semantic Web.
Nordic libraries and their digital library solutions The Nordic countries were relatively early implementers, yet despite apparently similar circumstances and conditions there are highly contrasting Nordic digital library solutions and policies.
An overview on past and current Nordic projects was given by Juha Hakala (Helsinki University Library).
The Nordic libraries fall back on a long tradition of collaboration, and there are also some Nordic projects on the web which have collaborated successfully.
One of the examples given was the Nordic Web Archive (NWA) [6] with its goal to archive Web documents for future generations (as a part of each library’s legal deposit obligation).
The Swedish Web space has been archived several times with a Combine harvester, which originates from NetLab but has been modified to serve the special purposes of harvesting for preservation (e.g.
scheduling rules: the harvester must get the entire file at the same time, e.g.
all images etc.).
Indexing is done by the Norwegian search engine FAST.
FAST recognises Nordic languages and can keep billions of files.
Juha also briefly presented the coming Scandinavian Virtual Union Catalogue (SVUC) [7] which will have full functionality by next summer, with approx.
15-20 million records.
Juha points out the long tradition in cooperation between libraries in the Nordic countries, e.g.
in inter-library loaning (ILL).
The national libraries seem to be shifting from bibliographic to content description.
BIBSYS [9] is the union catalogue of Norway, and is used by all Norwegian university libraries, the national library, all college libraries, and in a number of research libraries.
Ole Husby (BIBSYS) opened his presentation by saying that in a way we still live in the 1960s when it comes to the insufficient understanding of bibliographic elements & structure, attributes and relations.
The model of thinking that Ole and BIBSYS has embraced is IFLAs model on functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) [10].
BIBSYS has has not yet entered the implementation stage.
One reason for this wait is because of the almost impossible task of converting MARC-records automatically into a FRBR-based system.
BIBSYS first implementation is likely to be for periodicals, based on the four levels in FRBR.
FRBR has many connections in the community, similarities to e.g.
ABC Harmony, RDFS.
FRBR is also moving the perspective closer to the description focus on the web, by being more subject focused than item focused.
Furthermore we were given input from Sweden on issues surrounding management of a pre-prints service for Economics, in a talk given by Sune Karlsson (Stockholm School of Economics) with experiences from Swopec [8] and knowledge organisation in the service.
Denmark was represented by Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard (State university library, Århus).
She gave a presentation on the interplay between local and national solutions in Denmark, which can be summarised into an important appeal: Share work, experiences and costs!
We must consider how we get and maintain data, and to keep the local services focused on the target audience.
By also providing facilities for e.g.
harvesting and cross-searching the metadata can be repurposed and reused in more generic services.
Tension between visions and reality Two shared presentations were given on the theme “Tension between visions and reality”.
This theme was also known as the “Surprise session”, since the four extra speakers were invited only a few weeks before the conference.
Slightly unexpected at a conference in such northern latitudes, were the representatives from university libraries in nine Sub-Saharan African countries.
Their participation was due to workshops in conjunction to the conference for the CELI Project [12].
One of these visitors was also invited to speak in the session “Tension between visions and reality”.
Vitalicy Chifwepa (University of Zambia) gave a paper and presentation, shared with Jörgen Eriksson (NetLab, Lund University Libraries).
Vitalicy Chifwepa gave his presentation “Internet and information provision: the promises and challenges in African university libraries”.
The conclusions in Vitalicy’s presentation was (among other things that came up in the surrounding discussions) that “as African countries become connected, issues of accessing and disseminating worldwide information resources have been improving.
To address some of the challenges and constraints above there has been a number of projects and programmes” but “these will, however, need to be backed by solid provisions for sustainability by the African Universities.”” [13] The full paper by Vitalicy prepared for the conference “Internet and information provision: the promises and challenges in African university libraries” is to be found at <http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab/conf/chifwepa.html>.
The next presentation, “Two views of the digital library”, aimed at visualising the difference between the researcher and the practitioner.
Due to lack of time this discussion was unfortunately kept very short.
The one who gets to see the “light in the user’s eyes” in this session was Roddy MacLeod (Heriot-Watt University) as manager of EEVL.
EEVL [11] provides access to resources in engineering, mathematics and computing information.
In the other ring corner was the researcher Michael Day (UKOLN, University of Bath) representing applied and project-related research in a multidisciplinary environment.
Closing session During these three days many subjects were explored, and recurringly different speakers called attention to the importance of well-defined content (in order for the structures to succeed), whether it be for harvesting, searching or others.
Other key questions are long time preservation and the need for defining tasks and finding ways of improved collaboration.
The event itself was surrounded by interesting meetings and activities with connections to current activities among NetLab staff, such as the NKOS special meeting (around standard developments regarding the use of thesauri, classification and other knowledge organisation systems on the internet [14]), project meetings for the European projects ETB (European Treasury Browser) [15] and Renardus [16].
DCMI had a board meeting and workshops were held by NetLab staff around development of access to information and subject gateways in Africa, i.e.
CELI [12].
The Closing session was held by Anna Brümmer (BIVIL), who blew out the ten candles on NetLab’s anniversary gâteau and thanked everyone for coming and for being good friends.
Not only was this a nice way of celebrating an anniversary; as pointed out already in the welcome speech this conference is likely to pave way for new interesting ideas for projects and collaboration.
References [1] NetLab, <http://netlab.lub.lu.se/> [2] Lund University Libraries, <http://www.lub.lu.se> [3] NetLab and Friends, Conference <http://netlab.lub.lu.se/conf/> [4] DCMI <http://dublincore.org> [5] Inkling: RDF query using SquishQL, <http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/rdfquery/> [6] Nordic Web Archive, <http://nwa.nb.no/> [7] SVUC, <http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/svuc/> [8] Swopec, <http://swopec.hhs.se> [9] BIBSYS, <http://bibsys.no> [10] IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, 1998 <http://ifla.org/Vii/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf> [11] EEVL, <http://www.eevl.ac.uk> [12] CELI, <http://netlab.lub.lu.se/sida/celi/> [13] Chifwepa, Vitalicy, “Internet and information provision: the promises and challenges in African university libraries.
Presented on the 10th April to the NetLab and Friends of Conference 10th to 12th April.
<http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab/conf/chifwepa.html> [14] NKOS Special meeting at the NetLab conference, April 12, 2002.
<http://www.lub.lu.se/~traugott/NKOS-Lund.html> [15] ETB Project <http://eun.org/etb/> [16] Renardus Project <http://renardus.org> Author Details   Jessica Lindholm is part of the Research & Development team within UKOLN, University of Bath.
At the time this issue of Ariadne is published she has resumed her work at NetLab, Lund University Libraries.
Article Title: “NetLab’s digital library gâteau” Author: Jessica Lindholm Publication Date: 25-June-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/netlab-conference/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz dissemination thesaurus cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Justine Kitchen of the Resource Discovery Network Centre reports on the recent SOSIG relaunch, and Debra Hiom explores New Learning and Teaching Support Networks in the Social Sciences New Millennium, New SOSIG On the 25th February 2000 SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) officially launched its brand new service at a successful one-day event in central London.
Speakers at the event included Annabel Colley, website producer for BBC’s Panorama and Chair of the Association for UK Media Librarians who spoke of the enormous contribution SOSIG has made to research, since its inception.
“Used incorrectly, the Internet can be a huge time waster.
It’s been likened to a huge vandalised library: a useful analogy.
Internet services like SOSIG help to put it back in order.
For a journalist, the issue is always quality and accuracy, something SOSIG has consistently provided.” A variety of guests attended from across the business, law and social science communities to witness the new service in operation for the very first time.
SOSIG has been at the leading edge of Internet service provision since 1994, when it first began providing users with direct ease of access to high quality web information in the Social Sciences.
The new service has gone a step further to offer a brand new interface with improved design and navigability, together with some exciting additional services designed to enable users to find accurate, timely, authentic information resources in Social Science, Business and Law more quickly and effectively than ever before.
In short, SOSIG helps make sense of Internet Information by offering: An Internet Catalogue providing search and browse access to over 10,000 thousand high quality Internet-accessible resources from around the world together with brief descriptions, to help you identify the best sources for you quickly and effectively.
A Social Science Search Engine with over 50,000 social science related Web pages Browsing by subject, with supporting Subject Guides Thesaurus facilities to help you find alternative search terms and thereby improve your results The Social Science Grapevine, providing conference announcements, courses and CVs and profiles of like-minded researchers (and the option to publish your own) My Account, offering customised personal views of what’s new on SOSIG, including regular email updates A way to automatically find like-minded colleagues who are working in the same fields using the ‘find my friends’ option Take a look at the new site at http://www.sosig.ac.uk/.
SOSIG is a service of the Resource Discovery Network, a developing network based at King’s College London, partly funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
The network provides access to high quality resources in a range of other subjects visit http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ for more information.
Why struggle to find high quality information in your subject area on the Internet, when the experts have already done it for you?
If you have any queries about SOSIG please contact: Nicky Ferguson Director, Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) Email: nicky.ferguson@bris.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7084 Or Justine Kitchen Information and Training Manager Resource Discovery Network Centre King’s College London Email: justine.kitchen@rdn.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2935     New Learning and Teaching Support Networks in the Social Sciences   The review of the CTI and TLTSN initiatives funded by HEFCE led to a recommendation that there should be a rationalisation of the existing set of teaching and learning programmes and initiatives on a UK wide basis.
These have been formally convened within a Learning and Teaching Support Network, comprising 24 subject centres and one Generic Learning and Teaching Centre.
Many of the new subject centres build on existing CTI’s and involve learning and teaching support networks created by other funding council initiatives, such as FDTL.
The new centres will become the main points of contact within subject communities for information and advice on good practices and innovations in learning, teaching and assessment, and will provide support for the many networks which already exist.
The centres will aim to have high visibility within their subjects and ensure they provide both a pro-active and a responsive service to the needs of their communities.
Within the social sciences the following LTSN’s have been established: Business and Management and Accountancy   The Centre for Business, Management and Accountancy is a partnership between the School of Management, University of East Anglia (UEA), the Open University Business School, and the Business School at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) with the lead site at UEA.
UEA will co-ordinate the work of all three partners and will provide the first point of contact for the constituency in England and Wales.
The Centre at GCU will be responsible for the centre’s activities in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
An Advisory Board and an Associate Panel of Experts drawn from the academic and professional constituency will support the work of the centre.
The Centre’s aims are: To support lecturers of Business, Management and Accountancy in maintaining and enhancing the quality and effectiveness of their teaching.
To contribute to an understanding of the institutional, organisationaland human issues relating to successful adoption of innovative learning and teaching issues, including C&IT.
Encourage research and pedagogic development in the learning and teaching of the discipline, including support of C&IT and other innovations.
In pursuit of these aims LTSN.BMA will disseminate information through: the WWW, a journal and a newsletter, conferences, workshops and seminars definitive subject reports.
To find out more have a look at: http://www.mgt.uea.ac.uk/ltsn.bma Economics The Economics LTSN centre is based at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol and brings together expertise and experience from the Universities of Bristol, UWE and Portsmouth and from the former CTI Centre for Economics.
Its principal aims are to: Collate and promote information on good practices Provide networks for communication within the economics Provide opportunities for professional development Review, advise and encourage pedagogical research and development in economics.
The Economics LTSN centre hopes to act as a catalyst for improving learning and teaching in economics through a range of advice and guidance activities and by facilitating channels where lecturers can communicate with each other.
To find out more have a look at: http://econltsn.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Education Subject Centre: advancing learning & teaching in Education The Education Subject Centre is a partnership between the Universities of Nottingham, Bristol and Oxford Brookes with UCET and UACE.
The Centre will be directed by Professor Roger Murphy of the University of Nottingham.
The Centre is a resource on innovative practice and theoretical perspectives for educators in all sectors and educational contexts that, in order to help them: Provide high quality, relevant and appropriate differentiated support for learning Identify points of articulation between the curricula of compulsory and non-compulsory education so as to develop lifelong learning Provide support that meets the diverse range of learning needs of an extremely heterogeneous student population The functions of the Centre will be three-fold: The collection of insights, experience and resources from all sources within the subject, and from all regions The collation of the resources gathered into high quality support materials The dissemination of material and the promotion of good practice through a variety of knowledge brokerage activities, involving as wide a constituency as possible For more details contact: Arlene Gilpin a.gilpin@bristol.ac.uk The UK Centre for Legal Education   The UK Centre for Legal Education, is founded on the merger of the National Centre for Legal Education (supported by FDTL) and the Law Technology Centre (one of the CTI Centres) and is based at the University of Warwick.
The UKCLE aims to develop and enhance learning, teaching and assessment practices in legal education by supporting learning and teaching innovation in both academic and vocational legal training.
A key focus will be upon the effective development and implementation of technology to support learning and teaching practice.
To achieve its aims the UKCLE will provide a range of services and opportunities for the legal education community including a Learning and Teaching Fund to provide support for innovative educational projects.
In addition, the UKCLE will co-ordinate a number of events to encourage the exchange of ideas at macro level and to help with specific institutional concerns.
Regional seminars, bespoke workshops and a consultative service to providers are all part of the commitment to encouraging quality research and developing skills, knowledge and the autonomy of mind required of students in the 21st century.
Current news and developments will be posted on the centre’s website.
To find out more take a look at: http://www.ukcle.ac.uk or contact: T.Varnava@warwick.ac.uk Tel: 024 7652 3117 UK Centre for Legal Education University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL Psychology LTSN Psychology is led from the University of York, with an associate site at Strathclyde University.
A number of specialist consultants will be appointed to lead network activities in subareas of the discipline or in relation to particular educational methods or approaches.
The Centre aims to encourage the evaluation and dissemination of innovations developed for local use and will fund a number of small projects to make available to the wider community validated examples of good practice.
The Centre is currently recruiting staff and planning an initial survey of the needs of the Psychology community.
During the transitional period, the current CTI Psychology enquiry, web and distribution services will continue, although these will be reviewed as part of the initial survey.
A programme of workshops and visits together with publications and website will be announced later this year.
Dissemination of the Centre’s activities will be supported by a network of individual contacts within psychology departments.
If you wish to join the Centre’s mailing list or have enquiries relating to the Centre contact: Annie Trapp, LTSN Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of York, YO1 5DD.
Email: ltsnpsych@york.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)1904 433154 To find out more take a look at: http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/ctipsych/ SWAP-LTSN: Learning and Teaching Support Network Subject Centre for Social Policy and Social Work The centre for Social Policy and Social Work (SWAP) will collate, critically evaluate, promote, disseminate and develop good practice in learning, teaching and assessment in UK higher education funded social work and social policy education, including the use, where appropriate, of communication and information technology (C&IT).
SWAP is led by the University of Southampton, in partnership with the University of Bristol and the National Institute for Social Work (NISW).
Principal functions and activities will include: Asessing the baseline and the learning profiles of the disciplines Building the networks and communities Tracking existing and future HE projects and programmes Collating and critiquing practice in learning and teaching in Social Policy and Social Work Developing the knowledge base of good practice Facilitating the transfer and embedding of good practice in learning and teaching Developing the resourcxe base and adding value Disseminating information using a range of strategies.
To find out more have a look at: http://www.swap.ac.uk/ Author Details   Justine Kitchen Information and Training Manager Resource Discovery Network Centre King’s College London Email: justine.kitchen@rdn.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Debra Hiom Research Officer SOSIG ILRT University of Bristol Bristol Email: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Article Title: “New Millennium, New SOSIG” Author: Justine Kitchen Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/planet-sosig/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Clumps Come Up Trumps Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Clumps Come Up Trumps Buzz data software database metadata thesaurus browser identifier vocabularies schema sql copyright video cataloguing opac z39.50 marc perl aacr2 php rslp marc21 authentication interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Helena Gillis, Verity Brack, John Gilby and Marian Hogg review the four eLib CLUMP projects now at the end of their funding periods.
This article is an end of project review of the Large Scale Resource Discovery strand of the eLib Phase 3 Programme.
Four ‘clump’ [1] projects were funded, CAIRNS, M25 Link, and RIDING are regionally based, and Music Libraries Online (MLO) is subject based.
One question that this article aims to answer is ‘Have the clumps projects been a success?’ The following sections highlight some of the many issues that the four projects have looked at and the progress that has been made.
Technical Issues Z39.50 Software All the projects were using the Z39.50 protocol [2] for bibliographic search and retrieval; this protocol uses the client-server model, and the clumps have developed their own clients to search their libraries’ catalogues.
When the projects began in 1998 a limited number of options were available: M25 Link and CAIRNS chose the bespoke route, looking at what Z39.50 clients could be obtained, both free of charge and commercial, whereas RIDING and MLO used the Fretwell-Downing [3] VDX software.
Use of Z39.50 has increased throughout the lifetime of the projects and it is now the norm for academic libraries (and significantly, other sectors) to include a Z39.50 server in their library systems.
There are many different Z-clients now available and it is not obvious which software package is the best for any given application.
Availability, support, cost, ease of installation, ability to configure to specific Z-servers, skills needed to make changes, future expansion, and system requirements are some of the issues considered when making a choice of software.
M25 Link adopted the Europagate [4] software at an early stage of the project and carried out development work to build a Z-client into the existing M25 Web Guide.
Following evaluation, the team is implementing a new user interface with two additional clients: the Index Data PHP [5] client and the Zeta Perl client to compare searching performance.
One facility that has been designed into M25 Link is a database that contains all Z-server connection details, bibliographic attribute settings, mappings for returned data and general information about the member catalogues.
CAIRNS has investigated a number of gateway packages including GEOWEB [6], ZAP [7], Europagate and ELiAS [8].
Work on GEOWEB was frozen when it was found that the gateway, in its current form, was unable to send different search attributes to each target database.
epixtech software [9] was adopted as the main avenue for development, when investigation showed that it is possible to use it to develop a mechanism (termed ‘dynamic clumping’ by CAIRNS) to produce a sub-set of targets for users to search (see section 3.2), and to display accurate holdings and circulation information.
ZAP and ELiAS are of interest because they can handle both MARC and GRS-1 records, a requirement for the incorporation of non-library targets in the clumps.
Fretwell-Downing’s VDX gateway software is used by a number of existing services, such as AHDS [10], as well as RIDING and MLO.
It offers a fully-featured, integrated inter-library loan system as well as a Z-client.
Both RIDING and MLO were able to customise their VDX user interfaces, and the software can be configured to specify different search attributes for each target (‘query adaptation’).
MLO also have a JAFER software demonstrator [11] available from their web site; this software is to be developed under the JISC Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [12] development programme.
Holdings Information Three of the projects have looked at the retrieval of holdings information, something that is often not available to a Z-search although of great importance to users.
The epixtech software used by CAIRNS enables the display of detailed holdings for each item record from libraries using epixtech systems.
It is planned to expand this to retrieve data from other system types in the future.
The VDX software used by RIDING and MLO is currently able to access holdings information from Innopac systems.
M25 Link can access general holdings and location information with Aleph, Innopac, Talis and Unicorn systems, and in the future with Horizon.
M25 Link has also implemented a specific periodical title search option, essential for users seeking serials information.
De-duplication Another software issue is the combining and de-duplicating of results.
M25 Link combines the results from searched catalogues and then runs a de-duping routine.
Whilst not perfect, this does reduce the quantity of information on-screen for the user to look at.
However, some users, particularly cataloguers, are wary of the accuracy of operation of de-duping routines, and others have questioned its usefulness.
A requirement that all the projects have found essential is that the Z-client must have the facility to be tailored to individual library catalogues.
This theme is expanded below.
Interoperability Issues Interoperability is the term used for different systems working with each other and with each other’s data.
Interoperability is of many types – technical, semantic, political, human, domain, community etc.
[13].
From the clumps perspective there are two main interoperability issues: technical interoperability for Z39.50 use between different library system, and the consistency of data in the catalogues of the clumps libraries.
Z39.50 Attributes Bibliographic applications of Z39.50 use the Bib-1 attribute set to define access points to bibliographic records.
This is a set of 99 Use attributes, such as Title, ISBN, Date of publication etc., and related Structure, Position, Completeness, Relation and Truncation attributes of differing values, that are used in conjunction with a Use attribute.
Z-servers normally have only a selection of these attribute values implemented rather than the complete set, and so incompatibility is likely to occur between elements of the Z-client’s search request and the particular configuration of Bib-1 that is supported by a Z-server.
If a Z-server does not support an attribute value that is specified by a Z-client’s request, it can respond in a variety of ways: · it may invoke an alternative, default value; e.g.
if the requested entry point is not recognised, the encompassing Use attribute ‘Any’ could be used.
· it may reject the search request and return an ‘unsupported attribute’ error message.
· it may not complete the request.
Use attributes are mapped to particular indexes within the Z-server, so the Author attribute (1003) for example, would access an author index; occasionally this mapping is inappropriate so although data is returned, the hits appear to have little relation to the search term used.
Profiles Given the considerable scope for variation in the implementation of Bib-1 attribute values, it is necessary for any Z-gateway to utilise some form of controlling mechanism.
Such mechanisms are referred to as profiles, the essential function of which is to regularise the performance of the client and server in any Z39.50 association.
The Bath Profile [14] has relatively recently gained ISO recognition and is gaining acceptance in the library community.
The profile offers a suite of nineteen search options grouped into three levels of conformance.
A full set of six attribute values is specified for each search type.
Given the enhanced interoperability that this profile affords, M25 Link will formally adopt it, and is in the process of holding discussions with supplier representatives of the seven library systems currently included in the M25 Link.
CAIRNS, RIDING and MLO also support the adoption of the Bath Profile.
Cataloguing and Indexing Issues As is often the case with any form of union catalogue, cataloguing practices and conventions used by member institutions and library systems can lead to a wide variety in usefulness of results for the poor user.
Cross-searching highlights the differences between systems, and it is important that users understand that the quality of the data received is not necessarily dependent purely on the functionality of Z39.50.
Bibliographic Standards One of the obvious differences among catalogues is use of the MARC standard: partner libraries of the clumps variously use USMARC or UKMARC, and many have also introduced local fields; at least one clump library does not use MARC at all.
It is possible to develop mapping specifications that 'translate' each Z attribute to the relevant MARC tags in each database, and MLO has taken this path.
This has the effect of refining the search and display facility considerably, but the rules have to be adapted for new partners joining the clump.
This is obviously not an ideal solution in the long term, and Z39.50 searching would certainly benefit from the potential harmonisation of MARC standards represented by MARC21.
The British Library is currently moving towards adopting MARC21, and if this were more widely adopted it would be a welcome development in overcoming confusion in the use and meaning of MARC tags.
The clumps have looked closely at index 'content' issues, and found that there are wide variations in the actual content of the bibliographic record.
Most specialist material, such as music or electronic datasets, presents difficulties in cataloguing which are not fully addressed by traditional international cataloguing rules and standards.
Interpretation and adherence to AACR2 is often inconsistent, for example, MLO has found problems in the application of Uniform Titles; transliteration of non-Western alphabets (Rachmaninov, Rakhmaninov, Rakmaninoff etc); use and citation of thematic catalogues and/or opus numbers (crucial to music as, in the absence of an ISBN, these often represent the only unique identifiers); designation of the function of added names, such as performers; and subject headings, where almost all the libraries had their own internal system.
Some of these variations are more crucial than others, and CAIRNS and MLO have drawn up guides of recommended cataloguing and indexing practice [15] to encourage a greater uniformity within the consortia.
SCURL – the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries [16] has recently adopted the CAIRNS recommendations.
Without major retrospective conversion of catalogues there is never going to be complete uniformity, but progress in identifying the extent of diversity of practice has been made.
Indexing Policies As well as the different interpretations and applications of MARC tags, a further complication is that of different indexing policies.
It is quite possible that each library system will have its indexes built from different sets of MARC tags.
For instance, a Name index may include editors, performers, illustrators etc., as well as authors, and an Author search may well produce false hits because of this.
Equally, in records where the Notes field has been used extensively for additional names, such as performers on a sound recording or video, the names may well not appear in the Name index, and a personal name search would return no results.
Of course, these problems are not unique to virtual union catalogues, and every catalogue has its own search and retrieval idiosyncrasies.
However, it is much more complicated trying to guide a user through the multiple possibilities of search and retrieval that the cross-searching of diverse catalogues presents than it is for a single OPAC.
Clumps projects cannot expect partner libraries to make massive changes in their databases to suit cross-searching, but each project has encouraged its consortium libraries to think about interoperability in the long term, so that when new library systems are introduced, or major retrospective conversion programmes undertaken, some of these issues are taken into consideration.
User Interface Interface Design The development of web-based virtual union catalogues creates a tension between OPAC and web searching.
In his article on building a union catalogue in an earlier edition of Ariadne, Matthew Dovey [17] identifies the two major concepts of information retrieval: recall and precision.
An OPAC user would usually expect high recall and precision, in that they expect a query to return a comprehensive set of relevant results.
Web users, on the other hand, are used to low recall and precision, as they are generally searching unstructured data.
Naturally, the virtual union catalogues seek to be as like an OPAC as possible, but they do not have the advantage of a single set of cataloguing and indexing policies, consistent rules, or a single structured database.
Interfaces for cross-searching therefore need to be something between a traditional OPAC and a web search engine.
All the clumps projects have consulted with their users to establish what their requirements are, and have designed their interfaces accordingly.
The results from both surveys could be summarised by the three C's of Choice, Clarity and Customisation.
· Choice: Users want to be able to select the catalogues they search, rather than be faced with the whole range of libraries available.
They also want to be able to choose from a wide range of access points, with minimum guidance.
· Clarity: Users require logical and clearly laid out choices, such as the selection of catalogues; subject strengths should be organised in some form of classified sequence.
Terminology should be appropriate to the user community, and avoid web or computer style jargon.
Instructions for searching should also be clear, and the display of results should indicate the method by which it is ordered, and include, if possible, the facility to sort.
· Customisation: Evidence of an increased familiarity with web searching over OPAC use shows that users require and expect a customisable interface, whereby they can store a personal 'profile' of selections which they will use regularly.
Selecting Catalogues for Searching Each of the clump projects has been faced with the problem of how to guide users to the collections most likely to meet their needs.
Even with the relatively small number of collections included in each of the clumps, it does not make sense, whether in respect of a user’s time, or in respect of gateway and network efficiency, to search to all available collections.
A mechanism to narrow the focus of an enquiry to fewer, more suitable collections is a sensible approach even within a single clump.
The method that the clumps are using to assist users to target their searches more precisely is that of Collection Level Descriptions.
The development of a collection description scheme for the clumps involved input from a national working group [18] and also from other eLib Phase 3 projects.
The scheme has to encompass collections of physical items, collections of digital surrogates of physical items, collections of other digital items and catalogues of such collections.
The basic scheme was developed and refined, and is used by RIDING and Agora at their gateways.
Users are able to search collection level descriptions for location, subject matter, access details, and other information.
MLO have also based their collection descriptions on this scheme, and have additionally developed a list of specialist subject headings based on the adoption and expansion of the BUBL [19] list of subject terms for music.
The M25 Link and CAIRNS clumps use slightly different approaches; originally, M25 Link allowed users to identify collections with particular subject strengths (based on the M25 librarians’ own views of their collection strengths), and also to select by geographical area within the M25.
Following evaluation, a new interface is under design that has a default of selecting catalogues by geographical zone only.
Options are also available for selection of catalogues by subject strength, individual institution pick list, and access arrangements.
CAIRNS has adopted the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) Collection Level Descriptions schema [20] using a SQL database (MS Access) to store location, subject and other information, which can be searched and displayed in a client web browser using ColdFusion.
Collections can be identified using subject strengths taken from the Research Collections Online (RCO) [21] service of SCURL, and by geographical location in Scotland.
As well as 'dynamic clumping', CAIRNS also offers pre-selected 'mini-clumps'; subsets of the available Z collections and searches, selected by and for specific user groups.
Work on collection level description schemes is being taken forward in a number of ways, particularly by the RSLP Collection Description project, and the High Level Thesaurus (HILT) Project [22], which is investigating subject vocabularies.
Development of similar schemes is also taking place in other domains, such as the museums sector, as the importance of metadata increases.
Additional Clump Services Access to Resources The clump projects were based on the need for large scale resource discovery, and despite interoperability difficulties, have all succeeded in providing services for resource discovery.
However, it is inevitable that a user, having discovered a pertinent resource, will then wish to access it.
Thus the clumps have been faced with additional issues regarding physical access for consultation purposes and/or borrowing access.
Reciprocal Access and Borrowing Policies Initially, the clump projects merely provided information on access and loan rights but subsequently reciprocal access and borrowing policies have been developed for some of the consortia, and the investigation of inter-library loan services through the clump gateways is in progress.
Some clump projects include non-academic library targets RIDING includes the Leeds Library and Information Service for example – and implementation of reciprocal policies becomes more problematical when users outside the academic sector are included.
Obviously the display of detailed holdings information in the item records is of great importance here (see section 2.1 above); users would also like to see availability information if possible.
Z-searches normally only return the Z-target location e.g.
University of Sheffield, and cannot necessarily state which branch library holds the item.
Other holdings type information is returned with some searches: RIDING returns the call number for sites with Innopac library systems; CAIRNS returns the call number, holding status and location information for sites with epixtech library systems.
M25 Link returns library location for most system types, and recent versions of Unicorn are also able to include classmark and circulation data.
Inter-library Loans RIDING has established an inter-library loan service as an extension to its virtual union catalogue.
The user can select the ‘Request’ link beside an item in their list of search results; and, if authorised, access an inter-library loan form, already populated with the appropriate bibliographic details.
The form data can be edited if necessary, and the ILL request submitted.
The system automates the processing of requests to supplying libraries, and the complete loan cycle for an item is tracked.
A user can check the progress of the request at any time by logging in to their own RIDING account.
There are many developments to be made and issues to be resolved before on-line ILL is available to all users however; these include: · copyright · conflict with existing ILL systems · relationships with the British Library Document Supply Centre · adoption of the ILL ISO standard by system suppliers · reciprocal lending agreements Inter-library loans are a key area which the clump services have the potential to support, but further development is required.
Future Clump Developments The primary aim of each of the eLib clump projects is to provide searches to a virtual union catalogue for their consortium sites.
However, the wider vision for the clumps has always been to use the cross searching mechanism as a way of increasing access to resources.
For this reason, each of the clump projects investigated the development of a number of service extensions to the central clump search mechanism.
This has included the investigation of inter-library loans services (see above), authentication and authorisation facilities, and the manipulation of records to suit the needs of users.
Evaluation has shown that users (students, academics and subject librarians in particular) of the clump services would like to see further development of the services.
This development would include work on all the issues raised in this article and also on information landscapes and individual user profiles.
Conclusion To answer the question posed at the start of this article, the (perhaps a little biased!)
answer is ‘yes’, the projects have shown that Z39.50 is viable and can be used successfully to produce a union catalogue.
Evaluation of the clumps services have indicated that end users are amazed that cross-searching is possible, and are happy to cope with its short-comings, at least for the moment.
Cross-searching in the ‘real world’ will always have to cope with inconsistencies, and it is very unlikely that it will be able to achieve highest recall and highest precision, but it does provide a rapid and easy-to-use service.
The projects have generated interest and stimulated development in several areas; a list of successful outcomes of the clump projects includes: · working Z39.50 services cross–searching heterogeneous databases · input into development of the Bath Profile · development of working collection description schemas · service developments such as access and borrowing policies and inter-library loan services · guidelines on cataloguing and indexing for interoperability · blueprints for development of other clumps and for organisations wishing to join a clump · discussions with library system suppliers about their Z39.50 servers to improve interoperability and add further features · encouragement for consortium building, providing a forum for co-operation between consortium members at all levels The clump projects now have a pool of expertise, which they are willing to share with others who might be interested in creating a clump or joining a clump.
Please contact any of the authors of this article for information and advice.
Current Status of the Projects CAIRNS is due to complete its eLib Phase 3 funding activities on 31 December 2000 and thereafter work will continue under the auspices of the Scottish Collections Network Extension (SCONE) Project [23].
http://www.cairns.lib.gla.ac.uk/; Project Co-ordinator Helena Gillis (h.gillis@lib.gla.ac.uk) MLO carries on until 30 April 2001 and is seeking funding opportunities to become a live service.
http://www.musiconline.ac.uk/ M25 Link has funding until 31 July 2001 at which time the service will go live with all 40 members of the M25 Consortium of Higher Education Libraries as partners.
http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/M25link/ RIDING completed its project period in the spring of 2000 and continues as a live service for the Yorkshire & Humberside Universities Association until the end of 2001. http://www.riding.ac.uk.
References For information on clumps architecture see: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/clumps/ The Z39.50 Maintenance Agency at the Library of Congress: http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ Fretwell-Downing Informatics homepage: http://www.fdgroup.com/fdi/company/home.html The Europagate web gateway home page: http://europagate.dtv.dk/wg_index.htm Index Data homepage: http://www.indexdata.dk/ The GEOWEB homepage is at: http://www.library.geac.com/default.asp?Page=geoweb-na The ELiAS homepage is at http://www.elias.be/ The ZAP homepage is at: http://www.indexdata.dk/zap/ The epixtech homepage is at: http://www.amlibs.com/ Arts and Humanities Data Service gateway: http://ahds.ac.uk:8080/ahds_live/ The MLO experimental JAFER gateway: http://samantha.las.ox.ac.uk:8080/ Information about the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER): http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ Interoperability definitions by Paul Miller, the UK Interoperability Focus: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/interoperability/.
The Bath Profile An International Z39.50 Specification for Library Applications and Resource Discovery: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/bath/ CAIRNS cataloguing and indexing recommendations: http://cairns.lib.gla.ac.uk/docs/index.html SCURL – the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries: http://scurl.ac.uk/ Dovey, Matthew So you want to build a union catalogue?
Ariadne, issue 23: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/dovey/ The national collection description working group report is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cld/wg-report/ BUBL list of subject terms for music: http://link.bubl.ac.uk/music/ Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) Collection Description project: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/ For information on the Research Collections Online (RCO) database and clumping, see the article by Dennis Nicholson et al, Cairns that go clump in the night: A description of work in Scottish universities on distributed library systems, one of the 'clump' projects under eLib phase 3, in Library Technology, vol.3(5) November 1998 at: http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/lt/1998/news1167.html The High Level Thesaurus Project (HILT) is at: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ The Scottish Collections Network Extension (SCONE) project is at: http://scone.strath.ac.uk/ Author Details   Verity Brack RIDING Project Manager St. George’s Library University of Sheffield Email: v.brack@shef.ac.uk Web site: www.shef.ac.uk   John Gilby M25 Link Project Manager BLPES London School of Economics Email: j.gilby@lse.ac.uk Web site: www.lse.ac.uk   Helena Gillis CAIRNS Project Co-ordinator Library University of Glasgow Email: h.gillis@lib.gla.ac.uk Web site: www.gla.ac.uk   Marian Hogg MLO Project Co-ordinator Library Trinity College of Music Email: mlo@tcm.ac.uk Web site: www.tcm.ac.uk Article Title: "Clumps Come Up Trumps Author: Verity Brack, et al.
Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/clumps26/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Mirror: The National Mirror Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Mirror: The National Mirror Service Buzz data software database archives copyright cache ftp url Citation BibTex RIS Sally Hadland on the New National Mirror Service.
The National Mirror Service will supersede the HENSA services in August to become the primary mirror service for the academic community.
This will be a new, improved and more integrated service brought to you by the Universities of Lancaster and Kent and funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
The Director of the new service is Dr Tim Hopkins, Reader in Computer Science at the University of Kent.
The service will be based primarily upon the web, although access via FTP will still be available.
It will hold up-to-date copies or 'mirrors' of popular software and data sites from all over the world which may be of interest to academia.
This will save the user time online and save bandwidth as the mirror site may be in the UK but the originating site could be in the US.
The National Mirror service will not only distribute software for all widely available operating systems and platforms, but will collect all forms of freely available, electronically stored material.
This will include databases of textual and numerical data (including gathered data, bibliographic and reference material), audio material, static and moving pictures and web page based information.
This information will be provided free of charge, without restrictions.
Within the new service, continued development of easy-to-use, time saving access tools will be very important.
Much effort will be directed to developing indexing, searching and browsing interfaces which will track technological developments and integrate with other UK HE mirrors and institutional web sites.
A user-friendly, intuitive interface is a key factor in the new service, coupled with comprehensive and efficient searching to enable users to find and download the data they require.
To help the user save time, much of the compressed material will be automatically unpacked when browsing to provide access to textual information about content.
This enables evaluation of the package before downloading.
A commitment has been made to develop a value-added service, dedicated to saving time for pressured academics, particularly with non-specialists in mind.
While catering for the needs of computer experts, the primary aim will be to assist those, whose specialisations are in other areas, to locate, evaluate and obtain the information they require to perform their work.
There will also be a help desk with a telephone, fax and email helpline alongside comprehensive online help.
The National Mirror Service intends to collaborate with other services such as CTI centres, to increase academic relevance.
Liason with other centres such as the Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC) will ensure appropriate sources of subject-related data are investigated and supported.
Ongoing discussions with other organisations such as The National JANET Web Caching Service will serve to highlight important mirrors and information trends.
It may also be possible for links to be set up with other key community mirrors.
By working together an integrated information distribution service can be created that will save the user time, money and serve their information needs.
The collection of mirror sites will encompass a vast amount of varied data for a broad spectrum of subjects in various formats.
This means everything from specialised collections of subject software, images and data to support degree courses and teaching, to important software for programmers or the latest copy of Netscape or Internet Explorer for general web users.
Also available will be bibliographic information, numerical data and reference material for researchers.
The Higher Education National Software Archive (HENSA) will continue to be available until the new service begins on August 1st.
After that date most HENSA URLs will be automatically redirected to the equivalent resource in the new service.
References The National Mirror Service http://www.mirror.ac.uk The Higher Education National Software Archive (HENSA) http://www.hensa.ac.uk Computers in Teaching Initative (CTI) Centres http://www.cti.ac.uk Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk National JANET Web Caching Service (JWCS) http://wwwcache.ja.net Author Details Sally Hadland HENSA Information Officer Higher Education National Software Archive (HENSA) Email: s.hadland@lancaster.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Research: Browsing Video Content Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Research: Browsing Video Content Buzz data html database browser video cataloguing graphics hypertext multimedia jpeg ascii gif algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Peter Thomas, UWE, and Peter Macer of Hewlett Packard Research Laboratories describe automated techniques for browsing video content.
Interactive Media-rich Web Content Using Video One of the major problems experienced by Web users is the amount of time needed to download data.
As the speed and power of desktop computer has increased it has become possible for almost anyone with access to a PC to produce interactive web content using images, audio, and particularly video.
Therefore, even though the available bandwidth of the Internet is increasing, the bandwidth requirements of the media available through it, and the number of users trying to access that information are also increasing.
Although estimates vary wildly, the evidence is of massive, rapid, growth: the number of Web pages in September 1997 was 200M; the average time spent online in 1996 was 6.9 hours a week, and in 1997 9.8 hours; in 1997 there were an estimated 26M hosts, with 300,000 pages added to the net every week; information on the Internet doubles every year with 100 million people using the Internet, over 1.5 domain names, and a doubling of internet traffic every 100 days.
These factors combine to ensure that the effective bandwidth available per person is still low enough to make the downloading of some Web content take a long time.
The browsing model on which the web is based exacerbates this problem.
As hyperlinks are references to new information, users do not know exactly what that information is until it has been fully downloaded.
If the data takes many minutes, or even hours, to download, the browsing model begins to break down, and finding information can become a time consuming, expensive, and frustrating task.
In the case of video the problems are more pronounced.
Although video is a powerful communicative tool, especially for interactive web-based content, the large volume of raw data required for digital video sequences makes accessing video sequences from remote servers a time consuming and expensive task, with even small sequences taking many minutes or even hours to download.
It would therefore be valuable to ensure that the video data being retrieved by the user is exactly that which meets their requirements.
Video as Data Video has a number of properties that present a particular challenge to efficient storage and retrieval.
These properties are (i) the high volume of data needed to encode even short sequences of video, (ii) the temporal component of video, and (iii) the opacity of video to computers.
In the case of (i), data volume, the drawback of video as a medium is the sheer volume of raw data required to communicate and store it.
A single frame of broadcast television in the United States, for example, consists of 525 lines of colour and luminance information: by sampling at the same horizontal and vertical frequencies (i.e.
using square shaped pixels), and representing each pixel by three 8-bit colour values (one for each of the red, green, and blue colour channels), over a megabyte of memory is required to store a single television frame.
Furthermore, because US television pictures are refreshed thirty times per second, it requires 33 megabytes of memory to store a single second of television content.
The second property that ensures that video is difficult to store and retrieve in a convenient and efficient manner is its spatio-temporality.
Still images and text are spatial media: the information that they carry is spread out over an area in space, be it a sheet of paper, an artist’s canvas, or a computer screen, and it does not change over time.
Images can be almost fully understood at a glance and a page of text can be read very quickly to identify which sections are relevant.
Speech and other audio information by contrast are temporal media: it is meaningless to ask what sound can be heard at a given instant in time, because sound does not exist independently of time.
The temporal nature of speech and other audio information presents a problem when trying to browse or navigate through such media, because neither their general structure, nor an overview of their contents can be quickly assessed.
Video, like images and rendered text is displayed over a spatially but like audio, video information has a temporal component and so is a spatio-temporal medium with all the restrictions of temporal media rather than the advantages of spatial media.
Although an individual frame of a video sequence may be treated as a still image much of the important information in a video sequence is contained within its temporal component, and is not shown by a single still image.
Like audio, if the user wishes to understand a ten-minute sequence of video they must take ten minutes to watch the whole sequence.
In the case of (iii) textual information stored on computers is relatively easy to catalogue, search, and access, but images are not generally constructed from an easily identified and finite set of primitives and because of this their content and structure cannot easily be analyzed.
Rosetta a Video Storyboarding System We have developed a system called Rosetta which creates from video content a series of video stills representing a sequence of video footage.
This representation a storyboard is routinely used in the production of all types of film, video and animation and consist of a series of sketches showing each shot in each scene as it will be filmed, and possibly some indication of the action taking place.
A storyboard allows the writers and directors to plan the action to be shot and from what camera angle, and in essence provides a summary of the entire film.
Normally, the storyboard is not available to a viewer as it is discarded after the movie is completed.
If however, the storyboard for a piece of video, or a close approximation to it, could be generated from the video itself, then the viewer could be provided with an easy means of browsing and indexing an entire video sequence.
Figure 1 shows part of the original storyboard for the Oscar-winning animation The Wrong Trousers (Aardman Animation, UK).
Figure 1: Part of the original storyboard for the Oscar-winning animation The Wrong Trousers The Rosetta system, which is intended to produce storyboards in real time or faster then real time, has been tested by reverse-engineering storyboards from finished video sequences.
The system identifies three properties of each shot in the sequence: (1) the start point (first frame) of the shot, (2) the end point (last frame) of the shot, and (3) the picture that represents the shot as a whole.
The first two of these properties may be found by a process of transition detection and the third by representative frame choice.
Transitions are the links between successive shots in sequences.
The most frequently used type of transition is the cut, but effects such as fades, dissolves, and wipes are also used.
Transitions are detected by comparing the amount and constancy of change between individual frames.
Having identified the start and finish of each shot, an image must be produced that conveys the same meaning as the entire shot.
In Rosetta, a single frame from the shot is chosen as being representative.
The algorithm compares each frame in the shot to an ‘average frame’ generated by simply finding the mean colour of the corresponding pixels in each frame of the shot.
Originally, the algorithm was designed to choose the frame that differs least from the average frame (the typical frame).
Better results can be obtained by choosing the frame that differs most from the average frame (the atypical frame).
Figure 2 shows part of the Rosetta-generated storyboard from the video of The Wrong Trousers.
Comparison with the original storyboard fragment in Figure 1 reveals that Rosetta delivers a storyboard very close to the original.
Aspects of Rosetta are described in detail in references [1-9].
Figure 2: Part of the Rosetta-generated storyboard from the video of The Wrong Trousers Rosetta on the Web The value of Rosetta is to produce storyboard representations of video sequences accessible through the World Wide Web.
Because the data size of a storyboard representation is negligible when compared to that of the video sequence itself, each frame of the storyboard may be stored together with information about the start and finish frame numbers of the shot which it represents with negligible additional storage requirements.
By presenting a storyboard representation of the video sequence to the user as a preview of the video sequence itself, the user will be able to quickly assess which parts of the video sequence are required, and download only those parts of the sequence, and in a form which is most appropriate to their needs.
It is relatively simple for a server to automatically generate an HTML document displaying any part of the storyboard in a number of different possible formats including arbitrarily complex user interaction capabilities made possible using applets.
Using forms, control elements such as buttons and selection boxes can be made to appear on the web page.
In the example in Figure 3, three check boxes are included under each frame of the storyboard.
The first check box is accompanied by a magnifying glass icon, and may be selected to download a larger version of the image; the second, next to a loudspeaker icon, may be selected to download the audio track from the appropriate section of the video sequence; while the third, shown with a film projector icon, may be used to download the digital video itself.
Figure 3: User Interface Once a browser has downloaded and displayed the HTML page showing the storyboard, the users may look through the sequence of still images and decide if they require any additional representations of each shot to be downloaded.
A larger version of the representative frame, the audio track associated with the shot, or the full-motion digital video clip itself may be requested by selecting the appropriate check box under each frame.
When a video server receives a request for an alternative media, it is dealt with by a CGI script which parses an ASCII string description of the selections supplied by the browser.
Having established which additional media are required for which shots, the script can locate the required data, encode it in an appropriate format, and send the requested media back to browser.
The encoding in which the media is being sent (MPEG, GIF, etc) is identified by the MIME type included in the header information.
When the client receives the additional media requested by the user, the browser will examine the MIME type information associated with the data.
Standard browsers are generally only capable of displaying a very limited set of media types in few encodings, (hypertext, and gif and JPEG encoded still images) but this basic functionality may often be expanded by the addition of plug-ins.
If the browser includes a plug-in capable of decoding and playing the MIME type of the additional media, then it will be displayed by the browser itself.
Alternatively, the browser may be able to associate the MIME type with an external viewer, and send the additional media type to this application.
Figure 4 shows this process.
Figure 4: Model for dialogue between browser and server Developing Rosetta There are several developments of Rosetta as it stands which would be useful.
One is to generate storyboards directly from compressed data.
The algorithms used in Rosetta for cut detection only require the average colour within each of a number of blocks which each frame is divided into.
Because compression schemes commonly used on image and video themselves divide each frame into a number of smaller blocks applying a discrete cosine transform (DCT) to each one, coupled with the fact that the first coefficient of the resulting DCT is equivalent to the average colour over that block, it seems likely that the required information can be extracted from a compressed data stream with only partial decompression.
A second development is to attempt to make use of available a priori information.
In the case of the Representative Frame Choice algorithm this would mean weighting the decision of which frame is selected in favor of those which are known a priori to be most likely the best choices.
For example, it is assumed that the best frames typically come from near the middle of the shot, with less suitable frames being found toward the beginning and end.
The frame choice can then be weighted to take this a priori knowledge into account.
References Macer, P. and Thomas, P. (1996a) From Video Sequence to Comic Strip: Summarising Video for Faster WWW Access.
Proceedings of 3D Graphics and Multimedia on the Internet, WWW and Networks, British Computer Society Computer Graphics & Displays Group, 16-18 April 1996.
Macer, P. and Thomas, P. (1996b) Video Storyboards: Summarising Video Sequences for Indexing and Searching of Video Databases.
IEE E4 Colloquium Digest on Intelligent Image Databases, Savoy Place Wednesday, 22 May 1996.
Macer, P. and Thomas, P. (1999a) Browsing Video Content.
Proceedings of BCS HCI Group Conference, The Active Web, January 1999, Staffordshire University, UK.
Macer, P. and Thomas, P. (1999b, in preparation) Evaluation of the Rosetta Video Summarising System.
Macer, P. and Thomas, P. (1999c, in preparation) Video Browsing using Storyboards.
Macer, P. and Thomas, P. (1999d, in preparation) An empirical comparison of algorithms for representative frame selection in video summarising.
Macer, P. and Thomas, P. (1999e, in preparation) Accessing video over the web.
Macer, P. and Thomas, P. (1999f, in preparation) Transparent Access to Video Over the Web: a review of current approaches.
Proceedings of BCS Conference on Mew Media Technologies for Human-centred Computing, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford, UK 13-15 April 1999.
Macer, P., Thomas, P. Chalabi, N. and Meech, J.
(1996) Finding the Cut of the Wrong Trousers: Fast Video Search Using Automatic Storyboard Generation.
Proceedings of CHI’96 Human Factors in Computing Conference, Vancouver, April 1996.
Author Details Peter J. Macer Hewlett Packard Research Laboratories, Filton Road, Stoke Gifford, Bristol BS12 6QZ Email: pejm@hplb.hpl.hp.com Peter Macer is a Senior Member of Technical staff at Hewlett Packard Research Laboratories, Bristol and holds a PhD from UWE, Bristol.
Peter J. Thomas Centre for Personal Information Management Faculty for Computer Studies and Mathematics University of the West of England Bristol BS16 1QY Email: Peter.Thomas@uwe.ac.uk Peter Thomas is Professor of Information Management and Director of the Centre for Personal Information Management at UWE, Bristol.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz preservation licence mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Netskills has announced a change in its charging arrangements from 1 August 1998.
JISC has agreed to fund the continued production of Netskills material at the level of 50% of current funding.
This means that the system of making material available at a discount of 100% cannot be maintained after 31 July of this year.
In connection with this Netskills has been consulting with interested parties to develop a suitable and simple site licensing arrangement for the training materials after the end of eLib funding.
Netskills intends to use the reduced JISC funding to subsidise heavily the site licence fee for UK HE institutions.
The url for the latest documentation is: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/planning/NS.TM.charge.html In September 1998 the National Preservation Office and Research Libraries Group will be sponsoring a conference on Guidelines for Digital Imaging.
One of the features of this conference is that small groups of librarians and archivists from the UK and the US have been asked to prepare discussion documents on particular topics in advance so that attendees and others will have a chance to review and comment on them.
These documents will be on the web this summer.
Julia Walworth (University of London Library), Janet Gertz (Columbia) and Paul Ayris (University College London), are drawing together thoughts, ideas and existing guidelines on selecting material for digital image capture.
Anyone with practical knowledge or ideas about selection criteria is invited to contact Julia Walworth (not the list) at: Special Collections/Rare Books, University of London Library Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU Email: jwalworth@ull.ac.uk Details of the 1998 UCISA Web Awards can be found at http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/docs/webawa.htm.
The application form will be available nearer the closing date of 30 September 1998.
There are two awards, one for Teaching and Learning and one for Management Information/Business Systems.
The categories are the same as last year, and each award is for £1000.
An email list, lis-nesli, has been set up at Mailbase to provide information about the UK National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI), and for discussion about the progress of NESLI.
It is open to anyone interested in the development of NESLI.
Initial information about NESLI can be found on the JISC web pages at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/progs/index.html#nesli Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collection Description Focus: Spreading the Gospel Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collection Description Focus: Spreading the Gospel Buzz data database dissemination archives metadata thesaurus schema ead rslp interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Bridget Robinson and Pete Johnston with an overview of CLD activities in the first year.
The UK Collection Description Focus [1] was launched on 1 June 2001.
It is a national post, jointly funded for a twelve-month period by the Joint Information Systems Committee/Distributed National Electronic Resource (JISC/DNER) [2], the Research Support Libraries Program (RSLP) [3] and the British Library [4].
The Focus is working towards improving co-ordination on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors.
The Focus provides support both for UK projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work.
The Focus is located within UKOLN [5], and is supported by the Archives Hub [6] and the mda [7].
The Focus is informed by other work within UKOLN, including that done previously by Andy Powell on the RSLP CLD schema, the broader activities of Paul Miller as Interoperability Focus, UKOLN's work on the technical architecture for the JISC Information Environment, and its role in providing technical support to projects within the NOF-digitise programme.
The Focus also liases with the Collection Description Working Group within the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and is working closely with the CIMI Consortium, who are surveying approaches to collection-level description within the museum community.
The work of the UK Collection Description Focus was first reported in the October issue of Ariadne [8].
At this stage the Focus had only been in place four months and was still very much at the "listening" stage, collecting information from relevant projects and "stakeholders" via questionnaires and visits and responding to a range of project-specific queries.
The six months following on from the October article have been very busy, encompassing one briefing day, three regional workshops, monthly newsletters, presentations and the release of themed briefing papers.
The first Briefing Paper "Collections and Collection Description" was published in January [9].
The second paper, "The RSLP Collection Description Model and Schema" will be available at the start of April.
This article will look in more detail at the work and achievements of the Focus to date.
Events The first CD Focus Briefing Day "Collected Wisdom: managing resources and enhancing access through collection-level description", took place at the British Library in October 2001 [10].
The day opened with an introduction from Ronald Milne, Programme Director of the RSLP.
(An account of the work of RSLP can be found elsewhere in this issue.)
The subsequent speakers covered a range of experiences from specific RSLP projects, to various challenges across different domains, including the NOF-digitise programme and the use of collection-level descriptions in the JISC/DNER Information Environment.
Throughout the day, speakers noted the value of collection-level description in supporting interoperability in a cross-domain context.
The day concluded with an outline of the work of the CD Focus and a listing of the major themes of the day.
Delegates identified several key issues for the implementation of collection-level description.
The Focus proposed that work on these problems might be addressed through an open "forum" which would: allow participants to share information on these issues develop consensus on means of addressing the problems capture this consensus in the form of guidelines for good practice that can be promoted through the Focus.
CD Focus will prepare three short "position papers" on some of the issues highlighted and publish them on the "collection-description" discussion list.
The purpose of these papers is not to provide a comprehensive or definitive statement on the topic, but to open debate.
The following areas have been identified: Reuse of collection-level descriptions: granularity and other factors Content standards for collection-level descriptions e.g.
terminology control and collection strength Maintaining collection-level descriptions : implications for sustainability In addition to the Briefing Day (aimed at Policy Advisors, Information Managers and Senior Librarians), the Focus has organised three regional workshops for practitioners i.e.
those tasked with creating collection-level descriptions.
The events were held in Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh.
The first workshop, "Thinking Collectively: approaches to collections and collection description", was held in Manchester in November 2001[11].
It provided an introduction to the concept of the collection, and how it is interpreted and deployed within the different traditions of information management.
The workshop acknowledged that resource description at collection level could facilitate resource discovery.
However there needs to be consensus on the adoption of consistent and compatible approaches to collection description, within and across domains.
The workshop provided a good introduction to the background and thinking behind the RSLP schema backed up by a practical demonstration of its application within the Backstage [12] project.
Other presenters described the use of EAD (Encoded Archival Description) for collection-level description within the museum and archive domains.
The workshop highlighted that the cross-domain use of collection description is a reality: participants expressed an interest in sharing implementation experience with the goal of developing consensus on "best practice" to facilitate interoperability.
The second workshop, "Multi-purpose metadata for collections: creating reusable CLDs", was held in Birmingham in February [13].
This workshop built on the work done in Manchester by looking at how collection-level descriptions are used, and particularly how they are reused in different contexts.
A collection-level description is created within the context of a specific activity or project.
As part of that context, it may be created to support certain functionsor to be used by a particular user group for example, to support academic researchers in one subject area.
If such descriptions are to be reused in other contexts (possibly for different user groups, or to support different activities), that raises a number of issues.
All the projects that contributed to the day acknowledged the importance of reusability and the issues that need to be addressed in order to facilitate reuse.
These included: Adoption of recognised standards for CLD e.g.
RSLP.
ISAD(G), EAD etc Content/terminology standards, use of thesauri etc Agreement on a shared definition of collection functional granularity Flexible output of data to enable sharing with other systems (as seen with AIM25 and SCONE) Other issues emerged during the afternoon breakout groups: The need to clarify the rights and data protection issues associated with the creation, maintenance and sharing of CLDs.
The increased deployment of user/impact studies to learn more about how CLDs are being used Dissemination to user groups to let them know that CLDs are available and improved dissemination by projects to spread information about project experiences and outcomes Access to data the staffing and logistical problems of offering access to previously inaccessible physical collections, including issues of social inclusion, targeting of minority user groups etc.
The third workshop, "Raising standards for collection description: Subjects and strength in CLDs" was held in Edinburgh in March [14].
It concentrated on the issue of content standards and terminological control for collection-level description, with particular emphasis on the use of subject terminologies, thesauri and the use and applicability of collection strength indicators.
Conclusions The workshops have provided a useful platform for RSLP and other Collection Description projects to share their experiences through formal presentations, discussion groups and networking.
They have also provided the Focus with a valuable opportunity to learn how Collection Description standards have been applied in practice in Museums, Libraries and Archives.
Following on from the workshops, the questionnaire results and the project visits, the Focus will now seek to supplement the guidelines that are in place for the RSLP CD Schema, by developing more detailed examples of the use of the Schema, hopefully based on instances created by real projects.
These examples will be annotated to highlight key aspects of the use of the schema and the data model.
The Focus will also continue to draw on related work conducted elsewhere, including: the work on subject terminologies and collection strength within the HILT (High Level Thesaurus) Phase II project (15).
the work of CURL/iCas on the measurement of collection strengths as a means towards collaborative collection management.
the development of a collection description service within the JISC/DNER Information Environment the work of Cornucopia (database of UK Museum Collections), the Full Disclosure programme major initiatives for digital content creation such as NOF-digitise.
Much has been achieved in the ten months of the CD Focus taking advantage of the "considerable momentum" [16] already built up by the RSLP.
However, as interest and awareness of Collection Level Description grows so too does the need for more specific, contextual advice and guidance on the implementation of standards.
References The CD Focus website is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/ The JISC/DNER website is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner The RSLP website is at: http://www.rslp.ac.uk/ The British Library website is at: http://www.bl.uk/ The UKOLN website is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ The Archives Hub website is at: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/ The mda website is at : http://www.mda.org.uk/ http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/robinson/ The Briefing Papers are available via the CD Focus website (see Ref 1) The programme and presentations from the Briefing Day can be found at : http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/bd1/ The programme and presentations from the Manchester Workshop can be found at : http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws1/ Details of the Backstage project can be found at http://www.backstage.ac.uk/ The programme and presentations from the Birmingham Workshop can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws2/ The programme and presentations from the Edinburgh Workshop can be found at http://www/ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws3/ The HILT website is at http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk Milne, Ronald "The Distributed National Collection Access, and cross-sectoral Collaboration: the Research Support Libraries Programme" Author Details Bridget Robinson and Pete Johnston Collection Description Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK Email: cd-focus@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/   Article Title: "Collection Level Description Spreading the gospel" Author: Bridget Robinson and Pete Johnston Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/cld/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: What's New in Politics?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: What's New in Politics?
Buzz software database rss cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Place announces new training materials for the Web, Heather Dawson looks at at Web coverage of the recently run UK General Election and Chris Mitchell provides an update of activities from the Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre.
Virtual Training Suite Launched SOSIG is pleased to announce the launch of 9 more free Web-tutorials teaching Internet skills for different social science subjects ideal for students, lecturers and researchers who want to learn how to get the best from the Web.
This brings the total to 16 with one tutorial for each of the main subjects covered by the gateway (ranging from Anthropology to Women’s Studies).
The tutorials give a guided tour of the Web for the subject, with expert “tour guides” from university libraries and national social science organisations.
They can be accessed from the SOSIG Subject Guides page, or from the RDN Virtual Training Suite (where you will find the whole suite of 40 tutorials) [1].
Following the General Election on the Web Heather Dawson, SOSIG Government and Politics Editor, reviews some of theWeb coverage of the 2001 UK General Election.
Elections on the Web Politicians, the media and the public all turn to the Web at election time, and the array of online election resources has increased dramatically since the election in 1997.
For the 2001General Election SOSIG worked to help people follow the election on the Web by: Highlighting the key Web sites for the election adding new resources to the SOSIG catalogue daily Alerting people to new election developments on the Web by producing a special series of email bulletins distributed to members of the lis-socialscience JISCmail list throughout the election period [2].
The Web offers both primary and secondary information for elections.
On the one hand you can read it “straight from the horses mouth” by looking at the sites of the political parties.
On the other, you can look at the online news services or public fora to see the comments and views of others.
Historical manifestos from the three main parties 1945-1997 available from Keele University [3] News Services SOSIG offered a quick listing of election news services on the “What’s New in Politics” page [4].
No doubt the Web will be used in increasingly creative ways to cover future elections.
If you need a helping hand on following further political developments now the election has taken place we suggest you: Take a look at the Elections/Political Parties sections of SOSIG listed under Politics [5] Use the “My Account” feature on SOSIG to get email updates on new Web sites – we will email you resources that match the subjects you select as those that interest you – so select “elections” and “political parties” or for wider coverage “politics” and “government” http://www.sosig.ac.uk/grapevine/User Sign up to the LIS-SOCIALSCIENCE JISCmail list to get the special bulletins [2] Monitor the “What’s New” page for the SOSIG Politics and Government sections [4] LTSN Economics Chris Mitchell from LTSN Economics provides an update of activities from the centre.
The Economics Subject Centre of the LTSN (Learning and Teaching Support Network), housed just down the hall from SOSIG at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol, has just launched a catalogue of books for teaching and learning in economics.
Nearly two thousand paperbacks and cheap hardbacks are indexed by title, author, educational level and subject, and searchable via a ROADS database [6].
This is intended to help lecturers compile reading lists and choose course texts, but should also appeal to students and indeed to anyone with an interest in economics.
We are providing basic details on each book with a links to publishers’ sites or to Amazon for further information.
We hope that with the evolution of the UK academic Web, we will eventually be able to offer an “is this book in my unversity library?” button.
The centre also hosts catalogues of software and online teaching material in economics, the latter of which has recently grown to three hundred items, reflecting a recent explosion in the number of lecture handouts, exam papers and slide shows being put online.
Updates on Economics LTSN’s activities are available in the form of an RSS news channel, which you can browse for example through the personalisable “Grapevine” section of SOSIG [7].
Keep Up To Date with DEBE The use of the Web in teaching and assessment in economics will be one of the themes of “Developments in Economics and Business Education”, a conference jointly organised by Economics LTSN and Biz/ed.
It will be held in Bristol on the 17th and 18th of September 2001 [8].
If you would like to find out more about the work of LTSN Economics please get in touch via our email address ltsn-economics@bristol.ac.uk or via the contact details below: Postal Address: Centre Manager, Economics LTSN ILRT, University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH UK Telephone: +44 (0)117 928 7071 Fax: +44 (0)117 928 7112 E-mail: ltsn-econ@bristol.ac.uk References RDN Virtual Training Suite at http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ For John Kirriemuir’s At the Event article on the launch of the Virtual Training Suite in Edinburgh see http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/vts/ lis-socialscience JISCmail list at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/lis-socialscience.html Historical manifestos from the three main parties at http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/man.htm What’s New in Politics page at http://www.sosig.ac.uk/roads/whats-new.politics.html Elections/Political Parties sections of SOSIG at http://www.sosig.ac.uk/politics/ ROADS database at http://www.economics.ltsn.ac.uk/books/ “Grapevine” section of SOSIG at http://www.sosig.ac.uk/gv/ DEBE Conference at http://www.economics.ltsn.ac.uk/debe/ Author Details Emma Place SOSIG University of Bristol Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk Heather Dawson SOSIG Government and Politics editor British Library of Political and Economic Science Email: h.dawson@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Chris Mitchell Project Manager (Economics LTSN) Email: chris.mitchell@bristol.ac.uk Article Title: “Planet SOSIG: What’s New in Politics?” Author: Emma Place and Heather Dawson Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata (2): Towards Consensus on Educational Metadata Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata (2): Towards Consensus on Educational Metadata Buzz framework dissemination portal metadata digitisation cataloguing aggregation e-learning lom interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller describes the work of the UK's new cross-sectoral Metadata for Education Group (MEG) and calls for widespread support of their first deliverable: the MEG Concord.
As Pete Johnston illustrates elsewhere in this issue [1], e-Learning is big business, and likely to get bigger.
Figures quoted in the recent report to the US Congress from the Web Based Education Commission [2], for example, place the current value of US-based 'formal' education at all levels at $2.5 Billion, and estimates growth to nearly $14 Billion by 2003.
In the corporate sector, the figures are even more impressive, estimated at $1.1 Billion currently, and $11.4 Billion by 2003.
Globally, the report estimates e-Learning to be worth $365 Billion by 2003 [3].
In the UK, as elsewhere, numerous organisations are in the business of delivering some form of educational experience online, and new government initiatives and commercial startups continue to be announced with a vigour apparently undampened by the Dot Com collapses.
For the hapless learner, however, the real potential offered by all of this on-tap education is diluted to some degree by the disjointed manner in which material is being place online.
In an effort to reduce duplication, share experiences, and place the needs of the learner firmly to the fore, public and private sector organisations responsible for creating, storing, using and delivering educational resources have come together in forming the Metadata for Education Group (MEG) [4].
This paper introduces MEG, and outlines some of that which its members are hoping to accomplish.
Scoping the Problem Educational content is being created at an unprecedented rate.
Public bodies involved in formal education and lifelong learning create resources directly geared to their curricula, and commercial publishers generate a wealth of material aimed at the same audience.
Large initiatives such as the £50,000,000 nof-digi digitisation Programme [5] or the £10,000,000 being spent by JISC on focussing aspects of its DNER for learning and teaching [6] extend the picture yet further, catering as they do to educational exploration around and across the learning spectrum, rather than being geared explicitly towards identifiable parts of any formal curriculum.
This content is offered up to users through a multitude of portals and other access mechanisms, such as (to name but a few) the Qualifications & Curriculum Authority's new site for the English National Curriculum in schools [7], the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network's (SCRAN) catalogue [8], and the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) and University for Industry (UfI) sites for England, Northern Ireland and Wales [9, 10] and Scotland [11, 12].
Content is currently described using a wide range of standards and specifications, including a confusing mix of emerging international specifications such as the IMS Metadata Specification [13] and closely related LOM [14] from IEEE, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set [15] and proposed educational extensions [16], and locally developed alternatives.
Even where widely deployed 'standards' such as the Dublin Core are used, these tend to be refined and extended to reflect local requirements, as with European SchoolNet's interpretation of Dublin Core [17], and the further refinement of those interpretations by the NGfL Scotland team [18].
The notion of Application Profiles, outlined in an earlier Ariadne by Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel [19], becomes important in untangling this complex web.
Even where existing standards are meaningfully deployed, there is an ongoing need for localisation and UK-specific best practice.
Many systems, for example, include scope for a notion of 'audience' or 'level', which is useful in gauging the target for any given resource.
Terms for describing these, though, are often not international in scope (K-12 in the USA, National Curriculum Key Stages 1-4 in England and Wales, etc.
), and there is a requirement for specification and guidance within the UK in order to ensure that the standards are implemented meaningfully.
For those creating content, it is often unclear how best to create metadata which effectively describes what they create.
For aggregators and portal managers, it is extremely difficult to provide comparable descriptions of resources from different sources.
For the poor learner, it may be almost impossible to effectively gauge the relevance, value, or quality of many resources.
In short, the current situation probably benefits no one.
Consensus and Cooperation Operating under the auspices of UKOLN's Interoperability Focus [20], the Metadata for Education Group has been formed in order to address a number of these issues.
MEG offers a forum in which public and private sector bodies from across the UK can meet and address matters of concern in a way that no single agency currently has a remit to do.
The group's work is moved forward both through face-to-face meetings, which are most ably Chaired by Prof. Bruce Royan of SCRAN [8], and in discussion on and around the uk-meg electronic mailing list [21].
The work of MEG is explicitly not about the creation of whole new standards for educational metadata.
Rather, members focus upon developing consensus on the best approaches to a range of problems within the framework of existing standards and specifications.
Where requirements emerge for new or revised standards, these can be fed from MEG to the relevant national and international committees for action.
The MEG Concord The first significant deliverable from the group is the MEG Concord [22], which was released towards the end of 2000.
This document enshrines the key principles agreed upon by members as a basis for proceeding.
A high-level overview of these principles is provided, below.
The Concord is intended as a public statement of the open and consensual manner in which MEG works, and organisations are invited to lend their support to this process by signing up.
At the time of writing, some 45 organisations have done so, including the JISC [23], the National Learning Network [24], the New Opportunities Fund [25], UfI [10], and many more, including teaching institutions such as the University of Hull [26] and Aberdeen College [27].
A number of further major bodies are in the process of signing up, too.
Although the work of MEG is focused upon UK issues, the Concord is attracting a degree of interest from overseas.
Both EdNA [28] and GEM [29] have signed the Concord, and there is interest in what it is attempting to achieve elsewhere, with the likelihood of signatures from a number of other overseas partners, and collaboration between their efforts and those of MEG in the UK.
MEG members recognise the importance of Learning, both to the learner and to society, and seek means to facilitate it as an effective process MEG members aim to ensure that resources produced by themselves and others are truly accessible to the learner MEG members seek to encourage the creation of Learning Resources which are of appropriate granularity, and suitable for aggregation MEG members support work elsewhere to ensure that Learning Resources are sustainable, reusable, and interoperable In describing Learning Resources, MEG members will adopt existing and emerging open standards MEG shall aim to become the United Kingdom's forum for exchange of best practices and policy in the arena of learning resource metadata By advocacy and example, MEG members will work to ensure that developments in the United Kingdom are in line with best practice Members of MEG shall participate actively in the development, dissemination, and deployment of UK and international standards Where necessary, members of MEG shall seek to progress local practices through to international acceptance MEG members will work to produce UK–focused supporting material necessary for the effective deployment of UK and international standards Extracted from the MEG Concord Next Steps The work of MEG is very much driven by the members.
Given the informal nature of the group at present, and the lack of funding directly related to MEG activities within organisations, it is necessary to move forward with projects that directly impinge upon the workplans of individual members, in order that their existing effort may be harnessed towards development of common approaches.
Two current activities are the populating of a MEG registry and work on a common list of UK educational levels, which is at an early stage.
The MEG Registry Building upon work on the EC-funded DESIRE project [30], UKOLN staff are currently working to enter information on the use of educational metadata specifications.
This work includes registering the major specifications, such as IMS, as well as local Application Profiles [19] of these in order to make explicit the ways in which individual implementations alter a standard.
Pete Johnston provides an evolving MEG-specific entry point to the registry, and welcomes new items for registering [31].
An invitation Membership of MEG is open to all who have an interest in improving the description of educational resources.
Presently, anyone who joins the uk-meg mailing list [20] is a member of MEG, and able both to attend meetings and participate fully in the process.
If you have skills and experience to offer in this area, or if you just want to be made aware of where other people are moving in this field, then join the list and get involved to the extent that you are able.
References Pete Johnston looks at the implications of e-Learning to the custodians of our rich resources at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/johnston/ The Power of the Internet for Learning: Moving from Promise to Practice is at: http://interact.hpcnet.org/webcommission/ Moe, M. and Blodgett, H., The Knowledge Web.
Merrill Lynch.
2000.
The MEG web site is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/.
The nof-digi web site is at: http://www.nof-digitise.org/.
The DNER web site is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/.
The National Curriculum web site is at: http://www.nc.uk.net/.
The SCRAN web site is at: http://www.scran.ac.uk/.
The NGfL web site is at: http://www.ngfl.gov.uk/.
The UfI web site is at: http://www.ufiltd.co.uk/.
The NGfL Scotland web site is at: http://www.ngflscotland.gov.uk/.
The Scottish UfI web site is at: http://www.scottishufi.com/.
The IMS Metadata Specification is at: http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/.
The IEEE LOM is at: http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/.
The Dublin Core Element Set is at: http://uk.dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
The proposal of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative's Education working group is at: http://uk.dublincore.org/documents/education-namespace/.
The European SchoolNet metadata standard is at: http://www.educat.hu-berlin.de/~kluck/datahandbook.htm .
NGfL Scotland's metadata standard is at: http://www.ngflscotland.gov.uk/ngflfocus/keypub/standards/ngflmetadata.asp.
Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel offer an introduction to Application Profiles at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/.
Interoperability Focus is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/.
The uk-meg mailing list is at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/uk-meg.html.
The MEG Concord is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/documents/concord.html.
The JISC is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/.
The National Learning Network is at: http://www.nln.ac.uk/.
The New Opportunities Fund is at: http://www.nof.org.uk/.
The University of Hull is at: http://www.hull.ac.uk/.
Aberdeen College is at: http://www.abcol.ac.uk/.
The Education Network Australia (EdNA) is at: http://www.edna.edu.au/.
The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) is at: http://www.geminfo.org/.
The DESIRE Registry is at: http://desire.ukoln.ac.uk/registry/.
The Registry of MEG-related schemas is evolving at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/registry/intro.html.
Author Details Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN c/o Academic Services: Libraries University of Hull HULL HU6 7RX United Kingdom Email: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Article Title: "Towards consensus on educational metadata" Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/meg/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Are Document Management Systems?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Are Document Management Systems?
Buzz html database dissemination xml metadata browser hypertext xpointer xlink url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly explains the concept of document management systems.
The 3 day workshop on Institutional Web Management held at the University of Newcastle on 15-17 September is reviewed elsewhere in this issue of Ariadne [1].
As mentioned in the review, the use of backend databases for storing and managing information to be made available on the Web was felt to be extremely important, especially for institutional web sites, which provide the virtual view of an institution for many, including potential students.
Organisations which manage large web sites are now aware of the difficulties of managing a web site using simple HTML authoring tools.
Tools which have a file-based approach can make future maintenance extremely difficult.
For example it can be difficult to: Implement a new corporate house style if the old house style is embedded in many thousands of HTML pages.
Manage the quality of the web pages, such as hypertext links.
Produce management reports.
Deploy new web technologies.
The use of document management systems can help to address some of the problems.
What Is A Document Management System?
A document management system typically makes use of a backend database for storing and managing resources.
Resources can be made available to a web browser either by a "publishing" operation, in which the HTML resources are created by the document management system, or by converting the resources to HTML "on-the-fly".
Notice that with both of these approaches the HTML is created by the document management system information providers never get to create the HTML files using an authoring tool.
In some systems the resources are stored in a neutral format within the database.
Other systems, such as Inso’s Outside In Server [2], enable resources stored in proprietary format, such as Microsoft Word, to be converted to HTML on-the-fly and sent to the client, as described in Inso’s briefing document [3].
With information stored in a neutral back-end database it makes it much easier to change the look-and-feel of a corporate web site.
It also makes it easier to manage the web site.
Typically, for example, hypertext links could be stored separately in the database.
If, for example, you wish to change all links to the Microsoft web site to a UK-based mirror (because you are concerned about the network charges your institution will be billed for for trans-Atlantic network traffic) you could simple make one change in the database.
What could be easier?
Document management systems can also eliminate the need for embedded administrative metadata.
Who needs to manually add <META NAME="review-by" CONTENT="1999-12-31"> or <META NAME="remove-on" CONTENT="1998-09-31"> metadata to resources if the document management system provides tools for doing this?
Document management systems will be important for deploying new web technologies.
Increasingly we find that the systems are storing information in XML format [4], which is converted to HTML.
As browsers which provide support for XML begin to be widely deployed, it will be possible to ship the native XML resource, and benefit from other emerging technologies, such as XLink and XPointer [5].
What Next?
Many large commercial organisations with a significant web presence make use of document management systems.
Since the web is now widely regarded as strategically important to university, for a variety of purposes, including marketing, teaching and learning and dissemination of research results, it is now timely for our community to evaluate such tools, and to involve CHEST [6] in the negotiations: unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, many document management systems come with a large price tag.
It is probably not cost-effective to expect each individual university to begin an evaluation of what may be complex systems, such as Vignette’s StoryServer [7], Eprise [8], Lotus Domino [9] and Oracle [10].
As mentioned in the report of the Institutional Web Management workshop UK Web Focus intends to collaborate with institutions with an interest in this area, and with other appropriate organisations, including UCISA [11].
If you have an interest in this area, please contact the author of this article.
References Institutional Web Management, Ariadne issue 17 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue17/web-focus/> Outside In Server, Inso <URL: http://www.inso.com/> How Outside In Server Works, Inso <URL: http://www.inso.com/oiserver/oishiw.htm> What is … XML?, Ariadne issue 15 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue15/what-is/> What are .. XLink and XPointer, Ariadne issue 16 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue16/what-is/> CHEST, <URL: http://www.chest.ac.uk/> StoryServer, Vignette <URL: http://www.vignette.com/Solutions/ss4/0,1888,1888,00.html> Eprise <URL: http://www.eprise.com/> Domino, Lotus <URL: http://www.lotus.com/> Oracle Products, Oracle <URL: http://www.oracle.com/products/> UCISA <URL: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/> Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323943 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Country and Regional Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Country and Regional Search Engines Buzz data url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at Country and Regional Search Engines.
When I run my courses on searching the Internet for information one of the questions that I’m commonly asked is for regional or country based search engine information.
Of course, I knew about some of the major sites and search engines that help in this area, but I always had a sneaking suspicion that there was probably a lot more out there than I was aware of.
Consequently I thought it was about time I took a look at country and regional based search engines in a little more depth to see what I could come up with, so I started a little list.
This ‘little list’ now has over 1,400 different search engines in it, so I thought it might be of interest if we took a little world tour to see exactly what is out there.
If you’re in a hurry, the list is available from my website [1].
Regional search engines Some search engines do attempt to cover the world from a country based aspect, although most of these are not really search engines; like the CIA World Fact book [2].
They provide users with basic factual information about a country.
Their country profiles are an excellent way to obtain quick facts about a country such as size, land use, population, life expectancy, economy, communications, transportation and so on.
The Library of Congress has produced a series of country studies [3], although there are some notable exceptions, such as the UK.
However, it can prove a useful resource if you need information on rather more exotic countries, such as Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan.
It was a shame that a lot of the data contained was only current to 1996, but I suppose that’s better than nothing!
However, there are a few global country search engines, and of these Nations Online [4] proved to be quite useful, as did Orientation [5] which I found good for current affairs information.
If you need geographical information such as maps the Xerox PARC map viewer [6] is a quick and effective way to obtain overviews.
For a more regional approach the Middle East seems to be best served, with about 8 different search engines, such as ArabNet [7], although Europe is not far behind, with engines such as Euroseek [8] and SearchEurope [9].
Some other search engines attempt to provide a regional approach, but rather than use a single interface have chosen to produce country specific versions.
This is of course not a new approach, and Yahoo!
[10] has been doing this for some time.
However, it does appear to be something of a trend, and it is useful for the end user since it’s a quick and convenient way of searching particular countries, especially since some search engines such as Asiaco [11] and BUSCApique [12] do tend to focus on particular areas.
Other search engines take a very specific focus regarding a country; the EscapeArtist [13] for example provides information specifically for those considering relocating to a new country, so it emphasises education, lifestyle, real estate and so on.
Country Search Engines I have so far identified over 1,400 specific country search engines; it seems that almost every country in the world has at least one search engine dedicated to it, though an average figure would be between 6-8 engines per country.
The vast majority tend to be of the Index/Directory type – there are very few free text search engines at all.
Having said that, certain countries are much better served than others; some of the ‘big hitters’ are Australia (23), France (30), United States (36), Spain (41), India (50), Germany (58), Canada (59) and the UK (69).
These figures do not in general come as that much of a surprise since they reflect the origins of those countries that produce the most web pages; the exception of course being the United States.
A lot of the US search engines tended to restrict themselves to particular regions or states rather than the country as a whole.
I suspect that the reason for this is that a lot of general search engines will inevitably return a lot of US based sites anyway, so there is less imperative to produce search engines that cover the entire country.
I was however surprised at some results I found.
It might just be my perception of particular countries (and with no disrespect to them), but I was somewhat taken aback that Singapore can boast 23 engines, Taiwan 16, and Latvia with 7 engines to their names!
The vast majority of these engines are also of the Index/Directory variety (since that is by far the easiest way to create a search engine), and although they are obviously not as in-depth as Yahoo!
the categories were very similar.
The disadvantage of this approach of course is that you cannot be certain that you are going to find every appropriate web page; just those ones that the authors have decided to list with the engines.
However, it’s a quick, simple and easy way to begin a search for the information you require.
Many of the search engines were either bi-lingual, or they provided an English language version, although it’s not possible to rely on this, particularly from those countries which do not use a Roman alphabet – if you intend to use Russian, Chinese or Japanese search engines I would advise you to be prepared to download the appropriate fonts before you start.
One slight irritation that I had with far too many engines was a link they have with a certain online casino which pops up in a new window, forcing me to waste my time closing it down.
Overall I was very pleased with the results of my investigations; it is quite clear that almost every country you can think of has at least one search engine that is dedicated to it; it would be easier to list countries that didn’t in fact!
If you have any doubts about which search engine to use however (and as you can see, with some countries you are faced with a bewildering choice) I would be inclined to start with the major engines such as Yahoo!
or Lycos, since their coverage is greater, and if you are already familiar with their approaches and categories it will save you time in the long run.
References [1] Phil Bradley’s website http://www.philb.com [2] CIA World Fact book https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ [3] Library of Congress country studies http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html [4] Nations Online http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/ [5] Orientation http://www.orientation.com/en/home.html [6] Xerox PARC map viewer http://pubweb.parc.xerox.com/map [7] ArabNet http://www.arab.net/search/welcome.html [8] Euroseek http://www.euroseek.com/ [9] SearchEurope http://www.searcheurope.com/ [10] Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com [11] Asiaco http://www.asiaco.com/ [12] BUSCApique http://www.buscapique.com/ [13] EscapeArtist http://www.escapeartist.com/ Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Article Title: “Country and Regional Search Engines” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ePrints UK: Developing a National E-prints Archive Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ePrints UK: Developing a National E-prints Archive Buzz data software javascript database archives metadata repositories eprints oai-pmh z39.50 soap rae url research Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Martin describes the technical work of the ePrints UK project, and outlines the non-technical issues that must also be addressed if the project is to deliver a national e-prints service ePrints UK [1] is a two-year JISC-funded project under the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [2] which began in July 2002 and is due for completion in July 2004.
The lead partner is UKOLN of the University of Bath.
The aim of the project is to develop a national service provider repository of e-print records based at the University of Bath derived by harvesting metadata from institutional and subject-based e-prints archives using the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [3].
The project also aims to provide access to these institutional assets through the eight Resource Discovery Network (RDN) faculty level hubs [4] and the Education Portal based at the University of Leeds [5].
Three-stage development project The development work of the project is divided into three stages.
Firstly we are developing a central database of e-print records using ARC harvesting software which will be hosted on the RDN servers at UKOLN.
We will be harvesting metadata (and full text where available) of e-print records from OAI compliant repositories in the UK and abroad.
At the time of writing, our prototype database is developed and we have started harvesting records from repositories at the Universities of Nottingham, Southampton, Glasgow, and Bath.
Secondly, we are developing suitable SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interfaces to pass the metadata (and full text) to external Web services for enhancement, augmentation, or validation of the metadata.
Two of these Web services are based at the OCLC research centre at Dublin, Ohio [6]: these are a subject classification service, automatically assigning Dewey Decimal classmarks to the metadata; and a name authority service which checks the author's name as it appears in the metadata against authority name files (thus author entry "John Peter Smith" can be standardised to "John P. Smith" and his paper can be located alongside all other papers appearing under this form of his name).
A third Web service, a citation analysis service, is offered by the Open Citation project team based at the University of Southampton [7].
This service will parse semi-structured citation information in the document text to form structured, machine-readable, citations in the form of OpenURLs.
The metadata, enhanced by the Web service applications, will be returned to the central ePrints UK database via the SOAP interfaces, while the full-text material, which will be used to facilitate the subject classification service, will not be retained.
Finally, the ePrints UK service will be made available to end users in a number of ways.
Firstly, there will be a central website for the project, integrated with the current RDN website, providing a search interface to all the enhanced, harvested metadata.
In addition, ePrints UK will offer shared, configurable discovery services that enable the RDN hubs, UK academic institutions and other organisations to simply embed ePrints UK within their services.
This functionality will be based on three approaches: a Z39.50 target supporting Functional Areas A and C of the Bath Profile; a SOAP interface allowing sophisticated integration of ePrints UK within other services; and a simpler, less-sophisticated approach based on Javascript and HTTP linking, for those services not able to support SOAP.
These approaches will be closely based on the RDN's existing RDN-Include and RDNi-Lite offerings [8].
Figure 1: The Project Architecture (Andy Powell, UKOLN)   A technical project?
ePrints UK, very clearly then, is a technically-focused project with the ultimate aim of becoming a working service for the RDN and the wider HE/FE community.
However what is also clear to us is that the viability of an eventual ePrints UK service depends upon there being sufficient data provider repositories from which to harvest records, and sufficient records within those archives available to be harvested.
And this is less a technical and more a managerial problem.
The familiar barriers inhibiting the proliferation of institutional e-print archives, and the practice of self-archiving of e-print papers IPR concerns and publisher constraints; fears about the quality of pre-print material; control of metadata standards, etc.
are as much the concern of our service provider project as they are for anyone trying to develop a data provider service.
What's in a name?
(1) One solution to the shortage of UK-based data provider repositories is simply to look abroad and harvest records from the more established international archives.
To decide to do this took a certain amount of heart-searching at our first project team meeting: we are called ePrints UK after all.
What would the UK part of our name mean if we took this approach?
In the end, we decided that harvesting from international archives was justified since the aim of these archives is to make their resources visible to international users, and we would be contributing to this by making them available specifically to the UK Higher and Further Education communities via the RDN hubs.
Phew, the project name could stay.
Advocacy But our second approach towards tackling the record-shortage problem is to work with the wider OAI community to advocate the virtues of e-print archives and self-archiving to authors, publishers, and potential repository managers.
Firstly UKOLN Research Officer Michael Day will be writing four supporting studies covering the impact of e-print archives in supporting learning, teaching and research activities in the UK HE/FE sectors; collection description issues; business and IPR issues relating to e-print service providers; and a report outlining the requirements of funding councils if usage statistics from the ePrints UK service were to be included in the work of the RAE.
We hope to publish the findings of these reports in future issues of Ariadne.
Secondly, we plan to work in collaboration with the other JISC FAIR Programme e-prints and e-theses projects with which we have become associated at "cluster group" level, (mercifully known as "eFAIR" for short).
These include SHERPA and DAEDALUS, about which articles have already appeared in Ariadne [9].
At an initial cluster group meeting we decided that we had a common interest in advocacy work, and we hope to plan work in more detail at our second meeting in March 2003.
Metadata standards As the eventual ePrints UK service is aiming to be a central service provider repository for the UK Higher and Further Education communities, we felt as a project to be in a strong position to offer guidance on metadata standards to the newly emerging institutional repositories in the UK.
Project officers Andy Powell, Pete Cliff, and Michael Day have to this end compiled recommendations on the use of simple Dublin Core metadata to describe e-prints in data provider archives to facilitate more consistent results when searching and browsing records in the ePrints UK repository and other service provider archives.
These guidelines can be found at the project website and have been distributed on the mailing lists of the Open Archives Initiative and the Open Archives Forum [10].
What's in a name?
(2) You may have noticed the slightly idiosyncratic spelling of our project name as ePrints UK where throughout this article I have referred to e-prints spelt with a hyphen.
The reason for this is that our project website has the URL www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk and understandably we were getting our hyphens muddled up.
But I must admit to envy of the wonderfully named FAIR projects: DAEDALUS [11], SHERPA [12], TARDis [13], RoMEO [14] and the like.
Instead of classical, Shakespearean or cult TV allusions, we have a project name which is destined always to be misspelt.
But once our eventual service is up and running, we will at least, I hope, have a name that "does exactly what it says on the tin!"
References The ePrints UK project http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk The FAIR Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html The Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk The British Education Index http://www.leeds.ac.uk/bei/ OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. http://www.oclc.org/home/ The Open Citation Project http://opcit.eprints.org/ See http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rdn-i/ for more information on these services John MacColl and Stephen Pinfield: "Climbing the Scholarly Publishing Mountain with SHERPA" Ariadne issue 33, October 2002, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/sherpa/ William J. Nixon: "DAEDALUS: Freeing Scholarly Communication at the University of Glasgow" Ariadne issue 34, January 2003, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/nixon/ Using simple Dublin Core to describe eprints http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/simpledc-guidelines/ DAEDALUS A JISC FAIR Project http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/ SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ TARDis: Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure http://tardis.eprints.org/ Project RoMEO http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html Author Details Ruth Martin Project Manager ePrints UK UKOLN Email: r.martin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk Article Title: ePrints UK: Developing a national e-prints archive Author: Ruth Martin Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/martin/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CLUMPS Conference at Goldsmiths College, London Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CLUMPS Conference at Goldsmiths College, London Buzz ict url Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne reports on the first of two CLUMPS conferences, held on the 3rd of March.
With the people's network drawing ever nearer, the issue of Internet training for librarians and users looms large for most library managers.
In particular, the potential cost of providing such training, in pounds and hours is a real consideration for services.
Most libraries with Internet terminals will find that staff are peppered with questions from users on a daily basis, ranging from "Why can't I find this page?
to "How do I access this secure site?"
Questions can mean five, ten, even fifteen minutes away from an issue desk, and during busy periods, libraries may find themselves wishing they had extra staff to alleviate the load.
What's more, not all library staff are necessarily au-fait with the new technology, despite the users preconceptions that they must be.
Libraries are now in a period where their staff and patrons are being encouraged to become connected to the Internet and soon the People’s Network.
NOF (the New Opportunities fund) are offering financial backing to those libraries wishing to upskill their staff.
It's an opportunity many services have been waiting for.
Nonetheless, staff, however confident and skilled, will still in most cases be hard pressed to give sufficient time to user training.
With issue desks, enquiry desks and backrooms to be staffed, not many libraries can afford to spare a staff member to patrol learning centres or PC's, however much they may wish to.
Islington libraries are currently experiencing a happy compromise.
Working in partnership with the Social and Economic Regeneration department of the council, they have established a training centre in one of the larger libraries in the borough.
The futuristically named "CyberSkills Centre" opened in May 1999.
The Centre has been designed to provide first step computer and internet training for library users who wish to use the library's free internet access but don't know where to start.
Staff can refer these wannabe Internet users to the Centre and be confident that when the users leave, they'll be able to handle surfing the Net without having to ask library staff too many questions.
Since its opening the Centre has already trained over 500 people at varying levels.
Of course, training centres in libraries are not a new idea.
Input Output is another organisation which has been providing this sort of service.
This idea of "franchising" out training and information services is strongly recommended in the report "New library: The people's network", which takes into consideration the importance of training provision in the new library service.
More and more libraries are coming round to the idea of having ICT provision on their premises, which is not directly managed by them.
Provided such centres have clearly defined objectives and aims that work in tandem with their library "hosts", then the schemes provide a model of good partnerships in practice.
The CyberSkills model is flexible enough to fit in directly with the libraries needs.
Originally designed as an element of South Bristol Learning Network, the CyberSkills model has a tradition of working within learning environments and adapting to the needs of the local area.
CyberSkills specifically targets people with little or no experience, in particular the socially excluded who otherwise may not attempt to learn new skills.
To help in this respect, prices for each of the Islington workshops are kept very low.
Those on income support can attend a three hour training session, and receive four hours follow-up time, for as little as £5.00.
The Centre does not expect to make a profit from the service.
This is unlikely given the low prices and high costs of running the centre, and perhaps where they differ most obviously from other such service providers.
The workshops themselves are kept approachable, small in size, and informal, designed to attract those who would not normally approach a formal educational facility.
They are jargon free, and focus on making IT accessible and relevant to the individual.
Users do not gain a formal qualifications result but they do gain confidence.
The centre acts as a conduit, and passes people onto the libraries lifelong learning centre and surrounding colleges with a new-found confidence.
It is hoped that this will minimise dropout rates and feelings of "not being good enough".
Attendees' comments have been universally positive, and many go on to utilise the library's resources with a renewed enthusiasm.
The Regeneration department of the Council and head of the Library and Information Services instigated the original partnership.
Three librarians with I.T.
and training experience were then employed to staff the centre.
This similarity of background has helped the centre work in partnership with the Library service to overcome any difficulties.
Pricing had to be in line with current library tariffs, and considerable co-operation was needed in establishing the centres role in the lifelong learning remit.
There have been benefits to the library: over 100 staff have been trained in Internet use, and the centre is currently collaborating with the library services to provide further training for the NELLIE (North East London Learning initiative), a partnership between Camden, Islington and Hackney boroughs.
The staff library experience has also proven useful in other areas, and the centre is currently starting a training project with Camden for children.
The support of the library service has proven invaluable to the Centre, The public associates libraries with learning, and it is likely that much of the goodwill toward the centre has come from supportive library users.
As libraries move toward completion of the people's network, the nature of their work will change.
We all bemoan the lack of public funding for library initiatives, and many libraries are sick of being told about public/private partnerships.
Islington's experience has proven that they don't always have to be a headache, and can provide benefits to both parties.
If you'd like to speak the to centre, please contact them on 0171 7136593,or e-mail at the address below.
Author Details   Sheridan Dunkley Islington CyberSkills Finsbury Library 245 St John St London EC1V 4NB Email: sheridan@islingtoncyber.co.uk Web site: http://www.islington.org.uk/community/cyberskills Article Title: "A partnership in action: Islington libraries and CyberSkillsTitle" Author: Sheridan Dunkeley Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/pub-libs/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries and Community Networks: Linking Futures Together?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries and Community Networks: Linking Futures Together?
Buzz software database dissemination xml infrastructure standardisation copyright preservation cataloguing z39.50 telnet ftp privacy url Citation BibTex RIS Malabika Das argues public libraries and community networks have a future together.
Public libraries serve their communities by fulfilling seven basic roles, including knowledge archival, the preservation and maintenance of culture, knowledge dissemination, knowledge sharing, information retrieval, education, and social interaction [1].
Each of these roles offers the general public the opportunity to recognize and view libraries as an integral part of a democratic society where access to free information has been (and still is) both expected and demanded.
By comparison, community networks also have similar ideals for serving the public.
They focus on providing an open place for communication, interaction, and the exchange of information and ideas.
Thus together, both public libraries and community networks ultimately strive to serve the needs of the public.
This article will examine the relationship between public libraries and community networks and why their futures are potentially linked into becoming one.
The Role of Public Libraries In the past, public libraries placed a heavy emphasis on providing their clientele with print-based materials.
Access to electronic information was limited because it was costly and because libraries did not have the physical equipment to be able to access this information.
The growth of the Internet, however, has changed common opinions of how information should be provided to the public.
Many governments, educational institutions, an assorted array of non-profit agencies, commercial organizations and numerous others recognize the Internet’s potential for broadcasting information to the masses.
Consequently, this has led to many of them quickly 'jumping on the bandwagon' to get their messages across to the public.
Such a situation has led to a flood of information being available electronically and has also led to a confusing proliferation of various software tools or programs that allow access to this information.
For the general public, this growth poses a problem.
Where do they get the information and, more importantly, how do they get it?
In the past, the likelihood was that most people did not have modems and computers to access this information [2].
Now, a greater number of users have direct access to the Internet either from home, school, or from work [3, 4] and are likely to try finding information for themselves [5].
Are these users successfully finding relevant, accurate resources?
What types of search strategies are they using and what types of tools are being used to retrieve information?
Public libraries are ideally placed to provide guidance on such issues.
They can provide their services and their physical locations to facilitate access to the Internet.
Specifically, public libraries can have several roles: They can act as a 'safety net' for people who otherwise might not have access.
This would include low-income individuals, people in remote areas, and people who are not familiar with networking [6,7].
They can help people 'navigate' through and critically evaluate the complex maze of new information technologies [6, 8].
For example, librarians can create pathfinders and/or offer training sessions on how to use email, search engines, or do word processing and They can help people develop and use new resources and forums [6].
For example, if individuals wish to be more actively involved in an electronic medium, such as creating a public forum on local issues, librarians can help them get access to both local and remote resources.
Of course, certain problems exist and must be addressed before public libraries can fully provide a complete offering of electronic services including: Cost Who will pay for such services especially given that public funding for libraries is generally decreasing?
Some sample cost issues are hardware and software purchases (including long-term maintenance of the hardware and the updating of software), staff training, and communication costs (i.e., phone line rates).
Programs such as E-rate in the United States that exist today to help lower technology and telecommunications costs may disappear tomorrow as the government re-examines the value of such programs and its ability to fund them (see Appendix).
Lack of uniform policies While many librarians recognize the importance of providing access to the Internet or other electronic services, there is no universal law that ensures that libraries provide particular types of access (telnet, FTP, WWW, email, newsgroups, etc.)
Many libraries are taking on this responsibility by their own initiative and this has led to differences between systems (e.g., different user-interfaces, command languages, log-on commands, etc.)
[9].
The introduction of uniform policies would facilitate standardisation and promote greater access and sharing of resources between library systems.
Recent initiatives in this direction include the use of Z39.50, Dublin Core, and XML standards.
Organisation of information Should libraries be true information 'filterers' and provide information on demand, similar to several online services?
Or should libraries simply organise electronic information into traditional bibliographies or indices for people to use as a reference?
How can libraries best serve their clienteles' electronic information needs without impinging on their goal to provide such services for free?
The above discussion describes only some issues that public libraries will have to address as our society continues to integrate technology into our lives, relying more on electronic means to access information.
The Development of Community Networks Community networks are based on the premise that access to information via electronic means should be a fundamental public right.
Traditionally, computer networks have been an elitist enterprise for researchers, for organisations, and for anyone else who had money.
Computer technology was perceived to be expensive and information on networks was thought to be exclusive meant only for those who had access and reason to view the information.
Community networks strive to change this perception.
Their goal is to promote literacy in computer technologies and to provide free or low-cost access to this 'exclusive' electronic information.
The Morino Institute, for example, has called this phenomenon public access computing while a more descriptive term for community networks is alternatively 'public-access networks.'
The major focus of these community networks is to provide local or community-based information [10, 11].
Most community networks also offer the public the opportunity to explore other features such as electronic mail, discussion groups, public forums or electronic conferences, and access to social service agencies and professionals (e.g., post a question and receive an answer or find a service by looking it up on an electronic directory).
Access to the Internet is often an integral part of these networks.
Forging a New Relationship Libraries and Community Networks In an attempt to avoid the 'elitist' image and to provide access to those who do not have the necessary equipment, community networks often use public libraries as venues to place terminals.
Many of these libraries are already actively involved in providing support to these community networks by answering telephone and e-mail queries.
Some libraries are so involved that they are actually responsible for the community network itself by housing the equipment on-site and by providing staff to operate and administer the network.
Tom Grundner, founder of the Free-Net system, has also offered an analogy that links public libraries to the function of community computer networks in the future: Simply stated, we find ourselves unable to imagine a 21st century in which we do not have community computing systems, just as this century had the free public library.
Moreover, we believe that the community computer, as a resource, will have at least as much impact on the next century as the public library had on ours.
[12, p.46] Given that there is already a strong trend for libraries to support community networks, it is only logical to recognize that their futures are potentially linked especially since some libraries are already offering connection services like traditional Internet Service Providers (ISPs), access to electronic mail and online discussion forums (see Appendix).
The term 'digital library' also promotes the idea that libraries should be more focused on electronic media than traditional printed materials.
Community networks, by comparison, may also be viewed as information providers; however, their focus emphasizes the electronic delivery of community-specific materials and not worldwide resources.
Information delivery is based on the assumption that a local information provider knows what materials his or her users need, creates particular documents and then uses the established community network structure (e.g., document centers or menu headings) to distribute these documents.
In some ways, this general description is similar to how public libraries serve their patrons they know what their users need, create a collection to service their needs, and then place these materials in a structure that is readily accessible to all people.
Conclusion In summary, community networks and public libraries should examine their similarities and differences and consider the potential for linking their futures together.
Why?
For the following reasons: A majority of public libraries have already become wired for network access, leading to online library catalogues that can display the availability of local resources worldwide.
Since electronic access to local resources is a key feature of community networks, the distinction separating the two (libraries from community networks) is closing; Librarians have extensive experience in planning and developing community projects that relate to serving user needs.
Community networks need this type of planning to be successful; if users cannot access it then they will not use it; Librarians are knowledgeable about automated systems work and providing free access to information.
This expertise would be helpful to those community networks struggling to understand how to use their systems to provide information to all users.
Issues related to copyright, privacy, standards, and government information delivery are very familiar to librarianship as a whole [13]; and Community networks often struggle for adequate funding.
Librarians could help to determine what items should be free versus fee-based (if necessary since this might violate the mission of community networks).
Pooling resources for one network versus two or three separate ones could lead to standardised protocols and the potential to deliver additional services to all users.
Ultimately, the merging of established ideals for both community networks and public libraries in the realm of electronic information will allow all individuals to be empowered (hopefully) by letting them readily and freely access computer networks and public information resources.
References Barker, P. 1994.
Electronic libraries Visions of the future.
The Electronic Library, 12 (4), 221-229.
McClure, C. R. 1995.
Public access to the Information Superhighway through the nation’s libraries.
Public Libraries, 34 (2), 80-84.
The Nua Internet Surveys (1999) estimating how many people are online worldwide are at: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html U.S. Census Bureau.
1999.
Access Denied.
Changes in Computer Ownership and Use: 1984-1997.
This report is located at: http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/computer/confpap99.pdf Lipow, A.G. 1999.
"In your face" reference service.
Library Journal, 124 (13), p50.
Jordan, J., & Brintle, L. 1993.
Coalition for communication: Developing a public communication system.
Computers in Libraries, 13 (2), 29-32.
Watkins, C. 1999.
Opening the Gates.
(grants to public libraries) American Libraries, 30 (9), 11.
Whitlatch, J.B. 1999.
Enhancing the Quality of Reference Services for the 21st Century: Part 3.
Reference & User Services Quarterly, 38 (3), 233.
Lago, K.N.
1993.
The Internet and the public library: Practical and political realities.
Computers in Libraries, 13 (9), 65-70.
Schuler, D. 1994.
Community networks: Building a new participatory medium.
Communication of the ACM, 37 (1), 39-51.
The Community Networking Movement web site is at: http://www.scn.org/ip/commnet/ and additional information about community networks is at: http://www.scn.org/ip/commnet/info.html Mattison, D. 1994.
Librarians and the Free-Net Movement.
Computers in Libraries, 14 (5), 46-50.
Walsh, R.T. 1994.
The national information infrastructure and the recommendations of the 1991 White House Conference on library and information services.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science Appendix The E-rate (Universal Service) program in the United States has additional information at: http://www.sl.universalservice.org (applications) and http://eratehotline.org Examples of community networks using public libraries as venues to place terminals:National Capital FreeNet (NCF) Room 402, Dunton Tower Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6.
[Home page]: http://www.ncf.ca/FreeNet terminal locations: the Greater Ottawa Region, including Ottawa Public Library, Cumberland Township Public Library, Gloucester Public Library, etc.
Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN) 34 Wall St., Suite 407 Asheville, NC, 28801 USA [Home page]: http://main.nc.us/MAIN access via 35 public access terminals in rural libraries Examples of libraries operating and administering a community network:Southeast Florida Library Information Network, Inc. (SEFLIN Free-Net) 100 South Andrews Avenue Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301 USA [Home page]: http://www.seflin.org/Administered by Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, Martin & Monroe county libraries.
CascadeLink 205 N.E.
Russell St. Portland, OR 97212 USA [Home page]: http://www.region.portland.or.us/ or http://www.cascadelink.org/Administered by Multnomah County Library System.
Examples of online catalogues (accessible worldwide):Queens Borough Public Library 89-11 Merrick Boulevard Jamaica, NY 11432 USA [Catalogue access URL]: http://web2.queenslibrary.org [Community service databases]: http://web.queens.lib.ny.us/immigrant.html Author Details   Malabika Das Supervisor of Online Services Queens Borough Public Library Queens, NY Email: mdas@queenslibrary.org Web site: www.queenslibrary.org Article Title: "Public Libraries and Community Networks: Linking Futures Together?"
Author: Malabika Das Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue22/das/intro.html   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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WebWatch: Conclusions from the WebWatch Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines WebWatch: Conclusions from the WebWatch Project Buzz data software html apache metadata browser perl adobe doc url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly sums up conclusions from the WebWatch Project.
The WebWatch project [1], which was based at UKOLN, University of Bath and funded the the British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC), involved the development of robot software to analyse web resources in a variety of (mainly UK) communities.
The project analysed several communities and has produced reports on the results.
Following the successful completetion of the WebWatch project a final report has been produced.
This article summarises the findings published in the report.
Software Development Following an initial review of robot software tools, it was decided to make use of the Harvest software [2] to analyse web resources.
A slightly modified version of the software was used for a number of trawls.
However the analysis of the data collected showed that Harvest was limited in its use for analysing (rather than indexing) web resources.
Harvest was designed to index the content of HTML pages, whereas we wanted to analyse the HTML tags in HTML pages (and discard the content) and to analyse binary objects, such as images.
Due to the limitations of Harvest, it was decided to develop our own robot tool.
The robot was written in Perl and made use of the libwww library.
Trawls Several trawls were carried out using the WebWatch robot software including: UK Public Library Web Sites as described in the LA Record [3] UK University Entry Points as described in Ariadne [4] eLib Project Pages as described in a report published by UKOLN [5] UK Academic Library Web Sites as described in a report published by UKOLN [6] A second trawl of UK University Entry Points as described in the Journal of Documentation [7] A third trawl of UK University Entry Points as described in a report published by UKOLN [8] Observations Rather than repeat the observations from the trawls which have been published elsewhere, this article summarises some of the trends which were observed during the three trawls of UK University entry points.
Trawls of UK University entry points took place on 27 October 1997, 31 July 1998 and 25 November 1998.
The first trawl used a list of entry points supplied by NISS [9] but the other two trawls used one supplied by HESA [10].
Slight variations in these two lists, together with incomplete coverage of the entry points (due to errors in the input file and servers being unavilable when the trawl was carried out) means that accurate comparisons cannot be made, although trends can be observed.
Analysis of web server software show that both the Apache and Microsoft IIS servers are growing in popularity, at the expense of the CERN, Netscape and NCSA servers and a number of more specialist servers.
The size of entry points has not changed significantly between the second and third trawls (as mentioned previously, the original version of the WebWatch robot did not allow image files to be analysed, so data of the total size of entry points was not available for the first trawl).
Two entry points have grown in size significantly (by over 100 Kb) although one has reduced by 50 Kb).
“Splash screens” are growing in popularity, with a doubling in numbers (from 5 to 10) between October 1997 and November 1998.
Splash screens typically use the <META REFRESH=”value” HREF=”url“> HTML element to automatically display the page url after a period of value seconds.
Splash screens are often used to display an advertisment (typically containing a large image, before taking the user to the main enty point for a site.
Although splash screens can help to advertise an organisation, without forcing users to click to move progress further, they can be counter-productive by slowing down access to the entry points for regular visitors, and, of course, do generate extra network traffic.
Use of Dublin Core Metadata has shown a slight increase, from 2 sites in October 1997 to 11 in November 1998.
Use of Dublin Core metadata is still overshadowed by use of “AltaVista” metadata (i.e.
<META NAME=“description” CONTENT=“xx”> and <META NAME=“keywords” CONTENT=“xx”>).
A poster which illustrates these trends has been produced, which is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Trends in UK HE Entry Points WebWatch Web-Based Services The analyses of the data collected in WebWatch trawls is carried out be a series of Perl scripts and spreadsheet and statistical analysis packages (including Microsoft Excel and SPSS).
However it was felt desirable to provide web-based interfaces to a number of the utilities developed by the WebWatch project, so they were available for use by everyone and not just UKOLN staff.
Three WebWatch utility programs have been released with a Web interface: HTTP-info [11] : which provides details of the HTTP headers for a resource.
Doc-info [12] : which provides a wide range of information for a web resource, including size details for the resource and embedded objects, details of links from the resource, etc.
robots.txt Checker [13] : which provides details of the robots.txt file for a given web server.
An illustration of the Doc-info service is shown below.
Figure 2a: The Doc-info Service Figure 2b: Output from the Doc-info Service As described elswehere in Ariadne [14] these services can be integrated with a Netscape browser, which makes them much more accessible.
WebWatch Final Report The final report for the WebWatch project: WebWatching UK Web Communities: The Final WebWatch Report [15] contains more detailed information about the project, including observations from the trawls and relevant recommendations.
The report also includes the reports which have been published elsewhere.
The report is available in a variety of formats including MS Word, Adobe PDF and HTML.
Thanks Ian Peacock, who was appointed as the WebWatch Computer Officer on 28 August 1997, left UKOLN to take up a post at Netcraft [16] on 12 February 1999.
Netcraft is a commericial organisation which carries out regaular analyses of web sites.
Netcraft is based in Bath, so Ian has not had far to move.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ian for the hard work and dedication he put in to ensuring the success of the WebWatch project.
References WebWatch, UKOLN web site <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/> Harvest, web page <URL: http://harvest.transarc.com/> Robot Seeks Public Library Websites, LA Record, Dec. 1997 Vol.
99(12) <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/articles/la-record-dec1997/> WebWatching UK Universities and Colleges, Ariadne, Issue 12 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/web-focus/> Report of WebWatch Trawl of eLib Web Sites, UKOLN web site <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/reports/elib-nov1997/> A Survey of UK Academic Library Web Sites, UKOLN web site <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/reports/hei-lib-may1998/> How Is My Web Community Doing?
Monitoring Trends in Web Service provision, Journal of Documentation, Vol.
55, No.
1 Jan 1999 Third Crawl of UK Academic Entry Points, UKOLN web site <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/reports/hei-nov1998/> Alphabetically Sorted List of UK HE Campus Information Systems, NISS web site <URL: http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hesites/cwis.html> HESA List of Higher Education Universities and Colleges, HESA web site <URL: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/hesect/he_inst.htm> HTTP-info, UKOLN web site <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/services/http-info/> Doc-info, UKOLN web site <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/services/doc-info/> robots.txt Checker, UKOLN web site <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/services/robots-txt/> Web Focus Corner: Extending Your Browser, Ariadne, issue 19 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/web-focus/> WebWatching UK Web Communities: Final Report for the WebWatch Project, UKOLN web site <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/reports/final/> Netcraft, web site <URL: http://www.netcraft.com/> Author Details Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Understanding the Searching Process for Visually Impaired Users of the Web (NoVA) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Understanding the Searching Process for Visually Impaired Users of the Web (NoVA) Buzz data software framework accessibility cataloguing graphics hypertext url research Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Craven gives an overview of the Resource funded NoVA project (Non-visual access to the digital library).
Background to the NoVA project It is recognised that in order to participate fully in today’s society it is vital that citizens are not excluded for any reason, whether by virtue of birth, belief, aptitude or circumstance.
Exclusion takes many forms and must be countered in many different ways.
Funded by Resource and undertaken by the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) at Manchester Metropolitan University, the NoVA project is concerned with countering the exclusion from access to information which can all too easily occur when individuals do not have so-called ‘normal’ vision.
Our domain in this project is digital library services, and our concern is that all such services should, in their entirety, be as accessible to blind and visually impaired people as to anyone else.
The NoVA project builds on work previously undertaken by CERLIM during the REVIEL project[1] in which the REVIEL project team analysed a number of electronic resources such as subject gateways and online catalogues for accessibility.
Findings revealed that while most sites were partially accessible and at times adhered to accessibility recommendations such as those produced by the World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C/WAI)[2], many still included features that could be difficult for some groups of people to access.
For example, the use of graphics with no alternative text to support them means that a blind or visually impaired person using access technology cannot ascertain what the graphic is – and whether or not it is important.
A good example of this is the use of bullet points, which the user does not necessarily need to have read out (in cases like this the ‘NULL’ alternative text attribute should be applied so that the screen reader will skip over it).
Further experiments during the REVIEL project in which a group of blind people accessed a variety of online resources revealed that navigation and in particular searching for information, is a major problem within digital library systems.
The use of frames in a web environment, for example, enables the user to perform complex selections across a number of categories.
Research into user seeking behaviour in a web environment reveals that people generally do not read the whole of a web page but often glance over a page, picking out the sections most relevant to their needs or interests.
Sighted people are generally able to do this with relative ease, but for a non-sighted person using access technology it is necessary to navigate linearly within one frame at a time, and he or she may need to backtrack a long way (again in a linear manner) in order to reach the desired point (and then maybe track forward again).
Although much work is continuing to make interfaces accessible witness, for example, the work of the World Wide Web’s Web Accessibility Initiative, there is little current work on how blind and visually impaired people navigate interfaces, and in particular on how a serial or linear method of searching enforced by current access technology can be mapped onto the parallelism displayed by interfaces, for example, through the use of frames.
Work on accessibility concentrates on transcribing text (or replacing images etc.
with text or audio) and a number of research and development projects such as TIDE ACCESS[3], Emacspeak[4] and BrookesTalk[5] have developed systems to help enable universal access (interfaces using musical tones, text-only, customised interfaces).
The problem however may be much deeper when taking information seeking behaviour and the use of interfaces into consideration, as these often assume visual capabilities which blind and visually-impaired people may not possess.
Research and development work on computer accessibility in the past has had little input from human computer interface (HCI) specialists[6] although work undertaken at the University of Manchester Computer Science Department has provided a useful analogy between how sighted and visually impaired people travel in everyday life and their virtual ‘travels’ through cyberspace[7].
By comparing real life travel tasks with virtual ones the study suggests that as sighted people’s real life travel tasks will differ from people with sight problems, then the same is true in a virtual world.
Despite this interesting work, communication between HCI experts and disability access communities needs to improve.
Aims and objectives of the project The overall aim of the NoVA Project is to develop understanding of serial searching in non-serial digital library environments, with particular reference to retrieval of information by blind and visually-impaired people.
The objectives of the Project are: to develop an experimental framework for exploration of serial or linear searching and retrieval in non-serial environments to undertake a series of experiments with serial searching and retrieval, and subsequent use of digital content to map serial/non-serial approaches so as to develop understanding of how serial searching, retrieval etc.
can be optimised in non-serial environments to report on findings and to make recommendations for digital library system design.
Work in progress The research team has undertaken an analysis of documentary evidence in areas of accessibility, human computer interface design and information seeking behaviour relating to both the sighted and non-sighted community.
To date the evidence collected has revealed that although there are a number of studies conducted on the information needs of blind and visually impaired people[8], [9], [10], [11], there is very little literature available on the information seeking behaviour of blind and visually impaired people.
Therefore it is hoped that the results from the NoVA experiments will help to address this gap.
Development of the experimental framework is currently in progress.
The project team aims to use this framework to test the information seeking behaviour of sighted, blind and partially sighted people using a number of digital library resources (for example OPACs, search engines, online services such as BUBL) as well as a selection of commercial sites (for example Marks and Spencer).
The framework will include a set of structured and unstructured tasks.
In both cases the users will be given a choice in how to undertake the task.
For example they might choose the Search option or they may prefer to browse the site first for appropriate links.
Data will be logged using Lotus ScreenCam software[12] which simultaneously records key strokes and verbal dialog so that the search terms used and search path chosen will be recorded together with a verbal description.
The verbal description will be used to verify what is recorded on screen and provide a useful insight into why a search path was chosen.
More intensive logging of task processing by visually impaired users will be undertaken.
This will include follow up questions relating to the task and specific features used during the process.
Future work Future work of the project will include testing of the framework.
A sample of sighted and visually impaired users will be asked to perform a number of tasks to test it.
Results will be used to compare differences (and similarities) between the two groups in the searching process in order to map out serial and non-serial approaches to searching.
It is hoped that this will help develop an increased understanding of how serial searching is optimised in non-serial environments and be used to inform human computer interface designers in order to improve access to web-based search facilities.
It is anticipated that throughout the duration of the NoVA project, CERLIM staff will continue their liaison with experts in the field of access to information by visually impaired people including representatives of the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), the National Library for the Blind (NLB) and Disability and Information Systems in Higher Education (DISinHE).
References.
1.
Brophy, P. and J. Craven, The integrated accessible library: a model of service development for the 21st century.
British Library Research and Innovation Report 168.
1999, Manchester: Centre for Research in Library and Information Management.
2.
World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative is at: http://www.w3.org/WAI/ 3.
Petrie, H. and S. Morley.
The use of non-speech sounds in a hypermedia interface for blind users.
in Proceedings of the 5th international conference on auditory display.
1998.
4.
Raman, T. Emacspeak: a speech interface.
in Proceedings of the CHI’96 conference on human factors in computing systems.
1996.
5.
Zajicek, M. and C. Powell.
Building a conceptual model of the world wide web for visually impaired users.
in Proceedings of the Ergonomics Society 1997 Annual Conference.
1997.
Grantham.
6.
Bergman, E. and E. Johnson, Towards accessible human-computer interaction., in Advances in human-computer interaction, J. Nielsen, Editor.
1995, Ablex Publishing: New Jersey.
7.
Goble, C., S. Harper, and R. Stevens.
Travails of visually impaired web travellers.
in Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia.
2000: ACM Press.
8.
Astbrink, G., Web page design: something for everyone.
Link-up, 1996.
December: p. pp7-10.
9.
RNIB, The Internet and how to access it.
1998, Peterborough: RNIB.
10.
Williamson, K., Older adults: information, communication and telecommunications: PhD Thesis, in Department of Social Sciences.
1995, RMIT: Melbourne.
11.
Williamson, K., Discovered by chance: the role of incidental information acquisition in an ecological model of information use.
Library and Information Science, 1998.
20(1): p. pp23-40.
12.
Lotus ScreenCam website is at: http://www.lotus.com Author Details   Jenny Craven Research Fellow Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) Manchester Metropolitan University Department of Information and Communications Email: j.craven@mmu.ac.uk CERLIM web site: http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/ Project web site: http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/projects/nova.htm Article Title: “Understanding the searching process for visually impaired users of the Web” Author: Jenny Craven Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/craven/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Application Profiles: Mixing and Matching Metadata Schemas Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Application Profiles: Mixing and Matching Metadata Schemas Buzz data software rdf framework database rss xml infrastructure metadata identifier vocabularies namespace schema cataloguing z39.50 marc e-learning lom rslp dcmes dcmi rdfs url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel introduce a means of establishing a common approach to sharing information between implementers and standards makers.
Background This paper introduces application profiles as a type of metadata schema.
We use application profiles as a way of making sense of the differing relationship that implementors and namespace managers have towards metadata schema, and the different ways they use and develop schema.
The idea of application profiles grew out of UKOLN’s work on the DESIRE project (1), and since then has proved so helpful to us in our discussions of schemas and registries that we want to throw it out for wider discussion in the run-up to the DC8 Workshop in Ottawa in October.
We define application profiles as schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined together by implementors, and optimised for a particular local application.The experience of implementors is critical to effective metadata management, and this paper tries to look at the way the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (and other metadata standards) are used in the real world.
Our involvement within the DESIRE project reinforced what is common knowledge: implementors use standard metadata schemas in a pragmatic way.
This is not new, to re-work Diane Hillmann’s maxim ‘there are no metadata police’, implementors will bend and fit metadata schemas for their own purposes.
This happened (still happens) in the days of MARC where individual implementations introduce their own ‘local’ fields by using the XX9 convention for tag labelling.
But the pace has changed.
The rapid evolution of Rich Site Summary (RSS) has shown how quickly a simple schema evolves in the internet metadata schema life cycle.
The Warwick Framework (2) gave an early model for the way metadata might be aggregated in ‘packages’ in order to combine different element sets relating to one resource.
The work on application profiles is motivated by the same imperative as the Warwick Framework, that is to provide a context for Dublin Core (DC).
We need this context in order to agree on how Dublin Core can be combined with other metadata element sets.
The Warwick Framework provided a container architecture for metadata ‘packages’ containing different metadata element sets.
Application profiles allow for an ‘unbundling’ of Warwick Framework packages into the individual elements of the profile with an overall structure provided externally by namespace schema declarations.
The Resource Discovery Framework (RDF) syntax has provided the enabling technology for the combination of individual elements from a variety of differing schemas, thus allowing implementors to choose which elements are best fit for their purpose.
Who is constructing metadata schemas?
Who is managing metadata schemas?
Sometimes it seems as if there are two distinct sets of people involved with constructing and managing schemas: Standards makers They use a top down approach, driven by a search for a coherent element set which can be viewed as a ‘standard’, they are concerned with the integrity of the data model, they insist on a well structured element set.
Implementors Their primary motivation is to produce an effective differentiated service, they are looking for innovative, effective solutions to service delivery.
These service providers can, thanks to the flexibility of web technology, choose or construct a metadata schema best fitted for their purpose.
Both sets of people are intent on describing resources in order to manipulate them in some way.
Standard makers are concerned to agree a common approach to ensure inter-working systems and economies of scale.
However implementors, although they may want to use standards in part, in addition will want to describe specific aspects of a resource in a ‘special’ way.
Although the separation between those involved in standards making and implementation may be considered a false dichotomy, as many individuals involved in the metadata world take part in both activities, it is useful to distinguish the different priorities inherent in the two activities.
It is a particular strength of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) that many people are deeply involved in both approaches, and so we hope that within the DC community we will be able to have a fruitful discussion on the requirements of those looking for an ‘authoritative’ version of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES)and those whose primary requirements are to do with ‘practice’.
Examples of emerging schemas In order to illustrate how schemas work in practice we can examine two emerging schemas DC Education Schema The DC Education Working Group has proposed a schema (3) for describing educational resources.
Jon Mason of Education Network Australia (EdNA) and Stuart Sutton of the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) have led this activity, with a particular focus on five areas of interest to educational metadata projects: users duration learning processes standards quality Subsequent discussions at meetings and on mailing lists considered whether elements could be identified and evaluated within these areas.
The recommendation of the DC Education Working Group suggests a schema incorporating Various standard DC elements and recommended qualifiers DC Education ‘namespace’ (domain specific) extensions such as DCEducation Element: audience DCEducation Audience qualifier: mediator DCEducation Element: standard DCEducation Standard qualifier: identifier DCEducation Standard qualifier: version DCEducation Relation qualifier: conforms to Various IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) (4) elements such as InteractivityType InteractivityLevel TypicalLearningTime We can see from this schema extract that it consists of DC ‘standard’ elements, domain specific additions to recommended standard DC elements, and particular elements from other distinct element sets.
RSLP collection description schema Andy Powell of UKOLN has been leading an initiative on collection level descriptions.
The purpose of the collection description schema (5) is to describe newly digitised special collection catalogues being created as part of the UK Research Support Libraries Programme, but is intended longer term to have a wider application within the Distributed National Electronic Resource.
The schema is intended to facilitate the simple description of collections, locations and related people.
Particular areas of interest have centred on the best way to describe collection policy, collection strengths, and the people and organisations with responsibility for the collection.
Consensus has been reached within the programme on the schema and a metadata creation tool has been developed.
An extract of this schema includes dc:title The name of the collection dc: identifier A formal identifier for the collection dc:description A description of the collection cld:strength An indication (free text or formalised) of the strength(s) of the collection cld:accessControl A statement of any access restrictions placed on the collection including allowed users, charges etc We can see from this schema extract that it consists of DC ‘standard’ elements a ‘namespace’ schema, in this case the collection level description schema ‘cld’ refinements to the ‘standard’ definitions for DC elements which describe the particular type of resource We would argue that the treatment shown in these examples is typical of what occurs when DC, or indeed other element sets, are used in practice.
As mentioned before this is not new, but the opportunities offered by using the common syntax, RDF, increases the ease of combination and the possibilities for extension of element sets.
Having analysed what happens in practice, we propose a metadata schema architecture consisting of namespace schemas and application profile schemas.
Namespaces and application profiles This paper suggests that we can distinguish ‘namespace schema’ from ‘application profile schema’.
Namespace schema contain all those elements defined by the managing body or registration authority (whatever that might be) for a particular namespace.
Application profiles are tailored for particular implementations and will typically contain combinations of sub-sets of one or more namespace schemas.
‘Namespace’ is defined within the W3C XML schema activity (6) and allows for unique identification of elements.
Within the W3C XML and RDF schema specifications, namespaces are the domain names associated with elements which, along with the individual element name, produce a URL that uniquely identifies the element.
In W3C terms the namespace does not have to be a ‘real’ registration authority, nor does the element identifying URL need to point to a ‘real’ web address.
However in order to ensure a well managed metadata environment we would argue that the namespace should refer to a real registration authority that takes responsibility for the declaration and maintenance of their schema.
There is a continuum of formality in such registration authorities from those where the authority is an internationally recognised standards body through to those where the authority derives from national or sectoral de facto standards, and at the other end of the continuum, to self-contained schemas defined within a local project or service.
By means of ‘namespace’ we can Identify the management authority for an element set Support definition of unique identifiers for elements Uniquely define particular data element sets or vocabularies The DESIRE project constructed a prototype metadata registry schema with a data model within which ‘namespace’ consisted of three parts: Registration authority Namespace concept Namespace It may be useful to consider how, in combination, these entities might help us to identify well managed metadata element sets.
By use of these entities, a distinctive element set can be identified by a ‘namespace’, that namespace may have different instantiations over time (versioning) each of which require a separate namespace but all are associated with a namespace concept.
A namespaceconcept, is therefore a grouping mechanism for successive versions of anamespace.
Each namespace and namespace concept is associated with a registration authority.
Within the DESIRE registry this enabled us to consider that one registration authority might have several different element sets associated with it.
What is an application profile?
Application profiles consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespace schemas combined together by implementors and optimised for a particular local application.
Application profiles are useful as they allow the implementor to declare how they are using standard schemas.
In the context of working applications where there is often a difference between the schema in use and the ‘standard’ namespace schema.
Schema application profiles are distinguished by a number of characteristics.
They May draw on one or more existing namespaces The application profile may use elements from one or more different element sets, but the application profile cannot create new elements not defined in existing namespaces.
Introduce no new data elements All elements in an application profile are drawn from elsewhere, from distinct namespace schemas.
If an implementor wishes to create ‘new’ elements that do not exist elsewhere then (under this model) they must create their own namespace schema, and take responsibility for ‘declaring’ and maintaining that schema.
May specify permitted schemes and values Often individual implementations wish to specify which range of values are permitted for a particular element, in other words they want to specify a particular controlled vocabulary for use in metadata created in accordance with that schema.
The implementor may also want to specify mandatory schemes to be used for particular elements, for example particular date formats, particular formats for personal names.
Can refine standard definitions The application profile can refine the definitions within the namespace schema, but it may only make the definition semantically narrower or more specific.
This is to take account of situations where particular implementations use domain specific, or resource specific language.
By defining application profiles and, most importantly by declaring them, implementors can start to share information about their schemas in order to inter-work with wider groupings.
Typically implementors are part of larger communities, they form part of a sector (education, cultural heritage, industry, government), possibly a subject grouping, they are part of programmes with common funding, they work with others serving the same target audiences.
In order to work effectively these communities need to share information about the way they are implementing standards.
Communities can start to align practice and develop common approaches by sharing their application profiles.
Declaring profiles for application areas is a mechanism used elsewhere in computing.
In other contexts, agreement on usage by means of a profile will be familiar to readers.
For example within the area of resource discovery, Z39.50 application profiles have been used for some years, where implementors reach consensus on compliance with a sub-set of the Z39.50 standard.
The Z39.50 Maintenance Agency (**ref http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/profiles/profiles.html.
see last reference) defines a Z39.50 Profile as follows A profile specifies the use of a particular standard, or group of standards, to support a particular: application, for example GILS or WAIS; function, for example author/title/subject searching; community, examples: the museum community, chemists, musicians, etc.
; or environment, examples: the Internet, North America, Europe, etc.
By “specifying the use” we mean to select options, subsets, and values of parameters, where these choices are left open in the standard.
A number of such profiles are maintained by the Z39.50 maintenance agency and are referenced from its web site, such as the CIMI profile for cultural heritage information , the Bath profile for library applications and resource discovery.
Examples In order to illustrate the difference between namespace schemas and application profiles it may be helpful to refer to the DESIRE metadata registry where a few element sets have been treated in this way: Examples of Namespace schemas DC 1.0 DC 1.1 DC recommended qualifiers BIBLINK cld ROADS Templates Examples of Application Profiles BIBLINK Core DC Education Working Group proposed schema ROADS Document Template A fully worked example of metadata created in RDF according to the RSLP collection description schema can be found by going to Andy Powell’s RSLP collection description tool at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/tool/ and clicking ‘show example’.
Expressing the BIBLINK Core Application Profile in RDF Schemas As part of the SCHEMAS project (7) we are encouraging people to publish their application profiles.
Ideally we would like to use RDF schemas (9) since we would like to harvest distributed application profiles automatically.
We propose an expression of an application profile using the RDF Schema Specification syntax.
Our example is of the BIBLINK Core application profile (10) which has the following characteristics: uses DC elements uses BIBLINK specific elements refines DC elements associates schemes with DC elements The representation of this application profile in RDF schemas requires thefollowing: a BIBLINK namespace (bc.rdfs) to declare BIBLINK specific elements (11) an RDF schema (bc-ap.rdfs) for the BIBLINK Core application profile (12) (Note that it also requires DCMES in RDF schemas, which is notyet available).
Several “instance” records conforming to the BIBLINK Core applicationprofile, bc-ap.rdfs, are available for reference (13), (14), (15).
What are the implications?
Application profiles will assist collaboration amongst namespace managers Schema application profiles provide a basis for different metadata initiatives to work together.
By focusing on the requirements of implementations, we see that there is a genuine need to facilitate the combining of ‘extracts’ from standard namespace element sets into application profiles.
Procedure and methods for declaring application profiles need to be agreed There needs to be an easy way for implementors to disclose application profiles.
By declaring application profiles implementors will assist inter-working between co-operating services.
Both people and software need to be aware of metadata schema in use.
Implementations that wish to work together can begin to share information about the details of their application specific schema, they can align their schema by way of a shared application profile.
Software tools can go to application profile declarations in order to ‘learn’ how particular implementations are using metadata.
This might assist in a metadata creation tool presenting the correct options to the user, it would assist in conversion of metadata and controlled vocabularies between applications, and so on.
The SCHEMAS (7) project is addressing this issue as part of its on-going work on providing support for schema implementors.
SCHEMAS is funded by the European Community as part of its Information Societies Technologies programme and is providing a series of workshops to implementors to explore their requirements for sharing information about metadata schema.
Policies for metadata schema registries are required Registries might exist at a variety of places and ‘levels’ as part of the infrastructure for supporting digital information management.
Registries might be richly functional databases (the DESIRE registry is a prototype of such a registry), or they might be ‘thin’, merely providing links to schema declarations.
Registries might exist at the namespace level (e.g.
DC version 1.1) or registration authority level (e.g.
DCMI).
A registry might have an ambition to register all schemas associated with a namespace concept (e.g.
DC) and all application profiles containing elements associated with that namespace.
Or there might be separate registries for namespaces and for ‘communities of use’, the latter containing application profiles used by a particular implementor community.
Discussion on the role of registries is taking place within SCHEMAS, and more particularly it is an issue for the Dublin Core Registry Working Group (8).
Issues How do we deal with conformance?
Dublin Core is flexible as regards conformance, albeit that conformance has not been defined in practice.
Similalry MARC is flexible allowing for use of individual elements.
But can individual elements from other element data sets be used in such a flexible way?
Can an implementor take one or two IEEE LOM elements and combine them with Dublin Core?
The potential for parallelism and overlap Application profiles might contain elements that overlap in their semantics.
For example a simple form of an author and a more complex form.
It might be argued that this is valid, in that a particular application might want to use such ‘overlapping’ elements for different purposes.
For example a person’s name as an unstructured data element might be used for searching purposes, whilst an structured name separated into elements for first name, second name, might be used for display.
However obviously such overlapping and parallelism in use of elements would make manipulation and re-use of metadata more complex.
In real implementations where large collections of metadata are being managed it seems more likely that dynamic mappings will take place from an underlying database according to the appropriate application profile for the operation in hand.
Specifying conventions and constraints on usage There is a need for further investigation as to whether the likely syntaxes for expressing application profiles (RDF Schema, XML DTDs, XML Schema) have the means to specify rules for the content of elements, rules that do not exist in the vanilla namespace.
For example an application may want to make certain elements mandatory or it may want to specify that particular controlled vacabularies must be used for certain elements.
(REFERENCE http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-general/2000-08/0043.html)   Conclusions Taking existing implementation of metadata schema one recognises that rarely is ‘the complete standard schema’ used.
Implementors identify particular elements in existing schemas which are useful, typically a sub-set of an existing standard.
Then they might add a variety of local extensions to the standard for their own specific requirements, they refine existing definitions in order to tailor elements to a specific purpose, and they may want to combine elements from more than one standard.
The implementor will formulate ‘local’ rules for content whether these are mandatory use of particular encoding rules (structure of names, dates) or use of particular controlled vocabularies such as classification schemes, permitted values.
We see application profiles as part of an architecture for metadata schema which would include namespaces, application profiles and namespace translations.
This architecture could be shared by both standards makers and implementors.
This architecture reflects the way implementors construct their schemas in practice as well as allowing for the varied structures of existing metadata schemas.
We believe by establishing a common approach to sharing information between implementations and standards makers will promote inter-working between systems.
It will allow communities to access and re-use existing schemas.
And by taking a common approach to the way schemas are constructed we can work towards shared metadata creation tools and shared metadata registries.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank Michael Day, Tracy Gardner, and Andy Powell and Tom Baker for discussions which led to the formulation of the ideas and concepts in this paper.
Particular thanks to Carl Lagoze, Tom Baker, and Priscilla Caplan for their thoughtful comments on the initial draft.
References DESIRE metadata registry: a prototype registry developed as part of the EC funded DESIRE project http://desire.ukoln.ac.uk/registry/ Carl Lagoze.
The Warwick Framework A Container Architecture for Diverse Sets of Metadata Digital Library Research Group.
D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1996 http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/july96/lagoze/07lagoze.html The DC-Education Working Group proposal to the DCAdvisory Committee http://www.ischool.washington.edu/sasutton/dc-ed/Dc-ac/DC-Education.html IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee’s Learning Object Meta-data Working Group.
Version 3.5 Learning Object Meta-data Scheme.
http://ltsc.ieee.org/doc/wg12/scheme.html The RSLP collection description home page is at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/ Tim Bray, Dave Hollander, and Andrew Layman.
Namespaces in XML.
World Wide Web Consortium.14-January-1999 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names The SCHEMAS project home page is at http://www.schemas-forum.org/ Dublin Core Registry discussion list http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-registry/ The RDF Schema Specification is at http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-rdf-schema-20000327/ The BIBLINK Core Application Profile used is at http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/schemas/biblink/BC-schema.html The BIBLINK namespace in RDF schemas is at http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/schemas/biblink/1.0/bc-rdfs The BIBLINK Core Application Profile expressed in RDF schemas is at http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/schemas/biblink/1.0/bc-ap-rdfs A record conforming to the BIBLINK Core Application Profile is at http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/schemas/biblink/bc-ap-eg1-rdf A record conforming to the BIBLINK Core Application Profile is at http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/schemas/biblink/bc-ap-eg2-rdf A record conforming to the BIBLINK Core Application Profile is at http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/schemas/biblink/bc-ap-eg3-rdf Z39.50 International Standard Maintenance Agency.
Z39.50 profiles.
http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/profiles/profiles.html Examples of such conventions are given by Priscilla Caplan in a mail to the dc-general mailing list, see http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-general/2000-08/0043.html.
Proposals for expressing these in XML Schema are suggested by Jane Hunter see http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-general/2000-08/0050.html   Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel UK Office for Library and Information networking (UKOLN), University of Bath Article Title: “Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas” Author: Rachel Heery; Manjula Patel Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 31: An E-prints Revolution?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 31: An E-prints Revolution?
Buzz software archives metadata z39.50 rslp url research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter with the editorial for Ariadne issue 31.
Welcome to the March/April issue of Ariadne.
This issue of Ariadne is led by an article (‘Setting up an institutional e-prints archive’) on the practical implementation of an e-prints archive, by a number of authors with hands on experience of the task (Pinfield, Gardner and MacColl).
The article also deals with the issues which have to be considered alongside the technical issues of implementation.
These include: the impact on tried and tested means of scholarly communication; questions of quality control; intellectual property rights, and workload.
Not all academics will warm to these techniques of publishing without a good deal of advocacy beforehand.
As the authors suggest: Some academics are reasonably content with the existing systems.
They have built up their reputations using them.
They do not view comercial publishers in the negative light that some librarians do since they are often shielded from the economic realities of the journal industry.
A few who are editors might even receive some form of payment from publishers.
It is often a good idea therefore to picture self-archiving as complementary to ‘tried and tested’ journals, which is actually the case.
However, in addition to these philosophical and policy issues, there are also difficulties with the installation of suitable software: many projects are looking at the e-prints software created at the University of Southampton, and there were reports of installation problems at the Glasgow CURL workshop on e-prints in early March.
The adoption of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting may happen, not at a revolutionary pace, but at a leisurely crawl, unless these difficulties are ironed out at some point.
Since a large number of projects have shown interest in the OAI route to metadata exposure, and the technology may become mandatory for some programmes, this is an important issue.
Issue 31 also features an introduction to the Open Archives Forum (Dobratz, Schimmelpfennig and Schirmbacher), which has been created to provide a European focus for European activities related to Open Archives, and particularly the Open Archives Initiative.
The project has partners in Italy, Germany and the UK (UKOLN), details of an upcoming workshop in Pisa in May are available at: http://www.oaforum.org/workshops_ser.php.
Andy Powell and Liz Lyon contribute an interesting discussion of the parallels between current ideas about Web services (application talking to application) and the architecture of the JISC Information Environment.
He also suggests that the architecture of the JISC Information Environment is consistent with the use of both Z39.50 (distributed searching) and OAI (metadata harvesting) technologies.
Ronald Milne contributes a useful overview of the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP).
This is an important programme which works toward a ‘Distributed National Collection’ and the optimisation of the library research resource in the UK.
It promotes the sharing of information about collections among library and other HE institutions, and agreement about who is going to collect in what area.
Several high profile organisations have participated in the programme, including the Wellcome Institute, the Public Record office, the Tate Gallery, English Heritage, and the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland.
There is also an article about the RSLP project AIM25 in the issue (Baxter, Blomely and Kemsley).
We also have an introduction to the new Oxford Reference Collection online by the Director of the project, Dave Swarbrick.
This follows on from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, which we covered on both a technical and user level in preceding Ariadne’s.
There will be a user review of the service by Pete Dowdell in Ariadne 32.
There are numerous other interesting contributions to this Easter edition of Ariadne, and these include an overview of Collection Description Focus activities in the first year of the project, and two book reviews one on creating e-collections, and the other on Career Development Online, representing Pete Dowdell’s first contribution to Ariadne.
Shirley Keane assisted once again with the Newsline section.
Suggestions for articles for issues 32 to 34 are now being considered.
Article proposals and books for review should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Access statistics for 2001 are now available, and the main figures are tabulated below: Month January February March April May June July August September October November December Hits(month) 559,178 491,273 596,122 546,009 537,068 531,812 480,886 487,318 507,404 661,186 609,482 508,845 Users (month) 52,932 49,790 57,981 54,355 56,186 53,426 53,130 52,153 53,435 66,002 67,228 57,020 Users (day) 1,707 1,778 1,870 1,811 1,812 1,780 1,713 1,682 1,781 2,129 2,240 1,839 Page views (month) 194,451 165,350 193,423 191,247 199,716 193,050 172,180 193,496 189,061 205,097 196,195 178,500 Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Article Title: “An e-prints revolution?” Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Biz/ed Bulletin on Business and Economics Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Biz/ed Bulletin on Business and Economics Buzz data software database copyright cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Libby Miller looks at recent changes to Biz/ed and describes some new sites.
The Hub From 1 August Biz/ed is continuing resource discovery for the subject areas business, economics and management under the auspices of the Social Science, Business and Law Hub funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network Centre [1].
SOSIG [2] will act as an umbrella to a number of catalogues including Biz/ed’s.
Biz/ed will continue to have its own interface and look and feel, and Biz/ed’s records will continue to form the economics and business sections of the SOSIG hub.
However with the model of devolving resource discovery extended to other subjects that are covered by the hub, we have found it useful to make some technical, display-related, and categorisation changes to Biz/ed.
There are two main aspects to these changes: the change from ROADS v1 to ROADS v2, and the extension of categories to improve access to the catalogue for academic economists.
ROADS v2 [3] The software underlying the Internet Catalogue has recently been upgraded from ROADS v1 to ROADS v2.
This version offers a number of advantages over the previous version, including greater stability, better support for cross-searching and the ability to create a more sophisticated search interface.
At the same time, resources describing departments and business schools have been split off into a separate departmental database.
This has been particularly important for Biz/ed’s inclusion in the SOSIG hub, since SOSIG records are divided into two databases, departmental records and the main catalogue.
The previous cross-searching of the entire Biz/ed database with the general SOSIG database meant that Biz/ed departmental records appeared in general SOSIG searches of the main database.
Now they appear in the correct database, and we have seamless cross-searching and cross-browsing of Biz/ed from SOSIG.
A major change to the Internet Catalogue is the switch from flat browsing of resources to hierarchical browsing.
Biz/ed’s classification scheme has been altered so that each browsable section has a parent section and also related sections, so as to establish links between separate branches of the hierarchical tree.
Instead of users being faced by 54 categories when they choose to browse the Catalogue, they are now shown 14 main categories and can then drill down to find the category they desire.
Considerable thought went into deciding which categories should appear at the root of the tree.
The aim was to make drilling down into the tree as intuitive as possible.
This means that the hierarchy does not always follow that of the Dewey classification system Biz/ed uses, and some of the top level categories (for example Mathematical economics) do not correspond to any Dewey category.
Instead they are dummy categories designed to group sub-categories intuitively.
Dummy categories do not have any resources in their top level.
The root of the hierarchical tree, based on these categories, is shown in Figure 1 and a subsection is shown in Figure 2.
Fig 1: Biz/ed browse tree: subsection [4].
Fig 2: Biz/ed browse tree: subsection [5] Classifications for academic economists The switch to hierarchical browsing has made us think carefully about the display of the categories, but also the overall shape of the catalogue.
Biz/ed has a strong schools user community because of its non-catalogue resources, especially the teaching materials, which are aimed largely at GCSE/A-level.
Because the resource Discovery Network is primarily aimed at higher education and research, it is important that Biz/ed has sufficient coverage of economics, business and management at this level.
In the past no resource has been excluded because its content was felt to contain material of a higher level than that required by schools, and descriptions are generally appropriate to both levels.
However when I joined Biz/ed in January 1999, coming from an academic economics background, it was clear after that there were gaps in the catalogue with respect to the current state of higher education and research in economics.
This is partly because the split between school level economics and higher level is acute in the subject itself.
In particular mathematical economics does not appear a great deal in A-level syllabi, but is increasingly important in academia.
Therefore to increase the attractiveness of the catalogue to academic researchers and lecturers and tutors we have taken the opportunity of moving from ROADS v2 to ROADS v2 to add the following economic categories to the Biz/ed classification system.
(see also the Biz/ed Bulletin in Ariadne Issue 19 [6] for the business categories added) New Dewey Decimal Number Subject Coverage 330.015195 Econometrics 330.015196 Game Theory 330.015197 Decision Theory 330.015198 Experimental Economics Perhaps the most important of these new subjects is econometrics.
This is a large and growing sector of economics, concerning the theory and practice of testing economic models using statistical data.
Game concerns the analysis of strategy, and uses statistical theory to model types of uncertainty.
Decision theory uses mathematics and logic to analyse decision-making.
Finally Experimental economics, although not a large section of the academic discipline, is an interesting and growing part, and has a substantial presence on the web.
After discussion with university libraries and the subject community, and the other classification indexes, we decided to place econometrics, decision theory and game theory under the general heading of ‘mathematical economics’, while experimental economics was placed into the catch all general economics category (together with economic data, Environmental economics, economic systems and theories, and economic history and geography).
To illustrate the kinds of resources we are collecting under these subjects are some descriptions of recent resources added to the catalogue.
For game theory, a useful resource for undergraduate level is Advanced Decision Theory Game Theory Lecture Notes [7].
This is an example of a resource which may be extremely useful to students and lecturers, but which might not be catalogued, because it is the web version of undergraduate computer science lecture notes.
However the content is just the same as would be for an undergraduate introductory game theory course a detailed technical introduction to game theory.
Another interesting teaching resource for game theory is ComLabGames [8].
This is a freely downloadable piece of software that can be used for interactively demonstrating games such as the prisoner’s dilemma.
It can be played by many players over a network, and can be configured by the tutor.
At the end of the game it displays payoffs and results of play.
It could be very useful for demonstrating the principles and format of game theory to undergraduates, and as a practical demonstration of strategy.
For Decision Theory I have chosen a site that would primarily be useful for researchers.
The Decision Analysis Society website [9] is a part of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), an organization of operations researchers and management scientists.
The site includes a huge alphabetical listing of papers and books on decision theory compiled by a researcher.
The listings are primarily for his own personal use, but this place is a very useful place to find references on this topic for example at the start of a literature review.
The site also includes a lexicon of decision making, and listings for journals, software, employment opportunities, and research opportunities.
This site also demonstrates the close relationship between operations research and economic decision theory: this is an management site, but the bibliographic list is also appropriate for economic decision theory.
For Econometrics we have a ‘web book’ by Christopher Ferrall, an Associate Professor at the Economics Department of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada: HyperMetrics: Lecture Notes in Econometrics [10].
The book contains sections on regression, multiple regression, and the logit and probit models.
A similar web book for introductory game theory is Game Theory: An Introductory Sketch [11].
Both would be suitable for use as introductory undergraduate textbooks or references.
Finally we have the Iowa Electronic Markets [12] as an example from the experimental economics category The Iowa Electronic Markets are real-money futures markets in which payoffs depend on economic and political events such as elections.
There is currently a political market running for the 2000 congressional elections, and non-political markets in computer share prices and the Microsoft price level.
An example: before the 1996 presidential elections you could buy what were effectively shares in the presidential nominees; since Clinton won, shares in Clinton were paid at $1 per share when the result of the election was known.
In the meantime the price of the shares in the nominees could be studied as reactions to political events.
This data is still downloadable.
Although this site is run by the University of Iowa College of Business, this is equally an example of the sorts of experiments that could be performed in the name of experimental economics.
A related site is the Election Calculator [13], a site that uses econometric analysis of GDP and other economic indicators to predict who ‘should’ have won (according to their equations) in past US elections.
References [1] Resource Discovery Network (Site not yet publicly available) [2] SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk [3] ROADS http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/ [4] Biz/ed Browse page: root http://www.bized.ac.uk/listserv/listhome.htm [5] Biz/ed Browse page: subsection http://www.bized.ac.uk/roads/htdocs/subject-listing/econgen.html [6] Ariadne Issue 19 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/bized/ [7] Advanced Decision Theory Game Theory Lecture Notes http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~morri/comp9514/ [8] ComLabGames http://www.cmu.edu/comlabgames/ [9] Decision Analysis Society website http://www2.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/site/extorg/daweb/ [10] HyperMetrics: Lecture Notes in Econometrics http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/walras/custom/300/351B/notes/index.htm [11] Game Theory: An Introductory Sketch http://www.coba.drexel.edu/economics/mccain/game/game.html [12] Iowa Electronic Markets http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/ [13] Election Calculator http://www.mit.edu/people/irons/myjava/ecalc.html Author Details Libby Miller Biz/ed Economics Section Editor ILRT University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: libby.miller@bris.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bized.ac.uk/ Article Title: “Biz/ed Bulletin on Business and Economics” Author: Libby Miller Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/bized/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Transatlantic Bandwidth: How to Save Money on Your Costs Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Transatlantic Bandwidth: How to Save Money on Your Costs Buzz data software database apache archives zip browser windows linux cache adobe solaris ftp url Citation BibTex RIS Sally Hadland, Information Officer at the Higher Education National Software Archive (HENSA), describes how using HENSA can save on transatlantic bandwidth.
The big news this year was the implementation of charging for transatlantic bandwidth from August 1st.
Universities have had to reorganise their policy on Internet use and think about ways that they can save money whilst still providing the resources that students and lecturers need.
The charging for all incoming traffic through the transatlantic gateway means that costs will be incurred when getting information from not just North American sites but almost all overseas destinations outside Europe.
For the most part, this year won’t be too much of a strain on the pocket.
It has been stated that the JANET Web Caching Service is free in the first year and the HEFCs are subsidising usage for Higher Education Institutions up to an extent.
But next year when the Cache could be a charging service and the subsidy disappears it will be a different matter altogether .
This year universities have been given the time they need to set in motion any plans for saving money before they are faced with the more realistic bill next year.
Some universities will be setting up local caches to process requests before they go to the National Cache.
This will mean there are two chances to find a locally stored copy of the information or web page that you need before making the trip through the transatlantic gateway.
Setting up your browser to find a cached copy of the information that you want is one way of saving money.
The other way of saving money is to go directly to sources in the UK that copy or ‘mirror’ the information that you need.
HENSA is the UK’s higher education mirror site.
The information is mirrored overnight at the low peak time so up-to-date mirrors are available from all over the world.
Mirrors also hold information that can’t be cached and can offer valuable additional services such as searching.
HENSA holds software and other data, which notoriously takes a long time to download from sites abroad.
By downloading software using the HENSA site you are saving money as HENSA is a free service and there is no need to use the transatlantic link.
Just as important, you are saving your time as HENSA’s network of several servers ensure a faster download.
HENSA holds over 80 mirrors of software, data and information.
The platforms supported are Windows 3.11, 95⁄98 and NT, Apple Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes, Palmtops and the Unix platform including Solaris, SunOS and Unix clones for PCs such as Linux and FreeBSD.
HENSA doesn’t always just replicate the mirror but tries to provide a more user-friendly interface to the sometimes unintuitive ftp file structure of a mirror.
Users have the opportunity to open .zip, .tar and .exe files and look inside and retrieve any information files that may help them to decide whether it is the program they require, before downloading.
The HENSA search engine has been developed in-house so it is tailored specifically to the way the collections are organised.
This is so the maximum information and matching results are returned.
HENSA also provides help to users in the form of userguides on-line and an email and telephone helpline.
Among the many HENSA mirrors are Netscape, Microsoft, Adobe, 3Com, Gnu, Apache, Linux, and FreeBSD.
Other non software collections include the Classical Midi Archives, the Uunet archive and Request for Comment documents.
HENSA provides information and software from browsers and programming tools to database programs, screensavers and other subject based academic software.
The academic subject software section is produced in collaboration with the CTI centres.
References Higher Education National Software Archive (HENSA) http://www.hensa.ac.uk JANET Traffic Accounting Frequently Asked Questions http://bill.ja.net/common/faq.html JISC Network Charging Frequently Asked Questions http://www.jisc.ac.uk/acn/chargefaq.html National JANET Web Caching Service (JWCS) http://wwwcache.ja.net Rogerson, Ron,1998.
JISC Circular 3⁄98.
Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub98/c3_98.html Rogerson, Ron, 1998.
JISC Circular 7⁄98.
Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub98/c7_98.html Author Details Sally Hadland HENSA Information Officer Higher Education National Software Archive (HENSA) Email: hadland@lancaster.ac.uk URL: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Another Piece of Cake?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Another Piece of Cake?
Buzz software database dissemination portfolio rss urn infrastructure archives metadata safari udc cataloguing graphics opac z39.50 dcmi gopher url research Citation BibTex RIS Anders Ardö, Sigfrid Lundberg and Ann-Sofie Zettergren with an overview of the history of Netlab, now ten years old.
Actually, that was really the way it was: a cake for the consumption of a group of people interested in the development of digital libraries.
It was in 1991, long before this concept had been implanted into the heart of the library community.
Indeed long before most people knew about the Internet.
At this meeting the first seed for what was going to be NetLab [1] was sown the multidisciplinary researchand developmental group aimed at digital libraries and global network based information systems.
The NetLab seed grew in the earth that the explosive development of communications systems (international computer networks) and computer graphics was made up of, together with access to programs for global network-based information systems.
The collaboration between the librarian Traugott Koch and the programmer/computer technician Anders Ardö was water for the tender plant.
Enthusiasm and multidisciplinary competence gave the nourishment that made the organisation grow faster and faster.
NetLab has always consisted of a distinctive blend, a staff mixture of equal parts librarians and computer programmers for the optimal nourishment.
Neither part has dominated, but both have contributed with their special knowledge in an unusually successful cooperation where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The moral and practical support from the library management also did contribute to the life-giving light for the growing NetLab plant.
The purpose of NetLab was to test and develop a common solution for searching for electronic information using a common user interface based on systems for distribution and searching via computer networks, but also to spread knowledge of the possibilities for electronic information searching that was being made accessible in the early 1990´s.
In the beginning a substantial part of the work focused on "missionary work", that is to spread information about the digital library, its advantages and its possibilities.
The "missionary workshops" had a very practical content and also a frankdialogue between Traugott the librarian and Anders the computer programmer.
At the same time NetLab built a digital library at a local server as a demonstrator of the new technologies.
In 1992, a work station for the use of Gopher, WAIS and WWW was placed at one of the libraries in Lund, UB2, as oneof the world´s first Internet terminals freely accessible at a library.
The first experiments with the creation of a digital library was presented in 1992 at the 15th International Essen Symposium.
The first NetLab version of a digital library was dominated by local information from Lund university and the campus libraries.
Of course, this approach was widened and the digital library extended its linking to the rest of the Internet world.
During this first period of time several strategically important projects were initiated.
The main focus was the development of tools and methodologies for building digital libraries, e.g.
knowledge organisation, metadata and WWW-indexing.
A major part of the work was aimed at external projects, both national and international.
These first steps lead to contacts internationally and with like-minded people in the Nordic countries.
Many of NetLab's projects stem from the Nordic WAIS/World Wide Web Project (W4 project for short) [2].
Most of the themes we have worked with later can be seen in embryonic form there.
For example the W4 included cross searching between a library OPAC and a web index, automatic classification in UDC and then obviously search and navigation with respect to subject metadata.
The search and navigation themes were further developed in the Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden (EELS) [3], which started in 1994.
It was NetLab's first service with stringent quality selection criteria metadata definitions.
As such it is a very early implementation of a Subject Based Information Gateway, (SBIG).
The W4 project ended in 1995 and was followed up in 1996 by two new Nordic projects, first the Nordic Web Index (NWI) [4] and somewhat later the Nordic Metadata Project (NMDP) [5], both with partners from the Nordic Library communities, and in the case of NWI also with an academic Internet Supply Provider.
These two concepts, the metadata aware web index and the SBIG, have until recently been the two most important threads in NetLab's work.
Web indexing and metadata 1994 is an important year in Internet development.
Apart from that NetLab released its first SBIG that year, Internet itself celebrated its 25th anniversary, and we experienced the first breakthrough of the WWW.
Both the first and the second international WWW conferences were held, but perhaps more importantly it was for the first time possible to order pizza on the the web.
1992 the Gopher search tool Veronica was released, 1993 developers released the first spiders on the web and again 1994 the first full scale search engines appeared [6].
The W4 project (see above) released its search engine pilot a year later.
None of the American search tools did support eight-bit characters, so the W4 pilot and the full scale NWI were in that respect early implementors of a web search engine supporting European character sets.
However, NWI had a companion project in the Nordic metadata project, NMDP.
In 1996 The Nordic Council for Scientific Information, NORDINFO [7] had the vision to support the NMDP.
It was the first international project, which made the choice of building Dublin Core-based tools.
NetLab participated in this project that would last four years and was responsible for building the Dublin Core Metadata Creator [8] which is still in use.
Having been one of the Dublin Core pioneers has been a somewhat mixed blessing to the project.
The Nordic metadata project has become well-known all over the world.
On the other hand, the steady and still continuing progress of the Dublin Core has forced the project to constantly modify the tools earlier made available.
This has been possible because the project partners were involved in other metadata projects such as EVA – the acquisition and archiving of electronic network publications [9] and took the Nordic metadata tools and developed them according to their own needs.
Many of the resulting new services were later incorporated into the basic product.
Like the Dublin Core, our tools now have solid kernel functionality that will not be radically altered.
These tools especially the metadata template but also metadata harvesting and indexing software and URN generator are in widespread use.
It is important to support metadata creation with user guides and appropriate tools.
The resulting metadata must be properly indexed to motivate the providers to do the job properly.
The experience from the NMDP has shown that the applications and documentation required for Dublin Core production and use can be developed very effectively in international collaboration-operation, and then adapted according to the local needs for national and regional projects.
The intention was that NMDP, among other things, should provide guidelines and the infrastructure needed and NWI the harvesting infrastructure for building of a Nordic national search services, which we envisioned should have search facilities approaching those found in library OPACs -enabling users to search for creator, title etc.
Through the information retrieval protocol Z39.50, these services should be possible to cross search, and it should also be possible to cross search them with OPACS.
Even though the vision did never become reality, we did actually implement that metadata search engine.
But the metadata needed was never produced in the quantity needed.
However, within the DESIRE [10] projects we developed a new harvester, the Combine [11] which was a substantial improvement.
The vision was fruitful in another way: It spawned new projects.
The nationwide metadata enhanced search engine proved infeasible, federated metadata initiatives were not.
Coalitions of organisations were formed within different communities.
Within one of these, the providers of information about Swedish academic research commissioned such a search engine from us, SAFARI [12].
It used the NMDP's metadata creator together with the Combine harvester to provide advanced search interface to its users.
What we envisioned proved infeasible.
These early projects appearing in Australia, UK and Germany as well as here in Scandinavia, are to be regarded as predecessors of initiatives as RSS and OAI.
Also, only in Sweden tens of thousands of web pages has been meta-tagged during the last 5 years or so, and this cataloging effort is most likely the second largest after the libraries' cataloging of books.
Apart from the above mentioned, NetLab has been using Dublin Core Metadata in a series of projects such as EUC [13], EULER [14], EUN [15], NISBIG [16], ETB [17], Renardus [18], studera.nu [19] and Skånewebben [20].
People at NetLab have also taken part in the development of metadata by being members in boards within this issue.
Traugott Koch and Sigfrid Lundberg are members of the Advisory Board of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and Traugott Koch is also a member of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Usage Board (maintenance of DCMI standards).
Subject Based Information Gateways Subject Based Information Gateways (SBIGs) are subject entrances to quality assessed Internet resources.
Most of these services have scope policies declaring what subjects they are indexing as well as defined target group, for instance academics and researchers.
The resources in SBIGs are selected in accordance with an officially published list of quality criteria.
The resources are then manually given rich descriptions that are fed into a database as records.
This work is done by librarians or subject specialists and the records provide metadata about the resources, containing information like title, URL, keywords and abstract.
The SBIGs are often limited to a specific subject, but may be universal as well.
Furthermore, the resources in SBIGs are classified and given classification codes.
These codes can be extracted automatically from the records and used to organise the browsing structure of the service.
The use of open standards, in order to support co-operation with other services, is widely used.
NetLab has played a part in the development of SBIGs since 1994 when EELS started.
Within the European Union funded projects DESIRE, Renardus and ETB, NetLab has been taking part in work and project-related research concerning quality assessment, classification and metadata but also the additional robot-based indexing.
The development within these projects have been of use for SBIGs, such as EELS, Länkskafferiet [21], Skånewebben and NISBIG.
One can say that the DESIRE project focused on how to build and maintain SBIGs, using existing and developing SBIGs as inspiration and test beds.
The goal was to show how to make an SBIG, no matter what subject should be covered.
Since several of these existing SBIGs collaborated-operated within the DESIRE project a common wish arose about making a cross-searching functionality available to the users.
The main attraction for this is the possibility to catch the different perspectives that various disciplines have on a certain subject.
If different SBIGs apply the same quality criteria, utilise the same information in their records and use the same software for their database construction they can be cross-searched.
As with the integrated search the result from the cross-search will distinctly show which SBIG the records are from.
The Renardus project has taken this a step further.
The aim of the Renardus project is to provide users with integrated access, through a single interface, to SBIGs and other Internet-based, distributed services.
The collaborative approach has implications for organisational, technical and metadata standards.
This service will be available to the end users in June 2002.
Another European project which focuses on sharing and integration is ETB.
The aim here is to create a dynamic metadata network through which the subject gateways can share their educational resources´ metadata.
The project will enable and encourage trans-cultural and trans-national co-operation and communication and will enable individuals and workgroups to produce, handle, retrieve and communicate information in the languages of their choice, and to combine information resources from different regions and countries, and of different levels.
The development within these projects have been of use to our own SBIGs.
Especially EELS has been constantly developed and improved due to the outcomes of the projects, since it has been used as a testbed both in DESIRE and Renardus.
One of NetLab tasks in DESIRE was to do some testing of different automatic classification methods and to develop a pilot service using EELS integrated with the robot-generated "All Engineering" [22] database.
The user can choose to search either only the SBIG, both SBIG and automated index, or the index only.
The hit list from a "mixed" search will give the SBIG-hits first, since they are quality-assessed, followed by the results from the automated index.
Dissemination Besides the SBIG and the web indexing using metadata, NetLab has also been something of an educational center for teaching internet skills to librarians.
The "missionary work" by Traugott Koch and Anders Ardö in the beginning of NetLab´s history has led to a lot of things.
Many NetLab members, and in particular Traugott Koch, have given speeches, lectures and workshops all over the world on many different occasions, concerning aspects of the digital library.
NetLab have had a history of cooperation with the Danish organisation DTV in the form of the Nordic Net Center (NNC) [23].
This cooperation has mostly consisted of common projects, such as NISBIG.
One of the most successful projects for the NNC group was the organisation and realisation of the online course "From Internet surfer to web master" in 1996-1997.
Many librarians from all over the Nordic countries signed up for the course and took part in the discussions about digital libraries that evolved.
There have also been courses aimed at librarians in foreign countries.
1997 there was a workshop series in Vilnius and Lund for Lithuanian university librarians.
The workshop dealt with both sides of the Internet, that is searching as well as producing material.
In 1998 NetLab held a conference, The Electronic Library – Gateway to Information [24], about the electronic library and its possibilities for librarians from ten developmental countries around the world.
This has been followed up by the CELI workshops [25], who started in 2001, aimed at ten university libraries in the south of Africa.
The present and the future NetLab´s project portfolio has contained a variety of projects durig these ten years.
There have been local and national as well as international ones.
They have gathered around the main focuses just mentioned: SBIGs and metadata, sprung from each other, and given ideas for new projects.
We feel that we have achieved quite a lot during this decade.
Perhaps the most important thing is that NetLab has trained some 30 or 40 librarians and software engineers in digital library practices.
Around a dozen of those are still active within our organisation.
Many of the others have reached positions they would not have got unless they had the NetLab experience in their CVs.
NetLab started as a project and evolved into a development organisation.
As such it lived its own life in a partly self-imposed isolation from its owner, Lund university Library.
NetLab was more involved in international collaboration than in its owner, which has been reorganised and matured to meet the challenges of the new developments in scientific communication.
The library developed from a traditional monolithic university library into a network of libraries [26], which just recently for the first time acknowledged the need for a research and development department.
It realised that it owned one.
With some of its original freedom traded against a much higher local funding, NetLab has itself been integrated into the Library head office, and got the project many of us desired the most: to build the infrastructure for our own digital library service.
References: 1.
NetLab http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab 2.
Nordic WAIS/World Wide Web Project http://www.lub.lu.se/W4 3.
Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden (EELS) http://eels.lub.lu.se 4.
Nordic Web Index (NWI) http://decweb.ethz.ch/WWW7/1900/com1900.htm 5.
The Nordic Metadata Project (NMDP) http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/meta 6.
Hobbes' Internet Timeline http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/fyi/fyi32.html 7.
NORDINFO http://www.nordinfo.helsinki.fi 8.
The Dublin Core Metadata Creator http://www.lub.lu.se/cgi-bin/nmdc.pl 9.
EVA http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/eva/english.html 10.
DESIRE http://www.desire.org 11.
Combine http://www.lub.lu.se/combine 12.
SAFARI http://safari.vr.se 13.
EUC http://www.medianet.org/euc 14.
EULER http://www.emis.de/projects/EULER 15.
EUN http://www.eun.org 16.
NISBIG http://www.lub.lu.se/nisbig 17.
ETB http://etb.eun.org 18.
Renardus http://www.renardus.org 19. studera.nu http://www.studera.nu 20.
Skånewebben http://www.skanewebben.nu 21.
Länkskafferiet http://lankskafferiet.skolverket.se 22.
“All” Engineering http://eels.lub.lu.se/ae/index.html 23.
NNC http://www.lub.lu.se/NNC/swedish.html 24.
The Electronic Library – Gateway to information http://www.lub.lu.se/sida 25.
CELI http://netlab.lub.lu.se/sida/celi 26.
Lund University Libraries http://www.lub.lu.se   Author Details   Anders Ardö PhD, Associate Professor Departmen of Information Technology, Lund University http://www.it.lth.se/users/anders/index.html anders@it.lth.se Sigfrid Lundberg PhD, Software Engineer NetLab/Head Office, Lund University Libraries http://www.lub.lu.se/~siglun/ siglun@munin.lub.lu.se Ann-Sofie Zettergren MLIS, Electronic Information Services Librarian NetLab/Head Office, Lund University Libraries http://www.lub.lu.se/~annsofie/ ann-sofie.zettergren@lub.lu.se Article Title: "Another piece of cake......?"
Author: Anders Ardö, Sigfrid Lundberg, and Ann-Sofie Zettergren Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/netlab-history/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Looking Back in Anger: A Retrospective Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Looking Back in Anger: A Retrospective Buzz data digitisation copyright video cataloguing standards Citation BibTex RIS Don Revill, former Head of Information Services at Liverpool John Moores University, offers a retrospective.
Having read recent government reports, and returning now to the position of being a mere user contemplating a forty four year career in education for librarianship, libraries and (one must now add) information services, it strikes me that little has changed over the years.
The problems the profession faced in the 50s and 60s are still with us.
There are still many politically-charged questions that we are unable to answer convincingly, including how much it costs to provide library services for each successfully educated chemist, physicist, sociologist, geographer …… and how big the book (materials) fund should be, other than, of course, by asking “How much have you got?” I have yet to see an information strategy that successfully addresses such issues.
Recognition of the librarian’s contribution to the educational process is still not common.
(1, 2) Institutional managements tend not to recognise the role played by the information service.
Try asking them how many students hours they think are spent in their libraries.
A crude calculation based, say, on a university of 16,000 students and average class contact hours of 15 weekly, suggests a total annual count of 7.2 million student hours.
In comparison, its library might have 1.5 million user visits at an approximate mean duration of two hours, giving 3 million student hours per annum, or 42% of the figure above a not inconsiderable proportion and a significant part of a student’s time.
Some might argue that time spent on computing activities is roughly commensurate with that spent in the library.
My experience is of an integrated service where we could “prove” a mean of three visits weekly and roughly six hours weekly spent on both library and computing activities per student.
Evidence of duration of stay is not part of current national data gathering activities so comparative data is hard to find such is our lack of some significant overall usage measures, never mind the absence of information on usage by given student groups by year, status or discipline studied.
There are at least two information domains that universities experience.
The first, tending to be regarded as the more important, is that which is generated internally by the institution itself including the directives, advice and invitations from government and the funding councils.
This domain includes student applications, enrolments, timetabling, student progression, finance, classroom learning materials, personnel files, the political documents of the institution and so on.
The second domain, and that with which the library largely deals, is the substance of learning.
It consists of externally published information including that which is available electronically.
This domain is infinitely more extensive than the first but, by the same token, it is more remote, less obviously immediately applicable, has to be bought one way or another and, because resources are limited, it often has to be selected.
One therefore buys variable amounts of it.
Access to this domain can be extended or contracted as finances and institutional cultures allow.
It can be seen as less essential.
There have been cases in the past (vide the history of the polytechnics) where cuts have been imposed, materials not bought for several months, yet students did not fail in droves.
It is my contention that libraries (and perhaps even computing services) could cease to be but that the proportion of firsts, upper and lower seconds and thirds would barely change.
Academics would cope, change their expectations and practices, preserve their own jobs and preserve the existence of their institutions (the first real objective of any institution is its own survival) despite what happens around them.
I was once told by a lecturer colleague; “Your job is easy.
All you have to do is buy the books and journals we recommend and put them on the shelves”.
And that is still the perception of many academics.
Such is the vulnerability of the services we provide.
Many academic staff see libraries as purely a support service; not one intrinsically involved with the success of their own performance.
They see their students leaving their classrooms to pursue learning strategies, developed and controlled by academic staff, via other agencies the computer service and the library service in particular.
Neither of these services is particularly well-integrated into mainstream classroom activities.
What electronic teaching packages do exist tend to be designed in-house a consequence of the “not invented here syndrome”so prevalent, and so inimical to sharing high-cost programmes, in UK higher education.
Libraries largely support individual study.
They are insufficiently involved with the delivery of material directly relevant to course contents.
There are, of course, exceptions where courses are designed around project work and direct use of the library, but much of our service is of the further reading, background study type.
There are courses, many of which may be workshop or laboratory based, which barely require students to enter the library.
So we are of less direct relevance to academic staff.
By the same token our efforts therefore have little effect on alleviating pressures on the staff-student ratios a major concern for most universities.
The existence of electronic learning materials which do substitute for class contact time (courseware) gives libraries the opportunity to offer to deliver these to students and thereby become more relevant.
Even so there is a reluctance on the part of academic staff to allow such material to be networked.
They appear to prefer to retain control over it by establishing their own departmental PC suites.
Their argument, long since found by librarians to be largely untrue, is that no one else in the university is interested in the material.
The fact that much of it is developed in-house reinforces this attitude.
We do provide a support service in at least one respect, for example when a whole class descends on the library looking for the same things but the first three people through the door have cleared out the most useful items.
The words remind me of a surgical support which tries to take over when the damage has been done!
Electronic delivery could solve this eventually.
The present Government has begun to recognise the part libraries can play in the Learning Age, including creating digital versions of a range of cultural materials.
(3) Government support is vital.
Yet even at the institutional level curious euphemisms continue to be found.
The Government’s response to the Dearing Committee stated that “the reduction in the unit of funding …….
will be limited to 1%”, thus meeting the Dearing Committee’s priority for additional funding.
(4) Only in a government paper could a 1% cut be seen as extra cash!
The Government supports Dearing’s call for greater collaboration between institutions.
This has been a familiar theme in the library world for the past 40 years yet with no financial incentives to encourage it.
Libraries have long since collaborated yet there is little evidence of their institutions generally having done so.
The latter still tend to see themselves as in competition with others, particularly their local higher education establishments.
It makes no sense for a library to collaborate unless institutions rationalise their course provision so the library knows, more clearly, what do to.
The Government’s response to Dearing also mentioned the “chance of [students] hearing outstanding lecturers from elsewhere e.g.
on film, video or via broadcasting”, (5) yet there was no mention of availability via the Web for an idea that is at least thirty years old, yet waiting to be realised to any great extent.
We have long since heard that remedies for higher education lie in the greater use of information technology.
The Government recommends that by 2000⁄01 “higher education institutions should ensure that all students have open access to a networked desktop computer and expect that by 2005⁄06 all students will be required to have access to their own portable computer.”(6) The devil, as usual, is in the detail.
What does this mean in effect?
Will we need one PC per 5 students (the old Nelson report specification) or more, or less?
How much will it cost?
We even lack national data on current provision of PCs.
Even when (or if) students have their own portables they will still expect institutional PCs to be available, as well as printing facilities.
And what specification laptop will be needed to access the sources available from nstitutions’networks?
A colleague once remarked that a solution based on the possession of personal laptops may well founder on the simple fact that local thugs will relieve students of so many that ownership will become problematic!
If academic staff are reluctant to adopt materials devised elsewhere then the intention may also fail simply because of the cost of electronic production.
The old audio-visual prescription of 100 hours of staff input for every hour of learning materials appears to be multiplied ten fold, if not twenty fold, for electronic materials.
Nor is it likely that such materials will need less revision, or even easier revision, than more conventional items.
So recouping costs over time seems to offer little promise.
Digitised texts offer more hope yet raise additional difficulties.
We have a pre-Gutenberg situation where institutions make individual contracts with copyright owners for the use of their products for specified groups of students much like monasteries would copy manuscripts for other religious establishments.
We have a similar situation for CD-ROMs, where staff often need to consult contracts in order to decide which users are eligible to use which services.
There just is not the time to make individual arrangements for specific titles, and the whole notion of doing so is absurd.
Moreover, the Government supports the Funding Council’s intention to charge for transatlantic networking “in order to ensure that effective use is made of expensive network resources.”(7) It all goes to push up the costs of electronic delivery.
We desperately need a central agency to handle digitisation on a massive scale.
It should be done at source.
The original machine-readable text should be corrected as for the final proof-read edition and that electronic version deposited with the appropriate agency.
Electronic learning materials are needed in the thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, if higher education is to take real advantage of electronic delivery.
Despite JISC and eLib only small beginnings have been made.
(8) Not until a user can find an item, say via a one-stop catalogue, and then get the complete text on screen, with printing rights, at the touch of a button, will electronic access be a reality.
Librarians tend to forget that for the user this is the start of a process and not the culmination of it.
Not until the found item has been used successfully will the user be “satisfied”.
The really hard work starts when the user has enough material to meet his/her needs: not a comprehensive collection, but just enough.
Overly comprehensive answers tend to lead to information overload.
Another issue not receiving its due attention is that of plagiarism.
The ability to download texts electronically and then edit them will lead (if it has not already done so) to fraud on an unprecedented scale.
It would take an extremely well informed academic to recognise all cases of plagiarised texts in essays, projects, theses and seen examination answers.
We already hear of cases where first year university students appear to be surprised to learn that the cut and paste methods they used in primary and secondary schools are no longer acceptable in higher education without the inverted commas and the references, together with some sensible text in between.
The experience of more than one institution tells us that many are struggling to cope with demands especially so in the case of converged services having, as they do, the responsibility for handling computing matters.
(9) Our users’ complaints can be summarised roughly as: students want more books and study seats, academics want more journals, both want more PCs.
Seldom do either say they want more library staff.
The surveys done for, and the evidence given to, Dearing showed that the first priority of full-time students, and the second of part-time students was for more books!
(10) In the early 70s the Council of Polytechnic Librarians had the aim of achieving a ratio of 1 staff member per 80 full-time equivalent students, and a modest 50 volumes held per FTE in each polytechnic library.
Bearing in mind that the former polytechnics were less well endowed than the older universities, the SCONUL (and LISU) figures show a steady decline in support over the last twenty years.
In 1977⁄78 polytechnic libraries added 4.3 items to stock per FTE student per annum.
(11) In 1995⁄96 all university libraries added a mean of only 2 items to stock per FTE (1.29 net).
(12) Stock holdings have barely moved, from 52 items per FTE in Polytechnics in 1977⁄78 to 52.3 for all universities in 1995⁄96.
As we are aware, much student frustration is caused because there is not enough material available when it is required hence the short loan and photocopy collections, the attempts to digitise some texts and the reservations waiting lists.
We argue lack of resources.
We frequently blame customers, both academic staff and students, for lack of notice and preparation.
All this is partly true but simply points up the failures in communication between the parties involved, as well as resource deficiencies.
I do not believe that electronic sources have substituted for these lost resources.
We know that a large proportion of most students’ time on computers is devoted to word processing rather than information seeking.
It is another measure of our lack of information, and understanding, that we do not know much about how our PCs are used, which sources are used, or how much the Internet is used for academic rather than personal or trivial purposes.
Despite the demand for study space and the need to provide PCs, physical space allocated per FTE has also declined from 1.02m2 in 1977⁄78 to 0.9m2 in 1995⁄96.
The number of FTE students per seat has grown from 6 in 1977⁄78 to 8 in 1995⁄96.
All this despite the supposed greater degree of independent study.
Library staff to student ratios have also declined from 1 : 96 in 1977⁄78 to 1 : 145 in 1995⁄96.
The figures show diminishing resource provision over the years.
Usage, however, has increased.
The variety of services provided has also increased particularly in regard to electronic provision and the consequent training requirement for both staff and students.
As staff numbers decline students want, and will continue to want, personal assistance in order to make sense, and take advantage of, the information-rich environment.
Increasingly learning resources staff will have to tread the fine line between explaining how to do things and giving information and advice on the one hand and teaching them, if not actually doing their work for them, on the other.
Such staff carry out a tutorial function yet receive little recognition for it.
Yet this was ever the case with the older concept of subject librarians.
There is a limit to the efficacy of self-help devices such as idiots’ guides, frequently asked questions lists, user manuals and help screens.
Help screens, too often, can be infuriatingly unhelpful.
They can be presented in computerese, derived largely from the system documentation and not from the users’ perspective.
They can be akin to the video on “How to use a VCR”.
These arguments are relevant in the context of the Funding Council’s new funding method for teaching, based on the principle of a standard price for each of the four broad subject groups(13).
Surely the argument that quality has increased, and can be further improved, cannot be maintained?
The quality assurance game is at best camouflage or smokescreen, hiding the real situation, or at worst a cynical confidence trick in which we all join, however reluctantly.
We find euphemisms such as “improved quality levels within the context of efficiency gains” meaning we have improved things despite having less cash.
I do not believe that most university libraries are so inefficient that they can take cuts and improve quality at the same time.
It is patently not true that efficiency (meaning the production of a given pre-specified output at least cost) can be improved ad nauseam.
What if one is already “efficient?” “Slack” and “fat” have long since been removed from library systems.
Indeed staff cuts made to meet financial targets probably reduce efficiency measured any other way.
There is also the problem of what constitutes output, never mind effectiveness.
Outputs can be excellent, satisfactory, adequate and even inadequate.
Leaving aside who decides these matters, we all know that our users aspire to higher levels of service.
Demands appear to be infinite including personal, one to one, assistance.
Libraries lack specific, definable, tangible, objectives which can be measured and related directly to cash inputs and which are recognised by our masters as being pertinent.
We just manage.
We keep the lid on things in a situation of increasing uncertainty.
(14) We have nothing equivalent to an airline service’s objectives.
They can fly us to New York and we will know when we have got there.
We then choose on the basis of times of flights, duration, comfort, service and costs.
We can say we will satisfy 75% of our users’ information needs yet have few means of discovering those real needs (which themselves will alter as service expectations change), of quantifying them, or the cost of raising the proportion to 80% or 85%.
We have the dilemma of providing many services books and journal supply, tuition in information use, reference and advisory services, photocopying, PCs, printouts, study space and so on.
There are no simple, overall, measures over which library managements have some control.
While supply does create demand, we are still largely demand-led.
There is little library managers can do to influence demand in order to accommodate it within given resources.
Electronic access is presenting more problems than solutions.
It all seems so painfully familiar.
References 1.
Downing, Richard: Capturing the curriculum, Library Association Record, 100 (6), June 1998, 310 311 2.
Downing, Richard: Librarians left out of HE debate, Library Association Record, 100 (4), April 1998, 170 3.
Further education for the new millennium : response to the Kennedy Report, Department for Education and Employment, 1998, 13 4.
Higher education for the 21st century : response to the Dearing Report.
Department for Education and Employment, 1998, 13 5.
Ibid.
p41 6.
Ibid.
p41 7.
Ibid.
p38 8.
Electronic Libraries Programme: Electronic document delivery : the integrated solution (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/servicecs/elib) 9.
Clegg, Sue: Converged enquiry/help desks: rhetoric or reality?
Relay, (45) 1998, 7 -10 10.
National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education: Higher education in the learning society : the report of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education.
Chairman Sir Ron Dearing, 1997 11.
Statistics of polytechnic libraries 1977 78.
Council of Polytechnic Librarians, 1979 12.
Standing Conference of National and University Libraries: Annual library statistics 1995 96.
SCONUL, 1997 13.
Higher education for the 21st century.
Op Cit.
p 53 14.
Irving, Ann: Beyond Dearing : handling certainty uncertainly.
Relay, (45) 1998, 11 12 Author details By Don Revill formerly Head of Information Services Liverpool John Moores University Responses to Article 16 December, 1998 First, sorry about the demise of Ariadne I always make the effort to read it and it has been both interesting and useful.
Please could you pass on my thanks to Don Revill for his article I’m sure he can hear the sound of librarians (though many may not have this word in their job titles) saying “Yes!” I loved the pre-Gutenberg comparison, forwarded to my colleagues on the Electronic Information Licences Working Group (affectionately known as earwig), and the summary of user complaints is perfect.
Val Hamilton Faculty Librarian, Human Sciences University of Stirling Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Climbing the Scholarly Publishing Mountain With SHERPA Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Climbing the Scholarly Publishing Mountain With SHERPA Buzz data software dissemination rss infrastructure archives metadata accessibility repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 licence interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl and Stephen Pinfield explore the SHERPA project, which is concentrating on making e-prints available online.
JISC announced its FAIR Programme (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) in January of this year.
The central objective of the Programme is to test ways of releasing institutionally-produced content onto the web.
FAIR describes its scope as: “to support access to and sharing of institutional content within Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) and to allow intelligence to be gathered about the technical, organisational and cultural challenges of these processes.… This programme is part of a broader area of development to build an Information Environment for the UK’s Distributed National Electronic Resource.”(1) It specifically sought projects in the following areas: · Support for disclosure of institutional assets including institutional e-print archives and other types of collections through the use of the OAI (Open Archives Initiative) protocol.
· Support for the harvesting of the metadata disclosed through this protocol into services which can be provided to the community on a national basis.
These services may be based around subject areas or other groupings of relevance for learning and research.
· Support for disclosure of institutional assets through the use of other relevant protocols, for example Z39.50 and RSS.
· Exploration of the deposit of institutional collections with a community archive or to augment existing collections which have proven learning, teaching or research value.
· Experiments with the embedding of JISC collections and services in local institutional portals and how well they can be presented in conjunction with institutionally managed assets.
· Studies into the related issues and challenges of institutional asset disclosure and deposit, including collections management, IPR, technical, organisational, educational, cultural and digital preservation challenges.
FAIR awarded funding to 14 projects in five ‘clusters’: museums and images, e-prints, e-theses, intellectual property rights, and institutional portals (details are given in the Appendix).
The Open Archives Initiative lay very firmly behind FAIR, as the call document says: “This programme is inspired by the vision of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) (http://www.openarchives.org), that digital resources can be shared between organisations based on a simple mechanism allowing metadata about those resources to be harvested into services.… The model can clearly be extended to include….
learning objects, images, video clips, finding aids, etc.
The vision here is of a complex web of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those resources, but made available through service providers to the whole community of learning.”(2) The SHERPA project(3) represents the response to this vision of a number of major research libraries.
It is concentrating on making ‘e-prints’ (electronic copies of research papers) available online.
The bid was put together under the auspices of CURL (the Consortium of University Research Libraries) which is also contributing to the project funding.
The project is being hosted by the University of Nottingham.
The research library perspective The starting point of SHERPA is the view that the current system of research publication is not working.
In this system the research community (predominantly universities) generates research output in the form of papers, which it then gives away free of charge to commercial publishers, who in turn sell it back to the research community at high prices.
And the research community does not just give away its services as authors, but also as referees, editors and editorial board members, all mostly free of charge.
Ironically, this is a system that does not ultimately work out in favour of researchers.
As authors, the potential impact their research output may make is limited in this system since commercial publishers will normally shield their work behind ‘toll gates’ (journal subscriptions or article pay-per-view charges).
As readers of the literature, they are prevented by these toll gates from gaining easy access to all of the publications in their field.
Even libraries in large well-funded universities cannot afford subscriptions to anywhere near all peer-reviewed journals(4).
Academic libraries are then placed in a difficult position.
Journals account for a large proportion of most academic library budgets.
And this proportion is growing.
Over the last 15 years journal prices have risen by about 10% a year at a time when library budgets have grown by no more than 2 or 3%.
Libraries have often had to divert money from other budgets to maintain subscriptions or simply cancel titles.
In most cases, they have done both.
Many library managers have, as a result, become increasingly frustrated by the system, and those in research universities more than most.
It is, after all, these institutions, more than others, who are generating the research output, which they are having to buy back in large quantities and at high prices in order to support ongoing research.
Librarians who are buying these publications on behalf of their institutions have been leading voices in saying ‘we cannot go on like this’.
One possible solution is ‘self archiving’.
Authors can make their own research output freely available outside the confines of commercial journals.
Until recently, the best way of doing this was simply mounting it on a web site.
However, this is not a particularly attractive prospect.
It requires those carrying out literature searches to go to the web sites of individuals and research groups in potentially hundreds of different locations.
Either that or rely on standard web search engines.
Neither of these could give reliable comprehensive access.
The Open Archives Initiative(5) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a technical development which addresses this problem.
Through the use of a ‘lowest common denominator’ metadata format (unqualified Dublin Core), it allows those producing metadata for all types of digital objects to ‘expose’ their metadata on the internet.
The metadata can then be automatically harvested, collected together and made available in a searchable form.
The real potential of the protocol lies in its support for interoperability.
It is a tool for building union catalogues from a potentially vast range of different collections, and it therefore exploits the ubiquity of the internet to make virtually possible what is physically impossible.
E-prints, whether ‘pre-prints’ (which have not yet been peer-reviewed), or ‘post-prints’ (which have), can be deposited and described by the authors themselves or perhaps third parties and made easily available to users.
Through the OAI-PMH the metadata created can contribute to a vast worldwide network of resources which can be easily searched.
Of course, the ‘invisible college’ has always operated like this in any case (albeit in a limited way).
Researchers do in some cases make free copies of their research available to their peers – via conferences, and on web sites.
An interesting variant of this is the culture of working papers produced by academic staff belonging to particular institutions.
However, this is an exclusive method of communication.
Senior researchers in any discipline will know which institutions across the world have the strongest departments, or those with research interests which match their own – but what about junior researchers, or researchers in interdisciplinary areas?
They may miss out on accessing this research.
The potential impact of the research is then still limited.
Making searchable metadata about these papers easily available would be a big step forward in addressing this problem.
Benefits of OAI-PMH to institutions and their libraries With a system of OAI-compliant archiving, e-print repositories could replicate content only otherwise available commercially.
Making content freely accessible in this way has the potential to improve scholarly communication (by lowering impact and access barriers) but it also has the potential to save institutions and their libraries money.
Freeing-up access to the research literature and ensuring it is easily searchable will mean that commercial publishers have to pare down their profit margins and concentrate on adding value in order to retain customers.
But of course, it is likely to take a long time before there is a critical mass of content available.
This is a massive mountain to be climbed.
In some disciplines real progress has already been made.
The case of the high-energy physicists who have been using arXiv.org(6) for more than a decade is well-known, but few other disciplines have yet shown an interest in organising themselves around a centralised discipline-specific repository in this way.
One suggested means of redressing this is to put the emphasis on repositories at the institutional level instead of the disciplinary.
That is what the SHERPA project – located within the e-prints cluster of the FAIR Programme – will seek to test in the UK.
If the impetus comes from within the university, with institutional support mechanisms in place to permit the growth of an institutional repository, then the current unevenness in the disciplinary spread of the free corpus may be reduced(7).
Over time, the argument goes, a snowball effect will operate within institutions, and at a national – and international – level, so that a multi-disciplinary free collection of research literature can be built.
The institutional library service is in many ways the natural co-ordinator of this activity, performing the role of infrastructure provider.
As part of the SHERPA project, a number of CURL libraries will begin to take on this role.
Six open access e-print repositories will be funded within the project: at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oxford and Nottingham, together with a shared archive within the ‘White Rose’ partnership of York, Leeds and Sheffield, and one at the British Library for the research outputs of ‘non-aligned’ researchers.
They will use the open source eprints.org(8) software produced by the University of Southampton.
The project will investigate the technical and managerial aspects of running these repositories.
After the initial work is complete, it is hoped that other institutions will be able to come on board.
SHERPA will be setting up OAI-compliant e-print repositories but it will not (in the first instance at least) be creating aggregated search services.
This will be done by others, including new projects funded as part of FAIR.
One such project, e-prints UK, will be working in partnership with SHERPA to achieve the best ways of creating metadata so that it can be effectively harvested.
One of the key elements of OAI is this separation between repositories (‘Data Providers’) and search services (‘Service Providers’).
FAIR gives us an opportunity to try this model out within real organisations.
With this experience SHERPA hopes to be in a good position to advise others on setting up these kinds of services from scratch for themselves.
In the short term, the biggest challenge of all is not a technical or managerial one but a cultural one.
We need to convince academics that they must also join the expedition.
Librarians should now take on the role of change advocates.
SHERPA will aim to contribute to this advocacy.
Major advocacy campaigns will be mounted in CURL institutions supporting the institutional archive agenda.
It is also hoped to contribute to the wider campaign beyond these institutions as well.
SHERPA will, for example, put materials used and lessons learned into the public domain.
It hopes to be one of the growing number of voices in the academic community arguing for change.
Quality content One of the key ways of winning over researchers is by demonstrating that e-print repositories can provide access to the quality literature.
There are widely held views that free literature on the web is normally of poor quality and that open access repositories are not an appropriate medium for publishing peer-reviewed research.
For this reason SHERPA aims to concentrate on collecting refereed content.
It will not reject other forms of papers, but it will seek post-prints as its first priority.
Authors will be encouraged to post their work on their institutional repository as well as having it published in journals.
Having a good proportion of refereed articles searchable within the SHERPA corpus will help to demonstrate the viability of the approach.
Another reason to focus on refereed material is that it is likely that this will define which items in the SHERPA collections are selected for digital preservation.
While a pre-print which an author never intends to submit for peer review may still be worth preserving, generally the approach will be to preserve articles once they are in their final form – and this is most easily witnessed by their appearance in the journal literature.
The approach taken by SHERPA will then be to collect papers which have been (or will be) also published in the peer-reviewed literature.
For these reasons, SHERPA is keen to engage publisher support for the project.
The very choice of the name, indeed, is designed to convey this.
‘Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access’.
This particular ‘hybrid environment’ is one in which a free corpus of research literature can exist alongside a commercial one, and is not necessarily in conflict with it.
As the example of high energy physics shows, open access e-print archives do not necessarily kill journals.
Journals may however have to change their roles, possibly focusing on managing the peer-review process and adding value to the basic content (both of which of course cost money) rather than being sole distributors of content.
The SHERPA project wants to work alongside publishers to investigate how the field of scholarly communication may take shape in the future.
Copyright A key issue here is copyright.
It is common for commercial publishers to require authors to sign over copyright to them before they will publish an article.
In some cases, this will give the publisher exclusive publication rights and the author will not be able to self archive the paper.
The idea that authors should continue to submit their work to journals but also post their work on e-print repositories runs into problems here.
How can projects like SHERPA deal with this?
Firstly, it should be recognised that not all publishers require copyright sign-over.
A good number of publishers allow authors to keep copyright.
Since authors (to a certain extent) have the choice about where they place their papers, advocates of self-archiving can encourage authors to place their papers with publishers of this sort and thus retain copyright.
Where copyright sign-over is required by publishers, the author is sometimes still permitted to distribute a paper for non-commercial purposes outside the confines of the journal.
Some publishers have copyright agreements which explicitly allow the posting of e-prints.
Once again, authors can be encouraged to submit papers to these publishers.
One thing that SHERPA will aim to do will be to examine the copyright agreements of different publishers and publicise what their agreements will and will not allow.
Where exclusive rights are normally expected to be signed over, a number of possible strategies may be adopted.
Firstly, SHERPA intends to help authors to negotiate with publishers in order to allow them to self archive.
One possible way in which this may be done is to produce a standard ‘back licence’ document that can be appended by authors to publisher copyright agreements.
Such a back licence might state that the author is signing the publisher’s own licence but subject to the terms of the back licence, and the back licence in turn allows the author to retain the right to self archive the work in a non-commercial repository.
In other cases, SHERPA hopes to negotiate directly with publishers to persuade them to grant the project a blanket waiver which allows articles to be posted on SHERPA archives at least for the duration of the project.
This may not be as difficult as it might at first appear.
The editor-in-chief of an Elsevier journal in informatics, one of the professors of informatics at the University of Edinburgh, recently pursued Elsevier over its policy regarding e-prints.
He received a reply in the Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science for October 2001, in an article entitled ‘Recent Elsevier Science Publishing Policies’, which stated ‘… the exclusive distribution rights obtained by Elsevier Science refer to the article as published, bearing our logo and having exactly the same appearance as it has in the journal.
Authors retain the right to keep preprints of their articles on their homepages (and/or relevant preprint servers) and to update their content, for example to take account of errors discovered during the editorial process, provided these do not mimic the appearance of the published version.
They are encouraged to include a link to Elsevier Science’s online version of the paper to give readers easy access to the definitive version.’(9) This is an interesting departure for Elsevier and perhaps indicates that some publishers are keen to investigate these issues further.
Even where there is no interest, things can be done.
SHERPA will also investigate ways in which the Harnad-Oppenheim strategy(10) can be employed effectively and appropriately.
Digital preservation The SHERPA project is also keen to pursue another objective.
The CURL Directors, in considering the potential of the Open Archives Initiative, were very interested in the archiving dimension.
They wanted a project which would ‘put the archiving into Open Archives’.
The reason for this is that, as we move into an electronic-journal-dominated future for research, there are real concerns emerging about the preservation of digital material.
Who should take responsibility for the preservation of the academic record?
This has traditionally been a research library activity.
Peter Hirtle, writing in D-Lib in April 2001, stated: “an OAI system that complied with the OAIS reference model, and which offered assurances of long-term accessibility, reliability, and integrity, would be a real benefit to scholarship.”(11) OAIS is the Open Archival Information System(12) (a completely different standard from OAI-PMH), which emerged in 1999 from work done in NASA on designing a reference model for preserving space data.
The model was seized upon by the digital preservation world generally, and used within the JISC-funded CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives (CEDARS) project(13).
CURL therefore had a strong interest in implementing an OAIS-based digital preservation project, having initiated the successful work in OAIS model development undertaken by the CEDARS project since 1998.
We expect that SHERPA will also be engaged in digital preservation activity for the contents of its archives later in the project, and are talking to funding agencies and various partners about the prospects for this.
Conclusion The current structure of scholarly communication may have made some sense in a paper-based world.
However, in a digital world it is looking increasingly anomalous.
Where there is a need for the rapid and wide dissemination of content to the research community, it is found wanting.
It is also extremely expensive for the very research community it is trying to serve.
The development of institutional repositories is one possible response to the current problems.
SHERPA is one project which hopes to go some way in testing out this model.
There are key technical, managerial, and cultural issues which need tackling urgently.
As the project begins to do this it will disseminate the lessons learned to the wider community in the hope that others will begin the process as well.
SHERPA is, of course, just one project within a larger programme.
FAIR is just one programme within a larger set of international developments.
But it is hoped that FAIR projects, along with others working in this area, can begin to generate some kind of momentum which will enable us to improve the way in which scholarship is carried out in the future.
Appendix: FAIR projects Museums and Images Cluster (4 projects) · Petrie Museum, University College London Accessing the Virtual Museum · Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge; Archaeology Data Service, University of York Harvesting the Fitzwilliam · AHDS Executive, King’s College London; Theatre Museum, V&A; Courtald Institute of Art, University of London; Visual Arts Data Service, University of Surrey; Performing Arts Data Service, University of Glasgow Partial Deposit · ILRT, University of Bristol; University of Cambridge BioBank E-Prints Cluster (4 projects) · CURL (University of Nottingham; University of Edinburgh; University of Glasgow; Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York (‘White Rose’ partnership); University of Oxford; British Library) SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) · RDN, King’s College London; University of Southampton; UKOLN, University of Bath; UMIST; University of Bath; University of Strathclyde; University of Leeds; ILRT, University of Bristol; Heriot Watt University; University of Birmingham; Manchester Metropolitan University; University of Oxford; University of Nottingham; OCLC E-prints UK · University of Strathclyde; University of St. Andrews; Napier University; Glasgow Colleges Group Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed · University of Southampton Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and dISclosure E-Theses Cluster (3 projects) · Robert Gordon University; University of Aberdeen; Cranfield University; University of London; British Library Electronic Theses · University of Edinburgh Theses Alive!
· University of Glasgow DAEDALUS Intellectual Property Rights Cluster (1 project) · Loughborough University; Birkbeck College, University of London; University of Greenwich; University of Southampton Machine-readable rights metadata Institutional Portals Cluster (2 projects) · University of Hull; RDN, King’s College London; UKOLN, University of Bath Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally · Norton Radstock College, Bristol; City of Bath College; City of Bristol College; Filton College, Bristol; Weston College, Weston-super-Mare; Western College Consortium, Bristol FAIR Enough Author Details John MacColl is Sub-Librarian (Online Services) and Director of SELLIC at the University of Edinburgh.
Stephen Pinfield is Assistant Director of Information Services at the University of Nottingham and Director of SHERPA.
Both are members of the CURL Task Force for Scholarly Communication.
References (1) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c01_02.html (2) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c01_02.html (3) http://www.sherpa.ac.uk (4) See Stevan Harnad, ‘The self-archiving initiative’ Nature: webdebates.
<http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html> (5) See http://www.openarchives.org (6) http://www.arxiv.org (7) See Raym Crow The case for institutional repositories: a SPARC position paper.
Washington, DC: SPARC, 2002.
Release 1.0.
<http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html> (8) http://www.eprints.org (9) Arjen Sevenster ‘Recent Elsevier Science publishing policies’.
Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science 75, October 2001, 301-303 (10) Stevan Harnad, ‘For whom the gate tolls?
How and why to free the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving, now’, Section 6.
<http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim> (11) Peter Hirtle, ‘Editorial: OAI and OAIS: What’s in a name?’ D-Lib Magazine 7, 4, April 2001 <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/04editorial.html> (12) See Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems Reference model for an open archival information system (OAIS), 1999 <www.ccds.org/documents/p2/CCSDS-650.0-R-1.pdf> (13) http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/ Article Title: “Climbing the Scholarly Publishing Mountain with SHERPA” Author: John MacColl and Stephen Pinfield Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/sherpa/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz data framework database archives udc gopher url research Citation BibTex RIS Phil Cross presents the first of an occasional series of articles looking at individual subsections within SOSIG.
Phil has been the section editor for Environmental Sciences for the past year and gives a description of the types of resources users can expect to find in this rapidly expanding field.
Browsing the Environment Section SOSIG has chosen to use the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) scheme to produce the browsable sub-sections for its database.
The sections from this scheme that I selected from the general class of Environmental Sciences [1] were: Social and socio-economic aspects of human impact on the environment (social ecology); Adverse effects of human activity on the environment; and Protection of the environment, Management of environmental quality.
(For convenience these have been shortened to Social ecology, Adverse effects of human activity, and Protection of the environment respectively).
As with all classification schemes, these divisions have some short-comings in terms of their precision and thought will need to be given to further subdivisions in the future as the database continues to expand.
In the meantime, users will find resources on sustainability and renewable energy under Social ecology; resources on depletion of natural resources, pollution and environmental destruction under Adverse effects of human activity; and control of pollution, monitoring, recycling, waste disposal, and environmental law under Protection of the environment.
Clearly there are many resources which overlap these sections and which will be found featured in more than one.
Figure 1.
‘Environmental Sciences and Issues’ section of SOSIG Apart from these broad subject categories, however, the large number of environmental sites available on the Internet do break down naturally into a number of different types of resource.
Non-Governmental Organizations Some of the most useful resources are those produced by the major non-governmental organizations.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has its own Web site [2] which uses the global medium of the Internet to further the organization’s remit of promoting global approaches to caring for the environment.
The World Bank’s development section [3] provides environmental indicators and its own energy-environment strategy.
CIESIN (Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network) [4] is another non-governmental organization which is a very useful source of information aimed at the public, decision-makers and scientists.
The site provides access to many databases, ‘Thematic Guides’ to issues concerning environmental change, and the full text of scholarly papers, reports, working papers and newsletters.
Figure 2.
CIESIN homepage And there is also CEDAR (the Central European Environmental Data Request Facility) [5], an organization which was set up to provide computing and Internetwork facilities to support international data exchange with the Central and Eastern European environmental community.
Other sources of environmental data come from independent environmental organizations/think tanks such as the Ecological Society of America [6], although such sources often require payment for their reports.
Government Data Sources Governments are now becoming useful providers of information over the World Wide Web including data about the environment and the policies they are enacting to protect it.
The European Union is well represented with the European Environment Agency [7], established to provide high-quality information for the European Union, and Directorate-General XI of the European Commission: Environment, Nuclear Safety and Civil Protection [8].
The Canadian Government provide an excellent site called The Green Lane [9], and, as usual, the US Government offer large amounts of data via the United States Environmental Protection Agency [10].
In the UK, there is the Environment Agency of England and Wales [11] and the Natural Environment Research Council [12], one of the seven UK Research councils and which is the leading body in the UK for research, survey, monitoring and training in the environmental sciences.
The Environment A-Z As well as the general approaches of the above sites, as might be expected there are many Internet resources covering more specific subject areas, from composting (Humusphere [13]) to endangered species (Species Under Threat [14], giving details from the World Conservation Union’s `Red Lists’ of endangered plants and animals).
Or, were you aware that 1998 was declared the International Year of the Ocean by the United Nations?
Have a look at the International Year of the Ocean Homepage [15].
Ozone depletion is a topic of particular concern and the Stratospheric Ozone and Human Health World Wide Web Site [16] provides a multidisciplinary data resource for health officials, decision makers, government officials, researchers, and the general public.
This resource is produced through a collaboration between NASA and the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), part of CIESIN (mentioned above [4]).
Information on pollution in its many forms can be found in many resources such as the National Air Quality and Emissions Trends Report, 1996 [17], Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive Contamination [18], or Air Quality Issues [19] (an online newsletter from the Atmospheric Research and Information Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University).
Environmental legislation and treaties ENTRI (Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators) is an online search service for finding information about environmental treaties [20] and provides the complete texts of more than 169 environmental agreements (and is also provided by CIESIN!
), and The Environmental Law Information Center [21] has information regarding US environmental law.
Some of the more recent international conventions now have their own Web sites, notably Earth Summit +5 [22] which reports from a UN General Assembly meeting in special session on progress on “Agenda 21”, adopted at the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, in 1992; as well as the Kyoto site [23] (see [24] for the full text of the Kyoto Protocol in pdf format and [25] for a gopher version of Agenda 21).
Figure 3.
Earth Summit +5 homepage Other sources of environmental information on the Internet come in the form of journals and newsletters such as The Earth Times [26], Electronic Green Journal [27], Ethics and the Environment [28] (abstracts only), and Global Climate Change News [29], a monthly newsletter from the Atmospheric Research and Information Centre (ARIC), Manchester Metropolitan University.
There are also the usual large numbers of mailing lists which can keep you up to date on developments (to find these you can use the extended search options of SOSIG and look for ‘MAIL ARCHIVE’ under ‘Type of resource’, to filter your search).
This article has provided an overview of some of the resources catalogued on the SOSIG database.
We hope we have picked out at least some of the best of the crop of environmental data of use to researchers in the social sciences.
Perhaps one of the largest categories of environmental site available on the Web comprises those aimed at a lay audience and which are usually of little interest to researchers.
These can easily form the majority of hits returned from a Web search engine.
This is one category of resource we avoid on SOSIG!
Of course, there will be other sources of useful information of which we are unaware.
SOSIG provides a page which enables its users to submit the URLs of their favorite sites [30].
Please feel free to submit any such sites you haven’t found in SOSIG which you feel your colleagues would benefit from knowing about.
References [1] The Environmental Sciences and Issues section can be found at: URL: <http://www.sosig.ac.uk:80/roads/subject-listing/World/envsci.html> [2] United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): URL: <http://www.unep.org/> [3] World Bank: Topics in Development: URL: <http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/thematic.htm> [4] CIESIN: URL: <http://www.ciesin.org/> [5] CEDAR: URL: <http://www.cedar.univie.ac.at/> [6] Ecological Society of America: URL: <http://esa.sdsc.edu/esa.htm> [7] European Environment Agency: URL: <http://www.eea.dk/> [8] Directorate-General XI of the European Commission: URL: <http://www.europa.eu.int/en/comm/dg11/dg11home.html> [9] The Green Lane: URL: <http://www.ec.gc.ca/envhome.html> [10] United States Environmental Protection Agency: URL: <http://www.epa.gov/> [11] Environment Agency of England and Wales: URL: <http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/> [12] Natural Environment Research Council: URL: <http://www.nerc.ac.uk/> [13] Humusphere: URL: <http://www.composter.com/> [14] Species Under Threat: URL: <http://www.wcmc.org.uk/species/data/species_sheets/> [15] International Year of the Ocean Homepage: URL: <http://ioc.unesco.org/iyo/> [16] Stratospheric Ozone and Human Health World Wide Web Site: URL: <http://sedac.ciesin.org/ozone/> [17] National Air Quality and Emissions Trends Report, 1996: URL: <http://www.epa.gov/oar/aqtrnd96/> [18] Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive Contamination: URL: <http://www.bellona.no/e/russia/nfl> [19] Air Quality Issues: URL: <http://www.doc.mmu.ac.uk/aric/newaric.html> [20] ENTRI: URL: <http://sedac.ciesin.org/entri/> [21] Environmental Law Information Center: URL: <http://www.webcom.com/~staber/welcome.html> [22] Earth Summit +5: URL: <http://www.un.org/esa/earthsummit/> [23] Official Site of the Third Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, Kyoto, December 1-10, 1997: URL: <http://www.cop3.de/> [24] Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: URL: <http://www.cop3.de/fccc/docs/cop3/l07a01.pdf> [25] Agenda 21: URL: <gopher://gopher.un.org:70/11/conf/unced/English> [26] The Earth Times: URL: <http://www.earthtimes.org/> [27] Electronic Green Journal: URL: <http://www.lib.uidaho.edu:70/docs/egj.html> [28] Ethics and the Environment: URL: <http://www.phil.uga.edu/eande/> [29] Global Climate Change News: URL: <http://www.doc.mmu.ac.uk/aric/gcc/newgccip.html> [30] Submit a New Resource to SOSIG: URL: <http://sosig.ac.uk/sosig/cgi/newurl.pl> Author details Phil Cross Research Officer ILRT (Institute for Learning and Research Technology) Email: phil.cross@bristol.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BIOME News Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BIOME News Buzz software database portal cataloguing ddc url Citation BibTex RIS Paula Manning announces that the BIOME Site is now live, and reports on the new Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Gateway.
BIOME Sites goes live!
The BIOME site is now available at http://biome.ac.uk/ Please visit the site and fill in the feedback form accessible from the BIOME home page.
We value you comments and suggestions.
We have learnt a great deal while developing the Service.
The structure of BIOME, five separate gateways within one umbrella service, posed particular technical challenges, requiring much thought to overcome.
The solution we have implemented is a locally written database management system, based on the ROADS software concepts, but designed using relational technology.
This system meets local needs, whilst maintaining the inter-operability standards of the Resource Discovery Network.
The existing OMNI cataloguing and evaluation guidelines were also reviewed and expanded to reflect the new subject breadth of the Service and classification schemes and thesauri were identified for the four new BIOME gateways.
We have chosen to implement the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme as our BIOME level browse structure, to enable browsing across all the gateways within BIOME.
This is our next major challenge and will involve the mapping of the different gateway level classification schemes / thesauri to the DDC scheme.
The core of the BIOME service is the searchable catalogue of quality-filtered life sciences web resources.
BIOME is now participating in the Resource Discovery Network portal development project to investigate additional services to be offered via the site.
The project will last 12 months and will include the exploration of new technologies and cross searching with other information collections beyond the RDN.
New Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Gateway We are pleased to announce that BIOME has received funding from The Joint Information Systems Committee to develop a sub-gateway of OMNI, focussing on resources for Nursing, Midwifery and the Allied Health Professions.
The gateway – NMAHP – will be launched in Spring 2001 and is being developed in partnership with The University of Sheffield and The Royal College of Nursing.
Initial discussions have also taken place with representatives from the NHS to ensure that the NMAHP gateway develops in co-ordination with the NHS Electronic Library for Health programme.
http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/ Author Details   Paula Manning BIOME Service Manager pm@biome.ac.uk Article Title: “Biome News” Author: Paula Manning Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/biome/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Is Apache?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Is Apache?
Buzz software apache browser windows linux perl licence Citation BibTex RIS Eddie Young gives the essentials of "Apache", the widely used Unix-based web server software.
Apache is the name of the software that allows you to run a web service on a UNIX server.
Apache is very popular and provides access to most web sites on the internet.
A recent Netcraft survey of Web Servers around the world placed Apache Powered sites at over 50 percent of the total.
Part of the reason for this maybe that it is freely available, reliable and simple to set up and configure, and it can provide most of the requirements for a web site.
Why is Apache Free?
One of the reasons Apache is free is because it is written and maintained by enthusiasts and volunteers, much in the spirit of many UNIX users.
It is distributed under the GNU public licence, which means it can be compiled for free on any UNIX platform, including LINUX (Which is a UNIX platform for the PC.)
The Apache group work under an open philosophy: the software is written by volunteers which enables it to be distributed free of charge.
The underlying belief is that the Internet should remain an open and global system of communication, not ‘owned’ by any one company.
This will help to maintain the philosophy with which the web was originaly created and to keep tools for online publishing in the hands of everyone.
Additionally Apache benefits from being an open system in that its users often contribute to it, by writing enhancements, bug fixes, or writing documentation.
Potentially anyone in the world can add improvements to the Apache server.
In practice the contribution by individuals is fairly slim, however, because the development of the software is carefully monitored to ensure its robustness.
But it does mean that Apache ( as with any ‘freeware’) develops organically and by its end-users.
This can’t neccesarily be said about commercial software.
How is Apache implemented?
The source code can be downloaded from the Apache home pages at http://www.apache.org/.
It is then compiled onto the server that will support the web pages and set up by editing a number of text based configuration files.
These files command how the service will operate such as rejecting accesses from particular machines (creating a firewall security); or defining directories that will run script files, such as cgi, or perl.
You can set up Server-Side Includes (which are programs that are executed when a certain web page is accessed), or redirections for broken links.
One of the advantages of this text based style is that the administrator has complete control over everything that Apache is capable of doing using a simple text editor, but it does mean that there isn’t a GUI administration interface as there is with many modern programs, and so the learning curve is naturally steeper.
Also you cannot, at the present time, reconfigure Apache through a web browser, as you can with some of the Windows servers.
Once the Apache code is compiled, configured and run, the software runs continually as a UNIX daemon, making files in a particular directory available over the internet.
A set of text log files are created that can be used to monitor accesses to pages and any errors that might have occurred.
These can be useful for producing statistics on the pages people read, or for addressing and solving any problems with your website that might arise.
What documentation and extras are available?
Since the software is free there is a wealth of material on the internet describing setting it up and configuring it.
A search on http://www.altavista.com will turn up as much as you might need, and there are newsgroups (such as: <comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix>, etc.)
subscribed to by other Apache users that can help with many problems and questions.
Because you can download the source code for Apache it is entirely open.
If you want to check what it does and how it is written then the code is entirely readable before compiling it.
This means that, in theory at least, an administrator can tweak and customise the code for personal preference before running it.
Apache can be extended with personal, custom written add-ons in the form of modules.
These add extra functionality that can’t be found in the original code.
The Apache project encourages this, and information about writing your own Apache modules is available at http://modules.apache.org/reference.
Details of the current prewritten modules and download areas can be found at http://modules.apache.org/.
There are plans to make Apache available for NT users, and beta software is available.
But at the moment the performance is not as good as that on the UNIX machines.
Not because NT is slower, but the Apache programmers are still working on streamlining the NT version.
Author Details Eddie Young Email: e.young@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 826450 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Report on the Fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Report on the Fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop Buzz database xml usability infrastructure xslt e-learning personalisation e-business e-government url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, reports on the IWMW event in his regular column.
The fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop was held at Queen's University Belfast on 25-27 June 2001.
This year's workshop, which had the theme "Organising Chaos", was the largest to date with 150 delegates.
It was also the longest workshop, lasting from Monday morning until Wednesday lunchtime.
The extra half-day compared with the previous three workshops allowed us to run a full day of interactive parallel sessions.
The workshop is aimed primarily at members of institutional Web management teams within UK HE and FE institutions, although participants from related communities are also welcome.
This year we had a small number of participants from FE colleges and other public sector organisations as well as, it is pleasing to report, several Web managers from institutions in the Republic of Ireland.
Reflections The evaluation forms completed by the workshop participants plays an important part in reviewing the success of the workshop and making plan's for next year's event.
This year the average mark for the overall workshop content (on a scale of 1 for poor and 5 for excellent) was 3.7 (with 13 5s, 29 4s, 23 3s and 4 2s).
The average mark for the overall workshop organisation was 4.3 (with 32 5s, 25 4s, 11 3s and 1 2).
These scores were very pleasing, but what can happened behind these figures?
It is probably true to say that this year's event reflected a period of maturity and consolidation within the Web management community.
Previous workshops have provided an opportunity for participants to meet their peers within the community many of whom often pleased to find that they were not working in isolation and that the problems and difficulties they had encountered were common across institutions.
For many participants at previous workshops the event provided an insight into important new areas, such as use of databases on the Web and the potential for Content Management Systems, as well as resourcing, management and strategic issues.
This year's event did not provide significant insights into new opportunities or solutions.
This is probably to be welcomed, as it is an indication the profession of Web management is maturing.
It should be said, however, that not everyone welcomed this, and several participants expressed disappointment at not being given simple solutions to their problems!
This year the event lasted for 2.5 days half a day longer than the previous three events.
The extra time appeared to be appreciated, although many still commented that the parallel sessions were too short!
It is probably true to say that the format of the 2.5 days could be improved for next year's event.
The format of a day's plenary talks followed by a day of parallel sessions, was, in retrospect, a mistake.
Next year we will ensure that there is a mixture of talks and group sessions.
There was also a feeling that some of the talks were rather bland, giving general truisms rather than describing practical difficulties in real projects.
It was interesting to note that the two speakers with the highest scores (Alan Collins from Queen's University Belfast with a score of 4.4 and Paul Helm from Sheffield Hallam University with a score of 3.9) both gave talks on work carried out within their institution and described problems they'd experienced as well as their successes.
The highlight of this year's workshop seemed to be the social programme.
Many of the participants commented favourably on Belfast's most well-known Pub, the Crown [1] and on the conference meal, which took place in the University's Great Hall.
But the highlight for most was the bus tour of the trouble spots of Belfast.
Figure 1: Workshop delegates relaxing in The Crown The Content Plenary Talks Many of the speaker's slides are available online, so a brief summary of the talks is given with a link to the slides.
Peter Flynn began the workshop with a talk entitled Now You See It ... Now You Don't [2].
Peter, who works in the Computer Centre at University College Cork (UCC) was Ireland's first Webmaster (and, incidentally, the person who was responsible for the world's first broken link, back in 1991!)
reviewed the growth of Web services at UCC, describing some of problems they had experienced as the Web grew in importance within his institution.
He concluded by describing how XML can help as a facilitating technology.
Paul Helm of Sheffield Hallam University gave a very entertaining and well-received talk on elearning@SHU A Case Study [3].
The most technical presentation of the day was given by Ed Bristow of the Australian Tax Office.
Ed's talk on PKI: The View From Down Under [4] was acronym-heavy, but provided a useful overview of the approaches taken by a Government department in the development of a Public Key Infrastructure to support its e-Government activities.
Another talk from outside the HE sector was given by Andrew Savory and Mark Ray, currently of Luminas, but previously members of the University of East Anglia.
Their talk on What Students Want [5] looked to provide a user focus on the requirements of our Web services.
The talk could have been provocative, by giving an insight from a small commercial Web development company, which is not constrained by the inevitable politics which many Web teams will face within universities and colleges.
However this angle was not really addressed in the talk.
After lunch Peter Scott, Head of the Centre for New Media in the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, showed that he was prepared to be controversial in his talk on Will The Virtual University Kill The Physical University?
[6].
Diane McDonald, University of Strathclyde gave a report on a JISC-funded study on Advertising On Web Sites [7].
A number of delegates commented that they had hope to be told what they could and could not do.
However at the time JISC had not provided an official response to the report, and so it was not possible to give any simple advice which in any case may vary from institution to institution.
Grainne Conole, director of ILRT, University of Bristol, in her talk on Linking Development & Innovation With Mainstream Activities [8] looked at how institutions can address the balance between project development work and mainstream deployment of services an area in which there can often be tensions.
This is clearly an important area for institutional Web managers, as not only are there likely to be project work being carried out locally, but also JISC have several programmes of work which are expected to develop applications which are intended to provide important services for Universities and Colleges.
Alan Collins of Queen's University Belfast gave the final talk of the day on Webcasting In An Institutional Context [9].
This proved to be the most highly-rated talk, in which Alan described Queen's University experiences in Webcasting its degree ceremonies.
In Alan's talk he described many of the problems they had experienced and this honesty was very much appreciated by the delegates.
Interestingly the day's talks were Webcast live.
It was intended to subsequently edit the recordings and to make them available on the workshop Web sites.
At the end of the day it was discovered that the file had not been saved correctly, and the recordings were lost :-( Parallel Sessions Day 2 of the workshop was dedicated to parallel sessions.
The morning consisted of half-day sessions on (A1) E-Learning Barriers and Enablers [10], (A2) Users Of Our Services (Suits You Sir!)
[11], (A3) Practical Web Strategies: Conflict, Ethics and Your Web Site [12], (A4) CMS Case Studies [13], (A5) Intranets [14], (A6) Web Site Redevelopment [15], (A7) E-Business [16] and (A8) Update Your Web Skills [17].
In the afternoon delegates could choose 2 of the 90 minutes parallel sessions.
The first set of parallel sessions were (B1) FE & HE in the UK 'Legal, Decent, Honest and Truthful' [18], (B3) CMS Buy Or Build?
[19], (B4) XML and XSLT [20], (B5) Automated News Feeds [21], (B6) Hands-On Webcasting [22] and (B7) Addressing Usability Issues in HE Websites [23].
(Note that the B2 session was merged with session A3).
The second set of parallel sessions were (C1) Income Generation Options For Your Web Site [24], (C2) Providing Information To Third Parties [25], (C3) Promoting Your Web Site: Getting Your Site to the Top of the Search Engine Hitlists [26], (C4) Zope From Absolute Zero [27], (C5) Approaches To Personalisation [28] and (C6) Benchmarking Web Sites [29].
Figure 2: Participants at one of the parallel sessions The parallel sessions were much appreciated by delegates.
The evaluation forms included several comments on the importance of these sessions, with a number of delegates wishing that the sessions had been longer or that sessions could be repated.
Next Year A show of hands on the final day showed that most of the delegates intended to attend next year's event.
Plans for next year's event are already in progress.
The workshop will take place during the week beginning 17th June 2002 at the University of Strathclyde.
On the final morning of the workshop, the report backing from the parallel sessions was followed by a discussion on plan's for next year's event.
It was pointed out that a valuable community spirit had been built amongst institutional Web managers.
The Institutional Web Management Workshop provides a very valuable opportunity for face-to-face meetings and for building networks, as well as being updated on best practices, new technologies, etc.
Before next year's workshop we should we looking to make greater use of Web facilities to provide support for the Web managers and develop further this community.
It was also pointed out that there was a danger that we could be repeating topics and making suggestions for further work which had been made previously.
It would be useful to review the outcomes of previous events.
There was also some discussion about the content areas and whether the workshop should be more concerned with the management or the technical aspects of institutional Web services.
This year the majority of the programme committee felty that the workshop should continue to cover technical and management and strategic issues, and not exclude either of these areas.
However we welcome feedback on this.
In order to provide a forum for discussions on next year's workshop, and to review previous workshops, we will be making use of the Yahoo!Groups mailing list and Web site.
We invite interested parties to join the iwmw-2001 list [30].
We will be looking to make use of the realtime chat and voting services which are provided by this service.
To finish this trip report, some of the comments provided by participants are listed below: Overall Views On Workshop This being my first visit to the Web Management workshop I was pleased overall with the content although coming from a small college the scale of many institutions was much larger.
1st time I've attended; overall it was well organised.
The guided tour was worthwhile; informative and humerous and offered the chance to see areas of Belfast I otherwise wouldn't have seen.
It has been very good (as usual) with an interesting range of subjects.
I would like to have seen more talks on case studies/real experiences.
Could include more to bring marketing, design and IT people together to discuss different and common issues relating to the production of web-based material.
All have a lot to offer each other but they rarely get together to capitalise on all strengths Programme well paced.
Appropriate length and size (number of delegates).
Plenty of scope for people networking'.
Generally, it was great to meet people with similar interests and problems the meeting people was more useful than the listening bit!
Yet again, the best conference I have attended this year.
Parallel sessions particularly good.
Organisation both before and during excellent.
Staff at Queen's particularly catering staff, charming and helpful.
Most Valuable Aspects Of Workshop (a) Networking with colleagues from other colleges (b) Webcasting demo & talk (c) parallel session feedback Workshops too many good ones so difficult to choose.
Could be longer so major workshops be repeated a) Looking at my website with outsiders b) Benchmarking exercise c) Kent case study.
a) Going down the pub and talk to others b) the parallel sessions c) chance to re-affirm that we are all going the right way Communication with other institutions, the XML workshop, and of course the need to talk with others in similar situations Having the chance to meet other webmasters; gaining an overall impression of the way internet development is heading Aspects Of Workshop Which Could be Improved Report back from parallel sessions too short.
Possibly arrange for 1/2 day talks and 1/2 day sessions.
More focussed strands a) The first day talks were somehow too condescend on ourselves, we need more controversy and self-criticism b) we need to involve more people from outside our 'gang' c) the afternoon session on Monday seemed too long More time parallel sessions especially.
Maybe accommodation closer to city centre/venue would have been better Often feel like we are preaching to the converted, often feel that I want someone to say 'do it like this!'
rather than saying 'you could try this or this' Some of the talks on Monday could have been meatier a) Talks weren't very inspirational (wanted more new innovations) b) case studies would have been useful more like Alan Collins' talk c) timing workshops should have been first I was disappointed not to have the parallel sessions of my choice especially the XML one References The Crown Liquor Saloon, http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/crown/ Now You See It, Now You Don't Policies and Practices for Updating a Web Server, Peter Flynn, University College Cork http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/materials/talks-flynn/ elearning@SHU a case study, Paul Helm, Sheffield Hallam University http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/materials/talks-helm/ What Students Want, Mark Ray and Andrew Savory, Luminas http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/materials/talks-ray/ PKI: The View from Down Under, Ed Bristow, Australian Taxation Office http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/materials/talks-bristow/ Will The Virtual University Kill The Physical University?, Peter Scott, Open University http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/materials/talks-scott/ Advertising On Web Sites, Diane McDonald, University of Strathclyde http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/materials/talks-mcdonald/ Linking Development & Innovation With Mainstream Activities, Grainne Conole, ILRT, University of Bristol (and Paul Browning, University of Bristol) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/materials/talks-conole/ Webcasting In An Institutional Context, Alan Collins, Queen's University Belfast http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/materials/talks-collins/ A1: E-Learning Barriers and Enablers, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a1 A2: Users Of Our Services (Suits You Sir!
), Colin Work, University of Southampton http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a2 A3 Practical Web Strategies: Conflict, Ethics and Your Web Site, Amber Thomas, BECTA and David Lomas, University of Salford http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a3 A4 CMS Case Studies, Paul Browning, University of Bristol and Mike Lowndes, Natural History Museum http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a4 A5 Intranets, James Currall, University of Glasgow http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a5 A6 Web Site Redevelopment, Miles Banbery, University of Kent at Canterbury http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a6 A7 E-Business, Andrew Aird, King's College London http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a7 A8 Update Your Web Skills, Helen Sargan, University of Cambridge, Brian Kelly, UKOLN and Ingrid Evans, University of Manchester http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a8 B1 FE & HE in the UK 'Legal, Decent, Honest and Truthful', Ralph Weedon, JISC Legal Information Service and University of Strathclyde http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#b1 B3 CMS Buy Or Build?, Paul Browning, University of Bristol and Mike Lowndes, Natural History Museum http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#b3 B4 XML and XSLT, Mark Ray and Andrew Savory, Luminas http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#b4 B5 Automated News Feeds, Brian Kelly, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#b5 B6 Hands-On Webcasting, Alan Collins and Kenneth McCartan, Queen's University Belfast http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#b6 B7 Addressing Usability Issues in HE Websites, Grace de la Flor, University of Bristol http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#b7 C1 Income Generation Options For Your Web Site, Diane McDonald, University of Strathclyde http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#c1 C2 Providing Information To Third Parties, Brian Kelly, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#c2 C3 Promoting Your Web Site: Getting Your Site to the Top of the Search Engine Hitlists, Dave Hartland, Netskills http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#c3 C4 Zope From Absolute Zero, Paul Browning, University of Bristol http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#c4 C5 Approaches To Personalisation, Gareth McAleese, University of Ulster http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#c5 C6 Benchmarking Web Sites, Marieke Napier, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#c6 iwmw-2001, Yahoo!Groups http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iwmw-2001 Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Focus: Report On The Fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Using the Web for Academic Research: The Reading Experience Database Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Using the Web for Academic Research: The Reading Experience Database Project Buzz data database ascii url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alexis Weedon gives us some insight into a new web-based project designed to collate evidence for changing reading habits through history.
In literary criticism and cultural studies more attention is being paid to the reception of the text – who read it, who had access to it, how was it read – partly perhaps due to the interest in reader theory.
Such questions are relevant to the study of the development of a literary canon, the study of popular literature, the transmission of ideas through society both today and in the past and the changing relations between the author, editor, producer and reader of the text.
In such an interdisciplinary field there are a number of approaches to the study of reading: on the one hand from a close reading of the text we can theorise about the implied reader and the actual reader, on the other bibliographic studies allow us to trace the ownership and circulation of specific important texts through the accumulation and dispersal of physical libraries for example.
There are a number of other equally valid approaches most of which, however, tend to focus on the reception of canonical literature.
Our reading matter is much wider than that – in that famous formulation of popular media – we read (as well as watch TV) to be informed, educated and entertained.
Reading literature is, for most of us, first and foremost a pleasurable experience.
And it is largely the accumulation of critical opinion and enduring appeal that determines whether the book we read is regarded highly as a classic in our culture or whether it is viewed as mere entertainment.
Such distinctions and value judgements have changed over time and are constantly being reassessed.
However, we don’t know how these judgements are established or who establishes them.
Moreover, we know very little about the consumption of books, newspapers and magazines today and this raises questions about reading and literacy in the past.
Jenny Hartley’s recent study of contemporary reading groups tells us a lot more about how texts are circulated, recommended and enjoyed both as a personal and a group experience [1].
Celia Brayfield author of Bestseller: Secrets of Successful Writing and several bestsellers herself carried out a smaller survey of peoples reading habits in 1996 [2].
She found 57% of her sample owned over 100 books, ownership being commonplace.
John Sutherland has pointed out the economics of this: the cost of a new novel has remained at around one tenth of an average weekly wage for most of the 20th century [3].
However this is not so true of the past when a new novel could cost more than a workingman’s weekly income.
In her survey Brayfield found that some people felt overwhelmed by the amount of print they had to read for professional reasons.
For others reading was an activity done in their ‘spare time’ to fit in with the odd jobs they had to do.
It was generally a snatched pleasure done while doing something else, for instance on journeys, listening to music, in the bath, supervising children.
As an author speaking to potential novelists, Brayfield injects a note of realism saying that: The days when people gathered around the fireside after dinner every night to read aloud to each other have passed.
… If the great nineteenth-century writers constructed their vivid, flowing stories for [such] people … consider how much harder a twentieth-century writer has to work to hold the attention of people reading by themselves on the bus.
(p. 30-1) What is the Reading Experience Database (RED) Project?
Such comparisons of the idealised attentive – and fictional – leisured reader in the past have provoked this project.
We know so little about people’s reading habits in the past.
We can ask people today but we need a different methodology to find out how, what and where people read in the past.
Hence the Reading Experience Database – collaborative project headed by Professor Simon Eliot at the Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History, University of Reading, and The British Library’s Centre for the Book.
The Open University and the University of Luton are also involved and supportive of RED.
The aim of the project is to gather documentary evidence of reading experiences since the advent of the printing press until the First World War.
A period which cannot now be documented by oral testimony – and which precedes the Mass Observation project in the 1920s and 1930s.
And a period in which evidence is fragmentary and of necessity is documentary.
The project will be a tool for those interested in the consumption of print and the history of reading.
At this initial stage we want to collect documentary evidence and to establish a ‘critical mass’ in the database, and at a later stage we will make the database available to scholars.
We want to find out who read what: whether men and women read different genres or different classes read different texts.
We want to ask where they read; at home or travelling; in the streets or at work.
We are also interested in how they read it: aloud or silently, in company, to an audience or alone?
And how did they regard what they read, whether different classes read the same text differently.
This in turn leads us to larger questions: when did reading become commonplace and how did the taste for different genres change?
Where is the Evidence?
Of course there is a mass of material – and we have limited the size of the project through the dates 1450-1914 and by only recording the evidence of British readers – readers born or resident in the British Isles reading in any language whatsoever.
This means that we shall be interested, for instance, (to quote from our promotional blurb) in what British-born readers read when they were abroad (what did Milton read, and in what circumstances, when he was in Italy?).
We shall be concerned with what other nationals read while they were here (what did Erasmus read when he was in Cambridge?).
We shall be recording what the first generation of British settlers and, later, Irish emigrants read when they arrived in the New World.
We shall be recording what was read in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Welsh, Erse and so on, as well as in English [4].
The Reading Experience Database Form The Reading Experience Database (RED) form is accessible on the Open University Web site [4].
Entries made on the web form are sent by e-mail to myself as the database manager and I check ASCII file before adding the field names and loading it onto the BRS-SEARCH database.
While this procedure is labour intensive, it was felt that because the RED form is openly available on the net, some editorial intervention would be necessary to weed out spurious entries.
To aid researchers involved in the project we are currently moving the database onto Microsoft Access and creating a form which can run from researchers’ CD-drives through Microsoft Office.
We also have a paper form, which can be duplicated, filled in and sent to us for keying in.
We have tried to minimise the number of times similar details have to be repeated.
With the paper form the reference can be given once at the subsequent forms attached.
We have constructed two paper forms: a minimum form, containing what we consider to be the minimum amount of information which it is useful to record, that is either the basic subject matter of the work (i.e.
broad genre) who read it and when – and when can be anything from 15th century, to 8pm Thursday 23 May 1754 – and the supplier’s name.
The full RED form provides more detail and asks for details of the text read, the reader or listener, the evidence for the experience and the supplier’s details.
While there are over 90 fields in the web version, the format enables users to enter the details through check boxes, drop-down menus as well as by keying in.
At the moment RED is only searchable in its BRS-SEARCH form by the RED database manager, by the summer it is envisaged that it will be transferred onto Microsoft Access and the Steering Committee will be able to evaluate the progress to date.
The scope of RED is wide, and so we plan to make available sections of the database for demonstration use and piloting in due course.
We have two PhD candidates, Teresa Gerrard, University of Luton, working on the reading experience of the common reader 1850-1914 and Kate Kelman, Queen Margaret’s College, is looking at popular reading for women in Scotland between 1880-1939.
Our post-doctoral fellow, Stephen Colclough was appointed in October 1997 to look at Reading 1700-1740, 1800-1840.
He has spent much of his time working on Commonplace books 1800-1840 but also on manuscript diaries and reading and has compiled Primary Sources for the History of Reading [5] which is a form of location register of sources and he also produces our electronic newsletter the RED Letter.
RED is a long term project and we do not expect, particularly in the early years of the project when momentum will still be building up, for there to a be continuous, even flow of data coming in from contributors.
For this reason the RED Steering Committee is devising a long list of what it calls standard works.
These are mostly either studies of reading that naturally record a large number of examples of historical reading experience, or diaries, journals, autobiographies, biographies, etc.
which include many references to the central subject’s reading matter.
Both types of work will provide a density of data that will justify the task of working systematically through them to extract the reading experiences they record.
This task will be undertaken by members of the Steering Committee and by a large group of volunteer enthusiasts.
The Evidence of Reading Experience: Autobiographies One recognised source of documented evidence of reading is the autobiography.
Clearly this is not an innocent source and we need to examine carefully the limitations of the evidence presented.
Laurie Lee, born at the beginning of the First World War, claimed that he and his play fellows were “the inheritors, after centuries of darkness, of our country’s first literate peasantry” [6].
How accurate that claim is depends on your interpretation.
Certainly compulsory free primary education was a product of the 1870s, but at other periods in our history different sections of society have, for different motives, taught themselves or been taught to read.
It has been claimed that the 19th century was the period when the market for print increased so enormously that it became the first ‘mass media’.
During the century the percentage of the population who were literate rose from c30% of women and c60% of men to 96% of the total population.
Laurie Lee’s recollection of his parents and grandparents is indicative of the changes which were taking place all over Britain in the late 19th century as within three generations reading skills and greater access to reading matter became the norm.
His recollections tell us more about the difficulties of obtaining reading matter – perhaps a more difficult notion for us to comprehend today.
He recalled that his mother and father – “children of a coachman and a sailor … were largely self-taught.
But their parents could do little more than spell out their names – and given a book were likely to turn it over in their hands, cough loudly, and lay it aside” (p.15).
And he mentions a few books were available to this rural labouring family in the first quarter of this century: they had almanacs, Sunday Psalm books and the widely sold ‘Penny Readers’ with their irreproachable love stories, moral tales such as J. Cole’s life-story of a footman who became a butler through thrift and prayer stories of martyrs and church missionaries and strictures on drink (p.16).
Yet even these he claimed created a revolution in home entertainment by supplanting the gossip of grannies in chimney corners.
Some of the habits of reading surreptitiously under the eye of the bookseller, or reading what comes to hand from other people’s unwanted, discarded books are familiar today.
And it raises the question of how do we get hold of the material we read?
Today, with the wealth of printed literature it is not so difficult to find books, but in the past when they were less common and more expensive how did people get access to print?
Lee recalled how serendipity played a large part in his reading development – he came across Dickens through finding his collected works on a bonfire, scorched and mildewed, which he took home and read as they dried steaming, by the light of an oil lamp.
There were only a few books at the village school but it was only when Lee was old enough to go to the school in town that he had access to a greater range of reading matter.
“On my way home from school, he wrote, I developed a special technique: at several pages a day, while loitering at the bookstall in Woolworth’s, I found I could read most of their stock in a year”.
(p. 18).
Lee said that reading by stealth became so deeply ingrained that when he discovered the town library – it had been open some years, but none had thought to tell him – he was perplexed by the luxury of books that he could borrow freely.
Lee’s description of his and his parents and grandparents literary abilities point to several factors in the growth of reading which we are interested in in this project.
Factors such as schooling, access to reading material through the growth of the library system, even improvements in housing and lighting, transportation networks and how these factors affected people of different class/status differently.
For instance if we compare two autobiographical sketches we can see what difference class made.
Lee’s mother had read him Tennyson in the 1920s.
Fifty years earlier Molly Hughes’ mother had read to her children in the more luxurious surroundings of a middle-class urban home.
Neither Lee’s serendipitous and uncritical reading habits nor the limited access to books which left the Lee’s household with penny ‘moral epics’ were to be found in Molly Hughes’ house.
And she relates how, growing up in her London home the family discussed their readings amidst a great deal of humorous argument, defending their favourite authors.
Mary Hughes describes one incident (a quote which is in the database) “Occasionally the discussions became acrimonious.
My eldest brother was one day making disparaging remarks about Tennyson, and my mother, all agitated in defence of her idol, fetched his poems from the shelf, and with a ‘Listen now, children’ began to declaim Locksley Hall.
When she reached ‘I to herd with narrow foreheads’ she burst out, flinging down the book, ‘What awful rubbish this is!” [7].
Molly was taught first by her mother, then at school, learning languages, Latin and mathematics as well as reading her brother’s books of poetry and plays.
Yet even so she was confined by the social mores, for as a girl Molly Hughes, was not allowed to join her elder brothers in their activities – to travel on the omnibus, to go to the theatre, or go to the Lord Mayor’s Show.
So she enjoyed them vicariously, through the printed memorabilia they brought back for her.
We know this because she notes in her autobiography that when her brothers went to The Show “They always brought home for me a little book, that opened out to nearly a yard of coloured pictures, displaying all the features of the Show”.
In her excitement she ran round the house imitating the street hawker shouting out his advertisement for his wares (p. 26).
Mary Hughes’ autobiography reveals both the advantages of a middle class urban household in terms of education, access and ownership of books and the gender bias of the time.
All interesting questions which don’t, of course, only apply to the 19th century – and other researchers are interested in the reading habits of 16th and 17th century women, rural and urban workers and so on.
Autobiographies document the spread and increasing diversity of print available to the common reader.
The Evidence of Reading Experience: Marginalia Marginalia is also evidence of reading.
One record on RED documents Samuel Sotheby, of the auctioneer family, reading Jacobus Koning, Bijdragen tot Geschiedenis der Boekdrukkunst.
Here is an Englishman reading a Dutch text, and this is the evidence that we want.
We know he read it and when he read it because he annotated the margin of his copy in pencil saying: I never stumbled upon these observations relative to the Burgundian Arms, until Nov 13 1940.
We also know his son read it, because he came across the marginalia and thought to comment on it in his Paper-Marks in the Early Block-Books of the Netherlands and Germany, London 1858 (p.6).
Marginalia is also a key to how the text was interpreted and even why it was read.
Many of us use read books in a way that is very different from how the author intended us to read them – reading them in strong disagreement with the author, or being interested in the setting rather than the events of the narrative – or even reading them out of ‘duty’ or boredom.
I found a copy of William Beloe’s Recollections of a literary life in the Cambridge University Library, which had been read by W. Beckford in the early 19th century (1760-1844).
He had pencilled annotations sometimes violently critical of Beloe’s comments at the beginning of the two volumes – he wrote on the flyleaves giving the names of the some of Beloe’s acquaintances.
So I know Beckford read the book and I know he didn’t always agree with the author’s version of events.
But this volume had another surprise, it has also been read by H. R. Luard some time round the 25 July 1882.
He had gone through the volumes with a pen adding the names and further (salacious) details about authors and prominent persons mentioned in the text.
With such evidence I could be sure both men had read the text.
However it differs from the autobiographies I have mentioned before.
I don’t know where the book was read, nor whether Beckford or Luard were reading it alone or out loud to a group of undergraduates for instance, and this could be useful information.
Both Lee and Hughes relate how their families read aloud to each other and how they read alone, silently in company.
And this is of interest – we want to record whether the reading was silent or aloud; and, if aloud and in company, whether the audience listened passively or participated by making comments.
For example when the literate member of the family read the latest instalment of a Dickens novel to their assembled relations, did its members comment on or discuss the story?
Were servants present and, if so, how did they react?
Evidence of listening experience is important to record for many in the past got their experience of texts from listening rather than reading.
Conclusion The RED project is a long term one.
It is developing a new methodology to capture a hitherto inaccessible history.
We hope by the joint efforts of volunteers, post-doctoral fellows and the Steering Committee to accumulate the evidence necessary to trace a history of reading by the ordinary reading public as well as by the famous.
RED emulates the STC project in its reliance on volunteer contributors, submitting their snippets of evidence to build-up the larger picture, and in the use of new-technology – today it is the web.
We already have a list of 27 contributors from the UK, Ireland, USA, and Canada who are reading though specific texts including Jane Austen’s letters, Pepys’ diaries from 1661-1663, Newton’s Correspondence from 1661-1675, selected periodicals, working-class diaries, commonplace books and many others.
If you are interested in contributing please contact Dr Stephen Colclough s.m.colclough@open.ac.uk or Dr Alexis Weedon alexis.weedon@luton.ac.uk.
References Hartley, Jenny.
(2001) Reading Groups (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press).
Jenny Hartley of the University of Surrey Roehampton and her colleague, Sarah Turvey, surveyed 350 groups across the UK, reaching them through questionnaire.
Brayfield, Celia.
(1996) Bestseller: Secrets of Successful Writing (London.
Fourth Estate).
She sent a 1000 questionnaires out via 10 outlets including sixth forms, dentists waiting rooms, a design house, estate agency, post-grad college, choral society, health club, bank.
Sutherland, John.
(1998) Lecture at Institute of English Studies, University of London, November.
Reading Experience Database introduction and form.
1997 at http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/ (24 April 2001).
Colclough, Stephen.
(1999) Primary Sources for the History of Reading (Oxford and Bristol: HOBODS).
Lee, Laurie.
(1975) ‘True Adventures of a boy reader’ in I Can’t Stay Long (London.
Deutsch) p.15.
Hughes, M.V.
(1934) A London Childhood of the 1870s (Oxford: OUP) p.7.
Author Details Alexis Weedon University of Luton, UK alexis.weedon@luton.ac.uk Phone: +44 582 489031 Fax: +44 582 489014 Dr Alexis Weedon is a senior lecturer in publishing and new media at the University of Luton, author of Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for the Mass Market 1830-1916 (Continuum, forthcoming) and co-editor of Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies at http://www.luton.ac.uk/Convergence/ .
Article Title: “Using the Web for Academic Research: The Reading Experience Database Project” Author: Alexis Weedon Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/red/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: 'Ixquick', a Multi-Search Engine With a Difference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: 'Ixquick', a Multi-Search Engine With a Difference Buzz data browser mp3 algorithm url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley describes how Ixquick stacks up against the competition.
Ixquick and Multi search engines By now I’m sure that we’re all aware that just using one single search engine on its own isn’t a particularly effective way of searching the Web.
Even the large search engines which index 200-300,000,000 pages hardly scratch the surface of the one billion or more pages that are currently publicly available.
If you do find what you need with a single search engine, all well and good, but in many cases people are very often dissatisfied with that they get, and finish their search wondering if they have done all that they can to get everything possible.
This is understandable, and of course it’s never going to be possible to get everything available, however good the search engine is, and how skilled you happen to be at searching.
The most that you can do is to do as much as you can, and remember that you’re dealing with essentially an infinite amount of data, rather than the finite datasets that we’ve all been used to dealing with in the past.
In order to get a glow of satisfaction (or at least, to still the nagging doubts in your mind) it’s really necessary to utilise a number of different search engines to get as comprehensive view as possible of those web pages that are out there.
This is where multi (or meta) search engines come into play.
If I’m being pedantic, I suppose that I really shouldn’t call them search engines at all, since that’s not what they do.
They really act as go-betweens between you and the search engines, by taking your query, passing it onto the engines to execute, gathering the results and displaying them for you on the screen.
Most multi-search engines only use a small handful of search engines to look for material; the Big Hub for example only uses half a dozen.
Ixquick [1] uses a total of 14, as you can see in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Ixquick search dialog box To be specific, those engines are AOL, AltaVista, Direct Hit, Excite, Fast Search, Goto, Infoseek, Live Directory, Lycos, MSN, Open Directory, Snap, Webcrawler and Yahoo.
This is a nice wide spread, covering many of the top engines, although HotBot and Northern Light are noticeable by their absence, which is a slight weakness.
Of course, it is not necessary to use all the engines and the tick box does give the searcher the option of searching a smaller number, though Ixquick works so quickly the amount of time saved by doing this is negligible.
An advantage of multi search engines is quite clear therefore; they provide a much more comprehensive view of available webpages than you’ll get by using one single engine, and they also execute the searches much faster than it is possible to do manually.
However, there are disadvantages to this approach which have perhaps limited their value in the past.
Since a search is going to be run across a number of different engines, it’s necessary to be careful about the syntax that is being used most search engines will understand that ‘+’, ‘-’ and “…” mean include, exclude and phrase, but this cannot always be relied upon.
Furthermore, once you start to use slightly more advanced syntax, such as domain:uk many search engines will have no understanding of what they are supposed to be doing, and may actually look for a string of characters ‘domain:uk’ rather than finding websites with .uk in the URL.
Consequently, while you have comprehensiveness, you also have to deal with simplicity.
Ixquick however does not exhibit this problem; it understands which certain engines will understand which syntax, and translates and forwards the search only to those search engines which will properly understand and respond to them.
Consequently, the relevance increases, inappropriate results are excluded and users don’t need to learn the intricacies of the way each engine works.
Multi-search engines display the retrieved data in a variety of different ways.
Several multi search engines will simply display lists of web pages in the order that they were retrieved by the search engines, so you will get a page of hits from AltaVista, followed by a page of hits from HotBot and so on.
This is seldom useful; a good multi search engine will utilise anything up to 14 search engines, and it can quickly become tiresome wading through the results in this linear fashion.
Worse, by the time you’ve got to the end of the list you’ve forgotten what was at the beginning of it.
Finally, it can be difficult to see which pages are returned most often, and this is a shame, since it can be a very good indication of how relevant a page is to your search; if lots of search engines return that particular page it’s likely that it’s going to be of more use to you than a page that is only returned by one search engine.
Some multi-search engines take a different approach however, and will collate the results, de-duplicate them and then display the results using their own classification scheme, or will provide a single ranking, based on their own algorithms.
In most cases, none of the approaches are terribly helpful.
Search engine developers work hard on their relevance ranking systems, and each engine has it’s particular strengths and weaknesses some rank higher for pages that have lots of links that come into them, others on word positioning and so on.
If this is all thrown away by the multi-search engine that engine is essentially claiming that it knows better how to relevance rank.
Ixquick however takes a different approach, working with the strengths of search engines, rather than against them.
Ixquick looks at the results that are returned by the various search engines, and it awards each page a star for any search engine that placed that site in its own top ten.
It then further ranks by the position of that page in the top ten.
Let’s explore this by using ‘Ariadne’ as the search term.
The fourteen search engines used found at least 45,839 matching results, which it was then able to distill down to 48 unique top-ten pages.
The top result was our very own “Ariadne Library and Information Science Journal”, that position because a search done using that search term returned that web page by Direct Hit, Yahoo, Goto, Fast Search, Altavista, Lycos, and AOL.
Furthermore, it was in first position with the first 4 of those engines, in second position with Altavista, fourth with Lycos and seventh with AOL.
The second highest ranked web page was “Ariadne: Entrypoint Version 5.0” which appeared to be some type of computer classification scheme, and it was ranked by Lycos (2), Altavista (3), Goto (6), Fast Search (7) in the positions given in brackets.
The further down the list of the 48 unique top ten pages you go, the smaller the number of search engines that return pages, and the further down the top ten those pages are to be found, until you get to the logical conclusion of one search engine returning one web page in tenth position on its list of hits.
Ixquick also provides an equivalent method of searching for news, though this is rather less impressive, given that it only searches Associated Press, CNN, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post.
Admittedly some of those resources such as Reuters and AP are right at the top of the news tree, but a search on ‘Tony Blair’ only returned 28 unique pages, the first of which was dated for May 1998!
Rather than just rely on that single result I also looked for ‘Bill Clinton’ and Ixquick returned 31 hits, and none of them were particularly impressive or appropriate.
I don’t quite understand why Ixquick are using this approach, since I think it slightly weakens their overall success and in the area of news information it just doesn’t seem to work.
In common with everyone else these days Ixquick also offer an MP3 search facility, utilising 5 different engines; 2look4, Astra Web, Lycos, MP3 and Oth.net and both searches that I ran (‘Meatloaf’ and ‘sisters of mercy’) worked well, giving me a variety of appropriate songs very quickly.
When the user goes to view any of the pages that are returned Ixquick will open a second window on top of the first, taking users directly to the page they are interested in.
I can understand why they do this, since it does allow users to easily keep their search results but explore new pages.
However, having watched a lot of new users to Ixquick searching and then visiting their results I have to say that it does confuse many of them, and many get confused when they try to return to the Ixquick page; it’s only the sharp eyed users that notice the ‘Back’ option is greyed out and who think to close the second browser window.
Ixquick might want to consider the AskJeeves approach of displaying returned hits by clearly framing them, while giving the opportunity to remove the frame and go directly to the web page.
Ixquick: a summary The criticisms are minor however, and I was informed last week that Ixquick is due to revamp the site shortly, so my quibbles may already have been addressed by the time this column is published.
In summary, I think that it’s an excellent search engine and has, within a very short space of time, become my preferred multi-search engine.
Its method of displaying results uses the power of individual search engines, rather than working against them, which provides a more accurate and comprehensive result.
The display is clearly laid out on the screen and the ranking method used is clear and easy to follow, even for novice searchers.
I think it certainly deserves a place in any collection of bookmarks, and it’s worthwhile seeing how it compares to your own favourite multisearch engine.
I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
References Ixquick, http://www.ixquick.com/ Author Details   Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens, Feltham, Middlesex.
Email: philb@philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independant Internet Consultant.
Article Title: “Ixquick, a multi search engine with a difference” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/search-engines/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata (1): Encoding OpenURLs in DC Metadata Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata (1): Encoding OpenURLs in DC Metadata Buzz software html database metadata xhtml doi standardisation browser identifier vocabularies namespace schema dcmes openurl dcmi cookie url research standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell and Ann Apps propose a mechanism for embedding machine parsable citations into Dublin Core (DC) metadata records.
This article proposes a mechanism for embedding machine parsable citations into Dublin Core (DC) metadata records [1] based on the OpenURL [2].
It suggests providing partial OpenURLs using the DC Identifier, Source and Relation elements together with an associated 'OpenURL' encoding scheme.
It summarises the relevance of this technique to support reference linking and considers mechanisms for providing richer bibliographic citations.
A mapping between OpenURL attributes and Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) [3] elements is provided.
The OpenURL The OpenURL provides a mechanism for encoding a citation for an information resource, typically a bibliographic resource, as a URL.
The OpenURL is, in effect, an actionable URL that transports metadata or keys to access metadata for the object for which the OpenURL is provided.
The target of the OpenURL is an OpenURL resolver that offers localized services in an open linking environment.
The OpenURL resolver is typically referred to as the user's Institutional Service Component (ISC).
The remainder of the OpenURL transports the citation.
The citation is provided by either using a global identifier for the resource, for example a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) [4], or by encoding metadata about the resource, for example title, author, journal title, etc., or by some combination of both approaches.
It is also possible to encode a local identifier for the resource within the OpenURL.
In combination with information about where the OpenURL was created, this allows software that receives the OpenURL to request further metadata about the information resource.
However, this article focuses on the OpenURL metadata encoding mechanism rather than on the specific details of how OpenURLs are processed and used by resolvers and other software.
Originally known as the SFX-URL, the OpenURL's roots lie in the SFX research on reference linking in hybrid library environments [5].
At the time of writing, the OpenURL is most appropriate for citing bibliographic resources, although this is expected to change as the OpenURL develops and moves through the standardization process.
Furthermore, the OpenURL has been developed primarily to support 'reference linking' applications.
On its own, it does not provide enough richness to form the basis for detailed, full bibliographic citations, for example it includes only the first author of the work.
An OpenURL comprises two parts, a BASEURL and a QUERY.
The BASEURL identifies the OpenURL resolver that will provide context sensitive services for the OpenURL.
The BASEURL is specific to the particular user that is being sent the OpenURL it typically identifies the ISC offered by the institution to which the user belongs.
Services that embed OpenURLs in their Web interfaces, for example in their search results, must develop mechanisms for associating a BASEURL with each end-user.
One way of doing this is to store the BASEURL in a cookie in the user's Web browser, another is to store the BASEURL along with other user preferences.
The QUERY part can be made up of one or more DESCRIPTIONs.
Each DESCRIPTION comprises the metadata attributes and values that make up the citation for the resource.
A full breakdown of the components of the DESCRIPTION is not provided here.
See the OpenURL specification for full details [6].
Here is an example OpenURL: http://resolver.ukoln.ac.uk/openresolver/?sid=ukoln:ariadne&genre=article &atitle=Information%20gateways:%20collaboration%20on%20content &title=Online%20Information%20Review&issn=1468-4527&volume=24 &spage=40&epage=45&artnum=1&aulast=Heery&aufirst=Rachel In this example the BASEURL is <http://resolver.ukoln.ac.uk/openresolver/>, the URL of the UKOLN OpenResolver demonstrator service.
The rest of the OpenURL is the QUERY, which is made up of a single DESCRIPTION of an article entitled 'Information gateways: collaboration on content' by Rachel Heery.
The article was published in 'Online Information Review' volume 24.
Notice that, because the OpenURL is a URL, it is encoded in such a way that special characters, for example space characters, are represented by a percentage sign followed by two hex digits.
This process is known as mandatory escape encoding.
(Note that all the OpenURL examples in this article have been split across multiple lines for display purposes.
Note also that the optional OpenURL 'sid' attribute, set here to 'ukoln:ariadne', indicates the service that generated the OpenURL.
For simplicitly other example OpenURLs in this article do not contain a 'sid' attribute.)
Proposals This article makes two proposals.
Firstly, that an OpenURL may be given as the value of a DC Identifier element as a way of providing a citation for the resource being described by the DC record.
Secondly, that an OpenURL may also be given as the value of a DC Source or Relation element as a way of providing citations for resources that are related to the resource being described.
The mechanism used in both cases is the same a partial OpenURL is placed in the element value.
A partial OpenURL is an OpenURL without a BASEURL.
This is because, at the time at which the OpenURL is placed into the DC element value, there is no knowledge of which end-user(s) will receive the OpenURL.
It is therefore not possible or sensible to embed the BASEURL part of the OpenURL in the element value.
Only the DESCRIPTION part of the OpenURL should be placed in the element value.
A DC encoding scheme [7] of 'OpenURL' should be used to indicate that the value forms part of an OpenURL.
The DESCRIPTION part of the OpenURL should be full mandatory escape encoded prior to placing in the DC element value.
Furthermore, any ampersand ('&') characters that appear in the OpenURL as attribute separators must be encoded as '&amp;'.
Software that processes DC metadata records containing OpenURL DESCRIPTIONs will have to unencode any encoded '&' characters and add a BASEURL in order to deliver full OpenURLs to the end-user.
Proposal 1 providing a citation for the resource being described In order to provide a citation for the resource being described by a DC record, place an OpenURL DESCRIPTION for the resource in the value of a DC Identifier element and indicate a scheme of 'OpenURL'.
Here is an example, encoded using the XHTML <meta> tag: <meta name="DC.Identifier" scheme="OpenURL" content="genre=article &amp;atitle=Information%20gateways:%20collaboration%20on%20content &amp;title=Online%20Information%20Review&amp;issn=1468-4527&amp;volume=24 &amp;spage=40&amp;epage=45&amp;artnum=1&amp;aulast=Heery&amp;aufirst=Rachel" /> Note that the 'OpenURL' scheme is not yet formally recognised by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative as a recommended Dublin Core qualifier.
A fuller set of XHTML <meta> tags for this resource might be: <meta name="DC.Title" content="Information gateways: collaboration on content" /> <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Heery, Rachel" /> <meta name="DC.Identifier" scheme="OpenURL" content="genre=article &amp;atitle=Information%20gateways:%20collaboration%20on%20content &amp;title=Online%20Information%20Review&amp;issn=1468-4527&amp;volume=24 &amp;spage=40&amp;epage=45&amp;artnum=1&amp;aulast=Heery&amp;aufirst=Rachel" /> In this case some information is duplicated in both the OpenURL DESCRIPTION and DC elements.
This article makes no recommendations about whether it is sensible to duplicate the metadata in this way.
Note that for some applications, the citation provided by the OpenURL DESCRIPTION will not be sufficiently detailed.
In such cases, a rich citation for the resource being described by the metadata record may only be achieved by combining the OpenURL DESCRIPTION with DCMES elements and possibly elements from other namespaces.
Proposal 2 providing a citation for a related resource In order to provide a citation for a resource that is related to the resource being described, place an OpenURL DESCRIPTION for the related resource in the value of a DC Source or Relation element and indicate a scheme of 'OpenURL'.
For example, imagine that an HTML version of the journal article mentioned above is made available on the Web.
Its embedded metadata might be: <meta name="DC.Title" content="Information gateways: collaboration on content"> <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Heery, Rachel"> <meta name="DC.Format" content="text/html"> <meta name="DC.Identifier" content="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisrmh/infogate.html"> <meta name="DC.Source" scheme="OpenURL" content="genre=article& &amp;atitle=Information%20gateways:%20collaboration%20on%20content &amp;title=Online%20Information%20Review&amp;issn=1468-4527&amp;volume=24 &amp;spage=40&amp;epage=45&amp;artnum=1&amp;aulast=Heery&amp;aufirst=Rachel"> <meta name="DC.Relation.references" scheme="OpenURL" content="id=doi:10.1045/december99-dempsey&amp;genre=article &amp;atitle=International%20Information%20Gateway%20Collaboration:%20report of%20the%20first%20IMesh%20Framework%20Workshop &amp;title=D-Lib%20Magazine&amp;issn=1082-9873&amp;date=1999-12&amp;volume=5 &amp;artnum=12&amp;aulast=Dempsey&amp;aufirst=Lorcan"> This DC record refers to two related resources the original journal article from which the Web version is derived (using DC Source) and an article published in D-Lib Magazine that is cited in the article (using DC Relation).
Rich citations and strategies for handling duplicate information The example OpenURLs shown above are ideal for supporting 'reference linking' applications.
However, in some cases more detailed citation information may be required.
Consider this example DC record for a journal article: <meta name="DC.Title" content="International Information Gateway Collaboration: report of the first IMesh Framework Workshop"> <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Lorcan Dempsey"> <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Tracy Gardner"> <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Michael Day"> <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Titia van der Werf"> <meta name="DC.Publisher" content="Corporation for National Research Initiatives"> <meta name="DC.Date" content="1999-12"> <meta name="DC.Type" content="article"> <meta name="DC.Language" content="en-us"> <meta name="DC.Rights" content="Copyright (c) 1999 Lorcan Dempsey, Tracy Gardner, Michael Day, and Titia van der Werf"> <meta name="DC.Identifier" scheme="DOI" content="10.1045/december99-dempsey"> <meta name="DC.Identifier" content="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12dempsey.html"> <meta name="DC.Identifier" scheme="OpenURL" content="id=doi:10.1045/december99-dempsey&amp;genre=article &amp;atitle=International%20Information%20Gateway%20Collaboration:%20report of%20the%20first%20IMesh%20Framework%20Workshop &amp;title=D-Lib%20Magazine&amp;issn=1082-9873&amp;date=1999-12&amp;volume=5 &amp;artnum=12&amp;aulast=Dempsey&amp;aufirst=Lorcan"> Notice that there is information contained in the DC elements that is not available in the OpenURL for example the names of multiple authors.
There is also information in the OpenURL that is not available in the DC elements, and that could not be embedded into DC elements for example the volume and article numbers.
There is information that is more accessible for machine parsing in the OpenURL such as the author's family and given names.
Finally, there is some information that is duplicated in both the DC elements and in the OpenURL.
(Note: in the general case, one can imagine information about the affiliations of the authors also being embedded into the DC metadata, though details of the mechanism to do this have not yet been agreed by the DCMI.)
In some cases it might be useful to remove the duplicated information from the DC record.
One approach would be to remove attributes from the OpenURL DESCRIPTION, where that information is available in other DC elements.
So, in the DC record above, the 'atitle' and 'id' attributes might be removed.
In other cases it might also be possible to remove the 'date', 'aufirst' and 'aulast' attributes as well.
Software that processes the DC record could attempt to reconstruct a full OpenURL by adding information to the partial DESCRIPTION based on the DC element values.
However, in many cases, particularly where metadata is embedded into a resource dynamically based on a back-end database, the cost of duplicating information in both DC elements and the OpenURL is probably not very high.
Clearly, where metadata and OpenURLs are created and maintained manually, there will be consistency implications for any duplicated information.
A DC/OpenURL crosswalk The table below gives the definitions of the current OpenURL attributes: Attribute  Value  Description  genre  bundles:      journal  a journal, volume of a journal, issue of a journal    book  a book    conference  a publication bundling proceedings of a conference    individual items:      article  a journal article    preprint  a preprint    proceeding  a conference proceeding    bookitem  an item that is part of a book  aulast    A string with the first author's last name  aufirst    A string with the first author's first name  auinit    A string with the first author's first and middle initials  auinit1    A string with the first author's first initial  auinitm    A string with the first author's middle initials        issn    An ISSN number  eissn    An electronic ISSN number  coden    A CODEN  isbn    An ISBN number  sici    A SICI of a journal article, volume or issue.
Compliant with ANSI/NISO Z39.56-1996 Version 2 (see http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SICI/)  bici    A BICI for a section of a book, to which an ISBN has been assigned.
Compliant with http://www.niso.org/bici.html  title    The title of a bundle (journal, book, conference)  stitle    The abbreviated title of a bundle  atitle    The title of an individual item (article, preprint, conference proceeding, part of a book )        volume    The volume of a bundle  part    The part of a bundle  issue    The issue of a bundle  spage    The start page of an individual item in a bundle  epage    The end page of an individual item in a bundle  pages    Pages covered by an individual item in a bundle.
The format of this field is ' spage-epage' artnum    The number of an individual item, in cases where there are no pages available.
date  YYYY-MM-DD YYYY-MM YYYY  The publication date of the item or bundle encoded in the "Complete date" variant of ISO8601 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime).
This format is YYYY-MM-DD where YYYY is the four-digit year, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 28 or 29 or 30 or 31, depending on length of the month and whether it is a leap year.
ssn  winter | spring | summer | fall  The season of publication  quarter  1 | 2 | 3 | 4  The quarter of publication  The table below provides a mapping from OpenURL attributes to unqualified DC elements.
genre   individual items bundles   article preprint proceeding bookitem book journal conference aulast creator creator creator creator creator contributor aufirst creator creator creator creator creator contributor auinit creator creator creator creator creator contributor auinit1 creator creator creator creator creator contributor auinitm creator creator creator creator creator contributor issn X X identifier X eissn X X identifier X coden X X identifier X isbn X X identifier idenitfier sici identifier identifier identifier identifier bici identifier identifier title X X X title title title stitle X X X title title title atitle title title title title volume X X X X X X part X X X X X X issue X X X X spage X X X X epage X X X X pages X X X X artnum X X X X date date date date date date date date ssn date date date date date date date quarter date date date date date date date The table shows OpenURL attributes against the genres for which they are allowed to be used.
Mappings to DC elements are shown at appropriate points.
An X in the table indicates that the OpenURL attribute may be used with the particular genre, but that there is no sensible DC mapping at that point.
The OpenURL 'genre' can be mapped to the DC Type element, although the list of OpenURL genres does not correspond with the list of types in the recommended DCMIType encoding scheme qualifier [8].
Note that five (author-related) OpenURL attributes are shown mapping to the DC Creator and Contributor elements.
In general, several of these OpenURL attributes must be combined to form a complete DC Creator or Contributor value (for example aufirst and aulast).
Depending on the formatting of a DC Creator or Contributor element value, mapping back from DC to these OpenURL attributes may be difficult because of the problems of splitting a single name into multiple components.
A richer crosswalk would be possible using qualified Dublin Core elements but this has not been presented here.
OpenURL standardization and future work A request for fast-track standardization of the OpenURL was approved by NISO during its December 2000 SCD meeting.
The expectation is that "NISO's aim will be to move rapidly towards a Draft Standard for Trial Use".
Work is currently underway with NISO to establish a Steering Committee to work on the standardization.
However, at the time of writing no firm timescales had been established.
It is anticipated that there will be some changes to the OpenURL specification during the standardization process.
The nature of the changes will be: disentangling the syntax from protocol issues (basically describing the format in an HTTP-independent manner, with HTTP encodings as "examples") the introduction of a pointer to metadata on the OpenURL (which is available in an implicit way at this point).
The result will be that OpenURL will make metadata available either by value (on the OpenURL) or by reference (pointer on the OpenURL).
generalizations: the OpenURL must become applicable in a broader context than only scholarly bibliographic information.
Generally speaking this means that there is the need to be able to describe objects via an OpenURL by means of a choice of metadata schema (the current bibliographic schema being a special case).
Therefore, the notion of a metadata schema identifier will be introduced as a new parameter on the OpenURL.
Metadata elements used to describe an object via an OpenURL must be defined within the schema represented by the metadata schema identifier on the OpenURL.
The current bibliographic metadata schema will receive an identifier and current tags such as 'aulast', 'aufirst', 'issn', etc.
will be defined within that schema.
(The authors would like to thanks Herbert Van de Sompel, Cornell University for providing background information for this section.)
Relation to DC Citation Working Group recommendations The DC Citation Working Group was set up in November 1998 and was responsible for identifying standard methods for including bibliographic citation information about resources in their own metadata, and related problems of identifying resource version information.
The group concentrated specifically on an article's placement within a journal, volume, and issue.
The group has made several proposals for qualifiers to the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) to achieve this aim.
Specifically: In the metadata for an article, DC.Relation.isPartOf could indicate the SICI, DOI and/or URL for the issue.
Then, the metadata for the issue could indicate "isPartOf" the DOI and/or URL for the volume.
Similarly, the metadata for the volume could indicate the ISSN, DOI and/or URL for the journal.
Full citation information, including the page range (or other equivalent locator information for non-page-based articles) should go into DC.Identifier.
Encoding this information in DC.Identifier recognises the fact that the citation information of journal title, volume number and start page effectively identifies a journal article.
Furthermore, the working group recommended that DC.Identifier have an Element Qualifier of DC.Identifier.citation for the citation string.
The text string that follows could also comply with a DC Citation Scheme (or Value Qualifier set) to specifically indicate the structural components of the citation, such as Journal Title (full and abbreviated), Journal Volume, etc.
Specific title abbreviations can themselves be referred to external schemes, such as ISO 4, Index Medicus, Chemical Abstracts, Vancouver, World List, and so on.
(Not all these schemes are well documented on the Web, they are mentioned here solely to indicate that there are a number of possible "standard" ways of abbreviating journal titles.)
Other Identifiers could also of course go into DC.Identifier since all DC tags are repeatable, so the SICI, PII, DOI and/or URL for the article could also go here.
(Note: in the metadata for an article, the SICI, for example, that is entered into DC.Identifier is the SICI for the article, but the SICI that goes into DC.Relation "isPartOf" is the SICI for the issue.)
Chronology should be indicated in DC.Date.
The working group agreed a possible structured-value set:JournalTitleFull JournalTitleAbbreviated JournalVolume JournalIssueNumber JournalPages with the associated semantic definitions of these terms.
While this set does not cover every eventuality it deals with the vast majority of cases and will give (together with the article metadata in DC.Title, DC.Creator and DC.Date) complete information for any reference-citation record that anyone might want to extract.
It is worth noting that the working group's proposed structured-value set can be mapped directly to available OpenURL attributes as follows: Proposed structured value OpenURL attribute JournalTitleFull title JournalTitleAbbreviated stitle JournalVolume volume JournalIssueNumber issue JournalPages spage, epage, pages More recently the working group began discussing a related problem of how to capture bibliographic citation information about conference papers, with a view to including other bibliographic genre in the future.
OpenURLs provide a way to encode citation information for books, book parts, conference proceedings and papers.
However, some conference proceedings are also journal issues.
In this case, to capture citation information for an article as both a conference item and a journal item, it would be necessary to include two OpenURLs within repeated DC Identifier elements.
Therefore, the OpenURL DESCRIPTION appears to offer all the functionality identified by the working group for encoding bibliographic citations for simple resource discovery, albeit using a less human-readable syntax than that proposed by the working group.
However, it may not offer the required functionality for individual Dublin Core based applications.
(The authors would like to thank Cliff Morgan, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (previous chair of the DC-Citation Working Group) for supplying background information for this section.)
Conclusion The main purpose of this article has been to propose the adoption of an 'OpenURL' encoding scheme for the DC Identifier, Source and Relation elements.
By doing this, the DCMI will provide users of DC metadata with a simple method of encoding machine-readable citations for bibliographic resources within their metadata, in particular supporting a mechanism for linking between digital resources and non-digital resources.
We have also provided a crosswalk between unqualified DC and the OpenURL attributes and shown how a combination of both OpenURLs and DC metadata can be used to provide richer citations than those provided by either technology on its own.
References Dublin Core Metadata Initiative <http://dublincore.org/> OpenURL <http://www.sfxit.com/openurl/> Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) <http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/> Digital Object Identifier (DOI) <http://www.doi.org/> Reference linking in a hybrid library environment.
Part 3: Generalizing the SFX solution in the "SFX@Ghent & SFX@LANL" experiment.
Van de Sompel, Herbert and Hochstenbach, Patrick.
D-Lib Magazine, October 1999.
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october99/van_de_sompel/10van_de_sompel.html> OpenURL Syntax Description <http://sfx1.exlibris-usa.com/openurl/openurl.html> Dublin Core Qualifiers <http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmes-qualifiers/> DCMI Type Vocabulary <http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/>   Author Details   Andy Powell Assistant Director, Distributed Systems and Services UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, Uk E-mail: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Ann Apps Research and Development (Electronic Publishing) MIMAS, University of Manchester E-mail: ann.apps@man.ac.uk [Andy is a member of the Dublin Core Advisory Committee.
Ann is chair of the Dublin Core DC-Type Working Group and a member of the Dublin Core.
Ann is also a member of the OpenURL NISO Standards Committee.
Advisory Committee.]
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EEVL-ution to a Portal Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL-ution to a Portal Buzz data java rdf database rss xml portal metadata namespace cataloguing z39.50 syndication doc personalisation interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Roddy Macleod on the hub's 'EEVL-ution' to a portal.
EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Feedback In the last issue of Ariadne I wrote about the brand new EEVL service which was released in November 2001.
I'm delighted to report that the response to the new design and service, which now covers mathematics and computing as well as engineering, has been overwhelmingly positive.
Many comments such as "Congratulations on the new EEVL looks (and works) very well", "I have only just caught up with the new look EEVL and I just have to send you and the team an e-bouquet.
Congratulations on a great-looking, well-designed site."
and "I have been admiring the new layout of EEVL it's very intuitive and a great job!"
have been gratefully received.
As well as such nice messages, however, we are equally interested in constructive criticism of the service.
Can you think of any ways to improve what we do?
Do you find EEVL useful, or do you have problems using the services?
Are there any features you would like to see introduced?
Any feedback will help us mould the way EEVL is developed in the future, and can be sent to me, or the webmaster@eevl.ac.uk.
Portal developments As mentioned in previous EEVL columns, this is the start of a period of sustained development for the Hub.
Various services are being developed as part of the Subject Portal Project (SPP) (outlined by Judith Clark in Ariadne Issue 29 ), and by the staff at EEVL.
The result of this work will see fully-fledged portals for engineering and mathematics which will be integrated into EEVL.
Fortunately, for those who prefer gradual change to complete redesigns, the intention is that there will be an 'eevl-ution' to a portal, rather than a 'reevlution'.
Dreadful puns aside, work is progressing well, and some exciting portal features are already available and are described below.
The biggest changes will come early next year, however, when cross-searching of bibliographic databases will become possible.
In the meantime, in addition to the new features mentioned below, a variety of subject-based community services are being scoped.
I would like to thank all those who participated in the recent Portal Feature Survey which was part of this scoping process, and which was designed by Richard Young from the University of Birmingham.
The results of this survey will shortly be analysed, and reported in the next issue of Ariadne, and will help to inform the future development of not only the EEVL service, but also other SPP portal work.
For those who would like to know more about portal work in progress, in addition to the SPP Project site, two sets of pages have been developed: Engineering Portal Project Overview, and Mathematics Portal Project Overview.
As part of the development towards an engineering portal, a number of improvements have been made to the Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) bibliographic database.
The RAM database is a resource produced by the Library and Information Services Department at the Nottingham Trent University, and is hosted and maintained by EEVL.
It is a database of bibliographic information for manufacturing and related areas and covers items appearing in well over 500 niche and mainstream journals and magazines.
This is the first stage in the development of the RAM service which has been a popular part of the site for several years.
The second stage, which will further improve the user interface, will take place in autumn 2002.
Improvements made to RAM include the development of a simplified web-based online inputting system (which although hidden from users now allows the database to be updated daily), a java-based indexing automatic process and a new search interface.
The new search interface now offers phrase searching, a full record display including data such as author emails (where available), the ability to limit a search by a range of years chosen by the user, and all the options that were available in the previous RAM interface.
An updated edition of the RAM Reference Guide (Word Doc) is available.
For more information about RAM, contact: Jim Corlett jim.corlett@ntu.ac.uk The Nottingham Trent University Library, Burton St, Nottingham NG1 4BU.
According to EEVL's Top 100, some of the most popular sites included in EEVL's Internet Resource Catalogue are recruitment agencies.
This is hardly surprising, as a high proportion of the users of EEVL are students at universities and colleges who will one day have to seek employment.
Recognising that employmentinformation is so popular, three jobs news feeds have been added to EEVL's Jobs and Recruitment Hot Link.
These news feeds for, in turn, engineering and technology jobs, mathematics jobs, and computing jobs provide information about vacancies as advertised in the jobs.ac.uk service.
These announcements about research, science, academic, teaching and management jobs and studentships in the public and private sector are expected to be very useful for the academic community, but in terms of portal work, the feeds are a relatively minor improvement to the EEVL site.
Along with other services for the community, a facility which would aggregate job announcements appearing in numerous sites is being investigated as a possible future portal development.
The jobs announcements mentioned above are delivered via RSS channels.
According to UKOLN Metadata Resources, "RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format.
RSS 1.0 is an XML application, conforms to the W3C's RDF Specification and is extensible via XML-namespace and/or RDF based modularization.
RSS is primarily used for delivering news headlines on the Web.
Developed initially by Netscape for their 'My Netscape Netcenter' service, RSS is now widely used to exchange headline metadata between news content providers and portals."
In other words, RSS is a simple XML metadata application.
An RSS channel is also now available for additions to EEVL's Internet Resource Catalogue.
This channel contains the last 15 records added to the EEVL database and is updated on a regular basis.
Information about this facility, along with an outline of ways to link to the EEVL service, set up a search facility of the EEVL catalogue via standard protocols (Z39.50), obtain XML versions of EEVL records, and other similar details is now available from the Working with EEVL pages.
These pages are aimed primarily at webmasters and those producing their own Web sites who may want to embed relevant materials in their services.
The highlight of EEVL's portal development so far is, however, something entirely new.
As the Web grows as a means by which learning and teaching is delivered to students, there is a pressing need amongst lecturers, learning technologists and information professionals to know about existing courseware.
A new service, called SearchLT Engineering, aims to help lecturers select and access suitable computerand web-based learning materials in engineering for their courses.
This service, developed by the JISC-funded FAILTE (Facilitating Access and Information to Learning and Teaching resources in Engineering) has produced a searchable and browsable Internet resource catalogue with several extra-value services.
The extra features include independently produced reviews, plus other information, to help in the choice of suitable learning and teaching resources.
Links provide access to the resources (if web-based), or to the webpages of the providers.
Does existing courseware work well?
Does it interactively engage students?
What are the hardware requirements?
What is the educational level?
How long does it take to complete the resource?
What does it cost, or is it freely available?
These are the types of questions that SearchLT will be able to answer for learning and teaching resources in engineering.
In addition, SearchLT has a My Account feature allowing personalisation, saved searches, email alerts, and details of how to include records in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).
As part of the development of the Engineering Portal, access to this service is now available as an integrated part of EEVL as well as being available at the SearchLT site.
Searches made in the Engineering Section of EEVL now automatically cross-search the SearchLT database.
Not only that, but corresponding SearchLT and EEVL records are linked together.
This means that if someone starts at SearchLT and finds a record for which there is a corresponding EEVL record, the two will be linked together, and vice versa.
This cross-linking of records will help to ensure that those looking for learning and teaching resources will be alerted to relevant information whatever may be their starting point.
From EEVL's Engineering Section, the search box now cross-searches three different databases the engineering part of the EEVL Catalogue of quality Internet resources, a full-text Websites index of the engineering sites in the engineering section, and the SearchLT catalogue of Quality learning and teaching resources for engineering.
This new feature is likely to be a valuable addition to the service, and demonstrates interoperability in practice.. Other ongoing portal work at EEVL includes the development of several new full text Websites search engines, and the scoping of community-based services as mentioned above.
If you are interested in taking part in focus groups to discuss engineering community services, please contact the EEVL Hub Development Officer, Malcolm Moffat, at M.Moffat@hw.ac.uk.
Other news EEVL has joined up with Engineering magazine, E2 the career guide, Mathematics Today, and Computer Bulletin, plus top publishers Kluwer, Springer, Pearson, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Butterworth-Heinemann, to offer the chance of winning any engineering, mathematics or computer book from their catalogues, entirely free!
£7,500 worth of new books are being given away in this joint promotion, available from the Free Books pages.
Last year, EEVL ran a similar promotion and gave away £5,000 worth of books.
That promotion was a great success, attracting nearly 5,000 entrants, and was commended in the Library Association & Emerald PR & Publicity Awards 2001.
This year even more books are being given away, and a number of those available cover various aspects of the Internet, so there is something in it for just about everyone.
All entrants have to do is go to the Free Books page, browse the publishers' catalogues, choose a book and enter it on the form.
The promotion closes on 31st May 2002.
Author Details   Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: "EEVL-ution to a portal" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data dissemination archives metadata copyright preservation cataloguing vle authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
The JISC has published the following circular (JISC Circular C06/02) to the community [3 July 2002] A call for number of projects designed to give the UK experience of emerging technologies in the authentication and authorisation area, based on open, vendor-independent standards.
Institutions have a period of six weeks to respond.
The deadline for full proposals is 12 noon on Thursday 18th July 2002.
An electronic copy of this circular can be found on the JISC website at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c06_02.html Please note that an introductory guide to bidding for JISC funding is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub01/bidding_guide.html and this is intended to advise institutions/organisations that are not familiar with writing bids for the JISC.
The JISC has recently published the following circular (JISC Circular 07/02) to the UK HE community.
[3 July 2002] A call for a number of pilot projects of up to 10 months in length, designed to explore issues of linking institutional digital library systems and resources to virtual learning environments (VLE).
Some projects will consider technical issues whilst others are expected to consider the cultural and organisational issues of VLE digital library linkage.
Institutions have a period of six weeks to respond.
The deadline for full proposals is 12 noon on Tuesday 20th August 2002.
Projects should commence in October 2002 where possible and end on 31 July 2003 or shortly thereafter.
An electronic copy of this circular can be found at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c07_02.html Please note that an introductory guide to bidding for JISC funding is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub01/bidding_guide.html This is intended to advise institutions that are not familiar with writing proposals for the JISC.
DC-2002 in Florence [31 May 2002] DC-2002: Metadata for e-Communities: Supporting Diversity and Convergence, Florence, October, 13-17, 2002.
More information is be available at: http://www.bncf.net/dc2002/ Digital Preservation Coalition launches web-site and online version of digital preservation handbook [31 May 2002] The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) website http://www.dpconline.org goes live today providing a platform for the dissemination of DPC research and writing and makes available an online version of the Preservation Management of Digital Materials:A Handbook an authoritative and practical guide to the subject of managing digital resources over time and the issues in sustaining access to them.
As digital information becomes increasingly important to our culture, knowledge base and economy the DPC website will provide a resource for all those involved in the creation and management of digital materials.
The DPC officially launched at the House of Commons in February 2002.
The aim of the Coalition is to secure the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to ensure that access to our global digital memory and knowledge base is not lost.
The DPC has the following long-term goals: producing, providing and disseminating information on current research and practice and building expertise amongst its members to accelerate their learning instituting a concerted effort to get digital preservation on the agenda of key stakeholders acting in concert to make arguments for adequate funding to secure the nation’s investment in digital resources and ensure and enduring global digital memory providing a common forum for the development and co-ordination of digital preservation strategies in the UK promoting and developing services, technology and standards forging strategic alliances with agencies nationally and internationally attracting funding to the Coalition The launch of the website, and online version of the Preservation Management of Digital Materials, marks the next phase in the DPC’s development and is a significant step towards addressing one of the Coalition’s main goals: the commitment to disseminating information and sharing outcomes.
This handbook, originally published by The British Library in October 2001 and developed through funding from Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, and the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme, is based on research by staff from the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK Higher and Further Education Funding Councils (JISC) and the Arts and Humanities Data Service.
The handbook is aimed at a broad audience and is intended to provide guidance to institutions at national, regional and local levels who are involved in or contemplating creation and/or acquisition of digital materials.
In a rapidly changing environment the web version of the handbook can be updated on a regular basis to ensure currency of web references and cited projects.
Development of the online edition has been funded by the Digital Preservation Coalition and completed by Neil Beagrie and Brett Scillitoe on behalf of the DPC.
For further information please contact Anna Arthur/Tom Coupe at Anna Arthur PR on 020 7637 2994 or email: mailto:info@aapr.co.uk ECDL, the 7th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries [29 May 2002] This confereence will take place on August 17-22, 2003 ECDL 2003 Trondheim, Norway.
Tutorials will take place August 17 and workshops August 21 (-22).
ECDL 2003 is the 7th conference in the series of European Digital Library conferences.
ECDL has become the major European forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues.
ECDL 2003 has been moved from the traditional date in September (cf.
ECDL 2002 in Rome, http://www.ecdl2002.org) to August.
This is the reason for this early announcement.
The first Call for Contributions and the conference website will be available from the middle of July 2002.
For questions, comments and contributions please contact: the General Chair: Prof. Ingeborg T. Soelvberg, Dept.
of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Ingeborg.Solvberg@idi.ntnu.no or the Program Chair: Traugott Koch, NetLab, Lund University Libraries, Sweden Traugott.Koch@ub2.lu.se New book from Facet Publishing [27 May 2002] Libraries Without Walls 4 The delivery of library services to distant users Peter Brophy, Shelagh Fisher and Zoë Clarke, editors Click here to purchase online Or order direct from: Bookpoint Ltd, Mail Order Dept, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4SB Tel: 01235 827794 Fax: 01235 400454 E-mail: orders@bookpoint.co.uk For further information or a 2002 Facet Publishing catalogue contact: Mark O’Loughlin Marketing Executive Facet Publishing, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE Direct Tel: 020 7255 0597 E-mail: info@facetpublishing.co.uk online ordering/sample chapters/companion websites/ http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Of Arms and the Man We Sing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Of Arms and the Man We Sing Buzz e-learning research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl talks to Chris Rusbridge about the eLib programme.
Almost four years ago, the Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology (FIGIT), brought Chris Rusbridge back to the UK from his post as Information Systems Coordinator in UniSA Library, Australia, for the second time in his career (he had previously returned to become Director of IT Services at the University of Dundee).
This time, the challenge was to direct the newly-born FIGIT Programme, shortly to be re-christened the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), a major pump-priming initiative following the recommendations in the Follett Report of 1993, funded to the tune of £15 million per annum for three years.
Around forty projects were sparked into life over the first few months of Rusbridge’s appointment, rising to about sixty within a further year, in programme strands devoted to subject gateways, document supply, electronic reserves, training and awareness, electronic journals and on-demand publishing.
Ever eager to throw himself into hard things, Rusbridge managed to break his right wrist in his first year of office, and the left wrist three years later.
This latter adventure had the effect that the interview which formed the basis for this article had to be conducted by telephone, since even for the intrepid Programme Director driving around the country with his arm in a sling was unwise.
This did not stop him from continuing to enthuse about the work of the Programme which he has successfully steered to a point where rather fewer larger, aggregated projects continue to be funded by JISC (with the title ‘eLib phase 3’).
Writing recently for D-Lib Magazine in the US, Rusbridge drew a contrast between eLib’s essentially developmental approach, in which projects were based in real library and information services (LIS) operations and were intended to result in products and services often of almost immediate benefit to the HE LIS community, and that of the US Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI), which has been running over the same period.
DLI has been much more research-oriented.
"But it’s wrong to think that means there’s a major difference between UK and US digital libraries development, because DLI’s background was in computer science, and it was only one specific initiative.
You must not forget that there are a large number of other initiatives going on, much more library-oriented Making of America, American Memory, the National Digital Library Federation, and so on."
A difficulty for many of the DLI projects in the US has been the interest of their funding agencies in research rather than deployment.
But the second Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI2) is likely to address this, as new product-oriented funding agencies, like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Library of Medicine, have been brought into the frame.
"In any case, the difference is not so great if you take a European perspective.
There are so many projects in the US that some duplication is almost inevitable but if you look at Europe you find the same.
There are European Telematics projects going on which eLib people should know about, but don’t."
One criticism of the programme’s design has been the large number of small projects which it spawned.
The initial design was laid out in the catalyst JISC circular ‘4⁄94’, and over 320 submissions had been received in response before Rusbridge arrived on the scene in January 1995.
Was there a danger that so many projects could cause the Programme to run out of control?
"I thought many times that I would rather have had a small number of big projects because they can be monitored and encouraged much more effectively.
There are some projects, for example, which have started and finished, and they never received a visit from me.
That’s not really acceptable.
Having said that, there have been real benefits in the slightly ‘scatter-gun’ approach, not least in the lessons learned as we’ve gone along.
There’s often no right and wrong here, and one project does not give you all the answers.
Those lessons have been applied in the successive stages of the Programme, with Phase 2 and Phase 3 increasing the emphasis upon reporting, project management and evaluation.
It has been a way of spreading the risk."
Rusbridge believes absolutely in the value of digital library development in the higher education context.
"Digital libraries will profoundly change the way universities work and the way people teach, and the way people learn over time."
But universities are also in the business of reducing costs, and there must surely be an economic justification for so much time and resource expended on a national programme lasting several years?
Yet the Director of the Programme will not commit himself to the cost-benefit argument.
On the question of the economics of scholarly research publishing, for example, has eLib brought us any closer to breaking the publishers’ stranglehold on journal pricing?
"I would love to say ‘yes’, but I find I can’t.
In order to make that happen, we would need a business model in which people who don’t pay currently would have to start paying.
In one model, for example, they’d have to pay to publish where at the moment the library pays for them to read.
So far, I’ve seen nothing to suggest that librarians are likely to grasp the nettle and begin to pass on the cost of subscriptions to departments.
Departments therefore have no motivation to pay either to publish or to read.
If it could be done by decree, I think everybody would be reasonably happy with the system within a year or two, but to get there from here requires crossing a gulf of self-interest."
This third phase of eLib is devoting a considerable portion of its funding and effort to the goal of realising the ‘hybrid library’, Rusbridge’s own coinage.
To some it seems ironic that the electronic libraries programme has concluded that electronic libraries still embrace traditional forms.
Not so Rusbridge, however, who sees the ‘library’ as a triad of forms.
"There is library as concept, library as organisation, and library as place."
All will survive for at least the next 20 years.
The concept fulfills the need to provide information on the one hand, and the need to build the academic record on the other.
The organisation exists as a compromise between the need to contextualise learning (which might suggest that the library be disaggregated and replicated in individual departments) and the need to be able to afford the cost of the information and to manage and provide service.
One of its chief roles is to manage a key university budget in a focused way.
And the library is place because we cannot ignore the fact that there is still a huge quantity of information on paper, and because the physical plant provides an enormously valuable shared study and IT space.
"I haven’t heard any thinking librarian really say that we can abolish this space.
Real estate for information access is a serious issue."
One of Rusbridge’s regrets is the funding politics in HE which have kept the programmes designed to spread good practice in teaching and learning technology (the Computers in Teaching Initiative and the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme) separate from the Electronic Libraries Programme.
"This has not been good for higher education in my view.
It’s a tragedy, actually.
We had a visit from some Finns recently, and I envied them the fact that their electronic libraries and teaching and learning technology developments were melded together into a whole.
It is by far the most sensible way to approach the teaching and learning requirement of the student."
Nevertheless, working for JISC has been rewarding on the whole.
Rusbridge is full of praise for the staff of the Secretariat who have provided him with sterling support.
The Committee itself has had its share of structure changes which have not always made his life easy as Programme Director.
Having placed significant emphasis on the training and awareness element of eLib 1 and 2 the ‘people aspect’ Rusbridge was disappointed to find that the decisions on eLib 3 were allocated to two different committees, and the Committee on Awareness, Liaison and Training (CALT) could not sustain the same emphasis, leaving the newest phase without a significant training and awareness component.
ARIADNE was itself one of the casualties of this decision, although CALT did support the continuation of the publication in its Web-only form.
Throughout the life of this magazine there has been a question asked about whether its parallel form would ‘evolve’ into a Web-only publication.
Although this was not the view of the people behind ARIADNE, Rusbridge admits that he was not initially convinced of the viability of a continuing parallel publication.
"But in the end I thought the parallel format was very effective.
It maybe could have been exploited a bit more, but it was an intelligent response to the realities of life in a number of ways.
It has been used opportunistically, and picked up in coffee rooms all over the country.
The use of the electronic version to give fuller texts of articles and more technical material I also thought worked very well.
I was really pleased with it and am disappointed that we’re not going to have ARIADNE continuing indefinitely."
Alongside his excitement at the latest phase of eLib, Rusbridge is also enthusiastic about the new International Digital Libraries Programme, in which large-scale projects will be funded for joint UK and US teams.
"We’ve been discussing this with the National Science Foundation people for a long time.
This is a visionary move on the part of both JISC and the NSF."
As he reaches the end of his fourth year in post, Rusbridge betrays no sense of having had enough.
Does he still get a buzz from being at the centre of eLib?
"Most definitely.
The work of the Programme is not over.
There are so many technological changes in the way universities deal with scholarly information and the flows of teaching and research material, that we will need serious development for several years to come.
This is not a done deal.
And if my post were a permanent one, I feel I would never want to leave it."
Author details: John MacColl Production Manager, Ariadne Email: john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digitizing Wilfrid Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digitizing Wilfrid Buzz software javascript html database tei archives digitisation sql copyright video cataloguing graphics sgml dtd windows hypertext multimedia ead photoshop url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter talks to Stuart Lee about the prizewinning 'Wilfrid Owen Multimedia Digital Archive' and the JTAP 'Virtual Seminars on WW1'.
PH How did the WWW1 JTAP seminars get started?
SL A long time ago we did a set of Hypercard stacks on Isaac Rosenberg, which I converted for the web in January ‘95, and then when the JTAP call came out I thought that we could expand the tutorial and make four tutorials.
And then we had all the archive nearby: we thought we would tackle the idea of creating both online tutorials and a digital archive which lecturers could use.
PH Your first virtual seminar was a study of Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches.’ Any particular reason why you began with Rosenberg?
SL We did the Hypercard stack in 1992.
We chose the First World War because in the arts the things that had been concentrated on had been classics and medieval literature; what that told us was that hypertext lent itself well to something which you could embed in rich cultural surroundings history, art and so on.
The First World War is a very popular subject, and we went for Rosenberg because he isn’t that widely studied he is a popular poet, but nowhere as popular as Sassoon or Owen.
Probably one of the better poets of the war.
So that’s why we started with him and the First World War.
I’d been playing with it and Hypercard for so long and when the web came along I wondered how far I could push it.
I started thinking more about the design of it.
PH At the time what software were you using to create the seminar?'
SL I don’t think I was using Hotmetal in those days.
We started to look at Toolbook, a multimedia authoring tool, for Windows, which does now mount quite easily on the web, but in those days it would have meant developing for Windows only I’m pretty certain I did all the markup using a word processor.
There wasn’t much available at the time the site isn’t complicated.
The graphics were done in Photoshop.
I was speaking to Dave Hartland yesterday and he told me that they still use that tutorial at Netskills as an example because they know it is always going to work.
When we went to the other tutorials we used Hotmetal Paul Groves, the research officer for the whole project used it he did the bulk of the hard work.
PH Were you looking for writers with a smaller than usual output, with a view to digitizing their whole output, or did that idea come later?
SL With Rosenberg I don’t suppose we ever really thought about digitizing the whole collection.
There was talk of doing mass digitizations in 1992 when we started with Rosenberg the Perseus project for example but that was certainly the reason why we chose Owen: it was a managable corpus, and the bulk of it was in Oxford, or at least a good proportion of it.
He was easy to do you could do him in two years, and we needed only a year to do that side of it.
PH When you began the virtual Seminars were you thinking about producing a comprehensive digital archive of Owen’s work, beyond the poetry, or did that idea come later?
SL I think when we put in the original bid we said we would be digitizing the manuscripts of Wilfrid Owen, but we didn’t put a figure on it.
As soon as I went down to the archive itself I realised that would be ridiculous because the archive here also covers his childhood it has a toy boat, his schoolbooks, and the bulk of it is correspondences with his brother after his death.
And I thought we haven’t got much time and very little money so we have to be selective, and we selected the war poems, which I think is justifiable really.
The principle period I wanted to cover was his military service.
If the money had allowed I would have gone into earlier work.
But it was getting across the poetry of the First World War that is what I wanted to do, what I wanted to digitize.
We found then we had money to spare to branch out to do his letters as well, for that period.
We knew we wanted to put in the manuscripts, but outside of that....
The Imperial War Museum was interested in collaborating, but we didn't know what level of involvement they would have until a year or so into the project.
The photos, the video clips and the sound files all came from them.
PH How did you actually assess that it was feasible to publish all of Wilfred Owen’s manuscripts on the web?
SL We had a handlist for the archive, so we had an idea of the number of items, and then we did a doubling up because we knew we’d have to photograph recto and verso, and then I rang up David Cooper, who is our digitization specialist at the Library Automation Service, and he gave me a rough idea of what that would cost, so we knew we could do all the stuff here; for the two manuscripts at the British Library we knew the rough number of items and I used David’s pricing as a guide and realised we could do that too.
But there was a lot of reassessing of the figures as the project went along.
There was an internal Oxford grant available which we applied for and got, and then we knew we could expand into all the other stuff as well.
PH Was the project conceived as a way of demonstrating the practicality of digitizing the archives of other writers?
SL Yes.
That was what JTAP was all about: you had to demonstrate how the technology could be applied: what we were trying to do was talk about how the web could be used for teaching we wanted to look at digitization we knew there were lots of other people using it what we wanted to explore was how you could make a path through an archive, which is the other facility we created.
When you read the JTAP reports, they’re very generic, there is one on online teaching, and the final report of the project talks about the difficulties of digitizing and clearing copyright, not about the First World War much.
so it was a bonus that we got all this literary stuff as well.
PH The Virtual Seminars series contains a set of frames based pages which allow the user to look at all manuscript versions of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and to prepare their own edition of the poem.
After that the user can compare their own version of the poem with the Stallworthy edition (‘Oxford Collection’).
Do you see this kind of tool developing to the point where real literary research is actually done this way?
SL I could see real research certainly benefitting from the ability to pull in those images next to each other, because they are spread out across the world in three sites so you can’t physically put them together.
So it is the old virtual reassembling of a collection.
If I was a researcher into Owen I’m not sure the high resolution images would offer too much because the manuscripts are in fairly good condition: there is very little crossing out so heavy you can't read the underlying text, which is where image manipulation might help; all of it is legible.
The thing that all Owen researchers want is the watermarks on the paper.
Because it can tell you which notepad he was using, and roughly in which order he was writing the poems, and that is what Stallworthy bases most of his findings on.
We didn’t digitize those.
PH That’s interesting to me because in exploring the editions tutorial I had settled on a base manuscript with some confidence, on the basis of a comparison of the texts.
And then I discovered that Stallworthy had picked a different base manuscript.
But I didn’t know that Stallworthy had information about watermarks to go on.
SL That tutorial itself (number three) was one I had in mind a long time ago.
I really wanted to do that one because I come from from a medievalist background, where I normally do research, and you always look at primary source material there, and try to get students to look at it quite quickly, whereas modern literature students, certainly at undergraduate level, would just look at an edition.
And I wanted to show them what goes into making an edition, and all the decisions which are hidden from them necessarily in a published edition.
Which they can then begin to question.
PH Are the digitized manuscripts available on the web digitally watermarked in any way?
No, they’re not.
We had a look at digital watermarking and at the time the only system around was digimark, I think, which we could play with: with it we could put large quantities of text in the headers of the images and that sort of stuff, and we couldn’t afford it because in those days you had to register your images with a central service and maintain it.
Since the (Mellon) scoping study I’m pretty convinced what we did was correct because watermarking wouldn't have helped us that much.
People are probably already pirating the images around the world, but if they appear on the web and we find them they are quite clearly our images it is a single source item, there is no other copy of that material anywhere in the world.
The Owen estate was not concerned with watermarking at all they were just worried that very high quality images would be available which publishers could rip-off, so when we showed them that they were just working quality images they were quite pleased.
PH You have produced larger versions of the graphics for archival purposes where are these preserved?
SL We have a large 20 terabyte hierarchical file server here in the university, and that was bought in to preserve the university’s digital ‘intellectual content’.
It serves as a back up facility for personal PCs, but also for the types of stuff which David Cooper has done with medieval manuscripts, so they are all stored on that as an archive.
Nothing is served from it.
PH Did the tutorials grow out of your own requirements for teaching materials, or were they designed for the use of others from the outset?
SL It was designed with it in mind that others would use them.
At that point I hadn’t taught First World War poetry, I’ve only taught it since then.
So I didn’t have a course I wanted to slot these straight into.
I do now.
I think what happened is that I built the course around the tutorials.
I used my experience of teaching literature and looked at four different types of teaching: there is the introduction to a genre, which is covered in the first tutorial, and the add-on to that was the bulletin board so that you could then discuss the tutorial you can go into that at any time.
The second one looked at the close reading of a poem the Rosenberg one, which has the design where you read the poem, comment, go off and look at other materials, and then re-read the poem; the third one is about primary source study, and the fourth about text analysis.
So I looked at four areas and designed course material around them.
I had the ideas and mapped it out on paper, gave it to Paul and he built the thing.
That’s how it worked.
PH Sometimes messages appear on the discussion board which suggest that you are running physical classes using these materials over a number of weeks.
Is that right?
Do you try to synchronise these classes with the kind of use other tutors might make of these materials?
SL When I ran my class in Hilary term I announced that I was teaching for the next ten weeks.
The students contribute to the board, and people hang around and reply to the students.
Occasionally you would get a load of messages from what was obviously a class happening elsewhere.
But there was no announcement as such.
Someone in Texas has got in touch saying she is going to be running a class in November and that she is going to post a reading list before then.
Maybe some academics here might pick that up if they are running a similar course at that time, and join up.
The experiment we have been running for the past two weeks, a close reading of David Jones 'In Parenthesis,' was announced quite a bit.
If that works then that may be something we'll make a bit of a play of, we'll choose another poem or poet and say that in say November we are going to discuss whoever.
We might announce it on the front page of WOMDA and ask people to join in.
A sort of scheduled mini-conference.
PH What software did you use to create the structure of WOMDA?
SL All the bibliographic files are marked up in SGML, using (predominantly) AuthorEditor.
Paul used something else.
Occasionally I just used a straight word processor, because it did global replaces quite quickly and easily.
The DTD for these files is TEI Lite, slightly modified because it didn't have tags to deal with sound and video.
It's a DTD designed for text, so we had to put in a few extra tags.
The browse form sends a query via the CGI script which converts it and fires the query into a Opentext 5 search engine, searches the SGML.
On the server we have all the SGML files, plus the search engine which searches the SGML files, sends the results back, and the info is converted on the fly into HTML.
So when you use WOMDA you are not searching HTML text.
That's why the URL's look awful, because the site navigation is managed by CGI scripting.
Once you get to the digital object the URLs look fairly standard.
PH Are there plans to use EAD, as was suggested at one point, or is this not a practical proposition at the moment?
SL We looked at EAD, which is popular in Oxford, so it would have been in line with the general direction of the University to use it.
We have in the Computing Service and in the Text Archive expertise in putting TEI on the web, ready and running we were pushed for time so we went for that option.
But we are perfectly happy that in the future we could convert those files to EAD or make a master file and then filter into TEI if we so wish, and the benefit of using EAD would be that it would allow cross-catalogue searching at other institutions.
So it wasn't a conscious decision that we didn't want to touch EAD, but that we had experts in TEI here who could get things running quickly we could use existing scripts at the Text Archive.
PH WOMDA features the ‘path creation scheme’, which allows users to create their own virtual seminars, using the multimedia materials available in the archive.
Is this ‘off the shelf’ software, or was it custom scripting?
SL We designed it.
A colleague of mine, Chris Stephens, did it.
We put something in the original report about making digital paths through an archive.
Originally we looked at shopping basket type software you see on commercial sites.
We looked at all that, but it wouldn't really work for our purposes.
So Chris sat down and just built it.
It uses a mixture of Javascript and frames.
What happens is that it grabs the URL of whatever is in the right hand window and matches it to whatever text the user has put in, then stores the info in the SQL database, and it sits there till the path is requested.
It works beautifully.
There are a couple of things we'd like to change at the moment you can't get into to re-edit an existing path, which is irritating to users trying to improve them.
PH You have said that “the virtual seminar is an attempt to preserve the best aspects of traditional humanities teaching, using the potential offered by new media and new capabilities’.
How do you feel the virtual seminars have worked out in practice?
SL I think they did.
The purpose of the tutorials was to look at the way you normally teach literature, and to see whether or not that could be replicated in the electronic environment.
But I felt it was worth doing only if you could add something you couldn't do in the classroom.
When you look at the four tutorials I think they do all add something, even if it is only being able to talk to people all over the world about your ideas.
In tutorial three, bringing manuscripts together which students would never get their hands on, obviously, and in tutorial four you can't do manual searches on Owen's poems very quickly, so we sped that process up.
With the Archive, well, one thing we want to do more is resource based learning.
If you had unlimited money you would always do this, but the money is usually limited.
I'm also quite keen on immersing literature in its historical context.
The money we got from the UCISA award we've put into digitizing things from the John Johnson collection, which is a massive collection of 20th century ephemera.
There is nice stuff there to do with the Great War.
That's being digitized at the end of September and will go into the Owen Archive.
We are also now mirroring the WW1 Document Archive at Brigham Young, partly at the instigation of the Modern History Faculty so that this material will be available to their students.¶ References The JTAP virtual seminars are at: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/ The Wilfrid Owen Multimedia Digital Archive is at: http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/ Break of Day in the Trenches is at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/humanities/rose/ The WW1 Discussion Board is at: http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/jtap/board/config.pl The Final Project Report, On-Line Tutorials and Digital Archives or "Digitising Wilfred" by Stuart Lee and Paul Groves, is at: http://www.jtap.ac.uk/reports/htm/jtap-027-1.html The report: Forging Links: The Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature Project by Stuart Lee, Centre for Humanities Computing, University of Oxford is at: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/reports/eurolit.html The JTAP Home page is at: http://www.jtap.ac.uk/ The Oxford University Humanities Computing Unit is at: http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/ Author Details   Philip Hunter Information Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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I Have Seen the Future and IT Works Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines I Have Seen the Future and IT Works Buzz data database infrastructure accessibility cataloguing cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Chris Batt Director of Library Services, Croydon, discusses Information Technology.
A title like that is going to take some effort to live up to.
Whether taken in its original literal sense, as used by Lincoln Steffens reporting life in Russia in 1919, or as my intended double meaning, that IT will play a significant part in making the more abundant life, it remains quite a task to provide proof.
It is a bold statement as a counterblast to the dystopic view of the future given at last year’s lecture by Trevor Hayward.
The choice of title was not mine: I might have added to it I have seen the future and IT works, SOMETIMES!
On the poster promoting the lecture were three questions: will information be used for the good of individuals and society?
What will the future hold?
Will public libraries die, or lead the way to the Millennium?
The short answers are: don’t know, don’t know and yes!
More is expected of me than that, so first I will examine the nature of the Information Society: is it just a marketing fad or a real social revolution?
Second, I will define some landmarks along the pathway into the future: the indicators of change.
Third, I will give some examples of those changes in action.
The Information Society We can all agree on one thing about the Information Society.
It has generated a great deal of information!
And there has been no greater source of this than the European Commission.
I will not dwell on the importance of the Commission except to quote from three studies that give a public library/public information spin to their messages: "public information as the new engine of growth" (EU High Level Expert Group.
Final report).
"…libraries have a key role to play in facilitating public access at local level to electronically available information…" (European Parliament Green Paper).
"…public libraries will continue to play a crucial role as gateways to information resources, including those on the global superhighways."
(Public Libraries and the Information Society Study).
The components linking the studies, underpinning the Information Society movement, are the outputs of the union of information and communication technologies and their rapid diffusion, epitomised by the Internet.
It is my view that current trends have the makings of a social revolution, perhaps on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, but very different.
The Industrial Revolution was about using mass resources to deliver high returns to a few.
In time the drift to cities produced better sanitation for a healthier and therefore more efficient workforce and other social goods, not least the public library movement.
However, mass production methods subjugated rather than enriched the individual.
If it becomes a revolution, the Information Society will bring new individual opportunities that may not be fully comprehended for 40 or 50 years.
Information is now being delivered direct to the individual on a scale undreamt of.
This also offers, through discussion lists, email and self-publishing, new opportunities for the sharing of views and opinions with a global community.
But at present, we sit on the cusp of the change curve in a period of uncertain transition from the old to the new.
Within the developed countries only a minority of citizens are purposive users of the Internet, but it is a large and ever-increasing minority and companies large and small are moving into Cyberspace as they scent a huge potential market.
There are four phrases that appear again and again in the literature and in the corporate goals of governments, both national and local: economic development; lifelong learning/education; democratic rights/community action; social inclusion.
These are not only ideals for the revolution but the engines that will drive the change.
Landmarks on the Road into the Future We live in a time full of signposts.
The Information Society and indeed the role of the public library in the change process are becoming common parlance.
Through various reports, documents and initiatives, the message is that information and education are once again to be valued as public goods and that there is going to be a clear sense of direction from Government.
The National Grid for Learning (NGfL) has many resonances for the public library movement.
On-line resources, connecting institutions for learning, harnessing IT to improve the quality of life and removing barriers to learning are all strands of service which can be seen in the public library.
The NGfL white paper makes a bold commitment to connecting all schools, colleges, universities and public libraries to the Grid by 2002.
This statement alone ought to be cause for some celebration within the public library sector.
However, Government has made an even clearer statement of intent by sanctioning the publication of New Library: The People’s Network and then producing a response which makes new financial commitments to building the public library information superhighway.
New Library: The People’s Network proposes a national network connecting all public libraries.
There would be minimum configurations of hardware and a national information policy exploited by a public library network agency.
Three key elements of the network would be: Infrastructure (backbone and local networks); Content creation (education and lifelong learning, training and business for economic prosperity, social cohesion and national treasures); a national IT training programme for library staff.
The cost of delivering all these elements is estimated at [sterling] 750m spent over seven years and the Government has initially promised [sterling] 50m for content creation and [sterling] 26m for training and pump-priming projects, with a commitment to investigate ways of building the infrastructure in partnership with the private sector.
To some this may seem a less than fulsome offering but [sterling] 76m is not to be looked askance at and work to prepare guidelines for all aspects of development is proceeding at some speed.
Ministers have realised what librarians have always known: that public libraries have served to bind communities together, have created opportunities for self-development not found elsewhere, that they remain highly popular with communities and have been recycling on a grand scale for 150 years!
Glimpsing the Future Some of the building blocks of the future public library can be seen in the services we now provide in Croydon.
We have tried to draw out of our successes some understanding of the shape and content of future services.
CD-ROM Network : the Croydon network now contains over 150 databases delivered through 15 public terminals in the Central Library and extending by high bandwidth connections to branches and schools.
Access is available to national newspapers, business databases, government information and much more, at the touch of a button.
There are few people using the CD-ROM resources who would return to traditional printed media.
Public Access Training Resources : developing new IT skills is an essential stepping stone towards the Information Society.
In Croydon we will soon have access to PC training packages in all our branch libraries alongside free access to the Internet.
Croydon On-line : Croydon is developing a web site intended to be the engine of community development.
There are now many public service sites around the country, but we are trying to use the medium of the Web to produce a model that will allow not just the delivery of information to the community, but the means of greater community activity and creativity.
Through Croydon On-line you can access the library catalogue, send the library an enquiry, send questions and complaints to a variety of Council services and find information about living, working and studying in the town.
You can make comments about what you think is missing from the high street and you can promote your business on the global network.
Moreover we now encourage local groups to mount data on the site so that the citizens begin to own the network.
We have an on-line poetry magazine maintained by a group of local poets who regularly perform live in the Central Library, and a multitude of other groups are beginning to be involved.
(Croydon On-line: www.croydon.gov.uk) The strengths of the Web are the ease of updating compared with traditional formats for community information and the fact that we can point to anything that looks to be of interest.
The goals of Croydon On-line relate to economic development, debate and democracy, ownership, learning and inclusion.
Lifelong Learning : Now a phrase of some significance, it sums up a new strand of government policy encompassing quality of life, new opportunities, re-skilling and equality of access.
It therefore has relevance to the public library and is important for a particular reason.
if we are not careful something of what makes public libraries unique will be lost in the headlong rush for the lifelong learning experience.
There is a vision of lifelong learning as an extension of more formal learning structures, with awards, accreditation, recognition of achievement and quality assurance.
One of the Fryer Report task groups, working under the umbrella of the National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning , said: "…access to learning opportunities requires resources for self-directed and autonomous forms of learning as well as access to educational institutions, progression routes and formal qualifications."
There is nothing wrong with that but it is my firm belief that the public library can and does address a broader agenda, which is about learning for life rather than lifelong learning.
People have been coming into public libraries and learning things since the very moment the first recognisable public library opened its doors.
People already come into their library to find out about full time, part time or adult education courses.
They expect to be able to get support material for those courses and in future the public library will play a vital role as an interface between the world of learning opportunities and community need.
This will extend to the local library delivering networked learning material to those people who through choice or necessity will use the public library as the access point to resources such as the National Grid for Learning, the University for Industry, the new education entrepreneurs (Disney, Tesco, universities) and, of course, the People’s Network.
The public library becomes the community nerve endings of the education system.
Learning is not simply about following accredited courses to obtain qualifications.
It is about gaining knowledge to lead better, more fulfilling lives.
Such learning comes frequently in very small quanta.
It may be finding out where something is sold more cheaply, or how to travel from A to B in less time.
It may be broadening one’s emotional experience by reading about the life of another person or locating the self in the context of other people, be they real or fictional.
Public libraries are unique in the way that they can allow those tiny portions of learning to invisibly change people’s lives.
Nobody has ever measured the social good of such effects although public library managers know that users expect the library to meet their information and reading needs again and again and again.
The invisibility of the process means that it has not featured in any of the national discussions about lifelong learning.
Yet better managed, the continuous process of learning for life could make a significant difference to the lives of everyone, and there are many examples of the ways in which the public library can enrich this invisible activity.
They are examples of very basic roles which public libraries have fulfilled for many years.
Yet the learning for life role has not always been well-served even by the public library.
Where it has worked well it has probably been more by chance than design.
In the future we have the opportunity to create new services around the emerging media.
The wired public library will give access to a world of documentation that can be searched and downloaded to a local terminal.
While the economics of such new opportunities may not be fully worked out, the benefits will be great.
Joining the global shared interest group demonstrates that the enquirer has a body of knowledge of value to others.
To achieve such equality and opportunity is what the networked society will be about and it is to such change that the public library should be committed.
All those trivial questions like: who’s that French artist with spots?
How dense is a house?
What is Sanderstead for?
What was Elvis Presley’s favourite aftershave?
Are these the sort of questions that should be answered by services provided as public goods?
My answer is that we cannot readily judge whether or not the questions are trivial, or why they are asked and what value the answer will add to the life of the questioner.
Such questions (all of them are real) sit at the heart of the role of the public library as the community knowledge bank.
In future we will be better placed to give answers with less cost.
The Web already forms an integral part of the services in some public libraries as staff and public use it as an encyclopaedia on everything.
In addition, of course, one of the hidden strengths of the People’s Network will be the connection of people to other people as well as to information.
Email services such as Stumpers and Ask a Librarian form meta-brains as the knowledge of librarians can be brought to bear on intractable problems.
No other technology can bring such immediate connectivity between people across the face of the globe.
To see the Future you Have to Look in the Right Direction Some readers will rightly argue that there is nothing particularly new about anything I have said.
True, but progress comes generally through the repackaging of things we already do and know.
We need to know where to look and what paths to follow.
If we are to see revolutionary change in the emergent Information Society it will be within our own communities.
It will be a revolution that is at once global and local.
People will change their behaviours locally as they connect to global networks.
Connectivity will be a right giving access to resources, people and opportunities.
While we may wonder what a room full of empowered citizens would be like, the fact that more people will be able to express opinions when they wish to will change the local democratic process.
I believe that much of that change will be mentored and managed by the public library, where concepts such as economic development, learning for life, citizenship and equality of access have resonance for what public libraries have done successfully for a long, long time.
While change is needed now, it will be a long time before the public library as a place disappears.
People will want to come to use resources, to borrow books to read (still better information technology than the computer in many situations), to get advice from a real person and just be around other people the public library has been and will be a convivial meeting place.
At the same time those public library services will need to migrate into cyberspace; to allow 24 hour access to information and advice from anywhere, and to ease community access into the diverse world of the information and learning that will be available the global meeting place for the local community.
So, What Does it all Mean?
Where are we are now on the continuum of change and what should we be doing as information workers?
There is a growing diversity of resources to choose from so we must widen our selection processes and decide on the right medium for the right situation.
The old is not always bad, the new not always good: we must be selective and critical.
Now is the time to experiment.
If we do not start now others will get to the high ground first.
Obviously, content creation will be everything and management will be for the citizen.
Both physical and financial accessibility will be crucial, and space and place will co-exist.
New opportunities will emerge from traditional models and we must cherish the tradition of the public library.
The stability and continuity of the institution are critical to community health.
Learning for life is not just remote access to traditional education.
It is about enabling everyone to grow, through formal and personal learning, how they want to, when they want to and where they want to.
To do this a national information policy is vital.
Without a national information policy we will face competition between networks and services that will merely serve to weaken the magic that I have tried to describe.
Every element of the library and information sector will need to converge if we are to produce real added value for everyone.
Whatever the future public library looks like and whoever runs it, I want it positioned to be nothing less than the heart and the brain of the information society.
Author Details Chris Batt Director of Libraries and Museums, Croydon Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Syndicated Content: It's More Than Just Some File Formats?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Syndicated Content: It's More Than Just Some File Formats?
Buzz data rdf framework javascript html database dissemination rss xml portal infrastructure archives metadata cataloguing z39.50 aggregation copac personalisation uportal interoperability intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller takes a look at issues arising from the current enthusiasm for syndicating content to portals or other web sites, and offers some guidelines for good practice.
There is, unsurprisingly, an increasing recognition that digital resources of all kinds are eminently suitable to repurposing and reuse.
The Iconex Project [1], for example, was funded under JISC's 5/99 Programme to look at the creation, storage and dissemination of reusable learning objects.
Service providers of the Arts & Humanities Data Service [2] concern themselves with collecting the digital outputs of scholarly activity in order to preserve them for posterity, but also with facilitating their ongoing use and reuse by learners, teachers and researchers across the community [3].
International developments such as the Open Archives Initiative [4] explicitly recognise the value of sharing metadata about resources with any number of service providers in order to raise visibility, and draw greater attention to the underlying resources.
As the presentation frameworks generically labelled as 'portals' continue to gain ground across the community, there will be an increasing requirement for reusable content of all forms, whether drawn from within the organisation building the portal or gathered from elsewhere.
Work on the PORTAL Project [5], funded under the JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [6] is raising issues relating to the reuse and reintegration of digital resources of various forms, specifically in the context of 'surfacing' these resources within institutional portals.
In this article, a number of these issues will be explored.
For the sake of simplicity, and because of the ready availability of helpful visual examples, the bulk of the article will concern itself with RSS-based 'news feeds' [7].
Many of the issues raised, though, are more generically applicable, and will be revisited in greater detail through deliverables from the PORTAL Project itself.
Readers who are already comfortable with RSS may wish to skip straight to the suggestions for good practice... Those who are interested in making use of the potential offered by RSS, but without infrastructure such as a portal to display feeds of interest, might be interested in RSS-xpress-Lite from UKOLN [8], which allows RSS to be displayed in traditional Web pages with the use of a single line of Javascript.
RSS in context The JISC's Information Environment architecture [9] identifies three main mechanisms for disclosure of resources to end users: searching, harvesting, and alerting.
Of these, searching basically encapsulates a long-standing area of JISC activity, encompassing current services such as Zetoc, AHDS and COPAC, as well as eLib Phase 3's Clumps, and the JISC-supported development of the Bath Profile for Z39.50.
Harvesting takes a different approach, gathering metadata for remotely held resources to a central location.
The Archaeology Data Service catalogue [10] was designed from the outset as an expression of this (then unstated) model, with the more recent development of OAI and JISC's funding of explorations thereof through the FAIR Programme formalising this approach.
Alerting is different again, concerning itself with the business of keeping users apprised of changing conditions or resources; at a basic level, telling an avid reader of Nature that the latest issue is now available, and perhaps delivering its table of contents to their desktop.
The main mechanism recommended for alerting is the use of RDF (or Rich) Site Summary RSS.
Some RSS nuts and bolts UKOLN's Pete Cliff wrote a good introduction to RSS in Ariadne's sister e-publication, Cultivate Interactive [11].
Pete's article, and the references it contains, are useful in explaining the background to RSS, and point to some useful tools that will help to get an RSS feed up and running with a minimum of fuss.
In essence, RSS is a mechanism for sharing short snippets of information, along with a link back to the originating source for expansion.
The excellent BBC News service [12], for example, makes RSS content available, as in the example below from the portal being built at the University of Hull [13].
Anyone following one of the links is taken back to the BBC site for the full news story.
Figure 1: the University of Hull development portal, including an embedded news channel from the BBC   Figure 2: selecting one of the headlines from the BBC news channel directs you to the full story on the BBC site The UKOLN homepage, too, uses RSS.
The main block of News on the page is, in reality, an RSS feed, and can therefore easily be picked up for use elsewhere, whether on the UKOLN Intranet, or by a wholly external service.
Figure 3: the UKOLN home page, displaying an RSS feed of recent News   Figure 4: the UKOLN intranet, displaying the same RSS, alongside a feed from the BBC What is RSS?
RSS is an XML-based format, which looks much like related formats such as HTML.
Rather than including presentation information, though, the elements available in an RSS file are strictly limited to those required to define such things as a headline, a brief blurb, and a link to richer detail.
To confuse the otherwise suspiciously simple, there is more than one format of RSS; version 1.0 [14] is based on RDF [15], and includes such things as Dublin Core metadata about the RSS feed itself.
Version 0.9x [16] is straight XML, and still widely deployed.
Fortunately, presentation frameworks such as uPortal [17] are often capable of displaying any of the current flavours, and the end user rarely notices any difference.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <!DOCTYPE rss (View Source for full doctype...)> <rss version="0.91"> <channel> <title>BBC News | UK | UK Edition</title> <link>/go/rss/-/1/hi/uk/default.stm</link> <description>Updated every minute of every day</description> <language>en-gb</language> <lastBuildDate>Wednesday, 19 February, 2003, 10:52 GMT</lastBuildDate> <copyright>Copyright: (C) British Broadcasting Corporation, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/services/copyright/html/default.stm</copyright> <docs>http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/</docs> <image> <title>BBC News Online</title> <url>http://news.bbc.co.uk/furniture/syndication/bbc_news_120x60.gif</url> <link>http://news.bbc.co.uk</link> </image> <item> <title>Asylum seekers win ruling</title> <description>A group of six asylum seekers has won its High Court challenge against new rules denying them housing and benefits.</description> <link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/uk/2779343.stm</link> </item> <item> <title>'One in four teens a crime victim'</title> <description>A quarter of 12 to 16-year-olds have been victims of crime mostly violence and assault in the past year, says a study.</description> <link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/uk/2778255.stm</link> </item> <item> <title>£1m boost for epilepsy care</title> <description>A £1m strategy to improve epilepsy care is announced by the government, but campaigners say the plan does not go far enough.</description> <link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/health/2776279.stm</link> </item> ...
Figure 5: a sample of RSS 0.91, taken from the BBC News, © British Broadcasting Corporation <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:syn="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:taxo="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/taxonomy/"> <channel rdf:about="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/"> <title>LTSN Physical Sciences News</title> <link>http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/</link> <description>Latest teaching and learning additions to the LTSN Physical Sciences web site.</description> <dc:language>en-gb</dc:language> <dc:rights>Liverpool University for LTSN Physical Sciences</dc:rights> <dc:date>Mon Dec 16 11:51:10 2002</dc:date> <dc:creator>rgladwin@liv.ac.uk</dc:creator> <items> <rdf:Seq> <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/devprojs.asp" /> <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/download.asp" /> <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/journal.asp" /> ... </rdf:Seq> </items> <image rdf:resource="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/images/ltsnpsc6.gif" /> </channel> <image rdf:about="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/images/ltsnpsc6.gif"> <title>LTSN Physical Sciences</title> <url>http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/images/ltsnpsc6.gif</url> <link>http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/</link> </image> <item rdf:about="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/devprojs.asp"> <title>More development project reports</title> <link>http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/devprojs.asp</link> <description>The third tranche of projects have finished and reports are now available (Dec 02).</description> </item> <item rdf:about="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/download.asp"> <title>Development project resources downloads</title> <link>http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/download.asp</link> <description>This link allows direct access to resources created through the Centre's Development Projects (Dec 02).</description> </item> <item rdf:about="http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/journal.asp"> <title>Journal no 5 (Vol 3 Issue 2) published</title> <link>http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/journal.asp</link> <description>This latest version has reviews of 4 software packages, 2 web sites and 10 books (Dec 02).</description> </item> Figure 6: a sample of RSS 1.0, taken from the LTSN Physical Sciences subject centre, © University of Liverpool As Pete's article shows, there are a variety of ways to create RSS, and once done all you need to do is publish the URL and wait for other sites to pick it up and start redisplaying your content.
RSS in use On first consideration, RSS is an invaluable gift to those tasked with gathering, sifting and re-presenting information to users.
Take the example of an institutional portal.
One important aspect of most portals is personalisation.
Although there are certainly situations in which they will need or want access, it is generally true that the average researcher of Particle Physics neither needs nor wishes to see table of contents entries for the latest issue of Antiquity, nor news about the recent provision of online access to the census of 1981.
They very well might, though, be interested in topical information on the latest funding opportunities from the relevant research council, happenings at CERN, and the table of contents for this months' Physical Review.
Any and all of these could be available as an RSS feed, provided by their host organisation and either automatically made available in the portal of the researchers' institution on the basis of matching personal information held about the individual by their organisation or manually added to their portal layout by the physicists.
In reality, though, the ad hoc manner in which RSS feeds are currently populated and maintained makes it difficult for portal creators to plan for meaningful inclusion of RSS content from any of the available sources, either directly by end users or on their behalf.
Early experience in trying to do just that within the PORTAL Project [5] has led to a recognition of the need for agreed good practices amongst those creating and maintaining such channels.
A first attempt at establishing these practices is offered for comment, below.
Towards Good Practice In this section, I make a first attempt at establishing some guidelines for good practice in the use of RSS.
I am assuming that the primary purpose of the RSS is to be embedded in someone else's Web site or portal, in order to deliver current awareness information relating to the originating site, institution or service.
In order to illustrate the suggestions, there are references to existing RSS feeds that readers can look at for themselves.
Criticisms levelled at these feeds are intended to be general rather than specific in nature, and they are made within the context of my assumptions about the purpose of RSS and the guidelines that this article is attempting to formulate.
It should be recognised that the creators of any RSS feed criticised in this manner may well have had a different purpose in mind for their channel.
i.e., whilst their channel may be 'bad' for my intended use, it may be perfectly well suited to that for which it was created.
Adhere to the standards This one may appear obvious, but a random check of some of the RSS feeds listed in UKOLN's Channel Directory [18] turned up very few that validated successfully against Mark Pilgrim's useful RSS Validator [19].
The RSS standards are not overly complex, and tools exist which are capable of producing compliant RSS.
It therefore seems unnecessary for content providers to invest time and effort in building a feed that may not render properly when viewed by an end-user.
Recommendation 1: In line with current JISC guidelines [20] on provision of content for the Information Environment, comply with the RSS 1.0 specification [14].
Validate the structure of any RSS using an RSS Validation tool.
Ensure persistence If we presume that the principal use of RSS is alerting users to change, then it becomes important to ensure that the RSS feed itself is persistent and resilient.
End users, such as our putative physicists, are likely to alter their subscribed feeds only infrequently, if at all, and will expect those they have selected to continue to deliver useful and timely content.
Were a feed available from Physical Review, for example, our physicists might expect it to display the table of contents for the current issue, thus alerting them to the appearance of a new issue and giving an idea as to the subject matter covered [see an example].
Although they exist, it seems unlikely that our physicist would want separate feeds for each issue of Physical Review, with the corresponding need to receive some other notification that a new issue is out, and to then manually add it to those displayed through the portal or whatever presentation tool is being used.
There are surely better technologies for browsing or searching back-issues of a journal than a page filled with RSS feeds, one for each issue!
Recommendation 2: Maintain one or more feeds with changing content, rather than creating new ones each time there is new content to deliver.
Ensure that the locations of RSS feeds are persistent, and institute procedures to ensure that they are running and available.
Be brief and to the point... but not too brief!
An examination of the range of RSS content available in the UKOLN Channel Directory demonstrates a wide variation in the length and number of entries.
An RSS file incorporated into a presentation framework such as a portal will be displayed in its entirety, and often alongside other feeds or different portal services.
It therefore becomes important to ensure that the feed does not take up more room than it needs to, whilst providing sufficient information about each item in order to allow the reader to evaluate whether or not any link is worth following.
Hubs of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) provide potentially valuable feeds, highlighting resources newly added to their resource catalogues.
They take very different approaches, with SOSIG [see it] providing no more than a resource title and date, and HUMBUL [see it] including quite rich textual descriptions.
EEVL [see it] appears to take a middle ground.
Outside of the RDN, news feeds from CETIS [see it] and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative [see it] appear to strike an excellent balance between brevity and content.
As well as the length of individual entries, consideration should be given to the number of entries in any feed.
Given the need to fit the contents of any one feed within a page alongside other RSS sources or services, a guideline in which individual entries are limited to around 50 words, and a feed to no more than half a dozen entries strikes a reasonable compromise.
Note that although the RSS 1.0 specification [14] does not stipulate the number of entries allowed, it does suggest a maximum of 15.
Experience would suggest that, for RSS feeds used in the manner envisioned here, this number is too high.
Figure 7: different approaches to RSS content; one (too?)
short, one (too?)
long Recommendation 3: Restrict RSS feeds intended for embedding in external web sites, portals, etc.
to not more than six <item> s, each with <description> s of up to 50 words in length.
Stay current RSS feeds play an important role in keeping their readers informed as to current or topical events.
As such, it is important that they be topical and timely, and not overloaded with out-of-date content.
At the time of writing (the end of February, 2003), the LTSN Physical Sciences news feed, for example, contained items from June of 2002, and the most recent item is from December of that year!
[see how it looks today] Recommendation 4: Ensure that RSS sources are kept fresh with topical and timely content.
Archive or delete older material, rather than allowing it to languish at the bottom of the list.
Know what your feed is for RSS feeds have a wide range of purposes, including delivering news headlines, showing a current table of contents, alerting users to newly loaded records, etc.
The style and update cycle of each may differ, and it is therefore important to have a clear purpose in mind when creating a new feed.
Where more than one purpose must be fulfilled, it may be more appropriate to set up additional feeds.
This is preferable to overloading an existing feed (e.g.
one checked for new database records) with extraneous material (e.g.
job adverts).
Recommendation 5: Understand the purpose of each RSS feed you provide.
Provide multiple feeds, rather than diluting the message of one with information irrelevant to its audience.
Market your content Creation and maintenance of a useful RSS feed is a significant investment, but without letting potential readers know about its existence, that investment of effort will be wasted.
Various sites exist on which RSS feeds can be registered, including the Channel Directory at UKOLN [18] or Syndic8 [21].
If relevant, it might also be marketed through other awareness raising mechanisms already employed for the Web site or services of your organisation.
Recommendation 6: Register your RSS with appropriate sites, such as UKOLN's Channel Directory.
Remember that content may appear out of context Given that RSS feeds will often be displayed on Web sites belonging to organisations other than the content creator, and alongside content from any number of other sources, it is important to ensure that the feed makes sense in that context.
As such, content creators should aim to use language and terminology suitable to being read on any number of external sites.
Acronyms will need to be defined, for example, and the text of entries should be written for as general an audience as possible.
Use of 'this site', 'here', etc (referring to the site of the content creator) should clearly be avoided.
Recommendation 7: Write text for entries that is suitable for delivery through a wide variety of display channels, and to audiences not necessarily accustomed to the subject matter.
Cater — within reason — for different viewers Not all RSS viewers will display the entirety of an RSS feed.
Some, for example, will omit the paragraph of descriptive text associated with an item of news, and only display its title.
Creators of content should bear this in mind, and seek to provide meaningful and independent titles and descriptions.
For example, this snippet of RSS from the BBC: <item> <title>Asylum seekers win ruling</title> <description>A group of six asylum seekers has won its High Court challenge against new rules denying them housing and benefits.</description> <link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/uk/2779343.stm</link> </item> could conceivably be displayed as either: Asylum seekers win ruling A group of six asylum seekers has won its High Court challenge against new rules denying them housing and benefits.
or just: Asylum seekers win rulingRecommendation 8: Ensure that the content of an item's <title> and <description> make sense when viewed in isolation.
Preserve your brand There is some concern that the delivery of content to sites other than your own using technologies such as RSS will lead to a diminishing of your brand, and a drop in the number of visits to your site.
This would appear to be patently untrue, with techniques available within the RSS format to display appropriate branding, and with every reader clicking on a headline in one of your RSS feeds — wherever they read it — directed back to your site to read the full story.
RSS, potentially, leads to a massive increase in visits to your site, as you reach all the readers of all the other sites that display your headline content, rather than just the small number of visitors who choose to travel to your Web site on the offchance that there may be an item of interest to them there.
Many RSS feeds make use of the format's <image> subelement to ensure that an appropriate logo is displayed, along with the textual content, in order to impart branding.
Figure 8: logos of different sizes from a range of RSS feeds As can be seen, use of this subelement varies widely, from no logo at all to logos of excessive size that take up far more room than is necessary, and possibly even encourage portal and web page designers to avoid use of the feed.
Recommendation 9: Make full use of the <title> , <description> and <image> subelements of <channel> within the RSS format in order to carry branding along with the news feed.
Restrict <channel> titles to less than six words, descriptions to less than 15 words, and images to less than 90 pixels along the longest side.
Integrating other types of content The bulk of this article has been concerned with using the RSS format to deliver headline-type content to remote Web sites and portals.
Related issues arise in delivering other forms of content through portals, and the PORTAL project and others will need to develop guidelines and procedures in order to streamline this process before it can become truly effective.
The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) has made some progress in this area, with their Working with the RDN document outlining a number of the interfaces available to external services such as portals [22].
The PORTAL project is currently planning a workshop for content providers, in order to continue this process and work with the community to develop guidelines that meet the different needs of content owners and presenters/aggregators.
Staying informed There are several mailing lists and web sites devoted to discussion of portal issues.
One that is extremely valuable for those working in UK Further or Higher education is the portals list on JISCmail.
To join this list, send a message to   jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk   with the body of the message reading   join portals Your_Firstname Your_Lastname -  e.g.
join portals Paul Miller -  References The Iconex project is at: http://www.iconex.hull.ac.uk/.
The Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS) is at: http://ahds.ac.uk/.
The Archaeology Data Service's PATOIS project is at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/learning/.
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is at: http://www.openarchives.org/.
The PORTAL project is at: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/.
The JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair.
Some information on RSS is available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/rss/.
UKOLN's RSS-xpress-Lite tool is available at: http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/.
Information about the JISC's Information Environment Architecture is available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/.
The Archaeology Data Service's Catalogue is available at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/.
'RSS Sharing Online Content Metadata' by Pete Cliff appeared in issue 7 of Cultivate Interactive, and is available at: http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/rss/.
The BBC News site is at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/.
Information on the University of Hull's Digital University Project is available at: http://www.digital.hull.ac.uk/.
RDF Site Summary, version 1.0, is available at: http://purl.org/rss/1.0/spec.
Information on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) is available at: http://www.w3.org/RDF/.
Rich Site Summary, version 0.91, is available at: http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-spec-0.91.html.
Information on uPortal is available at: http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/.
UKOLN's Channel Directory is at: http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/.
Mark Pilgrim's RSS Validator is at: http://feeds.archive.org/validator/.
'5 step guide to becoming a content provider in the JISC Information Environment' by Andy Powell appeared in issue 33 of Ariadne, and is available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/info-environment/.
Syndic8 is at: http://www.syndic8.com/.
Working with the RDN is available at: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/workingwithrdn/.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Paul Browning, Pete Johnston, Liz Pearce, Andy Powell, and Robert Sherratt for commenting on a draft of this paper.
UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives & Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the United Kingdom's Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the Universities of Bath and Hull where staff are based.
The Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL — http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/) Project is a joint activity of UKOLN and Academic Services Interactive Media at the University of Hull, funded under the JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme.
Author Details Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Article Title: "Syndicated content: it's more than just some file formats?"
Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/miller/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Corner Buzz software database metadata cataloguing cd-rom ict research Citation BibTex RIS Sally Criddle reports on Resurrection: a new life for powerful public libraries.
And they’re off!… The going was good, not only for the Grand National runners at Aintree, but also for the future of our public library services, as the public librarians gathered for LA’s Public Libraries Group study school (the alternative event of the weekend) set out their visions for the future.
Resurrection: a new life for powerful public libraries was the title of the Library Association’s Public Libraries Group bi-annual study school, that I attended in April.
The study school was timely, picking up on emerging Government initiatives such as New Library and the National Grid for Learning, that have the potential to profoundly affect the future shape of our public library services as we move towards the new millennium.
I headed east to the University of East Anglia for a cold, grey, damp Spring weekend, but one that was enthused with a feeling of excitement and optimism.
I left with the feeling that now is the time for public libraries, the opportunities are there and the political climate is right for them to seize the moment and take forward their agenda.
The study school’s stated aim was to marshal evidence, demonstrate the worth of what public libraries do and to consider their impact.
The weekend brought together over one hundred public librarians from Oban to Guernsey, and representatives of library suppliers.
A welcome attendee was Peter Beauchamp, Chief Library Advisor to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
In all, ten speakers presented papers, all arguing passionately, for the recognition of the worth, impact and relevance of public libraries in the newly emerging social and political climate.
The feeling that we are poised on the brink of a truly defining moment was eloquently articulated in the opening paper, presented by Grace Kempster.
Grace argued that public libraries are perfectly placed to be a major player in social inclusion, the current political ‘big idea’.
We are facing a new beginning, not only in terms of information technologies available to us but a ‘new’ learning culture.
Public library can be at the heart of digital delivery of local government information.
She emphasised the fact the public libraries can and should be leading the way, showing the government what can be done.
On the question of funding, the opinion expressed was that public libraries get the funds that they deserve, and yes, we will have to continue fighting even harder for these, with all library staff having a role to play; junior staff having to deliver the promises of their leaders.
Following this battle cry from Grace was Paul Martin, speaking on his experiences as a survivor of local government reorganisation.
Paul is, since 1st April, Director of Community Services with responsibility for libraries, for the new Unitary Authority of Peterborough.
The weekend’s theme of resurrection was obviously a powerful theme in this context.
Paul gave a balanced account of the new opportunities that have emerged from the reorganisation and some of the dangers that can be associated with small, insular and parochial services.
Greater opportunities for senior library staff to work in the corporate structure were cited as one of the benefits of smaller, authorities.
It was also argued that the sense of ownership of council services and local accountability, usually associated with smaller authorities, is perhaps less important to people than is sometimes assumed.
To illustrate the point, an analogy with private industry was given, where organisational structures are very flat and individual employees often are unsure of who they ultimately work for without this being an issue.
Saturday’s programme opened with a presentation of the research findings of a new piece of national research ‘A Place for Children’ which is investigating the relationship between childrens’ reading and libraries.
The project will also produce service criteria and performance indicators which can be used to inform policy decisions for public libraries.
Debbie Denham, the project co-ordinator at the University of Central England with assistance from Patsy Heap, Head of Children’s Youth and Education Services for Birmingham City Council, explained that the aim of the research was to produce evidence of the role of the public library in support of children’s literacy development and to produce ‘good’ practical guidelines.
Immediately the difficulties of defining excellence in this area of service provision and the need for qualitative measures to measure excellence were highlighted.
Despite this, the research is producing a wealth of evidence in support of the public libraries role in developing children’s literacy skills.
The importance of IT was highlighted as the research suggests that increasingly childrens’ librarians are recognising the value of web access and other forms of software in developing reading skills.
However some concern has been felt amongst library staff that children are becoming over reliance on IT, and particularly that they may be relying on one or two electronic resources at the expense of richer forms information that are only available to them in traditional forms.
The paper also picked up on the importance of cross-corporate planning for children’s services.
John Allred, a partner of Information for Learning, illustrated the idea of the ‘educative community’ a learning place where people live, by describing the experiences of farmers in isolated communities having to relearn and investigate opportunities for training as traditional employment opportunities dwindled.
He argued that a lot of learning happens out of need, the need to retrain for job opportunities, for example.
In the farming community, the farmers wives were being introduced to ICT by the need to learn to use word processing and accounting packages at open learning centres in public libraries.
This community was making good use of a number of specialist databases and web sites, particularly a database of learning opportunities.
It was felt that there is a need to develop national CD-ROM learning packages rather than local, idiosyncratic systems.
Developing a seamless web of databases, OPACs and other catalogues with library staff ‘adding value’ to information, by rating the quality of information on a web site could be the result of closer collaboration with players in education and employment fields.
Being in Norwich, the opportunity to describe the planning behind the development of the replacement library for Norfolk and Norwich could not be missed –it being another excellent example of resurrection, literally a Phoenix rising from the ashes.
Hilary Hammond described the situation that Norfolk found itself in in 1995 and how this afforded an opportunity to go back and ask the fundamental question, do we need a central library?
The answer that yes, a physical building was needed was arrived at partial by recognising that a public library is valued as a neutral place for people to meet.
Picking up on an emerging theme of the weekend, Hilary noted that the Education Department had asked the library to include a recommendation for schools to be connected to the Internet in the bid for Millennium money.
This is an example, not only of cross-corporate working but recognition of the library as the vehicle for initiation.
Raymond Gray, Chief Executive of the Cypher library supply group provided a dose of commercial realism to the proceedings.
He provoked much commenting by suggesting that by developing ‘quality’ chain of supply systems, with commercial library suppliers much time and effort could be saved, as such systems negate the need, for example, for orders to be checked in when they arrive.
Notable too was the attitude of “let’s do it”, then see what the problems are.
Cross-sectoral alliances were the theme of the paper given by Derek Law, Director of Information Services and Systems, King’s College London.
He also emphasised that the political climate was now right for such alliances to be possible, suggesting a single, cross-sectoral network and the subsequent need for standards in, for example, resource discovery, such as metadata.
The penultimate presentation by Amanda Arrowsmith, Director of Libraries and Heritage for Suffolk County Council, looked of the role and activities of user groups in libraries.
This provided a wealth of anecdotes about the perception and activities of friends of public libraries, and again provided evidence of the impact of the public library in people’s lives.
The President of the Library Association, Bob Usherwood, presented the closing paper.
This paper argued the value of the library professional in the communication of information and ideas.
He urged us all to rediscover the confidence to make professional judgements, face the opportunities and problems of the future and meet these challenges and implement solutions.
The papers presented all supported the themes of the study school.
Throughout the weekend, the message was coming through load and clear that now is the time for public libraries.
The opportunities are there and the political climate is right.
Several papers highlighted the need for libraries to interact with local authorities at a corporate level.
Whilst it was acknowledged that funding remains an issue, there was a real sense of determination to fight for funds.
Inspired with the evidence and arguments articulated over the three days, we left Norwich ready to grasp the opportunities that are so tantalisingly close.
Author details Sally Criddle Resource Co-ordinator UKOLN Email: s.criddle@ukoln.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Let's Get Serious about HTML Standards Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Let's Get Serious about HTML Standards Buzz software html xml archives xslt xhtml accessibility browser namespace openoffice dtd windows linux adobe utf-8 mathml interoperability cookie url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly encourages authors to treat compliance with HTML standards seriously.
If you talk to long-established Web authors or those responsible for managing large Web sites or developing Web applications intended for widespread use in a heterogeneous environment you are likely to find that the need for compliance with Web standards is well-understood.
There will be an understanding of the need to avoid a re-occurrence of the "browser wars" and to minimise the development time for an environment in which, especially in the higher education community, end users are likely to use a wide range of platforms (MS Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, etc.)
and browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Galleon, Lynx, etc.).
However although many experienced Web developers will state their commitment to Web standards, such aspirations are not always implemented in practice.
This may be because the importance of HTML compliance is not communicated widely within an organisation (especially when there are likely to be many authors, as is likely to be the case within higher educational institutions); because HTML authoring tools fail to implement standards or because authors do not accept the need for standards and will either make use of non-standard features or fail to actively address non-compliance with standards.
This article aims to persuade HTML authors of the importance of compliance with HTML standards.
The article also provides an update on Web standards and contains advice on techniques of ensuring that resources comply with standards and for checking for compliance.
The Dangers Of Failures To Comply With Standards Does compliance with HTML standards really matter?
Surely if the page looks OK in Netscape and Internet Explorer Web browsers this will be sufficient?
Testing compliance with HTML standards by visual inspection is not satisfactory for the simple reason that Web browsers are designed to process Web pages which do not comply with standards as best they can.
However one should not use this permissive approach by Web browsers as a justification for not bothering with compliance with standards.
Strict compliance with HTML standards is important for several reasons: Avoiding Browser Lockin Web pages which make use of proprietary browser features will not be accessible to other browsers.
As we have seen with Netscape, even if a browser vendor has a significant market share there is no guarantee that this state of affairs with continue indefinitely.
Maximise Access To Browsers Certain browsers may be more lenient with errors than others.
Maximise Accessibility Web resources which comply with HTML standards will be more easily processed by screen readers and other accessibility devices.
Avoidance Of Court Cases If, for example, Web-based teaching and learning resources are not accessible to students with disabilities, students may have a case, under the SENDA legislation which becomes law in September 2002, to sue the organisation.
Enhance Interoperability Web resources which comply with HTML standards will be more easily processed by software tools, allowing for greater interoperability of the resource.
Enhance Performance Web resources which comply with HTML standards, especially the XHTML standard, are likely to be processed and displayed more efficiently since the HTML parser will be able to process a valid resource and not check for errors as existing Web browsers are forced to do.
Facilitate Debugging Web resources which comply with HTML standards should be easier to debug if the pages are not rendered correctly.
Facilitate Migration Web resources which comply with HTML standards should be more easily ported to other environments.
It should be noted that when HTML resources need to be reused by other applications, there is an increasing requirement for the resources to comply rigourously with HTML standards.
Arguing that a resource is almost compliant is like describing someone as almost a virgin!
HTML Standards If HTML standards are important, which standards should be used?
Many organisations are likely to have standardised on the HTML 4.01 specification [1].
Many widely-used HTML authoring tools can be used to create HTML pages which comply with this standards].
However HTML 4 is no longer the latest version of HTML.
The latest version, is XHTML 1.0 [2].
This recommendation, which is recommended for use by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium), became an official W3C Recommendation in January 2000.
XHTML is a "reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0" which means that it will be able to be used in conjunction with XML tools and will benefit from developments of the XML language, as described in "The XHTML Interview" [3] One benefit of XHTML which is worth noting is the XSLT language which can be used for converting an XML resource into another format, which could be another XML application or a non-HTML format, such as PDF.
However in order for XSLT to work, the XML resource must be compliant.
Ideally organisations should standardise on XHTML 1, as this.
However there may be obstacles to the use of XHTML 1.0 as an organisational standard, such as the need to upgrade authoring tools, provide training, etc.
If this is the case then HTML 4.01 should be the organisational standard.
Versions of HTML prior to this should not be used, as they do not provide an adequate level of support for accessibility.
Implementation Issues Whether you are using XHTML or HTML 4.01 there are a small number of elements which you must use in order to ensure your resources are compliant.
Your Web page must begin with the document type declaration (DOCTYPE).
For XHTML this is of the form: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> whereas for an HTML 4.01 document it could be: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> The document type declaration is used to specify which type of HTML is to be used.
If the first example above the document is an XHTML 1.0 transitional document, whereas in the second example the document is an HTML 4.0 transitional document.
Once the DOCTYPE has been defined you should give the <html> element.
If you are using XHTML, you will have to specify the namespace: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Why is this needed?
XHTML is an XML application and XML can be regarded as a meta-language which can be used to create other languages for example MathML the Mathematical Markup Language [4].
Since it may be necessary to create resources which combine languages (for example an XHTML document which contains mathematical formulae) a namespace is needed to differentiate the XHTML element names from those belonging to MathML.
In the document's <meta> element you should specify the character set for the document: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"> Your XHTML will therefore have the following basic structure: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>XHTML Template</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/> </head> <body> </body> </html> Note that the elements shown above can be regarded as mandatory for most XHTML documents (the DOCTYPE could be replaced by a more rigourous definition, but the one given is suitable for most purposes).
The format of HTML 4.01 documents will be : <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title>XHTML Template</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/> </head> <body> </body> </html> Note that the DOCTYPE shown above is mandatory for most HTML 4.01 documents (it could be replaced by a more rigourous definition, but the one given is suitable for most purposes).
If you are updating the template for resources on your Web site it would be useful to include a definition of the language type: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-gb"> or <html lang="en-gb"> Although not mandatory the language definition is needed if you wish to seek compliance with the W3C WAI AAA guidelines [5].
Ensuring Compliance With HTML Standards We have seen some of the mandatory elements of XHTML and HTML 4.
These must appear in compliant documents.
Ideally these will be included in templates provided to Web page authors or generated by a Content Management System, by use of XSLT, backend scripts, SSIs (server-side includes), etc.
However, as we know, agreeing on a standard and providing templates do not necessarily mean that compliant documents will be produced: authoring tools may still fail to produce compliant resources, templates may be altered, etc.
There will still be a need to test resources for compliance with standards.
There are several approaches for the checking of compliance with HTML standards: Checking Within The Authoring Tool Many HTML authoring tools provide HTML compliance checking facilities.
However it should be noticed that (a) compliance with the XHTML standard may not be possible and (b) authoring tools which work with HTML fragments may not provide correct results.
External HTML Validation Tools A number of HTML validation tools are available.
These include desktop tools such as CSE HTML Validator [6] and Doctor HTML [7] and Web-based tools such as the W3C HTML Validator [8] and the WDG HTML Validator [9].
Although many HTML validation tools are available use of them to check individual pages is difficult if you have an existing large Web site to maintain.
In addition if the validation process is separate from the page creation or maintenance process it is likely that the validation process will be forgotten about.
There are ways of addressing these problems, such as use of tools which can validate entire Web sites and integrating the validation with the page maintenance process.
A number of tools can validate entire Web sites, such as CSE HTML Validator Professional 6.0 [6] and the WDG HTML Validator mentioned previously [10].
Another approach is to embed a live link to an online validation service, allowing the page to be validated by clicking on the link.
This approach was used on the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2002 Web site [11] as illustrated below.
Figure 1: Embedded Links to Validation Services A refinement to this approach could be to provide a personalised interface to such validation links, so that the icons are seen only by the page maintainer.
This could be implemented through, for example use of cookies.
Another approach, which ensures that validation services can be integrated with the Web browser is to make use of a technique sometimes referred to as "bookmarklets".
With this approach a bookmark to, for example, a validation service is added to your Web browser.
The bookmarklet can be configured so that it will analyse the page which is currently being viewed, thus avoiding the need to copy and paste URLs.
Use of this type of service is illustrated below.
Figure 2: Use Of "Bookmarklets" A number of bookmarklets, together with further information on how they work, is available from the Bookmarklets Web site [12].
In addition to these approaches it is likely that we will see a growth in commercial Web site auditing and testing tools such as LinkScan Server and Workstation software [13] and services such as that provided by Business2WWW [14].
Challenges In Ensuring Compliance This article has described the importance of compliance with HTML standards and has described some of the key elements of XHTML and HTML 4.01 documents and a number of tools and approaches for ensuring that documents comply with standards.
However even if Web managers provide tools to create XHTML-compliant resources, if is still likely that on large Web sites non-compliant resources will be created.
This is especially likely when Web resources are created using third-party software over which little control in the output format is available.
This is true of, for example, Microsoft Office files, although, to be fair to Microsoft, the open source Open Office software [15] also does not support XHTML output.
What can be done in such cases?
The best advice is to ensure that the resource is available in HTML, even if the HTML fails to comply with standards.
This will ensure the resource is available to standard Web browsers, even if the resource cannot easily be repurposed.
In the case of software such as Microsoft Office, which provide an option for the type of HTML to be generated, you should ensure that the HTML output can be viewed by a wide range of browsers and is not optimised for particular browsers.
In the case of widely used proprietary formats for which viewers are freely available you should probably provide a link to both the HTML and the proprietary version.
Another option, in cases where conversion to HTML may be time-consuming, would be to provide a link to a online conversion service, such as Adobe's online conversion tool which can convert PDF to HTML [16].
Further Information A good starting point for further information on Web and HTML standards is the The Web Standards Project a group which "fights for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and longterm viability of any site published on the Web" [17].
The Web Standards Project provides a valuable FAQ on "What are web standards and why should I use them?"
[18].
IBM provide a useful introduction to XHTML, which provides a more complete description of the mandatory features of XHTML [19].
HotWired provide a useful summary of work of the W3C and The Web Standards Project in an article on "Web Standards For Hard Times" [20].
Finally the W3C are in the process of developing guidelines on "Buying Standards Compliant Web Sites" [21].
They have also recently set up the public-evangelist mailing list which provides a forum for discussion of Web standards [22].
References HTML 4.01 Specification, W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/ XHTML 1.0 , W3C, The XHTML Interview, Exploit Interactive, issue 6, 26th June 2000 http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue6/xhtml/ W3C Math Home, W3C http://www.w3.org/Math/ Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/#tech-identify-lang CSE HTML Validator, http://www.htmlvalidator.com/ Doctor HTML, http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/ W3C Validation Service, W3C http://validator.w3.org/ WDG HTML Validator, WDG http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ WDG HTML Validator Batch Mode, WDG http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/batch.html Institutional Web Management Workshop 2002, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/ Bookmarklets Home Page, Bookmarklets http://www.bookmarklets.com/ Linkscan, Elsop http://www.elsop.com/ Business2WWW SiteMorse Automated Web Testing, Business2WWW http://www.business2www.com/ OpenOffice, OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org/ PDF Conversion, Adobe http://access.adobe.com/simple_form.html The Web Standards Project, The Web Standards Project http://www.webstandards.org/learn/faq/ What are web standards and why should I use them?, The Web Standards Project http://www.webstandards.org/ XHTML 1.0: Marking up a new dawn, IBM http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/w-xhtml.html Web Standards for Hard Times, HotWired http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/33/index1a.html Buy Standards Compliant Web Sites, W3C http://www.w3c.org/QA/2002/07/WebAgency-Requirements public-evangelist@w3.org Mail Archive, W3C http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-evangelist/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Focus: Let's Get Serious about HTML Standards" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Sep-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Distributed National Electronic Resource and the Hybrid Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Distributed National Electronic Resource and the Hybrid Library Buzz data framework database infrastructure archives preservation z39.50 gis copac personalisation authentication url research standards sfx ldap Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Pinfield and Lorcan Dempsey with an overview of the DNER.
What is the relationship between the hybrid library and the DNER (the Distributed National Electronic Resource)?
This paper discusses that question and suggests a number of ways in which DNER strategy and thinking can be informed by hybrid library developments.
‘Suggests’ is the word, since there is currently an investigation underway that is dealing with this question which is still to report.
This is being coordinated by Stephen Pinfield, one of the authors of this article.
This article does not discuss in detail the progress and outcomes of the hybrid library projects – there is quite a lot published on the projects, and there are several companion articles in this issue of Ariadne.
The hybrid library projects supported by eLib have also yet to be completed and formally evaluated.
It is only when these activities are finished that we will be able to answer the question more confidently.
In the meantime, a number of issues can still be discussed.
First, a description of the DNER.
What is the DNER?
The DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) is a managed information environment which provides secure and convenient access to a range of information services and resources.
As such, ‘DNER’ is a generic term used to describe the wide range of information-related activities and services supported by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
(1) The DNER concept has been formulated to enable a coherent strategy to be developed for these varying activities and services.
Broadly, the DNER can be said to have two main components: Content: the collections of information resources themselves, selected for quality and relevance Environment: the online space within which these collections are accessed which is managed to allow a coherent user experience, and which interworks with other resources and initiatives.
These two main components are supported by other important elements: advisory services (such as those providing technical advice), preservation services (for digital preservation) and development programmes.
In this article we do not cover this full range, but focus on collections and the information environment.
Readers interested in the full range of DNER activity are referred to the DNER web site.
The draft Communications Strategy of the DNER sets three long term objectives for the DNER: To provide the world’s high quality information to staff and students in higher and further education at any time and anywhere.
To be the leading innovator in UK education in the field of digital information provision of information and take an influential role in developing the UK’s learning and research agenda.
To take a leading role in stimulating development both here and overseas.
The first of these looks not only at making high quality information resources available but also doing so in a way that fully exploits the available technology (distributing content as widely as possible).
It is not just about collecting content but also putting technical structures and licensing arrangements in place to allow access “any time and anywhere”.
The second objective sees national information providers as innovators taking a proactive role in learning and teaching and research in a way which improves the quality of these activities.
The third objective emphasises the importance of ongoing ‘development’.
‘Development’ in the sense of technological development; and also ‘development’ in the sense of the widening remit of the DNER to include a broader range of content (for example, by encouraging institutions to locate their own quality content within or adjacent to the DNER).
Like all long-term objectives, these are ambitious.
But they are an indicator of the direction in which the DNER is going and also the importance attached by JISC to DNER development.
Finally, it should be clear that these objectives will not be achieved in isolation of the wider information and user community.
The JISC needs to work with, and through, individual institutions.
It also needs to work with others to ensure that approaches taken are not idiosyncractic or rapidly superseded.
In particular, the ‘information environment’ and the preservation agenda need to be a collaborative activity.
For this reason, the JISC is actively implementing collaborative arrangements with other national information and learning initiatives and organisations, and with international bodies such as the National Science Foundation in the US.
Why the DNER?
There are a number of factors which came together and made the creation of the DNER an appropriate strategy: 1.
Incremental development JISC has been supporting the delivery of information resources for some time and this has been a valued activity.
However collections and services have grown incrementally and as a result of opportunistic acquisitions.
They have been delivered from different places in different ways with different support structures.
As collections have grown, a more sustainable approach is required.
The DNER is an opportunity to co-ordinate these developments and give them strategic direction.
2.
The need for more consultation and market research Many activities and acquisitions in the past have been determined by the centre.
A consciousness has grown that there is a need for more effective consultation and market research mechanisms to be in place so that the needs of Higher and Further Education Institutions (HEIs/FEIs) can be assessed more systematically.
3.
The incoherent ‘information brandscape’ Instead of information landscape what we have at the moment is more like an ‘information brandscape’ (a term coined by Lorcan Dempsey to describe an Internet environment where multiple individual websites compete for the user’s attention, encouraged by the proliferation of ‘portals’ and ‘one-stop-shops’).
Currently the user’s experience of JISC services is not a coherent one.
Rather, they are presented with a series of branded products and hosts all competing for brand recognition and offering themselves as individual opportunities.
The DNER is an opportunity to begin to find ways to address this issue to support a more coherent user experience.
4.
The need for systemic coherence The development of the DNER involves the design and further development of a system of provision, not of a single service.
Services need to cohere within that system, to work together to deliver the bigger goal.
This means that roles need to be clear.
This is at technical, service and policy levels.
This is not just an internal DNER issue.
The DNER needs to work with JISC’s middleware services for example, and also with wider development trends.
5.
The need to engage with learning and teaching There is a perception that much of JISC activity up until now has been geared up for research rather than for learning and teaching.
The DNER will evolve to ensure there is a balance of provision, and that resources are more actively used in learning.
The DNER team will work closely with the LTSN , BECTa and others to ensure that resources support learning and teaching in sensible ways.
It is important to remember that JISC services support both Further and Higher Education, and must develop accordingly.
One of the interesting things about the factors outlined above is that many of them are also issues that the eLib hybrid library projects were set up to address, albeit on a more local level.
The projects have been engaging with some of these issues for a while and therefore have some useful lessons to pass on.
This applies in particular to the aspect of the DNER as an environment – after all, one of the aspirations of the hybrid libraries has been to provide a local ‘information environment’ which brings together resources and services in helpful ways.
The DNER environment One way of thinking about resources within a DNER context which has been found useful is as follows; The DNER coordinates informational activity in three broad areas: The creation of a strategic national resource of educational and learning materials: this consists of collections of material made available on a national level via networked systems designed to deliver them to the end user.
These may be acquired through licensing arrangements, or by funding their creation.
These include a range of bibliographic, research, image and other data, typically made available through JISC services such as the data centres (see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/collections/ for further information about content collections).
This activity is motivated by the recognition that there is a wide range of resources where the DNER can add value through such central activity, whether in terms of achieving favourable acquisition deals, achieving economies of scale in hosting and delivery, or eliminating unhelpful redundancy across institutions.
Such activity complements institutional provision.
The creation of a framework for Community resources: institutions and individuals within institutions also manage or create resources that may be articulated as part of a wider ‘community’ resource.
The DNER provides services which address this requirement, adding value to institutional or individual resources by placing them alongside other resources in some wider framework of provision.
Services which assist here may be of several types.
Some services assist in the discovery of community resources (COPAC and the Archives Hub, for example, which point at collections within institutions).
Some services manage materials deposited with them by researchers and others (the Arts and Humanities Data Service or the Data Archive for example).
It is anticipated that this area will grow in importance as the value of accessing resources created by researchers, teachers and institution within a consistent framework becomes clearer (consider for example, image databases, e-print archives, learning materials, prospectuses, digitised special collections, and so on).
The creation of a resource discovery framework for Aa global resource: The DNER provides services (for example the Resource Discovery Network) which provides access to quality controlled resources on the public Internet.
It also supports the acquisition of other discovery services, abstracting and indexing services, for example.
In addition, the DNER recognizes that its services need to be visible and accessible alongside and with other resources.
For example: Institutional resources: resources licensed, purchased or created by institutions and provided through their own service infrastructures.
These might include e-prints, bibliographic resources, research data, or learning materials.
In some cases, as mentioned above, these may be available for users outside their institution; in others, not.
Personal resources: Increasingly, users have an expectation to be able to personalise their information spaces, and may have local collections (bookmarks, other tools).
Users are also increasingly creators of resources, and may want support to ‘publish’ or ‘deposit’ them in sensible ways.
From an end user perspective, it is not important precisely where resources or services are located in this model.
The end user wants to be able to see resources wherever they are located.
The challenge associated with the DNER is then to weave rich information resources of all types into the fabric of people’s working and learning lives – to make them accessible when, where and how it is most most useful.
This is a challenge which is jointly faced by institutions and by the DNER, and underlines the need to achieve useful complementarities and ways of working together.
The DNER aims to become a managed strategic resource which complements high quality institutional and community resources.
It flows from this that the DNER strategy should not only be including acquisitions at the centre but also encouraging and supporting institutions to disclose their own information resources in an organised and effective way.
The collections themselves consist of a wide range of resource types: scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images, vector and numeric data, moving picture collections and sound collections.
These collections need to be acquired as part of a coherent collection development policy which serves community needs.
The important question yet to be answered by the DNER is how is this wide range of resources to be brought together in a coherent whole?
How can they be used in an integrated way?
This underlines the need to further develop the second main DNER component: the information environment.
An information environment might be described as a set of network information services which support secure and convenient access to distributed collections.
Hybrid library goals, as much as DNER goals, benefit from a shared information environment: it is not sensible for each institution to individually address all the technical and service challenges of digital information environments.
DNER architecture and hybrid libraries This question of coherence and integration can begin to be addressed by mapping out a technical architecture for the DNER.
This is already starting to happen and will be done more formally as part of a technical review taking place at present, and due to report in early 2000.
In broad terms, the architecture is being seen in terms of four broad areas: Presentation: Most users will access DNER (and other) services through a web-based ‘front-door’.
Currently most individual resources provide their own front door.
The plan in the DNER is to look at providing a ‘presentation’ layer, which provides simple web-based collections of links to resources .
This will develop in various ways in due course, building on fusion and other services.
Content/service delivery: this is the content itself which currently sits on the network and is accessible in different ways.
The predominant approach is plain old HTTP, but this limits how the services can be used.
They are available to human users, throwing away structure.
The aspiration here is to make more services available through structured protocols such as Z39.50, LDAP, Open Archives Initiative.
In that way, their data is more directly accessible and manipulable for others to use.This aspiration is broadly in line with the vision of the ‘semantic web’ espoused by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Fusion services: these services will use various technologies to fuse content in different ways so that it can presented and re-presented to different user groups in different ways.
The availability of content through standard protocols will facilitate the work of the fusion services.
JISC is funding a number of services that will begin to achieve this, as an exploratory and exemplary process – leading to an examination of issues and a sharing of lessons.
The RDN will develop fusion services in the engineering, medical and social science areas.
These will provide services which cross-search resources in their area, which provide links between services (document search and document delivery, for example), which explore generalisable customization, and so on.
The hope is that individual institutions will also produce fusion services – and, indeed, one way of looking at the hybrid library projects is as fusion services.
Middleware: in JISC terminology, ‘middleware’ is used in a specialised way to refer to security and authentication services.
This category might be expanded to include other services.
The aim here is to split out common tasks into infrastructure where it makes sense to do so.
Authentication has been handled with benefit in this way, and other areas which will be explored include authorization, user profiling, and collection description directory services.
This basic architecture is in many ways similar to that developed by eLib hybrid library projects.
These projects have also investigated many of the processes and technologies that might be involved in creating a DNER technical architecture.
Hybrid library projects have investigated issues such as authentication and middleware, presentation, fusion technologies, content creation, and personalisation.
The projects therefore have important lessons to offer in the technical review of the DNER.
Many DNER activities may be seen as natural supports of hybrid library project activity.
For example, a number of hybrid library projects have implemented some kind of cross-searching facility.
Agora uses Z39.50, MALIBU uses HTTP.
An explanation and demonstrator of the latter has been provided by BUILDER.
One thing that has become apparent to projects is that effective provision of cross-searching services requires dialogue and co-operation between the data provider and library service.
There have to be agreed ways of presenting the data which ensures that it remains accessible to users.
Many of the projects have found that multiple individual approaches to data providers, each with slightly different questions, is not a sustainable or sensible long-term approach.
It seems more sensible for this to be done on a national level.
This is a role the DNER might play.
Data providers are far more likely to co-operate with a single national service than an array of local services.
The DNER can where necessary use the collective market power of further and higher education institutions to encourage data providers to make their information available using rich protocols, such as Z39.50.
Other technologies being used by the hybrid library projects may be of use in the DNER.
One interesting point here is that there are also a number of commercial products now (coming) on the market which seem to offer hybrid-library-like functionality.
These include products such as VDX (produced by Fretwell-Downing), MetaLib and SFX (produced by Ex Libris) and WebExpress (produced by OCLC).
These products are not the same of course but they each offer possible ways of achieving aspirations of the hybrid library.
It is possible that the DNER may want to make use of these products as part of its fusion services as an alternative to developing in-house solutions.
Some local institutions are certainly looking to them to support service development.
The question of the extent to which commercial providers should be used in developing the DNER infrastructure has yet to be decided.
There are models of the large-scale services being developed in partnership with a commercial company.
For instance, the DigiBib service developed in North Rhine Westphalia in Germany was developed by university library services alongside a company called Axion.
The service provides a tightly co-ordinated state-wide digital library using a variety of protocols and includes a personalised billing service for document delivery.
(2) DigiBib is of course a very different animal from the DNER but its success in working with a commercial provider is an interesting model.
National and local needs There are then a number of important correspondences between the concept of hybrid library and the DNER.
This raises an interesting question.
Is the DNER a national hybrid library?
The answer to this question depends to a large extent on the definition of hybrid library used (and there are several).
Some people use the term hybrid library to describe the general library service which combines access to a range of media, printed and electronic.
Others use the term more specifically to describe the integration of electronic services into a more coherent whole.
Using the latter definition, the DNER in many respects fits the bill.
The most important difference between the DNER and hybrid library projects is the most obvious one.
Whereas the hybrid library projects are based in individual institutions, the DNER is a national service.
There are a number of major advantages to running a national service some of which have already been suggested.
The national service can use its market power, there is also economy of effort and opportunity to concentrate expertise.
But one thing is clear, a national service is not of itself enough.
The national service cannot replace the provision in institutions – and nor is it meant to.
Institutional portals and landscapes are still required.
Almost all of the end users of the DNER are based in institutions.
It is institutions who buy and provide access to services (even if they do so through national agencies).
Information resources available to a given user at any one institution made available through the DNER are only a proportion of the totality of resources available to that user.
Institutions will also provide local networked resources (such as CD-ROMs) or may purchase access to web resources not part of the DNER.
These will differ from institution to institution.
Institutions will want to guide their users to the full range of resources available to them not just those provided as part of the DNER.
Of course, the DNER can encourage institutions to co-locate locally produced data with the DNER but there will still be room for portals or hybrid library implementations at a local level.
This is an opportunity for the DNER.
The DNER is not just yet another separate service provider but should also become a service enabler for HE and FE.
It should be set up in such a way as to enable institutions to better provide nationally-supported resources in a more integrated way to its user local communities.
Various approaches might be taken to this, here is an example of one.
The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) services, such as SOSIG, BIOME and EEVL, are already available through a single interface.
More recently this facility has been enabled so that it can be delivered through an institution’s own interface via a service known as RDN-i.
(3) Users can then search nationally supported datasets through their own local interface.
This is an example of how a national service can be an enabler – allowing local providers to more easily deliver information to their users.
A similar approach might be used for other national services.
For example, ATHENS (or its successor service) might be provided in such a way that local institutions can make use of it more easily for local needs.
This would create the potential for a more unified local and national provision.
This leads again into the notion of an ‘information environment’ which provides a range of shared services (middleware, content, resource discovery, etc) which can be assembled to meet local needs.
We hope that the DNER will enable more integrated use of information resources across HE and FE.
It will do this by providing some integrating services itself.
But, importantly, it will also work with providers and others to provide services so that they can be more easily integrated into local arrangements (hybrid library management systems, virtual learning environments, and so on).
It will also work to identify further ‘infrastructural’ services – authorization and user profiling have been mentioned – to better support local integration also.
Priorities will fall out of the technical review.
The way forward In practical terms, a range of work is now underway which will support the strategic development of the DNER.
There are investigations planned or going on in the following areas: Content mapping study: looking at procedures, practices, actors completed Collections subject mapping exercise: looking at collections against subject benchmarks to identify gaps being commissioned.
Service delivery framework: a stakeholder analysis looking at pattern, governance and coherence of service providers being commissioned.
Technical architecture: aiming to identify broad architecture and technologies commissioned from UKOLN, due to report in early 2001 Presentation requirements: being specified.
These will all support the emerging DNER strategy will will take shape within the broader JISC Strategy.
This will have the following components: collection development strategy, service delivery strategy, preservation strategy, development strategy, and communications strategy.
Some of this work now exists in draft and is being consulted.
Some awaits the outcomes of the work mentioned above.
The aim is to have the completed strategy framework in place by early Summer 2001.
This will in turn be supported by a range of policies which encapsulate decision making processes in important areas, and by several plans which outline particular service developments (draft plans for advancing services for FE and for providing distributed image services now exist).
Documents will be shared on the DNER website as they become available.
This work is being carried out or co-ordinated by the new DNER Team based at King’s College London.
This is how the team is shaping up: Lorcan Dempsey is the Director of the Team and he is supported by three Assistant Directors.
One for Collections and Communications (Alicia Wise), one for Development (vacant), one for Preservation (Neil Beagrie).
Staff work closely with JISC committees, JISC services, and with other partners to advance work.
They also work closely with projects in development programmes.
(One reason for putting a development strategy in place is so that future programmes have a clearer framework within which to be taken forward).
In conclusion … We have discussed some points of contact between DNER and hybrid libraries.
We have noted how the DNER will be taken forward, noting particularly continued activities in the collections area, and the development of the concept of an information environment which supports secure and convenient access to DNER and other collections.
The DNER team will be refining consultative mechanisms for its collections activity.
We also need to think about how best to have a dialogue over development and integration issues.
This dialogue needs to take place with several communities – with those responsible for developing hybrid and digital library services, as well as with those developing learning environments, and others.
We welcome advice on how best to achieve a fruitful dialogue here.
And finally, the DNER team has a number of priorities but one thing should not be forgotten in the rush for progress.
The DNER is an important service development for users but as yet it is lacking one thing a memorable and marketable name.
The terms ‘eLib’ and ‘hybrid library’ have been successful in inspiring the imagination of the community.
We look forward to an inspiring name for the DNER also!
(1) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ (2) http://www.hbz-nrw.de/DigiBib (3) http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rdn-i Author Details   Stephen Pinfield is Academic Services Librarian at the University of Nottingham.
Before this he managed the BUILDER hybrid library project at the University of Birmingham.
He is acting as part-time Programme Consultant to the DNER Office, overseeing eLib Phase 3 projects.
(email: Stephen.pinfield@nottingham.ac.uk).
Lorcan Dempsey is the JISC/DNER Director, based at King’s College London.
He previously worked at UKOLN, a partner in the Agora hybrid library project and several other related activies.
(email: Lorcan.Dempsey@kcl.ac.uk) Article Title: "The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and the hybrid library" Author: Stephen Pinfield and Lorcan Dempsey Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/dner/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Klearinghouse: An Inventory of Knowledge Technologies Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Klearinghouse: An Inventory of Knowledge Technologies Buzz data software database dissemination xml portal identifier schema sql video cataloguing multimedia aggregation perl crm licence url research Citation BibTex RIS George Brett discusses part of a model of distributed user support, The Klearinghouse.
The National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) has been actively supporting high performance applications and networking for the past five years.
The Klearinghouse is a next generation effort of the Advanced Applications Clearinghouse which is in the Distributed Applications Support Team of the NLANR.
Research and Education, especially higher education, have been key players in the development of various information technologies including the Internet.
While advances in networking, computing, scientific research and education applications have been proceeding at a rapid pace, what has been lacking is a coordinated effort to capture, collect, or otherwise systematically organize the experience, knowledge and other product of the work done.
We believe that a Knowledge Management Clearinghouse (aka Klearinghouse) can serve as a coordinating entity for the identification and use of tools for knowledge management in real time, any time, and over time.
The Klearinghouse will focus on three areas of information technologies: 1.
People to People Communications this is the space (kSpace) that knowledge grows and evolves from.
This includes real-time (synchronous) and any-time (asynchronous) communications services such as video conferencing, web conferences, and electronic mail.
2.
People to Content / Data this is the knowledge base (kBase) or collections of information that are growing in number and size.
3.
People to Work-Specific Technologies these are the applications and technology tools (kTools) used to perform the research and educational activities.
These tools are dedicated to serve specific purposes such as numeric analysis, genomic sequencing, or digital biological workbench.
Description Overview The Klearinghouse will be a nexus for the identification, cataloging, evaluation, aggregation of state of the art applications, tools, information, and services in support of Research and Education processes requiring high performance, advanced networks and computational resources.
Early work has been done by the Distributed Application Support Team[1] (DAST) of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research[2] (NLANR).
The DAST activity developed a database schema for the first phase of a High Performance Connections Applications Database[3] (HPC Apps Database).
The HPC Apps Database was designed to fulfill at least two functions: 1) it was to be designed as an open architecture (SQL, CGI, PERL) so that other institutions or organizations could make use of the design schema[4] for their own data collections of advanced applications.
Using like schema would then permit easier exchange of data from one collection to the other.
And 2) it was developed to provide the research community a means to find out who-is-doing-what with high performance networks and computational resources as well as advanced applications.
The preliminary design of the HPC Apps Database was completed in late summer of 1999.
The collection was initially populated with content about projects (meritorious applications) from the National Science Foundation High Performance Connections awards.
At that time, there were approximately 140 projects loaded into the database based on the early connections awards.
By September of 2000, there were more than 1100 projects identified, verified, and loaded based on information from later HPC awardees.
The database team then began to provide more detail by adding in specific resources used by the projects.
These resources include software applications, hardware, and other specific components used in support of the projects.
There were 390 resources in the collection by the Fall of 2000.
One can find the complete history, schema, and contents of the HPC Apps Clearinghouse at http://dast.nlanr.net/Clearinghouse/clearing_main.htm The HPC Apps Database was initially intended to be part of a larger set of tools for the Research and Education community online.
The Klearinghouse is a logical next-step to expand on the HPC Apps Database project.
The Klearinghouse is designed to serve as a resource and tool kit for people who are either planning to use advanced technologies in their work or who are looking for other people who are already using such resources.
When initiated, The Klearinghouse will evolve to become a national center for the identification, collection, and dissemination of information about tools, resources, and projects that require high performance networks and computational environments.
The Klearinghouse will work with select communities to identify computer mediated communications tools (e.g., Web base conferences, video conferencing, multicast services, etc., etc.)
that would allow teams to work over distance and time.
Additionally, The Klearinghouse will work with these communities to explore and develop ways to begin to establish information protocols in support of developing better knowledge management processes.
Knowledge Management Processes One outcome of the NLANR program has been the realization that the high performance network community as well as some of the discipline communities using the networks still do not know what other people or groups are doing with technology within or outside their own communities.
As a result there is duplication of effort and missed opportunities.
In addition, there has been a long-standing tradition in higher education to produce software locally on campus or in research lab.
With improved knowledge management processes, The Klearinghouse will provide the Research and Education communities with the ability to identify information technology resources and to make better decisions about which tools to apply to their particular requirements.
In support of these knowledge management processes, The Klearinghouse will focus three areas: 1) People to People communications (Knowledge Space / kSpace); 2) People to Content / Data (Knowledge Base / kBase); and 3) People to work specific technologies / tools (Knowledge Tools / kTools).
A diagram of this structure is presented in Figure 1.
Each of these three areas is addressed below.
People to People Knowledge Space (kSpace) "People to People communication" has been a key role of information technology for a long time.
In the early days, Computer Mediated Communications was mainly electronic mail and news.
Later, technology was used to build virtual laboratories for collaboration or collaboratories.
Recently, much of the work of the Internet2[5] has been focused on the use of network-based video technologies for Research and Education.
The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has led to an explosion of tools and resources for individuals and groups to work together across distance and time with technology.
Most of these tools have been developed for business communities and their customers.
Currently, one can find Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMS), and Enterprise Portal Systems (EPS) and more available for purchase or license on the Web.
There is not a centralized obvious source of information that provides the Research and Education community an overview or comparison of such tools.
The Klearinghouse will provide that source -enabling efficient and immediate use of these tools within the Research and Education communities.
Synchronous / Session based communication Real-time communications continue to be a driving force in the use of high performance networks.
Such applications include video which require high bandwidth along with quality of service guarantees to ensure that interactive sessions are technically acceptable to the participants.
Added to these requirements are increased technical demands when other applications are used concurrently such as remote instrumentation or sharing applications across networks.
The Klearinghouse Knowledge Space proposes to identify these real-time tools -both ready-to-use and under development.
kSpace provides an easy-to-use collection of information about the tools along with links to where they can be observed or used online.
Eventually, The Klearinghouse will create persistent links where its users connect with those resources identified to be the "best of breed" -if a person is looking for a synchronous tool she will be able to find that tool in the kSpace directory and then, via the network, observe or participate in a session using the tool.
Asynchronous / Thread based communication Asynchronous communication tools continue to be a mainstay of the net through email, USENET news, and World Wide Web.
These resources continue to be much the same as they were in the past.
However, there are aspects of even these basic tools that are subject to change such as new file formats, network optimization, and combinations of activities.
There is a recent emphasis in the business community to use Web browsers as the universal entry point and user interface for legacy computing and data systems.
The Klearinghouse proposes to identify these new Web tools and recent additions in a way that will be useful and meaningful for the Research and Education community.
As with the synchronous tools, we will provide links to "best of breed" with the asynchronous resources.
One additional element with asynchronous environments is the question of how to best capture synchronous events / sessions so that they then become useful in an asynchronous environment.
The Klearinghouse proposes to work on this question by identifying and evaluating existing projects that are already beginning to capture and index network broadcast video or data streams such as projects at the University of California at Berkeley[6] or the Carnegie Mellon University[7].
A conceptual map of this process is illustrated in Figure 2.
People to Content Knowledge Base (kBase) The DAST High Performance Connections Applications Database The Klearinghouse will expand on the information collection about advanced applications that require high performance networks and computational resources.
This database identifies work being done in various disciplines that is funded by a variety of agencies (federal and private).
A frequently asked question is "Who is doing what with which technology?"
This collection serves as a starting point in identifying the key personnel, the technologies implemented and where to go to find more information.
Links to other collections There are a number of information resources that relate research projects and education initiatives.
However, not many of these are linked together either organizationally, technically, on the net, or in any other manner.
The Klearinghouse will work to establish and improve these connections.
At first, The Klearinghouse will capture / collect pointers to these collections in an adjunct collection for Technology Information Resources.
During its first year, The Klearinghouse will work with other groups such as the Association for Research Libraries[8] (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)[9] to explore implementation of dynamically linking collections via meta data, XML, or other emerging technologies.
People to Tools Knowledge Tools (kTools) Examples of Knowledge Tools There are a growing number of projects in Research and Education that are focused on developing applications or software tools.
Examples of this include the Biology Workbench[10], the ACCESS Grid[11], the Grid Forum[12], and the Alliance Science Portals[13].
In most cases, these tools are being developed to meet the needs of specific communities defined by discipline, technology, or project.
At the same time, some of the underlying technologies of the tools are being generalized so that they might serve as platform for other tools.
Therefore it will be important for The Klearinghouse to identify these tools to be added to the kBase.
The Klearinghouse activities with kTools In a process similar to kSpace, initially The Klearinghouse proposes to collect information about kTools to be added to the kBase.
This information would provide discipline-based communities the ability to locate tools of special interest.
The Klearinghouse will in fact have a number of the kTools in the knowledge base due to the fact that these are often listed as either projects or resources for high performance network applications.
What will be important later on is to explore how to better connect the individual to the specific community as well the reverse.
In this case The Klearinghouse will need to work as a conduit or broker between individuals and communities.
This activity can be done in a number of ways including: presentations at discipline oriented workshops or conferences; establishing liaison relationships with support personnel within the discipline comminutes; or developing documents for online and print based dissemination.
Conclusion Rapid technological changes have impacted many aspects of how we participate in Research and Education.
A major challenge has been how to "keep up" with the technological advances.
Another challenge is how to keep abreast of current information in one's discipline.
Also, there is the question of how can we, as researchers and educators, be more proactive in contributing to the body of knowledge in our respective specialties.
These challenges are part and parcel with the implementation and integration of newly emerging software tools and networking systems into the daily activities of Research and Education.
The Klearinghouse plans to identify, develop and provide services that answer these and other questions related to the engineering and management of information / knowledge.
While Knowledge Management itself is a complex environment, the Klearinghouse will set elements in place to provide a foundation for an evolving system to support Research and Education.
The Klearinghouse will serve as a nexus for the identification, cataloging, evaluation, and aggregation of state-of-the-art applications, tools, information, and services in support of Research and Education processes requiring high performance, advanced networks and computational resources.
Figures References [1] Distributed Application Support Team (DAST): http://dast.nlanr.net [2] National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR): http://www.nlanr.net [3] High Performance Connections Applications Database (HPC Apps Database): http://dast.nlanr.net/Clearinghouse [4] The Advanced Applications Database: Conceptual Model: http://dast.nlanr.net/Clearinghouse/DBDesign.html [5] Internet2 Project of the Universities Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID): http://www.internet2.edu/ [6] The Berkeley Multimedia Research Center: http://www.bmrc.berkeley.edu/ [7] The Informedia Digital Video Library project: http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/ [8] The Association for Research Libraries (ARL): http://www.arl.org/ [9] The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI): http://www.cnir.org/ [10] The Biology Workbench: http://workbench.sdsc.edu/ [11] The ACCESS Grid: http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/fl/accessgrid/ [12] The Grid Forum: http://www.gridforum.org/ [13] Alliance Science Portals: http://www-pablo.cs.uiuc.edu/scienceportals/index.htm Author Details   George Brett, NCSA ghb@ncsa.uiuc.edu / +1 703-248-0120 http://klearinghouse.ncsa.uiuc.edu/k-house/TheKlearinghouse.htm Article Title: "The Klearinghouse: an inventory of knowledge technologies" Author: George Brett II Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/brett/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: 404s, What's Missing?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: 404s, What's Missing?
Buzz javascript html css accessibility browser copyright hypertext cache opera php mailbase url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly discusses 404 'not found' messages, and why you don't always get the same one.
What are the ten most visited pages on your website?
Your main entry point, no doubt.
And possibly your search page, a site map or other navigational aids.
A greeting from your Vice Chancellor may be a popular page or is it more likely to be a Student's Union Society page, or a personal home page?
All of these are possibilities, but isn't a frequently visited if not popular page missing from this list?
What about the infamous 404 Page Not Found message?
Web users encounter 404 error messages frequently, due to HTML authors making mistakes in keying in the HREF attribute, reorganisation of the file store, or simply users making mistakes when writing down URLs or when typing them.
In early June 1999 a survey was taken of 404 error messages generated on the main entry points for UK University websites.
This article reviews the findings and makes a number of suggestions for improvements.
Survey The 404 error messages for a total of 160 University web sites were analysed, as defined using the list of UK University entry points kept by NISS [1].
A summary of the findings is available [2].
Four sites appeared to have server configuration errors which result in a display of HTTP headers likely to be off-putting to the casual visitor, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Misconfigured Server Error Message A surprisingly large number of sites (114 or over 70%) used the web server's default 404 error message.
Depending on the server used, this would simply display a brief error message, or display the error message, together with a link back to the refering page.
A typical server error message is displayed in Figure 2.
File Not Found   The requested URL /foo.html was not found on this server.
Figure 2 Typical Default Server Error Message   Of the remaining 46 sites, there was a large variety in the way in which the error message had been tailored.
A number of examples are illustrated below.
King's College London provides access to the main college entry point and to several other key entry points and a link to the college's search facility, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 King's College London error message The page is well-designed and conforms to the website's overall design, making use of the website's standard navigation bar.
The destination links provided in the navigational bar are replicated in a text-based set of links provided at the bottom of the page.
The page also contains an email link to the owner of the page.
The University of Ulster 404 error message also makes use of the website look-and-feel.
This time the navigational bar is provided as a vertical bar on the left hand side of the page, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4 University of Ulster error message The main area of the page contains a link to the main entry point for the website and an email link to the owner of the page.
Keele University's error message has a simpler design, which simply uses the University's logo.
The page contains links to the main entry point, a search page, a sitemap (which contains an alphabetical listing of university departments, centres, units, offices, faculties and societies which have web pages) and a help page, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5 Keele University error message Helpfully, the page also displays the URL of the requested page.
The page also provides a link back to the referrer page the page containing the link which the user followed (also spelt referer).
If the user did not follow the link, but instead typed the URL directly, instead of a link to the referrer page, the user is asked to check the spelling.
The error page at the University of Southampton appears to have been designed to be fit on a VGA monitor without requiring the user to scroll (as shown in Figure 6).
Figure 6 University of Southampton error message The page makes use of a single colour (red rather than blue the institution's primary colour) on three sides of the page.
The centre of the page links to a sitemap (a list of departments) and a search facility, together with suggestions for the reasons for the broken.
The page also provides an email link to the page owner an a contact phone number (in international format).
Oxford Brookes University also makes us of its corporate background colour scheme and navigational bar (with links to the main entry point, search page and help page) on its error page.
Figure 7 Oxford Brookes University error message In addition the error page also contains an embedded searching service.
The page also maximises use of the screen real estate by using forms to provide links to key areas of the website.
The error page at the University of Cranfield provides a form-based interface to an email feedback service which makes it easier for users to report errors, as shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8 University of Cranfield error message An Unfortunate Internet Explorer "Feature" While conducting this survey the 404 error page was not displayed for a large number of websites instead a browser error message was displayed, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9 Internet Explorer's client-side error message Following discussion on W3C's WAI-IG mailing list David Norris pointed out [3] that this is a "feature" of the Internet Explorer browser.
Apparently if IE receives an error message from the server which is less than 512 bytes (or 1024 bytes according to some reports), it will display its own error message rather than the server's (as described on Microsoft's Support website [4].
Although it is possible to switch this option off (by disabling Show friendly HTTP errors in the Internet Options menu) it is unlikely that many users will make this change, or even by aware of the need to make this change.
I suspect this feature is intended to replace the typical server default error message illustrated in Figure 1.
Unfortunately it has the side effect of replacing locally configured error messages which happen to be less than 1024 bytes.
Sceptics of Microsoft products may not be surprised at what appears to be an incorrectly-specified browser default option.
It appears, however, that this mistake is not restricted to Microsoft, and the Opera browser is believed to work in this same way.
What Should Institutional 404 Error Messages Contain?
Based on an analysis of institutional 404 error messages, the following recommendations are made for use on institutional web services: All web servers should provide a tailored 404 message Web servers should not rely on the server default, which typically does not provide web service-specific help or links to resources and is often written using web-specific terminology.
The tailored 404 message should be larger than 1024 bytes In order to ensure that the server error message is displayed (and not the client error message) the server error message should be larger than 1024 bytes.
Provide links to key parts of website A link should be provided to the institutional entry point and to other key parts of the website.
Provide access to a search facility Either provide a link to the website search facility, or embed the search boxes within the page.
Provide a feedback mechanism Provide a feedback mechanism, such as a mailto: link.
Ensure that the 404 page are accessible Since 404 error messages may be accessed by people with disabilities and using a wide range of browsers (possibly including PDAs, text-only voice browsers, etc.)
it is important that the page is accessible.
For example you should ensure that the 404 page conforms to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (e.g.
images have meaningful ALT attributes).
Use appropriate language Make use of appropriate language on the 404 page, which is meaningful to non-technical users.
An interesting example of helpful messages can be seen at the 404 page on the Harvey Mudd College website [5], as illustrated in Figure 10.
Figure 10 Harvey Mudd College error message As well as providing advice for the end user, the page also tackles the problem of what to do if a misprinted URL is published.
Although it may be possible to provide redirects, if this is not felt desirable (as was the case at Harvey Mudd College) another option would be to provide corrections on the 404 page.
The 404 Page An Opportunity to Innovate?
The 404 page can provide an opportunity to try out innovative features which may be difficult to deploy across large number of conventional HTML pages.
A number of possibilities are listed below: Multi-lingual Pages In order to provide assistance to visitors whose native tongue is not English, the web server could be configured to serve the 404 page in other languages (using the Accept-Language HTTP header).
Structured Feedback Rather than providing a simple mailto: link, a feedback form could be provided which could provide more structured feedback.
The form could automatically include the name of the referrer page, and allow the visitor to provide additional information.
A "Back" Link Although the browser provides a "Back" button, it is (arguably) desirable to include this function within the page itself (e.g.
for a first-time web user who is not familiar with browser functions).
A number of servers provide a "back to referring page" by default.
Typically this uses JavaScript.
However if the end user's browser does not support this link will be inoperable.
It is possible for the server to create the link to the referring page.
For example follow this link to a non-existent page at Keele University.
Then copy the URL http://www.keele.ac.uk/bar.html into your browser's Location box.
Notice the difference in the message.
Use of Stylesheets Cascading Style Sheets are now the preferred method of controlling the appearance of web pages.
However many institutions are reluctant to make use of style sheets due to the difficulties and costs in moving from previous generation of authoring tools, or due to concerns regarding browser support for style sheets.
The 404 page could be used as a test bed for gaining experience in use of style sheets.
David Norris provided some interesting suggestions in his posting to the WAI-IG mailing list [3].
He suggested that tailored error messages be provided for all server errors, and not just 404s.
He also suggested using a backend email interface to send details of errors rather than relying on the page author or webmaster to examine the error logs.
David has helpfully provided access to a set of error messages for his website [6].
The error messages are created using the PHP server-scripting language.
In order to view the source of the PHP files it is necessary to use the Source Code Viewer [7].
So, for example, to view the 404 PHP file, the pathname errors/404.php3 (i.e.
<URL: http://www.misma.org/source.html?page_url=/errors/404.php3>) should be given.
What About The Cache?
Another possibility for tailoring 404 pages is to consider the approach taken by the UK's National Caching Service.
The National Caching Service has been experimenting with the use of rotating banner ads to advertise JISC services.
A sample page is shown in Figure 11 (see [8]).
Figure 11 The National Cache's error message This approach, which we see on many commercial sites, may be worth considering for use on an institutional 404 page (advertising institutional services and events rather than commercial goods).
Additional Resources Many thanks to Tony Grant, a regular contributor to the web-support Mailbase list for pointing me in the direction of the 404 Research Lab [9].
Figure 12 404 Research Lab The 404 Research Lab is am invaluable resource for any web administrator who is thinking about the design of a 404 page.
It note only provides advice on configuring 404 pages, but provides links to over 100 404 error pages, grouped into "cool", "interactive", "international", "strange" and "stupid" pages.
It also provides links to other 404 sites including the 404 Not Found Homepage [10] and Sendcoffee [11] websites.
Jakob Neilson has published a useful Alertbox article on "Improving the Dreaded 404 Error Message" [12].
Acknowledgments Many thanks to Nir Dagan for his suggestion concerning multi-lingual pages, Tony Grant, Kynn Bartlett and David Norris for additional comments.
References Higher Education Universities and Colleges, NISS <URL: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/links/he_inst.htm> Results of Survey of UK HE 404 Errors, UKOLN <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/404/university-404-survey-jun-99.html> Re: 404 error messages, David Norris, Posting to WAI-IG mailing list <URL: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/1999AprJun/0342.html> Description of Hypertext Transport Protocol Error Messages, Microsoft <URL: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q218/1/55.asp> 404 Error Message, Harvey Mudd College <URL: http://www.hmc.edu/foo.html> Error Messages, MISMA <URL: http://www.misma.org/errors/> Source Code Viewer, MISMA <URL: http://www.misma.org/source.html> Error Message, National Cache Service <URL: http://wwwcache.ja.net/~martin/oops.html> 404 Research Lab, <URL: http://www.plinko.net/404/> 404 Not Found Homepage, <URL: http://www.mindspring.com/~isixtyfive/404page/404.html> Sendcoffee, <URL: http://www.sendcoffee.com/minorsage/404error.html> Improving the Dreaded 404 Error Message, Jakob Neilson, Alertbox <URL: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/404_improvement.html> Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Buzz cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Walter Scales responds to Dave Beckett's article on search engines in issue 16.
In issue 16 of Ariadne Dave Beckett wrote an interesting article on search engines.
In that article he refers to lots of examples of UK-based and other searching services, and, albeit with some trepidation in view of the fact that Dave is normally the one doing the reviewing rather than being on the spot himself, I couldn’t resist the temptation of having a look at some of the resources he mentions in his excellent “Where in the World… is that ‘UK’ search engine/directory?” page at http://acdc.hensa.ac.uk/where.shtml.
I’m particularly interested in the “tone” (wonderfully old-fashioned word!)
of the different sites, as I’m working with Verity, a European project aiming to develop a searching service for 13-19 year olds.
Some of the resources mentioned here or new to me or are services I hadn’t come across much before.
At first, for example, I quite liked the look of “God” (Global Online Directory) http://www.god.co.uk/ which I first thought rather lived up to its snappily whimsical name: it had a nice young look to it, and the way it appeared to marshal its resources looked clear and easy to use, but wait: when I tried to do a “PeopleFinder” search it dumped me into Yahoo!
Also, I wasn’t too impressed with the fact that it found nothing when I entered the search term Sunderland AFC but found lots when I entered the term Newcastle United.
So, although because of that I couldn’t take it too seriously (!
), I did definitely like the look of it and the snappy way in which it was written.
An even more interesting resource for which I have to thank Dave is Whatsnew.com in the UK, at http://www.whatsnew.com/whatsnew/uk/ This really is a refreshing site because it offers intelligent choices and intelligent comments to help you make those choices.
Far be it from me to advocate prescriptive sites or even sites which are (heavily) censored, but it’s so refreshing to have neat two line comments from the very start: makes you feel that not only is the light on but there is actually someone at home.
I didn’t particularly mind that the first time I saw this site the fifth or sixth item listed was a Middlesbrough Football Club resource it’s a free country.
That’s the other good thing about this site: it offers you the choice of staying firmly with UK-based resources, or European, or US or Global.
Nice to have the opportunity to do this.
Perhaps with current charging changes in the UK this is a trend that will occur more often in UK-based services.
Whatever the reasons, I like it.
I really like Whatsnewcom because it really does seem up to date: if you can imagine a service based around the idea of a subject catalogue but without a trace of an actual subject catalogue in sight, then this is it.
Definitely “one for the people”.
The key criterion seems to be that the resources mentioned should be interesting and can fall neatly into a few neat categories such as travel, theatre etc.
Highly recommended.
Thanks Dave for all your good pointers.
Author Details Walter Scales Email: walter.scales@sunderland.ac.uk   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: Carrying Out Your Own Web Watch Survey Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: Carrying Out Your Own Web Watch Survey Buzz data software javascript html database archives accessibility browser copyright windows hypertext php url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly describes how you can carry out your own WebWatch benchmarking survey across your own community.
In 1997 UKOLN received funding for a project known as WebWatch [1] .
The aim of the WebWatch project was to develop and use automated robot software to analyse Web sites across a number of public sector communities.
After the project funding finished UKOLN continued to provide WebWatch surveys across communities such as UK Higher Education Web sites.
However once the initial WebWatch software developer left it was decided to adopt a slightly different approach rather than continuing to develop our own WebWatch robot software, we chose to make use of freely-available Web-based services.
The feedback we have received on our WebWatch surveys has been positive.
A number of people have expressed interest in running their own WebWatch surveys.
This article describes how you can apply the same methodology yourself across your own community, such as UK HE academic libraries, a particular academic discipline, projects funded by a particular programme, etc.
Why Carry Out Your Own WebWatch Survey?
Why would you wish to carry out your own WebWatch survey?
There are several reasons: you may be a national centre and wish to observe approaches taken to the development of Web sites within you community; you may be a funding body and wish to ensure that Web sites you have funded comply with service level agreements; you may have an academic or research interest in developments; etc.
Whatever your reason WebWatch surveys will help you to: Make comparisons across a community Spot trends Measure the effects of other developments (e.g.
has a publicity campaign results in more links to Web sites) Measure the uptake of architectures and technologies Current WebWatch Methodology Current WebWatch surveys are mainly based on the use of Web-based services.
Although in some cases it would be possible to make use of desktop applications, the Web-based solution has been adopted since the methodology is transparent and this approach allows end users to have live access to the survey services for themselves, enabling them to reproduce the findings.
Wherever possible the surveys make use of freely available Web services which will allow others to repeat the surveys without having to incur any charges for using licensed services.
The methodology also allows them to compare arbitrary Web sites with published findings.
There are a wide variety of Web-based services which can be used in the way described.
A number of them are listed in the following table.
Table 1: Examples Of Web-based Analysis Services Service Function NetMechanic General testing, including page analysis of HTML, links and file size.
Bobby Accessibility testing and page file size analysis.
LinkPopularity Numbers of links to a Web site, based on AltaVista, Google and HotBot.
In order to check if a Web service which provides reports and an analysis of a Web site can be used in a WebWatch survey, go to the Web service and use it.
In the page containing the results examine the URL window: if it contains the URL of the Web site you have analysed, you should be able to use the service to survey your community.
Figure 1: Use of the Bobby Accessibility Checking Service Figure 1 illustrates this.
The URL of the entry point of the UKOLN Web site is supplied.
The Bobby accessibility checking service then analyses the UKOLN Web site.
The URL of the page of results contains the URL of the UKOLN entry point: http://bobby.cast.org/bobby?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ukoln.ac.uk%2F (It should be noted that in this case certain characters (/ and :) are encoded.)
Further information on this technique is given on the Bobby Web site [2].
We can then simply include the URL given above as a hypertext link in a Web page.
Repeat this for all the entry points in our community and we can provide a WebWatch survey of the accessibility of the entry points within our community.
If we so desire, we can use other Web services in a similar way to provide a more comprehensive survey.
It should be noted that if the Web service does note include the URL of the Web site being analysed, that the technique described in this article cannot be used in the manner described.
Carrying Out Your Own WebWatch Survey We have described the technique used for carrying out WebWatch surveys.
So how should we proceed with a survey?
Collecting The Web Site Entry Points The first thing to do is to find an authoritative source for the entry points for your Web site.
An organisation such as HESA may provide a definitive list of entry points to UK Higher Education Institutions [3].
Other useful starting points include NISS [4] and University of Wolverhampton UK Sensitive Maps [5].
Organisations outside the HE community who provide directories include iBerry's list of Higher Education Links [6] and Tagish's directory of UK Universities [7].
You will sometimes find lists provided by volunteers such as Ian Tilsted's list of UK Higher Education & Research Libraries [8] and Tom Wilson's World List of Departments and Schools of Information Studies, Information Management, Information Systems, etc.
[9].
With all of these services you should bear in mind that the quality of the data may be variable for example Dr Dave's links to UK HEIs gives a link to the Computer Science Department at the University of Hull and not the University of Hull entry point [10].
You should bear in mind that although some organisations and individuals may be willing for their data to be reused in this way, others may not.
You should seek permission before reusing data from other people's Web sites you may find that the Web site owner is happy for the data to be reused.
Using Your Data Once you have obtained your list of URLs of entry points, you will have to use these as input data for the Web sites you will be using.
It would be a simple, but , on a large scale, time consuming task to simply copy and paste the URLs into a HTML template for each entry point (having remembered to convert and special characters, such as ://).
A better way is to store your data in a backend database, and to wrap the appropriate HTML tags around the data when accessing the data.
Another alternative would be to make use of server-side scripting (e.g.
ASP on a Windows NT platform or PHP on a Unix platform).
Once you have generated links to the Web site services, you will need to manually follow the links to obtain the results and then store them.
It would be possible to write a script which initiated the requests, and processed the results for you (this is sometimes known as "HTML-scraping").
However there is a danger that automated submission of requests to a service which has been developed for use by humans could degrade the performance of the service, and even, in extreme circumstances, result in a 'denial of service' attack.
You should not use this approach unless you have obtained permission from the service provider.
Analysing Your Findings Once you have carried out your survey you will need to analyse your findings.
You will normally find that you have a set of numerical values for your community: for example the size of entry points, the number of links to a site, the number of broken links on a site, etc.
These can be summarised in a graphical format.
You should note, however, that the findings you obtain may not be correct.
Use of the Bobby and NetMechanic tools to analyse file sizes revealed major discrepancies in a number of cases.
Further examination revealed that this was due to several factors including: (a) one service measures only images and HTML files while the other also measures external style sheet and JavaScript files; (b) one service will not analyse files if the site has a robots.txt file which requests that robots do not access files in named directories, whereas the other services ignores the robots.txt file.
When summarising the file sizes it was noticed that several appeared to be very small.
Further examination revealed that this could be due to several factors: (a) analysis of a redirect message from the server; (b) analysis of a NO-FRAMES message (e.g.
a message saying "Your browser does not support frames"); (c) analysis of other error messages.
In light of these findings you should be wary of the results and, in particular, examine any outliers in your findings in more detail.
Other Useful Tools As well as use of Web sites, there are other tools which can be used to support your survey.
Rolling Demonstrations University Web managers have how the "rolling demonstration" of University entry points [11], search engines [12] and 404 error pages [13] to be helpful when thinking about the redesign of local facilities.
Information on how to do this for your own community is available [14].
Bookmark Managers You may wish to manage the URLs of your entry points in a bookmark manager.
You could use the bookmark facility in your Web browser.
However you may find that dedicated bookmark management tools will provide richer functionality.
For example, you may wish to receive notification when an entry point no longer exists or the contents of a page changes.
Many bookmark managers will provide such functionality (e.g.
see [15] [16]).
In addition to desktop bookmark managers there are also a range of Web-based bookmark management tools which you may wish to use (e.g.
see [17]).
Since Web-based bookmark managers can be accessed by everyone, not only can they be used to help you manage your WebWatch survey, they could also act as part of the survey itself.
For example, the WebWatch surveys make use of the LinkBank link management tool.
As well as providing email notification when a resource is no longer available, it also provides an automated display of resources [18].
Offline Browsers You may wish to consider using an offline browser in order to capture Web pages from your community and hold them locally (e.g.
see [19] [20]).
This would, perhaps, we a way of archiving pages in order to make comparisons at a later date (although there are copyright and legal issues which you will have to consider if you wish to do this).
Disseminating Your Findings Your survey of the Web sites across your community should be of interest to members of the community.
The findings should help them to gauge how they compare with their peers and will encourage those whose Web sites are reported favourably and act as a spur for those whose Web sites did not appear to do so well.
You may wish to make your findings available on the Web.
Other options include writing articles based on your findings or giving presentations at appropriate conferences.
You may also find it useful to repeat your survey periodically in order to monitor trends.
You may also find it useful to compare your findings with other communities: for example, how do UK University entry points compare with those in the USA [21]?
In The Future The approach describe in this article is based on use of freely-available Web sites.
However there are a number of limitations to this approach: The Web sites are designed for manual use by humans The Web sites mentioned in this article were developed for use by humans.
The services assume that individuals will enter URLs into a Web form, and will read the results which are displayed.
The Web sites may have not been designed for use in the way described in this article.
Dangers of server overload There is a danger that if the technique described in this article is extended to allow automated submission of requests, that the Web site could become overloaded.
Changes in business models The article describes use of freely-available Web services, as this allows end users to reproduce the surveys.
However the providers of the Web sites may change their policy of use of their freely-available services.
This may mean that surveys cannot be rerun.
Change control The providers of the Web sites may change the internal workings of their form submission pages, which may result in surveys ceasing to work.
Difficulties in reuse of data The output from many of the Web sites is designed for reading using a Web browser and is often not suitable for post-processing.
In the future we should see solutions which will address the limitations of the current approach.
The term "Web Services" has been used to describe reusable software components which are designed for use by other applications and can be accessed using standard Web protocols.
Use of "Web Services" to provide auditing and benchmarking services about Web sites would appear to address the concerns mentioned above.
References WebWatch, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/ Terms of Use: About Bobby, CAST http://www.cast.org/Bobby/TermsofUse314.cfm Higher Education Universities and Colleges, HESA http://www.hesa.ac.uk/links/he_inst.htm UK HE Institutions, NISS http://www.niss.ac.uk/sites/he-cis.html UK Sensitive Maps, University of Wolverhampton http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/ukinfo/uk.map.html iBerry, iBerry http://iberry.com/ Directory of UK Government Offices Web Sites, Tagish http://www.tagish.co.uk/tagish/links/#univ UK Higher Education & Research Libraries, Ian Tilsed, University of Exeter http://www.ex.ac.uk/library/uklibs.html World List of Departments and Schools of Information Studies, Information Management, Information Systems, etc., Tom Wilson, University of Sheffield http://informationr.net/wl/ Dr Dave's UK Pages, Dr Dave http://uk-pages.net/ukframes4.shtml UK University Web Entry Points, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/site-rolling-demos/universities/ Web Tour of UK HE Search Engines, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/uk-he-search-engines/web-tour/ Web Tour of UK HEI 404 Error Pages, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/site-rolling-demos/university-404-pages/ Rolling Demonstrations of Web Resources, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/site-rolling-demos/#guidelines Directory of Bookmark Managers, ZDNet http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq/siteguides/bookmarkmanagers.html Bookmark Managers, Open Directory http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Web_Applications/Bookmark_Managers/ Web-Based Bookmark Managers, WebWizards http://www.webwizards.net/useful/wbbm.htm WebWatch Links, LinkBank http://www.linkbank.com/get_links/ariadne/default/13/ Offline Browsers, TUCOWS http://www.tucows.com/offline95.html Offline Browsers, Winappslist http://www.winappslist.com/internet/offline_browsers.htm US Universities, http://www.utexas.edu/world/univ/alpha/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Watch: Carrying Out Your Own Web Watch Survey" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Open Archive Forum Workshop: Creating a European Forum on Open Archives Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Archive Forum Workshop: Creating a European Forum on Open Archives Buzz data software xml portal archives metadata identifier schema oai-pmh interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne reports on the Open Archives Forum's First Workshop: Creating a European Forum on Open Archives.
Pisa, 13-14 May 2002.
CNR, Pisa.
Pisa is small medieval Italian town, and, as is well-known, it features some extraordinary architecture, both religious and secular, some of which dates back to the Roman period.
The Square of Miracles is in a class by itself, but there are several notable buildings as you move towards the river Arno.
Including the Scuola Normale Superiore, where Enrico Fermi studied, a medieval building refaced by the artist and art historian Vasari much later.
It also features some interesting modern architecture, of which the CNR is a fine example.
It first hoves into view as you arrive (by taxi) at a very Italian roundabout, almost entirely surrounded by advertising hoardings.
And behind it, filling nearly half of your field of view, is the CNR.
The entrance is a little further on, and non-descript: a narrow road which looks like it might have been once a railway line.
Possibly the CNR was built on land formerly occupied by a marshalling yard.
But it is a truly awesome sight: if it had existed in 1964 Antonioni might have chosen the building to appear in his film 'Red Desert'.
No steam comes out of the featured ventilation ducts all around the roof, but that would have been the only necessary addition.
The corridors seem endless.
The conference centre on the other hand is relatively easy to find, and (happily) the taxi drivers all seem to know where it is.
Here a cross-section of implementers and interested parties gathered on the morning of the 13th of May 2002, to discuss Open Archives related issues in a European context.
The Conference Donatella Castelli, one of the Forum's project partners, introduced the event, and Leona Carpenter of UKOLN gave an overview of the aims of the Forum.
After this, there was an important presentation by Michael Nelson of the Open Archives Initiative, in which he reviewed the principal changes about to appear in the latest version (2.0) of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
These changes include the use of six verbs (Identify List Metadataformats, List sets, List Identifiers, List Records, and Get Records) plus Dublin Core metadata, a single XML schema, the removal of some ambiguities, the addition of more expressive options, and a clearer separation of roles and responsibilities for data and service providers.
This was the good news.
The bad news was that version 2.0 is not backwards compatible with version 1.1.
In version 1.1 the focus was on 'document-like objects'.
This has now softened to a focus on 'resources'.
He then went through the significant changes point by point.
Castelli closed the morning event with an Overview of Open Archives activity in Europe, considering each country in turn.
This revealed an interesting range of work under way.
After lunch there were two breakout sessions which were run in parallel.
One was on organisational issues: lessons we can learn from early adopters?
Issues related to subject-based archives as opposed to institutional-based archives?
Is simple Dublin Core metadata adequate?
Which other formats might be used?
How different are metadata requirements for different communities?
Is cross-community interoperability desirable?
The partitioning of archives?
Do we need an e-prints application profile?
; the other was on Terminology, which was based on a review of the OA-Forum glossary.
Questions included: Are definitions clear?
Are definitions correct?
Do some terms also need to be defined in additional contexts?
What terms are missing?
What are their definitions?
The breakouts were followed by coffee, an then the report back by the rapporteurs.
After the reporting session there were two further presentations.
The first of these was by Martin Vesely who spoke about the Document Server software used by CERN.
Following this was a presentation by Steve Hitchcock of the University of Southampton, where there is a large and enthusiastic community involved with the Open Archives and the e-prints idea.
The Hitchcock paper was titled 'Revealing a new dynamic: interaction in Open Access Archives' and was summary of Stevan Harnad's view that e-prints and the self-archiving process are a way of freeing refereed literature from the clutches of academic serials publishers.
Afterwards there was an excellent official dinner in a restaurant in the centre of the town (Osteria Dei Cavalieri in S. Frediano street), not far from the Scuola Normale, where we were reminded of Pisa's history as a maritime power by the fact that four of the five superb courses featured different sea foods.
Day two opened with a presentation by Francoise Genova of CDS on the importance of On-line information in Astronomy, subtitled 'from networking to virtual observatory'.
Astronomers were quick to take advantage of the Internet, since they are a relatively small and highly distributed community.
They often have to be miles from anywhere to take advantage of local climatic conditions, and benefit hugely from the capacity to access remote data.
Genova made this clear, and illustrated the role for OAI metadata.
This was followed by Fabio Asnicar (International School for Advanced Studies) whose subject was the Open Portal 'Torii'.
The final presentation of the morning was by Umberto Straccia of the IEI-CNR, the hosts for the event.
The subject was the Cyclades project (pronounced 'kikla-dees'.
Apparently it isn't an acronym for anything).
The project's aim is the development of an open collaborative virtual archive environment.
After lunch there were another two breakout sessions in parallel.
The first of these was on 'Communities and Services'.
Questions included: 'What communities can benefit from the open archive approach?
Which type of services become possible?
Is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting powerful enough to support the services required by the e-print community?
Is OAI-PMH only a component of a richer set of tools required for supporting open archives?
What lessons have been learned by early adopters in the context of service provision?
The second session was titled 'Technical Validation/Software.
Questions included: What kind of software tools are needed to support the open archives approach?
What tools are already being used?
Who is developing them?
In Europe, Elsewhere?
Are they available to other implementers?
Is there an appropriate 'Open Source' environment for these tools?
We broke for lunch, and reconvened at 2pm to hear the reporting back from the breakout sessions.
Finally, Leona Carpenter provided a summing-up of the main issues which were facing the community, and outlined the road forward for the OA-Forum.
Author Details   Ariadne, UKOLN, University of Bath E-mail: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Open Archives Forum First Workshop: Creating a European Forum on Open Archives" Author: Ariadne Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/open-archives-forum/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data software java rdf framework xml infrastructure archives metadata vocabularies schema copyright preservation cataloguing provenance ebook ict interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
The Bridgeman Art Library acquires photographic archive of the Hamburg Kunsthalle Museum, Germany The Bridgeman Art Library announced today its acquisition of the photographic archive of the Hamburg Kunsthalle.
All of the museum’s works will be available through Bridgeman on an exclusive basis, providing image users with a rich source of German art.
Highlights from the museum’s four great galleries include a collection of magnificent mediaeval panel paintings, masterpieces by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich and important works by Paul Klee, Max Beckman and Edvard Munch.
The giants of contemporary art are well represented by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and George Baselitz.
Managing Director Harriet Bridgeman said: “The Hamburg Kunsthalle photographic archive is a significant addition to the Bridgeman Art Library collection.
Virtually every work is exceptional in its quality and appeal, and as a whole the archive is a valuable document of German history and culture.
We are honoured to represent this collection and continue to seek out the best of the world’s art so that image users have the widest choice of artists and subject matter.” Images from the Hamburg Kunsthalle are accompanied by complete picture data listing the provenance, artist, title, medium, dates and dimension, and carefully selected key-words expand on the subject matter and style.
This makes the archive uniquely accessible even for those with little art knowledge.
Images can be viewed and ordered online from the Library’s website catalogue at www.bridgeman.co.uk Libraries Without Walls 4 Conference announcement and call for papers The fourth Libraries Without Walls conference, to be held in Lesvos, Greece from September 14th 18th 2001, continues the tradition of the LWW Conferences by bringing together international perspectives on the delivery of library services to users distant from the physical library.
When the first LWW Conference was held in 1995, the focus was primarily on distance learning and geographical dispersion.
Since then, however, rapid advances in the development of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) based infrastructures and services have led to a situation where many library users now routinely access services remotely even when ‘remotely’ means ‘within sight of the library building’.
As a previous conference attendee observed, “we are all distance learners now”.
All enquiries should be addressed to the organisers: Libraries Without Walls 4 Conference Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) Department of Information and Communications Manchester Metropolitan University Geoffrey Manton Building Rosamond Street West off Oxford Road Manchester M15 6LL United Kingdom Email: cerlim@mmu.ac.uk Tel: ++44 (0)161 247 6142 Fax: ++44 (0) 161 247 6979 Critics blast BBC plan to play Net traffic cop By Jane Wakefield Special to CNET News.com February 1, 2001 The British Broadcasting Corporation’s plan to block U.K. access to its international news site has been greeted with a mixture of criticism and derision from experts.
The corporation plans to launch an international news site BBCNews.com later this year, which it says is a response to government pressure to extend its World Service onto the Internet.
The BBC proposes to make the new international site accessible only to people outside the United Kingdom.
This, it says, will maintain a distance between its publicly funded and commercial services.
Both the existing and proposed sites will carry the same news content, with the latter funded by and carrying advertisements for its international-only audience.
At least that’s the plan.
Technical experts dismiss the proposals as impossible, arguing that it is not feasible to control access by geography.
You can read the full report on: http://news.cent.com/news/0-1005-201-4688018-0.html?tag=st.ne.1005.saslnk.sa XML the “next revolution” in personal computing By Charles Cooper Special to CNET News.com March 12, 2001 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday that the spread of the XML software standard will constitute the “next revolution” in personal computing.
Speaking before a gathering of scientists and technical professionals, Ballmer said the acceptance of XML (Extensible Markup Language) as the new “lingua franca” of cyberspace would effectively clear away lingering barriers blocking companies from exchanging information over the Internet.
“This will be a much bigger deal than Java”, Ballmer said.
He added that the adoption of a common approach embodied by XML will provide a foundation “so that everyone’s work can leverage and build upon” the work of others.
“With the XML revolution in full swing,” he said “software has never been more important.” You can read the full report on: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-5112931.html?tag=st.ne.1003.saslnk.sase Publishers’ spat highlights e-book debate Wall Street Journal February 28, 2001 Random House has filed suit against e-book startup RosettaBooks, accusing it of illegally selling electronic versions of books by Random House authors Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron and Robert B. Parker.
RosettaBooks CEO Arthur Klebanoff countered that his company has contracts with the three authors to publish electronic versions of their works, and that Random House is “wrong” to think it automatically has rights to publish e-books just because it has the rights to the print versions.
The suit goes to the heart of a long-simmering debate between publishers and authors over whether publishers have an automatic right to publish electronic versions of books.
Authors argue that the right must be specified in a contract, much like foreign rights.
Full report is available on: http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB983320054682172823.htm [subscription required] 3rd SCHEMAS Workshop: Managing schemas in a multilingual Semantic Web http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/ws3 A two-day workshop, 10-11th May 2001, Budapest, Hungary co-ordinated by UKOLN Contact: Joy Fraser, Events Manager e-mail: j.v.fraser@ukoln.ac.uk The SCHEMAS Project is an accompanying measure under the European Commission’s IST programme.
Our aim is to support metadata schema implementers and designers by making available information about the proper use of new and emerging metadata standards and by providing guidance on adapting multiple standards for local use in customised schemas.
For further information, see the SCHEMAS Web site at http://www.schemas-forum.org.
One of the major goals of the SCHEMAS Project is to promote harmonisation and co-ordination among designers and implementers of services and projects.
To this end SCHEMAS is encouraging projects to publish their metadata vocabularies through a SCHEMAS Forum Registry which will be presented at the workshop.
Publication of standards-conformant metadata in an open and distributed Web environment is a key aspect of the Semantic Web.
As of 2001, it seems likely that the infrastructure of the Semantic Web will build on the enabling technologies Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Resource Description Framework (RDF).
This, the third SCHEMAS workshop, aims to examine how projects can publish and manage their vocabularies using RDF schemas in a form that is readily harvestible and searchable.
Participants will gain an understanding of how to go about creating and publishing application profiles for their own projects, as well as how these may be publicised and shared through the SCHEMAS Forum Registry.
The Web, by its very nature, is an international arena, requiring a publication environment that supports multiple languages.
The workshop will therefore also explore issues relating to the internationalisation of schemas.
The SCHEMAS project provides a forum for those working in the area of metadata schemas and the workshop will draw upon the experiences of experts working in various domains.
Ample opportunity will be provided for the exchange of ideas and discussion of issues through breakout sessions.
We encourage participation from implementers who are using metadata in varying domains such as digital preservation, rights management, e-commerce, collection description.
Participants should be familiar with the concept of metadata and have an interest in the technologies related to management and use of metadata.
In addition to the particular issues covered by the workshop, this is an opportunity for metadata schema developers from a wide range of domains to meet and discuss common problems and interoperable solutions.
The workshop will be held at the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary, http://www.sztaki.hu/sztaki/.
Booking details can be found on the SCHEMAS Web site, http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/ws3/.
*** Please note, places are limited, and we would like to involve articipants from a range of countries and sectors.
Please do not make travel arrangements before you have received confirmation of your booking *** BOOKING DEADLINE: Friday 20th April, 2001 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Have the CLUMPs Ever Done for Us?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Have the CLUMPs Ever Done for Us?
Buzz data software database accessibility vocabularies schema cataloguing z39.50 marc copac rslp interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Peter Stubley puts the CLUMPs in perspective.
Terminology appears to have played a large part in the work associated with virtual union catalogues.
We have had three years of dealing with new and slightly odd terms and only time will tell whether or not the curious word ‘clump’ becomes established in the library lexicon or whether it is simply a minor blip in cataloguing, networking and service history.
Rather like the term UKLDS.
Many readers will be too young to remember the UKLDS – United Kingdom Library Database System – an initiative begun in 1981 under the auspices of the CAG (Co-operative Automation Group) to consider the possibility of creating a centralised bibliographic database – a National Union Catalogue – for the UK.
This considered technical and operational factors from a completely centralised model at one end of the spectrum to a fully distributed model at the other, together with combinations of the two approaches.
The project foundered for two main reasons: lack of central funding – at the time from the Office of Arts and Libraries – and a conflict between the commercial interests of some key players – related to the value associated with bibliographic records – and the non-commercial interests of the wider library community.
In July 1984 a press release was issued [1] signalling the end of the UKLDS while including the interesting – in the present clumps context – statement:   … what is envisaged is a loose series of networking arrangements, resulting in the exchange of data between different parties on mutually agreed terms and conditions.
In this way the co-operatives and the British Library will be free to make arrangements at their own pace with priorities that match their organisational objectives.
CAG will thus formally cease to have as its objective the structured development of UKLDS, although it is expected that the networking arrangements will go a long way towards fulfilling one of the major aims of UKLDS, that of improving the sharing and accessibility of bibliographic records.
Library networking through bilateral arrangement is best facilitated by the development and use of common standards.
CAG has already achieved a great deal in this area, and sees for itself a continuing role in providing a forum for the discussion of issues of common interest and concern and the progression of shared standards, for example, in telecommunications.
While discussing the transience of terminology it is interesting to note that the once common EMMA – Extra MARC Material – that crops up from time to time in UKLDS documents has now almost dropped from use, presumably due to the high coverage of published material in bibliographic databases.
With such a closing statement from UKLDS, it is unsurprising that, twelve years later, in 1996, the possibilities for resource sharing and discovery through the implementation of Z39.50 should be seized on so greedily by the library community.
Four years down the line – though two working years for most projects – it is useful to look at the pros and cons of the clumps which can be conveniently considered under four headings:   what have the clumps achieved?
what do clumps do well?
what do clumps do less well?
what remains to be done?
What have the clumps achieved?
There is no doubt that, particularly in the UK, clumps have been responsible for sparking off awareness of Z39.50 and its potential for creating union catalogues in a way that would not have happened through the building up of the physical catalogue model.
The very word ‘clump’, childish and embarrassing in its simplicity, has attracted attention and captured the imagination in a way that a more technical term would have induced boredom, and it is partly for this reason that the UK library community is showing interest in the outcomes of the projects.
While a physical clump such as COPAC is an exceptional bibliographic resource, it is seen in some eyes as wedded to the old ways of doing and therefore viewed as being less imaginative.
Renewed interest in union catalogues has also arisen from the fact that the clumps (and COPAC) have looked towards the idea of union catalogues as tools for end users rather than as a further esoteric manifestation of the black art of the librarian: the catalogue as finding tool to satisfy interlibrary loans.
The need for, and acceptance of, a greater openness is a growing feature of our current society and it is right that end users should have the opportunity to search the holdings of a wide range of publicity-funded libraries for themselves, no longer relying just on librarians’ recommendations.
All developments in union catalogues in the future, whether physical or virtual, must provide improved facilities for end-user access and linked to this has been the introduction and implementation by the clumps of collection descriptions acting as pre-search filters.
By indicating the collection strengths of clump members it should be possible to reduce the overall resource discovery network load and direct searches to just those targets of primary interest.
Different models have been proposed for achieving this and in the CAIRNS clump the technique relies heavily on Conspectus and is referred to as ‘dynamic clumping’.
Additionally, the clumps are interested in the geographic spread of collections, realising that students, researchers and other users will be willing to travel to those cities or regions where there is a particular concentration of resources.
Music Libraries Online, as a subject clump, offers to some extent a special case of the fine tuning of targets, though the use of collection descriptions in this context requires a different perspective, focusing as it must on the particularity of the subject rather than the broad brush approach of the regional clumps.
A real achievement of the UK clumps has been the bringing of the subject approach to union catalogues to centre stage.
None of the clump projects could have reached its present position without strong partnership and co-operation, both within and between projects.
Working together to create a common gateway to their catalogues has strengthened the already substantial bonds between libraries and the pervasiveness of clumping issues has brought together a wide range of staff with different skills and interests.
In his introductory address to the workshop, Chris Batt spoke of the need for co-operation, partnership, common goals, a shared vision, and a focusing on customer need: the clumps projects have exhibited all of these, individually through the building of the common gateways to their joined-up catalogues and jointly through quarterly inter-clumping meetings and the organisation of two annual workshops to spread the clumps gospel.
What do the clumps do well?
Technical, organisational and service issues have always been central to the development of the clumps and it is not surprising that these substantially make up the success list.
Z39.50 has been an almost continuously moving target during the clumps lifetime, whether due to the development of the standard itself, the changing interpretation amongst different library suppliers, or the library community’s move to push things forward.
But the elucidation of technical issues, for example, the spreading of information concerning attributes, profiles, semantics, and indexing methodologies, has led to a successful approach to many of the problems and a greater understanding of the issues involved.
Again, the clumps have successfully worked together – and with their software developers – to resolve these issues.
A related technical success has been the creation of new, well-designed interfaces to catalogues.
RIDING, in particular but not exclusively, has put considerable effort into customising the gateway interface so that not only is the search screen easy to follow but help is readily accessible on the ‘simple search’ and ‘super search’ options, providing hints and tips to guide the user through the intricacies of Z39.50 in a friendly, non-threatening, non-technical way and even including details of the recommended search fields to use for individual targets.
The interface also provides links to collection descriptions, individual library sites, and explains the RIDING Access Policy.
Library services linked to the technical implementation have played a major role in some clumps and are set to become more important in others.
As an example, the RIDING Access Policy (RAP) has arisen directly out of RIDING but is not, of itself, linked technically with the gateway.
Superseding the many and various reciprocal borrowing and access policies that existed in the region, the RAP provides free access and borrowing for all accredited researchers at all RIDING member libraries.
RIDING is also experimenting with interloans integrated into the resource discovery mechanism – mediated by library staff and not providing free end user access – and the other clumps are also moving into this arena.
In terms of the actual resource discovery, all clumps are good at performing ‘quick and dirty’ simultaneous searching across a large number of catalogues, bearing in mind the caveats that are issued on the various help screens.
In fact, the clumps might be said to virtually work as one expects!
However, there are drawbacks with the mechanisms and these are best considered as:       What do clumps do less well?
It must be said that the systematic return of specific and predictable results to the end user does not feature highly on the list of clump attributes.
While it is possible to explain the reasons for the retrieval of particular items (and the lack of retrieval of others), this will bring little consolation to end users (or librarians) who may miss relevant monographs as a result.
The drawbacks of Z39.50 in this area have been described previously in Ariadne [2] and are not dwelt on here.
An associated difficulty is the display of retrieved records, particularly in large result sets, and the difficulty of consolidation.
It would appear likely that the consolidation of the same bibliographic item into a single record with associated holdings across multiple libraries is almost impossible in a clumped environment; at least it has not been achieved easily in the current projects, in spite of efforts at ‘de-duplication’.
This should be much easier to achieve in a physical clump, though some manifestations here are not always as good as one would hope to see.
One criticism of the clumps (that, ironically, does not often appear to be expressed) is that they focus on resource discovery for monographs, whereas certain sectors of the research community in particular have primary interests in serials.
The particular issues surrounding the treatment of serials in Z39.50 systems have been reviewed and documented by the M25 Link clump [3], but the outlook is not optimistic.
Whereas the long-term objective in M25 Link was to provide full details of serials holdings such as volumes and issues held, location information, missing parts, and current availability, it was finally accepted that this would be difficult to deliver via the existing Z39.50 profile.
This was further aggravated by the poor quality of serials holdings information in existing catalogues.
In spite of this, work continues to find a solution to the serials problem.
What remains to be done?
On the technical side, developments such as the Bath Profile [4] and the ZIG Holdings Schema [5] need to be followed and, where possible, adopted in due course with a view to improving interoperability and providing more information for the end user.
Ways of working with clumps of clumps also need investigating, and breaking down clumps to create new groups of targets that can be searched as a single, virtual, whole.
However, these are medium term objectives and there are more pressing needs facing the immediate future of the projects.
The clumps are now, or will be in the very short term, creating their exit strategies to work out how to continue, on the assumption that no further external funding will be forthcoming.
Three major calls for proposals offering some scope for extensions of clump work – from the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme, JISC Learning and Teaching Developments for the DNER, and the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) 2 – closed in early 2000, but at the time of the workshop it is too early to know the outcomes.
All the clumps have identified further development work that would benefit wider take-up within the UK and provide additional advantages to their internal operations and, while some of these may prove successful, it would appear that there is no guaranteed long-term funding from outside the originating consortia.
This is fair, and fits in with the strategy adopted for earlier eLib projects who had to work out their own means of survival but it could result in, if not stillborn projects, clumps with a high infant mortality rate.
But the fate of each clump will presumably rest with their own consortium through a consideration of the technical pros and cons, added value services and, particularly, the level of recurrent funding needed for maintenance, development and associated factors; new, special, funding models may have to be agreed between consortium members to permit the continuation of this type of common working.
[The day following the workshop, M25 Link found that they had been successful in their free-standing bid for additional funds to JISC.
This means that together with 25% funding from the M25 Consortium itself, the clump will be able to continue its work until July 2001.]
Even if the four clumps continue, one has to ask what the future might hold for these types of initiative?
Is there value in having just four clumps in the UK or does the idea of a virtual union catalogue require that the clump concept is grown until the whole country is covered?
If the existing clumps continue – in their present or an advanced form – they will still represent a major resource and one that is not completely covered by any other means.
RIDING, for example, provides access to around 5.5 million bibliographic records, less than half of which are available via COPAC.
But while these substantial resources have been created, the original incentive behind the clump initiative will appear to have been lost if other regions or subject areas are not encouraged to come forward to create clump consortia.
The question is, what factors will encourage the creation of new clump consortia if the external funding incentive is missing?
A greater emphasis on regional co-operation arising out of the work of the Regional Development Agencies may have some effect but any potential new clump will be looking critically at the reports on costings, performance, evaluation and value-added services coming from the existing work before taking the plunge into quite new waters.
And if these reports are negative, future progress will inevitably be stalled.
It is appropriate to conclude this overview of the current state of clumping with a look forward to the Feasibility Study for a UK National Union Catalogue.
The call for proposals was issued with the RSLP2 papers in late 1999 and it is jointly supported by RSLP, the British Library and JISC.
The call was an extensive document and suggested the methodology for undertaking the study, in addition to indicating a number of possible models that could be considered: a physical COPAC-style system; an extension of the clumps; joining other ‘supranational’ initiatives such as RLG or OCLC; and various combinations of these.
An investigation into the possibilities of creating (separately or integrated with a monographs catalogue) a National Union Serials Catalogue will form a major part of the Study.
It is expected that the Feasibility Study will be awarded in late March/early April with the final report to be delivered by 30 November 2000.
By that time, we might really be able to agree on what the clumps have done for us, and maybe the saga will be even longer running, ensuring that this insignificant five-letter word continues well into the new millennium, finding its own, enduring, niche in library vocabulary.
References   [1].
The UKLDS report appeared in Vine 57, December 1984, pp.
34–47.
[2].
See, for example, Stubley, Peter, Clumps as catalogues: virtual success or failure: <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/distributed/distukcat2.html> and the references therein.
[3].
The M25 Link Serils report can be found at: <http://www.M25lib.ac.uk/M25link/documentation/serials_report/serials_report6_issue1.html>.
[4].
The Bath Profile: an international Z39.50 specification for library applications and resource discovery.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/activities/z3950/int_profile/bath/draft/> [5].
Z39.50 Holdings Schema: <http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/holdings.doc> Author Details   Peter Stubley Assistant Director University of Sheffield Library University of Sheffield.
(Also Project Director of the RIDING clump) Email: <p.stubley@shef.ac.uk> Web site: www.shef.ac.uk Article Title: “What have the clumps ever done for us?” Author: Peter Stubley Publication Date: 22-Mar-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 23 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/stubley/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DISinHE: Web Content Accessibility Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DISinHE: Web Content Accessibility Buzz html css accessibility copyright video hypertext multimedia url Citation BibTex RIS Paul Booth discusses Web content accessibility.
The web is one of the most rapidly developing media for communication and information storage and retrieval available today.
Many people with extra-ordinary needs (such as users of palm-tops, legacy systems, and car-based systems, as well as disabled people using special technology) are restricted from access to the information available on the web, due to poor design caused by both a lack of information and sources of good advice for developers.
Currently Higher Education in the UK is exempt from legislation protecting the rights of disabled people to equal access to information.
However, pending changes to the law may remove this status, leaving many universities with potentially illegal information and courseware on their web servers.
Help is at hand however: on May the 5th of this year the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the release of its Web content accessibility guidelines recommendation, a set of definitive guidelines for web developers to ensure the accessibility of what is created.
"The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines explain what to do," said Tim Berners-Lee, Director of W3C in the organisations press release, "It has always been difficult to know, when making a site more accessible, which changes are critical.
These guidelines answer that question, and set common expectations so that providers of Web sites and users can be much more strategic.
The bar has been set, and technologically it is not a very high bar.
Some of the items in these guidelines will be unnecessary once authoring tools do them automatically.
Now it is time to see which sites can live up to this."
As a part of the Guidelines, the W3C have released checklists for web designers to review web sites.
These lists clearly delineate three different levels of priority in the guidelines, based on that particular checkpoints’ impact on disability: Priority one checkpoints must be satisfied by the developer, "Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document."
Priority two checkpoints should be satisfied by the developer or several groups of people will have difficulty in accessing the information on the page.
Priority three checkpoints may be satisfied to improve the access of the page.
The full checklist is available on-line from the W3C web site (see below).
In addition to the W3C guidelines, accessibility validation tools are also available.
These tools, for example Bobby from the Centre for Applied Special Technology (CAST), validate and rate entire web sites against many of the checkpoints and issues raised by the W3C.
Checklists and site validation are extremely useful tools for developers to have.
In order to prevent mistakes being made at design time, however, the consortium have also devised a QuickTips card.
The aim of these is to raise awareness of the key concepts of accessible web design.
The top ten key concepts of web accessibility quoted from the W3C QuickTips cards are: Images & animations.
Use the alt attribute to describe the function of all visuals.
Image maps.
Use client-side MAP and text for hotspots.
Multimedia.
Provide captioning and transcripts of audio, descriptions of video, and accessible versions in case inaccessible formats are used.
Hypertext links.
Use text that makes sense when read out of context.
For instance, do not use "click here."
Page organization.
Use headings, lists, and consistent structure.
Use CSS for layout and style where possible.
Graphs & charts.
Summarize or use the longdesc attribute.
Scripts, applets, & plug-ins.
Provide alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported.
Frames.
Label with the title or name attribute.
Tables.
Make line by line reading sensible.
Summarize.
Avoid using tables for column layout.
Check your work.
Validate the HTML.
Use evaluation tools and text-only browsers to verify accessibility.
For more information about Disability and Information Systems in Higher Education, please visit the DISinHE web site: http://www.disinhe.ac.uk/ The DISinHE Centre is a JISC funded project.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and checklists are available from the W3C web site: W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI/ Guidelines: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ Checklist: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990324/full-checklist.html The Centre for Applied Special Technology (CAST)’s Bobby tool: http://www.cast.org/bobby/ W3C material quoted here is reproduced with permission and is Copyright © World Wide Web Consortium <http://www.w3.org> , (Massachusetts Institute of Technology <http://www.lcs.mit.edu/> , Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique <http://www.inria.fr/> , Keio University <http://www.keio.ac.jp/>).
All Rights Reserved.
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ Article Title: "DisinHe: Web content accessibility" Author: Paul Booth Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/disinhe/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz archives copyright jpg interoperability Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz software framework portal archives thesaurus copyright cataloguing lcsh e-learning ddc e-science research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
The 7th Institutional Web Management Workshop : Supporting Our Users [April 2003] The 7th Institutional Web Management Workshop will take place at the University of Kent on 11-13th June 2003.
The theme of this year's workshop, the seventh in the series, is Supporting Our Users.
The Institutional Web Management Workshop series is organised by UKOLN's UK Web Focus and its aim is to support members of institutional Web management teams within the UK Higher and Further Educational communities.
Online booking for the workshop is now open.
Further information at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2003/ .
HILT Phase II [March 2003] Dennis Nicholson reports on the second phase of the High Level Thesaurus Project.
HILT Phase II is researching, implementing and evaluating a pilot terminologies server for the JISC Information Environment, looking at a number of approaches to dealing with the problems of harmonising subject access across JISC services that use different subject or classification schemes.
The pilot will include the DDC, UNESCO, and LCSH schemes at minimum, and will also look at common UK variations on subject terms from at least one subject scheme.
The schemes will be mapped to each other using a common spine.
Primary aims are to: Provide a practical experimental focus within which to investigate and establish subject terminology service requirements for the JISC Information Environment, with particular reference to collection level requirements in JISC collections and services Make recommendations as regards a possible future service, taking into account a range of factors, including a cost-benefit analysis.
In addition to JISC who fund the project and are active participants, and the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University, who are the lead site, the project has active participation from UKOLN, OCLC, mda (formerly Museum Documentation Association), National Council on Archives, The British Library, National Grid for Learning (NGfL) Scotland, Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC), Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC), Scottish University for Industry (SUfI), The Cura Consortium, Willpower Information and Wordmap.
Further information at http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ (HILT) and at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ (JISC Information Environment).
Organisations or individuals can participate more directly in the project by joining the HILT stakeholders list.
Realising the Potential of eLearning [April 2003] A workshop organised by the EPSRC, DfES, ESRC and the eScience Programme Educational technology has the potential to transform how people of all ages learn and develop skills.
The UK has been a world leader in research into distance learning (through the Open University), intelligent tutoring systems, mobile learning, and learning communities, but currently suffers from a lack of investment and coordination, particularly in comparison with the United States.
This workshop aims to bring together leading academics, educational practitioners, policy makers and funding bodies with a view to developing a clear set of proposals for a focused UK research initiative to realise the potential of ICTs to benefit learning.
If you would like to attend this workshop, please contact Dolly Parkinson (Dolly.Parkinson@epsrc.ac.uk) by 5pm on 1 May 2003 at the very latest.
Please note that spaces for the workshop are limited and will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.
TEL Final Conference The TEL project is pleased to announce The European Library (TEL) Final Conference at the National Library of Lithuania in Vilnius on 24 September 2003, 2 6 p.m. [April 2003] The European Library, TEL, is a pioneering collaboration between a number of European national libraries.
Created under the auspices of CENL, the Conference of European national librarians, it will establish a professionally designed and maintained single access point to selected parts of their holdings spanning a range of collections in all the partner national libraries so that the informed citizen in any country can utilise the resources not only of his or her own national library but also, during the same search session, the resources of any other partner national libraries which may hold material relevant to his or her interest.
This discovery and access tool will be multilingual and it will support the various character sets in use in CENL libraries.
Initially, the feasibility of this venture is being tested, with part-funding from the European Commission, in a project in which the participants are CENL, the national libraries of Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom along with ICCU, the national central cataloguing institute from Italy.
In time it is anticipated that more and more of the CENL member libraries will join the enterprise as full partners.
In order to achieve this goal the participants are working towards the establishment of mechanisms whereby a common portal will enable access to the collections of the united national libraries to any citizen via the Internet.
At the TEL Final Conference the project will present its results and give an outlook for further plans and developments.
The participation in the conference is free of charge.
Conference language is English.
A registration form and more information about the programme can be found at the project website: http://www.europeanlibrary.org and follow the link to "Final Conference".
Athens wins JISC UK HE and FE contract [March 2003] JISC is pleased to announce that the contract to provide an Access Management service for UK Further and Higher Education has been awarded to EduServ.
This means that institutions will continue to access electronic resources via the Athens system for a further three years, from 1 August 2003 31 July 2006.
Representatives from the JISC's Committee for Content Services (JCCS) undertook a thorough review of the technical requirements of the Access Management service during the procurement process to ensure that the chosen provider will supply a service that fully meets the needs of the education community.
JISC and EduServ will continue to work together over the next three years to develop the Athens service further for the benefit of the community.
Please see the EduServ announcement at http://www.athensams.net/news/jisc_contract2003.html for further information.
SEPIA descriptions of photograph collections draft [April 2003] Within the framework of the EU-funded Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access (SEPIA)-Project (http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/), the working group on descriptive models has been working on an advisory report to provide recommendations on how to describe a photographic collection.
A draft version of this report is now available for comments at: http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/workinggroups/wp5/advisory30.pdf (PDF, 1619 KB) The task of the working group has been to analyse existing methods to describe photographs and devise a basic model.
The SEPIA model will be presented in an advisory report and applied in a software tool.
The draft report contains an extensive overview of the multi-level structure and individual elements of the model, a recommended mapping to Qualified Dublin Core and a summary of core elements.
The core elements are meant to be used as guidelines for institutions that wish to have a basic description model for their photo collection.
The model as a whole provides a more detailed set of guidelines.
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OpenResolver: A Simple OpenURL Resolver Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OpenResolver: A Simple OpenURL Resolver Buzz software framework javascript html database metadata doi standardisation browser identifier cataloguing opac gif perl copac openurl licence ftp cookie url sfx Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell describes UKOLN's OpenResolver, a freely available demonstration OpenURL resolver.
This article provides a brief introduction to the deployment and use of the OpenURL [1] [2] by walking through a few simple examples using UKOLN's OpenResolver, a demonstration OpenURL resolution service [3].
The intention is to demonstrate the ability of OpenURL resolvers to provide context-sensitive, extended services based on the metadata embedded in OpenURLs and to describe the construction of simple OpenURL resolver software.
The software described here is made available on an opensource basis for those who would like to experiment with the use of OpenURLs in their own services.
The OpenURL is an important technology in the development of shared, open, reference linking services and is seen as one of the key 'access' components of the developing DNER information environment architecture [4].
The DNER enables people to 'discover', 'access' and 'use' a wide variety of resources.
OpenURL resolvers can locate various services associated with a resource, including services that allow the user to request and access it they can help to solve the 'appropriate copy' problem, namely: Having discovered a resource, how is the user provided with access to the most appropriate copy, given user and institutional preferences, access rights, cost, etc.?
OpenURL The OpenURL provides a mechanism for encoding a citation for an information resource, typically a bibliographic resource, as a URL.
The OpenURL is, in effect, an actionable URL that transports metadata, or keys to access metadata, for the object for which the OpenURL is provided.
The target of the OpenURL is an OpenURL resolver that offers context-sensitive services based on that metadata.
The OpenURL resolver is sometimes referred to as the user's Institutional Service Component (ISC).
The citation is provided by either using a global identifier for the resource, for example a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) [5], or by encoding metadata about the resource, for example title, author, journal title, etc., or by some combination of both approaches.
It is also possible to encode a local identifier for the resource within the OpenURL.
In combination with information about where the OpenURL was created, this allows software that receives the OpenURL to request further metadata about the information resource.
An OpenURL comprises two parts, a BASEURL and a QUERY.
The BASEURL identifies the OpenURL resolver that will provide context sensitive services for the OpenURL.
The BASEURL is specific to the particular user that is being sent the OpenURL it identifies the user's preferred OpenURL resolver.
In many cases this will be the resolver offered by the institution to which the user belongs.
Services that embed OpenURLs in their Web interfaces, for example in their search results, must develop mechanisms for associating a BASEURL with each end-user.
One way of doing this is to store the BASEURL in a cookie in the user's Web browser, another is to store the BASEURL along with other user preferences.
The QUERY part can be made up of one or more DESCRIPTIONs.
Each DESCRIPTION comprises the metadata attributes and values that make up the citation for the resource.
A full breakdown of the components of the DESCRIPTION is not provided here.
See the OpenURL specification for full details [6].
Here is an example OpenURL: http://resolver.ukoln.ac.uk/openresolver/?sid=ukoln:ariadne&genre=article &atitle=Information%20gateways:%20collaboration%20on%20content &title=Online%20Information%20Review&issn=1468-4527&volume=24 &spage=40&epage=45&artnum=1&aulast=Heery&aufirst=Rachel In this example the BASEURL is <http://resolver.ukoln.ac.uk/openresolver/>, the URL of the UKOLN OpenResolver demonstrator service.
The rest of the OpenURL is the QUERY, which is made up of a single DESCRIPTION of an article entitled 'Information gateways: collaboration on content' by Rachel Heery.
The article was published in 'Online Information Review' volume 24.
OpenResolver walkthrough It is recommended that you try out the following examples while reading this article, using your preferred graphical Web browser, for example Internet Explorer or Netscape.
Open a browser window and navigate to the following URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/openurl/ You should see a Web page like the one below: Imagine that the right-hand side of the page contains three items in a course reading list or forms part of the output of a search against a bibliographic database of some kind.
The right-hand side of the page is dynamic, in that the image and target URL associated with the button next to each of the three listed items is dependant on the preferred OpenURL resolver of the current end-user.
Notice that the first time you visit this page you will not have a preferred OpenURL resolver set, so the buttons indicate 'No resolver'.
The left-hand side of the page allows you to set your preferred OpenURL resolver.
Notice that in this example, you are only given a choice of two resolvers: UKOLN's OpenResolver service and the sample SFX resolver offered by Ex Libris [7].
In this demonstrator these two bits of functionality (setting your preferred resolver and displaying some citations) have been combined into a single Web page.
This is unlikely to be typical however.
OpenURL aware services (i.e.
services that can generate OpenURLs) are more likely to offer a single place on their site where you can set all your user-preferences, including your preferred OpenURL resolver.
An OpenURL aware service, such as the Web page above, needs to maintain knowledge of each user's preferred OpenURL resolver.
In this example, the BASEURL is stored as a cookie within the end-user's browser.
However, other approaches can be used, for example storing the BASEURL at the server along with other preferences associated with the user.
Select the 'OpenResolver' button on the left-hand side to set your preferred resolver.
The link associated with this button calls a CGI script called cookiepusher.cgi (based on the Cookiepusher developed by Ex Libris [8]).
The cookiepusher.cgi script takes two arguments, the 'BASE-URL' of an OpenURL resolver and a 'Redirect' URL.
The script sets a browser cookie containing the BASEURL and then issues an HTTP redirect to the specified URL.
In this case the redirect simply results in the OpenURL demonstrator page being loaded again (but this time with a cookie in the browser).
Notice that the buttons associated with each of the items on the right-hand side have now changed to indicate that your browser has stored a cookie containing the BASEURL for the OpenResolver service.
In this example, these buttons are generated dynamically by some JavaScript in the Web page.
In many services they will be generated dynamically by the Web server that is serving the page, perhaps as part of delivering some search results.
The code used to generate the buttons in this example consists of the following JavaScript embedded at the top of the page: <script language="Javascript"> <!-////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // taken from SFX version 3.0 // // version check var version = 1; var appname = ""; if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Netscape") >= 0) {  appname = "ns"; } else if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Explorer") >= 0) {  appname = "ie"; }  if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mozilla/2") >= 0) { version = 2; } else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mozilla/3") >= 0) {   version = 3; } else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mozilla/4") >= 0) {  version = 4; } // Read cookies function loadCookie(name) {   var allcookies = document.cookie;   if (allcookies == "") return "";   var start = allcookies.indexOf(name + "=");   if (start == -1) return ""; start += name.length + 1;   var end = allcookies.indexOf(';',start);   if (end == -1) end = allcookies.length;   return allcookies.substring(start,end); } // Read the user-OpenURL cookie that has been set by the // information system.
Give the BASEURL parameter the // value of the user-OpenURL cookie BASEURL = unescape(loadCookie("user-OpenURL")); // Provide the service identifier sid to be included in the // OpenURL // sid = 'ukoln:'; // Define a function that will open the OpenResolver menu screen // when the OpenResolverButton is clicked.
// object_info refers to the OBJECT-DESCRIPTION part of the // OpenURL.
function openWin(object_info) {        var url = BASEURL + "?"
+ "sid=" + sid + "&" + object_info;        window2 = window.open(url , "OpenResolverMenu" ,                    "location=no," +                    "status=yes," +                    "menubar=no," +                    "scrollbars=yes," +                    "resizable=yes," +                    "width=460," +                    "height=420");           if ((version>2 && appname=="ns")||(version>3 &&                appname=="ie"))                                   window2.focus(); } // Define a function that will insert the OpenResolverButton and that // will hyperlink the OpenResolverButton with the appropriate URL.
function OpenResolverButton(object_info) {       if (BASEURL.length < 4 && BASEURL.indexOf("http:") < 0) {           document.write("<img src=\"noresolver.gif\" alt=\"No OpenURL resolver              configured\" align=\"right\">");           return false;       }       var url = "javascript:openWin('" + object_info + "')";       var anchorStr = "<img src=\"" + BASEURL + "/sfx.gif\" alt=\"Resolve          OpenURL...\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\">";       document.write(anchorStr.link(url));       return true; } // // taken from SFX version 3.0 /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // --> </script> The following code is then used to generate each button: <script language="Javascript"> <!-OpenResolverButton("genre=article&sid=ukoln:&atitle=Information%20gateways:%20co llaboration%20on%20content&title=Online%20Information%20Review&issn=1468-4527&vo lume=24&spage=40&epage=45&artnum=1&aulast=Heery&aufirst=Rachel"); // --> </script> The OpenResolverButton() is passed the QUERY part of the OpenURL and is called once for each button on the page.
It combines the QUERY with the BASEURL extracted from the cookie and generates some HTML for the button.
Select the top OpenResolver button on the right-hand side.
A new, smaller window should open up: This window is the output of the OpenResolver OpenURL resolver service.
We'll take a look at the contents of the page in a moment.
However, before we do that it is worth noting that everyone reading this article and trying out these examples will be seeing the same thing at this point.
Instead, imagine a scenario in which there are lots of OpenURL resolution services available.
For example, many institutions may begin offering their own resolvers.
There may even be personal OpenURL resolvers available.
In such a scenario, each person reading this article is likely to want to set a different resolver BASEURL, and each person is therefore like to be presented with a different set of resolved services at this point.
This is the real strength of the OpenURL approach resolvers provide users with a set of context sensitive services that are tailored to their personal and/or institutional preferences, needs and access rights.
Now, back to that window.
The Web page it contains is the output of some relatively simple OpenURL resolver software.
The software has taken the metadata embedded in the OpenURL and used it to point to other services: The DOI in the OpenURL has been resolved to provide a URL for one of the on-line versions of the article.
(Note, that although the article is mirrored by UKOLN, the resolver points to the original version in the US.
Future version of the OpenResolver software will attempt to resolve the DOI into more than one URL, and to offer the most appropriate URL for any given end-user first.)
The main words in the article title have been used to form the basis of searches against well-known Web search engines.
The journal title has been used as the basis for a journal search of the University of Bath OPAC (note this service may not be available off-campus) and COPAC.
Finally, the first author's name (the OpenURL metadata only includes the name of the first author) is used as the basis of a Google search.
In order to do this, the OpenResolver software must be able to extract metadata (as text strings) out of the OpenURL and plug it into the URLs for other services.
Services that are compatible with this approach are sometimes referred to as being SFX-aware.
When the UKOLN OpenResolver was first developed, the University of Bath OPAC was not SFX-aware.
There was no way of creating a Bath OPAC URL containing the ISSN for a journal or the ISBN for a book all OPAC use was session-based, with journal titles only discoverable by searching.
This has now been rectified.
However, there is another, more general, problem.
The OpenResolver software simply takes the ISSN out of the OpenURL and inserts it into a University of Bath OPAC URL.
It has no real knowledge of whether that journal (or a particular journal issue) is actually held by the University of Bath library or not.
Links are created 'just in time', with no guarantees that they will actually point to anything useful.
As a partial solution to this problem, the DNER architecture proposes that OpenURL resolvers should be able to obtain holdings, and other, information from an 'institutional profile' service, indicating which journals are held by which libraries.
Go back to the first window and select the second OpenResolver button (the one alongside the Heery citation).
Now select the bottom link on the OpenResolver output for that OpenURL.
This link does a Google search for 'Rachel Heery'.
A third window will open up displaying the results of this search: Close this window and return to the first window.
Select the third OpenResolver button.
Take a look at the OpenResolver output: Select the first Google link on the page.
This performs a search of Google based on the words in the book title: Selecting the 'Bath OPAC' link displays the record (or records) in the University of Bath library OPAC that matches the ISBN encoded in the OpenURL metadata for this book: Finally, selecting the 'Amazon' link brings up the Web page for that ISBN in the Amazon (UK) [9] online catalogue.
OpenResolver software As indicated above the OpenResolver software is relatively simple probably too simplistic to form the basis of real services.
However, the source code is freely available under a GNU Public License [10].
It is written in Perl and may well form a suitable basis for more significant OpenURL resolution service development.
In the main, the software simply extracts portions of metadata from the OpenURL and reformats those text strings within the URL for another service.
For example, it extracts the ISBN from the OpenURL and reformats it as an Amazon 'query' as shown below: DOI resolution is slightly more complex than this, because the DOI has to be resolved into a URL.
Although in theory it is possible to resolve DOIs using the Handle service [11], the current OpenResolver software takes the simpler approach of encoding the DOI as a normal DOI URL, issuing an HTTP request for it and then trapping the resulting HTTP redirect from <http://dx.doi.org/>.
Summary and conclusions The following diagram summaries the delivery of the OpenResolver demonstration service described above: The OpenURL demonstration page is served by the UKOLN Web server.
JavaScript in the page obtains the BASEURL of an OpenURL resolver from a cookie from the user's browser and uses it to generate the buttons next to each citation on the page.
The user selects one of the buttons and a new window in their browser is directed to the OpenURL resolver of their choice.
The OpenResolver software constructs a list of services based on the metadata encoded in the OpenURL.
The user selects one of the services listed in the OpenResolver output.
A third window is opened and directed to the chosen service.
This has been a very quick tour of the functionality offered by the OpenResolver and by the OpenURL more generally.
There are signs that the OpenURL is already generating significant interest and a number of publishers, intermediaries and other service providers are committed to its support [12].
The OpenURL is currently moving through the NISO fast-track standardisation process.
It is anticipated that there will be some changes to the OpenURL specification as standardisation takes place.
In particular, it is intended to widen the applicability of OpenURLs beyond the bibliographic arena.
While there are obvious applications for providing access to books and journals through libraries, bookshops and other document deliver services, the OpenURL appears to also offer a simple mechanism for linking together bibliographic and other services in interesting, novel and useful ways.
References OpenURL Overview <http://www.sfxit.com/openurl/> Open Linking in the Scholarly Information Environment Using the OpenURL Framework Herbert Van de Sompel, Oren Beit-Arie D-Lib Magazine, Volume 7, Number 3 <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/vandesompel/03vandesompel.html> OpenURL demonstrator <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/openurl/> The DNER Technical Architecture: scoping the information environment Andy Powell, Liz Lyon <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/> The Digital Object Identifier <http://www.doi.org/> OpenURL Syntax Description Herbert Van de Sompel, Patrick Hochstenbach, Oren Beit-Arie <http://www.sfxit.com/openurl/openurl.html> Ex Libris SFX Web pages <http://www.sfxit.com/> SFX: Cookiepusher document <http://www.sfxit.com/openurl/cookiepusher.html> amazon.co.uk <http://www.amazon.co.uk/> OpenResolver source code <ftp://ftp.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/tools/openresolver/> Handle System <http://www.handle.net/> SFX: OpenURL-enabled resources <http://www.sfxit.com/sources-list.html> Author Details Andy Powell Assistant Director, Distributed Systems and Services UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath E-mail: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "OpenResolver: a Simple OpenURL Resolver" Author: Andy Powell Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/resolver/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Corner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Corner Buzz data javascript opac algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Dave Beckett discusses the best of the search engine features.
Are you trying to search for something difficult and end up with enormous and completely useless results?
The query in the table below is rather contrived but indicates the problem.
In this article I hope to help you with these kinds of situation by pointing you in the right place, showing you the best of the search engine (SE) features and giving tips on managing the output that you get when a query returns thousands of answers.
I run several search engines myself including the Academic Directory[3], UK Internet Sites[4] and research in the area.
Search Engine Est.
Size (May 1998) Results of searching for The Internet AltaVista[1] 140M About 47,565,550 matches were found HotBot[2] 110M Web Results 7939803 matches.
Breakdown: internet 4602458, the 47280842 Specialised Searching The first choice to make is where to search; and this may not be at a web crawler SE.
This table lists some good choices for specialised searches: Searching ...?
Try these USENET news DejaNews[5] (also available via other SEs) Stuff printed on dead trees Your local OPAC, NISS[6], BIDS[7], eLib[8] projects, Northern Light[9] Pictures Lycos[10], Yahoo!
Image Surfer[11] Sounds Lycos News BBC News[12], CNN[13], NewBot[14], NewsIndex[15], most big SEs UK Web Yahoo!
UK[16], Search UK[17], UK Index[18], InfoSeek UK[19], Excite[20], Lycos .ac.uk Web Academic Directory(I run this.)
European Web Excite, Euroferret[21], HotBot Particular country Web HotBot In a date range HotBot In a particular language AltaVista (translations too) Subject Specific Searches If you are very lucky, there may be a subject-specific site that you can use where professional cataloguers have been paid to find web resources and provide high quality records.
For example there are several eLib Subject Based Information Gateways (SBIGs).
Some of those projects are experimenting with web crawls of the sites they have hand-picked, so searching there should return highly relevant results.
So how do you find one of these sites?
Try using an appropriate authority in your subject.
If you have a professional body or association, look at their web site for links.
If that isn't possible, try a general SE or a directory service.
Search.com[22] contains a list of over 100 specialises SEs and may be a good place to start.
Search a Web Directory There are a few well known large directories of which Yahoo!
is the largest and best with over 500K web sites listed (and in fact is the #1 used site on the Web).
It is always a good idea to search there or maybe one of the other smaller sites such as LookSmart[23].
There are also some non-commercial directories such as WWWVL[24] (a site started by a creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee) and the new NewHoo![25].
Search a Web Crawler If you have got this far, you want to get something on the web, or the specialised searches didn't get quite what you wanted.
Coverage and freshness of the web crawls is important and all the web crawlers have different sizes and activity patterns.
Search Engine Watch[26] keeps up-to-date estimates on the sizes[27] but this isn't the full story.
A paper[28] at the WWW7 conference estimated the size of the web in November 1997 as 200M static pages but the joint coverage of the 4 largest SEs was only 160M and the overlap between them was only 2.2M or 1.4% of all pages!
At the current date, AltaVista is probably still the largest by far, with HotBot a close second and Northern Light getting larger rapidly.
Most of the largest SEs crawl are very active, checking or adding millions of pages each day so for freshness, chose the largest crawlers.
Each of the SEs has a different set of indexing and search features that can be exploited which may make the difference.
Getting Your Search Query Right The worst thing you can do to an SE is to present a one word query with a very common item.
If you look at some of the internet search engine spy pages[29] many people really do this.
Thus you should really choose some extra words.
Can't think of any?
Well try your one-word search on Excite and use its suggested words feature.
10 related words are suggested with the results of every search (JavaScript support is required for you to pick them via clicking; but you can always type them in too).
Assuming you have managed to get a couple of words, now you can do something with them.
If you try a general query on a SE like above, you end up with millions of results, so it is a good idea to modify the query.
Most SEs allow you use these methods, although the syntax varies and sometimes it is found on an advanced search page: Match Any Results may contain any of the words Match All Results must contain all of the words Exclude / Require Exclude / Require certain mix of words Phrase Searching Require words in the exact order given Proximity Look for words near other words Wildcards Partial match on words; do you know how to spell it?
For the details of which engines support which features, see the Search Engine Watch Power Searching page at [30].
Managing Millions So you have chosen a SE and tweaked the query to match what you want but still end up with an unmanageable set of results.
There are two types of page that you really want to identify[31]: Authorities -A page that contains a lot of information about a topic.
Hubs -A page that contains a large number of links to pages containing information about the topic.
People who create such pages do tend to submit them to directories and search engines or maybe get links made from other related authorities or hubs.
Check there if you can find those sites there but here are some techniques I suggest in working with SEs: Refine the query by adding extra keywords Excite is good at this; this should help you find authorities.
AltaVista allows you to refine by adding/excluding words that show up by selecting the Refine button and picking the word lists that are/are not related.
Search in the query results InfoSeek allows you to restrict searches to the result of the previous query, thus makes it easy to refine when you are confident the answer is in the larger set of results.
Run a query based on a page Lycos and Excite give you More Like This links which do a search based on one of the result pages; this can help identify hubs Show more results on the page Some SEs like HotBot allow up to 100 results per page and most allow you to just see the page titles.
This can allow you to get a good overview.
Sort the results Excite allows you to view the results by Web site -this can make it easy to identify potential authority sites with lots of pages related to your search.
Look at the matches per word PlanetSearch[32] by default shows how each word matched the results as coloured bars and you can show up to 250 results per page.
Try a meta-crawler Metacrawler[33] allows you to search 5 big SEs in parallel and merge the results.
This has the advantage of leveraging different scoring methods but can lose important results lower down in the replies and there are only three query types you can use.
FAQs ''So what search engine do you use?''
HotBot mostly, with all the options on; AltaVista for coverage and others as need be.
''Why?''
HotBot has loads of juicy features, is large enough and crawls often to keep the index fresh.
One downside is that it is US-based and has no local partner.
References Here, .com sites are in USA, .uk are in the UK unless otherwise indicated.
[1] AltaVista http://www.altavista.digital.com/ Note: Since the merger with Compaq, the European AltaVista service at altavista.telia.com does not seem to be updated.
You will have to use the US one.
[2] HotBot http://www.hotbot.com/ Inktomi provide the technology and data behind HotBot and also power searches at Yahoo!, CNET's Snap and Disney's Internet Guide (DIG).
Searches there mostly have the same functionality as HotBot.
[3] The Academic Directory, HENSA Unix http://acdc.hensa.ac.uk/ I made this.
[4] UK Internet Sites, HENSA Unix http://www.hensa.ac.uk/uksites/ and this.
[5] DejaNews http://www.dejanews.com/ [6] National Information Services and Systems (NISS) http://www.niss.ac.uk/ [7] Bath Information & Data Services (BIDS) http://www.bids.ac.uk/ [8] The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ [9] Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com/ See last months article for more information.
[10] Lycos UK, (actually in Germany) http://www.lycos.co.uk/ [11] Yahoo!
(US) Image Surfer http://isurf.yahoo.com/ [12] BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/ [13] CNN (European mirror) http://europe.cnn.com/ [14] NewBot http://www.newbot.com/ [15] News Index http://www.newsindex.com/ [16] Yahoo!
UK & Ireland http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ [17] Search UK http://www.searchuk.com/ [18] UK Index http://www.ukindex.co.uk/ [19] InfoSeek UK (actually in USA) http://www.infoseek.co.uk/ [20] Excite UK (actually in USA) http://www.excite.co.uk/ [21] EuroFerret (actually in UK) http://www.euroferret.com/ [22] Search.com, CNET http://www.search.com/ [23] LookSmart http://www.looksmart.com/ [24] World Wide Web Virtual Library http://www.vlib.org/ UK Mirror: http://www.mth.uea.ac.uk/VL/Overview.html [25] NewHoo!
http://www.newhoo.com/ [26] Search Engine Watch, Mecklermedia http://www.SearchEngineWatch.com/ [27] Search Engine Sizes, Search Engine Watch http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/sizes.html [28] A Technique for measuring the relative size and overlap of public Web search engines, Bharat and Broder, Digital Systems Research Center, USA in Proceedings of WWW7, April 1998.
[29] Yahoo!
Search Engine Spying Page http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ Computers_and_Internet/ Internet/ World_Wide_Web/ Searching_the_Web/ Indices_to_Web_Documents/ Random_Links/ Search_Engine_Spying/ [30] Search Engine Watch Power Searching http://www.searchenginewatch.com/facts/powersearch.html [31] Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, Jon Kleinberg in: Proceedings of 9th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998; also appears as IBM Research Report RJ 10076(91892) May 1997 http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.ps [32] Planet Search http://www.planetsearch.com/ [33] Metacrawler http://www.metacrawler.com/ Author details Dave Beckett Research Fellow Computing Laboratory, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK Email: D.J.Beckett@ukc.ac.uk Personal Web Page: http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/djb1/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Scientific, Industrial, and Cultural Heritage: A Shared Approach Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Scientific, Industrial, and Cultural Heritage: A Shared Approach Buzz data software framework api database infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation accessibility identifier vocabularies schema repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing multimedia z39.50 visualisation cache aggregation provenance mis personalisation telnet authentication interoperability privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Lorcan Dempsey presents a research framework for libraries, archives and museums prepared for the European Commission.
The Information Society Technologies programme within the EU's Framework Programme Five supports access to, and preservation of, digital cultural content.
This document describes some common concerns of libraries, archival institutions and museums as they work together to address the issues the Programme raises.
This accounts for three major emphases in the document.
First, discussion is very much about what brings these organisations together, rather than about what separates them.
Second, it describes an area within which a research agenda can be identified; its purpose is not to propose a programme of work or actions, rather a framework within such a programme might be developed.
Finally, although the main focus is on access to resources, this is placed in an overall life-cycle context.
Broad Goals This document is based on the assumption that libraries, archives and museums have shared research interests.
We can identify several broad goals which underpin these, and which encourage collaborative activity between libraries, museums and archival institutions.
These include: To release the value of Europe's scientific, industrial and cultural heritage in creative use by its citizens.
To engage with the cultural identities and aspirations of Europe and its peoples.
To develop practices appropriate to upholding the values and purposes of the library, archival and museum traditions in a digital environment.
To explore what it means to develop virtual civic presence.
To explore sustainable economic models which support both development and continued equitable access to the cultural heritage.
A feature of change is that we have no settled vocabulary.
Some terms may have partial or sectoral associations, which are not commonly shared.
This might be within particular curatorial traditions (library, museum or archival), particular disciplines, or particular national or language contexts.
We adopt the following terms, and explain them here to ensure shared understanding while acknowledging their imprecision.
Archive.
For conciseness, we typically use archive in place of archival repository or archival institution.
Cultural.
This document is about the scientific, industrial and cultural heritage.
In general we use the word 'cultural' in a broad sense to cover all of these.
Memory institution.
We have no term in routine use which includes libraries, archives and museums.
Again, for conciseness, we sometimes use cultural institutions and memory institutions in this inclusive sense.
Network service.
A resource is made network accessible through a network service.
So, for example, a catalogue may be made accessible through a telnet service, an http service, and a Z39.50 service.
A broker or mediator is a service which provides consistent access to other network services, typically to heterogenous or homogenous services from variously located service providers.
Resource.
This is a cultural entity of interest.
It may be a database, an artifact, a document, a newsgroup, a mailing list, a learning environment, an image, a map, a geographic information system, and so on.
Many resources typically reside in collections where a collection comprises similar or related resources.
Such collections are also, of course, resources, and collections may contain other collections.
We talk about the contents of libraries, museums and archival institutions as collections.
The Vision Archives, libraries and museums are memory institutions: they organise the European cultural and intellectual record.
Their collections contain the memory of peoples, communities, institutions and individuals, the scientific and cultural heritage, and the products throughout time of our imagination, craft and learning.
They join us to our ancestors and are our legacy to future generations.
They are used by the child, the scholar, and the citizen, by the business person, the tourist and the learner.
These in turn are creating the heritage of the future.
Memory institutions contribute directly and indirectly to prosperity through support for learning, commerce, tourism, and personal fulfilment.
They are an important part of the civic fabric, woven into people's working and imaginative lives and into the public identity of communities, cities and nations.
They are social assembly places, physical knowledge exchanges, whose use and civic presence acknowledge their social significance, and the public value accorded to them.
They form a widely dispersed physical network of hospitable places, open to all.
They will continue to fulfil these roles, as people wish to enjoy the physical experiences they and the use of their collections offer.
However, we are now seeing the creation of new places which offer a new type of experience, a global digital space based on the Internet and other digital networks.
Memory institutions are actively connecting their collections to these emerging knowledge networks.
They are creating innovative network services based on digital surrogates of their current collections in rich interactive digital environments.
They are focusing their traditional curatorial values on the challenges of the rapidly changing and growing digital resource, and developing relevant practices to support its use and management over time.
The archive, library and museum communities are addressing these issues within their own curatorial traditions and organisational contexts, and within specific national or other administrative frameworks.
They are exploring how to provide learning, research and cultural opportunities, and how to identify and grow new communities of users.
They are developing strategies to manage the physical, the digitised, and the born-digital as complementary parts of a unified resource.
They are developing strategies for the initial investment and managed intervention that is required to preserve the value of digital resources.
They are ensuring that 'born-digital' documents and artifacts become integrated into the cultural record, by being organised and documented so that they will be accessible, and become a part of the memory of future generations.
At the same time, they recognise their convergent interests in a shared network space.
This convergence is driven by the desire to release the value of their collections into this space in ways that support creative use by as many users as possible.
They recognise their users' desire to refer to intellectual and cultural materials flexibly and transparently, without concern for institutional or national boundaries.
To support this, they recognise the need for services which provide unified routes into their deep collective resources, which protect the value of their resources in an environment of easy access and reuse, and which ensure the authenticity and integrity of resources.
They wish to enhance and personalise their offerings through the collection of data about use and users, while preserving privacy.
These aims pose shared technical challenges, but also highlight the benefits of concerted attention to business and policy issues.
There is advantage in working together to develop business models which recognise the long-term ownership costs of digital media while preserving the public interest in equitable access; to establish and promote best practice for content creators and others which reduce the long-term costs of data ownership and enhance its use; and to explore what it means to develop cultural institutions in a digital environment.
Finally, they are unified in the belief that without the rich cultural resources memory institutions offer, emerging network places will be impoverished, as will the lives of the people who assemble there.
The Challenge The digital medium is radically new.
Although there is continuity of purpose and value within cultural institutions, these exist alongside a fundamental examination of roles and practices.
The costs of developing necessary roles and sustainable practices will be high, as will the social and organisational costs of change and institution building.
However the costs of not doing so will be higher, as the cultural and intellectual legacy to future generations is entrusted to a house of cards built on a million web sites.
The Challenge of Serving the Active User The focus of service delivery is becoming the active user in a shared network space.
The user wants resources bundled in terms of their own interests and needs, not determined by the constraints of media, the capabilities of the supplier, or by arbitrary historical practices.
The growth in the variety, volume and volatility of digital resources means that effective use depends not merely on pointing people to resources, but on supporting selection, aggregation and use.
It may mean providing interpretive environments in which resources are situated in relation to wider contexts.
It may mean supporting reuse and repackaging of materials.
Human attention is more valuable than computing resource, and it should not be wasted in unnecessary tasks.
Access and use may be situational: the 'information landscape' will be adapted to the needs of users or groups of users, rather than to the constraints of particular media or systems.
These factors shift the emphasis of automation from inward-looking collection management to outward-looking services to the user.
The Challenge of Living with the Radically New What is a 'document', or a 'publication', or an 'exhibition'?
We often cannot 'see' a digital resource, we cannot sense its scale or scope, or its internal organisation.
Nor can we always think in terms of traditional analogues: for example, we cannot simply 'print out' meteorological data, which may occupy gigabytes on disc.
Data and programs may be integrated in complex applications, difficult to disentangle.
Occupying a network space shifts the emphasis from standalone services constructed for human visitors alone, to services designed also to be visited by automated services which provide aggregation, filtering, selection or other services to human users.
Users may interact with resources through digital library services, learning environments, games or exhibitions.
The issues involved in providing services in such distributed, multi-layered environments are poorly understood.
Everywhere we are living with new ways of doing things.
A major feature of the new is that fluidity replaces fixity as a dominant characteristic of resource creation and use.
Fluid because data flows: it can be shared, reused, analysed; can be adapted, reconfigured, copied, and newly combined in ways which were not possible before.
A resource dissolves into multiple individually addressable resources, or can be aggregated in multiple combinations.
Resources can carry information about themselves, can communicate to automate processes or deliver new services, and can yield up use or status data which can drive decisions and inform behaviour.
The creation and use of flows in a digital medium offer unprecedented flexibility, enhancing and augmenting services.
However, with fluidity also comes the challenge of managing a fugitive and fragile resource: Fluidity foregrounds the need to support control and trust relationships.
Just as the accessibility of resources is potentially enhanced in a digital environment, so is the ability to control that access in fine-grained and subtle ways.
However, techniques for control lag behind techniques for access.
The authenticity and identity of users, service providers and resources needs to be established.
Where an increasing amount of cultural and commercial activity is based on the flow of signs and symbols, where our identities and services are increasingly mediated by digital environments, the nature of the rights associated with personal identities and intellectual products have profound implications for the management of the cultural heritage.
The management of rights becomes critical as models based on the granting of rights to use data for particular purposes or durations become common.
Technologies for control are the subject of significant attention and are essential for building institutions in a digital environment.
As they become infrastructural we will see major further growth in commercial and other activity, as users and providers acquire confidence in the security of transactions, and the cost of doing business goes down.
Data may be fugitive in several ways.
Resources may be generated from some underlying resource, or dynamically created in response to a particular combination of circumstances.
Data may not be recorded when created, they may disappear without trace if an appropriate business or policy framework is not in place, or they may not have documentation which provides the context, provenance or identity necessary for appropriate use.
Data may only be available subject to particular agreements, and disappear when rights lapse.
Data is fragile because 'content' depends on multiple structures and contexts which are vulnerable to change or obsolescence, whether these are physical media, encodings, logical structures, operating systems, interpretive and analytic tools, and so on.
The long term costs of digital content ownership are only now being recognised and the need to manage preservation strategies to minimise those costs and secure the cultural record for the future is critical.
The Challenge of Planning for the Radically Unpredictable Not only is change rapid, it is unpredictable.
The transforming influence of the Web was not predicted several years ago, nor was the rapid takeup of e-mail.
However, this is not a technological issue alone.
As networking becomes pervasive of more parts of our lives, the complex interdependencies of technology development, service provision, business models, and user behaviour make innovation, reconfiguration and unpredictability integral to practice.
As service, technology and business opportunities co-evolve, new service provider configurations or divisions of responsibility will emerge.
These may include third party resource discovery, authentication, or ratings services; long-term archiving facilities; or a new class of 'broker' or 'mediator' service which provides a single point of access across distributed collections.
User behaviour will be shaped by and will shape opportunity and development.
This unpredictability emphasises the need for approaches which do not lock providers into inflexible or unresponsive offerings, and which support movement of data and services through changing environments.
Without such approaches investment will be wasted and data will potentially be lost or difficult to use.
The Challenge of Institution Building Over the last years, emphasis has shifted from technology development to serving users and managing content.
However, procedures are still preliminary or provisional, awaiting agreements or technical developments which will provide routine and predictable services.
They have often not become part of 'business as usual'.
This is part of a wider institutional flux.
Institutions are relatively persistent embodiments of values and practices organised around particular goals, and we only beginning to sense how institutions will be built and modified in digital spaces.
What is the institutional context of the library, of the museum, or of the archive, as they evolve and as the expectations and practices of their users evolve.
And, importantly, as the institutions of learning and culture, of trade, of civic engagement, and of entertainment also evolve, altering patterns of relatedness and inclusion.
Development will depend on agreed business models, on an understanding of the role of public services in a digital environment, on emerging agreement about roles and responsibilities.
These in turn will depend on more mature information infrastructure, including the ability to conduct commerce, to identify and authenticate users and content, to develop personalised services, to guarantee persistence and predictability.
Institutions secure stable services.
The Way Forward A life-cycle approach to the creation, management and use of resources emphasises the interdependence of choices in the life of cultural content.
A choice made at any stage may ramify throughout the life of a resource, facilitating or impeding its appropriate flow through different custodial and use environments, and its ability to be an agile component of information and learning environments.
We discuss a research agenda based around the life-cycle presented in the accompanying figure.
There has been a historical separation between the 'supply-side' interests of memory institutions, traditionally focused on the management of collections, and the interests of users and creators of cultural content.
However, a significant feature of the digital environment is that memory institutions become centrally interested in supporting the creation and use of cultural content in more direct ways, as institutions and their users share the same digital space.
For example, archival institutions wish to influence the format of the records transferred to them, so as to reduce the costs of management and ownership.
Similarly, libraries, museums and archives are increasingly interested in serving up resources in such a way that their use is encouraged as active components of exhibitions, learning environments, and so on.
Services which manipulate or analyse various types of data may be provided alongside the data itself.
And of course, memory institutions are increasingly creating digital surrogates of items in their collections, or repackaging digital items in new offerings.
In what follows, different stages of the life-cycle are considered separately, with a concluding piece with gathers some organisational concerns.
We consider the following life cycle stages, acknowledging that these are not definitive or exhaustive: collection development, collection management, access (including discovery and retrieval), use, and creation.
It is important to note that this document concerns itself with the life of cultural content in relation to the interests of memory institutions and their users, not in a wider context.
A different perspective would yield different stages and emphases.
Special attention is given to questions of access to cultural resources and network services, as increasingly, all operations will be carried out in the environment it describes where actors are supported by variously assembled network services to carry out their tasks.
Accessing Resources and Services Memory institutions provide and use many network services to disclose and deliver their content.
They are individually valuable, however they do not yet seamlessly work together or rely on each other for services.
They do not communicate easily or share content.
For example, it is not yet common to interact with more than one catalogue at a time.
At the same time, as there is more development in a network environment additional network services are required, authentication for example.
This variety is potentially confusing and adds effort for the user or developer who has to discover what is available, cope with many different interfaces, negotiate different authentication systems, work out terms and conditions, manage different results, and move data between services.
In the current environment, the collection of information about a particular topic Darwin and finches, for example, as in the accompanying sidebar is inhibitively labour-intensive.
One has to know quite a bit, and do a lot of work, to get effective results.
Some of this work is mechanical it would benefit from being automated.
The focus has been on the automation of individual tasks rather than on the automation of end-to-end processes, the sharing of content, or other examples of communication between tasks.
In a shared network space, a new way of working is required, one which recognises that network services do not stand alone as the sole focus of a user's attention but need to be part of a fabric of opportunity.
Services need to be aggregated in support of business objectives and user needs.
They need to be able to pass data between them between a search service, a requesting service, and an accounting service, for example.
This requirement is driving an interest in 'content infrastructure', which works towards 'plug and play' infrastructure for discovery, use and exploitation of content in managed environments.
Monolithic applications are being broken down and reconfigured as systems of communicating services.
What services will be deployed by libraries, archives, and museums?
Some they will provide themselves; some will be third-party services used by them to augment their own.
They will also have to consider how these services are combined in helpful ways.
We consider some network services here in very general terms in the next section, and issues arising from their combination in a following section.
Some Network Services This is an indicative list, whose purpose is to illustrate the variety of activity; it is not exhaustive and adopts an inclusive view of 'service'.
The services discussed are provided in various ways and are at different levels of granularity.
First and foremost, libraries, archives and museums disclose and deliver cultural content.
Disclosure services.
Memory organisations disclose their resources through catalogues, finding aids, and related tools.
Effective disclosure is critical to discovery and effective use.
The characteristics of digital information above introduce additional descriptive requirements.
Resources, collections and services need to be characterised so that human and machine users can discover and make effective use of them.
Content delivery services.
They make cultural content available in different ways, as flat files, as databases of images or documents, and so on.
As we have discussed elsewhere, content is increasingly presented within interpretive environments.
Rights management services.
The automated management of rights will be a critical service as organisations wish to protect the value of their resources and describe appropriate use.
Some areas of development are especially important as they can lever significant expertise and knowledge within the library, museum and archival traditions to provide new types of service: Resource discovery services.
These support the discovery and selection of services and resources.
Typically they might provide data about the content and context of collections, service profiles required to make use of them, and terms and conditions under which they are available.
An example of a resource discovery service is the so called 'subject gateway'.
Terminology and knowledge representation services.
These may provide vocabulary support for query expansion or indexing.
Translation and dictionary services are also appearing.
Memory institutions have invested significantly in knowledge representation activities, which may increasingly appear as accessible resources in their own right, to support discovery or metadata creation.
Ratings services.
These may be used to associate values from some scheme with resources.
For example, they might be used to indicate relevance to a course of study, or collection strength in a particular thematic area.
Ratings data may be used to delimit or rank results in particular ways.
Some services will become 'infrastructural' in the sense that they become services which are predictably and consistently available in a shared way across providers, rather than being developed on a per-provider basis.
General third party services might include: Authentication services.
In the new shared space of the Internet, users and services may have no prior knowledge of each other.
Users, services and resources may need to be authenticated to provide assurance that they are what they purport to be.
Currently authentication tends to be service specific, and hence fragmented.
Multiple challenges are one of the main inhibitors to current network use, while the absence of a common approach inhibits suppliers.
A robust approach to distributed authentication is a major requirement for future services.
E-commerce services.
Memory institutions will increasingly provide charged for services, and common approaches will be needed.
Caching and mirroring services.
These services will become more common within particular communities of use to assist economic use of network resources.
Some services might begin to be shared within the memory domain, perhaps using generally available infrastructural services (such as directory services for example).
Examples might include: Schema registry services.
A schema describes the structure (attributes and relationships) of a data item such as a resource description.
Schema registries are central repositories which can provide humanor machine-readable schema descriptions, and will provide infrastructure for support of distributed access, use and preservation of resources.
Location services.
We use this phrase for the resolution of identifiers into locations.
These may be concise identifiers, where there is ongoing research into the design and deployment of persistent identifiers.
Such deployment will depend on technical and business solutions, which are still being investigated.
Persistent identifiers will be valuable in a range of application contexts.
Or they may be less concise, in the form of a citation which requires matching against holdings data to determine location.
This scenario is one which is being explored in a library context where multiple copies of items may exist.
The development and deployment of identifiers, and their interworking, present significant R&D challenges.
Memory institutions will develop particular services to enhance access to their resources, individually or collectively: User profile services.
These may be necessary for personalisation services, and store data about user permissions, profiles, and behaviour.
Currently they tend to be service specific and redundant.
Third party services may emerge, and there are clear links to authentication and other services.
How to characterise user preferences, behaviour and privileges in acceptable and useful ways is an open question.
Some basic services may be used to support other activities, for example: Search services.
These may have to iron out differences in underlying metadata or indexing schemes.
Searching across domains presents particular challenges given their different underlying content models and descriptive standards.
Search services may provide support for query routing, to avoid unnecessary use of resources.
Different search services may be provided: for textual material, for image content, and so on.
Request/order services.
These manage the request transaction from placing a request to its successful completion.
They need to interwork at technical and business levels, and communicate with accounting, billing, authentication and other services.
There is some standardisation in the libraries area, but approaches tend to be fragmented by service.
User interface services.
Services may be presented in different environments: web-based, immersive, or through some form of visualisation.
Combining Network Services Increasingly, such services will be built from other communicating services.
Services may share some basic services and infrastructure within agreed frameworks for communication.
For example, resource discovery services may report on the availability of services, may use location services to identify instances of resources (mirror sites for example), may be combined with user profile or ratings services to refine selections, and so on.
A service which mediates access to the holdings of several memory organisations might provide support for discovery and selection of services, manage service requests, translate formats, aggregate services, consolidate results, manage authentication and financial transactions, and so on.
Such 'mediator' or 'broker' services, which provide consistent access over other services and which allow them to communicate, will become more important.
These may be implemented in various ways, for example as bespoke applications or as networks of reusable components (e.g.
software agents).
Communication will benefit from agreed APIs (application programming interfaces) and data exchange formats.
Increasingly, applications will be built within a distributed object framework.
In order for a client or broker service to access a network service it must know: the location of that service and details of how to communicate with it.
We call such details a 'service profile'.
For example, in a particular case, such a profile might include the access protocol (which may be the simple web protocol HTTP, a search and retrieve protocol, a directory protocol or other form of protocol depending on the service being accessed); the request format (which may be defined by a query language); and the schema(s) relevant to the service (for example the metadata format in use).
Interworking across services will not be achieved by enforcing uniformity.
It is not desirable, nor would it be possible, to suggest that network services converge on a single service profile, although agreement over profiles for classes of service would facilitate interworking, as would a mechanism for sharing service profile descriptions.
A variety of service profiles will be in use across cultural domains, reflecting the variety of services they make available and the different curatorial traditions and professional practices in operation.
There are significant research and development challenges in the development of distributed content infrastructure.
Some areas which require attentions are: Architectures and models.
Work on how component services might be assembled to support particular business needs, and on interworking requirements will be necessary.
An architectural approach helps identify interoperability points and provides a shared framework for development.
APIs (Application programming interfaces) and exchange formats.
Agreed interfaces and exchange formats support communication between services.
For some services, such agreements do not yet exist.
A project team wants to find out more about Darwin's finches: they want some information about how they contributed to his theory of evolution.
They are doing a part-time course, and are exploring the leads provided in the course pack.
They decide to browse some of the resources mentioned.
They follow a link to Down House, where he lived, and explore the rooms where he lived.
They browse his Notebooks, going to relevant pages.
Then they get more focused.
They do a distribution map for finches in the Galapagoes Islands.
They think there should be more, and do a comparison with other island groupings in the Pacific.
They do a general search on the Galapagos, and get back a number of suggestions.
They follow some through and collect some photographs.
Some of these are in the Natural History Museum in London this leads them to see if it has some of the finches.
It does, and it also has a n online exhibition on the 'Voyages of Discovery' which has a copy of the first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, together with specimens beetles, fish, fossils and the actual finches brought back by him from the Galapagos Islands.
They order pictures of the finches from the Museum's Picture Library, and noticie on the 'fuel guage' that they have spent more than they intended.
There is a video to accompany the exhibition, but it is expensive to download.
They do a query and it is available at their college.
Then they switch to search for some articles or other material.
They decide to focus on undergraduate and general material, screening out more specialist stuff.
They request some articles, and view an encyclopeida entry.
There is still quite a lot of material, so they limit it to materials available to them without payment as part of their course, and immediately available to them electronically or available in print locally.
This is a simple scenario, but if it is to work seamlessly would require quite a bit of 'content infrastructure'.
The team has potentially used many different services.
For example: To avoid multiple challenges some form of distributed authentication would need to be in use.
To support this level of trading of content, rights management, e-commerce, billing, and other services would have to be deployed.
To support sensible navigation or selection of resources, collections and services need to be described, and indexed for searching.
Data needs to be shared between services to support forwarding of queries.
Searching or requesting across different services would require some mediating services.
Service for manipulating files, converting formats, and so on might be needed to deal with a variety of content.
And so on... Metadata.
Metadata is increasingly pervasive of network environments.
It is data which characterises objects and their relationships in order to support effective use and behaviours.
The design and deployment of metadata is now central to much network activity, both within particular domains and to support working across them.
Demonstrators and services.
Examples of broker services exist within the libraries, archives and museums area, some funded by previous European programmes.
There are few examples of cross domain brokers, and we have limited experience of technical and organisational issues of assembling them.
It is clear that services increasingly rely on each other and brokers will support relevant communication between them to create higher level services which meet particular business needs or quality of service objectives in distributed object environments.
We need experience of developing such services.
Use Memory institutions will support use in ways which reflect new opportunity, and the changing behaviour and needs of active users.
There is clearly a close relationship between resource use and adjoining operations in the chain: resource access and resource creation.
Areas for investigation include: User behaviour.
Our understanding of user behaviour and requirements is often limited by expectations based on current services or soon-to-be-superseded practices.
Service development needs to engage with the aspirations of users over time as possibilities change.
We know very little, for example, about what users might expect from cross-domain services.
How ought library, archive and museum resources sit together?
How do we support services through monitoring of user behaviour, with consequent privacy issues?
Service contexts.
As services and resources appear as components in different contexts, issues of presentation and interaction occur.
Cultural institutions increasingly embed resources in wider interpretive contexts, whether these are exhibitions, curricular materials, or other guiding material.
These might be realised through structured, searchable, sharable documents which provide instructional, learning, navigational or other interpretive narratives for services.
Some standardisation would support the sharing of such narratives, the use of common contextual knowledge (personal and institutional histories for example), and the structured collection of audience evaluation.
Interfacing to other environments.
Many users will interact with cultural services through some other mediating or broker service.
Learning environments, digital library services and games are important examples, which will become increasingly important.
It is important that cultural network services can be made available through these environments, and that appropriate interfaces exist which allow the effective sharing and communication of content.
User input.
Increasingly service providers are interested in receiving user input, commentary, or contributions which may be incorporated alongside other materials.
Are there shared issues surrounding such interaction?
In some cases there is value in collecting user analyses or interpretations of data for wider sharing.
A data archive may have an interest in providing access to analyses of data alongside the data itself, for example.
Information and cultural landscapes.
We have little experience of the distributed service scenarios which are emerging.
Interactions may be based on multiple communicating services, in ways which are opaque to users, or in which sets of layered services have to be presented meaningfully to users, and in environments which are increasingly personalised or adaptive.
For service providers they may have to consider issues of how their data might be presented in environments over which they have no control.
The user interface.
Services, or such 'landscapes', will be presented at different user interfaces.
Immersive environments, visualisation, and other approaches will benefit from structured approaches at relevant levels, which allow such different user interfaces to be written to the same underlying services.
Adaptive services based on knowledge of use and users.
Promotion and marketing.
It is usual to modify services based on data derived from use and users.
The techniques for gathering such data, and the type of data which can be collected, are changing.
As are the techniques for immediately modifying service based on such feedback.
Personalisation.
The use of personal profiles (which record such data as privileges, preferences, and past behaviour), and other techniques are increasingly used to personalise services.
Reuse and exploitation.
This is where use joins creation.
Increasingly, users will want to repackage and repurpose.
It is important that rights management and other frameworks are in place to support such use, where relevant.
Creation Memory organisations create digital cultural content themselves.
They can influence the creation activity of others, whose outputs they collect or are transferred into their holding.
They can provide resource creation services to their users.
In each case, they have a shared interest in promoting future use and in minimising the costs of accessioning and management, by working to develop good practice and the tools to support it.
Best practice guidelines.
Authoritative guidelines based on emerging best practice will achieve scale economies by accelerating the learning curve for resource creators, and support effective use and reuse.
They will also assist more effective use of funding, reducing redundancy of local investigation.
An indicative list of what such guidelines might cover include: digitisation of existing resources (e.g.
selection criteria, applicability of particular techniques against resource type and anticipated use, advice in relation to particular resource types); documentation and metadata (e.g.
use of particular schema, vocabulary and authorities guidance); processing (scanning, etc); control (e.g.
techniques for ensuring authenticity and integrity); preservation issues; presentation (e.g.
image formats and resolutions); conventions for recording (volume ranges).
Many guidelines currently exist, and there is no shared understanding of the issues to be addressed.
An overall life-cycle model is a heuristic tool in establishing needs.
Such guidelines will be useful in supporting the development of shared approaches to the creation of the intellectual and cultural record.
Access to techniques, tools and services.
Users will occupy different environments.
In some cases, memory institutions may provide them with creation, editing and other tools.
Developing Collections Libraries, archival institutions and museums have developed their collections in line with specific missions and according to different curatorial traditions.
A national library may benefit from legal deposit arrangements, for example.
Component collections may be built up to meet some particular interests, or may be transferred into memory institutions as complete entities.
Collections may be unified by theme, by medium, by ownership, by provenance, by administration.
Some large cultural organisations may have contained a combination of library, archival and museum collections, managed by staff from appropriate professional domains.
Memory institutions exert different levels of control over the materials they accession.
How can we expect the nature and composition of collections to change in the digital environment?
What is a collection?
Collections have been unified by collocation.
What does it mean to develop a collection in an environment where collocation is not a requirement?
What criteria govern its assembly?
How is it managed?
Where resources are brought together from different locations to create a collection, what framework needs to be put in place to ensure its continuity?
The Science Museum is in the process of creating a series of narrative-based digital documents, 'Exhiblets'.
These are intended to perform a number of functions, including acting as online resources for some of the thousands of collections-related enquiries the Museum receives each year.
They are valuable learning resources and provide audience-friendly access to the vast range of collections held by the Museum.
Exhiblets draw on information held in various forms, managed by a number of domains across the Museum and beyond.
Comprising information drawn from the Museum collections, the Museum's Library, its Archive and existing publications, Exhiblets depend on information being made accessible from these domains at item and collection level, and place this content in a narrative context.
The narrative provides a means of leading the user into the subject area and adds meaning to the structured information, making links between resources from the three domains, and building a story around the associations which can be made.
For example, an Exhiblet on the Portsmouth Blockmaking Machinery tells the story of the evolution of the first ever suite of machinery used for mass production.
Descriptions and images of the objects themselves, held at the Science Museum and also at other museums across the country, are placed in the context of the early stages of the industrial revolution.
Reference is made to the holdings of the Science Museum Library, providing a technological and historical background.
Letters between the inventors and manufacturers are drawn from archival sources and biographical information tells the story of how designers and manufacturers worked together to produce the machinery.
The potential for this type of format is great, providing as it does a jumping-off point for a user to follow the trails which lead off from this narrative.
Implementations of these Exhiblets will also provide users with the opportunity to provide their own knowledge which the Museum may be able to incorporate into the resource store for use in developing other resources.
Curators as 'knowledge providers' work with researcher-editors to make the production process as simple as possible.
However there are a number of issues which have yet to be resolved if this type of resource is to fulfill its potential.
How do we begin to build cross-domain collections, which assemble resources historically curated within different traditions?
What are the benefits to users of such collections?
Mapping collections.
The different curatorial traditions have different content models which direct documentation practices.
Libraries have tended to describe individual items journals or books but not the collections which contain them.
Archives and museums have developed multi-level approaches to description of collections and their parts.
Emerging distributed approaches have highlighted the importance of high level collection description to assist in navigation, discovery and selection of cultural content.
Agreed metadata and other approaches need to be developed, which work across the domains.
Managing collection development.
Digital collections depend for their usefulness on critical mass.
This in turn depends on a strategic approach to collection development, which encompasses a view of user needs and the wider availability of resources.
Management Libraries, archival institutions and museums deploy long-standing procedures and professional practices in the management of their collections.
These have been adapted as they move to 'hybrid' collections, collections which contain physical materials and newer digital material.
New procedures and professional practice are preliminary, are often exploratory or experimental, and may be confined to limited, highly labour-intensive operations.
Routine approaches will benefit from down-cycle technical and business agreement, but practice is still ahead of standards.
This will be increasingly unsustainable as memory institutions have to manage large-scale digital repositories, accession large volumes of heterogeneous digital materials, and organise them for immediate use and long-term access.
Such digital materials may be internally complex, multiply linked, and created in different computing environments.
Fine-grained rights management frameworks will need to be deployed.
Effective management of the radically new, and the radically unpredictable, poses many challenges.
Protocol support.
Protocol support for sharing and managing content is very limited.
Resource management depends on bespoke development, which is expensive.
Similarly, customised approaches have to be developed to track the life events of a resource.
Rights management.
In a network environment the assignment and assertion of rights becomes central.
Memory organisations will wish to assert the conditions under which users of different sorts can access or exploit their collections and parts of their collections.
Fine-grained control will be required to cover the ways in which resources will be used.
Developing new practices to manage large digital repositories.
Systems support for routine practices which can be automated will be essential.
For example, procedures for accessioning material which involve establishing the authenticity and integrity of a resource, determining its format, validating and managing associated metadata and control data, assigning identifiers if necessary, and so on, are needed.
Addition to a collection may involve many operations, across different data stores, with many associated checks and changes.
We have little experience of managing large digital repositories of complex objects.
There are points of contact and comparison here with general knowledge and document management approaches.
Serving current users.
Resources need to be made available through network services.
Current network services are often limited when compared to local services.
There is limited externalisation of structure or content, it is hidden behind web gateways, and not accessible to users or clients.
Network services are preliminary and partial; fuller services need investigation.
Serving future users.
The viability of digital information over the long-term needs to be secured.
Strategies for migration, emulation and technology upkeep are all being explored within experimental contexts.
Many issues are outstanding: preserving content, context and structure; keeping metadata and control data valid and in appropriate relation with content; dealing with encrypted data; IPR issues; approaches to dynamic or externally linked materials; event histories; and so on.
Early experience points to the lack of consensus as to best approaches; the significant ownership costs over time of digital materials and the need to reduce them through routine, automated practice; the technical complexity of some proposed approaches; the continuing development of formats and resource types.
Monitoring use.
As resources and users live in a digital space, the opportunities for capturing data increase.
Common frameworks for management information systems and decision support systems have been developed; these need to be extended across domains.
Managing hybrid collections.
Memory institutions are interested in the cultural record in its historical continuity and full current breadth.
They are concerned to manage the physical, the digitised, and the born digital as complementary parts of the fabric of knowledge.
To achieve this they will have to manage hybrid physical and digital environments, ensuring seamless transition between them.
Organisational Frameworks We have suggested that technology, service and business contexts are coevolving to shape opportunities and obligations in a new, shared network space.
This has some implications.
There are greater opportunities for scale economies as the level of infrastructure rises, in the form of technology or utility services.
A distributed service environment requires levels of agreement about how services and organisations relate to each other, as services are recognised as part of a fabric of provision rather than as standalone offerings.
New roles and divisions of responsibilities are emerging.
And finally, new practices must be institutionalised to secure their stability.
Rising level of infrastructure.
We are moving from a phase of monolithic applications, where services were provided on an application by application basis, to one where common services are increasingly split out into infrastructure.
It is the scale economies and interoperability which this delivers which is driving much current web development, as greater support for structured documents, for security and encryption, and for other common services is being worked on.
We are likely to see infrastructural support for distributed authentication, for e-commerce, for distributed authoring, for ratings, and for metadata management, which will all impact on how cultural content is served up.
In a related trend, third party suppliers are emerging to supply these and other services as utilities.
Business models for such services are immature.
A fabric of provision.
It is important that services interwork.
This will not happen without agreement.
Such agreement requires management, and a range of consensus making bodies exist.
These need to be reviewed in the light of emerging cross-domain agendas and new distributed environments.
Agreements will increasingly depend on infrastructural services which support communication as and when required without the need for prior knowledge.
Such services include registry and directory services, which may disclose information about the technical characteristics or content of resources.
Particular areas where agreement would support the emergence of services which address the full range of cultural heritage include user profiles, collection description, document type definitions, and search and retrieve protocols.
We are seeing a convergence of interests emerging through practice as new services develop; this needs to be supported through top down activity also.
Efficient use of network information will increasingly depend on effective use of mirroring, caching, query routing and other techniques, and their interaction with discovery and other services.
Such activity would benefit from attention.
We still have much to learn about sensible distribution of storage and processing.
For example, the library community is assessing the benefits of distribution of access in comparison to the distribution of collections (e.g.
use of distributed techniques to keep union catalogue up to date compared to use of distributed techniques to search across individual catalogues).
Roles and responsibilities.
Memory institutions are exploring new roles.
New organisations are emerging to fill new niches in the developing service environment.
Who will be responsible for long-term archiving of commercial publications?
Who will administer identifier schemes?
Who will provide cross domain resource discovery or rating services?
Explorations are taking place against uncertain business models, and a shifting environment.
Memory institutions will have to consider these issues and migrate project or exploratory activity to sustainable services based on developing experience.
Such change creates special challenges for professional and organisational development.
Staff may develop new roles (editors, producers), may have to deal with new business challenges, and may have to acquire new skills.
Organisations have to decide what their business is, may have to reprioritise or refocus, may have to enter into new collaborative or business liaisons.
The requirements for development and training need to be established.
User involvement.
Memory institutions are developing interactive services, are inviting contribution and selection, are entering into collaboration with their users.
In what way should these activities develop?
How will they be managed?
Institution building Economic and business models.
Digital provision is changing the cost structure of creation, supply and use.
The nature of value added in new creation and demand chains is still being assessed.
Service may be experimental or supported by development funding.
Market making mechanisms billing and charging, trust mechanisms are still immature, which inhibits some types of activity.
These and other factors make the development of valid economic models difficult.
There are important issues to be addressed where concerted action is important.
These include the development of common positions on the reuse of cultural content, on what it means to provide equitable access, on commercial partnership.
Many of these will need to be developed on a per case basis, but there is also merit in developing shared public sector views which establish guiding patterns of expectation in future provision.
Memory institutions may have different responses, and there are important domain differences arising from the nature of the collections involved and the historical roles of organisations.
Services and practices need to become institutionalised.
Institutions secure stable services, but take time and experience to establish.
They need to reflect need and support emerging practice.
It is important that effective international, cross-domain fora emerge in which consensus can be reached about preferred future directions, and in which memory organisations can reduce the uncertainty of change, and any potential perceived threats to the status quo.
Institutions will increasingly depend on technical infrastructure which support the development of predictable, trust relationships.
The authenticity of providers, resources and users needs to be established.
A framework for rights management and commerce needs to be in place.
Much of this activity will be outside the specific responsibility of memory institutions: it will be a part of wider provision.
However, memory organisations need to be alert to the ramifications of wider development for the construction of their own services, and work together to pursue shared interests.
A developing lexicon.
Individual curatorial traditions have developed their own ways of talking about concepts and objects.
In several cases, words may be used across traditions with difference emphasis or sense.
A shared glossary would usefully support the development of shared interests.
Interaction with other institutional contexts.
The institutions which support learning and research, commerce, entertainment, and government are changing, which will in turn impact on how memory institutions develop.
These changes need to be understood, if memory institutions are to develop in ways which ensure their contrinued relevance.
Civic presence.
The digital information environment is still 'under construction'.
Memory institutions have been instruments of civilisation, of engagement, of communication and community building.
They are a part of the civic fabric of our lives.
How will such presence be achieved in digital information spaces?
Do we even yet know what questions to ask?
Acknowledgements We are grateful to Pat Manson, DGXIII, for her support during the preparation of this document.
We are also grateful to the several people who have commented on the document in draft.
Prepared for DGXIII in the programme area: COLLABORATION BETWEEN ARCHIVES, LIBRARIES AND MUSEUMS UNDER KEY ACTION 3 (MULTIMEDIA CONTENT AND TOOLS) OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY TECHNOLOGIES PROGRAMME UNDER FP5 (November 1999) Author Details   Lorcan Dempsey Director, UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN) University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK email: l.dempsey@ukoln.ac.uk web site at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Scientific, Industrial, and Cultural Heritage: a shared approach: a research framework for digital libraries, museums and archives" Author: Lorcan Dempsey Publication Date: 12 January 2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/dempsey/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Oxford Reference Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Oxford Reference Online Buzz database metadata licence authentication url standards Citation BibTex RIS A user review of the Oxford University Press reference site by Pete Dowdell.
In March of this year Oxford University Press unveiled their online reference site.
Called the core collection, it comprises of around 100 reference works in print, collated into a coherent single body with well-integrated cross-searching facilities.
It has been developed as a joint project between the two halves of the OU organisation, in Oxford and in the USA.
The range of material covered is vast, the scope is huge.
The material on offer covers a wide range of reference titles: dictionaries, subject references, quotations and so forth.
It all adds up to over 1.5 million entries.
The validity of this body of work as a supreme reference is not in doubt and a web interface to this information is surely the most efficient and powerful means to access it.
However this power does not come cheap.
With development costs exceeding £1million and the online world in a much more sober and rational phase, the crucial question for this site is going to be whether the subscription model will work.
Subscriptions are made available in three basic forms: Concurrent, unlimited and school licenses.
For small organisations and companies, the concurrent model will likely be chosen.
In the smallest case, a single freelance worker requiring access to this kind of reference will be asked to pay £250 per year, or about £20 per month.
Note, this is a concurrent license so this could be used by a larger group of workers, but they would only be able to access the site one at a time.
Access is controlled by a login authentication, so the system will accept the number of logins requested.
Athens single sign-on authentication is also supported.
£600 buys a license for 2-5 concurrent users and additional users thereafter are charged £100.
Larger organisations are likely to opt for an unlimited subscription model…prices are not structured and one must request a quote for this model.
Schools are favoured with a special license for £175 per year.
Whilst the subscriptions look expensive from a web user perspective, the real comparison is against the cost of maintaining a hardcopy set of the works.
To purchase the full set of 100 books would surely approach £2000, and the online version is of course automatically updated.
Still, at these prices, they are clearly targeting institutional users.
I assume that they concluded there simply wasn't the user base to support the individual user, what with the range of free web-based references available.
The site is well designed.
They have avoided a standard template feel and have achieved a fresh and individual look.
The navigation controls are laid out in two horizontal rows, which is quite logical but it took me a while to get used to it.
The top row controls overall site navigation and the lower row navigates within the current section.
The page colours change as you move from one section of the site to the next.
It all takes some getting used to, but as this is a site that people will come back to again and again, they will learn to appreciate this navigation.
Several paths are provided for accessing lookups.
There is a basic and advanced search interface.
Users can also drill down past subject areas, to a specific reference work.
Keyword look-up is available on words in the description, and the general level of metadata around any entry is full and useful.
The default quick search will perform an "OR" search on all the terms entered.
Phrasing with quotation marks is allowed, and derivative words are also searched.
Access to the quick search interface is provided on every page.
The chunkier advanced search offers several useful settings without overwhelming the user.
Three basic modes of operation are offered.
In standard mode it functions like the quick search, except that you can narrrow your inquiry over a subset of the 24 subject areas.
A Boolean search is provided, allowing you to include AND, OR, NOT terms.
Finally, pattern searching is available.
This will find exact and similar matches to your search term(s), allowing you to enter guesses of the spelling of unfamiliar terms.
Wildcards are supported in any kind of search with 4 meta characters supported: *(zero or more characters), ?
(one character, # (single digit) and @ (single alphabet character).
Further refinement is also provided by an option to restrict the search over full text, the entry headings, dates or people.
Whichever way the search is accessed, the results are displayed in the same consistent manner.
Results are returned with a relevance score and the list ranking can be modified by relevance, alphabetic order, by subject or by book.
The number of results returned can be set ( 10, 25, 50, 75 or 100 per page) and the results list is accompanied by a list of Subjects that returned matches for the searched term, allowing the user to drill into results listed by subject and then, once within the subject area, by book.
Each hit returns the term found, a truncated description and the reference work from which it was found.
Clicking through on any particular result brings up the full term definition page, where any search terms will marked up as red in the text in fact, in one of two shades of red to indicate the strength of the match.
Any word in the descriptive text that matches other reference terms are marked as links, allowing you to jump straight to its definition.
A citation link is also provided, but this link is only accessible to logged-in users, limiting its usefulness.
Within the context of a search, extra navigation is provided on the definition page to allow you to step forward or back through your results without having to hit the back button to return to the list.
During the two month period that I spent testing the site, I was consistently pleased by the response time of the searches, and the general performance of the site.
A browse interface is also supported.
This allows you to view a full listing of all terms in the database.
You can restrict your browsing to within the scope of a subject area or just one book.
You start to get a feeling for the colossal size of this reference when you browse alphabetically through the entire collection.
For example, you will have to get to the third page of terms under the letter "M" just to find a word that isn't just "m" of one form or another!
Links to other quality resources on the web have been provided for each book in the collection, giving access to a huge wealth of associated information.
A very well written help section is also provided, with very clear instructions on all aspects of site usage.
Further support is available through a contact form on the site.
Heavy users of the OED, online or on CD, will be disappointed to learn that this reference work is not included in the package.
At present, you will have to pay again for the ORO subscription.
This separation of the two products strikes me as strange and I look forward to hearing of their integration in the near future possibly as a premium on basic subscription.
The quality of the service itself is beyond doubt.
This is a hugely impressive resource, endlessly absorbing to browse, weaving fascinating wide-ranging journeys across science, history, society, culture and philosophy.
But what will be interesting is to watch how this site stands the business test.
There are compelling arguments for organisations to switch from maintaining a physical reference library but these have to play against the entrenched attitude of the internet that everything should be free.
The absence of advertising is refreshing, at least, for the user experience.
These are big subscription fees but this is also a very serious offering.
Oxford Reference Online is at: http://www.oxfordreference.com/ Author Details   Pete Dowdell Email p.dowdell@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "The Oxford Reference Online" Author: Pete Dowdell Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/oxford-reference-collection/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Biz/Ed Bulletin: What Do You Want to Know?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Biz/Ed Bulletin: What Do You Want to Know?
Buzz data software java database cataloguing adobe mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Chris Mitchell and Martin Poulter introduce the Advice and Answers section of the CTI Economics Web site; and Kate Sharp explores Green Resources on the Web for Economics and Business Introducing the Advice and Answers Section of the CTI Economics Web site The CTI centre for Economics [1]is part of a national initiative encouraging and promoting the appropriate use of learning technologies in UK Higher Education.
It is based at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT)[2]at the University of Bristol.
The CTI Economics Web site has long provided academic Economists with resource catalogues that give value-added information on topics such as where to find on-line data, what software exists to teach Macroeconomics and how Java is being used in online tutorials.
Recently however, we have taken the decision to focus even more on answering many of our user’s common questions with a new Advice section [3].
This new section stemmed from the creation of twelve primers by staff among the 24 CTI centres and hosted on the CTI Web site [4] .
These primers are intended to provide a brief introduction to a range of technology and learning issues.
They have been written to help academics understand the new technologies available and integrate them effectively into their courses, with the emphasis on active and student-centred learning.
Figure 1: Advice and Answers section We have taken some of these primers, adapted them to enhance their relevance to our particular community and begun to author our own versions.
Currently the section includes thirteen documents ranging from how to put mathematical symbols and expressions into Web pages to the use of computers in giving lectures and presentations.
They consist of short articles, intending only as starting points, that address particular questions and link to further reading.
Like other parts of the site, these articles will be frequently maintained, with extra relevant links and advice being added as the centre receives them.
We hope that they will make academic Economists better able to make course Web pages, write assessment and revision questions, give computer-based presentations or integrate e-mail discussion into their teaching, amongst numerous other skills.
Figure 2: Example article The section is still new and we hope to build up a store of advice sheets, tailored for the Economic academic community.
We are looking for suggestions as to other advice sheets that we could include.
Please let us know if you have any ideas.
References CTI Economics Web site, Home page <URL: http://www.ilrt.ac.uk/ctiecon/> Institute for Learning and Research Technology, Home Page <URL: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk> CTI Economics Web site, Advice and Answers section <URL: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ctiecon/advice.htm> CTI Web site, CTI Primers <URL: http://www.cti.ac.uk/publ/primers/> Author Details Chris Mitchell ILRT University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol, BS8 1HH University of Bristol Email: chris.mitchell@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/chrismitchell.html Martin Poulter ILRT University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol, BS8 1HH University of Bristol Email: m.l.poulter@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/martinp.html Green Resources on the Web for Economics and Business There are two new sub-sections in the Biz/ed Internet Catalogue.
‘Environmental Economics’ and ‘Business and the Environment’ have been added as the number of high quality Web sites surrounding sustainable development and green issues has increased.
We have expanded the classification scheme to include these two areas and they will appear on the new browse screen when it is developed later in the year.
Here I introduce some key Web sites in these new disciplines as well as recommending some from the existing ‘Eco-tourism’ section of the Internet Catalogue.
This is a rapidly expanding field, as an ever-increasing number of charitable and non-profit organisations are using the Internet to publicise their campaigns and research.
You can find all of the following resources in the Biz/ed Internet Catalogue [1].
Environmental Economics The Environmental Economics and Indicators Unit [2] of the World Bank’s Environment Family was formed at the end of 1995 to serve as a focal point for two important areas of applied environmental economics: “new thinking on measuring the environment, and focused application of best practice on valuing the environment.” There are sections on environmental indicators, trade and the environment, green accounting, environmental policy and environmental evaluation.
This is a useful resource as it is possible to download full papers and reports published by the department in PDF format.
Figure 1: World Bank Environmental Economics and Indicators Unit Homepage ABARE (Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics) [3] is the largest applied economic research agency in Australia, with more than fifty years experience.
The organisation undertakes economic research and policy analysis of issues relating to minerals, energy, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, trade and the environment.
ABARE provides consulting and information services to a variety of industry groups, Australian and international agencies, research organisations, and governments.
The publication ‘Current Issues’ contains short reports on topical issues and can be read online with the aid of Adobe Acrobat.
There are also details about research and publications produced by the agency.
The Ecol-Econ [4] discussion list, hosted by the Communications for a Sustainable Future, enables discussion around alternatives to the prevailing economic paradigms.
It addresses such issues as sustainability, the role of economic growth, free trade and the environment, and the role of multilateral economic institutions in the sustainability of the development process.
The messages have been archived since April 1994.
The site also provides the full text of essays from some of the members of the mailing list and some links to related sources of information.
The Environmental Economics Working Paper Inventory [5] is intended as a service to environmental economists and others interested in the economics of environmental pollution control.
Their goal is “to provide a convenient location for almost immediate publication of new working papers and easy access to existing ones.
This site is run by the United States government’s Independent Environment Protection Agency (EPA) as a service to those interested in environmental economics.
It contains a database of working papers on environmental economics and pollution.
The database contains title, author(s), subject, keywords, date authored, date submitted, whether presented at conferences, an abstract, and a link to a web-accessible version of the paper if one exists (many do).
There are some author profiles, but not every author fills them in.
There is no peer review: the papers are self-submitted.
Many papers referred to are in PDF.
The site uses frames.
Sustainable Business The United Nations Department for Economic and Social Development [6] Web site is divided into areas of interest including trade, sustainable development and environment.
From the homepage follow the link to ‘Research’ for papers on development studies, statistics, models and forecasts which can be read using Adobe Acrobat.
There are also links to United Nations Development programme and the Economic and Social Council.
OneWorld Online [7]is dedicated to promoting human rights and sustainable development by harnessing the democratic potential of the Internet.
This set of resource guides brings together material from all over the world to give an introduction to subjects such as tourism, ethical consumers and fair trade.
Links to external resources and commentaries are provided in addition to information and news provided by each guides author.
This is an interesting resource as due to its wide range of supporting partners (over 260 organisations in this Internet community).
The site uses frames.
Figure 2: OneWorld Online Homepage business-ethics [8] is a mailbase list which seeks to “facilitate debate and discussion activities between the members of the academic, research, business communities and other parties who are interested in the systematic study or practical investigation of the ethical issues facing business and industry.” The list was first launched in June 1998.
SustainAbility [9] is an award-winning British strategic management consultancy and think-tank.
Founded in 1987, they are “dedicated to promoting the business case for sustainable development” of which their three main areas of operation are: foresight, agenda-setting and change management.
The SustainAbility mission is “to help create a more sustainable world by encouraging the evolution and widespread adoption of thinking and practices which are socially responsible, environmentally sound, and economically viable.” This Web site contains consultation papers, working papers, monthly reviews and key events relating to sustainable development.
There are also articles written by members of the company that have appeared in The Guardian, Resurgence and Tomorrow.
Figure 3: SustainAbility Homepage The Sustainable Business Network [10]is a resource guide which includes an extensive list of university departments and research organisations devoted to sustainable aspects of business.
There are also links to periodicals, reports, databases, directories and organisations.
Its mission is to “promote the growth and development of environmentally and socially responsible businesses, providing the tools and information necessary to make sustainable business a prominent global economic force.” There are also listings for people interested in becoming partners or investors in sustainable business projects.
Resources for the Future [11] is a non-profit and non-partisan think tank located in Washington, DC that conducts independent research, rooted primarily in economics and other social sciences, on environmental and natural resource issues.
Research is split into the following areas: Methods, Tools and Techniques; Environmental; Natural resources and Intersections.
Under the ‘Intersections’ heading you will find resources on sustainable development and urban transportation and in the ‘Methods, Tools and Techniques’ section there are papers etc.
on cost benefit analysis, risk and modelling.
The Web site holds discussion papers, works in progress, summaries of projects and reports.
You can search the inventory by title, author, subject, institution or media.
Eco-Tourism The primary objectives of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) [12] are to “help promote the development of an economically and environmentally sound mountain ecosystem and to improve the living standards of mountain populations”, especially in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan Region (HKH).
ICIMOD is the first international organization to make a commitment to improve the livelihoods of mountain communities, helping them to live and not merely exist upon the highest wonders on earth.
This Web site provides a specific case study of sustainable mountain tourism.
On this page you will find statistics on tourism in Nepal and the importance of tourism to the economy.
There are guidelines on best practices for eco-tourism and promising examples of sustainable mountain tourism.
Eco-Source [13] provides information and services regarding eco-tourism and sustainable development.
Established in October 1995, by professionals and individuals interested in helping the Travel and Tourism industry become sustainable this Web site includes eco-tourism facts and statistics in the Environmental Education section.
Figure 4: Eco-Source Homepage The CAFOD [14] Web site includes a number pages devoted to ‘Youth Topics’ surrounding ethical and environmental issues.
The ‘Holidays Poverty or Paradise?’ is divided into four activities with supporting materials to provide the context of the issue surrounding eco-tourism.
There are case studies, examining the image of tourism, facts about who travels where.
Also included are tourism issues to consider in an imaginary third world country, role-play’s and questions intended to provoke discussion amongst classes.
ECoNETT [15] is a joint project between the World Travel & Tourism Council and the European Commission to develop an information network for tourism and the environment.
ECoNETT aims to increase overall awareness of sustainable travel & tourism and in turn stimulate changes in management practices, in destinations and corporations to achieve sustainable travel & tourism development.
This site gives a comprehensive coverage of sustainable tourism initiatives as well as providing contacts and links to other sources.
Full text searching of the site is possible and links to related sites are provided.
Some information is given in Spanish, French, Dutch and Italian.
References [1] Biz/ed Internet Catalogue http://www.bized.ac.uk/listserv/listhome.htm [2]World Bank Environmental Economics and Indicators http://www-esd.worldbank.org/eei/ [3]ABARE Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics http://www.abare.gov.au/ [4]Communications for a Sustainable Future http://csf.colorado.edu/ecol-econ/ [5]Environmental Economics Working Paper Inventory http://206.29.48.66/EPA/wpi.nsf/ [6]United Nations Department of Economics and Social Development http://www.un.org/esa/index.html [7]OneWorld Online http://www.oneworld.org/guides/ [8]business-ethics http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/business-ethics/ [9]SustainAbility http://www.sustainability.co.uk/ [10]Sustainable Business Network http://sbn.envirolink.org/ [11]Resources for the Future http://www.rff.org/ [12]International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development http://www.icimod.org.sg/focus/tourism/mtour_toc.htm [13]Eco-Source http://www.podi.com/ecosource/ [14]CAFOD Holidays: Poverty or Paradise?
http://www.cafod.org.uk/holidays.htm [15]ECoNETT http://www.wttc.org/ Author Details Kate Sharp, Research Officer ILRT University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol, BS8 1HH Email: kate.sharp@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/kates.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Setting up an Institutional E-Print Archive Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Setting up an Institutional E-Print Archive Buzz data software framework html database dissemination apache archives metadata accessibility vocabularies repositories eprints copyright preservation latex linux passwords ascii perl mysql rae interoperability url research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Pinfield, Mike Gardner, and John MacColl with some practical advice on setting up an e-print archive.
This article outlines some of the main stages in setting up an institutional e-print archive.
It is based on experiences at the universities of Edinburgh and Nottingham which have both recently developed pilot e-print servers(1).
It is not the intention here to present arguments in favour of open access e-print archives – this has been done elsewhere(2).
Rather, it is hoped to present give an account of some of the practical issues that arise in the early stages of establishing an archive in a higher education institution.
What are 'e-prints'?
‘E-prints’ are electronic copies of academic research papers.
They may take the form of ‘pre-prints’ (papers before they have been refereed) or ‘post-prints’ (after they have been refereed).
They may be journal articles, conference papers, book chapters or any other form of research output.
An ‘e-print archive’ is simply an online repository of these materials.
Typically, an e-print archive is normally made freely available on the web with the aim of ensuring the widest possible dissemination of their its contents.
There are a number of successful open access e-print archives already in existence.
Perhaps the best known is arXiv(3), a service for high energy physics, maths and computer sciences.
Another example is CogPrints which covers cognitive science(4).
Both of these are centralised subject-based services.
They are single e-print repositories based in single institutions – Cornell and Southampton universities respectively.
Authors from any institution are required to submit their papers to the archive remotely by email or using the self-archiving procedure online.
Centralised subject-based archives work; but so far they have only been taken up by a limited number of subject communities.
Because of this an alternative model is being suggested by advocates of e-prints: institutional e-print archives .
Institutions, it is argued, have the resources to subsidise archive start-up, they also have the organisational and technical infrastructures to support ongoing archive provision.
In addition, they have direct interest in wishing to expose their research output to others as this would promote the institution's standing in the research community.
So far, there are few examples of established institutional e-print archives.
The archives set up by Edinburgh and Nottingham are attempts to experiment with the possibilities to see if the distributed institutional model works(6).
If it does, one of the key factors responsible for its success will undoubtedly be the Open Archives Initiative.
What is the Open Archives Initiative?
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI)(7) “develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.”(8) At the centre of this work is the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol.
This creates the potential for interoperability between e-print archives by enabling metadata from a number of archives to be harvested and collected together in a searchable database.
The metadata harvested is in the form of Dublin Core and normally includes information such as author, title, subject, abstract, and date.
The OAI distinguishes between ‘Data Providers’ and ‘Service Providers’.
OAI Data Providers are archives which expose metadata to harvesters.
Service Providers collect the metadata and create services with it, such as allowing users to search whi itch allow users to search the metadata.
This article concentrates on the first of these roles.
The distinction between Data Provider and Service Provider is conceptually very important but the terminology used may be a little unpopular with archive providers.
Many archive providers regard their role as providing a service themselves.
At Edinburgh and Nottingham we certainly think of what we are doing as providing a service directly to users as well as providing data for automated harvesters.
That being as it may, the most important point to make about OAI is that it creates the conditions for making distributed archives interoperable.
There is the potential for a cross-searchable global virtual research archive in which papers will be easily retrievable wherever they are located.
Setting up the server Installation At both Edinburgh and Nottingham we have set up our e-print archives using eprints.org software(9).
This software has been created at the University of Southampton and is made freely available for anyone to use.
The major advantage of this software is that it comes already OAI-compliant.
Once it is installed, it is automatically ready to generate metadata in a form which can be picked up by OAI harvesters.
We have used version 1 of the software and our experiences of this are described here.
Version 2 has recently been made available and so new users will want to use install this.
The installation at Nottingham is described here to illustrate a few points.
At Nottingham, the web development platform we are using is a standard Intel PC (800MHz; 256MB RAM; 20GB IDE disk) running Linux (SuSE 7.2) with the Apache web server and MySQL database.
This provides a simple and inexpensive system on which to trial new applications but we intend to migrate to a more substantial system before offering a full service.
We found the eprints.org software relatively straightforward to install but installation was not without problems and there are still some modules that we have not got working.
Installation of both version 1 and 2 require knowledge of Perl and MySQL.
One problem which arose in the installation of version 1 was with the automatic user registration via email (users have to register in order to self-archive their material).
We never got this working satisfactorily and currently have to register users manually.
There is a new web-based registration system in eprints.org version 2 which we assume is easier to configure.
However, if we were to roll self-archiving out to the whole institution, then we would definitely want to integrate with our current user registration methods (such as via LDAP to our NDS), rather than create another set of usernames and passwords for users.
Once the software is installed it is necessary to configure the metadata formats (such as the subject hierarchy and file formats) and customise the user interface.
It is simple to design your own subject hierarchy and load this into the database.
However it is far more complex to alter this once you have started to upload documents, so it is important to get this right before uploading too many papers.
It is also easy to change the list of accepted file formats and to change the design for the static home and information pages.
Similarly it is straightforward to design a custom header and footer and apply this to all the dynamic and static pages.
It is only slightly more complex to change the dynamic pages such as the document abstract pages (for example, a couple of lines of Perl adds in the document status).
On the whole, eprints.org software is an impressive and workable piece of software.
It allows institutions to create an instant framework for an OAI-compliant repository without having to do their own technical development.
Once the software has been installed, the server needs to be registered with the OAI.
The OAI maintains a list of OAI-compliant archives for OAI Service Providers to be able to visit.
Before registering the archive the OAI will point a harvester at it and carry out a number of tests to check if it is fully OAI-compliant.
When this is completed, they will confirm by email and the archive will added to the public list.
Nottingham has already registered its archive.
The process is taking longer at Edinburgh, where the appropriate committee of the University has yet to provide its ratification for the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) to go public.
Document types and formats The OAI protocol provides the functionality for metadata interoperability but it is not a specification for archive content.
In addition to OAI compliance, it is essential to develop an e-print archive collection policy which specifies various aspects of collection development and management.
One key element of this is document type.
What sort of document will be accepted by an archive?
A crucial question here is whether the archive will accept pre-prints as well as post-prints.
What other criteria would be used for papers?
Are conference papers or technical reports acceptable?
Next there is the question of file format.
The default on the eprints.org software is to accept Postscript PDF ASCII HTML Archive managers may want to add to or take away from these formats.
Possible additions may be specialised document preparation formats such as TeX or LaTeX, used by mathematicians and physicists, or common formats, such as Rich Text Format.
There are open-source utility programs available to convert from non-supported to supported formats.
Conversion from LaTeX to either Postscript or PDF can be achieved by using one of these programs.
Consideration may also be given as to whether any of these default formats should be switched off.
HTML for example is a very fluid standard which is difficult to validate easily.
It may be thought advisable to not accept documents in this format.
Digital preservation Related to the question of document format is the question of digital preservation.
One of the concerns frequently raised by institutions in response to the idea of the development of a ‘free corpus’ of research publications based upon the OAI is the very question of ‘archiving’ itself.
The ‘Archive’ of the Open Archive Initiative refers primarily to the process of depositing of articles, rather than to the process of preserving them.
A project with a similar acronym, OAIS (the ‘Open Archival Information System’)(10) addresses the question of archiving for long-term preservation.
In the medium to long term e-print archive managers may well want to apply its principles in running their archives.
As Peter Hirtle has stated, “An OAI system that complied with the OAIS reference model, and which offered assurances of long-term accessibility, reliability, and integrity, would be a real benefit to scholarship.”(11) For this reason it is good to at least be aware of the potential of OAIS now.
OAIS is a model which is based on the premise that digital objects must be converted into bitstreams which can then be preserved indefinitely.
This is achieved by a two-stage process known as ‘ingest’, in which data is separated from medium into an underlying abstract form.
The underlying abstract form is then mapped into a bitstream, which is preserved.
This model, by operating at a high level of logical abstraction, very successfully describes a system for rendering a digital resource into a format for preservation which can then be regenerated by reversing the steps.
Having created the form of the document for preservation, there are essentially three strategies for long-term digital preservation.
1.Migration: data is stored in a software-independent format and migrated through successive hardware regimes 2.Technology preservation: data is stored together with the hardware and software required to make use of it 3.Emulation: the look, feel and behaviour of a resource is emulated over time on a succession of hardware and software configurations.
This is most appropriate for resources produced in non-standard or proprietary formats.
Emulation is really a form of ‘virtual’ technology preservation, although it also requires migration of the emulator software in the medium and longer terms.
With the first and third of these strategies, one important aspect of preservation is that of location.
Eprints.org software automatically assigns a unique URL to each paper, but if in future another piece of software is used for an archive, these URLs would probably change.
The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) has addressed this issue by creating a system where a perpetual URL can be assigned for each paper (12).
Submission procedure Once the question of document types and formats has been addressed, the next collection development issue is submission procedure.
The e-print movement has traditionally been associated with so-called ‘self-archiving’, where the authors themselves format their documents and submit them.
This works well in established archives.
The eprints.org software has a self-archiving facility but our experience of this is that it is rather long winded and requires a certain amount of IT literacy.
Some users may well be put off.
In view of this some advocates of e-prints are suggesting that submission to an institutional archive should be mediated.
At least at the beginning the library (or whoever is managing the archive) should deposit the items on behalf of users.
We have found this more or less the only thing that works.
It may also involve the additional job of file formatting and conversion for users.
For example, many users may not have the facilities to convert a word-processed file into a PDF.
There is an argument which says that the archive administrator should take this on, at least at the beginning.
Metadata standards and quality Another role in which the archive administrator should be active is metadata creation.
Since OAI is based on the exchange of metadata, getting the metadata right is fundamentally important.
The OAI protocol harvests unqualified Dublin Core metadata but in practice this can mean pretty much anything.
It is crucial to have some kind of metadata quality threshold to ensure that it is accurate and sufficiently detailed.
This is particularly true in the context of self-archiving.
One of the potential problems of self-archiving is self-created metadata, with all of the inaccuracies that implies.
In a self-archiving environment it is important to have some kind of approval process where metadata can be checked and if necessary enhanced before the record is made public.
The eprints.org software builds this into the workflow.
An item has to be approved by the system administrator before it goes live.
The administrator can accept, edit or bounce a submission at that stage.
Metadata format and quality is obviously crucial to OAI Service Providers who are harvesting it and creating search facilities.
The creators of the ARC service (an experimental Service Provider) report a number of problems associated with metadata diversity(13).
These range from simple things like different variant spellings or date formats to more complex problems like different subject descriptors.
Normalising this kind of metadata to say create a meaningful browse index is very difficult.
They suggest the use of controlled vocabularies, but how realistic this is remains to be seen.
One other possible weakness of the OAI protocol relates to metadata.
This is the fact that the OAI metadata is not picked up by conventional search engines.
We have found that search engines actually do pick up some of the HTML from our browse pages in Nottingham archive.
But this is not very efficient.
New software tools such as DP9(14), which can translate OAI compliant metadata into search engine-friendly data, may be important in addressing this problem for OAI archive managers.
Costs The installation of an OAI-compliant e-prints server from scratch is not a costly business in terms of hardware and software.
Most of the costs are in staff time.
A rough guide to the staff time required to carry out the installation is: Software installation: one to two days Web interface customisation: three days Added to this are the hardware costs of a server.
This cost does depend on whether or not a dedicated server is purchased and installed for the e-print archive.
The costs of installation, however, are insignificant compared with ongoing costs of managing the archive and in particular in encouraging participation by researchers.
This is something we are only just beginning to do at Edinburgh and Nottingham but it is already clear that this is the biggest challenge.
Encouraging user participation What kind of participation?
Setting an archive up is one thing, getting users to participate in its ongoing development in quite another.
The participation of users is required in two main ways to make an e-prints archive work: first they need to contribute content, secondly they need to use it.
Left to itself, this is a chicken and egg situation (they won’t use it until there is content; they won’t contribute content until they are using it) so some kind of initial effort is required from the archive managers to get things moving.
The most important (and most difficult) thing is getting content in place.
There are two phases to getting content.
The initial (short-term) phase is getting enough content in place to set up a demonstrator.
The second (medium to long-term) phase is getting a critical mass of content in place to provide a useful service.
The first is important in achieving the second.
Based on the principle that ‘demonstration is better than description’, it is much easier to discuss the possibilities if you are looking at a demonstrator.
Users understandably like to see that the thing works before they will want to contribute to it.
In the short term In setting up a demonstrator database it is important to get some ‘real’ content in place.
We found that it was easiest to include publications already in the open access public domain.
At both Nottingham and Edinburgh, we discovered some of these on the institutional web site, either on personal or departmental pages.
Academics pointed us at articles on their departmental servers in some cases.
We located others in existing e-print archives, such as arXiv.
In all cases we contacted the staff concerned by email and asked them if we could include the items in our e-prints demonstrator.
In all cases they agreed and some even sent back a couple of other papers as well.
This approach enabled both institutions to get 50 or so papers in place relatively quickly for demonstration purposes.
Arguing for e-prints One of the key ways in attempting to get content for an e-print archive is to talk to academic colleagues more generally about scholarly communication issues.
An e-print archive is after all not an isolated development.
Rather it is a response to a number of structural problems in the academic publishing industry.
Describing these problems and showing how e-prints are a possible solution is crucial to any institutional advocacy campaign.
A word of warning here.
Academics are not normally interested in the ‘serials crisis’ per se.
To simply observe that serial prices have been rising at unreasonable rates since the 1980s is not normally convincing in itself that anything needs to be done by researchers.
This can easily be written off as ‘the library’s problem’.
Rather it is important to marshal the arguments from the point of view of a researcher, as a contributor to and reader of the literature.
So, What is in it for the researcher?
There are a number of possible approaches to answering this question: Lowering “impact barriers”.
E-print archives make papers more visible.
Papers are freely available for others to consult and cite.
Evidence is beginning to emerge that work which is freely available is in fact cited more(15).
Ease of access.
This is the other side of the coin of lowering impact barriers.
It means that access to the literature should be freed up, in contrast to the current system where most of the research literature is not easily available to most researchers.
Rapid dissemination.
Depending on what document types are accepted in the archive (pre-prints or post-prints) online repositories can really speed up the process of dissemination of research findings.
In certain fast-moving disciplines this can be an attractive prospect.
It was one of the main motivating factors behind the set up of the arXiv service.
OAI functionality.
OAI-compliant archives can be cross-searched.
The potential for a global cross-searchable research archive needs to be emphasised.
Showing users the potential of using services like ARC may help them to see how that cross-searching can work in practice.
We have found that we need to spell out this advantage very clearly.
Academics are not familiar with terminology such as ‘interoperability’ or even ‘cross-searching’.
If they are left with the impression that searchers will need to log in to an lots of different institutional servers – at Nottingham or Edinburgh or any other university – they will regard the initiative as doomed to failure (as indeed it would be).
Value-added services.
These might include presenting authors with details of hits on their papers, or enabling them to create publications lists on their own pages from e-print archive data.
Developing services such as Citebase may create the potential in the future to give users citation analyses of their work(16).
As well as persuading authors on the ground it is important to persuade institutional managers and policy makers.
The question is: what is in it for the institution?
Raising the profile of the institution.
Ensuring that the research output of the institution is widely disseminated is in the interests of the institution as a whole.
This helps to enhance its reputation and thus its ability to attract high quality researchers and further research funds.
RAE management.
E-print archives may be helpful in managing submissions for any future RAEs.
They ensure that a good number of papers (and bibliographical data about them) are easily available in advance.
Long term cost savings.
These savings will result in reducing outlays for periodical subscriptions.
This last point is not one to push too much.
There is a danger that it may cause managers to reduce the money allocated to libraries prematurely.
It needs to be emphasised this is a long-term potential gain if the investment is put in now in setting up and populating these archives.
The idea that e-print archives will lead to immediate gains as part of wider policies to manage the institution’s informational assets is one that sometimes seems to strike a chord with senior managers.
Addressing concerns As well as putting the positive case for e-prints it is also important to address concerns that might be raised in the minds of academics and managers.
In our experience there are a number of major concerns that academics seem to raise on a regular basis: Intellectual property rights (and particularly copyright) Quality control (and particularly peer review) Workload (theirs!)
Undermining the ‘tried and tested’ publishing status quo (on which academic reputations and promotions rest) The question of IPR and copyright is an interesting and complex one.
Who owns copyright of research output?
The custom and practice in most HEIs is that academic authors are permitted to claim or dispose of copyright themselves.
Many research journals require them to sign over copyright before publication.
However, there is an argument in law that the copyright or research output is actually owned by the employer (the HEI) rather than the individual.
But we have found that raising this question with academics can be rather sensitive.
In many cases, rather than attempt to fight this one out with researchers, it is best to assume that the author owns copyright and take it from there.
The most important thing is that authors should be discouraged from thoughtlessly signing away their copyright to publishers.
Authors should be encouraged where possible to retain their copyright by either submitting to journals that do not require sign-over or altering the copyright agreement to retain their copyright (or at least e-distribution rights).
If this fails, staff can be encouraged to invoke the ‘Harnad-Oppenheim’ strategy where a pre-print version of an article plus corrections (made as a result of referee comments) are deposited in an e-print server(17).
All of this may require someone with a good knowledge of copyright being available to help authors.
At Edinburgh and Nottingham we are certainly considering ways of giving academic authors easy access to copyright advice when they need it.
The crucial message is that authors do not need to stop submitting their work to high-impact traditional journals.
They should carry on doing so but also place a copy of their work in the e-print archive.
It is not an ‘either/ or’ situation.
This argument may also help to allay fears over quality control.
Authors often fear that self-archiving is the same a self-publishing and that it undermines peer review.
The important point here is that for the immediate term at least authors should still submit their papers to journals in order to get the peer review ‘kite mark’.
In physics, researchers still submit their work to journals even though they put it on arXiv.
Physicists do however also deposit pre-refereed versions of papers (pre-prints) on arXiv.
Physics has a well established pre-print culture.
But this is not the case with other disciplines.
In our experience, many academics from other disciplines strongly dislike the idea of publicly available pre-prints.
We have found it useful in these cases to downplay the pre-print idea and encourage authors to contribute post-prints only to the e-print archive.
Discipline differences are such that some institutions might consider having a number of different e-print archives for different subject areas each with different policies on document type.
It is important whatever happens that e-print archives are run in such a way that they address the needs and working patterns of researchers.
Things should be made as easy as possible for them to contribute.
At the beginning, emphasising that ‘the library will do the work’ may be only the way to get content.
Academics do not want additional bureaucratic burdens nor do they want to have to learn new IT skills.
Allowing them to email a paper to an archive administrator who will then do the format conversion and e-print submission will encourage them to provide content.
They will also be encouraged to provide content if they do not think that the e-prints movement will undermine the ‘tried and tested’ norms of scholarly communication.
Some academics are reasonably content with the existing systems.
They have built up their reputations using them.
They do not view commercial publishers in the negative light that some librarians do since they are often shielded from the economic realities of the journal industry.
A few who are editors might even receive some form of payment from publishers.
It is often a good idea therefore to picture self-archiving as complementary to ‘tried and tested’ journals, which is actually the case.
Once again the fundamental message is ‘do not stop submitting papers to peer reviewed journals but please deposit them in the e-print archive as well’.
Advocacy methods At Edinburgh and Nottingham we are only just getting under way with our advocacy so we do not have too much experience, but we are already finding it a challenge.
We have used a number of different dissemination methods: Setting up a project web site (linked to from the archive itself).
This can act as a focus for developments and news(18).
Producing a briefing paper.
This is useful for presenting to committees.
It should include specific recommendations for action and should be no more than two sides of A4.
Distributing literature, such as the SPARC Create change leaflet(19).
Using university magazines, including the Library user newsletter.
Presenting at departmental meetings and university committees.
Organising special advocacy events for university staff.
Various staff can be involved in these activities.
For senior university committees senior library managers should be involved.
Their commitment is often a good way to ensure the project retains momentum.
At other levels, subject librarians are often ideally placed to spread the word and encourage participation.
As with all library development projects, trying to identify ‘champions’ in academic departments who can encourage colleagues to take part is often the most valuable approach.
It may be possible to try to take a departmental approach in which several members of staff from a single department are encouraged to contribute.
Gaining the support of a senior member of staff may be crucial here.
Of course, it is important to pick the right champions.
It is crucial their ideas are not too radical.
For example, There are academics who are very opposed to traditional peer review practices, for example, and who may conceivably view open archiving as a banner under which to promote their views.
‘Champions’ of this sort may do more harm than good.
Whatever methods are used, our limited experience shows that it is a slog.
There is no magic bullet.
The message has to be put across using different media and fora on repeated occasions.
It takes time for it to penetrate.
The future The institutional e-print model still needs testing but it certainly has potential.
What we need now is more examples of institutional e-print archives to explore implementation issues.
We also need more OAI Service Providers to see whether search facilities and other value added services can be provided in a way which is useful to researchers.
It is hoped that in the UK the JISC-funded FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) programme will help to promote the use of OAI-compliant implementations, including e-print archives(20).
Whether there is external funding available for implementers or not, it needs to be recognised that OAI-compliant e-print archives are a real opportunity to improve the access to the research literature to enhance the scholarly communication process.
Library and information professionals should have the vision to be taking the lead on these important developments.
References (1) Nottingham’s is currently publicly available at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/library/eprints/.
For other experimental institutional archives see, for example, Glasgow’s available at http://eprints.lib.gla.ac.uk:333/.http://www-db.library.nottingham.ac.uk/eprints/ (2) See for example Stevan Harnad, ‘For whom the gate tolls?
How and why to free the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving, now’.
Available at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm.
(3) http://www.arxiv.org/ (4) http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ (5) See Stevan Harnad, '‘The self-archiving initiative'’ Nature: webdebates.
Available at http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html.
(6) Some of these issues are discussed in Stephen Pinfield '‘How do physicists use an e-print archive?
Implications for institutional e-print services'’.
D-Lib Magazine, 7, 12, December 2001.
Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/pinfield/12pinfield.html.
UK mirror site: http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/december01/pinfield/12pinfield.html.
(7) http://www.openarchives.org/ (8) http://www.openarchives.org/documents/FAQ.html#What is the mission of the Open Archives Initiative.
(9) http://www.eprints.org/ (10) http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/.
See Peter Hirtle, ‘Editorial: OAI and OAIS: what’s in a name?’ D-Lib Magazine 7, 4, April 2001.
Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/04editorial.html.
UK mirror site: http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/april01/04editorial.html.
(11) Peter Hirtle, ‘Editorial: OAI and OAIS: what’s in a name?’ D-Lib Magazine 7, 4, April 2001.
Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/04editorial.html.
UK mirror site: http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/april01/04editorial.html.
(12) Ed Sponsler ‘PURR The Persistent URL Resource Resolver’, October 2001.
Available at http://resolver.library.caltech.edu/caltechLIB:2001.003.
(13) Xiaoming Liu et al ‘Arc An OAI service provider for digital library federation’.
D-Lib Magazine, 7, 4, April 2001.
Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/liu/04liu.html.
UK mirror site: http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/april01/liu/04liu.html.
(14) http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/index.jsp (15) Steve Lawrence ‘Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact’.
Nature: webdebates.
Available at http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html.
(16) http://citebase.eprints.org/ (17) Stevan Harnad, ‘For whom the gate tolls?
How and why to free the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving, now’, Section 6.
Available at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim.
(18) Examples at Nottingham, http://www-db.library.nottingham.ac.uk/ep1/information.html, and Glasgow, http://www.gla.ac.uk/createchange/.
(19) For online equivalent see http://www.gla.ac.uk/createchange/ (20) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c01_02.html Author Details   Mike Gardner Mike.Gardner@Nottingham.ac.uk Mike is Web Support Officer in Library Services at the University of Nottingham Stephen Pinfield Stephen.Pinfield@Nottingham.ac.uk Academic Services Librarian at the University of Nottingham John MacColl john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk John is the Director of the SELLIC project at the University of Edinburgh (Science and Engineering Library) Article Title: "Setting up an institutional e-print archive" Author: Stephen Pinfield, Mike Gardner and John MacColl Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine), Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the E-Book Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine), Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the E-Book Buzz software html video cataloguing opac passwords marc ebook authentication url standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes explores the e-book from a Public Libraries perspective.
For years we’ve dreamed of the paperless office and foretold the death of the printed book, but my desk stubbornly remains cluttered with paper, my home full of books and my bag weighed down with reports.
But finally these electronic dreams seem to be about to come true e-books have arrived and are available at a Web site near you.
What is an e-book?
The term ‘e-book’ actually has several meanings.
It can mean any text or monograph which is made available in an electronic format.
For example, many amateur authors publish their work online in the form of web pages and these online works may be referred to as e-books.
Similarly a story sent in an e-mail, made available in Word format or even in plain text could also be referred to as an e-book.
Increasingly though, e-book is the term used for an electronic monograph which has been professionally edited and encrypted in some way.
This type of e-book is produced by traditional publishing houses like Harper Collins [1] or Schuster & Schuster [2] and requires the use of special software.
The software reproduces the electronic text in a format designed to be easy on the eye and prevents it from being copied or printed out.
To make things even more confusing the term ‘e-book’ is also used for the dedicated piece of equipment which people may use to read their e-book texts on.
The proper term for this equipment is ‘e-book reader’.
E-book Readers There are three main types of e-book readers.
These are Dedicated readers Handhelds PCs Dedicated Readers Dedicated readers are what most people think of when they hear the term ‘e-book’.
These have been designed specifically for reading electronic texts.
They are generally about the size and weight of a hardback book and have a large backlit colour or greyscale touch sensitive screen.
Most dedicated readers can store up to 10-15 books at one time and may also be able to play sound and video.
Users can alter the size of the text display, add notes, do keyword searches and insert electronic bookmarks.
Two buttons allow the user to page up and down through the text although a hyperlinked table of contents allows direct access to specific sections of each book.
The market leader for e-book readers is at the moment the Rocket eBook [3].
However, the company which owns Rocket eBook, Gemstar [4], has recently launched two newer models called catchily the RCA REB 1100 and the RCA REB 1200.
Other competitors in the field include the eBookman [5].
Handhelds Handhelds are also known as Personal Digital Assistants or Palmtop computers.
These are small (a bit bigger than a pack of cards) lightweight computers which are designed to provide some of the functionality of a PC (e-mail, calendars, web access, limited text editing) without the weight or size of laptops.
The market leaders in this field are Palm [6], Handspring [7] and PocketPCs [8].
These devices can be turned into e-book readers by installing freely available e-book software.
Handhelds are much lighter than dedicated e-book readers but have much smaller screens which tend to be of lower quality.
They can store fewer books at one time due to their smaller memories but have the advantage of greater functionality i.e.
you can use them to do other things than read e-books.
PCs PCs can also be used as e-book readers.
Again special software is needed to convert the PC or laptop into an e-book reader.
This software uses special fonts to make text easier on the eye and encrypts the book so it can’t be copied or printed.
The two market leaders for this software currently are Glassbook [9] and Microsoft Reader [10].
What about standards?
E-book standards are still in development and currently different e-book software packages use different standards.
For example, e-books developed for a Palm based OS system will use different technical standards than e-books developed for use with Microsoft Reader.
This is an issue which the e-book industry is currently grappling with and a common e-book standard is currently under development [11].
How do you buy books and what do they cost?
Buying e-books is a relatively simple procedure.
E-books are bought online usually through an e-book shop although some authors and publishers are experimenting with selling direct to their readers.
You simply search the catalogue, select the book you want, add it to your electronic shopping basket and purchase it using a credit card.
It is only at this point that the process differs from buying print books online.
Instead of waiting a few days for the book to be delivered, the e-book is available within seconds as a direct download.
Books may be downloaded to the hard-drive of a PC (which acts as a bookshelf for the e-book) or kept in a virtual bookshelf.
Virtual bookshelves are maintained by e-book vendors for their customers and are accessed by passwords.
Users simply log into their account when they wish to download a purchased book to their e-book reader.
Virtual bookshelves mean that if a user’s PC is stolen they do not lose their whole library of e-books too.
Most e-books cost the same or slightly less than their print equivalent.
Prices typically tend to be in dollars as most e-book vendors are based in America.
For example, Amazon.com [12] is selling the recent new John Le Carre novel in hardback for $22.40 (plus p&p) whereas the Peanut Press [13] e-book version costs $19.60 (but there is no p&p of course!).
Another example is Bag of Bones by Stephen King, this is available at Amazon in hardback for $22.40 and in e-book format from Peanut Press for $19.55 however this book is also available in paperback format at Amazon for $7.19.
E-books are therefore comparatively expensive and their lower production and delivery costs are not being passed onto the purchaser.
What’s available?
There are an estimated 50,000 e-book texts available.
This number is increasing rapidly as traditional publishers begin to make their new publications available in e-book format.
In addition, organisations like Net Library [14] are buying up the rights to many publications already available in print and converting them into e-books.
The choice of books being made available is being influenced heavily by the typical profile of the e-book purchaser.
E-book owners are typically technologically minded and likely to be males in their 20s and 30s.
Consequently a large percentage of the e-books published are aimed at this market with science fiction and technology books dominating.
Integrating e-books into libraries The challenge for libraries is how to integrate this new format of texts into the traditional library service model.
E-books are not physical items and so do not fit into existing acquisition or circulation models.
Circulating e-book readers The initial response to providing library users with access to e-books has been to circulate e-book readers.
The e-book readers are loaded with a number of texts, for example Riding the Bullet by Stephen King [15].
These texts are catalogued as usual and included in the OPAC.
If a library user wishes to read Riding the Bullet the catalogue record will direct the user to the enquiry desk where an e-book reader will be issued.
The e-book reader will have a loan period like any other item borrowed from the library and the library user must return the e-book reader at the end of the period.
The library user cannot personally download books to the e-book reader or read the library’s e-books on his or her own reader.
Algonquin Area Public Library, USA is an example of a public library already providing this service.
A useful FAQ about how it manages this service is available on its Web site [16].
Circulating pre-loaded e-book readers may just be a short-term solution to the issue of how to integrate e-books into the library.
By circulating the e-book readers the libraries are providing both text and the equipment to read it.
This would be equivalent to a library circulating both a video cassette and a video player.
However, as the penetration of e-book readers into the market is still very low the circulation of readers is still required.
Circulating e-books In the longer term libraries will simply circulate e-books for users to read on their own e-book readers.
As e-books are electronic files, library users will be able to download them directly from the library’s catalogue.
They may choose to do this in the library itself or most probably via the library’s Web site.
This will mean the library user will no longer have to physically visit a service point to borrow or return library books.
Each e-book borrowed will be automatically issued with an encrypted certificate.
As well as including information about how long the book is available for loan, the certificate will also prevent it from being copied to another reader.
At the end of the loan period this certificate will become invalid and the e-book will automatically delete itself from the library user’s e-book reader.
The library catalogue will then automatically make a copy of this e-book available for loan again.
No overdue notices need to be sent out, no fines need to be collected and the library does not need to be visited.
The integration of e-books into circulation systems is likely to be managed in one of two ways: Existing systems suppliers will develop new modules for current library management systems which allow the integration of e-books into the acquisition and circulation process.
In this model traditional book suppliers will expand their services to include e-books.
New organisations that specialise in supplying e-books to libraries will manage the administration of the e-books on the library’s behalf.
These suppliers will manage the acquisition and record management for the texts.
They will provide MARC records for insertion into the library’s traditional OPAC and support the integration of the library’s current acquisition system into their service.
Authentication procedures will be put in place to enable the library’s users to access this online library either from within the library or through its Web site.
NetLibrary is an example of a company already offering this service.
Currently its e-books can only be read via a PC or laptop but dedicated reader and handheld versions are due soon.
Stock selection models The e-book gives the library the potential to provide its readers with any book within minutes.
At present library users can only immediately borrow what is physically held in the library.
If the library doesn’t hold the required book the user will have to wait for it either to be sent from another library in that authority or request it via Inter Library Loan.
In an e-book environment if a user requests a book the library does not hold, the library can purchase it immediately and provide the reader with it within minutes.
The librarian will simply need to log on to its book supplier’s site, purchase the relevant e-book, download it straight to the library’s catalogue and then issue it to the library user.
This process is likely to take only a few minutes.
The instant access of e-books has strong implications for the traditional collection development model.
Public libraries tend to buy most books using the just-in-case model.
Books are bought in expectation of demand.
The librarians choose what they think their public wants to or even should be reading.
Developing an e-book collection could mean moving to a just-in-time model – with the readers’ demands being met within minutes of their requests.
This would mean that the library more accurately buys books which its users want but not necessarily books which librarians think they should have!
The development of workable e-book acquisition policies may be a time-consuming issue.
Possibly, libraries may still pre-select a large percentage of their e-book collection for their users (based on traditional selection criteria) with a smaller percentage of the stock selected as a direct result of reader requests.
Conclusions For libraries, the next few years will be challenging e-books will alter the way in which they circulate, acquire and manage their collections.
It really could be the end of the library world as we know it.
But if e-books deliver their promise and allow libraries to more effectively and efficiently meet the demands of their users then I feel fine.
References [1] Harper Collins http://www.harpercollins.com/hc/ [2] Schuster and Schuster http://www.simonsays.com/ [3] Rocket eBook http://www.rocket-ebook.com/enter.html [4] Gemstar http://www.ebook-gemstar.com/ [5] Ebookman http://www.franklin.com/ [6] Palm http://www.palm.com/ [7] Handspring http://www.handspring.com [8] Pocket PC http://www.microsoft.com/mobile/pocketpc/ [9] Glassbook http://www.glassbook.com/ [10] Microsoft Reader http://www.microsoft.com/reader [11] Open ebook forum http://www.openebook.com/ [12] Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com [13] PeanutPress http://www.peanutpress.com [14] NetLibrary http://www.netlibrary.com/ [15] Riding the Bullet Stephen King http://www.simonsays.com/book/default_book.cfm?isbn=0743204670 [16] Algonquin Area Public Library E-book FAQ http://www.nslsilus.org/alkhome/faq.html   The UKOLN E-book test I’ve been testing different types of e-book readers over the last few months.
Rocket ebook In Summer 2000 UKOLN purchased a Rocket eBook which cost £160.
First impressions were good.
It was lighter than expected and intuitive to use.
The quality of text presentation was good and was easy on the eye.
The backlit screen worked very well and it was still easy to read in bright sunshine and in the dark.
This proved to be a great boon if you like reading in bed at night but your partner prefers the lights off.
The e-book connected to a PC via a dedicated cradle which also acted its recharger (the typical battery length of the e-book is 40 hours).
Software had to be installed on a PC before any books could be downloaded.
The installation process was very quick and easy and provides an interface which allows you to manage your e-book collection.
This interface converts the hard drive of the PC into a long term bookshelf for the purchased e-books.
When you wish to read an e-book you simply download a temporary copy onto the reader which can be deleted when you’ve finished with it.
In general the e-book was easy to use and compared well with print books.
You could still highlight text, make annotations and insert bookmarks.
The size of the text could be altered which proved a big hit with my in-laws who liked the fact that they could read the e-book without their glasses.
It was also possible to read Word documents on the e-book which seemed a good idea.
However, to make them accessible on the e-book they first had to be converted into HTML (always an erratic procedure in Word) and then converted into a Rocket eBook format using a free piece of software called RocketWriter the end result was not always very familiar!
One problem with the e-book was its weight although it compared well with a hardback it was far heavier than a paperback.
Long reading sessions resulted in tired wrists rather than tired eyes!
A far greater problem was a purely mental one.
Purchasing a book to read (A Widow for A Year by John Irving if you’re interested) was technically very easy but mentally difficult.
E-books are over priced.
I seldom buy hardbacks because of their cost and consequently was put off by the high cost of e-books.
I only read one book on the e-book not because of the technology but because of the high cost of the e-books!
Handhelds Recently I’ve bought my first handheld PC and have been exploring how viable they are as e-book readers.
Unsurprisingly they are no way as comfortable or easy to use as the dedicated readers.
I use a Handspring Visor which probably has an average or slightly below average screen quality.
The display is greyscale and reasonably pixelated.
This means that screen quality doesn’t really compare very well with the Rocket eBook or a PC.
Due to the size of the screen a considerable amount of scrolling is involved in reading even the smallest amount of text.
Again text size can be altered and usually the reader software (I used PeanutReader) can be set to scroll the text automatically at a suitable speed.
This is quite a nice idea but the low quality screen makes it a rather visually jarring experience.
E-books for handhelds are downloaded again via a PC and then hotsynced to the handheld.
Handhelds provide a convenient way to read electronic text but are let down by the size of the screen and the quality of its resolution.
With colour screens and better resolution, handhelds could easily be used to read e-books but won’t challenge the dominance of print books because of the small screen size.
PCs PC’s are perhaps the most cumbersome way to read e-books but also the most sophisticated.
Packages like Glassbook and Microsoft Reader convert text on a PC screen into something more like text in a book.
The use of subtle colours, clever fonts and clear design is meant to transform the PC reading experience.
Text is easier to read and the experience is less tiring for the eye.
The use of full colour, the large screen and additionally functionality are all huge boons however they can’t get over the fact that, well a PC is a PC.
Unlike a PDA or a dedicated reader you can’t really curl up with a PC or even a laptop and quite frankly I spend enough time sitting at my PC as it is without doing my leisure reading this way too.
Overall Conclusions The dedicated reader I experimented with was surprisingly impressive.
I read practically the whole text of A Widow for a Year using it and found the experience very easy (the fact that I didn’t quite finish reading the book is more John Irving’s fault that the e-book).
The reader was easy to carry and had a very good battery life.
It was intuitive to use and it was easy to purchase books for it (from the limited range available).
Would I use it instead of normal books?
I’d be tempted but at the moment the price of e-books is too much of a barrier for me.
If e-books become cheaper and the cost of an e-book reader also decreases then I might be tempted in fact I’d be very tempted.
In the meantime I’m going to stick with paper books mainly for financial reasons.
Author Details   Sarah Ormes s.ormes@ukoln.ac.uk http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine) or How I learned to stop worrying and love the e-book” Author: Sarah Ormes Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/e-book/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BIDS Begets Ingenta Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BIDS Begets Ingenta Buzz data javascript database usability cataloguing sgml adobe licence telnet authentication url research Citation BibTex RIS The University of Bath concluded an agreement to sign over the ownership of BIDS to a new organisation known as ingenta ltd, while still retaining a substantial share.
Terry Morrow looks at the implications of the change, and reviews the latest developments in the services offered.
On 21st September 1998, primary responsibility for the BIDS collection of services was transferred from the University of Bath to a newly formed company known as ingenta ltd.
This was the culmination of a period of exploration and negotiation while the University sought a suitable partner to take over most of the financial responsibility for the growing organisation.
A Little History BIDS has been in existence since 1990, and started running its first public service, providing access to the collection of files supplied by ISI® known as the Citation Indexes in February 1991.
This service was the result of an agreement struck between ISI and CHEST, providing the UK HE and research communities with low-cost end-user access to a valuable set of data which indexes all articles published in a selected set of about 7,500 international academic journals.
Although ISI stands for the Institute for Scientific Information® (and their own end-user product is now called “Web of ScienceSM”), the databases are in fact multi-disciplinary, with separate files for Science, Social Sciences, and Arts & Humanities (as well as a conference proceedings index known as ISTP®).
Since the launch of the ISI service, it has grown in several different ways.
From an initial usage level of around 500 users a day, the ISI service alone is now delivering about 12,000 user sessions a day at peak times.
Added to this are several alternative bibliographic databases, a number of them covering more specialist areas such as IBSS (Social Sciences), EMBASE (Medical Science), and ERIC and BEI (the Education Databases).
The total number of institutions who subscribe to one or more databases has grown steadily over the years and is now over 130.
BIDS has actively developed the end-user facilities over the 8 years since the service was launched.
Although the service started with a simple telnet interface, a web interface was launched a couple of years ago, and this has recently been updated using frames and JavaScript to improve the look and usability.
A very popular feature that was introduced earlier this year is called AutoJournals, allowing users to select up to 50 journals covered by the ISI service and have the contents pages automatically e-mailed when updates are received.
Over 10,000 AutoJournals lists have already been set up.
Although initially set up to provide services within the UK, BIDS has delivered services overseas for a number of years, including EMBASE and the British Librarys Inside Information to Oslo University, and Compendex to Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden.
More recently, with the co-operation of IBSS and the ESRC, BIDS has conducted a trial of the IBSS Online (International Bibliography of the Social Sciences) database in Australia and New Zealand, with the result that 4 of the 7 universities in New Zealand, and a further 6 in Australia have agreed to take out licences.
Full Text Online As the popularity of BIDS bibliographic data services grew, the technical problems of mounting and distributing electronic versions of full text were gradually being resolved (primarily through the growing use of the Adobe Acrobat PDF file format and the ready availability of PDF viewers).
BIDS started to take an interest in delivering full text services, and was an active participant in eLib with the InfoBike project.
A successful approach to the JISC and the HEFCs resulted in BIDS being able to mount an embryo consolidation service using technology developed under InfoBike, by providing a single point of contact for material from three of the four publishers involved in the Pilot Site Licence Initiative [1] (Academic Press, Blackwell Science and Blackwell Publishers).
The service, known originally as JournalsOnline [2] but now re-badged as ingentaJournals, was launched in November 1996.
Initially it took a while to collect and load the material, but eventually approximately 450 titles from the three publishers, were mounted.
Delays in acquiring and mounting the material in electronic form highlighted the fact that publishers do not, by and large, print their titles.
It is a larger number of smaller, separate print houses that are responsible for creating the SGML header files and PDF article files for individual titles, and it has taken quite a while to get the processes of routine creation and delivery of this material working smoothly.
Use of the service has grown fairly steadily, but initially the popularity of this early service was somewhat limited because of the relatively small number of journals available.
However, a very attractive and unusual feature for users of ingentaJournals, which has encouraged take-up, is that there is no fee for accessing the database (and consequently no mechanism for subscribing).
The service is free to all, analogous to freely distributed mail-order catalogues.
Publishers effectively buy "advertising space" in the combined database of articles.
Full text delivery is then dependent on the user or institution taking out subscriptions either directly with the publisher or via subscription agents.
The ingentaJournals full text service was made even more useful as a result of work carried out by BIDS to integrate the bibliographic databases such as ISI with the full text service.
Bibliographic database search results are compared by the system with the material in the ingentaJournals service, and where there is a match, the display shows a “Full Text” tag alongside the hits.
Clicking on this triggers the delivery of the full text (assuming the user has right of access to the material).
This means that people who want to carry out searches over a greater time-span than is currently possible with full text services can still readily check the online availability of full text without searching multiple services.
The Birth of ingenta The growing importance of the ability to deliver full text, and the labour intensive nature of the work required to meet with publishers, draw up contracts, organise file formats and delivery procedures meant that BIDS needed more resources.
Since the JISC wasnt in a position to underwrite this sort of work, and because it clearly wasnt a core activity for the University of Bath, early in 1998 the University started discussions with a number of possible partners.
The end result was an agreement to set up a new company, to be known as ingenta ltd, which would take responsibility for BIDS and ingentaJournals and the development of the service.
The new CEO is Mark Rowse.
In this unique public/private partnership, the University has retained a substantial, but minority, stake in the new company, and for the foreseeable future ingenta will remain on campus.
The agreements with the JISC to run dataservices have been successfully sub-contracted to the new company, though the University remains the body with primary responsibility.
A key feature of ingenta is that it remains an organisation that is independent of any particular sector of the publishing business, including both publishers and subscription agents.
At the same time, through the widespread use of the bibliographic databases, it is a widely known service in academia.
These characteristics make the organisation very attractive to publishers who are looking for greater visibility for the electronic versions of their materials, without having to enter into business arrangements with competing publishers.
Having settled the organisational arrangements, ingenta has been very active in opening or re-opening discussions with a long list of publishers interested in a service which can promise such widespread exposure for their material.
As a result, there are now 14 publishers with agreements in place, and a large number of other leading publishers who are in detailed discussions.
Any publishers who enter into licensing agreements via NESLI [3] will also be welcome to make their material available via ingentaJournals.
Already, with well over 600 titles available or soon to be available, ingentaJournals is a very valuable resource, both to UK HE and beyond.
As for BIDS, the service name has such a high profile and level of awareness, its name (and URL) will be retained, especially for the services delivered to the UK Higher Education sector.
BIDS Academic, in a subcontracting arrangement with the University of Bath, will continue to operate the JISC supported services such as ISI, INSPEC, IBSS etc, on a separately accountable and not-for-profit basis, and will bid for new services as and when they are announced.
ingenta recognises the importance of bibliographic databases with their longer time coverage, which will undoubtedly complement the full text services for some years to come.
A reflection of the need for greater integration of these services was the launch at the beginning of October of the revised login procedures for BIDS services.
Instead of selecting a single service, such as ISI or ingentaJournals, users can now login to BIDS.
Having completed the ATHENS [4] authentication, the system now presents a list of services that are available to that particular username.
Searches can be switched from service to service without the need for re-authentication, simplifying access and hopefully increasing awareness of some of the other resources that institutions have bought into.
Future Growth The next few years are likely to see rapid growth in the range and usefulness of services offered by ingenta and BIDS.
While continuing to take an active interest in any new or renewed bibliographic database contracts negotiated by CHEST or JISC, ingenta will be putting most of its new resources into increasing the range of full text services as rapidly as possible, and promoting their widespread use.
Since academic publishing is an international business, a priority will be to increase awareness and usage outside the UK, particularly in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, North America and Australasia.
This should enable the organisation to attract even more publishers, making the service still more useful for those in UK HE and beyond.
Whatever happens to research publishing on the web, ingenta intends to be playing a major rôle.
References [1] The HEFC’s Pilot Site Licence Initiative http://www.jisc.ac.uk/progs/index.html#pilot [2] JournalsOnline: the online journal solution (Ariadne Issue 12) http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/cover/intro.html [3] NESLI the National Electronic Site Licensing Initiative http://www.nesli.ac.uk/ [4] ATHENS Access Management system http://www.athens.ac.uk/ Author Details Terry Morrow Academic Marketing Manager ingenta ltd University of Bath Email: T.M.Morrow@bids.ac.uk URL: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ccstmm/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Subject-Based Information Gateways Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Subject-Based Information Gateways Buzz data z39.50 interoperability Citation BibTex RIS Linda Kerr and Roddy MacLeod attended the recent CEI meeting at the Policy Studies Institute, London.
The JISC Circular 10⁄98, issued in August, invited full proposals and expressions of interest from institutions and/or consortia interested in participating in the development and extension of the work of the Subject Based Information Gateway (SBIG) projects, which are part of the Access to Network Resources (ANR) programme area of eLib.
The aim of the projects, which include ADAM [1], Biz/Ed [2], CAIN [3], EEVL [4], History [5], OMNI [6], RUDI [7] and SOSIG [8], supported in several cases by ROADS [9], is to help end-users in Higher Education Institutions by providing access to quality-tested collections of Internet resources.
The Committee for Electronic Information (CEI) wishes to extend the gateway concept, and interested parties were invited to attend a meeting at the Policy Studies Institute, London, on the 17th September to discuss the Circular.
The format of the meeting was a short presentation by Chris Rusbridge, Director of eLib, followed by a question and answer session.
In his presentation, Rusbridge outlined some of the intentions of the CEI as expressed in the Circular.
The intention is to obtain a more complete subject coverage than at present, but the level of funding available will not allow for a large number of subject gateways.
The proposed service will therefore have to develop partnership programmes in order to extend subject reach, and these may include agreements and partnerships both within and outside the UK.
A meeting to discuss international cooperation between subject gateways was due to take place the next week at the European Conference on Digital Libraries.
The CEI have suggested an organisational model similar to that of the AHDS [10], with a Network Centre responsible for overall strategic management of the resource discovery network and co-ordination of various subject services.
The Network Centre will take on responsibility for some areas such as the provision of training, service-wide technical development, overall collection policy, and evaluation, but implementation will need to be flexible.
Although the Circular states that control will be from the Network Centre, Rusbridge pointed out that it would have a wide range of relationships with the subject services, and a flexible approach is expected.
An interesting fact to emerge from the meeting was the hope that between £700,000 and £1million will be available for the service in the first year, with the level of funding reducing over three years.
The amount intended for the Centre has not yet been fixed.
The Network Centre, in collaboration with the Subject Services, will be expected to devise exit strategies for the service.
Full proposals to provide the Network Centre are required from institutions or consortia by 5th October, and expressions of interest from potential Subject Services are required by 2nd November.
CEI are expected to make a decision about the Network Centre on 12th November, so that some level of operation would begin in January 1999.
The Centre will operate fully from July 1999.
The Subject Services will be finalised between late January and early March 1999, and will operate from August 1999, so that there will be continuity between the old and new services.
The CEI realises that it may not be possible to achieve full subject coverage, and the topology of the subject landscape will be driven to some extent by the bids received.
It was gently suggested that parties interested in running more specialised subject gateways would be wise to link up with a larger gateway.
A sausage with spikes metaphor was used the spikes being the levels of high coverage in selected specialised areas within a broader subject gateway.
In this way, subject specialists could be accommodated rather than leaving everything to big gateways.
On the question of whether eLib will act as a matchmaker between potential subject services, the best way forward seemed to be for expressions of interest to make it clear if they were open to suggestions: in some cases they might be encouraged either to match up with other services or revise their funding proposals.
The lead site in any proposal must be from the higher education sector, but Subject Services can incorporate organisations from outside higher education, or outside the UK.
There were questions about the relationship between the proposed Network Centre and certain existing services.
Rusbridge explained that BUBL [11] might wish to bid to become a part of the new structure.
As NISS [12] is only partly funded by JISC, its role could not be dictated, but it was hoped that unnecessary duplication would be avoided.
The AHDS is at present a data centre, but it might wish to bid to add Subject Service functions to its mission.
The CTI Centres are currently under review, which complicates matters, but they too seemed good candidates to add Subject Service functions at marginal cost.
CEI is clearly hoping that there will be some available synergies when the dust of the review settles.
Whilst use of ROADS would not be prescribed, it was indicated that any potential service would need to address the question of interoperability.
ROADS staff were available to discuss such issues, and commented that ROADS already has several interoperability capabilities including the ability to cope with Z39.50 and Dublin Core.
On the question of support for various value added services which have been developed by some SBIGs, Rusbridge suggested that there might be scope for developing fee based additional services, and that these might well contribute to an exit strategy.
The overall impression given at the meeting was that the CEI intends to be flexible in its approach both to bids for the provision of the Network Centre and the Subject Services good bids will be considered carefully and may be encouraged to match up with other bidders and to the functions of the Network Centre with respect to the Subject Services.
1.http://www.adam.ac.uk/ 2.http://www.bized.ac.uk/ 3.http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ 4.http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ 5.http://www.ihrinfo.ac.uk/ 6.http://omni.ac.uk/ 7.http://rudi.herts.ac.uk/ 8.http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ 9.http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/ 10.http://ahds.ac.uk/ 11.http://bubl.ac.uk/ 12.http://www.niss.ac.uk/ Author details: Linda Kerr EEVL Project Officer, Heriot Watt University Roddy MacLeod Senior Faculty Librarian, Heriot Watt University Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Apart from the Weather, I Think It’s a Good Idea: Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Apart from the Weather, I Think It’s a Good Idea: Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals Buzz data rss portal usability archives repositories copyright url research Citation BibTex RIS Liz Pearce takes a look at recent research from the PORTAL Project, which asked over 600 users what they might want from an institutional portal.
The PORTAL Project [1], funded under the JISC's FAIR Programme, aims to explore a range of issues relating to the deployment of institutional portals within the UK tertiary education sector.
An introduction to the PORTAL Project was provided by Ian Dolphin, Paul Miller and Robert Sherratt in Ariadne Issue 33 [2].
The project began in September 2002 and work is well underway on the project's diverse work packages.
Work Package 6, 'Standards for the Description of Portal Users', is now available [3] and both technical and research work is ongoing.
Key to the work of the PORTAL Project is stakeholder consultation regarding the development and use of institutional portals.
Along with an Evaluation and Usability Study (WP13), two stakeholder requirements studies form Work Packages 3 and 4 of the project.
The first with which this article is concerned relates to the requirements for institutional portals themselves, whilst the second (ongoing at the time of writing) focuses on the requirements for external content, such as that provided by the JISC IE, in institutional portals.
The results of Work Package 4: Stakeholder Requirements for External Content in Institutional Portals will be published at the end of May and will be highlighted in a future issue of Ariadne.
Methodology Around 80 staff and students at five tertiary education institutions around the country participated in interviews and focus groups dealing with their expectations, needs, likes and dislikes with regard to institutional portals.
The participating institutions included an institute of higher education, an FE college, a 'new' or post-1992 university, a research institution and a red-brick university.
Participants included teaching staff, undergraduates, postgraduates and FE students, senior managers and administrators.
Two JISC representatives were also interviewed to highlight the views of external policy makers.
The qualitative data collected at the research sites was augmented by the results of an online survey.
Whilst the 'official' survey period ran from November 2002 – February 2003 the success of the data collection method, which employed a reusable Learning Object from the Iconex repository [4], has led to the survey remaining available.
It can be accessed via the project website and remains available to provide a rolling view of user needs and, potentially, to track changes over time.
The survey was completed by a total of 557 respondents, of whom some 265 were students.
Figure 1: The PORTAL Project's card sorting exercise, powered by a reusable Iconex Learning Object [larger image ] Results Despite low levels of awareness regarding what a 'portal' is, the concept of the institutional portal was well received, particularly amongst students.
Both in interviews and in the online survey – where comments were optional – students made comments such as: "I think this is a good idea...
I hope to use the portal soon", "I think it's really a very good idea it will help students be more organised" and "I think it's a great idea, I can't really see any problems with it".
Concerns were raised, however, about the value of a 'one-stop shop' or 'department store' approach to resources and services.
The fear that an 'interface to everything' would provide only superficial access to resources was voiced by a limited number of both survey and interview participants.
The top 10 rated features based on the results of the online survey are as follows: Rated Feature 1st Search your favourite resources 2nd Library administration 3rd Access or update teaching materials 4th Personal information 5th Library and quality Internet resources alerts 6th Access your institutional email 7th Handbook 8th Deadline alerts 9th Access or update reading lists 10th Campus news There are, predictably, differences in feature popularity across sectors and user groups.
For example, whilst rated 8th overall, 'Deadline alerts' were the top scoring feature for students and, though rated 5th overall, 'Library and quality Internet resource alerts' took the number 2 spot for staff in the Further Education sector.
Consistently in the top ten for various groups were both 'Search your Favourite Resources' and 'Library and Quality Internet Resource Alerts', providing a clear indication that access to external content is a key priority for the potential users of institutional portal systems.
Perhaps as revealing as the top-rated features are those which ranked as the least popular.
The bottom five features were revealed to be: Rated Feature 38th Weather 37th News 36th Catering 35th View payslips 34th Vote in student elections Both the news and the weather, presented as RSS feeds, form popular near-ubiquitous in the case of the weather – portal features, yet they formed the lowest rated features over all.
Whilst such features are often included as 'stickiness' enhancing items, the weather was the only feature to receive a consistently negative score.
Unlike other items, which despite low survey scores, were highly valued by qualitative respondents, the weather fared no better amongst interviewees and focus group participants.
Laughter was a frequent response to the inclusion of a weather channel in the portal and the title of this article indicates that, for one student, weather channels were perceived to be a portal's only negative feature.
A more detailed analysis of the stakeholder requirements work conducted as part of Work Package 3 of the PORTAL Project is also available [5].
Conclusions Whilst the online survey provided respondents with the opportunity to rate existing and planned portal features, interviews and focus groups provided a sample of the FE and HE community with a forum to suggest features and raise issues.
As well as revealing a (hopefully) useful set of stakeholder requirements, the consultation work undertaken has confirmed the extent to which such consultation is both valuable and valued by users.
One respondent noted that "I think what people like about this is that they feel they can have some sort of say... its not getting landed on us at the last minute with features that they thought you might like without knowing".
The low ranking of 'quick win' portal channels – such as the news and weather – indicates the extent to which institutions need to discover user needs in order to deliver information and services which genuinely meet them.
As one member of teaching staff lamented: "There is a huge danger with this that because you can do it – you do.
Who needs some of it?"
Whilst the debates surrounding the value and impact of institutional portals will continue, one suspects, for many years to come, the work of the PORTAL Project provides a view of potential users’ current needs information which can help us shape this rapidly developing field.
References The PORTAL Project is at: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/.
Ian Dolphin, Paul Miller & Robert Sherratt, 'Portals, PORTALS Everywhere', from Ariadne 33,is at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/portals/.
Work Package 6, Standards for the Description of Portal Users, is at: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/deliverables.html.
Ian Dolphin & Paul Miller, 'Learning Objects and the Information Environment', from Ariadne 32 is at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/iconex/.
Project deliverables for the PORTAL Project http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/deliverables.html.
Acknowledgements The Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL — http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/) Project is a joint activity of UKOLN and Academic Services Interactive Media at the University of Hull, funded under the JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme.
Author Details Liz Pearce PORTAL Project Academic Services Interactive Media University of Hull Email: e.pearce@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Apart from the weather, I think it’s a good idea" Author: Liz Pearce Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/pearce/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 36: This Time the Cavalry Showed Up Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 36: This Time the Cavalry Showed Up Buzz data software infrastructure archives metadata repositories copyright preservation cataloguing aggregation ontologies cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 36.
Welcome to the July 2003 issue of Ariadne.
I have to confess to an interest in preservation issues and so I feel a timely lesson comes to us all in the shape of the rescue of the BBC Domesday Project videodiscs.
Jeffrey Darlington, Andy Finney and Adrian Pearce have put together their compelling account of how all the data gathered by the Domesday Project in the mid-1980s was rescued at the last moment.
The near loss of a country-wide collection of information, not even twenty years old, as compared with the preservation of the original Domesday Book, is an irony which has not been lost on the national press [1].
Inevitably it leads one to wonder what else has been lost simply because material becomes trapped in a format which turns out to be unpopular, uncommercial or unmigrated.
Indeed this is also a major problem even for large and busy organisations with control over their material but which have significant archives that have to be protected [2].
However the conclusions of Domesday Redux: The rescue of the BBC Domesday Project videodiscs are perhaps a telling and useful reminder that a preservation strategy, even once devised, is not a policy cast in stone but a device that must itself be maintained and ready to migrate.
Liz Lyon looks at the trend in research to generate ever-increasing amounts of primary data and the cyclical manner in which the latter produces secondary information such as data sub-sets, aggregations, annotations, etc.
which may itself be reused.
In her article eBank UK she investigates the impact of Grid technologies and Grid-enabled applications upon the future of research, scholarly communication and ultimately learning itself and identifies the challenges involved.
Kelvin Hai, David Palmer and Chris Dunlop have contributed a technical description of the challenges faced by the MARTINI Project and the solution it devised to meet them.
The Project’s aim was to identify the generic and transferable aspect of the 7⁄99 projects.
Pursuing this aim, MARTINI has identified the IMS Enterprise Object Model as a standard for the representation of student information but also the obstacles associated with this standard.
In An IMS Generator for the Masses they describe the architecture and operation of the Project-developed IMS Generator and show how its flexibility allows it to handle the diverse nature of data held by institutions.
The aim of the JISC Information Environment to provide users of electronic resources in higher and further education in the UK with easy access to high quality information and learning resources.
Andy Powell in his article Mapping the JISC IE service landscape provides us with a graphical representation of how various services, projects and software applications fit within the JISC Information Environment technical architecture.
Verity Brack and Amanda Closier describe the role of the JISC Information Environment Service Registry in providing better access to the JISC’s numerous resources as part of the Information Environment’s middleware or shared services.
The Project aims to form a catalogue of the electronic resources available and so enable portals and other services to determine on behalf of their users which resources are available and appropriate for their needs, and to supply information about how these resources are accessed through a machine-to-machine interface.
In their article Developing the JISC Information Environment Service Registry, they describe recent work and what is planned for the coming months.
Julia Chruszcz takes a look at the world a decade ago when MIMAS became a JISC-designated national data centre and in particular at MIMAS Ten Years On.
Meanwhile in the field of electronic learning, Paul Browning gives a review of six of the 14 MLEs that were developed under the JISC-funded programme ‘Building Managed Learning Environments in HE’ Programme.
In Six MLEs more similar than different he considers the technical aspects of the six reviewed and how best their strengths can be taken forward.
The development of portals will be a topic for some time to come I am sure and following upon Geoff Butters’ and Liz Pearce’s articles in issue 35, I have been pleased to be able to persuade Liz Pearce and Ruth Martin once more to turn the spotlight on another aspect of institutional portals.
They ask whether external content in portals is Just a Distraction?
This issue also takes a look at the area of intellectual property rights through the eyes of the RoMEO Project which is investigating all IPR issues related to the archiving of research papers via institutional repositories.
For Elizabeth Gadd, Charles Oppenheim and Steve Probets one key issue is how best to protect research papers and their attendant metadata in an open access environment.
Their article on The RoMEO Project is very usefully supported by John MacColl’s at-the-event report on the one-day workshop Schemas and Ontologies: Building a Semantic Infrastructure for the GRID and Digital Libraries and which he calls Metadata Wanted for the Evanescent Library.
There are of course our usual regular columns and we welcome the return of News from BIOME to add to our strength in that section of the Magazine.
The reviews in this issue have all come from colleagues in UKOLN and I am particularly grateful to respondents on the lis-elib list [3] for their offers to write reviews for forthcoming issues of Ariadne.
As with issue 35, I am grateful to Shirley Keane for her advice and support in the production of Ariadne.
In addition to Philip Hunter’s review of a CD-ROM of a Blake work Songs of Innocence and of Experience, I am indebted to him for his advice and in particular the ‘corporate knowledge’ that he holds on the Magazine.
As Editor for five and a half years he has presided over a long tract of history in Internet terms and I trust I will be able to call upon my predecessor to continue his contributions to, and recall of, the Ariadne story.
In conclusion I would like to thank all contributors to this issue for their time and effort, not only in the writing of their article, but also in the support they have kindly extended in the editing and production process.
I trust you will find this issue of interest and that the changes that appear will do as intended and assist readers to navigate more easily round the Magazine.
References Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000.
The Observer, Sunday March 3, 2002, p.12.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,661093,00.html Wright, R. “Preserving Europe’s Memory”, Cultivate Interactive, issue 7, 11 July 2002, http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/presto/ lis-elib Mailing List, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/mailing-lists/lis-elib.html Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Editorial: “Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 36: This Time the Cavalry Showed Up” Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Ask Jeeves Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Ask Jeeves Buzz data database url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at Ask Jeeves.
In this issues column I thought that I’d take another in-depth look at a search engine to see what it can offer me and my subject, this issues victim is the Ask Jeeves search engine [1].
I chose this engine because it’s one that I use occasionally and also one that is often overlooked by searchers.
Ask Jeeves is what I refer to as a ‘natural language’ search engine, in that it your questions can be posed in everyday language, such as ‘What is the tallest mountain in the world’ or ‘Tell me about the UK tax system’.
The concept behind it is simply to explain and difficult to implement; it doesn’t just look for what you’ve asked for but instead attempts to understand what you actually want, and provide you with links not only to that specific information, but also to other supplementary sources of information in the same subject area.
Consequently it can be very useful if you’re not quite sure of what you’re looking for, or need to be able to read around a subject area.
In this respect it’s quite different to free text search engines that will just look for web pages that contain the string(s) of characters that you’ve asked for, or index/directory based engines that prompt you by providing lists of different subject headings to chose from.
To give you an example of a time when I found it useful was when I was asked for information on which gases are semi-soluble in water.
Now, not having a chemistry background I was a little stumped by this question.
I could have gone to one of the free text search engines and searched for something like ‘+gases +”partially soluble” +water’ but I suspected that I’d simply end up with hundreds, if not thousands of pages, and having no knowledge of the subject area I would have spent a long time picking pages almost at random in the hope of striking lucky.
I therefore really didn’t think that would be an option, but then, neither were index/directory engines because once I’d got into the section on Chemistry I was pretty sure I wouldn’t find a sub heading on ‘gasses partially soluble in water’!
At this point I remembered the existence of Ask Jeeves, so I paid it a visit, asked my question and within a few seconds I had the answer that I needed.
Consequently, if you don’t really know just what you want, or you need to read around a subject, it might be worth paying it a visit, so lets toddle along now and see what there is to be seen.
The search engine was first launched in April 1997 and has since added several other engines to its stable, including a UK version [2].
Their blurb states “From the beginning, Ask Jeeves at Ask.com has allowed users the ease of interacting on the Web the same way they do offline.
Users pose questions in plain English and receive links to Web sites containing relevant information, services and products.
Ask Jeeves’ combination of natural language question answering, human editorial judgment and popularity technology gives users the benefit of millions of previous searches.” As of May 2000 the search engine serves 11 million people a month, handling more than 15 million queries a day.
Ask Jeeves employs a staff who are responsible for creating a proprietary knowledge base.
They review web pages using their own criteria for inclusion based on such things as currency, reliability and content prior to including them in the database.
Their automated search technology also analyses previous choices that users have made in order to suggest the most appropriate web pages.
Ask Jeeves also periodically partners with other information providers in an attempt to provide even more appropriate content.
So, how is it used?
It’s all really quite simple; just ask a question using natural language, without bothering to use any syntax or Boolean operators.
Ask Jeeves will then attempt to break the question down into constituent elements and provide links to web pages that answer those questions.
So for example I asked the question “I need to know about the tax revenue system in the UK” and was provided with the opportunity for seeing the answers to questions on economic information for the UK, with pull down menus so that I could choose instead to look at answers for a map of, communication system for, government information for a wide variety of different countries.
Alternatively I could chose to see the answers to questions on tax preparation systems online, a guide to business taxes, downloading tax forms and so on.
Ask Jeeves also provided me with access to MSN Money Central, 10 top websites that other users with similar questions found useful and a list of responses provided by two other search engines.
Consequently I was able to locate 2 or 3 sites that gave me exactly the information that I required.
It does sound too easy to be believed and I’m afraid that to a certain extent it is.
The answers provided do depend on exactly how you have asked your question in just the same way that other search engines do.
If you ask the same question in a couple of different way you will find that you get entirely different results.
I asked ‘Tell me about Phil Bradley’ and ‘I need information on Phil Bradley’ and was presented with entirely different sets of answers for what was essentially the same question.
Answers to my first question were almost entirely irrelevant while answers to my second were much more on topic (and at least for me it was gratifying to see pages from my own website being delivered back in the answers).
I therefore think that there is a slight danger to using the service; when constructing a search statement with a free text search engine it’s fair to say that we do (in general) think about exactly what terms are appropriate, which we wish to exclude and so on.
It is therefore very easy to be quite precise about what information is required.
However, when using general everyday language precision isn’t always at the top of the list and there is a danger that searchers will assume that as long as the keywords are contained in the question one set of answers will be pretty much the same as another set, but quite clearly this isn’t the case.
There is a danger then that rather than slightly restate the question users will accept a less than accurate set of results simply because they don’t realise there is a difference between ‘Tell me about’ and ‘I need information on’.
Ask Jeeves also provides an index/directory approach by providing access to data via subject headings such as Business, News, Real Estate, Science, the World and so on.
I didn’t find this as comprehensive as the headings provided by someone such as Yahoo!
for example, although it should also be noted that although the number of sites listed was also much smaller (and not laid out as well) I found the descriptive summaries more helpful.
The search engine also provided a link to another facility which is not often seen, and that is the ability to post questions/provide answers in their ‘Ask other people’ section.
It has a number of interesting features, such as (obviously) being able to ask/answer questions, but also to challenge an answer, refer the question to a friend, or to subscribe to the answers from individual ‘experts’.
I checked the section on Searching the Internet, which had 490 questions that had been asked with 164 as yet unanswered.
It was also possible to search the questions to see if someone else had asked the question you were going to ask.
The ‘Ask other people’ FacilityAs well as the Global (ie.
American biased) version there is also a Spanish and Australian version and a UK version (as previously mentioned).
It is worthwhile choosing the appropriate version of Ask Jeeves; if you use the .com version you will get an entirely different set of answers to the question ‘Tell me about the Civil War’ than you do if you use the UK version!
(It’s also amusing to compare the questions asked, and the way that they are posed between versions!)
In summary I found the search engine quick and simple to use, and as long as I remembered to ask my question in the right way, the results were very useful.
However, because of the difficulty in defining questions by simply using plain English, rather than the greater precision afforded by free text engines with their search syntax I suspect that I’ll continue to use it if all else fails, rather than making it my search engine of choice.
That said, it’s certainly worth visiting Ask Jeeves; if you can’t think of a question to ask try ‘Am I in love’, ‘What is the meaning of life’ or ‘What shall I have for dinner tonight?’, as Ask Jeeves has answers to all those questions!
References Ask Jeeves at http://www.aj.com/ The UK version of Ask Jeeves is available at http://www.ask.co.uk/ Author Details Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens, Feltham, Middlesex.
Email: philb@philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independent Internet Consultant Article Title: “Search Engines: Ask Jeeves” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
Maybe it sends a little old man shuffling off wearily up the stairs and along the corridors to see if the book is still on the shelf Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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eVALUEd: An Evaluation Model for e-Library Developments Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eVALUEd: An Evaluation Model for e-Library Developments Buzz data dissemination url research Citation BibTex RIS Becky Hartland-Fox and Pete Dalton on a project to develop a transferable model for e-library evaluation.
Project background eVALUEd is a HEFCE funded project, based at the University of Central England.
It has been set-up to develop a transferable model for e-library evaluation in Higher Education and to provide dissemination and training in e-library evaluation.
The project commenced in September 2001 and will complete in February 2004.
Digital Library questionnaire for HEIs The project will examine good practice in electronic library evaluation.
At this stage, we are conducting a questionnaire This will be sent to all HEIs to find out what Digital Library developments are being made.
We are particularly concerned with the issue of evaluation, e.g.
: what techniques are being employed who uses the data collected how evaluation can inform decisions what evaluation could be conducted given more time, resources, staffing etc.
This data will enable us to gain an accurate picture of digital library evaluation and to inform our subsequent recommendations as to how evaluation can be effectively organised and implemented.
We are also hoping that institutions will be prepared to be involved in a follow-up study which will allow us to focus on examples of good practice in more depth.
The printed version of the questionnaire will be available from the end of March and will also be available from this date to fill out online.
The URL will be http://www.cie.uce.ac.uk/evalued/questionnaire.htm It will be sent to HE Library /LRC Managers in printed form.
Project outcomes We intend to provide resources to support library managers and other senior strategic managers in the higher education sector with evaluation and planning of electronic library initiatives and to provide training and awareness in evaluation of electronic library developments.
The project is expected to produce practical initiatives such as: a transferable model for evaluation of digital library initiatives training workshops in aspects of evaluation (aimed at library managers in the higher education sector) a website for project dissemination and resource publication a final project report outlining the model of evaluation and other aspects of good practice in digital library evaluation Further information about eVALUEd can be found on the project website and a public mailing list has been set-up.
eVALUEd website http://www.cie.uce.ac.uk/evalued Public Mailing List http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/digi-eval.html Author Details   Becky Hartland-Fox , Research Assistant and Pete Dalton, CIRT Research Development Manager Centre for Information Research (CIRT), University of Central EnglandBirmingham, B42 2SU, UK Contact: Rebecca.Hartland-Fox@uce.ac.uk Article Title: “eVALUEd – an evaluation model for e-library developments” Author: Becky Hartland-Fox & Pete Dalton.
Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/evalued/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz software database portal archives digitisation copac rslp url research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom with a report which covers: the launch of Citizenship Past; a new VTS Tutorial for European Studies; and an update on the SOSIG Portals Project.
Launch of Citizenship Past The launch of Citizenship Past took place on the 12th June.
This is a NOF (New Opportunities Fund) consortium whose aim is to digitize over a half a million historical papers and images in order to open up access to archival and government papers in the following areas: Unlocking Key British Government Publications, 1801-1995: Full Text Digital Library, led by BOPCRIS, Hartley Library, University of Southampton.
British Official Publications (government and parliamentary reports) constitute an immense body of material on the development of British society.
BOPCRIS aims to save users time and effort in finding relevant publications by enabling them, from any PC, to: (a) search and browse a Web-based finding tool containing details of over 23,000 key documents (b) read abstracts, and view detailed consistent subject indexing © read the full-text version of key documents.
a) and (b) and part of c) are already developed with funding from the Research Support Libraries Programme ( RSLP) NOF funding will enable full text digitisation of all the documents.
Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual Archive, led by The Children’s Society, London The key aim of the project is to provide first hand information on the lives of the children who were cared for by the Waifs and Strays Society, which later became the present day Children’s Society.
Documents from approximately 300-400 case files from 1882 to 1917 will be digitised and made available, as will photographs, oral histories and a digitised version of an in-house supporter magazine.
This material provides a fascinating insight into family life amongst the poorest members of community of this period, and into the way social support charities operated within the community.
It is also hoped that the site will provide an insight into the way researchers use original documents to construct histories, and that visitors to the site will be stimulated to carry out further social and local history research on the period and subjects covered.
From History to Her Story: Yorkshire Women’s Lives On-line, 1100 to the present, led by the West Yorkshire Archive Service As a major and unique project in women’s history, ‘From History to Her Story’ will make accessible to all, via the web, archive material relating to Yorkshire women through the ages.
Using the diaries, letters, and records by and about Yorkshire women, the project will uncover Anne Lister’s lesbian love affairs through selected transcripts of her diaries; highlight little known facts about the Brontë sisters; live the life of Amabel Yorke, Countess de Grey; discover why women were locked up in the West Riding lunatic asylum; and hear the testimonies of local women working in the mills in the early 20th century and this is only a fraction of the material which will be available.
‘From History to Her Story’ will, over the next 18 months, bring together around 85,000 images on a purpose-built website, thus creating a major learning resource and unlocking new learning opportunities for all, from academic researcher to schoolchild.
Materials are expected to be online by December 2002.
For more information about the collections visit: http://www.citizenshippast.org.uk For more information about the project contact: Simon Brackenbury Citizenship Past Co-ordinator Ford Collection of British Official Publications Hartley Library University of Southampton Highfield Southampton SO 17 1BJ Email: scb1@soton.ac.uk New VTS Tutorial for European Studies “Internet for European Studies” is a free “teach yourself” tutorial on the Web, teaching Internet information skills for European Studies.
The tutorial is aimed at students’ lecturers and researchers who want to improve their knowledge of the best Internet resources for this subject.
It takes around an hour to do and includes quizzes and interactive exercises.
There are also “Resources for Trainers” to support the use of the tutorial by librarians and lecturers who teach Internet Literacy.
The tutorial has been written by Lydia Gibb at Information Services, University of Birmingham and is part of the Resource Discovery Network’s (RDN) Virtual Training Suite.
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/subject-guides/euro.html The Virtual Training Suite now consists over 50 tutorials; the latest additions include 11 new tutorials being offered for students in further education to find high quality information on the Internet to support their course work.
To find out more see: http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ Update on the Portals Project As reported in Ariadne last year SOSIG will be developing a number of new services through the Subject Portal Development Project.
This is funded under the JISC 5⁄99 programme and its aim is to develop faculty-level subject portals based around the existing RDN subject gateways.
The core feature will be to enable SOSIG users to undertake a combined search of the main social science information sources through a single search box, including: Published articles Books and monographs Working papers and pre-prints Latest research projects and people working in the field Internet resources A selection of the services that we hope will be available for users to search from the portal include: Web of Science (General) IBSS (International Bibliography of the Social Sciences) ZETOC (British Library’s Table of Contents service) PsycInfo (Psychology) ERIC (Education) Regard (ESRC funded research) COPAC (General) SOSIG will be building on some of the services that it is already offering through the Social Science Grapevine to provide additional functionality for users.
For instance: Personalised services: being able to save searches, email search results to yourself, see new information based around your subject interests, etc News alerting services tailored to the users interests Providing an environment for learners and researchers to communicate with each other The first phase of the Project involved a review of different software platforms for the portals.
The review chose to follow a solution based on Open Source software developed by SOSIG.
A prototype service based on this first phase is currently available (this cross searches a selection of the databases mentioned above).
User testing on the prototype took place in the late summer last year and results from these sessions have fed back into the development plan for phase two of the Project.
This next phase has consolidated the technical effort from the RDN hubs to work on a programme of shared software development and we hope to be able to start some user testing over this summer.
SOSIG is keen to receive feedback and suggestions on how the portal should develop to best support the needs of social science information users.
If you are interested in being kept up to date with developments or would like to get involved in future focus group sessions or user testing please get in touch at the address below.
Author details Debra Hiom SOSIG ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Debra Hiom Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/planet-sosig/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Filling in the PIE: HeadLine's Resource Data Model Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Filling in the PIE: HeadLine's Resource Data Model Buzz data software html database usability metadata thesaurus identifier schema sql repositories preservation cataloguing graphics z39.50 mis ejournal rslp licence authentication interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS John Paschoud explains the concepts of representation and use of metadata in the Resource Data Model (RDM) that has been developed by the HeadLine project.
This article explains the concepts of representation and use of metadata describing library information resource collections in the Resource Data Model (RDM) that has been developed by the HeadLine project [http://www.headline.ac.uk/].
It is based on documentation originally intended for library staff who may become involved in maintenance of metadata in the RDM, as the deliverables of the project are handed-over into mainstream use.
An earlier published article [Graham] was based on the first (un-released) version of the HeadLine RDM, to which this is intended to be an update.
The RDM is designed as a relational database, and implemented using only standard and portable Standard Query Language (SQL) complying with the ANSI/ISO SQL-92 Standard SQL.
It was developed using the PostgreSQL database [http://postgresql.readysetnet.com/] in a Linux environment, but does not use any functionality that is proprietary to PostgreSQL, and can therefore be implemented on most available relational database management system products.
The RDM package also includes a library of access routines written in object Perl (version 5) [http://www.perl.com/], via which user interface applications (for either end-user access, or for metadata maintenance by library staff) can be implemented to access the logical structure of resource records without detailed knowledge of SQL, or of the internal structure of the RDM database.
However, this paper also contains details of that internal structure to facilitate the implementation of simple interfaces for specific metadata maintenance tasks using non-Perl-compatible tools (such as the creation of task-specific relational database views, or direct ODBC connection to the RDM database from Microsoft Windows-based tools such as Excel and Access).
Why the RDM was developed The HeadLine project started with the assumption that ROADS http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/ was established as a de-facto standard that would be adopted by projects within the eLib Programme.
In the course of our design and development phases it became clear that if we were to accurately model resource metadata in the level of detail we needed, then we would have to adopt a more structured model, and the database technologies to support it.
This was a controversial decision by the project at the time, although since then others, including the developers of ROADS (which is used as a platform for SOSIG [http://www.sosig.ac.uk/] and other JISC-supported resource gateway services) have since come to very similar conclusions [Hamilton].
The RDM was originally designed to meet the requirements of the HeadLine Personal Information Environment (PIE) [McLeish] [Gambles] for richly functional collection-level metadata about the whole range of information resources available in a ‘hybrid library’ [Rusbridge].
The PIE also uses a relational database (to describe users and to manage sessions), but this was deliberately designed (at some short-term performance cost) to be separate from, and not to be closely coupled with the RDM database.
Figure 1: Relationship of the RDM to the PIE and other HeadLine components The RDM as a shared and re-usable library tool The main reason for this design decision was our recognition of what is likely to be the most critical factor in the successful adoption of the PIE (and probably most other personalised, user-centric library services like the PIE): identifying a sustainable model for maintaining the rich and detailed resource metadata without which it cannot function.
The PIE, and services like it [Morgan] [ExLibris], are most likely to be each implemented, configured, maintained and operated by a single library or university.
To end-users for whom they are the main channels of access to a library service, they will effectively become the identity, ‘branding’ or ‘added value’ represented by that library.
A single PIE is unlikely to be operated across several libraries, unless they are also very closely related organisationally (such as with several faculty libraries of one university, or all the branches of one public library service).
There are two potential areas in which costs might reasonably be shared, without compromising this principle: Facilities management models in which the capital costs and technical support burden of server and network hardware and software to support many PIEs might be contracted out or undertaken on a consortial basis.
Some metadata about library resource collections (such as nationally or globally available online resources) clearly can (and ideally should) be maintained just once (probably by the resource provider or publisher), and the costs and benefits shared by all libraries that subscribe to the resource.
However, a library (or a library service director with any sense of self-preservation) is unlikely to decide to externalise or otherwise completely abdicate its’ role of maintaining metadata about the resources it provides (and guides the use of) for its’ users without risking the loss of its’ entire reason for existence except as a building in which to store a lot of books.
Maintenance of this metadata is a seriously non-trivial task, needing serious commitment of library staff with appropriate ‘traditional’ cataloguing skills, a good understanding of the more technical metadata elements needed for non-print resources (such as the parameters needed for configuration of a Z39.50 [http://www.niso.org/z3950.html] search target), and also an appreciation of the reasons why metadata needs to be more complex and structured than the simple ‘flat’ records of a bibliographic catalogue.
(This paper is intended to help develop that appreciation).
Our three reasons, then, for developing the RDM in a way that enabled it to stand alone from the PIE were: Pragmatic: within a limited period of the project, we could independently progress development of the PIE software and the RDM; in fact, the first released version of the PIE did not use the RDM (the development of which had been delayed by other factors), but some much-simplified temporary database tables to describe resources.
Shareability: with only project staff to maintain the metadata, we could initially compile a single shared RDM database, for use by all the three versions of the PIE (customised for users at each of the three institutions where test users were participating in the project).
Re-usability: once we had proved the concept of the RDM in use with the PIE, we could start to include the contents of other resource lists and databases, changing the applications that used them to access the same data from within the RDM instead, and diverting the (considerable) maintenance effort they required from library staff, to maintenance of the same data, as far as possible through (apparently) the same interfaces as before, in the RDM.
Existing services that the RDM can support At LSE these existing but disparate lists of resource collections for library users were (or still are) each serving to facilitate end-user access to supposedly ‘different’ types of resource, such as e-journal titles, statistical datasets, networked CDs, and external web sites of various types.
Some were implemented by hand-crafted static HTML pages, and others by small databases implemented for each purpose using Microsoft Access and similar tools.
A previous (and highly successful) attempt to implement a single unified interface to many resources was EASI (‘End-user Access to Subject Information’ [TimG?])
which used an Access database and Access forms to store and maintain metadata, with some fairly simple scripts run as batch processes (whenever changes were made) to regenerate a set of static linked HTML pages, presenting end-users with lists of resources by subject or by title in alphabetic order.
During the design phases of HeadLine the functionalities of EASI and other end-user metadata services at all three participating libraries were analysed and used to define some of the functional requirements of the PIE and the RDM.
It would therefore be surprising if the RDM as designed could not accommodate all the data in all of these separate services, and support all their previous functionality.
Figure 2: Possible relationships of the RDM to alternative end-user service interfaces However, the HeadLine project and this design process also gave us an opportunity to take a more considered overview of the commonalities and differences between these services, and think of new ways to structure and maintain this information.
A wider model of the resource metadata architecture in a truly hybrid library would show a single repository, accessed by end-users through a number of channels or views, and possibly also maintained by library staff through several different interfaces.
Maintenance Interfaces to the RDM We intend to provide a Web-based editing interface to the RDM for library staff users responsible for maintaining metadata about resource collections to which the library has access.
This will be usable in a way that integrates with the existing Web-based page customisation facilities of the PIE, but should also be usable standalone, without a PIE.
It will be important for library staff to understand the differences between their roles in editing data in the RDM (which may be used for many purposes), and editing customised pages in the PIE (which are each just one view of a set of resources described in the RDM).
A PIE page maintained by a librarian may show, for example, all of those resources relevant to a particular academic department of the university.
In this context it is also important to remember that relevance of a resource to a department of a particular university called (for example) “Economics” (and therefore inclusion of a pointer to that resource in a PIE page for the Economics Department), may not coincide with the term “Economics” as an appropriate subject or keyword (to be included in the RDM description of the resource).
The main problem we have faced in designing a maintenance interface for the RDM is that its’ structure is (necessarily) complex, but most maintainers don’t need to deal with most of that complexity.
Our solution has been to delay implementing a fully functional RDM editor, and instead identify the different editing functions needed by different maintainers, prototyping temporary ‘limited view’ interfaces for each of these using ODBC [Microsoft] connections direct to the RDM database, and Microsoft Access table-views and forms.
The simplest possible editing interface has consisted of only the default table-view of each of the RDM database tables (as ‘linked tables’ in Microsoft Access), plus a set of instructions [Noble] for editing; but we acknowledge that this is far from as “user friendly” as we would like!
This approach has the advantage that library staff who are not primarily IT specialists can relatively easily learn to build and modify their own editing forms, evolving the interfaces they want to show the information they want to see and edit, and none of the information that isn’t relevant to their task.
There are some risks to the data in the RDM, because it is quite easy to damage the relational integrity of the database when accessing it this way.
However, editing is relatively infrequent, so the risk can be protected against by reasonable backup procedures.
Because of the risks to the database, and the fact that direct access side-steps our own access routines (see below) and so avoids the RDM-specific data quality checks such as automatic attribution and time-stamping of record creation and updates, we don’t see this as a sound long-term method of implementing metadata maintenance.
However, we will be able to use the forms and views developed as well-tried models for the rapid implementation of a Web-based maintenance interface in due course.
Encapsulation of the RDM by access routines Where minor extra requirements for additions to the RDM emerged later (or are still to emerge), retro-fitting them to the RDM database should have no knock-on effects (and requirements for further changes) on the PIE (or on other applications using the RDM) because these don’t access the database directly but only via the library of access routines which encapsulates and effectively hides the internal structure of the database.
Only any affected access routines need be changed, for even quite radical internal changes to the database.
The combination of the RDM relational database and the access routines library effectively provides an object database view of the RDM.
Our intention in the future is to extend the library of access routines, to include facilities such as presentation of the RDM database as a Z39.50 target, or implementation of other interoperability protocols.
Wherever possible, access routines should be used to select from and update the RDM database, rather than direct SQL calls.
If an appropriate access routine is not available, it is preferable to add a new one to the library if possible.
Beware of confusing access routines (as described above) with the access methods to the metadata or full-content of the resources described in the RDM.
The RDM Database structure Figure 3: Tables, columns and relations within the RDM database (note: not all columns are shown here) Records (database rows) in each main table of the RDM database are uniquely identified by an arbitrary numeric key named xxx_id (where “xxx” is the table name).
Two such columns, identifying the two main tables they join, uniquely index tables implementing many-to-many joins.
(The table group_right is an exception to this rule, being uniquely indexed by a pair of identifiers, but is not strictly a many-to-many join-table).
Resources, Locations and Suppliers The Resource table could be seen as the core of the RDM.
Each record describes a single identifiable collection-level [RSLP] resource or information product.
A Resource may be uniquely identifiable by some externally-defined standard, such as ISBN or ISSN (standard_identifier); it should be based on a single main human language, defined by the language code used in Z39.50 http://www.oasis_open.org/cover/nisoLang3_1994.html.
A name and a short description (summary normally one paragraph) can be included, and a URL (icon_id -> icon.url) referencing a graphic icon to represent the resource, all of which are intended to be displayed to end-users in brief listings of resources.
A URL (about_url) can be used to reference longer explanatory information about the content of the resource, together with a textual label (about_url_text) for displayed links to this URL.
Another URL (training_url) can reference details of local end-user training about use of the resource content (this is normally displayed by applications using a standard icon for training, so has no related label text).
A contact person can be identified (by email address, normally of an appropriate RDM maintainer) to be responsible for the resource by manager_persid; applications may display this email address as “for further information, contact: “, or similarly.
Generally, a Resource record describes a collection of content, independent of the medium in which it is held or the arrangement for access to the content that may be made by any particular library.
There may be some potential for sharing standard Resource records (like standard bibliographic cataloguing records) between libraries, although libraries may also want to exercise local control over the way in which a Resource is commonly named or described; and of course the displayable textual metadata will normally use just one natural language.
The Location table of the RDM is in fact where most maintenance activity will need to be focussed.
Each Location record describes in detail, for a specific Resource, a holding of (or arrangement for access to) all or part of the content collection identified by the Resource, that is accessible to all or some users of a particular library.
A single Resource may have one or more Locations.
Location fields that are normally intended for display to end-users are: url and comment to reference the access address of the content, and to label that reference in listings; help_url and help_url_text to reference (and label the reference of) explanatory information about the Location; availability_message to inform about circumstances under which the Location is (un-)available; manager_persid to identify the responsible maintainer.
Other Location fields are not normally displayed to end-users, but are for the use of applications or maintenance administration.
These include: name (used to identify a Location, such as a service, online server, or physical collection site, which may be common to several Resources); available (valued ‘Y’ or ‘N’ to indicate to applications whether a Location is currently available); supplier_id (linking to the Supplier table); access_method_id (linking to the Access_method table); licensee_inst_id (identifying the library holding the license for end-user access to this Location, where a RDM database is shared by more than one library); license_start_date, license_end_date and licence_url (the currency and reference to details of the license for access to this Location); media_type, search_protocol and content_depth (enumerated values for the media, search protocol and depth such as ‘full-text’, ‘abstract’, etc); historic_range_start, historic_range_end and moving_wall_length (for date-range information on Locations such as periodicals).
In some ways there are conceptual parallels between the Resource and its’ available Location(s) in the RDM, and the bibliographic record and its’ corresponding holding(s) records (one for each copy of the same book) in a traditionally structured library management system.
The HeadLine project team suffered a crisis of terminology to arrive at the name “Location”, discarding first “Holding” (because many non-print resources are not “held” locally, but are physically stored by the supplier who grants access to users of a particular library), and then “Resource-Instance” (because it was confused with the relational database terminology for “an instance of a Resource” – meaning one row or record in the Resource database table).
Information in the Supplier table is purely for administration of contacts with resource vendors or other external suppliers, and is not normally visible to end-users.
One or more Locations may be linked to a Supplier.
Subjects, Keywords, Resource-types and ‘use metadata’ A Resource can be described or classified by one or more records in each of the Resource-type, Subject, and Keyword tables, and can be depicted by a (single) graphical Icon.
By implication, all such classifications of a Resource apply to all Locations of any subsets of the content of that Resource; it is important to remember that they describe the intellectual content of the Resource, not the technical or other details of any particular holding or access licence for all or some part of that content.
Any particular Resource-type, Keyword, Subject (or Icon) may naturally be used for more than one Resource, and applications will commonly wish to present Resource metadata organised into lists by these classifications (“show resources in alphabetic order of subject”, “show only resources of the type ‘journal’”, etc).
A Resource-type classifies resources by function, rather than medium (so, a journal is always a journal, whether it’s on paper, CD, Web or all three), and values should be selected from the existing list where possible (although we have not been able to identify any authoritative set of definitions for these), or new values created (up to 30 characters long) with care to avoid ambiguity or duplication.
A Keyword is any term (up to 30 characters long) selected or created by the RDM maintainer to describe a Resource.
A Subject describes Resources in the same way as a Keyword, but must be chosen from an identifiable authoritative origin_schema a controlled list or thesaurus of terms, and its’ normative origin_identifier (in that schema) should be included in the record.
Other metadata to facilitate the use of resources by end-users (resource.about_url, resource.training_url, location.help_url) is held directly in the Resource and Location tables, and has been described above.
Access Authorisation Control The RDM implements control of access by end-users to resource Locations with two possible methods: ‘group-rights’ and ‘IP address discrimination’.
IP-address This method is accepted as a ‘necessary evil’, and implemented in the RDM, because many supplier licences for content access are still restricted to on-campus users, or even specific identified workstations in a physical library building, despite the recognised demand for ‘anytime, anywhere’ access.
The IP_range table can be used to define named (for example, “library-building”) ranges of workstations by address (ip) and mask.
Locations can then be linked, many-to-many, with these ranges.
Group-rights The ‘group-rights’ method is favoured where available (and permitted by the license terms applicable to a Location), and is better for facilitating managed location-independent access by identified authorised users.
It allows a library that holds metadata about a known community of users, such as staff and students of a university (this data is not included in the RDM, but is expected to be available from other management information systems) to assign groups to individual users (or, to groups of users), and then (within the RDM) assign various rights to any combination of user groups, in respect of access to any resource Location.
This model for access management has been developed and described by the HeadLine project [Paschoud], and assumes that an application supported by the RDM will exercise reasonably strong authentication of each end-user.
Each Location can be linked to any number of entries in the Group_right table, each specifying a group_id and an access_right defining the level of access allowed by that group of users to that Location.
Access Methods The RDM can contain all the technical information necessary to an application to describe how the resource collections at certain types of Location can be accessed, or searched to disclose the individual (‘atomic’) items within them that match some user criteria.
An application using the RDM (such as the HeadLine PIE) can use this metadata to allow a single search query to be directed at multiple heterogeneous targets in parallel, and can then collate and present all the search result-sets.
The field Location.search_protocol, if specified, indicates that a Location record has a linked record in one of the following protocol-specific tables: location_z3950, location_whoispp, location_www or location_sql.
These each link to subsidiary records in other protocol-specific tables, for specifying the mapping of queries from a generic format, and the mapping of result-sets received back to a generic format.
This parallel searching was not originally an objective of the HeadLine project (it has been the primary focus of other eLib Programme projects, such as M25 Link [http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/M25link/], but was thought by the end-users we consulted to be an ‘obvious’ feature necessary in an interface like the PIE.
It has so far been implemented in prototype form for Z39.50 and Whois++ targets, with interfaces to other SQL-compliant resource databases and Web search-engines currently under development.
Although very few ‘traditional’ library resource catalogue targets support SQL, it was included as a protocol partly to ensure a route for RDM-based collection-level databases to interoperate with each other.
The details of these elements of the RDM will be documented in detail in a future paper on interoperability features of the RDM.
Attributes and conventions common to several RDM tables Time-stamps All dates (or times) in the RDM are held as 14 character text fields, in the form YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.
A date-time of 2.30pm on the 5th of March 2001 would be held as the string: “20010305143000”.
Where less precision is required or appropriate, insignificant parts of the field can be filled with zeroes.
Maintenance administration The Resource, Location, and Supplier tables each contain a standard set of 4 attributes: ad_creator_persid, ad_create_time, ad_last_mod_persid, ad_last_mod_time.
These are updated automatically by access routines, to assist in tracking changes to the database with the identities of the original creator of a record and the person to update it most recently, with the date/time of each event.
Maintainer and manager identities (xxx_persid) are normally recorded as standard format email addresses, like: “j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk”.
The Resource and Location tables each additionally contain a timestamp field ad_last_checked_time for use by automatic maintenance processes that will periodically check that URLs in these records are still reachable (alerting a human maintainer if not).
References [Graham] Graham, Stephen; “The HeadLine Resource Data Model” in VINE, Issue 117, pages 13-17.
[SQL] ISO/IEC 9075:1992, “Information Technology — Database Languages — SQL” (available from: American National Standards Institute, or see http://www.jcc.com/SQLPages/jccs_sql.htm for useful, but unofficial references) [Hamilton] Hamilton, Martin; Archived message to the ROADS discussion list on 3rd May 2000 http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/lists/open-roads/2000/05/0000.html [McLeish] McLeish, Simon; “The user environment in the hybrid library” in Managing Information, (September 1999) Vol 6 (7); http://www.aslib.co.uk/man-inf/sep99/articles.html [Gambles] Gambles, Anne; “The development and launch of the HeadLine Personal Information Environment” in Information Technology and Libraries (December 2000) Vol 19 (4) pages 199-205; http://www.lita.org/ital/ital1904.html [Rusbridge] Rusbridge, Chris; “Towards the Hybrid Library” in D-Lib, July/August 1998; http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/rusbridge/07rusbridge.html [Morgan] Morgan, Eric Lease; “MyLibrary: A Model for Implementing a User-centered, Customizable Interface to a Library’s Collection of Information Resources”, February 1999; http://my.lib.ncsu.edu/about/paper/ [Paschoud] Paschoud, John; “All Users are Not Created Equal!
How to decide Who Gets What from your Hybrid Library”, 30th March 1999 paper in the eLib session at Internet Librarian International 1999; http://www.headline.ac.uk/public/diss/index.html#90330JP [Noble] Noble, Imelda; “Editing the Headline Resource Database using Access” (unpublished, internal project document) [ExLibris] Supplier product information on MetaLib http://www.aleph.co.il/MetaLib/overview.html [EASI] http://www.library.lse.ac.uk/services/guides/easi.html [Microsoft] Supplier product information on ODBC http://www.microsoft.com/data/odbc/default.htm [RSLP] Research Support Libraries Programme, Collection Level Description http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cld/ Author Details   John Paschoud Project Manager Headline www.headline.ac.uk j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk Article Title: “The filling in the PIE HeadLine’s Resource Data Model” Authors: John Paschoud Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/paschoud/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: An Accessibility Analysis of UK University Entry Points Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: An Accessibility Analysis of UK University Entry Points Buzz data software javascript html accessibility browser identifier dtd flash url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on the accessibility of entry points of UK University Web sites.
The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) came into effect on 1 st September 2002.
The Act removes the previous exemption of education from the Disability Discrimination Act (1995), ensuring that discrimination against disabled students will be unlawful.
Institutions will incur additional responsibilities in 2003, with the final sections of legislation coming into effect in 2005 [1].
The implications of the Act will be of much interest to institutional Web managers who will be concerned that inaccessible Web pages will render their institution liable to claims from disabled students who are unable to access resources due to accessibility barriers.
Although the SENDA legislation covers much more than Web resources, Web developers are fortunate that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has, for several years, been active in addressing the accessibility of Web resources through the work of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) [2].
Work carried out by the WAI includes the development of a set of guidelines for authors of Web pages.
A number of organisations have developed tools which with help with the analysis of the accessibility of Web pages, based on the WAI guidelines.
In this WebWatch survey the Bobby accessibility checker [3] is used to report on the accessibility of the entry points to UK University Web sites.
About The Survey The survey was carried out using the Web-based Bobby tool to analyse the accessibility of entry points of UK University Web sites.
The results of the survey were recorded, including information on compliance with Bobby's A and AA guidelines and the numbers of Priority 1 (P1) and Priority 2 (P2) errors.
It should be noted that Bobby is only one of a range of accessibility testing tools.
Bobby is used in this survey as it is probably the most well-known.
A list of other accessibility testing tools is available on the W3C WAI Web site [4].
The Findings Only four entry points appeared to provide AA compliance by having no Priority 1 or Priority 2 errors.
These were the University of Bristol, the University of East London, the University of Sheffield and Writtle College.
Although the number of entry points which provide AA compliance is disappointing it is pleasing to note that seventy entry points appeared to provide A compliance by having no Priority 1 errors.
Discussion Methodology This survey addressed only accessibility aspects which could be detected by use of software.
A more thorough accessibility audit would require use of manual testing.
However this would be time-consuming to carry out.
However it can be said that although the survey could class pages as accessible which manual testing could prove to be inaccessible, the main conclusion of the survey is that the vast majority of pages have been found to be inaccessible to some extent.
It should be noted that a number of entry points contained frames or redirects to other pages.
In a number of cases this meant that further analysis would be required in order to measure the accessibility of the page.
Where redirects were implemented, the accessibility of the destination of the redirect was analysed.
However in this survey elements of framed pages were not analysed.
Main Findings A number of errors were caused by missing ALT attributes in IMG tags.
The use of ALT attributes is important for access by users with speaking browsers or with images switched off (which may be the case for Web sites stored on devices with limited memory capacity, such as PDAs.
As can be seen from Figure 1, the use of meaningful ALT attributes can allow a Web site to be used effectively (note click on the image to see a larger version).
Figure 1: University of Bristol Entry Point With And Without Images For some of the errors reported by Bobby it may be more difficult to understand the accessibility problems.
In order to highlight a number of accessibility problems which Bobby can find, we will review the errors found on entry points with only a few errors, as listed in the following table.
Table 1: Entry Points With Fewest Accessibility Errors   Institution AA Compliant?
P1 Errors P2 Errors Comments Try It 19 Bristol Y 0 0 AA approved Check 41 University of East London Y 0 0 AA Approved Check 133 Sheffield Y 0 0 AA Approved Check 160 Writtle Y 0 0 AA Approved Check 25 University of Wales Institute, Cardiff N 0 1 1 instance "Missing DOCTYPE" Check 27 University of Central Lancashire N 0 2 1 instance and 1 instance "Missing DOCTYPE" and "Use of absolute positioning" Check 81 London School of Economics N 0 1 4 instances "Use of absolute positioning" Check 92 Newman College N 0 1 72 instances "Use of absolute positioning" Check 97 Northern School of Contemporary Dance N 0 1 1 instances "Missing DOCTYPE" Check 103 Oxford N 0 1 4 instances "Use of absolute positioning" Check 125 College of St Mark and St John N 0 1 12 instances "Use of absolute positioning" Check 134 South Bank University N 0 1 53 instances "Use of absolute positioning" Check 162 York N 0 1 1 instance "Use of absolute positioning" Check Although it appeared that Writtle College had no P1 or P2 errors subsequent analysis revealed that the HTML tages were generated by JavaScript.
Since the Bobby tool does not process JavaScript, its findings were based on the page containing the JavaScript source code and not the output of the JavaScript.
The findings for the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC) reported a single occurrence of one P2 error: Use a public text identifier in a DOCTYPE statement This error indicates that the document does not contains a DOCTYPE at the start of the document of the form: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> The DOCTYPE is needed in order for the document to comply with HTML standards.
If a document does not comply with HTML standards, although it may look fine in most browsers it may be difficult for conversion tools to convert the document to alternative formats, including accessible formats for use by specialist devices.
The findings for the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC) also illustrate a failing of automated tools.
Although this would appear to have a high degree of accessibility, manual analysis reveals that the page contains a single image.
This page is, to a certain extent, inaccessible.
Although the page contains textual information requesting users to click for the next screen the quotation from the Sunday Times and the Award For Excellence are not available to users with text browsers.
The findings for the University of Central Lancashire reported two P2 errors: the missing DOCTYPE, as discussed above, and the need to: Use relative sizing and positioning (% values) rather than absolute (pixels).
Absolute sizes make it difficult for users to resize elements on the screen, such as the size of text.
It should be noted that the entry point for the University of Central Lancashire Web site contained an image-based interface with minimal use of ALT attribute.
However the page did provide access to a text-based Web site which was generated dynamically using the Betsie software [5].
The findings for the London School of Economics also showed one P2 errors: four instances of the need to use relative sizing.
No fewer than 72 instances of this error were found on the Newman College Web site.
The Northern School of Contemporary Dance appeared to be missing only the DOCTYPE statement.
However the entry point in fact contains a Shockwave page and users with a Shockwave plugin cannot access the Web site.
The entry points for the remaining Web sites listed in the Table contained a small number of instances of errors which have been mentioned previously, in particular the need to use relative sizing and positioning.
From these examples it can be seen that, in a number of cases, pages which appear to have a high degree of accessibility are, in fact, inaccessible.
On the other hand pages which contain certain errors, such as a missing DOCTYPE, can be made to comply with accessibility guidelines by making relatively simple changes.
Other errors, such as replacing absolute positioning by relative positioning, may be subject to more debate with Web teams.
This change, for example, is likely to alter the appearance of the page.
However this change will ensure greater flexibility for the page.
If an institution wishes to provide maximum flexibility it will be necessary to make such a change.
Conclusions Many institutions will be aware of the SENDA legislation and of the work of the W3C WAI.
Institutions will, I am sure, wish to minimise accessibility barriers to their Web sites.
However the findings of this survey of entry points for institutions, the most important page on a Web site, show that there is clearly still much work to be done.
Appendix 1: Results A summary of the findings is given in the following table.
Table 2: Bobby Analysis Of UK University Entry Points   Institution A Compliant?
AA Compliant?
P1 Errors P2 Errors Comments Try It 1 Aberdeen N N 1 31 instances 1 3 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 2 Abertay Dundee Y N 0 1 16 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 3 Aberystwyth N N 1 8 instances 4 47 instances, 1 instance, 1 instance, 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 4 Anglia Polytechnic University N N 1 2 instances 2 22 instances and 14 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 5 Aston N N 1 1 instances 1 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 6 Bangor Y N 0 1 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 7 Bath Spa N N 1 2 instances 2 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 8 Bath Y N 0 2 30 instances and 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 9 Queen's University of Belfast Y N 0 1 27 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 10 Bell College Y N 0 4 118 instances, 1 instance, 3 instances and 2 instances Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 11 Birkbeck College N N 2 1 instance and 10 instances 4 27 instances, 1 instance, 1 instance and 3 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 12 Birmingham Y N 0 3 25 instances, 1 instance and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 13 Bishop Grosseteste College N N 2 2 instance and 6 instances 4 26 instances, 1 instance, 10 instances and 1 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 14 Bolton Institute N N 1 47 instances 3 2 instances, 1 instance and 6 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 15 Arts Institute at Bournemouth         Web site not available [A Check] [AA Check] 16 Bournemouth N N 2 2 instances and 41 instances 5 45 instances, 1 instance, 2 instances, 2 instances and 4 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 17 Bradford Y N 0 3 33 instances, 1 instance and 10 instances Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 18 Brighton N N 1 17 instances 4 3 instances, 1 instance, 7 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 19 Bristol Y Y 0 0 AA approved [A Check] [AA Check] 20 Brunel Y N 0 3 9 instances, 6 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 21 Buckinghamshire Chilterns N N 1 7 instances 2 5 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 22 Cambridge Y N 0 2 5 instances and 3 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 23 Institute of Cancer Research Y N 0 1 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 24 Canterbury Christ Church N N 1 12 instances 3 6 instances, 15 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 25 Cardiff N N 1 49 instances 3 9 instances, 1 instance and 9 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 25 University of Wales Institute, Cardiff Y N 0 1 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 26 University of Central England N N 2 1 instance and 13 instances 4 69 instances, 1 instance, 5 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 27 University of Central Lancashire Y N 0 2 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 28 Central School of Speech and Drama Y N 0 3 18 instances, 1 instance and 9 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 29 Chester College N N 1 7 instances 2 58 instances and 4 instances Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 30 University College Chichester Y N 0 3 26 instances, 1 instance and 3 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 31 City University Y N 0 3 26 instances, 8 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 32 Courtauld Institute of Art N N 1 1 instances (frameset page) 1 2 instances(frameset page) Framed site.
Only master frameset file analysed [A Check] [AA Check] 33 Coventry N N Not analysed (framed site) Not analysed (framed site) Framed site [A Check] [AA Check] 34 Cranfield N N 1 1 instance 1 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 35 Dartington College N N 1 11 instances 3 33 instances, 1 instance and 32 instances Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 36 De Montfort N N 1 17 instances 3 38 instances, 29 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 37 Derby N N 1 15 instance 2 93 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 38 Dundee Y N 0 3 43 instances, 10 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 39 Durham Y N 0 1 30 instances   [A Check] \n[AA Check] 40 East Anglia Y N 0 1 66 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 41 University of East London Y Y 0 0 AA Approved [A Check] [AA Check] 42 Edge Hill College N N 1 3 instances 3 23 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 43 Edinburgh College of Art N N 1 3 instances 3 99 instances, 2 instances and 1 instance Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 44 Edinburgh N N 1 3 instances 3 96 instances,2 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 45 Essex Y N 0 3 15 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 46 Exeter Y N 0 2 34 instances and 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 47 Falmouth College N N 1 1 instance (frameset page) 1 3 instances (frameset page) Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 48 Glamorgan N N 1 22 instances 5 66 instances, 1 instance, 15 instances, 1 instance and 6 instances Redirect [A Check] [AA Check] 49 Glasgow Caledonian Y N 0 1 4 instances Analyses page for selection of Flash screen, ... [A Check] [AA Check] 50 Glasgow School of Art N N 1 2 instances 2 1 instance and 1 instance Splash screen with redirects after short period [A Check] [AA Check] 51 Glasgow Y N 0 2 55 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 52 Gloucestershire Y N 0 1 40 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 53 Goldsmiths College N N 2 1 instance and 33 instances 4 30 instances, 1 instance, 1 instance and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 54 Greenwich Y N 0 1 90 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 55 Harper Adams N N 1 4 instances 4 18 instances, 1 instance, 17 instances and 1 instance Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 56 Heriot-Watt N N 1 54 instances 4 33 instances, 1 instance, 23 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 57 Hertfordshire Y (Frameset page) N 0 1 1 instance Framed site [A Check] [AA Check] 58 Huddersfield N N 1 25 instances 3 26 instances, 1 instance and 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 59 Hull N N 1 1 instance 5 2 instance, 1 instance, 1 instance, 1 instance and 1 instance Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 60 Imperial College N N 1 14 instances 3 52 instances, 3 instances and 1 instance Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 61 Institute of Education N N 2 1 instance and 22 instances 4 115 instances, 1 instance, 14 instances and 1 instance Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 62 Keele Y N 0 4 5 instances, 1 instance, 13 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 63 Kent Institute of Art and Design N N 1 27 instances 3 36 instances, 1 instance and 3 instances Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 64 Kent Y N 0 2 7 instances and 3 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 65 King Alfred's College N N 1 4 instances (frameset page) 0 (frameset page) Framed site.
Only master frameset file analysed.
[A Check] [AA Check] 66 King's College London N N 1 34 instances 3 41 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 67 Kingston Y N 0 4 78 instances, 1 instance, 6 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 68 Lampeter N N 1 3 instances 3 14 instances, 1 instance and 8 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 69 Lancaster Y N 0 4 15 instances, 1 instance, 10 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 70 Leeds Metropolitan University N N 1 3 instances 2 12 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 71 Leeds Y N 0 2 38 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 72 Leicester Y N 0 3 4 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 73 Lincoln N N 1 3 instances 4 6 instances, 1 instance, 2 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 74 Liverpool Hope N N 2 9 instances and 11 instances 3 89 instances, 1 instance and 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 75 Liverpool John Moores University Y N 0 4 194 instances, 1 instance, 5 instances and 1 instance Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 76 Liverpool Y N 0 2 37 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 77 London Business School Y N 0 3 24 instances, 1 instance and 13 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 78 London Guildhall University N N 1 5 instances 4 38 instances, 1 instance, 12 instances and 2 instances Splash screen then redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 79 London Institute N N 1 3 instances 4 4 instances, 1 instance, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 80 University of London N N 1 6 instances 1 4 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 81 London School of Economics Y N 0 1 4 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 82 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Y N 0 3 5 instances, 7 instances and 6 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 83 Loughborough N N 2 1 instance and 7 instances 2 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 84 Luton N N 1 2 instances (frameset page) 0 (framed page) Framed site.
Only master frameset file analysed.
[A Check] [AA Check] 85 UMIST Y N 0 2 15 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 86 Manchester Metropolitan University Y N 0 3 25 instances, 1 instance and 9 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 87 Manchester N N 1 15 instances 3 203 instances, 1 instance and 6 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 88 University of Wales College of Medicine N N 1 22 instances 2 52 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 89 Middlesex Y N 0 3 68 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 90 Napier N N 1 67 instances 3 70 instances, 1 instances and 22 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 91 Newcastle Y N 0 4 31 instances, 1 instance, 3 instances and 4 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 92 Newman College Y N 0 1 72 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 93 Newport N N 1 48 instances 4 14 instances, 1 instance, 4 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 94 North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education N N 1 10 instances 3 34 instances, 25 instances and 11 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 95 University of North London N N 1 86 instances 5 171 instances, 1 instance, 48 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 96 University College Northampton Y (Frameset page) Y (Frameset page) 0 (frameset page only analysed) 0 (framed page only analysed)   [A Check] [AA Check] 97 Northern School of Contemporary Dance Y N 0 1 1 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 98 University of Northumbria Y N 0 3 44 instances, 1 instance and 20 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 99 Norwich School of Art and Design N N 1 3 instances (frameset page) 1 1 instance (frameset page) Framed site.
Only master frameset file analysed.
[A Check] [AA Check] 100 Nottingham Trent University N N 2 1 instance and 20 instances 3 51 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 101 Nottingham Y N 0 3 28 instances, 1 instance and 15 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 102 Oxford Brookes Y N 0 3 5 instances, 5 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 103 Oxford Y N 0 1 4 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 104 Paisley N N 2 10 instances and 4 instances 3 32 instances, 1 instance and 8 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 105 Plymouth N N 0 2 33 instances and 18 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 106 Portsmouth N N 1 9 instances 3 39 instances, 1 instance and 21 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 107 Queen Margaret University College, N N 2 5 instances and 2 instances 3 30 instances, 115 instances and 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 108 Queen Mary and Westfield College N N 2 23 instances and 2 instances 4 79 instances, 1 instance, 12 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 109 Ravensbourne College N N 1 36 instances 3 33 instances,1 instance and 11 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 110 Reading N N 1 8 instances 2 49 instances and 3 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 111 University of Wales, Registry Y N 0 3 19 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 112 Robert Gordon University Y N 0 3 44 instances, 11 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 113 University of Surrey, Roehampton N N 1 1 instances 4 4 instances,1 instance, 1 instance and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 114 Rose Bruford College N N 1 3 instances 3 10 instances,1 instance and 4 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 115 Royal Academy of Music N N 1 34 instances 2 35 instances and 9 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 116 Royal Agricultural College N N 2 2 instances 2 9 instances and 3 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 117 Royal College of Art Y N 0 1 4 instances Menu page for Flash or HTML site [A Check] [AA Check] 118 Royal College of Music N N 1 10 instances 2 15 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 119 Royal Holloway Y Y 0 (frameset page) 0 (frameset page) Framed site.
Only master frameset file analysed.
[A Check] [AA Check] 120 Royal Northern College of Music N N 1 5 instances 2 12 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 121 Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama N N 1 5 instances 2 1 instance and 1 instance Redirected page.
Redirect page uses frames.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 122 Royal Veterinary College N N 1 1 instances 6 28 instances, 3 instances, 1 instance, 7 instances, 2 instances and 3 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 123 St Andrews N N 1 1 instances 4 31 instances,1 instance, 12 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 124 St George's Hospital Medical School N N 130 instances 6 1 instances, 7 instances, 1 instance, 9 instances, 1 instance and 6 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 125 College of St Mark and St John Y N 0 1 12 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 126 St Martin's College Y N 0 3 5 instances, 2 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 127 St Mary's College N N 1 1 instances 2 4 instances and 10 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 128 Salford Y N 0 3 51 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 129 School of Oriental and African Studies Y N 0 4 7 instances, 6 instances, 21 instances and 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 130 School of Pharmacy N N 1 2 instances 3 50 instances, 1 instance and 11 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 131 Scottish Agricultural College N N 1 43 instances 3 115 instances, 4 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 132 Sheffield Hallam N N 1 68 instances 3 110 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 133 Sheffield Y Y 0 0 AA Approved [A Check] [AA Check] 134 South Bank University Y N 0 1 53 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 135 Southampton Institute Y N 0 0   [A Check] [AA Check] 136 Southampton Y N 0 4 15 instances, 1 instance, 10 instances and 3 instances Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 137 Staffordshire   N 1 15 instances 3 42 instances, 8 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 138 Stirling N N 1 1 instance 2 34 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 139 Strathclyde Y N 0 2 8 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 140 Sunderland N N 1 7 instances 2 77 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 141 Surrey Institute of Art and Design N N 1 22 instances 2 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 142 Surrey Y N 0 2 25 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 143 Sussex N N 1 4 instances 2 44 instances and 8 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 144 Swansea Institute N N 1 20 instances 4 36 instances, 1 instance, 5 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 145 University of Wales, Swansea N N 1 6 instances 4 163 instances, 1 instance, 11 instances and 12 instances Redirect.
Analysed redirected page.
[A Check] [AA Check] 146 Teesside N N 1 49 instances 2 24 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 147 Thames Valley University N N 1 5 instances 3 28 instances, 1 instance and 19 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 148 Open University N N 1 6 instances (frameset page) 1 1 instance (frameset page) Framed site.
Only master frameset file analysed.
[A Check] [AA Check] 149 Trinity College of Music N N 1 5 instances (frameset page) 1 1 instance (frameset page) Framed site.
Only master frameset file analysed.
[A Check] [AA Check] 150 Trinity College, Carmarthen N N 1 98 instances 3 10 instances, 1 instance and 3 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 151 Trinity and All Saints College N N 1 7 instances 4 88 instances, 1 instance, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 152 Ulster N N 2 1 instance and 39 instances 4 50 instances, 2 instances, 3 instances and 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 153 University College London Y N 0 2 16 instances and 7 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 154 Warwick Y N 0 4 15 instances, 1 instances, 10 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 155 Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama N N 2 1 instance and 3 instances 3 31 instances, 1 instance and 1   [A Check] [AA Check] 156 University of the West of England Y N 0 3 1 instance, 16 instances and 2 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 157 Westminster N N 1 7 instances 4 101 instances, 1 instance, 2 instances and 5 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 158 Wolverhampton N N 1 3 instances 3 10 instances, 1 instance and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 159 University College Worcester N N 1 4 instances 2 5 instances and 1 instances   [A Check] [AA Check] 160 Writtle College Y Y 0 0 Page created using JavaScript.
[A Check] [AA Check] 161 York St John College Y N 0 2 14 instances and 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] 162 York Y   0 1 1 instance   [A Check] [AA Check] The information in the table was initially collected on 7th August 2002.
On this date the AA compliance data was obtained.
The survey was repeated on 2nd September 2002, when A compliance data was obtained.
Note that a number of the entry points were found to contain a redirect.
In cases in which the address of the redirected page was displayed in the browser the new location was analysed by Bobby.
References The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, Sophie Corlett, Skill http://www.techdis.ac.uk/resources/skill01.html Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), W3C http://www.w3c.org/WAI/ Bobby, Watchfire http://bobby.watchfire.com/ Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility, W3C http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/existingtools.html Betsie, BBC http://betsie.sourceforge.net/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "An Accessibility Analysis Of UK University Entry Points" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Sep-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) Buzz data software framework database archives metadata digitisation copyright preservation cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Karla Youngs describes what TASI is and the work that it is doing in building a common ‘Framework’ for digital imaging projects.
The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) was established by the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC) to advise and support the Higher Education community on the digital creation, storage and delivery of image based information.
The objectives of TASI are to: share and promote technical expertise and standards within the academic and public sectors enable the academic community to develop digital archives of good quality image-related materials to support effective teaching and research by providing comprehensive information and advice.
What is involved in creating a digital image archive?
Careful planning is needed when building a digital image archive, as this will allow the creation of an effective, user-friendly archive, whilst avoiding costly and time consuming mistakes.
It is not (perhaps) widely recognised that digitisation of the primary source material is a small part of creating a digital archive.
There are other issues that need to be considered, such as copyright clearance, metadata issues and project management that can have a severe impact on both resources and time.
Decisions made at the beginning will impact on other aspects of the project and could thus jeopardise the success of the venture as a whole.
It is recommended that projects undertake a feasibility study to determine cost, benchmarks and quality assurance.
TASI has identified that the ‘Framework’ which defines the creation of digital image archives can be divided into three phases: Data Capture and Creation Data Access and Delivery Data Collections Management Image handling and preparation Search and retrieval Database creation and system design Image capture: hardware and software Access management Workflow and procedures management Formats and compression Quality assurance Copyright, IPR and ethics Project management Metadata: indexing and cataloguing Digital preservation: storage and archiving Issues surrounding resource capture/creation, resource delivery/access and collections management all need to be considered before widening the discussion to the ways in which such resource material can be effectively used to support teaching and research.
Whilst some of these issues are obvious, experience has shown that all too often critical issues are neglected during the early stages of such a project thus jeopardising the long-term use of digital resources.
What is TASI doing?
Having identified the key areas for consideration, TASI is developing the ‘Framework’ to provide comprehensive advice on building an image archive.
In the course of this development, TASI carries out a number of activities: the production of a card/resource pack visiting and documenting projects for current and/or best practice promoting and encouraging the adoption of good working practices via resource pack, workshops and seminars providing an information and resource server (WWW site) providing a sign posting service to digital image resources and other useful information and services The Warwick Workshop One workshop that has helped the development of the TASI ‘Framework’ was held in Warwick in June 1998.
This ‘Digital Image Library Workshop’ bought together representatives from 18 digital imaging projects to discuss five main themes: Criteria for Selection Digitisation Digital Preservation Managing Access to Digital Image Resources Planning and Managing the Digitisation Chain From these discussions the digital imaging community recognised that there were areas of strength (‘knowledge’) and weakness (‘some knowledge but requires further work’).
From these five subject areas the groups made recommendations that would further develop the ‘Framework’.
These will be incorporated into TASI’s work so that the ‘Framework’ is fully developed and thus extensive information pertinent to the building of a digital image archive is available to the TASI user community.
Why we would like to hear from you Providing impartial advice and supporting our users is the top priority for TASI.
TASI advice comes from practical experience of building digital image archives, surveying other image based projects, keeping abreast of current practices and maintaining a watch on future developments.
With these activities TASI aims to provide the best possible advice.
TASI would like to hear from you if: you are planning on building a digital image archive and would like help on technical issues (e.g.
metadata and copyright) you think we could provide training courses for you you would like help with writing a proposal for funding a digital image archive you have any other comments/advice/practical experience you would like to share you would like a copy of our flyer and/or resource pack TASI can be contacted at: The Institute for Learning and Research Technology, 8, Woodland Road, Tel.
0117 928 9835.
Please ask for Karla Youngs (TASI Manager) or Alan Lock (Technical Research Officer).
Email: info@tasi.ac.uk Visit our Web site at: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/ Author Details Karla Youngs TASI Manager University of Bristol 8 Woodland Road,Bristol,BS8 1TN Email: karla.youngs@bristol.ac.uk URL: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: The Use of Third-Party Web Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: The Use of Third-Party Web Services Buzz data software html css browser hypertext ejournal mailbase url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly discusses the use of third-party web services.
Background University web managers are busy people.
University departments seem to have never-ending requirements for new services on the institutional web site.
But, as we all know, it can be difficult to get the funding to buy expensive software products or extra staff to install and support free software.
But is there an alternative approach to trying to do everything in-house?
Nowadays the Web provides not only access to information resources, but also to applications.
Might not the use of externally-hosted applications across the Web provide a cost-effective answer for University web teams?
Externally-Hosted Web Services Let us first look at some of the externally-hosted services which are available on the Web.
Web Statistics Most people are interested in web statistics.
The statistics may be needed to justify the expense of the service, to monitor where the visitors are coming from, to investigate how the web site is being used or to detect broken links or other problems with the web site.
But it can be difficult to provide access to web statistics to a range of information providers.
The software must be purchased although software such as Analog is freely available, there is a cost associated with software which provides richer functionality.
Once the software has been purchased and installed, effort must be spend in configuring the web server and managing the log files.
Although this can, and should, be automated, it may be difficult to allow, say, departmental information providers to carry out data mining of their data.
These difficulties can be compounded for departmental or project web sites, which may not have dedicated IT support.
A number of externally-hosted services for providing web statistics are available, including NedStat [1], SiteMeter [2], SuperStats [3] and Stats4All [4].
These service typically work by providing a small icon which is included on pages on the web site.
When a visitor accesses a page containing the icon, a request for the image is sent to the company hosting the service.
The request is logged.
The log file may store not only the date and time of the request, but also a variety of additional information, such as the referrer field (how did the visitor get to the page), the search engine query string (if the visitor used a search engine to get to the page, what search term did they enter), a profile of the visitors client machine (operating system, browser, screen resolution, etc).
The Exploit Interactive web magazine [5] is currently evaluating the services provided by NedStat and SiteMeter and a report will be published in Exploit Interactive shortly.
Arguably one of the advantages of externally-hosted web statistical analysis services is the ease of access to the reports.
Typical clicking an icon (such as this ) will provide access to the information.
The Exploit Interactive statistics provided by SiteMeter are freely available [6] and examples of the reports are shown below.
Figure 1 gives graphical representation of the numbers of page views and visits during February 2000.
Figure 1: Numbers of page views and visits in February 2000 Figure 2 shows the browsers and browser versions which have accessed the web site.
Figure 2: Pie chart of the browsers and browser versions which have accessed the web site An example of NedStat can be see at the Information Research e-journal web site [7].
This web site has been using the service since 1 April 1998, so it provides useful information on long-term trends.
Link Management All University web sites provide links to external Web service, as reported in Ariadne issue 22 [8].
Maintainers (and, indeed, users) of large-scale link gateways (as such resources are sometime called) are aware of the problems in maintaining sets of links which are stored in unstructured HTML pages.
However making use of link management software can be expensive or require scarce software installation expertise.
As with web statistics software, management of web gateways can be provided by use of services on the Web.
LinkBank [9] and HotLinks [10] are examples of this type of service.
LinkBank provides a forms-based interface for uploading link information (with a bulk-upload facility).
An example of the administrators interface is shown below.
Figure 3: LinkBank Administrator’s Interface The information provider receives automated messages when a resource is no longer available.
Unavailable resources are automatically moved from public view to a review area, until the information provider has updated the link or deleted the resource.
The end user is provided with richer functionality than that provided by a static HTML resource (e.g.
sorting of links, display of most popular links, rolling displays of resources, etc.
), as illustrated below.
Figure 4: User’s View of LinkBank The LinkBank shown above is used to main a gateway to UK UNiversity web sites, search engines and web gateways [11].
Indexing Services The UK Higher Education community makes extensive use of freely-available indexing software such as ht://Dig, as documented in a recent survey [12].
But the survey also indicated that a significant minority appeared to provide no search facility on their web site.
Three institutions make use of externally-hosted indexing services for providing a search facility on their web site.
St Mary’s College [13] and Northampton [14] use FreeFind and Derby University [15] make use of the AltaVista service.
It is perhaps surprising that institutions which do not currently have a search facility have not chosen to provide one and, if the technical expertise to install software such as ht://Dig is not available, have not chosen a externally-hosted indexing solution, which requires completing a form and adding a few lines of HTML, as illustrated below: Search For:   Match:  Any word All words Exact phrase Sound-alike matching Within:  Anywhere Title Description Keywords Body Alternate text URL Show:  5 10 25 50 100  results  with without  summaries Sort by:  score date User Feedback The Web was originally designed to provide collaborative and co-authoring services for the Particle Physics community.
Unfortunately when the Web first began to grow in size and usage it was used as a publication service, with small numbers of authors and many readers.
There are now many collaborative software products available.
A variety of externally-hosted services for providing user feedback are available, including voting systems and real-time and asynchronous chat systems.
A number of popular web sites provide simple voting systems using a service provided by EZpolls.com [16].
As can be seen the free version of the EZpolls.com is funded by advertising.
A licensed version of the software is available which displays the voting form without any adverts.
Another example of a web-based user feedback system based on a voting system is provided by OnlineOpinion [17].
An example of a web-based user discussion for is provided by BoardServer [18].
Other Services A variety of other services can be provided by third-parties.
These include authoring and validation services (such as the W3C’s HTML and CSS validation services [19] and [20]), and services for monitoring web servers [21].
Possible Barriers Externally-hosted services can provide a cheap (often free) solution for a range of requirements.
But what are the problems with use of such services?
Several potential problem areas can be identified: Bandwidth Issues Many, but not all, of the services mentioned in this article are hosted in the US.
Significant use of the services would increase network traffic to the US, which would not only be slower than locally-based services, but, due to the costing model for network traffic to the US, could also potentially be costly for institutions using these services.
JANET AUP Use of services which provide adverts may contravene the JANET Acceptable Use Policy.
Limited Functionality of Services The services may not provide the full functionality which would be provided by use of an application installed locally.
Closed Nature of Services The services may not provide access to the data to be exported for reuse.
Failure to Exploit Local Expertise Use of externally-hosted services may fail to make effective use of expertise available locally.
Gives Negative Image Use of externally-hosted services may give the impression that the institution does not have the expertise to provide a solution locally.
Poor User Interface The user interface may not integrate with the user interface of the local service.
Are The Barriers Insurmountable?
Do the problem areas mentioned above automatically rule out deployment of externally-hosted web services?
Some counter arguments may be given.
Bandwidth Issues In the longer term the bandwidth concerns are likely to disappear.
In the medium term it would be possible for externally-hosted services to be located “closer” (in network terms) to the JANET network, thus removing the network bottle-neck.
JANET AUP One could choose to subscribe the the licensed service, which does not carry adverts or use services for which access to adverts required the user to actively follow a link.
In the longer term the conditions of the JANET Acceptable Use Policy could be revisited.
Limited Functionality of Services The additional functionality may not be needed, or not needed at the price it would cost to provide it.
Closed Nature of Services Some services do allow the data to be exported in a number of formats for reuse.
Failure to Exploit Local Expertise Use of externally-hosted services will free expertise available locally to take on other tasks.
Gives Negative Image Use of externally-hosted services should demonstrate that the institution is using local expertise efficiently.
Poor User Interface The user interface may be more manageable if it is contained within a frame on the local site.
Although many web managers do not use frames because of several well-documented problems, new developments (such as Cascading Style Sheets) should make it possible in future to provide frame-like interfaces in a more robust manner.
In addition, providers of externally-hosted services are increasingly providing the option to tailor the look and feel of their services, so that it can make use of an institutional design scheme.
The UK HE Perspective This article has mentioned a number of externally-hosted web services which may have a role to play in enhancing the services provided on UK University web sites.
It should be mentioned that there are also a number of factors of particular relevance to the UK HE community.
The UK HE community has benefited greatly from its coordinated development of national services.
CHEST (the Combined Higher Education Software Team) [22] provide an valuable service in negotiating deals for the HE community.
Although they initially focussed on deals for software (as can be seen from their name) they now have wider interests, which includes, for example, purchase of datasets.
Perhaps CHEST could use their negotiating skills to obtain a good deal for the licensed services which a number of the organisations mentioned in this article provide.
A concern for many will be whether use of free externally-hosted services which are funded by advertising revenue would contravene the JANET AUP [23].
There has been recently been discussion of the role of advertising on network services which make us of the JANET network.
Some argue that the community would benefit from the cost-savings which would be gained in generating advertising revenue by providing advertisements on institutional web sites, JISC services, etc.
Others are concerned that this would detract from the academic content and would reduce the amount of productive time spent by staff and students at a PC.
This debate is likely to continue.
Finally it should be pointed out that the DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource), which aims to provide seamless access to a variety of national electronic resources, will be providing services to the UK HE community which will be integrated into an institutional web site at a level other than hypertext links!
Many of the issues associated with use of commercial third-party services will be relevant to use of DNER services (perhaps even the advertising issue if JISC services are asked to go down this route).
Conclusions To conclude many externally-hosted web services are available which can help University webmasters.
There are pros and cons associated with their use, which webmasters need to take into account if they wish to add such services to the tools they use.
Institutional webmasters should remember, of course, that the devolved environment provided by the Web means that centralised approval for a strategy is not required, and there is nothing to stop departmental information providers from introducing such services for themselves.
As Tom Wilson, Research Professor in Information Management in the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield said in a message to the author: I use the external services because the University doesn’t allow me access to install on the server and because it doesn’t make any appropriate tools available.
I find the search engine … useful, in that it gives me data on the ‘hot topics’ of course people use the engine as though it was searching the Web, so I get some weird requests!
However, by and large it serves its purpose for me and, evidently, for the readers.
I use the counters to give me and the authors counts on hits on their papers, mainly the counter on the top page is a reasonably good measure of use and the counter service provides some nicely outputted results, as you’ve probably seen.
You may also have seen that I’ve used three counter services on the site NedStat which gives the top page results (and some others), what used to be LinkExchange (now bcentral, owned by Microsoft) for most of the pages, and (because the LE counters have been very variable recently), I’ve just started using a counter service from MyComputer.com which is a nice clear one and which I may continue to use in the future.
I leave the final word to Ian Usher, the Webmonger for the Department of Geography web site at UCL.
Ian has used several externally hosted services and, on a recent discussion on the web-support Mailbase list [24] said: Our search facility is currently hosted by atomz.com , some calendering by Yahoo!, so I’m increasingly drawn to externally hosted solutions… more time to catch up on other, more pressing work, until they all stop working.
References Nedstat http://uk.nedstat.net/ SiteMeter http://www.sitemeter.com/ Superstats http://v2.superstats.com/ Stats4All http://www.stats4all.com/ Exploit Interactive http://www.exploit-lib.org/ Exploit Interactive Website Statistics, SiteMeter http://sm2.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=sm2-exploit-home Information Research, University of Sheffield http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/publications/infres/ircont.html WebWatch: A Survey Of Institutional Web Gateways, Ariadne issue 22 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/web-watch/ LinkBank http://www.linkbank.net/ HotLinks http://www.hotlinks.com/ WebWatch Links, LinkBank http://www.linkbank.net/get_links/default/ariadne/1/ Survey Of UK HE Institutional Search Engines January 2000, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/uk-he-search-engines/survey-jan2000.html Search, St Mary’s College http://www.smuc.ac.uk/search/ Central Search, University College, Northampton http://www.nene.ac.uk/websearch/search.html Central Search, University of Derby http://www.derby.ac.uk/homepage/search.html EZPolls http://ezpolls.mycomputer.com/ OnlineOpinion http://www.o-pinion.com/ BoardServer http://boardserver.mycomputer.com/ HTML Validation Service, W3C http://validator.w3.org/ CSS Validation Service, W3C http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ WatchDog http://watchdog.mycomputer.com/ CHEST http://www.chest.ac.uk/ JANET AUP, UKERNA http://www.ja.net/documents/use.html web-support, Posting to Mailbase list, 11 Jan 2000 http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/web-support/2000-01/0005.html Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The National Internet Accessibility Database (NIAD) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The National Internet Accessibility Database (NIAD) Buzz database accessibility copyright cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS E. A. Draffon looks at the National Internet Accessibility Database (NIAD).
Over the years many guides have been produced to assist those choosing suitable assistive technology for individuals with disabilities.
These guides have usually been available in book format and are rarely updated on a regular basis, and if updates are available the user has to pay for the privilege of remaining informed.
In recent years there have been efforts to produce information on the Internet.
However, this information tends to be presented as little more than an on-line catalogue with brief descriptions of individual items.
The information is often disability specific and does not take into account the setting within which it will be used.
It is intended that the NIAD web site will be specifically orientated towards those working, studying and having interest in the Further and Higher Educational sector.
The Internet based resource will include information related to Assistive Technology for those with an interest in disabilities.
It will be a continually updated web based resource, which is an easily accessible resource for users of the DISinHE Web site.
There will be layers of information, which provide extensive choices for those accessing the database via the Internet beginning with basic guidelines that will be refined as the user goes down the various pathways.
The guide will link in with other aspects of the services offered by centres around the United Kingdom and other databases that will be designed for and by DISinHE.
In addition to these features: * NIAD wants to provide links between useful combinations of programmes and use its database of information from the lists to highlight positive and negative elements of these combinations.
* NIAD would like to provide interactive reports that can be made up in a way that would prove useful to those working in assessment centres, study skill and learning support units etc.
* The database would give the user instant access to product references, suppliers and where possible up to date costs.
The shopping list could be helpful to LEAs checking reports and to students who may wish to have more information about items.
It is essential in these days of inspections and evaluation that those working in the field of assistive and enabling technology are able to show that what is offered is both effective and fit for the purpose for which it has been proposed.
We need to be assured that we have what is termed 'evidence based practice', where interventions are founded on the sound knowledge that they actually work, rather than simply what has always been done or what is the easiest to provide etc.
This normally means basing practice on research evidence, although, in the case of enabling technology, expertise is more likely to form the basis of choice.
It is essential that those in the field should be able to share their expertise related to this rapidly changing field.
An interactive web site supported by experts in the field holding a knowledge base that can be built upon over the years would assist those new to the field and those wishing to update their own databases of information.
NIAD has developed links within the field of computing and information technology for those with disabilities.
The Assistive Technology Centre is a member of the National Federation of Access Centres, has membership with Skill through the University, and many other organisations linked to those with disabilities.
Links across the Atlantic have been maintained for several years with individuals and institutions including the DO-IT Program, EASI and Adaptech For further Information on NIAD please contact: Author Details   Mrs E.A.B.
Draffan, NIAD Assistive Technology Centre, Lancaster House University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QP Tel: 01273 678497 Fax: 01273 877370   e.a.draffan@sussex.ac.uk http://www.atc.sussex.ac.uk/ Article Title: "The National Internet Accessibility Database (NIAD)"  Author: E.A.Draffon Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/disinhe/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Evolution of Portable Electronic Books Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Evolution of Portable Electronic Books Buzz data software html wireless usability copyright graphics windows multimedia ebook mp3 mobi cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Wilson charts the development of portable electronic book hardware, from the first generation in 1980s to the range of handheld devices available today.
Many months after reading and hearing about their introduction in the US, portable electronic books are now becoming available in the UK.
Franklin’s eBookMan [1] is available online from bestbuy.com and amazon.com and from some high street retailers, the goReader is available for purchase via their Web site [2], a variety of ebook reading software can be downloaded to PDAs for free via the Internet, and some Pocket PCs are being sold pre-installed with Microsoft Reader [3].
This paper places these developments in context by outlining the evolution of the portable ebook from its original conception in the ‘60s through to the models available today, and on to the possible directions the design of these devices may take in the future.
Brief History The idea of the portable electronic book dates back to 1968 when postgraduate student Alan Kay articulated the concept of the Dynabook, "a portable interactive personal computer, as accessible as a book" [4].
Considering that this was many years before the advent of the personal computer and the Internet, his idea for a tablet-style computer capable of wireless communication was a visionary one, and more than two decades passed before products matching his description began to appear in the marketplace.
Kay went on to work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, developing graphical user interfaces, then at Apple, where his vision of the Dynabook finally transformed itself into reality in the form of the Apple Newton MessagePad, the world’s first PDA.
Touch-screen based, the Newton was capable of displaying electronic titles in NewtonBook format, and indeed hundreds of ebooks were produced, but the product line was discontinued in 1998 when leaner, lighter PalmPilots and Handspring Visors entered the market [5].
During this time, Franklin Electronic Publishers and Sony were busy developing their own concepts of the portable ebook.
In 1986, Franklin were the first to enter the market in 1986 with a handheld device containing an electronic dictionary and capable of displaying only one line at a time, followed, in 1991, by an electronic Bible, this time with a four line screen and keyboard.
Also in the early ‘90s, Sony developed the Data Discman [6], otherwise known as the Electronic Book Player, which played both audio CDs and books on CD-ROM.
The Discman was bundled with Compton’s Concise Encyclopaedia, Wellness Encyclopaedia, and Passport’s World Travel Translator and introduced to the American market at a price of $550.
The Sony Electronic Book Authoring System [7] enabled other compatible titles to be created, but this software sold for $9000 and few additional ebooks were ever produced.
Criticised for its proprietary architecture, small screen size, poor resolution and limited multimedia capabilities, the Discman was soon superseded by the Bookman (to be distinguished from the eBookMan) [8], produced first by Sony and later by Franklin.
This weighs 2 pounds, has a 4.5” diagonal screen, and employs cartridges containing a variety of reference materials, from foreign language dictionaries to collections of quotations.
These cartridges cost between $20 and $80 and are still available today.
Franklin’s other “first generation” portable ebook which can still be found on shop shelves is the Pocket PDR Medical Book System [9], a small 4.6 oz device with keyboard and monochrome screen, and with a variety of manuals of therapeutics and handbooks of drug interactions available on “book cards”, priced between $30 and $130.
Poor usability in terms of the comfort of reading from such small screens, and the lack of an appropriate content distribution channel, means that the success of these early devices from Sony and Franklin was limited.
Most recently, Franklin have launched the eBookMan (see below), a device which attempts to overcome these limitations by providing a larger screen and enabling titles to be downloaded from the Internet.
The arrival of PalmPilots in 1998 marked the widespread availability and uptake of small, powerful and portable computers, and had an enormous impact on the demand for handheld devices.
With the technology now available, a market for small devices established, and reading text from small screens growing in acceptance, publishers and entrepreneurs had both the ability and the confidence to begin developing electronic books, and a second generation was born [10].
Like their predecessors, these models of ebooks take advantage of the ability of technology to store multiple titles in a small space, but they also try to provide readers with a comfortable experience by retaining the advantages of the print medium and mimicking aspects of the book metaphor: they are all designed to be used “like a book” by reading black text against a light background on a high resolution screen, larger than that of the Discman or the Bookman, employing “pages” (or sections of text occupying distinct visual spaces) which can be “turned” using buttons dedicated to that purpose.
Nuvomedia, Inc. in Palo Alto, California, were the first to launch their “new wave” ebook at the Barnes and Noble store in New York in October 1998.
The Rocket eBook [11] is a paperback-size device that holds 10 books (4,000 pages of text and graphics), weighs one pound and cost around $270.
It has a 4-by-3-inch high contrast screen with high resolution, a number of font sizes can be selected, and it can be customised for leftand right-handed use.
The battery lasts for about 20 hours when backlit, and 45 hours without being backlit.
The device has a search facility and a bookmarking function.
The Rocket comes with a PalmPilot-like cradle that connects to a serial port; titles are ordered online, downloaded to a PC and finally transferred to the reader.
Its closest competitor was the SoftBook [12] by SoftBook Press of Menlo Park, California.
The SoftBook has a leather cover which, when opened, automatically starts up the book.
It holds 250 books (100,000 pages), has a backlit, high resolution 7-by-6-inch screen which can display 16 shades of grey and about twice as much text as the Rocket, weighs nearly 3 pounds and cost around $600.
Functions such as choosing a title, page turning, bookmarking, underlining and annotating can be performed using touch-screen technology.
Its battery provides up to five hours of viewing, but it offers a fast recharge of an hour.
Unlike the Rocket, it is completely independent from the PC: content is loaded in an HTML-based proprietary format and downloaded directly to the reader via an internal modem.
The Rocket and the SoftBook were available in the US and Canada, and have now been superseded.
Rockets can still be bought in Germany, however, and are still in wide circulation in the US.
Ebook Hardware Today Today, the market for portable reading devices is characterised by three main strands: dedicated ebook readers; PDAs and Pocket PCs with book reading software; and hybrid devices which primarily function as ebook readers but also offer some or all of the functionality of Pocket PCs and PDAs.
Dedicated Ebook Readers These are descendants of the Rocket and the SoftBook, built solely for the purpose of book reading.
Typically, they are small, lightweight devices (usually with larger screens than PDAs and Pocket PCs) with backlit screens and embedded dictionaries.
Often they enable searching, bookmarking and the ability to make annotations, and can either be connected to a PC or contain internal modems so that content can be downloaded from the Internet.
The SoftBook and the Rocket eBook sold less than 50,000 units between them [13], but the novelty of their design and availability of titles sparked interest and controversy and captured the imaginations of consumers and manufacturers around the world.
In January 2000 Nuvomedia and SoftBook Press were acquired by Gemstar eBook Group, and the Rocket and the SoftBook are no longer manufactured.
Figure 1: REB 1200 RCA, through a licensing deal with Gemstar, now manufacture the REB1100 [14] and the REB1200 [15], which replace the Rocket and the SoftBook respectively.
The REB1100 is the cheaper of the two, selling at around $300.
It is slightly lighter than the Rocket, has a built-in modem and runs its own proprietary format.
The REB1200 retails at $700 and has a large colour LCD screen.
The REBs have combined projected 2001 sales of 3 million to 7 million units [16].
Other companies have joined the market, goReader perhaps being the most notable.
The goReader is an OEB compliant ebook reader designed for university students, who obtain textbook content directly from the goReader Web site.
The idea behind this device is that it will enable students to carry around all their textbooks for one semester (it has a 5GB hard drive and 32 MB DRAM) in one portable device weighing less than five pounds.
Additional features, tailored to the student market, include a built-in calculator, calendar and electronic notepad.
Figure 2: goReader PDAs and Pocket PCs These are usually smaller than dedicated ebook readers and primarily function as personal organisers.
Often they also offer Internet access and word processing, spreadsheet and MP3 playing capabilities.
Increasingly, as content and ebook reader software for these devices becomes available, they are now being used additionally to read books.
Examples of the software available today include: Palm Reader [17], for reading books on PalmPilots, Handspring Visors, and Pocket PCs.
MobiPocket Reader [18] which lets you read text, Palm and HTML files on any device with the PalmOS or Windows CE versions 2.0 and later.
Microsoft Reader which attempts to recreate the look-and-feel of ink on paper through ClearType technology, which claims to triple the resolution of text by smoothing the tiny spaces between the pixels on a computer screen.
Some Pocket PCs are now being sold pre-loaded with Microsoft Reader.
Hybrid Devices Several devices are emerging which cross these previously distinct boundaries between hardware designed especially for reading books, and hardware designed to perform personal organiser tasks, with ebook reading an added functionality.
These “hybrid devices” look similar to dedicated readers, with larger screens intended for reading long streams of text, buttons placed for easy turning of pages, and with the usual ebook capabilities such as bookmarking and annotating, but may also contain address books and to do lists, and be used to perform the types of task normally associated with PDAs, such as email reading, Internet browsing and MP3 playing.
Figure 3: hiebook Examples include the eBookMan, relatively well priced at $130 to $230, currently the only device of its kind easily available in the UK and which supports audio files and contains an address book and a to do lost; the hiebook [19], with a large touch screen, which has emailing capabilities; and MyFriend [20], “your ideal companion for working, learning and having fun”.
The Future: Convergence vs Dedication The co-emergence of these three groups of portable devices on which electronic books can be read indicates that the ebook market is still in its infancy and very much in a state of flux.
Until recently, the design of such products has been in the hands of developers and manufacturers; as they become increasingly available, the future development of portable electronic books will be driven more by demand and user response.
Of course, the availability of content will play a key role in determining which devices succeed in the medium to long term (the devices are useless unless content is readily available), and the Open eBook Forum [21] has established standards for representing the content of electronic books which enable compatability across formats and, therefore, hardware.
In terms of the future physical design of ebooks, the current trend towards the convergence of hitherto discrete technologies has been well documented: “Today, the CE industry, as it becomes digital, is in the midst of a new wave of change.
The different worlds of television, telephone and data processing are beginning to share similar technologies and are starting to overlap.
This technological "convergence" spurs an array of other convergence moves in products, markets and businesses.” [22] Technological consumers of today demand convenience and economy of space from the products they buy [23].
Following this logic, of the three strands of portable electronic books outlined above, PDAs and Pocket PCs or hybrid devices which perform a multitude of functions in addition to book reading will prove most popular: why carry around one device for reading books and another for diary keeping, when both activities could be achieved using just one unit?
This process of convergence may even give rise to new relationships between technologies.
Although electronic paper [24] a prototype of which was recently developed by Bell Labs and E Ink Corporation and which will show electronic text on thin, flexible, plastic sheets that look and feel like paper and which can be instantly updated via wireless technology is being touted as the next phase in the evolution of ebooks, Clifford Lynch notes that if a display of this quality can be used as an ebook reader, then it can also be used on a general purpose laptop computer, and ebook readers will face competition, in terms of price and functionality, from the next generations of laptops [25].
Bundling together the functions of book reading and game playing in one device has also been suggested as a sensible and attractive combination.
For many, reading books and playing computer games are leisure activities, and today’s portable games consoles place emphasis on weight and screen quality and size, just as portable ebooks do.
In fact, a Game Boy Book Reader, written in assembler, has been developed in the UK by MQP Electronics, to allow out-of-copyright classic book texts to be read on the Game Boy screen [26].
However, there is also a strong case for the survival of devices which are dedicated solely or primarily to the purpose of book reading.
The act of reading a book is arguably unlike any other use to which handheld devices can be put, in that it is a highly personal and involving activity about which readers feel very passionate.
Moreover, it gives rise to a unique set of design requirements which cannot necessarily be served by hardware intended to perform a multitude of other functions.
A host of expectations derived from the print medium come into play, including the need for intuitively placed buttons for page turning, and to be able to “open” a book with the minimum of effort.
Issues such as screen quality and the comfort of holding the device in your hand, while important for all PDAs and Pocket PCs, become paramount when reading a book, and can sometimes give rise to contradictory requirements.
For example, a device which is small enough to fit into a shirt pocket may have a screen of sufficient size for diary keeping or note-taking, but may be simply too small for reading texts of any length.
That readers feel strongly about the experience of reading books is well known; that they will find specially designed devices which cater singularly for their unique book-reading needs more attractive than general purpose devices, is a real possibility.
Conclusions The future shape of the portable electronic book is, at least in part, dependant on whether the trend towards convergence applies equally to ebooks as it does to other technologies: do users’ desires for multi-functional devices override the unique set of design requirements which arise when reading text electronically?
Moreover, as Lynch notes, ebooks which represent a reconceptualisation of the printed book, “face formidable challenges in their authoring, economics, and acceptance; these are emerging rather than mature forms” [27].
EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface), funded under the JISC DNER Programme for Learning and Teaching [28], is learning about the wants and needs of users of ebook hardware, within the context of Higher Education, through an evaluation of a selection of devices during Summer 2001.
The aim is to discover which features facilitate or enhance the experience of reading a book, and which detract.
Lecturers and researchers from the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Computer and Information Sciences [29], and the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) [30] are participating in the evaluation of a Rocket eBook, a SoftBook, Franklin’s eBookMan, a PalmPilot and a Hewlett-Packard Jornada 548.
At the time of writing, this research is still underway, but it is possible to derive a selection of preliminary conclusions based on participants’ comments so far.
That readers approach texts in electronic format with expectations inherited from their experience with paper books has been confirmed in EBONI’s studies to date.
As one reader noted after reading a text on a handheld device, “It didn’t feel like I was reading a book.
The fact that it was an electronic device rather than a traditional book with a cover and pages somehow seemed to me to take something away from the experience”.
Results of EBONI’s evaluations so far highlight the importance of the following aspects of the paper book metaphor: “Opening” an electronic book should be as quick and easy a process as opening a paper book.
Where a portion of the text has already been read, navigating to this point in the book should be possible quickly or immediately.
Indications of a reader’s progress through the book should be accurate and visible.
In addition, one feature of reading a paper book has been identified as capable of improvement by the electronic medium.
Some readers feel that the action of turning pages slows down the reading process, and that alternative methods of moving through a book offered by electronic devices, such as turning wheels and pressing keys or buttons, increase the speed at which they read the book.
One participant in EBONI’s experiments commented, “In turning a paper page you lose momentum, albeit for a second or two.
I didn’t find this at all with the ebook.” Another noted, “The ability to change pages by using your thumb on the wheel meant that you could quickly move through a story without breaking your stride”.
In summary, early feedback from EBONI’s evaluations of portable reading devices points towards the following elements as worthy of attention when designing for usability: Display technology should be high resolution, with high contrast and minimal glare.
Backlighting can increase portability, in that it enables text to be read in poor lighting conditions.
Finding the optimum size of ebook hardware is a question of balancing lightness and portability against legibility of text on screen.
This paradox is summed up in the words of one user while evaluating the largest of the test devices, the SoftBook: “[It] really needs to be made a lot lighter/more portable.
However, having used a Palm I would say that the larger format is much more ‘reader-friendly’.
So I guess you are left with a dilemma – how do you preserve the size/format but make it more portable?” Ebook hardware should be designed for comfort, with the ability to hold a device easily in one hand considered an advantage.
The number and diversity of situations in which ebooks can be read can be constrained when devices are delicate or fragile.
As one user commented, “I was always conscious when reading that I was holding an expensive item – one doesn’t care so much when holding a paperback.
This obviously limits eating and drinking with an ebook, at least until the psychological barrier is crossed”.
The full results of this experiment and EBONI’s other ebook evaluations will feed into a set of best practice guidelines for the design of electronic textbooks.
These will be disseminated to publishers and writers of electronic material, libraries and museums involved in digitising collections and interested parties in the HE community in general.
They will also be available from the project Web site [31], together with an example of a text on which they have been implemented.
In the meantime, the project’s progress can be followed at the Web site, or by joining the EBONI mailing list [32].
References [1] Franklin eBookMan http://www.franklin.com/ebookman/ [2] goReader http://www.goreader.com/ [3] Microsoft Reader http://www.microsoft.com/reader/ [4] Kay, A.
And Goldberg, A.
Personal dynamic media.
Computer, 10 (3), March 1977, pp31-41.
[5] Apple Discontinues Development of Newton OS.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/1998/feb/27newton.html [6] Information on the Sony Data Discman can be found at: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0014.html [7] Information on the Sony Electronic Book Authoring System can be found at: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0125.html [8] Franklin Bookman http://www.franklin.com/estore/platform/bookman/ [9] Franklin Pocket PDR Medical Book System http://www.franklin.com/estore/platform/mbs/ [10] Stephanie Ardito.
Electronic books: to “e” or not to “e”; that is the question.
Searcher 8 (4), April 2000. http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr00/ardito.htm [11] Information on the Rocket eBook can be found at: http://www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=15&TBToolID=1115 [12] Information on the SoftBook can be found at: http://www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=15&TBToolID=1116 [13] Judy Luther.
Electronic Book 2000: Protecting Content.
Information Today, 17 (10), November 2000. http://www.infotoday.com/it/nov00/luther.htm [14] REB1100 http://www.ebook-gemstar.com/eb_dev/1100_intro.htm [15] REB1200 http://www.ebook-gemstar.com/eb_dev/1200_intro.htm [16] Dominic Gates.
E-book evangelist.
Industry Standard Magazine.
25 September 2000. http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,18591,00.html [17] Palm Reader http://www.peanutpress.com/ [18] MobiPocket Reader http://www.mobipocket.com/ [19] hiebook http://www.koreaebook.co.kr/ [20] MyFriend http://www.ipm-net.com/eng/products/appliances/myfriend/ [21] Open eBook Forum http://www.openebook.org/ [22] N. Hazewindus, P. Ballon, M. Bogdanowicz, J.C. Burgelman, U. Jørgensen, W.K.
Hansen, F. Hansen, G. J. Nauwelaerts, A. Puissochet, P. Tang, and T. Venables.
The impact of convergence on the competitiveness of the European consumer electronics industry.
First Monday, 5 (12), December 4 2000. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_12/hazewindus/index.html [23] Hassan, Robert.
The space economy of convergence.
Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 6 (4), Winter 2000.
[24] Ivan Noble.
E-paper moves a step nearer.
BBC News Online, 23 April 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1292000/1292852.stm [25] Clifford Lynch.
The battle to define the future of the book in the digital world.
First Monday, 6 (6), June 2001. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/lynch/ [26] Game Boy Book Reader http://www.mqp.com/fun/gb.htm [27] Lynch, op.cit.
[28] Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ [29] University of Strathclyde Department of Computer and Information Sciences http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/ [30] Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ [31] EBONI: Electronic Books ON-screen Interface http://eboni.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ [32] For details of how to join the EBONI mailing list, see the JISCmail Web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/open-eboni.html Author Details   Ruth Wilson EBONI Research Fellow Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) University of Strathclyde Email: ruth.m.wilson@strath.ac.uk Web: http://eboni.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/   Article Title: "Evolution of Portable Electronic Books" Author: Ruth Wilson Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/wilson/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: Regarding Collaboration, Conferences and Courses Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Regarding Collaboration, Conferences and Courses Buzz framework database rss metadata cataloguing url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alejandro Fernandez introduces a new collaborative initiative between the RDN and LTSN, Emma Place reports from the BPS Annual Conference and Neil Jacobs presents a new course for social researchers in Government.
SOSIG and LTSN Collaboration Project On March 11th, representatives from the social science-related LTSN Subject Centres sat down with SOSIG staff to kick off a collaboration project that has the grand goal of maximising the use of Internet resource descriptions and information created for the UK social science community by sharing cataloguing responsibilities and tasks.
LTSN subject centres have a central aim of following and supporting lecturer’s needs within higher education and within the specialised subject areas that they cover.
Linked to this is the role to “provide learning and teaching resources specific to their community”.
This project looks in particular at the selection and description of learning and teaching materials, which is where currently there is an overlap with the RDN.
In practice, this means: Using OAI as a way of sharing Internet resource description records Exchanging news and events information via RSS Committing to a shared metadata standard For this last point, we have decided to use the UK Common Metadata Framework (UKCMF), which provides a good starting point although a lot of work will need to go into making the language more suitable to the learning and teaching needs of the LTSN Subject Centres.
We will keep you updated on the project as it progresses.
The British Psychological Society Annual Conference 2003 The BPS (http://www.bps.org.uk/) annual conference took place in Bournemouth this March, revealing the latest research evidence in psychology, including the following new findings: Speakers who gesticulate will be better remembered than those who are motionless while they present Autism is “two separate illnesses” one relating to the lack of a “theory of mind” in the sufferer, the other manifesting in the obsessive behaviours often associated with the condition Ecstasy is linked with increased levels of clinical depression, even if only taken twice Happiness most commonly correlates with one or more of the following: religion, sociability, cooperation, and whole-hearted engagement with work or leisure.
Happiness is innate within us all, but for it to reveal itself, society has to be conducive to its attainment SOSIG was invited to give a presentation to the BPS Student Members Group (http://smg.bps.org.uk/) who ran a parallel conference on the Saturday.
This revealed the wealth of research work being undertaken by psychology students into subjects such as HIV and sexual risk-taking, and attitudes to e-therapy.
SOSIG received a very warm welcome from this group, provoking some discussion of the need for more research on the impact of the Internet on psychology.
Finding the Evidence With central and local government increasingly looking for evidence to underpin the programme of work, finding appropriate and relevant information quickly and efficiently has become an essential skill.
Effective use of the Internet, and library databases are a requirement for most social research projects, and yet the vast scope of these resources make identifying relevant and robust evidence a formidable task.
Even those who are familiar with the technology find accessing good quality research evidence an incredibly complex process.
A new course is being launched this month to help researchers, (especially those from the public sector), make sense of the wealth of information available and enable participants to target the right evidence.
The course will help participants to identify what evidence is currently available on their topic area, including databases that can be searched on the Internet, (such as Planex, Acompline and ChildData), as well as traditional sources of information, often overlooked.
The course is designed by the Centre for Management and Policy Studies (http://www.cmps.gov.uk/) in association with the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol and the ESRC UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice, Queen Mary College, London.
Author Details Alejandro Fernandez ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: a.fernandez@bristol.ac.uk Tel: 0117 928 7072 Fax: 0117 928 7112 Emma Place ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk Tel: 0117 928 7183 Fax: 0117 928 7112 Neil Jacobs ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: neil.jacobs@bristol.ac.uk Tel: 0117 928 7057 Fax: 0117 928 7112 Article Title: “Planet SOSIG: Regarding Collaboration, Conferences and Courses” Author: Alejandro Fernandez, Emma Place and Neil Jacobs Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata: Towards the Intelligent Museum Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata: Towards the Intelligent Museum Buzz data mobile database dissemination xml archives metadata repositories cataloguing sgml dtd multimedia z39.50 interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller and Alice Grant explore CIMI: the collections standards organization which JISC has just joined.
Like libraries, museums face the daunting task of preserving our cultural heritage, whilst also striving with the often conflicting need to make that cultural heritage available to us today.
Perhaps differently from libraries, interpretation plays an important part in the work of museums, where exhibitions are often designed around the telling of one or more stories about the past in order to place objects within their historical context.
Possibly even more so than in the library sector, the information revolution has had a profound effect upon the ways in which museums manage information, whether for internal use within their rich collection management systems, or externally in the content made available on web sites, in 'exhiblets', or in data exchanged between institutions or embedded within various educational resources such as CD–ROMs.
For ten years now, the international Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) [1] has been at the forefront of work to bring the information revolution to museums.
Past work has included important conceptual modelling of museum collections, the creation of an early Z39.50 Profile [2] and a rich SGML DTD [3], as well as extensive testing of the Dublin Core [4].
In 2000, this work continues with examination of diverse issues from the role of WAP phones and Personal Digital Assistants in the museum world through to examination of distributed metadata harvesting.
Ten years on, the work of CIMI remains important, and its relevance to the related agendas of the Joint Information Systems Committee [5] (JISC) has been recognised by the JISC's becoming a CIMI member, and taking a seat on its Executive Committee.
This paper illustrates some of the past and future work of CIMI, and hopefully goes some way towards demonstrating the clear relevance of this work to many areas of the JISC's activity.
Introducing CIMI CIMI is an international organisation committed to bringing museum information to the largest possible audience.
Its 25–plus members, comprising museums, systems vendors, governmental and non–governmental organisations share a common mission: to encourage an open standards–based approach to the management and delivery of digital museum information.
Since forming in 1990, CIMI has made substantial progress in researching for the museum community, standards for structuring its data and for enabling widespread search and retrieval capabilities.
CIMI's work is largely carried out through collaborative demonstration projects that inform not only its members, but the wider cultural heritage community, helping them learn how complex museum information can be standardized and therefore made accessible electronically.
CIMI membership is open to any institution, organization, corporation or individual — whether for–profit or non–profit.
In allowing vendors, museums, standards developers, service providers and government agencies to work together, CIMI has helped engender an atmosphere of trust and progressive thinking — essential survival rations in a relatively small market.
For example, this is a rare opportunity for the vendors of heritage information management packages to collaborate outside the context of the marketplace and in doing so, the museum sector has predated by some years joint ventures such as Symbian — uniting to concentrate and assert the potential of an otherwise dispersed community.
Project history An excellent example of CIMI's approach to working across the cultural sector to test and evaluate emerging standards on behalf of the museum community is its recent review of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set [6].
Involving seventeen institutions from Australia, south–east Asia, Europe and North America, the test bed ran from March 1998 and was concluded in January 2000.
It had a number of outcomes of significant value to the museum community, aiming not to provide an isolated view of the world, but to establish means of allowing museums to integrate emerging best practice into their work.
Building a database of Dublin Core records of museum collections, the project immediately resulted in an XML DTD used to construct the database and subsequently, 'best practice' guidelines [4] for museums to adopt when implementing the Dublin Core.
The findings of the test bed affirmed the ability of the Dublin Core to act as a high–level resource–location tool which was useful for museum collections.
The test bed established however, that Dublin Core Semantic Refinements did not enable retention of integrity of museum information at a detailed level.
That these facts could be established in a well–planned and rigorously implemented evaluation, involving systems specialists, museums and other organisations in the sector, provided the community with a valuable understanding of the issues inherent in implementing Dublin Core.
This understanding has been further enhanced with the establishment of the CIMI Institute.
Intending to raise awareness and cultivate expertise in the community, the CIMI Institute's initial activity has been a successful series of seminars and workshops on the implementation of Dublin Core.
With the assistance of additional funding from the Getty Grant Trust, these workshops have been held in Europe, Canada, the USA and Australia and are set to expand in terms of the number offered and subjects covered, in the coming two years.
Other projects have included the pioneering development of a profile for museums for use with the Z39.50 protocol for distributed access to databases [2], and the development of an SGML DTD [3] for the online delivery of rich–text information such as exhibition catalogues.
These, and other projects such as the evaluation of integrated information management methodologies in museums, have brought direct benefits to its members and the wider museum community alike.
Future activities CIMI plans for the next two years are equally ambitious and plan to deliver a wide range of benefits to a growing membership.
They include working with the mda [7] (formerly the Museum Documentation Association) to establish an XML DTD for SPECTRUM, the UK Museum Documentation Standard [8].
Once completed in Autumn 2000, the DTD will be evaluated by CIMI members in a further test bed.
Benefits of this work will include the elimination of costly and time–consuming bottlenecks experienced by museums and vendors alike when migrating data between systems.
An XML DTD for museum information would also permit easier integration of information across diverse systems in use within single organisations; e.g.
between specialist collections management applications and back–end web management databases.
Plans are also in progress to exploit the burgeoning use of mobile communications not only in Europe, but via test bed projects based also in Japan and North America.
How can museums 'push' information via WAP and other protocols to handheld devices?
How will the cultural sector need to prepare itself in order to capture this rapidly expanding market — and what will it mean for the scope and nature of the information to be delivered?
These and other questions will be addressed in CIMI's Handscape project, which will work with leading industry bodies to inform the museum community.
A further project will include the evaluation of scalable solutions for the interoperability of metadata from different domains, in association with the ABC initiative's [9] experimentation with metadata harvesting.
These and a range of other, related projects will work together under the umbrella of MIDIIS (Museum Initiative for Digital Information Interchange Standards), CIMI's longer–term strategy aimed at increasing the community's understanding of the nature of the museum information universe and how the types of information contained therein can be shared, re–packaged, and re–used for a variety of applications.
Finally, the CIMI website is also undergoing a major review and will be relaunched in October 2000, not only with additional member and staff services, but implementing the standards which CIMI has been active in promoting.
Together with a new series of 'industry innovation' briefings for the cultural information management sector, CIMI will continue to provide a trusted and authoritative source of specialist advice and knowledge.
CIMI and the Electronic Library The clear relevance of CIMI's work to the UK university museums within JISC's purview aside, much of CIMI's effort is also applicable to those aspects of tertiary education more traditionally associated with JISC; our developing electronic 'libraries'.
CIMI's work, in essence, focusses upon exploring approaches to the management of information in a digital environment.
Behind the community language, and the realia themselves, the issues of packaging, formulating, exchanging and managing this information are remarkably similar across all memory institutions; and beyond.
CIMI's Handscape project, for example, aims to explore the practicalities of extracting rich — often lengthy and learned — descriptions from existing content repositories and packaging these for delivery over a multitude of channels and to a variety of audiences.
That the content repository is a museum collection management system, the resource being described a physical object from the collection, and the primary channels of interest those relating to portable devices, in no way detracts from the importance of the underlying exploration; one of content repurposing with minimal human intervention.
Elsewhere, early CIMI work has also had an impact upon JISC activities.
The Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS) [10], for example, was a CIMI member prior to JISC's joining, and there was valuable cross-fertilisation between AHDS' catalogue development efforts and the CIMI Dublin Core Testbed.
The Bath Profile [11], too, which currently forms an important foundation to the DNER [12], learned a great deal from the development of CIMI's Z39.50 Profile [2], and the two are likely to become ever more closely linked in the future.
Cultural heritage content is becoming increasingly visible within tertiary education, whether in the form of excavation and survey archives served from the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) [13] or within rich image collections such as AMICO [14] and SCRAN [15], both recently made available to the community as part of the DNER's growing body of multimedia content [16].
The work of CIMI and others ensures that such content is available, usable, liable to be accessible in the long term, and capable of effective interoperation with other resources.
JISC's involvement will mean that the needs and experiences of the non-museum sector are also represented, and will assist in the dissemination of CIMI's work to a wider audience.
References The CIMI web site is at: http://www.cimi.org/ This site is currently being revised, with a new version due to appear in October.
Release 1.0H of A Z39.50 Profile for Cultural Heritage Information is at: http://www.cimi.org/documents/HarmonizedProfile/HarmonProfile1.htm The CIMI DTD is at: http://www.cimi.org/downloads/CIMI_SGML/cimidtd.pdf Version 1.1 of CIMI's Guide to Best Practice: Dublin Core is at: http://www.cimi.org/documents/meta_bestprac_v1_1_210400.pdf The JISC web site is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Collaboration, consensus and community: CIMI, museums and the Dublin Core, by Angela Spinazze appears in Cultivate Interactive 1, and is available at: http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/cimi/ The mda web site is at: http://www.mda.org.uk/ SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard, Second Edition.
Cambridge: mda, 1998.
An introduction to the ABC model is available at: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/harmony/docs/abc/abc_draft.html The AHDS web site is at: http://ahds.ac.uk/ The Bath Profile is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/bath/ The DNER is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ The ADS web site is at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ The AMICO web site is at: http://www.amico.org/ A press release announcing the JISC's licensing of the AMICO library is at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/e-collections/2000-08/0031.html The SCRAN web site is at: http://www.scran.ac.uk/ A press release announcing the JISC's licensing of SCRAN content is at: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/e-collections/2000-08/0030.html The JISC Current Content Collection is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/collections/ CIMI services are provided by 'Team CIMI'; consultants based in the cultural heritage and information management sectors.
For further information about CIMI in Europe, contact Alice Grant at: agrant@alicegrant.com.
Author Details Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN c/o Academic Services: Libraries University of Hull HULL HU6 7RX United Kingdom Email: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Alice Grant Alice Grant Consulting Fengate Farm Fengate Road West Pinchbeck Spalding PE11 3NE United Kingdom Email: agrant@alicegrant.com Web site: www.alicegrant.com/ Article Title: "Metadata: Towards the Intelligent Museum" Author: Paul Miller; Alice Grant Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/cimi/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ECMS: Technology Issues and Electronic Copyright Management Systems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ECMS: Technology Issues and Electronic Copyright Management Systems Buzz data software framework dissemination metadata identifier copyright video cataloguing ecms authentication interoperability privacy algorithm url standards Citation BibTex RIS Pedro Isaias looks at the relevant ECMS e-Commerce technology.
Technology issues are of utmost importance in Electronic Copyright Management Systems (ECMS).
In fact, these technologies can in part determine the success or failure of these systems.
In a traditional environment, consumers enjoy buying with efficient systems and security.
This is even truer in the Internet.
Thus the need to develop and deploy technologies that are efficient and can assure security.
This work covers these technology issues, illustrating the following points in an objective way: Payment systems and security techniques in the Internet; Importance of these technologies in ECMS.
ECMS: Important Technologies Most of the technologies referred in this article can be used with the so-called digital objects.
A digital object can be defined [1] as being "a logical entity or data structure whose two principal components are digital material ("data"), plus a unique identifier for the material and other information pertaining to the data ("metadata")".
In this section the following technologies will be focused: Payment Systems Security Techniques Payment Systems Having payment systems that are both effective and reliable is very important in ECMS and digital libraries.
It is commonly accepted that quality information should be paid for, situation in which these systems are more than needed: they are an imperative.
According to several authors [2,3] there are important requirements that electronic payment systems should follow in order to be reliable.
The most relevant are: Security/Integrity The system must assure security measures in order to guarantee the safety of the transactions and that no data is illegally modified; Robustness The system should be reliable under any circumstances (in this broad requirement it's included atomicity, which is the guarantee that a transaction occurred or not); Economic viability Cost of transactions and values transferred should be compatible; Scalability The system should be able to grow (i.e.
addition of new buyers and merchants) without significant lack of performance; Interoperability The system must make it possible to exchange payment means between different systems; Auditability The possibility to audit the system to look for records of operations and possible errors; Anonymous transactions The system should support anonymous transactions (i.e.
buyers and sellers identity not known); There are presently two broad categories of electronic payment systems in what concerns their money model [3, 4]: Token-based or cash-like systems; Notational or credit/debit systems.
In token-based or cash-like systems, transactions are performed with tokens that have a certain value (of themselves or from the status of the Institutions that issue them) and must be bought to a central authority before consumers being able to make any transactions.
These systems do not support debt.
Notational or credit/debit systems consist of having an account and the central authority keeping a record of the amount in that account.
In this particular systems consumers exchange documents that are equivalent of value transfers.
These exchanges consist in the debiting of the consumers' account and the crediting of the merchant account.
These systems can support debt.
Token-based or cash-like systems One of the most well known examples of these systems was Ecash (DigiCash).
The company has gone out of business and ceased operations (now taken over).
The main characteristic of the Digicash system, developed by David Chaum, lay in the possibility of using real electronic money.
The value of this system lay in the electronic cash, and not in the possibility of authoring funds transfers between consumers and suppliers (sellers).
The main strength of the Ecash system was, however, the possibility of conducting anonymous and secure transactions.
Basically, the Ecash system consisted of the following: A bank, which exchanged real money by electronic money, and simultaneously applied a digital signature for verification purposes; Electronic currency, which was transferred to the client under the format of a electronic wallet card or software client; The client, who could spend electronic money with suppliers, that in turn would exchange the electronic money received by real money in pre-defined banks.
This system presented several advantages: Anyone could buy and sell; Algorithms against copy of monetary units and against spending above authorised limit, with fraud record; Information on usage and statistics.
Ecash used a direct cash like payment model with online validation.
The same payment model is used by NetCash [5].
NetCash provides a framework for digital payments.
The system is based on a system of distributed issuing currency servers.
The NetCash coin has the name of the issuing server and specific serial number.
The currency servers offer several services, being one important service the redemption of coins for cheques (NetCheque digital cheques).
NetCash has now been layered into NetCheque.
MilliCent [6] is a strong alternative to other token-based systems.
It has been released in Japan (went live on June 1, 1999) and is being applied in several on-line sales.
The important aspect of MilliCent is that it covers operations as small as 1/10th of a dollar; this system clearly aims at the micropayments segment.
The other important aspect, especially for ECMS, is that with these small amounts, ECMS can sell individual papers, or even parts of papers, for instance.
A newspaper publisher can even sell a newspaper article by article.
MilliCent does no use real money but scrip which is like cash because it represents a value but is different from cash because it's only valid with a specific vendor.
Scrip is basically a electronic coupon which represents pre-paid value specific to a vendor.
Scrip associated with a specific vendor can be exchanged by scrip from other vendors via brokers.
The process of acquiring and using scrip is very straightforward: a customer can acquire it with his or her credit card and then it can be used to make purchases from a specific vendor.
Millicent uses a direct cash like payment model with semi-online validation.
Other relevant token-based systems are available (please refer to appendix for their URLs): CAFE and Mondex.
Notational or credit/debit systems One of the first examples of a notational system was First Virtual, which has ceased operations.
First Virtual system considered the possibility of a user having access to the information before paying for it which was a strong point but also a weakness since users could abuse the system.
Its simplicity was also highly regarded.
One of the weakest points was, however, not having cryptography, and therefore not being able to guarantee totally safety transaction.
First Virtual used a credit card payment intermediator notational payment model with online validation.
One of the most relevant systems in this category is CyberCash [7].
This system, which is in fact a system designed to charge the client's credit card, allows transactions with immediate payment between sellers and consumers through a financial institution.
The transactions are performed with credit card.
The CyberCash system works according to the following model: The client sends the credit card data, seller ID and products he wishes to buy to the server (crypted with a public key, and also a symmetric key); The server executes the operation with a financial institution; The server transmits to the seller the client ID, products he wishes to buy, number of transaction and symmetric key (encrypted information); The seller encrypts the information with the symmetric key and sends it to the client.
The CyberCash system has the advantage of cryptography, which guarantees security and privacy to the client.
CyberCash uses a secure credit card presentation notational payment model with online validation.
Another good example of a notational system is CyberCoin [8], originated in Cybercash.
The CyberCoin system has been designed to deal with small transactions (i.e.
25 cent to $10), that are considered small payments.
Cybercash has closed CyberCoin accounts (in North America only) and launched InstaBuy [9].
InstaBuy uses, as CyberCoin, a direct account based payment model with online validation.
Another good example of notational systems, specialised in micropayments, is the NetBill system.
The Netbill system [10] has been developed by the Carnegie Mellon University, evolving from previous billing service prototypes and being first applied in the digital library of this University, the CMU’s Informedia Digital Video Library.
The NetBill system deals with authentication, verifying credits, controlling accesses and recording transactions.
Their goals are: working with open protocols and dealing exclusively with goods that are delivered electronically and services.
The Netbill system works in the following way [11]: The consumer finds information of interest and requires its price from the merchant (i.e.
can be from a catalogue); The merchant returns the price; If the consumer accepts the price, his answer will be assured by a digital signature and sent to the merchant; The merchant sends the goods encrypted, along with a checksum and a time stamp; The consumer's software computes a checksum of the goods and this is sent, along with an electronic payment order to the merchant; The merchant receives the consumer's checksum, verifying that the consumer has received the goods in perfect conditions and sends the electronic payment order with his digital signature to the NetBill server; The NetBill server processes the electronic payment order and debits the consumer account and credits the merchant account; The NetBill server sends a digital signed message to the merchant confirming the success or failure of the operation along with the decryption key; The merchant forwards the key to the consumer in order to have access to the goods.
The NetBill systems features the following advantages: transaction security through encryption and digital signatures; the system allows the use of alias from customers in order to remain anonymous from merchants; the costs per transaction are very low.
NetBill uses a direct account based notational payment model with online validation.
One important standard of Notational systems, and especially designed for secure credit card processing in the Internet, is Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) [12].
SET is an initiative of VISA and Mastercard amongst other participants.
This initiative followed several other from different companies and organisations; basically none could impose its standard and since then they join efforts to produce a unified standard, SET.
A SET transaction works in the following way [13]: After the customer selects an item from a catalogue, for instance, and chooses the credit card he wants to pay with; The customer sends a signed payment slip to the merchant (protected by an encryption scheme); The merchant takes the slip and asks the bank gateway for authorisation; The bank gateway verifies everything and authorises or not the operation; If authorised, the merchant confirms the order to the customer; The merchant then sends the goods to the customer.
SET uses a secure credit card presentation notational payment model with online validation.
Other relevant notational systems are available (please refer to appendix for their URLs): NetCheque and eCheck (FSTC Electronic Check).
Security Techniques There are several techniques that implement concepts of Web security.
At the ECMS and digital library level, the following are relevant techniques: Encryption – Traditional encryption techniques have been used over the centuries.
In the Internet, encryption has progressively being adopted because it provides security against unauthorised access/reading.
This technique is quite simple in scope: it basically consists in content conversion (of a scientific paper for example) into contents that cannot be understood.
After this is done, the ECMS sends the referred contents to the person that requested them.
This person, holding both the encrypted contents and the encryption key, then converts the contents into an intelligible form (just like the original contents).
A good example of encryption software is Pretty Good Privacy [14].
Watermarking Technology – The traditional watermark that used to characterise certain paper producers is again en vogue.
But now, it's applied to the digital environment.
Digital watermarks (visible or invisible) applied to ECMS and digital libraries can point to information possession in two different ways [15]: By identifying from who the materials (contents) originate; By identifying the recipient (library or final user) to whom the materials (contents) have been distributed; The recipient watermark is the most used technique because it's easier to prevent in this way the re-distribution of the material.
In what concerns the watermark that identifies from who the materials (contents) originate, there are two possibilities of applying it (with different goals): Visible identification it enables the user to a priori avoid the dissemination and unauthorised use of the materials (contents); Non visible identification – It enables a posteriori to search the web with a view to locate who distributes and uses the materials (contents) without being authorised for that purpose.
Digital Signatures – They give secure integrity indications being in this way of great importance to ECMS.
They are generated using cryptographic methods.
Authentication – The goal is to assure that the data that comes from a certain entity can only have been originated by that entity and that the content has not been changed in any way.
Importance of these Technologies in ECMS It is quite obvious of the extreme importance of these technologies in ECMS.
The question mark lies more on the more or less appropriateness of some of the solutions presented rather than on the technologies themselves.
For instance, is it more appropriate to use a micropayment system or a macropayment system?
It seems from what has been described that for a ECMS is clearly more appropriate a micropayment system.
These allow the user to acquire only fragments or an article, or only an article in a journal.
It's clearly more flexible.
Another question is related to token-based vs. notational systems.
What systems are more suited for ECMS?
This is more difficult to answer.
It seems obvious that notational systems are taking the lead in disseminating themselves.
And banks and credit card issuers back up several of them.
But are these systems the ones that really defend customers?
The answer is more on the negative side.
In fact systems like Ecash (Digicash) really defended the customer by being rigorously anonymous and secure they were like real money.
But the market didn't favour them and they've ended operations.
Of course notational systems also have advantages like allowing debt.
And what about security?
ECMS require security in the operations in which the consumer engages.
Several options are available and being exploited and only the market will tell the methods that will prevail.
While the encryption method seems well suited to be used in payment mechanisms, the digital watermarking seems to be an obvious defence for the control of distributed materials.
Conclusions and Future Perspectives At a technological level, there are several obvious open questions: When will electronic payment systems be 100% safe?
Payment models what is the best?
The token-based or the notational?
When can the consumer choose his favourite payment system from several available ones?
The first question is impossible to answer.
When hackers enter the Pentagon systems and NASA systems are hacked with some frequency it is difficult to say that there will be 100% safe systems.
The bet is more likely to be in minimising the problem and finding alternative ways to address the question.
In technological terms is highly difficult to find 100% safe systems.
As for the payment model question, it's difficult to answer because some advantages that the others don't.
It depends on several variables like user's bank and specific vendors.
As from choosing from several available payment systems it depends on the ECMS that will choose the payment systems that they want to work with.
It would be nice to see ECMS presenting alternative payment solutions like we see today in a shop when we want to pay with credit card and several alternatives are often presented.
In future, the tendency is certainly to facilitate the ECMS use by consumers, through the more widespread use of simpler and more efficient technological means.
One thing is for granted: future systems will have more and better functionalities and will provide improved features, spoiling consumers with a myriad of possibilities.
Appendix List of Most Significant Electronic Payment Systems and Their URLs: CAFE http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/projects/cafe.html Cybercash http://www.cybercash.com CyberCoin http://www.cybercash.com/cybercash/services/cybercoin.html Ecash (DigiCash) http://www.digicash.com/ eCheck (FSTC Electronic Check) http://www.echeck.org/ InstaBuy http://www.instabuy.com/ Millicent http://www.millicent.digital.com/ Mondex http://www.mondex.com/ NetBill http://www.ini.cmu.edu/netbill/ http://www.netbill.com/ NetCash http://nii-server.isi.edu/info/netcash/ NetCheque http://gost.isi.edu/info/netcheque/ Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) http://www.mastercard.com/shoponline/set/set.html References [1] Cross Industry Working Team.
(1997).
Managing access to digital information: an approach based on digital objects and stated operations.
Available from: http://www.xiwt.org/documents/ManagAccess.html [August 4th 1999]     [2] Costa, J. F., Silva, A. and Delgado, J.
(1995).
Análise dos sistemas comerciais emergentes na Internet In: Proceedings of I Conferência Nacional WWW Informação Multimédia na Internet, Minho 1995     [3] Ferreira, L.; Dahab, R. (1998).
A scheme for electronic payment systems.
In: Proceedings of the 14th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 7-11 December 1998.
IEEE, 137-146.
[4] Weber, R. (1998).
Chablis Market Analysis of Digital Payment Systems.
Chablis (TUM-I9819)   Available from: http://medoc.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/Chablis/MStudy/x-a-marketpay.html [August 4th 1999]   [5] NetCash home page: http://nii-server.isi.edu/info/netcash/ [August 4th 1999]     [6] Millicent home page: http://www.millicent.digital.com/ [August 4th 1999]     [7] CyberCash home page: http://www.cybercash.com/ [August 4th 1999]     [8] CyberCoin home page: http://www.cybercash.com/cybercash/services/cybercoin.html [August 4th 1999]     [9] InstaBuy home page: http://www.instabuy.com/ [August 4th 1999]     [10] NetBill home page: http://www.netbill.com/ [August 4th 1999]     [11] Sirbu, M.; Tygar, J.
(1995).
NetBill: an Internet system optimized for network delivered services.
In: Proceedings of the CompCon Conference, March 1995.
IEEE   Available from: http://www.ini.cmu.edu/netbill/pubs/CompCon.ps.Z [August 4th 1999]     [12] Mastercard's SET home page: http://www.mastercard.com/shoponline/set/set.html [August 4th 1999]     [13] Asokan, N. et al.
(1997, September).
The state of the art in electronic payment systems.
IEEE Computer magazine [Online], Vol.
30 issue 9, 28-35.
Available: http://computer.org/computer/co1997/r9028abs.htm [August 4th 1999]     [14] More details as well as the software (distributed as freeware) can be found at http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html [August 4th 1999]     [15] Mintzer, F. et al.
(1997, December).
Safeguarding digital library contents and users – digital watermarking.
D-Lib Magazine [Online], 44 paragraphs   Available from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december97/ibm/12lotspiech.html [August 4th 1999] Author Details Pedro Isaias European Projects Manager at ISEGI New University of Lisbon and Professor at Portuguese Open University Email: pisaias@mail.telepac.pt Article Title: "Technology Issues and Electronic Copyright Management Systems" Author: Pedro Isaias Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/ecms/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
Supporting Material for Database Training, or 'Here’s One I Prepared Earlier' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Supporting Material for Database Training, or 'Here’s One I Prepared Earlier' Buzz data html database archives multimedia rtf copac licence url research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Alison McNab looks at the wealth of resources available for trainers provided by the information service and content providers within JISC-supported services.
Subject librarians will recognise the following situation: you have spent years trying to persuade Department X to let you run some information skills training for their students, but they’ve always said No!
Suddenly you get a phone call asking you to provide training next Tuesday afternoon.
You know that you’re being asked to “babysit” and in an ideal world you would negotiate a more sensible time that suited the students’ learning experience.
However, you also realise that if you turn this opportunity down you may never be asked again!
Naturally, your diary is so full that you have virtually no time to prepare between now and next Tuesday….. Fortunately, if the training session that you want to run includes introducing library users to online resources, much preparatory work has already been done for you by the information service and content providers within JISC-supported services [1].
These organisations produce a wide range of supporting material which may include: PowerPoint presentations (often including scripts) that can be customised for local use, exercises or worksheets, general or subject-specific handouts, and promotional fliers.
The summer vacation is an ideal opportunity to explore the materials listed below, but its also useful to know that they are there as a resource when scenarios like the one above occur.
BIDS [2] was the first of the JISC data centres to host bibliographic databases.
It provides HTML Guides [3] for all the services it hosts, as well as Search Tips [4].
PowerPoint files [5] are available for information professionals to use in presentations and training courses; these typically include an overview of the BIDS database services, and introductions to the individual services.
EDINA [6] provides a range of documentation [7] to support its hosted services in HTML, Postscript, and PDF.
Copies of EDINA quick reference cards and other documentation may be downloaded and photocopied for distribution to users at subscribing EDINA sites.
EDINA Online Learning Materials [8] are available in PDF and Word.
The EDINA Training Presentations [9] (PowerPoint and HTML) are intended as self-help guides for registered or non-registered users; the PowerPoint files can be edited and/or incorporated into your own demonstrations of local online resources.
JISC Subject Resource Guides [10] are available in HTML – these outline resources in broad subject areas, and provide details of access arrangements.
Some resources are free, while others require subscription and /or registration.
JISCMail, [11] which runs the National Academic Mailing List Service, provides documentation [12] including user guides and FAQs in HTML and Word.
Their training material [13] includes reference cards, flyers, and subject cards {HTML, PDF and Word).
MIMAS [14] provides a wide range of service-specific documentation [15] for the services it hosts.
Paper documentation [16] can be downloaded in PDF or Word and additional service-specific resources are available: training resources [17] for Beilstein CrossFire are available in HTML, PDF, and Word formats; COPAC provides an HTML User Guide [18] as well as HTML and Powerpoint training slides; [19] a wide range of supporting material is available for ISI services [20] in PDF, PowerPoint and Word formats; documentation [21], including practical exercises, is available for the JSTOR Electronic Journal Service in PDF and Powerpoint; and ZETOC Training materials [22] can be found in HTML, PDF, and Word.
Netskills [23] provides a comprehensive range of Internet training materials, [24] which can be used under licence.
Use of Netskills training materials is governed by the Standard Licence Agreement together with the appropriate schedule [either an Educational Licence Schedule or a Commercial Licence Schedule].
Forty-one Training Modules are available – most offering a presentation [with speaker's notes] and a set of hands-on exercises in HTML, PowerPoint and Word.
Samples from Netskills modules can be viewed, as can case studies [25] showing examples of use.
NISS (National Information Services and Systems) [26] provides Awareness Resources [27] including PowerPoint presentations giving an overview of NISS [and other EduServ divisions] and an RTF worksheet for new NISS users within further education.
The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [28] is a free Internet service providing effective access to high quality Internet resources for the learning, teaching and research community.
The RDN website includes publications [29], publicity and promotional documents [30] in HTML and PDF.
The RDN Virtual Training Suite [31] is a collection of forty free subject based tutorials designed to help students, lecturers and researchers improve their Internet information skills.
These tutorials offer self-directed learning and include quizzes and interactive exercises; each takes around an hour to complete.
Two of the RDN hubs provide additional resources: EEVL Documentation [32] includes an EEVL Guide to Engineering Information on the Internet, an EEVL Reference Guide, a RAM Reference Guide, and an Introductory EEVL Leaflet for end users.
SOSIG User Support Materials [33] include promotional posters and fliers; the SOSIG Desktop guide; a range of subject-specific fliers; and the SOSIG workbook.
In addition, a range of Training support materials [34] provides resources for user support activities including an event planning guide.
If you are providing training or briefing sessions on aspects of creating and managing digital information the following two services can help: The Arts & Humanities Data Service [35] provide training materials [36] on the AHDS website, including help in managing your collections and how to deposit digital data with the AHDS.
Resources provided by individual parts of the AHDS include: a range of Policy and Guideline Documents [37] from the Archaeology Data Service; Guides to Good Practice [38] from the Visual Arts Data Service; the Oxford Text Archive [39] provides current publications, reports, and presentations on its website; the History Data Service provides guides to good practice and technical information on creating data [40], as well as documentation for The Great Britain Historical Database; [41] and the Performing Arts Data Service are producing a series of Guides to Good Practice [42].
TASI (the Technical Advisory Service for Images) [43] has been set up to advise and support the academic community on the digital creation, storage and delivery of digital image archives.
Training resources [44] are available in HTML, PDF, and PowerPoint.
The Training section lists TASI’s workshop programme; a list of books and journals that TASI thinks is useful to keep up to date with developments in digital imaging; and online training materials.
The Digital Images In Multimedia Presentations (DIMP) [45] consist of a range of tutorials on preparing and manipulating digital images for use in multimedia presentations, and case studies on integrating images into common applications together with information on how different applications handle images.
Please note that, although freely available, some of the services noted above may place restrictions on the use to be made of their materials.
In addition, some sites may block access from sites that are not in the ac.uk domain.
Links to the majority of resources mentioned above are listed on a webpage which forms part of the UKOLUG website: Database Training Resources demonstration, training materials, and documentation for end-users [46].
References http://www.jisc.ac.uk/services/ http://www.bids.ac.uk/ http://www.bids.ac.uk/info/login/serviceguides.htm http://www.bids.ac.uk/info/searchtips.htm http://www.bids.ac.uk/info/login/servicedemos.htm http://edina.ed.ac.uk/ http://edina.ed.ac.uk/docs/doclist.html http://edina.ed.ac.uk/docs/olm.html http://edina.ed.ac.uk/training/ http://www.jisc.ac.uk/subject/ http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/docs/ http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/training.htm http://www.mimas.ac.uk/ http://www.mimas.ac.uk/docs/ http://www.mimas.ac.uk/docs/paper.html http://www.mimas.ac.uk/crossfire/docs.html http://copac.ac.uk/copac/userguide.html http://copac.ac.uk/copac/training/html/webdemo.html http://wos.mimas.ac.uk/documentation.html http://www.mimas.ac.uk/jstor/jdocs.html http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/support.html#materials http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ http://materials.netskills.ac.uk/ http://materials.netskills.ac.uk/case-studies/ http://www.niss.ac.uk/ http://www.niss.ac.uk/about-niss/aware/ http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/ http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/publicity.html http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ http://www.eevl.ac.uk/document.html http://sosig.ac.uk/about_us/user_support.html#materials http://sosig.ac.uk/about_us/trainers.html http://ahds.ac.uk/ http://ahds.ac.uk/training.htm http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/policy.html http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/guides/ http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/publications/ http://hds.essex.ac.uk/create.asp http://hds.essex.ac.uk/gbhd/docs/db_index.asp http://www.pads.ahds.ac.uk/padsGuidesSeries/ http://www.tasi.ac.uk/ http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training1.html http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/dimp/dimp1.html http://www.ukolug.org.uk/links/training.htm Author Details Alison McNab Academic Services Manager, Pilkington Library, Loughborough University Email: A.S.McNab@bigfoot.com http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/ From 1 July 2001 Alison will be the Collections Manager, DNER Office, King's College London http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ Article Title: "Supporting Material for Database Training – or “here’s One I Prepared Earlier”" Author: Alison McNab Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/training/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
EEVL News and Enhancements Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL News and Enhancements Buzz software rdf javascript html database rss accessibility copyright cataloguing personalisation url Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod and Lesa Ng provide us with the news and developments from EEVL.
EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
News In a recent article entitled “Turning gateways into portals” in Library + Information Update, Ruth Martin gave details of some exciting developments arising out of the Subject Portals Project (SPP).
This work will result in major enhancements to the RDN Hubs, and over the coming year EEVL will integrate various new features into its service.
In the meantime, however, there are a number of relatively minor enhancements to report upon.
Before we look at these, we are pleased to announce that the EEVL Internet Resource Catalogue now contains over 10,000 records.
Quality, not quantity, is one of EEVL’s bywords, and Web sites are not added to the Internet Resource Catalogue unless they comply with EEVL’s Collection Development Policy.
However, given that caveat, this is an important landmark for the service.
Some of the contributors to the EEVL service (from Heriot Watt University, University of Birmingham, Cranfield University, The Nottingham Trent University, Bell College) are shown above celebrating the news that the 10,000 landmark has been passed.
Ei Engineering Village 2, available via Edina Ei Compendex, now links to the EEVL home page from its Database Selection drop-down menu.
Ei’s interface for Compendex via Edina includes access to Scirus, US and European Patents, Standards and CRC Press Engineering Handbooks (table of contents included, full-text provision requires an add-on subscription with Ei), and to this has been added a link to EEVL’s home page.
This makes it easy for Village 2 subscribers to access yet another major engineering resource from the same interface.
Does your institution subscribe to Ei Compendex?
Click here to find out.
Two new Virtual Training Suite (VTS) tutorials of interest to FE students in the subjects covered by EEVL have been released.
They are: Internet for Maths & Adult Numeracy, and Internet for Health and Safety at Work.
Enhancements Top 100 lists For some time now, EEVL has featured a Top 100 sites in the EEVL Catalogue list.
This is a listing of the top 100 sites which are accessed most frequently from the EEVL Catalogue.
Now available are three other top 100 listings, one for each of our main subject sections.
The new lists are: Top 100 sites in the EEVL Engineering Section, Top 100 sites in the EEVL Mathematics Section and Top 100 sites in the EEVL Computing Section.
Search default change Regular visitors to the EEVL site may have noticed that, in order to bring things more in line with practices elsewhere, the default search limiter has been changed from Any to All (or, for those who like to think in terms of Boolean operatiors, from OR to AND).
This change has been made throughout the site, and should help to ensure increased relevance of search results.
Those wishing to search for any occurrences of words can still do so, by selecting the ‘Any’ option on search pages, and the results will continue to be ranked as before.
Search Result improvements Search results pages have been improved, and now indicate the search term(s), plus section searched (if appropriate), and details of any filters used.
For example, results from a simple search for resources on ‘corrosion’ from the EEVL home page is now indicated thus: You searched for: corrosion In all of EEVL, with filters: Exact word ON.
Whereas results from a search for UK resources on ‘corrosion’ from the Engineering Section Catalogue page, limited to Society/Institution sites, is now indicated thus: You searched for: corrosion In the Engineering section of EEVL, with filters: Exact word ON.
Location: UK.
Classification: Engineering.
Resource types: Society/Institution.
Changes in Aerospace and Defence Classification The Aerodynamics and Air transportation sections of the Aerospace and Defence Engineering section have been expanded.
A Change in Description Prescribed In the past, descriptions of sites in EEVL’s Internet Resource Catalogue followed the structure of two paragraphs; the first giving a description of the resource, and the second detailed what content the site offered.
For example: The International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) is an independent, non-governmental, non-profit making association.
ISWA’s objective is the maximum exchange of information and experience world-wide on all aspects of solid waste management.
The site has information about the Association, a calendar of events, details of their publications, a discussion forum, and links to relevant organisations.
Email newsletters and the annual report are also available.
Following various user comments we decided to change the focus of the first paragraph.
As the results pages show only title, URL and description, it was noted that users wanted to know what the site offered/did not offer upfront in the description.
i.e.
whether a site contained tutorials, images or software, etc.
It was decided to put the overall gist of why we include a site in EEVL in the first sentence.
Therefore using the same site the description would now be: This site has reports, position papers, news and guidelines on all aspects of solid waste management produced by the ISWA, an independent, non-governmental, non-profit making association.
Further information about the Association includes details of working groups, discussion forums, events, email newsletters and links to relevant organisations.
We hope this change will make it more quickly clear to users what a particular resource offers.
New Career Development news A Career Development News feed giving the latest career development news from Science’s Next Wave magazine has been added to EEVL’s Engineering Jobs & Recruitment section.
This is one of a number of RSS news feeds which will be added to the site over the next few months, and eventually these feeds will be incorporated into an ‘aggregated news service’ which will allow cross-searching and personalisation.
New lists of additions EEVL now has four lists of new additions to the EEVL Catalogue.
There is a generic list of New Additions for all three subjects, which was mentioned in the EEVL column in Ariadne Issue 32, and now there is a New Additions to the EEVL Catalogue: Engineering list, a New Additions to the EEVL Catalogue: Mathematics list and a New Additions to the EEVL Catalogue: Computing list.
These lists of new additions to the catalogue are available as RSS Channels, and each gives the latest 15 additions to EEVL’s various subject sections.
RSS, which stands for RDF Site Summary, is a technology which allows headlines to be easily incorporated and shared between Web sites.
It is possible to include these RSS channels into a desk-top news feed reader, or alternately they can be included in any Web site simply by inserting a small snippet of code.
To include them in a reader, download FeedReader and then insert the following URLs as new feeds: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-on-eevl.rss http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-eng-on-eevl.rss http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-mat-on-eevl.rss http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-com-on-eevl.rss To display them on a website, the RSS-xpress-lite service from UKOLN provides an easy solution using a short piece of JavaScript.
For example to include the EEVL channels, insert either of the following HTML fragments in a web page.
For the generic list: <!–EEVL New Resources for Engineering Mathematics & Computing RSS–> <script type=“text/javascript” src= “http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rss/viewer/?rss=http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-on-eevl.rss"> </script> <!–End RSS –> Or for the Engineering list: <!–EEVL New Resources for Engineering RSS–> <script type=“text/javascript” src= “http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rss/viewer/?rss=http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-eng-on-eevl.rss"> </script> <!–End RSS –> Or for the Mathematics list: <!–EEVL New Resources for Mathematics RSS–> <script type=“text/javascript” src= “http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rss/viewer/?rss=http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-mat-on-eevl.rss"> </script> <!–End RSS –> Or for the Computing list: <!–EEVL New Resources for Computing RSS–> <script type=“text/javascript” src= “http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rss/viewer/?rss=http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/new-com-on-eevl.rss"> </script> <!–End RSS –> Site Map and modified Help pages Last year, EEVL ran a series of Engineering Consultancy Groups with UK engineering academics and researchers as part of the JISC-funded Subject Portals Project.
As a result of the end user feedback gained during these sessions the EEVL help pages have been extensively modified and a site map has been introduced.
The changes are intended to provide a clearer picture of the resources available from EEVL and to help users make the best use of all of EEVL’s services and features.
‘What EEVL can do for you’ information sheets A few months ago we distributed ‘What EEVL can do for you’ information sheets to UK universities.
For those who missed these distributions, the following links may be useful: What EEVL can do for you: Librarians and Information Professionals [Word 97] [pdf] What EEVL can do for you: Lecturers and Researchers [Word 97] [pdf] What EEVL can do for you: Students [Word 97] [pdf] Another information sheet, aimed at those in Further Education, will be available shortly.
Web site search engines There are now four different full-text Website search engines available on the EEVL service.
Available from the EEVL home page is the main Web site search engine, which searches the full text of all of the sites listed in the EEVL Catalogue.
Over 120,000 Web pages are indexed.
This index is automatically cross-searched from the EEVL home page.
Available from the engineering section is the Engineering Website search engine.
This searches the full text of all of the sites listed in the engineering section of EEVL.
This index is automatically cross-searched from the engineering section home page.
Available from the mathematics section is the Mathemetics Website search engine.
This searches the full text of all of the sites listed in the mathematics section of EEVL.
This index is automatically cross-searched from the mathematics section home page.
Available from the computing section is the Computing Website search engine.
This searches the full text of all of the sites listed in the computing section of EEVL.
This index is automatically cross-searched from the computing section home page.
The Web site search engines can be searched separately, or in conjunction with the various sections of EEVL, as described above.
As they each search every word on the web pages of the sites listed, they provide an excellent way of finding subject-specific material in their respective areas.
Accessibility Statement Finally, an Accessibility Statement, detailing some of the actions which have been taken to improve the accessibility of the EEVL site, has been added.
Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Lesa Ng Acting EEVL Cataloguing Co-ordinator Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: l.ng@hw.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “EEVL News and Enhancements” Author: Roddy MacLeod and Lesa Ng Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 34: Cultivating Interoperability and Resource-Sharing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 34: Cultivating Interoperability and Resource-Sharing Buzz data framework infrastructure archives metadata digitisation preservation oai-pmh z39.50 visualisation gif e-learning personalisation interoperability e-government url research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter introduces Ariadne issue 34.
Welcome to the December/January issue of Ariadne.
This issue has as its focus the practicalities of resource sharing not only at a technical level, but also in terms of business models.
In Sharing history of science and medicine gateway metadata using OAI-PMH, David Little outlines the resource sharing arrangements between the MedHist gateway and the Humbul hub, using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and some of the issues it has raised.
It turns out that the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is an effective way of sharing metadata between gateway services, but does not solve all interoperability problems.
These problems may have to be addressed by anyone using OAI-PMH.
We have a report on the meeting held at CERN, Geneva, in October 2002 The 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) by William Nixon and Pauline Simpson, interestingly subtitled 'Gaining independence with e-prints archives and OAI'.
Its focus was on the challenges in establishing OAI services rather than the technical issues of implementing the OAI (a theme also found in William's other contribution to this issue, on the DAEDALUS project at the University of Glasgow).
In Cultural Heritage Language Technologies: Building an Infrastructure for Collaborative Digital Libraries in the Humanities, Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox describes the work of the Cultural Heritage Language Technologies consortium, a research group funded by the European Commission Information Society Technologies programme and the United States National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative.
This consortium has three major goals: adaptation of discoveries from the fields of computational linguistics, information retrieval and visualisation for the benefit of students; the establishment of an international framework with open standards for the long-term preservation of data, metadata-sharing, and interoperability between affiliated digital libraries; and ultimately to lower the barriers to reading texts in the original languages.
Personalising the Digital Library: Michelle Perrott and Anne Ramsden provide a report on the Joint Open University Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Seminar on Personalisation and Digital Libraries hosted at the Open University, October 2002.
This seminar was aimed at librarians and technologists, focusing on user-centred models including recommender systems, collaborative filtering, roles-based personalisation, and middleware to support portals and personalisation.
Exploring Charging Models for Digital Cultural Heritage, by Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan, describes the results of a study to investigate some of the underlying financial and policy assumptions being made as we move into the realm of digital capture and delivery in the cultural heritage field.
The report is based on 51 institutions surveyed (and 15 interviews) during 2002.
The report was carried out by the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS), on behalf of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Interestingly, the report concludes that the most powerful deciding factor for price was the perceived market value of the item (as defined by what similar organisations are charging) rather than the actual cost of creation and provision.
Exposing information resources for e-learning Steve Richardson and Andy Powell on Harvesting and searching IMS metadata using both the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and the Z39.50 Protocol.
The article contains an overview of the IMS Digital Repositories Working Group (DRWG).
The focus of the article is that, increasingly, information resources will need to be exposed for use in the context of online learning systems, and that the specifications used to deliver those systems will be those being developed by IMS.
There are useful examples in the text.
DAEDALUS : Freeing Scholarly Communication at the University of Glasgow: William J. Nixon presents a brief overview of the DAEDALUS Open Archives Project at the University of Glasgow.
This is a project funded under the FAIR Programme, which addresses two key problem areas advocacy and service development.
DAEDALUS has a project manager for each.
According to their website, 'DAEDALUS' is also an acronym for their project... Other items include: book reviews by John Paschoud, Bruce Royan and Ruth Martin.
We also have a review of Creating websites for e-citizens the Public Library Web Managers workshop, held in Bath in November 2002.
Penny Garrod explains how this workshop addressed some of the issues surrounding the implementation of e-government.
The UK government aims to provide online access to national and local government services by 2005, which means that these services must be interoperable.
The e-GIF (the e-Government Interoperability Framework) incorporates standards and is mandated on all new systems that involve the exchange of information between government and citizens, and government and the business community.
This involves more than 5 billion transactions per year.
We have our regular columns by Brian Kelly: this month, in his Web Focus column for this issue, Interfaces to Web Testing Tools, he looks at just that, and in particular at Bookmarklets simple extensions to browsers which enhance functionality.
Plus our usual complement of regular columns.
Ariadne would like to extend grateful thanks to Shirley Keane, who put together the Newsline column.
Suggestions for articles for issues 35 and 36 are now being considered.
Article proposals and books for review should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Article Title: "Cultivating Interoperability and Resource-Sharing" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: Building Better Library Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: Building Better Library Services Buzz software digitisation copyright video cataloguing mp3 ict url Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod on the recently published Audit Commission Report: Building Better Library Services.
I have decided to be highly topical in this edition’s Public Library column.
I have chosen as my topic -finger on buzzer the recently published Audit Commission Report: Building Better Library Services.
It has, after all, caused a bit of a stir.
Just when you thought it was safe to abandon the rolling stacks and had won the battle to be regarded as ‘cool’ and ‘sexy’ with all those flat screen terminals, scanners, and keen silver surfers, a brickbat is lobbed at your firewall, and, goodness gracious me, its books that are important after all!.
Not only should libraries have stacks of ‘em (of the ‘best seller’ variety, as opposed to the esoteric or out of print, as not stocked by Amazon or Waterstones), but it is the counting out of them that matters and the housing of them in swanky steel and glass modern buildings.
Public Libraries should also give readers what they want (surprise, surprise) perhaps a very large helping of the latest Harry Potter, served piping hot from the press, with a similar sized helping of Catherine Cookson’s final words?
Look at what the bookshops do well, the Commission advises book sales have risen by 25% over the past ten years, and libraries could learn a lot from them about marketing.
The report mentions Amazon just once on page 37: Bookshops have a good record in marketing their services and promoting reading to the general public, while the online catalogues provided by companies such as Amazon.co.uk give people access to reader reviews, lists of what people with similar interests bought and a range of other reader development tools that are not available in library service online catalogues Note the use of the term “reader development” – I thought this was a public library speciality?
Ouch!
Much reader development work undertaken in public libraries seems to involve face to face stuff with readers, rather than personalised interfaces or value-added features such as book reviews, but there are some notable exceptions – take a look at the Hillingdon’s Libraries, Arts and Information Services for starters: http://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/frames.htm?/education/library/booklink.htm Also the superb website for children run by Birmingham Library and Information Service: Stories from the Web: http://www.storiesfromtheweb.org/ However, creating interactive websites takes a lot of time and effort (negotiating copyright to reproduce the book jackets in the Hillingdon example), as well as the fact that you need staff with the necessary skills and expertise, and, lets face it public sector pay doesn’t exactly lead to queues of eager, fully webbed staff forming outside library doors.
But, it doesn’t end there – you need stacks of staff with time on their hands (warning – irony here), to drive the back office systems and deliver the service; its no good having whizzy interactive features with good marketing if nothing of substance lies behind them.
Imagine having filled out your form with that little blue pen in Argos, and arriving at the counter to discover that there is no-one to identify the goods and fetch them for you.
However, I doubt whether many of you would dispute the report’s findings regarding book stock, although all this does seem to me to be rather dated.
Am I missing something here?
I thought young people, in particular, preferred the visual (TV, video, computer games, MP3) to the printed word (putting the Harry Potter phenomenon to one side for the moment).
And… aren’t public libraries being reinvented as ‘street corner universities’ chock-full of PC’s, software, and free surfing, because, like it or not, information and communication technology (ICT) is the tool which enables us to email grandma in Australia or find that fantastic job in Finland?
Having said this we mustn’t forget the overarching government agenda i.e.
electronic service delivery for all public sector services (by 2005 – is this possible?
), and wiring up local authority departments is part of this grand plan.
Chris Batt, Acting Chief Executive of Resource, was quick to point out in Managing Information [1] that books ARE still important, but that the world has changed, and the People’s Network project is a response to this change as people are increasingly using ICT at work and at play.
The report is available online (58 pages, in PDF format, size: 1,859 Kilobytes), although a colleague had to print it on our new colour printer codename “Carrot”, but mustn’t give away UKOLN secrets.
For some reason the blue text, with which the report is liberally sprinkled, would not print on our black and white printer.
But if you want to skip the report and go for the soundbite version here is an extract from CILIP news, dated 20 May 2002: CHANCELLOR URGED TO FUND PUBLIC LIBRARY DEVELOPMENT Media seek CILIP’s views on Audit Commission report: Gordon Brown should use his Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) to help public libraries deal with some of the challenges raised in the recent Audit Commission report Building Better Libraries, says CILIP’s Chief Executive Bob McKee.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last Saturday, Dr McKee responded to criticisms by the author Beryl Bainbridge by pointing out that public libraries were not in the same business as the booksellers they were compared to in the report.
“You can get Beryl’s latest novels in a bookshop,” he said, “but not her earlier out of print work or books about Beryl.” He added that the CSR represented an important opportunity to redress the years of underfunding public libraries had faced a point also made by CILIP’s Head of External Relations Tim Owen in an interview on LBC radio’s Drive Time.
Whoa there!
Airtime on Radio 4, and Beryl Bainbridge!
What excitement.
Also a piece in the Guardian (How to fix our libraries [2]) Public libraries – you’ve never had it so good or have you?
Any publicity is surely better than none though the Guardian article does hit hard: The Audit Commission is absolutely right to use strong words.
Libraries have not made any of the improvements that bookshops have over the past two decades….yet…libraries still play a key part in the government’s goal to support “lifelong learning”.
To do this libraries need to be seen as useful places, which most patently they aren’t.
the result is that year after year the public’s use of the service declines, quite sharply.
Note, however, that this was penned by a former managing director of Waterstone’s and publisher of the Uncovered Editions series of government papers.
So what should we make of all this?
Can the public library be all things to all people?
Should the public library emulate the bookshops (UK major bookstores could emulate the US stores with their armchairs and comfy sofas, integrated coffee shop (not up a steep flight of stairs) and cool water machines.
Or should public libraries focus on new electronic services which have the potential to reach rural communities, housebound and disabled people?
I don’t see how public libraries can compete with services like Amazon.
I ordered three novels and Hitchhikers guide on CD at 9am on Friday morning.
The order arrived at my home in the extreme southwest at 8am the next day.
I don’t have to attempt to read, or listen to them, in two or three weeks or remember to renew them.
I can lend them to friends or give them away.
I can take them on holiday and if I lose them that’s my loss.
All of the items were heavily discounted.
Having said this – if I lived and worked in central Norwich I would visit the public library Public libraries are currently focusing on providing access to information and ICT skills as part of the government agenda to reach those people who are deemed to be ‘socially excluded’.
However, they also have to serve the broader local community, most of whom pay council tax and have expectations as to what they should receive for their money.
There is also the wider information environment to consider, and the contribution public libraries can and are making to the pool of national resources, through the digitisation of local, regional and special collections which can be made available online.
Money – that is lots of it is of course the key to all this diversification, rebadging and re-positioning: books plus computers (and DVDs;CDs;audio visual; business information; reference services etc).
I will therefore leave you to ponder this paragraph from the Audit Commission’s press release on their report.
I rest my case: Councils should take a thorough look at how and why they provide library services, the report says.
It calls on councillors and senior managers to provide clear leadership and commitment to libraries, including holding library services to account for the resources they use and the delivery of national standards and local targets.
[3] 1.
Resource welcomes Audit Commission report on public libraries.
Managing Information.
20 May 2002. http://www.managinginformation.com/news/content_show_full.php?id=561 [accessed 27 May 2002] 2.
Tim Coates.
How to fix our libraries.
Guardian unlimited.
18 May 2002 http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,717311,00.html [accessed 27 May 2002] 3.
Audit Commission.
Libraries encouraged to review services as study shows drop in use.
http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/news/prlibraries.shtml Article Title: “Public Libraries” Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/public-libraries/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Practical Clumping: Mick Ridley on the BOPAC System Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Practical Clumping: Mick Ridley on the BOPAC System Buzz java html database xml browser copyright video cataloguing opac z39.50 marc mis aacr2 copac interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Mick Ridley discusses the BOPAC system.
This article attempts to draw some practical lessons for those involved with clumps (or thinking about them) from our experiences on the BOPAC2 project [1].
BOPAC2 was a British Library funded project, that was investigating the problems of large and complex retrievals from Z39.50 [2] searches especially from multiple targets.
Although the funded stage of BOPAC2 is over the system is still under development and available on the web and I would urge people to try the sort of examples I will mention below (and give us feedback).
I would also like to make it clear that I am not in anyway blaming or condemning any library for the way its Z39.50 server works merely pointing out some of the problems in getting these sorts of services working.
In fact Id like to praise all those who have been pioneering Z39.50 access to their collections.
This is particularly since support from library system vendors has not always been what it might and 'the introduction of the Web redirected most vendor activity into developing web front ends to existing or planned systems' as Mark Hinnebusch noted in a 'State of Z39.50' report [3].
Consequently I've tried to keep the examples 'anonymous' and I hope people will take them as examples of the problems of getting consistent or equivalent results across a clump rather than an exposé of how some servers get it 'wrong'.
As something of an aside I should explain the acronym.
BOPAC originally stood for the Bradford OPAC (OK really Bradford Online Public Access Catalogue) since we were working at the University of Bradford, but this caused some confusion with the University Library's catalogue (which is itself reachable from BOPAC2).
So we have have tended to refer to the project simply as BOPAC.
If that has to be an acronym then I hope its for Better OPAC, thats our aim even if we aren't there yet.
And it wasn't just an attempt to get ahead of COPAC in alphabetic listings!
When BOPAC2 started the term clump wasn't even a gleam in Lorcan Dempsey's eye.
However I suspect by most people's definition BOPAC may be thought of as a clump system, or a broker in MODELS [4] (specifically the MODELS Information Architecture) terminology.
It allows you to create a clump of your own by selecting targets you are interested in from a large list and then searches those targets simultaneously and displays the results together.
It can also easily be configured to have a more fixed set of targets, as was done in the project for Bradford and Leeds University libraries, producing a mini West Yorks (including British Library Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa) clump.
BOPAC2 has two main parts, a Z39.50 client Web Interface based on the Europagate system and a Java applet that provides the display of, and search within, the retrieved records from all the servers.
It is the fact that BOPAC combines the retrievals from different servers into one set that can be manipulated in many ways, and consolidates records for the same item from different servers, that makes the differences between catalogues and their Z39.50 servers so crucial to us.
If most clumps are to be virtual, then the glue that will hold most of them together will be the Z39.50 protocol.
And Z39.50 may be the start of a new set of problems rather than the end of your problems.
There is a common view that Z39.50 will let you query another database with the interface of a system that you know.
E.g.
'The greatest benefit of Z39.50 was that it offered the potential of directly searching any database through the local systems interface' [5] This may be true.
What is doesn't tell you is whether the system will behave the way you expect, and give you the results you might expect.
In fact I would like to almost reverse the quote and say 'The greatest benefit of Z39.50 was that it offered the potential of directly searching any database regardless of any local systems interface' That is, the point to me is that Z39.50 allows access, presentation is a separate issue.
It may also be heretical but the 'local systems interface' may be known but it may also be disliked by users.
I would hope that we are entering an era where users can chose or customize the interface they use.
As we move to Web based interfaces for many different systems we need to recognise that the appearance of these is less controllable by system designers than other user interfaces.
On the other hand the appearance of an HTML form, for entering a query, may well be more consistent for an individual user with their favorite browser regardless of the system being queried.
There are a number of layers that a query must pass through from the user interface to the underlying servers and each layer can present problems.
We can group them broadly as below, although some layers may have sub layers and there may not be clear distinctions between them in some cases.
What do you call the search?
What Z39.50 bib-1 attribute, or attributes does this map to?
Do all the servers support this?
How does each of the servers interpret this?
What do you call the search?
: This problem is of course not specific to clump systems but must be tackled by any query interface.
There may, however, be a particular problem for clumps, related to the 'local systems interface' issue above.
It may seem desirable to use the same terminology as used on a local system but the members of a clump may use different terms, or the same terms but with different meaning, on their local systems.
One solution is to use the name of the bib-1 attribute, this seems promising initially but may not be such a straightforward solution as we will see.
What Z39.50 bib-1 attribute, or attributes does this map to?
: Z39.50 systems use attribute sets to define the type of search to be undertaken.
The most widely used set is 'bib-1' originally designed for bibliographic use but also used in other areas since it has achieved a 'default' status, other more specialised attribute sets exist.
The development of attribute sets is ongoing in the Z39.50 community and a full discussion is beyond the scope of this article.
More information can be found at the Library of Congress Z39.50 Maintenance Agency [2] or on the Z39.50IW maillist [6].
Put simply we can define what sort of search we want by specifying the attribute value e.g.
1003 for an Author or 7 for an ISBN.
While an ISBN search may be unambiguous the semantics behind an 'author' search may be more complex and there are a number of bib-1 attributes that might be used such as Personal name 1 Name 1002   Author-name personal 1004 and this assumes we are looking for a person and hence avoiding corporate names (2, 1005) and that we are happy to omit editor (1020).
Do all the servers support this?
: There is no guarantee that all the servers you want to query will support all the attributes (in fact they are most unlikely to) or even the same set of attributes.
A number of solutions may be possible here.
If different servers support different attributes it may be possible to map these to the same search for a (approximately) equivalent result e.g.
using a mixture of 1 and 1004 for 'Personal Name Author'.
If, however, there is nowhere that the searches available from the servers intersects, imagine all bar one supports ISBN ( and that one didn't support 'anywhere', which might have allowed the search by a back door) then what is to be done?
Do you allow that search but make it clear that there can be no results from that server?
Or do you disallow the search altogether, and get a more consistent interface?
Or disallow the search only when it involves the server who can't support it?
How does each of the servers interpret this?
Here we move on to the problems of what each server does with the same query.
Even with two servers that support the same attributes we cannot be certain that the search will be applied in the same way, that is to the same tags of a MARC record.
Or perhaps more accurately we cannot be certain that the index (or indexes) queried by a particular search were build from the same set of MARC tags.
Decisions in this area have always had to be made but in the past users could become aware of the 'foibles' of their own system.
When querying a clump of catalogues they may all show foibles but not the same ones and the search results may be very different as a consequence.
If we take as an example author searches which are often mapped onto search of a personal name index we can get very different results from two servers, holding the same items, with the same catalogue record for this item if the indexes have been built differently.
Examples in this area can be found depending on whether some or all notes fields have been used as a source of personal names.
This is particularly noticeable when searching for non-book materials when extensive cast lists for video or audio performances may be found in MARC 508.
There is also scope for confusion in situations where one server doesn't support an editor (bib-1 1020) search but MARC 248's contents contribute to their name index but another server does allow that search.
How in this case should a user try to formulate their query?
We can then add on to this local variations in cataloging practice as a further layer of complexity within this layer.
Whether the variations reflect ambiguities within AACR2, structural problems of AACR2 or bad practice is beyond the scope of this article.
What is clear is that clump systems need to be able to deal with this variation if they are to 'work'.
There are also problems that seem to touch all the layers mentioned about.
These are noticeable in the subject and keyword search areas.
Here there seems to be much more support for the use of Subject heading (bib-1 21) than Subject name personal (bib-1 1009) yet personal names from the subject heading of MARC 600 often contribute to names retrieved by author searches.
Also subject searching may be supported to some degree but use of Anywhere (bib-1 1035) or keyword in title suitably labeled may give the sort of result the user wanted.
What can be done about these problems?
Clearly there is no one silver bullet.
There are a number of small steps that can be taken and developers need to test extensively and get user feedback.
Some of things we did are outlined below.
In the course of developing BOPAC2 one significant feature we had to add was an explanatory line in the first display screen.
This added the MARC fields that contained a match for the search terms.
In many cases particularly with author,title or author and title searches you would have expected an author/title display to be (relatively) self explanatory but we found that many searches were returning unexpected items and users could make more sense of their retrievals with longer displays.
These made it easier to tell, at an early stage, whether items were likely to be of interest.
Examples of this could be seen in, for example, an author search for Dickens, these would often return, in addition to works by Charles Dickens, critical works on Dickens or works based on those of Dickens.
the original brief author/title displays included: Bleak House.
Hawthorn, Jeremy You must believe all this/ Mitchell, Adrian The first is a critical work on Dickens' Bleak House and its appearance might be self explanatory but the second is, hopefully, succinctly explained by the addition of the contents of the MARC tag that matches the search term.
-:Adrian Mitchell; from Holiday Romance by Charles Dickens; Or from an Author search for Frost showing that 'author' may express a variety of relationships to a work we show the expanded brief author/title display Phantasmagoria and other poems/ Carroll,Lewis -:By Lewis Carroll; with illustrations by Arthur B.
Frost Newton's Principia: Newton, Isaac -:by Percival Frost Magenkarzinom.
Hot,J.Meyer, Hans-Joacim, Schmoll, Hans-Joachim ORGANISATION: Frost Pharma Poems ; Dryden, John, -: John Dryden; editor; William Frost This may be the behaviour a user would expect from their local system in which case the shorter display would not be confusing, but for other users these retrievals may well seem puzzling not to say erroneous.
A related problem is that although some of the catalogues being queried may have treated an author search in this, broad, way other catalogues may have had a narrower interpretation of the query.
The only way to discover this is probably by observation that all the critical works come from certain catalogues not from the full range of catalogues that were queried.
Sometimes you may retrieve records that show no match with the original search.
An example of this was found with an author search for Dylan Thomas.
Amongst the retrievals was a collection of Welsh short stories but 'Thomas' was nowhere in the text of the record.
Sometimes you may get complete mis hits that seem to be errors but in this case we assume that the record should have been retrieved.
A possible reason for this is that the MARC record delivered may not have been the full record from the database, the server may not have deliverd the entire record and so the fields that caused the match may not be present.
A problem with title searches was brought to our attention by a user.
BOPAC2's default title search was a title match and the user had failed to find 'Time for Change' on all the servers they expected.
On investigation we found that at least one server was being much stricter and only giving a time match on 'Time for Change?'
while most servers ignored the question mark.
In an attempt to give what we felt was the behaviour users would expect we changed our default from an exact match to a title contains search.
So 'Time for Change' now includes titles that might have been excluded before such as 'Children in crisis: a time for caring, a time for change' but does get 'Time for Change?'
too.
In the examples above I've concentrated on 'known item' searches which was where BOPAC2 was focussed.
We have started to look in more detail at the problems of subject searching where there are clearly a lot of problems because of wider variety in MARC records both in terms of quality and standards than there is for author and title information.
We hope to pursue this further in a future BOPAC project.
What conclusions can we draw from this?
I believe that currently the best strategy for querying clumps is to use the most general query.
Attempting to get more precision in the query will result in less recall.
A consequence of this is that you will generally get larger result sets and more irrelevant material but it is the only way to ensure you don't miss relevant material.
BOPAC has been designed to make working in this way possible and hopefully easy.
Its easy with BOPAC to drop the Monica Dickens hits from a search for Dickens if you are interested in Charles Dickens.
That search will also have given you Charles Dickens's hits catalogued as Dickens or Dickens,C that the more specific Charles Dickens search would have excluded.
This may not be what should happen but our experience suggests that its the reality.
The BOPAC approach here matches the strategy for network queries suggested in a recent article on XML [7].
... imagine going to an on-line travel agency and asking for all the flights from London to New York on July 4.
You would probably receive a list several times longer than your screen could display.
You could shorten the list by fine-tuning the departure time, price or airline, but to do that, you would have to send a request across the Internet to the travel agency and wait for its answer.
If, however, the long list of flights had been sent in XML, then the travel agency could have sent a small Java program along with the flight records that you could use to sort and winnow them in microseconds, without ever involving the server.
Multiply this by a few million Web users, and the global efficiency gains become dramatic.
Looking further forward, work on the Z39.50 Interoperability Profile make help towards solutions of some of the problems discussed here.
This and the sort of suggestions Mark Hinnebusch makes [3].
will help clumps that have a working relationship between their members.
There still remain considerable problems for those involved in what might be called DIY clumping where you query a set of resources of interest to you who may have no relationship at an institutional level.
BOPAC allows you to work in this way as do products like BookWhere that let you set up the servers of your choice.
I believe that we may see more of this approach, the eLib supported clumps have been both geographical and subject based.
It seems to me that personalised clumps which may be very specific in a geographic or subject sense are likely to very useful.
Geographically I might be interested in the public library where I live and the academic library where I work.
And researchers might be interested in a set of libraries that are geographically very diverse but have material relevant to their specialisation.
This could be a quite specific subject like Soviet Science Fiction which would be unlikely to get the same sort of institutional support as Music Online.
A key factor in getting improved access to networked resources is information sharing and listings of Z39.50 targets, such as UKOLN's [8] , have a crucial role to play.
I hope this article can contibute to that information sharing process too.
Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the help of the other members of the BOPAC team: Lars Nielsen and Fred Ayres and the financial support of the British Library for the BOPAC2 project.
And thanks to all the BOPAC users who gave us feedback.
References [1] BOPAC Home Page.
This includes links to BOPAC2 itself and an online version of the BLRIC Report.
Available from: URL http://www.comp.brad.ac.uk/research/database/bopac2.html Last checked 21/05/99 [2] Library of Congress Z39.50 Maintenance Agency Available from: URL http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ Last checked 21/05/99 [3] Report to the CIC on the State of Z39.50 Within the Consortium.Mark Hinnebusch.
Available from: URL http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/cli/z39-50report.htm Last checked 21/05/99 [4] MODELS:Moving to Distributed Environments for Library Services.
Available from: URL http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/ Last checked 21/05/99 [5] Caswell, J.V.
1997.
Building an Integrated User Interface to Electronic Resources.
Information Technology and Libraries, 16 (2), 63-72.
[6] Z39.50 Implementors Workshop maillist.
Archived at URL http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/z3950iw.html Last checked 21/05/99 [7] Jon Bosak and Tim Bray.
XML and the Second-Generation Web, Scientific American, May 1999, Available from: URL http://www.sciam.com/1999/0599issue/0599bosak.html Last checked 21/05/99 [8] Directory of Z39.50 targets in the UK.
Available from: URL http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/zdir/ Last checked 21/05/99 Author Details Mick Ridley Senior Computer Officer Dept of Computing University of Bradford http://www.staff.comp.brad.ac.uk/~mick/ M.J.Ridley@comp.brad.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
E-Commerce in Higher Education: Can We Afford to Do Nothing?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines E-Commerce in Higher Education: Can We Afford to Do Nothing?
Buzz data software html database portal browser video php authentication privacy url standards Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Aird on the impact of e-commerce on the non-commercial sector.
With e-commerce emerging as the driving force behind commercial websites, its impact is beginning to be felt in the non-commercial sector.
Those of us working in HE, in particular, need to prepare carefully if we are to reap the rewards and avoid the pitfalls by establishing appropriate ‘business’ structures as well as refining technical and managerial approaches.
These were conclusions of the e-commerce parallel session at the Web Management Conference at Bath University in September.
A survey of existing and planned e-commerce systems in HE, illuminated by a HE case study and a detailed presentation from online payment and security specialists Trustmarque plc were the main features of the session(1).
I have tried to draw these threads together to look at the state of e-commerce in HE and to see if “Essential.
It’s happening!” (a comment from the survey) really sums up the present situation, and likely future developments.
Online e-commerce survey(2) Of the 76 HE organisations who responded over 80% claim to have some kind of e-commerce system in place now or plan to by the middle of 2001.
(E-commerce here is defined as having an online system for ordering and paying for goods or services, although the method of payment may not necessarily by credit/debit card.)
In fact, 70% of the institutions surveyed will continue to use paper-based systems (such as invoice generation, follow-up cheque) rather than online transfer of funds.
More secure or false economy?
Surprising conclusions reached at the parallel session are discussed later.
Selling publications, payment of fees and alumni goods make up the largest categories of transactions (74%).
Other uses included supplying advice and information (5%), sales of concert/theatre tickets and printing/photocopying charges.
So who runs these systems?
In many cases it was web staff (60%), although academic departments themselves show significant involvement (13%).
Perhaps surprisingly, Finance Departments appeared to be involved in very few cases (6%).
Only one institution surveyed had a project officer dedicated solely to e-commerce development.
On a technical note, almost half the respondents have a digital security certificate (45%) (regarded as essential for e-commerce as it assures your clients of the security of your system and authenticity of the institution), although the majority have secure servers (SSL) in operation.
Security and satisfaction The survey also looked briefly at the online shopping habits of the individual respondents, with the aim of seeing how much our consumer experience might affect our approach as providers.
Almost all (98%) of those who had bought goods or services online were satisfied, and most (92%) regarded this as a safe method of making payments.
Incidentally, the most poplar sites used were Amazon (62%), Easyjet (11%) and Go-fly, Expedia and Tesco equal in third place (4%).
The survey contrasts sharply with figures given at the Parallel Session by John Williams, CEO of Trustmarque plc(3): Taking a world view, 25% of e-commerce transactions are never fulfilled, and 53% of online customers are concerned about security and privacy.
Furthermore ‘conversion rates’ of visitors to buyers currently run at about 1.8%.
Evidently the experience of e-commerce in HEI is more positive, and this may be an important starting point when planning or running such a system.
Credit and credibility The ‘brand’ of UK HEIs already has much global credibility – no one suspects that a British University is going to steal your identity or defraud your credit card, and they already have a reputation for providing ‘quality’.
This may help to reassure users in the future who may be paying substantial course fees online, or signing up to an expensive distance-learning MBA.
Apart from this, there is much that can be done to re-assure users of the reliability and safety of what you have to offer: Exemplify privacy, disclosure and quality control policies and : how will you deal with a complaint if something goes wrong?
Do you sell people’s e-mail addresses etc?
Make it clear what the customer is buying and who they are buying it from.
Who can they contact for help?
Consider seals of approval – logos from VISA, etc., your security certificate provider (such as Verisign or Thawte) and the institution can build confidence.
Make the design of the e-commerce site as professional, easy to use and as fast as possible.
Quality institutions produce quality web sites!
Decide on the level of security needed and deploy appropriate technology Consider outsourcing it may turn out cheaper in the long run.
Online credit card payment and transfer of funds would have to be outsourced in any case.
It’s a business Doing e-commerce has far more to do with running a business than designing websites.
It’s better to think of opening a shop; the stock, the staff, the systems, the pricing and relationships with banks, etc.
all have to be in place before you can open the door to customers.
Many of the spectacular e-commerce failures of the last few months have involved ‘fulfilment’ problems, whereas few have failed because their website design or choice of technology was wrong.
Three likely business models are: · Physical fulfilment model The web site allows customers to order and pay for items that will be delivered later.
Examples include books, recordings, alumni t-shirts, etc.
Stock control is needed, preferably linked to the online ordering system, and the cost of delivery needs to be taken into account.
Policies on returned items, non-delivery, breakages etc, need to be decided upon and made clear to the customer.
· Online fulfilment model In this model the item purchased is fulfilled on line, either at the time of purchase or later.
Examples of this are software, electronic journals, digital-art, etc.
This model may be useful for the supply of learning materials for distance learning courses.
The onus of correct fulfilment falls on the technology employed – having paid for a piece of software online the customer needs quick and robust access to the data.
Telephone/e-mail support might be necessary.
· ‘Ticketless travel’ model At least one ‘budget’ airline now sells 75% of its flights through its website(4) – there is no actual fulfilment, apart from the supply of a number or code to be produced at the time of travel.
This model could be used for selling concert and theatre admissions, conference registration, payment of course fees, printing and photocopying charges, etc.
As in each of these cases supply will be limited (e.g.
by the capacity of the theatre) the system needs to be carefully designed.
What happens if the customer’s choice is fully-booked and thus not available?
It is unlikely that one e-commerce web site could service more than one of these models – they need different management, resources and technologies.
In the case of models 2 and 3, the products to be sold need to be designed with e-commerce in mind.
Recent experience at Goldsmiths College with online conference bookings showed that having numerous accommodation options all with slightly different prices was confusing to the user and increased the complexity of system design.
An ‘electronic version’ of a paper-printed journal that consists of a few PDF files is unlikely to be as good quality a product as one initially designed for the web.
In the case of the Physical Fulfilment Model, the price of a small item (such as a pack of Christmas Cards) may turn out to exceeded by the cost of stocking, packing and delivering it.
As with any business venture it is vital that all direct costs, overheads and other expenses are taken into account when setting up an e-commerce system.
Getting the money As well as different business models there are also different ways in which money can be obtained from the customer.
In choosing the most appropriate method security, costs, speed and convenience need to be considered.
Inevitably most e-commerce revolves around the use of credit/debit cards, but in the HE sector (especially for ‘business to business’ transactions) this may not yet be the most appropriate means.
The survey indicated that 52% of the respondent organisations had purchased items and services online.
On the other hand, it emerged at the Parallel Session that not all HEIs allow payment to be made by credit card in any case.
Therefore, choosing the right payment system may be crucial to the success of an e-commerce venture: · Full online card payment and fund transfer The customer submits card details which are passed electronically to an ‘online payment service provider’, such as Barclays Merchant Services, Trustmarque, etc.
the funds are transferred immediately and fulfilment can commence.
Costs: normally a charge is made per transaction ( about 25-50p, depending on turnover) plus the normal percentage taken by the card company.
· Off-line card processing The customer submits their card details, the number of which can be checked using a modulus analyser for validity, which are then send in an encrypted e-mail to a finance officer who processes the transaction using a ‘PDQ’ machine, or similar.
The success (or otherwise) of the transaction needs to be fed back into the e-commerce system before fulfilment can begin.
Costs: the time of the finance officer and the card company’s percentage.
· Payment by Standing Order, Direct Debit or Cheque in post As all these instructions require a signature, the only feasible way to do this is to generate a document which is printed off and returned by post, signed by the customer or with the cheque.
The order needs to be ‘held’ until this is received and processed or cleared.
Costs: manual processing time.
· Generation of invoice for subsequent settlement Perhaps only suitable when the customer is already known to the seller.
The goods or services are provided ‘on trust’ on the assumption that the invoice will be paid in accordance with the seller’s terms and conditions.
Costs: processing time, risk of default.
Certain business models imply one or other of these payment methods: for example, immediate online fulfilment requires immediate online payment processing, whereas physical fulfilment may allow a margin of time for off-line processing or for a cheque to be received.
As in the traditional non-electronic business-to-business trading model, the supply of goods pending payment of invoices requires knowledge and trust, and an assessment of risk needs to made which may be reflected in the price.
Although the full online card payment and fund transfer method appears to be the most expensive option, practical experience at Goldsmiths has shown that this may not in fact be the case.
Manual processing of card details has many pitfalls, such as the details being submitted incorrectly, insufficient funds available, wrong matching of payments to customers, etc.
Good system design and adequate training could overcome many of these potential problems, but bearing in mind the cost of this and time taken to sort out mistakes (let alone international telephone calls!)
a full online payment system may be better value, especially if the value of the transaction is relatively high, as in the case of a conference booking, for example.
What do you need?
The technology for e-commerce does not need to be hugely powerful, complex or expensive, especially as realistically the numbers of ‘hits’ on an HE site are not going to be enormous, especially at first.
Online Conference Booking systems at Goldsmiths have successfully used a variety of systems, ranging from Mac-based Filemaker Pro databases to a more robust solution using PHP on a secure Unix server.
It’s unlikely that much online trading could be achieved without using at least one database (to record the transaction details), and in reality most of the content of an e-commerce site will probably be database-driven.
CGI scripts, PHP, Active Server Pages or Cold Fusion are commonly used methods of linking databases to HTML pages, and this needs to be done by someone with a thorough understanding of the chosen technique.
Once your system is set up on an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) server you will need an digital security certificate(5) to prove it.
These can be obtained from a number of companies of which Verisign(6) is probably the best known.
Expect to pay £200-400 per annum for this depending on how many servers you operate.
Typically an HE e-commerce site will involve personnel from many departments, possibly ranging from the Alumni Office to Finance and the Computer services.
It is vital that all those involved fully understand how the system works and that there is effective communication between them, just as on a shop floor.
Real team work will make the venture a success, so avoid having to rely on sceptics or doom-and-gloom merchants!
As with any kind of team project there needs to be definite leader or manager empowered to make decisions quickly and unilaterally.
Perhaps above all, you need to advertise the existence of your e-commerce offering, so a marketing strategy is vital.
Simple things like making sure the URL appears on printed material, and that there are plentiful links from the ‘main’ website must not be overlooked.
A direct e-mail campaign may the most effective way of building potential customers.
Probably as much effort needs to be put into marketing as goes into all other aspects of building and running an e-commerce web site.
What do we all need?
Many recent national initiatives have implications for the way HE uses the web to market itself, such as HERO(7), UCAS entry profiles(8) and the e-university proposals(9).
As yet there does not seem to have been any parallel attempt to support the growth and management of e-commerce in HE.
There are a number of issues that can only meaningfully be tackled at a national (or even international) level: Authentication standards The use of ‘digital signatures’ or other means of authenticating a potential student or customer is still in its infancy and not standardised(10).
This is seen as a major hurdle in accepting applications online, organising video-conference interviews (how do you know who you are really interviewing?
), course-work submissions, etc.
Until progress is made in this area the use of online payment systems will be limited for many types of admissions transactions.
Kite-marking A nationally-agreed quality assurance scheme for HE would re-assure potential online purchasers that the site was reliable, secure and run by the institution named.
This would be exemplified though a logo and a link to the agreed terms and conditions relevant to the transaction.
Site design standards There is nothing more worrying to a user than, having gone through several screens of menus and forms, finding that the site hangs or dies.
It may then even be difficult to know if the order has been sent or if the payment has been deducted.
Many of these pitfalls could be avoided through the use of standard technologies (especially HTML) and careful browser-compatibility testing.
A central online ‘e-commerce validator’(human, maybe) would be useful, as it can be difficult to validate dynamically generated HTML with existing tools.
National portals Portals covering key relevant areas of HE e-commerce (such as online journals, alumni goods, ticket sales) would provide a show-case for developers themselves where ideas, approaches and technologies could be compared as well as an easy interface for potential customers.
A single point of access to all UK HE publications available online would be an example of a useful portal.
‘CHEST style’ deals Nationally-negotiated deals with online payment processing services and off-the-shelf packages would be financially beneficial and ensure that chosen suppliers are credible and reliable.
Training Bringing together training that covered basic business analysis, stock control, marketing etc.
in conjunction with relevant IT skills would enable more institutions to benefit from e-commerce.
Online course support and documentation would perhaps be the most appropriate means of delivery – learning by example.
Conclusion – do nothing?
In drawing a conclusion I wonder what would be the effect of doing nothing.
In the short term probably not very great, but institutions who don’t start now may well find it harder later; comments from the e-commerce survey indicate that there is a steep learning curve for both the person tasked with developing an online payment system and the institution of which they are part.
One of the challenges facing web site managers has been bringing together disparate people and parts of a college or university to convey a useful and attractive image on the web.
With e-commerce it seems we may have to repeat the process of forging key alliances, choosing the right technology and devising a business plan, but with the even more ‘mission critical’ objective of making money.
Already e-commerce has revolutionised banking, travelling, and book selling.
Other financial services, recorded music and food shopping seem likely to be next in line.
It’s happening in Higher Education among those institutions who see it as essential to their future prospects.
I wonder how many will be doing nothing in a years’ time.
References (1) A full report of the session is available at http://www.gold.ac.uk/webmanager/e-commerce/index.html (2) The aim of the survey was to discover the scale of usage (and planned usage) of e-commerce systems within the HE sector.
The web-based questionnaire was available from 17th August to 1st September 2000.
Full analysis: http://www.gold.ac.uk/webmanager/e-commerce/ecommerce-survey.htm (3) Trustmarque plc is a provider of ‘trusted e-commerce systems’: http://www.trustmarque.com (4) EasyJet, reported on http://www.easyjet.com/en/about/ (5) Also referred to as digital passports, X.509 certificates, or public-key certificates.
(6) Verisign: http://www.verisign.com (7) HERO: http://www.hero.ac.uk/ (8) UCAS entry profiles: http://www.ucas.ac.uk/profiles/index.html (9) E-university information from HEFCE: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Partners/euniv/ (10) See Overview of Watermarks, Fingerprints, and Digital Signatures (a JTAP report) at http://www.jtap.ac.uk/reports/htm/jtap-034.html Author Details   Andrew Aird Andrew@gold.ac.uk www.gold.ac.ukAndrew Aird is Web Team Manager at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
He has previously worked in commercial web site design and was manager of an international music software company.
He is also a consultant to various HEFCE and UKOLN projects, and advises the music publishing industry on e-commerce issues.
Article Title: “E-commerce in Higher Education: can we afford to do nothing?” Author: Andrew Aird Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/e-commerce/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The JISC Information Environment and Web Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The JISC Information Environment and Web Services Buzz data software rdf framework html database rss xml portal apache archives metadata css browser namespace schema repositories video oai-pmh z39.50 gis aggregation soap uri personalisation openurl wsdl uddi srw licence authentication interoperability url sfx Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell and Liz Lyon look at possible relationships between the Web Services idea and earlier ideas about seamless access to information.
The JISC Information Environment The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [1] is a JISC-funded, managed, heterogeneous collection of information resources and services (bibliographic, full-text, image, video, geo-spatial, datasets, etc.)
of particular value to the further and higher education communities.
The JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) [2] is the set of networked services that allows people to discover, access, use and publish resources within the DNER.
The JISC IE technical architecture [3] specifies the standards and protocols that provide interoperability between this network of services.
The current version of the JISC IE architecture focuses on the discovery of and access to resources within the DNER.
It is not the intention of this article to provide a detailed description of the architecture.
However, the following overview will allow us to make some comparisons between the JISC IE and emerging architectures based on Web services.
The architecture suggests a three-layer model comprising a provision layer, a fusion layer and a presentation layer.
The intention is to allow service providers within the JISC IE to work together to provide more seamless services than are possible currently.
In part, the intention is to reduce the need for end-users to interact with multiple, different Web sites in order to discover, access and use resources that are of interest to them.
Figure 1 JISC IE architecture Content providers In the provision layer, content providers make resources available (typically as part of their Web sites).
Perhaps the most obvious content providers in the JISC IE are those hosted by the JISC-funded data centres and other JISC-funded services [4].
There are, of course, many other content providers, both within and without the UK academic community.
Indeed, calls like the recent JISC FAIR programme [5], have explicitly encouraged UK HE and FE institutions to see themselves as content providers within the JISC IE.
Portals In the presentation layer, portals provide the end-user with discovery services across multiple content providers.
To support this, content providers must disclose information about the resources they hold in order that portals can provide discovery services across that content.
It is worth noting that a number of different types of portal are likely to emerge.
These include the subject portals being developed by the RDN through the Subject Portals Project [6], portals based on media type (e.g.
an image portal) and institutional portals.
The architecture suggests that content providers disclose metadata about the resources they hold in one of three ways.
They can make their metadata available for searching (i.e.
allow portals to send search queries to them, returning appropriate matches in their databases).
They can make their metadata available for harvesting (i.e.
allow other services to download copies of their metadata records).
Finally, they can alert other services to the existence of new resources.
The JISC IE architecture specifies that the Bath Profile of Z39.50 [7] be used as the mechanism for supporting distributed searching, that the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [8] be used to support metadata harvesting and that RDF Site Summary (RSS) [9] be used to support alerting.
It is worth noting the similarities between these three standards.
They are all XML based (or partially XML-based in the case of functional area C of the Bath Profile of Z39.50) and they all support the exchange of metadata based on unqualified Dublin Core.
Portals and content providers interact using these three mechanisms.
Presentation layer functionality may be shared between the portal and the end-user’s Web browser.
For example, a saved search may be stored at the portal as part of the user’s profile.
Alternatively, it may take the form of a URL that can simply be added to the user’s bookmarks stored in the browser.
Similarly, display preferences may be applied by the portal software prior to the delivery of HTML to the browser, or they may be applied within the browser, in the form of a Cascading Style Sheet.
Brokers and aggregators A middle layer the fusion layer sits between the provision layer and the presentation layer.
This layer is responsible for combining metadata records from one or more content providers, as a result of cross-searching, harvesting or alerting.
Some fusion activity may be undertaken directly by portals and content providers.
In other cases, stand-alone fusion services may be developed.
In the case of cross-searching, such stand-alone services are typically referred to as brokers.
In the case of harvesting and alerting, such services are referred to as aggregators.
An example broker is the one being developed by the Xgrain project [10] to enable “cross-searching between Z39.50-compliant abstracting and indexing, and tables of contents, services”.
Services in the fusion layer may combine the harvesting and distributed searching approaches.
For example, a fusion service may gather metadata records from content providers using the OAI-PMH, and make the combined database of gathered records available for searching using Z39.50.
Resolvers The technologies described above facilitate the discovery of resources by end-users and address what has been termed the portal problem namely, how do you provide seamless discovery services across a range of disparate content providers.
However, discovering the existence of a resource may only be the first part of the problem faced by end-users.
The primary reason for discovering a resource is to gain access to it, i.e.
to get a copy of the resource onto their physical or virtual desktop.
In some cases, notably that of freely available Web resources, access is provided by simply clicking on the link the URL in the metadata record takes the end user directly to the resource.
(Note that in a separate article in this issue, Brian Kelly provides some guidelines for making resource URIs more persistent).
In other cases, particularly in the case of discovering books, journals and journal articles, there needs to be a mechanism for linking from the discovered metadata record to the most appropriate copy of the resource.
This is known as the appropriate copy problem.
There is no need to take a specific view about what appropriate means here, however obvious examples include the physical copy of the resource that is held in the end-user’s local library, the online copy for which the user (or the user’s institution) has a licence agreement, the copy that can be delivered fastest, the copy available from the user’s preferred delivery service and so on.
It is worth noting that, for any given end-user, the most appropriate copy of a resource may change as they move from accessing the Internet in their office on campus, to accessing the Internet at home, to accessing the Internet while abroad at a conference.
The JISC IE architecture specifies the use of OpenURLs [11] and OpenURL resolvers to support access to the most appropriate copy of a resource.
OpenURLs were described in some detail in a previous issue of Ariadne [12].
Briefly, an OpenURL is a URL that carries a citation (some metadata) for a resource and passes that information to an OpenURL resolver specified by the end-user.
In the future we might expect to see an increasing number of institutions offering their own OpenURL resolvers based on commercial offerings such as SFX from ExLibris [13].
In the meantime however, it may be necessary to run a national service, offering an OpenURL resolver for those members of institutions with no appropriate resolvers of their own.
The kind of work being undertaken by the JOIN-UP programme[14] might form the basis for such a national service.
Mapping the service landscape We can see from the above that there will be a range of interactions between service components in the JISC IE in order to support the delivery of discovery and access functionality to the end-user.
The key services that need to interact with each other include the portals, content providers, brokers, aggregators and resolvers described above.
However, there will also be a whole range of other shared services that need to be considered and that haven’t been described here.
These include authentication and authorisation services such as Athens [15], terminology services, metadata schema registries, index services, institutional profiling services, user-personalisation services and so on.
Service components will need access to descriptions of the other components that are available to them.
Furthermore, such descriptions will need to be at a detailed enough level to support machine-to-machine (m2m) interaction between components.
The JISC IE architecture currently refers to two complementary services called the collection description service and the service description service.
The collection description service was seen as providing descriptions of the content of the collections made available by content providers in the DNER.
The service description service was seen as providing detailed, protocol level, information about the access points to the collections described in the collection description service.
Note that there is not necessarily a 1:1 mapping between these descriptions for example, a single DNER collection may be offered as both a Z39.50 target and an OAI repository.
Despite being logically separated, it was always envisaged that the collection description and service description services might be offered in a combined form.
Web services In an article in Ariadne 29, Tracy Gardner provided a good introduction to the concept of Web services [16].
A broad definition of Web services is given in the IBM Web services tutorial [17]: Web services are a new breed of Web application.
They are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web.
Web services perform functions, which can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes.
It is interesting to note that all the JISC IE service components described above can be thought of as Web services given this definition, though some might argue that making this case for Z39.50 is a little extreme!
However, the definition of Web services provided by the W3C [18] is a little narrower: The advent of XML makes it easier for systems in different environments to exchange information.
The universality of XML makes it a very attractive way to communicate information between programs.
Programmers can use different operating systems, programming languages, etc, and have their software communicate with each other in an interoperable manner.
Moreover, XML, XML namespaces and XML schemas serve as useful tools for providing mechanisms to deal with structured extensibility in a distributed environment, especially when used in combination.
The same way programmatic interfaces have been been available since the early days of the World Wide Web via HTML forms, programs are now accessible by exchanging XML data through an interface, e.g.
by using SOAP Version 1.2, the XML-based protocol produced by the XML Protocol Working Group.
The services provided by those programs are called Web services.
Here we can see a rather more definite link between Web services and the use of XML, XML namespaces and XML schemas.
Given this definition it is rather harder to make the case for the current form of Z39.50 to be considered a Web service.
Nonetheless, the OAI-PMH and the use of RSS over HTTP certainly do fall well within these definitions.
The ongoing work on ZiNG [19] and in particular SRW [20], looks to be of interest here.
SRW is a protocol that will offer a subset of Z39.50 functionality based on XML and SOAP [21].
The development of technologies like SRW complements the existing use of the OAI-PMH and the Bath Profile of Z39.50 quite nicely, and we would expect it to feature in future revisions of the JISC IE architecture if and when it becomes more stable.
The Gardner article describes IBM’s Web services architecture [22], comprising a service requestor, a service provider and service registry.
The services offered by the service provider are described using the Web Service Description Language [23], with descriptions made available through the service registry.
Universal Discovery, Description and Integration (UDDI) [24] provides a technology for building distributed registries of Web services.
Figure 2 Web services architecture By turning this model on its side (with the requestor at the bottom, the provider at the top and the registry to the left) it is easy to see how the Web services architecture layers onto the current JISC IE architecture diagram above.
Between any two points in the architecture (portal and broker, aggregator and content provider, portal and content provider, etc.)
there is the triangular model made up by those two service components and the combined collection and service description service.
There is some logic in re-naming such a combined directory service as the JISC IE service registry.
Figure 3 JISC IE and Web services A recent study by Matthew Dovey [25], considers the possibilities for using WSDL and UDDI as the basis for service description within the JISC IE, albeit acknowledging the need to provide access to richer collection descriptions within or alongside these technologies.
From portals to portlets the service landscape gets more complex!
As a final thought, it is worth mentioning the current trend towards implementing portals using portlet technologies.
Portlets provide the building blocks for portals and feature heavily in many of the current portal building frameworks such as the Apache Jetspeed project [26], IBM’s WebSphere Portal Server [27] and Oracle’s Application Server Portal [28].
Portlets provide the visible components end-users see within portal pages.
Typically, each portlet offers a small chunk of functionality, such as a cross-search or the display of a news channel.
The RDN Subject Portals Project is adopting a portlet approach for the development of the RDN subject portals.
There are clear synergies between portlets and Web services and it is reasonable to expect that, in many cases, the functionality offered within a portlet will be built on an equivalent underlying Web service.
The big advantage of a portlet approach is that the chunks of functionality offered by the subject portals will, in theory, be available for embedding directly into institutional portal developments.
Goodbye monolithic portal applications hello modular, re-usable portlets!
However, there is a cost to this approach the need for the portal to have some knowledge about the portlets that are available to it, some of which will be local to the portal, some of which will be remote.
Portlets will form a whole new set of services that will need describing in order that they can be discovered by portals, and portal developers, administrators and users.
Conclusion This article has attempted to summarise the JISC IE architecture and compare it with emerging Web services architectures.
Although Web services are being carried along on a near tidal wave of new technologies and acronyms, the underlying concepts aren’t that different to those already in place.
There has been a tendency, at least in some parts, to see the use of Z39.50 in the JISC IE architecture as an indication that the architecture is not mainstream enough.
We would disagree Z39.50 appears in the architecture because there is no practical alternative open protocol available at the moment to support distributed searching.
But that is likely to change, and as new distributed search technolgies are developed they can be added to the JISC IE architecture.
What is perhaps more important, is whether there is a need to align the JISC IE architecture more fully with architectures based on Web services.
Such an alignment will set the JISC Information Environment firmly within the more general architectural frameworks being developed to support commercial portal activities and other business-to-business (b2b) service scenarios.
We have tried to demonstrate in this article that such an alignment does not require a drastic change to the current architecture.
References The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/> Information Environment: Development Strategy 2001-2005 (Draft) <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/IEstrategy.html> JISC Information Environment Architecture Andy Powell & Liz Lyon, UKOLN, University of Bath <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/> JISC Services <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/services/index.html#info> JISC Circular 1⁄02 Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Programme (FAIR) <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c01_02.html> Subject Portals Project <http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/> The Bath Profile Maintenance Agency <http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/bath/bath-e.htm> The Open Archives Initiative <http://www.openarchives.org/> RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0 <http://purl.org/rss/> Xgrain <http://edina.ed.ac.uk/projects/joinup/xgrain/> OpenURL Overview <http://www.sfxit.com/openurl/> OpenResolver: a Simple OpenURL Resolver Andy Powell, UKOLN, University of Bath <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/resolver/> SFX Content-sensitive Reference Linking <http://www.sfxit.com/> The JOIN-UP Programme <http://edina.ed.ac.uk/projects/joinup/> Athens Access Management System <http://www.athens.ac.uk/> An Introduction to Web Services Tracy Gardner, IBM United Kingdom Laboratories (Hursley) <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/gardner/> Web services – the Web’s next revolution <http://www-105.ibm.com/...OpenDocument> W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group Charter <http://www.w3.org/2002/01/ws-arch-charter> Z39.50-International: Next Generation <http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/zing.html> Search/Retrieve Web Service <http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw.html> Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1 <http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/> IBM Web services Conceptual Architecture <http://www-4.ibm.com/software/solutions/webservices/pdf/WSCA.pdf> Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1 <http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl> uddi.org <http://www.uddi.org/> JISC Information Environment Service Level Descriptions Matthew Dovey, Oxford University <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/service-description/study/> The Jakarta Project Jetspeed <http://jakarta.apache.org/jetspeed/site/> IBM WebSphere Portal Server Architecture <http://www-3.ibm.com/software/webservers/portal/architect.html> Oracle9i Application Server Portal Product Features <http://portalstudio.oracle.com/.../PORTAL_TWP_9_01.PDF> Author details Andy Powell UKOLN University of Bath a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Liz Lyon UKOLN University of Bath e.j.lyon@ukoln.ac.uk     Article Title: “The JISC Information Environment and Web services” Author: Andy Powell and Liz Lyon Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/information-environments/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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RDN: Resource Discovery Network Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines RDN: Resource Discovery Network Buzz data database archives thesaurus copyright cataloguing url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alistair Dunning reviews the launch of the RDN (Resource Discovery Network) Picture, just for a moment, a scholar wise in the books of the world but new to technology.
Having heard about this 'Internet' business she goes to one of these search engines to try and find some resources relevant to her field of study.
She offers the phrase 'medical ethics' (that being her field of study) to one rather garish and excitable search engine, but, after a delay of a few seconds, is proffered seemingly random links and enigmatic descriptions.
One link's description asks 'Do We Still Need Doctors?
(Price $17.50)', while another offers 'Information on how to work at home as a telecommuter.'
Hmm.
There is little here for the serious researcher.
As commentators on contemporary times have repeatedly pointed out, this is one of the symptoms of our technology-fuelled age there exists a surfeit of available information, and thus separating the useful from the useless and creating a manageable amount of data is a prime concern.
For those unable to find the resources that undoubtedly exist on the world wide web, help, in the shape of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), is at hand.
Located at the URL www.rdn.ac.uk [1], the RDN leads researchers, teachers and lecturers to a pre-existing catalogue of high-quality electronic resources.
For example, inputting 'medial ethics' into the RDN's Resource Finder, our relieved scholar from above would find a much shorter but more relevant list of resources; links, for instance, to the Journal of Medical Ethics, and to documents on euthanasia, genetics and private health care.
Creating such an electronic catalogue, covering a wide range of subject-areas, is no simple task.
It requires not only an array of specialists to analyse suitable resources, but technical skills to align catalogues from different subjects and, perhaps most importantly, the vision to allow such a network to flourish in an era of rapidly-changing information demands.
With these obstacles successfully negotiated, the benefits for the potential user are enormous.
It would go a long away to fulfilling the long-trumpeted possibilities of the Internet as a tool for uncovering resources vital for research and teaching.
These issues provided the theme for the official launch of the RDN.
Held on the 19th November at the Congress Centre, near Tottenham Court Road, London, the launch offered various speeches, demonstrations, presentations and some top-class grub.
Lynne Brindley, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Communications and IT) at the University of Leeds opened the event, welcoming delegates, and giving an indication of the shaping factors in the development of the RDN.
Pushed by the 1994 Follett Report, emphasising the possibilities of information technology in higher education, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) soon created the eLib project.
Within this were several subject gateways, including those for history, medicine and engineering.
Though these gateways were successful, they had only limited funding and covered only a small percentage of human knowledge.
Ms Brindley continued that the JISC rapidly saw the need for a much more extensive network of gateways.
From this demand, the RDN was born.
Funded by the JISC, with additional support from the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the Economic and Social Research Council, the RDN was to be led by two institutions, the University of Bath, and King's College, London.
Guest speaker Professor Howard Newby, currently President of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, and a former Director of the ESRC Data Archive, placed Ms Brindley's address in a larger context, concentrating on the possibilities for new resource-finding tools such as the RDN.
The RDN was in an excellent position to expand outside traditional boundaries.
By continually seeking partnerships and users beyond Britain, and by stressing the potential of the RDN to institutions and bodies outside higher education, the network could create a wide stakeholding base to secure its place as an essential tool for high-quality resource discovery.
And by developing relationships in the public and private sectors the RDN would be in an excellent position to support itself financially.
Professor Newby completed his speech by formally launching the Resource Discovery Network.
Once these speeches had ended, glowing plasma screens positioned around the conference hall beckoned the assorted guests.
These screens advertised the various 'hubs' that constitute the RDN, and were the centrepoint of each hub's exhibition stall.
Interested delegates gathered around the screens for a demonstration to gain a better idea of the hubs' task within the network.
Initially, the RDN is, along with the central executive, constituted by five separate websites or 'hubs', each one of which covers a branch of human enquiry and learning.
Visitors could therefore attend the stand for BIOME [ 2], the hub for the health and life sciences; EMC [3], the hub for engineering, mathematics and computing; Humbul [4], the hub for the humanities; PSIgate [5], the hub for the physical sciences; and SOSIG [6], the hub for the social sciences, business and law.
The hubs operate by employing subject specialists to catalogue and describe Internet resources relevant to their field.
Compared to the varying descriptions given by the generic search engines, the RDN's hubs offer much more thoroughness, as each description summarises the resource's contents and gauges its accuracy and utility.
The hubs also execute regular link-checks, measuring the resource's technical reliability and factual precision.
This ensures that users are not forwarded to redundant sites and that the high standard of information is maintained.
Once the delegates had finished digesting the excellent lunch provided (many applauded the dim sum with hoy sin sauce), they had the opportunity to attend more formal presentations on the history, aims and objectives of each of the hubs.
As regular readers of Ariadne will well be aware, some of these hubs, under the guise of the eLib project, existed in their own right for quite some time.
SOSIG was one of them; EEVL another, having now melded with mathematics and computers to form the EMC hub.
The one time OMNI gateway for biomedical resources has become part of a larger hub, BIOME.
Humbul evolved separately, from the humanities bulletin board of the same name.
Only PSIgate is a completely new hub.
Plans are also afoot to develop a hub in the Creative Arts and Industries.
These presentations gave the hubs the opportunity to show the breadth of the area they are covering.
Each hub can only hope to cover its field by carefully dividing their subject area and finding the relevant specialists for each domain.
For example, BIOME contains five separate gateways the pre-existing OMNI has been added to four new gateways, AgriFor (covering agriculture, forestry and food sciences), VetGate (covers all aspects of animal health) BioResearch (covering biological and biomedical research) and Natural Selection (covering the natural world).
The new PSIgate hub will deal with astronomy, chemistry, physics, earth sciences and material sciences.
It was a central theme of the day's presentations that the hubs cannot hope to develop a thorough service if their connections remain only within their own university.
Therefore, when it comes to organising subject specialists, the hubs have developed close links with other academic bodies.
Humbul, which is based at the University of Oxford, have, amongst others, organised contacts at universities in Oslo and Liverpool (for theology and philosophy), and in California and London (for English literature).
Hubs have also been quick to realise the importance of forging links with partners outside academia.
Amongst the partners with whom BIOME have affiliations are the Natural History Museum and the Royal Free Hospital.
The presentation given by SOSIG emphasised the importance of hubs constructing their own identities and communities.
SOSIG, like the other hubs, aim to do more than just provide a catalogue of resources.
The 'Grapevine' section of their website offers the opportunity for dialogue between researchers and employers; the former can post their CVs on the site, while the latter can forward details of training and development opportunities.
The site's (freely) registered members can also enter mailing forums for discussion and tailor the presentation of the site to their own needs.
Dragging the delegates in from the tea, coffee and buns provided in the foyer, the day ended with a speech by one of the RDN's co-directors, Lorcan Dempsey (also Director of the UK Office for Library and Information Networking).
Mr Dempsey re-emphasised the philosophy underpinning the RDN, and showed how the network could hope to expand in the future.
One particular aspect of the RDN he expanded upon was the utilisation of search devices more sophisticated than the free text boxes which grace normal search engines, (although these are still present) to ensure that the specialised demands of researchers and lecturers are met.
Thesaurus-based searching offers the user more precise or alternative terms than the one she has entered, giving the possibility of a broader search (should the user have been offered few hits) or a narrower one (should the user have received too many).
EMC's subject gateway for engineering, EEVL, is one of many gateways that allows users to search the catalogue via their specialised subject.
Once the user has selected, for instance, chemical engineering, she can then further specify what type of resource she is searching for library catalogues, patents and standards, databases, or mailing lists are a few of the available categories.
The user can also further differentiate between subject areas to provide an even more exacting search.
Chemical engineers can search filtered catalogues, for example, relating to 'chemical engineering processes' or 'chemical engineering science'.
Of course, the process can work the other way.
While some searches demand precision along subject lines, other users require searches working across several subject catalogues.
When our scholar interested in medical ethics conducted her search, the final result drew in resources from both BIOME and SOSIG.
Now academic work is increasingly done at an inter-disciplinary level, the RDN's ability to overlap two or more different hubs will be an important factor for users.
With this final point, the launch party of the Resource Discovery Network ended.
PowerPoint was exited, terminals were switched off, plasma screens ceased to glow.
The RDN had been presented its past, its hubs, its aims, its future and the delegates departed knowing they now had secure directions to navigate the confusion of the Internet.
For more information on the Resource Discovery Network please contact: Justine Kitchen Information and Training Officer Resource Discovery Network Centre King's College London Strand London WC2R 2LS Tel: +44 (0)171 848 2935 Fax: +44 (0)171 848 2939 Email: justine.kitchen@rdn.ac.uk Or visit our website at http://www.rdn.ac.uk Alastair Dunning Outgoing Information and Training Manager alastair.dunning@courtauld.ac.uk Photographs by Philip Hunter, UKOLN References 1.
The Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk 2.
BIOME, the hub for the health and life sciences http://biome.ac.uk 3.
EMC, the hub for engineering, mathematics and computing http://www.emc.ac.uk 4.
Humbul, the hub for the humanities http://www.humbul.ac.uk 5.
PSIgate, the hub for the physical sciences http://www.psigate.ac.uk 6.
SOSIG, the hub for the social sciences, business and law http://www.sosig.ac.uk Article Title: "Do we still need Search Engines?"
Author: Alistair Dunning Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/dunning/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz database cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom and Angela Joyce provide more updates on the Social Sciences Gateway, including a new range of European sites.
Portals Project Work is underway on the RDN Portals Development Project.
Three prototype faculty-level subject portals will be developed one at each hub, covering the subject areas of biomedical sciences, engineering and social sciences.
The portals will enable end-users to extend their searches to include an enhanced range of databases from amongst the JISC’s current content collection.
This project will add value to the UK’s learning, teaching and research resources by improving the way these resources are presented to the user.
For more information about the project see: http://www.portal.ac.uk/ New European Studies Section for Europe SOSIG is pleased to announce that from March 1st work has begun on a new section for the service.
The section will cover learning and research resources in European Studies and will be managed by the University of Birmingham.
Although the coverage will be mainly social science related there will also be some regard to related materials in the humanities, geography and the environment.
We hope that the new section will be ready for the beginning of the new academic year.
For more information about the new section contact Louise Woodcock at l.a.woodcock@bham.ac.uk or Debra Hiom at d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Spotlight on Europe With topical issues such as the Euro, European Union enlargement and the emergence of market economies in Eastern Europe, it is no surprise that "European" and "Union" are among the top search terms used in the SOSIG catalogue.
A casual browse through the catalogue sections will find European resources in many sections, including under EU Economics, Banks, Electronic Commerce and Marketing.
A search simply using the term "Europe" will find about 1300 hits!
Of course not all these come under business or economics, but cover other social science areas too.
Articles are divided up by their Resource Type, eg.
journal articles, news sites or research centres, which makes browsing easier.
Go to http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ to access the main catalogue.
There are two main approaches to finding European sites: either look under the above sections and browse, or search using terms like "European", "EU" or by combining terms like "European AND business".
What Type of Sites?
These fall into several areas – only a small selection can be given here: Official European Union sites The Europa Web site at http://europe.eu.int/ acts as a gateway to all of these, and despite the EU reputation for bureaucracy, many of these sites are user-friendly and helpful.
They are often classed by a particular EU directorate, such as Environment, Non-EU members, Women or Education.
Search under "Directorate-General" for these sites or click on the links in the Europa site.
UK-based sites Some good UK-based sites are worth a look: European Information Centres at http://www.euro-info.org.uk/ offers plenty of information for businesses, and the UK government Web site at http://www.open.gov.uk/ has a vast number of European sites.
European official financial sites Sites for central banks and stock markets are often very comprehensive and generally have an English language version.
The Euro The Euro is another hotly-debated topic and a whole SOSIG section is devoted to sites.
Look under Economics, click on International Economics and then on The Euro to access this growing section.
The Eurolandia site, for example, is excellent for schools but appeals to adults too.
Chambers of Commerce.
Eurochambres at http://www.eurochambres.be/ has links to chambers of commerce all round Europe.
Other sites There are many interesting sites not exclusively confined to the EU or Europe.
Try searching under "teleworking", "Eastern Europe" or "European AND business".
Finally, there are of course sites which offer (sometimes heated) debate on EU membership or joining European Monetary Union – either for or against.
Search under "EU AND membership" for a selection of these.
Future Expansion The SOSIG catalogue is a dynamic resource and we are constantly expanding and reviewing its contents.
Future plans include cataloguing more sites about emerging economies in Europe, small and medium-sized businesses, EU enlargement and more sites in other European languages.
We would also like to add more European business schools and economics departments (see the Grapevine section of SOSIG which has a Departments section).
Conclusion I hope this has given SOSIG users a taste of the huge variety of European sites we have catalogued.
Comments are always welcome.
Please email me at Angela.Joyce@bristol.ac.uk Users’ participation SOSIG always welcomes suggestions for new sites from users.
If you find a quality site with good educational content and design, go to http://www.sosig.ac.uk/new_resource.htm Author Details Debra Hiom SOSIG Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square BRISTOL BS8 1HH d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Angela Joyce Biz/ed Library Research Officer Biz/ed Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square BRISTOL BS8 1HH Angela.Joyce@bristol.ac.uk Article Title: "News from Planet SOSIG" Author: Debra Hiom and Angela Joyce Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/planet-sosig/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 21: Ariadne's Thread Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 21: Ariadne's Thread Buzz apache archives digitisation accessibility copyright sgml windows multimedia z39.50 cache interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Introduction to Ariadne issue 21 by Philip Hunter.
This is the twenty first issue of Ariadne.
Our first issue was published in January 1996, under the editorship of John Kirriemuir.
Twenty one issues is not exactly a birthday, but nevertheless a significant milestone: I'm reasonably sure that when the idea of a web magazine was first floated in 1995, it was not imagined that it would still be around five years later.
There are five main articles in this issue, each covering aspects of library networking which have to be synthesised effectively if we are to achieve the kind of seamlessly interconnected and useful electronic resources which the community is aiming at.
Debbie Campbell looks at how the original criteria proposed for an IMesh map against Australian initiatives in her substantial article: An Overview of Subject Gateway activities in Australia.
On the interoperability front, Paul Miller looks at the Z39.50 standard, and successfully manages to extract some meaning from the mass of associated literature in: Z39.50 for All.
He also contributes later in the magazine Developing the 'Bath Profile', a report on a Z39.50 specification for Library Applications and Resource Discovery.
Michael Day looks at the future of the scholarly interchange of information and its principle medium, the peer-reviewed journal in: The scholarly journal in transition and the PubMed Central proposal.
Now that the function of a scholarly journal can be achieved at a cheaper cost, nothing is likely to be quite the same again.
The editor of Ariadne, Philip Hunter, contributes an interview with Stuart Lee, manager of the 'Virtual Seminars in Teaching' project based at the Humanities Computing Unit in Oxford, on the prizewinning Wilfrid Owen Multimedia Digital Archive and the JTAP Virtual Seminars on WW1.
This project has successfully undertaken a virtually complete digitization of one author's work and made it available on the web, using SGML.
It has gone where others will soon follow, and is worth detailed scrutiny on that account alone (Digitizing Wilfrid).
Pedro Isaias, chiming rather presciently with current UK governmental exhortations, looks at e-Commerce technology in his follow up article on: Electronic Copyright Management Systems Among the items in the Regular Columns, The Web Editor column for this issue, 'Abzu and Beyond', is by the Archivist of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago Research Archives, Charles Jones.
He muses on the history of the Internet presence of the institution, which he more or less single-handedly created.
Phil Bradley looks at FAST (www.alltheweb.com), which has recently been launched as the most comprehensive of the search engines, and this article compares the FAST results with those of AltaVista and Northern Light.
It is definitely fast, definitely more comprehensive, but lacking in precise query tools so far.
Planet SOSIG has its usual column, and EEVL also; for the latter Roddy MacLeod mounts an interestingly tendentious, not to say strained argument about the 'success' or otherwise of EEVL.
The article still manages to impart a lot of useful information about the project.
The DISinHE Centre contributes an article on 'Web Content accessibility' by Paul Booth; and in Biz/Ed Bulletin Libby Miller looks at recent changes in the project, and describes some Internet Resources for academic economists and researchers.
The Public Libraries column looks at: VITAL the Value and Impact of End-User IT Services in public libraries (Juliet Eve).
On the technical front, in Windows NT Explorer, Brett Burridge seems enthusiastic about Internet Information Server (IIS 4.0).
Ian Peacock is similarly enthusiastic about mod_perl, a technology for supercharging the Apache Server, which of course runs on that other OS, Unix .
The Web Cache column for this issue is by Ruth Jenkins who explores some related issues for Library and Information Services.
Brian Kelly reports on the latest "Institutional Web Management Workshop" in his regular 'Web Focus' column.
Brian also contributes Web Watch for this issue, and explores the search facilities used by UK university Web sites.
Finally, Christine Dugdale supplies a conference report for ALISS (Academic Librarians in the Social Sciences).
Bernadette Daly, Ariadne's co-editor and lead editor of Exploit Interactive, has departed to become a senior librarian in Fountain Hills, Arizona.
Temporarily therefore I find myself unable to discuss the finer points of American English with anyone knowledgable in the office.
Nor do I have an excellent second pair of eyes for markup problems at the next desk.
Her skill and speed are missed already.
Ariadne wishes her well, and is likely to take up the standing sofa offer some time in the near future.
Author Details Philip Hunter Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 21: Ariadne's Thread" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 23-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The People's Network and the Learning Revolution: Building the NOF Digitize Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The People's Network and the Learning Revolution: Building the NOF Digitize Programme Buzz framework portal archives digitisation accessibility video ict interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Susi Woodhouse brings us up to date with developments.
The launch of the New Opportunities Fund’s £50 million NOFdigitise creation of learning materials (1) programme in July this year marks the beginning of a major UK-wide initiative set to create a fundamental step-change in learning support.
For the past two years, a quiet revolution has been under way preparing the groundwork for a collective leap of faith into the future and the new opportunities it offers.
The Government has made clear the importance it attaches to the role of learning in all its guises as the cornerstone of people’s lives.
Furthermore, the Government sees universal access to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and its use as a delivery mechanism for learning opportunities as the catalyst for change.
The People’s Network To enable this to happen, Government has invested in the People’s Network (2): a £170 million project to create ICT learning centres in all 4,300 UK public libraries by the end of 2002 funded through the New Opportunities Fund, and supported with expert advice on planning and implementation from the People’s Network Development Team at Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries (3).
£50 million of this funding stream is for NOFdigitise, which will provide a significant element of the “stuff” of the People’s Network.
This newly-digitised content will be made available free at the point of use not only via the People’s Network, but also via the National Grid for Learning as a major contribution to online resources complementing National Curriculum materials This short article sets out how the programme has been put together and identifies issues, outcomes and impacts for the future.
NOFdigitise offers a landscape of opportunity complementing related programmes in other sectors including central Government’s UKOnline portal, the National Electronic Library for Health, higher and further education’s Distributed National Electronic Resource, and learning materials provided through the media and commerce.
It has the potential to demonstrate excellence, celebrate diversity and become a benchmark for the future digital learning continuum informing the development of programmes such as the Department for Culture Media and Sport’s Culture Online.
In view of this intensive level of activity, not only in the UK but across the globe what is it which makes this programme any different?
At a strategic level, the programme in harmony with other similar initiatives recognises the importance of creating a “networked learning space” which takes advantage of connectivity to engage users in shaping not only their own ideas, learning and lives, but to offer opportunity to make informed choices, to feed imagination, to build capacity, and to support the development of communities of interest.
However, over and above the sheer size of the sum of money being committed in one tranche of awards, there are three aspects that characterise the NOF-digitise programme that are special: It reflects ALL walks of life, encompassing a broad church of interests and information, supporting learning for life in its broadest sense It encompasses not only a wide range of participating organisations from the public, private and voluntary sectors, but also the whole continuum of experience from those who are old hands to those for whom this is a maiden voyage.
It will offer new opportunities for providers and partakers alike providing an invaluable legacy of increased competencies and confidence for both Building blocks of the programme The programme, launched in August 1999, sets out to improve the quality of life for all citizens through the imaginative and innovative use of Internet and digital technologies to create a coherent body of content that will unlock the rich resources of our knowledge organizations and support learning for life in its broadest sense.
Three overarching themes were specified reflecting the policies of the present Government’s strategies for the information age and ensuring a broad base for potential applicants: re-skilling the nation; cultural enrichment; and citizenship in a modern state.
The New Opportunities Fund made clear its commitment to fund projects that used best practice in creating digital materials, and to fund content that reflected the rich diversity of resources that is achievable through partnership.
The concept of partnership and collaboration was to form the bedrock of the whole programme.
It is important to appreciate that no-one had attempted a programme of such broad scale and scope before: it was impossible to predict what would happen, and all involved applicants and assessors alike would be part of a ground-breaking voyage of discovery requiring flexibility, adaptability and lateral thinking.
Stage one of the submission process resulted in some 340 applications totalling in excess of £140million and, following assessment by a panel of experts, some 200 institutions were subsequently invited to prepare full applications for Stage 2, of which 154 were awarded grants following further assessment.
This bald summary is, of course, highly simplistic, and as the bones of the programmes began to emerge, there were many issues to be addressed.
Indeed, this is still true as projects go “live” and vision becomes reality.
No-one can come up with all the answers in advance of the questions, and one of the characteristics of NOF-digitise will be innovation through the sharing of experiences.
The New Opportunities Fund’s attitude to the level of risk here is refreshingly healthy, and an apposite embodiment of its name.
The consortium approach to NOFdigitise In order to embed the partnership approach at the heart of the programme, the People’s Network Team at Resource undertook a careful topic analysis of the 343 applications for the Fund as an adjunct to the Stage One assessment process.
This would identify synergies between individual applications and inform the shape of the framework for the overall programme in a way which reflected and enhanced its three broad themes.
Following recommendations made by the Expert Panel on which applications should go forward to Stage Two, the next step was for Resource and the New Opportunities Fund to assemble individual applications into topic-based groups where it was felt likely that shared programmes for development, based on natural synergies could be found, and to invite those groups to work as consortia.
Efficient and effective use of resources for all concerned and technical coherence were driving factors, but most important was the wish to embed an outward-facing focus on learners’ needs by exploiting the flexibility of the networked environment which allows links and connections impossible in other media.
This resulted in a mix of consortia addressing particular themes (such as manufacturing, genealogy, basic skills, science and invention, world cultures) and those looking at resources reflecting the character (i.e.
sense of place) of a particular geographic area (the West Midlands, Wales, London, areas of outstanding natural beauty).
Whilst wishing to encourage as great a level of integration and joint working amongst consortium partners as possible, the over-riding concern was to provide a flexible framework within which individual solutions could be reached, not a straitjacket where one size had to fit all.
Several different working models were suggested from complete integration where a lead partner in a consortium managed and delivered the whole project through more informal arrangements where individual partners’ expertise and experience was used across the consortium to best effect, to a stand-alone option where for very good reasons an informed choice was made to continue as a single application.
Indeed, many applications were partnerships from the outset, some very extensive -such as Gathering the Jewels led by the National Library of Wales with 172 contributing organisations.
Technical standards Clearly, one of the major critical success factors for the digitisation programme is that it should be possible to share content seamlessly between projects, between projects and users, and between NOF-digitise other content creation programmes and users, to be able to find and use content without specialist tools, and to be able to manage it effectively in both the immediate and the long-term.
The adoption of a range of technical standards for the programme was therefore seen as a must from the outset.
The benefits of such a coherent, managed programme which ensures interoperability, sustainability, long-term accessibility and integrity are obvious and do not need to be rehearsed here.
The UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN) was asked to prepare a technical standards document for the programme which set out not only those standards which were to be mandatory across all projects, but also presented a range of others which would further enhance best practice creation, presentation and use of digital resources.
These standards which follow the digital lifecycle for ease of application will be revised from time-to-time during the life of the programme to reflect developments in the field, and the latest version (July 2001) can be seen at http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/nof/technicalstandards.html Support for projects As the scale and scope of the programme began to emerge at Stage One, the New Opportunities Fund and Resource began to discuss how best to provide support and guidance to applicants at Stage Two.
The need for expert advice on technical issues was clear, but other aspects such as business planning, intellectual property, project management also needed to be addressed and the Fund was keen to generate a sense of community amongst its digi applicants which would lead to shared work and experience and result in capacity building.
The solution was a three-way partnership in which UKOLN provided technical guidance, and Resource and the Fund a range of project planning support via the UKOLN and People’s Network websites together with a discussion list, all kick-started with a series of roadshows across the UK.
This support service continues through the life of the programme proper, and is seen as an important means of providing a vehicle for debate and discussion and supporting the development of the digi community.
There is much to consider: cross programme issues such as the use of Geographic Information Systems, emerging models for rights management, and for service sustainability, resource discovery, re-use, long-term access and evaluation.
See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof and http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/nof/ for more information.
Stage Two: defining the future The year of intense activity between the summers of 2000 and 2001 is one which will be remembered not only by project applicants as they put together their submissions in time for the February 2001 deadline but also by the New Opportunities Fund and Resource as the framework for a fair and accountable assessment process was put together and delivered.
In order to meet the tight timescale, a forty-strong team of expert assessors (technical and business) was assembled and managed by Resource to support the New Opportunities Fund ’s own team of case managers for the programme as the most efficient way of covering all aspects and ensuring that all applications received due and proper attention.
Recommendations were then put to three meetings of a Panel of Experts whose job it was to consider the appropriateness and viability of applications in the context of the whole programme and to advise the New Opportunities Fund Board who made final decisions on grants to be awarded.
Now the real work could at last begin.
The future starts here The 154 grants awarded (ranging from £14,000 to £4 million) to some 37 consortia and 34 individual projects will together produce a digital learning materials foundry of well over 1 million images, tens of thousands of audio and video clips, innumerable pages of text and many hundreds of new learning packages on topics as diverse as biscuits, voluntary work, migration, biodiversity, football, contemporary art, music and photography, reading, etc… It is impossible to reflect the huge diversity that is NOFdigitisein this short article, but a handful of examples are embedded along the way.
Imagination, innovation and creativity are central to the success of the programme and will realise the promise of a rich fabric of learning resources delivering the vision of New Opportunity.
To celebrate this, the Fund has begun work on a showcase website for all NOF-digitise projects which will develop over the life of the programme.
At present it is a simple presentation of thumbnail sketches and can be viewed at http://www.nof-digitise.org Impact What will be the impact of all this?
At the moment, of course, it is impossible to say for sure (and a multi-layered evaluation and impact programme is currently being prepared by the Fund and Resource).
The expectation is that is will, in combination with other programmes, fuel a learning revolution for all, engaging interests, whetting appetites for more and changing people’s lives for the better.
References (1) www.nof-digitise.org (2) www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk (3) www.resource.gov.uk Author Details   Susi Woodhouse Senior Network Adviser, People’s Network Development Team, Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries.www.resource.gov.uk   Article Title: “The People’s Network and the Learning Revolution: Building the NOF Digitise Programme” Author: Susi Woodhouse Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/woodhouse/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Virtual Training Suite Launch Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Virtual Training Suite Launch Buzz data video url research Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir reports on the Edinburgh stage of the launch of the RDN's Virtual Training Suite.
Wednesday the 9th of May saw the simultaneous launch of the JISC-funded Virtual Training Suite [1] across the United Kingdom.
The launch took place in six academic institutions: Edinburgh, Leeds, Bristol, Nottingham, Kings College London, and Manchester.
We attended the Scottish launch, which was held in the main library of Edinburgh University.
The Virtual Training Suite consists of forty online tutorials designed to help students, lecturers and researchers improve their Internet information skills.
The tutorials offer self-directed learning, take around an hour each to complete, and include quizzes and interactive exercises to lighten the learning experience.
The subject coverage of the tutorials is impressive, ranging from “Internet for Health and Safety”, “Internet Politician”, “Internet for Nature” to “Internet Anthropologist” and “Internet Developer”.
This wide range of quite specific subjects means that most people should find one (or possibly two or three) tutorials that very closely match their subject interests.
The event began with Micheal Breaks, University Librarian of Heriot-Watt University, opening proceedings wearing a bright yellow Virtual Training Suite t-shirt, reminiscent of the attire worn to raves a decade ago.
As Michael outlined the VTS, a slideshow sequentially outlined each of the guides in the background.
Following this, a video was played of Michael Wills [2], the Minister for Learning and Technology, who gave us his positive verdict and approval on the Virtual Training Suite.
His central message was how the Virtual Training Suite would help users to “harness technology efficiently”.
The highlight of the launch was a phone conference link-up between all six of the launch sites.
Despite cynical mutterings of “it’ll never work” from several attendees, it actually worked, and we were treated to Nicky Ferguson from the Institute for Learning and Research Technology seemingly auditioning for the job of Eurovision Song Contest Presenter e.g.
“Come in Edinburgh, can you hear me Michael?”.
A fine lunch was served to all attendees, the number of which seemed to mysteriously double as the food was dished out (the fact that EDINA work in the same building being surely a coincidence :-) ) As usual with any event organised by EEVL [3], a large number of goodies such as pens, balloons and so forth were available to take away; in fact, my previous place of work significantly reduced its office costs due to EEVL-related items being picked up at events.
A fully equipped lab was available for people to experiment with the Virtual Training Suite.
Previous to today, I had already gone through eight of these, being interested (but at the same time alarmed) at how much new information I hoovered up.
One of the interesting points about using the VTS tutorials is that in no way does it seem like hard work; but, after an hour or so, you discover that you’ve actually learnt a lot.
Perhaps that is, and will be, the secret of their success.
Over an extended lunch, several delegates and VTS developers shared their thoughts.
Robin Rice (Data Library, Edinburgh University), the developer of the Internet for Social Statistics tutorial, said “I think the most important addition the VTS brings to Higher Education is the subject specific context for learning to use the Internet effectively”.
Peter Maggs (Library, University of Newcastle) said “I particularly like the development of the scenarios…several students I have worked with have used the VTS to develope a worked practical example”.
Many other developers, Information Intermediaries and (most importantly) users gave unreserved positive comments.
References The Virtual Training Suite Web site is at: http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ The launch speech by Michael Wills, the Minister for Learning and Technology, can be found at: http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/video/index.htm The EEVL Web site is at: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ Author Details John Kirriemuir Independent Consultant johnkirriemuir@hotmail.com Article Title: “Virtual Training Suite Launch” Author: John Kirriemuir Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/vts/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 25: Beyond the Web Site Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 25: Beyond the Web Site Buzz data software html database dissemination xml tei archives metadata namespace schema repositories copyright sgml dtd z39.50 e-learning unicode interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter on the contents of Ariadne issue 25 and recent developments in the world of Digital Library initiatives.
The Higher Education (HE) community interest in information technology remains very much the same as it was when the web first appeared: networked access to high quality (and quality assured) information resources.
Current activities in the UK (the RDN, the DNER, HERO, etc) are logical developments of these core interests.
But in the few years which have passed, the concept of how such information ought to be accessed and what the nature of the interface might be (at both superficial and deep levels) has been discussed in various digital library forums and refined into a number of practical demonstrator applications and projects (the various hybrid library projects, the Agora project, etc).
These applications can of course function via web interfaces, but the web has a high maintenance overhead, and information delivery by this means is optional rather than mandatory (Z39.50 being a case in point).
The key aspect of networked information resources is the suitability for the purpose in question, rather than the protocol by which resource is delivered.
In Ariadne 25 we look at a number of issues which lie beyond the concept of the web site: issues which would have to be addressed in any networked environment in which dynamic and profiled access to information is of principal importance.
In A policy context eLib and the emergence of the subject gateways Derek Law and Lorcan Dempsey outline some of the features of the policy environment which led to the setting up of the influential 'subject gateways' as part of the UK Electronic Libraries Programme, and they thus put current developments into a useful historical context.
Altogether this covers a period of development of no more than seven years, but things have changed a great deal in such a short time.
Looking at the context in which policy has developed explains a good deal about the current appearance of the institutional landscape in the UK information networking field for instance the Follett Report in 1993 (which essentially gave rise to the UK eLib programme) makes no reference at all to the Web: computer networking was conceived in entirely different terms less than a decade ago.
George Brett II gets an honourable mention in the Law/Dempsey article, as influential in similar areas in the US at around the same time as the UK eLib programme got under way; and it was a great pleasure to meet him a few months back when he visited UKOLN.
He contributes his view of current developments in the article The Klearinghouse: an inventory of knowledge technologies.
He notes that while advances in networking, computing, scientific research and education applications have been proceeding at a rapid pace, there is almost no coordinated effort to capture, collect, or otherwise systematically organize the results.
The Klearinghouse is a proposed solution to the problem.
The idea is an interesting one, which parallels similar proposals early in the history of modern science: the Royal Society in London was originally founded partly to function as a clearing house (as well as a publishing house and as a data repository).
Science never looked back, and the idea was emulated around the world.
The notion of a co-ordinating institution for technical and scientific development was an idea of Francis Bacon's, which he published in the 'New Atlantis.'
There were also existing amateur arrangements around in the early seventeenth century, one very famous example being run by the French theologian and mathematician Marin Mersenne, who acted as a one-man information hub for many of the most famous scientists in Europe.
It was said that "to inform Mersenne of a discovery, meant to publish it throughout the whole of Europe."
It seems pretty obvious that the Internet needs something like this too, but on a sound institutional basis, and sooner rather than later.
In Virtual Universities Jonathan Foster observes that the impact of electronic methods of learning and teaching and the increased use of networked resources by library and information professionals has been researched by a number of UK Electronic Library Programme (eLib) projects (these issues have also been addressed by many of the eLib supporting studies, published in parallel with the project programme).
Other institutions and projects have also made significant contributions to an awareness of the issues.
The UK Higher Education Funding Councils have, over the past decade, funded a number of initiatives promoting the use of communications and information technology (C&IT) in UK Higher Education, including the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP), the Learning Technnology Dissemination Initiative (LTDI), etc; and now the e-University project (announced February 2000) will build on the experience of earlier initiatives, and will necessarily have to attend to many of the issues mentioned in Jonathan's article.
In Application Profiles Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel look at the issue of mixing and matching metadata schemas.
They argue that part of the difficulty with constructing and managing metadata schemas is caused by different approaches being taken by different groups of people, standards makers and implementors.
Standards makers use a top down approach, 'driven by a search for a coherent element set', whilst implementors are interested in producing a differentiated service which might mean using proprietary solutions.
The flexibility of web technology allows them to 'choose or construct a metadata schema best fitted for their purpose'.
Existing implementations of metadata schema rarely use the complete standard schema, rather they use a subset.
Local extensions to the subset might be added for specific requirements, and implementors might want to combine elements from more than one standard.
Application profiles are part of an architecture for metadata schemas which can be shared between standards makers and implementors.
An application profile consists of data elements drawn from one or more namespace schemas as combined together by implementors and optimised for a particular local application.
The principal characteristics of an application profile are: it uses existing namespaces; does not introduce new data elements; it can specify permitted schemes and values; and it can refine standard elements.
We have two articles related to the US Perseus project: the first is Knowledge Management in the Perseus Digital Library by Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox et al, on the knowledge management tools which lie behind the Perseus Project's literary materials and text tools, available to both students and scholars.
These management tools have to be sufficiently rich to be both useful to the user of the services, and also to future-proof the resource against technological change.
The former is a tricky proposistion, since the tool and usage requirements of the user have to be anticipated in the construction of the service.
The Perseus Project chose SGML, using the rich mark-up schema developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (the TEI) between 1989 and 1994.
As the authors point out, they 'have benefited from the generality and abstraction of structured markup which has allowed us to deliver our content smoothly on a variety of platforms'.
They point out that: 'customized DTDs ease the encoding of individual documents and often allow scholars to align their tags with the intellectual conventions of their field...[but] at the same time, they can raise barriers to both basic and advanced applications within a digital library' in other words, the very flexibility of markup schema can be an obstacle to interoperability.
The authors illustrate how their system allows the digital librarian to create partial mappings between DTD elements, enabling a focus on the structural features of the texts, despite different encodings.
As a consequence, the project has been able to integrate large numbers of texts from different collections into the Perseus Digital Library with 'very little custom programming.'
The second Perseus project related article is Electronic Homer, by Martin Mueller, which discusses the issue of how the availability of electronic editions of Homer may affect the way readers use the text, and the actual benefits of access to electronic versions of a canonical piece of literature.
Both of these articles complement a third article (principle author Gregory Crane): The Symbiosis Between Content and Technology in the Perseus Digital Library, which appears in the second issue (October 2000) of Ariadne's sister web magazine Cultivate Interactive.
Paul Miller and Alice Grant contribute Towards the Intelligent Museum: in which they explore the international collections standards organization the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information, which is attempting to bring order to the wider world of digital museums, archives and galleries.
They point out that CIMI has been at the forefront of bringing the 'information revolution' to museums, and that its past work has included 'important conceptual modelling of museum collections, the creation of an early Z39.50 Profile, and a rich SGML DTD, as well as extensive testing of the Dublin Core'.
The importance of its work has led the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to become a member, and now takes a seat on its Executive Committee.
Currently CIMI is working with the former Museum Documentation Association (MDA) to establish an XML DTD for SPECTRUM, the UK Museum Documentation Standard.
This DTD would permit easier integration of information across diverse systems in use within single organisations, such as, as the authors suggest, collections management applications and back-end web management databases.
Handy if you want to make profiled access to your collection data available via a dynamic web interface.
Or indeed another kind of networked interface for that matter.
Dianne Kennedy reports on the XML 2000 conference in Paris, which featured a number of new XML content management tools.
The range now available includes editing and authoring tools, workflow and publication software.
She also reports on the announcement by Softquad Europe of their latest version of XMetaL, which now has Unicode support.
ZOPE Swiss Army Knife for the Web?
Paul Browning on the Zope multiple authoring environment.
'Zope' stands for the Z Object Publishing Environment, and it offers some 'out of the box' publishing mechanisms, including WebDAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning).
WebDAV is a protocol which provides an extension to HTTP and employs the concept of workflow.
Workflow is a (useful) concept still rare in HTML oriented approaches to the web, but which is now well established in SGML web publishing mechanisms (sophisticated SGML workflow and publishing packages were around in 1996).
Zope also allows the site maintainer to manage content: users can be authenticated, and permissions granted to use objects.
This offers a solution to a problem faced by organisations: multiple instances of information, competing for authenticity.
Organizations need an information strategy which allows only single instances of authenticated information, and, as Paul suggests, an environment which encourages other parts of the organisation to reference (not copy) the single instance.
Zope's Database Adapter offers solutions for this kind of problem.
Zope is also 'XML aware' and can export collections of objects in XML format.
Other highlights of this issue include: Planet SOSIG Debra Hiom and Emma Place introduce the Resource Discovery Network's (RDN) 'Virtual Training Suite' (VTS).
Web Focus Brian Kelly reports on the recent International Web Management Workshop held in Bath.
Some pictures illustrating the event are available at the end of this editorial.
Maurice Line reviews Elaine Svenonius' 'The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization' published by MIT press.
Below is a selection of pictures from the International Web Management Workshop held in the University of Bath in September 2000.
The first three are from the exhibition held on the third day of the conference; the remaining pictures show the indoor barbecue and the barn dance on the second evening of the conference.
Brian Kelly (who organised the conference), puts in an unannounced appearance as a floorsweeper during the rapper dance display shown in the last two pictures.
Suggestions for articles for issues 26 to 28 are now being considered.
Article proposals should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Books for review should be sent to: The Editor Ariadne UKOLN The Library, University of Bath Claverton Down Bath BA2 7AY United Kingdom Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Marieke Napier Ariadne Deputy Editor Email: m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 25: Beyond the Web Site" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Creating Websites for e-Citizens: the Public Library Web Managers Workshop 2002 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Creating Websites for e-Citizens: the Public Library Web Managers Workshop 2002 Buzz framework blog e-learning ict e-government url research Citation BibTex RIS In the first of a series of articles, Penny Garrod takes us through some of the choices confronting UK public libraries, and begins by looking at the ramifications of the DCMS report "Framework for the future".
What is the primary role and function of the public library in 21st Century Britain?
Are public libraries in danger of trying to do too many things?
Are they trying to please all of the people all of the time?
How can the People's Network be sustained post-lottery funding?
What is special about public libraries do they have a Unique Selling Point?
Are traditional, book-based services being run down as the focus switches to ICT and e-everything?
What action, if any, should be taken in response to the report on public libraries from the Audit Commission in 2002 [1] [2].
These are the sort of questions that have been gathering like storm clouds on library horizons for some time.
Opinions as to what activities public libraries should focus on were aired at the Public Library Authority conference in September 2002 [3], with strong cases being made for the promotion of books and reading on the one hand, and for e-government on the other.
Reading and libraries, according to the report Start with the Child [4] are "crucial to achieving our national ambitions for community cohesion, active citizenship, lifelong learning and happy lives for our children".
McKeone and McKearney, of The Reading Agency, take this one stage further, and argue that libraries should use imaginative approaches to get more people to use their public libraries, and that libraries should be seen as "a centre of the community where exciting things are happening" [5].
Robert Kirk, Head of e-government at West Sussex County Council, argues that libraries are a finite resource and therefore need to prioritise.
For West Sussex, e-government is seen as the way forward because it underpins all public services.
A quick trip around West Sussex's website revealed that several of their one stop shops (described as 'Help points' -"single points of contact for any enquiry by the public about any local government or health authority service in West Sussex") are based in libraries.
Whichever model you favour, the new report from DCMS (see below) sees libraries playing a critical role in "promoting greater equality of access to and capability in using information, engaging in learning and acquiring knowledge".
Framework for the future: Libraries, Learning and Information in the next decade Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), February 2003 Framework for the future, the DCMS review of public libraries [6], was expected to provide some of the answers, not only to what libraries should be doing, but how these activities might be funded once initial funding has ended.
The framework was promised in Autumn 2002, and here it is at last but does it deliver?
It does provide praise and encouragement especially for those on the 'right' track, but it does read a bit like an end of term school report "Janet/John has done quite well but could do better".
There is praise for libraries housed in bright, new, shiny buildings; the concept of library as physical space and tangible place seems to be making a come-back, despite the lure of the virtual model the library "without walls", and the increasing trend in formal education towards e-learning.
The report then moves on to the nitty gritty stuff the vision for the public library service for the next decade, which would take us to 2013 quite a long time, given the rate at which government departments change their names, merge or even disappear completely.
We may even have a change of government during this timeframe what happens then?
Arriving at this vision involved extensive consultation with the library community and beyond, and one might anticipate that something of major concern to this community i.e.
funding, would be dealt with.
A stakeholder group was appointed with representation from a host of organisations including the Basic Skills Agency, the Local Government Association, and the Office of the e-Envoy.
There was input from the Advisory Council on Libraries, and the acknowledgments run to several pages.
The day after publication, CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) ran a news item on their website headed: "'Essential' Public Libraries need resources to do the job".
The article quotes Dr Bob McKee, CILIP's Chief Executive: "As the report acknowledges, money for public libraries comes not from DCMS but from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Department for Education & Skills also has a strong potential interest, which is already recognised by the Education Secretary," Dr McKee points out.
This fragmentation of the funding base is a systemic weakness referred to in the report, and Dr McKee believes that it contributes directly to the variation in standards of public library service across the country.
"Much of the innovation praised in the report comes from fixed-term project or partnership funding which is not always provided through central government, "Dr McKee notes, "The core funding for the Reading Agency, for example, comes from various arts bodies and from CILIP."
[7] How these funding anomalies might be overcome seems to have been overlooked by DCMS, or perhaps they simply don't have any answers.
Project funding is certainly the only means by which many libraries are able to develop and pilot new services, although the report did not highlight this fact.
However, one could argue that the fact that certain libraries have successfully bid for funds indicates that they are proactive, and able to seize opportunities when they come along.
Many libraries, however, will have lost out in the bidding process, whilst others may not have the resources to even contemplate applying for funds.
Most projects disseminate the lessons they have learnt so that others may follow in their footsteps.
However, developing new services requires cash, even when the groundwork has been done by others.
Barry Cropper, Chair of the CILIP Executive Board, reinforces this message when he argues that building relationships with business "is no substitute for adequate core funding"; and that the public library service is a statutory service, which should be adequately supported by public spending [8].
Update, the CILIP magazine, devotes three pages of news to the framework in the March edition.
"Framework or furore?"
and "where is the leadership (and cash?)"
it asks [9].
The selected views suggest that many feel the framework does not reach the parts it was expected to reach.
It presents a balanced and fair view of the current situation, but fails to tackle the main issues.
Bob Usherwood compares it unfavourably to a report from the Northern Ireland equivalent of DCMS [10], which includes 73 recommendations and several costed initiatives.
So what activities should libraries be focusing on?
Gateshead Libraries have introduced a Weblog (described as "the world's hottest craze" in Guardian online [11]) and Peter Bolger ('RefDesk department') has posted a message which quotes Baroness Blackstone, Minister of State for the Arts, speaking at the launch of the framework: Tessa Blackstone said: "Going to the library for books and general information has been part of our lives for more than a hundred years.
Great literature is, without question, our country's greatest gift to the world's cultural heritage, and libraries are the means by which we share and celebrate it.
Reading is essential to modern life, and a major source of pleasure for millions.
The Government is committed to public libraries and all that they stand for.
Our strategy for their future makes promoting reading their key priority.
Libraries also have and will continue to have a central role in helping people from all walks of life to be part of the communications revolution sweeping the world."
[12] So are the folk who advocated that reading and books should be the key priority right after all?
Does this mean that People's Network computers are to be used solely to promote books and reading, and do we need a 59-page document to tell us that?
Well, no, it is slightly more complex, as the Baroness's final sentence above suggests.
There are four factors which libraries should consider when developing services: Evolution: new roles and services should emerge from traditional core skills Public value: library services should have spin-off benefits for the rest of society, for example, by improving adult literacy or pre-school learning Distinctiveness: libraries should build on their open, neutral, self-help culture; they should not duplicate the efforts of other public or private sector providers Local interpretations of national programmes: the People's Network project is given as an example of a national programme that has been taken up in different ways at local level Libraries should then concentrate on three main areas of activities, all of which meet the above criteria: Promotion of reading and informal learning Access to digital skills and services, including e-government Measures to tackle social exclusion, build community identity and develop citizenship These areas of activity inter-relate and complement each other they are not mutually exclusive.
They meet the current political and economic agenda which is to build a skilled, literate (ICT skills and traditional literacy) citizenry who are employable, informed and contented, (well maybe the last one is a bit unrealistic).
Traditional literacy skills are required before you can develop digital skills, and digital skills comprise information-handling and ICT skills.
Reading fosters human qualities which can help improve quality of life and one's relationships with others; qualities such as imagination, creativity, emotional intelligence, spirituality, artistic sensibility and so on.
Digital skills are essential for the workplace, and increasingly for citizenship as we enter the era of web-based government.
Literacy skills are essential for survival in Western civilisation and for improved quality of life.
The government aims to draw in those outside the system whilst education and lifelong learning are the raison d'être of libraries.
Books, reading, and access to information and learning resources are a means to an end.
In the words of the review: "...it is hard for people to be active citizens unless they can read newspapers and government publications" (4.4 page 24).
Libraries should be promoting the skills and "the appetite for reading".
Many libraries are already making good progress in the areas identified in the framework.
They tend to be located within local authorities where the potential of libraries has been identified and acknowledged.
Some of these are 'beacon councils' which light the way for others, and they may also have achieved good ratings in the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) exercise [13].
SOCITM (the Society of Information Technology Management), in the flier for their latest "Better Connected" report, note a strong correlation between well-developed websites and councils that have an excellent CPA result [14].
I suspect that the same goes for library services good libraries are located within councils that have identified their value in delivering the current agenda, and have allocated funds accordingly.
Good leadership is also a critical success factor and library leadership is a hot topic, both here and in the United States and Australia, according to Sheila Corrall [15].
There is a dearth of good candidates coming into library management at present and large numbers of senior managers are now approaching retirement.
Public libraries will need people with the ability to manage change; people with vision and flair; people who thrive in a constantly changing environment, and who know how to put their libraries on the local, regional and national maps.
In the next issue, I will be dusting off the Ariadne telescope.
I shall train it on one of the three key areas for future public library activity outlined in the Framework for the future report, namely: the 'access to digital skills and services (including e-government)' topic.
The aim will be to seek out new life forms in the guise of innovative practice, pour encourager les autres, so to speak.
I will, however, avoid focusing on libraries already highlighted in the DCMS report.
This would violate the first law of 21st Century information professionalism, which states that under no circumstances must effort be duplicated or wheels reinvented (even if the original was designed for a handcart).
Your input would be most welcome.
If you would like to share with Ariadne readers any successes you have had in providing access to digital services and skills, please send me an email at p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk.
Thank you.
References Audit Commission (2002).
Building Better Library Services.
ACKnowledge.
Learning from audit, inspection and research.
http://ww2.audit-commission.gov.uk/publications/lfair_libraries.shtml See also: Public Library column in Ariadne 32: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/public-libraries/ Public Library Authorities Conference 2002: Making connections, making a difference.
Public Libraries in society.
Carden Park Resort Hotel, Chester Tuesday 15 Friday 18 October 2002. http://www.cilip.org.uk/groups/plg/plg4.html Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).
(2002) Start with the Child.
http://www.cilip.org.uk/advocacy/startwiththechild/ Gary McKeone and Miranda McKearney.
(2002) Hard to ignore.
Public Library Journal.
Vol.17 (4).
Pp.105-107.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport Framework for the future: Libraries, Learning and Information in the next decade.
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2003/framework_future.htm (available in Portable Document Format (PDF) in three parts: pages 1-20 (289 Kb); pages 21-40 (400 Kb) and pages: 41-59 (128Kb) CILIP News, 11 February 2003: http://www.cilip.org.uk/news/2003/110203.html Ibid.. Update.
Vol.
2 (3), March 2003.
Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Northern Ireland, http://www.dcalni.gov.uk/ "Tomorrow's Libraries" http://www.dcalni.gov.uk/libraries.htm Online on the Web.
Google takes over Blogger.
The Guardian Online.
20 February 2003, p.3.
Gateshead Libraries weblog posted by Peter Bolger on 13 February 2003: http://refdesk.weblogger.com/ Gateshead libraries: http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/libraries/index.html Comprehensive Performance Assessment: http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/ and: http://www.go-se.gov.uk/key%20business/LA/cpa_what.htm Society of Information Management (SOCITM) Better Connected 2003. http://www.socitm.gov.uk Sheila Corrall, speaking at the Public Library Authorities Conference 2002: Making connections, making a difference.
Public Libraries in society.
Carden Park Resort Hotel, Chester.
Tuesday 15 Friday 18 October 2002. http://www.cilip.org.uk/groups/plg/plg4.html ; see also: "Growing leaders".
Public Library Journal.
Vol.17 (4) 2002. pp.
115-116, 118.
Author Details Penny Garrod Public Libraries Networking Focus UKOLN Email: p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Website: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/ Article Title: "Creating websites for e-citizens: the Public Library Web Managers workshop, 2002" Author:Penny Garrod Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/public-libraries/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
"I'd hoped we'd end up with fewer books when the library became electronic" Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: Naked in Cyberspace Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: Naked in Cyberspace Buzz data software database copyright privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy taps into our increasing collective paranoia about privacy with a review that explores the use of personal information in the Cyber Age.
Tales of identity theft and computer hacking used to be the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, but in our increasingly techno world they are commonplace.
It was only the other month that Bristol pensioner Derek Bond was held at a Durban police station for over two weeks by the FBI after a major fraudster stole his identity.
Carole Lane’s research guide Naked in Cyberspace has its roots in our increasing fear of the proliferation of online personal data.
She explains: “We all leave paper trails.
Today paper trails have given way to ‘vapour trails’; far more of our records exist in the memories of computers than in paper files, much less the fallible memories of human beings.” Naked in Cyberspace claims that it will teach you how to use online tools and databases to locate and investigate people, access public records, search for assets, uncover criminal records, conduct genealogical research and much more.
At first glance it seems like a book that we won’t be able to live without on our move into the cyberage.
I was keen to start investigations.
The Guide The guide is divided into four main sections.
The first is a general introduction to personal records in cyberspace and is recommended as a must-read before moving onto the other more specific sections of the guide.
This section is definitely useful for those unfamiliar with the Internet and databases and does arm readers with some general points about future research.
For example it explains that searching databases is relatively easy however knowing which ones to search isn’t; and gives the good advice that you shouldn’t believe everything you find in a database.
It covers different types of database vendors including paid databases.
Lane also gives an introduction to search engines and their use.
She follows this with three sample investigations: a search to track down a person, a search for assets, and a background profile search using Bill Gates as an example.
The first section also gives an introduction to the Naked in Cyberspace Web site [1] which has links to all the online resources.
Note that Naked in Cyberspace is an American text and so a lot of the resources are more applicable to those based in the US.
However most of the discussions and processes explained are internationally relevant and Lane often mentions resources available for those based in other countries.
The final chapter in the first section discusses the emotional issue of privacy.
Although privacy laws in the US differ from those in the UK, the sentiments are still the same.
Lane explains that the laws of privacy are fragile and gives us her first law of information: “If information exists in one place, it exists in more than one place”.
This applies directly to your credit details!
Although information held by banks and credit agencies is secure and regulated for legal reasons, details of your purchases and card numbers can be found all over the Internet and the real world; you only have to take a look in the average high street litter bin.
Lane also covers the reduced security of information due to client-server architecture replacing corporate mainframe computers.
This availability of information has led to the emergence of three types of cybercriminal: the sport hacker, who hacks for the intellectual thrill, the destructive hacker, who hacks to destroy, and the data thief, whose aim is to get specific information to use for criminal purposes.
At the end of the chapter she offers a corollary to her first law of information: “If information exists anywhere, no matter how carefully guarded, it exists somewhere else, where virtually anyone can gain access to it.” The second section of the guide explains how personal records are used.
Chapters cover areas such as pre-employment screening, prospect research (fundraising), competitive intelligence and private investigation.
Not needing to carry out any complicated research tasks, I concentrated on the area that we all have an interest in: locating people.
Most of us have a friend, relative or lost love that we’d like to track down.
The approach taken in the guide involves documenting all that is known about the person we are trying to locate and then taking that information to a selection of Web sites.
Lane points out problems you may stumble upon: for example names are rarely unique and may even have been changed; she provides us with ideas about how to search with this in mind.
The methods Lane suggests are logical and thorough, unfortunately she is unable to provide the quick fix answer we are all looking for.
Finding someone often requires time, a lot of effort and a fair amount of money.
Saying that finding myself was pretty easy: with a job in the information world and an unusual name, a search on Google provided hundreds of hits that lead right to me.
It seems the odds are stacked against my ever carrying out any major fraud!
Section three of the guide deals with different types of personal records from biographies and general indices to telephone directories and criminal justice records.
The chapter on consumer credit records was pretty interesting and did provide information on whom to contact in the UK if you wish to find out about your credit rating (Experian and Infocheck-equifax).
But once again there was no easy answer and a lot of the searches require quite a lot of money.
Later on in the section Lane points out the limitations of online public records.
Although more information is appearing online everyday, it will take some time for all preceding records to be digitised.
One area in which the book provided a lot of useful sources was for those trying to trace adoptive parents, siblings or children.
There is a comprehensive list of adoption agencies and also details of adoption news groups.
Another area becoming more popular with Internet users is genealogy.
Lane provides links to genealogy software and information on genealogical record formats as well as census, birth, death and immigration records.
The final section of the guide provides pointers to further information.
There is a list of useful books, periodicals and organisations and their URLs.
The appendix offers details of more specific Web sites and databases such as telephone directories, adoption registries, business credit and company financial databases and companies and associations that can help to remove your name from mailing lists.
Naked in Cyberspace is a very relevant text for our times.
It discusses many issues that are becoming more and more applicable to our lives and makes suggestions about how we can control what is done with our own personal information and use what is done with other people’s.
If you have a specific search that you need to carry out, then this is an excellent starting point because Naked in Cyberspace does a good job of considering all the relevant issues related to a specific search.
It is also useful for information brokers, private investigators or researchers who make a business out of research.
However the guide does not give any easy answers.
A lot of the information searching you may want to do such as credit reports, criminal records etc.
will require you to sign up and pay for the use of databases and sites.
For me, a person who is finding it hard to come to terms with the increase in personal data held about us, this was actually quite a relief.
At least people who want to get their hands on this type of private information still have to give their details at some stage, though as Lane points out, data thieves don’t bother logging in.
Although Naked in Cyberspace is interesting and potentially very useful, it seems that if you want to track down your first boy/girlfriend then friendsreunited.com is still the place to look.
References Naked in Cyberspace web site http://www.technosearch.com/naked/directory.htm Author Details Marieke Guy QA Focus UKOLN University of Bath BA2 7AY Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/ Return to top Article Title: “Naked in Cyberspace” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/guy-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CATRIONA II Management Survey Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CATRIONA II Management Survey Buzz database dissemination usability archives accessibility copyright cataloguing z39.50 rae intranet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dennis Nicholson and Martin Smith provide a summary report of selected results from the CATRIONA II survey on the University Management of Electronic Resources.
Background to the Survey The CATRIONA II project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through its Electronic Libraries (eLib) programme.
The main objective of the project is to investigate approaches to the creation and management of electronic resources at Scottish universities.
In the first phase of the project, an in-depth survey was conducted into electronic resource creation at six institutions.
This ‘Resource Creation’ survey found that high volumes of quality electronic teaching and research material exist within institutions (90% of staff report that they have created such material), but that it is not generally available (only 31% say they have some accessible material).
The survey also found that 85% of those staff who were interviewed believed it was important to have access to the electronic resources created at other institutions.
It was against this background – confirmed high levels of electronic resource creation and low levels of resource accessibility, coupled with a very clear desire among academic staff for greater resource sharing between institutions – that the CATRIONA II project conducted its second major research survey: the service management survey.
The service management survey questionnaire was sent to representatives at all 13 Scottish universities in February 1998.
Prior research had been carried out to identify senior officers at each institution who would be best able to deal with the receipt and initial processing of the questionnaire.
The questionnaire included a ‘recommended procedure’ for respondents to follow during the processing and completion of the questionnaire.
These recommendations suggested that respondents consider forming a small subgroup of an ‘information-related’ group to consider and discuss the issues involved.
It was further suggested that this subgroup then submit a preliminary response to the questionnaire back to a full meeting of the group, in anticipation of the generation of a formal institutional response.
The CATRIONA II research assistant attempted to monitor the progress of the each questionnaire over the four-month period between their initial dispatch and the receipt of the last completed questionnaire.
Of the thirteen institutions who received the survey questionnaire, nine provided institutional responses, two provided responses from senior members of staff, one indicated that they felt unable to comment on what was a "developing area", and one institution declined to respond.
Q1: Method Respondents were offered choices that ranged from describing the issue as a vital issue requiring short-term consideration, through to an option indicating that the issue was of no immediate relevance to the real needs of the university.
There was also an option allowing respondents to indicate a belief that universities should not manage services.
Q1: Question The issue of whether or not universities should manage services aimed at making high quality electronic teaching and research resources created by their staff accessible either on-site or off-site or both, is…?
Q1: Results Response 1.
A vital issue requiring our careful short-term consideration.
3 2.
A vital issue requiring our careful medium-term consideration.
6 3.
A vital issue requiring our careful long-term consideration.
1 4.
A significant issue requiring further consideration as time allows.
1 5.
A matter of no immediate relevance to the real needs of the university.
0 6.
Something we would only consider doing if other universities started to do it.
0 7.
Easily answered – they shouldn’t.
0 Q1: Summary Clearly the issue of managing services is recognised as being of very high importance within Scottish universities: with 91% of respondents indicating that it is a vital issue.
As far as the timescale for consideration of the issue was concerned, 69% believed it to be an issue that should receive attention in the short or medium term.
It is worth noting that options indicating that the service management issue is not important, or that universities should not manage services, were not chosen by any respondents.
Q2.1: Method Respondents were provided with a list of possible reasons that could be given for managing local services.
The list – drawn up after consideration by various project participants – was not intended to be definitive and additional space was provided at the end of the list to allow respondents to proffer additional reasons.
Q2.1: Question Please indicate whether you agree, disagree or don’t know, if the following reasons are valid reasons for universities, in general, managing local services… Q2.1: Results Agree Disagree Don’t know % Agree 1.
A great deal of relatively uncoordinated effort is going into the maintenance of university websites in any case.
11 0 0 100% 2.
Most sites are developing an Intranet in any case.
8 0 3 73% 3.
A service to deliver resources locally would increase the possibilities of cross-fertilisation of research within an institution.
7 2 2 64% 4.
A service to deliver teaching resources would enhance possibilities for home-based and distance learning.
11 0 0 100% 5.
A service would save time and effort by making teaching resources created by one department available to others.
9 0 2 82% 6.
A service would improve dissemination of information throughout the University from both internal and external sources.
10 0 1 91% 7.
Teaching resources are being published on the website in any case in a more or less haphazard fashion.
A service management approach would ensure quality control, protection of course material, value assessment for commercial or strategic exploitation and currency control.
11 0 0 100% 8.
Service management would ensure a controlled approach to the protection of University Intellectual Property Rights.
10 0 1 91% 9.
Service management would ensure a controlled approach to safeguarding the University against copyright infringements.
9 0 2 82% 10.
On-line overview of teaching and research output offers greater strategic control.
4 3 4 36% 11.
There are strategic and commercial advantages because creating a local service makes offering an economic service to the wider community easier.
11 0 0 100% 12.
There are possible RAE and TQA advantages.
10 0 1 91% 13.
It would provide improved accessibility of information on staff expertise across the University.
7 1 3 64% 14.
A local service is a logical extension of implementing an information strategy.
10 1 0 91% Q2.1: Summary To summarise, the most popular reasons chosen for managing local services were that universities, in general, would potentially benefit from the services by: making better use of effort already going on in website development (100%); enhancing home-based and distance learning possibilities (100%); providing a better means of quality control and protecting course material for teaching resource output (100%); and, facilitating easier implementation of an economic service aimed at a wider community (100%).
Some reasons volunteered in favour of universities, in general, managing local services included: "There may be cost savings for the institution e.g.
photocopying costs.
However, any efficiency gains will be passed to the students."
"Could identify then reduce duplication of effort."
"It would assist in the sharing of good practice and the adoption of accepted standards."
Q2.2: Method Respondents were provided with a list of possible reasons that could be given against managing local services.
The list – drawn up after consideration by various project participants – was not intended to be definitive and additional space was provided at the end of the list to allow respondents to proffer further reasons against managing local services.
Q2.2: Question Please indicate whether you agree, disagree or don’t know, if the following reasons are valid reasons against universities, in general, managing local services… Q2.2: Results Agree Disagree Don’t know % Agree 1.
Even if effort is being put into websites, Intranets and information strategies anyway, service management requires significant extra resources.
4 6 1 36% 2.
Most of the advantages listed above are of minimal importance.
0 10 1 0% 3.
Service management is not a practical proposition where there is devolvement of control to departmental level.
1 9 1 9% 4.
Service management is not necessary individual departments will make their own decisions about services.
0 9 2 0% 5.
Staff don’t have the time to create electronic resources at a level that would make the exercise worthwhile.
2 9 0 18% 6.
The control implied by service management would be an infringement of academic freedom.
1 9 1 9% 7.
There would be too many copyright problems and conflicts with commercial publishers.
1 6 4 9% Q2.2: Summary To summarise, the most popular reason cited against managing local services in general, was that: significant extra resources – above that presently being expended – would be required to effectively manage services (36%).
Some reasons (and comments) volunteered against universities, in general, managing local services included: "The resources to establish and maintain such a service would have to come from University funds; the limited value of materials created by one department to another department; a service management approach wouldn’t necessarily ensure quality control…would require QA processes."
"The power of Faculties and Departments in the University is considerable, and "top-down" central initiatives may be ignored if not appropriate within the local context.
The initiative will only work if seen as relevant."
"It may be difficult to co-ordinate separate local services if delivery of national?
(i.e.
from TLTP projects) is required.
However, adherence to standards, e.g.
Z39.50, would help."
"However, the responses given do not mean to imply that these issues are insignificant."
[The responding institution disagreed with all of the claimed disadvantages.]
Q2.3: Method Respondents were asked to choose one of three options (yes/no/don’t know) to specify whether universities, in general, should manage services to deliver teaching and research resources locally.
Q2.3: Question Taking into account the reasons for and against listed above in questions 2.1 and 2.2, should universities in general, manage services aimed at making high quality electronic resources created by their staff accessible within the University?
Q2.3: Results Yes No Don’t know No answer Teaching resources.
9 0 1 1 Research resources.
8 2 0 1 Q2.3: Summary The results clearly indicate a belief that universities, in general, should manage internal services.
It is worth noting that – for teaching resources – no institutions responded that universities should not manage local services.
Q3.1: Method Respondents were provided with a list of possible reasons that could be given for managing external services.
The list – drawn up after consideration by various project participants – was not intended to be definitive and additional space was provided at the end of the list to allow respondents to proffer further reasons for managing external services.
Q3.1: Question Please indicate whether you agree, disagree or don’t know, if the following reasons are valid reasons for universities, in general, managing external services… Q3.1: Results Agree Disagree Don’t know % Agree 1.
CATRIONA II Survey results show that academics want access to research and teaching resources in other UK Universities but currently these are not generally accessible.
7 3 1 64% 2.
Services of this kind offer the possibilities of inter-institutional strategic alliances through sharing teaching resource creation.
9 1 1 82% 3.
Services offer the possibility of commercial advantage through sale of access to resources.
10 0 1 91% 4.
Consultancy/staff expertise databases could be offered to potential customers or to the media.
10 0 1 91% 5.
There is potential for promotional advantage, impressing funding bodies, potential employees and potential students.
11 0 0 100% 6.
Commercially or strategically successful external services could help pay for an internal services.
10 0 1 91% 7.
Commercially successful services would help recoup expected future increases in networking costs.
7 1 3 64% 8.
External services would help improve overall teaching and research through strategic co-operation and cross-fertilisation.
9 0 2 91% 9.
If more research material was available on the Web, the cost to universities of purchasing journals would decrease.
1 5 5 9% Q3.1: Conclusion To summarise, the most popular reasons chosen for managing external services were that universities, in general, would potentially benefit from the services by: promoting the institution to a wide range of audiences (100%); providing possible revenue generation through commercial exploitation (91%); raising awareness of staff expertise amongst prospective customers (91%); generating funds to finance an internal service (91%); and, improving the quality of teaching and research through improved co-operation between institutions (91%).
Other reasons (and comments) volunteered in favour of universities, in general, managing external services included: "Facilitation of wider access to higher education."
"It is possible that SHEFC may encourage institutions to make their resources more widely available in the aftermath of their consultation paper on Communications and Information Technology.
Other universities are likely to do this.
This university may need to follow suit to maintain its competitive position."
Q3.2: Method Respondents were provided with a list of possible reasons that could be given against managing external services.
The list – drawn up after consideration by various project participants – was not intended to be definitive and additional space was provided at the end of the list to allow respondents to proffer further reasons against managing external services.
Q3.2: Question Please indicate whether you agree, disagree or don’t know, if the following reasons are valid reasons against universities, in general, managing external services… Q3.2: Results Agree Disagree Don’t know % Agree 1.
The additional effort entailed in ensuring high profile, high quality services would require significant investment with no guarantee of substantial return.
4 3 4 36% 2.
External services would entail additional problematic access control problems.
6 5 0 55% 3.
Copyright disputes are more likely if services are offered beyond local institutions.
6 4 1 55% 4.
Rival institutions could exploit UK research or teaching ideas.
5 4 2 45% 5.
Training and promotion would be a major problem.
1 7 3 9% 6.
Inter-service integration would be a major difficulty.
1 3 7 9% Q3.2: Conclusion To summarise, the most popular reasons cited against managing external services in general, were that: services delivered externally would pose additional access control problems (55%); and, copyright issues would be more problematic with externally delivered services (55%).
Some reasons (and comments) volunteered against universities, in general, managing external services included: "Competition between universities could well make external services difficult to operate."
"General teaching resources are not high quality; resources are oriented towards specific groups; competing priorities; lecturers become “access facilitators" potentially changes the structure of the University towards an Open University model."
"Unless properly costed could become a drain on core resources.
If all do it, potential for variations in practice, with associated difficulty of locating resources."
"These are all problems.
They do not provide reasons for not managing services."
Q3.3: Method Respondents were asked to choose one of three options (yes/no/don’t know) to specify whether universities, in general, should manage services to deliver teaching and research resources externally.
This was followed up by a question asking respondents to give a written (open) answer on the issue of possible benefits to their institution from other universities managing external services.
Q3.3a: Question Taking into account the reasons for and against listed above [questions 3.1 and 3.2], should universities, in general, manage services aimed at making high quality electronic resources created by their staff accessible outwith the University?
Q3.3a: Results Yes No Don’t know No answer Teaching resources.
8 2 0 1 Research resources.
7 3 0 1 Q3.3b: Question Please indicate whether or not you feel it would be beneficial to your University if other universities offered such a service and please say why: Q3.3b: Results Yes No Don’t know No answer Beneficial to own university.
8 2 0 1 Q3.3: Summary The results clearly indicate a belief that universities, in general, should manage external services.
It is worth noting that the levels found in favour of managing external services (73% for teaching and 64% for research) were lower than those for managing internal services (82% for teaching and 73% for research).
When considering whether it would benefit their institution if other universities offered external services, 73% of institutions responded that it would, while 18% indicated that it would not.
Q4: Method The twelve subsections of this question asked respondents to indicate the position at their institution, regarding issues identified by the project as being important in providing services to manage electronic resources.
In indicating the current position, respondents were asked to choose between four options: in place, planned, worth considering and not worth considering.
Supplementary questions were included at the end of each subsection, asking about which university groups are/will be/should be/ might be involved in managing each issue raised.
The twelve issues raised in the subsections of question 4 were: Incentives to encourage resource creation; Resource creation guidelines; Quality and value assessment; Distributed or centralised service; Resource description and index creation; Access control; Currency of information; Help and training services; Archiving; Service administration; Service promotion, income generation and funding; and, Cross-service integration.
Q4.1: Question: Incentives to encourage resource creation Is University encouragement of electronic resource creation through…?
Q4.1: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Career recognition incentives.
1 1 7 1 1 2.
Internal funding incentives.
1 2 8 0 0 3.
External funding bid support.
6 0 4 0 1 4.
Free time for development.
2 2 7 0 0 5.
Training and support services.
7 2 2 0 0 6.
Financial rewards.
2 0 6 3 0 7.
Enhanced rewards for externally valuable resource creation.
0 1 7 2 1 Q4.2: Question: Resource creation guidelines Service provision requires that the service provider (the university) offer potential authors guidelines and advice on a range of issues relating to resource creation.
Are University guidelines on…?
Q4.2: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
The University’s position on Intellectual Property Rights in respect of works created by staff as part of their duties.
8 2 1 0 0 2.
Dealing with external publishers in respect of copyright on electronic versions of works.
3 3 4 1 0 3.
The best electronic formats to use when producing works.
1 5 5 0 0 4.
On copyright and other considerations when producing joint works with other institutions.
1 2 8 0 0 5.
Structure, quality control, currency control, navigational aids, general content in respect of electronic resources created for the service.
2 3 5 1 0 Q4.3: Question: Quality and value assessment Service provision implies objective and practical mechanisms to ensure and assess resource quality and access local value, and also commercial, promotional and strategic value for other institutions Are procedures to…?
Q4.3: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Assess resource quality.
2 3 6 0 0 2.
Assess local value.
1 4 6 0 0 3.
Assess commercial, promotional and strategic value beyond the local institution.
1 3 7 0 0 Q4.4: Question: Distributed or centralised service One service design issue would be whether or not the service would be based on a centralised model run by a central service such as the Library or the Computer Centre, or a distributed model with resources stored and catalogued on distributed servers.
The devolved nature of many institutions may make a distributed service more attractive, but complicates the nature of many of the issues, such as the creation of a single catalogue for the service, ensuring secure backup and archiving mechanisms, and overall service design.
At your institution is…?
Q4.4: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
A centralised service.
1 0 7 0 3 2. distributed service.
3 1 2 3 2 Q4.5: Question: Resource description and index creation There are a number of issues here.
Who will ensure accurate and efficient retrieval through the search interface by ensuring that resources are adequately catalogued, and all catalogued to the same standard?
If this is done at departmental level, who will advise on and monitor standards and how will the service ensure that it is possible to search the whole site in a single operation?
At your institution is cataloguing of locally created electronic resources as…?
Q4.5: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
A centralised activity.
0 2 8 1 0 2.
A distributed activity.
1 0 3 5 2 Q4.6: Question: Access control If a service is to be offered only internally, access control is required to ensure that there is no external access to valuable resources.
If an external service is to be offered also, access control is required to ensure that only those external users with whom the service has a commercial or strategic agreement have access.
Setting up and maintaining secure access control mechanisms is therefore crucial if any type of service is to be offered.
At your institution…?
Q4.6: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Are access control mechanisms.
8 1 2 0 0 Q4.7: Question: Currency of information It is important that mechanisms are implemented to ensure the currency of the information offered by the service.
Issues here are: currency of the resources themselves, currency of cataloguing information, currency of locational information (URL), etc.
… At your institution, are mechanisms to…?
Q4.8: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Monitor resource content currency.
3 1 7 0 0 2.
Monitor cataloguing information currency.
1 2 8 0 0 3.
Monitor locational information currency.
1 1 9 0 0 Q4.8: Question: Help and training services Any service should offer on-line help and a service to train both users and authors.
If an external service is offered additional problems may arise in respect of user training arise.
At your institution, are website wide on-line help and training efforts for…?
Q4.8: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Local users.
8 2 1 0 0 2.
External users.
1 1 5 1 3 Q4.9: Question: Archiving Arguably, offering a service will at some point entail implementing policies and mechanisms for archiving valuable but non-current material.
Who will decide to archive, discard or keep on-line?
How will archiving be dealt with technologically?
Which formats will be used?
How will archived material be accessed when required?
How can the service ensure that archived material will not become inaccessible as access technologies go out of date?
Is there a role for national bodies such as the National Library for Scotland?
At your institution…?
Q4.9: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Are archiving mechanisms.
0 1 10 0 0 Q4.10: Question: Service administration A service must be managed by some group within the institution.
In different institutions this might be the Library, the Computer Centre, an Information Services department entailing both, or some other body.
A mix of technological and information skills would be required.
At your institution…?
Q4.10: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Is management of the website as a service.
8 2 1 0 0 Q4.11: Question: Service promotion, income generation and funding If a service is made available to other universities the associated areas of service promotion, income generation and funding are of key importance At your institution…?
Q4.11: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Are services in the above associated areas.
2 0 9 0 0 Q4.12: Question: Cross-service integration If a service is to be offered externally for strategic or commercial reasons, issues related to integration with services elsewhere become important.
A service which integrates readily with other widely available services will be important.
For example, if the service catalogue was accessible via the library Z39.50 standard then users of the proposed cross-Scotland CAIRNS service would be able to search it in conjunction with all the library catalogues in Scotland making users more likely to use the service and to find resources they wished to access.
Another issue might be co-operation with other institutions intending to offer a service so that similar service designs could be agreed and usability of all services therefore enhanced.
At your institution…?
Q4.12: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Are discussions on the institution-wide implications of projects such as CAIRNS and associated library standards such as Z39.50.
3 2 6 0 0 Q4: Summary Despite the overall low levels of ‘in place’ responses, there was a clear indication that the vast majority of the key service elements identified by the project were worthy of consideration by institutions.
Indeed, the only exception to this trend can be found in question 4.5; where more institutions responded that the issue ofcataloguing of locally created electronic resources as a distributed activity was not worth considering, than responded that such an activity was in place, planned or worth considering.
It is worth noting that 73% of responding institutions are currently managing the university website as a service (question 4.11).
Q5: Method Respondents were offered four choices to best describe the current position at their university regarding managing: Teaching resources within the university; Research resources outwith the university; Teaching resources within the university; and, Research resources outwith the university.
The four choices offered to describe the current position were in place, planned, worth considering and not worth considering.
The final survey question asked respondents to choose between a central role, an advisory role and no part, to show what role the university library should play in managing services.
Q5a: Question Please indicate the position at your university with regard to the following: Is a university service to deliver locally created…?
Q5a: Results In place Planned Worth considering Not Worth considering No answer 1.
Teaching resources within the university.
2 6 3 0 0 2.
Research resources within the university.
1 2 8 0 0 3.
Teaching resources outwith the university.
1 2 7 1 0 4.
Research resources outwith the university.
0 0 9 2 0 Q5b: Question At your institution, what is the intended role of the university library regarding managing services to deliver electronic resources?
Q5b: Results A central role An advisory role No part No answer 1.
The role of the university library.
6 3 0 2 Q5: Summary The results of question 5 show that there is very strong interest in managing services – especially internal services – at respondents’ institutions.
Despite the strong interest, however, very few of the universities actually have services in place (18% internal teaching, 9% internal research, 9% external teaching and 0% external research).
Of those institutions answering question 5b, two-thirds indicated that it was intended that the university library should have a central role in managing services to deliver electronic resources.
The full survey results, with accompanying analysis and reference to other project research and activities, will be included in the CATRIONA II final report, to be published later this year.
Available from: http://catriona2.lib.strath.ac.uk/catriona/ Author Details Dennis Nicholson Catriona II Project Manager Head of Library Systems Strathclyde University Library 101 St. James Road GLASGOW, G4 0NS Tel: 0141 5484529 Fax: 0141 5523304 Email: d.m.nicholson@strath.ac.uk URL: http://catriona2.lib.strath.ac.uk/catriona/ Martin Smith CATRIONA II Research Assistant Research Assistant Strathclyde University Library 101 St. James Road GLASGOW, G4 0NS Tel: 0141 5484618 Fax: 0141 5523304 Email: marty@strath.ac.uk URL: http://catriona2.lib.strath.ac.uk/catriona/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: A Survey of Links to UK University Web Sites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: A Survey of Links to UK University Web Sites Buzz database portal archives passwords mailbase url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on the number of links to University web sites.
Background On 10 February Phillip Simons sent the following query to the web-support Mailbase list: “Can anyone tell me if there is any way of detecting who is linking to a particular URL?
We want to see who still has our old URL on their links pages.” [1].
The replies suggested a couple of approaches: looking at referer (sic) fields in server log files and using the link feature provided by a number of search engines to report on pages containing a link to a resource or web site.
A number of services are available (including LinkPopularity.com [2] and LinkCount [3]) which provide an interface to the “back-link feature of a number of search engines.
Why have such services been set up?
Why are web managers and information providers interested in details of links to their sites?
There are a number of reasons.
The LinkPopularity.com site makes the following points: Need to find additional sites that might link to you?
Run a Link Popularity report for competitors’ sites and contact sites that link to them.
Thinking about buying a product on the Internet?
Run a Link Popularity report to see what other sites say about it.
Links to your web site not only help to generate traffic.
Due to recent developments in search engine technologies they can generate additional search engine traffic to your site search engines such as Google make use of citation analysis to rank hits, so that a resource which has many links to it will be given a higher ranking that one with few links.
Since the number of links to web site resources improves access growth in the numbers of links may be a useful performance indicator for your web service.
A comparison with the numbers of links to one’s competitors may also prove interesting.
And as Roddy McLeod, manager of the EEVL subbject gateway said on the lis-elib list last November [4]: On 4 Nov, Brian Kelly helpfully suggested using info on the number of sites linking to a service as the basis for impressing potential advertisers.
I tried this, pointing out to a potential advertiser that EEVL had, according to HotBot, 1099 sites linking to it, whilst there were only 18 sites linking to their site, and suggested that what they needed was more exposure.
It seems to have worked, as they have agreed to buy an ad on the soon to be released new design EEVL site.
For how much?…well, its not a lot of money, not even enough to buy a plane ticket for the BARD to return from his Himalayan retreat where he is currently “resting”, but its a start.
It also helps that the site in question is the sort of information service which might just fit in to any future perfect portal (or whatever they are being called today).
The Tools Availalable Two popular web services which can be used to report on link popularity are LinkPopularity.com and LinkCount.
The output from LinkPopularity.com is shown in Figure 1.
As can be seen it gets its results from the AltaVista, Infoseek and Hotbot search engines.
Figure 1: Results from LinkPopularity.com The output from LinkCount is shown in Figure 2.
It gets its results from the AltaVista search engine.
Figure 2: Results from LinkCount As can be seen LinkCount enables the results from two sites to be compared.
Caveats Although a number of popular search engines can be used to report on links to a web site a number of caveats should be noted: Only links from conventional static web pages will normally be recorded.
Links held in databases will not be recorded.
Link information held on resources which are not harvested by search engines will not be recorded.
This could include password-protected resources, Intranets, bookmark files and pages which are protected by a robots.txt file.
In addition to the limitations on the information stored by the search engine vendors, it should also be noted that there are several issues associated with the reporting process: Should internal links be included in a survey (e.g.
links from www.foo.ac.uk to other resources on www.foo.ac.uk)?
Should links to subdomains be included in a survey (e.g.
links from www.bar.foo.ac.uk to resources on www.foo.ac.uk, links from www.foo.ac.uk to resources on www.bar.foo.ac.uk, etc.)?
Should links to alternate versions of a domain name be included (e.g.
www.bham.ac.uk and www.birmingham.ac.uk) Conclusions The results published in the Appendix provide a useful snapshot of the number of links to institutional web services.
The survey has helped to identify a number of deficiencies in the use of the AltaVista and InfoSeek search engines for monitoring back links, namely: The incomplete coverage of the search engines.
The volatility of the results, especially in the case of AltaVista.
There is a requirement for link information to be provided in reusable format for post-processing.
Perhaps the best advice is to treat link popularity information with the same healthy scepticism that you would treat web statistics.
References web-support archive, Posting to Mailbase list, 10 Feb 2000 http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/web-support/2000-02/0113.html/ LinkPopularity http://www.linkpopularity.com/ LinkCount http://linkcount.mycomputer.com/ lis-elib archive, Posting to Mailbase list, 10 Nov 1999 http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1999-11/0015.html Appendix 1: Survey Results The AltaVista and InfoSeek search engines were used to count the number of links to UK University web sites.
The survey was carried out between 14-18th February 2000.
The following table contains details of the number of links to UK University web sites.
Column 1 gives the name of the institution and a link to the institutional web server.
Column 2 gives the number of links to the main web server (e.g.
www.foo.ac.uk), excluding links from the institution’s own domain (e.g.
excluding links from foo.ac.uk).
Column 2 gives the number of links to the all web servers in the institutions domain (e.g.
*.foo.ac.uk), excluding links from the institution’s own domain (e.g.
excluding links from foo.ac.uk).
Note that in the survey the syntax of the search string used was: link:www.foo.ac.uk -host:foo.ac.uk (numbers of links to central web server) and link:foo.ac.uk -host:foo.ac.uk (numbers of links to all web servers).
Note the following limitations in the survey: Domain Name Variants The survey will not detect links from unusual domain names used within an institution: e.g.
a link from www.maths-lse.ac.uk will be included in the numbers of links to www.lse.ac.uk.
Short and Link Domain Names Institutions which make use of a long and short form of their domain name (e.g.
www.bham.ac.uk and www.birmingham.ac.uk) will have misleading results.
IP Numbers Links from sites within an institution which have an IP number rather than a domain name will be included in the lists of links.
InfoSeek Limitations The InfoSeek search engine appears to report on pages from other servers in a domain when this has been excluded.
Table 1: Numbers of Links to UK HEI Web Sites Institution No.
of Links (Main web site) No.
of Links (All web servers) Current No.
of Links Search Engine Aberdeen 17,445 3,048 25,459 4,400 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Abertay 991 223 2,129 387 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Aberystwyth 17,664 3,399 21,652 4,191 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Anglia Polytechnic University 5,086 815 7,357 1,639 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Aston 8,184 643 7,049 1,424 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Bangor 3,740 694 8,725 1,571 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek UCL 12,147 6,107 76,150 20,442 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Bath Spa 362 114 585 115 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Bath 23,368 4,592 40,122 6,937 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Belfast, The Queen’s University of 6,574 1,186 20,045 3,874 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Birkbeck 3,935 721 13,018 3,275 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Birmingham NOTE: Used <www.bham.ac.uk> and not <www.birmingham.ac.uk> 12,379 2,356 54,360 7,540 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Bolton Institute of Higher Education 855 133 2,062 399 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Bournemouth University 1,432 261 3,470 657 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Bradford 11,681 1,814 22,840 3,640 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Bretton College 98 24 155 25 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Brighton 1,932 350 4,608 800 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Bristol 1,374 349 10,785 545 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Brunel 6,993 1,257 17,797 3,365 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College 651 128 836 128 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Cambridge 9,501 2,866 231,339 42,198 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Canterbury Christ Church 2,309 230 2,938 256 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Cardiff 1,701 382 5,662 473 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Cardiff, University of Wales Institute (UWIC) 240 41 629 89 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Central England, University of (UCE) 1,144 210 1,630 252 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Central Lancashire 2,181 424 2,853 470 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Central School of Speech and Drama 37 7 43 7 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Cheltenham and Gloucester College of HE 1,128 222 1,306 234 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Chester College 522 318 675 346 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Chichester College 212 39 281 39 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek City 4,210 1,277 21,380 4,068 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek College of Guidance Studies 16 8 37 8 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Coventry 1,091 237 3,176 567 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Cranfield 8,609 1,330 8,246 1,587 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Dartington College of Arts 198 50 247 50 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek De Montfort (DMU) 6,531 1,049 15,683 3,193 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Derby 1,642 339 3,703 823 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Dundee 8,175 1,639 18,972 3,798 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Durham 23,046 4,010 26,693 5,559 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek East Anglia, University of (UEA) 7,370 1,204 24,502 4,297 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek East London 4,027 815 6,093 1,391 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Edge Hill 667 166 1,377 280 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Edinburgh 13,310 3,523 125,603 23,481 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Essex 4,295 997 17,960 3,991 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Exeter 22,720 4,977 31,923 6,758 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Falmouth 223 56 540 99 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Glamorgan 1,275 270 2,725 527 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Glasgow Caledonian University 874 143 2,799 502 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Glasgow School of Art 425 142 482 149 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Glasgow 15,180 3,181 57,375 10,582 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Goldsmiths College NOTE <www.goldsmiths.ac.uk> and not <www.gold.ac.uk> 158 66 336 66 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Greenwich 4,511 876 5,468 1,299 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Harper Adams 210 46 270 51 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Heriot-Watt 6,070 1,297 26,956 5,359 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Hertfordshire 2,240 487 5,813 1,247 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Huddersfield 2,519 585 3,333 655 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Hull 6,915 1,584 12,623 2,357 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Imperial 3,402 953 125,417 20,555 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Institute of Education 817 246 1,400 320 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Keele 9,614 1,824 10,971 2,336 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Kent 3,296 666 17,676 3,449 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Kent Institute of Art and Design 171 33 262 43 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek King Alfred’s College, Winchester 330 74 565 83 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek King’s College London (KCL) 5,663 1,262 15,300 2,769 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Kingston 2,544 856 4,142 1,023 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Lampeter 1,668 327 2,329 413 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Lancaster 10,918 1,897 27,395 4,857 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Leeds 16,850 4,010 99,801 12,239 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Leeds Metropolitan University (LMU) 1,666 344 2,356 374 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Leicester 6,280 1,352 16,587 3,324 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Lincolnshire and Humberside 93 40 172 54 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Liverpool 15,571 3,834 29,046 5,490 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Liverpool John Moore 3,539 828 6,163 1,139 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Liverpool Hope 286 73 386 75 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek London Business School 691 237 1,189 281 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek London Guildhall 3,277 760 3,696 791 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek London Institute 281 86 1,134 232 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek University of London (Institutes) 622 206 3,967 617 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) 3,143 872 9,134 1,875 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine 689 217 1,652 281 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Loughborough Note <www.lboro.ac.uk> and not <www.lut.ac.uk> 3,965 900 11,312 2,165 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Luton 786 183 1,411 231 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) 2,397 607 14,988 2,387 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) 2,084 561 10,036 2,187 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Manchester 8,152 2,107 47,996 8,581 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Manchester Business School 548 163 716 168 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Medicine, University of Wales College of 1,951 730 2,008 764 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Middlesex 2,497 548< 5,231 926 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Napier 1,804 463 8,414 1,462 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Newcastle 24,414 4,233 54,121 8,404 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Newman 185 42 238 42 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Newport 257 52 1,357 131 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education (NEWI) 648 146 1,597 303 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek North London (UNL) 2,268 564 3,903 895 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek North Riding College Higher Education Corporation 228 35 305 35 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Northampton, University College 877 147 1,396 155 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Northern College of Education 775 176 987 187 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Northern School of Contemporary Dance 79 16 83 16 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek University of Northumbria at Newcastle (UNN) 5,704 1,388 6,749 1,738 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Norwich School of Art and Design 109 18 127 18 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Nottingham Trent 1,969 872 7,193 2,357 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Nottingham 6,459 1,769 29,842 5,525 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Open University 5,228 1,445 22,629 3,987 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Oxford 6,496 1,312 164,307 28,591 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Oxford Brookes 5,121 1,171 8,761 1,247 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Paisley 980 171 2,587 318 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Plymouth 303 93 3,337 192 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Portsmouth 1,415 313 7,194 1,328 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Queen Margaret University College 821 181 1,324 250 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Queen Mary and Westfield College 4,303 1,199 24,889 4,630 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication 221 41 297 41 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Reading 9,164 1,589 14,545 3,089 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Ripon and York St John, College of 259 47 459 52 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Robert Gordon University 2,698 694 4,153 903 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Roehampton 1,045 261 2,504 294 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Rose Bruford College 42 11 61 11 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Royal Academy of Music 184 54 246 56 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Royal College of Art 506 115 894 187 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Royal College of Music 322 70 353 73 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Royal Holloway 1,545 376 7,617 1,614 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Royal Northern College of Music 134 36 185 48 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama 178 44< 207 44 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Royal Veterinary College 145 58 362 64 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek St Andrews 3,513 2,509 31,885 9,597 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek St George’s Hospital Medical School 1,804 295 3,494 570 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek St Mark and St John, College of 128 35 197 108 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek St Mary’s College 71 19 153 75 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Salford 6,706 1,419 9,722 1,637 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 1,886 435 3,076 545 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Scottish Agricultural College 557 188 951 192 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Sheffield Hallam University 4,491 1,238 7,473 1,585 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Sheffield 46,286 10,600 69,051 12,669 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek South Bank University 5,276 1,663 6,467 1,967 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Southampton 20,753 4,665 72,904 10,221 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Southampton Institute 866 208 1,771 214 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Staffordshire 3,505 485 6,478 1,034 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Stirling 7,801 1,590 14,725 2,989 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Strathclyde 11,810 1,735 23,800 4,124 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Sunderland 2,199 665 7,329 2,023 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Surrey Institute of Art and Design 462 107 594 113 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Surrey 5,082 876 29,705 4,410 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Sussex 4,360 1,084 9,636 1,371 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Swansea Institute of Higher Education 236 49 401 107 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Swansea 7,626 1,209 9,490 2,011 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Teeside 1,758 256< 3,037 431 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Thames Valley 514 78 1,149 227 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Trinity and All Saints 1,034 234 1,095 238 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Trinity College of Music 110 30 160 30 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Trinity College, Carmarthen 189 58 262 58 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Ulster 4,073 668 12,146 2,357 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek University College London 12,147 6,108 76,150 20,442 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Warwick 14,449 2,183 49,116 6,832 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Welsh College of Music and Drama 91 40< 184 40 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek West of England, University of (UWE) 1,439 343 5,050 971 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Westhill College 109 28 202 29 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Westminster College 362 85 412 88 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Westminster 552 105 2,313 120 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Wolverhampton 5,803 787 12,638 2,537 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Worcester, University College 439 108 620 90 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Writtle College 143 36 182 38 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Wye College 708 156 740 163 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek York 23,294 4,067 38,168 6,277 Main All Main All AltaVista InfoSeek Table 2 gives a summary of the top 5 web sites with the most links to the central web server as reported by AltaVista.
Table 2: Top 5 UK HEI Web Sites With The Most Links To Central Server Institution No.
of Links (Main web site) Current Value Sheffield 46,286 Check Newcastle 24,414 Check Bath 23,368 Check York 23,292 Check Durham 23,046 Check Table 3 gives a summary of the top 5 web sites with the most links to all servers within the domain as reported by AltaVista.
Table 3: Top 5 UK HEI Web Sites With The Most Links To All Servers Institution No.
of Links (All web servers) Current Value Cambridge 231,339 Check Oxford 164,307 Check Edinburgh 125,603 Check Imperial 125,417 Check Leeds 99,801 Check Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: The Role of the Web Editor Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: The Role of the Web Editor Buzz data software java framework javascript html database archives accessibility graphics perl licence gopher mailbase intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly asks, does 'web editor' mean Unix guru or an HTML coder?
The national workshops on Institutional Web Management held at the University of Newcastle in September 1998 [1] and King’s College London in July 1997 [2] attracted a variety of people involved in running institutional web services.
Damon Querry, the WWW Trainer & Enabler at Newcastle University ran a discussion group session at the KCL workshop on The Trials and Tribulations of a Web Editor [3].
That session, together with informal discussions at the workshops and on mailing lists such as the website-info-mgt Mailbase list have shown that there is much interest in the role and responsibilities of such posts.
This article attempts to explore these issues.
Historical Background In response to a message sent on 23rd October 1998 [4] to the website-info-mgt list asking for list members’ recollections of the first web posts advertised by UK universities, the following details emerged.
A Network Information Support post at Nottingham University was advertised in January 1994.
This was claimed to be the first of its type, although a Networked Information Services Advisor post at Brighton University was advertised (in the Library Association Record Vacancies Supplement) in December 1993.
Both of these posts, however, provided support for finding information on the Internet.
Sussex University appointed a CWIS Editor in January 1994, although this was to support a Gopher service.
Other universities, such as Cranfield and Leeds were running institutional web services in 1994, but this work was carried out by existing staff who had other responsibilities.
Further investigation revealed additional information on web editorial posts.
The post of CWIS Editor was created by University of Edinburgh in 1992⁄93.
The University of Nottingham produced a job description for a Network Information Systems Officer in July 1995.
The post-holder, who would be based in the Computing Centre, would manage the University’s web service.
Oxford Brookes University advertised for an Internet Publications Officer in summer 1995.
This was a one-year contract, jointly based in Marketing & Communications and the Computing Service.
The University of the West of England (UWE) advertised for a Library Internet Adviser around November 1995.
The post-holder would "play a leading role in enhancing the quality of the University’s corporate information on the Internet".
In autumn 1995 the University of Birmingham advertised for an Electronic Publication Developer.
The post-holder, based in the Public Affairs Office, would be responsible for making the Postgraduate Prospectus and related publications available on the web.
Recent Job Advertisments A survey of web-related posts in the UK HE community which have been advertised in The Guardian has been carried out recently in order to monitor job titles, skills required and salary scales.
University Web Posts Birkbeck College [5] advertised for a World Wide Web Editor in The Guardian originally on 11 July 1998 and re-advertised on 10 October 1998.
The advertisment was available on the jobs.ac.uk service on 23 October 1998.
This is a new post, based in the Central Computing Services.
The post-holder "should possess a degree or equivalent qualification and have a minimum of two years’ experience of developing and maintaining a corporate Web site.
Up-to-date technical knowledge and experience of Web authoring tools, graphics and design for the effective delivery of Web content are essential requirements."
This was a permanent post.
Salary for this post was on scale 2-3 (£20,409-£31,182, inclusive of London Allowance).
The University of Leeds [6] advertised for a Computer Officer (WWW Development) in The Guardian in October 1998.
The job advertisment was available on the Leeds University Computing Service web site [7], together with further details about the post [8].
This is a technical post in the University Computing Service requiring expertise in HTML, CGI, etc.
It is a permanent post.
Salary for this post is on scale 2-3 (£18,275-£29,048).
Roehampton Institute [9] advertised for a Web Development Officer and a Web Editor in The Guardian on 10 October 1998.
This post is based in the Institute’s Information Services department.
The Web Development Officer is expected to have experience of web authoring tools (MS Front Page or PageMill), web programming expertise (JavaScript and Perl) and preferably knowledge of web database integration.
The Web Editor post required knowledge of HTML authoring tools and would be responsible for developing the Institute’s Intranet.
Both of these posts were fixed term, the former lasting until 31 July 1999 and the latter for a period of 1 year.
The Web Development Officer post was advertised on a salary scale of £20,471-£23,416 and the Web Editor on a scale of £14,928-£18,177.
The University of Plymouth [10] advertised for a Senior Computing Officer (WWW and Electronic Information Development) in The Guardian in August 1998.
This post, in the Academic and Information Services department, requires someone with a Computer Science or equivalent degree to play a lead role in the installation, configuration and development of the University’s central Web and Electronic Information Service.
The post was advertised on the salary scale £18,374-£22,407.
Public Sector Web Posts Details of public sector web posts advertised recently are given below in order to make a comparison with the Higher Education community.
Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospital Trust [11] advertised for a Web Master in The Guardian in September 1998.
The advert stated that the Web Master "with creativity and structure will drive/forge the development of the Web services to ensure full use of this innovative communication tool throughout the Trust and ensure its interactions with the NHS and general public.
This role will require HTML and training / selling skills."
Essential experiences required included demonstrable Web Master expertise, web training and HTML authoring tools.
Experience of Java and ActiveX were desirable.
The post was advertised on a salary of around £22-24K.
Bristol City Council [12] advertised for a Coordinator Electronic Information in The Guardian on 17 October 1998.
This appeared to be a web editor’s post, with responsibility for content of the Council’s website.
This 3 year fixed term post was advertised on a salary scale of £23,199-£25,245.
The Commercial Perspective In October 1998 the US-based Internet World [13] magazine conducted an email survey of webmasters working for Fortune 500 companies.
A total of 65 replies were received.
The results of the survey [14] indicated that webmasters (a term liked by over half of the respondents) tended to work in teams, with the most common Web team size is between two and five people, although over 15% work in Web teams with over 50 members of staff!
Only 29% have annual salaries of less than $55,000 (£32,860), with 20% receiving over $95,000 (£56,757).
The Web Editor’s View On 19th October 1998 I sent a message [15] to the website-info-mgt list asking for people’s views on what it’s like being a web editor.
A number of personal replies were received, including the following.
Colin Work, University of Southampton wrote that the job of a web editor includes: Information management: correlating information from a wide range of sources into a coherent whole; ensuring this information provides the desired view of the institution; providing an effective means of locating specific information; commissioning material where there is an information deficiency.
Quality control: ensuring accuracy, maintaining house style; advising (if not determining) on editorial policy and implementing that policy; determining appropriate metrics and supplying evaluative data to management.
Author support: provision of tools, training, advice to facilitate HTML authoring.
Web Design: creation and implementation of the corporate Web look-and-feel.
Software skills: HTML, Perl, CGI etc.
i.e.
the technical ability to carry out the above.
System management: care and feeding of servers.
Colin listed these in order of importance to the editorial role in smaller organisations, the "editor" may be responsible for all six roles.
In larger organisations, the latter items may be assigned to specialists, or contracted out the first item may, in a large organisation, be the prime function of the Web editor, though the editor should then have a managerial view over the other functions.
Colin regards "information" as the primary driver, all other functions being subservient to the effective provision of information.
Colin feels that the following skills are needed, in the order given: formal training in information management/science/librarianship is invaluable.
good people skills.
people/resource management skills.
writing ability.
graphic design the web is primarily a visual medium.
technical skills (programming, etc.)
this is quite important, but perhaps more quickly and easily acquired than the above.
Colin doubts there is a real future in being able to "twiddle" HTML, etc.
However if the focus is on the information management aspect divorced from technology, this has got to be the growth area.
Every company, organisation etc.
has an information management problem whether or not they realise it.
As the actual value of information as a commodity is increasingly realised, people capable of addressing these problems will be in high demand.
Maurice Crockard of Anglia Polytechnic University is the web coordinator who also has responsibility for the University Information Strategy.
Maurice has intermediate level HTML and Javascript skills and relies heavily on technical support from his computing support staff.
Anglia Polytechnic University has a web-team, comprising two Computing staff plus Maurice, to read mail responses and information requests on behalf of the University web site users.
The two Computing staff have many other tasks not related to the web site.
Maurice’s role is to establish a consistency of approach down to the first page of any academic or administrative unit.
He has a group of "mini web coordinators" at this level who provide content and are expected to update their own central web pages.
This is about 30-40 staff, some of whom have little technical ability.
Part of Maurice’s role is in organising training for these staff and bringing them together for workshops to discuss problems and good practices.
Kriss Fearon, University of York, has the following responsibilities: Keeping an overview of the University’s web presence Maintenance of information for external audiences, including prospective students Print production of the graduate and undergraduate prospectuses production and maintenance of guidelines on best practice, visual identity and standards Liaising with (and advising and supporting) other members of staff on web issues Promoting YorkWeb Kriss also provides limited technical support for official providers with relatively straightforward problems, is secretary to Web Steering Group, runs various projects as required (e.g.
a joint project with an associated college, York CFHE, where the University of York provided web training to them and they designed York’s visiting students’ prospectus).
Kriss runs a training course on promoting web pages and is planning to work with various departments on the marketing side e.g.
helping the conference office write a web marketing plan.
In York University there is a webmaster based in the Computing Service who is responsible for running the web server and support software.
Another person within the Computing Service is responsible for Netscape support and HTML training and is also running a web-database interface JISC-funded project.
Kriss is responsible for the administrative side, Secretary of Web Steering Group and a number of other admin-related tasks.
Skills which Kriss feels are needed in her job include: An understanding of the traditional print production process is very helpful because it gives a good context and framework for running other projects and of the work and familiarity with the stages of work involved.
An understanding of the difficulties posed for staff working within the institution taking on additional work with which they are unfamiliar.
General political sensitivity!
Kriss has to work with all members of staff involved in web work and knowing what’s going on in the background is useful for ‘pitching’ ideas appropriately to different groups of people.
The usual technical skills.
HTML authoring expertise is needed, but not programming skills (although this may be different in other institutions).
Organisational skills and a grasp of the administrative structure of the institution are also important.
Andrew Cormack, Cardiff University, feels that there are two roles: webmaster and web editor.
The Webmaster is the technical person who deals with things from the silicon up to the software; web editor, like any other kind of editor, deals with content.
CGI scripts muddy the distinction somewhat, of course!
The simplistic, Unix-based, division is that webmaster needs root access and web editor doesn’t.
Depending on the size of the organisation, the editor may have mostly managing and collating job, or may be the person who generates most of the pages.
So you need people skills, some ability with graphics and design (unless this is contracted out), English (Welsh?
), HTML and other web languages.
Also depending on the size of the site, you could have anything from one person doing both jobs to a committee for each of them.
Under Andrew’s terminology, Cardiff University has rather less than half a webmaster and about a dozen web editors!
Linda Newall from the University of Central England, gave a departmental view.
Linda is the Faculty Web Coordinator for Faculty of Computing and Information Studies at UCE.
Her job includes developing strategies for the Faculty (Intranet, Internet, teaching and learning managing the web developments, team building, writing web pages, learning new technologies, graphic design etc.).
The work includes web author, graphic designer, manager, database manager which requires a range of skills including web design, project management, facilitation, report writing, authoring content, data management, information management, database management, server management, etc.
Sarah Bristow, Sheffield Hallam University, who has spent most of the last 3 years being the web person for the Learning Centre at Sheffield Hallam University (i.e.
not the person in overall charge of the whole university web service) was also willing to give her views from a departmental perspective.
The job entails creating pages; editing those provided by others to conform with certain ‘house styles’; soliciting new pages from all interested parties and overall design and maintenance of the site concerned (about 350-400 pages currently).
Whilst writing/understanding HTML is a major constituent of the post, Sarah often has to draw on her detailed knowledge of the department she represents, particularly when it comes to persuading colleagues to provide information about their services.
Most see the advantage of being able to advertise the department’s services and expertise on the web and have happily jumped on the Internet bandwagon, although a few have been more hesitant in exploiting this media, so diplomacy and negotiating skills occasionally have to come into play.
Resources For The Web Editor A number of organisations have been set up to provide support for Web Editors.
A brief review of a number of organisations, taken from Yahoo [16] is given below.
The HTML Writer’s Guild [17] (HWG) describes itself as the world’s largest international organization of Web designers with over 70,000 members in more than 130 nations worldwide.
Membership is open to anyone with an interest in web authoring and a desire to improve their skills.
Figure 1 The HTML Writer’s Guild Home Page The HWG hosts a website which provides useful information for HTML authors, including a variety of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).
Free trial membership of the group is available, which provides access to additional areas on the web site, including discussion areas.
Full membership, which must be taken out after a year’s trial membership, costs $40 per year and provides access to additional web services, including a Job Listing Service.
The mission of the International Webmasters Association [18] (IWA) is to "provide education and foster professional advancement opportunities among individuals dedicated to or pursuing a Web career, and to work diligently to enhance their effectiveness, image, and professionalism as they attract and serve their clients and employers."
Figure 2 The International Webmasters Association’s Home Page The IWA appear to have a broader view of the role of a web editor.
Their web site contains a variety of useful resources including a list of names and brief descriptions for those involved in web management [19] (although I suspect that not many readers of this article would call themselves a "Webmaster-Entrepreneur").
The list of job titles is used in a page describing three models for resourcing a web service [20].
The model of medium-sized Web organisation is probably nearest to a UK University, with a "Chief Web Officer" responsible for a "Systems Administrator Web Specialist", "Writer/Editor Web Specialist", "Programmer Web Specialist", "Marketing Web Specialist", "Instructor / Trainer Web Specialist" and a "Web Site Designer Web Specialist".
Although these job titles are unlikely to be used, many Universities will have systems administrators, programmers and trainers (often based in the Computing Service) together with editors and designers (who may be based in administrative departments) with marketing input from a public affairs department.
The IWA run Professional Development and Certifications Programs [21] which aim to "to further the effectiveness of the services rendered to the public by the web profession and to achieve the aims and purposes of the International Webmasters Association by providing a means for recognizing those web practitioners who have attained unquestioned professional status, while providing incentive to other members to participate in a program of self-development through education as prescribed by the International Professional Development Committee (IPDC)".
The certification programme is run in conjunction with a commercial company (Sysoft).
Although the cynic could argue that the certification programme is a marketing device for a training company, this criticism could be made of other certified training course which operate in other areas of IT and which members of the UK HE community have taken part in, including Sun, Microsoft and Novell certified courses.
In fact Novell are now offering certified courses in web design, web development, Intranet management and Internet business strategy [22].
The Sysoft web pages [23] provide access to further details about their web training courses and a career roadmap.
Unfortunately the roadmap [24] only covers the technical aspects of web management and their Corporate Webmaster course [25] covers HTML authoring and web programming and server administration, but fails to cover content management.
The IWA also produce a web magazine knbown as the "WebProfesion Ezine" [26].
This has been in existence since December 1997 and provides a variety of articles of interest to web editors, such as The Pains and Pleasures of being a Webmaster, Web Accessibility: A Moral or Standards Issue?
and a series on Designing Corporate Internet Sites.
Figure 3 WebProfesion Ezine The aim of the World Organization of Webmasters [27] (WOW) is to: Foster professional standards.
Provide for communication among all Webmasters,including corporate Webmasters in government, business, and education, independent Webmasters, and aspiring Webmasters such as students.
Provide for education through the publishing of articles, professional papers, and the sponsoring of seminars and conferences.
Stimulate the continued growth of the Web by providing a forum for the raising of new ideas and an effective mechanism for dialog on these issues.
Provide security, legal and marketing whitepapers as well as an area on the latest trends in the Internet on each of those items.
WOW recognises that the degree of technical skills needed by a Webmaster varies widely, with some requiring the ability to such things as write HTML, implement firewalls, and write programming languages such as JAVA, PERL, or C, while others work on a management level, and technical staff carry out technical work.
One of the purposes of WOW is to define the various types of Webmasters, and create a certification program for them.
Figure 3 World Organization of Webmasters The World Organization of Webmasters is currently working on a Webmaster Certification program which is due to be finalised in Autumn 1998.
The National Association of Webmasters (which appears to be a US predecessor to WOW) hosted a two-day meeting on Webmaster training and certification which was reported in WOW’s newsletter [28] in January 1998.
Unfortunately not a great deal of information is currently available on their website.
The International United WebMasters Association [29] (UWA) describes itself as a "bond of all WebMasters of the Internet world.
It belongs to all who care to join.
Membership of IUWA is only for WebMasters."
Webmasters are defined as " person or persons responsible for the technical care and/or appearance of a web site with specific access to perform such tasks."
Exploring IUWA’s web site, such as its list of projects [30] with its lack of a title, pointers to dated resources and text such as "This page is currently under construction" and "Return to the home page", would appear to indicate, however, that this is not a resource for professional web managers.
The Webmaster’s Guild [32], unusually, provides only a simple mailing list service.
Between 17 September and 25 October 1998 there were 86 postings to the list which included several "Unsubscribe me from this list" and requests for suggestions on HTML authoring tools.
There appears to be nothing here which is not provided by the web-support Mailbase list [32].
The Webmaster’s Guild is an off-shoot of the Association of Internet Professionals (AIP) [33].
This professional organisation has been in existence since 1994.
Its mission statement is "To unify, support, and represent the global community of Internet professionals."
Individual membership of AIP costs $90 but it is not clear from the web site what the benefits of membership are.
Unusually, IAP has a UK chapter.
The AIP London Chapter web site [34] does provide some local information, and pointers to web resources.
However the information about meetings does not been appear to have been updated for some time, and it would appear that it has insufficient momentum to get started.
Other Sources of Information CIO.com [35], a web site for information executives, host a Web Career Research Centre, [36], in addition, incidently, to research centres (which is how they call the area on their web site) on Intranets and Human Behaviour and the Web.
The Web Career Research Centre provides details of job vacancies (in the US), articles about careers and related resources.
Figure 4 CIO’s Web Career Research Centre Computer Weekly [37], a UK weekly computer magazine, hosts an impressive job vacancies service.
A search for jobs using the keyword web provided several dozen hits, including Web Designers with salaries ranging from less than £20K to up to £100K, Internet Programmers, Web Developers, and Web Consultants.
Figure 5 Computer Weekly’s JobFinder Service Although not as sophisticated as Computer Weekly’s JobFinder service (which includes the option to save job details to a personalised job folder), the jobs.ac.uk service [38] and NISS’s Vacancies Service [39] are more directly relevant to the UK Higher Education Community.
Finally the Web Developer’s Virtual Libary (WDVL) [40], contains a useful section on web-related jobs [41].
Figure 6 WDVL Section on Job Resources Conclusions What conclusions can be drawn?
From the University management perspective there appears to be little consistency in the job titles for staff involved in web management, and a range of salary scales and expectations of the skills required by the post-holder.
From the web editor point of view there appear to be a feeling that HTML expertise will diminish in importance (as sophisticated authoring tools become available and back-end databases become more widely deployed to provide access to corporate information).
Web editors seem to feel that information management, people and political skills are of great importance.
Technical expertise (such as systems management and software development) is important in running institutional web services, but is likely to be provided by others within the organisation.
However, although the importance of information management and political skills may be recogonised by the practisioners themselves, and by a number of web organisations, such as the International Webmasters Association, this does not yet appear to be acknowledged by University management, or, indeed, by the marketplace, with the high salaries going to software developers with scarce technical skills.
The career development (or rather lack of a career structure, which was mentioned in several personal communications) for web editors should be of concern to institutions.
The web can’t be both a strategic tool for institutions and a political football, with key personnel being employed on short-term contracts with uncertain futures.
Who can help?
Perhaps the AUT’s Computer Staff Committee [42] should have an interest, or the UCISA Staff Development Group (SDG) [43], which currently has projects looking into IT Training Routes to Accreditation / Certification and the European Computer Driving Licence and which runs workshops on communicating with users and management skills, are well-placed to progress the professional development of web editors further?
Over to you, UCISA-TLIG Committee [45]!
References Report on the "Institutional Web Management" Workshop, Web Focus Corner, Ariadne issue 17 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue17/web-focus/> Running An Institutional Web Service, Web Focus Corner, Ariadne issue 11 <URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue11/web-focus/> Trials and Tribulations of a Web Editor, Workshop report <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/feedback/workshop-conclusions.html#web-editor> website-info-mgt, Mailbase list archive <URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt/1998-10/0018.html> Birkbeck College, Institutional home page <URL: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> University of Leeds, Institutional home page <URL: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/> Computer Officer (WWW Development), Job advertisement <URL: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/vacancies/#wwwco> Computer Officer (WWW Development) Further details <URL: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/vacancies/wwwcojd.htm> Roehampton Institute, Institutional home page <URL: http://www.roehampton.ac.uk.com/> University of Plymouth, Institutional home page <URL: http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/> Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospital Trust, Institutional home page <URL: http://www.hospital.org.uk/> Bristol City Council, Institutional home page <URL: http://www.bristol-city.gov.uk/> Internet World, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.internetworld.com> More Work–But More Money, Internet World, 5 Oct 1998 <URL: http://www.internetworld.com/print/1998/10/05/news/19981005-more.html> website-info-mgt, Mailbase list archive <URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt/1998-10/0010.html> World Wide Web Organisations, Yahoo web site <URL: http://www.yahoo.co.uk/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Organisations/> The HTML Writers Guild, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.hwg.org/> International Webmasters Association, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.irwa.org/> Web Specialists Defined, International Webmasters Association <URL: http://www.iwanet.org/profdevel/specialists.html> Web Department Staffing Models, International Webmasters Association <URL: http://www.iwanet.org/profdevel/staffing.html> Professional Development, International Webmasters Association <URL: http://www.iwanet.org/profdevel/> Certified Internet Professional, Novell <URL: http://www.netboss.com/> Systems and Software Training Website, Sysoft <URL: http://NETRA.sysoft.com/web/> Systems and Software Training Website Career Roadmap, Sysoft <URL: http://NETRA.sysoft.com/web/crm.htm> Hands-On Corporate Webmaster, Sysoft <URL: http://NETRA.sysoft.com/web/corporate.htm> WebProfesion Ezine, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.webprofesion.org/> The World Organization of Webmasters, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.world-webmasters.org/> January Newsletter, WOW <URL: http://www.naw.org/newsletter/january/> International United WebMasters Association, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.iuwa.org/> IUWA Projects, IUWA <URL: http://www.iuwa.org/projects.htm> Webmasters Guild, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.webmaster.org/> web-support list, Mailbase list archive <URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/web-support/> Association of Internet Professionals, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.association.org/> Association of Internet Professionals, Organisational home page <URL: http://london.uk.association.org/> CIO, CIO Online home page <URL: http://www.cio.com/CIO/> Web Career Research Centre, CIO <URL: http://www.cio.com/forums/careers/> @ComputerWeekly, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.computerweekly.co.uk/cwmain/cwmainfram.asp> jobs.ac.uk, Organisational home page <URL: http://jobs.ac.uk/> Vacancies Service, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.vacancies.ac.uk/> The Web Developer’s Virtual Library, Organisational home page <URL: http://wdvl.internet.com/> Web-Related Occupations and Professions, Web Developer’s Virtual Library <URL: http://wdvl.internet.com/Internet/Web/Jobs/> AUT Committees, AUT <URL: http://www.aut.org.uk/about/committees.htm#computer> UCISA SDG, Organisational home page <URL: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/SDG/> UCISA SDG Committee, UCISA SDG <URL: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/SDG/uctgact.htm> Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323943 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Buzz software database portal cataloguing e-learning ejournal url standards Citation BibTex RIS Roddy Macleod manager of the EEVL project explains the new profile, new office: and coming soon: a new service.
EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is a free service, and is funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
New profile In previous Ariadne columns I have introduced EEVL as "the UK guide to quality engineering information on the Internet".
From the background information above, you will see that it is now referred to as the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
Why the change, and, for those who may have heard of it, what has happened to 'EMC'?
In Ariadne 23, Linda Kerr wrote "The EMC Hub can be viewed as a collection of gateways (which may eventually become portals) with technical facilities and some co-ordination provided by Heriot-Watt University."
That was the situation earlier this year, when it was the intention to develop separate gateways for each of the subjects covered (engineering, mathematics and computing).
For a number of reasons, related mostly to levels of funding, economies of effort and unity of service management, it has been decided to revise that structure and move towards a simplified organisational model, broadly similar to that of SOSIG, the Social Science Information Gateway.
The new model will see the formation of one service with a strong identity, but one which also allows for the delivery of integrated services for each of the subject communities concerned.
The 'EMC Hub' is therefore no more.
Instead, a new service, known as the EEVL Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing, is being developed.
It will build upon the brand recognition of the current EEVL service, and will be available from the same Web address ( http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ ), but it will in future include three main subject sections: engineering, mathematics and computing.
Once the service is developed, users will have the option of searching the entire EEVL Hub covering all three subjects, or searching any of the constituent subject sections.
Engineering will continue to include an aerospace and defence engineering section provided by AERADE at Cranfield University.
The mathematics section will be known as MathGate, and a Computing section will be created.
The lead site for EEVL is Heriot-Watt University, with partners at the University of Birmingham, the University of Ulster, and Cranfield University.
A number of other institutions and organisations will contribute to the development of EEVL, including Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, The Nottingham Trent University, the University of Sheffield, the LTSN (Learning and Teaching Support Network) Centre for Information and Computer Sciences and the LTSN Maths, Stats & OR Network.
It is hoped that the increase in the range of subjects will also increase commercialisation opportunities, though EEVL will continue to be a free service.
Whilst the new service is being developed, the existing EEVL Web site will continue to house a catalogue of engineering resources and other services such as the Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) bibliographic database, the Engineering E-journal Search Engine (which is being expanded to index over two hundred free full-text engineering e-journals), the Offshore Engineering Information Service, the University Science and Technology Librarians Group Directory, plus various Hot Links such as Current Awareness Services, from which the European mirror of the Sci-Tech Library Newsletter is available.
The work-in-progress on the mathematics section will also continue to be available from the existing MathGate Web site.
Sometime in the late spring of 2001, the new EEVL web site will be released, and at this time all sections will be integrated at the one site.
The above developments are keeping everyone involved very busy, but existing services are being maintained, and as well as the FAILTE (Facilitating Access to Information on Learning Technology for Engineers) Project which I reported on in the last issue of Ariadne, EEVL is also participating in the Subject Portal Development Project (SPDP).
This one-year project, which some may know as "SAD I A subject -based approach to DNER: portal development 1", is one of a number of projects which will help to develop the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
The Subject Portal Development Project is based within the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), and will be investigating and proto-typing various cross-searching and community services.
The three subject areas to be covered by SPDP are engineering, medicine and social sciences, business and law, and the software and design solutions developed in this project will feed into work being carried out as part of further DNER initiatives due to start August 2001.
Amongst these, fully-fledged portals in engineering and mathematics will be developed.
In addition, MathGate has been promoting the Secondary Homepages concept.
The secondary homepage is a template that contains standard fields based on the types of information that is found on departmental websites.
Currently there are pages at The University of Birmingham, University of Ulster, Keele University, University of Manchester, and Sheffield Hallam University.
There has been a surge of interest in secondary homepages due to the support given to them by the Heads of Departments of Mathematical Sciences (HoDoMS).
Seven RDN Virtual Training Suite tutorials of interest to the subjects covered by the EEVL Hub are currently in preparation.
These are: Internet Electrical, Electronic and Communications Engineer, Internet Occupational Health and Safety Engineer, Internet Materials Engineer, Internet Mathematician, Internet Mechanical Engineer, Internet Civil Engineer and the Internet for Petroleum and Offshore Engineering.
Having had a look at the work in progress, I am confident that these tutorials, along with the existing Internet Aviator, will be of immense benefit to those seeking information in the subject areas concerned, and many thanks go to all of the authors, and to Linda Kerr, who is coordinating the effort.
New office On 20th November, the EEVL Information staff based at Heriot-Watt moved into a new office in the lower-ground floor of the Library.
Contact details remain the same as before.
Author Details   Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: "EEVL: new profile, new office, and coming soon a new service" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Backs a Winner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Backs a Winner Buzz cataloguing e-learning url Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod and the team celebrate their 5th birthday with a day at the races, and supply some EEVL News Nuggets.
EEVL: is the UK guide to quality engineering information on the Internet.
It is a free service, and is funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Happy birthday!
This column is an excellent forum for alerting the online community to the progress being made by EEVL, and in the next issue I hope to bring news of some particularly significant developments to the service.
In the meantime, some recent news nuggets are detailed below.
It is not all non-stop work, though.
EEVL recently celebrated its fifth birthday, and to mark the occasion some past and present members of the EEVL Team enjoyed a day out at the races.
Musselburgh Racecourse was the venue, and whilst the quality of the racing might not have been up to Epsom Derby standards, there was plenty of excitement.
For the record, overall, the punters in the Team ended the day roughly even, though the Technical Manager's wallet seemed to bulge a bit after the 4.10.
'On parade' below are, at the rear, from left to right, Jenny Flemington, Phil Barker, Lesa Ng, and Roddy MacLeod, and a short head in front are Geir Granum, Malcolm Moffat, and Linda Kerr.
The Team would have had even more to celebrate if a horse going under the name of 'Megabyte' had not finished well down the field in the last race (Tip: never believe an EEVL person exclaiming "Its a sign...its a sign!")
EEVL News Nuggets The Internet Aviator, part of the RDN Virtual Training Suite, has been added to the site.
The Internet Aviator, which was written by Emma Turner of Kings Norton Library, Cranfield University and Annie Maddison of the Royal Military College of Science Information Service, Cranfield University, offers a subject-based approach to internet skills training.
EEVL is one of the partners, along with EASIT-eng and LTSN Engineering in a new project called FAILTE (Facilitating Access to Information on Learning Technology for Engineers).
FAILTE (which is pronounced fàltu, and which means 'welcome' in Gaelic) has been funded to provide a unified approach to the description and catalologuing of electronic learning resources for engineering.
The aim is to build an internet resource catalogue and other services which will allow lecturers to select and access suitable computerand web-based learning materials for their courses.
FAILTE has been funded by the Joint Informaiton Systems Committe (JISC) via a call for bids to "Enhance the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) for Teaching and Learning".
EEVL's Internet Resource Catalogue (IRC) now contains 6,000 records.
The Engineering Resources on the Internet: A bibliography has been updated, as has the FTSE 100 Engineering companies Hot Link, and the European mirror of the Sci-Tech Library Newsletter is proving to be popular with users.
A colourful A5 size flier giving information about the service is available.
To request copies, please email R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk.
EEVL has recently featured in a number of publications, and thanks go to various members of the Team who contribute to the promotional effort.
Of note is an article by Jim Corlett, in the September issue of Advanced Manufacturing, entitled Search tips to help you find your way: Strategies, options and developments in searching for manufacturing information on the Internet, and also Panorama of Engineering Portals, by Roddy MacLeod, in Free Pint, Number 66.
For more information, contact: Roddy MacLeod, EEVL Manager, Heriot-Watt University: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk 0131 451 3576 Author Details   Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4ASEmail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: "EEVL: EEVL backs a winner" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 22: Ariadne's Thread Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 22: Ariadne's Thread Buzz data framework database accessibility copyright url Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter introduces Ariadne issue 22, looks at Ariadne's web accesses for the past year, and previews the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
Ariadne continues to develop and make friends in the the world.
Shortly, if all goes well, every word published in Ariadne during the past four years will be available in a US education fulltext database, distributed on a world-wide basis.
This is a mark of the significance of Ariadne's contribution to the discussions surrounding digital library initiatives, both in the UK and the US.
An Ariadne reader, 'Delivering the Electronic Library' has been put together by Lyndon Pugh, John MacColl and Lorcan Dempsey and published in an edition published principally for distribution to UK institutions of Higher Education.
This draws on articles published over nearly three years in issues 1-18.
This book contains a good cross-section of the kind of articles published, and reflects something of real life in the UK eLib community during these important early years.
John MacColl has contributed a short introduction to the book for this issue of Ariadne.
Ariadne has been offered prestigious advertising for its pages.
At the moment we are considering both the practicalities and the legal and institutional implications of this.
Partly because of this, we have prepared a general analysis of Ariadne's access statistics over the past year.
Some details follow in the next section Ariadne access statistics The period for which detailed reports have been prepared runs from October 1998 to October 1999.
All the known caveats and problems with the interpretation of access statistics should be taken as read here: however an intelligent reading of the information available makes it clear that Ariadne's user base is continuing to expand.
During October 1998 we received just under quarter of a million raw hits from all sources (246, 574 hits, to be precise).
In October this year, the raw hit count for all issues of Ariadne had climbed to more than one third of a million per month (354,447).
This means that during the entire year, Ariadne took over 3 million hits.
The minimum total from 1st October 1998 till 24th November 1999 is 3,386,860 hits.
It is however better to look at accesses in terms of user sessions, for which some kind of definition exists.
In October 1998 Ariadne user sessions (defined as hits from the same IP address within a single thirty minute window) were 20,149 for the month, which breaks down to 649 users per day.
The number of page views for the month were 78,966, or 2,547 page views per day.
The home page, which has always been the principle point of navigation for Ariadne since it maintains a list of all previous issues, took 6,299 hits per day.
If we compare these stats with those for October 1999, we find that Ariadne user sessions were up to 34,119 for the whole month, which means 1,100 user sessions per day.
Page views per month were up to 102,593, or 3,310 per day (137 page views per hour).
The following chart summarizes the main details: Month Raw Hits User Sessions Page Views Home Page hits October 1998 246,574 20,149 78,966 6,299 November 1998 221,008 20,233 66,595 5,500 December 1998 196,309 17,850 50,502 4,421 January 1999 156,315 13,613 44,988 3,560 February 1999 198,370 18,714 62,337 4,744 March 1999 269,575 23,869 76,721 5,883 April 1999 251,998 22,858 73,426 5,592 May 1999 236,672 21,328 70,880 5,477 June1999 262,619 23,558 79,301 5,547 July 1999 256,916 22,907 81,855 5,367 August 1999 236,479 23,274 78,227 5,284 September 1999 288,153 26,498 92,535 6,396 October 1999 354,447 34,119 102,593 7,762   Looking at Ariadne user sessions from the geographical point of view, the October 1998 usage plausibly emanating from the United States was 45.6% of the total number (using domains as the discriminating factor.
Since some of these are also used elsewhere .com, for example -, the figure is necessarily imprecise).
Unknown or ambiguous addresses (unresolvable domain names, etc) amounted to 18.19%, and everybody else makes up the remaining 36.2%.
In October 1999 the US usage was pretty much the same, at 46.75%.
Unknown and ambiguous addresses made up 18.35% of the total, and the others were 34.88%.
The access statistics also tell us that the average user session length in October 1998 was 9 minutes 44 seconds, which had risen by October 1999 to 11 minutes 53 seconds (this is nearly four times the average user session length in May 1998, which was 3 minutes and 7 seconds).
This means, given the page views per hour mentioned earlier, that generally multiple users are reading Ariadne concurrently.
Finally, if we look back over Ariadne use since its launch, a clear trend is visible.
In January 1996 (the month of its launch), it managed to clock up 106 sessions; and one year later the usage had risen to 324 per day.
In July 1997 the daily user sessions were 355.
By May 1998 the usage had reached 480 per day.
Now Ariadne receives 1100 user sessions daily.
So Ariadne usage has risen more than ten-fold since its first publication in January 1996, and has doubled between May 1998 and October 1999.
The DNER (the Distributed National Electronic Resource) In the next issue of Ariadne there will be a major article about the forth-coming DNER service.
The DNER will be launched during the next academic year, and, according to the official briefing document, 'will revolutionise the existing resources and services available to people who use information, from learners, teachers and researchers to managers and administrators.
The ultimate goal, which will be implemented in stages, is to provide customisable interfaces for individual users, so that they will always have easy and quick access to the resources they need most frequently.'
The new strategy is intended to bring together 'existing resources and support services into a coherent model to support education.
More than that, it also provides funding and strategic management for the continuing development of collections of content and forms of access to them.'
The perception is that: 'increasing numbers of users, including teachers, students and researchers, are already creating their own learning materials to professional standards.
The DNER provides a framework for incorporating these materials into the pool of resources available to education, ensuring that both the standards and accessibility of materials are appropriate to educational needs.
Such material will be highly complementary to the datasets already compiled by professional and commercial information providers.
The range of content includes VR material, such as virtual fly-throughs; spatial mapping data (where you can take one or more elements from a map and put together a new one, for example, all the trees for a reforestation study or all the roads for route-finding); journal articles and abstracts; electronic books; digital images; bibliographies; teaching resources; self-assessment ware; sound collections; image collections (including manuscripts); and peer-reviewed web resources (ie the RDN).
The DNER will enable the delivery of hybrid libraries, which bring together printed and online materials.
Although in many cases much of the content is already available, a user working on a particular topic will currently have to do a lot of different searches.
The DNER’s customised interfaces will enable information to be presented thematically, according to the individual user’s own requirements.'
The briefing document for the DNER continues with the statement that the Resource is 'designed to enable users to make the most of the lifelong learning society, opening up educational opportunities to a wider range of people than ever before.
It will link up with other networks such as the National Grid for Learning and the New Library Network to ensure that learners are able to access their own preferred sets of resources from any networked computer, for example in the home, the college, the library or the workplace.'
The article in issue 23 should add a good deal of flesh to the bones of this ambitious proposal, and provide a benchmark description against which its success might be measured.
Issue 23 will be available towards the end of March 2000.
In the meantime, enjoy the contents of the current issue.
And my apologies to those who might have expected an Ariadne Christmas card.
They are sitting beside my machine, but I haven't had time to write any of them this year :-( Many thanks to those who managed to get cards to us.
Philip Hunter Editor of Ariadne Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 22: Ariadne's Thread" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL: Search Me!
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL: Search Me!
Buzz database rss xml cataloguing graphics z39.50 ejournal licence url Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod supplies guidance on the large range of available EEVL search options.
Background EEVL is the Internet guide for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Search Me!
There are twenty-seven different search boxes to be found on the EEVL Web site.
Is that a bit excessive?
Why are there so many?
I will try to explain the purpose of the various search boxes below.
It is important, however, to realise that the EEVL home page features one search box from which it is possible to search across all parts of the EEVL Internet Resource Catalogue (including Key Sites), plus EEVL’s main Websites search engine.
Importantly, this means that anyone arriving at the EEVL home page does not need to know about the intricacies of the site in order to be able to search for quality resources in the three subjects covered by EEVL engineering, mathematics and computing.
For those who are not interested in the complexities of the service, therefore, and who merely want to find resources by scanning EEVL’s Internet Resource Catalogue (IRC) of (currently) 9,700 quality resources, and at the same time search the full text of those same 9,700 sites, no further knowledge of the service, and little effort is required.
Figure 1: Main EEVL search box.
From the EEVL home page, it is possible to search the entire IRC plus the full text of sites in the IRC   The Websites search engine mentioned above harvests information from all the Web sites within the EEVL Internet Resource catalogue and allows the actual content of these sites to be searched (as a conventional search engine would do, but with greater subject focus).
About 75,000 pages are indexed by this search engine which uses the mnoGoSearch free software covered by the GNU General Public License.
As EEVL’s IRC is a relatively small database, the Websites search engine effectively acts as a backup for searches which are very specific and which otherwise might produce zero results.
The second, third and fourth search boxes search across all subject sections of EEVL and are, in turn, Key Sites, the EEVL Catalogue and the Websites search engine.
Each is available by clicking on the appropriate index tab from the home page, and each offers more search options than the home page search box.
The Key Sites search box searches only a subset of EEVL’s Catalogue.
Key sites are those which have been judged to be particularly important for EEVL’s user community, and only about 10% of those included in the IRC fall into this category.
The Key Sites search is especially useful for lecturers and library and information professionals who want to identify only the largest and most significant resources in relevant subjects.
The EEVL Catalogue search box searches the complete EEVL IRC.
Both the Key Sites and the EEVL Catalogue allow advanced search options.
For example, it is possible to pre-select the location of the resource (UK, Europe, World), and also to refine by subject area and resource type.
Any combination of up to 3 different subject sections or sub-sections can be chosen by using the pull-down menus, and the resource type selection boxes allow searching to be limited to one or more resource types.
This enables users to narrow their searches to particular sectors (i.e.
commercial/higher academic sector) or particular types of resources (i.e.
e-journals, learning materials, news, mailing lists, etc).
By default, all three main subject sections, and all resource types, are selected.
Figure 2: EEVL Catalogue search box.
Many options are available for limiting searches   Those who are interested only in one of the three main subjects covered by EEVL (engineering, mathematics and computing), can select that subject section from the EEVL home page by clicking on the appropriate subject section logos, which feature at the top of all pages.
Figure 3: Subject navigation graphics   Clicking on the browse headings will have the same result.
Figure 4: Top level browse headings   The three subject sections feature a similar interface to the home page, with each being colour-coded (green for engineering, blue for mathematics and red for computing).
From each there are default search boxes allowing the cross-searching of that subject section, or alternately tabs provide for more specific searching of Key Sites, IRC, or Websites for the same subject section.
In other words, there is a total of twelve search boxes which allow searches to be limited in one way or another.
In fact, there are thirteen, as there is an additional search box available from the Engineering subject section which searches the SearchLTEngineering database.
Figure 5: SearchLT search option   SearchLT-Engineering is an online database of web based Engineering resources for learning and teaching which have been selected by cataloguers and academics.
As well as being searchable via EEVL from the link indicated above, the full service, featuring several more options, can be reached from the SearchLT project web site.
EEVL browse sub-sections (see Figure 6, below) also feature a search box, with a drop-down option for searching only that browse section, or the whole of EEVL.
Figure 6: Example of an EEVL browse sub-section search box.
Not counting the SearchLT project interface, that makes, so far, a total of eighteen search boxes on the EEVL site.
There are more, though.
Figure 7: Search results example   Once a search has been conducted on EEVL, or within a particular section of EEVL, results are listed underneath a search box, as shown in Figure 7 above.
This search box defaults to the same search options as the original search.
For example, the results of a search in the engineering section of EEVL will feature a search box that will default to searching that same section once again.
A popular part of the EEVL site, which features its own search box, is the Engineering E-journal Search Engine (EESE).
EESE searches the full text of over 150 engineering e-journals which are listed in the engineering section of the IIRC.
In order to be selected, e-journals must be free, full text (or offer most of their content as full text) and available without registration.
Figure 8: Engineering E-journal Search Engine   Another very popular part of EEVL is the Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) database, which also features its own search box.
In fact, RAM features two search boxes, a Simple search available from the RAM home page, and a More Options search (shown below in figure 9).
Figure 9: RAM advanced search options   RAM is a freely available bibliographic database of information for manufacturing and related areas.
It covers items in well over 500 niche and mainstream journals and magazines, and also details of books, videos and conference proceedings.
Also available through EEVL, and with its own search box, is the Offshore Engineering Information Service (OEIS).
OEIS gives information about publications and meetings dealing with: oil and gas exploration and production; offshore health, safety and environmental protection; resources of the seabed and renewable energy; and marine technology.
Two specialist databases made available through EEVL, which also have their own search boxes, are the JET Impringement Database, and the Liquid Crystal Database.
Both are small, specialist bibliographic databases.
EEVL hosts a searchable Directory of Members of the University Science and Technology Librarian’s Group (USTLG).
USTLG is an informal group of UK university science and technology librarians, which holds a termly meeting and uses the lis-scitech discussion list to foster contact.
And, finally, on the EEVL site there is a search box which allows searching of the RDN ResourceFinder.
The ResourceFinder is a tool from the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) which searches across RDN Hub IRCs including those of Altis, Biome, EEVL, Humbul, PSIgate, SOSIG.
It facilitates the search for quality internet resources in a number of subject areas, and covers over 60,000 quality resources.
That makes a total of twenty-seven search boxes on the EEVL site.
Is that it?
Well…not quite.
There is one final search box.
This one can be found on the Working with EEVL pages.
These pages explain how to link to EEVL, get the latest EEVL news via RSS, search EEVL via Z39.50, get XML versions of EEVL records, download EEVL Logos, and also show how anyone can search EEVL from their own web site.
Engineering, Maths & Computing Figure 10: The EEVL search box can be embedded on any Web page   Part of this page features an example (shown above in Figure 10) of the search box which can be inserted into any Web site page.
Entering a term into the search box will search EEVL try it above, and you will see how it works.
So there are, in fact, twenty-eight search boxes on EEVL.
They are designed to satisfy the diverse information needs of a range of users.
Those searching only for resources in a particular subject area, those only interested in the most important sites, those using very specific search terms, those who want to filter their searches, those searching for bibliographic information, those looking for contacts, those wanting to broaden their searches to all of the RDN, and those looking for learning and teaching resources, are all catered for.
For many purposes, though, the main search box on the EEVL home page is sufficient.
Author Details   Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh E-mail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: “EEVL Search Me!” Author:Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Hot News From WWW10 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Hot News From WWW10 Buzz mobile software rdf framework xml apache archives css xhtml xsl namespace video hypertext multimedia png adobe e-learning streaming xpointer xlink smil svg interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reports on the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, held in Hong Kong on 1-5 May 2001.
Previous Web Focus articles have provided trip reports on the International World Wide Web conferences [1] [2] [3] and [4].
These reports have commented on the birth of new developments such as XML, RDF and WAP and the mobile Web.
So what was hot from WWW10?
Well the weather certainly was hot and very humid.
The 1,200+ delegates were very appreciative of the air-conditioning in the Hong Kong Conference Centre, located on Hong Kong island, next to the harbour (see Figure 1).
As is the norm, a Web site [5] was provided for the conference, which contained the conference details and also access to papers presented at the conference.
What Was Hot?
A theme running through the conference was "Web services" this phrase was featured in not only keynote speakers from software vendors and computer suppliers (such as Microsoft and IBM) but also in Tim Berners-Lee's talk on the Web.
The phrase "Web service" has been described as "an application delivered as a service that can be integrated with other Web Services using Internet standards.
In other words, it's an URL-addressable resource that programmatically returns information to clients who want to use it."
[6].
The role of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to facilitate the developments of Web standards and protocols to ensure that Web services will be interoperable.
Tim Berners-Lee's keynote talk at the conference was entitled "Are We Done Yet?"
[7].
In the talk, Tim described the architectural developments of the Web, and reviewed those architectural components which are in the process of being completed and those which are still to be developed.
Tim felt that in some respects the Web framework was complete: XML was well-established and additional XML components were being developed (XML Schemas became a W3C Recommendation on the opening day of the WWW 10 conference) and rich Web pages could now be produced using XHTML and CSS, with PNG and SVG providing powerful graphical facilities.
On the other hand, a number of aspects were not yet complete: XML still requires a query language and the richer hypertext functionality of XLink and XPointer had still not been completed and work still needs to be done on the integration of Web pages with multilingual resources, the role of XSL and richer forms.
In addition to the framework for the traditional mainstream Web, additional work is still needed to support Web services.
The IT community has much experience of remote operations (e.g.
RPC, CORBA, etc.)
Within the Web context, XML Namespaces and RDF will have to be completed in order to provide an open, interoperable framework for Web services.
The final aspect of the Web which still requires additional work is the architecture for the Semantic Web.
Tim admitted that we are still at the "fun stage" researchers are developing interesting Semantic Web applications based on RDF, but there is still little interest from the commercial community or deployment of production services.
Tim pointed out that XML documents have no inherent meaning does the content of an <TITLE> element refer to the title of a document, a CD or the status of an individual (Mr, Dr, Lord, etc.)?
Once schemas become widely deployed, XML document will have meaning, which will allow software agents to be much more useful.
Tim concluded by thanking the research community for the progress so far, but reminded us that the work was not yet complete.
Figure 1: Kong Kong Conference Centre Web Geeks Meet the Ontologists The future of the Semantic Web was one of the main topics of discussion at the conference.
Some felt that the Semantic Web was too much of an abstract research concept and that, in the light of experiences in the field of AI and Expert Systems, it would not be sensible to invest heavily in the development of Semantic Web services.
Interestingly, this conference was the one in which the knowledge representation community came along and met the Web community.
This meeting of two communities was reminiscent of the initial meetings with the hypertext community in the mid to late 1990s hypertext gurus, who previously had regarded the Web as a very flawed hypertext system, realised that, although flawed, the Web was important and would not go away.
So they came to WWW conferences and engaged the Web community in discussions on W3C Working and Interest Groups.
As a result of the this dialogue work progressed on the development of richer hypertext mechanisms, such as XLink and XPointer.
The same thing is happening with the Semantic Web.
The Knowledge Representation community is making its presence felt through attendance at the conference (which included participation in a Semantic Web workshop, panel session and Developer's Day track), and involvement in discussion lists such as the www-rdf-interest [8] and rdf-logic [9] mailing lists.
The discussions at the WWW 10 conference have generated much discussions on the lists, which can be illustrated by the responses to Jos De Roo's question "What do the ontologists want?
":   Since http://www.daml.org/listarchive/joint-committee/ is public and since I'm reading them from time to time, I came across http://www.daml.org/listarchive/joint-committee/0387.html In there, I found (among other comments) [[[ It might be salutary and useful if the RDFCore were to spend some time listening to what the ontologists want, instead of telling them what they can have. ]]]
Since I am a member of the RDFCore WG I'm more than glad to listen to the ontologists.
So what do the ontologists want?
Over 100 responses to this thread were posted in the following 10 days!
Although the jury is still out on whether RDF and the Semantic Web will be deployed to any significant extent, it can only be good news that the ontologists and the Web communities are willing to talk to each other.
What Else of Interest Apart from the widespread interest in Web services and the heated debates on the Semantic Web, what else was of interest at WWW 10?
Before the conference officially opened there was a day of workshops and tutorial sessions [10].
The SMIL tutorial described developments to the SMIL 2.0 specification which hopes to become a W3C Recommendation in summer 2001.
SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) [11] aims to provide simple TV-like "rich media"/multimedia presentations such as training courses on the Web.
A SMIL presentation can be composed of streaming audio, streaming video, images, text or any other media type.
SMIL would seem to be of particular interest to the teaching and learning communities as it appears to provide an open framework for developing e-learning applications.
The WebDAV tutorial described developments to the WebDAV standards.
The aim of WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is to "define the HTTP extensions necessary to enable distributed web authoring tools to be broadly interoperable, while supporting user needs" [12].
Currently if documents can be updated by multiple authors it will be the responsibility of the authoring tool to handle file locking.
If authors wish to use different authoring tools, there is clearly a problem.
Management of file locking by the operating system will not provide a solution as the operating system will not be aware of the relationship of files with each other e.g.
this file is the table of contents for these other files, which comprise a document which should be treated as a single object.
WebDAV aims to provide the open standard for managing distributed authoring on the Web.
Support for WebDAV is available in in a number of open source systems including the Apache Web server and the Zope Content Management System.
Commercial products include Adobe GoLive and Microsoft Office 2000.
A list of WebDAV applications is available on the WebDAV Web site [13].
Within a University environment, in which it is unlikely that institutions will agree to adopt a single authoring tool, products which implement WebDAV would appear to be essential if distributed authoring is a requirement.
Technical Papers and Posters The WWW10 Refereed Conference track included 78 papers.
These were grouped into a number of sessions, including ETools For Learning, E-Learning Environments, Personalized Presentation, E-Commerce, XML Foundations, etc.
As well as the refereed papers track, there were also the Vendor Track, Culture Track and the Poster Track, together with the W3C Track.
As will previous WWW conferences, many of the papers are available online [14] [15] [16].
The Next WWW Conference The next WWW Conference, which has the name WWW2002, will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii from 6-11 May 2002.
The conference Web site has already been set up [17].
Details of the calls for refereed papers, tutorials, workshops, etc.
are available on the conference Web site.
It would be good to see a significant presence from the UK so why not think about contributing to the conference.
Figure 2: The WWW2002 Conference Home Page References Report on the WWW 6 Conference, Ariadne, issue 9 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/web-focus/ WWW7: The Seventh International World Wide Web Conference, Ariadne, issue 15 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue15/web-focus/ Report on the WWW 8 Conference, Ariadne, issue 20 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/web-focus/ Reflections On WWW9, Ariadne, issue 24 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/web-focus/ Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, http://www.www10.org/ Welcome to the .NET Sample Web Services, http://www.gotdotnet.com/playground/services/ Are We Done Yet?, Tim Berners-Lee, W3C http://www.w3.org/2001/Talks/0501-tbl/ www-rdf-interest@w3.org Mail Archives, W3C http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/ www-rdf-logic@w3.org, W3C http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-logic/ WWW10 Tutorials and Workshops, http://www.www10.org/program/w10-tutwork.shtml Synchronized Multimedia, W3C http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/ DAV Frequently Asked Questions, http://www.webdav.org/other/faq.html WebDAV Projects, http://www.webdav.org/projects/ The Tenth International World Wide Web Conference & Poster Proceedings, http://www.www10.org/cdrom/start.htm WWW10 Vendor Track Presentations, http://www.www10.org/vendors/ WWW10 Web and Society Track Presentations, http://www.www10.org/program/w10-prog-soc.html WWW2002 Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference, http://www.www2002.org/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Focus: Hot News From WWW10" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL: 'Not a Success' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL: 'Not a Success' Buzz data database dissemination copyright ejournal url Citation BibTex RIS Roddy Macleod embarks on a tendentious argument.
It is fairly common practice for anyone writing about a service or project with which they are involved to emphasise its benefits, popularity and plus points, and so perhaps the title of this article EEVL ‘not a success’ may seem a little abstruse and may even have grabbed your attention.
If that’s the case, let me explain what I mean by “EEVL ‘not a success’”.
I do not mean that EEVL [01] has been unsuccessful.
After all, as a gateway to engineering information on the Internet, EEVL has attracted two million page views since it was launched in September 1996, and has secured funding into the immediate future as the ‘E’ part of the EMC Hub [02].
EEVL has gained a certain amount of acceptance, both within the academic community and beyond, as a service which helps people find useful engineering resources on the Internet, and in addition to its database of over 4,500 quality engineering resources it has developed several other services which have proved equally popular.
EEVL’s Engineering E-journal Search Engine [03] provides a way of accessing the contents of over 120 freely available e-journals, and the Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) [04] bibliographic database now contains details of over 30,000 articles on subjects of importance to industry.
In addition, EEVL also hosts a fairly crude but effective directory of USTLG (University Science and Technology Librarians Group) members [05], a surprisingly popular Bibliography of guides to engineering information on the Internet [06], two small specialist bibliographic databases on Liquid Crystals [07] and Jet Impingement [08], and an Offshore Engineering Information Service [09].
With such an array of services, and with a track record of usage, therefore, I think it is fair to say that EEVL has not been unsuccessful.
At the same time, however, I feel that it is equally fair to say that EEVL has failed to fulfil all of its potential, and therefore it could be said that it has not been a success.
I would suggest that EEVL has not been successful in two areas: firstly, it has failed to secure sufficient funding to allow it to exist without direct monetary input from JISC through the RDNet [10], which is the aim of JISC for such services, and it has not been promoted sufficiently to its user community.
Let me now look at both of these areas in more detail.
From August 1995 to July 1999 EEVL was funded through eLib: the Electronic Libraries Programme [11], and during that period it was always hoped that an exit strategy could be developed which would secure sufficient funding from other sources to allow the service to continue.
Various funding models were reviewed, including the possibility of developing EEVL into a subscription-based service.
That option was discarded mainly because of the expectation, within the networked community, that such Internet search tools should be freely available to all.
Commercial sponsorship was also considered, and although EEVL has made some progress in this direction, it is a difficult track to follow for a project based in the higher education sector.
Although some praise has been received for EEVL’s promotional efforts, most of its marketing has been undertaken on a small scale.
EEVL has been featured in a number of publications, as can be seen from the EEVL in the Media [12] page, and at first glance that list of articles and press release items might impress.
On closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that much of the press coverage has appeared in library and information journals.
The LIS press is, of course, an important target for any information service such as EEVL, but it is not the only one.
The majority of potential users of a service giving access to engineering resources will not be members of the information community.
Where EEVL has succeeded in being mentioned in the engineering press, and in particular in engineering trade journals, in most instances these have consisted of small news items and brief extracts from press releases.
Exceptions have included a regular feature in the monthly Industrial Technology [13] magazine, which has a circulation of around 25,000, and several articles which have appeared in various Setform engineering publications, but although these instances have been very welcome, the titles in question amount to only a small portion of the engineering trade press.
Various other promotional ideas have been tried, including giveaway EEVL pyramid calendars and a leaflet with a distinctive triangular design.
For the last three years, 1,000 calendars have been distributed in January to UK information professionals and others on the EEVL mailing lists, and approaching 20,000 triangular leaflets have been sent out, mainly to university libraries.
Last year, colourful posters featuring the EEVL logo were sent to members of the USTLG using a mailing list produced from the USTLG directory.
It is hoped that these efforts have helped to spread recognition of the service, and the assistance of many science and engineering information professionals throughout the country for their unpaid distribution work has been much appreciated.
Other promotional activities have included workshops held at various institutions, presences at a small number of conferences, including Online ‘98 and Tomorrow’s World, regular mailings to different mailing lists, e-journals and newsgroups, submission of the EEVL site details to the growing plethora of search engines and directories, and contact with a large number of webmasters.
As one of the people responsible for coordinating EEVL’s promotional campaigns, I can say that the planning and implementation of all of the above things has been both interesting and educational, but I cannot say that, combined, they have been successful.
Why?
Because out of necessity and due to the amount of funds available, the scale of the effort has been small.
Whilst 20,000, being the number of leaflets distributed, might seem a reasonable figure, it is tiny in comparison to the number of students and staff in engineering departments in UK higher education institutions (over 150,000) or the hundreds of thousands of engineers in industry.
It is a resulting unfortunate fact that many engineering academics and practicing engineers have simply never heard of EEVL.
Of course, EEVL’s various promotional campaigns will continue, but what else can be done in order to make EEVL a success?
How might the service secure non-JISC funding, and how might EEVL promote itself adequately to the large number of potential users?
There must be great potential for a service such as EEVL, which is of relevance to the engineering sector, to tap into corporate sponsorship and advertising budgets.
However, approaching engineering companies with cap in hand, and requesting financial contributions for a relatively small scale, and in some ways unusual (in that it is concerned with electronic information) service, is not an easy thing to do.
EEVL has made such approaches, but they have sometimes been turned down after initial interest.
It is possible that the approaches have been made to the wrong person or in the wrong way, but it is more likely that the companies concerned have been wary of investing in a service which they do not fully understand.
Companies are not altruistic and have tried and tested methods of marketing themserves, and association with a Web-based resource discovery service will be a novel concept for many.
And as far as marketing is concerned, promoting a service such as EEVL on the same scale as, say, a commercial search engine such as Mirago [14], which has a six-figure marketing budget, is clearly impossible.
However, EEVL is currently planning a new initiative which, it is hoped, may combine a potential for revenue raising from the commercial sector with widespread promotion through a number of outlets, both in the LIS and engineering trade press, and all at a relatively low cost.
This will be EEVL’s biggest marketing effort so far, and although it may not raise income in itself, it will hopefully help to forge partnerships with relevant companies.
These partnerships might be exploited at a later date, or might even pave the way to alliances with other companies.
The exercise will also bring the service to the attention of many new potential users.
I do not wish to go into too much detail at the present time, as this initiative is still at the planning stage, but I will say ‘look out for the EEVL Challenge’ which may be running at the time you read this.
The EEVL Challenge will take the form of a competition, with fliers advertising it to be widely distributed, and a number of prizes on offer as inducements for participation.
Already secured for the EEVL Challenge is sponsorship or assistance from RS Components [15], ESDU International [16], Design Engineering Online [17], The Engineer Online [18], Newnes [19], BRIX (Federation of Master Builders) [20], EDINA (Edinburgh Data and INformation Access) [21], TWI [22], Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) [23], HotEcho [24], and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) [25].
If everything goes according to plan, it is possible that I may just be able to report in a future issue of Ariadne, that “EEVL is becoming successful”.
However, whether or not the EEVL Challenge itself is as successful as I hope it will be, it should offer a case study of an attempt by a JISC funded service to generate commercial partnerships and to undertake a large scale promotional exercise.
One of the aims of the Resource Discovery Network (RDNet) [26] is to assist gateways, hubs and their partner organisations to develop business plans, and the Challenge may also provide experience and data for consideration and dissemination within the constituent parts of the RDNet.
References Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL).
http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ EMC Hub.
http://www.eevl.ac.uk/em c.html Engineering E-journal Search Engine.
http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/ Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM).
http://www.eevl.ac.u k/ram/index.html University Science and Technology Librarians Group.
http://www.eevl.ac.
uk/ustlg/index.html Engineering Resources on the Internet: A bibliography.
http://www.eevl.ac.uk/bibliog.html Liquid Crystal Database.
http://www.eevl.ac.uk /lcd/index.html JET Impingement Database.
http://www.eevl.ac.uk/jet/index.html Offshore Engineering Information Service.
http://www.eevl.ac.uk/offshore/ eLib: Electronic Libraries Programme.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ EEVL in the Media.
http://www.eevl.ac.uk/press.html Industrial Technology.
http://www.industrialtechnology.co.uk/index.htm Mirago.
http://www.mirago.co.uk/ rswww.com http://rswww.com/ ESDU http://www.esdu.com/ Design Engineering.
http://www.designen gineering.co.uk/ The Engineer.
http://www.theengineer.co.
uk/ Newnes.
http://www.bh.com/newnes/ BRIX, Federation of Master Builders.
http://www.fmb.org.uk/ EDINA: Edinburgh Data and INformation Access.
http://edina.ed.ac.uk/index.shtml TWI: World Centre for Materials Joining Technology.
http://www.twi.co.uk/ Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
http://www.rics.org.uk/ HotEcho.
http://www.hotecho.org/ Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE).
http://www.iee.org.uk/ Resource Discovery Network (RDNet).
http://www.rdnet.ac.uk/ Author Details Roddy MacLeod EMC Hub Coordinator Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: “EEVL ‘not a success’” Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: Lights Out and Silver Boots on Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: Lights Out and Silver Boots on Buzz mobile database infrastructure digitisation video cataloguing passwords ebook mp3 licence url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes with her predictions for the future of Public Libraries and the Internet.
After five and a half years at UKOLN I’m leaving.
I’m having a small career break and will be indulging myself in some lie-ins, a bit of travel and a chance to find out just who are all those people wandering around the shops between 9 am and 5.30 pm, Monday to Friday.
This then is my final Ariadne column and it’s a good opportunity to review the last five years and look forward to what the next five will bring.
My first day at UKOLN was a very dark experience not metaphorically but physically.
A power failure had plunged the mainly windowless University Library, where UKOLN is based, into near darkness.
A security guard with a torch had to physically lead me through the building to my new office which thankfully had a window.
I couldn’t help feeling at the time that it was an omen but what kind?
Was this job a mistake?
Was I entering a dark period of my life?
Or was it a symbolic journey the darkened stacks representing libraries’ paper based past and the bright UKOLN offices symbolising their electronic future?
Or was it perhaps just a sign that the library refurbishment taking place wasn’t going very well?
At that time in 1995 public libraries were just beginning to explore what the Internet had to offer them.
One of first pieces of work I did was a survey for the then newly created Library and Information Commission about the level of Internet connectivity in public libraries [1].
The survey revealed a depressing picture less than 3% of public library service points had access to the Internet and less than 1% were providing public Internet access.
Most public librarians didn’t have e-mail addresses (I was the main user of the office fax), had never used the Internet and if access was available it was via a slow dial-up connection on the system librarian’s PC.
This picture of low connectivity was in stark contrast to the academic community where campuses had high-speed access via JANET, even students had e-mail addresses and academic libraries were merging with computer services so to be able provide more electronic services.
For many public librarians at this time developing Internet services seemed an impossible challenge.
The early nineties had not been a good time for public libraries.
There had been cuts, more cuts and yet more cuts.
Services were struggling, book-funds had been slashed and staff were under-resourced.
The sudden arrival of the information superhighway (as we quaintly called the Internet then) with its need for infrastructure investment, staff training and building remodelling seemed a challenge too far.
How on earth could libraries afford to develop these new services when they were barely managing to deliver existing services?
There was, however, a light at the end of this very dark tunnel.
Despite its failings the then Conservative Government recognised the importance of the role public libraries could have in making the Internet accessible to the public.
The Library and Information Commission was asked to produce a vision of how the Internet could be integrated into public libraries.
This report became New Library: the People’s Network (the report’s title indicating the change of Government that took place whilst it was being written) [2].
The New Library report was hugely important for the development of Internet services in public libraries.
It provided a powerful vision of what libraries could become in the digital age.
It didn’t look back to the golden days of the early 1970s and it didn’t bemoan funding cuts and the slow decline of libraries, it looked forward and highlighted the potential networking offered.
It showed that libraries had an important role to play in the new government’s policies of education, education, education and social inclusion.
This vision was so successfully sold to Government that in 2000 the Government committed millions of pounds to connecting all public libraries to the Internet by the year 2002 [3].
Lottery money was also made available for training every public librarian in IT skills [4] and £50 million was made available through the New Opportunities Fund to digitise public library content and services [5].
And so now five years after I started at UKOLN networked services are becoming commonplace.
Already many staff have been trained to European Computer Driving License standard and public Internet access is a standard service.
Admittedly there are still problems there could be more money for infrastructure, many authorities are struggling to meet their share of the funding requirement.
There could be more staff existing staff are stretched in trying to support these new services in addition to the old ones.
And there could be more money for digitisation £50 million doesn’t go a long way when split between 200 library authorities and numerous museums and charities.
But in general this is a positive time for libraries.
It is a time of opportunity and change.
Whereas the last five years have been about getting the technology into public libraries, libraries are now going to start exploiting it.
The next five years won’t be about infrastructure but about content and online service delivery.
Here then are my predictions about what’s going to happen to libraries in the next five years, bear in mind though that five years is a ridiculously long time to make any predictions connected to the Internet.
If you’re reading this in 2006 I hope these predictions give you some entertainment even if they are completely wrong.
Electronic Reference in five years time all public library authorities will offer real time online electronic reference services.
These services will give access to a reference librarian either in a real-time chat room or via some kind of video-conferencing.
Fewer people will visit the library to have their reference query answered preferring the convenience of the online service Running such services will prove time-consuming and initially expensive and so authorities may work together to develop regional or even national online reference services.
These services will be available if from early morning to late in the evening if not 24 hours a day.
They will use databases, books and the Internet to answer queries.
Some libraries may generate income by offering differing levels of service for example a premium service available for a charge would guarantee a fuller answer delivered more quickly.
Services of this type are already being developed by libraries in America [6] and by dot com enterprises [7].
E-books in five years time most libraries will circulate e-books.
E-books are electronic texts which can be read either using a specific e-book reader, a handheld PC, laptop or desktop PC [8].
Library users won’t need to visit the library to borrow and return e-books but will simply download them from the online catalogue.
E-books will not have challenged the predominant use of print text for fiction reading but will start to become commonplace for many reference, non-fiction and academic texts.
By 2006 at least 10% of a library’s book budget will be spent on e-books.
In additional libraries will also loan electronic talking books, music in Mp3 format and possibly even digital videos.
These loans will be mediated by the online catalogue.
Different charging models will be developed around the country with some authorities viewing all electronic media as a value added service and others seeing e-books at least as part of their free core services.
Death of Community Information in five years time most libraries will no longer have community information services.
A large number of commercial companies are already providing in-depth community information which is in direct competition with library services.
In Bath, for example, at least three Web sites provide information about the city, local clubs, events, doctors, businesses and so on.
These kind of commercial sites are more visually attractive, more interactive and have a greater number of users than similar library services.
They include information from local newspapers, job adverts, classified ads and house sales.
As these services continue to expand it will become hard for libraries to compete with them and so user numbers of the library service will begin to fall.
By 2006 many libraries will have redirected funding previously used for Community Information services into developing other online services.
Reader Development by 2006 libraries will be offering interactive reader development services.
These will range from the relatively simple, for example book groups run via e-mail, to more complicated developments like enhanced catalogues.
Enhanced catalogues will look similar to Amazon’s book catalogue [9] and allow users to comment on books they’ve borrowed, rate them and read reviews from publishers and journals.
These catalogues will also build up profiles of the users and automatically recommend other books that they might enjoy.
It will e-mail users (or even send text messages to mobile phones) overdue notices, information about new books which match their reading profile and information about library events and exhibitions.
The catalogue will no longer be just a book location tool but will become an interactive book promoter.
These kind of catalogues will roll out as libraries upgrade or replace their existing library management systems.
By 2006 enhanced catalogues will be recognised as the ideal system to have but won’t yet be available in all libraries.
Competition Between Libraries in five years time all libraries will provide a range of interactive online services.
The development of these services may cause libraries to start competing for users with each other.
As a growing number of users choose to use online services only the location of the library service becomes immaterial to them.
The online library services of an authority 200 miles away are just as technically accessible as those provided locally.
Such virtual users may compare online library services and seek out the ones most suited to their needs.
The question is how libraries will deal with such non-local use?
Will they password control access to all their services so only local users (or in other words local Council Tax payers) have access to them or will non-local use be welcomed?
One option may be to offer non-local users access to online services for a fee.
Morton Grove Library [10] in America already provides this kind of service in limited form.
It offers non-local users access to online databases for an annual fee of $25.
I predict that by 2006 this model will be common in the UK and libraries will be selling online library memberships to non-local users.
Fees will be on a sliding scale ranging from just having access to databases to having access to all online services including borrowing e-books.
This kind of charged for service may become very lucrative and an important income stream for libraries.
It will mean that libraries will compete for customers and be in direct competition.
It is likely that the larger and more effectively funded authorities will create the highest quality online services.
Smaller authorities may find that their users start migrating to these services leading to a drop in user numbers.
The major development of the next five years will be the virtual branch of the public library.
These virtual branches will consist of a collection of online services which replicate, extend and complement the services provided in library buildings.
Their development will raise a number of challenging questionswho can use a library’s online services?
will libraries start competing for customers?
and what counts as a free core service in a digital environment?
Different authorities are going to answer these questions in different ways and online services won’t develop uniformly the virtual branch will look very different depending on which authority is providing it.
Despite these rather uncomfortable challenges public libraries will be stronger than ever in 2006.
People will continue to visit their local library building to browse and borrow books, study, use the Internet and research information.
But in 2006 when this building is shut they’ll still have access to these services.
The next five years will see the library moving out of its building and into even more people’s lives.
Oh yes, one final prediction: Silver clothes.
2006 sounds so futuristic surely by then we’ll be wearing silver clothes and travelling to work on hover-bikes.
References [1] Library and Information Commission public library Internet survery http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/ukoln/ormes-1995-01/ [2] New Library: The People’s Network http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/intro.html [3] People’s Network Infrastructure http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/project/infrastructure.html [4] People’s Network Staff Training http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/project/training.html [5] NOF Digitise http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/project/content.html [6] Real Time Reference Services http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/LiveRef.htm [7] Web Help http://www.webhelp.com/home [8] An E-book Primer http://www.earl.org.uk/policy/issuepapers/ebook.htm [9] Amazon Book Catalogue http://www.amazon.co.uk/books/ [10] Morton Grove BraryDog Premium Membership http://www.brarydog.net/premium.asp Author Details Sarah Ormes Public Libraries Focus UKOLN University of Bath United Kingdom Email: s.l.ormes@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Public Libraries Focus: Lights Out and Silver Boots On" Author: Sarah Ormes Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/pub-libs/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz archives repositories copyright windows streaming quicktime personalisation ict research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
JISC/CNI Conference 2002 Following the success of previous conferences held in London and Stratford The Joint Information Systems Committee and the Coalition for Networked Information are proud to announce the 4th International Conference, that will be held at the Edinburgh Marriott on 26th and 27th June.
The conference will bring together experts from both the United States and the United Kingdom with keynote addresses from speakers from OCLC, SCRAN and CNI.
Parallel sessions will explore and contrast major developments that are happening on both sides of the Atlantic.
It should be of interest to all senior management in information systems in the education community and those responsible for delivering digital services and resources for learning, teaching and research.
Keynote speakers include: Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Office of Research; Bruce Royan, Chief Executive of SCRAN since 1996; and Clifford A. Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997 will provide summary comments at the close of the conference.
Pre-Conference Sessions There will be two pre-conference sessions from 9:30 11:00 am on the 26th, held by SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and ETDs: Electronic Theses and Dissertations, these sessions are included in the conference fee.
Further information and a Registration details can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ COPYRIGHT FOR BEGINNERS 15 May, London Everything library and information professionals should know about copyright but were afraid to ask!
This introductory workshop has been designed to provide a thorough grounding in the basics of copyright, the current law and its application, as well as to provide practical guidance on dealing with day to day issues.
BENEFITS FROM ATTENDING By the end of the workshop participants should feel confident that they are not breaking the law.
Clear common-sense advice will be given on coping with the law when dealing with all library, information and learning resources from print to digital.
The workshop leader encourages interactive participation and discussion of the various issues.
The final session will involve a short test to see what has sunk in!
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
All those who work in the library and information profession who are affected by copyright and related problems and who have little or no knowledge of the subject.
This workshop is suitable for all beginners including paraprofessionals and newly qualified staff as well as reprographics and ICT staff.
It is also useful for those who want a basic refresher.
PROVISIONAL BOOKING: To make a provisional booking simply telephone us on 020 7255 0560, textphone 020 7255 0505, visit our web pages at http://www.cilip.org.uk/training or email training@cilip.org.uk An Introduction to Streaming Media & Live Web-casting 19 April 2002 Presenter: Derek Richards (HyperJAM) What is ‘Streamed Media?’ Why is it important?
This is a new course from the BUFVC which will give participants an understanding of the basic technologies and problems associated with streaming time-based media, and to then investigate how to use these technologies to web-cast live.
The course will cover: Basic server technologies; problems, how streaming works, bandwidth issues, compression The benefits of web-casting, including access, automatic archiving, interactive broadcasting Web-casting pre-production and production issues Practical exercises and demonstrations Coverage of the ‘big 3’ streaming technologies Real, Microsoft Windows Media, Apple QuickTime Throughout the day discussion and feedback will be encouraged.
The practical and economic considerations of different technologies will be compared and participants will be encouraged to consider the needs of the Web-cast when creating original footage.
Derek Richards is founder of HyperJAM, (http://www.hyperjam.co.uk) which provides digital media services for live events to the arts, entertainment, and corporate sectors: their clients include the ICA, FilmFour and the Notting Hill Carnival.
He was also involved in establishing Britain’s first digital arts training centre, Artec, in 1991.
Intended audience: audio visual and computer service providers, audio-visual librarians and producers.
Cost per person, including lunch and refreshments: full price: GBP 120.00 (inc. VAT), BUFVC member¹s rate: GBP 100.00 (inc. VAT).
You can download booking forms from the BUFVC website at http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/courses/index.html, or for more information email: courses@bufvc.ac.uk Workshop on Personalisation Technique 28 May 2002, Spain Electronic Publishing (EP) on the Web is a fast growing field which includes various heterogeneous systems for information access: traditional journals, magazines and newspapers accessible via Web, fully electronic journals, scholarly journals, e-prints repositories, news, vertical and horizontal portals, and so on.
This workshop aims at both reviewing the current state of the art in the exploitation of personalization techniques within Web sites devoted to electronic publishing, and highlighting major trends for the future and open research problems.
The Workshop is addressed to researchers and to electronic publishers.
More information can be found at: http://www.dimi.uniud.it/~mizzaro/AH2002/ Concord: The Library Co-operation Website various items recently put up on the website A new Final Report: Touchstone: co-operation and partnership programme for UK Shakespeare collections (in PDF format) can be found at http://www.bl.uk/concord/pdf_files/touchstonefinal.pdf A Supplementary Report: INFOSAVE Saving our National Written Heritage from the Threat of Acid Deterioration (in PDF format) can be found at http://www.bl.uk/concord/pdf_files/deacidsupp.pdf A Press Release concerning the above can be found at http://www.bl.uk/concord/pressrelease11.html Five new Progress Reports are available: CECILIA: mapping the UK music resource http://www.bl.uk/concord/2000project08int1.html Libraries and Learners in London (in PDF format) http://www.bl.uk/concord/pdf_files/liblearnlonprogress.pdf Black and Asian Londoners 1536 1840 http://www.bl.uk/concord/2000project09int1.html Widening Access to Resources in Merseyside (WARM) (in PDF format) http://www.bl.uk/concord/pdf_files/warmprogress.pdf Working with public libraries to enhance access to quality-assured health information for the lay public (in PDF format) http://www.bl.uk/concord/pdf_files/qualmedprogress.pdf Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Managed Learning?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Managed Learning?
Buzz data software framework portal metadata passwords e-learning vle shibboleth licence authentication interoperability webct url research Citation BibTex RIS Nicole Harris on current developments towards Managed Learning Environments in the ANGEL project.
The terms MLE (Managed Learning Environment) and VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) are frequently found in use within UK HE institutions at present.
They are applied, along with a range of alternative terms, to products that provide teaching and learning tools within an online environment.
These products range from commercial offerings from companies such as Blackboard [1] and WebCT [2], project developments such as COSE [3] and CoMentor [4], and institutional portal developments that allow users easy access to all required services such as the Edinburgh Student Portal (ESP) [5].
The focus of UK HE is evidently on these technologies.
A survey by UCISA found that 81% of interviewed institutions are making use of what UCISA term VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) [6].
ANGEL (Authenticated Networked Guided Environment for Learning) is one of many projects developing enhancements for VLEs, looking specifically looking at integrating library resources and online learning environments.
In this respect, the ANGEL project is looking at providing MLE functions for use with VLEs.
Managed or Virtual?
Due to the sheer amount of products and terminology in use, attempts have been made to clearly define terms applied to these technologies.
JISC and BECTa provide one of the most widely accepted definitions of Managed Learning Environments, describing them as: "software applications that support on-line learning.
They offer a virtual environment that supports all the educational activity that is normally associated with the learning experience.
In this respect, MLEs will offer functions to support pedagogy, the management of learning materials, student administration and a communications environment.
MLEs have the potential to unify, monitor and coordinate all activity within colleges, and critically .
.
.
to link activity between institutions."
[7] A VLE is generally perceived to be a software package that directly supports on-line learning.
In this respect the VLE is part of the MLE system.
The projects participating in the current JISC MLE programme agree that it is not possible to buy an MLE product off the shelf at the moment, although many projects are examining ways in which MLE functions can be joined-up to the VLE [8].
This includes connecting Student Record Systems, Library Management Systems, learning resources, quality processes and off-line learning.
In the JISC description of an MLE, the term management is applied specifically to activity, which describes the day to day running of institutions.
The concept of management within learning environments, however, can be broken into more specific areas.
Managing Learning Environments Management needs for learning environments remain constant, whether that environment is virtual or traditional.
These needs can be broadly categorised into the following areas: Management of content.
Within an educational institution, the responsibility for management of content is traditionally perceived as the library role.
This analogy has not been adopted directly into VLEs.
Institutions adopting VLEs are suddenly faced with dilemma of managing material that has previously been controlled only by the individual lecturer or by departments.
The simple process of collecting a set of reading lists, or lecture notes can cause problems due to differing attitudes towards data storage and quality assurance.
The sheer effort involved in managing this content has meant that integration of the more open sources controlled by the library has been ignored or put-aside.
Management of learning.
Managed or guided learning is more elegantly expressed as mediated learning by Laurillard, who describes the process as knowing something about student learning, and what makes it possible, rather than simply attempting to 'impart knowledge' [9].
Within UK HEI, most individual lecturers have their own concepts of how mediated learning should be achieved, and wish to apply these concepts within the VLEs purchased by their institution.
It is, however, impossible for VLEs to be pedagogically neutral.
Every decision concerning presentation, navigation and design that is imposed by the VLE will impact on mediated learning.
The idea of controlled pedagogy was embraced by the COSE VLE with the development of a constructivist VLE that forced staff attention towards mediated learning [12].
Management of activities.
The wealth of activities that surround learning experiences and learning materials is familiar to any educational institution.
Such tasks as user administration, timetabling, scheduling services, and user authentication are just a few of the obstacles that are faced by institutions and will impact on use of the VLE.
Many institutions need to look beyond the abilities of the VLE in order to manage these tasks.
The key factor in all of these management activities is the need for a change in practice in order to achieve implementation.
VLEs, by their very nature, bring about a fourth management issue: Management of change within the institution.
Issues of change management have been investigated on many levels, by institutions, independent companies, and projects.
The eLib projects constantly highlighted the problems involved in implementing new ideas, reporting that 'attitudes and behaviours among professional librarians, academics and students continue in many instances to be a barrier to the effective embedding of eLib products and services' [10].
More recently, the INSPIRAL bibliography [11] demonstrates the continuing concerns over barriers to institutional change.
The ongoing examination of these issues and the importance placed on the problems by project reports makes one issue very clear: nobody has found a simple solution to tackling change management within UK HEIs.
The research carried out by the ANGEL project provides a recent insight into the problems faced by institutions introducing VLEs and struggling with change management in this specific context.
The ANGEL Approach The ANGEL project carried out extensive research for the Initial Formative Evaluation stage of the project.
As well as informing the project, this process also allowed the project team to gain a valuable insight into use of VLEs in a wider context.
The project interviewed staff from a wide variety of departments, job roles and backgrounds at four HEIs within the UK.
Interviewees had a very clear picture of the experience they wished to achieve with a VLE, and this is expressed in figure one.
Figure One: VLE experience as seen by ANGEL interviewees.
This design centres around the learning event in the middle of the diagram.
This event could take a variety of formats, ranging from online tasks to traditional lectures.
The pre-event and post event activities on either side of the event contribute to form the learning experience.
The entire learning experience is further supported by the pre-experience events such as content gathering and training.
This allows the student to confidently enter the pre-event section where they can register for courses, immediately download timetables and receive pre-event information such as location details and reading materials.
After the event, the student returns to the VLE to examine tailored resources and begin assessment procedures.
The post experience tasks include log analysis and evaluation, while the student continues to the next learning experience.
Despite recognition that this process is possible within many existing commercial VLEs, all interviewees expressed concern and doubt over the ability to achieve this.
Many problems were raised at the interviews, very few of which related to poor software.
These problems can be expressed as lack of ability, lack of understanding and lack of trust.
Learning to teach using a VLE can be a steep learning curve for instructors who are not conversant with the style of technology.
Gaining the ability to utilise VLEs effectively requires extensive training programmes and continual support, the cost and logistic of which are often ignored in implementation plans.
Furthermore, detailed training is required to allow students to learn effectively using VLEs, which can cause problems in many institutions where Information Skills are still struggling to find a permanent place on the curriculum.
This need is slowly being addressed, as evidenced by the sudden surge in advertisements for VLE / MLE Support Officer posts.
A lack of understanding of institutional goalposts can act as a obstacle to the implementation of VLEs.
Many members of staff do not clearly understand what is expected of them, what the institution hopes to achieve with the VLE, or why additional quality assurance practices are being brought to bear on their work.
This situation is aggravated by a lack of clear strategic planning at the point of purchase.
The UCISA study shows that 5% of institutions quote 'Keeping up with the Jones' as a reason for implementing a VLE [13].
Finally, lack of trust in these systems effects the experience of many members of staff.
On a personal level, staff are concerned about IPR and the levels of access that both internal and external people will have to their work.
Additional, staff are unwilling to use online environments for assessment purposes.
The ANGEL interviews clearly demonstrated that many interviewees believed that IT made it easier for students to cheat at a variety of levels.
A broader overview of the problems identified by interviewees within the ANGEL user needs analysis can be found in the final reports from workpackage two of the project [14].
On completion of the User Needs Analysis, the job of the ANGEL team was to find a specific role for ANGEL within this context.
There were clearly many areas where technical developments and research evidence could help improve the utilisation of VLEs and inform the HE community.
Equally, there were many problematic areas where ANGEL would not be able to offer solutions.
In order to find a place for ANGEL, the team turned to management solutions.
The ANGEL service will be a set of functions that work behind the scenes, allowing end-users to continue using familiar interfaces (VLEs, institutional portals etc.)
without having to be aware of the ANGEL.
The middleware that will form the ANGEL service will deal with authentication and authorisation, resource discovery management and service maintenance.
The ANGEL team is creating three managers to deal with these functions.
Resource Manager The Resource Manager (RM) will deal with issues surrounding content used in VLEs by controlling appropriate metadata for the content.
This will allow institutions to delivery 'appropriate copy' material to the end-user.
Institutions will be able to control this process, allowing access to electronic versions of texts to one group of users while guiding other groups of users to paper copies in the library if required.
User Manager The User Manager (UM) will either control or access information about the end-user.
This function will work with the RM in order to manage authentication and authorisation.
Through a combination of detailed knowledge about content, and detailed knowledge concerning access rights, the UM will allow for single sign-on, negotiating repeated password challenges behind the scenes.
ANGEL is looking specifically at two existing models for authentication and authorisation solutions: the American Shibboleth programme [15] and the European PAPI design [16].
Scheduled Services Manager The Scheduled Services Manager (SSM) will be responsible for automating certain functions and tasks in order to facilitate the operation of the ANGEL service with VLEs.
These services include maintenance of referenced URLs, which will allow instructors to confidently make use of deep-links to resources.
The SSM will also allow for collection checking for both staff and students, and allow users to run searches across a multitude of services at specified times.
Awareness alerting will be an important feature of the SSM, including both current awareness alerts and license expiry warning.
Conclusion In the creation of the three ANGEL managers, the team hopes to address some of the issues that currently effect the smooth implementation of VLEs and other such software.
The team has chosen to focus on the management of content and the management of activities by automating tasks and working behind front-end services to provide a seamless system for both instructors and students.
The research carried out by the ANGEL team will also serve to highlight the continuing problems faced by institutions who wish to introduce new working practices.
By looking at ways to tackle issues of interoperability, standarisation, and maintenance the ANGEL service addresses many of the problems raised within our formative evaluation.
ANGEL does not directly address issues of learning management or change management, but the team hopes that the tasks performed by the ANGEL service will make the management of these areas an easier task, even though it does not offer direct solutions to these inherent problems.
References 1.
The Blackboard web site is at: http://www.blackboard.com/.
2.
The WebCT web site is at: http://www.webct.com/.
3.
The COSE project is at: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/.
4.
The CoMentor project is at: http://comentor.hud.ac.uk/.
5.
The Edinburgh Student Portal is at: http://www.registry.ed.ac.uk/ESP/.
6.
The UCISA Survey is at: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/SG/events-papers/mle-vle/jenkins.ppt.
7.
The JISC definition is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub00/c07_00.html.
8.
Information about the MLE programme can be found at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/mle/.
9.
Laurillard, Diana.
Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology.
London: Routledge, 1993.
14.
10. eLib papers cab be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/.
11.
The INSPIRAL bibliography is at: http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/resources/bibliography.html.
12.
Stiles, M.J.
Effective Learning and the Virtual Learning Environment is at: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/cose10/posnan.html 13.
The UCISA Survey is at: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/SG/events-papers/mle-vle/jenkins.ppt.
14.
The final report for workpackage two of the ANGEL project can be found at: http://www.angel.ac.uk/documents/documents.html.
15.
Information concerning Shibboleth developments can be found at: http://middleware.internet2.edu/shibboleth.
16.
The PAPI design can be found at: http://www.rediris.es/app/papi/doc/TERENA-2001/.
Author Details   Nicole Harris Researcher ANGEL project LITC South Bank University Tel: +44 (0)20 7815 7838 Fax: +44 (0)20 7815 7050 Email: harrisnv@sbu.ac.uk Web site: www.angel.ac.uk Article Title: "Managed Learning?"
Author: Nicole Harris Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/angel/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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QA Focus Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines QA Focus Buzz software framework html database usability archives metadata digitisation accessibility video preservation graphics url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Napier on Quality Assurance procedures in the Jisc 5/99 Programme.
Introduction to the QA Focus Post The JISC QA (Quality Assurance) Focus post [1], which came into being in January 2002, was detailed in full in the last issue of Vine [5]; but for those unfamiliar with the post a brief introduction follows.
The new QA Focus post is promoting a Quality Assurance framework to ensure a more rigorous approach to the establishment of consistent, high quality standards for all the JISC DNER 5⁄99 projects and their associated ‘products’.
The decision by JISC to create the post was the result of the culmination of a number of significant factors.
Over the past five years projects and programmes involved in the creation of learning materials have expanded rapidly across the FE and HE sectors.
In particular, through the DNER and associated initiatives, a range of different digital assets and products have been produced.
These include distinct types of digital assets (such as image archives, video or audio clips, and discrete learning materials), and software/applications (such as computer-aided learning packages, support systems, databases and portals).
Throughout the creation of these materials there have been no established Quality Assurance procedures against which the quality of these materials can be assessed.
It is anticipated that the QA Focus post will reverse this position for the JISC.
The post itself is being provided by an equal partnership of ILRT 2 and UKOLN 3 and is jointly held by Ed Bremner (ILRT) and Marieke Napier (UKOLN).
A collaborative approach to working has been established but the two partners are also responsible for individual areas.
Marieke covers quality assurance for Web sites; aspects include accessibility, provision of Web sites, access by non-standard browsers and other user agents, compliance with accessibility guidelines and standards documentation, metadata, re-use/repackaging of Web sites and preservation of Web sites.
She is also be responsible for deployment of project deliverables in a service environment and Quality Assurance for software development.
Ed Bremner covers quality assurance for digitisation; aspects include digital images, technical metadata, digital sounds, moving images and multi media resources.
He is also responsible for the creation and delivery of learning and teaching packages, modules and objects.
The QA Focus post is given strategic support from Brian Kelly and Karla Youngs, Project Managers in UKOLN and ILRT respectively.
Background to the QA Focus Questionnaire One of the first QA Focus outings was to the 3rd Joint Programmes meeting for all DNER projects held at the Manchester Conference Centre in late January.
At this meeting QA Focus handed out a questionnaire that aimed to both gain some preliminary understanding of what Quality Assurance procedures were currently being carried out within the DNER 5⁄99 projects and to obtain a better insight into project’s expectations and hopes for the QA Focus post.
The initial questions given on the questionnaire were used to acquire information about the individual project, such as the name of it, the project’s goals, the materials intended to be produced and how they would be produced.
General questions were also asked in order to get projects personnel to think about the procedures carried out in their projects.
In total we received 22 replies, which accounts for just under half of the current projects.
The Questionnaire Products The products which are being created by the projects are fairly varied.
They include images (both 2D and 3D graphics), sound and video material, e-texts, html pages, case studies, interfaces, teaching and learning materials, online tutorials, databases and datasets, metadata and some reusable tools.
Almost all of these materials are being created in-house.
However some projects are also using the help of partners in the FE and HE sectors.
A few projects have used external companies for specific pieces of work such as creating CDs but only one project stated that they have used an external organisation for all of their resource creation.
Goals A fair number of projects have had to modify their goals in some way.
Most have had to scale down the number of images or resources created.
Many have also have found that their project has progressed slower than they initially expected, this was mainly due to a late start date or staffing problems.
As a result of this a number of projects will be running for a longer period than initially expected.
Projects seemed keen for the QA Focus to recognise that there is a need for more understanding of the difficulties involved in the type of projects covered by the DNER 5⁄99 programme and that there may possibly have been the necessity for lowering expectations at the start of some projects.
Quality Assurance Procedures Almost all projects that replied to the questionnaire felt that they had some quality assurance procedures in place already.
Many saw these procedures as being carried out through some form of internal monitoring and self assessment.
A number of projects have set up internal focus groups dedicated to quality assuring resources created.
Others have regular steering group meetings and management evaluation sessions that consider how their project is running.
These progress reviews are found by projects to be very useful.
Projects have also been using peer review systems to assess the quality of their resources and have been asking for feedback from other DNER projects as well as from students studying the relevant subject area.
A number of projects mentioned user rating systems.
These were explained to be a process of carrying out usability testing on resources to study how the users use them and to also locate any problem areas, such as bad Web site navigation.
It is interesting that these particular projects see quality assurance as a system of user evaluation as opposed to internal assessment.
The area of work in which quality assurance procedures have been the most clearly identified is in image creation.
For image work projects often have testing mechanisms or a form of quality control in force.
Images are often internally vetted, although a number of projects explained that they had also used external consultants to come in and evaluate their projects.
This type of evaluation was expensive and had usually been written into the original project plan.
It also seems that metadata is being vigorously validated by a high number of projects.
Some projects explained that metadata standards were followed and records were then checked by at least 2 people.
Advisory Services Used An assortment of advisory services were mentioned by projects including TASI, VADS, HEDS, LTSN, PADS, UKOLN, TechDis, and the CD Focus; although worryingly a number of projects claimed that they had not consulted any yet.
There seems to be consensus between projects that further information is needed on the specific roles of advisory service.
Many projects found that they were unsure of the exact nature of work carried out by some of the services and the overlap between them.
Some projects were also unsure of how advisory services could specifically help them with their work.
Standards Documentation Of the 22 projects who replied to the survey only one was not aware of the DNER technical standards.
Although this information in itself is worrying it is possible that the answer is due to a misunderstanding of the question.
All other projects stated that they have found the advice and guidelines offered useful, but were quick to point out that the standards had not been available at the start of the programme.
QA Focus will be doing further investigation into this area.
QA Focus Role As was anticipated there is some apprehension about the QA Focus role.
Projects are unsure of what to expect from the position and how the QA Focus work will affect them.
This conclusion is probably reasonable as the role is a dynamic one.
The main areas in which project personnel felt that the QA Focus could help them were: As a sounding board, a ‘critical friend’.
Projects felt that because of the unique position that the QA Focus was in, of being neither project nor service, they could be a point of formal reference that projects could turn to.
They would be able to see the whole picture and provide support and understanding.
In demonstrating systematic approaches to processes.
This could be achieved through online check lists, information papers, templates and the Quality Assurance toolkit.
By using knowledge about the programme and other projects to come up with benchmarking criteria, rating systems and methods (and examples) of best practice.
As a communication service that put projects in touch with others working on similar areas or suffering related problems.
Also in informing projects about new developments.
The projects felt that although there would be significant benefits to their final resources in having an active QA Focus there were also potential problems.
A number of the pros and cons of the role were dealt with in the Vine article but the main one quoted by projects was the extra time and money needed to document quality assurance procedures.
This was felt to be particularly pertinent if the project had already finished.
However it was noted that the experiences learnt would be beneficial for future project funding and on future programmes.
Projects also felt that they would have problems articulating the quality assurance procedures they already had in place and that learning ‘quality assurance speak’ would take time.
The replies in the completed questionnaire indicated that there was also confusion on how the QA Focus role actually differs from the other main JISC services.
From Workplans In the evaluation process carried out the quality assurance information given in the questionnaires was used alongside quality assurance information given in project’s original workplans.
Many projects had given some thought to quality assurance and its role within the project from the start; though as was displayed in the questionnaires Quality Assurance processes were usually defined as summative evaluation undertaken by external organisations.
Conclusion So what did we learn from the questionnaires?
We learnt that quality assurance is already seen as an area of potential importance for projects but that at the moment how this quality assurance should be implemented is unclear to people.
People seem unsure of what quality is and what quality assurance is.
They almost view the two as some sort of add on that comes at the end of a project rather than a core thread running through a project.
The role of the QA Focus will be to encourage the integration of quality assurance procedures into general working practices.
This will mean attempts to move away from post project evaluations carried out by external companies and instead concentrate on ongoing assurance of quality.
The QA Focus does recognise that external evaluation has its role within a programme and individual projects, but feels that continual assessment and ‘QAing’ is preferable.
Quality assurance, as the QA Focus sees it, examines the processes that shape a project and when good quality assurance is implemented there should be improvement in the overall way a project runs as well as the final deliverables.
QA Focus has established 4 key areas of quality assurance for implementation within a project: Strategic Quality Assurance carried out before development takes place involves establishing best methodology for your project.
Workflow Quality Assurance carried out as formative Quality Assurance before and during development involves establishing and documenting a workflow and processes.
Sign-off Quality Assurance carried out as summative Quality Assurance once one stage of development has been carried out involves establishing an auditing system where everything is reviewed.
On-going Quality Assurance carried out as summative Quality Assurance once one stage of development has been carried out involves establishing a system to report check, fix any faults found etc.
Consideration of these key areas as the basis of quality assurance would be highly beneficial to ongoing and future projects.
They were used in a recent workshop on QA for Web sites given at the institutional Web Managers Workshop at Strathclyde [4].
Further discussion of their implementation will be discussed in future QA Focus articles.
Contact Information Ed I Bremner ILRT Ed.Bremner@bristol.ac.uk Phone: 0117 9287109 Marieke Napier UKOLN M.Napier@ukoln.ac.uk Phone: 01225 386354 References JISC QA Focus URL: <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/qa_focus/> ILRT, Institute for Learning and Research Technology URL: <http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/> UKOLN, a national focus of expertise in digital information management URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/> QA Focus Area of the UKOLN Web site URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/> QA for Web sites URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/materials/napier/> JISC QA Focus Published in Vine, Volume 126.
URL: <http://susanna.catchword.com/vl=1050753/cl=35/nw=1/rpsv/catchword/litc/03055728/v126n1/contp1-1.htm> Appendix QA Focus Questionnaire What is the name of your project?
What is your project start and end date?
Give a concise outline of your goals and aims for the project?
What digital prodcts/materials have or will be produced by the project?
(i.e.
what are the deliverables?)
Have your digital products been created in-house or through an external agency?
If so who?
Since the project bid have you had to change or modify any of these goals in any way?
If so how.
What Quality Assurance processes does your project currently use, if any?
Are you aware of the DNER quality standards (DNER Standards document) and have these been useful in establishing standards for your project?
Which advisory services, if any, have you consulted so far?
What Quality Assurance issues do you feel are especially important to your project?
What do you expect from the QA Focus role?
Is there any particular way in which you hope the QA Focus will be able to help you?
Author Details   Marieke Napier QA Focus UKOLN University of Bath, Bath, England, BA2 7AY Email: M.Napier@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Quality Assurance Procedures in the JISC 5⁄99 Programme” Author:Marieke Napier Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/qa-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ECDL-2003 Conference Notes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ECDL-2003 Conference Notes Buzz data software rdf wireless xml archives metadata blog preservation ontologies personalisation url research Citation BibTex RIS Lesly Huxley shares her notes on the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries.
ECDL2003 was the seventh in the annual series of European Digital Library conferences, this year hosted in Trondheim, Norway.
The unusual move from September to August does not carry through to next year’s conference at the University of Bath, UK, which returns to the ‘normal’ September slot (12-16 September).
My interests in digital library applications, user perspectives and service management obviously influence my ‘take’ on the conference experience and the sessions I attend.
ECDL2000 in Lisbon seemed to me to have an emphasis on technologies and hard computer science which I found difficult to engage with.
The Rome experience at ECDL2002 was more ‘user-friendly’, with a small but interesting number of papers on user interactions with digital libraries and on applications.
It was interesting to note further growth of these topics in papers presented at ECDL2003, presaged by the Rector of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in his opening address, noting the growing importance of interdisciplinary work for digital libraries research and practice.
A fairly high-level summary of some of the highlights of the conference is given below, with presenter/paper references where appropriate.
A small bone of contention for many who present (and for those unable to attend) is the print-only publication of papers.
The proceedings are available in the Springer ‘Lecture Notes in Computer Science’ series (volume LNCS 2769) [1].
This year, as a move towards wider publication, some of the presentations (in PowerPoint or PDF) are also available from the conference Web site [2].
Conference in a Nutshell There were two main conference tracks which reflected the computer science and more user-oriented topics mentioned above.
Whilst still treated as separate, the balance between them is a step in the interdisciplinary direction.
My general impression is that there was a lot of interest in RDF/XML, ontologies and Semantic Web-related languages and technologies, and not just from the computer scientists.
The ‘big research things’ emerging from the sessions I attended seemed to be: More intelligent search technologies for applications and for end users; more relevant results from both structured and unstructured data Further development of annotation, recommendation and personalisation systems to enhance use of digital library collections Gaps in provision of robust digital preservation and Web archiving mechanisms Continuing and iterative analysis of user behaviour (in different cultural, subject and other contexts) in digital library use There also appeared to be a willingness to question why digital library features and services were being offered, rather than an acceptance that ‘just because we can, we should’.
Evaluation of added value, as well as of technologies per se, was a recurrent theme.
Formats and Findings This year, there was an attempt to introduce sessions in different formats alongside the traditional papers.
The poster session [3], for example, was preceded by a ‘one-minute madness’, with 50+ poster and demo presenters giving a 60 second sales pitch with slides to encourage delegates to visit them during the drinks reception.
This was both nerve-wracking (for those of us presenting) and entertaining and energising (for those of us in the audience).
It could all have gone horribly wrong, but it was actually a very good way of getting a feel for the projects and ideas being presented and provided an opportunity to put faces to names.
John Lervik (FAST) in his opening keynote [4], listed the potential of search technologies for digital libraries of the future.
His focus was on the systems (query and data analysis engines, relevance research and entity extraction, adaptive and customisable services) and the notion that ‘search engines can do more than just search’.
During questions, he also highlighted the importance of user interface design and user studies in ensuring that user expectations (built on the simplicity of Google and single keyword search preferences) can be met by digital libraries with such advanced search technologies.
User studies featured strongly in the subsequent paper session [5] which showcased experiences of user studies from three countries (France, Slovakia and the UK).
A study of use of, amongst others, the national library of France’s digital library (Gallica) undertaken by FranceTelecom, used a methodology that involved the installation of ‘tracking’ software on user computers for six months.
The study also involved a number of more traditional questionnaires and generated a typology of digital library users (for Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)), revealed a general preference for searching over browsing and a disinclination to read online.
Most interestingly, the study revealed a new audience for ‘academic’ digital libraries including the “non-professional researcher” interested in family or regional history.
An ad hoc panel convened at the end of this first paper session included a reminder (from Slovakia) that network access is not such a given in other countries as it is increasingly becoming here in the UK.
The ‘official’ panel sessions were also interesting.
A clash of commercial and open access publishers on ‘The future of academic publishing’ featured panellists Leo Waaijers (Wageningen University Library); David C Prosser (SPARC Europe) and Michael Mabe (Elsevier Science).
Given that so much has already been said on both methods with little sign of consensus, there was little new from either panellists here or from the floor.
The question: Digital preservation are metadata really crucial?
generated some thought-provoking points from the audience and panellists Michael Day (UKOLN, University of Bath); Steve Knight (National Library of New Zealand) and Catherine Owen (Performing Arts Data Service).
There is already a huge amount of metadata ‘out there’ and we are still unsure ‘how much metadata is enough’.
Migration tools are not yet fully developed.
Our priority now should be preservation of digital objects for the next 5-10 years rather than trying to second-guess the future.
Papers on annotation and recommender systems [6] focused on a different kind of discovery and interestingly noted the potential for ‘undiscovery’.
This can occur when suggestions are made to users on the basis of their previous patterns of digital library use (and those of others with similar expressed or inferred interests).
This session also raised issues around users’ willingness (or, it seemed, otherwise) to read and make annotations online.
ECDL2003 was for me a surprising success: this may be a reflection of the maturity of the field.
That is not to say that there were no innovations.
This is obviously still an area where there is much to be developed and researched and where there are some exciting initiatives underway.
But I certainly had the impression that much of what was being discussed was in the mainstream of problems faced by digital library providers and users and offered learning opportunities for many.
Final Words The wireless network worked extremely well and did away with the usual unseemly queues for machines where people can check their email.
This could also have provided an excellent opportunity for greater audience participation and exchange of views via IRC or Weblogs as I have been told happened at the last WWW conference: as far as I am aware, there were no organised channels for this and I didn’t come across any informal ones either … unless someone can tell me different?
The ECDL2004 Conference [7] will take place in Bath, UK, 12-16 September 2004.
References Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Traugott Koch and Ingeborg Torvik Solvberg (eds): Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer LCNS 2769 Order details available from: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/ ECDL 2003 Conference Web site http://www.ecdl2003.org/ List of accepted demos and posters http://www.ecdl2003.org/posters/demosandposters.php Digital Libraries: What Should We Expect from Search Engines (Presentation slides in PDF).
John M Lervik, CEO and Co-Founder, Fast Search and Transfer (FAST).
http://www.ecdl2003.org/posters/demosandposters.php Session 2A: Uses, users and user interaction.
Presentations: Users and Uses of Online Digital Libraries in France.
(PDF) Houssem Assadi, Thomas Beauvisage, Catherine Lupovici and Thierry Cloarec.
http://www.ecdl2003.org/presentations/papers/session2a/Assadi/Assadi_EtAl_ECDL2003.pdf In search for patterns of user interaction for digital libraries.
(PowerPoint) Jela Steinerová.
http://www.ecdl2003.org/presentations/papers/session2a/steinerova/jelainsearchtr.ppt Evaluating the Changes in Knowledge and Attitudes of Digital Library Users.
(PowerPoint) Gemma Madle, Patty Kostkova, Jane Mani-Saada and Julius R Weinberg.
http://www.ecdl2003.org/presentations/papers/session2a/Madle/GemmaMadleECDL2003.ppt Session 3A: Annotation and recommendation.
Presentations: Annotations: Enriching a Digital Library.
(PDF) Maristella Agosti and Nicola Ferro.
http://www.ecdl2003.org/presentations/papers/session3a/AgostiFerro/ECDL2003_Annotations.pdf Identifying Useful Passages in Documents based on Annotation Patterns.
Frank Shipman, Morgan Price, Catherine C. Marshall and Gene Golovchinsky.
Others Also Use: A Robust Recommender System for Scientific Libraries.
(PDF) Andreas Geyer-Schulz, Andreas Neumann and Anke Thede.
http://www.ecdl2003.org/presentations/papers/session3a/Neuman/neumann-ecdl2003-slides_final.pdf The ECDL2004 Conference Web site http://www.ecdl2004.org Author Details Lesly Huxley Research Director ILRT University of Bristol Bristol BS8 1HH Email:lesly.huxley@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/ Lesly Huxley is Research Director at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol.
In her eight years in the Institute she has worked on a number of national and European digital library projects including DESIRE, Renardus, SOSIG and Regard.
She was Publicity Chair for ECDL2003 and is Workshop Chair for ECDL2004.
Return to top Article Title: “ECDL2003: Conference Notes” Author: Lesly Huxley Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/ecdl2003-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CLUMPS in the Real World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CLUMPS in the Real World Buzz data javascript html database copyright cataloguing opac licence research Citation BibTex RIS Juliet Dye and Jane Harrington look into evaluation procedures for the CLUMPS projects.
In attempting to establish the requirements of users in the context of the four e-Lib Clump Projects we decided to take a two-pronged approach.
Firstly we tried to look at some typical user profiles and see what their search requirements were likely to be.
Then we related this to what we found when we did some actual searches.
This article will provide the reader with some pointers to the relative merits or otherwise of the projects.
Some similar points emerge from both stages.
What do people want?
The first question that should be asked is what is it that users might actually want from clump services?
Probably any search undertaken is likely to be for one of two things: A specific item.
This might just be a bibliographic reference at this stage, or it might be something which actually needs to be physically accessed.
Subject coverage What, then are the questions that the user is going to be asking if the search is successful and throws up some possible hits?
Where is material located?
Is it available on the open shelves or is there restricted access?
Can I go there myself to use it?
If I do go there can I borrow it?
Better still, if I can’t get there can it be sent to me?
Who is a typical user?
The next thing we tried to identify was whether there was any such thing as a "typical user".
Trying not to be influenced unduly by our academic bias we identified three levels of user who might want to access clumps.
The student who may or may not live or work close to their place of study, so is looking for somewhere more convenient to use.
Alternatively their own institution may not have sufficient subject coverage in their chosen area so they need to find somewhere else which will provide them with a suitable range of material The researcher/academic who may have more specific demands and may need to undertake a quite extensive literature search, or they could be looking for hard-to-find material.
The wider public who may have a work or study related need or could be searching for material purely for personal use.
Skills Profile It goes almost without saying that these different categories of users will have very different skills when interrogating catalogues or databases.
They might be very experienced searcher who can define their terms precisely and need little or no help, or they may have very limited experience beyond using their own OPAC.
In the latter case they will either require substantial assistance or screens will need to be designed for this level of naivety.
What do Users Want?
Whatever their skills profile however, it is likely that they will actually want very similar things from any single search of a shared library resource.
Readers should forgive us for using some poetic license when coining a new phrase in defining what any clump project is about when we use the term "One Stop Search".
All users are going to demand a user-friendly, familiar interface which is probably typical of any of the popular web sites the general public are now becoming familiar with searching.
They will need to be able to choose whether to undertake one search across a total range of databases or whether to be more selective, either by subject or location and use only appropriate databases.
It is also essential that there is feedback provided during the search process, which can in some instances take a relatively long time.
Tracking of search history will be another desirable requirement so that users can re-trace their steps when necessary.
Any search undertaken should be saveable for future reference and to assist with refining the search more precisely.
Search Results Once the search has been made it should be possible to refine it down if there are too many hits, probably by language, date or medium at the very least.
The search results should be able to be sorted by a range of criteria with location probably being the default as this is likely to be the most popular way of listing material.
However other appropriate ways should be offered such as chronologically or alphabetically by author or title.
The user should be offered a brief list of hits in the first instance, which they can then expand to a full record where desired.
At this point the location becomes particularly critical, especially for split-site institutions or organizations.
Lastly the user will then need to be able to access current holdings information.
If they do want to look at material or borrow it they must know whether that item is available.
After the Search Once the search has been completed where then does the user go from there?
As access is likely to be the key question it is essential that the user is easily directed to the relevant information they are likely to require.
Ideally there should be a link directly from the search screen into the relevant library home page or summary screen.
That next screen should provide answers to the following questions for the user:Is there just reference access to the item or can it be borrowed?
Can I request it to be reserved for me on screen?
If I can reserve it can it be sent to me without having to collect it?
If it’s a journal article is there a document delivery scheme?
These last two points highlight areas that service providers will need to address in terms of what exactly the role of the librarian is in this process.
To what extent is it the librarian or the interface which is the intermediary?
Also what will be the charging mechanism if there is a document supply scheme?
The Future The last aspect to consider is where the projects go from here.
The term "inter-clumping" is not an attractive one but the opportunities it could provide certainly would be.
The future presumably will bring the possibility of searching across a range of clumps or the possibility of moving from one to the next until search terms are satisfied.
The Actual Experience of Searching Our evaluation of the Clumps did not attempt to be comprehensive or rigorous.
Time was fairly tight and in any case our brief was simply to sample these resources and present our initial reactions as non-technical librarians.
We could not pretend to be naïve users.
But our daily contact with such people, combined with our own lack of familiarity with the Clumps, meant that we could make a good stab at predicting possible problems.
Some observations could be made without actually doing any searches at all.
However we obviously needed a common thread and we chose to look for material on ‘Japanese management’.
We chose this because it was fairly specific without being overly narrow.
It is also a topic which could be the subject of all kinds of student project, or could be an enquiry from a member of the public about to be involved with a company run in this way.
We didn’t aim to judge the absolute quality of the information we found – the Clumps are (or were) in an early stage of development, after all.
Instead we tried to note what happened and what we thought of this.
We were very conscious of the need to note the good points as well as the bad (and therefore very relieved to find both).
Although it became clear that we did raise matters which the Clump project managers had not thought about or noticed, it was also inevitable that some criticisms would pinpoint problems that they were only too well aware of.
In order to keep the mood of the session upbeat we started with the ‘discouraging’ things we had found and ended with the ‘encouraging’ features that we had liked.
These have been amalgamated in the section below however.
We did not name particular Clumps in the evaluation and although it was sometimes possible for the informed members of the audience to identify them, there were several points which applied to more than one anyway.
The checklist of headings which emerged was as described below.
Screen Puzzlement Did the opening screen make us feel anxious or irritated?
Was there too much background information, making it look confusing?
Was it immediately obvious where to enter your query?
Sometimes it wasn’t clear exactly what choices we were being asked to make.
One might pick something that looked promising, such as ‘main web site’ and then find out that it was not an appropriate choice and have to try again.
Do I want ‘gateway’ or ‘research collections online’?
How are they different?
Sometimes a choice would quickly return you to the opening screen in a kind of loop.
This irritates users with some knowledge.
Those with very little knowledge would probably be either worried or just terminally dismissive.
Looking at a lot of different screens makes it very obvious that busy screens are distracting and moving screens induce nausea.
Lots of white space plus blues, whites and yellows seem very easy on the eye.
A feature we personally liked was the combination of a simple map and hot links to give an immediate physical orientation.
Perfect geographical fixing may be unnecessary however?
Terminology Not everyone immediately recognises the professional terminology relating to client server architecture.
We thought that some users might not instantly know what a ‘target’ means for instance.
To the lay person this might be a library, a subject, a collection or a server.
It seems perfectly proper to be led into using structured language where this is necessary and effective, but it needs to be explained.
Another example was the term ‘collection description’, which might have been a description of all the libraries being searched but turned out to be a list of special collections.
Similarly ‘gateway’ can be an ambiguous sort of word.
Conversely there were some good examples of natural language where the user is asked to fill in the blanks in a sensible sentence e.g.
‘ Display each record in [] notation and sort by []’ Managing the Customer There is a central tension between getting the user to refine the search so that it is efficient and allowing him or her to search widely.
It’s important to make it very clear what the choices are.
If the default search is going to be all locations, this information should be up front and obvious so that the customer can actively decide whether to choose a quick foray or risk a longer wait for an exhaustive investigation.
To the user ‘search’ is usually a more important concept than ‘target’.
The provider may want to reverse that weighting in the interests of orderly searching.
We suggest that it may be psychologically important to have both on the same page.
Truncation and the use of a wild card character was sometimes specifically encouraged and sometimes not.
It’s not a technique that occurs naturally to many users, but it’s a useful one and we felt that on balance it was worth highlighting the possibility.
A prominent ‘reset’ button, which allowed you to wipe out everything and start again was very welcome.
Repetition of important instructions at top and bottom of the screen was also helpful.
Online help was at different stages of development.
We saw some very clear pages such as ‘How to use this service’ but also some vacuums, for example in help with collecting together your results from various searches.
Often there was just a message saying that this was still to be written, which is understandable.
The problems of online help are not peculiar to Clumps.
You want enough on the screen to give you the confidence that you know how to proceed without endlessly clicking back and forth.
But you don’t want to be held up by having to read whole paragraphs of explanation, or having to do a lot of scrolling down.
Some compromise has to be reached using buttons or hot links for more detail.
The less cluttered the screen the less off-putting it was to use.
The Search Experience Inevitably we had some confusing experiences.
These could have been due to our misunderstandings; to known snags which would be addressed at some point; to shortcomings or variance in the basic indexing of the source data; to problems with the underpinning systems; or to limitations in the records which were available at the time.
Only the experts would know.
An example of such confusion involved a subject search (on Japanese management) which turned up records at one member library only.
After examining those records we chose a particular book called ‘Japanese multinationals’.
An author-title search on that book revealed that in fact it was also held by a second clump library.
We assumed that the user might then conclude that a subject search on ‘Japanese multinationals’ could be worthwhile and we did one, plus another on ‘Japan’ and ‘multinationals’.
The result was zero records, even though we knew there was something in there The actual explanation could have been that some sites’ Z-servers are not yet working when it comes to subject searches.
It would not inspire confidence if it turned out to be a routine occurrence however.
Error messages are disconcerting at any time but especially when they don’t really explain the problem e.g.
‘JavaScript error’ or ‘combination of specified databases not supported’.
It was very reassuring when it was clear that something was happening the reporting of how a search was going, how many targets had been processed, which servers were down and so on.
Simple terms like ‘searching; presenting; connecting; awaiting response; no hits; complete,’ all make users feel that they have an overview and are in control.
Dealing with Results A major drawback, we felt, was the lack of information about availability of a particular item.
We understood why this is difficult, but anyone doing a search for anything other than bibliographic reasons would be likely to be interested in exactly where something is and exactly how available it is.
Interloan request as an immediate hot link is excellent from a reader’s point of view.
Obviously great care will be needed in clearly explaining any limitations of access to such a service and any associated charges that are being incurred.
Collecting together one’s results and doing something with them involves several possibilities and we had a variety of experience.
Ways of rearranging and sorting your display in various ways were always provided, but guidance on how to do this wasn’t always forthcoming.
At best you were prompted, at worst you were left to figure it out.
Clear signposting on how to view your search history is helpful.
We didn’t have time to investigate what could be done with these, but double clicking to re-run it or to examine it again would be a predictable preference.
Clear invitations to delete or re-use might be helpful.
Another development might be the facility to transport a search to another clump altogether.
Exporting the results caused a few problems.
Copy and paste into Word worked by and large, albeit with some strange characters and formats sometimes emerging.
Some on-screen help about this might be welcome.
We tried downloading some results to disk and got all the html along with them.
Our overriding impression was that the Clumps could be an exciting and accessible tool, which mirrors the way our users are thinking.
In our experience many of them want to search out resources independently for themselves, even though they also want guidance on how to do it.
They can be also be surprisingly willing to travel about in search of what they feel they need.
At our own university, the guide to libraries in other institutions is one of the more popular ones with students and access to other online catalogues is a common query.
The Clumps project could have a major impact on this sort of activity.
Author Details: Juliet Dye Deputy Manager Harrow IRS Centre University of Westminster E-mail j.n.dye@westminster.ac.uk Jane Harrington Library Manager Marylebone Campus University of Westminster Email: j.harrington@westminster.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Exam Papers Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Exam Papers Online Buzz data java dissemination xml metadata standardisation identifier schema copyright adobe ftp interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sally Rumsey on an innovative system for providing electronic access to examination papers.
The George Edwards Library at the University of Surrey is close to completing a project for providing on-line access to the University’s exam papers for members of the University.
Although other institutions are already providing electronic access to their exam papers, the system designed for use at Surrey is believed to be innovative in a number of ways.
The overall achievements are: Simple and efficient method of delivery of electronic exam papers Will makes papers available to multiple users 24 hours per day from any site with Internet access on or off campus A non Java version for those who require it Use of Adobe Acrobat PDF to view papers Ability to watermark papers if required by Schools Conforms to Dublin Core metadata standards (for more information see the Dublin Core site at http://purl.org/DC/) Indexing is provided by the Academic Schools Use of an XML schema to ease editing A generic system that can be used for other learning and teaching materials Links to the Patron (Performing Arts Teaching Online) system (http://www.lib.surrey.ac.uk/PATRON2/) A demonstration site to aid dissemination of the system Simple and efficient method of delivery The system has been designed so that it is simple for all users: users include end-users (mainly students), School administrative staff who deliver the papers and Library staff who manage the system.
Delivery is easy to perform: the administrator completes a web-based form, attaches the file containing the exam paper and then sends the paper to the Library.
The attached electronic file is sent to the Library server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
The administrator is then notified of receipt of the file via e-mail.
Improved access to exam Papers The current method of access to exam papers has a number of problems which result in inconvenience for users.
Problems include only having single copies of each paper, delays caused by binding, access only being available when the Library is open, incomplete sets of papers and occasional vandalism.
The electronic system that has been designed allows multiple users to access the papers 24 hours per day from any site with Internet access on or off campus.
Non-Java version Problems encountered in one of the computing labs in an Academic Department resulted in the development of a non-Java version of the exam papers on-demand.
This means that the system should be accessible to users on any platform.
Use of PDF During the feasibility study it became clear that Academic Schools were keen for the papers on-line to appear in a format as close as possible to the printed versions.
It was therefore decided to make use of Adobe Acrobat PDF to display the papers.
The Library will undertake conversion to PDF if it is not possible in the Schools.
Adobe Acrobat has the advantage of being widely used cross-platform format and the Reader can be downloaded free of charge by users.
Ability to watermark papers if required by Schools Watermarking is an option open to Schools should they wish it to be included in their papers.
This will authenticate the paper for the user and deter copyright infringement.
Conforming to Dublin Core Metadata Standards As far as can be ascertained no other institution’s exam papers on-demand make use of the Dublin Core metadata standard.
It was decided to include such metadata so that future interoperability would be easily possible if required and to aid retrieval of documents.
If the system expands to include other items in addition to exam papers, this will become more important.
Indexing Provided by the Academic Schools In order for staff in the Academic Schools to send electronic copies of papers to the Library they have to complete a web-based form and attach the paper before dispatch.
The form is designed to be simple and quick to complete.
Most of the fields can be completed by use of a drop-down menu which reduces the amount of typing required.
This also results in reliable standardisation of entries (ie reduces the risk of spelling or typographic errors or multiple descriptions of one element).
This also keeps the Schools in control of the description of their papers.
It was felt that staff in the Schools would be better placed to provide the Library with correct identifiers for exam papers.
Each field on the web-based form forms one of the Dublin Core metadata elements.
Without realising it, staff in Academic Departments are creating a Dublin Core compliant description of their exam papers.
Use of an XML Schema An XML schema automatically creates an inputting form from the data in the schema.
This means that fields on the form can be easily edited.
Designed as a Generic System This system has been designed so that not only is it efficient and effective for use with exam papers, but that it can be used for other Learning & Teaching materials as well.
Links to Patron Many of the Music exam papers contain extracts from printed scores.
This is possible “for the purposes of an examination” without infringing copyright (see the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988).
However, it is not possible to mount these extracts on the Internet without first obtaining permission from the copyright holders.
The Patron system is already in negotiation with music publishers for allowing electronic access to scores (and other items such as dance videos and choreography notes).
The Patron system was a JISC funded e-Lib project completed in 1999 and was developed by the LSU (Learning Systems Unit) at the University of Surrey.
The exam papers on-line will make use of the Patron system by having the LSU team to negotiate copyright clearance for required musical extracts and by allowing links to the extracts via Patron.
Demonstration Site For those who are not members of the University of Surrey and therefore who do not have access to the exam papers on-demand but would like to see a demonstration site in action there is a “demonstration” button on the exam papers on-line web page.
University of Surrey exam papers on-line are at: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LS/exams/ Further details of the exam papers on-line can be found on the University of Surrey Centre for Learning Developments web page at http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ARD/ Author Details   Sally Rumsey Research Assistant George Edwards Library University of Surrey Guildford, GU2 5XH, UK 01483 873312 s.rumsey@surrey.ac.uk Article Title: “Exam Papers On-line” Author: Sally Rumsey Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/exam-papers/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Agora: From Information Maze to Market Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Agora: From Information Maze to Market Buzz data software rdf framework database dissemination archives metadata schema cataloguing multimedia z39.50 aggregation streaming authentication url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Bridget Robinson, David Palmer and Rosemary Russell outline the Agora cross-searching software project, and its technical background.
Agora is one of the five elib hybrid Library projects which began in January 1998 and are all due for completion at various times this year.
They form part of Phase 3 of the elib Programme that is investigating issues of digital library implementation and integration.
The word Agora comes from the Greek word meaning meeting place or assembly point.
On further investigation the Perseus project, part of the Department of Classics, Tufts University)[1] describes an agora as: 'A large, open public space which served as a place for assembly of the citizens and, hence, the political, civic, religious and commercial center of a Greek city.
Buildings for all of these various purposes were constructed as needed in and around the agora.'
In the original proposal submitted in response to JISC Circular 3/97, the reasoning behind the choice of the project name was explained in the following way 'Our title Agora, reflects our belief that the library will continue to organise the assembly places where information users and information products are brought into fruitful contact.'
[2] The concept of a meeting place has proved to be very relevant to the Agora experience to date.
Background The Agora[3] project is developing a hybrid library management system (HLMS) to provide integrated access to distributed information services.
In parallel with this it is also developing library skills and experience in the management of hybrid resources.
Agora aims to increase awareness and understanding of the benefits of a standards-based management framework; and therefore dissemination activities are an important part of the project.
Agora is a consortium-based project, led by the University of East Anglia; partners are UKOLN [4], Fretwell Downing Informatics and CERLIM (the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management).
The project also works with several associate groups: libraries, service providers and systems developers.
Implementation of the HLMS in the Agora associate libraries forms a key part of the development process.
The Agora development framework Agora is based on concepts which emerged from the MODELS [5] project, MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services.
MODELS has been developing frameworks for managing distributed resources, to enable truly integrated access.
The central part of the Agora framework is a layer of 'broker' services or 'middleware' which shields the user from the complex and repetitive processes involved in interacting with individual services.
It is based on open standards, including amongst others HTTP, Z39.50 and ISO lLL.
We are also tracking the W3C query language discussions and RDF developments, in order to plan future directions.
The web provides the primary end-user access point to Agora.
The concept of information landscapes, based upon work at an earlier MODELS workshop, is integral to the Agora organization and presentation of resources.
The term 'landscape' is used to describe a way of presenting different views of information resources to users, according to their interests and needs.
Agora is exploring the construction of information landscapes, as part of its user-centred focus.
In order to provide information landscaping it is necessary to match information about users against collection level descriptions (information about resources).
Agora is using the collection description schema drafted by a national working group and edited by UKOLN[6].User authentication (by Athens or an alternative system) is also required to determine access privileges; this may be done individually, or based on membership of user groups.
The Agora HLMS includes the ability to integrate previously separate functions of discovery, searching, request/locate and delivery..
In concrete terms, this means the integration of electronic document delivery with traditional interlending.
Progress The prototype hybrid library management system was launched in summer 1998.
The system is based on Fretwell-Downing's VDX software.
It was considered important to have a prototype at the beginning of the project in order to gather the best possible feedback from associates in the early stages.
The prototype focussed on social science resources, across different domains.
It included abstract and indexing services, library catalogues, archive databases and subject gateways.
It supports the four 'MODELS verbs' : search, locate, request and deliver.
Two scenarios were demonstrated: cross-domain searching for mixed media; and search through to delivery for monographs and serials.
The prototype supported parallel Z39.50 searching and displayed the status for each target to inform the user of the progress of their search.
System definition Based on prototype evaluation, the system definition for the first 'real ' Agora HLMS was drafted and approved by the Agora Board in early 1999.
It has a number of components, including the requirements catalogue which sets out 145 Agora requirements in detail.
Prioritization undertaken by the Library Associates in cooperation with the Project determined functions to be implemented in Release 1 of Agora and those to be implemented in Release 2.
Requirements will continue to be added to the catalogue on an ongoing basis.
Other components of the system definition are the 'user framework' and the 'requirements tabulation', which present functionality and requirements in a simpler format.
This system definition documentation is available on the Agora web site.
Release 1 and user case studies Release 1 of the Agora HLMS underwent compliance testing as against the system definition, was subsequently approved by the Agora Board and is currently being installed at each Library Associaten site.
Release 1 provides cross-domain searching and integrated delivery of information either electronically or by way of institutional interlibrary lending.
An evaluation of Release 1 has been completed by the Library Associates and the resulting report is being finalized.
Release 1 will provide the platform upon which each institution will conduct case studies in the summer of 2000.
These case studies constitute the major work of the Project in it's last year and represent a move towards a process and policy focus a human approach that will inform the wider community of the reality of the hybrid library.
The case studies are diverse in nature, examining a range of issues pertaining to the implementation and use of the HLMS.
The studies address three areas: functionality of the system, how different user groups use the system, and the training/management tools required.
Issues under functionality include: Discovery of resources the location and organization of resources within the system via the landscape function; Searching resources simple and advanced searching simultaneously across multiple databases to test benefits of cross-domain searching; Delivery of information the transmission of information to the uservia the Interlending function The user groups to be examined include: Academic, research and faculty staff; University based and distance learning postgraduates, and; Professional and non-professional library staff The time scale of the project as it currently stands precludes undergraduates as a user group, although it is hoped that this can be revisited at a later date.
In the area of training and management tools, one of the studies will be specifically addressing the issue of training requirements of library staff.
One of the major objectives of the project is the provision of 'change management tools' that will assist the information community in assessing and potentially integrating hybrid library management systems, and that will also contribute to the larger debate and development of the hybrid library concept.
It is expected that all the Associates will contribute to documentation, which will reflect their experiences and the ongoing evaluation within the context of the case studies.
This documentation will consist of project-wide work and documents tailored to the specific needs of each Library Associate.
Achievements Although exciting to look at where the Agora project is going, it is also important to look back over the last 2 years and acknowledge the achievements of the project to date.
The three major tangible achievements are: The HLMS System definition.
This has proved to be a landmark document.
It is a substantial body of work, which brings together for the first time a complete functional description for the hybrid library.
The Agora software will not meet all the requirements but it does go a huge distance in validating the theory.
The document continues to provide a point of reference for a number of other projects.
It also represents the consensus of a range of information stakeholders on what constitutes a HLMS.
The provision of a working HLMS.
Release 1 offers cross-domain searching across a variety of resources including multimedia(images and media streaming), bibliographic databases, full-text and web pages and can be used as a testbed for the Hybrid library concept.
Release 1 is an early instantiating of the HLMS concept and is one of the first DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) prototypes.
It also stands as a significant achievement in its own right.
The Agora project has foreseen, and perhaps influenced the direction of the information community in relation to the HLMS concept.
At the start of the project, the HLMS was a concept that was unfamiliar to many and required explanation.
Two years on, we can see that many of the software suppliers are pursuing the HLMS concept in their product development.
Many data providers now accept that adherence to a cross-domain protocol is necessary, and there is an acknowledgment by much of the library community that the integration of functionality envisaged by the Agora HLMS is desirable.
The existence of the system definition and the subsequent work to translate it into a real system has provided a point of reference within the information community regarding the development of the HLMS concept.
The Agora HLMS is by no means a finished 'commercial' product it is a proof of concept system that is only at its first release.
However, even at this stage we can point to some specific areas of functionality that represent real progress in the area of the hybrid library: The landscape function is a critical breakthrough for Agora Release 1.
Landscapes (i.e.
aggregations of resources) can be created, deleted, modified and stored for future use, independent of any particular search strategy.
This is essential to the discovery functionality of HLMS; The integration of collection level descriptions as a metadata standard for describing resources and to facilitate discovery and organisation of resources; The provision of simple and advanced searching, searching simultaneously across multiple databases and recovery of records with a variety of data structures; Results are displayed while the search process is ongoing and in a number definable by the user.
Transmission status reports are provided to the user.
Results can be sorted and contain URLs; Searches are capable of being saved proactively and survive beyond the current search session; Locate functionality for non-electronic resources exists in Agora Release 1 sited within the Admin client operates away from the user but works automatically; Use of URLs allows for simultaneous location and delivery of web-accessible electronic resources; The Agora interlending function is a major step forward in the seamless integration of interlending as a delivery mechanism within the Agora HMLS Conclusion Agora provides both a technological meeting place for information sources and a meeting place of a different kind a forum for discussion.
The Agora project has made real' much of the theoretical work surrounding the HLMS concept and will in turn inspire further thought, action and debate in this area.
References 1.
The Perseus Project is a non-profit enterprise located in the Department of Classics Tufts University.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ It is funded by: Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2, Tufts University, the Modern Language Association, the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education 2.
Proposal document for Agora can be found at http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora/documents/proposal/ 3.
The Agora main website is at http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora/ 4.
UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives & Libraries (the organisation succeeding the Library and Information Commission), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
5.
MODELS website is at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/ 6.
Collection description working group report http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cld/wg-report/ Author Details   David Palmer Assistant Librarian University of East Anglia David.Palmer@uea.ac.uk Bridget Robinson Agora Communications Coordinator UKOLN (UK Office for Library & Information Networking).
lisbrr@ukoln.ac.uk Rosemary Russell Research Officer, Distributed Library & Information Systems UKOLN (UK Office for Library & Information Networking).
lisrr@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Agora: From Information Maze to Market" Author: David Palmer, Bridget Robinson and Rosemary Russell Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/agora/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Many Movements in Mere Months Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Many Movements in Mere Months Buzz data database blog copyright multimedia url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at various developments that have occurred recently in the ever-shifting scene of the search engine.
The Internet moves quickly, and no more so than when looking at search engines.
In the last few months (or even weeks) there's been a lot of movement, with some major changes in the field.
Consequently, rather than just look at one search engine in detail, or a particular subject area, I thought it might be useful to play catch-up in this issue of Ariadne; hopefully you'll be aware of all these news stories, but in case you've actually got a life and don't sit glued to your computer screen, some of them may be new to you.
Google [1], as always, has been in the news of late, for a variety of reasons.
It has recently bought Pyra Labs, which owns Blogger, a web log company.
There's been a lot of speculation about why exactly they've done this, and it caught a lot of people by surprise.
However, with the benefit of hindsight, it's actually fairly obvious.
Well, it's obvious if you know anything about blogging!
If you don't, here's a brief outline.
A blog or web log is basically an online diary, and most bloggers tend to do one of two things (or indeed a combination of them): they write about things that interest them, often from a personal perspective, just like a diary, or they'll observe what's going on in the world and will link to sites that interest them.
My blog for example [2] tends to be the latter I'll briefly mention news stories that are of interest to searchers and point them to a resource that goes into more detail.
Consequently, if it's possible for a company, (such as Google), to get access quickly to a company that hosts blogs and index the data, they can do a number of things.
Firstly, since blogs are very much 'here and now', if Google can index them quickly, (which it can), it's very easy to see new and emerging trends, news stories and so on.
Secondly, since people link to other sites, this gives Google another way of working out which sites are particularly authoritative.
For more details on the purchase you can visit Blogger [3] and read their FAQ on the matter [4].
On the search engine acquisition front the big news is of course that Overture has bought both AltaVista and FAST as well.
There's a very good and interesting article, produced by the folks over at ResearchBuzz [5], on why Overture is doing this, and what the possible outcomes might be.
While some search engines grow and prosper, others fall away.
NorthernLight [6] has finally closed its doors; there's a slight crack though, since it's still possible to search its special collection, but you can't see the full text, so it's pretty much worthless.
It's a great shame I can think back (not long ago either) to the Online Conference, and if you didn't know better, you'd think that this was the only search engine on the planet.
I think the crucial mistake that they made was to close their doors and move to a subscription-based model.
Once they did that people stopped talking about them, webmasters stopped trying to get a high ranking with them, (or indeed getting into their database in the first place), since they couldn't see what they were doing, which would have meant that the indexed database would have been less useful and so on.
Talking about making money (or at least trying to) Yahoo!
[7] is apparently changing its layout in an attempt to get more advertising on the page.
The idea is to put more adverts down the side of the screen à la Google.
Personally I think the new look is dreadful; the main reason that people want to go to Yahoo is to search, and now the search option (the hierarchical directory) is hidden down in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen on my monitor it isn't even on the first screen, I have to scroll down to see it.
I can fully understand that Yahoo wants to make money, but, (to my mind at least), the whole point of Yahoo is its use as a search engine that's why I and millions of others go there.
No amount of advertising is going to help me find what I want, and I think they're in danger of losing the plot a little.
There's an interesting news story from ZDNet that goes into their thinking a little bit more deeply than I'm able to here [8].
Some search engines have recently been increasing their sophistication.
Alltheweb has now added full Boolean search capabilities [9] while AltaVista has increased search functionality when it comes to using their news feature [10].
They've also released an expanded version of their multimedia database which now contains over 240 million files.
If you're looking for that sort of data, I certainly think it's worthwhile spending a little bit of time checking it out.
There's a good story on it at URLWire[11].
Teoma is also getting in on the act, and has increased their advanced search tools, among other new features [12].
I still keep trying Teoma, and I keep hearing good things about it, but I still remain fairly unimpressed with it I updated an article comparing search engines (available on my site ) recently [13], and it still lags behind the others.
A new service called Googlert [14] has been produced by Gideon Greenspan, a PhD student at Israel's Technion.
This is a way of storing searches and getting Google to run it for you on a regular basis.
Obviously as time goes on you get fewer results, but it's also a useful way of seeing how much new material gets added to their database, and when their major updates take place.
I wrote about image search engines a very long time ago now [15], and was considering updating the article, but I've been beaten to the draw on it.
There's a really nice article on image search engines produced by TASI [16] which is definitely worth reading.
As for new search engines, if you're interested in exploring the whole blogging phenomenon in more detail you might want to take a look at Daypop [17] which indexes 14,600 news sites and weblogs for current events and breaking news.
I think I'll stop at that point and set all the events in stone the longer I delay doing that, the more likely they are to keep changing, and this column will never get finished!
However, if you do want to keep up to date with events in the search engine field, feel free to pop in and have a look at my web log (well, since everyone else is writing them these days I thought I should as well!)
to see who is buying who today!
[18] Stop Press!
Just when I thought it was safe to send my column off to Ariadne word reached me that AlltheWeb [19] has changed its interface again.
I thought I should take a quick look, and I'm very impressed with what I've seen.
They've increased the size of their index to try and stay within touching distance of Google, and they've made one or two cosmetic changes which are fine if you're interested in that sort of thing.
However, in the area of searching they've added in the AlltheWeb URL investigator.
It quickly allows you to see who owns a site, who links to it, who refers to it, sub-domains, size, what it used to look like and so on.
This is going to be an extraordinarily useful tool for evaluation of sites and for lateral searching.
Add to the fact that AlltheWeb has recently improved their search tools as well [20] makes this search engine an increasingly attractive proposition for the experienced searcher.
References Google front page http://www.google.com Phil Bradley's Blog front page http://www.philb.com/blog/blogger.html Blogger front page http://www.blogger.com/ Blogger and Google FAQ http://www.blogger.com/about/blogger_google_faq.pyra Search Engine News and My Exploding Head http://www.researchbuzz.com/news/2003/feb20feb2603.shtml#searchengine Divine Northern Light front page http://www.northernlight.com Yahoo front page http://www.yahoo.com Yahoo!
tests new search layout http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2129882,00.html?rtag=zdnetukhompage Search Engine Showdown: Full Boolean at AlltheWeb http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/newsarchive/000629.shtml Additional Search Options on Alta Vista News http://www.researchbuzz.com/news/2003/jan30feb503.shtml#additionalsearch URL wire Alta Vista Launches Largest Multimedia Search Database http://www.urlwire.com/news/021203.html Ask Jeeves Inc news item http://www.irconnect.com/askjinc/pages/news.mhtml?d=35741 Phil Bradley site: Search Engines: How to get the best out of the Internet http://www.philb.com/compare.htm Google Alert http://www.googlert.com/ Finding images on the Internet, Ariadne issue 25, September 2000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/search-engines/ TASi: A Review of Search Engines February 2003 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/searchengines.html DAYPOP http://www.daypop.com Phil Bradley's Blog http://www.philb.com/blog/blogger.html alltheweb front page http://www.alltheweb.com alltheweb FAQs: Query Language http://www.alltheweb.com/help/faqs/query_language.html Author details Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens Feltham Middlesex Email: philb@philb.com URL: http://www.philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independent Internet Consultant.
Article Title: "Search Engines: Many movements in mere months" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue35/search-engines/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: Songs of Innocence and of Experience Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: Songs of Innocence and of Experience Buzz software usability archives digitisation copyright graphics provenance adobe photoshop cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter reviews a CD-ROM edition of one of William Blake's most famous works.
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience [London 1794 & 1826], Octavo Edition, 2003 isbn 1-891788-89-2 A number of works of literature in the past were published in expensive and idiosyncratic formats, highly illustrated and occasionally coloured by hand.
And sometimes the editions of these works vary substantially one from the other.
Some were never in printed editions at all, but remain in manuscript.
These items are difficult and enormously expensive to reproduce in print, and the cost of the process limits the size of the audience willing (or able) to pay for the reproduction edition.
Digitisation of the original items is an obvious solution to the problem of reproducing for sale useful versions of these works of literature, and there are several companies who now specialise in making these books and manuscripts available to the public in CD-ROM format.
Octavo [1] is one of the leading publishers of these fine art editions they come in two varieties: the standard Octavo editions, which are suitable for use by students, and the Research editions (where these are desirable), which contain higher resolution images, suitable for researchers who might otherwise find it difficult to get such detailed and sustained access to these works.
The stated rationale for the Octavo editions is to provide inexpensive access to rare materials of interest to students, educators, scholars, bibliophiles, and also a general readership.
The editions also (to some extent) allow the user to experience books as they were originally presented.
The edition contains, all within a single Adobe Acrobat PDF file, a table of contents, a commentary by Stuart Curran, (Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, a specialist in Blake and the Romantics), information about the binding and contents (particularly important in this case, since the contents have been moved about since their original creation by Blake), the provenance of the volumes, transcriptions of the text, and images of two versions of the book: Songs of Innocence and of Experience Copy C, London, 1794, and Copy Z, London, 1826 (both of which belong to the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress); plus some ephemera a Manuscript Index and Proof Sheets; and, most interestingly, a section comparing the 1794 and 1826 Plates.
It was digitally imaged at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C, using Apple Macs.
Octavo used a number of industry standard pieces of software, including Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Microsoft Word, as well as Adobe Acrobat version 5.0.
The text about the edition helpfully explains how the individual sections can be printed out by selecting the appropriate page sequences (the transcription for example runs from pages 19 through to 77).
Some background information on Blake for those unfamiliar with his work: Blake became an artist and engraver during ‘England’s great age of art, when Sir Josua Reynolds presided over the Royal Academy, and luminaries such as Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, and Thomas Lawrence successfully courted patronage from a wealthy upper class’.
Blake however remained relatively obscure, intent on following his own path.
He took lessons at Henry Pars’ Drawing School in the Strand, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver for the London Society of Antiquaries, for seven years.
He was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1779, and earned his living as a book illustrator his main source of income for most of his life.
In 1782 Blake married the illiterate daughter of a market-gardener, Catherine Boucher, to whom he was devoted.
The year after Blake’s marriage, he published a volume of verse by the standard booksellers route, Poetical Sketches.
However it made little impact, and it may be that this caused Blake to consider producing and printing his own work.
On the other hand, as Curran suggests, ‘perhaps… it was… that, with nothing to warrant financial success, no sensible publisher would have been prepared to wager his business on so unlikely a prospect’.
And, by way of explanation of the highly idiosyncratic nature of Blake’s illuminated books, Curran observes that: wholly in charge of his own production, from etching and inking his copperplates to hand-coloring the pages, Blake did not have to subscribe to the terms of production or the kinds of schedules we normally associate with a publishing house.
His works could be produced individually or in small multiples over a period of decades, at times in response to specific commissions.
Necessity probably dictated the method that Blake came to use.
Unable to afford a commercial etching press and even at times hard put to undertake the expense of the essential copperplates, Blake developed a method that was fundamentally the opposite of customary etching, allowing him, using a varnish resistant to acid, to transfer his texts onto a heated copperplate from a specially coated paper, then add his designs and, after printing onto paper, superimpose coloring.
This innovation required great skill but it also allowed Blake extraordinary flexibility in rendering his final product.
25 copies of the original (and separate) Songs of Innocence survive, but only ten of these are complete.
Eleven of them have watermarks which show that they were completed well after the combined Songs were created.
The joint work survives in some thirty complete or near complete copies however only twenty-four of these were produced in Blake’s lifetime.
The Songs of Innocence and of Experience were the most popular (if that is the word) of Blake’s illuminated books in his own day, and his reputation from his lifetime until our own day rests to a very large extent on these works.
They remain (unlike other Blake works), both accessible and often read.
Curran quotes Blake’s title page which describes the combined Songs as “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul,” emphasising the contrasting natures of the two parts, but Blake evidently conceived this contrast ‘as far more complex than a strict bifurcation of the sequences suggests.
In later copies, he shifted four poems from their original position among the Songs of Innocence to the Songs of Experience (and even then, not always uniformly)’.
So this makes an edition (such as this one) which allows comparison between early and late copies, of particular interest.
The two editions chosen for comparison represent one of the earliest and one of the latest copies of the work, and differ greatly in appearance.
How easy is this edition to use?
In terms of the organisation of the material and the quality of the digitisation, it cannot be faulted.
The introductory essay is excellent, and the other materials are extremely useful.
The introductory essay is hyperlinked to the examples and comparisons, so that the user can move back and forth within the file a page from the text is reproduced here showing these links.
However opening a single large Acrobat file (about 112mb) requires a fairly modern machine if the user is not to have to wait a substantial amount of time for individual pages to load.
I haven’t seen earlier versions of the Octavo interface which used multiple files, and cannot compare the usability directly.
I can say that there was no problem using this CD on an 800mhz PC with 128mb of RAM.
The single Acrobat file could be copied to the hard-disk in cases where the read access rate from a CD player is slow.
How does this CD compare with access to materials available from the William Blake Archive [2] on the Web?
The William Blake Archive is now a large library, and this CD is the equivalent of one or two volumes from such a library.
However, the existence of libraries (digital or otherwise) does not discourage interest in ownership of or access to volumes which can be consulted elsewhere (and Blake is fortunate to have such a resource available few other authors have anything as good).
You can imagine the access problems with large scale graphics over standard dialup.
Within a university setting in which high bandwidth access to the Internet is standard and reliable, where the student requires access to a large number of Blake’s works, there might be many reasons to prefer to go to the William Blake Archive.
There are excellent facilities for comparison there too.
For those however with requirements less focussed on an upcoming dissertation or Ph.D thesis, this edition contains everything needed to appreciate the Songs, and is a pleasure to use.
It is a useful critical edition in itself, and the Curran essay contains pointers for the student wishing to pursue study of the book further.
References Octavo is based at 134 Linden Street, Oakland California, and can be found on the Web at: http://www.octavo.com The William Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive.org/ Author Details Philip Hunter Research Officer UKOLN Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispjh/ Return to top Article Title:“Songs of Innocence and of Experience” Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/hunter-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Virtual Universities: Institutional Issues for Information Professionals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Virtual Universities: Institutional Issues for Information Professionals Buzz framework dissemination infrastructure e-learning url research Citation BibTex RIS Jonathan Foster examines the institutional implications of networked approaches to learning for information professionals.
In 1997 The Dearing Report (NCIHE, 1997) published its review of the British higher education system.
Underpinned by principles of inclusion and life-long learning the Report put forward wide-ranging recommendations in all areas of educational provision including students and learning, supporting research and scholarship, staff in higher education and the management and governance of higher education institutions.
An important component of the Dearing vision is the utilization of new technology, which can provide universities with the potential to widen participation, to reach new markets and to make internal efficiency gains.
In so doing greater access to British higher education can be achieved.
The UK Higher Education Funding Councils have funded a number of initiatives promoting the use of communications and information technology (C&IT) in UK higher education.
These have included the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) (http://www.ncteam.ac.uk/tltp), the Learning Technology Dissemination Initiative (LTDI) (http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/ltdi/), the Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network (TLTSN) (http://www.tltp.ac.uk/tltsn/index.html), the TALiSMAN project (http://www.talisman.hw.ac.uk/) and the Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) (http://www.cti.ac.uk/), the latter recently being integrated into the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) (http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/).
In February 2000, in response to the growth in virtual and corporate universities which has emerged in the United States and elsewhere, the HEFCE announced its e-University project (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Partners/euniv/default.asp).
Virtual University Models Virtual university models can be located on a spectrum, from the wholesale dedication of institutional resources to distance learning on the one hand to the development of individualized courses on the other.
In the former one can place the new breed of corporate providers and education brokers such as the University of Phoenix, Disney University, Western Governor’s University, and the global ‘mega-universities’ (Daniel, 1998) which include the Open University in the UK.
In the latter category one can place almost every university in the United Kingdom, as educational providers begin to turn their attention towards online provision as an innovative way of providing access to new learning opportunities.
This provision can take the form of incorporating a WWW resource into a predominantly face-to-face module, developing teaching strategies which can be implemented both face-to-face and on-line or by designing a course which is delivered entirely online.
There appears to be no one generic model of the virtual university or of virtual provision and its particular nature will depend on a number of local factors such as technology, pedagogy, assessment, training, communications, legal issues and support staff (McConnell, Harris & Heywood, 1999).
Virtual Universities and Traditional Methods of Education For the majority of educational institutions i.e.
those whose mission is not one specifically dedicated to distance learning, the emergence of virtual methods of education presents these institutions with major challenges of both technological and organisational change (Bates, 1999; Laurillard, 1993), decision-making (Collis, 1996) and costing (Basich et al., 1999; Collis, 1996).
Research from the Computer-Based Collaborative Group Work Project (http://collaborate.shef.ac.uk) on institutional readiness for networked learning at a traditional research-led university (Foster et al., 2000; Foster et al., 1999) identified the need both for technological and organisational changes in internal infrastructure, including the need for more effective channels between institution and academic practice and the need for greater inter-institutional collaboration.
Although the increase in virtual methods represents challenges of organisational and technological change which involve all parties within a university (e.g.
academic staff, support staff, administrative and management staff) the introduction of C&IT into learning and teaching carries with it different emphases for each party within the university.
Some of the emphases for support staff generally and information professionals in particular are reviewed in the next section.
Virtual Universities and the Information Professional As the educational landscape changes through widening participation, the increased use of C&IT and continuing financial imperatives (see Edwards, Day and Walton, 1998 for an ‘imagining’ review of the different institutional scenarios), the wider institutional context of the provision of information services becomes increasingly relevant.
In an attempt to embed new technologies at one university, Pollock and Cornford (2000) comment that: Initiatives were confounded by difficulties in co-ordinating a wide range of actors across a large organisation (p.2); and in the ‘hybrid library’ context, providing access to both traditional and electronic resources, the following comment may also be typical of the organisational situation: …there is a demand for an effective ‘one-stop shop’ which will require better institutional coordination and closer liaison between different university departments (Wynne and Edwards, 1998, p.8).
In order to carry out their task effectively the changing practices of academic and support staff communities also need to be supported by changing aspects of institutional design (Wenger, 1998).
As well as technological and organisational change these include: incentives (Foster et al., 1999) and quality assurance procedures (Pollock & Cornford, 2000).
The Dearing Report identifies how new technologies have had an impact on teaching methods e.g.
more project work by students, more team/group-work by students and increased use of multi-media and videos (NCIHE, 1997a).
One of the most pervasive interpretations of computer based teaching methods is that it involves materials development (Laurillard, 1993).
As such the development of virtual universities has strong connotations with the design and delivery of resource-based learning approaches (Ryan, Scott, Freeman & Patel, 2000).
In light of the Dearing Report’s recognition of the potential benefits accruing from the use of C&IT e.g.
widening participation, improving understanding, providing electronic access, and immediate feedback, the following definition of resource-based learning is apposite: …an integrated set of strategies to promote student-centred learning in a mass education context, through a combination of specially designed learning resources and interactive media and technologies (NCODE, 1999).
The particular impact of electronic methods of learning and teaching and the increased use of networked resources on library and information professionals has been researched by a number of e-Lib projects (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/), including the people-oriented IMPEL2, and training & awareness projects such as Netlinks and TAPin.
Issues for library and information staff include: promotion of information services; reorganisation and restructuring within the institution; selecting resources; course development and liaison; user education and support; electronic resources production; staffing; training & multi-skilling (Parker & Jackson, 1998; Jackson & Parker, 1996).
Researching these implications has carried forward into the current Hybrid Libraries and Clumps projects with their continued emphasis on access to network resources.
The successful adoption of resource-based learning approaches also has institutional implications (see Ryan, Scott, Freeman & Patel, 2000; Gibbs, Pollard & Farrell, 1996 for examples of institutional case studies).
Institutional support for library and information services includes institutional commitment, funding and strategy formulation (Jackson & Parker, 1996).
Indeed, an information strategy (NCIHE, 1997) linking the institution and support staff in a joint enterprise remains a key denominator of any change scenario (Edwards, Day & Walton, 1998).
Research conducted by the Computer Based Collaborative Group Work Project (Foster et al., 1999) supports much of the above research identifying the following areas of concern identified by support staff in getting ready for the delivery of networked learning methods: Vision & top-down leadership Strategic planning in the areas of IT, staff development, curriculum development and learning opportunities for students Quality materials In sum, a dual focus on resources, their selection and development, along with effective collaboration with academic, management, other support staff and students (and agencies such as publishers outside the institutional context), each supported by the institution is clearly important in moving successfully towards a situation in which effective support for online learning & teaching is the norm.
Conclusion In the face of the current hype surrounding virtual universities Brown & Duguid (2000) point to the recalcitrance of institutions: In looking at university change for its own sake or as an indicator of institutional change more generally, no one should underestimate the remarkable staying power of these institutions.
They have been around…for more than 1000 years.
In that time, they have survived many revolutions and may survive more yet, including the digital one (Brown & Duguid, 2000, pp.240-241).
The impact of C&IT on information professionals needs to be seen in the context of and in dialogue (Foster et al., 2000) with the other communities who are part of the institutional context.
Whether it is taken to mean the production of materials or liasing effectively with other professionals inside and outside the institution, the development of virtual education is an intrinsically collaborative problem.
Jonathan Foster is Research Associate on the Computer Based Collaborative Group Work Project funded by the UK Teaching & Learning Technology Programme Phase 3.
References Basich, P, Ash, C, Boniwell, K, Kaplan, L (1999) The Costs of Networked Learning: Report One.
Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University.
Available at: http://www.shu.ac.uk/virtual_campus/cnl/report1/index.htm Bates, A W (1999) Restructuring the university for technological change, in Brennan, J, Fedrowitz, J, Huber, M and Shah T (eds) What Kind of University?
International Perspectives on Knowledge, Participation and Governance, Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press.
Brown, J S and Duguid, P (2000) The Social Life of Information.
Boston (Mass.
): Harvard University Business Press.
Collis, B.
(1996) Tele-learning in a Digital World: the Future of Distance Learning.
London: International Thompson Computer Press.
Daniel, J S (1998) Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education.
London: Kogan Page.
Edwards, C, Day J M, and Walton, G (1998) Elib’s IMPEL2 Project: Organisational Structures and Responses to Change in Academic Libraries, The New Review of Academic Librarianship, Vol.4, pp.53-70.
Foster, J, Bowskill, N, Lally, V, McConnell, D (2000) Negotiating practice: an analysis of an institutional dialogue about networked learning, in: Asensio, M, Foster, J, Hodgson, V and McConnell, D (eds) Networked Learning 2000: Innovative Approaches to Lifelong Learning and Higher Education through the Internet, Proceedings of the Second International Conference Jointly Organised by Lancaster University and the University of Sheffield, and held at Lancaster University 17th-19th April 2000.
Foster, J, Bowskill, N, Lally, V, McConnell, D (1999) Preparing for networked collaborative learning: an institutional view, European Conference on Educational Research, Lahti, Finland, 22-25 September 1999.
Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ Gibbs, G, Pollard, N, Farrell, J (1996) Institutional Support for Resource Based Learning.
Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development.
Jackson, M. & Parker, S. (1996).
Resource Based Learning and the Impact on Library an Information services.
Available at: http://ilm.unn.ac.uk/impel/rblrng.htm Laurillard, D (1993) Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology.
London: Routledge.
MacDougall, A.
(1998) Supporting learners at a distance, Ariadne, Issue 16, pp.6-7.
McConnell, M, Harris, R & Heywood, I (1999) Issues affecting virtual universities, Vine, No.
109, pp.62-67.
NCIHE (1997) Higher Education in the Learning Society: Report of the National Committee.
London: HMSO.
Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ NCIHE (1997a) Higher Education in the Learning Society: Report 3, Academic staff in Higher Education: Their Experiences and Expectations.
Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ NCODE (1999) Quality guidelines for resource based learning report to NCODE 11 from RBL working party.
Available at: http://cedir.uow.edu.au/NCODE/info/qual_guide.html Parker, S and Jackson, M (1998) The importance of the subject librarian in resource based learning: some findings of the IMPEL2 project, Education Libraries Journal, Vol.41, pp.21-26.
Pollock, N and Cornford, J (2000) Theory and practice of the virtual university, Ariadne, Issue 24.
Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/virtual-universities/ Ryan, S, Scott, B, Freeman, H and Patel, D (2000) The Virtual University: The Internet and Resource-Based Learning.
London: Kogan Page.
Wenger, E (1998) Communities-of-Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wynne, P M and Edwards, C (1998) The eLib HyLiFe project: implications for the user community, The New Review of Academic Librarianship, Vol.4, pp.3-10.
Author Details   Jonathan Foster Lecturer in Information Management Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield Western Bank Sheffield S10 2TN Tel: +44 (0)114-222 2665 Fax: +44 (0)114-278 0300 E-mail: j.j.foster@sheffield.ac.uk Article Title: "Virtual Universities – Institutional Issues for Information Professionals" Author: Jonathan Foster Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/foster/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Launching an Electronic Magazine: An Overview of Value-added Features and Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Launching an Electronic Magazine: An Overview of Value-added Features and Services Buzz data software java html database portal archives metadata browser video graphics quicktime personalisation sesame ftp cookie privacy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Bernadette Daly looks at a variety of electronic publications as part of the research phase in the delivery of a new Web magazine.
As a partner in the Exploit Project, funded under the EU Telematics for Libraries program, UKOLN will be delivering the first issue of ‘Exploit Interactive’ early in the new year.
We took the opportunity to review a wide variety of electronic publications as part of the research phase for the development of a prototype.
These publications included journals, magazines and newspapers in the UK, US and the EU.
The aim of the review was to identify any value-added features and services for both users and publishers that could be delivered or used in an electronic magazine; though not necessarily for inclusion in Exploit Interactive.
The value-added features and services included: peer review software, the automation of editorial and publishing functions, personalisation, targeted email, email versions of the magazine or tables of contents previews, interactive games and puzzles, chat services, printer-friendly versions, electronic commerce, user state analysis, etc.
To find examples of some of the services, including personalisation, it was necessary to look beyond the web journals and magazines to some of the popular portal sites (Internet entry sites), and commercial web sites.
The value-added options and issues: The inclusion of the value-added features and services are, of course, dependent upon budget, staffing, and technical feasibility.
Where many of the services can be delivered with the use of intelligent web server software, similar results can be achieved using client and server-side scripts and other options.
Choosing the intelligent software route has, of course, costs and benefits for both the information provider and the user.
With the latest software comes a suite of tools and applications for managing sites and the publishing process, analysing usage data, and collecting the valuable user information, often as part of the user registration for personalised services.
Personal Information Using the popular personalisation features do require some knowledge about an individual’s interests and possibly behaviour.
In some commercial web sites we see the user trading personal information, comprising a user profile which is stored in a database, for email notification of updates, news, personalised services such as a personal view of the site, and the like.
This, of course, raises issues of privacy and trust, particularly where the information may be used for targeted advertising or shared with other information providers.
With this, we’re seeing the nature of privacy statements changing; detailing methods used for tracking users and providing the personalised views.
So for magazines moving away from the traditional print model, providing features and services requiring access to users’ personal information, consideration must be given to privacy statements and policies.
Privacy Statements/Policies Microsoft’s Slate Magazine privacy statement [1], states that they explicitly ask when “personal information” is needed as in the case of their voluntary reader surveys, and that Slate uses cookie text files (not requiring “personal information”) for customising the reader’s view of the site.
The privacy policy [2]on the Snap site goes into more detail regarding personal information; noting that personal data may be requested when signing up for Snap’s personalized services, registering for contests, sweepstakes or other promotional programs, and goes on to explain that the information will not be disclosed to parties other than Snap and its parent companies in any way that personally identifies users without their prior permission.
The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) [3] is currently working on a platform that will allow users to be informed of the practices of a given web site.
A number of companies have been publicly involved with P3P efforts.
Although the P3P protocol is not yet complete, Engage Technologies, Firefly/Microsoft, Intermind, Lumeria, Microsoft, Netscape, Open Sesame and Microsystems have announced plans to implement within their products.
Adding Value: a few examples The following magazines, journals, newspapers and general information web sites have been selected to demonstrate the types of value-added features and services that could be included in a web magazine: Automation of editorial, publishing and refereeing functions: Conservation Ecology: a peer-reviewed journal for its Peer Review Software PhysChemComm: a new electronic-only refereed journal from The Royal Society of Chemistry noted for its automation of editorial, refereeing and publishing process, with its six week turn-around for published articles General value-added features and services: The New England Journal of Medicine for its medical quizzes, classified section which includes career and jobs information, along with a personal archive for saving links to articles and searches of interest Ariadne Web Version for its metadata delivered via a server-side include (SSI) script C|net: News.Com for its article forwarding and printer-friendly versions of articles CLIC enhanced articles (The Royal Society of Chemistry) using 3D rotatable images The Irish Times for its Java and non-Java crossword puzzles Forum for discussion: D-Lib Magazine for its integration of Hypernews within the magazine Slate Magazine for its email versions and well placed access to reader discussion groups SBN Magazine (Site Builder Network) for its well promoted live chat services Personalisation: The Guardian Online for its personalised London Film Festival Planner My Yahoo, My Snap for personalised layout and news Conservation Ecology Journal & Its Peer Review Software The Conservation Ecology Project began in 1993 to address issues of cost, speed, and access to research findings in a rapidly changing and growing discipline.
They found that electronic preparation of manuscripts and the use of Web technology, made it possible to conduct the entire peer-review process online.
Conservation Ecology’s automation software has served as their editorial office for the electronic journal for over a year.
The entire process of running the journal is automated; submission, editing, clerical steps to do with peer review, publication, distribution.
Figure 1: Conservation Ecology: peer review Figure 2: Issue-in-Progress: table of contents The project notes numerous benefits to the software that they had not anticipated when they initially set out to create an automated editorial office.
One such benefit is archiving.
All versions of manuscripts are archived by the software, along with a complete record of timing of all events associated with a particular manuscript.
All correspondence with the software is logged automatically.
Correspondence outside of the system can also be added to the log by designated users (i.e.
editor-in-chief, sub-editor).
The journal uses a “double blind” review process, in which authors are not told who reviewed their paper and reviewers are not told who wrote the paper.
The peer reviewers are informed as to the identity of authors only after the manuscript has been accepted or rejected.
Document conversion (word processing files to web-ready files) is also handled by the software.
Accordingly, formatting a manuscript for submission to Conservation Ecology involves document formatting (e.g.
references, units of measure), and file formatting which involves splitting the manuscript into the component files (e.g.
article, figures, table files) required for processing by the software.
For more information about the Conservation Ecology Peer Review Software: http://www.consecol.org/Journal/consortium.html The Royal Society of Chemistry’s new electronic-only journal: PhysChemComm is an electronic communications journal dedicated to publishing innovative research covering all aspects of chemical physics.
All aspects of the journal, from submission to publication, will be carried out in a purely electronic form, with the published articles existing in a fully searchable database.
The automation of many of the editing and publishing functions results in a quick turn-around, allowing articles to be published within six weeks of submission, if accepted for publication.
The refereeing process is also handled electronically via the Referee Report Form.
Articles/manuscripts are “double-refereed” and, once published, will be treated by Chemical Abstracts and the ISI (citation index) as conventional papers.
Figure 3: PhysChemComm File Upload Figure 4: Referee Report Form Articles can be submitted to the journal electronically via file upload, file transfer protocol (FTP) or on a diskette via conventional post (which they do not recommend).
The file upload form can be viewed at http://www.rsc.org/is/journals/submission/upload.htm PhysChemComm hopes to develop other possible aspects of electronic publishing, such as a live comments page.
Along with the usually accepted graphics formats, the journal will accept graphics/video file types including MPEG, Quicktime, VRML, structure and spectra files, and proprietary file types familiar to the scientific community requiring browser plug-ins or viewers (PDB, CIF, MOL, JCAMP-dx).
The file types mentioned are not currently being implemented in the journal, though expect to see PhysChemComm using the medium to its fullest in the future.
The journal will be free for a trial period.
For more information on the PhysChemComm journal, see: http://www.rsc.org/is/journals/current/PhysChemComm/pccpub.htm New England Journal of Medicine: The Journal’s web site has been redesigned so that now there are two parts: a free, unrestricted area for all users, and an enlarged, subscriber-only area.
The new area offers the print-version-subscribers access to the complete text of the Journal, including review articles, for all issues since 1993.
Figure 5: New England Journal of Medicine Figure 6: Career Development and Jobs Section The Journal’s suite of value-added services: Weekly table of contents via email Mailing list which requires registration but no subscription Interactive medical image quiz hyperlinked to related articles (using Microsoft’s Active Server Pages technology) http://www.nejm.org/content/scripts/icm/icm.asp Classified Ads section: http://www.nejm.org/classifieds/ with a form for submitting ads online Career development and Jobs section For subscribers there’s full-text search capability (by article, author, article category, issue number, page number, and date) Also within the subscriber-only area, the journal offers services such as a personal archive to be used for saving links to articles and searches, free software available for subscribers to download for printing the articles in a format that is virtually identical to that of the journal’s print format.
To view the New England Journal of Medicine: http://www.nejm.org/ Ariadne: Dublin Core Metadata The Dublin Core metadata seen in the source code of Ariadne is being used as part of the NewsAgent project; an eLib funded project to provide a personalised current awareness service for library and information professionals.
UKOLN uses MS-Access database to create the Dublin Core records.
To associate a resource with its metadata, resources are placed in separate files in the same directory on the Web server, with the name of the SOIF (the Summary Object Interchange Format) file being derived from the name of the HTML file.
In issue 10 of Ariadne, Andy Powell discusses the various models for the management of Dublin Core Metadata.
He describes the model used for Ariadne Web Version, which makes use of a Server Side Include (SSI) script to embed Dublin Core metadata into the page on-the-fly.
In the article he discusses the various models for management of the metadata, along with solutions for performance problems relating to the SSI scripts.
[4] Figure 7: Article from issue 17 of Ariadne Figure 8: Source code showing metadata C|net: Article forwarding and Printing C|net offers a number of value-added services and features under their collection of sites; accessible via one of their many domain names.
The News.Com site shows the use of an article forwarding feature.
This can be viewed by clicking on ‘Send this article to a friend’, at the top right-hand corner of one of the articles.
From the accompanying form, the user is able to include multiple email addressees, send an abstract or full-text version, and include a message for the recipients.
Should the user wish to print the article from the site, he or she can select a printer-friendly version, though this comes complete with advertising.
To view C|net: News.Com: http://www.news.com/ Figure 9: C|net’s News.Com site Figure 10: C|net’s article forwarding The Royal Society of Chemistry’s CLIC Enhanced Articles: The menu system in the left hand frame of figure 11 allows the user to navigate across all The Royal Society of Chemistry articles enhanced by The CLIC Consortium.
The enhanced articles work best with Netscape Navigator 4.06.
In order to view and rotate the 3D renderings, a Netscape plug-in, MDLI Chemscape Chime 1.1+ is required.
To view the CLIC enhanced articles: http://www.rsc.org/is/journals/clic_rsc/net_4.htm   Figure 11: CLIC Enhanced Articles Figure 12: 3D using MDLI Chemscape Chime The Irish Times: interactive games & puzzles Familiar to many newspaper readers, whether print or electronic, is the crossword section.
The Irish Times incarnation of the crossword is available to users with both older and newer browsers.
With the Java version of the puzzle the user is able to write to the screen with the clues being crossed out once the user manages to type in the correct answer.
The Java and non-java versions of the puzzle (for browsers not supporting Java or cookies) can be seen at: http://www.irish-times.com/crossword/index.cfm Figure 13: The Irish Times Java Applet Crossword Providing a forum for discussion: D-Lib Magazine D-lib Magazine, of the US D-lib Program for research in digital libraries, has integrated HyperNews [5] within the magazine.
HyperNews, which is free, is a cross between the hypermedia of the WWW and Usenet News (commonly known as newsgroups).
Users can become members of HyperNews or subscribe to a forum in order to get e-mail whenever a message is posted, so they don’t have to check the magazine to for new additions to a particular forum.
This e-mail gateway is also bi-directional, so the user doesn’t have to find a web browser to reply.
HyperNews then places the message in the appropriate forum.
HyperNews should be compatible with the standard CGI support provided by most Unix http servers.
[6] Figure 14: D-Lib Magazine Figure 15: D-Lib’s HyperNews To view D-Lib Magazine and the HyperNews archive see: http://www.dlib.org/ http://www.dlib.org/Hypernews/get/dlib_responses.html Microsoft’s Slate Magazine: email and print delivery Slate’s member services, which include personalisation, are accessible by subscription only.
The magazine comes in print and electronic versions.
Slate’s various options for delivery or access are a far cry from the local newsshop shelf; via AOL, Microsoft Network, HotMail, Web, etc.
The Fray Discussion Forum: From every section in Slate, the user is given the opportunity to jump (via hyperlink) into “The Fray” and share their thoughts on any given issue.
The forum includes dozens of ongoing discussion “threads” on topics ranging from politics to religion to book reviews, which is suggested as a value-added alternative to the familiar “E-Mail to the Editors.” Figure 16: Slate Magazine View Slate Magazine at: http://www.slate.com/toc/FrontPorch.asp Microsoft’s SBN Magazine and the SBN chat services Missing in many electronic magazines is the opportunity for spontaneous response and discussion… if not, debate.
Though many sites do provide a email link or form for readers to respond to articles, many are not well used nor promoted.
The SBN Magazine (Site Builder Network) demonstrates a well-promoted chat service.
The chat area is actually part of the larger SBN site.
The SBN chat area is arguably unfairly restricted in the eyes of the non-accredited; open only to site members with a particular level of Microsoft accreditation.
The goal of SBN appears to be that of creating a demand for its commercial services and products; the vehicle being the reward of chat area access, rather than the chat area access being the promoted product/service.
Perhaps the well promoted promise of a useful narrowly focussed discussion may be enough of an invitation to draw the right voices from a given community, and an enhancement to any online magazine.
SBN Live Chat: http://www.microsoft.com/devtraining/chat/default.asp SBN Magazine http://www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder/magazine/default.asp Figure 17: SBN Magazine Figure 18: Site Builder Network (SBN) Chat The many faces of Personalisation Though ‘personalisation’ seems to be the popular feature in the latest releases of intelligent server software, it is just one of many offerings.
As can be expected, the software comes in all flavours and is priced accordingly.
At the high end is content management software such as Vignette’s StoryServer 4, which supports personalisation.
Microsoft’s Site Server 3.0, affordable with an educational discount, is being used by a number of groups within the UK Higher Education Community, including the eLib BUILDER project [7] , University of Essex Computing Service [8] , and the forthcoming Exploit Interactive.
Many of the general information/news and search sites use some sort of personalisation.
Some of the earlier adopters offering users personalised content and layout include: My Yahoo, MSN, My Snap or Local Snap, My Excite.
Figure 19: My Yahoo Figure 20: My Snap My Yahoo: http://my.yahoo.com/?myHome My Snap: http://www.snap.com/LMOID/mysnap/mysnap/0,160,home-0,00.html?st.sn.fd.t.ms Personalisation from The Guardian Online: The Guardian Online is currently redeveloping the way they work.
Their new system has at its heart Vignette’s StoryServer content management software.
Liz Sarginson, of the Guardian, explained that the recently released version 4 is being used for the development of a number of new sites; the first site, Jobsunlimited will be going live shortly and will be followed by Footballunlimited.
Although the latest release of StoryServer has built-in personalisation, the Guardian began its developing with an earlier version and had built their own personalisation system.
It is expected that over time, they will no doubt use the facilities available in version 4 and later releases of the software.
The London Film Festival site which is sponsored and produced by the Guardian is offering a Personalised Festival Planner.
The personalisation here is being accomplished with the use of CGI scripting.
Personalised Festival Planner: http://www.lff.org.uk/cgi-bin/lff/lff_planner.pl View The Guardian Online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Figure 21: The Guardian Online Figure 22: London Film Festival Personalised Festival Planner Summary This article has identified many features and services currently available to users on the Web.
Whether these options can be successfully implemented and managed within the context of an electronic magazine would depend of course on budget, staffing and technical feasibility within the given organisation.
The adoption of more intelligent server software, along with the automation of many of the traditional submission, editing, refereeing, and publishing functions should lead to a new breed of Web magazines and journals.
This would benefit not only the users, but also the authors, and those involved in some of the more tedious administrative tasks involved with the publishing of an electronic magazine.
Some of the most advanced examples of electronic magazines and journals available on the Web are within the scientific community.
These publications do begin to exploit the Web and are leaving behind former print based models.
In launching a new Web magazine, the goal is to not only produce a magazine with rich and timely content; but also to present the user with a well-managed package that hopefully will be well received and used, adding value where many print model magazines and journals leave off.
References: Slate: http://www.microsoft-online-sales.com/slate.asp Snap privacy policy: http://www.snap.com/main/register/problems/0,135,home-0,00.html W3C P3P: http://www.w3.org/P3P/Overview.html Ariadne Web Version http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ What is HyperNews?
http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/hypernews/about.html HyperNews Compatability http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/hypernews/compatibility.html The BUILDER Project http://builder.bham.ac.uk/startmenu/welcome.asp University of Essex Computing Service http://www2.essex.ac.uk/webauthoring/Default.asp Author Details Bernadette Daly Information Officer, Co-editor of Ariadne web version and Exploit Interactive UKOLN: UK Office for Library & Information Networking University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK Email: b.m.daly@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Buzz data software infrastructure archives metadata identifier repositories eprints copyright video preservation oai-pmh dspace interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS William Nixon and Pauline Simpson report on the meeting held at CERN, Geneva, in October 2002.
CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research is the world’s largest particle physics centre.
It is located just outside of Geneva on the French-Swiss border.
CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990.
About the Conference The workshop was organized by LIBER, SPARC-Europe and CERN Library and sponsored by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), OSI (Open Society Institute), and ESF (European Science Foundation).
Some 136 participants from 9 countries attended with 22 presentations [1].
It was aptly subtitled “Gaining independence with e-prints archives and OAI” and its focus was on the challenges in establishing OAI services rather than the technical issues of implementing the Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
It was also an opportunity to meet and to listen to some of the founders of the Open Archives Initiative such as Michael Nelson, Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel and more importantly to interact with the international community that is coming to grips with the implementation of e-Prints Archives.
The Open Archives Initiative is a growing movement to enhance access to e-Print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication [2].
Programme The workshop programme was opened  with a presentation on the just released OAI-PMH v.2.0 by Herbert Van de Sompel.
This provided a technical overview and a look at its new features and functionality with a hint of future enhancements including certification, usage logs, citation data and rights metadata etc.
Case studies of discipline based and institutional archives There was a mix of case studies looking at discipline based archives and then institutional based archives with presentations from both service and data providers.
These included DSpace at MIT and the California Digital Library.
Jörgen Eriksson from Lund University in Sweden gave a talk on the implementation of an e-Prints service at the Lund University and demonstrated how e-Prints could offer departmental branding and sit within a departmental website.
This has been a key strategy in encouraging the use of the service [3].
Stephen Pinfield, Project Director of the CURL SHERPA Project [4] presented the UK perspective.
Stephen gave an overview of the state of OAI in the UK and noted that the real challenge for institutions is to get the content for their repositories.
The UK’s FAIR programme is intended to address a range of these issues and has funded projects such as RoMEO [5], TARDIS [6], SHERPA and DAEDALUS [7].
John Ober presented an excellent Case Study of the California Digital Library.
CDL was founded in 1997 and was “charged to create a comprehensive system for the management of digital scholarly information.” The CDL eScholarship Program has established a number of discipline based repositories as examples of alternative publishing services such as Working Papers in Social Sciences and Humanities Technical Topics Eric Van de Velde from Caltech talked about Caltech CODA [Collection of Open Digital Archives].
CODA has some 1100 documents now available and has been set-up using the publicly available ePrints.org and the Virginia Tech e-theses software.
They have established a range of different repositories for a number of subjects including Computer Science and Earthquake Engineering as well as a repository for Theses.
From July 2002, e-submission of theses at Caltech is now compulsory.
Caltech have Use Licences in place for their repositories which identify the rights and conditions which must be accepted if a paper is to be deposited.
To ensure future access to the content of CODA, each paper is assigned a unique identifier and a Resolver has been implemented to keep track of its location.
Michael Nelson gave a paper entitled “Service Providers: Future Perspectives” and talked about the growth of service providers.
There is currently a ratio of five data providers to one service provider.
He noted the shift in topics from those about the protocol itself to actual services, which can take advantage of it.
He listed a range of service providers from the original ARC service at Old Dominion to the University of Michigan’s OAIster as well as discipline specific providers such as ARCHON.
The code for the ARC service provider is now publicly available [8].
Controversially, he even then posited that the OAI-PMH is not actually important!
This is because users will not care about it and if it used right then there is no reason for them to know.
It is just a core technology like http whose presence will just be assumed.
He concluded that Service Providers are now becoming a competitive market with a growing sophistication of services.
The OAI-PMH will have arrived when the protocol itself fades into the background.
Gaining Independence An adjunct to the sessions on the OAI was a range of talks under the banner “Gaining Independence”.
Alison Buckholtz from SPARC-Europe discussed the role, which OAI compliant institutional repositories can play in reclaiming scholarly communication.
Fred Friend gave a talk about the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which supported both self-archiving, and the creation of new open access journals.
These and the other talks in this session provided a timely context in which to ground the opportunities offered by embracing the OAI protocol.
However the presentation from Elsevier ‘Scirus’ service indicated how commercial interest was already ‘harvesting the fruits’ of OAI-compliant repositories such as CogPrints and arXiv.org.
Practical steps to promote the OAI: Technical Issues Saturday began with two more excellent talks, which showcased freely available software to enable institutions or disciplines to build OAI compliant data providers.
Jean-Yves Le Meur gave a paper on the CERN Document Server software.
This was made publicly available in August 2002 and is currently in use at CERN.
Chris Gutteridge provided an overview of the GNU Eprints 2 software.
He identified a range of issues that need to be considered before the software is installed and the need to decide what it is to be used for.
Chris also discussed how he saw the interoperability between different e-Prints software.
Particularly interesting throughout the three days, was hearing about e-Prints software beyond the widely used GNU eprints from the University of Southampton [9].
Mackenzie Smith walked us through DSpace from MIT (now available) [10].
One of her main messages for university based archives was to engage senior management before implementing the software [this was to be a recurring theme].
DSpace has a core digital preservation element and their information model includes a much wider community and aspects of revenue earning on premium services.
From Max Planck we heard about their eDoc software which offers archive, publication tools and workspace for working groups.
From CERN we saw a demonstration of their own CDSWare [11] which is a particularly sophisticated package offering applications tools for automated document conversion, but also in progress is the extraction of citation from the full text and extraction of keywords.
Practical steps to promote the OAI: Political Issues In the final session  Jean-Claude Guédon from the Université de Montréal talked about Independence from an “academic” point of view.
He proposed open access archives incorporating the peer review process and looked ahead to ‘federal’ editorial boards organized by groups of universities.
The final talk of the workshop, by Bas Savenije focused on FIGARO, a European e-publishing initiative for the academic community.
FIGARO will build an e-publishing infrastructure and foster innovation to enhance scientific communication – tenets central to the Open Access Initiative.
Breakout sessions At the end of Friday we all elected to join one of the breakout groups discussing:  Long term e-Archiving, Non-commercial scientific journals, OAI protocols, OAI software, OAI services, Document provider (server) implementation, Human related problems around institutional OAI servers, Mise en service d’une archive numerique.
Possibly the most contentious was the long-term e-Archiving issue for which there is no definitive answer as yet, but which the group recognized should be an international responsibility A talk by Chris Pressler gave hope that at least nationally in the UK the Digital Preservation Coalition [12] will “address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base.” Conclusion This was a fascinating and very worthwhile workshop which struck the right balance between technical issues and the real world challenges in building OAI services.
It left the attendees enthusiastic and encouraged about the OAI and committed to build upon the momentum this workshop inspired.
Presentations of the workshop (including slides and video recordings) are available at http://doc.cern.ch/age?a02333 Author Details References [1]   Detailed Agenda  http://documents.cern.ch/AGE/current/fullAgenda.php?ida=a02333 [2]   Open Archives Initiative  http://www.openarchives.org [3]   Lund Medical Virtual Journal  http://search.medfak.lu.se/ [4]   SHERPA Project  http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ [5]   Project ROMEO  http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/ [6]   TARDIS Project  http://tardis.eprints.org/ [7]   DAEDALUS Project  http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/ [8]   ARC Cross Archive Search Service   http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ [9]   GNU Eprints 2 software  http://software.eprints.org [10]   DSpace  http://www.dspace.org [11]   CERN Document Server  http://cdsware.cern.ch/ [12]   Digital Preservation Coalition  http://www.dpconline.org   Author Details   William J Nixon w.j.nixon@lib.gla.ac.uk William is the Deputy Head of IT Services, Glasgow University Library and Administrator of the Glasgow ePrints Service.
He is also the Project Manager: Service Development for DAEDALUS (University of Glasgow) Pauline Simpson ps@soc.soton.ac.uk Pauline is Head of Information Services, Southampton Oceanography Centre and Faculty Liaison Leader for Science, Engineering and Math, University of Southampton.
She is also the TARDIS (University of Southampton e-Prints) Project Manager.
Article Title: “2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)” Author:William J. Nixon and Pauline Simpson Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/geneva/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure Buzz framework usability infrastructure archives metadata copyright preservation cataloguing interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reviews the book by Christine Borgman: From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure.
Christine L. Borgman, From Gutenberg to the global information infrastructure: access to information in the networked world.
Cambridge, Mass., London: MIT Press, 2000. xviii, 324 pp.
£27.95.
ISBN 0-262-02473-X.
Christine Borgman’s book From Gutenberg to the global information infrastructure was published in March 2000 in the Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing series edited by William Arms.
The book is an excellent introduction to a wide range of issues related to the development of digital libraries and to what is called here a ‘global information infrastructure.’ It is possible that some readers approaching a book with this title might be led to expect a historical review of the development of information technologies since the fifteenth-century.
However, in this book the term ‘Gutenberg’ is used as a kind of shorthand for ‘print-culture’ a usage popularised by Marshall McLuhan in his 1962 book The Gutenberg galaxy [1].
As is often the case, the book’s subtitle access to information in the networked world gives a better indication of its content.
In her first three chapters, Borgman spends some time defining key terms and introducing some important issues.
In chapter 1, for example, she gives a very broad definition of what she means by a global information infrastructure: “a technical framework of computing and communications technologies, information content, services, and people, all of which interact in complex and often unpredictable ways”.
Chapters 2 and 3 define various meanings of the terms ‘digital library’ and ‘access to information.’ Chapter 3 in particular contains a very good introduction to metadata and its various uses.
Throughout all of this, Borgman makes it clear that she is not just interested in technological issues, but in the full range of economic, legal and societal factors that can influence access to information in the networked world.
The next few chapters broadly cover the life cycle of information, the use of digital libraries and a more detailed analysis of the role of libraries as institutions.
These chapters introduce a very wide range of issues: the role of libraries in selecting, preserving and giving access to content, the usability of systems and institutions, information seeking behaviour, the differences between novice and expert search strategies, interoperability, etc.
Chapter 8 concentrates on how system designers need to focus on the identified needs of their content and target audience while also being aware that there may also be a broader global audience for their service.
Two problems that Borgman returns to in her last chapter are digital preservation and scalability.
Digital preservation is mentioned repeatedly throughout the book as a serious issue, especially in chapter 7 where she notes that the issue often raises more questions than answers.
In chapter 9, she also speculates on the scalability of existing networks (e.g.
the Internet) to support the development of a global information infrastructure.
These concerns, again, are to some extent technological, but Borgman notes that there are also a range of legal, economic and political problems that will also need to be addressed.
In this chapter, Borgman also includes a ‘case study’ of Central and Eastern Europe based on research carried out in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia throughout the 1990s.
This section will probably be useful for those who have an interest in this particular geographical region, but it doesn’t necessarily cohere well with the rest of the book.
That said, this book is very good.
Chapter 7, in particular, is an excellent assessment of where libraries stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century.
It stresses that debates about the future of libraries are not really about libraries at all, but about how to best facilitate public access to information.
The issues that are covered (all too briefly) by the chapter includes: national libraries and legal deposit, the sharing of cataloguing information, metadata standards and content rules and the role of the library as a physical space.
It also mentions the potential impact of intellectual property laws on information access in libraries.
Borgman notes that “finding the balance between the rights of citizens and the rights of producers may be the greatest challenge we face in providing access to information in democratic societies.” One major theme of the whole book is that of ‘co-evolutionary’ change.
Borgman takes a via media between those who argue that the development of online access to information resources will have revolutionary consequences and those who argue that any changes will be evolutionary, and that existing institutions (e.g.
libraries, publishers, etc.)
are likely to survive in some form.
She feels that the most likely future is co-evolutionary; people will adopt new technologies when they feel that they are appropriate but will not discard all of their older habits.
Later on in the book, Borgman points out that the development of printing didn’t completely destroy communication through oral tradition or the art of handwriting, and in another chapter notes that at the moment electronic forms of communication complements, rather than replaces, many aspects of face-to-face communication.
A second major theme of the book is that of usability.
Borgman devotes two chapters to this issue and outlines various themes of a potential research agenda.
The book contains summaries at the end of each chapter, an index and forty-pages of references.
This list alone would provide a good starting point for students and others who are interested in pursuing the issues raised in the book further.
Inevitably, the book with the exception of the case study covering Central and Eastern Europe has a North American flavour, but this is not a big problem.
More serious is the lack of consideration of the related concerns of archives and museums, except in a small part of chapter 7.
I was also surprised that the discussion of cataloguing rules and standards in chapter 7 didn’t mention the report of the IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records [2] and other recent developments.
The book contains a few mistakes.
For example, PDF (p. 155) should be the Portable Document Format, while the “British National Lending Library at Boston Spa” (pp.
175-6) presumably refers to the British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC).
There are also some inconsistencies in the presentation of URLs in the references; i.e., some missing punctuation and inappropriate capitalisation.
These small items, however, do not detract from the generally good quality of the book’s production.
In short, this is an excellent book.
It introduces a wide range of issues that relate to the development of digital libraries and a future global information infrastructure.
It should be read by all of those people who have an interest in digital libraries and their development, whether practitioners, researchers or students.
References: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
IFLA Study Group, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: final report.
Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998.
Author Details   Michael Day UKOLN University of Bath m.day@ukoln.ac.uk http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “From Gutenberg to the global information infrastructure” Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/review/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL: Round the World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL: Round the World Buzz data mobile software database portal repositories copyright url research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod considers Southern African engineering resources.
South Africa may have been cut off from the rest of the world during the years of the Apartheid era, but it is now very much a part of the networked world, and is trying hard to make up for lost time.
South Africa has a wired population of over 1 million, and awareness of the commercial possibilities of the internet is relatively high.
South Africans have for some time been heavy users of modern communications systems and especially mobile phones, the international cricketer Alan Lamb being one of the best-known advocates in recent years, and many were quick to see the possibilities of the internet in breaking their isolation.
Aggressive marketing of ISPs has meant that use of the Internet from homes is relatively widespread amongst some sections of the population.
The country also has experience of nationwide internet-based networks in the public sector, an impressive example being the linking of polling stations, which allowed 18 million votes to be processed within 24 hours during the last national democratic election.
In some of the surrounding countries, the picture is less rosy.
According to a recent UNESCO study [1], for example, parts of sub-Saharan Africa have only one scientist or engineer for about every 10,000 population.
Although containing 12% of the world’s population, sub-Saharan Africa has only 2% of its telephone lines [2].
Botswana and Zimbabwe fair better than many countries in the region.
For example, Botswana has achieved a teledensity of over 4% (telephone lines per 100 inhabitants) [3] the third highest in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, but internet awareness is nevertheless lower than in South Africa.
As might be expected, there are some impressive internet resources to be found in the region, however those covering engineering are patchier.
As a starting point for investigation, there are several multidisciplinary regional and South African search engines and directories.
Aardvark http://www.aardvark.co.za/ consists of a search engine powered by Infoseek and a Yahoo!-type directory.
Around thirty engineering resources are listed in its directory.
Ananzi http://www.ananzi.co.za/ points to about one hundred sites in its Mining and engineering section, and a similar number of other engineering sites in its Industry section.
Max http://www.max.co.za/ lists a smaller number, fewer still are included in the Search SAO directory http://www.southafrica.co.za/search.html and TheMark http://www.themark.co.za/ has only a handful.
The SA Web-Chart http://sa.web-chart.com/ has a more promising looking category listing structure, but yields few resources in engineering, and when I visited it, Zebra http://www.zebra.co.za/ was only available for site submissions, whilst the Woyaa!
http://www.woyaa.com/ South African engineering section was completely empty.
Africa Online http://www.africaonline.com/ does not have a section on engineering, being more business and news orientated.
Brabys's Online http://www.brabys.co.za/ contains details of many engineering companies, but it does not link to web sites.
The InterneXt Gateway to South Africa http://www.marques.co.za/ has a Science, Tech & Health section, and within it there are links to quite a number of both large and small commercial, professional and academic sites under headings such as ‘Engineering – Electr’, ‘Engineering – General’ and ‘Engineering – Mech’.
The ZA Worm Search Engine, http://zaworm.co.za/ which is associated with the InterneXt Gateway, and which claims to search sites in the .za domain (South Africa), was not working when I visited it (on several occasions).
Zamnet http://www.zamnet.zm/ is a laudable effort for Zambian services, but is not as well developed as some of the South African-based services.
How about the international directories?
There are no Yahoo!
directories for Africa, and barely a handful of resources are listed in Yahoo!
Regional:Regions:Africa http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/Regions/Africa/, but the attractively designed and relatively new Orientation South Africa http://za.orientation.com/ is much better, listing over two hundred engineering sites in its Web Sites by Topic section.
The regional Orientation Africa directory http://af.orientation.com/ lists 49 engineering sites, but some of these are duplicated in the Orientation South Africa directory.
As for South or Southern African engineering subject gateways, I found one or two which bear some likeness to that ilk.
Englink, which is also called Eng-Link, http://www.englink.com/welcome.html is aimed at the South African construction engineering industry, and describes itself as "a hub of information that can be tapped by companies in the industry affording them a one-stop engineering shop."
It promises a lot, but at the present time delivers little, however the site is currently undergoing major software and Y2K upgrades, and so it may improve.
The Ananzi directory mentioned above has an associated service called TecNet Engineering South Africa http://www.tecnet.co.za/ TecNet has been developed by Promech Publishing, who publish The SA Mechanical Engineer http://www.tecnet.co.za/mags/mol/index.htm , Materials Handling Today http://www.tecnet.co.za/mags/math/index.htm, Aluminium News http://www.tecnet.co.za/mags/aluminium/index.htm and Stainless Steel http://www.tecnet.co.za/mags/steel/index.htm , in a joint venture with Technical Application Software.
It is a bit like an engineering portal, in that as well as extracts from the four journals mentioned above, it has several company and product directories, is developing an engineer’s toolbox, and contains information about conferences.
However, it should be noted that directory Web site links are secured by payment rather than quality, and the Hot Links contain far more international, than South African, sites.
Then there is Expo http://www.expo.co.za/engineering.html which showcases South African products.
This is aimed at viewers from outside the region, and consists of a number of sectoral expos, for example Construction Expo http://www.expo.co.za/construction.html Electrical Expo http://www.expo.co.za/electric.html Mining and Quarrying Expo http://www.expo.co.za/mining.html and Engineering Expo http://www.expo.co.za/engineering.html The Expos are handy because they link through to the Web sites of many South African engineering companies.
Describing itself as a gateway to the South African building and construction industry, Buildnet http://bi.co.za/buildnet/ has links to a number of interesting sites, including recruitment agencies, publications, publishers and associations, some of which are produced by Buildnet itself.
Some sections of Buildnet are better seeded with sites than others, and I came across several broken links, however in general this is a very useful gateway.
In its own category is Mbendi AfroPaedia http://mbendi.co.za/ .
This describes itself as ‘Africa's electronic encyclopaedia of business and commercial information’, and although concentrating on business, includes various information profiles of interest on the African chemical, mining, oil, and gas industries.
As well as background and detailed information about the industries in question, Mbendi also contains directories of companies, and statistics.
Some of the most rewarding collections of links to South African engineering resources are maintained by the CSIR (formerly known as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) http://www.csir.co.za/ .
The CSIR is a very large research, development and implementation organisation at the heart of the scientific and technological community.
Its Web site is not only full of very useful information about the CSIR, its structure and operation, but also contains details of forthcoming meetings, seminars, workshops, and courses.
Within the pages for some of its business areas and divisions are well-maintained links to building, construction, defence technology, environmental, and transportation sites.
CSIR also produces various electronic publications including a magazine, called Technobrief, a Mining R&D newsletter, and a transportation newsletter.
I have found relatively few links to engineering sites within the region included in university engineering departmental Web sites or library servers, and even in the links pages of many professional societies.
However, using the aforementioned directories and gateways, and with a little exploratory work, it is possible to find a fair number of Southern African engineering resources of interest.
Let us look at the sort of material which is available.
The last time I visited South Africa was several years ago, with a small group of fellow employees from the University of Botswana who were investigating working examples of networked computer cabling solutions.
One of the places we went to was the Iscor steelworks plant at Vereeniging, not far from Johannesburg, where we viewed a recently installed network.
Iscor is a South African mining and metals company, and what amazed me at the time was the size of the plant at Vereeniging.
It took a full fifteen minute car ride to reach the rear of the plant from the front entrance, just about the same length of time that it took me to learn how to pronounce the name of the town ‘Vereeninging’!
Despite its size, the steelworks at Vereeniging is only one of five operated by the steel giant Iscor.
The others are located at Pretoria, Vanderbijlpark, Cape Town and Newcastle.
The Iscor web site http://www.iscorltd.co.za/ gives quite a lot of information about the company, noting in passing that the Vereeniging works specialises in seamless tubes and spring steels, alloy steels and small forgings, and provides background information on the company and its operations.
However, I noticed that the site is about to be completely updated to reflect the new directions the company has taken in the last year.
Iscor Steel ranks as 30th in the world on the basis of metric tons of crude steel output, but that is only one part of the operation.
Sister company Iscor Mining http://www.iscorltd.co.za/mining/default.htm is a world-class South African mining and mineral processing company, and there are various Iscor subsidiaries, such as Suprachem (Pty) Ltd., http://www.suprachem.co.za/ which manufactures organic and inorganic chemical products derived from coal and the steel-making process, and joint ventures such as Saldanha Steel (Pty) Ltd., http://www.ssteel.co.za/ in which Iscor shares an interest along with the State-owned Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa Limited http://www.idc.co.za/ By no means did I spend my time in Southern Africa criss-crossing the bushveld and highveld visiting industrial plants, steelworks and mining operations, and in fact, at that time, I had little interest in such things, but on another occasion I visited the town of Thabazimbi in the Northern Province of South Africa, which happens to be where the Thabazimbi Iron Ore Mine, http://www.iscorltd.co.za/mining/thabazim.htm owned by Iscor Mining, is located.
The Thabazimbi Iron Ore Mine web site is under construction at the time of writing, and yields little information, but for those who want to locate this exotic sounding town, there is a map of the area at a Yahoo!
GeoCities site http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/8028/thaba/thabazimbi.html The area around Thabazimbi is typical bushveld, although close to the mine there are various mountains of iron-ore slag.
Iscor Mining also run operations in Sishen, http://www.iscorltd.co.za/mining/sishen1.htm north of Kimberley, where the reserves include half the world's reserves of lumpy iron, and there is a coal business http://www.iscorltd.co.za/mining/coal.htm and heavy minerals operation http://www.iscorltd.co.za/ihm/ as well.
Iscor is only one of many companies involved in the mining sector in South Africa.
Mining is one of the most important industries in the whole of the Southern African region.
Mining contributes 7.5% of the South African GDP [4] , 10.8% of the Zambian GDP [5], 4.7% of the Zimbabwean GDP [6], and a massive 35.1% of the GDP in Botswana [7].
South Africa accounts for about 30% of the total world’s gold production, and Botswana is the largest producer, in terms of value, of diamonds.
South Africa, Angola, and Namibia are not too far behind.
Copper, nickel, coal, platinum, cobalt, silver, nickel, asbestos, salt and soda ash are also important in the region.
Despite the importance of the sector, Southern African mining company sites do not exactly abound on the Web.
Amongst the ones I located are Ingwe Coal Corporation Limited, http://www.ingwe.co.za/ , Amcoal, http://www.amcoal.co.za/homepage1.html one of the largest coal producers in South Africa, Ocean Diamond Mining Holdings Limited, http://www.odm.co.za/ a marine diamond mining group working offshore in Angola, Namibia and South Africa, Implats, http://www.implats.co.za/ a platinum mining company whose web site yields mostly financial information, Anglovaal Mining Limited, http://www.avmin.co.za/ Gold Fields, which is a merger of Gold Fields Limited http://www.goldfields.co.za/ and Driefontein Consolidated Limited, http://www.driefontein.co.za/ Western Areas Gold Mining Company http://www.westernareas.co.za/ and the associated Randfontein Estates Limited, http://www.randfonteinest.co.za/ Anglo American Platinum Corporation Limited (AMPLATS), http://www.amplats.co.za/ Deton Engineering Pty Ltd, http://www.index.co.za/deton/ opencast consultants Tacmin http://www.tacmin.co.za/ and Shaft Sinkers (Pty) Ltd http://www.shaftsinkers.co.za/.
Orientation South Africa lists a several more within its Mining section http://search.za.orientation.com/cgi-bin/catbr1?za+eg+D622+2 The web site of the massive De Beers, http://www.edata.co.za/DeBeers/ the largest diamond mining company in the world with operations in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, yields little information of interest to engineers.
De Beers Centenary AG and the Botswana government are joint shareholders of the Debswana Diamond Company (Pty) Ltd., which has three large mines at Jwaneng http://www.edata.co.za/debeers/jwa.html , Orapa and Letlhakane http://www.edata.co.za/debeers/orapa.html Although these sites contain only a little engineering data, they are worthwhile visiting in order to gauge the enormity of the mining operations from the photographs on view.
When based in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, I did not manage to visit Jwaneng, but a glimpse of what life is like there can be seen from the artwork of Joseph Moagaesi, who attends Acacia Primary School in the town, and who has drawn a touching picture http://www.creativeconnections.org/art98/botswana/72.html On the processing side, there is Mintek, http://www.mintek.ac.za/ a metallurgical and minerals-processing technology company.
Some of the above sites contain engineering-related material, whilst others concentrate more on financial details.
Unfortunately, there are numerous defunct South African mining web sites, such have been the rapid changes in this sector in the last few years.
Staying with the mining sector, information about the award winning publication African Mining http://www.mining.co.za/ is available, and subscribers can receive an additional weekly email news update.
Incidentally, the publishers of African Mining recently started to publish another bi-monthly magazine called African Energy, which focuses on Africa's power industry http://www.africanenergy.co.za/The South African Institute of Mining & Metallurgy http://www.saimm.co.za/ covers mining, mineral processing, extraction metallurgy and metals and materials sciences, and synopses of journal papers are available at its Web site.
The Chamber of Mines of South Africa http://www.bullion.org.za/ has a well-maintained and particularly informative site, which includes a mining data library and a number of downloadable publications such as the Chamber of Mines Newsletter.
With its World Mining Directory http://www.bullion.org.za/bulza/chaorg/wmdir/wmdmin.htm it can justifiably call itself the "World's Largest Repository of Mining and Minerals related information on the internet".
The Web site of the Mine Ventilation Society of South Africa http://home.global.co.za/~minevent/ is small, but that of the Safety in Mines Research Advisory Committee (SIMRAC) http://www.simrac.co.za/ is much larger, and contains a number of downloadable reports.
A regional body is the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Mining Sector Co-ordinating Unit: http://www.sadcmining.org.zm/ Finally, related sites include the South African Coal Processing Society http://www.sacoalprep.co.za/Default.htm, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) http://www.num.org.za/ and the colourful Fossil Fuel Foundation of Africa http://members.xoom.com/FOSSIL_FUEL/ Several mining professional societies have been mentioned above.
Professional associations are normally a fruitful source of information about their respective industries, and the following are some of the most important engineering institutions with Web sites in South and Southern Africa.
Aluminium Federation of Southern African (AFSA) http://www.afsa.co.za/ Association of Architectural Aluminium Manufacturers of South Africa (AAAMSA) http://www.icon.co.za/~aaamsa/ Association of Quantity Surveyors (ASAQS) http://www.asaqs.co.za/ Building Industries Federation South Africa http://buildnet.co.za/Associations/bifsa/ Cement and Concrete Institute (C&CI) http://www.cnci.org.za/ Chamber of Engineering Technology http://www.chamberengineering.co.za/ (this Chamber represents Registered Engineering Technicians in South Africa).
Civil Engineering Industry Training Board (CEITB) http://www.ceitb.org.za/ Contractors Plant Hire Association (CPHA) http://www.cpha.co.za/ Engineering Institution of Zambia http://www.coppernet.zm/eiz/ Institute of Plumbing (SA) http://www.iopsa.org.za/ Institution of Municipal Engineering of Southern Africa http://www.imesa.org.za/ South African Association of Consulting Engineers (SAACE) http://www.saace.co.za/.
Southern African Bitumen Association (SABITA) http://www.sabita.co.za/ South African Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors (SAFCEC) http://www.safcec.org.za/ South African Institute of Building http://bi.co.za/associations/saib/index.html South African Insititute of Electrical Engineers http://www.saiee.org.za/ South African Institute of Marine Engineers and Naval Architects http://www.saimena.co.za/ South African Institution of Chemical Engineers (SAIChE) http://www.saiche.co.za/index.htm South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) http://www.civils.org.za/ South African Institution of Mechanical Engineering (SAIMechE) http://www.saimeche.org.za/welcome.htm South African Optical Society http://mafadi.aero.csir.co.za/ South African Pump Manufacturers Association (SAPMA) http://www.pumpnet.net/sapma/ Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa (SEIFSA) http://www.tecnet.co.za/seifsa/ Relevant academic servers include: School of Technology, Border Technikon http://www.bortech.ac.za/Technology.htm Faculty of Engineering, University of Cape Town http://www.uct.ac.za/depts/engineering/ Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Durban-Westville, http://www.udw.ac.za/~mcarsky/ Department of Civil Engineering, University of Durban-Westville http://www.udw.ac.za/~civil/ Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Durban-Westville http://marconi.udw.ac.za/ee/ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Durban-Westville http://www.udw.ac.za/~mecheng/ Faculty of Engineering, University of Natal http://www.unp.ac.za/MP/prospectus/sp_18.htm Department of Civil Engineering, Port Elizabeth Technikon http://www.petech.ac.za/civil/Default.htm Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Port Elizabeth Technikon http://www.petech.ac.za/eleceng/ Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Port Elizabeth Technikon http://www.petech.ac.za/mech/ Faculty of Engineering, Potchefstroom University http://www.puk.ac.za/engineering/index.html Faculty of Engineering, University of Pretoria http://www.ee.up.ac.za/ Faculty of Engineering, Rand Afrikaans University http://www.rau.ac.za/english/academic/engineering/index.htm Faculty of Engineering, Stellenbosch University http://www.eng.sun.ac.za/ Faculty of Engineering, Technikon Pretoria http://168.172.74.27/engineering/ef/ Faculty of Engineering, Technikon Witwatersrand http://www.twr.ac.za/faceng.htm Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand http://www.wits.ac.za/fac/engineering/ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Zambia http://www-mech.uz.ac.zw/ Faculty of Engineering, University of Zimbabwe http://www.uz.ac.zw/engineering/REP/ For anyone involved in research in science and technology, the National Research Foundation (FRD) http://www.nrf.ac.za/ is a very important body as its mission is to support, promote and fund various projects.
The large publicly available FRD site includes information, news, events listings, details of publications and contact databases, plus some useful links to other resources.
Further information is available to participating organisations.
Lastly, to complete this brief review of Southern African engineering resources, there is the National Science and Technology Forum http://www.nstf.org.za/home.html which has a consultative and lobbying role within South Africa.
More details about most of the significant Web sites mentioned above will be found at EEVL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ References [1] http://www.unesco.org/opi/scitech/ Science and Technology in Africa: Facing the Facts [2] http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-98/white.html International Assistance for Internet Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Wendy D. White, Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science June/July 1998 Volume 24, No.
5 [3] http://www.satcc.org/memberstates/botswana/profile.html Southern African Transport and Communications Commission : Country Profile: Botswana [4] Europa World Yearbook 1999, London, Europa Publications, 1999, p. 3210 [5] ibid.
p. 3977 [6] ibid.
p. 3992 [7] ibid.
p. 698 Author Details Roddy MacLeod EMC Hub Coordinator Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4ASEmail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: "EEVL: Round the World: Southern African engineering resources" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22  Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 37: Monocultures Threaten More Than Species Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 37: Monocultures Threaten More Than Species Buzz software dissemination rss portal archives metadata eprints copyright preservation unicode ebook openurl dspace ict interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue issue 37.
These days zoologists view with increasing alarm the disappearance of species in this world, to the point where they fear their extinction will predate their discovery.
This is no less true for linguists who are witnessing the same phenomenon in terms of dying languages and dialects.
A parallel therefore can be drawn with the situation as detailed by Deborah Anderson.
She is most concerned by the progress made by historic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs towards inclusion in the Unicode Standard and fears that unless efforts in this area are maintained, certain historic scripts may fall into the abyss, being denied exposure to the many through the enormous access afforded by the Internet.
It may be possible to discern an interest in preservation here in the broadest sense of the word.
However the other point that Unicode and Historic Scripts makes is very much about access the universal access to that which the linguists would stoutly maintain is at the very heart of our cultural development and heritage, digital or otherwise: language.
As I pointed out in my last editorial, the topic of portals was unlikely to go away.
Conscious of discussions on what exactly constitutes a portal, I welcomed a contribution from Paul Miller who felt compelled to respond to the urge, as he puts it, “to ‘portalise’ everything”, by offering his own point of view.
In so doing, he is by no means out to evangelise, but in Towards a Typology for Portals he does attempt to draw boundaries around Web sites, gateways, portals and what he is pleased to call ‘thingummies’, his term for an aspect which deserves closer attention.
In the same vein, I suppose, I should not apologise for the likely continuation of the theme of scholarly communication.
In this issue Theo Andrew casts some light upon current Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff within his own institution.
He points out however that the uptake of digital media for research dissemination is not confined to organisations.
Theo provides and analyses statistical evidence and offers a number of conclusions, some worrying, some more encouraging.
William Nixon is also involved in scholarly output and has a story to tell of DAEDALUS: Initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow.
The opportunity to make comparisons originates in the history of the project and William provides information on both types of software.
Providing a context in which both were considered, he offers detail on their implementation, covering a variety of issues including installation and submission features.
Moreover he supplies a useful reminder: software choices are not just about perceived technical superiority; proper consideration of the intended services, purposes and content, among other things, should be a major determinant.
If choices are something of a matter of horses for courses, then such an opinion would appear to be supported by some of the points made by Penny Garrod when she writes on Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where are we now?
It would appear that the focus is gradually shifting away from ebooks as devices towards ebooks as content.
Libraries in the UK are starting to adopt a variety of ebook models but pricing mechanisms and appropriate content remain ongoing issues.
Penny addresses this issue as well as providing the most recent chapters not only in the story of the technology itself and its associated platforms, but also, and more importantly in my view, recent developments in terms of collections, suppliers and services.
In the latter regard she also details which hardware libraries are using.
In this comprehensive overview the author highlights a telling point in the debate about the future of ebooks: their longevity and usage are more likely to be determined by perceptions of their relative flexibility and usefulness than by mere technological developments.
Doubtless there will be those who, along with denigrators of ebook technology, will maintain that RSS is a largely insignificant development.
Nonetheless Roddy MacLeod demonstrates quite clearly in his EEVL News column that RSS has something to offer his service users and Monica Duke underpins this theme by writing about Delivering OAI Records as RSS: An IMesh Toolkit module for facilitating resource sharing through the delivery of subject gateway records as a newsfeed.
In addition to information on RSS and the use of the Module, Monica addresses related interoperability issues including the structure of attendant metadata records.
In an article with a Scandinavian context, Kjell Jansson, Jessica Lindholm and Tomas Schönthal describe their Experiences of Harvesting Web Resources in Engineering Using Automatic Classification.
In relating the history of their work, they provide us with a comparison of approaches, namely between a Web index using automatic classification and another that is robot-generated.
Meanwhile Emma Beer advises that Updated JISC Guides Are Now Available and provides a rapid overview of what is now on offer.
Once again I am indebted to the writers of our regular columns and also to those of this issue’s bumper crop of at the Event articles, where for example, Lesly Huxley and Michael Day provide the general and particular of the deliberations of ECDL2003.
In his article Crime and Punishment, Andrew Charlesworth, owing more to William Gibson than to Dostoyevsky, details the many and strange issues related to the protection of not only individual ICT users and their information against computer crime and abuse, but also more importantly, from my perspective, the institutions supplying them the ICT services.
Manjula Patel provides an overview of OAI: The Fourth Open Archives Forum Workshop, Pete Johnston writes on DC2003 in Seattle and Metadata and Interoperability in a Complex World, while Linda Humphreys and Andy Powell join Frances Boyle in a three-handed description of the recent JIBS-UKOLN OpenURL Meeting.
All these of course flanked by contributions from Web Focus, News and Reviews, where in the latter case we have been fortunate to garner opinions from three information professionals on recent books on the information society and information services.
As before, this issue comes to you courtesy of the enthusiasm and dedication of its authors together with support and advice from colleagues at UKOLN.
I hope you will enjoy it.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Editorial: “Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 37: Monocultures Threaten More Than Species” Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Open Archives Forum Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Open Archives Forum Buzz data software framework database dissemination xml portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation repositories cataloguing interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Susanne Dobratz, Friederike Schimmelpfennig and Peter Schirmbacher introduce the new Open Archives Forum project to promote the ideas of the OAI in Europe.
The Open Archives Forum: Mission and Goals The Open Archives Forum provides a European focus for the dissemination of information about European activities in Open Archives.
A particular focus is on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).
The Open Archives Forum aims to promote the idea of globally distributed digital archives within Europe, to support the establishment of new digital archives and their related services, and to initiate European special interest groups.
It is important to add particular European interests to already existing models such as the Open Archives Initiative.
Doing this, the different approaches, standards and technologies can be evaluated in terms of their feasibility and their limitations.
The Open Archives Forum will serve as the European web-portal for initiatives, technologies, and communities within digital archives activities.
It will enable a web based information space where communities can store information about their repositories and services and the technology used in those, e.g.
the protocol, the internal partition of the repository, and the metadata sets supported.
Descriptions of European projects looking into different aspects of open archives will be held in the Open Archives Forum databases.
The website (http://www.oaforum.org) itself will work as an entry point for discussions, workshops, reports and reviews on different topics of questions related to open archives over the Web.
Interested parties can register with the site for receiving the newsletter, giving information about their repositories and participating in email discussions.
Open Archives Issues There are now plenty of libraries on the Web with their catalogues, full text and other digitised resources, as well as e-print archives, archives and museums.
This gives rise to questions of how to build a heterogenous digital library that provides access to all those different resources via a single Web portal.
However, the realization of those ideas often has its technical limits.
Often different and diverse metadata standards for description of electronic resources are used to build up those archives.
This makes it much more difficult to establish a comprehensive platform for providing retrieval and service for all archives.
Not only the heterogeneity of metadata standards but also the implementation of different harvesting and exchange protocols is one of the major reasons why establishing services using different types of archives becomes so difficult.
Different systems, transfer protocols, and retrieval mechanisms are in use that are anything but compatible.
In libraries these are mostly the Z 39.50 protocol, with NCSTRL it is the DIENST protocol , with other models such as Harvest it is the HTTP protocol.
The Open Archives Initiative To bring something to bear on this dilemma the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)(1) was established in the USA.
In July 1999 the founders of the initiative, Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce und Herbert Van de Sompel, initiated a meeting of the world’s biggest pre-print archives [2].
This meeting took place in October 1999 in Santa Fe and finally led to the foundation of the “Open Archives Initiative“.
The OAI deals with how document archives, pre-print servers, and digital libraries can be connected with a common and easy-to-use interface, and how to develop related services like distributed retrieval options, expert information systems and other services [1].
Having its roots in the pre-print area, the original aim of the initiative was to re-organise communication between different scientific pre-print servers.
For this it was necessary to build a organisational and technical framework that could be used as a basis for free and commercial services.
The major archives that took part in the OAI from the beginning are: arXiv.org(2), the pre-print server at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which specialises in high energy physics and other related fields; CogPrints(3), which archives publications in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience ;NCSTRL(4), a distributed system for servers within the computing sciences; NDLTD(5), the world’s largest virtual archive of electronic dissertations and theses; and RePEc(6), a distributed archive of pre-prints in economics.
Within the development of the initiative, libraries and commercial institutions were invited to take part in this distributed model.
Today a considerable number of archives and also some commercial services are involved.
The OAI website is based at Cornell University, USA.
Here information about the standards developed, participating archives, repositories and service providers as well as dates for presentations, workshops and standards releases are given.
A short overview of archives registered with the OAI can be seen on the server(7).
The Open Archive Interoperability Framework According to the OAI’s interoperability framework there are two different user groups within a distributed system: Data provider (metadata repositories and archives) Service provider (harvesting and third party services) By implementing the OAI protocol, archives (i.e.
the data providers) make metadata for their digital contents accessible.
Requests using the OAI protocol are answered in a standardised way.
Service providers harvest metadata made available by the data providers and thus implement further services like special information options, document delivery services, or search engines.
These services can be free or charged.
Part of the OAI idea is that the service provider observes the legal policies of the referring archives.
The OAI has suggested the usage of the Dublin Core metadata set (as a minimum) encoded in a special XML syntax developed by the Initiative.
Standards, Communities and Open Archives The openness of the OAI specification offers two options for communities to adapt the standard to local, domain-specific requirements and rules.
These are: building up and agreeing to a set: the set definitions.
They allow requests to the subsets of the archives’ documents community-specific extensions and interpretations of the Dublin Core metadata set or the use of other metadata standards with the OAI protocol.
To establish community-specific standards (in spite of the flexibility of the Initiative’s requirements) information about and coordination of developments is urgently needed.
It is also important to inform new projects such as those involved in digitisation activities about interoperability solutions.
And it is also important to evaluate the feasibility of the OAI Interoperability Framework and whether or not it provides a low-barrier solution for interoperability one of the main motives behind the creation of the Initiative.
Which role does the Open Archives Forum play within the context of web based open archives?
The Open Archives Forum is a new EC 5th Framework Accompanying Measure for supporting the dissemination of information about European activities that adopt an open-archives based approach.
OA-Forum will build a framework where European and national initiatives that use this approach can share their experiences and co-ordinate the development of software tools and infrastructures.
Special attention will be dedicated to those initiatives which are implementing or using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
The project will facilitate a critical evaluation of the potential of the open archives approach in a wider context, as well as validating a European experience of OAI specifications.
Open archives offer a low cost means for disseminating content now ‘hidden’ in cultural heritage and learning institutions.
If this promise is fulfilled there may be a significant impact on providing new services.
It is essential that European data and service providers are prepared to participate in such innovations.
The Open Archives Forum will facilitate the exploration of the benefits of the OAI as a framework for low cost access to content.
It will consider benefits of access to ‘hidden’ data surfaced (by deployment of OAI) to the citizen and learner.
The Open Archives Forum will encourage European readiness to exploit commercial opportunities offered by low cost entry to interoperability.
It will investigate different business models for open archives that have been developed so far and will encourage communities to set up new business models and develop new ideas.
The Open Archives Forum will provide a focus for projects funded under the IST Programme, but it will also encompass national initiatives and commercial interests especially publishers.
The open archive approach is relevant to a number of domains and the project will encourage participation from cultural heritage institutions, research organisations, the public library sector, community services and commercial organisations.
The Open Archives Forum’s core objectives are To provide a European-based focus for dissemination of information about European open archive activities.
A series of workshops will enable communities to share experience and to promote good practice targeted at current and potential implementors, as well as at service and data providers, commercial, cultural heritage, research and educational initiatives.
The project’s web site will become a central information portal for information concerning the implementation of open archives in Europe.
Information regarding the implementation of OAI will be published through a variety of different publishing channels.
The Open Archives Forum will facilitate communication and collaboration with the OAI in the USA and beyond.
To stimulate the building of an open archive infrastructure in Europe, the Open Archives Forum will co-ordinate the evaluation of OAI specifications.
It will consider alternative technical and organisational solutions, communicate information about software tools and added value services.
The project will also explore sustainability issues arising from the OAI approach.
To encourage the provision of new services the OA-Forum will facilitate groupings of European OAI Data Providers and Service Providers as well as the co-operation on infrastructural issues, agreements on metadata extensions, common partitioning of archives, etc.
One of the project issues is to facilitate a consensus approach to IPR issues and to evaluate the benefits of the open archive approach in different domains and sectors.
To exploit synergies between projects and reinforce the combined effort of projects.
It will present integrated results of related projects by means of reports and a database.
The projects web site provides a platform for exchange of experience between projects in Europe.
Within the projects focus is the interaction with the international open archive community.
Under these main topics the activity of the Open Archives Forum is organised along three main tracks: 1.
Technical Validation: An inventory of software products in use and under development in Europe and elsewhere will be kept in order to encourage European projects to share software solutions.
In addition, a forum for examining technical issues that need to be addressed in building a viable service delivery infrastructure will be maintained.
2.
Organisational Validation: The potential business models for sharing metadata, publishing and archiving will be reviewed.
The added value that the open archives model might offer in these contexts will be explored.
3.
Workshops and Expert Reviews: A series of four workshops which will enable face-to-face sharing of open archives experience among IST and other European projects and initiatives will be organized.
Reviews of the potential of the open archives approach will be commissioned from domain-specific experts.
Further Information For further information, see the project web site at http://www.oaforum.org Please contact: Susanne Dobratz – Humboldt University E-mail: susanne.dobratz@rz.hu-berlin.de or Rachel Heery UKOLN E-mail: r.heery@ukoln.ac.uk or Donatella Castelli – IEI-CNR E-mail: castelli@iei.pi.cnr.it Bibliography [1] Van de Sompel, H. & Lagoze, C.: The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative.
D-Lib Magazine.
Band Vol.
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2000, no.
2, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-oai/02vandesompel-oai.html [2] Ginsparg, P.; Luce, R. & Van de Sompel, H.: The Open Archives initiative aimed at the further promotion of author self-archived solutions.
1999, http://www.openarchives.org/meetings/SantaFe1999/ups-invitation-ori.htm [3] Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Version 1.1.
2001, http://www.openarchives.org/OAI_protocol/openarchivesprotocol.html [4] Lagoze, C. & Van de Sompel, H.: The Open Archives Initiative: Building a low-barrier interoperability framework.
2001, http://www.openarchives.org/documents/oai.pdf (1) http://www.openarchives.org (2) http://www.arxiv.org (3) http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk (4) http://www.ncstrl.org (5) http://www.ndltd.org (6) http://www.repec.org (7) unter http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.pl und http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html   Author Details   Susanne Dobratz, Friederike Schimmelpfennig and Peter Schirmbacher Humboldt-University Berlin, Computing Centre 10099 Berlin Unter den Linden 6 Contact: dobratz@rz.hu-berlin.de Article Title: “The Open Archives Forum” Author: Susanne Dobratz, Friederike Schimmelpfennig and Peter Schirmbacher Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/open-archives-forum/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: The New Kids on the Block Copying Or Competing?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: The New Kids on the Block Copying Or Competing?
Buzz url Citation BibTex RIS Search Engines: Phil Bradley The new kids on the block copying or competing?
This article looks at who is providing the competition for Google and Ixquick, and provides some food for thought for those who use these two search engines.
I’m sure that you don’t need me to tell you that the world of the search engine is constantly in a state of flux – old search engines falling away, only to be replaced by new ones.
This can be clearly illustrated this month as two well known favourites, Google and Ixquick are facing up to new competition.
This article looks at who is competing with them, and provides some food for thought for those people who automatically go to one or other search engine.
You may or may not have noticed that the BBC launched a new search engine at the beginning of May this year, so I thought it might be a good idea to go along and take a little look at it.
I suppose the first question to answer is ‘Do we actually need another search engine out there?’ The BBC obviously thinks that we do; in the news item on their website [1] they make reference to a recent NOP poll and Director of BBC New Media Ashley Highfield said “Given that 90% of respondents to the independent survey stated that they would use the BBC search engine, and that a similar number said they would prefer unbiased search, it is evidently something that people want.” However, while the average searcher may welcome the new search engine, rivals such as Espotting and Overture are rather less than enthused, citing unfair competition.
However, since they’re more than capable of looking after themselves, I’m more interested in the engine itself.
One thing that leaps out at users is the lack, indeed the non-existence of, any advertising.
Indeed, this is a particular point that the BBC is pushing, and Highfield is again quoted as saying “The BBC, with its 80 years of know-how and editorial expertise is ideally placed to provide a UK-focused search engine that will not be tainted by paid-for results.” (That’ll be why Espotting and Overture are less than charmed then!)
It’s built on Google’s search engine technology, and although there are a number of similarities with it, it does have a number of major differences.
If you take a look at it [2] it has a very lean design (once you can find it on the BBC page, cluttered and confused as it is), with a simple search box.
No details of how to search, no link to any advanced search functionality, just a box.
Once you’ve run a search and got some results the information that you’re presented with is similarly sparse – page name, short description and URL.
No links to similar pages, no cached version, translation or indeed anything else that we’ve come to expect from a major search engine.
There are two tabs to alter the set of results – ‘Results from BBC news’ and ‘Results from all the BBC’.
Useful if you’re doing a search for current information or media coverage, but less than helpful if you want to search newsgroups or look for images for example.
Having said that, the results page is well laid out and will, I’m sure, appeal to novice users.
One useful feature does pop out at you; the ability to just search for UK results, and this isn’t limited to sites that end in .uk – it also includes .com sites as well, which is a definite plus.
Is that enough to wrench searchers away from their avid devotion to Google [3] though?
Well, in order to answer that question, it’s necessary to do a little comparative work.
The BBC engine automatically filters out pornographic and derogatory sites, while Google does not.
This in itself is useful; a search for “Phil Bradley” for example doesn’t bring up any pages that refer to the American gay porn star of the same name when using the BBC offering, which makes a nice change!
A very quick and unscientific series of searches does however appear to show that while the BBC offering can come within touching distance of Google when it comes to UK sites, it falls behind when looking at the web generally.
The following table shows the results of 3 searches when done for both the web and just limited to the UK Google Results Search Term BBC results 1,070,000 Ariadne (web) 409,000 94,600 Ariadne (UK) 58,000 3,780 “Phil Bradley” (web) 2,750 891 “Phil Bradley” (UK) 737 110,000,000 Internet (web) 5,440,000 2,250,000 Internet (UK) 2,210,000 I’m sure that the automatic filtering of pornographic and hate sites is going to reduce the number of results by a factor, but for the BBC engine to be down about 106,000,000 results on the general web search for ‘Internet’ is pushing that rather too far.
However, that of course is only one part of the equation – what about the actual results themselves?
I tended to find that both Google and the BBC engine tended to give me either exactly the same results for the top ten returns, or almost exactly the same ones; there was little to choose between them.
On news stories there was however a difference – I did a search for the result of one of the World Cup matches that finished about an hour before, and while both engines produced current news links for me, unsurprisingly all the ones from the BBC engine originated from the BBC, while the Google results produced stories from African and American newsfeeds as well as Reuters.
Consequently, I suppose that if you were looking for news stories with a particularly UK bias to them the BBC engine would be the better source, but if you wanted a more global perspective, you’d be better off using Google.
It’s worth pointing out (even if the BBC don’t do so themselves!)
that the engine does use some of the advanced search syntax that is available with Google, such as site:, intitle:, inurl:, link:, related: although they haven’t added the facility to search for file types for example.
In summary, I don’t think that Google has got anything to worry about yet; the BBC search engine is no competition when it comes to searching the whole of the web, or for some of the advanced search functionality.
However, having said that, it will prove to be popular with people who want quick and hassle free searching, who require a UK bias/perspective and who don’t want to have to filter out pornography themselves.
I’ll certainly refer clients to it in the future who have any of those specific needs, but other than that, it’ll only get a cursory mention at the moment.
Worth keeping an eye on for future developments though.
Regular readers of my column (or people who come on my courses) will know that I have been very taken with the Multi/Meta search engine Ixquick [4], because it’s fast, effective, works with the search engine ranking systems and queries a lot of different search engines in one go.
However (like Google) it too now has some real competition, in this case from a new search engine called ez2www 5.
The owner emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking me to try it out, and I have to say that I’m very impressed.
Unlike Ixquick, it searches some of the major search engines, such as Alltheweb, Altavista, Google, Open Directory, Teoma, Wisenut and Yahoo.
The concept is the same; pages that are highly ranked by several search engines come towards the top of the list, and results are then worked out on the basis of the position within the top places.
A search brings in quite a dazzling array of results – categories (based on the directory search engines), clustered results based on concepts discussed in the returned pages, sponsored links (which are clearly marked and neatly placed at the side of the page so that we can all ignore them), and a very useful summary of results at the bottom of the page, which makes it simplicity itself to see which engines returned results.
If you’re unhappy with the results, you can change the amount of time taken to search from the default 5 seconds up to a minute if necessary.
It also has an advanced search function which allows users to interrogate individual search engines, allowing a better opportunity to find material on the invisible web (although it doesn’t inform you as to exactly where it gets the results from, which is a shame).
Another very nice feature is the option of choosing a particular country, and ez2www has an impressive array available.
Appropriate news stories are presented, and local weather conditions are also the default option, as well as information on the standing of the local currency in comparison to the US $.
Ez2www defaults to searching the web, but also allows users to search their directory of 3,365,300 sites listed in 389,748 categories – of over 1,000 specific search engines.
It also has a news function, taking feeds from ABC, BBC, CNN, Fast, Washington Post, Yahoo News and Moreover (though these are the defaults, so even if you choose another country, those are what you’re offered, which is a shame.)
It has a few weaknesses – you can’t search for images or through newsgroups for example, but these are minor points, and I mention them just so that I don’t appear too enthusiastic about it!
I’ve already decided that ez2www is going to become my multi search engine of choice – sorry about that Ixquick, but you have to keep one step ahead of the game, and you’ve now got an awful lot of catching up to do!
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1964000/1964553.stm [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/ [3] http://www.google.co.uk [4] http://www.ixquick.com [5] http://ez2www.com Author details Phil Bradley Article Title: “Search Engines: The new kids on the block – copying or competing?” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Access to Archives: England’s Contribution to the National Archive Network Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Access to Archives: England’s Contribution to the National Archive Network Buzz data software framework database xml infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus repositories cataloguing sgml dtd ead soa ict url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Caroline Thibeaud discusses the Archive 2 Archive project.
The Access to Archives project is one of the most exciting initiatives in the world of archives in England.
It aims at developing a virtual national archival catalogue for the country.
At a click of the mouse one will be able to find multilevel descriptions of some of the most important historical records of England.
For family historians, school teachers and pupils, academic researchers or just curious life long learners the A2A gateway is a unique facility to pursue their interests and research from a PC terminal any time of the day, anywhere in the world.
The A2A project sits alongside sister projects like Archive in London and the M25 Area (AIM25), the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) and the Archive Hub in an attempt to make available at a “one-stop-shop” site on the World Wide Web the catalogues of archives in the UK.
The 4 projects linked electronically will form the core of the National Archive Network.
This article is a brief presentation of the project, its origins, its management and its funding bodies.
I will also present the basic principles behind the project, the underlying standards and behind the scene infrastructure.
Readers unfamiliar with the UK archival scene will find it helpful to check the glossary at the end of this article.
Origins of the Project In 1998 amid the debate on the development of the Information Society in the UK the library oriented “New Library-People’s Network” report struck a chord with the archival profession who realised the opportunities offered by ICT for access to archives.
The National Council on Archives (NCA) produced a document entitled “Archives on Line: The Establishment of a United Kingdom Archival Network” [1] which recommended the creation of a National Archive Network by which users could have access to all archival catalogues across the UK from a single gateway.
The subsequent NCA report, “British Archives: the Way Forward” [2] identified its main focus as “Access for All” and consequently endorsed the development of the electronic National Archive Network.
Scotland had already paved the way with a similar initiative called Scottish Archive Network (SCAN).
In England the project was called Access to Archives and aimed at gathering electronically the catalogues of historical records of national, regional and local importance held in national, local, private or specialist repositories across England.
The Structure behind the A2A Project The project is lead by a central team based at the Public Record Office (PRO) that is responsible for the practical and technical implementation of the retroconversion of the catalogues.
It is responsible to a Steering Committee representing the three participating organisations: the British Library (BL), the Historical Manuscript Commission (HMC) and the PRO.
Other members of the Committee represent the A2A participants and include the NCA, the Society of Archivists (SOA) and the Association of Chief Archivists in Local Government.
[3].
The whole project has been broken down into regional or subject based project consortia, all of which have an identity of their own.
For instance the “Web of Science History” project intends to provide access to the archives of scientific organisations and societies anywhere in England whereas the “From Landlord to Labourer: Family and Estate Archives” project focuses on the archival catalogues of 15 repositories in the South East of England.
Each consortium selects the catalogues that will appear on the A2A database.
There are thirteen initial projects plus two others undertaken by the Central Team at the PRO.
Once the initial goal of 400,000 pages of digitised catalogue is achieved more catalogues will be included, giving a chance to minor repositories that could not have afforded it on their own to publicise their valuable collections.
Funding The A2A infrastructure is funded for a period of 2 years by the “Invest to Save Budget” government scheme [4] for which the PRO bid and obtained £697,000 from April 2000 to March 2002.
This was used for the creation and maintenance of the central team, software and servers.
The A2A main partners (BL, PRO and HMC) also participated financially, which brought the total available fund to £830,000.
This sum is available to A2A participants who then apply for matching fund to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
[5] More funding has been secured for the continuation of the project after March 2002.
Principles of the A2A Project and Criteria for the Selection of Catalogues The A2A team has identified 6 main criteria for the retroconversion of catalogues based on the recommendations of the “British Archives: The Way Forward” report.
These are: · Public access to heritage: the catalogues selected should have the potential to be used by a wide range of people and contribute to cultural enrichment.
· Education: the archives selected should be of use to schools, academic researchers and life long learners.
· Social inclusion: the catalogue should document the geographical, cultural, ethnic or religious development of local communities.
· Regionalism: by breaking up the A2A project into mainly regional consortium, the central team has encouraged regional initiatives and left the task of selecting, marking up and editing the catalogues in the hands of those concerned with material of regional importance.
· Knowledge economy: the A2A project is a direct contribution to the development of the Information Society of use to a wide public from school pupils to professionals.
· Common standards: the A2A is committed to the respect of archival standards central to efficient data exchanges and information retrieval.
[6] Standards: The Basis for a Consistent and Efficient Database Taking advantage of newly emerged archival standards the central team spelled out the specific standards that would ensure the creation of a consistent and easily searchable database for the A2A in a paper entitled “Cataloguing Standards for A2A”.
These standards are International Standard on Archival Description (General) (ISAD (G)), International Standard for Archival Authority Records (Corporate, Personal and Family) (ISAAR (CPF)).
The central team also supports the creation and development of a Name Authority File conforming to the NCA Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names.
This task is in the hands of the HMC.
Subject names are to be created according to the UNESCO Thesaurus.
Not all existing paper catalogues held in English repositories are ISAD (G) compliant (especially old catalogues that were created before the development of the standard, i.e before 1994).
Therefore the central team decided on rules for minimum conformity by following ISAD (G) rules of description.
[7] There are also a minimum set of data elements that should be included in the description at the highest levels including reference code, title, creator(s), abstract, creation dates, extent and form, access conditions, level of description.
These sets of data are deemed essential for international data exchange by ISAD (G), the Society of Archivists and the PRO.
In the future it is hoped that the A2A will be part of a wider network that will allow cross-domain searching and as such the project had to conform to metadata standard.
Therefore all metadata collected from the catalogues are mapped to Dublin Core.
The software used to capture and search the data is Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a SGML DTD.
EAD is ISAD (G) compliant.
[8] From Start to Finish: How to Transform a Paper Catalogue into an Electronic one?
Once a regional/topical consortium has agreed on the retrocoversion of a catalogue its paper version is marked up manually to make the structure within the collection of records explicit.
8 colours are used to differentiate for instance between fond, sub-fond, series, file and item level.
The mark-up is carried out by the various regional/subject consortia staff.
The catalogues thus marked are sent to the keying contractor’s staff in Mauritius who input the catalogues data onto EAD templates.
Back at the PRO the templates are checked for possible errors and converted to SGML files and then into XML and are finally checked in TEXTML the A2A server repository system.
They are indexed according to region/dates/A2A themes/authority control index terms/full text description criteria (the reader will recall these are the criteria selected by the A2A programme).
[9] The End Result: Presentation of the A2A Website Unlike other projects like the Archive Hub or AIM25 that provide collection level description only, the A2A database offers a multi-level description of catalogues selected.
The website is equipped with a powerful search engine allowing users to search by keyword (free text), A2A themes (for example London Archives in the Wider World, Tracking Railways Archives, etc), repository location and archive category (political, religious, education, etc).
It is also possible to focus the search using subject, personal or family, corporate name index and geographic place name.
The search result can then be sorted by date or location of the archive.
There are also direct links within the catalogue to the ARCHON and the NRA websites so that users can find repositories details if they want to consult the archives physically.
[10].
Conclusion Having done my research for this article and collected information from the creators of the projects I decided to jump on the other side and tried the database as a user: it turned out to be a valuable lesson.
While I do think the A2A is a wonderful idea the project is still in its infancy and more needs to be done to improve the user interface.
In fact as you read this article The National Archive Network as a whole is being assessed by users.
The National Archive Network Users Research Group (under the umbrella of the NCA) is conducting 6 user evaluation sessions around the UK this December involving school pupils, postgraduate students, library users and members of the public.
Results of the sessions will be published in 2002.
[11] References http://nca.archives.org.uk/ONLINE02.HTM http://nca.archives.org.uk/brarchs.htm Sarah Flynn, Mathew Hillyard, Bill Stockting, “A2A: the Development of a Strand in the National Archives Network” in The Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol.22, No2, Oct. 2001, p179-180.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/isb/ http://www.pro.gov.uk/archives/a2a/Fundinginformation.htm http://www.pro.gov.uk/archives/a2a/Abouta2a.htm See ICA, ISAD (G), 2000 section I.9, p8.
ISAD (G) is unfortunately temporary unavailable on the International Council on Archives website but will certainly appear soon.
Check http://www.ica.org Op.
Cit.
Sarah Flynn, 2001, p182-183.
Ibid, p185-186.
http://www.a2a.pro.gov.uk/mainform.asp E-mail from Sarah Flynn on the Archives-NRA list, 9 November 2001 at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0111&L=archives-nra&F=&S=&P=4047 Glossary Archive Hub: ‘provides a single point of access to descriptions of archives held in UK universities and colleges.
At present these are primarily at collection-level, although where possible they are linked to complete catalogue descriptions.
The Archives Hub forms one part of the UK’s National Archives Network, alongside related networking projects.’ http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/introduction.shtml Archive in London and the M25 Area ( AIM 25): ‘is a major project to provide electronic access to collection level descriptions of the archives of over fifty higher education institutions and learned societies within the greater London area.’ http://www.aim25.ac.uk/ ARCHON: is ‘an up-to-date electronic directory of archival repositories in the UK and abroad.
ARCHON is the gateway to information on archival resources, and provides the framework for a virtual UK archival network’.
It is maintained by the Historical Manuscript Commission.
http://www.hmc.gov.uk/abouthmc/home.htm Historical Manuscript Commission (HMC)’s ‘primary purpose is to provide information about the existence, location and nature of manuscript and records for the study of British history.’ http://www.hmc.gov.uk/abouthmc/home.htm International Standard for Archival Authority Records (Corporate, Personal and Family) (ISAAR (CPF)), Ottawa, 1996: ‘gives general rules for the establishment of archival authority records that describe corporate bodies, persons and families named as creators in finding aids.’ http://www.pro.gov.uk/archives/a2a/cataloguingstandards.htm International Standard on Archival Description (ISAD (G),Ottawa, 1994: ‘ provides principles of multilevel description, definitions and rules for the application of elements of description and a proposed minimum set of data elements for international data exchange.’ http://www.pro.gov.uk/archives/a2a/cataloguingstandards.htm National Council on Archives (NCA)’s remit is: ‘to bring together the major bodies and organisations concerned with the care, custody and use of archives and to provide a forum for the regular exchange of views between them.’ http://nca.archives.org.uk/ONLINE01.HTM#about National Council on Archives Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place andCorporate Names, NCA Rules, London, 1997: ‘give precise rules for the structure content of authority records for personal, place and corporate names when used as access points in archival description, thus ensuring consistency and facilitating data exchange.’ http://www.pro.gov.uk/archives/a2a/cataloguingstandards.htm National Register on Archives (NRA): is an indexes to ‘the papers of c.150,000 corporate bodies, persons and families relating to British history with a further 100,000 connected records.
These are held in a network of national and local record offices, university libraries and specialist repositories in the UK and abroad.
The NRA gives details on availability and access if the records are held privately.’ http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/Nra2.htm Scottish Archive Network (SCAN): is ‘an electronic network and search room linking the catalogue of nearly 50 Scottish archives.
Also provides a Knowledge Base of Frequently Asked Questions on Scottish History, exhibition, publications, and index of wills from 1500 to 1875 with digital images links.’ http://www.scan.org.uk/aboutus/aboutus.htm Author Details   Caroline Thibeaud Assistant Archivist National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists University of Bath E-mail: liscft@bath.ac.uk   Article Title: “Access to Archives: England’s Contribution to the National Archive Network” Author: Caroline Thibeaud Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/archives/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BIOME Buzz data software framework database metadata standardisation identifier repositories cataloguing interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paula Manning reports on recent developments within BIOME, the health and life sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network.
The new BIOME Internet site will go live this summer and we are looking forward to seeing the months of background work become an operational service.
Since Lisa Gray, the BIOME Team Manager reported the outline for the Service in the December issue of Ariadne, we have been busy building content in our databases as well as designing a new website, developing new catalogue software and establishing links with other health & life sciences Internet services.
This issue of BIOME news reports on 2 inter-related developments, which BIOME has been participating in.
Both aim to increase access to quality information via the Internet through international collaborations.
Global Forest Information Service The International Union of Forestry Research Organisations (IUFRO) established the Task Force on Global Forest Information Service (GFIS) in 1998.
The mission of GFIS is to enhance access to and provision of quality forest-related information, especially that available through electronic media [1].
The basic architecture of the planned GFIS Service will be a central website, linked to a network of nodes.
A prototype of the central website will be demonstrated at the IUFRO world Congress to be held in Kuala Lumpur in August.
The goal of the Service is to lead users to the relevant data repositories rather than create large data warehouses and so GFIS will be a metadata service using Dublin Core as the standard data description protocol.
The first phase of BIOME’s alliance with the GFIS Task Force is now in the final stages of negotiation.
It is planned that the co-ordinators of the Virtual Library for Forestry http://www.metla.fi/info/vlib/foresty/ based at Metla, the Finnish Forestry Research Institute, who are members of the Task Force, will directly input resources into the AgriFor gateway within BIOME.
If this proves to be a successful model, it is hoped that AgriFor will then formally become a ‘GFIS Affiliated node’ within the Global Forest Information Service.
Investigations to develop an international Agricultural Internet Gateways co-operative The Australian agriculture subject gateway AgriGate http://agrigate.edu.au/ have recently appointed an independent consultant, Jan Whitaker to investigate the issues involved in developing an international co-operative of agricultural gateways.
Services taking part in the feasibility study are US based AgNIC http://www.agnic.nal.usda.gov/, the National Agricultural Library of Canada, the Scandinavian based gateway NOVAGate http://novagate.nova-university.org/ and BIOME http://biome.ac.uk/.
The investigations will draw on the IMesh recommendations for gateway interoperability [2] as well as other interoperable gateway projects including ISAAC [3] and CIMI (Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information) [4].
This work also follows on from the post IMESH Workshop test bed development ‘GardenGate’, a sample search facility set up to cross-search BIOME with NOVAGate.
It is anticipated that the results of the feasibility study will be reported in September with a proposal for a way forward to develop an agricultural ‘supergate’.
There are many similarities in the goals of the 2 developments and there is obviously an overlap in the subject content.
In recognition of this, the two initiatives will cross-pollinate knowledge and experience with each other for the benefit of both.
The prospect of offering cross searching beyond our own core data is very appealing.
Likewise it will be worthwhile agreeing collections policies to ensure good subject coverage.
Reaching the goal of seamless interoperability will require some level of ‘global standardisation’.
What this level will mean to each of the gateways/nodes and how much technical and information management negotiation and perhaps compromise will be required are issues to be explored over the coming months.
Just as crucial an issue will be the identification of long term funding to maintain international networks.
However, the support given so far is an encouraging indicator for the future.
References The GFIS Task Force documents can be found at: http://iufro.boku.ac.at/iufro/taskforce/hptfgfis.htm Dempsey, L. Gardner, T. & Day, M. International information gateway collaboration.
Report of the first Imesh framework workshop at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12dempsey.html The ISAAC Network Project page is at: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/research/index.html The CIMI home page is at: http://www.cimi.org/ Author Details   Paula Manning BIOME Service Manager University of Nottingham Email: pm@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Biome News" Author: Paula Manning Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/biome/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Windows NT Explorer Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Windows NT Explorer Buzz data software java html database xml apache browser sql copyright cataloguing windows passwords cache perl personalisation e-business ftp cd-rom intranet url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brett Burridge on Internet Information Server (IIS 4.0) IIS has been around for quite some time now.
IIS 2.0 can be found on the Windows NT 4.0 Server installation CD-ROM.
This version of IIS was pretty basic, and changing advanced settings usually involved messing around with the Windows registry.
Version 3.0 was little different from 2.0, but it did see the introduction of server-side scripting through the use of the innovative Active Server Pages [1].
By contrast, version 4.0 of IIS saw a radical change to the application.
IIS 4.0 sported a completely new user interface, a host of new features, and improved reliability.
Installation and system requirements There are three versions of an Internet Information Server 4 installation, all of which are installed from the same IIS Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack CD-ROM (or website) [2]: Despite the application being called the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, a version of IIS (called Microsoft Personal Web Server) runs on Windows 95 or Windows 98.
It is a useful web server to run if your system resources are limited, and even has support for Active Server Pages.
However, Windows 95⁄98 is not recommended for hosting public facing Internet sites because: The operating system has few built in security features.
It supports a limited number of simultaneous connections.
Performance is poor.
Microsoft Personal Web Server also runs on Windows NT 4 Workstation, but it is a more sophisticated application compared to the Windows 95⁄98 version.
The main advantages over the Windows 95⁄98 version are: Management is possible through the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
There are many more features, particularly in the areas of security and access control.
The web server runs as a service, so nobody needs to be logged into the machine in order for the web services to be accessed.
Like the Windows 95⁄98 version, the Windows NT 4 Workstation version also supports a limited number of simultaneous network connections.
The full version of IIS requires installation on Windows NT Server.
This version supports an unlimited number of simultaneous network connections.
There are also a number of additional services and applications that can be installed (such as Index Server and Site Server Express).
So although both Windows NT 4 Workstation and Windows 95⁄98 can be used to host a website, it is recommended that IIS be installed on Windows NT Server.
Hosting on the other operating systems is, however, useful for development purposes.
Figure 1: The Internet Information Server/Personal Web Server installer is easy to use Whilst Internet Information Server will work on just about any recent Pentium PC, for a reliable system it is recommended to purchase a dedicated machine.
A system such as the popular Dell PowerEdge series [3] is recommended.
A PowerEdge 2300 with twin Pentium III 500MHz processors, 512Mb RAM and 18 Gb of disk space currently costs less than £4000.
It is also essential not to overload the server with applications that don’t co-exist together very well.
In particular, it is better to install IIS on a standalone server (i.e.
not a Primary or Backup Domain Controller), and not on a machine already hosting resource intensive applications such as Exchange Server or SQL Server.
The order of software installation is also important.
A useful list of which applications to install if IIS is to be installed on the same machine as Site Server 3.0 and/or SQL Server is available [4].
As a general guide, the following installation order will work well: Windows NT 4 Server.
Windows NT 4 Service Pack 3 (essential).
Internet Explorer 4 (essential).
Windows NT 4 Option Pack (excluding FrontPage Server Extensions).
Windows NT 4 Service Pack 4 (recommended).
Internet Explorer 5 (if required; useful for server-side XML support and the latest VBScript and JScript scripting engines).
The most recent version of the FrontPage Server Extensions.
The most recent version of the Data Access Components (if the server is going to be extensively used for database connectivity).
For optimum security the machine should have its disks formatted with the NTFS file system.
Managing the server There are three methods of managing IIS.
The first is to use the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
The MMC is a container for “Snap-ins”, which allow the management of specific services.
Most of Windows 2000 will be managed through the use of the MMC with specific Snap-ins.
Extensions to IIS (such as Microsoft Site Server) also use “Snap-ins”.
Provided you have the appropriate Snap-in, services can be administered from remote machines on the network.
The MMC is fairly straightforward to use, and there is context-sensitive help available for most functions.
An example screen from the MMC is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Administering Internet Information Server (IIS) through the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) A second method of administering IIS is through a web browser.
Obviously care must be taken to ensure that the administrative site is adequately protected from unauthorised accesses.
There are a few things that cannot be done through the web administration interface, such as stopping and restarting the web server.
The final method of administering IIS is through a scripting language such as the Windows Scripting Host.
IIS comes with several example scripts.
These examples will be of use should some of the functions of IIS be automated, such as the automatic creation of a large number of new websites or periodically restarting the IIS services.
As you would expect, IIS is fully integrated with Windows NT, so the performance of the web services can be monitored using the Windows NT Performance monitor, the Event Log can be used to view important messages, and so on.
Figure 3: Standard Windows NT tools can be used to measure server performance Features of the server IIS is a major application it weighs in at over 70Mb for a full install.
A few of the main features will be described below.
FrontPage Server Extensions If any of your users are regular users of Microsoft FrontPage then you will no doubt receive many requests for installing the FrontPage Server Extensions on your web server.
These basically serve two main purposes: They allow FrontPage users to publish to the web server via HTTP.
All contact with the web server is done through the FrontPage Explorer, cutting out the need for complicated FTP uploading or cryptic Unix commands.
The extensions contain a number of components that act as server-side CGI scripts, making it easy for users to add page counters, forms and other interactive resources to their website.
Because of a number of security issues, many administrators are uncomfortable with the thought of installing these Server Extensions on Unix based systems.
However, it is generally accepted that the Server Extensions are more secure if used on Windows NT systems.
If installed and used correctly, they are no more insecure than traditional FTP access to servers, since the biggest security risk is usually the loss of users’ passwords.
IIS is supplied with the FrontPage Server Extensions, but it is highly recommended that the latest versions are installed from the Microsoft FrontPage website [5].
The FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions are also now available, and work well with IIS 4.
Active Server Pages & component development IIS supports traditional Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts that can be written in any language supported by the web server in question.
Perl for Windows NT is developing rapidly, and most Unix Perl scripts can be ported to Windows NT without too much difficulty.
IIS supports several methods for server-side interactivity.
Active Server Pages are an excellent facility for the rapid creation of server-side scripts, and were described in Issue 20 of Ariadne [1].
IIS provides support for the creation of ASP documents written in VBScript or JScript.
A free third party solution [6] allows ASP documents to be written in PerlScript, a popular relative of the Perl language.
ASP can also be extended through the creation of COM (Component Object Model) objects written in languages such as Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Java [14].
Alternatively, there are plenty of pre-compiled objects that can be used.
IIS is supplied with a few COM objects that can be used for database access, content rotation, finding client browser capabilities etc.
Alternatively, a wide variety of 3rd party components are available [13], many of which have been released as freeware.
IIS also supports both Internet Database Connector (IDC) applications, and Internet Information Server Application Interface (ISAPI) applications.
ISAPI can be used to extend the functionality of the web server, and ISAPI applications typically outperform their CGI counterparts.
For example, the Internet Information Server resource kit contains ISAPI filters for adding Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) support and for caching the output of selected ASP files.
Index Server As your website grows, it soon becomes essential to establish some method of rapidly finding the document you are looking for.
Index Server 2.0 is supplied with IIS (but will only run on Windows NT 4 Server).
It trawls the Windows NT file system and catalogues a variety of file types.
Its main benefits are: Performance.
Users are often critical of the slowness of Microsoft’s desktop applications.
Happily the same cannot be said for the server applications Index Server can be incredibly fast at providing search results.
Ease of administration.
Once installed, Index Server pretty much looks after itself.
Ease of customisation.
There are plenty of sample search pages supplied with IIS, and the accompanying documentation is excellent.
Search pages written using ASP can be fully customised to incorporate the appearance of your website.
The downside to Index Server is that it isn’t really suited for cataloguing content from several web servers, so if you have multiple web servers and want to provide a unified search facility it is worth considering a product such as Microsoft Site Server 3.0 [7].
Data Access Components One of the attractions of IIS is the ease in which databases can be connected to web pages.
This functionality is provided by the Data Access components.
IIS is supplied with the ability to connect to common databases such as Access, Oracle, SQL Server and ODBC compliant databases.
There are several ways of accessing such databases from the web; the use of custom written front-ends using Active Server Pages is the most widely used method.
Microsoft has grand plans for unifying its approach to data management the Microsoft Universal Data Access website has further details [15].
Site Server Express Site Server Express can be used to generate statistics from your website.
However, it is fairly slow and not really up to the task for creating reports from busy sites.
An alternative is to use the ever popular Analog [8], which is able to create reports from IIS log files.
Transaction Server Transaction Server offers the ability to create sophisticated distributed applications.
It can be used from Active Server Pages to control transactions, where the outcome of that transaction is critical.
For example, if your institution created a web based facility for users to change their passwords, it would be critically important for the user to know that the password changing routine had either succeeded or failed.
SMTP and NNTP support When installed on Windows NT Server, IIS also includes SMTP and NNTP services.
The SMTP service is particularly useful in that it can be used to send email from Active Server Pages.
The NNTP service could be used for hosting discussion sites and customer support areas.
Development of web applications Out of the box, IIS has support for Active Server Pages [1], which is rapidly becoming the development environment of choice for sophisticated (e-business) web applications.
The included Data Access Components included with IIS make it possible to directly link databases to Active Server Pages.
Transaction server and IIS’s load balancing support are invaluable in the development of robust distributed web applications.
There are also an increasing number of additional applications that can be incorporated into IIS in order to extend the web server into areas such as E-Commerce and data warehousing.
One particularly interesting application is Microsoft’s Site Server 3.0.
This adds additional features to IIS, such as site searching facilities, personalisation & membership and content control.
The Site Server 3.0 search facility was described in Issue 19 of Ariadne [7].
Intranet hosting IIS is particularly popular for hosting Intranets.
The attraction for hosting Intranets with IIS is the tight integration with the other services provided by Windows NT Server.
In particular, there is full integration with the Windows NT security model, making it straightforward to set up restricted access areas of the site.
Setting up IIS to use Secure Sockets Layer 3.0 (SSL) encryption is also fairly straightforward.
Resources IIS is supplied with a large amount of high quality documentation in HTML format (see Figure 4).
This documentation describes all the features and components of the server, including extensive documentation for ASP (using both VBScript and JScript) together with plenty of background information on subjects such as the use of Intranets and web server security.
A wide range of printed books covering the installation and management of IIS are available from most book stores.
There are also some very good resources for IIS on the web, although Active Server Page technology tends to generate the most interest.
15seconds [9] is a good place to start, as is ASPWatch [10].
Figure 4: The documentation supplied with IIS is plentiful and generally of excellent quality For anyone who wants in depth knowledge of IIS, studying for the Implementing and Supporting Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 exam [11] is worthwhile.
Anyone passing this exam achieves Microsoft Certified Professional status.
The exam can also be used to earn credit towards the highly sought after Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer + Internet and Microsoft Certified Professional + Internet certifications.
Summary & Conclusions Internet Information Server is Microsoft’s attempt to establish Windows NT Server as a viable alternative to Unix in the lucrative web server hosting market.
IIS 4.0 is a quality application it is reliable, easy to use, and yet is packed full of useful and advanced features.
However, despite the rapid growth in the number of web servers on the Internet, IIS has not yet made significant inroads into the huge market share of Apache (in August 1999, Apache had a 55% market share compared to 22% for Microsoft servers [12]).
It will be interesting to see if the release of IIS 5 (an essential part of Windows 2000) will increase the market share of IIS.
References Active Server Pages, Ariadne issue 20 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/nt/ Windows NT Server: Web Services, Microsoft http://www.eu.microsoft.com/ntserver/web/default.asp Dell PowerEdge Servers, Dell http://www.euro.dell.com/countries/uk/enu/gen/products/poweredge/default_pedge.htm How to Install Site Server 3.0 with All Updates, Microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/support/siteserver/install_ss3.asp Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft http://www.eu.microsoft.com/frontpage/ ActivePerl, available from the ActiveState Tool Corp. website http://www.activestate.com/ Windows NT Explorer: The Microsoft Site Server Search Facility, Ariadne issue 19 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/nt/ Analog http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/ 15seconds http://www.15seconds.com/ ASPWatch http://www.aspwatch.com/ 70-087: Implementing and Supporting Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0, Microsoft certification exam preparation guide http://www.eu.microsoft.com/Mcp/exam/stat/SP70-087.htm Web server survey, Netcraft http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ Component section of 15seconds http://www.15seconds.com/component/default.htm Microsoft COM Technologies, Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/com/ Microsoft Universal Data Access, Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/data/ Author Details Brett Burridge Computing Service University of Essex Colchester Essex, CO4 3SQ Email: brettb@essex.ac.uk Web site: http://www.essex.ac.uk/   Article Title: ‘Internet Information Server’ Author: Brett Burridge Publication Date: 20-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/nt-explorer/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Future Is Hybrid: London Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Future Is Hybrid: London Buzz data framework portal usability accessibility identifier copyright preservation url research Citation BibTex RIS Kate Robinson reports on 'The Future is Hybrid' project day at the British Library in London.
This workshop had a very full programme and made an early start.
The day began with an enthusiastic welcome to the British Library by Lynne Brindley, who spoke about whether in hindsight the British Library could have been re-designed as a building, or as a digital resource.
She went on to describe the value of the physical presence of a building and its role as a showcase for the importance of libraries.
The new British Library has a symbolic role, giving libraries a dominant profile.
In addition, the British Library should be a launch pad for all things digital, and it is undertaking a major programme of digital activity.
The British Library is also a ‘gateway library’, looking to both the documentary sources of the past and the electronic sources of the future.
It has significant new skills to acquire: new ways of team working, a key role for copyright and Intellectual Property Rights, and also a role as a digital preservation co-ordinator.
New partnerships are being developed, both in the public and private sectors, and with colleagues in technical areas.
She ended by suggesting that Librarians should not be too proud to copy the best ideas.
We should keep our minds bedded in the practical, but be aware of and open to new developments.
Finally, we should stop using the term ‘Hybrid Library’, and instead recognise that this is now ‘the Library’.
Lynne’s enthusiasm for the British Library and her view of its future was inspiring.
This was complemented by the next session which narrowed the focus of the workshop, looking specifically at the eLib 3 Programme and the Hybrid Library.
Jean Stewart began by giving a clear overview of the projects and reflecting on the progress made so far.
She looked back to when the work of eLib 3 began, and commented on how far the projects have come.
It was interesting to consider that what was then a research project is now integrated into libraries and incorporated into working life.
The impact of the project on some service areas will be massive, especially in areas such as inter-lending with hard-copy verses electronic full-text delivery.
Library services are beginning to re-position as they move more toward centre stage and become more relevant to business interests, becoming involved with corporate data, intranets etc.
Changes are also occurring in the skills base of librarians and of library users as we move further into the electronic environment.
Jean stressed the need for the eLib 3 projects to be robust and generic enough to provide templates for the future, but flexible enough to accommodate our changing business processes and new learning agendas.
The following sessions of the morning gave a more in-depth look at the eLib 3 projects themselves: MALIBU, BUILDER, HeadLine, Agora, and HyLiFe.
Valeda Dent’s message of “give ‘em what they want” reminded us that library provision begins and ends with the end user and the hybrid library must be managed for the end-users’ benefit.
The MALIBU project has a strong user focus, and concentrates on the integration of resources, with particular reference to the humanities.
As information provision is evolving in terms of IT we need to be proactive in managing services and processes.
There is a shift in the culture of the way in which libraries do things, and we need to ensure that libraries can provide the support users need.
Ian Upton took us through a very practical session on BUILDER, looking at the nuts and bolts of the project and how its aim to make libraries more seamless with the use of similar interfaces has been achieved.
BUILDER has developed very focussed products in response to users’ needs, such as electronic short-loan, exam papers, and online inductions.
The emphasis has been on providing the material quickly, soliciting comments and feedback from users, and responding to these by adapting the products as appropriate.
The presentation was very accessible, practical and straightforward.
John Paschoud then talked us through the HeadLine project.
His focus was very much on the main end product, that of allowing users to develop their own personal library.
With HeadLine, users can build collections and set up group information environments and chat rooms for shared collaborative work.
They can also discover resources and collect them in a personalised portal, a ‘personal information environment’, matching appropriate resources to the user.
Greg Newton-Ingham described the Agora project and also explored what eLib has achieved.
He described it as a safe, co-operative test bed, moving from the research to the product, dealing with the needs of librarians in terms of service delivery and helping to move the community forward.
Hybrid libraries are dealing with the same issues, and developing different solutions.
The key lessons we are learning are that these developments are reliant on supplier relationships, staff development, user identification/evaluation, and user expectation management.
We need to provide a single interface to lots of different resources (integrating web resources, local collections, different media etc.
), supporting the breadth of resources by bringing them all together.
The HyLiFe project managers, Peter Wynne and Catherine Edwards, were sure that the hybrid library changes the relationship that the library has with its parent institution, and their presentation gave us a framework for implementing such change.
They included securing the support of senior managers; collaborative working with academics, technical support and others; considering scalability right from the start; “vigorous” and ongoing promotion; and a focus on content rather than design.
They also highlighted the importance of training and support for staff and users.
Following a break for lunch, we had a choice of sessions in the afternoon where we could look in more depth at one of the projects.
It was a difficult choice but a very useful option, giving us more of an opportunity to ask questions and to learn about a specific area.
After tea, the majority of us held on for an interesting presentation from Stephen Pinfield looking at the hybrid library and the DNER.
Stephen gave a personal view of some of the lessons emerging from eLib 3, and focused on the DNER and its strategy of joining up resources and structures, and adding a strategic direction.
In the hybrid library context it is possible to see the DNER as a kind of national hybrid library.
Although it does not replace institutional activity, it should help institutions turn eLib projects into deliverables.
However, it needs to be marketed to seniors in institutions so they can see its applications.
Libraries within HE need to re-position themselves, using technologies and ideas in a broader context than in traditional libraries, as part of a managed learning environment.
Stephen ended with the message that it is important to capitalise on all the hybrid library work at this stage so we do not loose its value.
Each of the presentations has its own particular flavour, and it was especially interesting to hear the different approaches of each project to the move towards a hybrid environment.
The focus in all cases was on accessibility and usability, with the end user as the focus.
It was a lot to take in on one day, but an excellent opportunity to draw together the work of the eLib 3 projects, in an understandable and meaningful way.
Author Details   Kate Robinson Head of Reader Services, University of Bath Library & Learning Centre Article Title: "The Future is Hybrid: Libraries in the 21st Century: a one day workshop " Author: Kate Robinson Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/kate-robinson/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The DISinHE Centre Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The DISinHE Centre Buzz mobile software infrastructure accessibility copyright video url standards Citation BibTex RIS Professor Alan Newell asks: How can technology assist with the obligations of HE to support staff and students with disabilities?
Over four percent of students in Higher Education have registered as having one or more disabilities, but the actual number of students may be closer to ten percent.
Communications and Information Technology (C & IT) has an important part to play in supporting both staff and students with disabilities, and staff in Institutions clearly need to be aware of their moral and legal obligations, and know how to set up processes and practices to provide such support effectively and efficiently.
One important side-effect of this approach is that, learning support methods and materials which are accessible to students with disabilities, are likely to be significantly better for all students.
{The most ubiquitous general example of this effect is the cassette tape recorder, which was originally invented by the company marketing talking books for blind people.}
Thus providing accessible systems and materials is a situation where everyone can win.
The UK Disability Discrimination Act makes it illegal for Institutions to discriminate against disabled staff and external "customers" of its services, and requires "reasonable" provision for their support.
In its present form, this Act does not include students, but Institutions are required to publish a "Disability Statement" describing their support procedures.
It is likely that the exclusion of students from the Act will be removed, and Human Rights legislation gives everyone the right to benefit fully from education.
An Institution may thus decide to suffer the displeasure of the Funding Council (which has a responsibility to "take account to the needs of students with disabilities when exercising their function") by, for example, not insisting that lecture notes should be in an accessible form, but they could be in breech of the Human Rights legislation.
The Dearing Report, the Funding Councils' Widening Access and Equal Opportunities initiatives, and teaching quality assessments also have a focus on the needs of students with disabilities, which Institutions ignore at their peril.
Other countries, particularly, the USA, have more prescriptive legislation, and the possibility of disabled students sueing Institutions is greater, but UK is rapidly moving in this direction.
There is a whole raft of support which Institutions are encouraged to provide for students with disabilities, and the Higher Education Funding Council of England has recently published a document which lays down general guidelines for "baseline provision".
Increasingly, however, Institutions are using C & IT as part of their support for students, and it is important that they consider the accessibility of this technology, and how it can help them to provide a proper level of support for students with disabilities.
C & IT has great potential to provide an effective and efficient way of accessing learning materials for people who are disabled.
With some forethought by the designers, for example, Web pages can be designed so that they can be easily outputted in synthetic speech by blind people using Screen Reading technology, and keyboard commands provided for those who cannot use a mouse.
With a little care, electronic text can be designed so that it is easily convertible to Braille, and the fonts, colours and layout modifiable so that people with Dyslexia can read it more easily.
Institutional acceptance of word processed essays and examination scripts means that those who can only use a keyboard, or even those who have to use special input devices, can be fully integrated into a course of study.
If such provision is properly organised at a strategic level, appropriate support can be available whilst minimising the need for special provision for individuals.
It may also be possible to use C & IT based video links to provide temporary alternatives to cope with physical access problems.
The downside, however, is that some C & IT can be completely impossible to access by these same groups of people, and there is a danger that certain recent technological advances will make this situation worse.
Access to computer based information by blind people had become relatively simple, until graphical user interfaces were introduced.
Initially this system had no accessibility features, and blind people were suddenly unable to use even standard packages.
Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and other manufacturers now provide accessibility features, but other more specialised software suppliers often do not.
Some educational software and web pages are triumphs of form over content, and not only need the most up-to-date multi-media equipment and browsing software to operate them, but also are often completely inaccessible to people with disabilities.
The irony of the situation is that, if accessibility is considered at the beginning of the design process, accessibility features do not add substantially to the cost of a product (e.g.
the provision of a text description of a picture or diagram) and indeed can often make the design better (e.g.
the designer is forced to ask "what is the pedagogical reason for this picture).
If such considerations are not included at the design stage, however, it may be very difficult, or even impossible, to add them at a later stage.
Thus, if for no other reason than to comply with the law, Institutions may have to completely re-write their web pages and their computer based learning packages, or provide an alternative learning methodology for those students who cannot use them.
This could be an expensive venture!
Talking into account the needs of people with disabilities will not only fulfil legal and moral obligations, but also, provide many possibilities for improving educational provision for all students.
For example, if lecture support material is accessible to students with disabilities, it will be easily accessible to all students.
All students would benefit from a requirement that timetable changes should posted on the Web in accessible format, and Computer Based Learning material which was properly designed for students with disabilities is more likely to be of higher quality and thus benefit all students.
Accessible web pages are also much likely to readable by those with non standard equipment, a slow connection to the internet, or via mobile phone technology, than more "picturesque" pages.
Many IT Services Departments provide good one-to-one support, but usually as an add-on extra.
It would be much more effective if Institutions fully considered the needs of staff and students with disabilities within their C & IT strategies, and as part of the Information Strategies which they are developing.
Total support for people with every type of disabilities can seem an impossible task, but the Act does have a "reasonableness" clause, and it is very important to realise that significantly better access can be provided relatively easily, especially if this is done early and has a strategic dimension.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have funded the Disability and Information Systems in Higher Education (DISinHE) project to provide Institutions with support in this area.
The project is based in the Applied Computing Department at Dundee University, which, for many years, has had an international reputation for developing C & IT systems for people with disabilities.
The project is a clearing house for information about such support: DISinHE is also developing guidelines for Institutions to ensure that this support is properly embedded in the procedures and practices of institutions, and in particular, within the generic C & IT support which is offered to staff and students.
The DISinHE project is building up an extensive web site (see <URL:http://www.disinhe.ac.uk/>) to assist Institutions in this important task.
The remit of the project is not to support individual students, but to help Institutions to provide generic technical support, and appropriate technical infrastructure so there is less need for personalised support for individual students.
Deputy Principals, Pro-Vice Chancellors and senior managers in the C & IT support services are encouraged to visit the site as part of their task of ensuring that the provision for people with disabilities is an integral part of the normal infrastructure of their Institution.
Author Details Alan Newell DISinHE Centre Department of Applied Computing University of Dundee Dundee,DD1 4HN Scotland, UK Email: alan@disinhe.ac.uk Web site: http://www.disinhe.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: Size of Institutional Top Level Pages Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: Size of Institutional Top Level Pages Buzz data javascript html stylesheet archives css copyright windows multimedia gif flash swf dhtml url Citation BibTex RIS Web Watch: Brian Kelly looks at the size of institutional top level pages.
Is your University home page big, bold and brassy?
Is it colourful and interactive, making use of new technologies in order to stand out from the crowd?
Or is it mean and lean, with a simple design providing rapid download times and universal access?
This survey of the size of the entry points for UK University and College entry points seeks an answer to these questions.
The Methodology This report is based on use of two Web-based tools: NetMechanic and Bobby.
Two tools were used in order to see if there were any differences between the way the tools worked, the results they gave, etc.
The output from the NetMechanic service is illustrated below.
Figure 1: Output From NetMechanic It should be noted that NetMechanic gives the overall file size, together with the sizes of objects it finds, which includes HTML, images, background images, style sheet and JavaScript files, etc.
The output from the Bobby service is illustrated below.
Figure 2: Output From Bobby It should be noted that Bobby also gives the overall file size, together with the sizes of HTML and images objects it finds.
However the current version of Bobby does not appear to provide information on the size of other objects, such as stylesheet files, external JavaScript files, etc.
It should be noted from Figures 1 and 2 that NetMechanic indicates that the University College Chichester Home Page contains only one image and is 15,839 b whereas Bobby analyses several images and gives a total size of 130.43 Kb.
This discrepancy is due to the sites robots.txt file: NetMechanic obeys the directives in this file and will not analyse files in the site's /images directory.
The Survey On 15th-31st May 2001 the NetMechanic and Booby tools were used to obtain information on the size of the institutional entry points for UK Higher Educational Institutions, based on a list taken initially from HESA [1].
In cases of significantly small sizes, the results were manually checked in order to see if the tools were reporting on the page which end users will see.
It was noted that in a significant number of cases the tools were not reporting on the page as seen by the end user: instead the tools give figures for pages containing (a) redirect information (b) no-frames alternatives or (c) "splash screens".
In addition it was found that if a site's robots.txt file prohibited robots from accessing directories containing image resources used on the entry point, then the sizes of these image files was not included in the overall total.
In a number of cases it was also noted that there were significant discrepancies between the results reported by NetMechanic and Bobby.
In these cases the discrepancies were flagged and, in some cases, further analysis was carried out.
For example, it was found that if a site's robots.txt file prohibited robots from accessing directories containing image resources used on the entry point, then the sizes of these image files was not included in the overall total.
Findings A summary of the findings is given below.
Largest Entry Points The largest entry points is given in Table 1.
This table gives details on entry points larger than 100 Kb.
It should be noted that if the file sizes reported by NetMechanic and Bobby differ, the largest value is used to determine whether the Web site should be included in the table.
Institution Size (NetMechanic) Size (Bobby) Comments 1 Dartington 396,225 b Try it 396.22 Kb Try it Contains large animated GIF and graphical menu items 2 Napier 256,157 b Try it 82.65 Kb Try it Contains large Javascript menu (173,778 b).
Reported by NetMechanic but not Bobby.
3 Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College 180,587 b Try it Cannot connect Try it This site spawns new windows, uses frames, has a redirect and uses Javascript, which causes problems for Bobby 4 Stirling 147,642 b Try it 145.76 Kb Try it Has large image (88,171 b) 5 Surrey Institute of Art and Design 146,975 b Try it 146.53 Kb Try it Has several medium sized images (6,000-14,000 b) 6 Nottingham 136,253 b Try it 134.93 Kb Try it   7 Chichester, University College 15,839 b Try it 130.43 Kb Try it Discrepancy 8 Cardiff, University of Wales Institute 124,914 b Try it 122.52 Kb Try it Has several medium sized images (1,00-25,000 b) 9 Bath Spa (10,520 b) Try it 123,498 b Try it (6.06 Kb) Try it 123.38 Kb Try it Has several medium sized images and a "splash screen".
The second set of results give the size of the second page.
Note that the combined size of the splash screens is not included.
10 School of Pharmacy, The 123,635 b Try it 85.96 Kb Try it Contains a single large image (84,554 b) and a large background image (37,680 b) 11 Central Lancashire, The University of 117,642 b Try it 101.45 Kb Try it Contains a large background image and several medium sized images.
12 Staffordshire 112,364 b Try it 101.81 Kb Try it Contains a large animated image and several medium sized images.
13 Durham 110,248 b Try it 109.37 Kb Try it   14 Thames Valley University (TVU) 105,628 b Try it 105.63 Kb Try it   Table 1: Largest Entry Points The Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College entry point is shown below.
This can be regarded as an example of a big, bold entry point, which contains a secondary window, frames and a dynamic Javascript menu.
Figure 3: Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College Home Page It should be noted that, with the exception of Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College and Napier University, the remainder of the large entry points appear to be due to the images.
The size of Buckinghamshire Chilterns entry point appears to be due to its complexity, and Napier due to the Javascript program which provides the dynamic menu (shown below).
Figure 4: Napier University Home Page A rolling demonstration of the pages listed in the above table is available which provides a simple means for comparing these entry points [2].
Smallest Entry Points A list of the smallest entry points is given in Table 2.
It should be noted that if the file sizes reported by NetMechanic and Bobby differ, the largest value is used to determine whether the Web site should be included in the table.
However the values are checked to see if they give the size of the entry point which would be seen by an end user.
If the value for the file size is based on a redirect message, a no-frames page, etc.
the Web site is not included in the table.
Institution Size (NetMechanic) Size (Bobby) Comments 1 Norwich School of Art and Design 7,046 b Try it 7.07 Kb Try it   2 University of Hull Scarborough Campus 11,148 b Try it 11.15 Kb Try it Interim page until merge is complete 3 Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama 13,053 b Try it 12.92 Kb Try it   4 Glasgow School of Art 13,345 b Try it 13.34 Kb Try it NetMechanic and Bobby analysed the splash screen 5 Royal Academy of Music 2,806 b Try it 14.26 Kb Try it   6 King Alfred's College, Winchester 15,463 b Try it (0.80 Kb) Try it Bobby processes non-frames version 7 Welsh College of Music and Drama 17,426 b Try it 17.54 Kb Try it   8 St Mary's College 18,360 b Try it 17.95 Kb Try it   9 Newcastle 19,754 b Try it 19.56 Kb Try it   Table 2: Smallest Entry Points A rolling demonstration of the pages listed in the above table is available which provides a simple means for comparing these entry points [3].
Conclusions This is believed to be the first survey of the size of UK University and Colleges entry points since the initial WebWatch surveys which were carried out in 1997 (see Ariadne issue 12 [4]) and 1998 (see [5] and [6]).
A histogram of the size of entry points in 1998, taken from the Third Crawl of UK Academic Entry Points report [6] is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Profile Of Size Of Entry Points in 1998 It should be noted that the data represented in Figure 4 in based on the size of the HTML page and inline images other linked files, such as style sheets, JavaScript, etc.
were not included (and were probably not widely deployed at that time).
The range of sizes shown in Figure 4 spans from around 5Kb (Royal College of Music [7]) to around 200 Kb (Kent Institute of Art and Design [8]).
The second large outlier (192 Kb) was for the Scottish College of Textiles an institution which has now merged with Heriot-Watt University.
Detailed comparisons with previous surveys are difficult to make due to the inconsistencies of the tools and the lack of a rigourous definition of what is meant by the size of a page.
However it is hoped that the survey has provided a useful overall picture of the UK HE community.
It is also hoped that this survey will stimulate a discussion on the ideal size for an institution's entry point.
Should be be now looking to exploit the functionality which is now provided multimedia objects to provide an attractive and memorable interface and provide more functional and, perhaps, usable dynamic interfaces which JavaScript can provide.
Or should priority be given to small sizes and speedy download times?
Alternatively, is there a compromise, and what should this compromise be?
Future Work It is intended to carry out further surveys of the size of entry points within the UK HE (and, if resources permit it, FE communities).
Future work will attempt to provide a more rigourous, relevant, measurable and reproducible measure for the size of entry points (although, of course, the growth of personalised entry points and changeable entry points containing news items, may not make this feasible).
References Higher Education Universities and Colleges, HESA http://www.hesa.ac.uk/links/he_inst.htm Largest UK HE Entry Points, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/web-watch/rolling-demo-large/ Smallest UK HE Entry Points, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/web-watch/rolling-demo-small/ WebWatching UK Universities and Colleges, Ariadne, issue 12 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/web-focus/ How Is My Web Community Doing?
Monitoring Trends in Web Service Provision, Journal of Documentation, Vol.
55 No.
1 January 1999, pp 82-95 Third Crawl of UK Academic Entry Points, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/reports/hei-nov1998/ Royal College of Music, http://www.rcm.ac.uk/ Kent Institute of Art and Design, http://www.kiad.ac.uk/ Appendix 1: Survey Results CAST's Bobby service and the Net mechanic service were used to analyse UK University institutional entry points.
The survey was carried out between 15th-31st May 2001.
The following table contains details of the survey.
Column 1 gives the name of the institution and a link to the institutional web server.
Column 3 gives the information provided by NetMechanic.
Column 4 gives the information provided by Bobby.
A summary of the findings is given in the following table.
Note that cases in which NetMechanic and Bobby give significant differences in the file sizes are flagged.
Table 3: Information On Size Of UK University and College Entry Points   Institution Size (using NetMechanic) Size (using Bobby) Comments 1 Aberdeen 49,731 b Try it 49.56 Kb Try it   2 Abertay 99,003 b Try it 1.63 Kb Try it Bobby analyses the no-frames page 3 Aberystwyth 63,567 b Try it 6,313 Kb Try it   4 Anglia 78,203 b Try it 60.69 Kb Try it   5 Aston 22,837 b Try it 20.14 Kb Try it   6 Bangor (482 b) Try it 43,929 b Try it (0.34) Kb Try it 43.77 Kb Try it Bobby analyses the redirected page additional details given for <http://www.bangor.ac.uk/home.html> 7 Bath Spa (10,520 b) Try it 123,498 b Try it (6.06 Kb) Try it 123.38 Kb Try it Bobby analyses the "splash screen".
8 Bath 39.580 b Try it 39.58 Kb Try it   9 Belfast, Queen's University of 45,590 b Try it 45.59 Kb Try it   10 Birkbeck 34,948 b Try it 39.72 Kb Try it   11 Birmingham 32,996 b Try it (8.15 Kb) Try it Size of images not reported by Bobby due to site's robots.txt file 12 Bishop Grosseteste College 94,830 b Try it 94.83 Kb Try it Bobby appears to have problems with the site's JavaScript 13 Bolton 79,083 b Try it 79.08 Kb Try it   14 Bournemouth 39,939 b Try it 39.94 Kb Try it   15 Bradford 39,731 b Try it Not available Try it Framed page, with full noframes option 16 Bretton Hall 44,208 b Try it 44.21 Kb Try it   17 Brighton 38,049 b Try it 37.72 Kb Try it   18 Bristol 25,215 b Try it 25.06 Kb Try it   19 Brunel 53,842 b Try it 53.84 Kb Try it   20 Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College 180,587 b Try it Cannot connect Try it This site spawns new windows, uses frames, has a redirect and uses Javascript, which causes problems for Bobby 21 Cambridge 31,364 b Try it 29.78 Kb Try it   22 Canterbury Christ Church University College 47,818 b Try it 40.67 Kb Try it   23 Cardiff 52,374 b Try it 52.19 Kb Try it   24 Cardiff, University of Wales Institute 124,914 b Try it 122.52 Kb Try it   25 Central England in Birmingham, The University of 82,869 b Try it 82.87 Kb Try it   26 Central Lancashire, The University of 117,642 b Try it 101.45 Kb Try it   27 Central School of Speech and Drama 31,265 b Try it 31.26 Kb Try it Were all images found?
28 Cheltenham and Gloucester College of HE (7,477 b) Try it 66.92 Kb Try it Uses JavaScript to load images these weren't found by NetMechanic 29 Chester College of HE 60,033 b Try it 59.88 Kb Try it NOTE CSS file include in NetMechanic analysis 30 Chichester, University College 15,839 b Try it 130.43 Kb Try it Discrepancy 31 City University 97,006 b Try it 96.05 Kb Try it   32 College of Guidance Studies 2,035 b Try it 2.04 Kb Try it Organisation has merged with another 33 Coventry 36,115 b Try it (3.05 Kb) Try it Bobby analyses "No frames" page 34 Cranfield 58,451 b Try it 52.02 Kb Try it   35 Dartington 396,225 b Try it 396.22 Kb Try it   36 De Montfort University 81,528 b Try it 78.91 Kb Try it   37 Derby 44,185 b Try it (1.09 Kb) Try it Note 1: Bobby analyses "no-frames" page.
Note 2: Web site spawns new window.
38 Dundee 12,413 b Try it Notice discrepancy.
The robots.txt file bans access to most images.
39 Durham 110,248 b Try it 109.37 Kb Try it   40 East Anglia, The University of 53,438 b Try it 53.44 Kb Try it   41 East London, The University of 29,670 b Try it 29.67 Kb Try it   42 Edge Hill 48,467 b Try it 48.34 Kb Try it   43 Edinburgh College of Art 7,675 b Try it (7.49 Kb) Try it 30.37 KB Try it Bobby checks page stating IE or Netscape needed.
44 Edinburgh 42,105 b Try it 41.88 Kb Try it   45 Essex 62,512 b Try it 62.31 Kb Try it   46 Exeter 82,731 b Try it 82.73 Kb Try it   47 Falmouth College of Arts (711 b) Try it (0.51 Kb) Try it NetMechanic and Bobby analyse results from "Loading" message from splash screen 48 University of Glamorgan 84,453 b Try it (5.68 Kb) Try it Bobby analyses no-frames page 49 Glasgow Caledonian University 17,562 b Try it 11,18 Kb Try it NetMechanic does not analyse images.
The page is an entry point to a Flash / DHTML menu page.
50 Glasgow School of Art 13,345 b Try it 13.34 Kb Try it NetMechanic and Bobby analysed the splash screen 51 Glasgow 41,186 b Try it 29.69 Kb Try it Discrepancy 52 Goldsmiths 52,473 b Try it 50.68 Kb Try it   53 Greenwich 53,198 b Try it 53.20 Kb Try it   54 Harper Adams University College 1,079 b Try it 52,157 b Try it (1.08 Kb) Try it 44.88 Kb Try it Bobby analyses the redirect page 55 Heriot-Watt 35,129 b Try it 34.71 Kb Try it   56 Hertfordshire 50,164 b Try it 50.16 Kb Try it   57 Homerton College Try it Try it Same Web site as Cambridge 58 Huddersfield 44,381 b Try it 44.38 Kb Try it   59 Hull 44,381 b Try it (0.84 Kb) Try it 50.35 Kb Try it Bobby analyses the redirect page 60 Imperial College 48,473 b Try it 47.30 Kb Try it   61 Institute of Education 66,042b Try it 63.51 Kb Try it Example of CSS and Javascript (and redirect) 62 Keele 37,001 b Try it 36.88 Kb Try it   63 Kent at Canterbury, The University of 36,892 b Try it 28.40 Kb Try it   64 Kent Institute of Art & Design 25,105 b Try it (1.86 Kb) Try it Bobby processes non-frames version 65 King Alfred's College, Winchester 15,463 b Try it (0.80 Kb) Try it Bobby processes non-frames version 66 King's College London 26,261 b Try it 26.05 Kb Try it   67 Kingston University 42,527 b Try it 42.55 Kb Try it   68 Lampeter 67,479 b Try it 66.46 Kb Try it   69 Lancaster 31,267 b Try it 31.14 Kb Try it   70 Leeds Metropolitan University 61,546 b Try it 59.56 Kb Try it   71 Leeds 70,309 b Try it 31.15 Kb Try it   72 Leicester 70,684 b Try it 46.87 Kb Try it   73 University of Lincolnshire and Humberside 40,864 b Try it 37.53 Kb Try it   74 Liverpool Hope 50,681 b Try it 48.24 Kb Try it   75 Liverpool John Moores University 47,384 b Try it 47.18 Kb Try it   76 Liverpool 50,875 b Try it 48.90 Kb Try it   77 London Business School 102,019 b Try it 28.93 Kb Try it Large discrepancy Netcraft reports on SWF file 78 London Guildhall University (18,773 b) Try it (18.77 Kb) Try it NetMechanic and Bobby analyse splash page 79 London Institute, The 22,663 b Try it 22.66 Kb Try it   80 London Institutes and activities, University of 42,740 b Try it 14.03 Kb Try it   81 London School of Economics and Political Science 68,710 b Try it 73.72 Kb Try it   82 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine 49,928 b Try it 49.81 Kb Try it   83 Loughborough 48,132 b Try it 50.37 Kb Try it   84 Luton 64,405 b Try it (0.92 Kb) Try it Bobby analyses the no-frames page 85 UMIST (29,615 b) Try it (18.02 Kb) Try it NetMechanic did not analyse images.
Bobby analyses the no-frames page.
86 MMU 59,679 b Try it 59.13 Kb Try it   87 Manchester 62,915 b Try it 62.73 Kb Try it   88 Middlesex 55,052 b Try it 48.98 Kb Try it   89 Napier 256,157 b Try it 82.65 Kb Try it Very large according to NetMechanic due to Javascript menu 90 Newcastle 19,754 b Try it 19.56 Kb Try it   91 Newman College of Higher Education 32,674 b Try it 32,67 Kb Try it   92 Newport, University College of Wales 42,951 b Try it 40.11 Kb Try it   93 North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education 63,377 b Try it 63.48 Kb Try it   94 North London, The University of 22,208 b Try it 22.21 Kb Try it   95 University of Hull Scarborough Campus 11,148 b Try it 11.15 Kb Try it   96 Northampton, University College 64,041 b Try it 63.43 Kb Try it   97 Northern College of Education 70,845 b Try it (0.94 Kb) Try it Bobby analyses the no-frames page 98 Northern School of Contemporary Dance 61,281 b Try it 52.01 Kb Try it   99 Northumbria at Newcastle, The University of (UNN) 57,690 b Try it 27.61 Kb Try it   100 Norwich School of Art and Design 7,046 b Try it 7.07 Kb Try it   101 Nottingham Trent University (NTU) 90,450 b Try it 22.00 Kb Try it   102 Nottingham 136,253 b Try it 134.93 Kb Try it   103 Open University (7,800 b) Try it 6.27 Kb Try it NetMechanic and Bobby analyse the no-frame page 104 Oxford Brookes 27,907 b Try it 29,79 Kb Try it   105 Oxford 26,836 b Try it 11.56 Kb Try it Discrepancy 106 Paisley 70,442 b Try it 64.78 Kb Try it Discrepancy 107 Plymouth 47,098 b Try it 7.74 Kb Try it Discrepancy 108 Portsmouth 60,532 b Try it 56.46 Kb Try it Discrepancy 109 Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh 35,081 b Try it 35.08 Kb Try it   110 Queen Mary and Westfield College 66,340 b Try it 66.21 Kb Try it   111 Ravensbourne College 12,745 b Try it 12.74 Kb Try it   112 Reading 42,035 b Try it 42.04 Kb Try it   113 Registry, The University of Wales 13,181 b Try it 59.19 Kb Try it Discrepancy 114 Ripon and York St John, The College of 37,515 b Try it 37.32 Kb Try it   115 Robert Gordon University (RGU) 59,443 b Try it 1.51 Kb Try it Bobby analyses the no-frames page 116 Roehampton, University of Surrey 44,103 b Try it 70.67 Kb Try it Discrepancy 117 Rose Bruford College Speech and Drama 47,616 b Try it 46.82 Kb Try it   118 Royal Academy of Music (2,806 b) Try it 14.26 Kb Try it NetMechanic fails to detect the image due to the robots.txt file 119 Royal College of Art 21,023 b Try it 21.02 Kb Try it   120 Royal College of Music 39,675 b Try it 39.68 Kb Try it   121 Royal Holloway and Bedford New College 2,356 b Try it 2.39 Kb Try it Processes non-Javascript version of page 122 Royal Northern College of Music 9,278 b Try it 50.58 Kb Try it Discrepancy 123 Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama 13,053 b Try it 12.92 Kb Try it   124 Royal Veterinary College 28,310 b Try it 26.63 Kb Try it   125 St Andrews 67,976 b Try it 65.04 Kb Try it   126 St George's Hospital Medical School 95,461 b Try it 95.46 Kb Try it   127 Saint Mark and St John, College of 1,183 b Try it 0.82 Kb Try it Analyses redirect page.
Also has splash page.
128 St Martin's College 30,890 b Try it 30.89 Kb Try it   129 St Mary's College 18,360 b Try it 17.95 Kb Try it   130 Salford 76,967 b Try it 73.48 Kb Try it   131 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 12,104 b Try it 35.01 Kb Try it   132 School of Pharmacy, The 123,635 b Try it 85.96 Kb Try it Discrepancy 133 Scottish Agricultural College 52,935 b Try it 46.62 Kb Try it Discrepancy 134 Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) 54,237 b Try it 54.09 Kb Try it   135 Sheffield 41,140 b Try it 37.50 Kb Try it Discrepancy 136 South Bank University (SBU) 74,294 b Try it 67.26 Kb Try it Discrepancy 137 Southampton Institute 45,303 b Try it 33.31 Kb Try it Discrepancy 138 Southampton 49,629 b Try it 46.25 Kb Try it Discrepancy 139 Staffordshire 112,364 b Try it 101.81 Kb Try it Discrepancy 140 Stirling 147,642 b Try it 145.76 Kb Try it   141 Strathclyde 84,063 b Try it 76.27 Kb Try it Discrepancy 142 Sunderland 82,160 b Try it 21.41 Kb Try it Discrepancy 143 Surrey Institute of Art and Design 146,975 b Try it 146.53 Kb Try it   144 Surrey 65,869 b Try it 65.87 Kb Try it   145 Sussex 46,512 b Try it 34.88 Kb Try it Discrepancy 146 Swansea Institute of Higher Education 120,197 b Try it 120.20 Kb Try it   147 Swansea 95,078 b Try it 95.08 Kb Try it   148 Teesside 59,658 b Try it 59.49 Kb Try it   149 Thames Valley University (TVU) 105,628 b Try it 105.63 Kb Try it   150 Trinity and All Saints College 67,610 b Try it (10.23 Kb) Try it Bobby analyses no-frames version 151 Trinity College of Music 74,488 b Try it 0.80 Kb Try it Bobby analyses no-frames version 152 Trinity College, Carmarthen 92,206 b Try it 94.06 Kb Try it   153 Ulster, University of 22,835 b Try it 83.54 Kb Try it   154 University College London (UCL) 44,560 b Try it 42.08 Kb Try it   155 Warwick 10,119 b Try it 35.63 Kb Try it Discrepancy 156 Welsh College of Music and Drama 17,426 b Try it 17.54 Kb Try it   157 West of England, University of the 40,518 b Try it 41.25 Kb Try it   158 Westminster College     Web site no longer exists (was at <http://www.ox-west.ac.uk>) 159 Westminster 41,598 b Try it 41.60 Kb Try it   160 Wolverhampton 59,748 b Try it 57.48 Kb Try it   161 Worcester, University College 57,976 b Try it 57.35 Kb Try it   162 Writtle College 28,235 b Try it 28.24 Kb Try it   163 Wye College 38,918 b Try it 38.80 Kb Try it   164 York 29,937 b Try it 29.94 Kb Try it   The information in the table was collected between 18 and 31 May 2001.
Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Watch: Size of Institutional Top Level Pages" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Jun-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Is a URI?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Is a URI?
Buzz framework html database urn metadata doi standardisation accessibility identifier namespace copyright cataloguing gif purl uri ftp interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Ian Peacock explains 'URI' in plain English.
Users of the Web are familiar with URLs, the Uniform Resource Locators.
A URL is a locator for a network accessible resource.
Such a locator can be considered an identifier for the resource that it refers to.
Depending on the interpretation of identification, various different attributes of a resource could be considered as an identifier for that resource.
However, what comprises a functional resource identifier depends upon the context in which that identifier will be used.
For example, in a group of five people, identifying individuals by weight is unlikely to be practical.
In many situations, we assign a name to an object and use this attribute as the object identifier.
Such names also have to be chosen with regard to the context in which it will be used in order to be functional.
Back to the example of a group of people, we may refer to a particular person by a combination of their fore and surnames.
This name label would probably adequately identify a particular person in a group of five.
The Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) are a set of character strings, defined by a generic URI syntax, that are used for identifying resources.
A URI provides a simple and extensible means for identifying a resource that can then be used within applications.
The URI specification implements the recommendations of various functional recommendations (see further information below).
URIs form a superset of three distinct groups of identifiers, which will be described further on.
They are: URLs Uniform Resource Locators URNs Uniform Resource Names URCs Uniform Resource Characteristics These identifiers, and the generic URI are formally specified in various IETF Working Drafts and RFCs.
What is a resource?
We can consider that a resource is anything to which we can attach identity.
A resource arises through a conceptual mapping to an identified entity.
Such identity does not necessarily imply network (or other) accessibility.
Since the mapping is conceptual, the entity itself may not be constant (e.g.
a book being written changes over time) or even instantiated at any given time (e.g.
the contents of a noticeboard could be empty).
Some examples of resources are listed below: A physical noticeboard The contents of a noticeboard All people within the University of Bath A kitchen A book A sentence from a book A book in the process of being written A GIF image An HTML document A postscript document residing on an FTP server What is an identifier?
An identifier is an object that acts as a reference to something that has identity (i.e.
a resource).
The identifier may be used to dereference the resource if the resource is accessible.
Note that at this level we have not specified that an identifier be unique.
Some examples of identifiers are listed below: A forename and a surname A postcode An ISBN number An ISBN number and a page reference A filename A description (e.g.
colour, shape, weight) Confusingly, we sometimes identify an entity by a name that is also another attribute of the entity.
For example, we could label a particular person as “Jim with brown hair”.
In the context of URIs, the identifier is a set of characters conforming to the URI syntax.
Restrictions to the syntax may further classify the URI as a URL, URN or URC, i.e.
to different classes of identifier.
Very broadly, a URN is a name, though this name should be globally unique, a URC is a resource description and a URL specifies the resource location.
What is uniformity?
The Uniformity of the URI is inherited by URLs, URNs and URCs.
Uniformity refers to the strict syntax to which the URI must conform.
A URL, URN or URC must each follow a more class specific syntax, designed to best facilitate the purpose of the class.
Uniformity provides a number of benefits: It allows the introduction of new types of resource identifiers without interfering with the way that existing identifiers are used.
It allows a uniform interpretation of semantic conventions across different types of resource identifiers (for example, it is conventional for URL schemes to represent the method of network access).
It allows different types of resource identifier to be used in the same context.
For example, a URL and a URN can both refer to the same resource.
It allows the use of identifiers to be reused in different contexts (thus permitting new applications or protocols to leverage a pre-existing set of resource identifiers).
The URL The best known identifier is probably the URL.
A URL identifies network accessible resources by a scheme (that conventionally represents the primary access mechanism), a machine name and a “path”.
The path is interpreted in a manner depending on the scheme.
URLs have the most varied use of the URI syntax and often have a hierarchical namespace (e.g.
in specifying a directory path in an HTTP scheme URL).
Currently, we confuse URLs as both a name and a location for a resource.
This is bad practice, since URLs may be transient and a the location defines exactly one location even though a resource may exist in multiple locations.
In the larger Internet information architecture, URLs will act only as locators.
The URN Whereas a URL identifies the location or container for an instance of a resource, a URN, in the Internet architecture, identifies the resource.
The resource identified by a URN may reside in one or more locations, may move, or may not be available at a given time.
The URN has two practical interpretations, both for network-accessible resources.
The first is as a globally unique and persistent identifier for a resource, achieved through institutional commitment.
The second interpretation is as the specific “urn” scheme, which will embody the requirements for a standardised URN namespace.
Such a scheme will resolve names that have a greater persistence than that currently associated with URLs.
Work is still in progress on standardising this scheme.
A functional requirements standard for URNs (RFC1737) lays down a number of properties that URNs should embody.
This includes features such as global scope, global uniqueness and persistence.
A number of URN resolving services currently exist, see the applications mentioned below.
The URC The Internet draft “URC Scenarios and Requirements” defines the URC: The purpose or function of a URC is to provide a vehicle or structure for the representation of URIs and their associated meta-information.
Initially URCs were envisioned to be the intermediate that associated a URN with a set of URLs that could then be used to obtain a resource.
Later it was decided that metadata should also be included so that resources could be obtained conforming to a set of requirements.
URCs are essentially descrptions of resources available via a network.
Although work has been carried out by the IETF URC working group, URCs are still not in existence.
It seems unlikely at present that URCs will become standardised.
Use of URIs The problems of using a locator (i.e.
a URL) as a name have already been mentioned.
URIs tackle addressing for the future Internet architecture.
Resources will be identified by a URN, which will be resolved via a URN resolution service.
Currently, it looks unlikely that URCs will have a large part to play in the process.
Official URI-related standardisation has been slow, though a number of URN resolution services now exist adhering to accepted conventions.
For more details, see the TURNIP [9] pages.
A number of applications have been built around the URN concept, including: The Digital Object Identifier System (DOI) [10] The goals of the DOI system are to provide a framework for managing intellectual content, link customers with publishers, facilitate electronic commerce, and enable automated copyright management.
The underlying technology is based on the Handle resolution system.
The components of the system are an identifier, a directory (the basis for a resolution system) and a database (containing object information).
The Handle System [12] The Handle System, developed by CNRI, is a distributed global system which stores names, or handles, of digital objects and which can resolve those names into locators to access the objects.
PURLs [11] Persistent URLs, or PURLs, were developed by OCLC as an interim naming and resolution system for the Web.
PURLs increase the probability of correct resolution and thereby reduce the burden and expense of catalogue maintenance.
A PURL is functionally a URL.
However, a PURL refers to a resolution service, which maps the PURL to a URL and returns this to a client.
On the Web, this process is a standard HTTP redirect.
Further information RFC1630, “Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW”, <URL: http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1630.txt">.
RFC1738, “Functional Recommendations for Internet Resource Locators”, <URL: http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1738.txt>.
RFC1737, “Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names”, <URL: http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1737.txt>.
RFC1738, “Uniform Resource Locators (URL)”, <URL: http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1737.txt>.
RFC2141, “URN Syntax”, <URL: http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc2141.txt>.
RFC2396, “Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax”, <URL: http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc2396.txt>.
“URC Requirements and Scenarios”, <URI: http://www.acl.lanl.gov/URI/Scenarios/scenarios.txt>.
W3C page on Addressing, <URL: http://www.w3.org/Addressing/>.
TURNIP, the URN Interoperability Project, <URL: http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/TURNIP/>.
The DOI Foundation, <URL: http://www.doi.org/>.
PURL Homepage, <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/>.
The Handle System, <URL: http://www.handle.net/>.
Author Details Ian Peacock Email: i.peacock@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Tel: 01225 323570 Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz archives copyright jpg Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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Search Engines: Robots, Spiders and Your Website Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Robots, Spiders and Your Website Buzz data software html browser url standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at the effect these have on your site's vital statistics.
This issue I thought I’d take a look at a subject which is of absolute importance to those of us who use search engines, but is something we know virtually nothing about, and that is how do web pages end up in search engine directories?
If you’re short on time, the quick summary is that search engines of the free text variety (rather than the Index/Directory type) employ specialised utilities which visit a site, copy the information they find back to base, and then include this information the next time that they update their index for users.
OK, that’s it.
You can move onto the next article now.
Oh, you’re still here!
Well, in that case, lets look at the entire issue in a little more detail.
These utilities are often called robots, spiders or crawlers.
As already described, they reach out and grab pages from the Internet and if it’s a new page or a page that has been updated since the last time that they visited they will take a copy of the data.
They find these pages either because the web author has gone to a search engine and asked for their site to be indexed, or the robot has found their site by following a link from another page.
As a result, if the author doesn’t tell the engines about a particular page, and doesn’t have any links to it, it’s highly unlikely that the page will be found.
Robots are working all the time; the ones employed by AltaVista for example will spider about 10,000,000 pages a day.
If your website has been indexed by a search engine, you can be assured that at some point a robot has visited your site and by following all your links, will have copied all the pages that it can find.
It might not do this in one go; if your site is particularly large for example it could put something of a strain on the server which wouldn’t please your technical people, so many robots will stagger their visits over the period of several days, just indexing a few pages at a time until they’ve taken copies of everything that they can.
Also, if you have ever submitted to a search engine that says that it will instantly register and index your site in actual fact it won’t do – it will make a preliminary visit and make a note to come back and grab the rest of your data at a later date.
How can you tell if your site has been visited by one of these robots?
The answer, as with most answers related to the Internet is ‘it depends’.
Obviously one way is to go to a search engine and run a search for your site; if it’s retrieved, then your site has been visited.
An easy way of doing this at somewhere like AltaVista for example is to do a search for: host: <URL of your site> such as host:philb and if you get some results back, you know that your site has been indexed.
(It might be worth checking at this point however just to make sure that the search engine has got all of your pages, and also that they are the current versions).
However, this is a pretty laborious way of checking – what is much more sensible and easier to do is to access the log files that are automatically kept on your site.
As you may know, if you visit a site, your browser is requesting some data, and details of these transactions are kept by the host server in a log file.
This file can be viewed using appropriate software (usually called an Access Analyser) and will provide information such as the IP address of the machine that made the request, which pages were viewed, the browser being used, the Operating System, the domain name, country of origin and so on.
In exactly the same way that browsers leave this little trace mark behind them, so do the robot programs.
Consequently, if you know the name of the robot or spider that a particular search engine employs it should be a relatively easy task to identify them.
Well (and here’s that answer again), it depends.
If your site is popular your log files will be enormous and it could take a very long time to work through them to find names that make some sense to you.
Added to this is the fact that there are over 250 different robots in operation and some, many or none of them might have visited in any particular period of time.
So it’s not a perfect way of identifying them.
Besides, new robots are being introduced all the time, old ones may change their names, all of which can make the whole process much more difficult.
There is however a simpler solution that makes a refreshing change!
Before I tell you what it is, a quick diversion.
It’s quite possible that, if you’re a web author you might not want the robots to visit certain pages on your site – they might not be finished, or you might have some personal information that you don’t want everyone to see, or a page may only be published for a short period of time.
Whatever the reason, you don’t want the pages indexed.
The people who produce search engines realise that as well, so a solution was created to allow an author to tell the robots not to index pages, or to follow certain links, or to ignore certain subdirectories on servers – the Robot Exclusion Standard.
This is done in two ways, either by using the meta tag facility (a meta tag being an HTML tag that is inserted into a page and which is only viewed by search engines, not the viewer of a web page via their browser) or by adding a small text file in the top level of the space allocated to you by your web hosting service.
It is this second method that is of interest to us.
Since search engine robots know that authors might not want them to index everything, when they visit sites they will look for the existence of this file, called robots.txt just to check to see if they are allowed to index a site in its entirety.
(For the purposes of this article it’s not necessary to go into detail about what is or is not included in the robots.txt file, but if you’re interested in this, a good page to visit is the description of it at AltaVista (http://doc.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_avoiding.html) Alternatively, if you want to read the nitty gritty you might want to look at “A Standard for Robot Exclusion” (http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots.html) Admittedly, not all robots do look for this file, but the majority do, and will abide by what they find.
Right – that’s the quick diversion out of the way, so back to the article.
When you look at your statistics you should pay particular attention to any requests for the robots.txt file, because the only requests for it will be from the robot and spider programs; it’s not the sort of thing that a browser will go looking for.
It should then be a much simpler matter of then being able to identify which search engines have visited your site over the particular period in question.
If you see that ‘Scooter’ has requested the file you can then track that back to AltaVista – once you know enough to link Scooter to that search engine of course.
A very useful site which lists details on over 250 robots and spiders can be found at The Web Robots Page at http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html and just reading the list of names can be quite fascinating – I noticed one called Ariadne for example (part of a research project at the University of Munich), another called Dragon Bot (collects pages related to South East Asia) and Googlebot (no prizes for guessing where that one comes from!)
Are there any disadvantages to using this approach?
Yes, you’ve guessed it, the answer is once again ‘it depends’.
If you only have very limited access to statistical data it is possible that you will get an artificially high count of users, when in actual fact the number of ‘real’ users is much less than this.
Unless you extract more information from your statistics it’s going to be very difficult to isolate the real users from the spiders.
Some people do claim that the spiders cause problems due to the bandwidth they use to collect their data, particularly if they use the ‘rapid fire’ approach of attempting to get a large number of pages in a very short space of time.
This in turn leads to poor retrieval times for ‘real’ people who want to view pages on a site.
Since anyone with sufficient knowledge can create spiders or robots their number will only increase in the future, and although the robots.txt file is of some use in this case, there is no requirement or standardisation that says that all robots need to adhere to it; some may very well completely ignore it.
These problem have been addressed in an interesting article written by Martijn Koster, which although now several years old still makes relevant and interesting reading.
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/threat-or-treat.html However, like them, loathe them or be completely indifferent to them, spiders are one of the most important ways that we have of being able to access the information that’s out there.
Author Details Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens, Feltham, Middlesex.
Email: philb@philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independant Internet Consultant.
Article Title: "Robots, spiders and your website."
Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/search-engines/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Intellectual Property Rights Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Intellectual Property Rights Workshop Buzz software dissemination archives metadata repositories eprints copyright oai-pmh linux e-learning flash drm licence odrl url research standards Citation BibTex RIS William J. Nixon and Jessie Hey co-report on the JISC IPR workshop held in London, May 2003.
The Intellectual Property Rights workshop was organised by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on behalf of the X4L [1], 5⁄99 [2] and FAIR [3] Programmes and was a well attended and thought-provoking event.
It was also timely, as many of our projects, in both higher and further education, begin to deal with the larger IPR issues which we are all facing.
Copyright is becoming more complex and there are many unresolved issues about relationships and ownership, whether in the context of Learning and Teaching or of other institutional resources.
Programme Rachel Bruce, Information Environment Acting Team Leader, opened the day on behalf of JISC.
The aims of the day were: to update delegates on the current IPR situation regarding electronic materials to offer presentations and discussions on a range of IPR issues that are relevant to the different programmes The programme began with a talk from Emanuella Giavarra, a copyright lawyer and the author of the Draft Depositor Licence for JORUM a digital repository service for learning materials.
Emanuella’s talk was entitled “Copyright and the EU Directive” [4].
Her aim was to “make lawyers out of us in half an hour” and provide an introduction to Copyright.
Copyright is a property right and one which subsists in: “original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works sound recordings, films, broadcasts or cable programmes typographical arrangement of published editions” [4] It provides the creator of the work, or in the case of copyright being assigned, the assignee a range of rights which include the rights to: “to copy the work to issue copies to the public to rent or lend the work to the public to perform, show or play a work in public” [4] The European Union has issued a range of Directives in recent years and The EU Copyright Directive 2001 is being implemented in the UK right now.
It is intended to bring EU harmonisation on copyright for both the paper and the digital environments.
The deadline was, in principle, 31 December 2002.
The Article 3 directive on rights of communication with the public, for example, was causing problems as it was difficult to understand its meaning.
Sarah Currier provided an overview of “Digital Rights Management and e-Learning” [5].
Sarah recommended that people interested in Digital Rights Management (DRM) should read the IEEE report “Towards a Digital Rights Expression Language Standard for Learning Technology” [6].
From the wide variety of standards that are surveyed in that white paper, Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML) are singled out as potential candidates for the role of educational digital rights expression language standard.
In both cases, some extensions or some application profiling (i.e.
agreeing an implementation) would be necessary to support all the necessary access roles.
Digital Rights determine who can do what under what conditions.
The aim of DRM is to prevent unauthorised use and to preserve the integrity of digital information.
This is critical if we are to ensure the integrity of the e-Learning or other digital objects which are held in our repositories.
We must be able to assure our users, (the creators of content), that we can enforce digital rights in the use of their objects.
These issues are not specific, or unique to e-Learning but they are critical to its success.
Digital rights are not static, they will change over time or in different circumstances.
Sarah provided some examples of this, such as authors who may wish to make their content free for academic, but fee-based for commercial users.
In the e-Learning world, where objects may be reused or re-purposed, attribution to the original creator, context and fidelity are paramount.
There is a range of bodies dealing with DRM issues.
These include the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee Digital Rights Expression Language Study Group.
The CEN/ISSS Learning Technology Workshop, led by Richard McCracken, is producing an overview of all types of Copyright Issues.
Elizabeth Gadd introduced the “Open Rights Digital Language (ODRL)”.
ODRL is an open source Digital Rights Management Language which only describes rights.
Elizabeth took us through the ODRL Expression Model.
The RoMEO Project is now hoping to work with the Creative Commons licences rather than develop a standalone ODRL solution.
Richard McKracken, Head of Rights at the Open University, presented a talk on the “Creative Commons” [7] The Creative Commons has a very positive approach to copyright as is illustrated by the excellent “Get Creative” [8] an animated Flash short feature about creative co-authorship and copyright in the digital age which Richard showed us.
You can see this for yourself on the Creative Commons web site.
The Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.
Fig.
1 (taken from Creative Commons under a Creative Commons Licence).
In the Creative Commons model, there is a distinction drawn between: Big C [Copyright] “All Rights Reserved” and CC “Some Rights Reserved”.
The Creative Commons evolved from the same ideals of open source software such as Linux.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare [9], a free, open, publication of MIT Course Materials, piloted in September 2002, is another example using the open source model for learning materials.
The Commons was founded in 2001 and is housed at Stanford Law School.
There are 11 licences and four categories: “Attribution Non-commercial Non-derivative Share-alike” [7] The licences come in three versions: Legal, plain text and machine-readable.
Parallel Sessions The parallel sessions provided more specific sessions for each of the programmes.
The presentation about the “Draft JORUM Depositor Licence for learning materials” [10] by Emanuella Giavara was of particular relevance to X4L while Elizabeth Gadd’s “RoMEO Project outcomes” was of particular interest to FAIR Projects.
There is, however, overlap here and the development of the JORUM Depositor Licence and the background to it is of interest to FAIR and vice versa.
James Clay, Director, FAIR Enough Project discussed the issues of “Sharing resources: ownership and protection within and outside institutions” [11].
James’ talk focussed on issues of ownership and protection which employees of institutions have, or may think which they have.
He drew attention to differences between Higher Education and Further Education with particular regard to contractual obligations.
In many cases HE staff have more rights over copyright and IPR than their colleagues in FE institutions.
Elizabeth Gadd, from the RoMEO Project led a “Workshop and discussion on the outcomes of the work of the RoMEO Project” [12].
RoMEO has identified a range of solutions to the issues of copyright assignation and stressed the importance of a depositor’s licence for Institutional Repositories.
She also presented a useful flowchart of the publishing process from the RoMEO Study: The impact of copyright ownership on academic author self-archiving.
It is entitled ‘How can I self-archive AND get my paper published?’ This looks at the options of self-archiving the pre-print and the post-print and the effects of different copyright transfer agreements and could prove useful in discussions with academics.
The Creative Commons licences which featured in the morning were thought to be a good fit with the RoMEO findings, having all the elements of a complete rights solution.
Academics are prepared to offer very liberal usage rights.
Some technical problems would need to be addressed to incorporate the Creative Commons into Open Archive Initiative (OAI) [13] solutions.
The RoMEO project has discussed this with the OAI and since the workshop it has been announced that the OAI will be working with the RoMEO project to develop a white paper on disclosing and harvesting rights under the OAI-PMH protocol.
This will then be discussed by a specially established OAI technical committee on rights, refined, and put out to the whole community for further discussion.
It is hoped that the final specification will be completed by February 2004.
Ralph Weedon, Director of the JISC Legal Information Service (J-LIS), and Helen Pickering (Copyright Manager of HERON) co-hosted a parallel session with an “IPR FAQ” [14] and “Licensing parts of commercial works for educational use” [15].
Q & A Session There was a lively Question and Answer plenary session when all of the attendees came together after the parallel sessions [16].
A range of issues were discussed including the responsibility of a library to check whether users are copying for commercial purposes which they should.
Ideas which may be taken forward include a training day on licensing issues (organized by J-LIS the JISC Legal Information Service [17]).
This event would be useful for both project and institutional staff involved with contracts.
Since the event, JISC has put together a focus group to look at the development of a “Creative Commons” licence for the UK which includes Emanuella Giavarra.
This group will also be responsible for developing a strategy for dissemination of the licence system to ensure maximum engagement and take-up.
Conclusions This was a very useful and thought-provoking event.
The presentations [including the Q & A session] can be viewed in more detail [18] on the JISC Web site.
Although we were perhaps not Copyright experts by the end of the day we were much more aware of the IPR issues which our projects need to tackle.
We also saw some possible approaches to managing IPR from Open Digital Rights Languages to the development of depositor licences.
These approaches will enable us to balance copyright management with the ideals of open access and fair use which underpin our programmes.
Editor’s note Readers may also be interested by Elizabeth Gadd’s article on protecting metadata in an open access environment in this issue.
References JISC Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_x4l Learning and Teaching 5⁄99 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_learning_teaching FAIR http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair Copyright and the EU Directive: Emanuella Giavarra [Powerpoint] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/EmanuellaPreso1.ppt Open Digital Rights Language encapsulating rights in metadata: Sarah Currier [Powerpoint] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/SarahCurrierPreso.ppt “Towards a Digital Rights Expression Language Standard for Learning Technology” [Word] http://ltsc.ieee.org/meeting/200212/doc/DREL_White_paper.doc Creative Commons: Richard McCracken [Powerpoint] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/RichardMcCrackenPreso.ppt Creative Commons http://www.creativecommons.org/ MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html JORUM+ depositor licence: Emanuella Giavarra [Powerpoint] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/EmanuellaPreso2.ppt Sharing resources: ownership and protection issues: James Clay [Powerpoint] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JamesClayPreso.ppt Workshop and discussion on RoMEO project outcomes: Elizabeth Gadd [Powerpoint] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ElizabethGaddPresopart1.ppt http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ElizabethGaddpresopart2.ppt Open Archives Initiative (OAI) http://www.openarchives.org/ IPR FAQ: Ralph Weedon [Powerpoint] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/RalphWeedonpreso.ppt Licensing parts of commercial works (HERON): Helen Pickering [Powerpoint] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/HelenPickeringpreso.ppt Plenary Questions and Answers [Word] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCIPRqa.doc J-LIS (JISC Legal Information Service) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=services_jlis IPR meeting 29 May 2003 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_event_ipr_may_03 Author Details William J Nixon William is the Deputy Head of IT Services, Glasgow University Library and Administrator of the Glasgow ePrints Service.
He is also the Project Manager: Service Development for DAEDALUS (University of Glasgow) E-mail: w.j.nixon@lib.gla.ac.uk Web site: http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus Jessie Hey Jessie is a Research Fellow on the TARDIS e-Prints project at the University of Southampton E-mail: jessie.hey@soton.ac.uk Web site: http://tardis.eprints.org/ Return to top Article Title: “Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Workshop, London May 2003” Author: William J Nixon and Jessie Hey Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/iprws-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sharing History of Science and Medicine Gateway Metadata Using OAI-PMH Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sharing History of Science and Medicine Gateway Metadata Using OAI-PMH Buzz data rdf javascript database rss archives metadata css thesaurus repositories oai-pmh cataloguing opac z39.50 aggregation interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS David Little outlines the resource sharing arrangements between the MedHist gateway and the Humbul hub, using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and some of the issues it has raised.
The MedHist gateway [1] was launched in August 2002, providing access to a searchable and browsable catalogue of high quality, evaluated history of medicine Internet resources.
MedHist has been funded and developed by the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine [2], but is hosted by the BIOME health and life sciences hub [3], and as such is part of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
MedHist was developed principally to fill the gaps left in the coverage of the history of medicine by existing resource discovery services within and outside the RDN.
Both the Humbul Humanities Hub [4] and OMNI [5 gateway within BIOME provided some coverage of the subject, although this was not exhaustive.
Outside the RDN, resource discovery services for the history of medicine were either defunct or concentrated on far narrower or broader subject areas [6] .
The fact the history of medicine is such an interdisciplinary subject caused problems for the Wellcome Library in deciding where to locate MedHist.
Keen to keep the service within the RDN, it was decided to make MedHist a part of BIOME whose federated structure of health and medicine related gateways under a single hub suited the creation of an independent gateway with an affiliation to an existing service.
However, the interdisciplinary nature of the subject area suggested that it would also be important to make available MedHist's resource description records to other services with over-lapping subject interests, such as Humbul and the SOSIG [7] gateway, and to import any relevant metadata from other gateways, such as Humbul's History and Philosophy of Science records.
Therefore, early on in the development of MedHist, methods of making its metadata available to other services, and importing external metadata, were investigated.
The solution that was decided upon was the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [8].
Gateway metadata MedHist, in line with other RDN gateways collects and makes available descriptive metadata about Internet resources, catalogued in accordance with the Dublin Core Element Set [9].
In addition to obvious access points such as title and URL, resource descriptions include an evaluative paragraph outlining the purpose and main features of the resource, and keywords are assigned from the National Library of Medicine's MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) thesaurus [10].
Additionally, where a resource is dedicated to an individual, personal name headings from the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) are also added [11].
In addition to this descriptive metadata, administrative metadata such as site creator and owner are also collected, but not displayed on the MedHist Website.
Approaches to resource sharing MedHist records automatically are available via a number of different access points: via the MedHist Website, the BIOME Website which searches the catalogues of all its constituent gateways and the RDN ResourceFinder database, a "union catalogue" of all the RDN's service providers' catalogues [12].
However, sharing metadata directly between different RDN services required the use of a separate process.
Several options were considered before deciding on the use of OAI-PMH to expose and harvest metadata: Live cross-searching A possible solution was the use of live cross-searching from one gateway of another's resource catalogue using Z39.50.
Leaving aside some of the disadvantages of Z39.50 in terms of server response times [13], relying on cross-searching would have required some amendments to MedHist's and Humbul's user interfaces, to, for example, include a tick box requiring the user to indicate they wished to search another gateway's catalogue.
Additionally, relying on cross-searching would also cause problems for users wishing to browse.
Using Z39.50 does not easily allow for the incorporation of external records into the home service's browse structure.
Custom-built solutions Another approach considered was the use of custom-built solutions such as the My Humbul include.
[14] This particular service allows for the selection of a number of records from the Humbul hub which can be reproduced on another Website, using a Javascript include.
This service and the use of custom-built solutions were rejected for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the My Humbul service would simply allow for the display of a selection of records from Humbul on the MedHist Website.
The records themselves would still reside on the Humbul database and would not be searchable via MedHist or truly integrated into MedHist's subject browsing structure.
Reliance on custom-built solutions was not felt to be effective due to the fact they would not necessarily be re-usable and would be specific to each gateway which entered into a resource sharing arrangement   RSS feeds Similar to the above solution would be the use of RSS (RDF Site Summary) [15] feeds to display third party metadata.
Some gateways make their new acquisitions lists available in this format, using a service such as UKOLN's RSSxpress [16].
As with the use of custom built solutions, records displayed in this way are neither searchable or truly browsable, and there may be limited control over their display, even with the use of css stylesheets.
OAI-PMH The use of OAI-PMH to expose and harvest metadata records between MedHist and other gateways seemed the most effective solution.
Not only was it an emerging standard for the exchange of metadata, it was already in use across the RDN to create the central ResourceFinder database: BIOME and other gateways already made available entire sets of their metadata records in OAI repositories which are harvested by the RDN [17].
BIOME and Humbul also had in place the necessary harvesting tools and technologies to successfully import third party OAI repository data and index the information onto their own databases Using OAI-PMH to share metadata records At present, MedHist records are exported to Humbul and Humbul's History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) records are imported into MedHist on a weekly basis.
Whilst the exchange of records has been largely successful, some ongoing issues, some examined below, have currently prevented MedHist records being displayed on Humbul.
However, Humbul HPS records are fully accessible via MedHist.
.
Importing Humbul HPS records into MedHist Humbul OAI records are currently exported to MedHist on a weekly basis: A script on the Humbul server automatically emails the BIOME technical staff a file of Humbul OAI records (in tar format) The records are indexed onto the MedHist database BIOME alert MedHist staff to new Humbul HPS records Once imported, MedHist staff: Decide on which records are most suitable for MedHist's subject coverage and make them "live" on MedHist Add local metadata such as MeSH and LCNAF subject headings.
Suppress any resource descriptions from Humbul that "duplicate" existing MedHist descriptions.
Once live, Humbul HPS records are available on the MedHist Website: For searching via MedHist's search engine For browsing through MedHist's subject browse.
Assigned keywords allow Humbul records to be fully integrated into MedHist's browse structure.
Humbul HPS records display in the same format as MedHist records with an added rights statement that indicates the record is from Humbul's History and Philosophy of Science collection.
Record display for the Aldous Huxley: the author and his times Website ...and the same record displaying in MedHist Some issues To date the process has highlighted some issues which are currently being addressed by both Humbul and MedHist.
Staff time overheads To fully integrate Humbul records into MedHist, MedHist staff must spend time adding subject headings to imported records, and deleting any Humbul records which "duplicate" existing MedHist entries.
In terms of the number of records imported from Humbul this is not too time consuming, although it raises questions of the sustainability of the process if it were extended to include records from other gateways.
One approach currently being considered is the automated addition of suitable subject headings by the data provider, i.e.
for Humbul to add agreed MeSH keywords to each of the records exported.
This would allow records to be incorporated into MedHist's browse structure, although it is likely they would have to be very generic headings (e.g.
"Science" and "Philosophy").
Whether it is possible, or even desirable, for third party metadata to be in an automatic "live" state after import is another area which needs to be examined more closely.
Re-presenting metadata MedHist and Humbul have slightly different conventions for the display of metadata records.
Humbul favour both a short and full record display, the latter displaying information such as site author and publisher in addition to title, URL and description etc.
MedHist has only one record display which features hyperlinked title, description and keywords.
BIOME have tended only to use author / publisher information only for internal purposes, whereas Humbul consider this part of the full record display, in the same way it would be displayed for books within a library OPAC.
Certainly BIOME have expressed some concern about this administrative data being displayed and the implications it may have for data protection.
This is an area which may need to be considered across the RDN as a whole.
Rights In a similar vein, some thought has had to be given about the expression of rights statements when displaying third party metadata.
At present MedHist displays a single rights statement which indicates the record is from Humbul's History and Philosophy of Science collection, but does not reflect the rights statements published by Humbul which acknowledge the work of individual cataloguers within its distributed cataloguing system.
The most likely way that this will be addressed is to have a hyperlinked rights statement that will lead users to the full record within Humbul, where they will also be able to see the resource creator and publisher information.
Collection development Over-reliance on third party metadata could potentially encourage gateways not to catalogue within certain areas of their collections which may be covered by other gateways.
Whilst this may cut down duplication of effort and be seen as beneficial, it may be some key resources will not have been described by a particular gateway for its key audience.
MedHist continues to catalogue all history of medicine resources, including ones that may already be within Humbul, and views other Humbul records as ways of supplying records which may be slightly more peripheral, although still of interest to the subject area.
In addition to "adding value" to the service, these more tangential records help to provide contextual information for those interested in, for instance, developments within scientific thinking during a particular period of time.
OAI and Dublin Core At present, OAI records only support the use of unqualified Dublin Core.
This means that records imported and exported cannot express the full richness of the metadata collected.
For instance, MedHist keywords are exported without any indication they are from the MeSH or LCNAF thesauri.
Similarly, Humbul's author / creator distinctions (e.g.
Web designer, author, compiler) are lost during the export process (although it must be noted that these would not be able to be used by MedHist in any case).
Different records for different services?
At present, BIOME must currently export two sets of OAI records: one for the RDN which feature a "cut-down" version of its gateways' metadata (featuring basic descriptive metadata and metadata about the metadata record itself), and one for Humbul which must additionally feature author and publisher information.
This raises questions about standards within the RDN and the extra work for technical staff which "bilateral" agreements between gateways can create.
This is an issue that will probably have to be considered across the RDN as a whole.
Conclusion It has become clear that OAI is an effective way of sharing metadata between gateway services, but that it is not a panacea for all interoperability ills.
The process between MedHist and Humbul has not been as straightforward as originally envisaged.
It has been a "learning process" which has raised almost as many questions as it has solved.
However, it is clear that the issues that have been raised are ones which may have to be addressed by anyone using OAI-PMH or metadata aggregation services and are hurdles to be overcome.
Overall OAI-PMH has shown itself to be an efficient and effective way of metadata exchange, and also demonstrated how data may be re-used and re-formatted outside its original context.
We certainly look forward to resolving some of the outstanding problems and pushing the resource sharing agenda forward with other related gateways, including SOSIG.
References MedHist is at: http://medhist.ac.uk The Wellcome Library home page is at: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk http://biome.ac.uk/ http://www.humbul.ac.uk http://omni.ac.uk The Medical History on the Internet site: http://www.anes.uab.edu/medhist.htm closed as of December 2000.
For a service concentrating on a narrower topic see the Karolinska Institute History of Biomedicine page: http://www.mic.ki.se/History.html; for a service covering a broader area, the ECHO history of science, technology and medicine pages: http://echo.gmu.edu/center http://sosig.ac.uk The Open Archives Initiative Website is at: http://www.openarchives.org The list of current Dublin Core elements can be accessed at: http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/dc/current-elements/ The MeSH 2002 home page is at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh The Library of Congress Authorities page is at: http://authorities.loc.gov The RDN ResourceFinder catalogue is at: http://rdn.ac.uk See for instance Pete Stubely, 'Clumps as catalogues: virtual success or failure?
', Ariadne Issue 22, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/distributed/distukcat2.htm The My Humbul page is at: http://www.humbul.ac.uk/user/myhome.php More information on RSS can be found at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/specification.html The RSSxpress page is at: http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk See Pete Cliff, 'Building ResourceFinder', Ariadne Issue 30, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/rdn-oai/ Author Details   David Little MedHist Project Officer Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine Wellcome Trust Email: d.little@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk Article Title: "Sharing history of science and medicine gateway metadata using OAI-PMH" Author: David Little Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/little/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Oxford Puts Its Reference Works Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Oxford Puts Its Reference Works Online Buzz data digitisation tagging vocabularies graphics opera authentication url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dave Swarbrick on the new Oxford University Press reference Web site.
What or who is ‘Ariadne’?
She was, of course, the girl who fell in love with Theseus, who gave him the thread by which he found his way out of the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur.
Her story was made into an opera by Strauss in which some of the greatest operatic stars have performed.
But did you know that it has also inspired other composers like Handel, Dukas, Monteverdi, Haydn, and Musgrave, and many choreographers too?
A Cretan dialect gave rise to the name, and St Ariadne was a Phrygian martyr.
Ariadne is rarely a given name in Britain and American, but in France it appears as Arianne, and in Italy as Arianna.
How long would it take to gather this information in a traditional reference library?
I gleaned it in moments from Oxford Reference Online.
Oxford Reference Online at www.oxfordreference.com is the name of Oxford University Press’s new reference web-site.
Beginning in March 2002 hundreds of Oxford’s language and subject reference dictionaries, famous Oxford Companions, and other reference works will become available on subscription.
The site is expected to total well over 130 million words (equivalent to over 300 books) by the end of the decade.
This could well make it the biggest general knowledge resource on the web.
On 20 March 2002 the first part of the new Oxford Reference Online web-site, Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection, becomes available.
Over 1.5 million entries, including dictionary definitions, facts, figures, people, places, sayings, and dates, from around 100 of Oxford’s acclaimed English and bilingual dictionaries, usage, quotations, and subject reference books have been combined to create ONE huge integrated knowledge resource.
The service will cover over 20 subjects in the humanities, social sciences, science and medicine from art and astronomy to sociology and zoology.
The result of a two-year collaborative project between OUP Oxford and OUP New York that has cost well over £1 million, Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection is available on subscription to academic, corporate, and specialist libraries, schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and government offices around the world.
Users will be able to access the service in their library, but members of subscribing public libraries will also be able to access it at home via library card authentication.
In the UK, Oxford is working with JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) to provide access to Oxford Reference Online as the cornerstone of an electronic reference collection for the Further and Higher Education communities.
Why has Oxford taken this giant step in its online publishing strategy now at a time when few publishers are risking money in web-based projects?
Part of the answer lies with the success of the Oxford English Dictionary Online.
While there is no question of the yearly subscriptions to OED Online ever covering the £35 million/$55 million that the twenty-year project to revise the Oxford English Dictionary is costing, the gross revenue of over £1m has covered the cost of putting the work online.
The service has also been a great hit with users world-wide.
Very careful planning, cost-effective marketing, and close to 100% subscription renewals, has made the Oxford English Dictionary Online into a success story.
The other part of the answer lies with the growing needs of an increasingly computer-literate world population.
The internet has changed the way we discover information.
Oxford had massive reference assets.
Put the two together and you have ORO, which we hope offers a new global standard for reference across the Internet.
A major benefit the web offers is the ability to update and expand the new service.
Oxford’s extensive programme of new references and regular new editions of works on key subjects will bring up to 30 new and revised works to ‘The Core Collection’ between now and 2004, on subjects such as statistics, tourism, sport, archaeology, and business.
Oxford Reference Online provides access to reference material that is both up to date and carefully prepared by leading scholars.
www.oxfordreference.com is the child of its customers.
Nearly 10 rounds of market research were run over 24 months in the US and the UK.
Scores of librarians, professionals, academics, students, teachers, school children, and general library users were involved at difference stages.
Having established the nature of the product, hundreds more hours of one-to-one interviews, email research, workshops, and phone interviews followed.
What sort of functionality was required?
How should a quick search differ from advanced or browse?
What could be added to Boolean to make advanced searching more flexible?
Where should the search boxes be?
How should the results be displayed, ranked, reordered or interrogated?
How should different subjects be searched?
Out of the market research has emerged a product that is aggregated, but also modular, with every discipline having its own home page; where the identity and integrity of the original books is preserved and yet can be pooled with others to allow for massive searches, the results of which could give you scores of different perspectives on the same subject.
Preparing Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection, has been a huge task that has taken months of planning and execution.
The first major hurdle was the digitisation of tens of millions of words, and the complex and extensive restructuring and tagging of the 1.5 million entries from the first 100 chosen texts.
From ‘Aalenian’ in the Dictionary of Earth Sciences to ‘ZZ Ceti star’ in the Dictionary of Astronomy, material equivalent to over 60,000 book pages has been turned into more than more 500Mb of data, each part of it crafted to an elaborate tagging specification to enable high-quality searching.
Semantico, the Brighton (UK) based online reference developer (www.semantico.com), has used state-of-the-art technology to complete the challenging and complex task of building Oxford Reference Online.
A wealth of functionality has been built into the site using innovative new approaches to manipulating complex data.
But although ORO is technically very complex, users will never be aware of it.
For them the majority of searches should be simple and direct, executed from the very first page.
Users at all levels of expertise will be able to get more out of the wealth of knowledge available in Oxford texts than ever before.
To help them, the design aims to be simple, elegant, and jargon-free with no ads, no fussy graphics, and no distractions.
All key services are at, or near, the top level, and movement around the site is easy.
A big step forward is the new functionality in cross-referencing.
Users are not restricted to cross-searching key words; they can highlight any word and click on the ‘Cross Reference’ icon to find more information.
Instant definitions of complex vocabulary will be of huge value to any user but particularly to those for whom English is not their first language.
But by far the best way to find out what Oxford Reference Online can do is to go to the site and discover for yourself.
www.oxfordreference.com has a guided tour, and if you are an institution, library or business, you can sign up for a free trial too.
Happy searching!
Author Details David Swarbrick, Project Director, Oxford Reference Online.
Article Title: "Oxford puts its reference works online" Author: Dave Swarbrick Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/oxford-reference-collection/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL News Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL News Buzz data software rdf rss portal metadata browser copyright cataloguing syndication interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod describes how EEVL is putting RSS to work.
EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
RSS and EEVL Before, (quite naturally), you ask, RSS can stand for ‘Rich Site Summary’, ‘RDF Site Summary’ or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ depending on who you are talking to and which RSS version they are speaking about.
EEVL recently published an RSS Primer for Publishers and Content Providers.
RSS is an excellent and cost-effective way of driving traffic to, and increasing brand awareness of, any Web site that publishes content such as news, jobs, products, or events, on a regular basis.
An RSS file enables other sites to syndicate the content, and thereby reach new audiences.
RSS is now considered to be the dominant format for distributing headline content on the Web, and allows easy sharing of data between sites.
In addition, RSS content can be viewed by personal desktop news reading applications such as AmphetaDesk.
RSS feeds can also be read through a Web browser via services such as Bloglines.
EEVL’s Primer is aimed at publishers and content providers, with the intention of introducing and explaining the concepts behind RSS and addressing some commonly expressed concerns.
It is primarily intended for a non-technical audience who require an overview of RSS to make decisions regarding the possible use of the technology.
However, the guidelines also provide recommendations for good practice, case studies on RSS production and links to tools and specifications which provide useful starting points for those tasked with actually producing RSS feeds.
The Primer is available at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/ and also as a Word document: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/rss_primer.doc.
It was written by Malcolm Moffat, the EEVL Development Officer, and produced through work undertaken as part of a JISC-funded Publishers and Library/Learning Solutions (PALS) Metadata & Interoperability project.
Details about the project are available from the EEVL Projects Web site.
The Primer is already proving to be very popular and has been regarded as an easy-to-understand guide to RSS.
Syndicated News and EEVL One purpose of the RSS Primer mentioned above is to encourage publishers and content providers to make their content available via RSS so that it can be syndicated by other sites.
Putting this into practice, EEVL has teamed up with several leading trade information publishers (Pro-Talk Ltd, Jobsite and Centaur Communications Ltd.) to syndicate a number of RSS feeds and thereby provide improved access to industry news and job announcement news.
This is the first part of a three-stage process to improve radically access to the latest information and news in the subjects covered by the EEVL service (i.e.
engineering, mathematics and computing).
Further developments, which will be announced in due course, will aggregate these feeds, and this will make scanning and accessing information from a variety of sources far easier.
Stage three will see the feeds added to other, personalisable services made available as a result of the Subject Portal Project (SPP).
The new syndicated services, all of which can be accessed via the EEVL site, include: Industry news: Latest News from e4engineering.com http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/newsfeed_e4engineering.htm More information about E4Engineering is available from the EEVL record.
Latest News from Engineeringtalk http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/newsfeed_engineeringtalk.htm More information about Engineeringtalk is available from the EEVL record.
Latest News from Processingtalk http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/newsfeed_processingtalk.htm More information about Processingtalk is available from the EEVL record.
Latest News from Buildingtalk http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/newsfeed_buildingtalk.htm More information about Buildingtalk is available is available from the EEVL record.
Latest News from Electronicstalk http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/newsfeed_electronicstalk.htm More information about Electronicstalk is available from the EEVL record.
Latest News from Manufacturingtalk http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/newsfeed_manufacturingtalk.htm More information about Manufacturingtalk is available from the EEVL record.
Latest News from Subcontractingtalk http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/newsfeed_subcontractingtalk.htm More information about Subcontractingtalk is available from the EEVL record.
Job Announcements: Latest Engineering Jobs from Jobsite http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/eng-jobs-jobsite-engineering.htm More information about Jobsite is available from the EEVL record.
Latest Engineering Jobs from The Engineer http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/eng-jobs-theengineer.htm More information about The Engineer Jobs is available from the EEVL record.
Latest IT Jobs from Jobsite http://www.eevl.ac.uk/computing/comp-jobs-jobsite-computing.htm More information about Jobsite is available from the EEVL record.
Latest Electronics Jobs from Jobsite http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/eng-jobs-jobsite-electronics.htm More information about Jobsite is available from the EEVL record.
Latest Manufacturing Jobs from Jobsite http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/eng-jobs-jobsite-manufacturing.htm More information about Jobsite is available from the EEVL record.
Each of these RSS feeds contains the most recent fifteen items released by the publisher in question.
An item can consist of a news headline and brief details, or in the case of job announcements, details of the latest vacancies added to the publisher’s site.
In all cases, links take you to the actual publisher’s site where full details are available.
Typical examples of items from the RSS feeds are shown below.
The first item is from Latest News from e4engineering.com and the second is from Latest IT Jobs from Jobsite.
Nanotubes used to reinforce ceramics Materials scientists have created a ceramic material reinforced with carbon nanotubes that is tougher than conventional ceramics, conducts electricity and acts as a heat exchanger.
Oracle Developer/Reports Writer (£Neg, London,South West London) Oracle Software House require an Oracle Developer/Report Writer for contract.
You must have reports 6i/Oracle RDMS 8i experience.
Any experience designing and building Datamart solutions would be an advantage.
It is important to note that the RSS feeds give details about only the latest job vacancies.
Many more vacancies are listed at the host Web sites.
In addition, a new version of the Science Next Wave Career Development News RSS feed is now available.
The news feeds are available from the EEVL News section, where they have been added, under appropriate subject headings, to other links to sites which give the latest news, and the job announcements are available from the Jobs & Recruitment hot links: (Engineering, Mathematics and Computing Jobs and Recruitment and Engineering Jobs & Recruitment.).
This allows those visiting the EEVL News and Jobs & Recruitment hot links to scan announcements from a number of relevant sites.
In the case of the Jobs & Recruitment hot links page, relevant records of recruitment agency sites from the EEVL Catalogue are listed below the RSS feed links.
In this way, EEVL is beginning to ‘mesh’ together relevant subject information in various formats from various sources.
Future work at EEVL will hope to mesh together other types of information, with the intention of further facilitating access to subject-based materials.
Our hope is that more publishers will join Pro-Talk Ltd, Jobsite, Centaur Communications Ltd and Science Next Wave in producing RSS feeds of their industry news, job announcements, press releases, events news, or tenders and contract news.
We can then syndicate them at the EEVL site.
This will help to facilitate access to these important sources of information and drive traffic to the publishers’ own Web sites.
Anyone with an interest in providing such information is invited to contact me.
Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Return to top Article Title: “RSS and EEVL: Syndicating industry news and job announcements” Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: Welfare Reform Digest Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Welfare Reform Digest Buzz data database copyright cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Jennie Grimshaw gives a personal account of the creation of the Welfare reform digest.
Social Science Business and Law Hub We are pleased to announce that as of August 1999 SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway), the UK’s number one place to find social science information on the Internet will be expanding its service.
SOSIG provides a browsable and searchable database of thousands of high quality Internet resources of relevance to social science researchers, academics and practitioners.
The gateway will draw on the expertise of a number of specialist organisations within the social sciences to help build its database of resources.
The new partners are: Biz/ed, University of Bristol British Library for Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Canterbury at Kent CTI Centre for Psychology, University of York Department of Sociology, University of Surrey Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, University of London National Institute for Social Work In addition to the expanded catalogue of Internet resources SOSIG will benefit from closer links with the Social Science Research Grapevine service which will provide news of conferences and courses in the social sciences as well as an area for researchers to post CVs and find potential research opportunities and partnerships.
SOSIG is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of the UK Resource Discovery Network (RDN) which will be developing an integrated resource discovery service for the UK.
If you have any queries about the new service please send them to Debra Hiom SOSIG Institute for Learning and Research Technology 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH D.Hiom@bristol.ac.uk The British Library’s WELFARE REFORM DIGEST The British Library has produced a valuable Internet current awareness service for social policy practitioners and researchers interested in the future of the Welfare State.
The Welfare Reform Digest is published monthly on the Web and brings together details of recent publications from a whole host of sources, including research reports, government papers, journals and newspapers.
This site could save people many hours in keeping abreast of new literature on welfare reform, as each article is listed under a subject heading with a detailed abstract and full bibliographic information.
Subjects covered include: care of the elderly, child welfare, education, health care, the minimum wage, pensions, social care, social housing, social security and the welfare state.
Jennie Grimshaw gives the history of this Internet resource: When the Social Policy Information Service was launched by the British Library in December 1996 with me at its head, part of its mission was to facilitate access by social science practitioners to the results of academic research.
Now I was far from being the ideal head of a proactive information service, since I had spent my entire career as a cataloguer, mostly in science and technology libraries and was totally ignorant of social science.
However, in an attempt to fulfil our mission, I began to cast about for ways in which busy social science practitioners might be made painlessly aware of leading edge research.
I also needed to try and educate myself about the literature of the social sciences, current thinking and research trends, so as to appear something less than a complete idiot when talking to clients (potential and actual).
Inspiration dawned in the shape of an idea for the production of a literature digest or current awareness bulletin on a topic of current concern.
Then, in May 1997, the New Labour came into power with a mission of their own, to modernise Britain and to reform the welfare state.
Here was a topic that would be relevant to a wide spectrum of social science practitioners social and health care professionals, educators, pressure groups and the voluntary sector.
Compilation of the digest would involve me in systematically scanning our intake of official publications, journals and monographs, which would educate me about current issues and research in short order.
The subject itself seemed guaranteed to generate impassioned debate, and an extensive literature discussing and evaluating the reforms that was just begging to be digested.
So in the early summer of 1998 I approached the then Science Reference and Information Service Publications Committee with a formal proposal for the production of a monthly printed digest as a priced publication.
The proposal for a printed product was turned down flat as not commercially viable, but the Committee suggested we might launch it experimentally as an electronic journal on the Internet.
Initially the resource would be free, and would add value to the Section web site.
If successful, access to the database we built might become fee-based.
Having scanned and abstracted the literature for four weeks from mid-July to mid-August 1998, we were ready to launch a pilot issue, but ran into a lengthy delay in getting permission from the British Library’s Webmaster to mount the resource on Portico, the BL web site.
We were finally able to mount the pilot issue, six months late, in early 1999.
Since then, the digest has been updated monthly.
It covers reform of health and social care, social housing, the benefits system, pensions, and education, both in the UK and overseas.
It includes abstracts of official documents (policy statements and consultation papers), journal articles, research reports, current monographs and reports in the quality press.
Material is identified through systematic daily scanning of the new books, trade and academic journal issues and UK government documents destined for the open access collections in the Official Publications and Social Sciences Reading Room at St Pancras.
We hope it reflects the cut and thrust of the debate, and will help practitioners to keep up with policy developments, critical commentary on them, and empirical research evaluating their implementation and impacts.
The basic product which we have mounted as a free resource needs to be improved in many ways.
Three spring immediately to mind: Provision of a search engine to supplement the current arrangement under broad subject headings.
Linking of abstracts to full text of documents where these are available on the web.
Extension of the coverage of report literature, which is difficult because the BL’s collection of grey literature is held at the Document Supply Centre two hundred miles away in Yorkshire.
We hope to grow the resource incrementally, and to develop it in time into a comprehensive database.
The next step, now that we have a decent quantity of data mounted, is to promote use of the site through linking to established social science gateways like SOSIG, and articles in the professional press.
So in conclusion I would like to invite you to visit Welfare Reform on the Web at the British Library’s web site at http://www.bl.uk/services/stb/spiswlfr/digest.html.
Please have a look at the goods on offer and let us have your comments on the response form provided.
If I have been wasting my time on this project, an early indication would be welcome so that will no longer have to sit up in bed abstracting Community Care!
Author Details Jennie Grimshaw Email: jennie.grimshaw@bl.uk Article Title: “Planet Sosig Column” Author: Debra Hiom, Jennie Grimshaw Publication Date: 23-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/planet-sosig/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CTI-AFM Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CTI-AFM Conference Buzz software database infrastructure copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Christine Dugdale reports on the 10th CTI-AFM Annual Conference, Brighton.
The 10th CTI-AFM Annual Conference was held during beautiful spring weather on 8 9 April in the historic setting of the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton.
There was nothing traditional, however, about the papers that were presented.
They constituted a stimulating collection of reports of ongoing research and teaching practices.
All-in-all, a fitting set of papers for the last CTI-AFM Conference before the advent of the new Subject Centres that are being planned for next year.
It was to the new Subject Centres that the first speaker first turned his attention.
These are intended to combine pedagogy and technology to help practitioners within the subject context.
Roger King then went on to describe the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education that will be launched formally in late spring.
This followed from the recommendations of the Dearing Report.
It will be a UK-wide professional organisation intended to enhance the status of teaching, maintain and improve the quality of teaching and learning in HE and set standards of good professional practice that others in HE might follow.
The remaining papers of the conference also looked to the future, but addressed present organisations and practices in describing research and, particularly, ongoing methodologies.
Billed as a conference to bring together academics novices and experts interested in harnessing the power of technology to enhance learning, the papers presented this year seemed to offer advice, describe best practice examples (or constructively explain failures) and stimulate thought within the subject area admirably.
There appeared to be a newer emphasis upon web technology and how it could be harnessed in the learning process to improve access to information to a wider group of end-users than upon the more familiar IT presentational packages and aids.
Many papers concentrted upon web technology and addressed the practical and cultural issues surrounding web-based teaching and learning.
A keynote speech by John Schostak highlighted the subjects of many of the themes that emerged from papers throughout the conference.
In particular, he touched upon the contradictions of the availability and use of technology.
IT is harnessed to help teachers to teach and learners to learn and it provides something new and extra to enhance and stimulate the learning experience, but confusion can often result when technology is introduced.
Using the phrase, ‘information swamp’, he suggested that technology can help to transform information into knowledge for decision making or it can simply add to the swamp and confuse users more.
This theme was picked up by a number of papers that demonstrated the use of different teaching packages.
He also emphasised the two aspects of the whole range of issues surrounding cultural concerns; referring to the ‘machine side’ and the ‘human side’ of technology.
In considering organisational and infrastructure issues, he discussed the mechanisms, procedures and communications’ infrastructure necessary to put ideas into action as well as the personal, social and cultural practices required.
Again, these were themes that threaded their way through a number of papers.
Some presenters spoke of the need for cultural changes that would encourage colleagues to adopt the use of technologies in their course designs and delivery.
Others hinted at the need for cultural change when describing courses or teaching support that were championed by individuals or small groups, but might be treated with suspicion, disinterest or indifference by colleagues.
Many found that they had to find ways of overcoming academic autonomy when attempting to introduce new shared technology-based resources.
Others touched upon the need for cultural changes that would translate the theories represented through technology into practices found in the workplace.
As with so many IT-thought-based conferences in a wide range of subject areas that are held today, speakers returned again and again to this theme of ‘people’ issues rather than to technological issues.
There was no dearth of papers describing learning packages and technology-based new teaching, learning and assessment methodologies and organisations at a range of British and overseas institutions, but it was cultural issues that seemed to constantly emerge as the important ones.
‘Cultural change’ appeared to be an umbrella term that covered a wide range of concerns and problems.
A whole raft of interesting thoughts (but no firm conclusions) were raised about the ways in which introducing new technologies might effect the processes of teaching and learning and the psychological impact new technologies might have upon the existing roles and relationships between academics and students.
It would appear that academics find themselves as caught up in problems associated with changing each other’s approaches to technology as LIS professional do in changing academics’ perceptions and adoption of new information technologies.
Thoughts centred around the building of knowledge through conceptual visions that would require changes in cultural practices and organisational infrastructures.
A number of presenters pointed out that much of the technology was, itself, not really new.
It was already there.
Nor was there any lack of web-based teaching materials.
A number of papers, however, referred not only to the difficulty of persuading colleagues to accept and use new technology and new packages, but also to the fact that there was little supporting literature on how technology would effect teaching and learning and the teachers and learners.
There was still a pioneering feel about introducing technology into many courses.
As in many of today’s LIS conferences, many speakers seemed convinced of the importance of introducing technology and of bringing about the necessary cultural changes for any such introduction, but failed to fully explain what these cultural changes should be or how they could be brought about.
The usual questions of document and system ownership arose as well as issues surrounding the concept of sharing and networking resources and of maintaining and financing systems.
The issue of ownership appeared to be a very important one that marked a noticeable difference between a conference arranged for academics than one held for LIS professionals.
Systems described tended to have been created and were being championed by individuals or small groups of individuals.
Consequently, there was a stronger feeling of personal ownership of materials and/or systems even where they were shared.
Those systems that were the focus of papers were not institutional as with most library-models.
At best they were only used by a small group of staff within a single department.
This must raise issues of scaleability that were not often addressed at the conference.
Unlike LIS conferences where questions of finance centre more around the issue of who finances a library-led system/development networked throughout an institution, individual academics who had developed new technology-based courses were more concerned about personal recompense.
Concerns centred around the lack both of acknowledgement of pioneering work and of the amount of effort and time required to design technology-based courses and information-support.
Without adequate recompense system development could rest upon the goodwill and enthusiasm of individual members of staff.
This situation could limit developmental work.
Mention was also made of the fact that systems championed by an individual might be the focus of partisan research and that they might result in uneven adoption with cultural dissonance, although one paper did suggest that evidence of cultural change was beginning to appear.
Over and over again the idea of using technology emerged as a means to the end of achieving ‘best practice’, while ‘human resources’ remained the main ‘bottleneck’ to the advancement of this ideal.
Many papers stressed the fact that technology, of itself, does not change teaching styles.
And that it does not, necessarily, encourage students to use software.
Students do not tend to use different databases voluntarily.
The well-rehearsed arguments heard at LIS conferences that there has to be a constant programme of promotion to students and to teaching colleagues to encourage them to use technology was aired along with the problems encountered because different students are more or less willing to use information and communications technology depending upon a whole range of variable factors such as support and availability of PCs within their institution, individual departments and home.
Since the conference was aimed at academics, the emphasis was rightly upon harnessing technology for teaching.
For someone from a LIS background, however, there was a disappointing lack of references to systems of information provision despite the occasional obligatory mention of lifelong learning and the future importance of technology to provide access to information in every aspect of life.
Too often, papers described isolated incidences of information sharing.
Cultural issues centred very much upon sharing, but sharing amongst fellow academics.
They did not appear to embrace the more fundamental change of sharing with other professionals such as library and IT support staff.
Mention was made of the fact that accountancy is a cross-disciplinary subject area, but not of support services.
Without a closer working relationship and sharing with other staff, academics might well present courses in a more exciting format, but they will only be harnessing technology to support existing practices rather than introducing more innovative ones that embrace an integrated mix of tuition and information provision that embeds IT skills.
Author Details Christine Dugdale University of the West of England Email: Christine.Dugdale@uwe.ac.uk Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Travelling at the Speed of Discovery: The MALIBU Project's Most Valuable Lessons Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Travelling at the Speed of Discovery: The MALIBU Project's Most Valuable Lessons Buzz data framework dissemination archives vocabularies cataloguing multimedia z39.50 interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Valeda Dent with a newcomer's perspective on the MALIBU project.
The MALIBU Project has as its main goal to develop examples of hybrid libraries, focusing specifically on the humanities, at each of three major partner institutions (King’s College London, University of Oxford and University of Southampton).
The research and outcomes of the project have reinforced generally held ideas about issues such as what users want, and how they go about obtaining what they want.
However, it has also highlighted some important distinctions about the process of providing hybrid services to the user and the impact on the hybrid library.
Each discovery has involved a great deal of learning and synthesis of those lessons, followed dissemination to relevant colleagues and institutions through workshops, presentations, papers, etc.
Though the end of this leg of the trip will end in a few months, the most salient lesson of MALIBU is that the journey is far from over.
There is still a great deal of work left to be done in the area of hybrid library management in general.
MALIBU staff identified five areas where the most valuable lessons were learned, though there were certainly many more lessons to be shared.
One unique feature of the MALIBU lessons is that they not only reflect the experience of the MALIBU team, they provide insight into the issues that are important for future uptake, whether by other projects or agencies.
The MALIBU lessons are in the following areas: Overall project management Hybridicity Models Search engine development and interoperability User testing Overall Project Management The MALIBU project utilized a unique organizational structure, with staff on each of the three major partner institution campuses – King's College London, University of Oxford and University of Southampton – participating equally.
Each site had library team and technical representatives, as well as Project Coordination Team (PCT) members.
The PCT members shared coordination of management of the project, a very unique approach to management structure.
The role of the PCT was balanced with the role of the Senior Project Manager, responsible on a daily basis for the operational and functional aspects of the project.
The team members collaborated cross-site to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, everything from design of the search engine prototype to the development of the user questionnaires.
In addition to the cross-site team, the project had local teams that were cross-disciplinary, and it was this structure that allowed for much of the sharing of expertise between teams and sites.
The structure also allowed each team member to contribute to the project based on their skills and knowledge base, and made maximum use of the diverse backgrounds of each team member.
This diversity added a certain depth and richness to the project, as well as provided a meaningful experience for team members.
Much of the learning for the project as a whole began with the process of team members learning from one another.
The distributed nature of the project placed added pressure on communication mechanisms, such as email lists, shared webspace, regular meetings, etc.
; this all proved considerable overhead for the project.
The organizational structure for any project needs to take this type of overhead into account, and investigate the most efficient ways to keep members of the team in touch and connected.
Working on the MALIBU project often (unintentionally) created new opportunities for team members, in the way of full-time and newly created positions based at the partner institutions.
This was indication that at the institutional level, the project was recognized as being important and meaningful, and also, that MALIBU team members had very desireable skills that would serve the institution well.
As some of the MALIBU team staff were on secondment from their initial appointments, participation on MALIBU affected and was often affected by this status.
One lesson that was reinforced time and time again was that of so much to do, so little time.
This lesson had two parts.
Despite long hours and herculean efforts, the MALIBU team still felt time was not on their side – a reflection of the the project generating a great deal of useful but often complex information and lessons that needed to be shared; too much to do so completely within the context of a three year project.
Thus the exit strategies at the institutional level become the vehicles for sharing project outcomes and knowledge widely.
Another lesson from project management was the importance of having a solid platform to provide the theoretic and practical fuel for the project.
The MALIBU models provided that fuel.
Models One of the primary aims of the MALIBU project was and still is the development of hybrid library models, focusing on organizational and management aspects.
From the start, a tension existed between wide applicability and practical applicability, an issue that became increasingly obvious during the lifetime of the project.
Models require supporting tools and documentation to allow for their assessment; such assessment is the only way to assure they providing a strategic framework and informing relevant decisions.
Early on in the project it became clear that within the highly interdisciplinary MALIBU team, development of these models challenged basic assumptions about user behaviour and the functions of the hybrid library.
It was essential to go back to the basics and to map user actions from the beginning of their search process – the query – to the end – the answer.
This process followed the user through identifying the question, evaluation, location of resources, manipulation and analyzation of information.
The resulting framework provided a solid platform for the other models to be built upon.
These models included the Organization and Management models, and the Hybrid Library Services model.
As part of this process, a greater mutual understanding and common vocabulary was developed within the project team.
The models, once developed, provided the basis for the development of the MALIBU search engine prototype, and also highlighted the importance of complimentarity between a dynamic physical environment and the hybrid environment.
We called this concept “hybridicity”.
Hybridicity Project MALIBU's own prototype search engine was designed to give prominence to both local resources and external resources of relevance to Humanities scholars in an increasingly multimedia world.
Questionnaires had shown the breadth of resources consulted from radio programmes to archives and electronic citations to microforms, supplemented by consultation of the "respected peer".
We were encouraged that users showed enthusiasm for a friendly, uncomplicated, introduction into relevant but unfamiliar resources.
Archives become less hidden away and web resources more accessible.
Providing a welcoming electronic environment needs to be supplemented by a dynamic physical environment.
Southampton University's extension of its main library with an Electronic Information Services Wing provided an effective example of a model for bringing together both hybrid resources and services in an organised fashion.
For example, music can be listened to and worked with in a managed environment much closer to traditional resources such as books and music scores.
Training in a well designed training room gives the librarian an opportunity for "hands on" teaching for searching "hybrid" resources.
It also provides an occasion to bring students into the library to retain more familiarity with traditional resources in which the library has made such a huge investment over the years.
This proximity of services gives the librarian an opportunity to work closer to users and remain more aware of their needs.
MALIBU's 'digital library' training courses for information services staff , particularly in Oxford, proved very popular and timely.
They reflected the need to update digital skills (supplemented by project management skills) for the librarian who wishes to become the truly rounded "hybrarian".
At the same time, the hybrid library emphasis of the eLib projects has enabled us to focus on new library developments with a truly hybrid library awareness.
We have come closer to the scenario where traditional resources, like physical libraries and archives, are exploited to their full extent, but in a managed environment with guided access to the global electronic world.
Search Engine Development and Interoperability The Malibu Search Engine prototype interface was designed to simultaneously search many different types of on-line information resources or 'targets', including OPACS, full-text journals, web sites, archival finding aids and digital archives.
Developing such a tool was always going to be a major technical challenge, but in fact also turned out to be a time consuming and complex exercise in administration.
One of the technical challenges was the fact that the Search Interface was developed using 'agent' technology; it was constructed as a series of independent agents that communicate through a 'meta-agent'.
This technology is still fairly new and more complex than the traditional development methodologies, but the benefit has been that as newly written agents have been completed, they have been fairly easily integrated into the Interface.
Another main technical challenge was raised by the diversity of the targets chosen for searching.
Roughly half of them used Z39.50, a search and retrieval protocol, to deliver information.
Z39.50 was developed with adherence to a certain standard, thus the Z39.50 targets should have been straightforward to communicate with.
This was not the case, and we found that a slightly different approach had to be taken with each Z39.50 target to successfully obtain search results.
The remaining targets were web sites that had their own proprietary method of searching their data, which the Malibu Search Agent attempted to emulate.
In practice, we discovered that we needed to write a separate agent for each of these targets rather than just one per target type.
Negotiation with the providers of the targets was much more time consuming and complex than was ever envisaged.
It was not always easy, for instance, to determine who the technical contact was, and even when identified, (s)he was often not available.
Much time was spent waiting for responses, and in some cases, discussions with technical staff eventually came to nothing, as they seemed unable to respond to queries from MALIBU in sufficient detail.
Some resource providers wanted to charge for access, which was unexpected, and some persistently referred MALIBU to the sales staff.
This inconsistent response pattern affected the development of the agents in turn; development could take a few hours to several weeks.
The development process for the search engine prototype was reiterative, and often ran in parallel to the user testing process, with users providing feedback that was fed back into ongoing development.
User Testing Users are not a heterogeneous group.
They have different methods of working, which will reflect their character, their particular situation and perhaps most importantly their previous experience.
It is perfectly reasonable behaviour to follow strategies that have proven successful in the past, but the rapid changes which now take place in the world of information provision mean that many paths that were once useful may now be more like dead-ends.
A source that has proved successful in the past will be often used for new searches, whether it is apparently appropriate or not; the "comfort" factor is very influential.
Equally, a search strategy that produces acceptable results when looking for an item in a library catalogue will be employed in a very different situation, such as using full-text services or online archives.
When using electronic services, a lack of understanding of the data that is offered and how it is organised is more likely to lead to poor quality results than in the print world, where users may find it easier to gain an overview.
In the same way, it is less likely that unfamiliar resources will be tried.
Few end-users have the luxury of enough time to follow up service announcements, publicity flyers, etc as they appear.
Unless the incentive is very strong, or there is a fortuitous coincidence of discovering a new resource just when information is needed, the learning curve is too much effort.
At present, personal recommendation by a respected "peer" (who may be a librarian, colleague, supervisor) is probably the most effective way of persuading users of any level of experience to try something new.
The hybrid library service aims to provide information in the fittest format for its users' purposes.
Doing so does not stop at selection of materials to be provided, but involves adding value by knowing users and their circumstances, and by fostering the expectation that time spent updating information skills is a good investment.
There is a balance to be reached between suppressing variations that act as a barrier to use and impoverishing the quality of the information itself.
Conclusion The MALIBU Project will leave as its trademark, a road map.
A rather complex one, but one that will compliment the maps that will no doubt be left by the other hybrid library projects.
These maps, a mosaic of the outcomes and deliverables for each project, as well as the informal lessons learned, will clearly indicate what supplies are needed to travel, have warning signs for those who will follow similar routes, suggestions about alternative routes to research, and hints about areas to investigate that can’t yet be seen on the map.
A very valuable legacy indeed.
Author Details   Michael Cave Valeda F. Dent Jessie Hey Ann Lees Astrid Wissenburg Article Title: "Travelling at the Speed of Discovery: The MALIBU Project’s Most Valuable Lessons" Author: Michael Cave, Valeda F. Dent, Jessie Hey, Ann Lees, Astrid Wissenburg Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/malibu/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: Building Community Information Networks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: Building Community Information Networks Buzz url Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff reviews 'Building community information networks: strategies and experiences,' edited by Sheila Pantry.
My first reaction when asked to review this book was "What is a community information network?"
Fortunately the authors of the book foresaw such a response and were thoughtful enough to include the following definition in the opening chapter: "a [network of computers] which provide: community information; and a means for the community to communicate".
Obvious when you think about it.
Furthermore, the opening chapter gives a brief overview of what characterises a community network from any other (that they have a local focus and promote free access to all) and sets out the impetus behind their creation.
Many of the issues raised in this first chapter are explored and illustrated later in the book.
However, dispite the introductory chapter, do not be decieved.
This book is not designed to introduce Community Information Networks, and neither does it claim to be, for in the next two chapters the reader is launched into the gory details of a Community Information Network project proposal and how one may procede.
These chapters come early in the book, suggesting that it is aimed squarely at those familiar with the concept of Community Information Networks and are preparing to embark on road to creating one.
If this is the case then I suspect these two chapters will be a guiding light indeed I would suspect that including swathes of Chapter Two into a project proposal is a sure fire way to receiving a cheque.
Having introduced the concepts and then suggesting some ways of developing these into something tangible, the book moves on to explore some of the other work in the area.
Helen Leech introduces the work of the CIRCE project that is "...looking at issues to do with using Internet or other new technologies to network community information"; Graham Bagshaw reviews some of the technologies available; and in what is perhaps the longest and most discursive chapter in the book, Kevin Harris examines the sociological aspects of an informed community.
Much of the later part of the book is devoted to examples of Community Information Networks in practice, giving several examples including "the New Library: the people's network", a national initiative to network public libraries; the "Barcelona Community Network", a vast metropolitan network; and the "Cambridge Online City", perhaps the most interesting because it represents a real, close to home example of a Community Information Network that is built on and embodies the principles discussed in the rest of the book.
The book concludes with an extensive bibliography and a not so extensive glossary.
I came at this book a newcomer to the world of Community Information Networks but having read this book feel both that community networking is not only important, but essential.
The Internet and other technologies provide vast scope for global communication, and this book provides a guide to tapping this improve our everyday lives.
My only complaint would be the lack of a summary from the author to bring it all to a close.
Author Details   Peter Cliff Resource Discovery Network Systems Developer UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Building Community Information Networks: Strategies and Experiences" Author: (Edited by) Shiela Pantry Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/checkout-review/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Homer Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Homer Buzz data database archives thesaurus identifier algorithm url standards Citation BibTex RIS Martin Mueller reads Homer electronically with the TLG, Perseus, and the Chicago Homer.
Introduction and summary In the following pages I look at reading Homer in Greek as a paradigm of “reading with a dictionary” and other forms of “look-up” reading for which a digital environment offers distinct advantages.
I take as my point of departure the activity of reading Homer in a print environment with a text, dictionary, and commentary, and then consider the added value of three electronic tools: the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), a virtually complete archive of all ancient Greek texts the Perseus Project, a bilingual text-and-dictionary web site that provides access to a large chunk of classical and Hellenistic Greek texts the Chicago Homer, a specialized bilingual web site of Early Greek epic that will be published by the University of Chicago Press late in 2000 [1] What can you do with any electronic tool that you cannot do with a printed text and a dictionary?
And what can you do with a special tool like the Chicago Homer that you cannot do with more broadly based tool such as Perseus or the TLG?
I want to give concrete answers to those questions, but I also want to use the particular example as a way of reflecting on the ways in which information technology offers some distinct advantages for “reading” canonical texts and navigating the envelope of annotation and finding tools that has traditionally surrounded them.
Reading electronically There is much to be said in favor of lowering the claims made for what electronic editions can or cannot do.
The transformative power of “e-ditions” is sometimes wildly exaggerated, and in the collision of authorial hyperbole and readerly skepticism it is easy to lose sight of the limited but significant advances that electronic editions offer to readers in search of better understanding.
Any edition of a text, whether printed or electronic, rests on ancient technologies of reading and writing, which in turn rest on evolved human capacities for processing language.
It is worth repeating the obvious point that the core activities of reading and writing in a narrow sense have remained and will remain quite unaffected by information technology.
Although virtually all writers have come to depend on the convenience of word processors, it is doubtful whether word processors have on average produced faster or better writers.
As for reading, the computer industry has only begun to design reader-friendly devices, and it will be some time before any computer screen can compete with a moderately well designed printed page.
Even when it does, it will not transform the act of reading.
Considered as a tool for reading, an electronic edition of a text is a very poor cousin of a decently printed book.
Sometimes an electronic edition is the only version of a document available to a reader.
In such cases, it serves as a better surrogate than, say, microfilm.
But with highly canonical texts like Homer printed editions are plentiful and are either available freely in libraries or can be bought for little money.
Thus the added value of something like the Chicago Homer cannot rest on any claim that it presents a superior tool for reading a text, where “reading” is understood as the bundle of activities involved in going through a book more or less from beginning to end.
If the computer is on the whole a wretched tool for reading (and is likely to remain so), it is on the other hand a terrific tool for looking up things.
The simple reasons for this bear spelling out.
Reading in a broad sense consists of “getting ready” or “getting there” and actually reading.
Once I have the book I want to read, getting ready is simple: I sit down, open the book, and read.
I may also adjust the light, get a cushion, or do various other things involved in curling up with a book.
In any event, getting ready takes up only a small fraction of the time spent reading, unless I’m the kind of reader for whom getting ready to read is the more important part of the activity, in which case I may doze off after a few minutes.
When I look things up in a dictionary or look for a passage in a book, the balance shifts.
Getting ready takes as much time as reading itself.
In fact, looking for something in a book that is not designed for look-ups may take much longer than reading it once I have found it.
What people ordinarily call “reading” is actually a fairly special case of the complex activity “getting there and reading.” It describes a situation in which “getting there” takes up a negligible fraction of the total activity because I have the text at hand, am competent to read it without further aid, or have immediate access to and am familiar with such look-up tools as I require.
But such situations of readerly equilibrium are special.
[2] They do not apply to the novice who has insufficient knowledge to make sense of the text or to the curious and expert reader who finds his knowledge no longer sufficient and wants to know more.
While computers offer no advantages for “reading” in the narrow sense, they can, on the other hand, reduce by orders of magnitude the time it takes to “get there.” If a digital environment does better than print in achieving an acceptable balance of “getting there ” and “reading” it offers a clear advantage for working with a text or “reading” in the broad sense.
Reading ancient Greek electronically The reading of ancient Greek offers a good example of the very practical components of this cost benefit analysis.
Very few readers know ancient Greek well enough to read it without frequent recourse to a dictionary or grammar, and because of their highly specialized interests, the few readers who can do so are likely to be particularly intensive users of such reference works.
Reading ancient Greek is an activity with an intrinsically high look-up cost.
If in reading the Iliad, I need to look up a word, it may take me thirty seconds to find it in a dictionary.
If I follow up a citation, it may take another thirty seconds if it is in the Iliad; it may take a minute or more if it is in another book on a shelf within reach.
If I do this occasionally, it is a pleasant interruption from the flow of reading.
If I do it often, the minutes add up very quickly.
Reading ancient Greek with the help of the TLG There are three electronic tools that in different ways can cut down the time of getting there.
The most fundamental is the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG).
This is an electronic archive of virtually every ancient Greek text.
From one perspective, it is “merely” a digital transcription of print editions, some better than others.
The digital encoding includes nothing but the texts and the conventional citation schemes.
The query potential of the data is quite primitive since the archive only supports conventional string searches.
From another perspective, this thirty-year old project is a phenomenal achievement because it has put all the remains of Greek literature within the confines of one search space.
For any word in any text, I can find the other occurrences of that word in the text, in the whole corpus, or in a chosen subset of the corpus.
The task of looking for all occurrences of a Greek word in the printed canon is practically impossible.
Ten years ago such a search with the search tool Pandora took about 45 minutes.
Today, it may not be possible to formulate a search that takes more than a few seconds to execute on an up-to-date desktop computer.
The TLG makes no concessions to the user.
The available search engines for it do not tell you what a word means; they simply return all the lines of text in which a specified character string occurs, together with the canonical citation of the line.
You must know a fair amount about Greek dialects and morphological rules to retrieve the differently inflected occurrences of a “word.” Search results are not summarized in any way, whether a search returns three or 3,000 hits.
But if you want to know whether a word in the Iliad also occurs in the late antique poet Nonnus, the TLG is the only place to go, and it will tell you in a split second.
And the TLG is a good demonstration of the fact that in the conversion from printed to digital text the first step is by far the biggest: once an electronic text exists, a user with sufficient expertise in both the discipline and the technology can perform an amazing variety of previously impossible searches.
The text and dictionary environment of Perseus The text-and-dictionary environment of Perseus makes its archive much more accessible to a reader with less expertise in the discipline or the technology.
Perseus offers a very special digital environment, currently unmatched for any other substantial linguistic corpus.
It contains a large chunk of the surviving texts from archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greece, many of them derived from the TLG, and all of them accompanied by English translations.
Every wordform in the Perseus corpus contains its possible morphological descriptions, and through this morphological parser it is linked to the lemmata or dictionary entry forms in Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ), the most authoritative dictionary of ancient Greek.
All the citations in the dictionary are in turn linked back to the Perseus corpus.
The English equivalent of this would be a digital corpus in which any wordform in much of the literature from Chaucer to Joyce is linked directly to its lemma in the Oxford English Dictionary.
[3] When I read the Iliad in the mountain cabin where I am writing this piece, it is not faster to look up a word online than it is to look it up in the dictionary: my modem connection is very slow, and since I have used my copy of LSJ for forty years, I can find my way around it quite fast.
On the other hand, if I want to follow up a citation from LSJ, I have a choice between using my very slow modem or not doing it at all: there is no corpus of Greek literature on the shelves of my mountain cabin.
At home over a DSL connection or in my office, the advantages of Perseus are striking: if I click on a word in the text, I will get to the dictionary entry in less than three seconds, and in less than ten second I can get from a citation in the dictionary to the full text.
If I look up enough words, the time savings are very considerable.
There is of course a “moral hazard” aspect to this improvement.
The easier it is to do something, the less I’m inclined to ask whether it is worth doing in the first place.
Every form of saving time generates new ways of wasting it.
That melancholy truth, however, is a better argument for moderating my enthusiasm about such advances than for rejecting them.
If you have an interest in reading ancient Greek (a very big “if”) there is little doubt that the digital environment of the Perseus corpus offers distinct advantages to readers at all levels of competence and encourages forms of textual exploration by drastically lowering the cost of “getting there.” If I make my way through a book of the Iliad with the help of Perseus I will almost certainly use a printed text of the Iliad to “read” and use the screen text as a point of departure for look-ups.
Screen display of Greek would have to improve by orders of magnitude before I give up the clarity and familiarity of the printed page.
It is a nice question whether in such a case the computer is an extension of the book or the other way round.
But the modalities of my work are more heavily dependent on the computer than on the book.
Without the book, I would curse the wretched display of the text on the screen.
Without the computer, I would have to pay the look-up costs of the print medium, usually high, and often prohibitive.
Compared with the raw text archive of the TLG, the data in Perseus are more heavily mediated.
The morphological tools in particular make Greek texts much more accessible to readers with little Greek.
Expert readers will also find Perseus more convenient and informative provided they need not go beyond the (generous) limits of its archive.
Searching by lemma, which you can do in Perseus, but not in the TLG, is simpler and faster than capturing the variants of a lemma through through truncation and wildcard characters.
Perseus also contains primitive but effective frequency data.
Proper humanists like to shudder at numbers, but very little reflection shows that in order to claim knowledge of a word you must know not only what it means, but how common it is and in what contexts it is likely to occur.
Perseus keeps frequency data by broad genres (hexameter, poetry, drama, prose) as well as by author.
It tells you at a glance and with some precision that the first word of the Iliad is more common in epic than in poetry or drama and much less common in prose.
It is much harder to extract this kind of information with equal precision from the TLG or a print dictionary.
Translation and transliteration in Perseus Oscar Wilde said of Loeb editions that they were the kind of book where you have to look at the original to figure out what the translation means.
He had earned the right to this joke by his great competence as a Hellenist.
Today most professional Hellenists depend heavily on translations, a fact that is no less true for being weakly acknowledged.
To read Greek for the most part means to read bilingually: it is probably a very common practice to “preread” in English and focus on key passages in the original.
As an “electronic Loeb Library” Perseus does not only provide a service ad usum delphini, but is a basic reference tool for the professional scholar.
Perseus also allows the display of text in Latin transliteration.
Hellenists like to look askance at this practice, for reasons that have little to do with philology and a lot with guild mentality.
There is nothing particularly authentic about Greek as it has been printed for 500 years.
Transliteration not only involves no significant loss of information but is arguably closer to the orthographical practices of Plato’s youth.
But most importantly, transliteration can be a surprisingly effective tool in making some aspects of the original accessible to a reader without Greek.
An educated speaker of English has a tacit knowledge of many Greek words, which it is possible to draw on in pedagogical situations through the combination of translation, transliteration, and some of the search features in Perseus.
With some guidance, even Greekless readers can get a feel for the semantic contours of keywords or concepts in Greek texts that it would not be possible to derive from the translation alone.
This limited but real access to aspects of the original for a Greekless reader is a distinct feature of the electronic environment in Perseus.
It is not matched by anything available in print.
The Chicago Homer The Chicago Homer is a highly specialized tool.
It restricts itself to the small corpus of the quarter million words that make up Early Greek epic (Homer, Hesiod, Homeric Hymns), but building on the base of TLG and Perseus, it processes the data of its narrow corpus much more heavily in ways that are responsive to the linguistic peculiarities of the corpus and the needs of sophisticated researchers as well as readers with little or no Greek.
The very granular (and often manual) data processing that underlies this project is simply not feasible with larger corpora like Perseus or TLG, and except for the New Testament there probably is no Greek text that has received similarly close attention.
The parallel is not an accident.
There will come a day when nobody will read ancient Greek anymore.
But Homer and and the New Testament will almost certainly be the last two texts to go.
Like TLG and Perseus, the Chicago Homer does not concern itself with textual variants, but accepts a more or less standard text for what it is.
While it is the case that the electronic medium offers many opportunities (so far unrealized) for representing textual variance in Early Greek epic, it is also the case that for all practical purposes dependence on any standard text is good enough to realize most of the benefits that accrue from the query potential of a text in a digital format.
Like Perseus, the Chicago Homer includes several features for readers with little or no Greek.
It uses the translations of Richmond Lattimore and Daryl Hine.
Both translators closely follow the line structure of the original and make it easier for a Greekless reader to navigate the original via the translation.
The Chicago Homer also includes an English-Greek index derived from Lattimore’s Homer translations, which permits quite precise triangulations of semantic aspects of the original.
The most distinctive features of the Chicago Homer are extensions of Morpheus, the morphological parser in Perseus.
Morpheus is a bundle of rules that establish for every wordform in the Perseus corpus its possible grammatical descriptions.
The Chicago Homer disambiguates the many instances where a wordform has more than one valid descriptions and establishes the grammatical form it represents in a specific location.
This is sometimes useful for the novice reader, although such readers usually do not have much difficulty determining which of several possible descriptions applies in a particular context.
The true utility of such disambiguation lies elsewhere: the Chicago Homer contains a complete inventory of all morphological phenomena separately or in combination.
Thus readers who encounter a particular morphological form (eg aorist optative passive) can look for other forms that match it wholly or in part.
At a more abstract level, the Chicago Homer supports inquiries into the frequency and distribution of morphological phenomena across the corpus of Early Greek epic.
This is a pretty arcane field, but for those interested in it, the Chicago Homer gives very fast access at different levels of granularity to information that could not easily be extracted from the TLG or Perseus.
A second extension is also based on but leads away from Morpheus.
Phrasal repetition (“rosy-fingered dawn”) lies at the heart of Homeric poetry, and the kind of repetition found in Homer can be captured by a computer with considerable precision.
Because morphological disambiguation has lemmatization as a byproduct the Chicago Homer contains a a version of the text in which every inflected form is replaced by its lemma, and this abstract model of the text is the basis for a complete index of all repeated phrases or strings of words that occur more than once.
Because the lemmatized text ignores textual difference due to inflectional variants, the index supports a considerable amount of “fuzzy matching.” Repeated phrases are treated as lexical items and can be searched by length, frequency, location, or words contained.
As a result, the Chicago Homer offers significant advantages for the systematic investigation of repetitive phenomena, whether at a summary or finely granular levels.
Printed commentaries, such as the great nineteenth century editions by Leaf and Ameis-Hentze, have done an excellent job of recording repeated lines and half-lines.
But there are several ways in which the management of this information in a digital environment is superior: The local identification of repetitions in print commentaries rests on variable criteria of significance.
In the Chicago Homer, an algorithm is used to generate the list of repetitions.
While this algorithm is liable to a (very small) margin of error for false positives and negatives, its very “stupidity” is a huge advantage: repeated phrases that readers experience as “meaningful” are embedded in a wealth of “meaningless” functional or grammatical repetition that turns out to be surprisingly interesting for many purposes.
The Chicago Homer offers for the first time a firm empirical base for defining the circumstances under which something “counts as” a repetition of a certain kind.
The sheer mass of Homeric repetitions makes it difficult to generalize about repetitive phenomena with precision if the evidence exists in the form of individual annotation of particular lines, from which it is possible, but extremely tedious, to aggregate data for specific purpose.
The database in the Chicago Homer contains some 180,000 occurrences of about 36,000 distinct repetitions.
These data can be quickly grouped, sorted, and summarized by various criteria.
Perhaps most strikingly, repeated phrases can be displayed in the text as links from which the reader can go to other occurrences of the phrase, navigating, as it were, the neural networks of bardic memory.
While the index of repeated phrases exists in the Chicago Homer as tables in a databases, the results of queries based on them can be “projected” on the “screen” of the text.
This is probably the most original feature of this project, and it can be thought of as a visual simulation of the experience of the putative original audience for whom repeated phrases resonated with the contexts of their other occurrences.
This feature is of equal interest to the novice and expert reader.
For the novice, it identifies potential points of resonance.
For the expert, it establishes the degrees and parameters of such resonance with a precision not found in any other tool.
Conclusion Let us take stock of the extensions that various electronic tools offer to the reader of Homer beyond the resources of the page and the associated finding tools of a print environment.
The TLG, Perseus, and the Chicago Homer wrap different layers of information around the text.
A great deal of tedious labor went into the construction of these layers in such a way that a contemporary user can, in most instances, retrieve information virtually instantaneously.
In the TLG, this additional layer was created by the transformation of the corpus of printed Greek into a single search environment in which for any single text all other texts become an archive of lexical information.
It took decades to complete this task, and probably nobody in the early seventies imagined that thirty years later a user with relatively modest resources could within seconds complete almost any imaginably search.
In Perseus, the additional layer consists of the integration of a narrower corpus with a morphological parser, the major dictionary, and the simple but powerful quantitative reporting powers of a digital text environment.
As a result, the canonical Greek authors from Homer to Plutarch exist in a search space that greatly lowers access hurdles for inexperienced users and gives to professional Hellenists much more precise data about usage.
The Chicago Homer surrounds the small corpus of Early Greek epic with a more intensive layer of information.
It goes beyond Perseus in disambiguating all word forms with multiple morphological descriptions.
Its index of repetitions takes advantage of information technology to create a complete inventory of a stylistic feature that is crucial to this particular form of poetry.
This is a very corpus specific form of textual elaboration and probably would not be a sensible thing to do for other works.
How much difference do these tools make to our reading of Homer?
None of them will turn a reader without aptitude or interest into a good reader of Homer.
A gifted reader with a dog-eared print copy will always do better than a plodding user with a fancy digital toolkit, and disappointment is in store for whoever thinks that using Perseus or the Chicago Homer is a substitute for learning Greek.
On the other hand, for a sensitive reader with a knack for taking advantage of the query potential of electronic texts, the tools create new opportunities for working with texts and will produce some insights not easily available to the reader of the printed page.
One should not expect more from computers.
References [1] The Chicago Homer is a bilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with or without Greek.
Its editors are Ahuvia Kahane and Martin Mueller.
Its technical editors are Craig Berry and Bill Parod.
The Chicago Homer will be published by the University of Chicago Press with the support of Northwestern University Academic Technologies and the Northwestern University Library.
[2] Craig Berry (in correspondence) draws my attention to the famous scene in the eighth book of the Confessions, where the despairing Augustine hears the voice of a child next door repeating the refrain “tolle lege” (take, read), opens his copy of the Bible at random and finds the verse that triggers his conversion: “Augustine’s conversion experience could be described (perversely but accurately) as a fantasy of rapid-access text retrieval.
The point being that – like the airplane – the electronic text/concordance is a technology that finally lets us do something we’ve always wanted to do.” [3] The analogy ignores some questions of scale and orthography.
Perseus, which includes pretty much all the highly canonical Greek texts, contains about four million words (roughly five times the Shakespearean corpus), compared to the 76 million words of the TLG.
An English “Perseus” from Chaucer to Joyce would be a database of some 500 million words with several million distinct wordforms.
The aggregate of Chadwyck-Healey databases approximates such a corpus, but the variability of English spelling makes cross-corpus searches difficult, and there are as yet no tools that let users look up a modern spelling and retrieve all orthographic variants.
Perhaps because ancient Greek is a heavily inflected language, the orthographic practice of manuscripts and editions was standardized from an early period on.
Thus orthographic variance is a relatively minor difficulty in the digital transcription of ancient Greek texts.
It is a major problem with creating an English corpus that can be dependably searched.
[4] See also a companion article to this one by Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox et al, “Knowledge Management in the Perseus Digital Library”, Ariadne Issue 25, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/rydberg-cox/ Author Details   Martin Mueller email: martinmueller@nwu.edu www.nwu.edu Article Title: “Electronic Homer” Author: Martin Mueller Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/mueller/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The 7th Institutional Web Management Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The 7th Institutional Web Management Workshop Buzz data usability accessibility copyright e-learning vle foi foia url research Citation BibTex RIS Catherine Ewart gives us her view of IWMW 2003, University of Kent, June 2003.
This year’s event [1], subtitled “Supporting our Users”, was held during a spell of gloriously sunny weather at the University of Kent’s campus at Canterbury, which has stunning views of the city and the cathedral.
As a result of feedback from last year’s event, I had been invited to join the Programme Committee to help provide input on the needs of the research user (the academic researchers, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students who use institutional web services).
It was especially rewarding to be able to contribute to the Workshop agenda and to represent the research side of higher education.
Plenary sessions The business was spread across two and a half days and consisted of plenary talks interspersed with parallel discussion groups and workshops.
The Workshop was introduced by Brian Kelly of UKOLN and opened with an address by the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor David Melville, who, after giving us an overview of the University, entertained us with his views on “How to deal with Spiders” the senior staff within higher education institutions who are beginning to realise that web services can be used to help achieve their organisational objectives.
At the wine reception: enjoying a glass or two in the sunshine The other eight plenary talks were as follows: John Burke from JISCInfoNet spoke about “JISCInfoNet: Helping Web Managers to Support Our Users” and gave useful insights into how the Freedom of Information Act 2002 will impact on Web managers.
He also managed to infer that people from Newcastle, (I am one), like to drink a lot and eat curries.
David Supple from the University of Birmingham spoke about “Web Strategies: Bridging a Continent”, recounting the University of Birmingham’s experiences in taking control of its multiple sites and their various designs which involved departing from established practices by building an in-house content management system and adopting an “anti-guru” philosophy.
Sarah Agarwal from the University of Bristol reminded us that we should be “Focusing on Users: Gathering Users’ Requirements”.
Dave Beckett from the ILRT at the University of Bristol and Brian Kelly from UKOLN spoke about “Semantic Web Technologies for UK HE and FE Institutions”.
Gareth McAleese from the University of Ulster and Ricky Rankin from Queen’s University Belfast gave us their opposing views on “Content Management Buy or Build?” Steve Musgrave from Blackpool and the Fylde College told us about the emergence of locally-grown citizen portals in his talk “Community Portals A False Dawn over the Field of Dreams?”.
Dr Alejandro Armellini from the University of Kent spoke about “e-Learning: The Strategy Continuum”.
Mark Stiles from Staffordshire University told us about “Beyond your VLE: Strategic Challenges”.
Discussion Groups The discussion groups invited delegates to identify the key difficulties being faced in e-learning, information management, research, strategy & management, technical, usability & accessibility issues, and encouraged discussion of possible solutions.
In my own group, which considered research issues, there was a very good debate which centred around three key areas.
We acknowledged that first we needed better mechanisms for sharing our solutions to problems and the Institutional Web Management Workshop was certainly one important way of keeping in touch with the solutions being developed by others.
The second area was about how we address support for researchers who work across traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
Here, we felt that directories of expertise might be able to help like-minded researchers working in different disciplines to make contact and team up to discuss cross-disciplinary approaches.
The third area addressed the need to relieve researchers of the burden of repeated data input, particularly data on areas of expertise.
We concluded that the situation could be improved by better design of the forms used to collect data (for example by pre-populating them, where the data is available) and by integrating the point of data input into systems which researchers use regularly and out of necessity.
Workshops In addition to the discussion groups, there were twenty-four workshop sessions addressing a diverse selection of topics from “Managing People and Resources”, through “Implementing a Web Strategy” to “Implementation of a Commercial Content Management System”.
A Canterbury Tale In the summing-up on the last day, it became clear that many participants were attending the Workshop for the first time.
Some of these were my own colleagues from the research councils and research council institutes.
Before writing this report I asked a research council web developer how useful the workshop had been from his perspective.
He responded enthusiastically, saying that as well as giving him his first visit to Canterbury Cathedral, (part of the excellent social programme), he especially appreciated the opportunity to meet colleagues from the Higher Education web community who are dealing with similar issues and problems to those facing research council web teams.
I heartily concur.
The research councils will certainly be represented at next year’s event.
Well done to the local organisers at Kent who made our stay in the Garden of England such an enjoyable one and well done to Brian Kelly and UKOLN for continuing to make the Workshop interesting and relevant.
The PPARC Web team in the cloisters of Canterbury Cathedral References Institutional Web Management Workshop 2003:Supporting Our Users http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2003/ Author Details Dr Catherine F Ewart Head of Information Management PPARC Email: catherine.ewart@pparc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.pparc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “The Seventh Institutional Web Management Workshop” Author: Catherine Ewart Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/iwmw2003-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digitization: Do We Have a Strategy?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digitization: Do We Have a Strategy?
Buzz framework database archives metadata digitisation copyright preservation cataloguing marc url research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS David Pearson suggests that the library sector should find a mechanism to put digitisation high on the agenda.
The notion that we are living through times of great change in the communication of information and the transmission of texts is a truism which will bring a weary look to most professionals with any kind of involvement in the area.
The digital age, the information age, the electronic age – we’ve all heard these terms so many times and have sat through innumerable discussions, and seen even more documents, trying to sort out what it all means.
There are almost as many views on the likely pace of change and the shape of the landscape 10 or 20 years from now as there are librarians to hold forth on the subject.
Perhaps this helps to explain why the library community as a whole seems to be in such a rudderless state regarding the creation of digital content; no shortage of action, but no overall sense of direction.
I am talking here about digitization of our documentary heritage, that vast mass of books, archives and other media which fill our library shelves today.
The fundamental truth is that digital technology, including its associated communication networks, has radically altered the way in which texts can be accessed.
And for the majority of users, texts (or other form of content, such as images) are more important than books.
Discussions about books, and about how wonderful and essential they are, tend to confuse the distinction between texts, and books.
“Book” is often used as a synonym for “text”; when Milton enthused about the importance of a good book as “the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life” he was actually meaning a good text; a collection of words put together so as to inspire, educate, communicate … all the things that texts are capable of.
The numerous other writers throughout history who have expounded on the qualities of books have usually been using the term in the same way.
This is not to say that books are not in themselves potentially wonderful objects; their form is a masterpiece of design and they have considerable aesthetic potential, something which has been exploited by printers, typefounders and bookbinders down the ages.
As historic artefacts, they may also have great value; book historians are increasingly coming alive to the lessons that annotated or otherwise personalised copies of books have to offer, and to the subtler arguments about the effect which the physical format has on the delivery of the message.
These points are, however, something of a sideshow to that which most users see as the primary purpose of books, both new and old; to be the containers of texts.
Books were invented so that people could get at texts, and libraries followed as a logical extension of the theme.
People want the texts that are contained in books, and libraries present an efficient way of serving popular need by bringing whole collections of books together in one place.
People will go to libraries because they hold the texts they need, and make a whole lot more texts available besides, which may be relevant also.
The digital revolution has the power to run a coach and horses through all of this.
If a text is held electronically on a server connected to the Internet, it becomes available anywhere in the world through a few keystrokes; no need to go to a library.
The importance of texts remains unchanged, and is likely to do so until a method of communication is developed which does not rely on words.
“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime”, but the absolute need for books as the containers of those rimes may disappear.
There are numerous arguments marshalled against this drift, most of them spurious in the long run.
It is frequently observed that more and more books are published with each passing year, with no indication they are yet becoming like the horse to the motor car.
People like books, they are familiar and comfortable with them; our own generation is never likely to move away from that, but we should be wary when predicting the future.
The academic scientific community (unlike the humanities one) is one which is already largely converted to the philosophy that it doesn’t exist if it’s not on the net, or at least online, and that trend will surely grow.
Many people point to the clumsy and unsatisfactory nature of the technology – slow transmission, ugly presentation, the difficulty of reading large amounts of text from a screen rather than a piece of paper.
These are all true today but will they be equally true in 20 years’ time, given the pace of technological development?
People worry about the problems of digital preservation, and whether the e-texts of today will still be readable ten years from now.
We all know some standard horror stories to illustrate this, but again, can we really believe that this will be other than a transient problem?
Whether we like it or not, the technology already exists to convert the world’s entire documentary heritage to digital form, although the money to do it is not presently forthcoming.
Those who do make use of digital surrogates, or born digital material, will generally recognise the benefits of such ready access, though they may still be reading the results on a paper print-out.
If you wish to check a reference to the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1750 there is now no need to go to a library to do it, and to call up what is almost certainly a closed access item.
A few keystrokes to reach the site of the Internet Library of Early Journals e-lib project will produce the text on screen, and you can print off as many pages as you like without arguing with conservation-steered librarians about photocopying fragile material.
[1] How have we responded to the creation of this potential?
There is, as stated earlier, no shortage of activity.
We have debated endlessly what it will all mean and whether the death of the book really is round the corner or not; as long ago as 1992, the librarian of the Houghton Library at Harvard, speaking at a colloquium on the future of rare books librarianship, was willing to predict that “every book printed in a western language before 1800” would be available in full-text digital form within a 25 to 50 year timeframe.
[2] Sir Anthony Kenny, however, writing the foreword to the British Library’s Towards the digital library (1998), was robust in wishing to “dismiss the fantasies of those who say that in the 21st century all information will be stored and transmitted electronically”.
[3] Much effort has been directed towards defining the concept of the hybrid library, with a mixture of print and electronic.
We have also, collectively, poured a great deal of energy and expenditure into projects of all kinds to develop digital access.
Much work has gone into creating web-accessible electronic catalogues, as a logical first step, but these are only the foothills of digital librarianship compared with the bigger challenge of creating full-text digital content.
This is where the picture is much more fragmented.
Umpteen small to medium scale textual digitisation projects have been carried out, some by libraries, some by academic groupings and some by commercial publishers.
Selected highlights of particular collections have been put on the web, along with complete texts of (particularly) literary works.
The rationale behind these projects varies; there is a sense of much dipping of toes into a new and sexy pool, where people don’t want to be left out but at the same time don’t want to (or can’t) invest too much resource.
For libraries, particularly, the driver is often the availability of funding streams, be it JISC (for e-lib) or NOF, creating the danger that priorities are set according to varied philosophies rather than a more long-range strategic perspective.
As the 1999 report on Scoping the future of the University of Oxford’s digital library collections put it, “most of the initiatives have been undertaken in isolation, coming up with different answers to the same questions, or suffering from the familiar problem of reinventing the wheel.”[4] The consequence is a chaotic mass of digital content with few guiding principles and not a little duplication.
A quick search on the web produced, in a matter of minutes, five different freely available full text versions of Bleak House; there are probably more.
There is no end of digitised titlepages, images, bits of text mounted on umpteen library websites all over the world, sometimes as the legacy of particular exhibitions, sometimes as tasters and testers of what lies in the collections.
And there are resources which, one suspects, rarely connect with the people who might need them; I wonder how many people who search for John Ray’s Catalogus plantarum (London, 1670) in library catalogues around the country know that a complete digital surrogate is available on Gallica, the digital library database of the Bibliothèque Nationale?
[5] The really important ideas in librarianship have tended to be the big and simple ones, aimed at comprehensiveness and inclusiveness of coverage.
The short-title catalogues, mapping the total published output of national cultures within defined time zones, have become interdisciplinary cornerstones of research.
The MARC format, in a different kind of way, is another example.
From Alexandria onwards, the most important libraries have been the ones which held the literature of a subject or a nation as comprehensibly as possible under one roof.
As publications have proliferated and Panizzian visions of gathering it all together in one place have become ever more impracticable, the principle has lived on in notions like Universal Bibliographic Control, or a Distributed National Resource – co-ordinated systems which hang on to the notion of being able to access everything in a joined up kind of way.
The digital environment offers new possibilities of building comprehensive collections virtually, in a way that we now accept as being impossible physically, in any one location, but the library sector seems to be all over the place when it comes to recognising this challenge and picking it up.
It is, rather, in the commercial sector that there is more evidence of this kind of thinking.
A full-text digital version of the entire English-language published output down to 1700 is under active development by ProQuest (Early English Books Online), a company which also now has the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online database under its wing, with full text versions of over a quarter of a million literary texts.
JSTOR, which digitises entire periodical runs within defined datespans, is not strictly commercial but run as an independent not-for-profit organisation.
It may be objected that this is all as it should be, it’s the job of libraries to house material and make it accessible, not to publish it in facsimile, which is where the commercial operations rightly take their place.
This may be so, but digital technology introduces subtle and major changes to the traditional model.
It makes it possible for the facsimile publisher ultimately to cut out the role of the library altogether, to deal directly with the users (at terms to be dictated) because they become the holders of the material in the way that libraries used to be.
Such developments may be no more than inevitable and healthy aspects of economic evolution; but librarians, before they don their turkey hats and vote for Christmas, should reflect that they are the custodians of the documentary heritage, that they sit on the stuff which researchers want, and they should perhaps be playing a more active role in steering the development of digital content.
A further argument recognises that many libraries, including the nationals, the public libraries, and (increasingly) other libraries in the education arena who are being encouraged to recognise their wider community potential, have a basic rationale which is about making material available.
They exist partly in order to be reservoirs of material, and partly to create a service which can control access to it for maximum public benefit.
If we believe that it is in the public interest to have national collections like the British Library funded from the public purse, because they make the books freely available for the good of all, translating that vision to the digital age implies that we should be making the digital successor similarly available pro bono publico.
If further proof is needed of the dangers of allowing control over access to documentary material to slip too far into the commercial sector, we might contemplate the movement to liberate scientific journals.
“There is growing concern among scientists that research results are controlled by an increasingly small number of publishers who have great control over the marketplace”, as William Hersh recently wrote in Nature.
[6] As librarians who have to subscribe to the major groupings of scientific journals know only too well, a situation has developed in which a few publishers have an economic stranglehold; scientists produce research which is published in journals which have to be bought, at ever-more crippling subscription rates, by the institutions where many of the scientists are themselves based.
Copyright over this material has also been cunningly controlled by the publishers, who have often required authors to sign their rights away.
The establishment of new groupings like SPARC and PubMed, trying to bring control back into the community that creates the work, and make it freely available on the Internet for wider public good, is a heartening response but the battle will not be easily won and there is much ground to be caught up.
The thoughts marshalled in this paper have evolved as part of the process of trying to decide, from the standpoint of the Wellcome Library (an independent research library, part of the Wellcome Trust, with rich and diverse holdings), where effort should most usefully be directed in developing a digitisation programme.
We have been working with the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS) to seek some properly planned answers and one of the conclusions which came through strongly from their survey, though not one which caused any surprise, was that the most useful digitisation projects are the big ones which take in a readily understood body of material in a comprehensive way, things like EEBO and JSTOR.
The itty-bitty ones, creating little digital islands here and there, are much less useful.
The study also pointed to a surprising lack of hard published evidence on the success or failure of particular digitisation projects.
The thing that is really woefully apparent in all of this is the absence of any agreed national strategy to provide a context for decision making.
However large a project any particular organisation or consortium undertakes, it will always be a contribution to a bigger picture and whatever the jigsaw is, we need it to be completed; we don’t want two people trying to fit the same piece in and we don’t want half the frame and a bit of one corner.
“How much better it would be if there was a shared and centrally managed programme [for digitising texts] across the nation”, as Ray Lester wrote in the SCONUL Newsletter in autumn 2000.
[7] The fundamental principles of such a strategy are not hard to envisage.
They would begin with an agreed position on that proportion of the documentary heritage which the nation wishes to see digitised within a target timeframe of (say) the next twenty years.
That might be literally everything (an ambitious target) or more realistically every text (not every edition), perhaps further narrowed by discipline or other criteria.
The target could be further refined by recognising higher and lower priorities within the overall framework; and a similar statement would need to be drawn up for archives.
The resulting document would provide guidance for anyone undertaking digitisation work on their own holdings, and for agencies who may be funding such work.
The vision then calls for a central database (which may of course be virtual, not actual) whose metadata holds direct links to the urls of digital surrogates; for the national printed archive down to the beginning of the 19th century, the ESTC file comes naturally to mind, although this is not all-inclusive.
The French Gallica database, which uses not only digital files created by the BNF but also ones created by a number of partner institutions, seems to offer the beginnings of a model and something in advance of anything currently available in the public domain in the English-speaking world.
Where might we look for such a strategy to be developed?
Much of the cutting edge work in electronic library developments in recent years has been focussed in the higher education sector, where of course many of the significant research libraries also live, but such libraries are individually tied to local rather than national priorities.
Groupings such as CURL, or RLG, or LIBER might be better able to take an active interest, though they have limits on both resources and influence.
The national library is an obvious place to look, but the BL has always been ambivalently placed when it comes to recommending, let alone setting, national policies, where Re:source might expect to be more of a voice.
There are other big quasi-national libraries who are not tied to a specific academic community, with whom some of the thoughts expressed here may strike a chord, but they are not a group able to force action alone.
And of course we also have a plethora of other bodies like UKOLN or DNER working on aspects of electronic library developments, with complementary but slightly differing agendas , none of whom have a remit to tackle the big picture issue outlined here.
The new Research Support Libraries Group has expressed an interest in this area – Brian Follett, the Chairman of the Group, has stated that their terms of reference include “to seek a national strategy for digitising existing collections of primary research material” but the issue is not yet reflected in the Group’s minutes, as published on their website.
[8] The analysis offered in this paper may be over-simplistic on a number of counts, and it certainly makes a number of assumptions.
Firstly, it assumes that the technology is now sufficiently mature for it to be worth investing money and effort in creating digital surrogates which will be of lasting worth, which I think is sound but may require further thought.
It also assumes that the kind of funding model in which libraries are maintained at public cost for public good is a permanent feature of the landscape – that society will continue to believe that it is right for the nation’s citizens to have free access to documentary materials, in the way that a national library provides it, a national databank being a logical corollary in a digital age.
This is harder to predict in a world of public-private partnership, and one in which universities are increasingly being expected to act more like businesses.
It also makes no mention of the issue of copyright, a huge concern for modern texts and born digital material, but less of a showstopper if we concentrate on the vast pre-20th century heritage.
The idea of a national strategy may seem impossibly challenging, or even presumptuously dictatorial, and it may make unwarranted assumptions about priorities for librarians today.
But every time I reject it all as folly and pipe-dreams, I am forced back to an unavoidable feeling that the present unsatisfactory situation can only get worse and more confused if nothing happens.
We will pour yet more money into fragmented activities, or start constructing huge stable blocks next door to Mr Benz’s nice new motor car factory – is this not a danger of schemes like Full Disclosure or UKNUC, putting great effort into mapping the physical whereabouts of texts when, a generation down the line, people will no longer need to know?
I believe there is an urgent need for the library sector to pull its act together and for us to find a mechanism to put digitisation of the documentary heritage, and a strategy for achieving it, high on the agenda.
Making it all happen is not something that libraries can achieve single-handedly but inertia will lead to regret in due course.
It is one of the great visionary challenges for the present professional generation.
Notes http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej.
Richard Wendorf (ed.
), Rare book and manuscript libraries in the twenty-first century, Cambridge (MA), 1993, p.11.
Anthony Kenny, “Foreword” in L. Carpenter et al (eds.
), Towards the digital library, London, 1998, 5-9, p.5.
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/scoping (see section 7.1).
http://gallica.bnf.fr/scripts/ConsultationTout.exe?E=0&O=N098508.
William Hersh, “The way of the future?”, Nature 413 (18 October 2001), 680.
Ray Lester, “A few irreverent thoughts on ‘digitisation’ …”, SCONUL Newsletter 20 (Autumn 2000), 5-7.
Brian Follett, “Just how are we going to satisfy our research customers”, LIBER Quarterly 11 (2001), 218-223, p.222.
The Group’s minutes are accessible on their website, http://www.rslg.ac.uk.
Author Details   David Pearson Librarian, Wellcome Library London Email: d.pearson@wellcome.ac.uk Article Title: “Digitisation: do we have a strategy?” Author: David Pearson Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/digilib/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz data database url research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Place and Dave Boyd describe a new feature on SOSIG called 'Experts Choice', and report on upcoming events.
SOSIG Expert’s Choice Which Web sites do leading social scientists find invaluable in their research?
Find out by visiting the new Expert’s Choice section on SOSIG.
Experts from a range of disciplines and sectors were asked to recommend their favourite Web site and describe how they found the site useful.
Over 30 experts are currently featured, with more being added all the time.
SOSIG aims to highlight experts that students are likely to have heard of in their courses, with a view to inspiring a new generation of social scientists to use the Web.
Here are a few examples … Frances Cairncross, Chair of the ESRC and Senior Editor on The Economist recommends: the ESRC Web Site http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ ”The best way to discover the huge range of social science research being undertaken in Britain, information on our Centres and the work they do and the various conferences and seminars we sponsor”.
The Rt.Hon.
Charles Kennedy MP, leader of the Liberal Democrat Party recommends: Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk ”This site is impressive because of its accessible layout, which is neither complex nor confusing.
The site offers many interesting features; a favourite of mine would have to be the debate section entitled ‘The Talk’.
Evan Davis, economics editor of the BBC recommends: International Monetary Fund http://www.imf.org ”I use it for the data which is available going back a long way on all countries.
Try looking at the World Economics Outlook Database section”.
Dr Steven Pinker, Experimental Psychologist at MIT (author of “How the Mind Works”) recommends: Cognet http://cognet.mit.edu ”A superb collection of materials on cognitive science, including cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, and evolutionary psychology”.
SOSIG lists experts for social sciences, business and law.
To see what the Expert’s recommend in your subject area, go to: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/experts-choice/ SOSIG on Tour SOSIG will be promoted at a number of social science events this year.
Please look out for us / our literature at these events and find out what the service can offer you.
British Psychological Society Annual Conference 2002 PLAT 2002, Psychology Learning and Teaching The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Exhibition The British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2002 Business Education Support Team 2002 Annual Conference British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Annual Conference 2002 Online Conferentie 2002 Royal Economic Society 2002 Annual Conference Political Studies Association Annual Conference for 2002 British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association 2002 Conference International Association for Social Science Information Service & Technology Author details Emma Place and Dave Boyd SOSIG ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk d.j.boyd@bristol.ac.uk Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Phil Cross and Dave Boyd Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Strategy for the UK Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Strategy for the UK Buzz data software html database dissemination xml infrastructure archives metadata digitisation schema eprints oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 ejournal openurl interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS by John MacColl considers a strategy for electronic theses and dissertations in the United Kingdom.
‘ETDs’ is the acronym widely used in the US to stand for ‘Electronic Theses and Dissertations’.
The father of the ETD movement, Professor Ed Fox of Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech), explains the acronym as containing an implicit Boolean ‘OR’: ‘ETs’ OR ‘EDs’ equals ‘ETDs’.
This makes for a very convenient shorthand, whereby a digital object which is either an electronic thesis or an electronic dissertation can be referred to as ‘an ETD’.
It makes sense to have the acronym as inclusive as this, since the use of the terminology ‘theses’ and ‘dissertations’ varies considerably not merely from country to country, but even within countries.
Certainly in the US, there is no uniform agreement among graduate schools over what is a thesis and what a dissertation.
The international ETD movement had its fifth annual symposium last month – although ETDs have been created at Virginia Tech since 1994.
The event was held in the US, and the delegates were mostly from North America and Canada, with a sprinkling of South Americans, Australians and a few Europeans.
Germany, France and Scandinavia were all represented.
There was one delegate only from the UK.
The ETD movement has obviously not yet taken root in the UK.
Nevertheless, there has been a group concerned with exploring the issues.
UTOG, the UK Theses Online Group, was established several years ago, and it has been aware of the activities of the ETD movement, but also of the distinctive characteristics of thesis publishing in the UK, which have made us – so far – unsympathetic to the creation of an ETD culture here.
In 2001, UTOG commissioned a report into the digitisation of theses from the SELLIC(1) Project at the University of Edinburgh.
In addition to considering retrospective digitisation, the report also looked at the issues involved in the production and management of ‘born digital’ theses, identified reasons for the UK to become properly involved in this initiative, and recommended that UK institutions join the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).
These ideas were taken forward by JISC’s Scholarly Communications Group, and SELLIC was encouraged to submit a project proposal to the JISC Focus on Access to Intellectual Resources (FAIR) programme at the beginning of 2002, under the name Theses Alive!
As a result, a two-year project was funded, based at Edinburgh, and will be starting work in a national effort to promote ETDs from the autumn of 2002.
Theses Alive!
is one of three projects in electronic theses funded by JISC.
The others are DAEDALUS, led by Glasgow, and E-theses in the UK, led by the Robert Gordon University.
Theses Alive!
will work with both of these, and will share an advisory structure with the latter.
Why put them online?
What is the value in putting theses and dissertations online?
First, it is important not to be too exclusive about the material we are talking about.
When we think of ‘theses’, most of us probably conjure up an image of thick, black-bound volumes standing forbiddingly in rows on library shelves, very probably in closed access stack.
These unwelcoming and largely unused and unvisited volumes stand as silent witness to the claim of our major universities to the designation ‘research institutions’ – alongside the research publications of our academic staff, which of course are treated very differently, with the aim of securing maximum impact.
Printed theses and dissertations, unfortunately, have all too little scope for impact.
But what they also are is the fruit of original research, achieved usually only at great effort by students many of whom go on to become the academy – to careers in research publishing and teaching in universities.
They contain years of work: important ideas, painstaking methodologies, literature reviews, successful hypotheses, and records of experimentation.
While most of the very important original research in them is likely eventually to be recorded elsewhere, in the journal literature, or in monograph publications which are based upon them, particularly in the case of the humanities and social sciences, this is by no means true of all of them.
It is not unusual to come across theses which are the only substantial work of criticism of a minor author, for example.
Even where it does happen, there is usually a significant delay between the completed research and its publication.
And this body of work is only the doctoral thesis literature.
In the UK, we are consistent in describing doctoral-level research outputs as ‘theses’, while reserving ‘dissertations’ for less elevated research: that done for masters degrees, or even at undergraduate level.
Are we then to exclude dissertations from our consideration, or might there be a value in releasing this research also, or at least a portion of it, into the online corpus of research material?
Where it also represents original work, the means of introducing our junior scholars to the world of research, then it surely has a value in advancing knowledge?
ETDs, OAI-PMH and NDLTD At this point, there is a need to explain some other acronyms.
OAI-PMH stands for ‘Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting’.
NDLTD stands for ‘Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations’.
OAI-PMH is fairly new on the scene: the NDLTD, on the other hand, has been around for several years now.
The NDLTD was begun by Ed Fox and his colleagues at Virginia Tech, as a movement to promote the development of online theses and dissertations.
Joining the NDLTD commits an institution to moving towards a requirement that – from a given launch date, the theses and dissertation (TD) literature, or a portion of it, is mounted online on a university server for free internet access.
Many US universities now do this.
Virginia Tech alone has over 4,000 ETDs available (more than half of them being Masters dissertations).
In Europe, the presence of ETDs is patchier, although Humboldt University in Berlin has developed an impressive system for managing ETDs, and has changed the legislation surrounding thesis literature in Germany (which until recently mandated print output) in the process.
The NDLTD is a realistic and pragmatic movement.
It does not expect institutions to change everything overnight.
There is a journey to be undertaken, the principal steps of which are: a.
Ensure that the metadata for ETDs is available online.
b.
Move to a hybrid system of print and online TDs for a period of time.
c. Arrive at the point at which the online medium is the authorised medium for the production of TDs.
This journey may take several years.
The NDLTD has been in existence since 1997.
To date, there has been no membership fee, and it had been run on the efforts of a number of dedicated volunteers, largely inspired by Ed Fox’s philanthropic vision.
However, as the international interest grows, and the movement spreads, the organisation has reached the point at which it needs a stronger organisational structure to sustain its efforts, and to undertake promotional activity and support materials in a more concerted way.
At this year’s conference it was announced that it is soon to be registered officially in the US as a non-profit membership organisation, and a fee will be levied from members.
NDLTD has been around much longer than OAI-PMH, but the recent development of the latter protocol has given a significant new boost to its objectives.
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is an important new protocol in the world of internet information.
Through the use of a ‘lowest common denominator’ metadata format, it allows those producing metadata for all types of digital objects to ‘expose’ their metadata to a protocol running extensively across the internet, so that that metadata can be harvested by search software and made available to the communities who may wish to harvest it for any purpose they wish.
The true significance of the protocol lies in its support for interoperability.
It is a tool for building union catalogues from a potentially vast range of discrete collections, and it therefore exploits the power of the internet to make virtually possible what is physically impossible.
Collections of theses and dissertations, catalogued by librarians at the institutions in which they were produced, can – via the OAI-PMH – contribute to a vast worldwide virtual database of metadata which can be searched via the same protocol.
This means that all the ETDs on the subject of sub-Saharan climatic change, for example, or manipulation of a particular gene, or the economy of Hong Kong, or the works of the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith, can be found in a single search.
The NDLTD does not mandate the use of OAI-PMH – at least not yet.
Before the new protocol was on the scene, it advocated the use of the Z39.50 protocol for search and retrieval (and the two protocols used together would offer a powerful combination).
But it seems clear that the NDLTD’s effort to build a global virtual database of ETDs does point very naturally to the use of the OAI-PMH, and the most commonly-used database systems which have been developed to support ETDs, including the Virginia Tech ETD software, are now being adapted to become OAI-PMH compliant, with OAI data service interfaces being developed.
Is metadata not enough?
Do we need thousands of electronic theses and dissertations clogging the arteries of the internet (or possibly the Grid, in the near future)?
In the UK at least we have grown used to engaging with this literature on the basis of its proxies – the metadata for theses, which usually includes an abstract.
We have the British Thesis Service (BTS)(2), run by the British Library and supported by most UK universities – though there are a few significant omissions of research universities from its ranks.
The BTS takes copies of printed theses produced by its members, and makes microfilm copies of them for loan or sale via the British Library.
This saves the individual institutions the trouble of responding to requests for sale or loan copies directly, and also means that the metadata is searchable via a common union catalogue.
The British Library made a commitment at the end of 2001 to join the NDLTD, and is planning to convert its microfilm operations to a digitisation-based service, which it also hopes to apply retrospectively to its huge body of thesis literature.
When this is achieved – and it must surely be a mammoth task – hundreds of thousands of UK-produced ETDs will find their way onto the NDLTD.
The UK also has a commercial metadata service, the Index to Theses(3) published by Expert Information Ltd, whose coverage does not map exactly onto that of the BTS, although the two services are examining ways of harmonising their operations.
The ProQuest service, Digital Dissertations, based on the University Microfilms International (UMI) Dissertations Abstracts database, while it has wide international coverage, does not feature many UK theses, because the UK has been so well catered for by the BTS and Index to Theses.
The model, then, has been primarily a centralised one, and one which is based upon metadata.
Those wishing to search the thesis literature would most commonly use the Index to Theses, and then order a sale or loan copy of the thesis they wish to consult either from the British Library, or direct from the university concerned, if it is not a member of the BTS.
One reason why the UK has perhaps not moved faster into the world of ETDs is because of this centralised model.
Many universities have become used to a procedure involving the despatch of their theses to the British Library, and have considered the management of their theses an issue for the British Library rather than for themselves, shelving their own local copies of theses in closed access stack, and fetching copies out when requested for use on-campus.
But we are all familiar with the limitations of microform as opposed to online dissemination, and the difficulty for the British Library’s service has been the size of its operation, which makes switching from a microfilm to an online process costly and time-consuming.
Nevertheless, such a switch is necessary for several reasons, the main one being that metadata is not enough.
The now intuitive action, for the researcher using this literature, is to proceed from the metadata to the full-text at the instant they wish to.
We might consider this a measure of its responsiveness.
Until the advent of ETDs, thesis literature was one of the least responsive.
Once identified in an index of theses (of which there were several in themselves), the thesis had to be requested using the local interlibrary loan service, could take some time to arrive, and could then only be used in association with the discomfort of a microform reader machine.
If a bound copy was loaned, usually it would be for restricted use in the borrower’s library only.
As the rest of the research literature becomes more and more available through aggregated ejournal services, offering instant access to sets of journals extending back now often to their origins, searchable in a variety of ways across a large online corpus, the thesis literature, by contrast, could appear antiquated and intractable.
For that reason, and because web sites are now so prominent in the communications of researchers among themselves, thesis literature has been moving online anyway, in a patchy and uncontrolled way.
There is nothing to prevent a student putting a copy of their thesis onto their own web server, or a departmental server.
And so there is ‘bottom-up’ pressure to provide ETDs, more than pressure from the organisations whose research is being published.
There is also evidence that students know about and use the NDLTD already.
Recent figures on the use of the ETDs in the Virginia Tech archive indicate a high number of hits from the UK(4) The metadata alone is not enough, and is patchy in any case, with the Index to Theses providing the best service.
The BTS cannot be searched directly, but recommends that users use the Index to Theses or the SIGLE(5) service, or else the British Library Public Catalogue Books File.
(6) This multiplicity of possible routes to finding only the metadata is one of the reasons why the thesis literature is not more sought after by researchers.
Many are not prepared to fight their way through the unconnected metadata sources only to end up with a potentially long wait for an item which is likely to arrive in a difficult format.
A strategy for the UK In developing a strategy for the development of ETDs in the UK, however, we do wish to start with metadata.
Theses Alive!
will aim to ‘genericise’ the metadata creation process for all UK theses and dissertations, in order to simplify the distribution of metadata while at the same time linking it to an ETD wherever possible.
The model we plan is shown below.
Using the submission software, the student creates their own metadata, which is quality-controlled by the Library.
Also in the loop, inevitably, is the authority responsible for validating the approved thesis, which we have simply called the ‘registrar’ in the model.
Interaction between student and supervisors goes on throughout the course of the degree programme.
Finally, the system outputs are the metadata, formatted as required for various agencies, and the ETD itself, which may be a PDF or other file format attachment, or may be part of the same XML file, plus any linked files.
Our expectation is that an XML schema – or perhaps a number of schemas will be developed for UK theses and dissertations, possibly based upon schemas which already exist for use in another context.
A schema will describe each thesis according to its various structural elements, and should support the export of metadata in all of the various formats required, while at the same time describing the full text of the thesis.
In other words, PDF is not likely to be sufficient in the longer term.
Using XML provides us with a non-proprietary format, with greater scope for database storage of deconstructed documents, greater search flexibility, and the possibility of preserving the ‘raw’ source of the document.
The more challenging task may be to find universities which are willing to allow ETDs to be created in their institutions, and to work with us in the Theses Alive!
project, as pilot sites.
We are not providing any funding for hardware for sites, but will support them with software installation, and will provide technical and advocacy support.
The intention is to solicit interest from institutions willing to act as pilot sites, in August 2002.
We hope to have five or six of these, representing a mix of different university types in the UK, and providing both doctoral theses and Masters-level dissertations to the project.
Much of our work will be on the political and cultural changes needed in institutions in order to prepare them for the inevitable future context of ETDs.
For some institutions, moving to an environment in which the electronic thesis or dissertation is the authoritative copy, the one which is preserved and used, may seem a huge step which is still years away.
Even in the US, the numbers of institutions which have made provision for ETDs is still relatively small, though growing almost daily.
At this point, let me add a little more detail to the three-stage process described above.
This is the strategy we wish to see adopted by individual universities in the UK, and supported by Theses Alive!
Genericise the metadata: this step is not a prerequisite, but it helps inasmuch as it implies the use of a single ETD as a structured digital object, and creates an ‘ETD in waiting’.
The ETD is there, but is restricted to non-public access only, by a system administrator.
This is the first goal.
Introduce a hybrid print and electronic TD publishing policy: very few institutions are likely to adopt ETDs outright, without running a parallel print and web service to begin with.
During this stage, the print version remains the authority version for a period, but at a particular point, the roles swap over, and the ETD becomes the authority.
This is the second goal.
It is then a fairly short step to the third stage, in which the electronic format is the required format for submission.
Of course, there is a great deal of work to be done within institutions as they move through these stages.
Theses Alive!
will develop an ETD submission system designed for use in the UK, but rolling it out for use by newly-commencing postgraduate students in universities will involve a lot of effort.
University staff will require training in order that they can offer training programmes to the students concerned.
It is likely that these staff will be Library staff, although other staff in a training role, from IT services or even academic staff training new postgraduates in research skills, may be the preferred source of this.
Virginia Tech uses graduate students themselves, which clearly also has a number of advantages, though it would be a less common model in the UK.
A major component of the training programme will be attention to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
Students will require to be educated not only in their own rights in their theses or dissertations, but also of the need to clear rights for linked or embedded content.
Theses Alive!
will provide central support for the training programmes in pilot sites.
Mandatory ETDs The number of US universities which have gone down the ‘required’ route is still also small – perhaps around a dozen.
Some of them have followed an accelerated process, taking their users by surprise.
Others have worked with pilot departments for a while, and then taken the plunge.
A number of speakers at the Fifth International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, held in Brigham Young University, Utah, last month, spoke about going ‘cold turkey’ taking a decision to require ETDs, then announcing when it will happen, and dealing with the pain along the way.
Many have found this a tough process, but none have gone back on it.
In the US context, those universities which are already far advanced on the ETD path generally have achieved this by means of a collaboration involving four different players on campus – academic staff, administrators, library staff and IT staff.
Of these four, the most important group is perhaps the administrators – those involved in the management of graduate education.
Most US universities have an organisation on campus called the ‘graduate school’, with a supporting infrastructure which is coherent and well-resourced.
Few UK universities have ‘graduate schools’ as such, though they are growing in number.
Postgraduate education in the UK is more commonly managed on a departmental basis.
Being more fragmented, and less capable of achieving economies of scale across the postgraduate studies layer, may well make the task of engaging these administrators, the Deans of Graduate Schools, considerably more difficult in the UK.
But without the support of senior university managers, the ability of an institution to move in the direction of requiring ETDs is likely to be very much compromised.
Certainly, the library cannot do it alone – nor the computer services department.
Academics can lobby successfully, if they become convinced of the value of the initiative, but they might be content with achieving ETDs in their own department only – a partial solution which will not satisfy the library’s desire for uniform access.
The benefits to postgraduate education There are clear benefits to scholarship in the development of ETDs.
Here is a body of original research material which is hugely underused.
Cynics might say that some research supervisors exploit this situation.
Knowing that a student’s thesis is unlikely ever to be read by more than a handful of people, might make a supervisor less diligent in providing supervision than is in the best interests of the student.
Another way of looking at this is to accept that researchers are under tremendous pressure to do their own research, and getting the PhD out of the way is a necessary evil which, once passed, allows a real research career to begin.
Yet this is to sell our junior scholars short.
Providing them with a structured environment in which to write their theses and dissertations makes a major improvement to their experience as postgraduates.
Another very clear advantage is the creation of a corpus of ETDs produced by previous cohorts of students, which can serve as exemplars and to support the new TDs being selected by newly-arrived students.
The systems which have been developed to support ETD development can do more than simply allow a finished ETD to be uploaded to a server, to await processing by research committee, academic registrar and library.
They should support the interactivity between student and supervisor or research committee from day one of the postgraduate degree course.
Here, perhaps, is what a real ‘virtual research environment’ should be.
They should also provide the student with a record of their progress, containing a history of the changes and edits, of supervisor comments, together with the bibliographic review and experimental history.
There are systems around now to support these functions – some open source and others commercial.
Theses Alive!
is likely to base its UK-oriented system on one which is already in existence.
And in the interests of the advancement of knowledge generally, here we have a new body of material to add to the corpus of freely available research now supported by the web via new standards such as the OAI-PMH and the OpenURL protocol.
ETDs can then join eprints in representing the growing body of original research produced by our academic community, which is quality-controlled – or has at least some indication of quality control status – and is provided for peers to use as they wish, at no cost – not even that of an interlibrary loan copy on microfilm, or a photocopy.
The systems which handle eprints and ETDs, indeed, share a considerable amount of functionality.
Much of the workflow is similar, though the sequencing is not quite the same.
Both follow the same basic sequence of preparation – submission – review – finished publication – although ETDs obviously have much more in-progress review.
A key difference will be in their readiness to join the corpus.
A researcher using a search provider to query the research corpus is only likely to be interested in completed ETDs (and extremely unlikely to be able to find anything else), whereas they may be happy to search for eprints which include those submitted for publication but not yet published.
An interesting area of overlap occurs in the case of research programmes which require their students to publish an article or a number of articles in a peer-reviewed journal as part of their degree.
It is not difficult to imagine a scholarly publishing system which allowed students working in an ETD module to tap in to the functionality used by academics in eprint self-archiving and journal submission.
Theses Alive!
is a project which many consider well overdue in the UK.
The hard work of the UK Theses Online Group over the past few years now has an opportunity of bearing fruit.
That work will commence in the autumn, and we would welcome expressions of interest in participating in it from universities across the country.
June 2002.
© John MacColl.
Non-exclusive right of publication granted.
References (1) Science & Engineering Library, Learning & Information Centre [www.sellic.ed.ac.uk] (2) www.bl.uk/services/document/brittheses.html (3) www.theses.com (4) See http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/data/somefacts.html#logs (5) ‘System of Information for Grey Literature in Europe’ [www.kb.nl/infolev/eagle/frames.htm] (6) http://blpc.bl.uk/ Author Details   John MacColl SELLIC Director and Sub-Librarian (Online Services) University of Edinburgh Darwin Library The King’s Buildings Mayfield Road Edinburgh EH9 3JU john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Article Title: "Electronic Theses and Dissertations: a Strategy for the UK" Author: John MacColl Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/theses-dissertations/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Distributed Computing: The Seti@home Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Distributed Computing: The Seti@home Project Buzz data software video flash algorithm url research Citation BibTex RIS Eddie Young and Pete Cliff look at a particularly successful example of a distributed solution to a very large number crunching problem.
Distributed Solutions to Number Crunching Problems There are many problems that require the large scale number crunching capablilities of supercomputers.
For instance calculating Pi to the nth level of precision, attempting to crack the latest encryption algorithm [1], mapping the human genome, or analysing radio waves from space.
For some applications, a Supercomputer might not be enough; nor can every project can afford one.
However, but with a little bit of clever software engineering applied to the Internet, there is a solution.
Even if you spent a lot of your time active at work and your PC is constantly trying to keep up, there will be moments when you stop for coffee, pop out for a sandwich, or whatever where your computer does nothing.
[2] Multiply all this processor idle time by the number of computers in use today and you have a lot of processing power simply going to waste.
One facet of "distributed computing" is the harnessing of this unused processor time to do useful work.
By utilizing this idle time projects can clock up years of processing time in days.
The growth of the power of these types of applications can be directly related to the growth of the Internet.
SETI@home Radio telescopes have been monitoring the skies for decades, providing astronomers with a more detailed picture of the Universe than optical telescopes can provide.
Many of the radio signals received are white noise (technically its brown noise, but sounds similar), the sound of space, emissions from stars, nebula, and other stellar bodies.
To a radio receiver from outside our solar system the earth itself is sending out a great many radio waves.
Like the noise our planet is emitting, perhaps somewhere there will be radio noise from other planets.
Noise that could indicate intelligent life.
But how do we find these patterns?
The vast number of radio waves that break on our planet every day would take centuries for a single computer to analyse.
(Indeed by the time it completed its work we would probably have built spaceships to find out ourselves!)
This is where the power of distributed computing can help.
For the last 5 or 6 years Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory has been running the SETI@home project.
SETI stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence and the project is dedicated to searching for patterns that may be signs of intelligent life amongst the mostly random mass of radio signals that reach the Earth from space.
Each member of the project offers some of their computer’s time to the cause.
Membership is open to everyone with access to a computer and the internet.
There are currently 2,822,404 members and they have clocked up 582,977 years of processing time.
When you join project SETI you supply a username in the form of your e-mail and some details about yourself and then download the software.
The project automatically assigns to you a small portion of the night sky and you begin the search right away.
Each time your PC is idle the software starts up as a screen saver and gets to work on the data.
Once all of the downloaded data has been anaylsed the results are uploaded to the SETI main server and the next portion of data is downloaded ready for a new analysis.
Each data packet is around 300K and uploading and downloading are fast.
You also have the option of running the software all the time "in the background".
I have used a 450Mhz PIII for above-average CPU intensive applications (manipulating large images) with the SETI software running in the background without any noticable loss of speed.
The software is exceptionally well behaved, running at a low priority and giving up the processor to anything else that requires it.
It has never crashed the machine (that is left up to Internet Explorer!).
Distributed Solutions The idle time of a desktop PC can be anywhere between a couple of minutes to an entire day.
Add up this idle time for every PC in the world and it comes to a considerable amount.
Distributed computing uses the internet to harness the power of a global network of PCs effectively creating a single supercomputer.
It is interesting to think that this supercomputer is not powerful in its own right but rather its power is directly related to the number of active participants.
(‘Active’ in the loosest sense of the word since all you need to do is download the software and agree to take part).
The "computer" has a processing power that is a function of the amount of ‘virtual’ time it has available to it to work on a problem.
It is not important how fast any single processor is 50 computers could be working on a different part of the same problem all at the same time, solving it 50 times faster than a single machine.
Effectively this means that the designers of distributed software like this have created a powerful parallel computer, where individual processors can be added easilly, each becoming a cell of the whole.
Is it far-fetched to draw an analogy between these individual wired PCs connected through the Internet and individual neurons in a human brain?
How far away are we from writing distributed parallel code that can behave in a similar fashion to neurons, creating an unknown type of intelligence that simply uses idle PC time to communicate with other neurons to contemplate other problems?
Invisible and silent.
Some distributed projects are trying to simulate a very simple model of evolution, wherein a basic predator/prey ‘lifeform’ is designed complete with mutations, and are left on the battlefield to kill, eat, be eaten, and reproduce.
Distributed computing can also bring like-minded people together in a virtual community, where they work on the same project and can exchange ideas and solutions.
SETI themselves have developed workgroups to encourage users, with competitions and chat forums.
The University of Kent Space Society have active usergroups, and meet regularly in the pub.
There is an interesting site at http://www.pcfseti.co.uk/ where many users are actively studying the SETI ideas.
Individually the results may not make much sense, but collectively large complex problems can be solved.
At the time of writing the most powerful computer, IBM’s ASCI White, is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS and costs $110 million.
SETI@home currently gets about 15 TeraFLOPS and has cost $500K so far.
[3] As an undergraduate project Pi has now been calculated to a Quadrillion (1 with 18 zeroes) bits during a 2 year project.
During those 2 years the combined efforts of two thousand computers worldwide, clocked up an astonishing 600 years of processing time.
That’s the equivalent of a single P90 desktop PC working constantly on that single problem for 600 years.
These are PCs that would have otherwise been doing nothing at all.
The data The data used comes from signals collected from a radio telescope set in the crater of a dormant volcano in Arecibo, in Mexico.
The region in purple on this sky map shows the areas covered so far.
There is still an awful lot of the sky to scan.
Since I have had the screen saver running on my PC, installed on 23 February 2000, I have clocked up 3554 hours of CPU time – that’s about 150 days, and my computer is currently analysing data from the region at 18hr 8 min 42 sec, +17 deg, 46’’ 12’ , recorded on Wednesday December 20 2000 at 17:35.17.
That is the region in the constellation Ophiuchus on the map above (marked ‘Oph’), collected last December.
The Analysis When the SETI software runs this is what you see on your screen.
That’s not a very exciting screen saver, but it does move!
The graphs are actually power spectra of the regions being analysed, and as the analysis runs they update automatically.
This screen saver is actually running Fourier transformations on the data.
This is a technique that seperates out the component frequencies from a signal to provide some information on its structure.
Particularly the software is looking for spikes and Gaussian bells.
Spikes: A spike is a frequency with a significantly high amplitude.
These are measured to ensure that the software and hardware are working properly, but could also provide interesting patterns.
Gaussians bells: The anaysis supposes that a distant (alien) transmitter is sending out some sort of signal.
Signals from this transmitter should get stronger and weaker, as the recording telescope moves over that point in the sky.
This is measured as a power increase and then decrease, which has a very characteristic shape, known in mathematics as a Gaussian bell, since it looks roughly bell shaped.
(The top of the bell the strongest signal, fading out to the edges.)
SETI use a statistical method (known as Chi squared) – which returns a high or low number, depending upon how close the data is to matching a Gaussian bell shape.
The lower the value the closer the data matches a Gaussian bell, increasing the importance of that location of the sky.
For example if a similar project sere running on distributed computers on a planet orbiting Alpha Centuri it may not take long before they see a Gaussian bell shape centred over our solar system.
At the time of writing nothing has been found, but they (and we) are still looking, and still hopeful.
note: 1 Encryption companies often place large scale challenges on the Web to see just how secure their encryption methods are.
Some like-minded people completed one of these challenges by using the distributed use of processor time as outlined in the article.
It would be of no surprise to discover similar, illegal projects, working to decrypt code in this way.
Interestingly a virus could potentially function in much the same way as the SETI@home screensaver, only keep itself hidden.
note : 2 This article was written on a Pentium III 450Mhz PC, which is pretty slow compared to desktop PCs available today, yet as I type my processer never goes above 5% usage.
When I fire up Excel and open my timesheet for editing there are peeks of about 30% and even the Flash intensive AtomFilms site only manages a peek of 100% before settling back to around 4%.
A streamed video from the same site idles at 5%.
In short, in everyday usage, my machine’s processor is heavily underused.
(Try this yourself and see how much CPU processing power you use during the day).
note: 3 You can consider a ‘FLOP’ to be a single calculation FLOP FLOating Point calculation.
In this case FLOPS stands for floating point calculation per second.
So 1 TerraFLOPs is over a trillion floating point calculations a second.
References http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ The SETI home pages http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/pihex.html calculating pi http://www.nyx.net/~kpearson/distrib.html website on distributed computing http://www.naic.edu/ The Arecibo homepage http://golem03.cs-i.brandeis.edu/ A technical article on SETI@home has been published in the IEEE magazine "Computing in Science and Engineering".
It is available at the IEEE Computer Society’s web page (http://www.computer.org).
Author Details Eddie Young Network Support Officer UKOLN e.young@ukoln.ac.uk Pete Cliff Research Officer UKOLN p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Distributed Computing – the SETI@home project" Authors: Eddie Young and Pete Cliff Publication Date: 23-Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/seti/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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VITAL services?
Evaluating IT access in Public Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines VITAL services?
Evaluating IT access in Public Libraries Buzz data framework copyright cataloguing cd-rom url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Project officer Juliet Eve discusses the value and impact of end-user IT services in public libraries.
Since the publication of the hugely influential New Library: the People’s Network, [1] and the follow-up document detailing the plans for rolling out the network, Building the New Library Network, [2] we have seen a whole range of government policy documents and initiatives stressing the importance of the role of the public library in the developing “information society” [3].
Public libraries are increasingly being recognised and heralded as ideal local delivery points for a range of national programmes addressing lifelong learning, access to IT skills and services and the delivery of government services.
Libraries are also being championed as a means of tackling social exclusion, providing access to IT services for disadvantaged communities, and acting as “street corner universities”.
The government response to New Library itself has also been promising, with £70 million pledged over four years as a basis for the implementation of the network, which will be augmented by local authority and private sector investment [4].
This, combined with National Lottery funding, from which £20 million has been made available for basic training in IT skills for all public library staff, represents a significant commitment towards projects in public libraries which support these policies.
The DCMS/Wolfson Public Libraries Challenge Fund, now in its third year, has also provided an unprecedented boost to the development of IT services in many public libraries around the country.
The library and information community itself has responded enthusiastically and imaginatively to the trend towards greater IT provision and rallied around the vision set out in New Library.
Of course, many library authorities have been developing IT services for years, on their own, or, commonly, in partnership with other organisations or business, often local colleges, and sometimes with the support of other external funding sources such as Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) or European funding.
Despite this, provision of IT services remains patchy, and the extent and quality of services varies enormously between authorities.
Some, for example, are able to offer extensive access to PCs, CD-Rom networks and fast Internet access, and have begun to move towards the development of content and services, provided via the Internet.
Several authorities, for example, provide access to library catalogues online (e.g.
Cambridgeshire), whilst others enable users to have private e-mail addresses via the library server, and have also begun to offer access to community services in locations outside the library (e.g.
Croydon).
In other areas, users (and indeed staff) have access to a limited number of terminals, providing, for example, dial-up access to the Internet, or have no access to IT facilities at all.
Evaluation Evaluation of library services in general has increased over the years, with mandatory exercises such as the Audit Commission, the preparation of statistics for annual library plans, and CIPFA (The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) returns, and some qualitative exercises addressing specific areas of library services by individual authorities.
Chris Batt’s regular publication, Information Technology in Public Libraries [5] provides statistical information on IT services, and a certain amount of analysis of developments, but little qualitative work has been done on the benefits of access to IT facilities, for individuals or communities One-off projects, such as the Croydon Online Research Project, which investigated the value for the local community of Croydon Online, a community website run and based in the public library, indicate that evaluation is becoming an important issue.
However, nationally, no programme for measuring the impact of services exists, and as yet, the CIPFA questionnaires do not contain questions about IT usage.
As libraries increasingly move beyond just providing access to IT facilities and begin to develop their own content, measurement and value of electronic services will become increasingly important; as indicated by the Society of Chief Librarians, “their value and cost-effectiveness need to be demonstrated” [6].
The VITAL project CERLIM, the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management, based at Manchester Metropolitan University, has won funding from the research department of the Library and Information Commission to carry out research in this area.
The project is called VITAL (Value and Impact of IT Access in Libraries), and will run until September 2000.
The project is designed to develop and test measures of the value and impact of end-user IT services, and disseminate this knowledge to policy makers and others.
These measures will be developed within the context of national and international work on performance measurement and service quality as well as the Audit Commission’s framework for public library performance indicators and the work of CIPFA.
The aims of the project are: To develop and implement methodologies suited to the evaluation of end-user IT services in public libraries.
To gather and disseminate authoritative information on the value of such services and their impacts.
To assist policy makers by providing access to methodologies and data which enable the assessment and evaluation of the contribution of public libraries to the networked information society and the national lifelong learning initiative.
To provide public library managers with a tool to plan, develop and evaluate services.
To assist collaborators with public libraries by providing vital information for partnership developments.
The project will draw on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
Quantitative techniques will include transaction logging, to provide statistics on number of sessions etc., together with service type data, such as which application has been used.
Management data will be collated to provide information on total usage, costs, market penetration etc.. One of the objectives of the project is to establish standard methodologies for wide use, to provide useful comparative data.
Qualitative methods will include content analysis of documentary evidence for placing the research in its national and international context; the use of surveys and semi-structured interviews with both users and non-users, with an emphasis on exploring the issues of benefits of access to IT based services.
Phase one The first stage of the project has developed a draft methodology “workbook”, which is now being implemented by the three library authorities project partners: Birmingham, Cheshire, and Cumbria.
The workbook consists of basic introductory information about the research process, more detailed information about the approaches to be piloted, as well as prototype questionnaires and interview guidelines.
Each library authority has recruited a part-time researcher for six months to pilot the methodology.
The researchers are currently compiling a library profile, consisting of background information such as relevant policy documents relating to IT developments, number of service points, and statistical information on IT usage.
They have also begun to survey non-users, and will be surveying existing library users during September 1999.
Work has also begun on interviewing existing IT users, which will be the main focus of analysing the impact and benefits of library access to these services.
This pilot stage of the project will run until December 1999, after which the analysis of the findings will enable the refinement of the methodologies, which will then be used to carry out fieldwork across a wide range of public access points, including those public libraries who have developed services as a result of DCMS/Wolfson funding.
For those wishing to receive regular updates on the project, and contribute to discussion of issues relating to value and impact of IT services, a discussion list has been set up.
To join this list, send a message to: majordomo@mmu.ac.uk, with with the following as the body of the message: “subscribe vital”.
References [1]Library and Information Commission, (1997).
New Library: The People’s Network.
Available from: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary [August 23rd 1999].
[2] Library and Information Commission, (1998).
Building the New Library Network.
Available from: http://www.lic.gov.uk/publications/policyreports/building/index.html [August 23rd 1999].
[3] See, for example, the White Paper, The Learning Age : a new renaissance for a new Britain (Cm 3790) London: The Stationery Office, 1998, available from: http://www.dfee.gov.uk/post16/index.htm [August 27th 1999] Connecting the Learning Society: National Grid for Learning, Department for Education & Employment, 1997, available from: http://www.dfee.gov.uk/grid/challenge/index.htm [August 27th 1999] [4] Department for Culture, Media & Sport (1998), “New Library: The People’s Network”: The Government’s Response (Cm 3887).
London: The Stationery Office.
Available from: http://www.culture.gov.uk/NEW-LIBRARY.HTM [August 23rd 1999].
[5] Batt, C. (1998), Information Technology in Public Libraries.
6th ed.
London: Library Association Publishing.
[6] Public Libraries Research Group of the Society of Chief Librarians (1998), “Public Libraries Strategic Research: Strategic Research Issues for Public Libraries – 1997”, Library & Information Research News, 22 (70), pp.14-22.
Author details Juliet Eve Research Fellow CERLIM (The Centre for Research in Library and Information Management) Manchester Metropolitan University Rosamond Street West off Oxford Road Manchester M15 6LL 0161 247 6142 j.eve@mmu.ac.uk http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/cerlim/ Article Title: “VITAL services?
Evaluating IT access in public libraries” Author: Juliet Eve Publication Date: 23-Sep-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 21 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/public-libraries/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: Internet Training for the Social Sciences Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Internet Training for the Social Sciences Buzz url research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom and Emma Place announce the RDN virtual training suite.
RDN Virtual Training Suite SOSIG is pleased to announce the launch of the RDN (Resource Discovery Network) Virtual Training Suite a set of free, interactive, web-based tutorials for students, lecturers and researchers who want to discover what the Internet can offer in their subject area.
Each tutorial has been written by an academic or librarian with specialist knowledge of both their subject area and the Internet.
There are 11 tutorials available in phase one of the project (with another 27 in production).
Key features include the opportunity for users to: TOUR key sites in their subject area DISCOVER techniques for improving Internet search skills REVIEW skills needed to evaluate internet information REFLECT on practical ideas for using the Internet to support study, teaching or research Quizzes and exercises help to lighten the learning load and a virtual “shopping basket” is available in which users can collect links to interesting sites and return to them later.
Who should know about the Virtual Training Suite and why?
Students who can use the tutorials to familiarise themselves with the key sites in their subject area and gain tips on how to use the Internet to support their study and research.
Lecturers and teachers who can discover ideas for making effective use of the Internet within their teaching and support their students by encouraging them to work through the tutorials.
Internet trainers, librarians or academic support staff who can integrate the suite within institutional training programmes to complement local induction/education/refresher activities.
Posters and leaflets are available to help you promote the service.
The Training Suite has been built at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol.
SOSIG is host to seven tutorials within the RDN Virtual Training Suite: Internet Business Manager written by Kate Sharp of Biz/ed, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol.
Internet Economist written by Libby Miller and Martin Poulter, Economics LTSN, University of Bristol.
Internet for Lawyers written by Sue Pettit, Subject Librarian for Law, Wills Memorial Library, University of Bristol.
Internet Politician written by Heather Dawson, British Library of Political and Economic Science, the Library of the London School of Economics.
Internet Psychologist written by Annie Trapp, LTSN Psychology, University of York.
Internet Social Worker written by Angela Upton, National Institute for Social Work, London.
Internet Sociologist written by Stuart Macwilliam, Library and Information Services, University of Exeter.
For details of the tutorials available in other subject areas and future planned tutorials (available in May next year) see: http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ Some feedback from the tutorials so far: “Very user-friendly.
Well laid out and easy to use.
An ideal introduction for new students” Politics lecturer, University of Bristol “We think this is a wonderful self-paced guide for law and will create a link to it from our Library web page for students and Faculty”.
IT Training and Development, Law Faculty and Bodleian Law Library, University of Oxford “I like the way it introduced me to new economic sites I didn’t know.” Economics post-graduate student, Oxford University “Brilliant resource which I’m sure I’ll use again and again.
Thank you!” Psychology researcher, University of Edinburgh “Quick and easy links.
Well-designed”.
Economics researcher, University of Leeds Author Details   Emma Place and Debra Hiom SOSIG University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Article Title: “Planet SOSIG: Internet Training for the Social Sciences” Author: Debra Hiom and Emma Place Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/planet-sosig/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Hidden Treasures: The Impact of Moving Image and Sound Archives in the 21st Century Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hidden Treasures: The Impact of Moving Image and Sound Archives in the 21st Century Buzz software framework infrastructure archives metadata digitisation copyright video preservation cataloguing multimedia licence url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter reports on the one day meeting on multimedia objects in the British Library, London, October 2002.
This conference was set up 'to consider the central importance of moving images and sound to our heritage and present-day culture, the necessity of adequate funding for the archives that preserve such materials, and asks why there is a lack of any coherent infrastructure for moving image and sound archives in the UK'.
In fact the real subtext of this conference was the race to save 100 years worth of material.
Christopher Frayling (Rector, Royal College of Art) set the tone from early on with his remarks about film and film scholarship.
There were lots of questions posed, including 'whose responsibility is it to preserve this material?
', and 'where is the money coming from?'.
Frayling has written extensively on film and media, including subjects such as Tutankhamun's reception in the 20th century, the history of the vampire concept in film, and Spaghetti westerns (he has written on cut sequences in the westerns of Sergio Leone).
He used some interesting examples to illustrate the difficulty of using film sources as material for discussion.
He has in the past used the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, particularly the part with the rising lions sequence.
Sometimes this sequence is missing from the print.
He pointed out that in the field of literature, this kind of textual corruption would make the craft untenable.
It is possible to find variorum editions of Shakespeare whose pages might contain only three lines of actual text, and the rest of the page is made up with footnotes.
Film scholarship is treated very casually by comparison.
Frayling mentioned Murnau's famous Nosferatu many prints in circulation show Nosferatu walking around in daylight not tinted blue as originally intended to suggest night and the scene is therefore incomprehensible.
Another classic film which Frayling lectured on in the 1980s (didn't catch the title) has a scene in which a woman appeared, naked except for a pair of shoes.
This scene was always missing in 16 millimetre prints.
Someone should be looking after the definitive texts as in Classics.
Frayling was entirely unambiguous about his view that the same standards as for text should apply to film.
Frayling also looked at the process of discovery and research in film, discussing it as a user who has used archive material for books and film.
He suggested (and illustrated effectively) that private collectors are an underrated resource.
He mentioned one in particular who is using off-air videotapes as loft insulation, having decided to collect all Italian films produced between 1957 and 1972, including variant editions (Frayling could shed no light on why this exact period had been chosen, but seemed very grateful that the collection exists).
Frayling mentioned that the famous still photographs of Tutankhamun's tomb taken by the photographer Harry Burton were lit in a way reminiscent of Hollywood films of the period.
In fact Harry Burton shot footage of the dig (some of which he was able to show).
The Metropolitan Museum knew that they had some footage relating to the Tutankhamun dig, but didn't know exactly what it represented.
Hence the film was not prioritised for restoration until recently.
What survives is often still around through sheer luck.
There is some surviving footage shot by Lowell Thomas (the biographer of T.E.
Lawrence) which was originally circulated by a travel agency ('Gamages' in fact, in the days when they supplied such a service): the surviving film is a 16 millimetre 12 reeler.
Interesting in itself, its existence enabled the Imperial War museum to identify high quality 35 mm footage relevant to Lawrence, which otherwise would have languished as unimportant.
This is in fact part of the footage which Lowell Thomas used to create the myth of Lawrence.
He showed a short clip of Queen Elizabeth's famous Tilbury speech from the film Fire over England, in circulation just before the beginning of WWII.
This showed squadrons of aircraft over the English Channel a strange inclusion in a film about the Spanish Armada, though it was obviously shot to make concrete the parallel with the imminent struggle.
He asked: was it ever there in the circulated print?
The real challenge is to establish the versions of film we are working from.
This is a challenge both to snobbery (films are not important) and to an industry chasing quick profits.
At the end of his presentation, a representative from an archive in the North of England reported that they had a print of Fire over England with the squadrons of aircraft included (I'm sure that I saw a print of this film including the aircraft myself about twenty years ago on a regional television channel).
In summary, the business of disinterring hidden treasures is a double-edged sword.
Most effort goes into just making stuff available.
But new discoveries are more likely to be made in a film (and sound) area (where things can be compared, as they can in a library or archive).
Frayling argued that archives should be involved in the creation of a national strategy – including deciding 'who does what'.
To talk seriously about resources, and to establish connections with print archives.
There should be a national debate.
The idea of regional archives was a new idea 20 years ago now there is a network of them.
The use of these archives is as a source of material illustrating life in all its aspects, so the provision for archiving ought to be obvious.
He pointed out that the idea of making archives of film authoritative is not new, and in fact can be traced back to 1898.
James Patterson, Director, Media Archive for Central England, looked at current UK provision of moving image and sound, and asked: how are UK archives doing?
If we’ve made progress, what are the barriers?
And what are we going to do about it?
In general we talk of public sector archives, but, as indicated, private stuff is just as important.
He announced that Resource is funding work which will result in the 1st published strategy.
[1] He noted that the 'Public Good' is a main driver in public moving image archives.
Currently we are engaged in a mapping exercise.
And regional bodies help to develop a sense of place.
He observed that the BFI collection was first developed in 1935 this means that the whole era of silent film had passed by: archives are always playing ‘catchup’.
Financial imperatives comprise a major barrier to development (at all levels).
But, collections have to be developed, otherwise there is nothing to unlock.
How are we doing in general?
We’re late but excellent core work which has been carried out, and the foundation has been laid for a hugely important public resource.
This requires recognition of the archival value of the materials, and we are close to this now.
We need the strategic vision to move us all forward – this conference marks the beginning of this process.
We need to think of distributed collections and develop the appropriate mindset.
Other speakers included Crispin Jewitt, who gave the view from the British Library National Sound Archive.
He gave an outline of the history of recorded sound, in order to give context to the kind of material which is available with existing provision in the UK.
Surprisingly, it seems to have first got off the ground for academic field research (folk music, anthropological recording and linguistics).
The convergence of digital technologies means there is now a blurring of media boundaries.
There is a surprising richness of content, which he illustrated with some well chosen clips.
One in particular will have interested those in the audience interested in authenticity issues: Chopin’s minute waltz recorded in 1905 by a pupil of Chopin.
One might expect that, being much closer in time to Chopin, and to the playing tradition of Chopin's period, as well as being performed by a pupil of the master, that it would represent a more authentic performance (I've always felt that Chopin today is played far too fast, for example) in fact, not only does it sound quite unlike any performance of the minute waltz you have ever heard, it sounds as though the performer was making it up as he was going along.
How authentic is that?
On the institutional front, Jewitt's view was that there is little coherent public strategy.
Users of sound and audio-visual archives are often metropolitan focussed (for broadcasting).
There is strength in existing provision (he engaged in a brief survey of archives).
He noted gaps and shortfalls, and inadequate institutional structures, and that there is a lost heritage because of this.
He made the important point that 'stuff which may be reused, is liable to be preserved over stuff of intrinsic worth'.The way forward might be via a co-ordination of strategy and an engagement with existing cross-sectoral developments.
Also through the clarification of the interface with arts and broadcasting sections.
The afternoon session looked at practical issues and examples of moving image and sound activities.
These presentations included those by BeMe (Black & Ethnic Minority Experience), the Project to bring football films to the local community in Nottingham, Full Circle Arts/North West Film Archive’s ‘Can I Hear That in Colour?’ project, Black History Month, Mental Health Media, and the NIFTC’s Digital Film Archive Joan Bakewell (British Film Institute) spoke of the huge amount of material threatening to overwhelm.
Formats multiply, and we feel the need to migrate.
BFI is conscious that we need to set up strategic approach to video and sound in the UK, and that we want to be a part of it.
Rights these are third party largely ('we are ‘custodians,’ not owners').
On preservation she mentioned that the BFI has around 107 million feet of film in its archive.
They have about 38 thousand films to stabilise, and around 100 thousand to catalogue.
We need to settle on a format for access.
The BFI wants to be part of the strategy, and the technology has to help us here, to manage and share the collections.
We need more access initiatives, and to exploit core competences.
Mark Wood (substituting for the Chair of Resource, Matthew Evans) said that the description of Resource is based on the assumption of common challenges among museums, libraries and archives.
Resource is setting up an archives task force, essentially to undertake a mapping exercise of what is identifiable and accessible [1].
For example ITV has about 300,000 hours of newsclips (from the 1890s onwards) at 16 hours a day it would take about 51 years to watch all of it.
He argued that we need common digital mappings and frameworks.
Liz Forgan (Chair, Heritage Lottery Fund) applauded the creation of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
It isn't just preservation matters which makes treasures hidden copyright is another issue which takes material out of reach.
The Heritage Lottery Fund supports important projects but wants to see the bigger picture: a national strategy is required for this.
She welcomed the announcement that such a strategy would be developed.
and said that the HLF will support it financially in order to better pursue their own.
She pointed out that the HLF grant programme has been simplified.
She closed her remarks by observing that the conference marks a milestone in learning how to hand on this part of our cultural heritage.
Derek Law (University of Strathclyde and Director of the Centre for Digital Library Research) spoke on 'access & metadata' (the word 'metadata' had not been much in evidence earlier in the day).
Some users (he said) relate to archivists like jailers.
This is because it is difficult to get clips of anything.
We need to sort out access getting funding for digitisation is not so much of a problem.
We need to consider metadata and sustainability and staffing.
He felt he was contributing a dose of cold water to the conference.
He explained why the Higher Education community doesn't use multimedia to any significant extent (the community spends according to his figures one two-thousandth of one per cent on multimedia).
It's a priority question it is just too hard to get hold of these resources.
HE has done well however with the Technical Advisory Service on Images (TASI).
He asked why it was that we don't have more sites in the UK like the Library of Congress's 'Memory of America'?
Fair dealing = stealing?
IPR issues should be resolved for HE.
Stills are ok. Sound clips are ok, but it is difficult to get video.
And the metadata is now much better.
As far as content is concerned, there aren't that many good clips around.
The community wants clips, not whole films.
Finding aids are also a problem.
The BUFVC Researchers guide is free in the ac.uk domain, so it can't be accessed online outside the network.
We (as a community) want instant access.
In the HE community we also need to address systems obstacles.
There are too many formats; standard software is a problem, as is the general absence of metadata (how can you search across these resources otherwise?).
There are physical problems too.
Underinvestment.
Plus, it is just too complicated.
Without metadata, we can't decide what is relevant to our requirements.
And we want it now.
He concluded by pointing out that HE requires a solution which has to work with the Microsoft platform with an academic license.
References [1] The purpose of the Strategy is to: *produce a document for audiovisual archival development across the UK *provide information on the strengths and weaknesses of audiovisual archival provision across the UK *recognise the important strategic benefits to be gained from the audiovisual sector working closely with the wider museums, libraries and archives sector *do the above within the broader context of changing national and regional policy making and structures *inform public and private funding bodies on the priorities for capital and revenue investment in audiovisual archives sector The completed strategy will be launched in London in June 2003.
Author Details   Philip Hunter Editor of Ariadne UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Article Title: "Hidden Treasures: the impact of moving image and sound archives in the 21st Century" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/london/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Software Review: C4U Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Software Review: C4U Buzz software database usability archives browser copyright windows passwords php cookie intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Cox and Simon McLean review this web-monitoring software.
C4U is a personal link checker that will check for changes to web pages according to parameters you set, can access password protected sites and through which you can preview changes to see whether they are significant.
As a personal productivity tool I recommend it, though some aspects of its design could be improved.
We all want to keep up to date with the minimum of effort.
There are quite a few options available: Open email lists: this is a great way to find out what is happening, partly because the news comes to you and news often breaks on the lists before it is announced officially by the organisations involved on their web sites (in fact most organisations are very slow to put press releases up on the web).
Many of the discussions are long, off-theme and tendentious, however.
We are all trying to cut down on our list memberships.
News services: there are many useful newsletters around, but they do not fully reflect one’s interests, one often discovers specific sites that one feels it would be useful to track.
Bookmarking: one can simply bookmark the news pages of relevant organisations, and run the bookmark checker occasionally to see which sites have changed.
In Netscape, for example, you can highlight a group of bookmarks and check only them, or check everything in your bookmark folder.
Most bookmark utilities built into browsers only tell you that a site has changed, however, nothing about what has changed or how much.
Third party services like Mind-it, from NetMind (http://www.netmind.com/): Mind-it will send you an email when a page or pages you have selected changes according to configurable parameters.
Being a third party web based service it can be a bit slow.
Also in the default service you get an individual email for every page that changes, potentially annoying, unless you choose to log in to view a report for all the sites you are monitoring on the website.
C4U is not greatly different from Mind-it, except that it is installed software and has a little bit more functionality.
Ultimately the choice between the two will probably be determined by whether you generally want to run your checker from one particular machine; or you want a service which you can access from any machine you happen to be working on.
Using C4U C4U is available for windows operating systems above Win95, and is easy to install.
It can be run from the program menu, systems tray and will appear on the browser toolbar as a new button.
Clicking on this button adds the page currently in your browser to your list of items to check.
Mind-it has a similar QuickMind function (click on this link and it will mark the referring URL, remembering who you are through a cookie).
Some of the item description is gathered from the page itself eg the resource name, from the title tag.
You can edit page names and descriptions, as you can in Mind-it.
Using C4U for a few days will bring you to a realisation of how bad most web sites are about describing a page in the title tag.
Commonly in the pages I look are just entitled ‘news’.
This is a silly mistake, since most search engines use the title tag as the name of the link to the site in a hit list.
You would have thought people would have realised that they should use something sensible like Acme news.
When you want to run a check on what has changed you simply launch the application, and it goes through your collection, giving an (annoying) beep when it is finished.
Pages that have changed have a yellow smiling face against them, unchanged pages have a blue face and where the programme could not connect there is a grey face.
This is a slightly childish way of presenting the information but when all is said and done it is immediately obvious from first using the programme what it means, and the yellow stands out.
If text has changed you can click on a link and see a preview of the page with the changed text highlighted, in the lower section of the screen (highlighting of changes is also available as an option for Mind-it alerts).
From this I’ve found it very easy to quickly identify which changes are worth following up.
If links have changed you can view a listing of all the links on the page with the new ones marked.
[See figure 1] Figure 1 Screenshot illustrating a preview of a changed page.
For each page you are checking you have a range of parameters that you can set to determine when you are alerted (Mind-it offers a range of similar functions, though I have not tested these to see how well they work in comparison).
For example you can choose only to be alerted if the text changes or only if a link is added, or only if 3 links or more have changed.
This gives you half a chance of eliminating alerts for proofing changes to web pages, and gives you the option to check for small changes on sites that are important to you, but only get alerted of major changes to less important sites.
There is a function to check a page and only be alerted when certain keywords appear.
Although it is possible to think of applications for this, in reality I cant see myself using it that often.
For my purposes the most useful approach I have found is to check the news or press release page of a site for new links.
You can run the checker when you want (or schedule it to run at certain intervals).
With Mind-it one typically gets an alert when one is working on something else, and one just files the mail away.
The checker gives you the control to just look for updates when you want.
Its true that you can suppress the Mind-it alerts and log onto the My Mind-it site, but it takes a lot more discipline than just clicking an icon on your desktop.
If you have a number of professional roles it is convenient to be able to separate out checking functions for each one.
In C4U you can check a site or folder of sites individually with a right mouse click or you can check all the locations.
You can store basic passwords for a particular resource.
This is no great achievement to those who have learnt the trick of embedding the password in a URL, and Mind-it offers you the ability to save passwords too, though you should be more cautious about saving passwords to a third party service.
But it is a useful added function, allowing me to keep an eye on key pages of the Intranet, for example.
C4U is the best tool for I have found for keeping track of changing sites, I much prefer it to Mind-it, even if the differences are apparently marginal.
However there are a lot of improvements that could be made to its usability.
Irritations Although you can do a bulk import of bookmarks, you cannot export links to share them with another person or to save them to your main bookmark file.
This means that you will inevitably have to match two bookmark files at once: one using the browser, one in C4U.
It is obvious that the more integration between the two there were the easier it would be to maintain both.
C4U only works on pages, not sites.
With a webspider I could monitor sets of pages to a particular depth, the software following the links on my chosen page to see if sub-pages had changed.
If only links have changed and not the text you do not get the preview option, it would be better to always offer the preview.
The scheduling is crude.
You can set C4U to check from every day back to every 15 minutes ( does the web change that much?
and even it does who wants to be alerted that often?).
The option to select your own number of hours to the next check seems to have a bug in it, I could not find a number that the programme accepted as valid.
Therefore scheduling is a problem.
C4U does not always work terribly well with dynamically created sites.
I found for example that the Ingenta news site always seemed to register as changed, even if it had not, probably because somewhere a session ID was stored in the page.
It is suggested by C4U that you save a search engine argument and use the software to check to see if there are new results.
In fact I found a saved Google search changes every time, probably not because of new search results but because of dynamically created information.
It did work though with Excite (despite the ads) and the local SBU search engine.
If you run the check, but have to go away and do something else, and close the programme, you have lost any information about what pages had changed.
It would be valuable to have a log.
Clicking to confirm that you had noted that a particular page has been updated would be annoying.
Like many bookmark functions in browsers it is not easy to organise your pages.
There is an alphabetical sort but it sorts everything not just a particular folder.
You can only drag and drop individual items, not a number which have been selected, unless they are in a folder.
So just making everything tidy is more hassle than it needs to be.
The different windows of the application are resizable, but once your collection of links gets beyond forty or fifty it becomes quite tiresome to move items; you need a strong hierarchical structure to store them in, and discipline to move new links into the appropriate folder.
The help is online help, which is always slower than help stored in the local system, though saying that the programme is so simple to use, it is unlikely that you will often have to consult the help anyway.
Conclusion To supplement open email lists (fast but random), service providers own news lists (there are too many to join), and email news services (never quite specific enough to one’s current research needs).
I think a tool like C4U has an important place in enabling the professional to keep an eye on what is going on, without being drowned in information.
Author Details   Andrew Cox Associate Director of LITC South Bank University Email: coxam@sbu.ac.uk Website: http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc C4U is a Microsoft Windows program which tracks web site changes.
It does this by sitting in your system tray and periodically running a check on a list of sites you provide.
The changes from the last run on each site are noted.
I have run it on Windows 2000 workstation (Pentium 650) for a few weeks now and so far it appears to be relatively stable running.
That said, I can’t say how stable it is on other hardware and software.
As many people already track changes to their web site in a number of ways, how then is C4U different?
Well, as a windows client rather than something you run on the server, it can ‘beep’ at you as well as visually notify you from the desktop when something on your list of sites changes.
It is not designed as a replacement for link checkers or other tools such as htnotify (part of htdig – see http://www.htdig.org).
There may well be specific lists of URLs you wish to generate through these sorts of programs that are not relevant to this program.. A basic use of the program would be to monitor the home page for changes such as news and highlights.
This brings us to the change tracking features it provides: Change Tracking Keywords: Entering text keywords will allow you to detect and highlight elements in a particular web page returned, so entering ‘science’ will notify when that word appears in the page text of that URL.
Booleans: Entering ‘kings and not alumni’ for instance will track only changes based on the logic entered much like you can enter on a number of search engines.
Text Change Tracking: One use I managed to find for the software is to track database updates: running a cgi (or asp, php..) program which lists off contents of a particular database.
You could use this to track web form submissions for instance.
The preview window brings up a version of the page like a mini-browser and highlights the bits of the page that it has recognised as having altered.
The web site help (http://www.c-4-u.com/howtouse.html) discusses further examples of usage.
Eg.
See example (King’s College site used as an example) Conclusion As a piece of freeware it is a neat little desktop program and can be put to many uses..
It has a slightly quirky feel rather like a 3rd party paintbrush program but that said, its relatively easy to edit site properties.
A pity you cant make it skip/disable checking selected sites in the list you produce without removing them completely.
Limitations that it does not address for example listing expired pages or the last ‘N’ days of web page changes.
Then again, its not designed with those functions in mind.. References The web site for C4U is : http://www.c-4-u.com/ Author Details   Simon McLean Senior Applications Analyst/Advisor (Webmaster) Kings College, London Email: simon.mclean@kcl.ac.uk Website: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ Article Title: “Software Review: C4U” Authors: Andrew Cox and Simon McLean Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/c4u/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 24: Plumbing the Digital Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 24: Plumbing the Digital Library Buzz framework html database xml tei archives metadata identifier sgml z39.50 interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter introduces Ariadne 24.
Lorcan Dempsey Farewell Lorcan Dempsey, Director of UKOLN for the past six years, has recently moved up to head the newly constituted DNER (the Distributed National Electronic Resource), and is now based in London.
This is UKOLN’s loss, but a great plus for the DNER.
Ray Lester, head of UKOLN’s management committee, points out that Lorcan: … has presided over a remarkable period of growth and diversification during his almost 6 years as Director of UKOLN.
He has ensured the Centre has been able to respond to the opportunities offered within the UK, within Europe, and internationally, as those concerned with networked information sought to react to the Internet and the World Wide Web….
Lorcan moved early to expand work in the UK public library arena and then to embrace the similar needs of museums and archives.
[He also]….. had long recognised the need to establish UKOLN as a world player in the field of metadata and resource discovery and he proceeded to spearhead this to great effect.
Ray Lester also comments that: Leaders need vision: and they do so most especially when working in a rapidly changing external environment.
Many of us have frequently commented that it is the combination of being able to engage with and articulate the technical details of ‘shared information spaces’ in ways that we can all (usually!)
understand, coupled with a masterly appreciation of what all this networking business means for society, that makes Lorcan such a rare beast.
He has our best wishes with the DNER, and we hope to see him again soon, possibly sporting a ‘Book of Kells’ tie, which is just visible (boxed) on the table in the accompanying photograph :-) Lorcan Dempsey’s farewell lunch at the Moon and Sixpence, Bath Ariadne Issue 24 A number of projects, with which UKOLN has been and is currently involved, have explored areas related to DNER type services.
The AGORA project for example, which is outlined in an article in this issue by Bridget Robinson, David Palmer and Rosemary Russell, allows users to create a personal landscape of relevant resources on the basis of z39.50 databases in libraries around the world.
Those who attended the UKOLN conference in the summer of 1998 will recall that the name of the conference was ‘Information landscapes for a learning society’, and that it explored a range of issues connected with the the intelligent delivery of information across networks, plus the use of user profiles for resource discovery.
In the last issue of Ariadne we ran two articles on the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was launched successfully on the 14th of March: one from Juliet New, who is involved in the project, and also a user review by Peter Cliff (of UKOLN and the RDN).
Both of these articles have received a lot of interest.
These two articles are followed up in this issue by a final piece written by Laura Elliot, a technical expert associated with the project, who explores the use of SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language) in the management of the (extensive) OED text.
This technology is particularly interesting since there is a lot of it out there behind HTML pages.
It is just that it cannot be seen or easily detected for what it is.
Easy therefore for users of the web to assume that there isn’t very much SGML/XML activity happening out there, and to make systems architecture decisions on this assumption.
Most publishing houses which use electronic markup systems use SGML for archival, editorial, structural and analytical purposes (creation of indices, tables of contents, etc): they don’t use HTML behind the scenes because it does not have available the necessary richness of markup possibilities.
(this deficiency is and was one of the motivations for the creation of the XML standard in 1996).
The OED text is delivered to the user in HTML format, but not held or manipulated in that form by the publisher.
Ariadne was present at the Glasgow CLUMPS conference in April this year, and has contributed a report on the event.
The issue of free text searching as opposed to structured information surfaced, as well as a number of other issues.
The conference was attended by a significant number of non-eLib participants, particularly those from an interlibrary loans background: this has turned out to be a significant area for the CLUMPS projects.
The JISC-CNI conference in Stratford this month has also been covered in this issue.
Another conference reported on is the recent JASPER Further Education meeting held in London: the author has contributed a highly valuable ‘Acronym Alert’ section, giving an overview of the new terms which the HE and the FE communities have to learn, as well as a guide to where the same acronyms are used in different senses.
Glasgow CLUMPS conference, April 2000 Lou Burnard contributes an introduction to the new Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium, which, I am assured, will be a lot cheaper to join than W3C.
The TEI was an important refinement to the SGML standard, launched in 1994, which offered a standard for the markup used in humanities computing projects, to ensure logical consistency and interoperability.
This standard has been widely used by a number of prestigious projects.
It is now being relaunched as a mark-up independent standard for text encoding (meaning it might be used also with XML and other text mark-up metalanguages).
Paul Miller has contributed two articles to this issue: one on ‘Interoperability’, and another on Digital Object Identifiers .
This issue also contains the usual Regular Columns section, and the Get Tooled Up section.
This month the latter section contains two articles by Brian Kelly.
The Web Focus article reports on WWW9 held in Amsterdam just a few weeks before this issue of Ariadne.
The Web Watch article looks at just how many web servers there are in the UK Higher Education community.
The article provides some answers.
The Odds and Ends section, contains the usual cartoon, the caption competition, plus a book review, as well as access to the old Checkout Archive.
eLib and the DNER Ariadne is gearing up to cover the development of the new Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and its services.
A number of the JISC eLib programme projects are now winding down, but there is still substantial scope for coverage of these until at least the end of the year, and a little more thereafter.
Those projects which have made a successful transition from demonstrator project to service will of course continue to be a focus of interest.
Ariadne reviewed the CLUMPs one day conferences in issues 23 and 24, and also featured the Agora project in issue 24 (all Z39.50 projects).
At the turn of the year (as regular readers will know) an article on the proposed DNER service was mooted for Ariadne, which we hoped to run in issue 23; due to the pace of events however, the article was rescheduled for issue 24.
We’ve postponed it again, since the pace of events continues (the DNER is now being set up and staffed, as our opening paragraph indicated).
We hope to run a significant article on this subject at the earliest sensible opportunity.
UKOLN Web Magazines The UKOLN Information Services Team now has two Information Officers once again with the arrival of Marieke Napier.
Marieke comes to us from Manchester.
Prior to joining UKOLN she worked as corporate desktop support officer and webmaster for Building Design Partnership, a multidiscipline architectural design company.
For the remainder of the year the IST will be fielding three electronic magazines, and Brian Kelly, who has been acting editor for Exploit Interactive for the past two issues, is continuing to contribute substantially to the commissioning effort for the magazine, as well as providing important extra effort for the launch of our latest magazine.
Marieke will be lead editor of Exploit Interactive for its remaining issues (seven were planned in all), and lead editor for the forthcoming EU Fifth Framework Digicult project magazine Cultivate Interactive released on the 3rd of July at http://www.cultivate-int.org, as well as Ariadne Deputy Editor.
This new magazine will cover the wider cultural community of Museums and Galleries in Europe involved in digital library initiatives, in addition to the library and archive sector currently addressed by Exploit Interactive.
Summary Access Statistics for Ariadne, January through May 2000 Hard hat zone only.
User sessions for the whole Ariadne site in January 2000 were 902 per day, and 27,963 for the whole month.
Page views for the month ran to 103,222, and the site as a whole took just over a third of a million raw hits.
In February the user sessions amounted to 1,000 per day, and 29,009 for the month.
Page views were to 107,352.
Total number of hits: 312,325.
User sessions rose again in March (Ariadne 23 was published on March 23rd), with an average per day of 1,257, and a total for the month of 40,234.
Page views were 118,492 altogether, with raw hits at 405,466.
In April Ariadne collected 1,133 user sessions per day, 34,019 for the month; and page views were 101,252 during the same period.
Total hits for April were 329,005.
During the same four month period the average length of user sessions varied between twelve and a half minutes and 17 minutes.
May saw the raw hit count at 348,214, page views at 116,446, monthly user sessions at 35,813, and daily user sessions at 1,155.
The figures are summarised in the table below: Month: January February March April May Hits (month) 333,800 312,325 405,466 329,005 348,214 Users (month) 27,963 29,002 40,234 34,019 35,813 Users (day) 902 1,000 1,257 1,133 1,155 Page views (month) 103,222 107,352 118,492 101,252 116,446   Suggestions for articles for issues 25 to 27 are now being considered.
Article proposals should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Books for review should be sent to: The Editor Ariadne UKOLN The Library, University of Bath Claverton Down Bath BA2 7AY United Kingdom Enjoy the issue.
Author Details Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Article Title: “Editorial Introduction to Issue 24: Plumbing the Digital Library” Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/editorial/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Towards a User-Centred Approach to Digital Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards a User-Centred Approach to Digital Libraries Buzz database portal usability ejournal url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ken Eason reports on the five themes in the Digilib Conference, Espoo, Finland.
The National Library of Finland led the organisation of this conference to bring together librarians and researchers from around the world to discuss progress with digital libraries.
The aims were to explore how users were responding to digital services and to examine how services could be made more 'user-centred'.
The conference was attended by 200 delegates from 23 countries.
The Powerpoint presentations of speakers have been placed on the finelib Web site [1] and some of the papers have been published in the electronic journal Information Research [2].
Many of the papers reported evaluations of user behaviour and it proved a good forum to judge the value of different evaluation methods and to assess the progress that is being made around the world to make digital libraries a reality.
Since the focus was on libraries, the conference also provided some insights into how librarians currently feel about the great change that digital technology is bringing to their profession.
The papers were organised into five themes: Methodologies of user studies Usefulness and validity of digital resources in research Impact of digital libraries on student learning Evaluation of digital library programmes and services Visions of the Future Methodologies of user studies Linda Banwell from the JISC-funded Jubilee Project at Northumbria University gave the keynote address for this theme.
The Jubilee project is developing a range of evaluation methods for librarians to use and Linda was keen to encourage libraries to use a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to understand both what users were doing and what was important to them.
Philip Pothen, Communications Manager for JISC, gave an overview of UK projects that were evaluating user behaviour.
I attended the conference to report our evaluation work on the Zetoc Service and Lesley Huxley reported work on SOSIG, both also funded by JISC.
There was some envy from delegates of other countries that in the UK we recognise the importance of user evaluation and have a wide-ranging programme for funding evaluation work.
Linda Banwell's call for different types of evaluation was echoed in a number of papers that compared the results of different types of evaluation.
Ellen Hoffmann reported a study of ECO (Early Canadian Online) which used a range of methods including user surveys, server logs, focus groups and interface assessments.
Mark Notess from Indiana, similarly used a mixture of methods including session logging, a questionnaire and contextual inquiry, (including observation, interviews and focus groups), in a study of Variations, a music teaching system.
They reported that the more quantitative methods allowed usage trends to be followed but it was the qualitative methods that enabled explanatory models of users to be developed which could guide future service development.
Usefulness and validity of digital resources in research Carol Tenopir from Tennessee gave the keynote address for this theme and focussed on evidence that scholars are reading more because of the availability of digital resources.
She was careful, however, to highlight the differences between disciplines.
Sanna Talja from Tampere reported a qualitative study of scholars from four disciplines that looked at why there were differences in take-up of electronic journals between the disciplines.
The study concluded that it was factors such as domain size, degree of scatter and relevance criteria rather than familiarity with the technology.
Other papers in this theme gave a broadly optimistic view of the usefulness of digital resources and reported that scholars were beginning to exploit these resources.
But they repeatedly came back to one point; scholars may be able to access a great quantity of information but what they really wanted to do was assess quality and this was much harder to do in the anarchic world of Web resources.
Impact of digital libraries on student learning Sakari Karjalainen, from the Finnish Ministry of Education, led this theme by describing the national strategy in Finland to develop an information society, part of which includes a national plan for a digital library.
Delegates from other countries were impressed by the long-term, integrated approach being taken in Finland and decried the fragmented approach in their own countries.
Many had been able to get funding to launch new services but not to sustain or develop them further.
The importance of evaluating user responses to a service was widely acknowledged but it carried the implication that there would be resources to modify and develop the service to meet emergent requirements.
Service providers often ran into difficulties because there was no further funding for iterative development.
A number of papers considered student responses to digital libraries.
John Colvin and Judith Keene from University College, Worcester, reported on a study in which e-journal access was embedded in teaching materials for business studies students.
This proved a valuable service but the quality depended on good co-operation between academics and library staff.
A common concern about student use of electronic resources was a fear of the dominance of Google.
Many students now come to university knowing that you get information by searching the Internet.
They tend to use Google and the other Internet search engines rather than use the specially developed services of the digital library and they get results.
The worry (again) is that they get a mixture of good and bad quality results and modern students have to be taught how to establish the quality of what they find on the Internet.
Lesley Huxley and Angela Joyce from Bristol University, reporting user behaviour with SOSIG (Social Sciences Information Gateway), were also concerned about Google.
Any subject portal has to keep pace with the facilities offered by general Internet services and, whilst SOSIG can offer quality services to social scientists, it was more difficult to sustain the iterative development costs to keep pace with the services offered by commercial services.
Evaluation of digital library programmes and services In this theme there were examples of different kinds of evaluation and evaluations of different kinds of services.
A number of macro-studies of users were reported, some over a period of years, which gave some insights into the progress of adoption of digital services.
Grace Saw, for example, reported the changing needs of the user community of the University of Queensland.
She drew attention to the continuous need for the iterative and evolutionary development of library services and gave examples of the wide range of evaluation methods they used to assess their services.
Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, head of the National Digital Library of Finland, gave a paper about the use of the national service from 1998 to 2002.
The results show a gradual increase in usage of the service, especially amongst scientists, and gradual increases in levels of user satisfaction.
However, the percentage of those willing to cancel print subscriptions when an e-journal is available has only increased in this period from 49% to 58%.
Brinley Franklin from Connecticut reported a review of Web-based services at four health science libraries and two large campuses from 1998 to 2003.
By 2003 the ratio of 'remote' users to in-house users in the health sciences libraries was 4:1 and in the main campuses 1.3:1, although few of the on-campus users were now visiting the library.
This change in the location of the users was reflected in a study by Kirsti Nilsen from Ontario.
He reported the challenges for the library reference desk when it no longer met users in the library but at a 'virtual reference desk' because the users were remote from the library.
The overall changes were reflected in a paper by Waldomiro Vergueiro reporting a survey of users in San Paulo.
In general users, especially from the hard sciences, were pleased with the electronic resources available to them, but still made use of and continued to value the print stocks in the library.
Users liked the digital library but a hybrid rather than a wholly virtual library remained essential.
The authors of the survey in particular noted that most users had a very limited understanding of the electronic services available and were rather naïve in their use of them.
These broader surveys were complemented by more focused studies of particular services which used a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to explore usage trends, user needs and motivations.
The paper I presented on the zetoc evaluation [3] was in this category.
zetoc provides alert and search facilities for British Library holdings to users across UK Universities.
Our evaluation used log statistics, two questionnaire surveys and an interview programme to develop a broad understanding of usage trends and an in-depth understanding of user strategies and motives.
The full evaluation report is available on the zetoc Web site [4] and it shows that zetoc is a very successful service, well regarded by its users as a comprehensive current awareness service.
Most of the discussion of the paper was about our finding that there are a minority of active users but a majority of more passive users.
Others agreed this was a common pattern and said it was important not to base evaluation (and service changes) just on the views and behaviour of activists.
It was also important to understand the passive users who may have different needs and problems.
Others also drew attention to the 'innovators' and the 'laggards' amongst the user population.
Paola Garigiulo from Rome described a major study of 25 universities using a collection of 3,566 e-journals.
Like the earlier SuperJournal study [5], a cluster analysis was performed on the results of a questionnaire survey of 1,305 users.
It showed that, whilst 28% could be described as 'innovators without hesitation', (mainly engineers), the majority had reservations, used e-journals sparingly and still valued the print tradition.
A number of studies looked at efforts by libraries to create personalised services for their users, for example, Jette Hyldegaard from Copenhagen and Ursula Jutzi from Zurich.
In general they found that users valued them for convenience but their over-riding need was for the service to stay relevant to their needs without the need for them to spend their own time managing the resources.
A number of studies examined the usability to digital services.
While agreeing the importance of usability, several authors warned of the danger that studies could give misleading results.
Kai Oorni from the University of Oulu reported that usability studies had low predictive validity and recommended that studies should be contextually defined.
Teal Anderson from John Hopkins University, Baltimore, reported the use of a range of methods on a variety of services.
He made a number of specific recommendations to ensure the results were accurate; that, for example, task scripts reflected the diversity of user groups and the system was tested for its usability when the user had unexpected as well as standard tasks.
Visions of the future Lars Bjornshague from Lund University gave the keynote address for the final theme by drawing attention to the proliferation of services that now existed to make the digital library a reality.
These services were poorly integrated which meant the digital library was far from 'user-friendly'.
The big technical challenge for the future was to achieve a seamless integration of all these services for the benefit of users.
(There was little discussion at the conference of integrating mechanisms such as open urls but this was not a gathering of technical specialists).
Lars also felt that these developments carried with them big organisational challenges for libraries, changing their roles in relation to their users and in relation to the providers of resources and services.
There was some pessimism voiced about the power of individual libraries in these times of great change.
It was felt that 'Digital Darwinism' might prevail and only the 'fittest' services would survive.
It seemed unlikely that under-funded services developed by libraries would survive against the commercial forces of the publishers and others.
There were calls for libraries to co-operate but no mechanisms were proposed.
One of the final papers was by Bo-Christer Björk from Helsinki who reviewed the progress of the open access movement and asked whether the future would be free access to scholarly information.
The audience were clearly in favour of this approach and hopeful that it would develop as much momentum as the open source and free software movement.
However, many were fearful that the commercial interests of the big publishers would in fact determine the future.
Conclusions My overall impression was of a community that is excited by the digital library but expected, and perhaps hoped, that libraries would remain 'hybrid'.
There was a desire for libraries to continue to be the local centre of services to their user community.
However, they saw major organisational and business changes coming in the wake of technical developments and many were fearful that libraries would lose their role as the interface to local communities of users if they were unable to make their voices heard internationally in a concerted way.
They also had to understand the needs of their user community so that they could act as a 'value-added' virtual gateway to complex services for their users.
If they cannot provide a 'value-added service' some aspects of their traditional role of local service might be usurped by powerful commercial services.
Evaluation is obviously a key to understanding user requirements and there was much to commend in the many evaluations reported.
However, evaluation research is a complex field; developing a sophisticated level of competence amongst librarians in the undertaking of evaluation studies may be quite a challenge.
The delegates obviously found Digilib a useful forum for sharing these important issues with colleagues and there were hopes of holding another such conference in two years time if a volunteer came forward to act as organiser and host.
References FinELib, the National Electronics Library of Finland http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/finelib/digilib/ Information Research: an international electronic journal, Vol.9, No.2 (2) http://informationr.net/ir/9-2/infres92.html Eason, Ken, MacIntyre, Ross, Apps, Ann and Ashby, Martin.
(2003).
'Early Integrators and the Passive Majority: An evaluation study of a large web-based bibliographic reference database', Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Users in the Electronic Information Environments.
UEIE2003 Towards a User-Centred Approach to Digital Libraries) http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/papers/ueie2003.html zetoc British Library Electronic Table of Contents at MIMAS http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk Eason K.D., Richardson, S, Yu, L., 'Patterns of use of Electronic Journals', Journal of Documentation, Vol 56(5) pp 477-504.
Author Details Professor Ken Eason The Bayswater Institute 9 Orme Court London, W2 4RL Tel : 020 7229 2729 Email: k.d.eason@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bayswaterinst.org/ Ken Eason is Director of the Bayswater Institute which is an independent research organisation specialising in action research and evaluation to help organisations in the process of change.
Ken is also Emeritus Professor at Loughborough University where he has undertaken research on the organisational impact of information technology.
He was the chief evaluator of SuperJournal in the e-Lib programme and is currently working with MIMAS on evaluations of Zetoc and ITAM.
Return to top Article Title: "The Digilib Conference:Towards a user-centred approach to digital libraries" Author: Professor Ken Eason Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/espoo-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Functionality in Digital Annotation: Imitating and Supporting Real-world Annotation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Functionality in Digital Annotation: Imitating and Supporting Real-world Annotation Buzz data software html database xml archives metadata browser identifier repositories copyright video hypertext multimedia provenance xpointer vle uml authentication url research standards modelling Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller looks at both pre-digital and digital concepts of annotation, with a view to how annotation tools might be used in the subject-gateway environment.
Long before the first Roman scrawled (possibly a term such as "detritus") in the margin of something he was reading, people had been making annotations against something they had read or seen, however uncomplimentary.
It is more than likely that the first annotation occurred the moment the person making it was able to find a suitable implement with which to scrawl his or her opinion against the original.
Annotating may be defined as making or furnishing critical or explanatory notes or comment.
Whether positive or negative, implicit in the meaning of an annotation is the original text, image or other medium to which the annotation refers; and upon which that annotation is dependent for its full meaning.
In this article I would like to examine the the uses and characteristics of what we might term "pre-digital" or hand-written annotation before comparing them, in the context of digital annotation in a subject gateway environment, with the approaches in design that can be made in digital annotation.
It is anticipated that the characteristics of analogue annotation will influence and even challenge the design of its digital equivalent.
This will lead us to the consideration of annotation functionality from an essential standpoint, that of users.
Finally we will be able to to consider some basic designs of more straight-forward annotation tools.
Definition of annotation in digital context One form of a distributed digital environment would be a subject gateway.
The gateway is designed to provide (usually registered) users with resources of agreed quality, grouped by subject, through a common browser-based interface.
Access may be subject to authentication processes.
So a working definition of a digital annotation might be as follows: A comment upon a digitally accessed resource as a whole, or the contents of a resource, and which itself can be digitally accessed as well as stored.
It would be equally reasonable to elaborate by stating that the annotation need not be stored in the same location as the original resource.
(In the context of a distributed entity like a subject gateway, this would be most probable).
An annotation may apply to many different kinds of resources, text, image as well as other forms of Multimedia and can be applied at differing levels of granularity.
For example, in the instance of a text document, an annotation could apply to the item description of the document, a sub-division of the document, a paragraph, passage or span of text right down to a single word as might appear in a glossary.
Not all these levels would be necessarily appropriate for users and would certainly involve different functionality, but all could prove useful depending on the needs of the user.
Why do people annotate?
Whilst we take it for granted that annotations exist, what is perhaps less obvious is why people make and use annotations.
It is important not to lose sight of the base document or original source when considering the purpose of annotations.
As stated above, an annotation is worse than useless, indeed extremely frustrating, if it is not possible to see the reason why the annotation was written in the first place.
However it is not an exaggeration to characterise annotation as a form of interlocution, i.e.
a conversation between the original author and the annotator through the medium of their respective texts, or other media for that matter.
After all, why do annotators annotate?
It is because they wish to record, principally, their reactions to the base resource.
In the context of publishing, of course, the annotations truly are a form of conversation with the author; annotation systems do exist to permit on-going conversations about the draft of a document being prepared for publication, as we will see in due course.
But consider our example of the Roman writing ‘rubbish’ in the margin of the manuscript: he is most certainly addressing his remark to the author.
However, by and large, annotators are recording their comments in, say, books without any expectation whatsoever that the author will ever see them, (whereas of course the exact opposite is the case when we come to consider digital annotation).
The words to emphasise in this instance would be "are recording".
For even though the original annotator may have no expectation of his/her comments ever being read by another, such annotations can prove invaluable, particularly with the passage of time.
In many instances this passage of time may last no longer than it takes to read the book or some sub-division thereof.
Readers, just like software users, have differing motivations for their use.
Readers read for different reasons Someone reading for pleasure may pencil in the margin an occasional note with nothing more than the vague notion that it will be amusing to remember the initial reaction to the text when it comes to a subsequent and conceivably far off reading.
A student reading a book may be using annotations to provide, for example, brief plot notes throughout a narrative in order to obtain landmarks through a story, or key assertions in a polemical essay, etc.
A researcher might well approach the same text, (conceivably the same that (s)he read as a student), with a somewhat different agenda.
The annotations, (perhaps in a different colour), may be addressing answers to a specific enquiry the researcher has formulated.
In writing his/her reactions, (s)he is now seeking to record to what degree the original work provides evidence to support or refute a finding or theory previously conceived.
In this context the annotations possibly begin to form the bones of an argument either with oneself, or perhaps with contradictory material elsewhere.
Where such contradictions or indeed agreements occur, the annotation is most effective when it is able to cite the comment in the other book together with the text to which that annotation refers.
It is worth noting that whilst researchers' motivation and manner of annotation differ from the previously mentioned annotators, that element of conversation, in this instance more noticeably with themselves, is still central to the act of annotation.
It has been observed in this context [1] that wily purchasers of second-hand higher education text books eschew the neat nearly new copies on the shelf in favour of the much thumbed and weary looking versions.
Their experience is that the latter tend to contain the largest number of annotations, annotations, moreover, which emanate from more than one author.
Such copies consequently offer the purchaser a plethora of opinion and ideas in comparison with the near-pristine texts.
The annotation's audience Whilst it is possible to argue that editors’and critics’ footnotes and commentaries are in fact annotations for the benefit of others, the main point is that handwritten annotations are not usually intended for publication.
In effect, they have an intended audience of one; moreover, that one also happens to be their author.
When we come to consider digital annotation, the motivation inevitably changes to a degree since the audience changes.
This is because the anticipated audience has increased, albeit perhaps by only one; the annotator, conscious that the annotation will be read by another, will alter, however imperceptibly its content and style from that which (s)he wrote for personal use.
The annotator is likely to improve the text in terms of clarity, supporting references, and, indeed even diplomacy and sensitivity.
Indeed the greater the likelihood the annotation will be seen by strangers or outsiders to the domain in which (s)he usually operates, the more likely such enhancements, (and others, such as elimination or expansion of in-house acronyms or jargon), will occur.
Such enhancements are likely to require more space and clearer links.
So it is just as well that the digital environment, with fewer restrictions on space and volume, is more capable of accommodating such improvements than its paper and binding equivalent.
Having considered some of the original reasons for annotation in a pre-digital context and how their content alters with the annotators' motivation and audience, we might usefully consider some of the characteristics of annotation commonly experienced and consequently the challenges they represent to digital annotation design.
Problems posed by handwritten annotations and their digital solutions We might usefully examine a few examples of real-world annotative behaviour which are illustrative of the benefits and difficulties which will confront anyone seeking to implement an annotation process in a digital environment.
Let us consider what may confront a reader who comes upon annotations in a second-hand textbook or a library book.
Our earliest common experience of annotation may well be the cryptic, (though frequently anonymous) comments against a passage in a textbook.
A common habit is to underline the text to be annotated; indeed such underlining may be the only form of annotation undertaken __ an indicator to the annotator only of an item of particular note.
Where the annotator has only underlined the original text, there may well be no obvious reason for the annotation at all.
The annotation is exclusive to that person.
A digital system would be able to help to some degree.
Firstly, and we will return to this advantage, it can automatically supply an author of the underlining or highlighting of the original text where the annotation system is distributed to others.
Unless one were particularly interventionist, it is unlikely a digital system would insist on an annotation body or free text message, (though it could be designed to do so).
However the automatic supply of a text editor for the annotator's thoughts related to the underlining or highlighting increases the likelihood of the annotator writing at least a short comment.
The alternative on occasions is no better for the new reader: the body or message text of the annotation may be clear, but the source, i.e the passage to which it refers may not.
Does one assume, for example, that a one-line comment in the header of the book page relates to the topmost line of the page or the text of that entire page?
Where a comment or opinion is written, it is often short in length; this is frequently because the annotator has only a narrow margin in which to write __ not without its benefits.
Where the annotator does need to write more, (s)he may have recourse to writing the comment in the top or bottom margin, thereafter linking it in some way to the original text, for example by numbered asterisks.
The situation can become even more frustrating where there are so many annotations that the referred text is unclear, or the content becomes confused.
Just to make things worse, we can even predict that some of the solutions to these analogue obstacles may prove as difficult for the subsequent reader as the problems.
If one uses scraps of paper on which to write lengthier annotations and inserts them in the relevant pages, all is well until the wind blows or the book is dropped.
Most of these difficulties would be addressed by the fundamental characteristics of a digital annotation system.
The digital annotation system would automatically store and link annotations and sources with machine tidiness.
As noted above, it is more than likely in a distributed system that annotations will be stored separately from the sources to which they refer.
However, unlike the real-world equivalents, they would automatically hold information that links them effectively to the associated source.
However, it is incumbent upon that system to display a clear association between annotation and source.
But the potentially limitless capacity of an electronic writing space, indeed one that expands its viewing size to the later reader commensurate with the size of text inserted, would easily resolve the analogue annotator's problem of insufficient writing space.
Moreover, it is worth taking into consideration the change that such expanded capacity may have upon the behaviour of annotators; an uncramped writing space may equally 'uncramp' their style and encourage them to be more expansive and, possibly, more informative.
Equally important, there is no limit upon subsequent annotations relating to the original source or, for that matter, to the initial annotation.
Clearly an example where the distributed nature of digital annotation presents a clear advantage.
Even a clearer annotation generally still lacks all or some of the following: an author, or author status, a date or time, and where the annotation relies on other text or supporting evidence, (e.g.
"This contradicts his view in Chapter 3"), it may have no clear direct reference either.
A further complication might be the annotations, (or even counter-annotations) of another anonymous party.
It is worth remarking that a digital system would be able to record the date and time of the annotation action, the source, and give some indication of the person who initiated the marking.
If it were deemed unacceptable in certain systems, the annotation could be rejected as giving inadequate content.
Once again the advantage of virtually unlimited writing space would allow the annotator to quote, if desired, the text to which (s)he refers elsewhere; alternatively the functionality that permits the annotator to highlight a source could also be adapted to permit the highlighting of a reference item for inclusion in the annotation body as a hypertext link.
Some, but not necessarily all of the analogue difficulties may have been encountered; but they all serve to illustrate the difficulties that arise the moment annotations cease only to be read by their original author.
It is outside that limited context that we largely need to consider annotations in the distributed digital environment.
Picking up on this aspect, we might therefore consider the challenge posed by any system of annotation that intends to have an audience of greater than one, and, conceivably of scores or hundreds of annotators and annotation readers.
Irrespective of their number, what makes such multiple annotations unreliable is one's ignorance of the kind of person who made the annotation: expert?
amateur?
joker?
authority?
Who wrote the annotation probably ranks as more important than any other undisclosed information about it.
In this regard an annotator is no different from an author or writer of papers.
Understanding the authority with which an annotation is made can be a key determinant in users' behaviour when accessing annotations across a distributed system.
Questions of authority In our initial consideration of real-world difficulties with annotations, we highlighted the problems posed by annotations that give little indication as to the authority of the annotator.
To illustrate this point more fully, we might consider the reviews written on books that appear in the pages of Amazon.com.
These readily satisfy a definition of a comment on a resource, even where they are quite lengthy.
Let us imagine that we are considering buying an expensive technical work on a little-known topic where a number of competing titles are available.
Where a title is well known, there is an Amazon review, also sometimes reviews by critical journals; additionally there are reviews by people who participate in the Amazon reviewer profile and also those who do not.
Our reactions as to the authority of the review vary, one might suspect, from category to category.
Amazon's own review might be considered by some, to some degree, a little suspect as it has a financial interest in the book reviewed.
The journal, supposedly independent, is more usefully judged on the basis of its prior reputation.
The reviewers who leave a profile give clues as to profession, experience and education, though not necessarily always the degree of objectivity with which they have commented.
Reviewers who leave no profile give clues in the content of their comment but ultimately leave no formal notion of the degree of their authority.
Indeed unedited submissions may provide clues or red herrings by the quality of the language used; perceptive comments clothed in rather shabby syntax might wrongly be dismissed as invalid.
If the foregoing provides a qualitative look at the reviews provided by Amazon, a view based largely on provenance, it is worth briefly examining the quantitative aspect of Amazon's review information.
When one selects a particular book from a list of competing titles, each selection appears with a scale of approval; 5 stars are presented and the level of approval is denoted by the number of stars that are coloured in.
It is apparent that this rating system is fairly fine-tuned since it is capable of filling in fractions of a star.
The feature that underpins this at-a-glance evaluation and renders it particularly informative is the accompanying text which indicates the total number of reviews received.
Inevitably where a book attracts a relatively large number of assessents, the authority of the star rating increases.
Perhaps mindful of the fact that in-house reviews may be criticised as self-serving, Amazon’s approach is to provide star-rated assessments that come from the public.
Admittedly the background and therefore authority of such reviews are unknown.
However in Amazon’s case there is one more supportive feature that encapsulates the notion that annotations may annotate annotations and even vote upon them, i.e.
rate them.
Amazon publishes the results of its ongoing poll as to how many people out of a stated total number found an anonymous review, i.e.
annotation, useful.
Certainly the application of two criteria ought certainly to allow a potential purchaser to identify a popular choice, (not necessarily the same as the right choice).
Firstly has the title attracted a large number of reviews?
Secondly, if so, is its approval rating average or above?
If the answer to both questions is yes, the title may be considered a popular choice.
Conversely if a title well past its initial publication date has attracted a positive rating but a small number of reviews, the case for its popularity is considerably weaker.
So where an annotator is not personally known by those viewing comments, any design may have to consider what the effect might be upon those evaluating the source against its annotations.
The status of an annotator becomes increasingly important where the matter of authority looms large enough to become a factor in the user's assessment of the annotation.
This will vary in importance depending upon the closeness or breadth of the world in which annotations are made.
It also provides a broad clue to what ought to determine the usefulness of these different aspects of digital annotation and their likelihood of inclusion: their potential value to their users.
Users with differing roles in a digital environment Not for nothing does the consideration of a design for a digital annotation system revolve around its users.
Whilst the software industry may not always react accordingly, it is increasingly conscious of the relationship between design failure and the inadequate identification of user requirements.
Furthermore, the easiest route to such a failing is to omit altogether categories of users from the outset.
We have already identified above how, in the pre-digital annotation environment, an apparently homogenous group of ‘readers’ turns out to have quite different motives for reading the same text or resource and consequently have quite different expectations and indeed methods of annotation.
By way of illustration, let us examine an example of another digital environment in which annotation could become an identifiable feature the moment one considers the different categories of people involved.
A virtual learning environment or VLE is populated by a number of different actors.
A VLE, as defined by JISC, (Joint Information Systems Committee [2]) constitutes " the components in which learners and tutors participate in 'on-line' interactions of various kinds, including on-line learning [3].
If we now consider a later section in the JISC circular it denotes the principal functions of a complete VLE and provides us with several clues as to the categories of users operating in the VLE, (emphases are mine): 14.
The principal functions that a complete VLE needs to deliver are: controlled access to curriculum which has been mapped to elements (or 'chunks') that can be separately assessed and recorded; tracking of student activity and achievement against these elements using simple processes for course administration and student tracking that make it possible for tutors to define and set up a course with accompanying materials and activities to direct, guide and monitor learner progress; support of online learning, including access to learning resources, assessment and guidance.
The learning resources may be self-developed or professionally-authored and purchased materials that can be imported and made available for use by learners; communication between the learner, the tutor and other learning support specialists to provide direct support and feedback for learners, as well as peer-group communications that build a sense of group identity and community of interest; links to other administrative systems, both in-house and externally [4] .
It is worth noting the variety of activities involved; a number of these could very reasonably be supported through the use of annotation.
The picture that JISC provides of a complete VLE indicates more than one role within this environment.
The most obvious users of course are the students, the intended main beneficiaries.
It is worth noting however certain wording which indicates, just as with our analysis of the 'readers' above, that students can operate in different ways or differ in their expectations or needs of the VLE.
The term "controlled access" is the first clue to this.
If students are not to be overwhelmed by material or to feel quickly out of their depth, there must be a progression through their course and its associated materials; in other words, course elements and resources are differentiated and access by students is controlled such that courses are encountered in an educationally rational order.
Such differentiation consequently envisages students as different users by dint of their experience, previous knowledge and skills, ability and the subject or topic options they have made.
Therefore whilst all students of the VLE follow a course through the curriculum, that course and therefore the population for which it is intended, may differ considerably.
Figure 1: diagram: Differentiated use of annotations     (Additionally, each user above might have a private annotation facility for note-taking, etc.)
It follows that the guidance and support from another group of users, tutors, and even "other learning support specialists" will also differ.
For example, a tutor offering historians an option on the development of Victorian Technology would annotate a document on the construction of urban sewerage systems with a different emphasis to the tutor offering the option on Public Health Policy.
Nonetheless they could annotate the same document or resource in their own way and with equal benefit provided the annotation system was capable of distinguishing between the two sets of students and their tutors.
When considering users and the different roles they assume, we might also examine the phrase in the JISC circular: "as well as peer-group communications".
Not only might tutors see the value of guidance and comment, i.e.
annotations, for the benefit of a subset of the student body, but annotation can be of enormous assistance to members of a common subset, for example, engaged upon a group assignment, particularly where opportunities to communicate face-to-face may be limited, as may well be the case in a VLE.
The opportunity to comment upon a resource or the assignment it engenders would definitely represent a facility designed to "build a sense of group identity and community of interest ".
There is no reason why the same facility could not be extended to the course tutors who share a common interest in the preparation and evaluation of course resources and other materials, (although within the JISC definition this function may operate more properly within the wider Managed Learning Environment (MLE) of which the VLE forms part, but no matter).
Indeed, where tutors need to gauge common standards of evaluation, as in moderated assessment, items of students' work may become the base resource and annotations on them would be made by and for the tutors' peer group.
Were the moderation process more formal, then there might be a need for the annotations to carry a formal scoring or rating system with the capacity to deliver statistics upon the whole body of students’ work.
In this way the group of assessors would have statistics with which to benchmark each item.
The advantages such an automated system would offer over its handwritten equivalent would be considerable.
Annotations and audience What we can see evolving here is the whole issue of audience.
For whom is the annotation intended?
As we have seen above, annotations can be directed for the benefit of different groups of students as much as being intended entirely for 'public' consumption within the VLE, as in the case for example of an annotation giving general or introductory guidance.
Indeed within the structure of a VLE, if there is a rationale for the creation of annotations for general or public use, as well as for subgroups based on common subject or background, there is also an argument for annotation for personal or private use.
We should not underestimate the value to students of such functionality; to tutors too, who would wish to engender a culture of documenting reactions and ideas associated with the base resource.
Apart from the value of promoting a paperless study environment, such a private annotation facility saves time as students can include initial notes in subsequent work without need of transcription.
Such private annotations tend therefore to seed comments.
For example, an initially private reaction might be passed to a peer group for a reaction and having received support may go on to appear as a public annotation which benefits all.
A glance at the diagram above shows the degree of complexity a dynamic VLE might assume in its use of differentiated annotation.
As this complexity grows it is inevitable that the exact nature of any given audience on an identical resource also becomes complex.
Equally the larger the number of annotators, the more annotations will need to be prioritised in terms of their value to different users.
For example, all users might have the option to view, create edit and delete their private annotations.
A student might also view those directed at his/her course workgroup whereas a tutor might be presented with annotations from the all subgroups for which (s)he is responsible, and also conceivably from colleagues as mentioned above.
Where annotations on a record or resource begin to proliferate, then the information that attaches to any given annotation begins to assume increasing importance for the purposes of searching and display.
It is worth considering the different types of information about the annotation, its metadata, that can be of use as numbers rise.
For example, the time of an annotation's creation is of importance even across the relatively short lifetime of a course module; what people think at the outset may alter considerably by the time they reach the module's conclusion.
Every annotation needs to bear the reference to the resource upon which it comments, but the type of audience for which it is intended is a vital determinant in judging the value of the comment being made.
The difference between an audience of first years and third years, for example, means that the comment made will be aimed at two quite different levels of understanding; references and information contained therein could be quite different.
Equally, as mentioned earlier, the subject or option emphasis would make a difference to a user's choice when searching for comments upon a resource.
In effect where the role and status of annotators within a large system can vary greatly, the design of such a system would need to address what becomes another key issue: authorial status.
Annotations and their authors For students at least, education is usually a fairly transient affair.
The same can be true for tutors.
As the number of users in our VLE increases, the greater the likelihood there will be that an annotator's name will mean less to a greater number of people.
It therefore follows that metadata on an annotator's status could prove increasingly valuable.
This holds equally true with another factor, mentioned earlier, which also tends to cloud viewers’ perception of an annotation: the passage of time, i.e.
if public annotations on a resource are designed to persist beyond one cohort rotation.
Any user in a hurry to find the most authoritative annotations on a resource could opt to filter out all but tutors' annotations provided it is possible to search on authorial status.
This capability greatly enhances the value of differentiated annotations since it encourages their use by promoting the means to allow users to prioritise their choices in the search for results and in displaying them.
Moreover, were metadata on authorial status with regard to tutors to extend to their specialism or the option they offer, it allows viewers to consider their annotation in the light of the tutor's particular expertise.
Such information would address in part one of the underlying weaknesses of much distributed information: the reliability and even bias of the author.
Annotations and metadata Equally any student keen to learn of the published opinions of his/her year or peer group could set a search across that subset of users.
Where a design offers to grant limited access to certain users, for example between members of a workgroup such that those in subgroup A may see all annotations made by its members whilst viewing none of those created by subgroup B, user status metadata would prove essential to the process.
So a system using metadata to carry out such demands may be searching across a set of values such as: Status=student; Student=undergraduate; Year=1; Subgroup=A; Course=History Option=A:Public Health Policy; In fact such metadata could be organised in a larger set that might divide across three main areas: information about the resource information about the annotation author information about the annotation Consider this example: Resource Annotation author Annotation Resource identifier From: Name Annotation Identifier Resource proposer Status To: No.
annotations attracted Course Time Rating received Option Date   Times annotated resource No.
annotations attracted   Times annotated option     Times annotated course   It is worth remembering that an annotation may become a sort of base document in itself since it should be able to attract annotations upon itself, a simple way of engendering debate about a specific resource.
The amount of metadata tabled above might appear unduly complex though not so if one includes the role in the VLE of an "other learning support specialist", namely the course organiser and resource provider.
(S)he has set up the entire course and options for the tutors to use.
Course organisers may be tutors themselves and have operated in consultation with all other tutors, but their role is overarching in terms of the course.
Indeed they also constitute a further but hidden audience with regard to annotations.
The numerical data in the table above could provide them with considerable assistance when assessing the usefulness of the resources they have placed on the virtual courses.
An annotation system ,particularly operating at the resource or record level, represents a good indication of users' reactions.
Even tutors, who will naturally provide a minimum acceptable level of guidance, will nonetheless find some resources more amenable to annotation than others.
Minimal annotation from tutors and students may be an indication of a resource's relevance or usefulness.
It is possible to include in an annotation system's functionality a component with the specific task of requesting users' approval of the resource, just as with Amazon.
The system design would then include the capacity to calculate the effect of each annotation's rating and providing information on averages, means and rankings, etc.
This would go beyond the basic design of view, create, edit and delete annotations, but could prove useful.
Therefore an annotation system that takes account not only from whom a comment comes but also for whom it is intended, makes it possible for users to evaluate its content and authority to a far higher degree despite the heterogenous environment in which it was created.
Finally, the inclusion of the numerical data suggested above can prove highly beneficial in permitting course organisers to see the overall picture about users' reactions to resources to add to their understanding of the different people who are annotating and their degree of experience and expertise.
Annotations as they relate to their source If the example of the VLE provides us with a clearer notion of the users, i.e.
that they can represent more than just one homogenous population, then we ought perhaps to consider to what annotations can refer.
For just as an annotation must have an author and an intended audience, the other key relationship is with the base document or resource which has attracted the annotator's attention.
We have already encountered comments upon whole resources, i.e.
at document level.
However that document may be composed not just of sections of text but also of illustrations, tables, diagrams and even audio or video clips, etc.
It is possible that an annotator may wish to refer specifically to a constituent of such a document for example.
There is therefore the matter of granularity: the level at which an annotation system refers to its base source.
This could range from above document level, such as to a whole collection of resources, in the sense of libarary or archive collections but even also of a reading list which amasses a number of very large documents, e.g.
books.
An annotation can refer to a resource by annotating the record of that resource, i.e.
a description of the whole resource as might appear in a results set following a search operation; in other words the annotation content could be a comment upon the accuracy of the record as a description, or seek to supplement its content, etc.
Heading towards the finer-grained end of the scale, annotations can refer to sections of a document, e.g.
paragraphs, illustrations or supporting multimedia within the base document.
Where close criticism is the requirement, then the annotation needs to make it clear to which spans of text, or just sentence or phrase, it is referring.
By the time we come to annotation as a system of glossary support, the system is highlighting single words.
Not surprisingly the design solutions required for these differing levels of granularity may also differ.
A system operating at document level might well be able to use the resource or record url as the basis for its referral.
A system highlighting spans of text would need a technology like XPointer [5] and a more complex approach to its base documents in order to deliver such a level of referral.
Nor should we forget, as intimated above with regard to possible metadata for annotations, that an annotation of itself can constitute a subject for comment and so a base resource.
In such instances, it is important that the link between annotations on annotations and the base resource which attracted the first annotation is not lost.
A whole thread of discussion is unlikely to begin if the original cause of the discussion is no longer accessible.
Naturally the complexity of the relationships between users of annotation in the VLE does not necessarily reflect a typical situation.
It did however demonstrate the need to investigate the varying motives behind users even in a closed community with common aims.
If one examined the scenario of say a subject gateway providing records of resources distributed across a number of servers and welcoming annotations from a far wider community of users, the relationships alter.
Even where the gateway registers users or their institutions, much less might be known about them.
Circumstances for a gateway or web site allowing free unregistered access to some or all resources whilst offering an annotation service, would be rather different.
While our working definition of annotation boils down to commenting upon an existing resource, inevitably the activity of the host will determine not only the kind of resources it holds but also what users will expect the annotation system to do.
Though too complex to examine in detail, the example of a site or gateway offering archaeological maps and supporting pictures for comment will serve.
It is reasonable for annotators to wish to comment on specific points on a map or photo, in efect operating at a very fine grained level of granularity.
Though doubtless textual comment would also be desirable, users might want to point and append remarks.
This would probably require some form of digital overlay with the capacity to draw lines, arrows and circles, etc.
in much the same way as Paint ; and allow users to append text and perhaps other pictures, drawings etc.
to those spatial indicators; whilst, all importantly, lest we forget, entirely preserving the original resource.
A far more complicated implementation, but palpably the correct answer to the needs of the majority of its users on such a site.
Without functionality of this order, the design might as well confine itself to email discussion.
Possible implementations Simple annotation applications (1) The most likely experiment with a pilot application will be an approach that does not impose a great deal of alteration to the existing subject gateway, since one hesitates to undertake an experimental addition if it might involve a great deal of re-writing of code to accommodate it.
It is therefore important to consider the level of granularity of the annotation tool, since the finer that becomes the more involved the annotation tool has to become with the existing system.
For example, an annotation system that permits comment upon spans of text in a base document represents a completely different and higher degree of complexity than one which operates by annotation of an entire resource or even the description of that resource.
It is at that degree of granularity that an experiment could be undertaken.
One area that merits further investigation is a very minimal approach that obviates the need for any software production: the use of mailing list software.
This would mean looking at the subject threads for the relevant resource.
However such an approach would be incapable of wider functionality; it could not, for example, accommodate the inclusion of any form of usable ratings, i.e.
a system to calculate the mean, average or otherwise of a series of grades or marks awarded by the annotators.
Therefore such an approach would mean that there could be no extensions or development because of the very minimal basis on which it would be established.
However to provide an example of a possible approach, let us see how annotation could work simply with a resource or record.
A user making a search of resources is provided with a number of results, each bearing a short description of that resource and three links.
The first is to the resource itself, which (s)he uses in order to view the resource.
This done the user navigates back to the list of results and clicks the other link, entitled "Comment upon this resource".
Instead of being linked however to a full-blown annotation service, the user is presented with an email form, as is the case when one clicks on the email address on someone's personal page.
In this instance however the resultant email form would not only bear the email address of the mailing list for these resource annotations, but also a subject line with some key information on the resource to be annotated, for example it's title, unique identifier, etc.
The annotation made, the user submits the annotation by sending the email to the list.
On using the third link, "View annotations made on our resources", or similar, the user is presented with the archive of all mails/annotations written on the resources in that gateway.
Therefore to find annotations on the same resource, the user will have to search the archive using the subject thread, which, as mentioned above, was pre-configured by the act of clicking the mailto link for that particular resource.
It would be fair to say that where the volume of users on a system were fairly low and therefore possibly even quite well known to viewers, such a simple model would operate fairly effectively since the number of annotations would not be excessive.
Again, as is the case with any search results, such a model would be unlikely to require an elaborate system of filtering in order to bring the number of results down to manageable proportions.
As mail archives can offer the option to search by author, date or even "most recent" mails, it is possible for persons monitoring the list, (we examine moderation elsewhere), to keep check easily upon recent additions to the list.
It could be argued that were volume of traffic great enough, then one could create a mailing list for each resource, i.e.
so that every mailto address were different for each resource.
Whilst this would greatly simplify searching for relevant annotations, and free up the mailto form's subject line, the volume of traffic required to justify such a move would begin to push one in the direction of a more complex approach and the greater functionality it could offer.
Furthermore, the use of mailto is confined to Unix systems [6] .
Mailto is a Mail gateway conforming to the CGI specifications.
It can be used as a replacement for the mailto: URL scheme, with a form interface.
Mailto was originally created in 1994, before the mailto: URL Scheme came into full use.
Its primary and most commonly used role is in securely providing form usage for users on your system.
Mailto allows users still to use forms by simply parsing all of the fields and emailing the results to the specified user, in this instance, the resources' common mailing list.
However, whilst this simple approach has the merit of avoiding the need for specific coding through the use of the mailto facility, it also presumes that the annotations will emanate from a closed community of users with a reasonable standard of browser.
The greatest drawback is that the use of mailto does not conform to W3C HTML 4.0 specifications [7] and might represent a serious security flaw if the annotation system were accessible to virus writers [8].
This does not preclude the use of other mailing software which would be able to avoid these difficulties, but it is perhaps an example of how "quick and dirty" can be too dirty for comfort.
Simple annotation applications (2) Whilst perhaps turning our back on a quick solution such as mailto, therefore, it might nonetheless be sensible to start from the same point as before, the record or resource description which provides a link that permits a fairly detached system of annotation to be created.
This has the distinct advantage of avoiding the imposition of great alteration to the existing gateway resource retrieval system.
As a minimum each resource description or record would need to offer an identical link to an annotation service.
That annotation service need not have to offer an enormous range of functionality.
However to be of any value, it would have to offer users the option to: view all existing annotations on a record create their own annotation delete or edit their own annotation Expressed in UML, this functionality can be represented as follows: Figure 2: diagram: Use cases for basic design of simple annotation system   Another means of expressing the likely functionality of a simple annotation system is through screen prototyping as shown below.
This approach allows one to envisage what exactly a user of the system might expect to see.
Figure 3: diagram: Map of Navigation between Screens in Annotation Design     Scenario However the easiest way of understanding what a simple system might offer is to walk through a scenario of usage.
Let us imagine therefore that a user receives a display of results from a search and is presented with one or more resource descriptions to inspect.
Having done so, (s)he returns to the display of records.
The user has the option to use a link to an annotation service, perhaps entitled "Read or write comments on this resource".
Selecting the link brings the user to the Main Menu of the annotation service and the choice between viewing and writing a comment or annotation.
The user opts to view and receives the display of an Annotation Service Results Page showing all the annotations that have been written on that particular resource by other users or even authors.
(System simplicity imposes the limitation of viewing only annotations for the particular record viewed).
The results are listed by author, date, star-rating accorded and the beginning of the annotation text.
The user selects the annotation of choice and receives the display of the foregoing items plus the entire annotation text.
The user then has the option to return and select another annotation or to return to the main menu.
Returning to the main menu, the user opts on this occasion to stay with same resource but this time write an annotation of his/her own.
The system therefore displays a form for the user's comment and star rating, say so many stars out of five, and on submission the form transmits the user's input together with other key data to the annotations database, provided the minimum input was present on the form and within range.
Were this not the case, the form would be re-displayed with an error message.
The information passed to the database includes not only the annotator's id and the date and time of creation, but most importantly the url of the record to which the annotation refers.
All this information, together with an auto-created id number for the annotation itself is stored on an annotations database which is searched for annotations on a particular resource every time a user wishes to view.
Whenever the user opts to view an annotation that (s)he created, the system will offer the option to edit or delete it using another form with the original contents present.
The system will delete or update the annotation on the database accordingly.
It should be emphasised that this is very much a basic design; it simply offers a basic functionality.
At base the system maintains a database of annotations and requires a means of inputting data from the annotators, which could be accomplished by CGI and HTML forms, and the means of storing annotations effectively on a database so that they can be searched against a resource id.
However simple this approach might appear, it has one overwhelming advantage over the simpler solution of using existing mailing software: it is capable of enhancements.
For example, it would be possible to offer the user a number of ways of displaying the results during annotation viewing, chronologically rather than by author, a summary or subject line could be offered so that in effect users could begin threads on a particular annotation.
The failure to apply any analysis of the star ratings that a resource has attracted could be rectified within the scope of this basic design by collating the results on the database and providing some averaging or ranking facility right across the resources annotated.
Something like the latter option is entirely feasible since it is able to seek data right across the database.
Therefore whilst quick solutions may exist, it is reasonable to argue that the existence of a stable repository in the design such as a database provides the minimum basis upon which it is possible to add greater functionality to a design.
Simple annotation applications (3)auto-moderator As has been mentioned above, whilst there may be items of functionality which can remain entirely elective, there is also functionality that is imposed upon the system by the very nature of the community or volume that it serves.
It was noted with regard to the quick solution of the use of mailto: as a rapidly installed annotation system that its use could only be advocated in a small close-knit community with similar if not identical equipment.
This is an example of how the nature of the users determines the limitations of the annotation system solution.
The following extension to the basic design serves as an example of how the size of the population with access to an annotation system imposes the adoption of an item of functionality in order, in effect, to protect the effective operation of the basic annotation system.
In this instance, a large number of users of a system who have no common goal or identity means that some contributors of annotations may be tempted to post inappropriate content that might cause offence to other users.
The most obvious example would be obscene language.
Small user communities, where everyone is known to other users, rarely encounter such problems; where the number of unknown contributors increases, this risk grows commensurately.
Therefore a system of control such as moderation imposes itself in order to police and maintain the use of the basic annotation system.
In this instance the UML model of such an extension to the basic design would look as follows: Figure 4: diagram: Annotation Use Case Main Model However, once imposed, complications may be occasioned by the number of annotations involved.
It is largely unlikely that any one person will devote their entire effort to moderating even a large volume of annotations on a frequent basis.
Consequently a slightly topsy-turvy regime begins to operate: in order to ensure that no inappropriate annotations become viewable, annotations must await the attentions of the moderator before being certified viewable.
In effect the contributors of the 99% of annotations that do not contravene the AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) are obliged to await clearance in order to police the 1% that offend against it.
The situation becomes all the more unacceptable when the moderator goes on leave, etc.
and annotations begin to back up.
The response to such a problem would be an automatic system that permits the immediate viewing of almost all "innocent" annotations whilst withholding from view the small percentage that contravene the AUP.
Such an auto-moderator would be designed to vet the provenance and content of all annotations.
Using a set of criteria that can be loaded and configured by the human moderator or Moderator, the system would assign values to all elements in an annotation that appear to represent a threat.
A simple example would be a fairly high value being registered at the presence of an obscene word.
Such a high value might alone bring about the system reaching its threat threshold, i.e.
the point at which that particular annotation will no longer be automatically viewable.
The same outcome might occur after the accumulation of points awarded to possibly milder language but also a "riskier" domain name in the email address than say ".ac.uk", as an example.
An important aspect of such an auto-moderator would be the flexibility accorded the Moderator in what terms (s)he might load into the list of criteria, the individual values of threat they attract, and the threat threshold or degree of tolerance under which the system generally operates.
The Moderator could therefore render the auto-moderator more sensitive to, or less tolerant of, threats than usual.
Whilst the system would ideally come with a set of criteria pre-loaded, the Moderator, in the light of experience, could add to the threat criteria and refine the values (s)he accords them.
There would however also be a set of threat criteria pre-loaded to deal with a danger that the Moderator might not have anticipated: virus attacks and other malicious contributions.
It is not possible to devote any great space to this aspect.
However if the basic system of annotator form validation does not address this problem because the threat is not perceived great enough to warrant it, (given the community of users), then at the point a moderation system becomes necessary for the reasons already stated, so does a means to check on such forms of attack.
Even a simple design could include certain threat criteria that would deal with a large number of such malicious items.
For example, an attacker including an executable script in the body of the annotation content would need to use angle brackets.
The criteria values could be configured to accept, say three such brackets before hitting the threat threshold, so as not to disadvantage, for example, mathematicians' annotations, but anymore would mark the annotation as a major threat and cause it to be quarantined.
Another aspect of malicious use, albeit not a virus threat, would be the posting of url's which lead to inappropriate web sites.
The simplest solution would be to exclude all such site recommendations by creating a high value against a criterion of "http" in the annotation text.
However, once again, this seems completely unfair on the overwhelming majority of contributors who wish to recommend sites or resources by citing a url.
Therefore the auto-moderator's pre-loaded criteria should be configured to tolerate url's that include reassuring elements such as ".ac.uk", ".edu" etc., whilst apportioning high threat values to url's about which a Moderator would feel less complacent.
It is important to recognise the value of the flexibility accorded the Moderator by such a design.
The ability to add threat criteria on the basis of experience or as a reaction to a sudden perceived threat should permit some fine tuning of the auto-moderator's capability.
It would be reasonable to say that the system and the Moderator have reached the peak of performance when only a small percentage of blameless annotations are being withheld from immediate viewing and absolutely no inappropriate annotations are escaping detection.
Conclusions In conclusion, this article has considered some common issues to the development of digital annotation by going back to pre-digital characteristics in order to take account of users' expectations and behaviour.
One issue has been the relationship between the type of resources held and the annotation functionality that is appropriate.
However perhaps even more important is the need to consider where the system is working and the community it must serve, whilst avoiding the pitfall of grouping too closely together the individuals in that community in terms of their motivations and differing use at different times.
This is something to be borne in mind if one wishes to avoid placing all those individuals en bloc and imposing a "unique option", or Hobson's choice.
But just as excessively fine-grained granularity can turn out to be irritating for users who are content to work with much coarser grained anchors, so can over-complex annotation tools burden users unnecessarily.
It is worth recalling an observation made by one investigator [1] that most annotators just wanted to underline.
That is to say, purely for their own benefit.
So audience is as much a consideration in design as an annotation's authorship, in fact probably more so.
It is perhaps sensible to recall that just because something can be designed, it does not follow that everyone will want it.
This article perhaps appears to demonstrate the extremely long road taken by the human race from the marginal scrawl to the worldwide transmission of, or access to, structured analysis with supporting links unencumbered by any of the failings of the entity it actually analyses or annotates.
However it is worth remembering that even digital annotation is still very much a human process and consequently subject to the vicissitudes and shortcomings that can characterise human thought and action at times.
In common with most successful technological innovations, it will be the annotation system designs that most closely consider human flaws and, in particular, needs and motivations, that will give most satisfaction.
References Marshall, C. "Annotation: from paper books to the digital library" in Proceedings of the ACM Digital Libraries '97 Conference, Philadelphia, PA (July 23-26, 1997) http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/dl97.pdf The Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ JISC Circular 7/00 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=news_circular_7_00, Definitions, item 8 JISC Circular 7/00 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=news_circular_7_00, section 14 XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr/ Mailto 1.6 http://www.roguetrader.com/~brandon/Mailto/ HTML 4.01 Specification http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/ The Mythical Mailto: http://www.isolani.co.uk/newbie/mailto.html Further Reading Christophides V. "Community Webs (C-Webs): Technological Assessment and System Architecture" (2000), ch.4 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/christophides00community.html Denoue, L. "Adding Metadata to improve retrieval Yet Another Web Annotation System" Feb 1999 http://www.univ-savoie.fr/labos/syscom/Laurent.Denoue/publications/TR1999-01.pdf Denoue, L, Vignollet, L. "An annotation tool for Web browsers and its applications to information retrieval" (2000) http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/denoue00annotation.html Laliberte, D., and Braverman, A., "A Protocol for Scalable Group and Public Annotations."
Proceedings of the Third International World Wide Web Conference, Darmstadt, Germany, April 1995.
Marshall, C.C.
"Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation" in Proceedings of Hypertext and Hypermedia '98 (Pittsburgh PA, June, 1998), ACM Press, 40-49. http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/ht98-final.pdf Doug Rosenberg and Kendal Scott, "Applying Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML", 2001, Addison-Wesley ISBN 0-201-73039-1 Wilensky, R. "Digital Library Resources as a Basis for Collaborative Work" JASIS Volume 51, No.
3, February, 2000 Robert http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/wilensky00digital.html Acknowledgements Research for this article was undertaken as part of the research activity for the IMesh Toolkit Project, a project for providing a toolkit and architecture for subject gateways, funded by JISC/NSF.
The author would like to acknowledge the invaluable support of Leona Carpenter (former Technical Development and Research Officer, UKOLN) in the development of this article.
Author Details   Richard Waller Information Officer, UKOLN Email: r.waller@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Functionality in Digital Annotation: Imitating and supporting real-world annotation" Author: Richard Waller, Information Officer, UKOLN Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/waller/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Biz/Ed Bulletin Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Biz/Ed Bulletin Buzz data software javascript html database usability archives metadata browser copyright cataloguing graphics windows algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Kate Sharp and Libby Miller describe Business and Economics Resources on the Internet.
Biz/ed Introducing Biz/ed Biz/ed [1] is a free, subject-based information gateway service providing access to quality-assured Internet resources in business and economics.
It is managed from the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) [2] based at the University of Bristol.
The core service was originally targeted at the needs of staff and students up to first year undergraduate level.
However, funding under the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) [3] has enabled Biz/ed to encompass research users and those developing and using materials for more advanced courses in the HE sector.
Recent Developments On 11 January 1999, the Biz/ed Team launched a redesigned and reorganised site.
This was a result of usability testing that showed that due to the changing emphasis of some areas of the site, reorganisation and/or renaming of parts would be beneficial to users.
It also highlighted the fact that users rarely used the graphical navigation tools and prefer to use the back button and search.
As a result we have implemented new metadata on the site and the search results have been substantially improved through the addition of textual descriptions for each page.
We have also introduced a new navigation bar and a sitemap, and improved the help pages.
It is hoped that these re-named and re-organised sections will make it significantly easier for the novice user to navigate the site.
What will you find on Biz/ed?
Figure 1: Biz/ed Home Page Biz/ed is a collection of resources and primary materials for those interested in economics or business education.
The site is divided into five sections: Internet Catalogue; Data; Company Facts; Learning Materials and Virtual Worlds.
In the Data section is a collection of statistics from various sources, intended for use by schools in combination with the extensive selection of original worksheets and information contained within the Learning Materials section.
Also in the Learning Materials section is a new section containing leaning materials for MBA students.
Company Facts is a selection of FAQs provided by the companies themselves, suitable for schools.
The sections most of use to HE users are Virtual Worlds, (in particular the newly launched Virtual Economy), the MBA resources, and the Internet Catalogue.
Virtual Worlds The Virtual Worlds section contains the popular Virtual Factory [4] and the new Virtual Economy [5].
The Virtual Factory is a model of the Cameron Balloons factory, and is a good resource for schools for providing readily comprehensible ‘real life’ examples of the application of business theory to the real world.
Figure 2: Virtual Economy Home Page The Virtual Economy, launched in February 1999, is an on-line model of the economy based on the Treasury model with an extensive range of supporting materials.
The interface to the site is structured very loosely around No.
11 Downing Street.
Each different floor of the building contains different resources, such as a section on policy advice (detailing economic models), and a library (including extensive worksheets for use with the model).
The model itself is an expanded version of the macroeconomic model behind Be Your Own Chancellor [6] combined with a microeconomic model designed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies [7].
It is an interactive model in which users can change key variables in the economy and then run the model to show the effects of changes in the economy on ‘typical’ individual households.
The result is a sophisticated tool for modelling changes in the tax and benefit system in the UK, suitable for undergraduates and schools.
MBA Learning Materials A recent addition to Biz/ed is Internet Learning Materials for MBA Students [8] which can be found in the Learning Materials section.
This is a large new resource financed by the Foundation for Management Education and produced by Biz/ed.
Academic staff were contracted to author Internet training materials in their respective fields, which would complement standard teaching tools.
Each author has written an introduction to their section explaining why they think the Web should be used to support their subject.
The materials are grouped under the six main subject headings which form components of most MBA programmes.
Each subsection provides a detailed guide to suitable sites and further links.
Although these materials are aimed at MBA students and their teachers it is hoped that they will also be useful to those studying for a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate business degrees and professional qualifications.
Figure 3: MBA Learning Materials Home Page Internet Catalogue The Internet Catalogue is a searchable database of approximately 1300 resources for business and economics on the Internet.
The resources are screened by subject experts using the well-established SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) [9] selection criteria.
Potential sites are assessed for their usefulness to researchers or teachers, for their originality of content, and for the stability and availability of the information contained within them.
Biz/ed provides comprehensive descriptions of the sites so that researchers and teachers can see the usefulness of the site before visiting it.
The catalogue is searchable and browsable.
We are currently expanding the economics section of the catalogue to increase the numbers of resources appropriate for HE and especially for research, by consulting university lecturers and PhD students.
Biz/ed provide the business and economics section editors for SOSIG, so that resources under these categories searched for within SOSIG are in fact part of the Biz/ed catalogue.
This has been made possible by the use of a new and innovative feature created as part of the DESIRE project, which means that a query on the SOSIG catalogue is also cross-searched on the Biz/ed catalogue.
These elements of Biz/ed make it part of a growing distributed system of quality Internet resource gateways.
Strategies for Heterogeneous Users As Biz/ed has developed, and the links with SOSIG have become closer, we have had to re-evaluate our organisational policy for the catalogue, because of the need to accommodate both HE users and schools users.
There are two principle difficulties in making the catalogue usable for disparate groups of people.
The first is that for the catalogue to be useable by different user groups, there needs to be thought given to the categorisation of resources according to their suitability for different groups.
It is not obvious how to do this, although an alteration to the ROADS [10] configuration used by Biz/ed by the addition of another field is one possibility.
The second problem is that many of the sites catalogued are large and only parts of them are suitable at all, while some parts may be appropriate for different users.
Increasing the number of fields in ROADS to accommodate annotations about the relevancy for different users would also have to take into account different parts of the site in that annotation.
A similar problem is the proliferation of sites which have sections which cannot be bookmarked because of the use of frames; there is a need here for annotations which describe the useful parts of the site and how to get to them.
An advantage of creating new fields for this metadata would be that different user groups could search under different headings and potentially browse solely within their own user category.
An alternative approach is to include relevant “who for” annotations in the description of the site.
Since Biz/ed’s search algorithm searches all the text in the database, this would have approximately the same effect as a new field in terms of searching, but it would not be possible to browse the section by category.
In terms of categorising parts of the site for different users, one approach is to state in the description what group the site taken in its entirety would primarily be useful for.
Biz/ed’s solution has been to include terms such as ‘teaching resources’ in the description of the site if it contains materials explicitly described as such (see for example the entry for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis [11]), or to indicate if a site could be useful for this, even if it does not have that explicit purpose (see the entry for What is a dollar worth?
[12]).
There is a case for describing the levels of resources (undergraduate, A-level, GCSE) which we have done as far as possible; but we have not described resources as being useful in particular for researchers.
This is partly because researchers are looking for disparate things and do not constitute a coherent user group.
One might be looking for academic papers on a subject, another for data, another for official reports and policy documents.
For this reason at Biz/ed we have tried to give a comprehensive description of the contents of sites, so that researchers can evaluate them for their own purposes.
However the problem of identifying the important parts of a large site remains a difficult one.
Below we describe some large sites and the location of useful items within them, and navigate the user around the site.
There are obvious difficulties with this approach because to be useful it requires that users have two windows open and preferably visible.
However with some sites this approach is pretty much unavoidable.
For example, the United Nations web site is a good source of international data, but because there is so much on the site, including a great deal of information about poverty, human rights, the protection of the environment, the advancement of women and children, and the UN’s work in these areas, as well as economic data, it is necessarily to guide users through the morass.
In addition the site is not intuitively organised, providing a further need for navigation.
In contrast, Business Day is well-organised, with an intuitive feel, so that the description of what is found in which part of the site is merely away of organising the description of the site.
Examples of descriptions of these and other sites are provided below.
Finding information using the Biz/ed Internet Catalogue This section provides a short guide to some general sites you can find through Biz/ed.
Under each of three categories you can find sites appropriate as a starting point for research on a particular topic.
For information on the UK government, you could start with the CCTA Government Information Service, which proves access to all government sites.
More specifically the HM Treasury Web site is useful for data on UK finances, as well as information about the budget.
Good sites for international data are the United Nations (UN) and World Bank sites.
Business Day is a very up-to-date site for business information, including share prices, while the Financial Times site provides a similar service but also has a searchable archive of business information.
These descriptions are designed to reflect the types of descriptions with the catalogue, including the kind of information available (data, reports), and the format available including the type of software required (such as pdf, browser with JavaScript).
Information about the UK To find documents about local and national government, a good place to start is the CCTA Government Information Service [13] which provides a frame around a list of links to all the government sites and government-related sites in the UK.
It has a functional and organisational index, both of which are alphabetical.
Since information about government departments is diffused among their own web sites, this is a useful wrapper for them.
For more specific data on the UK economy, you could start with HM Treasury Web site [14].
On this site there is a great deal of information about this and previous budgets.
From the front page, under ‘Budget’ you can examine the full text of the chancellor’s speech in November 1998 and the pre-budget report, which includes data about the taxes and expenditure in the UK economy.
On this part of the site there is a link to a pdf file containing various predictions about the economy’s performance and comparisons with the treasury model results.
The ‘Speeches’ part of the site provides the full text of keynote speeches by the Chancellor, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury.
There are links to the previous administration’s speeches, and all the speeches are in html.
Again from the front page ‘Economy’ contains information about various initiatives, and also discussion papers in pdf.
Apart from the front page the site does not use many graphics and is fast to load.
International Data A good source of international data is the United Nations Web site [15].
This is a very up-to-date, interdisciplinary site.
For economic data, from the front page choose ‘Economic and Social Development’, ‘Statistics’, and then select the first option: ‘Economic and Social Affairs’.
Some of the options in this section are (paying) subscriber only (specifically the Monthly Bulletin of Statistics) but you can examine ‘Social Indicators’ free.
Under this there are headings such as population, housing, health, income and economic activity.
Statistics may in some case be out of date or unavailable, and the dates of data vary.
From here there are also links to references for methodology and classification of data.
The site is available in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Russian.
It is also available in text only format.
The World Bank’s Web site [16] is also a good source for international data, but much better organised than the UN site.
There are various ways of accessing the data.
You can go via the front page, choosing ‘data’ ‘country data’ and then selecting a country.
This gives you key statistics on the country in the form of ‘country at a glance’: two pages of indicators and graphs, in pdf format.
Alternatively, from the front page or top menu go to ‘regions and countries’ for overviews of regions and within each region information about reports and initiatives, and the country profile.
Click on the region itself for ‘regional focus and topics’ relevant reports, speeches, and details of conferences.
From the front page or top menu you can also access ‘publications and projects’.
Many reports, newsletters, projects, and periodicals are available online here, and you can buy them if they are not.
Or again from the front page or top you can access ‘development topics’, which contains summaries of reports in html and lots of text in pdf under such categories as economics and trade, and gender.
You can also gain access to a ‘development forum’, the aim of which is to share information through moderated discussion open to the public for development, threaded for particular topics.
Business News For current business data such as business news, current stock and currency prices, a nice site is Business Day [17], which is part of the London Evening Standard [18] online.
It is a free view of the Standard’s business pages, updated daily.
On the front page there are summaries of the main business stories, and you can click on them for the full story.
There is also a section called ‘markets at a glance’ on the front page, with a link to exchange rate figures, markets and tourist, for many currencies.
There is a story index for that day, a company index of companies mentioned in the current edition, a link to money markets, including Liffe futures and bullion, and share prices (FTSE 100 and shares by sector).
The site is searchable.
It also has links to weather, top news stories from the Evening Standard, and breaking news from the Standard.
It is readable without graphics turned on, but uses frames and JavaScript.
The Financial Times (FT) Web site [19] has similar facilities to the Business Day site, but also has three important additional features.
The first is an archive of business stories from top international Newspapers and magazines.
It includes 3000 publications and 4 million articles.
Articles from the Financial Times in the past month are free.
The archive includes full text of the FT since 1996.
It is accessed by searching: searches are saveable.
Another useful part of the FT site is ‘economic indicators’, which are tables of free data of economic indicators, updated every four weeks, under various categories (e.g.
Balance of Payments, Prices) and then by country: UK, Italy, France, Germany France, US.
Also useful is a section called ‘company briefing’ which is a database of descriptions of companies including key financial and other data, names of directors, registered office and turnover.
It is accessed by searching, limitable to sector.
Both company briefing and economic indicators are free, although to access the site at all you need to register.
Conclusions This article has been designed to introduce readers to the newly redesigned Biz/ed, and to raise some issues about the problems of making the site attractive to the HE sector.
We have illustrated part if the Biz/ed strategy for dealing with user heterogeneity, and shown how the strategy for the catalogue looks in practice with examples.
We would welcome feedback on this and other aspects of the Biz/ed site [20].
References Biz/ed, Home Page <URL: http://www.bized.ac.uk/> ILRT, Home Page <URL: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/> eLib, Home Page <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/> Virtual Factory, Biz/ed web site <URL: http://www.bized.ac.uk/virtual/cb/> Virtual Economy, Biz/ed web site <URL: http://www.bized.ac.uk/virtual/economy/> Be Your Own Chancellor, Institute For Fiscal Studies web site <URL: http://www2.ifs.org.uk/budget98/byoc/form1.htm> Institute For Fiscal Studies, Home Page <URL: http://www1.ifs.org.uk/> Internet Learning Materials for MBA Students, Biz/ed web site <URL: http://www.bized.ac.uk/fme> SOSIG, Home Page <URL: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/> ROADS, ILRT web site <URL: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/> Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Home Page <URL: http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/> What is a dollar worth?, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site <URL: http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/economy/calc/cpihome.html> CCTA Government Information Service, Home Page <URL: http://open.gov.uk/> HM Treasury, Home Page <URL: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/> United Nations, Home Page <URL: http://www.un.org/> World Bank, Home Page <URL: http://www.worldbank.org/> Business Day, London Evening Standard web site <URL: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/business/top_direct.html> London Evening Standard, Home Page <URL: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/> Financial Times, Home Page <URL: http://www.ft.com/> Biz/ed, email address <URL: bized-info@bris.ac.uk> Author Details Kate Sharp, Research Officer ILRT University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol, BS8 1HH Email: kate.sharp@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/kates.html Libby Miller, Research Officer ILRT University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol, BS8 1HH Email: libby.miller@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/about/staff/libby.html   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Buzz mobile software html video streaming ict privacy url standards Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod's second outing in Ariadne as Public Libraries Focus.
I purchased the Guardian newspaper to read on the train from Bath to Birmingham the other day.
It was the Thursday edition, so the tabloid-sized Online section was sandwiched between the folds of the main paper – a sort of light digital filling in an otherwise heavy snack of wars abroad and spin at home.
“Why sex still leads the net”, ran the Online headline, with the byline: “porn websites are making millions.
Now mainstream dot.coms are asking them for advice”.
[1] My immediate reaction was to sigh … was it ever thus, and to wonder whether technological advance goes hand in hand with the pursuit of hedonism and spiritual decay.
Does history repeat itself?
Will modern Western civilisation rise and fall like the Roman Empire?
The article led me to reflect on whether this taste for services that sell sex on the Internet, albeit of the virtual kind, need concern the public library community.
You may think that networked public library services are a far cry from all this seedy stuff, but if this were the case one wouldn’t need to draft those Acceptable Use Policies, or weigh up the pros and cons of various filtering software packages.
Both are standard weapons in the public library arsenal, that aim to ensure the barbarians remain outside the gates (and portals).
The Guardian article focused on one Danni Ashe, a ‘coiffured’ blonde, equipped with the usual assets associated with a lady who makes a living from baring her flesh (she sells online nude photos of herself).
Ms Ashe is a porn star turned entrepreneur, who has become the hot keynote speaker on the Internet conference circuit.
Star appearances include the Internet World Conference in Sydney, and the Streaming Media Asia seminar in Hong Kong.
On these occasions Danni is encased in a ‘cleavage-hugging suit’ rather than the birthday variety I thought you might like to know that.
Danni has also been called upon to testify before US congressional committees on child protection and internet related issues, and is much sought after as an advisor and consultant to those who earn their crust (or maybe a global bakery in this case) out of dot.coms.
Ashe started her business after teaching herself HTML hmmm.
I taught myself HTML a few years back, but sad to say I am not anticipating profits of $7 to $8 million this year.
Have I gone wrong somewhere?
(apart from the obvious no sniggers please, I’m a librarian).
Ashe’s success is based on a subscription model.
Nothing new here you may think people are obviously prepared to commit themselves to paying a regular or lump sums for services they want.
Playboy magazine obviously thinks a subscription model will work for them they are still smarting from having lost $50 million in two years in online operations, and are now looking to generate income from their “Mobile Playmate of the Month” service.
Will the armies of young (and getting younger) mobile phone users be able to access these?
Picture this you are on the train (a recurrent theme in this column you will find), and your ears have been bombarded by the massed bands of the mobile ringtones.
Suddenly, the young salesperson next to you pulls out his state of the art, third generation, mobile phone.
The ringtone is in the top ten its the ‘Bob the Builder’ theme tune.
On his rinky dinky little screen is the mobile equivalent of the Sun’s ‘page three girl’.
Okay, it’s safe to come out now.
One can only hope that subscribers to such services will view these images in the privacy of their own homes, but as this is a monthly download something tells me images could well be used as screen-savers.
Turning now to Public library users -most seem prepared to pay one-off amounts to borrow videos, DVDs and CDs.
They will also pay a small fee for services such as email or extended Internet time.
The success of the former lies partly in the fact that libraries tend to charge less than the local video store, and offer longer loan periods.
They also offer a broader range of titles, for example, BBC dramatisations of classic novels and leisure activity videos.
However, I’m not sure if library users would be prepared to pay subscriptions for these things, or for services which have been previously been free or very cheap, such as Internet access?
However, Public Libraries do have to sustain services when the People’s Network and New Opportunities Funding (NOF) ends, but I doubt whether many of you anticipate charging commercial rates for many these services it surely defeats the whole social inclusion and learning opportunities objectives.
However, despite the drive for public sector organisations to adopt business models, I’m not convinced that models like subscriber-based ones translate well to the public sector.
It is not always a matter of how good a service is as successful children’s projects like Stories from the Web [2] can testify.
Birmingham Library Authority, who lead this project, looked at subscription models when their Wolfson funding ended.
To make the model viable, they needed a reasonable number of library authorities to subscribe to the service for a year or more, with fees reducing in line with the total number of subscribers.
However, not enough authorities felt able to commit at this time.
It is therefore back to the drawing board for the ‘Stories’ team and a re-evaluation of possible funding opportunities.
Services such as those offered by Playboy magazine and Denni Ashe, rely on individuals parting with their cash for something they want and are happy to pay for.
In the case of library authorities, the individual end-user may not be expected to pay for services.
This means that a subscription service would need to come out of existing budgets, and something else might have to be dropped in order to pay for the new service.
The library is also accountable to the local authority, which in turn is accountable to raft of stakeholders, including national government and the ratepaying public.
It is all very complicated.
Perhaps the only way forward, and many of you are already doing this, is for public libraries to work increasingly in partnership with other local authority departments, as well as with local community groups and external agencies, such as the Learning and Skills Council.
The need to think outside of the ‘silo’, as it is now called (‘boxes’ are passé), involves joining forces with those doing similar things.
This raises the profile of the public library at local authority and national government level, and enhances their standing within the local community.
This helps when it comes to impact evaluation, as library services will be perceived to be a part of a whole, not something isolated and primarily associated with lending materials.
This is the diversification which small businesses, and the farming community in particular, have been charged with doing as a means to surviving in a changing world.
For the public library, the immediate need is to identify methods to evaluate the impact of new ICT-based services.
You need to convince the purse string holders of your effectiveness, and of the value placed upon your services by your user community.
Result happiness and sustainable services.
References: 1.
Sara Gaines.
“Why sex still leads the net”.
The Guardian (Online section), 28 February, 2002. pp.1-3.
2.
Stories from the Web Project: http://www.storiesfromtheweb.org Author Details   Penny GarrodPublic Library Networking Focus Email: p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Public Libraries” Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/pub-libs/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing the JISC Information Environment Service Registry Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing the JISC Information Environment Service Registry Buzz data software database archives metadata identifier schema copyright cataloguing authentication url Citation BibTex RIS Verity Brack and Amanda Closier provide us with an overview of the aims and latest work in the development of the JISC IE Service Registry.
The JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) is a pilot project that has been funded by the JISC for 14 months until December 2003, under its Shared Services Programme.
The Information Environment [1] aims to provide users of electronic resources in higher and further education in the UK with easy access to high quality information and learning resources.
The JISC already provides numerous resources but these are unfortunately not used to their full extent, as many users are unaware of their existence and the means of access to them.
The Information Environment will supply an architecture to support easy access to existing services and resources in an integrated way that minimises effort by the user.
This architecture [2] specifies standards and protocols that will be used to bring all these disparate resources and services together.
Shared Services and Middleware ‘Middleware’ is the term for the software and associated services that will link resources within the Information Environment.
Middleware provides services such as identification, authentication, authorisation, directories, and security.
A key middleware service (a ‘shared service’) is the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR).
Service Registry Aims The aim of the Service Registry is to form a catalogue of the electronic resources available in the JISC Information Environment.
The idea is to enable portals and other services to discover which resources are available and appropriate for their users, and to supply information about how these resources are accessed, through a machine-to-machine interface.
The Registry will be an electronic catalogue of resources available in the JISC Information Environment.
The descriptions within the Registry will include technical information on how to access the resources as well as descriptive information about the resources themselves, i.e.
service descriptions and collection descriptions.
Other services, e.g.
portals, will be able to query this database to facilitate information discovery and retrieval.
The IESR Project The IESR Pilot Project is looking at a number of resources and services currently available to users in FE and HE and developing metadata schema to hold all the detailed information required for discovery and access.
This information is intended primarily for machine-to-machine interaction rather than direct access by users.
The eventual aim of the Service Registry will be to hold a comprehensive listing of resources supplied by the JISC and others; but during the pilot phase of the IESR, only a relatively small number of resources will be involved, mainly from the collections held by MIMAS, EDINA, the AHDS, the UK Data Archive, the UK Mirror Service and the RDN.
Stakeholder Analysis One of the first tasks within the IESR Project was to identify potential stakeholders and clarify any role they might be willing to play in the Project.
Further analysis of stakeholder requirements could then progress by involving key stakeholders in detailed interviews and/or meetings.
A starting point for selecting stakeholders was the list of current JISC projects [3], along with other recommendations from the Project scoping document and members of the Project team.
It was felt important to select stakeholders from as broad a range of service and resource types as possible, so the list was added to and refined several times.
Both content providers and potential users of the service were included.
Eventually 79 stakeholders were identified, and out of these, 22 were described as key stakeholders by the Project team.
Additional stakeholders were added as the project became more widely known.
Most stakeholder analysis methods assume that stakeholders are aware of a project and have already indicated an interest in it, so as this project was not yet well known to others working in a similar area, it was decided to send out an initial short questionnaire to promote awareness and gauge interest.
This could then be followed up by a more detailed questionnaire.
This initial questionnaire merely asked for contact details, an indication of general interest in the IESR, some details of the extent of possible involvement in the development of the IESR, and if the stakeholders had any collections that could be included in the pilot phase.
This questionnaire [4] is available on the Project Web site.
The questionnaire was circulated by e-mail in January 2003 to all stakeholder names on the list.
Only a small number of replies were returned so another e-mail circulation was made, followed up by direct approaches to individuals.
This had more success and the final total of returns was 30 replies from 91 stakeholders (33% response).
Of these responses, some covered more than one stakeholder in the list, for example the replies from MIMAS were actually on behalf of 16 projects and services, and some stakeholders were involved in more than one project and/or service.
Consequently, 60% (30 out of 50 stakeholders) could be counted as having replied, which is a high response rate.
This list of ‘effective stakeholders’ is available in the Stakeholder Analysis Report [5].
Many of the stakeholders who returned the questionnaire were very keen to be involved and made useful comments.
These stakeholders were then contacted by the Project Officer who interviewed them in more depth.
User Requirements After the stakeholders had been identified a User Requirements Survey was drawn up.
This questionnaire asked how the IESR could be used and whether existing services already created collection and service descriptions for any of their resources.
They were asked to look at initial drafts of the pilot registry’s metadata schemas [6] and to comment on them.
As the registry is predominantly for machine-to-machine access, considerable discussions on protocols have taken place, covering both those used to access the registry and those of the services described in the registry.
Stakeholders were given the opportunity to comment on quality control and administrative issues and to put forward any specific requirements they had of the IESR Project.
This initial phase of IESR User Requirements work is now coming to an end.
A series of face-to-face meetings was held to follow up the results of the User Requirements Survey.
These meetings allowed stakeholders the opportunity to discuss specific issues raised by the proposed metadata schema and to detail individual service requirements in more depth.
They also offered many stakeholders the chance to clarify how the registry might be of use to them.
During this requirements-gathering phase an email discussion list [7] was set up for the benefit of those interested in the pilot’s development.
It was predominantly through this list that details of an IESR stakeholder meeting were publicised.
The meeting took place in Birmingham and attracted interest from a range of projects and services.
The scope of the pilot, the model, and detail of the IESR’s metadata were delivered and stakeholders were involved in breakout sessions on various aspects of the pilot’s development.
The results of these discussions fed into the requirements gathering and in some instances into immediate changes to the metadata.
Whilst the pilot is limited in what it can achieve and only a handful of key service providers will directly contribute records to the pilot registry, input from other stakeholders has been crucial.
Throughout the initial requirements gathering phase of the pilot many service providers outside the scope of the project were approached and their input will feed into both the registry’s development and the project’s final reports.
There has been considerable interest in the IE Service Registry and the number of identified stakeholders has grown steadily.
Whilst some of the requirements identified in these initial stages may not feed directly into the development of the pilot, it is envisaged that they will have a considerable impact on any development of a full service registry.
Future Developments The next few months will see the consolidation of the metadata schemas for the registry and the population of the database with collection and service descriptions.
A demonstrator service will be made available later in 2003, using the Cheshire II search and retrieval software.
As this is a pilot project, the number of service types supported will be limited, as will the number of data providers, but it is envisaged that there will be adequate time and resources to test and evaluate the functionality of the IESR, with a view to developing a full IE Service Registry Shared Service.
The IESR Web site [8] has more detailed information for the Project, including the metadata schemas [6] and examples.
Queries can be e-mailed to the Project team at iesr@mimas.ac.uk .
References The JISC Information Environment http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ie/ The JISC Information Environment Architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ Current JISC projects http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=projectsbrowse The JISC IE Service Registry Stakeholder Analysis Questionnaire http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/stakeholdrep.html#appendix3 The Stakeholder Analysis Report http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/stakeholdrep.html IESR: Metadata http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/metadata/ JISCMAIL Archives of IESR Stakeholders http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/IESR-STAKEHOLDERS.html The JISC IE Service Registry Web site http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/ Author Details Verity Brack Institute for Lifelong Learning University of Sheffield Email: v.brack@shef.ac.uk Web site: http://www.shef.ac.uk/till/ Amanda Closier UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.closier@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Developing the JISC Information Environment Service Registry” Author: Verity Brack and Amanda Closier Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue36/jisciesr/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web-archiving: Managing and Archiving Online Documents and Records Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web-archiving: Managing and Archiving Online Documents and Records Buzz data framework database archives identifier copyright preservation ulcc url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie and Philip Pothen report on the Digital Preservation Coalition Forum held 25th March 2002.
Web sites are an increasingly important part of this country’s information and cultural heritage.
As such, the question of their preservation through archiving becomes one which organisations need to be increasingly aware of.
This event, organised by the newly-created Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), brought together key organisations in the field of web archiving in order to assess the needs of organisations involved in the field to archive their and others’ web sites, to find areas of agreement, to highlight good practice, and to influence the wider debate about digital preservation.
Neil Beagrie, Secretary of the DPC, began the day’s proceedings by welcoming delegates to the event, the first event on web archiving to be organised by the DPC.
He stressed the importance of the issue, as did the first speaker, Catherine Redfern from the Public Record Office (PRO).
Web sites are records, and as such, need to be archived.
But selection was necessary too, said Ms Redfern.
But what are the criteria to be employed in such a process of selection?
And how important is the capturing of the ‘experience’ of using the web site given that the look and feel of a site are an intrinsic part of the record.
It was important, concluded Ms Redfern, to accept that perfect solutions do not exist, and that flexibility means that it may be the case that different solutions existed for different web sites.
Brian Kelly of UKOLN followed, and emphasised the sheer scale of the challenge by looking at attempts to define and measure UK web space.
Different organisations came up with different measurements, but a figure of 3m public web servers was given which contained .uk within their URLs.
Preserving web sites which we are unable to count will prove particularly difficult, he said, but perhaps the most important question was: at what rate is the UK web space growing?
A number of the web sites of e-Lib projects were disappearing soon after their funding had finished.
This led to a pilot study which came up with a number of conclusions about the way forward in this area.
Brian Kelly also referred to the Internet Archive (www.archive.org/) which is offering permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format.
Comparisons with other international situations are important in this context, and Julien Masanes from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF), gave the French perspective on these questions, where the Government is currently in the process of modifying the law regarding legal deposit of online content.
The BnF is currently researching the best way to manage procedures of selection, transfer and preservation, which could be applied on a large scale within the framework of the proposed law.
Two large-scale projects are proposed as part of this ongoing research.
The first one has begun and involves sites related to the presidential and parliamentary elections that will take place in Spring 2002 in France.
More than 300 sites have already been selected and the BnF collects about 30 Gb per week.
The second project will be a global harvesting of the ‘.fr’ domain in June.
If the sheer scale of the amount to be archived presents a major challenge, it is one that the BBC, with a million pages on its web site, and each regularly being updated, faces as a matter of course.
Cathy Smith of the BBC spoke about the huge logistical and legal problems that this can involve.
The BBC’s Charter responsibilities mean that it must archive its content, while its message boards, live chat forums, etc.
mean that Data Protection becomes a serious issue in this context too.
Multi-media content, often created through non-standard production processes, add further problems while proposals to extend the period within which the public can make formal complaints from one year to three years, has important consequences for the amount that will need to be archived.
Ms Smith talked of the need for archived material to be directly accessible to users as a way of avoiding the ‘gatekeeper’ culture of traditional archives, and once again emphasised the fact that an archive needs to recreate the look and feel of the original record since this was an important aspect of what it is that the BBC does.
A number of reports from DPC members followed in the afternoon.
Stephen Bury of the British Library spoke of some of the criteria used by the BL under its current archiving activities, given the lack of legal deposit requirements.
These criteria include topicality, reflecting a representative cross-section of subject areas, etc.
Stephen Bailey, Electronic Records Manager for the Joint information Systems Committee (JISC) spoke of the JISC’s attempts to implement its own recommendations in this area with its current project of redesigning its own web site.
The archive module of the new site will allow for identification and retention of key pages and documents and will also allow a greater degree of functionality for end users.
Centralised control; of the web records’ lifecycle will allow for greater uniformity but will place demands on content providers.
Long-term preservation will, however, be a key requirement of the new site, he explained.
Steve Bordwell of the National Archives of Scotland asked whether we should even be attempting to preserve web sites, and whether we should rather be focussing on content.
Snapshots or web cams might provide us with the look and feel of archived web sites, he suggested.
David Ryan of the PRO looked at the project to preserve the No.
10 web site, and asked what an acceptable level of failure might be in terms of archiving and preservation procedures, while Kevin Ashley of the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), suggested that we need to think what the purpose of Government web sites is precisely, what their significant properties are in order to formulate criteria for selection, and so on.
Robert Kiley spoke about the joint Wellcome/JISC archiving feasibility study which is looking at archiving the medical Web.
Once again, the sheer volume of the medical Web presents significant problems for selection: quality would be one criterion, but how should we judge quality ?
In addition, many database are published only electronically, while discussion lists and e-mail correspondence are potentially of immense importance to future generations of researchers.
The study will produce recommendations, Mr Kiley reported, on how some of the questions can be answered, as well as answers to the questions of copyright, costs and the maintenance of any medical web archive.
Discussion throughout the day ranged across a number of areas, but questions of standards, selection criteria, and cost, dominated the proceedings.
Author Details   Neil Beagrie and Philip Pothen Article Title: “Web-archiving: Managing and Archiving Online Documents and Records” Author: Neil Beagrie and Philip Pothen Publication Date: 8-July-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/web-archiving/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Library and Information Professional's Guide to Plug-ins and Other Web Browser Tools Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Library and Information Professional's Guide to Plug-ins and Other Web Browser Tools Buzz software portal accessibility browser url research Citation BibTex RIS Book review by Ruth Martin.
The last thing I expected a book with a title like The Library and Information Professional’s Guide to Plug-ins and Other Web Browser Tools to be was entertaining.
But to my amazement, this book kept me turning the pages for the length of a long train journey, thanks to its illustrated examples of how US libraries and museums have made use of plug-in applications in such things as interactive library tours, 3-dimensional exhibit image display, and virtual enquiry desks.
I got a genuine sense of reading the future, right here, from a book which sets out otherwise to be no more than a practical guide to software applications.
These examples from real-life library and information services also earn the book’s right to the title The Library and Information Professional’s Guide… The authors are themselves librarians, and they tell us in the preface that they wrote the guide having been frustrated in their own search for something that was written from the perspective of people who have neither the time nor the inclination to research the subject in depth, but who simply want guidance on what plug-ins do, how to install them, and what to do when things go wrong.
Not that it is exactly a noddy-guide: in only 171 pages to cover a wide field, it inevitably assumes a certain level of systems competence from its readers.
Indeed, I would have welcomed a glossary of terms which, from librarian authors, I am perhaps justified in expecting!
Each chapter is well structured and attractively presented: for each application the reader is told its purpose, its system requirements, given tips on its installation and is alerted its pros and cons.
You are warned for example which installations are band-hogs – essential information if you are responsible for managing a network.
Finally each chapter ends with a troubleshooting guide, which means that this book should sit usefully at any system librarian’s elbow.
But possibly not for very long: this UK edition is dated 2002, yet as it admits, it already contains old news.
The authors warn us in the preface that since the some of the applications described are updated annually, and even monthly, you cannot rely on total accuracy of the book’s contents, and therefore it is accompanied by a website with links to the application providers’ websites to allow readers to keep up to date with costs and upgrades.
One quibble: what exactly is the point of this so-called UK edition?
None of the US spellings have been anglicised (one chapter is left called “Math and Science”); and none of the dollar prices are converted into sterling.
More importantly, the chapter on accessibility tools refers readers to their obligations under US law, but CILIP’s publishing arm Facet Publishing makes no mention of UK librarians’ equivalent duties under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.
But this aside, I was secretly glad of the book’s US origins: all those fabulous US library tours!
Author Details   Ruth Martin Subject Portal Project Manager Email: r.martin@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “The Library and Information Professional’s Guide to Plug-ins and Other Web Browser Tools” Author: Ruth Martin Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/martin/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: HTML is Dead!
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: HTML is Dead!
Buzz mobile software html database rss xml infrastructure xslt xhtml standardisation xsl gif uri xlink url research standards Citation BibTex RIS HTML is Dead: Brian Kelly explains why this is, and why it is a good thing.
HTML is Dead?
Previous Web Focus articles have reported on developments which have been the featured prominently in International World Wide Web conferences.
These include XML, which was the highlight of the Sixth WWW conference in 1997 [1].
Have developments such as this affected mainstream Web services, or are they restricted to the research community?
Indeed, wouldn’t it be sensible for HTML authors for mainstream Web services to be still be making use of the same HTML tags (and possibly authoring tools) they mastered several years ago?
The answer is no!
Unnoticed by many, there has been a quiet revolution behind the scenes.
Yes it’s true: HTML is Dead!
Why Is HTML Dead?
The simplicity of the HTML language helped to provide the rapid growth of the Web.
However HTML has a number of problems.
For example: Lack of Extensibility It is very time-consuming to extend the HTML language.
In order to introduce a new HTML element a lengthy discussion period with the W3C standardisation body, with the user community and will software vendors is needed.
Lack Of Structure HTML only provides very limited structuring, and this is restricted to document structures (e.g.
paragraphs, bulleted items, emphasised text, etc.).
In HTML it is not easy to define other structural elements (e.g.
in a memo, the subject, to, from and cc: fields, etc.)
Difficulty Of Reuse of HTML Resources It is difficult to reuse HTML resources e.g.
to transform them into other formats, to perform mathematical functions on numeric fields, to validate fields, etc.
Limitations of HTML Hyperlinking HTML only provides very simple hyperlinking concepts.
These limitations has led development of a replacement for HTML; work which has been coordinated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
What Has Replaced HTML?
XML is widely acknowledged as a W3C success story, and is in use for many sophisticated Web applications.
But does it have a role for simple HTML authoring?
The answer to this question is yes.
XHTML has been developed as a representation of HTML in XML.
Since XHTML is XML, an XHTML document will inherit the benefits of XML.
In the future this should include more sophisticated hyperlinks (through technologies such as XLink [2]) and transformation techniques (through technologies such as XSLT [3]).
Key Features Of XHTML For HTML authors the XHTML language will be very familiar.
The key differences are: Elements must be lower case Unlike HTML, XHTML is case sensitive.
The lower case lobby won the battle, so a paragraph element in XHTML is <p> and not <P>.
The reason for this change is to support the internationalisation of XML applications.
Elements must be closed All elements must have a close tag: for example, all paragraphs must be terminated with a </p>.
Unlike HTML, which has a fixed element set which allows applications to have knowledge of the structure of HTML documents, XML applications, such as XHTML, can contain arbitrary elements, so an application would find it difficult to have knowledge of the structure and to imply where unclosed elements should terminate.
Empty elements must be terminated Some elements, such as <img>, <br> and <hr> are empty elements i.e.
they do not have a close tag.
Such elements must be flagged as empty, by use of a slash: e.g.
<img src=“logo.gif” … />> or <br />.
Note that there should be a space before the />.
Attribute values must be quoted Attribute values in elements must be contained in quotes e.g.
<img src=“logo.gif” alt=“logo” height=“20” width=“50” />.
XHTML documents must be valid Unlike HTML (in which browsers will often render an invalid document), XML applications such as XHTML must be valid.
As can be seen, XHTML will be familiar to HTML authors, but there are a small number of changes.
XHTML is more rigourous; this allows XHTML resources to be processed by other applications, thus facilitating the reuse of XHTML resources.
XHTML Tools What tools can authors use to create XHTML pages?
Unfortunately there appear to be only a few tools which are available.
One commercial authoring tool which is available is Mosquito [4].
Those authors who are happy with use of a simple editing tool may find that HTML-Kit [5] (illustrated below) provides a more than satisfactory alternative to use of simple editors such as vi or Notepad.
Figure 1: The HTML-Kit Authoring Tool HTML-Kit makes use of a public domain XHTML utility called Tidy [6] which can be used to convert HTML resources to XHTML.
An Automated Approach To XHTML The lack of XHTML authoring tools may be a problem.
However as large organisations begin to address the management of large Web sites through use of Content Management Systems or by backend databases, we may see such tools being used to provide large-scale Web sites which are based on XHTML.
Transformation Of XHTML Resources Although applications which use XHTML to support enhanced hyperlinked have yet to arrive, useful applications of services which transform XHTML files to other formats are currently available.
An Example Transforming XHTML To A New feeds The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web site provides an example of an attractive and easy-to-use Web site which is based on XHTML.
The W3C home page [7] contains a series of news items in the middle of the page, as shown below.
Figure 2: The W3C Web Site Since the news is defined in XHTML, it is possible to use the XSLT transformation language to transform this information to another format.
W3C make use of XSLT to transform this information into an RSS (Rich Site Summary) channel.
The RSS file can then be processed by an RSS application, which enables the W3C news to be dynamically incorporated into third party Web sites, as shown below.
Figure 3: Processing The W3C’s RSS File The use of XSLT to transform XHTML resource could also be used to transform a Web site into a WAP site, viewable on a WAP-enabled mobile phone (although, of course, it is likely that XSLT would be used to display only a limited area of a Web site, such as news, contact details, etc.
Deployment Issues What should institutions be doing?
The World Wide Web Consortium is unambiguous: “XHTML 1.0 is the current W3C Recommendation”.
[8].
Although many institutions will have a policy of supporting open standards, in practice there are, of course, a number of implementation issues which will need to be addressed.
As has been pointed out, the apparent lack of XHTML support in many of the popular HTML authoring tools may be a problem.
Related to this is the training and support infrastructure which many institutions provide for their HTML authors.
Clearly a migration strategy from the unstructured world of (often invalid) HTML to the more structured world of XML and XHTML will be needed.
The following suggestions may be helpful for institutions developing migration strategies: Move towards an XHTML-style approach to use of HTML.
For example, deploy lowercase elements names in institutional templates, ensure attribute values are quoted, etc.
Reemphasise the importance of HTML validation in training courses and develop procedures for checking HTML validation and compliance with HTML standards.
Evaluate use of XHTML for new Web site.
Ensure that dynamically-generated pages comply with the XHTML standard.
Find Out More XHTML-L Mailing List and Web Site A useful resource for finding out more about XHTML is the XHTML-L Yahoo!
Groups (formerly eGroups) mailing list [9].
This mailing list provides a forum for debate and discussion about XHTML which is aimed at XHTML authors, developers of XHTML authoring tools and others with an interest in the XHTML language.
In addition to the mailing list, the XHTML-L Yahoo!
Groups Web site also provides a range of useful resources, including a list of books about XHTML, XHTML compatibility suites, lists of XHTML tools and tutorials and information on XHTML specifications [10].
Figure 4: The Yahoo!
Groups XHTML-L Mailing List Other useful portals to XHTML resources include the Dutch “STARTKABEL xhtml” resource [11] and the Encyclozine’s Introduction to XHTML [12].
A useful article is Web Review’s “XHTML Roadmap for Designers” [13] XHTML Online Tutorial W3Schools.com provide an online tutorial about XHTML [14].
The home page is illustrated in Figure 5.
Figure 5: The W3Schools.com Home Page References Report on the WWW 6 Conference, Ariadne, issue 15 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/web-focus/ XLink http://www.w3.org/XML/Linking XSL Transformations (XSLT), W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt Mozquito Factory, Mozquito http://www.mozquito.com/ HTML-Kit, Chami http://www.chami.com/html-kit/ Clean up your Web pages with HTML Tidy, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ W3C Home Page, W3C http://www.w3.org/ HTML Home Page, W3C http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/ XHTML-L, Yahoo!
groups http://groups.yahoo.com/group/XHTML-L/ XHTML-L Links, Yahoo!
groups http://groups.yahoo.com/group/XHTML-L/links/ startkabel, http://xhtml.startkabel.nl Introduction to XHTML, Encyclozine http://www.encyclozine.com/WD/xHTML/ To Use or Not to Use: An XHTML Roadmap for Designers, Web Review, 2 March 2001 http://www.webreview.com/2001/03_02/designers/index01.shtml XHTML-L Tutorial, W3Schools.com http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/ URI gives 404: amended to http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_xhtml.asp [Editor: 14 November 2012] Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: “Web Focus: HTML is Dead!” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata: Preservation 2000 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata: Preservation 2000 Buzz data software framework database xml archives metadata digitisation standardisation accessibility identifier vocabularies schema repositories preservation cache provenance ulcc prism dcmes licence interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reports on the Digital Preservation conference held in York in December 2000.
The Cedars conference, "Preservation 2000: an International Conference on the Preservation and Long Term Accessibility of Digital Materials," was held at the Viking Moat House Hotel in York on 7-8 December 2000.
There were over 150 participants, about one half from outside the UK.
As a prelude to the conference proper, a one-day workshop entitled "Information Infrastructures for Digital Preservation" was held at the same venue on the 6 December.
This workshop mostly concerned preservation metadata and attracted over 70 participants.
The theme of the "Preservation 2000" conference was the long-term preservation of digital materials [1].
The conference was organised as part of the Cedars (CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives) project and was sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and OCLC Online Computer Library Center.Cedars is a Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under phase 3 of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) [2].
The project was funded to investigate some of the issues that relate to digital preservation and the conference was an opportunity both for the project to share information about project outcomes but also to look at some other recent international developments.
Throughout the three days, demonstrations of the Cedars demonstrator archive and some BBC microcomputer emulation experiments undertaken as part of the CAMiLEON project were available in a room adjoining the conference venue [3].
Preservation 2000 Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, opened the "Preservation 2000" conference with a keynote address [4].
The presentation described a range of digital preservation activities that had been undertaken in the UK since 1995 (including the Cedars project) and highlighted several national library approaches to the issue, including that of the National Library of Australia (NLA) and the European NEDLIB project.
Through these initiatives, and others, Brindley noted that much good work had been carried out already but that there was a critical need to involve more stakeholders and to get digital preservation on the agenda of key decision makers and funding bodies.
She pointed out that those concerned with the digital preservation problem have not "yet brought seriously on board authors, publishers and other digital content creators, funding agencies, senior administrators, hardware and software manufacturers, and so on."
The presentation ended with a plea for a national (and international) manifesto, with eight specific commitments outlined.
In summary, these commitments included: Public relations there is a need to get digital preservation on the agenda of key decision-makers and funding agencies.
Web archiving there is a specific need to collaborate in research and development (and implementation strategies) for preserving significant Web sites.
Digital preservation strategies there is a need for the development of digital preservation strategies both at national and international level.
Collaborative working there is a need to commit to working internationally and collaboratively ways that we can learn from mistakes as well as successes.
We also need to ensure that there are links with other international stakeholder groupings.
Specifically within the UK, it will be important to support the creation of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
The papers that followed were divided up into broad themes.
For example, the first session was entitled "Models for distributed digital archives," and included an account of Cedars project outcomes by Kelly Russell of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) and a description of the LOCKSS project by Vicky Reich of Stanford University Library.
Russell's paper gave some background on the Cedars project and stressed the "vertical learning curve" that project participants had faced at the beginning of the project.
She described how the project had adopted a distributed architecture based on the draft Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) produced by the Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems (CCSDS) [5].
The presentation also outlined the main project deliverables, which included the included the development of a demonstrator archive, the production of a metadata schema and guidance for collection managers.
In summing up, Russell noted a number of lessons that the project had learnt over the past two and a half years.
Without going into too much detail, it might be useful to enumerate some of these lessons here.
First, it was noted that adopting the OAIS model had been important because in addition to providing a generic architecture for a digital repository it also helped the project to acquire a shared understanding of vocabulary and concepts.
Secondly, Russell noted the vital importance of the creation and maintenance of metadata regardless of what particular digital preservation strategy has been adopted.
Indeed, Russell pointed out that in one sense digital preservation is "all about metadata."
This then raises the issue of what specialist knowledge and expertise will be required of those staff who will need to create and maintain this metadata.
The experience of the Cedars project suggests that there may need to be some sharing of expertise with specialists outside the traditional library and information domain, e.g.
with computer scientists.
There may also be specific educational requirements for all of the cultural heritage professions, some of which could be dealt with by specialised courses like the MPhil in Digital Management and Preservation offered by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow [6].
Russell finished her presentation with an explanation that funding had been acquired for an additional year of the project.
This would enable some scalability testing of the Cedars demonstrator to take place as well as some continued work on preservation metadata standardisation and the organisation of some collection management workshops in conjunction with the JISC Digital Preservation Focus activity.
The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) project is an initiative of Stanford University Libraries [7].
It is concerned with maintaining access to Web based journals (chiefly in the scientific, technical and medical areas) by distributing copies in Web caches managed by a number of distributed organisations (chiefly libraries).
If many libraries are able to take "custody" of Web content in this way, the caches can communicate with each other through a protocol called LCAP (Library Cache Auditing Protocol) and recover lost content.
There was quite a lot of interest in the LOCKSS approach at the conference, but it was noted that the technique could only be applied at the moment to Web based information of a non-volatile nature.
The next session concerned the management of national collections of digital information.
This included descriptions of preservation activities in the British Library by Helen Shenton, a description of the NEDLIB project by Lex Sijtsma of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands) and a description of the National Library of Australia's experience by Colin Webb.
Helen Shenton's presentation was entitled "From talking to doing" and it described some of the preservation initiatives of the British Library, including the preservation functions of its newly commissioned Digital Library System (DLS).
The core of the presentation, however, concentrated on the diversity of staff skills that are required, and how the British Library has built up its own expertise in this area both by involving existing staff in its digital preservation initiatives and by bringing in others from outside.
Lex Sijtsma described the European Union-funded NEDLIB (Networked Deposit Library) project, whose partners included a number of European national libraries and other organisations [8].
He described the project's development of a Deposit System for Electronic Publications (dSEP) based on OAIS and demonstrated an "Interactive Work Flow Tour" of it.
Colin Webb's presentation reviewed National Library of Australia (NLA) initiatives from the beginning of the PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources in Australia) project [9].
This was an interesting paper based on the NLA's extensive experience of doing digital preservation.
In his reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the NLA approach, he noted that a particular long-term strength was the fact that the library had not been reliant on external funding for its digital preservation initiatives.
The NLA itself had funded them as part of its core business.
This meant that these initiatives were not dependent on the whims of short-term research-type funding and that the NLA itself had built up a considerable amount of expertise in digital preservation.
The second day of the conference began with a session on the practicalities of digital preservation.
This started with a description of the draft Workbook for the Preservation Management of Digital Materials by Maggie Jones of the Arts and Humanities Data Service [10].
The "Workbook" is the result of a Library and Information Commission (now Re:source) funded project and is a comprehensive outline of best practice in the digital preservation area.
Jones's paper concentrated on the results of the peer-review process that had just been completed and looked forward to developing it further as a training tool through various workshops.
This presentation was followed by a paper entitled "Comparing Preservation Strategies and Practices for Electronic Records" by Michèle Cloonan and Shelby Sanett of the University of California, Los Angeles.
This reported on a study carried out on behalf of the Preservation Task Force of the InterPARES project [11].
The study involved some interviews with individuals involved in digital preservation strategies.
The presentation concentrated on perceived changes of emphasis in how the term "preservation" was understood and some preliminary thoughts on the economic costs of preservation to institutions.
The session was wrapped-up with a brief outline of intellectual property rights issues by Ellis Weinberger of Cambridge University Library and the Cedars project.
The next session broadly covered those important issues that relate to preserving the authenticity of digital information.
The first presentation was by Nancy Brodie of the Treasury Board Secretariat of the Government of Canada who addressed authenticity issues with regard to the requirements of scholars, law librarians and governments.
This was followed by a presentation by Kevin Ashley of the University of London Computing Centre (ULCC) who, like Brodie, emphasised the need for the authenticity of digital objects to be known, and suggested that any accompanying metadata itself needed to be part of the chain-of-proof.
He also looked at how differing rights of access might need to condition which parts of digital resources might have to be "hidden" from users or archive staff.
For example, personal data in databases might have to be deleted or anonymised, as might some descriptive metadata.
The final paper in the session was an outline by George D. Barnum of the US Government Printing Office (GPO) of that organisation's creation of a Federal Depository Library Program Electronic Collection [12].
This looked at the changing nature of the GPO as it changes from an organisation primarily concerned with the distribution of printed materials to traditional library-type organisations into being the host of digital collections in addition to it's original role.
The final session was about "working-together" and included an account of some ongoing international collaboration concerning digital preservation metadata by Robin Dale of RLG.
The presentation included a report of the Information Infrastructures for Digital Preservation workshop that was held the day before the conference (and which is described in more detail below).
This was followed by a description of the JISC's Digital Preservation Focus activity by Neil Beagrie, the Assistant Director (Preservation) of JISC's DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) Office [13].
One of the most important tasks of the Digital Preservation Focus will be the setting-up of an UK Digital Preservation Coalition that will be an important focus of continued collaborative activity in this area, both within the UK and internationally.
The conference ended with a closing keynote by James Michalko, the RLG president.
He echoed many of the more internationally applicable points of Lynne Brindley's proposed manifesto and raised some difficult issues.
For example, he asked participants to note important groups of people who were not in attendance at the conference: e.g., high level decision makers, software manufacturers, publishers and government agencies.
He also noted that as yet there were no widely accepted business models for digital preservation in place.
In his comments on Lynne Brindley's manifesto, he suggested that the UK Digital Preservation Coalition could help take forward the public relations agenda and orchestrate research and development initiatives with reference to the wider international context.
Information Infrastructures for Digital Preservation workshop On the day before the "Preservation 2000" conference started, a one-day workshop entitled "Information Infrastructures for Digital Preservation" was held at the same venue.
The main theme of the workshop was digital preservation metadata.
Accordingly, the first presentation of the day was by Brian Lavoie of OCLC, who gave an outline of a White Paper produced as part of the work of the joint OCLC and RLG Working Group on Metadata for Digital Preservation [14].
The White Paper, which will be published in January 2001, describes the current state-of-the-art on the development of metadata to support digital preservation.
The paper begins by defining the objectives of a broadly applicable preservation metadata element set and then reviews the OAIS model with regard to how it characterises the range of metadata elements needed in order to support the operation of a digital archive.
Lavoie pointed out that the OAIS model was a useful starting point for the identification of the types of information required to manage preservation in an archival system.
He also noted, however, that it should not be treated as a rigid blueprint and that the model may need to be adapted, extended and altered.
The White Paper also reviews and attempts to synthesise the various draft metadata specifications proposed by the Cedars project [15], the National Library of Australia (NLA) [16], the NEDLIB project [17] and Harvard University Library.
Lavoie noted areas of convergence between the various specifications, notably the explicit or implicit influence of the OAIS model and their emphasis on defining preservation in terms of maintaining the accessibility of digital information objects in the context of changing technical environments.
He also noted points of divergence relating to important issues like granularity and implementation.
Lavoie pointed out that after the White Paper is published, the real work of the joint OCLC/RLG working group will begin.
This will include the development of an overall metadata framework and the identification of those metadata elements that will be able to support.
The working group will also have to address implementation issues possibly with some kind of testbed project and produce some recommendations on best practice.
At the end of Lavoie's paper, an international reaction panel made some comments.
The panel included representatives of the developers of all of the preservation metadata initiatives reviewed in the White Paper.
The panel comprised Stephen Chapman of Harvard University, Kelly Russell of the Cedars project, Colin Webb of the NLA and Catherine Lupovici of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) on behalf of the NEDLIB project.
All of the panel were happy with the general approach of the White Paper and appreciated the RLG and OCLC's support of the working group.
Several of the panelists made the point that the preservation metadata specifications that were produced as part of their projects were developed in response to specific practical requirements and that it was interesting to see how these would all be able to fit into a generic metadata framework.
The following four presentations concerned particular projects.
Inka Tappenbeck of the State Library of Lower Saxony and University Library of Göttingen (SUB Göttingen) described the ongoing work of AP 2/5 of the CARMEN (Content Analysis, Retrieval and MetaData: Effective Networking) project [18].
The project is funded by the Global Info programme a programme supported by German scientific societies, scientific information centres, libraries, publishing houses and the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF).
Work package (AP) 2/5 of CARMEN concerns metadata for terms and conditions and archiving.
Partners in AP 2/5 include SUB Göttingen, the publisher Springer-Verlag and Munich University of Technology (TUM).
AP 2/5 wanted to use existing standards and, where possible, had based their metadata element set on existing standards like the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) and the OAIS model.
The OAIS model provided the starting point for the structure of the CARMEN AP 2/5 metadata element set with, for example, Reference Information being provided by DCMES 1.1 and Provenance Information being based on an adapted version of the metadata described in the Cedars outline specification.
The prototype set was then compared with the format used by the Göttingen Digitisation Centre (GDZ).
In the second presentation, Oya Rieger of the Department of Preservation and Conservation at Cornell University Library described the metadata aspects of Project Prism [19].
Prism (Preservation, Reliability, Interoperability, Security, and Metadata) is a four-year research project funded by phase 2 of the Digital Libraries Initiative and involves personnel from both Cornell's Computer Science department and Cornell University Library.
A major focus of Project Prism is information integrity.
Rieger talked about the need for an well defined data model for metadata to ensure extensibility.
The presentation also mentioned two other Cornell-based projects.
The first was a Web site profiler tool developed by students in the Computing Science department that can be used to analyze Web sites and create a profile of characteristics that might be "important in maintaining, mirroring and preserving them" [20].
The second project concerned the implemention of a digital preservation strategy for Cornell's digital image collections, a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) [21].
The third presentation was by Günter Mühlberger of the University of Innsbruck.
He described the Metadata Engine (METAe) project funded by the European Commission under the 5th Framework Programme [22].
The project intends to develop digitisation software that will be able to extract metadata about a document's structure during the digitisation process itself and create a rich text structured in XML (Extensible Markup Language).
This enriched output of the digitisation process might enable new products to be developed, might enable easier access for visually impaired users and might also aid the long-term preservation of the digital object created by the digitisation process.
Finally, Margaret Byrnes of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) outlined the findings of the NLM's permanence working group.
The working group developed an initial permanence rating system that could be applied to the range of digital resources that the NLM publishes.
Some common themes It is very difficult to identify and summarise all of the issues that were raised at the Preservation 2000 conference and the Information Infrastructures for Digital Preservation workshop, but there follows a personal attempt to identify some common themes.
Please note that these are in no particular order and as they are a result of personal reflection, some other important themes may have been neglected.
Preservation strategies Lynne Brindley reminded us that in a world of digital information we are no longer able to rely on "benign neglect" as a backup preservation strategy.
This strategy worked quite well (in some contexts) for traditional information types, but it is not a sustainable option in the digital era.
Those concerned with digital preservation need to be involved at the beginning of the digital life cycle.
Data creators and publishers it is vital that there is good communication between those who create and publish digital information on one hand and those who are responsible for its preservation on the other.
This is not just an intellecual property issue, but is based on the fact that data creators and publishers often have a very detailed technical understanding of the nature of the resources they make available.
This technical knowledge might need to be part of the metadata that accompanies a digital resource.
Intellectual property rights (IPR) some of the issues relating to IPR were discussed in Ellis Weinberger's presentation, but solving IPR issues in collaboration with publishers and other rights owners remains an important problem that needs to be addressed by libraries and other cultural heritage organisations.
Negotiating specific rights for preservation may need to be part of license negotiations between publishers and library consortia.
Collection management although we don't have precise figures, there is a perception that digital preservation (if not digital storage per se) costs a lot of money.
Collection management policies for digital information will have to find a balance between keeping everything and keeping the minimum amount of information possible in order to maintain the possibility of future serendipity.
Lynne Brindley said that "we must bear in mind that we are in effect deciding what record will be available in the future: a decision not to select a digital document means there is unlikely to be the serendipitous find in the future."
Metadata two of the presenters (Kelly Russell and Oya Reiger) emphasised the centrality of metadata in the digital preservation process.
The work of the OCLC and RLG Working Group on Metadata for Digital Preservation will be important in informing the future development of preservation metadata standards.
Web archiving the importance of preserving (parts of) the World Wide Web was raised several times at the conference.
This should be the topic of future research.
Staff expertise Kelly Russell and some others raised the issue about the level of staff skills required for digital preservation activity, especially the creation of technical metadata (e.g., Representation Information in OAIS terminology).
This may need to be the focus of specific education and training needs.
Collaboration throughout the conference and workshop there was an emphasis on working together and sharing experiences, successes and failures.
It is hoped that the development of groups like the UK Digital Preservation Coalition will help foster international collaboration and co-operation.
The Preservation 2000 conference was a good reflection of the current state-of-the-art in digital preservation.
It demonstrated, if nothing else, that digital preservation is slowly moving from being the focus of specific research and development projects into being seen as part of the core mission of libraries and other cultural heritage organisations.
That is not to say that there is no need for more research and development work.
There is, and it is hoped that this can be co-ordinated on a national level.
Full proceedings of both the conference and workshop will be made available on the RLG Web site [23] and the conference papers in a special issue of the New Review of Academic Librarianship.
An inital account of both events has already been published in RLG DigiNews [24].
References 1.
Preservation 2000: an International Conference on the Preservation and Long Term Accessibility of Digital Materials: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/cedars-2000/ 2.
Cedars project: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/ 3.
CAMiLEON project: http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ 4.
Lynne Brindley, Preservation 2000: keynote speech, Presentation given at: Preservation 2000: an International Conference on the Preservation and Long Term Accessibility of Digital Materials, Viking Moat House Hotel, York, 7-8 December 2000. http://www.bl.uk/concord/otherpubs_speeches04.html 5.
Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, Reference model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Red Book, Issue 1.
CCSDS 650.0-R-1.
Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, May 1999. http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html 6.
University of Glasgow, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, MPhil in Digital Management and Preservation.
http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/Courses/DigitalMPhil/ 7.
LOCKSS: http://lockss.stanford.edu/ 8.
NEDLIB project: http://www.kb.nl/coop/nedlib/ 9.
PANDORA project: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pandora/ 10.
Neil Beagrie and Maggie Jones, Preservation Management of Digital Materials Workbook.
Pre-publication draft, October 2000. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation/workbook/ 11.
InterPARES project: http://www.interpares.org/ 12.
Government Printing Office (GPO), Federal Depository Library Program Electronic Collection (FDLP/EC): http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/locators/net/abtfdlpec.html 13.
JISC Digital Preservation: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation/ 14.
RLG and OCLC Explore Digital Archiving.
RLG News Release, 10 March 2000: http://www.rlg.org/pr/pr2000-oclc.html 15.
Kelly Russell, Derek Sergeant, Andy Stone, Ellis Weinberger and Michael Day, Metadata for Digital Preservation: the Cedars Outline Specification.
Leeds: Cedars project, March 2000. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/OutlineSpec.htm 16.
National Library of Australia Preservation Metadata Working Group, Preservation Metadata for Digital Collections: Exposure Draft.
Canberra: National Library of Australia, 15 October 1999. http://www.nla.gov.au/preserve/pmeta.html 17.
Catherine Lupovici and Julien Masanès, Metadata for Long Term Preservation.
NEDLIB Report series, 2.
The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, July 2000. http://www.kb.nl/coop/nedlib/results/D4.2/D4.2.htm 18.
CARMEN AP 2/5: Metadaten zu Terms und Conditions und zur Archivierung: http://harvest.sub.uni-goettingen.de/carmen/ 19.
Project Prism: http://www.prism.cornell.edu/main.htm 20.
Web Site Profiler: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs501/2000fa/project-folder/profiler.html 21.
Preserving Cornell's Digital Image Collections: Implementing an Archival Strategy: http://www.library.cornell.edu/imls/ 22.
Metadata engine project: http://meta-e.uibk.ac.at/ 23.
Papers from the Preservation 2000 conference and presentations from the Information Infrastructures for Digital Preservation workshop are available on the RLG Web site: http://www.rlg.org/events/pres-2000/ 24.
Robin Dale and Neil Beagrie, "Digital Preservation Conference: Report from York, UK."
RLG DigiNews, Vol.
4, no.6, 15 December 2000. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-6.html#feature2 Author Details   Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, Uk E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Photographs by Philip Hunter, UKOLN Article Title: "Preservation 2000" Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/metadata/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What's in GEsource for Further Education?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What's in GEsource for Further Education?
Buzz data database cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS John Blunden-Ellis provides a view of the material available to FE from GEsource, the RDN subject service for geography and environment.
GEsource [1] is the geography and environment hub of the RDN and provides free access to a fully searchable catalogue of high-quality resources on general geography, human geography, physical geography, environment, and techniques and approaches.
Below is a selection of resources in GEsource that will be relevant to learning and teaching in FE: Virtual Training Tutorials A wide choice of free tutorials on how to develop Internet information skills in specific geography-related topics is available in the Training Tutorials area [2] of GEsource.
Many of these are on topics that are cross-disciplinary and are therefore relevant to other hubs particularly the social sciences hub SOSIG [3].
Internet for Agriculture, Food and Forestry Internet for Development Internet Earth Scientist Internet Economist Internet for European Studies Internet Geographer Internet for Social Research Methods Internet for Social Statistics Internet Town and Country Planner Internet for Travel and Tourism Geography Timeline GEsource is currently building a geography-related timeline that looks at significant dates and events that have shaped the geographical world, from the formation of the Earth to the present day.
In addition to browsing the information provided, a user may choose a keyword or date range to search, thereby generating a customised timeline.
Many timelines are linked to topics in the main GEsource catalogue.
World Guide GEsource has brought together a series of fact sheets and lists of geographic information to create a world 'guide'.
Data can be fund about the world's longest rivers, the highest mountains and much more.
This data has been adapted from a range of Internet and general reference sources.
Additional data is provided via the World Flag Database, databases of online maps, and free country and continent outline maps.
Case Studies for Further Education A series of geographyand environment-related case studies for FE has been commissioned and illustrates how resources from GEsource may be used for learning and teaching in FE.
Each case study has the same structure, including ideas on creating material, and how to use the materials in FE teaching.
Geography Population Issues and Demographic Variables Case Studies of MEDCs, LEDCs and EU countries Hurricanes Land and Environment Land, Environment and the Weather Health and Safety for Farm Workers Farming and Land Use Environmental Science Introduction to Environmental Science Rationale for Conservation: Conservation methods Marine Ecosystems and Effect of El-Niño Internet Resource Catalogue The Gesource catalogue currently contains over 4,500 high-quality, information-rich resources.
These resources have been selected by information professionals and are regularly reviewed.
The catalogue can be searched by keyword, or alternatively there are a large number of browse headings, segmented under the five main subject areas.
Examples of the types of resources found in the GEsource catalogue are: Field studies and Field Guides Maps Lecture Notes Case Studies Animations FAQs Resources in the catalogue will be suitable for reading lists, study packs, and teaching resources.
In addition, an internal search engine provides a broader catalogue (called the 'Web Catalogue') of nearly 43,000 resources.
Future Plans During 2004, substantial amounts of material relevant to Further Education will be added to the GEsource catalogue.
FE resources currently available in the catalogue will also be selected and tagged to create a readily identifiable resource tailored specifically for Further Education.
References GEsourcehttp://www.gesource.ac.uk/ Gesource Training Materials http://www.gesource.ac.uk/training.html SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk Author Details John Blunden-Ellis Service Manager Gesource Email: j.blunden-ellis@man.ac.uk Web site: http://www.gesource.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "What's in GEsource for Further Education?"
Author: John Blunden-Ellis Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/gesource/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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At the Event: The EPrints UK Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines At the Event: The EPrints UK Workshop Buzz data software java database dissemination apache archives metadata identifier repositories eprints copyright preservation perl provenance ejournal mysql tomcat dspace licence rae research standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Cross, Debra Hiom and Emma Place report on this workshop which was held at the University of Bath in February 2004.
The workshop was aimed at those interested in setting up institutional e-print servers where the outputs of their organisation (journal articles, papers, reports etc) could be published, stored and searched via a central institutional server.
The event was fully booked which perhaps indicates that universities, colleges, academics and librarians are increasingly recognising the value of the e-print publishing model.
The day was run by ePrints UK [1] (in conjunction with SOSIG), an RDN [2] project which aims to offer a new national e-print subject service by pulling together information from institutional servers and presenting it by subject discipline (via the RDN hubs).
The workshop looked at the main issues to be addressed in setting up institutional and national e-print services: the rationale, technologies and legal issues but also the people and political factors required to encourage widespread participation in this new and promising publishing model.
Introduction to ePrints UK Marieke Guy, Project Manager, ePrints UK The basic principle of the e-prints movement is self-publishing materials in digital format and then sharing it freely with others, using agreed standards.
Marieke described how the ePrints UK project was one JISC [3] initiative that aimed to promote this vision for a new publishing model for scholarly communication.
The success of e-print initiatives depends on widespread adoption and use and this workshop aimed to support those working at spreading the word and starting to act.
A Whirlwind Guide to E-Prints Philip Hunter, ePrints UK Project, UKOLN, University of Bath Philip started with an overview of e-prints past and present, describing how by implementing some relatively simple ideas and Internet technologies institutions and individuals could significantly improve access to their scholarly publications.
He outlined the rationale for institutions to start to address the crisis in the dissemination of scholarly communication caused by spiralling journal subscription costs and delays caused by existing peer review processes.
The Internet enables academics and universities to self-publish their own papers and make them easily accessible, offering an alternative to the traditional model of publishing via a commercial publisher.
This model was first introduced in the 1990s within the physics community, where a critical mass of scientists came to use the arXiv ePrint server in the USA to both deposit their own papers, and find papers by others.
The advantages were quickly apparent to many, as papers could be published very quickly, with no fee for either retrieval or submissions by users worldwide.
Philip went on to describe the Open Archives Initiative, the international movement that clearly identifies the potential advantages of e-print publishing and sharing, and offers practical models for implementation and use.
The initiative has developed metadata standards and protocols to facilitate exchange of scholarly publications and Philip outlined these in his presentation.
To summarise the basic architecture: an institution can be either or both: A Data Provider: placing e-print metadata in a repository and making this available to others to harvest A Service Provider: harvesting and presenting metadata from repositories to provide an e-print service Philip described how ePrints UK are currently building a service demonstrator where e-prints metadata harvested from a number of data providers is being pulled together to facilitate searching across archives.
The demo currently contains over 11,000 records (of peer reviewed papers, theses, grey literature, collections, images etc) but it is hoped that as more institutions establish their own e-print servers over the next few years, this number will increase enough to develop a rich and valuable national e-prints service.
E-Prints: A librarian's perspective Linda Humphreys, Faculty Librarian, University of Bath Linda gave a persuasive presentation about the benefits of e-print services to users, libraries and academic institutions.
She suggested that for users, they would offer wider and quicker dissemination of academic publications.
For libraries and institutions they help to keep a record of institutional output, raise the profile of institutional research and help with the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
For libraries, the e-prints model offers a better vision than the existing, highly costly journal publishing model.
Linda described her own work in setting up an ePrint server at Bath University.
Bath now has a dwindling collection of print journals, relying instead on expensive inter-library loans.
Having commercial e-journals has not made subscriptions cheaper and has made management of journal access and preservation more complex.
The vision of a universal virtual library is appealing to librarians embroiled in the current serials crisis.
Institutional policy and metadata agreements are two key issues in setting up an e-print server and Linda gave a clear account of her views in both areas which will no doubt be of interest to other institutions.
What Technology is Involved?
Christopher Gutteridge, EPrints.org, University of Southampton Christopher is the developer of the Web-based ePrints archive: GNU Eprints2, produced by the University of Southampton.
He talked generally about the usual structure found with e-print archive software and briefly described the two main players in the field: his own EPrints2, which is based on Apache/Perl/MySQL, and DSpace, which is based on Java Tomcat/Postgres.
Both provide general solutions, but stressed that both require extra work to customise them to an organisation's particular requirements.
There are a number of other software packages available, recommended in the Open Society Institute Guide to Institutional Repository Software (referenced from Christopher's slides).
Christopher suggested that institutions need to decide up front what the focus of the archive is to be and listed the goals to define before setting up an e-print archive.
He mentioned four possible main goals: the dissemination of research; the preservation of research; generating lists of publications, for CVs for example; and collecting statistics.
It is important that an archive builds up a critical mass and Christopher mentioned a few techniques such as importing as much material as possible to start with, to encourage use.
He also suggested that the 'shame' technique of listing numbers of articles available in an archive for each member of staff is also a useful ploy!
Some mid-session questions raised the following views: PDF has become the favoured document standard, but everyone has their own way of doing things, so it's best not to be too prescriptive The general experience is that having users enter their own data is not a problem if good examples are provided EPrints software has a built-in ability to be able to import from bibliographic databases but this would require some work by a local programmer.
Christopher is looking at writing code to create an interface for this The next topic was cost: the software is free and open source, but you still need hardware (including backup facilities) and staff.
The main cost is staff time, mainly in setting the archive up: you can install the software in a couple of days, but configuring it to how people want it can take some time.
Christopher then gave an overview of the EPrints2 software finishing with a statement of their design philosophy: that the supplied defaults are a good starting point, but that tweaks will be needed.
EPrints is configurable, rather than perfect out of the box!
Chris Gutteridge (left) talking to delegates in the break Setting Up Institutional and Subject (Research Funder) Repositories: Practical Experiences, Academics' Views Neil Jacobs, Regard Information Officer, ILRT, Bristol Neil manages the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)'s online research service Regard, and has been running an e-prints pilot study at ILRT (Institute for Learning and Research Technology) in Bristol (which hosts Regard) in association with IRIS (Integrated Research Information System), the University of Bristol's internal database of research outputs.
Both Regard and IRIS are submission-based and have a history of having to persuade academics to submit their data.
The main report of the pilot study is due in April 2004.
He wanted to look at the range of issues involved in setting up an archive, in particular the organisational, cultural, legal, and technical issues and presented the interim findings of the study.
With organisational issues, metadata quality was found to be a major concern, as were the problems of reconciling different metadata schemas, the lack of name authority lists, and the need to indicate the provenance of metadata.
In the cultural area there was concern from academics that peer review was still central to quality.
Some of them also felt it best to stick with existing practices and try to work with existing archives rather than rocking the boat too much.
Legal issues that turned up included the fact that authors are generally uninformed about copyright issues but that there is a potential for the research councils to get involved in discussions between researchers and publishers.
There were also technical issues involved: setting up an archive is technically trivial, but linking it into legacy systems such as OPACs and institutional research databases is not.
The study also looked at the different approaches of institutional or subject-based archives.
Both approaches can build on existing systems but as yet neither are sufficiently involved in the creation of standard metadata needed to sustain archives such as these.
The JISC FAIR Programme and Wider Scholarly Communications Activity Chris Awre, FAIR Programme Manager, JISC Chris Awre gave a broad overview of the FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) Programme, of which the ePrints UK project is part.
The programme represents a £2million investment from JISC spread across 14 projects (involving over 40 institutions across the UK).
The overall aim of the programme is to investigate the issues around the deposit and disclosure of institutional resources as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication.
It was also expected that the tools and experiences that came out of the projects would feed into the wider community.
Chris iterated the point that cultural barriers were by far the greatest obstacle for the projects as they are going against the long-established practice of the publishing industry.
Copyright was also mentioned as a barrier although the next speaker dealt with this issue fairly comprehensively.
Again technical issues were not seen as a major barrier although Chris did note that a particular skill set was needed to maintain the repository, which institutions needed to take into account on a longer-term basis.
He then went on to describe some of the specific projects and particular findings that had come out of the programme so far.
Finally Chris reported on the broader picture of the changes in scholarly communication, looking at some of the work that JISC and FAIR in particular have been doing in the area of Open Access (through self-archiving and open access journals).
The current Government inquiry into pricing and availability of academic journals is also due to report in March 2004 which will consider some alternative models to the current situation including institutional repositories.
Intellectual Property Right issues: Identification and management Laurence Bebbington, Law Librarian, Information Services, The University of Nottingham IPR and Copyright are topics that send normally a shiver down any information professional's spine but Laurence started off his presentation by giving a very clear overview of the range of Intellectual Property Rights; from Patents, through to Confidential Information.
He went on to highlight some of the issues around e-prints and open access, such as: Who is retaining the rights the individual or the academic?
Encouraging academics to retain copyright if possible Need for guidance on negotiating licence changes and proper legal advice if amending publishers' licences While he suggested that copyright is generally at the root of the issue with e-prints, there is also the concept of Database Right to take into consideration, which is a view of the e-prints collection as a database.
Database right can normally be asserted if it can be shown that "substantial investment" had been involved in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents of the database.
Typically database right would rest with the institution and it would need to consider the longer-term implications of maintaining this.
Laurence also highlighted some issues and risks around decentralised publishing such as plagiarism, defamation, errors, etc and illustrated this with an example of a recent case of plagiarism being spotted in a number of papers that had been submitted to the Physics preprint server ArXiv.
The result was that 22 of the papers were withdrawn with the threat of a possible lawsuit for defamation.
The workshop finished with a Question and Answer panel session involving all of the day's speakers.
The questions ranged from queries about database rights to the possibilities of building links between Open Archives and established full-text databases using OpenURLs.
Question Time: Chris Gutteridge, Chris Awre, Laurence Bebbington, Neil Jacobs and Philip Hunter The feedback from the workshop was very positive and some of the actions that participants suggested that they would be taking as a result of the workshop included: Plans to set up an experimental repository or progress their current repository Encourage interest in e-prints at their library or raise awareness Some institutions considering joining Sherpa This was the first in a series of 5 workshops [4] taking place around the UK in conjunction with RDN hubs.
References The ePrints UK Project http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ The Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ The Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ ePrints UK Workshops http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/workshops/ Author Details Phil Cross Senior Technical Researcher ILRT University of Bristol Email: phil.cross@bristol.ac.uk Debra Hiom SOSIG Director ILRT University of Bristol Email: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Emma Place SOSIG Information Manager ILRT University of Bristol Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "At the Event: ePrints UK Workshop" Author: Phil Cross, Debra Hiom and Emma Place Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/eprints-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Curation: Digital Archives, Libraries and e-Science Seminar Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Curation: Digital Archives, Libraries and e-Science Seminar Buzz data software infrastructure archives metadata identifier repositories preservation e-business ulcc curation e-science rae url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie and Philip Pothen report on the Digital Preservation day in October 2001, held in London.
Digital preservation remains a significant and growing challenge for libraries, archives, and scientific data centres.
This invitational seminar held in London on the 19th October sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition and the British National Space Centre, brought together international speakers to discuss leading edge developments in the field.
Three developments were key to the timing and organisation of this international event: firstly, the imminent approval of the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) Reference Model as an ISO standard; secondly, the launch of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a cross-sectoral coalition of over 15 major organisations; and, finally, the development of the e-science programme to develop the research grid in the UK.
Neil Beagrie (JISC Digital Preservation Focus and Secretary, Digital Preservation Coalition) in outlining the main objectives of the event, suggested that there was a need to raise the profile of relevant british and international standards and initiatives in the UK, to show their practical application in the sciences, libraries and archives, and to illustrate their role in securing and promoting access to digital resources for current and future generations.
The first session of the seminar dealt with the OAIS Reference Model and digital archive certification.
Lou Reich of NASA spoke about how NASA and the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) had been central to the development of the OAIS Reference Model, but how they had ensured widespread consultation and cooperation with the archive and library communities, both in the US and internationally.
The resulting model had been developed, therefore as an ‘open’ and public model and was already being widely adopted as a starting point in digital preservation efforts.
Lou Reich explained that a new version of the OAIS Reference Model was delivered to the ISO and CCSDS Secretariats in July 2001 for a two month public review period, and a final standard should be produced in late 2001.
Dr Reich concluded by outlining some of the uses and implementations of the OAIS Model, including the Networked European Deposit Library (NEDLIB), the National Library of Australia, the CEDARS project in the UK, the US National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC), the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and others.
Bruce Ambacher of NARA spoke on certification efforts based on the OAIS model.
The October 1999 Archival Workshop on Identification, Ingest and Certification (AWIICS) was particularly involved in the area of Certification.
The AWIICS Certification Working Group developed a preliminary checklist for certification that develops best practices and procedures for each aspect of the OAIS model, including legal issues, mission plans, compliance with relevant regulations, relationships with data providers, ingest procedures, data fidelity and life-cycle maintenance.
Further work on certification based on OAIS was now being proposed.
Robin Dale of RLG spoke on the RLG and OCLC report Attributes of a Trusted Digital Repository for Digital Materials.
She also emphasised the importance of certification as a key component of a trusted digital repository; self-assessment, she said, will not always be adequate.
There is a need, therefore, for certification practices to be formalized and made explicit.
The AWIICS draft report had suggested the need for an official certifying body, for identifying the attributes to be measured and to define the conditions of revocation of certification.
But many questions still remained to be answered, including, who will be on such a body, who will set up this body and which stakeholders will be represented on it.
The importance of collaboration was an important theme of the day, and David Ryan of the UK Public Record Office, as a founder member of the DPC, emphasised this point.
He outlined the PRO’s mandate to store and make available comprehensive ‘born digital’ public records and how its activities and future plans in this area were a core part of the PRO e-business strategy.
An important discussion followed in which the relative costs of printed and digital storage were discussed.
The duty of care and costs associated with traditional special collections and archives was cited.
With digital storage the costs of computer storage are diminishing constantly so costs would be related primarily to staff effort required for long-term preservation.
The degree of automation which could be implemented for future migrations and preservation efforts, would therefore be critical to relative and absolute costs over the long-term.
It was argued that issues such as appraisal and migration represented costs that were ongoing.
It would be easy to underestimate the costs of long-term digital preservation where it was dependent on human intervention and perhaps could not be scaled across collections.
In the second session of the day – on data curation and the Grid Professor Tony Hey, Director of the UK e-science programme, began by stating that e-science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.
He quoted John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils who said that ‘e-science will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken.’ NASA’s Information Power Grid has promoted a revolution in how NASA addresses large-scale science engineering problems by providing a persistent infrastructure for ‘highly capable’ computing and data management services.
The Grid, by providing pervasive, dependable and inexpensive access to advanced computational capabilities will provide the infrastructure for e-science, said Professor Hey.
The UK e-science initiative represents £120m worth of funding over the next three years to provide next generation IT infrastructure to support e-science and business, £75m of which is for Grid applications in all areas of science and engineering, £10m for the supercomputer and £35m for the Grid middleware.
It uses SuperJANET and all e-science centres will donate resources to form a UK National Grid.
Peter Dukes from the Medical Research Council outlined the overall scope of its programmes and its current work to develop a data archiving policy.
Outlining some of the access issues, such as rights and ownership, consent and ethics, Peter Dukes stressed that the research Grid would provide tremendous opportunities for advancing science.
However work on research data policies and practice was also needed to help unlock the potential of the Grid for collaborative scientific research.
The main challenges involved in scientific data curation are a rapidly increasing capability to generate data in many different formats in the physical and life sciences, the increasingly expensive facilities needed to generate this data, the irreplaceability of much of the data, and the increasing need for access to be on a global scale.
David Boyd of the CLRC e-science Centre looked at how the Grid can help address some of the challenges of curating scientific data.
Paul Jeffreys, Director of the Oxford e-Science Centre, spoke about the Oxford-wide collaboration that the centre is involved in, such as the work with the Oxford Digital Library, the Oxford Text Archive and Humbul.
Although, Dr Jeffreys said, global science is driving the initiative, the interest is much wider, and these areas of collaboration suggest that the centre will become a core part of the University’s life.
The key issue that came up in the second discussion session was the importance of data curation and the need to look at data policies, archival models, and how to incentivize the submission of primary research in digital form with appropriate metadata.
Ideas put forward included: financial incentives; increasing and enhancing recognition of the value of digital resources in general among the research and scholarly community; through to persuading funding councils, the RAE and publishers to take these matters more seriously and to build such considerations into their funding and reward processes.
In the final session of the day – on the curation of digital collections Maggie Jones and Derek Sergeant from the CEDARS project funded by JISC, spoke about some of the lessons of the project, including the centrality of metadata to the preservation of resources, and the increasing consensus that is emerging about standards.
At the moment the British Library’s digital collecting was on the basis of a voluntary deposit, along with purchases made by the BL, as well as created digital resources undertaken by the BL itself.
Among its main priorities, said Deborah Woodyard, Digital Preservation Coordinator at the British Library, was to ensure improved coverage of the UK’s National Published Archive, to increase the collection of digital materials and to continue to collaborate with other major players in the field.
Kevin Ashley of the University of London Computing Centre (ULCC) and the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) spoke about ULCC’s role under contract to the PRO and others for digital preservation and their practical experience of running a digital preservation service.
He spoke about the OAIS model; it advantages were clear, he said in that it eases procurement of hardware and software, and interworking with compliant systems, as well as migration tasks, but there are question marks about interworking with traditional repositories, as well as its working with mixed-mode models, questions which will need to be looked at closely in the future.
Discussion continued on the potential value and limitations of the OAIS model.
Its value in the early stages of system design and development was recognised but at the same time it would not provided he detailed implementations and practice.
Documenting and sharing practical experience in this area will be vital.
In summarising the lessons and next steps that came out of the day, David Giaretta (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory/BNSC and chair of CCSDS panel developing the OAIS model) noted the next international CCSDS meeting which would discuss OAIS and archive certification was being held in Toulouse in the following week.
He would report on the UK seminar and its discussion.
It was also important to continue co-ordination across sectors and the Digital Preservation Coalition could be immensely valuable in achieving this.
Neil Beagrie suggested that closer involvement between JISC and the research councils to support users of the Grid and primary research data would be important.
The creation of a JISC research committee chaired by Tony Hey could clearly have an important role in this area.
He hoped to see close links with e-science and a growing membership of the DPC amongst the research councils and data centres.
Tony Hey noted he was open to discussion of possible projects in data curation or indeed other areas raised during the seminar but it was important to note the need currently for industry involvement and funding in such proposals.
The seminar was felt by participants to have been a great success with outstanding speakers, leading-edge discussion of theory and practice, and to have established an essential cross-sectoral dialogue.
For those who wish to learn more about the seminar and presentations, a fuller meeting report and speakers presentations are now available on the JISC website at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation/digitalarchives.html.
Neil Beagrie and Philip Pothen Article Title: “Digital Curation: digital archives, libraries and e-science seminar” Author: Neil Beagrie and Philip Pothen Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/digital-curation/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from the Resource Discovery Network Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from the Resource Discovery Network Buzz url research Citation BibTex RIS Simon Jennings and Philip Pothen on the new RDN workbook and extensions to the RDN Virtual Training Suite.
New RDN workbook and training page The Resource Discovery Network (www.rdn.ac.uk) has launched a training page, including a new workbook designed to introduce students and staff to some of the services of the RDN.
The workbook contains practical tasks and exercises and can be used to support a hands-on workshop or can be used by individuals for self-paced learning.
It also contains quizzes, tips and hints, as well as scenarios designed to suggest ways in which the RDN can be used practically to support learning and teaching.
The workbook has already proved popular, with nearly four thousand downloads in two weeks and dozens of enquiries about institutional visits by the RDN to host workshops focussing on the workbook.
The training page contains links to training services at the RDN’s hubs, a Powerpoint presentation for use in institutions and downloads of flyers and posters.
The RDN provides access to high-quality Internet resources that have been selected and described by subject specialists.
See http://www.rdn.ac.uk/training/ for the RDN workbook and other training materials.
Extensions to the RDN Virtual Training Suite Four new Virtual Training Suite tutorials are being created and will be launched in June 2002.
They are in the following subject areas: Internet for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting; Internet Pharmacist; Internet for Allied Health; and Internet for European Studies In addition, the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol and Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC) are collaborating on a project to create eleven Web tutorials for the RDN Virtual Training Suite specifically targeted at students in further education (FE).
This project builds upon the success of the RDN Virtual Training Suite (www.vts.rdn.ac.uk), a JISC-funded project, which teaches Internet information skills for different academic subjects via a suite of “teach yourself” online tutorials, authored by subject specialists.
The Suite currently offers 40 tutorials: 11 went live in July 2000 and 29 more in May 2001.
While feedback from the FE sector suggests that the Virtual Training Suite is potentially a valuable tool for post-16 learners (particularly for those studying academic subjects), it is also clear that the current tutorials, devised for the higher education community, do not meet the needs of the FE students either in terms of subject coverage or format.
This new project will deliver eleven tutorials covering popular subjects in FE (such as Construction and Hairdressing and Beauty).
Following consultation with the FE community, the new tutorials have also been redesigned to better meet the needs and learning priorities of students in the sector.
In teaching students how to find information on the Internet and how to critically evaluate Web resources, these tutorials will help students develop their key skills in information technology.
Comprehensive teachers’ notes to support the use of the tutorial with in the classroom will accompany each tutorial.
The eleven tutorials will be available on the Web in June 2002.
Author Details   Philip Pothen Communications Manager Resource Discovery Network King’s College London Email: philip.pothen@kcl.ac.uk Web site: www.rdn.ac.uk   Simon Jennings Manager Resource Discovery Network King’s College London Email: simon.jennings@kcl.ac.uk Web site: www.rdn.ac.uk Article Title: “News from the Resource Discovery Network” Author: Simon Jennings and Philip Pothen Publication Date: 11-April-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 31 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/rdn/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Electronic Publication of Ancient Near Eastern Texts Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Electronic Publication of Ancient Near Eastern Texts Buzz data software framework html database dissemination xml infrastructure stylesheet archives standardisation accessibility tagging browser xsl copyright cataloguing sgml dtd ascii unicode interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Charles E. Jones and David Schloen report on a Chicago conference which explored XML tagging for Ancient Near Eastern Texts on the Web.
The civilizations of the ancient Near East produced the world's first written texts.
In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, recognizable texts begin to appear in the late fourth millennum B.C.
[1] A well developed system of numerical tabulation combined with a varied and sophisticated repertoire of sealings and seal impression is evident even earlier across a wide geographical range in Western Asia[2] and evidence from recent archaeological discoveries in Egypt promises to push the origins of writing even further into antiquity.
[3] For the first two millennia or so of the world's written record Near Eastern texts were written in one of several varieties of cuneiform, or in Egyptian hieroglyphs and its cursive variant known as hieratic.
[4] In the latter half of the second millennium B.C.
scripts with recognizably alphabetical characteristics begin to appear, and rapidly spread among the languages and dialects of the Eastern Mediterranean world, eventually spawning a host of descendents and borrowings across Asia, Africa and Europe.
[5] Writing more than a half-century ago, A. T. Olmstead began his monumental study of the the Old Persian period with the memorable statement: "When Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 B.C., the world was old.
More significant, the world knew its antiquity.
"[6] Ancient scholars and scribes collected and catologued historical and scientific records from their own immediate and distant pasts; they observed and organized natural phenomena; they abstracted medical, mathematical, astronomical and theological ideas; they sought to understand the world, and to preserve their understanding of it.
[7] On a more mundane level, ancient scribes recorded the commercial transactions on behalf of individuals, organizations, and political entities; they recorded contracts deeds and legal proceedings; they wrote notes and letters; and they doodled in the margins.
The roots of "Western" (not to say "modern") scholarship on the societies and cultures of the ancient Near East are ancient in themselves.
Among the most celebrated literary compositions of western civilization are the editions, translations and interpretations of, and the commentaries on, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek religious texts from the ancient Near East.
[8] The communities which produced the scholarship on religious texts, and the societies in which they lived and flourished, maintained the languages of the Bible as living entities.
A more ignominious fate befell the languages of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Texts of various sorts continued to be written in Akkadian and Egyptian into the first centuries of this era, but knowledge of them soon died out to the point where there was no longer even the recognition that the languages behind visible texts inscribed on the standing walls of ruined buildings were ancestral or cognate to living tongues, or that living tongues such as Coptic were related in any way to such ancient writings.
[9] Aside from occasional descriptions of monuments in early travellers' accounts, many of which connect the remains of ancient sites with descriptions in biblical and classical literature, and aside from the astonishing and fantastic speculations of scholars such as Athanasius Kircher,[10] almost nothing was learned of ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian societies until the eighteenth century.
The more careful observations and drawings made by such travellers as Carsten Niebuhr in Iran[11] and Robert Wood and James Dawkins in Syria,[12] eventually resulted in publications which were fundamental to the early decipherments of Palmyrene and Old Persian.
French and English colonial adventures in Egypt at the turn of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries resulted in the recovery of multilingual inscriptions notably the Rosetta Stone[13] leading directly to the decipherment of Egyptian.
English speaking scholars, working with the Niebuhr's drawings of biand trilingual cuneiform texts, as well as with the raft-loads of inscribed monuments and tablets appearing from the excavations of Botta at Khorsabad and Layard at Nineveh in Assyria,[14] and which they shipped back to the Museums in Paris and London, competed with one another for the honor of being called "the decipherer" of the languages of these inscriptions.
[15] Even before there was universal acceptance that both Egyptian and Akkadian had been deciphered there was a growing corpus of secondary literature including text publications, editions, commentaries, catalogues, dictionaries and so on.
From the start, hieroglyphs and cuneiform characters posed problems for the typographers charged with seeing manuscripts into print.
Already in the first generation there were reasonably successful attempts to build typefonts capable of representing a wide variety of cuneiform characters.
Such efforts were quickly followed by similar movements in Egyptological publication.
[16] A parallel trend continued and continuesin both Assyriological and Egyptological publishing the use of hand written text to reproduce individual characters normalized to standard forms,[17] as well as the hand drawn facsimiles or copies of texts themselves.
[18] There have never been universally accepted standards among either the Egyptological or the Assyriological communities on how to represent texts in transliteration or transcription.
Particular fields have developed individual styles as have "schools" of scholarship which, for reasons well-known in academe, tend also to fall into groups according to nationalist criteria or language of scholarship.
Until the 1960's scholarship on ancient Near Eastern texts was conducted with the long established tools of the trade: the eye, the pen and the index card.
Individual scholars, as well as collaborative projects, collected data with for the most part specific purposes in mind.
The Assyrian Dictionary of the University of Chicago, for example, had adopted and modified the procedures of the Oxford English Dictionary for the collection of lexical data to date they have collected nearly two million cards.
[19] Modifications of card-based systems, such as needle-sorted punch-cards, existed, but it was the development of electronic text processing which offered the first real promise as a tool to sort large amounts of data in complex ways.
Encouraged by the success and usefulness for ancient Near Eastern studies of such projects as the Tuckerman Tables,[20] scholars began to experiment with how computers could be harnessed to process textual data.
Many early projects were individualized and often conducted in relative isolation, but in 1965 Stanislav Segert and I. J. Gelb, working respectively on South Arabic and Amorite developed a mutually acceptable code for the representation of Semitic phonemes for use in text processing on an IBM mainframe.
[21] Other projects, like those of the Sumerologists Gene Gragg and Miguel Civil,[22] exploited the big mainframes to considerable advantage in the analysis of textual corpora.
Despite such use, computers remained a tool which was relatively invisible from the point of view of the published results of research.
Text had to be processed into one or another idiosyncratic machine-readable form for manipulation in the computer, and then re-rendered into forms acceptable to the reader's eye for publication.
However, with the development of the personal computer in the 1970's; its wholesale adoption by the scholarly community by the end of the 1980's; and the gradual and (nearly) universal network wiring which began in the 1990's, the division between text processing, tool development and publication became less and less evident.
The remarkable success of such largescale computerized text corpus projects as the State Archives of Assyria project in Helsinki,[23] and the increasing availability of inexpensive and highly effective off-the-shelf tools for desktop text processing, encouraged the development of multi-use filing systems and the incremental accumulation of "personal" text corpora by virtually every scholar.
It is issues surrounding the development of these resources, the long-sought-for standardization of encoding, and consequent ability to communicate and collaborate more effectively, which we hoped would be addressed in the Chicago Conference in early October 1999.
The Plan for the Conference In December 1998 we announced the conference with a call for papers.
We indicated that a primary focus of the conference would be on Web publication of "tagged" texts using the new Extensible Markup Language (XML).
XML provides a simple and extremely flexible standardized syntax for representing complex information and for delivering it over the World Wide Web.
Furthermore, it is based on a proven approach because it is a streamlined subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) that has been used for electronic publication worldwide for more than a decade.
XML therefore makes possible powerful and efficient forms of electronic publication via the Internet, including academic publication of philological and archaeological data.
With the technology and infrastructure in place, it is appropriate for ancient Near East specialists to begin considering what is involved in publishing their data on the Web in XML format.
XML itself is merely a starting point because the very simplicity and flexibility require the development of specific tagging schemes appropriate to each domain of research.
It was the intention of the organizers of the conference to bring together researchers who have begun working on electronic publication in various ways using such tools as SGML, HTML, and XML, or who are interested in exploring these techniques, and to foster collaboration in the development of specific XML/SGML tagging schemes, especially for cuneiform texts in which a number of the conference participants specialize.
In addition, it was our intention to inaugurate a formal working group on cuneiform markup to provide an ongoing forum for communication and collaboration in this field.
We stressed however, that the issues under discussion are not of interest only to cuneiformists presentations and discussion concerning other ancient Near Eastern scripts and languages were encouraged and explicitly solicited.
Similarly, we recognized the need to present "texts in context": as archaeological artifacts among other artifacts.
Archaeologists and philologists share the need for efficient and flexible electronic publication of complex data.
In many cases also they have overlapping interests in terms of substantive historical questions.
Indeed, it is likely that cooperation on the level of technical methodology in pursuit of effective electronic publication will have the beneficial effect of reducing the tendency toward balkanization among disciplines.
An ancillary goal of our conference, therefore, was to stimulate interest in interdisciplinary research projects that involve both archaeological and philological data.
By facilitating electronic access to philological data by archaeologists and vice versa, and by learning a common data representation technique such as XML, we can expect to generate new ways of representing or even conceiving of the conceptual relationships not just within but also between archaeological and philological datasets, which are so often considered in isolation.
The potential to store these different kinds of datasets and their interrelationships in a commonly accepted, rigorous, formal framework offers exciting prospects for subsequent linguistic, socioeconomic, and historical research.
We have no doubt that electronic publication will play an essential role in future research on the ancient Near East.
Philologists and archaeologists alike work with complex, highly structured datasets consisting of visual as well as textual information which call for "hyperlinks" among different kinds of data.
But devising suitable forms of electronic publication is not a trivial matter and can only be done on a collaborative basis.
Suitable electronic publications will represent in a standardized fashion the large number of internal and external cross-references among the many individual elements of each dataset and will capture the semantic diversity of the many possible types of such cross-references, representing, for example, various kinds of spatial, temporal, or linguistic relationship.
Furthermore, the goal of such publication is not simply to facilitate human navigation of large and complex bodies of information but also to permit automated computer-aided analyses of data derived from many disparate sources.
We believe that XML will be an important medium for this because Web publication using this format promises to be a simple and effective means of merging complex datasets from multiple sources for purposes of broader scale retrieval and analysis, avoiding the problems caused by the existing proprietary, limited, and inflexible data formats which have hindered electronic publication to date.
XML is a non-proprietary, cross-platform, and fully internationalized standard that has been enthusiastically embraced by the software industry in general.
For this reason our conference was announced as focussing specifically on the use of XML in the publication of ancient Near Eastern texts.
Goal of the Conference A major goal of our conference was to assess the prospects for establishing a formal international standards organization charged with setting technical standards for the interchange of Near Eastern data in digital form.
Both the conference and the establishment of such an organization are timely in light of the recent development of internet-oriented data standards and software that now provide a common ground for cooperation among diverse philological and archaeological projects, which have heretofore adopted quite idiosyncratic approaches.
This common ground, not just for academic research but in all areas of information exchange, is created by the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and a growing array of software tools that make use of XML to disseminate information on the Internet.
The XML Standard As we noted in our original announcement of the conference, XML is a nonproprietary "open" or public standardized data format which provides a simple and extremely flexible "tag"-based syntax for representing complex information as a stream of ASCII or Unicode text and delivering it over the World Wide Web.
Furthermore, it is based on a proven approach because it is a subset of the ISO-ratified Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which has been used for electronic publication worldwide for more than a decade.
XML therefore makes possible powerful and efficient forms of electronic publication via the Internet, including academic publication of philological and archaeological data.
But XML itself is merely a starting point, for its very simplicity and flexibility, which ensure its widespread adoption, require the development of specific XML tagging schemes or "markup languages" appropriate to each domain of research.
Such a tagging scheme expresses the abstract logical structure of a particular kind of data in a rigorous and consistent fashion.
Thus, for example, chemists have already created a "Chemical Markup Language" using XML to express the structure of molecules and chemical reactions, so that the data they work with can be easily shared and searched on the Web.
Likewise, NASA has created an "Astronomical Instrument Markup Language," biologists have created a "Biological Markup Language," and so on.
Once such tagging schemes exist, various kinds of software can then be developed to present different views of logically structured data for different purposes, or to create new sets of data structured in a particular way, with the assurance that these data structures can be created and viewed on any computer anywhere without special conversions or translations.
For general reference see Robin Cover's The SGML/XML Web Page http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/ Formation of a Working Group for Text Markup There was a consensus among the conference participants that XML should be used as the basis for future electronic publication of Near Eastern data.
The establishment of a formal working group for Near Eastern text markup was also strongly endorsed, as a vehicle for the collaborative development and dissemination of suitable XML tagging schemes and associated software.
Stephen Tinney of the University of Pennsylvania, the editor of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, who has substantial experience in electronic text processing and in the use of SGML and XML, in particular, was elected to be the chair of the working group.
The name and scope of the new standards organization remain to be decided.
A number of conference participants emphasized the importance of including Near Eastern languages and texts of all periods within the scope of the text markup group, rather than arbitrarily limiting it to ancient Near Eastern texts in general or cuneiform texts in particular, because comparable issues arise in dealing with non-European scripts and languages regardless of their date.
Similarly, several people expressed what seemed to be a generally held desire to find ways to include electronically published archaeological data within our standards-setting effort.
This would ensure maximum interoperability of textual and archaeological datasets, so that it would be easy to obtain information about the spatial provenience and the material-cultural context of excavated or monumentally inscribed texts, and conversely so that it would be easy to obtain philological information about texts viewed as artifacts from an archaeological perspective.
In the opinion of the conference organizing committee, therefore, a suitable name for the new standards organization would be "Organization for Markup of Near Eastern Information" (OMNEI).
This name emphasizes the central role of XML markup as well as the organization's potentially wide scope in terms of Near Eastern information of all kinds, including both primary data (philological, archaeological, and geographical) and relevant secondary literature.
Even restricting the scope to "Near Eastern" information is rather arbitrary from a technical standpoint, but this mirrors the scope of the existing academic infrastructure of Near and Middle Eastern departments, institutes, and centers to which members of this organization will in most cases already belong.
OMNEI would serve as an umbrella organization for various standards-setting efforts necessary for the interchange of Near Eastern information, beginning with a Working Group for Text Markup chaired by Stephen Tinney.
Eventually there could be a parallel Working Group for Archaeological Markup whose efforts would be integrated with those of the Text Markup group.
Note that OMNEI's mission is not just to devise XML tagging schemes but also to facilitate the development of well-documented Web browser-based software that could be widely shared among Near Eastern projects, and to coordinate training and professional development for researchers who want to learn how to use these tagging schemes and software.
Thus at some point it might also be desirable to create a formal Task Force for Training and Professional Development within the OMNEI organization.
In the aftermath of the conference, discussion is underway concerning these details, including the name and the precise scope and mode of operation of our new international organization, as well as a schedule of future meetings.
Decisions will be announced in the near future, but it is clear already that there is a widespread desire to make this organization as broadly based as possible so that it can facilitate the cooperative development of effective and widely accepted technical standards.
Judging by the success of the recent conference, it seems likely that many leading Near and Middle Eastern departments and institutes worldwide can be enlisted in support of this venture.
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago will continue to do everything possible to sponsor this effort and to support it with its reputation and resources, in collaboration with the University of Chicago's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World.
Topics Discussed What follows is a brief summary of the main points touched on in the formal presentations and in the open discussion sessions.
It is not an exhaustive account of everything that was said.
For further details on the formal presentations, in particular, please contact the presenters individually.
Following each section is a paragraph including links to on-line or other electronic publications pertinent to the issues discussed in the section.
Friday October 8th   Stephen Tinney of the University of Pennsylvania led off the Friday morning session with a presentation entitled "From Dictionary to Superdocument: XML, the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, and the Universe."
Tinney surveyed some of the basic concepts underlying XML and the "markup" approach to electronic text representation, and then he outlined his ideas concerning the implementation of a corpus-based lexicon such as the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary on the Internet using XML.
He pointed out that such a lexicon can and should transcend the limitations of existing printed dictionaries.
In particular, an electronic lexicon would not be a static entity but would be the dynamic product of three types of interlinked and constantly updated data, comprising primary text corpora, grammatical analyses, and secondary literature.
In other words, the same data would be reusable in different contexts, and many possible views of the data could be constructed for different users.
One such "view," of course, is a printed or printable version of the lexicon in the traditional format.
Tinney concluded his talk by presenting and commenting briefly on an XML "document type definition" (DTD) which defines a set of element (tag) types and their attributes by means of which a corpus-based lexicon, for any language, could be represented.The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu:80/psd/ The Index to Sumerian Secondary Literature http://ccat.sas.upenn .edu:80/psd/www/ISSL-form.html In the discussion that followed Tinney's presentation, and in other discussions throughout the conference, the concern was expressed that electronic publications of the type he and others envisage would be evanescent and might become inaccessible because of the notoriously rapid obsolescence of digital media, the instability of the Web addresses (URLs) for electronic publications, and the dependence of the scholarly community on a few technologically expert colleagues, such as Tinney, whose eventual departure or retirement might orphan their brainchildren.
Tinney and a number of other conference participants responded to these important concerns at various times during the conference by making the following points: Sustained institutional support of electronic publications is necessary, just as it is for printed publications; thus the publisher, be it a private company or a university institute, museum, or department, must take responsibility not only for peer review and editorial oversight, but also for preserving the accessibility of its publications by systematically migrating electronic files to new physical media and upgrading the necessary software and hardware as needed.
An institutionally supported and sponsored publication such as the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary cannot and would not be left to an individual scholar, whether it exists in printed or electronic form.
The basic assumption here, of course, is that the publicly available hardware and software infrastructure of the Internet and the World Wide Web is not going to disappear or regress, but will be maintained and developed indefinitely, just as the infrastructure for producing and disseminating printed publications has been maintained and developed over the centuries since Gutenberg.
Moreover, it is safe to assume that an increasing number of scholars will acquire the software and the relatively simple technical know-how required for them to produce and use XML-based electronic publications -especially if an organization exists to help them do this.
Governmental or quasi-governmental agencies (the Library of Congress?)
will eventually take responsibility for archiving and making permanently available many kinds of electronic publications, on the model of the government-funded Arts and Humanities Data Service established in the United Kingdom a few years ago, in part to meet this need.
University libraries may also have a part to play in this.
XML is a nonproprietary standard, like HTML (on which the Web is currently based), so it is not subject to the whims and fortunes of an individual software company such as Microsoft.
Furthermore, unlike proprietary database formats, XML is a text-based format (using the ASCII and Unicode international character encoding standards), which means that any computer anywhere can read and print XML datasets as plain text.
Indeed, for this reason it is "human-readable" on an immediate level in a way that other data-encoding formats are not.
The capability for permanent Web addresses ("permanent URLs") which can be reliably referenced over a long period has been or will be developed by Internet standards bodies, because everyone, not just the academic community, requires this feature.
In the meantime, physical distribution of electronic publications on optical disks can ensure accessibility.
The second presentation on Friday morning was by Stephan Seidlmayer of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, on the subject of the "The Ancient Egyptian Dictionary Project: Data Exchange and Publication on the Internet."
Seidlmayer described the history of the Ancient Egyptian Dictionary project and outlined the plan for taking it onto the Internet using XML.
The precomputer text corpus of the Ancient Egyptian Dictionary was stored on a large number of handwritten index cards, produced from the 1920s to the 1960s, as was typical of dictionary projects of this kind.
This information was used to produce the twelve-volume Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, which is now out-of-date and in need of revision.
Much of the original material has been digitized and updated, and the current text corpus of the Ancient Egyptian Dictionary project is stored in a DB2 relational database with local client-server access.
Once a suitable XML markup scheme has been developed, this information will be converted to XML format and made available on the Internet, to facilitate international cooperation in this dictionary project.Altägyptisches Wörterbuch http://www.bbaw.de/vh/aegypt/inde x.html Das digitalisierte Zettelarchiv des Wörterbuchs der ägyptischen Sprache http://aaew.bbaw.de:88/dzaInfo/dzaInfo.html   The third session on Friday morning was an open discussion "The Current State of Electronic Publication: Problems and Possibilities," moderated by Charles E. Jones and John Sanders of the Oriental Institute.
Participants engaged in lively and interesting duscussion of issues relating to the on-line publication of text.
Caution and concern was raised about copyright and intellectual property right issues.
Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox from Perseus and Mark Olsen from ARTFL shared their own experiences with the use of text over which individuals or organizations claim ownership.
It was evident that the law governing the re-use of text is both unclear and incompletely understood by the participants.
There was a general sense that openness and collaboration were to be encouraged, and indeed are essential, if large scale projects are to be successful.
Differences between commercial and non-commercial models of publication and long term institutional support whether from commercial publishers or from universities or other non-commercial institutions seemed to present a source of anxiety for participants, particularly as they have an impact on the long-term accessibility of on-line electronic publications.
In the first session on Friday afternoon, Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox of the Perseus Project, based at Tufts University, spoke about "Creating, Integrating, and Expanding Electronic Texts in the Perseus Digital Library."
The conference participants, almost all of whom work with ancient Near Eastern texts, found it very useful to learn more about this relatively large and well-established project that deals with Greek and Latin texts and their cultural and geographical context.
Rydberg-Cox described how the Perseus team currently operates in terms of both tagging procedures and software development, and the kinds of lexical and morphological searching Perseus makes possible via a simple Web browser interface.Perseus Project http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ Perseus Searching Tools http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/s earches.html Teaching with Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/T eaching.html The next presentation was entitled "XML and Digital Imaging Considerations for an Interactive Cuneiform Sign Database."
It was given in three parts by Theodoros Arvanitis and Sandra Woolley of the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham in Britain, and by Tom Davis, a forensic handwriting specialist in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham.
Dr. Arvanitis read an introductory statement by Alasdair Livingstone, the Assyriological member of this project, who unfortunately could not be present.
The Birmingham team described the objectives of their collaborative project, the results of the first year's work, and their plans for future work.
A major goal of their project is to experiment with various digital image representations of cuneiform signs in order to determine which techniques for image capture, formatting, and compression are most effective for disseminating detailed facsimiles of cuneiform texts on the Web for research purposes.
Another aspect of their research involves the automated analysis and categorization of cuneiform signs and scripts.
The Birmingham team has also kindly offered to host a future meeting of the new working group on Near Eastern text markup.Cuneiform Database Project, University of Birmingham http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/cuneiform/ XML and Digital Imaging Considerations for an Interactive Cuneiform Sign Database A Powerpoint Presentation http://www.eee.b ham.ac.uk/cuneiform/cuneiform_chicago.ppt The final session on Friday afternoon was devoted to an open discussion of "Editing, Disseminating, and Preserving Electronic Publications," moderated by Charles Jones and John Sanders of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, with panelists Patrick Durusau of Scholars Press, James Eisenbraun of Eisenbrauns Inc., and Thomas Urban of the Oriental Institute Publications Office.
The necessity of careful editorial oversight of electronic publications was emphasized by several participants, in light of the ease of "self-publication" on the Internet.
On the other hand, it was recognized that the electronic medium makes possible a variety of types of publications of varying degrees of formality and completeness, ranging from the equivalent of "privately circulated" manuscripts, by means of which a group of colleagues informally shares ideas and data, to official institutional publications corresponding to printed monographs in peer-reviewed series or journals.
Several participants stressed the important role even of lightly edited individual publications on the Web, which need not be regarded as the author's final word, and to which electronic access might be restricted to those who understand their limitations and can make best use of them.
The line between what is "published" versus "unpublished" is now somewhat blurred because all types of Web publications are equally accessible from a technical standpoint.Another point made during this discussion had to do with the role of publishers, which might seem to be threatened in the era of electronic publication.
Jim Eisenbraun pointed out that printing, binding, and distributing printed books is not the major expense in publishing, in any case.
The major expense is incurred at the editorial stage, and the traditional role of publishers in this and the associated expenses will not be diminished, regardless of the medium of distribution.
The financial basis for Web-based electronic publication will be some kind of subscription system, however, rather than the purchase of physical media.
Recapitulating a point made in the morning discussion session, Patrick Durusau make an explicit call for open source development of resources and tools.
The Oriental Institute Web site http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ default.html Scholars Press http://scholarspress.org/ Eisenbrauns http://www.eisenbrauns.com/ Oriental Institute Publications http://www-oi.uc hicago.edu/OI/DEPT/PUB/Publications.html On Friday evening there were three presentations.
The first was a presentation of "The Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions Project" by Gene Gragg and Matthew Stolper of the University of Chicago.
Stolper gave a brief overview of the background and goals of the project, and Gragg described the project's existing encoding scheme and his plans to convert this to XML.
Gragg demonstrated the use of the XML-oriented Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) in Internet Explorer to generate various views of XMLencoded texts within a Web browser application.Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions Project http://www-oi.uchicago.ed u/OI/PROJ/ARI/ARI.html The Afroasiatic Index Project http://www-oi.uchicag o.edu/OI/PROJ/CUS/AAindex.html The second evening presentation was by Hans van den Berg of the Center for Computer-aided Egyptological Research at Utrecht University.
In a talk entitled "Egyptian Hieroglyphic Text Processing, XML, and the New Millennium," van den Berg noted the substantial progress that has been made in Egyptology in developing standardized character encodings of hieroglyphic signs, to the point where there is now a proposal before the Unicode consortium for a 16-bit character encoding system that covers most of the known signs.
The need for XML arises when representing the palaeographic characteristics of hieroglyphic texts, in terms of both character anomalies and specific positional information (i.e., the juxtaposition or superposition of individual signs).
Van den Berg presented a set of XML tags that can represent such palaeographic characteristics.Centre for Computer-aided Egyptological Research (CCER) http://www.ccer.ggl.ruu.nl/ccer /ccer.html The last presentation of the evening was by Mark Olsen, Assistant Director of the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) of the University of Chicago.
Olsen's title was "Using Encoded Texts at ARTFL: The Case for Simplicity."
He argued that tagging schemes should be kept as simple as possible, drawing on the experience of the ARTFL project and the negative example of the Text Encoding Initiative, which has developed overly elaborate tagsets that are difficult to support.
The main problems with a complex tagset involve the expense of developing software to support such a tagset and the need to spend extra time and effort training data entry staff to use it.
In the discussion that followed Olsen's presentation there was general agreement that the complexity of tagging schemes should be kept to a minimum.
Elsewhere during the conference, however, a distinction was made between the number of distinct element types (tags) used to mark up a text and the degree (or "granularity") of the tagging, because the software and procedures for dealing with an intensively marked up text are no different than those for a lightly tagged text, if the same simple set of tags is used in each case.
What is at issue is the appropriate degree of logical abstraction for a tagging scheme which is to faithfully describe the data and maximize its reusability in different contexts.Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language, University of Chicago (ARTFL) http://humanities.uchicag o.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html ARTFL Experiments and Development Projects Page http://tuna.uchicag o.edu/homes/ARTFL.experiments.html Saturday October 9th   The first presentation on Saturday morning was given by Jeremy Black and Eleanor Robson of the University of Oxford.
They discussed "The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature," a Web-based project whose aim is to make accessible to a wide variety of readers, specialists and laypeople alike, hundreds of Sumerian literary works.
Black presented the philological and pedagogical rationale for the project, while Robson discussed its operating procedure.
This procedure involves the use of SGML tags and a simple wordprocessing macro interface for the entry and markup of transliterated texts by Sumerologists, and hence a minimum of custom software development.
Robson showed the project's Web browser interface via an online Internet connection, emphasizing the project's use of basic HTML generated from the underlying SGML version of the texts.
Because the intended audience goes beyond scholars at major research universities, users of the electronic Sumerian text corpus should not and do not need the latest version of Web browser software running on the fastest computers with high-speed Internet connections in order to use the texts effectively.The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/ The ETCSL docum ent type definition for composite texts http://www-etcsl.o rient.ox.ac.uk/technical/compdtd.htm The ETCSL document type definition for English prose translations http://www-etcsl.
orient.ox.ac.uk/technical/transdtd.htm The ETCSL document type definition for bibliographies http://www-etcsl .orient.ox.ac.uk/technical/bibliodtd.htm SGML Declaration for all ETCSL SGML files http://www-etcsl.
orient.ox.ac.uk/technical/sgmldecl.htm The next presentation was by Miguel Civil of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who drew on his decades-long experience in cuneiform text encoding to comment on the history of efforts in this area.
Civil gave an overview of his own approach and the software he has developed to integrate text corpora with grammatical and lexical information.
During the course of the conference a number of participants congratulated Civil for his influential pioneering work and for his generosity in supplying otherwise unavailable editions of texts in digital form to a wide variety of colleagues.Sumerian Lexical Archive (SLA) http://www-oi.uchica go.edu/OI/PROJ/SUM/SLA/SLA1.html The Saturday morning session ended with an open discussion of "Standards for Text Encoding and Markup," moderated by Gene Gragg and Steve Tinney.
This discussion continued after lunch, after Gene Gragg, the Director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, had made a formal proposal to create a "working group on cuneiform markup" chaired by Stephen Tinney.
There was strong support of this proposal, with considerable discussion concerning the scope and thus the name of the proposed standards group, as we have already mentioned.
David Schloen, an archaeologist in the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, gave the final formal presentation on Saturday afternoon, entitled "Texts and Context: Using XML to Integrate and Retrieve Archaeological Data on the Web."
Schloen noted that XML is as suitable for representing archaeological databases as it is for representing ancient texts.
But whether the information is expressed in XML or in some other data format (e.g., a relational database), archaeologists need an appropriate data model that captures in a rigorous and consistent fashion the idiosyncrasies of units of archaeological observation, as well as the spatial and temporal interrelationships among them.
Schloen proposes a hierarchical, "item-based" data model, rather than the "class-based" (tabular) data model which currently prevails.
The item-based data model has the advantage of being straightforwardly represented in XML as a nested hierarchy of tagged elements with their attributes.
Moreover, texts can be treated like any other type of artifact, as items in a spatial hierarchy with their own properties.
Schloen concluded by presenting an XML tagging scheme dubbed ArchaeoML ("Archaeological Markup Language") which can represent any kind of archaeological data on any spatial scale, including the vector map shapes and raster images which belong to individual archaeological items.In the discussion that followed, the question arose of the precise relationship between electronically represented texts and archaeological data disseminated on the Web using XML.
Schloen's response was that the physical characteristics and archaeological context of a text would be represented as for any other artifact, but the XML "item" element representing a given text as an archaeological item would have a link to another Web location containing the contents of the text from a philological perspective.
The same kind of link would operate from the other direction, so that each XML "text" element in an electronically represented corpus of texts would be able to retrieve its geographical location and archaeological context from an archaeological dataset.
The conference ended with a final open discussion entitled "What's It Good For?
Uses of Electronically Published Texts," moderated by Matthew Stolper of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute.
Stolper commented on the impact electronic publication has had and will have in his own research.
During this discussion several previously discussed issues were revisited, including the need to welcome a wide variety of different types of electronic publication intended for different purposes, ranging from the relatively simple sharing of transliterated texts to comprehensive and authoritative critical editions.
This should not cause problems as long as the user is made aware of the author's intention, recognizing that it is preferable whenever possible to deploy the full panoply of peer review, copy-editing, and "official" dissemination under a reputable institution's imprimatur.Abzu: Guide to Resources for the Study of the Ancient Near East Available on the Internet http://www-oi.uchica go.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/ABZU.HTML The program of the conference is also availableClick here for a pdf file References Excellent recent surveys of the development of writing appear in the appropriate chapters of J. T. Hooker (editor) Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet, London: The British Museum, 1995, and in Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (Editors) The World's Writing Systems, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
[Return to text] The corpus of such counters and tokens is collected and analysed in detail in the two volumes of Denise Schmandt-Besserat's Before Writing, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992 significant and important commentary on the corpus appeared in subsequent literature.
[Return to text] Widspread press coverage during 1999 accompanied the appearance of the formal publication of some of this material in Günter Dreyer's Umm El-Qaab I: Das prädynastische Königsgrab U-j und seine frühen Schriftzeugnisse, Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1999; c1998.
(Deutsches Archäologisches Institute Abteilung Kairo: Archäologische Veröffentlichungen; v. 86).
[Return to text] Standard inventories of the character set used for dialects of Akkadian number about six hundred cuneiform signs René: Labat (with Florence Malbran-Labat) Manuel d'Épigraphie Akkadienne (Signes, Syllabaire, Idéogrammes), Paris; Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1988 (Sixth edition).
For Egyptian, calculations of the inventory range depending on how one interprets variants of sign forms from several hundred as in the basic sign list in Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, Oxford: Griffith Institute, 1957 (third edition), to several thousand, as in Nicolas Grimal's (and colleagues) Hieroglyphica, Utrecht: Center for Cpomputer-aided Egyptological Research, 1993 (Publications Interuniversitaires de Recherches Égyptologiques Informatisées; v. 1).
[Return to text] See again The World's Writing Systems cited in note 1 above.
[Return to text] A. T. Olmstead History of the Persian Empire, Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 1948, page 1.
[Return to text] Modern literature on ancient scholarship is vast and rapidly increasing.
Particularly interesting are the products of the State Archives of Assyria, for instance Simo Parpola's volume Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1993.
(State Archives of Assyria, v. 10).
Notable also is the recent publication of the Babylonian astronomical diaries by A. J. Sachs and Hermann Hunger Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia, Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988-1996, which presents a quite astounding corpus of scholarly observation spanning nearly six hundred years of history.
[Return to text] The Jewish, and Christian bibles and the scholarly literatures from which they are inseparable are fundamentally important to virtually all early western scholarship.
Emanuel Tov's Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992 presents the scope of discussion for this corpus in a single volume.
Also worthy of note is Ernst Würthwein's The Text of the Old Testament, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995 (Translated from the fifth German edition by Erroll F. Rhodes).
[Return to text] A series of essays at the beginning and end of Jack Sasson's monumental four volume Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1995, give an elegant overview of the legacy of "The Ancient Near East in Western Thought" (Volume I, Part 1) and the recovery of antiquity in the last two centuries: "Retrospective Essays" (Volume IV, Part 11).
[Return to text] An assessment of Kircher's Egyptology is found in Enrichetta Leospo's article "Atanasio Kircher e l'Egitto: Il formarsi di una collezione egizia nel Museo del Collegio Romano" in Morigi Govi, Cristiana; Curto, Silvio; Pernigotti, Sergio, Editors, L'Egitto fuori dell'Egitto: Dalla riscoperta all'Egittologia, Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1991, pages 269-281 [Return to text] A wonderful account of Carsten Niebuhr's extraordinary expedition of the 1760's to South Arabia and Iran appears in Thorkild Hansen's Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767, New York: Harper and Row, 1964.
[Return to text] See Peter T. Daniels article "The Decipherment of Ancient Near Eastern Scripts" in the first volume of Sasson's Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, (see note [9] above).
[Return to text] This year marks the bicentennial of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
To commemorate that event the British Museum has mounted an expedition Cracking the Codes, with an excellent catalogue by Richard Parkinson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment.
London: The British Museum, 1999.
[Return to text] For the former see the essays in Elisabeth Fontan (editor), De Khorsabad à Paris: La Découverte des Assyriens, Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994; and for both, Mogens Trolle Larsen's The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land 1840-1860, London: Routledge, 1994.
[Return to text] Edward Hincks emerges as a fundamental force in decipherment history.
See, for instance the essays collected by Kevin J. Cathcart in The Edward Hincks Bicentenary Lectures, (Dublin: Department of Near Eastern Languages, University College Dublin, 1994).
[Return to text] The the best of my knowledge there has not yet been a study of Assyriological or Egyptological typography, though it is of considerable interest for the history of both fields.
A set of type which was apparently quite flexible in its customizability was used for the publication of such fundamental works as Robert Francis Harper's seminal fourteen volume Assyrian and Babylonian Letters Belonging to the K. Collection of the British Museum, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1892-1914.
The Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale began to use a font of movable hieroglyphic type early in the century: Émile Chassinat published the first catalogue of the type available from them in the Catalogue des signes hiéroglyphiques de l'imprimerie de l'Institut français du Caire, [with supplement issues in 1930 and a complete reprinting as recently as 1983].
Not long after that, Alan Gardiner published his Catalogue of the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Printing Type..., Oxford and Chicago: Oxford University Press and The University of Chicago Press, 1929, which was designed for the production of his then forthcoming Egyptian Grammar, which in its third edition (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 1957) remains in print to this day.
[Return to text] With the exception of a few introductory pages, every word of Adolf Erman and Herman Grapow's essential Wörterbuch der Aegyptische Sprache, (Leipzig; J. C. Hinrisch'sche Buchhandlung, 1925, etc.)
was hand written, as was each volume of Anton Deimel's Sumerisches Lexikon, (Rome: biblical Institute Press, 1928, etc.).
Such practice was not unusual into the 1960's see for example volume 8 of Benno Landsberger's Materialien zum Sumerischen Lexikon, Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1962, and others.
[Return to text] Hand drawn facsimiles of ancient texts remain, along with photographs, the primary form of interpretive presentation of both cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts.
Styles of copying vary widely among fields and sub-fields of ancient Near Eastern philology, but copies are seldom absent from text publications, and if they are the authors are generally called to task for the omission in reviews.
[Return to text] A droll (if not particularly scholarly) account of a number of lexicographical projects including the Chicago dictionaries appears in Israel Shenker's Harmless Drudges : Wizards of Language--Ancient, Medieval and Modern, (Bronxville: Barnhart Books, 1979).
[Return to text] Bryant Tuckerman Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions 601 B.C.
to A.D. 1 at Five-Day and Ten-Day Intervals, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1962), and Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions A.D. 2 to A.D. 1649 at Five-Day and Ten-Day Intervals, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1964) [Return to text] Some of the history of this collaboration is outlined in the introduction to the final report of Gelb's project Computer-Aided Study of Amorite, (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1980).
[Return to text] Gragg made use of Civil's unpublished editions of Sumerian literary compositions typed onto punch-cards and processed in the mainframe in the preparation of his Sumerian Dimensional Infixes, (Kevelaer and Neukirchen-Vluyn: Verlag Butzon und Bercker and Neukirchener Verlag, 1973.
For the later work of both, see below.
[Return to text] The State Archives of Assyria project http://www.helsinki.fi/scienc e/saa/cna.html has published more than a score of volumes to date, and has revolutionized the field of Assyrian Studies because of the size and quality of the corpus it has collected, and because of the generosity of its staff.
[Return to text] The Oriental Institute http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ default.html The Franke Institute for the Humanities http://humanities.uch icago.edu/institute/index.html [Return to text] Author Details Charles E. Jones Research Associate and Archivist Bibliographer The Oriental Institute University of Chicago 1155 E. 58th St. Chicago IL 60637-1569 USA Voice (773) 702-9537 Fax (773) 702-9853 Email: cejo@midway.uchicago.edu David Schloen Assistant Professor The Oriental Institute and The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations University of Chicago 1155 E. 58th St. Chicago IL 60637-1569 USA Voice (773) 702-1382 Fax (773) 702-9853 Email: d-schloen@uchicago.edu Article Title: "Electronic Publication of Ancient Near Eastern Texts" Author: Charles E. Jones and David Schloen Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999  Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/epanet/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: A Standards-Based Culture for Web Site Development Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: A Standards-Based Culture for Web Site Development Buzz software java javascript html xml xhtml preservation graphics multimedia rtf url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly outlines strategies for choosing appropriate standards for building Web sites.
In Ariadne issue 33 the Web Focus column encouraged Web developers to "get serious about HTML standards" [1].
The article advocated use of XHTML and highlighted reasons why this was an important standard for Web developers.
XHTML is just one of the standards which has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
W3C has also developed several standards for XML as well as standards in the area of hyperlinking, multimedia and graphics.
The W3C are not the only body which is responsible for the development of open standards of relevance to Web developers: the IETF [2], for example, is responsible for the development of underlying Internet standards, ECMA [3] for the client-side scripting language JavaScript (or ECMA script, as it is formally known) and ISO [4] in a range of other areas such as language codes, character encodings, etc.
However although an approach to Web development based on open standards may seem appealing, in practice there will be occasions when use of proprietary solutions may be needed (for example, there may be areas in which open standards are not available or are not sufficiently mature for deployment in a service environment).
An awareness that Web developers may be faced with a choice leads to the need for that choice to be an informed one.
This article aims to advise Web developers on several factors to consider when choosing formats for use when developing Web sites.
What Are Open Standards?
The term "open standards" has been used without defining what this term means.
It can mean: Standard ratified by recognised standards body An open standards-making process Documentation is freely available on the Web Use of the standard is uninhibited by licensing or patenting issues Note that not all open standards bodies will comply with all of these features.
The standards-making process within the W3C, for example, is initially restricted to organisations which are members of the W3C and a small number of invited experts.
Alternatives To Open Standards There are a number of formats which are widely used by the Web community but are not open standards in the sense used above.
The term "proprietary" is normally used to refer to formats which are owned by a company.
However, to confuse matters, companies sometimes use the term "industry standard" or "de facto" standards to refer to proprietary formats.
In addition to the use of confusing terminology, some proprietary formats may be more open than others.
For example, proprietary formats may have a community development process, which allows users of the format to have some level of input into developments of the format, or the specification may be published openly.
A Strategy For Choice Ownership of format is not the only factor.
There is also a need to consider issues such as cost, resource implications and the appropriateness of the format; and the need for a risk assessment of the dangers of adopting an inappropriate standard.
You should remember that even choosing an open standard is not without its dangers readers over the age of 35 involved in IT in the UK university sector may remember Coloured Book networking protocols (which were promoted as the path to the ISO-standard OSI (Open System Interconnection) networking protocols, but were eventually discarded in favour of Internet protocols).
Rather than mandating a particular approach, the alternative is to provide a multi-dimensional pattern of relevant factors and leave it to Web developers to choose the appropriate approach for their particular project.
The following factors need to be considered and the degree to which they apply to a project.
Ownership of Standard Is the standard: Owned by an acknowledged open standards body Owned by a neutral body, but not (yet) formally adopted as an open standard (e.g.
Dublin Core) Owned by a company (i.e.
a proprietary standard) Openness of Proprietary Format If the standard is proprietary is it a proprietary standard for which: There is an open development process (e.g.
Sun's Java) The specification is published openly (e.g.
Microsoft's RTF) The specification has been published by third parties reverse-engineering the specification (e.g.
Microsoft's Word) The specification has not been published Availability of Viewers Are viewers for the format: Available free of charge?
Available on multiple platforms?
Available as open source?
Availability of Authoring Tools Are authoring tools for the format: Available free of charge?
Available on multiple platforms?
Available as open source?
Functionality Does the standard provide: Rich functionality Basic functionality User Requirements Does the standard: Largely provide the functionality required by end users of the service?
Adequately provide the functionality required by end users of the service?
Insufficiently provide the functionality required by end users of the service?
Largely fail to provide the functionality required by end users of the service?
Fitness for Purpose Is the standard: Ideal for the purpose envisaged?
Appropriate for the purpose envisaged?
Not particularly appropriate for the purpose envisaged?
Resource Implications Will use of the standard: Have significant staffing implications for development and maintainenance?
Have relatively few staffing implications for development and maintainenance?
Have significant financial implications for development and maintainenance?
Have relatively few financial implications for development and maintainenance?
Preservation Is the format: Ideal for preservation?
Appropriate for preservation?
Inappropriate for preservation?
Migration If it becomes necessary to migrate to an alternative format will it be: Easy to migrate to alternative formats?
Difficult to migrate to alternative formats?
Cultural Factors As well as the various technical issues addressed above, there is also a need to consider the organisational culture of the developers.
For example, is the organisation keen to make use of innovative developments or does it prefer to make use of mature solutions; is the use of open source software prevalent in the organisation; etc.
Conclusions This article has sought to address some of the difficulties likely to be confronted when choosing standards for use in the development a Web site.
You may find it useful to make use of the list of factors given above as part of an overall strategy for the development of a Web site.
Either way, there is little doubt that time devoted to such strategy formulation pays dividends in the long run.
References Let's Get Serious About HTML Standards, Ariadne issue 33, Sept 2002 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-focus/ The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) http://www.ietf.org/ ECMA http://www.ecma-international.org/ ISO http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/ISOOnline.frontpage Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "Web Focus: A Standards-Based Culture For Web Site Development" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/web-focus/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where Are We Now?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where Are We Now?
Buzz data mobile software framework database portal archives safari identifier copyright cataloguing passwords aggregation adobe e-learning ebook mp3 marc21 drm cd-rom authentication e-government url standards Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod brings us up to date on developments in ebooks.
“I suspect that more words are being published about the ebook phenomenon in print than have actually been placed into ebooks so far.” [1] Clifford Lynch made this observation back in June 2001 in his seminal paper The Battle to define the future of the book in the digital world.
At the end of 2003 Lynch’s words still strike a chord here in the UK, as conferences, articles and workshops on the ebook ‘phenomenon’ continue to feature on a regular basis.
In Ariadne alone three articles on ebooks have been published within the space of seven issues [2].
Even the broadsheet newspapers occasionally get excited about ebooks; Simon Midgley, writing in the Guardian newspaper, asks whether ‘hard-up’ students will need to buy textbooks in the future as lecturers are now able to ‘slice and dice’ electronic material to meet student need [3].
Predicting the demise of the printed book may be one way of ensuring your article is read, but a balance is struck with this quotation from Rod Bristow, president of Pearson Education UK: I think you will see a multiplicity of media in future, rather than one medium replacing another.
If you look at the history of media in general, when a new medium comes along, it does not usually replace an earlier one; it just adds to it.
When a new medium comes along it adds to the choices available rather than substituting one for another.
Print and electronic resources satisfy different information needs and contexts; printed copies of papers and books are useful on long journeys by train or air, and busy managers, who often spend limited time in front of a computer, favour the ‘executive summary’ printed on two sides of A4 paper.
Electronic resources, from portals to electronic versions of magazines and books, offer convenience and flexibility instant information delivered at the point of need.
Disability legislation has also had an impact on the presentation of information.
Organisations are now obliged by law to offer leaflets, brochures and instructions in a range of alternative formats, including large print, audio and Braille.
The fact that large sections of the population are unable to read small print, which is often printed on white glossy paper, has at last been acknowledged.
Ebooks represent a logical step on the timeline of publishing and the evolution of digital collections.
Like all Internet-based resources, ebooks break down geographic barriers.
They also offer many of the features associated with Web resources e.g.
embedded hyperlinks, bookmarks, annotation, text searching etc.
If a digital library is defined as “an electronic extension of functions users typically perform and the resources they access in a traditional library” [4], then ebooks are a natural addition to digital collections.
However, in a library context, if the cost of ebook collections is to be justified, titles must be fully integrated into existing electronic collections.
Ebooks should blend in with existing digital collections, so that the reader is aware, when browsing the library Web site or online catalogue, that some books are available online, and they need to be made aware of when and why an ebook might be more appropriate than a printed text.
If they are seeking information then an electronic copy of a reference text may be preferable to the tome located on a shelf at library X two and a half miles away.
Searching for bite-sized pieces of information and general browsing are activities which are ideally suited to the online environment.
This partly explains why higher education institutions are increasingly subscribing to ebooks, whilst public libraries have adopted a wait-and-see approach.
As a public library user I might find an online travel guide useful when contemplating a holiday, but would I want to read War and Peace on a PC screen or on a handheld device?
Traditional books are published, printed and sold as separate physical entities, whilst ebooks exist as electronic copies of printed texts sited on a central server.
This is why only authorised users can access library ebook collections, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems have been developed using encryption to control access to ebooks.
Ebooks are protected from unlawful use (downloading, copying, distributing to others etc.)
after they have been created.
The only ebooks which are available for free are out of copyright titles, usually classics, which have then been digitised and made available on the Internet.
Project Gutenburg [5] and the Free ebooks portal in Australia [6] are examples of free ebook collections, and libraries can add value to their electronic collections by adding a link to these sites on their web pages.
Recent Developments in Ebooks Some key developments occurred in the UK in the latter half of 2002 and throughout 2003 which I feel warrant closer inspection.
They include: a project, jointly managed by Co-East (a library consortium in the East of England) and Loughborough University [7], received funding from the Laser Foundation [8] to evaluate usage models for ebooks in Essex public libraries the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames launched a new ebook service in Borough libraries in March 2003.
[9] The service consists of ebooks from : Safari Technical Books [10] and netLibrary [11], plus digital audio books from Audible.com [12] a netLibrary User Group (Europe and Southern Africa) was established by OCLC PICA (Birmingham, UK) in September 2002.
The group has a committee, an email discussion list and a website [13]; the main library sectors are represented.
netLibrary users now have a direct link to netLibrary staff, and are able to influence service development.
Members also have a forum in which to share experiences and expertise netLibrary is currently the main supplier of ebooks to UK academic libraries.
The total number of titles on netLibrary’s database was estimated to be 51,836 in April 2003.
In July, netLibrary announced that around 1,000 new titles a month are being added to the database [14] digital audio books form part of ebook services in some public libraries.
Audio books can be downloaded onto MP3 players and loaned to readers; disabled people in particular are likely to benefit from e-audio services Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are being piloted as a platform for delivering ebooks and e-audio to public library users in several public libraries Library consortia can cut costs and share responsibility for collection development by taking out joint subscriptions to ebook collections.
Partnerships between libraries in different regions are also possible, as geographical location is irrelevant for ebook collections.
For example, the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames library service and Blackburn with Darwen Borough libraries have a joint subscription for e-audio content Overdrive is a US ebook supplier [15] offering popular fiction titles and other electronic content to public libraries.
Negotiations are in progress to trial the service in two UK library authorities In March 2002 Resource commissioned a survey into ebook provision in public libraries across the UK which was carried out by Loughborough University [16].
116 library authorities responded, of which 13 (11%) claimed to provide ebooks in their libraries.
All bar one authority defined ebooks as books on CD-ROM; only Blackburn with Darwen offered ebooks preloaded onto Rocket ebook reading devices for loan to readers.
This report supports hearsay evidence that the majority of public libraries have not acquired ebooks, but it also reveals confusion amongst staff as to what an ebook is This article will summarise these developments, and provide a snapshot of ebook activity during the period September 2002 to September 2003.
Ebook technology: a brief update Early ebook reading devices A few year ago the focus seemed to be on the technology, rather than the electronic content, and ‘ebook’ came to be associated with the new dedicated reading devices which had just come onto the market e.g.
the Rocket ebook [17].
The original Rocket ebook was heavier than a standard paperback, although similar in size and shape.
It claimed to be portable, but was difficult to hold for any length of time, making it cumbersome for people with dexterity problems or certain physical disabilities.
Two models eventually replaced the Rocket, the GEB 1150 and the GEB 2150 when Gemstar acquired the business.
The 1150 is the size of a paperback book (with a 5.5 inch diagonal black and white screen), whilst the 2150 is similar to a hardback in size (with a 8.2inch diagonal colour touchscreen) they were therefore marketed as ‘books’ rather than devices on which to read books in electronic form.
Figure 1: The GEB1150 successor to the Rocket ebook from Gemstar The GEB devices are no longer available as Gemstar has withdrawn from the ebooks market completely, stating that they were unable to “obtain the size and revenue necessary to support the current ebook operations in today’s difficult business climate” [18].
The company has, however, agreed to ‘honor the warranty’ offered on the devices sold through SkyMall its online ebook store.
In the period 2000-2001 Market Harborough Public Library piloted the Rocket ebook as part of a longitudinal study undertaken by Loughborough University [19].
Blackburn with Darwen Borough Libraries [20] were also pioneers in the use of these early ebook reading devices, but they also experimented with MP3 players loaded with audio files.
Blackburn have recently acquired national funding to develop their ebook/e-audio service and have purchased 40 Compaq iPAQ PDAs to trial with users.
They are also negotiating with the US ebook supplier, Overdrive, to supply a full online Web-based service and e-audio.
The Co-East /Loughborough University ebooks project is also negotiating with Overdrive.
The Franklin eBookman is a cheaper, smaller alternative to the GEB dedicated ebook devices, and at one time it was available from a well known catalogue store, but has since been withdrawn.
A couple of public libraries considered purchasing the Franklin ebookman, but decided to opt for PDAs instead.
PDAs are versatile devices which offer better value for money.
Current hardware choices: PCs and PDAs Academic libraries The PC is the hardware platform of choice for the delivery of ebooks in UK higher education.
Universities and colleges offer students suites of PCs located on campus, and new student accommodation now comes equipped with network points, where students can plug in their own computers and laptops.
Remote access is desirable as many students live in private off-campus accommodation and an increasing number own their own PCs or laptops.
Many students of computing, technology, business and management, for example, own their own computers, and these are dynamic disciplines which require up-to-date resources.
Publishers have responded to this potentially strong market by producing many titles for these subjects in ebook form.
netLibrary is currently the leading supplier of ebooks to the UK academic community.
They provide a PC-based service modelled on the traditional library, which integrates well with existing systems and resources.
In September 2002, when the netLibrary User Group was set up, 17 out of 24 members were from the academic sector.
However, some academic libraries offer additional ebooks services, for example the University of Huddersfield subscribes to Books24x7 (2200 titles in computing, IT and IT in business), and ENGnetBASE (140 engineering titles in PDF format) [21].
Both services are only accessible from campus-based computers.
A report on the use of PDAs in UK Higher and Further Education has recently been published which provides some indication of future technological trends among student populations [22].
The author, Ted Smith, argues that although PDAs have the potential to enhance teaching and learning, it is difficult to predict future usage patterns.
Smith believes UK students are unlikely to buy PDAs for study purposes; if they are a course requirement then the institution will have to purchase them.
However, ownership of mobile phones by students is high and the next generation phone will feature electronic calendars and task lists that can be synchronised with central servers or desktop/laptop computers.
Textbooks are available as ‘sliced and diced’ e-content , and reading lists and bibliographic information might be easy to access through mobile technology.
The mobile phone could, therefore, prove to be a viable adjunct to teaching and learning, but whether they will be ebook-capable remains to be seen.
Ebooks in academic libraries is a large subject deserving a fuller discussion than has been provided here.
Readers may like to read the Issue Paper by Woodward and Edwards published in 2001, which provides a useful overview of the publishing industry and the role of ebooks in higher education.
[23] Public libraries The People’s Network Programme [24] has provided computers with free Internet access and email in every public library in the UK.
Public libraries are now looking to maximise the use of these new machines through the development of innovative electronic services.
New services are being developed which build on existing services and meet local and national government agendas, (social inclusion, lifelong learning, e-government etc.).
These services also have to be user-centred and libraries have to determine who might benefit from ebooks and e-audio.
New services are supposed to build on, or complement, existing programmes in areas such as reader development and IT taster sessions.
Public libraries are therefore taking an active interest in PC-based ebook models, including netLibrary and services offered by other ebook aggregators.
This interest will only translate into action when practice-based evidence is made available, and it has been demonstrated that ebooks are viable in public libraries.
Projects have now been funded to pilot several different ebook models and these will provide practical evidence and recommendations for future services.
In addition to making good use of library-based computers, remote access is also desirable.
Users expect to be able to access electronic resources from home or their place of work.
The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames has had an ebook service since March 2003 and users can access the netLibrary collection remotely through the library catalogue link.
Authentication is achieved by clicking on the borrower information link, and entering a library card number and PIN (personal identification number).
For those wishing to access the collection from any PC using netLibrary’s Web site, Richmond recommends the creation of a netLibrary personal account.
Once this has been done users can make use of netLibrary’s advanced features, such as checking out an ebook (rather than just browsing), and adding favourites and notes to borrowed items.
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in public libraries PDAs are becoming more affordable and have the benefit of being multifunctional devices.
PDAs provide email and Internet access, plus standard applications such as spreadsheets and word processing.
They are also lightweight and fit easily into the hand, and users can listen to audio books or music as well as read ebooks.
An ebook reader (piece of software) usually comes pre-loaded, but if not it is freely available from the Internet.
However it must be compatible with the device e.g.
Palm Reader is required for devices with the PalmOS operating system, and Microsoft Reader for the Pocket PC.
Initially the issue of formats and readers for ebooks was very confusing, but three main formats seem to have emerged (although this may change), all of which are available to download for free.
They are: Adobe Reader (for ebooks in PDF format) Microsoft Reader Palm Reader (for use with certain PDAs but not PCs or laptops)[25] Two projects have been funded to pilot the use of PDAs in public libraries: Blackburn with Darwen Borough Libraries Co-East and Loughborough University with Essex Libraries.
Both authorities are evaluating how PDAs might meet the needs of various groups of users e.g.
housebound and disabled people and young adults.
1.
Blackburn with Darwen Libraries Blackburn have purchased 40 Compaq iPAQ PDAs with funding from the People’s Network Excellence Fund.
Microsoft Reader and Audible.com digital audio player is installed on each device, enabling the borrower to listen to audio books and read ebooks.
Blackburn have taken out a joint subscription with the London Borough of Richmond to purchase audio content through Audible.com [26].
This enables both authorities to purchase a wider range of audio ebooks for use on both PCs and PDAs.
Blackburn are particularly keen to trial PDAs with young people, especially non-readers in the hope that the ‘cool’ technology will attract them.
Figure 2: Compaq iPAQ PDA Blackburn’s pilot scheme ended in September 2003, and they are now in process of analysing the feedback from the questionnaires that were handed out with the devices.
2.
Co-East and Loughborough University with Essex Libraries This Laser-funded project is piloting new models for ebooks in public libraries, and is jointly managed by Co-East, a library consortium in the East of England and Loughborough University.
The project is testing twelve Pocket PC PDA devices (HP iPAQ 1910) loaded with titles supplied by OverDrive, a US company offering popular fiction, travel, business, study guides, and IT materials.
They are also piloting ebrary a US ebooks supplier to the library sector [27].
Figure 3: overdrive.com screenshot PDA model and e-content from Overdrive.com OverDrive offers a flexible model which allows users to download titles onto their own PC or PDA.
The project team will loan the dozen iPAQs they have purchased to special interest groups in Essex libraries, including housebound people, students, commuters and teenagers in care.
Essex has a large potential audience for ebooks (around 400,000 individuals) and if this small scale pilot is successful, ebook suppliers should be queuing up to supply their future needs.
Until Overdrive was discovered, finding a supplier of fiction titles to UK public libraries had proved difficult.
OverDrive currently supplies Cleveland Public Library (Ohio) with a range of popular titles which, they claim, are ‘flying off the library shelves’ [28].
PC-based ebrary model ebrary offers a different model to netLibrary.
It is a multi-user, simultaneous access model for PCs, which means that more than one user can access a title at any given time.
This model makes good sense, and members of the netLibrary User Group have, on several occasions, expressed a desire to see it implemented through netLibrary.
netLibrary have advised the User Group that publishers are the ultimate determinants of whether their titles are licensed for multi-users.
netLibrary negotiates with publishers on an individual basis, and has indicated that many publishers will not consider the multi-user model, because it poses a threat to sales of printed books.
ebrary is able to offer the multi-user model however; though as it was designed for the US market and its methods of calculating numbers of library users, it does not transfer easily to the UK public library sector.
The implications of this type of issue and others that arise during the course of the project will be published in a report at the end of the project in 2004. eaudio services in public libraries A recent development has been the provision of e-audio services as a component of ebook services in public libraries.
Both the London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames, and Blackburn with Darwen Borough Libraries offer e-audio services.
They are now working in partnership to purchase e-audio content from Audible.com.
Figure 4: ebooks and e-audio services at London Borough of Richmond upon Thames Libraries E-audio files are similar to talking books, but they can be delivered on small, relatively inexpensive portable devices, for example MP3 players, which have traditionally been associated with music files.
The quality of reproduction of spoken word files, coupled with superior storage capacity, makes MP3 players a viable alternative to books on audio-cassette.
E-audio is particularly suitable for people with disabilities, including visually impaired people and people with mobility problems.
Housebound readers, young people with poor reading skills, reluctant readers and those with dyslexia or other learning difficulties can also be targeted for e-audio services.
The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames has purchased MP3 players for users to borrow.
They are small, easy to operate, and have 64 megabytes of storage capacity, offering 20 hours of spoken word audio.
Library members can borrow two titles for a two week loan period.
Figure 5: Otis 4 MP3 player Richmond offers a comprehensive list of titles, which can be browsed by author or subject.
From Ruth Rendell to Terry Pratchett and Ellis Peters there is something to suit every taste, plus non-fiction materials.
Audio services can raise the profile and image of a public library if marketed properly.
They demonstrate that libraries are able to offer electronic services using popular technology, whilst meeting the needs of a range of users, including those with special needs.
The netLibrary user group In February 2002 netLibrary became a division of OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.. OCLC is a large provider of computer-based cataloguing, reference, resource sharing etc.
to libraries worldwide, therefore the acquisition of netLibrary ended a period of uncertainty about the company’s future when it ran into funding difficulties.
OCLC PICA [29] is a European library co-operative with headquarters in Leiden, the Netherlands.
It also has a regional office in Birmingham, UK, which now has responsibility for netLibrary customers in Europe.
In 2002 the Birmingham office set up the ‘NetLibrary User Group’ as a forum for future discussions between itself and its customers.
Figure 6: OCLC netLibrary User Group web pages netLibrary is an ebook aggregator providing a turnkey system for libraries based on the traditional circulation model.
The company negotiates directly with publishers to supply non-fiction content in digital format which is hosted on netLibrary’s servers.
In July/August 2003 netLibrary was offering approximately 50,000 titles and adding around 1000 new titles each month [30].
netLibrary claims to be the “world’s premier provider of electronic books (eBooks) to over 7,000 academic, medical, special, corporate and public libraries.” The service to libraries includes reporting mechanisms for usage statistics and to assist with collection development; digital rights management for copyright clearance; and records in MARC21 format, so that netLibrary titles can be integrated into library catalogues.
netLibrary provides a PC-based, one user-one title access model for ebooks.
In effect, this means that if a library purchases a single copy of a text, then only one reader at a time can access it.
netLibrary’s customer base is diversifying, for example, in August 2003 it announced it was to be involved in a new national framework agreement to supply ebooks to National Health Service staff.
[31] It is also negotiating with Nielsen Bookdata for the inclusion of netLibrary titles in Book Data’s BookFind and Whitakers databases.
If this is successful, it will be possible to order netLibrary titles alongside print materials.
The netLibrary user group has convened four times since its inception in September 2002.
It has around 24 members the majority of whom are from academic libraries.
Public libraries are well represented both within the group and on the committee [32].
A representative from Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, also attends group meetings.
Since the formation of the group, netLibrary customers have been able to voice their concerns and raise issues directly with netLibrary staff.
‘Wish lists’ of required titles have been created which netLibrary use to negotiate with publishers.
Lists include specific titles and also subjects where coverage is poor.
The group has also put forward suggestions for future enhancements to the service, for example the need for a simultaneous access model.
Athens authentication (the access management system used in UK academic libraries) has also recently been implemented at the request of academic members of the group.
Conclusions This article has barely scratched the surface of this complex topic.
Ebooks are well established in US libraries and it is just a matter of time before Europe catches up.
One of the key factors affecting the take-up of ebooks in the UK has been that content and services have been developed by US companies for the US market and this represents a sizeable market to ebook publishers and aggregators.
Content suitable for UK (and European) markets was, until recently, in very short supply, although pricing and access models also put ebooks out of reach for many UK public libraries.
In some subject areas it may not matter if materials have a US bias, but it is important in subjects such as law and medicine, especially in the academic sector, where booklists are made up of titles from leading international publishing houses.
netLibrary is now trying to remedy this situation and has recently added content from a range of international publishers including Kluwer, Blackwell, John Wiley and University presses (e.g.
Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh).
The public library sector is waiting for reports from the projects mentioned above before taking further action.
Hampshire County Council will be joining Richmond, Blackburn and Essex however, as it has recently been given the go-ahead to provide ebook services in Hampshire libraries.
Hampshire is now part of a consortium called Co-South, and other libraries may follow its lead.
The audience for ebooks in public libraries is much harder to quantify and usage is not guaranteed.
Marketing is therefore vital, as people will not use ebook collections if they do not know they exist or if they cannot see the purpose of them.
Ebooks should be linked to, and integrated with, existing collections rather than simply bolted on if usage is to be maximised and costs justified.
Ebooks can be linked to exhibitions and ‘theme’ weeks in museums, archives, and libraries.
In this way ebooks are not seen as isolated examples of new technology, but resources that complement and enhance existing collections.
For example a local authority may decide to celebrate the life of a writer or musician who has local associations, and here a link to a relevant ebook or e-audio title can be placed on library and museum Web pages and included in any promotional literature.
Reference books and other non-fiction materials (books on travel, gardening, computing, finance and ‘How to’ guides etc.)
are standard fare in public libraries, but there may be only one copy of a text located in a central or reference library.
This requires travelling to the library to read it.
If this book is made available as an ebook, then members of the library can access it from any branch, or from the home or office.
Libraries are gradually moving from holdings-based models towards access models, and the digital library can complement and promote the traditional library, with a bit of thought.
However, this does not mean those sheets of paper bound between covers can be abandoned.
Users will want belt, braces, laces, buckles the lot.
Collection development therefore becomes more complex, and librarians have to decide how far their shrinking budgets will stretch.
They have to consider a range of options including sharing subscription costs through partnerships and consortia and offering ebooks-only services where appropriate, for example for short loan collections in academic libraries, or for standard reference texts where online access may provide a better solution than print.
Many information professionals remain sceptical about ebooks.
But we should look beyond the ebook to the wider world of learning.
Distance and e-learning are becoming accepted modes of study, and e-learning has been the focus of a recent consultation document from the Department of Education and Skills [33].
In this document the DfES states that e-learning has the potential to ‘revolutionise’ teaching and learning, and talks about ‘embedding and exploiting technologies’.
Ebooks can support e-learning by offering 24⁄7 access but they need to be embedded into curricula and collections in order to do this effectively.
In addition, we need to forget the traditional book/reading model; ebooks are about fast and easy access to information, rather than reading an entire novel online.
O’Leary describes ebooks as being for use, rather than for reading i.e.
you use them rather than read them [34].
He also points that ebooks are of interest to professionals doctors, engineers, lawyers and scientists etc.
as well as students.
Now, if all those expensive texts targeted at library and information professionals were made available as ebooks, that would be useful.
References Clifford Lynch.
The Battle to define the future of the book in the digital world.
First Monday, volume 6, number 6 (June 2001).
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/index.html see Ariadne issues 27,29,33. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk Midgley, S. The end of books?
The Guardian, 9 April 2002. http://education.guardian.co.uk/ Sun Microsystems Inc. (August 2002) Digital Library Technology Trends.
p.3.
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/whitepapers/ pdf/digital_library_trends.pdf Project Gutenberg: http://promo.net/pg/ Free ebooks (Australian portal offering extensive lists of free ebooks from all parts of the world).
http://www.e-book.com.au/freebooks.htm Loughborough University and Co-East.
A feasibility study for developing usage models for Web-based and hardware-based electronic books http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/disresearch/ebooksinpublib/index.html The Laser Foundation: http://www.bl.uk/concord/laser-about.html London Borough of Richmond upon Thames ebooks service: http://www.richmond.gov.uk/depts/opps/eal/leisure/libraries/pn/default.htm Safari Technical Books online (from Proquest): http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com netLibrary: http://www.netlibrary.com Audible.com: http://audible.com/adbl/store/welcome.jsp.
The company produces a monthly newsletter which is published on the Web site or available by email.
netLibrary user group Web site (members section is password protected): http://oclcpica.org/?id=1206&ln=uk Updates issued by OCLC PICA to netLibrary User Group at meetings on 9th April 2003 and 16th July 2003, OCLC/PICA, Birmingham.
Overdrive.com: http://www.overdrive.com James Dearnley, Cliff McKnight, Mari Connal and Gemma Towle.
The People’s Network, Public Libraries and ebooks: specification for baseline intelligence-gathering work.
Department of Information Science, Loughborough University April 9 2002. http://www.resource.gov.uk/documents/re177rep.pdf Rocket ebook (superseded by two models: the GEB 1150 and GEB 2150): http://www.gemstar-ebook.com see “Another important eBook announcement” on Gemstar Web site (news item dated 16 July 2003): http://www.gemstar-ebook.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/eBookstore.woa/wa/ Two studies were undertaken in 2000 and 2001 at Market Harborough public library by James Dearnley and Cliff McKnight of Loughborough University’s Department of Information Science.
See: Dearnley, J.
& C. McKnight.
The revolution starts next week: the findings of two studies considering electronic books.
Information Services & Use, 21(2), 2001, pp.
65-78.
Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council library and information services: http://library.blackburnworld.com/ For further information on electronic books at the University of Huddersfield, see the Computing and Library Services (CLS) pages at: http://wwwcls.hud.ac.uk see also: Ian Jennings and Eileen Hiller (University of Huddersfield).
Netlibrary ebooks.
SCONUL Newsletter 23 Summer/Autumn 2001.
Ted Smith (2003) Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in Education.
http://www.techlearn.ac.uk/NewDocs/PDABriefing.pdf Hazel Woodward and Louise Edwards.
(September 2001).
Shaping a strategy for ebooks: an issue paper.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=wg_ebooks_strategy1 see also the JISC ebooks Working Group: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=wg_ebooks_home The People’s Network Programme: http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk ebooks123 provides useful help pages on the 3 main ebook readers (software enabling you to read an ebook on a PC or PDA) i.e.
Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader and Palm Reader: http://www.ebooks123.com/ e-audio services from Audible.com: http://www.audible.com ebrary.
http://www.ebrary.com ebooks are flying off the library shelves.
News item dated 5 May 2003 on OverDrive.com Web site: http://www.overdrive.com/news/pr/05052003.asp OCLC PICA: http://www.oclcpica.org figures supplied by netLibrary to members of the netLibrary User Group in 2003. press release from OCLC PICA, Birmingham, UK dated 1 August 2003. http://www.oclcpica.org/?id=1310&ln=uk Members of the netLibrary user group committee (for 2002⁄2003): Ian Jennings, University of Huddersfield (Chair); Lynn Allardyce Irvine, Glasgow Caledonian University (Secretary); Penny Garrod, UKOLN; Jane Weller, Hampshire County Library HQ and Niels Jorgen Blabjerg, Aalborg University Library, Denmark.
Department for Education and Skills.
(July 2003).
Towards a Unified eLearning Strategy.
Consultation document.
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/elearningstrategy/ Mick O’Leary.
Ebook scenarios updated.
Online.
27 (5) Sept/Oct 2003. http://www.infotoday.com/online/sep03/oleary.shtml Author Details Penny Garrod Public Library Networking Focus UKOLN Email: p garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/ Return to top Article Title: “Ebooks in UK libraries: where are we now?” Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/garrod/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BOBCATSSS 99 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BOBCATSSS 99 Buzz database digitisation copyright url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Christine Dugdale reports on the BOBCATSSS 99 conference.
The 7th International BOBCATSSS Symposium on Library and Information Science was held in the modern Istropolis Congress Center in a somewhat damp and foggy Bratislava in Slovakia, 25-27 January.
Although the gloom outside was lifted by the enthusiasm of the many young delegates, this year’s conference was a disappointment.
In particular, the somewhat muddled 3-pronged themes of ‘Learning Society’, ‘Learning Organisation’ and ‘Lifelong Learning’ were not often addressed directly.
The opening remarks stressed the importance of learning throughout life.
Great emphasis was placed upon the role of information professionals in providing information, and teaching learning, awareness, selection, navigational and retrieval skills in addition to encouraging active learning.
These strands of thought, however, tended to be absent from the following papers.
The conference is unique in both being organised by library school students as part of their studies and in its emphasis upon encouraging and supporting papers from students as well as lecturers and practitioners.
But, whereas some of the clearer and more refreshing overviews were given by LIS students last year, this year they seemed to follow a more pedestrian approach of simply detailing literature reviews, describing courses and existing teaching initiatives rather than a more adventurous ‘star-gazing’ from the stance of a future practitioner.
This pattern was followed by other speakers and there was little discussion about on-going research or announcements of new findings.
Indeed, papers tended, overall, to be descriptive of existing practices or situations with well rehearsed accounts of the information needs of the organisations/citizens of tomorrow.
There was no attempt to suggest ways of meeting those needs.
As might be expected from a conference organised by library and information students with ‘learning’ as a theme, there was a heavy emphasis on the training of future information professionals and on Continuing Professional Development for existing practitioners in papers presented by LIS students and lecturers.
More papers discussing different ways of helping or educating users to navigate today’s information maze, presented by practitioners from public and specialist libraries, would have offered a more balanced approach.
Indeed, whereas it is true that lifelong learning, the acquisition of new skills and a flexible and inquisitive mind is essential for those working in the field of library and information science, there was a disturbing near-silence about users.
Very few speakers even mentioned, in passing, the place/needs/demands of users with regard to lifelong learning in the learning organisation.
According to the programme, conference themes should have centred around the issues of new media for schools, lifelong learning via libraries, learning and knowledge management, library education, self-directed learning, strategies for a learning society, learning organisations, and qualifications for the learning society.
There was, therefore, ample opportunity to discuss the impact both of future sources of information and of information systems.
Despite this, very few papers ever even mentioned system users or recipients of the help/advice which the well-educated librarian of the future would be qualified to offer.
One would have expected the needs of users to be high on the curricula of library schools and, therefore, to be reflected in a conference organised by students which included several papers presented by existing students.
Any discussions about library school curricula, the training of future information professionals and the design of digital infrastructures must, surely, be meaningless without any consideration of the user’s needs or the impact of these programmes/systems upon users?
It is possible that system development has been so fast and concentration upon technology so great that librarians have lost sight of this most important fact that all developments exist in order that they might be harnessed to provide information for the end-user and that their primary task is to help end users to satisfy their needs.
One would have expected all this to underlie all system development and LIS student training.
One would also have expected that emphasis would always be on the content and access to that content rather than on the media itself.
If this conference is typical of current student thinking, then we will not be an IT-using society, but an IT-driven society.
In a customer-care ethos, everything else is a means to the end of serving the information needs of the end-user.
There were descriptions of existing services in a number of very different countries scattered among papers, but little about the impact that these services were having upon individual users, organisations or, indeed, how widespread their use was.
One often wondered how extensive a coverage some of the more advanced systems being described actually were.
One speaker from an Eastern European country did stress her frustration on returning home bubbling over with enthusiasm about all she had learnt about web services whilst in America as well as all the knowledge she had gained and the information that she could pass on only to meet with indifference and a lack of support.
The opening addresses emphasised that there is now a greater exchange of information than ever before.
They also made fascinating references to the idea of a new-found greater equality of access to information and more equality in the information exchange process between the ‘transmitters’ of information and the ‘receivers’ of information.
Unfortunately, these thoughts were not taken up by later speakers.
One of the aims of the symposium is to provide a platform for a dialogue between librarians, teachers, information managers, and students from Western and Eastern Europe.
The symposium did achieve this objective with more than 50 papers and workshops and over 200 participants from over 20 countries in Europe and beyond.
Speakers came both from those countries with well-developed electronic networks and those which are still devising policies on digitisation to support educational and cultural initiatives.
Whereas, last year, a large number of the papers presented by speakers from East European countries frequently mentioned the new millennium and quoted their government’s or their organisation’s use of the year 2000 as a spur to new developments, this was strangely missing from this year’s papers.
One was left wondering whether initiatives were so well advanced that speakers’ thoughts were turning towards new directions or whether the momentum had been lost and these projects would struggle to meet their year 2000 deadlines or had even been abandoned.
The theme of fast changing technology and the phenomenal proliferation of information of varying degrees of quality, however, was carried forward into this year’s symposium.
It was stressed that information had been revolutionised many times in the present millennium, albeit, generally, at a slow pace.
The greatest development, Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, had served to organise and standardise the exchange and spread of information.
Advances in the next millennium were more likely to increase the spread of information at ever faster rates, but in a far more disorganised non-standard way through electronic sources and, especially, the internet.
It was, however, perhaps an appreciation of this, that led to one very interesting thought being voiced.
It was suggested that, in the next millennium, the information professional will have a more stable career path than others.
In the face of rapid advances in technology and communications and a volatile global working environment, information will become ever more important.
While information specialists will need to change their methods of working and their information sets frequently, they will not need to change careers like others.
The need for information managers and information intermediaries will grow and become more and more important in the learning organisations of the future.
The theme which emerged most strongly from many of the papers throughout the symposium was the importance of information management and the role of the information manager now and, especially, in the future within every sphere of life throughout the world.
Information will become more and more important in the future and information will need managing in every area of society.
Without management, information cannot be accessed, retrieved or used.
Without carefully selected and organised information, individuals, companies, and countries will not be able to turn information into knowledge to equip them to live and work effectively in tomorrow’s global society.
It was stressed that management skills were essential for the information professional and that these skills figured large in many library schools’ curricula today.
One speaker even suggested that more emphasis is placed on the assimilation of management skills in library schools than on many syllabi for business students.
Information management was important in every discipline and this was highlighted by the large number of students at the symposium who all saw themselves as future information managers, but who came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were studying in departments with an impressive range of titles.
It was stressed over and over again that the future picture of information systems was one of merging, converging and cohesion.
There was an important need for local information systems, but these should all be components of an interdependent whole.
Different information systems must be inter-joined for efficiency and effectiveness.
This calls for ever greater management skills.
Yet, when questioned, most librarians do not cite management as one of their most important skills.
This year’s conference was organised by the students of the Fachhochschule Darmstadt and the Hochschule fuer Bibliotheksund Informationswesen Stuttgart.
Next year’s conference will be held in Krakow, Poland on 24-26 January and will be organised by the students of the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark on the them of "Intellectual Property v The Right of Knowledge?".
Feedback If you have any comments on this article, please contact the author (Christine.Dugdale@uwe.ac.uk) or the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Further Information 1998 BOBCATSSS symposium URL: <http://www.db.dk/bobcatsss/> 1999 BOBCATSSS symposium URL: <http://www.fh-darmstadt.de/BOBCATSSS/conf99.htm> 2000 BOBCATSSS symposium URL: <http://www.bobcatsss.com> Author Details Christine Dugdale manages the ResIDe Electronic Library at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Funded as an eLib short loan project, the ResIDe Electronic Library sought to explore such issues surrounding the implementation of an electronic reserve as copyright and collection management systems.
ResIDe has expanded to include a current awareness database and a past examination paper database and is now a permanent part of the University’s Library Services.
Christine Dugdale ResIDe Electronic Library University of the West of England Email: Christine.Dugdale@uwe.ac.uk URL: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/itdev/reside/ Tel: 0117 965 6261 ext 3646 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: I Just Got Back from the Windy City.. Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: I Just Got Back from the Windy City.. Buzz wireless cataloguing opac ebook url research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes reports on the recent American Library Association conference held in Chicago.
Everything, they say, is bigger in America.
Well, it’s true.
Portions of food, buildings, cars and library conferences.
If the UK Library Association’s biennial conference is an Umbrella, the American Library Association Conference is a marquee.
It had 20,000 delegates, 2,300 meetings, programmes and events, 1,300 exhibitors and a conference handbook thicker than the Bath and West Wiltshire telephone directory.
Of course such a large event can be somewhat overwhelming.
Sessions were held either in a gigantic conference centre (surely two or three times the size of the NEC) or in hotels around the city.
Physically moving from session to session often meant a bus trip across town, followed by a hunt for a small conference room in a cavernous hotel only to find the session full, the seats all taken and the temperature rising.
However if you could deal with the sheer scale of things, work out the codes in the conference handbook and factor in the transportation time there were wonderful sessions to be found.
The hot topic for the event was e-books.
The conference exhibition had been sponsored by an e-book supplier called Net Library [1], there were a number of e-book sessions which attracted 300 500 people each and the chief topic of conversation on the conference buses was once again e-books.
I attended an e-book session which also looked at handheld computers.
This session explored what exactly were handheld computers and what was their relationship to e-books and library services.
The first speaker, David Pogue, talked enthusiastically about how handheld computers make available some of the utilities of PCs mainly diaries, e-mail, note-taking/writing facilities and increasingly e-book readers in a very small and lightweight form.
Products like the Palm Pilot [2] are replacing the filofax due to their additional functionality and ability to synchronise with a PC.
They are now becoming ubiquitous in the USA.
People are using these devices not only to access their diaries but also to read their newspapers, books and magazines.
Rather than carry a number of different texts people prefer having it all accessible on their handheld computer.
Mike Seagroves, from Peanut Press [3], then talked about how Peanut Press has become the leading supplier of e-books for handheld computers.
Books are bought through the Peanut Press website and then downloaded, via a PC, to the handheld computer.
Purchasing and downloading a book takes only a few minutes and the cost is lower than buying a traditional paper based book.
Currently Peanut Press have a catalogue of 22,000 books ranging from main stream novels to Star Trek novels to the latest best sellers to academic and specialised texts.
As the typical Palm Pilot user is male (90%) and under 50 (65%) the catalogue is somewhat science fiction heavy though!
Peanut Press are currently working on developing a facility which would allow them to work with libraries.
They want to allow libraries to let their users to check in and return Peanut Press books and integrate with the Peanut Press catalogue with the existing library catalogue.
The company is also working on developing kiosks which will be placed in locations like airports and train stations which will allow users to purchase and download e-books immediately.
The final speaker of this session was Hye Ok Park, Systems Officer at California State University, Fresno [4].
She fascinated the audience with a description of the development of a wireless LAN in her library.
Installing a physical LAN proved to be simply too expensive and technically inappropriate for the library building.
The innovative solution the library chose was to install a wireless LAN.
A Wireless LAN means that users’ computers do not physically have to be connected to a network point in order to have network access.
Wireless network cards can be installed into either existing laptops or special laptops the library circulates.
These network cards allow the computer to access the LAN without the need for a physical connection.
The wireless connectivity means that every reader space in the library becomes a networked PC point, students can move around the library and take their laptops to where the books are, and the OPAC is accessible everywhere in the building.
The potential for other libraries in old, listed or simply difficult buildings is immediately obvious and with the development of facilities like BlueTooth [5] wireless connectivity of this sort seems likely to become more and more familiar.
Among other sessions that I attended topics such as how to use the Internet to promote reading, how to provide web services for people with disabilities, designing web pages to attract donors (a very well attended session!)
and providing electronic services to children and seniors were covered.
There was a strong emphasis through out the conference that no matter what the skills or needs of the user are, the library should be able to support them in accessing their electronic services.
For Seniors (OAPs in English) this can often prove to be challenging.
Irene Goldberg, from Monroe Township Public Library [6], New Jersey talked about the challenges her library faced setting up Internet classes specifically for Seniors.
Fifty percent of Monroe’s population is retired and living in specifically built retirement communities.
Library staff found the challenge for seniors when developing computer skills was learning to control the mouse.
Without this basic skill, which most of us take for granted, most computer functions are impossible to access.
The library had to learn that its users needed additional equipment like trackballs to get them started.
Also slowing down the drag speed of the mouse was a great help.
Eventually the library computer sessions became so popular that over 200 people turned up for a session for 20 people.
Every one there asserted their right to attend the session and refused to leave.
Tempers became fraught and eventually the library had to call the police to have the truculent Seniors physically removed!
Despite incidents like this, the library’s programme of gearing Internet training to seniors has been very successful.
The library has found that its users feel that the library is the one place where they can learn about technology in a non-threatening environment.
These two sessions are just highlights from what was an incredibly diverse and busy conference programme.
The scale of the event and the wide selection of programmes to choose from meant that it could often be a frustrating experience.
All too often two fascinating sessions clashed and hard choices had to be made about which one to attend.
The geographic spread of the locations of the sessions also meant that it was hard to move quickly from one session to another.
Planning a day’s conference going involved precision timing, a good grasp of the geography of Chicago and a ruthless ability to decide what you really were interested in and wanted to hear.
The conference was a good opportunity to see the kind of issues that UK public libraries are going to have to deal with in the next couple of years.
E-books seem set to become one of the major new services libraries are going to have to get to grips with.
Judging from the amount of money that e-book suppliers and publishers were spending on supporting the conference (by exhibiting their services and providing free bagels) they view the library market as one they want to make big inroads into.
They have spotted the library/e-book potential synergy even if all librarians haven’t yet.
No doubt they will try and seduce UK librarians in the very near future.
Here’s to free bagels at Umbrella 2001!
References Net Library provide and manage e-books for libraries.
They provide the means for libraries to integrate e-books into their existing systems.
At: http://www.netlibrary.com/ Palm Pilots are the leading brand of handheld computers.
At: http://www.palm.com/ Peanut Press is the leading seller of e-books for Palm Pilots.
They have recently been acquired by Net Library and are currently developing e-books which can be read on other systems.
At: http://www.peanutpress.com/ The slides for Hye Ok Park’s presentation is available at: http://www.lib.csufresno.edu/publications/ Bluetooth will enable users to connect a wide range of computing and telecommunications devices, without the need to buy, carry, or connect cables.
It is currently being integrated into many new electronics devices.
At: http://www.bluetooth.com/ Monroe Township Public Library.
At: http://township.monroe.nj.us/library/start.htm Author Details Sarah Ormes Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: s.l.ormes@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "I Just Got Back from the Windy City…. "
Author: Sarah Ormes Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/pub-libs/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz software archives digitisation accessibility copyright preservation interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
DOCUSEND PROJECT MANAGER Docusend <http://www.docusend.ac.uk> is a national three-year project which began in May 2002 and is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
The key project objective is to develop a journal article request and delivery broker service.
The Docusend partners include the ten university libraries which comprise the Lamda electronic document delivery service <http://lamdaweb.mcc.ac.uk>, with King’s College London as the lead site.
Docusend is part of the JOIN-UP project cluster <http://edina.ed.ac.uk/projects/joinup/> which consists of two further JISC 5⁄99 projects hosted at EDINA and the BL/MIMAS Zetoc development and works to encourage the production of separate but interoperable services.
The Consortium is now seeking to appoint a project manager for the final eighteen months of the project.
The post-holder will ideally be based at the Joule Library, UMIST in Manchester (although applications can be considered from candidates able to be based in one of the Lamda partner institutions in London, Leeds or Birmingham by mutual agreement).
Applications from candidates seeking secondment to this post will be welcomed.
The responsibilities will involve the day-to-day management and implementation of the project, including the provision of input and advice for the strategic development of Docusend on issues such as customer base and content supply development.
Liaison with the other JOIN-UP partners and the user community will also be important elements of the job.
Applicants should be educated to degree level and have experience of project management together with excellent communication and liaison skills.
Knowledge of document delivery and/or the publishing industry would also be advantageous.
Salary will be circa £28,498 to £33,679 (ALC3) depending on skills and experience.
(In the case of an exceptionally qualified candidate appointment on ALC4 will be considered.)
Holidays will be 25 per year, plus public holidays.
Informal enquiries should be made to Ms Anne Bell, Director of Information Resources & Services at King’s College London and Docusend Project Director, email anne.bell@kcl.ac.uk Announcement: Web-Wise 2003 Registration is invited at this time for the fourth annual Web-Wise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World, to be held in Washington, D.C. from February 26-28, 2003.
The conference is sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and co-hosted by Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries.
This year’s theme is “Sustaining Digital Resources,” with discussions focusing on preservation and economic issues as well as on opportunities for increasing impacts and reaching new audiences.
The conference will also highlight a number of innovative digital projects both in plenary sessions and in demonstrations during long breaks.
The target audience is all those involved in the creation and use of digital resources, including library, museum and archives professionals, computer scientists, educators and learners.
Registration is limited in order to facilitate discussion and networking among participants.
There is no registration fee; however, participants will be responsible for their own travel and lodging expenses.
The conference will take place at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill, 400 New Jersey Avenue, NW, Washington, DC (near Washington’s Union Station).
The conference will open with a reception at the hotel on the evening of Wednesday, February 26.
A continental breakfast will be provided February 27 and 28 and lunch on February 27.
For more information about the program and to register, please see the conference Web site at <http://webwise.mse.jhu.edu>.
You will need to register early to ensure your place.
To reserve a sleeping room at the conference hotel at the rate of $169.00/night + tax, please call (202) 737-1234 or 1-800-233-1234.
In order to obtain the group rate, be sure to mention that you are attending the “Web-Wise” conference.
The cut-off date for hotel reservations is Wednesday, January 29, 2003.
Questions about the Web-Wise Conference may be directed to Matt Burdetsky, Capital Meeting Planning, Inc. at (703) 536-4993 or matt@cmpinc.net Web-Wise Preconference This year a special Preconference Copyright and the Digital Age will be offered on Wednesday, February 26, 9:00 4:00, at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill.
The Preconference is organized by the University of Denver Penrose Library, Colorado Digitization Program, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), and OCLC, and with funding from IMLS and OCLC.
Speakers include: Peter Jaszi, American University; Georgia Harper, University of Texas; Lolly Gasaway, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Maria Pallante, Guggenheim Foundation; Rachelle Browne, Smithsonian Institution, and Linda Tadic of ArtStor.
There is no registration fee, but YOU MUST REGISTER SEPARATELY FOR THE PRECONFERENCE.
The Preconference agenda and registration is posted at <http://www.oclc.org/events/register/rightsmanagement.shtm> 2003 Agentcities: Challenges in Open Agent Environments The Agentcities Challenges in Open Agent Environments ‘03 Workshop will be held in Melbourne, Australia as part of the 2nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS’03).
The workshop will focus on the practical deployment and application of Agent technology to large-scale, open heterogeneous environments: How can existing research be applied?
Is it mature enough for use in real large-scale open systems?
What are the most significant issues to be considered (technical, social, legal)?
How do agent-based solutions relate to those from other technologies?
and what is the role of standards & integration with industrial strength application software?
This area of work has become increasingly important with the emergence of industry and Internet developments such as Web Services, ebXML and GRID computing.
These initiatives are beginning to enable the deployment of increasingly automated software components in the public Internet.
The aim of the workshop is to act as forum for discussion of whether and how agent technology can help in this challenging new environment.
Last year’s Challenge’02 attracted 52 paper submissions, 60+ attendees, see on-line papers at: < http://www.agentcities.org> and will have proceedings published by Springer-Verlag in early Spring 03 as part of the LNCS series.
ERPANET Training Seminar Policies for Digital Preservation The programme for the ERPANET seminar on “Policies for Digital Preservation” has been released.
ERPANET is happy to have enthused speakers with a background in digital preservation policies.
Speakers will provide their valuable experiences, and thereby equip participants with the necessary skills to develop and implement digital preservation policies.
This two day training session, co-hosted by the Archives de France, will be held in Fontainebleau (near Paris) on January 29-30, 2003.
Venue The venue at INSEAD, one of the worlds premier business schools, has been kindly made available by the Archives de France.
To Register The cost of this seminar is 150 Euros.
This price includes learning materials, lunch, and additional refreshments.
Please register at <http://www.erpanet.org >.
For any additional information, please contact dutch.editor@erpanet.org or coordinator@erpanet.org Collection-level description and the information landscape Users evaluate strategies for resource discovery Thursday 30th January 2002, Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge The Fifth Collection Description Workshop will concentrate on user needs, incorporating experiences from a range of disciplines and domains.
The workshop will explore user studies and evaluation reports in order to highlight the ways in which CLD’s can help to facilitate information disclosure and discovery.
The workshop will focus on the needs of the “end-user”, who may be a researcher, a student or a member of the public.
The workshop will also look at issues of accessibility with special reference to the physical accessibility of both collections and collection-level descriptions.
There is no charge for this event.
Further details and a booking form are available at: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/> Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Just a Distraction?
: External Content in Institutional Portals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Just a Distraction?
: External Content in Institutional Portals Buzz data rdf framework database rss portal usability copyright passwords url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Martin and Liz Pearce reflect on stakeholders' views of external resources within institutional portals and highlight the findings of recent PORTAL Project research.
The PORTAL Project [1], funded under the JISC’s Focus on Access to Institutional Resources, (FAIR) Programme [2], aims to explore a range of issues relating to the deployment of institutional portals within the UK tertiary education sector [3].
In issue 35 [4], Liz Pearce discussed the ‘Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals’ report [5] which formed Work Package 3 of the project.
Building on both the data and the analysis of Work Package 3, the recently published report ‘Stakeholder Requirements for External Content in Institutional Portals’ [6] focuses on the issues surrounding the inclusion of external resources within institutional portals.
There are two key reasons for the work package’s specific focus on external content: firstly, as portals are a relatively new concept within the UK academic sector, (inevitably, the first question asked in stakeholder consultation sessions is “what are they?”), it has been valuable to examine both what the information resources included should be, and how users might want to access such resources.
Secondly, given the internal administrative focus of a number of developed institutional portals [7], it was pertinent to question the need for institutional portals to offer access to external content at all.
Methodology In order to obtain end-user views on the issues relating specifically to external content, additional focus groups were held with staff and students from two institutions: an FE college [8] and a “new” or post-1992 University.
Focus group sessions attracted students, teaching and research staff and explored the resources currently used by participants, gauged their opinion of a number of JISC resources and assessed their likes and dislikes regarding various search facilities and presentation formats [9].
As a follow-up to these focus groups, a number of other stakeholders were interviewed.
Librarians were identified as key institutional intermediaries and interviews were conducted with library and learning resource staff at four institutions.
Similarly representatives of content providers, brokers and agencies including MIMAS, EDINA, Resource, ALPSP, Wiley and the Institute of Physics Publishing were interviewed in order to establish their views regarding the potential of institutional portals for presenting external content.
This article will concentrate primarily on the findings of the focus groups involving FE and HE staff and students.
Results The conclusions of the ‘Stakeholder Requirements of Institutional Portals’ report indicated that access to both internal and external content were of value to potential institutional portal users.
The table below indicates the rankings awarded to those external content features included in the online survey [10]: Feature Rating by All Participants Search Your Favourite Resources 1st Library & Quality Internet Resources Alerts 5th Careers Information 13th Internet Search 18th Conference Alerts 19th Jobs 20th Internet Bookmarks 23rd Teaching & Learning Information 24th Access Other Email 29th News 37th Weather 38th (Last) Figure 1: Rankings awarded to external content features in the online survey Whilst some external content features were rated highly by respondents, most notably access to search facilities and library and quality internet resource alerts, a number of qualitative participants were unconvinced about the value of including external resources in institutional portals.
One focus group participant noted that: “I’ve got rid of voicemail and if I could stop people knocking on the door I might get some work done, the last thing I want is all these external distractions” Higher Education Teaching Staff A number of staff indicated that to be of value external resources must be closely related to the teaching, learning or research focus of the individual portal user: “the key thing for the portal is to offer educational services what is important for teaching and learning the news should relate to educational subjects”.
Further Education Teaching Staff Features Searching Since the ‘Your Portal Priorities’ online survey indicated that ‘search your favourite resources’ was the most popular overall institutional portal feature, we were particularly interested in the methods of searching and search interfaces that portal end-users might wish to access.
It will perhaps come as no surprise that the Google search engine emerged as the most widely used method of Internet searching, though participants did mention other tools such as Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves and Dogpile.
One Higher Education lecturer indicated that since starting to use Google he rarely users any other discovery tools.
Most participants used the simple search option for the majority of their searching, with one FE staff member commenting “I didn’t even know that [the Google advanced search] was there”, and others reported that they had been put off advanced search options because they “looked daunting” or seemed “too complicated”.
Despite such concerns one HE student participant remarked that he preferred the Google advanced search as it located results more quickly than the simple search.
Where participants mentioned alternative search engines many evidenced strong ‘brand loyalty’ and were keen that they should be able to select, or be given a choice of internet search facility.
Despite the popularity of internet search engines many participants raised concerns regarding the quality and objectivity of the results returned by standard search engines suggesting a clear role for quality assured resources.
A number of participants commented on the potential for companies to ‘buy’ higher rating in commercial search engines and one FE student pointed out that: “I was looking for information on the book ‘The Naked and the Dead’ simple Google searching was just too dangerous!” Further Education Student Whilst complex advanced search features were often unpopular, participants appreciated search facilities which enabled users to control the resources returned by format (images; pdf files); by geographical region; or by type of user (children for instance).
Participants did recognise that advanced searching added value to simple search options: “something half way between simple and advanced [searching] would be best.” Figure 2: Participants were enthusiastic about ‘clean and simple’ search interfaces and filtering options but many were unfamiliar with the concept of cross-searching Cross-Searching The idea of cross-searching multiple information resources was a new concept to the majority of research participants.
In each Work Package 4 focus group, some participants confused the concept with that of a meta-search engine (such as Web Crawler).
When the idea of cross-searching was explained, most participants said that they thought it was a good idea, but levels of enthusiasm were mixed: whilst for one participant: “cross-search is one of the most important things for research activity” Higher Education Teaching Staff others expressed concern that a cross-search would generate too many results to be a useful form of searching.
A number of projects exploring the technologies associated with cross searching are ongoing.
Both the Xgrain Project [11] and the Subject Portal Project [12] are developing cross-searching tools for resource discovery within the education sector.
Password Protection Whilst Work Package 3 research indicated that participants were keen on single sign on, when asked specifically about password-protected access to information resources in Work Package 4, respondent opinions were mixed.
Some staff and students indicated that they were put off, or actively avoided, password-protected resources, yet others acknowledged that although a nuisance to remember password entry was a mark of quality, with one student remarking: “it’s not just any old thing, if there’s a password you know it’s there for a specific reason and you’re going there for that reason” Higher Education Student This view was echoed by a representative of MIMAS who suggested that contextual information about the source and value of information would be required in order that information resources be used effectively and responsibly.
Alerts and Newsfeeds Work Package 3 indicated that, while participants were keen to access to ‘library and quality Internet resource alerts’ covering resource, teaching and learning and research information, the format of these alerts and bulletins was problematic.
Many alerting services currently use email to deliver current awareness services to users, yet both staff and students questioned whether email was the most appropriate place to receive such alerts: “I find that having alerts of any sort coming through your email box just ties your email up you spend all day just going through your email” Higher Education Student Figure 3: You’ve got (too much) mail!
HUMBUL currently provides access to its subject-based alerts via both email and RSS.
Recipients can choose from over 30 specific subject areas within the broader ‘Humanities’ category.
Given such reservations, participants were generally enthusiastic about the concept of receiving alerts via RSS (RDF Site Summary) [13] channels within an institutional portal.
In the course of the research it emerged that ‘less is more’ when it comes to the level of detail that alerts should include.
Some participants suggested that key information such as subject coverage, date and author (if appropriate) were all that should be included or that keywords perhaps in bold or coloured text rather than full abstracts would be useful [14].
Participants were also keen that current awareness services, whatever their format, be flexible enough to respond to users’ changing needs.
Having control over the regularity, duration and focus of alerts emerged as a key user requirement.
One HE student commented: “if you’re specialising in an area and doing research these will be a God-send but we’re not going to want alerts after that assignment is completed.” Higher Education Student Granularity It was widely suggested that the usefulness of alerts would depend upon their currency and specificity.
Whilst access to national and international news received a mixed response, a number of participants indicated that where such information could be accessed at a finer level of granularity its value would increase.
While the BBC provides access to current affairs headlines via an RSS channel, participants saw the value of specific groups accessing finer grained resources (ie health news for Nursing or Health and Social Care students, business news for Business and Management students).
The HUMBUL hub of the RDN provides a general Humanities RSS channel of ‘the last fifteen records added’ but also provides RSS channels relating to 30 specific subject areas [15].
One member of teaching staff indicated that, without such assurances of relevance, alerts “might be more distracting than useful”.
The perception that resources with a broad coverage offered limited value was born out by one librarian who commented on the difficulty of attracting users to resources such as Infotrac, which, though a valuable resource, was perceived as being too generic by many staff and students.
Figure 4: BBC News RSS channel as it appears in the University of Hull portal.
Figure 5: Participants were keen to look beyond the ‘general’ and access resources relevant to their subject area.
The BBC provides news in a number of specialist areas (including business, politics, health and education) but currently only provides a general RSS channel.
External Resources in Institutional Portals Interviewees and focus group participants indicated that they used a range of external resources for teaching, learning, research and professional development.
Resources ranged from subscription databases to company, government, funding council and media sites and general Web resources.
Similarly, we encountered a number of participants who failed to recognise the names of what could be considered to be key JISC resources in their fields.
While, in general, content providers felt that institutional portals could provide an effective means of raising the profile of resources, the integration of the external resources within institutional portals relies on content providers publishing resources via relevant interfaces.
In providing access to external resources via institutional portals it will be vital to balance the range of resources valued by staff and students with the more limited number of resources making content available through appropriate standards.
The need for stakeholders in institutional portal developments to engage in dialogues with a range of content providers both with and beyond the JISC Information Environment is clear.
Conclusions The report ‘Stakeholder Requirements for External Content in Institutional Portals’ combines the requirements of potential portal users with those of intermediaries, content providers, agencies and brokers.
During the course of this research it has become increasingly clear that portal developers must genuinely consider their stakeholders’ requirements, rather than simply provide what they think the users might like, what is easy to develop or what is provided via a particular content provider or broker.
Participants were keen that resources included in institutional portals be current, relevant to their areas of interest, and easy to use and control, (whether via simple interfaces, transparent authorisation or flexible delivery modes).
Content providers were generally enthusiastic about the presentation of resources via an institutional portal and a number of content providers both within and beyond the JISC Information Environment have been keen to engage in discussions with the PORTAL project.
Content providers and brokers identified content branding, knowledge of appropriate technologies and development schedules as key issues surrounding the integration of external content in institutional portals.
The usability and evaluation work which comprises Work Package 13 of the PORTAL project will look at the relationship between users and external resources where they are included in a range of institutional portal frameworks and assess the extent to which such resources provide a distraction or a key element of teaching, learning and research support.
Acknowledgements The Presenting national Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL) Project is a joint activity of Academic Services Interactive Media at the University of Hull and UKOLN at the University of Bath, funded under the JISC’s Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme.
References The PORTAL project is at: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/ For further information about the JISC FAIR Programme see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair An introduction to the PORTAL project was previously published in Ariadne: Ian Dolphin, Paul Miller & Robert Sherratt, “Portals, PORTALS Everywhere”, Ariadne 33, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/portals/ Liz Pearce.
“Apart from the weather, I think it’s a good idea”, Ariadne 35, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/pearce/ Liz Pearce et al.
Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals.
2003 http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/stakereq.pdf Liz Pearce & Ruth Martin.
Stakeholder Requirements for External Content in Institutional Portals.
2003 http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/contentreq.pdf Liz Pearce.
Institutional Portals: A Review of Outputs.
2003. http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/WP3.html The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Anne Atkins of the Western Colleges Consortium and the JISC funded FAIR Enough project http://www.westerncc.co.uk/fair/index.html for her help in organising and delivering the FE college focus group.
The presentation used a focus group session which can be downloaded as a separate appendix from http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/WP4.html The ‘Your Portal Priorities’ survey is still available for completion http://www.learndev.hull.ac.uk/portal_survey/ Information about Xgrain can be found at http://edina.ed.ac.uk/projects/joinup/xgrain/ Information about the Subject Portals Project can be found at http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/ RDF Site Summary, version 1.0, is available at: http://purl.org/rss/1.0/spec.
Paul Miller.
Syndicated Content: It’s more than just some file formats.
Ariadne 35, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/miller/ Humbul RSS channels are available at http://www.humbul.ac.uk/help/rss.html Author Details Ruth Martin Researcher PORTAL Project UKOLN University of Bath Liz Pearce PORTAL Project Academic Services Interactive Media University of Hull Email: e.pearce@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Just a Distraction?
: External content in institutional portals” Author:Ruth Martin and Liz Pearce Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/justadist/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Report On The Sixth Institutional Web Management Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Report On The Sixth Institutional Web Management Workshop Buzz software framework html rss portal usability infrastructure css xhtml accessibility blog video mis vle authentication interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly with a report on the Sixth Institutional International Web Management Workshop held this year at the University of Strathclyde.
The Institutional Web Management Workshop series is the main event organised by UK Web Focus.
The workshop series began with a two-day event at King's College London in June 1997.
The event has been repeated every year since then and, after the first event, was extended to a three-day format.
Overview Of This Year's Event This year's event was held at the University of Strathclyde.
The full title of the workshop was "Institutional Web Management Workshop 2002: The Pervasive Web".
The workshop aimed to address issues associated with the management of institutional Web services which are pervasive in so many aspects of our work (teaching, research and administration) as well as in our social lives (how many of us caught up with World Cup scores using the Web?).
This year's event was the largest to date, attracting over 175 participants.
But was it the best?
The workshop evaluation forms have not yet been analysed (this report is being written just a few days after the workshop finished).
However an initial analysis indicates a high degree of satisfaction, with over 20% of the forms received so far giving the event a score of Excellent for both the workshop content and organisation, and most of the other forms giving ratings of between excellent and good.
These results reflect the very positive buzz at the workshop and the various informal comments I have received.
A full analysis of the evaluation forms will be published shortly [1] which will provided more detailed insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the event.
A number of new features were introduced to the workshop this year.
This follows a review of the feedback from last year's workshop, held at Queen's University Belfast, in which there was a feeling that, although the event was enjoyable and well-organised, the content was somewhat flat [2].
The Programme Committee addressed these comments be revising the format of the workshop, with a mixture of plenary talks and group sessions, providing even more parallel sessions that previous years and introducing a number of new features, all of which are described below.
Plenary Talks Opening Keynote Plenary Talks This year some thought had been given to the role of the plenary talks.
The Programme Committee agreed that the first two days should begin with inspired visions of the future from speakers of proven quality.
The workshop opened with a hilarious and thought-provoking talk by Derek Law, University of Strathclyde.
Derek's talk had the intriguing title "Are All The Children In Their Bed?".
Although the slides for this talk (along with the slides for all of the plenary speakers) are available on the workshop Web site, they will fail to convey Derek's message and his style of presenting.
Fortunately a video of his talk is available from the workshop Web site [3].
Viewing is strongly recommended!
Bill Nisen, Chief Executive of the E-Institute a "collaboration between the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow that aims to better equip Scotland to fight for a world-leading place in the 'new economy'" [4] gave the opening keynote plenary talk [5] on the second day of the workshop.
Bill acknowledged that the Web has become one of the most important information and communication inventions.
But he asked us to consider if the Web can store, process and deliver knowledge?
He speculated on use of the Web as a knowledge tool and discussed the implication of current trends.
Bill talk was well-received, perhaps, in part, as it allowed delegates to sit back and listen to the vision, without having to worry that this would be something that would new implementing over the next few weeks!
Other Plenary Talks The main plenary speakers were all Web management practitioners within the HE and FE communities.
All had been asked to provide case studies of relevant developments within their institutions, to avoid bland generalities, to be prepared to describe any difficulties they had experienced and, if appropriate, to be prepared to be air controversial views.
Andrew Aird, the Director of Web Services at King's College London, was certainly prepared to be controversial in his talk "Virtually Everything Virtually Everywhere: Pursuing A Radical Web Strategy" [6].
Included in Andrew's rather controversial Web strategy were the banning and MS Word and PDF files, automated deletion of content, banning of Dreamweaver and other HTML editing tools and giving the central Web team ultimate control over the institutions Web site!
Andrew did admit that some of his suggestions were rather tongue-in-cheek and he did not go into detail as he would like his strategy to be implemented.
However Andrew certainly ensured the workshop got off to a lively start, and after his talk had finished many delegates asked for the microphone to ask Andrew questions, and to challenge his views.
Interestingly, though, some of Andrew's controversial points were echoed in other sessions, with the Technical Issues discussion group, for example, also feeling that use of a centralised Content Management System was preferable to use of distributed HTML authoring tools, and others discussing accessibility issues mentioned the difficulties of providing accessible Web site if there is no central control over Web authoring tools.
Perhaps next year we may find that Andrew's controversial Web strategy is on the path to becoming part of a mainstream orthodoxy.
Lawrie Phipps, who runs the JISC-funded TechDis Service, which looks at all aspects of Technology and Disabilities in the further and higher education sectors, gave an update on "Legislation, Disabilities and Education Web Sites" [7].
Within the sector there is quite a high level of awareness of the importance of accessible Web sites, especially amongst those who are responsible for managing institutional Web services.
However not everybody was aware of SENDA, the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, which confers similar rights upon disabled students against educational institutions as those available to disabled people against service providers under the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act.
With SENDA compliance becoming law on September, this briefing from Lawrie was very timely.
Lawrie also provided a TechDis Briefing Paper on Institutional Web sites and Legislation, which is also available on the Workshop Web site [7].
It was pleasing this year to have a speaker from the FE sector.
Stephen Tanner, Head of IT Services at Colchester Institute, described the approaches taken to the provision of a portal for staff in his college [8].
Stephen argued that many institutions with the educational sector do not have the resources to develop IT services which are tailored to the diverse needs of a wide range of user communities.
He feels that we should tell our users that "the silver service is off" and they will have to use the "drive-thru" option, based on the deployment of commercial software.
Stephen's talk was followed by Mark Simpson, a User Issues researcher at De Montfort University (DMU).
Mark described the approaches taken to usability testing and design of DMU's VLE, which was developed locally because, according to Mark, of the lack of suitable commercial products [9].
Like Stephen, Mark has never attended an Institutional Web Management Workshop before.
These two talks complemented each other nicely, one looking at a staff portal in an FE college which was developed using commercial software and the other looking at the usability issues of a student VLE in a HE institution developed using home-grown software.
Mike McConnell and Iain Middleton from the University of Aberdeen gave another somewhat controversial talk on "Centralised Control or Departmental Freedom?
[10].
Mike and Iain outlined the problems with a developed approach to the provision of Web services, and reviewed the approaches that had been taken at Robert Gordon University and the University of Aberdeen to try and remedy these problems.
Paul Browning kindly agreed to step in at the last minute to give a talk which aimed to pull together a topic of much interest in previous workshops CMS and one of interest at this one Portals.
In his talk "Portals and CMS Why You Need Them Both" Paul reviewed the current state of play with CMSs and showed how a CMS was needed to manage content which would be accessed, perhaps with a personalised view, using a portal [11].
Innovations A number of innovations were introduced to the workshop this year.
We provided a panel session which address the topic "Avoiding Portal Wars" [12].
This session illustrated the different approaches taken to the provision of portals by different groups including the Library, MIS departments, the teaching and learning community as well as external bodies such as JISC.
The aim of the session was to illustrate the different approaches which are being taken, the different understandings of the term "portal" and to highlight the dangers of different groups within institutions attempting to develop institutional portals in competition with each other.
However the lack of time available for each speaker made it difficult to bring out these issues.
A panel session is probably worth keeping for next year, but the session will need some fine-tuning.
Another new feature this year were the debates.
Two debates were held in parallel: of interest to software developers and other "techies" was the debate on "The house believes that the future of Web in UK Higher and Further Education communities lies in the adoption of open source software" while the managers where asked to consider motion "The house believes that Web Strategies are a waste of time" [13].
The feedback indicates that many delegates found the debates to be fun.
The speakers certainly found them a useful way in which to put across perhaps unpopular or controversial views, without encountering the hostility which sometimes occurs on mailing lists.
We will probably repeat the debates next year, again with some fine-tuning.
Would any be prepared to argue on controversial topics such as "We should ban the use of HTML authoring tools", "Web standards are too difficult and to slow in arriving let market-place solutions drive the Web" or even "Accessible Web sites are too expensive to develop and the costs cannot be justified"?
If so, please get in touch.
To complement the plenary talks (which are very much in the control of the speaker) and the parallel sessions (which have a facilitator who has the brief of encouraging interaction from participants) this year we introduced a number of discussion groups sessions, in which delegates were free to appoint their own facilitator and choose the topic for discussion within a broad area of VLEs and MLEs, Portals, Technical Issues, Web Strategies, Support for Information providers and Design and Accessibility (the session on Career Development failed to attract sufficient interest) [14].
These sessions probably worked well, although a number of participants suggested that a facilitator should have been appointed in advance.
We also provided a small number of briefing sessions, including one's on Web Standards, Interoperability and Learning Standards and Web Sites and Legislation [15].
These seemed to prove popular and will probably be repeated next year.
It was also felt to be important to allow workshop delegates to have the opportunity to organise their own Birds-of-a-Feather session.
Rooms were reserved, which could be used if at least 10 delegates signed up for a session.
It was pleasing that, following a parallel session on Authentication, a group who had an interest in pursuing the technical aspects of authentication arranged a BoF on this topic.
The final innovation was the "Vendor Presentation" slot [16].
There has been interest in the past from delegates who would like the opportunity to hear out commercial software, such as Content Management Systems.
The vendor presentation slot aimed to provide an opportunity for two vendors, both with an interest in the HE and FE sector, to describe their products.
The session was held in parallel with other briefing sessions.
We are still to evaluate this session.
Parallel Sessions In all six of the Institutional Web Management workshops we have held parallel workshop sessions, which provide the opportunity for delegates to make an active contribution to proceedings.
These sessions have always proved popular, so this year we increased the number of parallel sessions and the number which delegates could choose to attend.
Delegates could choose to attend 3 sessions from a total of 24 separate sessions, which included 19 interactive workshop sessions, 3 briefing sessions, a vendor presentations slot or a Birds-of-a-Feather session Many of the materials used in the parallel session are available on the workshop Web site [17] and we hope to make available additional materials, including notes on the workshop sessions if and when we receive them.
Technical Infrastructure This year we also made a number of innovations to the Workshop Web site [18].
The workshop Web site is mostly created in XHTML, with an increasing amount of CSS used to describe the appearance of the Web site.
We provide a dynamically-created RSS news feed for the site, and are using the Web site as a test bed to developed a quality assurance framework, which includes use of a variety of testing tools.
We also provide a description of the technical architecture of the Web site [19].
We also provided access to the YahooGroups externally-hosted groupware service [20] to provide an opportunity for delegates to evaluate the potential of such services as well as to provide a mechanism for delegates, speakers and workshop facilitators to host their own content.
Although this was not widely used, the infrastructure is in place if it is felt useful to provide a forum for post-workshop discussion.
Following a parallel session on Blogging [21] we are also considering providing access to a Weblog (or Blog) to allow participants to explore the potential of such systems by providing their own comments on the workshop.
Impact Analysis In the workshop introduction delegates were asked to reflect on the effectiveness of previous workshops in initiating cultural change: as the workshop is now well-established it is probably no longer sufficient for delegates to find the event interesting, informative and enjoyable the workshops should also play a role in initiating significant changes, especially in areas identified as important by delegates in the workshop.
On reflection it is clear that a number of key areas have been identified.
At this workshop the importance of authentication was identified in a number of sessions, and it was pointed out that personalised portals will be difficult to implement, maintain and support without a reliable and cost-effective authentication service.
It was also recognised that there are no simple answers to this problem, and that solutions were best implemented according to a national strategy based on use of open standards.
The work of JISC and Alan Robiette was recognised as important [22].
Another important area which was flagged in previous workshops was the need for a Content Management System to support the management and repurposing of large-scale Web sites.
I think this is an area in which the workshop have had a significant role to play in raising awareness of the importance of CMSs and providing a forum for discussion and debate on the approaches which are being taken.
It is likely that the area of portals is one which has been identified at this year's workshop as important to many in the community, and we will be considering ways in which we can have a significant impact in developments in this area.
Managers Or Techies / Providers Or Users There has always been a healthy debate as to whether the workshops should focus on the needs of managers or technical developers.
Judging from an initial analysis of the feedback, this year the balance has probably been just about right: strategic and managerial issues have been raised in the plenary sessions and the parallel sessions have allowed delegates to choose whether to attend strategic or technical sessions.
A strength of the workshop is in providing a forum in which, to use Paul Browning's terms the "suits", the "anoracks" and the "cardigans" (managers and MIS staff, techies and librarians) can get together and gain an understanding of each other's perspectives.
However it is true to say that not many participants representing the user community attend the workshop the focus is on the various providers of institutional Web services and not on the consumers of the services.
We should probably seek to address this gap in next year's workshop, and think of ways in which to attract representatives of the user communities (the "tweed jackets" or the "gowns"?)
This may be an issue to explore with the LTSN (Learning and Teaching Support Network).
In would be very interesting to hear the reaction from users to some of the suggestions for more central control of Web services which were made at the workshop.
Thanks Before finishing this report, I should give my thanks to members of the Programme Committee who not only helped to provide a rich programme, but also played an active role in the workshop itself, through chairing sessions and debates and facilitating parallel sessions.
The members of the Programme Committee were myself, Diane McDonald (University of Strathclyde), James Currall (University of Glasgow), Kriss Fearon (University of York), Duncan Smeed (University of Strathclyde) and Clare Rogers (JISC Assist, who was not able to attend the workshop itself).
In addition the workshop Organising Committee ensured smooth running of the workshop, despite the increased complexity with the increase in the numbers of parallel sessions.
The members of the Organising Committee were myself and my colleagues Sara Hassen and Jo Stone (UKOLN).
However most of the work was carried out by Diane McDonald and David Miller (University of Strathclyde) and, as mentioned in the Workshop Conclusions [23], particular thanks should be given to Diane and David.
Next Year Following the success of this year's event, next year's workshop is likely to have a similar format and take place sometime in June.
We look forward to seeing you next year.
References Workshop Evaluation, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/evaluation/ Report On The Fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop, Ariadne, issue 29, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/web-focus/ Are All The Children In Their Bed?, Derek Law, University of Strathclyde http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/law/ Briefing On Bill Nisen, Chief Executive E-Institute, University of Strathclyde Press Release, August 2002 http://www.strath.ac.uk/press/news/media-releases/2001/aug/ei.pdf Knowledge and ..
Preparing the Web for Human Use, Bill Nisen, E-Institute http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/nisen/ Virtually Everything Virtually Everywhere: Pursuing A Radical Web Strategy, Andrew Aird, King's College London http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/aird/ Legislation, Disabilities and Educational Web Sites, Lawrie Phipps, TechDis http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/phipps/ The Lecturer's MIS Menu: Why Silver Service Is Off And Drive Thru's In, , Stephen Tanner, Colchester Institute http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/tanner/ Designing for Usability, Mark Simpson, De Montfort University http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/simpson/ Centralised Control or Departmental Freedom?, Mike McConnell and Iain Middleton, University of Aberdeen http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/mcconnell/ Portals and CMS Why You Need Them Both, Paul Browning, University of Bristol http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/browning/ Avoiding Portal Wars, Paul Browning, Tracey Stanley, Julie Stuckes and Tony Shaw http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/panel/ Debates, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/debate/ Discussion Groups, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/discussion-groups/ Briefing Sessions, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/sessions#briefings Vendor Presentations, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/sessions#vendor-slots Workshop Materials Parallel Sessions, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/materials/ Institutional Web Management Workshop 2002: The Pervasive Web, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/ Web Site Architecture, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/web-architecture.html YahooGroups, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/yahoogroups.html Weblogs and Blogs: What Are They?
What Can They Be Used For?, Duncan Smeed, University of Strathclyde http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/sessions.html#workshop-smeed-1 The Future of Authentication for JISC Services, JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/ar1/future_auth.html Workshop Conclusions, Brian Kelly, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/talks/conclusions/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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NT Explorer Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines NT Explorer Buzz data software java database browser sql cataloguing graphics windows perl personalisation e-business cookie url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brett Burridge Looks at Microsoft's Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition.
Microsoft were late to realise the potential of the Internet, so many of their Internet products came about through the acquisition of other companies.
In order to advance Windows NT Server as a viable platform for e-commerce, in 1996 Microsoft acquired e-Shop Inc., a small company specialising in e-commerce software.
e-Shop's software was integrated into Microsoft Merchant Server 1.0, which subsequently evolved into Microsoft Commerce Server 2.0.
Version 3.0 was released in early 1998, and added support for Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS).
Commerce Server 3.0 is supplied as the major component of Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition (SSCE).
The other component of SSCE is Ad Server.
One thing to note is that Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition should not be confused with the standard version of Site Server 3.0.
The standard version of Site Server contains a number of enhancements to IIS in the areas of content management, personalisation and site searching.
The Search facility of Site Server 3.0 was featured in a previous issue of Ariadne [1].
What is it, and what is it not?
It is important to bear in mind that SSCE is not a “shop in a box” solution.
In this way, it differs from products such as Actinic’s Actinic Catalogue [2], or Shop@ssistant [3], which require minimal configuration to get your online shop up and running.
The University of Sussex Alumni Society [4] is an example of a site that uses Shop@ssistant.
SSCE could perhaps more accurately be described as a collection of objects and conventions that aid shop creation.
SSCE comes supplied with a number of Component Object Model (COM) objects designed for integration with Active Server Pages.
There are objects for handling the usual shop facilities such as shopping baskets.
There is a pipeline editor for handling transactions.
And there is also a well defined set of coding conventions.
In particular, there are functions for encoding query strings, and for changing the site to use SSL when the site is ready to be deployed to the staging server.
Most of the sample code is based on ASP written in VBScript.
But since SSCE is based on COM, it is possible to develop the shop using any language that supports COM, e.g.
JScript, Java, Visual Basic, Visual C++ or even Perl.
SSCE contains two Wizards for building shops: the Site Foundation Wizard and the Commerce Site Builder Wizard.
The Foundation Wizard creates the bare bones of the site, including the required folders and certain files (such as the global.asa).
Although this can be used as the basis of a standard shop, it is usually best to subsequently make use of the Site Builder Wizard.
This Wizard will create a basic shop based on a number of shop types (these are described below).
Although very basic, the shops contain all the required ASPs and required database structure.
SSCE also requires additional software to get it up and running.
SSCE needs to be installed on a Windows NT Server machine running IIS 4 or above [16].
A database server is also required.
Although SSCE directly supports Access, SQL Server and Oracle, Access is only recommended for the smallest of shops.
The components of Site Server Commerce Edition One way of looking at SSCE is that it is a toolbox containing a number of components that are of use in creating the shop.
The major components are described below.
Baskets Of fundamental importance to the design of a shop is the "basket", into which shoppers add items they are interested in purchasing, before proceeding to the checkout (or leaving the shop without making a purchase).
The basic shops created by the Site Builder Wizard include all the required code and database structure for shopping baskets.
COM objects SSCE is supplied with a number of COM objects to aid creation of the shop.
The Predictor component is one such example.
The component takes information from shoppers’ purchases and calculates related products to those purchased.
As such it can be used in a similar way to Amazon.com’s recommendations feature (customers who bought book W also bought books X, Y and Z).
It can also be used for other scenarios (e.g.
for predicting what parts of a site your visitor might be interested in – see [5]).
The downside is that the predictor component needs a large amount of data before it becomes reliable, and so it is most likely to be of interest in subsequent modifications to a site.
Other COM objects supplied with SSCE include those for handling the shopping basket and order form, and those for manipulating the shop's website.
Pipelines Another essential part of SSCE is the concept of pipelines.
These are executed at certain stages of the shopper's progress through the shop.
For example, the purchase pipeline will run some basic checks on the shopper’s address, check the validity of the credit card number, then send an email to the shopper confirming their order.
Pipelines use Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) where appropriate, so failed transactions can be aborted.
Figure 1.
The Commerce Order Processing Pipeline Editor The advantage of using the pipelines is that they allow for much of the complexity of the shop to be separated from the ASP code.
Pipelines can be easily extended and customised through the use of the range of components supplied with SSCE, or through the use of custom written or third party components.
SSCE comes supplied with a number of useful components that can be used within pipelines, such as those for executing custom SQL or VBScript, or the sending of email.
The downside is that pipelines can be difficult to debug, especially if there are numerous stages within that pipeline.
Microsoft Wallet SSCE also supports Microsoft Wallet, a browser plug-in for Microsoft and Netscape browsers that allows a user's address and credit card details to be securely stored on the client machine, and card details to be safely passed to the online shop.
In practice, Microsoft Wallet is not widely used by shoppers, so the Wallet functionality is usually best removed from the basic shop template.
Microsoft have also invested heavily in Microsoft Passport [6], so it is unlikely that Wallet will ever become widely used.
Ad Server The Ad Server is used to manage the targeting of banner ads on the website.
Like the Wallet, the Ad Server appears to be little used by SSCE developers.
Coding Conventions As well as containing a number of useful COM objects and shop templates, SSCE also introduces certain coding conventions and procedures that can assist with cutting down on development time.
A few examples are listed below: Use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) SSCE obviously supports the use of SSL for the creation of a secure shopping environment.
It assists development of the secure site by containing an admin function that allows the site to be developed in a non secure environment, then the URLs of the live site to be modified to use https.
Handling of session state HTTP is a stateless protocol, and yet for an online shop it is critical that state is maintained between the various processes (browsing the shop, adding to the basket, ordering etc.)
Site Server supports two methods of maintaining state once the shopper has logged onto the site: cookies and query strings.
Cookies have their own particular problems of course.
One major problem with cookies is the fact that they cannot be used between servers, so a shop using cookies could not be as easily load balanced compared to one using query strings alone.
Site Server’s Personalisation and Membership features also require that cookies be used.
Use of the global.asa SSCE makes extensive use of the global.asa.
In particular, it stores SQL queries in a dictionary object so that they can be easily accessed from pipelines and ASP documents.
Error messages such as "At least one item is out of stock."
are also stored there.
Extendibility One obvious advantage of SSCE over "shop in a box" solutions is the ease with which the shop can be extended through the use of third party add-ons.
Most of these use COM components to provide additional services, such as linking to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems, real time processing of credit card details through a merchant account, tax handling and shop catalogue management.
An example of SSCE's extendibility is through the use of the DataCash NT Payment Gateway Module [7].
This is a third party application that allows for the real time processing of credit card details.
The downside to SSCE is that there can sometimes be major issues with extending the sample shops.
One particular problem I have encountered is that SSCE treats each item purchased as a single item in the basket, regardless of the quantity purchased.
This can cause major complications when you need to perform an operation on each item purchased, such as specifying the type of gift wrapping for items bought as presents.
The other problem is that experienced developers may have problems with doing things "the Site Server way", such as making extensive use of the global.asa, and using the special query string encoders.
Using the Site Builder Wizard Recognising that it would be time consuming to build an online shop from scratch, Microsoft have included the Site Builder Wizard, which allows a basic shop to be created from one of several shop templates.
Each of the Wizards builds the shop front, as well as a basic administration interface and the necessary database structure.
Figure 2.
The Commerce Site Builder Wizard The shop templates are: Clocktower – a simple business to consumer e-commerce shop.
Volcano Coffee – a more sophisticated business to consumer e-commerce shop, offering customer registration and product search facilities.
Microsoft Press – another business to consumer e-commerce shop, which implements cross-selling and the more sophisticated display of products.
Trey Research – this is a different type of shop to the previous templates in that it sells analyst’s reports that can be viewed online once they have been purchased.
This shop also makes use of Site Server's Personalisation & Membership features.
At the time of SSCE's release, interest from the developer community was firmly focussed on the creation of business to consumer shops, hence the bias towards the creation of business to consumer sites.
Additional templates for the Site Builder Wizard (such as an Auction Component [8]) are available from Microsoft.
Although these templates are useful starting points, a considerable amount of customisation is required.
For example, the payment facilities normally use the Microsoft Wallet browser plug-in as default, and the customer order numbers Site Server generates are very long.
The shop's administration site will also need integration with any back-end inventory or ordering systems you might have.
Needless to say, you will also need a graphic designer to spruce up the site.
Figure 3.
Part of a shop’s administration site created by the Site Builder Wizard Disadvantages of using SSCE A major limitation with SSCE is the cost – both in development time and software costs.
Good web developers with knowledge of SSCE are very difficult to find.
The cost of SSCE licences [9] is also significant.
As far as development is concerned, although there is a reasonable amount of documentation available, it tends to concentrate on the basic features.
In particular, there is little documentation with respect to using a few of the advanced features (such as integration with the Personalisation & Membership features of Site Server), and in particular, the integration with back-end legacy systems.
Future of Site Server Commerce Edition As you might expect, e-commerce is a core component of Microsoft's future strategy [10].
The next version of Commerce, Commerce Server 2000, has been recently released.
This new version adds advanced profiling and targeting of customers, data warehousing, data mining and analysis [11].
The product looks like being a complete, if costly, complete e-commerce solution.
Resources There are few web resources for SSCE when compared to those that cover topics such as Active Server Pages.
Both ASPToday and 15Seconds have sections dedicated to Site Server [12] and [13].
Microsoft [14] also have some useful articles, particularly in the areas of deployment and capacity planning.
An excellent reference guide is also available Professional Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition by Marco Tabini [15].
This book is an essential resource for anyone developing sites using SSCE.
Summary Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition is a useful starting point for web developers wishing to create a online shop on the Windows NT platform.
The package is flexible enough to allow the creation of a wide variety of shops.
The downside is that the package is costly, and requires significant expertise.
Author details Brett spent two years working in the University of Essex Computing Service before moving to a Microsoft Certified Solutions Provider based in London and the Netherlands.
The company develops E-business solutions using Microsoft and Java based web technologies for a range of multinational companies, as well as smaller start-up companies.
References Windows NT Explorer: The Microsoft Site Server Search Facility, Ariadne issue 19 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/nt/ Actinic Catalogue, website http://www.actinic.co.uk/ Shop@ssistant, website http://www.floyd.co.uk/system/index.html University of Sussex Alumni Society, website http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/alumni/ More Uses For The Predictor, ASPToday http://www.asptoday.com/articles/19990315.htm Microsoft Passport, website http://www.passport.com/ DataCash NT Payment Gateway Module, DataCash http://www.datacash.com/ Auction Component for Site Server Commerce, Microsoft http://www.eu.microsoft.com/siteserver/commerce/DeployAdmin/Auction.htm Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition Pricing and Licensing Information, Microsoft http://www.eu.microsoft.com/siteserver/commerce/ProductInfo/Pricing.htm E-Commerce on Microsoft Business, Microsoft http://www.eu.microsoft.com/business/ecommerce/ Microsoft Servers Microsoft Commerce Server, Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/ ASPToday Site Server Section, ASPToday http://www.asptoday.com/search.asp?category=Site%20server 15 Seconds : Site Server Section, 15 Seconds http://www.15seconds.com/focus/Site%20Server.htm Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition, Microsoft http://www.eu.microsoft.com/siteserver/commerce/ Professional Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition, Wrox Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861002505/brettbcom Windows NT Explorer: Internet Information Server, Ariadne issue 21 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/nt-explorer/ Author Details   Brett Burridge Email: brett@brettb.com Web: http://www.brettb.com/ Article Title: "NT Explorer: A brief overview of Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition" Author: Brett Burridge Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/nt-explorer/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Multi-media and Image Handling: The future is Textless Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Multi-media and Image Handling: The future is Textless Buzz data mobile software archives metadata css thesaurus standardisation graphics multimedia visualisation personalisation algorithm url research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Napier on a DTI multimedia day in London in November 2001.
The Software Technology Outreach Programme (1) was initiated in Autumn 2000 by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to bridge the gap between academia and industry.
As Tony Stock explains “More than 1,000 advanced projects are carried out in UK universities every year, each producing on average five potential business applications but companies are missing out because they and the universities are out of touch with each other”.
Software Technology Outreach coordinates a variety of different workshops on relevant technology research areas that provide an opportunity for academic researchers to present to a commercial audience.
Some of the recent seminars have included Virtual Reality: Real Uses, Advanced Networking and its Applications, New Roles for Software in Mobile Networks, Data Visualisation and Data Mining.
The programme of seminars is run in conjunction with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
In November I attended the Multi-media and Image Handling seminar to see what the programme has to offer academics and business professionals alike.
The seminar was held in the Regus Centre, No 1 Poultry just next to Bank tube station.
On exiting the station I suddenly felt like I was missing something…could it be a bowler hat and an umbrella?
Bank is situated in the heart of the city of London and there is serious business feel to the surrounds.
So what potential image handling products could academics offer these high-powered, fast-moving business people?
After coffee and an introduction by Tony Stock, Software Technology Outreach Programme Director, Richard Storey from the BBC Research and Development department gave a presentation on Software technology in broadcasting.
The majority of the presentation was spent discussing the problems the BBC have storing production information (metadata) and archiving material.
Very apt considering their recent call for old videos of BBC programmes.
After this Richard contemplated what will be next after television and radio and had a quick look at entertainment software.
Richard observed that broadcast is a conservative business and that they haven’t taken too well to IT.
This has created a proliferating amount of content without metadata and as he put it “content with no metadata is a liability”.
Richard’s concrete example of this was exploding nitrate films!
What the BBC need is a low cost solution that could link metadata to the essence (content).
The solution would need elements of audio content recognition, data mining from existing texts, image content recognition and contextual and natural language searching.
Richard and his Research and Development team are working on ideas but are still interested in finding out if anyone has anything better offer?
Someone suggested scanning the credits!
Richard’s talk led nicely into the one by Paul Lewis from the University of Southampton on Content based retrieval and navigation.
In the past metadata has been used to retrieve multimedia data from multimedia information bases.
Recent research has tried to address some of the limitations of using text metadata by making use of multimedia content as a basis for retrieval.
Paul discussed several projects he’s worked on/is working on in this area including MAVIS, MAVIS 2 and ARTISTE (2).
The ARTISTE (An integrated Art Analysis and Navigation Environment) project is working at building a tool for the intelligent retrieval and indexing of high-resolution images.
As part of their research they are investigating sub image location, crack classification and border finding and classification.
These methods use algorithms that deal with the ‘semantic gap’ through use of a ‘Multimedia Thesaurus’ for images.
Paul concluded by saying that these methods have their own set of limitations and content based retrieval for non-text media is still too crude to be used on its own without additional support.
Farzin Mokhtarian’s presentation was on The Curvature Scale Space representation (CSS for short which could be easily confused with cascading style sheets if you work in web development).
Shape, like colour and texture features, can also give a great deal of information about images.
Farzin explained that 2D shapes can be represented using a multi-scale organisation (graph) which then allows searching on particular shapes.
Using even more complicated algorythms it is possible to have 3D and noisy artificial object recognition.
The CSS shape detector was actually selected for MPEG-7 standardisation in September this year.
I took a deep breath…things did seem to be getting progressively more academic.
The last presentation before lunch was given by Boris Mirkin of Birbeck College on Intelligent K-means clustering.
K-means clustering’ is a popular method of data mining, however it has been found to have a number of limitations such as data standardization.
Boris proposed some effective algorithms for automatically producing both the initial setting and three-level interpretation aids.
After the presentations there was some time for discussion.
A delegate from the Heritage Image Partnership asked about what had changed in the multimedia and image-handling world in the last 10 years given that the essence of the problems discussed was already there then and it is still remains difficult to retrieve images using media content.
The speakers seemed in agreement that the big change has been in perceptions and attitudes, not technology.
10 years ago archives were being created but nobody really understood why, or what benefits they would have.
Now with more sophisticated and faster computers managers are starting to realise that there is money in archives, searching and image handling.
Although there is no longer a technological wall stopping us find the answers to these problems there is still much research needed before academics arrive at a product that is suitable for mainstream multi-media and image handling.
I pondered that the situation is very similar to that of machine translation; once the algorithms are cracked the technology will follow.
After lunch, a cup of tea and a quick walk around Bank for some fresh air the second lot of presentations began.
Dave Elliman of Nottingham University started the afternoon on a lighter note with his presentation on Image extraction and Interpretation (or escaping from under the paper mountain).
Dave used some great sound effects and a short parable to demonstrate the negative repercussions of information overload.
As a cure for the problem he proffered Nottingham University’s various state of the art paper ‘capturing and understanding’ systems.
At this point in time Nottingham can offer cue-based agents that answer mail automatically, document readers that recognise hand written and cursive script, and content-based retrieval systems.
Dave explained that if a document can be understood it can be stored efficiently and easily formatted.
When asked how his software differed from the other paper capturers out there he gave its adaptability and personalization features as an answer.
Dave left us with an image in our heads of a time when all documents could be processed entirely automatically or discarded without anyone needing to spend valuable time reading them.
I wasn’t too sure if when this day comes it would mean we’d either find ourselves with time on our hands to do the things we really should be doing or all out of jobs.
Xiaohong Gao from Middlesex University gave the next presentation on recent progress in PET Image retrieval and traffic sign recognition in which she considered two areas of research.
She started of by discussing the two main image types on which the majority research on indexing medical images by their content features (e.g.
tumor shape, texture) has been done computerised tomodensitometry (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MR) images.
She then introduced another image type, Position Emission Tomography (PET).
The second half of her presentation considered a vision model based approach for traffic sign recognition.
Min Chen of the University of Wales gave the final presentation of the day on Volume Graphics.
Volume graphics is a new field in computer graphics concerned with graphic scenes defined in volume data types; a model is specified by a mass of points instead of a collection of surfaces.
The day ended with some discussion on one of the points made by Min Chen on the gap between the academic software community and business users.
He had used the slide above to discuss the flow of research to product.
He felt that ideas are encouraged through academic research and that products are created using business acumen because there is money to make.
However to arrive at a business product technologies need to be created and at the moment there seems to have emerged a gap in the process.
Delegates discussed how to bring people’s ideas to the market businesses would need to get involved at an earlier stage when the financial gains are not so high.
Industry needs to take further risks and academics need to make sure they are more exploitative with their research.
Delegates felt that partnership between business and academia need not always have a financial basis and suggestions for further collaboration included businesses providing real data for researchers to work with.
After the discussion people carried on business card swapping, networking and deliberating over the issues raised during the day.
The Software Technology Outreach Programme definitely seems to be on the way to bridging the knowledge gap between universities and industry.
(1) Software Technology Outreach Programme http://www.st-outreach.org.uk (2) ARTISTE: An integrated Art Analysis and Navigation Environment http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/artiste/ Author Details   Marieke Napier, Email: m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Multi-media and Image Handling: The future is textless” Author: Marieke Napier Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/dti/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Library Resource Sharing and Discovery: Catalogues for the 21st Century Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Library Resource Sharing and Discovery: Catalogues for the 21st Century Buzz data database infrastructure metadata browser cataloguing windows z39.50 telnet authentication interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne reports on the highlights of the recent Glasgow CLUMPS one day conference This article is supplementary to the issue 23 report on the CLUMPS event at Goldsmiths College in March this year, and perhaps should be read in conjunction with both that report and Peter Stubley’s article on ‘What have the CLUMPS ever done for us?’ in the same issue.
Details of presentations which were broadly similar to those given at Goldsmiths are not repeated here, but can be found in the Ariadne 23 report.
Ariadne made the trip to the north a few days before the conference, so by the day of the event was thoroughly acclimatised for the weather.
Grey skies, some rain, but not too windy.
Took the underground (the ‘Clockwork Orange’) to Hillhead, and was quickly no more than five minutes’ walk away from the University’s precincts.
The trains are on the dinky side, in comparison with other metro railways (hence the clockwork part of the nickname), but sound and feel like a proper underground system.
This being Ariadne’s first experience of the Glasgow underground, the width of the platforms between the tracks was unnerving: no more than eight feet or so, from edge to edge, with no safety barriers.
Which works out at four feet each for the public travelling in each direction.
Ariadne moved along the platform with caution, trying to imagine how Saturday night revellers would cope with this, and decided that they probably took the bus instead.
The Boyd-Orr Building is a fairly typical example of mid-1970’s architecture in Scottish Universities: a tower design, to get the maximum teaching space out of expensive urban land; rubberised flooring to soften a concrete floor (economy), plus cattle sized industrial strength lifts to stop the staff and students having heart-attacks on their way up the stairs to the 9th floor seminar.
In Edinburgh, the Appleton Tower with its prairie of rubber on the entrance hall floor, and also the David Hume Tower, used to (perhaps still do) admit horrendous drafts as well as rain through ill-fitting windows (of which there were many); but it was not very windy on this Glasgow day, and Ariadne could not tell if the Boyd-Orr Building had the same problems.
Historically however it used to have another wind problem, mentioned later in this report.
Addressing University Priorities: CLUMPed or Free Text Searching?
Mark Denham of the CAIRNS Project was the chair for the morning sessions.
Ian Mowat, Librarian to the University of Edinburgh, gave the keynote address of the day, ‘Shall Clumps match university library priorities?’ He was obviously concerned that some of the audience might have heard his views before: in this regard he quoted a famous true story concerning the third member of a famous Scottish academic cum medical dynasty, the Munros.
Munro Tertius began a lecture in 1824 by reading from his grandfather’s notes, which was his usual practice.
On the day in question Tertius began with the phrase ‘when I was a student in Leyden in 1718…’ which understandably resulted in uproar on the benches.
Mowat is a member of a JISC committee and is also on the advisory boards for CAIRNS and Riding, and so has aired his views to the eLib community before.
However there were many non-eLib faces in the audience for this meeting, so for many, as for Ariadne, these views were heard for the first time.
He briefly outlined the background of the CLUMPS programme: it was part of the 2nd phase of eLib, and this phase was supposed to learn from the experience of parts of the 1st phase.
It also set out to explore moving towards delivering a service essentially to find out what it was like.
CLUMPS projects were set up to allow the possibility of wider access access to more than the user’s host library.
CLUMPS have explored various alternatives, such as subject versus geographical approaches (three of the clumps are geographically based, and there is one subject clump).The definition of ‘CLUMP’ was also explored.
In the dictionary, the original term refers to trees, shrubs.
Mowat developed the metaphor: these objects don’t have to be the same species, he argued, but one might expect the clumped trees and shrubs to be of broadly the same genus.
CLUMPS are a technical solution to a perceived problem, using Z39.50 technology.
Beyond that, there was, at the time of the inception of the programme, the feeling that it was a positive move towards service delivery.
It was also about the complex institutional politics that go towards developing a service.
Looking at the service side of the programme, he pointed out that in the ‘real world’ of the user, every user is a member of several CLUMPS.
The programme aimed at trying to bring order and definition to the issue of developing services, but, he argued, if we are not careful, the CLUMPS groups might become unhelpful users might want access to another CLUMP elsewhere.
Ariadne understood this to mean that the advantages of grouping might be undone by users wanting access to differently CLUMPed resources elsewhere resources essentially of a different genus.
Mowat briefly looked at the lessons learned from CLUMPS in the areas of access, lending, ILL, and membership.
Lots of registrations have taken place for the CLUMPs lending facilities.
The technology has helped by making virtual access easier, and by showing how physical access might be had.
However the Scottish Library Group has not taken forward CLUMPS idea for purposes of ILL (Mowat chairs the Group).
Dennis Nicholson has urged this, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Mowat argued that ‘a feeling of membership is really what it is about’.
The feedback from the Riding project is that ILL has been improved as a result of the project: however his own feeling is that the ILL world is moving so fast that these prototype services will be an irrelevance, since so much happening, and so fast.
The future for CLUMPS technology is as intra-library loans, rather than ILL.
The CLUMPS lessons are important also in that they are useful for the JISC/CEI (Committee for Electronic Information) in determining where we go from here.
Mowat remains unconvinced about the National Union Catalogue as a proposal, since no-one has put pen to paper to explain what these catalogues are for.
We (the HE community, the users) have different needs at different times.
The nation (in this context) doesn’t mean much, and is a carry over from the idea of the nation state.
There is a role in the wider international context but it is, maybe, best to scale up from a national catalogue to a global catalogue.
These questions have not been asked.
CLUMPS have raised questions about how you do it; and whether to use a physical or a virtual catalogue.
His gut feeling is that the experience of the CLUMPS has suggested that Z39.50 is not the ideal solution.
It may be that there is technology in development which serves the purpose better.
But these technical developments are in the same position today as was z39.50 when we thought it was the solution.
OCLC has 43 million items in its database which means that the single physical entity model is a practical one.
But OCLC has problems with the updating of the entries in this database.
A CLUMP of CLUMPS approach is conceivably better in terms of keeping a large database of records up to date.
But he is of the view that it is a big question as to whether catalogues will be necessary in future: the power of search engines is so powerful that free text searching may be as quick as metadata searching (this argument generally put to him by colleagues from a computing service background).
Ariadne was surprised at this view, since it seems to discount the value of structured information as opposed to raw data.
There is in Lewis Carroll a passage known as ‘The Paradox of the Complete Map,’ which is of relevance here (Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893: see note [1]).
Some mapmakers are represented as deciding that the most accurate map of territory is the territory itself.
But the problem with this is that the definition ‘accurate’ doesn’t address the usefulness (or otherwise) of the map to the user.
Whereas something more subjective and tailored structured information might be of more navigational use.
This ‘structured information’ v ‘free text searching’ (the map v the territory) dispute has been running for some time, and will continue to run as long as the annual increase in processing power continues.
The usefulness to the user is critically important in the design of services: however it is not always clear at the outset what ‘useful’ is or how it might be defined.
Ian Mowat mentioned the first days of the Boyd-Orr building, in which it was discovered that, on windy days, the architectural design funnelled air through the front doors so effectively that some of the students were propelled towards the ‘out’ doors on the other side of the building, without the benefit of the lectures which were supposed to be attended somewhere in between.
The situation did not improve until a suitably placed wall was constructed to help the students stay in the building.
Other Views Matthew Dovey spoke twice during the day: both times on Z39.50 related issues.
During the first of these presentations he introduced the concept of the ‘Mega-Clump’.
Ariadne checked this over lunch with him since there was the possibility that Ariadne misheard ‘mega-clump’ for ‘meta-clump’ at the Goldsmiths event.
It turned out that this was not the case: however Ariadne is still adrift with respect to the development of the terminology in this field.
John Gilby spoke for the M25 project.
They have a vision for easier resource discovery, and are ‘doing stuff’ on interoperability (or will be) with UKOLN.
Fraser Nicolaides spoke on evaluation issues in the project, using the same powerpoint as John Gilby.
M25 has been using four lots of focus groups, and they have been looking at the usefulness (perceived needs) and the structure and appearance of the user interface.
This has resulted in detailed amendment of the interface.
Most of the changes which were required were organisational (i.e.
access to libraries questions, and ILL).
These are essentially questions beyond the actual scope of the M25 Link project, but are questions which have to be addressed if M25 Link is to become a service.
Services ought to have a user-centric perspective.
An example of the kind of problem they had in mind was given: searches on the author Graham Greene four versions of the name used in searches will return records of some sort, but no individual search will return all.
A user-centric interface has somehow to cope with this kind of problem.
Community Profiles were also discussed, as before at Goldsmiths.
Dennis Nicholson took friendly issue with Ian Mowat’s view, expressed earlier in the day, that metadata might not be necessary his view is that not only is it necessary, but it is essential.
Speed of search is an illusion CAIRNS has struggled with this perception which tends to come from the computing side of things.
The issue needs to be addressed.
Dennis’s CAIRNS talk looked at three areas, which were: visions/issues/Pathways.
CAIRNS aims at a distributed union catalogue with a single user interface, allowing users to search clumps of servers, using server based dynamic clumping.
The project was aimed at creating a union catalogue for Scottish Higher education without the cost and effort of setting up and maintaining a central database.
They wanted it to integrate these with access to other clumps.Other issues addressed by the CAIRNS project include ILL; authentication, distributed approach to serials (i.e., SALSER).
CAIRNS currently has 13 databases not big enough to justify the mechanisms which it uses, but it is assumed it will become bigger.
Lunch!
Internet Café!
Lunch was available in a cafeteria a short walk away.
It was grey and windy day, but fortunately the local elements were not out to show what they are made of.
The buffet lunch was tasty and fine.
Ariadne was engaged for the whole of the lunch in a discussion about the current redundancy of overlapping and equivocal terms relating to digital libraries, many of which have the strength and resilience of herbicide resistant weeds.
The Internet Cafe was set up in a fairly small lab rather than the spacious layout at Goldsmiths, and furthermore was on the sixth floor of the windy tower (we used the lift).
Lunch and the Cafe were split into two sessions therefore, in order to avoid overcrowding (attendees were given different colours of ticket on arrival).
The machines were set up for the demonstration of the CLUMPS gateways rather than any more flexible use (i.e., email), but a resourceful person associated with CAIRNS soon found a way of invoking telnet sessions :-).
Summary Address Richard Heseltine, who is on the advisory committee for the RIDING project, was invited to give the summary address for this meeting.
He performed the same service for the CLUMPS meeting held in 1999 in the St Pancras British Library building.
He argued that what was wanted was a certain openness being able to search across a range of resources which are not predetermined.
Richard recalled that many years before he worked for the SCOLCAP project in the early eighties, and that it bore similarities to current efforts.
One of its problems was that all of it was proprietary (i.e., not interoperable).
There was then no z39.50, and there were no common standards.
Now we have some standards, but there are problems because of the variety of z39.50 implementations, and profiles.
In addition, Web browsers create problems because of their inherent statelessness, and cataloguing standards differ between institutions.
Richard referred to a remark of Matthew Dovey’s that the Web browser may not be the most appropriate means of accessing information from multiple target databases, and Richard asked if perhaps the Bath profile was intended to address this issue.
Originally the benefit of z39.50 was using the interface with which you were familiar to search another database, and then it became the searching of several databases the origin of the problems we are now experiencing.
Richard then turned to the issue of the CLUMPS.
What are CLUMPS for?
Everybody agrees that they have to supply services.
But the Jury is still out.
On the question of access, he noted that CLUMPS have stimulated reciprocal borrowing arrangements.
But these developments should not be exaggerated: in Yorkshire for example, Leeds University stopped CLUMPing for borrowing.
As far as ILL is concerned, it is still too early to tell.
He was hopeful that the CLUMPS will improve access to books.
And mused that perhaps we might see the return of van services!
He felt that the CLUMPS will survive as resource discovery options and access rights.
He thought that they might transform into something else, here referring to Dennis Nicholson’s contribution earlier in the day, when he described the CAIRNS/ SCONE vision for a cross-sectoral Scottish distributed catalogue and, in particular, the idea of using the catalogue records of the National Library of Scotland database to tackle interoperability problems associated with legacy metadata.
This, he thought, sounded suspiciously like SCOLCAP reborn.
The providers of resource discovery (covering bibliographic info) have an important role to play.
But organisational integration (referring to Ian Mowat’s contribution earlier in the day) needs to be embedded in institutional structures: there needs to be a cross-sectorality.
There is currently a great growth in part-time learning VCLOPS for example CAIRNS might underpin something like this, and the organisational integration of the CLUMPS as a whole might be institutionally embedded as part of these developments (Richard referred to the 7⁄99 JISC call).
He repeated a view Ariadne first heard from him at the UKOLN conference in 1998: that there should be more integration of learning and working environments.
Richard agreed with Ian Mowat that he was not clear about what a National Union Catalogue is, or is for, but was of the opinion that, whatever it is, it will be created.
He expressed the view that it will be a monument to cataloguers, however, and not the end users.
Richard then made a few remarks on the current organisational and institutional environment for CLUMPS type projects, and its suitability as an infrastructure for the development of services.
Richard concluded by referring to the recent appointment of Lynne Brindley as Director of the British Library as a very positive development, and hoped that in future it might be possible to talk of the ‘Electronic British Library’.
References ‘That’s another thing we’ve learned from vour Nation.’ said Mein Herr.
“map-making.” But we’ve carried it much further than you.
What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful ?’ ‘About six inches to the mile.’ ‘Only six inches!’ exclaimed Mein Herr.
‘We very soon got to six yards to the mile.
Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile.
And then came the grandest idea of all!
We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!’ ‘Have vou used it much ?’ I enquired.
‘It has never been spread out, yet.’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight!
So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’ From Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, by Lewis Carroll, 1893.
At: http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Carroll/Sylvie/ Information about the programme for each of the two CLUMPS conferences is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/elib-clumps-2000/ CLUMPS projects can be accessed via the eLib Programme Projects page: http://ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/ ‘Catalogues for the Twenty-first Century?’ A report on the Goldsmiths conference on the 3rd March 2000.
Peter Stubley’s article What have the CLUMPS ever done for us?, delivered to to the ‘Catalogues for the Twenty-first Century?’ conference at Goldsmiths, is available in Ariadne issue 23.
Peter Stubley’s ‘Clumps as Catalogues: virtual success or failure?’ looks at the state of of parallel searching with Z39.50, and was published in Ariadne issue 22: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/distributed/distukcat2.html Matthew Dovey’s ‘So you want to build a union catalogue?’: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/dovey/intro.html Author Details   Ariadne UKOLN University of Bath Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Catalogues for the Twenty-first Century?” Author: Ariadne Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/glasgow-clumps/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Migration: A Camileon Discussion Paper Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Migration: A Camileon Discussion Paper Buzz data software framework database archives identifier video preservation graphics multimedia rtf ascii gif url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Wheatley explores migration issues for the long-term preservation of digital materials.
Aims This paper is intended to continue the debate on the different uses of migration for the long-term preservation of digital materials.
This discussion will hopefully form the basis of future comparisons between migration and emulation as part of the CAMiLEON project’s investigation of emulation as a digital preservation strategy (A look at some of the practical aspects of an emulation preservation strategy can be found in “Emulation, Preservation and Abstraction” [1] by David Holdsworth and Paul Wheatley).
To this end there are three key aims: To break down the traditionally broad view of migration into more easily digestible components and to develop some standard terminology for these different migration practices.
Consider the options for the migration of digital materials by working from a number of practical examples.
Begin to discuss some of the issues arising from this categorisation of migration options.
This paper provides no easy answers and there is still a long way to go.
Hopefully it does take us at least one step nearer to the confident use of migration as a viable tool for long term digital preservation.
What is migration?
Migration of digital materials in the traditional sense has typically only dealt with relatively simple digital objects that are converted in a series of steps to current platforms.
Little research has been conducted as to its use beyond this level.
Access to word processor files, statistical data files and bitmap image files has been maintained by migrating from one format to another, often by the import facilities of current application software.
With more complex digital objects it is not immediately clear how these would be migrated or what migration in this context actually means.
Furthermore, is migration at all useful in this field or is emulation always a better strategy for preserving these more complex objects?
The CPA/RLG report [2] provides a useful and broad definition of migration as “…a set of organised tasks designed to achieve the periodic transfer of digital materials from one hardware/software configuration to another, or from one generation of computer technology to a subsequent generation.” This paper will attempt to describe what these different tasks could be in a practical sense and discuss their relative usefulness in different contexts.
Implementations of some or all of these migrations may provide comparisons for the user testing of these resources in an emulated environment (The CAMiLEON [3] project will be performing user testing of various digital resources both in their original environments and in emulated environments).
This paper will also introduce the concept of recreation as a an alternative digital preservation strategy that is related to migration.
Migration, the story so far The influential Open Archiving Information System (OAIS) [4] breaks down migration into four categories; refreshment, replication, repackaging and transformation.
This is useful, but we can certainly go much further.
In particular, refreshment, replication and repackaging are distinct processes in themselves, which are more appropriately associated with the general management of an archive.
These processes merely ensure that we maintain a reliable copy of the bytestream of our digital object (refreshment) or a manageable package within an OAIS archive (replication and repackaging).
Surely it is sensible not to group these within the overall moniker of migration.
OAIS transformation actually modifies the bytestream of a digital object (so that it can be interpreted on a current computer platform) and this is what will specifically be considered as the process of migration within this paper.
OAIS goes further in breaking down this migration into two more categories; reversible migration and non-reversible migration.
This is a crucial distinction.
The only way to guarantee that no information will be lost when a migration is performed is the litmus test of a backwards migration which recreates the original object precisely.
Charles Dollar [5] begins to break down the overall task of preservation into different categories and makes some important distinctions between migration and related processes (see “Authentic Electronic Records: Strategies for Long-Term Access” by Charles Dollar).
He is keen to highlight the differences between maintaining the “processibility” of digital objects and the function of actual migration.
The former relies on import/export facilities of current software to convert digital objects to a current format, and the latter involves a far more involved process of performing a migration to a current format without these existing application aids and perhaps little knowledge of the formats and systems involved.
However, a third and related strategy, which needs to be highlighted, is the Cedars Project’s cautious but sensible take on migration.
This aims to preserve both the original bytestream and a tool for understanding or interpreting the original object.
This is discussed in more detail under section a href=“#3.5”>3.5.
Dollar identifies maintaining the authenticity of a digital object as a key aim in the migration process.
He suggests that migrating objects may result in some loss of their original properties.
However, we have to be far more pessimistic and accept that migration will always result in some losses of this kind.
This makes it essential to identify these side effects in order that the best preservation method is chosen for each circumstance and that the implications of any migration action that is taken are fully understood.
“Risk Management of Digital Information : A File Format Investigation” [6] by Lawrence et al, attempts to quantify the risks involved in the use of migration and analyses several commercially available migration tools for their relative accuracy.
This practical investigation has led to the identification of some key requirements for migration software: Read the source file and analyze the differences between it and the target format.
Identify and report the degree of risk if a mismatch occurs.
Accurately convert the source file(s) to target specifications.
Work on single files and large collections.
Provide a record of its conversions for inclusion in the migration project documentation.
These requirements are equally applicable for tools used as part of the three migration strategies identified above, but few existing tools come close to meeting all of them.
Dollar envisions a diminished role for migration in future times as the producers of digital objects move towards standard or open formats and the application software, which renders proprietary format objects, provide built in export and import features which can be relied on to perform format “conversion”.
Unfortunately it is not in the interest of software developers to rely completely on open formats like RTF and there is little interest from publishers in providing digital objects in any form other than those desired by current users.
The trend of increasing complexity in ‘published’ digital objects also looks set to continue.
With these driving forces working against the common sense voice of the preservation community it seems rather optimistic that our preservation challenge will become easier with time.
To this end we must continue to be sceptical of the longevity of current format ‘standards’ (and platforms) and develop suitable migration or emulation strategies, before it is too late to preserve much of our digital heritage.
The difficulties inherent in the understanding and interpretation of data formats, whose design has been influenced by commercial software developers, is illustrated all too well by Lawrence et al.
The report reveals that even when format specifications are publicly available they are often incomplete.
Furthermore a substantial component of file format specifications often consist of non-standard elements which “provide the competitive edge for third-party software and rarely are openly circulated.” 1.4 Who are we preserving for?
This is a broad look at preserving a range of digital objects and no assumptions about who the materials are being preserved for have been made.
A software historian will obviously have very different requirements to those of a sociologist solely interested in the raw intellectual content of an object.
Each digital object has a range of significant properties (see [7] A blueprint for Representation Information in the OAIS model” by David Holdsworth and Derek Sergeant) that we may be interested in preserving, but few preservation methods retain all of them.
Performing migration in order to preserve is, to a certain extent, always going to be a contradiction.
By changing the form or even the structure of a digital object the final output will not be a strict preservation of the original.
In many cases this is acceptable but it is important to consider very carefully and understand fully the potential loss of content and structure when using migration as a preservation strategy.
The only kind of migration which does not pose a significant risk of loss is a reversible migration.
A useful series of questions that should be asked before preserving a digital object might be: Who are we preserving for?
Why are we preserving?
What are the relevant significant properties of the object, given the answers of the above?
Which method of preservation will most accurately preserve these significant properties within time/cost constraints.
It should be noted that assumptions have not been made as to any particular starting point from which a preservation action may take place.
Access to the object running on the original platform may be available in some cases.
Alternatively future historians may be engaged in ‘digital archaeology’ and have no information or experience of a certain object’s format, never mind access to its original platform and running environment.
BBC materials The BBC Micro platform [8] was chosen as a source for the test materials for several key reasons.
Primarily it offers a source of material that is at risk of loss and at the same time contains some valuable intellectual content that is worth preserving.
A wide range of educational material was produced for the BBC Micro platform, much of which is in danger of being lost.
Examples include a range of software produced for the Micro Electronics Programme and the BBC Domesday Project which collected together 2 laser discs worth of social and geographical material on the UK.
A comprehensive description of the Domesday Project, by one of the original project team, can be found online [9].
Working with material that is not current allows ourselves to be placed in the role of the archivist working to preserve materials that are becoming obsolete, rather than simply performing arbitrary and unrealistic tests on current materials.
The BBC materials were selected to provide a cross section of data types and complexity across a fairly small number of resources.
All these resources and their respective software applications (where applicable) are available for download on the Internet for use on the original hardware, under emulation or as the source for a migration of some kind.
Appendix A provides a brief description of these applications.
Obviously these examples are not directly analogous to every instance where migration could be used, but they do offer a starting point for this bottom up development and discussion of migration strategies.
Terminology It is abundantly clear that many migration terms (namely conversion , translation, transformation and indeed migration itself) have taken on meanings from several disciplines leading to much potential for confusion.
In the following discussions an attempt has been made to avoid misleading terms and to use new more explicit ones where appropriate.
Preservation processes The following represents an attempt to break down migration as a generalised term into the different practical migration tasks or methods available for digital preservation.
I will then describe the outputs of these preservation methods when applied to our test materials in the table below.
The final section of the paper will discuss these options, their implications and their usefulness (or otherwise) in different situations.
Minimum preservation Minimum preservation refers to preserving a copy of the bytestreams that make up the original object (a copy of the original bytestream should always be retained in addition to any other migrations that modify the original).
Minimum migration This method represents fairly trivial migration tasks that require very little technical work.
This is a simple way of improving a minimum preservation for human viewing.
These tasks could be performed by hand or automated using a software tool as a simple example of automatic conversion migration (see below).
A possible example of a minimum migration could be a word processor file that is stripped of all but the common ASCII characters.
This process would naturally remove all formatting and structure from the document, but would be a very simple, cheap and easy way of gaining access to the raw text of the document.
Preservation Migration The three forms of preservation migrations defined below combine the most basic form of access to the intellectual content, with a non-technical way of preserving some of the look and feel of the original digital object.
Dollar sites that “In some instances where it is technically possible to preserve all the functionality and integrity associated with electronic records during migration, the costs of doing so may exceed available resources.” A preservation migration is an example of a possible strategy in this situation.
Obviously the additional information recorded will create a new preservation issue in itself, so the data formats used should be considered carefully, with an eye for longevity.
Basic preservation migration.
This involves recording screen shots of the software in use.
This could be a snapshot of the actual screen display on the obsolete platform, or a photo of the VDU while the digital object is viewed.
Annotated preservation migration.
A more comprehensive record than the basic preservation migration which includes textual descriptions and annotations describing the function and look and feel of the object in question.
Complex Preservation migration.
As above, but using simple additional methods to capture descriptive information about the original object.
An example of which could be captured video sequences to record key processes in the use of the digital object (eg.
For a word processor document this might involve recording the sequences of running the word processor application, loading the digital document and scrolling through some of its content).
Recreation A recreation is the re-coding of a digital object by hand.
With a document this could mean re-typing the text in a current application and adding formatting to match the original.
At the other end of the scale, a complex software object could be re-coded on a current platform from scratch.
Human conversion migration A human conversion migration uses exactly the same processes of reproducing the function of the object, but some element of the original object (usually the data rather than the software) will be incorporated in the final migrated object.
An example would be a human conversion migration of the BBC Domesday [7] object which combined the original (or automatically conversion migrated versions of the original) image and textual data with a newly recreated or re-coded software front end.
Automatic conversion migration An automatic conversion migration uses a software tool to interpret and modify a digital object into a new form.
A typical example would be to take a word processor file from the BBC and output the object as a Word98 document.
This is a good example of a traditional view of migration.
The following table describes the practical output of these different methods of preservation on the BBC example resources.
Note that I have not considered emulation strategies to be within the scope of this document.
For an in depth technical look at emulation, see “Emulation, Preservation and Abstraction” [1] by David Holdsworth and Paul Wheatley.
BBC Resource View document View Store document Human Digestive system Chuckie Egg Resource Description Document for use with typical BBC word processor.
Document for use with typical BBC database program.
Interactive multimedia program with sound and animations.
Classic ‘platform’ arcade game.
Minimum preservation Copy of document’s bytestream.
Can be examined in ASCII/hex viewer.
Copy of the bytestream of all files making up the database.
Copy of the bytestreams of the files that make up the program.
BASIC files can be viewed in tokenised BASIC viewer.
Copy of the bytestreams of the files that make up the program.
BASIC files can be viewed in tokenised BASIC viewer.
Minimum Migration Edited/processed copy of the document as a text file.
Control codes removed in ASCII editor.
Remaining file can be viewed in text viewer.
Textual dump of spreadsheet view of database.
Data is then viewed in text viewer.
Screendumps converted to GIF files for use in graphics viewer.
Tokenised BASIC converted to raw text to view in text viewer.
Level data cut and pasted from program code to view in a Hex viewer.
Tokenised BASIC converted to raw text to view in text viewer.
Basic preservation migration As above with screenshots (either screendumps grabbed with a utility on the BBC and then converted to a current graphics format (e.g.
GIF) or graphics files digitised from the BBC’s video output) of several views of the document in the word processor.
As above with screenshots of key moments in the use of the program (e.g.
Each table view).
As above with screenshots of key moments in the use of the program (e.g.
Each diagram).
As above with screenshots of key moments in the use of the program (e.g.
Loading screens, and several in game views).
Annotated Preservation Migration As above with annotations to the screenshots.
As above with annotations to the screenshots.
As above with annotations to the screenshots.
As above with annotations to the screenshots.
Complex Preservation Migration As above with video sequences of the word processor while viewing the document.
Video clips accompanied by textual descriptions and explanations of program processes.
As above with video sequences of the database while viewing the data.
Video clips accompanied by textual descriptions and explanations of program processes.
As above with video sequences of key moments in the use of the program (e.g.
Each digestion animation).
Video clips accompanied by textual descriptions and explanations of program processes.
As above with video sequences of key moments in the use of the program (e.g.
Playing through a level of the game, losing a life, etc).
Video clips accompanied by textual descriptions and explanations of game processes.
Recreation Document is “re-keyed” into a current word processor, based on a print out or display of the original document in View.
Database data is re-keyed and database structure is reproduced in a current database application.
Program software is re-coded on a current platform in a current computer language, based on appearance and function of original.
Program software is re-coded on a current platform in a current computer language, based on appearance and function of original.
Human conversion migration As above, but the text and image data from the original object is incorporated into the migrated object.
As above but the level data is incorporated into the migrated object.
Automatic conversion migration Format conversion program transforms the document from View format to a current word processor format.
Format conversion program transforms the tables, data and structure from ViewStore format to a current database format.
Original program code is converted line by line to a current language.
This is combined with program data and graphics to produce a working conversion of the original.
Original program code is converted line by line to a current language.
This is combined with program data and graphics to produce a working conversion of the original.
Discussion of migration possibilities Minimum migration The minimum migration method collects together methods of migration that require a minimum of technical work.
The raw bytestreams are hand edited in hex or text editors to produce a clear human understandable text output.
In the case of the View files, a look at the raw bytestream in an editor reveals readable chunks of ASCII text with some control codes which can be stripped away by hand or a simple migration tool (perhaps even the search and replace features of modern text editors).
This could provide a better representation of one of the significant properties (i.e.
the intellectual content of the raw textual data) of word processor files that do not rely on a large amount of formatting.
The advantage of this method is its simplicity and ease of execution in comparison to an automatic conversion migration or complete re-keying of the data.
With the ViewStore database, this method also seems to make some sense where cost is an issue.
Saving a text dump of the database view loses all of the database functionality, but it does give a cheap and reliable way of getting to a substantial amount of the intellectual content.
As long as the original bytestream is maintained along with any relevant documentation (in this case the valuable original ViewStore manual which describes the ViewStore file format in detail) for the possibility of better preservation work in the future, this migration method could be a useful stop gap measure.
In the case of the Human Digestive System object, graphical data is converted to a current graphic format.
It could be argued that this is a more complex operation that should come under the banner of an automatic conversion migration.
However, at this level I’ve considered the conversion between bitmap graphics formats as a relatively trivial task and so have included it here.
Obviously with regard to migration costs this is not very technical work, so unit costs will be small but the overall cost for a large number of files could be prohibitive.
If an automated approach is taken where a simple conversion tool is produced to perform the migrations, there will be a single initial cost after which unit costs will be low.
Preservation migrations If emulation or code conversion of the Chuckie Egg object is not possible for technical or cost reasons then it would seem prudent to preserve as much of the look and feel of the original as possible by taking a visual record.
For the object to be recreated in the future by re-coding, a video record of the game in action would be invaluable.
There are obviously doubts over authenticity of this kind of “preservation” and important questions about what we’re actually trying to preserve.
For many preservation purposes these strategies could be seen as woefully inadequate, but in the absence of alternatives, a last ditch effort to record as much information as possible may be all that can realistically be done.
With the rapid obsolescence of computing platforms and the vast amount of digital material at risk, compromises between the quality of preservation work and the reality of losing valuable data may have to be made.
With regard to more simple digital objects, a preservation migration of a View file could actually be seen as a sensible way of preserving digital objects of this kind.
A large quantity of data in View format could be preserved with a minimum migration or (more usefully) an automatic conversion migration, but with a small number of files preserved additionally using a preservation migration.
We then retain at least some record of the look and feel of the original environment in which the objects were created.
This goes a long way to reduce the costs involved in this kind of preservation, where we require at least some record of the object’s original environment.
This would be far cheaper than the up front cost of producing an emulator or a recreation of the object (or its application software in the case of a digital document).
Recreation It’s important to consider recreation as a different process to migration (despite many similarities to the execution of a human conversion migration) as it is a process of creating a new object which re-produces the significant properties of the original without incorporating any elements of the original object.
The re-keying of a View document into a current word processor is probably the least technical approach to preservation here and is obviously open to the introduction of errors or other changes to the data.
However in some cases it could be the method of preservation chosen.
When we cast the same strategy across to more complex objects however, we quickly see a range of further issues and possible problems developing.
Re-keying a ViewStore database into a current database application brings up many questions of authenticity and accuracy but even before that it’s important to look at how the work would be done.
With the object running on the original BBC system and software, reproducing the intellectual content on a current platform seems quite reasonable.
But without the original to work from, a recreation looks like a difficult job.
Working from a minimum migration with little technical knowledge of the ViewStore file structure, much of the intellectual content could be lost.
A good Preservation migration may have helped to save this data for a future recreation.
It should be noted that leaving preservation work until after the platform in question has become obsolete and unavailable will introduce further risks of the loss of significant properties.
A recreation of Chuckie Egg complicates these issues further and this is illustrated very well by the existing implementations of this method available on the Internet.
What constitutes an authentic recreation of an arcade game?
The best Chuckie Egg conversion provides an almost pixel perfect visual copy of the original game.
But place a hardened games player with experience of the original game in front of it and they will quickly pick up on subtle differences in the game play that are different from the original.
Asked the question “Is this Chuckie Egg”, they might reply with a definite “no”.
To many, the exact details of the ‘feel’ of a computer game may seem irrelevant in this context, but in fact Chuckie Egg acts as a very clear example of the potential for the loss of what constitutes a key part of the intellectual content of many interactive digital objects.
Further to the notion of recreating an object authentically, are there in fact cases where recreating the dated user interface of an object may not be ideal?
Does the preserver take the opportunity to enhance access to the reproduced intellectual content of the original?
Recreation has a high unit cost, and depending on the complexity of the object in question this could be prohibitive in a lot of situations.
If a considerable amount of effort is going to be spent recreating several objects from one particular platform it may be more worthwhile to produce one emulator which will preserve all of these objects.
A well implemented recreation of a complex object may offer advantages that make the high unit cost of such work worthwhile in some circumstances.
It could be argued that such a migration of Chuckie Egg in a modern high level language like C would actually preserve many of the software functions behind the game in an easily understood way.
Making it far more understandable at least than the original 6502 machine code of which the original is encoded.
For an exceptional digital object, which warranted good preservation, this could be seen as a useful strategy.
Human conversion migration Much of my discussion of recreation as a preservation strategy is applicable in the use of human conversion migration which recreates software elements of a digital object while re-using as much of the data of the original object as possible.
The advantage of this strategy is that a migration of the data elements of the original object could contribute to a more accurate reproduction of the object’s significant properties.
Automatic conversion migration Automatic conversion migration uses a software tool to automatically convert digital objects to a current environment.
With word processor and database files, this can be seen as one of the traditional uses of migration.
Although many consider this to be the best way to migrate and preserve an object, it should be noted that preservation of this kind still only retains some of the intellectual content.
Nothing of the original environment in which the object was created in is preserved and there is no guarantee that all of the formatting and structure will be retained.
Although automatic conversion migration could be used to convert a batch of files to a current format, which would then be used and preserved as the primary objects, this process will have to be repeated when the current format becomes obsolete.
Hence further migration costs will be incurred and additional losses of significant properties may occur.
A more useful approach is that of migration on request, conceived by the CEDARS project [10].
Original objects are maintained and preserved in addition to a migration tool which runs on a current computing platform.
This would be employed by users to convert the original bytestream of the object they want to use into a current format (This process will be formalised in chapter 5 of the CEDARS project [10] final report).
When the current platform becomes obsolete the migration tool will no longer work, so the preservation problem in this case is obviously focused on the maintenance of the migration tool.
Many strategies for ensuring the longevity of a migration tool are equally applicable to those used in emulator development (See “Emulation, Preservation and Abstraction” [1] by David Holdsworth and Paul Wheatley), but much further work needs to be done in this area.
Is there an existing format which would be an ideal middle ground for a migration tool to convert objects to, before output to a current format for use?
And hence can a standard migration tool framework be developed, into which read or write modules (which understood specific file formats) could be plugged?
There are many advantages to this migration approach:   Code which interprets a specific obsolete format need only be produced once.
The actual migration is performed on the fly when objects are required by users.
So there are no volume dependent costs when a large number of objects of a specific format, are migrated.
The original bytestream is always interpreted so there is only one migration process where the loss of significant properties can occur.
Proving the authenticity of the preserved object is more straightforward if the object being preserved is the original bytestream.
Working within a framework for read and write migration modules reduces the workload required to be able perform the litmus test of a reversible migration, hence guaranteeing that the migrated object is an accurate representation of the original object.
Preserving the original bytestream and a tool to migrate it is not incompatible with a parallel strategy of emulation.
With complex objects to preserve its not even clear if an automatic conversion migration of the original code is possible, especially if associated resources like graphics or data files also have to be dealt with.
With many objects (eg.
Multimedia programs) this necessitates a specific solution in each case.
This is highly technical and therefore likely to be costly.
Alternate strategies like recreation or emulation are likely to be more suitable in this situation.
Conclusion It is clear that migration and emulation strategies will both play an important role in the long-term preservation of digital materials.
Migration will be crucial for the preservation of more simple data objects and emulation will undoubtedly be essential for preserving complex objects that incorporate software elements.
However the use of migration or recreation strategies for preserving objects of particular outstanding value should not be underestimated.
For many objects both migration on request and emulation strategies which interpret the original bytestream will provide useful methods of access for different users of these materials.
It is not unrealistic to consider providing more than one means to render a digital object especially if both objects and rendering tools are managed in a sensible way (see Representation Nets in “A blueprint for Representation Information in the OAIS model” [6] by David Holdsworth and Derek Sergeant).
Although much recent work has gone a long way to establish the terminology that provides a common language for the discussion of preservation issues, the description of migration terms in particular has remained relatively confused.
To continue progress in the development of practical preservation strategies we should not be afraid to introduce new and more specific language or to redefine ambiguous terms of old.
This paper has gone some way to tackling this problem, but there is still a long way to go.
Appendix View View was one of the first and most widely used word processing applications on the BBC Micro, and was released under the Acornsoft label.
ViewStore ViewStore shared the same origins as View, but targeted the database market.
ViewStore was quite advanced for a home database application of its day, but it only allowed very simple relationships between tables of data.
Human Digestive System This educational software was typical of many new learning tools of the day.
Textual information and diagrams are combined with programmed animation to describe the functions of a human digestive system.
The application also includes test sections which quiz the user on their learning.
The Human Digestive System is a good example of software produced under the Micro Electronics Program (MEP) project.
Chuckie Egg Chuckie Egg was considered one of the classic arcade games of its day.
Although not technically advanced for its time, the game’s popularity presents interesting options for user testing comparisons of the game under emulation or in a migrated state.
Will the game under emulation bring back the original look and feel for a user who has played the game in the eighties?
Acknowledgements Many thanks to both the CAMiLEON and CEDARS project teams for their invaluable contribution of ideas and critique.
In particular I’d like to thank Kelly Russell, Derek Sergeant and Nancy Elkington.
References Holdsworth, D and Wheatley, P, “Emulation, Preservation and Abstraction”, http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews5-4.html#feature2 The Commission on Preservation and Access and The Research Libraries Group, Inc “Preserving digital information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information”, (1996), http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/tfadi.index.htm CAMiLEON project at http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ Open Archiving Information System (OAIS) at http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html Dollar, C M, “Authentic Electronic Records: Strategies for Long-Term Access” (1999) Lawrence, Gregory W. Kehoe, William R. Rieger, Oya Y. Walters, William H. and Kenney, Anne R. “Risk Management of Digital Information : A File Format Investigation” (June 2000), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub93/contents.html Holdsworth, D and Sergeant, D M, “A blueprint for Representation Information in the OAIS Model”, (1999), http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~ecldh/cedars/ieee00.html BBC Micro platform at http://bbc.nvg.org/history.php3 Finney, A, “The Domesday Project November 1986”, http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html CEDARS projecthttp://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, “Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System” (Red Book May 1999), http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html Author Details Paul Wheatley CAMiLEON Project http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ University of Leeds http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ LS2 9JT, UK Article Title: “Migration a CAMiLEON discussion paper” Author: Paul Wheatley Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/camileon/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Joining Up the Dots Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Joining Up the Dots Buzz data infrastructure copyright hypertext e-government privacy url standards Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Hannabuss seeks the tenor among the diversity of voices provided by Challenge and Change in the Information Society.
Any work on the information society attracts that ambivalent reaction that it might be trite and it could be seminal.
But, with the logic that nothing that becomes cliché can be other than centrally relevant, above all when published by a professional body, (which should know these things), Challenge and change promises well.
It aims for professional practice and academic study and will stand side-by-side with works like Feather’s Information society (2000) and Dearnley and Feather’s The wired world (2001) as particularly relevant to students on information/library courses, and new and prospective trainees and practitioners.
Beyond them are more theoretical works such as Lyons and Webster.
So how does it stack up in its own terms?
I think we can all go along with Peter Brophy’s remark (last chapter, on the information society and the information professional) that ‘information professionals need to engage in a much higher level of debate about these issues [of the information society and their role in it] than has been apparent to date ..
The dilemma over value neutrality and societal engagement can only become more marked as our society becomes more dominated by ICTs.’ It is reasonable, by this token, to expect a coherent and hard-hitting dialogue about the information society making it clear that, whether it is information or knowledge or social capital, information folk are there in the middle, thinking and acting it through.
After all, with all this talk of the information society, is it really there?
It is certainly there theoretically.
Economists like Machlup and Porat and sociologists like Castells and Bell remind us that there are now off-the-peg approaches to the information society, (John Feather in the first of three essays on the fact-or-fiction of the information society).
Alistair Black argues that it is merely another phase of industrial capitalism, while Dave Muddiman that it simply restructures society in postmodern terms, with a facile welfarism leaving many excluded from it, and the rest of us objects of social surveillance and useful workplace knowledge.
Plenty of stuff here (plus bibliographies) for the seminar group.
But how does it feed through to later arguments in the book?
Putting your money where your mouth is a challenge for professionals and for policy-makers.
There are numerous voices.
Chris Batt offers an optimistic view of information and library services as being key drivers for social transformation standard fare and rather chatty.
J Stephen Town applies his know-how from the SCONUL Information Skills Task Force to argue for more clearly defined measures of information literacy the ‘Seven Pillars’ approach to good practice and to critique documents like LIC’s Keystones for being vague.
Ian Rowlands explores a normative process model of policy-making, hinting (tantalisingly) at elements (like information infrastructure and markets and protectionism) which could and should form a central part of information policy in the information society.
Ian Beeson provides a case study of an online community where, following Certeau and Lash, participants used narrative to affirm identity and ‘strategically engaged’ with the hypertext technology.
Perhaps part of the problem is that the term ‘information society’ has so many meanings Derrida would approve (‘There is nothing outside the text’).
In consequence, these essays provide fragments of an ongoing commentary on something that resists definition.
Stakeholders move in and out of view Batt is a library manager looking at the community, Town seeking to persuade bureaucrats, Rowlands meditating on Platonically ideal policy, and Beeson providing a gloss on cyberspace communities where, arguably, formal information policy does not apply or has broken down.
If, then, we are looking for the information society, it has to be inferred from these accounts, oscillating between abstract theory and practical casework, with policy-making (presumably, and hopefully, including decision-making by information and library managers) in between.
The information society is also the knowledge society.
As Abell and Oxbrow say in their Competing with Knowledge (2001), the information professional operates in the knowledge management age.
The editors are right to try to build KM into the picture, although it would be asking a lot for a study of the public sector to account for KM which is at least, and probably far more, evident in the private sector.
Now how is that part of the information society paradigm predicated by the book?
As I said, whether a case study of KM in the UK National Health Service is the best way to do it is another story.
As such it opens up KM strategy (for practitioners and consumers) quite well, and anyone wanting a quick update will find it useful.
Yet it is asked to do a large job and worries about e-government and e-democracy, hoping that, part for whole, the case for the wider theme of the information society can be made.
All of which leads me to wonder about joining up the dots.
This goes beyond the thought that the information society is a pluralistic concept, and takes us into the more delicate territory of how coherent this actual collection of essays is.
Rounding up the strays, Graham Cornish provides (as always) a clear résumé of copyright (caught between protection and freedom), J Eric Davies a very law-centred summary of data protection, and Claire Warwick updates us on electronic publishing (not as successful as some people say).
At this stage, if not before, the reader is asking where and how it all holds together, where the links are between the privacy discussed by Davies and the surveillance covered by Muddiman, between the technological determinism examined by Black and the KM in the NHS and in Beeson’s cyber-community, and between Batt’s optimism and Warwick’s scepticism.
And between the library, information, and knowledge strands of the information society, and between the academic’s, the manager’s, and the politician’s perspective on information policy.
This is, I suppose, where the reader looks to the editors, Susan Hornby (of Manchester Metropolitan University) and Zoë Clarke (of CERLIM at the same place).
Informed readers can construct a picture for themselves, but, given the intended readership, of readers who will probably need much more help, the lack of a editorial overview is a lost opportunity.
Turning back to Peter Brophy, that ‘higher level of debate’ is still needed : the present collection reveals that the whole is not necessarily greater than the sum of the parts.
That said, it reveals where such debate can and should go towards a fuller integration of theory and practice, management and policy : the ingredients are there.
Very much a signpost of a book.
Author Details Dr Stuart Hannabuss Aberdeen Business School Aberdeen Email: s.hannabuss@rgu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Book Review: Joining Up the Dots” Author: Dr Stuart Hannabuss Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/hannabuss-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ECDL 2004: A Digital Librarian's Report Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ECDL 2004: A Digital Librarian's Report Buzz data software framework database usability infrastructure archives repositories e-learning soap dspace e-science interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Jessie Hey reports on the 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries held at the University of Bath in September 2004.
This year it was the turn of the UK to host this major European conference and researchers and librarians took the opportunity to recharge and hear about and debate the latest research and technology advances in digital libraries.
There were 47 peer-reviewed papers a 32% acceptance rate.
Remarkably papers were received from 27 countries.
There was something for everyone: from digital library architectures through innovative technologies and techniques and particular kinds of libraries personal and music and I was particularly pleased to attend several sessions more focussed towards the user.There was sometimes a dilemma choosing which parallel session to attend with a hearty sprint to the other lecture theatre.
Inevitably with parallel sessions anyone's experience is biased in certain directions but having the book of the conference proceedings [1] on tap provided the opportunity to skim other papers, perhaps leaving the technical detail for later.
Strangely the electronic proceedings were not yet listed on Springer's Web site at the time of going to press although later conferences are already available electronically.
My university library now subscribes to the electronic version of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series but, tantalisingly, had the conference been available, my off-campus connection would still not have given me access.
Open access, either via the conference Web site or via the authors' institutional repositories seems such a logical way of rapidly disseminating digital library research results in a fast moving field.
Interestingly I also missed having the book of abstracts which had room to scribble notes on which another beneficial conference, shortly before in Newcastle, (Digital Resources in Humanities [2]), had supplied.
Its somehow inhibiting to write notes on a new book and the battery power of my computer is still not good enough to use it comfortably in a lecture theatre.
The technology still has a way to go for me to be able to annotate effectively my personal conference library!
Tony Hey introducing e-Science to the digital libraries agenda Conference Highlights Three keynote talks were placed strategically at the beginning, middle and end to stimulate us to think broadly about digital libraries and their external links.
Professor Tony Hey, Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme, in a talk entitled e-Science and the Grid e-Infrastructure and Digital Libraries, gave some wonderful examples of new research in e-Science enabled within transient virtual organisations.
The grid and e-infrastructure were terms used to describe a set of core middleware services.
The newly created Digital Curation Centre [3] would play an important role in a data intensive world and would need to liaise directly with individual researchers, data archives and libraries.
In some areas, notably biology, databases were replacing publications as the medium of communication.
He ended with a call to digital librarians to engage with e-researchers and make the most of their skills where they matter.
The presentation by Jane Hunter of the University of Queensland, showed the way with a talk on Next Generation Search Interfaces Interactive Data Exploration and Hypothesis Formulation spanning e-Science and innovative digital library techniques.
Neil McLean, Director, IMS Australia, in his keynote, also looked at interdependencies between people, digital content and institutions.
Taking a broad brush, he looked at The Ecology of Repository Services: A Cosmic View !
Emergent e-learning communities need access to repository services.
He described e-learning as being in the cottage industry phase.
An evolving e-learning framework would be part of the next phase.
Interoperability was also inevitably the theme of 3 case studies.
A new Web Services SOAP (a server-to-server protocol for object retrieval) interface, was described by Ann Apps for one of them: zetoc the British Library's current awareness and document delivery system.
With Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, as General Chair for the conference, the third keynote was, fittingly, given by Lorcan Dempsey, now Vice-President Research and Chief Strategist at OCLC in the US but also an earlier director of UKOLN which is based at the University of Bath.
His talk was entitled Libraries, digital libraries and digital library research.
He pointed out the problem of the bewildering convergence of technological developments that librarians had to cope with.
He emphasised the co-evolution of the research and learning behaviours that we had been learning about earlier.
A history of consumption also means we are unprepared for contribution.
An interesting short paper presented by MacKenzie Smith of MIT on the evolution of DSpace as Open Source repository software caused a lot of discussion about the transition to this new sharing world.
As always when you have been cocooned in lecture theatres most of the day it is good to explore your surroundings and talk to other delegates more informally.
With such an international audience coming from as far away as Russia, China, Australia and the US, there was opportunity to meet up with distant friends and build up potential new collaborations.
The City of Bath is such a wonderfully elegant city to spend the evening in and the conference organisers did us proud.
The Roman Baths were magical as it got darker.
The burning torches helped you forget the early autumn chill in the air.
Reception at the Roman Baths Although there were opportunities to look at posters in the coffee breaks it was beneficial to have a special poster session designated on the second day.
I appreciated the chance to discuss our poster on our 'Institutional Repositories' experiences with colleagues in different countries and also with others who were less familiar with the concepts of the Open Archive Initiative.
The session was followed by a welcome drinks reception in the City's Art Gallery leading on to a banquet in the splendid Guildhall.
Some people followed this with the contrasting delights of an Irish Bar a little too noisy to continue talking technical!
However, here I learnt from the Colorado contingent that next year's American conference JCDL 2005 [4] would be in Denver and the theme would highlight the powerful role of digital libraries as cyberinfrastructure.
The theme seemed a natural progression from some of the digital library links being encouraged at this conference but couched in American terminology of course cyberinfrastructure instead of e-infrastructure.
Finale It was fitting to end with the new awards for Best Paper and Best Young Researcher's Paper.
The DELOS Best Paper Award went to Ray Larson and Patricia Frontiera of Berkeley for their paper on Spatial Ranking Methods for Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) in Digital Libraries.
Besides learning a new acronym or two I discovered that you could make some significant improvements in Geographical Information Retrieval.
The DELOS Research Exchange Award was assigned to the best paper presented at ECDL by a researcher under the age of 35 for research which had mainly been carried out at a European research organisation.
The Young Researcher honoured was Markus Franke from the University of Karlsruhe.
Markus with co-author Andreas Geyer-Schulz had tackled Automated Indexing with Restricted Random Walks on Large Document Sets.
Using relatively lightweight usage data would be welcomed to help relieve the burden of manual indexing.
For some delegates there had been tutorials on the Sunday before the conference and for others related workshops afterwards but there was plenty enough in the main conference to stimulate new ideas.
Next year's conference will be in Vienna [5], a grand city, and we were given a taster of the next conference to tempt us to travel further afield.
In the meantime, the ECDL 2004 Conference Web site [6] gives an opportunity to look in detail at some of the presentations that either move forward research in your own area of expertise or give a chance to learn about some of the broader influences such as e-science and e-learning which will have an impact upon digital libraries in the future.
The panels and other talks covered such a wide range of issues from the Semantic Web to cross-cultural usability.
Many thanks to all the people who worked behind the scenes to make this digital libraries conference a stimulating gathering for delegates from a wide range of backgrounds.
Acknowledgements My thanks to Francesca Borri and Vittore Casarosa of ISTI-CNR for information on the DELOS-supported awards for Best Paper and Best Paper by a Young Researcher.
DELOS is Europe's Digital Library Network of Excellence funded under the EU 6th Framework Programme (FP6).
The Editor would like to thank Philip Hunter for the conference pictures.
References Heery, Rachel and Lyon, Liz (eds.)
(2004) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: Proceedings of 8th European Conference, ECDL 2004, Bath, UK, September 12-17 2004.
Berlin, Springer-Verlag (LNCS 3232).
http://www.springerlink.com/ Digital Resources for the Humanities (DRH2004) Newcastle upon Tyne, 5-8 September 2004 http://drh2004.ncl.ac.uk/ Editor's note: Ariadne also carries in this issue a report on DRH2004 : http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/drh2004-rpt/ The Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ JCDL 2005 Cyberinfrastructure for Research and Education, Denver, Colorado 7-11 June 2005 http://www.jcdl2005.org/ ECDL 2005 Vienna, 18-23 September 2005 http://www.ecdl2005.org/ ECDL 2004 http://www.ecdl2004.org/ Author Details Jessie Hey Researcher TARDis Institutional Research Repository Project University of Southampton Email: jessie.hey@soton.ac.uk Web site: http://tardis.eprints.org/ Return to top Article Title: "ECDL 2004: A Digital Librarian's Report" Author: Jessie Hey Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue41/ecdl2004-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization Buzz framework database archives copyright cataloguing aggregation lcsh ontologies ddc url Citation BibTex RIS Maurice Line reviews Elaine Svenonius' 'The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization', published by MIT Press.
Cataloguing, long respected as the prime task of librarians, declined somewhat in status in the 1970s, when libraries became conscious of the need to serve users more directly than by merely providing finding tools; also, a need to change the image of librarians (represented by the middle-aged female cataloguer) was perceived to be important.
More recently, the growth of the Internet has led to increasingly desperate cries for the imposition of some order on the vast quantities of unstructured information that it made accessible, and to attempts at doing so.
Cataloguing is one form of organising information, a lot better planned and structured than some of the suggested alternatives.
This book examines the intellectual underpinnings of the organisation of information.
To quote the blurb on the book jacket, ‘Integrating the disparate disciplines of descriptive cataloguing, subject cataloguing, indexing, and classification, the book adopts a conceptual framework that views the process of organizing information as the use of a special language of description called a bibliographic language’.
This is an ambitious aim, which is triumphantly achieved.
‘The book’, we are warned in the Preface (which incidentally gives a very good summary of the contents), ‘is not … a catechism of rules, a compendium of practice, or a training manual.
… [It] is directed towards two groups of people: those who are interested in information organization as an object of scholarly investigation and those who are involved in the design of organizing systems.’ The work’s first five chapters are concerned with an ‘analytic discussion of the intellectual foundation of information organization’, beginning by identifying the main purpose of systems for organising information ‘bringing like things together and differentiating among them’.
The history of such systems, starting with that great asylum seeker Panizzi and ending with IFLA’s Functional requirements for bibliographic records, is then reviewed.
‘Ontology’, the information entities mandated by the objectives; the ‘special purpose bibliographic language’ used in organising information; and the principles guiding the construction of systems are considered in chapters 3-5.
The second group of five chapters deals with particulars, surveying three ‘languages’ used in describing works: work, document and subject languages.
Along the way it looks at the common systems such as AACR in its various versions, DDC and LCSH; PRECIS is also considered.
An Afterword ‘speculates on the continuing development of bibliographic languages as reflected in trends towards formalization and automation.’ The book is intellectually rigorous and conceptually stimulating.
It is something of a tour de force to encompass the subject matter in 200 pages (the remaining 50-plus pages are devoted to notes, an excellent bibliography, and a good index.).
It will be apparent from the above outline of the contents that the book is not bedtime reading.
However, the writing is very stylish, and so clear that no-one should find it hard going.
I have one or two comments (I would hesitate to call them criticisms), since it seems to me that some practical needs have been neglected in the author’s intellectual analysis.
The objectives of catalogues, as defined by Lubetsky, refined by IFLA and further developed by the author, include the very worthy and necessary one of ‘select[ing] an entity that is appropriate to the user’s needs (i.e.
to choose an entity that meets the user’s requirements with respect to content, physical format, etc….)‘.
One common need is to identify the level of audience at which the entity is aimed, which is by no means evident from the usual elements included in a record.
Another need was suggested to me by Svenonius herself, in her remark that ‘many [Internet documents] … are of an ephemeral nature’: ephemerality.
To be sure, some documents that were conceived as ephemeral (including Shakespeare’s plays?)
have proved to be permanent in their own right, or because they are historically interesting (first recorded instance of …); but in most cases coding would not be too difficult.
My point is that these needs are as valid as others that catalogues try to provide for.
And if some commercial databases indicate audience level, why can’t catalogues?
And why can’t we have access to book indexes?
The chapter on ‘Bibliographic entities’ does not discuss the desirable size or level of entity: e.g.
there is no discussion of whether papers in composite works should be catalogued, let alone chapters in monographs; or, to go down a further level, sections within chapters or articles.
There is a good case to be made for any or all of these for serving the subject searcher.
This issue is dealt with in chapter 6, ‘Work languages’, but entirely neutrally.
Why should fragments of information on the Internet be indexed, and substantial chapters in major works of scholarship not?
Svenonius mentions (almost in passing) cost as a factor in designing systems, but not speed or immediacy.
In the real world, for current access to information most of us would rather have a ‘quick and dirty’ (sometimes even immediate and filthy) system than a superb and delayed one although the former should be superseded as soon as possible by the latter.
It is fine to consider the intellectual foundations of information systems, but they should not (on Svenonius’ own terms) lead to systems that do not serve some needs.
There is no reason why the above needs cannot be subjected to the same kind of analysis as the needs that are covered in the book.
Perhaps a future edition could take this on board.. Nicely though the book is produced (one would expect no less of MIT Press), I must make the same complaint as I did when reviewing two other books in this series.
It is by no means obvious what are headings within chapters and what are subheadings; both use bold lower case.
The only difference is that headings are followed by a line space, while subheadings are not.
(Sub-subheadings are more obvious, as they are in bold lower case italics.)
I spotted two misprints.
On p.135, Wyndham Hulme appears as Wyndam; and in the Index, ‘aggregation’ should be given as appearing on pp.102-104, not pp.102-194.
This work is a major contribution to information and library science.
It is not only informative; it makes the reader think more carefully about what information control systems are for and how they do or should work.
I shall be surprised if it does not become a classic.
‘The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization’ By Elaine Svenonius (Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing; William Y.
Arms, series editor) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, xv, 255 pages, ISBN 0 262 19433 3 £24.50.
(UK) Author Details Maurice B.
Line Consultant mbl@hgte.demon.co.uk Article Title: " The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization " Author: Maurice B.
Line Publication Date: 24-Sep-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 25 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/review/intro.html Copyright and citation information File last modified: Monday, 04-Oct-2004 12:19:10 UTC Ariadne is published every three months by UKOLN.
UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives & Libraries (the organisation succeeding the Library and Information Commission), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
Text on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors.
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DAEDALUS : Freeing Scholarly Communication at the University of Glasgow Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DAEDALUS : Freeing Scholarly Communication at the University of Glasgow Buzz data software archives repositories eprints copyright preservation dspace url research Citation BibTex RIS William J. Nixon presents a brief overview of the DAEDALUS Open Archives Project at the University of Glasgow.
DAEDALUS [1] is a three year JISC funded project under the FAIR Programme [2] which will build a range of Open Archives Compliant (OAI) digital collections at the University of Glasgow.
These collections will enable us to unlock access to a wide range of our institutional scholarly output.
This output will include not only published and peer-reviewed papers but also administrative documents, research finding aids, pre-prints and theses.
DAEDALUS is also a member of the CURL SHERPA project [3].
Key Elements At Glasgow, our experiences with our initial ePrints service [4] enabled us to identify two key elements for the development and implementation of a successful service: “The support, endorsement and most critically, the content produced by our academic colleagues and partners The resources [staff, equipment, expertise] to ensure that it is developed, marketed and launched properly” [5] We have addressed both of these elements in DAEDALUS by establishing two distinct but complementary project strands: Advocacy and Service Development, each with their own Project Manager and remit.
Advocacy Through their experiences many early ePrints adopters have identified the critical role which Advocacy activities have played in the success of their services.
The broad remit of the Project Manager (Advocacy) is: to create an Open Access culture to gather content for the range of Open Archives services to provide advice on policy implications, guidelines and processes of the services to formulate an exit strategy that ensures a full and fully used service.
The Project Manager (Advocacy) will work with our Subject Librarians and with other FAIR Projects such as SHERPA and TARDIS [6].
The Project Board has been set-up and includes a senior academic member of staff from each of three territorial subject groups in the University.
We will also build on the initial momentum of our Scholarly Communication event entitled "Creating Change" [7], which was held in April 2002.
It was attended by some 60 plus members of staff and provided an opportunity for invited speakers, such as Julia Blixrud from SPARC to raise awareness of the issues surrounding the Crisis in Scholarly Communication.
We are now in the process of contacting academics who are already self-publishing.
With the support of early adopters of our initial ePrints service we have been invited to a make presentations to departmental meetings.
We will also act as a Focus for publisher copyright policies for published papers and have been greatly assisted in this by the work of Project RoMEO [8].
RoMEO has published a range of publisher policies for copyright and self-archiving.
In addition to this advisory role the Library will provide a mediated submission service for any academic staff who would like to deposit their content in our archive.
It is also apparent that there are broader issues which must be considered as the project continues beyond the immediate ones of copyright, quality control and peer review such as digital preservation.
These broader issues will be explored through our use of software such as DSpace and in conjunction with other projects including SHERPA.
Service Development The remit of the Project Manager (Service Development) is to establish five OAI-compliant collections [Data Providers] and one search service [Service Provider].
These collections will use a range of different software solutions including GNU Eprints 2.0 and MIT’s DSpace.
The collections are: Published and peer reviewed academic papers Pre-prints and grey literature Theses Research resource finding aids Administrative documents We will also build an OAI-compliant search service, which will enable users to cross-search this material.
In the first year of the project we will be focusing on published papers, preprints and theses using a range of open source and freely available software solutions.
GNU Eprints 2 – Published and Peer-reviewed papers Published and peer-reviewed papers will be deposited in a repository implemented with the GNU Eprints 2 [9] software from the University of Southampton.
We are currently building a new Demonstrator service using Eprints 2.0 and will look to migrate content from the current service in the New Year as it is developed and configured.
DSpace – Preprints and Working Papers DSpace is a digital repository created to capture, distribute and preserve the intellectual output of MIT [10].
The source code was released on the 8th of November 2002 and is freely available for download.
DSpace will be used as a repository for preprints, working papers and technical reports.
We will begin working with DSpace in early 2003.
Virginia Tech ETD-db – E-Theses Theses will be deposited in a repository using the ETD-db software from Virginia Tech.
This is already in use in sites such as Caltech and is well documented [11].
We are also working with two other FAIR Theses Projects: Theses Alive!
(University of Edinburgh) and the E-Theses Project (Robert Gordon University) [12].
Other Collections: Administrative Documents and Research Finding Aids From August 2003 DAEDALUS will begin to investigate the challenges of making existing collections of material OAI-compliant as we build on the initial collections established over the first year.
DAEDALUS (and Ariadne) Why Daedalus?
Daedalus, architect of the Labyrinth for King Minos came to the aid of Ariadne [13].
He divulged the secret of his Labyrinth to her so that she could rescue her lover Theseus.
Minos discovered Daedalus' betrayal and imprisoned him.
Daedalus made wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son, Icarus to enable them to escape.
Icarus, ignoring his father's warnings flew too close to the sun, his wings melted and he plunged into the sea.
Daedalus, however, did not fly too near to the sun and was able to land safely in Sicily.
An architect, able to arrive safely at his destination seemed a fitting choice for a project to build a range of OAI-compliant services and to unlock scholarly content.
The DAEDALUS project logo is taken from this woodcut of Daedalus watching Icarus fall in Ovid: Metamorphoses, illustrated by Virgil Solis (Frankfurt: 1569) and held in the Department of Special Collections, Glasgow University Library.
The Future The FAIR Programme in the UK has put the development of such services firmly on the agenda for many UK institutions.
DAEDALUS will contribute to this work and the wider debate on scholarly communication through our practical experience of implementing these collections.
References [1] DAEDALUS http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus [2] JISC FAIR Programme Circular 1/02 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c01_02.html [3] SHERPA (CURL) http://www.sherpa.ac.uk [4] Glasgow EPrints Service http://eprints.lib.gla.ac.uk [5] Nixon, William J "The evolution of an institutional e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow".
Ariadne Issue 32 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/eprint-archives/ [6] TARDIS (University of Southampton) http://tardis.eprints.org/ [7] Creating Change [at Glasgow] http://www.gla.ac.uk/createchange/future/ [8] RoMEO (Loughborough University) http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/ [9] GNU Eprints 2.0 http://software.eprints.org [10] DSpace http://www.dspace.org [11] Caltech ETD-db Resources for Developers http://etd.caltech.edu/developer/ [12] E-Theses Project (Robert Gordon University) http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/library/e-theses.htm [13] Whitaker, Graham "Greek Myths", Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/about/myth-new.html Author Details   William J. Nixon Deputy Head of IT Services / Project Co-ordinator Glasgow University Library, Hillhead Street, Glasgow, UK e: w.j.nixon@lib.gla.ac.uk | http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk | http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus Article Title: "DAEDALUS: Freeing Scholarly Communication at the University of Glasgow" Author: William J. Nixon Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/nixon/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: Revisiting 404 Error Pages in UK University Web Sites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: Revisiting 404 Error Pages in UK University Web Sites Buzz mis url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly revists 404 Error Pages in UK University Web Sites.
A survey of 404 error pages on UK University Web sites was carried in June 1999 and the findings were reported in Ariadne issue 20 [1].
After a period of 2 years the survey has been repeated allowing trends to be identified.
The findings are given in this article.
Why are 404 pages important?
Put simply, 404 error pages are probably one of the most visited pages on a Web site.
If user's type a URL in incorrectly, or follow a link which has been entered incorrectly, or if the Web site has been reorganised the user will see the 404 page.
So it is important to provide functionality and help information to assist the visitor finding the resource they are seeking.
In addition, if your institution has invested in a look-and-feel for its Web site it is only sensible to ensure that the 404 page uses the branding.
Current Findings Details of the current survey are given elsewhere [2].
A summary of the findings are listed below.
Table 1: Summary of Types of 404 Pages Type of 404 Page Findings 1999 Findings 2002 Tailored message (displayed correctly in IE5) 36 88 Tailored message (but problem in IE 5) 5 0 Server default (which causes problems with default setting in IE 5) 114 65 Issues redirect 2 1 Mis-configured server 5 0 Note The default setting for Internet Explorer version 5 means that Web server error messages below a particular size are not displayed; instead a client-side error message iss displayed.
If a redirect is issued by a 404 page, this can cause navigation problems (the Back button may be difficult to use).
Trends As can be seen from Table 1 there has been a significant trend towards use of tailored error messages.
This is very pleasing, although there is still a large number of institutions which use the default server error message [3].
Conclusions Commentary on interesting approaches to use of 404 error messages is not given in this article.
However the suggestions given in the previous Ariadne article are still valid, and readers with an interest in updating their 404 error page are advised to read this article [1].
References WebWatch: 404s What's Missing?, Ariadne, issue 20, June 1999 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/404/ Results of Survey of UK HE 404 Errors Carried Out in June 2002, Brian Kelly, UKOLN, June 2002 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/404/university-404-survey-jun-02.html Summary Of Results of Survey of UK HE 404 Errors Carried Out in June 2002, Brian Kelly, UKOLN, June 2002 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/404/university-404-survey-jun-02.html#summary Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz jpg Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
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WebWatch: Surfing Historical UK University Web Sites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines WebWatch: Surfing Historical UK University Web Sites Buzz java javascript archives browser preservation flash intranet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly outlines strategies for choosing appropriate standards for building Web sites.
It has been said that those who ignore history, are condemned to repeat it.
In the Web world we can be so excited by new developments that we may forget approaches we have taken in the past and fail to learn from our mistakes.
This article describes how the WayBack Machine [1] was used to look at the history of UK University Web sites.
The Survey The survey was carried out by entering the URL of the entry point for UK University Web sites, recording details of the availability of the Web site in the Internet Archive (including earliest and most recent dates and numbers of entries) and providing a link to enable readers of this article to obtain the most recent results.
The full survey findings are given in the Appendix.
Viewing The Past A "Web Tour" has been developed which provides an automated view of the oldest pages.
The display changes every 10 seconds.
The Web tour is available at [2].
Discussion Brief comments are provided on interesting findings in the Appendix.
It was noted, for example, that in a number of cases images were not displayed.
This will have been due to the site containing a robots.txt file which banned robots from accessing directories containing images for the site, such as the institution's logo, standard navigation images, etc.
When the Standard For Robot Exclusion [3] was first released it was applicable for indexing robots such as the robot used by the AltaVista search engine.
The consensus view was that it was advisable to ban robots from accessing directories containing images, as these contained no text to be indexed.
We can now see that robots provide a wide range of functions which include archiving.
There are advantages to be gained in allowing robots to access directories of images, not only so that the Internet Archive's robot can archive a Web site's images, but also to allow indexing robots which can provide a search facility for images (such as the Google image search [4]).
A number of Web sites contained "Best viewed in Netscape 2" style messages.
The community probably now accepts that designing best sites for a specific browser is not advisable and it is probably sensible to avoid promoting a specific browser on an institution's entry point.
There appeared to be a number of instances of use of non-native Web technologies such as Java which required browser plugins on institutional home pages.
There were also a number of instances of use of frames or content provided by third parties, (such as usage counters), which were not fully functional in the archived Web site.
Conclusions The Internet Archive can be a fun resource to access, especially for Web managers who have been developing Web sites for a number of years.
However in addition to the embarrassment factor, ("did I really use the <BLINK> tag!
"), there are also valuable lessons which can be learnt from our approaches to Web site development in the late 1990s.
It can help us to reflect on the processes which lead to the chosen design; the technical decisions which where used and the way in which we sought to support the users of our Web sites.
This will, of course, be a continuous process.
The decisions we are making today are the potential embarrassment of tomorrow.
Perhaps the most importance message of this survey is the need to preserve access to to our digital past.
The Internet Archive may provide one mechanism for preserving the past (provided, of course, that we allow robots to access our resources).
Some organisations, however, may not feel comfortable in relying on a third party.
In this case there will be a need to develop a digital preservation or records management approach which embraces institutional Web sites.
References Wayback Machine, Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ Display of UK University Entry Points From Internet Archive, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/site-rolling-demos/universities-archive/ A Standard for Robot Exclusion, The Web Robot Pages, http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html Google Image Search, Google, http://images.google.com/ Appendix 1 Survey A summary of the findings is given in the following table.
Table 1: Analysis of UK University Web Sites in Internet Archive   Institution Earliest finding Comments View Archive View Earliest Entry 1 Aberdeen Dec 12, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 2 Abertay Dundee Sep 03, 1999 Images not displayed.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 3 Aberystwyth Dec 10, 1997 Images not displayed.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 4 Anglia Polytechnic University Mar 30, 1997 Images not displayed.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 5 Aston Jan 23, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 6 Bangor Feb 20, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 7 Bath Spa Dec 02, 1998 Blank page displayed.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 8 Bath Apr 18, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 9 Queen's University of Belfast Dec 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 10 Bell College Dec 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 11 Birkbeck College Dec 01, 1998 Sidebar not available due to robots.txt file.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 12 Birmingham Jan 06, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 13 Bishop Grosseteste College Nov 11, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 14 Bolton Institute Dec 01, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 15 Arts Institute at Bournemouth Oct 09, 1999 "Splash screen" causes problems.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 16 Bournemouth Oct 20, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 17 Bradford Apr 30, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 18 Brighton Jul 15, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 19 Bristol Jun 06, 1997 Has links to Extranet and Intranet.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 20 Brunel Dec 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 21 Buckinghamshire Chilterns Nov 25, 1999 Creates pop-up window and uses frames and JavaScripted navigation.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 22 Cambridge Feb 12, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 23 Institute of Cancer Research Feb 27, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 24 Canterbury Christ Church Feb 17, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 25 Cardiff Dec 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 26 University of Wales Institute, Cardiff Dec 06, 1998 Has Java applet which does not work.
Images not displayed.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 27 University of Central England Dec 18, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 28 University of Central Lancashire Dec 12, 1997 Blank screen.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 29 Central School of Speech and Drama Oct 11, 1999   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 30 Chester College Dec 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 31 University College Chichester Aug 19, 2000   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 32 City University Feb 07, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 33 Courtauld Institute of Art Dec 06, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 34 Coventry Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 35 Cranfield   Not archived due to site's robots.txt file.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 36 Dartington College Jul 06, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 37 De Montfort Jan 05, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 38 Derby Jul 03, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 39 Dundee Jun 03, 1997 Large numbers of links.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 40 Durham Jun 07, 1997 Repeated use of logo as watermark.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 41 East Anglia Dec 10, 1997 Error in accessing page in Archive.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 42 University of East London Jun 26, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 43 Edge Hill College Jan 25, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 44 Edinburgh College of Art Apr 22, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 45 Edinburgh Jan 04, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 46 Essex Dec 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 47 Exeter Mar 30, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 48 Falmouth College Note archived due to site's robots.txt file.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 49 Glamorgan Nov 11, 1998 Comment about "Flash 3 plugin".
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 50 Glasgow Caledonian Jan 02, 1997 Contains link to home page.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 51 Glasgow School of Art May 08, 1997 Contains "best viewed with Netscape Navigator 2.0 or higher" message.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 52 Glasgow Feb 06, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 53 Gloucestershire Jan 22, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 54 Goldsmiths College Jan 27, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 55 Greenwich Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 56 Harper Adams Apr 11, 2000 Uses Java applet (not found).
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 57 Heriot-Watt Jan 14, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 58 Hertfordshire Jul 14, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 59 Huddersfield Jun 26, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 60 Hull Feb 06, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 61 Imperial College Nov 06, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 62 Institute of Education May 23, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 63 Keele Apr 16, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 64 Kent Institute of Art and Design Nov 08, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 65 Kent Oct 14, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 66 King Alfred's College Dec 02, 1998 Framed interface, but pages not in archive.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 67 King's College London Jul 07, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 68 Kingston Dec 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 69 Lampeter Feb 19, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 70 Lancaster Oct 21, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 71 Leeds Metropolitan University Jul 22, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 72 Leeds Oct 19, 1996 File Retrieve Error.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 73 Leicester Jun 13, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 74 Lincoln Jan 25, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 75 Liverpool Hope Apr 14, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 76 Liverpool John Moores University Apr 29, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 77 Liverpool Feb 17, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 78 London Business School Jun 30, 1997 Contains "You will require the following: Netscape Navigator 2.1 or higher Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher" message.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 79 London Guildhall University Dec 11, 1997 Images not displayed.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 80 London Institute   Not available due to robots.txt file.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 81 University of London Jun 10, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 82 London School of Economics Dec 31, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 83 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Feb 06, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 84 Loughborough Nov 09, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 85 Luton Dec 11, 1997 Has "Best viewed with Netscape" message.
Navigational images not displayed.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 86 UMIST Apr 05, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 87 Manchester Metropolitan University Jul 09, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 88 Manchester Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 89 University of Wales College of Medicine Apr 13, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 90 Middlesex Apr 24, 1997 Page not available in index.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 91 Napier Dec 24, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 92 Newcastle Feb 15, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 93 Newman College Apr 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 94 Newport Dec 21, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 95 North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education Nov 12, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 96 University of North London May 23, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 97 University College Northampton Feb 27, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 98 Northern School of Contemporary Dance May 07, 1997 Framed interface.
Usage counter not operational.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 99 University of Northumbria Feb 06, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 100 Norwich School of Art and Design Apr 12, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 101 Nottingham Trent University Jul 24, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 102 Nottingham Dec 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 103 Oxford Brookes Feb 12, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 104 Oxford Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 105 Paisley Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 106 Plymouth Jan 13, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 107 Portsmouth Feb 21, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 108 Queen Margaret University College, Dec 24, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 109 Queen Mary and Westfield College Apr 23, 2001   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 110 Ravensbourne College Dec 31, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 111 Reading Jan 03, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 112 University of Wales, Registry Dec 05, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 113 Robert Gordon University Jul 02, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 114 University of Surrey, Roehampton Jun 03, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 115 Rose Bruford College Dec 05, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 116 Royal Academy of Music Dec 12, 1998 Grey box on blue background.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 117 Royal Agricultural College Apr 05, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 118 Royal College of Art Jan 20, 1997 Java applets not found.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 119 Royal College of Music Dec 19, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 120 Royal Holloway Aug 17, 2000 Displays simple text file, with message about page for modern browsers which support JavaScript.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 121 Royal Northern College of Music Jan 25, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 122 Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama Oct 12, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 123 Royal Veterinary College Jun 23, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 124 St Andrews Jan 07, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 125 St George's Hospital Medical School Oct 22, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 126 College of St Mark and St John Dec 24, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 127 St Martin's College Dec 28, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 128 St Mary's College Jan 17, 1999   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 129 Salford Jan 29, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 130 School of Oriental and African Studies Jan 21, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 131 School of Pharmacy Dec 06, 1998   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 132 Scottish Agricultural College Oct 07, 1997 Contains large grey image, provided by Internet Archive.
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[View] [View Earliest Entry] 137 Southampton Dec 29, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 138 Staffordshire Feb 21, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 139 Stirling Feb 28, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 140 Strathclyde Jun 05, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 141 Sunderland Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 142 Surrey Institute of Art and Design Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 143 Surrey May 03, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 144 Sussex Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 145 Swansea Institute Jan 10, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 146 University of Wales, Swansea Dec 23, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 147 Teesside Jul 09, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 148 Thames Valley University Dec 22, 1996   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 149 Open University Feb 01, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 150 Trinity College of Music No matches found.
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[View] [View Earliest Entry] 157 University of the West of England Jan 03, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 158 Westminster Dec 11, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 159 Wolverhampton Feb 04, 1997 Path Index Error.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 160 University College Worcester May 26, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 161 Writtle College Mar 29, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] 162 York St John College Aug 03, 2001 Path Index Error.
[View] [View Earliest Entry] 163 York Jan 08, 1997   [View] [View Earliest Entry] The information in the table was initially collected between 20-23 December 2002 Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: "WebWatch: Surfing Historical UK University Web Sites" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: April-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 35 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Improving the Quality of Metadata in Eprint Archives Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Improving the Quality of Metadata in Eprint Archives Buzz data software html usability archives metadata vocabularies schema eprints oai-pmh cataloguing rslp interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy, Andy Powell and Michael Day address the argument that the quality of service to end-users is markedly influenced by the quality of metadata being produced and provide suggestions.
Throughout the eprints community there is an increasing awareness of the need for improvement in the quality of metadata and in associated quality assurance mechanisms.
Some [1] feel that recent discussion of the cultural and institutional barriers to self-archiving, which have so far limited the proliferation of eprint archives in the UK, have meant that anything that is perceived as a barrier between academics and their parent institutions needs to be played down.
However, ‘metadata quality has a profound bearing on the quality of service that can be offered to end-users…and this in turn may have a detrimental effect on long term participation.’ [1].
Therefore, this article suggests a number of quality assurance procedures that people setting up an eprint archive can use to improve the quality of their metadata.
Importance of Metadata Quality Quality is very difficult to define.
A definition that can be used in the context of metadata is: ‘high quality metadata supports the functional requirements of the system it is designed to support’, which can be summarised as ‘quality is about fitness for purpose’.
Metadata quality is a particular problem for the eprints community for two reasons.
Firstly, within eprint archives, metadata creation is often carried out by document authors as part of the deposit process; yet there remains a lack of good (and configurable) metadata creation tools that support the untrained end-user in this task.
Secondly, in order for end-users to benefit fully from the development of eprint archives, service providers need to maintain a high level of consistency across multiple data providers.
In other service areas, where this high level of interoperability is not as important, lower metadata quality may be more easily tolerated.
In eprint archives, metadata quality influences not only the service offered through the archive’s native Web interface, but also what options can be offered by OAI service providers like ePrints UK [2].
Some of the quality assurance points noted below, such as defining functional requirements, may need to be articulated at both levels.
Groups of data providers, e.g.
those within a particular project or initiative, may want to define requirements cooperatively with appropriate service providers, and from those outline the minimum ‘quality’ requirements for participating data providers.
Deciding upon Metadata Quality Before starting work on the creation of an eprint archive the following four assessments should be carried out: 1.
Define the ‘internal’ functional requirements relating to the archive’s Web user-interface To decide what metadata is needed, you should decide what the archive is trying to achieve and what your end-users will want to do with the metadata held.
The easiest way to define this is to write a full list of requirements relating to the eprint archive’s Web user-interface.
An example list of functional requirements is given in Table 1.
It may also be useful at this stage of the project to attempt to define the browse tree structure required for certain metadata fields.
This will allow you to decide upon the level of granularity required in the controlled vocabularies at a later stage.
For example, dc:type (which describes the nature or genre of the resource) might be used to ‘filter’ search results.
This would allow the user to filter search results by journal article, book chapter, thesis, etc.
Example of Functional Requirements List We would like users to be able to: Search records by: Title Author name Keyword Type of document Publication Conference name Year Browse records by: Year Department View latest additions to the archive We would like to be able to: Link together records from the same: Conference Publication Filter by: Year Table 1: A functional requirements list 2.
Define the ‘external’ functional requirements relating to disclosed metadata The next step is to define all the functional requirements relating to the exposure of your metadata to external services using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
This list may be similar to the previous list because you may want to allow external services to carry out similar actions on your metadata.
However it is likely that the list will be shorter because you have little control over the functionality offered by external services.
Note that your external functional requirements are likely to be heavily influenced by the functionality of existing Open Archive Initiative service providers.
3.
Define a metadata ‘application profile’ that will support the listed functional requirements Once the requirements have been established, it should be possible to define the list of metadata elements, encoding schemes and controlled vocabularies needed to support the requirements.
Controlled vocabularies are an essential part of the metadata in an eprint archive, e.g.
for subject terms, resource types, etc.
It will be necessary to decide whether to adopt existing vocabularies or to create new ones.
In general, using existing, externally-maintained vocabularies is more likely to lead to interoperability with other systems, which may be important in meeting the ‘external’ functional requirements identified in 2. above.
Note that there may be other constraints at this stage, for example the OAI-PMH requirement to support simple Dublin Core.
4.
Define ‘content rules’ for the values used within your metadata Metadata quality can be assessed by determining whether the metadata in the eprint archive is good enough to support the functional requirements defined above.
For example, where dates are used as metadata values it is important to have content rules specifying the format of those dates.
If the date format is not specified, and different date formats are used when documents are deposited, it may not be possible to sort those documents by date.
As a result, users will not be able to search or browse documents by date.
If searching and browsing by date are listed as functional requirements for your eprint archive, then your metadata will not be of sufficient quality to meet your functional requirements.
Similarly, if you have a requirement to browse author names alphabetically, then you need to ensure that author names are entered in a controlled form (e.g.
family name first).
Martin Halbert, as part of various Mellon Foundation-funded projects, has looked at issues of metadata quality in OAI-based services, including what he calls ‘collisions’ between metadata formats, authority control and de-duplication issues [3].
More problem areas relating to the quality of metadata for both learning objects and eprints are outlined in a recent paper by Barton, Currier and Hey [1].
Achieving Metadata Quality through QA Mechanisms Deciding upon the metadata quality needed for your eprint archive is only the first step in achieving metadata quality.
In order to achieve quality as defined, what is needed is a quality cycle that should be built into your eprint archive from the outset.
This cycle consists of a number of elements: A.
Produce cataloguing guidelines Once the metadata schema to be used by an eprint archive has been defined, a set of cataloguing guidelines should be produced.
These guidelines should define all metadata elements that are to be used, give content guidelines for each including information on the particular standards in use and some examples.
They are essential in ensuring a minimum level of consistency between eprint records [4].
B.
Improve the usability of metadata entry tools In order for the cataloguing guidelines to be used effectively, it is important that they are imbedded within the input tools in some way.
Note that the design of metadata creation and editing tools is a non-trivial activity and that issues relating to the usability of these tools is not tackled in this article.
However, a simple example of how integration of guidelines can be carried out is shown by the RSLP collection description tool [5].
The data entry guidelines may be made available as a separate document, from within the editing tool in the form of explanations and examples, or both.
It is important to remember that inconsistent application of controlled vocabularies will have a negative effect on the functionality of the eprint archive.
In order to avoid this, there may be ways of changing the interface of metadata editing tools to support their consistent use, e.g.
through the use of ‘drop-down’ boxes or links to authority lists.
C. Implement appropriate quality control (QC) processes Once the application profile, controlled vocabularies, cataloguing guidelines and data entry tools are in place and metadata is being entered into the eprint archive, it is important to make sure that they are having the correct impact on the quality of the metadata being created.
Their impact can be tested by implementing suitable QC processes within the metadata input workflow.
For example, once a month a random sample of metadata entered could be sent to an information specialist for assessment.
The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) uses a commercially available visual graphical analysis tool called Spotfire DecisionSite [6] to carry out tests on random samples of metadata.
They found that the software significantly improved efficiency and thoroughness of metadata evaluation.
Their methods and findings are documented in the paper by Dushay and Hillman [7].
Paul Shabajee of the Arkive Project [8] has recently carried out some work on inter-indexer consistency.
An automated system has been scoped that allows the system to feed resources out to cataloguers in the form of a ‘cataloguing to-do list’.
The system can throw a small percentage of images/items to all (or a subset of) cataloguers.
This means that sometimes the same resource is sent to more than one cataloguer and the results are compared and inconsistencies flagged and examined.
Naturally, inconsistencies do not always mean an inaccuracy and there are a lot of complex semantic issues that need consideration.
The system then collates the statistics and provides dynamic feedback on consistency.
This in turn feeds back into other QA processes.
Within the project it is felt that if the indexing within a system is inconsistent then it does not matter how good the information recall system is, the service will ultimately fail.
The recall and precision of the system are fundamentally limited by the underlying consistency.
Advantages of the scoped system would be that once it is set up there is a very low overhead and results are provided from real daily work and not special QC survey activities that are likely to skew results by making the cataloguers behave, probably subconsciously, differently to normal [9].
In order to put more value on the information obtained by assessing random samples of metadata, it is probably useful at this stage to look at the metadata creation workflow models that are commonly in use.
Most eprint archives make some use of automated metadata creation during the document deposit process.
This automation can vary from full automation, for example when assigning the dc:format of a document, to semi-automation, for example when a title is automatically extracted from a document but is then presented to the document author (or whoever is depositing the document) for manual checking.
However, not all metadata fields benefit from a full or semi-automated approach.
In these cases manual cataloguing must be carried out by the document author or by an information specialist.
When assessing random samples of metadata it may be useful to assess the quality of automatically generated metadata by considering how often the document author has to amend it.
Looking at this aspect of the metadata created would allow steps to be taken to improve the automated service.
Similarly, it may be possible to analyse how often information specialists need to modify the metadata supplied by the document author, with steps being taken to improve the cataloguing guidelines and metadata entry tools being offered to the document authors as a result.
Figure 1: Metadata creation workflow It is important that whatever constructive feedback is obtained from testing be passed back into the system through redesigns of the application profile, controlled vocabularies, cataloguing guidelines and data entry tools.
This QA process can be viewed as a cycle or feedback loop, in that each stage feeds into the next, (see Figure 2).
Processes, standards, tools and documentation are iteratively enhanced with the overall aim of improving the metadata created.
When good Quality Assurance is implemented there should be improvement in the quality of the metadata, the usability and performance of the eprint archive and there should be a decreasing rate of defects.
Defects here refer to the problem areas defined by Barton, Currier and Hey [1].
Figure 2: Quality assurance loop for metadata D. Carry out usability tests Another QA mechanism that needs to be put in place is a form of testing to ensure that end-users are able to undertake the activities specified in the initial functional requirements.
The most straightforward way of testing this is through usability tests.
These usability tests need to be well designed in order to differentiate clearly between testing of the metadata quality and the overall usability of the eprint archive.
The Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure (TARDis) Project [10] has been funded as part of JISC’s Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Programme (FAIR).
The project itself will be building a sustainable multidisciplinary institutional archive of eprints to leverage the research created within Southampton University using both self-archiving and mediated deposit.
However, while developing the archive, TARDIS will be passing feedback back into the GNU eprints software [11] developed at the University of Southampton.
To do this they are trialing a simpler interface to eprints software for author-generated metadata and testing the value of a number of areas.
These include: targeted help; more logical field order; examples created by information specialists and fields required for good citation.
Conclusion As more work is carried out in the area of eprints there is an increasing realisation that the metadata creation process is key to the establishment of a successful archive.
There is still much research work to be done in areas such as consideration of the processes involved and the use of metadata tools.
However this article has outlined a number of procedures through which those setting up eprint archives may be able to improve the quality of the metadata being produced for their own service and external service providers.
The consistent application of relevant metadata is extremely important in supporting the creation of high-quality services based on it.
In order to achieve this, data providers need to consider their own functional requirements and those of relevant service providers.
They also have to define an appropriate metadata application profile to support these requirements and make clear decisions on the quality levels needed for them to operate properly.
The provision of cataloguing guidelines and authoritative information on controlled vocabularies can help support the metadata creation process, e.g.
by being incorporated in metadata editors.
Finally, there are a number of quality assurance techniques that can be used to measure the quality of the metadata after it has been created.
These include the evaluation by information specialists of random samples and the use of graphical analysis tools.
It may also be possible to focus on improving eprint deposit and metadata creation workflows and to undertake some usability testing of the archives while they are being developed.
References Barton, J; Currier, S & Hey, J.
(2003) Building Quality Assurance into Metadata Creation: an Analysis based on the Learning Objects and e-Prints Communities of Practice, DC-2003.
http://www.siderean.com/dc2003/201_paper60.pdf Powerpoint available from http://tardis.eprints.org/papers/ ePrints UK http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ Halbert, M. (2003) The MetaScholar Initiative: AmericanSouthOrg and MetaArchive.Org, Library Hi Tech, 21(2), 182-198.
Available (in HTML and PDF) from the Emerald Library http://www.emerald-library.com/ Using simple DC to describe ePrints.
Powell, A, Day, M & Cliff, P. (2003) http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/simpledc-guidelines/ RSLP collection description schema http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/ DecisionSite Analysis Builder http://www.spotfire.com/products/decision.asp Dushay, N & Hilman, D. (2003) Analyzing Metadata for Effective Use and Re-Use, DC-2003.
http://www.siderean.com/dc2003/501_Paper24.pdf Arkive Project http://www.arkive.org/ Shabajee, P. (2003).
The ARKive-ERA (Educational Repurposing of Assets) project: lessons and thoughts.
Semantic Web for scientific and cultural organisations: results of some early experiments, Florence, Italy, 16-17th June 2003. http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/mesmuses/shabajee_musmuse s.pdf TARDis http://tardis.eprints.org/ EPrints software http://software.eprints.org/ Author Details Marieke Guy Subject Portals Project Manager, ePrints UK Project Manager and QA Focus UKOLN Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Andy Powell Assistant Director, Distributed Systems and Services UKOLN Email: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Michael Day Research Officer, Research and Development UKOLN Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Title: “Improving the Quality of Metadata in Eprint Archives” Author: Marieke Guy, Andy Powell Publication Date: 30-January-2004  Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/guy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 30: Centering the Periphery A New Equity in Information Access?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 30: Centering the Periphery A New Equity in Information Access?
Buzz mobile framework database xml archives metadata digitisation accessibility repositories copyright preservation perl ebook url research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter introduces Ariadne issue 30.
Welcome to the December/January issue of Ariadne.
A focus of this issue of Ariadne is the Open Archives Initiative and the wider implications of the techniques and technology associated with it.
A major impetus behind the take-up of the OAI idea is the wish to make research available more widely and more quickly than before, and also to counter the problems created by the nature of existing academic publishing.
As David Pearson writes in our lead article on digitization strategy, ‘….librarians who have to subscribe to the major groupings of scientific journals know only too well, a situation has developed in which a few publishers have an economic stranglehold; scientists produce research which is published in journals which have to be bought, ever more crippling subscription rates, by the institutions where many of the scientists are themselves based.’ Stevan Harnad has graphically illustrated this situation elsewhere (‘For Whom the Gate Tolls’) by pointing out that the authors of research may find themselves in the situation where they have no access to the published version of their own research.
Pearson also mentions the copyright problem: ‘Copyright over this material has also been cunningly controlled by the publishers, who have often required authors to sign their rights away.
The establishment of new groupings like SPARC and PubMed, trying to bring control back into the community that creates the work, and make it freely available on the Internet for wider public good, is a heartening response but the battle will not be easily won….’ The Open Archives Initiative builds on the pioneering work of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Pre-Prints Archive (New Mexico), which was created for the benefit of the physics community (the Archive is now located at Cornell University and known as arXiv).
Where once the the community which benefitted from a pre-print archive was confined to the subject of physics, the Open Archives Initiative envisages the application of the idea to the whole of the research community.
The Los Alamos archive itself now covers mathematics and computer science as well as physics.
Universities around the world are now in the process of setting up their own metadata repositories and full text archives.
Leslie Chan and Barbara Kirsop highlight some of the possibilities of the application of OAI ideas worldwide in their article ‘Open Archiving Opportunities for Developing Countries: towards equitable distribution of global knowledge’.
They say that ‘the [Los Alamos] archive has become indispensable to researchers world wide, but in particular to research institutions that would othewise be excluded from the front line of science for economic and sociological reasons….’ And that: ‘a key benefit for developing-country scientists is that global participation could take place without further delay.
The academic communities in poorer countries can take advantage of servers anywhere in the world offering OAI services, without the need to set up their own independent servers or maintain them.’ They also note that the scientific community at large has: ‘…become aware of the many benefits conferred by open archiving, such as the removal of the cost barrier to high-priced journals, the reduction of time in announcing research findings, and the provision of access to all with Internet capability….’ Chan and Kirsop also address the quality control question about open archiving, pointing out that ‘scholarly archives, while possibly containing both refereed (postprints) and non-refereed material (preprints), nevertheless provide clear options for readers to selectively retrieve material.
The experience of physicists/mathematicians who have used open archiving for a number of years shows that quality of research is not jeopardised by the process, since researchers that submit material are concerned with their reputation and professional credibility and that their work is open for review by their peers around the world….‘vanity publishing’ by individuals must be distinguished from the institutional or author-archiving of preprints of papers submitted for peer review.
While there has been a lot of publicity about the Open Archives Initiative as an idea, there has been much less on the actual implementation of OAI archives.
Ariadne hopes to remedy this to some extent over the next few issues.
In the meantime we have an article by Pete Cliff, Systems Developer for the Resource Discovery Network, which explores the RDN’s use of the OAI metadata harvesting protocol (‘Building ResourceFinder’).
UKOLN developed a Perl implementation of an OAI repository, using two scripts: one to convert the records from the gateway database format, to Dublin Core XML records, and the other to function as the OAI front end to the repository.
So far the RDN’s OAI repositories are not available outside the RDN, but it is envisaged that access might be offered to RDN partners, and possibly beyond.
There are many other interesting contributions to this issue of Ariadne, and these include: Jenny Rowley’s introduction to the ‘JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework’; Nicole Harris’s report on current developments in the ANGEL project (‘Managed Learning?’); Brian Kelly’s look at Mobile e-Book readers in his regular Web Focus column; Phil Bradley’s regular column compares two popular search engines and suggests that Alltheweb has overtaken Alta Vista in terms of general usefulness; Neil Beagrie and Philip Pothen report on an important Digital Preservation day in October 2001 (‘Digital Curation’); Philip Pothen also contributes an item with Simon Jennings on developments at the Resource Discovery Network (RDN); Penny Garrod contributes her first column as Public Libraries Focus at UKOLN, and writes in fine style; Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes explore Content Management Systems and provide a systematic look at the various options.
The article summarises and updates a recent JISC-funded TechWatch report which provides the kind of objective assessment of the issues not in abundance elsewhere; we also have a report by Jennie Craven on a pre-conference session at IFLA in Washington which looked at accessibility issues for the blind and visually impaired.
Thanks again to Shirley Keane (for assistance with the Newsline section).
Thanks also to those who supplied trip reports, enabling us to put together another substantial ‘At the Event’ section for this issue.
Congratulations are also due to Marieke Napier who has moved on from Cultivate Interactive Magazine to become UKOLN’s QA Focus/NOF-digitise Advisor.
Suggestions for articles for issues 31 to 33 are now being considered.
Article proposals should be sent to: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
Enjoy the issue.
Philip Hunter Ariadne Editor Article Title: “Centering the Periphery: A New Equity in Information Access?
Issue 30” Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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eBank UK: Building the Links Between Research Data, Scholarly Communication and Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eBank UK: Building the Links Between Research Data, Scholarly Communication and Learning Buzz data software rdf framework database dissemination xml infrastructure archives metadata identifier schema repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh aggregation provenance ontologies uri vle curation wsrp mets dspace e-science rae privacy url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Liz Lyon describes some new digital library development activities and considers the implications of linking research and learning outputs in an environment of assured data provenance.
This article presents some new digital library development activities which are predicated on the concept that research and learning processes are cyclical in nature, and that subsequent outputs which contribute to knowledge, are based on the continuous use and reuse of data and information [1].
We can start by examining the creation of original data, (which may be, for example, numerical data generated by an experiment or a survey, or alternatively images captured as part of a clinical study).
This initial process is usually followed by one or more additional processes which might include aggregation of experimental data, selection of a particular data subset, repetition of a laboratory experiment, statistical analysis or modelling of a set of data, manipulation of a molecular structure, annotation of a diagram or editing of a digital image, and which in turn generate modified datasets.
This newly-derived data is related to the original data and can be re-purposed through publication in a database, in a pre-print or in a peer-reviewed article.
These secondary items may themselves be reused through a citation in a related paper, by a reference in a reading list or as an element within modular materials which form part of an undergraduate or postgraduate course.
Clearly it will not always be appropriate to re-purpose the original data from an experiment or study, but it is evident that much research activity is derivative in nature.
The impact of Grid technologies and the huge amounts of data generated by Grid-enabled applications [2], suggest that in the future, (e-)science will be increasingly data-intensive and collaborative.
This is exemplified in the biosciences where the growing outputs from genome sequencing work are stored in databases such as GenBank [3] but require advanced computing tools for data mining and analysis.
The UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) recently published a Ten Year Vision [4] which describes this trend as “Towards predictive biology” and proposes that in the 21st Century, biology is becoming a more data-rich and quantitative science.
The trend has clear implications for data/information management and curation procedures, and we can examine these further by returning to the concept of a scholarly knowledge cycle.
A complete cycle may be implemented in either direction so for example, discrete research data could (ultimately) be explicitly referenced in some form of electronic learning and teaching materials.
Alternatively, a student might wish to “rollback” to the original research data from a secondary information resource such as a published article or from an element within an online course delivered via a Learning Management System [5].
In order to achieve this, a number of assumptions must be made which relate largely to the discovery process but are also closely linked to the requirement for essential data curation procedures.
The assumptions are: The integrity of the original data is maintained There is a shared understanding of the concept of provenance The original dataset is adequately described using a metadata description framework based on agreed standards A common ontology for the domain is understood Each dataset and derived data and information are uniquely identified Open linking technology is applied to the original dataset and the derived data and information The scholarly knowledge cycle is shown below in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The Scholarly Knowledge Cycle Illustrating by example chemistry We can take a closer look at some typical research information workflows which form a part of the cycle, by focusing on a discrete domain, chemistry, and in particular draw on experimental detail from the Combechem Project [6] which is an e-Science Grid-enabled initiative in the area of combinatorial chemistry investigating molecular and crystal structures.
The Combechem Project is an ideal research test-bed because large quantities of varied data are generated.
These include electronic lab books, crystallography data and physical chemistry data i.e.
textual, numeric and 2/3D molecular structure datasets.
Outputs from the project are published in fast track “Letters” formats and as articles in peer-reviewed journals.
These articles reference experimental data.
In addition, “Letters” are referenced in postgraduate teaching modules.
Currently, once a research experiment in this area is finished, the initial dissemination may be via a letter or communication, followed later by a more detailed explanation in a full paper describing in-depth analysis and collating several related results.
Reference data may be provided at this point, but there is unlikely to be any link back to the raw or processed data.
The ability to publish data directly and the wider availability of e-prints suggest that these potentially valuable connections can be made.
This linking is illustrated by an example from crystallography: Step 1 A new compound or material is created and submitted for structure determination by x-ray diffraction by the EPSRC National Crystallography Service [7] Step 2 The data is analysed, a structure determined and then validated.
At this stage an e-print system could carry the identification of the compound and the fact that a structure has been determined, supported by some basic characterisation of the material Step 3a If it is found that the structure is routine and not worthy of special discussion at this stage, the full structure is made available via the e-print and submitted up to the crystallographic databases.
The e-print system will link to the raw data and other researchers could look at this to assess the validity of the work Step 3b If the material is worthy of discussion, then the group who produced the material will write and submit the communication to a journal.
The e-print access is altered at this stage to give the referees access to the structure and the raw data.
The paper can then be validated, and published, and the e-print links are opened to the community Step 4 The article is referenced in an (online) course module which forms a part of the postgraduate curriculum The eBank UK Pilot Service eBank UK is a new JISC-funded project which is a part of the Semantic Grid Programme [8].
The project is being led by UKOLN in partnership with the Combechem project at the University of Southampton and the PSIgate [9] Physical Sciences Information Gateway at the University of Manchester.
This new initiative is set in the context of the JISC Information Environment which aims to develop an information architecture [10] for providing access to electronic resources for UK higher and further education .
The eBank UK pilot service is a first step towards building the infrastructure which will enable the linking of research data with other derived information.
The project will build on the technical architecture currently being deployed within the context of the ePrints UK Project [11] and which has been described in a recent Ariadne article [12].
The architecture supports the harvesting of metadata from eprint archives in UK academic institutions and elsewhere using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [13].
The eBank UK Project will augment this work by also harvesting metadata about research data from institutional ‘e-data repositories’.
Initially this will encompass data made available by Combechem, but will include data from other sources in the longer term.
Metadata records harvested from e-data repositories will be stored in the central database alongside the eprint metadata records gathered as part of the ePrints UK Project.
The eprints.org software will be adapted to provide storage for and metadata descriptions of the research data outputs.
The data will be described using a schema which is based on existing work in the Combechem Project, and will be described in a human-readable document and as machine-readable XML and RDF schemas.
The XML schema is required so that metadata records conforming to the schema can be exchanged using the OAI-PMH.
The RDF schema will support use in the context of the Semantic Web/Grid.
Recommendations are required for how e-prints should cite the research data on which they are based, and this may be achieved using a URI based on the unique identifier that is assigned to the research data when it is deposited in the e-data archive.
An enhanced end-user interface for eBank UK, targeted for delivery through the RDN PSIgate Hub, will be developed which will offer navigation from eprint metadata records to research data metadata records and vice versa.
The Web interface will be hosted on the RDN Web site [14] and will form the basis of the interface that will be embedded into the PSIgate Web site.
Embedding will be implemented using the CGI-based mechanism that was developed for RDN-Include [15] and by investigating development of a Web Service based on the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) [16] specification.
eBank will also investigate the technical possibilities for inferring which subject classification terms may be associated with research data, based on knowledge of the terms that have been automatically assigned to the eprints which cite those data resources.
Figure 2 below outlines the eBank UK information architecture framework under development (diagram by Andy Powell).
Figure 2: eBank UK Information Architecture Framework under development Identifying the challenges Addressing socio-economic and cultural issues There are currently many initiatives to promote open access to the research literature through new approaches to scholarly publishing.
These are based on the author self-archiving principle [17] and have focused on the creation of subject-based repositories of e-prints such as Cogprints [18] and arXiv [19], institutional repositories [20] [21] and activities to facilitate aggregation or federation such as the national pilot service ePrints UK.
In a similar manner, data repositories have been created on a national basis [22] [23], on a subject basis [24] and even about particular species [25].
More recently, Grid-enabled UK e-science projects such as AstroGrid [26] and GriPhyN [27] which are highly data-centric, are generating peta-bytes of data and require advanced tools for data management and data-mining.
The move towards a distributed Virtual Observatory will also require new distributed search and query tools such as SkyQuery [28] and Web Services form a key component of the technical infrastructure underpinning this development.
From a scholarly perspective, the strategic importance of institutional repositories has been articulated by Clifford Lynch [29] and he notes their potential for addressing data dissemination and preservation in addition to their role in managing other scholarly outputs.
Digital asset management systems such as DSpace [30] support the storage of datasets as well as other digital formats.
New projects are underway to investigate the issues around the preservation of institutional research data in the JISC-funded Supporting Institutional Records Management Programme [31].
Whilst the case for institutional repositories has been well-presented in a SPARC Position Paper [32], there is evidence that the authors themselves, i.e.
academic researchers, appear to be reluctant to deposit and share information in this way [33] [34].
The cultural barriers and issues of intellectual property rights and quality control that have been identified as concerns to academics are being investigated in the JISC FAIR Programme/CURL-funded TARDIS [35], RoMEO [36] and SHERPA [36] projects.
A further key issue is the research impact factor element in the context of freely-available electronic publications and this has been addressed in a recent paper by Stevan Harnad and colleagues [38].
Will similar reservations be expressed by academics when asked to deposit their research data in institutional repositories?
To further complicate the picture, in some disciplines such as biomedicine, there are difficult issues of sensitivity, privacy and consent which act as barriers to the availability of electronic data and information.
In summary, it is vital that the socio-economic and cultural barriers are addressed in parallel with the technological challenges.
Assuring the provenance of digital resources Provenance is a well-established concept within the archives community [39] and in the art world [40][41], where the lineage, pedigree or origins of an archival record or painting are critical to determining its authenticity and value.
It is of equal importance in science where the provenance or origin of a particular set of data is essential to determining the likely accuracy, currency and validity of derived information and any assumptions, hypotheses or further work based on that information [42].
Significant research has been carried out on describing the provenance of scientific data in molecular genetics databases SWISSPROT and OMIM [43] and in collaborative multi-scale chemistry initiatives [44].
The topic has recently been explored in a workshop at the Global Grid Forum (GGF6) in relation to Grid data [45] and the relationship of provenance to the Semantic Web has been noted [46].
The Open Archives Initiative has also carried out some work to describe the provenance of harvested metadata records [47] and the concept is included as an element in the administrative metadata which is part of the METS [48] metadata standard.
eBank will be reviewing the body of work on provenance, describing the observed trends and directions, and will particularly focus on the relationship between the creation, curation and management of research data and its integration into published information resources which are contained in digital libraries.
Metadata descriptions and common ontologies A recent joint UKOLN/National e-Science Centre (NeSC) Workshop [49] [50], Schemas and Ontologies: Building a Semantic Infrastructure for the Grid and Digital Libraries explored some generic challenges which creators of digital libraries and Grid data repositories need to address.
More specifically, eBank will be considering a wealth of metadata issues relating to the perceived hierarchy of data and metadata from raw data up to “published” results.
These include the need to identify common attributes of a dataset and relate them to domain-specific characteristics, managing legacy data, dealing with metadata created at source by laboratory equipment and the relationship to wider data curation activities.
The Combechem project will act as a discrete case study and metadata from three sources (e-Lab book, crystallography data and physical chemistry data) will be used to inform the drafting of a schema for describing chemistry datasets.
Impact on the wider community and on research and learning processes It is hoped that the outcomes of the project will have the potential for very significant long-term impact on the whole scholarly communications process.
The availability of original data, together with the ability to track its use in subsequent research work, scholarly publications or learning materials, will have outcomes in a number of areas: It will be possible to track more accurately the protocols, mechanisms and workflows integral to the research process.
Referees will be able to validate more effectively the accuracy and authenticity of derived works which will lead to a more transparent and auditable process.
In addition the accepted standards associated with the publication of research outputs will be raised, which will enhance the integrity and rigour of the scholarly knowledge cycle and facilitate the explicit referencing and acknowledgment of original contributors Access to research outputs will be greatly improved and will benefit the wider community of scholars.
It will be possible to increase the speed of dissemination of research activity for the benefit of the wider community.
The ways in which data and information are used and reused for a range of purposes will be expanded leading to potentially innovative applications and outcomes Learners will be able to examine the original data underpinning published work and use this information to inform their course work .The quality and richness of materials created for learning and teaching will be enhanced, whether these are digital materials for an online course or in support of more traditional delivery methods Finally, it is clear that some historic scientific controversies would have been easier to resolve within an environment of assured data provenance, and we can cite the example of Rosalind Franklin [51].
She was one of the leading molecular biologists of the mid-twentieth century, who worked with James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in the early 1950s.
To this day, the debate continues on the significance of her role in determining the structure of DNA, in the absence of persistent digital evidence!
Acknowledgements The contributions of Andy Powell (UKOLN) and Jeremy Frey (Combechem Project, University of Southampton) are gratefully acknowledged.
References Lyon, L. (2002) Developing Information Architectures to support Research, Learning and Teaching, UCISA Conference, March 2002. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/dev-inf-arch/intro_files/frame.htm Frey, J., De Roure D. and Carr L. (2002) Publishing at Source: Scientific Publication from a Web to a Data Grid, EuroWeb 2002 Conference, Oxford.
Dec 2002. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/publicationAtSource Tony Hey, Anne Trefethen, The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective.
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/documents/DataDeluge.pdf GenBank http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/Genbank/GenbankOverview.html BBSRC Bioscience for Society: A Ten-Year Vision.
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/publications/policy/bbsrc_vision.html [URL updated 2007-12-12 Ariadne] A Learning Management System is taken to be synonymous with a Virtual Learning Environment or VLE.
Combechem Project http://www.combechem.org/ EPSRC UK National Crystallography Service in the Chemical Crystallography Laboratory at the Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton http://www.soton.ac.uk/~xservice/ JISC Semantic Grid & Autonomic Computing Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_semantic_grid PSIgate http://www.psigate.ac.uk/newsite/ The JISC Information Environment Architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ ePrints UK Project http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ Ruth Martin.
ePrints UK: Developing a national e-prints archive.
Ariadne , 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/martin/ Open Archives Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/ RDN http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ RDN-Include http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rdn-i/ Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsrp Stevan Harnad.
Free at LastThe Future of Peer-reviewed Journals.
D-Lib Magazine, 1999. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html Cogprints http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ arXiv http://arxiv.org/ University of Bath: ePrints@Bath http://eprints.bath.ac.uk/ University of Nottingham ePrints http://www-db.library.nottingham.ac.uk/eprints/ UK Data Archive http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ UK Census Datasets http://census.ac.uk/cdu/datasets/ NERC Environmental Data Centre http://www.nerc.ac.uk/data/ FlyBase http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu/ AstroGrid project http://www.astrogrid.org/ GriPhyN Project http://www.griphyn.org/index.php SkyQuery http://www.skyquery.net/main.htm Clifford Lynch ARL Bimonthly Report 226, February 2003 http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html DSpace http://dspace.org/index.html JISC Supporting Institutional Records Management Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_supporting_irm SPARC Position Paper http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html Stephen Pinfield, Mike Gardner and John MacColl, Ariadne, 2002. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ Stephen Pinfield D-Lib Magazine March 2003. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march03/pinfield/03pinfield.html TARDIS Project http://tardis.eprints.org/ RoMEO Project http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/ SHERPA Project http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Stevan Harnad et al Mandated online RAE CVs linked to university eprint archives: enhancing UK research impact and assessment.
Ariadne , March/April 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ David Bearman & Richard Lytle.
The Power of the Principle of Provenance.
Archivaria, 21, p14-27, 1985.
Getty Provenance Index http://piedi.getty.edu/ Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Provenance Project http://www.moma.org/provenance/ Peter Buneman et al Why and Where:A Characterization of Data Provenance http://db.cis.upenn.edu/DL/whywhere.pdf Peter Buneman et al Archiving Scientific Data http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wctan/papers/02/sigmod02.pdf Collaboratory for the Multi-scale Chemical Sciences CMCS http://cmcs.ca.sandia.gov/index.php Data derivation and provenance workshop GGF6 http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/provenance/ Carole Goble Position Statement at GGF6 Workshop.
Open Archives Initiative guidelines http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-provenance.htm METS http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ UKOLN/NeSC Schemas & Ontologies Workshop http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=163 John MacColl Metadata Wanted for the Evanescent Library, Ariadne issue 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/maccoll-rpt/ Rosalind Franklin Brief Biography http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/franklin.html Author Details Dr Liz Lyon Director UKOLN University of Bath UK Email: e.lyon@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “eBank UK: Building the links between research data, scholarly communication and learning” Author: Liz Lyon Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/lyon/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 41: Forces in Train Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 41: Forces in Train Buzz software portal archives metadata identifier repositories oai-pmh aggregation dspace research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne 41.
For someone who is relatively ill at ease with numbers, it comes as no surprise that our lives grow increasingly controlled by them in ways which perhaps Orwell did not 'foresee' in 1984.
Winston Smith tries very hard to remain an individual, as I hope do we all; indeed it is most often the great individuals whom we either cherish as a national treasure [1], or loathe most enthusiastically, but to whom we are rarely indifferent.
But numbers are also great facilitators and provided they have the scope, are able to secure and operate the most complex of systems and technologies as we know.
Those of us who remember the great shift in this country to new telephone trunk dialling codes will recall the upheaval that irritating but essential adjustment occasioned in our lives.
Ann Chapman writes of a similar impending and major shift in the numbers which we have used to identify books for many a year and makes it clear that ISBN-13: New Number on the Block will have an impact to varying degrees on all users of ISBNs: publishers, distributors, booksellers, libraries, and suppliers of systems and software to the information community and the book trade.
As you will read, despite a period of adjustment being theoretically planned for, major forces will be employing the new system as of now.
Those readers who have been following developments in the software and development of academic repositories will know Richard Jones of old and no doubt remember his interesting comparison in issue 38 that looked at the similarities and differences between DSpace and ETD-db to determine their applicability in a modern E-theses service.
Times have moved on and I very much welcome his description of The Tapir: Adding E-Theses Functionality to DSpace.
Meanwhile, with so much interest on this side of the North Sea in academic repositories, it will be interesting to hear from Annemiek van der Kuil and Martin Feijen who are able to describe The Dawning of the Dutch Network of Digital Academic REpositories, (the Netherlands being that little further east).
Jean Godby asks What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the Learning Object Metadata Standard?
and and in her response she makes it clear that the model in view has been influenced by usage patterns that are already observable but that problems nonetheless exist which have to be addressed because the context for the management of learning objects is growing ever more complex.
Paul Davey, Roddy MacLeod and Malcolm Moffat go into detail about how the technology developed for JISC and its services will be Improving Communications through News Aggregation and enable us to see at a glance what is going on in the JISC Service community.
Debbie Campbell writes on How the Use of Standards Is Transforming Australian Digital Libraries, something that is well received in this neck of the woods.
She describes how exploiting recent standards including the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), handles for persistent identification and metadata schemas for new types of content has had a highly beneficial effect upon their capacity to digitise collections, host federated search services and provide an improved service.
Meanwhile Chris Awre, Matthew J Dovey, Jon Hunter, William Kilbride and Ian Dolphin describe the JISC-funded Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment otherwise known as the CREE Project which will combine user and technical investigations to examine how users wish to use library search services when they are embedded in portal and non-portal environments, and investigate the use of open standards wherever possible to achieve such embedding.
UKOLN has found itself more than usually busy this past year culminating in its hosting the the 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL2004) at the University of Bath where it is based.
All hands were on deck and much rushing back and forth from stern to the foc'sle was called for, but manifestly there was a distinct buzz to the conference which was good to see.
Jessie Hey provides A Digital Librarian's Report on the conference and Michael Day who has once again covered The 4th International Web Archiving Workshop as he did for last year's workshop in Trondheim.
However the presence of ECDL2004 on our doorstep has not diverted Ariadne from other conferences as you will see if you visit this issue's At the Event section.
Other sections in the issue include Regular Columns and Get Tooled Up this issue carries an item from Brian Kelly on how quality assurance principles should inform the work of developers.
Andy Powell gives an overview of one collaborative tool that he has been looking at that places distributed partners in contact so that, though in Virtual Rooms, Real Meetings are nonetheless possible at a fraction of the traditional cost of face-to-face encounters.
In this issue's News and Reviews we have reviews of works on the information society, a review on the leassons learned in Knowledge Management, and a careful study of the latest Library Without Walls Conference, while a book on Information Representation and Retrieval comes in for balanced but also quite adverse critical comment.
Then Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources will , I feel sure appeal to many of us, if ever we find time.Once again I am indebted to the many readers of Ariadne and members of academic lists who have offered to review for us.
I am also very grateful to Ariadne's columnists for their contributions and the information and informed comment they provide.
I hope you will enjoy issue 41.
References Obituary: John Peel http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3955369.stm Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Ariadne 41: Forces in Train" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata for Digital Preservation: An Update Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata for Digital Preservation: An Update Buzz data software framework usability archives metadata doi standardisation identifier schema repositories copyright preservation cataloguing hypertext provenance pdi authentication interoperability url taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day discusses 'Metadata for Digital Preservation'.
In May 1997, the present author produced a short article for this column entitled "Extending metadata for digital preservation" [1].
The article introduced the idea of using metadata-based methods as a means of helping to manage the process of preserving digital information objects.
At the time the article was first published, the term 'metadata' was just beginning to be used by the library and information community (and others) to describe 'data about data' that could be used for resource discovery.
So, for example, the most well-known metadata initiative was (and remains) the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, initially concerned with defining a core metadata element set for Internet resource discovery [2].
It is now widely accepted that identifying and recording appropriate metadata is a key part of any strategy for preserving digital information objects.
This brief update will report on a number of more recent initiatives that have relevance to preservation metadata, but will take a specific look at currently proposed digital preservation strategies and the development of recordkeeping metadata schemes.
It will also introduce the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model that is beginning to influence a number of digital preservation based projects.
This review of activities is partly based on a review of preservation metadata initiatives carried out for the Cedars project in the summer of 1998 [3], but it has been updated to include reference to additional projects and standards.
Digital preservation strategies and metadata If one ignores the technology preservation option, there are currently two main proposed strategies for long-term digital preservation: first the emulation of original hardware, operating systems and software; and secondly the periodic migration of digital information from one generation of computer technology to a subsequent one [4].
Emulation strategies are based on the premise that the best way to preserve the functionality and 'look-and-feel' of digital information objects is to preserve it together with its original software so that it can be run on emulators that can mimic the behaviour of obsolete hardware and operating systems.
Emulation strategies would involve encapsulating a data object together with the application software used to create or interpret it and a description of the required hardware environment i.e., a specification for an emulator.
It is suggested that these emulator specification formalisms will require human readable annotations and explanations (metadata).
Jeff Rothenberg says, for example, that the emulation approach requires "the development of an annotation scheme that can save ... explanations [of how to open an encapsulation] in a form that will remain human-readable, along with metadata which provide the historical, evidential and administrative context for preserving digital documents" [5].
Migration the periodic migration of digital information from one generation of computer technology to a subsequent one is currently the most tried-and-tested preservation strategy.
However, as Seamus Ross points out, data migration inevitably leads to some losses in functionality, accuracy, integrity and usability [6].
In some contexts, this is likely to be important.
David Bearman, for example, has pointed out that if electronic records are migrated to new software environments, "content, structure and context information must be linked to software functionality that preserves their executable connections" [7].
If this, however, cannot be done, he suggests that "representations of their relations must enable humans to reconstruct the relations that pertained in the original software environment".
Successful migration strategies will, therefore, depend upon metadata being created to record the migration history of a digital object and to record contextual information, so that future users can either reconstruct or at the very least begin to understand the technological environment in which a particular digital object was created.
There is currently a debate about the relative merits of emulation and migration strategies.
Rothenberg, for example, claims that migration has little to recommend it and calls it "an approach based on wishful thinking".
He criticises the approach because he feels that it is impossible to predict exactly what will happen and because the approach is labour-intensive and expensive [8].
In the absence of any alternative, a migration strategy may be better than no strategy at all; however, to the extent that it provides merely the illusion of a solution, it may in some cases actually be worse that nothing.
In the long run, migration promises to be expensive, error-prone, at most partially successful, and ultimately infeasible.
Bearman questions the basis of this opinion and opines that Rothenberg is mistaken because he assumes that what needs to be preserved is the information system itself, rather than that which the system produces.
By this he means capturing "all transactions entering and leaving the system when they are created, ensuring that the original context of their creation and content is documented, and that the requirements of evidence are preserved over time".
In any case, Bearman argues that the emulation approach is itself extremely complicated [9].
Rothenberg's proposal does not even try to define the elements of metadata specifications that would be required for the almost unimaginably complex task of emulating proprietary application software of another era, running on, and in conjunction with, application interface programs from numerous sources, on operating systems that are obsolete, and in hardware environments that are proprietary and obsolete.
The debate is likely to continue for at least as long as it takes to test the emulation approach.
For example, some work is being carried out into the use of emulation techniques for preservation as part of the JISC/NSF funded Cedars 2 project [10] and as part of the European Union-funded NEDLIB project.
Regardless of whether emulation-based or migration-based preservation strategies are adopted and it is likely that both will have some role the long-term preservation of digital information will involve the creation and maintenance of metadata.
Clifford Lynch describes the function of some of this as follows[11]: Within an archive, metadata accompanies and makes reference to each digital object and provides associated descriptive, structural, administrative, rights management, and other kinds of information.
This metadata will also be maintained and will be migrated from format to format and standard to standard, independently of the base object it describes.
As a result preservation metadata has, therefore, become a popular area for research and development in the archive and library communities.
Archivists and records managers have concentrated on the development of recordkeeping metadata, while other groups have dealt with defining metadata specifications for particular needs.
For example, the library and information community has initiated some important work: The Research Libraries Group a Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata commissioned by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) defined the semantics of sixteen metadata elements that would be able to serve the preservation requirements of digital images [12].
The National Library of Australia a team based at the National Library of Australia (NLA) developed a logical data model (based on entity-relationship modelling) to help identify the particular entities (and their associated metadata) that needed to be supported within its PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia) proof-of-concept archive [13].
This model has been revised recently for use within the NLA's Digital Services Project [14].
Archivists and "Recordkeeping metadata" As has been mentioned, another group with a keen interest in long-term digital preservation are the archives and records management communities.
Traditional approaches to the archival management of records and archives tended to be based on physical records being transferred into the physical custody of an archival repository at the end of their active life-cycle.
The growing existence of digital records, however, has resulted in a widespread reassessment of archival theory and practice [15].
For example, in the digital environment, it is no longer sufficient for archivists to make decisions about the retention or disposal of records at the end of their active life.
By that time it may be too late to ensure their preservation in any useful form.
Greg O'Shea of the National Archives of Australia has commented that the ideal time for archivists attention to be given to digital records, "is as part of the systems development process at the point systems are being established or upgraded, i.e.
even before the records are created" [16].
Some archivists, particularly Australian ones, have begun to shift attention from the traditional 'life-cycle' approach to records and have started to develop archival management practices based on the concept of a 'records continuum'.
A continuum approach to records means that a major change in the understanding of archival description (or metadata) is required.
Sue McKemmish and Dagmar Parer have summarised what this means [17].
If archival description is defined as the post-tranfer process of establishing intellectual control over archival holdings by preparing descriptions of the records, then those descriptions essentially function as cataloguing records, surrogates whose primary purpose is to help researchers find relevant records.
In the continuum, archival description is instead envisaged as part of a complex series of recordkeeping processes involving the attribution of authoritative metadata from the time of records creation.
This metadata is commonly known as 'recordkeeping metadata', or "any type of data that helps us manage records and make sense of their data content" [18].
McKemmish and Parer have definitively expressed the concept as being "standardised information about the identity, authenticity, content, structure, context and essential management requirements of records" [19].
A variety of research projects and practically-based initiatives have been concerned with the development of recordkeeping metadata schemes and standards: The Pittsburgh Project one of the earliest archive-based research projects that introduced the concept of metadata for recordkeeping was the University of Pittsburgh's Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping project, a project funded by the US National Historic Publications and Records Commission [20].
As part of this project, the project team developed what they called a metadata specification for evidence based on a model known as the Reference Model for Business Acceptable Communications (BAC).
The project proposed that digital records should carry a six layer structure of metadata which would contain a 'Handle Layer' that would include an unique identifier and resource discovery metadata, but also very detailed information on terms and conditions of use, data structure, provenance, content and on the use of the record after its creation.
This metadata is intended to carry all the necessary information that would allows the record to be used even when the "individuals, computer systems and even information standards under which it was created have ceased to be" [21].
The UBC Project At aproximately the same time as the Pittsburgh Project was developing its functional requirements for recordkeeping, another North American-based project based at the University of British Columbia (UBC) was investigating "The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records" [22].
The methodological approach of the UBC project was to determine whether the general premises about the nature of records in diplomatics and traditional archival science were relevant and useful in an electronic environment.
The UBC project researchers were primarily interested in preserving the integrity of records as defined through the concepts of completeness, reliability i.e.
the authority and trustworthiness of a record as evidence and authenticity i.e.
ensuring that the document is what it claims to be [23].
The project also developed a set of eight templates that were intended to help identify the necessary and sufficient components of records in all recordkeeping environments.
These templates were a form of metadata scheme.
In a further attempt to indentify a core set of recordkeeping metadata elements, Barbara Reed of Monash University has produced a mapping between the Pittsburgh BAC model, the UBC templates and the 'registration' section of part 4 of AS 4390 Australian Standard on Records Management.
[24].
The National Archives of Australia an detailed specification for recordkeeping metadata was published by the National Archives of Australia as the Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies in May 1999 [25].
The SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata Project this was an Australian project concerned with developing a framework for standardising and defining recordkeeping metadata [26].
The project, amongst other things, attempted to specify and standardise the range of recordkeeping metadata that would be required to manage records in digital environments.
It also was concerned with supporting interoperability with generic metadata standards like the Dublin Core and relevant information locator schemes like the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS).
The project developed a framework for standardising and defining recordkeeping metadata, a metadata specification known as the SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata Scheme (RKMS) and a conceptual mapping against the AGLS standard and other schemes [27].
The Netherlands State Archives Jeff Rothenberg and Tora Bikson have recently produced a report for the National Archives and Ministry of the Interior of the Netherlands entitled Carrying authentic, understandable and usable digital records through time [28].
This document defines a strategy and framework for dealing with digital records, and (in Annex C) contains a model and metadata framework for use within a proposed experimental testbed.
The OAIS Model Most of the initiatives mentioned so far originated in the library and archives communities.
Another important recent development with preservaation metadata implications has been the development of a draft Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).
The development of this model is being co-ordinated by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) at the request of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
The CCSDS is an organisation established by member space agencies to co-ordinate members information requirements.
ISO requested that the CCSDS should co-ordinate the development of standards in support of the long-term preservation of digital information obtained from observations of the terrestrial and space environments.
The result, the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System is currently being reviewed as an ISO Draft International Standard.
The document defines a high-level reference model for an Open Archival Information System or OAIS, which is defined as an organisation of people and systems that have "accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a designated community" [29].
Although development of the model originated in and has been led by the space data community, it is intended that the model is able to be adopted for use by other communities.
The OAIS model is not just concerned with metadata.
It defines and provides a framework for a range of functions that are applicable to any archive whether digital or not.
These functions include those described within the OAIS documentation as ingest, archival storage, data management, administration and access.
Amongst other things, the OAIS model aims to provide a common framework that can be used to help understand archival challenges and especially those that relate to digital information.
As part of this framework, the OAIS model identifies and distinguishes between the different types of information (or metadata) that will need to be exchanged and managed within an OAIS.
Within the draft recommendation, the types of metadata that will be needed are defined as part of what is called a Taxonomy of Information Object Classes [30].
Within this taxonomy, an Archival Information Package (AIP) is perceived as encapsulating two different types of information, some Content Information and any associated Preservation Description Information (PDI) that will allow the understanding of the Content Information over an indefinite period of time.
The Content Information is itself divided into a Data Object which would typically be a sequence of bits and some Representation Information that is able to give meaning to this sequence.
Descriptive Information that can form the basis of finding aids (and other services) can be based on the information that is stored as part of the PDI, but is logically distinct.
The OAIS Taxonomy of Information Object Classes further sub-divided the PDI into four different groups.
These were based on some concepts described in the 1996 report on Preserving Digital Information that was produced by the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) and the Research Libraries Group (RLG).
The task force wrote that "in the digital environment, the features that determine information integrity and deserve special attention for archival purposes include the following: content, fixity, reference, provenance and context" [31].
Accordingly, the OAIS taxonomy divides PDI into Reference Information, Context Information, Provenance Information and Fixity Information.
Reference Information: the OAIS model defines this as the information that "identifies, and if necessary describes, one or more mechanisms used to provide assigned identifiers for the Content Information".
This (rather clumsy) definition indicates that there is a need for the Content Information to be identified and described in some way.
The CPA/RLG report suggests that for "an object to maintain its integrity, its wholeness and singularity, one must be able to locate it definitively and reliably over time among other objects".
Reference Information would be a logical place to record, for example, unique identifiers assigned both by the OAIS itself and by external agencies, e.g.
a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or an ISBN.
It could also be used to store basic descriptive-type information that could be used as the basis for resource discovery, although that would not be its main purpose within the PDI.
Context Information: this is defined as information that "documents the relationships of the Content Environment to its environment".
Again, this rather unhelpful definition can be supplemented by the wider discussion that is provided by the CPA/RLG report.
This suggests that 'context' should include information on the technical context of a digital object, e.g.
to specify its hardware and software dependencies and to record things like hypertext links in a Web document.
Context could also include information relating to the mode of distribution of a particular Digital Object (e.g.
whether it is networked or provided on a particular storage device) and its wider social context.
Provenance Information: within the OAIS taxonomy, Provenance Information refers generally to that information that "documents the history of the Content Information".
Provenance is a key concept in the archives profession [32].
The CPA/RLG report says that the "assumption underlying the principle of provenance is that the integrity of an information object is partly embodied in tracing from where it came.
To preserve the integrity of an information object, digital archives must preserve a record of its origin and chain of custody".
There is a certain overlap with the OAIS taxonomy's definition of Context Information, so Provenance Information is described in the OAIS taxonomy as a "special type of Context Information".
While Provenance Information is primarily concerned with supporting the integrity of a Data Object, the information that is recorded could also provide information that could be used to help the management and use of Digital Objects stored within a repository (e.g.
administrative metadata).
It could also store information about the ownership of intellectual property rights that could be used to manage access to the Content Information of which it forms a part.
Fixity Information: this in OAIS terms refers to any information that documents the particular authentication mechanisms in use within a particular repository.
This is information that, like Provenance Information, helps support the integrity and authenticity of the Digital Object.
Like 'provenance', terms like 'integrity' and 'authenticity' have been understood and used by archivists (and other groups) for a long time [33, 34].
The CPA/RLG report comments that if the content of an object is "subject to change or withdrawal without notice, then its integrity may be compromised and its value as a cultural record would be severely diminished".
Changes can either be deliberate or unintentional, but both will adversely effect the integrity of a Digital Object.
Most current technical solutions to fixity problems are based on the computation of checksums that can be used to tell when a resource has been changed or through the production of digital signatures.
Presumably, these types of information could be recorded as Fixity Information.
There is no clear understanding, as yet, how the Taxonomy of Object Information Classes defined in the OAIS model is meant to be implemented.
It is possible, for example, that it could itself provide a basis for the development of a metadata schema.
Several European library-based projects have expressed an interest in implementing parts of the OAIS model, including its Taxonomy of Object Information Classes: The NEDLIB project the NEDLIB (Networked European Deposit Library) project is funded by the European Commission's Telematics Applications Programme and is led by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands.
The project has been developing a architectural framework for what it calls a deposit system for electronic publications (DSEP) that is based on the OAIS model [35].
The project will also be testing emulation-based preservation strategies and building a demonstrator system to test the handling of electronic publications from acquisition to access.
The Cedars project The Cedars (CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives) project is a three-year project, funded under Phase III of eLib and managed by the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) [36].
The lead sites in Cedars are the universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Oxford, with expertise being drawn from both computing services and libraries within the three organisations.
The project's aim is to address some of the strategic, methodological and practical issues relating to digital preservation.
These issues are being addressed in three main project strands; one looking at digital preservation strategies and techniques (including emulation); another concerned with collection development and rights management issues; and a third interested in the metadata required to adequately preserve digital information objects [37].
Cedars has adopted a distributed archive architecture based on an implementation of the OAIS model [38].
In addition, the project is attempting to developing a preservation metadata schema that can be tested within the project demonstrators.
The development of this schema has been informed by the OAIS model and the taxonomy of information object classes that it identifies.
Conclusion For a variety of reasons, this column has concentrated on identifying relevant projects and initiatives rather than on describing any of them in detail.
It is suggested that those with a deeper interest in the subject would profit by following-up some of the hypertext links listed in the References section below.
References Day, M., 'Extending metadata for digital preservation.'
Ariadne (Web version), 9, May 1997. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/metadata/ Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
http://purl.org/DC/ Day, M., Metadata for preservation.
CEDARS project document AIW01.
Bath: UKOLN, UK Office for Library and Information Networking, 1998. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cedars/AIW01.html Ross, S., 'Consensus, communication and collaboration: fostering multidisciplinary co-operation in electronic records.'
In: Proceedings of the DLM-Forum on Electronic Records, Brussels, 18-20 December 1996.
INSAR: European Archives News, Supplement II.
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1997, pp.
330-336; here p. 331.
Rothenberg, J., Avoiding technological quicksand: finding a viable technical foundation for digital preservation.
Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1999, p. 27. http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/rothenberg/contents.html Ross, S., 'Consensus, communication and collaboration,' op.
cit.
p. 331.
Bearman, D., Electronic evidence: strategies for managing records in contemporary organizations.
Pittsburgh, Pa.: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1994, p. 302.
Rothenberg, J., Avoiding technological quicksand, op cit., pp.
13-16.
Bearman, D, Reality and chimeras in the preservation of electronic records.
D-Lib Magazine, 5 (4), April 1999. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/bearman/04bearman.html Cedars 2. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/cedars2/index.htm Lynch, C., 'Canonicalization: a fundamental tool to facilitate preservation and management of digital information.'
D-Lib Magazine, 5 (9), September 1999. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september99/09lynch.html RLG Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata, Final report.
Mountain View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, May 1998. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/presmeta.html Cameron, J. and Pearce, J., 'PANDORA at the crossroads: issues and future directions.'
In: Sixth DELOS Workshop: Preservation of Digital Information, Tomar, Portugal, 17-19 June 1998.
Le Chesnay: ERCIM, 1998, pp.
23-30. http://www.ercim.org/publication/ws-proceedings/DELOS6/index.html National Library of Australia, Request for Tender for the provision of a Digital Collection Management System.
Attachment 2 Logical data model.
RFT 99/11.
Canberra: National Library of Australia, 23 August 1999. http://www.nla.gov.au/dsp/rft/index.html Dollar, C.M., Archival theory and information technologies: the impact of information technologies on archival principles and methods.
Macerata: University of Macerata Press, 1992.
O'Shea, G., 'Keeping electronic records: issues and strategies.'
Provenance, 1 (2), March 1996. http://www.netpac.com/provenance/vol1/no2/features/erecs1a.htm McKemmish, S. and Parer, D., 'Towards frameworks for standardising recordkeeping metadata.'
Archives and Manuscripts, 26, 1998, pp.
24-45; here, p. 39. http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/rcrg/publications/recordkeepingmetadata/smckrmp1.html McKemmish, S., Cunningham, A. and Parer, D., Metadata mania.
Paper given at: Place, Interface and Cyberspace: Archives at the Edge, the 1998 Annual Conference of the Australian Society of Archivists, Fremantle, Western Australia, 6-8 August 1998. http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/rcrg/publications/recordkeepingmetadata/sm01.html McKemmish and Parer, op.
cit., p. 38.
Duff, W., 'Ensuring the preservation of reliable evidence: a research project funded by the NHPRC.'
Archivaria, 42, 1996, pp.
28-45.
See also the project's Web site at: http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/ Bearman, D. and Sochats, K., Metadata requirements for evidence.
Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Science, 1996. http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/BACartic.html Duranti, L. and MacNeil, H., 'The protection of the integrity of electronic records: an overview of the UBC-MAS research project.'
Archivaria, 42, 1996, pp.
46-67.
See also the project's Web site at: http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/duranti/intro.htm Duranti, L. 'Reliability and authenticity: the concepts and their implications.'
Archivaria, 39, 1995, pp.
5-10.
Reed, B., 'Metadata: core record or core business.'
Archives and Manuscripts, 25 (2), 1997, pp.
218-241. http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum/brep1.html National Archives of Australia, Recordkeeping metadata standard for commonwealth agencies, version 1.0.
Canberra: National Archives of Australia, May 1999. http://www.naa.gov.au/govserv/techpub/rkms/intro.htm Acland, G., Cumming, K. and McKemmish, S., The end of the beginning: the SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata Project.
Paper given at: Archives at Risk: Accountability, Vulnerability and Credibility, the1999 Annual Conference of the Australian Society of Archivists, Brisbane, Queensland, 29-31 July 1999. http://www.archivists.org.au/events/conf99/spirt.html Ibid.. See also: McKemmish, S. and Acland, G., Accessing essential evidence on the Web: towards an Australian recordkeeping metadata standard.
Paper given at: AusWeb99, the Fifth Australian World Wide Web Conference, Ballina, New South Wales, 17-20 April 1999. http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw99/papers/mckemmish/ Rothenberg, J. and Bikson, T., Carrying authentic, understandable and usable digital records through time: report to the Dutch National Archives and Ministry of the Interior.
The Hague: Rijksarchiefdienst, 6 August 1999. http://www.archief.nl/DigiDuur/index.html Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, Reference model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Red Book, Issue 1.
CCSDS 650.0-R-1.
Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, p. 1-11 http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html Ibid.
pp.
4-21 4-27.
Garrett, J. and Waters, D., (eds.
), Preserving digital information: report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group.
Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1996. http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/ Bearman, D. and Lytle, R.H, 'The power of the principle of provenance.'
Archivaria, 21, 1985-86, pp.
14-27.
Duranti, L., Eastwood, T. and MacNeil, H., The preservation of the integrity of electronic records.
Vancouver: University of British Columbia, School of Library, Archival & Information Studies, 1996. http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/duranti/intro.htm Lynch, C.A., 'Integrity issues in electronic publishing.'
In: Peek, R.P.
and Newby, G.B., (eds.
), Scholarly publishing: the electronic frontier.
Cambridge, Mass.
: MIT Press, 1996, pp.
133-145.
Werf-Davelaar, T. van der, 'Long-term preservation of electronic publications: the NEDLIB project.'
D-Lib Magazine, 5 (9), September 1999. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september99/vanderwerf/09vanderwerf.html Russell, K., 'The JISC Electronic Libraries Programme.'
Computers and the Humanities, 32, 1998, pp.
353-375.
Russell, K., 'CEDARS: long-term access and usability of digital resources: the digital preservation conundrum.'
Ariadne, 18, December 1998. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue18/cedars/ Russell, K. and Sergeant, D., 'The Cedars project: implementing a model for distributed digital archives.'
RLG DigiNews, 3 (3), 15 June 1999. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews3-3.html 7.
Acknowledgements Cedars is a Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK higher education funding councils through its Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
UKOLN is funded by the Library and Information Commission, the JISC, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath, where it is based.
Author details Michael Day Research Officer UKOLN: the UK Office for Library and Information Networking University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY, UK E-mail: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Metadata for digital preservation: an update" Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/metadata/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL: Four Search Engines and a Plaque Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL: Four Search Engines and a Plaque Buzz data html archives cataloguing linux e-learning ejournal research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod looks at some recent developments to the EEVL service.
If the title of this column caused you to anticipate a new blockbuster featuring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell, then I apologise.
It's far more interesting than that!
Four Search Engines Four new search engines from EEVL make it possible to search the content of over 250 free full-text ejournals in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
EEVL's Ejournal Search Engines (EESE) are divided according to subject content.
The Computing ejournal search engine [1] searches the content of 60 freely available full-text ejournals in computing.
The Maths ejournal search engine [2] searches the content of 28 freely available full-text ejournals in mathematics.
The Engineering ejournal search engine [3] searches the content of 160 freely available full-text ejournals in engineering.
The final one [4] searches the content of all 250 freely available full-text ejournals in all three subjects engineering, mathematics and computing.
Much useful information is published in freely available ejournals.
Trade journals, house journals and even some peer-reviewed scholarly journals are indexed by EESE, making this a very useful, if somewhat unusual set of services.
It is unusual in that not only can articles be found via EESE, but also news items, product announcements, job opportunities, market and sector analyses, brief technical reports, component details, meeting announcements, conference reports, and more.
This differentiates EESE from most other journal or ejournal indexes which tend to concentrate on indexing articles.
On the other hand, it makes it a potentially valuable service for those looking for information in engineering, mathematics and computing, where vital information is very often published in non-article format.
Whilst most of the ejournals indexed are available as HTML web pages, some are PDF versions of print journals.
Over 200,000 web pages have been indexed.
Results are sorted through an internal mechanism, with relevance ranking given according to location and frequency of search terms.
Because of the way that the data has been automatically harvested, it is unfortunately not easy to limit results by journal title or publication date.
A full list of ejournals covered is available [5].
While every effort has been made to index all the journals on this list, and while the indexes are regularly updated, occasionally information from a journal will be temporarily unavailable due to technical problems on the journal server at the time of indexing.
A typical entry from a search result is shown below.
Quality Digest Magazine http://www.qualitydigest.com/currentmag/articles/02_article.shtml October 6, 2004 Lessons from the Trenches Good Vibrations for Nondestructive Testing Improving the Quality of Leadership The Greening of Industry 2004 Vision Systems Directory Gathered from: Quality Digest A link from the title leads to the full text of the item at the ejournal site.
An interesting feature is the last element of the result above: "Gathered from: Quality Digest".
This links to the record for the ejournal website in EEVL's Internet Resource Catalogue, as shown below.
Title: Quality Digest URL: http://www.qualitydigest.com/ Description: Quality Digest is a monthly product providing information on what is happening in the quality field services, news, products, buyers guides, articles and editorials.
A current edition is published free online every month, and an archive file is available.
A free, searchable directory of all North American ISO 9000 and QS-9000 registered companies is accessible.
Links to quality-related sites are given.
Keywords: quality management, quality control, TQM, total quality management, ISO 9000, QS-9000 Resources: Journal Full-text Engineering Classification: Engineering General->Engineering Management Location: World Country of Origin: United States Language: English Examples of ejournals being indexed by EESE include: Mechanical Engineering Magazine Online [6] An online version of the print journal Mechanical Engineering, a publication of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
This publishes up to date industry and business news, along with selected feature stories from the print version.
e-Journal of Nondestructive Testing [7] This has monthly issues featuring topical professional NDT articles.
Technology Today [8] A multidisciplinary journal published three times a year by the Southwest Research Institute.
Archivum Mathematicum [9] Published by Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, this is the electronic version of Archivum Mathematicum.
Linux Gazette [10] Published by Linux Journal, this is a non-commercial, freely available publication dedicated to sharing ideas and discoveries about Linux.
British Asbestos Newsletter [11].
A quarterly publication financed by Jerome Consultants (an independent organisation specialising in the field of asbestos and tobacco research), focusing on asbestos-related news in Britain, but also including European, Australian and international events.
To complement EESE, access is provided from the home pages of the search engines to another joint service from EEVL and TradePub which provides printed trade publications free to qualified professionals [12].
EESE is a free service.
A Plaque EEVL's marketing efforts were recognised at the CILIP Publicity & Publicity Group Conference in Grasmere, Cumbria on 11 November, where the EEVL OneStep promotional campaign was awarded 'Commended' in the PPRG Public Relations & Publicity Awards 2004, in the keenly contested 'Promotional Campaign with a budget over £500' category.
Shown above are those who received marketing awards at the PPRG Conference, along with Linda Smith (far left) PPRG Chair, Susan Peat, from Farries (second left) and Margaret Haines, President of CILIP (centre, rear).
Roddy MacLeod (front, 2nd from right), EEVL Manager, received an engraved plaque on behalf of all of the team at EEVL which had worked on the OneStep campaign from November 2003 to July 2004.
Two services featured in the promotional campaign, OneStep Industry News [13] and OneStep Jobs [14].
The OneStep promotional campaign incorporated a mixture of traditional marketing methods plus online marketing techniques.
More details are available on the JISC Web site [15].
Malcolm Moffat, EEVL Project Officer, giving a visitor a OneStep flyer at the Learning & Teaching Conference at Heriot Watt University EEVL's OneStep Promotional campaign will be the subject of a case study in a forthcoming book being edited by Elaina Norlin and Tiffini Travis, entitled "E-learning and business plans: national and international case studies" to be published by Scarecrow Press.
About EEVL EEVL, the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing, is a UK-based not-for-profit free guide.
It was created and is run by a team of information specialists from Heriot Watt University, with input from a number of other universities in the UK, including the University of Birmingham and Cranfield University.
EEVL provides academics, researchers, students, and anyone else looking for quality-assured information in engineering, mathematics and computing, with a centralised access point on the Internet.
EEVL, which is funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), is available on the Web at: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ References EEVL's Ejournal Search Engines Computing http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/eese-comp.html EEVL's Ejournal Search Engines Mathematics http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/eese-math.html EEVL's Ejournal Search Engines Engineering http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/eese-eng.html EEVL's Ejournal Search Engines http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/eese-eevl.html Ejournals indexed by EESE http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/journal_list.html Mechanical Engineering Magazine Online http://www.memagazine.org/ The e-Journal of Nondestructive Testing http://www.ndt.net/ Technology Today http://www.swri.org/3pubs/ttoday/tech.htm Archivum Mathematicum http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/EMIS/journals/AM/index.html The Linux Gazette http://www.linuxgazette.com/ The British Asbestos Newsletter http://www.lkaz.demon.co.uk/ Trade Publications FREE to Qualified Professionals http://eevl.tradepub.com/ EEVL : OneStep Industry News http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepnews/ EEVL : OneStep Jobs http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepjobs/ Online marketing tactics land award for JISC Service http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=marketing_award_for_eevl_221104 Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot Watt University Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/libram/roddy.html Return to top Article Title: "EEVL Column: Four Search Engines and a Plaque" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Crime and Punishment: Protecting ICT Users and Their Information Against Computer Crime and Abuse Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Crime and Punishment: Protecting ICT Users and Their Information Against Computer Crime and Abuse Buzz data mobile software digitisation copyright video ict privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Charlesworth reports on a seminar seeking to protect ICT users and their information against computer crime and abuse.
The Crime and Punishment seminar was organised by the Joint Information Systems Committee Legal Information Service (J-LIS) [1] in London, September 2003.
This event aimed to provide information about the risks, vulnerabilities and liabilities that might arise from the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in Further and Higher Education.
It also planned to suggest some strategies for determining the right balance between the aim of reducing risk, vulnerability and liability and the need to retain the value added to education by the free flow of information and communication.
It is clear that unfettered use of ICT by staff and students can pose significant legal problems for educational institutions; but equally clear is that attempting to exert control over that use may open institutions to charges of breach of privacy rights, breach of interception laws and interference with academic freedom.
Programme John X Kelly, Legal Information Officer at the JISC Legal Information Service, opened the day on behalf of J-LIS.
The aims of the day were: to provide delegates with a range of viewpoints from ICT professionals in FE and HE, academic researchers and commercial enterprises to provide a forum for discussion and information sharing about the types of problems currently facing ICT professionals in FE and HE, including possible future problems Andrew Cormack, Chief Security Advisor at UKERNA, then began the morning’s presentations.
UKERNA [2] manages the operation and development of the JANET network under a Service Level Agreement from JISC and Andrew’s presentation discussed the issue of risk assessment in ICT provision.
He suggested that when assessing risk, it is important to place the highest priority on those assets where both the threat and impact are high.
In FE and HE institutions both the threat of attack or intrusion, and the effect of such an attack or intrusion, are likely to be greatest in their networks and their information.
This is because educational institutions tend to have comparatively high bandwidth networks and high value information both in terms of institutional administrative data and in terms of research and commercially sensitive data.
He also advised that the risks should be properly understood, for example, while an educational institution may suffer disruption if it is the target of a ‘denial of service attack’ (DOS attack), perhaps a larger risk, both in terms of potential legal liability, and in terms of damage to reputation, may be the use of institutional computer networks by intruders to launch large ‘distributed denial of service attacks’ (DDOS attacks) on third parties.
Having proper procedures for identifying both inbound and outbound attacks, and ensuring that staff are available with the necessary technical understanding and the authority to take rapid and effective action to stop them, is thus vitally important.
In terms of information, the ever increasing digitisation of institutional data, combined with new networked mechanisms for storing and retrieval of such data can provide a fertile environment for information thieves when installation, maintenance and security precautions appropriate to the nature of the data are not observed.
While staff and student records may be of great value to those concerned, and their loss or corruption may lead to liability under data protection law, as well as attendant bad publicity, the greatest risk may well lie with controversial or commercially sensitive research data which, by its very nature, may attract very serious and targeted intrusion attempts.
Sharon Bishop, UK Field Operations Manager of FAST Corporate Services Ltd, then spoke about the need for effective software compliance in the FE and HE sector, and the potential penalties for failing to comply with copyright law.
FAST Corporate Services [3] obviously have a vested interest in encouraging institutions to do their utmost to avoid deliberately or inadvertently engaging in software piracy, inasmuch as they act as a lobbying and enforcement body for the software industry, and provide consultancy in corporate software compliance.
But the message embedded in the presentation was a valuable one if your institution doesn’t know, and can’t control, what software its users have on its institutional machines, then it risks serious financial penalties, and senior management may also risk criminal penalties.
A further useful point was that lack of knowledge about software piracy on an institution’s machines may also suggest that other undesirable or illegal activities are likely to be missed.
Sharon suggested a 4-stage software compliance programme involving: the establishment of proper polices and procedures, with measures taken to ensure that users are aware of and respect such policies the conducting of a software audit to determine what software is being used, and where it was pointed out that this might identify over-licensing as well as under-licensing.
the reconciliation of software installations with software licences ongoing management, including review of policies and procedures, regular audits and maintenance of a software asset register.
Sharon further noted that whilst FAST does not pay reward money for tip-offs, the Business Software Alliance UK provides an award of up to £10,000 for every report ‘successfully concluded’ an attractive option, perhaps, to a disgruntled employee or student Following the coffee break, Mike Roch, Director of IT Services, University of Reading and Vice Chair, Universities & Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), spoke about his practical experiences of ICT misuse and provided specimen cases exemplifying the themes of the presentation.
The thrust of the presentation was that while hazards such as hacking, viruses, spam and pornography are often seen as the prime examples of ICT misuse, and receive a large amount of media coverage, they are in essence problems with a technical solution, are often relatively well understood by those who have to deal with them, and because of this are usually manageable.
The real difficulties often lie with misuse involving offences such as defamation, copyright infringement and harassment for which ICT is essentially the conduit, because these are harder to prevent via technical measures, require little technical know-how on the part of the misuser, usually have to be dealt with after the fact, and often involve difficult issues of evidence and proof.
Mike noted that the law in this area sometimes appears contradictory, with legislation like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and its associated secondary legislation providing powers for interception and investigation, whilst the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act place restrictions on what can be collected, when it can be collected and what it can be used for.
Gavin Sutter, Research Fellow, Information Technology Law Unit, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, then gave a whistle-stop tour of the UK regime for interception of electronic communications established by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA).
He made specific reference to the obligations placed on FE and HE institutions to comply with warrants requiring assistance with an interception and notices to hand over certain types of information.
This included the content of communications, communication data, (information which is associated with a network user’s communications excepting the actual content), and protected information (essentially encryption keys and/or plaintext of encrypted messages).
Gavin advised, in the course of a detailed and comprehensive guide to this facet of the RIPA that institutions should: establish a dedicated team to deal with interception warrants and notice to handover have an awareness raising policy document for staff who may be the first recipient of such a communication to the institution use confidentiality agreements, alongside the awareness raising policy information, to encourage a ‘need-to-know’ culture and to avoid breach of secrecy requirements have procedures for secure disposal of intercepted content once no longer necessary, much as with disposal of confidential information consider carefully their use of encryption, if handing over an encryption key might compromise additional data is not subject to a particular notice Following a hearty lunch, Andrew Charlesworth, Senior Research Fellow in IT & Law at the University of Bristol, did his best to keep the audience on their metaphorical toes with a discussion of the role of academic freedom in the debate over ICT use.
He made particular reference to the trend towards the filtering of incoming content and the censorship of outgoing information in FE and HE institutions.
Academic freedom is a delicate subject in current times, due in part to the increasingly managerial approach of modern education, which has difficulty with the expression of academic opinions which do not reflect, or indeed may actively contradict, the institutional viewpoint.
But also because there will always be those who seek to promote their viewpoint under the banner of ‘academic freedom’ whilst seeking to deny others that same freedom.
Andrew suggested that the concept of academic freedom remained a valuable one, but that in demanding academic freedom, staff and students should be willing to accept that with the rights inherent in that concept come a related set of responsibilities.
In the provision of ICTs, as in other areas of FE and HE activity, the way to maintain academic freedom, whilst ensuring the effective provision of services and the protection of the institution’s interests, is to ensure that there is a dialogue between members of the institution, and that policies and practices are discussed and explained in a fashion that permits a shared understanding of acceptable ICT activities (even if that understanding is not unanimous).
Institutions have to be willing to be flexible in their construction, development, interpretation and application of ICT usage rules, and both able and willing to provide constructive advice to academic staff and students.
They also have to be clear about their policy with regard to use of institutional ICTs to promote non-core research and teaching viewpoints, and should endeavour to apply such policies in an even-handed and non-discriminatory fashion.
Academic staff should be conscious of the operational environment in which other staff work and consider carefully the implications of their actions on their institution’s image and whether their viewpoint/opinion/action is one that should be identified with them as an individual, or with the institution.
A sombre note was struck by Joanna Price of the Cyberspace Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire, standing in for Rachel O’Connell, Director of the Unit, who was unable to attend on the day.
Joanna gave an eye-opening and alarming presentation on the use of current forms of ICT by paedophiles, such as chat rooms and discussion lists, as they select and groom children for exploitation.
She demonstrated the likely risks of newer forms of ICT such as video mobile phones.
Joanna then outlined a strategy for pre-empting such exploitation which has been developed by the Cyberspace Research Unit.
The sophistication and effectiveness of the cybergrooming techniques and the damage and distress that they and any resulting physical exploitation may cause, should give all parents of young children reason for concern and promote a serious interest in understanding the nature of the cyberactivities of their offspring.
The presentations were concluded with a presentation by George Vernon, Computer Systems Manager at Plymouth College of Further Education, who spoke about his practical experiences of ICT misuse in the FE sector and made an eloquent case that his job description in the current stage of educational ICT use should probably more accurately be Information Systems Security Manager.
George noted that while many of the problems in the FE sector were not dissimilar to those in the HE sector, the nature of the institutions suggested a different range of solutions, not least because of the widely differing ages, abilities and attitudes amongst FE students.
Certainly the range of solutions George offered, including filtering of mail and Internet access together with the possibility of restricting internet access to essential users, would probably play very badly amongst staff and students in a large university.
However when one considers the resource constraints for some FE colleges, including an institutional bandwidth of 2Mbits, and the youth of some of the students, such restrictions may seem less draconian.
Certainly the points relating to handling academic staff diplomatically and the need for provision of well communicated practical advice for users are as applicable to HE as they are to FE.
Conclusions Overall, the combination of speakers worked well, and the provision of both FE and HE viewpoints made for some interesting debates in the various discussion sessions scattered throughout the day (all chaired by Lindsay Boullin of Eversheds).
It was clear that the issue of computer crime and abuse of ICT cannot be handled by ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy and advice, as the effect of such activities varies widely in scope, scale and impact between the FE and HE sectors.
All the presentations can be viewed in more detail on the JISC Web site [4].
References JISC Legal Information Service http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=services_jlis UKERNA http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/ The FAST Web Site http://www.fast.org.uk/ Crime & Punishment Protecting ICT users and their information against computer crime and abuse event materials http://www.jisc.ac.uk/legal/index.cfm?name=lis_ccrime_materials Author Details Andrew Charlesworth Andrew Charlesworth is Senior Research Fellow in IT and Law and Director of the Centre for IT and Law (CITL) based in the Law School and Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol.
Email: A.J.Charlesworth@bristol.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Crime and Punishment: Protecting ICT users and their information against computer crime and abuse, London September 2003” Author: Andrew Charlesworth Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/jisc-lis-2003-09-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ERPANET / CODATA Workshop, Lisbon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ERPANET / CODATA Workshop, Lisbon Buzz data software framework database dissemination xml infrastructure archives metadata vocabularies repositories preservation cataloguing licence ftp interoperability algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day gives us a detailed report on the ERPANET / CODATA Workshop held at the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, 15-17 December 2003.
On 15-17 December 2003, the ERPANET Project [1] and the ICSU (International Council for Science) Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) [2] held a joint workshop on the selection, appraisal and retention of digital scientific data at the National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional) in Lisbon.
The workshop brought together around 80 participants, a mix of scientists, archivists and data specialists.
Day One After the opening introductions, the first presentation was an overview of CODATA data archiving activities given by Bill Anderson, co-chair of the CODATA Task Group on Preservation and Archiving of Scientific and Technical Data in Developing Countries.
He first highlighted a number of recent news stories that concerned the re-analysis of scientific data [3], [4], [5] and a report in Science on disappearing Web references in scientific papers [6].
He then reiterated a point made by Bernard Smith of the European Commission at a workshop in 2002 that "digital resources will not survive or remain accessible by accident."
He then introduced CODATA and its Task Group on Data Preservation.
The presentation ended with a brief look at a range of scientific, management, policy and technical issues relating to the long-term preservation of scientific data.
Anderson argued that one challenge from a scientific point of view was the tension between discipline-specific requirements and practices and the growing need for interdisciplinary approaches to scientific data.
View over Lisbon Terry Eastwood of the University of British Columbia then introduced the archival concept of 'appraisal' and its application to digital records.
Archivists had been dealing with the preservation challenges of electronic records for some time and had been involved in the development of record-keeping systems that include provision for determining the disposition of records.
Terry argued that archivists' experiences are likely to have parallels in other spheres where digital objects need preservation.
He then briefly outlined a model of the archival selection function developed by the Appraisal Task Force of the InterPARES Project [7].
The model defines four appraisal activities, compiling information about digital objects and their contexts, assessing their continuing value, determining the feasibility of their preservation, and finally the appraisal decision itself.
Old Tram in an Older Town The focus of the workshop then changed slightly as Peter Weiss of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spoke about the economics of data reuse.
His presentation argued that giving all researchers open access to government-funded scientific data would have considerable economic and social benefits.
He cited the example of how the use of multiple meteorological datasets could be used to predict major weather phenomena in developing countries, e.g.
monsoons.
While observational data from the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) was freely available, Peter noted that research into monsoon prediction at the India Institute of Technology had been hampered by the high prices charged for historic atmospheric model data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) [8].
He argued that the resulting lack of data from ECMWF not only resulted in potential social and economic harm for the people living in monsoon areas, but that high prices also generated no revenue for the ECMWF itself.
Peter pointed out that the United States had long supported making government-funded information available at no more than the cost of dissemination, a policy "based on the premise that government information is a valuable national resource, and that the economic benefits to society are maximized when government information is available in a timely and equitable manner to all" [9].
In consequence, the importance of the private sector in meteorology was growing, e.g.
for providing weather risk management services.
A 2003 report produced by the US National Academy of Sciences noted the importance of private sector use of National Weather Service data, which 'greatly increases the value of the data and further justifies the high costs of the national observing system infrastructure' [10].
After a brief introduction to the economics of information, Peter used figures from a report produced in 2000 by PIRA International for the Information Society Directorate-General of the European Commission [11] to argue that charging for public sector information (PSI) in Europe was detrimental to the European economy.
The PIRA report concluded, 'a conservative projection of a doubling of market size resulting from eliminating licence fees would produce additional taxation revenues to more than offset the lost income from PSI charges' [12].
In addition, Peter was very critical of particular European policies on data access, in particular the Deutscher Wetterdienst, Germany's National Meteorological Service, which quoted a price of over US$1.5 million for access to historical data, and cost recovery, noting that 50% of the revenue of the UK Meteorological Office comes from a single government department (the Ministry of Defence) with another 30% from other government agencies.
He ended his presentation with some examples of good practice and some recommendations.
After this, the focus of the workshop moved on to a series of disciplinary and interdisciplinary case studies.
The first was a disciplinary case study in the physical sciences.
Jürgen Knobloch of CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) briefly introduced CERN, and then described the nature of the data collected in particle physics.
Particle colliders generate massive amounts of raw data (much of which is routinely thrown away), which is repeatedly analysed to produce results data.
More data is generated by computer simulation of the same processes.
CERN has an archiving policy, embodied in an operational circular published in 1997 [13], but this does not specifically cover digital physics data.
Despite this, CERN has undertaken to maintain the ability to analyse data generated by its Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP) for as long as it is practicable.
The strategy is currently dependent on the running of existing software, which may be in the future need to be part of a 'museum system.'
Data preservation in particle physics raises many issues, not the least of which is the perception that data cannot be analysed in meaningful ways by people who were not involved in the original collaboration.
Tools for making data available, however, are under development.
Knobloch mentioned a method called QUAERO [14] that has been used to make high-energy physics data publicly available.
High-energy physics data is reviewed by other scientists through the Particle Data Group (PDG) [15] who maintain a database of experimental results.
CERN's current major development in particle physics is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [16], currently under construction.
(Knobloch noted that there were millions of patents and engineering drawings that would need to preserved at least for the lifetime of the collider).
LHC was expected to generate around 12-14 petabytes of data a year, which would present severe challenges for data analysis.
Knobloch concluded by reminding attendees that experimental physics is extremely expensive and that experiments are not easy to repeat, and that data are useless without additional documentation, metadata, and software.
The next two presentations moved on to consider the data requirements of the space sciences.
Firstly, Françoise Genova of the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) looked at the observational data generated by astronomers.
She noted that the reuse of observational data in astronomy was important for optimising the scientific return on large projects.
The relatively small size of the profession and the lack of commercial constraints meant that astronomers had a strong tradition of networking and data sharing.
Links between observational data and published results are part of the astronomical bibliographic network, which includes the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) [17] for bibliographic information and specialised online services like SIMBAD [18] and the NASA/IPAC (Infrared Processing and Analysis Center) Extragalactic Database (NED) [19].
Genova noted that there had been some progress on the development of an interoperable standard definition for tabular data and stressed the importance of de facto standards and of co-operation between all actors, e.g.
journals, the ADS, data centres and archives.
The presentation ended with a brief look at data interchange formats, including an XML-based format for the exchange of tabular data called VOTable [20] being developed by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA).
This format incorporates an existing standard for describing astronomical images known as the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS ) [21].
The next presentation by Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins University focused on the changing scale and nature of astronomical data.
He noted that there was an exponential growth in the amount of astronomical data that was being generated, estimating that the amount of data doubled each year; currently consisting of a few hundred terabytes, but expected soon to reach a petabyte.
Some other trends identified were that data collections were increasingly likely to be distributed, that data itself was 'live' and subject to change, and that scientists were themselves becoming the publishers and curators of data and other content.
One consequence of the exponential growth in data being generated is that current tools for downloading and analysing data were becoming less adequate.
Szalay and his collaborator Jim Gray of Microsoft Research have commented that FTP or GREP tools do not scale to dealing with terabytes.
They have written elsewhere that 'FTPing or GREPing a gigabyte takes a minute, but FTPing or GREPing a terabyte can take a day or more, and sequentially scanning a petabyte takes years.'
[22] Consequently, new techniques are needed for data analysis, including the concept of 'data exploration,' whereby the analysis is performed much closer to the data, e.g.
inside the database itself [23].
Szalay also noted that additional work is required on developing better algorithms for data analysis.
Riverside in Tiles Day Two The following day started with an interdisciplinary case study focused on the social sciences.
Myron Gutmann from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), based at the University of Michigan, gave the first presentation.
He noted the importance of metadata standards and emphasised that the ICPSR had put a lot of work into the development of such standards, e.g.
through the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) [24].
The types of data that social scientists are concerned with are both quantitative, e.g.
census and administrative data, surveys, etc., and qualitative.
In the US, the largest data producers are the federal government, universities and private foundations.
The main data holders are the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and university-based archives.
However, there was still a major challenge in getting data owners to archive data.
Partly this was due to serious concerns about confidentiality and research priority, but in many cases researchers just lacked the time or motivation to prepare data for archiving.
Kevin Schürer of the UK Data Archive then described the corresponding UK situation.
The data types involved were similar, but there was now a growing amount of non-survey type data, e.g.
videotaped interviews, mixed media, etc.
In the UK, data repositories included the National Archives (Public Record Office), data centres directly funded by research-funding agencies like the Data Archive, the NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) Data Centres and the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), as well as university-based centres like EDINA.
Turning to appraisal issues, Schürer reminded workshop participants that appraisal is not just about selection, but also about clear decisions on what it is not necessary to keep.
Appraisal criteria might include whether a data set is appropriate to a particular collection, the existence (or not) of metadata, etc.
Resource implications mean that archives like the UK Data Archive are unable to accept all the data that they are offered.
The next disciplinary case study concerned the biological sciences.
Firstly Meredith Lane of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Secretariat in Copenhagen [25] talked about the different kinds of situation in biology.
Meredith said that there were three main kinds of biological data: firstly genomic and proteomic sequence data (typically known as bioinformatics data), secondly data about how organisms interact with ecology and ecosystems (ecoinformatics data), and thirdly information about species (biodiversity informatics data).
While these subdomains have much to offer each other, each has its own particular problems.
So while bioinformatics data are almost all digital and are kept in universally accessible data stores, the vast majority of species and specimen data are not yet in digital form, often being held in physical data stores that are not easily accessible, e.g.
museums of natural history.
While, as with bioinformatics data, ecological and ecosystem data is mostly digital, it is not always freely accessible.
Meredith went on to describe the GBIF; a 'megascience facility' focused on making primary species occurrence data freely available through the Internet.
One motivation was to make biodiversity data the majority of which is held in the developed world freely available to the developing world, from where much of the raw data originated.
GBIF has concentrated its activities on areas that are not being addressed by other initiatives, focusing on biological names, the generation of catalogues and information architectures, and the interoperability of biodiversity databases among themselves and with other biological data types.
Achieving interoperability, however, will depend on good co-operation between the various biological data initiatives in existence [26].
Weber Amaral of the International Plant Genetics Resources Institute (IPGRI), based near Rome, then gave some examples of data use in the area of agro-biodiversity, a small subset of around 100,000 species, of which 100 species provide around 90 per cent of human nutrition.
He explained the differences between the ex situ conservation of species, e.g.
in genebanks or botanic gardens, and in situ conservation, where plants are kept in their natural habitat or (where cultivated) in the habitats in which they were domesticated.
Amaral then described some of the functionality of the SINGER database [27], the System-wide Information Network for Generic Resources of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
The final interdisciplinary case study concerned the earth and environmental sciences.
The first presentation was given by John Faundeen of the US Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center in South Dakota.
The centre holds data from satellite missions and land-sensing data.
Some of this data results from missions with which the USGS is involved while others are sought for or are offered to the agency.
In order to deal with these, the data centre set up two committees one internal and one external to advise on selection criteria and other issues.
For appraisal, the USGS uses checklists, including one developed by the NARA for electronic records.
The use of these may not lead to a definitive decision, but they do help to inform the process and also document the criteria that were used to reach that decision.
The US Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) has also developed a checklist for the retention of data, which has been used, together with the NARA list, by the USGS to re-appraise some data sets already held by the data centre.
This has resulted in the 'purging' of at least one large satellite collection, but re-appraisal has helped to align the collections of the data centre with its original mission.
Luigi Fusco of the European Space Agency (ESA) European Space Research Institute (ESRIN), based in Frascati, Italy, gave a presentation on earth observation archives.
Earth observation (EO) data is observational data that is used by multiple scientific disciplines and by commercial organisations.
While long-term preservation has been identified as a requirement, there are no unified archiving policies at either European or national level.
Responsibility for preservation currently mostly resides with the mission owner.
Luigi then went on to discuss how data interoperability and preservation were being considered in the context of an European initiative called Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) [28], which would integrate space and ground-based EO data.
After a brief look at some other EO initiatives, Luigi concluded with an overview of emerging technologies, primarily with regard to GRID developments.
The afternoon was taken up with a discussion chaired by Gail Hodge.
This was extremely wide ranging, and the following just highlights a selection of the issues that were raised: Differences in perspectives.
It was noted that the case study presentations had highlighted major differences between the data practices of scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines.
While some disciplines had already developed cultures and technical frameworks for maintaining and sharing research data, others had not.
There were also potential conflicts between the viewpoints of scientific investigators and archivists, e.g.
on the ownership of data.
The role of funding agencies.
The importance of funding agencies was mentioned several times in the discussion.
Some funding agencies were becoming more aware of data issues, and some were already supporting the maintenance of data archives or encouraging grantees to make data publicly available.
For example, the UK Economic and Social Research Council will withhold the final 10% of grants if the UK Data Archive cannot confirm that the data generated by the research has been offered to them.
Penalising scientists for not depositing data, however, was not a cost-free exercise so there needed to be an added emphasis on giving academic credit for making data available and the resulting need for robust citation mechanisms for data which is currently sub-discipline dependent.
In general, however, it was felt that agencies were interested more in funding primary research than in providing ongoing support to data archives.
Appraisal.
The subject of appraisal was returned to time and again in the discussion.
There were questions as to when it should take place, e.g.
at the beginning of the data lifecycle (e.g., as part of the project review process) or at the point when data is transferred to an archive.
Some argued that an important aspect of appraisal related to the existence (or not) of the metadata required to interpret correctly.
Others noted that appraisal criteria would normally depend upon the reasons why data was being retained, e.g.
noting potential differences between scientific data that only needs to be kept for a relatively short period of time, e.g.
for verification, and the longer-term views of archivists.
Costs and benefits.
There was some discussion of the costs of retaining data.
While storage costs are getting cheaper, it was recognised that this would not scale to petabytes of data.
The hardware required at this level e.g., tape drives and robots remains expensive, not to mention the less quantifiable costs of migration or retrieval.
There was some recognition of the need for more cost-benefit models and for demonstrator projects that could highlight these.
The need for a common vocabulary.
The workshop presentations had highlighted many differences in the use of terminology.
Several attendees mentioned the value of the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) (ISO 14721:2003) for providing a common vocabulary [29].
Donald Sawyer of the US National Space Science Data Centre said that appraisal fitted in with the 'Ingest' function of the OAIS functional model and noted work currently being led by the French Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) within the Consultative Committee on Space Data Standards (CCSDS) on developing an abstract standard for a 'producer-archive interface methodology' [30].
CODATA representatives promised to initiate some co-ordinating work on harmonising terminologies.
Day Three The final day began with panel presentations on appraisal by John Faundeen, Jürgen Knobloch, Kevin Schürer and Terry Eastwood.
John first highlighted the need for scientific relevance but stressed that an appraisal policy should always align with the collecting organisation's mission or charter.
He also noted the need for sufficient documentation to use records without the assistance of the creating agency.
Another important criteria would be the continued availability of a sufficient level of funding for preservation and to fulfil any additional requirements for distribution, e.g.
rights management.
Jürgen argued that preservation needed to be seen as important but that appraisal could only be done in collaboration with scientists.
Kevin looked at a survey of the use of data sets in the UK Data Archive, noting that a majority of use (around 60%) was concentrated on a fairly low proportion of the collection (around 10%) and he thought that a large percentage of data would most probably never be used.
As acquisition was the most expensive part of the preservation process, Kevin concluded that a balanced appraisal policy was essential.
The UK Data Archive had set-up an Acquisitions Review Committee to support its accountability, e.g.
for when data is rejected.
He also emphasised the need for continued dialogue with data creators and the need to move assessment back to the beginning of the data life-cycle.
Schürer noted the difficulty of assessing the long-term value of data, noting that future users were likely to be quite different from current ones.
Terry Eastwood noted the dichotomy between requirements of the scientists who generate data and those agencies that undertake to take responsibility for data, maintain, preserve and make it available.
He argued that creators and preservers needed to collaborate and that, above all, preservation activities needed to be funded adequately.
The final presentations were an overview of the OAIS model by Donald Sawyer and some reiteration of his earlier comments by Peter Weiss, which generated some more debate on the merits of making all publicly funded data available at cost [31].
Conclusions By way of conclusion, this ERPANET/CODATA workshop was a useful forum for scientists, data managers, archivists, and the representatives of funding agencies, etc.
to meet together to discuss an issue that is growing in importance.
I was personally struck if not entirely surprised by the diversity of standards and practice that had been developed within different sub-disciplines.
The increasing interdisciplinary nature of some scientific disciplines will mean that more attention will need to be given to building tools that build data links between them, e.g.
as attempted by the GBIF.
It also seems clear that the attention of scientists, their institutions and funding agencies need to be directed towards the creation of a sustainable infrastructure that will result in data with continuing value being retained for as long as it is required.
Selection and appraisal guidelines will be a key part of this infrastructure.
While the workshop concentrated on discipline-specific approaches, it is likely that there will need to be some interaction with institutional or national initiatives.
For those interested, the workshop briefing paper and presentation slides are available from the ERPANET Web site [32].
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"The encyclopedia of life."
Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 19(2), 77-80.
CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) System-wide Information Network for Genetic Resources (SINGER): http://singer.cgiar.org/ GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security): http://www.gmes.info/ Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems.
(2002).
Reference model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).
CCSDS 650.0-B-1, Blue Book, January.
http://www.ccsds.org/documents/650x0b1.pdf Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems.
(2003).
Producer-archive interface methodology abstract standard.
CCSDS 651.0-R-1, Red Book, April.
http://www.ccsds.org/review/RPA305/651x0r1.pdf For more details, see: US National Research Council.
(2001).
Resolving conflicts arising from the privatization of environmental data.
Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.
http://www.nap.edu/books/0309075831/html/ ERPANET/CODATA Workshop on the Selection, Appraisal, and Retention of Digital Scientific Data, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal, 15-17 December 2003: http://www.erpanet.org/www/products/lisbon/lisbon.htm Author Details Michael Day UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: eBank UK project home page Return to top Article Title: "The Selection, Appraisal and Retention of Digital Scientific Data: the ERPANET / CODATA workshop" Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/erpanet-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 37, 2003 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 37, 2003 Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Colin Harris declares himself a veteran reader of the ARIST, assesses the kinds of reviewing it performs and balances the strengths and weaknesses of this long-standing publication.
ARIST is a remarkable institution.
For 37 years, since Carlos Cuadra edited the first volume in 1966, it has provided expert overviews of current developments in information science and technology.
I was a keen user in those early days; the first five volumes included chapters on 'information needs and uses' (by Menzel, Herner, Paisley, Allen and Lipetz) which provided invaluable help to a young researcher.
If it wasn't exactly standing on the shoulders of giants, it was certainly an opportunity to enjoy the perspectives of expert reviewers and to avoid much of the digging and sifting that would otherwise have been required.
Cuadra edited ARIST for ten years; his successor, Martha Williams, edited it for a staggering 25 years.
This, volume 37, is the second to appear under Blaise Cronin's editorship.
It is not possible for any individual to assess the accuracy and other qualities of all papers in a single volume, such is the range of topics covered; it is that range, combined with the reputation of its authors wherein lies the strength of the Review.
This year's review has eleven chapters: Information retrieval and the philosophy of language; Natural language processing; Indexing and retrieval for the Web; Electronic journals, the Internet and scholarly communication (jointly authored by Rob Kling, who sadly died earlier this year); Visualising knowledge domains; Museum informatics; Music information retrieval; The concept of information; Task-based information searching; The role of trust in information science and technology; and Information and equity.
These eleven themes are quite different from the thirteen in the 2002 volume which, in turn, were quite different from the nine in 2001 and the eight in 2000, (the latter two editions under Martha Williams' editorship).
The chapters differ, too, in their nature and purpose.
Indexing for the Web is a relatively recent issue; the literature reviewed covers about a five-year period, weighted towards the more recent, as you would expect.
The concept of information reviews the development of thinking over forty years (and most of the historic names are there).
Both types of review have a valuable place.
This variety is both a strength and a weakness: a strength in the sense that the review covers an awful lot of ground; a weakness in the sense that the probability of the theme in which you are interested appearing in any one year is rather low.
On the other hand, the review does offer all information professionals an opportunity easily to maintain at least a passing acquaintance with a very wide range of matters that help to shape our future, something they might otherwise be unable to undertake.
This is an impressive work of authorship and editorship: nearly 600 pages, reviewing an estimated 1600 published works, (I didn't count them!)
Cronin and his Associate Editor, Ralf Shaw, and the international Advisory Board that guides them, are to be congratulated, as is Information Today, Inc., for maintaining a stimulating and useful 37-year-old tradition.
Author Details Colin Harris University Librarian Manchester Metropolitan University Email: c.harris@mmu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Volume 37, 2003" Author: Colin Harris Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/harris-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: Keeping Social Scientists Connected Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Keeping Social Scientists Connected Buzz data software database rss archives passwords url research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom and Emma Place discuss work to keep social scientists connected.
Grapevine is the 'people oriented' side of SOSIG, offering the social science community a place to look at and publicise information about events, career development opportunities and professional colleagues.
Grapevine began life in 1998 as an ESRC funded pilot project and was brought under the auspices of SOSIG in February 2000 with the launch of the new interface and associated services of the gateway.
You can use Grapevine to find: conferences courses university departments CVs like-minded colleagues Similarly you can use Grapevine to publicise information to the social science community: post details of conferences post details of courses you run add the Web site for your university department to the database publish your CV online for others to browse seek research profiles of like-minded professional colleagues Getting Connected All of the information stored on Grapevine can be browsed and searched from the following URL: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/gv/ If you want to post information or to customise SOSIG to create your own, tailored SOSIG information services you will need to set up an account on SOSIG.
This will enable you to: receive weekly email notification of new Internet sites, conferences, courses and colleagues from SOSIG which match your own personal interests publish details of your conferences and courses on the Grapevine section of SOSIG publish your CV on the Grapevine section of SOSIG find like-minded colleagues who are working in the same fields as you find conferences and courses which match your interests set up your own Web page on SOSIG that displays social science newsfeeds of your choosing Also or a limited period SOSIG Account Holders will receive a 20% discount on the purchase of selected books published by Oxford University Press.
How to set up an Account on SOSIG Setting up a personal account on SOSIG will cost you nothing and only involves a few simple steps: On the SOSIG Home Page find the My Account section on the left of your screen and select "New user: Register" option.
On the Registration page enter your personal details and a username and password and select the Register button at the bottom of the page.
The next screen will tell you whether you have successfully created an account.
If not, go back and fill in mandatory fields.
If you have, select the Enter My Account link.
You will need to login to your account by entering your username and password.
You will then see your own personal page on SOSIG.
From this point you can now decide how you would like to use this feature of SOSIG.
One of the first things you should do is set up a personal profile so that you can get information that is tailored to your own personal interests Creating a Personal Profile To receive many of the benefits of the My Account feature you will need to set up a personal profile.
Your profile will be used to tailor some of the SOSIG services to have particular relevance to your interests.
It will be used to tailor the messages you get via the Email Alerting Service to match your interests.
It will also be used to allow you to find information that matches your profile on your My Account page (i.e.
conferences, courses and like-minded "friends" for your preferred subject areas).
There are over 3500 thousand social scientists currently subscribed to My Account and this is growing steadily.
Choosing Channels The My Account feature on SOSIG enables you to set up a personal, customised Web page on SOSIG that points to selected information from various information providers offering RSS (Rich Site Summary) channels or newsfeeds.
Channels are a Web technology that allows us to display information from many different sources in the same Web page.
Social science Web information providers are increasingly making information available via channels.
SOSIG will enable you to select the channels and information you would like to view from your Account page.
These currently include the Guardian Unlimited, What's New from Sociological Research Online, The UK Data Archive and JSTORNews.
More Information If you would like to find out more about setting up an account on SOSIG see: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/help/custom.html Or contact Debra Hiom at the address below.
Regard: Access to UK Social Science Research Introduction Regard is a Web-based database that helps users locate and explore the research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK's largest independent funding agency for research into social and economic issues.
The database currently holds over 65,000 records, dating back to the early eighties and is updated weekly, ensuring that the very latest research is included.
Regard is publicly and freely available at www.regard.ac.uk New developments In September 2000 the Regard Web site was redesigned, based on feedback from our users.
Particular attention was paid to the way users can search Regard and we now offer a variety of search options: Basic search Advanced search Browsing options Accessing the latest research only using project start/end dates and publication dates We have also introduced a login facility to allow users to manage their searches and results.
Once you login, using your email address, you are able to: Track all the searches you do in the current and previous month on Regard Use your records in-tray.
The in-tray acts as a holding area for records of particular interest to you, which you may want to print out or email to yourself Database content You can search Regard to find information on: Research project details (called Awards): researchers, institutions, an abstract and links to projects Websites where available (see Figure 1) Outputs: books, journal articles, conference papers, datasets, software etc.
Research findings reports Figure 1.
Example of an award record, providing details of a research project Searching Regard With a large database it is essential that the searching facilities are both powerful and easy to use.
Our redesigned Web site offers a variety of search options: · Simple keyword searching using the basic search (see Figure 2) Figure 2.
Home page showing search options · Advanced search options to build a more specific search (see Figure 3) Figure 3.
Advanced search · Browse the index of personal names to find all records for a particular researcher   · Accessing the latest research only.
Search the database using project start/end dates and publication dates.
If required, you can refine your search by also using keywords to build up a search such as: "Show me research projects ending this year that are about social exclusion"   · Browsing the ESRC Research Centres and Programmes.
This allows you to see all records for individual research centres and programmes and link to their Web sites (see Figure 4) Figure 4.
Partial list of ESRC research centres Most users find Regard easy to use, but extensive help is available from our Web site.
A help desk is also available by emailing regard-help@bristol.ac.uk or telephoning 0117 928 7194.
If you would like to know more about Regard please contact us at: Regard Institute for Learning & Research Technology University of Bristol, 8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol, BS8 1HH Regard is publicly available without subscription at: www.regard.ac.uk Author Details   Debra Hiom SOSIG Co-Director ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Tel: 0117 928 7117 Fax: 0117 928 7112   Alison Parker REGARD ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: regard@bristol.ac.uk Tel: 0117 928 7194 Fax: 0117 928 7112 Article Title: "Planet SOSIG: Keeping Social Scientists Connected" Author: Debra Hiom and Alison Parker Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/planet-sosig/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Watch: What's Related to My Web Site?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Watch: What's Related to My Web Site?
Buzz data software rdf portal archives browser url Citation BibTex RIS What's Related To My Web Site?
Brian Kelly looks at Netscape's 'What's Related?'
facility and reports on the service's findings for institutional Web servers.
Netscape’s What’s Related Service One possibly underused facility in the Netscape browser is its What’s Related feature.
When viewing a Web page, clicking on the What’s Related button in the Netscape toolbar (shown in Figure 1) will display related information about the page being viewing.
The information displayed by use of the What’s Related service is illustrated in Figure 2.
As can be seen a number of related Web sites will be displayed.
In addition information about the Web site will be displayed, including its popularity, the number of pages on the Web site and the number of links to the Web site.
About The What’s Related Service What’s Related is a feature of Netscape Communicator that is designed to “help you figure out where to go next when you’re surfing the web or drilling for information”.
By clicking on the icon ion the toolbar you can see sites that provides information or offers products and services that are similar or connected to those offered by the site that you’re currently viewing.
You can go directly to a related site by selecting one of the links in the drop-down menu, or select the Detailed List to see a web page with a list of related sites.
Figure 1: Netscape’s What’s Related Service The What’s Related data is created by Alexa Internet.
Alexa uses crawls the Web to create and categorise related Web sites for millions of web URLs.
Alexa uses links on the crawled pages to find related sites.
The day-to-day use of What’s Related also helps build and refine the data.
As the service is used the requested URLs are logged.
By looking at high-level trends, Netscape and Alexa can deduce relationships between Web sites.
For example, if thousands of users go directly from site A to site B, the two sites are likely to be related.
Once all the relationships have been established and the links have been checked, the top ten related sites for each URL are chosen by looking at the strength of the relationship between the sites.
Each month, Alexa recrawls the web and rebuilds the data to pull in new sites and to refine the relationships between the existing sites.
New sites with strong relationships to a site will automatically appear in the What’s Related list for that site by displacing any sites with weaker relationships.
Figure 2: Netscape’s What’s Related Service Note that since the relationships between sites are based on strength, What’s Related lists are not necessarily balanced.
Site A may appear in the list for Site B, but Site B may not be in the list for Site A.
Generally this happens when the number of sites with strong relationships is greater than ten or when sites do not have similar enough content.
As an example of this difference in content, consider the relationship between several major Internet sites: Netscape is a browser and server software company as well as an Internet portal, so the What’s Related list will contain a mix of these types of companies.
When visiting a “pure” Internet portal, you might see Netscape Netcenter in the list; however, when you visit Netcenter, you might not see that “pure” portal in the Netcenter What’s Related list because several other browser and server software companies are included along with the related Internet portals.
Further information about Netscape’s What’s Related service is available on the Netscape Web site [1].
A What’s Related FAQ is also available [2], from which the above description was taken.
It should be noted that Netscape’s What’s Related service was an early example of an RDF application.
Brief information about the implementation in Mozilla is available at the Mozilla Web site [3].
Survey On 21st and 23rd October 2000 the What’s Related service was used to obtain information for the main server hosted by UK Higher Educational Institutions, based on the HESA list [4].
Information on the popularity of the Web server, the number of pages on the Web sites and the number of links to the Web site were recorded.
Links to the What’s Related service for each institution are provided in the survey data, allowing the current information to be obtained.
Findings A summary of the popularity data, numbers of pages on Web site and numbers of links to Web server is given below.
Popularity The five most popular Web servers, based on the information provided by Netscape’s What’s Related Service, is given in Table 1.
Table 1: Most Popular Institutions Institution Position In Popularity Table Current Details Open University 7,221 Try it Sheffield 7,238 Try it Southampton 8,259 Try it Nottingham 12,766 Try it Cambridge 16,911 Try it Numbers of Pages Indexed The five Web servers with the most pages, based on the information provided by Netscape’s What’s Related Service, is given in Table 2.
Table 2: Most Number of Pages Institution Number of Pages Current Details Sheffield 26,865 Try it Aberystwyth 14,990 Try it Leeds 14,675 Try it Bath 14,471 Try it Southampton 12,842 Try it Numbers of Links The five Web servers with the highest number of links, based on the information provided by Netscape’s What’s Related Service, is given in Table 3.
Table 3: Most Number of Links Institution Number of Pages Current Details Imperial College 25,817 Try it Leeds 19,920 Try it Reading 18,365 Try it Exeter 18,242 Try it Cardiff 18,007 Try it Note that it would be interesting to compare the information on the number of links to the main institutional Web servers with the survey carried out in March 2000 using ALtaVista which was published in Ariadne issue 23 [5].
Related Pages As might be expected the related pages for University Web sites were often other University Web sites (especially other Universities within the region or Universities beginning with the same letter) as can be seen from Figure 4.
Figure 4: What’s Related For The University Of Bath It was interesting to note that many Universities were seen to be related to the Graduatebase.com Web site [6].
A number of other interesting relationships were observed, some of which are summarised below.
Table 4: Examples of Related Sites Institution Related Site Check Bradford Related to a Greek Web site Try it Oxford Related to Yale and Harvard Try it Cambridge Related to Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Try it Royal Veterinary College Related to The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh and the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Liverpool Try it It should be noted that the relationships are provided for the Web site and not for individual Web pages.
So, for example, if you are viewing a page on nuclear physics which is hosted on the institutional Web server, the What’s Related information will provide links to Web sites which are related to the institutional Web server, and not to the pages on nuclear physics.
This provides an argument for hosting departmental and project pages on their own domain rather than on the institutional Web server.
As can be seen from Figure 5, which shows the What’s Related links for the DESIRE project [7], more relevant links can be provided in such cases.
Figure 5: What’s Related For The DESIRE Project This argument for hosting departmental and project pages on their own domain does not, of course, address the maintenance and support issues.
Discussion The success of the Google search engine [8] has demonstrated the effectiveness of citation analysis for finding relevant resources a resource is given a high rating if there are many Web sites which link to the resource.
Although Netscape’s What’s Related Service does not seem to be widely used (possibly due to Netscape’s uncertain future following the AOL / Time Warner takeover deals) it may be useful to monitor developments in services which use citation information.
The What’s Related Service is interesting since it not only uses the link information provided by Alexa [9] (which in turn uses the Internet Archive service [10]) but, since it is integrated within a Web browser, it can also make use of end user browser patterns (resource A is related to resource B not only becuase there are hyperlinks between A and B, but also because many users follow the link).
The figures on the popularity of Web sites, the numbers of pages on the Web site and the numbers of links to the Web site are, of course, open to various interpretions.
Further work remains to be done.
References About What’s Related, Netscape http://home.netscape.com/escapes/related/ What’s Related FAQ, Netscape http://home.netscape.com/escapes/related/faq.html RDF: Related Links and other such fun stuff, Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/SmartBrowsing.html Higher Education Universities and Colleges, HESA http://www.hesa.ac.uk/links/he_inst.htm A Survey Of Links to UK University Web Sites, Ariadne, issue 23, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/web-watch/ Graduatebase, http://www.graduatebase.com/ DESIRE, http://www.desire.org/ Google, http://www.google.com/ Alexa Internet, http://www.alexa.com/ The Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/ Appendix 1: Survey Results The Netscape What’s Related service was used to analyse institutional Web servers in UK Universities.
The survey was carried out on 20 and 23 October 2000.
The following table contains details of the survey.
Column 2 gives the name of the institution and a link to the institutional web server.
Column 3 gives the information provided by What’s Related service on (a) the popularity of the institional Web site, (b) the number of pages on the site and © the number of links to the site.
This column also has a link enabling you to obtain the current details for the site.
Column 4 provides a link to Google’s Find Similar service.
A summary of the findings is given in the following table.
Table 5: Information On UK HEIs   Institution What’s Related (Netscape) Find Similar (Google) 1 Aberdeen Popularity: In top 25,982 Number of pages on site: 9,802 Number of links to site on web: 13,905 Try it Try it 2 Abertay Popularity: In top 287,267 Number of pages on site: 20 Number of links to site on web: 118 Try it Try it 3 Aberystwyth Popularity: In top 21,719 Number of pages on site: 14,990 Number of links to site on web: 3,906 Try it Try it 4 Anglia Popularity: In top 74,379 Number of pages on site: 360 Number of links to site on web: 1,847 Try it Try it 5 Aston Popularity: In top 94,516 Number of pages on site: 2,623 Number of links to site on web: 2,038 Try it Try it 6 Bangor Popularity: In top 66,841 Number of pages on site: 2,906 Number of links to site on web: 5,198 Try it Try it 7 Bath Spa Popularity: In top 184,567 Number of pages on site: 139 Number of links to site on web: 425 Try it Try it 8 Bath Popularity: In top 19,653 Number of pages on site: 14,471 Number of links to site on web: 6,008 Try it Try it 9 Belfast, Queen’s University of Popularity: In top 26,739 Number of pages on site: 5,566 Number of links to site on web: 7,016 Try it Try it 10 Birkbeck Popularity: In top 83,469 Number of pages on site: 411 Number of links to site on web: 2,688 Try it Try it 11 Birmingham Popularity: In top 24,082 Number of pages on site: 3,878 Number of links to site on web: 13,988 Try it Try it 12 Bishop Grosseteste College Popularity: In top 698,862 Number of pages on site: 34 Number of links to site on web: 105 Try it Try it 13 Bolton Popularity: In top 280,668 Number of pages on site: 15 Number of links to site on web: 940 Try it Try it 14 Bournemouth Popularity: In top 103,525 Number of pages on site: 262 Number of links to site on web: 1,857 Try it Try it 15 Bradford Popularity: In top 40,101 Number of pages on site: 3,556 Number of links to site on web: 9,537 Try it Try it 16 Bretton Hall Popularity: In top 337,532 Number of pages on site: 21 Number of links to site on web: 103 Try it Try it 17 Brighton Popularity: In top 137,686 Number of pages on site: 693 Number of links to site on web: 2,058 Try it Try it 18 Bristol Popularity: In top 37,346 Number of pages on site: 4,586 Number of links to site on web: 16,420 Try it Try it 19 Brunel Popularity: In top 42,152 Number of pages on site: 10,710 Number of links to site on web: 8,251 Try it   20 Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College Popularity: In top 367,171 Number of pages on site: 4 Number of links to site on web: 192 Try it Try it 21 Cambridge Popularity: In top 16,911 Number of pages on site: 2,786 Number of links to site on web: 15,889 Try it 22 Canterbury Christ Church University College Popularity: In top 88,475 Number of pages on site: 1,815 Number of links to site on web: 6,329 Try it Try it 23 Cardiff Popularity: In top 24,266 Number of pages on site: 790 Number of links to site on web: 18,007 Try it   23 Cardiff, University of Wales Institute Popularity: In top 142,978 Number of pages on site: 32 Number of links to site on web: 699 Try it Try it 25 Central England in Birmingham, The University of Popularity: In top 51,292 Number of pages on site: 689 Number of links to site on web: 1,126 Try it   26 Central Lancashire, The University of Popularity: In top 68,683 Number of pages on site: 8,128 Number of links to site on web: 2,948 Try it Try it 27 Central School of Speech and Drama Popularity: In top 246,510 Number of pages on site: 35 Number of links to site on web: 65 Try it Try it 28 Cheltenham and Gloucester College of HE Popularity: In top 147,661 Number of pages on site: 1,528 Number of links to site on web: 1,334 Try it Try it 29 Chester College of HE Popularity: In top 145,842 Number of pages on site: 1,032 Number of links to site on web: 507 Try it Try it 30 Chichester, University College Popularity: In top 1,425,790 Number of pages on site: ?
?
Number of links to site on web: 1 Try it NOTE: Web domain recently changed from www.chihe.ac.uk Try it 31 City University Popularity: In top 42,375 Number of pages on site: 1,931 Number of links to site on web: 4,908 Try it Try it 32 College of Guidance Studies Popularity: In top 3,776,710 Number of pages on site: 18 Number of links to site on web: 38 Try it Try it 33 Coventry Popularity: In top 95,673 Number of pages on site: 516 Number of links to site on web: 2,147 Try it Try it 34 Cranfield Popularity: In top 49,789 Number of pages on site: 273 Number of links to site on web: 6,173 Try it Try it 35 Dartington Popularity: In top 525,489 Number of pages on site: 90 Number of links to site on web: 214 Try it Try it 36 De Montfort University Popularity: In top 41,636 Number of pages on site: 2,842 Number of links to site on web: 4,623 Try it Try it 37 Derby Popularity: In top 77,496 Number of pages on site: 2,551 Number of links to site on web: 1,434 Try it Try it 38 Dundee Popularity: In top 31,397 Number of pages on site: 4,986 Number of links to site on web: 7,376 Try it Try it 39 Durham Popularity: In top 23,567 Number of pages on site: 12,701 Number of links to site on web: 9,973 Try it Try it 40 East Anglia, The University of Popularity: In top 44,236 Number of pages on site: 8,604 Number of links to site on web: 4,811 Try it Try it 41 East London, The University of Popularity: In top 86,129 Number of pages on site: ?
Number of links to site on web: 3,775 Try it Try it 42 Edge Hill Popularity: In top 143,074 Number of pages on site: 1,062 Number of links to site on web: 736 Try it Try it 43 Edinburgh College of Art Popularity: 598,063 Number of pages on site: 21 Number of links to site on web: 327 Try it Try it 44 Edinburgh Popularity: In top 30,479 Number of pages on site: 382 Number of links to site on web: 7,390 Try it Try it 45 Essex Popularity: In top 51,655 Number of pages on site: 1,409 Number of links to site on web: 6,166 Try it Try it 46 Exeter Popularity: In top 16,854 Number of pages on site: 7,279 Number of links to site on web: 18,242 Try it Try it 47 Falmouth College of Arts Popularity: In top 1,182,181 Number of pages on site: 45 Number of links to site on web: 421 Try it Try it 48 Glamorgan Popularity: In top 110,798 Number of pages on site: 751 Number of links to site on web: 1,434 Try it Try it 49 Glasgow Caledonian University Popularity: In top 141,153 Number of pages on site: 534 Number of links to site on web: 2,821 Try it Try it 50 Glasgow School of Art Popularity: In top 192,352 Number of pages on site: 623 Number of links to site on web: 514 Try it Try it 51 Glasgow Popularity: In top 16,336 Number of pages on site: 7,918 Number of links to site on web: 13,328 Try it Try it 52 Goldsmiths Popularity: In top 94,188 Number of pages on site: 248 Number of links to site on web: 620 Try it Try it 53 Greenwich Popularity: In top 48,410 Number of pages on site: 4,196 Number of links to site on web: 2,407 Try it Try it 54 Harper Adams University College Popularity: In top 1,259,559 Number of pages on site: 32 Number of links to site on web: 221 Try it Try it 55 Heriot-Watt Popularity: In top 67,131 Number of pages on site: 2,539 Number of links to site on web: 6,144 Try it Try it 56 Hertfordshire Popularity: In top 54,242 Number of pages on site: 2,620 Number of links to site on web: 3,391 Try it Try it 57 Homerton College Popularity: Has Cambridge’s domain!
Number of pages on site: Has Cambridge’s domain!
Number of links to site on web: Has Cambridge’s domain!
Try it Try it 58 Huddersfield Popularity: In top 71,840 Number of pages on site: 2,360 Number of links to site on web: 3,105 Try it Try it 59 Hull Popularity: In top 47,728 Number of pages on site: 3,269 Number of links to site on web: 8,473 Try it Try it 60 Imperial College Popularity: In top 89,134 Number of pages on site: 129 Number of links to site on web: 25,817 Try it Try it 61 Institute of Education Popularity: In top 135,053 Number of pages on site: 1,086 Number of links to site on web: 1,403 Try it Try it 62 Keele Popularity: In top 46,832 Number of pages on site: 4,039 Number of links to site on web: 9,796 Try it Try it 63 Kent at Canterbury, The University of Popularity: In top 75,215 Number of pages on site: 382 Number of links to site on web: 5,597 Try it Try it 64 Kent Institute of Art & Design Popularity: In top 732,496 Number of pages on site: 21 Number of links to site on web: 173 Try it Try it 65 King Alfred’s College, Winchester Popularity: In top 172,749 Number of pages on site: 319 Number of links to site on web: 461 Try it Try it 66 King’s College London Popularity: In top 24,007 Number of pages on site: 7,774 Number of links to site on web: 7,805 Try it Try it 67 Kingston University Popularity: In top 78,251 Number of pages on site: 1,898 Number of links to site on web: 2,289 Try it Try it 68 Lampeter Popularity: In top 74,830 Number of pages on site: 832 Number of links to site on web: 3,423 Try it Try it 69 Lancaster Popularity: In top 33,260 Number of pages on site: 4,360 Number of links to site on web: 13,951 Try it Try it 70 Leeds Metropolitan University Popularity: In top 64,009 Number of pages on site: 2,454 Number of links to site on web: 2,117 Try it Try it 71 Leeds Popularity: In top 17,160 Number of pages on site: 14,675 Number of links to site on web: 19,920 Try it Try it 72 Leicester Popularity: In top 25,501 Number of pages on site: 5,813 Number of links to site on web: 10,075 Try it Try it 73 Lincolnshire and Humberside, The University of Popularity: In top 220,335 Number of pages on site: 178 Number of links to site on web: 157 Try it Try it 74 Liverpool Hope Popularity: In top 370,027 Number of pages on site: 1,182 Number of links to site on web: 968 Try it Try it 75 Liverpool John Moores University Popularity: In top 48,865 Number of pages on site: 2,650 Number of links to site on web: 4,051 Try it Try it 76 Liverpool Popularity: In top 20,495 Number of pages on site: 689 Number of links to site on web: 12,729 Try it Try it 77 London Business School Popularity: In top 59,181 Number of pages on site: 588 Number of links to site on web: 1,989 Try it Try it 78 London Guildhall University Popularity: In top 65,144 Number of pages on site: 2,056 Number of links to site on web: 3,824 Try it Try it 79 London Institute, The Popularity: In top 173,316 Number of pages on site: ?
Number of links to site on web: 275 Try it Try it 80 London Institutes and activities, University of Popularity: In top 66,861 Number of pages on site: 139 Number of links to site on web: 627 Try it Try it 81 London School of Economics and Political Science Popularity: In top 22,869 Number of pages on site: 1,422 Number of links to site on web: 4,999 Try it Try it 82 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Popularity: In top 162,482 Number of pages on site: 458 Number of links to site on web: 1,053 Try it Try it 83 Loughborough Popularity: In top 35,073 Number of pages on site: 4,554 Number of links to site on web: 12,331 Try it Try it 84 Luton Popularity: In top 59,596 Number of pages on site: 335 Number of links to site on web: 3,394 Try it Try it 85 University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) Popularity: In top 83,371 Number of pages on site: 930 Number of links to site on web: 4,161 Try it Try it 86 Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Popularity: In top 56,394 Number of pages on site: 1,786 Number of links to site on web: 4,699 Try it Try it 87 Manchester Popularity: In top 24,077 Number of pages on site: 5,989 Number of links to site on web: 9,303 Try it Try it 88 Middlesex Popularity: In top 74,422 Number of pages on site: 1,127 Number of links to site on web: 2,519 Try it Try it 89 Napier Popularity: In top 129,276 Number of pages on site: 6,355 Number of links to site on web: 3,178 Try it Try it 90 Newcastle Popularity: In top 25,855 Number of pages on site: 9,589 Number of links to site on web: 15,825 Try it Try it 91 Newman College of Higher Education Popularity: In top 412,734 Number of pages on site: 113 Number of links to site on web: 495 Try it Try it 92 Newport, University College of Wales Popularity: In top 275,788 Number of pages on site: 216 Number of links to site on web: 345 Try it Try it 93 North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education Popularity: In top 237,402 Number of pages on site: 1,606 Number of links to site on web: 1,405 Try it Try it 94 North London, The University of Popularity: In top 62,776 Number of pages on site: 517 Number of links to site on web: 2,339 Try it Try it 95 North Riding College Higher Education Corporation Popularity: In top 645,401 Number of pages on site: 36 Number of links to site on web: 231 Try it Try it 96 Northampton, University College Popularity: In top 93,832 Number of pages on site: 1,366 Number of links to site on web: 3,638 Try it Try it 97 Northern College of Education Popularity: In top 179,866 Number of pages on site: 315 Number of links to site on web: 707 Try it Try it 98 Northern School of Contemporary Dance Popularity: In top 1,603,157 Number of pages on site: 54 Number of links to site on web: 153 Try it Try it 99 Northumbria at Newcastle, The University of (UNN) Popularity: In top 39,464 Number of pages on site: 2,228 Number of links to site on web: 6,377 Try it Try it 100 Norwich School of Art and Design Popularity: In top 792,158 Number of pages on site: 36 Number of links to site on web: 184 Try it Try it 101 Nottingham Trent University (NTU) Popularity: In top 81,506 Number of pages on site: 872 Number of links to site on web: 2,477 Try it Try it 102 Nottingham Popularity: In top 12,766 Number of pages on site: 11,881 Number of links to site on web: 12,997 Try it Try it 103 Open University Popularity: In top 7,221 Number of pages on site: 1,501 Number of links to site on web: 5,637 Try it Try it 104 Oxford Brookes Popularity: In top 34,862 Number of pages on site: 2,881 Number of links to site on web: 7,887 Try it Try it 105 Oxford Popularity: In top 29,592 Number of pages on site: 202 Number of links to site on web: 5,881 Try it Try it 106 Paisley Popularity: In top 205,033 Number of pages on site: 429 Number of links to site on web: 1,719 Try it Try it 107 Plymouth Popularity: In top 187,409 Number of pages on site: 655 Number of links to site on web: 3,374 Try it Try it 108 Portsmouth Popularity: In top 113,833 Number of pages on site: 38 Number of links to site on web: 2,278 Try it Try it 109 Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh Popularity: In top 297,784 Number of pages on site: 142 Number of links to site on web: 520 Try it Try it 110 Queen Mary and Westfield College Popularity: In top 80,413 Number of pages on site: 1,806 Number of links to site on web: 3,644 Try it Try it 111 Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication Popularity: In top 455,159 Number of pages on site: 49 Number of links to site on web: 232 Try it Try it 112 Reading Popularity: In top 24,126 Number of pages on site: 9,172 Number of links to site on web: 18,365 Try it Try it 113 Registry, The University of Wales Popularity: In top 358,828 Number of pages on site: 36 Number of links to site on web: 209 Try it Try it 114 Ripon and York St John, The College of Popularity: In top 126,709 Number of pages on site: 167 Number of links to site on web: 408 Try it Try it 115 Robert Gordon University (RGU) Popularity: In top 72,272 Number of pages on site: 1,030 Number of links to site on web: 2,483 Try it Try it 116 Roehampton, University of Surrey Popularity: In top 112,513 Number of pages on site: 159 Number of links to site on web: 1,099 Try it Try it 117 Rose Bruford College Speech and Drama Popularity: In top 905,416 Number of pages on site: 33 Number of links to site on web: 79 Try it Try it 118 Royal Academy of Music Popularity: In top 441,991 Number of pages on site: 32 Number of links to site on web: 321 Try it Try it 119 Royal College of Art Popularity: In top 207,721 Number of pages on site: 124 Number of links to site on web: 404 Try it Try it 120 Royal College of Music Popularity: In top 313,673 Number of pages on site: 29 Number of links to site on web: 287 Try it Try it 121 Royal Holloway and Bedford New College Popularity: In top 87,686 Number of pages on site: 1,106 Number of links to site on web: 4,489 Try it Try it 122 Royal Northern College of Music Popularity: In top 513,686 Number of pages on site: 194 Number of links to site on web: 234 Try it Try it 123 Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama Popularity: In top 735,184 Number of pages on site: 114 Number of links to site on web: 204 Try it Try it 124 Royal Veterinary College Popularity: In top 429,903 Number of pages on site: 10 Number of links to site on web: 415 Try it Try it 125 St Andrews Popularity: In top 63,464 Number of pages on site: 4,254 Number of links to site on web: 8,827 Try it Try it 126 St George’s Hospital Medical School Popularity: In top 89,074 Number of pages on site: 851 Number of links to site on web: 2,876 Try it Try it 127 Saint Mark and St John, College of Popularity: In top 531,871 Number of pages on site: 29 Number of links to site on web: 244 Try it Try it 128 St Martin’s College Popularity: In top 349,400 Number of pages on site: 32 Number of links to site on web: 631 Try it Try it 129 St Mary’s College Popularity: In top 413,212 Number of pages on site: 159 Number of links to site on web: 267 Try it Try it 130 Salford Popularity: In top 64,698 Number of pages on site: 3,264 Number of links to site on web: 6,222 Try it Try it 131 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Popularity: In top 90,621 Number of pages on site: 497 Number of links to site on web: 2,823 Try it Try it 132 School of Pharmacy, The Popularity: In top 1,001,810 Number of pages on site: 21 Number of links to site on web: 143 Try it Try it 133 Scottish Agricultural College Popularity: In top 282,399 Number of pages on site: 510 Number of links to site on web: 535 Try it Try it 134 Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) Popularity: In top 18,089 Number of pages on site: 8,711 Number of links to site on web: 5,833 Try it Try it 135 Sheffield Popularity: In top 7,238 Number of pages on site: 26,865 Number of links to site on web: 32,732 Try it Try it 136 South Bank University (SBU) Popularity: In top 34,391 Number of pages on site: 3,196 Number of links to site on web: 4,924 Try it Try it 137 Southampton Institute Popularity: In top 25,963 Number of pages on site: 2,250 Number of links to site on web: 1,378 Try it Try it 138 Southampton Popularity: In top 8,259 Number of pages on site: 12,842 Number of links to site on web: 5,341 Try it Try it 139 Staffordshire Popularity: In top 83,051 Number of pages on site: 3,706 Number of links to site on web: 2,188 Try it Try it 140 Stirling Popularity: In top 41,227 Number of pages on site: 1,840 Number of links to site on web: 7,296 Try it Try it 141 Strathclyde Popularity: In top 30,871 Number of pages on site: 8,071 Number of links to site on web: 9,013 Try it Try it 142 Sunderland Popularity: In top 63,685 Number of pages on site: 2,089 Number of links to site on web: 1,732 Try it Try it 143 Surrey Institute of Art and Design Popularity: In top 366,669 Number of pages on site: 113 Number of links to site on web: 406 Try it Try it 144 Surrey Popularity: No information available Number of pages on site: No information available Number of links to site on web: No information available Try it Try it 145 Sussex Popularity: In top 40,248 Number of pages on site: 2,156 Number of links to site on web: 11,732 Try it Try it 146 Swansea Institute of Higher Education Popularity: In top 882,069 Number of pages on site: 142 Number of links to site on web: 480 Try it Try it 147 Swansea Popularity: In top 47,203 Number of pages on site: 4,335 Number of links to site on web: 14,057 Try it Try it 148 Teesside Popularity: In top 167,626 Number of pages on site: 1,074 Number of links to site on web: 2,028 Try it Try it 149 Thames Valley University (TVU) Popularity: In top 110,152 Number of pages on site: 243 Number of links to site on web: 434 Try it Try it 150 Trinity and All Saints College Popularity: In top 125,641 Number of pages on site: 1,061 Number of links to site on web: 971 Try it Try it 151 Trinity College of Music Popularity: In top 448,843 Number of pages on site: 22 Number of links to site on web: 176 Try it Try it 152 Trinity College, Carmarthen Popularity: In top 637,670 Number of pages on site: 164 Number of links to site on web: 496 Try it Try it 153 Ulster, University of Popularity: In top 50,765 Number of pages on site: 5,051 Number of links to site on web: 14,953 Try it Try it 154 University College London (UCL) Popularity: In top 19,389 Number of pages on site: 570 Number of links to site on web: 10,645 Try it Try it 155 Warwick Popularity: In top 17,682 Number of pages on site: 5,722 Number of links to site on web: 15,085 Try it Try it 156 Welsh College of Music and Drama Popularity: In top 678,886 Number of pages on site: 27 Number of links to site on web: 167 Try it Try it 157 West of England, University of the Popularity: In top 81,456 Number of pages on site: 1,637 Number of links to site on web: 1,657 Try it Try it 158 Westminster College Popularity: In top 178,253 Number of pages on site: 4 Number of links to site on web: 493 Try it Try it 159 Westminster Popularity: In top 33,130 Number of pages on site: 2,772 Number of links to site on web: 5,485 Try it Try it 160 Wolverhampton Popularity: In top 43,352 Number of pages on site: 3,430 Number of links to site on web: 2,664 Try it Try it 161 Worcester, University College Popularity: In top 254,777 Number of pages on site: 8 Number of links to site on web: 479 Try it Try it 162 Writtle College Popularity: In top 748,200 Number of pages on site: 54 Number of links to site on web: 220 Try it Try it 163 Wye College Popularity: In top 279,363 Number of pages on site: 630 Number of links to site on web: 723 Try it Try it 164 York Popularity: In top 26,222 Number of pages on site: 7,067 Number of links to site on web: 10,932 Try it Try it The information in the table was collected on 21 and 23 October 2000.
Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Article Title: “Web Watch: What’s Related to My Web Site?” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: Mar-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 27 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/web-watch/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Targeting Academic Research With Southampton's Institutional Repository Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Targeting Academic Research With Southampton's Institutional Repository Buzz data software framework html database dissemination infrastructure archives metadata vocabularies repositories eprints copyright cataloguing multimedia e-learning mp3 e-research rae research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jessie Hey describes how user needs have influenced the evolutionary development of 'e-Prints Soton' as the University of Southampton Research Repository.
The University of Southampton has been one of the pioneers of open access to academic research, particularly, in the tireless advocacy of Professor Stevan Harnad and in the creation of the EPrints software [1], as a vehicle for creating open access archives (or repositories) for research.
These activities have been supported by a long-standing programme of research into digital libraries, hypermedia, and scholarly communication.
In the early days, before the vocabulary of open access issues was so well developed, we talked of the 'esoteric literature' the 'not-for-profit' academic literature and the Faustian bargain that the authors made with the publishers [2].
The authors gave away copyright and therefore control of access to work which had been written by academics and refereed by academics but, in an ideal world, would also be read and acted upon by as wide an interested audience as possible.
The digital medium, in principle, gave a huge opportunity for change and it was embraced early on by a few disciplines with centrally based archives.
Now that change is happening in earnest with new and varied initiatives appearing so fast in the international arena that it is vital to scan Open Access News [3] regularly to keep up with them.
As we aspire to join an age of e-research in global collaboratories, it is fitting that, this year, open access to research should have been a keen interest of the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.
It published its Tenth Report of the Session 2003-04, Scientific Publications: Free for all?
[4] on 20 July.
The Committee concluded that the current model for scientific publishing is unsatisfactory.
An increase in the volume of research output, rising prices and static library budgets mean that libraries are struggling to purchase subscriptions to all the scientific journals needed by their users.
The Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online.
It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way.
Institutional repositories are now being recognised as a significant way of valuing and showcasing an institution's intellectual assets: 'While early implementers of institutional repositories have chosen different paths to begin populating their repositories and to build campus community acceptance, support, and participation, .... a mature and fully realised institutional repository will contain the intellectual works of faculty and students--both research and teaching materials--and also documentation of the activities of the institution itself in the form of records of events and performance and of the ongoing intellectual life of the institution.
It will also house experimental and observational data captured by members of the institution that support their scholarly activities.'
[5] Although we are a long way from gathering all these assets there are plenty of unpredictable questions forthcoming about which assets we can store and how.
It is useful to compare experiences and the baselines from which other institutions are working.
The demands that drive a repository down a particular path may be quite different or may steer others in a common direction if circumstances are similar.
User demands have given Lund University in Sweden a related path to ours [6] via a publications database as we shall see later from Southampton's own responses to its current environment.
TARDis The TARDis (Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure) [7] e-Prints Project benefits from being one of a cluster of complementary projects in the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [8] funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which supports Higher and Further Education in the UK.
The work of this programme has been inspired by the success of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) [9] a simple mechanism that allows metadata about resources to be harvested into services that can be searched by staff and students.
Within this context, TARDis is exploring ways to build a sustainable multidisciplinary institutional archive of e-Prints (currently named e-Prints Soton [10]) to leverage the research created within Southampton University.
It is testing the viability of both self-archiving and mediated deposit for a wide range of disciplines.
While developing the archive, TARDis is specifically feeding back into the pioneering GNU EPrints software.
In looking at a broad-based institution, we are aiming also to gear the software to provide ease of use by archive administrators and end-users from a spread of cultures and practices.
The publications archive developed for use in the Electronics and Computer Science Department, which uses the GNU Eprints software, and held over 800 full text publications as we began to set up our pilot institutional repository in 2003, was well known to the TARDis team.
It now holds over 1600 full text items; evidence of continuous use of the kind which might ideally be envisaged for the whole university.
Since this is also a bibliographic database of citations to work by departmental researchers, there will already be practical and technical decisions to be made in incorporating this within an institutional database intended originally to house full text publications in electronic form to aid both access and visibility.
To provide solutions which are meaningful across the whole institution it is very useful to get an understanding of the different publication practices of some of the other University departments.
Sampling a range of subject areas has brought some extremely useful observations and our users have suggested some very practical strategies which fit our current environment.
More details can be seen in the Environmental Assessment Report [11] which complements the explorations of our project cluster partner Edinburgh University [12].
The Broader University Picture The University of Southampton is currently ranked among the top ten university institutions in the UK for the quality of its research.
As such it seeks to maintain the high profile of outstanding departments as well as encouraging other departments to increase the standard and visibility of their research.
The University has greatly expanded in recent years and now has over 19,000 students and around 4,800 staff based on several campuses in the Southampton region.
This exercise has looked at the kind of activity which currently takes place within different communities across the campuses to manage their research output and other publications for external consumption.
It also provides some feedback on taking this forward.
However, while thinking about how best to introduce a new venture, it became evident that many other changes were taking place within the University which needed to be taken into account, including major improvements to the Web site and to University management systems.
Although the aim is to streamline these processes, these developments all introduce an extra burden on staff as they learn and adapt to the changes.
The most significant change was the major restructuring of the University from 1 August 2003.
Inevitably this has had an impact on the work of the TARDis Project in various ways.
A major part of the restructuring process has been the reorganisation of the University's academic departments into 3 faculties and 20 schools with varying degrees of change to be made.
As this major change took place in August 2003, e-Prints Soton was set up to use the new structures for simplicity.
Since there is a need to minimise barriers for authors to deposit their work, a simple framework is an important consideration.
For Oceanography there is the added complication of the drive to develop a fully integrated centre of excellence from the NERC Research Division and the School of Ocean and Earth Science, with their different cultures and practices, operating within the new Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics (and therefore under the management of the University), later in 2004.
Staff would all be members of a research group (currently 10 in number).
This progression might, however, simplify understanding of the various research areas for an outsider: this was certainly a challenge when sampling the research publications of the Southampton Oceanography Centre for this assessment.
For e-Prints Soton it is timely to represent the new structure in a manageable way.
From the preceding discussion, it is clearly important to recognise that this structure will not remain static and we will need to endeavour to build the service to accommodate this.
While faculties are still part of the vocabulary, disconcertingly, even the traditional word 'department' must be removed and be replaced by 'school'.
The original decision has been to try to encompass all schools in one database rather than creating individual databases with software which might otherwise have to be upgraded individually and searched with a separate cross-searching tool.
At the same time as this major reorganisation, there are the major changes taking place in the software systems supporting student administration: this suggests that any examination of linking to the core systems would be more beneficial after these systems are more stable.
Exploring the Faculties The 3 new super faculties are: Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences (LASS) Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences (MHLS) Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics (ESM) We looked at the Web sites of some of the schools or subsets within the individual faculties.
Schools, in any case, varied considerably in size.
Within the old structure Mathematics was even a faculty on its own.
The following chart looks specifically at the percentage of publications displayed on the sample Web sites with full text.
It must be remembered that departments (or schools) often display only selected publications and not necessarily the most recent.
Department Total number of publications listed on Web Full text on Web Percentage of Publications with full text Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences Archaeology 252 2 1% English 243 3 1% Modern Languages 160 0 0% Music 280 5 2% Politics 138 6 4% Economics 357 89 25% Maths Education 170 34 20%   Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences Biology 796 24 3% Medicine 1603 247 15% Health Professions and Rehabilitation Sciences 332 0 0% Nursing and Midwifery 439 0 0%   Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics Chemistry 1128 111 10% Electronics and Computer Science 7008 866 12% Mathematical Studies 849 310 37% Ocean Circulation and Climate Group, SOES 286 9 3% James Rennell Division, SOC 792 68 9% Figure 1: Sample Web sites within University of Southampton faculties with percentage of publications in full text They can also be usefully viewed as a graph: LASS MHLS ESM 1 Archaeology 8 Biology 12 Chemistry 2 English 9 Medicine 13 Electronics and Computer Science 3 Modern Languages 10 Health Professions 14 Ocean Circulation and Climate, SOES 4 Music 11 Nursing and Midwifery 15 James Rennell Division, SOC 5 Politics   16 Mathematical Studies 6 Economics     7 Maths Education     Figure 2: Number of academic publications listed with full text electronically available via exemplar school Web sites, 2003 Shown as percentages, we see that Mathematics with its highly methodical publications listings organised around its 4 research groups already has 37% of its publications available from its site in electronic form.
These listings are not generated using the GNU EPrints software, however, and this will need to be taken into consideration within the institutional context.
Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences To illustrate some of the disciplines within the faculty we will examine some specific examples firstly within the School of Humanities: Discipline of Modern Languages The former department of Modern Languages is one of the leading centres in the UK for the study of foreign languages and cultures, and was awarded the highest grade (5*) in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise.
PhD supervision is offered in line with the expertise of the members of staff in the primary areas of language, culture and society.
The list of all members of Modern Languages is available [13].
Each member of staff has a Web page that briefly covers his/her biography, teaching and research interests and recent publications.
Typically a member of staff lists about 3-7 examples of the recent works, the majority of which are books.
Only one person refers to titles of the journals she published her works in as opposed to the list of the publications she produced.
There are 69 books listed among 51 members of the research staff and some staff display front cover shots of the published books.
However cover shots of the books are not linked to, say, a publisher's catalogue description for more information.
Many staff also list the books they have translated in the publication list.
One member of staff provides a link to the full list of his publications in addition to the standard profile; the list contains 96 publications but has as yet no links to abstracts or any electronic text.
Overall, staff members in Modern Languages do not provide links to either any full text or abstracts of their publications and do not have any additional links to personally maintained Web sites.
However, there appears to be further potential for putting some publications, or even parts, online or simply linking to additional useful information about them, which can be further explored.
Although the range of publications differs considerably from some science subjects, there is already the possibility of adding cover images built into the GNU EPrints software.
Discipline of Music, School of Humanities Although the University has created an Arts campus, Music remains on the main campus where it is adjacent to the renowned Turner Sims Concert Hall.
The discipline of Music carries out international-level research across a broad spectrum of topics, encompassing music history, theory and analysis, issues in contemporary music and popular culture, performance research, and composition.
Departmental research falls into six broad themes, with several staff working in each; this overlapping of interests contributes significantly to the vitality of our research environment.
These themes are listed [14] with links to the appropriate sections of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise return, which summarise work done in each field between 1994 and 2000, and publications resulting.
A list of annual departmental publications can also be found on the University's Corporate and Marketing Web site.
Neither list of themes nor departmental publications listed here have links to abstracts or full text.
All University-hosted Web pages of the teaching staff members follow guidelines [15] for maintaining a home page.
According to the guidelines it is Music Department policy that every staff member maintains a home page including a summary biography and publication list.
The publication lists also include a section on current projects or work in progress.
The Music Department stipulates a specific format for publication lists because it draws information from the publication lists (for research returns, postgraduate brochures, etc.
), and for this purpose it is requested that everyone uses the same conventions.
Apart from this, staff members are free to lay out the home page as they prefer and some staff members have highly sophisticated home pages (for example, see Pete Thomas [16]).
In addition to a conventional list of publications that normally includes books, book chapters, journal articles and reviews, Music department members also list compositions and performances.
Some staff have created links to MP3 files to enable a Web site visitor to listen to compositions.
Some books may also be linked to a publisher's catalogue description.
The new School of Humanities includes the incredibly diverse areas of Archaeology, English, Film, History, Jewish History and Culture, Modern Languages, Music and Philosophy.
Clearly disciplines such as Music will have its own special requirements within the new broad School of Humanities.
Economics, School of Social Sciences Within the Social Sciences we see evidence of other traditions such as working papers and here we see a clear picture of a transition towards provision of full text in electronic form.
Discussion of the ideas within the papers is likely to be more timely if the full text of the document is easily accessible [17].
The University of Southampton Economics Division has been publishing discussion papers in Economics since 1992.
Abstracts for papers from 1997 onwards are available on-line.
For papers from 1999 onwards, authors have included on-line files of their work, always in PDF (Acrobat) format, although paper copies can be sent on request and are available on subscription.
Figure 3: The transition to full text of Economics Discussion Papers at Southampton This snapshot shows the publications now containing full text as a norm.
When looking at the whole institution there is obviously a need to consider how to manage the integration of this established practice as well as the established publication listings of the school as a whole.
The Centre for Research in Mathematics Education The Centre for Research in Mathematics Education (CRIME) is an example of an established interdisciplinary centre within the University.
CRIME, one of the centres within the former Department of Education, was established in 1970.
It includes academic staff from the Faculty of Mathematical Studies and the Research and Graduate School of Education.
After the restructuring the School of Education has been assigned to the Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Mathematics is now part of a much larger Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics.
The centre already makes a percentage of its work available online.
A potential bonus of an institutional repository is that, in such an interdisciplinary area a work need be entered only once and can be immediately reflected in both disciplines for use in University reporting of research and wider.
The centre expressed interest in acquiring a simple conversion service for creating pdfs.
Elsewhere in Education there is keenness to show through the visibility of full text the strength of the research record particularly in newer fields such as e-learning.
Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences Medicine, in particular, has an existing structure with access to publications leading to abstracts and sometimes full text of which it is necessary to take note.
An institutional e-Print archive would need to build on this previous work.
Medicine operates a highly focused research strategy with large interdisciplinary research divisions which bridge traditional subject boundaries.
It provides a highly organised Web site for research based on the six research divisions [18] reflecting the School's major strengths.
The list of recent publications presented by a staff member is normally a list of references with links to either an abstract of the article or full text or both.
The abstracts are always linked to the PubMed database [19] which can contain a link to the full text version of an article on the Web site of the relevant publisher.
The full text is normally linked directly to a publisher's Web site by-passing the PubMed database.
It appears from the School of Medicine (SOM) Web site that research profiles of individuals are normally maintained by the school or the relevant sub-division.
Only a few academic staff members maintain their own Web pages in addition to their research profiles.
It is possible to view a typical example of the School of a Medicine staff member Web page [20].
Of 9 recent papers all have an abstract and 5 also have links to journal text in pdf format although none of the pdfs are stored in-house.
Southampton researchers have also submitted 10 items of research to BioMed Central, the open access publishers, including a conference paper published in January 2004, a review, a commentary and oral presentations.
Nursing, by contrast, does not yet have any links to full text publications but a seminar for research staff showed there was a keenness to increase visibility and profile.
Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics School of Electronics and Computer Science The department [21] started a database to list its own research publications in 1998.
Researchers in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group have also created the open source GNU EPrints software for use by others around the world to create their own eprint archives.
The original 'Jerome' database has become a useful exemplar for the EPrints software and now uses the latest version.
It includes bibliographic information (now over 8000 publications) and offers the option to add full text (now 1600 documents).
It became departmental policy for all staff and research students to contribute their publications adding full text where possible.
Thus in 2003 the database was successfully used as the basis for the department's input to the University's 2002 research report.
Lists were generated which highlighted missing fields enabling staff to check metadata quickly.
Reports were then easily generated in the appropriate format specified for the input to the University.
Elsewhere in the Faculty there is interest in eprints for a variety of reasons.
In Chemistry there is potential interest in electronic publications because of the number of international students.
Linking to data is also a particular interest being pursued as part of the eBank UK Project.
In Physics and Astronomy there is a perceived need for a publications database with full text deposits or links as appropriate.
The traditional High Energy Physics Preprint list would also benefit from a simpler method of deposit.
Astronomy already provides a live search on the subject-based archive 'arXiv' for the publication list on their Web pages.
There are strong links with arXiv and the library-based complementary database called SPIRES for some but not all physicists.
Southampton Oceanography Centre A contrasting approach is taken by the Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) which as we have seen has two specific overlapping entities which will be coming together more closely in the future.
The current distinctions are emphasised in our look at the Web sites of interrelated groups.
The Southampton Oceanography Centre is a joint venture between the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the University of Southampton and embodies the previous Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (IOS) and the departments of Geology and Oceanography.
Historically (since 1949) the National Oceanographic Library (NOL) within IOS was responsible for the recording of all research output and between 1950-1980 produced and distributed worldwide, an annual volume of Collected Reprints (an obvious paper analogue to the present intended e-Print activity).
The NOL is required annually to report on 'Output Measures' of SOC and since 1995 (the inception of SOC) has taken responsibility for recording research output of both NERC and University researchers.
The NOL plays a central role in the scholarly communication process.
It lists all research papers from submission to publication, orders and distributes the reprints of research papers and is responsible for the production and distribution of SOC Reports.
It produces throughout the year updates of papers published to line managers and makes the SOC Staff Publications database available on the NOL Web site.
Over 600 research publications are produced each year of which nearly 300 are peer-reviewed.
There is a formal process between researcher and the NOL in place to ensure that a definitive listing can be provided both for NERC and the University Research Report.
We are using this fertile environment to pilot e-Prints Soton which, nevertheless, also provides a challenge in that certain procedures are already in place although without an emphasis on full text currently.
This tour of some of the diverse disciplines of the University showed a variety of practices, styles and formats.
Most importantly it showed that we are not starting from scratch which might be a simpler task in many ways.
However, it shows there is plenty of potential for adding or linking to full text until it becomes second nature as it has already become for Economics Working Papers or for Astronomy journal articles.
As we met with pilot depositors we assembled a variety of practical suggestions to inform our own route to Open Access.
Summary of Perceived Needs of University Authors and Suggested Services Academics are asked to provide information about their publications for a large variety of demands and for which the format required varies each time.
The following needs were some of those identified, but not prioritised, by our academics: Providing a secure store for publications in electronic form at an early stage for sharing with the research community or enabling visibility of one's work as a professional Providing information for a school's research report (regardless of where the electronic document is stored) and from there the University Research Report Providing information and documents for CVs, job and fellowship applications Providing information and documents for a school's public front including lists on its Web site in a variety of forms (by person, group, project or topic) and also publicity in printed form Providing information and documents for research proposals Providing information and documents for the Research Assessment Exercise (however it is presented in its new form) Providing information and documents for other publication archives such as those of research councils (the ESRC, for example, is experimenting with a full text archive) Providing a simpler way of maintaining a personal Web site A specific annual burden on academics is the University Research Report.
Traditionally in paper form it provided publication lists in pdf form for departments in 2002.
Normally seen as a request for large amounts of information well after the event it would be a considerable bonus if an e-Prints archive could provide the basis of a more proactive service which could, at the same time, improve the visibility of Southampton research in a simpler fashion.
These demands sway the decision on whether the eprints database can remain solely a full text database or whether it must be an integral part of a publications system to obtain support from the academics who must help create it.
To enable all these needs to be fulfilled successfully, a number of services were suggested by individuals which e-Prints Soton or other publication services might offer to facilitate these processes.
The one that authors might well appreciate the most was their being able to input data just once and to use this for multiple outputs.
Bibliographic information and also the document itself may, however, be updated when an article is published.
The deposit process is more complicated in disciplines where authors already contribute to subject-based archives such as arXiv or RePEC or contribute to major project databases such as AKT.
Import for high energy physicists could perhaps be aided by being able to ask the SPIRES library system for bibtex output and importing that directly into the departmental database.
The School of Physics and Astronomy has already been experimenting with EPrints software because of the numerous demands for publication information.
They propose that the publications database created could also provide a store for the electronic document when it is not already stored elsewhere e.g.
in arXiv.
Other useful services suggested included the capacity to: provide filters to produce the performance codes required by the University publication reports provide export to personal bibliographic software e.g.
EndNote, Reference Manager, bibtex etc provide export functions and support for creating the University Research Report provide conversion to pdf for deposit provide conversion to HTML and perhaps plain text that could be cut and pasted as required provide a facility to add corporate authors and collaborations (now included) provide 'metadata importers', for example, for multiple authors (which may in Physics even stretch to 500 or more) provide editors to add details to incomplete information (this ties in with our aim to test a mediated process) It was suggested that the e-Prints community might produce/ build up a bank of filters over time.
It might be possible to take advantage of mark up schemes devised for special purposes such as Mathematics or Chemistry.
Key Issues for e-Prints Soton A key consideration for the TARDIs Project is how to ensure e-Prints Soton collaborates effectively with the new Schools.
At this sensitive time of transition, there is a need to ensure our service can add value and save time rather than entailing significant extra work for individual researchers.
This is where mediated support may prove a bonus even if it later becomes less necessary.
In some areas, in which up until now there has been little move to make full text available electronically, it will be more straightforward to provide a new service as less duplication is involved.
Here, however, advocacy and support may become a greater priority.
Although it throws up additional issues to tackle, an exploration of current electronic publication recording practices, particularly involving full text dissemination, around the University has provided a firmer basis and constant reminder on which to proceed towards an Open Access vision for research within specific faculties and schools.
Providing a number of value-added services to meet perceived needs could help create some valuable incentives to deposit publications proactively in e-Prints Soton.
Research recording demands provide a framework within which to position the institutional repository if indeed it is to become an essential component of the infrastructure for the digital age.
A preliminary look at our user-centred route map is shown in the following figure: Figure 4: Back to the future with the TARDis Institutional Repository route map To achieve the original vision we are moving around the clock, now working hard in the lower half, to get around to our goal at midnight!
Conclusion 'All rising to great place is by a winding stair' Francis Bacon To achieve a sustainable repository we need to integrate our archive within the natural processes of its staff and students; this gives them the bonus of a reusable resource.
While immediate visibility leading to increased research impact is the primary aim of Stevan Harnad's campaigns, we can achieve this by example, practice and cooperation.
No doubt we will find other benefits as resources reach a critical mass.
The route we are taking has been driven by our users and even if it is a more circular route than we might have first supposed it will be the more sure for taking it.
So although the way Dr Who's TARDIS travels through space time is something of a mystery, Southampton's TARDis is travelling back to the future in a more clearly defined mode, steered by its users.
The TARDIS contains a lot of rooms including libraries and swimming pools.
Our TARDis libraries become more visible week by week as we encourage a culture of open access.
References GNU EPrints archive software http://software.eprints.org/ Harnad, Stevan and Hey, Jessie, "Esoteric knowledge: the scholar and scholarly publishing on the Net" in: Lorcan Dempsey, Derek Law and Ian Mowat, eds, Networking and the future of libraries 2: managing the intellectual record, London: Library Association Publishing, 1995, 110-116 Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html Great Britain Parliament House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Tenth Report of Session 2003-04 "Scientific Publications: Free for all?"
HC 399-I, 2004,114p http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm (pdf also available) Lynch, Clifford A., "Institutional repositories: essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age", ARL BiMonthly Report, 2003, No.
226, 1-7 http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html Eriksson, Jorgen and Kjellberg, Sara, "Summary of how we have approached the task of setting up an institutional archive", LU:Research http://www.lub.lu.se/lucep/documents/lu-research/description_of_experiences_040211.shtml TARDis Project http://tardis.eprints.org/ FAIR programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair Open Archives Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/ University of Southampton Research Repository (e-Prints Soton) http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/ Hey, Jessie M.N, "An environmental assessment of research publication activity and related factors impacting the development of an Institutional e-Print Repository at the University of Southampton.
", 2004 Southampton, UK, University of Southampton, 19pp.
(TARDis Project Report, D 3.1.2) http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/archive/00006218/ Andrew, Theo, "Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff" Ariadne Issue 37 2003 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/andrew/ Languages at Southampton: Staff list http://www.lang.soton.ac.uk/profiles/stafflist.htm Music University of Southampton : Music research http://www.soton.ac.uk/~musicbox/research.htm Guidelines for creating home pages http://www.soton.ac.uk/~musicbox/home_page.htm Pete Thomas: music producer / composer / saxophone http://www.petethomas.co.uk/ University of Southampton Economics Division: Discussion Paper Series in Economics and Econometrics http://www.socsci.soton.ac.uk/Economics/Research/Discussion_Papers/default.php?NavContext=Discipline University of Southampton School of Medicine Research http://www.som.soton.ac.uk/research/ PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/ University of Southampton School of Medicine: IIR Allergy and Inflammation Sciences, Members:John Warner, Professor of Child Health http://www.som.soton.ac.uk/research/ais/members/jow.htm School of Electronics and Computer Science http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Author Details Jessie M N Hey Research Fellow TARDis Institutional Repository Project University of Southampton Email: jessie.hey@soton.ac.uk Web site: http://tardis.eprints.org/ Return to top Article Title: "Targeting Academic Research with Southampton's Institutional Repository" Author: Jessie M N Hey Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue40/hey/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review: E-learning and Teaching in Library and Information Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review: E-learning and Teaching in Library and Information Services Buzz html e-learning rslp url research Citation BibTex RIS Book review by John Paschoud Since their first recorded appearance in history (take your pick from www.libraryhq.com/libhistory.html), librarians have had an important role in education at all levels in all major cultures.
But the exponential pace of technology change is such that many of them, and the institutions they work in, have not yet caught up with the special relevance of Internet-based technologies for learning.
Reading Barbara Allan’s latest book would be an effective way to remedy this, quite comprehensively.
I had to overcome a by now strong tendency to be turned-off by anything prefixed with “e-” (for any reader starting to suffer similar symptoms, I recommend that you help me start the trend of calling academic or administrative processes that involve any pieces of paper, “p-learning”, “p-government”, etc).
My only other negative reaction to this book was over the author’s initial scoping definition (a useful thing for any book to do with its’ subject) of e-learning: “E-learning involves learning that is delivered, enabled or mediated by electronic technology, for the explicit purposes of training and/or education.
It does not include standalone technology-based training such as the use of CD-ROMs in isolation.” This definition seems to be unnecessarily hung-up on an irrelevant technical issue.
Something about interaction (between learners, teachers, and other learners) might have helped to distinguish the real topic slightly better.
Content that happens to be physically on a Web server somewhere remote from the learner (such as a Learndirect (www.learndirect.co.uk/) course I tried recently), seems to be included but can actually leave the learner just as isolated as CDs and other “standalone” media that are summarily excluded from the author’s definition of e-learning, and therefore the scope of the book.
The part of the book that describes tools and technologies is (wisely) a brief overview.
Because it concentrates on how tools (like email, online conferencing and virtual worlds) can be used (rather than how they work), it is in less danger of becoming merely a source of quaint amusement to the users of successor technologies in too short a time.
Don’t expect to learn how to install and administer these things from this book (there are plenty of others for that); but do expect to find a host of good ideas and examples of good practice in using them.
Having worked for some time with ‘virtual teams’ (physically distributed across Britain and Europe, and depending largely on telematic tools to work together), I saw a lot of parallels between the ways Barbara describes interactions (and what can go right and wrong with them) between learners/teachers, and the same issues for groups of people working together in other contexts.
Currently available integrated/managed/virtual (which of these terms does trump the others?
I’m still not sure!)
learning environments and Web based training packages are also covered in sufficient introductory detail, with some good examples of their use in teaching information skills for HE students and information services staff.
What the book concentrates on, and what will remain relevant for far longer, are the pedagogical approaches and models that can underpin uses of interactive network-based media and materials for learning.
Although this manages to cover quite a lot of the theory and jargon of pedagogy, it is written in an accessible style and includes a large number of ‘cookbook’ examples that could probably be re-used by other professionals and institutions.
Again, the focus is mainly on information-handling skills rather than other academic subject disciplines but that’s not a bad place to start, given the intended (and likely) readership of the book.
My biggest problem in reviewing this book was that I ended up reading it far more thoroughly avidly, even – than I’d expected to.
I don’t know if Barbara Allan has a ‘source’ inside the JISC, but her book is spot-on in anticipating their current 7⁄02 programme (integrating digital library resources with virtual learning environments, described at www.jisc.ac.uk/mle/divle/), and I will be recommending it as background reading to my own project team, and those I meet from the other nine projects funded by the programme in various HE and FE institutions around Britain.
The book has also drawn on plenty of topical information arising from recent JISC and RSLP research programmes, such as the INSPIRAL Project Report (inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/).
The summary of those sources will be useful for anyone approaching this convergence of specialisms from a pedagogical background.
For me (as a person who has been involved in the library and technology side of this game for a few years) it was a very well-structured introduction to many of the issues about learning and teaching strategies and models, that are on my own lifelong learning timetable for this year.
Author Details   John Paschoud InfoSystems Engineer and Projects Manager (currently managing the JISC-funded projects: ANGEL, DELIVER and SECURe) London School of Economics Library Email: j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk Article Title: “e-learning and teaching in library and information services” Author: John Paschoud Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/paschoud/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL: Brand new EEVL service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL: Brand new EEVL service Buzz software database portal archives cataloguing graphics ejournal url research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy Macleod introduces a new service.
EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Brand new EEVL service There is a brand new EEVL service at http://www.eevl.ac.uk As well as engineering, which has been covered since 1996, the new EEVL service also encompasses mathematics and computing.
New database software to power the extended service has been written by Geir Granum, the EEVL Technical Officer.
A brand new web site has been designed with several interesting features.
It works in a similar way to the old service, so regular users should find it easy to become familiar with the new service.
The new site is sponsored by Adept Scientific, who supply and support a range of software and hardware products for scientific, technical, mathematical and industrial applications on desktop computers.
The official title of EEVL for some time now has included the tag "the guide to engineering, mathematics and computing information on the Internet".
Now all three subjects are available from the EEVL web site.
The core of the new site is still the searchable and browseable Internet Resource Catalogue (IRC) which now contains over 7,000 records covering all subjects within engineering, mathematics and computing.
Thanks to AERADE, who provide IRC records in Aerospace and Defence, this section of Engineering is particularly well represented, but all the other subject sections are rapidly being populated.
Content for the Mathematics section is being managed by the University of Birmingham, whilst the University of Ulster is managing the content for the Computing section.
Enter a search statement in the search box on the home page and the results will be fairly familiar to those who used the old service except for two things: the Engineering Newsgroup Archive is no longer cross-searched; and the full text search engine, which is cross-searched, has been completely revamped.
Both changes should improve the service and make it more user friendly.
For some time we have been aware that the relevance of results from the newsgroup archive was sometimes low and did not justify being cross-searched from the main search box.
The newsgroup archive is still available separately elsewhere on the site.
The new search environment on the home page has been designed to make it look and feel like many of the newer commercial search services, with some options being presented via an index-card concept.
An important new option is available.
It is now possible to limit searches to only those records in the IRC deemed to be key resources by clicking on the 'Key Sites' tab.
From the new home page there are several links (from the three simple graphics representing gears, mathgate and a computer) to colour-coded subject sections for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is possible to limit searches to those subject sections, and also browse down through the subjects covered.
Also available from these sections are subject-specific services, such as the Engineering E-journal Engine, the Engineering Newsgroup Archive and Maths Secondary Homepages.
At present, there is only one full text search engine for all of EEVL.
This searches the full text of most of the sites included in the Internet Resource Catalogue.
However, we are hoping to develop additional subject-based search engines in the near future.
The Key Site filter option mentioned above came about because we were aware that not every user wants to search for all quality-assured resources in any given subject.
Doing so sometimes produces a quite lengthy list of results.
To limit the content of the EEVL IRC only to key sites, however, would make it too specialised to be useful for the average user because the database would be very small and highly selective.
The new service therefore caters both for those looking for numerous quality-assured resources, and also for those who are only interested in discovering the core sites on a topic.
Default searching of the new EEVL service combines both key and non-key resources, with key resources being ranked higher is result sets.
By 'Key Sites' we mean the most important resources, such as the large professional associations, important government departments, large databases, well-known ejournals, prominent research groups, large publishers, major recruitment services, substantial subject guides and directories, and so on.
Ranking of search results was mentioned above.
Ranking is regarded as important in order to ensure that the best resources appear high up in any list of results.
EEVL's ranking criteria takes into consideration the frequency and location of search terms, and whether a resource has been designated a Key Site.
EEVL is one of only a few gateways which rank results in this way..
The new EEVL site is more complex, has wider coverage, colour-coded subject sections, several new features, more options and additional services.
To assist users and information professionals a new reference guide is being prepared which explains the purpose of the service and how to make the most of it.
We hope that this will be helpful for user education sessions.
Over the last few weeks copies of a new EEVL flier were distributed to a number of libraries and academic departments.
Additional copies are available by contacting me at the address below.
As mentioned in previous issues of Ariadne, this is the start of a period of development for EEVL and the other RDN Hubs.
Bibliographic cross-searching projects have been funded under the DNER Programme, as well as a variety of subject-based community services.
Hopefully the new EEVL site can be expanded to include these features as they are rolled out without too much redesign.
I hope to report on some of these portal developments in the next issue of Ariadne.
Author Details   Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Article Title: "Brand new EEVL service" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/eevl/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL News: EEVL Update Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL News: EEVL Update Buzz database rss cataloguing ejournal Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod and Agnes Guyon look at some recent developments to the EEVL service.
New Sustainable Development section added to the EEVL Catalogue of Engineering Resources It is now tacitly recognised that engineers, across all sectors of engineering, play an important role in shaping our environment and therefore have a professional responsibility towards ensuring sustainable development.
Sustainable development, defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) as ‘Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ has been integrated in most engineering curricula throughout the nation.
The Engineering Council UK Output Standards for Accredited Engineering Programmes (April 2004) [1] stresses the need for engineering graduates to have an ‘understanding of the requirement for engineering activities to promote sustainable development’.
In recognition of this fact, EEVL has added a Sustainable Development section to its catalogue of engineering resources.
The section now lists over 100 sustainability resources.
Examples include Higher Education sites such as the Centre for Sustainable Development in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge [2], professional societies: IEE Networks for Engineers: Engineering for a Sustainable Future [3], journals: International Journal of Low Energy and Sustainable Buildings [4] and more.
The EEVL Sustainable Development section is available from the subject listing page [5].
New Improved OneStep Industry News and OneStep Jobs services Several improvements have been made to EEVL’s popular OneStep Industry News [6] and OneStep Jobs [7] services.
The OneStep services, first reported in Ariadne Issue 37 [8] aggregate RSS feeds, and allow users to find, in turn, the latest sector news in engineering, mathematics and computing, and the latest job announcements from top recruitment agencies in the same subjects.
A number of new sources have been added to each service.
OneStep Industry News now includes feeds from: scenta 9 impeller.net 10 robots.net [11] Yenra Auto News [12] Yenra 3G News [13] OECD Nuclear Energy Agency [14] EurekAlert!
[15] PC Magazine [16] ActiveState [17] New Scientist [18] World Wide Web Consortium [19] Web Services Network World [20] and Reuters Technology [21].
These join sources which have already proved popular, such as e4engineering.com [22] and Buildingtalk [23].
OneStep Industry News now includes 60 RSS feeds from top news sources, making it a very handy way to scan the very latest news from a number of sources in one place.
OneStep Jobs now includes feeds from: JimFinder [24] Materials Edge Recruitment [25] NES International [26] Constructor.co.uk [27] Matchtech [28] and The Career Engineer [29] as well as those sources which have already proved popular such as JobSite [30], The Engineer [31] and Jobs.ac.uk [32].
The latest feed to be added is from Jobs 4 Engineers [33].
OneStep Jobs now includes 25 top job announcement services, detailing several thousand of the very latest job vacancies in engineering, mathematics and computing.
As both of the OneStep services become more popular, more news publishers and recruitment agencies are being encouraged to produce RSS feeds for inclusion, so the lists above are not exhaustive, and we expect that more feeds will be added in the near future.
Some development work funded by JISC has enabled us to make several enhancements to both services.
Boolean and phrase searching is now possible, though it should be kept in mind that the databases behind the OneStep services are relatively small, so care should be taken when searching.
In addition, it is now possible to scan only breaking news and today’s jobs by selecting New in Last 24 Hours from the drop-down option on the service pages.
News and job announcement can also be restricted to the last 7 days, if desired.
New A3 size foot-shaped posters (shown below) promoting the two OneStep services will soon be distributed to university and college libraries and to a selection of academic departments.
To request a copy of the posters, please contact R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk giving your name and address.
Posters for OneStep Industry News and OneStep Jobs Forthcoming: New e-Journal Search Engines EEVL’s existing Engineering E-journal Search Engine [34] harvests the full text of over 70 freely available engineering e-journals.
Many of the journals indexed are trade journals such as CE News [35] and Electronic Products [36] which tend not to be indexed in traditional abstracting and indexing databases.
This may help to explain why this service is so popular, as it helps in the location of articles, product reviews and news reviews which are difficult to find from other sources.
In the near future, we are going to produce e-journal search engines for the other two subjects covered by EEVL: mathematics and computing, plus a fourth e-journal search engine covering all three subjects together.
We will also be completely revising the coverage of the engineering e-journal search engine, and adding a number of new journals to the index.
References UK-SPEC http://www.ukspec.org.uk/ The Department of Engineering Centre for Sustainable Development http://www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustdev/ Engineering for a Sustainable Future http://www.iee.org/OnComms/PN/sustainability/index.cfm The International Journal of Low Energy and Sustainable Buildings http://www.byv.kth.se/avd/byte/leas/ EEVL: Engineering http://www.eevl.ac.uk/engineering/index.htm OneStep Industry News http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepnews/ OneStep Jobs http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepjobs/ “RSS and EEVL: Syndicating industry news and job announcements”, Roddy MacLeod, October 2003, Ariadne Issue 37 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/eevl/ scenta http://www.scenta.co.uk/news/newsList.cfm impeller.net http://impeller.net/ robots.net http://robots.net/ Yenra Auto News http://www.yenra.com/autos/ Yenra 3G News http://www.yenra.com/3g/ The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) http://www.nea.fr/ EurekAlert!
http://www.eurekalert.org/ PC Magazine http://www.pcmag.com/ ActiveState http://www.activestate.com/ New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/ The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/ NetworkWorldFusion Web services http://www.nwfusion.com/topics/webservices.html Reuters http://www.reuters.com/ www.e4engineering.com http://www.e4engineering.com/ Buildingtalk http://www.buildingtalk.com/indexes/newsbymonth.html jimfinder http://www.jimfinder.com/ Materials Edge Recruitment http://www.materials-edge.net/html/index.php NES Group web portal http://www.nesgroup.com/nes/client/pub/home.do Constructor.co.uk http://www.constructor.co.uk/ Matchtech http://www.matchtech.com/ The Career Engineer http://www.thecareerengineer.com/ jobsite http://www.jobsite.co.uk/ The Engineer Jobs http://www.theengineerjobs.co.uk/ Jobs.ac.uk http://www.jobs.ac.uk/ www.4engineers.co.uk http://www.4engineers.co.uk/ The Engineering E-journal Search Engine (EESE) http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/index.html CE News http://www.cenews.com/ME2/Audiences/default.asp Electronicproducts.com http://www.electronicproducts.com/ Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot Watt University Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/libram/roddy.html Agnes Guyon EEVL Cataloguing Co-ordinator Heriot Watt University Email: A.Guyon@hw.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “EEVL News: EEVL Update” Author: Roddy MacLeod and Agnes Guyon Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Freedom of Information and the Historian Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Freedom of Information and the Historian Buzz archives foi foia research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Twigge reports on a one-day conference on Freedom of Information and the Historian jointly hosted by The National Archives and the Institute of Historical Research.
On 1 January 2005, the Freedom of Information Act will come fully into force.
With the implementation of the Act, all new and existing records, excluding those subject to exemption, will be available to the public, effectively ending the 30 year rule governing access to official documents.
The conference provided historians with the opportunity to learn more about the Freedom of Information Act and its potential impact on their work.
A primary aim of the conference was to provide a forum for historians to express their views about the process whereby records are released and learn more about the latest thinking within government departments.
The conference was opened by Sarah Tyacke, Chief Executive of The National Archives, who hoped that the day would generate useful discussion.
Presentations The first presentation was a keynote address delivered by Baroness Ashton of Upholland, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Constitutional Affairs.
In her presentation, the Minister stressed the importance she attached to the Freedom of Information Act and reaffirmed the government's determination that the public should reap the rewards of greater openness.
The positive role played by the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on National Records and Archives in balancing the need for openness with the need for confidentiality was commended by the Minister who announced that 70,000 new files, many of which were currently closed to the public, would be made available to researchers in January 2005.
The anticipated impact of Freedom of Information legislation on government departments formed the central core of presentations delivered by Gill Bennett of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Alex Ward of the Ministry of Defence.
In their presentations both speakers expressed the view that Freedom of Information was not so much a revolutionary as an evolutionary development in the sphere of public access to information.
All government departments currently operated under the 1992 Code of Access to Government Information which provided many researchers with a valuable route for getting hold of material older than 30 years old which had been retained or closed.
Both speakers believed that the significant change introduced by the Freedom of Information Act was the access provisions to material less than 30 years old.
It was stressed, however, that Freedom of Information did not imply free access to all government records.
Issues such as counter-terrorism, human rights and good governance required a climate of confidentiality in order to establish trust and ensure understanding.
The morning session was concluded by a round table discussion chaired by Chris Collins of the Thatcher Foundation.
The session was used to answer a variety of questions from the floor covering such issues as the role of the Information Commissioner, access to service records and concern that departments would destroy records early to avoid the need to release information.
This latter point was rejected by Gill Bennett who believed that in order to function effectively government departments required a full record of all its activities.
The concern was also expressed that departments would be so overwhelmed with Freedom of Information requests that the normal process of review would be adversely affected.
This eventuality was considered unlikely as departments would be able to redeploy staff more effectively.
The afternoon session was composed of two parallel workshops chaired by Professor Ian Nish on foreign and defence records and Professor Rodney Lowe on domestic records.
The workshops provided the opportunity for delegates to make specific requests concerning records of particular interest.
The issues covered included the process of submitting a request for information, future research trends and the application of the various exemptions.
Summing Up The conference was closed by Professor Richard Aldrich who summed up the day's events.
He expressed the view that to work effectively Freedom of Information would require a cultural change by both government departments and the academic community.
He also expressed the concern that unless historians became more engaged in the process, the profession would be placed at a disadvantage in relation to other pressure groups that were better organised and able to use the new legislation more effectively.
The delegates expressed the view that the conference had been a great success and that a follow-up seminar in January 2006, to discuss the impact of the Act during its first year, would be a welcome development.
Author Details Dr Stephen Twigge Head of Academic Services The National Archives Kew Richmond Surrey TW9 4DU United Kingdom Email: Stephen.twigge@nationalarchives.gov.uk Web site: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk Return to top Article Title: "Freedom of Information and the Historian" Author: Stephen Twigge Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/foi-historians-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Accidental Systems Librarian Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Accidental Systems Librarian Buzz data software digitisation copyright cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Eric Jukes takes a look at the strengths and weaknesses of another book in the 'Accidental' series.
Surprisingly, it appears to be a fact that many people involved in systems work in libraries have fallen into the position accidentally.
At least, this seems to be the case in America.
The author of The Accidental Systems Librarian believes that “anyone with a solid foundation in the practices and principles of librarianship and a willingness to confront changing technology can serve effectively in a library technology position” without any formal computer training.
I declare straight away that I am a sceptic!
The author says that some accidental systems librarians ended up that way by “assignment”, or due to “gradual assumption of systems duties”, or by luck.
Some just “felt compelled to take responsibility for computer systems and services because their library’s existing technological environment was in some way failing to serve the needs of staff and patrons.” The reader is informed that these facts came as a result of the responses of 114 systems librarians to a survey by the author, and the comments from the survey run throughout the book.
The book’s confident air is slightly worrying.
At least one cautionary tale would introduce a sobering note.
I am sure that at least one accidental systems librarian must have made the mistake that resulted in the library catalogue being wiped, or some other awful blunder!
But not one question gets anywhere near it in the “Accidental systems librarian survey”, the full version of which appears as an appendix.
Chapter 1 starts with an attempt to define systems librarianship.
The author observes that the task bears an unfortunate resemblance to trying to define what constitutes obscenity most people just “know it when they see it”!
And that, to some extent, is the problem of the book.
Most readers will come to the book with a pre-conceived model of a systems librarian.
If the book fits that model then the reader will probably like it.
I had a problem straight away as I expected to find a lot more than one and a half pages devoted to the Integrated Library System which seems to me to be a fundamental requirement for a systems librarian.
The management, migration of a system, associated vendor selection, data clean-up and staff training did, however, receive a comprehensive and helpful coverage in Chapter 8 under Administration and Management.
Chapter 2 provides a whistle-stop tour of “Technical areas you may need to master”, including Microsoft and Open Source software, Macintosh, and Web design, all covered far too briefly in my view.
Chapter 3 covers the Organisation of Knowledge including inventorying, licensing, support information, and documentation.
This is useful stuff, but then the book goes off into great detail on how to produce a Help Sheet for library users.
Considering the short shrift given to some areas, such as digitisation, a two and three quarter page example of a help sheet for “Pasting a Résumé into an Internet Form” seems over-extravagant.
Other chapters include Instruction Techniques (training), Independent Study, Research Techniques, and Networking (with people not computers.
Computer networking receives a much shorter coverage in another chapter).
Finally, for the accidental systems librarian who is really fired up, there is a chapter covering ‘Life Lessons’ which includes finding a job and negotiating a ‘raise’.
I have commented on the brevity of some subjects but the book does make up for this by listing ‘works cited’ at the end of each chapter, and includes a detailed appendix of recommended reading plus a large number of references to relevant Web sites.
There is also the now mandatory Web site for the book which may be accessed at http://www.lisjobs.com/tasl/.
The Web site includes the book’s Foreword and Introductory chapter.
Author Details Eric Jukes Senior Learning Resources Adviser Barnet College, Barnet, Herts.
Email: eric.jukes@barnet.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Book Review: The Accidental Systems Librarian” Author: Eric Jukes Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/jukes-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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WWW2002 Here Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines WWW2002 Here Buzz data rdf javascript html database wireless xml infrastructure archives xslt metadata blog sql copyright graphics pics adobe flash svg url Citation BibTex RIS Libby Miller sends notes from the WW2002 conference in Hawaii.
WWW2002 [1] was the 11th annual World Wide Web Conference, held this year in Tourist Hell (Waikiki), Hawaii.
WWW2002 ran over three days, with 10 refereed tracks including one on the Semantic Web, and six ‘alternate’ tracks.
All the papers from the conference are available online in html [2].
You might also like to look at the RDF Interest group chatlogs and blog pages for the days covering the conference [3] and I also have some photos [4] as does Dave Beckett [5].
I’m a Semantic Web researcher at ILRT, with particular interests in RDF query languages and calendaring.
I’m currently employed on the just-started SWAD-Europe project [14], an EC-funded project which extends W3C’s Semantic Web Advanced Development [swad] in Europe.
I therefore chose a certain subset of the parallel talks to do with the Semantic Web, although the conference convered a wide range of topics for example education, web engineering, wireless, e-commerce.
Here’s a quick run through of the parts of the conference I attended.
Wednesday The first day I attended was Wednesday 8th.
I went to the plenary session [6].
Tim Berners-Lee did a nice speech explaining the importance of patent-free infrastructure for the web [7], [edd].
Then in the Semantic Web Service track I went to a talk about extending XQuery for implementing web services [8], which seemed to be an entire programming language.
In the afternoon there was a W3C track on the Semantic Web, which basically meant reports back from the working group chairs of RDFCore and Webont (respectively Brian McBride and Jim Hendler), plus some information about W3C SWAD activity, and so SWAD-Europe, by Ralph Swick [9].
There was also a nice demo of R.V.Guha’s TAP system [10] which illustrates cross searching of google and W3C-specific data sources, such as people, working group documents (example [11]).
After that was a poster session, and after that, a birds of a feather meeting about Semantic Web tools, chaired by the chair of RDFCore, Brian McBride of HP Labs Bristol.
It was very interesting to listen to the Semantic Web interests of the 30-odd people who were there.
Thursday Thursday I went to the Global Community track to see Charles McCathieNevile of W3C present a paper which described among other things the principles behind the design of SWAD-Europe [12].
Charles did a great job, despite being drowned out by the presentation next door, and there was lots of interest in the paper.
Thursday afternoon I started in the Semantic Web panel, which seemed rather mired in business-related aspects of the Semantic Web, rather than the interesting-to-me technical aspects.
Then I got tipped off on IRC that Dean Jackson was presenting a very interesting series of SVG demos.
Dean’s demos aren’t all available yet [dean], but he helped me hack a version of one of them for the codepiction database [13] which gives you a flavour of the quality of them (although my version is much uglier).
Another demo was Max Froumentin’s XSLT/SVG Chess demo [14] which is amazing.
Dean’s session was part of ‘cool web’ session, and was very well received.
I was thinking ‘I’m in the wrong business’.
Friday Friday, the main session for me was query langauges for the Semantic Web.
RQL had a paper [15]; there was also an interesting talk on a peer to peer system for Education resources (Edutella), which had several levels of query langauges [16].
Finally there was one about mapping part of XSLT to SQL, which was interesting because it was by very clever database people and because ideas in it might be stealable for RDF (because it uses unordered, graph structure to represent the query) [17].
Later I went to see my colleague Dave Beckett give his talk [18] on WSE scalable RDF searching.
It was very well-received.
Saturday Saturday was Developer Day [19].
There was a session on the Semantic Web, with lots of demos, including a talk from a Rob Corell from Adobe, on their implementation of a subset of RDF, called XMP [20]; a talk by Emmanuel Pietriga [21] about his vizualisation system for RDF data, IsaViz; Mike Dean [22], excellent as ever, creating tons of data for Semantic Web using screen scraping techniques.
I demoed RDFAuthor [23] on behalf of Damian Steer (RDFAuthor is being used for a front end to the MEG [meg] project, collaborating with UKoln and working with Dave Beckett of ILRT), I also showed the codepiction [24] work I’ve been doing with Dan Brickley and Damian.
There were 200+ people in a huge room.
In the afternoon I was working on some slides for a presentation in Luxembourg, so missed demos on Haystack and Annotea, the W3C’s annotations system.
There is plenty on IRC about them though [25].
People were very impressed with Haystack, though it’s not available yet, and will cost money.
I got back in just in time to see another demo of the codepiction work, and also the IRC ‘chump bot’ [26](a blogger that writes URLs from IRC to a webpage and enbles you to annotate them) on screen.
Impressions There was a great deal of interest in the Semantic Web, especially on Developers’ Day.
But it was Dean Jackson’s SVG demos that drew audible ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the crowd.
SVG is a vector graphics format for the web described in XML.
This means that it is extremely flexible and accessible.
If you use it with Javascript, for example, you can create amazing flash-like interactive graphics which are also standards compliant.
A nice aspect of the conference was the wireless network throughout the buildings.
With an 80 dollar 802.11 wireless card you had a fast connection to the internet thoughout the conference.
This is becoming increasingly common at conferences I’ve been going to in the past year, and leads to all sorts of unusual things happening.
Maybe the most fun example is the use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to recommend good presentations, report back about what was going on in different sessions, and for rude backchat about the speakers.
The RDF Interest group has an IRC channel which also serves as a place for people to recommend and annotate webpages [26].
During the conference it was also used to describe the speeches that were going on and to recommend related links.
Other cool uses of the network included people creating immediate Weblogs about the conference as it was happening [blogs] and also uploading their pictures [4], [5], [pics].
References WWW2002 web site: http://www2002.org WWW2002 programme and links to papers http://www2002.org/program.html The RDF Interest Group Weblog (‘chump’)’s main page is here: http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/ .
The pages for the dates of the conference are: http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2002/05/08/2002-05-08.html to http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2002/05/12/2002-05-12.html Libby’s photos from the conference are here: http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/photos/2002/05/05/ http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/photos/2002/05/12/ Dave Beckett’s photos from the conference are here: http://photos.dajobe.org/gallery/www2002-hawaii WWW2002 plenary session talks are linked from http://www2002.org/plenary.html Tim Berners-Lee’s plenary talk is here: http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/www2002-tbl/ XL: An XML Programming Language for Web Service Specification and Composition: http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/481/ Semantic Web Advanced Development by Ralph R. Swick & Dan Brickley http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/0508-swad/ The TAP website is here: http://tap.stanford.edu/ A TAP example search for Eric Miller for the W3C http://tap.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/w3csearch.pl?q=eric+miller&sitesearch=w3.org&domains=w3.org The Role of Community in Technical Development: http://www2002.org/CDROM/alternate/725/ A demo showing the use of SVG for an image database Dean Jackson/Libby Miller http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/people/libby/rdfweb/paths/6degcodepict.svg Max Froumentin’s SVG XSLT ChessGML demo http://people.w3.org/maxf/ChessGML/ RQL: A Declarative Query Language for RDF http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/329/ EDUTELLA: A P2P Networking Infrastructure Based on RDF http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/597/ Translating XSLT Programs to Efficient SQL Queries http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/226/ Web Crawling High-Quality Metadata using RDF and Dublin Core http://www2002.org/CDROM/alternate/747/ WWW2002 Developers Day http://www2002.org/devday.html Adobe’s XMP http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html IsaViz http://www.w3.org/2001/11/IsaViz/ Work by Mike Dean: http://www.daml.org/people/mdean/ Damian Steer’s RDFAuthor http://rdfweb.org/people/damian/RDFAuthor/ Codepiction ‘paths’ demonstrator http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2002/02/paths/ RDF interest Group IRC chatlogs from Developers’ Day http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2002/05/12/2002-05-12.html and http://ilrt.org/discovery/chatlogs/rdfig/2002-05-12.html The RDF Interest Group blogger page (‘chump’) http://rdfig.xmlhack.com Dean Jackson’s SVG presentation [dean] http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/www2002-SVG/ [meg] The MEG registry http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/registry/intro.html [swad] W3C’s Semantic Web advanced Deveopment: http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/ [blogs] Weblogs from WWW2002 http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2002/05/09/2002-05-09.html#1020972761.905195 [pics] images from WWW2002 http://www2002.org/gallery/ [edd] Notes from WWW2002: http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1390 Author Details   Libby Miller Technical Researcher ILRT University of Bristol Email: libby.miller@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://ilrt.org/discovery/ WWW2002: “WWW2002 here” Author: Libby Miller Publication Date: Publication: Ariadne Issue 32 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/www2002/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digitizing Intellectual Property: The Oxford Scoping Study Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digitizing Intellectual Property: The Oxford Scoping Study Buzz data software dissemination infrastructure archives metadata digitisation copyright preservation cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Lee discusses the Mellon Digitization Scoping Study for Oxford University.
In 1998 the University of Oxford initiated a nine-month study into its digitization activities: past, present, and future.
The 'Scoping Study' as it has now become known, was funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and completed its findings in July 1999.
This paper briefly outlines the reasons behind the study, its methodology and how this might be applied to other institutions, the main results, and the planned next stages.
Reasons for the Study The University of Oxford, like many other institutions, has been involved in digitization projects throughout the 1990s.
In some cases this has been as a result of successful bids under national initiatives, in others responding to offers from external sponsorship.
Similarly, like many institutions, at the beginning of the decade the projects undertaken were having to design systems and guidelines from scratch; the relatively new nature of the subject meant that there was very little experience to build on.
As activity (and funding) in digitization is showing no signs of easing off, the University felt it was time to draw together its experiences to see what could be learnt from all the projects (internal and external) and how this could be taken forward at an institutional level.
This desire was coupled with the recognition that the library system at Oxford was currently undergoing a major process of integration since the appointment of Reg Carr to the post of Director of University Library Services.
As at other institutions many of the initiatives undertaken by Oxford have worked in isolation of each other, often repeating the same mistakes, or discovering similar solutions.
The attraction of bringing these projects together in terms of efficiency gains is obvious.
Furthermore, as the digitization of a critical mass of resources has been overtly identified as one of the library system's principal strategic objectives the need to find a way forward was pressing.
Methodology Oxford received funding from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to cover a nine-month study [1].
Most importantly, reflecting Mellon's remit, this meant that wherever possible the general conclusions and deliverables of the study should be produced in such a form as to be of help to other institutions.
The aims of the study were: * to document, analyse, and evaluate Oxford's current digitization activities, as a basis for assessing the effectiveness of the various methodologies used; * to investigate the possibilities for building on the existing project-based work and for migrating it into viable services for library users; * to develop appropriate selection criteria for creating digital collections in the context of local, national, and international scholarly requirements for digital library products and services; *to make recommendations for further investment and activity within the Oxford libraries sector, and potentially within the UK research libraries community.
To achieve the above the study outlined a work-plan of deliverables.
To begin with key areas of investigation were identified (selection criteria, digitization methods, metadata, and copyright).
In turn, research was undertaken into these looking at initiatives and projects worldwide to try to get an up-to-date picture of recent developments.
All of these were written up as reports and are available on the we site as appendices.
Furthermore, as we were aiming to indicate potential future investment levels, external consultancy was bought in from HEDS the UK's Higher Education Digitization Service) who were charged with developing both a business plan and model to take this forward.
Immediately, this brought into focus the question of what exactly was needed in terms of services?
A model cannot be constructed without a plan, and a plan depends on clear objectives.
In a sense, part of the service envisaged had already been identified.
It was agreed that at Oxford one of the most urgent needs was to introduce an on-demand digitization service for users.
This was termed 'reactive' digitization, i.e.
responding to reader requests for digital images of items in the library sector.
The next logical step was to expand this to a more proactive service which could cope with project level demand, but more importantly to target collections for conversion.
Therefore, workflows for both services were drawn up and presented to HEDS (these are available also in the appendices of the report).
HEDS were then asked to plan and model, in isolation, the conversion facility that could cope with this level of demand.
Simply put, they were asked to cost the level of hardware, software, staffing, and finance, that would be needed to establish a unit that could convert all these requests into the required digital objects (based on an estimated figure of 500,000 images per annum).
The plan presented in Appendix A of the report then does this and no more.
It was always recognised that such a unit could not exist in reality without other services, i.e.
it was only part of a much larger picture (see below).
Finally, and in a sense the most important activity, was to ascertain the level of digitization activity in Oxford past, present, and the potential level in the future.
There were two stages to this activity.
First, a questionnaire was circulated to get an accurate list of all the projects that had been undertaken, but also to ask librarians and curators what collections they could identify as possible candidates for digitization.
Second, the author interviewed everyone who had replied and performed a basic analysis of their project or the items offered as candidates for conversion (the interview sheets and questionnaires are available as Appendix C on the study web site).
Results of the Interviews The most apparent conclusion from the interviews was that Oxford could clearly demonstrate a proven track record in digitization (over 11 major projects attracting in excess of £2.2 million in external grants), and a great deal of expertise in all aspects of digital activity, both project-based and service-based.
Many digital resources had been created within the University, and access to them was managed by a range of systems and services.
There was significant collaboration in place between libraries, services, and individuals, and a considerable infrastructure of support services to help advance the University's activities in the digitization arena.
More importantly, there was a good groundbase of knowledge about the possibilities and potential for digitization, though many still saw its main content focus as being on rare and unique items.
However, more specifically, certain topics continually arose as areas of concern or further investigating.
In short, these were: Access v Preservation: most of the people interviewed saw the main advantage of digitization being the potential for increasing and widening access to items.
However there was considerable suspicion about the digital object acting as a preservation copy (in comparison with the known medium of microform), although its potential to reduce handling of the original was noted.
Accurate Knowledge of Collections: in many cases accurate cataloguing of collections was often notable by its absence, especially to the level of the individual item.
This made assessing large collections extremely difficult.
Central Advisory Service: as well as the need for an on-demand digitization service (noted above and confirmed during the interviewing stages) there was a repeated request for some form of central service that could provide information and advice about digitization.
When it came to looking at the collections offered for digitization some new work had to be performed.
The study had been charged with developing selection and assessment criteria for judging whether an item or items were suitable for digitizing, and to rank these in terms of importance.
To do this it had to draft new guidelines, going far beyond any existing decision matrices.
The main decision matrix in Appendix B, which was designed during the study, satisfies this.
In addition it could be used by any institution to assess a collection proposed for conversion.
After some initial questions on available surrogates and copyright, the matrix proposes a series of categories under which the item can be assessed in terms of it in creasing 'access', matching 'preservation' needs, and fulfilling the 'infrastructure' goals.
Once these have been addressed it then presents a separate matrix assessing the possible digitization method one could employ (e.g.
in-house v out-source), and then returns to check the 'feasibility' of the project.
In the initial trawl of potential collections 93 were identified (a 'collection' here could mean a single item, e.g.
a manuscript, or an entire archive).
These were visited and studied to produce some form of initial assessment of the material.
Four representative collections were subjected to a more considered analysis by Simon Tanner of HEDS, to produce more accurate ideas on costing and methods of conversion (see Appendix J).
The main list of collections is presented in Appendix D of the report as a prioritized list; however, due to the security risk this list has not been made publicly available.
In short, though, each collection was briefly discussed identifying potential problems (e.g.
copyright, lack of cataloguing, etc.)
and some recommendations on how they could proceed (if at all).
Collaborative projects of collections containing similar content were suggested, but more importantly each was subjected to the assessment matrix described above and ranked (Low, Medium, and High) in terms of their access, preservation, and infrastructure priorities.
Most importantly, Oxford now has a starting list of prioritized collections that have undergone an initial assessment, ready to respond to new national funding initiatives.
The University can also demonstrate that it has thoroughly investigated and evaluated its current practices.
The Way Forward Having assembled all this data the next stage was to sketch out a development plan that addressed the identified objectives of: * migrating projects into services * reactive and proactive digitization As already noted with the limitations of Appendix A, it was clear that any service or services offered had to cover all aspects of the digital library, e.g.
management, administration, conversion, data management, and so on.
At the same time, it was unrealistic to assume that this would be green-field development and any system proposed would collaborate with existing units and services on offer at Oxford (in keeping with the present climate of library integration at the University).
The model proposed then was the Oxford Digital Library Services (ODLS).
This would act as a central point of advice, consultancy, and dissemination of good practice in matters related to digitization.
It would cope with both reactive and proactive digitization, with the overall aim being to deliver a critical mass of digital materials to support teaching and research.
Its remit was defined as '... to expand access to Oxford's own collections through digitization, including the creation of new materials in response to reader requests, a proactive targeting of collections, and the provision of an interface with collections already digitized.'
More importantly it should ' be able to convert analogue material to digital form (or commission external vendors and agencies to do so), and administer, manage, catalogue, and market a fully functional digital library.'
Quite clearly, however, these short recommendations contain much that needs to be discussed further, as the implications for funding (at the very least) are considerable.
Furthermore, one of the criticisms of the study (and it is recognised as a fair observation) was that it was library-centred, and that the users of the proposed service were not truly identified or consulted.
Therefore, Oxford's approach to the next stage has been to establish a development team.
Partly charged with filling in the gaps left by the initial study, this will establish working groups to formalise approaches to such things as user needs, metadata, architecture, collection development, and delivery systems.
It will then map out a more detailed plan encompassing the other services needed for the ODLS to succeed, and show how this would fit into current structures.
At present the team has begun its work and is aiming to produce its final conclusions by July 2000.
References [1] In terms of staffing there was one FTE (the author), seconded from his current post at the Centre for Humanities Computing in Oxford.
Furthermore a steering group was established consisting of: John Tuck (Chair), Deputy to the Director of University Library Services; David Cooper, Manager of the Celtic and Medieval Manuscripts project; Marilyn Deegan, Manager of the Refugee Studies Programme digital library; and Peter Leggate, Keeper of Scientific Books at the Radcliffe Science Library, and joint-manager of the Internet Library of Early Journals project.
All members of the group met at regular intervals to discuss the study and guide its progress.
Most importantly, every member of the group and the Director of University Library Services offered numerous contributions and took part in the editing of the final report.
[The report is available at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/scoping/]   Stuart Lee Head of the Centre for Humanities Computing, University of Oxford Stuart.Lee@oucs.ox.ac.uk http://users.ox.ac.uk/~stuart/ Article Title: "Digitizing Intellectual Property: the Oxford Scoping Study" Author: Stuart Lee Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/oxford-mellon/intro.html   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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In Vision: The Internet As a Resource for Visually Impaired People Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines In Vision: The Internet As a Resource for Visually Impaired People Buzz data software java html database portal archives metadata accessibility browser repositories copyright video cataloguing graphics opac multimedia linux ascii perl ocr cd-rom ict url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman on the Internet as a resource for visually impaired people: a survey of accessible sites, resources, current research and software.
Introduction Until recently, visually impaired people (VIP) were poorly served by the library and information provision that is routinely available to sighted people.
They have relied to a great extent on specialist voluntary organisations transcribing a limited range of materials into accessible formats.
This situation is changing with advances in technology and recent initiatives on social inclusion.
Increasingly visually impaired people will be able to locate and use information independently, as sighted people already do.
The Internet allows visually impaired people to access the same resources as sighted people, using access technology, although features such as graphics can prove a problem.
Library OPACs allow users to locate resources in suitable accessible formats.
New formats are extending the traditional range of tactile, audio cassette and large print into CD-Rom and etexts.
These technical advances are supported by a range of initiatives co-ordinated by the Library and Information Commission and Share the Vision.
This programme covers a national inter lending system, the development of a national database of resources in accessible formats, extending access to library ICT, extending the range of titles transcribed into accessible formats and a best practice manual for libraries.
Accessible Web Sites The development of the Internet and web-sites has produced a valuable new resource for people with visual impairment that they can access independently.
Access is facilitated by access or assistive technology, which ranges from screen magnification, through customisation of screen display by alteration of font size and background/text colours, and screen reader software combined with speech synthesiser output, to temporary braille display or permanent braille output.
In the early days, web pages were simple in design because of the limits of the available technology, and were suited to access technology.
Many new features are now possible in web page design e.g.
banners, graphics, patterned backgrounds but these can end up limiting access again for visually impaired people.
Ensuring accessibility need not mean avoiding such features but should include relevant solutions: e.g.
if you use graphics ensure that there is an attached text description.
The following sites provide standards and guidance.
As part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) <http://www/w3/org/WAI> works to ensure that web technologies support accessibility.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ > were issued in May 1999 and explain how to make web content accessible.
While the primary goal is to promote accessibility to people with disabilities, following the guidelines will also make web content more available to all users.
Instead of discouraging the use of images, videos, etc., they explain how to make multimedia content more accessible.
Have a look also at Paul Booth’s article on the guidelines in Ariadne issue 21.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/disinhe/> and an article by Helen Brazier and Simon Jennings on accessible web design in Library Technology <http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/lt/1999/news1330.html> [1] The IBM web site has a section on Special Needs Systems (SNS) <http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/> and these pages also contain guidelines on accessibility.
The SNS pages cover software, the web, Java, Lotus Notes and hardware, and each section has an accessibility checklist.
The pages also have information on some special needs products.
In addition to the guidelines, tools are being developed to audit the accessibility of a site.
Bobby is a web-based tool that analyses web pages for their accessibility.
It was developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) and is offered as a free service.
A visit to the Bobby site <http://www.cast.org/bobby/> allows you submit the URL of a web page and receive a report indicating any problems.
Sites receiving a Bobby Approved rating can display a Bobby Approved icon.
The Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) is another source of information on web-site design <http://www.rnib.org.uk/access/> and <http://www.rnib.org.uk/digital/>.
In collaboration with the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), the RNIB have a video ‘Websites that Work’ (for further details on both the course and the video contact Julie Howell at jhowell@rnib.org.u k).
RNIB also offer to audit your web-site, advise you of problems and solutions.
Web pages that divide text into columns may cause problems for screen readers, resulting in garbled text.
The BBC Education Text to Speech Internet Enhancer (Betsie) is a filter program, using a simple PERL script, developed and used by the BBC to create an automatic text-only version of its website.
Instead of telling your browser to get a web page directly, you tell it to ask Betsie for the page.
Betsie finds the page, then removes images and unnecessary formatting and sends you the text content at the top and the links on the navigation bar at the bottom.
As well as five BBC Betsie -enhanced sites, the Betsie home page <http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/betsie> provides links to a number of other sites which now have Betsie-enhanced access including Cyber Kitchen, Manchester Metropolitan University, Suffolk County Council, Portuguese Newspapers and the Department of Trade and Industry.
So what does a well designed accessible site look like?
One thing they don’t need to do is look identical or unprofessional.
Have a look round at some sites.
The National Library for the Blind (NLB) web-site <http://www.nlbuk.org/> is an example of a site that has been designed for people who use speech synthesis software, screen magnification and soft Braille displays.
As part of the site it includes a page detailing guidelines for accessible pages <http://www.nlbuk.org/access/nlbguidelines.html>.
In 1999 NLB was one of three winners (from 1,400 entrants) in the Ericsson Internet Community Award for the innovative use of new technology by not-for-profit organisations around the world.
The award will support further development of NLB web site.
For other examples of good design, the RNIB web site <http://www.rnib.org.uk/access/> offers a page of links to accessible web-sites such as the Inland Revenue, BBC Online, Community Justice National Training Organization and Hampshire County Council.
Resources on the Internet In the past visually impaired people have had to rely on tactile or audio or enlarged print transcripts of information originally produced in standard print.
A very limited range of materials is available in this way and finding specific information still often means finding it in standard print and then arranging to have it transcribed.
The Internet provides an information resource that visually impaired people can access independently.
While they may be interested in any site that a sighted person would use, there are three areas that contain particularly relevant resources.
Resources on VIP issues People with visual impairment, their families and those who support them may wish to locate information and contacts about specific conditions, about support groups and networks, and about services that are available to them.
The following sites provide a starting point.
The RNIB web site has a number of relevant pages.
Understanding Your Eye Condition <http://www.rnib.org.uk/infor/eyeimpoi/> takes you to pages on specific eye conditions.
Living with Sight Loss <http://www.rnib.org.uk/sightlos/> is an introduction into services, publications and products for those with visual impairment and details of how to register as blind or partially sighted.
Agencies for Blind and Partially Sighted People <http://www.rnib.org.uk/Agencies/Agencies.htm> links to a database of organisations of and for blind and partially sighted people world-wide.
Searches can be made on the full database or on UK agencies only.
Community Care Network (CCN) is one of three subject groups in the Library Association Health Libraries Group.
It aims to bring together all those providing information and library services to people with disabilities, those who are housebound or in residential care, carers and people in hospital.
Contact details can be found on the homepage.
<http://www.la-hq.org.uk/directory/about/> The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) includes a Section for Libraries for the Blind.
This section focuses on library services for the blind and other print handicapped readers.
The section home page <http://www.ifla.org/VII/s31/> contains contact details and links to its twice yearly newsletter in electronic form.
The V.I.
Guide <http://www.viguide.com/> is a site developed and maintained by the parent of a visually impaired child.
It is a guide to Internet resources about visual impairments, for parents and teachers.
As the family lives in the United States there is a US bias to some of the resources.
This also provides a link to the Blind Ring, which is designed to join together home pages and web-sites that are either run by visually impaired individuals or are for visually impaired people.
Another US site shows how the state of Ohio supports young people with visual impairment.
ORCLISH <http://schoolimprovement.ode.ohio.gov/orclish/> is the website of the Ohio Department of Education project serving the parents and teachers of students with low incidence and severe disability in the state of Ohio, USA.
The site contains sections on assistive technology, disability related resources and visual impairment resources.
The Macula Lutea site <http://home.swipnet.se/macula-lutea/> is an information resource on vision and vision impairment.
It contains a Calendar which lists conferences worldwide in a wide range of visual impairment related fields the listing currently includes entries for medical, rehabilitation, accessible format producers, and teaching conferences.
There is a large section of links to other sites (listing 994 links in April 2000), again relating to the whole range of visual impairment related fields.
The links can be viewed either by site name alphabetical listing or by country and there is a separate listing of new links added in the last 3 months.
Each entry contains brief details about the site.
Going further afield, the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped <http://www.savh.org.sg/> web site includes pages of links to Organisations of and for the Blind, related home pages, and speech friendly search engines; it is also a Blind Ring member.
Libraries and Library Catalogues Did you know that only a small proportion of standard print titles (between three and five per cent of the hundred thousand new British titles published each year) are transcribed into an accessible format?
And did you know that there are more than 230 organisations producing and supplying accessible format materials in the UK?
Put these two facts together and you can why users of these materials (or library and information staff on their behalf) might spend a great deal of time establishing whether a version they can access is available somewhere.
It is important to know who holds collections of these materials and which formats they hold.
It is equally important to know what titles are in each collection.
Catalogues for a few of these collections are now available over the Internet and can be consulted at a distance.
Borrowing from these collections is subject to the policies of the holding institutions and inter-library lending arrangements.
With so many organisations supplying accessible formats in the UK, there is a need for a union catalogue of these materials.
At present the National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats (NUCAF) has this role but it is not comprehensive in coverage, nor is it is not accessible on the Internet.
Currently it is not directly accessible outside the RNIB where it is maintained, although it has recently been loaded on the Unity and V3.Online inter-lending databases, and will therefore be available to interlending department staff.
This situation is set to change.
A recent review [2] <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/sharethevision/> made a recommendation (accepted by the Library and Information Commission and Share the Vision) that a new web-based database should replace this.
The new database, to be known as Reveal, is in the early stages of development at present.
The National Library for the Blind (NLB) is the largest lending library for people who read by touch.
The majority of its collection is in Braille and Moon, including braille music scores.
It also has a collection of several hundred large print titles.
The library catalogue can be downloaded from the web-site <http://www.nlbuk.org/> as a set of ASCII files and should be available this year as a web OPAC.
Visitors to the site can also try out the Fiction Café, an initiative for young readers where they can browse before choosing a title, and then request the item online.
The RNIB web site has a page on library and information services for people with impaired vision <http://www.rnib.org.uk/wesupply/fctsheet/>.
This includes a select list of organisations or agencies which provide library and information services on a national or international basis.
For each listed organisation, there are contact details and a brief description of its collection and services.
A number of web-based catalogues are already in existence overseas, and the RNIB and the NLB have some borrowing arrangements in place.
The NLB have partnership agreements with the Canadian Institute for the Blind, Library of Congress Braille Music, and other international libraries, and the RNIB are the Library of Congress agents in the UK.
The Canadian National Institute for the Blind maintains a range of services including a library <http://www.cnib.ca/library/> of over 45,000 titles in braille, audio, electronic text and descriptive video.
The catalogue <http://www.cnib.ca/library/visunet> is available online.
The National Library Service for Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) in the United States is maintained by the Library of Congress.
The Union Catalogue (BPHP) and the file of In-Process Publications (BPHI equivalent to cataloguing in publication) can both be searched via the web site.
<http://lcweb.loc/gov/nls/> The Union Catalogue is bannered as the NLS catalogue but also includes details of the holdings of the RNIB and the accessible format collections of Ireland, Canada and New Zealand and now has bibliographic records for more than 340,000 items.
The RNIB file includes braille books, music scores, and two and four track audio cassette tapes but does not include the six track Talking Books for technical and copyright reasons.
The American Printing House for the Blind hosts the Louis Database of accessible materials for people who are blind or visually impaired.
This contains more than 145,000 titles in braille, large print, audio and electronic files from over 200 agencies in the US.
To get to the database click on the Louis icon below the Search Our Site heading near the bottom of the home page.
<http://www.aph.org/> And in Europe, Talboks-och Punktskriftbiblioteket is the library for audio books (Talboks) and tactile media (Punktskrift) in Sweden.
The web-site <http://www.tpd.se/> has a number of sections, with Handikat being the catalogue itself.
Easy to move round the site even if you don’t read Swedish.
The International Directory of Libraries for the Blind (4ed.)
is available in electronic form as a searchable database <http://dserver.dinf.ne.jp:591/>.
It lists libraries for visually impaired people world-wide, giving contact details, and information about holdings in various formats, acquisitions rates and loan policies.
Electronic Texts Electronic texts (sometimes referred to as etexts) provide a new form of access for visually impaired people.
These texts can be downloaded as a file onto a PC, enabling the user to choose their preferred method of access technology screen magnification, speech synthesis or temporary Braille display for output.
At present there are few sites offering such texts; while it is likely that the future will see more of these sites, it is difficult to predict the rate of expansion.
A specific problem for such sites relates to copyright law, since material that has already been published and is still within copyright can only be made available subject to gaining the relevant copyright permissions.
Online Originals <http://www.onlineoriginals.com> is a publishing company that operates solely through the Internet.
It publishes book length works that have not been previously published in either printed or digital form.
Works include both fiction and non-fiction, with a focus on new, unusual, multi-disciplinary and innovative writing.
At present most of the texts are in English, with a few in French.
Each month, a specific title is available free, other titles cost around £4.
There is a special arrangement with the NLB, whereby selected titles that have been formatted for speech synthesis and refreshable Braille are available free via the NLB web-site Project Gutenberg <http://promo.net/pg/> is an archive of free electronic texts of works in the public domain.
From the beginning the intention has always been to make the texts available in the simplest, easiest to use forms; thus ‘plain vanilla ASCII’ is used on the basis that 99% of the hardware and software that people are likely to use can read and search these files.
Likewise, the texts are selected on the basis that they are likely to be of interest to 99% of the general population.
The archive covers three areas: light literature (e.g.
Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Aesop’s Fables), heavy literature (e.g the Bible, Shakespeare, Zola, Spinoza) and reference (e.g Roget’s Thesuarus).
The above two sites cover only monograph material.
For newspapers and magazines, the Talking Newspaper Association of the UK (TNAUK) links around 530 Talking Newspapers in the UK.
Through TNAUK, over 50 newspapers and magazines are available as electronic texts; they are distributed on IBM compatible computer disks, by email or retrieved from a bulletin board service.
More details can be found in an article on TNAUK featured in Ariadne issue 10 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/tnauk/> The Ezio Galiano Foundation is an Italian web-site <http://www.galiano.it/> with both Italian and English pages.
The site provides free access to around 2,500 literary works in Italian (ranging from classics to leisure fiction) and to a selection of Italian daily newspapers and popular magazines.
New initiatives are extending the options for visually impaired people.
The NLB now offers NLB members free access to an online reference resource, KnowUK, via the NLB web site.
KnowUK <http://www.knowuk.co.uk/>, published by Chadwyck-Healey, is a collection of over 65 of the most heavily used reference sources in British Libraries (e.g.
the Hutchinson Encyclopedia, Hansard, Who’s Who, and the Municipal Yearbook) through a single interface.
Resources cover a wide range of subjects, including biography, community information, education, government, health, law, religion, and KnowUK also contains information on national events, travel and leisure.
Research and Projects In the past few years a number of research projects have been carried out both in the UK and overseas.
Some projects focus on developing technology, some on the provision of new equipment and services, and others on integration with existing provision for sighted people.
A two-year European Union project, Testing Electronic Systems using Telematics for Library Access for the Blind (TESTLAB) combined a number of nationally based projects and was completed at the end of September 1998.
In Ireland, libraries installed workstations providing a selection of access methods and the National Council for the Blind of Ireland created a new accessible catalogue of their holdings.
The UK project enabled NUCAF to be integrated into the Unity regional inter-lending catalogue and carried out a pilot project for inter-lending accessible format materials.
In Italy participant libraries put in additional workstations but the major focus was on social aspects and mobility issues.
In Austria academic libraries installed workstations and created a network of libraries, developed catalogue access systems and linked these to information from other German speaking parts of Europe and the project influenced decisions on changes to national cataloguing.
In Greece, the project reviewed provision of services in areas where currently nothing exists.
The Dutch libraries coordinated the project and developed the interfaces.
TESTLAB2 is a continuation of the project and involves the European Union and East European countries.
Information about TESTLAB and reports on the individual projects can be found on project web-site <http://www.svb.nl/project/testlab/>.
In 1988, the Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille (TPB) recognised that the current technology for audio books was inadequate for the advanced audio book reader.
In 1991, TPB was awarded a government grant to develop a new technique that could: (a) store more than 20 hours of continuous speech on a single CD-Rom disc and (b) give the reader random access to the audio book from the table of contents.
TPB commissioned Labyrinten Data AB to develop software based on the Digital Audio-based Information System (DAISY) concept of phase based storage.
Additional requirements of the system were that it should be able to: * skim the text, phrase by phrase or section by section, where section is a collection of phrases * search for different parts of the text based table of contents * search for specific pages in the talking book * place and search for bookmarks in the book * and in a future version, make underlining and notes in the audio book.
The first prototype was demonstrated in 1994 and gained international attention, as around the world there was a growing interest in a new common format for all audio books.
In 1996 the DAISY Consortium <http://www.daisy.org/> was formed as an international organisation, with RNIB one of the founder members.
The objective of the DAISY Consortium is to establish an international standard for the production, exchange and use of the next generation of audio books.
The development of the format is carried out by the DAISY Foundation (based in Amsterdam).
In 1997 it was decided to change the file format to the de facto industry standard and so compatible with the HTML format.
For more details see the IFLA Section for Libraries for the Blind Newsletter Fall 1996.
<http://www.ifla.org/VII/s31/nws1/fall96.htm> The Resources for Visually Impaired Users of the Electronic Library (REVIEL) project at the Centre for Research in Library and Management (CERLIM) took place over two years.
Investigations of current services and the potential of technology were carried out, establishing that there were small pockets of excellence but large areas where the issues were unknown.
The report [3] reviews its findings and presents the case for a National Accessible Library Service (NALS), the elements of the accessible library of the future, together with implementation issues and suggestions for further research and development.
In 1999, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport allocated £200,000 to be administered by the Library and Information Commission (LIC) to improve access to library and information services to visually impaired people.
The LIC worked in partnership with Share the Vision (STV) to identify the key elements and draw up a programme of work <http://www.lic.gov.uk/research/visualaccess> for 1999-2000, consisting of a number of projects.
These projects were based on the following areas: Developing and maintaining a union catalogue of accessible format materials (Reveal) Developing a national interlending system for accessible format materials Extending access to IT in libraries Extending the range of titles transcribed into accessible formats Initiating a range of best practice and best value initiatives including a Best Practice manual.
On the first of February 1999, the Music Information Assisted Computer Library Exchange (MIRACLE) project <http://www.svb.nl/project/MIRACLE/> was launched under the European Commission’s Telematics Applications Programme (Libraries Division).
Co-ordinated by the SVB in Amsterdam this two-year project aims to create a central catalogue and database of music scores in accessible formats.
The project is based on the co-operation of four major libraries, SVB, RNIB, ONCE and SBS (Switzerland), which have worked together for five years to create the standards for the central catalogue.
The project consortium consists of these four libraries plus the Danish Library for the Blind and the Stamperia Braille of Florence, Italy.
The system, developed by Shylock Progetti of Venice, will be based on the library access program developed in the CANTATE project.
Project management will be supplied by the FORCE Foundation in the Netherlands.
Because music in accessible formats is so expensive to produce it makes sense for libraries around the world to share their resources, thereby avoiding duplication of effort.
MIRACLE is not only an international catalogue of music; it will also deliver the digital files of the pieces.
These will be primarily braille but it is hoped to include spoken word music and large letter music.
The whole system will be available via the Internet.
Where libraries are required to sell music files, the system will track and permit secure electronic payment and manage the redistribution of costs.
Although it is possible to make the system open to individuals, the primary participants will be special libraries for the blind and other braille production units.
There will be differences in the music layout produced in different countries.
MIRACLE is not setting out to automate conversion from one layout to another but it will be investigating the acceptability of these different files to the users.
MIRACLE expects to open the system to as many libraries as wish to take part during the two years of the project.
The system must be ready for trials and evaluation in February / March 2000.
See the report in the IFLA Section for Libraries for the Blind Newsletter for Spring 1999.
[4] NLB has applied to the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) for a grant to fund a project with the working title of Visugate.
There will be notification in June 2000 as to whether the project has passed round on of the NOF selection process, with a final decision in Spring 2001.
The Visugate project aims to create a freely available, comprehensive, searchable Internet resource containing information on all aspects of visual impairment.
It would digitise information not available on the Internet at present and create an online visual impairment information portal to link to the existing high quality Internet resources in addition to the newly digitised material.
The NLB would work with a number of organisations in the visual impairment field.
No web page is yet available on the project but for more information contact the Visugate project manager Joanna Widdows at joanna.widdows@nlbuk.org.
Software and Equipment Software and equipment designed for use by people with visual impairments is known as assistive or access technology.
For example, keyboards can have embossed braille characters or large print letters on the keys.
Speech synthesis or screen reader packages (e.g.
Hal, Window Eyes, Jaws, Webspeak) convert print to audio.
To provide enlarged print, screen magnification packages (e.g.
Lunar, Aladdin), portable plug-in screen magnifiers (e.g.
Eezee reader/writers), optical character recognition (OCR) scanners (as in the Cicero package) and closed circuit tv can be used.
Text can be converted to braille as either temporary display or refreshable braille, and as hard copy braille output (e.g.
Kurzweil readers).
An increasing range of such software and equipment is available, so where do you go to find out what what’s available, how it performs and what might be the best options for your organisation?
A recent initiative is the new National Internet Accessibility Database (NIAD) being set up by the Assistive Technology Centre at Sussex University and described in Ariadne 22 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/disinhe/>.
This will be a continually updated web based resource on products and performance, with a specific focus on the higher and further education sectors.
Some products are listed on the NLB site; while not endorsing any specific products, there is a page on suppliers of access technology <http://www.nlbuk.org/access> with links to their web sites.
If you’d like to try out the Internet using access technology, the NLB site also has a page of places where you can do this.
The page <http://www.nlbuk.org/access> details the location (a number of RNIB Cybercafes and some public libraries), the equipment available and contact details.
The RNIB web site also has a page of links <http://www.rnib.org.uk/wedo/services/edtu/inf-ser.htm#links> to access technology manufacturers.
The links identify the manufacturers and list their products.
TNAUK is also working to extend access to computer resources to visually impaired people who may not otherwise have this opportunity.
Under a recently funded lottery grant, it has just begun a three year programme to provide computer resources at forty-five of its local Talking Newspaper groups.
Around twelve centres around the country will be equipped in the first year, with the first installation in Maidstone, Kent in April 2000 and the second in the Isle of Wight in May.
The funding will provide computer equipment, onsite training for staff and volunteer assistants, support manuals and documentation and telephone support from TNAUK.
The TNAUK site <http://www.tnauk.org.uk> features this project in its news section and further details can be requested from info@tnauk.org.uk.
The software and equipment are not only for institutions or workplaces; they also enable visually impaired people to access the Internet at home.
The RNIB web site section on The Internet and How to Access It <http://www.rnib.org.uk/access/> is a basic guide to the Internet for non-users.
As well as explaining the various terms, and identifying where problems can occur for people with visual impairment and how access technology can help, the guide includes some useful addresses and a list of the major Internet Service Providers.
The NLB web site <http://www.nlbuk.org/access/> includes a page that looks at the adjustments possible with the browsers Internet Explorer and Netscape that would assist users with visual impairment.
Then there is Emacspeak <http://cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/emacspeak>, a speech interface that can be combined with the Linux operating system allowing visually impaired users to interact independently with the computer.
Both Emacspeak and Linux are available free on the Internet.
The Blinux site <http://www.hzo.cubenet.de/blinux/> is designed as a meeting point for people interested in support for visually impaired users of Linux.
The site includes the Blinux Archive, a repository that offers all related software and the Blinux Distribution, an easy to install Linux distribution.
If you’re keen to find out more in this area, WebABLE <http://www.webable.com/> is a web site for disability-related Internet resources that lists many resources on accessibility.
One offer that has been announced [5] is the joint venture between Demon Internet and the Apart Consultancy, which was founded to advise companies on exploiting the abilities of visually impaired people and retaining employees who have lost their sight.
Apart has designed a package the Brunel Freedom system which provides a computer, scanner, modem and KA9Q along with the Webspeak package.
This is linked to free sign-up with Demon Internet.
SpeecHTML is a new service developed by the UK based company Vocalis, reported in the NLB Research Bulletin in March 2000.
[6] This service allows anyone who can’t use, or hasn’t got a PC to access Web pages using an ordinary telephone and spoken commands.
SpeecHTML <http://www.speechtml.com/> is based on two core technologies Advanced Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS) and the system reads standard hyper text mark-up language (HTML).
Web site owners can provide SpeecHTML as an add-on facility, and implement it using templates or ‘Wizards’.
Once implemented, the site can offer a telephone number using their web pages as a source.
Users then call up the telephone number associated with the site and the textual parts of the site are read back to them.
By speaking the menu item required into the telephone handset they can navigate their way to the information required.
The service has been well received by users in a pilot trial.
And Finally… The Internet does provide a substantial resource for those with visual impairment.
If you are in charge of a web site, or web pages, why not take a look at them with the accessibility guidelines in mind.
Perhaps only small changes are required to make them fully accessible.
If you offer a service to visually impaired people, check out some of the sites you haven’t come across before and perhaps put together some bookmarks so you can refer others to these sites.
Find out whether any of the new initiatives are operating in your area; your users may be able to use them.
It may also be useful to look at the special issues on IT and disability produced by Vine issue 106 <http://litc.sbu.ac.uk/publications/vine/106/> [7] and Library Technology for February 1999 <http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/lt/feb99cover.html> [8].
Share the Vision News also carried a special supplement on accessible technology in 1999 [9].
As part of the DCMS funded programme to improve library services to the visually impaired, copies of Share the Vision News issues for 1999 have been sent free of charge to libraries in the UK.
References [1] Brazier, Helen and Jennings, Simon ‘Accessible web design’ Library Technology February 1999 [2] Chapman, Ann.
Project One, Part A.: The Future role of NUCAF and a technical specification of the metadata requirements.
Bath: UKOLN, 1999.
Report to the Library and Information Commission and Share the Vision Project One Steering Committee [3] Brophy, Peter and Craven, Jenny.
The Integrated Accessible Library: a model of service development for the 21st century.
Manchester: CERLIM, 1999 ISBN: 0953534316 British Library Research and Innovation Report no.168 [4] The Miracle project.
IFLA Newsletter Spring 1999: <http://www.ifla.org/VII/s31/nws1/spring99.htm> [5] Demon Dispatches Winter 1997⁄98 pp72-74 [6] NLB Research Bulletin No.
2, March 2000 pp27-28 [7] Vine Special issue 106, 1997 [8] Library technology Special issue February 1999 [9] Jennings, Simon, et al.
Accessible Technology: a practical guide.
Share the Vision News issue 31 (Special supplement), Winter 1999, pp39-50   Ariadne has featured articles on disability and accessibility topics in a number of previous issues.
Issue 7 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/web-access/> Issue 8 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/disabilities/> Issue 8 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/web-access/> Issue 9 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/web-access/> Issue 10 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/tnauk/> Issue 14 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue14/older-people/> Issue 19 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/disinhe/> Issue 20 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/disinhe/> Issue 21 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/disinhe/> Issue 22 <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/disinhe/> Acknowledgements Many thanks to Helen Brazier (National Library for the Blind), Simon Jennings (Resource Discovery Network Centre), David Owen (Share the Vision), and David Taylor (Royal National Institute for the Blind) for comments on the draft of this paper and suggesting some additional sites.
Author Details   Ann Chapman Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: ann.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “In Vision: The Internet As a Resource for Visually Impaired People” Author Name: Ann Chapman Publication Date: 21-Jun-2000 Publication: Ariadne Issue 24 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/in-vision/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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BIOME: Progressing through Partnerships Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines BIOME: Progressing through Partnerships Buzz database portal infrastructure cataloguing url Citation BibTex RIS Paula Manning reports on recent collaborations.
The BIOME Service has been very fortunate in building partnerships with other information providers within the life sciences field.
The Service is itself the product of a consortium [1] led by The University of Nottingham.
For example, The Natural History Museum is a major contributor to the Service managing the Natural Selection Gateway within BIOME.
Through partnerships BIOME has benefited from the subject expertise of many staff as well as being able to participate in related initiatives and increase the range of services available from the BIOME web site.
I reported on two international collaborations last year in Issue 24 of Ariadne [2].
The paragraphs below outline some of the recent BIOME partnership developments.
Wellcome Trust Psci-com Gateway Psci-com [3] is a gateway to public understanding of science and science communication information on the Internet.
The Gateway is provided by the Information Services Department of the Wellcome Trust and offers practitioners, whose role is to raise awareness of science, a quick and easy way to find quality resources to support their work.
In addition to providing a very useful catalogue of Internet resources, there is also an events calendar, a bibliography of current literature and a link to the Psci-com mailing list.
The service is currently hosted and accessed within the OMNI health and medicine gateway, but will soon be re-launched utilising the BIOME web design and navigational features.
As part of this development a new 'hosted services' navigation bar will be added to the left hand side of the BIOME pages.
The aim in undertaking these changes is to increase the consistency in site navigation between BIOME and Psci-com.
In addition to the layout changes, greater access to the Psci-com Internet resource record collection will also be provided.
As well as being able to search the Psci-com collection directly from the Psci-com website, the records will also be retrieved via searches conducted using the BIOME 'cross-gateway' search box on the BIOME home page and also via searches of the entire RDN using the resource finder on the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) web site [4].
NMAP Gateway and National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) BIOME is very pleased to announce the launch of NMAP [5].
This is a new section of the OMNI health and medicine gateway focussing on the nursing, midwifery and allied health subject areas.
The development of NMAP has followed the same partnership model as the parent BIOME service.
It represents a unique collaboration between the professional bodies in the subject field to build a collection of records relating to quality, relevant Internet resources.
Major Partners in the development of NMAP include The University of Sheffield and The Royal College of Nursing.
A list of all the partner and contributor organisations is available from the NMAP Partnership page [6].
The shared aim to provide access to high quality information services has also provided a good opportunity for BIOME to collaborate with the NHS National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH) Project Team.
This collaboration has also focussed on nursing.
midwifery and allied health following the concurrent development of NMAP with the development of the nursing and allied health portals within NeLH.
NMAP and OMNI records can now be directly searched from the newly established NeLH nursing and allied health portals pages [7] and BIOME has also received NeLH funds to increase the number of Internet resource records being added to the NMAP gateway.
This aims to ensure that both the education and NHS communities benefit from the shared investment in the established service infrastructure at BIOME.
Vetsonline.com Continued Professional Development (CPD) Database A very recent partnership with Vetsonline.com [8] has allowed BIOME to offer direct searching of their veterinary Continued Professional Development (CPD) database.
The database of courses, seminars and events can be searched by subject, location and date and will be accessible from VetGate [9], the animal health gateway within BIOME and presented within the VetGate page design.
The above initiative, like the Psci-com collaboration means BIOME can offer additional services for the benefit of users within the convenience of one web interface.
The aim in providing these additional information elements also mirrors the aims of our Internet Portal Project to offer easy access to a range of good quality services relevant to the subject communities.
More information on the RDN Subject Portals Project can be found on the web site [10].
References BIOME Partners at http://biome.ac.uk/about/partners.html Psci-com at http://www.psci-com.org.uk/ Manning, Paula "Biome news" Ariadne, issue 24, June 2000 at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/biome/ Resource Discovery Network (RDN) at http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Internet resources in Nursing, Midwifery and the Allied health Professions (NMAP) at http://nmap.ac.uk/ The NMAP partnership page can be accessed at http://nmap.ac.uk/about/partners.html NeLH nursing and allied health portals pages at http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/ Vetsonline.com at http://www.vetsonline.com/ (now Vet Times http://www.vettimes.co.uk/) VetGate at http://vetgate.ac.uk/ RDN Subject Portals Project at http://www.portal.ac.uk/ Author Details Paula Manning BIOME Service Manager University of Nottingham Email: pm@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk Article Title: "BIOME: Progressing through Partnerships" Author: Paula Manning Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/biome/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What's in Humbul for Further Education?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What's in Humbul for Further Education?
Buzz metadata cataloguing personalisation research Citation BibTex RIS Randy Metcalfe provides an overview of the materials and services of use to humanities practitioners in the FE sector.
Humbul [1] is the humanities hub of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [2] and represents a sound starting point for finding quality resources in this subject area.
Subject specialists have built our catalogue of evaluated resources.
And they add to it every day.
The goal is to make access as easy as possible to the best of what the Web has to offer in English, Religious Studies, History, Archaeology, Modern Languages and other humanities subjects.
Each record offers information about the resource, including a description that should provide pointers to whether this resource will be useful for teaching and learning in the FE sector.
It is possible to find records using the Humbul search box or browse through the resources in a subject, organised by type of resource, time period, (especially useful for History resources), or intended audience.
At Humbul, we work hard to enhance our Internet resource catalogue with additional features and functionality, including Humbul Topics, FE Case Studies, and My Humbul, our personalisation service that brings Humbul's resources into users' own Web pages as well as offering an alerting service for new resources.
But perhaps most important of all is the Virtual Training Suite (VTS) of humanities subject-related tutorials that introduce students and practitioners to the range of resources available on the Internet.
My Humbul My Humbul [3] is Humbul's personalisation service.
Within it, users have access to My Humbul Alert and My Humbul Include.
The service is entirely free, although it is necessary to register.
Since Humbul's network of subject specialists is regularly adding new resources to our catalogue, Humbul's support for the range of subjects may change significantly over time.
Of course users can just come and visit Humbul every week to see what is new; or they can arrange for Humbul to come to them, by setting up a My Humbul Alert.
It is possible to choose a subject alert or a saved search alert.
Users will receive a weekly email whenever a new record is added to Humbul that matches their criteria.
For example, if a user wants to be notified whenever a new resource is catalogued that deals with "battlefield memorials", then a saved search alert may be just what is required.
My Humbul Include goes one step further.
It enables users to select records from within Humbul and dynamically include them within their own Web pages.
They can even choose to add their own annotations to Humbul's descriptions.
Meanwhile Humbul continues to check regularly that the resources selected are still available, updating the link and the description as required.
This means there are no dead links on course Web pages.
And once My Humbul Include has been added to users' Web pages, they can add new records, remove existing records or even change the metadata displayed, all from Humbul's My Humbul interface.
Virtual Training Tutorials The RDN has begun building a suite of tutorials specifically for FE [4].
Two of special interest to humanities students will be English Studies and Learning Languages.
These free humanities subject-based tutorials enable students and teachers to develop the skills needed to make the most of resources they find on the Internet.
Humbul also maintains the following tutorials, which were originally written for HE, but which have also proved popular in FE: Internet for English Internet for Historians Internet Philosopher Internet for History and Philosophy of Science Internet Theologian Internet for Religious Studies Internet for Modern Languages Whichever tutorial users choose, they will have the chance to practise and develop the Internet skills that will support their teaching and learning.
It is possible to tour key Web sites for a chosen subject, discover how to search the Internet and recognise the difference between an automated search engine such as Google and a catalogue of hand-picked resources such as Humbul.
The process allows practitioners to review and evaluate Web sites, and also identify hallmarks of a quality resource.
It also allows teachers to approach the Internet with a plan to get the most out of it for teaching and learning.
A major advantage of this method is that users are able to take the tutorials at a pace and a time that suits them.
The tutorials even provide the means to assess the development of one's skills, for example through self-assessment quizzes.
Further Education Case Studies Humbul quickly recognised the value ofpractitioners sharing best practice in the use of its Internet resources.
It therefore participated in an RDN project to develop case studies by FE teachers for FE teachers in English, History and French.
There are six case studies for each subject.
They run the gamut from individual lesson plans on using a particular resource such as Hamlet on the Ramparts [5] to advice on how to use the Internet to support the teaching of a major subject like the First World War [6].
A few tutorials even focus on how to make the best use of Humbul for your teaching and learning in further education [7].
Humbul Topics Sometimes a fully searchable catalogue of the best resources on the Web just is not enough.
Humbul is working to enhance practitioners' use of resources by inviting subject specialists to write a Humbul Topic that gathers together resources of particular relevance [8].
Usually these will be resources which even with a very thorough search strategy users may not be able to locate easily.
Whether it is resources dealing with English Local History or Poetry on the Internet, a Humbul Topic represents a useful introduction to the best available resources on a specific topic.
A new Humbul Topic is produced about every two months.
We actively encourage lecturers from Further Education to suggest and write Humbul Topics for us.
We are keen to learn what FE practitioners want to see in the future.
Humbul Promotional Materials If you would like to raise awareness of Humbul amongst your students or colleagues, we would be delighted to help with Humbul Promotional Materials [9] such as flyers and bookmarks up to 50 each free of charge.
Just send in your request to info@humbul.ac.uk Future Plans for FE Humbul is committed to serving the needs of Further Education.
In the first instance, that means continuously building its catalogue of resources, ensuring that subject specialists with experience in Further Education are there on the ground level selecting resources for Humbul.
But it also means reviewing more than 7000 existing Humbul catalogue records in order to ensure that their descriptions and metadata make finding the right record as easy as possible.
Along with other hubs in the RDN, Humbul will dramatically increase its FE holdings in the next year through a project working directly with FE colleges, part of the JISC Exchange for Learning Project.
With that in mind, Humbul is developing ways of browsing search results that make it even easier to reach the resources that will work best for users.
In the coming months, Humbul will enhance its subject pages with additional teaching-related content.
Future Humbul Topics will explore issues of relevance to FE.
And we hope to see Humbul records used on as many FE Web pages as possible through My Humbul Include.
References Humbul http://www.humbul.ac.uk/ Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ My Humbul http://www.humbul.ac.uk/help/myhumbul.html RDN Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ RDN Case Study Hamlet on the Ramparts http://www.rdn.ac.uk/casestudies/humbul/english/case2.html RDN Case Study World War One http://www.rdn.ac.uk/casestudies/humbul/history/case4.html Example: RDN Case Study in English subject area, My Humbul http://www.rdn.ac.uk/casestudies/humbul/english/case5.html Humbul Topics http://www.humbul.ac.uk/topics/ Humbul Publications http://www.humbul.ac.uk/about/publications.html Author Details Randy Metcalfe Communications Manager Humbul Humanities Hub Research Technologies Service University of Oxford 13 Banbury Road Oxford, OX2 6NN Email: info@humbul.ac.uk Web site: http://www.humbul.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "What's in Humbul for Further Education?"
Author: Randy Metcalfe Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/humbul/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Bath Profile Four Years On: What's Being Done in the UK?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Bath Profile Four Years On: What's Being Done in the UK?
Buzz html database portal copyright cataloguing z39.50 authentication interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Fraser Nicolaides gives us his take on the conference to review the implementation of the Bath Profile in the UK, July 2003.
The genesis of the Bath Profile occurred at a meeting in Bath Spa during August 1999.
It sought to address a wide range of issues pertaining to the effectiveness of the search and retrieval processes between Z39.50 client and server services.
Over the ensuing months, members of the relevant communities created an ISO-recognised profile specifically intended to have international application.
In June 2000, Release 1.1 of the Bath Profile gave precise semantic definition to the abstract search types used by Z39.50-enabled services.
The initial focus was to define search and retrieval processes appropriate for bibliographic and cross-domain applications.
The suite of search types for bibliographic applications was rationalised and extended in the recently issued Release 2.0.
In addition, the new release now provides a detailed specification for the retrieval of holdings information, and defines a further suite of search types for authority records.
Four years after the creation of the Bath Profile, the M25 Systems Team sought to review its implementation within the UK.
The resultant conference was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and organised in association with UKOLN.
It offered a series of integrated presentations on the envisaged potential and current actual deployment of the Profile.
To summarise briefly , the presentations on 7 July 2003 comprised: Carrol Lunau, the principal editor of the Profile, gave the keynote paper on its historical development and current status John Gilby and Fraser Nicolaides, of the M25 Systems Team, described the possible problems that the absence of semantic interoperability could cause the implementers and end-users of virtual union catalogues Andy Powell of UKOLN presented the contextual role of Z39.50 and the Bath Profile within the JISC Information Environment Peter Stubley, Assistant Director of Academic Services at the University of Sheffield, reprised the conclusion of the UK National Union Catalogue Feasibility Study on the inappropriateness of Z39.50 as a technical solution for this type of service Rob Bull, Managing Director of Crossnet Systems, detailed the significant interrelated technical and business-strategy difficulties confronting Z39.50-server vendors who potentially might implement the Profile Slavko Manojlovich, of the Memorial University of Newfoundland and here representing Sirsi, concluded with an overview of that company’s marked success in effecting implementation of the Profile The event was chaired by Peter Burnhill of EDINA.
It was a specific intention of the organisers that the presentations stimulate discussion amongst the audience.
This was emphasised by an extended panel-moderated session at the close of the event.
Many of the fifty-six delegates were invited representatives of leading vendor companies and service organisations operating in the UK.
The former comprised: Aurora, Crossnet/DS, Dynix, Endeavor, Ex Libris, Fretwell-Downing, Sirsi and Talis.
Amongst the services providers and developers were: EDINA, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, IRIS, M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries, MIMAS; and UKOLN Interoperability Focus.
The purpose of this article is not to restate the content of the papers and the discussion that they engendered, but rather to document certain key statements and proposals that could have a significant bearing on the current implementation and future development of the Bath Profile.
These are detailed below.
(It is worth noting, however, that the presentations [1] are available in HTML format or MS PowerPoint).
Stability of the Bath Profile In a particularly cogent presentation by Rob Bull (who had been invited by the M25 Systems Team to emphasise the actual and perceived technical difficulties associated with implementation), it was conjectured that limited implementation was a consequence of the perceived instability of the Profile.
The inclusion of proposed developments in Release 1.1, and anticipated extensions of the current version may have generated this unwillingness to commit possibly considerable technical and, by implication, financial resources to the creation of fully compliant Z39.50 server modules.
Unfortunately, this perspective was neither refuted nor confirmed by any of the vendor delegates.
(Indeed, as one delegate noted, the vendors were peculiarly reticent on most issues throughout the day.)
The legitimacy of such a position was comprehensively refuted by Carrol Lunau.
Two particular points were to be noted, namely: that developments are responsive to the requirements of the application user communities, and thus constitute necessary revisions of a functionally useful profile that any further developments or extensions will not confute or otherwise negate the existing specifications.
In summary, the Profile should be regarded as both progressively developmental and immediately implementable.
Internationalisation Although devised and presented as an internationally applicable profile, the Bath Profile has received only limited endorsement by countries outside North America and the United Kingdom.
This regrettable situation has perhaps been exacerbated by the fact that until recently the Profile was available only in the English language (though I would regard this as being as much a symptom as a cause) [2].
It is arguable that this perforce threatens the status and identity of the Bath Profile as an international standard.
Indeed, this situation may be independently compounded by the appearance of Z39.89-200X, ANSI/NISO’s U.S. National Z39.50 Profile for Library Applications [3].
(This forthcoming national profile uses many but not all of the bibliographic search and retrieval elements defined by Release 2.0 of Bath.)
Given NISO’s organisational resources and inherent authority, it is conceivable that in the long term Z39.89 could, as Carrol Lunau stated, “ultimately make Bath redundant”.
I would argue that the definition of international interoperability should remain technically and organisationally independent of any national initiative.
This does not negate any national or sub-national initiatives.
The Z Texas Profile [4] demonstrates how Bath can, as originally intended, comprise the core specification around which are defined additional requirements.
It should be reiterated that this is a highly speculative assessment.
Although beyond the formal scope of the conference, it was nevertheless evident that the identity of the Bath Profile required further consideration.
Independence of the Bath Profile from Z39.50 The Bath Profile is subtitled ‘An international Z39.50 specification for library applications and resource discovery’, which functionally associates it exclusively with the Z39.50 information-retrieval protocol.
As Z39.50 is no longer the only protocol that requires search types to be semantically defined, it was cogently suggested by several delegates and at least one speaker that the Bath Profile be disaggregated from Z39.50.
This would not negate the current content of the Profile, but would require it to assume a more abstract format.
Informed customer requirements specifications A key inhibitor to adoption of the Bath Profile was identified as the inadequate specification of requirements by customer organisations.
Request For Proposal documents may mandate compliance with the Bath Profile, but neither specify to what level nor require confirmatory proof.
It was recommended therefore that requesting institutions be far more precise in the specification of their requirements.
Within the context of particular consortial and other operational circumstances, they may, for example, require compliance to specific levels of each Functional Area of Bath, augmented by a range of additional search types.
To confirm that the specification may be supported, potential vendors should be required to submit their Z39.50 server configuration to the Z-interop Testbed for independent verification.5.
A directory of Z39.50 server databases One especially notable issue arising from the event was the identified need for a publicly accessible directory of Z39.50 server database implementations.
This would document not simply the required connection information (IP address, authentication string, database name(s), etc.
), but also would detail the Bib-1 attribute arrays that were supported.
As a feature of this latter function, each directory entry would declare which Bath Profile-defined search types were supported.
Such a service should greatly assist institutions and consortia in the configuration of their Z39.50 clients.
It is arguable that, at least in the UK, the directory should be associated with or form a component of the JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) 6.
The M25 Systems Team intend to discuss this proposition further with JISC and the IESR project team.
Cross-domain searching Carrol Lunau reported that Functional Area C of the Bath Profile, ‘Cross-Domain Search and Retrieval’, had elicited no comment or criticism from the envisaged user community.
Andy Powell and others, however, confirmed the considerable potential usefulness of this Functional Area as many portal and related ‘metasearch’ tools were being developed that enabled the simultaneous searching of multi-domain resources.
Conclusion This event successfully highlighted the challenges facing the designers, commercial implementers and institutional end-users of the Bath Profile.
In doing so, there may be a tendency to feel daunted and overwhelmed.
Such a negative response, however, should be regarded as fundamentally inappropriate.
Alternatively, in confirming the continued need to engage with the general issue of semantic interoperability, the identified challenges demonstrate the essential vibrancy of the responsively developmental Bath Profile.
The currency of the Profile should also be recognised.
It is not a blueprint for future application, but needs to be used now by customer and vendor organisations alike.
In this sense, the reticence of most of the vendor delegates to make any discernible contribution to the discussions could be regarded as somewhat alarming.
As consortial interoperability comes increasingly to the fore, it may be necessary for the customer organisations to clarify their business requirements.
Finally, I should like to reiterate that the opinions and interpretations expressed here are entirely those of the author.
References Bath Profile Meeting: Bath Profile Four Years On:What’s being done in the UK?, Monday 7 July 2003, Bath, UK.
Presentations are available in HTML format or MS PowerPoint at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/bath-profile/programme.html The French language version of Le Profil Bath is at: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/bath/tp-bath2-f.htm U.S. National Z39.50 Profile for library Applications by the National Information Standards Organization is at: http://www.niso.org/standards/standard_detail.cfm?std_id=734 The Z Texas Profile: A Z39.50 Specification for Library Systems Applications in Texas (Release 2.0) by The Texas Z39.50 Implementors Group and William E. Moen is at: http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ld/projects/z3950/tzigprofilerelease20.html The Z-interop Home page is at: http://www.unt.edu/zinterop/index.htm The JISC Information Environment Service Registry Home page is at: http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/ Author Details Fraser Nicolaides Projects Officer M25 Systems Team London School of Economics Email: f.nicolaides@lse.ac.uk Web site: www.m25lib.ac.uk/M25link/ Return to top Article Title: “The Bath Profile Four Years On: What’s being done in the UK?” Author: Fraser Nicolaides Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/bath-profile-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Subject Portals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Subject Portals Buzz data software java framework database portfolio rss portal usability infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus vocabularies cataloguing windows multimedia z39.50 aggregation mysql tomcat licence uportal interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Judith Clark describes a three-year project to develop a set of subject portals as part of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) development programme.
The vision that created the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) grew out of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)s history of engagement with Higher and Further Education Institutions and significant research libraries in the UK.
The DNER has an ambitious goal to empower the HE/Post-16 community by providing quick, coherent and reliable access to a managed information environment that is geared to supporting learning and teaching activities.
The JISC has established a great number of services that are helping to fulfil this vision of an integrated information environment.
It also sponsors many initiatives that are developmental in nature.
The Subject Portals Project (SPP) is one of these.
It is a JISC-funded initiative led by the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) for the DNER.
The project aims to enhance resource discovery by developing a series of portals focussed on the requirements of end-users located in a variety of learning environments within the further and higher education sectors who are the main clients of the DNER.
The first phase of the project ran from Nov 2000 to Sep 2001 and was mainly concerned with building a Z39.50 cross search prototype at each of these three RDN Hubs SOSIG , EEVL and BIOME .
The second phase, which ends in 2003, involves two further Hubs, HUMBUL (in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Data Service) and PSIgate, and will examine the feasibility of delivering a set of subject portal services that build on the research network already established by the RDN.
Enhancing the RDN The RDN and its component subject Hubs are well known to librarians in the higher education community.
The RDNs roots go back to the early days of networked information services.
It is now one of the more successful components of an academic and research information infrastructure that continues to evolve rapidly.
The RDNs services today fulfil an expressed goal of the eLib programme, which in 1994 funded a series of demonstrator services designed to create a national infrastructure capable of generating significantly more widespread use of networked information resources [1].
Those services, then known as subject gateways, developed in response to community interests specific to each gateway.
The RDN itself was established in 1999 to bring the gateways together under a federated structure.
The Hubs are based around faculty-level subject groupings, chosen with a view to potential for partnership, sustainability, and growth, while preserving legacy investments [1].
The RDNs internet resource catalogues include records describing almost 40,000 web sites and are growing steadily as new subject areas are encompassed.
The Hubs offer a discovery tool, enabling users to quickly locate the most relevant Internet resources.
They were built around many of the same concepts that underpin the library catalogue.
The Hubs direct their users towards content that is freely available although difficult to find using a non-specific search engine.
Like a library, a Hub is inherently reliable because it has applied standardised policies and procedures.
Sites are selected on the basis of selection criteria developed in partnership with the research libraries and universities that contribute to the RDN, they are catalogued following consistent practices, and they are analysed by people with expertise in the relevant subject discipline.
Links are checked daily in an automated process and all entries are updated regularly by subject specialists.
Because only high-quality Internet resources are included, and these are classified using an appropriate controlled vocabulary, the RDN is an ideal environment for resource discovery.
Undergraduate students with only a rudimentary knowledge of a discipline can be confident that their search results will be authoritative and appropriate to their learning context.
Researchers and professionals who are comfortable using advanced search techniques with vocabulary terms particular to their specialised field will also retrieve relevant records.
This makes the RDN a valuable tool for teaching and learning.
Students can use the Hubs to find appropriate resources fast, while at the same time developing their own abilities to identify and locate relevant information.
Lecturers, librarians and tutors can quickly identify key web sites for their students to explore.
Usage statistics, however, indicate that the RDN is under-utilised [2] .
Several research studies have shown that tutors and lecturers are disinclined to direct their students to explore the Web.
From necessity, most opt for reading lists and/or prescribed resources.
A Managed Learning Environment (MLE) could reinforce this tendency, by making it even easier to embed pre-selected resources in with other electronic curriculum material.
The subject portal is the perfect complement to packaged courseware.
It will enrich the digital learning environment, not only by providing structured opportunities for learners to access web-based information relevant to their immediate needs, but also by providing opportunities to interpret, compare and interact with resources.
A portal could even provide something broadly the equivalent of the social context of an old-style departmental library, encouraging self-study and imbuing discipline-based values.
Hubs to portals The RDN is a resource discovery engine tailored to the needs of scholars and researchers.
Around this core service, each Hub offers additional related services including news and alerting services, and conference information.
So are the Hubs already portals?
A portal is a type of Web site.
There are many definitions of what makes a site a portal.
The typical early commercial portals were consumer Web destinations such as Yahoo!
and Excite, which aggregated news and information and offered other enticements, designed to keep people at the site and to draw repeat visitors, such as free e-mail and calendars.
This led to the commonly accepted concept of a portal as any Web site that offers a community of users the comfort of a home base, a single entry point to resources from a range of other Web places.
The RDN Hubs have done this for some time and do it very successfully.
In the terms of one definition of a portal, they provide an exciting, interesting and focussed view of a special part of the Internet [3].
In other quarters, the defining attribute of a portal is the ability for users to personalise the site according to their own preferences.
Here again the RDN meets the criteria.
SOSIGs Grapevine has over 5,000 registered users and a number of channels that can be customised according to the users preferences.
A more rigorous use of the term portal has developed within the Knowledge Management (KM) industry.
The concept of an Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is based on a simple idea, to offer end-users one-stop-shopping for business information.
A number of portal solutions have emerged offering fast, easy and consistent access to corporate intelligence, but despite the hype, most companies are finding that the one-stop-shop remains an elusive idea.
In many cases the EIP has proved to be an ever more-costly goal, and a far more complex undertaking than first envisioned.
Considerable resources have been invested by the universities that have developed portals, such as the MIT Web Portal project , the uPortal implementation at the University of British Columbia and myMonash in Australia [4], [5], [6].
The RDN subject portals share certain functionality with EIPs/MLEs.
This includes Customisable home pages driven by a single secure log-in Ability to share information and communicate across the community Transparent access to a wide range of high-quality information and information services that have been deemed to be of relevance in a particular context Ease of use and ubiquitous availability Access to information located in disparate data sources, including unstructured data.
In the same way that enterprise portals aim to enhance corporate productivity, portal-enhanced RDN Hubs seek to support research, learning and teaching in the academic context.
A successful portal environment is one that extends the users capabilities it has a capacity-building aspect that is really exciting.
There is no doubt that in offering advanced aggregation mechanisms, RDN subject portals have potential to stimulate learning and teaching in ways that we cant predict.
The Hubs currently provide a basic level of aggregation using HTTP.
The SPP seeks to take this to the next level, to create an integrated system that is both dynamic and stable.
It is very much a developmental project, and will involve much testing to see how such a system might be utilised by learners and teachers.
Enterprise information portals have three basic components; context, content and activity.
The RDN portals can be modelled in this way too.
The context in both cases is a technological infrastructure that supports resource discovery.
Typically this includes a set of communication protocols that support data exchange between different services.
Within this context, resource discovery is enabled according to the extent to which the content is structured or unstructured, in other words, discovery can only be effective if the appropriate metadata tags have been applied to the resources themselves.
In the SPP case, we are not just concerned with resources as items, but also as collections of items.
Further, these items are far more dynamic than those typically described by the traditional library catalogue.
Implied in Lorcan Dempseys description of the web as a pervasive social, research and business medium, home to the full reach of intellectual product [7] is a complexity driven by a whole range of emerging uses of information resources.
User-driven activity ultimately defines what the portal does, but what makes any portal project so unpredictable is that as the content and context are changed, new behaviours are enabled.
The RDN portals are primarily concerned with technologies that broker subject-oriented access to resources.
Effective cross-searching depends on consistent metadata standards, but these are still under development and although the RDNs collection is governed by sophisticated metadata schemas, this is not the case for many of the other resources targeted by the portals.
Z39.50 is the standard that has been adopted for the preliminary cross-search functionality.
Further portal functionality is being developed using RSS (Rich Site Summary) and OAI (Open Archives Initiative).
Other standards applications that underpin the portals are notably Dublin Core and a variety of subject-specific thesauri such as the CAB Thesaurus and MeSH.
Back to the drawing board, again and again The problem that the RDN portals address is that there are so now many information resources available at the desktop that the proliferation itself has become a barrier to effective use of information technologies.
Having to separately check a number of different types of commercial and institutional databases, each with its own access instructions and search interface, is at best annoying and at worst, completely confusing.
Portals seek to lower the barriers by operating across a variety of different systems in such a way as to make it appear to the user as if they are using a single coherent resource.
The project started with an assumption that in the wealth of resources that make up the DNER is contained quality content that learners need to be able to discover easily and quickly.
We assume that we have the skills and tools to create the technological context to enable rich resource discovery.
We assume that the subject approach to resource discovery is one that will be attractive and valuable to learners.
What we have no idea about is how learners will use a retrieval tool that can cope with resources in many different formats, of varying size and scope, from a number of different owners.
Whats more, we are now dealing with resources that can be used and reused, reformatted, reassembled, annotated, and shared.
Portal users will be able to interact with and contribute to DNER content (Pinfield and Dempsey in their description of the DNER in Ariadne 28 propose that personal information spaces will increasingly be visible alongside other content in the DNER [8]).
This raises a difficulty faced by any large digital library, and in this case, an issue that is also one of the fundamental challenges faced by the DNER -how to make it useful to different communities of users and for different purposes.
The SPP reflects the DNERs vision of an information landscape.
Each portal will present a different view of that landscape, shaped by each Hubs unique understanding of the needs of its own user community.
The RDN is familiar with the concept of users who dont have any loyalty to a library in the sense of it being a place that they visit.
Hub or portal users are likely to be sitting at their own desks at home, at their place of work, or on the train, and they may never enter a library building.
On the other hand, they may be using a public access workstation in their own library, where they have certain rights, or at another library where as a guest they have a more limited set of rights.
They may belong to several institutions that each provide access to a different set of information resources.
In some cases these institutions may subscribe to the same content but via different providers who compete on the basis of the specialised interface features each has to offer.
The funding proposals for the SPP sought to exploit this and other strengths of the RDN organisation.
However, the RDN has an explicit mandate to reduce the Hubs dependence on central (JISC) funding.
Each Hub is actively seeking commercial arrangements and linkages that will help to sustain service provision.
There is a dynamic tension between the income-generation goals of each Hub and the wider vision of subject portals as a set of windows to the DNERs current collection, in which the SPP is viewed as part of the work of creating a unified national digital resource [9].
The JISC has a long history of funding projects with the expectation that innovation and research work will lead smoothly on to fully operational services in the public arena and the Subject Portals project is a case in point.
SPP funding has been allocated to the Hubs to support research and development effort that is inseparable from the ongoing strategic business development of an existing service.
There are bound to be difficulties with this approach.
A way of minimising future problems is to ensure that the desired outcomes are clearly spelled out at the outset.
It may be that for the SPP these are in fact less to do with providing subject portals in the DNER sense and more to do with leveraging previous and current investment across the RDN to serve stakeholders better.
Nevertheless, there is a truly R&D component to this work.
The outcomes are unpredictable and portals development has to be iterative.
It is unrealistic to expect that at the end of the project, the RDN will have achieved the JISCs goal of being able to provide seamless access to existing services through a variety of entry points [9].
While it is important that portal functionality is developed with an eye to scalability, it will be necessary to start small, by first releasing a limited set of functions that meet the needs of a specific sub-set of users, and thoroughly testing that before offering additional functions.
Searching for the needles in a field of haystacks Access to a broad range of high-quality materials underpins successful performance [of universities].
Easy access to electronic information from desktops is expected, and required, by students and staff [9].
The JISCs portfolio already includes a superb range of the major bibliographic databases, electronic journals and multimedia information resources used in universities and colleges across the UK.
Increasingly this includes a variety of primary resources and course materials available online, including hybrid local collections held in museums, archives, academic departments and other institutions across the country.
In the DNER architecture, portals are seen as one means of overcoming the paradox of in-depth electronic resources that remain invisible to everyone except those who are already aware of their existence.
Each of the target information services available through any RDN portal is likely to be organised under a different system, accessed according to conditions and property rights specific to the particular service, and managed by a different organisation.
The end-user may not care about the supply chain but needs to be led through it in such a way as to preserve the integrity of each and every link in the chain.
In terms of interface design, there are many options in how results are presented to users; for example, it may better to rank results in some predetermined order, or to group them by supplier.
The portals may offer users the ability to customise how their results sets are displayed, for example a user may prefer the briefest description in the first instance as opposed to the more detailed records that the RDN Hubs currently display.
Even if this level of user-driven functionality can be offered, there will need to decisions made as to the default presentation format.
Experience at SOSIG suggests that only a small percentage of users take up the options available to them to customise the screen appearance of the Grapevine services.
Portals are but one means to present the DNERs content and services to end users, and there is as yet little understanding of user behaviours in the context of a wide-reaching managed information environment.
Usability testing thus has to consider some of the fundamental issues and is not a simple matter of determining the look and feel of the interface.
It is not possible to predetermine whether different functionality will be required by different subject communities.
There are also questions about how many subject portals are possible and how they relate to each other.
The SPP is working on broad faculty-level groupings.
It is unclear whether these can co-exist with more specific portals for more specialised communities, for example, nursing or veterinary studies, or indeed if this is desirable.
A question that follows from this is whether it may be feasible to offer pre-defined views of the DNER landscape for a particular organisation, in which case the interface would be at the institution rather than at the RDN.
To the end-user, the subject portals are essentially an aggregation of services on one web site.
Does it matter which web site that is?
It is possible that an MLE could be an alternative entry point to a subject portal It remains to be seen how universities will handle the potential proliferation of portals on campus.
Channel systems based on tools such as RSS present a whole range of new opportunities to be explored, and may support delivery of subject-focused RDN content via a variety of institutional channels [10].
A key to the feasibility of such services for the RDN is the extent to which necessary maintenance processes can be automated.
New models for collection development The RDN seeks to provide subject portals that will showcase the diversity and quality of electronic resources available for UK academic teaching, learning and research.
In the first instance this means the JISC current collections.
These are the resources made available to institutions and colleges on the basis of deals struck on behalf of the sector by the JISC.
However, portals present a new set of issues to add to the negotiating table.
For this reason, it is probably not appropriate that each RDN Hub negotiate with each supplier/distributor/owner/vendor individually.
A collection development policy can be established at the Hub only in so far as it is part of the business plan for the delivery of services to a constituent group of users.
One of the requirements for the portals is that they present a user with a discovery landscape that is comprised only of those resources that he or she is eligible to use.
This can be achieved via an ATHENS account [11].
There is an argument that suggests that it would be better if the user was shown the environment as selected by the RDNs teams of subject specialists.
There could be several ways of handling this.
Either a user would see a full set of collections/services (targets) with some greyed out, or a search could be run across all the targets and metadata returned from all and the user would be challenged only on the basis of further use of the metadata.
Another challenge raised by the SPP is that of RDN use statistics and their role in decision-making.
Potentially libraries could draw on a whole new set of usage data that would indicate not just what had been used, but what would have been useful had the institution held an appropriate licence.
Publishers and other content providers may also be interested in the data that a portal will be able to provide that shows comparative use of products.
Portals offer a different type of marketplace and have potential to change some of the ground rules of competition between scholarly content providers.
New business models distributed, networked The SPP team has not just taken on the challenge of breaking new technological ground, but also need to consider effective business models to underpin effective services to learners and teachers.
The RDN has an innovative organisational structure.
In the business world there is a lot of talk about an emerging networked organisational form that transcends the traditional boundaries of place, company loyalties and hierarchical structures.
The RDN is an outstanding example of how to share human and financial resources to deliver an integrated service.
A great many HEIs and other institutions collaborate to provide the RDNs services.
These institutions are distributed across the UK and their remits vary widely.
Yet the efforts of the diverse team of content providers and Hub managers come together to provide benefits for each institution that are far over and above what they could achieve working by independently.
The cataloguers (content providers) represent over 50 different universities, plus museums and many of the peak research bodies, and this broad constituency ensures that the RDN remains appropriate to changing needs in teaching, learning and research communities.
The Subject Portals development exploits the software applications that drive the RDNs Internet resource catalogues, its distributed administrative and organisational structure and the value of the existing content.
These have resulted from significant investment by JISC over the past seven years.
The SPP will add further value in ways that have already explored in the eLib hybrid Library projects.
What software?
The recent study by Andy Powell and Liz Lyon outlined a technical framework to underpin the DNER [12].
The Subject Portals are an integral part of this overall architecture.
It was acknowledged in the proposal that significant in-house development effort would be required at the Hubs because there was no suitable out-of-the-box portals product available.
Several options were investigated, and we decided to take two differing approaches at the development work.
At the SOSIG Hub, the test portal was built using Java servlets, relying upon various open source packages, including Velocity, SiRPAC and ZAP!
Tomcat was used to run the application and Jetspeed and MySQL or PostgreSQL are being explored to provide additional portal-like functions.
At BIOME and EEVL, a prototype portal was developed using SiteSearch, an OCLC product.
Further work will continue using open source software using a distributed development model.
The DNER technical architecture provides the framework for machine-to-machine (M2M) interoperability.
A mass of agreements, licences and contracts underpin the inter-institutional (B2B) collaboration and interaction.
Below that are the formal and informal person to person (P2P) communication networks that are required to operate distributed services.
There is no doubt that maintaining effective relationships between so many different partners has a high overhead cost.
The SPP needs to quantify what additional resource will be required to support fully functional portals across the RDN.
Final words Subject portals offer unique potential to support innovative learning and enhanced resource discovery.
The SPP is seeking to create the tools and applications that are required to give users the ability to tap content from across a range of sources via a single interface.
By building portals that are integrated into the Hubs, the RDN will be able to provide timely, reliable high-quality access to a greatly enriched range of highly respected content providers and information services, while maintaining its trusted subject focus.
Connecting these vast resources to the greatest number of students in such a way as to encourage learning, exploration and discovery is what the portals seek to achieve.
The project is working with many sectors of the education community to realise this goal.
Much progress has been made but the business issues remain a challenge.
References Lorcan Dempsey, The subject gateway: experiences and issues based on the emergence of the Resource Discovery Network', Online Information Review, 24 (1), 2000, 8-23 The First Annual Report of the JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework by Jennifer Rowley, is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub00/m&e_rep1.html#top Practical Portals, http://www.practicalportals.com/ Social context of the construction of an mIT Web Portal, by Christopher Beland, at: http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/papers/STS.092.htm http://my.ubc/ca/ http://www.its.monash.edu.au/services/flt/portal/ Lorcan Dempsey, The subject gateway: experiences and issues based on the emergence of the Resource Discovery Network', Online Information Review, 24 (1), 2000, 8-23 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/dner/ http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/ Forthcoming article by Tessa Griffiths and Simon Jennings, in Vine, http://litc.sbu.ac.uk/publications/vine.html http://www.athens.ac.uk Andy Powell and Liz Lyon, The technical architecture of the DNER, at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/ Author Details Judith Clark Subject Portals Project Manager Resource Discovery Network Email: judi.clark@kcl.ac.uk Web site: www.portal.ac.uk Article Title: "Subject portals" Author: Judith Clark Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/clark/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Biggest Digital Library Conference in the World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Biggest Digital Library Conference in the World Buzz mobile software dissemination infrastructure archives digitisation preservation mis naan ict research Citation BibTex RIS John Paschoud reports on the International Conference on Digital Libraries held in New Delhi, India, 24-27 February 2004.
An amazing event, in an amazing place India is an amazing place, and one that broadens the experience of any Western first-time visitor.
I was no exception, and my personal conceptual scales for many things have been extended way beyond where they ended before.
(I thought that South Londoners, Parisians and Milanese would be obvious contenders for the world championships in dangerous urban driving until I tried the Delhi rush-hour in a 3-wheel taxi!)
The International Conference on Digital Libraries (ICDL 2004) in New Delhi could have been just another of oh-so-many, but it too extended my own conceptual scale of what can happen at a conference full of (mostly) librarians and, more importantly, my understanding of the potential impact of ‘the digital library revolution’, (that now passé term we were using back in the days when the Follett Report [1] was hot stuff), on the lives of many millions of people who have yet to be reached by the ‘printed library revolution’ initiated by Herr Gutenberg.
ICDL 2004 was the first such conference in India to be organised on a truly international scale, and it attracted more than 740 registered participants from 33 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, America and Australia.
The organisers (TERI The Energy and Resources Institute, in partnership with the Indian Government departments of Culture and Information Technology) claim that ICDL 2004 was the biggest ever digital library conference organised so far in the world, and it certainly felt like it.
Relaxing view of the Delhi rush-hour Political significance The significance of the event was clear from the inaugural address by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, the President of India.
Not the usual ‘Welcome to our esteemed overseas guests, and have a nice conference’, that many of us expected; but about 40 minutes of well-informed discourse on the impact of digital library developments on the emerging Indian knowledge economy, with references to several papers in the three hefty printed volumes of conference and workshop proceedings 2, and including announcements of new State Government initiatives to implement digital land and electoral registries.
If I had not already been convinced by the inaugural address that India has the most remarkable and intellectually able Head of State (an aeronautics research scientist, before he ‘retired’ into politics), I would have been by his latest book [3] and the chapter on knowledge economy.
I recommend it as reading for anyone who underestimates the effort that this country of a billion people is putting into technology development; along with a browse of the inaugural address [4] on the Presidential Web site.
Inauguration of ICDL 2004.
From left: Prof. Hsinchun Chen, Professor, Department of MIS, University of Arizona, USA; Dr R K Pachauri, Director-General, TERI; Prof. N Balakrishnan, Professor and Chair, Division of Information Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, Hon’ble President of India; Mr Jagmohan, Hon’ble Minister of Tourism and Culture, Government of India; and Mr Vinod Bhargava, Additional Director, Division of Information Technology and Services, TERI.
Photo by kind permission of TERI The conference was held at the Habitat Centre in New Delhi, a modern complex with quite good audio-visual facilities and the other usual appointments.
After some of the ‘conference catering’ I’ve experienced at UK venues, the copious buffets, with chefs baking fresh naan breads and freezing kulfi to order, all eaten outdoors with the sun just bearably hot (and the ever-present circling kitehawks usually keeping a safe distance until the human diners had finished), tempted me to eat much more than was healthy!
And I am now a good judge of which of my local Indian restaurants are really cooking what is eaten by Indians at least the affluent ones.
The Habitat Centre, New Delhi Another measure of the impact of ICDL was the presence as exhibitors and sponsors of many of the major commercial journal and e-resources publishers, who seem convinced that the potential market here is the next big thing in which to invest.
The serious stuff The first day of the event was devoted to tutorial workshops, and I attended the session on the Greenstone Open Source digital library system, given by Ian Witten of Waikato University, New Zealand.
Greenstone is intended to enable cheap and simple deployment of digital libraries to remote places (and its development, while a range of e-content on practical topics such as agriculture and health is sponsored by UNESCO).
However it also has greater potential and deserves consideration for use as a platform for collections, (such as archives and other digitised or born-digital resources), in more well-off libraries, which are currently using commercial alternatives that are more expensive to buy and operate, and not as good.
Apart from being a very affable software engineer, Ian is also a rather accomplished clarinet player, and added even more value to his visit with an extended lunchtime cabaret on the final day of the conference.
Prof Ian Witten entertains The main conference programme included over 120 paper presentations in three parallel tracks.
Arguably this was too much content packed into too little time, with only 15 minutes each for session keynotes by invited speakers, and 10 minutes for other presenters.
Many speakers, delegates and session chairs felt this to be a problem, but it was easy to understand the pressure on the organisers to be this inclusive, and they did a commendable job of keeping reasonably well to the overall timetable.
I am not intending to include in this report a blow-by-blow account of all sessions, partly because I could not possibly have attended them all, and mainly because TERI have done a much better job of this in a full report available from their Web site of the ICDL2004 Conference [5].
I was privileged to be one of 55 invited speakers, along with Norman Wiseman of the UK JISC, to ICDL.
We both realised that there was a wide range of experience among the audience at many of the sessions, and no general consensus on whether ‘digital library’ is principally about the digitisation of print resources and archive material (of which Indian libraries have a great wealth, raising new issues about preservation and dealing with multiple languages, non-Western character sets, and palm leaves as a medium), or the provision and management of access to new online resources.
Norman spoke on JISC’s development of the Information Environment architecture for UK education, and I covered JISC’s Access Management programmes and worldwide developments in that field.
There is a great deal of interest among Indian library professionals in the UK model for national coordination of information resources for education; but their community has also developed strong links with Canada and Australia in particular.
Several of the speakers, and many of the delegates, were focussed on addressing what most European libraries would consider very basic issues such as network/Internet connectivity and management.
These are things that many of us take for granted, like the water and electricity supplies to our homes, and national consensus about which side of the road to drive on.
Just as India still has many millions of households without these fundamentals (and the likelihood that your car will meet an oncoming camel cart in the fast lane of an intercity highway), so there are major telecommunications problems to be tackled before truly egalitarian access to digital libraries (or any other applications and services that depend on a reliable ICT infrastructure) can be a possibility.
Some interesting socio-technical projects were described, including mobile digital libraries (complete with generator, satellite dish Internet connection, printer and book-binder) that can bring a choice of books-on-paper to the most remote village, and to some of that significant proportion of the world’s population who have yet to make their first telephone call.
Mobile digital library Some Indians for whom digital libraries are not yet the highest priority It is easy, at first, to jump to the conclusion that the ‘digital library’ issues for India are all about struggling to reach the level of information economy that the so-called developed world already has, and on such a vast scale and with so many other pressing priorities for limited public resources.
But the conference, and the knowledge and attitude of the library professionals there, convinced me that India is also addressing the same leading-edge problems that are occupying Europe and the USA.
It can make a significant contribution to their solution for all of us, and could well have a working public sector Information Environment, with the full national participation of post-16 education, in a similar timescale to that planned for Britain.
The programme included papers on all of the current ‘hot topics’ I would have expected, some of them covered at a frenetic intensity, to audiences who were not at all reticent to challenge the platform speakers with difficult, well-informed questions and, in some cases, extended ‘points from the floor’.
(What is the record time for keeping hold of one of those roving radio microphones?).
Where next?
Most of all, I hope that ICDL 2004 has served to open up channels of contact, and inspire the imaginations of people (inside and outside India) who will do more to overcome the barriers of distance, economy and culture, and include this thriving community of professionals in worldwide developments.
Norman and John explore some cultural frontiers A potential next step after ICDL 2004, being considered by TERI (which also functions as a postgraduate teaching institution), is the establishment of capacity for postgraduate learning opportunities for library professionals in India, focussing on the latest available digital library technologies and concepts worldwide, and structured to enable maintained contact with international peers, and dissemination to Indian public and academic libraries at state and district levels.
This is a development worth watching with interest, and worthy of support from the relevant UK professional bodies.
To improve upon the ancient proverb that was quoted by several ICDL speakers: ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life.
Help him to found a School of Fishing, and you feed his sons, daughters and neighbours, for ever.’ References The Follett Report http://www.cpa.ed.ac.uk/reports/follett/ International Conference on Digital Libraries 2004: knowledge creation, preservation, access, and management.
Conference papers.
pub.
TERI, New Delhi, ISBN 81-7993-029-7 Kalam, Prof APJ Abdul & Dr A Sivathanu Pilai, Envisioning an Empowered Nation, pub.
Tata McGraw-Hill, New Delhi, 2004.
Inaugural address to ICDL 2004 by the President of India http://presidentofindia.nic.in/scripts/sllatest1.jsp?id=282 ICDL 2004 event Web site http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl/ Author Details John Paschoud Infosystems Engineer & Projects Manager London School of Economics Library Email: j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lse.ac.uk/people/j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “The Biggest Digital Library Conference in the World” Author: John Paschoud Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/icdl2004-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: Managing the Virtual Branch Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: Managing the Virtual Branch Buzz data mobile software java javascript html database infrastructure metadata accessibility perl url Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ormes reports on the recent Public Libraries Web Managers Workshop held in the University of Bath.
The Public Library Web Managers workshop is a relatively new event for UKOLN.
Held for the first time in 1999 [1] it aims to provide an annual opportunity for public library web managers to share their expertise, learn from each other's experiences and keep abreast of the latest Web technology developments.
The emphasis of the event is always on the practical aspects of developing and managing a public library web site.
'Managing the Virtual Branch' built on the success of the previous year's workshop.
In response to feedback from last year's workshop, Managing the Virtual Branch was longer, had more speakers, included hands-on training sessions and had a social programme for the evenings.
Once again the workshop was held at the University of Bath in October.
Managing the Virtual Branch was attended by 39 delegates who came from all over the UK.
Most of the delegates were from local authorities and either were already developing a public library Web site or would be taking this role on in the near future.
The Talks A brief summary of all the presentations is given below.
All the speakers' slides are available from the workshop's Web site [2] along with their e-mail addresses, biographies and links to further information.
Readers of this article are encouraged to use the resources available on this site as this article only provides a brief summary of each presentation.
As part of my role as UKOLN's Public Library Networking Focus I gave the opening presentation for the workshop [3].
The presentation was entitled The Public Library Web Site 2003: The Virtual Branch and gave an overview of the sort of services public libraries could be providing via their Web sites in three years time.
It emphasised that the public library Web site may become the preferred access point to the library service for many users.
Paul Miller (UKOLN) then gave a presentation about the UK Government's Web Guidelines [4].
These guidelines were published last year and provide guidance on the development of government web sites.
They give advice on the management, design and content of public service web sites and so had great relevance for public library Web managers.
The rest of the opening afternoon's programme looked at case studies of actual public library Web sites.
Three librarians from different authorities talked about the development of their own Web sites and the online services they are currently providing.
Joanna Clark (Essex) talked about Euroguide, a gateway to European information on the Internet developed by Essex Libraries [5].
This freely available gateway is based on the ROADS software and aims to guide members of the public through the maze of information provided online by the European Union.
By linking to Euroguide all public libraries have a cost effective alternative to creating their own collection of links to EU information.
Helen Wood (Hillingdon) explored in her case study how her authority has used its web site to promote literature [6].
The Hillingdon library Web site gives readers the opportunity to review books online, look at their covers and find out about reading promotions in the library.
In the final case study, Don Yuile (Shropshire) talked about how he developed a WAP version of the Shropshire library site [7].
WAP is the protocol used to make Web pages accessible over mobile phones.
He talked through the issues he encountered in developing the WAP version of the site, the free online tools he used and how he is going to develop the site further.
Don Yuile's presentation closed the first day of the workshop.
Delegates had just enough time to check into their on campus accommodation before reassembling for the evening's entertainment.
When the workshop was planned in the summer a bus tour of the city of Bath seemed like a fun way to spend the first evening.
What wasn't expected was that on a cold, wet and dark October evening the bus company would send an open top bus!
The workshop delegates were soon divided into the hardy and bedraggled (who were going to sit on the top deck irrespective of the weather) and the sensible and dry (who retreated to the relative warmth and comfort of the lower deck).
A reception at the city's Municipal Art Gallery followed the bus tour and the large glasses of red wine helped people to warm up!
The second day of the workshop was opened by Andy Powell (UKOLN) whose presentation was entitled 'Making Your Site More Dynamic' [8].
His presentation gave a clear guide to Java, JavaScript and the use of Perl.
He also explained how Web forms work and the scripting needed.
He also briefly touched on personalised Web sites and the kind of programming they require.
Justine Kitchen (RDN) then explored the best ways to manage large collection of links [9].
In her presentation The Public Library as a Gateway to the Internet she explained how many internet users are simply overwhelmed by the amount of resources available and find focused link gateways extremely useful.
She discussed how libraries could provide such gateways without them becoming difficult to manage and maintain.
Design issues were covered in a paper by David Egan and Joanne Widdows (National Library for the Blind) [10].
Their presentation, Accessibility and Your Web Site explained why accessible design is important and what its key elements are.
To drive their point home they used speech reading software to access a number of Web sites those web sites which hadn't used accessible design were painfully obvious.
Over lunch delegates were able to access their own sites using the speech reader and quickly found out their own accessibility design flaws.
The final presentation on day two was given by Adrian Tribe (Birbeck, University of London) [11].
In his paper Data Protection and Your Web Site he outlined how data protection laws apply to web sites.
He surveyed UK public library Web sites and found that 71% are not complying to the current Data Protection Act.
He demonstrated very effectively why data protection is so important and how public library web managers can develop their web sites without contravening the act.
Parallel Sessions Four parallel sessions were held on the afternoon of the second day of the workshop.
The point of these sessions was to provide delegates with the opportunity to learn some practical skills and/or be able to explore in discussion groups pertinent issues in more detail.
The topics for the four sessions were Stylesheets Developing an Online Magazine Career Development of a Web Officer Auditing and Evaluating Web sites The Stylesheets session was led by Manjula Patel (UKOLN).
It took a "hands-on" approach to learning about the basics of style sheets.
Participants learnt why style sheets are useful in both designing and maintaining Web sites.
They created their own HTML documents with styles incorporated in several different ways and validated their own style sheets using an online validation tool.
They also explored the current state of the art in style sheet activity, its benefits and drawbacks.
All the learning materials created for this session are available online [12].
The Online Magazine session was led by Marieke Napier (UKOLN).
This workshop provided an overview of the process of setting up and implementing an online magazine.
It covered the key areas of thinking through what you want, technology and resources, design, content, publicity and promotion and finally evaluation and auditing.
Other common issues such as access, electronic format, editing and delivery were also considered.
The development process was illustrated by brief case studies of magazines that have addressed some of these issues.
A few of the prominent electronic journals in the library/networking communities were assessed and considered to see if they work well or not.
The workshop involved lots of hands-on tasks and group work.
All the learning materials created for the session are available online [13].
The Career Development of a Web Officer was led by Peter Griffiths (Home Office).
It examined the skills required for Web work, and asked which are appropriate for public library Webmasters and Web staff.
It covered employers' current requirements in Web work, and examined what the specialist recruitment agencies consider to be the core skills.
Notes from the session are available online [14].
The Auditing and Evaluating Web sites was led by Brian Kelly (UKOLN).
In this hands-on session participants tried out a range of tools which can be used to evaluate and audit Web sites.
The session made use of tools which can evaluate both individual pages and entire Web sites.
The session concluded with a group discussion which formulated recommendations for further work, both by the delegates themselves within their own organisation and by national or regional bodies.
Again notes and resources from the session are available online [15].
Once again the delegates were only allowed a few hours rest before that evening's social programme kicked in.
The workshop dinner was held that night in a converted train station in the centre of Bath.
Although the meal didn't finish until gone 10 pm some delegates were still spotted heading off to the pub instead of back to bed!
The final day of the workshop consisted of four presentations in the morning.
Marieke Napier (UKOLN) kicked off with a presentation entitled Publicising Your Web Site with Search Engines [16].
Her presentation explored how to get your Web site listed in search engines most effectively.
She explained how metadata can help improve your site's listings in search engines and the kind of problems which may be preventing your site from being listed.
Pete Cliff (UKOLN) then outlined the importance of good Web site infrastructure for the long term development of a web site in his presentation Behind the Scenes a Guide to Web Site Infrastructure [17].
He provided key tips on how to design a web site from the beginning for growth and longevity.
He explored why a database driven web site may be the best approach for very large web sites.
Martin Belcher (ILRT) opened the final session of the workshop with his presentation Commissioning a Web Site.
This presentation focused on how to commission a web site from an external agency [18].
He explained that the key to a successful relationship with an outside agency was in having an effective design spec.
He gave examples of good and bad specs and outlined the crucial elements which should always be included.
He emphasised that if you draw up a bad spec you're very unlikely to get the Web site you wanted.
Due to popular demand, Brian Kelly gave the closing presentation [19].
Ever the pragmatist Brian's presentation was titled Externally hosted Web services and focused on a range of Web services which can be used for little or no cost and which require minimal technical support.
He argued that public library web managers simply may not have the resources available to set up and develop complicated interactive services.
He highlighted how some interactive services (such as online votes) are provided for free online and can be easily integrated in public library web sites.
However, he also pointed out that using such services means giving up a degree of control and having to hope that the service remains reliable and free!
Conclusions 'This was perfect, it covered all the key elements I wanted covered'.
'This was one of the best courses I've attended.
Content was excellent'.
'Ideal coverage for my current needs'.
The above comments have been taken from the feedback forms for the workshop.
Admittedly the workshop was very intensive with an awful lot of new ideas and information being presented in a short space of time.
However, the delegates seemed to thrive on this information barrage and debate was always lively both in the sessions and in the coffee breaks and evening events.
For many public library web officers maintaining the library web site is a rather solitary experience.
Often the web site is seen as the responsibility of one person only and so they seldom have the opportunity to bounce ideas off other people or share experiences.
One of the most pleasing outcomes of the workshop was the sense of community it developed among the delegates as they relished the opportunity to share ideas, expertise and plans for the futures of their web sites.
Thanks I would like to give thanks to every one who was involved with the planning and running of the workshop.
Special thanks must go to all the speakers who obviously spent so much time and effort putting together such excellent presentations.
Finally special thanks must go to Joy Fraser and Birgit Kongialis, UKOLN's events organising team, who made sure everyone knew what they were doing, where they were staying and when they should be there!
References Running a Public Library Web Site 1999 workshop Web sites http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/running/ Managing the Virtual Branch 2000 workshop web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/ The Public Library Web Site 2003.
Presentation by Sarah Ormes http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/ormes/ Government Web Guidelines.
Presentation by Paul Miller http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/miller/ Euroguide.
Presentation by Joanna Clark http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/clark/ Promoting Books Online.
Presentation by Helen Wood http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/wood/ Developing a WAP enabled Site.
Presentation by Don Yuile http://website.lineone.net/~literary/ Making Your Site More Dynamic.
Presentation by Andy Powell http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/powell/ The Public Library as a Gateway to the Internet.
Presentation by Justine Kitchen http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/kitchen/ Accessibility and Your Web Site.
Presentation by David Egan and Joanne Widdows http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/egan/ Data Protection and Your Web Site.
Presentation by Adrian Tribe http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/tribe/ Hands On Guide to Working with Stylesheets.
Facilitated by Manjula Patel http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/patel/ Developing an Online Magazine.
Facilitated by Marieke Napier http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/isg/events/library-2000/magazine/ The Career Development of a Web Officer.
Facilitated by Peter Griffiths http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/griffiths/ Auditing and Evaluating Web Sites.
Facilitated by Brian Kelly http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/pub-lib-2000/workshop/ Publicising Your Web Site with Search Engines.
Presentation by Marieke Napier http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/isg/events/library-2000/search/ Behind the Scenes a Guide to Web Site Infrastructure.
Presentation by Pete Cliff http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/cliff/ Commissioning a Web Site.
Presentation by Martin Belcher http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/belcher/ Externally Hosted Web Services.
Presentation by Brian Kelly http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/pub-lib-2000/ Author Details   Sarah Ormes Public Libraries Focus   Article Title: "Report on 'Managing the Virtual Branch: Public Library Web Managers Workshop 2000'" Author: Sarah Ormes Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/pub-libs/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: Social Science Case Studies Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Social Science Case Studies Buzz udc url research Citation BibTex RIS Dave Boyd provides an update on SOSIG’s involvement in the new RDN FE case studies project, and on developments within the Geography and Environmental Sciences subject sections.
The RDN has recently launched a set of case studies aimed at supporting the use of the Internet for further education.
The project was led by staff at Biz/ed based at The Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT).
It started in February 2002 and was completed in October this year.
The project has resulted in the publication of 106 practical examples that describe the way in which RDN Internet resources can be used to help lecturers in the delivery of particular courses.
The case studies have been prepared by practitioners from the further education (FE) sector and cover a wide range of subjects and courses.
SOSIG staff assisted the FE representatives in the preparation of their case studies in the social sciences.
In total, thirteen ‘social science’ case studies have been produced, for Business (GNVQ); Sociology (AS/A2 level); Psychology (‘A’ level) and Economics (‘A’ level).
Each of the thirteen social science case studies is derived from Internet resources on SOSIG, or resources linked to by SOSIG.
The development of the case studies is intended to illustrate how lecturers can easily integrate Internet resources into their courses and aims to encourage more teachers to use the RDN and the subject hubs.
Specific examples of social science case studies include ‘Diagnosis and treatment of a mental disorder’ which takes the Internet Mental Health resource [1] as a starting point.
This case study involves a learning activity that demonstrates to students the problematic nature of defining atypical behaviour and how a range of treatments and therapies can be described.
The aim is to provide students with an introduction to key conceptual and methodological issues in the subject area.
The case study was written by Brian Lambourne, a lecturer in psychology at Boston College in Lincolnshire.
Brian also developed a case study that explores how cognitive psychologists are able to use models, and design research to make inferences about cognitive processes.
The practical study utilises an online ‘lab experiment’ developed at the University of Mississippi [2].
Written by Peter Rouncefield, a sociology lecturer from the City of Bristol College, ‘Crime and Deviance’ explores issues surrounding contemporary crime theory.
Peter’s study uses as a basis for discussion and learning a UK Home Office Police Research Group paper entitled ‘Opportunity makes the thief: practical theory for crime prevention’ [3].
All the case studies, and further information about the project can be viewed at http://www.rdn.ac.uk/casestudies/ Update on the SOSIG Geography and Environmental Sciences sections Geography and environmental sciences are unique subjects, subjects that explore the relationships and interactions between people and places.
Though unique, many of the issues pertinent to these subjects are of an interdisciplinary nature that requires inclusion and input from social scientists across a wide range of fields.
Many topical geographical and environmental issues reflect growing areas of study in the social sciences, e.g., globalisation, migration studies, citizenship, identity and community, global awareness, sustainability, and environmental education.
Issue 30 of Ariadne (December 2001) included news of forthcoming changes to the Geography and Environmental Sciences sections of SOSIG.
In the past year these changes have been implemented and are now beginning to take shape on the site.
Visitors to SOSIG will notice that the two subject sections have been significantly restructured and expanded.
In part this is due to a collaborative venture that has involved SOSIG contributing a substantial number of resources to the new RDN Geography and Environment hub (GESource) that is due to be launched early next year.
During this process, and with renewed effort SOSIG has been able to build on its own collection of geography and environment resources that are of particular interest to social scientists.
The two sections alone now direct users to over 1000 high quality resources in the field.
Within the structure of the existing classification scheme (UDC), several sub-divisions have recently been introduced.
Users may now browse and search for resources in a wide range of areas that include, urban growth and urbanisation, political geography, regional geography, sustainable development, global warming, and green issues.
It is hoped that the restructuring process will better reflect growth areas of study.
The process of building up the two sections continues.
Interested parties may like to participate.
SOSIG greatly values input from its user community.
To that end SOSIG provides an online form [4] where users are welcome to contribute high quality Internet resources they feel would usefully complement the collection.
For more information contact Dave Boyd at the address below.
References [1].
‘Internet for Mental Health’ can be found at URL:<http://www.mentalhealth.com/p.html> [2].
‘PsychExperiments’ can be found at: URL: <http://www.psy.ed.ac.uk/psychexps/Exps/labexperiments.htm> [3].
‘Opportunity makes the thief: practical theory for crime prevention’ can be found at: URL: <http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/prgpubs/fprs98.pdf> [4].
‘Add a new resource to SOSIG’, the form can be found at: URL: <http://www.sosig.ac.uk/new_resource.html> Author Details Dave Boyd (SOSIG Research Officer) Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: d.j.boyd@bristol.ac.uk Article Title: “Planet SOSIG Social Science Case Studies” Author: Dave Boyd Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Information Society A Study of Continuity and Change Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Information Society A Study of Continuity and Change Buzz data database infrastructure copyright soap foi Citation BibTex RIS Lise Foster finds this a useful scene setter for the novice and valuable reminder for the professional of the challenges facing today's librarian.
In 2000, John Feather concluded the 3rd edition certain that libraries would endure as concrete entities due to the investment of time and money they represent and as bookstores.
In this latest edition he is no longer sure, describing the library as no longer a location, but a concept and asking such tough questions as what place do librarians occupy in the context of these new developments and what challenges to our fundamental attitudes and skills must we overcome as we adapt to changing times.
An alternative subtitle for this book could well be 'A brief history of everything' as within its 220 pages it covers topics as wide ranging as cave paintings, cuneiform, the invention of zero, third world economies, new information technologies, the printing press, globalisation and copyright together with a brief overview of freedom of information, data protection and the field of records management.
Intended primarily for students of library and information studies, this book is also a useful overview for the established professional as it encourages us all to take a step back from our everyday concerns and take a look at the society in which we work and how traditional librarianship is evolving.
The book is divided in to 4 main sections: The historical dimension The economic dimension The political dimension The information profession The first section puts the enormous developments of the last 25 years into perspective.
Though the mass media and the Internet have changed our society in permanent and profound ways, the development of the alphabet and invention of the printing press were, in their time, no less momentous.
All are responses to the fundamental need of human societies to record, store and disseminate information, so any examination of the 'information society' is right to examine this need and the means we have found to express it, rather than become fixated on charting developments in computing.
The author says 'In essence, this book is to provoke thought rather than merely convey fact' and although many facts are certainly conveyed in this whistle-stop tour of civilisation, there are many interesting considerations.
John Feather likens the alphabet to the computer in its flexibility and ability to transmit information across time and in different languages.
This initial development then led to the printing press, which brought about the first information explosion where for the first time ideas, facts and propaganda could be transmitted relatively cheaply and to anyone with the skills of literacy.
Although confined to ideas, which could be expressed in verbal form, the press was then complemented by cinema, radio and television.
It's worth remembering that, amid all the concern over the quality and pervasiveness of information available over the Internet, the broadcast media still reach the most people and inform most opinion.
The historical inaccuracies of films such as U-571and Braveheart arguably have greater impact through the cinematic medium than if they were found on the Internet.
It is too easy to fall into the trap of becoming too focussed on the computer as transmitter of information.
In part 2 : the economic dimension, the author visits the commercial background to the publishing industry and examines information as a commodity which can be expensive to produce and supply.
The different concepts of multi-user resources such as a single copy of a printed book, compared to restricted use of licensed databases, and the solidarity and endurance of print compared to the impermanence of electronic resources are discussed in turn, including how the processes involved in the traditional publishing industry have been applied and adapted in e-publishing.
Feather also mentions the global conglomerates such as Reed Elsevier, Time Warner and, the biggest behemoth of all, Murdoch's News Corporation, and points out how these companies quite often contain 'a multitude of competing and complementary sectors' within themselves.
He also exposes oddities such as the long endurance of the Net Book Agreement on the grounds that diversity of opinion would be stifled by competition, while the same concern was not extended to newspaper publishing, where the he suggests the spectrum of opinion available has narrowed as titles have merged or folded.
He then links the Net Book Agreement to a timely consideration of the BBC's charter during its current renewal and consultation period.
Describing the public library as an 'icon of civilised society' does not prevent him from recognising them as huge customers of the commercial book trade and leads him to return to the emerging theme of this book the way libraries are changing from providers of a service to buyers, sellers and facilitators of information.
He also points out that a workable World Wide Web was only developed in 1991.
In the early days of this new technology, as before in printing and written representations of language, there is bound to be a period of anarchy and uncertainty until new patterns of production and use emerge and become established.
In dealing with the new technologies, it is important to keep an eye on the longer-term historical perspective and recognise we are by no means 'there' yet wherever 'there' may turn out to be.
The process of peer review and scholarly publishing is one area still slow to adapt to the new environment and the reasons for this are explored, as well as recognising that we are now dealing with an environment in which it is fast becoming as impossible to lack basic IT skills as it is to be illiterate in the traditional sense.
The new technologies have extended the potential for access to information but are also the means of restricting access to those lacking the equipment or the skills.
These ideas lead neatly into part 3 : the political dimension in which the John Feather discusses globalisation and the many different ways in which societies can be information-poor from the developing world handicapped by poverty and limited infrastructure, to the developed world where people actively choose to be more informed about the lives of soap stars than current affairs.
The concept of information overload is also touched on, with the interesting thought that some US journalists have complained that the sheer amount of information made freely available by their government is in itself a way of obscuring awkward facts from general scrutiny.
This section also deals with the wealth of detailed information the state maintains from tax returns to health to census information and the laws which control its use, and usefully contrasts the British approach with that of other countries and legal codes.
In part 4 : the information profession, the author moves on to what all this means for us the professionals in the workplace.
The central question here is what purpose does a librarian serve when so many of our users can now tune in or log on without our involvement.
Perhaps 'librarian' is now a subset of 'information professional' rather than simply a different label.
Certainly the profession has shifted to be a more service oriented activity providing information services, rather than the former 'custodian' role.
Increasingly we are becoming managers, trainers and facilitators rather than providers as librarians respond to the widespread need for the information searching and management skills which used to define the profession.
Ten years ago, when I started my first post, when a colleague went online it was a nerverackingly tense operation due to the pressure to get relevant results as quickly and therefore as cheaply as possible.
Nowadays, with easier search interfaces and bills based on information retrieved rather than time spent online, searching is increasingly coming within the grasp of everyone, with the librarian moving into the role of facilitator, trainer or advisor.
Finally, Feather discusses the roles of archivist and records manager, both of whom have been forced to confront changing technologies at an earlier stage as they deal with the need to ensure stored materials remain accessible.
This is necessarily a very general book but well written and extremely useful to any student of information, at any stage of their career.
For those wanting to explore the topics covered in more depth, there is a short section of suggested further reading.
Author Details Lise Foster E Services & Systems Manager Perry Library London South Bank University 250 Southwark Bridge Road London SE1 6NJ Tel: 020 7815 6610 Email: fosterlj@lsbu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lisa.lsbu.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: The Information Society A Study of Continuity and Change" Author: Lise Foster Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/foster-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cartoon Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cartoon Buzz e-learning ebook jpg Citation BibTex RIS New cartoon work by Malcolm Campbell.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Information Environment Service Registry: Promoting the Use of Electronic Resources Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Information Environment Service Registry: Promoting the Use of Electronic Resources Buzz data html rss xml portal archives metadata identifier schema repositories copyright oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 purl rslp openurl wsdl srw licence e-science url research Citation BibTex RIS Amanda Hill outlines progress on the Information Environment Service Registry Project and explains what it will mean for service providers and portal developers.
The last ten years have seen a huge investment in the creation of electronic resources for use by researchers, students and teachers.
Increasing amounts of money are being spent now on providing portals and virtual learning environments (or learning management systems) for use within institutions and organisations, or for people focusing on particular subject areas.
A portal is defined by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as " a network service that brings together content from diverse distributed resources using technologies such as cross searching, harvesting, and alerting, and collates this into an amalgamated form for presentation to the user."
[1] It follows from this definition that portal developers need to have knowledge of the electronic resources (or collections) that are available for their users.
In order to provide cross-searching, harvesting and alerting functions, the portals also need to have information about the electronic entry points to those resources.
The Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) has been developed (with funding from the JISC) to provide a central source of information about many of these electronic resources and the ways in which they can be accessed.
The important difference between the IESR and other online directories is that the IESR is primarily being designed to be accessed by other applications; as a machine-to-machine service, rather than simply as a Web interface for human users.
The aim is that portals and other services will be able to use the registry as a source of information about which collections are available, and also as a means of providing direct access to those collections; either to their Web pages or through any machine-to-machine services that may be supported by the resources (for example, a Z39.50 search interface or a metadata harvesting protocol).
Designing the Service Registry Work on creating the IESR began in November 2002 and the project is now in its second phase (due to end in February 2005).
Much time was spent in the first phase of the project in determining the structure of the XML metadata which would be needed for the registry.
The IESR describes three different entities: collections, services (which provide access to the collections) and agents (organisations which own the collections and/or administer the services).
These entities are represented in the diagram below: Figure 1: IESR Entities and their Relationships The IESR is also able to describe transactional services, i.e.
those which do not have an associated collection.
One example of such a service would be an institution's OpenURL resolver, which passes information, such as bibliographic details about a journal article, from one application to another in order to locate a copy of the item through a local subscription.
In the IESR a transactional service is linked only to the agent which administers the service.
The metadata used to describe these entities was developed during 2003.
The project team includes staff from UKOLN, the Cheshire development team at the University of Liverpool, and MIMAS, who between them had accumulated a good range of experience in the fields of metadata design, collection description and providing access to electronic resources.
This combination of experience has proved invaluable for the project.
Input from the project's stakeholder community was also very important, as explained in Verity Brack and Amanda Closier's article in issue 36 of Ariadne [2].
The IESR metadata for each of its entities is described in the following section.
Further detail, including the IESR Application Profile and additional examples, is available in the Metadata section of the IESR Web site [3].
Collection Descriptions The IESR collection information is based on the RSLP (Research Support Libraries Programme) collection description schema and describes the electronic resource.
The mandatory fields are shown as bold in the table below.
Administrative metadata relating to the creation of the IESR entry is not shown.
The example given shows extracts from the collection description for zetoc.
All entities within the IESR are allocated a unique reference, using a PURL-based Object Identifier [4].
Screenshot of Extract from Table 1: IESR Collection properties There are three fields in the collection description relating to rights: Rights, Use Rights and Access Rights.
Rights (dc:rights) is a statement about the ownership of copyright in the collection.
Use Rights (iesr:useRights) defines the allowed use of data from the collection, while Access Rights determines who can actually get to the collection in the first place.
The IESR metadata itself is made available under a Creative Commons licence [5].
This is set in one of the administrative metadata fields with a fixed value of: <dc:rights xsi:type="dcterms:URI">http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/</dc:rights> This means that all the metadata within the Service Registry can be copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, but that attribution must be given to the original author.
Service Descriptions Each IESR collection description is associated with at least one service description, which holds information about a method of accessing the collection.
The RSLP Locator property is used to identify the access point as a URL.
This is sufficient information for access to some types of service: an OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) repository for example, but more information is required for other methods of access.
So in the description for a Web Service, the 'Interface' property is used to point to the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file, which contains information on how other applications can interact with the service.
The table below shows the metadata associated with a service description, again using zetoc as an example and excluding the administrative information about the creation of the description.
In this case it is the Z39.50 interface to zetoc that is being described.
Screenshot of Extract from Table 2: IESR Service Properties   Agents Agents are the owners of collections and the administrators of the services which provide access to the collections.
The mandatory information recorded about agents includes their name and e-mail address.
In the future these contact details may be used to alert administrators in the event that their services are unavailable for a significant period of time, or to trigger a reminder to check the currency of the IESR's information about a service or collection.
Screenshot of Extract from Table 3: IESR Agent Properties Using the Information in the IESR In conducting research among the stakeholder community, there was an encouraging response to the question 'Would you make use of the IESR?
', with 83% of stakeholders indicating that they would.
A major challenge for the project team now is to convert that theoretical willingness into real use of the registry.
One important factor in this process is the provision of as many routes as possible to the data within the registry.
The IESR is currently (June 2004) available through Web and Z39.50 interfaces.
The Web interface is most likely to be used by contributors to the IESR as a means of checking their descriptions [6].
Z39.50 access allows other services and applications to access the IESR metadata in various formats: these are described on the Z39.50 access page of the IESR Web site [7].
Key tasks for the current phase of the project are to extend the methods of access to the registry by making the data available through OAI-PMH and via a SRW (Search and Retrieve Web Service) interface.
It is thought that the principal users of the Service Registry's information will initially be the portals described above, using the service as a means of obtaining information about resources and the ways in which they can be accessed.
For resources that support machine-to-machine interaction, portals will be able to provide cross-searching facilities using the information within the IESR.
By providing access to a central registry, there should be less work involved for the developers of portals in keeping information about these key resources up to date.
Content of the IESR The records in the registry were supplied in the first phase of the project by six JISC service providers: AHDS, EDINA, MIMAS, RDN, UK Data Archive, UK Mirror Service.
In all, 250 collection descriptions were submitted with their associated service descriptions and metadata about agents.
To create the descriptions, the data providers had the option of completing XML templates or Excel spreadsheets.
The spreadsheet data was converted into XML at MIMAS and then loaded into the Service Registry.
One of the priorities for the current phase of the project is to make the submission and alteration of data more straightforward for all involved, by providing a Web form for entering and editing IESR metadata.
Quality control is an important part of the data submission process.
A certain amount of data checking is built into the process of loading data into the Service Registry: ensuring that mandatory fields have been completed, for example.
The project team's Content Manager also performs a manual check on the data, to ensure that it is as consistent as possible.
Particular attention is paid to potentially problematic areas such as subject headings.
His liaison with data contributors is extremely important, as experience in other projects has shown that a collaborative approach to compiling metadata is the best way to produce accurate and complete information about resources.
A recent paper by Jane Barton, Sarah Currier and Jessie Hey provides a useful analysis of this area of work [8].
The IESR aims to be a catalogue of the high-quality resources available within the JISC's Information Environment, and beyond.
'Beyond' in this context may include the resources owned and administered by other public bodies, such as those represented on the Common Information Environment Group [9].
Membership of the group includes representatives from Becta, the British Library, the e-Science Core Programme, the JISC, MLA (the Council for Museums, Libraries and Archives), the National Archives, the National Health Service and the UK Government.
The CIE initiative is aiming to encourage collaboration in the provision of digital content by a range of UK organisations.
More information about it can be found in Paul Miller's Ariadne article of April 2004 [10].
The IESR could hold information about the services provided by the organisations represented in the CIE group.
Although the IESR has a machine-to-machine focus, the majority of the resources currently described within it are accessible only through Web pages.
The access methods described by the service descriptions within the service in June 2004 break down in the following manner: Web pages 91% Z39.50 6% Web cgi 1% OAI <1% OpenURL <1% RSS <1% Table 4: Proportion of Different Service Types Described in the IESR, June 2004 The expectation is that these proportions will change as the technology of Web services becomes more widely adopted and increasing numbers of resources are made available through machine-to-machine methods.
Tracy Gardner gave an introduction to Web services in an Ariadne article [11], while Andy Powell's 'Five step guide to becoming a content provider in the JISC Information Environment' gives a good overview of the other ways in which administrators can make the content of their collections more accessible to other services [12].
Conclusion In some ways the IESR is a service that is being designed for the way that things will be in the near future, rather than the way that things are right now.
Machine-to-machine interfaces have been relatively rare outside of the world of library OPACs, but this is beginning to change, particularly with the push towards providing institutional repositories of learning materials and e-prints.
The IESR should make it possible for other services to provide some reliable answers to the questions like 'What is the best place to look for learning objects about landscape gardening?'
or 'Which resources provide RSS feeds related to physical geography?'.
It may also encourage more service providers to look at alternative ways of presenting their content, to ensure the widest possible availability and use of their resources.
Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge that it would not have been possible to write this article without building on the work of other members of the IESR team, particularly that of Ann Apps, Pete Johnston and Leigh Morris.
References JISC Portals FAQ at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=ie_portalsfaq Brack, V. and Closier, A., "Developing the JISC Information Environment Service Registry", Ariadne 36, July 2003, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/jisciesr/ IESR Metadata: http://www.iesr.ac.uk/metadata/ Powell, A., Young, J. and Hickey, T., "The PURL-based Object Identifier (POI)", 2003, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/poi/ Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/ The Web interface to the service registry is at http://www.iesr.ac.uk/registry/ Details of Z39.50 access to the IESR are at: http://iesr.ac.uk/registry/docs/iesrZ3950.html Barton, J; Currier, S & Hey, J (2003) Building Quality Assurance into Metadata Creation: an Analysis based on the Learning Objects and e-Prints Communities of Practice, DC-2003, http://www.siderean.com/dc2003/201_paper60.pdf The CIE pages can be found at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=wg_cie_home Miller, P., "Towards the Digital Aquifer: introducing the Common Information Environment", Ariadne 39, April 2004, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/miller/ Gardner, T., "An Introduction to Web Services", Ariadne 29, October 2001 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/gardner/ Powell, A., "5 step guide to becoming a content provider in the JISC Information Environment", Ariadne 33, September-October 2002, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/info-environment/ Author Details Amanda Hill Project Manager MIMAS University of Manchester Email: amanda.hill@man.ac.uk Web site: http://www.mimas.ac.uk/staffpages/amanda_hill.html Return to top Article Title: "The Information Environment Service Registry: Promoting the use of electronic resources" Author: Amanda Hill Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/hill/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata Wanted for the Evanescent Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata Wanted for the Evanescent Library Buzz data software rdf framework database xml infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus vocabularies namespace schema copyright preservation cataloguing multimedia visualisation marc e-learning unicode ontologies owl uri lom uddi dcmi e-science interoperability url taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl reports on Schemas and Ontologies: Building a Semantic Infrastructure for the GRID and Digital Libraries: a one-day workshop at the e-Science Institute, May 2003.
This event was organised jointly by UKOLN and the National e-Science Centre (NESC) [1].
Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, gave the introduction, reminding us that this was the second UKOLN-NESC workshop.
The first happened about a year ago, bringing together the digital library and Grid computing communities for the first time.
The presentations were as follows: Building a Semantic Infrastructure David De Roure Why Ontologies?
Jeremy Rogers Publishing and Sharing Schemas Rachel Heery and Pete Johnston Implementing Ontologies in (my)Grid Environments Carole Goble Knowledge Organisation Systems Doug Tudhope Concluding Remarks Carole Goble Building a Semantic Infrastructure In his introductory talk, Building a Semantic Infrastructure, Professor David De Roure of the University of Southampton, provided a history lesson at a gallop on the Grid and the Semantic Web.
He began by attempting to dispel the myth that the Grid is all about huge amounts of data, high bandwidth and high performance computing.
This is no longer true.
Science is a ‘team sport’, and the Grid facilitates this.
What the Grid is really about is resource sharing and coordinated problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organisations.
He referred to the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
The old problem was lots of different computers; the new problem is lots of resources of various types.
The holy grail is semantic interoperability, and the domain is not only research, but encompasses e-learning also.
Professor De Roure quoted Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web: ‘The Semantic Web will be a space in which data can be processed by automated tools as well as people.’ He presented a 7-layer architecture of the Semantic Web: Trust Proof Logic Ontology Vocabulary RDF XML + Namespace URI/Unicode He then went on to spend some time describing OWL (‘Web Ontology Language’, which spells OWL, he reminded us, in the same way that Owl in Winnie the Pooh spelt his own name).
He posed two critical questions: 1.
Where will the metadata come from?
2.
Where will the ontologies come from?
The answer must involve collaboration between the digital library and knowledge representation communities.
Moving on to the Semantic Grid, the core problem was quoted as being the need for flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources.
Metadata is crucial to the Semantic Grid.
He went on to present a useful diagram showing the Semantic Grid as being both highly based in computation and highly dependent on semantic technologies.
Figure 1: Convergence of Grid and Web Web and Grid convergence is now the leading edge of the discourse.
He concluded by saying that the goal is to accelerate the scientific process and not just scientific computation: this is the reward which will motivate the Semantic Grid.
Why Ontologies?
Dr Jeremy Rogers of the University of Manchester then gave an excellent presentation from the perspective of medical informatics, on the topic Why Ontologies?
His e-Science project is called CLEF [2]), which has the goal of extracting text from clinicians’ descriptions of patient cases, and using ontologies to make deductions from these.
He began by describing the differences between quantitative and qualitative data, giving examples from medicine.
The history of description in medicine is approximately 400 years old.
A publication called the London Bills of Mortality appeared every Thursday from 1603 until the 1830s.
In the 1860s, William Farr took these Bills and attempted to regularise them, which in time became the International Classification of Diseases.
Librarians entered the picture in 1900 with MeSH, and Elsevier arrived with EmBase in the 1950s.
There are now many different medical classifications, and many projects trying to address the problems with them.
Two of the largest and most comprehensive schemes are SNOMED and UMLS (which has 1.8m different medical concepts).
To illustrate the rate at which descriptions of diseases and conditions are growing, Jeremy informed us that between 1972 and 1999 the number of possible descriptions of pedal cycle accidents grew from 8 to over 900.
We are good at measuring and describing things in a simple way, but not at the capture, integration and presentation of descriptive information.
He described how case notes could be marked up differently by different GPs using the same scheme (XML).
Computers have therefore been unable to help, because they are built by people for interpretation by people.
Hierarchies (borrowed from librarianship) cannot easily be computed, and terms cannot be understood by machines.
The solution is formal ontologies (‘Let the electronic brain take the strain’) which can be used as the basis for inference and synthesis.
In a list of caveats, he counselled that logic however will not cure all ills.
There are ‘ontological bear traps’ (e.g.
‘bladder’ is an ambiguous term).
Rigour of build is no guarantee of rigour in use.
He concluded by saying that there is a need to describe the world, which is very different from measuring it.
Publishing and Sharing Schemas Rachel Heery of UKOLN spoke on Publishing and Sharing Schemas.
She began by explaining that the motivation for looking at registries is the proliferation of metadata schemas, and provided some helpful definitions in an area where terminology is not yet clearly understood, at least by librarians.
She gave a description of a schema as ‘a structured representation that defines and identifies the data elements in an element set.’ A schema provides an authoritative declaration of semantics, and defines the formal representation (RDF or other language).
An element set is ‘a coherent bounded set of elements (terms) formulated as a basis for metadata creation.’ Both MARC and IEEE LOM are element sets.
An application profile is ‘an element set optimised for a particular local application.’ There are a large number of DC application profiles.
Application profiles may use elements from different element sets.
Schemas are generated from digital libraries, open archives, enterprise portals, e-commerce, e-science, rights and conditions of use, etc.
There is a need in all of these to facilitate data exchange, share and reuse metadata, and use common tools, while allowing for extensibility and localisation.
Her project has been seeking to encourage ‘declaring and sharing’ of data elements, element sets and application profiles.
The initial focus has been on navigation, supporting schema evolution, providing mappings and annotations.
Users might be software (e.g.
metadata editors, validators or conversion tools) or humans.
Registries may be distinguished by their collection policies.
Design choices have to be made (e.g.
thin registries containing links, and thick registries, which are databases).
Decisions need to be made on whether schemas are created centrally or in a distributed way, and whether access is by humans or software.
Also, the decision must be made whether the registry is a shared collaborative web tool, or a web service.
In the digital library world there are three well-known registries: DESIRE registry (SCHEMAS Registry, sharing schemas and application profiles) MetaForm (database of DC crosswalks, based in the University Library at Göttingen) DCMI Registry (authoritative specification of DC current element sets, hosted by OCLC) The Metadata for Education Group (MEG) has a JISC/BECTa-funded project to provide an interactive environment for schema registration.
Metadata schema registries are just part of wider work going on in registry creation at present.
Two other examples which Rachel gave are the national Health Information Knowledgebase in Australia, and the US Environment Protection Agency’s Environmental Data Registry.
There is also the xml.org registry, which offers a central clearinghouse for developers and standards bodies to submit, publish and exchange XML schemas, vocabularies and related documents.
Rachel then went on to consider how this relates to ontologies.
Simple ontologies have been described as having three distinct properties: Finite controlled (extensible) language Unambiguous interpretation of classes and term relationships Strict hierarchical subclass relationships between classes Her conclusion was that there are commonalities between metadata and ontology initiatives.
However, the scale and complexity is different.
Ontologies focus on semantic relationships and the delineation of knowledge space, whereas metadata schemas concentrate on descriptions and on instantiations of objects.
Her UKOLN colleague Pete Johnston continued Rachel’s theme, describing how the MEG registry tool works.
It reads machine-readable descriptions of metadata vocabularies, indexes them and provides browse/search interfaces for humans and software.
The registry data model is a simplification of complexity, providing a basis for comparison.
It is based on the DC ‘grammatical principles’, subsuming elements, element refinements and encoding schemas.
It is also based on application profiles, which give rules for how elements are used.
This is very useful work in formalising the work going on internationally in metadata use.
It also seeks to encourage the re-use of existing element sets, rather than the creation of new ones.
He showed how application profiles can be created simply by means of a ‘drag & drop’ tool.
Implementing Ontologies in (my)Grid Environments Professor Carole Goble of the University of Manchester gave a presentation on Implementing Ontologies in (my)Grid Environments.
Her opening statement gave heart to the librarians present: ‘The Grid is metadata-driven middleware’.
Ontologies are prevalent and pervasive for carrying semantics.
What can the Grid offer as a mechanism for ontology and schema delivery services?
The Grid now seeks to empower the user or a process to discover and orchestrate Grid-enabled resources as required.
This implies cataloguing and indexing available resources using agreed vocabularies but what is being described is not documents, but software components and data fragments.
The Library which the Grid community recognises is evanescent: ‘the library is now an arbitrary and disappearing set of fragmentary resources.’ The metadata requirement is not simply content (as librarians would understand a requirement for cataloguing metadata), but also for its frameworks the schemas and ontologies which must populate the digital order.
However, the Library is still required to manage the permanent resources for which it already has the metadata maps: ‘In the end, biologists go and read a whole load of papers.’ Using the example of biologists whose experiments are increasingly done in silico, she made the observation that Grid work is data-intensive, not compute-intensive.
Experiments on the Grid have a life cycle which begins with forming experiments and moves through executing and managing them to providing services for discovering and reusing experiments and resources.
The architecture for this is essentially service-based.
Services have to be found, match-made, deregistered, linked together, organised, run and executed.
This architecture gives rise to a whole range of metadata problems: there is a need for shared schemas and registries.
The underlying technology is Web Services-based, and the services belong not to myGrid, but to the world, and are registered in service registries, expressed in RDF-based UDDI.
The descriptions are of the services at the atomic level, of third-party annotations of services, of quality of service and ownership.
Registries must be able to answer questions such as ‘What services perform a specific kind of task?
What services produce this kind of data?
What services consume this kind of data?’.
Things are described by their properties, and the classification is then assigned by the inference engine.
‘In the Grid we end up with tiers of abstraction for describing services.’ The world is also one of multiple data types conceptual types, plumbing syntax, biological data formats, MIME types etc.
all of which have to be associated.
Knowledge Organisation Systems Dr Doug Tudhope of the University of Glamorgan described Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS).
He classified KOS under three types: term lists (e.g.
authority files, gazetteers, dictionaries, glossaries), classification and categorisation tools (e.g.
Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal) and relationship schemes (e.g.
thesauri).
Ontologies, and semantic networks, were considered to be relationship schemes.
Thesauri employ three standard relationships between concepts: equivalence, hierarchical and associative, whereas ontologies employ higher-level conceptualisation, defining relationships formally and deploying inference rules and role definitions.
The KOS legacy is large multilingual vocabularies, indexed multimedia collections and scientific taxonomy initiatives.
They have been created on the basis of peer review, and by following standards, but they are losing value in the digital world because they cannot explicitly represent semantic structure.
Semantic Web technologies now afford an opportunity to formalise and enrich KOS systems.
There are some projects now in existence, for example, to represent KOS in RDF/XML, and the NKOS Registry is a draft proposal for KOS-level metadata, based on Dublin Core.
These initiatives give rise to the possibility of cross-mapping between different KOS systems, such as is being explored in the Renardus Project.
He went on to discuss the research issues faced by KOS.
What services for digital libraries and the Semantic Grid may be built on them?
Can traditional library-faceted classification techniques and knowledge representation foundational concepts be made into complementary approaches?
The UK Classification Group has recently extended Ranganathan’s set of five fundamental categories to: entity, part, property, material, process, operation, product, agent, space and time.
These are now used as the basis for several industrial KOS.
The difficulty, however, is that the synthesis rules for facet combination lack formal expression.
However, in the ontology world, foundational concepts and relations employ similar fundamental categories, logically expressed and axiomatised, and there is potential there for faceted classification and ontologies to join forces in creating new automated means of representing knowledge.
There is work in progress at present to link Digital Library entities (collections, objects and services) to KOS entities (concepts, labels and relationships).
Visualisation tools are also being built which can use the rich semantics embedded in KOS.
Thesaurus and gazetteer protocols are emerging, with services such as ‘download all terms’, ‘query’ for matching terms, ‘get-broader’ and ‘get-narrower’ hierarchical searching.
Doug then presented a possible KOS-based terminology server for the JISC Information Environment.
In order to make full use of machine techniques, it is also necessary to rationalise indexing practices.
Doug suggested that the KOS registry should include indexing praxis in an attempt to make indexing practice more explicit.
Conclusions In her conclusion, Professor Carol Goble stated that, since the Grid is fundamentally metadata-driven, the digital library community is at its centre.
There is no doubting the value of ontologies, but their development is expensive: we need both to invest in them and to curate them.
There is a need for an internationally coordinated approach, in order to provide mappings between community ontologies.
One solution which might provide rapid progress would be the ability of machines to build ontologies.
Could the Grid deliver us schema and ontology services, rather than simply taking them from our communities?
This may be the right moment to press for this, since the Grid architecture is being redefined in terms of services.
Digital librarians are now required to codify the semantics of the digital order.
The world of schemas and ontologies presents information science with perhaps its greatest challenge since the classification schemes and cataloguing standards developments of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I found this a fascinating meeting, in which two quite different communities, newly discovering common ground, strove to understand the differences between their views of the world, which emerged in several places.
For example, both communities mean something quite different by the concept of an index.
Another term which means different things within the distinct communities is ‘services’.
These orthogonalities proved the need for the communities to remain in close dialogue with each other.
The knowledge representation community also revealed that they had tools for building knowledge models which the digital library community would value, but do not normally see themselves as using.
Does a key difference lie in the approach to building knowledge representations?
Librarians generally adopt the schemes of forerunners (who are information scientists rather than librarians) and apply these, rather than build them anew.
But in the digital world, they do not yet exist in many areas, so that those who describe and those who build must work in partnership.
The question was raised whether ontology development can be mandated via grant conditions, in the same way as has been mooted for digital preservation metadata.
Where communities are involved in building ontologies as teams, in a way analogous to the open source software movement, it is necessary to appoint ‘data curators’ to those teams.
Ultimately there must be sharing (and librarians think naturally of sharing and reuse, as Rachel Heery had described), otherwise ontologies are likely to vie with each other for the same territory, and an inefficient ‘survival of the fittest’ process may result.
References National e-Science Centre http://www.nesc.ac.uk/ Clinical e-Science Framework’ (CLEF) http://www.clinical-escience.org/ Author Details John MacColl Sub-Librarian (Online Services) Edinburgh University Library Email: John.MacColl@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Metadata Wanted for the Evanescent Library” Author: John MacColl Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/maccoll-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Development of Digital Libraries for Blind and Visually Impaired People Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Development of Digital Libraries for Blind and Visually Impaired People Buzz database accessibility browser cataloguing ebook url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jennie Craven reports on the IFLA/SLB conference in Washington in August 2001.
The 2001 IFLA pre-conference SLB took place in Washington with a theme of Digital Libraries for the Blind and the Culture of Learning in the Information Age [1].
Papers delivered at the 2001 conference were from a wide range of subjects relating to digital libraries for the blind.
Subject areas included meeting the educational needs of children and youth through libraries for the blind, digital library services and education, creating inclusive models of service and building small digital libraries for the blind.
This report will focus on a selection of papers looking at how the development of the Internet and web-based technologies can be used to increase information choices for people who are blind and to enhance a culture of learning in the information age.
Further details about the conference can be found on the IFLA SLB web site [2].
As a tool for the delivery of library services the Internet should offer increasing possibilities to users who are print disabled.
It should enable people to access information in a format that is appropriate to their needs, which could be in a braille or audio format, or through assistive technologies.
These may include speech output, braille output, tactile devices or even just through simple adjustments to a browser.
Despite growing technological developments, however, a paper on Future library services: developing research skills among blind students [3] reveals that only a small percentage of documents are actually made available in accessible formats.
According to Miesenberger, the availability of documents in accessible formats is the way forward for library services for print disabled users and these formats should be distributed in better ways with more emphasis on the accessibility of non-textual parts of the document such as calculations, complex structures and figures, for print-disabled students.
The paper goes on to describe the Austrian Network on Research Teaching and Service Provision for Print Disabled People (i3s3), which is an Austrian wide institute comprising five universities, most of which include the library, who co-operate in a network of distributed competencies.
The i3s3 has been working in co-operation with the University Library Graz and the Institute for German Literature Studies of the University of Innsbruck, on the Austrian Virtual Library ALO (Austrian Literature Online).
This service not only provides a standard virtual library system, but also aims to integrate blind and visually impaired students into the mainstream university by focusing on accessibility issues relating to service provision, the aim being for all Austrian universities to join the network to enhance service delivery and to enable access for all print disabled students in Austria.
The needs of blind and visually impaired users are further explored in a paper entitled Education on the job [4], which poses the question: are the services offered by the library are essential to the blind information professional?
The paper suggests that in order to increase the career opportunities for blind people there is a need for libraries for the blind to increase their collections of non-fiction and reference books and that these collections need to be provided in different formats.
Electronic formats in particular are needed and should include ‘web-based electronic text documents, links to other digital resources on the Internet and commercial licensed reference databases’ [4] so that libraries do not have to acquire all this content themselves, but should simply build links via the library web site to content that is held elsewhere.
The type of library described in Chevalier’s paper is already becoming more of a reality both in mainstream library services and in library services for the blind and examples are given in several papers.
Placing library service for the blind in the community [5], for example, describes how the Internet is used by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) library to make its national network of information available through VISUNET (which includes VisuCAT, VisuNews and VisuTEXT services).
VisuCAT is the CNIB library’s online catalogue, which not only provides users with book details but also (for registered users or institutions) facilities to request books.
Access to electronic texts are offered through the VisuTEXT service and web access to Canadian newspapers via VisuNews (also available via the telephone).
Another example is given in a paper on the Future of lifelong learning in the next generation of library services [6].
This looks at how the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress (NLS) is making use of the Internet to deliver a number of its services.
The delivery of Braille, for example, has been made available to users via the Internet since 1999 using the Web-Braille system.
The system currently has approximately 1,500 users and 3,800 titles and these numbers are growing.
Users can search the NLS catalogue for items and can limit their searches to Web-Braille titles.
In 2001 further developments to the system made braille magazines available via Web-Braille.
Integration of blind and visually impaired people into schools, universities and training centres is being considered through projects such as BrailleNet which is described in a paper on Digital document delivery for the blind in France [7].
BrailleNet looks at the potential of the Internet for digital document delivery and aims to achieve integration through the development of assistive technologies and teaching materials which are made accessible on the Web.
The delivery of adapted books to visually impaired people is further enabled through co-operation with publishers, adaptation centres and printing centres.
BrailleNet also provides advice and guidelines for web designers (based on the recommendations of the W3C/WAI) through their publication ‘Better access to the World Wide Web for blind and partially sighted people’.
This document defines what is meant by the term ‘accessible’ and then goes on to describe how to make an accessible site including examples and resources for further reading.
Despite the examples given in these papers of how Internet technology can be used to improve the delivery of services to blind and visually impaired people, it should be remembered that technological advances are not necessarily experienced world-wide.
This was addressed to some extent in a section on the need to consider low budget solutions to building digital libraries for the blind.
This section was particularly pertinent to an international conference such as IFLA, where delegates from libraries in less developed countries do not experience the technological advances enjoyed by others.
Papers in this section included advice on some simple techniques to enhance Internet use not only through accessible web design but also through simple screen enhancement features such as increasing the font size and changing the colour contrasts [8].
Consideration given to the fact that there are different levels of technical development throughout the world is just one issue which requires further exploration and understanding.
Two papers in particular brought home the fact that many countries still have a very long way to go, not only in technological terms, but terms of attitude and culture.
In One student’s experience in the developing world, a young blind student from Zimbabwe described how as a child she did not expect to receive any kind of education at all, and that her parents initially ‘could only envisage a future for me begging on the streets, since this is the usual fate of the blind’ [9].
Fortunately however, her parents wanted her to have an education and as a result of determination and support she was able to attend school and managed to receive an education which led to a scholarship in Australia.
Attitudes towards blind people in Mexico were brought to attention of delegates in a presentation on the social integration of persons with disabilities [10].
This presentation described how blind people in Mexico are generally excluded from society and certainly not expected to receive any kind of a formal education.
These problems emphasise that before technology can be considered, some fundamental attitudes regarding blind and visually impaired people still need to be overcome.
Dick Tucker of the Force Foundation in the Netherlands, reinforced this with a presentation of the achievements of many blind and visually impaired people around the world who have managed to progress and succeed in life, often with their local library being the main support mechanism.
Fortunately the experience in many countries is a more positive one, as demonstrated in papers featured in this report.
Other papers relating to the conference theme included work on how libraries for the blind are meeting the education needs of children and youth through the work of the CNIB KidsWorthy service [11].
Issues relating to digital library services and education were identified by Connaway [12] and were addressed in papers relating to the move from analogue to digital.
Kerscher’s paper on the work of the DAISY Consortium reported moves towards the integration of DAISY standards for talking books into mainstream ebook standards such as the Open eBook Forum (OeBF).
The DAISY Consortium strive to keep accessibility issues to the forefront of ebook developments and feel that ‘as long as the disability community participates in the OeBF’s activities, accessibility concerns will be honored’ [13].
Finally, creating inclusive models of service were presented in papers describing the UK experience of working towards a vision of a national service [14] and the development of partnerships between public or government agencies and non-profit organisations [15].
The final day included break-out sessions to discuss the ‘top ten issues’ relating to the conference theme.
These included Braillle and electronic text development, connecting students and information, mainstreaming library services for blind and print disabled users, and technology for users in the digital age.
The sessions involved some lively discussion and enabled delegates from around the world to share a wide range of experiences, developments and ideas.
I would like to pass on my thanks to the IIS John Campbell Trust who provided funding through the John Campbell Conference/Travel Bursary to enable me to attend the conference.
Thanks also to Steve Prine at the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress for his advice.
The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Section of Libraries for the Blind (SLB) was established in 1983 as a forum for libraries for the blind to gather and address common issues.
It is concerned with the delivery of library services to blind and other print disabled users and its main purpose is to promote national and international co-operation.
Since its establishment, IFLA SLB has held expert meetings and training events throughout Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe.
It participates in the annual IFLA conference and also in a bi-annual pre-IFLA conference for the Section.
References Digital libraries for the blind and the culture of learning in the information age, conference proceedings of the IFLA SLB Pre-Conference, Washington DC, United States of America, August 13-15 2001.
IFLA/SLB, 2001.
The IFLA SLB web site is at: http://ifla.inist.fr/VII/s31/slb.htm Miesenberger, K. Future library services: developing research skills among blind students (In: ref.1.)
Chevalier, G. Education on the job: is library service essential to the blind professional?
(In: ref.1.)
Paterson, S. Placing library service for the blind in the community.
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Sung, C. The future of lifelong learning in the next generation of library services.
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Making use of the Internet: simple techniques to consider.
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Guzman, M. The social integration of persons with disabilities in Mexico and the impact of libraries on their learning (not published in proceedings) Owen, V. From mother goose to Euripides: reading in the formative years.
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Connaway, L. S. Bringing electronic books into the digital library: identifying the issues.
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Author Details   Jenny Craven Research Fellow.
CERLIM: Centre for Research in Library and Information Management Manchester Metropolitan University UK Email: j.craven@mmu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/dic/people/jcrhome.htm Article Title: “The development of digital libraries for blind and visually impaired people” Author: Jenny Craven Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/ifla/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Libraries in China Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Libraries in China Buzz data framework portal usability infrastructure archives repositories video preservation multimedia flash wsdl e-government url research Citation BibTex RIS Liz Lyon reports on the International Digital Library Conference held in Beijing in July 2002.
I was indeed fortunate to be invited to China to speak at the International Digital Library Conference [1] in Beijing in July 2002.
The 3-day event was held at the Friendship Hotel, a large and splendid establishment built in traditional garden style and which retained some of the architectural character of times past.
The conference was sponsored by the Ministry of Culture with support from other government departments and organized by the National Library of China NLC [2].
There were a number of arranged visits including the National Library, to local university libraries and to a major IT exhibition.
The latter was held at a luxury hotel with an ultra-modern exterior, in marked contrast to the conference venue.
The trip was quite memorable with some unexpected surprises (all of them pleasant!)
and I hope I can convey some of the flavour in this short report.
China Digital Library Conference The Conference was preceded by a day of invited parallel two-hour tutorials/panels ranging from the session I presented on "Building digital libraries for the future a UK perspective" (which gave a high level overview of a broad range of activities in education, cultural heritage and e-government) to more specific themes such as knowledge management systems (Prof. Hsinchun Chen, University of Arizona), evaluating usability (Prof. Christine Borgman, UCLA) and technical challenges of multimedia content (Howard Wactlar, Vice Provost, Carnegie-Mellon).
These were all very well attended with approximately 100 delegates at each presentation.
All tutorial sessions were conducted with simultaneous translation and moderated by senior staff from the National Library.
The first day of the conference began with a formal Opening Ceremony with short speeches given by the Vice-Ministers for Culture and Education, and the Deputy Director of the National Library.
There was much flash photography by members of the local and national media which included shots of the invited speakers in the first three rows of the audience; I did wonder fleetingly if I would be appearing on Chinese TV at a later stage.
The pattern of the day was for a morning of plenary sessions followed by parallels in the afternoon and the opening plenary was chaired by Prof. Ching-Chih Chen, Simmons College, USA.
About 350 delegates listened to the keynote presentation given by Hu Quiheng who was Chief Advisor of the China Digital Library Project.
This major national initiative began in 2000 with a 5-year timeframe, building content and infrastructure based on global standards.
There is also provision for staff training with the aim of having full internet coverage in China (penetration is currently 25%).
The consortium project has 21 participating institutes with the NLC as the major implementer.
Various familiar challenges were described such as intellectual property rights and the role of commercial and public information.
In later papers, overviews of some of the associated projects were presented including Zhiang Xiaolin from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who described the Chinese National Science Digital Library.
CNSDL is being developed by 90 research institutes in 20 cities in a collaborative initiative which is learning from the experience of our own Resource Discovery Network and the National Science Digital Library in the US.
CNSDL includes both research data and tools and is based on an open framework, open services, open description and open wrapping using a web services approach.
It is still at the design stage but a 3-layer architecture was described with service registries containing descriptions in WSDL forming the core of the system.
Another interesting presentation was given by Gao Wen, also from the Chinese Academy of Sciences on the China-US Million Book Project.
The aim is to provide digitized content (50% Chinese, 50% English) from special collections and rare books and also on relevant cultural topics such as silk, tea, Ming dynasty etc.
US partners include MIT, Carnegie-Mellon and Simmonds College.
The platform being implemented is iMedia providing multi-lingual processing, news video analysis and image-based retrieval.
International speakers included Prof. Ed Fox (Virgina Tech, US) who described the NSDL and particularly CITIDEL [3] which is a repository of computing science materials and provides a content submission mechanism for authors and teachers called VIADUCT [4] and which uses the focused crawling / crawlifier [5] approach to resource discovery.
Winston Tabb (Associate Librarian, Library of Congress) spoke of the strategic role of national libraries and the digital opportunities in the 21st century.
He described a number of initiatives and referred in particular, to the need to harvest web sites selected by curators for archival purposes (implemented in a partnership agreement with the Internet Archive).
LC has focused recently on sites related to the US presidential campaign in 2000.
In a related initiative, the MINERVA [6] web capture program is designed to assist librarians and information professionals in acquiring and managing virtual collections.
In a different work area, LC in a partnership with OCLC has created Questionpoint [7], a new collaborative 24/7 online reference service ("the mortal behind the portal").
The UK was represented by Vanessa Marshall (Director, National Preservation Office) who talked about the challenges facing the British Library in order to balance the requirements for access, management and preservation of collections ("challenging dragons"), and by myself presenting a view of information architectures and emerging technologies including web services, in the final plenary session before the closing ceremony.
Visit to the National Library of China The visit to the NLC in Beijing covered a range of library activities and materials based on both print and digital technology.
The NLC is the largest national library in Asia and one of the largest in the world.
It was founded in 1909 as the Capital Library of the Qing dynasty, started to receive legal deposit items in 1916 and was renamed the National Library of China in 1998.
The tour highlight for me (as part of a small interested group), was an opportunity to see some of the original manuscripts from the caves of Dunhuang which are being studied and preserved in the International Dunhuang Project [8].
IDP partners include the British Library and the Bibliotheque nationale de France and the project is aiming to digitize the manuscript collection so that a complete virtual collection (both front and back of the manuscripts), is available online to scholars.
Impressions A few impressions to summarise the visit: China is clearly taking great steps to become a major player, not only in the digital library arena, but also in the wider world of IT.
They are very keen to collaborate with western partners and have some wonderful cultural materials and artifacts to share.
They are very aware of western trends towards a knowledge-based economy, of (e-)business developments such web services and also of emerging grid technologies, which will combine to influence our future design of digital library systems and services.
It will be certainly be interesting to watch developments in China over the coming years.
Finally on a more social note, it was a pleasure to experience the friendly hospitality in Beijing and to learn more about both the country (past and present), and its people.
References [1] Digital Library : IT Challenges and Opportunities in the New Millennium <http://www.nlc.gov.cn/dloc/index_en.htm> [2] National Library of China <http://www.nlc.gov.cn/english.htm> [3] CITIDEL <http://www.citidel.org/> [4] VIADUCT <http://citidel-dev.dlib.vt.edu/viaduct/app_user/> [5] Contains link to Crawlifier Research Report <http://elaine.dlib.vt.edu/> [6] MINERVA <http://www.loc.gov/minerva/> [7] Questionpoint <http://www.questionpoint.org/web/news/release.htm> [8] International Dunhuang Project <http://idp.bl.uk/> Author details Liz Lyon UKOLN University of Bath e.j.lyon@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Digital Libraries in China" Author: Liz Lyon Publication Date: 10-Oct-2002 Publication: Ariadne Issue 33 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/china/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Buzz database copyright adobe url Citation BibTex RIS Donald Mackay, Rod Ward and Jenny Hall provide us with the first of a series of bulletins on developments within the BIOME area of activity.
The Wellcome Trust and BIOME are pleased to announce the launch of psci-comlit, a new bibliographic database that can be found on the psci-com gateway.
The database has been developed to provide a searchable source of journal, newspaper and book references on science communication, public engagement with science and the wider issues of science in society.
Accessing psci-comlit is free of charge.
The database was created and is being continually expanded by the Wellcome Library in collaboration with the BIOME team.
Librarians at the Wellcome Library scan a broad range of journals, newspapers and new book acquisitions to create the descriptive records that populate the database.
In addition, the records are used to produce a monthly current awareness bibliography, also accessible from the psci-comlit page.
Topics covered include public attitudes towards science, science communication, science and the media, science centres and science education.
If you have any comments or suggestions about the new database, please contact Louise Simon.
New OMNI Resource Booklet Our booklet Internet Resources for Health and Medicine is due to be updated.
The sixteen-page booklet provides examples of some of the quality Internet sites in health and medicine to give a flavour of the millions of resources that are available.
Subject experts have selected all the sites included in the booklets.
The booklets are excellent introductions to key resources in their subject areas, and should be useful for students, staff and researchers at universities and colleges.
To order copies of this booklet, (UK only), see details on the BIOME Publications page of the BIOME Web site.
The Wellcome Trust has kindly agreed to sponsor this booklet.
BIOME has a suite of promotional materials that can be sent out to you free if you are running training events or workshops, or would like to display materials at your institution.
We have fliers (A5 size) and posters (A3 size) for BIOME and the gateways, as well as pens and fliers for the Virtual Training Suite tutorials.
Please contact us at leaflets@biome.ac.uk with any requests for materials, or the posters and fliers can be downloaded in PDF (requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader) from the BIOME Publications page of the BIOME Web site.
NMAP Celebrates its Second Birthday In April, NMAP The UK’s free gateway to high quality Internet resources for Nurses, Midwives and Allied Professions celebrated its second birthday.
The NMAP service was launched in April 2001 and since then has served over 3 million pages of information to its users.
NMAP is a core part of the BIOME service and provides specialised information for the nursing and allied health communities, focusing on information of relevance to nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dieticians, health visitors, podiatrists, chiropodists, speech therapists, theatre practitioners and radiographers.
NMAP aims to help students, researchers, academics and practitioners find the information they need from the Internet without endless hours of searching.
Each of the 2800 Internet sites in the database is hand selected for inclusion within NMAP, and is evaluated according to the BIOME Evaluation Guidelines.
NMAP also provides a core database for the professional portals within the National electronic Library for health (NeLH).
An evaluation of NMAP was completed by 671 users.
Findings indicate: 88% of respondents were able to find the information they wanted easily.
84% rated the relevance of the resources they found as being ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’.
Further evaluation work is underway looking at ease of use, and in conjunction with this we will be enhancing the pages to make key information even easier to find.
Last year the NMAP team authored two freely available online tutorials as part of the Virtual Training Suite (VTS) programme the ‘Internet for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting’ and ‘Internet for Allied Health’ tutorials.
The tutorials can be accessed from the RDN Virtual Training Suite NMAP is produced by a team of information specialists and subject experts from the BIOME service at the University of Nottingham, the University of Sheffield and the Royal College of Nursing, assisted by other key organisations throughout the UK.
Members of the NMAP team are currently participating in the NeLH Digital Libraries Network (DLnet) “master classes” for digital library trainers which are being held at eight venues across England this summer.
Changes at BIOME Following his appointment as an Assistant Director within Nottingham University Information Services, Stephen Pinfield has taken over the role of BIOME Service Director.
Donald Mackay joined us in March 2003 as Service Manager, having previously worked for the University of Oxford as Enquiry Service Manager at the Cairns Library.
After many years of valued service for the OMNI and BIOME services, Lisa Gray will be leaving us in July 2003.
Lisa will be relocating to Bristol for personal reasons and although we are very sad to see her leave us, we would like to wish her all best wishes for the future.
Author Details Donald Mackay Service Manager BIOME Email: dmm@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Rod Ward NMAP Project Manager BIOME Email: Rod.Ward@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://nmap.ac.uk Jenny Hall Administration Officer BIOME Email: jh@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Donald Mackay Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing Buzz software bsd copyright aggregation solaris gpl lgpl qt licence research Citation BibTex RIS Mike Fraser asks whether a recent book on open source software licences will help him answer a few questions.
The picture on the cover of Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing by Andrew M. St. Laurent is a 19th century engraving of a shootout at a railway in the American West.
What early conclusions should we draw from that less than innocent image?
Leaving aside men with guns in the Wild West, Understanding Open Source is an in-depth study of software licences commonly used with the release of open source or free (as in speech) software.
The book is written by a US lawyer but not necessarily for lawyers (though I am certain there are lawyers who would benefit from reading this work) nor just for US citizens (ditto).
There are over fifty approved licences listed by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) [1], together with a review process for further licences.
Clearly, it would be a work of weight (and dare I say not terribly interesting) that examined each one in detail.
A quick look at SourceForge.net, home to the largest number of open source software projects [2], reveals projects to have been licensed under most of the OSI-approved licences with by far the most popular being the GNU General Public License (GPL) (41067 projects), GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL) (6596 projects), and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) License (4271 projects).
The Apache Software License, the Artistic License, and MIT License all have in the region of 750-1500 projects each.
Following this pattern Understanding Open Source provides a close reading of these together with the Academic Free License and Mozilla Public License.
In addition to the software licences, St. Laurent has included a chapter dedicated to the QT, Artistic and Creative Commons licences and a further chapter on non-OSS licences which incorporate some OSS-like elements.
The latter mainly comprise the Sun Community Source licence [3] and the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative.
However, Microsoft's contribution is only discussed briefly and cast aside as, 'it is, at least at this time, little more than a branded extension of Microsoft's current commercial licensing practices' (p.145).
The bulk of the book, therefore, deals with individual licences (four chapters out of seven) with the remaining three chapters providing: a basic overview of copyright, licences in general and the definition of open source; the legal implications of entering into software contracts based on open source/free software; and finally, a chapter dedicated to issues particular to software development.
I approached Understanding Open Source as Co-ordinator of the Research Technologies Service (RTS) [4], a section which contains a significant number of projects piloting new technologies and which has a commitment to open standards and the appropriate use of open source software.
Of course, I should note that the RTS (as are others in a similar position within the UK) are ably assisted by OSS Watch [5], the JISC-funded open source software advisory service, in our decision-making concerning the development and deployment of open source software.
There still remains the need, however, for detailed guidance on single issues, which is what this book aims to do for licensing.
Given that the audience of the book is not necessarily lawyers, I also approached it with three questions which are based on actual cases recently encountered: A nationally-funded project states that it will release software outputs as open source.
But under which licence?
[6] A company producing 'closed source' software wishes to include material from the aforementioned project within one of its products.
What does it need to know to make that decision?
A university computing department selects an open source product for one of its enterprise systems and intends to modify the code for its own needs.
What might its obligations be in this regard?
Oh, and finally, Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License 2.0.
What does this mean for me the reader?
There are some caveats with this approach.
First, as with many such questions the initial answer is always going to be 'it depends'.
But at least having an overview of the dependencies is useful.
Secondly, even if you do work out an answer, don't always expect absolute truth.
Licences, like the Bible, may give the impression of having been God-given but actually they're the work of human hands, attempting to disambiguate language in order to convey common meaning, but often failing.
In which circumstance the lawyers will often direct us towards that other semi-divine institution, the judgement of the courts.
And it is the court which will ultimately interpret its meaning in law.
This applies as much to the use of licences or contracts originally developed in the US (as most open source licences are) and used within the UK as it does to licences written with English law in mind.
It is not the purpose of this review to provide the answers to any of the above questions, but rather to give the reader some sense of whether the book under review will help to provide the answers.
Start at the end of the book if you are trying to choose an open source licence.
Sections in chapter 6, on the legal impacts, outline some of the issues particular to open source/free software licensing (e.g.
Violation of a licence risks nullifying any benefits accrued from improving licensed code; or how to join together material from two or more programs released under different licences).
Chapter 7 provides a relatively brief discussion of the issues inherent in open source licences relating to software development, including a section on the risks and opportunities of project forking and an outline of the nature of the choices faced by a project manager or software developer.
Perhaps, not unexpectedly (and in keeping with the no-easy-answers theme): the conclusion drawn is that 'while a certain license is the best for a given project, particularly when a substantial amount of work has already been done under that license, such decisions depend largely on circumstance and on the taste of the project developer' (p.176).
Elsewhere, it's noted that the taste might not always be pragmatic, 'The thesis is that the licensor's choice to use the GPL license is, in some sense, a political one, and that choice should be protected and defended against encroachment' (p.45 on § 7 of the GPL).
However, a deeper consideration of rights management within a software development environment would have been useful at this point.
Having to proceed to the end of the book is a symptom of the book's format which does not lend itself to such linear decision-making.
The detailed commentary on each of the selected licences is useful if you already have an idea of which licence you wish to employ for your own software (or have modified and plan to distribute an already-existing open source application) and wish to understand the implications of a particular clause.
However, if you are still at an earlier point in the decision-making process then the inclusion of a flowchart would have been helpful in order that a project, for example, might determine answers to some of the more basic questions, e.g.
Who actually owns the software in whole or part -you, your employer, a consortium?
Are you sure you know?
Is the software wholly original or derivative in part or whole?
Do you care if others modify and re-distribute the software under a different licence, even a closed licence?
What disclaimers of liability or warranty do you want or are permitted to include?
How much of this would you be prepared to stand up and claim in court?
Having answers to starter questions such as these are crucial to both the development of software in an open source context or the modification and distribution of someone else's open source software.
Commentary on complex and often misunderstood licences like the GPL and LGPL, for example, is as clear as one could expect.
As with many attempts to explain legal clauses for the general reader there is always a risk that one over-burdened sentence is replaced by a paragraph equally weighty in meaning.
Whilst some of the commentary suffers from not enough re-writing in simple terms, the author himself, fortunately, does not hold back from drawing attention to inconsistencies or ambiguity within a licence.
For example, on the Academic Free License, 'There are problems with this first sentence.
First, it is not immediately clear that the licensor intends that the provisions of this license also govern the derivative works created by the licensee and derivative works created by the licensee's licensees and so forth' (p.27).
Or, concerning the LGPL, 'This bar on the creation of derivative works other than libraries from LGPL-licensed works makes the LGPL essentially useless as a license for such works.
Creators of such works should look to the GPL or another open source license' (p.53).
Or, finally, the Mozilla Public License 1.1, 'As with many provisions of this license, its [§3.4(c)] legal effects are unclear at best' (p.72).
Knowing the substantial differences between the licensing models helps to answer the second question relating to inclusion of material from open source software within a 'closed' or proprietary package.
Clearly the company needs to read the terms of the licence.
For example, what may be permitted in the BSD and Apache licences (so long as the copyright notices are reproduced) becomes somewhat more complicated in the GPL or LGPL where the meaning of 'to include material' is crucial (perhaps it's actually 'mere aggregation' or a 'linked' software library).
The author is also eager to dispel myths on this subject, 'Contrary to the beliefs of some, the GPL does not require that software running on a GPL-licensed operating system be licensed under the GPL' (p.82).
(As he notes elsewhere, the GPL is not contagious like a cold.
Software doesn't catch it by mere proximity it needs to derived from or integrated with GPL-licensed code.)
Finally, there is a section within the book which discusses the Creative Commons licences which although not intended for software, certainly draw upon the open source way of life [7].
By comparison, the Creative Commons licences are models of clarity (and also probably the only open source-like licence to have a version adapted for UK usage [8]).
It happens that the entire Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License.
The commentary in the body of the book relates to the 'Attribution-ShareAlike' 1.0/2.0 version of the licence.
However, the 'Attribution-NoDeriv[ative]s' version is reproduced as an appendix.
As you may imagine this neatly answers my final question and clarifies the rights I have: to copy, distribute, display and perform the work to make commercial use of the work but not to alter, transform or build upon the work while at all times giving the original author credit and making clear the terms of the licence in any subsequent distribution.
Understanding Open Source is a text-rich work.
There are no attempts to visualise the issues through any other means than writing about it.
The use of comparative tables, flowcharts and other illustrations would have helped mitigate the risk of missing an important observation simply because it was buried in the discussion of section 2.1(b) of a licence in which you assumed you had no interest.
Having said that, making the effort to read the book in a linear fashion before using it as a reference work certainly increased my understanding of the practical implications of the freedoms and benefits granted under open source/free licences.
I can certainly recommend this book to anyone who has a responsibility for reading software licence agreements whether prior to clicking 'I accept' on an installer, or as part of the process of creating, building on and distributing open source software.
I am sure institutional legal services or technology-transfer units will find the book to be of interest, especially if the queries about open source software are only now beginning to arrive in their inbox.
And if you want to write your own open source software licence?
Read the book and then consult a lawyer.
References Open Source Initiative (OSI) http://www.opensource.org/ SourceForge.net: OSI-approved open source http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=14 The OSI has recently approved an open source licence submitted by Sun Microsystems, the Common Development and Distribution licence (CDDL) based on the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
Solaris 10, Sun's operating system, is being released as an open source product.
See further http://www.sun.com/cddl/ Research Technologies Service http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/ OSS Watch the JISC-funded open source software advisory service http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ See further "Government policy on the use of Open Source Software within the UK government"(2.0) which includes the principle, "Publicly funded R&D projects which aim to produce software outputs shall specify a proposed software exploitation route at the start of the project.
At the completion of the project, the software shall be exploited either commercially or within an academic community or as OSS".
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/consult_subject_document.asp?docnum=905 Creative Commons: choose license.
http://creativecommons.org/license/ Creative Commons Worldwide: United Kingdom.
http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/uk/ Author Details Michael Fraser Co-ordinator Research Technologies Service Oxford University Email: mike.fraser@oucs.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mikef/ Return to top Article Title: "Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing" Author: Michael Fraser Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/fraser-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Metadata for Information Management and Retrieval Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Metadata for Information Management and Retrieval Buzz data rdf framework xml metadata identifier vocabularies cataloguing graphics sgml multimedia marc gif ead lom frbr mets onix interoperability e-government algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy takes a look at a recent introduction to metadata for the information professional.
Anyone scaling the heights of metadata for the management and retrieval of digital information for the first time can be forgiven a degree of initial bewilderment.
The same goes for this article, so a glossary of terms found here are offered in the spirit of saving readers' time [1].
David Haynes' book appears to go a long way to guiding its explorers through the foothills and beyond in this complete introduction to the subject for the information professional.
At first glance this work covers all the classic metadata basics covered by Caplan's Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians [2].
But Haynes moves away from the solitary library perspective and also looks at the relevance of metadata to digital information resources and recent progress in the field of metadata standards in much more detail.
Content Introductory Section The book is divided into three sections.
The introductory part gets the ball rolling with an interesting preamble on the parallel evolutionary histories of metadata; which in turn explains why there are complications in establishing a concrete definition.
It is at this point that Haynes explains how the book is structured.
He merges two models (Michael Day's seven item model and Gilliland-Swetland's more specific classification [3]) to come up with a five-point model of the purposes of metadata.
It is on this model that he bases the five chapters which make up the lion's share of the work.
The next two chapters give a brief overview of ways to express metadata (such as DTDs, SGML, XML) and recent attempts to work within a common framework using data models and standards.
A brief explanation: data models (such as RDF, FRBR and OAIS) are representations of the objects, concepts and entities that exist while standards (such as DC, MARC, ONIX and IEEE LOM) are specific functional applications of metadata.
Purposes of Metadata The second section of the book looks in more detail at the five-point model of the purposes of metadata previously mentioned.
These purposes are: resource description information retrieval management of information rights management, ownership and authenticity interoperability and e-commerce Each chapter catalogues the various metadata attributes that would be applicable to the given purpose.
Throughout his exploration Haynes always includes a digital resource slant.
For example he spends significant time on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs); and when looking at information retrieval, as well as subject indexing and controlled vocabularies, he also considers retrieval on the Internet, the algorithms used and discovery of newer resources such as multimedia and graphic images.
Chapter eight on Interoperability and e-commerce initially feels a little awkward as the pearing is not one I would naturally plump for.
However again Haynes has useful things to say, though he does have a tendency to be slightly e-government-centred.
On reflection it is only natural for the author to make considerable mention of e-GIF as his recommendations to the Cabinet Office in 2000 led to the formation of the Working Group on Metadata and the eventual establishment of the e-Government Metadata Standard.
I personally felt that the more significant interoperability issues, such as consistency, facilitating data exchange between systems etc.
were covered in more detail in the Managing Metadata chapter.
Treatment of Metadata The final section of the book looks at more general treatment of metadata and considers future developments.
The chapter on Managing Metadata takes a project lifecycle approach and provides a good checklist for someone starting a new project.
There is not a great deal on the creation of metadata but nevertheless Haynes makes a good stab at the issues involved when choosing schemas.
Some important topics covered in this chapter include importing metadata and normalising data, controlled vocabularies and quality management.
In the final chapter Haynes takes a look at the potential for developing and using metadata concepts further.
He feels that the increased interest in the study and use of metadata means that it has the capacity in future years to become an entirely new discipline.
Important areas to watch are the semantic Web, what will happen to the cost of indexing and standards development.
Haynes concludes that metadata is an integral part of information systems and that it will develop through co-operation between communities and the establishment of a universal model of metadata.
XML schemas are likely to play a big part in this and indeed become the norm.
Conclusion David Hayne's book is not, and does not claim to be, all things to all people.
It is clearly not intended as a highly technical resource.
However it does provide a very sound introduction to current metadata concepts for librarians and information workers alike.
There is no doubt that it is already a key text on Library and Information Science courses and will remain so for many years.
This is a relatively slim publication at only 184 pages, but nonetheless a lot is covered in the space available.
Many of topics and technologies are not dealt with in depth, but references are consistently given to enable further research.
David Haynes is actually running a series of workshops that introduce the book and take some of the issues mentioned further [4].
The real success of this work lies in Haynes' ability to capture both the older issues of concern to librarians, archivists and museum and gallery professionals, such as what metadata to include, and the new information management puzzles that the Internet has generated.
As such it should prove a valuable resource for many people.
References Note that all acronyms not expanded in the text are listed in the glossary.
Caplan, P. (2003) Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians, American Library Association.
Day, M. (2001) Metadata in a Nutshell, Information Europe, 6 (20), 11.
Gilliland-Swetland, A.
(1998) Defining Metadata.
In Baca, M. (ed).
Introduction to Metadata: pathways to digital information, Los Angeles, CA, Getty Information Institute.
CILIP: What you need to know about metadata Workshops http://www.cilip.org.uk/training/training/pts/Whatyouneedtoknowaboutmetadata.htm Glossary METS Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard.
DTDs Document Type Definitions SGML Standard General Mark-up Language XML Extensible Mark-up Language RDF Resource Description Format FRBR Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records OASIS Open Archival Information Standard DC Dublin Core MARC Machine Readable Catalogue ONIX Online Information Exchange IEE LOM IEEE Learning Object Metadata EAD Encoded Archival Description Author Details Marieke Guy Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Return to top Article Title: "Metadata for Information Management and Retrieval" Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/guy-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Experiences of Harvesting Web Resources in Engineering Using Automatic Classification Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Experiences of Harvesting Web Resources in Engineering Using Automatic Classification Buzz data software framework html database usability thesaurus vocabularies copyright cataloguing z39.50 php algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Kjell Jansson, Jessica Lindholm and Tomas Schoenthal describe the work in setting up a Web index that uses automatic classification as a means for the selection of resources.
The story behind Engine-e [1], a recently created robot-generated Web index, is best told by starting in 1994 with the development and maintenance of EELS (Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden) [2], a manually indexed quality-controlled subject gateway in Engineering.
EELS was accompanied by the experimental robot-generated index, “All” Engineering [3], created within the DESIRE framework [4].
The solution used already in “All” Engineering is similar to that of Engine-e, but with some distinct differences.
Work on EELS was initiated by SUTL (Swedish University Technology Libraries) in 1994 with the purpose of giving the technology libraries and universities an opportunity to explore the Internet from selected links to valuable resources with a special focus on resources from Sweden and other Nordic countries.
As such it was a very early implementation of a subject-based information gateway [5].
A group of some ten subject editors from Swedish technology universities carried out the tasks of collecting, evaluating, indexing, cataloguing and updating resources in EELS [6].
The technical development of EELS was carried out by NetLab [7], a research and development department at Lund University Libraries, Sweden.
Traugott Koch, senior librarian and digital library scientist at NetLab, suggested at an early stage the development of a robot-generated index within EELS, which later was realised in “All” Engineering.
The intention was to integrate “All” Engineering as far as possible into the same structure as the one used in the original EELS where the classification scheme of Engineering Information Inc. was used [8].
The harvesting robot in “All” Engineering collected resources starting from seven reliable quality-controlled subject gateways and followed their links down to two or three sub-levels [9].
As matters progressed, it became apparent that the work to be done by the subject editors proved itself to be the most problematic part of the EELS project.
During the period 1994-2000 the Web had expanded exponentially and search engines had greatly increased their performance.
Thus the problem of coverage in EELS became increasingly urgent.
The editors discovered how labour-intensive it was to keep EELS up to date in this new environment.
At the same time users´ need for EELS seemed to diminish as new generation search engines grew increasingly popular.
Furthermore, the funding for technical development from the Royal Library´s Department for National Co-ordination and Development, BIBSAM [10], had also come to an end, except if EELS were to be integrated into a planned national service together with the quality-controlled subject gateways from other Swedish national resource libraries.
Eventually the SUTL consortium could no longer guarantee the quality of resources in EELS, due to difficulties experienced by the subject editors.
All work on EELS was frozen in 2001.
Manually Indexed Quality-Controlled Subject Gateways vs. Automatic Classification Indices At the same time as EELS was closed, it was suggested that the work carried out in “All” Engineering was a useful base on which to build further development.
What advantages did “All” Engineering have over the quality-controlled subject gateway EELS?
In the context of Engine-e as a successor to a quality-controlled subject gateway, the question of which is best inevitably arises.
The question is highly relevant, as not many institutions have the capability to maintain both services.
Both quality-controlled subject gateways and robot-generated indices are well-suited for their purposes.
These purposes however should be regarded as different.
We will discuss some of these considerations below.
Browse/search: One of the major benefits with a quality-controlled subject gateway is that normally, due to the use of knowledge organisation systems, (e.g.
classification systems and thesauri), it allows users to browse resources by subject.
This can be seen as one means of offering an alternative to what a more general search engine does.
In a robot-generated index using automatic classification this functionality can be kept, though not with the same precision in the assigned classifications as can be obtained by intellectual analysis of the resource.
Cost/Manual effort: Maintenance of a subject gateway is often related to the labour-intensive and costly manual effort devoted to indexing resources.
In comparison a robot-generated index is filled with content quickly and at a low cost.
The robot-generated index also requires manual maintenance, the focus however is not on the resources but rather on tuning the terms in the vocabulary chosen to describe the content of the resources.
Many classification schemes and thesauri are not created to be interpreted by a machine.
Intellectual tasks may include specifying that some words should not appear in the document in order for that document to receive a certain classification.
Ambiguous terms needs to be accompanied by more specialised words in order to be assigned a classification, etc.
Quality/Quantity: The quality of resource descriptions in a quality-controlled subject gateway is related to the effort put into describing the resources, but they can be expected to maintain a very high standard.
Keeping records up to date in the robot-generated index is a task for robot software.
As regards the quantity of resources populating the two different services, the robot-generated index has a clear advantage, even though a larger amount of irrelevant material is included.
The Start of Engine-e The further exploration of the ideas behind “All” Engineering received funding approval from BIBSAM for 2002-2003 based on the background presented above.
This resulted in the creation of Engine-e as a subject index in Engineering, with subject-based hierarchical browsing and free-text search using Boolean operators.
Development has been done in collaboration between the Royal Institute of Technology Library [11] and Lund University Libraries [12], and is being built within the Swedish National Resource Library framework [13].
The Engine-e demonstrator was launched in January 2003.
Engine-e’s goals are both quality and quantity, as well as continuous renewal and minimised manual labour.
From the beginning Engine-e was able to take advantage of work done in EELS and “All” Engineering, benefitting from recent experience and case studies, as well as by having two software components ready for use, i.e.
the Combine robot [14] and a classification algorithm that’s compatible with the Combine robot.
Engine-e also benefitted from being able to use the appropriate Elsevier Engineering Information Thesaurus and a suitable list of term matching patterns.
Given these advantages, continued work concentrated on: selecting start pages for robot harvesting trouble-shooting the software calibrating the classification algorithm developing a gateway for Engine-e establishing robust and automatic runtime routines for maintaining the service identifying what manual tasks would be needed to maintain the service in the long term and in what framework.
conducting a smaller user survey Start Pages Which Web pages should serve as starting points for the Engine-e harvesting robot?
First of all, Web pages of the universities of the SUTL consortium were given careful consideration, since Swedish material is considered to be of special interest for this project.
Among the 21 selected start pages, 15 were (non-Swedish) quality-controlled subject gateways.
The hyperlinks from these startpages led the robot on the journey of finding resources.
If the resources are found to match the criteria for inclusion they are assigned one or more classifications and are included in Engine-e.
If not, they are dropped, and their outgoing links are not followed.
Classification in Engine-e Here follows a brief description of how a document is handled by the classification algorithm.
The classification algorithm stipulates that each term: may be a word, a phrase or an AND-combination of words/phrases is assigned a score is assigned one or more Ei classification codes The list of terms has almost 21,000 entries, below is a sample with four terms   2: planets=657.2 8: plasma oscillations=932.3 8: plasmas @and beam-plasma interactions=932.3 4: plasmas @and pinch effect=701, 932.3   The first number represents the score, and the last is the Ei classification code assigned to that term.
The automatic classification algorithm attempts to match terms found in a particular document with the list of terms.
An absolute document score is computed as sum_over_all_terms(number_of_hits[term]*score[term]) A relative document score taking the document’s size into account is also computed The decision whether to accept or reject a document is based on the above document scores in relation to the experimentally established cut-off values In order to find out how the classification algorithm behaves and the influence of its parameters, a series of initial experiments were carried out and investigated.
In the first series of experiments the cutoff values for accepting or rejecting candidate pages varied.
A sample of URLs representing material of varying quality was fed to the algorithm and the outcome was compiled into lists of sample documents that were examined manually.
The questions asked: Was too much low-quality material accepted?
Was some high-quality material lost?
Were the classifications relevant?
Did the algorithm tend to assign many or very few classifications per page?
When a reasonable set of cut-off values was found, a second experiment was carried out.
This time a fairly large number of pages (about 40,000) were collected, using a large set of selected start pages, and a searchable and browsable Web index was built and serviced via a preliminary version of the gateway.
This experiment resulted in: Bugfixes.
Among other things the classifications were lost for about 1,5% of the records Modifications of the record structure Full-scale Data Collection When a safe and automatic runtime environment capable of handling a very large dataflow and computational effort was developed, a full-scale data collection was attempted.
Harvesting with automic classification involved the following steps: Feeding the robot with start pages for harvesting Storing web pages (HTML and PDF originals) internally Parsing yields a uniform representation Storing successfully classified pages (20% or less of the harvested material) in the database, and their outgoing links are fed back into the robot for continued harvesting There are some interesting variables and events related to quantity and size of: disk space; records; outgoing links; harvester URL queue and intermediate storage.
Another approach is related to quality, e.g.
the distribution of: classification codes; classification codes per record; Web servers; and document types.
We quickly learned that the distribution of classification codes, the intermediate storage, (classification is computationally intensive), and the harvester URL queue can grow out of hand.
One solution might be to take a crude process control approach by sampling some of these quantities and pause or resume harvesting when appropriate and to constantly log them in order to gain insight.
The users of the service would not notice any of these events.
The database is indexed once daily in order to become searchable via the Z39.50 protocol [15].
The browsing structure, belonging to the gateway, is automatically derived from this index.
The Z39.50 server status is checked every five minutes and restarts automatically when necessary.
A full-scale data collection conducted over a period of seven weeks resulted in 344,886 records and a browsing structure with 740 out of 846 possible nodes populated with resources.
The Engine-e Gateway The Engine-e gateway should be kept as simple as possible, i.e.
it should: generally be familiar to users of quality-controlled subject gateways.
Browsing results show title, classification and by selection also show excerpts from the document consist of as few pages as possible.
Consequently, no distinction should be made e.g.
between a simple and an advanced search form only have one box for entering a search string but offer a variety of interpretations (exact phrase or implicitly inserting one of the the Boolean operators AND, OR and BUT NOT between the words in the search string, the default being AND).
Engine-e remembers the previous query completely, which for example allows the user to change Boolean operator or correct a spelling mistake with minimal input.
The price paid for this simplicity is that only one kind of Boolean operator can be used at a time always reconstruct exactly the browse or search operation whenever results are shown The presentation of free-text search results supports field-weighted, lexical relevance ranking.
The following fields and weights were chosen, based on assumptions of where the relevant terms occur in a document.
Field Weight Subject heading Highest Title High Document heading Medium URL Low Fulltext Lowest The gateway is implemented in the PHP language [16] and accesses the database via the Z39.50 protocol, using Indexdata´s YAZ Library [15].
Figure 1: Engine-e During the autumn of 2003 a user survey was conducted.
Some of the results from this survey are incorporated below, together with an introduction of how to use Engine-e. Browsing by subject: The browsing interface of Engine-e consists of a table of subject headings, which follow the Ei classification system, with six broader categories as a starting point for the sub-divided categories under each heading.
To browse deeper into the subject hierarchy simply click on a subject.
Each subject heading is followed by its Ei classification code and, within parenthesis, the associated hit count.
Results from browsing are sorted alphabetically according to title (whereas search results are sorted according to relevance).
After feedback from the user survey, it has been suggested that this should be replaced by a ranking procedure based on weighting and ‘popularity links counting’ like those used in Google.
The number of resources shown at a classification level could also be limited to a practical size.
It is also desireable to be able to limit search queries to be performed on a specific level (and downwards) of the browsing structure.
Searching: Engine-e provides full-text searches, looking for matches in title, headings, text body, subject classification fields and the URL.
Results are ranked according to where the hits occur in the document.
Presenting results: Results are presented with titles first.
Clicking on the title brings you to the resource.
Thereafter follows a list of subject headings assigned to that document.
By clicking on one of these the user is presented with a list of all resources that have been assigned that particular subject heading.
There are two formats for presentation of results, the default format is a short format containing a linked title leading to the resource, a URL and linked allocated Ei class(es) leading to the class(es) in the browsing structure.
There is also a format that includes full-text excerpts from the documents.
Conclusions Engine-e is far from ready, but has proven to be valuable for the users in the survey.
The remaining work falls roughly into the following categories: Improved presentation and ranking of results Improved usability and layout Intellectual work on the term list, and improved interpretations of these by the robot.
An administrative tool to support the tasks also needs to be developed Engine-e provides a low-cost search and browsable subject index in the field of technology.
While the recall of results is rather high, the drawbacks are that the precision is sometimes low.
We find both types of subject gateways; either those created by intensive manual labour or with the help of some smart computing, both allowing the users to search and retrieve information in a useful way.
References Engine-e demonstrator http://engine-e.lub.lu.se/ EELS, Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden http://eels.lub.lu.se/ “All” Engineering resources on the Internet http://eels.lub.lu.se/ae/index.html The DESIRE Project http://www.lub.lu.se/desire Ardö, A., Lundberg, S. and Zettergren, A-Z (2002) “Another piece of cake……?” Ariadne, Issue 32 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/netlab-history/ Jansson, K. (1996) “Indexerade kvalitetsresurser på Internet EELS-projektet” Nordic Journal of Documentation, 51 (1-2), pp.14-20, ISSN 0040-6872.
NetLab http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab/ Elsevier Engineering Information http://www.ei.org/ Ardö, A., Koch T. and Noodén, L. (1999) The construction of a robot-generated subject index.
http://www.lub.lu.se/desire/DESIRE36a-WP1.html BIBSAM http://www.kb.se/bibsam/english/first.htm Royal Institute of Technology Library http://www.lib.kth.se/kthbeng/about.html Lund University Libraries, Head Office http://www.lub.lu.se/new_top/omlub/bd_eng.shtml Swedish National Resource Library framework http://www.kb.se/bibsam/english/nrl/first.htm The Combine robot http://www.lub.lu.se/combine/ Indexdata, provider of the Zebra Z39.50 implementation, the PHP-YAZ library http://www.indexdata.dk/ PHP language http://www.php.net/ Author Details Jessica Lindholm Lund University Libraries, Sweden Email: jessica.lindholm@lub.lu.se Web site: http://www.lub.lu.se/~jessica/ Tomas Schönthal Lund University Libraries, Sweden Email: tomas.schonthal@lub.lu.se Web site: http://www.lub.lu.se/~tomas/ Kjell Jansson Royal Institute of Technology Library (KTHB), Sweden Email: kj@lib.kth.se Return to top Article Title: “Experiences of Harvesting Web Resources in Engineering using Automatic Classification” Author: Jessica Lindholm, Tomas Schönthal and Kjell Jansson Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/lindholm/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review of Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review of Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook Buzz rdf framework xml archives metadata digitisation copyright cataloguing sgml multimedia url research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter and Marieke Napier review Stuart Lee's 'Digital Imaging' handbook.
Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook is very much a 'how to' guide for those about to embark on a digitisation project, and it offers a complete picture of the workflow process of a digital imaging project from its inception to the final maintenance and archiving of the end product.
It is aimed at information professionals and librarians managing such a venture, but is also of value to researchers and students.
The Handbook’s five chapters, follow the model structure of an actual digitisation project.
It begins by considering reasons for digitisation and covers the assessment and scoping of different collected works, resulting in selection of the most pertinent collection.
After discussion of preparation techniques a detailed deconstruction of the whole digitisation process is given, with special regard for fragile materials.
At this point the various digital image file formats and digitisation hardware available are discussed.
The rest of the Handbook considers the steps carried out after digitisation.
Stuart Lee, author of the Handbook, is an expert in the digital imaging field, and is responsible for the prize-winning Wilfred Owen Multimedia Archive.
He also conducted the Mellon Foundation scoping study which looked at prospective materials for digitization held by Oxford University.
Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook is the outcome of his personal experiences, and the experiences of others.
Lee successfully provides us with a wealth of approaches, important insights and recommendations and does so in a consistently pragmatic way.
Lee also provides a number of excellent resources: real life and fictitious/utopian examples are consistently given to illustrate points, including the ambitious 'digitisation ready reckoner for time and costs' used for working out the cost of a project.
Excellent decision matrices are included for guidance throughout the project and the appendix contains questionnaires for assessment of an institution's holdings and proposed collections.
There is also a list of further reading material and URLs.
Although Lee spends considerable time on the actual digitization process it is in its dealing with the peripheries that this book excels.
He gives excellent recommendations and assessment of areas such as benchmarking, copyright, funding, archiving, cataloguing and metadata.
With regard to metadata Lee gives analysis and comparison of current developments such as Dublin Core (DC), Resource Description Framework (RDF), SGML and XML.
It is suggested that in a full digitisation project, project metadata should satisfy the needs of cataloguers, users, technical experts, and project administrators.
All will be involved in its creation, and all should be able to use it in the course of the project.
Lee also highlights the importance of cataloguing to digitization projects.
He suggests, on the basis of earlier experience, that cataloguing and indexing can account for nearly a third of the overall cost of digitisation projects.
This level of cost is inevitable if the user of a digital collection is to have a browsable or searchable catalogue available at the end of the day, and, equally importantly, for the administrators of a project to keep track of its progress, and, in appropriate cases, to facilitate sales of images.
Working out how much time is required to catalogue items, and which level of cataloguing is appropriate, is acknowledged as a difficult task.
But the point is rightly reinforced as an important one.
Although most acronyms are explained Lee does expect a certain level of understanding of the current technical climate.
The writing is unusually clear for a publication dealing with such a complex and technical area, and could be recommended also as a model text for other authors.
Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook belongs to a growing field of publications.
Kenney and Chapman's Digital Imaging For Libraries and Archives (1996) and the more recent volume Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives (2000) by Kenney and Rieger are both available from the Research Libraries Group.
Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives, a collection of articles by a number of prominent authors, is referred to repeatedly throughout the Handbook, particularly for its formulae for costs and hands on case study material.
There was also, way back in 1993, Peter Robinson’s The Digitization of Primary Textual Sources, which covered some of the same ground, and was similarly aimed at users intending to set up digitisation projects.
However Lee's text is both up to date and affordable at £24.95, and a more comprehensive guide for those who do not have digitisation experience.
The book contains a useful list of further reading, much of which references sources available on the Web.
This list includes both up-to-date references, and others which fill out the development of digitisation as a systematic procedure.
Stuart D Lee (October 2000) , Library Association Publishing.
ISBN: 1-85604-353-3 Price: £24.95 [review published 01 Feb 2001] Author Details   Marieke Napier m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk Philip Hunter p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN University of Bath http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook" Author: Stuart Lee Publication Date: 10-Jan-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 26 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/review/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing Your Internet & Intranet Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing Your Internet & Intranet Services Buzz software usability blog copyright intranet research Citation BibTex RIS David Hook sees this edition as a useful overview but finds unfortunate omissions as well as beneficial inclusions.
Building and maintaining Web sites and intranets are no longer simple, unimportant tasks that can be relegated to an IT department.
The 2nd edition of Peter Griffiths' Managing Your Internet & Intranet Services not only recognizes this, but argues that perhaps it is LIS professionals who are best suited for managing Web sites and intranets.
On the surface this book appears to be very useful it is written from the LIS perspective, and focuses on the management side of Web development rather than the technical how-to.
Being a non-technical book, not only is it very readable, but also is not likely to fall out of date as quickly as most others on Web development.
The first edition of Griffiths' book is often found on LIS course recommended reading lists.
This new second edition addresses some of the newer advances in Internet and intranet development such as new standards and software, as well as some rising trends such as Web logs, information architecture and content management.
Griffiths explains in the opening chapters why Web management is a natural fit for LIS professionals, and why their skills enable them to succeed in the role.
An introduction to getting on the Web is provided as well as explanations as to the benefits of creating a Web site or intranet.
Also included is a chapter on how to build a business case for creating a Web site.
Later chapters focus on the management of Web technologies from staffing, administrative and content management perspectives.
Finally, a lengthy list of resources is provided.
While the book covers Web site management in a little more detail, it falls short on its coverage of intranets and intranet management.
Only one chapter is devoted to intranet management, and little differentiation is given between Web management and intranet management throughout the book.
With an external Web site, there typically needs to be a greater emphasis on design and appearance than an internal one.
With an intranet, functionality and document retrievability are of more importance than appearance.
Moreover, copyright is much less of an issue, and there is less of a need to design sites for a wide variety of users and technologies.
On the other hand, business cases for intranets can be built through many of the benefits they can bring better documentation management and control, improved retrieval of information, collaboration and automation of processes.
In chapter 6, we are presented with a list of the top ten features of library Web sites.
While this list is very useful for Web site management, there is no equivalent list given of top ten intranet features.
Such a list would have been much more valuable for intranet management, as it is far easier to come by a library Web site than a behind-the-firewall intranet.
The author also misses some of the key benefits of building an intranet such as enabling users to find information faster, the ability to disseminate information more quickly and to automate routine business processes.
Chapter 4 provides a good introduction to building a business case for a Web site, and covers the financial considerations in detail.
For the financial benefits however, the chapter tends to focus too much on the smaller and easier-to-measure benefits such as not having to print paper brochures, rather than the larger, difficult-to-measure benefits such as a Web site's ability to bring in new business.
There is no equivalent chapter on building a business case for an intranet.
A key element needed for designing, planning or maintaining a Web site or intranet is the ability to acquire metrics on its usage.
Yet other than a paragraph on usability testing, there is no mention of any kind of feedback mechanism or metrics collection method.
For a brief introduction to the factors involved with building and managing a Web site, this book provides a very accessible overview of the key topics.
It goes, however, very little beyond scratching the surface, and misses several key elements such as metrics, document management and disaster recovery to name a few.
Author Details Dave Hook Supervisor, Business Research & Product Assurance Records MD Robotics Ltd. Email: dhook@mdrobotics.ca Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Managing Your Internet & Intranet Services" Author: Dave Hook Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/hook-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Developments Amidst the Tulips and Windmills Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Developments Amidst the Tulips and Windmills Buzz mobile url research Citation BibTex RIS Christine Dugdale reports on the Digital Library course run as part of the annual Summer School at the Tilburg Innovation Centre for Electronic Resources (TICER B.V.).
Netherlands, August 2001.
Well, OK, being August, there were no tulip fields to gambol through, but one can always dream!
To be honest, there were no nearby picturesque windmills to be seen either.
But we were surrounded by trees and quiet and yet were not far from the modern town of Tilburg in The Netherlands.
So, why should I complain?
I was there to attend the Digital Library course run as part of this year’s International Summer School by TICER B.V. (Tilburg Innovation Centre for Electronic Resources) at Tilburg University.
This is the sixth consecutive year that there has been a Summer School, but the first time that three one week courses have been/are being run.
The first Summer School was held in 1996.
(1) They are run under the auspices of TICER B.V. which is a private company created in 1995 by the University’s Library and Computer Centre and is wholly owned by the University at Tilburg.
(2) The company was created to meet a demand that was stimulated by developments in the University Library (whose new librarian is Mel Collier).
Tilburg claims to be the first university in Europe to have developed a strategic vision of the digital library that would provide electronic access to information from users’ desktops.
In 1992, a new library building was opened with 450 computer workstations that provided integrated access to various information sources for all staff and students.
It is quite amazing to think that this was such a radical development in 1992 – less than a decade ago.
There has been such a rapid and vast change in the development of information provision and in the role of libraries and librarians in such a short time.
Tilburg’s commitment to digital development is continuing and PCs with flat screen monitors were being installed when we toured the library one evening.
These developments created great interest around the world at the time and stimulated a large number of enquiries and visitors to the library.
As library resources did not stretch to helping those asking questions about the developments as much as library staff would have liked, the idea of running a summer school evolved and the new company was formed to run the Summer Schools.
The format and content of the courses have changed over the years.
The speakers at the first Summer Schools were all members of Tilburg staff, but it was felt that there should be a wider input from other universities, organisations and countries to develop a more rounded and broader overview of digital developments.
Consequently, in subsequent years, international speakers were invited.
These represented people who were thought to be specialists in their own fields and who would be able to discuss developments in their home countries.
Another change after the first Summer Schools was a greater opportunity for more student participation scheduled into the days’ activities.
Judging from the tremendous enthusiasm for the really useful discussions that took place, this seemed to me to have been an excellent move.
I attended part of the week-long Digital Libraries and the Changing World of Education, which was being held for the first time.
Even for an institution with such an interesting history, it struck me as being particularly brave to run a course on such a fast changing subject as digital libraries.
The pace of change is so rapid in this field that it must have been very difficult to plan as far in advance as must have been necessary.
It will also require a considerable amount of updating each year if the course is repeated in the future.
The completely new course was advertised as being designed for librarians, reference librarians, library managers, instruction librarians, designers of learning environments, and teaching staff.
There had been a Managing the Change Process Towards Your Library of the Future course the previous week.
Both these were run at Tilburg University in The Netherlands.
These Tilburg courses had been split into these two separate ones; each running for approximately a week instead of a single one taking place over a fortnight as in previous years.
An autumn course is being held on Electronic Publishing: Libraries as Buyers, Facilitators or Producers in Florence in October.
Unfortunately, I only managed to ‘dip my toe in the water’ in sampling the Summer School in the sense that I was only able to attend for the first two days instead of the full week enjoyed by all the participants and most of the lecturers.
I was not sure what to expect from a summer school as opposed to a conference on this subject.
Two days, however, was sufficient to appreciate an enormous difference.
Everyone there displayed an infectious feeling of enthusiasm for the subject of electronic library developments; an enthusiasm that fed off itself from the very first session of the first day.
Indeed, this was already evident during the opening dinner the night before the course started.
Of course, enthusiasm is found at many conferences, but the level of exchange of information that took place was very different to any conference that I have ever attended.
Everyone was anxious to learn more about digital libraries, to relate everything that they heard to their own situations/potential developments in their own institutions and to share their experiences with each other.
There was an immediate desire to talk to each other, to ask questions, to seek and to provide explanations.
This level of exchange and discussion was facilitated and encouraged by the fact that participants and lecturers socialised outside the quite intensive lecture/workshop sessions over meals in the evenings and at the weekend.
Everyone appeared eager to participate completely by taking a full part in discussions and workshops.
At the ‘ice breaking’ session, during which each participant had to say something about their own work and the course, most had a tremendous amount to say.
It was obvious that they had done their ‘homework’ and carefully read the impressive pre-course literature with which we had all been provided.
They had all read, at least, sufficient about the lectures to be very clear about which of them they thought that they would find the most interesting and relevant to their own situation.
There were no ‘shrinking violets’ unwilling to describe their own work situation and this session overran its allotted time.
I could not help wondering, however, how many were in a position to introduce the new electronic services in their own organisations that they all seemed to think would result from their reports of the week’s activities!
Or would still have the necessary enthusiasm a few weeks later!
A full range of experiences and ideas was available to share as there was a truly international flavour with 40 participants from 14 countries situated on 4 continents.
This was a little lower than the preferred number of 45 delegates which is presumably more cost effective.
Previous Summer Schools have suggested that a higher number than this mitigates against full participation and good interaction.
76% of the participants were involved in library instruction or information literature courses.
There were few from other areas such as publishing.
This may, of course, have been because there is to be another course dedicated to electronic publishing in the autumn.
The participants did, however, represent a wide variety of organisations.
There were several delegates from The Netherlands, but a far lower proportion than in the early years.
There was, however, only one UK participant with four UK lecturers.
I could not help asking myself why this was.
Do we believe that we already possess sufficient expertise in digital library development?
Are we too busy running our digital (or print) libraries to attend such events as participants or are staff development budgets too much of an issue in the UK to permit this kind of expenditure?
Another way in which the Summer School varied from the conferences that I have attended was in the length of presentations and workshops.
Often these are only scheduled for a short time at a conference instead of the one and half hours given at Tilburg.
This allowed lecturers time to develop themes and thoughts and to invite questions and comments.
Often, conference presentations are for such a short time only that speakers degenerate into demonstrating or ‘advertising’ their own projects with little thought for developing the concepts behind them for their audience.
In this ‘showcase’ environment it is difficult for delegates to gather thoughts, to devise questions and to try to think how such developments might be used in their own situations.
The aim of the Summer School, however, is to do this very thing to prepare librarians for setting up their own digital library.
The course looked at the possible roles of and opportunities for libraries in education and focused on practical experiences and case studies of libraries around the world.
There was an exploration of the importance of merged roles and the fact that digital libraries provide opportunities for merging roles and convergence of services and departments to offer a more integrated, efficient and better service to meet organisations’ aims.
It was stressed that the digital library is the natural complement of digital learning environments, and that there are opportunities for library staff in co-designing digital learning environments.
During the week, participants examined the role of libraries in education, paying attention to issues such as virtual learning environments, digital portfolios, the physical library as a learning space, information literacy, and new roles for librarians.
These themes were of obvious importance and interest to many of the 13 lecturers who stayed for the whole week; thus lending the course a new dimension.
During the first two days, which were the only ones that I was able to attend there was a great deal of discussion about the changing HE environment, the changing make-up of the student population and their different needs and about changing teaching styles and, especially, about digital learning environments.
It was stressed that digital library/digital learning environments were complementary and that they offered new opportunities for librarians.
Speakers recognised that digital libraries were not a new concept.
The technology for their development had been available for a long time.
However the ‘c’ word – cultural change – often got in the way of such developments which were now needed even more than ever to complement the new digital learning environments.
Of course, this still needed the ‘c’ word since faculty and librarians need to co-operate if they are to support each other’s work in these new environments.
As at all LIS conferences, it was stressed over and over that librarians need to ‘infiltrate’ the decision-making bodies in their own institutions if integration between information providers and information seekers and their respective systems and needs is to take place.
Any real digital library development may require a dramatic change in the organisational culture.
Different groups need to hold a shared vision.
Librarians and academic staff in educational institutions need to share their visions about education.
As always, when hearing these ideas expressed, I could not help thinking that I had heard all this before and that so, probably, had all the other participants.
There is nothing wrong with preaching to the converted, of course.
They often enjoy hearing the same ideas expressed again or might like hearing new arguments that re-enforce their own deeply held views.
But we still need to preach this basic message to the unconverted.
Unfortunately, the ‘converted’ are librarians and the ‘unconverted’ frequently tend to be the people with whom we wish to integrate our services.
They, of course, do not regularly attend LIS conferences or international summer schools.
It is very difficult to persuade someone who thinks of the library only in terms of a draining cost centre that it is really a very positive asset that will help them to achieve goals set in the organisation's mission statements.
Constantly telling each other is only of benefit if we all leave from hearing this message sufficiently enthused once again to try to move what can often appear to be unmoveable objects in our own institutions.
I often wonder how many of us not only mange to do so, but also keep on trying weeks after the initial enthusiasm has subsided and we have become engrossed in the old routines.
Information literacy became something of a buzzword while I was there with all the well-rehearsed ideas such as the ‘knowledge economy’, ‘problem-solving’ and ‘real and virtual learning environments’ being bandied around.
There was also discussion about the social context of learning.
It was pointed out that the virtual world can be a lonely one.
A number of people believed that to be the case.
Learning often takes place more efficiently when there is face-to-face contact with lecturers and where there are exchanges between fellow students whom one meets.
Others thought that the virtual world could be a less isolating one than the ‘real’ learning environment.
Although something might be lost without face-to-face contact with lecturers, most lecturers make themselves available at certain times and may take more care to reply to e-mails than to linger after lectures to talk to students.
In a sense, therefore, they are more accessible to students requiring help and advice.
E-mails and other on-line exchanges between students can also draw even the shiest student into exchanges that are beneficial to their studies.
During the two days other themes were explored.
In a particularly lively session we considered the question of what a library actually is and what constitutes a digital library, and how easy they are to access, and we considered world-wide systems and more local ones.
There was also discussion of the different ways in which we can get information to users and about how technological developments enable us to make information that was previously only available to the few visitors to a physical site available to large numbers of people globally.
We also considered the flexibility of new systems.
The themes for the different days were: Digital libraries and digital learning environments Virtual and real learning environments Information literacy The library profession In addition to the lectures there were a number of workshops during the week to encourage discussion and thought.
At the one that I attended, the participants were divided into 8 groups of 5 and asked to think and, then, report back what they felt were two very important current issues that interested them from the two general opening lectures.
The aim was to create learning goals for the week by thinking of the themes covered in these lectures in respect of home organisations.
I thought that this would have produced far more duplication than was the case.
After all, everyone had just sat through the same lectures and these should have set their thoughts going in similar directions.
But I was wrong.
There was a large amount of variety.
I suppose that this shows what a lively and stimulating profession LIS is – very far removed from the image of the silent old-fashioned librarian ‘guarding’ and ‘preserving’ their stock from unruly borrowers!
: The ideas that were suggested were: Group 1 Relationship between stakeholders in educational awareness of clients of potential libraries.
What is the library’s core business.
Should the library play a more positive role in providing education or should it limit itself to helping/providing information.
(This, of course, raises many questions about where one draws the line between teaching users how to use the library and teaching them information literacy).
Group 2 How do we get faculty staff to naturally work with library staff without library staff pressurising them.
How do we encourage non-users to start using our services.
Group 3 From where do we find resources.
How do we encourage the best possible use/exploitation of resources.
Group 4 There is a changing role from the traditional library to the instructional library.
What is the effect of library instruction on end users.
Has there been any research about this.
Group 5 What role can the library play in bringing about cultural change in an organisation.
Should we/how do we teach the teachers rather than the students.
Group 6 How de we market library services to effect co-operation between faculty and library staff.
How do we market a change within the library for library staff to change to meet the needs/demands of the institution.
Group 7 How do we introduce new students to the library.
How do we organise life long learning for librarians/keep abreast of staff needs.
Group 8 Should the library be involved in the pedagogic issues of faculties.
How do we make communication between staff/librarians visible – how do we ensure that the library is considered when courses are being developed.
Summary It was decided that these represented ideas that could be grouped under three headings: What constitutes the tasks of the library and how far should we go/what are the boundaries.
Building relationships with long established academic staff, new staff and students.
What is our personal goal in the library as a librarians.
Later, another workshop was planned to look at ‘What’s wrong with Tilburg University Library?’ I wished that I had been able to stay to participate in this.
I would imagine that it generated a large amount of input and helped participants, away from home and with others thinking about the same things, to consider their own organisations very carefully from a less biased viewpoint than might normally cloud their vision.
On a purely personal note, I was very impressed by the excellent organisation which also marked the Summer School out from many conferences and other teaching situations.
There were no IT breakdowns as can be found in the most well organised conferences.
Lecturers’ slides were mounted and ready for viewing before each session.
This saved me from my usual survival tactic of seeking out a technician well in advance of a talk, confessing my technical ineptitude and asking them to remain in the room in case I needed someone to help me out.
The domestic organisation was equally good with excellent meals and plenty of pre-school information about transport and accommodation.
And I have found that this ‘customer care’ has continued after the Summer School through a ‘follow-up’ service that provides additional information.
This encourages continued networking after initial enthusiasms have declined.
In particular, I was very impressed by the way in which a Blackboard demonstration was introduced into the day’s scheduled events after one group requested it.
It was, however, nerve-racking, as a lecturer, quite unexpectedly, to hear that course auditors from the Tilburg campus or library would appear unplanned and unannounced at the start of individual lectures to watch the lecturers!
On the other hand, it was such a relief to see the total lack of laptops and mobile phones, the twin curses of any conference presentation!
It would be very unfair of me to mention any particular session that I found most the valuable or which I most enjoyed since I only heard a few.
But I can honestly say that I found them all stimulating which is far more than I can say about attending most conferences or the postgraduate library and information course that I followed!
One aspect that troubled me was the concentration upon looking at separate digital or electronic developments.
We talked about many global services and highlighted the vast changes that are taking place in information provision and, in particular, access to information.
Systems/services that were described or demonstrated were very impressive.
Some were smaller developments attached to a single institution.
But there was no mention of hybrid developments while I was there.
Of course, I was only able to attend for a small part of the course.
It may be that there was discussion about hybrid libraries later, but I was concerned about this large gap and regretted that I did not have more time to explore the importance of integrating print and electronic information provision more in my own talk.
I felt that my causal mention of the word ‘hybrid’ was interpreted as meaning merely a mix of print and electronic rather than the seamless integration I was suggesting that we should all be striving to achieve.
Of course, I had been asked to talk about the ResIDe Electronic Reserve (http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/itdev/reside) at the University of the West of England and this has been and will continue to run as a separate electronic service until autumn.
Perhaps others were similarly handicapped by their own briefs and would have liked to have introduced more discussion about the development of and need to develop hybrid libraries.
Despite this latter lack, which, after all, was outside the theme of the Summer School, I would recommend attendance at next year’s course(s).
References (1) For an account of the first Summer School by the only UK delegate, see van der Zwan, R. (1996) Ticer Summer School on the Digital Library, 4-16 August 1996, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Ariadne, Issue 6 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue6/tilburg/intro.html (2) For further information about the background to the development of the summer school, see Prinsen, J.G.B.
& Geleijnse, H. (1999) The International Summer School on the Digital Library: experiences and plans for the future, D-lib Magazine, Vol 5 No 10 October.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october99/prinsen/10prinsen.html Author Details   Christine Dugdale, Glenside Library, University of the West Of England, Bristol, Blackberry Hill, Stapleton, Bristol BS16 1DD E-mail: Christine.Dugdale@uwe.ac.uk Article Title: "Digital Developments Amidst the Tulips and Windmills" Author: Christine Dugdale Publication Date: 02-October-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 29 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/dugdale/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Filling Institutional Repositories: Practical Strategies from the DAEDALUS Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Filling Institutional Repositories: Practical Strategies from the DAEDALUS Project Buzz data software database archives metadata repositories eprints copyright preservation perl licence rae research standards Citation BibTex RIS Morag Mackie describes some strategies that can be used to help populate an institutional repository.
DAEDALUS [1] is a three-year project based at the University of Glasgow funded under the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [2].
The main focus of the project has been developing institutional repositories to hold content ranging from peer-reviewed published papers to theses and working papers.
Separate repositories have been developed for published material [3] and other material [4].
This article will detail some of the strategies we have adopted in gathering existing content for the institutional repositories we have developed at Glasgow.
It will not consider the case that requires to be made in order to persuade academics to deposit content in repositories, as this is already well documented.
Instead it will concentrate on practical strategies that can be used to identify potential content and which will result in real content being added to a repository.
The majority of the strategies discussed should be seen in the context of the need to gather existing content in order to populate a repository.
At the outset of developing a repository it is vital to be able to demonstrate to stakeholders how it will work, and it is only possible to do this with content in place.
Addressing the need to establish a process whereby academics systematically self-archive or, at the very least, provide publication details on an ongoing basis requires a different approach.
This article will concentrate solely on published peer-reviewed journal articles, as this is the area which has proved most challenging in terms of persuading academics to give us their content, and also in relation to publishers' copyright agreements.
This material is at the heart of the open access/scholarly communications crisis debate.
Although the project is also collecting departmental working papers, technical reports and other related material we have not experienced any major difficulties in persuading University departments to allow this content to be deposited.
Similarly, although the process of changing the University regulations in order to permit the electronic deposit of theses is proving slow we do not anticipate being faced with the same sort of challenges in gathering this content.
We hope that institutions in the process of building repositories will find our experiences useful.
Initial Strategies At the outset of the project it was clear that it would be vital to get academics on board as soon as possible.
A first step in this direction was to ask prominent academics from the three territorial research areas of the University to become members of the DAEDALUS Project Board.
This helped us to begin developing relationships with the different faculties of the University.
A small number of academics known to be interested in open access issues were also contacted and asked if they would be willing to submit content.
However, the main activity in the first few months of the project consisted of giving presentations to a wide variety of University committees, ranging from faculty research committees to departmental and library committees.
Our focus during these initial talks was the benefits of institutional repositories to academics and information about how they could contribute content.
It soon became clear that most (though not all) academics were fairly sympathetic to the aims of the project, though many of them were concerned about copyright issues.
Despite a generally encouraging response, this did not translate into real content being deposited in the repository.
During talks to staff we had explained that project staff would be happy to add content on behalf of authors, although a self-archiving facility was also in place.
We found that it was difficult to get staff to give or send us electronic copies of their papers, even when they had promised to do so.
This was our first indication that while staff may be sympathetic many of them do not have the time or the inclination to contribute.
They were happy to give us permission to do the work on their behalf, but could not commit to doing the work themselves.
Clearly the advantages of institutional repositories were not yet sufficiently convincing to academics to persuade them to play an active part in the process.
Within the first year of the project a University-wide event on open access and institutional repositories was held.
The event was publicised by email and in the University Newsletter.
Subsequent to the event each of the attendees was contacted individually, and follow-up meetings were arranged.
It was hoped that this would be a good method of generating content.
However, although it helped to open a dialogue with academics, this did not always translate into content.
Follow-up Strategies With levels of content in the service still relatively low it was clear that additional strategies would need to be developed.
Experience so far had indicated that relying primarily on staff to come up with content was not sufficient.
Practical strategies that would actually result in some content in the repository were required.
Staff Web Sites As a means of gathering support from staff who were likely to be sympathetic to the open access cause a survey of personal staff Web pages was carried out.
This enabled us to establish which members of staff were already in the habit of making the full text of publications available on their personal Web sites.
An approach was made to these staff explaining the aims of the project, and asking if they would be interested in their content being made available in the repository.
In most cases the staff we contacted were keen, although some pointed out that they thought publishers would not mind articles being made available on personal sites, but would be less keen on the organised nature of an institutional repository.
Others had not considered the fact that they might not actually be permitted even to post articles on a personal site.
However, the majority of academics we contacted were happy for us to establish which of their publications could be added to the repository.
Publisher Copyright Agreements In adopting this strategy we were committing to checking the copyright agreements pertaining to each of the individual articles we hoped to add.
This proved to be a challenging and time-consuming activity.
The only central resource currently available for checking publisher copyright policies is the list created by the RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open Archiving) and now maintained by the SHERPA Project (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Access and Preservation) [5].
While an extremely useful resource and one that is growing all the time, the list does not cover all publishers.
As this is the case it has been necessary to track down policies from publishers' Web sites, or to contact publishers directly where these do not exist or where they do not address the issue of whether an author is permitted to make his or her paper available in a repository.
No two publisher polices are exactly the same, and many do not explicitly state what rights authors have in relation to repositories.
In some cases this may be deliberate, but in many cases the lack of information is more likely to stem from a lack of awareness on the part of the publisher that authors want to know what rights they retain in relation to deposit in repositories.
Interpreting publisher copyright policies is also a difficult area, particularly as there is no real precedent and no case law.
Where copyright policies did not exist or where they were unclear, we contacted the publishers directly and asked for permission.
Where it was possible to identify an individual responsible for rights management we contacted them directly either by email or by letter.
Generally speaking we have found that publishers are happy to accept such requests by email.
Although some publishers reply quickly, others may take some weeks and some do not reply at all.
We found that publishers were more likely to give permission for specific papers to be added than to outline their general policy on the issue.
Consequently permissions for most articles have to be established on a case-by-case basis.
Journal Approach As an additional means of populating the repository we decided to identify journals and/or publishers with copyright policies which permitted deposit in repositories.
The SHERPA/RoMEO list was particularly helpful in this respect.
Having established a particular journal to target, our next step was to find out which Glasgow authors had published in the journal.
The easiest means of doing this was by searching standard abstracting and indexing databases such as Web of Science, MEDLINE, etc.
using the Journal Title and Author Affiliation fields.
Having established who our target authors were we then made contact with them.
Our approach was to explain the aims of the project, explain that we were contacting them as authors of an article within a particular journal, outline the copyright policy saying that this permitted articles to be added to a repository, and then ask for permission to add the article.
In some cases we asked the authors to let us know if they were willing to give permission or not, but we have also made use of an opt-out strategy, whereby we said to authors that we would go ahead and add the article unless they asked us not to.
We have only adopted this opt-out policy after discussion with a senior member of staff within the department or faculty concerned.
So far no members of staff have ever got back to us and asked us not to add their article, but it is unclear whether this is because they support the project or because they have no strong feelings about the issue.
Contacting staff individually and asking for a response allows a relationship to be developed, but issues of lack of time and apathy do mean that it is inevitable that some members of staff will not reply to requests.
As a small case study we decided to choose a journal with a copyright agreement that left us in some doubt as to whether it permitted deposit in an institutional repository.
We were aware that the journal Nature had publicised the fact that from February 2002 they no longer required authors to sign away their copyright but were instead asking authors to sign an exclusive license.
The message from the publishers was that this would permit authors to retain more rights than previously, as they would be 'free to reuse their papers in any of their future printed work, and have the right to post a copy of the published paper on their own websites' [6] .
This statement was further clarified within the Nature Author License FAQ [7]: 'The license says I may post the PDF on my "own" web site.
What does "own" mean?
It means a personal site, or portion of a site, either owned by you or at your institution (provided this institution is not-for-profit), devoted to you and your work.
If in doubt, please contact permissions@nature.com' As this does not explicitly include institutional repositories, (they are not devoted to the work of one particular author), we decided that it would be a useful exercise to contact Nature and ask if deposit in an institutional repository fell within the terms of the license.
In order to do this we began by establishing which Glasgow authors had published in Nature, (following the same procedure as outlined above).
We then contacted each of them individually and asked if they would be willing for us to approach Nature on their behalf.
Of 22 individuals contacted 16 replied, and all were happy for us to go ahead.
We were pleasantly surprised to receive a positive reply from Nature, indicating that they were willing to allow us to add the articles to the repository so long as the authors were members of staff at the University.
Interestingly they did not fully address the issue of a perceived distinction between personal Web sites and institutional repositories, and this meant that it was not entirely clear whether their positive response could be applied more widely to other Nature Publishing Group publications.
The authors were then contacted to advise them that permission had been granted.
Again we did not experience any resistance to going ahead and adding the articles to the repository.
The Nature articles did raise an interesting practical issue as many of the articles were fairly short they frequently ended half way down a page.
This meant that sections of unrelated articles also appeared on the same page.
Seeking permission from the authors of these unrelated articles was not practical, but we did not feel that blanking out areas of the page was appropriate either.
As Nature had specifically indicated that we could use the pdf copy available on the journal Web site we made the decision to use this version without making any changes.
Open Access Journals as a Source of Content Assuming that Glasgow academics who had published in open access journals would not be averse to these articles being made available in the repository, we identified relevant articles from BioMed Central journals [8], and approached the authors concerned.
It would be useful to be able to identify additional content in other open access journals, but so far we have not found an easy way of doing this.
The Directory of Open Access Journals [9] is very useful, but it does not enable searching by institution or author affiliation.
Other repositories have been able to add the entire content of a particular open access journal where that journal is hosted by the institution, and this is a useful way of seeding a repository.
Long-Term Strategies All of the strategies described so far have been relatively small-scale approaches to the challenge of filling an institutional repository with content.
While very worthwhile in the short term, it is clear that such strategies are not sustainable, particularly as they rely on a large investment of project staff time for relatively small gains.
In addition, the strategies deal with existing content, and do not address the need to establish a system whereby new content is added to the database automatically, (either through self-archiving or some other systematic method of gathering content).
It was clear that a more wide-ranging strategy was necessary.
Faculty and Departmental Publications Databases Any strategy likely to be successful had to take into account the fact that most academic staff, while supportive, were unwilling to deposit content in the repositories themselves.
Until such times as they are required to do so, either by the institution or by funding bodies, it seems unlikely that the majority of staff will undertake this activity.
At the same time, we needed to find a way of gathering content that was more systematic than our current approach.
Taking advantage of the fact that each of the faculties within the University were at the beginning of gathering publication details for the forthcoming Research Assessment Exercise, we decided to investigate the possibility of becoming involved in this process.
A number of faculties had chosen to use bibliographic software packages such as Reference Manager to collate details about their publications.
As staff were going to be required to provide publications details to departmental or faculty administrative staff for inclusion in the database, we started to test out the possibility of importing bibliographic details from Reference Manager into our repository for published and peer-reviewed papers.
A Perl script was written which enables bibliographic details in RIS format (a tagged format developed by Research Information Systems) to be imported directly into the ePrints.org software.
Having established that this process was feasible technically, it was then necessary to convince the faculties to allow us to import the details from their databases.
One faculty already had a substantial publications database developed over several years, but most faculties were in the position of starting from scratch.
This proved to be an advantage, as the Faculty Support Teams within the Library were approached by a number of faculties to aid with the creation of such databases.
In return for carrying out this work we have been able to open a dialogue about the possibility of importing the records into our repository for published and peer-reviewed papers.
We are currently in discussion with several faculties about the practicalities of setting this up, initially as a pilot.
Such imports will only populate the repository with bibliographic details, and so from each faculty we are seeking authorisation to go ahead and add full text wherever this is permitted without the requirement to contact all authors individually.
Gaining such a commitment from even one faculty would have a significant impact on the amount of content in the repository.
It is important to point out that publications databases maintained by departments and faculties are not viewed as a competitor to the repository we are developing.
In many cases they are used to hold data in addition to bibliographic details, e.g.
relating to research grants etc., and this is not information which would be appropriate for the public domain.
In addition, software such as Reference Manager is not OAI-compliant, and so is not suitable for being searched by harvesters such as OAIster [10].
Instead we hope that the two can be complementary, and that our repository will form the publicly accessible face of the information in the databases.
Ultimately we are aiming to develop a workflow which would enable us to add content systematically on a University-wide basis.
This would operate on the basis that each faculty or department would create and maintain a locally held publications database using Reference Manager or a similar package.
We anticipate that this would operate in the following way: Academics periodically provide updated publications details for departmental/faculty publications database; Departmental/faculty publications database administrators provide periodic updates for the repository by sending records for import into ePrints; Bibliographic details are imported into ePrints; Full text of articles is added where publishers permit where possible the pdf version will be used.
If this is not possible or we do not have a subscription to the title in question, staff will be contacted directly to ask if they can provide an electronic copy.
Although the proposed workflow allows a significant percentage of the process to be automated staff input will still be necessary.
Most significantly time will need to be spent checking whether publisher copyright agreements allow articles to be added or not.
In addition, metadata will have to be checked and subject headings will have to be added.
The resource implications of such a model should become clearer over the next few months of the project as we begin to import details from faculty publications databases on a trial basis.
This will help us establish whether such a model will be sustainable in the long term.
However, a key element of the model is that academics will only be required to submit details of their publications once, thus no additional work is required on their part.
Conclusion Filling a repository for published and peer-reviewed papers is a slow process, and it is clear that it is a task that requires a significant amount of staff input from those charged with developing the repository.
Although we have succeeded in adding a reasonable amount of content to the repository we have also been offered significant amounts of content that cannot be added because of restrictive publisher copyright agreements.
In some cases academics have offered between ten and twenty articles and we have not been able to add any of them to the repository.
This is a clear demonstration that major changes need to take place at a high level in order for repositories to be successful.
Although some academics have taken the decision to try and avoid publishing in the journals of publishers with restrictive policies, this is still relatively rare.
We can inform staff about the issues, but we cannot and should not dictate in which journals they publish.
Change is only likely to happen if staff are required, either by the funding councils or by their institution, to make their publications available either by publishing in open access journals or in journals that permit deposit in a repository.
Academics also need to be assured that their chances of scoring highly in the Research Assessment Exercise will not be adversely affected by publishing in open access journals.
It is clear that while academics can see the benefits of institutional repositories, there has not yet been a sufficient cultural shift to persuade them to take action.
It will be very interesting to see whether the policy adopted by the Queensland University of Technology requiring academics to deposit their research outputs in the University's Eprint repository [11] is more widely adopted.
On a more positive note, there have been a number of recent encouraging developments, in particular the statement from the Wellcome Trust supporting open access [12], and the ongoing Parliamentary Inquiry into Scientific Publications.
Changes in the scholarly communications process at this level will make a huge difference to the success of the institutional repository movement.
At the same time open access issues are starting to become mainstream news for academics, and greater awareness of the issues can only help the development of repositories.
It will be critical for repositories to start to prove themselves in the foreseeable future, and it is to be hoped that such developments will go a long way towards helping them to do this.
References DAEDALUS Project http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/index.html JISC FAIR Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair DAEDALUS repository for published and peer reviewed material http://eprints.gla.ac.uk DAEDALUS repository for pre-prints, grey literature, theses etc.
https://dspace.gla.ac.uk SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher copyright policies http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php Nature Author News http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/05_news.xml&style=xml/05_news.xsl Nature Author License FAQ http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/05_faq.xml&style=xml/05_faq.xsl BioMed Central http://www.biomedcentral.com Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org OAIster http://www.oaister.org Queensland University of Technology: E-print repository for research output at QUT (Policy document) http://www.qut.edu.au/admin/mopp/F/F_01_03.html Wellcome Trust Position Statement in support of open access publishing http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002766.html Author Details Morag Mackie Project Manager: Advocacy (DAEDALUS) University of Glasgow Email: m.mackie@lib.gla.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/index.html Return to top Article Title: "Filling Institutional Repositories: Practical strategies from the DAEDALUS Project" Author: Morag Mackie Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/mackie/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Accessibility: CHI 2001 and Beyond Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Accessibility: CHI 2001 and Beyond Buzz mobile software html usability infrastructure archives accessibility browser video windows gis ebook cd-rom ict url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Leona Carpenter reports on the key issue of accessibility as covered at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference held in Seattle, and also provides a round-up of sources of further information.
The “CHI” series of conferences sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM-SIGCHI) [1], in partnership with, among others, the British HCI Group, is the premier international conference on human aspects of computing.
CHI2001: anyone.
anywhere.
[2], held in Seattle from 31 March – 5 April, focussed on the pervasiveness of information and communication technology (ICT) in contemporary life and the consequent imperative to make ICT accessible to people, whatever their characteristics or location.
Along with mobile computing and internationalisation, accessibility for people with functional limitations was a key theme of the conference.
This theme was touched upon by one of his colleagues in Bill Gates’ opening plenary remarks “Advancing the user experience”, and addressed in detail by Gregg Vanderheiden in his inspiring yet pragmatic closing plenary talk "Why do we?
Why can't we?
Future perspective and research directions" on designing standard mass-market products so that everyone can use them.
CHI 2001 Opening Plenary – The Two Bills Bill Gates (Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft) focussed his plenary remarks on research and development projects within his company that have innovative human/computer interface elements, bringing in three of his colleagues to flesh out details of their work on support for digital reading, tablet computers you take anywhere and on which you can write with digital ink, and prioritisation and notification systems [3].
The “anywhere” concept was clearly intrinsic to much of this work, but “anyone” less so.
However, the accessibility strand of the “anyone” conference theme did emerge in the presentation of Bill Hill, readability researcher on the Microsoft Reader team [4].
The standard features either currently implemented or under development for the Reader include some that support readers with visual impairment.
An automatic large print facility involves adjusting the spacing between the lines, re-hyphenating words, re-justifying paragraphs, and repaginating; all this without disturbing the reading experience.
A speech-driven interface and a text-to-speech facility would be useful for all, as well as essential for blind readers.
Bill Hill’s vision for accessibility of publications is that through electronic books the accessible version is the same version at the same price and published at the same time as the ordinary version, with no need to wait for later, heavier, and perhaps more expensive large print, Braille or recorded speech editions.
CHI 2001 Closing Plenary – Trying Harder Greg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Center at the University of Wisconsin [5], cited curb ramps, captions on television, mouse keys, typewriters, carbon paper, Jacuzzis, and LP records as examples of products that were originally designed for people with disabilities which have become mass-market (and hence profitable) products.
His design ideal is not doing something special for special people, but rather learning to design flexible interfaces we all can use.
Making it possible for people (who otherwise could not) to get jobs and keep them, to do banking and other activities required to live independently, could be profitable because products designed like this may be better for others as well.
Two of the examples he provided of this kind of design were E-books where text enlargement and voice output are standard for all options (assisting people with visual impairment), and web pages which provided a way to shut off animations (assisting people with attention deficit).
He also pointed out that all the things which are important for mobile computing are also important for accessibility.
However, he acknowledged that "there are no universal designs"; rather, we should design for as broad a range as is both possible and commercially practical.
Vanderheiden’s vision for the future was a pocket-sized "window-to-the-world" all-purpose pda-phone-browser-mailer, with a few buttons, a pencil/stylus, plus speech input/controls, an earphone which could have a hearing aid built in, a camera, etc.
– all of which would incorporate "natural accessibility".
For example, all buttons are software, hence enlargeable, both all-verbal and all-silent options are available, a text capture and read facility that can also be used as a magnifier, and it knows where you are via a geo-locator.
This product, and other ICT products would operate in conjunction with a 3-tier "modality translation" service infrastructure, consisting of local automatic services, network advanced services, and human assisted services, iwth each succeeding layer invoked by the necessity to "try harder" to address the needs of people with functional limitations in the context of a particular task.
Modality translation services include text to speech, speech to text, speech to sign, sign to speech, international language translation, language level translation, and image/video description.
See the Trace Center's Modality Translation Services Program [6] for information on work in progress to realise this vision; and especially for the handout [7] on envisioned services, illustrated by a good, clear diagram.
Accessibility Issues and Sources Now While Vanderheiden set out an impressive vision for the future, there is much that can be and to some extent is being done now to make accessibility a reality.
Accessibility is now a widely acknowledged issue in the design of ICT for public services.
In the USA there are guidelines for ICT accessibility for federal employees, and federal agencies have legal obligations to procure accessible ICT systems and services.
As a result, companies supplying systems to federal departments and agencies must design the systems supplied to comply with these requirements [8],[9],[10],[11].
Broader legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which makes it possible for employees to sue their employers of software provided for them to do their jobs is not accessible may be interpreted by American courts to require accessibility of commercial Web sites.
These legal requirements, in addition to any ethical and commercial considerations, have made developers increasingly aware of the issues and willing to seek solutions and develop guidelines.
For example, see Microsoft’s Accessibility site, and its involvement in two UK accessibility-related initiatives [12],[13].
IBM and Sun are two further examples of substantial ICT companies making public their efforts to address these issues and encouraging others to do the same [14],[15],[16].
In the UK, public bodies – as well as commercial organisations such as Tesco [17] – are addressing accessibility issues.
Recently, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has initiated the Technology for Disabilities Information Service (TechDis) to provide information and advice on the use of new and existing Communication and Information Technologies (CIT), to enhance access to learning and teaching, research and administration activities for students and staff with disabilities [18].
The Digital Media Access Group at the University of Dundee offers accessibility audit and consultancy services [19].
Also in the UK, the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) campaigns for good Web design on behalf of blind and partially sighted people, and Resource (The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries) has a chapter on Website accessibility in its Library Services for Visually Impaired People: a Manual of Best Practice [20],[21].
Internationally, WC3 (World Wide Web Consortium) pursues its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), supported by the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, European Commission's Information Society Technologies Programme, and Canada's Assistive Devices Industry Office, among others [22].
As might be expected from the organisation developing the technologies upon which the Web is founded, the WAI Web pages are rich in resources, covering technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development.
Particularly interesting is a listing – with links – of existing tools which can be used by developers or users for improving accessibility.
Some of these are tailor-made for accessibility, while others, such as HTML validators, have features which can turned to the purpose [23].
This report has not addressed how we can achieve accessibility in information and education systems and services.
However, the author hopes that it has provided a reminder of the importance and potential of doing so, along with pointers to a some good starting points for those developing or responsible for providing inclusive (and therefore of necessity) accessible ICT-based services.
References ACM SIGCHI Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction at http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/ The CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Seattle, Washington, 31 March-5 April 2001 http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/chi2001/ Remarks by Bill Gates, CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Seattle, Wash., April 2, 2001 http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2001/04-02chi.asp Meet the Microsoft Reader Team at http://www.microsoft.com/reader/meet_team.asp Trace Center, College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison at http://trace.wisc.edu/ Modality Translation Services Program at http://trace.wisc.edu/world/modtrans/ Modality Translation on Next Generation Internet at http://trace.wisc.edu/handouts/modality_translation/ Jason Peckenpaugh, Acquisition council issues guidelines on IT accessibility standards, Government Executive Magazine, 25 January 2001 http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0101/012501p1.htm Federal IT Accessibility Initiative at http://section508.gov/ US Dept.
of Justice Section 508 Homepage at http://www.justice.gov/crt/section-508-home-page-0 U.S. Department of Justice, Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA Home Page at http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/adahom1.htm Microsoft Accessibility: technology for everyone at http://www.microsoft.com/enable/ Workability in Microsoft in the community UK at http://www.microsoft.com/UK/info/community/workability.htm IBM Accessibility Center at http://www-3.ibm.com/able/ David Mertz, Tips: Design for accessible Web sites: Making Web sites available to users with disabilities in IBM: developerWorks: Web architecture library [visited June 2001] http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/w-mertz.html Sun Microsystems’ Accessibility Program at http://www.sun.com/tech/access/ About the tesco.com/access grocery service at http://www.tesco.com/access/about.htm Technology for Disabilities Information Service at http://www.disinhe.ac.uk/project/techdis.asp Digital Media Access Group at http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/projects/dmag/ RNIB Campaign for Good Web Design at http://www.rnib.org.uk/digital/ Library Services for Visually Impaired People: a Manual of Best Practice.
Resource.
available on the National Library for the Blind website [also available in Braille, audio cassette and CD-ROM formats] at http://www.nlbuk.org/bpm/ Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility in Web Accessibility Initiative at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/existingtools.html AbilityNet at http://www.abilitynet.co.uk/ Further Resources Bobby in CAST BOBBY is a tool Web authors can use to assess whether their individual pages are accessible for people with disabilities, and what to do about it if they are not.
It is provided by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) a not-for-profit organisation in the USA dedicated to the use of technology to improve opportunities for all people, including those with disabilities.
Cast also supplies software that adds spoken voice, visual highlighting, document navigation, or page navigation to any electronic text, including that in Web pages, word processing files, scanned-in text, or typed-in text.
The eReader is available in both Macintosh and Windows versions.
http://www.cast.org/bobby/ Information Technology Technical Assistance and Training Center (ITTATC) Established by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA), sponsored by and in association with the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) to promote accessible ICT through technical assistance, training and information.
Firmly within the context of US legislation, this organisation nevertheless provides information and a set of information links with broad applicability.
http://www.ittatc.org/index.cfm Karen Soloman, 'Disability Divide', The Industry Standard Magazine, 03 July, 2000 http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,16236,00.html universal usability.org: Pushing Human-computer Interaction Research to Empower every Citizen The universal usability.org website was created in 2000 by the student fellows and the fellows committee members from the ACM's Conference on Universal Usability (CUU), and covers a broad range of issues, including but not limited to disability-related accessibility.
http://universalusability.org/index.html Accessibility Resources in HCI Bibliography : HCI Webliography This page of Gary Perlman's HCI Bibliography site now serves as the ACM SIGCAPH (Special Interest Group on Computers and the Physically Handicapped) page of Links to Internet Resources on Accessibility.
On 11 June 2001, it contained 111 links to information related to making computers and software accessible to people with disabilities.
http://hcibib.org/accessibility/ Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge the usefulness in the preparation of this report of information and comments posted to the SIG-IA information architecture mailing list in response to message “Common Benefits of ADA Accessibility Compliance” posted by Diana Ringer of Wells Fargo Bank on 26 April 2001, and which were summarised by her on 3 May 2001.
List archives are available at http://www.listquest.com/computers/tier2/computer_misc.htm.
Author Details Leona Carpenter Technical Research Officer UKOLN Email: l.carpenter@ukoln.ac.uk URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Accessibility: CHI 2001 and Beyond" Author: Leona Carpenter Publication Date: 22-June-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 28 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/chi/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Invisible Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Invisible Web Buzz software rdf framework database xml archives metadata browser copyright graphics png passwords svg gopher ftp url research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Napier reviews the book: The Invisible Web.
Chris Sherman and Gary Price The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t see Cyber Age Books, 2001.
ISBN 0-910965-51-X Price: $29.95 I first became interested in the Invisible Web after seeing Chris Sherman and Gary Price talking at the Internet Librarian International Conference in March this year.
In their words “The Invisible Web consists of material that general purpose search engines cannot or will not include in their collection of Web pages.” If currently available resources from search engines are the tip of an iceberg, the Invisible Web is all that lays beneath the surface of the water.
The idea of a huge hidden Web available for us to explore was enough to make any information professional get excited.
Several months later The Invisible Web book arrived and I’ll admit that after reading the blurb on the back I began to have doubts about whether a guide on the Invisible Web would actually be that unique and relevant.
The press release claims that it is “the first handbook and directory for information users who wish to utilize Invisible Web resources systematically in order to improve the quality and effectiveness of their online research”.
It all sounded just too much like another list of useful resources and key sites.
In spite of the hype The Invisible Web pleasantly surprised me by being both informative and useful.
However, although both are of interest, it isn’t the directory or the explanation of the Invisible Web itself that make this book worth buying.
The essence of this text lies in its discussion of the art of searching.
It starts off by leading us on a whistle stop tour from the creation of the Internet in the 1960s to the evolution of search engines and on to the Web as it is today.
Once search engines have been put into context current searching problems are discussed and consideration is given to the ways in which we can improve our searching.
It is this further understanding of ‘how the Web is’ that promises to help a searcher succeed rather than the list of often out of date URLs at the back.
Structure After a shaky start with a number of repeated paragraphs in the foreword (written by Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com) the book is well laid out.
Sherman and Price have split the main body of the book into 3 main subject areas.
The first and definitely the most interesting for me considers the Internet and searching, the second introduces the Invisible Web and the third is a directory of resources.
The resources are also available online with further information about the book from The Invisible Web site (1).
The authors of The Invisible Web are Chris Sherman, the associate editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, and Gary Price the writer of the well-known Web research tools Price’s List.
Both authors are experts on search engines and sufficiently well qualified to write about this subject area.
Yet their writing throughout the book is both informal and easy to follow.
The end result is accessible to any level of Web user, from novice to experienced information professional.
No prior knowledge is expected except maybe a few hours ‘surfing’ time.
To help those less clued up on the Web in the early chapters the authors spend some time defining key terms.
These definitions are given in separate text boxes for the sake of clarity.
Every chapter also contains one or two separate myth boxes where a general belief about the Web, such as ‘All search engines are alike’, is quashed Content Although I have read a few books on the evolution of the Web this was the first time I’d read anything that considered it from a search engine perspective and I found the different approach quite refreshing.
This said I am sure there are a number of other books dedicated to this subject area and I’d be interested in knowing how much of a cross over there is between The Invisible Web and these texts.
In the first three chapters the authors fill us in on the history of the Internet and the eventual need for search technologies.
In the early days of the Internet searching usually took the form of sending a request for help to an email list (how much has actually changed we ask ourselves?).
With the introduction of anonymous FTP servers, a type of centralised file server enabling file sharing across networks, the situation greatly improved and a directory listing of all the files stored on the server could be shown in the form of an index.
An interesting resource listed in the book is the first Web directory available from the W3C site(2).
As the Internet began to grow researchers began work on various Internet search tools.
The first being Archie created by McGill University, Montreal in 1990, Gopher was created at the University of Minnesota and its interface is a precursor of the popular Web directory like Yahoo.
Another search engine, WAIS, the Wide area information server, was the first natural language search engine.
Sherman and Price are keen to point out that the fundamental problem with searching in the past and today is that no-one is in charge of the Web which means there is no central authority to maintain an index.
Throughout their introduction to the Internet and Web Sherman and Price offer us a selection of information and trivia.
For example have you ever considered where the major search engines get their names from?
Yahoo originally stood for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle and Lycos is actually short for Lycosidae Lycosa, a type of Wolf spider that catches its prey by pursuit rather than relying on a Web.
After their brief history lesson they consider current Web services available on the visible Web by looking at search engines and directories and discussing the difference between browsing and searching.
They give a fair explanation of how directories and search engines work and consider the issues and the pros and cons of using either to find information.
They end their look at current search engines with a glimpse at specialised and hybrid search tools.
URLs are given for meta search engines search engines that search across search engines, value added search services, browser agents – handy add on tools which must be downloaded, and client based Web search engines or bots such as Copernic (3) which is definitely worth a look.
From chapter 4 onwards the authors move on to looking specifically at the Invisible Web explaining that many people are unaware that much of the authoritative information accessible over the Internet is invisible to the key search engines.
They consider 4 levels of invisibility: The Opaque Web – files that can be but aren’t included in search engines such as PDFs and word files.
The Private Web – technically indexable Web pages that have been excluded from search engines by being password protected or through the use of a robots.txt file.
The Proprietary Web – Web only available to people who have agreed to certain terms in exchange for viewing the pages.
Normally some form of registration is needed which may be free or cost money.
The Truly Invisible Web – The Web, which cannot be seen due to technical reasons, lack of metadata etc.
The majority of dynamically created pages created from content-rich databases fall into this category.
Sherman and Price explain that much of this invaluable material is comprised of from universities, libraries, associations, businesses, and government agencies around the world in database format.
Later in their discussion of the Invisible Web the authors make the point that while searching you need to assess the quality of information and watch for biased information.
Some of the key methods used when establishing the credibility of a resource are: looking at its URL to see if it is an established site, considering the author information and making sure that the site is up to date.
The credibility of information is one advantage Invisible Web resources have over many of the other sites a search engine would recommend.
Invisible Web searching also makes sense when looking for specialised content because there are more focused search results and usually a specialised search interface giving you more control over your search input e.g limiting historic eras.
Prior to the directory listing there are a list of FAQ’s on the Invisible Web and number of case studies of Invisible Web searching.
The case studies don’t strike me as being very useful, unless you are looking for information on one of the subject areas covered (such as historical stock quotes) or based in the USA.
There is also a chapter on the future for the Invisible Web and searching.
Sherman and Prices’s main predictions are that more smart crawlers and targeted crawlers will spider the Web and there will also be more specialised search engines.
The authors also take this opportunity to mention metadata standards, Resource Description Framework (RDF) and XML.
Unfortunately there was a disappointing lack of depth in the discussion of the promise and pitfalls of metadata in the future.
There is also a very brief mention of Image handling processes, again there is no depth, no discussion of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Portable Network Graphics (PNG) or other types of image handling(4).
They also touch briefly on wrapper induction techniques, where software probes a database and acts on results, use of such software may ultimately mean that search engines will be able to index databases.
Chris Sherman and Gary Price’s mission is apparently to “save you time and aggravation, and help you succeed in your information quest”.
It’s an ambitious plan and you might need a little more help than just an organized bookmark list, which is really what their directory is, though there are some exceptional sites listed.
Criticism aside, this book will make you think about why, how and what you search, so it’s definitely a foot in the right direction.
(1)Invisible Web site http://www.invisible-web.net (2)The first Web directory Information by Subject http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html (3) Copernic http://www.copernic.com Author Details   Marieke Napier Email m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t see” Author: Marieke Napier Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/invisible-web/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Disaster Management for Libraries and Archives Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Disaster Management for Libraries and Archives Buzz archives passwords research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Lovecy looks at a useful consolidation of approaches to disaster management.
The aim of this book is ambitious: it sets out to present current professional and practical ideas on the whole range of disaster management, from the precautions which will prevent or at least minimise disaster, through the financial considerations, balancing of risk, and staff training needs, to the process of recovery and re-establishment of a service.
It does so in an international context; and it does so based on the practical experience of the contributors.
None of this is, of course, entirely new.
There is a vast literature on the experience of disasters in library and archive services, and one of the valuable achievements of this book is to direct readers to a number of these sources.
This it does both in the specific references at the end of individual chapters and in the final chapter, which is effectively a bibliography.
It is helpfully laid out, with general literature sub-divided into books, chapters in books (two items only, but both key treatments of the topic), and Web sites, these being further sub-divided by major countries.
There follow sections on topics covered in the rest of the book, although not following exactly the structure of the chapters.
The chapters themselves follow a logical structure which might be described as before, during and after a disaster, although there is a necessary degree of overlap if the arrangement is simplified in this way.
The Introduction explains this structure as it gives a brief introduction to the raison d'être of each chapter.
Before the Disaster Happens Heather Mansell has first-hand experience of writing Disaster Control Plans (DCPs) and of training in this area; moreover she has digested and fed into her chapter comments and suggestions from colleagues in other parts of Australia, so that what we are given is more robust than a single individual's view of the subject.
She emphasises the need to resource the plan the process as well as its conclusions the importance of training, and the value of the actual writing of the plan as a discipline which focuses management and staff on the subject.
In the same way, although she acknowledges the practical necessity for a single person to write and update the plan, she points to the advantages of a committee and of rotation of the responsibility for updating as a means of raising awareness throughout the organisation.
Risk Management This is touched on in the first chapter, but Alice Cannon deals with it in detail.
She too sees the process as valuable in itself in facilitating better decision-making through the formal collection of information, and she claims it has a place in building a more cohesive management structure by focusing on the purpose of the organisation.
She also indicates that the analysis of risks can be helpful more generally in obtaining resources; I have found it helpful in explaining the rationale behind applications for the re-grading of junior staff, whose mistakes can sometimes have severe consequences.
The chapter gives a brief history of risk assessment, looks at the difference between perceived and actual risk, and identifies the risks inherent in risk assessment!
Among the latter is complacency, and it is perhaps unfortunate that, when noting that existing preventative measures affect the assessment of the level of risk, Ms Cannon does not note that complacency may lead to the diminution or cessation of those measures.
Nor does she mention the vital role of internal audit in looking at risk assessment updates.
Much of the chapter is a fairly detailed manual of how to set about establishing risk assessment and risk management procedures none of which is new, but which it is useful to have grouped together with the more theoretical aspects.
Three themes common to all the chapters in this book implementation, documentation and communication are also clearly stated.
Fire and Flood In the first of two chapters dealing with the most common of disasters, Bill Jackson is concerned more with the layout and construction of a building to prevent major fire disasters than with how the consequences are dealt with.
Drawing lessons from his experience at the National Library of Scotland he describes the way the Library Trustees moved from the realisation of the vulnerability of the building to a much safer arrangement, while continuing to provide a service to readers.
He lists the lessons learned (p 81), but they are more those to be applied to any major building project than specific lessons about fire safety.
However, in the second half of the chapter he outlines in a table all the elements of a fire safety strategy, and then elaborates this in the text.
Sometimes the points seem self-evident; but experience suggests that however blindingly obvious it is that staff should keep areas tidy to avoid fire risk, a casual inspection of any library will reveal failures of implementation.
Whereas the chapter on fire precautions is based on a specific building, the chapter on floods is very general.
Again, headings such as 'definition of a flooding incident' may sound more appropriate to Noddy Becomes a Safety Officer, but it is worth remembering that floods can be caused by dishwashers as well as acts of God.
Christine Wise quotes a number of relevant standards and guides, and illustrates the use of constructed scenarios to assist planning.
Her list of supporting documentation for a DCP is comprehensive, but it would be more helpful had she differentiated between what might be needed in the immediate aftermath (e.g.
passwords and authorisations) and what provides background information to support the plan (e.g.
BS 5424 : 2000).
Very relevant is her emphasis on the need to document moves of materials ('Where did we put the Gutenberg Bible?
'); documenting the sequence of decisions, which is also one of her recommendations, while helpful for future iterations of the DCP, might not be feasible at the height of the crisis.
Coping with the Crisis Sheryl Davis and Kristen Kern write about the value of cooperation, and cite examples of it in the USA.
They indicate how such cooperatives have come about, and in the case of IELDRN (Inland Empire Libraries Disaster Response Network) quote the mutual aid agreement in full.
This provides a useful starting point for anyone drawing up a similar agreement (it has been used extensively in the USA), and while the legal phraseology may seem off-putting and contrary to the basic good will with which help is offered, it is in fact important that agreements are made as to what happens to supplies in the event of a member's withdrawal.
Both writers point out that cooperation in disaster management may lead to other cooperation; looking at some of the cooperatives mentioned it is clear that in some cases the networks existed before they turned their attention to this topic as is the case with the M25 group of academic libraries in London.
An area which is often overlooked as managers survey gutted buildings and soggy books is that of the human reactions of staff and of users.
Maj Klasson uses her study of both groups after the arson attack on Linköping central library to show what often needs to be done.
She lists the effects on both groups, and describes ways of coping with them using a debriefing process for staff, and a 'billboard' for the public allowing them to post notes of their feelings about the library (and in this case about the arsonist also).
The research is summarised in a series of recommendations (reminders and suggestions might be a better heading) at the end of the chapter.
War In the first of two chapters describing actual disasters, Kornelija Petr describes the effects on libraries of the war in Croatia between 1991 and 1995.
This was disaster on a national scale, one in which libraries were only a small part of the wholesale destruction, although she makes the point that the Serbian forces had a definite policy of trying to destroy the cultural heritage of the Croatian nation.
Ms Petr notes a number of factors which affected libraries apart from the shelling, such as the movement of people from affected areas, the conscription of young male librarians, and the feeling of unreality in running a library service in a war; against which she sets the increased demand for reading material for people spending long hours in shelters, and for children trying to escape an intolerable reality.
She writes of the mutual help and cooperation of libraries (without formal agreements), but also of the mistakes, particularly the lack of preparation and the non-existence of plans for moving the most valuable material (and valuable here relates to value as cultural heritage, not monetary value).
She draws together at the end the lessons which can be learnt.
In Western Europe we may be rather blasé about the idea of war; as I write this in mid-July I cannot fail to be aware that two of the bombs in London on 7th July were relatively close to the British Library and Senate House Library.
Getting Back to Normal Any treatment of disaster needs to end on a positive note, and this book ends with a case study of the aftermath of the Norwich City Library fire in 1994.
After setting the library and the level of loss in context, John Creber recounts the steps which were taken to recover stock (more was salvageable than was first thought an important lesson to be drawn), to store what had been saved, and to re-establish rapidly a service to residents.
The chapter is helpfully punctuated by lists of lessons learnt in the immediate aftermath, in terms of decisions on stock (which may require a degree of ruthlessness), the time conservation will take, the need to support staff and users; and later on the purchase of replacements, dealing with donations, dealing with insurance claims, and finding temporary premises.
The last is tied up with the question of the long-term replacement of the library building, and the need to resist a rapid solution when a better prospect looms.
The chapter concludes with a picture of the excellent new Norwich City central library.
Conclusion Any book written by a number of contributors, in particular one on a subject such as disaster management where all aspects interlace, is going to be repetitive in places.
The first chapter strays into areas such as risk assessment and cooperative activity, while any chapter dealing with a specific sort of disaster has to refer to Disaster Control Plans.
Editorial inserts of references forward or back draw attention to the fact.
Equally, any book written by those whose work is primarily in this area will have a focused view of what libraries are about.
To take just one example: the references to the training needs of disaster management contained in the chapter on the DCP seemed to me likely to exhaust the time staff have for training, let alone the training budget there are other activities in a library which also need staff training.
Library managers have to balance a range of activities of which disaster management is only one.
Nevertheless, in doing so they could well be helped by the existence of a book which will remind them of the many elements involved, and direct them to the sources which they may need for a specific problem.
In its combination of theory based on first-hand experience and lessons drawn from actual examples this book forms a very practical introduction to a topic which can elsewhere be obfuscated with jargon.
Author Details Ian Lovecy Library and IT Consultant Bangor Email: ian_lovecy@hotmail.com Ian Lovecy was formerly Librarian and Director of Information Services at the University of Wales Bangor, and subsequently Senior Strategy Adviser at the same institution, where his responsibilities included business continuity strategies.
Return to top Article Title: "Disaster Management for Libraries and Archives " Author: Ian Lovecy Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/lovecy-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DSpace Vs. ETD-db: Choosing Software to Manage Electronic Theses and Dissertations Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DSpace Vs. ETD-db: Choosing Software to Manage Electronic Theses and Dissertations Buzz data software java database apache infrastructure archives metadata identifier schema repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh linux passwords perl mysql tomcat dspace lucene licence ftp authentication interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Jones examines the similarities and differences between DSpace and ETD-db to determine their applicability in a modern E-theses service.
The Theses Alive!
[1] Project, based at Edinburgh University Library and funded under the JISC Fair Programme [2], is aiming to produce, among other things, a software solution for institutions in the UK to implement their own E-theses or Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) online submission system and repository.
In order to achieve this it has been necessary to examine existing packages that may provide all or part of the solution we desire before considering what extra development we may need to do.
We evaluated two open source packages to deliver E-theses functionality via a Web-based interface: ETD-db [3] by Virginia Tech, and DSpace [4] written in partnership between Hewlett-Packard (HP) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
A direct comparison is hard as each package is driven by different motivations: ETD-db is specifically designed for E-theses, containing a 'workspace'for supervised authoring of documents, and a thesis-specific metadata set; DSpace has been developed to aid the creation of institutional repositories, with the emphasis more on post-submission workflows and potential digital preservation for a variety of document types.
The DAEDALUS [5] Project at the University of Glasgow has provided us with a round-up of initial experiences with DSpace and another open-source institutional repository package called EPrints.org [6] and notes that: 'They have much in common and the choice of which, or both, or neither, will hinge on a range of local factors' [7].
This study in part then considers whether one of these popular institutional repository software packages is better for E-theses than software written specifically for the job or not.
This comparison will look at some of the common elements between these packages and draw conclusions on which is the best in each field.
In addition, it will look at how difficult it will be to modify each of the packages to provide an E-theses service for the UK.
This analysis will be considered alongside the medium-term future of each of the packages as they are developed as well as the scope for expansion that each package has within the library and also the university itself.
We will spend most time considering elements particularly relevant to E-Theses such as the metadata elements and submission flow, as well as essential areas such as security and administration.
An Introduction to the Software ETD-db ETD-db has been developed by one or two developers at Virginia Tech, and endorsed by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) [8].
As of February 2002 development of the official release of this package paused at version 1.7c, but it is still used as their ETD submission, archive and search tool; there are suggestions now that the public development of this product will resume in the near future.
Currently this is the most widespread E-theses package in use, in part due to the support it has from the NDLTD.
Despite this, there is currently little directional development, with some institutions choosing to install the "out-of-the-box" version, while others make their own changes to the system, which are not easily available to the general community.
ETD-db depends upon the Perl [9] programming language and the MySQL [10] open source database system.
Perl is native to most Linux and Unix installs, and MySQL is also very common.
In addition to the standard Perl installation, it is also necessary to install additional 'Perl Modules' which enhance the functionality of the language.
It requires a reasonably experienced systems administrator to do the prerequisite installation.
DSpace DSpace has been developed in partnership between HP and MIT.
Development is still very much in progress, but as institutional repository software DSpace is making its mark, with an increasing number of institutions around the globe installing, evaluating and using the package.
Currently, the original developers undertake most of the core development, but a growing technical user base is generating suggestions for future releases as well as producing some add-on modules.
In addition the DSpace Federation [11] is guiding the transition to a more community-wide open source development model, although this has yet to be finalised.
The future of this package seems stable in the medium-term, although it is difficult to predict what the outcome of the federated approach will be.
DSpace depends upon the Java [12] programming language and the PostgreSQL [13] open source database system.
It also requires a number of additional Java-based elements to be installed: Tomcat [14], which is a Java Web server; a number of Java code libraries; and Ant [15], a Java compiler.
It is recommended that DSpace be installed on a Linux or a Unix machine.
It requires an experienced systems administrator to do the prerequisite installation.
Comments Based on the factors above, the choice that we will need to make can be broken down as follows: Having a relatively stable, basic package designed specifically for E-theses, but which requires a commitment on our part to patching and possibly supporting.
Having a powerful, developmental package not specifically for E-theses, but which looks like it will be part of a global community for some time.
The remainder of this article will consider the properties of each package that may affect which of the above routes we consider to be the most appropriate.
Submission Procedures Here we are mainly concerned with what metadata can be collected during submission, although it will also be valuable to see a submission procedure that is well laid out and has a logical flow.
This comparison will also take into account how files are added to the repository, and the ease with which procedures can be customised.
Table 1 shows the main elements that the default submission procedures in each package collect.
These are compared where possible and the quality of the comparison is commented on.
ETD-db DSpace Comments Abstract Abstract   Degree Type Qualified Dublin Core does not have an obvious place for the degree information.
Document Type Type This refers to PhD or Masters etc, and as above there is no obvious place to represent it.
Title Title   Keywords Keywords   Name Author DSpace allows for multiple authors.
Copyright Agreement Licence   Availability   Security is done by directory in ETD-db and authorisation policy in DSpace.
Name of Committee Member   ETD-db requests committee members' names, which is not UK-specific.
Title of Committee Member   ETD-db requests committee members' titles, which is not UK-specific.
Email of Committee Member   ETD-db requests committee members' emails, which is not UK-specific.
Defence/Viva Date   Required for Viva date, and missing in DSpace.
Date Date of Issue DSpace does not specifically allow for the date of award, but date of issue should be applicable.
Department Publisher The pending recommended schema for UK E-theses will suggest that the degree awarder can be referred to as the publisher.
Description No obvious use for E-theses.
Alternative Title DSpace allows for multiple titles on submissions.
Series/Report No obvious use for E-theses.
Identifier Some standard identifier   Language ISO language reference   File Format Document Type/Format may be determined automatically in DSpace.
Sponsors The names of sponsors and/or funding codes associated with the submission.
Citation Useful for PhD by research publication.
Table 1: Comparison of submission elements Comparison The question that we must answer is whether each package collects enough information for E-theses, and whether the data that is collected is extensible or flexible in any way.
The data in Table 1 explains which fields are analogous in each system, where discrepancies arise and some explanation as to why and how each system deals with that difference.
For example, ETD-db collects the 'department' the student has studied in, whilst we feel that 'publisher' could be used to do the same job in DSpace.
ETD-db is designed specifically for theses management, so it collects the Defence or Viva date for each thesis no such analogue exists within DSpace.
Meanwhile, where ETD-db requests an availability level for the thesis, DSpace offers a far more sophisticated way using an authorisation policy system built into the administration area.
ETD-db also collects information regarding 'committee members' who are equivalent to examiners in the UK DSpace provides no obvious analogue to this.
In terms of document management, DSpace has a registry of file formats which it recognises and will store as part of the metadata.
This allows the administrator to be able to indicate to the user which file formats are supported by the repository.
Both take file uploads via the Web interface, but only ETD-db provides the administrators with the option to give FTP access to users for file upload.
The reason that DSpace does not support FTP is due to the way that it stores files internally.
Both systems allow multiple files, although DSpace adds the option to attach descriptive text to each file that is uploaded when there is more than one.
When DSpace stores the copyright licence, it does so by including it with the files so that it may be also preserved.
ETD-db's analogue is to store the copyright notice in the database with the metadata.
The subtle difference in these two approaches may be important.
Table 2 and Table 3 illustrate the differences in the way that DSpace and ETD-db store their data in the database; (it is not an exact representation of the structure of the database).
DSpace uses Qualified Dublin Core [16] to identify the stored data.
This is a well-established basic metadata standard, and it is possible to represent the basic information of many types of digital object, especially when combined with some DSpace specific qualifiers.
This overcomes a number of extensibility and flexibility problems that can arise when storing defined data.
ETD-db, conversely, has a number of pre-determined database fields, (guided by the ETD-MS [17] standard recommended by NDLTD), which require programmer intervention to alter, although the metadata schema that it uses is good for E-theses, being similar to an extended version of Qualified Dublin Core.
Item ID Element Qualifier Value 1 description abstract This is my abstract 1 title null This is my title 1 identifier citation This is my citation 2 description abstract This is another abstract 2 title null This is another title Table 2: DSpace data storage structure Item ID abstract title 1 This is my abstract This is my title 2 This is another abstract This is another title Table 3: ETD-db data storage structure It is worth noting that some of the fields DSpace collects allow for a significant array of submission types, which are not necessarily relevant for E-theses (e.g.
Series/Report).
These fields should not affect our opinion on which package is superior in this section.
DSpace allows for multiple authors per submission also, and ETD-db does not allow for more than one submission per user simultaneously but neither should be an issue since it is unlikely that students will be submitting more than one thesis at the same time, or that more than one student will be submitting the same thesis!
Conclusion It is clear that DSpace has a more comprehensive metadata collection process (partly due to the collection of excess elements) and that it stores this metadata in a more flexible manner.
Due to the customisable nature of the Dublin Core registry within DSpace and the option to modify the submission interface (although this is a job for a programmer), DSpace will take any data that can be represented within the qualified Dublin Core.
ETD-db has no such flexibility and future changes in metadata schemas could cause significant problems, although the submission interface is no harder to modify than that of DSpace.
Archiving and Access Both packages are, at some level, designed to make the archiving of certain types of digital resource quicker and easier, but these are not the only requirements.
We wish to make the archive available via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [18], whereby 'data providers' (such as the institutional repository) expose their metadata to 'service providers' who harvest it to be used in cross-searching multiple repositories.
Additionally, we would like to see an archive that is preservable, stable and secure.
In this section, we will be looking briefly to see how each package addresses these issues.
ETD-db ETD-db undertakes storage in a straightforward manner all files are held in a basic directory structure; the area that they are in determines the security level applied to the item.
If the security settings are changed, then the item is physically moved to another directory.
The metadata associated with the item is maintained within the database for as long as the item remains in the repository.
ETD-db comes with the facility to expose its data via the OAI-PMH, but in v1.7c (the last public release) only v0.9 of the protocol is supported.
Since at the time of writing the version is v2.0, it is necessary to make a major upgrade to this area of the system; current recommendations from the producers of OAI-PMH recommend at least v1.1 with a view to all users moving to v2.0 in the not too distant future.
DSpace All items in the DSpace archive have a kind of 'wrapper' in which the parts of the relevant data are stored.
This includes all the individual files and the copyright licence.
The metadata is maintained in qualified Dublin Core format in the database for as long as the item remains in the repository.
Security settings for the repository are handled via the authorisation policy tool and the security of the archive depends upon the way that the DSpace Administrator configures the policies for each community, collection, and item.
DSpace also comes with OAI-PMH v2.0 fully supported, allowing for immediate compatibility with the more advanced features of this standard.
We would expect that future versions of DSpace would have the most up-to-date version of this protocol, (although any significant evolution is not expected [19]).
Conclusion The DSpace archive is perhaps more geared toward digital preservation, although this issue is still very much in debate and a solution to the problem may be a long time in coming.
It may be that digital preservation is an issue which is never 'solved' but which requires constant attention by those wishing to preserve and may not necessarily have anything to do with the software package in question.
For this reason it is hard for us to be sure which package is going down the correct route, and even if that route exists.
Moving files around may be a weak spot within ETD-db, since the more you physically move files, the more chance there is of them being lost or corrupted.
The purpose of moving files within ETD-db is to apply the Web server's directory security settings to everything in that directory and all sub-directories within.
For a complex system this method of providing security is possibly not the best way, although it is much simpler to use and implement than the DSpace approach.
Storing the files in a standard directory structure, as advocated by ETD-db, makes the files far easier to access without using the Web interface.
DSpace requires you to use import and export facilities in order to move files in and out of its internal storage structure.
Administration and Security Both systems require submitters to have their own user account before depositing any items.
We are primarily interested here in how secure the current sign-up procedures are, and whether they can be replaced with institutional authentication systems.
In addition each package provides administrative features for service providers and administrative staff.
These include some workflow facilities that allow certain users to perform tasks on a submitter's item, as well as user administration tools.
The most important administrative options will be discussed in the sections below.
In addition we will see how the security in each package functions at this level, and consider the best way of addressing any security issues that arise.
ETD-db To register for an ETD-db account a desired username and password are requested on the registration page, and this is sufficient to open an account.
The user is then moved on directly to create a new "Main Record", in which email address, name, and department are requested.
The registration page does not validate the user's identity in any way, and anyone who can see the registration page is capable of creating an account.
Like all other Web-based systems, it can be run through a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and this makes the security of data being transferred to and from the submitter's machine very good.
The user's password is kept encrypted in the database using 'crypt', a Unix native encryption package which is sufficiently strong for our purposes.
There is no specific location into which administrators might plug an institutionally based authentication system.
Instead it would be necessary to write any additional software interface that is required.
In order to access ETD-db's three administrative areas, (Review Submitted ETDs, Manage Available ETDs and Manage Withheld ETDs), it is necessary to have the specific login details for each area which are initially defined at installation.
In this system there is only one username-password pair needed to access each area, which means that it is impossible to give an administrator access to a subset of the available options.
Review Submitted ETDs gives the administrator the option to browse the list of all E-theses currently in progress and to perform all of the actions that the author can perform on their item.
Effectively this provides a "workspace" where a student and a supervisor can collaborate and communicate on the thesis.
From here, the administrator may then also approve the thesis for inclusion into the repository in either "available" or "withheld" status.
Manage Available ETDs provides the facilities to administer the E-theses that are available to be viewed by the public.
Primarily, at this stage this allows the administrator to remove the item or move it into the "withheld" section of the system.
Manage Withheld ETDs provides similar functionality to that of Manage Available ETDs, but with the option to move items into a status of "available".
The main drawbacks of this system are that there is no way of providing a single supervisor to a single submission exclusively, and that all supervisors with the permission to access the Review Submitted ETDs section can see the theses of all students who are currently submitting.
The list of theses in progress is potentially quite large, so the supervisor may be presented with a list of hundreds upon login.
It is also assumed that it will be the supervisor who will eventually agree that the metadata for the item is correct and that the thesis is complete, marked and ready to enter the repository in general this will not be the case; instead we would expect a qualified librarian to make that decision.
The advantage of this administrative system is it applies security via the Apache Web server to the directories that are restricted.
This method of securing directories is well known and reliable, ensuring that content is sufficiently secure.
The basic structure of a sensible administration system is here, but there are a number of bugs and security holes as well as a deficit in desirable functionality.
For example, a policy system for within the Review Submitted ETDs section would be a valuable addition.
DSpace To register for a DSpace account requires just a valid email address.
The user is emailed with an authentication token, which is then presented back to the system in order to activate the account.
When this is done the system requests the user's name and telephone number and desired password.
This reduces the chance of multiple accounts for one user, and also prevents people being signed up for an account in error.
There is no specific validation, though, as to who can sign up for an account, and anyone who can see the registration page can register.
Again, SSL is available and recommended to make the data being transferred secure.
The user's password is kept encoded using MD5 [20] in the database, which is sufficiently secure.
There is also the option to include a customised site authentication system (which must be written by the local administrator), or to authenticate users automatically using a Web certificate.
DSpace has many administrative options, and splits its facilities into two parts: Workflow users and DSpace administrators.
The fundamental difference between these two sections is that Workflow users may only perform their administrative actions within the constraints of the workflow system, (the permissions assigned to their group and location in the workflow define their available actions).
These duties include reviewing, modifying and approving submissions after, and only after, the author has submitted them for consideration.
DSpace has three well-defined workflow steps which groups of users can be assigned to in order to perform their duties.
DSpace administrators, on the other hand, have access to a large set of tools located in a different area of the system, allowing them to administer user accounts and user groupings, create and configure communities and collections, manage support levels for file types, create and modify system policies and so on.
Login for Workflow users and DSpace administrators is provided through precisely the same system as login for all other users, and the differences in the behaviour of the accounts is purely down to the policies applied to the user account, (so DSpace can have multiple administrator accounts for example).
This method has no real organisational drawbacks, employs a consistent method of system design and has no obvious security holes.
Its advantages lie in the fact that there is only one type of user and that each user's properties can be modified, even over time if necessary.
The main problem from which DSpace suffers here is that the current implementation of policies is difficult to use, and some refinements to the interface would be welcome.
Conclusion The level of configuration available within the DSpace administrative area puts it far ahead of ETD-db in this category.
Although this is not quite as sophisticated as we might want it is only necessary in a few, more advanced, cases to delve into the code itself to make changes but this is true of ETD-db also.
The rigidity of its workflow, though, could stand in the way of creating the steps that different institutions could fit into their current working methods.
ETD-db is designed to allow the easy authoring and supervision of E-theses, and the tools that it provides for this purpose are straightforward and relatively effective.
DSpace provides none of this functionality and would need to have it added before a service could be provided.
We have also seen that when withholding items, ETD-db provides far simpler although potentially flawed functionality than DSpace.
Overall the methodology employed by DSpace is superior to that of ETD-db, and many of the shortcomings of the DSpace system can be reasonably solved.
Conversely, the work required to bring the ETD-db up to the same standard in all other respects is fairly extensive and may require rewriting of much of the software.
Overall Conclusions In the majority of comparative areas that we have investigated we find that for our needs DSpace is clearly ahead of ETD-db.
It is a well-supported package with a future that is being planned now, while ETD-db has been dormant for some time and its future is uncertain.
DSpace is far more functional with regards to essential features such as security and administration and this sort of infrastructure is important for any piece of software of this nature, no matter what additional features are available.
The DSpace approach to user accounts and administration is more common than the ETD-db approach.
The main shortcomings of the ETD-db method are in the security issues that currently exist, since it is likely that only one submission per user is required in an E-theses system (see Submission Procedures, Comparison).
DSpace does not suffer from such severe issues, and any bugs found in the system should be fixed in the development process.
There are also areas where there is no great distinction between the packages.
With the uncertainty of the evolution of digital preservation, their archiving methods could be difficult to choose between, although the fact that DSpace is already considering these issues perhaps makes it the favourite in this respect.
Likewise, their submission interfaces are adequate, and similarly difficult to modify.
Although we have not looked at them here, both have similar browse and search facilities at the moment, although DSpace's facilities are based upon a third-party search engine (Lucene [21]) which is capable of being employed in more powerful ways.
It is worth considering that ETD-db is designed specifically for E-theses, whilst DSpace's support in this regard is fairly generic.
The questions that must then be answered are as follows: How hard would it be to add E-theses support, as we require it, to DSpace?
How hard would it be to bring ETD-db up to the standard that we would require for an E-theses service?
During product evaluation both questions have been considered.
The results indicate that bringing ETD-db up to standard would require extensive bug fixing as well as major feature upgrades to improve data structuring, security, and overall behaviour of much of the system.
Creating E-theses-specific functionality in DSpace, however, is not only one of the possible features in the development plan, but requires mostly minor modifications to the system, with some software engineering to provide additional functionality.
The estimate for not only the ease of doing this, but also the long-term support of modifications, suggest that DSpace would provide a better core system for an E-theses repository than ETD-db.
There is a strong argument to suggest that since an E-thesis is a piece of university research output, it belongs alongside other forms of research output, such as E-prints.
ETD-db does not have the functionality to deal with these other forms of electronic document, based on the metadata schema, user account types (and the constraint to one submission per user at any one time), as well as the structure of the administration system.
DSpace has been developed with these other forms of research in mind, and adding E-theses support is a logical progression.
The future of E-theses and of archiving and searching in general depends on institutions being able to deliver top quality services, with a high degree of interoperability.
This means, among other things, that systems must continue to be developed and they must be able to handle many different types of digital object.
We believe that DSpace will fulfil these requirements to a higher degree than ETD-db and will continue to improve in this way in the future.
(Editor's note: Readers may also be interested to read DAEDALUS: Initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow by William Nixon in issue 37).
References Theses Alive!
Project at Edinburgh University Library: http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/ Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC): http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ and Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair ETD-db home page: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ETD-db/ and Virginia Tech's E-theses repository: http://etd.vt.edu/ DSpace home page: http://www.dspace.org/ and MIT's institutional repository: http://dspace.mit.edu/ DAEDALUS Project, Glasgow University Library: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/ EPrints.org home page: http://www.eprints.org/ and the University of Southampton e-Prints Service: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/ Nixon, W. 2003.
DAEDALUS: Initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow.
Ariadne.
Issue 37. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/nixon/ The National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD): http://www.ndltd.org/ Perl scripting language: http://www.perl.org/ MySQL Database: http://www.mysql.com/ DSpace Federation: http://www.dspace.org/federation/ Java at Sun Microsystems: http://java.sun.com/ PostgreSQL Database: http://www.postgresql.com/ Tomcat, Apache Jakarta project: http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/ Ant Java Compiler from Apache: http://ant.apache.org/ Dublin Core: http://dublincore.org/ , or more specifically http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ Electronic Theses and Dissertations Metadata Standard (ETD-MS): http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/current.html .
Also for additional interest, ETD-ML Document Type Definition: http://etd.vt.edu/etd-ml/ Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH): http://www.openarchives.org/ Lagoze, C. 2003.
Open Archives Initiative: where are we, where are we going.
OA Forum, Bath.
http://www.oaforum.org/documents/wspres.php MD5 at RSA Security: http://www.rsasecurity.com/rslabs/faq/3-6-6.html Apache Lucene Search Engine: http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/ Author Details Richard D Jones Richard is the Systems Developer for Theses Alive!
at Edinburgh University Library.
Email: r.d.jones@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations" Author: Richard D Jones Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/jones/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Exposing Information Resources for E-learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Exposing Information Resources for E-learning Buzz data database xml portal archives metadata accessibility identifier schema repositories oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 perl e-learning soap php mysql vle interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Steve Richardson and Andy Powell on Harvesting and searching IMS metadata using both the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and the Z39.50 Protocol.
An introduction to the IMS Digital Repositories Working Group IMS [1] is a global consortium that develops open specifications to support the delivery of e-learning through Learning Management Systems (LMS).
(Note: in UK higher and further education we tend to use the term Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in preference to LMS).
IMS activities cover a broad range of areas including accessibility, competency definitions, content packaging, digital repositories, integration with ‘enterprise’ systems, learner information, metadata, question & test and simple sequencing.
Of particular relevance to this article is the work of the IMS Digital Repositories Working Group (DRWG) [2].
The DRWG is working to define a set of interfaces to repositories (databases) of learning objects and/or information resources in order to support resource discovery from within an LMS.
In particular, the specifications currently define mechanisms that support distributed searching of remote repositories, harvesting metadata from repositories, depositing content with repositories and delivery of content from the repository to remote systems.
Future versions of the specifications will also consider alerting mechanisms, for discovering new resources that have been added to repositories.
Note that, at the time of writing, the DRWG specifications are in draft form.
Two broad classes of repository are considered: Native learning object repositories containing learning objects.
Information repositories containing information resources (documents, images, videos, sounds, datasets, etc.).
In the former, it is assumed that, typically, the learning objects are described using the IMS metadata specification [3] and packaged using the IMS content packaging specification [4].
The latter includes many existing sources of information including library OPACs, bibliographic databases and museum catalogues where metadata schemas other than IMS are in use.
In both cases it is assumed that the repository may hold both assets and metadata or just metadata only.
Both the example implementations described below fall into the second category of repository.
The DRWG specifications describe the use of XQuery [5] over SOAP [6] to query ‘native’ repositories of learning objects.
This usage is not discussed any further in this article.
The specifications also describe how to search and harvest IMS metadata from ‘information’ repositories using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [7] and Z39.50 [8].
The primary intention of the specifications is two-fold.
Firstly, they support the integration of a LMS with one or more back-end learning object repositories.
Secondly, they support relatively seamless discovery of resources in one or more information repositories by the end-user from within an LMS.
So, why is this important?
Well, as information providers we are used to disclosing information about the resources we make available, either through our Web sites or in more structured ways using, for example, Z39.50.
However, in the main, such disclosure tends to happen in the context of other information systems.
Increasingly, information resources will need to be exposed for use in the context of online learning systems, and it is reasonable to expect that the primary specifications used to deliver those systems will be those being developed by IMS.
IMS metadata and the JISC Information Environment The JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) technical architecture [9] specifies a set of standards and protocols that support the development and delivery of an integrated set of networked services that allow the end-user to discover, access, use and publish digital and physical resources as part of their learning and research activities.
In the context of the JISC IE, both learning object repositories and information repositories are known as ‘content providers’, while a VLE (or LMS, to use IMS terminology) is known as a ‘presentation service’, because it is primarily involved in interacting with the end-user.
It is interesting to note that two of the key technologies endorsed by the JISC IE are Z39.50 (to support distributed searching) and the OAI-PMH for metadata harvesting two of the same technologies as specified by the DRWG.
What is different between the two approaches is that the JISC IE uses these protocols to exchange simple Dublin Core (DC) [10] metadata records, while the DRWG use these protocols to exchange IMS metadata records.
As we show below, content providers that already support Z39.50 or OAI-PMH to expose simple DC metadata records probably don’t have to do too much work to make IMS metadata records available.
Case study 1: Integrating IMS into the RESULTs OAI repository The RESULTs Learning Technology Portal [11] is a project funded by JISC and is intended to be a dynamic Web portal for learning technologists in the sense that it will provide multiple views to multiple types of resources for multiple types of users and aspects of practice.
The portal accommodates resource browsing, search, collating, resource categorisation, submission and editing, interactive activities and discussion networks.
RESULTs is a metadata repository and does not host actual resources.
Typically resources reside on other servers and the URLs for those resources are stored in RESULTs as part of enriched metadata records.
Careful attention has been paid to interoperability standards throughout the development of RESULTs and support for both Dublin Core and IMS metadata formats has been integrated into the underlying relational database structure.
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a transport protocol that oversees the transfer of any metadata from one computer, acting as the data provider (or repository), to another computer, acting as the service provider (or harvester).
A harvester can make requests for information about the repository or for an individual record or groups of records that may be restricted by date or by other predefined groupings.
The requests that are of interest here are requests for records, and in particular the type of metadata that is returned.
The default metadata schema for records in OAI-PMH is simple Dublin Core (oai_dc).
All repositories must support the oai_dc record format, however there are no restrictions on the other types of metadata that can be used.
It is equally valid to use the International Metadata Standard (IMS), or indeed any metadata standard provided that they can be encoded using XML.
OAI-PMH uses HTTP to encode requests and XML to encode responses.
A typical request for a single record with the identifier 568 from the RESULTs OAI Repository in DC format looks like this: http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai:uk.ac.results:568&metadataPrefix=oai_dc Breaking this into its constituent parts; there is a repository gateway that handles all OAI requests: http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php An instruction, or verb, that tells the repository what to do: Verb=GetRecord An identifier so that the Repository knows which record is being requested: Identifier=oai:uk.ac.results:568 And finally the metadata specification, in this case asking for ‘simple’ DC metadata: MetadataPrefix=oai_dc The response is coded in XML, which is simplified into a schematic view below: <OAI-PMH> <responseDate>2002-11-05T14:11:52Z</responseDate> <request verb=“GetRecord” identifier=“oai:uk.ac.results:568” metadataPrefix=”oai_dc“>http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php</request>   <GetRecord>     <record>       <header>         <identifier>oai:uk.ac.results:568</identifier> <datestamp>2002-03-19</datestamp>       </header> <metadata>         OAI Dublin Core Metadata Record       </metadata>     </record>   </GetRecord> </OAI-PMH> Two aspects of this response are of interest here.
One is the ‘metadataPrefix’ attribute of the request element, which simply says that the encoding of the returned metadata is ‘oai_dc’ (technically, this means that the returned metadata must conform to an XML schema for simple DC, as defined by OAI).
The second is the actual metadata itself, in this case an ‘oai_dc’ metadata record, the details of which are not shown for simplicity.
A similar request for the same record but in IMS metadata format would look like this: http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai:uk.ac.results:568&metadataPrefix=ims The only difference is the ‘metadataPrefix’ attribute.
As can be seen below, the only thing that has changed is the prefix and the actual metadata itself.
The same principle can be applied to any metadata schema, i.e.
OAI can transport any metadata, provided it can be encoded using XML and the encoding can be described using XML schema.
<OAI-PMH> <responseDate>2002-11-05T14:11:52Z</responseDate> <request verb=“GetRecord” identifier=“oai:uk.ac.results:568” metadataPrefix=”ims“>http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php</request>   <GetRecord>     <record>       <header>         <identifier>oai:uk.ac.results:568</identifier> <datestamp>2002-03-19</datestamp>       </header> <metadata>         IMS Metadata Record       </metadata>     </record>   </GetRecord> </OAI-PMH> Implementation Details The OAI Web site has a selection of tools implemented by members of the OAI Community [12].
The RESULTs server is running MySQL and PHP as the database and main programming environment and there is a PHP OAI Repository tool kit [13] available for download from the OAI site.
Integrating the code was simply a case of copying the files onto the server and editing the configuration script to reflect the RESULTs specific information.
The code provided will only support flat database tables where all the information about a record is stored in one table and as RESULTs has a relational database table structure some additions had to be made to the code to resolve reference numbers into actual values.
Integrating IMS The code provided only supported ‘oai_dc’ metadata, but the author did have the foresight to provide a mechanism by which other metadata formats could be easily integrated.
Only two things were required: Update the configuration file to support the IMS record format.
Write a script that takes a database record, resolves any foreign keys into actual values and wraps the data in IMS compliant format.
By writing an IMS metadata template and then adding IMS as a metadata type in the configuration file, along with information on how to find the IMS template, the Repository now handles requests for IMS data equally well.
A demonstration of this functionality is available on the RESULTs site and the following URLs will demonstrate the services provided: http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=Identify http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai:uk.ac.results:568&metadataPrefix=oai_dc http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=ListRecords&from=2002-07-06&metadataPrefix=oai_dc http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=ListRecords&from=2002-07-06&until=2002-10-11&metadataPrefix=oai_dc All the above examples will work equally well for IMS records by simply changing the MetadataPrefix to ‘ims’ like so: http://www.results.ac.uk/phpoai/oai2.php?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai:uk.ac.results:568&metadataPrefix=ims Note: No support is given in the RESULTs repository for OAI-PMH sets as it is still unclear as to what actually constitutes a set in RESULTs.
Case study 2: Integrating IMS into the RDN Z39.50 target The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [14] is a national service funded by JISC to provide access to high quality Internet resources for the UK higher and further education communities.
The RDN is a cooperative network of subject &lsquo;hubs&rsquo;, including ALTIS (hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism), BIOME (health, medicine and life sciences), EEVL (engineering, mathematics and computing), HUMBUL (humanities), PSIgate (physical sciences) and SOSIG (social science, business and law).
Each hub provides access to one or more Internet resource catalogues, containing descriptions of high quality Internet sites, selected and described by specialists from within UK academia and affiliated organisations.
Value-added services such as interactive Web tutorials and alerting services are also provided to enable users to make more of their time on the Internet.
The resource descriptions available in each of the hub catalogues are gathered into a central database of all RDN records, known as the RDN ResourceFinder.
The OAI-PMH is used to gather the records together.
Currently, the default simple DC record format is used to share records, though there are plans to exchange richer metadata records based on qualified DC.
Various interfaces to ResourceFinder are made available [15] including a Z39.50 target that complies with functional area C of the Bath Profile.
The database technology used to deliver ResourceFinder is Cheshire [16], an open source XML-based information retrieval tool.
A Cheshire configuration file defines the search attributes that ResourceFinder supports, and record conversion ‘output filters’ written in Perl convert the internal XML record syntax stored in the Cheshire database to Bath Profile compliant XML and SUTRS (unstructured text) record syntaxes for delivery as search results.
(In Z39.50 terminology, ‘XML’ and ‘SUTRS’ are known as Record Formats).
In order to modify the ResourceFinder Z39.50 target to support the draft DRWG specification, we needed to do three things: Decide on an Element Set Name for our new IMS metadata XML record syntax.
In this case we chose ‘IMS’ as the name.
Write a new Perl output filter to convert the internal XML record syntax stored in Cheshire to an IMS-compliant XML record syntax.
Modify the Cheshire configuration file to associate the new output filter with the ‘IMS’ Element Set Name.
The results of this work can be seen in the live ResourceFinder Z39.50 target (z3950.rdn.ac.uk, port 210).
It is worth noting that the work done so far is not fully compliant with the DRWG specifications, partly because they are still undergoing development.
For example, the DRWH specifications define a large number of IMS-specific search attributes (the attributes upon which searches can be based).
The ResourceFinder target does not currently support any of these it only supports the DC search attributes required for Functional Area C of the Bath Profile.
Furthermore, the ‘IMS’ Element Set Name that we use is not part of the current IMS specifications.
To demonstrate the results of this work, here is an annotated transcript of a Z39.50 session using the UNIX linemode Z39.50 client, yaz-client [17], to search the ResourceFinder database: $ yaz-client z3950.rdn.ac.uk:210 Connecting…Ok.
Sent initrequest.
Connection accepted by target.
ID : 2001 Name : Cheshire II zServer XRDN RDN ResourceFinder Version: 2.33 Options: search present delSet resourceCtrl accessCtrl scan sort Elapsed: 0.158460 Run yaz-client and connect to the ResourceFinder target… Z> base xxdefault …set the database name to ‘xxdefault’… Z> find MRSA Sent searchRequest.
Received SearchResponse.
Search was a success.
Number of hits: 5, setno 1 records returned: 0 Elapsed: 0.010991 …search for ‘MRSA’ (the hospital suberbug which is passed through poor hygiene)… Z> format SUTRS Z> elements F Z> show 1 Sent presentRequest (1+1).
Records: 1 [xxdefault]Record type: SUTRS Title: Identification of MRSA reservoirs in the acute care setting: a systematic review executive summary Description: One of a series of reviews related to MRSA infection control practices written by Rhonda Griffiths et al.
The purpose of this review is to present the best available evidence regarding “the design of clinical areas and the role of the inanimate objects commonly found there, in the transmission of MRSA in the acute hospital setting.” This executive summary discusses the scope of the review; inclusion and exclusion criteria; search strategies used; quality assessment; data collection and analysis; and includes a brief summary of the results and their implications for practice.
Published in 2002 by the Joanna Briggs Institute for Evidence Based Nursing and Midwifery, and available on the Web in PDF (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
The full-text version is available to members only.
Identifier: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/record/redirect/oai:rdn:nmap:4072654 Identifier: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/record/redirect/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww... joannabriggs.edu.au%2FEXMRSAident.pdf Type: Document/report / Systematic review Subject: Staphylococcal Infections / transmission Subject: Bacterial Infections Subject: Antibiotics Subject: Literature Reviews Subject: Review Literature [Publication Type] Subject: Methicillin Resistance Subject: Nosocomial Infection Subject: Cross Infection Note: This metadata record is copyright an RDN partner.
Personal and educational use is allowed.
All other use prohibited without permission.
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/copyright/ nextResultSetPosition = 2 Elapsed: 0.611498 …set the record format to ‘SUTRS’, the element set to ‘F’ (full) and return the first result… Z> format XML Z> elements F Z> show 1 Sent presentRequest (1+1).
Records: 1 [xxdefault]Record type: XML <?xml version=“1.0”?> <record-list> <dc-record> <title> Identification of MRSA reservoirs in the acute care setting : a systematic review executive summary </title> <description> One of a series of reviews related to MRSA infection control practices written by Rhonda Griffiths et al.
The purpose of this review is to present the best available evidence regarding “the design of clinical areas and the role of the inanimate objects commonly found there, in the transmission of MRSA in the acute hospital setting.” This executive summary discusses the scope of the review; inclusion and exclusion criteria; search strategies used; quality assessment; data collection and analysis; and includes a brief summary of the results and their implications for practice.
Published in 2002 by the Joanna Briggs Institute for Evidence Based Nursing and Midwifery, and available on the Web in PDF (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
The full-text version is available to members only.
</description> <identifier>http://www.rdn.ac.uk/record/redirect/oai:rdn:nmap:4072654</identifier> <identifier>http://www.rdn.ac.uk/record/redirect/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww... joannabriggs.edu.au%2FEXMRSAident.pdf</identifier> <subject>Staphylococcal Infections / transmission</subject> <subject>Bacterial Infections</subject> <subject>Antibiotics</subject> <subject>Literature Reviews</subject> <subject>Review Literature [Publication Type]</subject> <subject>Methicillin Resistance</subject> <subject>Nosocomial Infection</subject> <subject>Cross Infection</subject> <type> Document/report / Systematic review </type> </dc-record> <record-list> nextResultSetPosition = 2 Elapsed: 0.574363 …set the record formt to XML, the element set name to ‘F’ (full) and re-display the first result… Z> format XML Z> elements IMS Z> show 1 Sent presentRequest (1+1).
Records: 1 [xxdefault]Record type: XML <?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?> <lom xmlns=“http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imsmd_v1p2" xmlns:xsi=“http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation=“http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imsmd_v1p2 http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imsmd_v1p2p2.xsd"> <general> <identifier> oai:rdn:nmap:4072654 </identifier> <title> <langstring> Identification of MRSA reservoirs in the acute care setting : a systematic review executive summary </langstring> </title> <language> eng </language> <description> <langstring xml:lang=“en-GB”> One of a series of reviews related to MRSA infection control practices written by Rhonda Griffiths et al.
The purpose of this review is to present the best available evidence regarding “the design of clinical areas and the role of the inanimate objects commonly found there, in the transmission of MRSA in the acute hospital setting.” This executive summary discusses the scope of the review; inclusion and exclusion criteria; search strategies used; quality assessment; data collection and analysis; and includes a brief summary of the results and their implications for practice.
Published in 2002 by the Joanna Briggs Institute for Evidence Based Nursing and Midwifery, and available on the Web in PDF (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
The full-text version is available to members only.
</langstring> </description> <keyword> <langstring>Staphylococcal Infections / transmission</langstring> </keyword> <keyword> <langstring>Bacterial Infections</langstring> </keyword> <keyword> <langstring>Antibiotics</langstring> </keyword> <keyword> <langstring>Literature Reviews</langstring> </keyword> <keyword> <langstring>Review Literature [Publication Type]</langstring> </keyword> <keyword> <langstring>Methicillin Resistance</langstring> </keyword> <keyword> <langstring>Nosocomial Infection</langstring> </keyword> <keyword> <langstring>Cross Infection</langstring> </keyword> </general> <metametadata> <contribute> <role> <source> <langstring>RDN</langstring> </source> <value> <langstring>Creator</langstring> </value> </role> <centity> <vcard> BEGIN:VCARD ORG: END:VCARD </vcard> </centity> </contribute> <metadatascheme> IMS Metadata 1.2 </metadatascheme> </metametadata> <technical> <location> http://www.joannabriggs.edu.au/EXMRSAident.pdf </location> </technical> <educational> <learningresourcetype> <source> <langstring>RDN</langstring> </source> <value> <langstring> Document/report / Systematic review </langstring> </value> </learningresourcetype> </educational> </lom> nextResultSetPosition = 2 Elapsed: 0.918393 …set the record format to ‘XML’, the element set name to ‘IMS’ and display the first result a third time… Z> quit …quit.
Note: support for the use of Z39.50 to expose IMS metadata records by the RDN ResourceFinder should be seen as purely experimental at the time of writing.
Conclusions The purpose of this article has been to raise awareness of the work of IMS in the area of providing access to learning object and information repositories and to show that implementing these specifications for existing systems may not be an overly difficult task.
However, while we are confident that the use of OAI-PMH described here will form a sensible basis for interoperability between different systems, the draft nature of the DRWG specifications probably means that it is a little early to be spending significant effort on supporting IMS metadata in Z39.50 just yet.
References IMS <http://www.imsglobal.org/> IMS Digital Repositories Working Group <http://www.imsglobal.org/digitalrepositories/> IMS Learning Resource Meta-data Specification <http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/> IMS Content Packaging Specification <http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/> XML Query <http://www.w3.org/XML/Query> Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) <http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/> OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting <http://www.openarchives.org/ Z39.50 <http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/> JISC Information Environment Technical Architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/> Dublin Core Metadata Initiative <http://dublincore.org/> RESULTs <http://www.results.ac.uk/> OAI-PMH Tools <http://www.openarchives.org/tools/> PHP OAI Data Provider, University of Oldenburg <http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/oai/> Resource Discovery Network (RDN) <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/> Working with the RDN <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/workingwithrdn/> CHESHIRE <http://cheshire.lib.berkeley.edu/> YAZ <http://www.indexdata.dk/yaz/> Authors Andy Powell UKOLN, University of Bath a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Steven Richardson UMIST s.richardson@umist.ac.uk Article Title: “Exposing information resources for e-learning” Author: Steven Richardson and Andy Powell Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/powell/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Six MLEs: More Similar Than Different Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Six MLEs: More Similar Than Different Buzz data software java framework api database xml portal schema repositories copyright python windows mis vle authentication uportal interoperability webct plone url ldap Citation BibTex RIS Paul Browning offers a technical review of the systems developed by the JISC 'Building MLEs in HE' (7/99) Programme The JISC-funded programme ‘Building Managed Learning Environments (MLEs) in HE’ [1] was of three years’ duration and concluded in July 2003.
The aim of the programme was to explore developments that test, evaluate, and prove (or in some circumstances disprove) the generic deployment of technology in support of improved learning.
The programme has developed good practice and shared ideas and experiences across FE and HE sectors.
The specific objectives were to: demonstrate to the FE/HE community the potential of MLEs to support and enhance learning and teaching identify the generic and transferable aspect of the development projects demonstrate the benefit of a student-centred approach to service provision enrich the educational sector understanding of the cultural and organisation issues encountered when developing MLEs create technical and organisational guidelines to support the introduction of MLEs The fourteen projects funded under the programme explored issues in four areas: the development of learner-centred MLEs; the development of institutional systems to support MLEs; the use of IMS specifications to develop MLEs; and strategies to achieve organisational change to support MLEs.
Six of the projects developed a variety of joined-up systems which, in general, linked together back-end administrative systems and presented a user interface through a Web front-end.
In many cases, the system that was developed shared many of the characteristics of an institutional portal (also commonly known as Educational or Campus portals).
The JISC wished to review the systems that were developed and to consider their potential for future use in the wider FE and HE community; this article summarises the full report [2] that was produced as part of the review.
Aims The aims of the report were to review products developed under the programme in the context of international technology developments in order to ascertain their potential future in the FE and HE community.
The objectives of the report were: to document the products that were developed by the projects, including how successfully they were achieving their objectives to make recommendations about the potential deployment of the products in the wider FE and HE sector or the integration of the products with current open source portal software/frameworks.
Analysis Essentially all project products were underpinned by an architecture summarised in Figure 1: Figure 1: A generic MLE Architecture?
Whilst common across the JISC 7⁄99 projects that were reviewed, Figure 1 is not really a generic MLE Architecture; rather it is typical of any N-tier Web application and contains easily identifiable storage, logic and presentation layers on the server side of the application.
Harder to pigeon-hole was the ‘glue’ that supports interoperability between the various layers to occur the term ‘middleware envelope’ is used here to bracket the integration magic that holds it all together.
It was principally in the nature of their middleware envelope that projects differed from a technical standpoint and this is also where the major innovations of this strand of the JISC 7⁄99 programme can be identified.
Project overviews The overall impression was that the six projects had more in common than they had differences.
This commonality is conveyed in Figures 2-13; the architecture diagrams have been constructed using the same schema as that used in Figure 1.
De Montfort University-MLE This project sought to integrate the student information system, the timetabling system, key documents (e.g.
student handbook, regulations) and a news/messaging system.
The product was primarily aimed at students of De Montfort University.
The project started development using Java and XML but switched to the uPortal [3] framework when Version 2 became available.
The potential for exploitation within other institutional contexts is very wide; the uPortal framework is agnostic and standards-based.
The degree to which other systems can integrate is limited only by whether they offer adequate APIs and whether sufficient expertise is available to undertake the task (and maintain the service subsequently).
In general the architecture was flexible.
However, the most innovative component of the product the Broker between the student record system and the rest of the MLE was also the most proprietary in terms of the toolkit (Visual Basic) and the platform (Windows) required.
For such middleware to be adopted widely it needs to be recast in a more open, less platform-dependent alternative.
Figure 2: The DMU-MLE architecture Figure 3: Screenshot of DMU-MLE the Home Tab (before login) The Generic Integrated Management Information System (GIMIS) Integration of Writtle College’s four primary databases (finance, library, student records and timetabling) was the primary goal of this project.
In addition, about twenty-five ancillary databases and discrete data sources used throughout the College were also integrated within the GIMIS core (e.g.
locations database, FE Attendance).
The product was aimed at both staff and students.
The architecture was flexible if working within a Cold Fusion [4] environment.
The potential for exploitation within other institutional contexts is limited by this factor.
The current prototype exposed an extraordinarily rich range of information drawn from many content sources within the institution and demonstrated what can be achieved with a high level of commitment to an information strategy.
Figure 4: The GIMIS architecture Figure 5: Screenshot of GIMIS StaffNet Admin Menu Institutionally Secure Integrated Data Environment (INSIDE) Perhaps the distinguishing feature of this project (a joint venture between St. Andrews and Durham Universities) within the JISC 7⁄99 programme was its recognition that information maintained by departments (as opposed to the central administration), and the work involved in doing so, are important components in the overall institutional information base.
This project sought to integrate departmental and centrally maintained systems using Java Server Pages [5].
In particular it focused on the exchange and management of data about students and modules (the ‘Module Management System’ MMS).
The product was mainly aimed at academic staff.
There are many components to the overall system; it was not clear to what extent they would be portable to other institutions, (though this was never an explicit goal of the project).
The diversity of applications suggested that the system was indeed flexible within the local departmental context, provided in-house expertise was available to customise and develop the system.
Figure 6: The INSIDE architecture Figure 7: Screenshot of INSIDE Staff Information Portal MARTINI This project sought to provide access to a wide range of systems: student records, unit enrolments and marks, course data, accommodation records, debtors and payments data, library borrower information, IT Service user data and timetabling information.
It was primarily aimed at students of the University of East Anglia.
The project started development using WebObjects [6] but switched to the uPortal [3] framework in its final stages.
The architecture was flexible; the IMS Generator and XML IMS conversion programs can work with either a WebObjects-based or uPortal-based system.
The use of XML to act as the interface with institutional data allows this middleware to sit between any data and any Web application that can import and read XML.
If you know your institutional data structures and have the expertise to modify a few (less than five) XML documents, then the middleware can work in your context.
The potential for exploitation within other institutional contexts was very wide.
It was not clear that deep integration of systems had yet been achieved in the current prototype; the passing of authentication credentials between component systems had not yet been implemented.
Figure 8: The MARTINI architecture Figure 9: Screenshot of MARTINI Student Details screen (after login) Sunderland Managed Interactive Learning Environment (SMILE) This project at Sunderland University attempted to integrate a virtual learning environment (WebCT) and student records system (SITS) within a portal.
The product was aimed at both staff and students.
The project was distinctive in not having embraced Java as a development platform and instead adopting Zope 7.
While this architecture is highly extensible (and portable), the project was able to reuse existing components (Plone [8] itself built upon the Content Management Framework), to create their product more or less ‘out of the box’.
SMILE had not yet achieved deep integration of its SIS and VLE systems.
It had achieved a degree of being joined-up by providing a ‘one-stop shop’ at which users can find collected in one place the links they need to other campuses.
But there was no passing of authentication credentials; a separate login was required at the systems (e.g.
E-mail, VLE) to which you were taken.
Figure 10: The SMILE architecture Figure 11: Screenshot of SMILE Academic Life Tab Towards an Integrated Student Record (TISR) The validating example of the TISR project was a model of the student record.
The project showed how a student record can be embodied as an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory entry, and, using the TISR API, how the LDAP directory can be populated with student records, the individual components of which are derived from different sources.
TISR is described as a ‘lazy meta-directory’.
Its role is to integrate the disparate data sources that typically make up the student record.
Sample data connectors including JDBC (Java Database Connectivity ), LDAP, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) [9] and XML have been developed.
In short TISR will integrate whatever you want.
The product is aimed at systems administrators.
Aware of the international efforts to produce specifications for interoperability such as the IMS, EduPerson and LiPerson ‘student objects’, TISR focused on a pragmatic solution while such standards consolidate and manufacturers of both instructional and administrative software for the educational sector implement them.
The potential for exploitation within other institutional contexts is probably universal what institution does not have more than one flavour of content repository?
The TISR middleware is agnostic and standards-based.
Ravensbourne College has delivered an exemplar project which should inform the future development of any ‘project standards’ that the JISC may wish to consider in programmes involving technical development.
Figure 12: The TISR architecture Figure 13: Screenshot from TISR demonstrator Viewing search results Summary of Recommendations Assessment of middleware The principal recommendation from the review was the need for further assessment of middleware.
There are many questions: Which middleware is best?
Can one size fit all?
To what extent can functions within the middleware envelope be defined in common ways across institutions?
To what extent can functions to and from the middleware envelope be defined so as to keep them to a manageable number?
What are the key functions to concentrate on to fit the greatest number of institutional environments?
Is ‘a middleware toolkit’ potentially a UK contribution to global portal framework projects such as uPortal?
How might this link with projects such as ANGEL [10]?
Is this a task to be undertaken by CETIS [11]?
Development programme/project management (e.g.
advice on software licensing and distribution, as well as technical evaluation, should be an expectation for any programme).
Observation and advice for other developers in the community (e.g.
all projects used LDAP, build security in from the beginning rather than retrospectively, supply test data sets, stress test, the need to skill up in load-balancing).
Recommendations to JISC on areas that need further investigation (e.g.
CMS, Web services, collaborative tools).
Acknowledgements It has been a privilege (and a learning experience) to see behind the scenes of the projects, their code and their host institutions their co-operation is gratefully acknowledged.
My thanks in particular to Tish Roberts (JISC Programme Manager) for the support and patience she has shown.
References The Building MLEs in Higher Education programme page is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_mle_he The Technical review of the systems developed by the JISC ‘Building MLEs in HE’ (7⁄99) programme is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=799_techreview The uPortal site is at: http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/index.html The Cold Fusion MX site is at: http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/ The Java Server Pages site is at: http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/ The WebObjects site is at: http://www.apple.com/webobjects/ The Zope site is at: http://www.zope.org/ The Plone site is at: http://www.plone.org/ The Enterprise JavaBeans site is at: http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/ The ANGEL Project site is at: http://www.angel.ac.uk/index.html The CETIS site is at: http://www.cetis.ac.uk Author Details Paul Browning Information Strategy Co-ordinator University of Bristol Email: paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC Return to top Article Title: “Six MLEs: more similar than different” Author: Paul Browning Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/browning/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Finding Someplace to Go: Reading and the Internet Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Finding Someplace to Go: Reading and the Internet Buzz framework database archives metadata cataloguing hypertext openurl interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy takes a look at what the Internet has to offer the art of reading.
Reading has always been pretty popular.
According to Alberto Manguel in his work A History of Reading [1] archaeologists have argued that the prehistory of books began near Babylon towards the middle of the fourth millennium B.C.
It may well have begun even earlier than that.
This given, it will come as no surprise that readers are the biggest arts audience we have in the UK.
The number of readers far exceeds all other arts audiences combined (with the country's soccer fans thrown in for good measure) [2].
Reading has been making us laugh and cry, inspiring and enraging us since we were small children.
So what more is there for us to learn about the art of reading?
Reader Development Libraries rarely sit still when it comes to developing their readers.
In 2000 the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS)/Wolfson Public Libraries Challenge Fund gave out thirty three awards totalling nearly £2 million towards activities in local libraries that highlighted the pleasures of reading for all sections of the community.
Reading and learning continues to be a key part of the Framework for the Future document [3], which sets out the government's vision for English public libraries over the next ten years.
The partners involved in the document's delivery [4] have turned it into an action plan with several themes.
The reading and learning theme looks primarily at what it calls 'enhancing adult reading experiences'.
Reading and the Internet So how exactly can our experiences of private reading be enhanced?
And what role can the Internet play in that enhancement?
Some might ask: how can such a passive experience translate to the online world?
It seems that recently people have begun to discover something that those who have studied literature have known for years: reading is a creative activity.
Some might even call it an art.
Something new comes to a book with every additional reader.
And the Internet, being a pool of creativity, has a lot to offer readers in improving their art.
The Reading Experience: Sell the Sizzle not the Sausage One organisation that has been using the Internet to stimulate readers is Opening the Book [5].
Opening the Book has led strategic thinking in reader development since 1990 and works to encourage reading through consultancy, training and promotion.
It also has a great deal of experience of creating Web sites for readers using the reader development principles it has developed.
These include putting the reader first, encouraging exploration in reader choices and facilitating reader-to-reader connections.
Unlike many previous explorations of literature and reading, Opening the Book uses a reader-centred definition of quality; it is not the quality of the book that matters, rather the quality of the reading experience.
Thus it believes in promoting the 'sizzle' (the experience) not the 'sausage' (the product).
Opening the Book has created several Web sites designed to enhance the experience of reading.
Its sites help readers pick books and talk to other readers.
A number are also targeted at specific audiences, such as teenagers.
Whichbook.net [6] was funded by the New Opportunities Fund and provides an intuitive aid for choosing books.
Instead of starting with an author or genre, readers consider the kind of experience they would like to have: 'I want a short romantic comedy' or 'I'd like a challenging book that's pretty disturbing'.
Visitors to the site select their desired experience based on twelve sliding scale options: e.g 'beautiful' 'disgusting', 'conventional' 'unusual', 'optimistic' 'bleak' and so on.
Visitors can also choose books by specifying the setting, characters and plot they would like included or by providing details such as a character's race or sexuality.
There are 20 million different combinations of factors and the site will suggest titles which most closely match the reader's needs.
Once a book has been selected, a 'borrow' hypertext link allows visitors to go through to their local library and check the library catalogue for copies held.
Figure 1: Choosing a book on the Whichbook.net Web site The Whatareyouuptotonight.com Web site [7] has a target audience of 16-25 year-olds.
It is divided into two sections, one for users wanting books for an evening in and one for users wanting books for a holiday or journey.
A very popular section with the site's visitors is Blind Date, an online version of the TV show.
Users select from a list of 10 different styles of 'date' and get a book which matches their desires.
Once again the site links through to local libraries by allowing the book to be ordered; but the book selected by Blind Date remains a surprise until the reader goes to collect it.
Another site tapping into popular culture is 4ureaders.net [8] which includes a Book Brother area similar in operation to the Channel 4 TV reality programme.
Seven books are nominated at the beginning of the Book Brother cycle and once a week two books are nominated for eviction based on the number of online votes collected.
Figure 2: Book Brother on the 4ureaders.net Web site Links to all the Web sites Opening the Book has created, including an online resource for reader development professionals, are available from their site.
Online and Off-line Working Together The key with the Opening the Book ideology is that it offers more than just an Internet-only solution to reader development.
Through its sites it aims to encourage people to visit their local library.
Opening the Book believes that linking the online with the off-line is the secret to getting people reading again.
Online reader development programmes are hardly new.
Stories from the Web [9] is managed by Birmingham Library and Information Services and has been running for over seven years.
The site evolved out of a small-scale pilot Web site called Treasure Island [10] which was developed by UKOLN [11] as a possible service model for a children's library site.
Stories from the Web aims to develop both traditional literacy skills and Internet-based skills in children through reading and online interaction.
Such initiatives are on the increase all over the world.
For example in Canada, Book Adventure [12] is a reading motivation programme for school children.
Children create their own book lists from over six thousand recommended titles, take multiple choice quizzes on the books they have read, and earn points and prizes for their literary successes.
Online Reading Groups Another boom area in reader development is reading groups (or book clubs).
Meeting and talking about books has been popular in some circles for a long time, but recently reading groups have become very fashionable.
One possible contributing factor to this move into the mainstream was the BBC's The Big Read survey carried out in the winter of 2003.
The BBC polled the general public on its favourite novel and ran a series of programmes on the resultant Top 10.
By the end of the initiative three quarters of a million votes were received, a high percentage of these through The Big Read Web site [13].
J.R.R.
Tolkien's classic The Lord of the Rings was officially voted the UK's Best-Loved Book.
Opening the Book takes a more downbeat, but still valid, view of the impact of The Big Read.
It feels that the need for consensus among readers is potentially dangerous, possibly causing stagnation and resistance to trying out new books [14].
Nonetheless, whether they were contemporary or classic books in The Big Read, there is no denying they encouraged many people to read and talk about books.
Opening the Book encourages what it calls 'the reader-centred reading group'.
A reader-centred approach emphasises the quality of the reading experience rather than the quality of the book.
Such a reading group respects everybody's individual reading experience and makes no assumptions about what people have already read or their knowledge of literary theory.
It also enables people with different reading preferences to talk to each other on common ground and encourages honest exploration of responses, instead of just pressuring people to 'perform' in front of fellow group members.
One important consideration is that such a group accommodates varying levels of time commitment and reading appetite [15].
Reading groups are an excellent mechanism for allowing people to communicate, they often provide their members with a safe platform on which to carry out discussions that would not normally take place without confrontation.
The reading group experience can be a really positive one and recently there have been many schemes to establish reading groups within libraries.
Off-line reading groups are now using the Internet more to complement their meetings.
The Mostly, We Eat site [16] has been presented as an example of a longrunning reading group that exploits the Internet for its own management.
The group uses its Web site to link to chosen books, offer recommendations and provide maps and schedules for members.
Many book sites now offer discussion guides for reading groups, aids to choosing pertinent books to discuss and even discounts on group purchases.
There are also more resources than ever out there for people wanting to set up a reading group [17].
It does seem that everyone is up to it.
Even Channel 4's daytime chat show hosts, Richard and Judy, have a book club [18].
In so doing they promote book reading for the masses.
Their selections have been made in connection with the National Library for the Blind (NLB) and all book choices are available in Braille.
But what do you do if you cannot or prefer not to meet up with people?
The Internet, through discussion forums and email, has made it possible for reading groups to exist online.
Online reading groups have a number of advantages over the traditional reading group model.
Traditional reading groups are limited by time, space and location.
Being online and effectively anonymous also means that there is no limit to the diversity of views and perspectives that enter into the discussion.
Also due to the immensity of the Web and the variety of reading groups available, readers who turn to the Internet to find a book club enjoy a much wider selection of clubs, including many dedicated to a specialised interest or genre.
Of course, there are also disadvantages associated with online reading groups.
For instance, the intimacy of a personal discussion is lost, along with the social interaction that is often a part of the traditional reading group experience.
The type of reading group one should join is very much down to the individual.
A good list of online reading groups is available from the Open Directory Project [19].
The People's Network Service Approach With support from a £500,000 grant by the Big Lottery Fund, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has begun developing the first phase of the People's Network Service [20].
The project looks at online services and the range of resources which they offer.
One of the three intended service areas is reader development.
The predicted outputs will include an online reading group run in a real-time environment, links to many readerand reading-focused online resources and a national database of reading groups.
The database will initially contain all the reading groups that meet in public libraries and will be searchable by postcode.
It is being developed by UFI/learndirect alongside a similar project establishing a directory of library services.
The Web site (or 'reading book toolkit') for the project, called Reader to Reader [21], is being created by Opening the Book and pulls together all these resources.
There will be attempts to include deep links via library catalogues.
There will also be connections with Find Your Library [22], an interactive way to locate your nearest branch.
Reader to Reader will run for 3 years with the Web site going live in the Autumn of 2005.
Connecting the Online with the Off-line As mentioned earlier, many of the Internet reading resources available are seeking to connect up with libraries.
One method of making the leap from the online to the off-line is by deep linking into library catalogues.
The best way to do this right now is by using an OpenURL [23] to transport citation information for a resource.
The idea behind OpenURLs is that links should lead a user to appropriate resources.
The OpenURL is, to put it simply, an actionable URL that transports metadata for the object in question.
The target of the OpenURL is an OpenURL resolver that offers context-sensitive services based on that metadata.
This piece of technology allows users to find their local copy of a book with the click of a button.
A way to see this in action is to have a look at the UKOLN Open URL demonstrator [24].
You can also try Jon Udell's LibraryLookup bookmarklet [25], which will invoke your library's lookup service when visiting an online bookstore.
Conclusion The Internet has been the perfect medium with which to kick-start a reading revolution.
It has a lot to offer readers everywhere, from reading groups to resources a-plenty.
The key is that the Internet and reading have a lot in common.
Both are about communication, interaction and interpretation.
And both can give us great pleasure.
As Mason Cooley the famous American aphorist once said, 'Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are'.
The Internet seems to provide the perfect transport.
References Manguel, A (1997).
A History of Reading, Flamingo.
Quote from Olive Fowler, Opening the Book.
Framework for the Future: Libraries, Learning and Information in the Next Decade http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2003/framework_future.htm Framework for the Future Action Plan http://www.mla.gov.uk/action/framework/framework.asp Opening the Book http://www.openingthebook.com/ Whichbook.net http://www.whichbook.net/ What are you up to tonight http://www.whatareyouuptotonight.com/ 4ureaders.net http://www.4ureaders.net/ Stories from the Web http://www.storiesfromtheweb.org/ Treasure Island http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/treasure/ UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Book Adventure http://www.bookadventure.org/ BBC's Big read http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/ The Big Read in libraries http://www.openingthebook.com/website/page.asp?idno=906 Opening the Book : Reader-centred reading groups http://www.openingthebook.com/otb/page.asp?idno=362 Mostly, We Eat http://www.mostlyweeat.org/ Book-Clubs-Resource.com http://www.book-clubs-resource.com/ Richard and Judy's Book Club http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/R/richardandjudy/book_club/book_club.html The Open Directory Project http://dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Reading_Groups/ People's Network Service http://www.mla.gov.uk/action/pn/services.asp Reader to Reader (due Autumn 2005) http://www.readertoreader.co.uk/ Find Your Library http://www.findyourlibrary.co.uk/ OpenURL definition from Ex Libris http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/sfx_openurl.htm OpenURL demonstrator http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/openurl/ LibraryLookup homepage http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html Author Details Marieke Guy Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Return to top Article Title: "Finding Someplace to Go: Reading and the Internet" Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/guy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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An IMS Generator for the Masses Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines An IMS Generator for the Masses Buzz data mobile java html database wireless xml stylesheet xslt accessibility xsl sql copyright uportal rdbms url standards Citation BibTex RIS Kelvin Hai, David Palmer and Chris Dunlop of the MARTINI Project describe the architecture and operation of the Project-developed IMS Generator and show how its flexibility allows it to handle the diverse nature of data held by institutions.
One of the aims of all JISC 7⁄99 projects has been to explore technologies that are generic in nature in support of improved learning and specifically, to “Identify the generic and transferable aspect of the development projects”.
In pursuit of this aim, the MARTINI Project has been specifically standards-driven.
One of the standards that we have employed is the IMS Enterprise Person Object Model for representation of student information.
As has been discovered, however, there are two fundamental obstacles to overcome with the use of the IMS standard; one, the standard only covers a small subset of the information any institution holds about a student, and two, there is a diverse array of systems and architectures that hold this data within each institution.
MARTINI’s solution has been to create an ‘IMS-Generator’ which not only can create the IMS extensions necessary to hold the data but also allows for the creation of IMS-conformant XML files of any and all data held by an institution, regardless of ‘native’ format and/or structure.
Indeed, the MARTINI IMS-Generator ‘toolkit’ can be used to transform records from specified databases to any standard, not just IMS Person Object Model.
Use of this type of ‘middleware’ eliminates the need to recode the toolkit in order to satisfy a particular task.
This article will outline what exactly the IMS Generator does, how it does it, and what implications this might have for the development of MLEs (Managed Learning Environments), particularly in the HE community.
It will draw heavily on existing work by MARTINI Project staff [1], but will attempt to explain the concepts within the IMS Generator in a non-technical manner, and without inclusion of streams of code.
General Architecture As shown in Figure 1 below, the basic architecture of the IMS-Generator is essentially quite simple.
In order to retrieve records from a particular database, the database connectivity drivers must be in place.
The general approach of IMS-Generator is to create a configuration file in XML format (rdbms.xml).
Its contents are then formatted into an instance of a Java object named RDBMsDetails.java.
This instance will then be used to connect to specified databases and retrieve records from those databases.
At University of East Anglia (UEA), JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) is used but the IMS-Generator can also cope with ODBC (Open Database Connectivity).
Those retrieved records will then be formatted into portions of XML code which are finally created as a temporary XML document (temp.xml).
The elements in temp.xml are created using the internal field names of database tables.
An eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, (XSLT) stylesheet (build-ims.xsl) is applied to temp.xml to create an XML document conformant with the IMS Person Object Model which is named ims.xml.
Finally, the ims.xml file is used to create a set of HTML pages (presentation layer) by doing transformation with a set of XSLT stylesheets.
Figure 1: Basic architecture of the IMS-Generator Database Connectivity Mapping The initial requirement for the IMS-Generator is simply to connect to resident institutional databases.
In the UEA version of IMS-Generator, pure JDBC technology is mainly used to communicate with databases.
However, the JDBC-ODBC Bridge technology is also used occasionally for talking to databases that use ODBC.
The JDBC information for any database is stored in the XML file, rdbms.xml.
The properties element imbedded within the file contains the JDBC properties necessary for connection to a database.
Within the properties element, there are four child elements that contain specific information matching a JDBC driver to a particular database.
There is another element within the rdbms.xml file named additional-properties, which provides additional JDBC information, where necessary.
This allows for addition of connectivity information without recoding the entire file.
As many elements as necessary can be included within additional-properties.
Multiple databases pose no problem for the IMS-Generator.
Any number of rdbm elements can be created as child elements of the root rdbms element.
Each rdbm child element holds all the information necessary for connecting a specific database.
Each will contain, where necessary the elements noted above; i.e.
properties and additional-properties.
Adding another rdbm child is straightforward simply copy an existing rdbm element and modify the data therein to represent the new database that is being included.
SQL Statements Preparation This area of the IMS-Generator constructs the queries that will extract data from the resident institutional databases.
It does this by way of execution of SQL statements.
Within rdbm.xml, these statements are held in a statements element, which in turn, contains child elements called statement.
Each statement element has a child element named query which is where the standard SQL statement (i.e.
query) is held.
An example of this is shown below: <statements> <statement groupTagName=‘studentdetails’> <query> select SURNAME from STUDENTDETAILS </query> </statement> </statements> The XML attribute groupTagName of the statement element creates a pair of XML tags that are used to group the result from querying the database with the specified SQL statement.
Using the above example, if one wishes to group the results for this SQL statement by an XML element named familyname, simply set this attribute to be groupTagName=“familyname”.
Where there are multiple values records with the same element within a database (e.g.
surnames in the above example), the result for the SQL query will be formatted into XML format under the attribute groupTagName.
In this case, this has been set equal to “familyname”, and therefore the query result will be grouped by the familyname element.
Each of these retrieved surnames is created as a SURNAME element because IMS-Generator, by default, uses the local name of the field of the database table as tag name for the XML element created.
This SURNAME element will then be embedded by the result element that is coming from IMS-Generator.
The number of result elements is dependent on how many records are returned when a specified SQL statement is executed.
Creating multiple SQL statements for a particular database is relatively easy.
One simply adds an additional statement element within the statements element that contains a unique groupTagName attribute and a query child element to hold the new query.
The number of statement elements is unlimited.
However, the statements element can only contain queries for one database, as it is limited to the database defined in the rdbm element in which it is found.
If IMS-Generator has to access multiple databases, it creates a rdbm element for each of the databases.
The configuration of this element is exactly as noted above, save that the values and properties of the new database need to be included.
Retrieval and Formatting of Query Statement The process outlined so far has been preparation for the heart of the IMS-Generator functionality, i.e.
the retrieval of information and its conversion into IMS-compliant XML for later representation in a presentation layer.
This section outlines the first process, i.e.
the retrieval of the results of a query statement.
Assuming that all above has been done correctly, the contents of rdbms.xml (which contains the results of the SQL queries) is converted to an instance of RDBMDetails.java.
This instance is made up of JDBCProperties.java and StatementDetails.java; the former containing the properties element of the rbdms.xml and the latter the statements element of the rdbms.xml file.
If there is more than one database to be accessed, IMS-Generator will create multiple instances of RDBMDetails.java Java objects.
The number of instances of RDBMDetails.java depends on how many databases are to be accessed.
Finally, IMS-Generator puts these instances of RDBMDetails.java into a vector that is then saved as an instance of a Java object, RDBMsDetails.java.
Figure 2 in shows this process in graphical terms.
Figure 2 Conversion of contents of rdbms.xml to RDBMsDetails.java The IMS-Generator uses these instances of StatementDetails.java as the SQL statement for querying the corresponding databases and stores the retrieved records in an instance of the Java object String, which will eventually be written to a local file storage.
However, IMS-Generator does a reformation of the resultant records into XML format before the instance of the Java object, String, is written to a local disk.
Transformation to XML The data recovered is now ready to be converted to XML.
A retrieved record can contain as many fields/attributes/columns of a particular database table as necessary.
There are two ways for IMS-Generator to deal with the field/attribute/column names: In the first case, the field names are declared within the SQL statement.
These field names will be used to create XML elements.
In the second case, the field names are not declared in the SQL statement, as shown in the following portion of XML code; in which case, IMS-Generator actually reads the field names corresponding to that SQL statement automatically.
<statement groupTagName=‘uPortal-Users> <query> select * from UP_USER </query> </statement> If there were, for example, 6 columns in the above UPUSER table, IMS-Generator reads the field names and uses them to create a set of XML elements with corresponding retrieval results as their text value as seen below: <USER ID>RetrievalResults</USER ID> <USER NAME> RetrievalResults </USER NAME> <USER DFLT USR ID> RetrievalResults </USER DFLT USR ID> <USER DFLT LAY ID> RetrievalResults </USER DFLT LAY ID> <NEXT STRUCT ID> RetrievalResults </NEXT STRUCT ID> <LST CHAN UPDT DT> RetrievalResults </LST CHAN UPDT DT> Turning to the contents of these retrieved records, again the IMS-Generator is able to deal with either singular or multiple records, using the same methodology.
Portions of XML code are created to represent each of the retrieved records, regardless of the number of records.
These are each held within a separate result element that contains both the field/attribute/column names and the records within each of those separate fields/attributes/columns as child elements.
The difference between single and multiple records is simply the number of result elements created with the above characteristics.
For single results, only one is created; for multiple results, as many are created as necessary.
The attribute groupTagName is used to gather the various result elements.
The IMS-Generator uses the groupTagName created previously for the SQL statement to create an XML element in which all the result elements are placed.
In the example above of UP_USER, where there are multiple records, the code would appear as follows: <uPortal-Users>  <result>   <USER ID>0</USER ID>   <USER NAME>system</USER NAME>   <USER DFLT USR ID>0</USER DFLT USR ID>   <USER DFLT LAY ID>0</USER DFLT LAY ID>     <NEXT STRUCT ID>0</NEXT STRUCT ID>   <LST CHAN UPDT DT>2003-04-09   </LST CHAN UPDT DT>  </result>  <result>   <USER ID>1</USER ID>   <USER NAME>guest</USER NAME>   <USER DFLT USR ID>0</USER DFLT USR ID>     <USER DFLT LAY ID>0</USER DFLT LAY ID>   <NEXT STRUCT ID>39</NEXT STRUCT ID>   <LST CHAN UPDT DT> 2003-03-04   </LST CHAN UPDT DT>  </result>  <result>   <USER ID>2</USER ID>   <USER NAME>demo</USER NAME>   <USER DFLT USR ID>1</USER DFLT USR ID>   <USER DFLT LAY ID>1</USER DFLT LAY ID>   <NEXT STRUCT ID>40</NEXT STRUCT ID>   <LST CHAN UPDT DT>2003-03-05   </LST CHAN UPDT DT>  </result> </uPortal-Users> Where a groupTagName attribute does not, for whatever reason, exist, the IMS Generator uses a default value, RESULT_Without_GroupTag_Specified of attribute groupTagName, to create a parent element within XML that will hold the result child elements.
In the above example, if no groupTagName attribute existed, RESULT_Without_GroupTag_Specified would be seen/used where uPortal-Users is seen/used.
All the retrieved results are integrated through the creation of an auxiliary database, temp.xml, as a root document holding all the elements created so far.
Figure 3 below illustrates this process.
There are 2 instances of RDBMDetails.java, one containing 2 instances of StatementDetails.java and the other only one (our uPortal-Users from immediately above).
A portion of XML code is created for each instance of StatementDetails.java (portion A, B, & C in Figure 3).
The root element created to hold all of this is named enterprise.
All the results child elements and groupTagName elements created previously are retained and held within the enterprise element.
The name of the root element is hard coded in the Java class named RDBMs2XML.java.
If this name is to be changed, the source code has to be modified.
Figure 3 Integration of retrieved records and creation of temp.xml This structure is completely flexible and imposes no limits on the number of XML portions that can be held within the enterprise element.
If the resultant temp.xml file is too big for the hardware in place, multiple temp.xml files can be created.
A tool named XMLMerger.java that is described at greater length below will merge these.
Creating IMS-compliant XML The temp.xml document now created retains the structure of the underlying data.
It now has to be transformed into a standard format; in the case of MARTINI, IMS.
This is done by the use of eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, (XSLT).
This is a simple process using an XSLT document entitled build-ims.xsl.
Figure 4 models this process.
Figure 4: Conversion of temp.XML to IMS Person Object Model The resultant document of this process can be a text, HTML or XML document.
The Java class, XSLTransformation.java, works with both temp.xml and build-ims.xsl to create the final document.
The instance of XSLTransformation.java does not actually do anything special.
The clever bit is in the XSLT document, build-ims.xsl, which allows the transformation of an existing XML document to another document in various formats.
More importantly, it allows the conversion of an existing format or standard to another widely used standard such as IMS which has been used in MARTINI Project.
XSLTransformation.java uses three parameters, String xmlFileName, String xslFileName, and String outFileName, which are instances of the Java predefined object, String.
The xmlFileName is the url of a source XML document, temp.xml; The xslFileName is the url of an XSLT document, build-ims.xsl and the outFileName is used to store the destination url of a resultant file.
Suppose the temp.xml and build-ims.xsl exist in the current working directory, and we want to create a resultant XML document named ims.xml for the transformation in the same directory, what one would need to do is create an instance of XSLTransformation.java as shown below.
XSLTransformation xslt = new XSLTransformation(“temp.xml”, “build-ims.xsl”, “ims.xml”; One of the key advantages IMS Generator is that approach it takes allows to create ‘extensions Enterprise format ‘on fly’ by definition extension fields in the build-ims.xsl file.
This file also ‘pulls relevant underlying data from the temp.xml files, which results appearance an extension element within the resultant ims.xsl holds the extensions to the IMS Enterprise standard.
Actual coding details of how how accomplished are held a in a technical paper [1] available on the MARTINI website [2].
Merging Multiple XML documents As noted above, there may be occasions when more than one temp.xml file might need to be created by the IMS Generator.
Earlier iterations of the MARTINI IMS Generator that used WebObjects made extensive use of the XMLMerger engine but subsequent enhancements of the system have meant that only one temp.xml document is now created.
However, the XMLMerger is still a very useful tool for merging existing XML documents into an IMS-compliant record in XML format.
Within the IMS Generator, the XMLMerger.java engine is simply a Java class which transforms an XML document (which specifies the URLs of the source XML documents) with a XSLT stylesheet for merging into an entire resultant document in XML format.
Figure 5 below shows the basic architecture of the XMLMerger.java engine.
Figure 5: Basic architecture of XMMerger.java XMLMerger.java inherits XSLTransformation.java, the engine by which an XML document is converted into an IMS-compliant XML document.
The XMLMerger Java class also includes source.xml, a file that specifies the source XML documents to be merged and merger.xsl, an XSL stylesheet that specifies how to merge the source XML documents identified in source.xml.
Finally, XMLMerger.java has to be called to perform the transformation of source.xml with merge.xsl to create a resultant XML document, mergedresult.xml which stores the result after merging the specified XML documents.
Once again, as noted above, the results are held in an extension element that supplies an IMS conformant structure.
Presentation of data to end user Currently, many organisations and institutions are using XML documents as data sources rather than building XML-based applications.
More precisely, organisations and institutions tend to use the XSLT technology for transforming XML documents into other documents with different formats such as Text, different XML and majority HTML pages.
As one of objectives of MARTINI project is to provide a Web-based front-end application for students, we create HTML pages for the presentation layer.
This is done by transforming the IMS-conformant data held in the XML document ims.xml, with a set of XSLT stylesheets.
This is shown in Figure 6, which illustrates a basic architecture of building HTML pages on top of the IMS standard.
Figure 6: Creation of HTML pages from IMS Person Object Model The process is as described earlier.
It is quite simple, performing transformation from ims.xml with a set of XSLT stylesheets, which tells the Java class XSLTransformation.java to produce different HTML pages as resultant documents.
The details of this are shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7 : Creation of HTML pages from IMS Person Object Model (detailed) The MARTINI IMS-Generator is not only able to transform data from institutional specified databases to IMS Person Object Model format, but can also transform the specified data structure to any standard.
All that is required in order to use IMS-Generator to conform your institutional specified data to another standard is to modify build-ims.xsl so that it specifies the way to format your data to another standard.
Indeed, the MARTINI Project has found value in the IMS Generator in unanticipated ways.
It has been used, for example, to convert the contents of a CVS file containing survey results of 300 UEA students into an Excel format that allows for easy manipulation and analysis.
Accessibility is an increasingly important issue when developing Web-based applications and a lot of effort to make their Web pages accessible for potential users who have difficulties in viewing the page.
As all HTML pages created via IMS-Generator use the XSLTransformation.java to transform the IMS-conformant file, ims.xml with differing XSLT stylesheets, it is pretty simple to address the accessibility issues by using an XSLT stylesheet with the appropriate format so that accessible Web pages can be generated.
VoiceXML is another choice for addressing part of the accessibility issue.
The ims.xml file can easily be transformed to VoiceXML as long as a set of appropriate XSLT stylesheets are provided.
VoiceXML applications can then act as a screen reader to help students with difficulty reading the normal computer screen.
Many mobile devices nowadays are able to browse Web pages.
However, the content these devices can access is limited.
WML is a subset of XML technology which allows access to simple web pages for mobile devices.
Again, it is extremely easy to conform institutional data to a set of Wireless Markup Language (WML) documents provided a set of XSLT stylesheets have been created that will allow the IMS-Generator to do the transformation.
Conclusions Whilst this article, and the MARTINI Project for that matter, has concentrated on the creation of IMS-compliant XML, the IMS Generator’s flexibility as shown above allows it to be a tool of on-going value to the MLE community.
As new standards emerge, the IMS Generator will be able to adapt and remain useful.
The use of standards such as XML, XSLT and Java are also critical to the future of the IMS Generator.
This will permit development of the IMS Generator itself, and will also mean that it is embedded in the mainstream of technical developments within the MLE community.
On a related point, as the IMS-Generator is developed in pure Java programming language and with XML technology, it is capable of being executed on different platforms.
The implementation of XML and XSLT technologies also provides an easier way for people in other institutions to use this toolkit without requiring solid Java programming skills.
However, knowledge of SQL, XML and XSLT is required for configuring IMS-Generator.
In short, we believe the IMS Generator to be inexpensive, useful, sustainable, and easily integrated by a wide range of institutions; a tool for the ‘masses’.
References Hai, (Kelvin) Hing Kwong.
IMS-Generator Description Technical Paper.
(unpublished ms.) May 2003.
MARTINI Project website http://www.mis.uea.ac.uk/martini/ Author Details (Kelvin) Hing Kwong Hai MARTINI Project University of East Anglia Email: kelvin.hai@uea.ac.uk Website: http://www.mis.uea.ac.uk/martini/ David Palmer MARTINI Project University of East Anglia Email: david.palmer@uea.ac.uk Web site: http://www.mis.uea.ac.uk/martini/ Chris Dunlop University of East Anglia Email: c.dunlop@uea.ac.uk Web site: http://www.mis.uea.ac.uk/martini/ Return to top Article Title: “An IMS Generator for the Masses” Author: K. Hai, D. Palmer and C. Dunlop Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/martini/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines Buzz thesaurus browser flickr cataloguing graphics url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley casts his eye over image search engines.
I last looked at image search engines in my column [1] back in September 2000 , which in Internet terms is probably equivalent to several decades, so I decided that it was time to revisit the subject to see what has changed.
Having recently become interested in photography, I know that I certainly use a lot of image search engines now that I didn't use then, but there are also one or two old faithfuls still out there.
Consequently, I'm going to give an overview of different ways that you can find images, and my test subjects are 'Robert E Lee' (Confederate general in the American Civil War), because there are only a limited number of photographs of him and they're all very well known, so most engines should have a good collection of him; 'Tony Blair', as there are a huge number of photographs of him, and it's a collection that is constantly growing; 'flower' because you can't get much more generic than that; finally 'internet' because it's a nice abstract term for images of all types.
Search Engines For many of us, a first port of call when looking for images is going to be traditional search engines.
Most good search engines these days index images, and many will have a specific tag you can search under.
Google Google Image Search [2] styles itself as 'the most comprehensive image search on the web' which is a fairly confident statement.
The interface, in case you haven't tried it, will be familiar and doesn't look any different to that found on their home page.
There is an option for advanced search (which I'll come to later), a good help page and a preferences section with standard options such as language, safe search filtering, number of results per page and so on.
My search for "Robert E Lee" resulted in 14,600 results and there were only 3 results on the first page that were not directly of him.
Google also gives searchers the option of limiting searches by size Large, Medium or Small.
This is vaguely helpful, although if I was going to use an image I'd be able to resize it using a graphics package.
It would however be useful if I was using other images though.
Under each image is the filename, size (both pixel size and file size), and the site that hosts the image.
Choosing an image creates a framed page, with a thumbnail of the image at the top, the hosting page underneath and the option of seeing the image full size without having to open the page up properly.
My search for the British Prime Minister resulted in 45,900 images.
3 images returned on the first page of 20 results were not on target, but several others would have been unusable, since they had cartoon speech bubbles.
The term 'flower' gave me a whopping 2,640,000 results which wasn't unexpected and there was only one image in the first 20 that wasn't of a flower of some sort (it was a flower press, which I think is fair enough).
The term 'internet' gave me 4,280,000 hits with, as I suspected, a huge variety of types of image keyboards, charts, diagrams and a guy tearing his hair out (I know how he feels!).
All in all, I was happy with what I found at Google as far as relevance goes (I'm not overly bothered by the actual numbers themselves, particularly since I'm limiting my comments to the first page of results), but I did think it was disappointing that I couldn't narrow my search very much other than by size.
Yahoo!
The Yahoo Image Search page [3] is exactly the same as the home page, which made me blink, since I was expecting perhaps slightly different treatment for a different type of search.
However, that's my expectation, rather than anything to do with Yahoo!
although annoyingly I wasn't presented with a different URL, which means that it's difficult to link to directly I should in fairness point out that they do have a specific page [4] but it's not clear when looking at their home page.
Advanced search functionality was better than that provided by Google, since I could limit my search to size (wallpaper, large medium or small, giving a further option to those offered by Google), by colour (colour, black or white or either) and importantly by type of site, such as .com, .edu or .gov.
Now, I could actually do this in Google using the site: syntax, but equally I knew how to do that anyway, so a prompt by Google would be helpful for people who were unaware of the option.
My 'Robert E Lee' search gave 12,000 results, all but one of the first 20 being on target.
Moreover, I was prompted by Yahoo!
to narrow my search with different terms, by size or colour.
The display options followed the same pattern as offered by Google.
'Tony Blair' gave me 32,254 and all but one were appropriate.
However, what was interesting was that almost all of the them were 'sensible' images rather than some of the silly ones that Google provided.
This is I think an important point there's no point in getting thousands of results if they're not really on target, so relevance is in many ways more important with images than with webpages.
The term 'flower' gave 1,896,188 results and again, only one of the first 20 was not relevant (a flower girl at a wedding).
Moreover, all the images were obviously of flowers, without some of the slightly abstract representations Google gave me.
The term 'internet' served up 6,481,220 images (a lot more than Google), and they were a mixture of cartoons, diagrams, photographs of keyboards and so on.
Obviously it's a personal call regarding the question of relevance, but once more, Yahoo!
did out perform Google, at least as far as I was concerned.
Consequently, while Google may well style itself as comprehensive, while in most of the searches it outperformed its rival, I did not feel the actual images returned were as appropriate as those found by Yahoo!
MSN Search I next looked at the Microsoft offering [5].
Search options were limited, and I didn't find that they were particularly helpful.
My Confederate general search gave me a very meagre 185 results, but they were all (with one exception) right on target.
Once I'd run the search I also had the opportunity of limiting by three sizes and colour or black and white.
Disappointingly however, many of the images were exactly the same, just found on different sites, so I had less choice of image in the first page than I did with the previous two engines.
The Prime Minister also didn't fare terribly well either, only having 7,661 images to his name.
Most were again on topic, but subjectively were less useful than those I obtained at Yahoo!
My flowers search gave me 578,619 results and several of these were clearly from commercial sites using flowers as a logo, and I wasn't impressed at all.
My final search for 'internet' gave 237,607 results, most of which were graphs or diagrams.
All in all, a very disappointing set of results.
General Search Engine Results Overall, the clear 'winner' to bring it down to very base terms was Yahoo!
It's true to say that in most instances they didn't have as many images available as their major competitor, but in all cases I felt they were much more relevant.
The main surprise for me was just how poorly Microsoft did; a small number of results and not particularly useful ones either.
As I mentioned earlier, all the major search engines do have image search capability, and I could have written my entire article just on those.
However, I wanted to expand beyond these offerings to see if image specific engines would fare any better.
Image Search Engines These have proliferated in the last year or so, and it's almost impossible to navigate around the Internet without bumping into them; I have a dozen that I'll use on a regular basis.
However, due to time and space considerations I'll limit myself to just a couple.
The Devilfinder Image Browser Devilfinder [6] came to my attention a few months ago and I've been using it quite a lot.
Options are limited to safe search, number of images displayed in one go and viewing results in a new window; no advanced search functionality there!
Images are displayed full size, which leads to slow loading of pages, even on a fast broadband connection.
Devilfinder does provide an option to email the image to a friend, and to see a link to both the image link and the hosting site, which is not, I feel, particularly helpful.
It does however offer a link to any videos of the subject of the search, which I did find helpful.
All the results were on topic with my Lee search, although there were far more drawings than photographs.
Unfortunately the engine doesn't tell you how many images it has found though.
I was also slightly put off by the number of adverts on the page; they really clutter it up and reduce loading time even more.
The Tony Blair search worked well and did give me an excellent set of results with which I was very happy.
Similarly, the flowers search worked well, but initially I didn't think that I had any results at all, as I could see the advertising, but no images.
The reason for this was that the first flower image was very large and was placed below the adverts.
However, they were all absolutely relevant; all pictures of flowers.
DevilFinder also performed well with the abstract 'internet' as well, it pulled up the by now familiar mix of graphs, diagrams and computer images.
Overall, I thought the engine did provide good results, the main disadvantages being that it showed the images in full size and didn't give me any opportunities to narrow the search in the same way that the other engines did.
However, it was also terribly slow, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone without a good broadband connection.
Cydral Cydral [7] is an engine I have only recently discovered.
It had no options on the main search screen other than a family filter, and no help either, which always irritates me.
The 'Robert E Lee' search returned a poor 41 images, and several of those were not on topic either.
As with most of the other search engines, it did provide both pixel and file size.
Confusingly, clicking on the image doesn't work; it's necessary to click on the 'info' button.
However, one feature that Cydral does have is the ability to sort your results in terms of similarity.
This worked extremely well, so much so that the first three images returned using this facility were exactly the same.
Unfortunately it doesn't appear possible to define 'similarity', since I could have wanted pictures of the General returned ordered by photograph, drawing, black and white or colour.
However, it's still an extremely useful feature and very helpful, particularly if you are dealing with a lot of images.
A final helpful function was a link to a Web search which returned a goodly number of different search suggestions.
The Blair search gave me 362 images, most of which were relevant (though I'm not sure how the Aztec temple image crept in), but most of them were fairly informal photographs I wouldn't have been able to use any of them on an official biography page for example.
My flowers search was less impressive though.
I obtained 5,863 images, and while most of them were what I was expecting I did for the first time get an image that was vaguely pornographic.
It's worth pointing out that I ran all the searches on all engines with the family filter turned off, and this was the first time that I got an less than wholesome image.
The search for my abstract term 'internet' was quite frankly awful.
Of the 14,440 images most of the early ones were of a roleplay game and there was nothing on the first page that would have been useful if I'd been doing any sort of research.
In many ways, Cydral was a disappointment; it didn't provide a great many images, and the relevance was spotty at best.
However, it is worth persevering with, if for no other reason than its ability to resort results by similarity.
Having found at least one good image in a search this option did bring me back others further down in the rankings that were exactly the kind of images that I was expecting.
It's an extremely interesting function and one that I expect the other major search engines will include before too long.
Other Useful Resources It would be invidious not to mention a few other resources that the searcher desperate for images should consider using.
I've only had time to scratch the surface of the subject here, but there were some other sites that I did want to mention, albeit briefly.
Flickr Flickr [8] is a user-driven site, where individuals can upload their own photographs.
These can be collated into their own sets, or added to group pools of images related to a certain subject.
Users can also 'tag' photographs in their own amateur classification/thesaurus/catalogue approach.
Inevitably, because these are personal photographs you will get a lot of hits that are way off the mark, and I found this with all the searches that I ran (photographs tagged with 'Tony Blair' were almost always photographs of people protesting against him or his policies), but my flower search gave me some of the best photographs of all.
Fagan Image Search Engines Michael Fagan has put together an excellent collection of image search engines [9] , covering a wide variety of subject areas regional, historical, meta search engines, clip art, educational and so on.
If you cannot find the images you are looking for from any other major search engines, it's always worth trying out some of the ones in his collection; if you still can't find it, then it probably doesn't exist!
TASI The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) based in the UK has a good overview [10] of some of the major (and a few minor) search engines.
It is another good starting point if you are looking to expand your knowledge and understanding of image search engines.
Image Search Engines from My Previous Ariadne Article I also decided to take a quick look to see if the search engines that I mentioned in my previous article [1] were still in existence.
The AltaVista Image Search [11] function is still available, and for a search engine generally ignored these days.
it did have a wide variety of search options.
While not in quite the same numerical league as Google or Yahoo!
I was very pleased with the results that it gave me.
Another name from the past, Lycos Image Search [12] also performed quite well although the search options and results were fairly unremarkable.
The meta search engine Ixquick [13] was wholly unremarkable, pulling in a lot of material that was either not relevant or only tangentially so.
The Berkeley Digital Library Image Finder [14] is still in existence and provides access to a number of specialised search engines, and the Stock Photography site [15] is also up and running, providing the same service of identifying images that can be purchased as well as royalty free images.
Conclusion If you are in a hurry, and you only have time to use one resource to find images I would have to say that in my experience, the Yahoo!
Image Finder [3] is the best one to use.
Yes, it doesn't have the same number of images that Google has, but the relevance (which I fully accept is very subjective) was far superior, at least for me on the searches that I ran.
If you have a little more time available it would be worth trying out Cydral [7], and accept that you're going to have to re-sort your results to get close to what you're after.
Overall however, I was disappointed with the search capabilities of the engines that I looked at, since I was hopeful of a wide range of search criteria that I could use, but this didn't seem to be the case.
It's clearly an area that is waiting for a company to 'do a Google' and take image searching seriously.
I hope that when I revisit this area again in another couple of years we'll have just that.
References Bradley, P "Finding Images on the Internet" Ariadne 25, September 2000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/search-engines/ Google Image Search http://images.google.com/ Yahoo!
Image Search http://www.yahoo.com/ Yahoo!
Dedicated image search page http://search.yahoo.com/images?&ei=UTF-8&p= MSN Image Search http://search.msn.com/images/results.aspx?FORM=IRHP&q= Devilfinder Image Browser http://images.devilfinder.com/ Cydral Image Search http://en.cydral.com/ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ Image Search Engines http://www.faganfinder.com/img/ TASI http://www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/searchengines.html AltaVista Image Search http://www.altavista.com/image/default Lycos Image Search http://www.lycos.com/ Ixquick meta search engine http://www.eu.ixquick.com/ Berkeley Image Finder http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ImageFinder/ Stock Photography site http://www.1stopstock.com/ Author Details Phil Bradley Internet consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: "Image Search Engines" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics Buzz e-business ict research Citation BibTex RIS Sheila Corrall reviews a new landmark book which explains and promotes a distinctive approach to information-related research spanning traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries.
Social Informatics (SI) is a relatively recently named field of research, which has evolved from earlier studies of the role of computers in society and the social impacts of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which were often conducted as separate, unconnected discussions by computer scientists, information systems researchers, sociologists, educational researchers and others.
Rob Kling, the lead author of this book, who died in 2003, is generally regarded as the prime mover and founder of this new domain.
According to William Dutton's Foreword, Kling first coined the term in the early 1980s, but it was more than a decade later that he began actively to promote it and also established the Center for Social Informatics in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.
Variously referred to in the text as an inter-, multior trans-disciplinary field, SI is first defined as 'the systematic study of the social aspects of computerization' (p.3) and then later, more formally, as 'the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses, and consequences of ICTs that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts' (p.6).
A clear definition is essential as the term 'informatics' can be interpreted in several different ways, even within the information science community though a common theme in the latter context tends to be a focus on information and how it is presented, which seems to be missing here [1].
The above definition of SI was agreed in 1997 at a groundbreaking workshop funded by the National Science Foundation to articulate this new research domain and define its research agenda.
The book reviewed here was originally conceived as a means of capturing the intellectual substance and enthusiasm of that workshop while at the same time launching the new domain with its first monograph.
With the passage of time, the concept has inevitably evolved into something slightly different, with a broader intent.
The Preface explains that the book is 'an overview, designed to be short, readable in pieces, and directed to our colleagues and those who wish to engage with the concepts and issues of computing from a social perspective' (p.xx).
The Introduction goes on to identify four particular audiences: those involved in developing educational curricula for courses examining ICTs and social change; those with teaching and/or research interests in the field; analysts of ICT policies; and funders of programmes of research about ICT and social behaviour.
The authors also mention another 'important audience' for the results of SI research, to whom the book is not addressed, namely 'students of ICT and working ICT professionals', pointing to other, more accessible, books and articles directed at these groups [2].
The book is an introduction to the subject of SI research, but it is not a textbook; and it does not fit easily into any recognisable publication genre, as an outline of its contents indicates.
Chapter 1 introduces the domain, discusses the disconnect between scholarly and popular journalistic treatments of the subject, and then explains three distinct approaches to SI research, normative, analytical and critical orientations, pointing out that they may be combined in a specific study.
Chapter 2, entitled 'The consequences of ICTs for organizations and social life' contrasts the socio-technical model of SI research with direct effects theories, such as technological determinism.
It then presents and discusses general findings from SI research.
The next two chapters pursue this approach in more detail in relation to particular constituencies.
Chapter 3 explains the value of SI research for designers, developers and implementers of ICT-based systems, providing a useful summary table contrasting 'social design' and 'designer-centric' (developer-centred engineering) approaches on 14 dimensions (p.42).
Chapter 4 discusses how SI research can help ICT policy analysts, interested in issues such as the digital divide and e-business, by offering an illustrative case study and then reviewing ICT policy analysis activities in the US, UK and Europe over the last three decades.
The remaining two substantive chapters are considerably longer (at 40 pages each) and rather different in character.
Chapter 5 deals with the teaching of SI, particularly to computer science and information systems students though it acknowledges the subject's relevance to other disciplines, such as information science.
It highlights the core concepts, discusses why they should be taught and how, and concludes with a page of specific recommendations to guide curriculum design.
Chapter 6 deals with communicating SI research to professional and research communities, identifying two main audiences for 'SI outreach efforts', namely ICT professionals (as previously mentioned) and other academic research communities with shared interests in the social contexts of computing, including computer science and information science.
The section on ICT professionals is much longer (24 pages, against eight), but both parts finish with suggested strategies to improve communication with these groups.
Chapter 7 concludes the work with a brief review of the cumulative findings to date from SI research, followed by brief summaries of the key messages for ICT designers, ICT policy analysts and ICT-oriented academic teachers, and a round-up of other key points, ending with a section 'Taking Social Informatics seriously' which re-states the case for SI 'moving from being a useful but alternative approach to being one that is the core knowledge base for understanding computing' (p.153).
In addition to an extensive list of 350+ references, the authors then provide a glossary of 60 key terms; an appendix of 19 reviews and anthologies of SI research, published mainly in the 1990s; two appendices related to the 1997 workshop; and name and subject indexes.
This book is clearly a landmark text for the domain.
It fills a gap and follows on from older, shorter introductions to the subject [3][4].
The authors are well qualified to write on the subject, having being involved with the field from its inception.
The text is clearly expressed and is easy to navigate, with chapters helpfully broken down into sections and sub-sections, which extend to three levels in the longer chapters and are also enumerated in the table of contents.
The work is likely to be of most interest to people working in related areas and/or contemplating a move into the field, including early-career researchers, though it is not a 'how-to' guide, but a survey of the terrain.
The book is written from an insider's perspective, with an unconcealed mission to promote and re-position the domain.
Chapters 5 and (particularly) 6 exemplify this and the latter, especially, seems aimed more at existing insiders than at new converts: 'In this chapter we ask Social Informatics (SI) researchers to shoulder the responsibility for communicating the core of Social Informatics (defined here as its assumptions, concepts, theories, insights, and findings) to ICT professionals and other academic research communities.'
(pp.106-107) At times, this political motive comes close to unbalancing the text.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are all longer than necessary to fulfil their purposes and in serious danger of over-stating their case.
Chapter 4, in particular, goes into unnecessary detail in its examples of SI policy inputs.
These sections can be contrasted with Chapters 2 and 3, which manage to provide overviews that are both informative and concise.
However, the weaknesses identified should not deter potential readers from obtaining this volume.
It is intended to be read in chunks and its organisation and layout facilitate its use as a reference tool.
Anyone who wants to gain a fuller understanding of SI research, its approaches and applications, should start with this book.
References Fourman, M.
"Informatics."
in: Feather, J. and Sturges, P., eds.
International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science, 2nd.
ed.
London: Routledge, 2003, pp.237-244.
e.g.
Kling, R. "Critical Professional Discourses about Information and Communications Technologies and Social Life in the U.S." In: Brunnstein, K. and Berleur, J., eds.
Human Choice and Computers: Issues of Choice and Quality of Life in the Information Society.
New York: Kluwer, pp.1-20.
Kling, R. "What is Social Informatics and Why Does It Matter?"
D-Lib Magazine, 5 (1), 1999. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/kling/01kling.html Kling, R. "Social Informatics."
In: Drake, M. A., ed.
Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, vol.
4.
New York: M. Dekker, 2003, pp.2656-2661.
Author Details Sheila Corrall Professor of Librarianship & Information Management University of Sheffield Email: s.m.corrall@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/staff/corrall.html Return to top Article Title: "Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics" Author: Sheila Corrall Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/corrall-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework Buzz data mobile framework url taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Rowley introduces the JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework.
The JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (hereafter the Framework) is an ambitious project to design and use a research framework that monitors and maps the development of user behaviour with electronic information resources in higher education.
Initially approved for three years, the Framework is currently in its third and final annual cycle.
The methodology and findings relating to the first and second cycles are located in the First Cycle and Second Cycle Annual Reports, available through the JISC web site.
Aspects of the work conducted under the Framework have also been disseminated variously through conference papers, and professional and academic journal articles.
The concept of the Framework was sponsored by JISC’s Committee on Awareness, Liaison and Training in collaboration with the JISC Committee on Electronic Information.
The Framework has three strands which are managed through the two projects: JUSTEIS and JUBILEE, as described below.
In the second cycle pilot studies were also conducted under each of the strands in further education and these will be expanded to full studies with both ‘survey’ and action research components during the Third Cycle.
Framework Projects JUSTEIS (JISC Usage Surveys: Trends in Electronic Information Service) Strands A and C of the Framework were contracted to the Department of Information and Library Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Under the JUSTEIS project, Strand A is an annual survey which seeks to measure and evaluate the overall awareness, uptake, usage and usefulness of information technologies and information services in higher education in the United Kingdom.
The survey was conducted by telephone interview, e-mail and paper-based questionnaire.
Several hundred interviews have been conducted with students and staff drawn from institutions and subjects across the entire higher education spectrum.
The interviews use a critical incident technique to investigate the types of EIS that are accessed, approaches to searching, and success in searching, and the reasons for use of the EIS.
A taxonomy of EIS is used to define the types of EIS covered.
Strand C is a general survey of EIS provision, with the aim of developing profiles of current and planned service provision.
The basis for this survey is a Web survey of resources access provided by individual HEI’s.
This has been supplemented by telephone interviews with senior LIS managers to explore purchasing determinants and intentions.
JUBILEE (JISC User Behaviour in Information Seeking: Longitudinal Evaluation of EIS) Strand D of the Framework has been contracted to The Information Management Research Institute, School of Information Studies at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle.
The JUBILEE Project team have completed the Second Cycle of a linked programme of ongoing, longitudinal monitoring of the information behaviour, needs and opportunities for specific academic and students communities and for academics and students in general.
This ongoing programme of qualitative monitoring centres around a selection of actual (HEI’s, Departments) and virtual (discipline/subject communities/networks) ‘sites’, with an annual reporting cycle.
Six institutions and three disciplines are studied per cycle.
The focus of monitoring changes over time.
For the first cycle the disciplines were: Health Sciences, Business Studies and English.
Second Cycle disciplines were History, Computing and Sociology.
Research methods have included questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, electronic communication (Chat room and observatory) and feedback on case study reports.
The Development of the Framework Work on the Framework has two components: The establishment of a methodology for monitoring, interpreting and responding to user behaviour The findings from the methodology.
As indicated in Table 1 the key focus in Cycle 1 of the Framework was to design and test the methodology.
By Cycle 2 the data sets start to be sufficiently well populated to increase confidence both in the methodology and in findings.
Cycle 3 will continue with population of data sets, but also focuses more strongly on integration as a basis for a holistic set of deliverables.
Cycle Key Activities Level of Integration 1 Design and testing of project data collection and access methodologies, leading to the generation of frameworks for understanding the data at project level Loosely linked set of project with an overarching set of objectives.
2 Further refinement of data collection and access methodologies.
Further population of data sets.
Partial integration based on enhanced understanding of the relationships between projects.
3 Further population of data sets Refinement of project data collection, and analysis to generate a holistic picture of user behaviour Full integration, evidenced through a holistic set of deliverables.
Table 1 : Framework Cycles Profiling User Behaviour The findings from the Second Cycle replicate those from the First Cycle to a significant extent.
These are: Undergraduates use EIS mostly for academic purposes connected to assessment, and also for leisure and lifestyle reasons.
Search engine use predominates over all other EIS, and search engines are an important arena for practising search skills.
Research postgraduates’ pattern of use of EIS differs from that of taught postgraduates.
Some postgraduates make more use of JISC-negotiated services and specialist EIS than undergraduates.
Electronic journals are used by postgraduates and by academic staff (teaching and research) but use is relatively infrequent.
Services such as Genie (for sending a text message to a mobile phone from a PC) may become increasingly popular.
Many students have more than one e-mail address.
Patterns of use of EIS vary among disciplines, except for search engine use that is predominant for all clusters.
From JUSTEIS, for example the PAS (Pure and applied sciences) cluster (and to a lesser extent the CM (Clinical medicine) cluster) make noticeably more use of JISC-negotiated services than other disciplinary clusters.
The PASS (Pure and applied social sciences) cluster makes comparatively more use of organisational Web sites than other clusters.
Academic staff influence student (UG and PG) use of EIS more than LIS staff.
Friends and colleagues are also influential.
Own experience weighs most heavily, though, suggesting that patterns of EIS use become habitual.
Author Details   Jenny Rowley Email:Rowleyj@edgehill.ac.uk Article Title: "JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework" Author: Jenny Rowley Publication Date: 20-December-2001 Publication: Ariadne Issue 30 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/jisc/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Herding Tigers, Part II Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Herding Tigers, Part II Buzz software xml accessibility vocabularies schema blog repositories e-learning lams interoperability Citation BibTex RIS Sophie Clarke describes an event designed to share ideas on accessibility, evaluation and the use of learning technology standards.
'Herding Tigers' was held at Oxford University Computing Services on the 17 December 2003, with a theme of Best practice in e-Learning development.
This was the second event of its type organised by the University's Learning Technologies Group [1], the previous year's having had a slightly different focus on raising awareness and collaborative working between e-Learning practitioners and academics.
This year the day had been devised as an opportunity to discuss some of the practical challenges presented to developers when dealing with the areas of accessibility, applying learning technology standards, and evaluation.
Accessibility The first topic tackled was accessibility, with an excellent session facilitated by Brian Kelly of UKOLN who had very kindly stepped in at the last minute.
Delegates were split up into small groups and discussed their thoughts on a wide range of accessibility-related topics including the end-user experience; education and involvement (particularly of those preparing content); and useful tools and technologies.
Each group fed back the fruits of their discussion to the wider group, and it was pleasing to see that there seemed to be something of a consensus as to how accessibility could and should be approached, with a particular emphasis on what was most pertinent to providing e-Learning resources.
The discussion was too lengthy to cover in its entirety here, but here is a summary of some of the main conclusions: Most people use the WAI guidelines as a starting point for assessing the accessibility of their site, but it was acknowledged that there are things that the guidelines do not cover, or do not cover well.
In general, nobody relied entirely on a checklist-based approach, with some things always being dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
This common sense approach needs to be maintained when educating non-expert content providers; ideally they should be given a sense of priority, with a list of 'must do', 'should do' and 'helpful to do' measures A basic accessibility strategy can cater well for most students, and most disabilities.
Over and above this basic strategy, provision to try to deal with more complicated situations quickly becomes very expensive and time-consuming, (which is not to say that this should never be done) There were two schools of thought regarding when accessibility work should be done on a Web site: the 'just in time', and the 'just in case' approach.
The former entailed building as flexible a site structure as possible, and then tweaking according to the needs of students enrolled on the course that term.
The latter "just in case" route is to build the site to be as accessible as possible from the outset There was some feeling that accessibility could endanger innovation on the Web, but also that this need not happen.
A good guiding principle reached was to make an accessible site and then make it engaging, rather than making an engaging site and then making it accessible The skeptics among us needed to be reminded that we are all 'temporarily able-bodied', and could easily be affected by a disability at any time (as easily as breaking your mouse finger!)
Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) can be problematic as content is not so easily controlled, but they can also have an enabling role in allowing groups of disabled students to be supported and to communicate with each other; (this was taken to mean the full spectrum of 'disabled groups', for instance students with poor language skills could be supported together) Institutional accessibility policies are a 'must' but they are not much use if not enforced in some way.
This could be a difficult area, particularly in relation to VLEs.
UKOLN's QA Focus Project [2] looks at how policies can be enforced.
Any policy that is drawn up must involve all of the relevant groups (technical and academic staff, students and policy makers) There was an important reminder that our aim was actually to make the Learning Experience accessible as a whole.
For students who cannot access a particular piece of e-Learning, it might help us to try to remember how we taught that concept in the old days, pre-Internet Learning Technology Standards For the next session participants were thrown in at the deep end with a whistle-stop tour of Interoperability Standards and Tools.
There was a wide range of experience across the group and for many people it was their first experience of using standards in a practical capacity.
For this reason Howard Noble of the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford had created an open-ended exercise running through the full lifecycle of a content package, with the intention that participants could carry on with it at their leisure later.
Participants downloaded a content package from the IntraLibrary Learning Object Management System on the Intrallect Web site [3], and edited the content package in Reload [4], the free editor being developed at the Bolton Institute.
The next step was to republish the edited package back to Intralibrary and, time permitting, to advertise it in another repository, MERLOT [5].
The practical session ended with a discussion of next-generation standards-based tools, and in particular the learning design-inspired LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) software.
The hands-on session was immediately followed by lunch, but before getting back to the discussions after the break there was an interesting and technical talk given by David Balch of Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), another Oxford-based group.
David's presentation covered the workflow that has been gradually refined by TALL [6] over the last few years to specify, produce and deliver online courses using an XML and standards-based approach.
Of particular interest was their clever use of MS Word templates, using Word styles to give a familiar content authoring tools for academic authors that can then be converted (almost!)
automatically into their in-house XML schema for content.
Evaluation The evaluation session was run by Martin Oliver of University College London, with a strong component of small-group discussion in much the same vein as the accessibility session from the morning.
The focus was on sharing tools and techniques and contemplating some of the political issues arising from evaluation, (an area which most of the audience found particularly useful).
Evaluation was considered to be especially hard to get to grips with because strategies need to be varied on a case-by-case basis, and most people looked to using a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods to build up an overall picture.
Producing at least some numbers at the end of an evaluation was deemed to be a necessary evil as "managers like numbers", although we were not sure what managers themselves would think to this generalisation.
Tracking tools and Web logs were a popular choice for providing these numbers (particularly in the age of VLEs).
However caution was advised when doing so, given that the numbers are often difficult to analyse meaningfully and do not always show what they seem to; (a hit on a Web page does not tell us if the student understood or even read the material there).
The old problem of actually getting feedback from end-users was something that nearly everybody had had to deal with at some point.
A variety of strategies had been tried out ranging from the nice, (bribery in the form of HMV vouchers), to the nasty, (preventing students from accessing course work until a feedback form was received).
Not surprisingly there were doubts about the quality of feedback that might be received using some of the more extreme methods!
A cheering thought was that in some cases at least, the quantity of feedback was not necessarily all that important, provided that the feedback that was received was useful.
Considering motives (political and otherwise) behind carrying out evaluation work was another useful issue raised.
It was pointed out that an evaluation that is intended to get together ideas to really improve a Web site might happily result in a list of problems, but if your intention was to get together evidence to show your project in a good light then a list of problems and requests for changes would be not be best information to gather.
Conclusions The closing discussion was led by Stuart Lee, Head of the local Learning Technologies Group.
For a day involving nearly all people on the technology side of resource development, together with a smaller number of academics among them, both parties thought that there was need for a shared vocabulary to link these two groups, and also staff development/educational specialists (a task that JISC is taking on in its Pedagogies for e-learning Programme).
A new pedagogic trend was identified, that of creating e-Learning experiences, (rather than the conventional approach of teaching).
Students are driving this agenda themselves with their demands for increasingly more sophisticated computer-based resources.
Overall the day was very enjoyable and provided a great deal of food for thought.
One of the best points of the day was the opportunity to meet and share with others 'in the same boat'.
As one of the participants said: 'There are like-minded souls out there'.
References Learning Technologies Group http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/ QA Focus http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/ Intrallect http://www.intrallect.com Reload http://www.reload.ac.uk MERLOT http://www.merlot.org/ TALL Development Tools http://www.tall.ox.ac.uk/tallinternet/projects/projects_development-tools.asp Author Details Sophie Clarke Academic Computing Development Team Oxford University Email: sophie.clarke@oucs.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/acdt/ Return to top Article Title: "Herding Tigers II: Best practice in e-Learning development" Author: Sophie Clarke Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/ltg-tigers/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Towards a Typology for Portals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards a Typology for Portals Buzz rdf html rss portal archives metadata xhtml browser cataloguing graphics z39.50 aggregation soap personalisation uddi interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller looks at some of the services we call portals, and argues for better words to describe them.
Regular readers of Ariadne and related publications possibly feel more than a little overwhelmed by the current deluge of portal-related literature; a deluge for which my colleagues and I on the PORTAL Project [1] must of course accept some responsibility.
Nevertheless, with Gartner and others pointing to continued interest in enterprise portals amongst the business community, the headlong rush to ‘portalise’ everything from the Post Office to the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), and figures from the Campus Computing Project [2] suggesting that over 40% of US universities either had or were building an institutional portal in 2002, the portal in its various forms is clearly going to be with us for a while!
Earlier this summer, I was invited to speak at the British Museum by the Historic Environment Information Resources Network (HEIRNET) [3].
Their conference, Opening Doors: web portals and the historic environment, conference aimed to place exciting and innovative developments in the cultural sector such as HEIRPORT [4] and Canmore [5] in context, and to look at further ways in which a wealth of heritage information could be delivered to an interested and increasingly knowledgeable public.
I took the opportunity to think a bit about all the different services that we call portals, and sought to clarify the space a little by categorising the different types of ‘portal’ that I saw [6].
This short article begins to take those initial musings further, and removes the rather weak type of thingummy from the set I presented to the conference.
I hope that it will play a role in tightening up our thinking about, (to misquote Ian Dolphin), ‘the services formerly known as portals’, and look forward to continued debate in this area.
The purely presumed primacy of the portal Before spending the rest of this paper arguing that x, y and the Royal Mail’s dreadful Web site are not portals, it is probably important to come right out and state unequivocally that I most definitely do not feel that portals are ‘best’.
This paper is not about clearing out the hangers-on and usurpers of terminology in order to preserve the Elysian ideal of portal-ness for converts to the one true way of doing things.
Far from it.
Rather, the paper is a heartfelt plea that we simply call a spade a spade, a trowel a trowel, and a JCB a JCB, in preference to labelling all of them with whatever happens to be the name of the currently fashionable earth-moving implement (something carrying Ground Force or Time Team branding, presumably?).
In this paper, we’ll look at Web sites, at gateways, at portals, and at some other terms for our diverse information collection, collation, aggregation, integration or presentation services.
Like our earth-moving implements, each has a place, each can be very good at whatever it is intended to do, and each is not necessarily at all suitable for a different task.
Imagine, for example, re-potting a flower with a JCB or clearing a construction site with a trowel.
Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?
No, yet another portal!
Look around you.
They’re everywhere.
Everyone who is anyone has a portal, even if in reality that means no more than paying some graphic designer an insane amount of money to knock up a new graphic for your old Web site that says ‘Portal’.
We can only assume that, for the corporate sector at least, someone at PwC, Accenture, KPMG, McKinsey or one of the others decided that portals were cool and started sticking them into their PowerPoint as another thing you could pay them to build for you, in order to turn your company around, and make it world-beating.
Before we knew it, the portal plague was out of the lab, replicating and mutating like anything.
More seriously, portalising was probably perceived to be one of the easiest and most visible ways in which an organisation could demonstrate itself to be a fully fledged proponent of The 21st Century Way, customer/ user/ client/ staff/ whatever-facing, rather than silo-ised, ruled by process, procedure and the paper trail.
Well, it’s not that simple.
All those different sets of functionality blithely called ‘portal’, all those proponents to be your one and only “One-Stop Shop” to absolutely everything, all those Web pages comprising no more than links to other sites, all those downright bad sites calling themselves portals have simply diluted the value of the term, and mean that any hope our end-users might ever have had of knowing what one was, and why it’s different to something else, went out the window some time ago.
Good sites calling themselves portals without offering portal functionality disappoint their users unnecessarily, by failing to deliver on expectations.
Good portals (and they are many) get lost in the morass.
The dross, as elsewhere on the Internet, continues to exist.
Does anyone benefit?
So… when is a portal not a portal?
I’ve visited some of the definitions of portals in papers before now, but need to do so again here, briefly, to see if we can capture the Essence of Portal.
With that, we can then look at what is, and what is not, a portal and begin to work out where various types of service fit into our emerging typology.
In the context of the JISC’s Information Environment Architecture [7], Andy Powell of UKOLN describes a portal as being: “an online service that provides a personalised, single point of access to resources that support the end-user in one or more tasks (resource discovery, learning, research, buying plane tickets, booking hotel rooms, etc.).
The resources made available via a portal are typically brought together from more than one source.
In the context of the JISC Information Environment (IE), portals typically focus on supporting the end-user in their learning and/or research activities by providing personalised discovery services across multiple, heterogeneous content providers.
The key technologies that support interoperability between JISC IE portals and content providers are Z39.50, OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and RDF Site Summary (RSS), SOAP and UDDI.” [8] Writing in the JISC’s portals FAQ [9], Andy and JISC’s Chris Awre say that “Technically, a portal is a network service that brings together content from diverse distributed resources using technologies such as cross searching, harvesting, and alerting, and collate this into an amalgamated form for presentation to the user.
This presentation is usually via a web browser, though other means are also possible.
For users, a portal is a, possibly personalised, common point of access where searching can be carried out across one or more than one resource and the amalgamated results viewed.
Information may also be presented via other means, for example, alerting services and conference listings or links to e-prints and learning materials.” Within PORTAL, we tend to simply say that a portal is “a layer which aggregates, integrates, personalises and presents information, transactions and applications to the user according to their role and preferences.” From these, and other, definitions, the key points would appear to be the portal’s ability to offer customisation, personalisation and integration of content and services drawn from a range of sources.
Other systems, of course, also offer such functionality, but maybe only a portal can meaningfully offer all three?
In the presentation at the British Museum, I suggested a basic four-part classification; Web site, gateway, thingummy and portal.
Although crude, this initial classification would appear to offer the outline of a way in which different types of service might be classified and labelled, enabling creators and users to share a much better idea of what we are discussing.
Web Sites Web sites, I suggested, represent the basic delivery of online content.
Their defining characteristics might be said to be their availability on the Internet, their visibility (more or less!)
via a standard Web browser, and their markup as HTML/XHTML text with associated embedded images or sound.
Finally, although Web sites of course employ HTML’s mechanism of hyperlinking from one page to another, their focus tends to be inward-looking; links from one part of a site to another, or out to external resources that help to illustrate whatever point the site is trying to make.
Gateways Readers of Ariadne will, of course, be familiar with Gateways in the form of the Hubs of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Gateways like these are collections of links and pointers to content of value, mostly elsewhere on the Web, and generally within a single defined topic or small set of topics.
Their defining characteristics are that they are primarily a collection of descriptions of resources, rather than the resources themselves, and that the bulk of those resources tend to be held elsewhere and belong to others.
Typically, the resources being described tend to be Web sites.
Thingummies The poorly-named thingummy adds a degree of complexity to the concept of Gateway, and is demonstrated by services such as the historic environment community’s HEIRPORT [4].
Like the Gateway, a thingummy provides links and pointers to content of value, but introduces a capability to search the content of the resource referred to.
Indeed, the thingummy may further be capable of cross-searching the content of more than one resource.
For example, a Gateway might describe the online holdings of the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and provide a URL for their Web sites.
A thingummy, on the other hand, could also offer the user an opportunity to search the British Museum’s online catalogue without the need to visit the British Museum’s Web presence.
Clearly, the terminology needs some work, though.
I am not aware of a good term for this Gateway-on-steroids, and would offer the rather linguistically depressing “Deep Search service” until something better is proposed.
Incidentally, it is products in this area that tend most to adopt the terminology of portal, especially amongst library automation and learning environment vendors.
Although there are exceptions, the majority of their ‘portals’ appear in reality to be Deep Searchers.
Portals Whilst there appears to be a clear layering of increased functionality from Gateway to Deep Search, the Portal is actually something quite different.
It may well incorporate elements of Gateway functionality, but the principal motivation for the portal is something quite different; the delivery of a personal service, drawing upon content and functionality from a number of underlying sources.
Defining characteristics of the Portal, as we have said, are that it is customisable, personalisable, and capable of aggregation, integration (Single Sign-On, for example?
), and the embedding of external transactional services such as those currently in favour amongst Government departments.
Presumably the typology need not end here, as there are further services to be defined and built beyond the portal.
It is also worth stressing that the current typology is not for four neat units, but rather for a continuum reaching from the most basic of Web sites to the most personalised of portals.
Most resources will lie somewhere along that continuum, whilst few will be capable of unambiguous association with just one of the definitions.
Staying Informed There are several mailing lists and Web sites devoted to discussion of portal issues.
One that is extremely valuable for those working in UK Further or Higher Education is the portals list on JISCmail.To join this list, send a message to jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk with the body of the message reading join portals Your_Firstname Your_Lastname – e.g.
join portals Paul Miller – References The Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL) project is at http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/ The Campus Computing Project is at http://www.campuscomputing.net/ The Historic Environment Information Resources Network (HEIRNET) is at http://www.britarch.ac.uk/HEIRNET/ HEIRPORT is at http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/heirport/ The National Monuments Record of Scotland is available online at http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/index.html Information on Canmore can be obtained at http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/canmoreintro.html My paper, Portal Proliferation: Good, Bad, or Just Confused?, is available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/heirnet/ppt/portals.ppt The JISC’s Information Environment Architecture is described at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ The JISC Information Environment Architecture’s FAQ on portals is at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/faq/portal/ The JISC’s Portals FAQ is at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=ie_portalsfaq Acknowledgements UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives & Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the United Kingdom’s Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the Universities of Bath and Hull where staff are based.
The Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL) Project is a joint activity of UKOLN and the e-Services Integration Group at the University of Hull, funded under the JISC’s Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme.
Author Details Paul Miller Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Return to top Article Title: “Towards a typology for portals” Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/miller/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC/CNI Conference, York 2006 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC/CNI Conference, York 2006 Buzz data software portal infrastructure metadata digitisation repositories eprints copyright preservation provenance vle licence e-science ict interoperability research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Najla Semple and Robin Rice were at the JISC / CNI conference 'Envisioning future challenges in networked information'.
Encapsulating the events of such an information-rich event as the JISC / CNI conference can be a tricky task, but the next few lines will, we hope, deliver a flavour of the occasion as well as a summary of a few significant themes.
No single overarching theme dominated the event and indeed everyone we spoke to over the two-day event expressed a different opinion as to what they thought were the really important issues.
However, three areas that clearly prevailed were: the changing needs of the user; the impact of mass digitisation; and open access.
Each of these demonstrated how technology is profoundly changing the process of scholarship.
This cross-Atlantic meeting of minds was no doubt enhanced by much invigorating post-prandial bar action and the fact that, for the first time, Lorcan Dempsey followed Derek Law in the after-dinner speech.
A star-studded cast delivered the opening plenary, all of whom praised the JISC/CNI partnership and its collective adventures.
We learned from Duane Webster that an informal predecessor to the JISC CNI conference was a group who gave themselves the telling acronym, SWIG.
Ron Cooke contrasted JISC's centralised funding system with the role of CNI in the US, and reflected on how differences between the two organisations also provide a stimulus for the direction of Internet services.
Resource discovery has been emphasised in the UK, whereas large research programmes tend to dominate the US agenda.
Derek Law emphasised JISC's historical enthusiasm to respond to change and to shape the dialogue and the debate.
Clifford Lynch picked out three areas where we need to concentrate our efforts -digital preservation, mass digitisation, and middleware for e-Science.
Reg Carr praised JISC's vision and ability to implement it we can predict the future by inventing it, but we need to initiate and drive the change.
Reg Carr: "The JISC has succeeded in changing the culture of the Research Library for ever and for better."
Derek Law challenged research libraries to take responsibility for preserving the 'born-digital' record and to enter the arena of e-Science, or risk being judged by future generations.
While delegates heard about the progress of the JISC/NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom DIDET Project, in the parallel Preservation and Access session, session, Laura Campbell from the Library of Congress outlined the activities of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Programme in the US.
This 'learn by doing' initiative emphasises the importance of having a network of partners due to the fact that there are so many decentralised activities in the US.
There is a need for a large-scale distributed response to these system-wide challenges and repositories at both state and local level should be encouraged to deal with the huge variety of content in order to make digital preservation work.
The next stage in this project is to consider potential digital preservation business models in order to assist smaller, local institutions.
The two Digital Repositories sessions mirrored the theme of distributed access to digital materials.
Herbert Van de Sompel presented what is potentially a very important model for repository development, based on the concept that there is no one-size-fits-all model for all of an institution's assets.
What is required is a distributed model with suitable interfaces, linked together by a universal connector.
Services can then be built on top of this adaptor layer.
The creation of these rich cross-repository services will enhance the scholarly communication workflow.
Value will be added to the data and these 'value chains' will be used and reused a great deal over time.
It's not only about asset transfer but about having one shared data model to support these core services across repositories.
To augment interoperability, when an object is requested from a repository it will be a 'digital surrogate' that is accessed in the first instance, allowing the user to retrieve only the parts of a work which are needed.
Echoing this vision of rich data flow between repositories, Rachel Heery of UKOLN outlined the JISC repository roadmap, the vision that a variety of repositories will support richer scholarly communication based on open access and reuse of scholarly materials.
Rachel Heery: "The vision is to capture content from desktop applications, smart labs, VLE's ...[automatically]"At the same time however she emphasised that we must not lose sight of what the user wants, a combination of shared services and interoperability with services such as Google.
Deposit is a priority, however it is clear that there are no widely agreed mechanisms for getting content into repositories, or for assigning metadata.
Continuing on the repositories theme, the next session proved very interesting from the point of view of a commercial software organisation, VTLS, incorporating open source software into a content management system, 'VITAL'.
The benefits of the combination of proprietary and open source software systems were made apparent.
The repository is based on Fedora (open source software developed at Cornell and University of Virginia), thus it is flexible and extensible, while the VITAL software provides the much needed workflow tools such as ingest, validate, export, preserve.
The key point was that system designers should work closely with the 'source' of their 'open source'.
Les Carr of Southampton spoke about EPrints, an open source repository system, and the need to make researchers the custodians of their own knowledge output, to store it, manage it and reuse it.
The software itself may be somewhat bland but it is highly configurable and can be put to many different uses.
He emphasised the importance of embedding the repository within the institution, of gaining both grassroots and senior level buy-in.
Les also said that preservation shouldn't be a barrier to access.
However, this topic caused some debate among the audience with regard to what scholars see as the more important function of a digital repository, preservation or access.
Parallel sessions on e-theses and open access added depth to the repository theme.
Leo Waaijers from SURF sung the praises of open access and of scholars retaining copyright to their works.
He criticised 'exclusive copyright agreements' by publishers as unnecessarily excessive in the current electronic environment; a license for the publisher to use the material in perpetuity should be all that is required.
He demonstrated how national support for institutional repositories led to the creation of the Dutch Cream of Science Project a showcase of works of the top Dutch scholars funnelled through a portal on the internet.
Robert Terry told of an equally inspiring policy achievement of the Wellcome Trust in mandating deposit of funded research outputs into the PubMed Central repository and the development, with partners, of the future UK PMC.
Delegates appeared on day two, ever so slightly bleary eyed, to listen to the changing needs of users.
David Nicholas of UCL Centre for Publishing, whose study of virtual scholars iterated a paradigm shift in user behaviour, stated that while users are incredibly active, they are in fact searching more horizontally rather than vertically.
This different form of learning moves us further apart from our users.
Joan Lippincott of CNI outlined the needs of the new generation of users, sometimes refered to as 'dotnets' who are both producers and consumers of information.
The traditional method of the 'sage on the stage' has altered somewhat and users are now learning through their own initiative and exploration of digital resources.
While Kevin Guthrie of Ithaka explained how business models can support preservation, Chris Rusbridge's presentation stressed that the future records of science are in fact based on past record.
Hence the importance of curating data for current and future use, as on a continuum, adding value, for others to access and reuse.
He stressed that a digital collection is constantly evolving, and managed through a series of conversions.
Chris dissected various examples of the difficulty of curating research datasets.
Data are meaningless without context and impossible to cite without provenance.
Chris also stressed that we may not be able to guarantee data preservation for a 100-year period, but we can deliver on a 4-5 year promise, and a commitment to hand the data on in a good state to the next curators, almost like a relay marathon.
He ended with some deeply reassuring words for the curator ... 'Don't panic!'
Sessions focused on mass digitisation projects and ICT in the Humanities provided a view of how scholars' methods are changing, as ever more information becomes available, with ever more sophisticated tools for extracting and re-using it.
John Price Wilkin gave an insider's view of the Google Books scanning project at the University of Michigan, and how the Library will retain value for itself and its users while simultaneously enriching the digital content coffers of the Internet search giant.
In a session devoted to resource discovery, Nikki Ferguson gave a sneak preview of survey results of users within the JISC Information Environment, and how far there is to go in ensuring resources developed for the academic community reach their target audience.
On the positive side, some were happily making use of the services without being aware of their names, being seamlessly transferred from a library Web site or Google search.
Lorcan Dempsey followed by giving a current view on what the community can learn from the 'Amazoogle' commercial services and how through Web 2.0 technology, users' behaviour is more and more 'inside the network.'
Don Waters' closing speech thoughtfully considered the issue of open access from the point of view of a funder of JSTOR and other open access publishing initiatives.
He highlighted the difference between the commercial exuberance of the 1990s with the spirit of democratisation today, and suggested that commercialisation and open access can in fact compliment each other.
Don gently challenged open access adherents to consider whether it always necessarily furthered the cause of scholarly/scientific communication.
The publishing process brings capital and added value important to the communication of the scholarly/scientific record, which the open access model has yet to fully establish.
He recognised the empowering aspect of the open access movement; that making scholarly work available to the public easily can be liberating at both individual and institutional levels.
However, Don also stressed that we are already awash with unprecedented amounts of information; free information could compromise the scholarly process unless we take strategic action and design scaled systems which are well targeted for users' actual needs.
We also need imagination and expertise beyond just the local level to provide sophisticated searching across systems.
Clifford Lynch: "We've learned from SURF about what it's like when repositories are deployed country-wide and can be relied on as part of an infrastructure."
Overall Observations on the Event We are face to face with forces of change and fundamental questions for the future of our institutions and higher education.
Community information its creation and its sharing is a reality that must be recognised and cultivated, however our understanding of the user is still fairly rudimentary.
An emerging theme was the importance of Web 2.0, and its impact on all services across the sector.
Web 2.0 is helping learners and teachers engage in different ways.
Delivery and management of information is crucial and all the work on digital repositories has started to define how it is we can deliver on this.
Although as a community we are still coping with change, we are adapting to its challenges, and dealing with it well.
As we take one step at a time into the future, the JISC/CNI meeting has given us a look at how far we've come, and a glimpse of where we are headed.
Author Details Najla Semple Executive Secretary Digital Preservation Coalition Email: najla@dpconline.org Web site: http://www.dpconline.org Robin Rice Data Librarian EDINA & Edinburgh University Data Library Email: R.Rice@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://datalib.ed.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "JISC/CNI conference, York 2006" Author: Najla Semple and Robin Rice Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/jisc-cni-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Towards the Digital Aquifer: Introducing the Common Information Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards the Digital Aquifer: Introducing the Common Information Environment Buzz data database portal archives thesaurus digitisation blog repositories aggregation adobe e-learning wordnet personalisation curation e-science interoperability e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller discusses current efforts by UK agencies to collaborate on a Common Information Environment that meets the diverse needs of current and future consumers of digital content and services.
aquifer n underground bed or layer yielding ground water for wells and springs etc Nisus Thesaurus 1.0.1.
All rights reserved.
Using the WordNet 1.7 database, © 2001 Princeton University Google [1] is great.
Personally, I use it every day, and it is undeniably extremely good at finding stuff in the largely unstructured chaos that is the public Web.
However, like most tools, Google cannot do everything.
Faced with a focussed request to retrieve richly structured information such as that to be found in the databases of our Memory Institutions [2], hospitals, schools, colleges or universities, Google and others among the current generation of Internet search engines struggle.
What little information they manage to retrieve from these repositories is buried among thousands or millions of hits from sources with widely varying degrees of accuracy, authority, relevance and appropriateness.
How can the creators and curators of high value, authoritative, information ensure that their work is found and used?
More than that, though: how can we work to build associations and relationships between these aggregations of world-class content such that the user with an interest in ‘The Titanic’, say, can move in a structured fashion from photographs and documents in The National Archives to objects in museums, to learning resources from Curriculum Online, to multiple media context from the BBC?
How do we achieve all of this in a manner that is adaptable to the varying needs of our users, whether they are school children, undergraduates, teachers, researchers, or members of the general public with an ongoing thirst for knowledge?
And how do we maximise the value of the current and ongoing investment in creation, curation and delivery of this information and the range of services built around it?
This is the problem area in which many organisations find themselves, and there is a growing recognition that the problems are bigger than any one organisation or sector, and that the best solutions will be collaborative and cross-cutting; that they will be common and shared.
The Common Information Environment (CIE) [3] is the umbrella under which a growing number of organisations are working towards a shared understanding and shared solutions.
The CIE in 454 words There’s a notion in business of the “elevator intro”; chancing upon a potential client/customer/backer in the lift, you have as long as it takes to reach your floor to make the pitch.
Here, then, is the Common Information Environment’s elevator intro.
Museums, Libraries, Archives, educational establishments, the health sector, and various facets of central and local government together create, manage and deliver a wealth of authoritative online information alongside their physical offerings with which many may be more familiar.
Currently, the full value of this information is far from being realised, as it can be difficult to find and, once found, will often appear fragmented unless the needs of the user happen to fall squarely within the remit of a single institution or Web site.
Working under the umbrella of the Common Information Environment, a number of UK agencies are cooperating to nurture an open environment in which information and information-powered services may be disclosed, discovered, embedded, used and reused in a manner that meets the needs and aspirations of the user, rather than just the originating organisation.
Underpinned by a shared vision and widely accepted standards, guidelines and procedures, the Common Information Environment unleashes information into new markets, and creates opportunity for CIE partners and for others in building a wide range of value-added services on this information for markets new and old.
Information has a crucial role to play in meeting the needs of the UK’s population, in fulfilling their desire to understand where they come from, where they fit within the world of today, where they might go, and of what they might be capable.
Additionally, Government priorities for the Knowledge Economy, Education, e-Skilling, aspiration-raising, e-Government, provision of compelling content to drive take-up of broadband and more are all clearly met.
The CIE is not a new search engine to compete with Google.
Nor is it a portal onto all of our knowledge.
Rather, it is collaborative work towards a culture in which existing and future organisations presume the need to be joined up to be part of the digital aquifer of national interest information from the outset, and work for that, rather than continuing the trend of building multitudinous silos of data, each fronted by a different Web interface, and each ignorant of related data in neighbouring silos.
When realised, the vision is one from which everyone benefits.
The end user, for whom this content has been produced, is able to find it, and to work with related offerings from very different organisations.
The information-holding organisations are better able to meet the needs of their existing users, have access to a wide range of comparable material from their peers, and are visible in new ways to a whole new set of potential beneficiaries.
In the Knowledge Economy, ready access to high quality, high value information must become a right and an expectation for all.
The CIE is a large part of the process by which we all get there.
Scoping the problem Within the purview of organisations such as the JISC or the NHS Information Authority, much work is being undertaken to ensure that online resources are created, described, curated, and delivered in a manner suitable to the requirements of the organisations’ core audiences.
The task is by no means complete, but at least the processes are in place and the need is recognised at a sufficiently high level such that strategic decisions are being taken informed by the realities of delivering useful and often mission-critical content and services to real end-users.
The problem occurs when you consider the real-world plight of the vast majority of our users.
Rare, admittedly, is the user who needs to search simultaneously across learning, research, and curatorial data from museums, libraries, archives, universities, colleges, the health sector and beyond, but users with a need to interact with any two (or more) of these appear far more common than we sometimes pretend.
It is for this majority that the activity of the CIE is important, as we work to agree appropriately common approaches to common problems across rather than merely within domains.
In seeking to agree common approaches we must, of course, remember that some of the differences of language, approach and culture are wholly valid reflections of the context within which organisations and domains find themselves.
These differences are not threatened by some CIE drive to homegenise and “dumb down”, because there is no such drive.
The CIE seeks not to make everything the same, but to make things no more different than they need to be.
Engaging with those for whom we work Significant sums of money are being spent in the UK and around the world on the piecemeal creation of digital content.
Much of this is new, but the majority is some form of digital surrogate for a physical original; scanned photographs of buildings and museum objects, for example.
Over recent years, a sizeable body of high quality content has been created in this way, but relatively little effort has been devoted to exploring the uses made of this online information, or questioning whether or not the choices made as to what gets digitised actually meet the requirements of current users or do anything to address the reluctance of non-users.
Except, perhaps, in cases where digitisation is explicitly being used to preserve an at-risk item, surely we have such a body of content that there can now be no excuse for embarking upon large-scale digitisation work without first doing something to gauge need?
Within the cultural sector, the Cultural Content Forum [4] last year commissioned Alice Grant Consulting [5] to look at work done to date within the sector.
This produced two reports [6, 7] examining a body of mostly ‘grey’ literature, and offering a different perspective on use of Heritage resources to that illustrated in an earlier report [8] by the Cultural Heritage Consortium [9] for the Historic Environment Information Resources Network (HEIRNET] [10].
Similar work is being undertaken elsewhere, but there appears to be a growing interest in funding a single significant piece of work to engage with both users and non-users in a meaningful fashion, and to shape an effective strategy for moving forward in the online environment.
Demonstrating ways forward The HEIRPORT demonstrator As part of illustrating the potential offered by a Common Information Environment, a call [11] was issued during 2003 for two small demonstrator projects.
The Health Demonstrator was built by Adiuri Systems Ltd [12] of Bristol, and demonstrated the power of their WayPoint technology and its “Adaptive Concept Matching” to guide users through a mass of existing medical information (nearly 30,000 documents) drawn from seven repositories such as the Cochrane Library and the National Electronic Library for Health’s Guidelines series.
The Place demonstrator, produced by a consortium led by the Archaeology Data Service [13] showed the power of geographical location as a means to gather diverse content (some 2,000,000 existing resources for the demonstrator) from 13 very different databases, and also began to explore the role of personalisation in offering the same content to different groups of people in ways appropriate to their needs.
The two demonstrators adopted quite different approaches, but each clearly illustrated the value of combining resources from multiple sources, reinforced the message that the technical standards underpinning activities such as the JISC Information Environment [14] or the New Opportunities Fund’s Digitisation Programme [15] really are capable of doing what we want them to, and pointed to areas in which we need to continue to work.
On the basis of this success, the CIE is currently scoping an enhanced demonstrator that is intended to build upon the existing work and result in something more robust and comprehensive, suitable for use in illustrating the Vision to a wide and diverse audience.
As with the original demonstrators, this new piece of work is in no way intended to compete with or replace existing online services.
Rather, it is meant to advance community understanding of possibilities and obstacles and to act as a visible example of the types of service that might be possible were more existing sources of information to be re-engineered along the lines of the CIE Vision.
It is far easier to relatively quickly build something that demonstrates aspects of the Vision than to fundamentally re-engineer a number of production services and their underlying data and processes.
Once demonstrated, it is for others to build or rebuild the next generation of real services.
Hearts, minds, and wallets If the Common Information Environment is to be realised, it requires a significant degree of collaboration amongst those who wish to participate.
There will be a need to agree on certain core standards to facilitate interoperability, and there will be a need to build new content and services in new ways; as part of a greater whole, rather than solely as discrete web sites.
More than this, though, there is a need to engage with senior policy makers in order to affect a significant shift in the definition and realisation of Government objectives in this area, and to afford due credit and worth to contributing a piece to the greater whole.
We need action that cuts across Departments and agencies, we need realignment of existing budgets, and focussed injection of new funds at a small number of key points outside the direct influence of current CIE partners in order to maximise the value of the work being undertaken.
In short, we need to engage Hearts with a vision that is compelling and exciting, we need to persuade Minds with an argument that is sound and relevant, and we need to spend from our own Wallets to re-engineer what we already do whilst finding new sources of funding to permit leaps forward and to aid the introduction of our Information to new markets.
We have begun on all three fronts, but there is much still to be done.
Staying informed There is no public mailing list specifically for the CIE.
There are, however, several mailing lists, web sites and Blogs related to discussion of issues relevant to the building of a Common Information Environment.
One list that is less domain-specific than most is interoperability on JISCmail.
To join this list, send a message to jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk with the body of the message reading join interoperability Your_Firstname Your_Lastname – eg join interoperability Paul Miller – References Google is at: http://www.google.com/ I think this term for our archives, libraries and museums entered common usage following publication of the following article in an earlier Ariadne: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/dempsey/ The Common Information Environment Web pages are at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/cie/ The Cultural Content Forum Web pages are at: http://www.culturalcontentforum.org/ Alice Grant Consulting is at: http://www.alicegrant.com/ Evaluation of Digital Cultural Content: Analysis of evaluation material is at: http://www.culturalcontentforum.org/publications/audience/audience_analysis.pdf [Adobe PDF format] Evaluation of Digital Cultural Content: Initial survey results and research agenda is at: http://www.culturalcontentforum.org/publications/audience/initial_audience.pdf [Adobe PDF format] Users and their Uses of HEIRs is at: http://www.britarch.ac.uk/HEIRNET/users.PDF [Adobe PDF format] The Cultural Heritage Consortium Web pages are at: http://www.cultural-heritage.org/ The Historic Environment Information Resources NETwork (HEIRNET) Web pages are at: http://www.britarch.ac.uk/HEIRNET/ The ITT for the CIE’s 2003 Demonstrators is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=funding_0203 Adiuri Systems Ltd. are at: http://www.adiuri.com/ The Archaeology Data Service is at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ The JISC Information Environment Architecture is at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ The NOF-Digitise Technical Standards & Guidelines are at: http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/content/technical.asp Acknowledgements Organisations currently working to shape the Common Information Environment include Becta, The British Library, Culture Online, the Department for Education & Skills’ (DfES) e-Learning Strategy Unit, the e-Science Core Programme, JISC, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA, formerly Resource), The National Archives, the NHS’ National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH), the Office of the e-Envoy and UKOLN.
Author Details Paul Miller Common Information Environment Director Email: p.miller@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/cie/ NB: For readers aware of these, the cross-agency work to build a Common Information Environment (CIE) should not be confused with the similarly named JISC Information Environment (IE) or JISC’s Committee for the Information Environment (JCIE).
These JISC-specific activities are somewhat different in scope, although their work has done much to inform the emerging Common Information Environment.
Return to top Article Title: “Towards the Digital Aquifer: introducing the Common Information Environment” Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/miller/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU) Buzz data api database rss xml stylesheet xslt metadata xhtml browser identifier vocabularies xsl schema repositories oai-pmh cataloguing dtd marc perl ssh soap uri srw mets mods sru cql telnet url standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Eric Lease Morgan describes sibling Web Service protocols designed to define a standard form for Internet search queries as well as the structure of the responses.
This article is an introduction to the "brother and sister" Web Service protocols named Search/Retrieve Web Service (SRW) and Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU) with an emphasis on the later.
More specifically, the article outlines the problems SRW/U are intended to solve, the similarities and differences between SRW and SRU, the complimentary nature of the protocols with OAI-PMH, and how SRU is being employed in a sponsored NSF (National Science Foundation) grant called OCKHAM to facilitate an alerting service.
The article is seasoned with a bit of XML and Perl code to illustrate the points.
The canonical home page describing SRW/U [1] is also a useful starting point.
The Problems SRW and SRU are Intended to Solve SRW and SRU are intended to define a standard form for Internet search queries as well as the structure of the responses.
The shape of existing queries illustrates the problem.
The following URLs are searches for 'dogs and cats' against three popular Internet search engines: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=dogs+and+cats&btnG=Google+Search http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=fp-pull-web-t&p=dogs+and+cats http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH&q=dogs%20and%20cats Even though the queries are the same, the syntax implementing the queries is different.
What is worse is the structure of the responses.
Each response not only contains search results but lots of formatting as well.
SRW and SRU address these shortcomings by specifying the syntax for queries and results.
Such specifications open up Internet-accessible search functions and allow for the creation of tools to explore the content of the 'hidden Web' more effectively.
SRW/U allow people and HTTP user agents to query Internet databases more seamlessly without the need of more expensive and complicated meta-search protocols.
SRW and SRU as Web Services SRW/U are Web Services-based protocols for querying Internet indexes or databases and returning search results.
Web Services essentially come in two flavours: REST (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).
A "REST-ful" Web Service usually encodes commands from a client to a server in the query string of a URL.
Each name/value pair of the query string specifies a set of input parameters for the server.
Once received, the server parses these name/value pairs, does some processing using them as input, and returns the results as an XML stream.
The shape of the query string as well as the shape of the XML stream are dictated by the protocol.
By definition, the communication process between the client and the server is facilitated over an HTTP connection.
OAI-PMH is an excellent example of a REST-ful Web Service.
While OAI 'verbs' can be encoded as POST requests in an HTTP header, they are usually implemented as GET requests.
These verbs act as commands for the OAI data repository which responds to them with a specific XML schema.
"SOAP-ful" Web Services work in a similar manner, except the name/value pairs of SOAP requests are encoded in an XML SOAP 'envelope'.
Similarly, SOAP servers return responses using the SOAP XML vocabulary.
The biggest difference between REST-ful Web Services and SOAP requests is the transport mechanism.
REST-ful Web Services are always transmitted via HTTP.
SOAP requests and responses can be used by many other transport mechanisms including email, SSH (Secure Shell), telnet, as well as HTTP.
Web Services essentially send requests for information from a client to a server.
The server reads the input, processes it, and returns the results as an XML stream back to the client.
REST-ful Web Services encode the input usually in the shape of URLs.
SOAP requests are marked up in a SOAP XML vocabulary.
REST-ful Web Services return XML streams of varying shapes.
SOAP Web Services return SOAP XML streams.
Many people think implementing REST-ful Web Service is easier because it is simpler to implement and requires less overhead.
SOAP is more robust and can be implemented in a larger number of networked environments.
SRW is a SOAP-ful Web Service.
SRU is a REST-ful Web service.
Despite the differences in implementation, they are really very similar since they both define a similar set of commands (known as "operations") and responses.
Where OAI-PMH defines six 'verbs', SRW/U support three 'operations': explain, scan, and searchRetrieve.
Like OAI, each operation is qualified with one or more additional name/value pairs.
Explain Explain operations are requests sent by clients as a way of learning about the server's database/index as well as its functionality.
At a minimum, responses to explain operations return the location of the database, a description of what the database contains, and what features of the protocol the server supports.
Implemented in SRU, empty query strings on a URL are interpreted as an explain operation.
When explicitly stated, a version parameter must be present.
Therefore, at a minimum, explain operations can be implemented in one of two ways: http://example.org/ http://example.org/?operation=explain&version=1.1 An example SRU response from an explain operation might look like the text below.
It denotes: the server supports version 1.1 of the protocol records in this response are encoded in a specific DTD and records are encoded as XML within the entire XML stream the server can be found at a specific location the database is (very) briefly described the database supports only title searching the database returns records using Dublin Core the system will return no more than 9999 records at one time <explainResponse> <version>1.1</version> <record> <recordSchema>http://explain.z3950.org/dtd/2.0/</recordSchema> <recordPacking>xml</recordPacking> <recordData> <explain> <serverInfo> <host>example.org</host> <port>80</port> <database>/</database> </serverInfo> <databaseInfo> <title>An example SRU service</title> <description lang='en' primary='true'> This is an example SRU service.
</description> </databaseInfo> <indexInfo> <set identifier='info:srw/cql-context-set/1/dc-v1.1' name='dc' /> <index> <title>title</title> <map> <name set='dc'>title</name> </map> </index> </indexInfo> <schemaInfo> <schema identifier='info:srw/schema/1/dc-v1.1' sort='false' name='dc'> <title>Dublin Core</title> </schema> </schemaInfo> <configInfo> <default type='numberOfRecords'>9999</default> </configInfo> </explain> </recordData> </record> </explainResponse> Scan Scan operations list and enumerate the terms found in the remote database's index.
Clients send scan requests and servers return lists of terms.
The process is akin to browsing a back-of-the-book index where a person looks up a term in the back of a book and 'scans' the entries surrounding the term.
At a minimum, scan operations must include a scan clause (scanClause) and a version number parameter.
The scan clause contains the term to look for in the index.
A rudimentary request and response follow: http://example.org/?operation=scan&scanClause=dog&version=1.1 <scanResponse> <version>1.1</version> <terms> <term> <value>doesn't</value> <numberOfRecords>1</numberOfRecords> </term> <term> <value>dog</value> <numberOfRecords>1</numberOfRecords> </term> <term> <value>dogs</value> <numberOfRecords>2</numberOfRecords> </term> </terms> </scanResponse> SearchRetieve SearchRetrieve operations are the heart of the matter.
They provide the means to query the remote database and return search results.
Queries must be articulated using the Common Query Language (CQL) [2].
These queries can range from simple free text searches to complex Boolean operations with nested queries and proximity qualifications.
Servers do not have to implement every aspect of CQL, but they have to know how to return diagnostic messages when something is requested but not supported.
The results of searchRetrieve operations can be returned in any number of formats, as specified via explain operations.
Examples might include structured but plain text streams or data marked up in XML vocabularies such as Dublin Core, MARCXML, MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema), etc.
Below is a simple request for documents matching the free text query 'dogs': http://example.org/?operation=searchRetrieve&query=dog&version=1.1 In this case, the server returns three (3) hits and by default includes Dublin Core title and identifier elements.
The record itself is marked up in some flavor of XML as opposed to being encapsulated as a string embedded the XML: <searchRetrieveResponse> <version>1.1</version> <numberOfRecords>3</numberOfRecords> <records> <record> <recordSchema>info:srw/schema/1/dc-v1.1</recordSchema> <recordPacking>xml</recordPacking> <recordData> <dc> <title>The bottom dog</title> <identifier>http://example.org/bottom.html</identifier> </dc> </recordData> </record> <record> <recordSchema>info:srw/schema/1/dc-v1.1</recordSchema> <recordPacking>xml</recordPacking> <recordData> <dc> <title>Dog world</title> <identifier>http://example.org/dog.html</identifier> </dc> </recordData> </record> <record> <recordSchema>info:srw/schema/1/dc-v1.1</recordSchema> <recordPacking>xml</recordPacking> <recordData> <dc> <title>My Life as a Dog</title> <identifier>http://example.org/my.html</identifier> </dc> </recordData> </record> </records> </searchRetrieveResponse> A Sample Application: Journal Locator In an attempt to learn more about SRU, the author created a simple SRU interface to an index of journal titles, holdings, and locations.
Like many academic libraries, the University Libraries of Notre Dame subscribe to physical and electronic journals.
Many of the electronic journals are accessible through aggregated indexes such as Ebscohost Academic Search Elite.
Since the content of these aggregated indexes is in a constant state of flux, it is notoriously difficult to use traditional catalogueuing techniques to describe journal holdings.
Consequently, the Libraries support the finding of journal titles through its catalogue as well as through tools/services such as SFX (Special Effects) and SerialsSolutions.
Unfortunately, when patrons ask the question "Does the library have access to journal...?
", they need to consult two indexes: the catalogue and an interface to SFX.
Journal Locator is an example application intended to resolve this problem by combining the holdings in the catalogue with the holdings in SFX into a single search interface.
By searching this combined index, patrons are presented with a list of journal titles, holding statements, and locations where the titles can be found.
The whole thing is analogous to those large computer printouts created in the early to mid-1980s listing a library's journal holdings.
Here is the process for creating Journal Locator: dump sets of MARC records encoded as serials from the catalogue transform the MARC records into sets of simple XHTML files dump sets of SFX records as an XML file transform the XML file into more sets of simple XHTML files index all the XHTML files provide an SRU interface to search the index Here at the Notre Dame we use scripts written against a Perl module called MARC::Record [3] to convert MARC data into XHTML.
We use xsltproc [4] to transform XML output from SFX into more XHTML.
We use swish-e [5] to index the XHTML, and finally, we use a locally written Perl script to implement an SRU interface to the index.
The interface is pretty much the basic vanilla flavour, i.e.
supporting only explain and searchResponse operations.
It returns raw XML with an associated XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) stylesheet, and consequently the interface assumes the patron is using a relatively modern browser with a built-in XSLT processor.
Journal Locator is not a production service.
A rudimentary SRU explain operation returns an explain response.
The response is expected to be transformed by the XSLT stylesheet specified in the output into an XHTML form.
Queries submitted through the form are sent to the server as SRU searchRetrieve operations.
Once the query string of the URL is parsed by the server, the search statement is passed on to a subroutine.
This routine searches the index, formats the results, and returns them accordingly.
An example SRU searchRetrieve request may include: http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/sru/search.cgi?operation=searchRetrieve&query=dog&version=1.1 Here is an abbreviated version of the search subroutine in the Perl script.
Notice how it searches the index, initialises the XML output, loops through each search result, closes all the necessary elements, and returns the result: sub search { # get the input my ($query, $style) = @_; # open the index my $swish = SWISH::API->new($INDEX); # create a search object my $search = $swish->New_Search_Object; # do the work my $results = $search->Execute($query); # get the number of hits my $hits = $results->Hits; # begin formatting the response my $response = "<?xml version='1.0' ?>\n"; $response .= "<?xml-stylesheet type='text/xsl' href='$style' ?>\n"; $response .= "<searchRetrieveResponse>\n"; $response .= "<version>1.1</version>\n"; $response .= "<numberOfRecords>$hits</numberOfRecords>\n"; # check for hits if ($hits) { # process each found record $response .= "<records>\n"; my $p = 0; while (my $record = $results->NextResult) { $response .= "<record>\n"; $response .= "<recordSchema>" .
"info:srw/schema/1/dc-v1.1</recordSchema>\n"; $response .= "<recordPacking>xml</recordPacking>\n"; $response .= "<recordData>\n"; $response .= "<dc>\n"; $response .= "<title>" .
&escape_entities($record->Property('title')) .
"</title>\n"; # check for and process uri if ($record->Property ('url')) { $response .= "<identifier>" .
&escape_entities($record->Property('url')) .
"</identifier>\n" } # get and process holdings my $holding = $record->Property ('holding'); my @holdings = split (/\|/, $holding); foreach my $h (@holdings) { $response .= '<coverage>' .
&escape_entities($h) .
"</coverage>\n" } # clean up $response .= "</dc>\n"; $response .= "</recordData>\n"; $response .= "</record>\n"; # increment the pointer and check $p++; last if ($input->param('maximumRecords') == $p); } # close records $response .= "</records>\n"; } # close response $response .= "</searchRetrieveResponse>\n"; # return it return $response; } The result is an XML stream looking much like this: <?xml version='1.0' ?> <?xml-stylesheet type='text/xsl' href='etc/search.xsl' ?> <searchRetrieveResponse> <version>1.1</version> <numberOfRecords>2</numberOfRecords> <records> <record> <recordSchema>info:srw/schema/1/dc-v1.1</recordSchema> <recordPacking>xml</recordPacking> <recordData> <dc> <title>The bottom dog</title> <coverage> Microforms [Lower Level HESB] General Collection Microfilm 3639 v.1:no.1 (1917:Oct. 20)-v.1:no.5 (1917:Nov. 17) </coverage> </dc> </recordData> </record> <record> <recordSchema>info:srw/schema/1/dc-v1.1</recordSchema> <recordPacking>xml</recordPacking> <recordData> <dc> <title>Dog world</title> <identifier> http://sfx.nd.edu:8889/ndu_local?genre=article& sid=ND:ejl_loc&issn=0012-4893 </identifier> <coverage> EBSCO MasterFILE Premier:Full Text (Availability: from 1998) </coverage> </dc> </recordData> </record> </records> </searchRetrieveResponse> Another nifty feature of SRW/U is the use of 'extra data parameters'.
These parameters, always prefixed with xin an SRU URL, allow implementers to add additional functionality to their applications.
The author has used this option to create an x-suggest feature.
By turning 'x-suggest' on (x-suggest=1), the system will examine the number of hits returned from a query and attempt to suggest additional searches ready for execution.
For example, if the number of hits returned from a search is zero (0), then the application will create alternative searches analogous to Google's popular Did You Mean?
service by looking up the user's search terms in a dictionary.
If the number of hits is greater than twenty-five (25), then the application will help users limit their search by suggesting alternative searches such as title searches or phrase searches.
The next steps for Journal Locator are ambiguous.
One one hand the integrated library system may be able to support this functionality some time soon, but the solution will be expensive and quite likely not exactly what we desire.
On the other hand, a locally written solution will cost less in terms of cash outlays, but ongoing support may be an issue.
In any event, Journal Locator provided a suitable venue for SRU exploration.
SRW/U and OAI-PMH SRW/U and OAI-PMH are complementary protocols.
They have similar goals, namely, the retrieval of metadata from remote hosts, but each provides functionality that the other does not.
Both protocols have similar 'about' functions.
SRW/U's explain operation and OAI-PMH's identify verb both return characteristics describing the properties of the remote service.
Both protocols have a sort of "browse" functionality.
SRW/U has its scan function and OAI-PMH has ListSets.
Scan is like browsing a book's back-of-the-book index.
ListSets is similar to reading a book's table of contents.
SRW/U and OAI differ the most when it comes to retrieval.
SRW/U provides a much more granular approach (precision) at the expense of constructing complex CQL queries.
OAI-PMH is stronger on recall allowing a person to harvest the sum total of data a repository has to offer using a combination of the ListRecords and GetRecords verbs.
This is implemented at the expense of gathering unwanted information.
If a set of data were exposed via SRW/U as well as OAI-PMH, then SRW/U would be the tool to use if a person wanted to extract only data crossing predefined sets.
OAI-PMH would be more apropos if the person wanted to get everything or predefined subsets of the data.
OCKHAM There is a plan to use SRU as a means to implement an alerting service in a sponsored NSF grant called OCKHAM [6].
The OCKHAM Project is lead by Martin Halbert (Emory University), Ed Fox (Virginia Tech), Jeremey Frumkin (Oregon State), and the author.
The goals of OCKHAM are three-fold: To articulate and draft a reference model describing digital library services To propose a number of light-weight protocols along the lines of OAI-PMH as a means to facilitate digital library services To implement a select number of digital library services exemplifying the use of the protocols OCKHAM proposes a number of initial services to be implemented: a registry service an alerting service a browsing service a pathfinder service a search service a metadata conversion service a cataloguing service Notre Dame is taking the lead in developing the alerting service -a sort of current awareness application allowing people to be kept abreast of newly available materials on the Internet.
This is how the service will work: An institution (read 'library'), will create a list of OAI data repositories (URLs) containing information useful to its clientele.
These URLs will be fed to an OAI harvester and the harvested information will be centrally stored.
Only a limited amount of information will be retained, namely information that is no older than what the hosting institution defines as 'new.'
One or more sets of MARC records will be harvested from library catalogues and saved to the central store as well.
Again, only lists of 'new' items will be retained.
As additional data is harvested the older data is removed.
Users will be given the opportunity to create searches against the centralised store.
These searches will be saved on behalf of the user and executed on a regular basis with the results returned via email, a Web page, an RSS feed, and/or some other format.
Repeat.
SRU URL's will be the format of the saved searches outlined in Step 4 above.
These URLs will be constructed through an interface allowing the user to qualify their searches with things like author names, titles, subject terms, free text terms or phrases, locations, and/or physical formats.
By saving user profiles in the form of SRU URLs, patrons will be able to apply their profiles to other SRU-accessible indexes simply by changing the host and path specifications.
The goal is to promote the use of SRU URLs as a way of interfacing with alerting services as unambiguously and as openly as possible.
Summary SRW and SRU are "brother and sister" standardised Web Service-based protocols for accomplishing the task of querying Internet-accessible databases and returning search results.
If index providers were to expose their services via SRW and/or SRU, then the content of the 'hidden Web' would become more accessible and there would be less of a need to constantly re-invent the interfaces to these indexes.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the people on the ZNG mailing list for their assistance.
They were invaluable during the learning process.
Special thanks goes to Ralph Levan of OCLC who helped clarify the meaning and purpose of XML packing.
References The home page for SRW/U is http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/ CQL is fully described at http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/cql/ The home page of MARC::Record is http://marcpm.sourceforge.net/ Xsltproc is an application written against two C libraries called libxml and libxslt described at http://xmlsoft.org/ Swish-e is an indexer/search engine application with a C as well as a Perl interface.
See: http://swish-e.org/ The canonical URL of OCKHAM is http://www.ockham.org/ Author Details Eric Lease Morgan Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department University Libraries of Notre Dame University of Notre Dame Notre Dame Indiana, 46556 USA Email: emorgan@nd.edu Web site: http://www.nd.edu/~emorgan/ Return to top Article Title: "An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU)" Author: Eric Lease Morgan Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/morgan/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG: Asking Questions The CASS Social Survey Question Bank Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG: Asking Questions The CASS Social Survey Question Bank Buzz data software rdf framework javascript html database dissemination xml infrastructure archives metadata css thesaurus browser vocabularies schema repositories copyright graphics windows hypertext ocr adobe dom microdata rae dhtml algorithm intranet url research standards nesstar Citation BibTex RIS Adam Guy writes about the Question Bank service.
The purpose of this article is to introduce The Question Bank contents and situate the resource in the context of its Information Space, that is its relationship to other projects that aim to make social surveys more accessible.
I have the subsidiary aim of using this text to present the choices and decisions that need to be identified, preferably before undertaking the introduction of a medium sized web-based information resource.
I aim to be decidedly non-technical, however many of the problems the Question bank team has overcome have been solved because of the increasing flexibility that newer software offers.
This article itself breaks the golden rules of writing for the web, it is not concise, scannable or objective.
But the recommendations it makes are all in-line with current entreaties to keep the web simple, fast and user-oriented.
Throughout this piece is a not so heavily veiled critique of overly complicated resources that claim for themselves the right to define rules of data management, but rarely deliver consistent or integral data storage or reliable and standardised rules of access.
In effect this is a claim for the legitimacy of smaller, more focussed information sources, complementary to the larger, more resource-intensive operations, for resources that aim at being visible and accessible rather than making any great claim to comprehensiveness or authority.
Ideally such niche driven operations should be flexible and responsive, with the ability to alter course faster than the supertankers.
This depends on the navigation skills of the crew, but also one needs a chart of the ocean.
Adequate and fully functional user appraisal and feedback is the crucial element, and this is a hugely problematic concept in web resource provision where the user is predominantly a taker and not a participant.
The opportunity to write this, slightly contentious, introduction for a new audience is very welcome.
I have to state that the Question Bank is a resource in development and that any criticism of its structure or content, however harsh, is of course welcome.
Social surveys and data archives Whether one agrees that quantitative methods are the best way to measure social features of the population or not it is a fact that large scale social surveys have become the major tool for gathering such data and are extremely influential upon government and social policy.
Not only has the process of survey construction become highly professionalised, but also the techniques for data gathering, to say nothing of analysis and interpretation, and storage and dissemination, are becoming increasingly complex.
There is appearing a perceptible gap between sociologists and survey professionals, and between students of sociology and social policy and those who create, interpret and act upon survey findings.
The theorist practitioner gulf is exacerbated as much by organisational as by technological change.
Downsizing, outsourcing, competitive tendering and the fragmentation of the large government agencies into autonomous business units has meant that independent survey organisations, such as The National Centre for Social Research in the UK, now compete favourably with state departments such as The Office for National Statistics (ONS) for data collection contracts, and even for the design of the major longitudinal national surveys.
In such a situation documentation becomes a serious issue.
What exactly was asked and in what context?
From a more critical sociological perspective, as well as a conscientious professional one, there is often a need to know just what was the context of a given question or set of questions that led to a certain set of data and their various interpretations.
In addition to organisational Balkanisation there is, as there always was, the structural complexity of the survey.
With the inclusion of multi-part and sub-group targeted aspects to nearly all the major data gathering exercises there arises a plethora of paper and electronic objects, be they questionnaires, special-interest group supplements, interviewer manuals and notes, or diverse visual material such as showcards or pictures.
All the previous applies without even considering the complexities introduced with non-linear telephone and computer based interviewing techniques.
For those interested in survey construction, secondary analysis or even survey interpretation to any degree of accuracy, wading through this mire of detail is truly mind-boggling, if and when they actually manage to find any of it.
A requirement of the Education and Social Research Council (ESRC) is that data and documentation generated by any of the projects or surveys that it funds should be lodged at the Data Archive, at the University of Essex.
The Government Statistical Service (GSS) and The Office for National Statistics (ONS), along with other survey generating government agencies, including those responsible for the Census of Population every 10 years, tend to deposit their data with the Data Archive too, although they have their own data service, StatbaseTM.
Although the scale and breadth of such archives is impressive, users must often register or even pay for access to information, the search interfaces are often complex with steep and idiosyncratic learning curves, online documents and datasets are large with long download times, and documentation is often patchy and poorly hierarchised or explained.
As a consequence of this general inaccessibility third party data providers, such as Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS), have been funded to provide data subsets and selections, together with associated documentation, aimed specifically at academics and sociologists.
Whatever advances the above resources have made available to analysts, they all operate to data-driven agendas.
Before 1996 there was scant and uneven attention paid to the documentation of the questionnaires themselves.
In recognition the ESRC, in 1995, funded the establishment of The Centre for Applied Social Surveys (CASS).
A large component of this virtual organisation was to be an online questionnaire resource, The Question Bank (Qb).
The CASS Question Bank       The Centre for applied Social Surveys was set-up, as a virtual organisation run jointly between three host organisations, The National Centre for Social Research (then SCPR), The University of Southampton and The University of Surrey.
CASS is responsible for a popular series of courses on survey methodology, and for the Question Bank.
The Question Bank was introduced expressly to deal with questionnaires and questions and not data or datasets.
It is an online resource that is freely available over the World Wide Web without registration or payment.
First available in 1996 the resource has over the last six months undergone a radical overhaul of its interface and structure, and there is almost daily change and improvement to the content of the site.
Development has not been untroubled, and though this article deals with an overview of the scope and use of the Question Bank, I shall continuous reference to the hard choices necessary in undertaking a project of this nature.
Given the brief to make surveys available online, something which in 1995 no other agency was doing in any systematic way, the directors of the Qb project Roger Thomas and Martin Bulmer had to make decisions for the project scope based on resources.
Essentially the balance in such an endeavour boils down to expertise, delivery of material and available labour time, though there are subsidiary concerns that I shall touch upon.
Whole questionnaires The main imperative was that the resource should consist of whole questionnaires.
The reasons for this were threefold: Questions should be seen in their original environment and not separated into atomic, decontextualised units (i.e.
questions).
In real world surveys questions are asked in blocks, the routing through a question sequence may be complex and depends upon the responses of the interviewee, and data is often derived from combinations of questions after the interview has occurred.
The analyst therefore, although they may be interested in only one section of a survey, might need to trace down separate questions and to understand their interconnection.
Likewise the student or social researcher might want to see how a sensitive or awkward subject is approached, how the questions lead and follow each other, and what sequence has produced proven and reliable results.
For these reasons material in the Question Bank is reproduced as far as possible in the original format.
Aside from 'chunking' the documents to optimise for rapid download over the net all the questionnaires in the Question Bank have been processed without loss of context.
Initially this meant representation of paper based survey tools, but more recently interactive programme based questionnaires (CAPI) have become the norm (see later this article).
All other resources in the same field organise and structure their holdings along the lines of indexes.
These indexes are made at either the levels of question, subject or general survey scope (e.g.
The Data Archive uses its own indexing system, HASSETT, to which it has devoted enormous resources and time).
This means that in searching for content of specific interest the user is limited to the structure pre-set by the indexers of the data base, or by the conceptual complexity and coverage of the index thesaurus.
In effect all data or text strings not explicitly indexed are invisible to the enquirer, whether they are using a general web search engine like Infoseek, or are querying the resource holdings through its own quirky interface.
(A controversial exception to this rule is the ONS Harmonised Question Scheme that aims to make certain themed question blocks available across a wide range of government surveys, still however only visible if you have a copy of the key document).
The Question Bank is fully searchable, every word of every document being visible through a single search enquiry field.
We have selected the MUSCATTM search engine, which can handle natural language enquiries, and through fuzzy logic can find words associated with the search term.
Furthermore since large amounts of Question Bank material is in the semi-structured document hierarchy characteristic of a website, rather than hidden away in a proprietary database, it is visible to WWW worms and robots, and is thus regularly indexed by the general search engines.
Since these are most people's first choice of information gateway this strategy opens the Qb material to the widest possible of audiences.
The results of a search for a named social survey, for example the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), or the Family Expenditure Survey (FES), using Infoseek, Hotbot, Yahoo or Northern Light or similar popular tools, is far more likely to return a Question Bank document than pages of any of the major archives, or even the websites of the government agencies responsible for sponsoring the surveys.
Important surveys produce datasets that are often re-analysed.
Until recently no one has systematically stored the documentation which actually generated those data sets.
A driving force in the founding of the Question Bank was an attempt to rescue significant examples of such key questionnaires and their documentation.
This has necessitated an extremely laborious process of conversion from paper to electronic format.
Technically, for a document to be fully searchable, each and every word must be visible to the search engine.
This is a relatively minor problem where an electronic file is available, it can be converted to a web distributable format by any of a growing number of conversion tools.
(In practice it should be noted that the choice is rather more limited than it might seem).
For paper however each word must be proof read to ensure that it has been correctly scanned, converted and represented in the final document.
In the Question Bank this conversion step has formed the bulk of the work.
In contrast to many other resources where a mass (read automatic) conversion process is undertaken, with its concomitant increase in the percentage of conversion error, we have chosen a process of 'cherry-picking' key documents and ensuring that they are fully machine searchable.
Given prior access to most electronic documentation, The Data Archive amongst others, has now begun to publish questionnaires to the web.
Usually however the survey questions form only sections of large 'documentation' packages that might take minutes and minutes to download before the user is able to open them, look, and find that they did not contain the required material.
In one strategy the Question Bank might be used as a scanning tool to find interesting microdata at the question level, and then follow up the enquiry in the more extensive holdings of the larger resources.
The Question Bank tries, wherever possible, to send users directly from any questionnaire to its dataset, held elsewhere.
Such attempts at helpful cross-linking are generally confounded by the fact that relevant documents are stored in databases that cannot be directly hyperlinked at present, since databases can only generate web pages 'on the fly' as the result of a specific enquiry.
Instead the most specific page to which the user can be redirected is often only at the very highest level (e.g.
BIRON).
MIMAS is an exception in this respect in that each survey has its own HTML root documents or web pages.
Document and Resource Format and Structure The Question bank is a website.
This means it sees itself as part of the Internet, rather than simply using the Internet as a delivery system.
The team tries to be conscious of this at all times and it was to a web constituency, using standardised web technology, and coping with familiar web based problems, that the initial decisions about document format were directed.
Document Format Essentially all material in the Question bank falls into one of two categories: Questionnaires In the Question Bank these long and complex documents form the bulk of converted objects and any strategy of representation must reflect this in an efficient and robust manner.
Initially many documents existed as paper only, with precise and proven layout conventions, and often designed for ease of interviewer use as much as with the interviewee in mind.
Reproduction needs to maintain layout, produce a small, easily transmissible document, whilst maintaining searchability to the level of the individual word or phrase.
Furthermore these documents need to be visible and searchable on a wide variety of software configurations, all conceivable combinations of platform and browser.
Given also that the resource is aimed primarily at academics, students and those working in large institutions with dinosaur IT departments and budget committees, it was understood that 'cutting-edge' technology was unlikely to be encountered, and hence that Question Bank documents should not be too innovative in format or structure.
Network administrators are also loath to disturb the fragile equilibrium of their systems.
Any downloadable plug-ins, system extensions or applications are unlikely to be available to users in such large organisations.
Because conservation of document layout and low download size (kB) across a broad platform base were the key initial criteria the decision was taken to use Adobe Acrobat software to convert the questionnaires into Portable Document Format (PDF).
A PDF file is produced from Postscript, theoretically one of the only constants in the world of computing, since it is the language that most operating systems use to talk to printing machines.
The decision to use this format has proven a very good one.
More and more this is the format used when a web designer wants to provide a document based on a print original and where layout and typography must be preserved.
Government publications and technical manuals are increasingly published primarily rather than secondarily in this file format.
A plug-in is needed to view PDF's, but given its general utility and free availability it is normally loaded on most networks as a standard.
PDF's are small, fast to download, stable, manipulable, and common.
They are also searchable, within the application (PDF Viewer) or from outside the document with the right search engine.
The Question Bank search engine MUSCAT was chosen explicitly for its ability to see into PDF's (it can also look into Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as well as of course HTML or web pages).
General search engines are rarely configured to search the contents of non-HTML documents (many look no further even than the document TITLE and META attributes) but with PDF use in exponential increase this may be a service that one or more of the general engines might begin to offer soon.
The largest mass of Qb documents were converted to PDF format from paper using Acrobat Capture, an archive optimised Optical Character Recognition (OCR) package (not to be confused with the lower quality option of Adobe Acrobat).
This method entails a proof reading step that most resource providers omit.
Capture will produce an eye-readable document from a scanned image in seconds.
At the machine-readable level however all is not as it seems.
The view of a page will contain fully converted words, those recognised by the OCR algorithms, in combination with images of words where the OCR package has not recognised characters that were badly scanned, smudges, small, non-left to right in orientation, etc.
Unless these images of words are manually replaced, by comparison with the original, the document may be left with upwards of 30% non machine-readable content.
Large archives rarely take the time to perform this arduous and time-costly exercise.
Increasingly however, documents are available to the archivist in electronic format, often as last draught word or text files (NB rarely as the post-proofing version that the typesetter and author finally signed-off to the printer of a document, the definitive final public or end-user version).
Conversion to PDF or HTML is easier in this case and it is more a case of which package to use than whether it is worth the effort or not.
Or so it might seem.
If the criteria of maximum cross-platform viewability and full searchability are rigorously applied the conversion software of choice shrinks rapidly.
Simply converting to HTML (web page) using basic conversion programs leads to one of two consequences: Non standard and 'dirty' HTML which can be viewed only on certain platform-browser combinations (Microsoft Word and FrontPage please stand up) Change or loss of layout in the HTML output, a disaster for most questionnaires.
As windows are resized web page contents flow to fit the new area, so layout is never an element that can be controlled in an HTML document.
The most recent conversion packages claim to have overcome these problems but only by recourse to Dynamic HTML (DHTML) Layers and/or JavaScript elements, technologies with notoriously different implementation on Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers, and thus effectively barred from use by the web developer who wishes to reach a large audience.
Using Adobe Acrobat Distiller most electronic documents can be converted to PDF with their initial format, layout, fonts, and graphic elements intact (relatively), and often at one-tenth the size of the original document.
Such documents load faster, and are more cross-platform than HTML equivalents or even than the originals.
For consistency and reliability, PDF is the format the Question Bank team chose for nearly all questionnaire material.
Again it is possible to use simple non-labour intensive methods to produce PDF's from electronic documents, such as the PDF Writer plug-in for MS Word.
Acrobat Distiller however is the only way to ensure that the contents are faithfully reproduced at maximum compression (smallest size) and with full searchability.
The Question Bank optimises AND splits the finished PDF file so that few documents should take longer than 15 seconds (at 28.8 kB psec) to download.
Splitting and cross-linking documents is a MANUAL task which few archives spare the time to perform.
Infrastructure All non-questionnaire material forming the structure that contains, discusses, orders, and indicates the location and scope of the Qb questionnaires.
In the Question Bank all of this material is in HTML format.
But it is not enough to say 'put it into HTML'.
Again tough decisions are necessary at this stage.
All coding in the Question Bank aims to comply with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C® ) recommendations for HTML-4, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the JavaScript Document Object Model.
I know its fashionable to trash 'big bad Bill' but Internet Explorers 4 and 5 are the ONLY web browsers that reach these standards.
For some obscure reason IT administrators all load up Netscape Navigator, which in its most recent manifestation, Navigator 4.6 is rubbish on HTML4, worse on CSS, has its own peculiar manifestation of the DOM and crashes the operating system every time you try to click anything too fast.
It remains to be seen whether Navigator 5 will make any concessions to the confused and riled general web using community, but until that time we can only recommend using IE4 as the browser of choice to view Qb documents.
Unless of course you use a Mac where IE4 is worse than Netscape 3 (a virtual 1995 situation).
In preparing the Question Bank infrastructure it was necessary to conclude that although more than half of all browsers are now IE3 or above, in our constituency of students, researchers and survey professionals a generally unrepresentative majority will still be stuck with version 3 browsers, predominantly the four year old Netscape 3, or even older versions (I saw Netscape 1 on a colleagues laptop the other day).
This may be compounded by low resolution monitors and long average download times due to slower software on operating systems as old as Windows 3.11.
Users might even have highly restricted Internet access as is often the case in organisations that have yet to realise that exclusion from information is no longer a viable economic strategy.
Vexing as all this might be to the web developer it can be overcome with thoughtful use of colour (which comes free), diagrammatic representation (images can get large though), flat not deep structure (everything only three clicks from the home page), liberal cross-linking (in recognition that users do not read but scan and download), elegant degradation (writing HTML pages that still look OK in successively lower browser versions), and the use of scripting to route users to alternative interfaces depending on their machinery.
The Question Bank uses all of these techniques in an attempt to make material as attractive and navigable as possible.
Feedback please?
Finally the Question Bank uses frames.
This bucks all recent trends.
Since the main content of the Question Bank is in PDF format users might rapidly lose their place in the web site because PDF's, which might also take a while to download, will fill the browser window unless a navigation frame is added around the document loading frame.
A necessary evil.
Links to the Question Bank Information Space Supposedly the confidence of a website is measured in its willingness to send viewers off to another place.
This is the raison d'être of well-conceived gateways.
There are moves to try and delineate structure from the morass of the WWW, even attempts to build intelligent search agents able to rank the worth of a resource automatically using a mechanical process analogous to that used in human-mediated ranking (e.g.
Yahoo and Alta Vista are really sets of lists collected and grouped by their content and utility).
Such schemas would divide useful resources into one of two types: A Hub A web page that links to many authorities An Authority A web page that is pointed to by many hubs If link density is to be an important criterion for visibility on the Internet the designer must decide how many, AND EXACTLY WHICH, links to collect in their website.
Will users click and rush off, never to return?
Will they understand that they have left at all?
The Question Bank team does not pretend to be producing a Gateway but we repeatedly discover some new resource or centre that we knew nothing about.
It is not uncommon whilst teaching or demonstrating to find that the structure of the survey Information Space (meaning a kind of sub-domain of the WWW) is poorly understood.
Furthermore repeatedly we are asked if we archive datasets.
Clearly the aim of the Question Bank is to become an 'authority' but since so many users ask to be redirected there is an inescapable trend toward becoming a 'hub' as well.
The decision was taken early that this is almost a separate aspect of web resource provision and the Question Bank employs a part-time researcher at the University of Surrey to collate hyperlinks for us.
Currently the results of her work are seen in the links and bibliography sections of each of the Qb topic regions.
We are also constructing an InfoSpace section in Qb the site.
This is a diagrammatic representation of the data archives, government agencies, survey associated sites (some have their own website) and related research and co-ordination bodies that concern themselves with survey design and construction.
The Question Bank is very easy to step out of.
On a technical level, if you are in framed site do you allow a hyperlink to replace your site in the browser window, or do you launch the remote website in a separate, new window.
Current feeling concurs that confidence will out, and that you should always launch into THE SAME window, allowing users to carry on using the back button which gives them control over their mental map of their individual session history.
This is generally the course chosen in the Question Bank.
Finding material in the Question Bank Finding stuff is what it's all about on the web.
Other than making as much material visible to external robots (general search engines) any site of any size really needs its own search engine.
Important too is a structure and site design of minimum necessary complexity.
Although many websites are very small their interfaces are often very busy.
With a larger resource a more sedate approach is essential and here the accepted standards of the web, the general user paradigm, is best followed.
In the Qb technological frills have been kept to a minimum, and where clever stuff does exists, it is generally completely invisible to the user.
As mentioned the largest single aid in finding material is actually the frameset which contains buttons linking to all main areas of the site, visible at all times.
A drawback is that no individual document can be simply bookmarked (but try IE5, it does it!).
The Structure of the site is arranged around the unit of interest, The Survey, and the unit of description, The Topic, with subsidiary, or complementary areas such as the CAPI section, the author list, help pages, contact forms, etc.
clearly indicated as autonomous units.
Beneath this apparent structuration however there is multiple cross-linking and as much sharing of material as possible.
The Question Bank has been designed to help users by offering multiple routes and methods to find relevant material.
There are however three main search strategies: Survey menu Some Question Bank users will come looking for material that they believe has been included in particular surveys known to them.
For example, they may recall that a particular topic was included in the British Household Panel Survey in a particular year and wish immediately to access and perhaps browse through the questionnaires for that year.
Their needs are accommodated by a menu system that lists source questionnaires by survey and year.
In most cases a sub-index is provided for the longer questionnaires to help narrow down the search.
Topic menu Many users will approach with a broader perspective, knowing that they are interested in a particular topic area, say ‘ethnicity’, and wanting to review the relevant concepts and variables and the measurement approaches which have been used on major benchmark surveys.
Then, having read something of the conceptual background and the methodological problems of the topic area, they may wish to proceed via menus or hypertext links to look at the way the topic has been tackled in practice in questionnaires.
Such users can access the Question Bank ‘top-down’ via the topic list menu, which in turn leads on via hypertext links to commentary on various aspects of the topic area, or to survey examples.
The topic list is also a quick and general way for users to check whether the general topic area in which they are interested is covered by the Question Bank.
Users can then reach relevant survey material either through installed hypertext links or by searching using MUSCAT.
MUSCAT search engine The topic list and the questionnaire indexes provide a quick, but inevitably rather rough and ready, means of identifying whether and where broad topics are covered by the Question Bank.
A more focused and powerful method of searching is to use an intelligent search engine that indexes the entire contents of the Question Bank.
After considerable investigation and testing we have selected the MUSCAT â„¢ search engine, which can scrutinise both HTML and PDF files.
Search terms can be entered as free text including key words, and MUSCAT will search the entire content of the Question Bank for those terms, producing a list ranked in terms of relevance.
MUSCAT uses probabilistic retrieval, allowing users to type, just as they would speak, a natural sentence or phrase expressing their interest.
Feedback Mechanisms As stated earlier feedback is the single most crucial tool in website development.
This has been the second least impressive area of performance in our record (the worst being the commissioning of topic material for the Question Bank, see later this article).
Although there are multiple methods for online feedback from the Qb site response is very poor, and this even though the access logs indicate an impressive hit rate.
It would seem that the web user is essentially a downloading machine, that invitations to contribute are almost always ignored, and that the provider of any resource would do well to build face-to-face feedback opportunities into any development program.
The Question Bank resource is under continuous and intensive development.
We invite queries, complaints, suggestions for inclusion, or any other form of feedback, positive or negative.
We have constructed several ways for users to comment on the site or its content, from quick observations to a considered critique: Suggestion Box A free form text box always visible in the frameset Quick Comment Quickly tell us what you were looking for and whether you found it Feedback Form Provide us with a longer and more structured example of your views cassqb@natcen.ac.uk email us with any comments or suggestions a.guy@natcen.ac.uk email Adam Guy for technical or navigation guidance Write to The National Centre for Social Research, 35 Northampton Square, London EC1V OAX.
CAPI documentation The popular image of the social survey interviewer is that of someone carrying a clipboard or folder with a paper and pencil (PAPI) questionnaire that they complete in writing.
For most of the surveys listed in the Survey section of the Question Bank, however, this has been replaced during the last decade by the interviewer carrying a portable computer on which the questionnaire resides as a program for Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI).
This represents a major technical advance in the survey process, but also poses a challenge to the professional survey researcher to make the CAPI interview intelligible to the lay person.
The Question Bank makes available on our site the version of the survey questionnaire published by the survey organisation producing the survey.
Sometimes this is quite similar in appearance to a paper questionnaire.
In the case of more complex surveys, for example the Family Resources Survey or the Health Survey for England, it bears less resemblance to a paper questionnaire, and has alternating sections, showing respectively the actual question wording and the routing followed through the questionnaire for different respondents according to the way in which they have answered earlier questions.
Both the National Centre with support from the ESRC Research Programme into the Analysis of Large and Complex Datasets (ALCDS) and ONS (TADEQ) are attempting to build software tools that generate and represent CAPI documentation in ways that users of different experience levels and with different requirements can use.
The Question Bank team is grappling with problems of making the way CAPI surveys work in the field as transparent as possible to Question Bank users, and is writing material to explain some of the features of these new styles of questionnaire for our site.
This will become an increasingly important issue for the survey researcher as we move into the twenty-first century.
Metadata Data about data The proliferation of Internet repositories, each with its own navigational, location, storage and indexing systems means that the user often has to learn new skills each time a resource is discovered.
Finding relevant material can become extremely time-consuming, institutional resources are wasted in duplication and crucial data is often hidden within a plethora of proprietary databases, accessible only through idiosyncratic gateways and invisible to general web searching tools.
In recognition of this problem many incentives are under way to make data and documents visible across a variety of processes, gateways and search tools.
Metadata, data about data, are tags, descriptions or indexes attached to resource elements and are intended to unify or standardise the key attributes of information objects.
Metadata conventions will allow researchers using diverse tools to classify, store, access and retrieve key information using the web as the common platform.
Competition is intense and cross-competing claims to have produced the standard system are many.
Of current interest are the NESSTAR project which aims to enable users to search for relevant data across several countries in one action, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative which recommends a 15-element metadata set for describing Web resources.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C®) are promoting the adoption of Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) to enable archivists to 'wrap' documents in metadata envelopes, thus improving their visibility to the next wave of XML capable search engines.
The W3C are also involved in the development of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a foundation for processing metadata that will allow machines (worms and intelligent agents) to 'understand' rather than just 'read' documents.
The Question Bank team is actively researching these developments and is in contact with those involved in key incentives in the fields of social surveys and sociological resource provision.
Documents held in the Question Bank are consistently labelled, and since the resource is semi-structured and visible on the web, rather than hidden within a database architecture, could be easily assimilated by any, or several, of these schemes.
Conceptual Structure Users In developing the Question Bank we primarily aim to help: Researchers devising their own survey questionnaires, by providing easily-accessed illustrations of how the topics with which they are grappling have been handled/measured in professionally designed surveys.
Secondary analysts of survey data, either at the stage where they are seeking out surveys containing material of interest to them, or at the stage when, having worked with particular survey data sets, they wish to learn more about the underlying survey processes and their likely strengths, weaknesses and limitations.
Teachers and students of survey methods by providing text and examples on the wording of questions and the construction of questionnaires, and online presentations and exercises for use in workshops.
Indexing I have already said a lot about how indexing can lead to an inflexible, brittle and user-unfriendly organisation schema.
It is also a load of work.
Users want lists though, and in recognition of this we have begun to develop keyword indexes and to extract question examples for the topic or other subject led pages.
This is a slow process and essentially relies upon the contribution and time of experts, a rare commodity.
Surveys Research teams drawn from professional survey organisations and survey sponsoring organisations have created the Questionnaire facsimiles available in the Question Bank.
Wherever possible, the details of the responsible survey organisation are given.
These organisations support the idea that other researchers should be able to copy questions and use them in their own surveys.
Material in the Question Bank is reproduced by special permission of the copyright holders of published documents in which the material appeared.
Question Bank staff have taken great care to reproduce the questionnaire instruments accurately, but the originators of the questionnaires are the authoritative source of knowledge about the questions and their development.
Neither the originators of the questions nor the Centre for Applied Social Surveys can take any responsibility for use of the questions by others, or for providing advice to individuals on the design and use of questions.
The Question Bank contains questionnaire examples from the following surveys or survey groups: Links to the British Crime Survey website British Election Survey British Household Panel Survey British Social Attitudes Survey 1991 UK Census of Population English and Scottish Church Censuses European Household Panel Survey Family Expenditure Survey Family Resources Survey Family and Working Lives Survey The Fourth National Study of Ethnic Minorities General Household Survey Health Survey for England Housing Attitudes Survey Labour Force Survey National Child Development Survey National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles National Survey of NHS Patients National Survey of Voluntary Activity National Travel Survey People, Jobs and Recession (from 1984) Survey of Activity and Health Survey of English Housing Women and Employment Survey Workplace Employee Relations Survey Coming soon are: British Election Panel Survey Dietary and Nutrition Survey of British Adults Scottish, Welsh (also in welsh) & Northern Ireland Referendum Studies Scottish and Welsh (also in welsh) Election Studies Welsh Health Survey (also in welsh) For continuous surveys the aim is to hold copies of versions of the survey fielded since 1991 and, for both continuous and one-off surveys, to display all questionnaires (e.g.
household, individual and proxy schedules) for the appropriate year.
Surveys are being added to the Question Bank continuously.
A number of academic surveys with national coverage on particular topics will be added during 1999.
If you would like to nominate a survey to add, please email the Question Bank at: cassqb@natcen.ac.uk.
Survey inclusion The criteria we have used in selecting surveys are: UK sample coverage Ideally a Question Bank might aim to cover all suitable surveys conducted in countries sharing a common language and culture.
If we take English-speaking countries as our standard, that would bring into scope a very large number of excellent surveys conducted in North America, in Australia and so on.
Unfortunately, the resources of the CASS Question Bank are not sufficient for us to aim for such broad coverage and we have confined ourselves to surveys conducted in the United Kingdom.
Social surveys only Surveys for which questionnaires are included in the Question Bank are all social surveys.
Commercial market research surveys and business surveys directed to organisations are not in general included in the Question Bank.
In most cases the population units which the surveys are intended to study are either individual persons, or domestic groups such as households or families.
Surveys deal with a very wide range of topics that relate to the circumstances, behaviour and attitudes of these units.
Mainly large scale surveys The Question Bank focuses mainly on large-scale quantitative surveys.
Most of them have quite long and complex questionnaires, administered in the field, or over the telephone, by trained social survey interviewers.
High proportions of the inclusions are conducted either by, or for, central government departments.
Others are major academic surveys.
Many are repeated, continuous or longitudinal surveys that produce an annual series of published results.
Benchmark surveys Another main reason for selecting the questionnaires of particular surveys for inclusion in the Question Bank are that these surveys on a national scale are generally treated as benchmarks against which other surveys in the same topic areas can be compared.
The criteria for selecting surveys as benchmarks are: that the survey should have been professionally developed and conducted to a high technical standard that it should cover a national reference population that it should be a prime current source of information on the important social science topics that the Question Bank sets out to cover.
Conducted mainly since 1991 The Question Bank aims to keep up with the constantly increasing tempo of new questionnaire instruments coming on stream, and the release of survey datasets to the Data Archive.
Retrospectively, we decided to try to cover the period from 1991 (a Census year) onwards, but not to attempt systematic coverage of the period before 1991.
However, a number of surveys conducted before 1991 are still used as benchmarks, or exemplify particular innovations in question or data collection design.
For these we have made exceptions to our rule, so that the Question Bank contains questionnaires for selected surveys conducted during the nineteen eighties.
Professionally designed Within the field of UK surveys conducted over the past 20 years or so, the questionnaires included in the Question Bank have been chosen partly because all have been developed by leading professional survey organisations operating in Great Britain.
That usually means that the question developers have had considerable survey experience to draw on.
Quality assured Given their origin, it can be assumed that the questions reproduced in the Question Bank have also been pilot tested, to make sure that they seem to work satisfactorily for the population of British respondents at whom they are aimed.
Such piloting will normally have taken the form of rehearsal-type field tests, plus scrutiny of the data yielded by the questions for omissions and anomalies.
Such testing weeds out, for example: questions which respondents may find baffling because of the concepts, syntax or vocabulary used questions which some respondents are unwilling or unable to answer questions which elicit obviously irrelevant or inconsistent answers questions which fail to capture part of their intended universe of content questions which produce unduly skewed distributions of responses.
For some questions special tests have been done, over and above standard piloting, to check that different respondents understand them in the same way and that the answers obtained are sufficiently valid, accurate and statistically reliable for their purpose.
Such tests may involve, for example, cognitive testing of the way in which the questions are answered and controlled empirical comparison of the results obtained by different question forms or special validity checks.
These methods require extra time, trouble and expense and are the exception, rather than the rule.
Nevertheless the questions used in the Census of Population, for example, have been subject to very extensive formal testing of this kind and there have been similar question testing and evaluation programmes in certain other areas.
The Question Bank contains some references to the results of question testing, where available.
Questions contained in the Question Bank are likely, on the whole, to perform better as means of collecting quantitative information for particular purposes than questions which someone coming fresh to a survey topic, without previous question drafting experience, might invent for themselves.
However, there can be no such thing as the ideal question on a given topic for every application, only questions which are good relative to the purpose for which they were intended and within the constraints of a particular data collection situation.
Users should read the commentary on the various approaches to questionnaire design exemplified in the example questionnaires.
Harmonised question forms Some topics recur in many different social surveys in the Question Bank.
They include, for example: demographic information, questions to establish household structure and housing circumstances, economic activity topics, income topics and so on.
Since the questions devoted to these topics typically provide the analysis framework within which other topics are analysed it is particularly important to users of survey data that the framework be standardised, so that the results of different surveys can be compared and aggregated.
In 1995 in recognition of this the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which runs various important government surveys included in the Question Bank (e.g.
Labour Force Survey, Family Expenditure Survey, General Household Survey), initiated a programme of work and negotiation with survey sponsors which aimed to arrive at a set of question wordings harmonised across surveys.
The result was a controversial booklet entitled Harmonised Questions for Government Social Surveys, which sets out the harmonised forms.
These have now been, or are in process of being, adopted in all major continuous government social surveys.
By agreement with ONS the Question Bank contains the full text of this booklet, as well as of the two subsequent updates (1996, 1997), and a quick reference table that indicates which question blocks were used in which years.
It will be useful to all questionnaire designers who wish to make their own surveys comparable to major standard government surveys covering the same topics, particularly since the question forms are arranged in a concise way under topics.
The ONS Harmonised Questions website is the authoritative channel for the latest information on this process.
Topics The area in which the Question Bank or any medium sized resource should be strongest is in its meta-narrative.
Material that elucidates the purpose and theoretical underpinning of a resource, including extensive illustration by example, is the bedrock of good website design.
It is precisely to this type of online writing that the web, with its ability to hyperlink, most lends itself.
The topic area has been the hardest section of the Question Bank to populate.
Reasons are threefold: RAE Web disseminated articles are not generally refereed, they are therefore inadmissible for the Research Assessment Exercise, which measures and ranks the performance of non-independent academic institutes.
There are no 'brownie points' to be gained by academics in writing for the web.
Time Although the Question Bank is based (physically) in centres of excellence in survey design, the commercial imperatives touched upon in the first section mean that the immense time investment needed to pick over the Qb material and write discursive essays has often been prohibitive in our approaches for submissions.
Writing for the web This is a new art.
Long convoluted and wordy documents (like this one) cannot be easily read onscreen.
Users also approach browsing in a 'grab and get' frame of mind.
They simply will not read carefully.
Articles and explanatory material then needs to be bite-sized, repetitive and heavily hyper-linked.
Writing like this is something academics and specialists in their field are very unhappy about doing.
Those planning on creating a web resource should think carefully about where material will come from and even more critically about WHO will do the work to supply copy with which to populate the architectures in their minds.
In principle, the Question Bank aims to cover all topics of interest to social science that can be studied using the standardised quantitative social survey method.
The potential range is very wide.
In order to give some structure and make it easier for Question Bank users to find what they are looking for, we have provided a broad listing of 21 topic areas.
Currently 14 areas contain diverse material, often links to related websites outside the Qb, essays on key variable definition, or bibliographic lists: Crime and victimisation Demography Economic activity Education, qualification & training Ethnicity and race Family Gender Health, illness and disability Housing and household amenities Household definition and structure Income, expenditure and wealth Leisure and lifestyles Political behaviour and attitudes Religiosity Soon to be linked are 7 more topics: Geography Social Attitudes in general Social class Social protection and care Travel and transport Voluntary associations Working life Topic commentary In addition to the questionnaire material and the excerpts from other published documents bearing on particular topics, the Question Bank aims to contain specially written critical and explanatory commentary.
The commentary is intended to help users to understand the conceptual structure of each topic area and the way it is reflected in the structuring of questionnaires.
It may also make users aware of other concepts and questioning approaches that may be closely related to the ones that they had in mind when accessing the Question Bank.
The commentary includes discussion of any available objective evidence on the validity, reliability etc of the measures produced by questions used.
For each topic area, we aim to provide a summary account of the main concepts involved and of current approaches to measuring them using survey questionnaire methods.
We aim, where possible, to directly link the commentary to relevant examples of sections of questionnaires in the Question Bank surveys.
In addition, we provide bibliographic references to relevant social science research literature on the topic, and to other Internet sites containing salient information.
An editorial board has been set up to monitor the quality of material in Question Bank, and to commission commentary from experts in their subject.
The members of the Editorial Board are: Martin Bulmer (Chair, CASS) Angela Dale (Director of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester) Peter Halfpenny (Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research, University of Manchester) Jean Martin (Head of the Survey Methodology Unit, Office for National Statistics) Roger Thomas (Director, CASS).
Experts in particular topics are currently writing and reviewing material for the Question Bank.
A new policy decision is that all material written for the ‘topics and areas’ will be attributed to a named individual, so that the source of material may be clearly identified.
This will further the aim of creating within the Question Bank site an electronic encyclopaedia about survey research methodology.
Authors can be found through a list on the website, and their articles accessed directly from there.
Using the Question Bank I don't intend to go into long descriptions about how to actually use the Qb site in this article.
There are plenty of help pages on the site itself.
I would like to point out the growing teaching area which makes available presentations that we have used to explain the purpose and use of the site and contains downloadable full-colour help-sheets and exercises.
The aim is that teachers of research methods or survey methodology could integrate use of the Question Bank into their course schedule.
As usual feedback would be nice.
Qb Staff Roger Thomas is the Director of CASS.
He is a senior member of the Survey Methods Centre at the National Centre for Social Research.
Martin Bulmer is the Academic Director of the Question Bank.
He is Foundation Fund Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey and Associate Director of its Institute of Social Research.
Adam Guy is Manager of the CASS Question Bank in the Survey Methods Centre, The National Centre for Social Research.
Tom Johnson is responsible for the quality of material in the Question Bank and he also works in the Survey Methods Centre, The National Centre for Social Research.
Christina Silver is a researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and has been responsible for finding material related to Qb topics on the Internet.
Stuart Peters, based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey, produced Sociological Research Online for three years and is now involved in EPRESS, a project aimed at helping others to publish journals online.
He helps maintain the Question Bank search engine.
Author Details Before working on the Question Bank Adam managed the database, project led the website team and introduced an Intranet for a management consultancy.
He holds an MSc in Social Anthropology from University College London.
He has one daughter and another on the way.
Author Details   Adam Guy   Manager of the Question Bank   Centre for Applied Social Surveys   National Centre for Social Research   35 Northampton Square   London EC1V 0AX   0171 250 1866   a.guy@natcen.ac.uk The CASS Web address (URL): http://www.natcen.ac.uk/cass/ Article Title: "Planet SOSIG: Asking Questions -The CASS Social Survey Question Bank" Author: Adam Guy Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22  Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/planet-sosig/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing Digital Rights A Practitioner's Guide Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing Digital Rights A Practitioner's Guide Buzz software database archives copyright drm Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Hannabuss likes the way this book reminds us that information professionals need to apply the law and not merely know it.
Everyone is talking about digital and electronic rights these days.
Rightly so.
A wealth of legal advice is available in works like Simon Stokes's Digital Copyright : Law and Practice [1] which alert us to the many directions in which things are moving digital rights management, ecommerce, virtual learning environments, software copyright, licences and contracts.
This professional table d'hôte indicates what information professionals are assumed to know.
This is not just 'copyright in the information age' any more that is far too generalised : now people need advice on practice and procedures, the 'how' now that the 'what' is widely known.
Digital rights management, licences and contracts, and the wider balance between information creators and users, are key professional and political issues.
This has been picked up by the second edition of Chris Armstrong & Laurence Bebbington editors Staying Legal : A Guide to Issues and Practice affecting the Library, Information and Publishing Sectors [2], Paul Brennan's Law for IT Professionals [3] and Paul Pedley's own Essential Law for Information Professionals [4].The last of these has useful chapters on contracts and licensing agreements, professional liability, and defamation.
Other points of reference are Sandy Norman's Practical Copyright for Information Professionals : the CILIP Handbook [5] and Graham Cornish's Copyright : Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services [6].
Pedley comes highly recommended.
Many readers will already know of his Essential Law, of his Information Law Newsletter, (now discontinued), his work for the Economist Intelligence Unit, and with the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Legal Information Service.
So, turning to Managing Digital Rights itself, we have expectations of relevance, and these are fulfilled.
It is a short but highly relevant work, likely to be useful to any information professional, particularly anyone interested in: a quick update on copyright and digital rights Pedley a snapshot of 'how we have got to this point' Norman on international, mainly European, legal debate, the work of IFLA and EBLIDA, new copyright law in the USA and Australia, browsing and circumvention issues copyright clearance Pickering on HERON (Higher Education Resources ON demand), the scheme to provide digital materials, copyright-cleared, for Higher Education digital rights and Higher Education Purdy on Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) from the tutor's and student's perspective and corporate rights Watson on digital rights licensing and charging in the newspaper and electronic newspaper and database field Five short but informative chapters which could, easily, have appeared as articles in professional journals, but are helpfully brought together here as a coherent view.
The 'practitioner's view' has been, I believe, the rationale for this work.
Anyone substantially versed in what the other works say will know the issues.
Owners of, say, Norman's book, will probably not need to read her chapter except for interest and for her excellent comparison between Europe, America, and Australia.
Potential buyers should also be aware of the fact that the advice from Pickering, formerly Copyright Manager for HERON, now with Ingenta, on how copyright clearance works for the scheme is as much an advertisement for newcomers as a checklist for subscribers.
Furthermore the chapter by Purdy, Information Adviser at Sheffield Hallam University, on 'digital rights and education' is more a guide for student newbies, and is certainly the most generalised contribution.
The contribution from Watson, Head of Rights and Information at Newsquest Media Group (which includes the Glasgow newspaper The Herald), provides a fascinating viewpoint from the industry.
Here we are offered the newspaper and publisher perspective on digital rights, the way creation and delivery entail contractual and licensing arrangements, the role of collective licensing bodies like the Newspaper Licensing Agency, legal changes reflected in cases like Tasini and Loutchansky and Gutnik, and implications for pricing and tracking.
What Watson says about defamation and contempt of court will interest students of publishing and media.
All of which takes us back to Pedley's overview, which is topical in picking up on relevant EC Directives and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) law, examining challenges to interpretation which affect information professionals, and highlighting the growth of licences and contracts in the digital domain.
These and the book itself, at its level hit a bullseye with the issues and preoccupations they raise.
Principal among these is how information professionals are caught in a cross-fire between rights holders and users in the global digital field.
Even though there are (probably inevitable) unevennesses of emphasis, this work has identified the current concerns of the profession.
A natural, then, for the professional library.
A good quick read to update one's knowledge.
Some obvious stuff, some locatable elsewhere, and generally likely to interest information professionals in learning/teaching environments more than others.
Case studies would have been welcome, teasing out the interpretation and application of the law, rather than, at times, a general debate about rights balances or, at others, detailed advice on procedures, and I hope that Pedley will next direct his clear talents to producing just such a book.
Moreover an advanced text for specialists in DRM (Digital Rights Management) is much needed, above all now.
References Simon Stokes, Digital Copyright : Law and Practice, Butterworths/Lexis Nexis & Tarlo Lyons, 2002, subsequently Tottel Publishing and now available from Marston Book Serives Ltd of Abingdon, Oxon, UK, ISBN 0 406-94702-3 Editor's note: In respect of Staying Legal: A Guide to Issues and Practice Affecting the Library, Information and Publishing Sectors, Chris Armstrong & Laurence W Bebbington, editors, 2nd edition, Facet Publishing 2004, ISBN 1 85604 438 6 : Stuart is too modest to reference his own review; to be found in Ariadne issue 40, July 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/hannabuss-rvw/ Paul Brennan, Law for IT Professionals, emis professional publishing, 2003, ISBN 1 85811 322 9 Paul Pedley, Essential Law for Information Professionals, Facet Publishing, 2003, ISBN 1 85604 440 8 Sandy Norman, Practical Copyright for Information Professionals : the CILIP Handbook, Facet Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1 85604 490 4 Graham Cornish, Copyright : Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, (now in its 4th edition), Facet Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1 856-4 508 0 Author Details Dr Stuart Hannabuss Aberdeen Business School Email: s.hannabuss@rgu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Managing Digital Rights : A Practitioner's Guide" Author: Stuart Hannabuss Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/hannabuss-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold Buzz framework archives metadata tagging repositories research standards Citation BibTex RIS Stevan Harnad provides a summary of his critique of Jean-Claude Guédon's views on the green and gold roads to Open Access.
This article is a critique of: The "Green" and "Gold" Roads to Open Access: The Case for Mixing and Matching by Jean-Claude Guédon [1].
Open Access (OA) means: free online access to all peer-reviewed journal articles.
Jean-Claude Guédon (J-CG) argues against the efficacy of author self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles -the "Green" road to OA -on the grounds (1) that far too few authors self-archive, (2) that self-archiving can only generate incomplete and inconvenient access, and (3) that maximizing access and impact is the wrong reason for seeking OA (and only favours elite authors).
J-CG suggests instead that the right reason for seeking OA is so as to reform both the peer review system and the journal publishing system by creating new ways of "creating value" and "branding" whilst converting to OA ("Gold") publishing (in which the online version of all articles is free to all users).
We should convert to Gold by "mixing and matching" Green and Gold as follows: First, self-archive dissertations (not published, peer-reviewed journal articles).
Second, identify and tag how those dissertations have been evaluated and reviewed.
Third, self-archive unrefereed preprints (not published, peer-reviewed journal articles).
Fourth, develop new mechanisms for evaluating and reviewing those unrefereed preprints, at multiple levels.
The result will be OA Publishing (Gold).
I reply that this is not mixing and matching but merely imagining: a rather vague conjecture about how to convert to 100% Gold, involving no real Green at all along the way, because Green is the self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed articles, not just dissertations and preprints.
I argue that rather than yet another 10 years of speculation [2] what is actually needed (and imminent) is for OA self-archiving to be mandated by research funders and institutions so that the self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed journal articles (Green) can be fast-forwarded to 100% OA.
The direct purpose of OA is to maximise research access and impact, not to reform peer review or journal publishing; and OA's direct benefits are not just for elite authors but for all researchers, for their institutions, for their funders, for the tax-payers who fund their funders, and for the progress and productivity of research itself.
There is a complementarity between the Green and Gold strategies for reaching 100% OA today, just as there is a complementarity between access to the OA and non-OA versions of the same non-OA articles today.
Whether 100% Green OA will or will not eventually lead to 100% Gold, however, is a hypothetical question that is best deferred until we have first reached 100% OA, which is a direct, practical, reachable and far more urgent immediate goal and the optimal, inevitable and natural outcome for research in the PostGutenberg Galaxy.
"Recent discussions on Open Access (OA) have tended to treat OA journals and self-archiving as two distinct routes" From the day it was coined in 2001 by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), [3] "Open Access" has always been defined as free online access, reachable by two distinct routes, BOAI-1, OA self-archiving ("Green") and BOAI-2, OA journals ("Gold"): "Some... even suggest that [self-archiving] alone can bring about full Open Access to the world's scientific literature" OA's focus is only on peer-reviewed journal articles -2.5 million annual articles in 24,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals -not on "the world's scientific literature" in its entirety (i.e., not on books, magazines).
(1) To self-archive one's own article is to provide Open Access (OA) to one's own article.
Every author can do this, for every one of his articles.
If/when every author does this, for each of the annual 2.5 million articles, we have, by definition, 'full Open Access' (Green).
(2) By the same token, if/when every publisher of each of the 24,000 journals converts to OA publishing, we have, by definition, 'full Open Access' (Gold).
The rest is simply a question of probability: Is it more probable that all or most journals will convert to OA, or that all or most of their authors will self-archive their articles?
Which faces more obstacles, costs, delay, uncertainty, risk?
Which requires more steps?
Which can be facilitated by university and research-funder OA mandates?
Which is already within immediate reach?
"[S]elf-archiving is not enough... the repositories [need] some branding ability" Self-archiving is not enough for what?
Would 100% self-archiving not correspond to 100% OA (just as 100% OA journals would)?
And as we are talking about the self-archiving of peer-reviewed, published journal articles, why is there a need for "branding"?
Branding what?
The journal articles?
But those are already branded -with the name of the journal that published them.
What is missing and needed is not branding but Open Access to those journal articles!
(J-CG's preoccupation with branding will turn out to be a consequence of the fact that he is not proposing a way to make current journal articles OA, but a way to replace current journals altogether.)
"[OA journal publishing] amounts to a reform of the existing publication system [relying] on journals as its basic unit... and... aims at converting [to] or creating... Open Access journals."
Both OA self-archiving and OA journal publishing (and indeed, OA itself, and the definition of OA) "fundamentally rely on journals as [their] basic unit" because it is the articles in peer-reviewed journals that are the target literature of the OA movement.
It is true, however, that only BOAI-2, OA journal publication (Gold), aims at a reform of the existing publication system.
BOAI-1, OA self-archiving (Green), is neutral about that.
It aims only at OA... "[F]inancial viability [of OA publishing] rests on the will of governments ... and varies... with... country and circumstances" All the new and converted OA journals are valuable and welcome, but their numbers and the rate of increase of their numbers has to be realistically noted: About 5% of journals are OA ("gold") journals today (1400/24,000).
In contrast, about 92% of journals are "green" i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive their articles if they wish.
The rate of increase in the number of green journals has been incomparably faster than the rate of increase in the number of gold journals in the past few years.
The amount of OA (15%) generated via self-archiving has also been three times as great as the amount of OA generated via OA publishing (5%); and (although direct measures have not yet been made) it is likely that the rate of growth of OA via OA self-archiving is also considerably higher than the rate of growth of OA via OA publishing for obvious reasons that have already been mentioned: It is far easier and cheaper to create and fill an institutional OA Archive than to create and fill an OA journal.
Moreover, there is a considerable financial risk for an established journal in converting to the OA cost-recovery model, which has not yet been tested long enough to know whether it is sustainable and scaleable.
So whereas all new and converted OA journals are welcome, it makes no sense to keep waiting for or focusing on them as the main source of OA.
The real under-utilised resource is OA self-archiving underutilised even though it already provides three times as much OA as OA journals and is probably growing faster too: because OA self-archiving is already in a position to provide immediate 100% OA, if only it is given more of our time, attention and energy.
It is unrealistic to imagine that the reason the number of new and converted gold journals is not growing faster is that governments are not willing to subsidise them!
It is not clear whether governments should even want to, at this point, when OA is already reachable without any need for subsidy, via self-archiving, and researchers are simply not yet ready to perform the few keystrokes required to reach for it (even for the 92% of their articles published in green journals) despite being alleged to want and need OA, despite being willing (in their tens of thousands!)
to perform the keystrokes to demand it from their publishers -despite the fact that the benefits of OA itself are intended mainly for researchers and research [4].
If government intervention is needed on behalf of OA, surely it is needed in order to induce their researchers to provide the OA that is already within their reach to provide, rather than to subsidise journals to do it for them.
"[For self-archiving] the article [is the] fundamental unit [and] journals matter only to differentiate between peer-reviewed articles and non-peer-reviewed publications and to provide symbolic value" Symbolic value?
Consider how much simpler and more straightforward it is to state this theory-independently: Today, most of the 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 peer reviewed journals are inaccessible to many of their potential users because they cannot afford access.
If the articles are made accessible free online (by self-archiving them), this problem is solved.
We need not theorise about why users want to use peer-reviewed journal articles.
We can take that as a rather obvious premise.
Yes, users want the peer-reviewed articles (and the journal's name tells them which ones those are); and peer review itself provides the 'value' they seek in an expert-vetted literature rather than an unfiltered free-for-all.
There is no need to debate the value of peer review in an OA context: One of the premises of the OA movement is that OA is about access to the peer-reviewed journal literature, not access to something else.
So peer review and the journal names come with the territory.
The only problem to solve is access.
And Open Access solves that.
And self-archiving is by far the fastest and surest way to provide immediate OA.
No further theorizing, or complicating, is needed: We have peer-reviewed journal articles, but we do not have Open Access to them.
Self-archiving them provides that access.
End of story.
The rest is merely speculation (needless speculation, needless complication), needlessly delaying OA.
"The problem with the self-archiving argument is that, until now at least, its results are unimpressive" OA self-archiving's results to date are indeed unimpressive.
I do not disagree at all -but compared to what?
Certainly not compared to the results of OA publishing, since OA self-archiving has generated 3 times as much OA as has OA publishing and is probably growing much faster too.
Green is only unimpressive relative to its own immediate potential for generating OA, which is at least 92%, compared to Gold's 5%.
In that respect, it can be said that Gold, at 5%, is much closer to its full immediate growth potential, whereas Green, at 15%, is not.
But surely the remedy for that is to devote more time, attention and energy to exploiting Green's full immediate potential!
That is what the impending self-archiving mandates will do.
In the meanwhile, however, it would help if (1) less time and attention were devoted exclusively to Gold, as if OA publishing and OA were the same thing, and if (2) the Gold option were always balanced by pointing out the Green option too.
(Green has for several years now adopted the unified OA provision strategy: 'If there is a suitable Gold journal for your paper, publish it there; if not, publish it in a Green journal and self-archive it.'
Just taking that step of fairly presenting the two options at all times would go a long way toward redressing the imbalance between Gold and Green.)
"More important still, a majority of scientists have not been swayed either" Not just more important: most important.
Indeed the problem of "swaying" researchers to provide the OA that they are purported to want and need so much is the only real challenge for OA.
And it is already clear what will meet that challenge: (1) Empirical evidence of the OA impact advantage [5] plus (2) an OA self-archiving mandate on the part of researchers' institutions and research funders to ensure that advantage is taken of that advantage by naturally extending their existing 'publish or perish' mandate to 'publish and self-archive' (so as to maximise the access to, and the usage and impact of, your articles) [6].
And we already know from a recent survey that just as they currently comply with their 'publish or perish' mandate, most researchers report they will not self-archive if it is not mandated, but they will self-archive and self-archive willingly -if ever it is mandated by their institutions or funders [7].
"the number of articles published in "gold" journals (5%)... is often contrasted with the total number of articles published under "green" titles (85% or more), without any mention.. that a majority of those are not actually...in Open Access repositories" On the contrary, it is always stated very explicitly (including in an article co-appearing in the very same issue as J-CG's article!)
[8] that whereas 93% of journals are green, only 20% of articles are OA, 15% of them OA via self-archiving!
This fact is not being concealed, it is being trumpeted, in order to point out that if researchers really want and need OA and its benefits in terms of access and impact as much as they are described (by OA advocates of both the Green and Gold hue) as wanting and needing it, then it is up to researchers to provide it particularly where they have even been given their publisher's green light to go ahead and do so!
But it is clear that just as far fewer researchers would publish anything at all (despite the advantages of publishing -advantages that researchers presumably want and need) if it were not for their institutions' and research funders' "publish or perish" mandate to do so, so researchers will likewise not self-archive until their institutions and research funders make their employment, salary and research funding conditional on their doing so.
(Institutions and funders already do this implicitly, in making researchers' employment, salary and research funding conditional not only on publication, but on the impact of publication.
Since OA maximises impact, this implicit causal connection and contingency now simply needs to be formalised explicitly.)
"Institutional archives are being created, but need to be filled more quickly, by authors, with research journal papers.
Attracting authors and their papers requires evidence of services that will improve the visibility and impact of their works" Correct, and we are gathering and disseminating the requisite evidence [9].
However, as noted, this evidence, and the probability of enhanced usage and impact to which they attest, are still not enough to induce a high or fast enough rate of OA-provision, just as the probability of the usage and impact that will result from publishing at all are not enough to induce publishing: The incentive to provide OA, like the incentive to publish, must be made explicit, as being among the formal conditions for employment, promotion and research funding, much the way both publishing and research impact are already among the conditions for employment, promotion and research funding.
"No wonder... scientists are not rushing to self-archive; no wonder... the "self-archiving" side has welcomed mandating "self-archive" ...
If research institutions... through their promotion and tenure procedures, and the granting agencies, through their evaluation procedures, favor documents in Open Access.. then Open Access will indeed progress.
But...[this] argument [is] totally independent [of] the impact advantage argument" Institutions and funders mandating OA for their research output has nothing to do with the "impact advantage argument" (and evidence)?
One might as well say that the existing weight that institutions and funders place on journal impact factors has nothing to do with impact either!
The very reason for OA itself, and the institutional and funder rationale for mandating that OA should be provided (by self-archiving) has everything to do with impact.
It is in order to maximise the visibility, usage impact and citation impact of their research output -instead of continuing to limit it to only those users whose institutions can afford to pay for access -that universities and granting agencies are now planning to mandate self-archiving: (Does J-CG imagine, instead, that they are mandating OA in order to reform the publishing system or to solve the journal pricing/affordability problem?)
"Where governments decide to move in and press for Open Access publications, a great deal of... political groundwork [is needed].
But... the need to rely on mandating shows that the "self-archiving" side cannot avoid political maneuvers either" Governments cannot and do not "move in and press for Open Access publications": Whom can they press, how, to do what?
All that governments can do is to cover OA journal authors' publication fees.
What they can press for is Open Access itself.
Research funders can require their grantees to provide OA to their funded research findings -either by self-archiving all the resulting non-OA journals articles (Green) or (if a suitable journal exists) by publishing them instead in an OA journal (Gold) -as a precondition for receiving research funding at all.
And research funders now seem well on the way to pressing for exactly that.
If/when they do, we will all be well on the way to 100% OA [10].
"Ultimately, the point of the "gold" road is to create intellectual value in new and better ways.
To achieve this goal, the "gold" road must pay attention to more than the impact advantage that addresses only the author side of the scientist.
A scientist is also a hurried reader and value can be built out of better searching, retrieving, and navigating tools...
The "gold" projects should strive to collaborate to create citation links and indices" "Create intellectual value"?
Is it not simpler and more theory-neutral to say that OA journals make their articles OA, and charge the author-institution, whereas non-OA journals charge the user-institution?
Do we really need the theorizing about "creating intellectual value"?
After all, we all know what journals do: they implement peer review and tag the result with the journal's name, and its associated track-record for quality.
OA and non-OA journals both do that; they just charge different parties for it.
Gold journals should certainly collaborate and citation-link, and they do.
But so do all the non-gold journals (green and grey) do the same.
And so do OA Archives and harvesters, like Citebase [11].
So what is the point here?
"I would suggest starting not with peer-reviewed articles, but rather with doctoral dissertations [emphasis added]" Here we have arrived at the heart of J-CG's proposal.
OA's target is peer-reviewed articles.
Only 20% of them are OA to date.
And J-CG suggests that we not "start" with them, but with self-archiving dissertations (some of which are being self-archived already) [12].
Why are we being asked to start our mixing match with dissertations?
(The answer will shortly become apparent: We will never in fact be moving on to self-archiving peer-reviewed journal articles, in J-CG's recommended mix/match scenario: We will instead somehow it is never specified quite how (but one guesses that it is by going on to self-archive unrefereed preprints rather than peer-reviewed journal articles) segue into the construction, bottom-up, of a brand new alternative peer review and publication system, somehow, on top of these dissertations, to replace the existing peer-reviewed journals.
This is in fact J-CG's version of the Golden road, of creating OA journals; it is not a mix-and-match of green and gold at all!
It is an independent reinvention of the entire wheel.
The first step is new forms of "quality evaluation" -arising, somehow, out of new ways of "promoting the intellectual value" of doctoral dissertations...) "an inter-institutional strategy to promote the intellectual value, authority, and prestige of doctoral theses could easily provide the testing ground for the emergence of inter-institutional disciplinary archives" At a time when out of 2.5 million annual peer-reviewed articles in 24,000 journals -all of them already having whatever intellectual value they already have -only 20% are OA, we are being bidden to self-archive dissertations and to promote their intellectual value!
But is not it the other 80% of those already evaluated but still inaccessible articles that we really need?
And is this, then, the promised alterative green-and-gold mix-and-match proposal?
"Evaluation Levels: The metadata should also be extended to provide some indication of quality.
It could be designed to help identify the identity and the nature of the evaluating body that passes judgment over the documents in the repository.
In other words, the metadata should help identify the quality, nature, and procedures of groups that begin to work as editorial boards would.
The metadata could also help design evaluations [sic] scales imagine a one brain, two brain, ... n-brain scale, similar to a Michelin guide for restaurants" Quality metadata?
For dissertations?
Whatever for?
We are not trying to create a dissertation peer-review service.
We are trying to provide OA for the other 80% of already peer-reviewed articles; and their "indication of quality" is the name of the journal that already performed the peer review on them!
For journal articles, the "evaluating body" is the journal, tagged by its name.
For dissertations, who knows?
(And who cares, insofar as OA is concerned?
Quality-tagging dissertations has nothing to do with OA.)
We do not need a Michelin guide to journal articles!
We just need access to the articles, and their journal names!
Here we are instead busy reinventing peer review, in hitherto untested and (as we shall see) rather extravagant new forms: "This leads to a new project: If various universities create consortia of disciplinary repositories, then nothing prevents them from designing procedures to create various levels of peer review evaluation, e.g., institutional, consortial, regional, national, international" This is a new project indeed!
For the old project was to provide Open Access to the remaining 80% of the existing 2.5 million annual articles in the existing 24,000 peer-reviewed journals.
Now we are talking about what?
Reviewing the peer review?
Re-doing the peer review?
Replacing the peer review?
I suspect that driven by his publication-reform theory what J-CG is really contemplating here is entirely replacing the non-OA journals in which 95% of these self-archived articles are currently being published!
But OA itself is just about providing free, online access to those peer-reviewed journal articles, not about wresting them from the journals that published them, and from their peer-review at least not OA via the Green road of self-archiving.
Nor is that what a journal means in giving its green light to self-archiving: that you may treat my published articles as if they had never been peer-reviewed and published, and simply start the whole process anew!
Nor is there any point in starting the whole process anew, if it was done properly the first time.
It is hard enough to get qualified referees to review papers once, let alone to redo it (many times?
at many "levels"?)
all over again.
Nor is that what the authors or the would-be users of those already peer-reviewed, published articles need or want.
What authors and users want is Open Access to those articles.
How did we get into this bizarre situation?
It was by accepting the invitation to populate the OA Archives with dissertations instead of peer-reviewed journal articles, as a "testing ground."
Apparently, we are never to graduate to self-archiving journal articles (Green) at all: Rather, we are to rebuild the whole publication system from the bottom up, starting with dissertations, and then generalizing and applying it to the unrefereed preprints of articles-to-be.
(J-CG has wrongly inferred or imputed that "Green" means mainly the self-archiving of unrefereed preprints, rather than the peer-reviewed, published postprints that are OA's main target!)
In other words, we are to reform the publication system after all, just as J-CG recommended.
Never mind about providing Open Access to that other 80% of existing journal articles: We will instead create new evaluation bodies (Gold).
We have time, and surely all parties will eventually go along with this project (in particular, all those sluggish authors who had not been willing even to self-archive...).
They are to be weaned from their current journals and redirected instead to it is not yet altogether clear what, but apparently something along the lines of: "various levels of peer review evaluation, e.g., institutional, consortial, regional, national, international"... "At that point, a recognised hierarchy of evaluation levels can begin to emerge [emphasis added]... clearly identifiable through the metadata... [indicating] what level of peer review and evaluation is being used... [and] which group is backing it.
In effect, this is what a journal does and... how it acquires some branding ability" In effect, the current journal system is what J-CG is proposing (because 95% of journals have obstinately declined to go Gold) to replace (bottom-up, starting with dissertations) with the above "emergent" Gold system, consisting of "a recognised hierarchy of evaluation levels" ("clearly identifiable through the metadata").
And this alternate "branding" system, starting with dissertations, is to emerge as a result of mixing-and-matching green-and-gold.
What follows is speculation piled upon speculation, all grounded in this initial premise (that if you cannot convert them, replace them): "An international registry of such evaluation procedures and of the teams of scholars involved could then be developed... [to] lend transparency and credibility to these value-building procedures.
In this fashion, a relatively orderly framework for expanded peer review and evaluation can emerge" J-CG has here managed to resurrect, almost exactly, the very same incoherence that beset Harold Varmus's original 1999 E-biomed proposal, which could never quite decide whether what was being proposed was: (1) free access to journal articles, (2) an archive in which to self-archive articles to make them freely accessible, (3) a rival publisher or publishers to lure away authors from existing journals (4) an alternative kind of journal or journals, with alternative kinds of peer review, or (5) all of the foregoing [13].
That somewhat mixed-up and ill-matched 1999 vision is what has since become gradually more sorted out and focused in the ensuing years, as follows: First, PubMed Central [14] was created (February, 2000) as a central OA archive in which publishers were invited to deposit their contents six months after publication.
When few publishers took up that invitation, the Public Library of Science (PloS) was founded (October 2000) and circulated an Open Letter, signed by 34,000 biomedical researchers the world over, demanding that existing journals should go Gold [15].
When that too failed, PLoS became an Open Access Publisher (2001) and has since launched two Gold journals [16] (forgetting altogether about green self-archiving).
Most recently (2004), perhaps having noticed that the golden road to OA is a rather long and slow one, PLoS again took up the green road of self-archiving by helping to promote the proposed NIH public-access policy (which would request that all articles resulting from NIH-funded research should be self-archived in PubMed Central within 6 months of publication) [17].
J-CG now proposes to resurrect something very much like the original 1999 matchless E-biomed mix once again!
I would like to make the counter-proposal that once was enough: that we should forget about trying to rebuild the publishing system bottom up (with a vague, untested, speculative, and probably incoherent mix-and-match model of archiving and publishing) and instead reinforce the road that Harold Varmus, PLoS, the Wellcome Trust, the UK Government Select Committee, and many others have lately rejoined (and the one they would have been better off taking in the first place) -the green road to OA -by promoting the OA self-archiving of the remaining 80% of the existing journal literature as a condition of research funding (and employment).
"New Journal Models: Transparency, prestige, and rigor are needed to create credible value... something like "overlay journals"[will] begin to emerge and... gradually acquire visibility and respect.
At that point, the institutional repositories will have effectively morphed and matured into a consortium-based network of repositories with a rich set of value-creation tools and increasingly recognised names or labels" The trouble is that all the "morphing" so far is happening only in the mind of the passive speculator; and meanwhile 80% of articles continue to be inaccessible to those would-be users who cannot afford access yet that was supposed to be the problem OA was remedying.
Just like E-biomed and "deconstructed journals," "overlay journals" are at the moment figments of the armchair theorist's imagination.
Moreover, it is not even clear what "overlay journals" means.
If it just means conventional journals (whether hybrid or online-only) implementing online peer review by having submissions deposited on a Web site and then directing referees and revised drafts to the site, then most journals are already overlay journals in this banal sense.
If "overlay journals" means journals that are online only, then that is nothing new or interesting either.
If it means that the archive to which the referees go to find the paper and where revised drafts are put is not the journal's Web site but an OA Archive (whether institutional or central), then that too is uninteresting -just a trivial (and quite natural) implementational variant of a standard feature of extant journals and conventional (online) peer review [18].
If the journal itself performs only peer review and certification, and the archives do all access-provision and archiving, then this may have some potential interest, some day -but there exist at most a handful of journals that resemble that description today, and between them and the remaining 99.99% of journals is the still unsettled future of OA (Gold) journals and their cost-recovery model [19].
So overlay journals are still just an armchair speculation: But 100% OA need not be and it certainly need not wait for the "morphing" of the current 24,000 journals into overlay journals.
"As a result of this evolution... original submissions will be addressed to these new channels of scientific communication [overlay journals]... in parallel with, the fact [they] will have been already "published" in traditional journals.
This is where the importance of "self-archiving" really finds its anchoring point... All this can be achieved by treating the "self-archiving" strategy as a transition phase on the way to the "gold" objective" It is hard to see how an article that has already been published in a traditional journal can become an "original submission" to an "overlay journal" harder still to see this as self-archiving's real "anchoring point."
Perhaps self-archiving should just stick to the more mundane task of providing immediate OA to the remaining 80% of the current journal literature, rather than waiting for this hypothetical new multilevel, multivalent system to evolve?
The only "transition phase" that is worth talking about (and is tested, and visible, and reachable) is the transition from today's 20% OA to 100% OA via self-archiving.
After that, nolo contendere and hypotheses non fingo!
"Open Access should not be the tactical tool of a few, elite, established, scientists that want to enhance their careers and little else" No one has suggested OA is, or should be the tactical tool of a few, elite, established, scientists.
It is J-CG, however, who suggested (without saying how, or why) that impact enhancement through OA self-archiving would only benefit the elite, established scientists.
The analysis by author/article seniority and quality-level is yet to be done, but there is no particular reason to expect that the OA-impact advantage will be only, or even mostly, at the top.
Conclusion What is needed today is already quite clear: 100% OA by the fastest and surest means possible.
It is also clear what that means is: self-archiving (Green), which now needs to be mandated by researchers' institutions and funders.
There is also scope both for the growth of OA journals (Gold) and for experimentation with hypothetical new systems in parallel with the self-archiving of all peer-reviewed, published journal articles (Green) but not in place of it.
Let there be no mix-up about that!
References All quotes are from: Serials Review 30(4) 2004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.005 For a fuller version of this critique, see: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/mixcrit.html ; Editor's note: some useful information on Serials Review 30(4) 2004 is available at http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0412/msg00075.html Richard Poynder, "Ten Years After" Information Today 29(9) 2004. http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml Budapest Open Access Initiative.
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml A Keystroke Koan for our Open Access Times.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3061.html Journal Self-Archiving Policy Registry.
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Bibliography of Open Access Impact Advantage Studies.
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html Registry of Institutional Open Access Provision Policies.
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php Swan, A & Brown, S. Authors and open access publishing.
Learned Publishing 17 (3) 2005 http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Authors_and_open_access_publishing.pdf Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access, Serials Review 30 (4) 2004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.013 Open Access Impact Studies: http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm Directory of Institutions with Open Access Policies.
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php Citebase scientometric search engine http://citebase.eprints.org/ Open Access Dissertation Archives.
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?page=all&type=theses Critique of e-Biomed Proposal.
http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45 PubMed Central.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ PLoS Open Letter to Publishers.
http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml PLoS Journals.
http://www.plos.org/journals/ Proposed NIH Public Access Policy, http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html Online Peer Review Innovations.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/peerev.ppt Harnad, S. "For Whom the Gate Tolls?"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2 Author Details Stevan Harnad Canada Research Chair Université du Québec à Montréal Email: mailto:harnad@uqam.ca Web site: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Return to top Article Title: "Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold" Author: Stevan Harnad Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/harnad/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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MIMAS Ten Years on Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MIMAS Ten Years on Buzz data software dissemination portfolio infrastructure archives copyright copac e-science url research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Julia Chruszcz looks at the ten years of MIMAS as a JISC-designated national data centre.
The Joint Information Systems Committee [1] was founded by the Higher Education Funding Councils in 1993.
It quickly established its sub-committees, one of which, the Information Systems Sub-committee (ISSC), reflected JISC’s interest in networked information services and datasets.
At its May 1993 meeting, the ISSC designated Manchester and Bath as National Data Centres.
(EDINA became a JISC-designated national data centre a few years later).
Over the last ten years there have been advances to the Information Systems infrastructure within universities enabling new and advanced use of online information within research and teaching.
A decade of computing and the growth of the “information age” has brought massive change to the data services MIMAS [2] provides and the way in which they are used within institutions.
Ten years ago we were oblivious to the impact the World Wide Web would make.
We ran no subscription services, focusing upon the Census, Government Surveys, Time Series and an extensive application software service.
Users by necessity had to be very computer literate and get to grips with complex applications in order to access and analyse the data they required.
This was a far cry from the intuitive interfaces of today.
“Remote terminal access” was the norm for users around the country and a gigabyte of storage was a significant amount.
Today MIMAS provides services to over 250 institutions in the UK and beyond.
The populations within each institution that might be eligible and/or interested in the use of external services is increasing substantially.
The MIMAS portfolio currently includes ISI Web of Science, the Archives Hub and the British Library zetoc service, CrossFire, International Time Series, Satellite data, JSTOR, COPAC, NLN Learning Materials, and recent UK Census statistics.
As well as the JISC, MIMAS is also supported by ESRC, the British Library, the Consortium of Univerisity Research Libraries and JSTOR.
A few facts about some of the JISC-supported services at MIMAS include: The web page access to date on the MIMAS main server alone is over 430 million accesses (241M “pages”) and 3.3 terabytes downloaded by browsers.
MIMAS hosts nearly 5 terabytes of data, contained in over 40 strategic datasets, available to Higher and Further Education Institutions throughout the UK and beyond.
COPAC over 22 million records, in more than 300 languages, from 23 institutions including the British Library.
Up to c. 400,000 search sessions and up to c. 2 million web page accesses per month.
The Archives Hub contains information about a very broad range of subjects.
For instance, the Hub service team regularly receives phone calls about sewing threads and net curtains, as a consequence of the service holding information about the Coats Viyella archives.
They have also been e-mailed about the price of a pint of Newcastle Brown, courtesy of the Scottish and Newcastle Brewery collection.
zetoc contains 20 million article records from 20,000 journals and 10,000 are added every night.
The zetoc Alert feature now has over 18,000 users who, on average, have 1.5 lists each covering 9 journal titles.
Over 8,000 emails are sent each night.
(It is possible to view the zetoc Usage Statistics [3]).
The ISI Web of Science Service for UK Education, with 1,200 concurrent users, is the largest instance in the world.
During term time we deal with around 10,000 sessions per day, executing 35,000 searches.
The Census Dissemination Unit at MIMAS currently provides support and access to aggregate statistics from the 1981 and 1991 UK Censuses of Population.
The service is currently being expanded to incorporate statistics from the 1971 Census and from the 2001 census as these become available during the first half of 2003.
Census-taking is a major logistical undertaking involving the collection and analysis of huge volumes of information.
English and Welsh forms alone from the 2001 Census occupy over 40 miles of linear shelving at the Office for National Statistics.
Processing these forms will provide approximately 2,500,000,000 items of information relating to socio-economic and demographic conditions in the UK.
In addition to the hosting of services, MIMAS is involved with a number of research and development projects, including work on the JISC’s Information Environment development, the GRID and eScience.
Over the past ten years MIMAS has been a story of collaboration across the sector with many of the services only made possible by the knowledge and support of colleagues elsewhere.
Partners of particular note are the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, the UK Data Archive, CURL Libraries, the British Library, UKOLN, the contributors to the Archives Hub, EDINA, and the universities of UMIST, MMU, Liverpool, Leeds, UCL.
There are many individuals who have offered their support over the years, attending steering groups and user groups, and promoting JISC services within their own institutions.
2003 promises to be the start of another challenging decade for MIMAS.
30 June saw the official launch in London of the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS)[4].
It is a collaborative venture between: the UK Data Archive (UKDA) and the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), both based at the University of Essex; and Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS) and the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research (CCSR) both at the University of Manchester.
As part of the new ESRC/JISC-funded [5] Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS), an International Data Service (IDS) has been established.
The IDS will provide access to, and support for, a range of international datasets both macro and micro sources.
The central aims of the service are to promote and facilitate increased and more effective use of international datasets in research, learning and teaching across a range of disciplines.
The service is led by MIMAS with support from the UKDA at Essex.
Key deliverables include the provision of Web-based access to regularly updated time series datasets produced by organisations such as the OECD and the IMF.
The IDS will also be providing training courses, a helpdesk, user workshops and a range of other value-added services to promote the databanks and encourage their use in teaching and research.
On 2 July 2003 we marked our 10th anniversary at the MIMAS Open Forum [6].
This annual event normally attracts over 100 people, bringing together users, teachers and support staff interested in online information and learning resources, in UK higher and further education, and presents news of current and future developments at MIMAS and in the academic information environment.
There are workshops and opportunities to meet staff.
On 16 July the Archives Hub [7] held a major national event to mark the first three years’ development and service and to launch the next phase of development and content creation.
In September we are hoping to have an event to launch the ISI Web of Knowledge [8] which we are in the process of launching during the summer.
All in all a busy and eventful year with many positive developments and services to higher and further education.
References The Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ MIMAS http://www.mimas.ac.uk/ zetoc Usage Statistics http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/stats/ Economic & Social Data Service http://www.esds.ac.uk/ Economic & Social Research Council http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ The MIMAS Open Forum http://www.mimas.ac.uk/news/mof2003/ The Archives Hub http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk ISI Web of Knowledge and Web of Science Version 5 Transitional Phase and Upgrade http://www.mimas.ac.uk/news/wos-apr03.html Author Details Julia Chruszcz Director of National Data Services Manchester Computing Manchester University Email: julia@man.ac.uk Web site: http://www.mimas.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “MIMAS Ten Years On” Author: Julia Chruszcz Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/mimas/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 36 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 36 Buzz data database usability metadata copyright preservation multimedia visualisation gis interoperability privacy algorithm url research semiotic bibliometrics Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day takes a detailed look at the structure and content of this hardy annual.
The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST ) [1] will already be familiar to many readers of Ariadne.
It is an important annual publication containing review articles on many topics of relevance to library and information science, published on behalf of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) [2].
Volume 36 is the first volume to be edited by Blaise Cronin of Indiana University, in succession to Martha Williams who edited ARIST from volumes 11 to 35.
One of the most noticeable changes that the new editor has introduced is the use of the American Psychological Association (APA) referencing style, which brings it into line with the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and many other journals.
Cronin has arranged the chapters in ARIST vol.
36 into five sections.
The first of these concerns ‘communication and collaboration’ and the opening chapter is a review of scholarly communication and bibliometrics by Christine Borgman and Jonathan Furner of the University of California, Los Angeles.
While bibliometrics has been covered in ARIST before, Borgman and Furner consider that the recent development of electronic scholarly communication means that it is a useful subject to revisit.
Their chapter covers topics like link analysis (e.g., Google’s PageRank algorithm [3]) the process of writing and submitting documents, and collaboration.
They note (p. 55) that bibliometric studies of collaboration (usually evidenced by the number of co-authors) had often concluded that the amount of collaboration between scholars is growing.
Thomas Finholt of the University of Michigan follows up this theme in the following chapter on ‘collaboratories.’ These have been defined by William Wulf [4] as a “… center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to geographical location interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information in digital libraries.” Finholt first outlines the practical development of selected collaboratories, before discussing some of the lessons learned and the way that they might develop in the future.
This chapter is followed by a review of computer-mediated communication (CMC) on the Internet by Susan Herring of Indiana University.
She introduces CMC types in terms of their ‘mode,’ e.g.
e-mail, discussion lists, etc., and ends her review with a brief look at some current issues, e.g.
freedom of expression, anonymity, trust, privacy, etc.
The second section of ARIST volume 36 is about ‘knowledge discovery.’ The opening chapter is a review of organisational knowledge and communities of practice by Elisabeth Davenport and Hazel Hall of Napier University, Edinburgh.
Communities of practice are groups of professionals who interact and thereby embody a store of common knowledge (p. 171).
The authors identify and describe three domains that have contributed to current concepts of communities of practice: situated learning, distributed cognition and communication studies.
The following chapter is on discovering information in context by Paul Solomon of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The author investigates a recent trend in recent information science research to look in more detail at the wider contexts of information discovery, i.e.
the interactions of people, technology, and social structures.
After an outline of theoretical foundations and a review of some recent research, Solomon concludes his chapter with a consideration of the various ways in which the enhanced understanding of information discovery as a process could be translated into system design.
This chapter is followed by a review of data mining by Gerald Benoît of the University of Kentucky.
This chapter supplements older reviews of “Data mining and knowledge discovery” and “Text mining” that appeared in ARIST volumes 32 and 34 [5], [6].
Benoît opens his chapter by noting the terminological confusion that sometimes arises when discussing data mining.
He views it as one aspect of the wider subject of knowledge discovery in databases, “emphasising the cleaning, warehousing, mining and interactive visualization of knowledge discovery in databases” (p. 266).
The importance of data mining is enhanced by the growing dependence of science on exceptionally large volumes of data, e.g.
for genomics or geospatial research.
Benoît first outlines some of the main data mining processes and methodologies, emphasising the importance of research activity in cognate fields, e.g.
machine learning, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
The chapter identifies several critical challenges, including problems with data representation and reduction, algorithm design, the inexperience of users, the growing importance of domain-specific applications, and architectures.
Benoît notes that the Internet is playing an increasingly important role in data mining, especially in commercial contexts.
Many of the examples given in the chapter concern the corporate use of data mining, rather than its role in scientific research.
Those interested further in the mining of scientific data could supplement this chapter by referring to the review published in a recent volume of Advances in Computers [7].
Section three concerns ‘Intelligence and strategy.’ The opening chapter is by Philip Davies of the University of Malaya and is entitled “Intelligence, information technology, and information warfare.” This provides a state-of-the-art review of intelligence and information warfare in the context of national security, but its main focus is on the situation in the US, UK and Canada.
The chapter covers topics like information warfare, hacking, counterintelligence, and other subjects of relevance to national security.
As with some present-day journalism, the frequent but perhaps inevitable use of intelligence world jargon (e.g., psyops, HUMINT, WMDs, etc.)
sometimes irritates, but the chapter does provide a good introductory overview of this increasingly relevant topic.
The following chapter by Pierrette Bergeron and Christine Hillier of the Université de Montréal reviews its commercial equivalent, known as ‘competitive intelligence’ (CI).
The authors note that this is part of strategic information management, and that it should “stimulate an organisation’s creativeness, innovativeness, and willingness to change” (pp.
357-8).
After a quick review of developments between 1994 and 2000, Bergeron and Hillier outline the general CI process and the analytical techniques used, including benchmarking, patent analysis and bibliometrics.
Further sections review CI systems, implementation issues and training.
The authors note that formal CI practice is most often found in large organisations, and that there have been few studies made of CI in small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
Despite the growing importance of the topic, Bergeron and Hillier concede that much of the current literature contains little of enduring value and that little attention is being paid to understanding CI needs and uses.
They conclude that in order to grow, CI “requires the development of sound, multidisciplinary research from which results can be appropriately transferred and applied within training programs and practices” (p. 379).
Section four concerns ‘information theory.’ The opening chapter is by Ian Cornelius of University College Dublin and attempts to answer the question of whether information science has a theory of information.
This rather complex chapter looks at understandings of information both in and outside information science (e.g.
semiotics and philosophy).
Cornelius concludes that information scientists need to be clear as to why they seek a theory of information, reflecting that “until we know what it is that we cannot do without a theory of information, we will be unlikely to get one” (p. 421).
The next chapter in this section is on social informatics and is by Steve Sawyer of Pennsylvania State University and Kristin Eschenfelder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The authors understand social informatics as the research field that focuses on the relationships between information and communications technologies and their wider social contexts.
Like many of the other subjects reviewed in this volume of ARIST, this is a very interdisciplinary topic, drawing on perspectives from outside information science, e.g.
economics, psychology and sociology.
Sawyer and Eschenfelder organise their review of the literature around some of the common findings that arise from social informatics research.
The final chapter in this section is a review of ‘intellectual capital’ by Herbert Snyder of Fort Lewis College and Jennifer Burek Pierce of the Catholic University of America.
This is a topic of great interest in an era when a large proportion of the value of many companies seems to be based on intangible knowledge assets like trademarks or employee know-how.
After some introductory definitions, Snyder and Pierce provide a short history of the concept of intellectual capital, outline approaches to its measurement, and indicate how it is linked with knowledge management.
The final section of the volume concerns “technology and service delivery.” The opening chapter offers a review of digital libraries by Edward Fox of the Virginia Polytechnic University and Shalini Urs of the University of Mysore.
This is the first review of digital libraries to be included in ARIST, and the chapter attempts to identify trends and future research directions.
The authors note that the development of digital libraries has gone hand-in-hand with technological development, chiefly in terms of computational, networking and presentational technologies, e.g.
increases in computing power, database management techniques, multimedia capabilities, the Internet protocols, markup languages, etc.
They argue that the “synergistic effects of technologies, along with societal response and support, have helped the emergence, accelerated growth, and continued support of DLs” (p. 507).
The chapter also notes that the digital library concept has different meanings for different professional groups, and that DLs have a wide range of stakeholders, including, governments, publishers, educators, librarians, archivists, researchers, etc.
For these reasons, digital libraries are difficult to define to everyone’s satisfaction.
Further sections of the chapter go into more detail on digital library content (e.g., creation, organisation, resource discovery, etc.
), services (e.g., retrieval, usability, etc.
), management (e.g., preservation), and perhaps those most difficult of all to deal with social, economic and legal issues.
These briefly introduce a wide range of issues, including metadata, architectures, interoperability and human factors.
The chapter provides a good overview of recent digital library developments, but has its strongest focus on the US context, e.g.
the Digital Library Initiative (DLI) projects and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).
The final chapter is a review of health informatics by Marie Russell of the Victoria University of Wellington and the consultant Michael Brittain.
This supplements an older review of health informatics that was published in ARIST in 1994 [8].
Health informatics has (elsewhere) been defined as “the application of IT to the management of health information or the systematic use of data to manage and provide health services” [9].
In this chapter, Russell and Brittain first review health informatics in relation to its wider contexts, including hospital management systems, consumer-health information, electronic medical records, and the support of primary care.
They then look in more detail at the implications of evidence-based medicine for health informatics, e.g.
the value it places on finding and using up-to-date information.
A third section outlines the growing role of the Internet in health provision, particularly for patient information.
ARIST volume 36 is a large volume that is unlikely to be read from cover-to-cover.
Instead, readers will probably prefer to consult particular chapters and will then follow up by tracing some of the many resources cited in the text.
In total, the volume contains over 2,300 citations, so there is plenty of scope for further reading.
It is very hard to generalise from a volume that contains chapters on so many distinct subjects, but I was struck by a couple of things while reading this book.
Firstly, that many of the subjects covered were just emerging as a discipline (or sub-discipline) in their own right.
Several of the chapters mentioned the existence of new journals and specialised conferences, e.g.
for competitive intelligence or digital libraries.
In many cases, the recent emergence of topics means that they are often multidisciplinary, drawing not just on traditional information science, but also on subjects like psychology, management, ethnology, and computer science.
Secondly, around a quarter of the chapters in this volume had their major focus on the commercial and business use of information.
While it may not be sensible to read too much into this, it shows the continuing importance of the business perspective for information science.
The volume contains a very useful 61-page index, but there is no cumulative index to other volumes in the series.
ARIST has been criticised in the past for its American bias [10] and dependence on English-language publications [11].
With regard to the former, it is perhaps significant, therefore, to note that nine of the twenty contributors to volume 36 are currently based outside the US; three of these in the UK, two in Canada, the remainder in India, Ireland, Malaysia and New Zealand.
The geographical coverage of the chapters varies.
For example, the chapter on digital libraries concentrates largely on US initiatives, with an occasional pointer to developments in Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
Other chapters e.g.
the reviews of health informatics and intelligence cover the UK situation in more detail.
However, with the important exception of the French-language references in the chapter on competitive intelligence, volume 36 of ARIST still almost exclusively concentrates on English-language publications.
While the volume has been attractively produced, I felt that the numbering of sections might help with navigation.
It is also perhaps worth noting that some of the chapters are easier to read than others.
I personally found the chapters on communities of practice and information theory to be heavy-going, while some individual sentences elsewhere are difficult to understand, e.g.
“the structure of the system and the kinds of actions the system recognizes or permits cut the system off from other systems through, for instance, a lack of congruence of terminology or fit with the activities with other systems” (p. 233).
Considering the size of the volume, however, there are very few obvious errors.
I noticed a couple of misprints, chiefly inconsistencies in citation styles (e.g.
on pp.
261, 388) or in the treatment of diacritics (e.g., the misspelling of Kovács on pp.
543, 573).
The price (and nature) of the volume means that it will not grace the bookshelves of many students, but many of the individual chapters would represent a very good starting point for investigating a new topic of interest.
I would particularly recommend the chapters on scholarly communication and bibliometrics, collaboratories, digital libraries, and health informatics.
I am sure that many of the other chapters would also be of interest to readers of Ariadne.
To sum up, Cronin and his contributors have produced a high-quality volume that is worthy of its predecessors.
References Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.
Available at: http://www.asis.org/Publications/ARIST/ The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST).
Available at: http://www.asis.org/ Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1-7), April 1998, 107-117.
Also available at: http://dbpubs.stanford.edu/pub/1998-8 Cited in: Richard T. Kouzes, James D. Myers and William A. Wulf, “Collaboratories: doing science on the Internet,” Computer, 29(8), August 1996, 40-46.
Walter J. Trybula, “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery,” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 32, 1997, 197-229.
Walter J. Trybula, “Text mining,” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 34, 1999, 385-419.
Naren Ramakrishnan and Ananth Y. Grama, “Mining scientific data,” Advances in Computers, 55, 2001, 119-169.
Jennifer MacDougall and J. Michael Brittain, “Health informatics,” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 29, 1994, 183-217.
J. Michael Brittain, Jennifer MacDougall and Robert Gann, “Health informatics: an overview,” Journal of Documentation, 52(4), 1996, 421-448.
For example: R. T. Bottle, “References for reviews” [letter], Journal of Information Science, 15, 1989, 130.
Maurice B.
Line “Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol 35, 2001” [book review], Library Management, 23(6⁄7), 2002, 345-346.
Author Details Michael Day UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 36, 2002” Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/day-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: Creating Websites for E-citizens -The Public Library Web Managers Workshop 2002 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: Creating Websites for E-citizens -The Public Library Web Managers Workshop 2002 Buzz data software framework html rss xml usability metadata css accessibility vocabularies video cataloguing graphics multimedia gif smil svg ebook ict interoperability e-government intranet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod reports on the Public Library Web Managers workshop, November 2002, held in Bath.
Background to the workshop The third Public Library Web Managers workshop to be organised by UKOLN was held at the University of Bath on the 5th and 6th of November 2002.
This year’s event aimed to provide public library web managers with a brief respite from the trials and tribulations of the workplace, and the chance to share networking experiences with colleagues up and down the country.
It also aimed to bring together some key speakers on this year’s hot topic –e-government (electronic government).
The previous two workshops took place in 1999 and 2000 [1], and if we could wind back the clock to the event in 2000 I think we might appreciate just how far public libraries have come in a relatively short space of time.
If two weeks is a long time in politics, then two years in public libraries is an eon.
The £100 million People’s Network initiative is providing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) learning centres in every UK public library, and very soon we should see computers rubbing shoulders with long-established bookstock in 98% of public libraries [2].
Staff in public libraries are now grappling with a whole new set of issues revolving around the provision of community based networked services.
From choosing filtering software and content management systems, to designing accessible web sites and building e-content – staff are having to plan ahead for the ultimate goal, i.e.
the implementation of web-based government.
Libraries are now technologically capable of playing a key role in their local authorities’ e-government strategy.
They now have the hardware, although broadband network connectivity (defined as at least 2mb) is not yet available in all libraries, and libraries are able to offer access to the Internet, email and a range of learning opportunities.
Having galloped the first furlong, public libraries now have to think about completing the course.
They have to develop electronic services and content which not only meet the criteria of government in terms of interoperability and usability, but which are designed with the end-user in mind.
Ordinary citizens, in particular, the socially excluded groups who tend to be big users of government and council services, must be able to locate web-based services with ease.
Having found a service or resource, someone without knowledge or any significant experience in using the Internet, must then be able to complete an online transaction with ease, or must be able to find the information they require, without the need for specific search skills.
This year’s workshop Creating websites for e-citizens: developing public library websites for 2005 – was the topic of this year’s even and it tried to address some of the issues surrounding e-government.
The UK government aims to provide online access to national and local government services by 2005, and if this vision is to become reality, local and national government information systems must ‘join up’ – which means they must be interoperable, and this is where the e-GIF (the e-Government Interoperability Framework) [3] comes in.
The e-GIF incorporates standards and is mandated on all new systems that involve the exchange of information between government and citizens, and government and the business community.
To give you some idea of the scale of what the government proposes, it conducts over five billion transactions with citizens and businesses every year, spread over 20 large departments, 480 local authorities, and more than 200 agencies (4).
It therefore makes sense to offer as many delivery channels for government and council services as possible.
The Internet is just another way of delivering information and services, and the current technological environment has made web-enabled government a viable option.
Forty-five delegates from across the UK attended the event from North Ayrshire to North Somerset, and from Lincolnshire to Luton, we were extremely heartened that so many people were prepared to travel to Bath to hear our speakers and share experiences with colleagues.
Keynote speech The workshop programme started after lunch with a welcome from the Director of UKOLN, Dr Liz Lyon.
Liz then handed over to Ann Chapman, Bibliographic Management, UKOLN, who presented the Alan Jeffreys Award for 2001 to the keynote speaker, Maewyn Cumming.
Maewyn is Senior Policy Adviser (Interoperability and Metadata) at the Office of the e-Envoy (OeE), which is part of the Cabinet Office, and she received the award in acknowledgement of the significant contribution she has made to the development of cataloguing standards.
The award is conferred by the Cataloguing and Indexing Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), and Ann Chapman seemed the ideal person to present the award, as holder of the previous year’s award.
Maewyn began by outlining the rationale for e-government, and explained that although 45% of UK households can access the Internet from home, use is heavily skewed to London and the south of England, and also to younger people and higher income groups.
No big surprises there, but of those without access, fifty per cent gave their reason for non use as lack of interest, and this renders the government’s plans for universal access somewhat difficult.
The government is particularly keen to encourage the heavy users of government and council services to use the Internet, again no surprises – as anything that is more cost-effective makes sense.
However, their solutions to increasing the take-up of net-bases services include better marketing and content, improving access, and making provision for ICT skills development.
The skills agenda is being addressed by the setting up of UKonline centres [5] half of which (around 3000) are to be based in public libraries.
These centres are designed to act as stepping stones to learning, for example by users signing on to Learndirect/UfI (University for Industry) courses [6].
Maewyn then outlined the Government website guidelines copies of which she had brought with her (on a sort of cut-down compact disk with two straight edges) – this is a long document which takes up lots of hard drive space (six parts; nine page index, eleven annexes and a 26 page glossary), so the disk version acts as a portable reference tool.
The guidelines are designed to help government departments and local authorities develop their web sites, and I assume most developers will use them as a reference tool to consult as and when the need arises.
From the guidelines we moved to the e-GMS – the government metadata standard, which is based on Dublin Core, but has additional elements for improved retrieval, records management, data security and legal requirements.
Finally, Maewyn provided examples of the Government Category List (GCL) which is part of the e-GMS.
The GCL uses broad subject headings and controlled vocabularies to aid browsing of public sector information.
All of this aims to bring structure and order to official websites – library cataloguers must be laughing (or crying) at the irony of it all.
The presentations Our second speaker was Emma Place, who is Project Manager at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol.
Emma described and demonstrated the Virtual Training Suite (VTS) [7] which is part of the Resource Discovery Network [8].
The VTS is a free online educational resource from the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) [9], which is designed to help people use the Internet to support their learning.
Emma specifically addressed the issue of whether the VTS could help public libraries, especially in developing ‘e-literacy’ skills to enable users to become effective ‘eLearners’ and ‘eResearchers’.
During my years in higher education, I have noted a tendency to focus on the development of IT skills to the detriment of information or research skills – with the latter often being overlooked or not even considered as a specific skill.
Academic librarians have been trying to address this problem for some time, especially in the context of rising student numbers, increasing use of ICT and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), and the move towards more student-centred approaches to learning.
The VTS consists of 50 free ‘teach yourself’ tutorials on a wide range of topics, eleven of which have been designed for use in further education.
The eleven tutorials are on vocational subjects, including: Art, Design and Media; business studies and hairdressing and beauty.
The tutorials have been written and edited by lecturers, and librarians from more than 50 UK universities and colleges, and include aids to learning such as quizzes and exercises, and each has a glossary of Internet terms.
Our next speaker was Andy Holdup, e-Government Programme Manager at Hampshire County Council.
Andy has worked in Hampshire’s IT department for 20 years, and is currently involved in shaping IT policy and the e-government programme.
Andy touched on the thorny issue of how to actually get people to use electronic services, and the inescapable fact that the socially excluded groups the government are targeting as big users of government and council services, actually prefer to use the telephone or conduct transactions on a face to face basis.
Andy showed us the results of a MORI [10] poll of Hampshire residents which was undertaken earlier in 2002.
This revealed that 90% of respondents thought they were currently most likely use the telephone to report a highway defect to the council; even worse, given the 2005 goal for electronic services, 76% stated that they would be most likely to use the same method in two years time.
A quick and dirty search on MORI’s website produced a page on implementing local e-government which warned that services must be demand-led and hinted at the difficulties ahead.
MORI’s charts showed that socially excluded groups are unlikely to make use of web-based services, precisely because they are less economically active, and are made up of the older sections of society.
Yet it is these groups who are often most dependent on local authority services [11].
Education and improved access are seen as crucial to success, and the People’s Network programme and UKOnline centres have been set up to address these two issues.
Andy also cast doubt on the take-up of interactive digital television (iDTV) as a channel for interacting with local authorities, yet digital television is being heralded as the future in terms of delivering e-government services.
Andy also argued that the web should be seen primarily as a tool to support front-line staff, with “self service as a valuable spin off”.
Three break-out sessions rounded off the day led by UKOLN staff: Pete Cliff (RDN Systems Developer), Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) and myself (Penny Garrod, Public Library Networking Focus).
Pete’s session focused on syndicated content for websites (or: how not to do it yourself but grab what’s out there and free to use), in particular incorporating RSS newsfeeds [12].
Brian focused on approaches to search facilities, and the use of ht://Dig and Google which drew on the results of a survey undertaken since 1999 on search facilities used by UK institutions of higher education.
My session looked at accessibility and usability issues, and tried to set these in the context of implementing e-government, where the aim is to ensure users can find information and complete a task with ease.
The first day ended with a relaxing dinner in the University’s Wessex House restaurant.
Fortunately, the sound of glasses chinking and the soft burble of conversation was only upstaged by the soothing sounds emanating from the home-grown quartet – remember this was the 5th of November – a celebration of the day a Mr G. Fawkes attempted to destroy the House of Parliament, and here we were attempting to install government in cyberspace.
On Wednesday morning after a hearty breakfast we started with Danny Budzak, Head of Information Management and e-Government at the London Borough of Lewisham talk on content management.
Danny deconstructed content, content management and content management systems, and then went on to evaluate the need for, and advantages of, using a content management system.
He drew on his experiences of the APLAWS project (Accessible and Personalised Local Authority Websites) [13] whilst working at the London Borough of Newham as their Internet and Intranet manager.
APLAWS, for those of you thinking what a wonderful acronym, and why didn’t we think of it first -.APLAWS is a pathfinder project -one of 25 Local Government Online (LGOL) projects funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) [14].
Pathfinders were set up with the aim of finding generic solutions to a variety of technical, policy and management issues surrounding the implementation of e-government.
APLAWS workstreams cover: content management; information architecture, and metadata, usability and accessibility.
The APLAWS products include: an Open Source Content Management System; guidelines for implementing metadata standards for local government, and a category list based on the Government Category List – full details can be found on their website.
Nick Poole, ICT Advisor at Resource, then presented a paper entitled ‘dynamic accessibility’, which as far as I understand it boils down to a sort of turbo-charged accessibility for dynamic, rather than static, web pages.
Nick focused on the effective use of XML (Extensible Markup Language) [15], and, after outlining the basic concepts: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); reading order; visual presentation etc., he drilled down to specifics including semantic consistency and designing for platform independence.
He then moved onto look at accessibility issues for some of the technologies, for example: SMIL (Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language); VRML (Virtual Reality Machine Language) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).
Finally, Nick addressed ebooks and text to speech accessibility issues, and the conflict that exists between XML coding and Digital Rights Management information [16,17].
Brian Kelly, Web Focus, UKOLN, provided a highly practical presentation on quality assurance for library websites.
He started off by comparing and contrasting quality control and quality assurance, and then quickly ran through the typical problems to be encountered on websites, such as broken links, out of date content, missing graphics, and content which people with disabilities cannot access.
Brian then looked at testing procedures and possible solutions to common problems.
He emphasised the need to ensure that the tests chosen are appropriate for the site being tested, and the trade off between using automated tools which have major limitations, and manual testing which is time intensive.
Brian illustrated this through a recent case study, using the website devised for UKOLN’s annual Institutional Web Management Workshop.
The site contains information about the event, plus an online booking facility, but it also acts as a demonstrator of standards and best practice in action.
Brian concluded by reiterating the importance of quality assuring your website, especially in the context of compliance with government guidelines and standards, e.g.
the e-GIF.
Alan Davies, National Programme Manager, London Borough of Lewisham, outlined the LEAP project, which stands for: The Life Events Access Project [18].
LEAP has a natural synergy with the UK Online programme as it organises information and services around a series of defined episodes in people’s lives.
These events are based on times when people are most likely to interact with government or local authorities, and LEAP has identified eleven of these ‘events’ including dealing with crime, becoming a carer and moving house.
Alan outlined the various channels for delivering e-government services: kiosks, one stop shops, call centres, Internet, Minicom, mail or fax and Telly Talk, which is a video conference facility placed in libraries, shopping malls, neighbourhood offices and one-stop-shops around the borough.
[19] Alan then described the various standards developed at Lewisham, in particular the LEAP ‘Process Naming’ standard, which starts with a top level header – in this case a ‘Frequently Asked Question’ (FAQ) and drills down to branch process and sub-process level.
He then demonstrated how this works using an application for a ‘blue badge’ as an example (Blue badges are parking permits which are granted to people with severe mobility problems).
Alan concluded by looked at how Lewisham might progress its virtual services and identified implementing an integrated content management system and exploring further partnerships, possibly with the private sector via the Office of the e-Envoy or Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, in order to develop XML schemas, e-forms and enabling customer access to services.
Our final speaker before the end of workshop panel session, was Cathy Day, Community Information Network Officer, Essex County Council.
Cathy described the use of standards in the development of the web-based citizen’s gateway service: Seamless UK [20].
Seamless brings together quality assured local, regional, and national resources, and offers users single search and retrieval access to a wealth of information.
Seamless meets the 7 critical tests outlined in the key local e-government paper e-gov@local [21], namely: it is joined up and accessible; it is delivered and supported electronically, jointly and seamlessly (this counts as 3 tests); it is open and accountable; and it is used by people.
Many organisations have contributed information to the gateway including: ‘Age Concern’, the BBC, UK Online and NHS Direct Online.
The project exemplifies effective public sector partnership between councils at various levels (district, unitary etc.)
and Essex Fire and Police Services, local educational establishments, and voluntary organisations.
A semi-automatic metadata tool (SeamlessUK.dot) was developed which is template based, and the metadata used throughout is based on Dublin Core, and is e-government compliant.
The event ended with a final panel session with delegates breaking out briefly to frame any last minute questions for our presenters.
The event was a very enjoyable one, and the feedback has been very positive.
All we have to do now is await 2005 to see if the measures being taken now and over the next two year have had the desired effect.
Considerable effort will be going into the development of websites that are both accessible and usable, but the ultimate determinant of success will be the take-up of e-government and electronic services, and how far government and councils are able to influence and educate people to use electronic services either using a computer at home or using a terminal or kiosk in a public place.
References: Public Library Web Managers Workshop 2000: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/; Public Library Web Managers Workshop 1999: www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/running/ Chris Batt, speaking at the Public Library Authorities Conference, Carden Park Resort, Chester, 15-18 October 2002 UK GovTalk: www.govtalk.gov.uk/ (current and past versions of the e-GIF are downloadable from here) Maewyn Cumming.
Metadata for e-government.
(CILIP)Update 1 (3) June 2002, pp.40-41.
http://www.cilip.org.uk/update/ UK Online.
www.ukonline.gov.uk/ Learndirect: www.learndirect.co.uk Virtual Training Suite: www.vts.rdn.ac.uk Resource Discovery Network: www.rdn.ac.uk The JISC: www.jisc.ac.uk MORI (Market & Opinion Research International): www.mori.com/polls/ MORI – egovernment pages: www.mori.com/pubinfo/anc-egovt.shtml RSS Xpress see: www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/rss/ and http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/ APLAWS Project: www.aplaws.org.uk/ Local Government Online: Pathfinders: www.lgolpathfinder.gov.uk/ XML: www.w3.org/XML/ Open ebook Forum Mooney, Stephen.
Interoperability.
Digital Rights Management and the emerging ebook environment.
D Lib Magazine, Vol.
7 (1), January 2001. www.dlib.org/dlib/january01/mooney/01mooney.html#6 LEAP Project: www.leap.gov.uk/ Telly Talk at Lewisham: www.lewisham.gov.uk/NewsAndViews/tellytalk.asp Seamless UK project: www.seamless-uk.info Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR).
April 2002. e-gov@local.
Towards a national strategy for local e-government.
A consultation paper.
Author Details Penny Garrod Public Libraries Networking Focus UKOLN email: p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: “Creating websites for e-citizens: the Public Library Web Managers workshop, 2002” Author:Penny Garrod Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/public-libraries/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the Learning Object Metadata Standard?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the Learning Object Metadata Standard?
Buzz data software framework xml infrastructure archives metadata identifier vocabularies namespace schema repositories copyright cataloguing graphics multimedia aggregation perl e-learning lom dcmi mets mods scorm interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jean Godby assesses the customised subsets of metadata elements that have been defined by 35 projects using the LOM standard to describe e-learning resources.
A Metadata Standard for Learning Objects As learning objects grow in number and importance, institutions are faced with the daunting task of managing them.
Like familiar items in library collections, learning objects need to be organised by subject and registered in searchable repositories.
But they also introduce special problems.
As computer files, they are dependent on a particular hardware and software environment.
And as materials with a pedagogical intent, they are associated with metrics such as learning objectives, reading levels and methods for evaluating student performance.
The conventional wisdom is that a learning object should be accompanied by a metadata record, whose minimal form would contain the information typically found in the description of a book or journal article, such as title, author, subject, and a unique identifier.
But a more complete record would describe the technical and educational context required to activate the learning object and connect it with others to create a rich educational experience for an appropriate audience.
These needs motivated the development of the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard [1].
The most recent draft of the standard, issued in 2002, states that LOM was designed “to facilitate the search, evaluation, acquisition, and use of learning objects by learners or instructors or automated software processes.” The standard proposes a set of 77 elements, distributed among the nine categories shown in Table 1.
Table 1 The high-level LOM categories, as described in the Draft Standard Category Description General This category groups the general information that describes this learning object as a whole.
LifeCycle This category describes the history and current state of this learning object and those entities that have affected this learning object during its evolution.
Meta-Metadata This category describes this metadata record itself (rather than the learning object that this record describes).
Technical This category describes the technical requirements and characteristics of this learning object.
Educational This category describes the key educational or pedagogic characteristics of this learning object.
Rights    This category describes the intellectual property rights and conditions of use for this learning object.
Relation This category defines the relationship between this learning object and other learning objects, if any.
Annotation This category provides comments on the educational use of this learning object, and information on when and by whom the comments were created.
Classification This category describes where this learning object falls within a particular classification system.
Though all elements are optional, the fullest expression supports three levels of description: 1.
The first, and perhaps most familiar, is that of an object resembling a bibliographic record, encoded in a coarse-grained standard designed for computer files, such as Dublin Core (DC) [2] or the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) [3].
Most of these elements are subsumed in the General category, which lists the title, author, unique identifier and language of the resource, as well as keywords indicating a subject.
A lightweight bibliographic record could be completed by filling out the Relation and Rights elements and enhanced with the Classification element, which would index the resource with controlled vocabulary from a standard subject classification scheme.
2.
Most of the remaining elements represent LOM innovations that describe a learning object’s potentially complex social and technical context.
The LifeCycle element captures the fact that learning objects may have a revision history to which many parties have contributed.
The Technical element lists the software and hardware requirements for accessing the learning object.
The Educational and Annotation elements describe critical details of the learning experience created by the learning object.
For example, who is the intended audience?
How much interaction does it require?
How long does it take?
How difficult is it?
How have instructors used it?
3.
Finally, the Meta-Metadata element acknowledges the fact that the descriptive record for a learning object is also a piece of intellectual property, which must be maintained separately because a description has its own author, language, and controlled vocabulary.
Application Profiles Derived from LOM The LOM standard is currently being tested by members of the e-learning community who are committed to open access and interoperability.
High-profile projects that manage collections of education metadata in East Asia, Europe, and North America have adopted variants of the standard.
Metadata schemas that are being designed for the needs of specialised education communities also strive to be LOM-compliant.
Among them is the standard developed by the U.S. Department of Education-sponsored Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) Project [4], which manages learning objects for primary and secondary school students.
The Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) standard [5] also has a LOM-compliant section, which is enhanced with elements required for describing the unique technical requirements of learning objects designed for military and industrial training.
In addition, the Dublin Core community has developed extensions for education metadata which are derived from LOM or which can be easily mapped to it [6].
These activities imply that the LOM standard has achieved a high degree of informal acceptance in communities that develop education metadata.
But a closer look reveals an adoption rate that is less than comprehensive.
Because LOM elements are optional, projects that have adopted the LOM standard usually define application profiles, or subsets of metadata standards, which follow certain established guidelines: they retain the broad semantics of the elements and may combine elements from multiple standards but introduce no new definitions.
According to Heery and Patel [7], application profiles can achieve a reasonable compromise between interoperability and the unique needs of locally defined projects.
To monitor progress on these goals for the LOM community, Friesen [8] and Campbell [9] have assembled data from application profiles into a machine-processable format defined by 29 projects in Asia, Europe, and North America.
The raw data is coded in a spreadsheet whose rows represent the 77 LOM elements and whose columns represent the projects identified by Friesen and Campbell that create and maintain the profiles.
Each cell contains a value indicating whether an element in a given profile is mandatory, recommended, or optional.
The Friesen study summarises this data in a graphic that represents the three levels of adoption as successively darker shades of red.
The bands of dark red, which represent mandatory elements, are prominent in the LOM General category and can be used to create descriptions that roughly correspond to a Dublin Core record.
Friesen also tried to obtain records that comply with these profiles, but the effort was largely unsuccessful because the sample size was small and not widely distributed across the profiles.
Nevertheless, the small number of records he examined reveal that the LOM standard can be used to create sophisticated descriptions of learning objects, though the recommended elements in the application profiles were often unused.
In the rest of this article, I update this analysis of LOM application profiles.
My study builds on the Friesen/Campbell spreadsheet, which they kindly made available to me, and includes profiles that were not available earlier.
It attempts a more detailed interpretation and addresses the following questions: 1.
Which elements are most widely adopted?
Can a viable record be assembled from the most popular elements-i.e., one which would describe the unique characteristics of learning objects, or at least support discovery and harvesting?
2.
What are the prospects for interoperability in a complex metadata scheme that consists entirely of optional elements?
3.
What can be learned about the motivation for developing an application profile-either from the coded data or the supporting documentation?
Should the LOM standard be revised?
The study of application profiles represents a shorthand for a much more extensive analysis, which would critically review the arguments that motivated the profiles and examine records that conform to them.
But a study of recommendations for use in real-world contexts gives a high-level view of these important issues and provides a framework for future discussion.
Selection criteria I retained all of the data in the Friesen and Campbell spreadsheet and added six more profiles from the United States, Europe and Australia.
Two criteria govered my selection.
First, the profiles must be accessible from a public Web site and represent a persistent organisation or project that has been creating or collecting learning object metadata since the LOM standard was published in 2001.
Second, the LOM application profile must consist primarily of LOM elements.
Unfortunately, these criteria eliminated three well-known learning object initiatives: the MERLOT Project [10], whose metadata record is based on a LOM profile that has not been made public; GEM [4], which is committed to compliance with LOM but has not published a detailed description of the relationship between the two element sets; and Dublin Core Education [6], which proposes to use a small number of LOM elements to enhance a Dublin Core record.
The sample is skewed toward English-language projects, a consequence of fact that the three primary contributors to this study live and work in English-speaking countries.
Nevertheless, the sample contains application profiles from non-English-language projects in Central Europe, China and Japan.
Data Tabulation In addition to codes representing three levels of recommended compliance to the LOM standard, the Friesen/Campbell spreadsheet also has missing cells and shows evidence of several coding conventions which may have had differing intents that can no longer be interpreted.
To reduce confusion, I added data that is as simple as possible.
It has just two levels yes and no and ignores any conditional logic that may be encoded in a given profile (for example: Lifecycle.contribute is mandatory if Lifecycle.contribute.role is present).
A Perl script reduces the original data in the spreadsheet to the same binary classification by scoring all cell entries of M (mandatory), Y (yes), R (required) and Auto (automatic) as yes; all other data, including blank entries, is scored as no.
A Core LOM Record The first priority in this study is to identify a core or composite record that would support interoperability across repositories of learning object metadata created in different institutions and provide some measure of confidence that the elements defined in the LOM standard are perceived as useful.
Since the rows in the spreadsheet represent LOM elements, while the columns represent institutions that have created application profiles, it should be a simple matter of collapsing the columns across rows to obtain the most popular elements.
Despite the relaxed criteria for scoring that I have adopted in this study, no elements scored yes in all 35 profiles.
As Table 2a shows, the most commonly cited elements are General.Title (31) and General.Description (30).
The remaining entries in Table 2a represent the one-fourth of the elements with the highest yes scores, which have been assembled into the LOM record structure to promote readability.
Below this cutoff point, the yes score rapidly drops to less than 50%.
By contrast, Table 2b represents the one-fourth of the elements with the lowest yes scores.
Table 2a The most commonly recommended LOM elements Table 2b The least commonly recommended LOM elements LOM Element Count Dublin Core equivalent LOM Element Count Dublin Core equivalent General    Title    Description    Identifier    Language    Keyword Lifecycle    Contribute       Entity       Role       Date   Meta-metadata   Medatascheme   Technical     Format     Location   Rights     Cost     Copyright AndOtherRestrictions   Classification     Purpose 28 33 34 31 25 26 29 29 27 23 24   22   25 22   24 24 25 22 25 Title Description Identifier Language Subject Contributor or Publisher Date         Format Identifier Rights   Subject General   Structure   Coverage Technical    OrComposite        Name        MaximumVersion        MinimumVersion OtherPlatformRequirements    InstallationRemarks    Duration   Educational    SemanticDensity    Difficulty    Language Relation     Kind     Description         Catalog         Entry Annotation 5 6 2 6 5 4 8 7 6   4 8 6 8 4 4 4 8   Coverage                 Relation   Total:        35 Average: 26.3     Total: 35 Average:    5.6   In Table 2a, a composite LOM record emerges that gives substance to the impressions recorded in Friesen’s analysis [8].
As he observed, most of the recommended elements map to Dublin Core equivalents.The result is remarkably coherent, considering that it is produced from a crude tabulation and that the projects from which the data was obtained were implemented by the early adopters of a new standard who were not necessarily working with one another’s knowledge.
Viewed as a Dublin Core surrogate, the composite record has just two redundancies-for subjects and identifiers, which is perhaps a reflection of disagreement or confusion about how to represent this information.
For example, the LOM standard defines General.ldentifier as a “globally unique identifier” and Technical.Location as “a string that is used to access this learning object” a fine distinction that may not be universally necessary.
Nevertheless, the record could be easily converted to the simplified Dublin Core specification promoted by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) [11] to support a coarse degree of interoperability required for discovery through federated searching or harvesting.
But with an average yes score of 26.3, the result is not a resounding consensus.
In the composite record shown in Table 2b, assembled from the least commonly recommended elements, only two of the elements map to Dublin Core equivalents: General.Coverage and Relation, neither of which is widely used, according to studies of usage patterns in Dublin Core-encoded records [12].
Perhaps the elements in Table 2b are only locally useful or should be candidates for refinement by the sponsors of the LOM standard.
Of these, Educational.SemanticDensity is the most controversial.
This element attracts many comments in users’ guides for creators of learning object metadata because it seems to be ill-defined.Though the LOM standard defines semantic density as “the degree of conciseness of a learning object,” it is defined slightly differently in another description as “a subjective measure of a resource’s usefulness relative to size or duration.” Many practitioners have commented that the LOM education elements are especially problematic and difficult to use.
Perhaps the problems stem from the fact that these elements blur the distinction between educational purpose and material form, or that they fail to address more fundamental issues such as how learning objects should be defined and how their granularity should be measured, as Campbell [9] observed.
In addition to the educational elements, the LOM elements that define the technical features of learning objects other than those that map to the Dublin Core elements Format and Identifier have also failed to win widespread recommendation, as shown by the short list of technical elements in Table 2a and the long list in Table 2b.
And the Relation element shows the same imbalance.
As noted in description of the CELEBRATE profile, Relation is optional because implementation is complex and time-consuming: multiple relationships require multiple instances of the category, and it is unclear how to associate learning objects in multiple languages.
Thus the authors of the CELEBRATE profile recommend omitting the Relation unless the considerable effort required to identify and document the related resources can be justified [13].
Taken together, these observations about the Educational, Technical, and Relation elements imply that the parts of the LOM record designed to distinguish learning objects from other electronic resources-by establishing the context for access, presentation to an appropriate audience, and evaluation-are among those least commonly recommended.
Table 2 is derived from an overall tabulation of the spreadsheet, but further regularities emerge from separate tabulations that divide the 35 application profiles into the three obvious geographic regions represented by the sample.
18 are from Europe; 8 are from North America and 9 are from the Pacific.
Since each region has highly visible projects that must answer to local government agencies and educational institutions UK LOM Core [14] and CELEBRATE [13] in Europe; CanCore [15] and SCORM [5] in North America; and IMS [16], the Le@rning Federation [17] and CELTS (China) [18] in the Pacific-there is no reason to expect that the recommendations will result in records that are fully interoperable with those developed in distant locations.
Table 3 shows the results of separate tabulations by geographic region.
As in Table 2, only the top fourth of the elements are shown, sorted by yes count and organised into the LOM record structure.
These tabulations reveal slightly more detail than the overall tabulation.
For example, the data in the Europe and North America profiles reflect an apparent interest in rights data that would be more detailed than an unqualified Dublin Core description.
Moreover, some of the LOM innovations are given greater prominence, such as the Meta-Metadata elements in the North American profiles and the Educational categories in all three profiles.
Nevertheless, a more striking observation about the data summarised in Table 3 is that when the application profiles are tabulated by geographic region, the composite records simply represent different proposals for descriptions that could have been largely encoded in a minimal Dublin Core record.
And when all three regions are overlaid, only four of the high-level LOM categories and four subcategories emerge as common.
This data suggests that the prospects for interoperability among LOM application profiles are greatest within a single region and they suffer when two regions are involved.
But if records are to be shared across arbitrary projects without regard to geographic location, additional coordination will be required to ensure their compatibility.
Table 3: Composite LOM records from three geographic regions Europe Pacific North America All three regions General      Identifier      Title      Language      Description Lifecycle    Contribute        Role        Entity        Date     Technical        Format        Location Educational        LearningResourceType Rights     Cost     CopyrightAndOtherRestrictions     Description   Classification        Purpose General      Identifier      Title      Language      Description      Keyword Lifecycle     Contribute          Entity          Date       Technical      Format Educational IntendedEndUserRole      Context       Classification      TaxonPath          Purpose             Source             Taxon General      Identifier      Title      Description      Keyword Lifecycle      Status     Meta-metadata      Identifier      MetadataScheme Technical      Format      Location Educational      TypicalLearningtime Rights     Cost     CopyrightAndOtherRestrictions Relation      Identifier General    Identifier    Title    Description   Lifecycle       Technical      Format Educational Total: 18 Total: 9 Total: 8 Total: 35 Interoperability among Projects The foregoing discussion identified the LOM elements that are most and least likely to be recommended in application profiles by collapsing the columns in the Friesen/Campbell spreadsheet and nesting the application profiles within elements.
Additional insights can be obtained by collapsing the rows in the spreadsheet, which has the effect of nesting the elements within the profiles.
This tabulation provides a first draft of the answer to one of the most important questions posed by the presence of 35 application profiles created by projects on nearly every continent: will they be able to pool or share their resources?
The answer requires the calculation of an agreement score, which can be straightforwardly obtained by representing each application profile as a vector of yes and no values.
For every pair of vectors, the agreement score is incremented if the yes and no values match in a given location.
This value is a formal expression of the fact that two institutions might, for example, recommend the use of General.Description or refrain from recommending Educational.SemanticDensity.
The results are sorted by agreement score for all unique pairs.
Table 4 shows the 11 pairs of application profiles that have achieved the highest agreement scores.
SCORM Content Aggregation and SCORM Shareable Content Object have perfect agreement according to the coding standards adopted here.
In other high-scoring pairs, the application profiles usually originate from the same geographic region or from the same enterprise.
(Links to the application profiles cited in this section are listed in the Appendix at the end of this article).
Table 4: Application profiles with the highest pairwise agreement scores Score Application profiles Same region?
77 76 75 70 69 69 69 68 69 68 68 68 SCORM Content Aggregation and SCORM Shareable Content Object CELT(China) and Celebrate LT Scotland Objects and LT Scotland Resources   Learning-and-Teaching-Scotland and LT Scotland Objects Curriculum Online and SingCORE SCORM Shareable Content Object and SCORM Asset SCORM Content Aggregation and SCORM Asset Japan JST and Japan EHDO CanCore 1.9 and SDLF CanCore and TBITS39 LT Scotland and LT Scotland Resources CanCore and UfI Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y No pair of profiles shows perfect disagreement, even at the bottom of the ranked list.
The lowest agreement scores result from application profiles that show the greatest divergence in the scope of their recommendations.
For example, the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse (ENC) profile was developed in the context of a project [19] whose goal is to create a collection of detailed original records for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) [20], a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded intiative.
Accordingly, the ENC profile leaves open the possibility of defining a potentially rich LOM record and recommends the use of all but two of the elements.
By contrast, CanCore 1.9 defines a minimal record, with the goal of establishing a ‘meta-profile’ that promotes interopability among projects throughout Canada.
Yet despite differences in goals and scope, the agreement score for ENC and CanCore 1.9 is not zero because the elements recommended for CanCore 1.9 are common to both, which suggests that ENC and CanCore-compliant records can interoperate.
The ranked agreement scores can also be used to identify the application profiles that have the greatest and least resemblance to the other profiles in the sample.
The application profiles shown in the left half of Table 5 appeared most frequently in the top one-fourth of the ranked list of pairwise agreements.
Among them are English-language meta-profiles from three regions: RDN from the United Kingdom [21]; IMS Core from Australia [16]; and TBITS39 from Canada [15], all of which recommend a large number of elements that map to Dublin Core.
By contrast, the application profiles in the right half of Table 6 appear most frequently in the bottom one-fourth of the ranked list, indicating that they show the greatest disagreement with the other profiles in the sample.
Many, but not all, are projects with local or regional scope.
Table 5: Application profiles at the top and bottom of the ranked agreements Top Bottom RDN IMS CORE COSE TBITS39 Japan EHDO CELT (China)   ENC CanCore 1.9 SDLF Learning and Teaching Scotland ENCORE Resl Finally, the agreement scores can be used to focus on a single application profile of interest and assess its prospects for interoperability with a range of peers.
As an illustration, Table 6 shows the ranked pairwise agreement scores involving SCORM Content Aggregation.
The profiles showing the highest pairwise agreement with SCORM Content Aggregation are, in descending order of agreement: from the same enterprise (SCORM) from IMS Core, an English-language project in the Pacific region from Europe and North America and from non-English-language projects in the Pacific The data in Table 6 supports a hypothesis that is also suggested by Table 3: the best prospects for interoperability are local, and they degrade as institutional, linguistic, and cultural boundaries are crossed.
Table 6: Ranked Agreements with SCORM Content Object Key: Regions: R=related enterprise; N=North America; E=Europe; P=Pacific Profile Score Region Profile Score Region 1.
SCORM Shareable Content Object 2.
SCORM Asset 3.
IMS CORE 4.
COSE 5.
RDN 6.
NGfL Scotland Content 7.
Metakka 8.
UfI 9.
TBITS39 10.
CanCore 11.
UK Common Framework Core 77 69 66 59 57 57 56 56 55 55 54 R R P E E E E E N N E 12.
Japan EHDO 13.
Normetic 14.
HLSI 15.
Japan NICER 16.
Curriculum Online 17.
BECTA NLN 18.
Japan JST 19.
Japan ALIC & eLC 20.
CELT (China) 21.
The Le@rning Federation 22.
SingCore 54 53 53 51 50 50 50 50 49 48 48 P N E E E E P P P P P The Learning Object Metadata Standard: A short progress report The foregoing discussion presented an analysis of 35 LOM application profiles and described a methodology that can be re-administered if more data becomes available.
It yields an abstract view of the metadata schema that is a major contender to become a worldwide standard for describing learning objects.
The results can be cited in answers to the three questions posed at the beginning of the previous section.
A Viable Record The tabulations illustrated in Tables 2 and 3 suggest that a viable record can be assembled from the most highly recommended LOM elements.
It is descriptively similar to an unqualified Dublin Core record and exhibits regional variation.
Such a record lacks the elements for describing the educational, social, and technical contexts required for a successful interaction with a learning object.
But application profiles designed primarily for the management of locally produced records, such as ENC, include most of these elements and support a rich description.
By contrast, meta-profiles such as CanCore, RDN, and UK LOM Core, which are designed to promote interoperability among similar projects, have far fewer recommended fields.
Perhaps the composite record that emerges from the recommendations in the application profiles is adequate for supporting resource discovery.
But since subject data is sparsely represented, and subject classification schemes for learning objects are still under active development, discovery strategies for LOM records will probably be restricted to known-item searching.
Prospects for Interoperability The results of this study contain a mixture of good and bad news.
The good news is that, despite a large sample, the application profiles examined here exhibit a relatively small subset of logically possible variations, which can be sensibly interpreted as an OAI record capable of supporting limited discovery and harvesting.
But it is important to keep in mind that the data from this study gives only a best-case estimate of interoperability prospects because it has analyzed only application profiles-or, templates for records-and not the records themselves, which are still difficult to obtain on the large scale required for an empirical study.
Friesen [22] offers a glimpse of the real data in his analysis of 250 records from five projects, two of which are publicly available and included in my analysis.
His tabulations of the most frequently used elements largely overlap with the results of my study and support the conclusion that the recommendations documented in the LOM profiles are, in fact, being implemented.
Nevertheless, this evidence constitutes only a precondition for interoperability.
A study of application profiles must make the simplifying assumption that profiles are interoperable if they recommend the same elements.
But, as Powell 23] points out, two application profiles might use LOM.Classification.Purpose and still fail to interoperate because this element could be used to annotate different facets of the resource, such as pedagogical intent and position within a knowledge hierarchy.
Though consistency could be enforced by record editing tools that implement the profiles and recommended controlled vocabularies, such tools are not yet widely available.
These observations imply that it is premature to assess the prospect for interoperability of LOM records, especially those created by geographically and culturally distant institutions.
Indeed, studies of interoperability for records describing much better-understood resources are only now beginning to appear in the research literature.
For example, Ruddy [24] describes the technical and social requirements for the shared access of repositories of digital mathematics monographs by Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and the University Library of Göttingen.
Such studies can provide important clues about how to design a rigorous test of interoperability and define a set of priorities for metadata description.
As Ruddy argues, the record format must be adequate for local needs and must be consistent with the formats of institutions most likely to share records.
If these requirements are met and the record format is based on a recognised standard, it is possible to start thinking more globally.
Motivations for Developing Application Profiles Perhaps the most compelling issue raised by this study is existential: why have so many application profiles been developed with a core of LOM elements that they generate a significant body of data to be analyzed?
Viewed from a high level, the variability results from two countervailing pressures.
On the one hand, there is a pressure to conform because the development and promotion of an interoperable metadata standard is a long-term intellectual effort that few institutions have the resources to undertake.
But there is also substantial pressure to innovate.
Web-accessible learning objects present a host of new problems for access and management, which are only partly addressed by a relatively new metadata standard that is still being tested.
An application profile is a sensible response to these conditions, and the needs of the material may dictate whether the elements will be drawn primarily from LOM or from more relevant standards.
For example, the WebDance Project [25], which was not included in my study, attempts to catalogue e-learning materials for dance education and has developed an application profile based on LOM, Dublin Core Education, and MPEG.
Since the major problem for the WebDance Project is the management of multimedia files while the educational issues are subordinate, the application profile emphasises MPEG elements and recommends only a subset of LOM elements, thus failing the major criterion for inclusion in this analysis.
Other projects have developed extensive subject and educational vocabulary that is only locally relevant and may propose extensions or namespaces that are not part of the LOM standard.
Still other projects are relatively new, with small collections, so they have not yet encountered a pressing need for the LOM elements that describe relationships to other versions or similar resources.
Thus it is possible to argue that the large number of application profiles represents an expected state of affairs for a new genre of electronic resources and a new standard for describing them.
The institutional investment in these profiles implies that LOM has a chance of meeting these needs even if it must be supplemented or modified.
But LOM has to have demonstrable value in the face of competition with other standards for describing education metadata, such as Dublin Core Education and EDNA [26].
Some Recommendations Given that the learning object community is in a state of flux, what must stakeholders do to increase the odds that LOM is widely adopted in the fullest possible form?
Following the empirical orientation of the study I have described in this paper, I believe that successful projects with a significant investment in LOM need to mature and report their experiences.
The learning object community would benefit if such projects could share pieces that are now missing from the formal statement of the standard and would be candidates for incorporation into future versions, such as syntactic bindings, the most useful extensions to controlled vocabulary, and protocols for communicating with like-minded projects.
This study suggests that the LOM standard could be conceptualised as a series of layers defined by need.
The first layer would define a core set of elements for minimal interoperability and metadata harvesting.
The core set could be obtained from the composite records illustrated here, with minor editing to eliminate redundancies and enforce the need for desirable elements such as subject and identifier.
The second layer would contain pointers to data of local interest, such as descriptions of the context for accessing, executing, and interacting with the learning object.
The outer layer would collect the lifecycle elements for the subset of learning objects that will eventually have a long revision history and complex relationships to other objects and will perhaps always remain a small percentage of the total.
This model is suggested by usage patterns that are already observable and could certainly be improved, but the problems it addresses must be solved because the context for the management of learning objects is growing more complex.
In the future, learning object metadata collections must interoperate not only with one another, but with other digital repositories developed by libraries and cultural heritage institutions [27].
The groundwork is now being prepared.
Appendix 35 application profiles were analysed in this study.
The raw data includes multiple versions of profiles from CanCore, Curriculum Online, SCORM and LT Scotland.
The CanCore site has a useful service, currently in beta form which lists some of the major profiles and allows users to specify three levels of detail about them.
http://phenom.educ.ualberta.ca/n/cancore/ ALIC Advanced Learning Infrastructure Consortium, Japan.
http://www.alic.gr.jp/eng/index.htm BECTA NLN (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency National Learning Network) BECTA: http://www.becta.org.uk/index.cfm NLN: http://www.becta.org.uk/index.cfmhttp://www.nln.ac.uk/materials/default.asp CanCore, CanCore 1.9 http://www.cancore.ca/guidelines/CanCore%20Guidelines%20version%201.1.doc CELEBRATE http://users.utu.fi/lasnir/docs/CELEBRATE_app_prof.doc CELT (China) Centre for Learning Technology.
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content/20010817102511 COSE Creation of Study Environments.
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/ Application profile described in http://www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/cosenew/metadata_used_in_cose.doc Curriculum Online http://www.dfes.gov.uk/curriculumonline/ EHDO (Employment and Resources Development Organization of Japan) “LOM Activity and Implementation in Japan.� http://jtc1sc36.org/doc/36N0720.pdf ENC (Eisenhower National Clearinghouse) http://www.enc.org/ Application profile described in http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/lightle/09lightle.html ENCORE (Enriching Courses with Resources) http://lib.derby.ac.uk/encore/encore.html Application profile described in http://lib.derby.ac.uk/encore/publications3rdpge.html FAILTE (Facilitating Access to Information on Learning Technology for Engineers) http://www.failte.ac.uk Description of application profile in http://www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/ FERL (Further Education Resources for Learning) http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?page=1 Description of application profile in http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/usage_survey/cs_ferl.pdf HLSI (High Level Skills for Industry Repository) http://www.hlsi.org.uk/ Description of application profile in http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/usage_survey/cs_hlsi.pdf IMS CORE (IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.) http://imsproject.org/ JST (Japan Science and Technology) “LOM Activity and Implementation in Japan.� http://jtc1sc36.org/doc/36N0720.pdf Learning and Teaching Scotland http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ Application profile accessible at: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/files/lts_info_model_v0p7.xls The Le@arning Federation http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/tlf/newcms/d2.asp Application profile accessible at: http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/repo/cms2/tlf/published/8519/Metadata_Application_Profile_1_3.pdf LT Scotland Objects, LT Scotland Resources Learning and Teaching Scotland http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ Metakka (Finland) http://www.tieke.fi/metakka/lom.nsf NGFL Scotland Content National Grid for Learning.
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ngflscotland/ NICER (National Information Center for Educational Resources), Japan http://www.nicer.go.jp/english/ Normetic http://www.profetic.org:16080/normetic/ Application profile described in http://www.profetic.org:16080/normetic/IMG/pdf/annexeG.pdf RDN (Resource Development Network) RDN/LTSN application profile: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ap/ RESL (Reusable Educational Software Library) http://www.resl.ac.uk/ Description of application profile in http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/usage_survey/cs_resl.pdf SCORM Asset, SCORM Shareable Content http://adlnet.org/ SDLF (Smart Learning Design Framework) http://www.digitalmedia.uow.edu.au/sldf.html SingCORE (E-Learning Compentency Centre) http://www.ecc.org.sg/cocoon/ecc/website/standards/singcore.standards TBITS39 (Treasury Board Information Management Standard) http://www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/its-nit/index_e.asp UfI (University for Industry) http://www.ufi.com/ Application profile described in http://www.openline-learning.net/MILO/MILOProfile01.htm UK Common Framework Core http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/uklomcore/ Acknowledgements I have benefited greatly from discussions and correspondence with Debbie Campbell, Norm Friesen, Neil McLean, and Jian Qin.
They are, of course, not responsible for the shortcomings of this work.
References (Links accessed 15 September 2004) Draft Standard for Learning Object Metadata.
Learning Technology Standards Committee of the IEEE.
July 2002. http://grouper.ieee.org/LTSC/wg12/files/LOM_1484_12_1_v1_Final_Draft.pdf Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
2004. http://dublincore.org/ Metadata Object Description Schema.
Library of Congress.
2004. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-userguide-announce.html Gateway to Educational Materials.
2004. http://geminfo.org/ SCORM Overview.” Advanced Distributed Learning.
2003. http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scormabt DCMI Education Working Group.” Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
2003. http://dublincore.org/groups/education/ Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel.
Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas.“Ariadne.
Issue 25, September 2000. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/ Norm Friesen.
Survey of LOM Implementations.
CanCore.
September 2003. http://www.cancore.ca/lomsurvey.doc Lorna M. Campbell.
UK LOM Core Update.” PowerPoint presentation, CETIS.
September 2003. http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/sig_meetings/lon_presentations/mdsig_040903_uklomcore.ppt MERLOT: Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching.
2004. http://www.merlot.org/Home.po Open Archives Initiative.
2004. http://www.openarchives.org/ Ellen Knutsen, Carole Palmer and Michael Twidale 2003.
Tracking Metadata Use for Digital Collections.
In DC-2003: Proceedings of the International DCMI Metadata Conference and Workshop p. 241-242. http://www.siderean.com/dc2003/706_Poster49-color.pdf CELEBRATE Metadata Application Profile.
May 2003. http://users.utu.fi/lasnir/docs/CELEBRATE_app_prof.doc UK Learning Object Metadata Core.
2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/uklomcore/ CanCore Learning Object Metadata.“Version 1.1.
CanCore Initiative.
Athabasca University, Edmonton, Alberta.
2002. http://www.cancore.ca/guidelines/CanCore%20Guidelines%20version%201.1.doc “IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.” 2004. http://www.imsglobal.org/ The Learning Federation.
2003. http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/tlf/newcms/d2.asp CELT.
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http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content/20010817102511 Kimberly S. Lightle and Judith Ridgway.
Generation of XML Records across Multiple Metadata Standards.
DLIB Magazine.
September 2003. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/lightle/09lightle.html NSDL: National Science Digital Library.
2004. http://www.nsdl.org/ Andy Powell.
RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile.
Version 1.0.
University of Bath.
2004. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ap/ Norm Friesen.
International LOM Survey: Report.
DLIST, 2004. http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/archive/00000403/ Andy Powell, personal communication.
David Ruddy.
“A distributed digital library of mathematical monographs: technical aspects.” PowerPoint presentation at the Digital Library Federation Spring Forum.
April 2004. http://www.diglib.org/forums/Spring2004/Ruddy0404_files/frame.htm “WebDANCE: 3D dance for All using virtual Cultural E-learning tools.” Version 1.0.
University of the Aegean.
Mytilene, Greece.
January, 2003. http://www.aegean.gr/culturaltec/webdance/reports/WebDANCE_metadata_overview.pdf “The EDNA Metadata Standard.” Education Network Australia.
2004. http://www.edna.edu.au/metadata Neil McLean and Clifford Lynch.
“Interoperability between liberary information services and learning environments-bridging the gaps.” A joint white paper on behalf of the IMS Global Learning Consortium and the Coalition for Networked Information.
May 10, 2004. http://www.imsglobal.org/digitalrepositories/CNIandIMS_2004.pdf Author Details Carol Jean Godby Research Scientist OCLC Online Computer Library Center 6600 Frantz Rd.
Dublin, Ohio 43017 USA Email: godby@oclc.org Web site: http://www.oclc.org/research/staff/godby.htm Return to top Article Title: “What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the Learning Object Metadata Standard?” Author: Carol Jean Godby Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/godby/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Supporting Local Data Users in the UK Academic Community Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Supporting Local Data Users in the UK Academic Community Buzz data mobile software wiki database wireless dissemination archives metadata digitisation blog repositories video preservation multimedia gis e-learning microdata curation podcast research Citation BibTex RIS Luis Martinez and Stuart Macdonald discuss the differing areas of expertise within the UK data libraries with particular reference to their relationship with National Data Centres, the role of the Data Information Specialists Committee UK (DISC-UK) and other information specialists.
This article will report on existing local data support infrastructures within the UK tertiary education community.
It will discuss briefly early methods and traditions of data collection within UK territories.
In addition it will focus on the current UK data landscape with particular reference to specialised national data centres which provide access to large-scale government surveys, macro socio-economic data, population censuses and spatial data.
It will outline examples of local data support services, their organisational role and areas of expertise in addition to the origins of the Data Information Specialist Committee UK, DISC-UK.
The article will conclude with an exploration of future developments which may affect considerably the work of data professionals.
The 'tradition' of data collection within the United Kingdom can be traced back to the 7th century 'Senchus fer n'Alba' in Gaelic Scotland (translated as tradition/census of the men of Alba).
In 1086 the Domesday Book was commissioned by William the Conqueror for administration purposes.
It was not until 1801 that the first comprehensive UK Census was conducted, partly to ascertain the number of men able to fight in Napoleonic wars, subsequently to be carried out on a decennial basis.
The need for a Central Statistics Office was recognised as early as the 1830s but it was not until 1941, with the aim of ensuring coherent statistical information, that the Central Statistics Office was founded by Winston Churchill.
Following the advent of mainframe computing the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Data Bank was established at the University of Essex in 1967 (later to become the UK Data Archive [1]).
The first Data Library based in a UK tertiary education institution was set up at Edinburgh University in 1983.
In 1992 the World Wide Web was released and in 1996 the CSO merged with the Office for Population, Censuses and Surveys to become the Office for National Statistics.
Figure 1: Historical data events in timeline also available in text-only format From the abridged account above it is evident that the collection, organisation and analysis of records about people is nothing new.
What is new is the microprocessor and PC in conjunction with advances in telecommunications and Web technologies.
As Robin Rice suggested in the recent article 'the Internet and democratisation of access to data' (as part of an online discussion for ESRC Social Sciences Online Past, Present and Future): 'Data collection has arguably been changed more by computers than analysis itself, which has been dominated for decades by a few well-known statistical, and qualitative, analysis packages' [2] Analysis of large research datasets at the desktop requires a different set of skills to those of data discovery.
These skills include tools to make the data usable in addition to a familiarity with the construct of the dataset.
Thus it is as a result of this march of technology that there have emerged data professionals who not only have the necessary data discovery skills but also provide access to, support and train those wishing to use research and statistical data.
Government Agencies and National Data Centres Currently the United Kingdom has several government statistical agencies and national data centres which deal with the data collection, storage and dissemination.
The number of requests for resources from these agencies and data centres is significant; thus local data support staff need to have a good understanding of what is available in addition to data access conditions, format and delivery method.
Government agencies provide statistical and registration services, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) [3] is responsible for such activities in England in addition to conducting the decennial census for England and Wales.
The General Register Office for Scotland [4] and the Scottish Executive are charged with similar roles in Scotland.
The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) [5] and the Statistical Directorate of the National Assembly of Wales have similar functions within the other two UK territories.
National data centres are by nature distributed providing a range of cross-disciplinary data services.
They offer the UK tertiary education and research community network access to a library of data, information and research resources.
In the majority of cases services are available free of charge for academic use.
The UK Data Archive (UKDA), based at the University of Essex acts as a repository for the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK.
Its remit includes data acquisition, preservation, dissemination and promotion of social scientific data.
EDINA [6] is hosted by Edinburgh University Data Library.
Services include abstract and index bibliographic databases such as BIOSIS; spatial data services such as Digimap and UKBORDERS; multimedia services such as Education Media Online (EMOL) and the Education Image Gallery (EIG).
Based at Manchester Computing at the University of Manchester, MIMAS [7] provides spatial data services, census data via the Census Dissemination Unit and international data banks (via the Economic and Social Data Service, ESDS [9]).
ESDS is a distributed service based on the collaboration between four key centres of expertise, UKDA, MIMAS, the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), and the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research (CCSR).
It acts as a national data service providing access and support for an extensive collection of quantitative and qualitative datasets for the research, learning and teaching communities.
The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) [8] is a data centre which aids the discovery, creation and preservation of digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and humanities.
United Kingdom Local Data Support Services 'Institutions provide support for data services in a variety of ways, these being reflected in the diversity of organisational representatives for ESDS, for example.
Some work in a data library, a university library, a university computing centre, a central research office or an academic department.'
[10] However the data support offered by data libraries goes beyond supporting the national data services.
Data librarians/managers deal with the management and implementation of such services.
Among their multiple tasks, data libraries: act as data repositories, developing and preserving local collections serve as reference services helping researchers to identify appropriate resources and troubleshooting educate users to access and handle data resources through teaching and learning activities.
Although there are common activities, the level of support and areas of expertise varies among services.
Below there are examples of four different local data support services in the UK.
Edinburgh University Data Library Edinburgh University Data Library (EUDL)[11] was established in 1983 and as such was the first such service in the UK.
It was set up as a small group with a Sociology lecturer as part time manager, with 1.5 staff (one programmer and one computing assistant).
Currently two qualified librarians provide the service, with administrative and technical support from EDINA.
The current collection covers large scale government surveys, macro-economic and financial time series, population and agricultural census data and geospatial resources.
EUDL specialises in data for Scotland and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) resources due to its relationship with EDINA.
The Data Library staff actively participates in local training activities in addition to providing a consultancy service, helping with the extraction, merging, matching and customisation of data; for time-consuming jobs a fee is charged.
University of Oxford Data Library The University of Oxford Data Library [12] started in 1988.
Three people formed the Computing and Research Support Unit, with one statistician, one computer/statistical software specialist and one data manager.
At present it consists of one data manager, with no dedicated IT support and is part of the Nuffield College Library.
The current collection comprises survey micro-datasets from UK and elsewhere, including the large government continuous surveys, and many ad hoc, repeated cross-section and panel/cohort academic surveys.
Subsets of General Household Survey and Labour Force Survey variables combined over time have been compiled, and are widely used by researchers.
For seventeen years now the University of Oxford Data Library has supported researchers in using quantitative datasets; some of the key support functions have been: Data searching and conversion Negotiations and management of contracts with data providers Storage, protection and access arrangements Questionnaire design, data collection and management methods, knowledge of question wording, coding structures and methods, data cleaning.
London School of Economics Data Library The LSE Data Library [13] was launched in 1997 to support LSE researchers in the task of locating quantitative data.
It provides an advisory service to PhD students, contract researchers and academics, helping them to locate and access datasets.
Its collection includes a microdata archive covering large scale government surveys, longitudinal data collections and international opinion polls.
It retains a wide range of aggregated databases providing worldwide socio-economic indicators from IGOs such as IMF, OECD or EUROSTAT.
There are also geographic information systems (GIS) covering UK boundaries and EU and World administrative regions.
Lastly, financial databases are increasingly becoming an important part of the collection, providing company accounts, indexes and bond data, exchange and interest rates, etc.
The Data Librarian offers direct support for users through the weekly data surgery (one-to-one advice) and Information Literacy courses, helping to locate, access and format data.
A data laboratory, Datalab, is being implemented, it will provide gigabit connectivity between PCs in a computer classroom and a dedicated server.
The Datalab will be used for using datasets for teaching as a first stage, and will be hosting all microdata and managing access and metadata.
A high level advisory group for guidance on academic priorities formed by one academic from each department is also in place.
The group will identify academic priorities across LSE departments and will shape strategic planning for the future.
London School of Economics RLAB Data Services The London School of Economics RLAB [14] Data Services started in 1999 providing data support to LSE's research laboratory, a unique institution bringing together leading research centres in economics, finance, industrial relations, social policy and demography.
The centrepiece of the collection is an electronic library housing approximately 150GB of data.
The data is mainly social survey data, with some financial, geographical and medical data.
Both macro and micro datasets are held in the library, data from individual countries throughout the world as well as a wealth of international sources from the US, Europe, India and China.
Data Support is part of the RLAB IT Service; there is a team of 5 people.
Therefore the data manager has the support of two systems professionals, and a part-time information professional to help with the Web site.
Rlab's data manager, Tanvi Desai, is now involved in the ESRC Review of International Data Sources and Needs.
The aim of the project is to gain an understanding of the opportunities and the obstacles presented by international data resources, enabling us to recommend strategies for improving international research and collaboration [15].
Data Information Specialist Committee, DISC-UK UK Data librarians have always been represented by the International Association of Social Science Information Service & Technology [IASSIST].
This association also represents international data archives, statistical agencies, government departments and non-profit organisations.
It was perceived however that much closer collaboration was required in order to deal with day-to-day data issues within the UK academic community.
In October 2002, a mailing list "Digging for Data" was set up as a forum to help data librarians, national data centre site representatives and any other academic staff, support staff, statistical consultants or students to locate and use quantitative data.
It was an informal initiative among UK data librarians represented by Oxford University, the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics.
In September 2003 the data libraries from these Universities formed a support group called DISC-UK, or Data Information Specialist Committee-UK [16], meeting formally for the first time in February 2004.
The group meets several times per year to compare issues and solutions arising from their daily work and its aims are the following: Foster understanding between data users and providers Raise awareness of the value of data support in universities Share information and resources among local data support staff Figure 2: Screenshot of the DISC-UK Web site The founding members intend to open up their group to others performing similar roles in their universities though they may not work in dedicated data libraries.
ESDS site representatives were emailed a simple questionnaire to find out the level of data support offered at their institutions.
Although this elicited only one response from a site representative who had little to do with data support in his institution, it is an area in which DISC-UK will work further.
A much better response has been obtained when individuals have been approached.
Universities such as Warwick, Glasgow, Birkbeck, Southampton and others have been contacted and links with those institutions have been established for future collaboration.
An interesting fact deriving from the contacts is that in most cases people doing data support in those institutions are subject librarians dealing with other electronic resources such as bibliographic databases.
The Web site for the group has been set up, with links to member sites and a description of the group's aims.
Over time it is hoped that the site will develop into a helpful resource hosting online training materials and links to relevant articles.
Channels of communication between DISC-UK and the national data centres are already in place.
ESDS workshops have been organised in each of the member institutions and several improvements suggested to UK Data Archive's administration Web interfaces.
The next step for the group is to plan and coordinate the necessary resources to act as a broker between member institutions and the national data centres in addition to investigating the possibility of running 'Train the Trainers' events.
The arrangement of regular meetings with those centres will benefit both, establishing the means to provide feedback and develop common strategies for the promotion of the data hosted at the national data centres.
Future Developments Web and telecommunications developments and the culture of educational technology serve as the backdrop for the future of local data support within the UK academic community.
The following issues (as relevant as they are at time of publication) have to be considered on the strength of their relationship to the above-mentioned factors: Rationalisation of large-scale surveys For example, the General Household Survey's transition to a longitudinal survey and eventual integration into the Continuous Population Survey (along with the Labour Force Survey, Expenditure and Food Survey and the National Statistics Omnibus Survey).
As has been reported earlier, analysis of large research datasets at the desktop requires a different set of skills to those of data collection and discovery.
By rationalising large-scale government surveys and the Population Census this could pave the way for a new generation of uniform online analysis tools.
Increased use of European survey data Recently commissioned European surveys such as the European Social Survey, and the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC preceded by the European Household Panel Survey) will become valuable resources as each wave adds value to the time-series element of analysis.
In an increasingly global environment analysis at this level may take on greater relevance.
Other European data sources (including macro-economic and financial data) may in turn see greater demand depending upon the UK's role within the European Community.
Consolidation of library support The UK model has been national data centres providing centralised access to and support for data resources.
With the advent of search engines such as Google in addition to budgetary constraints academic institutions are reviewing 'Reference Desk' services.
This has ramifications for the 'data reference interview' for example, identifying those users whose data needs are not met by the above methods in addition to a whole range of user support issues including training and outreach.
Advances in 'portable' educational technology These include delivery of digital course and lecture notes to students via mobile phone, wireless and WAP technologies.
In addition to opening up endless possibilities and consequent re-thinking of delivery of teaching content there is potential for data professionals to take on a more pro-active role.
Will there be palmtop data analysis?
Rising expectations of an increasingly IT-literate student population By the end of the decade a new generation of users totally familiar with Bluetooth, WAP, MP3s, and pixels will be participating in tertiary education.
In order to use and benefit from technological advances, teachers and practitioners (including data professionals) have to be at ease in this environment.
This may well prove to be a bigger challenge than first anticipated.
Centralisation versus institutionalisation Centrally-funded (JISC, ESRC AHRC) data centres brokering deals with large data suppliers to supply data to the academic community means no more individually brokered subscriptions for a whole range of spatial, financial, macro-economic and survey data.
This trend towards centralisation is being countered by open access publishing and institutional repositories as each institution seeks to gain greater control over their own 'assets'.
Diversification: words, numbers, pictures, sounds Diversification into support for data from other disciplines such as physics, astronomy, meteorology, genetics.
It can be argued that the disciplines mentioned have been revolutionised by new media and digital technology.
The 'Statistics, Librarianship and Computing' elements which comprise the current role of local data professionals (and refer predominantly to the Social Science domain) may need to be expanded to include branches of mathematics such as algebra!
Another area of diverse activity is in the humanities where there is increasing use of digital resources such as images, video, and spoken word.
Data curation Scientists and researchers across the UK generate increasingly vast amounts of digital data, with further investment in digitisation and purchase of digital content and information.
The scientific record and the documentary heritage created in digital form are at risk, by technology obsolescence and by the fragility of digital media.
The role of the data professional could be to assist universities rise to the challenge of 'curating' their own scholarly assets including perhaps the actual or derived datasets upon which published research papers are based.
Professional recognition The introduction of data librarianship as a module or component of Library and Information Science qualifications.
Alternatively potential certification of such a profession via professional organisations such as IASSIST.
Grid technology and e-Social Science The Grid may well prove to be the first major advance with regard to data analysis and more importantly data integration since the establishment of a few well-known statistical and analysis packages in the late sixties.
The Seamless Access to Multiple Datasets (SAMD) project [17] is one example of integrating and streamlining the access to data repositories and analysis engines in a social science context.
The Semantic Web Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has been promoting for a few years now what is meant to be an extension of the current Web.
He writes, "Most of the Web's content today is designed for humans to read, not for computer programs to manipulate meaningfully.
The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users."
[18].
The Semantic web in conjunction with Web services and Grid technologies will bring new standards which can be used to represent information and to exchange knowledge.
Data discovery will also be greatly affected and it will become a much easier practice.
Learning and teaching There exists the potential for the involvement of data professionals in the creation, promotion and use of learning and teaching datasets including tools for using data in the classroom.
An example being the X4L SDiT Project [19] which aims to increase the use within the classroom of real data sources held within the JISC Information Environment.
Other notable developments could include: Next-generation Virtual Learning Environments Text and data mining technologies Open access publishing and digital repositories [20] Blogs, Wikis, and other Web communication tools Other Internet applications such as Podcasting.
Conclusion The tradition of local data support in the UK can be traced back to the first Data Library set up in 1983.
In more recent times data support professionals have come together to form a group (DISC-UK) in order to occupy the perceived gap between national data centres and users at their respective institutions.
Currently there is a national commitment towards providing distributed access to digital resources and materials produced in academic environments.
However at present this does not cover data suitably .
A centralised approach for data repositories and disseminators dominates the data landscape in the UK with centrally funded data centres dealing with the acquisition, preservation, support and access issues relating to data.
In this context, DISC-UK members hope to play an increasingly important role in establishing communication bridges between data users and data centres.
This will be set against the backdrop of the continuous and multifarious advances of technology which continue to shape data practices, with current and future data professionals having to adapt, evolve and embrace the diversity of data-related activities.
References UK Data Archive site http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ Rice, R, 'The Internet and democratisation of access to data', blog for Social Science Week SOSIG, July 2005, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/socsciweek/ Office of National Statistics site http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ General Registry for Scotland site http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/ Scottish Executive site : http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Home/ EDINA site http://www.edina.ac.uk/ MIMAS site http://www.mimas.ac.uk/ Arts and History Data Service site http://ahds.ac.uk/ Economic and Social Data Service site http://www.esds.ac.uk/ Rice, R "Providing local data support for academic data libraries", The Data Archive Bulletin 8-11, http://datalib.ed.ac.uk/discuk/docs/rice2000.pdf Edinburgh University Data Library site http://datalib.ed.ac.uk/ Oxford University Data Library site http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/projects/datalibrary/ London School of Economics Data Library sitehttp://www.lse.ac.uk/library/datlib/ LSE RLab Data Service site http://rlab.lse.ac.uk/data/ ESRC Review of International Data Resources and Needs site http://rlab.lse.ac.uk/ESRCData/default.asp Data Information Specialist Committee, DISC-UK site http://datalib.ed.ac.uk/discuk/ The Seamless Access to Multiple Datasets (SAMD) project site http://www.sve.man.ac.uk/Research/AtoZ/SAMD/ Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, "The Semantic Web" Scientific American, May 2001.
X4L SDiT project site http://x4l.data-archive.ac.uk/ The University of California's eScholarship Repository http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/ Author Details Stuart Macdonald Assistant Data Librarian Edinburgh University Data Library (EUDL) Email: Stuart.Macdonald@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://datalib.ed.ac.uk/ Luis Martinez Data Librarian London School of Economics Data Library Email: L.Martinez@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://lse.ac.uk/library/datlib/ Return to top Article Title: "Supporting Local Data Users in the UK Academic Community" Author: Stuart Macdonald and Luis Martinez Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/martinez/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing Change Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing Change Buzz framework graphics Citation BibTex RIS Donald Maclean reviews a text that lays down guidelines for information managers attempting to analyse, implement and evaluate change within their organisation.
This manual for managing change has been around since the 1980s, but has recently been revised and extended.
Susan Carol Curzon is Dean of the University Library for California State University, Northridge, and is an experienced and high profile librarian and manager [1].
Her background and position obviously affects the way she looks at libraries and management structures, and this is reflected in the textual structure, language and viewpoint of this book.
One of the book's first offerings is a graphical overview of the author's change management cycle, alongside chapter titles and subtitles.
Reassuringly, the graphic corresponds precisely to the content and order of the chapters.
The order, content and flow of the text has obviously been rigorously thought out, and is presented with a very precise style and structure.
The revised edition features a new section which offers fifteen 'change scenarios' for discussion and analysis.
The bulk of the text deals with the change management cycle itself, and the issues that the individual parts of the cycle raise.
The chapters look at: conceptualisation, preparing the organisation for change, organising the planning group, planning the change, deciding what needs to change, managing individuals during change, controlling resistance, implementing change and evaluating the process.
The step-by-step approach reflects the author's approach to her subject, with everything placed in a highly structured order and within a tight procedural model.
What is not tackled in this book is the potential for a change management within the change management structure itself.
No allowance is made for the organic nature of change, that change breeds change, and that the project may need to address these new changes mid-stream, as so often happens in reality.
Two important issues are raised in the first chapter.
Firstly, whether change is necessary or desirable at all.
One of the challenges of change management is dealing with resistance to change, but the danger of instigating change for its own sake is just as as vivid and real.
The second issue raised is that of setting aside time for reflective thinking.
Often in the modern workplace, reflective thinking time can be seen as non-productive, indeed as some form of shirking and idleness.
However, it could be argued that without provision for reflective thinking time, the danger of over-enthusiatic change instigation, and the likelihood of insufficient planning for change resistance increase dramatically.
Preparation, organisation and planning are rigorously and meticulously dealt with, if one accepts that the world of change consists of well informed and highly motivated managers, who have the best interests of the organisation and their staff at heart.
For such a scenario, the options are well covered and documented.
The framework for discussion is similar to other models [2], i.e.
Preparation, Planning, Implementation, Monitoring.
Chapter five includes consideration of an area which is often overlooked when looking at new ideas and change; that is, when a group might decide it is better to cut and run, and abort a project.
Many reasons are cited for this potential to abort, but the the main one (and surely the most important) is that the project will no longer benefit the organisation.
The author goes into some detail about how such a decision might be made, and does not shirk from giving some stern advice about the role and responsibilities of the manager in such a situation.
The section which considers how to deal with individuals during the change process is by far the most intense and interesting.
Potential reactions to negative change include anger, depression and a choice of two outcomes: integration or alienation.
Whilst pointing out that managers should be aware of deep-rooted emotion such as alienation, no pointers are given as to how to deal with these symptoms on a practical level.
Even reactions to positive change can be a minefield; surprise, trepidation and acceptance are hardly big morale-boosting terms.
During this process, managers are expected to monitor and assess their own performance at the same time.
A tough call.
After the potential pitfalls, challenges and responsibilities outlined in the text so far, the implementation and evaluation processes are dealt with relatively briefly.
By this stage of the text, the question-suggestion format is beginning to grate somewhat; the reader can only be asked so many questions before a sense of cynical apathy creeps in: are there actually more questions than answers?
Part II offers fifteen 'change scenarios', where a situation is outlined, prompting a response, and asking (more) questions which hint at the direction of potential discussion.
For anyone who has ever been in a training event situation where the trainer hands out a scenario for discussion, and no promise of resolution, the heart-sinking feeling will be familiar.
No answers are offered, no guidelines for closure follow.
No one can expect precise answers, but a general outline of ways to go, or not go, would undoubtedly be useful.
Although this text is obviously professionaly produced and presented, it might be accused of being procedurally top-heavy.
A document produced by 'Our South West' dealing with the same subject [3] and covering a more modest eight pages, covers much of the same material succinctly, and certainly does not ask so many questions.
The nature of these texts is different but the comparison is interesting.
The management structure referred to in the text is worthy of note: usually, we have 'manager(s)' and 'staff'.
There is very little distinction made between senior (decision-making) managers, middle management and supervisors.
The presumption is that 'managers' will be innovative, well-motivated and keen on worthwhile change.
What is not addressed is the potential for staff who are keen on change, meeting resistance from an entrenched senior (or middle) management who are not.
How would pressure be exerted upwards, and what would the procedure be?
This issue has been tackled elsewhere [4], and would appear to be an important issue within change management, one that is too important to ignore.
The author is a high-profile librarian, and she obviously has some clout as a manager within her institution.
Many librarians are not so fortunate.
Their status, their salary, their hard-earned professional qualification are often called into question or derided.
It is not uncommon for senior management teams to be unaware of information science issues, or indeed what information science is actually about.
When many talented and innovative professionals are faced with intransigent management teams on one hand, and status and salary issues on the other, is it so surprising that many choose not to buy into the change culture?
This is one of the challenges facing such a text; who is the intended audience here, and what is the ultimate goal?
Conclusion This is an excellent manual for those who are new to librarianship, or new to management.
For those librarians who still have fire in their belly, and good ideas, but do not quite know how to go about turning those ideas into substantial and lasting outcomes, it will serve excellently as a guidance manual.
For the more experienced practitioner, it will all be fairly familiar.
Often, the problem for them is not how to structure the change process, but how to convince decision makers that change is desirable, necessary and achievable, and that they should be part of the change management process.
References Susan Carol Curzon, Ph.D. -A Brief Biography http://library.csun.edu/susan.curzon/biography.html Carnall, Colin "Managing Change In Organisations", pp220-21 Prentice Hall, May 1995, ISBN 0131509543 'Our South West' project document: Managing Change http://www.oursouthwest.com/SusBus/mggchange.doc Burnes, Bernard, "Managing Change", Chapter 16, Prentice Hall, 2004, ISBN 0273683365 Author Details Donald MacLean Librarian Perth College Crieff Road Perth PH1 2NX Email: donald.maclean@perth.uhi.ac.uk Web site: http://www.perth.ac.uk/Library/index.htm Return to top Article Title: "Managing Change: A How-To-Do-It Manual For Librarians" Author: Donald MacLean Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/maclean-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Digital Library and Its Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Digital Library and Its Services Buzz framework identifier preservation soa authentication interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie and Rachel Bruce report on a two-day invitational conference on The Digital Library and its Services sponsored by The British Library, JISC and UKOLN under the aegis of the British Library/JISC Partnership, held in the British Library Conference Centre on over 6-7 March 2006.
Over the past decade there has been substantial progress in the use and delivery of digital resources.
This evolving area has now reached a point of maturity where digital library providers, be they national libraries, universities, or bodies co-ordinating and delivering distributed national and global services, have begun to identify common service requirements and service frameworks.
These emerging digital library services might be delivered in a distributed manner or shared centrally.
The core aim of these approaches is to achieve interoperability, ease of access management and use, as well as ways in which to manage digital resources into the future.
The British Library and JISC are both heavily involved in the development of digital library services and joint partnership activities [1].
A key aim of these partnerships is to ensure that learning and research in the UK is supported by the leading-edge digital library technology and access to exceptional content.
As a result, this two-day meeting on the Digital Library and its Services was jointly sponsored by the BL, JISC, and UKOLN to bring together experts to discuss evolving approaches to digital library services and focused on four major service areas.
These were: persistent identifiers access management collection and service registries, and digital preservation.
The aim of the meeting was to share approaches and to identify ways in which these services might be delivered or what work needs to be undertaken to develop solutions.
In particular the meeting aimed to help identify potential future areas of joint work and collaboration.
The meeting was opened by Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library and Malcolm Read Executive Secretary of the JISC and had keynote addresses from: Peter Brantley from the California Digital Library; Pat Manson from the European Commission; and Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN.
Peter Brantley gave a wide-ranging and thought-provoking keynote about the future of digital libraries including Service Orientated Architectures (SOA) and examples from the California Digital Library.
He talked about the new environment for digital libraries and the fact that we are now seeing new practices where users are engaging in the creation of information not just the use of it and that there is the added new dimension of 'social software'.
He argued that with this new context digital libraries need to work on making themselves available and relevant to users.
Pat Manson opened the second day and covered both past and current projects and directions in digital library research and services funded by the European Commission.
She described work under the sixth framework programme which will shortly include two major new digital preservation integrated projects, and current initiatives such as i2010: Digital Libraries and how this might build on The European Library (TEL) project.
Liz Lyon closed the meeting with a presentation on Digital Libraries and Business Process.
Liz gave an overview of business process and the numerous methods and approaches to capturing and designing work flows associated with research and learning.
She spoke about the need to think about human and machine interactions and the fact that this is delicate balance which needs to be better understood.
She concluded that the digital library is now about creation, interaction and recombination.
The message to take away from this closing session was that much better and more thorough understanding of researchers and learners (and other digital library users) is required to inform digital library service development.
The plenary sessions included contributions from Rachel Bruce, JISC Programme Director, Information Environment; and Richard Boulderstone, Director of e-Strategy and Information Systems at the British Library, and these provided overviews of strategy and developments from the perspectives of both organisations [2].
In addition attendees participated in four breakout sessions facilitated by expert aspect leaders as follows: Persistent Identifiers approaches and service solutions: Richard Boulderstone (British Library) Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation) Digital preservation approaches and service solutions: Adam Farquhar and Paul Wheatley (British Library) Helen Hockx-Yu (JISC) Chris Rusbridge (Digital Curation Centre) User authorization and authentication approaches and service solutions: Nicole Harris (JISC) Sean Martin (British Library) Mark Tysom (UKERNA) Collection and Service Registries approaches and service solutions: Rachel Heery and Pete Johnston (UKOLN) Robina Clayphan (British Library) It is hoped a longer article covering discussion and outcomes from the meeting will appear in the next issue of Ariadne (July 2006).
Notes and References The British Library/JISC Partnership was established in 2004 to carry forward and develop earlier collaborative activity between the British Library, the JISC and UK Higher Education.
Further information on the Partnership and current joint activities are available online from the British Library Web site at http://www.bl.uk/about/cooperation/jisc.html and the JISC Web site at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/part_bl_info.html Presentations are available from the conference programme Web pages at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/bl-jisc-conference-2006/programme/ Author Details Neil Beagrie British Library/JISC Partnership Manager The British Library Email: neil.beagrie@bl.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk and http://www.bl.uk Publications: http://www.beagrie.com Rachel Bruce Programme Director, Information Environment Joint Information Systems Committee  Email: r.bruce@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "The Digital Library and its Services" Author: Neil Beagrie and Rachel Bruce Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/dlservices-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data software database dissemination portal archives metadata digitisation accessibility identifier vocabularies schema copyright preservation cataloguing z39.50 marc e-learning lom ebook rslp openurl url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Reveal [September 2003] The Reveal Web site, launched on 16 September 2003, brings together information about services and resources for visually impaired people from organisations across the United Kingdom.
Reveal is an information resource where you will be able to find books in Braille and Moon, audio books and digital talking books, tactile diagrams and other accessible format materials, find out who produces, loans or sells accessible materials, and find information about the different accessible materials.
The Reveal Catalogue of Resources is held on a Geac Advance system, using the Reveal bibliographic standard, which was developed from the MARC 21 Bibliographic standard by UKOLN.
The database is Z39.50 compatible and can therefore be searched by other Web-based services using Z39.50.
The Reveal Suppliers Register uses the Reveal collection description schema which was developed from the RSLP collection description schema by UKOLN.
The software development of the database was carried out by Samsara Research.
Reveal development has been funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme, the Lloyds TSB Foundation, the Ellerman Foundation, the National Library for the Blind and the Royal National Institution of the Blind.
It also received additional support from Share the Vision and UKOLN.
To visit the Reveal Web site: http://www.revealweb.org.uk/ ‘Parallel Lives’: Digital and analog options for access and preservation [September 2003] Joint conference of the National Preservation Office and King’s College London Date: 10 November 2003 Time: 09:30 16:00 Venue: The British Library Conference Centre, London, NW1 2DB A conference to address the importance and interrelated lifecycles of digital images, microfilm, photographs and other surrogates.
How should we create, store, provide access and manage them for the benefit of culture and society?
Outline Programme Co-chairs: – Vanessa Marshall, Head of the National Preservation Office – Harold Short, Director of Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London Keynote speaker: Meg Bellinger, Associate University Librarian, Yale University Morning Session Simon Tanner: Issues and choices in digital and analog representation (KDCS, KCL) Mike Evans: The continuing importance of photography and the role that digitisation plays (National Monument Record, English Heritage) Tim Hitchcock: The Old Bailey Sessions Papers the role of digitisation from microfilm and how the digital resource enhances (Old Bailey Project, University of Hertfordshire) Marilyn Deegan, Policy and Planning issues (Oxford University) Afternoon Session: Choosing to microfilm?
Two Case Studies: John Lauder, Newsplan2000 John Goldfinch, British Library, Early English Printed Collections Helen Shenton: Managing lifecycle decisions for long term use of original and surrogates (BL) Simon Tanner: A question of cost: choices on the road to digitisation (KDCS, KCL) Harold Short: Closing remarks (KCL) Launch of ‘What’s in London’s Libraries’ (WiLL) [September 2003] A new service has been launched which should be of interest to London library users and librarians.
‘What’s in London’s Libraries’ has brought together information about all the public libraries in London and it is now available to everyone via the Internet.
Londoners are no longer limited to searching just one library catalogue at a time.
The same search can be run against many catalogues all over London and the results are delivered back to the user in seconds.
Finding out about library buildings and services is equally straightforward.
Each of the 33 boroughs has entered details about all their libraries into a central database.
The service has been made possible thanks to a £200,000 lottery-funded grant from the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) via the People’s Network Excellence Fund which is run by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries.
It also received some additional funding from the London’s Museums, Archives and Libraries Partnership.
The simultaneous searching of multiple sources was made possible by Crossnet, which specialises in inter-operability projects in the library and heritage arena.
Its DScovery software was used to build the user interface backed by its Zedlib suite of software which allows data to be searched via the Z39.50 protocol.
At the same time, in a related move, London’s libraries, museums and archives have also joined forces to develop a Web site about their services.
The British Library has developed a Londoners’ Web site to highlight what the St. Pancras facilities have to offer.
Further information: What’s in London’s Libraries http://www.londonlibraries.org.uk/will General London Libraries site with museum and archive listings: http://www.londonlibraries.org.uk British Library London site http://www.bl.uk/london.html Microsoft Gets Behind Techshare 2003 [September 2003] RNIB’s Techshare Conference, is for professionals who are interested in technology and the role it plays in learning, work and life for people with sight problems.
The conference, now in its fourth year, has attracted much welcomed support from Microsoft.
Microsoft’s presence this year will include a Keynote speech by Madelyn Bryant McIntire, Microsoft’s Director of the Accessibility Group.
Other key speakers include Brian Charlson from the American Council of the Blind and Rob Lees from Vodafone.
The conference will take place on 20-21 November at Jury’s Inn, Birmingham, UK.
Techshare 2003 has a varied programme which includes a debate that is expected to be very lively.
Other features of the conference include an evening drinks reception and a two-day informal exhibition in the coffee area.
The programme includes presentations on user experiences of technology, Internet, e-books, training, e-learning, technical advances and new products.
Further information: The full programme on the Web site and online booking at: http://www.techshare.org.uk Email: techshare@rnib.org.uk Tel: Inside UK 0870 013 9555 Outside UK +44 (0)121 665 4230 Seminar: Global Access to UK Research: Removing the barriers [September 2003] Universities UK, Woburn House, London, 20 November 2003 The JISC wishes to invite individuals in the further and higher education sectors who are interested in the dissemination of the results of UK research to attend a one-day seminar at Universities UK.
The distinguished guest speakers who include Mark Walport of the Wellcome Trust and Jean-Claude Guedon of the University of Montreal will describe current initiatives to remove the barriers to research publications.
The barriers of price and licensing restrictions are hindering access to the results of academic research world-wide and the seminar will place UK initiatives in the context of international moves to create open access to published research.
The topics to be discussed will be of interest to the DfES, the Research Councils, research agencies, heads of academic departments, deans, directors of research and other senior members of universities or colleges, plus publishers, scholarly societies and research charities.
The seminar programme and booking form are available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=event_reseach_1103 The Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference [September 2003] May 17-22, 2004 New York City, NY USA Paper submission deadline: November 14, 2003 The WWW2004 conference will be held in Manhattan at the Sheraton Hotel.
The technical program will include refereed paper presentations, alternate track presentations, plenary sessions, panels, and poster sessions.
Tutorials and workshops will precede the main program, and a Developers Day, devoted to in-depth technical sessions designed specifically for Web developers, will follow.
Important Dates Tutorial/workshop proposals deadline: 15 October 2003 Paper submission deadline: 14 November 2003 Panel proposals deadline: 14 November 2003 Poster submission starts: 15 January 2004 Poster submission deadline: 7 February 2004 Author notification (papers): 31 January 2004 Developers Day deadline: 14 February 2004 Final papers due: 28 February 2004 Author notification (posters): 14 March 2004v Industrial Practice track deadline: 15 March 2004 Conference: 17-22 May 2004 For further information: http://www2004.org/ General questions about WWW2004 may be sent to info@www2004.org   RDN/LTSN partnerships technical documentation [October 2003] Over the last year or so JISC has been funding some collaborative work between the RDN Hubs and LTSN Centres.
The primary intention of these subject-based RDN/LTSN partnerships was to: develop collection policies that clarified the relationships between the two sets of activities enable the sharing of records within and beyond partnerships using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
This second area of work has produced a number of technical specifications, including an ‘application profile’ of the IEEE LOM (compliant with the UK LOM Core) and a number of agreed vocabularies.
The technical specifications are available under: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ It is recommended that those interested in this begin with the FAQ in order to get an overview of what is happening with this work.
The FAQ covers a range of issues, such as the assignement of OAI item identifiers, the assignment of resource identifiers, workflow issues as records are shared between partners, the use of OpenURL for physical resources, etc.
The RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile and some of the vocabularies have also had input form the ‘Learning and Teaching Portal’ team, and will be used as the basis for metadata sharing within that activity as well.
Taylor & Francis Online eBook Library is now part of the JISC Collections [October 2003] The Online eBook Library from Taylor & Francis is now part of the JISC Collections.
It contains over 4,000 titles are available, providing a wealth of material for librarians, academics and students at all levels.
This comprehensive collection includes the leading titles published by Taylor & Francis, Routledge, RoutledgeFalmer, RoutledgeCurzon, Martin Dunitz and Spon Press.
Special rates are available exclusively through the JISC.
The Online eBook Library is currently grouped by the following main subject areas: Education; Business, Management & Economics; Geography; Literature, Language & Linguistics; Philosophy; Sociology; Political Science & Government; History & Archaeology.
Titles are also available in other subject areas.
Details of the subject collections and title listings are available at : http://www.tandfjisc.com.
For more information on this resource, including pricing and other benefits: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_tandf_ebooks.html.
Return to top Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data mobile software framework wiki database wireless usability infrastructure archives metadata blog repositories eprints preservation aggregation e-learning mis ebook openurl e-science ict research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Slide Libraries and The Digital Future Wednesday 24th March, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2EU.
For more information and for booking details contact laura.valentine@royalacademy.org.uk.
Booking closes on 3 March 2004.
AUDIENCE: UK Slide Librarians in HE and those responsible for visual collections "Higher education in the UK has always needed images, especially in the field of art and design, and institutions have built up their own slide libraries to service that demand.
Latterly, however, it is digital images that are being sought by lecturers and students and numerous products are being produced to accommodate this need.
Slide librarians need to educate themselves about these new products and update their skills so that they can continue to ensure that their specialist knowledge of image use at higher education level is applied by the new developers".
Jenny Godfrey (2004) [January 2004] The proposed OpenURL Framework Standard goes to ballot Eric Van de Velde reports that NISO Committee AX has delivered the proposed OpenURL Framework Standard to NISO headquarters.
The documents can be found on the Web site of NISO Committee AX at: http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/Standard.htm NISO will hold a ballot among its membership according to its established procedures.
For more details, please consult the NISO Web site at http://www.niso.org/, where the official announcement will be posted in the next few days.
The NISO membership will be submitting comments along with their votes.
Until the end of the ballot -March 10th, 2004, -comments remain welcome at openurl.comment@library.caltech.edu .
[January 2004] OpenURL Router released The the availability of the OpenURL Router has been announced.
For more information see http://openurl.ac.uk/doc The OpenURL Router is sponsored by the JISC and administered by EDINA in association with UKOLN.
The Router is provided to all HE and FE institutions in the UK, with the aim of: Helping institutions with OpenURL Resolvers to establish OpenURL links from a wider range of services.
Enabling providers of OpenURL aware services to link to the appropriate OpenURL Resolver for each of their end users.
Extending the range of services in which OpenURL links can usefully be deployed.
The OpenURL Router works by offering a central registry of institutions' OpenURL resolvers.
An institution registers details of its resolver just once, at openurl.ac.uk.
When the resolver has been registered at openurl.ac.uk, any service provider can provide users from that institution with OpenURL links to their resolver.
Any queries on the above to be mailed to EDINA support at helpdesk@openurl.ac.uk [January 2004] The 10th INFORUM Conference on Professional Information Resources 2004, May 25 27, 2004, Prague (Czech Republic) http://www.inforum.cz/ , http://www.inforum.cz/english The three-day conference, which is focused on variety of aspects concerning use of electronic information resources in research, development, education and business, will be attended by information specialists from public and special libraries, the corporate sector and government agencies.
The conference is the main event in this field in the Czech and Slovak Republics and last year the conference also extended its focus to countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Last year there were 70 professionals who contributed papers to a conference of over 630 participants.
Conference Topics Trends & News in the Field of Electronic Information Resources Website Optimisation for Search Engines Creating a Successful Information Service and Its Contribution to the Organisation E-books: Threat or Supplement to Traditional Documents?
Marketing the Information Resources and Services Presentation of Cultural Heritage : Integration Aggregation Contextualisation Document Delivery Services (DDS) Present and Future Information Services Effectiveness in Health Care Library and Public Administration Partnership Abstracts should be sent via the conference Web site using the relevant form http://www.inforum.cz/inforum2004/english/papers.php Deadlines 16 February 2004: Submission of abstracts 8 March 2004: Acceptance notifications 12 April 2004: Submission of full text's electronic versions The delegates' registration forms will be available along with the preliminary conference programme by the beginning of March 2004.
[January 2004] Call for Papers: ECDL 2004 European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) 2004 September 12-17 2004 University of Bath, UK http://www.ecdl2004.org ECDL 2004 is the 8th in the series of European Digital Library Conferences.
ECDL has become the major European Forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, organisational and social issues.
Digital library research brings together a number of disciplines and practitioner communities, providing an environment for debate and an opportunity for establishing collaboration.
ECDL provides a forum for the exchange of ideas between scientific disciplines and fosters joint initiatives with application communities.
Involvement of researchers and practitioners from computing and information science disciplines is well established at ECDL.
Increasingly these disciplines are engaging in discussion and co-operation with other groups concerned with knowledge management.
ECDL 2004 encourages involvement from a wide range of disciplines and looks forward to increasing contributions from usability experts, educationalists, developers of eLearning systems, and by working within the eScience and GRID communities.
The continued success of ECDL rests on the exchange of ideas and experience between these groups.
ECDL 2004 welcomes contributions and participation from scholars, researchers, practitioners and policy makers across the range of disciplines related to the development of the digital library in its widest sense.
IMPORTANT DATES 5 April 2004: Papers, panels, tutorials and workshops submissions due.
19 May 2004: Poster and demonstration submissions due.
11 June 2004: Final submission date.
[January 2004] ePrints UK Workshops ePrints UK Workshops In the next few months ePrints UK Project will be running a series of workshops providing an introduction to eprints and institutional repositories and the issues surrounding them.
These workshop are aimed at HE/FE librarians, information systems staff and academics and are free to attend.
People can now register for the Edinburgh (Friday 14 May) and Nottingham (Monday 24 May 2004) workshops.
[January 2004] PRONOM file format database available The National Archives is committed to preserving historic electronic records indefinitely, and has embarked on a programme to make this feasible on a practical level.
One strand in this programme is PRONOM, our database of software products and file formats.
For example you can enter a file extension and PRONOM will find all products that can read or write files with that extension.
The Web version PRONOM 3 is now available to the whole preservation community.
For the initial data load the emphasis is on the most commonly used office products for PC operating systems from PC-DOS onwards.
We intend to load information on about 450 products over the next few months and we encourage software developers and others to be proactive in providing information via our online submission form.
For the place of PRONOM in a digital preservation programme, see the article PRONOM: A Practical Online Compendium of File Formats http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews7-5.html Jeffrey Darlington Digital Preservation Department The National Archives [January 2004] JSTOR announces new Arts & Sciences Collections JISC and JSTOR are very pleased to introduce two new collections: the Arts & Sciences IV Collection and the Arts & Sciences Complement.
Together with Arts & Sciences I, II, and III, these collections will represent the building blocks of a single interdisciplinary archive of over 600 journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The Arts & Sciences IV Collection will focus on disciplines new to JSTOR including law, psychology, and public policy and administration.
The collection will also include a selection of new education journals and will incorporate 20 of the journals already available in the Business Collection.
Arts & Sciences IV will not contain the 26 other Business Collection journals that are available through Arts & Sciences I and II.
When complete, the collection will comprise a minimum of 100 journals to be released between 2004 and 2006.
For further information on these new collections, including pricing information, please see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/jstor.html .
[January 2004] Announcement of Web Service Resource Framework Dr Daniel Sabbah, Vice President, Software Development, Strategy and Architecture at IBM, on behalf of IBM and the Globus Alliance, announced proposals for a collection of web service standards that provide conventions for handling stateful resources, e.g., file systems, databases and long-running programs, within the preferred service-oriented architecture of web services.
This neatly addresses the requirements of large-scale and long-running systems typical of grid computing while retaining the style of web services favoured by industry.
The announcement was made at Globus World ( http://www.globusworld.org/ ) in San Francisco.
More information can be found at http://www.globus.org/wsrf/ Professor Tony Hey, Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme said, "The proposed WSRF standards are a very welcome step as they bring the web services and grid communities into closer alignment.
This will lead to increased synergy with commercial middleware development that will be of significant value to research communities.
In this emerging framework the UK is expected to continue to play a leading role in developing standards and their implementations."
Prof Malcolm Atkinson Director of the National e-Science Centre said, "These proposed standards are a very valuable and a much needed step in the integration of web service and grid approaches to large scale distributed systems.
I'm delighted to see that they provide an effective framework for handling stateful components which are essential for grids, computational steering and distributed data management.
Many European organisations rely on the Globus Toolkit and we are pleased to be at the vanguard of developments which will deliver much greater synergy between commerce and research."
[January 2004] UKOLN Public Library Web Managers workshop 2004: Beyond the Web site UKOLN will be holding another of its popular public library web managers workshops in May this year.
The event will take place on the 5th and 6th May at the University of Bath conference centre.
The event is aimed at all public library staff with responsibility for developing web-based services in public libraries.
This year the focus will be on developing and implementing quality web-based content and services to maximise the potential of the People's Network ICT infrastructure.
The event will be practice-based with case studies from library and information managers, plus the chance to debate the the pros and cons of some of the more innovative e-services e.g.
mobile technologies and wireless access in public libraries.
For the preliminary programme (January 2004) we have the following speakers: Martin Greenwood, Socitm Insight Programme Manager (Socitm the Societyof I.T.
Management in local government which publishes the 'Better Connected' report on local authority website David Potts, Senior Network Adviser, at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council on the viability of Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi 'hotspots' in public libraries.
Derrick Fernandes, ICT Development Manager at the London Borough of Hillingdon, on the 24/7 networked electronic information services in Borough libraries.
Andrew Lewis, e-Services Officer, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead on Webwords the 'listen before you choose' way to select audio books.
Nigel Peck, Managing Director MIS Web Design Limited, on Content Management Systems and the issues to consider when choosing a CMS.
Plus Brian Kelly, Web Focus at UKOLN on Implementing Quality Assurance For Your Web Site, and Ann Chapman, Bibliographic Management at UKOLN on demystifying metadata.
For further information please contact events@ukoln.ac.uk [January 2004] UKOLUG Web Development Day Usability Testing, and Blogs and Wikis Date: 12 February 2004 Venue: CILIP, London Seminar leader: Martin White The day will comprise two half-day seminars, and delegates may attend either or both of the seminars.
Further information: http://www.ukolug.org.uk/content/public/activities/meetings/index.html [January 2004] Return to top Publication Date: 30-January-2004  Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Online Repositories for Learning Materials: The User Perspective Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Online Repositories for Learning Materials: The User Perspective Buzz data software framework metadata tagging browser repositories copyright cataloguing aggregation e-learning flash owl vle dspace moodle authentication webct url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Amber Thomas and Andrew Rothery explore how online repositories are being used to store and share e-learning content, and show how taking the user perspective might challenge the emerging approaches to repository development.
Much of the work around institutional repositories explores one specific function of repositories: to store and/or catalogue scholarly content such as research papers, journal articles, preprints and so on.
Ariadne has reported on many of these developments [1] [2] [3].
However, as stressed by the JISC senior management briefing papers [4] for Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE), repositories can be a tool for managing the institution's learning and teaching assets too.
The West Midlands Share project (WM-Share) [5], funded under JISC's Distributed E-Learning Strand Regional Pilots [6] is looking at repositories that support the sharing of learning and teaching content within FE and HE in the region.
As well as institutional repositories the project's scope covers the use of regional and national repositories.
Examples may be found in the following references: [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] There is an increasing number of repositories for learning and teaching.
However we do not yet have sufficient understanding of how repositories might be used to facilitate the use and sharing of content in a way which is embedded into normal working practices.
WM-Share aims to find out what the emerging reality is, and how these developments can best be supported within the region.
This article sets out some of the ideas we are now addressing, and highlights the likely characteristics of successful e-learning repositories.
Usage Scenarios So what do we know about how repositories of learning and teaching content are being used?
We will outline here four usage scenarios.
The scenarios are not intended to be a complete classification of usage types, but represent a set of illustrations to demonstrate the distinctive and varied nature of repository use in e-learning.
Scenario A: Amanda Amanda is a member of a community of practice centred on a common teaching area.
The members belong to different institutions in the region.
They have met and know each other.
All members have created their own online learning content and recognise that it may be very useful to others.
Amanda agrees to share her content.
She uploads her files to a central store, gives the content a good description, classifying it by subject.
Users can then search the store, find that content, download it, tweak it for their own purposes and use it in their teaching.
The people who get resources also put their own resources here.
As time goes on, the amount of content reaches a critical mass and the community decides to make it available via open access to anyone.
This subject community scenario may be familiar from e-learning research, and represents a good practice model that some projects seek to reproduce.
In our research so far, we are finding little evidence that this type of practice is common on a day-to-day level.
This scenario represents an extremely beneficial way of working for this particular type of community and is well worth supporting; however, it will nonetheless be very difficult to reproduce successfully as standard practice for everyone, as not everyone is a member of such a community.
Other ways of working need to be considered.
Scenario B: Brian Brian is one of a team of four maths lecturers at the same university.
Between them the lecturers teach a number of first year courses.
They are all confident VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) users and are happy to share teaching resources with each other.
This is the third year they have taught these modules between them, and Brian has had to spend several weeks rebuilding the courses on the VLE.
They are also developing some new materials for the spring term and are currently emailing the drafts around as they develop them.
They start using a repository to upload their worksheets, presentations, problem sheets and study materials, adding descriptions, version numbers and comments; they also place their draft materials there.
Instead of uploading every document to the new course area in the VLE, Brian is able to have one browser window open on the VLE administration page and another open on the repository, and upload links to the repository content into the VLE.
When anyone updates or replaces a file in the repository, the VLE course is thereby automatically updated.
In the repository Brian can sort the resources A-Z, and he can classify them by topic area.
He starts to add some of the key Web sites he uses for his research work so that all his key sources are in one place.
He also has his own space on the departmental Web site where he puts his project work so he also adds a link to this in the repository.
This institutional course team scenario reflects some of the willingness to share evident in the first scenario, but only within a small, closed group.
The resource collection is highly specific to this course team, and contains Web links and drafts as well as finished teaching content.
No one outside the team would ever see the content repository because students are just linked direct to the content from within their VLE courses.
Scenario C: Clare Clare is a foundation degree course leader.
A number of neighbouring FE colleges all teach similar curricula for one of their foundation degrees.
Among the seven colleges, two are WebCT users, three are Moodle users, one is a Learnwise user and one has no VLE.
They already collaborate and share practice, and are keen to avoid 'reinventing the wheel'.
They discuss creating some shared courses in Moodle, as the most common VLE within the group, but that still means staff from the other four institutions having to learn Moodle.
They decide that their aim is to share teaching content via a repository, and that they will each take local decisions about how best to deliver that content.
Clare asks them to email her 10 content files each to make a start, along with descriptions of each file.
She uploads the files onto the repository, then when a reasonable amount is there, she sets up user accounts for the rest of the group.
They continue emailing her their content during the year, and they download the content they want direct from the repository into their own VLE.
Unlike the previous scenario, the repository is not being used as a tool behind the VLE.
Instead it is used as an alternative file store that is institution-neutral and VLE-neutral.
The collection is intentionally shareable and reusable.
Staff do not directly upload their own content, instead they contribute to the collection via Clare.
Such a multi-institution model can exist in many forms.
For example, repository uploading can be either mediated (as here, by Clare), or team members could upload themselves directly.
Use of the VLE can be independent at each institution (as here), or the whole course could use just one VLE course area (as we have also observed in the West Midlands).
There are many possible variations of this model.
Scenario D: Dave Dave works within the History Department and has his own teaching area in which he is the departmental specialist.
He manages all his own online courses himself, with the assistance of one of the University's learning technology officers.
He has read a lot about how institutions are setting up repositories full of learning materials, and how JORUM and other regional and national initiatives are encouraging people to share.
At the moment he is trying to find a repository somewhere which might cover his specialist area, but so far he has not had much success.
He uses Google Scholar [13] and Humbul [14] a lot, and is discussing with Library staff how the Library catalogue search tool can be developed further.
This way he has found quite a lot of descriptive information, film clips, and journal articles; but would find it helpful in building his courses to have some teaching resources such as materials for role play scenarios, multiple choice questions for formative assessment, and topics and background information for group project work.
In this scenario we simply have an individual teacher wishing to benefit from the online resource collections which have been set up.
A large number of online repositories are being set up with the idea that the resources in them can be openly shared by all.
But how is the average lecturer, pressed for time, going to find a way to search through them all and find what is needed?
Though in previous scenarios we have emphasised the use of repositories as tools for teams and communities, there is a challenge in making the tutor-created content developed within these teams available alongside professionally produced, quality-checked learning materials so that the individual tutor has access to the most useful content.
These scenarios are just a sample of the activity that we have found in the West Midlands and are by no means an exhaustive classification of usage.
But they do illustrate some common themes.
Although it is very early days, it is becoming clear that the latter three types of repository use may become far more common than those in the first scenario.
If this is the case then we need to explore how these models can be integrated into the Common Information Environment 15] for the benefit of users.
Types of Content We are finding many different of types of learning and teaching content in repositories and this means that no single type of repository structure and organisation could be expected to cope with them all.
We will now describe some examples of the types of learning materials in use.
Repositories can be a home for publicly-funded learning objects e.g.
NLN (National Learning Network) Materials in FE repositories, and soon, X4L content in JORUM [9].
Many repositories also provide a player for content-packaged materials, enabling users to 'try before they buy'.
The content is intended to be downloaded as required into a VLE.
Such content has perhaps initially been developed by teachers but has been subjected to a strict quality management system and likely to be of a high professional standard.
A simple object is a tutor-recommended Web site link.
Tutors who are keen to share useful resources for their colleagues often start sharing details of Web sites as well.
This may seem to duplicate the role of library subject gateways, but from the tutors' point of view it gives them more ownership of the recommended resource, they can provide their colleagues with a more complete picture of their sources, and they might not feel they are in a position to contribute to the library-controlled lists.
Working teachers produce tutor-created content.
In the course of their work, most academics and teachers create their own content.
These materials, such as worksheets, learning materials, presentations, case study notes etc, may be used as electronic resources or they may just be printed out, but either way they are created electronically and stored in the VLE, shared drive or personal file store.
They might be as basic as a one-page PDF document, or as complex as a set of Macromedia Flash animations.
A common concern we have heard raised is that such tutor-created material might be of low quality.
Issues mentioned are: faulty spelling and grammar, uncleared third party copyright, technical problems (for example, badly rendered Web pages), style over substance (lots of pretty pictures but very little depth) and so on.
Of course some tutor-created content may indeed be of poor quality but equally, a vast amount is of a good professional standard.
It is true that such content is perhaps not as polished as other content might be, but nor is it in any way sub-standard; after all, it is being frequently used with students and has often been refined by the tutor over several iterations.
In fact, it might be highly refined to support the objectives of the course, with a tight focus on learning objectives and activities.
There is a large amount of this type of content in use, and there are some services already supporting the sharing of such content [16] [17].
It is very likely that institutional repositories will make this content more visible and accessible.
The nature of the content held in repositories raises a number of questions: How should repository services approach tutor-created content?
Should they set quality thresholds?
How will those who search repositories evaluate this working content?
How likely is it that this content will be useful to them?
Repositories designed for course team and community use will need to build in features to meet community needs.
If all the meta-tagging and descriptions are written with the team in mind, might they use shorthand, abbreviations and jargon?
Will the metadata be understandable to other users?
Does it need to be?
If repositories include URLs as well as hosted files, does this duplicate the function of library subject gateways?
Should the managers of those subject gateways be able to capture and integrate those URLs as part of their services, rather than let them build up on the repository?
If staff already publish their content on Web sites, should they be encouraged to move it to the repository (thus making it less accessible to the "Web public"), or should they put the links as items in the repository?
How can this collection of working content be shared more widely?
Would the team be willing for colleagues across the institution to access it?
If the content is seen as being of high value, how can it be turned into formal content and shared beyond the institution?
Putting and Getting In exploring usage we have found it useful to classify activities as putting and getting.
Putting involves uploading, meta-tagging: describing, classifying and keywording; and getting includes searching, browsing, locating a known item, downloading, linking to.
Our first scenario suggests that each user engages in both these activities on any one visit, and most repository software is designed on that premise.
But the other scenarios show that a more diverse picture is emerging.
'Putting' might be a totally separate activity from 'getting' in the majority of cases.
Most tutors do not necessarily have to 'put' their content in the repository at all, since this might be mediated or supported by a colleague or a learning technologist as part of the team organisation.
Experience from institutional repositories (for example, Glasgow's DAEDALUS Project [18]) echoes this finding.
Since the effort required to 'put' may be perceived by the user as outweighing the benefits, it may be necessary to do the putting for them, perhaps on a central basis via learning support services.
Whatever the situation, the process of 'putting' needs to be easy and straightforward if it is to be embedded into practice.
The activities in the course team scenarios both result in small collections of content that would only be of use to very specific users.
Even in the initial subject community scenario the content might be limited to a very specific subject area.
The members of the groups know they can get useful content in these very particular locations, but people outside such groups would view these repositories as rather 'empty'.
At what point does an open access repository contain enough content to make it worth coming to as a place to get content?
How should that informal content collection be promoted?
Can it be promoted as quality-assured?
Will it all be focused on a specific subject area?
How can the general individual user such as Dave in the final scenario easily find very specific subject resources across the distributed collection of repositories now emerging nationally and internationally?
Distributed Networks of Repositories Given all the factors above, it is quite possible that the activity of 'putting' will often happen quite separately from the activity of 'getting'.
It is also clear that it may be rarely worthwhile for individual tutors to go directly to a repository to obtain content; it would be far more efficient for them to search across a number of distributed repositories.
It cannot be assumed that all e-learning repositories will be open access.
So how does a collection in a closed repository become available more widely?
To return to the course team in Scenario B, how does the maths lecturers' content become openly available?
There are a number of steps they need to consider: Agree to share their materials more widely.
This is not as easy as it looks.
The team members might not be confident in the quality of the materials, they may not think they would be useful, or they may fear that the materials might give other institutions a commercial advantage.
Make the materials suitable for sharing.
Again, this is not an easy step.
It could include additional meta-tagging, pruning of content, double-checking copyright.
Who would undertake this work and how much time would it take?
Identify a suitable mechanism for sharing.
Should they provide a copy of their collection to a subject hub, or to their institutional repository?
Can this transfer process be supported by automatic systems, and if so, does the data need cleaning up?
Or does the transfer need to be managed manually, in which case, who does it?
Alternatively should they open up their collection where it is?
How will authentication be managed?
This is a lot of work for a small team to undertake, and we cannot assume that it will be willing or able to do it.
Whilst it is all possible, it requires a lot of effort and therefore may never be carried out.
Once several repositories have agreed to open up access then developments such as open standards, search agents, aggregation tools and authentication frameworks will be needed to make their use an operational reality.
This work is being undertaken under JISC's Digital Repositories Programme [19].
The model outlined in the initial scenario, of a user who is both a contributor and a searcher, may only occur in the minority of cases.
If users can access the contents of the repository alongside other collections without having to visit it directly, then the collections themselves do not have to be either large or comprehensive.
In that situation they do not have to promote themselves directly to the users, only to the search agents.
This is quite a different approach.
A shared understanding of what the user really needs should enable repository providers to make best use of emerging technical solutions.
What People Need in Learning Materials Repositories The following suggestions are based on our observations so far and are subject to further refinement, but they are shared here to give an indication of the emerging key factors for success.
Support for Community Use Much of the content will be 'working content' shared by a group of people who work together.
They need the ability to set up group areas in the repository, perhaps not initially viewable outside their community.
The community ownership might need workflow tools for the management of content so that the responsibility for the system can be shared appropriately among skilled members of the group.
Ease of Uploading Unless content is uploaded by professional central teams, it will be uploaded by a busy working lecturer.
Therefore systems involving processing the material prior to uploading (e.g.
IMS packaging) might be seen as too complex.
A very simple upload mechanism and metadata entry is needed.
Straightforward IPR Guidance Users of working content will need to feel comfortable about the Intellectual Property Rights of the materials; since the community members know and trust each other, more relaxed rules for sharing would be acceptable locally.
Perhaps different parts of a repository or even different items in the repository would have different rules.
VLE Awareness The repository is highly likely to be used in conjunction with some kind of VLE as the means by which the repository resources are presented to the students.
There needs to be a simple process by which resources are first downloaded from the repository and then re-uploaded into the VLE, or whether they can be transferred directly, or whether the VLE can simply contain a direct link using the URL of the repository resource.
All this VLE awareness affects the functionality needed in the repository and its surrounding support tools.
Responsive Hosting and Technical Development There will be a variety of practices among users, and the lecturers and tutors will want to have a say in how things are organised.
This means they need a host who will listen, and who will act on their wishes.
Tools to Search across Distributed Repositories In response to the growth in repository provision throughout the FE and HE sectors, search agents will need to access these diverse content services.
The many development projects funded by JISC in this area will need to address the diversity of repository provision.
As illustrated by the requirements listed above, no single type of repository system is going to meet all needs.
No one host institution or organisation is going to be able to run a repository for every purpose.
The content will vary from informal, through 'working content', to formal polished professionally produced content.
No one repository will have the technical or management structure to deal with all these different types.
We will find ourselves in an environment containing a variety of different repositories.
It is very important for repository owners to think very carefully about who their users are and exactly what kind of repository they are developing.
Conclusions There is an increase in use of repositories to use and to share online learning and teaching content within and between institutions.
As well as national and regional repositories, all FE and HE institutions are being encouraged by JISC to develop and run their own repositories.
This growth complements the drive towards scholarly repositories, but should be understood as a distinct activity.
The benefits to users depend on how they already share their teaching content with their peers.
Some may benefit most from a closed, team-only institutionally-provided solution, whereas others may prefer an open access repository used by a community of practice; and many users may require something in between.
There is no single set-up to suit every arrangement.
The content collected within these teaching repositories will make up diverse collections, varying in quality and purpose, raising questions for library services.
The methods for sharing these informal content collections beyond the immediate user groups have yet to develop, but individual repository owners will need to address issues of ownership, content quality and metadata, according to the particular type of use to which that repository will be put.
By focusing on the user perspective, we see a rich but complex pattern emerging which may greatly challenge the emerging approaches to repository development.
The West Midlands Share Project is exploring these issues and we hope to report our findings here in 2006.
If you have evidence of repository use that supports or challenges our thinking, we would very much like to hear from you .
References van der Kuil, A., Feijen, M., "The Dawning of the Dutch Network of Digital Academic REpositories (DARE): A Shared Experience", Ariadne 41 , October 2004, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/vanderkuil/ Hey, J., "Targeting Academic Research with Southampton's Institutional Repository", Ariadne 40, July 2004, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/hey/ Jones, R., "DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations", Ariadne 38, January 2004, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/jones/ "Digital repositories.
Helping universities and colleges", JISC Briefing Papers for Higher Education Sector and for Further Education Sector, July 2005, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=pub_repositories WM-Share Project Web site http://www2.worc.ac.uk/wm-share JISC Regional Pilots Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pilotsdetail.html West Midlands Regional Repository http://www.nti-cw.com/repository/ Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Repository http://www.yhlearning.org.uk/default.php JORUM http://www.jorum.ac.uk OWL http://www.owl-elearning.ac.uk/index.php MERLOT http://www.merlot.org/Home.po Ferl http://ferl.becta.org.uk/ Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ Humbul's history gateway http://www.humbul.ac.uk/history/ Common Information Environment http://www.common-info.org.uk/ Ferl's learning and teaching resource bank http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?page=628&catID=594 Teacher Resource Exchange http://tre.ngfl.gov.uk/ DAEDALUS Project http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/ JISC's Digital Repositories Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digital_repositories Author Details Amber Thomas Project Leader West Midlands Share Project University of Worcester Email: a.thomas@worc.ac.uk Web site: http://www2.worc.ac.uk/wm-share Andrew Rothery Director of E-Learning and Online Information University of Worcester (Project Director) Email: a.rothery@worc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.worcester.ac.uk Authors' note: Please note that the views in this article are the authors' own, and do not represent formal project findings or recommendations.
The WM-share project concludes in April 2006 and its formal outputs will be made available via its Web site as they become available.
The authors are very grateful to Sue Moron-Garcia and Viv Bell, fellow members of the project team, for helpful and challenging discussions, and to JISC for funding the project.
Return to top Article Title: "Online Repositories for Learning Materials: The User Perspective" Author: Amber Thomas and Andrew Rothery Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/thomas-rothery/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline: News You Can Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline: News You Can Use Buzz data usability archives metadata digitisation copyright preservation oai-pmh multimedia visualisation gis ontologies e-business url research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
The British Library’s ground-breaking secure Electronic Delivery Service June 2003 The British Library previewed its new and ground-breaking secure Electronic Delivery Service at the SLA 94th Annual Conference in New York in June .
Fully available from October 2003, the new service means that almost anything from the Library’s huge collections whether born digital, in print or in microform can be securely delivered to a desktop within two hours if needed, with born digital material available for instant delivery.
One hundred and eleven new scanners have been installed in the Library Document Supply Centre to scan hard copy documents and customers can view the document with ease.
Investment in new high speed Xerox printers ensures top quality hard-copy documents for postal delivery.
Natalie Ceeney, the British Library’s Director of Operations and Services, said, ‘This breakthrough will allow customers to deal direct whilst delivering the security safeguards that publishers demand.‘ The annual Digital Resources for the Humanities (DRH) conference July 2003 DRH (http://www.drh.org.uk/) is the major forum for all those involved in, and affected by, the digitisation of our cultural heritage.
It is a unique forum bringing together scholars, teachers, publishers and broadcasters, librarians, curators and archivists, and computer and information specialists.
It provides an opportunity to consider the latest ideas in the creation and use of digital resources in all aspects of work in the humanities, in an informal and enjoyable atmosphere.
This year’s conference will be held at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham UK, 31 Aug 3 Sept 2003.
Conference themes include: The impact of access to digital resources on teaching and learning Digital libraries, archives and museums Time-based media and multimedia studies in performing arts Network technologies used to support international community programmes The anticipated convergence between televisual, communication and computing media and its effect on the humanities Knowledge representation, including visualisation and simulation For further information and the online booking form visit: http://www.glos.ac.uk/humanities/drh2003 The 7th ECDL conference takes place in Trondheim, Norway, 17-22 August 2003.
May 2003 A full programme offers insights into digital library research and practice through thirteen sessions in parallel tracks, invited talks, special panel debates, tutorials, posters and workshops.
The parallel sessions take delegates through the entire Digital Library lifecycle, from establishing user needs, through knowledge organisation and technical architectures to digital preservation, archives and evaluation.
The Keynotes (John Lervik (Fast Search & Transfer), Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information) and Karen Sparck Jones, University of Cambridge) focus on information retrieval research and the role of search engines in digital libraries.
The nine tutorials cover a broad range of topics, from usability evaluations, through thesauri and ontologies, geo-spatial data and geo-referencing to multilingual access and the CIDOC conceptual model.
The proceedings will be available in print in the Springer Verlag LNCS series for all participants of the ECDL2003 conference, and the volume number will be LNCS 2769.
A report of the conference will appear in a future edition of Ariadne.
The preliminary programme, registration forms and a host of other useful information are available from the conference Web site at http://www.ecdl2003.org/ Emerald, international publisher of management journals, launches ManagementFirst.
June 2003 The online information resource for managers offers critical insight, analysis and practical solutions to day-to-day management problems, and support for continuous professional development.
Based on information from Emerald’s research-based journals including Management Decision, Strategy & Leadership, The European Journal of Marketing and The TQM Magazine, the new service can help managers solve business problems and become better managers acting like a virtual mentor.
Shelly Grimshaw, head of ManagementFirst, explains: ManagementFirst is an ideal resource for individuals or organizations who would like to supplement training, or who perhaps cannot justify expensive training courses.
The service lets you obtain specific information about the challenge you are facing, whether its how to most effectively appraise someone or to gain knowledge fast on a particular topic.
She continues: At a time when practical leadership skills in the UK are in short supply from top to bottom of organizations, the ManagementFirst ethos of providing practical management advice will be welcomed.
Evidence links good people management practices with improved bottom line performance, but recent CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development) research shows that board level managers are not really aware of the evidence that links good people management and business performance.
Shelly Grimshaw comments: ManagementFirst makes the latest thinking in management best practice accessible and affordable, helping managers become aware of research and thinking that will help improve the performance of their business as a whole, as well as the individuals within it.
Split into nine online communities or subject areas: change management; e-business; human resources; innovation; knowledge management; management styles; marketing; quality; and strategy.
Discussion forums, case studies, articles and Guru interviews with the likes of Sir John Harvey-Jones and Philip Kotler are just some of the services on offer.
A host of information is available, ranging from free services such as the discussion forum to single article purchase, subscription to one journal or full access to all ManagementFirst titles and online information.
For further information visit http://www.managementfirst.com The 4th Open Archives Forum ‘In Practice, Good Practice: the Future of Open Archives’ will take place at UKOLN, University of Bath, 4-5 September 2003.
July 2003 The workshop is now taking registrations for this event.
Registration can be completed via a page at the Open Archives Forum project site at: http://www.oaforum.org/workshops/bath_invitation.php.
The programme of the workshop is available at: http://www.oaforum.org/workshops/bath_programme.php and further information can be found on the Open Archives Forum Web site at: http://www.oaforum.org/ This event will focus on good practice in the implementation of open archives.
A particular theme of the workshop will be the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) in the area of Cultural Heritage.
The workshop will also be looking at the use of the OAI protocol as a way of publishing information about university theses, and how that might contribute to developing useful content for institutional (as opposed to subject-based) eprint archives.
Topics for discussion will comprise Intellectual Property Rights, technical and organisational issues, including a report on the latter by an OAForum working group.
There also will be an introduction to an online tutorial which will give guidance to those wishing to implement a project using the OAI-PMH.
This tutorial will be based on the experience of pre-workshop tutorials held in Lisbon (2002) and Berlin (2003).
There will be representatives of the Open Archives Initiative present at the workshop including Carl Lagoze and other important figures in the world of open archives.
There will be a contribution from LIBER and SPARC on the current status of Open Access and a closing panel session.
Additionally there will be a poster session and time and space for networking.
Those wishing to submit a poster should contact Sara Hassen (s.hassen@ukoln.ac.uk) UK research, accessible for free, for everyone June 2003 More than 80,000 biology and medical researchers working at UK universities can now share their research findings freely with fellow researchers, funding bodies, students, journalists, and the general public worldwide.
Making the results of science and medical research openly available will aid the global advancement of science and healthcare.
Publishing in freely accessible online journals will also make the UK higher education system more cost-effective, by reducing the amount of money spent on journal subscriptions.
The landmark deal announced today by The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), a joint committee of HEFCE and other UK further and higher education funding bodies, and open access publisher BioMed Central places the UK at the forefront of the drive to make scientific research freely available on the Internet.
The BioMed Central membership agreement commences on the 1 July.
From this date article-processing charges will be waived for all UK higher education staff when publishing in any of BioMed Central’s 90+ peer-reviewed journals in which all research content is freely accessible.
Dr Alicia Wise, Head of Development at JISC, explains the commitment by JISC to fund open access publishing for the entire UK Higher Education community: “This ground-breaking deal represents a major shift in the way that research is undertaken and its outputs published and shared.
The implications for research and for our educational institutions beyond the health and medical field are immense.” This is the first step of many that funding bodies are taking to ensure the success of open access.
For the academic and clinical research communities working in UK Higher Education institutions, one of the biggest hurdles to publishing in open access journals cost has been removed.
Funding bodies are now moving to acknowledge that authors who publish in open access journals are providing a service to the scientific community.
The JISC deal means that 180 universities in the UK will now become BioMed Central members.
Together with the recent NHS England membership agreement1, the vast majority of research produced in the UK could be published in open access journals at no cost to the individual author.
Publisher Jan Velterop explains the significance of this development for BioMed Central: “JISC’s support is of huge significance.
The UK is taking the fastest and the largest steps to become a completely open access environment for the sharing of biology and medical research results.
Unrestricted access to the majority of UK biomedical research output is now a very real possibility.
This represents our largest deal to date, and is a sure sign that the tide has turned to embrace open access.” BioMed Central now has more members in the UK than in any other country.
The UK is a major contributor to the global advance of knowledge.
With just 1% of the world’s population, Britain funds 4.5% of all scientific research, and produces 8.5% of the research articles that are published worldwide.2 BioMed Central and JISC look forward to seeing a fast-increasing proportion of these articles published with open access, for the benefit of science and society at large.
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A Librarian's Experience of E-Government Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Librarian's Experience of E-Government Buzz database metadata thesaurus vocabularies cataloguing sms e-government foi foia Citation BibTex RIS Jane Inman describes the route she has taken as a librarian through the expanding landscape of e-government and highlights the skills librarians can bring to this arena.
E-Government is essentially about improving service delivery in central and local government.
Our customers expect a level of service and access to services, which is effective, efficient and convenient.
They want to be able to make contact with government at a time and in a way which fits in with their lives.
In order to deliver excellent public services in customer-focused ways we have to use the available technology to its very best advantage.
We are not just talking about the Web when we talk about e-government but of course the Web is a very convenient and accessible means of communication.
The latest figures on Web access from the Office for National Statistics [1] show that 52% of the population have Web access from home compared to 9% for the same period in 1998.
For those for whom the Web is not a viable option there is digital TV, SMS (Short Message Service) and more to come.
But I'm a Librarian My experience in the e-government arena has been while working in a large and diverse local authority department.
I began my working life as a very conventional librarian and took the ALA route to chartership.
I worked in academic, public, school and special libraries before I reached my current post as Technical Librarian of the Department of Planning, Transport and Economic Strategy of Warwickshire County Council.
Coming to this from the academic world I knew my way around the Web but as a user not a creator.
Warwickshire has from its very earliest forays into the Web opted for a devolved model of Web management.
There is only one corporate Webmaster with an assistant and all the other work is done within the departments.
There is of course IT support for the development of central tools such as our feedback database for dealing with emails submitted via the Web, online payments and the development of online forms.
In my own department we have divisional Webmasters who help to co-ordinate the Web work in their divisions and approve pages for publication.
The vast majority of pages are created and maintained by staff in the departments and often these are the staff closest to the area of work covered by the pages.
In this way they are the ones to know what needs to be changed.
This is not to say that all staff find this easy or that every page is maintained with up-to-the-minute information.
What it does mean is that there is no bottleneck created while a Web team creates pages and the staff feel an ownership for the pages they have created.
For a number of years local government has been measuring its progress in using the Web to deliver customer services against a BVPI (Best Value Performance Indicator).
This BVPI, no.157, had the target that all services which could be e-enabled should be in place by the end of 2005.
Our approach has always been to create pages and services which meet first and foremost the needs of our customers but also meet government requirements.
This way of tackling it has served us well and our score on the BVPI had reached 87% by the end of 2004.
Our county council Web site has grown to more than 11,000 pages and receives more than 2 million visitors a year.
Involvement in the Wider Aspects of e-Government In our department, which is large, inevitably there are times when a team is unable provide someone immediately to create Web pages.
In these cases the library will step in.
One member of staff in particular has developed the skills to help teams through to a stage where they can take on the maintenance of pages themselves.
In e-government more generally we became involved because the Web delivery is one aspect of a larger e-government project.
In the middle of 2004 this was the case with e-planning.
In June 2004 the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) moved the goalposts very slightly.
It issued a document called Defining e-government outcomes for 2005 to support the delivery of priority services and national strategy transformation agenda for local authorities in England [2].
Every time I write about this publication, which is quite often, I have to look up the title as it is not exactly memorable.
This set out 14 areas where we are required to make progress in e-government and 53 specific targets which have become known as Priority Service Outcomes (PSO).
The Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) then put some flesh on the bones of this and in its document Priority Outcomes: Explanatory Notes for Practitioners Version 1.0 described in greater detail what the government required us to do.
This document is not easy to find but it should be possible to access a copy [3].
The categories for the PSOs are set out as 'required' which must be in place by the end of 2005 and 'good' which need to be ready by the end of March 2006.
'Excellent' targets were also listed but these will be agreed between authorities and government when the 'good' levels have been reached.
An Example: e-Planning For my department the major areas we needed to address were planning, road works, public transport information and parking contravention.
We highlighted planning and road works as the areas where most work was required to reach these targets.
The target as set out for us by ODPM was to offer online submission of planning applications and the IDeA added to this the explanation that what we attempting to achieve was 'end-to-end automation of the planning ...process.'
As far as the provision of information on planning issues was concerned we had achieved 100% when measured against the BVPI 157.
However our site was not interactive, we could not accept applications online and information on current planning applications being considered was produced manually for the Web from an old DOS-based office system.
One of the visions of e-government is that information is delivered to the Web as a spin-off from the office processes and not an extra piece of work.
The only way this could be achieved was by replacing the existing systems.
County councils, unlike districts, boroughs and unitary authorities manage a small number of planning applications but each of these can be very complex [4].
They do not deal with domestic planning matters such as the erection of a garage but large-scale applications for the management of waste or the extraction of minerals.
The small number handled has been a barrier to installing newer systems as it is very difficult to prove a cost benefit.
Phase 1 Faced with the PSO and a need to improve our Web pages we set to within the library to redesign the planning Web pages but with the support of the planning staff.
This was achieved up to a point where, when judged by the ODPM survey, we had the highest score of all the county councils.
We had met 15 out of the 21 criteria used to judge the sites.
Local authority planning Web sites were first surveyed in 2003 by a firm of planning consultants, Peter Pendleton and Associates.
This review was published as the Pendleton Review and identified 22 criteria for a good planning Web site.
The 2003 survey did not look at county council Web provision however we learned that in 2004 we were to be included.
We suspected that the results would affect the size of the grant we would receive for planning delivery from the government.
Just before Christmas 2004 we learned that this was exactly what the ODPM was considering in a consultation due to end on 28 January 2005.
Phase 2 We were delighted with the result and the Web pages for planning are much improved.
However we had only met 15 out of a total of 21 criteria set by Pendleton and much of this is still achieved by 'manual' processes.
Greater integration with back office processes is required if we are to achieve true e-government.
This is phase two and we have gone out to tender to appoint consultants to help us through identifying and purchasing a system which will integrate with the Web.
Why Librarians?
There are many librarians involved in e-government projects.
I chair a group of information professionals working in local government and many of its members will have been involved in e-government in one way or another.
Librarians should be at the forefront as the provision of information is a key element; and that is what we do best.
I do not know if Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science [5] are still taught but it would be interesting to apply these to e-government.
The five laws are: Books are for use Every reader his or her book Every book its reader Save the time of the reader The library is a growing organism If we begin to apply these laws to the provision of information to the public and the interactions being offered by e-government they still make a lot of sense.
All the most magnificent e-government technology in the world is worthless if it is not used and if it is not used to deliver to readers or users the information they need.
So every reader has the information needed and every piece of information has a reader.
We are always trying as we develop Web pages to make it quicker and easier for users to find their way around and find what they need.
And finally we know only too well that an electronic service grows and grows just like the libraries of Ranganathan's day.
We are attempting through e-government to connect our customers with the information they need and that is what every librarian has been doing from the time of Ranganathan and before.
Skills The skills we take for granted as librarians are exactly the skills needed to deliver e-government.
E-government without its customers would be a complete waste of time and effort and librarians know all about customers and identifying and meeting their information needs.
At a practical level we understand information architecture.
We know that a Web site cannot function if it is not arranged logically.
We know that a Web site needs to be indexed and we know that metadata is only really cataloguing.
We know that we need to use a controlled vocabulary, put in added terms and perhaps use a thesaurus and subject headings.
We are customer-focused and we know what our customers need and what they will and will not use.
A librarian's skill is also in identifying what information customers need even when they are not clear themselves or when they are not communicating it clearly.
In my experience librarians tend to be very flexible in their approach to their work.
Perhaps this is because anyone who has ever worked on an enquiry desk especially in a public library will never know what the next enquiry may be.
They have to be flexible to be able to jump from dealing with one enquiry to another which is probably on a completely different subject and like as not needs very different tools and skills to answer it.
Maybe it is this talent as much as anything which should encourage us to transfer our skills to the e-government arena.
The Times covered Librarianship in a series called 'Get a job as ...' and listed a degree of flexibility as the first skill for a successful librarian.
Is it not this variety which makes library work even in a special library unpredictable and interesting?
Information as an Asset We deal in information and information is valued today as never before.
When the Hawley Committee [6] produced its report in 1995 it identified for the first time that information is an asset.
Those of us who still call ourselves librarians should make it clear that we manage information.
In a recent article in Information World Review their first survey of readers' salaries showed that 'only 3.6% of those who defined themselves as Librarians are earning more than £40,000, while 16.3% of Information managers and 52% of Information Directors were earning above that figure.'
Is the work of those with information in their job title so very different?
I could not say, but I would suggest that the underlying skills are very similar.
I am writing this at the very beginning of 2005 as we wait to see the full impact of the Freedom of Information Act and this is another area where librarians have huge opportunities.
The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in the report from its Freedom of Information Panel to the CILIP Council on 10 December 2003 tells us 'We have the skills -let's use them'.
As librarians and information professionals we must not sell ourselves short.
We have the skills needed and the flexibility to use them.
We should be there at the forefront of e-government and in other aspects of information management.
The recognition of the value of information, its exponential growth and the need to be able to retrieve it quickly and efficiently make any job in information management a challenge.
Anyone who has the skills to be able to manage information is invaluable to an organisation and this is not going to change in the foreseeable future.
In fact I would anticipate demand for information skills will continue to rise and librarians need to be seen to be involved at every level.
E-government is just one area where we can make a difference.
References National Statistics Online home of official UK statistics http://www.nationalstatistics.gov.uk/ Defining E-Government Outcomes for 2005 to Support the Delivery of Priority Services & National Strategy Transformation Agenda for Local Authorities in England Version 1.0 http://www.odpm.gov.uk/pns/pnattach/20040112/1.doc e-government: Priority outcomes: explanatory notes for practitioners http://www.idea.gov.uk/transformation/?id=priority_outcomes For example, see Warwickshire Couny Council Planning and Development site http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/planning Ranganathan, S. R. 1963.
The Five Laws of Library Science.
Bombay: Asia Publishing House.
2nd ed.
(Ranganathan Series in Library Science; no.
12) Information as an asset : the board agenda, The Hawley Committee; a consultative document for chairmen, chief executives and boards of directors developed on behalf of the KPMG IMPACT Programme by a committee under the chairmanship of Dr Robert Hawley, chief executive of Nuclear Electric plc.
London : KPMG, 1995.
Affiliation of Local Government Information Specialists (ALGIS) http://www.algis.org.uk/ Author Details Jane Inman Technical Librarian Planning, Transport and Economic Strategy Warwickshire County Council Email: janeinman@warwickshire.gov.uk Jane is Chair of the Affiliation of Local Government Information Specialists (ALGIS [7] in LARIA) Return to top Article Title: "A Librarian's Experience of e-Government" Author: Jane Inman Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/inman/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A National Archive of Datasets Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A National Archive of Datasets Buzz data software database xml archives metadata sql video preservation cataloguing graphics ascii gis unicode ulcc foi privacy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jeffrey Darlington describes how structured datasets produced by UK Government departments and agencies are being archived and made available to users.
The National Archives has been building up a collection of UK Government datasets since 1997 under a contract with the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) [1].
The archived datasets are available to users free of charge through the World Wide Web and are known as the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) [2].
Datasets are one of the earliest types of digital record produced by Government departments, some of those now archived dating back to 1963.
The appraisal and selection of datasets is done by the National Archives, working together with the departments that created them.
They cover a wide range of subjects, a few examples being: Ancient Woodland Inventory North Sea Geographical Information System Public Health Common Data set Digest of Museum Statistics British Crime Survey Ancient Woodland Inventory An inventory of woodland sites over 2 hectares in England which are thought to have been in existence since at least 1600 AD.
The AWI was begun by the Nature Conservancy Council in 1981 and has been continued by its successor, English Nature.
The data gathered includes the name of the site, its location, the current area, the area cleared of woodland since surveying was conducted for the Ordnance Survey First Series 1:25,000 maps, the areas of ancient semi-natural woodland and ancient replanted woodland, and whether the site is associated with a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
NDAD currently holds a single dataset consisting of AWI data extracted from English Nature's information system in 2001-2002.
Figure 1 : The Ancient Woodland Inventory Like other public records, datasets are selected for permanent preservation because of their potential future value as part of the nation's memory.
The National Archives has a published acquisition policy [3] implemented through published Operational Selection Procedures that explain the criteria for selection.
The selected datasets are preserved and, subject to restrictions on access for reasons of confidentiality, are made available for public use through the Web.
The potential users are of two kinds.
One kind typically analyses large sets of records by statistical methods.
The other is the kind of user who wishes to search for a small number of records by the name of a person, place or organisation.
These include family history researchers, who have become the most numerous users of digital data in recent years, and for whom the National Archives provides data resources including the Documents Online [4] and Access to Archives [5] Web sites.
At present, users of the national dataset collection are mainly of the first kind, since those records that are of interest for family history are not yet open for access.
Many important datasets at NDAD are closed for 30 years or more.
These closed datasets are kept in a secure section of the archive and preserved for re-use by future users, the National Archives having recognised that digital records will not be readable after 30 years without taking active steps to preserve them.
The advent of Freedom of Information in 2005 may result in some datasets being released to the public much earlier than originally intended, though it is likely that personal data will remain closed for 100 years.
The archive will increase in value as a resource for users as these restrictions expire in future years.
Decisions about access rights are complex.
It is not just a matter of protecting the privacy of personal and corporate data.
Information about the natural environment may also be sensitive; people who illegally collect wildlife or wildlife products could misuse knowledge of the habitats of rare species if it is freely distributed.
Users of the Archive At present researchers from the academic and business worlds are the main users of the open datasets.
Social and political scientists are established users (and sharers) of structured data, re-analysing for example the survey data used to support Government decisions; their analysis is typically numerical and statistical.
The archive also provides a helpful data source for students of the natural environment and of education.
Historians are not great users of numerical data at present, but we may expect that in time they may take more interest in digital records and statistical methods.
It is also expected that Government users will become more active in analysing their own historical data in future.
The North Sea GIS and some other datasets are of significant and obvious business interest.
All open datasets are available for on-line browsing, and users can create subsets of data through a query processor, for viewing and for downloading to their own computers for further analysis.
A comprehensive on-line catalogue explains both the context and the content of each dataset, and describes the tables and columns included in them.
Codes used in the datasets are held in their original form, with an instantly accessible explanation of the meaning of each code and the values it takes (the codebook).
When browsing a dataset, codes are either expanded or left in their original form at the user's choice.
Many datasets come with extensive documentation that is essential to understanding the meaning of the data, and for some types of research may be more important than the data itself.
Often there is a published report based on the dataset.
Other documentation may include copies of questionnaires or a user manual and when the dataset has a geographical dimension, maps.
In some cases we even hold listings of COBOL programs as a record of processes included in the original system.
All these items of documentation are also held in digital form and are catalogued and made available (if open) for browsing and downloading.
The archive's catalogues of data and documentation conform to international standards, and can be accessed from the National Archives' own catalogue as well as from the NDAD Web site.
Figure 2: Map from Welsh Coastal Survey Preservation Strategy The physical preservation of datasets is based on a high-capacity automated tape library system that provides a very high level of reliability and security.
Multiple copies are kept, on-line and off-line.
Periodic checks are made by the system to see if any tape has passed a defined maximum age or accumulated usage.
In addition, over a six-month period at least one copy of every file stored is automatically verified for readability, and over a period of 18 months, every single tape that contains data is checked for readability.
Each dataset is stored in a simple linear format based on open standards.
The common format has a minimum of hardware and software dependencies, making it relatively 'future proof'.
Statistical datasets consist essentially of collections of simple tables of data values, and this structure is accurately captured in the common format when accompanied by suitable metadata.
Even though the standards on which it is based could become obsolete in time for example, the 8-bit ISO 8859-1 character set may be superseded by Unicode forward migration is assured, and the common format is easily imported into the proprietary formats of successive generations of analysis software.
Many users of digital datasets are interested in comparing figures over long time periods that may have originated in different studies using different data formats, and conversion to a common format is helpful to them.
Many other national archives use similar formats, as do academic archives of research results in social and political sciences.
In future, as more complex collections of data are archived, the strategy will be adapted to deal with them, based always upon open standards.
Many Government datasets are produced using one of the common statistical survey packages such as SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).
Other datasets come from 'retired' Government systems that maintain operational databases, sometimes in historic formats like IDMS (Integrated Data Management System) or Adabas.
These are more difficult to preserve, because they support more complex data relationships, and often include standard queries and 'views' of the data, which are not captured in the flat file format.
Their metadata conforms to a wider range of standards than those for statistical data.
When such databases are proposed for transfer to NDAD, data tables are extracted and converted to the standard preservation format.
In this way only the data tables are preserved, but on the other hand researchers can then view them without having to hold a wide variety of database licences for obsolete products.
The original record format is documented in the dataset catalogues, along with details of the original system and the hardware and software environment in which it operated.
The process of conversion is also documented and any deficiencies found in the data are listed.
The Swiss Federal Archives has commissioned a software package called SIARD (Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases), which promises to preserve queries and views in the standard SQL database language, along with the data tables and standardised metadata an ambitious aim.
The approach uses a combination of XML (Extensible Markup Language) and standard SQL.
This software will be made available to other national archives and will provide an improved preservation strategy, at least for the range of currently popular relational database products.
The National Archives is participating in the testing of SIARD.
Preservation Challenges Some of the datasets being archived now are relatively new, in some cases still being available in whole or in part on the website of the originating agency.
Early selection and early archiving has the great benefit of insuring against the loss of data, of documentation, and of expertise when the dataset goes out of operational use.
That this is a very real danger is illustrated by the problems encountered in archiving older datasets.
In some cases these have been stored on their original magnetic tapes for decades, a preservation strategy not to be recommended.
The tapes deteriorate and may become completely unreadable.
At best they may be readable at a slow speed, and even then portions of the data may be lost beyond recovery.
Nevertheless, we have managed to recover data from some 30 year old tapes, only because three copies of each tape were kept, and we were able to piece together a complete set of the data by reading different segments from different copies.
It goes without saying that a digital archive must have a tape drive for reading 9 track open reel tapes.
Despite its exceptionally long life as a standard interchange medium, this is a historic format and manufacture of the drives has now ceased.
Migration This term covers a range of processes that may be employed in the preservation of data: Conversion from one software format to another, for example Word to PDF.
Conversion from one character code to another, for example EBCDIC to ASCII.
Transfer from one physical medium to another, for example an old magnetic tape format to a newer.
Copying a file to fresh media of the same kind, more appropriately known as media refreshment.
In other cases datasets from as far back as 1963 have been received from the originating agency (or its successor) on a modern tape medium, the data having been migrated through successive generations of computer systems at the agency.
This approach alleviates the troubles attendant on dealing with obsolete physical media, but in their place brings problems of its own.
In some cases data has been lost in previous migrations; it is important to guard against this possibility by checks against the documentation.
On one occasion it was found that the totals in the published report (supplied with the dataset) did not tally with totals derived from the digital records.
It turned out that a mistake in tape handling in one migration had caused about a thousand records to be lost forever.
It proved possible with help from the agency to reconstruct a summary of the missing records in this case.
The transfer medium most frequently encountered at present is the compact disc.
Transfers on obsolete types of floppy disc are now quite rare, although a variety of disc and tape media are still supported.
Digital Archaeology Normally some care has been taken to avoid actual data loss during migration.
Preservation of the metadata that defines the meaning of the data has not always been so rigorous, especially for older datasets.
An example of this occurred with the earliest digital records of the Schools Census [6].
This survey of schools in England and Wales is believed to have been started in about 1946 and first recorded on computer media around 1975.
The datasets transferred to NDAD are normally in the file format of Qstat, the survey software used by the Government's educational statisticians.
A small number of records in one of the earliest datasets proved to be incomplete when data was extracted from this format.
A more serious problem though was found with the data dictionaries that gave the names of columns, explanations of their use and keys to encoded values.
The data dictionaries had themselves been migrated in 1991-2 and data had been lost from them, the explanations provided for some columns having been cut short.
In these and other cases column descriptions were duplicated, even though the columns clearly contained different data.
This was not the only problem, since the dictionaries also contained unexplained abbreviations and unexplained encoding that made it impossible to define the meaning of each column precisely.
It would normally be possible to overcome these deficiencies by referring to the paper documentation and copies of the original survey forms.
For the very earliest 1975-9 datasets (and some later years), these documents had apparently not survived.
Since other datasets were more fully documented, and in the interest of preserving as long a time series as possible, it was decided to engage in some 'digital archaeology' to recover the early metadata.
With the help of two County record offices and a few schools, some copies of completed survey forms were located, along with instructions for completing the forms.
The completed forms were matched up to the corresponding digital records, and the meanings of the columns became clear.
The annual volumes of education statistics in which the results of the 1975-9 schools census were originally published gave further help, by explaining some of the mysterious abbreviations and coding schemes used in the survey.
The catalogues for these datasets were brought up to the normal high level of completeness, in this case through an unusually thorough process of research.
Routine cataloguing is normally more straightforward, though the level of skill and experience required to capture all the information needed to make datasets readily usable should not be underestimated.
A Transatlantic View In the United States, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) [7] has been archiving Government datasets for a much longer period, and in 2003 introduced the Access to Archival Databases (AAD) [8] Programme to allow on-line browsing of selected datasets through the Web.
Some of the most popular of these datasets are derived from military sources.
Casualty lists are available from the Vietnam War and other conflicts going back to the Second World War, the earlier records having originated on punched cards.
These and other military records are open for public inspection, and generate large volumes of inquiries.
It is often forgotten that punched cards were in use for recording data from the year 1901, long before the computer era, and that cards continued to be used as a storage medium for a long time after the introduction of magnetic tape and disc media.
Most of the early card records have been lost, but in a few cases they were considered valuable enough to be preserved and eventually transferred to magnetic media.
The time horizon for digital records is farther back than is generally realised.
Punched cards from a later period are still occasionally received by NARA, who have a card reader hooked up to a PC to transfer them to disc.
The PC software includes a card reader driver, once a fundamental part of every mainframe operating system and now an exotic novelty in the modern world.
A similar facility is available in the UK.
The Future The next step for the National Archives is the preservation of the more diverse digital data that is now produced by Government departments and agencies.
The traditional preservation of printed text on paper is to be progressively replaced by preservation of the digital source files.
A Digital Archive has been set up for this purpose, based on the same principles as the national dataset archive, and taking advantage of the latest generation of storage technology.
Secure storage of closed data is again an important requirement.
The first records to be received are from temporary bodies such as public inquiries, since these come to the National Archives as soon as the body is disbanded, without the usual intermediate period of storage at a Government agency.
These records [9] are in a wide range of formats, including those produced by current office and graphics software products, but also including sound and video recordings and even virtual reality models.
For the present, records are being stored in their original formats, and are made available only to on-site visitors to the National Archives at Kew.
The presentation of these diverse records to Web users is a subject for future development.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Kevin Ashley and the NDAD team at ULCC.
References University of London Computer Centre Web site http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/ The National Digital Archive of Datasets Web site http://ndad.ulcc.ac.uk/ The PRO's Acquisition and Disposition Policies http://www.pro.gov.uk/recordsmanagement/acquisition/ DocumentsOnline http://www.documentsonline.nationalarchives.gov.uk// Access to Archives http://www.a2a.org.uk/ Peter Garrod, "The Schools' Census and Digital Archaeology", in Digital Resources for the Humanities 2001-2002: An Edited Selection of Papers, ed.
Jean Anderson, Alastair Dunning and Michael Fraser (London: Office for Humanities Communication, 2003) The National Archives and Records Administration http://www.archives.gov/ The Access to Archival Databases (AAD) System http://www.archives.gov/aad/ Public Record Office: Digital Preservation http://www.pro.gov.uk/about/preservation/digital/holdings/default.htm Author Details Jeffrey Darlington NDAD Contract Manager Digital Preservation Department The National Archives Email: jeffrey.darlington@nationalarchives.gov.uk Web site: http://www.pro.gov.uk/about/preservation/digital/default.htm Return to top Article Title: "A National Archive of Datasets" Author: Jeffrey Darlington Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/ndad/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004 Buzz mobile software wiki portal usability accessibility blog e-learning mp3 e-business foaf intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley reports on the 8th Institutional Web Management Workshop at the University of Birmingham over 27-29 July.
The theme of this year's workshop was Transforming the Organisation.
The 8th Institutional Web Management Workshop provided an entertaining mix of new ideas, challenges, controversy and debate, this year in a Birmingham setting.
The sub-title for the conference Transforming the Organisation was well chosen.
The Web is now 'mission critical' in all of our organisations, and the workshop gave us all ample opportunity to reflect on how the Web is transforming our organisational and working practices and changing every aspect of our professional lives.
Key Themes A number of key themes emerged from the workshop over the 3 days.
Partnerships Web professionals are increasingly finding themselves at the centre of organisational change often in the position of driving change.
As a result, the value of cross-institutional partnerships is increasingly being recognised, and Web professionals are finding themselves drawn in to (or in many cases initiating) project networks and teams across the campus in order to deliver enterprise-wide services.
David Supple described how his role in developing the Web-enabled campus increasingly involves him in a juggling act between institutional politics, technology and relationship-brokering in his plenary session on the Trials, Trips and Tribulations of an integrated web strategy [1].
Heidi Fraser-Krauss and Ester Ruskuc described their roles at St Andrews University as acting as the human interface between the techies and the users in their session on E-business: Why Join In?
[2].
Growth of the Web Community The Web community is growing and maturing all the time, as evidenced by the large numbers of first time attendees at the workshop.
A new development this year was the presence of large teams of Web staff, evidence that the Web professional is moving from lone individual status to working in larger and better-resourced teams with a greater standing in the organisation.
Dave Hartland talked about the need for strategic staff development to support Web providers in his plenary on Strategic Staff Development for the Web-enabled organisation [3].
The Web as an Enterprise Tool Heidi Fraser-Krauss and Ester Ruskuc described how an e-business strategy had been developed at St Andrews University in response to student demand.
Students no longer wanted to queue in the cash office to pay their fees, but instead wanted to be able to do this online, potentially at the same time as purchasing a commemorative mug and paying off their library fines.
Heidi referred to this as the 'Amazon mentality'.
In response the University has developed a system which can sell virtually anything online, from any of the myriad of internal suppliers around the campus.
In giving more control to the customer they have lost some control from the centre, but the service has proved extremely popular with students and has simplified workflow processes for staff.
The University has transformed thinking about how it can interact with its 'customers'.
Stephen Bulley added a note of realism with his plenary on LSE for You: From Innovation to Realism and Beyond [4].
Stephen described how the LSE for You Project has climbed a slope of increasing realism after falling into a trough of disillusionment.
The service began as a project to Web-enable key applications on campus such as student registration and module selection, and is now moving into more mainstream portal development.
Stephen described how they had worked with a philosophy of 'think big start small' in order to move the project forward and gradually change the culture.
They had now reached a 'plateau of productivity' and are developing a strategy for full portal development.
Controversy Brian Kelly and Lawrie Phipps challenged the current consensus on Web accessibility in their plenary session on Beyond Web Accessibility: Providing a Holistic User Experience [5].
Currently, awareness of Web accessibility issues is widespread amongst the academic community.
However, compliance with the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) guidelines is still very low, as a recent survey on accessibility of University home pages has shown [6].
Brian and Lawrie concluded that the guidelines are difficult to achieve in an environment where the needs of all users must be considered.
There is confusion over the guidelines, and some institutions have tried to implement them as mandatory standards, but this approach has invariably failed.
Brian pointed out that even the Web site of the Disability Rights Commission is not AA-compliant.
Brian and Lawrie concluded that pragmatism is the key to interpreting the guidelines in an educational environment.
David Supple dismissed the current trend for Content Management Systems; raising concerns about total cost of ownership, lack of flexibility and inability to support a large complex environment.
Strategy versus 'Just Do It' David Supple discussed the strategic approach to using the Web to transform the organisation.
Tony Brown and Matt Thrower from PPARC (Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council) came at organisational change from a different angle, as described in their plenary session Socrates: building an intranet for the UK research councils [7].
Tony and Matt have built a cross-research council intranet which has encouraged greater communication, information-sharing and community across the research councils.
Their approach was to 'just do it' rather than waiting around for the decision-making process to catch up with them.
Their mantra of 're-use and re-cycle' has led them to build the site largely based on freely available tools.
The result is a popular and well-used service which is succeeding in breaking down communication barriers across the research councils.
New Tools and Services Sebastian Rahtz introduced us to the OSS Watch Service (Open Source Software) in his plenary entitled Beyond Free Beer: Is Using Open Source a Matter of Choosing Software or Joining a Political Movement?
[8].
The OSS Watch Service is funded by JISC to advise UK HE/FE about issues around open source software.
Brian Kelly introduced us to Life After Email [9] in his plenary session on Strategies for Collaboration in the 21st Century.
Brian took us through a whistle-stop tour of developments in new collaborative tools.
Increasingly our users have access to a whole range of mobile devices such as PDAs (personal digital assistants), mobile phones, MP3 players and digital cameras, all of which have collaborative potential.
Users will expect us to be able to deliver our services to all of these devices, and will increasingly expect support for other collaborative tools such as instant messaging and blogs on campus.
There is huge scope for the use of these tools to support e-learning.
Brian posed the question of whether we can afford not to support such technologies, and suggested that we need to get to grips with the strategic challenges they bring with them.
Other Activities In addition to the plenary sessions, delegates could choose from a large selection of parallel workshop sessions on topics ranging from the use of blogs and WIKIs in a support environment through to the legal aspects of Web management.
All of these sessions were interactive, with lots of opportunities for discussion and sharing issues.
Discussion groups were also available, covering strategy and management issues, technical issues, usability and accessibility issues, information management issues, e-learning issues and staff development.
Delegates also made the most of the excellent opportunities for relaxation in Birmingham, taking a well-earned break with a canal boat trip into the city centre, followed by a chance to sample the Birmingham nightlife.
Post-workshop, the opportunities for discussion and collaboration continue, with a WIKI (a collaborative Web-based authoring environment) made available for delegates to evaluate the potential of this emerging technology [10].
Delegates are also invited to create a FOAF (Friend of a Friend) file which can be used to enable an electronic social network of participants [11].
References Supple, D., "Trials, Trips and Tribulations of an Integrated Web Strategy", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/supple/ Fraser-Krauss, H. and Ruskuc, E., "E-business: Why Join In ", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/fraser-krauss/ Hartland, D., "Strategic Staff Development for the Web-enabled Organisation", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/hartland/ Bulley, S., "LSE for You: From Innovation to Realism and Beyond", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/bulley/ Kelly, B. and Phipps, L., "Beyond Web Accessibility: Providing a Holistic User Experience", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/phipps-kelly/ Kelly, B. and Phipps, L. "Accessibility Survey", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/phipps-kelly/survey/ Brown, T. and Thrower, M., "SOCRATES: Building an Intranet for UK Research Councils", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/brown/ Rahtz, S. "Beyond Free Beer: Is Using Open Source a Matter of Choosing Software or Joining a Political Movement?
", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/rahtz/ Kelly, B.
"Life After Email: Strategies for Collaboration in the 21st Century", http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/kelly/ Invitation to Contribute to Workshop WIKI, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/ Invitation to Join a Social Network, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/ Author Details Tracey Stanley Head of e-Strategy and Development Leeds University Library University of Leeds Email: t.s.stanley@leeds.ac.uk Web site: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/people/tss.htm Return to top Article Title: "The Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004" Author: Tracey Stanley Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/iwmw2004-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Personalisation of the Digital Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Personalisation of the Digital Library Buzz data software database portal infrastructure metadata vocabularies namespace cataloguing videoconferencing ontologies soap personalisation authentication uportal interoperability privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Michelle Perrott and Anne Ramsden report on the Joint Open University Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Seminar on Personalisation and Digital Libraries hosted at the Open University, October 2002.
The interest in personalisation began with online commerce and the need for one-to-one relationships with customers in the early 1990s.
Higher education is rapidly moving towards online delivery and mass education, so students could benefit from more personalised services, hence the recent interest in institutional portals, such as uPortal (1), which can personalise and present information.
Within this context, the libraries of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and The Open University are embarking on a new programme of work to investigate personalised library environments through their respective projects, PESIC and MyOpenLibr@ry.
The personalisation seminar organised jointly by the two institutions provided the opportunity to learn from other researchers and libraries that have implemented MyLibrary examples, developed personalisation and gateway tools and researched the user aspects.
This is a truly international topic as reflected in the programme of speakers who came from Greece, Catalonia, New Mexico and the UK.
The seminar was aimed at librarians and technologists and focussed on user-centred models including recommender systems, collaborative filtering, roles-based personalisation, and middleware to support portals and personalisation.
Presentations included applications in The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute and Student Services, and MyLibrary case studies in Los Alamos National Laboratory, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and The Open University Library.
Georgia Koutrika, researcher in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens, set the scene with a presentation entitled A personalised perspective on personalisation (2).
She touched on the information avalanche, pointing out that as the amount of available information increases and evolves every day at a high rate, providing accurate, compact, and relevant answers to users’ requests becomes harder and harder.
Information-filtering techniques help cope with the current “information avalanche”, but the ultimate response to the problem may be offering “personalised” information access, i.e., access based on the needs, preferences, and current status of individuals.
Despite the popularity and the high promises of personalised access, however, a survey of the field indicates that most current efforts originate in the area of Information Retrieval and are limited to dealing with accessing unstructured documents only without taking structured databases into account.
Because of this and several other limitations, the current state of the art is far from offering the kind of personalised access one would really envision.
Her presentation included a summary of a representative sample of the works presented at the DELOS workshop on “Personalization and Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries”, which was organized by the “DELOS Network of Excellence in Digital Libraries”.
Finally, Georgia touched upon the University of Athens interests in offering personalised access to structured data through technology incorporated inside database systems.
An interesting presentation by John Paschoud from the London School of Economics, on Portals, portals everywhere, why the Interface-to-Everything is not an Interface-for-Everyone (3), provided much food for thought in the tricky area of authentication in relation to personalisation.
John assumed the role of devil’s advocate for the seminar, as he noted that the thinking behind such “interfaces to everything” is at risk of missing the point that the intended users are not just students (or academic staff, or researchers, or administrators), but people; and that most people have lives that include several roles, with several corresponding sets of information needs.
It is crucial that we do not confuse the role of a person, with his or her identity.
He pointed to the experience of a few US universities, where development of institutional information environments have a (short) lead over most in the UK, but that many students reject the offer of including “personal” information content in University Web portals designed for their use.
The fact that many individuals have multiple roles impacts particularly on the processes of authentication (process of confirming the link between a person and his/her electronic identity) and authorisation (the process of linking the electronic identity to a set of resources to which the person has been granted access).
Some rights of access derive from roles, and some from individual identities.
In this context, John outlined the aim of the JISC-funded ANGEL Project, which is specifying a Roles Namespace suitable for use in UK tertiary education, and a resolution model for use in shared authorisation services which can work behind single or multiple institutional portals, and other ‘presentation layer’ services that meet the requirements of the JISC Information Environment.
Monica Bonett’s (UKOLN) presentation An architecture for personalisation of subject gateways based on web services (4) discussed the experience of the IMesh Toolkit project of using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) as a basis to provide interoperable tools for subject gateways.
After briefly introducing both the application area, (subject gateways), and the SOAP protocol, the presentation explored the reasons for the choice of SOAP as an interface, and discussed how SOAP can be used in the context of subject gateways to build reusable tools to manage and share user profiles.
Katie Anstock (5) from Fretwell Downing Informatics spoke of the digital library issues which faced the AGORA project team in the 1990s and how those issues were resolved at a technical level.
Many of the requirements identified during the project were adopted in the development of Fretwell Downing’s ZPORTAL solution.
The Open University’s Marion Phillips (6), Assistant Director of Student Services, discussed how elements of a customised learner service might be developed using web-based technologies.
Using examples from the developing online student support service at the UK Open University, a variety of possible techniques were: online self-assessment activities for students linked to appropriate feedback and guidance, individualised targeted reminders and guidance through timely messages sent to students, use of systems employing reusable learning objects and content management strategies to precisely tailor mass produced learning resources to the individual’s studies.
Enrico Motta (7) of the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute outlined how the semantic web and ontologies (an ontology can be seen as a specification of a shared vocabulary, to enable software agents to co-operate on the web) could be used to support radical new personalisation facilities, based on an understanding of the ‘meaning’ of web resources, rather than simply on past histories and/or current behaviour.
Some examples of how the semantic web and ontologies can be used to provide personalisation services were mentioned to illustrate this principle in two domains: scholarly digital libraries and electronic newsletters.
The keynote speech by Clifford Lynch (8), Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) on Personalization, Privacy, and Distributed Information Resources was delivered via a videoconference link from the Educause office in Washington D.C.
He spoke about how personalisation technologies such as recommender systems have become commonplace and well-accepted in certain environments, most notably electronic commerce settings, but in other environments they have seen little use in part due to organisational cultures that place extremely heavy emphasis on user privacy.
Libraries in the USA would be included in this group.
An additional constraint in current recommender technology is that it works best in massive, centralized systems; whilst this makes business sense (and indeed can represent a competitive advantage) for the commercial services such as Amazon that have implemented them, it is less clear that this limitation is desirable for consumers, and it certainly is not consistent with the information seeking and use patterns of many communities, where users interact with large constellations of distributed, autonomously managed content resources.
He examined some of the prospects for extending personalisation technologies to these distributed settings and for accommodating privacy concerns, and described some developments in distributed authorisation technology which may provide useful infrastructure to support new developments in personalisation.
The final session of the seminar focussed on Personalisation in Digital Library Environments.
Mariella Di Giacomo (9) spoke on the Web-based Personal Digital Libraries at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Mariella presented an overview of MyLibrary@LANL, a service which supports digital library users, either as individuals or as groups, with a personalised Web environment that enhances scientific collaboration.
In addition to supporting personalised shared environments, the system incorporates the integration of a recommendation system, a Web link checking mechanism, and tools that extend the functionality of Web browsers.
A particularly interesting feature of the MyLibrary service is that it gives users the opportunity to create and populate personalised Web environments called libraries.
A personal library holds categories called folders that hold a collection of links.
These folders can be shared with other users and a user sharing a library with a group of people is able to define the people who can participate and what their rights should be.
Marta Enrech (10) from the Biblioteca at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) presented the PESIC project, founded by the University’s Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and lead by the Virtual Library team of the UOC.
She outlined the main objective of PESIC which is to define a personalised information system, from the concept of the analysis of the user’s information needs in virtual environments, as well as the analysis of technical requirements for the creation and maintenance of the system.
Institutional funding will be made available to develop the personalised environment including “my profile”, personalised services and recommenders.
This will involve a needs analysis of a pilot group of researchers based in the IN3, system specification and implementation.
Finally, Anne Ramsden (11), seminar organiser and project manager of the MyOpenLibrary Project at the Open University Library, spoke of the issues from the student perspective, the ever burgeoning increase in information resources and resulting overload, as well as difficulties of access to external proprietary databases and content.
The MyOpenLibr@ry Project aims to address these issues and deliver a personalised digital library environment that will support the teaching and learning needs of students and staff.
The challenges are the development of a user-centred customisable interface, the need to ensure consistent cataloguing of resources and to include the metadata elements to enable personalisation at the course level.
It is equally important that our users have a seamless view of the University and should not have to cope with multiple “mypages”.
The Open University is embarking on a institutional portal project to deliver functionality like a corporate portal with channels of information for individuals and user groups – calendars, schedules, courses, student services, library, administration etc.
This will provide scope for broader integration of personalised library services across the University as the portal becomes the primary access point for all library users.
That way OU students will be able to find information more easily, carry out more effective research and achieve an all round better learning experience.
Speaker biographies, presentations including the webcast of Clifford Lynch’s keynote talk, and links to projects/resources mentioned during the seminar are available from the Open Library website at http://library.open.ac.uk/aboutus/myolib/seminar.htm .Further information about the MyOpenLibrary Project is available also from http://library.open.ac.uk/aboutus/myolib/introduction.htm .
Next year, the Open University Library in conjunction with UOC will be organising another similar seminar in Barcelona.
References 1.
Ian Douglas, Paul Miller and Robert Sherratt.
Portals, portals everywhere.
Ariadne, October 2002 Issue 33, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/portals/ 2.
Georgia Koutrika and Professor Yannis Ioannidis (Department of Informatics, University of Athens) – Athens.
“A personalised perspective on personalisation”.
3.
John Paschoud, Angel Project Manager, London School of Economics “Portals, Portals, everywhere…Why the Interface-to-Everything is not an Interface-for-Everyone”.
4.
Monica Bonnett, Software Developer, UKOLN “An architecture for personalisation of subject gateways, based on web services”.
5.
Katie Anstock, Zportal Product Manager, Fretwell Downing, “Tailoring the user experience”.
“Tailoring the User Experience”.
6.
Marion Phillips, Assistant Director, Student Services “Personalisation and student support services: developments at the UK Open University” (not available online).
7.
Enrico Motta, Director, Knowledge Media Institute (OU) “Ontology-based Personalisation Services”.
8.
Clifford Lynch “Keynote : Webcast”.
9.
Mariella Di Giacomo, Librarian, Los Alamos Laboratory “Web-based personal digital libraries”.
10.
Marta Enrech, Head of Digital Collections, Biblioteca Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Catalunya.
“PESIC project”.
11.
Anne Ramsden, The Open University Library, “MyOpenLibrary project”.
MP Page 2 01-11-03 Personalising the digital library Author Details   Michelle Perrott and Anne Ramsden The Open University Library Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA URl: http://www.open.ac.uk/library Article Title: “Personalising the digital library” Author:Michelle Perrott and Anne Ramsden Publication Date: 14-Jan-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 34 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/ramsden-perrot/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Policy Management Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Policy Management Workshop Buzz framework infrastructure standardisation accessibility identifier copyright provenance e-learning dom drm onix licence research Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie and Mark Bide report on a one-day invitational workshop on Digital Policy Management sponsored by The British Library, JISC and UKOLN under the aegis of the British Library/JISC Partnership, held in the British Library Conference Centre on 24 April 2006.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology is commonly portrayed as a mechanism for restricting access to and use of digital content.
On the contrary, a properly implemented Digital Policy Management infrastructure will facilitate the widest possible use of digital content, supporting the interests of library users, libraries and rights owners.
'Access and use policies' are a traditional element in the management of every library collection.
There are many reasons why every item in a library collection may not be accessible to every library user; and the uses to which different items may be put are frequently not uniform across the complete collection.
Policies may derive from internally determined library practice, from the legal framework within which the library operates or from licence agreements with controllers of copyrights.
In the physical world, the management of these policies is relatively easily managed by physical constraints and occasional human intervention.
However, if libraries are to take full advantage of the opportunities that the network creates for wider access to their growing digital collection, relying on physical constraints and human intervention creates insurmountable barriers to efficient management.
In a networked environment, there are no convincing arguments that physical constraints provide the optimum mechanism for managing policies (for example, by restricting access to content to particular terminals in particular physical locations).
Rather, we should seek to find technical solutions to a technical problem.
The Workshop This invitational workshop on Digital Policy Management was held at the British Library Conference Centre in April to explore these issues.
It is one of three joint British Library, JISC and UKOLN workshops organised for 2006 as part of the British Library and JISC Partnership [1].
Its aims were that by the end of the workshop, the participants should: be better informed about the issues; understand the current 'state of the art' in technology and technical standards (and where the gaps may be); understand different stakeholder attitudes.
This should contribute to: improved policy formation; identification of potential future actions or research and development opportunities, particularly those that might beneficially be undertaken jointly by JISC and the British Library.
Delegates heard overviews from Mark Bide (Rightscom), Richard Boulderstone (British Library), and Amber Thomas and Liam Earney (JISC); and specific case studies on the JISC JORUM service and Creative Commons from Susan Eales (JISC), The British Library Digital Object Management (DOM) programme from Richard Masters (British Library), ONIX for Licensing Terms from David Martin (Book Industry Communication/EDItEUR), and Standardisation in Other Media and in Consumer Electronics from David Gooch (International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers).
All Powerpoint presentations from the workshop and the programme have been made available on the Web [2].
Outcomes The following recommendations were made by the meeting delegates: The bringing together of the group itself drawn from the British Library, JISC Executive, JISC services and projects, and publishers and industry representatives was seen as having been a valuable exercise in sharing of expertise; this reflected the complexity of the challenges, and the value of learning across traditional boundaries.
The organisers of the workshop were invited to consider how the group (or a similar one) might be best used in future.
The minimisation of complexity (but equally the avoidance of a 'lowest common denominator' approach to access) is dependent on the wide implementation of standards, and in this light a warm welcome was given to the development of ONIX for Licensing Terms (OLT) [3].
It was agreed that it would be valuable to express the JISC National Electronic Site Licensing Model Licence for electronic journals [4] in the OLT messaging format; this should be accompanied by (plain English) documentation stressing the extent of what is permitted under the terms of this licence as well as what is not permitted.
In addition, it was noted that in many contexts clear explanations of permissions and restrictions are rarely available to end-users.
'Click-though' licences were felt to be particularly inadequate in this regard.
Finally the close alignment of evolving digital policy management for the DOM system with OLT within the British Library was also noted and welcomed.
The significance of the role of system providers and particularly of Electronic Rights Management system vendors in the widespread implementation of OLT was acknowledged.
It was agreed that specific activity (perhaps jointly sponsored by the British Library, JISC, and publishers) should be undertaken among the vendor community to 'evangelise' OLT at both technical and strategic level; and that this should be reinforced by raising awareness among librarians of the potential benefits (so that the system vendors could be made aware of real market demand).
The group recognised that seeing 'DRM' in the rather wider context of 'policy management' gives an additional perspective to the issue.
For the orderly management of policy, it needs to be possible to express in machine interpretable formats (for example) Open Access policies and Creative Commons licences as well as Publisher Licences.
An area that requires further exploration is the development of Creative Commons-like licences that are more appropriate for the specific requirements of the UK Higher Education/Further Education communities.
Although recognising the inherent challenges to exceptions to copyright, it was recognised that there may be lessons to be learned from the music industry in the development of services based on effective DRM and that these might be further explored in future.
It was agreed that the British Library and JISC should share their responses to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property [5].
Other issues that arose that would benefit from future discussion included: 'one stop shop' rights clearance for e-learning and teaching materials; a better understanding of trust, identity and provenance models; the management of students' outputs; accessibility; and an understanding of the application of policy management to academic models of 'right, reward and responsibility' (which are different from the economic models of the copyright industries).
Notes and References The British Library/JISC Partnership was established in 2004 to carry forward and develop earlier collaborative activity between the British Library, the JISC and UK Higher Education.
Further information on the Partnership and current joint activities are available online from the British Library Web site at http://www.bl.uk/about/cooperation/jisc.html, and the JISC Web site at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/part_bl_info.html Presentations are available from the Workshop Web pages at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/drm-2006/programme/index.html For further information on ONIX for Licensing Terms see the Web page at http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html For further information on the JISC NESLI Model Licence see Web pages at http://www.nesli2.ac.uk/model.htm For further information on the Gowers Review see Web pages at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/gowers_review_intellectual_property/gowersreview_index.cfm Author Details Neil Beagrie British Library/JISC Partnership Manager The British Library Email: neil.beagrie@bl.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk and http://www.bl.uk Publications:http://www.beagrie.com Mark Bide Rightscom Limited Email: mark.bide@rightscom.com Web site: http://www.rightscom.com Return to top Article Title: "Digital Policy Management Workshop" Author: Neil Beagrie and Mark Bide Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/dpm-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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2nd International DCC Conference 2006: Digital Data Curation in Practice Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 2nd International DCC Conference 2006: Digital Data Curation in Practice Buzz data software java framework wiki html database infrastructure archives metadata blog repositories copyright flickr preservation frbr curation dspace e-science droid algorithm research irods Citation BibTex RIS Alexander Ball and Manjula Patel provide an overview of the second annual conference of the Digital Curation Centre.
The International Digital Curation Conference is held annually by the Digital Curation Centre [1] to bring together researchers in the field and promote discussion of policy and strategy.
The second conference in this series [2], with the theme 'digital data curation in practice', was held between 21-22 November 2006 in Glasgow.
Day One Opening Keynote Address Hans Hoffman of CERN gave the opening keynote address.
The e-Science 'revolution' is being both pushed by advances in technology and pulled by demands from researchers.
In order to respond to these pressures, an infrastructure is being set up that encompasses large databases or digital libraries, software, high-speed network connectivity, computation, instrumentation, and (importantly) people and training.
In the particular example of particle physics, research takes place in a global network of 7000 scientists; the annual turnover of staff is in the region of 1000 (mainly junior) scientists.
This turnover raises challenges for effective information exchange, and means that procedures need to be in place to ensure experience and information is passed on to each new intake of scientists.
The data collected by instruments such as the Large Hadron Collider are useless if the configuration of the instruments is not known.
Therefore, CERN has an Engineering Data Management System for life cycle and configuration management, maintaining access to the drawings, 3D models, and associated documentation for the instruments, along with test results, experimental parameters, and change histories.
Not only does the physical set-up need to be recorded, but also the data workflow: the raw data needs to be heavily processed before it can be used, but unless these processes are well documented the final data may not be reusable by others.
Hans also outlined the importance of open access to scientific research outputs, and set out the ingredients for a successful virtual organisation or collaboratory.
These included: a common goal, formalised in some way; clear definition of the rights, duties and deliverables associated with each partner; completely open sharing of information, data technologies, and insights between partners; quality assurance of deliverables, schedules and budgets; and enough partners to be able to tackle the common goal effectively.
Disciplines and Data Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins University presented a paper on Digital Data Preservation in Astronomy.
He described a prototype digital preservation facility being developed by the University that would take care of the entire process of submitting scholarly astronomy papers.
The principle is that the Library would host the data sets, imagery, spectra, etc.
underlying a paper and make it available with appropriate metadata and protocols to Virtual Observatories; it would also pass on the submitted paper to the publishers (the American Astronomical Society, the Astrophysical Journal, the Astronomical Journal, and the University of Chicago Press are co-operating in this venture), who on publishing the paper would make reference back to the underlying data held by the Library.
This relieves the data archiving burden from publishers and makes the data more readily accessible for reuse.
Reception in the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow Melissa Cragin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presented a case study of a developing Neuroscience data repository.
The study focused on interviews with nine depositors, eleven potential reusers of the data, three of the developers of the repository and two consultants.
The repository was seen as a useful way of gathering project data together in one place, making it easier to cross-analyse or mine the data.
It was also seen as a useful medium for scholarly communication, both informally between colleagues and formally as part of the publication process, as a source of illustrative materials for teaching, and as a source of material on which students could practise their skills.
This was in addition to consideration of the preservation role of the repository.
Paul Lambert of the University of Stirling presented a paper on the challenges of curating occupational information resources.
One of the major problems surrounding reuse of occupational surveys is the large number of coding schemes used for recording the data, most of which are inconsistent with each other and idiosyncratically applied.
The (partial) solution applied by Stirling's Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment (GEODE) is to mark up each data set with the encoding scheme used, employing a registry of such schemes.
Where links between schemes can be made, this is noted in the registry to allow such translations as are possible.
The context is also recorded, e.g.
the geographical area, time period, and social group studied, and reference unit used for analysis, e.g.
just individuals' current occupation, their career history, or the occupations of those in a single household.
All these factors are important to researchers looking to compare their data with earlier sets.
Poster and Demo Session The session started in the presentation room, with contributors giving a one-minute spoken advertisement for their poster or demonstration.
Afterwards, contributors took up residence in the poster room to talk people through their poster or demonstration individually [3].
Life Cycles Jeremy Frey of the University of Southampton presented a paper on curating laboratory experimental data.
In the context of the data life cycle he stressed the importance of recording sufficient metadata (and other aspects of good record-keeping) at the time of data creation (e.g.
spectra of samples).
Various tools are being developed in Chemistry for different stages of the life cycle.
The SmartTea Project [4] has been looking at electronic laboratory notebooks, and producing software that can capture and store high-quality metadata to accompany the record of the experimental process.
The R4L (Repository for the Laboratory) Project [5] is looking at ways to capture and store large quantities of laboratory data.
The e-Bank Project [6] is investigating ways of exposing data (specifically crystal structures) for e-Science purposes.
The CombeChem Project [7] is looking at blogs as a possible mechanism for converting experimental records, data and scientific discussions into a publishable format.
Frances Shipsey of LSE presented a paper describing a user requirements survey conducted for the VERSIONS Project [8], which attempts to deal with version control for academic documents.
The findings of the study were that academic authors have to deal with large numbers of revisions, and that while most authors aim to keep copies of all or most of their revisions, many of these copies become inaccessible over time; this is sometimes due to technical difficulties and sometimes due to organisational changes.
As well as VERSIONS, other projects covering similar ground are the NISO/ALPSP Working Group on Versions of Journal Articles (specifically dealing with stages from the point of submission to a publisher), RIVER (investigating what versioning means for various digital objects) and the JISC e-Prints Application Profile Working Group (applying Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records [9] to versions held in repositories)[*].
Yunhyong Kim presented a paper on automated genre classification.
By 'genre' is meant 'type of document', e.g.
academic textbook, novel, scholarly article, newspaper/magazine, thesis.
The paper compared the effectiveness of using image-based and text-based classification techniques, and found that newspapers and magazines are more visually than textually distinct from other genres, whereas theses were found to be visually similar to business reports, minutes, textbooks and novels.
Day Two Keynote Address Liz Lyon of UKOLN gave a keynote address reflecting on Open Scholarship.
The talk consisted mostly of a tour of initiatives working in the area of open source, open access and open data, and the new possibilities that arise from blogs, wikis and 'mashed-up' Web services.
Various aspects of the publishing process were tackled, such as open peer review (implemented in different ways by Nature and PLoS One), and new forms of publishing such as the molecule database held by the UCSD-Nature Signaling Gateway [10].
The e-Prints Application Profile was introduced as a tool for providing the rich metadata sets that are required for the discovery and reuse of resources.
The talk concluded with consideration of the inter-disciplinary nature of e-Science, which was illustrated with an amusingly over-ambitious job description for a data curator/librarian for earthquake research data, requiring specialist knowledge of at least three different fields.
Panel Session on Open Science The three panellists were Peter Murray-Rust of Cambridge University, Andreas Gonzalez of Edinburgh University, and Shuichi Iwata of CODATA.
In his opening talk, Peter pointed out the futility of trying to guess at the original data from the imagery published in journals, and explained that open access is not enough for e-Science: data needs to be openly reusable.
Many publishers forbid this in their copyright declarations; even though the data is a set of facts, copyright still applies to the database.
Andreas explained how the Science Commons movement is trying to find a legal solution to such problems as database rights and patents.
Shuichi described how the industrial capitalist paradigm has driven science and technology for the past two centuries, and pointed out that while this has achieved much, it has also caused several problems: one case in point is IPR issues stunting scientific growth.
On the question of the ownership of data automatically generated by instruments (usually tied to the question of who owns the instrument), Andreas recommended writing down who owns what right at the start to avoid confusion later.
Peter recommended that when it is unclear whether copyright rests with the researcher or the university, researchers should release the work under Creative Commons and if this is a mistake, the university can correct it later!
The discussion further included issues relating to sensitive data such as medical and other personal data which cannot be made open by default.
Practical Approaches Adrian Brown of The National Archives (TNA) presented a paper on the PRONOM format registry [11] and the DROID format recognition tool.
TNA is developing an active preservation framework around PRONOM.
This framework consists of three functions forming a cycle: characterisation, preservation planning and preservation action.
The characterisation process will identify and validate the format of files, and extract the significant preservation properties (e.g.
the compression algorithm used, the duration of an audiovisual clip, the text from a document).
The preservation planning process will monitor the preservation risk associated with files held by TNA, and when the risks rise above a certain level for a set of files, the process will produce a migration plan for those files.
The preservation action process carries out the migration, after which point the characterisation process recommences and the results are compared with the original files.
MacKenzie Smith of MIT Libraries and Reagan W. Moore of the San Diego Supercomputer Center presented a paper on the usefulness of machine-readable digital archive policies.
The idea is that archivists can take assessment criteria for a trustworthy repository such as the RLG/NARA Checklist [12] and translate them into policies and thereby functional requirements for their repository.
These requirements are taken by repository technicians and translated into machine-readable rules, which are used to control the preservation activities of the repository.
Metadata and state information can be generated to record the outcome of the various activities, and these can be analysed later to confirm that the rules are satisfying the assessment criteria used at the beginning of the cycle.
MIT Libraries, the University of California San Diego Libraries and the San Diego Supercomputer Center are putting all of this into practice using DSpace and iRODS.
Paul Watry of the University of Liverpool presented a paper on a prototype persistent archive being developed jointly by the University of Liverpool, the University of Maryland and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
The archive is modular in architecture, with three layers (application, digital library, data grid) each with various functional elements.
The showcase tool was Multivalent, currently used as the user interface in the application layer and the document parser in the digital library layer.
Multivalent is a Java program that uses media adapters to interpret the content and functionality of documents, and allows interaction with and the annotation of the document without changing the original file(s).
While it was presented as a panacea to open practically any document or data file, the range of supported formats is actually quite limited at the moment (for example, its HTML support only goes up to HTML 3.2).
Graham Pryor of the University of Edinburgh presented a paper on the survey conducted for Project StORe, which is developing middleware to allow reciprocal linking between material in data repositories and material in publication repositories.
The survey found that within the seven disciplines surveyed, dual deposit of publications and data was already an accepted working practice, and that there was a great deal of enthusiasm for international data sharing, data curation and data mining efforts.
The importance of metadata was also appreciated.
There were, however, a number of cultural and organisational barriers to data deposit.
These ranged from an unwillingness to relinquish control of data, to fears that the data might be misinterpreted, to a perception of increased workload (due to time-consuming metadata creation).
The current state of practice with regard to repositories was found to vary enormously between disciplines.
Parallel Sessions Three parallel sessions were held.
We both attended the session on preservation repository experiences.
The other sessions were on educating data scientists, and policies and persuasion.
Sam Pepler of the British Atmospheric Data Centre presented a paper tackling the issue of citing data sets.
The method used was to derive a citation style by analogy with the National Library of Medicine-recommended format for the bibliographic citation of databases and retrieval systems.
A lot of emphasis was placed on including a reference to a peer review process.
Jessie Hey of the University of Southampton reported on work being done by the PRESERV Project to link up repositories with The National Archives' PRONOM registry.
The work has so far centred on using the DROID tool to produce file format profiles for registries, inform preservation policies and flag up unusual items.
Gareth Knight of the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) presented a paper on the SHERPA DP Project, which is looking at model architectures for repositories wishing to outsource their preservation functions.
The principle is that the preservation service maintains a mirror of the repository as a dark archive that the repository can call upon should any of its material become corrupted or inaccessible.
Closing Plenary Session The Conference closed with the launch of the International Journal of Digital Curation [13].
This was followed by a keynote speech by Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information.
Digital curation as a phrase only became common currency in about 2000, but has now been recognised as a fundamental pillar of e-Science.
Current trends are to focus on the 'knowable' life cycle, without worrying too much about the 'speculative' life cycle: the various ways in which data might be reused in the future.
There is also a strong emphasis at the moment on putting data and metadata in good order right from the start, to make it easier to handle in the future.
While work on metadata is progressing, there is still much more to be done.
The issues of digital curation are forcing reconsideration of other areas, such as the amount of informatics support given to researchers, and the ethics surrounding the use and reuse of health and social science data.
It is also calling into question the nature of scholarly communication, and how it relates to e-Science.
The rise of the Virtual Organisation, by its very nature an ephemeral beast, poses particular challenges for digital handling.
Cliff concluded by mentioning a topic that has not received much attention as yet: how to manage historical digital collections centred on a significant person or an organisation.
How will data curators be able to cope with the diverse range of formats?
How will such collections be brought together from the scatter of disc drives and Web services such as Flickr?
Conclusion The Conference was enjoyable and brought together some highly valuable research in the field.
The theme of the Conference, Digital Data Curation in Practice, was evident in the mix of papers presented.
The conference Web site [2] and forum [14] remain open for reference.
*Editor's note: Readers may be interested to read of work by the JISC e-Prints Application Profile Working Group in this issue.
References The Digital Curation Centre web site http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ 2nd International DCC Conference 2006: Digital Data Curation in Practice http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/ The list of posters is available from http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/posters/ The SmartTea Project http://www.smarttea.org/ The R4L (Repository for the Laboratory) Project http://r4l.eprints.org/ The eBank UK Project http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ebank-uk/ The CombeChem Project http://www.combechem.org/ The VERSIONS Project http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/versions/ Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm UCSD-Nature Signaling Gateway http://www.signaling-gateway.org/ TNA's PRONOM Registry http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/ RLG/NARA Checklist http://www.rlg.org/en/pdfs/rlgnara-repositorieschecklist.pdf International Journal of Digital Curation http://www.ijdc.net/ 2nd International DCC Conference Forum http://forum.dcc.ac.uk/viewforum.php?f=19 Author Details Alexander Ball Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: a.ball@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Manjula Patel Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: m.patel@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "2nd International DCC Conference 2006: Digital Data Curation in Practice " Author: Alexander Ball and Manjula Patel Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/2-dcc-conf-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The ResIDe Electronic Library: An Evolving Library Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The ResIDe Electronic Library: An Evolving Library Service Buzz framework database dissemination copyright hypertext passwords url research Citation BibTex RIS Christine Dugdale looks at the progress of this project to a functional service.
The ResIDe Electronic Library (http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/itdev/reside) was first developed as the ResIDe Electronic Reserve at the University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE) in 1996.
Originally funded under the eLib Programme (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib), the Electronic Reserve was created as a research tool to explore such issues surrounding the implementation of an electronic reserve as copyright and collection management control mechanisms.
Uniquely, in the electronic reserve strand, lead partners were the library and a faculty (the Faculty of the Built Environment) of the same academic institution and ResIDe sought, specifically, to examine issues relating to the mounting of multi-media documents supporting Built Environment studies.
Growth Following the conclusion of this initial research phase, the University's Library Services took the decision to maintain, develop and expand the service.
It now includes three databases; the original electronic reserve, a current awareness service and a past examination paper database accessible from a common interface.
It has expanded to include modules from most of the University's twelve faculties and is used by staff and students on all of its eight campuses.
Its larger, more important and more diverse role is reflected in the new title of ResIDe Electronic Library.
Evolution The metamorphous of the embryonic ResIDe Electronic Reserve into today's ResIDe Electronic Library, however, has encompassed more than growth.
It has been the result of an evolution sometimes deliberate, sometimes unconscious, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow from a research tool into a user-led library service.
Any service, developed primarily as a means of researching issues relating to the implementation and maintenance of that type of service, will not necessarily be identical or even similar to one that would have developed naturally within a particular institution.
It must, of course, meet the needs of the members of the institution in which it is piloted to a large degree.
Otherwise, the project's findings will be irrelevant.
Evaluation of an imposed or unwanted service cannot be helpful.
It is possible, however, to introduce and evaluate a service to address research issues that also meets the needs of current users, although these needs will not always be the prime consideration in shaping developments.
Had UWE's academics not believed that an electronic reserve would be a useful teaching/learning tool, they would not have been willing to support it by offering their time and effort identifying relevant readings.
Nor would they have recommended the service to their students.
Had students not believed that it saved them time and effort by providing them with easier and faster access to readings, they would not have used it.
The service that was created to meet research imperatives, therefore, did address the needs of UWE Library users to a significant degree.
User Input When the ResIDe Electronic Reserve was first designed, there was considerable consultation with all users through user surveys and interviews.
It would, however, be inaccurate to claim that the original ResIDe system was a user-led service.
The Project was funded to research issues surrounding the introduction of an electronic reserve.
Consequently, users were asked how they would like an electronic reserve to develop.
They were asked which features and types of documentation they would like it to include.
They were not asked whether they actually wanted an electronic reserve or not.
They were not asked if they would also like or even prefer other services delivered through an electronic library of which an electronic reserve might be a component.
The decision to create an electronic reserve and only an electronic reserve had already been taken.
Many did imply that an electronic reserve would be a welcome addition to the library service.
They did not, however, explicitly state that they wished the library to introduce an electronic reserve.
Few, of course, knew that such a service was a possibility when they asked that the library find solutions to the problems that electronic reserves actually address.
Some, for example, asked for greater access to recommended texts and extended opening hours from a larger short loan collection.
Offering multi-user, multi-location and twenty four-hour simultaneous access to multi-media documents, an electronic reserve addresses most of these issues.
The implementation of an electronic reserve should, therefore, have met with user approval and might have been expected to follow a user-led path of system expansion and future development.
This did not, immediately, prove to be the case.
Implementation, development and growth remained firmly grounded in research imperatives for a year.
During this one-year pilot stage, the growth of the Electronic Reserve proved to be a slow 'chicken and egg' situation.
Unable, initially, to see a working system, academics were unwilling to commit time to providing reading lists and, more specifically, to submitting them with a sufficient lead-time for obtaining copyright clearance.
Without a critical mass of relevant documents, students were unwilling to commit the necessary effort in learning how to use an, albeit simple, additional library system.
It was only towards the end of this early phase that the system's popularity grew.
With its growing popularity came its evolution into a user-led service that more closely resembled the needs of UWE Library users.
Current Awareness The first phase of this evolution was the development of the current awareness service.
This was, in fact, an expansion of an additional service developed during the research stage; mainly as a means of identifying and building a database of up-to-date correct publisher address and contact details.
It was, moreover, a service developed to meet the demands of internal users.
It grew and evolved at the request of library staff rather than directly from library users.
In offering an electronic current awareness service networked to all campuses and incorporating links to publishers' websites, the Library is able to offer its users a service that is superior to its print current awareness bulletins.
Information is freely and easily available to all users.
It is not limited to the academic staff who were recipients of individual subject print bulletins.
Dissemination is much faster and a backfile is created and maintained within a single source.
Electronic Reserve As the current awareness service began to grow, the electronic reserve itself began to evolve.
Once the research phase concluded, it was possible to expand the service into other faculties and onto other campuses.
Since individual academics were now 'requesting' the service rather than being invited to use it, they felt a greater sense of ownership and involvement.
This led to the service evolving in several directions simultaneously.
Library staff had, inevitably, encouraged some lines of development to address research issues.
The implemented system, however, was designed as a very simple and flexible service that could meet the diverse needs of different disciplines and individual teaching and learning styles in keeping with the Library's culture of a user-led service.
The service's tremendous potential as more than an easy access to a safe depository of module-related published material had always been evident to library staff.
It can support a 'one-stop-shop' source of material encompassing copyright and non-copyright readings, module information, teaching and learning materials and a wide range of multi-media interactive materials.
It can also be used as an agent of self-directed learning and as a teaching aid.
It also underpins and could be used to introduce new pedagogic practices by supporting and encouraging academics to harness new technologies in their teaching and in the work set for students.
Different academics have sought different functions/features.
Whereas the Electronic Reserve has now developed so that it is able to offer this fully comprehensive service at all times to all users, it is actually used in more individual and fragmented ways by different groups.
This is because it has become clear that the system must evolve to meet the demands of one relatively small group of users; academic staff.
The needs of students tend to be mediated through their tutors and lecturers.
Academics identify materials held on the system.
They are also the only group able to ensure its full exploitation by student users through submitting materials and recommending their retrieval and use.
Consequently, they are the group that has dictated the development of the electronic reserve.
And they have done so individually to meet the specific needs of their own discipline and to support their own teaching style.
Consequently, the Electronic Reserve has developed to fulfil different needs.
For some modules, it is a 'safe haven' for lecturers' own material and nothing else.
This might include option details and reading lists only.
Or it may include a much wider selection of documents such as lecture notes and slides and timetables, workshop details, and answers, module guides, assignment details and past examination papers with answers, tutor's reports and examples of excellent answers.
This information might be added to help students plan their own learning and revision programmes, to support lecturers' teaching plans, as a means of securing key documents for internal and external audits or as a means of guaranteeing easy, twenty-four hour access to secure banks of material for their students.
For other modules, the Electronic Reserve has become a safe depository for easily accessible published material.
For some modules it is both.
For a few lecturers it is also a means of communication with students.
For some it is all these and is also used as a very proactive teaching and learning tool.
Unfortunately, the service has not and cannot evolve to meet all the expressed needs of the largest group of users students, although their opinions can and are constantly sought as they were in the preliminary stage.
Student feedback forms, however, tend to reflect individual problems in using the system such as their inability to trace specific examination paper titles.
They might suggest changes to the interface.
All these comments are carefully considered and, whenever possible and appropriate, acted upon.
Students, however, do not tend to make unsolicited constructive suggestions about system development.
When asked, they very rarely proffer any suggestions about the overall system.
Since the pre-implementation stage, none have ever suggested areas for future development.
Over the last two years, two module groups whose assignment work is based upon use of ResIDe have completed regular questionnaires.
These students, however, rarely express their own information needs in ways that might inform further ResIDe development.
Often, those needs that are expressed cannot be met because of considerations outside the control of library staff.
Compliance with conditions made by rightsholders, for example, involves the imposition of passwords to which students object.
As students are a large and diverse group, it is also impossible for any one system to meet their needs as easily as it might those of individual module leaders in respect of their own module readings.
Students, for example, have different degrees of computer literacy.
Some want a very simple system.
Others want a system offering a much more sophisticated searching mechanism.
Compromises are necessary.
It is far easier to provide flexibility, within ResIDe's modular approach, for individual lecturers.
Students are, inevitably, treated as one homogeneous group or, at least, one homogeneous group, with each module.
Consequently, ResIDe has been developed to offer a standardised and very user-friendly interface and search engine that is sufficiently flexible to be adapted by individual module leaders to support their perception of their own students' needs.
Following consultation with module leaders, for example, documents can be named and displayed in different ways to support different teaching and learning outcomes.
Hypertext links to full-text databases to which the Library subscribes might be added to meet different pedagogic objectives.
Links might be added with little further direction to enable more capable and enthusiastic students to retrieve additional peripheral materials whilst directing all students to a set of core readings.
More direction and explanatory information to such links might be given where a module leader wishes student to become familiar with searching different databases.
Assignments might be set and direction and help sheets given to students to guarantee that they use such links if a module leader so desires.
Document sets can also be accessed through more sophisticated indexed programmes at the discretion of a module leader.
Examination Papers Students did lead the evolution and development of the third ResIDe Electronic Library service.
From the very earliest stages, students had asked for easier access to past examination papers.
It was not appropriate to offer this service during a research phase that was seeking to look primarily at Built Environment material, multi-media materials and copyright issues.
It was, however, a very obvious step to take for an evolving user-led service and access logs reveal that this is a very popular feature of the ResIDe Electronic Library especially in the three months leading to the main examination period.
The Current Service The present service has evolved to meet the needs of UWE Library users.
It has grown and developed far beyond the system implemented for research purposes.
It has also grown and evolved beyond anything originally envisaged during this research stage.
Future Development The system, however, could only have developed at this time through an existing service.
It might not have developed as a result of user demand.
It certainly would not have been introduced so early as a result of user demand.
It is possible that this pattern might be the most appropriate way forward.
Users do not, necessarily, articulate their needs very clearly.
They may be unaware of possibilities for future development.
Users have, for example, asked for the system to expand to include a new database containing module option details.
It would be a simple process to design this.
It may, however, be more appropriate to take the service into an entirely new direction rather than expand the current system.
Many users, for example, ask for all their information to be provided through a single resource.
One means of achieving this would be the planned integration of the ResIDe system with the library management system.
This would provide a more seamless provision of print and electronic information.
Users, however, have not explicitly asked for this.
In deciding to integrate ResIDe with the library management system, therefore, it might be said that system development and evolution has come full circle.
As at the beginning, library staff have taken a decision to introduce a change.
It is, of course, the responsibility of librarians to be proactive in alerting users to new possibilities to meet their clear if unarticulated needs.
Within this framework of an imposed change, however, a new user-led service should evolve.
Author Details Christine Dugdale ResIDe Research Fellow Bolland Library University of the West of England, Bristol Email: Christine.Dugdale@uwe.ac.uk Tel: 0117 965 6261 ext 3646 Web site: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/itdev/reside   Christine Dugdale manages the ResIDe Electronic Library at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Article Title: "The ResIDe Electronic Library: an evolving library service" Author: Christine Dugdale Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/reside/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Seminar Invitation from DEF Danish Electronic Research Library The DEF XML Web Services project invites you to participate in the seminar: Building Digital Libraries with XML Web Services on Friday 27 August 2004 from 9:30 to 16:00 at the Technical University of Denmark, Building 303, DK-2800 Lyngby.
The headlines of the seminar are: § Setting the scene: XML tools, visions, initiatives Introduction to XML and Open Source Web Services The National Danish initiatives: XML Project, Enterprise IT Architecture, Infostructure Database etc.
The DEF XML Web Services Initiative § Fedora: Digital Library Architecture Meets XML and Web Services Fedora: A Repository Architecture Built with XML and Web Services Fedora: Digital Library Use Cases and Applications The DEF Fedora Pilot Projects Among the speakers are Sandra Payette, Cornell University and Thornton Staples, University of Virginia, who are prime developers of the Fedora system, a general-purpose digital object repository system that demonstrates how distributed digital library architecture can be deployed using Web-based technologies, including XML and Web services.
Please see the full seminar programme with registration form at http://defxws.cvt.dk/events/seminar040827/ [Received: July 2004] Back to headlines Digital Resources for the Humanities Conference 2004 Sunday 5th to Wednesday 8th September 2004, University of Newcastle This is DRH’s ninth annual conference.
Its goal is to bring together the creators, users, distributors, and custodians of digital resources in the humanities.
Speakers are from the UK and mainland Europe, the USA, and Australia.
1.
A poster competition is being run with the prize of a digital camera going to the best poster at the conference.
Those wishing to demonstrate their projects, software, research or other aspect of digital resources in the humanities can do so by entering a poster at: http://drh2004.ncl.ac.uk/proposals.php 2.
The early bird prices for registering for the conference end on 31st July, so book now to save = £25 per delegate http://drh2004.ncl.ac.uk/ 3.
The reserved accommodation we have made available online through the Newcastle-Gateshead Convention Bureau is available only until Sunday 8th August.
Note that accommodation must be booked separately from the conference registration.
http://drh2004.visitnewcastlegateshead.com/ The 2004 Conference aims to address some of the key emerging themes and strategic issues that engagement with ICT is bringing to humanities computing and scholarly research.
Themes for 2004 include: Methods in humanities computing.
Cross-sector exchange between heritage, national and local government, and education bodies.
Broadening the humanities computing base.
New forms of scholarly publication.
In addition to refereed papers, the conference includes Posters, an Exhibition and a social programme.
Full details of the programme on http://drh2004.ncl.ac.uk/programme.php To register for the conference, please use the registration form on the Web site: http://drh2004.ncl.ac.uk/registration.php Other enquiries to can be addressed to drh@ncl.ac.uk [Received: July 2004] Back to headlines Third DELOS International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies (ISDL 2004), 6-10 September 2004, Pisa, Italy The DELOS Network of Excellence is pleased to announce its Third International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies (ISDL 2004) to be held in Pisa, Italy, on September 6-10, 2004.
This edition of the School will focus on “User-Centred Design of Digital Libraries”.
The DELOS Network of Excellence is an initiative funded by the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission, within the Work Programme of the Information Society Technologies, (please see http://www.delos.info/).
Aims and Objectives The main purpose of the DELOS Summer School is to foster research in and understanding of the fundamental technologies underlying the Digital Libraries field.
It is directed towards graduate students and young researchers and professionals involved in R&D in DL-related areas.
No particular qualifications or pre-requisites are necessary.
Course Programme The one-week intensive course will consist of nine half-day lectures and one half-day dedicated to BOF (Birds of a Feather) sessions.
The preliminary programme for the School is shown below: Monday, 6 September 2004 8:30 9:00 Presentation of the School Costantino Thanos (IEI-CNR, Italy) 9:00 12:30 Introduction to Digital Libraries and User-Centred Design Tiziana Catarci (Universita’ di Roma “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy) Yannis Ioannidis (University of Athens, Athens, Greece) 14:00 17:30 Archives’ User Needs Mariella Guercio (University of Urbino, Urbino, Italy) Tuesday, 7 September 2004 9:00 12:30 Personalization (1) Barry Smyth (University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland) 14:00 17:30 Personalization (2) TO BE CONFIRMED Wednesday, 8 September 2004 9:00 12:30 Museums’ User Needs TO BE CONFIRMED 14:00 17:30 Birds of a Feather (BOF) Sessions Thursday, 9 September 2004 9:00 12:30 User Needs and Digital Libraries Design (1) Rudi Schmiede (Darmstadt U. of Technol., Darmstadt, Germany) 14:00 17:30 User Needs and Digital Libraries Design (2) Rudi Schmiede (Darmstadt U. of Technol., Darmstadt, Germany) Friday, 10 September 2004 9:00 12:30 User Interfaces (1) Alan Dix (Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK) 14:00 17:30 User Interfaces (2) Alan Dix (Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK) Accommodation and Venue The School will be held in Pisa in the beautiful Conference Centre of Santa Croce in Fossabanda, an ancient monastery dating from the 14th century recently renovated, fifteen minutes walking distance from the center of the city.
Registration and accommodation information can be found at the DELOS Web site, (http://www.delos.info/) in the list of events.
[Received: June 2004] Back to headlines European Conference on Digital Libraries 2004 Open for Business The full programme is now available and registration is open for the European Conference on Digital Libraries 2004 (ECDL 2004) ECDL 2004 takes place at the University of Bath,UK on September 12-17 2004 and is anticipating more than 250 participants.
ECDL 2004 is the 8th in the series of European Digital Library Conferences.
ECDL has become the major European forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, organisational and social issues.
For the full programme and to register for the conference, tutorials and workshops please visit: http://www.ecdl2004.org/ [Received: July 2004] Back to headlines Stadtund Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt Am Main : 4th Frankfurt Scientific Symposium, 4-5 October 2004 The 4th International Scientific Symposium ICICOM, 4-5 October 2004 is entitled: “What is literacy?
What is information?
What is knowledge?” .
Programme: http://www.stub.uni-frankfurt.de/messe/symposium2004/veranstaltungskalender.htm This Symposium is sponsored by Lib-IT GmbH, Sisis Informationssysteme GmbH, Stephan Froehder, Swets Information Services GmbH, U.S.
Diplomatic Mission to Germany.
It goes without saying that reliable selection, processing and provision of information for research and teaching purposes are amongst the most important tasks of modern knowledge management in universities and industry.
University libraries are thus exercising their core competence towards guaranteeing the future by supporting studies and science with the provision of specific information services and creating the fundamental pre-requisite for the work carried out there.
The aim of the Symposium is to discuss methods on how to handle subject-specific content efficiently, in order to ensure essential media competency in all areas of science and industry.
At the heart of the discussion should be the specific role of the librarian which, in comparison with other sectors in information management, is not a closed book yet.
This year’s Symposium seeks to clarify the role of libraries and colleagues in the changing world of information management.
Dr. Andreas Werner: werner@stub.uni-frankfurt.de, Tel.
: (069) 212-39-355 [Received: July 2004] Back to headlines EURBICA Conference on the DTDs EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and EAC (Encoded Archival Context), : 7 and 8 October 2004, Paris Following the seminar held 2 years ago in the conference room of the National Library of France, (on the application of the EAD DTD for cultural heritage purposes in archives and in libraries), the Directorate of the Archives of France is organising a European Conference on 7th and 8th October 2004 on data-processing software for encoding research aids for archives and authority data into XML (Extensible Markup Language).
The last European Conference on the subject took place at the Public Record Office in Kew, in October 1999.
Since 2001 another DTD, EAC (Encoded Archival Context), has been developed simultaneously.
Perfectly compatible with the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families ISAAR(CPF), and complementary to the UNIMARC/Authorities format, the EAC combines bibliographic authority records and archival authority records, which give information both about the creator and the context of creation of archival material.
The Beta version of EAC Tag Library should shortly become available.
Tests have been done on the conversion of authority data into EAC/XML format, in particular within the LEAF project (Linking and Exploring Authority Files): local authority data will be downloaded from the local servers of the participating organisations to a central system which links automatically the authorities belonging to the same entity.
The participants will present their research results and ideas on different issues: what is required for EAD implementation : thoughts on standardisation, training; EAD implementation : tools for creating EAD documents, interoperability, compatibility with other standards; publishing EAD/XML documents : editing tools, documentary management applications with documents stored on a Web server in native XML; the EAC DTD and the first examples of authority records encoded into XML.
The European seminar will be held at the conference room of the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires (MNATP), 6 avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, 75016 Paris There will be translation in English and French.
The registration is free.
N.B.
registration is mandatory because of the limited seating capacity of the MNATP’s conference room (300 seats).
Further information: http://www.ica.org/calendrier.php?pcalendrierid=211&plangue=eng Contact: maryline.wasikowski@culture.gouv.fr [Received: May 2004] Back to headlines Internet Librarian International 2004 Returns to London The 6th annual Internet Librarian International Conference will take place over 10-12 October at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London.
The conference, designed for information professionals and librarians who are using, developing, and implementing Internet, intranet, and Web-based strategies in their daily work, is sub-titled “Access, Architecture & Action: Strategies for the New Digital World”.
For further information: Internet Librarian International 2004 http://www.internet-librarian.com/ Programme: http://www.internet-librarian.com/Programme.shtml [Received: July 2004] Back to headlines “Towards an Information Society for All 4” Bucarest, 14-15 October 2004 The British Council, Great Britain’s international cultural organisation, will be holding an international conference on European Information Society issues in Bucarest / Romania on 14 and 15 October 2004.
This event is the fourth in the series of conferences themed “Towards an Information Society for All (TISA)”.
The special focus of TISA4 will be “Better lives, better communities”.
It will mainly be looking at sustainable and replicable community projects that helped to improve the citizens’ quality of life by using information and communication tools.
Previous events have been held in Paris, Bologna and Berlin.
Information on this series as well as registration can be found at http://www.britishcouncil.ro/tisa/ Guido Jansen Head, Information British Council Germany Email: guido.jansen@britishcouncil.de Web site:http://www.britishcouncil.de The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for educational and cultural relations.
Registered in England as a charity.
[Received: July 2004] Back to headlines 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2004) Sunday, November 7 Thursday, November 11, 2004 Hiroshima Prince Hotel, Hiroshima, Japan http://iswc2004.semanticweb.org/ ISWC2004 is the major international forum at which research on the Semantic Web is presented.
The vision of the Semantic Web is to make the contents of the Web unambiguously computer-interpretable, enabling the automation of a diversity of tasks currently performed by human beings.
The goal of providing semantics and automated reasoning capabilities for the Web draws upon research in a broad range of areas including Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Software Engineering, Distributed Computing and Information Systems.
Contributions to date have included languages for semantic annotation of Web documents, automated reasoning capabilities for Web languages, ontologies, query and view languages, semantic translation of Web contents, semantic integration middleware, technologies and principles for building multi-agent and Grid systems, semantic interoperation of programs and devices, technologies and principles for describing, searching and composing Web Services, and more.
The conference comprises a research track, an industrial track and a poster track, as well as exhibitions, demos, semantic web challenge, and other events.
Early Registration Deadline: Tuesday 31 August 2004 The on-line registration site has been opened: https://j-click.jtb.co.jp/registrye/registrye.asp?id=0292 [Received: July 2004] Back to headlines Holiday in Berlin?
5th Languages & the Media International Conference for Languages in the Audio-Visual Media November 3 5, 2004, Hotel InterContinental, Berlin http://www.languages-media.com/ 17th EXPOLINGUA Berlin International Fair for Languages & Culture November 12 14, 2004, Russisches Haus der Wissenschaft und Kultur, Berlin http://www.expolingua.com/ 10th Online Educa Berlin International Conference for Technology Supported Learning and Training December 1 3, 2004, Hotel InterContinental, Berlin http://www.online-educa.com/ [Received: July 2004] Back to headlines Internet Scout Pathfinding New Software to Handle Data on Resources The Internet Scout Project, a research centre at the University of Wisconsin Madison, has recently released version 1.1.1 of its free open source software package CWIS (Collection Workflow Integration System).
CWIS is software to assemble, organise, and share collections of data about resources, like Yahoo or Google Directory but conforming to international and academic standards for metadata.
CWIS was specifically created to help build collections of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) resources and connect them into NSF’s National Science Digital Library, but can be (and is being) used for a wide variety of other purposes.
A few of the features of CWIS include: prepackaged taxonomies user-definable metadata schema recommender system keyword and fielded search engine resource annotations and ratings CWIS requires a Web server that supports PHP and MySQL.
The software is designed for a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) platform, but is also being run on OS X, Solaris, and FreeBSD.
Internet Scout Project estimates that in a compatible environment, it normally takes less than ten minutes to get CWIS installed and running.
More information can be found and a copy of CWIS downloaded at: http://scout.wisc.edu/Projects/CWIS/ Questions about CWIS can be sent to: cwissupport@scout.wisc.edu CWIS development is being funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The project builds upon previous work on the Scout Portal Toolkit, which was developed under a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
The Internet Scout Project Team invites feedback.
[Received: 6 May 2004] Back to headlines SAGE Publications Launches Advanced Journal Platform with Stanford’s HighWire Press SAGE Publications have announced the development of its new online search platform.
Powered by Stanford University’s HighWire Press, the new platform will launch in September 2004.
The platform will host all SAGE journals in both the social sciences and STM disciplines, providing institutions with premier search technology, toll-free linking features, a social science specific taxonomy, and enhanced subscription options for their journal collections.
They state that the new platform will dramatically enhance the functionality of SAGE online journals.
HighWire features are developed with constant feedback from librarians and readers and provide flexible and customisable searching, browsing by topic based on peer-reviewed subject taxonomies, PDA downloading options, and a high level of reader customization such as favourite journals, linking tools, search re-execution and e-mail alerts.
Further information about HighWire Press: http://highwire.stanford.edu/about/ Further information about SAGE: http://www.sagepublications.com/about.htm [Received: 4 June 2004] Back to headlines Library of Congress Funds Advanced Research into Preservation of Digital Materials with NSF The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of the Library of Congress (NDIIPP) is partnering with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish the first research grants programme to address specifically the preservation of digital materials.
NSF will administer the programme, which will fund cutting-edge research to support the long-term management of digital information.This effort is part of the Library’s collaborative programme to implement a national digital preservation strategy.
The research program announcement coincides with a memorandum of understanding between the LoC and NSF to collaborate over the next decade in a broad set of research activities related to digital libraries and digital archives.
The new Digital Archiving and Long-Term Preservation research programme, which expects to make to make approximately $2 million in initial awards using NDIIPP funds, has three main focus areas for which proposals are sought: Digital repository models Tools, technologies and processes Organisational, economic and policy issues.
The NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, will issue a call for proposals shortly; see NSF Web site at http://www.cise.nsf.gov/div/index.cfm?div=iis for current information.
The complete text of the “Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program” is available at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ This includes an explanation of how the plan was developed, whom the Library worked with to develop the plan and the key components of the digital preservation infrastructure.
The plan was approved by Congress in December 2002.
Report from the national-level multisector interdisciplinary workshop convened by the Library and the National Science Foundation in April 2002: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/index.php?nav=3&subnav=11 The NSF Digital Government Research Program: http://www.digitalgovernment.org/ NSF-led Digital Libraries Initiative (1994-2004): http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/ NSF-administered National Science Digital Library: http://www.nsdl.org/ Library of Congress National Digital Library (NDL) Program: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/lcndlp.html Digital Archiving and Long-Term Preservation (DIGARCH): http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04592/nsf04592.htm [Received: 14 June 2004] Back to headlines Archive of Medical Journals to be Made Freely Available on the Internet The Wellcome Trust, in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) are joining forces to digitise the complete backfiles of a number of important and historically significant medical journals.
The digitised content will be made freely available on the Internet via PubMed Central and augment the content already available there.
With funding of £1.25 million (£750,000 from the Trust, £500,000 from the JISC) the project plans to digitise around 1.7 million pages of text.
The NLM will manage the project, host the archive and ensure that the digital files are preserved in perpetuity.
The list of journals to be digitised will include the Annals of Surgery, Biochemical Journal, Journal of Physiology and Medical History.
Digitisation will commence in Summer 2004 and the first titles will be online early in 2005.
In addition to creating a digital copy of every page in the backfiles, the digitisation process will also create a PDF file for every discrete item (article, editorial, letter, advertisements etc.)
in the archive, and use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to generate searchable text.
Although the project focuses on digitising backfiles, publishers will also include new issues of the selected journals on an ongoing basis subject to an embargo period, as defined by each participating publisher.
The Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation Project is one of six digitisation projects with funding for the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE).
The overall programme, being managed by JISC, represents a total investment of some £10m to be applied to delivering high quality content online, including sound, moving pictures, census data and still images for long-term use by the further and higher education communities in the UK.
Further information about this project can be found at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/node280.html [Received: 28 June 2004] Back to headlines Results Available from the Gabriel/The European Library User Survey Results of a survey among the users of the Gabriel Web Service (http://www.kb.nl/gabriel/) are now available.
Gabriel is the joint Web service of the 43 European national libraries.
The results of the user survey are available at http://www.kb.nl/gabriel/surveys/results2003/ Background to the User Survey The user survey was available on the Gabriel website between 16th April until 16th July 2003.
It was conducted on behalf of the TEL Project (http://www.europeanlibrary.org) which laid the foundations for a new pan-European online service to search and retrieve the collections of the national libraries in Europe, both printed and digital.
De Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, is currently developing the TEL project results into an operational service called ‘The European Library’.
It will be launched at the beginning of 2005.
Gabriel will be incorporated into The European Library and will therefore disappear as a separate Web service.
Aims of the User Survey This survey was designed to obtain a better profile of the users of Gabriel and their future needs.
The users of Gabriel are considered an important target group for The European Library.
In total 560 people from across Europe responded to the questionnaire.
This report gives insight into the background of the respondents (e.g.
age, education), their use of the Internet, their use of the Gabriel Web site and their opinions of the site.
The respondents were also asked if they would use a shared catalogue of all the national libraries in Europe if that were to be created.
Further information: Gabriel Web site: http://www.kb.nl/gabriel/ Or contact : Olaf Janssen, Gabriel Editor Koninklijke Bibliotheek National Library of the Netherlands olaf.janssen@kb.nl [Received: 7 July 2004] Back to headlines Three New Open Access / OAI Articles and Reports Gerry McKiernan, Associate Professor and Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer at Iowa State University Library announced the availability of three major publications relating to Open Access and the Open Archives Initiative: [I] “Open Archives Initiative Data Providers.
Part II: Science and Technology,” Library Hi Tech News 21, no.
5Three New Open Access / OAI Articles and Reports (June 2004): 22-30.
Self-archived at: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OAI-DP-II.pdf (accessed 7 July 2004).
Bioline [ http://www.bioline.org.br/ ] CERN Document Server (CDS) [ http://cds.cern.ch/ ] Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) [ http://www.dlese.org/dds/index.jsp ] Organic Eprints [ http://orgprints.org/ ] [II] “Gaining Independence with E-Print Archives and OAI: Report on the 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative, October 17-19, 2002, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland,” Journal of Internet Cataloging 6, no.
3 (2003) [2004]: 35-52.
Self-archived at: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OAI-WS-02.pdf (accessed 7 July) Gerry advised that in addition to a detailed description and summary of individual presentations and reports, a bibliography of ‘Related Readings, Reports, and Resources’ was compiled and appended to the formal workshop report.
[III] News from the Field,” Journal of Internet Cataloging 6, no.
3 (2003) [2004]: 61-80.
Self-archived at: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NEWSv6n3.pdf (accessed 7 July 2004).
In this latest news column, numerous Open Access and Open Archives Initiative programmes, projects, and publications were profiled.
[Received: 7 July 2004] Back to headlines EC Reports on SEPIADES a multi-level data element set to catalogue photographic collections The European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA) has just published the report ‘SEPIADES: Cataloguing photographic collections’.
It aims to provide background information on the SEPIADES (SEPIA Data Element Set) advisory report and software tool that were developed in the framework of the SEPIA Programme.
For information on SEPIA (Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access) see http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/ SEPIADES is a multi-level data element set to catalogue photographic collections.
Apart from 21 core elements, it contains many suggestions for use of specific, detailed elements.
The report explains about the motives behind SEPIADES, providing an introduction to both the model and the software tool.
It is aimed at all those involved in cataloguing photographic collections, both cataloguers and decision makers.
Copies of the report can be downloaded from the ECPA Web site free of charge, see http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/publications.html For SEPIA publications see http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/publications.html [Received: 8 July 2004] Back to headlines Version 54, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Available Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development, University of Houston Libraries, advises that Version 54 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available.
This selective bibliography presents over 2,150 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
HTML: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html Acrobat: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.pdf The HTML document is designed for interactive use.
Each major section is a separate file.
There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet.
It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.
The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file: (1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (bi-weekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list–see second URL) [http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm] [http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepwlist.htm] (2) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites) http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepr.htm (3) Archive (prior versions of the bibliography) http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/archive/sepa.htm The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk): Table of Contents:   Economic Issues* 2 Electronic Books and Texts 2.1 Case Studies and History* 2.2 General Works 2.3 Library Issues* 3 Electronic Serials 3.1 Case Studies and History 3.2 Critiques 3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals 3.4 General Works* 3.5 Library Issues* 3.6 Research* 4 General Works* 5 Legal Issues 5.1 Intellectual Property Rights* 5.2 Licence Agreements* 5.3 Other Legal Issues 6 Library Issues 6.1 Cataloguing, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata* 6.2 Digital Libraries* 6.3 General Works* 6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation* 7 New Publishing Models* 8 Publisher Issues* 8.1 Digital Rights Management 9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI* Appendix A.
Related Bibliographies Appendix B.
About the Author   Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections: Cataloguing, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata Digital Libraries Electronic Books and Texts Electronic Serials General Electronic Publishing Images Legal Preservation Publishers Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI SGML and Related Standards An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-02/bailey.html [Received: 15 July 2004] Back to headlines LibPortal: Access to library resources: A survey and review of library portal activity in HE and FE Chris Awre writing on behalf of JISC announced that the final report from this study, carried out by LISU at the University of Loughborough, is now available on the JISC Web site at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_libportal The introduction indicates the breadth and scope of the report.
The research undertaken for the LibPortal Project is intended to inform the JISC of the current development of library oriented portals in the Higher Education and Further Education sectors.
The project reports on the takeup of commercial systems as well as the reasons for institutions deciding to choose an alternative solution.
The survey asked questions about integration, access to resources, technical and bureaucratic issues with implementation, promotion and usage of resources.
Respondents gave replies relating to both commercial products and to the delivery of other Web-based resources.
Additional information was gathered from representatives of HE and FE at a focus group.
A survey of users of library portals and Web-based systems was also conducted.
[Received: 15 July 2004] Back to headlines New Case Studies on Institution-wide Portals Now Available Five case studies describing the assessment and implementation of institution-wide portals are now available on the JISC website at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/project_portal_casestudies.html The case studies cover the uPortal, Oracle and Blackboard platforms, although an emphasis has been made on extracting generic lessons from the processes involved in the assessment and implementation carried out.
A number of the case studies formed the basis for presentations at the recent PEPC 2004 Conference at the University of Nottingham.
(Details of these presentations and others will be available via the conference Web site at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pepc2004/).
completion.
[Received: 15 July 2004] Back to headlines Robots Unlikely to Enforce Payment of Library Fines Whether this piece counts as ‘silly season’ material is debatable but assumedly this little item from the BBCi site will give pause across the libraries of the nation: one extract: “In the first experiments, the books really got damaged because it was pressing too hard.
….” Perhaps they should be i/c fines collection after all.. See ‘Robots get bookish in libraries’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3897583.stm [Received: 21 July 2004] Back to headlines VNU Exhibitions Europe acquires Library + information Show VNU Exhibitions Europe, organiser of the Online Information event, has today announced its acquisition of the Library + information Show (LiS) from Resources Exhibitions Ltd (REL).
The acquisition follows a joint venture between the two businesses in April of this year which saw VNU’s Total Library Solutions event incorporated into the overall LiS show proposition.
Nigel Clear, Event Director at Resources Exhibitions comments: “The acquisition of LiS by VNU Exhibitions Europe is an extremely positive development for the future of the event…..” The show will retain its scheduled dates for next year, running from the 20 21 April 2005 in the Pavilion Hall at the NEC, Birmingham.
This year’s event attracted 2180 visitors when it took place in April at London’s ExCeL.
VNU’s information products include: the Online Information exhibition and conference, Online Information Online, the Content Management Europe exhibition, Information World Review magazine and The Bookseller magazine.
For more information on: LiS : http://www.lishow.co.uk/ VNU Exhibitions Europe http://www.vnuexhibitions.co.uk/ [Received: 22 July 2004] Back to headlines JISC Collections Commissions Market Research Study The JISC Collections Team is commissioning a market research study.
This study will be taking place in the next few weeks and will specifically focus on the attitudes and levels of satisfaction that the JISC Community currently holds towards JISC Collections.
An independent market research agency, Mindset Research, will carry out the study.
It will be conducted in accordance with the Code of Conduct of the Market Research Society.
This means that the information supplied by respondents will remain confidential to the agency and will only be used for research purposes.
At no time during or after the survey will any attempt be made to sell them any products or services as a result of their participation.
As Mindset Research will be contacting a random selection of institutions, not everyone will be contacted in this instance.
JISC Collections would greatly appreciate institutions’ participation as feedback is very valuable to the team in its aim to improve the JISC Collection and services continuously.
Further information: JISC Collections http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=coll [Received: 22 July 2004] Back to headlines JISC-funded report by TSO: Digital Object Identifier for Publishing & the e-Leaning Community A report by the Stationary Office (TSO) funded by JISC under the PALS Metadata and Interoperability programme is finally available.
The main purpose of this report is to guide and assist development of a JISC digital identifier policy.
It is principally aimed at persistent digital identifiers for JISC services, external agencies and JISC digital content publishing programmes.
Further information: Digital Object Identifiers for Publishing and the e-Learning Community, a report by The Stationery Office, July 2004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1786/430153514841 [Received: 28 July 2004] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz data database archives accessibility tagging copyright preservation ict url research Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom highlights some new events, publications and services in the social sciences and Andy Hargrave introduces recent developments for FE in the Bized Service.
Developments in Economics and Business Education Conference (DEBE) The DEBE conference, held jointly by Economics LTSN and Bized, will take place on September 15-16 2003 in Edinburgh.
The conference will comprise a mix of papers, workshops and poster sessions around the themes of Curriculum and context Assessment and monitoring Classroom practice and student engagement Case studies, role-playing and simulations Learning approaches Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Interdisciplinary studies Online registration for the conference is available.
New Journal for Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences LATISS (Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences) is a new refereed journal that aims to use the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, politics, international relations and social policy to reflect critically on learning and teaching practices in higher education and to analyse their relationship to changes in higher education policies and institutions.
The research field of Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences will include: all aspects of learning and teaching and higher education reform from national and comparative perspectives evidence-based developments in curriculum, assessment, learning and teaching methods analyses of impacts of institutional and national policies on learning and teaching e.g.
widening access, employability, audit, quality enhancement Each volume will have some articles on a common theme.
The overall theme for 2004 is Changing Landscapes of Higher Education.
There is a journal Web site.
New Economic and Social Data Service Launched The new Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) was launched in London on the 30 June.
ESDS provides researchers, teachers and data support staff with access to a very broad range of economic and social data across a wide variety of themes, and includes access to international and national datasets such the General Household Survey and the Labour Force Survey.
It brings together the following centres of expertise in data creation, preservation and use: UK Data Archive Institute for Social and Economic Research Manchester Information and Associated Services Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research See Economic and Social Data Service.
Beyond the Headlines A pioneering, free Internet service that allows users to look beyond today’s media headline and find academic research relevant to the story is now available.
Called ‘In the News’; the new service can be found on Regard, an online database containing information on social science research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Regard ‘In the News’ has already covered issues such as congestion charging, children and nutrition, pensions and policing.
It contains over 7,500 research projects, dating back to the mid-1980’s, on every subject from Alzheimer’s to Enterprise Zones and is updated daily to include the most current research.
An archive of the news stories exists enabling you to go back to stories that hit the headlines weeks or months ago, and see what ESRC research relates to them.
‘In the News’ can be accessed from Regard’s home page.
Clicking on the headline link from the news archive shows the most relevant research.
Biz/ed Built for FE?
This summer sees the completion of ‘Building Biz/ed for FE’, a JISC-funded project aimed at boosting the relevance, structure and accessibility of our service to the FE community.
There were several strands to this project, including: The site re-design, completed in October 2002 Setting up an FE Focus Group to advise on improving the service still further Enhanced relevance through re-purposing existing content Developing an AVCE (Advanced Vocational Certificate of Education) support section, with advice and resources developed by FE practitioners for teachers and learners of business, leisure and recreation and travel and tourism Regular Biz/ed users will already be familiar with our new site.
The introduction of highly detailed tagging to each page of Biz/ed, allows ‘mass customisation’ of the service to the individual needs of our users.
Our ‘Quickjump’ box is the most visible outcome of this work and can be accessed from our home page.
Our FE Focus Group was set up in 2002, meeting over the course of the year to advise on maximising the relevance of what we do for FE teachers and learners.
The group brainstormed ideas for worksheets to be put into a set of new resources giving AVCE guidance to students and lecturers.
Group members were then commissioned to create some of these new resources.
Among the materials created are: Tips for dealing with Unit tests A company research checklist A guide to Unit-specific Web sites How to cross-reference between Units The materials address parts of the Leisure and Recreation, Travel and Tourism and Business curriculum and will be appearing live on Biz/ed this summer.
See the page Building Biz/ed for Further Education (FE).
Company Profiles and Data In March 2003 Biz/ed launched an interactive data service allowing students to access financial data from a range of UK and International companies.
The data are supported by a comprehensive suite of learning materials aimed at developing skills in financial ratio analysis Learners’ skills can be honed by accessing information from the profit and loss accounts and balance sheets of 34 well-known business organisations.
At present, two full years of data have been gathered, allowing comparisons to be made within the firm, across their industry and over the economy as a whole.
The objective of this service is to leaven the learning experience in a traditionally inaccessible area of the business syllabus.
Biz/ed are pleased to be able to enhance this resource with profiles of some of the 34 companies on which we have gathered financial data.
Featured companies include : easyJet, Sainsbury’s, Carphone Warehouse and Domino’s Pizza.
We expect this useful resource to grow as more business profiles are added and the financial data are updated.
See the Financial Data Request Form.
Author Details Debra Hiom SOSIG Co-Director ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Tel: 0117 928 7117 Fax: 0117 928 7112 Andy Hargrave Bized ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: bized-info@bized.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bized.ac.uk/ Tel: 0117 928 7124 Fax: 0117 928 7112 Return to top Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Debra Hiom and Andy Hargrave Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ShibboLEAP: Seven Libraries and a LEAP of Faith Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ShibboLEAP: Seven Libraries and a LEAP of Faith Buzz data software framework database dissemination infrastructure identifier vocabularies repositories eprints e-learning personalisation tomcat shibboleth moodle authentication privacy research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Martin Moyle introduces the ShibboLEAP Project, a multi-institution Shibboleth adoption in London, and hopes that later adopters will benefit from its findings.
Much of UK Higher and Further Education (HE & FE) has begun to grapple with next-generation access management technology.
Many UK developments in this area are underpinned by Shibboleth, which is conceptually simple, but architecturally complex.
It is hoped that this article will benefit newcomers to Shibboleth.
We offer a brief introduction to Shibboleth technology, in the context of the UK’s burgeoning federated access management infrastructure.
We go on to describe the ShibboLEAP Project, which saw six University of London institutions implement Shibboleth under the guidance of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
The project’s background, aims and core findings are summarised, and the detailed project outputs, including case studies of Shibboleth Identity Provider implementation at each participating institution, are introduced.
The project deliverables may be of practical assistance to institutions which decide to implement Shibboleth as a step towards federated access management.
Shibboleth: What Is It?
Shibboleth assists with the secure management of Web resources across domains.
The software and its installation have been discussed in this publication before [1], and elsewhere [2] [3], but a brief re-introduction would be timely.
Shibboleth is an output of the Internet2 Shibboleth Project [4], which is developing an architecture and policy framework to support the sharing of access-controlled Web resources.
Shibboleth is not an all-in-one solution for federated access management, nor is it a SSO (Single Sign-On) system.
Rather, as a component in an organisation’s SSO environment, Shibboleth interacts with a local authentication system and a local user database and facilitates the exchange of authorisation and authentication information between organisations and resource providers.
The software is standards-based, open-source middleware, consisting of ‘Identity Provider’ software (for universities and other institutions), and ‘Service Provider’ software (for any parties, whether internal or external, wishing to provide secure access to a resource).
In a Shibboleth environment, an Identity Provider (IdP) passes attribute information about Web-browsing users to a Service Provider (SP), which then bases authorisation decisions on those attributes.
The Identity Provider is responsible for authenticating users, using whatever local technology is appropriate.
This sensible division of labour, whereby the registration and authentication functions are carried out by the Identity Provider, while the Service Provider is responsible for authorisation and accounting, carries with it an element of trust.
Service Providers need to be confident that IdPs are keeping accurate records and authenticating robustly.
Trust is supported by another important facet of Shibboleth: the federation.
A federation is a group of organisations which have agreed to share a common set of policies and rules, forming a ‘circle of trust’.
Federations allow for scalability in trust and policy arrangements.
An organisation can belong to as many federations as is necessary to access all the resources it requires.
Privacy is a key feature of Shibboleth technology.
The IdP controls which user attributes are disclosed to the Service Provider after authentication.
The information which is released concerns the authenticated user’s role, rather than his or her identity ‘member of institution’ is the typical default, a level of detail which is very often sufficient for a UK HE user to access a protected resource.
Shibboleth can, however, support finer levels of granularity in attribute release detail such as ‘student member of institution on course x’ or ‘student member of institution y AND member of organisation z’ could be made available to a Service Provider in cases where access was so closely-governed as to make it relevant.
Meanwhile, role-based access management does not mean that personalisation is unsupported: each user is allocated a persistent resource-specific identifier, which ensures that he or she is ‘recognised’ on return visits, while anonymity is preserved.
Finally, because the release of attribute data would be in vain without a common attribute vocabulary, the Shibboleth Project has begun the process of defining a standard set of attributes, initially based on the eduPerson object class [5].
Shibboleth in the UK In recent years the JISC, through the Core Middleware initiative [6], has invested significantly in moving the UK towards a federated access management infrastructure founded on Shibboleth technology.
At the time of writing, the launch of the new UK Access Management Federation for the UK is imminent [7].
As noted above, Shibboleth permits membership of multiple federations; and indeed, Shibboleth federations are not difficult to establish.
However, only the UK Access Management Federation need be joined in order to use Shibboleth authentication to resources which are at present protected by Athens.
The current JISC contract for Athens comes to an end in July 2008.
Athens has served the UK splendidly, but Shibboleth technology offers two great advantages over existing access management arrangements.
First, Shibboleth permits both internal and external resources to be accessed using a single identity.
In practical terms, besides supporting access to third-party resources, it has the potential to support authentication to internal administrative systems and VLEs, to assist with inter-institutional resource-sharing, such as the sharing of e-learning resources across joint degree programmes, and to facilitate dynamic research collaboration.
Shibboleth offers us a glimpse of a future in which users take seamless Single Sign-On to Web resources for granted.
The second big advantage of Shibboleth is that it is not only standards-based, but that it is becoming a de facto international standard.
Federations based on Shibboleth already exist in the US, Switzerland and Finland, and serious Shibboleth projects are under way in several other countries.
Take-up of Athens outside the UK has been limited, meaning that willing resource providers have often had to invest in it for the benefit of a relatively small marketplace, and alongside other access management technologies.
Consolidation around a global standard will, over time, reduce administrative complexity and costs for suppliers and HE institutions alike.
ShibboLEAP The ShibboLEAP Project ran from April 2005 to April 2006.
It was funded by the JISC under the Core Middleware Early Adopters Call [8], which was designed to stimulate the building and sharing of experience of the technical, cultural and administrative implications of the transition to Shibboleth technology, for the benefit of the wider JISC community.
ShibboLEAP had seven partner institutions, as follows: Birkbeck Imperial College London King’s College London London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Royal Holloway School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) UCL (University College London) All the partners were founding members of the SHERPA-LEAP [9] Consortium, which has been developing institutional eprints repositories for University of London institutions since 2004, with the generous support of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of London.
LEAP stands for London Eprints Access Project; hence the somewhat aesthetically displeasing project name for ShibboLEAP (‘just a badly-chosen email subject-line that stuck’, to quote the Project Manager).
ShibboLEAP had two overriding objectives.
The first was to enable a full Shibboleth Identity Provider for all users at each of the seven partner institutions, using their existing directory and other infrastructure services wherever possible, and to document the process for the benefit of later adopters.
The second objective was to enable the EPrints software [10], which was then in use by all the partners, as a Shibboleth Service Provider.
(The content of the repositories is openly accessible, of course, but access restrictions apply to depositors, editors, and so on.)
The Project was led by the LSE, already capable of operating as a Shibboleth IdP [11] as a result of prior work on the SECURe [12] and PERSEUS [13] projects.
The LSE Project Team undertook to help the other six partners through their IdP implementations.
The partnership, though a natural grouping because of its existing consortial work, offered for these purposes a happy diversity in terms of size, institutional mission (from large, research-led institutions to continuing education specialists), and academic discipline.
Understandably, the size and skills sets of IT support departments varied within the partnership, as did the partners’ existing arrangements for identity management and resource access management: these included ‘classic’ Athens, Athens DA, several different implementations of LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), and various data sources used to hold and maintain identity and role attribute information about their user base, together with various methods of populating those data sources.
All the partners have strategic goals to work towards SSO.
In all, the total ‘population’ of the partner institutions is estimated at over 150,000 users.
We would stop short of describing the partnership as a microcosm of UK HE, but its breadth and overall size certainly made it a potentially interesting testbed.
Main Findings Technologists thirsty for detail should read no further, but head straight for the project Web site [14], where case study reports from participating institutions are to be found.
These include background information on institutional size and mission; descriptions of directory and authentication regimes, and other relevant infrastructural issues; accounts of IdP installation, including any difficulties encountered and copies of relevant configuration files; various expositions of Shibboleth, and other internal dissemination, for different audiences; and thoughts on future plans for Shibboleth integration and deployment.
The six case studies are supplemented by an overarching project report, and accompanied by a separate report on the work carried out to enable Eprints2 as a Shibboleth Service Provider.
Technical detail aside, various points of agreement between partners emerged in the course of the project.
In the first place, it is clear that the Shibboleth installation process remains complex; arguably too complex.
All the partners had frequent recourse to the assistance of the LSE Project Team, whose achievement in having effected a ‘solo’ implementation of Shibboleth IdP seemed all the more impressive as time wore on.
Secondly, while the project funded ample levels of staffing at each institution (a member of IT staff at 0.4 FTE, and a Co-ordinator at 0.1 FTE, the latter often from the Library), it became obvious that Shibboleth implementation requires skills, such as Tomcat expertise, which Unix Systems Administrators do not generally possess.
A third obstacle to successful installation was the quality of the Shibboleth documentation, which is notoriously poor.
Documentation, formal and informal, is available on the Web, but it lacks clarity, there is often inconsistency between sources, and it is very difficult for a novice installer to work out exactly which piece of documentation is most appropriate to his or her situation.
A pre-packaged installer might be too much to ask for, but Shibboleth clearly lacks a single site for high-quality, consolidated documentation.
(In the meantime, it is hoped that the efforts of ShibboLEAP and the other Early Adopters to document their experiences will help to resolve the problem, rather than exacerbate it!)
It also became clear that the demands of Shibboleth on institutional directories can be problematic.
Existing directories may not be fit for purpose, especially where ad hoc changes applied over time have created data inconsistencies a commonplace scenario; and some directory products are not supportive of change to schemas.
Some ShibboLEAP institutions took the opportunity to replace existing directories, or, at least, to clean them up, prior to taking on the Shibboleth installation.
Moreover, directories are usually crucial to the day-to-day running of an institution’s technical infrastructure, and engaging with the difficulty of installing the eduPerson object class on such an important service was a risk which few were prepared to take.
However, where the required data was already present in the directory, partners were able to use the IdP software to transform the names and values of attributes released by the directory to those required by eduPerson, a simple and robust solution.
Next Steps: The ShibboLEAP Partners Although the project delivered only pilot installations, and in spite of the installation issues itemised above, the partners all expect to continue to use Shibboleth in some way.
The Shibboleth-Athens gateway is a particularly useful tool for connecting Shibboleth IdPs to third-party resources, and an increasing number of such resources are already independently Shibboleth-compliant [15].
All the partners are considering their position with regard to Athens resources, although those who are already using AthensDA are more phlegmatic than those still using ‘classic’ Athens.
JORUM is an interesting case, since it is licensed only to staff from member institutions, and will therefore test Shibboleth attribute release and authentication to a finer level of detail than most other Athens resources.
Metalib is also mentioned as a potential candidate for early ‘Shibbolising’.
One partner is already investigating authentication across institutions for a joint e-learning course, using Shibboleth authentication to Moodle.
All the partners, understandably, envisage taking a resource-by-resource approach to Shibboleth integration, rather than replacing all existing authentication regimes with a ‘big bang’.
Some concerns were expressed during the project about the resource implications of maintaining a Shibboleth IdP in addition to existing authentication systems, but as the number of Shibboleth-enabled Web resources continues to grow, and as the configuration overheads for such resources are expected rapidly to diminish as experience and expertise bed down in the community, it is likely that an institutional investment in Shibboleth will show increasingly high returns over time.
Next Steps: New Installers Those planning a Shibboleth IdP implementation might begin by asking a few key questions.
What is the institutional directory?
Who owns it, how is it updated, and how are changes to it arranged?
Does it contain all the information required for resources protected with Shibboleth?
Should a new directory solution be considered?
How does the institution currently handle user account management?
Are user credentials secure enough for SSO use outside the institution?
Is a WebISO (Web Initial Sign-On) solution, such as Pubcookie, already in use?
Where will the IdP be installed, on what type of machine, and how will it be connected to the institutional directory?
It should be borne in mind that network account technical staff, directory administration technical staff, firewall and security staff, Web staff with Tomcat skills, Library IT staff (and other Library staff with knowledge of relevant external electronic resources), the institutional Athens administrator(s), and all their managers, will need to be involved in the process.
From here onwards, unfortunately, the absence of a suite of ‘oven-ready’ installation models, and the quality of the Shibboleth documentation, mean that things can, occasionally, get a bit difficult.
However, the good news is that Shibboleth installation is an increasingly well-trodden path in the UK.
The ShibboLEAP outputs, the work of the other Early Adopters, and the JISC’s Support Service [16] will all be able to offer some guidance through the complexities of Shibboleth installation and its equally complex documentation.
Conclusion Shibboleth is being adopted by educational institutions worldwide, including institutions in the UK, in support of federated access management.
Shibboleth is not an ‘all-in-one’ access management solution; but, as a component in an institutional SSO environment, it offers tremendous enabling possibilities.
It is architecturally complex, and can be difficult to install, but a number of UK institutions, including the seven ShibboLEAP partners, have already blazed a trail through the installation jungle.
This growing body of experience in Shibboleth deployment in the UK will benefit new adopters of this important new technology, which has the potential to help institutions to take major steps forward towards achieving Single Sign-On to secure internal and external Web resources.
Afterword: you say tomato… The word ‘Shibboleth’, in this context, has a distinguished history.
The Bible (Judges 12, v.1-6) records how the Ephraimites, fleeing Gilead after an unsuccessful attack, were cut off at the river Jordan by Gileadites.
Those attempting to cross the river were asked to say ‘Shibboleth’.
The unfortunate Ephraimites, who pronounced ‘sh’ as ‘si’, said ‘Sibboleth’, and 42,000 of them were duly slaughtered.
While this was undeniably a triumph of access management, we are confident that the implications of Shibboleth for the 150,000-plus members of the ShibboLEAP institutions will prove to be rather more uplifting.
Acknowledgements Thanks to John Paschoud and Simon McLeish of the LSE, both for reading a draft of this article, and for their indefatigable technical assistance to the ShibboLEAP partners during the project.
References McLeish, S. “Installing Shibboleth”, Ariadne 43, April 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/mcleish/ JISC “Connecting People and Resources; Briefing Paper version 2”, March 2006 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=pub_shibboleth MATU Middleware Assisted Take-up Service “What is Shibboleth?” http://www.matu.ac.uk/shibboleth_intro.html Internet2 Shibboleth Web site http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ eduPerson Object Class Web site http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?PAGE_ID=949&bhcp=1 JISC Core Middleware: Technology Development Programme; JISC Core Middleware Infrastructure Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_middleware UK Access Management Federation Web Site http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/ JISC Early Adopter Programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_cminfrastructure SHERPA-LEAP Web site http://www.sherpa-leap.ac.uk EPrints Web site http://www.eprints.org/ Shibboleth at LSE Web site http://www.angel.ac.uk/ShibbolethAtLSE/ SECURe Project Web site http://www.angel.ac.uk/SECURe/ PERSEUS Project Web site http://www.angel.ac.uk/PERSEUS/ ShibboLEAP Web site http://www.angel.ac.uk/ShibboLEAP/ Index of Shibboleth-Enabled Applications and Services http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/seas.html MATUMiddleware Assisted Take-up Service http://www.matu.ac.uk/ Author Details Martin Moyle Team Leader, Science; Project Manager, SHERPA-LEAP University College London Email: m.moyle@ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library Return to top Article Title: “ShibboLEAP: Seven Libraries and a LEAP of Faith” Author: Martin Moyle Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/moyle/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The JISC Annual Conference 2007 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The JISC Annual Conference 2007 Buzz data mobile software framework database dissemination portfolio infrastructure archives digitisation accessibility tagging browser repositories copyright video flickr preservation cataloguing aggregation e-learning ejournal personalisation e-business vle sms soa curation eportfolio crm youtube e-science rae ict openid interoperability foi foia research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Pothen and colleagues provide an overview of the proceedings of this Spring's JISC Annual Conference.
Opening Keynote Address The 2007 JISC conference began with a welcome from JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read who thanked the more than 600 delegates for attending the conference, held for the fifth year running at the ICC in Birmingham.
JISC Chairman Professor Sir Ron Cooke outlined JISC’s achievements over the last year, including the launch of the UK Access Management Federation [1], the launch of JISC Collections [2] as a mutual trading company and the launch of SuperJANET5 [3], the upgrade to the JANET network which quadruples its capacity.
Sir Ron talked of the JISC Value for Money report [4], published recently, which showed, for example, that for every £1 JISC spent on services, the community received £9 of demonstrable value.
Comparisons with commercial equivalents for JISC’s services showed that JISC and its services brought significant economies of scale.
Introducing the new JISC strategy [5], Sir Ron said that it included a new strand, that of business and community engagement, an area which is becoming more and more important to the HE sector.
Open access and interoperability were principles which also pervaded the newly updated strategy.
Sir Ron Cooke welcomed keynote speaker Professor David Eastwood, CEO of HEFCE, who began by saying that ‘we are in an era of mass higher education.’ Expansion of the sector had, he said, transformed the sector, and JISC had been important to that expansion.
He echoed Sir Ron Cooke in emphasising the importance of business and community engagement to make the most of the knowledge and intellectual property that is generated by the HE sector.
IP transfer is the key, rather than exploitation, he suggested.
Drivers for change include an increasingly diverse student body, a more demanding student body, new research approaches, the Internet and the growth of IT-enabled tools as well as cost and funding pressures.
Professor Eastwood talked of new student approaches to learning which had changed ways of accessing and using information.
Previously universities had established a degree of order to information and knowledge, but there are question marks against such structures with seemingly universal access to information through ICT and the Internet.
Calling for a ‘partnership between teaching staff and information professionals’, Professor Eastwood suggested that such a partnership could help meet this challenge and maximise the investment being made in ICT.
A new metric-based framework for the Research Assessment Exercise was now in place beyond 2008 and plans for the 2008 exercise were in place.
Professor Eastwood said he was ‘confident’ the system would work without difficulties.
Beyond 2008 there would be a major emphasis on the quality of information.
This meant a commitment to robust and transparent systems.
One of the key challenges will therefore be ‘the data challenge’, he said.
Reaffirming HEFCE’s commitment to JISC, he said that it provided an excellent model for delivering economies of scale to the sector.
Are there other such services that could be delivered on ‘a JISC-type model’?
he asked.
Professor Eastwood ended by saying that the HE sector faced a series of profound challenges, but that such challenges presented a series of questions about the nature of higher education which will shape the university and indeed the nature of learning in the twenty-first century.
EThOS, the New e-Theses Service for the UK Neil Jacobs (JISC programme manager) introduced the session by saying that the importance of intellectual property transfer could be strongly supported by work in the area of e-theses and through the work of repositories in general.
R John Robertson, repositories research officer at JISC-CETIS [6], said that an ecology is a complex system, with elements interacting and depending on each other.
It provides a useful metaphor for the work of repositories, he said, and represents a way of thinking about information systems and the relationships between systems and services.
Key features of an information ecology include diversity, evolution and a sense of locality.
Infrastructure and people were ‘keynote species’, he claimed, in the development of a repository ecology.
If a repository wanted to articulate whom it is useful for, such an approach provided a means of specifying specific benefits, such as the possibility of richer multifaceted and personalised approaches for end users and for more specific views, such as those of researchers, for example.
Susan Copeland, senior information adviser at Robert Gordon University, spoke about the CURLand JISC-funded EThOS project [7] which began in 2005 over a period of 18 months to establish a test-bed for a national e-theses service.
Building on earlier projects which had explored the possibility of a central hub providing access to e-theses, EThOS identified various relationships which would have to be taken into account in the creation of a ‘live’ service, such as those with institutional repositories, the role of national libraries and the international Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NTLTD).
Critical success factors included cultural and administrative issues, such as advocacy and changes to institutional policy; legal issues, including copyright and plagiarism concerns; technical issues, and financial issues, including set-up and running costs.
e-Framework, SOA and EA JISC’s Director of Systems Technology and Infrastructure, Bill Olivier began the session by introducing the service-oriented approach (soa) animation [8]; making sense of the e-Framework.
Currently the most popular download on the JISC Web site.
This session introduced the e-Framework initiative, the service-oriented approach (soa) to ICT provision and the development of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) within institutions.
The e-Framework is three things: A major JISC research and development programme An International initiative seeking to share the workload and expertise involved in supporting service oriented approaches for education and research A Web site supporting a knowledge base, on service-oriented approaches Chris Greenslade of the Open Group explained the Group is a not-for-profit consortium, committed to making technical standards work, in support of integrated information.
As a consortium, The Open Group has a mixed membership; corporate members, suppliers, developers and users, with some 6000 active individual participants, in 19 countries.
The Open Group has been working for some years, in the development of standards and service-oriented architecture approaches.
The Learner’s Experience of e-Learning This session was chaired by Paul Bailey, e-Learning Programme Manager, JISC, and the presenters were Dr. Rhona Sharpe, Learner Experience Synthesis Team, Oxford Brookes University, Ellen Lessner, Learner Experience Synthesis Team, Abingdon and Witney College and Emma Purnell, student, University of Wolverhampton.
This is the context of the learner experience today: WAP-enabled mobile phones are the second most popular digital device in the UK (the 1st is the personal computer); 90% of 12-year olds own a mobile phone; and most of the action during the 2006 National Union of Students election took place on Myspace.
Projects that have worked in this area expected students to be talking about institutional VLE’s; instead they are concentrating on social software and personal communications, and taking control of technology, sometimes without the sanction of the University and often without staff being aware of this ‘underworld’ of communication amongst their learners.
Students need support with how to select and find the trusted information on the Internet, their primary source of information for study and personal needs.
One technology increasingly employed by learners is the e-Portfolio.
Not just a binder of information, it has become an all-singing all-dancing portfolio, with video, audio, music.
Described as an addictive technology, used even after their PGCE course has finished, qualified students often open it up for students going through what they were a year ago.
Some of the recommendations and likely progressions from this work include focusing on social networking, having a community to learn with and keeping in touch.
Personalisation and customisation are also significant.
There needs to be consistency of course materials and environments.
Search, retrieval and access will become increasingly important.
Yet face-to-face contact will remain of value in a blended learning approach.
Why Have a JANET Connection?
Tim Marshall, CEO of UKERNA, delivered an interesting presentation emphasising the benefits of a JANET connection.
Many of the JANET services are delivered under a JISC Service Level Agreement (SLA) but for the future JANET hopes to offer non-SLA services such as SMS alongside these.
Tim stressed that JANET was a private network and the acceptable usage policy is often incorrectly cited by institutions as a reason not to use JANET for certain inter-institutional connections (halls of residence for example).
Tim offered personal support in answering any questions about this policy.
The directors of JISC’s two national data centres Peter Burnhill, Edina and Julia Chruszcz, MIMAS, delivered a joint presentation explaining the range of services and resources that are available through a JANET connection, “Taking it to the network”.
Both data centres deliver a diverse range of complementary services and resources.
“Taking it to the network” means adapting to the changing practices of a new generation of learners and teachers and evolving pedagogies.
Virtual Research Environments in a Real Research World David de Roure, University of Southampton, explained that e-Science was already strong but tech-centric rather than user-centric.
The VRE challenge was to ‘create an infrastructure routinely useable by researchers’; VRE1 was therefore experimental, working on a range of projects.
Into VRE2, the focus shifted to engaging communities and raising awareness; a research practice focus rather than developmental.
Characteristics of a VRE, among others, are that it should be a distributed tool, based on Open Source, and customisable.
Just some of the issues include desktop integration, social space, and open or protected content.
Roger Slack, University of Wales, continued with a round-up of some of the issues raised by the Memetic VRE1 project.
A consortium-based project, it was very much focused on user engagement, and ‘Securing commitment, supporting work and ensuring futures’.
Development was based on current user needs (rather than seeking to change research practice), required the active involvement of participants, and a long-term involvement through the lifetime of the project.
Future project work includes a Collaborative Research Events pilot involving many institutions and further embedding work.
Third Stream: Knowledge Transfer from Education to Industry Norman Wiseman gave a background to JISC’s involvement in Third Stream work (Business and Community Engagement [9]) and the HEFCE-funded work over the next few months based on the results of a user needs study in 2006 and the Think Tank work with community representatives.
JISC sees its opportunity as at the interface between the campus and the rest of the world and this interface is one of the main areas of difficulty that JISC might help to address.
In particular the issues of Knowledge Exchange between the HEI and the wider community, Employer engagement, Work-Based Learning and Community Engagement.
JISC will concentrate on four key issues the provision of advice, raising awareness, communications, and customer relationship management that were flagged by participants in the Think Tank.
Simon Whittemore described where Third Stream came from as a term together with other terms such as Knowledge Transfer, Knowledge Exchange and Business and Community Engagement (BCE).
They all relate to the process of externalising the work of institutions and working to extract greater benefit from the work of institutions.
The context of BCE work includes economic challenge, civic changes and tensions and the need in the UK to maximise the use of the HE knowledge base and make further connections into the regional agenda.
Engagement is core to all of this if there is to be a contribution to companies and economic competitiveness.
This all connects to JISC’s fifth strategic aim [10] and there is a suite of work in the short term looking at social software uses, IPR advice, the application of the Advisory Services, the use of Customer Relationship Management systems and possibly the extension of the RSC’s role particularly in connection with work-based learning.
Simon made reference to KE Good Practice [11] and the creation of the Institute of Knowledge Exchange as useful reference points to gain more information about work in this area and the move towards the creation of KT professionals in the community Di Martin’s presentation tried to cover the cultural, corporate and customer challenges for institutions together with ways in which JISC might be able to lend support and assistance.
Cultural issues included IPR, collaboration vs. commercial in confidence, individual vs. corporate, from research to innovation etc.
JISC help here could cover staff development, costing and pricing, good practice models, advisory services, promotion and dissemination.
Corporate issues covered working across a large organisation, co-ordination with partners, business-to-business working, business intelligence, corporate vs. local systems etc and JISC might help via external connectivity, CRM development, e-administration, interoperability and evaluation toolkits.
Managing and Preserving Institutional Digital Assets Rachel Bruce, JISC programme director, began the session by saying the issue of digital preservation is a key theme of the newly updated JISC strategy, and something that is central to the ongoing development of the Information Environment.
Helen Hockx-Yu, JISC programme manager, gave an overview of JISC digital preservation activities by saying that an important strand of this work was the support of institutional efforts in this area.
Current feasibility and scoping studies were looking to assess preservation risks and requirements and were looking at Web resources, e-prints, learning resources, e-science data, e-journals and much more.
National services funded by JISC include the Arts and Humanities Data Service (co-funded by the AHRC), the UK Data Archive (with the ESRC), the Digital Curation Centre (with the UK e-science core programme), which all in different areas promote expertise and good practice in the field of digital preservation.
Projects from various programmes since 2003 had engaged institutions directly in examining, testing or implementing emerging tools and standards, strategies and business models in an operational environment.
JISC also works in collaboration with national and international bodies.
Involvement in the UK Web Archiving Consortium, the Digital Preservation Coalition and formal partnership with the British Library are important examples of this work.
Maureen Pennock, research officer for the Digital Curation Centre based at UKOLN, said some important synthesis work was currently being undertaken on the work of the Digital Preservation and Asset Management programme, pulling out lessons from the work of the programme for the community.
The programme funded 11 projects.
Key themes that were common to all or most projects include the question of the digital lifecycle, while a number of recurring elements were highly visible to the projects as a whole, such as legal issues, cultural issues, repositories and preservation and policies and strategies.
One of the most valuable output from the projects were the case studies.
These gave insight into institutional challenges.
Training is another key feature.
The many stakeholders involved in the issue of digital preservation and curation need training and many of the outputs of the projects addressed this need directly.
All projects had made new and unexpected insights and had made connections between key organisations in the field, leading to better communication.
Opening the Research Data Lifecycle Liz Lyon, UKOLN, spoke on relations between institutions, institutional repositories and data centres.
Many bodies are interested in storing and accessing data.
Currently there are varying degrees of linkage in the various Research Councils, and patchy data management, although the Wellcome Trust has a sharing policy on the Web, and NERC has 7 designated data centres, committed to supporting data in perpetuity.
Licences for data deposit are needed, and there are IPR issues to be addressed, as well as technical issues with varying complexities of data sets.
Institutional repositories currently do not hold much information; barriers to data sharing, IPR, lack of awareness and resistance to change are all hurdles to be overcome.
However, progress includes a departmental data audit being set up at Southampton, integrated databases at the European Bioinformatics Institute, and eBank’s close liaison with publishers from the beginning.
In sum, more join-up and co-ordination is needed, and an understanding of who funds the research needs, and sorts out the technical interoperability issues.
Good practice in data management planning needs to be shared, along with training methods and guidance, and consistent and co-ordinated advocacy work.
Enabling Lifelong Learning Sarah Davies, session chair, set out a number of issues that the Lifelong Learning projects have had to address: Vocational Barriers No desire to enter HE Lack of information about learning opportunities Difficulty in tracking student progress Difficulty integrating learning with existing skills and experience Difficulty in communicating vocational qualifications and experience She referred to Gill Scott’s (Learner Suppor Development Manager for Greater Manchester Strategic Alliance GMSA) work on joining up learning and recording the use of PDP and e-portfolios, progression pathways, course information, achievement tracking and combining many experiences in learning into one award.
Bill Pollard from Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College felt that the key may be a group of people with the same learning objective.
He spoke about a Web browser called ‘Flock’ and del.icio.us; both helping in tagging and recording sites.
Flock acts as the students’ personal Web browser and not the one provided by the institution this makes it easy to bring in streams, easy to tag and share sites with peers either locally or in a wider group.
Ultimately as they individually use keywords they can use their resources to share in a wider online community.
Some institutional controls have had to be implemented to reduce overload of Web traffic.
This gives “extra in and extra out” students add the software for their studies and their social life.
Bill Leivers from Loughborough College discussed a number of issues surrounding lifelong learning, such as Progress Files, interoperability, FECs and HEIs, accessibility using ACCLIP standards (RNIB connection), interoperability between eProgress File and college eBusiness Systems using automatic population of eProgress Records and electronic registers.
Loughborough College has also developed KS3 and KS4 extensions in the Leicestershire 13-19 Agenda.
This allows a seamless transfer within the 14-19 community in Leicestershire.
There is a need to engage with what the students want and acknowledge the students’ desire for engagement with the college.
Mark Stiles, Professor of Technology Supported Learning and Co-director of the Learning Development Centre at Staffordshire University, raised points including work-based learning, looking at the uptake and use of foundation degrees, and how to get institutions to work together across HE and FE.
There was a particular need for support for the companies and employers with resources in work-based learning more so than the students.
Employer engagement was vital.
He also mentioned the impact of WBL Way Architecture which was moving towards a seamless supporting network of employers, mentors, tutors and learners.
Dr Gill Ferrel of JISC Infonet discussed the Camel Project Sharing Experience between institutions, and collaborative approaches to the management of e-learning.
She also mentioned the Uruguay farmer support network, which was planned collaboratively, documented before and after, which focused on the aspects which mattered.
She stated it was expertly facilitated and that there was a strong emphasis on tacit knowledge.
The partner institutions for this were Leeds College of Technology, Loughborough College, University of Greenwich, Staffordshire University.
Is e-Content out of Control?
Catherine Grout, JISC, examined national trends in Content.
She asked ‘will a few multi-national corporations delivering information and learning become the force of the future by-passing the need for publicly funded institutions?’ And ‘Is there really a role for formal published content in the future of education and research?’ These issues are examples of how content is changing very fast and the important role that the Strategic e-Content Alliance (SEA) has to play.
SEA’s vision is to realise the potential of e-content for all users through the greater integration of services and technologies and the removal of political and administrative barriers.
Stuart Dempster, JISC, explained that SEA was born out of the Common Information Environment (CIE) work and the Loughborough Study, which made key recommendations to JISC, in particular, highlighting the need for a National Digitisation and Content strategy.
He explained that JISC, the BBC, the British Library, Becta, MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council), the National Health Service, and the national e-Science programme are taking forward the Strategic e-Content Alliance initiative.
The aim was to ‘work across the public sector to fully realise the potential of e-content for all users through the greater integration of services and technologies and the removal of political and administrative barriers’.
This initiative will deliver an e-content framework of principles and good practice which will provide a blue-print for effective collaboration across the public sector in the e-content arena.
David Dawson, MLA, talked of the varied and rich collections that are locked away in museums and libraries scattered across the country.
He emphasised the potential benefits to the citizen researcher.
He gave an example of key Nottingham resources, which are held in a museum in Oxford; these can be made available electronically enabling access to all citizens not just traditional HE researchers.
He also highlighted that today’s public library user may well be tomorrow’s student.
Becta told a story of students of all ages and how the SEA is going to make a difference to their access to resources throughout their education literally from cradle to grave; removing the institutional barriers was key to achieving this.
The director of the e-Science institute emphasised the key role that he believes the SEA will play in developing the UK’s e-infrastructure.
None of this infrastructure is interesting or useful without content.
He believed that all science must be made available to the general public.
He mentioned many research activities that are driven by amateurs (e.g.
bird songs, genealogy and so on).
To develop new knowledge, we had to allow access to all science.
Compliance at Any Cost?
The presenters were Steve Bailey, Senior Advisor (Records Management), JISC infoNet and Steve Wood, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University.
This session concentrated on the survey conducted by JISC InfoNet on the impact of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) on UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
The survey is available on the JISC InfoNet Web site.
Instead of the feared tidal wave of FOI requests, the reality was more of a ‘damp squib’, on average only three requests per institution per month.
However, this is likely to increase in the future as trends such as business and community engagement (BCE), and students as fee-paying customers, develop.
Although most were currently coping with the demands of FOI, HEIs would be wise to develop effective and innovative records management practices for cost-effective compliance.
There are many resources available from JISC InfoNet to assist HEIs with planning their information management strategies.
UK Access Management Federation This session was chaired by John Robinson, Services Operations Director, JISC and the presenters were Henry Hughes, Middleware Group Manager, UKERNA, Mark Williams, Access Management Outreach Coordinator, JISC and Masha Garibyan, PERSEUS Project, LSE.
The UK Access Management Federation covers the whole of the UK education sector Further Education, Higher Education and schools.
A short presentation was given, including a viewing of the new Access Management animation [12], which describes the benefits and steps that need to be taken to join the federation in an easily digestible non-technical format.
Eduserv Workshop This session, led by Ed Zedlewski, Eduserv Technologies and Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation, provided an overview of the future of Access and Identity Management (AIM) in the UK educational sector.
It considered the middleware landscape over the coming years, focussing in particular on the implications of a potential transition from the institutionally-oriented federated approaches, such as the JISC’s UK Access Management Federation, towards user-centric identity management approaches.
It also discussed newly emerging technologies such as OpenID and Microsoft CardSpace.
The session provided details about Eduserv’s plans for Open Athens [13] and how it saw its services evolving to meet institution’s needs now and in the years to come.
The speakers suggested that the need to support multiple AIM technologies, each of which is evolving at a fairly rapid pace, and multiple federations means that outsourcing to an external identity provider will provide the most cost effective AIM approach for many institutions.
Closing Keynote Address Tom Loosemore, Project Director of BBC 2.0, gave the second keynote speech of the day on the topic of how the BBC is embracing the find, share and play attitudes of the Web 2.0 community.
He began by thanking the audience and JISC for the development of JANET which had allowed him to develop his passion for the Web as a student.
Tom’s firstly addressed the question, ‘Where did BBC 2.0 come from?’.
He spoke of a six-month review in 2004 which examined how to reach the 44 million people who do not use the Web, and how to develop the BBC’s Web sites accordingly.
As a result the BBC produced 15 draft principles which provide a useful guide to Web development at the BBC.
Tom covered each in turn, with short comments as follows: Build Web products that meet users’ needs, is the first principle.
Examples include the CBeebies Web site [14].
The best Web sites do one thing really, really well.
The BBC News site [15] attracts 5.5m users per week and answers the question ‘What’s going on right now?’ The BBC History site [16] is less well used although it is a remarkable site.
Do not attempt to do everything yourselves link to other high-quality sites yourselves.
The John Peel Day Web site [17] brings together an enormous number of concerts and festivals run in the late DJ’s memory and includes photos taken by music lovers from these events and placed on the Flickr Web site and tagged with the keyword ‘John Peel’.
Fall forward fast make many small bets.
See the BBC Programme Catalogue [18].
Treat the entire Web as a creative canvas.
The best example of this is an ABC programme which spent three times more on sites away from its own Lost site than it did on the Lost site itself, including ‘Lostpedia’, and the commissioning of a book which was available on Amazon.
The Web is a conversation join in.
Adopt a relaxed conversational tone.
Admit your mistakes.
Any Web site is only as good as its worst page.
Rigorous processes are needed in developing and editing Web sites.
Make sure all content can be linked to forever.
Linking is what is key to the Web.
Remember your granny won’t ever use Second Life.
If you focus only on early adopters then you’re missing many potential users; too much on everyone and you will lose the urge to develop Web sites and cutting-edge services.
Maximise routes to content.
Develop as many aggregations as possible reflecting as many people, places, topics, channels, networks and time as possible.
Optimise your site to rank high on Google.
BBC sites do this extremely well.
Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one size fits all.
Architecture should reflect interaction.
Accessibility is not an optional extra.
The Accessible UK Train Timetables site [19] is the result of a passion on the part of the developer to ensure that everyone could use the Web site.
Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes.
YouTube is an excellent example of this.
Link to discussions on the Web, don’t host them; only host Web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale.
Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent.
Respect your users’ data.
If these 15 principles need to be condensed, then five principles might suffice.
These would be: Web sites should be: Straightforward: i.e.
simple, uncomplicated Functional: i.e.
usable and useful Gregarious: i.e.
sociable, participatory Open: i.e.
exposed, unguarded Evolving: i.e.
emergent, growing Editor’s note: Further information, abstracts and presentations are available from the JISC Conference 2007 Web site [20].
References UK federated access management: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/access_management/federation.aspx JISC Collections http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/services/services_jisccollections.aspx SuperJANET5 http://www.ja.net/superjanet5/ JISC Value for Money report http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/about_jisc/value_report.aspx Strategy 2007-2009: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/strategy/strategy0709.aspx JISC CETIS (JISC Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/services/as_jisccetis.aspx EThOS Project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digital_repositories/project_ethos.aspx The Service Oriented Approach: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_eframework/soa.aspx Business and Community Engagement (BCE): JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/business_community_engagement.aspx Strategic aims and key deliverables: JIS http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/strategy/strategy0709/strategy_aims.aspx KE Good Practice http://www.kegoodpractice.org/ Federated access management animation: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/access_management/federation/animation.aspx Open Athens http://www.eduserv.org.uk/aim/openathens/ BBC CBeebies Web site http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ BBC News Web site http://news.bbc.co.uk/ BBC History Web site http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ BBC Radio 1 Keeping it Peel John Peel Day http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/johnpeel/johnpeelday/2005/ BBC Programme Catalogue http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/ Accessible UK Train Timetables http://www.traintimes.org.uk/ JISC Conference 2007 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/conference2007/ Author Details Dr Philip Pothen Press and PR Manager JISC Email: p.pothen@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “The JISC Annual Conference 2007” Author: Philip Pothen and colleagues Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/jisc-conf-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The JIBS Workshop on Resource/Reading List Software the Reality Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The JIBS Workshop on Resource/Reading List Software the Reality Buzz software framework portfolio schema cataloguing opac e-learning vle openurl interoperability sfx Citation BibTex RIS Frances Boyle reports on the one-day workshop on the current state of play in the Resource/Reading List software market, held at the SaÔd Business School, University of Oxford, on 9 September 2004.
This was a workshop organised by the JIBS User Group [1] to bring together both vendors and practitioners to discuss that old chestnut of reading lists, so dear to the hearts of many a jobbing librarian.
The format of the day was that the morning focused on the vendors' story, with major market players being present.
The afternoon was given over to practitioners, both librarians and learning technologists, to share their experiences on the implementation and the use of the products 'in anger' as it were.
The final speaker took us away from the 'hows' by looking at the overarching question, the 'why'.
The event was an informal participative one with a final lively discussion session.
The meeting was attended by 52 delegates from over 30 institutions in the pleasant surroundings of the Saïd Business School.
Vendor Sessions Two of the major commercial suppliers, Talis, represented by Karen Reece and Sentient, represented by John Davidson were present and the third supplier was LORLS (Loughborough Online Reading Lists System) from Loughborough University.
This is an open source approach which was outlined by Gary Brewerton the co-developer of the software.
While the look-and-feel of the products varied greatly the end products, with slight variations in the different bells and whistles provided, were not a million miles away from each other.
Their was emphasis on integration with other systems, for example LMS, VLEs, Open link resolvers, electronic portfolio systems etc.
LORLS, as perhaps would be expected, did not have the glossy front-end or the development timeline, however it seemed to deliver the basics of reading list management very effectively in a well considered workflow.
Practitioner Sessions The three counterparts to these were practitioners from Nottingham University, the Open University and Oxford University.
Vivien Sieber, Senior Learning and Teaching Officer in the Medical Sciences Division at Oxford University led the way.
The thrust of her paper was that it was still work in progress on the pilot scheme that is being run in the Medical Sciences division which began in April 2004.
The major focus of the work is the integration of the Sentient product with Oxford's implementation of the Bodington VLE system.
Teething problems identified were links to the local Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC), the upload of files from EndNote, issues linked to the local OpenURL resolver and the effect on Sentient reports by the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) interface.
In short the integration with the existing and legacy systems.
As yet the system has not been tested with students, this will happen in the coming months.
Christine Middleton from Nottingham University shared her experience of LORLS.
At Nottingham a strategic decision had been made in the light of the need expressed by both the academic and library communities for reading lists to be made available online.
In 2001 an evaluation of the Aleph and LORLS systems was undertaken with the conclusion being that LORLS, at that time, best fitted the Nottingham wish list.
The implementation was successful and since that time there has been development and ongoing activity to convince the academics to employ the system.
The development thrust was focussed on three areas: tagged output for citations further developments with link resolvers e.g.
SFX liaison with bookshops Interestingly the common concern from academics was the citation format; each department had its preferred format and managing this was proving a challenge.
Philip Adams from De Montfort University reminded the audience of the real need to facilitate the use of reading lists from the users' point of view.
De Montfort had linked the launch of the project, using TalisList, with the BBC's Big Read in the summer of 2003.
To date there were over 800 lists available.
The system is linked from their OPAC and VLE.
They have yet to implement the link to the ordering process and the creation of subject reading lists.
A common thread through each of these case studies was that, in reality, it was the library staff who were inputting and creating the reading lists; there was as yet still no appreciable buying discernible on the part of the academics.
Howard Noble, of the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University gave an informed overview of the JISC E-Learning Framework (ELF)[2] which supports the development of open source software that complies with interoperability standards.
The final comments that technology was useless without a change in cultural change were particularly apposite.
Conclusion To sum up, I felt that the day had achieved its aim as a relaxed event culminating in a lively debate at the end which I felt was beneficial to both practitioners and vendors alike.
The wide range of issues raised in the discussion session, from information literacy to collection management tools indicated the breadth and scope of the environment in which librarians are now operating and also the many uses for which reading/resource list software is being pressed into service.
The much bandied term interoperability was omnipresent and my final thought was that the skill and challenge for jobbing librarians is to manage and exploit these connections to enable our users to locate the resources in a timely fashion and to enable the joined-up schema that we so often see on PowerPoint slides.
The speakers have kindly allowed us to load their presentations [3] on the JIBS Web site.
References JIBS http://www.jibs.ac.uk/ JISC ELF http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=elearning_framework Presentations of speakers at the workshop are available from the workshop programme page http://www.jibs.ac.uk/meetings/workshops/readinglist/index.html Author Details Frances Boyle Electronic Resources Manager University of Oxford Email: fb@sers.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ox.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The JIBS Workshop on Resource/Reading List Software The Reality " Author: Frances Boyle Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/jibs-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Are Your Terms?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Are Your Terms?
Buzz data software java rdf framework sparql api database xml portal archives metadata vocabularies namespace schema oai-pmh cataloguing aggregation provenance e-learning soap lom mysql rslp dcmi redland interoperability rdfs research standards Citation BibTex RIS Pete Johnston introduces the JISC Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) Project and examines some of the challenges it is facing.
The JISC Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) Project [1] is funded by JISC through its Shared Services Programme to develop a metadata schema registry as a pilot shared service for the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE).
Partners in the project are UKOLN, University of Bath and the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol.
The Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) are contributing to the project in an advisory capacity.
This article describes the work of the IEMSR Project to date against the background of metadata usage by applications within the JISC IE.
It describes the tools that the project is developing, and highlights some of the issues, both technical and policy-related, that the project is considering.
Metadata Schema Registries A metadata schema registry is an application that provides services based on information about 'metadata terms' and about related resources.
The term 'metadata term' is used here to denote some identified 'unit of meaning' deployed in a metadata description.
The label 'term' is preferred here to 'element' or 'data element' as it is intended to encompass several different types of component that occur within metadata descriptions, both in the 'attribute space' and the 'value space', the 'elements', but also the 'schemes' that provide values for those elements.
Such 'terms' are typically defined and managed as functional aggregations created to support some operation or service.
The services offered by a metadata schema registry may cover many different functions, and different metadata schema registries may provide different sets of functions depending on their purpose, scope and context; those functions might include: Disclosure/discovery of information about metadata terms Disclosure/discovery of relationships between metadata terms Mapping or inferencing services based on relationships between terms Verification of the provenance or status of metadata terms Disclosure/discovery of related resources (such as functional aggregations of terms, guidelines for use, bindings for metadata instances, etc) The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) maintains a metadata schema registry that offers services based solely on the descriptions of the terms within the metadata vocabularies maintained by DCMI [2].
A Web site provides a human-readable interface to the registry, and simple REST(Representational State Transfer) and SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol) based APIs support a few basic operations that return machine-readable descriptions of terms.
In the UK, the Metadata for Education Group (MEG) Registry Project [3], funded jointly by JISC and Becta, sought to build on the work of the DESIRE and SCHEMAS projects to develop a schema registry for the educational metadata community.
The work was developed further by the EU-funded CORES Project [4].
The MEG Registry and CORES projects essentially extended the data model deployed within the DCMI Registry to include the concept of the 'metadata application profile'.
Metadata Standards and Metadata Application Profiles Research within the DESIRE Project [5] explored the way implementers deployed metadata standards, and the project indicated that the concept of 'profiling' might be applied to metadata standards, similarly to the ways it was applied in other contexts.
The notion of the metadata 'application profile' was introduced to a wider audience through the paper by Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel, "Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas" [6].
Heery and Patel contrast the 'top-down' approach of standards makers concerned with generality and interoperability, and the pragmatism of implementers requiring specificity and localisation who optimise standards for the context of their application.
The paper proposes a typology of metadata schemas in which: namespace schemas declare (name and define) data elements; application profiles describe the use of (previously declared) data elements to meet the requirements of a particular context or application.
A metadata application profile may select elements from multiple namespaces (but must not use elements that are not previously declared in a namespace schema); refine the definitions of elements by making them narrower or more specific; specify constraints on the permitted values of elements by mandating the use of particular controlled vocabularies or formats Figure 1: Application Profiles and 'Namespace Schemas': a simplified view Given this principle that a metadata application references, or 'uses', existing data elements, it is often the case that the development of an application profile is accompanied by the development of a new set of data elements to provide the descriptive capability required to supplement that of the standard schema: that is, a new 'namespace schema' is supplied by the developers of the profile.
For example: 'Simple Dublin Core' is an application profile of the Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard in which metadata descriptions make use of the 15 elements of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, and all elements are optional and repeatable [7] [8].
The Simple Dublin Core profile has been widely implemented, particularly by adopters of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH) [9], where it has been applied to the description of many different types of resources.
(The "oai_dc" metadata format, which the protocol requires data providers to support, is a serialisation of the Simple Dublin Core metadata application profile.)
the RSLP Collection Description Schema [10] specifies how terms drawn from the three Dublin Core 'namespaces' and from other metadata vocabularies, including a vocabulary constructed for this purpose, are used together for the description of a collection, its location and agents related to the collection and location.
It makes recommendations for constraining the value space of terms (in the form of 'encoding schemes' and human-readable guidelines) and for the obligation to use terms in a description.
Implementers of both the Dublin Core and the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) [11] standard recognise the principles of modularity (the notion that component parts of metadata standards may be (re)used as 'building blocks' in different contexts) and extensibility (the capacity to introduce new components as required to meet functional requirements not catered for by the standard).
They regard the metadata application profile as a key mechanism for realising these principles [12].
Metadata in the JISC Information Environment The JISC IE is a 'set of networked services that allows people to discover, access, use and publish' information resources within the UK HE and FE community [13].
The JISC IE is not itself a single system or service; rather, it is an open and expanding collection of services that can be used in combination as components to deliver functionality of interest to a user.
Many of the functions provided by service components within the IE depend on operations on metadata records describing those information resources, and the effective transfer of metadata records between service components is a critical factor in their interoperability.
To support the core functions of discovery of, and access to, information resources, the JISC IE Technical Architecture [14] specifies several mechanisms by which one service component can make metadata available to other service components.
The Standards Framework for the JISC IE [15] specifies a set of protocols that implement these mechanisms and also the formats in which metadata records should be made available.
This metadata is based on Dublin Core and the LOM standard.
More precisely, the Standards Framework recommends the deployment of two application profiles of these standards: Simple Dublin Core (as described above) and the UK LOM Core [16], a profile of the LOM designed to support the disclosure and discovery of, and access to, learning objects designed for use at any educational level within the UK.
Records conforming to these profiles, serialised using the recommended formats or bindings, form a 'baseline' for the transfer and exchange of metadata between service components in the IE.
If metadata interoperability within the JISC IE is based on these two application profiles and their associated formats, what then is the role for a metadata schema registry?
Is it not sufficient to direct implementers to the sources of information about these two profiles and the corresponding formats provided by their owners?
In addition to supporting these 'baseline' metadata application profiles, some content providers within the JISC IE seek to enable a richer level of functionality by developing additional application profiles and, where necessary, additional metadata formats for the serialisation of descriptions based on those profiles.
Typically the sharing of such richer/extended metadata takes place between a closed (or semi-closed) group of service providers and depends on prior co-ordination between the partners on the use of metadata terms and, if necessary, on extensions to syntactical bindings.
For example: The 'RDN DC' Dublin Core Application Profile is used for the sharing of metadata records between hubs within the Resource Discovery Network [17][18] The RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile (RLLOMAP) was developed to support the sharing of metadata records between RDN hubs and the former Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Centres (now Higher Education Academy Subject Centres) [19][20] Disclosure, Reuse, Provenance and Relationships As the number of metadata application profiles deployed increases it becomes important to have a means by which the developers of those profiles can disclose their existence, and by which other parties can discover them.
Those other parties may be the developers of applications that are interacting with the services using those metadata application profiles.
They may also be the developers of quite separate services seeking to build on existing practice.
That 'reuse' may take the form of adopting an existing profile as a whole, but it may involve constructing a new profile that references a new permutation of existing terms.
It may be the case that the developer of a new service finds that it is not appropriate to adopt an existing application profile in its entirety, but that a profile references, say, controlled vocabularies, that are indeed suitable for their purposes.
Clearly if the developers of new services are to be encouraged to adopt existing metadata application profiles and to reuse existing 'terms' as components within their own application profiles, then it is important that the descriptions of these resources not only provide clear explanation of the meaning and use of the terms but also include clear indications of their status and provenance.
Knowing whether a term or set of terms is stable or whether it is still the subject of testing and development may condition decisions about its suitability for reuse.
Similarly being able to establish that a term has been deployed in multiple application profiles may give some indication of its usefulness.
New metadata terms are typically created in order to express some new piece of information for which no existing term sufficed.
However, it is common that the description or declaration of a metadata term includes a description of relationships between the new term and one or more existing metadata terms.
While the description of these relationships in isolation is useful, the aggregation of this information about multiple terms provides a basis for more powerful mapping or inferencing operations to be developed.
These, then, are some of the factors motivating the investigation of the development of a metadata schema registry for the JISC IE.
Where these discovery functions are provided to a human user, strictly speaking, within the high-level functional classification of the JISC IE Technical Architecture, they are provided by a presentational service that mediates between the user and the metadata schema registry itself, a service characterised as a 'metadata portal' in the diagram below: Figure 2: A 'Metadata Portal' queries the IEMSR However, increasingly the 'agents' requiring information about metadata terms are not only human beings, but also software applications performing operations on behalf of those human beings.
It is expected that components within any of the four JISC IE functional categories content providers, fusion services, presentation service, or other shared services might interact with the IEMSR to provide or obtain information about metadata terms.
For example, a presentation service might obtain a set of human-readable labels to apply in the display of the content of a metadata record; a metadata creation tool might use the description of an application profile to load appropriate controlled vocabularies or 'tool tips'; and a fusion service might make use of information about equivalence or other relationships between metadata terms.
Figure 3: The IEMSR and other IE components Metadata Application Profiles and Metadata Formats An important note of qualification is required here: a metadata application profile, at least as it has been defined within the context of the IEMSR, does not in itself describe how to represent a metadata instance conforming to that profile in a machine-readable form.
An application profile is (only) an 'information model'.
To represent an instance of that model, a binding is required a mapping between the components of that information model and the structural components of a machine-readable syntax, typically, in the case of the JISC IE at least, XML.
Indeed the relationship between metadata application profile and metadata format is one-to-many: metadata descriptions conforming to a single metadata application profile may be serialised in several different formats.
In its present form, the IEMSR does not describe these mappings, and it requires that applications using the IEMSR have built-in information about such mappings if they are to use the data made available by the IEMSR in operations on metadata records.
The Trouble with Terms and the Matter of 'Meta-models' Central to the concept of the metadata application profile is the notion that components defined in a 'namespace schema' can be brought together in the new context of the metadata application profile and then deployed in metadata descriptions based on that profile.
However, the experience of designing metadata application profiles and of developing applications that work with both DC and LOM metadata has suggested that the concept of 'mixing and matching' requires some qualification.
The reason for this is that the 'terms' defined by metadata standards are defined within the context of conceptual frameworks or 'meta-models' which determine how those terms are to be interpreted.
And different metadata standards do not necessarily adopt the same, or even compatible, meta-models.
A recent DCMI recommendation, the DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM) [21], seeks to articulate the meta-model for Dublin Core.
Essentially, the DCAM presents a Dublin Core metadata description as a set of statements about a single resource.
In its simplest form, each statement consists of a reference to a 'property' and a reference to a second resource, which the DCAM calls a 'value'.
That is, each statement asserts the existence of a relationship between two resources, and the type of relationship is indicated by the property.
All DC elements and element refinements are properties, i.e.
they are types of relationship that may exist between two resources.
A reference to a property in a statement is treated as if it is always a reference to the same concept, the relationship type.
The LOM standard does not explicitly describe or refer to a meta-model, but it defines the structure of a LOM metadata instance in terms of a set of LOM data elements organised into a tree or nested container structure.
LOM data elements, then, are quite different in nature from Dublin Core elements: they are containers for sequences of other LOM data elements, or for values, and the nature of the values is specified by the datatyping rules of the LOM standard.
LOM data elements are interpreted in the context of the other LOM data elements within which they are contained.
The consequences of this are that, firstly, a full mapping between the two metadata standards is not straightforward (because the mapping process must take into account the differences in the meta-models), and secondly, terms defined within the two meta-models are different types of resource and can not be directly combined.
(Note: It is beyond the scope of this article to present a detailed discussion of the DC and LOM meta-models.
Accounts can be found in the work of Mikael Nilsson and his colleagues on the development of a (Dublin Core-compatible) RDF binding for the LOM standard [22]).
Furthermore, the two different conceptual frameworks result in slightly different approaches to the metadata application profile.
The terms referenced by a Dublin Core application profile are terms of the type described by the Abstract Model, i.e.
an application profile describes, for some class of metadata descriptions, which properties are referenced in statements and how the use of those properties may be constrained by, for example, specifying the use of vocabulary and syntax encoding schemes.
An examination of existing LOM application profiles reveals a different approach: CanCore can be seen to take its cue from a definition of application profiles that precedes ones more recently referenced.
Instead of "mixing and matching" elements from multiple schemas and namespaces (Heery & Patel 2000), it presents "customisation" of a single "standard" to address the specific needs of "particular communities of implementers with common applications requirements .." [23] That is, a LOM application profile is designed within the LOM tree/container framework and describes how the information model described by the LOM standard is adopted to the requirements of an application.
For the IEMSR Project, the incompatibility of the LOM and DC meta-models has presented the challenge of managing descriptions of two distinct sets of resources Dublin Core Application Profiles and the components that they reference on the one hand, and LOM Application Profiles and the components that they reference on the other and doing so, as far as possible, within a common set of software tools.
The IEMSR Architecture and the IEMSR Tools The IEMSR has been developed as an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [24], a W3C recommendation (or rather set of recommendations) for a language to represent information about resources.
One of the reasons for using an RDF-based approach is that it facilitates the aggregation of independently created data sources: in particular it means that the IEMSR can take advantage of the availability of existing descriptions of metadata vocabularies created by the owners of those vocabularies using the RDF Vocabulary Description Language (RDF Schema) [25], and published on the Web.
And conversely, the descriptions of metadata vocabularies created using IEMSR tools may be made available to other RDF/RDFS applications, either through the services of the IEMSR itself or through the publication of the documents on the Web independently of the IEMSR.
Although this article has tended to refer to 'the IEMSR' or 'the registry' as a single entity, the discussion above noted that a presentation service was distinct from the registry itself, and the project has developed a number of distinct functional components: The registry server A Web site A data creation tool The IEMSR tools will be made available as open-source software.
Both the Web site and the data creation tool act as clients to the registry server.
In principle, any of these components could be replaced by another application performing the same function: other parties could develop data creation tools or Web sites to interact with the IEMSR registry server.
Figure 4: The IEMSR Architecture The Registry Server The registry itself is what the JISC IE Technical Architecture describes as a 'shared infrastructural service': it provides interfaces to other applications, but it is largely 'invisible' to the human user of those applications.
The registry is an RDF application currently based on the Redland RDF Toolkit.
It provides a persistent data store (using a MySQL database) and a REST API for uploading data to the data store and for querying its content.
The query interface supports SPARQL [26] the RDF query language under development by the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group.
The IEMSR Web site The IEMSR Web site is a presentational service.
It provides a 'metadata portal' function: it allows a human user to browse and query the data that is made available by the IEMSR registry server it offers 'read-only' access to the registry server.
One of the challenges has been to present the descriptions of Dublin Core and LOM application profiles through a single interface in a way which emphasises the significant differences between different types of resource but does not present the user with a confusing number of navigation options while they are navigating the data.
The current design adopts a 'tabbed browsing' approach, where the user selects a tab as an entry point to a section of the dataset (e.g.
Dublin Core and Dublin Core application profiles or LOM and LOM application profiles), and then is presented with the navigation options appropriate to that particular section.
A further challenge is selecting an appropriate 'structural granularity' for the display of application profiles.
They are complex objects, and the internal data model of the registry represents a single application profile as a large set of related resources.
While this enables rich operations on the data and flexibility in its presentation, a compromise must be found between, on the one hand, presenting a rather overwhelming amount of data to the user in one display, and on the other, presenting a large number of hyperlinked pages in which it can become difficult to maintain a sense of the relationships between the parts and the whole.
At present, the functions provided by the IEMSR Web site are based solely on data made available by the IEMSR registry server.
However, user requirements indicate the possibility that it may be necessary to combine data made available by the IEMSR with data drawn from other sources.
For example, if it is required to present information about the services which have deployed metadata application profiles and formats, then it may be that that requires a combination of data made available by the IEMSR with data made available by the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) [27] and/or by other service registries.
In the future, it is quite likely that close integration with terminology services may be required.
The Data Creation Tool The IEMSR Data Creation tool supports the creation of RDF data sources for submission to the registry server.
It is written in Java and uses the Eclipse SWT and JFace libraries to provide a natural interface across different platforms.
Although it was noted above that a DC application profile and a LOM application profile are different types of resource, the models adopted within the IEMSR share the same notion that the application profile references or selects or 'uses' a set of existing terms, and provides information about the use of those terms in a particular context.
The Data Creation Tool reflects this by providing a similar interface for the creation and editing of descriptions of both a DC application profile and a LOM application profile.
That interface consists of a form divided into two areas: the right-hand panel provides a view of the 'current document' being edited (typically a description of an application profile), while the left hand panel provides a view of data made available by the registry server.
The users submit queries to the server and from the result set select items for 'use' in the application profile that they are constructing or editing.
Figure 5: Editing a Dublin Core Application Profile with the IEMSR Data Creation Tool The figure above shows the editing of a description of a Dublin Core application profile.
The registry view (left-hand) panel displays the results of a search on the keyword 'subject': terms matching the query are grouped by the name of the metadata vocabulary within which they are defined.
The current document (right-hand) panel displays the components of the application profile that the author is describing.
Selected terms from the query result set are added to the application profile using the 'Add' button in the lower centre of the form.
Once a reference to a term is added, the author can then provide additional information about the 'usage' of the term in the context of the DC application profile.
A similar mechanism is used for the description of a LOM application profile.
The most significant difference is that while in the DC case an open set of properties and classes is available for selection, in the LOM case, the user is presented with a tree-view of the set of LOM data elements prescribed by the LOM standard.
Figure 6: Editing a LOM Application Profile with the IEMSR Data Creation Tool The Data Creation Tool also enables the user to save their descriptions as a new data source, and also to submit that data source to the registry server.
Challenges for the Future Centralisation or Distribution of IEMSR Services The current implementation of the IEMSR might be described as 'semi-distributed'.
Where possible, the IEMSR makes use of existing data sources, published on the Web in standard formats by the owners of metadata vocabularies.
That data is used by many different applications, including other metadata schema registries, and responsibility for the security and availability of those data sources, and the maintenance of their content, lies with their owners/publishers, rather than with the providers of the IEMSR.
The data sources created using the IEMSR data creation tool described above may also be stored, published and accessed independently of the IEMSR.
The IEMSR serves as one point of access to that distributed data.
However, in terms of the services provided across this aggregated data, the IEMSR displays a more 'centralised' aspect.
The IEMSR registry server is a single point of access to those services provided on the aggregated data and also a single point of failure.
Future work may include investigation of the appropriate balance between the distribution and centralisation of registry services and the data on which those services are built, and the technologies required to support the choices that are made.
'Collection Policy' and Coverage The 'boundaries' of the JISC Information Environment, if such boundaries can be said to exist, are shifting and porous: the range of information resources used, and the range of metadata schemas and formats used to describe those resources, are constantly changing.
So the questions of what range of data should be exposed by the IEMSR, and how that data can be quality-assured, are important.
The question of persistence of access must also be considered: in a distributed or semi-distributed environment, data sources may become unavailable.
It may be necessary to implement a process in which the IEMSR maintains permanent copies of this distributed data in order to guard against that eventuality.
'Meta-models' and IEMSR Scalability The differences between the DC and LOM meta-models mean that the IEMSR has to manage two quite different sets of information.
The 'statement-oriented' DC meta-model is closely aligned with that of RDF, and makes use of RDF Schema (though it does introduce some record/document-oriented aspects which do not reflect RDF's 'open-world' assumptions).
However, the way LOM application profiles are described for IEMSR reflects the 'document-oriented' nature of the LOM conceptual model, and is specific to that model.
This does raise questions about the scalability of the current approach: extending the coverage of the registry to a new document-oriented metadata standard based on a different document structure, with different constraints on what consisted of an 'application profile', would require additional development effort.
Conclusions The IEMSR Project hopes that the deployment of a metadata schema registry will contribute to improving the disclosure and discovery of information about metadata terms and the functional aggregations in which those terms are deployed.
In highlighting some of the issues raised, the project also seeks to contribute to wider discussions on the use of metadata within the JISC Information Environment and beyond.
References JISC Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) Project http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/iemsr/ The Dublin Core Metadata Registry http://dublincore.org/dcregistry/ MEG Registry Project http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj/ CORES Project http://www.cores-eu.net/ DESIRE: Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education http://www.desire.org/ Heery, R. and Patel, M., "Application Profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas", Ariadne 25, September 2000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/ Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ DCMI Metadata Terms http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
Version 2.0 http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html RSLP Collection Description Schema http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/ IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/par1484-12-1.html Duval, E., Hodgins, W., Sutton, S., & Weibel, S.L., "Metadata Principles and Practicalities".
D-Lib, Vol 8 No 4 (April 2002) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/weibel/04weibel.html JISC Information Environment Architecture: General FAQ http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/faq/general/ Powell, A., Lyon, L., The DNER Technical Architecture: Scoping the Information Environment http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/dner-arch.html JISC Information Environment Architecture: Standards Framework.
Version 1.1 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/standards/ UK Learning Object Metadata Core http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/uklomcore/ Day, M. and Cliff, P., RDN Cataloguing Guidelines.
Version 1.1 http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/cat-guide/ Powell, A., RDN OAI rdn_dc XML schema(s) http://www.rdn.ac.uk/oai/rdn_dc/ Powell, A., RDN/LTSN LOM application profile.
Version 1.0 http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ap/ Powell, A. and Barker, P., "RDN/LTSN Partnerships: Learning resource discovery based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH", Ariadne 39, April 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/powell/ Powell, A., Nilsson, M., Naeve, A., & Johnston, P. DCMI Abstract Model, DCMI Recommendation http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/ Nilsson, M., Palmér, M. and Brase, J.
"The LOM RDF binding principles and implementation".
Paper to 3rd Annual Ariadne Conference, 20-21 November 2003, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (November 2003) http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/SemanticWeb/LOMRDFBinding-ARIADNE.pdf Friesen, N., Mason, J., and Ward, N. "Building Educational Metadata Application Profiles".
Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata for e-Communities 2002, pp 63-69 http://www.bncf.net/dc2002/program/ft/paper7.pdf Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://www.w3.org/RDF/ Brickley, D. & Guha, R. V., eds.
RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema.
W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004 http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/ Prud'hommeaux, E. & Seaborne, A., eds.
SPARQL Query Language for RDF.
W3C Working Draft 19 April 2005 http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-rdf-sparql-query-20050419/ JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) http://www.iesr.ac.uk/ Author Details Pete Johnston Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.johnston@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.johnston/ Return to top Article Title: "What Are Your Terms?"
Author: Pete Johnston Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/johnston/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 47: Keeping What We Know Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 47: Keeping What We Know Buzz framework archives metadata standardisation tagging browser repositories preservation oai-pmh soa interoperability standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne 47.
Perhaps I am not quite so cynical as I suppose when, despite being more than a little aware of the problem confonting us in respect of safeguarding electronic resources, I can nonetheless be shocked by the statistic Eileen Fenton provides us in her article on Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico where she reveals the percentage of resources, from impeccable sources, that were no longer retrievable from the original hyperlink a mere 27 months after their appearance.
While not all cases of preservation are as dramatic and 'white-knuckle' as some Ariadne has covered, where for example, we were within a gnat's whisker of losing the accumulated efforts of thousands of teachers, students and communities across the UK [1], the fact remains that there are already enormous challenges for preservation arising from the pre-digital decades of the last century.
By no means least is the danger of losing one of the last jewels in the crown in the shape of much of our broadcast cultural heritage from a period, to my mind, of exceptional innovation, experimentation and originality, particularly where the UK in general and the BBC in particular, are concerned [2].
It is therefore pleasing to be able to include a contribution from one of the partners in the FP6 PrestoSpace Project: Duncan Burbidge describes a new approach to digitising an archive both as a future-proof substitute and for Web delivery in Digitising an Archive: The Factory Approach.
Of course the preservation agenda is not confined to the rescue and migration of content on obsolete formats; it goes much wider.
Great concern exists over the safety of materials far more recently produced as Eileen's article indicates.
The tragi-comical image comes to mind of some cartoon character forging across a rope bridge over a chasm only partially aware of the bridge falling apart behind him and reluctant to look over his shoulder at the impending disaster.
Only time will tell whether this is a fanciful representation of the state of scholarly communication and the management of digital resources.
However, I have read somewhere that we could all be so much more clever if we just used what in fact is already known, and perhaps by next issue I will recall where I saw it.
It is in the nature of humans and scientists in particular to wish to forge ahead and be excited by the latest innovation.
There is also an understandable tendency to support financially that which most pushes the boundaries furthest.
The mundane truth is that few innovations appear in a vacuum and that many radical developments are built on the work of those who have gone before.
Emma Tonkin in her article Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-text Tagging addresses this theme and suggests that new ideas are often on their second circuit and are none the worse for that.
With the wider deployment of repositories, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is becoming a common method of supporting interoperability between repositories and services.
In Stargate: Exploring Static Repositories for Small Publishers, R. John Robertson introduces a project examining the potential benefits of OAI-PMH static repositories as a means of enabling small publishers to participate more fully in the information environment and indicates that they may have potential in the context of other, more dynamic, content.
I was very saddened by the circumstances under which it was impossible for Phil Bradley to join the band of invited authors last issue and offer us the benefit of his long experience in matters search engines.
We had asked him to perform the same sort of operation as the other contributors and give a 360-degree view of search engines during the lifetinme of this publication.
I am delighted that Phil has now written on Search Engines: Where We Were, Are Now, and Will Ever Be in which, among other things, he reminds us that the history is not such a long one.
Google is regarded as part of the furniture but as you will see from his section on emerging trends, the nature of search engines is beginning to alter right under our noses.
I am indebted to Debra Hiom who, as another long-time contributor to Ariadne, has not only gathered up the history of the Resource Discovery Network in Retrospective on the RDN but has also organised a two-part series for us whereby in a future issue Caroline Williams will attend to the future, in the shape of Intute, which will be launched in July 2006.
Impressed as I was by the programme of the inaugural code4lib conference, which appears to have been a great success, I was consequently delighted to receive an article from a contributor Aaron Krowne and his colleague Urvashi Gadi, entitled QMSearch: A Quality Metrics-aware Search Framework.
They describe for us a framework which improves searching in the context of scholarly digital libraries by taking a 'quality metrics-aware' approach whereby the digital library deployer or end-user can customise how results are presented, including aspects of both ranking and organisation in general, based upon standard metadata attributes and quality indicators derived from the general library information environment.
"I want my browser to recognise information in Web pages and offer me functionality to remix it with relevant information from other services.
I want to control which services are offered to me and how they are offered."
Theo van Veen writing on Serving Services in Web 2.0 provides this example of the requirements that modern service users express to illustrate the necessary ingredients in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that will benefit them by combining services according to their preferences.
Such an approach represents a concept which he summarises as a 'user-accessible machine-readable knowledge base of service descriptions in combination with a user agent' and which he hopes will lower the barriers for users wishing to build their own knowledge base, promote the integration of services and contribute to the standardisation of existing non-standard services.
In Metasearch: Building a Shared, Metadata-driven Knowledge Base System, Terry Reese remarks upon the scarcity of non-commercial implementations available within the range of metasearch tools currently on offer.
He muses on why this is the case when one reflects that, overall, libraries have been responsible for a thriving open source community over the past decade or so.
He writes about OSU's Metasearch, a metasearch tool which has been developed outside the vendor-based model and he addresses the questions relating to the knowledge base and knowledge base management that are part and parcel of the development of such a tool.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, and reviews on institutional repositories, social informatics, digital reference and winning strategies from library leaders.
In addition of course we provide our usual news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 47.
References Editorial: This Time the Cavalry Showed Up, July 2003, Ariadne Issue 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/editorial/ Wright, R. Preserving Europe's Memory, Cultivate Interactive, issue 7, July 2002 http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/presto/ Daniel Teruggi, Can We Save Our Audio-visual Heritage?, Ariadne Issue 39 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/teruggi/ Paul Gerhardt, Creative Archive, July 2005, Ariadne Issue 44 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/gerhardt/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 47: Keeping What We Know" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ /issue47/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DAEDALUS: Initial Experiences With EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DAEDALUS: Initial Experiences With EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow Buzz software java database bsd xml apache stylesheet archives metadata repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh multimedia linux perl solaris mysql tomcat dspace licence url research Citation BibTex RIS William Nixon provides an overview of the DAEDALUS initial experience with the GNU EPrints and DSpace software and the decision to employ both.
DAEDALUS [1] is a three-year JISC-funded project under the FAIR Programme [2] which will build a network of open access digital collections at the University of Glasgow.
These collections will enable us to unlock access to a wide range of our institutional scholarly output.
This output includes not only published and peer-reviewed papers but also administrative documents, research finding aids, pre-prints and theses.
DAEDALUS is also a member of the CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) SHERPA Project [3].
The project began in July 2002 and this article provides an overview of our initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace.
It is based on a presentation given at the Digital Preservation Coalition forum meeting in June 2003 [4] and is archived in our DSpace service.
Why EPrints and DSpace?
The most frequently asked questions which the DAEDALUS team receive (after ‘ Why DAEDALUS?‘ [5] and ‘How much content do you have?)
are ‘Why are you using both EPrints and DSpace?‘ and ‘Why not one or the other?‘.
The answers to the latter questions lie in the origins of the DAEDALUS Project.
DAEDALUS evolved from our initial experiences with EPrints and the creation of a pilot institutional service.
This pilot was set up to accept a wide range of content from preprints, published papers and theses and to be an OAI (Open Archives Initiative)-compliant service (which was the case).
Once this pilot service was up and running, using EPrints 1.x, it became very apparent that there were different criteria which should be applied to the different types content which we accepted.
In our initial implementation it was also not easy to identify readily the type of content which was on display.
EPrints requires details such as publication status and document type but these were not displayed in our first release.
To remedy this we made some changes to the record level description for items so that they would display status and type.
These fields are all displayed in GNU EPrints 2.x and it is apparent what the status and type of an item is.
The proposal for DAEDALUS was to take this one step further and to build a range of distinct services which would be differentiated by content type so that peer-reviewed content for instance would not be interfiled with technical reports or theses.
The collections were identified as: Published and peer-reviewed papers Grey literature including technical reports and working papers Theses Administrative documents Research finding aids During the lifetime of the project these individual collections will be underpinned by a local OAI service search to enable users to cross-search our range of collections.
Work has not yet begun on that service.
This decision then provided us with the opportunity to use different pieces of software such as GNU EPrints which we had experience with, and the Virginia Tech software for e-theses.
At the time of writing the bid for the FAIR Programme, (March 2002), DSpace was not publicly available and it was our intention to use the GNU EPrints software for both published and peer-reviewed material as well as the pre-prints / grey literature material.
One of the aims of DAEDALUS is to gain experience in the installation and rollout of different pieces of software and we will publish a full comparison of the software on the project Web site.
Work has already been undertaken by the ‘Theses Alive!‘ Project to look at DSpace and the ETD-db software [6].
The GNU EPrints software has been used for our published and peer-reviewed papers service.
The role of this service has been expanded beyond our initial proposal also to include bibliographic records (without full text) as a means of seeding the service with publication details.
This approach has already been taken by Lund University in Sweden [7] using EPrints.
The decision to swap DSpace into the mix for the pre-prints and grey literature service was made for a variety of reasons.
We felt that we were in a position (with both the hardware and technical support) to run DSpace in addition to the ETD-db and GNU EPrints software.
The DSpace model of Communities and Collections and the institutional origins of the software provided administrative features sufficiently different from GNU EPrints to make it an interesting proposition for departmental content.
The future possibility of devolving the administration of Communities to individual departments was another key area which we are interested to explore.
We are also particularly interested in the digital preservation components of DSpace.
The focus for DAEDALUS is on text-based research material rather than datasets, images and other types of digital content much of which drove the development of DSpace at MIT.
About EPrints GNU EPrints 2.x ‘is free software which creates online archives.
The default configuration creates a research papers archive‘ [8].
With its origins in the Scholarly Communication movement, EPrints default configuration is geared to research papers but it can be adapted for other purposes and content.
It was developed in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group at the Electronics and Computer Science Department of the University of Southampton.
There are currently some 106 EPrints listed on the GNU EPrints Web site.
Anecdotal evidence would indicate that there are many more in development or use.
Within the FAIR Programme in the UK the TARDis Project [9] is developing an EPrints Archive at the University of Southampton and feeding comments back to EPrints software development, much of which will be included in v.2.3.
GNU EPrints is freely distributable and subject to the GNU General Public License [10].
Further information about GNU EPrints as well as the software, documentation and a full list of features as well as documentation is available from its Web site [8].
A list of (known) installed sites is also available.
Figure 1: software.eprints.org About DSpace DSpace is ‘a digital repository designed to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output of a university‘s research faculty in digital formats.‘ [11] Like EPrints, it is an open-source system and is freely available for anyone to download and run at any type of institution, organisation, or company (or even just an individual).
DSpace was jointly developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard.
Users of DSpace are also allowed to modify DSpace to meet an organisation‘s specific needs.
The BSD distribution license describes the specific terms of use [12].
Within the UK, other projects such as DSpace@Cambridge [13] are using DSpace to build digital repositories.
Further information about DSpace is available from the DSpace Federation Web site [14].
This has been recently relaunched and contains a wealth of information about DSpace as well as an FAQ section, implementation guidelines and links to software itself together with the DSpace mailing lists.
Figure 2: DSpace.org DSpace, as a product emerged from an institutional imperative to manage and preserve digital content and that imperative has shaped its development and the model of ”Communities and Collections” which it has adopted.
Communities can be mapped to administrative units of an organisation and at Glasgow, like MIT, we have created Communities which map to our ”early adopter”departments.
Collections for different types of content, research groups, etc.
can then be created within communities.
Figure 3: DSpace Communities at Glasgow Our initial experiences with DSpace were that the current implementation of Communities and Collections was too flat.
This issue is being addressed and the addition of sub-communities is on the shortlist of enhancements for the 1.2 release [15].
This enhancement will enable us to nest academic departments within faculties in a more hierarchical fashion, similar to the Browse by Departments option we provide in EPrints.
Implementation at Glasgow At Glasgow both GNU EPrints and DSpace are running on the same server, namely a Sun Fire server with the Solaris Operating System, 4 GBytes of memory and 2 x 36 GBytes Disks.
The specifications of this server are in excess of what both EPrints and DSpace would recommend for a minimal installation of the software but we felt that it was important to ”future proof” the server for the lifetime of the project and beyond.
The advice from both EPrints and DSpace is to start small.
They can both be installed on a desktop specification PC running a flavour of Linux and this is a useful starting point to gain experience and also to run a pilot service.
Installation of GNU EPrints EPrints was the first package installed on the DAEDALUS server since we had previous experience with the original version of the software.
It took about a week and a half to do the initial installation of the software and to get an ‘out of the box‘ service up and running.
We then spent several additional weeks configuring and customising the service.
These configurations ranged from the ‘look and feel‘ of the service to the addition of new fields and format types.
Although EPrints is now on version 2.x, the software was substantially rewritten from version 1.x.
It was not until version 2.x that it became GNU EPrints — so much so that EPrints recommended a clean and new installation of the software rather than an upgrade.
It is also worth noting that the installation routines in EPrints 2.x were very much improved over version 1.x — as was our experience of installing it.
Figure 4: Glasgow EPrints Service Installation of DSpace The installation of DSpace was a more complicated affair.
We had no previous experience with it until the publicly released version 1.0 in November 2002.
Work began on the installation of DSpace in February 2003.
In all, it took us some 3 months (off and on) to install and configure the software fully other work was ongoing around this process.
Much of the time devoted to installation can be attributed to the version of Tomcat which was already installed.
Tomcat is the servlet engine which handles requests for Java servlets which are passed to it by Apache.
We assumed DSpace would work with this installation, but it could not be forced to work with it and so we had to go back and re-install Tomcat from source.
DSpace has also been installed on Solaris rather than Linux and many of the problems we encountered were associated with the specific versions of packages which needed to be installed to make DSpace run.
This may also have implications for DSpace upgrades, particularly if there is other software running on the server which also requires specific versions.
Ultimately the software was further upgraded to version 1.1 in May 2003 with little difficulty.
At the next release of DSpace we consider missing out Apache and just using Tomcat standalone or mod_jk which other institutions have examined.
Other sites such as the University of Tennessee have provided their experiences on installing DSpace on Solaris on their Web site ‘DSpace for Dummies‘ [16].
Like EPrints, DSpace also has a technical list, DSpace-tech [17] at SourceForge which is very active and an invaluable resource for installing and configuring DSpace.
Figure 5: Glasgow DSpace Service Skills Sets and Platforms EPrints and DSpace use different backend programming languages, Perl for EPrints and Java for DSpace.
Staff with experience in Java or Perl, depending on the choice of software is highly recommended.
GNU EPrints DSpace Operating System Unix / Linux Unix/Linux Backend programming language Perl Java Database Management System MySQL PostGreSQL Configuration The configuration of the services can range from the ‘look and feel‘ to the implementation of additional functionality.
Both products can be used ‘out of the box‘ as they are installed.
It is very likely, however that sites will want to do some elements of customisation even at the most basic level of the ‘look and feel‘.
Configuring GNU EPrints To date the most extensive configuration work we have done has been with the GNU EPrints software.
This has ranged from implementing a Glasgow ‘look and feel‘ to the creation of additional fields and document types.
The range of configuration work which we have done with EPrints has been as a result of our familiarity with the software and the strength of our skills base in Perl.
These additional fields have included one to enable us to provide a link out to DSpace if a preprint is available.
Figure 6: EPrints Preprint available By default EPrints deals with the existence of preprint (and postprint) versions very elegantly and provides both backward and forward links to different versions automatically.
Our decision to split the location of the preprint from the final version has meant that we could not take advantage of this excellent feature.
With GNU EPrints the configuration changes are done at the code level and changes must be made in various xml files in the /cfg directory, (ArchiveRenderConfig.pm; ArchiveConfig.pm and so on).
The EPrints documentation provides a helpful range of How To guides for adding additional fields as well as other refinements [18].
Configuring DSpace DSpace like EPrints can also be significantly modified and it provides a breadth of functionality.
This ranges from the submission process through to the administration of the service.
To date we have not made any substantial code changes to our installation.
We have changed the ‘look and feel‘ of our DSpace implementation with a local stylesheet and imposed our own colour scheme.
We have also added our own Glasgow header and footer.
The service is currently branded ‘The Glasgow DSpace Service‘ but beyond that we have not altered the basic functionality of the service.
It is possible, indeed encouraged by DSpace that sites work with the code.
The University of Edinburgh‘s ‘Theses Alive!‘ Project has developed an add-on module for theses for DSpace [19].
At the Administrator level it is possible to make various changes to the Community and Collection home pages in DSpace.
These can be customised with an image as well as descriptive text.
There is also a field for adding copyright information about a Community or Collection.
A list of ‘Recent Submissions’ are displayed in the sidebar.
Figure 7: DSpace Community Department of Slavonic Studies There is also a Template feature which can pre-populate fields with content which you may wish to see added to each item in a collection.
In the DAEDALUS collection we added text in the Sponsor field to acknowledge that the project has been funded under the JISC FAIR Programme.
This content is now automatically added to each item which we deposit in this collection.
It can also be removed at the point of submission if the content of a field is inappropriate.
Submission Both EPrints and DSpace are designed for self-archiving and the deposit of content by individual authors (or submitters); however within the FAIR projects alternative submission processes are being investigated.
Part of the TARDis Project is to offer an assisted deposit gateway to authors and a new interface has been configured for this.
Under the auspices of DAEDALUS we are currently providing a mediated submission service rather than actively encouraging our users to deposit their own content — a self-perpetuating, self-archiving model is one to which we would want to move to in the longer term.
DAEDALUS content can only be submitted to the service by registered users and it is necessary to login to each service to deposit content.
Submission of GNU EPrints In EPrints, after the user has logged in, they must select the content type first; this will determine the range of fields to be completed some of which are mandatory from a drop down menu.
A typical set of options is shown below.
In the Glasgow EPrints Service, we have configured the service to display only journal article as an option.
Figure 8: Drop-down list of content for EPrints The range of content types can be added and deleted in the metadatatypes.xml file in the \cfg directory.
It is then necessary to enter the bibliographic data about your item.
Fields marked with a * in this section are mandatory.
An additional field which we added here, with a radio button option was to confirm if the full text of content would also be deposited.
Figure 9: EPrints Full Text Provided After completing the bibliographic details, it is necessary to upload the files into EPrints.
This is done by selecting the format and indicating the number of files.
We have added a range of file formats such as XML Docbook to our service.
EPrints will then display what the record looks like and the content for the various metadata fields.
The final step of the process is the click-thru‘ agreement: Figure 10: EPrints Click Thru Agreement Content submitted into EPrints automatically goes into the Submission Buffer, even if you are an Administrator.
Once in this buffer, it can be viewed, edited, accepted or rejected.
When the content is accepted, it becomes available through the search interface.
It is not displayed in the Browse listings until the generate_views routine is run.
This routine should be a scheduled cron job in the EPrints service and be set to run at least daily.
Submission of DSpace With DSpace the submission process is very similar; but the initial stages are centred on the collection into which the content will be deposited, rather than the type of content.
After logging into My DSpace, the user can click on Start a New Submission and then select the Collection to which the item is to be added from a drop down list.
The full list of Collections are displayed in alphabetical order.
We found it necessary to give all of our collections different names to ensure that there was no confusion as to which Community it belonged to.
It is also possible to start from the Collection and to use the ‘Submit to this collection’ button.
Figure 11: Submission to a DSpace Collection Once a Collection has been selected the user is presented with some initial choices about the item: Figure 12: DSpace item choices The DSpace submission process has a ‘sausage bar‘ progress indicator to indicate where you are in the seven step submission process.
The section you are in, in the case below for verifying submission, is highlighted in red.
Figure 13: DSpace deposit bar The Describe sections are similar to the Bibliographic Details entry page in EPrints.
There are only three mandatory fields in the default DSpace: title, date and language.
Like EPrints, you can also save the work in progress.
It is also possible to move back to earlier submission stages by clicking on a previously completed stage in the progress bar.
At the Upload stage, rather than selecting a file type and then uploading it, in the way in which EPrints does, DSpace compares the file type to its bitstream registry and then assigns a file type to it.
Additional file types can be added to this registry through the Administration section of DSpace.
It is also possible to provide some descriptive text about the file and this is particularly useful for items with multiple files.
Figure 14: DSpace items The final stage of the DSpace submission process is the click-thru licence.
DSpace comes with an example MIT licence for informational purposes — this will need to be customised.
A copy of the licence is held with the record and can be viewed by the Administrator.
License granted by William Nixon (w.nixon@lib.gla.ac.uk) on 2003-06-18T08:56:16Z (GMT) The workflow rules which are in place for the Collection will determine if the item is to be made immediately available or if it will go into the ‘Pool‘ the DSpace equivalent of the EPrints Submission Buffer.
My Dspace and (My)EPrints Both EPrints and DSpace have a ‘MyRepository‘ feature.
This provides a Web interface for registered users to submit content, view items which they have deposited and return to any content which is already in progress.
GNU EPrints Within EPrints there is a User Area Homepage where users can return to any documents they are currently submitting, can view submissions they have already made, or any which are pending in the submission buffer.
Figure 15: EPrints User Area My DSpace In DSpace, users who have a role in the workflow of a collection can also see any tasks which are in the ‘Pool‘ for them to take.
They are also notified by e-mail when a new task has been assigned to them.
Figure 16: My DSpace Administration The administration of the services is handled through a Web interface.
This enables the Administrator to manage the registered users (Users or E-People), approve/delete items and to create additional communities or subject headings.
Administration of GNU EPrints In EPrints, it is possible to manage user details as well as the content of the service.
Content may be edited directly or moved into the submission buffer and out of the main archive before any work can be done on it.
There is also a system status option for the Administrator account.
This lists the number of items in the service, the current release and the amount of space currently in use.
It is also possible in version 2.x of EPrints to add or delete entries from the subject tree through the web interface.
Figure 17: EPrints Subject Editor Administration of DSpace DSpace has a well developed Web user interface for the administration of the service and provides access to the range of areas which an administrator may want to update.
The left-hand column indicates the range of areas which may be administered.
Figure 18: DSpace Administration The Communities and Collections model in DSpace means that it is possible to be very granular with the access to the content of collections.
Within EPrints access control can be applied to individual items.
Different workflows can also be put in place as well as different policies for access to individual collections.
These are managed though the use of Groups and Policies to control access to Collections and the items which they contain.
The Adminster Authorization Policies tool provides a powerful range of options for managing access to DSpace content.
Figure 19: DSpace Policies Tool DSpace provides system status information via e-mail.
These are comprehensive reports providing similar as well as detailed information about user logins, logs of searches in the service and the number of times items have been viewed.
Further experiences There remains a range of work to be done at Glasgow with EPrints and DSpace but the services are now in place and no longer ‘vapourware‘.
GNU EPrints and DSpace are richly featured products which are still in the early days of their development.
They are both in ongoing development by their own developers as well as by active communities of users.
Ongoing areas which we will continue to investigate include but are not limited to: Import/Export of bibliographic details and content Scalability of content OAI-PMH implementation Implementation of a handle server to manage persistent urls Conclusion This article set out to provide a flavour of two of the software options available for building institutional repositories.
They have much in common and the choice of which, or both, or neither [20], will hinge on a range of local factors.
It is not a question of which software is better but rather which is appropriate for the institutional services which you are building, their purpose and the content.
Will it be to free research papers or is it to manage and preserve digital content, or both?
The choice of software is only one component in a larger collection of issues for the implementation of an institutional repositories service.
There is a range of policy decisions which must be made and from that will flow the decisions on assets, advocacy, access and audience.
At the University of Glasgow we see GNU EPrints and DSpace as complementary products which have enabled us to take a twin-track approach to our advocacy work in gathering different institutional assets which present different challenges.
Ultimately it is the cultural change and advocacy work which will ensure that these services have content and do not languish empty and unfulfilled.
Experience has shown us that it is not enough to merely build such services, the real challenge is to gather the content but that is another article.
Acknowledgements My thanks to my DAEDALUS colleagues, in particular Stephen Gallacher, Lesley Drysdale and Morag Mackie whose work, comments and assistance have been invaluable.
(Editor’s note: Readers may also be interested to read DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations by Richard Jones in issue 38).
References DAEDALUS Project http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/index.html The JISC FAIR Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair The SHERPA Project http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Digital Preservation Coalition Forum, 24 June 2003. http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/24603dpcforum.html Nixon, William J, “DAEDALUS: Freeing Scholarly Communication at the University of Glasgow”, Ariadne 34, December 2002/January 2003 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/nixon/ Jones, Richard, ‘DSpace and ETD-db Comparative Evaluation‘, http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/arch_reports.shtml LU:Research http://lu-research.lub.lu.se/ EPrints.org http://software.eprints.org/ TARDis Project http://tardis.eprints.org/ EPrints GNU License http://software.eprints.org/gnu.php DSpace FAQ: What is DSpace?
http://dspace.org/faqs/dspace.html#what BSD License http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php DSpace@Cambridge http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dspace/ DSpace Federation Web site http://dspace.org/ Dspace-general list: Preview of next release of DSpace http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/dspace-general/2003-September/000006.html ‘DSpace for Dummies‘ http://sunsite.utk.edu/diglib/dspace/ DSpace Tech List http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech EPrints 2.2 Documentation How-To Guides http://software.eprints.org/docs/php/howto.php Theses Alive!
Project, DSpace Add-on for Theses http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/dsp_home.shtml There is other software such as CDSware: http://cdsware.cern.ch/ Author Details William J Nixon William is the Deputy Head of IT Services, Glasgow University Library and Administrator of the Glasgow ePrints Service.
He is also the Project Manager: Service Development for DAEDALUS (University of Glasgow) Email: w.j.nixon@lib.gla.ac.uk Web site: http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus Return to top Article Title: “DAEDALUS: Initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow” Author: William Nixon Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/nixon/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OSS Inaugural Conference: Open Source Deployment and Development Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OSS Inaugural Conference: Open Source Deployment and Development Buzz data software java framework xml portal browser video windows linux vle licence uportal interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Sebastian Rahtz and Randy Metcalfe give an overview of the first conference of the Open Source Advisory Service.
OSS Watch [1] is a pilot advisory service set up by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to provide UK higher and further education with neutral and authoritative guidance about free and open source software and related standards.
Although it is rather small, (a staffing of 1.25 full-time equivalent (FTE)), this new service has stakeholders ranging from IT directors and managers developing institutional IT strategies that acknowledge the role that open source software does (and will continue to) play; to IT staff deploying software across universities and colleges; and to software developers seeking advice on how to release their work as open source.
It's a daunting task.
OSS Watch's initial focus has been to conduct a scoping study of the current situation in UK HE and FE in order to inform its plans for the coming years.
The report from this study was released at a conference held in Oxford on 11 December 2003.
Others then set the scene for open source in UK HE and FE.
If nothing else, the conference revealed that one of OSS Watch's principal contributions may lie in facilitating opportunities to share best practice.
About 150 people attended from right across the spectrum of educational institutions, public bodies, software companies, and open source advocacies, and there was lively discussion at all times.
Programme Plenary Sessions The day began and ended with plenary sessions and between these were two parallel workshops with one strand following the deployment theme and the other the development theme.
After a warm welcome from Reg Carr, Chair of the JISC Committee for the Information Environment (JCIE), the first plenary session, Open source in academia where are we?, started with a presentation from OSS Watch manager Sebastian Rahtz and researcher David Tannenbaum.
They spoke on the results of the scoping study on open source deployment and development in UK HE/FE which had been conducted in autumn 2003.
The full report from this scoping study [2] is available on the OSS Watch Web site.
Key findings included: 38% of HE and only 9% of FE respondents reported that their institutions have an IT strategy which explicitly considers OSS FE institutions lag behind HE institutions in their number of staff with the skills to deploy OSS HE institutions are much further advanced in the process of examining the potential of OSS solutions for their institutions Reasons for choosing OSS solutions in both HE and FE are principally financial The majority of institutions which develop software in-house (59%) have never considered the issue of licensing, and do not have an institutional licensing policy No great surprises, probably, but it is important to gather more and more data of this kind to back up what are often simply guesses about the state of open source in the UK education sector.
After presentation of the study, Sebastian Rahtz outlined a programme of events for OSS Watch in 2004 to meet the recommendations.
The second presentation in the initial plenary session was from Jim Farmer, project administrator for JA-SIG's uPortal Project [3].
uPortal is a portal framework developed by a consortium of universities in the USA with funding from the Mellon Foundation; it is now being deployed at a number of sites in the UK.
Jim brought out some important points about the funding model and how it is now supported by both open source academic programmers and also commercial partners.
It was a salutary reminder of the range of open source projects, which nowadays go far beyond the simplistic model of lone enthusiasts working at night.
The plenary session concluded with a general discussion which warmed up nicely as people reflected on the history and meaning of open source.
Two Strands: Deployment and development The conference then broke into its two strands.
In the deployment strand, Making the institutional case, we saw presentations from Andrew Findlay of Skills 1st Ltd [4] and Brian Kelly of Web Focus [5], UKOLN.
Andrew concentrated on the Secure Open Desktop Architecture (SODA) [6] being developed by Netproject [7].
With a scale from 10 to 100,000 desktops, SODA demonstrates the potential for open source desktop deployment on an institutional level.
Brian Kelly's presentation, 'Open Source?
No, Open Standards!
', reminded participants that the most important issue for deployment was interoperability, and for that there really is no substitute for open standards.
It does not follow that just because software is open source that it will conform to open standards.
So when selecting software we need evaluation criteria to spot the appropriate solutions and avoid the inappropriate ones.
Brian was the first speaker to raise the spectre of software patents and gave some salutary lessons about how they may work both for and against us.
In the development workshop in another lecture theatre, Jon Maber of the Bodington Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Project [8] was speaking on 'How do you make an open source project?'
Jon was the sole presenter in this workshop in the absence of Ben Lund, Nature Publishing Group, due to illness.
Jon was very candid about the mistakes they had made and about the occasionally accidental nature of their success; but he also made it clear that a successful project needed a lot of hard work and commitment.
It provided a useful lesson in the nuts and bolts of building up a piece of software to the stage where it could be used by other sites.
Another set of parallel workshops followed on after lunch.
The deployment strand saw Paul Browning, Information Strategy Co-ordinator at the University of Bristol, report on some of his tales from the front line especially regarding the deployment of Zope [9] and, more recently, uPortal.
Paul's presentation focused on some of the pitfalls encountered along the way and revealed another key aspect of OSS Watch's role to provide an opportunity for colleges and universities to share experiences in open source deployment, whether they are successes or disappointments.
One important point made by Paul was that an institution must make its own hard decisions about whether it can support a development process at all, regardless of open source and open standards.
Paul was followed by Henrik Omma, the founder of TheOpenCD Project [10].
TheOpenCD is a collection of quality open source software that runs on the Windows operating system a perfect demonstration that open source doesn't necessarily mean anti-Windows.
The project's work is to find stable software and package it with a good installer.
The process of selection was interesting, in that they chose only one of each type of program ('best of breed'), and consciously limited themselves to mainstream programs, (Web browser, office suite, picture editor, etc).
This looked like a healthy contrast to the glut of programs provided in Linux distributions, which not only provide the kitchen sink, but 5 alternatives to it as well.
In the development stream participants were focusing on Getting the right licence, with presentations from Susan Foster, Eversheds LLP and Andrew Charlesworth, Senior Research Fellow in IT and Law, and Director of the Centre for IT and Law (CITL) at the University of Bristol.
Andrew's presentation concentrated on working through the variety of licences available, while Susan's focused on the broader institutional issues around intellectual property (IP).
Questions from the audience indicated that the level of knowledge in this area is very basic and that practical guidance in future from OSS Watch would be welcome.
The final plenary session, entitled Does open source matter?, brought together presenters from two corporate giants.
Jeremy Wray, Business Development Executive for Public Sector in IBM UK, concentrated on the pragmatic aspects of open source.
He urged delegates to approach open source with an open mind rather than religious fervour, and to stay focused on open standards when asking whether any software solution is fit for purpose.
Jeremy wasn't coy about IBM's involvement with open source.
It's a business decision, and if they didn't think they could make money out of providing support for open source solutions they wouldn't be involved.
He perhaps upset part of the audience by repeatedly saying that nothing was really free, ('if it looks too good to be true, it probably is'), which conflicted with the view of some open source work as comparable to charity in its selflessness.
Nick McGrath, Head of Platform Strategy, Microsoft Ltd, was the other presenter in this session.
Although the promotional video with which he began may have been misjudged for this audience, the remainder of his presentation focused on Microsoft as a comprehensive solution to institutional IT needs.
It may not have gone down well with the open source advocates in the audience, but inevitably this type of solution fits many local situations.
It would be disingenuous to consider open source software without reminding ourselves of the real-world situation out there for IT decision-makers.
Despite robust questioning, both the IBM and Microsoft representatives stood firm on the point that whatever decision you take, somebody pays.
We seemed to end up with a choice of corporate strategies: IBM work around open source by sweeping up lots of business behind it, and stress the role of open source as essentially a software development methodology; Microsoft prefer to offer a total alternative, and meet the free software movement head on.
Whatever else may happen, one thing is sure free and open source is centre stage at the moment, and everyone is taking it rather seriously.
After the plenary, a good many people stayed on for a reception, noted for its 'free beer' and heated debates on the quality of the Microsoft TV commercial.
Conclusions When it was all over, we were confident that we had tackled a good broad range of issues during the day.
Inevitably, not everyone had found what they wanted, or had explored their favourite subject far enough; but initial feedback was that the majority of delegates went away with a plan software to look at, Web sites to visit, projects to evaluate, contacts to follow up etc.
What more could one ask?
OSS Watch itself has plans for 2004, to follow on from the conference.
It is going to: hold a workshop in the spring about licensing and IPR run a conference in the summer about support and training run an autumn workshop on interoperability and migration start a student-level experiment in desktop deployment with TheOpenCD Project work with Regional Support Centres to provide hands-on exposure to open source software for FE colleges.
It looks like being a busy, but interesting, year ahead.
References OSS Watch http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ OSS Watch Scoping Study http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/studies/scoping/ The Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) http://www.ja-sig.org/ Skills 1st http://www.skills-1st.co.uk/ UK Web Focus http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/ The Secure Open Desktop Architecture (SODA) http://www.netproject.com/opendesktop.html netproject http://www.netproject.com/ Project Bodington on SourceForge.net http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodington/ Zope http://www.zope.org/ TheOpenCD Project http://www.theopencd.org/ Author Details Sebastian Rahtz is Information Manager at Oxford University Computing Services, and is also director of the OSS Watch service.
He is also on the Board of Directors and Technical Council of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, and author of various open source packages in the XML and TeX worlds.
Email: info@oss-watch.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ Randy Metcalfe is Communications Manager for both OSS Watch and Humbul, the Humanities hub of the Resource Discovery Network.
Email: info@oss-watch.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "OSS Watch Inaugural Conference: Open Source Deployment and Development" Author: Author's name Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/oss-watch-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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TASI Offers Workshops over Summer and Autumn Months The JISC-funded Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) is offering a number of workshops in the coming months, of which two below are given as examples.
Building a departmental resource 11 August 2005 This workshop aims to demonstrate the steps for creating, maintaining and delivering an image collection.
Through a range of hands-on activities, attendees will investigate suitable Image Management Systems (IMS), be introduced to Metadata, and consider its practical application.
It is suitable for anyone who wishes to construct and publish simple image collections, including academics, technicians and library staff, who are developing a departmental resource.
Create and animate vector graphics using Flash 16 September 2005 This workshop will introduce the underlying theory and provide a practical understanding of the use and properties of vector graphics within the Flash environment.
It is suitable for non-technical professionals, who wish to create animated graphics for use on the Web, or in presentations.
This workshop requires no prior knowledge of using Flash, though some understanding of digital imaging would be an advantage.
Full details of each workshop and an online Booking Form can be found at: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html Back to headlines OpenURL and Metasearch: New Standards, Current Innovations, and Future Directions A NISO educational workshop: Venue: Washington DC, USA Dates: 19-21 September 2005 This workshop represents an opportunity to get the latest information on OpenURL and Metasearch, two standards supporting technologies that continue to transform the information landscape.
The three-day programme includes a training day for technical staff from all types of content providers (publishers, vendors, and libraries).
Training will cover the basics of implementation, available tools, and requirements for standards conformance.
In this highly networked world, the key to success is "learning to play well with others" the training day intends to tell you how.
In addition: The programme includes opportunities for dialogue with experts and informal networking during breaks, meals, and a special conference reception.
Sponsoring vendors will highlight the features of their products in Vendor Showcases and in Exhibits.
The workshops will be held at the spacious state-of-the-art conference facility at the Academy for Educational Development near DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. See the NISO Web site for details on the agenda, speakers, exhibitors etc, and to register: http://www.niso.org/ Back to headlines Canadian Metadata Forum 2005: Metadata: A Reality Check Library and Archives Canada is pleased to announce the Canadian Metadata Forum 2005 a two day event designed for key decision-makers and leaders in the field of information resource management.
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/metaforum/index-e.html Date: 27-28 September, 2005 Venue: 395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Canada.
The Canadian Metadata Forum 2005 will build on the foundation of the first forum held in September 2003 to address the challenges of metadata implementation, namely: how to realise the investment in metadata and how to influence metadata policy where it matters most: organisations and search engines.
Metadata continues to gain recognition as the tool to resource discovery and information management, not only for Web information products but for information in all formats.
However, basic questions remain unanswered: Is metadata living up to expectations?
Are users finding more of what they want in metadata-enabled searches?
How can we leverage standards and technology convergences to improve metadata performance?
What might the alternatives to metadata be?
Experts from the Canadian metadata community, both government (federal and provincial) and non-government, including libraries, archives, museums, educational and research institutions, academia, multimedia producers and other experts will gather in Ottawa to discuss these important questions.
You are invited to be part of this groundbreaking discussion.
The Canadian Metadata Forum 2005 is pleased to offer sponsorship and exhibiting opportunities.
By participating in the Forum you allow it to be recognised as a strong supporter of the metadata community.
Back to headlines Digital Resources for the Humanities Conference (DRH 2005) 4-7 September 2005 Lancaster University, UK http://www.ahds.ac.uk/drh2005/ REGISTRATION for DRH 2005 is now open: see http://www.ahds.ac.uk/drh2005/registration.php Registration will remain open until Friday 12 August 2005.
Programme The keynote speakers are: Lou Burnard (Oxford University Computing Services, UK) Neil Silberman (Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation, Belgium) A full list of papers accepted for the conference is available http://www.ahds.ac.uk/drh2005/papers.php?first_letter=all At this, the tenth DRH conference, the focus will be on critical evaluation of the use of digital resources in the arts and humanities.
What has the impact really been?
What kinds of methodologies are being used?
What are the assumptions that underlie this work?
How do we know that the work that we accomplish is truly new and innovative?
How does technology change the way in which people in this area work?
The Conference will also address some of the key emerging themes and strategic issues that engagement with ICT is bringing to scholarly research in the arts and humanities, with a particular focus on advanced research methods: What sort of research does ICT in the arts and humanities enable researchers to do that could not be done before at all?
Does this enable 'old' research to be done in a significantly new way?
In what ways does the technology serve the scholarship?
Similarly, what are the key aspects of virtual research environments ("cyberinfrastructure") which can facilitate collaborative research?
Please address any queries about the conference to drhconf@lancaster.ac.uk Back to headlines Netskills Workshops in September 2005 Netskills will be running the following workshops at North Herts College, Letchworth Garden City: 1.
Mobile Learning: Education on Demand Tuesday 6 September 2005 Mobile Learning: the next stage of e-Learning, or a whole new learning experience?
Learning without barriers, or the latest fad?
This workshop explores the principles and practice of m-Learning.
It is for anyone who is interested in the application of mobile technologies in education, or those who simply wish to know more about the emerging technologies and potential uses.
2.
Detecting and Deterring Plagiarism Wednesday 7 September 2005 This is a practical workshop aimed at staff in Further and Higher Education institutions who wish to find out more about the impact of the Web on plagiarism, and how to deal with it.
As well as gaining a thorough understanding of issues concerned with plagiarism, participants will also explore essay banks, online plagiarism detection services, and, through discussions and scenarios, consider different approaches to deterring plagiarism.
N.B.
:This is one of the last opportunities to take advantage of the JISC subsidy available for this workshop.
Full details of these workshops, together with booking forms are available from our events Web site: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/workshops/forthcoming.html Back to headlines 1st International Digital Curation Conference Venue: Hilton Bath City, Bath, UK Dates 29-30 September 2005 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/dcc-2005/ The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is jointly funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) on behalf of the UK Research Councils.
The DCC provides a focus on research into digital curation expertise and best practice for the storage, management and preservation of digital information to enable its use and reuse over time.
The programme, which includes Keynote Speakers, will provide an overview of the work of the DCC and an opportunity via a "Symposium" to discuss the concepts and principles of Digital Curation.
There will also be a series of parallel sessions, which will look in more detail at specific topics including Socio-Legal Issues, Format Registries, Storage Media, Training, Staff Development and Certification.
Who should attend The Conference will be of interest to individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains that are engaged in the creation, use and management of digital data from researchers and curators through to policy makers and funders.
Confirmed Speakers The Conference will be chaired by Chris Rusbridge, the Director of the DCC, with contributions from the DCC Directorate as follows: Professor Peter Buneman DCC Research Director Dr David Giaretta DCC Associate Director Development Dr Liz Lyon DCC Associate Director Outreach & Community Support Professor Seamus Ross DCC Associate Director Services Opening address: Graham Cameron, Associate Director, European Bioinformatics Institute Closing address: Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Further details can be found on the Draft Programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/dcc-2005/programme/ For further information regarding the conference please contact: events@ukoln.ac.uk Back to headlines Exploring Common Issues with New Contacts: MLA Conference Bursaries 2005 The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is again offering to sponsor places at three major sector conferences taking place in 2005.
The £10,000 sponsorship is divided equally between the three domains with the Society of Archivists, CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and Museums Association each managing the nomination process for their respective workforce.
This year in order to support a broader understanding of the issues which cut across museums, libraries and archives the funding will be used exclusively for cross-domain sponsorship enabling museum, library and archive staff to attend conferences other than their own.
This is an opportunity to develop a greater understanding of common concerns and to establish contacts in a wider arena.
The conferences for which sponsorship is available are: The Museums Association Conference 2005 http://www.museumsassociation.org The Museum Association's annual conference and exhibition will be held at the QEII Conference Centre, London on 24 October to 26 October.
The conference will cover a wide variety of subjects but will explore four main themes Collections for the Future, Valuing Learning, Cultural Tourism and World Cities, World Cultures.
The Society of Archivists Conference 2005 http://www.archives.org.uk/conference.html The Society of Archivists Conference 2005, entitled 'From Parchment to Pictures to Pixels', will look at many aspects of archival preservation and access in this electronic age, and will take place at the University of East Anglia from 2.00 p.m. on Tuesday, 6 September to the afternoon of Friday, 9 September inclusive.
For further Information on applying to attend a conference please contact the appropriate professional association.
Museum staff wishing to attend either the 2005 Umbrella (Libraries) Conference or the Society of Archivists Conference, should contact Lorraine O'Leary at the Museums Association lorraine@museumsassociation.org Archive staff wishing to attend either the 2005 Museums Association Conference or Umbrella, should contact Stephen Harwood at the Society of Archivists stephen.harwood@nationalarchives.gov.uk In the event of applications exceeding available places priority will be given to non-managerial and frontline staff who do not usually have the opportunity to attend a conference.
Delegates who receive sponsorship will be asked to write a short summary of their experience and learning at conference for their sponsoring professional association that may be published in the trade journals.
Note also that Umbrella Conference 2005 http://www.umbrella2005.org.uk was organised by CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals at the University of Manchester on 30 June 2 July 2005 with the theme 'Tackling the key issues together' and was also part of this scheme.
Back to headlines TAPE Workshop on Management of Audiovisual Collections Amsterdam, the Netherlands 28 September 4 October 2005 Librarians, archivists and curators in charge of audiovisual collections need to know about the role of new technology in collection management.
Digitisation offers unprecedented opportunities for access to historical materials.
But how can it be combined with established preservation methods in an integrated strategy, to ensure optimal access today as well as in the future?
In this 5-day workshop, the characteristics of film, video and sound recordings and the different recording systems and devices will be reviewed.
Specific requirements for their handling and preservation will be related to the nature and function of different kinds of audiovisual materials.
The workshop will explore the different transfer and conversion methods, technical requirements in relation to quality, and long-term management of digital files.
Issues will be approached as management problems, and due attention will be given to aspects like needs assessment, setting priorities, planning, budgeting and outsourcing, and project management Target group: All those responsible for audiovisual collections in archives, museums, libraries.
For this introductory course, no specific technical expertise is required.
The workshop will be in English.
Participants are expected to have a working knowledge of English in order to participate in discussions.
Organisation: European Commission on Preservation and Access, (ECPA) Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
The workshops are supported by the Culture 2000-programme of the EU as part of the TAPE project.
Venue: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam.
Registration fee: 600 euros, this includes coffees, teas, lunches and a course pack with reading materials.
Participants from institutes who are TAPE partners or ECPA contributors will pay 500 euros.
How to apply: For online registration: http://www.tape-online.net/courses.html The registration deadline is 1 August 2005.
By 15 August you will be informed whether your application has been accepted.
For more information on the TAPE project: http://www.tape-online.net Back to headlines The Second International Workshop on Grid Computing and its Application to Data Analysis (GADA'05) http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/gada2005cfp.html In conjunction with OnTheMove Federated Conferences (OTM'05) http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/ Proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag Venue: Ayia Napa, Cyprus Dates: 31 October 4 November 2005 Grid computing has become one of the most important topics in the computing field in the last decade.
The research area of grid computing is making rapid progress, owing to the increasing necessity of computation in the resolution of complex applications.
Clusters are, in some sense, the predecessors of the grid technology.
Clusters interconnect nodes through a local high-speed network, using commodity hardware, with the aim of reducing the costs of such infrastructures.
Supercomputers have been replaced by cluster of workstations in a huge number of research projects.
The great challenge of grid computing is the complete integration of heterogeneous computing systems and data resources with the aim of providing a global computing space.
The achievement of this goal will involve revolutionary changes in the field of computation.
This workshop is intended for researchers in grid computing, who want to extend their background on this area and more specifically to those that use grid environments for managing and analysing data.
Topics of Interest Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Computational grids Data integration on grids Grid-based data mining Grid solutions for data-intensive applications Grid infrastructures for data analysis High-performance computing for data-intensive applications Grid computing infrastructures, middleware and tools Grid computing services Grid and cluster computing Collaboration technologies Data analysis and management Databases and the grid Extracting knowledge from data grids Agent-based management of data in distributed systems Agent architectures for grid environments Semantic Grid Data grids for bioinformatics Security in data grids Back to headlines SemAnnot 2005 5th International Workshop on Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semannot2005 Workshop at the 4rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2005) 7 November 2005 Galway, Ireland While a lot of basic infrastructure exists now for the Semantic Web (OWL, Editors, Inference-Engines), the lack of semantic metadata is still a major hurdle for the broad success of the Semantic Web.
To overcome this obstacle, one needs methods that facilitate and accelerate the creation of metadata at a mass scale.
The workshop will address the issue of upgrading the actual Web towards the semantic web by means of (automated) annotated strategies for Web documents.
The target audience are researchers and developers working towards the proliferation of semantic annotation.
The goal of the workshop is to share experiences and to establish common strategies for semantic annotation of the current Web covering various aspects of the actual Web, like structured vs. instructed information, static vs. dynamic web pages, textual vs. multimedia or multi-modal information.
Topics of Interest Potential topics include but are not limited to: General description of semantic annotation tools/strategies for upgrading the current web to the Semantic Web A common semantic annotation strategy for upgrading the web to the semantic web (including multimedia content) NLP tools/strategies for semantic annotation of the current web Multimedia tools/strategies for semantic annotation of the current web Semantic annotation of static vs. dynamic web documents Manual vs. automated annotation.
Can automation be effectively deployed?
Statistical vs. rule-based semantic annotation strategies Manual and/or automated semantic annotation of the current web: when only manually?
In which cases can automation be effectively deployed?
Multimedia annotation (e.g.
by using MPEG-7) Collaborative, shared annotation Evaluation of Semantic Annotation Back to headlines ICDM '05: The 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society New Orleans, Louisiana, USA 27-30 November 2005 http://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/~icdm05/ November 27, 2005 Tutorials and Workshops November 28-30, 2005 Conference The 2005 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (IEEE ICDM '05) provides a premier forum for the dissemination of innovative, practical development experiences as well as original research results in data mining, spanning applications, algorithms, software and systems.
The conference draws researchers and application developers from a wide range of data mining related areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases and data warehousing, data visualisation, knowledge-based systems and high performance computing.
Conference Co-Chairs: Vijay Raghavan, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, USA Rajeev Rastogi, Bell Laboratories, Lucent, USA Further Information and latest updates, see http://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/~icdm05/ Or contact: Vijay Raghavan University of Louisiana, Lafayette, USA Phone: 337-482-6603 Fax: 337-482-5791 E-mail: raghavan@cacs.louisiana.edu Back to headlines 8th International Bielefeld Conference Academic Library and Information Services: New Paradigms for the Digital Age 7 9 February 2006 Venue: Bielefeld, Germany, Bielefeld Convention Centre Arranged by: Bielefeld University Library Preliminary Programme: Thematic Areas Strategic Planning of Information Services Internet Information Services and how they will affect Library Activities Rethinking Structures and Organisation of Local (Information) Services Innovative Library Services Future Service Challenges for Libraries National Strategies for Libraries Please see the conference Web site for the programme and further details: Web site http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de E-mail: conference.ub@uni-bielefeld.de Back to headlines Library Use Soars A new report published by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) shows a record rise in public library usage across the UK.
In 2003/04, visits to public libraries increased by nearly 14 million, over 250,000 extra visits a week.
This is the second consecutive annual rise and builds on an additional 5 million visits made in 2002/03 the first upturn in usage since the early 1990s.
The sea change in popularity coincides with the introduction of computers and internet access into all 4200 of the UK's public libraries.
Thanks to the lottery-funded People's Network project there are 32,000 computer terminals offering broadband internet access in public libraries, and all library staff have been trained to provide help and advice for users.
Welcoming the figures, Mark Wood, chairman of the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) said: "This is an astonishing turnabout.
Since 2002/03 there have been 18 million additional visits to public libraries that's 200 times the capacity of the new Wembley Stadium.
If libraries were listed companies, people would be rushing to invest.
"Libraries have been tremendously successful at keeping up with the times, offering broadband internet access, wifi and SMS alongside traditional services."
The CIPFA figures are based on a 100% response rate from all local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales and represent the most accurate information available on public library usage in the UK.
[Received May 2005] Back to headlines DCMI Recommendation on Bibliographic Citations The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has published a Recommendation ( http://www.dublincore.org/documents/#recommendation ): It is entitled Guidelines for Encoding Bibliographic Citation Information in Dublin Core Metadata http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dc-citation-guidelines/ This recommendation uses an OpenURL Framework ContextObject to describe a machine-parsable citation.
It is primarily about capturing the bibliographic citation information about a journal article (for example) within its own metadata for which it recommends the DC property 'dcterms:bibliographicCitation', which is an element refinement of 'dc:identifier', but also includes recommendations for capturing references in 'dcterms:references'.
But this could easily be extrapolated to using a recommended parsable citation as the value of a 'dc:source' property, for example when capturing the publication citation for an eprint.
Moreover the recommendations in the document assume that 'qualified' DC is being used, ie.
with the availability of all the 'dcterms' properties.
But it does also give guidelines for using simple Dublin Core.
[Received: June 2005] Back to headlines CNI Interest in Major Reports on Digital Preservation and Curation In a recent posting Clifford Lynch, Director CNI, pointed to a number of significant reports.
"The U. S. National Science Board has approved the release of the final version (subject to copy-editing) of Chris Greer's report on Long-Lived data collections.
Chris gave a talk on this report at the spring CNI meeting, and I circulated a pointer to the earlier version of this report that was issued for comment in March 2005; the version that has just been posted incorporates many of the comments that were received on the draft report.
You can find this document at: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2005/LLDDC_report.pdf I would urge anyone at a U.S. research institution or organization concerned with research to take the time to at least look at the executive summary of this very important report."
Clifford went on to state, "In addition, the Canadian National Research Council has issued its final report on the 18-month Canadian consultation on access to scientific research data.
This is in important, interesting and timely document that serves as a fine complement and counterpoint to the U.S. report just discussed; it is much broader in terms of policy questions but also somewhat more tentative.
Again, I would urge anyone interested in scientific or scholarly data curation to at least skim this important report.
It can be found at: http://ncasrd-cnadrs.scitech.gc.ca/home_e.shtml In the UK, the JISC has announced a new series of awards (totalling some four million pounds) under its repositories programme.
For information on this, see: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digital_repositories and follow the pointers to the descriptions of the individual projects, many of which are of extraordinary interest."
[Received: June 2005] Back to headlines RCUK Announces Proposed Position on Access to Research Outputs The principal investors in publicly-funded research in the UK have responded to the debate on improved access to research outputs by putting forward their emerging views on the issue.
The eight UK Research Councils, under the umbrella of Research Councils UK (RCUK), have proposed to make it mandatory for research papers rising from Council-funded work to be deposited in openly available repositories at the earliest opportunity.
The Councils are seeking views on their position statement published on 28 June 2005 on the RCUK Web site: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp RCUK spokesman, Professor Ian Diamond said that Councils have already widely consulted the research community: "We've held workshops, given evidence at Select Committees, met with the publishers through a DTI working group and written out to all UK Vice Chancellors to share our views as they emerge on this issue and hear what others are saying," he said.
"The technology that has led to this debate is still evolving and so is our position.
We see today's statement as a starting point and we're actively seeking the views of all parties involved in the debate, such as the Learned Societies," he added.
RCUK proposes: A requirement for all grants awarded from 1 October 2005 that, subject to copyright and licensing arrangements, a copy of any resultant published journal articles or conference proceedings should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository is available to the award-holder.
Deposit should take place at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication.
Research Councils will also encourage, but not formally oblige, award-holders to deposit articles arising from grants awarded before 1 October 2005.
Councils will ensure that applicants for grants are allowed, subject to justification of cost-effectiveness, to include in the costing of their projects the predicted costs of any publication in author-pays journals.
A full copy of RCUK's position statement on access to research outputs can be found at http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp [Received: June 2005] Back to headlines ALA MARS UASC Discusses "Do You Trust Your IT Staff?"
The tension between the need to keep our library systems secure against hackers and virus attacks and the desire to maintain maximum accessibility for legitimate users of those systems has long been of concern to library staff.
Control over the computing environment in the library can be a significant source of contention between systems/information technology and public services/reference personnel.
To investigate this relationship, the American Library Association's Machine-Readable Reference Section's User Access to Services Committee (ALA MARS UASC) put together a panel consisting of two systems and two public services professionals as part of the ALA's Annual Meeting in Chicago, USA, on 25 June, 2005.
Craig Davis, Director of Adult Services at the Chicago Public Library and Mary Ellen Spencer, Head of Reference & Research Services at Virginia Commonwealth University Library in Richmond, Virginia, represented the reference/public services side.
Karim Adib, Director of Library Automation for Chicago Public Library, and Dennis Newborn, Head of Systems for West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia, offered the systems/information technology viewpoint.
Adib, who is not a librarian by training, pointed out that hardware must be fairly new, the network had to be robust, and the primary responsibility of his staff was to their 'customers' -the library staff and the users of the library system.
Davis agreed that this had been a fairly successful endeavour.
In fact, this part of the panel presentation turned into a bit of a 'love fest' rather than an exploration of tension.
Dennis Newborn spoke for the information technology viewpoint within academic libraries.
His primary concern (and one that is shared widely among academic computing staff regardless of geography) is security.
Hacking and viruses can completely shut down productive work in an entire institution, but often success in fending these off also has the effect of protecting users from fully understanding the potential threat.
Newborn's experience with a major attack several years ago actually helped his public services colleagues better to understand the seriousness of the situation, as they lost functionality on their staff machines and watched users' computing grind temporarily to a halt.
In this case, he asserted, a brush with disaster engendered greater understanding by public services staff of his responsibility to protect the library's assets effectively.
Earlier in her career Mary Ellen Spencer had also worked in a systems department and so fully understood what 'the other side' was experiencing.
She did comment that it would be helpful though if systems staff could consider feedback from public services colleagues as 'usability data' rather than as of 'anecdotal' interest.
The MARS UASC analysed the panel presentation afterwards and concluded it was worthy of further investigation by the Committee in the form of an article.
It is hoped to submit the article to Reference & User Services Quarterly ( ISSN 1094-9054 ) in the summer of 2006.
For further information contact: Bryna Coonin Co-chair, ALA MARS User Access to Services Committee East Carolina University Greenville, N.C. USA Email: cooninb@mail.ecu.edu Web site: http://www.library.umaine.edu/staff/MARS_ALA/MARS_UASC_index.htm [Received: July 2005] Back to headlines Documents Online will soon be a JISC Collection All Higher and Further Education institutions in the UK will soon have the opportunity to offer their staff and students access to The National Archives' collection of digitised public records DocumentsOnline.
They can subscribe to this online resource through the JISC licence.
With DocumentsOnline, users can tap into a rich archive of public records, including academic sources, maps, images, government documents, wills and family history sources.
The breadth and depth of the content ensures its relevance across a wide range of subject and curriculum areas including: architecture, environmental management; history; international relations and politics; legal history; military history and war studies.
New material will be added, which will be available at no extra charge to subscribing institutions.
Enjoy the benefits of onsite and remote access As you can access this online resource through the Athens authentication system, you can maximise the value of your subscription with multiple users and remote access.
No Obligation Free Trial To take advantage of a no obligation 30 day free trial, please contact trial_access@jisc.ac.uk.
Please remember to include DocumentsOnline in the subject line of your email and let us know which online resource(s) you would like trial access to.
Further details on this resource can be found at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_documentsonline.html [Received: July 2005] Back to headlines Oxford Journals Launches Oxford Open: A New Open Access Initiative Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press (OUP), has announced its latest Open Access (OA) project, Oxford Open.
Commencing July 2005, it will offer an optional author-pays model to authors of accepted papers in a range of Oxford Journals titles.
Oxford Journals has also amended its post-prints policy to be compliant with the latest National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy.
Both of these announcements further support Oxford Journals' central remit, as a leading not-for-profit publisher, to bring the highest quality research to the widest possible audience.
Oxford Open will give published authors in participating Oxford Journals titles the option to pay for research articles to be freely available online immediately on publication.
The open access charge for each article will be £1,500 or $2,800, with authors being given the option to pay this amount once their manuscript has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication.
Discounted author charges of £800 or $1,500 will be available to authors from institutions that maintain a current online subscription.
Authors from developing countries will also be eligible for discounted rates.
The online subscription prices of participating journals will be adjusted for 2007 and subsequent years, according to how much content was paid for by authors and thus freely available online during the previous year.
Further details about Oxford Journals Author Self-Archiving Policy can be found at: http://www.oupjournals.org/selfarchivingpolicy/ [Received: May 2005] Back to headlines UKOLUG Becomes UKeIG The Group's name has changed.
The membership passed a motion at the 26th UKOLUG AGM (8 June 2005) to change the groups' name to UKeIG (UK eInformation Group).
CILIP Council has approved this name change.
http://www.ukeig.org.uk [Received: June 2005] Back to headlines MLA Issues Call to Action for Public Libraries The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has presented England's public libraries with five major challenges to be met over the next three years.
In its response to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee's report on public libraries, published today, MLA is calling on local authorities and other funding bodies to back its improvement programme for libraries by: extending opening hours, particularly at evenings and weekends diversifying both the library workforce and the services on offer and involving the community in service development programmes sustaining free Internet access in all public libraries co-ordinating book procurement, reducing overheads and increasing the range of resources available to users.
establishing a major investment programme to renovate and sustain public library buildings.
MLA chair Mark Wood said: "Councils must be confident they are providing modern public libraries that are relevant to today's users and open at convenient times.
Traditional lending services must be improved, and complemented by online access to information using up-to-date technologies."
MLA states that in 2002 it oversaw the introduction of computers and Internet access in all 3000 public libraries in England.
That year, for the first time in a decade, library visits increased by 5 million.
Last year they shot up by a further 14 million.
Mark Wood continued: "We are calling on local authorities to capitalise on the success of the introduction of Internet access by extending library opening times, improving book stock and modernising other aspects of public libraries.
"We are also calling for urgent investment in library buildings so that they're the sorts of places people want to visit.
We know that when libraries are properly funded book borrowing rates and visitor numbers increase, yet most public libraries have suffered from a chronic lack of capital investment.
We have commissioned a comprehensive audit of the condition of library buildings and the costs of refurbishment or replacement which we will publish later this year."
MLA's full response to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport's review of public libraries will be available from 29 July on http://www.mla.gov.uk/information/responses/resp2005.asp [Received: July 2005] Back to headlines MLA Becomes Partner in Cultural Leadership Programme In response to the Government's commitment of £12 million to promote leadership skills within the cultural sector, the Arts Council is developing a cultural leadership programme.
Working with sector partners, including MLA, it has published Cultural Leadership Programme A call for ideas.
The document outlines the scope of the proposed programme and signals the start of a consultation process that will inform its further development.
Along with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, Arts Council England is supported in this initiative by the Clore Leadership Programme, Creative and Cultural Skills and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
The Cultural Leadership Programme will make it possible for the cultural sector to develop and strengthen its leadership and establish a culture of excellence for the future.
It will develop the business and leadership skills required to lead in a changing global environment.
The programme will address the development needs of leaders at all stages of their careers as well as trustees and board members.
The Cultural Leadership Programme will run for two years from April 2006 and has two areas of priority: Creating a culture of strong leadership To embed a culture of support and development for leaders in the sector.
Diversity in leadership To enhance the diversity in cultural leadership with a particular focus on leaders from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds.
The Arts Council is seeking partnerships across the sector and to learn from other sectors facing and tackling similar challenges.
[Received: July 2005] Back to headlines Publication Date: 30-July-2005  Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Blogging and RSS A Librarian's Guide Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Blogging and RSS A Librarian's Guide Buzz software rss blog aggregation syndication podcast itunes Citation BibTex RIS Kara Jones reviews a practical guide to blogs and RSS written for librarians, packed with library-specific examples.
At the time of review, Amazon UK had over fifty different titles for sale on weblogs and RSS feeds.
How do you choose which to read?
When faced with a new technology or service, it's useful to have instruction designed specifically with you in mind as the reader and learner.
In 'Blogging and RSS: A Librarian's Guide', Michael Sauers does exactly that and pitches directly to a specific audience.
Those interested in this book will presumably be librarians and information professionals and will probably already have an idea of what a blog is, and some knowledge of RSS feeds.
Starting with introduction of each topic, Sauers outlines the mechanics involved and moves on to the practical 'nitty-gritty' of setting up your own blog or RSS feed.
Interestingly, Sauers has chosen a format that represents the character of social technologies in general an engaging, informal tone and an understated approach to the technical operations behind these services.
There are lots of examples provided, allowing the reader to observe different approaches.
This is supported by interviews with well-known library bloggers, although originality points are lost here as anyone who's read Rebecca Blood's 'We've got Blog' [1] back in 2002 will recognise this interview technique for sharing experiences.
It has to be said that there is the risk this text will date quickly as Web sites and their content change, and indeed the technology reported here will change, perhaps giving this book a short shelf-life.
Blogs The book has been neatly divided into two halves, with the first four chapters focusing on blogging and blog development.
The introduction gives a very brief description of a weblog, and goes on to provide anecdotal evidence on the effects blogs are having on the distribution of information in the traditional media and in libraries.
The next section concentrates on introducing the reader to the 'Library Blogosphere'.
Part One provides numerous examples of blogs from individual librarians, and blogs from libraries.
Each example includes the title of the blog, the author, Web site address and a snippet from one of their blog posts with corresponding screen shot.
While the screen shots are a nice idea, they do lose quite a lot in translation from screen to black and white small print.
Part Two offers a series of interviews with librarian bloggers, exploring their experiences and their recommendations for those new to blogs (frequently 'don't blog unless you've got something to say!).
While the bloggers interviewed represent a range of library sectors, they are predominately North American which presumably reflects the geography of early blog adopters.
The next chapter moves along to the mechanics of blog creation.
There is a brief section about Web, server or client software-based blogs, but for the most part Sauers uses Blogger [2] as the foundation stone for describing how to create a blog and becoming familiar with the blog landscape.
There is quite a lot of detail here from the basic to advanced set-up options for Blogger, some of which has changed already as Blogger has moved onto a new version but as Sauers notes, the help files on Blogger will be more up-to-date than the instructions supplied in this book.
That said, the information here is detailed, with numerous screenshots supplied at each step.
This then segues nicely into the idea of keeping up with Web sites which update regularly, and content syndication with RSS.
RSS The second half of this book delves into RSS feeds.
This is possibly the most useful section as Sauers provides a comprehensive introduction to RSS (useful as RSS feeds are notoriously counter-intuitive), followed by a chapter on aggregators and then noteworthy feeds.
The introduction to RSS defines the file format and gives a short history of its development (with an invitation to the reader to skip this section as it is admittedly complicated and esoteric).
This is followed by a useful breakdown of the components of an RSS feed file (with fuller examples in the Appendices) and an outline of feed types such as on-screen and behind-the-scene feeds, again illustrated with screenshot examples.
Once feeds have been described and identified on a Web site, Sauers then moves on to deciphering content contained in an RSS file with the use of an aggregator.
This chapter again uses examples to illustrate the concept and again has very heavy use of screenshots.
Sauers continues to lay the foundations of subscribing to feeds through use of the popular Bloglines [3] Web site as an example of the basic components of aggregators.
This is really a very comprehensive introduction to many of the Bloglines features, including adding feeds, importing and exporting feeds, finding new feeds from blogrolls, managing your Bloglines account, and so on.
This section concludes with an overview of podcasting and RSS, and the use of iTunes to subscribe to audio files.
Again using the technique of learning by example, the next section contains 'noteworthy feeds' of interest to library professionals.
This really does demonstrate the potential RSS represents, from announcements on new materials from libraries, newspaper feeds, journal table of contents alerts to LibraryElf's [4] due date reminders for loaned items.
The final section deals with possibly the most technical topic: that of creating feeds.
This covers 'hand rolling', or writing an RSS file by hand, to semi-automated services that add the relevant code and may publish a feed to a server but still require the content to be created.
The final section covers fully automated RSS generation, using functions built-in to services like Blogger.
This section is wrapped up with a brief look at placing outside RSS content on your own Web site using services like Feed Digest [5], with a caution on potential fair-use issues and clarifying the content creator.
Conclusion In his Afterword, Sauers emphasises that putting into action what has been learned from this book is the next step, and encourages his readers to go out and 'tell their story'.
Those who would welcome a little more background before delving into the world of blogs and RSS are provided with an extensive list of recommended reading.
All in all, this title does what it says on the tin it offers an introduction to blogs and RSS using plenty of examples for inspiration but read it soon, before the technology moves on.
References Blood, R. We've got Blog: How weblogs are changing our culture.
New York: Perseus Books, 2002.
Blogger http://www.blogger.com Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com LibraryElf http://www.libraryelf.com Feed Digest http://www.feeddigest.com Author Details Kara Jones Subject Librarian University of Bath Email: k.l.jones@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/contacts/people/klj.html Return to top Article Title: "Blogging and RSS: A Librarian's Guide" Author: Kara Jones Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/jones-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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24 Hour Museum: From Past to Future Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 24 Hour Museum: From Past to Future Buzz data software api html database rss xml portal infrastructure archives metadata accessibility tagging vocabularies windows aggregation syndication soap widget interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS As 24 Hour Museum rebuilds and looks outwards to new partnerships, Jon Pratty looks at challenges faced over the last seven years.
24 Hour Museum [1] is a successful and sustainable cultural Web site.
Type the word 'museum' into Google UK and up it pops as a top five search result.
Unlike the other top sites, all national museums or galleries, 24HM's remit covers the whole country, in eclectic subject areas, reaching a wide variety of audiences with simple and accessible content.
In 2006 24HM reached ten million visits in the year.
2007 sees the site reaching a million visitors a month, from home to office, schoolroom to museum.
Funded by the DCMS through MLA, with additional money from the Department for Education and Science (DfES) and the Arts Council, it is run from small offices in Brighton with a fulland part-time staff of around ten.
Now, as Web 2.0 brings new opportunities for the cultural sector [2][3], 24HM is undergoing a redesign to accommodate the possibilities of the new Web; into this is being added a wider view of the digital cultural landscape, and linkages with the plans and strategies of MLA, Arts Council and also key sector partner MDA [4].
In the Beginning In May 1999 the 24 Hour Museum was launched to general acclaim [5] and occasional brickbats.
It was born into a Web 1.0 world of sites built in clunky and passive HTML, frames and portals: museum Web sites as venue brochures.
The heart of the 24HM was a simple dynamically driven Web magazine about museums and galleries, with a database of venues, plus a regional map and some longer themed features dubbed 'trails.'
As the 24HM went live, it created a stir when Culture Secretary Chris Smith bestowed 'National museum' status upon the site [6].
There is, of course, much more to being a National museum than putting up a Web site, and at the launch of the new site to the sector there were some red faces and cross words.
But it was a bold vision, the era of free access to museums, and some would say the seeds of bigger plans like Culture Online [7] were sown when 24 Hour Museum opened its digital doors for virtual visitors.
Figure 1: Screenshot of the 24 Hour Museum homepage Figure 2: How the BBC told the story of the 24 Hour Museum launch in 1999 The cost of the site at launch was around £70,000 and it was projected to cost around £55,000 per year to run.
Small beans at today's prices, but in 1999 quite a sum.
Interestingly, this was core funding, not project money, a real aid to planning and sustainability.
Launch editor was respected arts writer Simon Tait.
Simon collated printed press releases and chose stories in consultation with Ylva French, from the Campaign for Museums (CfM).
With Loyd Grossman, Ylva and the CfM were instrumental in getting the site started, together with the Museums Documentation Association (now the MDA) in Cambridge.
Simon's copy was sent to the CfM offices, where it was checked, subbed and forwarded to MDA, which uploaded the content to the Web site.
Uploading was accomplished using a Windows-based WIX client working into an SSL Index + CMS [8].
For now, this robust system is still in use.
Pictures were researched from the CfM office in London, transparencies then being posted to Cambridge for scanning, editing and uploading by MDA.
By summer 2000 it was clear changes were needed.
Jane Finnis, who, as Director of Lighthouse, a media facilities and training centre in Brighton, had radically developed the centre, was recruited to pull the 24HM operation together on one site with newly granted independent status.
Interviewed for the job of Editor in December 2000, my pitch involved putting in place journalistic values and the sort of publishing and editorial practices that would get things moving and pull in readers.
Figure 3: Growth of 24HM visitor sessions 1999-2007 Making Changes, New Technology First impressions of the Web site in 2001 were interesting.
The site updated every two weeks, pictures were few and far between.
Visitor figures were on the low side (around 25,000 per month in Jan 2001) after a bright period following the launch fanfare.
It seemed search engines were not indexing the site very well.
Importing good publishing practice was the first step: first weekly, then daily updating.
Changing the homepage frequently kept people wanting to check the site.
Better key wording of articles and titles and more pictures on stories came next [9].
Looking into the search indexing problem, I found the dynamic site needed to be optimised to suit search engines: this led to SSL, our contractors, building pages that signposted our content more effectively to Google.
Ariadne readers may remember things called 'Z' pages.
We looked into what these were, also asking SSL to make our URLs more 'friendly.'
Site visits soon began to grow, doubling each year.
Working at the Daily Telegraph in 1999, I was intrigued to see something new and exciting that added value and meaning to the Web an RSS aggregator Web site called NewsNow [10].
It pulls together news ticker feeds from multiple sources into one interface.
Looking into this further, I found it was enabled by RSS (Really Simple Syndication) XML technology [11].
Wanting to grab some of this connectivity, we put together a rough specification for a feed in early 2003 with SSL.
There was a brief moment of worry when those around us were advising the use of RSS 1.0.
Looking outwards, major publishing users of RSS were mostly employing RSS 2.0, a slightly different set of standards and technologies.
Since the point of RSS was to join our information up with the outside world, not the murky interior of the museum and Further Education sector, we plumped for RSS 2.0 in our view, exactly the right choice.
Our first RSS feed premiered in summer 2003, resulting in an immediate leap in usage of the site [12].
Subtle in many ways, RSS activity does not usually represent a massive change in visitor numbers; rather it can be a good way to reach influencers like cultural journalists, RSS aggregating sources like Moreover [13], Feedburner [14] and so on.
These days it is useful to note the ubiquity of RSS culture the very simplicity of XML has made it the building block of Web 2.0.
Figure 4: 24 Hour Museum RSS feed seen on My Learning, the Yorkshire Museum's hub education Web site 2003: Extending the Offer: Show Me Our children's site, Show Me [15] was funded in the build stage by the Clore Duffield Foundation and launched in 2003; another simple journalistic site, driven off the same database and Index + client.
This time though, the emphasis was on educationally sound content directly aimed at children at Key Stage 2 of the National Curriculum.
Show Me is all about finding great museum content (whether games, resources, things to make and do, etc) writing about it in accessible ways, attracting readers, then brokering the audience out to the source museum Web sites.
Show Me is edited by Anra Kennedy, an experienced teacher, trained journalist and respected expert on museum Web education.
Anra has built Show Me into a popular site for children both in school and at home, regularly reaching 300,000 plus visitors (robots excluded) per month.
Weaving Information Threads Together At the heart of 24HM is a growing database of 3800 museums, galleries, libraries and archives.
Each venue can use an online Direct Data Entry (DDE) [16] system to add events, amend venue details, add collection information and educational resources.
Well over half of our participants use the system, and the database is a living, breathing fertile information store, used to drive data into all corners of the 24HM family of Web sites, as well as some external ones too.
Of course, in a Web 2.0 context, holding a live and authoritative source of data is a useful commodity, something to be offered to others to use in new digital contexts.
DDE is a valuable informational commodity that gives 24HM equity with external publishers, as well as individuals wishing to mash up our data.
In this age of shared, exchanged and interwoven data, DDE can be seen as a crucial part of the way we work.
Citizen Journalists and Sustainability Sustainability is the core characteristic of 24HM content development strategy.
Needing more content to update the site more frequently, work experience agreements with journalism courses were put in place from 2001 onwards to build writing capacity organically.
We used, and still use, these opportunities to spot good writers, building up layers of structured volunteer placements which then give us a pool of ready-trained people to work with.
As a result, though we can populate the basic site with a small number of writers, we can also expand to fit new opportunities if project money comes in.
Volunteers around the country were a natural extension of the in-house effort and they number some 20 at any time: over 120 writers have been published on the site since 2001.
Many have gone on to full-time employment as a result.
The Present Day and the Current Rebuild: Success and the Portal Problem It's a bind get yourself high up in Google and search-borne visitors pop off elsewhere after looking at just one page.
Successful sites have faced this dilemma since the rise of search engines.
For the last five years or so, the BBC, The Guardian and other digital media publishers have tackled the fickle one-page visitor by clustering associated content together into sections.
Analysis of 24HM audience trends show we face the same situation.
The current architecture of 24HM relates to an early Web model of user behaviour, and it clearly fails to serve today's search-borne readers.
While we successfully write and deliver up-to-the-minute content into the places online where audiences are to be found, the architecture and navigation of the site cannot deliver more associated content to keep readers on-site.
Thanks to funding from the DfES in late 2006 we began to rethink the shape and philosophy of the site, with a special brief to expand the way the site delivers educational content to audiences.
According to David Dawson, head of Digital Futures at MLA, the site needed to be a 'cultural broker': an apt way to describe the way Show Me and 24HM woo audiences with timely and topical journalism, sharing out traffic to linked museum or gallery Web sites, where they can enjoy authoritative content at source.
We will also be publishing data sources outwards from our site we mine our participating venues for events, venue and collection details and these can be available as Web services, API's , RSS or variations on OAI harvesting or SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).
Figure 5: Show Me 300,000 visits per month to this 24HM KS2 Web site Beyond the cultural broker idea, the rebuild process is intended to recut existing and new database content into subject-based silos, allowing us new ways to sort and display content of all types in ways that will increase our conversion ratio of page visits to substantial sessions.
This being a Web 2.0 world, the new 24HM will make extensive use of taxonomies and vocabularies to sort content automatically where possible; and of course, with the DfES funding in mind, we will be building relationships with the curricula of all four UK nations as well.
Extensive user profiling, sector consultation, brand evaluation and accessibility research has already been carried out, with work going on also to look closely at how the rebuild may benefit others in the sector who may want cost-effective and standardised ways to publish too.
As a result, MDA has brought into the project the Subject Specialist Network (SSN) Explore Web sites that are likely to be based on simplified off-the-peg versions of the new 24HM site architecture and CMS.
Nick Poole, Director of MDA, is firmly convinced about the benefits of joined-up thinking in the digital cultural sector.
We are all familiar with expensive cultural Web sites that pop up and disappear almost overnight, of repeated re-development of solutions for problems that do not exist, and grandiose schemes for seamlessly inter-operating networks that are neither seamless, interoperable, or even networked.
In his speech to the Museums Computer Group Autumn 2006 meeting at the Natural History Museum, published later on the 24 Hour Museum [17], Poole effectively summarised new ideas for shared architecture, pooled skills and a more strategic approach to knowledge management across the museum and gallery sector.
24 Hour Museum sits at the core of lots of the connected Webs of data joining the creative sector.
We try to be the place where audiences find animated, topical and interesting content; the latest events and listings data, and pathways through to many inspiring cultural experiences, in museums, galleries, archives and libraries, amongst others.
According to Nick Poole, 24HM is a key marketing layer that can play an effective, popular and sustainable role as part of an intelligent structure melding centrally aggregated and stored cultural information; good practice in standards and infrastructure that could help us all.
This re-consideration of the wider strategic place of 24HM has led to our recasting the rebuild as an Integrated Architecture Project (IAP), with the intention of offering to the rest of the sector a distributed publishing, data-sharing and collaboration platform.
Figure 6: Ross Parry, University of Leicester, discusses the meaning of the Web with Frances Lloyd Baynes, V&A, London, at a Semantic Web Think Tank meeting in Brighton The Semantic Web Think Tank In the perfectly interoperable future, better metadata might connect all our material more closely, more intelligently, and with more meaning.
It is this opportunity for more thoughtful connection that lead to our recent Semantic Web Think Tank (SWTT) Project [18], a radical experimental partnership between 24 Hour Museum, the Museums Computer Group [19], MDA, national museums and many collaborators in the academic world as well as the software sector.
24 Hour Museum was keen to participate in the AHRC-funded partnership project to help us inform our rebuild effort.
The £15,000 project pulled together small groups of experts to talk in directed sessions, which would then be recorded and published as short papers or notes.
The six meetings that followed were planned in advance to deal with likely developmental themes pre-agreed by a core organising group.
SWTT was funded to be a think tank, and initially intended not to make product, but to look for directions, to sense the lie of the land for us and to perhaps make some simple recommendations for those who have responsibility for the development of cultural digital infrastructure in the UK.
The major benefit from the SWTT Project has not, in the end, been a demonstrator or widget of some kind.
It is instead the emergence of a suggested roadmap for the future development of a joined-up digital cultural sector, which will be revealed in more detail in a report published late 2007/spring 2008.
If we have any notion of wanting to develop a knowledge web we need to consider the bindings, the threads that weave together to make one.
SWTT will work over the next year to advocate more thought, communication and co-ordination between the arts, tourism and museum and gallery sector with respect to taxonomical systems, vocabularies, tagging systems and database relationships.
Simple first steps in this new effort might be to see more formal taxonomical connections between systems we are already working on, like the SSN Explore Web sites.
Conclusion In seven years 24 Hour Museum has become established as a key player in the digital cultural sector in the UK.
We work to support regional initiatives through linking efforts, we power Web sites for Museums and Galleries Month, Abolition 200 and Untold London and we have put together data-sharing partnerships across boundaries, with bodies like Visit Britain, The Art Fund and Arts Council England.
As the Web joins up more, as we inch towards a more meaningfully connected digital world, 24 Hour Museum's place in the cultural infrastructure is clearly vitally important.
With the Cultural Olympiad racing up to meet us in September 2008, and 2012 looming large in our exhibition programming diaries, we need a joined-up digital cultural sector which gets our great British culture and heritage out there onto the World Wide Web quickly, efficiently and in a sustainable fashion.
With 2012 in mind, 24 Hour Museum strategy is to keep looking outwards for great new technologies that could help us all weave that better Web; to look creatively at ways we can cleverly join up our common digital interests and to support sensitively with assistive infrastructure the excellent digital cultural work going on all over the UK.
One thing is certain: the way to a better future Web is through better connections semantically, politically and creatively.
Editor's note: Following the publication of this article in the Summer Issue, 2007, the organisation that publishes 24 Hour Museum changed its name to Culture24 on 26 November 2007 [20] [2008-01-16].
References The 24 Hour Museum Web site http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk 'Riding the new wave web', Jon Pratty, January 2007, 24 Hour Museum Web site http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART42348.html 'Are museums doing IT right?'
Nick Poole, December 2006, 24 Hour Museum Web site http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh/ART41939.html The Museum Documentation Association (MDA) http://www.mda.org.uk/ '24 Hour Museum goes live', 13 May 1999, BBC Web site http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/342954.stm '24 Hour Museum prepares to go live,' 18 January 1999, BBC Web site http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/specials/bett_99/254933.stm Culture Online, London http://www.culture.gov.uk SSL Limited, London http://www.ssl.co.uk/ Communications with nobody: is anybody out there?
conference paper, CULT 2001, Copenhagen, 2001 http://cult.kulturnet.dk/pt3.htm NewsNow Web site http://www.newsnow.co.uk/ 'RSS,' Wikipedia entry, retrieved 5 August 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RSS&oldid=145740751 The 24 Hour Museum RSS newsfeed, conference paper, Museums and the Web 2004 http://www.archimuse.com/mw2004/papers/pratty/pratty.html Moreover Web site http://w.moreover.com/ Feedburner Web site http://www.feedburner.com/ Show Me Web site http://www.show.me.uk/ 'How to use our Database,' 24 Hour Museum Web site http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/etc/formuseums/TXT17733_gfx_en.html 'Are museums doing IT right?'
Nick Poole, December 2006, http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh/ART41939.html UK Museums and the Semantic Web Web site http://culturalsemanticweb.wordpress.com/ The Museums Computer Group http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/ 24 Hour Museum to Become Culture24!, 24 Hour Museum, 27 November 2007 http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/etc/about/TXT52252_gfx_en.html Author Details Jon Pratty Editor 24 Hour Museum Email: editor@24hourmuseum.org.uk Web site: http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/ Jon Pratty is a Fine Art graduate and has worked in the museum and gallery sector for 15 years, as well as serving time in design consultancy in London in the 90's.
He retrained as a journalist over 1996-7 and made a name in technology and Web writing, working in the Daily Telegraph's 'Connected' section, as well as 'Doors', on the Sunday Times.
Return to top Article Title: "24 Hour Museum: From Past to Future" Author: Jon Pratty Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/pratty/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Participate in Your Future: The IST2004 Event Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Participate in Your Future: The IST2004 Event Buzz data framework accessibility preservation multimedia visualisation e-learning ict e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Gabriella Szabo reports on a three-day event addressing European policies, strategies and research activities in all areas of the Information Society held in The Hague.
IST2004 [1] organised by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs in cooperation with the European Commission, brought together over 3000 participants from all over the world with an interest in Information Society Technologies.
The event had been given the title 'Participate in your Future' emphasising the importance of providing guidance in defining the ICT sector of tomorrow.
The aim was to create fora for all the stakeholders from relevant areas of research, business or policy-making.
The event brought together major attractions including: a conference consisting of 35 plenary and thematic sessions complemented by a continuous session covering the practicalities of participating in calls for proposals under the new IST work programme for 2005/06.
an exhibition with some 184 individual exhibits and 26 information stands.
networking events with 65 informal sessions to give like-minded people and potential research partners an opportunity to discuss the strategic objectives of IST research.
The organisers developed an impressive IST2004 Web presence for listing the contributions and providing general information about the conference [2].
Conference opening The Conference : The Future of European IST Research Policy The conference was centred on the current challenges for IST.
It began by addressing the policy agenda for IST research, positioning it in the context of global developments and illustrating future perspectives.
After the welcome speeches given by Wim Deetman, Mayor of The Hague and Laurens Brinkhorst, Minister of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands, a plenary session, chaired by Fabio Colassanti, Director General, DG Information Society and Media, presented contributions from high-level decision-makers (including Vaira Vike-Freiberga, President of Latvia and Mosidudi Mangena, Minister of Science and Technology, South Africa, who expressed their commitment to the Information Society.
Since the conference proper was dedicated to IST research topics, four distinguished speakers from the business sector were invited to contribute to the discussion on policy guidelines for R&D.
The central messge from Matti Alahuhta, Chief Strategy Officer, Nokia, was that the key element for future prosperity would be a positive climate for R&D, mostly as a result of public/private partnerships.
Focusing on the industrial perspectives, Bernard Meric, Managing Director, Hewlett-Packard stressed the importance of integrating users' needs in decision-making with regard to innovation.
Harry Hendriks, CEO Philips, underlined the role of IST in competitiveness.
The recently published report entitled 'Facing the Challenge The Lisbon Strategy for growth and employment' [3] was quoted as a key document for the future of innovation policy.
And last but not least, Nicholas Donorfrio, IBM's technology strategy leader, highlighted the global responsibilities of the business sector in IST Research.
The conference sessions illustrated how the economic goals of the European Union depended on sustainable growth in the context of the knowledge society.
In the session 'IST research strategy beyond 2004' the major topic was the forthcoming 7th Framework Programme for Research and Development (FP7) [4].
The Commission fully agreed with the recommendations presented in 'Facing the Challenge The Lisbon Strategy for growth and employment'' drafted by the high-level group chaired by Wim Kok which would contribute to defining priorities for FP7.
Frans de Bruine, Director for eEurope and Information Society Technology Policies, added that the main innovative component in the Commission's proposal for FP7 was the 'Comprehensive IST Policy' a holistic approach aimed at attaining synergy between the R&D objectives, the right regulatory environment and good practice.
FP7 should be based on competitiveness and cooperation.
With regard to competitiveness, the European Commission considered ICT as a key enabler for productivity growth and for future wealth and welfare.
The changing R&D environment and the challenge of global competition needed to be addressed in future policies for innovation.
And as for cooperation, the importance of complex approaches as well as the vertical and horizontal partnerships between the stakeholders would need to be taken into account.
There would be new R&D challenges for FP7 such as innovations resulting from the use of ICT and "breakthroughs at the cross-roads" with ICT-bio, ICT-cogno and ICT-nano.
All in all, the key message was that the European Union could not afford to under-invest in ICT research and development and that FP7 would be a significant tool capable of increasing collaboration and prosperity across Europe.
Additional information about FP7 was presented at the session 'Strategic Questions for IST Research' with contributions from the IST Advisory Group (ISTAG)[5] set up to advise the Commission on the overall strategy to be followed in carrying out the IST thematic priority and related research activities as well as on orientation in the European Research Area by helping to stimulate European research communities.
Paul T Hoen, a member of the ISTAG working group 'Europe-Wide Initiative' presented a report which highlighted the ISTAG's recommendations for future initiatives.
He stressed the importance of the European dimension, the 'urgency' of the topic, enhancing competitiveness, long-term impact and synergy with related projects in connection with new European initiatives.
The advisory group proposed covering the following areas: Health Road safety Government Media Using ICT to build and enhance the European Research Area On the last day of the conference, an open discussion forum on FP7 was held in order to encourage contributions on the future of R&D research in the area of Information and Communication Technologies.
Participants could forward questions and comments to key players at the Commission.
However that forum was not the only opportunity for participation as the online discussion page [6] was to remain open until 31 December 2004.
Presentation about the future of ICT R&D The Exhibition: The Result of Cooperative Research Programmes The IST2004 exhibition was centred on some 90 stands displaying the results of European research projects.
The aim was to present leading-edge outcomes from work in Europe, under national, regional or corporate research programmes.
The Exhibition portrayed how this would benefit the citizens of Europe and our economic competitiveness.
The exhibits were grouped in the following major areas: European IST Prize Pavilion, Dutch Pavilion, IST research results in four fields such as Working in the Knowledge Economy (WORK), Citizens in the Knowledge Economy (CARE), Ambient Intelligence (AMI), Communication and Amusement (FUN) and the European Commission Information Stand.
The European IST Prize Village presented the 20 winners for 2004, selected from 430 applicants from 29 countries.
The European IST Prize [7] is the most distinguished prize for innovative products and services in the field of Information Society Technologies.
It is open to companies or organisations that present an innovative IT product with promising market potential.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the prize, five winners of previous years were also exhibiting.
In the Dutch pavilion some showcases of national and corporate research results from the Netherlands were provided in the context of IST projects at the European level.
The CARE stands were dedicated to e-Learning, e-Health, e-Safety, e-Inclusion and e-Government so as to demonstrate the contribution of technology to the everyday life of the citizen.
The AMI section addressed recent developments in robotics, cognition, computer vision, microand nanotechnologies.
The demonstrations on the FUN stands showed possible scenarios for the future of multimedia and communications.
And the European Commission Information Stand provided background literature on the Framework Programmes, Work Programmes, projects and portfolios.
The Networking Sessions: A Bottom-up Activity One of the main objectives of the IST2004 Event was to assist the European research field and companies to build up multidisciplinary and international research communities across Europe.
The Networking session of the IST2004 Event brought together people who were interested in a specific topic of IST research, offering more detailed information and discussion on project ideas, research activities and partnerships.
The Commission itself organised sessions devoted to each Strategic Objective of the IST priority of the 6th Framework Programme [8] and the recently published IST Work Programme for 2005-2006 (WP 2005-2006) [9].
The Technology-enhanced Learning session, organised by the European Commission, DG Information Society, Unit 'Technology-enhanced Learning; Cultural Heritage' [10] covered one of the strategic objectives of WP2005-2006.
It targeted integrated technological, cognitive and pedagogical approaches so as to create novel dimensions enhancing the learning process in the knowledge-based society.
Patricia Manson, European Commission, Unit 'Technology-enhanced Learning; Cultural Heritage' opened the session with an overview of 'Technology-enhanced learning' as a strategic objective in the IST Work Programme 2005-2006.
The recently published Call 4 addressed two research topics, namely exploring interactions between the intertwined learning processes of individuals and organisations, and contributing to new understandings of the learning processes by exploring links between human learning, cognition and technologies.
Marco Marsella, European Commission, Unit 'Technology-enhanced Learning; Cultural Heritage', complemented this with a presentation on the specific aspect of possible synergies between learning and cognition in humans and machines.
Martin Wolpers from the University of Hanover, project manager of the PROLEARN Network of Excellence [11], suggested some research issues for technology-enhanced learning in corporate training.
One of the challenges was to provide the sector, especially small and medium enterprises, with more affordable, more interactive eLearning infrastructures, which could be integrated into the workplace.
Costas Davarakis (Systema Technologies SA), project manager of Lab@Future [12] (FP5) focused on the learning process.
He suggested that new research projects in the field should put a stronger accent on promoting the interplay between technology on the one hand and pedagogy and cognitive science on the other.
In his view, consistent pedagogy could provide insight into new ways of conceptualising and integrating activities both for individual learners and for groups.
The last presentation was given by Barbara Wasson and Sten Ludvigsen, both members of the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence [13].
They explored how insights into the social contexts of learning could have an impact on the development of innovative technology-enhanced solutions.
As challenging research topics, they mentioned the role of different technologies and media, the relative merits of collaboration (or interdependency) and flexibility, the relationship between individual and collective activities, and methodological issues such as the coordination of learning activities and evaluation.
Networking session: Technology-enhanced Learning The Network session 'Access and preservation of cultural and scientific resources' organised by the unit 'Technology-enhanced Learning; Cultural Heritage' focused on the topic as a strategic objective in the IST Work Programme 2005-2006.
In her introduction, Pat Manson described how techniques and tools for preserving the availability of digital resources were an increasingly urgent research issue.
She stressed that there was also a need for both short-term experimental work and longer-term research strategies for dealing with complex, dynamic, high-volume and highly interactive resources.
Synergies between leading-edge technologies (especially knowledge technologies, VR, and visualisation) would assist the development of applications addressing specific user communities and would support proactive and creative use of cultural resources.
Costis Dallas, Critical Publics SA, focused on new types of experiences which different types of user communities might expect to see in evolving cultural heritage services.
Of particular importance, was the need for ordinary citizens to be able to access, interact and create cultural resources reflecting their own artistic interests.
Success here would depend on systems able to make use of adequate knowledge representation of complex, heterogeneous cultural objects.
Hilde van Wijngaarden, National Library of the Netherlands, explained how the increasing complexity of digital documents and the multiplicity of formats to be preserved render their accessibility and long-term availability a key challenge for future work.
Franco Niccolucci, PIN University of Florence, coordinator of the EPOCH Network of Excellence [14], saw the main challenges for the research as first, the use of technology to enhance preservation and scholarship in cultural heritage, particularly in the area of data volume, representation and organisation of knowledge, and second, bringing history to life for the citizen, which had a potential benefit for the education and tourism sector.
Paolo Cignoni, ISTI-CNR, reported on the result of ViHAP3D, an FP5 project which had developed prototypes of a scanning tool for the acquisition of accurate and visually rich 3D models, for post-processing and efficient rendering (interactive and inspection), and for the presentation and navigation in high-quality digital model collections.
In addition to these interesting presentations, participants had an opportunity to discuss recent developments and challenges in the area of digital heritage in the context of the Commission's new work programme.
A Catalyst for New Partnerships The items described above are just a small, but perhaps representative selection of the sessions and other attractions of the event.
Just as important were the informal meetings between researchers from various fields of technology and from different areas of application who had a common interest in participating in future projects.
There was every indication that the coffee and lunch breaks, not to mention the conference dinner, provided excellent opportunities for networking and brainstorming.
In particular, participants from the new member states and from countries outside the EU could exchange ideas and priorities with those who had practical experience of IST projects.
It will be interesting to see how these preliminary discussions translate into exciting new proposals submitted to Call 4 (Learning) and Call 5 (Scientific and Cultural Heritage).
Pertinent information and news items will be posted on our Web sites for Techology-enhanced Learning [15] and Cultural Heritage [16].
References IST 2004 at a Glance http://europa.eu.int/information_society/istevent/2004/glance/index_en.htm IST 2004 Event Participate in your future http://europa.eu.int/information_society/istevent/2004/index_en.htm Facing the Challenge The Lisbon strategy for growth and employment Report from the High Level Group chaired by Wim Kok, November 2004 http://europa.eu.int/comm/lisbon_strategy/pdf/2004-1866-EN-complet.pdf European Research Area: Future of research Building FP7 http://www.cordis.lu/era/fp7.htm IST Advisory Group (ISTAG) http://www.cordis.lu/ist/istag.htm Research Themes in FP7 http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/future/themes/index_en.html The European IST Prize http://www.ist-prize.org/ Sixth Framework Programme 2002 2006 http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/fp6/index_en.html Work Programme: 2005-2006 Work Programme http://www.cordis.lu/ist/workprogramme/fp6_workprogramme.htm Directorate E Interfaces, knowledge and content technologies Applications Information market Unit E3 Technology-enhanced Learning; Cultural Heritage: Mission statement http://www.cordis.lu/ist/directorate_e/telearn-digicult/ PROLEARN Network of Excellence Professional Learning http://www.cordis.lu/ist/directorate_e/telearn/fp6_prolearn.htm Lab@Future http://www.labfuture.net/ KALEIDOSCOPE Concepts and methods for exploring the future of learning with digital technologies http://www.cordis.lu/ist/directorate_e/telearn/fp6_kaleidoscope.htm EPOCH Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage http://www.cordis.lu/ist/directorate_e/digicult/epoch.htm Unit E3 Technology-enhanced Learning; Cultural Heritage : Mission statement http://www.cordis.lu/ist/directorate_e/telearn-digicult/ Directorate E Interfaces, knowledge and content technologies Applications Information market Cultural Heritage : Introduction http://www.cordis.lu/ist/directorate_e/digicult/ Author Details Gabriella Szabo On assignment to DG Information Society Unit Technology-enhanced Learning and Cultural Heritage IST Return to top Article Title: "Participate in Your Future: The IST2004 Event " Author: Gabriella Szabo Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/ist2004-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Mapping the JISC IE Service Landscape Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mapping the JISC IE Service Landscape Buzz data mobile software rdf framework api rss portal infrastructure archives metadata doi browser identifier schema repositories eprints copyright oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 gis aggregation purl uri openurl uddi srw dspace authentication webct url research sfx Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell provides a graphical representation of how some well-known services, projects and software applications fit within the JISC Information Environment technical architecture.
This largely graphical article attempts to explain the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) [1] by layering a set of fairly well-known services, projects and software applications over the network architecture diagram [2].
The JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) technical architecture specifies a set of standards and protocols that support the development and delivery of an integrated set of networked services that allow the end-user to discover, access, use and publish digital and physical resources as part of their learning and research activities.
The key standards and protocols specified in the technical architecture are listed in the JISC IE Architecture Standards Framework [3].
Before looking at the diagrams below, (for which a larger original is available), it is probably worth noting a couple of points: Firstly, the services, projects and software applications listed here are intended to be seen as examples of the kinds of activities happening at that point in the architectural diagram.
The list is in no way intended to be exhaustive.
Apologies in advance to anyone who thinks that their very important activity should be listed but isn’t!
Secondly, the placement of individual services, projects and software applications at particular places on the diagram is somewhat arbitrary, in some cases more so than others.
In particular, remember that almost all the activities mentioned below offer some kind of user-interface direct to the end-user and can therefore be thought of as presentation layer activities, at least to a certain extent.
The intention here is to select the core function of the chosen service, project or software application and to position it accordingly.
The reader is, of course, free to disagree with the author’s analysis!
The terminology used in the architecture diagram used below is defined in the JISC IE glossary [4].
Presentation layer services Presentation layer services provide the end-user with a “personalised, single point of access to a range of heterogeneous network services, local and remote, structured and unstructured”.
Almost all access to JISC IE services is currently through the end-user’s Web browser, though there are some exceptions to this (see below).
In the future, one can anticipate increased access to services through mobile technology such as phones and PDAs.
Institutional portal activities, such as that being undertaken by the PORTAL project at the University of Hull, will provide members of the institution with a single, personalised interface to many of the resources they need to undertake their research, learning and teaching activities.
Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL) Subject portals, such as those being developed by the Resource Discovery Network Subject Portal Project (SPP) and the LTSN Learning and Teaching Portal, provide the end-user with a discipline or topic specific view of available resources.
Subject Portals Project Learning and Teaching Portal Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), a.k.a.
Learning Management Systems (LMSs), provide the student with a single environment within which he or she can discover and access learning resources and carry out learning-related tasks.
Blackboard WebCT Library portals extend the functionality offered by the library catalogue, typically including cross-searching of local and remote collections.
ZPORTAL MetaLib As mentioned above, most access to JISC IE services is through the end-user’s Web browser.
There are some exceptions however.
Desktop reference managers, like EndNote and ReferenceManager, and other desktop tools such as FeedReader and the Google toolbar, provide the end-user’s desktop with much of the functionality one might expect to get from portals and other services.
EndNote Reference Manager FeedReader Google Toolbar Fusion services Services in the fusion layer bring together metadata records, by searching (using Z39.50 or SRW), gathering (using the OAI-PMH, RSS/HTTP and/or HTTP) or manual cataloguing.
Commercial abstracting and indexing services like ISI Web of Science are hard to place within the JISC IE architecture.
They are shown here as an ‘index’ (based in part on the generic name of the type of service that they offer).
Given that they don’t make content available directly (only metadata about content), abstracting and indexing services do not belong in the provision layer.
However, the increased portalisation of these kinds of services (for example in the form of ISI Web of Knowledge) means that aspects of their services could easily be positioned in the presentation layer.
ISI Web of Science Service for UK Education The two services that feature heavily in end-user surveys of approaches to resource discovery are Google and the library catalogue.
Services like Google build full-text indexes from fairly unstructured content (‘Web pages’ made available from ‘Web sites’) in the provision layer.
With the development of machine interfaces to such indexes (in the form of the ‘Google APIs’) these services can be said to fit firmly into the fusion layer.
Google Web APIs (beta) In addition to its human-oriented Web sites, the RDN also offers machine interfaces to its catalogues of high-quality Internet resources.
The interfaces take the form of Z39.50 and SRW targets, as well as more ad hoc approaches to embedding the RDN service within institutional services in the form of RDN-Include.
Similarly, Amazon also offers machine interfaces to its catalogues.
Working with the RDN Amazon Web Services Library catalogues are another resource discovery service that feature highly in the experience of students and researchers.
Most library automation applications support machine interfaces to the catalogue in the form of a Z39.50 target, though the software isn’t always configured to have this feature enabled.
Sirsi Unicorn Talis There are a number of Rich/RDF Site Summary (RSS) news-feed aggregation services available on the Web.
Probably the best known is that offered by Syndic8.com.
In addition to a human-oriented Web interface, such services also typically offer machine interfaces in the form of aggregated RSS channels.
Syndic8.com Another form of aggregation is that offered by OAI service providers such as the ePrints UK Project.
Such services aggregate metadata records from multiple repositories; in the case of ePrints UK these are enhanced through the use of a number of Web services, before making them available for searching or harvesting using Z39.50, SRW or OAI-PMH.
Celestial is a service that harvests metadata from repositories that support the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and caches that data for other services to harvest.
ePrints UK Celestial Open Archives Gateway Brokers, like that offered by the Xgrain project, take a query from a presentation layer service and pass it on to one or more content providers in the provision layer.
Results from multiple content providers are merged and ranked before being passed back to the presentation layer service.
Xgrain OpenURL resolvers OpenURL resolvers accept metadata about an item, encoded in the form of an OpenURL, and provide the end-user with a set of links to delivery services where the item can be obtained and to value-added services associated with the item.
Most OpenURL resolver services are expected to be offered within the institution, typically by the library, using software such as SFX from ExLibris.
SFX Sirsi Resolver Where the institution does not offer an OpenURL resolver itself, a national default OpenURL may be offered for use by anyone in the UK higher and further education community.
Experiments in this area are being undertaken by the ITAM and ZBLSA projects.
In some cases, institutional resolvers may be hosted off-site, for example using the 1Cate service from Openly Informatics.
However, it is arguable whether this should be considered as a true ‘shared service’.
MIMAS ITAM: SFX Trial ZBLSA 1Cate Shared infrastructure Shared infrastructural services support the activities of all the other services within the JISC IE.
Identifier resolver services, such as those offered at purl.org, dx.doi.org and hdl.handle.net, take an identifier encoded as a URI and return an HTTP redirect to the current location of the resource being identified.
PURL Digital Object Identifier Handle system Service registries provide machine-readable information about available services.
The JISC IE Service Registry will make available information about the collections and services that are available as part of the JISC IE.
UDDI.org (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) provides a global registry of Web services.
JISC IE Service Registry Pilot Project UDDI “Find” service The Athens Access Management System provides a single, shared authentication and authorisation service for the UK higher and further education community.
Athens for Education A variety of other Web services are, and will become, available including those covering terminology, institutional and user preferences and metadata schema registries.
Examples of Web services currently available or being developed include OCLC’s Dewey auto-classification service and Southampton’s citation analysis services (both being trialled as part of the ePrints UK Project).
OCLC Metadata Switch ParaCite Content providers Content providers make content available.
Content is the stuff that end-users want to get at scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, learning objects, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections.
Content made available by institutions will increasingly be managed in the form of eprint archives and/or learning object repositories.
EPrints.org DSpace Content will also continue to be made available through nationally managed repositories such as those currently offered by the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) and the learning object repository being developed by the JORUM project.
AHDS JORUM+ Content is also made available directly by the publishers, for example the Institute of Physics Publishing and Blackwell Publishing, and through intermediaries such as ingenta.
Institute of Physics Publishing Blackwell Publishing ingenta Finally, some disciplines will continue to develop subject-specific repositories such as those currently available at arXiv and Cogprints.
arXiv.org e-Print archive Cogprints Conclusion The purpose of this article has been to illustrate the JISC IE by showing where various services, projects and software applications fit into the architectural diagram.
The fact that the positioning of some services is a little arbitrary is not a serious problem.
The network service diagram is not intended to be a straightjacket into which all services must neatly fit.
In any case, as indicated in the final slide of a recent presentation about the JISC IE technical architecture [5], end-users are unlikely to perceive a neatly regimented hierarchy of services anyway.
Furthermore, as can be seen from the list of services, projects and software applications above, the architecture is not intended to say that the only route to content is through a presentation layer ‘portal’, i.e.
moving from front to back through the diagram.
Services will interoperate with each other in a variety of ways, sideways across the diagram as well as front to back.
The diagram helps services to see where they fit within the bigger picture and informs the selection of standards and protocols needed to allow different services to interoperate with each other.
References Investing in the Future: Developing an Online Information Environment http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ie/ JISC Information Environment Architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ JISC Information Environment Architecture Standards Framework http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/standards/ JISC Information Environment Architecture Glossary http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/glossary/ JISC IE Architecture external trends and their potential impact http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/tech-trends-2003/ Author Details Andy Powell Assistant Director, Distributed Systems and Services UKOLN Email: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Mapping the JISC IE service landscape” Author: Andy Powell Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/powell/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works Buzz data software rdf framework wiki dissemination xml archives metadata identifier vocabularies namespace schema repositories eprints copyright oai-pmh hypertext marc aggregation uri frbr openurl dcmi dspace foaf z39.88 licence interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Julie Allinson, Pete Johnston and Andy Powell describe a Dublin Core application profile for describing scholarly works that makes use of FRBR and the DCMI Abstract Model.
In May 2006, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] approached UKOLN [2] and the Eduserv Foundation [3] to collaborate on the development of a metadata specification for describing eprints (alternatively referred to as scholarly works, research papers or scholarly research texts) [4].
A Dublin Core (DC) [5] application profile was chosen as the basis of the specification given the widespread use of DC in existing repositories, the flexibility and extensibility of the DCMI Abstract Model [6] and its compatibility with the Semantic Web [7].
The main driver for this work was the establishment of a three-year project to aggregate content from repositories and offer cross-searching and other added-value services [8].
Drawing on the conclusions of the ePrints-UK Project [9] and the findings of the ongoing PerX Project [10], JISC was quick to identify that the quality and consistency of metadata would be a critical success factor for this project.
The work was carried out over a three-month period from May to July 2006, before moving in early August into what we have termed our community acceptance period.
A working group of invited experts was assembled to contribute to the development of the application profile both in person and through an active email discussion list and the project deliverables were developed in the open, collaborative arena of the UKOLN Repositories Research Team wiki [11].
The core deliverables were a functional requirements specification, the application model, application profile and usage guidelines, eprints XML schema and 'dumb-down' guidelines.
The ensuing article offers a whistle-stop tour of the development process that led to the production of these deliverables and the application profile as a whole.
Identifying Metadata Requirements for Describing Scholarly Works Identifying the functionality that we need to support is an important first step if the profile is going to be fit for its primary purpose.
Current practice for repositories is to expose simple DC records over OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) [12] as mandated by that protocol.
However, it is widely agreed that simple DC has limitations that pose problems for repository developers and aggregator services.
Issues relating to normalised names, use of controlled subject vocabularies or other authority lists, dates and identifiers are common and many were identified in the course of our functional requirements gathering.
From the work specification supplied by JISC, we defined our primary use case in developing an application profile for scholarly works as: supporting the Intute repository search project to aggregate richer, more consistent, metadata from repositories.
Through liaison with that project, a review of existing standards and previous project findings, plus consultation with our working group, we established a set of scenarios from which we derived an extensive list of functional requirements [13].
Principal amongst these were the following: Provision of richer, more consistent metadata.
Facilitate search, browse or filter by a range of elements, including journal, conference or publication title, peer-review status and resource type.
Enable identification of the latest, or most appropriate, version and facilitate navigation between different versions.
Support added-value services, particularly those based on the use of OpenURL ContextObjects [14].
Implement an unambiguous method of identifying the full text(s).
Enable identification of the research funder and project code.
Facilitate identification of open access materials.
Note that by 'open access' we mean "free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."
[15] The Application Model In order to build up a DC application profile for scholarly publications we first need to develop an application model.
This model shows the entities that we want to describe in DC and the key relationships between those entities.
It is critical to undertake this modelling step in the development of any application profile.
Without it, users of the application profile may become confused about which entity is being described by any given metadata property.
As a simple example, imagine developing an application profile to describe a personal audio CD collection.
One might choose to model the following set of entities: the collection and its owner, each CD, the recording artist and the record label.
Each of these entities could then be described separately, using a specific set of properties for each entity.
We refer to such a model as the application model.
The application model for scholarly publications presented here [16] is based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [17.
FRBR is an entity-relationship model developed by the library community for the entities that bibliographic records are intended to describe.
FRBR models the bibliographic world using four key entities: work, expression, manifestation and item.
This article does not attempt to summarise the FRBR model in any detail.
Readers that are not familiar with it are encouraged to consult the FRBR documentation [17].
In the context of this model an eprint is defined to be a scientific or scholarlyresearch text (as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative [18]), for example a peer-reviewed journal article, a preprint, a working paper, a thesis, a book chapter, a report, etc.
The Model Figure 1 shows the Eprints application model Although FRBR is used as the basis of the model, some of the entity and relationship labels used in FRBR have been modified for this model, in order to make them more intuitive to those dealing with eprints and to align them with the terminology used in DC: DC FRBR ScholarlyWork Work Copy Item Agent Corporate Body isExpressedAs relationship 'is realized through' isManifestedAs relationship 'is embodied in' isAvailableAs relationship 'is exemplified by' isCreatedBy relationship 'is created by' isPublishedBy relationship 'publisher' attribute of a Manifestation A ScholarlyWork is a distinct intellectual or artistic scholarly creation.
The isExpressedAs, isManifestedAs and isAvailableAs relationships can be thought of as 'vertical' relations between the ScholarlyWork and its Expressions, between an Expression and its Manifestation and between a Manifestation and its Copies.
There are also 'horizontal' relationships between different Expressions of the same ScholarlyWork (e.g.
the 'has a translation' relationship in FRBR), different Manifestations of the same Expression (e.g.
the 'has an alternative' relationship in FRBR) and so on.
These 'horizontal' relationships have not been included in this model.
Software applications may be able to infer some of these 'horizontal' relationships by navigating up and down the 'vertical' relationships.
In natural language, what the above model says is: A ScholarlyWork may be expressed as one or more Expressions.
Each Expression may be manifested as one or more Manifestations.
Each Manifestation may be made available as one or more Copies.
Each ScholarlyWork may have one or more creators, funders and supervisors.
Each Expression may be have one or more editors.
Each Manifestation may have one or more publishers.
The most common forms of Expression of an eprint are the various 'revisions' that it goes through (draft, pre-print, ..., final published version, etc.)
and its different translations.
Therefore, the most important Expression to Expression relationships required are isVersionOf/hasVersion and isTranslationOf/hasTranslation.
Attributes A critical part of developing the application model is to identify the key attributes that will be used to describe each entity in the model.
Initially, this can be done in a fairly generic way, noting for example that we want to capture the 'title' of the ScholarlyWork but not worrying about whether we are going to use DC Title or some other kind of title.
The key attributes for each of the entities in our application profile are listed below.
Attributes of a ScholarlyWork title subject abstract grant number has adaptation identifier (URI) Attributes of an Expression title description date available status version number or string language genre / type copyright holder has version has translation bibliographic citation references identifier (URI) Attributes of a Manifestation format date modified identifier (URI) Attributes of a Copy date available access rights licence is part of identifier/locator (URI) Attributes of an Agent name family name given name type of agent workplace homepage mailbox homepage identifier (URI) A Note on Implementing This Model Using DC Metadata Many of the above relationships and attributes can be implemented fairly easily using metadata terms already defined by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [5].
DC metadata is sometimes only considered capable of describing flat, single-entity, constructs a Web page, a document, an image, etc.
However, the DCMI Abstract Model [6] introduces the notion of a description set, a group of related descriptions, which allows it to be used to capture metadata about more complex sets of entities, using application models like the one described here.
DCMI is currently developing a revised set of encoding guidelines for XML and RDF/XML, which will allow these more complex, multi-description, description set constructs to be encoded and shared between software applications.
The Application Profile and Vocabularies The application profile provides a way of describing the attributes and relationships of each of the five entities as part of a description set.
The profile also identifies mandatory elements, provides usage guidelines and offers illustrative examples.
Note that for this application profile, we have made very few elements mandatory.
Indeed, all that a minimal description set must include is either: a single ScholarlyWork description with at least one dc:title statement and one dc:type statement indicating that this is a ScholarlyWork entity, or: a single ScholarlyWork description with one dc:type statement indicating that this is a ScholarlyWork and one eprints:isExpressedAs statement linking to a single Expression description with at least one dc:title statement and one dc:type statement indicating that this is an Expression.
All other aspects of the application profile are optional.
It is not the intention of this article to offer a full analysis of the different metadata properties and readers should refer to the documentation for further information [4].
Briefly, the profile makes use of properties from a number of schemes: the DC Metadata Element Set (simple DC) [19], DC Metadata Terms (includes qualified DC terms) [20] and the MARC relator codes [21] all provide terms.
Properties from the Friends of a Friend (FOAF) Scheme [22] introduce some semantic web flavour and only five new properties have been created from scratch: grant number, affiliated institution, status, version and copyright holder.
Where existing dc:relation qualifiers have been used, the relationships being documented have been clearly defined alongside five new properties: has adaptation has translation is expressed as is manifested as is available as To aid fulfilment of several of the functional requirements further, four vocabularies have been defined for: access rights (Open, Restricted or Closed) entity type (ScholarlyWork, Expression, Manifestation, Copy or Agent) status (Peer Reviewed or Non Peer Reviewed) resource type Figure 2 shows the resource type vocabulary as an extension of the value 'Text' in the DCMI Type scheme [23].
Figure 2: Eprints Type Vocabulary Eprints DC XML: An XML Format for the Eprints Application Profile At the time of writing (January 2007), the DCMI does not define an XML format to support the serialisation of DC description sets as described by the DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM).
The existing DCMI recommendation Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML [24] pre-dated the development of the DCAM and is based on two simpler 'abstract models' for DC metadata which are described in that specification itself.
The DCMI Architecture Community [25] is currently considering a working draft [26] that describes a new XML format which is based on the DCAM, with the intention of producing a new DCMI recommendation, probably in early/mid-2007.
Since the Eprints application profile makes use of the full range of features of the DCAM, the serialisation of description sets based on that application profile requires a format which supports those features, so the working group has defined an XML format known as Eprints DC XML [27].
The format is based very closely on the latest drafts being considered by the DCMI Architecture Community, although it does make use of different XML Namespace Names from those used in the DCMI drafts.
Figure three shows an example instance of the Eprints DC XML format: Figure 3: Eprints DC XML instance A W3C XML Schema and a RELAX NG [28] Schema for Eprints DC XML are available.
The Eprints Application Profile and 'dumb-down' One of the requirements of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) specification [12] is that, for each "item" in a repository, the repository must support the dissemination of metadata records in the "oai_dc" "metadata format".
"oai_dc" is a format defined by the OAI-PMH specification to serialise "Simple DC" description sets.
Simple DC is an application profile in which: the description set comprises a single description each statement within that description references one of the 15 properties of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set [19] each of those 15 properties may be referenced in multiple statements each statement has a single value string each value string may have an associated language tag there is no use of resource URIs, vocabulary encoding scheme URIs, syntax encoding scheme URIs, value URIs or rich representations The Simple DC profile is used by many systems as a 'lowest common denominator' for basic interoperability, and the process of transforming description sets based on some richer application profile into description sets based on the Simple DC profile is sometimes referred to as 'dumb-down', reflecting the fact that such a transformation involves a loss of information content.
The working group provided a mapping from the Eprints application profile to the Simple DC application profile [29].
Because a description set based on the Eprints application profile typically contains multiple descriptions, each of a single resource, the mapping generates multiple Simple DC description sets from a single Eprints application profile description set.
In the proposed mapping, the resulting Simple DC description sets describe the eprint only at the ScholarlyWork and Copy levels.
The Simple DC description set for the ScholarlyWork complies with the guidelines specified by the ePrints-UK Project [30].
This is not the only possible approach to mapping the Eprints application profile to Simple DC.
For example, it would also be possible to map to a group of Simple DC description sets, one for each entity in the model or to a single Simple DC description set only about the ScholarlyWork.
However, the working group felt that the chosen mapping offered the most useful set of simple DC descriptions with minimal loss of information.
Conclusion: Towards Community Acceptance This application profile represents a relatively innovative approach to metadata, taking as it does the FRBR model and applying it to scholarly works.
By making use of the benefits afforded by the DCMI Abstract Model, the profile is able to group descriptions of multiple entities into a single description set.
Overall this approach is guided by the functional requirements identified above and the primary use case of richer, more functional, metadata.
It also makes it easier to rationalise 'traditional' citations between 'expressions' and 'modern' hypertext links between 'copies', as well as supporting navigation between different versions and the identification of appropriate, and, we hope, open access, full-text copies.
In practice, this seemingly complex model may be manifest in relatively simple metadata and/or end-user interfaces.
Furthermore, it is likely that many repositories already capture the metadata properties identified in the profile, but are prevented from usefully exposing this metadata to other services by the limitations imposed by simple DC.
Yet the application profile alone cannot bring about interoperability or provide Intute and other aggregators with the metadata necessary to offer rich functionality.
For this we need community uptake by repositories and repository software developers, agreement on common approaches and most of all, Eprints DC XML metadata being generated and exposed.
There are growing signs that our community acceptance and dissemination activities to date are generating momentum, with support built into the newly released GNU Eprints version 3, alongside statements of support from DSpace and Fedora [31] developers, interest from European colleagues and lively discussions at the recent DC 2006 and Open Scholarship 2006 conferences in Mexico and Glasgow.
References The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ UKOLN, University of Bath http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ The Eduserv Foundation http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ Eprints Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) http://dublincore.org/ Powell, Andy, Nilsson, Mikael, Naeve, Ambjörn and Johnston, Pete, DCMI Abstract Model.
DCMI Recommendation, May 2005 http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/ W3C Semantic Web Activity http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ Intute Repository Search Project http://www.intute.ac.uk/projects.html Eprints UK Project http://eprints-uk.rdn.ac.uk/project/ PerX Project http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/ Repositories Research Team wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/ Lagoze, Carl, Van de Sompel, Herbert, Nelson, Michael and Warner, Simeon.
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
Protocol Version 2.0 of 2002-06-14. http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/openarchivesprotocol.htm Eprints Application Profile Functional requirements specification http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Functional_Requirements ANSI/NISO Z39.88 -2004: The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services http://www.niso.org/standards/standard_detail.cfm?std_id=783 Budapest Open Access Initiative: Frequently Asked Questions http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess Eprints Application Model http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Model IFLA, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, 1998 http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf Budapest Open Access Initiative http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1.
DCMI Recommendation.
April 2006. http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ DCMI Usage Board, DCMI Metadata Terms, DCMI Recommendation, December 2006 http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office, MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions, January 2007 http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/ Brickley, Dan and Miller, Libby, FOAF Vocabulary Specification, January 2006 http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ DCMI Usage Board, DCMI Type Vocabulary, DCMI Recommendation, August 2006 http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/ Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete.
Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML.
DCMI Recommendation.
April 2003. http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/ DCMI Architecture Community.
http://dublincore.org/groups/architecture/ Johnston, Pete and Powell, Andy.
Expressing Dublin Core metadata using XML.
DCMI Working Draft.
May 2006. http://dublincore.org/documents/2006/05/29/dc-xml/ Johnston, Pete.
Eprints DC XML.
November 2006. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_DC_XML OASIS RELAX NG Technical Committee http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=relax-ng Powell, Andy.
Mapping the Eprints Application Profile to Simple DC.
August 2006. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Mapping_the_Eprints_Application_Profile_to_Simple_DC Powell, Andy, Day, Michael and Cliff, Peter.
Using simple Dublin Core to describe eprints.
Version 1.2. http://eprints-uk.rdn.ac.uk/project/docs/simpledc-guidelines/ Eprints Application Profile Community Acceptance Plan http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Community_Acceptance_Plan Author Details Julie Allinson Repositories Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: j.allinson@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Pete Johnston Technical Researcher Eduserv Foundation Email: pete.johnston@eduserv.org.uk Web site: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ Andy Powell Head of Development Eduserv Foundation Email: andy.powell@eduserv.org.uk Web site: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ Return to top Article Title: "A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works" Author: Julie Allinson, Pete Johnston and Andy Powell Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/allinson-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: The Altavista Relaunch, Personalised Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: The Altavista Relaunch, Personalised Search Engines Buzz data portal zip copyright video passwords personalisation url standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley on the Altavista relaunch, and Personalised Search Engines.
AltaVista relaunch I don’t know how many of you were aware that AltaVista [1]was going to relaunch, so it may have come as something of a surprise if you visited after October 25th only to find the general appearance had changed.
It was even a surprise for those of us who use it regularly!
The re-launch has led to lots of confusion, many unhappy people and lots of comments, so before continuing with the rest of the column this month I’ll do my best to set the record straight about what is happening with the engine.
I think that it’s a move that AltaVista had to make their interface was looking increasingly out of date and old fashioned, and they were (and still are) facing a lot of competition from the likes of Yahoo!
[2] with it’s portal services, Northern Light [3] and FAST [4], both of which have boasted indexes larger than that provided by AltaVista.
As well as making changes to the engine, we’re going to be faced with an advertising campaign over the next year, costing them a reported $120 million.
I suppose it will at least make a change from the adverts I’ve seen on television for Lycos, which to my mind are rather less effective and rather more annoying than their advertising company thought.
However, while it was a good idea to re-launch, I’ve seen very little other than criticism for the new system.
It’s certainly a much busier page than it used to be; I had to hunt for ages in order to find the ‘Add URL’ link for example.
Though I think it’s a valid criticism, it doesn’t particularly bother me, since I just look for the search box and ignore the rest!
However, if you’re introducing new users to it, they may find it rather more daunting now than they did previously.
The next criticism that has been levelled at the service is much more serious people are apparently finding many less references to their pages or sites than they found with the old version.
Of course, the first thing that I did was to do a search for me, and I was astonished to find one reference to my site instead of the 70 or 80 that I used to get when doing a host:philb.com search.
However, the reason for this quickly becomes clear AltaVista is now ‘clustering’ similar pages or sites together.
A link under the returned reference offers ‘more pages from this site’, which if you click on that will return all the pages that the engine is aware of from that particular site.
When I tried this I was given a listing of the 70 or so pages that I was used to seeing.
This approach has both advantages and disadvantages.
It can make it much more difficult to find the exact page that you want, and it has certainly upset web authors who previously spent much time ensuring that all of their pages got a high rating.
However, the advantage is that it is now possible to see an increased number of pages, with less clutter, and users don’t need to wade through 10 or 20 returned hits in order to see references from more than one site.
However, the ‘more pages from this site’ link isn’t as clear as it could perhaps have been, and I suspect that a lot of users are simply going to miss this small, but crucial link.
Another criticism levelled at the service relates to the number of pages which are indexed.
AltaVista say that they now index 250,000,000 pages, which would once again put them right at the top of the tree, but at the same time I’ve never seen so many web authors complaining that their site(s) has disappeared.
The newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines has been full of such complaints.
Some sites certainly have disappeared, and this has been blamed on the company using an older version of its index.
However, they have promised to update the index and are processing requests for sites to be spidered.
Being charitable, I think it can be put down to a glitch in the system, but it has caused some embarrassment, which has overshadowed the re-launch.
My experience has been that a lot more pages are now available another of my standard searches is (deliberately poorly constructed, so please don’t send me mail about it!)
‘car cars automobile jaguar’.
Pre re-launch I’d commonly get about 2,000,000 hits, while post re-launch this has gone up to over 14,000,000 hits.
Other points briefly worth mentioning are that AltaVista has beefed up its category approach; they’ve obviously decided that Yahoo!
knows a thing or two, and are doing their best to match them.
‘News’ (under the search box) gives you the latest news headlines, but once again, this seems to be a poor imitation of what Yahoo!
does; if I want new headlines I would still go there rather than to AltaVista (though if I’m to be honest, I’d probably use the BBC or Capital Radio websites for that information).
The ‘My AltaVista’ has now changed into AltaVista Live!
but still looks pretty much the same as it always did.
‘Discussions’ provides a better way of searching newsgroups (though I’ll still use Deja.com for that), but the ‘Images, Audio & Video’ tab does lead you into a first rate way of finding information in other than a text only format.
There is still an Advanced Search function, though it still seems pretty meaningless to me; other than searching by date it doesn’t offer any more than some of the advanced search features you can use on the normal search page.
Overall I’d say that I think AltaVista has improved and is still a good engine to use, but the manner of that improvement may well cost them dear; I’ve not read of anyone using it because of the upgrade, but I’ve heard of lots who have gone elsewhere.
If you’re interested in following up on the changes, you might be interested in the following news stories: “AltaVista loses search results” by Jim Hu, staff writer, CNET News.com [5]and “AltaVista De-Indexes Web Search” by Chris Oakes [6].
Personalised search engines Unusually for me, I’d actually written my piece for Ariadne well in advance for once, and had decided to write about the ability to personalise search engines.
However, the Altavista story knocked that off the top spot, but rather than consign the article to the cyber waste paper basket thought I’d still include it.
So this month you get two items for the price of one!
In order to be successful, search engines need to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
They have to be comprehensive, current, and provide searchers with the right results to their queries.
However, this is simply the start; they need to draw people back to them time and time again in order to promote the services and products that bring in revenue for them.
In Internet jargon, they need to become ‘sticky sites’ which people will keep returning to ideally as their home page of choice.
Simply being a good search engine (and by ‘good’ I mean finding relevant material quickly) is no longer enough they need to provide added value and services to increase their attractiveness to the people who use them.
Consequently, over the last couple of years we’ve seen search engines trying to outdo each other by providing more and more facilities (and unfortunately it has to be said, sometimes at the expense of ensuring better interfaces and increased search techniques).
One area in which the major players are battling head to head is over the personalisation of the engines, by allowing their users to create a custom built web page that covers the subject areas that they are interested in.
It is this personalisation that I’d like to spend some time exploring in this article.
I’ve looked at a number of search engines; Lycos [7], AltaVista [8], Excite [9] and Yahoo!
[10] and concentrated on the options that they have available, how easy they are to use, any special personalisation techniques and the extent to which they have become (for me at least), ‘sticky’.
When I started looking at these sites my original idea was to look at each of the search engines previously mentioned and to compare and contrast their offerings.
However, it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be possible, for one simple reason they are almost all exactly the same!
If I ignored identifying features such as names and logos it was almost impossible to tell them apart.
Consequently I’ll look at all the features available, and point out when one search engine differs from the others, before drawing my conclusions.
Let’s first start with the names of the personalised services My Lycos, My AltaVista (I don’t know if someone at AltaVista got hold of my article before I published it, because they have since renamed the service to AltaVista Live, overcoming some of my later criticisms!
), My Excite and My Yahoo!
My point is immediately proved; surely one of them could have come up with something a little more original?
Each service requires that you register, which is no surprise at all, and they want to know the details that you would expect; name, age, address, location, user name/password and areas of interest.
Yahoo!
was the only one of the four which didn’t assume users are going to be American, since it provided a ‘Non-US’ registration form (though it still expected some sort of Zip code and didn’t like it when I couldn’t provide something in the format it was expecting).
Various enticements were offered to me to keep me informed about happenings on the Internet, various deals and so on.
Since I get enough unwanted email I very carefully unticked all the appropriate boxes, and I would suggest that you do the same.
I was then taken to ‘My (insert search engine of choice) Home Page’ and was able to start configuring the system to provide me with news and current events of interest.
The subject coverage was almost identical in every case; I could chose to have up to 10 headlines in areas such as American News, World News, Business Information, Sports, Health, Science, Technology, Entertainment, Local Interest (by which they all mean American local interest), Weather, Stocks and Shares and… well, you get the picture, I’m sure!
It was possible to further identify subject areas within some of the categories.
In the ‘News’ section of My AltaVista I was able to specify National, International, Financial, Entertainment, Technology, Sports, Health, Science, Opinion and Politics for example.
It will also come as little surprise that the bias was heavily towards the United States, although My Yahoo!
did allow me to choose up to 13 different categories of UK news in their section ‘News from Europe’.
Interestingly, My Yahoo!
also allowed me to chose up to 200 UK locations for the weather, compared to 6 UK cities in My Lycos, none in My AltaVista and 26 UK locations with My Excite.
It was however disappointing that some features, such as Sports scores, Television listings, Lottery numbers and so on were all limited to the United States.
The information sources used for new and breaking stories was however a little more cosmopolitan in nature.
They all seemed to draw quite heavily on Reuters as a major source, although My Yahoo!
did appear to have something of an edge here, with a much wider coverage it was possible to choose such sources as The Scotsman, the Independent and the Daily record for example.
The actual process of choosing subjects was again identical, with an ‘Edit’ box for each section.
Simply by clicking on this I was then taken to another page where I could configure the system to include or exclude various fields or types of information, and once happy with my choice I could submit this and then return to my newly created page.
Further personalisation was also possible by choosing additional subject areas; with My Yahoo!
I found an extra 62 categories hidden away, with such things as ski reports, maps and vitamins and herbs that I could add to the page; it’s worthwhile really checking out what is available, since many of these options are rather hidden away.
Quite what I’d do with information on vitamins and herbs I’m not entirely sure however, but I’m certain that many people out there are desperate for such information.
All the services allowed me to chose how to present information on the screen, where to place the different news sections, and what colours to use.
In case you’re wondering, I chose the colour option ‘Wet Sand’ with My Lycos, and had a picture of Tower Bridge adorning my ‘My Excite’ page.
Once you’ve spent time customising the page itself you can then go onto explore other features of the systems.
I now have so many email addresses I don’t know what to do with them, and I am sure I could wallpaper my walls with the variations of ‘My Calendar’ that I have got.
Chat rooms, bulletin boards, free webspace for home pages, member directories and horoscopes were all beckoning to me.
(As an aside, it was interesting to read the horoscopes they did a splendid job of contradicting each other!).
It’s obvious to see why the search engine producers are providing all these free utilities and extra data, since wherever I went, subtle adverts were being pushed at me from various parts of the screen.
Since the services offered were all free it seems churlish to complain about it, and after a while my eyes just glazed over them, which obviously wasn’t the intention!
However, after a while, all the clicking and changing colours and positions of material on the screen begins to pall, and you start looking at the content of the headlines that you are being provided with.
And surely this is the whole point of the exercise as far as the end users are concerned; is all this choosing and clicking resulting in the useful provision of information?
At this point I’m going to have to sit slightly on the fence.
It has to be said that yes, I did find some useful and interesting material in subject areas that I concentrate on.
I was quickly able to see lead stories regarding the Internet for example that I would have found difficult to have obtained easily from elsewhere.
However, when it came to World or European news stories I was kept up to date much better by the two minute news bulletins that Capital Radio puts out every half an hour.
The trouble is you see, that you can only really customise these services so far.
If someone wants to know what is happening in the world of Business and Finance they’re going to have many other information resources available, or if they want stocks and shares information they’ll have access to real time quotes, rather than the 20 minute delayed versions available with the ‘My XYZ’ services.
At best they are a blunt tool for information gathering, although to be fair they could be valuable in keeping you up to date in subject areas that you have a passing, rather than crucial interest in.
There were certainly some features that I could find useful in the future; My Lycos allowed me to choose up to 20 categories on new book releases, together with brief reviews, and the same service used a ‘Personal Notifier’ which ensured that news and stocks information could be emailed directly to me.
The Daily Briefings provided by Real Networks via ‘My Yahoo!’ could also prove to be valuable, and I was quite interested in the News Tracker Clipping Service courtesy of ‘My Excite’.
Finally, the question needs to be asked and answered ‘Would I use any of these on a daily basis?’ I can say with no doubt at all that I wouldn’t use all of them, unless I was a real news junkie; if you’re the type of person who reads four newspapers before breakfast that comprehensive coverage might appeal, but since I’m not that sort of person it doesn’t appeal in the slightest.
Unfortunately for the search engine providers I have to go on to say that I don’t think I’d use any of them myself on a regular basis.
They may come in useful if I had a sudden need of current information in an area that I don’t know particularly well, but in the main I can keep up to date quite nicely by newsgroups and specifically mailing lists.
None of the ‘My XYZ’s provided me with really precise and closely tailored information, and although they might give me some pointers they could do no more than that for me.
Having said that, and in attempt to redress the balance slightly, I don’t think the services are particularly aimed at information professionals.
Given the scope of the subject headings, and the emphasis on sports and other leisure/entertainment offerings they seem to be trying to attract the casual Internet user who wants a ‘one stop shop’ which they can use as an default home page to keep roughly up to date with what is happening, to check the weather and to read their horoscope.
If you have clients or users who fit that image it would certainly be worth pointing them towards any of these personalised services, and I think they could get quite a lot out of them.
As for me?
I’ll stick to my mailing lists, focused searches using the traditional search engines, intelligent agents and last but not least, the two minute news reports from Capital Radio.
References 1.
Altavista http://www.altavista.com 2Yahoo!
http://www .yahoo.com 3Northern Light h ttp://www.nlight.com 4FAST http://w ww.alltheweb.com 5 AltaVista loses search results http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1426414.html 6 AltaVista De-Indexes Web Search http://www.wired.com/news/verity_index/story/0,1419,32246,00.h tml 7Lycos http://personal.lycos.de/Personal/uk/ 8Altavista htt p://www.altavista.com 9Excite http://ww w.excite.com 10Yahoo!
http://my .yahoo.com Author Details   Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens, Feltham, Middlesex TW13 4QY Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Article Title: “The Altavista Relaunch / Personalised Search Engines” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999  Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/search-engines/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Recipe for Cream of Science: Special Content Recruitment for Dutch Institutional Repositories Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Recipe for Cream of Science: Special Content Recruitment for Dutch Institutional Repositories Buzz data software database infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus standardisation identifier blog repositories copyright oai-pmh dspace research standards Citation BibTex RIS Martin Feijen and Annemiek van der Kuil describe the Cream of Science Project, part of the DARE Programme, which generated a Web site offering open access to almost 25,000 publications by 207 prominent scholars across the Netherlands.
Results Cream of Science: The Challenge One of the key challenges of the DARE Programme [1] is to encourage scholars to deposit digital versions of their research output in a university archive (institutional repository) that, in turn, can make this output accessible on the Internet.
With this in view, a project called Cream of Science was initiated in the summer of 2004.
One of the prime aims of Cream of Science is to unlock top quality content to the scientific community and make it more easily and digitally accessible.
Another target is to demonstrate that scholars are willing to deposit their materials in a repository, thereby also increasing the awareness of other scholars.
All DARE partners selected ten of their prominent scientists and made their complete publication list, with as much full text available as possible, visible and digitally available through DAREnet.
All in all, almost 24,000 full text publications were made accessible by means of the repositories.
The project ran from October 2004 to April 2005.
The purpose of this article is to share the experience of the journey into Cream, the results and the lessons learned.
Selecting the Cream Cream of Science aimed to create a selection of prominent Dutch academics, not necessarily the best 150 in the Netherlands.
There was no objective criteria to define ‘prominent’, so each DARE partner was free to use whatever selection mechanism it wanted.
Most of them used a formal method; selection by the Executive Board and/or using a letter from the Dean to invite academics to be part of Cream.
In some cases, the University Librarian undersigned the letter.
Follow-up was carried out by (faculty) librarians, using personal contacts to convince academics to join the team.
In some cases, Faculty Deans did this work and/or helped to facilitate the process.
The response was generally positive, but a small group still held back.
Nevertheless, between January and May 207 academics joined Cream.
Initially the goal was 150, so we were already witnessing a ‘me-too’ effect.
It is interesting to note that nobody was forced to join Cream.
Instead, Cream was joined by those who shared the project’s aims and objectives.
Launch and Celebration The launch of Cream was part of a two-day leadership conference ‘Making the Strategic Case for Institutional Repositories’, organised by SURF, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK.
All Cream Scientists were invited, as well as the Executive Boards of all universities and participating organisations and the seventy international repository experts attending the conference.
Regrettably, a number of scholars were unable to attend the celebrations, which led to significant disappointment, but all in all a total of 60 scholars were able to attend and enjoy the festive occasion.
Figure 1: Prof. Dr. Frits van Oostrom launches Cream of Science (Photo courtesy of Theo Koeten Photography) The site was launched in style on 10 May 2005 in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences’ (KNAW) Trippenhuis, by Prof. Dr. Frits van Oostrom, KNAW’s President, who was petitioned by attending fellow ‘Cream of Scientists’ to open the site.
During the launch, six institutions signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
These were NWO, the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Leiden University and JISC, SURF’s counterpart in the United Kingdom.
KNAW and SURF had signed the Berlin Declaration previously.
Signatories intend to encourage their researchers/grant recipients to publish their work according to the principles of the open access paradigm.
Since 10 May, two other universities have signed the Declaration (Delft and Groningen) and LIBER also signed the Declaration on 22 September 2005.
In addition to the official launch, all people involved in the project were invited to a surprise celebration.
Sharing their experiences, successes and frustrations with colleagues from other universities in a relaxing atmosphere was highly appreciated.
Within just a day of its launch on May 10, DAREnet registered half a million hits.
Over the next two days some very unexpected things started to happen: newspapers were publishing short items about Cream, radio reporters were calling for interviews and the Web site was overwhelmed by visitors.
Subsequent technical problems caused the Web site to crash several times after this and it took two days to stabilise it.
More importantly, numerous Cream scientists were proud to be part of the project and mentioned it in their weblogs, Web sites etc.
Researchers were also enthusiastic about the initiative.
A number of them now refer to www.creamofscience.org on their own Web site for a complete overview of their work.
They regard ‘Cream of Science’ as a hallmark of quality.
Some media reports, particularly those published outside the Netherlands, suggested that the site was a declaration of war by universities against academic publishers.
This is not the case.
On the contrary, some publishers, such as Springer, are co-operating with the ‘Cream of Science’.
DARE’s primary objective is to share knowledge and the site is one means of achieving this aim.
Results in Facts and Figures Cream of Science consists of: 15 institutions 207 authors (187 male, 20 female) 40,479 records (average of 195 records per author; ranging from 3 to 1,224 records per author, per institution) 23,853 documents are full text available (59%, ranging from 19% full text availabiltiy to 96% per institute) 25% is copyright obstructed, 15% only metadata available at the moment, 1% is lost.
Statistics for DAREnet Statistics for DAREnet Month Unique visitors Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth May 2005 35,762 49,538 746,208 1,471,585 8.74 GB June 2005 17,054 21,582 105,008 342,388 2.53 GB July 2005 9,462 11,676 45,990 140,967 1.07 GB as of 10 May 2005 Due to both national and international media attention following the launch on 10 May, the initial number of visits to the Web site was unexpectedly high.
Although predictions were about 50,000 searches between May and December 2005, this target was met in just a single day.
This meant the site encountered an overload for a while, but the problem was soon resolved.
It was, of course, impossible to keep this high score and the summer period certainly contributed to the drop in numbers.
Statistics for the following months will show whether or not visitors find DAREnet and Cream of Science interesting enough to visit again.
Project Issues and Topics Copyright For most libraries and authors, copyright is an important issue.
DARE has no copyright policy, but a copyright approach.
A major step is the publication by DARE of an analysis of author publisher contracts.
Much to the surprise of the DARE community, it was clear that all materials published before or during 1997 could be part of a repository without any copyright restrictions.
Publishers had, up to then, not incorporated electronic publication into their contracts.
After 1997, they changed their contracts and included the digital version as part of the copyright agreements.
Another surprise was that most authors did not really know what exactly they had signed up to, thus giving away their copyright to a commercial publisher.
Most DARE partners decided to stay on the safe side, either because their scientists wanted it that way, or because the library had a ‘strict’ policy.
But, on some locations, a majority of scientists decided that they wanted to include all publications in the repository, regardless of copyright.
Many libraries spent a lot of time and effort finding out which articles were copyright-free and which were not, by using the Publishers’ Copyright Listings via the Sherpa Web site [2].
This proved to be a very time-consuming task and in some cases this activity was therefore terminated.
For materials published before or during 1997, both PDF’s and metadata were stored in the repositories.
For materials published after 1997, which still had copyright restrictions, only metadata was available.
As a result, Cream gives open access to almost 60% of the documents on the publication lists: publications whose copyrights have never been transferred like reports, dissertations and conference proceedings are open access; publications before or during 1997 where the digital copyright was never transferred.
Most of these have been scanned; some publications published after 1997 : where authors unconcerned by any potential confrontation with their publisher(s) explicitly direct their inclusion in Cream; permission was sought to scan a number of monographs and this was granted by the publisher without any problem; the publishers saw this as promotion of their printed collection; articles published in open access journals; last but not least: Springer co-operated with the Cream of Science project, allowing worldwide access via DAREnet to the articles of the 207 participating scientists.
The other 40% of Cream materials are not freely accessible.
Copyright restrictions after 1997 represent the largest hurdle.
Content Metadata One important observation in Cream was that many libraries did not have metadata to cover the publication lists of the Cream scientists.
They all had metadata records available for their monographs and journals, but most of them (except for the technical universities) did not hold metadata for the individual articles.
Since metadata input was based on the publication lists provided by the authors (i.e.
researchers etc., not cataloguers), the quality was sometimes very poor.
Some institututions tried to add metadata (using both internal and external sources), but due to a lack of manpower and time this was not always feasible.
For this reason, Cream does not always offer a complete metadata record.
Scanning Less then 20% of materials published before or during 1997 is available in digital form in DARE repositories.
So a lot of scanning needed to be done.
This was done either by an internal scanning department or outsourced.
The outsourcing was centrally organised by DARE and outsourced to Strata.
All DARE partners gathered the articles from their library archives.
Articles that were not available were obtained via centrally organised inter-library loan from other libraries.
It turned out that 1% of the publications were lost because it was impossible to find a printed or digital version of the original document.
This fact clearly shows that repositories serve a valuable purpose.
Strata developed dedicated software to link metadata with scanned object files.
A very tricky logistical problem was the integration of the separate workflows input of metadata, scanning, inter-library loan and the local lending process of volumes that had to be transported from library to Strata and vice versa.
Special documentation was written to make this process work, but for most libraries this caused problems and misunderstandings.
Quality issues needed to be addressed.
Scanned articles that came out of inter-library loan requests were initially of low quality.
Everybody realised this was all pioneering work, never attempted before elsewhere in this way.
As a consequence, the expression ‘trial and error’ acquired a deeper meaning.
Harvesting Because Cream of Science is part of DAREnet (read more about this in the next paragraph), sets [3] are used for harvesting.
The ARNO and DSpace sites had to implement a set mechanism because both systems did not support sets, as defined by OAI-PMH.
Other systems found other working solutions.
By 8 May 2005, just in time, harvesting of the final version was ready and the DAREnet platform was frozen in order to have a stable version for the official opening on 10 May.
Web site Cream of Science [4] is a part of DAREnet [5].
DAREnet was launched in January 2004.
Initially its purpose was to demonstrate the network of the local collections of digital documentation held by all the Dutch universities and several related institutions, presenting them to the user in a consistent form.
This also makes it possible to search one or more of the repositories concerned.
DAREnet is unique.
No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its academic research output in digital form.
In the space of a year, DAREnet now serves not only to demonstrate the network but also the usefulness of repositories, permanent storage and open access.
The 2004 version of DAREnet was a demonstrator, not a production platform.
With Cream, this needed to change and performance, stability and functionality needed to be improved.
DARE programme management decided to start a pilot with the SURFnet Search Engine (which uses the FAST software, also used by Scirus and others) for DAREnet.
Later, in January, the pilot having proved itself successful, the new version of DAREnet was implemented, though this parallel activity did occasion additional pressure on the Cream Project.
DAREnet harvests all digitally available material from the local repositories, making it searchable.
But it limits the harvest to those objects that are full content available to everyone.
Toll-gated objects (e.g.
publications held by publishers who only provide access through expensive licences) are not harvested by DAREnet and can only be found in the local repository.
This means that the total content of all repositories in the Netherlands inevitably exceeds that of the content that can be found in DAREnet.
However, DAREnet guarantees free and open access to all its content for everyone, with no restrictions.
Cream of Science is an exception to this rule of open access.
In order to attract maximum interest to Cream of Science it was decided to give access to the complete overview of publications of the 207 selected scientists, therefore including copyright-restricted publications.
Due to these copyright restrictions, about 60% (approx.
25,000 items) is fullcontent available.
Of the other 40% only metadata is available.
Figure 2: Degree of overlap between DAREnet and Cream in open access availability For all Cream scientists, a personal page was set up containing basic information: photo, affiliation, research field(s) and specialism(s), awards and, if available, there is a link to their personal Web site.
Added value is provided by the link to the most recent list of publications available through the repositories.
We have also provided a Project Chronology for readers interested in following the history of the project.
Lessons Learned Evaluation: The Library’s View We asked the libraries for their views on the results of Cream.
Some general observations can be made although it must be stressed that local conditions vary greatly.
One thing all DARE partners experienced was a ‘post-Cream anti-climax’.
People had worked really hard to realize the project’s aims and some time to unwind was badly needed.
Libraries reported the following benefits from Cream: For some, funding has been granted for follow-up projects on Cream to improve quality, add new content and add new academics to the local repository For some, temporary or longer term manpower has been added to the library’s workforce Great, some or no enthusiasm for DARE and Cream have all been attested by local academics Criticism of metadata, scan quality and DAREnet functionalities (too limited and sloppy; limited full-text indexing) Increased awareness of DARE, repositories, open access Improved relations with faculties Improved relations with academics Repositories are here to stay!
Workflow and infrastructure still need a lot of tuning and optimisation Exposure (national): all institutional media paid attention to the Cream Project and its results Exposure (international): Google Scholar has indexed DAREnet, including Cream.
Because of the pioneering work that needed to be done, many people had to stretch their imagination, their skills, their patience and their commitment to collaborate and improvise.
This was not an easy task, for anyone.
Despite the time pressures, it must be said that Cream generated a lot of enthusiasm and dedication.
It was fascinating to see people grow in terms of their personal development and skills.
For them, this was not just a lesson learned but an important experience in their professional lives.
Problems and solutions The work done by the DARE libraries was pioneering in many ways.
Below, we offer the reader a list of the most important problems encountered and the solutions that we have chosen.
Problem Solution Organisational problems Local Selection of Cream scientists Local decision by library, faculties or university management board No manpower Local: engage temporary manpower; Central: additional funding and creation of support DARE teams Central No hard data for planning of necessary capacity Using best-guess estimates and adjusting during the process High-volume contract but low-volume use of support Use the money for higher quality (greyscale scan instead of bi-tonal), or more support from Strata to solve errors in metadata or downloads into the repository Workflow integration of metadata, scan, inter-library loan No effective solution was found.
Daily trouble-shooting was used to remedy this Incorrect ideas about copyright Analysis of author publisher contractsUsing the special SURF Web site on copyright Not 100% Open Access and digital availability Accepting what is; Asking some publishers about their willingness to co-operate and to give special permission for Cream-publications Experimenting with tweaking [6] of PDFs Technical problems and solutions Author name variations Use of a standard list during metadata input and a formatted list in DAREnet [7] Journal title abbreviations and variations Use of a standard list during metadata input Crash after launch due to unforeseen high number of hits Adding additional server(s) Costs The SURF Foundation is co-ordinator and co-funder of the DARE Programme.
Therefore, SURF was also financially involved.
The original budget for costs for Cream on the SURF-side of the project was Euro 100,000.
Later, this budget was raised to Euro 200,000 because of the additional number of scientists.
This budget was used to cover the costs of scanning, metadata input by support teams (labour) and inter-library loan.
There are no exact figures on the costs incurred by the DARE partners at the local level.
But there are some estimates.
Estimation of the total cost of Cream is Euro 10,000 per scientist.
We estimate that Euro 8,000 per scientist were spent by the library and Euro 2,000 by SURF.
Of these Euro 2,000, about Euro 1,000 was spent on scanning, metadata input and inter-library loan.
All other costs at the SURF level and locally related to staff effort (manpower).
This means that we spent Euro 50 for each Cream publication, Euro 45 on staff effort and Euro 5 on other costs.
Compared to the average cost per hardcopy publication in a traditional library process, the costs per Cream publication are certainly not higher.
On the contrary, Cream processes had to be invented on the spot and were not streamlined and standardised.
We expect to be able to reduce the costs to about Euro 10 per publication once the processes and infrastructure have been improved.
Conclusions Scientists are willing to deposit their output in repositories when the circumstances are right.
Cream resulted in a short-term ‘me-too’ effect and mid-term expansion via new local Cream-like projects.
Cream has created much more awareness of repositories in the scientific community, improved relations between scientists and libraries and an important growth in the content of Dutch repositories.
Added value for the scholars involved is the digital availability of as many of their publications as possible, the logistics involved, and the resulting extra exposure.
Cream has demonstrated that repositories are here to stay and that they serve many purposes, one of them being the prevention of publication loss.
Although this diverse collection of 207 Dutch leading scholars cannot (yet) be seen as a major source of academic information, the myth that material in institutional repositories is of low quality is now a thing of the past.
The Netherlands are at the forefront of international repository developments and Cream has been an enormous impulse for the open archive community, on a national and international level.
As much as we wanted Cream of Science to be Open Access (being part of DAREnet), offering the scholars their complete publication list (full text available or only metadata) was essential to securing their involvement.
Although challenging in its logistics, a project like Cream of Science can be done.
The final product is not perfect at all, but, as in many other examples, the journey into Cream was more important in itself than the resulting Web site.
Average cost per document was Euro 50, which is less than process costs for a hardcopy document in a traditional library setting.
Costs can be reduced to Euro 10 per document once processes and infrastructure become more standardised, thereby improving cost-efficiency.
The technical infrastructure needed for a networked national repository system, like that of the Netherlands, needs a lot of improvements and fine-tuning.
Existing tools and solutions are still very young and will benefit greatly from being redesigned and/or enhanced.
Cream in itself is not enough to keep the DARE train rolling.
New ideas need to be developed to improve awareness among academics and to ‘seduce’ them into loving repositories.
The ego factor seems to play an important role, but that’s only on the outside.
Libraries really need to go into the faculties, learn to speak the language of the scientific community and co-create the tools that are needed for new, innovative scientific communication.
It is difficult to anticipate the (media) attention such a project will receive.
But the more the better.
Don’t be too modest.
Do anticipate an initial rush on the Web site.
Do’s and Don’ts Do involve scientists and reassure them that there are benefits in repositories.
Connect with them and talk their language, not yours.
Do co-ordinate the selection process for scholars carefully, both with executive boards, faculty and with scholars.
Do use your enthusiasm to keep on track, despite adverse situations.
Do allow people to develop, despite potential frustrations.
Do make a project plan before you start (if you have the time).
And discuss the plan with all the people involved to get the right basic data and commitment.
But be aware that you will have to improvise.
The plan itself is not a guarantee that the project will be successful.
Do shop around and force suppliers to be competitive.
Don’t go for a fixed-price, fixedvolume deal unless you are absolutely sure about your volumes.
Do communicate a lot (daily) with the people who really do the work and help them as much as you can.
Do not allow scanning quality to be poor.
Demand better quality from inter-library loan suppliers.
Do accept the fact that repositories and repository software are still very immature and that you will encounter things that do not work yet or not in the way you would want them to work.
Be flexible and jot down what needs to be improved later.
Do celebrate and reward the work by the people who made the end result possible.
Don’t worry too much about copyright.
Before or during 1997 it is not an issue, after 1997 it makes no sense to check each individual publication.
Most of the post-1997 publications do have copyright restrictions and you have to make up your mind how you deal with this, whether in a liberal (e.g.
tweaking) or stricter fashion.
Don’t use separate suppliers and/or workflow streams for metadata input, scanning and ingest into the repository.
Make the workflow as simple as possible.
Don’t underestimate the workload on library personnel and don’t ignore current (old) library policies.
For example, no head of a lending department allows journal volumes to leave the building.
Future Plans Life after 10 May 2005 After the initial overload situation, traffic on the Web site slowed down, media attention disappeared and life went back to normal, or so it seemed.
Libraries turned their attention to things that had been postponed because of the workload for Cream of Science.
A new problem arose: what do we do with new material that Cream scientists now start to offer to the library?
Some libraries are writing project plans for follow-up on Cream.
For example, Utrecht University has decided to add 15 scientists to their Cream scientists and Tilburg University has decided to spend additional money to expand the local Cream activities.
Improving Infrastructure Because of the comments made about infrastructure and workflow in respect of Cream, DARE programme management discussed this with the DARE partners in meetings held in May and June 2005.
There were two major themes.
The first one was to stabilise and improve the infrastructure and workflow.
There is still too much that has to be done manually, systems are not integrated seamlessly, input, processing and output still need a lot of attention; there are quality issues and so forth.
The DARE partners stated that the last year of the DARE Programme needs to focus on these improvements.
As a result, DARE is already drawing up a proposal for optimisation to be implemented in 2006.
The second theme was continuation.
All DARE partners agreed that there needs to be a DARE 2 programme.
Cream of Science is a catalyser, but more and longer-term effort is needed to realise a platform for improved scientific communication with repositories as a tool for the scientists.
We are currently discussing what approach can help us to create a DARE 2 programme.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to the project leaders involved who have given their input to this article.
References The DARE programme ‘Digital Academic Repositories’ is a joint initiative of Dutch universities to make all their research results digitally accessible in a standardised way.
The programme is co-ordinated by the SURF Foundation http://www.surf.nl/ Sherpa http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Set = a term used in the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol relating to a subset of metadata records in a repository database.
Cream of Science http://www.darenet.nl/nl/ DAREnet http://www.creamofscience.org/ Tweaking: One library decided to experiment with tweaking PDF’s.
They took postprints, removed the publisher’s information and layout, reformatted the text into a new layout, while keeping the start and end page numbers the same, inserted university information (e.g.
logo) and created a new PDF.
The time required was too prohibitive to continue this strategy on a larger scale during the Cream Project.
But the experiment has not been terminated and it is expected that a software tool can be written (or may already be available) to make this a more feasible approach.
Standardisation of author names: The lack of standard forms of Cream author names caused several problems.
For a project like Cream these problems can be overcome with temporary solutions.
In the long run a more robust approach is necessary.
As part of the DARE Programme a DAI (Digital Author Identifier) will be implemented in the first half of 2006.
Currently a special project has been started to prepare the DAI infrastructure.
The PICA author name thesaurus will be used as a basis.
Author Details Martin Feijen Member of DARE Programme Management / Partner and Corporate Coach of Innervation BV Email: feijen@surf.nl Web site: http://www.innervation.nl Annemiek van der Kuil DARE Community Manager SURF Foundation Email: vanderkuil@surf.nl Web site: http://www.surf.nl/en/oversurf/index.php?cat=Organisatie&oid=21 Return to top Article Title: “A Recipe for Cream of Science: Special Content Recruitment for Dutch Institutional Repositories” Author: Martin Feijen and Annemiek van der Kuil Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/vanderkuil/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Building Open Source Communities: 4th OSS Watch Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Building Open Source Communities: 4th OSS Watch Conference Buzz software apache firefox copyright e-learning vle gpl moodle licence uportal Citation BibTex RIS Sebastian Rahtz and Randy Metcalfe report on a one-day conference on open source software development communities organised by OSS Watch held in Edinburgh on 4 July 2005.
When people get together and talk about open source, there are three things that come into the conversation early on.
Firstly, they argue about open source licences; secondly, they ask "but is it really free?
"; and thirdly, they state that "it's all about the community".
That last one is definitely worth unpacking further.
When a new project starts, or an existing project is being assessed, everyone will ask "what sort of community does it have?"
Moreover, it might be thought that community is something for which you can find a recipe.
This is just the sort of question the 4th OSS Watch [1] national conference, Building Open Source Communities, set out to answer on 4 July in Edinburgh.
You may remember July 4th.
That was a day or so after Live8, and 2 days before the G8 summit.
Unfortunately, Bob Geldof and Tony Blair had not consulted OSS Watch about their events.
We were, therefore, a little apprehensive about attracting people up to Edinburgh for the event, but in the end we had a very lively gathering of people to listen to a varied day of talks at the University of Edinburgh.
Bill Olivier, JISC Development Director (Systems and Technology), opened the conference, speaking about JISC's interest in the open source phenomenon.
He took the opportunity to start the process of publicising JISC's soon-to-be published open source policy, which was approved by JISC committees earlier this year.
Amongst other matters, the policy discusses the importance of sustainable communities.
The OSS Watch manager, Sebastian Rahtz, started the discussion of communities by trying to break down the ways in which open source users and developers group themselves together [2].
A community of developers is not the same as a community of users; furthermore, the open source method may simply be a way for programmers to work together efficiently.
He enumerated some of the roles people may take within a community (leader, project manager, programmer, documenter, disseminator, enthusiast, etc), and offered the well-known projects of Apache, Firefox, Moodle, Debian [3] and uPortal as successful examples of different approaches.
He stressed the importance of understanding the type of community one wants to build, instead of blindly copying the working methods of Apache and expecting to have similar recognition.
Sebastian Rahtz thanks Jim Farmer for agreeing to speak at Building Open Source Communities Jim Farmer, a familiar and welcome face from the uPortal and Sakai [4] projects, took the subject of communities wider [5], and placed open source in the context of traditional commercial software vendors.
As these companies, he argued, take open source ever more seriously, so discussions about licensing and the various open source business models become more than academic.
The idealistic notions of free software, perhaps associated with the GPL licence, face many challenges as open source is embedded into corporate business plans.
After coffee, Helen Sharp, from The Open University Computer Science Department and the Centre for Empirical Studies of Software Development, took us on a very different journey [6] into the world of Extreme Programming (XP) [7], and Agile [8] development in general.
Since open source enthusiasts have made much of the importance of Eric Raymond's "bazaar" style of development [9], we wanted to hear whether Agile is the same thing under another name, or relevant solely in a closed source environment.
Dr Sharp has studied XP in practice in software companies, and described the basics of the methodology with reference to a set of real-life scenarios.
The talk inevitably left a lot of questions unanswered, but the relevance to the methodologies in informal use in open source groups was obvious.
The oft-expressed mantra of "release early, release often" was put into context by showing how it fits into XP's quite formal structure.
Helen Sharp from The Open University talks about co-located agile development Gustav Delius, from the University of York Mathematics Department, brought us back to the type of JISC community with which most of the audience were probably familiar [10].
He leads the successful Serving Maths Project, which has developed ways of embedding maths-related teaching exercises in a variety of VLE programs.
Gustav represented here a community neither of users nor developers, but of practitioners, maths teachers who wanted a working tool.
This was an important new viewpoint, though in practice Gustav turned out to be yet another admirer of Moodle [11], a theme which continued through the day.
After lunch, the meeting focused even more on the workings of real projects.
Andrew Savory, Director of Luminas [12] and a Cocoon committer, took us on a detailed tour [13] of the Apache [14] Project, describing the decision-making processes, the legal structure, and the history.
Two points came over clearly.
Firstly, Apache is based on a hierarchical technical meritocracy, in which developers come in at the bottom, prove themselves, then rise up a series of ranks to the top-level committee.
Secondly, Apache's formal status dates from when IBM and HP donated substantial amounts of code, and needed crystal clear agreements on copyright and future directions.
Finally, Sean Keogh talked [15] about the grass-roots MoodleMoot [16] meetings which he started in 2004.
As became clear throughout the day, Moodle has a very well developed and coherent community, not least because it attracts people more interested in teaching than in IT.
The MoodleMoot in 2004 was the first face-to-face meeting of users, and was rapidly followed by others around the world.
It shows how important meeting in person can be.
Sean is a UK Moodle Partner; this is another interesting development, in which those offering regular Moodle consultancy can gain a special status and in return tithe a proportion of their income back to the project.
A final panel session opened up a broad range of questions from the delegates and some thought-provoking answers.
Panel discussion session at the end of the day The OSS Watch communities conference took a broad approach to the subject, from moots to XP.
It did not attempt to offer participants a top ten steps they could take to guarantee a great community, or to identify infallible rules for sustainability.
The belief that the success of open source is dependent on communities remained true, but we were reminded of just how wide a range of activities community can describe.
References OSS Watch open source software advisory service http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ What is an open source software community?, Sebastian Rahtz, July 2005 http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2005-07-04/index.pdf Debian The Universal Free Operating System http://www.debian.org/ The Sakai Project http://www.sakaiproject.org/ Licenses, Features and the Open Source Community in Higher Education, Jim Farmer, 4 July 2005 presentation http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2005-07-04/I050704F_OSS_Watch.pdf Co-located agile development: community and culture, Helen Sharp and Hugh Robinson, July 2005, presentation http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2005-07-04/extreme.pdf Extreme Programming:A Gentle Introduction http://www.extremeprogramming.org/ Manifesto for Agile Software Development http://agilemanifesto.org/ The Cathedral and the Bazaar http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ Serving Maths: Experiences from a JISC Distributed e-Learning Project, Gustav Delius, July 2005, presentation http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2005-07-04/servingmaths.pdf Moodle A Free, Open Source Course Management System for Online Learning http://moodle.org/ Luminas Internet Applications http://www.luminas.co.uk/ Life and times in the Apache community, Andrew Savory, July 2005, presentation http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2005-07-04/community.pdf The Apache Software Foundation http://www.apache.org/ Meeting Real People Meeting Real People from a Virtual Community from a Virtual Community, Sean Keogh, July 2005, presentation http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2005-07-04/moodlemoot_presentation4b.pdf MoodleMoot Home Page http://moodlemoot.org/ Author Details Sebastian Rahtz Manager OSS Watch Email: info@oss-watch.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ Randy Metcalfe Communications Manager OSS Watch Email: info@oss-watch.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Building Open Source Communities: 4th OSS Watch Conference" Author: Sebastian Rahtz and Randy Metcalfe Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/oss-watch-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Support Models for Open Source Deployment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Support Models for Open Source Deployment Buzz data software java framework html xml portal apache linux e-learning vle licence uportal interoperability Citation BibTex RIS Sebastian Rahtz and Randy Metcalfe report on OSS Watch's one-day conference on support models held in London in June 2004.
OSS Watch's [1] second national conference focused on an often articulated anxiety concerning how an institution will answer the question of support when considering the deployment of open source software.
OSS Watch is a pilot advisory service set up by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to provide UK Higher and Further Education with neutral and authoritative guidance about free and open source software.
Whereas OSS Watch's inaugural conference in December 2003 [2] presented an overview of the entire field, this event concentrated on what is sometimes thought to be the single most significant barrier to institutional take-up of open source software.
Support Anxiety: The highest barrier to open source deployment?
Sebastian Rahtz, Manager, OSS Watch The first session of the day, chaired by Paul Browning, University of Bristol, started with a presentation from Sebastian Rahtz.
Sebastian set the scene by exploring some of the data gathered in OSS Watch's scoping study [3] on open source development and deployment in UK Higher and Further Education.
That study revealed that 37% of respondents (41% in the case of further education colleges) cited support as a major concern.
Such a reservation might be a very practical barrier to open source deployment.
Moreover, this could be a significant differentiator between open source and propriety software.
It could be the deciding factor when an institution is engaged in a procurement or deployment decision-making process.
But is this anxiety in fact well-founded?
The four models to be explored throughout the day do not exhaust the range.
They suggest that there is a spectrum of support options available.
But there is no silver bullet.
The surprise here, if there is one, is that the exact same thing can be said of support for proprietary software.
Increasingly open source and proprietary options share the same ground, e.g.
IBM or Novell support both, there are training companies who support both, there are books about both, help on the Web about both, and so on..
The difference, where there is one, returns to the rough ground fitness for purpose.
And that, Sebastian suggested, is probably the best basis for choice that anyone could recommend.
If open source is up to the job, or does a better job, that should be the reason it is chosen.
Support, perhaps, is, or is becoming, merely a co-factor.
Do It Yourself Adam Marshall, University of Oxford and Joel Greenberg, The Open University Adam Marshall [4] gave a personal account of his involvement in the development of the Bodington [5] Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), as deployed at the University of Oxford.
Bodington was developed in-house at the University of Leeds and was later 'open-sourced'.
That decision process itself might be worthy an independent case study.
Adam, however, concentrated upon Oxford's direct involvement in the project of taking Bodington development forward.
Bodington is a relatively small project in terms of participants (3 or 4 big sites); developers in Oxford therefore have close contact with its originating developer, Jon Maber.
Indeed, Adam noted that such contact was invaluable.
Amongst the difficulties in this deployment was the effort to convince funding bodies that money spent on development equated to money that might otherwise have been spent on a yearly licence for a proprietary VLE.
However, there have also been unexpected benefits.
With sufficiently experienced Java programmers now working on Bodington's development, Oxford has also been able to bid for other projects in the e-learning sphere and elsewhere; which taps an otherwise unreachable funding stream for ongoing development.
Joel Greenberg approached the DIY theme from the institutional perspective.
His presentation, Deploying Open Source Solutions in an eProduction System [6], demonstrated how, from the institutional perspective, there is little difference between open source and proprietary software.
From this more global view the issues tend to be those of interoperability and workflow.
Joel explained how The Open University had arrived at its eProduction environment.
This environment uses a mixture of proprietary and open source solutions moving from a localised implementation of Word 2003 for structured authoring, through an in-house tracker system and content management server, to XML conversion and later preview presentation as HTML via Apache Cocoon.
The choice at each step between open source and proprietary software was based strictly on fitness of purpose.
Where in-house solutions worked best, they were chosen; likewise when proprietary solutions worked best.
Pragmatism (and good practice), not ideology, were the driving factors.
Join a Consortium Ian Dolphin, University of Hull and Paul Cooper, OpenAdvantage The second session of the day was chaired by Andrew Savory, Luminas.
Already in the DIY session there had been considerable discussion about linking with other institutions to share solutions and development work.
Ian Dolphin's presentation, JA-SIG & uPortal: The Hull Experience [7], confirmed that in some cases such as institutional portal deployment, there is much to be gained through joining a consortium.
The consortium in this case was the uPortal project of the Java Architecture Special Interest Group (JA-SIG).
Players within this group include Yale University, Columbia University, University of British Columbia and other large North American institutions.
Ian noted that, among other reasons, it is certainly no bad thing for The University of Hull to be mentioned in such company due to its involvement in the consortium.
This raised an interesting point.
Deployment decisions may have ramifications at many removes from their direct application.
Sometimes decision-makers need to step a long way back in order to see the big picture.
Paul Cooper of OpenAdvantage knew the practical benefit of building consortia.
OpenAdvantage [8] is an independently funded vendor neutral organisation bringing together small and medium size businesses in the West Midlands with public sector institutions around the use and support of open source software.
Consortia can be large international ventures or they can be very local.
The importance is to leverage the different skills within the group for the advantage of all.
Get Consultancy Support John Merrells, Parthenon Computing and Michael Sekler, OS Consult The third session of the day was chaired by Mike Banahan, GBdirect.
Both presentations for this session involved open source consulting companies explaining what they are and what they do.
To some this may have sounded like a sales pitch.
That would have been no bad thing if it were true.
It is time to realise that small businesses are springing up to support open source deployments.
John Merrells [9] drew a distinction between direct and indirect support.
For some, support is about solving the 80% of deployment issues that prior experience with the software makes plain.
For others, support involves the need for the development of special features in the software.
Open source deployments, of course, make that second case far more practical.
Small consultancy firms often seek to cover both consultancy needs.
Michael Sekler's [10] firm is primarily focused on that second group.
They work closely with Wynona, the developers of Apache Lenya, a content management system based on the Apache Cocoon framework.
Vendor Support Simon Lidgett, Novell and John Heath, Sun Microsystems The final session of the day moved open source support onto an entirely new level.
Chaired by Tony Brett, University of Oxford, this session focused on the support for open source software provided by substantial corporations.
Simon Lidgett [11] of Novell began with an overview of the Novell solution for educational institutions.
Novell's solution offers a mixture of open source and proprietary software that builds a complete stack suitable for solving most needs.
Interestingly, the Linux operating system is a substantial component within the stack.
Novell do not treat open source as peripheral to their support packages.
Open source software is as fully supported as Novells' own proprietary software.
Of course this kind of support comes at a price.
But that too is consistent with the spectrum view of open source support.
John Heath of Sun took this opportunity to outline a new initiative within Sun for the education community: the Java Education and Learning Community (JELC) [12].
Sun is fostering a community to share Java-related open source educational tools, open learning standards implementations and open course learning materials.
Conclusion Support Models for Open Source Deployment was a lively day full of debate and discussion.
Sebastian probably got it right in his opening remarks: there is no silver bullet.
Support for open source is a broad church and there are many different models available.
What is most clear, however, is that the concern that there is no support available for open source is certainly unfounded.
Of course this does not mean that open source is necessarily on the same footing with proprietary software in every sphere of deployment.
Decisions, as ever, need to be based on the reality of what is available at the time.
But that begins to sound rather like simple, practical, advice that would be true whether you were thinking of deploying an open source or a proprietary solution.
Perhaps the fact that this comes as no surprise is itself the most surprising observation that could be gathered from this conference.
References OSS Watch Web site http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ Rahtz, S., Metcalfe, R., "OSS Watch Inaugural Conference: Open Source Deployment and Development", Ariadne 38, January 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/oss-watch-rpt/ OSS Watch Scoping Study http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/studies/scoping/ DIY Open Source http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2004-06-03/marshall.pdf Boddington http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodington/ Deploying Open Source Solutions in an eProduction System http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2004-06-03/greenberg.pdf JA-SIG & uPortal: The Hull Experience http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2004-06-03/dolphin.pdf OpenAdvantage http://www.openadvantage.org/ Consultancy Supported Open Source Software http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2004-06-03/merrells.pdf OS Consult http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2004-06-03/sekler.pdf Open Source and Linux within the Novell Value Proposition http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2004-06-03/lidgett.pdf Java Education and Learning Community (JELC) http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2004-06-03/heath.pdf Author Details Sebastian Rahtz Manager OSS Watch Email: info@oss-watch.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ Sebastian Rahtz is Information Manager at Oxford University Computing Services, and is also manager of OSS Watch.
He is also on the Board of Directors and Technical Council of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, and author of various open source packages in the XML and TeX worlds.
Randy Metcalfe Communications Manager OSS Watch Email: info@oss-watch.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ Randy Metcalfe is communications manager of OSS Watch, a role he previously filled for the Humbul Humanities Hub.
Return to top Article Title: "Support Models for Open Source Deployment" Author: Sebastian Rahtz and Randy Metcalfe Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/oss-watch-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Installing Shibboleth Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Installing Shibboleth Buzz data software wiki xml portal apache infrastructure archives metadata schema repositories windows linux passwords tomcat shibboleth saml licence authentication cookie research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Simon McLeish describes the experience of Shibboleth installation in a Higher Education environment, and suggests ways to make this experience more user-friendly.
What and Why Is Shibboleth?
One of the major issues that faces all today’s Internet users is identity management: how to prove to a Web site that you are who you claim you are, and do so securely enough to prevent someone else being able to convince the Web site that they are you.
There are many initiatives attacking the problem, with approaches both technical and legal.
Shibboleth [1] is a relatively new piece of software which concentrates on one specific area: trust management within the Higher Education community and between that community and the academic publishers which service it.
In this arena, there is one very important player: the institution.
Each individual in the community is part of some institution (university, college, research centre etc.
), and this institution knows a great deal about the individual.
This means that it becomes possible to separate the information about the individual (i.e.
that held by the institution) from the information about the resource (i.e.
that held by the publisher); this in turn makes it possible to anonymise the information about the individual in many cases, as most resources only need to know that a user is a member of an institution which holds a valid licence for access.
The purpose of Shibboleth is to provide a secure and verifiable channel for the transfer of information about the individual from the institution to the publisher.
The architecture of Shibboleth moves on from the clumsy or over-centralised models which have catered for the needs of the Higher Education community up to this point, and its widespread acceptance shows that this is the time to move forward.
Like many open source software packages, Shibboleth uses (and informs development of) standards.
The most relevant ones are Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) [2], which is used for the passing of information about access by Shibboleth; and eduPerson [3], an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) object class for describing individuals in Higher Education.
This is, like Shibboleth, a project which is part of the massive Internet2 [4] development initiative.
For those unfamiliar with Internet2, its overall brief is to fund development leading to the next generation of the Internet, and Shibboleth is part of its Middleware Initiative [5], focusing on developing the software between the network and applications, and related standards.
How Does Shibboleth Work?
Shibboleth has an extremely complex architecture, despite only implementing a selection of possible SAML assertions.
It divides into two major components, the Identity Provider (known as the origin up until version 1.2) and the Service Provider (formerly the target).
As the names suggest, the Identity Provider makes authenticated information about individuals available, while the Service Provider protects a resource, allowing access only to authorised users.
The two parts divide into several components, which sequentially deal with authentication and then provision of user attributes so that the resource can determine what the user is authorised to access.
Figure 1: Simplified Diagram of Shibboleth Architecture The trust architecture of Shibboleth is based on the idea of a federation.
This is a grouping of identity and service providers which agree on such issues as usage of attributes (e.g.
more precise shared ideas of what something like ‘member’ means than there is in the eduPerson specification) and where members provide metadata for distribution across the federation.
Federations can be extremely informal, like the InQueue Federation [6] set up by Internet2 for test purposes, or they can have membership conditions which are strict and complex, like the InCommon Federation [7].
Federations can have a small number of members (the smallest containing one of each type of provider), or a large number (though there are scaling difficulties with finding the relevant identity provider for an individual something which is the most immediately obvious limitation of the Shibboleth software).
Within a federation, fine-grained access control is, of course, possible: a Service Provider can deny access to a user even if they have been vouched for by an Identity Provider that it trusts, if the attributes sent to it by the Identity Provider do not show a right to use the resource.
Both the Identity and Service Providers can be members of several federations at once.
Installing the Shibboleth Identity Provider The Shibboleth Identity Provider requires a complex and up-to-date institutional infrastructure to be present prior to a full installation, and this needs to be planned properly before going ahead.
For testing, it is possible to omit a fair amount of what is required in the longer term, but such an installation will not be suitable for serious use.
The actual machine is reasonably standard, with a secure Web server and a servlet container (typically Apache and Tomcat, but it has also been tested with IIS for those irretrievably committed to Microsoft).
One point that does need to be borne in mind when planning an installation is that time needs to be allocated to obtain a server certificate, which can take up to several weeks, depending on the supplier used and the state of the institutional relationship with them.
Test and self-signed certificates may be used, but are not suitable for a production installation.
Note that many federations will place limitations on the particular certificate suppliers which can be used for verification of communication between members (because certificate information, including root certificates, also needs to be shared); Shibboleth also uses certificates for other purposes (e.g.
for securing HTTP connections), and these are not restricted.
The single requirement which may well lead to a significant amount of work is the need for an institutional repository which provides the data passed on by the identity provider as attributes: an institutional LDAP server is by a long way the most likely solution here.
While many institutions own an LDAP server (because most email servers come equipped with one), they are not always activated and are frequently little used except for address look-up from email clients.
Most Shibboleth Service Providers will require eduPerson attributes to be passed via the Identity Provider, and so the eduPerson schema needs to be loaded into the LDAP server and the attributes populated, something that in itself may require some debate within an institution (to determine what data fits best into each attribute).
At the moment, most resources accessible through Shibboleth do not require anything complicated in terms of attributes, so it is possible to carry out this process in stages; but at the very least, an Identity Provider is going to need to be able to give out a user’s eduPersonScopedAffiliation, and even there the value ‘member@institution.ac.uk’ is likely to be satisfactory.
Getting the eduPerson schema and data into the Windows ActiveDirectory LDAP server was the biggest single task involved in implementing the Shibboleth Identity Provider at the London School of Economics; the difficulty of this task will depend on the LDAP server and the ease of making the data available to it from other systems.
The documentation suggests that a WebISO installation is also needed, to provide the authentication needed by Shibboleth.
In fact, it is possible to get round this; I have installed an Identity Provider using mod_authz_ldap [8] to authenticate directly against the institution’s LDAP server, and this is probably an easier route to follow if the institution has no general need for an internal single sign-on system (such systems being complex software in their own right).
If this is the case, it is important that the userID and password used to authenticate to the LDAP server should be ones which are familiar to the user; if it is possible to use the standard network credentials, this is ideal.
For the Identity Provider, there are currently two main official documents which describe the installation process.
Both are useful, though they also have deficiencies.
One of these, the deployment guide [9], is a general description.
It can seem complicated and hard to follow.
The other, the checklist [10], is more informal and was developed specifically for the purposes of the Internet2 Shibboleth Installfest events, at which a roomful of system administrators are guided through the installation process.
This describes a simplified installation without the complex institutional prerequisites listed above.
It also uses informal server certificates that can be more easily obtained and so have no assurance.
This means that in places its instructions are not appropriate in the institutional context.
There are also a few places where the two documents disagree; this may be confusing, but following one or the other will work in most situations.
Neither document really tackles how to get things working if (as is almost certain) the installation doesn’t work first time; there is a (sketchy) FAQ [11] for this or the installers can google the shib-users [12] mailing list or indeed, post to it themselves.
The Shibboleth user community is still small, and it’s a friendly mailing list where the newbie can expect sympathetic treatment.
Testing can be carried out through a federation which allows this (InQueue Federation [6] or SDSS [13] for UK institutions), or (if the installer feels brave) by simultaneous installation of a local Service Provider.
Whatever you choose to do, the co-operation of the Service Provider to be used for testing is essential, as it is usually only by a comparison of the error messages at each end that problems can be diagnosed and fixed.
Most problems with new installations seem to be related to the metadata that the two providers use in their respective configurations to describe each other, once obvious problems such as incorrect firewall settings are fixed.
This is one reason why it is useful to test a new Identity Provider by connecting to a Service Provider which is known to work, and vice versa.
Installing the Shibboleth Service Provider Installing the Service Provider is for some institutions likely to be the logical next step once the Identity Provider is working.
(I say ‘some’ because not all will feel a need to do so.
Possible reasons for such a requirement might be to protect and share resources with other institutions or, more likely in the future perhaps, to provide single sign-on to many resources via an institutional portal).
This is also a complex process, though much easier once the Identity Provider has been installed: many of the same pitfalls can be avoided as a result of this experience.
There are RPMs available, and on Fedora Core 3 (the system I installed it on) these need to be used as they contain a bug fix not yet in the main source code release.
(This is something that I only discovered when a source code release failed to work and I searched the mailing list for a solution.)
Those wanting to use the RPMs need to be cautious: there were reports on the mailing list of clashes with other RPMs already installed, but this was not a problem I encountered personally.
The current release is also not compatible with the SELinux [14] security policies implemented by default on Fedora Core 3.
There is only a deployment guide for this installation [15], but it seems less complete than the companion Identity Provider document, so an installer is likely to need to spend a fair amount of time looking error messages up on the mailing list, particularly if they are not installing the Service Provider to use the InQueue Federation.
Some parts of the XML configuration are not documented at all, and need to be inferred from the configuration files distributed with the software.
Conclusions Shibboleth is a complex piece of software, and its installation is likely to stretch many institutions particularly when it comes to setting up the infrastructure needed for it.
It is essential to plan the process carefully, and to ensure that enough time is allocated.
The skills required are at the advanced end of system administration; experience in installing software beyond just downloading RPM files (or the equivalent for your favourite Linux distribution) is necessary, and expertise in handling Web server configuration will also be needed.
The difficulty of understanding Shibboleth is heightened by the out-of-date nature of the documentation of the architecture; it is hard to answer questions like ‘what is the role played by cookies?’ without recourse to the mailing list.
This documentation is currently being updated ready for the 1.3 release.
The Shibboleth software generally seems to work fine, once configured correctly.
Logging is reasonable, and when turned up to ‘debug’ level more than comprehensive enough to help locate a problem.
(One issue I experienced with the logging is that, when the Identity Provider is sharing a Tomcat server with other applications, it tends to take over the logging for all of them, so that log messages for the other applications will confusingly also appear in the Shibboleth log files.)
So far, there have not been any serious security concerns, and the issues that have been raised have been followed by quick updates fixing the problem.
The scalability issue in respect of federations, as mentioned above, is being addressed by the development team.
(However, the problem is one of interface design and is slightly out of their hands, as the information enabling a user to find their Identity Provider is likely to be displayed in a different fashion by each federation.)
Shibboleth has been widely accepted as the sensible way forward for authentication in the Higher Education context, being endorsed by national bodies elsewhere in Europe as well as in the UK and US.
More publishers are making their material accessible via Shibboleth all the time; for example, an Identity Provider set up with the SDSS Federation can provide access to a number of resources hosted at Edina and MIMAS (depending on your institutional licences) making a far better demonstration of the success of Shibboleth than the test sites that were previously available.
This means that time spent working on a Shibboleth installation is unlikely to be wasted.
This means that the only remaining impediment for institutions regarding Shibboleth is the difficulty of installing it.
This is a major hurdle, and has prompted eduServ, for example, to begin to write its own version of the software with the aim (in part) of making this a much simpler process.
The difficulty is partly that the Identity Provider is software for an inherently complex task, but there are definitely issues that would be worth working on here.
The obvious area for improvement with respect to ease of software installation is the documentation.
The existing documentation should be tidied up though production of documents is notoriously a low priority of open source developers.
The production of two install guides (even if intended for different purposes) for the Identity Provider which do not quite agree is even poorer than the average.
There have been several independent attempts to produce installation guides, particularly ones which focus on specific varieties of Unix or on Windows, which are worth consulting and which are easily found via a search engine.
These often contain details derived from the installation experience which could usefully be fed back into the general, official documentation, as this is seriously lacking in help with problem resolution.
It would not be fair to end without pointing out that work is currently under way to improve the documentation, using a new Wiki-based format (also accessible to members of the SDSS Federation), and this will, I hope, address many of these issues.
The current problem-solving model, where members of the development team tend to field queries on the mailing list, cannot continue to be supported as the number of installations increases, so improvements in the documentation of problem resolution are vital for the continued success of the software.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Masha Garibyan for the diagram, which is derived from one originally produced by SWITCH (Swiss Education and Research Network); to Ian Young, Masha Garibyan and John Paschoud for reading and commenting on a draft; to Ian Young and Fiona Culloch for help in joining the SDSS Federation; to Scott Cantor and Walter Hoehn for technical support.
References Shibboleth Project Web site http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ SAML Home Page http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=security eduPerson Home Page http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?PAGE_ID=949&bhcp=1 Internet2 Web site http://www.internet2.edu/ Internet2 Middleware Initiative Home Page http://middleware.internet2.edu/ InQueue Federation Home Page http://inqueue.internet2.edu/ InCommon Federation Web site http://www.incommonfederation.org/ mod_authz_ldap Home Page http://authzldap.othello.ch/ Shibboleth Identity Provider Deployment Guide http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/guides/deploy-guide-origin1.2.1.html Shibboleth Identity Provider Installation Checklist http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/guides/identity-provider-checklist.html The account of one such ‘Installfest’ can be read in Ariadne, issue 42, January 2005: Shibboleth Installation Workshop Shibboleth Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) https://umdrive.memphis.edu/wassa/public/shib.faq/shibboleth-faq.html shib-users mailing list: archive https://mail.internet2.edu/wws/arc/shibboleth-users joining instructions http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/shib-misc.html#mailinglist Shibboleth Development and Support Services Federation http://sdss.ac.uk/ SELinux Home Page http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/ Shibboleth Service Provider Deployment Guide http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/guides/deploy-guide-target1.2.1.html Author Details Simon McLeish Chief Technical Officer PERSEUS Project London School of Economics and Political Science Email: s.mcleish@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.angel.ac.uk/PERSEUS/ Return to top Article Title: “Installing Shibboleth” Author: Simon McLeish Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/mcleish/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Library Systems: Synthesise, Specialise, Mobilise Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Library Systems: Synthesise, Specialise, Mobilise Buzz data database rss metadata identifier copyright cataloguing e-learning openurl authentication research standards Citation BibTex RIS Robin Murray examines how the changing landscape for library systems is altering their service model.
The role of the integrated library system is, and always has been, to help manage the effective delivery of library services.
This has traditionally been anchored on the management of the catalogue and physical collection.
The core business and service model could be described as ‘Acquire Catalogue Circulate’.
This is increasingly no longer the case.
While the physical collection remains a critical aspect of the library service, it is just one of a number of ‘atomic’ or ‘granular’ services presented by the library.
The only distinguishing feature of the local collection is the physical location of the resources; a facet that is increasingly irrelevant in today’s networked world.
Libraries today present a more holistic information environment; the role of library systems therefore is to make the management and delivery of that environment both effective and efficient.
The business and service model is evolving from acquiring, cataloguing and circulating physical collections to synthesising, specialising and mobilising Web-based services.
While the transition is undoubtedly evolutionary, it is not at all clear that the systems required to support the new paradigm are an evolutionary development of the traditional Information and Library Service (ILS).
Figure 1: Library Systems: Synthesise, Specialise, Mobilise The current generation of federated search systems, link resolvers, resource-sharing systems and electronic record management (ERM) systems are starting to address the new model; the approach, however, is somewhat piecemeal, driven by the identification of specific market opportunities.
The fact that these new components are typically being delivered as stand-alone, yet integratable, components is indicative of the current state of the evolution: No clear model yet exists for the shape of future library services and systems.
It is unclear where the ILS fits in the future strategy.
There is a period of market disruption providing opportunities for new and existing players to reposition themselves in the market.
In making the transition to this new model there are many significant challenges to be overcome by all players in the information supply chain: libraries, system vendors, content suppliers and network service providers.
Synthesising There is a bewildering and increasing number of ‘atomic’ services that are relevant to library provision.
These range from traditional library services such as content and metadata, to more generic Web services such as authentication, taxonomies and spell-checkers.
The role of the library, and its supporting systems, is to synthesise these atomic Web services into a cohesive user-centric environment.
A significant change that has occurred in recent years is that, historically, the component services have been provided by players from within the ‘library industry’ content providers, catalogue services, reference services, etc.
Increasingly, rich network services are being made available from players outside the traditional library industry.
Trivial examples of these services nowadays include the likes of the Web service access to Amazon book reviews and Google’s spell-checker.
As developments progress, such services will become richer and more commonplace; this means that library systems have to be far more open and externally focused than in the past.
It also has profound implications for library standards organisations which traditionally have been internally focused and now need to be far more outward looking.
Figure 2: Synthesising atomic services into coherent and comprehensive user services New-model library systems need to offer a ‘plug-and-play’ environment to allow holistic user-focused services to be synthesised from this ever-changing sea of Web services.
There are three core aspects to such an environment: Integration providing the core technological capability to integrate disparate services into the environment.
Administration providing a management environment that takes into account the commercial licensing and maintenance issues of the underlying services.
Measurement providing an environment that drives continuous improvement by measuring and monitoring user behaviour and system use.
Specialising The key value proposition of the local library derives from its physical presence, integration of local services and the detailed knowledge of the user population it serves.
In a flattened world where information services can be delivered from anywhere on the network, to maintain relevance it is essential the library leverage these unique strengths to provide a specialised service for its users.
Figure 3: Added value is generated by specialising services according to local needs and capabilities It is the library system’s role to support this local specialisation of services.
Examples include: Respecting local rights and policies comprehensive authentication and authorisation can only be by integrating the local context; the rights and policies appropriate to a particular individual will include rights derived from local library affiliation.
The service provided through the library can therefore be more specialised than that provided through generic network services.
Respecting national policies and copyright law the access policy in the content provider contract that has to be understood, respected and enacted in the specialised service.
Applying local knowledge of the user population to the service understanding holistic user profiles and requirements allows the service to be tailored to specific user groups and individuals.
The library has greater access to specific profiling information than is available to generic network service providers.
Integration of local systems and services specific local systems and services (which may or may not be library services) can be integrated into the overall specialised service offering.
Mediation and guidance of critical importance is the library’s ability to integrate a local personal service with an IT-based service.
This clearly distinguishes it from any generic network-based services.
The challenge is to provide this mixed human and IT-based service as integrated system with a strong unified brand.
It is clear that as the new model evolves, any services that can be abstracted to generic network services will be.
This will be driven by the inexorable need to reduce redundancy and generate wider economies of scale.
Throughout this evolution: Libraries have to be alert and responsive to changes and be ready to take advantage of the economies and service enhancements generated.
Network service providers have to be continually looking for opportunities to provide new ‘synthesisable services’.
Library systems have to be sufficiently flexible to support the changing nature of service provision.
Mobilising Mobilisation is a key catalyst to drive library use and value.
The library service must find users at their point of need, wherever that is: Users are on the Web; they are using their suite of office applications; students are using their e-learning environments; doctors are in their clinical management systems; researchers are in their electronic lab books this is where the library service has to meet them if it is to realise its full value.
Figure 4: Mobilisation: embedding the library in workplace applications to meet users at their point of need Mobilisation is the next frontier of development for library systems.
The ability to integrate rich, synthesised library services tightly into workplace applications represents the potential to unlock the latent value in information services.
It should be noted that producing well-synthesised services is a necessary pre-cursor to mobilisation while, for example, there is undoubtedly some value in presenting a library catalogue search within an e-learning environment, the true value is realised when a comprehensive information discovery service is integrated.
It is also apparent that generating this level of integration will necessarily mean significant interaction with bodies from outside the traditional library sphere; integrating library systems into ‘foreign’ applications necessarily means interacting with players in those domains.
Sometimes these foreign applications will be mainstream de facto standard applications such as Office suites in this case the integration standards will be defined by the likes of Microsoft and the library systems will simply have to fall in to line.
In other cases the foreign systems will be niche applications operating in similar ‘island communities’ to the library community.
In both these situations mobilisation will have profound effects on library system development organisations and the relevant standards organisations: It will drive the more rapid uptake of modern mainstream technologies within library systems.
It will see bridges being built between ‘niche island communities’ in order to foster cross-application integration.
Example: The UK National Library for Health The UK National Health Service (NHS) is committed to providing excellence in healthcare, free at the point of use.
Everyone in the UK no matter how much they earn, who they are, how old they are, where they come from or where they live should have the health care they need for themselves and for their families.
80% of the UK population say the NHS is critical to British society and the country must do everything it can to maintain it.
To achieve this vision, the NHS has grown into a phenomenally complex organization it is the world’s third largest organisation with around 1 million employees.
Every day the service provides around 2 million consultations with approximately 10 million clinical decisions being made.
Critical within the NHS’s service delivery is the mandatory use of ‘evidence-based healthcare’.
To support this, a well-mobilised and synthesised evidence base is clearly essential.
The value placed on knowledge services within the NHS is perhaps best summarised by the following quote from Dr. Muir Gray: “Knowledge is the enemy of disease; the application of existing healthcare knowledge will have a greater impact on health and disease than any drug or technology likely to be introduced in the next decade.” [1] The National Library for Health has embarked on an ambitious programme to synthesise, specialise and mobilise the evidence base to support the NHS’s core mission.
Figure 5: The National Library for Health Synthesising, Specialising and Mobilising At the heart of this programme is a synthesized information discovery and fulfilment service.
This programme represents a good example of the evolution of the new library model: Synthesising A single search environment is provided across multiple specialist library services, commercial databases and internal information sources.
The search process is augmented and enhanced with various Web services such as the Google spellchecker, Amazon book reviews and data enrichment services.
These services originate from sources from within, and from outside, the traditional library sphere.
Authentication and authorisation is provided through an external, NHS-wide authorisation network service.
This forms the basis of a comprehensive user-profiling service that can be used to specialise the service to the individual.
For fulfilment services a synthesised environment can be presented integrating OpenURL resolution, Inter-Library Loan from internal NHS libraries and links to commercial document suppliers.
Specialising Appropriate presentation of the evidence base is a central requirement of the service within the health environment there is a specific requirement for grouping information according to types such as ‘patient information’, ‘clinical guidance’, ‘clinical evidence’, etc.
These information types cut across the underlying atomic sources; the specialisation layer performs real-time data analysis in order to categorise and present the information according to the target user requirements.
Local service integration the system can direct users to the local library service centres or the appropriate specialist libraries depending on the profile of the particular user.
Mobilising It is clear that mobilisation represents the key activity that can drive improvement in the delivery of evidence-based healthcare; the evidence base must meet users at their point of need.
It is also clear that mobilisation cannot properly occur until the services have been fully synthesised.
Initial points of mobilisation include: Office suite applications integrating the evidence base into the Microsoft Research Pane.
Email & RSS delivering update information tailored to the user’s profile through email and RSS.
Integration with the Map of Medicine the Map of Medicine is a specific workplace application that maps over 250 different patient journeys.
These journeys are symptom-based and clearly map out the steps to be taken by the clinician.
Points in the journeys can be contextually linked to the evidence base through clickable buttons.
This is a compelling example of the synthesise, specialise, mobilise paradigm in action.
If this model can be delivered effectively within the health service there is unquestionably immense, and tangible value to be realised.
The model clearly does translate into all spheres of the library service, though clearly the value proposition is particularly dramatic in the health space.
Conclusions Library systems have traditionally been synonymous with the ILS.
The classical ILS is increasingly managing and focused on a legacy business process.
While the ILS will remain a critical component in the management of a library service, its functions will gradually become peripheral to the core of the library service.
While the ‘new library model’ is an evolution of the traditional model, the IT systems required to support it are clearly not evolutionary developments of the ILS.
At some point there will be a critical jump in perception as to what is the core system supporting the library.
The core of the library system will become an environment that is focused on synthesszing, specialising and mobilising Web services to deliver user-centric services at the point of need.
Figure 6: Maximising the value of library and information services Significant added value can be realised from library and information services through this model.
This can be achieved through: Maximising the scope and breadth of services that we can synthesise.
Minimising and simplifying the interface definition to the core synthesised services.
Maximising outreach of the service through mobilizing as widely as possible.
The development of this model has been caught in a ‘chicken-and-egg’ scenario: there is no market for ‘synthesisable services’ until systems are capable of using them; systems will not be developed to synthesise services until compelling services are available.
This cycle can be broken either through ad hoc identification of market opportunities, or through some form of vertical market alignment whereby the systems and services are developed in concert; the latter is more likely to generate a strategic catalyst for development.
During this period of re-alignment, significant opportunities exist for more globalised strategic initiatives both in the development of reusable, synthesisable services and in the front-end systems to exploit such services.
All players in the supply network need to be cognizant of and alert to such changes: Libraries need to keep aware of new services that can be synthesised into their offering.
Libraries need to be ready to outsource internal services to network service providers who can realise economies of scale.
Network service providers have to be looking for opportunities to provide new ‘synthesisable services’.
Library systems providers have to ensure ‘plug-and-play’ compatibility with network services.
Above all, to maximise the value of our library services the industry needs to be far more externally focused than has traditionally been the case.
The services we are synthesising will increasingly be coming from ‘foreign’ parties and our services will need to be mobilised into domains outside the traditional library sphere.
The industry needs to foster links with these adjacent domains at all levels if we are to realise the value inherent in our services.
References Dr. Muir Gray, Director, UK National Electronic Library for Health speaking at Chief Scientific Officers 2nd Annual Conference, Healthcare Science: Achievements and Challenges: London, 7 8 July 2005 http://www.dh.gov.uk/NewsHome/ConferenceAndEventReports/ConferenceReportsConferenceReportsArticle/fs/en?
CONTENT_ID=4126209&chk=7zVR65 Author Details Robin Murray Chief Executive Officer Fretwell-Downing Informatics OCLC PICA Email: robin.murray@fdisolutions.com Return to top Article Title: “Library Systems: Synthesise, Specialise, Mobilise” Author: Robin Murray Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/murray/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) 24-26 June, Toronto The Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) is the international meeting for organisations and individuals involved in the preservation and restoration of original image and sound materials.
This year, JTS is scheduled to be held in Toronto, Canada, June 24-26, 2004.
Preliminary program information is now available on the JTS 2004 website.
See: http://www.jts2004.org/english/program.htm For more information please see the website or contact the organization responsible for coordinating the event on behalf of the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA): Association of Moving Image Archivists, 1313 North Vine St., Los Angeles, CA 90028 Tel: 323-463-1500 Fax: 323-463-1506 Email: info@jts2004.org [February 2004] DC2004 China 11-14 October: Call for Papers International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 11-14 October 2004 Shanghai, China http://dc2004.library.sh.cn/ Metadata based on standards such as Dublin Core is a key component of information environments from scientific repositories to corporate intranets and from business and publishing to education and e-government.
DC-2004 the fourth in a series of conferences previously held in Tokyo, Florence, and Seattle will examine a broad range of metadata applications, especially with a view towards improving interoperability across boundaries of language, culture, and communities of practice.
Tutorials will provide an introduction to metadata for non-experts.
In conjunction with DC-2004, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative will hold technical working-group meetings and Shanghai Library will host the 2004 Shanghai International Library Forum (http://www.libnet.sh.cn/silf2004/).
[February 2004] ERPANET Training Seminar, 10-11 May 2004, Austrian National Library ERPANET iannounces its training seminar on 'File Formats for Preservation'.
It will be held on 10-11 May 2004 at the Austrian National Library.
File formats are a crucial layer, indeed a hinge between the bits in storage and their meaningful interpretation.
The proper access to and display of content depends entirely on the ability to decipher the respective bitstream, and consequently on precise knowledge about how the information contained within is represented.
Thus file formats are one of the core issues of any digital preservation approach, and file format obsolescence is a major challenge for anybody wanting to preserve digital files.
The ERPANET Seminar aims at giving an overview on these issues and at offering guidance based on practical experience.
Requirements and best practices for archival file formats will be discussed, and issues such as file format registries and format validation will be treated.
This training seminar is aimed at all people who are dealing with file format issues.
These include practitioners in digital preservation from all kind of organisations and institutions, decision-makers and other people involved in choosing preservation file formats, and preservationists who are facing file format challenges and are looking for first-hand information and experience.
In particular, people who want to exchange their experience with colleagues from all over Europe and beyond should consider attending.
We expect attendants to have basic familiarity with digital preservation and file format issues.
Please see the bibliography on the seminar webpage at http://www.erpanet.org for some introductory reading.
[April 2004] The eVALUEd Conference 16 June 2004, Birmingham, UK A one-day conference aimed at library practitioners, researchers and others which forms part of the HEFCE-funded eValued Project which is based at the UCE.
There will be a keynote address by Professor Charles McClure of Florida State University, who has been a consultant to the project, and a range of speakers in addressing current issues in the evaluation of Electronic Information Services (EIS) in Higher Education including: The e-metrics project The emeasures project selection criteria for e-resources Performance management ProjectCOUNTER extending LIBQUAL+ to the digital environment The day will conclude with a panel drawn from the speakers who discuss a key topic.
Further details are available at http://www.ebase.uce.ac.uk/evalued/conference.htm or by contacting Sarah.McNicol@uce.ac.uk [February 2004] NISO Workshop: Metadata Practices on the Cutting Edge 20 May, Washington Information professionals: Get the guidance you need on the growing variety of metadata standards and explore issues of interoperability.
The NISO one-day workshop, Metadata Practices on the Cutting Edge, will be held in Washington, DC on Thursday, May 20, 2004.
Topics in the spotlight -from both theoretical and practical perspectives -include: metadata syndication, digital archiving, metadata quality assurance, the Joint Working Party initiative on serials and subscription metadata, METS, MODS, and more.
Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC, will keynote; confirmed speakers include:Rebecca Guenther, Library of Congress; Chuck Koscher, CrossRef; Evan Owens, JSTOR; Howard Ratner, Nature Publishing Group; and Bruce Rosenblum, Inera, Inc.
In addition, members of the NISO Standards Development Committee will discuss plans to support metadata interoperability through the development and coordination of standards and will share information about NISO's strategic planning initiative.
Please check the NISO website (http://www.niso.org) for programme and registration details.
[March 2004] JISC agreement for the Academic Library The Academic Library is now available through a three year JISC licence from 28 February 2004 to 28 February 2007.
The offer includes collections from Pluto Press and The Electric Book Company, with other publishers expected to join shortly.
Currently the library has nearly 300 online book titles covering Anthropology and Development Studies; Cultural and Media Studies; Politics and International Relations, with an additional collection of classic texts in Political Economy.
Libraries can choose to subscribe to complete collections or to select 50 or 100 titles on a pick and mix basis.
Some of the key benefits are: Unlimited simultaneous access, meaning titles are never unavailable.
Title lists are continually updated and the latest titles are instantly available Access by both Athens and IP address, allowing distance learning where appropriate.
Subscriptions can include a pick and mix selection of titles or complete collections in any combination, maximising cost-efficiency.
Titles or collections can be added to the subscription at any time This online resource is available at special rates, exclusively through the JISC.
Please go to http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_academiclib.html for further information.
To subscribe, simply complete the Sub-Licence Agreement by visiting http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_academiclibrary_sub.html.
[February 2004] OCLC Research announces ResearchWorks Web site OCLC Research announces the ResearchWorks Web site, featuring demos, prototypes, and other interactive items that showcase the current work of OCLC Researchers.
Visitors to OCLC ResearchWorks can explore the site, follow their interest from one demo to another, and comment on and discuss them with others.
The idea is to display some of what's on the minds and the "workbenches" of OCLC Researchers.
The ideas may serve as examples librarians can develop or incorporate into their own systems.
ResearchWorks features works in progress rather than full services or even polished prototypes.
There are links to background information, a discussion form, and a form to send a message directly to the researcher involved with each project.
OCLC ResearchWorks is located at: http://www.oclc.org/research/researchworks/ For more information, please contact: Shirley Hyatt Communications & Business Transitions Director OCLC Research hyatts@oclc.org +1-614-764-4389 or: Bob Bolander Communications & Programs Manager OCLC Research bolander@oclc.org +1-614-761-5207 [February 2004] MATES '04 29-30 September, Erfurt, Germany Second International German Conference on Multi-agent System Technologies (MATES '04); Fair and Convention Centre, Erfurt, Germany, 29-30 September 2004 http://www.gi-vki.de/MATES04/ IMPORTANT DATES Submission of papers: May, 21, 2004 Submission of tutorial proposals: June 18, 2004 Submission of exhibit/demo proposals: July 9, 2004 Notification of authors: June 21, 2004 Camera-ready papers: July 9, 2004 AIMS & SCOPE The German conference on Multi-agent system TEchnologieS (MATES) provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users (members of business and industry) and developers, to present and discuss latest advances in research work, as well as prototyped or fielded systems of intelligent agents.
The conference covers the whole range from theory to application of agentand multi-agent technologies in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems.
The conference features an exhibition of practical applications with an advanced concept of agency, as well as introductory and expert keynotes/tutorials on practical aspects of agent-based computing.
For the second time the German special interest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence jointly with the steering committee of MATES organises this international conference in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems.
Building on the sequence of agent-related events in Germany in the past such as VDI 1998 (Chemnitz), VertIS 2001 (Bamberg), and KI 2002 (Aachen), the MATES conference series now is exclusively devoted to agents and multi-agent systems, and the cross-fertilization between agent theory and application.
MATES04 is conducted as an integral part of the fifth international conference NetObject Days 2004 in an exciting joint event.
The conference language is English.
Moreover, it is co-located with other agent-related events, especially the 8th International Woprkshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA) 2004 (http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2004/index.html), and the autumn FIPA (Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents (http://www.FIPA.org>) meeting.
Finally, it is intended to exhibit and present the most relevant agent platforms and real-world agent-based applications.
[March 2004] Education and Culture: new programmes Education and Culture Commissioner Viviane Reding has announced details of a programme to replace the Culture 2000, Media Plus and Youth programmes which all come to an end in 2006.
Running from 2007-13, the 'citizenship in action' programme puts more emphasis on fostering European culture and diversity in order to encourage and develop European citizenship.
The new Youth progamme in particular includes international and third country relationships.
The new Culture programme seeks to go 'beyond a mere project-oriented approach'.
However, it will 'actively contribute to the bottom-up development of a European identity'.
It will also aim to be 'more user-friendly', and 'be open to all cultural and artistic fields, without predetermined catagories, and to a greater variety of cultural operators'.
During the period 2007 to 2013, the new Culture programme aims to support around 1,400 cultural co-operation projects, including around 80 multi-annual cultural co-operation focal points.
It also aims to suport around 50 networks of organisations of European interest.
And there will be a series of targeted studies, together with actions for collating statistics and disseminating information.
Visit http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/education_culture/index_en.htm for more information [March 2004] Workshop on Philosophy, Ontology and Information Systems June 15, Oslo Call for position papers The ECOOP-04 Workshop 'Philosophy, Ontology and Information Systems' aims at providing a forum where the issues related to the use of philosophical ontology in object-oriented information systems can be discussed.
Key goals of the workshop are to secure, as far as possible, a measure of agreement on: What philosophical ontology is Whether, and how, ontology can assist in object oriented software development What philosophical ontology can add to the debate on the mapping between objects in the real world and system objects What the key obstacles to the deployment of ontology are The possibility of collaborative research efforts among the participants.
People interested in participating in the workshop are requested to submit a short position paper (5 pages or less) that indicates the issues they wish to have discussed in the workshop and/or relevant work they have done.
The workshop organisers will review and select from the submitted papers providing feedback as needed.
Position papers will be posted prior to the workshop so as to give participants the time to read the papers beforehand.
Important Dates Deadline for submission: April 5, 2004 Notification: April 26, 2004 Workshop: June 15, 2004 Further information will be posted on the workshop page: http://www.ifomis.uni-Leipzig.de/Events/ECOOP/2004/WS_PhilosophyOntologyInformationSystems/ [March 2004] Association for History and Computing UK 2004 Conference 'Recasting the Past: Digital Histories' Institute of Historical Research, London 27 November 2004 This year the conference has taken the theme of 'Recasting the Past: Digital Histories'.
The aim of the conference is to explore how the ever increasing number and variety of digital and electronic sources have changed the way in which history, and historical sources, are created, selected, researched, taught, written, presented and used.
Even historians who do not use computer methodologies are likely to encounter sources in digital form or have their access to analogue sources mediated by electronic means.
Whilst the digital form can transcend the constraints of time and space it brings new problems and challenges to historians and historical research.
Some of the questions the this conference seeks to explore include: Availability and Access On what basis are selection and prioritisation criteria made for digitisation?
Are digital resources limited by the way they are funded?
Do commercial interests dictate digitisation?
Are historians interests represented in this process?
Are digital sources the type historians need?
How are digital resources described and accessed?
What are historians' information retrieval strategies in the digital age?
Research How do historians evaluate digital resources?
Do digital resources fundamentally differ from their analogue counterparts?
How is digitisation affecting research activity?
Does the research climate help or hinder the creation and use of digital resources?
What possibilities do 3D digitisation and virtual reality open up for historians?
Writing and Teaching How does digitisation affect the way history is written?
How does multimedia communication alter the structure of narrative discourse?
Can historians write a 'digital history'?
What is the role of the historian in a multi-dimensional digital history?
How do digital resources affect the way history is taught?
200 word abstracts are invited on any of the three themes above.
As well as historians submissions are also encouraged from archivists, librarians, curators and others who are responsible for creating and using digital resources.
Submissions from Further Education and Postgraduates are particularly welcome.
Postgraduates presenting a paper are eligible for a free place, £50 contribution towards expenses and membership of the AHC for one year.
Successful contributors will be invited to submit a full paper to the international, peer reviewed journal 'History and Computing'.
Abstracts should be sent to Dr. Ian Anderson (Convenor AHC-UK) at the address below, not later than Friday 28th May.
Submission as an email attachment in MS Word or RTF format is preferred.
All submissions will be 'blind' peer reviewed.
Dr. Ian G. Anderson Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) University of Glasgow Email: I.Anderson@hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk Website: http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk [April 2004] ERPANET Seminar on Persistent Identifiers June 17-18, 2004 University College Cork Co-Sponsors University College Cork Digital Curation Centre (UK) MINERVA Focus The persistent identification of electronic resources can play a vital role in enabling long-term access and re-use and can positively impact on an object's authenticity.
This seminar aims to provide an overview of current activity in the field of persistent identifiers and an understanding of the various persistent identification strategies being used and developed.
Individual experiences with persistent identifiers will be explored through presentations from the library community, the higher and further education community, the scientific community and the publishing community.
The seminar will also provide an update from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) working group on persistent identifiers.
Who will benefit from attending?
The seminar will bring together a wide range of participants from a variety of sectors from all over Europe.
This training seminar will benefit anyone who creates or manages access to digital resources including librarians, archivists, scientists, publishers and staff from higher and further education and government institutions.
Venue The seminar will be held in the Main Quadrangle Building (Lecture Theatre W5), University College Cork.
More information about the UCC is available on their website http://www.ucc.ie.
ERPANET is extremely grateful to the University College Cork for providing the venue for this training event.
Programme (TBC) The seminar features presentations by: Kathrin Schroeder, Die Deutsche Bibliothek Robin Wilson, The Stationary Office (TSO) Stuart Weibel, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) John Kunze and/or Mary Heath, California Digital Library (CDL) Details of these and other presentations will be available on our website soon.
Further information A briefing paper, travel and accommodation information, and an extensive list of background documentation are available from the ERPANET site (http://www.erpanet.org).
Abstracts, papers and the seminar report will be accessible via the ERPANET site following the event.
To register The registration fee is 100 Euros.
Please go to http://www.erpanet.org and follow the links to register.
For additional information, please contact british.editor@erpanet.org [April 2004] The European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS '04) formerly: International Conference on Web Services Europe (ICWS-Europe) Erfurt, Germany, September 27-30, 2004 Call for Papers The ECOWS'04 conference will be held in conjunction with the 5th International Conference Net.ObjectDays 2004 (NODE'04) and the International Conference on Grid Services Engineering and Management (GSEM'04) in Erfurt, Germany, September 27-30, 2004.
The 2004 European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS'04) is the a international conference focusing on Web Services.
ECOWS'04 is a forum for researchers and industry practitioner to exchange information regarding advancements in the state of art and practice of Web Services, as well as to identify emerging research topics and define the future directions of Web Services computing.
ECOWS'04 has special interest in papers that contribute to the convergence of Web Services, Grid Computing, e-Business and Autonomic Computing, or those that apply techniques from one area to another.
The conference is a sister event of the International Conference on Web Services 2004 held in San Diego and the sucessor of the International Conference on Web Services Europe 2003.
The program of ICWS-Europe'04 will continue to feature a variety of papers, focusing on topics ranging from Web Services and Dynamic Business Process Composition, Web Services and Process Management, Web Services Discovery, Web Services Security, Web Services Based Applications for e-Commerce, Web Services based Grid Computing, Web Services Standards and Technologies, Web Services Solutions, Web Services Industrial, and other emerging technologies or solutions.
Suggested Topics We invite research papers, work-in-progress reports and industrial experiences describing advances in all areas of Web Services, including, but not limited to: Adoption of Web Services by organisations Automatic computing for Web Services infrastructure Business Grid solution architecture Business process integration and management using Web Services Case studies on Web Services based applications Choreography issues and standards Confluence of technologies of the Semantic Web and Web Services Customisation of existing Web Services Data management issues in Web Services Dynamic invocation mechanisms for Web Services Economics and pricing models of utility computing and Web Services Enhancements to existing standards Frameworks for building Web Service applications Grid architectures, middleware and toolkits Mathematical foundations of Web Services Multimedia applications using Web Services Quality of service for Web Services Resource management of Web Services Scalability and performance of Web Services Semantic contracts Service oriented architectures based on Web Services Service registries Software re-usability and Web Services as wrappers of existing legacy systems Solution management for Web Services Trust, security & privacy in Web Services Version management in Web Services Web Service-based Grid computing and peer to peer computing Web Service composition Web Services and process management Web Services architecture Web Services-based applications for e-Commerce Web Services discovery & selection Web Services modelling & design Web Services negotiation & agreement Wireless Web, mobility, and Web Services Submission Guidelines Full papers must not exceed 15 pages (see http://www.netobjectdays.org Menu For Authors).
All papers should be in Adobe portable document format (PDF) or PostScript format.
The paper should have a cover page, which includes a 200-word abstract, a list of keywords, and author's e-mail address.
Authors should submit a full paper via electronic submission to submission@ecows.org.
Important Dates Extended Submission Deadline: May 7, 2004.
Notification: June 11, 2004.
Final Version Due: July 9, 2004.
[April 2004] Information Architecture 8-9 June 2004, Paris Information Architecture is an intensive 2-day conference about how to design and organise information systems that enable better search, navigation, and collaboration within organisations.
http://www.infotoday.com/iaparis/programme.shtml The 8th annual Internet Librarian conference and exhibition Monterey The ONLY event designed for librarians and information professionals who are using, developing, and embracing Internet and Web-based strategies.
http://www.infotoday.com/il2004/ Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2004 Theme: Global Reach and Diverse Impact June 7-11, 2004 Tucson, Arizona, USA http://www.jcdl2004.org/ (Advanced Registration Deadline: May 9, 2004) The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues.
The intended community for this conference includes those interested in aspects of digital libraries such as infrastructure; institutions; metadata; content; services; digital preservation; system design; implementation; interface design; humancomputer interaction; performance evaluation; usability evaluation; collection development; intellectual property; privacy; electronic publishing; document genres; multimedia; social, institutional, and policy issues; user communities; and associated theoretical topics.
Conference Theme: Global Reach and Diverse Impact In addition to the listed digital library research topics, JCDL 2004 encourages submission of papers that illustrate digital library's global reach and diverse impact.
Conference Location JCDL 2004 will be held in Tucson, Arizona on June 7-11, 2003.
Important Dates: May 9, 2004 Last date for Advance Registration May 10, 2004 Late Registration fees begin May 26, 2004 Last date for cancellation with 80% refunds; no refunds after this date May 31, 2004 Last date for Online Registration; only onsite registration available after this date June 7, 2004 First day of conference tutorials June 8, 2004 Conference June 9, 2004 Old Tucson Studios Tour and Barbecue [April 2004] mod_oai Project Aims at Optimising Web Crawling Norfolk VA & Los Alamos NM The Computer Science Department of Old Dominion University and the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory announce the launch of the "mod_oai" project.
The aim of the project is to create the mod_oai Apache software module that will expose content accessible from Apache Web servers via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
The mod_oai project is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Apache is an open-source Web server that is used by 63% approximately 27 million of the Websites in the world.
The OAI-PMH is a protocol to selectively harvest from data repositories.
The protocol has had a considerable impact in the field of digital libraries but it has yet to be embraced by the general Web community.
The mod_oai project hopes to achieve such broader acceptance by making the power and efficiency of the OAI-PMH available to Web servers and Web crawlers.
For example, the planned OAI-PMH interface to Apache Web servers should allow responding to requests to collect all files added or changed since a specified date, or all files that are of a specified MIME-type.
Contact: Michael Nelson mln@cs.odu.edu and Herbert Van de Sompel herbertv@lanl.gov More information about the mod_oai project can be found at http://www.modoai.org.
More information about the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting can be found at http://www.openarchives.org/.
More information about Apache can be found at http://www.apache.org/.
More information about the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation can be found at: http://www.mellon.org/.
Herbert Van de Sompel digital library research & prototyping Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library Tel: + 1 (505) 667 1267 URL: http://lib-www.lanl.gov/~herbertv/ [April 2004]   FOIS-2004 International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems http://fois2004.di.unito.it/ November 4-6, 2004, Torino (Italy) Just as ontology developed over the centuries as part of philosophy, so in recent years ontology has become intertwined with the development of the information sciences.
Researchers in such areas as artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have come to realize that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry.
In all these areas, attention has started to focus on the content of information rather than on just the formats and languages in terms of which information is represented.
The clearest example of this development is provided by the many initiatives growing up around the project of the Semantic Web.
And as the need for integrating research in these different fields arises, so does the realization that strong principles for building well-founded ontologies might provide significant advantages over ad hoc, case-based solutions.
The tools of Formal Ontology address precisely these needs, but a real effort is required in order to apply such philosophical tools to the domain of Information Systems.
Reciprocally, research in the information science raises specific ontological questions which call for further philosophical investigations.
The purpose of FOIS is to provide a forum for genuine interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of a unified ontological analysis effort.
Although the primary focus of the conference is on theoretical issues, methodological proposals as well as papers dealing with concrete applications from a well-founded theoretical perspective are welcome.
Invited Speakers Peter Gärdenfors, Lund University Cognitive Science, Sweden Amie Thomasson, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, USA For details see: http://fois2004.di.unito.it/ [April 2004] Institutional Repositories PALS Conference Institutional Repositories and Their Impact on Publishing 24 June 2004, London, UK Institutional repositories (IRs) have been attracting increasing attention since the launch of MIT's Dspace in 2002.
Their contents journal article eprints, theses, dissertations, datasets and other grey literature are generally freely available and they are seen by their advocates as a promising route to open access to scholarly research.
But how will they affect the traditional scholarly communication model?
This conference, organised by the PALS group (see below), aims to go some way to answer this question by gathering together members of the publishing and higher education worlds to look at where the IR agenda is at present and how it is likely to develop, who is using IRs and how, and what the practical issues are for universities and publishers.
Find Out About Strategically important developments in institutional repositories How open access to the research outputs of universities via institutional repositories might affect the business models of publishers Case studies from leading institutional repositories The kind of content that is currently stored on institutional repositories and how this is planned to develop Other key issues for publishers, including copyright, impact on journal author submissions and the effect on library budgets The issues for universities and colleges developing an institutional repository How one leading publisher is collaborating with an institutional repository Venue Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, 27 Sussex Place, Regent's Park, London, NW1 4RG, UK.
Organised by The PALS group (JISC, ALPSP and The Publishers Association) see below.
Supported by The Times Higher Educational Supplement Chair Jon Conibear, Managing Director, Taylor and Francis Speakers Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information Keynote presentation Mark Ware, Director, Mark Ware Consulting Ltd Chris Awre and Catherine Grout, JISC.
Greg Tananbaum, The Berkeley Electronic Press.
Steve Probets, Technical Director, RoMEO Project/Lecturer, Loughborough University.
Leo Waaijers, Project Director, DARE.
Richard O'Beirne, Electronic Publishing Manager, Oxford University Press and Johanneke Sytsema, SHERPA Project Officer, Oxford University Library Systems & Electronic Resources Service Who Should Attend?
This conference is essential for those potentially affected by the deployment of institutional repositories: Publishers, especially in journal and academic publishing Librarians, academics and other HE/FE staff involved in setting up and managing repositories Senior university/college administrators interested in the policy implications of institutional repositories Costs £195 + VAT @ 17.5% (Total = £229.13) includes lunch and refreshments About PALS PALS (Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions) is the ongoing collaboration between UK publishers (ALPSP and the Publishers Association) and higher/further education (JISC).
PALS aims to foster mutual understanding and work collaboratively towards the solution of issues arising from electronic publication.
For more information about the work of the PALS group, go to http://www.palsgroup.org.uk For more information and to book go to http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/ or contact Lesley Ogg on events@alpsp.org or telephone 01245 26057 [April 2004] Want to learn about Return on Investment for your library?
It is becoming more and more important to demonstrate the economic impact of libraries and information services to management or client environment.
For the very first time, these important management issues have been tailormade in a course context for library managers.
Where and when Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
Sunday evening 27 up to and including Tuesday 29 June 2004.
Target group Those working in libraries and knowledge centres as directors, librarians, senior managers, deputy managers, department managers and at those aspiring to these positions.
Participants will rapidly be able to apply the acquired skills to their own organisation as they will learn by means of case studies and the associated practical appraoch to deal with the problems and challenges that different organisations face.
Subjects The issues of the organisational benefits from libraries or information services, expressed in Return of Investment, business case, fluctuating budgets, financial and functional models, and the activities and responsibilities connected to these topics.
Organisation The course is organised by Ticer B.V. Website http://www.ticer.nl/04roi/ Registration, via http://www.ticer.nl/form/form04.htm.
More information can be found on the Ticer website, via http://www.ticer.nl/plans.htm.
Other courses given in 2004 The Digital Library and e-Publishing for Science, Technology, and Medicine (4.5 days) CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 13-18 June 2004 Electronic Resources and Electronic Publishing (3 days) Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 10-13 August 2004 Library Strategy and Key Issues for the Future (2 days) Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 15-17 August 2004 Change: Making it Happen in your Library (3 days) Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 17-20 August 2004 Contact Ticer B.V. Ms Anja Huijben and Ms Esther Bruls Email: ticer@uvt.nl URL: http://www.ticer.nl/ Return to top Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico Buzz data software infrastructure archives accessibility repositories preservation graphics dtd passwords ejournal licence authentication research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Eileen Fenton outlines issues relating to the long-term preservation of digital resources and the characteristics of an archival entity responding to this need.
The work of academics in teaching and research is not possible without reliable access to the accumulated scholarship of the past.
As scholars have become more dependent upon the convenience and enhanced accessibility of electronic scholarly resources, concern about the long-term preservation and future accessibility of the electronic portion of the scholarly record has grown.
One recent survey found that 83% of academic staff surveyed believe it is 'very important' to preserve electronic scholarly resources for future use [1].
As usage of electronic scholarly resources continues to grow, the urgency of this concern is likely to rise, and it is a concern that is well founded.
Recent studies have found that 13% of Internet sources cited in three prestigious journals were not retrievable from the original hyperlink only 27 months after publication [2].
The fragility of electronic resources has significant implications for scholars who are troubled by the possibility of gaps in the scholarly record and the impact that these may have upon their ability to generate new scholarship which builds upon the work of today's researchers.
The concerns for libraries may be even more striking.
In 2003-04, libraries surveyed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) expended total institutional resources of US$301,699,645 to license electronic materials.
On average, 31% of total library material expenditures are devoted to electronic resources [3].
If one extends this expenditure trend beyond the membership of the ARL, the total investment which libraries across the higher education community are making in licensing access to electronic resources is truly noteworthy and suggests that efforts to protect and preserve these resources would be a wise investment.
And yet even as scholarly use of electronic resources has grown and library expenditures have been increasingly directed toward electronic resources, reliable long-term preservation arrangements for this critical part of the scholarly record have not yet fully emerged.
Because many librarians are uncertain of the source of ongoing preservation and access for the digital materials for which they are expending considerable institutional resources, they are, at least in the case of electronic scholarly journals, frequently continuing to receive, process and store the print format journals even as they license access to the electronic format.
Because libraries do not yet feel secure in relying exclusively upon the electronic format they and scholarly publishers are not yet able to decrease the expenditures associated with the receipt and storage of print journals.
In short, until a reliable archiving arrangement is in place, neither libraries nor publishers are fully able to make the transition to secure reliance upon the electronic format which is so clearly preferred by scholars, researchers and students [4].
This need for a robust archiving solution is perhaps best expressed in the endorsement in late 2005 by the ARL, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and others of the 'Urgent Action Needed to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals' statement which documents the urgency of the preservation need and recognises that now is the time for the library community to act in support of initiatives that will ensure enduring access to scholarly e-journals [5].
Characteristics of Digital Preservation Archive Even as the urgency of the preservation need has become clear, key questions have remained about who is responsible for carrying out long-term preservation of digital resources, how this activity will be financed over the long term, and how the reliability of any given archival approach can be gauged.
Some of the earliest answers to these fundamental questions were posed in the May 2002 report, 'Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities', produced by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and OCLC.
The current work underway at RLG and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is advancing this work even further as will the forthcoming survey commissioned by ARL [6].
From even this very early work, a number of key characteristics are emerging as essential to a reliable archiving effort.
First, organisational mission is critical.
Long-term preservation must be at the core of the mission of the organisation undertaking the archival activities.
This focus will help to ensure that preservation will be at the fore as resource allocation decisions are made and organisational priorities identified.
Second, the archival organisation must have an economic model able to sustain the work of long-term preservation.
In order to reduce risk, it is important for this financial support to come from multiple sources so that the archive is not overly reliant upon and vulnerable to any single source of funding.
Third, the archive must have a technological infrastructure including hardware, software and appropriately skilled staff to meet the challenge of preserving complex and varied electronic resources.
There must also be a commitment and ability to maintain, enhance and update this infrastructure as technologies and formats change over time.
Finally, the archive must have relationships with both libraries, which serve the interests of current and future students and researchers, and with content creators, such as scholarly publishers, who are responsible for creating and distributing the electronic resources.
These five factors taken together form a useful foundation upon which a robust archival effort can be established, and as the community gains more experience with digital preservation, no doubt further requirements will also be identified.
From this early understanding of what is required to ensure that the long-term preservation of electronic scholarly resources grows, possible models for meeting this need are beginning to emerge.
National libraries such as the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands are beginning to ingest and hold electronic journals, and the Library of Congress through the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program is building a network of archival partners that is working to ensure the long-term preservation of a variety of digital materials.
Third parties such as OCLC, and more recently Portico, are also emerging [7].
Long-term preservation is still such a new endeavour that we will no doubt continue to learn more about how to construct reliable archiving solutions; however, an overview of one entity, Portico, may provide a useful illustration of how the key characteristics of an archival entity can be given practical shape.
Portico: An Overview Anticipating the need for robust preservation of electronic journals, in 2002, JSTOR launched a project which has now become Portico [8].
Portico is a new, not-for-profit electronic archiving service established in order to address the scholarly community's critical and urgent need for a robust, reliable means to preserve electronic scholarly journals.
Portico builds upon and advances JSTOR's efforts to provide a trusted and reliable community-based archive, and Portico works with JSTOR to expand significantly the preservation infrastructure developed on behalf of the scholarly community.
JSTOR has provided initial support for Portico's development together with Ithaka, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Library of Congress.
Portico's mission is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students.
History Portico began as the JSTOR Electronic-Archiving Initiative launched by JSTOR with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and was intended to build upon the Foundation's seminal e-journal archiving programme [9].
The charge of the initiative was to build an infrastructure and economic model able to sustain an electronic journal archive.
Initially the focus of the project was designing and prototyping content handling and archival systems, crafting potential archive service models, testing possible models with libraries and publishers and a drafting business model able to support a long-term archival effort.
For more than two years, project staff worked on the development of technologies necessary to meet the project objectives and engaged in extensive discussions with publishers and libraries to craft an approach that balances the needs of both communities while researching what would be necessary to build a sustainable business model for the archive.
During 2004 the project was transferred to Ithaka, and efforts to hone the Portico archival service continued [10].
These efforts involved wide-ranging discussions with a large and informal network of librarians from more than fifty academic institutions of all types and sizes and the engagement of ten publishers ranging from small scholarly societies, to a university press, and large commercial publishers who agreed to participate in the discovery phase of the project [11].
Building from the findings that emerged from our iterative and collaborative discussions with the community, a new service, now known as Portico, was shaped and launched in 2005.
The Portico electronic archiving service is initially focused on the long-term preservation of electronic scholarly journals.
The Portico archive, which is a centralised repository, is open to a scholarly publisher's complete list of journals, including those titles which may be published in electronic format only, or print and electronic formats, or which may have been 'reborn' or digitised from print.
Portico is focused on preserving the intellectual content of the electronic scholarly journal; we do not attempt to recreate or preserve for the long term the exact look and feel of the journal or the publisher's Web site or delivery platform.
Portico's archival approach for electronic journals is managed preservation focused on the publishers' e-journal source files.
Source files are the electronic files containing graphics, text, or other material that comprise an electronic journal article, issue, or volume.
Source files may differ from files presented online most typically by including additional information such as richer mark-up or higherquality graphics.
Portico receives source files directly from the scholarly publishers who have agreed to contribute content to the Portico archiving service.
Portico subjects the publishers' source files to a systematic normalisation process that migrates the content from the publishers' proprietary data structure to an archival format based upon the NLM Archive and Interchange DTD [12].
Both the source file and the normalised files are retained in the archive, and Portico takes responsibility for the long-term preservation and management of the archived materials [13].
Accessing the Archive Portico's normalisation efforts are focused on ensuring that content remains available and accessible into the future.
Portico recognises that while access to e-journal literature today may not be a concern, librarians and their constituents do need to have assurance of future access, a theme echoed in the Urgent Action statement noted earlier [14].
To address this need, all libraries supporting the Portico archive have campus-wide access to archived content when specific trigger events occur, and when titles are no longer available from the publisher or other source.
Trigger events include when a publisher ceases operations; or ceases to publish a title; or no longer offers back issues; or suffers catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher's delivery platform.
In addition to these trigger events, both publishers and libraries have recognised that in some cases, even after a library has terminated a licence to an electronic resource, it may be necessary for that library to continue to have ongoing access.
This is commonly known as 'perpetual access' or post-cancellation access.
A publisher may choose to extend perpetual access to a library and that access can be provided through the Portico archive, if the publisher desires.
In addition, select librarians at participating libraries are granted password-controlled access to the archive for verification purposes.
This verification access, which is granted to the entire archive, is not intended to be used as a replacement for commercial document delivery services or to fulfil inter-library loan requests.
Finally, all publishers participating in the archive have full access to their own content and any content for which a trigger event prevails.
The Portico archive relies upon the co-operative participation of both publishers and libraries.
To participate in Portico, a publisher: signs a non-exclusive archiving licence that gives Portico the right to ingest, normalise, archive, and migrate the publisher's content indicates whether Portico will serve as a perpetual access mechanism supplies electronic journal source files in a timely way, and makes an annual financial contribution.
To participate in the Portico archive, a library: signs an archiving licence agreement makes an annual support payment, and provides IP or other relevant information for user authentication purposes.
Sustaining the Archive Financial support is critical to a long-term preservation effort of any kind.
Two kinds of support are needed: funds for initial development of technological infrastructure and early operations, and funds that can support the operation of the archive over time.
Portico has secured substantial grant support from JSTOR, Ithaka, the Library of Congress, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to cover the costs of initial development.
Unlike in the for-profit sector, the 'venture capital' funds made available for Portico's start-up phase do not need to be repaid.
The 'return' that these investors seek is a functioning archival service.
While Portico will not attempt to recover its initial funding, the organisation does need to cover its ongoing operating costs from diversified funding sources; it cannot rely upon any single revenue stream.
The chief beneficiaries of the archive publishers and academic institutions are asked to provide the primary sources of funding; however, charitable foundations and government agencies will also be expected to provide support.
As noted above, publishers make an annual contribution to the archive and share with other supporting publishers the ongoing costs to receive, normalise, store, and migrate journal content.
Fees are based on publishers' total journals revenues (i.e.
subscription, advertising, licensing) and range from US$250 to US$75,000 per year.
Libraries are also asked to make an annual payment to support the ongoing work of the archive, including the addition of new content to the archive, maintenance and enhancement of the technological infrastructure, and format migrations as technology evolves.
Library Annual Archive Support payments are tiered and vary according to the amount which a library expends on building and maintaining its collections.
A library self-reports to Portico their total Library Materials Expenditure (LME), and the corresponding Annual Archive Support payments range from US$1,500 to US$24,000 per annum (U.S. dollars).
To encourage broad participation in Portico from the outset, from institutions of all types and sizes, Portico designates early participants (institutions who begin Portico support in 2006 and 2007) as 'Portico Archive Founders', and recognises their early support of this important initiative by providing significant savings on Founders' annual support fees.
We believe that robust and international support of this new electronic archiving service very early on will send an important signal to all constituents in the scholarly community that the long-term preservation of born-digital content is an important priority and is being dealt with seriously by those most affected.
(Details of the publisher and library contributions are available from the Portico Web site [8].)
Portico Today and Looking Ahead As of mid-April 2006, nine publishers have committed more than 3,200 journals to the Portico archive.
Participating publishers include Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Oxford University Press, American Mathematical Society, American Anthropological Association, University of Chicago Press, UK Serials Group, Berkeley Electronic Press, and Symposium Journals (UK).
We are in discussions with a large number of publishers commercial houses, university presses, and scholarly societies and are encouraged by how these are progressing.
Response from libraries has also been encouraging with nearly three dozen institutions committed to supporting the Portico archive since announcing library participation fees at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting.
We are currently reaching out to libraries both in the US and internationally and are encouraged by the responses which we are receiving.
We expect to build the base of participating publishers and libraries over time and as participation in Portico grows, we will keep the community informed via updates to the Portico Web site.
We recognise that participating in a long-term preservation effort is a new collaborative activity for both publishers and for libraries.
As with any new endeavour in the earliest days, questions may be more abundant than answers; nonetheless, it is important to find a way to begin archiving.
We are pleased that Portico has been able to play a small role in moving forward on this complex issue, but we are mindful that we as a community will continue to learn more about the challenges of digital preservation and to build upon these lessons.
As we do so, we will rely upon ongoing dialogue with the community, which was so integral to Portico's creation, and upon the guidance offered by the Portico Advisory Committee, which is comprised of leaders from across the spectrum of organisations involved in scholarly communication [15].
Our participation in the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program has already begun to yield helpful findings, and we look forward to broadening our engagement even as we work to meet our primary responsibility to preserve the scholarly literature entrusted to us for long-term preservation care and keeping.
References "Electronic Research Resources" survey of 7,403 faculty conducted in 2003 by Odyssey, a market research firm, on behalf of Ithaka (unpublished).
Dellavalle, R. P., Hester, E. J., Heilig, L. F., Drake, A. L., Kuntzman, J. W., Graber, M., Schilling, L., "Information Science: Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References", Science 302, no.
5646, October 31, 2003, p. 787-8.
Analyzed journals included the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Science.
A separate study found that up to 33% of footnote citations did not yield the quoted source (see Carlson, S., "Scholars Note 'Decay' of Citations to Online References", The Chronicle of Higher Education 51, no.
28, March 14, 2005, p.
A30.)
Average 2003-04 library expenditures for electronic materials was $2,718,015.
See Young, M. and Kyrillidou, M., "ARL Statistics 2003-04", Association of Research Libraries, 2005.
In 2003, 78% of surveyed faculty characterized electronic scholarly journals as "invaluable research tools."
See "Electronic Research Resources" survey.
See ARL Endorses Call for Action to Preserve E-Journals http://www.arl.org/arl/pr/presvejrnloct05.html Accessed March 13, 2006.
See RLG-OCLC report "Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities" http://www.rlg.org/legacy/longterm/repositories.pdf For a useful overview of the current effort to develop repository certification processes, see Dale, R., "Making Certification Real: Developing Methodology for Evaluating Repository Trustworthiness" RLG DigiNews, October 15, 2005 http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20793&Printable=1&Article_ID=1780.
Accessed April 5, 2006.
The report forthcoming from ARL in mid-August 2006 is described in the ARL Bimonthly Report 245, April 2006 http://www.arl.org/newsltr/245/preserv.html.
All accessed April 5, 2006.
For additional information on each of these efforts see: http://www.kb.nl/index-en.html, http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/, http://www.oclc.org/ and http://www.portico.org/ Accessed April 5, 2006.
Portico Web site http://www.portico.org/ Note that an extended overview of Portico will appear in a forthcoming issue of Serials Review.
Details regarding JSTOR are available at: http://www.jstor.org.
More information on this programme is available from http://www.diglib.org/preserve/ejp.htm Accessed April 3, 2006.
For information on Ithaka see: http://www.ithaka.org Accessed March 13, 2006.
Publishers participating in the Portico pilot included: the American Economic Association, American Mathematical Society, American Political Science Association, Association of Computing Machinery, Blackwell, Ecological Society of America, National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Royal Society, University of Chicago Press, and John Wiley & Sons.
Details of the Journal Archiving and Interchange Document Type Definition created by the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Library of Medicine are available at http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov/.
Accessed March 13, 2006.
Additional details regarding Portico's archival approach are available from Owens, E., "A Format-Registry-Based Automated Workflow for the Ingest and Preservation of Electronic Journals," November 8, 2005, Digital Library Federation Fall Forum, Charlottesville, VA. http://www.portico.org/about/community.html.
Accessed March 13, 2006.
See Urgent Action Needed to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals http://www.arl.org/osc/EjournalPreservation_Final.pdf Accessed March 12, 2006.
The members of the Portico Advisory Committee are: John Ewing, American Mathematical Society; Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka; Daniel Greenstein, University of California; Anne R. Kenney, Cornell University; Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information; Carol Mandel, New York University; David M. Pilachowski, Williams College; Rebecca Simon, University of California Press; Michael Spinella, JSTOR; Suzanne Thorin, Syracuse University; Mary Waltham, http://www.MaryWaltham.com; Craig Van Dyck, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Author Details Eileen Fenton Executive Director Portico Email: eileen.fenton@portico.org Web site: http://www.portico.org/ Return to top Article Title: "Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico" Author: Eileen Fenton Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/fenton/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OAI: The Fourth Open Archives Forum Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OAI: The Fourth Open Archives Forum Workshop Buzz data software framework database dissemination xml portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility identifier schema repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing multimedia marc ead personalisation lom rslp dspace rae interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Manjula Patel provides us with an overview of the 4th Open Archives Forum Workshop.
Welcome and Introduction Rachel Heery, UKOLN, University of Bath Delegates were welcomed and reminded that this was the fourth and final in a series of workshops which have been organised by the Open Archives Forum Project.
Rachel Heery explained that the project was a supporting action funded by the European Commission to bring together EU researchers and implementers working in the area of open access to archives.
Developing the OA-Forum Online OAI Tutorial Leona Carpenter, Digital Library and Information Consultant This tutorial has drawn on various presentations and tutorials from the OAI community which were acknowledged.
It is being developed as a set of Web pages and is available from the OA-Forum Web site [1].
The tutorial breaks down into two main areas: OAI for beginners and OAI-PMH (OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).
The beginners section provides some background on what the protocol is and what it does; technical detail is at an introductory level for those considering implementing the protocol.
The second part relates to various topics covered in workshop tutorials, largely basic ideas, history and development and the technical basis for implementing the protocol.
It also covers XML schemas and metadata formats.
Breakout Session: E-theses facilitated by Jessica Lindholm, Electronic Information Services Librarian, Lund University Libraries, Sweden The session covered a variety of e-theses-related issues from a range of perspectives.
The group identified metadata, workflows, copyright issues, preservation and convincing decision makers as themes of special interest for the session.
In the time available it was not possible to discuss the topics that had been identified as being of common interest in great depth, but the overall impression of the current situation was encouraging.
Many developmental projects are underway, some universities are already requiring electronic submission, and there was an indication from one participant that e-theses work, initially funded on a project basis at his university, is now considered a routine part of the work of library and computer staff (and funded accordingly).
With a large number of people undertaking research in this area, problems are being resolved and pockets of expertise are emerging.
Generic ready-to-use tools are desired, but local needs are likely to create high levels of expectation and demand on such tools.
They are to handle the entire publication life chain, producing a ‘useful’ document for resource discovery which also accommodates preservation needs.
The tools are to support the learning environment as well as the archival environment.
The participants felt that they would benefit from closer collaboration, particularly in terms of sharing best practice in several of the areas that were discussed.
For example, a joint approach on standardised copyright agreements between authors and publishers could be interesting to investigate in depth.
As more institutions adopt e-theses, it becomes easier to convince decision makers of the merits of this approach.
Breakout Session: Quality Issues facilitated by Rachel Heery, UKOLN, University of Bath This session discussed the identification of good practice and the formulation of generic guidelines for the future.
The distributed nature of systems means that quality becomes more and more important the greater the number of contributions.
Quality Assurance (QA) needs to be considered right from the start (e.g.
all JISC projects are now required to take QA into account, with additional funding for this specific purpose).
QA requirements change to meet technical advances, so the process needs to be iterative.
There was a question over who should be responsible for QA, Data Providers, Service Providers or Clusters?
At the moment OAI-PMH mandates DC (Dublin Core) as the lowest common denominator for metadata description -this unfortunately makes the default of a very low specificity.
The guidelines need to encourage the sharing of richer metadata records such as MARC and IEEE LOM, to enable records to be re-tasked and re-purposed.
Breakout Session: Sustainability Issues facilitated by the DARE Project In this breakout session participants discussed organisational issues relating to sustainability of open archives.
Sustainability entails securing organisational support and providing a service based on an institutional repository to a scientific or scholarly community by building service on top of the archive.
A question was raised as to whether a “self-archive” model was appropriate for institutional repositories.
IMLS Collection Registry and Item-level Metadata Repository at the University of Illinois Timothy Cole, Mathematics Librarian & Professor of Library Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Tim began the presentation by providing background information on the Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant Program (IMLS NLG) in the US which funds research and demonstration, digitization, preservation, model programs and new technology in the Library and Museums arena.
He gave an overview of the “IMLS Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections”, published in November 2001 [2] and spoke of four general recommendations from the IMLS Forum, one of which indicates that the IMLS should encourage the integration of an archiving component into every project plan by requiring a description of how data will be preserved.
An overview was also provided of an interesting OAI project in which the University of Illinois had been involved under a Mellon grant.
The primary objective of this project was to create and demonstrate OAI tools; build a portal using aggregated metadata describing cultural heritage resources; investigate use of EAD (Encoded Archival Description) metadata in an OAI context and research the utility of aggregated metadata.
The portal currently has 25 OAI data providers and aggregates some 479,000 metadata items.
An announcement was made of a preliminary version of OAI guidelines for static repositories, as a lower barrier option for exposing relatively static and small collections of metadata [3].
In addition, there are now OAI data provider services being built into many popular digital library applications such as ContentDM, Encompass, DLXS, Dspace, and Eprints.org.
However, some of the implementations are limited in that they may support the oai_dc metadata schema only, or have limited feature sets and metadata mappings which may not be configurable.
Some concerns were expressed over IP rights issues and uncertainties as to whether licences limit metadata sharing; Timothy Cole’s view is that machine readable IP rights attributes are needed to facilitate reuse.
In closing he considered OAI in context; descriptive item-level metadata alone appears not to be sufficient.
It needs to be combined with collection descriptions, user annotations, machine-generated clustering etc.
; it is important to note that OAI-PMH is not limited to item-level descriptive metadata.
The second day of the workshop was themed around several applications amongst which cultural heritage featured prominently.
Theses Alive!
Theo Andrew, Project Officer, University of Edinburgh Richard Jones, Systems Developer, Edinburgh University Library This 2-year project is being led by the University of Edinburgh, its aims being to develop an OAI-compliant thesis archive and submission system for use in all participating universities and to develop an infrastructure which enables e-theses to be published on the Web to the extent that a minimum of 500 e-theses exist within the UK segment of the NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) after two years.
As was explained, the project also aims to develop and implement a metadata export system (crosswalk) capable of delivering metadata to relevant metadata repositories for UK thesis information and to produce a “checklist approach” for universities to use as they develop e-theses capability.
An analysis of the current situation has revealed that on average 100 theses are accessed via a reading room per month and approximately 50 paper copies of theses are sent out per year.
Given such demands, the school of informatics was keen to develop a repository for theses.
Dspace [4] was chosen for its power and functionality, technical support, continued development, emphasis on digital preservation and its use of the most up to date OAI-PMH version 2.0.
The repository was to be developed in two phases, a post-viva deposit of the final version and a pre-viva submission for examination.
Since DSpace does not currently provide functionality to handle the submission phase, a software module was developed by the project to cater for thesis authoring and supervision; workflow features for thesis submission; required forms for submission; metadata export/crosswalk facilities and an option to withhold the thesis at the archive end.
The project is looking not only at the act of building and populating an E-Theses archive, but also at addressing the requirements of university administrators, examiners, students and academics.
It has become apparent that a new role is required for the Library/Information Services -one which is not simply a replacement for the traditional interlibrary loan.
Aquitaine Patrimonies & Cyberdocs: A French cultural heritage portal and an electronic structured document publishing platform Rasik Pandey, Developer, AJLSM The presentation gave an overview of the development of a cultural heritage portal from a service provider’s point of view.
A diverse range of cultural heritage information relating to the Aquitaine region in France is harvested using the OAI-PMH.
The portal is currently in a validation phase, the final version being due in March 2004 [5].
At present there are several types of search available: a simple search based on full text; an advanced search based on field-level free text; and a cartographic search which works by searching geographic departments followed by the town.
The project has found that a major difficulty stems from trying to find common threads in diverse content by which resources can be presented such that value can be added by the service provider.
They also found that DC was insufficient and added seven additional terms.
The second half of the presentation described Cyberdocs which has is origins in developing an information processing platform for scholarly publishing, its forerunner being Cybertheses.
Cyberdocs is an open source platform for publishing structured electronic documents.
DARE: a new age in academic information provision in the Netherlands Henk Ellermann, Project Leader, Erasmus University, Rotterdam DARE is the Dutch equivalent of the open archives movement, or Digital Academic Repositories [6].
It aims to have repositories at all universities catering for the archive of all academic output which would include: theses, articles, data sets, lecture slides, etc.
A major aim is to enable reuse of such resources and the provision of services based on the repositories.
A tender process is currently in progress for the provision of services.
Science and Culture: Developing a knowledge site in distributed information environments Ann Borda, Head of Collections Multimedia, Science Museum Alpay Beler, IS Architect, Science Museum Nick Wyatt, Collections Services Librarian, Science Museum Library This presentation described a project being undertaken by the Science Museum in London with the support of funding from the New Opportunities Fund (NOF).
The project involves several museums in the UK, aiming to make a rich quantity of materials and collections accessible.
It further aims to contextualise information through intelligent display, searching and relational linking and to develop user-focused activities and personalisation tools.
NOF projects are required to use DC and XML, although flexibility is allowed in the implementation.
Content is drawn from 5 disparate databases amounting to 40,000 digitised images and associated text; 30,000 library records; 10,000 object records and 50 narrative topics.
The project has found authority control to be an essential feature if consistency in the data is required.
At the collection level DC and Research Support Libraries Programme Collection Level Description (RSLP CLD) [7] elements are used.
Future work is envisaged in the area of creating communities based on interest groups linked to subject hierarchies.
Harvesting the FitzWilliam Shaun Osborne, Project Manager, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge The Fitzwilliam is the Art Museum of the University of Cambridge [8], providing access to teaching, learning and research as well as access to the general public.
The museum has a diverse collection of 500,000 objects managed in 5 curatorial groups: manuscripts and printed books; paintings, drawings and prints; antiquities; applied arts; coins and medals.
The goal of the work being undertaken is to develop a unified catalogue of object records which can be used for: collections management; teaching, learning and research; and electronic access.
The work is being funded by JISC’s FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) Programme to support the preparation of records and images to provide access using the OAI-PMH.
OA-F Organisational Issues Working Group Report Paul Child, Project Manager: Artworld, University of Cambridge This presentation provided a summary of the review of organisational issues which have emerged through discussions within the OA-Forum project and covered the following issues: business models, intellectual property rights, quality assurance, metadata, interoperability, content management systems, and the importance of organisational issues.
The review forms a part of the set of deliverables of the project.
Open Archives, Open Access and the Scholarly Communication Process David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe The scholarly publishing process comprises four functions: registration (establishing intellectual priority); certification (certifying the quality/validity of the research); awareness (assuring accessibility of research); archiving (preserving research for future use).
Looking at each function from an institutional repository perspective, it is clear that registration can be achieved.
Certification on the other hand, via the process of peer review is independent of the medium.
Awareness can be enhanced by OAI-compliance and interoperability, so that search engines can index the metadata harvested from federated repositories.
The advantage in terms of preservation is that an institutional repository helps to put librarians rather than journal publishers in charge of digital archiving.
Panel Session and discussion of the future of Open Archives Tim Cole The OAI-PMH technical guidelines have been deemed to be good.
But object identity attributes are still not well understood.
For example, to what extent does the object’s “value-addedness” need to change before it can take on a new identity?
Simple DC is neither rich nor structured enough; DC is focused on static objects and operates at an item-level view.
CLD may be more important.
On a philosophical level, open archives initiatives need to encourage reuse of information objects and provide cost-benefit analyses.
Carl Lagoze We should remember that metadata has uses other than just resource discovery.
OAI metadata is largely for dissemination purposes.
It may be useful to add work flow processes into the OAI model, so that for example migration of articles can be tracked or information such as annotations or versions can be maintained.
Andy Powell Largely from a technical point of view, as far as the OAI-PMH protocol is concerned, no further development is required.
Assignment of rights, such as how to carry Creative Commons licences could be an area to investigate; also how to carry metadata other than DC.
There is certainly no need to remove the mandatory status of DC.
There is a need for additional mechanisms, (over and above cataloguing guidelines), to cater for QA in metadata provision.
Some scepticism was expressed with regard to getting OA eprints adopted in the UK -self-archive may not be the correct model.
Muriel Foulonneau Largely concerned with how memory organisations take up technology and collaborate (with a French focus).
There is a need for preservation metadata to be adopted, as well as data transfer and repository synchronisation.
OAI-PMH appears to be under-exploited by memory organisations.
Discussion To begin with, questions from the floor and discussions centred on the issue of take-up of open archives, in particular institutional repositories.
Andy Powell felt that it was difficult to convince academics to self-archive and that there probably would be no significant take-up until there is a requirement to do so by funding bodies.
Tim Cole suggested that there is good take-up of archives in some areas such as physics, but studies were required to get a better picture.
A member of the audience thought that linking the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise to institutional repositories would also encourage take-up in the UK.
A significant point made by a member of the audience was that, if institutional repositories are to gain acceptance by academics, there will need to be a change in the scholarly publishing process a view with which the author agrees.
Further discussions related to: whether publishers would be happy with self-archiving of published material; the cost of running an institutional repository; institutional versus discipline-based repositories (e.g.
with joint authorship, where should the article be archived?
); and tracking of how harvested metadata is being used.
References The Open Archives Forum Web site http://www.oaforum.org/ IMLA Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections http://www.imls.gov/pubs/forumframework.htm OAI Guidelines for Static Repositories http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-static-repository.htm Dspace http://www.dspace.org/ Aquitaine Patrimonies Portal http://ajlsm-sdx.hopto.org/sdx-22h/pa-portail/ The DARE Project http://www.surf.nl/ RSLP Collection Description http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/ The Fitzwilliam Museum http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ Author Details Manjula Patel Research Officer UKOLN Email: m.patel@ukoln.ac.uk Website: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Fourth Open Archives Forum Workshop In Practice, Good Practice: The Future of Open Archives” Author: Manjula Patel Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/oa-forum-ws-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Libraries Integrating Content and Systems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Libraries Integrating Content and Systems Buzz data rss portal infrastructure metadata xhtml blog repositories passwords openurl sru authentication Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre finds a useful toolset to guide librarians and LIS students on the future use of IT to deliver their services.
We are not short of information on digital libraries and the technologies involved in building them.
There have been multiple papers in many journals, of which Ariadne itself is key, many books and, now, many blogs enthusiastically informing us of the technical directions it is best to take.
Nevertheless the constant evolution of available technologies, makes book publishing in the field a tricky business, risking irrelevance prior to release.
However, it is valuable to be able to place markers along the evolutionary way and recognise the technical approaches that can be consolidated and built upon with an assurance that they will be around for some time to come.
As digital library practice matures it is also valuable to take a slice in time and reflect on future directions based on established practice.
This book seeks to and does both of these, focusing on tools and strategies.
The chapters provide information on technologies that have become established, as well as looking ahead from these to the wider implications of applying the technologies in the long term.
As such it is both a 'state of the art' review and a guide to planning for the future.
Its presumed audience would be those working in libraries on the IT side digital library integrators to use the authors' suggested title.
But the authors stress that this limit should not be unduly emphasised: the book will also help managers in planning for the future generally; it will help non-technically involved librarians to think through what they would like to achieve; and it will help students of library and information science to a better understanding of the field they are entering.
As indicated in the book, libraries and IT go hand in hand nowadays, and digital library planning by all in the sector will have a major impact on how libraries are both delivered and perceived.
The first three chapters set the scene for the rest of the book to build on.
Chapter 1 addresses the skills required and opportunities available in building digital libraries.
The challenge outlined is to recognise the value of infrastructure in underpinning digital libraries and the value of collaboration to help provide it.
There is also a need to recognise the potential of innovation on a small scale, and the ability to address specific user needs.
The authors are keen to highlight not only the potential of libraries to build digital services but also their existing capability and how they might make the most of this.
Chapters 2 and 3 provide information on relevant technologies, from networks and XHTML to the standards that can be used such as SRU/W and OpenURL.
These chapters, whilst useful lists for reference, are possibly the weakest parts of the book, though through no fault of the authors.
Listing technologies and describing them is never easy how much or how little information should one provide?
Some references are given to Web sites for additional information, though these are limited: this is a factor throughout the book and frustrates when it would have been useful to leap off and discover more.
The book comes into its own as the chapters develop from this start.
Chapter 4 on authentication, identity management and security is a useful overview of possible options and the components involved, even mentioning Athens!
It is nice to see a focus on identity management, a piece of infrastructure that is currently appearing on the horizons of institutions in this country, and its benefits for libraries.
The value of maintaining a single source of identity management to service different applications is high, preventing passwords from becoming outdated and removing the need to log in for every different service used.
Chapter 5 describes the ways in which digital libraries can interface with the integrated library system (ILS).
The authors are clear that this is not simple, as the various products do not make it easy.
But where possible options ranging from replicating human interfaces through to web services can be applied to good effect.
There is some consideration of the future of the ILS, as has been frequently seen elsewhere as well in recent years, focusing on the ability of the ILS to become more componentised.
One particular component that may play a major role is Electronic Resource Management, the ability to manage digital resources and provide access to them according to the licences involved.
Chapter 6 looks at the emergence of this technology whilst wisely making it clear that ERM is not just an ILS bolt-on but a valuable approach to managing resources generally.
Libraries have a number of options for providing ERM functionality (ILS module, standalone, based around data provided by a third party, e.g., Serials Solutions) and this area of digital library development will no doubt develop further in the next few years.
ERM, of course, focuses on metadata about resources that are usually sourced externally to the library.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) addresses complete resources that are often sourced internally, though the authors also make it clear they anticipate more external content to be harvested for local searching rather then being accessed remotely in the future.
Whether external or internal, there is an increasing amount of digital content that needs to be managed if the library is to deliver it effectively.
The chapter addresses three levels at which this can be achieved: a repository for each material type, a repository that can manage more than one type, and the comprehensive one-stop shop model for all types.
As with ERM, early developments have provided useful functionality that will develop rapidly in the near future.
Chapter 8 addresses functionality that has become more established within libraries: integration with content providers through the use of OpenURL linking and federated searching.
Both provide more direct integration with external content, though there remain, widely aired, reservations about the potential of federated searching truly to deliver what the user needs.
Chapter 9 looks at library portals whilst recognising that the term 'portal' is as much a useful term for encapsulating digital library provision as a 'thing' in its own right.
It considers three types: the simple portal of a web page with relevant links; the 'well-integrated' portal providing federated searching and a variety of links from this using OpenURL and RSS; and the 'well-rounded' portal, which is described as more of a strategy to deliver library services within the wider environment the users sit within.
It is a shame the book does not examine this in greater detail.
All the topics discussed are of great value to a library, and there is clear recognition of the benefits to be gained by collaborating with others in an institution towards the provision of certain infrastructural components (e.g., authentication, networking, servers, etc.).
Chapter 10 looks ahead and emphasises that library technology is not just for library IT staff, but influences everyone connected with a library.
This affects the skills required and the teams of people that can best achieve the desired goals.
This book is very much focused on how digital libraries are delivered by the library.
As the Internet becomes the primary source of information and content for most users the library risks losing its position as the main institutional information service deliverer.
By taking the library out into the wider environment, instead of expecting users to come to the library (even digitally), the added value libraries can provide can be better emphasised.
Notwithstanding the challenges involved, though, the authors finish on a high note, recognising that today is also a tremendously exciting time to be involved in digital libraries and the tools within these.
Amen to that!
Author Details Chris Awre Integration Architect e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Digital Libraries: Integrating Content and Systems" Author: Chris Awre Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/awre-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing and Publicising a Workable Accessibility Strategy Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing and Publicising a Workable Accessibility Strategy Buzz software usability accessibility browser multimedia e-learning ict wcag research standards Citation BibTex RIS Lawrie Phipps, Sue Harrison, David Sloan and Betty Willder look at the increasing need for developers of institutional and educational Web sites to develop and follow a strategy for ensuring optimal accessibility of online content.
This article looks at the increasing need for developers of institutional and educational Web sites to develop and follow a strategy for ensuring optimal accessibility of online content.
In particular the need is stressed for careful thought about the aims of such a strategy, and to ensure that the strategy meets a balance between ambition, legal responsibility and equitable access to learning and teaching.
As an example, the need for a well written public online accessibility statement is discussed, not only as a demonstration of awareness and proactivity, but also as an important factor in its own right in optimising access.
Background: Web Accessibility Drivers In the UK there are several drivers that are helping to ensure that Web accessibility is at least a consideration for all education institutions.
These have included the Quality Assurance Agency's (QAA) Code of Practice for the Assurance of Academic Quality and Standards in Higher Education, Section 3: Students with Disabilities [1], increasing awareness of good practice in Web development, (such as the use of standards), and disability discrimination legislation.
It is this latter driver that has perhaps brought accessibility of Web-based material to the top of some Web managers' 'to do' list and is likely to continue to do so.
The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) outlaws discrimination against disabled students, both as individuals, in that they cannot be treated 'less favourably' than non-disabled students and, potentially more significantly for the provision of Web materials, as a part of the general public by not making 'reasonable adjustments' to the services the institution provides.
Reasonable adjustments are a duty owed to the wider community and are anticipatory.
The legislation is there to ensure that if a disabled student should wish to attend a course at a specific institution then practices that could have been amended have been, or that there is a policy in place that can amend a practice with the minimum of disruption to the disabled student.
Whilst it may be some time until the legislation is tested in a court of law, thereby providing case law to define the legislative requirements further, commentators have agreed that institutional Web sites would be covered by the requirement to make reasonable adjustments, that is, they need to be accessible to a wider disabled community [2][3].
However, while the legislation is a major driver and is forcing Web developers to look at how disabled students access their material, they should also be aware that a wider social inclusion agenda is also gaining momentum.
Inevitably access to all electronic materials will become an equity of access issue that should be second nature to the developer, in the same way as the consideration of ramps and lifts is to an architect when designing a new building.
UK Higher Education Accessibility Studies There is clear evidence that across the UK, steps are being taken to address accessibility of institutional Web sites, supported by two recent studies which simultaneously, but independently, analysed a range of Higher Education Web sites against established accessibility criteria.
While current efforts are acknowledged, both studies indicate that there is scope for more to be done, particularly in terms of conformance with levels of accessibility claimed by the sites themselves.
Kelly analysed 162 Higher Education entry points (i.e.
the home page of the Web site) [4] using the online Bobby testing tool.
Kelly adds the caveats that the findings are only indicative of the current state of accessibility, that the testing tool is limited and that full assessment would necessitate a large degree of manual checking.
The limitations of automated checking tools have been further explored by Diaper and Worman [5].
Their research found not only shortcomings in the tools but also that some results differed between the tools when tested on the same page.
Kelly's findings demonstrated that 70 entry points met the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI) Conformance Level 'A', whereby at least all Priority 1 checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) are satisfied and four met W3C WAI Conformance Level 'Double-A', whereby at least all Priority 2 checkpoints are also satisfied.
However, only those checkpoints that could be tested with software tools were measured, meaning conformance with a significant number of checkpoints, and hence a true level of accessibility, could not be assessed.
Witt and McDermott [6] carried out two surveys using similar methodologies to Kelly; they also found that some institutional home pages met the Priority 1 and Priority 2 guidelines when tested with an automatic checking tool.
However, they took the testing further and assessed home pages (both automatically and manually) against their declared level of compliance.
They found that only 58 of the 80 they tested actually complied with the standard to which they aspired.
Why Make a Statement about a Web Site's Accessibility?
Web developers and managers should realise that more emphasis is being placed on their Web sites as a medium for information transmission.
They are often an extension of the prospectus and sometimes the first time a student 'sees' an institution it is through a computer monitor.
It is essential that institutions realise that this 'front door' will sometimes need a ramp.
Because of this an institution needs to understand the importance and implications of making a public statement about the accessibility of their Web site.
Amongst other reasons, this will ensure that potential students with accessibility issues understand what is being done and what they can expect, in the same way that a prospectus carries information about aspects of student life other than the courses available.
In addition, it is important that institutional staff know about the aspirations of the institution and understand their role in achieving them.
This is essential if staff are required to publish material for students on the Web site.
But, perhaps cynically, the statement is a first and obvious step to take in ensuring that the institution understands, and is meeting, its obligations under the DDA.
Text-Only and Web Site Logos Throughout the Internet there are a growing number of Web sites offering specific 'disabled access'.
These are almost always a text-only version of the existing Web site, in many cases preserving accessibility problems in the alternative site, and often appearing to consider blind people as the only group affected by accessibility problems.
If Web sites are to become socially inclusive, all users must be able to enjoy shared experiences.
Logos and signs pointing to a separate resource serve only to segregate the experiences of users and further exclude the disabled community.
A metaphor that is being increasingly used to illustrate this point is that of a wheelchair user going to the theatre to be told that they must watch the play through a closed circuit television in the cloakroom because the main auditorium is inaccessible.
Web managers should also be wary of displaying a large variety of icons to indicate the level of accessibility they have reached logos can easily become false indicators as soon as a change is made to a page which usually inadvertently introduces an accessibility barrier.
Unfortunately there are people who seem to delight in publicly shaming sites which, though displaying a W3C WCAG icon, have slipped up somewhere [6].
TechDis also discourages the excessive and inappropriate use of logos denoting that Web sites are 'disabled friendly' [7].
The use of a logo in many cases appears to be a contractual obligation or badge of honour for the developer, but can at best be seen as patronising and at worst as offering no true reflection of the usability of the site for a disabled person.
Thatcher [8] describes how a site can be designed apparently following accessibility guidelines to the letter, yet spectacularly fails to provide an acceptable browsing experience for disabled visitors.
It is important to remember that social inclusion is more than an exercise in paying lip-service to what has been done for disaffected communities; it is about ensuring equity of service and standards.
Web developers are now feeling the effects of the social inclusion agenda, but with a community of technologists that are used to innovation and change inclusive practice is only another milestone on the road to good and equitable practice.
Current Web Accessibility Information on UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) So what is the current level of information about accessibility of UK HEI sites?
Of the 163 HEI Web sites accessed between September and October 2003, 88 (54%) were found to have some level of accessibility information on their public Web site.
The information was of varying depth and quality, some were very structured policy documents linked to strategy and staff development, whilst some only made a broad statement about staff being mindful of disabled students' needs.
Text-only 'alternate' Web sites were found in 44 HEIs these are generally advertised as accessible versions of the main site.
Of the range of accessibility advice publicly available on institutional Web sites much of the material was aimed at the users of the Web site, informing the user of the lengths to which the institution had gone to ensure access and how to get more out of the features available.
In addition institutions also provided material aimed at staff that published material on the Web.
The approach here tended to be authoritarian informing staff of the policy and the need to ensure accessibility (usually as a result of the 'Special Educational Needs and Disability Act').
Stress was primarily placed on the need for staff to comply with the policy in order to protect the institution, but also in many cases it was explained why material should be created accessibly.
Some institutions devolved responsibility of accessibility, handing over the design and implementation of an accessible Web site to third parties, such as a Web design consultant.
In many cases this involves the development of the corporate Web site and then the supplying of templates to Web managers for use by staff.
Across the 88 institutions that did have some form of information about accessibility there was no consistent reference to standards or guidelines: 36 referred to W3C.
16 referred to accessibility tools including Bobby and LIFT.
This can be problematical as different tools can yield different accessibility results [5].
Eight referred to SENDA compliance in meeting the requirements of disability discrimination legislation (where no direct reference to Web accessibility is made).
28 referred to a variety of other standards including US legislation (section 508) and 'in-house' standards.
19 of the 88 additionally suggested that users having difficulty accessing material should contact a relevant member of staff (such as the Webmaster).
Of the 75 HEIs that did not have a visible policy or statement, 20 were contacted via their Webmaster.
Nine stated that they either had a policy that was not public or would soon be made public.
Of the remaining 11, four stated that the institution had held workshops for staff or were creating resources to help staff acquire skills.
This small sample of the 75 institutions with no visible policy, where almost half of those institutions contacted said that they did have some form of policy, could indicate that there is more awareness than is indicated by the original research.
Clearly, therefore, there is some scope for enhancing the information available about the accessibility of an institutional Web site, and the strategy taken to optimise accessibility of institutional Web content.
What Should a Statement Say?
The first step of any accessibility strategy should be to identify a workable yet equitable level of accessibility towards which to aim.
This may be the W3C WAI guidelines 'Double-A' standard [9] (recommended) but other standards and guidelines are becoming available and the decision needs to be taken by the institution.
Accordingly, a published accessibility statement should reflect this strategy.
Be aware though, that for many disabled Web users, particularly those without expertise in Web usage and design, the statement of a W3C conformance level may be meaningless in terms of helping them to use the site.
Therefore it is essential to provide, in non-technical language, information that advises on accessibility features provided.
In addition, there may be areas of the Web site that do not yet reach the aspired standards of accessibility and due to factors such as use of complex multimedia, may never reach that level.
In such a case, it is well worth mentioning them in the statement with a brief explanation of the access issues in question, and, crucially, with details of how a user can retrieve the required information or functionality in another way.
Other useful additions to the accessibility statement include: Details of any testing the site that has taken place with disabled users.
Description of any assistive technologies used in testing, including any incompatibilities.
Information about how people can change display settings, through the browser, or alternative style sheets if offered.
It is extremely important that people know what they can do for themselves, by using their browser or operating system as assistive technology.
Provide information about page layout this can help screen reader users understand where on each page types of information are found navigation bars, internal page navigation, form layout, etc.
It is essential to provide contact information for people to report any problems they are having or to request information in an alternative accessible format.
It is expected that an accessibility statement will be organic changing to reflect the increasing accessibility as improvements are made.
A Cautionary Note It is important to bear in mind that whatever is published about the accessibility of a Web site can affect users' expectations.
There are indications that consumer rights and remedies are being increasingly used when contesting what is seen as inadequate provision of education services.
One reason for this is that students are now making considerable payments towards their education.
There is an expectation that statements made on for example an institution's Web site or in its prospectus should be accurate and should not be misleading.
Advertising standards and practices also have a role to play in this.
Making sweeping statements such as "we are compliant with W3C WAI 'Triple-A'" may be an admirable aspiration, but if any part of the institution's Web site does not meet this standard then there may be a legal case to answer.
Using language such as " we aim to " and "the Institution is working toward.." may be a better route, coupled with a pragmatic approach where students, potential students and other users are encouraged to contact an appropriate person at the institution if they have any difficulties accessing information.
The legal issues about accuracy of this type of information are also highlighted by Cooper [10]: "Information given to students about IT facilities must be accurate as the provision of a particular facility could persuade a student to choose a particular course.
A claim for damages could result from the failure to provide that facility."
By extension, stating that the institution's Web site is (or aims to be) accessible to a standard could arguably result in a similar scenario and the student could potentially have a legal claim for damages if his valid expectations are not in fact met.
In addition use of 'notices and disclaimers' may not necessarily protect the institution from consumer protection legislation, where a disclaimer adding a caveat that some material is not accessible may be valueless if elsewhere on the site a statement claims to meet accessibility standards [10].
Web managers should be aware that the institution may ultimately be held liable for any material published within its domain, including personal Web pages, Virtual Learning Environments and student discussion boards [11].
If these facilities form part of the education provision and if students are encouraged to participate in or use them, then it is highly possible that the expectation of accessibility and usability is a valid one.
The Next Steps Web managers need to be mindful of the issues raised in this article, particularly with regard to the expectations of students and potential students.
Disability discrimination legislation has placed a clear responsibility on Web developers.
Yet embedding the accessibility of the disparate elements of an institutional Web site into a strategy is not a simple task and involves, in the short term, ensuring that issues such as staff development, purchasing of resources and tools as well as development of materials are all included.
Eventually, the ideal way of ensuring sustainable Web accessibility is to embed it in other strategies, e.g.
staff development strategies, ICT and e-learning strategies, and information strategies.
However, in the short term, Web managers should take a series of steps: 1.
Re-examine existing Web accessibility statements, ensuring they are user-focussed as discussed in this article.
1.1.
This may mean examining all accessibility statements within the institution's domain (including those within VLEs).
1.2.
Web managers should involve the institution's legal team and other appropriate committees.
2. Review institutional statements on equal opportunities and disability.
2.1.
This is essential in ensuring consistency across the information that is provided.
For example, a prospectus may state that the institution is sensitive to the needs of students with disabilities and they can expect adjustments to the way their courses are organised, taught and assessed.
This would obviously have an implication if any part of it involved using the Web as a medium.
3.
Decide on an appropriate level of accessibility that the institution should aim for.
3.1.
Base the level on appropriate information.
TechDis and other bodies recommend the W3C guidelines [9].
However, there are other guidelines such as the UK Government's own standards [12] and it must be an institutional decision as to which are adopted.
3.2.
Ensure that the chosen strategy is workable across sectors do not introduce an inflexible level; that may result in some pedagogically valuable resources having to be removed, and in general may result in demotivation amongst staff.
3.3.
Many institutions are using tools as a compliance measure, such as 'Bobby compliant'.
While very useful in discovering, and in some cases repairing, certain accessibility features, these tools require a great deal of subjective assessment and claiming compliance could be challenged in the subjective areas.
4.
Deploy the statement across all sectors of the institution.
4.1.
This will ensure that all staff are aware of what prospective students are being told, and what they should be aiming for with any e-materials they are developing.
4.2.
The statement should also be reflected in the institutional strategies on ICT, e-learning and any other appropriate areas upon which accessibility will have an impact.
5.
Work with the staff development unit to ensure that appropriate workshops and training are available for staff involved in development.
Conclusion Finally, Web managers should not attempt the task on their own.
Only by working with other areas of the institution, such as disability support, staff and educational development, e-learning units and senior managers with responsibility for ICT, can institution-wide Web accessibility be achieved and maintained over time.
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(ds.)
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Thatcher, J.
[online] (2003) Web Accessibility What not to do http://jimthatcher.com/whatnot.htm [accessed 19.11.03] W3C (1999a) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 http://www.w3c.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/#Conformance [accessed 16.10.03] W3C (1999b) Fact Sheet for "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0", http://www.w3.org/1999/05/WCAG-REC-fact.html [accessed 30.09.03] Cooper, C. [online] (2003) Legal Risks and Liabilities for IT Services in Higher and Further Education http://www.jisc.ac.uk/legal/index.cfm?name=lis_legal_risks [accessed 10.11.03] Sutter, G. [online] (2003) FE/HE Institutions and Liability for Third Party Provided Content http://www.jisc.ac.uk/legal/index.cfm?name=lis_gs_content_regulation [accessed 14.11.03] Office of the e-Envoy (2003) Guidelines for UK Government websites.
Cabinet Office, London Author Details Lawrie Phipps JISC TechDis Service Email: Lawrie@techdis.ac.uk Web site: http://www.techdis.ac.uk Sue Harrison JISC TechDis Service Email: Sue@techdis.ac.uk Web site: http://www.techdis.ac.uk David Sloan Digital Media Access Group Email: DSloan@computing.dundee.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dmag.org.uk Betty Willder JISC Legal Information Service Email: b.willder@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/legal/ Return to top Article Title: "Developing and Publicising a Workable Accessibility Strategy" Author: Lawrie Phipps, Sue Harrison, David Sloan and Betty Willder Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/phipps/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Mozilla Firefox for Rapid Web Development and Testing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mozilla Firefox for Rapid Web Development and Testing Buzz framework javascript html xml css firefox browser repositories dom php xul intranet url Citation BibTex RIS Patrick Lauke takes a quick look at Firefox, the new browser released by the Mozilla Foundation, and points out useful features and extensions for Web developers.
Mozilla Firefox [1] is a free, open-source Web browser based on the Mozilla codebase.
Version 1.0 was recently released after two years of development, so now may be a good time to evaluate this browser's capabilities.
"Out of the box" Mozilla Firefox offers a variety of features catering to both occasional Web surfers and power users.
The more advanced functionality can be particularly noted as a real time saver during the Web development process.
Standards-compliant Rendering Engine Based on the Mozilla Application Suite [2], Firefox's page rendering (as well as the complete rendering of the user interface itself) is handled by Gecko.
First implented for Netscape 6.0, this rendering engine has proven to be very close to the official W3C [3] recommendations in relation to behaviour and display.
As a result, Web pages that render correctly in Firefox are more likely to work reasonably, if not perfectly, well in most other standards-compliant browsers with only minor adjustments.
Compare this to the all too frequent practice of designing for Internet Explorer (with its notoriously flawed rendering engine), Firefox saves a significant amount of time to ensure a consistent result in other browsers.
Extensive Page Information Figure 1: Firefox page info dialogue general summary tab Figure 2: Firefox page info dialogue media tab Where other browsers may attempt to hide a lot of complex information from the user, Firefox offers comprehensive page information dialogue clearly aimed at the more technically minded audience.
MIME type, character encoding, meta information included in a document's head section and listings for all form elements, links and media files are all collated and give the user a comprehensive overview of the currently loaded Web page.
User-friendly view source Figure 3: View source with syntax highlighting Rather than sending the source code to an external text editor, Firefox uses its own source viewer with syntax highlighting, which colour-codes the various tags, and line wrapping.
When content on a Web page is highlighted, Firefox also offers the option to view selection source from its context menu.
This will open an abridged version of the source code view, with the selection's markup highlighted in the source.
This reduces the need to 'hunt' for a specific section of a Web page in the overall source code.
DOM Inspector Figure 4: DOM Inspector The DOM inspector is a powerful tool that gives developers direct access to the Document Object Model the tree-like structure of the current page.
For each element in the DOM, the inspector provides a comprehensive collection of information, including the list of CSS styles currently affecting the element and the computed styles that are effectively being used (after all things like font size inheritance and percentage values have been calculated).
Customisable Interface Figure 5: Firefox interface customisation dialogue A unique feature of Firefox is the comprehensive level of customisation of the actual browser interface than can be performed by the user.
'Right-clicking' anywhere in the browser's top interface gives the option to enable/disable certain toolbars, as well as providing access to the customisation dialogue.
By dragging/dropping interface elements between the dialogue window and the browser interface itself, and reorganising elements that are already in place, users can make sweeping changes to suit their preferences and way of working.
Extending Firefox Beyond the default features already present in Firefox, the real strength of this browser lies in its extendibility.
Further refining the concept of 'extensions' from the main Mozilla suite, Firefox offers a framework that enables users to customise the program's features and capabilities to match their particular needs.
While other browsers may have opted for a more traditional, platform-specific plug-in approach, Firefox uses (for the most part) cross-platform extensions.
Behind the scenes, extensions are normally created with a combination of XUL [4] (XML User Interface Language) and Javascript.
As writing extensions does not require any particular development environment [5] and developers can leverage previous knowledge from simple Web application development and DOM-based javascripting, there already exists a large number of extensions [6] to install.
Here is a brief look at three extensions that I personally find to be most useful: Adding Options to the Context Menu Figure 6: 'view this page in IE' context menu option Figure 7: 'open link target in IE' context menu option With regard to IE View [7]: Many extensions add very small and specific features to Firefox that may initially appear to be trivial, but save time during general browsing and Web development.
This extension is a good example: it adds options to the context menu (normally accessed through right-clicking the mouse over a Web page) that allow the user to open the current page or the target of a link in Internet Explorer.
Normally, developers would resort to copying/pasting a page's URL between address bars.
This process is now streamlined into a single click.
HTML Validator An HTML validator extension can also prove useful [8].It can often be difficult to validate Web pages, particularly when working on restricted resources like an intranet.
Figure 8: HTML Validator with Tidy source view Figure 9: HTML Validator with Tidy code clean-up view As the W3C validator can't be allowed to access the page directly, the source code needs to uploaded as a file.
This becomes frustrating when working with dynamically generated pages, because you can't simply send your unprocessed ASP/PHP/etc documents.
To work around the issue, developers would either access the relevant page from the restricted server, save the HTML from within the browser and upload the resulting file, or set up a local validation service.
The HTML validator extension painlessly takes care of the latter, by integrating a customised version of Tidy [9] with the default View source functionality.
Originally developed by the W3C, Tidy not only reports any problems it may encounter in a page's markup, but also offers the function to fix the issues and clean up the document.
Web Developer Toolbar If there is one extension that makes Firefox an indispensable tool for Web development and testing, Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar [10] has to be it.
To cover all the features of this extension would require a whole series of articles, but a few of the most interesting are briefly introduced below.
Outline Menu Figure 10: Web Developer Toolbar Outline block level elements Figure 11: Web Developer Toolbar Options dialogue, with the 'Show element names when outlining elements' checkbox ticked This menu contains a variety of commands to place visual, colour-coded borders around elements on the page.
Particularly useful for debugging CSS driven layouts, these outlines give a good "at a glance" overview of the overall page structure and help highlight certain elements of the markup in a quick and intuitive fashion.
Additionally, the name of outlined elements can be displayed by enabling the relevant option in the toolbar's preferences.
Display ID & Class Details Figure 12: Web Developer Toolbar Display ID & Class Details As the name suggests, this option found in the generic Information menu displays any element ID and CSS class.
Combined with the outline commands, this option can be helpful in providing a quick overview of page structure without the need to examine the markup.
EditCSS Figure 13: Web Developer Toolbar EditCSS sidebar This opens a sidebar that displays any stylesheets linked to from the current page and allows users to edit the style rules on the fly.
It's an excellent way to test and prototype changes and additions to a page's CSS quickly, this option can be particularly useful when debugging the presentation of an online Web page without the need first to download the document and related CSS files.
Disable Menu Figure 14: Web Developer Toolbar Disable menu A set of commands that enables developers to toggle quickly a variety of browser features such as javascript, loading of images (although it's probably more appropriate to use the replace images with ALT attributes option from the Images menu) and stylesheets.
This latter option in particular can give a quick overview of how a page looks without any CSS applied, thus giving a good feel for the markup structure with regard to proper use of headings, lists, etc.
Conclusion Mozilla Firefox offers core functionality, making it ideally suited for Web development and testing applications.
Through the addition of a whole range of extensions, many complex commands can further be integrated directly with the browser, in many cases removing the need to rely on external applications.
Firefox can be turned into a quick prototyping environment, particularly when working with Web standards and CSS driven layouts.
This additional functionality is invaluable during debugging and troubleshooting sessions.
References Mozilla Firefox product page, http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Mozilla Application Suite product page, http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/ World Wide Web Consortium, http://www.w3.org/ Mozilla XUL Documentation, http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/ mozillaZine's Extension development documentation project, http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extension_development Mozilla Update Firefox extension repository, https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefox IE View extension, http://ieview.mozdev.org/ HTML Validator extension, http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/ HTML Tidy Library Project, http://tidy.sourceforge.net/ Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar extesnion, http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/ Author Details Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster University of Salford Salford M5 4WT Email: p.h.lauke@salford.ac.uk Web site: http://www.salford.ac.uk Personal site: http://www.splintered.co.uk (which demonstrates certain aspects of this article).
Return to top Article Title: "Mozilla Firefox for Rapid Web Development and Testing" Author: Patrick H. Lauke Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/lauke/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Tapir: Adding E-Theses Functionality to DSpace Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Tapir: Adding E-Theses Functionality to DSpace Buzz software java wiki api html database bsd xml apache archives metadata identifier repositories preservation oai-pmh dspace lucene licence interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Jones demonstrates how the Theses Alive Plugin for Institutional Repositories (Tapir) has provided E-Theses functionality for DSpace.
The Theses Alive Plugin for Institutional Repositories (Tapir) [1] has been developed at Edinburgh University Library [2] to help provide an E-Thesis service within an institution using DSpace [3].
It has been developed as part of the Theses Alive!
[4] Project under funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [5], as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) [6] Programme.
This article looks at DSpace, the repository system initially developed by Hewlett-Packard and MIT and subsequently made available as a community-owned package.
We discuss how this community driven open-source development method can work when third-party tools such as the Tapir are also involved, and what issues arise.
One of the primary objectives is to introduce the Tapir in detail, explaining what has been developed and what relevance this has to E-Theses.
There is also a very brief introduction to the UK-recommended E-Theses Metadata set.
As a use case, we will look at the recently released Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) [7], and will examine DSpace and the Tapir working together to provide Edinburgh's Institutional Repository.
Finally we look at how development of tools such as the Tapir can be sustained and what issues were encountered during the recent upgrade from DSpace 1.1.1 to DSpace 1.2.
The future of the package is considered and some recommendations for the future are made.
What is DSpace?
DSpace was initially developed by Hewlett-Packard and MIT in collaboration [8].
The objective was to create a package that could provide an institutional repository which addressed the problem of digital preservation as a central theme.
Since then there have been considerable changes to the process of development, and these changes are continuing.
A number of individuals from institutions using DSpace have taken on the role of developers, and a community of interested parties has evolved who have started to feed code back into the core.
This is part of the open-source development model into which DSpace is moving, and will be discussed further in the following section.
The application itself provides ways of capturing, storing, indexing, preserving and disseminating digital objects.
In its primary role as an institutional repository package this is the intellectual output of the institution when such output is in digital form.
This can include, but is not limited to, research papers, conference papers, book chapters, datasets, learning objects and, of course, E-Theses.
Capture happens primarily through a Web interface which collects some metadata elements and manages file uploads; as a secondary means of capturing items there is also a bulk upload feature.
Storage currently occurs as a combination of information in a relational database and a traditional file system, although plans to change this to enhance the preservation aspects are currently in motion.
Lucene [9], a third-party java search engine, provides the indexing and searching facilities that DSpace utilises.
Exposure is provided in a number of ways: first there is the traditional Web interface, fed from search and hierarchical browse facilities, second the system exposes its metadata via the OAI-PMH [10].
Open Source Development, DSpace and the Tapir There are various ways that open-source development can be achieved, and here we will briefly examine the model to which DSpace is attempting to adhere.
The source code is maintained in a version-controlled repository [11] on a publicly accessible server (there are a number of these available, but DSpace is hosted by SourceForge [12]).
From this repository anyone may obtain a copy of the current source code in whatever state it is in.
A number of individuals have administrative control over the versioning system, and these administrators are referred to as committers; their role is to action any changes to the core code.
Only trusted developers should be given this access (by other trusted developers), and they will vet code submissions from contributors to see if they are ready to go into the source.
Periodically a version of the source code will be declared as stable and it can be packaged up into an official release which can be downloaded and used by people not interested in working with the development copy.
At time of writing DSpace has yet fully to mature into this form of development, but the first steps have been taken.
The way that third-party developments such as the Tapir fit into this is as follows.
First, you must be willing to work from the most bleeding edge version of the source code; this often means having some space on a development machine of your own where you can regularly build and work with the most recent version.
It is also necessary to make a decision as to the developmental model that you will use for your own software.
Will you write patches to existing source code and commit the changes to the versioning system, or will you write and maintain your own software pack that can be installed onto DSpace?
At Edinburgh University Library we have chosen the latter approach for a number of reasons: It was not necessarily anticipated that our developments would be of interest to the whole of the DSpace community.
The developmental model of DSpace at the time the project began was not as open as it is now.
The Tapir was primarily being developed for UK E-Theses sites, and development was not expected to move at the same speed as DSpace development.
For these reasons we have created our own SourceForge project [1] and maintain our own source code.
The question then is whether we should be using the same developmental model as DSpace?
Currently we are not, since the Tapir is a Theses Alive!
project outcome and we have some interest in controlling the direction of development.
This is not a problem at the moment since there is little code being contributed from other sources, but we are prepared to open development of the software further if there is a demand for it, and the licence allows for the code base to be forked.
If you choose to commit software directly back to the DSpace source code then you must either have committer status with the version control system or be in direct contact with a committer.
There are a number of mailing lists that you can join to make this possible [13].
To create the Tapir we chose not only to build separately from the DSpace core but also to create our own Java file package (JAR) which would ultimately be installed in the DSpace library directory alongside other third-party tools such as Lucene or the JavaMail package.
The advantage of this over integrating into the DSpace source is easier installation and maintenance.
At this point a brief note on licensing is also warranted: DSpace has been released under a BSD-style licence [14], which is a common standard open-source licence.
The Tapir has also been released under a similar licence, with agreement from the University's legal advisors, in part to ensure that future integration with DSpace is feasible.
The Tapir The objective of the Tapir was, as already mentioned, to provide E-Theses functionality to DSpace.
We have previously performed a comparative evaluation of two packages: see DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations in Ariadne issue 38 [15] to see which was most suitable for our E-Theses management system.
Consequently some of the shortcomings of DSpace to ETD-db [16] were adopted as desired features for the Tapir.
The general feature list that we had in mind was as follows: Allow supervisors to observe the work of students, to make changes, suggestions or comments prior to submission.
Collect the relevant metadata for an E-Thesis.
Allow E-Thesis metadata collection and item submission to be done separately to other research material's metadata collection.
Allow for easy identification of the type of content in the institutional repository (e.g.
E-Thesis, E-Print etc).
Provide a metadata export facility for services not using OAI-PMH This is, of course, in addition to the administrative procedures that were to be developed along with the other project aims from Theses Alive!
At time of writing features 1 4 are well developed and 5 is in the pipeline.
We now examine the way in which the first four of these features were developed in order to provide some insight into both the nature of the Tapir and the developmental methods that were employed.
Later we will look at how this could have been improved both from the point of view of Tapir development and the DSpace architecture.
Supervision Orders This section discusses the way in which we designed and built the supervision orders facilities, and is the longest section because it introduces most of the issues surrounding developing for DSpace, and tackles them where relevant.
The full range of functionality provided by the supervision order system is as follows: Collaborative workspace in which items that are in the process of being submitted appear in the supervisor's private workspace.
This is good for integrating E-Theses into a traditional institutional repository because the supervisor can also be simultaneously authoring other documents in this workspace and be supervising more than one thesis (See Figure 8).
Tools for supervisors with insufficient privileges to edit a student's submission to be able to observe the ongoing work.
This is the sort of functionality that might be required by external advisors.
Tools to allow online, recorded, communication between students and supervisors.
At a later time it should be possible to decide whether these notes form an interesting part of the submission or can be discarded.
A system to administer supervision orders that provide the above functionality.
This includes an authorisation tool to provide different types of supervision.
To integrate this into the initial DSpace system it is necessary to understand where this functionality can be inserted.
For feature 1: in DSpace there is a 'My DSpace' section from which logged-in users can manage their digital items, and this is the obvious place to insert the user interface (UI) for the functionality.
In fact, in 'My DSpace' there already exists an 'In Progress Submissions' area in which items part way through submission reside while the author is logged out of the system.
This is effectively exactly what an item in our desired collaborative workspace will be, so we can see straight away the point at which we will insert our own functionality.
The underlying object structure out of which DSpace is built models items that exist in the 'In Progress Submissions' section as 'Workspace Items' (org.dspace.content.WorkspaceItem) which behave slightly differently to normal items.
Nonetheless, the Workspace Item is a type of Item as far as many of its properties are concerned, and this means that some operations which can be applied to items can also be applied to workspace items; for example, and important in this case, the application of authorisation policies.
Since there is nothing to prevent us making any Workspace Item visible to anyone using the application, all we need to do is provide UI tools for the collaborative workspace, then decide who is allowed to look at any particular Workspace Item via the authorisation policies.
We therefore create a linking database table where we join EPerson Groups (collections of authenticated system users) to specific Workspace Items (See Figure 1).
Manipulation of this table will be the goal of feature 4.
Figure 1: Basic relationship between EPerson Groups and Workspace Items Now we can easily obtain, for any single EPerson's 'My DSpace', all Workspace Items with which an EPerson is associated.
We authorise the supervisors to open the item by simply applying policies using the tool developed for feature 4 above to the item from which the Workspace Item is derived.
The policies that we define are as follows: None The supervisors have no authorisations concerning the workspace item.
This is only useful if you intend to configure your own policies manually.
Editor The supervisors have full editorial control over the item.
This gives them precisely the same authorisations as the owner of the item.
This would also form the basis of a truly collaborative workspace.
Observer The supervisors may only observe the metadata and files of the item, but cannot make changes.
This is the driving force behind feature 2.
We can extend Figure 1 to show how all this is related inside the system, as depicted in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Advanced relationship between Groups and Workspace Items The fact that we can now prevent groups from editing items, whilst still giving them permission to read items, means that we must make allowances for a different sort of interface in the workspace.
The obvious candidate for this is the standard item viewer in DSpace, but the problem with it is that it requires the item to have a handle [17], which our workspace items do not yet possess.
In order to maintain our development model it is necessary, unfortunately, for us to duplicate a large body of DSpace code in the Tapir in order to modify some of the functionality.
We make a modified copy of the item viewer that can see workspace items, but still fulfils the requirements to function within the workspace.
So we provide a basic interface for feature 2, but we must provide an entirely new area of the system for feature 3.
This is relatively straightforward as we can easily deploy new servlets [18], which are the crux of the DSpace users' interaction with the core system.
In order to explain how these servlets work the notes system (Tapir v0.4) is diagrammatically explained in Figure 3: Figure 3: Basic representation of a specific servlet as an example of how servlets work The NotesServlet looks at the request type that the client has made, and maps it onto one of a number of operations that it can perform, runs the relevant procedures and returns the final result.
This is also the general form of servlet behaviour.
The final thing that really needs explanation is how we embed these extra facilities into the DSpace application as a whole.
We are fortunate to have our own set of core classes which are easily included in the DSpace library, and we have a lot of our own custom user interface components (JSPs [19]) which stand by themselves, and are therefore also easily included in the DSpace Web application.
The core of our problem is that we wish to include access via 'My DSpace', which is part of the DSpace user interface package, and which consists of a large number of components that deal with various parts of the system.
The information for the interface is pre-prepared by its servlet (org.dspace.app.webui.servlet.MyDSpaceServlet) before the UI components see any of the information.
This, in itself, is not a bad thing; generally speaking it is essential that the user interface and the core logic of any application remain separate [20].
Problems arise when you wish to plug additional components into your UI without modifying any of the core code of the system.
We took the decision to maintain our code separately from the DSpace code for reasons previously discussed.
The down-side is that it is then impossible to leverage core functionality in the native user interface without resorting to more obscure and less desirable methods.
For example, the Tapir has to wait until DSpace has completed its business when loading the 'My DSpace' page before making a call from the Java Server Page (JSP) to a class which it needs to run before it can output its own interface sections.
This is an unpleasant fix which can only be tolerated due to the fact that any other solution is contrary to our general development method and introduces potentially worse maintenance issues.
Other solutions are currently being considered.
Toolkits such as Apache Cocoon exist to alleviate these problems in general, and future versions of DSpace will employ that sort of technology to make modular user interface components easier to incorporate.
E-Thesis Metadata The UK recommended E-Theses metadata set [21] has formed the basis for the Tapir's theses submission system's metadata collection section.
This metadata set was developed in collaboration with the Robert Gordon University (Electronic Theses Project [22]), the University of Glasgow (DAEDALUS [23]) and the British Library [24].
Devising a new submission system for DSpace is straightforward enough, although there is a strong case to be made for redesigning the entire submission system to cater for customisable metadata (at time of writing some development has begun in this area at MIT).
The metadata set will not be discussed in detail here, but some of the more interesting recommendations are summarised in Table 1.
Field name Element and Qualifier Populated by Repeatable Required Author contributor.author Student No Yes Supervisor/ Advisor contributor.advisor Student Yes No Institution, College, School publisher Default maintained by institution Yes Yes Type, Qualification Level, Qualification Name type Student No Yes Table 1: Some metadata elements used in the Tapir Of particular note is the 'Institution, College, School' element where we have provided the facilities for authority controlled values which cannot be edited by the submitter as well as free-text values that can (See Figure 4).
The purpose of this is to ensure that collections can enforce the correct values for their own purposes but if awards have been obtained jointly with other institutions these can be added by the submitter.
Figure 4: The Institution, College and School of the submitter E-Theses Submission System The E-Theses submission system has a number of objectives to fulfil: Sit alongside one or more other submission systems Collect the metadata discussed in the previous section Apply a multi-part licence to the item Apply 'physical' restrictions to item access where necessary Feature 2 is relatively straightforward once you are familiar with the DSpace API (Application Programming Interface) for reading and writing metadata.
All that is required is a modification of the user interface and the underlying servlet.
Things only need to become more complicated if you wish to have more sophisticated elements such as our authority-controlled and simultaneously user-editable 'Institution, College, School' field.
Feature 1 is a effectively a meta-feature for this section.
We need to provide a choice of one or more submission systems to be made.
Currently all requests to start a submission go to DSpace's SubmitServlet (org.dspace.app.webui.servlet.SubmitServlet), so the obvious course of action is to replace this with something which provides all of the required interaction as well as the facility to choose between submission servlets.
This includes dealing with the possibility that users may wish to start a submission from within a collection and that they may wish to suspend submission for a short period of time (where the item rests in the workspace), then resume later on.
The system behaves as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Choosing and deploying a submission interface So our submit servlet (ac.ed.dspace.app.webui.SelectSubmitServlet) replaces the current DSpace submit servlet, takes all the same requests as the original, but processes them in a different way.
It also provides additional facilities to choose between different submission engines.
In this way it is possible to have arbitrarily many submission engines deployed with minor modifications of the servlet.
Substituting our servlet for the DSpace servlet is relatively straightforward, as a single configuration file maintains the mapping from requested URLs to servlets.
This mapping is in a basic XML file and we replace org.dspace.app.webui.servlet.SubmitServlet with ac.ed.dspace.app.webui.servlet.SelectSubmitServlet to substitute in all of the above behaviour.
Lastly we move onto solving the licensing and restrictions features 3 and 4, which are intrinsically linked.
There are two important concepts that need to be considered when dealing with this: first, that there are three parties involved in licensing (the submitter, the institution and the end-user); second, that restrictions are not necessarily absolute (they may have time or domain dependencies).
We consider both of these when designing the Tapir, and the following is a description of how the multi-part licences we use work with our restriction system.
First we define three licences: a deposit licence, which gives the repository administrators the rights they need to hold and maintain the item; a use licence, which gives the end-users the rights they need to use the item in a reasonable manner; a restriction licence, which gives the submitter some control over the availability of the item.
Implementation of these licences is site-specific but the Tapir ships with the defaults that we use at Edinburgh University Library.
Next we define six restrictions that are available to depositors: None no restriction on access Domain, 1 year restricted to institutional domain for 1 year Domain, 2 years restricted to institutional domain for 2 years Withheld, 1 year restricted from all for 1 year Withheld, 2 years restricted from all for 2 years Withheld permanently restricted from all forever The process of building the licence is described in Figure 6.
All items have a deposit licence, then time-dependent licences are applied for domain-restricted and non-permanently restricted items, which then also have a restrict licence appended.
For non-restricted items the simple end-user licence is appended instead.
Figure 6: Procedure flow for constructing multi-part licences The following is a stripped down example of a full multi-part licence submitted on 30 March 2004: ========================================================= Time Dependencies on this Licence ========================================================= The 'Permanent Licence' contained within this file is limited in scope for 2 years.
Until 30th March 2006 the licence applies only to users who exist within the University of Edinburgh domain For all users outside ed.ac.uk (Edinburgh University) the 'Temporary Licence' contained within this file applies.
========================================================= ========================================================= | Permanent Licence | ========================================================= Standard Use Licence (e.g.
Creative Commons) ========================================================= ========================================================= | Temporary Licence | ========================================================= Standard Restriction Licence ========================================================= ========================================================= | Site Licence | ========================================================= Licence Required by site to hold item ========================================================= The choice of restriction also affects the way that 'physical' restrictions apply.
As of Tapir v0.4 restrictions are applied automatically for all options other than domain restriction (the issues surrounding domain restriction are still under investigation at time of writing).
To provide the restrictions required we simply 'withdraw' the item from the repository, allowing it to exist without being available to any users other than administrators.
Item Type Identification It was identified fairly early on that academics were interested in maintaining at least some distance between theses and research papers, suggesting that in some situations theses were 'research training' and not necessarily research quality.
Without commenting on this, we have chosen to make some minor modifications to the DSpace interface to ensure there is a quick and easy method of identifying all research types that enter the repository.
In addition we have removed thesis supervisors from the author listings for the item, preferring instead to list them on the item metadata page instead.
In order to achieve the desired customisations it was necessary for us to replace the DSpace item listing and item metadata classes (org.dspace.app.webui.jsptag.ItemListTag and org.dspace.app.webui.jsptag.ItemTag respectively) with custom local files; these are compiled java classes with display code built in.
This is not ideal as it makes localisation that bit more complex and harder to maintain.
On the other hand, the tag library approach makes it easy to replace one tag with another in a single XML config file.
Our new item listing, then, simply contains an extra column displaying the item type alongside the title and authors, (authors' names have been removed), as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: An extract from our new item listing page Correspondingly the new item metadata page copes with the E-Theses metadata set correctly, and divides up contributors into their relevant groups (authors, supervisors, advisors).
The Edinburgh Research Archive To show the Tapir in a typical setting we introduce the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA), which is an institution repository service run by Edinburgh University Library.
The primary aims of ERA are to hold to outcomes of the Theses Alive!
and SHERPA [25] projects, being E-Theses and E-Prints respectively.
In addition to this, evaluation of DSpace, and thus ERA, is being conducted in contexts as diverse as learning objects and conference posters.
Currently ERA is DSpace 1.1.1 using Tapir 0.3 (along with some additional local customisations), although an upgrade to the most recent versions of these two pieces of software is imminent.
Figure 8 shows how we have integrated DSpace into the general 'look and feel' of the Library Web site, and you will notice also the 'WorkSpace', which is a product of the Tapir.
Figure 8: ERA User's homepage Notice that the user is both authoring and supervising items in the same workspace, and has the same options for both items even though they are only responsible for originating one of them.
What follows now, then, are a set of screenshots of ERA, highlighting the functionality that the Tapir has added to DSpace.
Figure 9 shows the various options available to the user in their collaborative workspace.
Figure 10 shows an extract from the licence page, where users select their restriction level.
Figure 11 shows part of the administrative interface for configuring supervision orders.
Figure 9: Collaborative workspace options Figure 10: The licence restriction options available to the submitter Figure 11: Administrative tools for applying supervision orders Cross-Version Code Maintenance Maintaining software that is dependent on other software, such as the Tapir, always brings with it maintenance issues.
Sometimes problems arise when API changes in the host software require code changes in the agent.
Other problems arise when the agent has supplanted host functionality with its own, but then host functionality has been upgraded and the agent would like to take advantage of the improvements.
Examples of both these situations can be found when considering the upgrade of DSpace from v1.1.1 to v1.2 and ensuring that the Tapir is compatible with the latter.
During the development of DSpace 1.2 it was decided that upload of files to the server required additional information, and thus the operation called to achieve this was modified to use another parameter.
The effect of this is that requests to upload files by the Tapir's submission system were no longer compatible with the storage layer in DSpace.
On another occasion, significant functionality had been added to the default DSpace submission system to deal with HTML files and their relationships.
This functionality was desirable in the Tapir, and so had to be included in the custom E-Theses and E-Prints submission systems.
Long-term solutions to these sorts of problems are difficult, although a more modular architecture would certainly be an asset for third-party developers.
In addition it could be argued that some elements of DSpace are too large and not specific enough.
Breaking down some of the current 'modules' would be an advantage for people only wishing to replace small areas of functionality.
For example, the submission system could be split into sections: metadata, file management, licensing, verification and commitment, each of which could interoperate with the other modules.
In this case, then, the Tapir would only need to override the metadata and licensing sections of the submission system.
DSpace development is proceeding towards such a modular configuration, with the ultimate goal being the 2.x architecture [26].
The path from the current state to the target state, though, is long and we can expect to see software such as the Tapir adapting regularly to remain current.
Conclusion The Tapir has addressed most of the objectives for which it was originally specified, and the hope is that much of the code which drives it will eventually make its way into the DSpace source code.
Now that DSpace 1.2 has been released, and 1.2.1 is imminent, the community-driven development effort seems to be gaining some momentum, and there may well be room for developments such as the Tapir or other work such as DSpace@Cambridge [27], North Carolina SILS-ETD [28], or SIMILE [29] to name but a few (information on other projects is available on the DSpace Wiki [30]), to become part of the main source code.
The Theses Alive!
project, meanwhile, draws to a close, but Edinburgh University Library has already made the decision to continue to work with DSpace, and there is the possibility that additional developments will be made along the way as uses for the software are investigated and implemented.
References Tapir SourceForge page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapir-eul/ Edinburgh University Library: http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/ DSpace: http://www.dspace.org/ Theses Alive!
project home page: http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/ Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) home page: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ JISC FAIR Programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA): http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/ The HP-MIT Alliance: http://www.hpl.hp.com/mit/ Lucene Java search engine: http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/ Open Archives Initiative, originators of the OAI-PMH: http://www.openarchives.org/ Some example versioning systems: Concurrent Versions System: https://www.cvshome.org/ Sub-Version: http://subversion.tigris.org/ SourceForge, open-source development support: http://sourceforge.net/ DSpace mailing lists for technical information: General Technical List: dspace-tech@lists.sourceforge.net Developers List: dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net The Berkley Software Design licence, examples of which are available: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations, January 2004, Ariadne, Issue 38. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/jones/ Virginia Tech ETD-db system: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ETD-db/ CNRI Handle System: http://www.handle.net/ Java Servlet Technology: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/ Java Server Pages (JSP) Technology: http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/ Model-View-Controller pattern: http://java.sun.com/blueprints/patterns/MVC-detailed.html UK Recommended E-Theses metadata set: http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/library/guidelines/metadata.html Electronic Theses project at the Robert Gordon University: http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/library/e-theses.htm DAEDALUS Project, University of Glasgow: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/ The British Library Theses/Dissertations: http://www.bl.uk/services/document/theses.html SHERPA Project: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ DSpace 2.x proposed architecture: http://www.dspace.org/conference/agenda.html and http://www.dspace.org/conference/presentations/architecture.ppt DSpace@Cambridge: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dspace/ Hemminger, B.
Fox, J. Ni, M. (2004).
"Improving the ETD submission process through automated author self contribution using DSpace", ETD 2004, Lexington, KY: http://ils.unc.edu/bmh/pubs/ETD%202004%20paper.pdf Also see: http://etd.ils.unc.edu/ Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILIE): http://simile.mit.edu/ DSpace Wiki: http://wiki.dspace.org/ Author Details Richard Jones Systems Developer Edinburgh University Library Email: r.d.jones@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The Tapir: Adding E-Theses Functionality to DSpace" Author: Richard Jones Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/jones/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval Buzz database archives cataloguing ejournal Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim sees improvements in this second edition but has reservations about one of the few UK-based texts on this subject.
This substantial (470-page) paperback is the second edition of one of the few UK-based textbooks on information retrieval (IR).
The first edition appeared in 1999, and was criticised for being badly out of date and at times too complex for its intended undergraduate and postgraduate student audience.
How does this second edition stack up?
The first thing to say is that it is a lot better than the first edition there are a number of new chapters that are well written and up to date, and some of the chapters that also appeared in the first edition have had errors removed.
But the bad news is that there is still quite a lot wrong with this book.
The book comprises 23 chapters, starting with basic concepts, database technology, bibliographic formats and cataloguing, and considering search and retrieval and user issues before considering evaluation methods.
It concludes with a hotch potch of miscellaneous topics, such as Web IR, intelligent IR, natural language processing, digital libraries and the future.
Each chapter is supported by some references (wildly varying in number in one chapter it was more than 100, but 20 was the more typical number).
A few of the references are to Web sites, and a heavy emphasis on BUBL as a typical database a bit unfortunate, as it seems to have closed in mid 2002.
There is no question that, if used judiciously, the book could form the basis of a text for teaching basic IR principles.
However, the mistakes (recall and precision do not range between 1% and 100%, but between 0% and 100%; Memex was designed for microfilm retrieval and not online as the author claims), inconsistencies (sometimes bibliographic databases include full-text ones, sometimes they do not; is it Theodore Nelson or Ted Nelson?
), the bits missing (nothing on searching e-journal collections; virtually nothing on the Open Archives Initiative; the list of key DIALOG commands missed the crucial TYPE command; too limited on evaluation of Web search engines) and the badly out of date references (especially Chapters 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 13 and 20), greatly diminish the text.
In some cases, the references are to ancient editions of books that have since been updated, e.g.
Jenny Rowley's The Electronic Library and the UKMarc Manual.
Does the author not make any checks about recent books?
In other cases, he refers to 'recent' articles that are in fact six, eight or 10 years old.
Some chapters fail to refer to seminal works, such as Bourne and Hahn on the early history of online, Rowley on abstracting, Pedley on the invisible Web (confusingly called "deep Web" by Chowdhury) and Case on user studies.
There are many tedious lists of bullet points in some chapters, and over-complex explanations in others, for example on automatic classification and automatic indexing, vector processing, natural language processing and best match searching.
Does the author really expect librarianship students to understand advanced calculus?
There are a small number of minor typos.
From time to time the author introduces concepts, such as PRECIS in one chapter, and then explains them fully in a later chapter.
It would be good to have some cross-referencing in place.
The in-depth discussion of Farradane's relational indexing, which was only ever used in one establishment where Farradane worked, and was then immediately dropped when he left the establishment more than 30 years ago, is pointless.
Similarly the descriptions of Uniterm, Peek-a-boo, certain "intelligent information retrieval" systems and Xanadu do not make it clear that these are systems that have long vanished (or in the case of Xanadu, never got going), and are therefore of passing historical interest only.
To summarise there is the basis of a good textbook on information retrieval here, but it needs to be revised, with the out of date references, and over-complex and erroneous material removed.
Can we have a new improved third edition soon please?
Author Details Charles Oppenheim Loughborough University Email: C.Oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval" Author:Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/oppenheim-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Must Email Die?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Must Email Die?
Buzz software rdf wiki html rss portal infrastructure archives metadata blog video flickr syndication sms licence interoperability intranet url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly recently gave a talk on this subject at the Internet Librarian International 2005 conference.
In this article he expands on the talk and revisits the question as to whether email really should disappear.
The ILI 2005 Conference The ILI (Internet Librarian International) 2005 Conference [1], the seventh in the series, was held in the Copthorne Tara Hotel, London over 10-11 September 2005.
This conference is aimed at information professionals and librarians who are using, developing and implementing Internet, Intranet and Web-based services in their daily work.
One of the main themes at the conference explored at the conference was the potential for technologies such as Blogs and Wikis within a library context.
I took part in the opening session on this theme and explored the potential for several new technologies and associated strategies.
Email Must Die!
Following the opening keynote presentation, the conference split into three parallel tracks.
I took part in Track A on Blogs, Wikis, and Collaboration Tools.
The other speakers in this track were Michael Stephens, St. Joseph County Public Library, Indiana, USA, who spoke on “Tools for Digital Collaboration” [2] and Aaron Schmidt, Reference Librarian, Thomas Ford Memorial Library, Illinois, USA, speaking on “Digital Tools for Collaboration” [3] and who described the potential of applications such as Flickr and del.ico.us.
Michael Stephens, Brian Kelly and Aaron Schmidt, speakers in the opening track.
Following these two presentations which outlined the potential of several areas of collaborative Web-based networked applications, I gave a presentation entitled “Email Must Die!” [4].
This provocatively titled presentation was intended to challenge the notion which may be felt by some that use of such new collaborative technologies will be restricted to well-funded organisations in the US or the technology enthusiasts.
The talk gave a critique of email and outlined areas in which new collaborative technologies may provide a better alternative to email or other established working practices.
In the talk I pointed out that many of the tools are easy to use, often, in the case of open source applications, with no licence costs to act as a barrier to their use.
I then outlined a number of areas in which such technologies could be used.
This article expands on the ideas given in the talk.
A Critique of Email Email has, of course, proved to be an essential tool for use within the Higher Education sector, especially for those involved in the development and provision of networked services.
Email has developed from providing a simple mechanism for communication between two people with the widespread use of emailing lists and the ability to send attachments.
Sadly the effectiveness of email seems to have decreased with its more widespread usage.
Many users treat email as an instant response technology, resulting in subject lines which are unhelpful when subsequently (perhaps much later) trying to find a relevant message: The poor use of metadata with email can also be a barrier to managing messages.
Despite the provision of message filtering rules in many email clients, such management capabilities do not appear to be widely deployed and are always liable to fail when systems are not correctly configured (ever see “On holiday” messages sent to mailing lists?).
Such limitations have led to the argument that “E-mail is where knowledge goes to die” [5].
The majority of users of email will have, of course, have received spam.
Spam or unsolicited commercial email (UCE) as it is also known is probably the most annoying aspect for email users today, hindering the productivity of email users.
A Range of Options Although the limitations of email are widely recognised, it should be acknowledged that email does have advantages: users are familiar with email and email clients, and email is widely used to support business processes.
However we should be looking at areas in which other technologies may provide a more effective solution to our business processes than email or other existing solutions.
I will now outline a number of relevant collaborative technologies and discuss areas in which their use may be applicable.
Instant Messaging Instant messaging (IM) technologies will be familiar to many.
IM appears to be a cult fashion for many young people, and its use is growing with the increasing uptake of broadband in homes.
Organisations are under pressure to provide instant messaging capabilities: some provide a range of IM tools (e.g.
the University of Liverpool [6]) while others have concerns over the additional pressures this may place on scarce PC equipment, support implications, etc.
Although there are legitimate issues regarding the provision and management of such technologies, instant messaging can provide a useful tool for users.
The JISC-funded QA Focus Project, provided by UKOLN, based at the University of Bath and AHDS, based at King’s College London, made use of instant messaging for formal meetings and in a more informal way.
In order to ensure effective use was made of this form of workshop a policy on instant messaging was produced [7] and a case study summarised the background to this approach [8].
Instant messaging can also be used in environments in which email would be inapplicable.
For example, during the session at the ILI conference, instant messaging was used between myself and a member of the audience.
This enabled me to be reminded of issues I could use shortly before I gave my talk.
Potential concerns regarding use of instant messaging include distractions such as beeps as colleagues arrive and leave instant messaging environments and archiving of discussions held using instant messaging technologies.
Simple solutions to such concerns include familiarising oneself with the capabilities of the applications, in order to disable sounds and archive messages or simply to make use of the tools in contexts in which such issues are not relevant.
Such issues are mentioned in the QA Focus briefing document Using Instant Messaging Software [9].
RSS A significant use of email is for making announcements.
There will be many occasions in which providing news feeds using RSS (Really Simple Syndication / RDF Site Summary) will provide advantages over use of RSS.
Use of RSS should allow the end-user greater flexibility in finding, managing and processing such announcements.
If you enjoy receiving news from the BBC, rather than subscribing to a BCC email service you may find that subscribing to a BBC RSS news feed provides greater flexibility in managing the information.
With many RSS readers you can choose how often to process new RSS items and how the information should be displayed.
If you wish, you can receive your RSS news feed within your email client email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird provide RSS viewers as standard [10] and RSS extensions for Microsoft Outlook are available [11] [12].
An advantage with this approach is that you do not have to wade though out-of-date news when you return from holiday.
It should also be noted that email and RSS need not be regarded as isolated technologies.
A number of mailing lists applications, such as YahooGroups, provide RSS feeds of the archives of the lists.
An example of use of the Sage RSS viewer to view summaries of messages in the rss-dev YahooGroups list [13] is shown in Figure 2.
Viewing an RSS Feed from a YahooGroups Mailing List RSS feeds are available for the JISCMail archives, but unfortunately the content of mail messages is not syndicated, only the address of the messages, which means that the approach described above cannot be used for JISCMail archives.
Blogs Readers of this article will, no doubt, be familiar with Blogs.
But how do Blogs relate to use of email?
We can illustrate some of the possible benefits by searching for reports on the ILI 2005 conference.
Using Google to search for “ILI 2005” and “ILI2005” we find that, excluding results related to the main ILI 2005 conference Web site, many of the search results come from trip reports published in Blogs by speakers and delegates at the conference [14], [15], [16], [17] [18].
For speakers at such conferences, who typically have a remit to maximise exposure to their ideas, it would seem that use of Blogs to gain exposure is likely to be more effective than sending reports to mailing lists (of course, the information could be transmitted over both applications).
Wikis A Wiki is a collaborative Web-based authoring environment [119].
Wikis aim to be easy to use, requiring no special software to be installed and providing a simple markup language which is easier to use than HTML.
I have been using Wikis for some time now.
One area of use is when collaborating with co-authors on a paper or proposal.
In the past this would typically involve passing, for example, a Microsoft Word document around the co-authors.
Use of the Wiki helps to avoid many of the problems associated with this process, such as multiple copies of the file being distributed, different ways of using the application, etc.
I have also used Wikis in the planning of events.
Again rather than having to search across email messages, a Wiki is used in conjunction with email lists.
Email is used to gain consensus on ideas; once this has been obtained the Wiki allows members of the event team to collaborate on the development of relevant documents.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) The Skype Internet telephony application [20] is another technology which I use in a number of ways.
Skype has been used at several events recently (including the EUNIS 2005 conference and the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005) to allow remote participants to listen in to talks.
Skype is also being used with co-authors of papers to discuss ideas in a more interactive fashion than is possible when using email.
The audio discussion is complemented by use of Skype’s instant messaging capabilities for purposes such as sharing URLs.
Must Email Die?
So should email disappear?
The answer is, of course, no.
Email will continue to have a role to play in many areas.
However there will be areas in which alternative approaches may have advantages over email.
Organisations should ensure that they are prepared to have an open mind regarding the potential of new technologies, particularly in areas in which existing practices are well established.
The technology should not, however, by forced upon the user community, but instead provide a more effective solution for its users.
It should be noted, however, that in some cases the user community may be ahead of the service providers.
A survey on policies on the use of instant messaging (IM) was carried out on a UCISA mailing list some time ago.
One institution stated that “IM … is ‘here to stay’ an ‘unstoppable tide’.
Seen as part of youth culture, along with … SMS” whilst another commented that “Students will arrive familiar with, and expecting to .. use such tools.
Email seen by younger people to be ‘boring’, ‘full of spam’, IM and SMS immediacy preferred.” [21] From this perspective the question to be addressed could be “will email die?” rather than “should email die?” From these comments it would appear that a significant part of our user community regard email in a similar fashion to how many long-standing Internet users may regard Usenet News!
However a danger with end-users driving such technological innovation is that issues such as interoperability, support, records management, etc.
may be ignored.
These are important issues and so institutions will need to ensure that such considerations are being addressed.
References Internet Librarian International (ILI) 2005 Conference, 10-11 October 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/web-focus/ Tools for Digital Collaboration, M. Stephens, ILI 2005 Conference http://www.tametheweb.com/presentations/ToolsMS.pdf Digital Tools for Collaboration, A. Schmidt, ILI 2005 Conference http://www.walkingpaper.org/presentation/tools/ Email Must Die!, B. Kelly, ILI 2005 Conference http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ili-2005/talk-1/ e-mail is where knowledge goes to die, Transforming Information into Knowledge at the Portal, Bill French, 22 April 2000 http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/item/5994 Instant Messenger FAQs, Computing Service Department, University of Liverpool http://www.liv.ac.uk/CSD/helpdesk/faqs/instant/ Policy on Instant Messaging, QA Focus policy document, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/qa/policies/instant-messaging/ Implementing a Communications Infrastructure, QA Focus case study no.
12, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/case-studies/case-study-12/ Using Instant Messaging Software, QA Focus briefing document no.
56, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-56/ Thunderbird, Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ Newsgator Business http://www.newsgator.com/business.aspx Read RSS in Outlook, intraVnews http://www.intravnews.com/ rss-dev, YahooGroups http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/ List of Bloggers, Internet Librarian International 2005 Unofficial Wiki http://ili2005.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Bloggers ILI 2005, Science Library Pad http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/ili2005/ Collaboration Tools Session at ILI2005, Marydee Ojala http://www.onlineinsider.net/2005/10/collaboration-tools-session-at-ili2005.html Email Must Die!
Karen Blakeman http://www.rba.co.uk/rss/2005/10/email-must-die.html ILI2005: Emailen er død…, Internetsøgning, (in Danish) http://erikhoy.blogspot.com/2005/10/ili2005-emailen-er-dd-lad-os-begrave.html An Introduction to Wikis, QA Focus briefing document no.
78, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-78/ An Introduction to Audio and Video Communication Tools, QA Focus briefing document no.
79, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-79/ Unpublished report, University of Edinburgh.
Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Web Focus: Must Email Die?” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Repositories Support Project Summer School Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Repositories Support Project Summer School Buzz software framework database archives metadata identifier repositories eprints copyright video preservation cataloguing dspace research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jackie Knowles reports on the RSP Summer School, a 48-hour intensive learning programme for new institutional repository administrators, organised by the Repositories Support Project Team.
The Repositories Support Project (RSP) is a major initiative from JISC to support the development and growth of the repositories network in the UK [1].
With its first major event the RSP team offered 23 prospective and new repository managers from Higher Education institutions across the UK the opportunity to participate in an intensive 48-hour repository summer school.
Held at the inspirational and delightful Dartington Hall in Devon, this three-day residential course delivered a comprehensive overview of the practical challenges and solutions to effective repository implementation.
Day 1 Making the Business Case for Repositories The summer school kicked off with a warm welcome from Chris Pressler, Dean of Information and Learning at Dartington College, followed by an overview of the aims and objectives of the summer school delivered by the RSP Project Manager, Bill Hubbard from SHERPA, based at the University of Nottingham.
Bill summarised the preparatory work that had been completed by those attending the course and outlined how the summer school hoped to address their key concerns.
Common points of interest that the programme was designed to address were a better understanding of the issues involved with repositories such as creating successful advocacy campaigns and dealing with copyright and other intellectual property rights (IPR) issues, along with the need to network with others involved in repository work to develop a sense of community.
Figure 1: Dartington Hall The main event of day one was a keynote presentation by Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd [2] who delivered an overview of some of the barriers and drivers relating to institutional repositories and explored the concepts of making a business case and strategic planning.
Alma covered a huge amount of material during her talk including a look at key stakeholders, barriers and drivers from different stakeholder perspectives and some practical suggestions when it came to addressing strategic planning for repositories.
The session offered a high level of detail for participants and was particularly successful in summarising the breadth of issues repository managers need to embrace.
The presentation was followed up with a discussion session asking participants to consider the key questions they need to ask at the planning, pilot, launch and evaluation stages of repository implementation.
The first day closed with a networking opportunity over dinner which was followed by Chris Pressler leading a very welcome stroll around the spectacular gardens at Dartington.
The rain just about held off long enough for us to be able to relax and enjoy the varied features such as a Henry Moore sculpture and the medieval terraces and tiltyard, originally used for jousting tournaments.
Figure 2: Dartington Hall Gardens Day 2 Software Day two of the summer school began bright and early with a session on the software options for repositories led by Les Carr of University of Southampton and Chris Yates of University of Wales Aberystwyth.
Beginning with a review of what a repository is all about, Les brought together information about the types of content that might brought into institutional repositories, a look at repository directory services such as OpenDOAR [3] to encourage participants to stay curious about what others are doing with their software, and a summary of some of the constraints that might influence software choices.
Les and Chris then led the audience through a series of comparative demonstrations of functionality within two key open source repository software solutions, DSpace [4] and EPrints.org [5].
The demonstrations highlighted some useful case studies and explored the potential of software solutions to deal with and present different types of repository content.
Figure 3: DSPace at Loughborough [6] Figure 4: EPrints at Southampton [7] Metadata and Workflow After a very welcome coffee break it was time to get practical with a hands-on exploration of metadata and submission workflows.
This session was my own contribution to the summer school and after delivering a short presentation on the theory behind metadata I asked the participants to work together to create some actual metadata.
Each of the four groups were given typical repository content a journal article, a book chapter, a thesis or a conference paper and they were asked to set up a metadata scheme for their items using just pen and paper.
Figure 5: Metadata Groupwork Once the groups had come up with their metadata scheme they were then asked to consider submission workflow within a repository and consider which elements of metadata they had identified would be completed by academics and which elements were more likely to be completed by repository managers or administrators.
The practical exercises stimulated lots of discussion, in particular highlighting the problems with using the simple Dublin Core metadata standard [8] and were a useful opportunity for participants to explore a key concern with regards to repository management.
Many delegates indicated that they would be returning home and repeating the same exercises with their local cataloguing experts.
Metada and workflow practical Book Chapter Field label DC tag Content Author M dc:contributor.author Nancy Armstrong Editor dc:contributor.editor Ellen Rooney Chapter title M dc:title What feminism did to visual studies Book title dc:relation.ispartof Feminist Literary Theory Publisher M dc:publisher Cambridge University Press Publisher dc:publisher.place Cambridge Date M dc:date.issued 2006 ISBN dc:identifier.isbn 0-521-00168-4 Abstract M dc:description.abstract Chapter considers the effect of the advent of fem... Subject dc:subject.class PN 98 W64 C1 M Mandatory Fields Workflow 1 Author/submitter enters metadata 2 Manager checks for new items Checks metadata entries (cataloguing staff) Enters additional metadata (cataloguing staff) Checks for copyright clearance (rights officers) Figure 6: Metadata Practical Exercise Results Copyright and Legal Issues After lunch we turned our attention to the thorny issues of legal matters and repository policies.
Jane Smith of the University of Nottingham gave a presentation on copyright matters in repositories covering aspects such as self-archiving and publisher policies to dealing with embargoes and mandates.
Particular copyright problems were highlighted by looking at non-print media and learning objects in repositories.
The session closed with a demonstration of the Romeo [9] and Juliet [10] services, which are directories of publisher self-archiving policies and funding council mandates respectively, and both core tools for repository managers to engage with.
Policy Framework The session on policy frameworks was led by Bill Hubbard who gave an overview of the policy environment in Higher Education in a wider sense before drilling down and covering the policy options that repository managers need to consider.
To support the theory, the audience was then shown a brief demonstration of the OpenDOAR policies tool [11] which can be a particularly useful way for repository managers to assemble a repository policy document quickly.
The session ended with a presentation by Steve Hitchcock of the University of Southampton on the importance of preservation planning in relation to policies and the need for repositories at least to consider preservation, even if they don't feel they will actually be doing any actual preservation in the long run themselves.
Day two was drawn to a close with a panel session and question and answers.
Despite showing initial signs of information overload and flagging energy levels, several interesting themes emerged from the discussion most notably the relationship between repositories and Web 2.0 technologies.
Day 3 Populating Repositories and Developing Marketing Strategies Day three again saw the participants catching an early breakfast before settling in for an inspirational presentation on advocacy strategies given by Sally Rumsey the Research Archive Manager for Oxford University [12].
Sally re-enforced the messages from previous sessions looking at stakeholders and issues with repositories before outlining some specific ideas for publicity and marketing channels that participants may wish to use to promote the use of their repository.
Figure 7: Repository Advocacy Sally Rumsey's Top Ten+ Tips [text-only version] The high level of practical advice in Sally's talk was particularly appreciated by the audience and a break out session that then followed saw people take inspiration from Sally's talk and work together in small groups on a practical exercise creating plans for a marketing strategy for a specific stakeholder group within Higher Education.
Figure 8: Marketing Strategy Groupwork The summer school closed with a final report-back and discussion session where RSP staff indicated their intent to keep in touch with the summer schoolers and ask them to report back their progress at 4and 8-month intervals by filling out questionnaires and attending a follow up meeting.
Conclusion The summer school provided an excellent opportunity to participate in a range of interactive seminars, practical workshops, lectures and panel sessions.
Participants were able to engage in scholarly debates on current repository theory and gain hands-on experience with repository software and tools.
We certainly felt a sense of a community being established among delegates, helped in part by the feeling of being away from the pressures of daily working life and meeting people in similar situations in an inspirational environment.
Lots of positive feedback has already been received: 'I have learnt more from this single event that I have from 2 months of looking up IR sites' 'Each session gave me pieces of information to take away a web site here, a name there, an idea, a process.
Really useful' 'I feel well prepared to take our repository forward and if I don't know what to do I know I've got support from RPS and participants at the event.'
Our overall impression was that the attendees left feeling enthused and that they were ready to return to their institutions to prepare for their repositories' implementation of the various things they had learnt.
The RSP intends to run the summer school again in 2008 and we are now taking details of people who would like be part of the next cohort; to register your interest please contact me on the email address below.
References RSP Web site http://www.rsp.ac.uk/ Key Perspectives Web site http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/ OpenDOAR Web http://www.opendoar.org/ DSpace Web site http://www.dspace.org/ Eprints Web site http://www.eprints.org/ Loughborough University Institutional Archive https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace/ SERPENT Image and Video Footage Database at Southampton University http://archive.serpentproject.com/ Dublin Core Web site http://dublincore.org/ Romeo Web site http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php Juliet Web site http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php OpenDOAR Policies Tool http://www.opendoar.org/tools/en/policies.php Oxford Research Archive http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/access/ Author Details Jackie Knowles Repository Support Officer RSP Project University of Wales, Aberystwyth Email: jak@aber.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Class of 2007: The Repositories Support Project Summer School" Author: Jackie Knowles Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/rsp-summer-sch-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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PALS Conference: Institutional Repositories and Their Impact on Publishing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines PALS Conference: Institutional Repositories and Their Impact on Publishing Buzz data software html dissemination infrastructure archives metadata repositories eprints copyright preservation dspace e-science interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Kurt Paulus describes for us the Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions (PALS) Conference held in London this June.
PALS [1] is the ongoing collaboration between UK publishers (ALPSP [2] and the Publishers Association [3]), and Higher/Further Education (JISC).
PALS aims to foster mutual understanding and work collaboratively towards the solution of issues arising from electronic publication.
This was a 'hot issue' conference [4], on a topic institutional repositories that has seen much interest, lots of activity and experiment.
The general direction of the concept is not yet clear, but at least some of the issues are being exposed and are beginning to be clarified.
Moreover it's another opportunity to learn lots of new acronyms, including PALS itself: Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions.
Before going into detail about the conference, held at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, London, it is interesting to look at the composition of the audience.
Over 100 people had signed up to attend.
Of these, about 40 were from universities academic and library departments.
About 35 were from publishers of various sorts, and the remainder were from JISC, funding agencies, national laboratories and so on.
So, it appears, the interest of the audience was more in the first part of the conference topic than the second, and this was reflected in the individual contributions.
Most speakers provided their own definition of what institutional repositories are: institution-based services that provide storage, dissemination, management and stewardship of content created by the institution(s) housing the repository.
Although the language differed between speakers, the basic concept was agreed.
Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) [5], set the scene with a keynote talk on the future infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age as he saw it.
He pointed to some significant developments that in his view will shape the information landscape of the future: The developing intellectual life of (academic) institutions is not best served by the formal scholarly publishing mechanisms with which we are familiar.
The intellectual wealth of an institution is unstructured, with many scholarly, educational and administrative strands, and repositories need to reflect that.
Unlike the permanency and open access of the published literature, it is not clear that all an institution's intellectual content should be open to everyone nor whether it should be preserved forever.
He posed a challenge to publishers particularly, though not exclusively, in the sciences: the contemporary research environment in the sciences relies heavily on computer networks, sensors and the data they capture, vast datasets (e.g.
in astronomy), software and simulation.
Traditional scholarly publishing has accommodated these changes in only a very limited way, and it may be that institutional repositories will be the format for making this content more accessible.
Much of the discussion of repositories has revolved around the outputs of the research communities.
Increasingly, though, attention is turning to the digital resources required for education and learning: lecture notes, course collections, interactive learning materials and so on, the latter constrained to a degree by intellectual property issues.
And what about the wider public: repositories in public libraries, for example?
One step at a time!
In his usual way, Clifford provided us with both a context and a vision, as well as food for thought for what he called a conversation not a conference.
The speakers for the rest of the day dwelt on what is happening on the ground, today, which tends to be much more prosaic.
It will be interesting to see how the projection of current activities will reflect Clifford's more visionary expectations in a few years' time.
It fell to Mark Ware, of Mark Ware Consulting [6], who recently reported to PALS on Web-based repositories, to provide some factual background.
Yes, interest in institution-based repositories is growing strongly, ranging from the pioneering ones at MIT [7] and Caltech [8] , via Glasgow, the collective initiative of the Dutch universities.
User interest is growing more rapidly than content: between January and June this year, accesses to the Caltech CODA Archives, for example, increased by 107% but the number of records by only 7%.
While there has been growth in content at MIT's DSpace, it has come from new departments contributing working papers and technical reports, rather than from new material contributed by the existing participants.
Most of the repositories are small, with the number of records in the hundreds only.
There are now over 130 e-prints repositories but with an average of only 350 records each (254 if the original three repositories are excluded).
These figures suggest that one of the early main issues is to persuade academics to deposit their outputs in the repositories, through advocacy and training.
One or two institutions take a somewhat more coercive line, but none of the speakers recommended this as a sensible route.
With the current slow rate of progress, there is little evidence yet that repositories are focusing on reforming scholarly publishing.
Nor have they yet begun to tackle long-term preservation seriously; they are still some way from achieving the sort of vision that Clifford Lynch presented.
In principle, well based and stocked institutional repositories could have a significant impact on scholarly publishing, but Mark Ware's survey of publishers suggested that they are not yet quaking in their boots.
Less than half those surveyed thought repositories would have a significant impact on traditional publishing within five years.
Nearly three quarters considered that the commercial impact would be zero or neutral.
Their permissions policies reflect this fairly relaxed view and they are split between either waiting or doing some experimentation to explore the many publishing issues surrounding repositories.
The Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK has actively supported new approaches to the management and dissemination of academic information.
Chris Awre from JISC gave an overview of JISC's FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) Programme [9].
Under the programme, JISC is sponsoring some 14 projects looking at e-prints, museums and images.
It is also sponsoring institutional portals to investigate the technical and cultural issues, test the interoperability between different repositories through open archive standards and explore the issues related to supporting different communities in parallel, for example e-science and teaching and learning.
Chris Awre's view was that institutional repositories can be valuable tools for the sharing of information and breaking down the barriers between currently separate silos of information, and FAIR's role is to test how well repositories can achieve these objectives.
Repositories need new software, and Raym Crow of SPARC Consulting Group [10] summarised what is currently available.
There are now more than a handful of systems available publicly via open source licences, with Eprints, DSpace and Fedora in the lead.
All are compliant with OAI metadata harvesting protocols.
Interoperability is therefore a key characteristic, facilitating discovery of content.
Currently they support traditional content preprints and postprints, curriculum support materials, conference proceedings.
Content submission and management processes are developing, though there is as yet no peer review facility, something that is still in the hands of the publishers.
None of the systems provide turnkey solutions for long-term preservation, but preservation is clearly a key concern.
Other issues being addressed are varieties of access policies and the complexities of rights and permissions.
The afternoon of the conference was devoted to four somewhat dry case studies.
It is a reflection of the interest in the subject that the vast majority of the audience stayed in their seats even as the presentations stretched beyond their allotted times.
The first was by Greg Tananbaum of Berkeley Electronic Press, talking about the e-Scholarship Repository at the University of California.
The system has an impressive feature set, including peer review (!
), ability to publish HTML, full text searching and personal e-mail notification of new content.
What struck this listener most was how closely the repository resembles a good scholarly publishing approach: ease of submission for the author with automated conversion to PDF; energetic marketing to potential authors; author service and feedback on how widely the content had been accessed (with some 90% of readers coming from outside the institution); and so on.
Tananbaum's main conclusions from this experience were clarity over what the repository is to achieve, making a compelling case to faculties that use of the repository saves them time and enhances their reputation, and making sure that non-academics, including administrators, are actively engaged.
All content, printed, musical or other, has rights attached to it, so the issue of how to manage these rights in the context of preprints, e-prints, post-prints and repositories is an obvious concern.
The worry has been, perhaps, more acute for publishers but is clearly taken on board by the proponents of institutional repositories.
Steve Probets of Loughborough University reviewed the outcome of the JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving) [11] set up to explore the rights issues related to self-archiving by authors.
This included an extensive survey of existing copyright transfer agreements, an analysis of what authors can legally do with their works and a survey of what authors consider important in what is done with their works.
Not surprisingly, authors tend to be fairly permissive, as increased availability of their papers is of benefit to them.
This also goes hand-in-hand with the more relaxed attitude that many publishers have been developing.
The fact that there is a significant lack of clarity overall perhaps reflecting this laid-back view of rights management is shown by indicators that many authors quite happily sign over copyright, that data and service providers are less than rigorous in checking rights status of the work they handle and that only half the data providers ask authors explicitly for the right to manage their works.
Nevertheless, there is agreement among data and service providers that rights management needs to be tackled by means of machine-readable rights specifications and integrated into OAI-compliant protocols.
The Creative Commons solution 11 licences each in three versions is perhaps over-complex but could be integrated into OAI-compliant systems in a way that also satisfies authors' aspirations.
Leo Waaijers gave a sweeping account of the Dutch multi-university multi-project DARE (Digital Academic Repositories) Initiative [12].
The project reflects some of the concerns expressed by other speakers and re-emphasises the need to market to the internal academic audience.
In DARE, for example, 144 top scientists in the participating institutions have been targeted to get them to deposit their work in the repositories by the end of this year.
DARE recognises that there are different audiences academics, teachers and students, 'society' and is structured appropriately, allowing for institutional and disciplinary repositories with the back-up of an 'e-depot' to be managed by the Royal Library.
Conceptually it allows for a variety of derivative and overlay products to be derived from it, conceivably giving publishers the opportunity to be part of the action.
However, with the big search engines such as Google and Yahoo entering the research and scientific arenas, Leo Waaijers felt modestly uncertain about the direction matters would take: direct use by readers via search engines, derivative products generated by publishers and others, or a bit of both.
Oxford University Press (OUP) [13] is one of a number of publishers who have been dipping their toes into the water rather than waiting and seeing.
Johanneke Sytsema and Richard O'Beirne had just a few minutes at the end of the proceedings to talk about collaboration between OUP (via Oxford E-prints) and the (JISCand CURL-funded) SHERPA Project [14].
As with many of the other projects it is early days, but the experience so far has been positive, and recent collaboration demonstrates that there is more to be learned from rolling up one's sleeves than standing on the sidelines.
Discussion time was modest between the two sessions, and non-existent at the end of the day.
The comments reflected the concerns already recorded, with the exception of some exchanges about whether institutional repositories could help with the difficulties facing monograph publishing.
It is not a technical problem, again, but a social/political one requiring tenure committees to review their assessment criteria.
If one were to attempt to summarise the conference, one would say that institutional repositories are only at the starting gate but are beginning to translate aspiration into identifying the issues that have to be defined and resolved before substantial progress occurs.
The main content providers researchers and teachers are slow to come on board.
The technical, standards and legal problems are being addressed in a coherent and apparently successful way.
The question of whether this is a sea change in the way information is disseminated, rather than an additional tool at the disposal of the researcher and student seems to be, on the evidence presented at this meeting, quite an open one.
For publishers, again, there are threats to be assessed and opportunities to be explored.
Editor's Note: The Editor would like to thank ALPSP, Kurt Paulus and Philip Pothen of JISC for their kind collaboration in making this report available to Ariadne.
References Home page of PALS (Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions) http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/ The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) http://www.alpsp.org/ The Publishers Association http://www.publishers.org.uk/ PALS Conference 04 Institutional Repositories and Their Impact on Publishing http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/palsweb/palsweb.nsf/0/f2667489f3b9a3b780256e37005147c8?OpenDocument Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) http://www.cni.org/ Mark Ware Consulting http://www.markwareconsulting.com/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) http://web.mit.edu/ California Institute of Technology (Caltech) http://www.caltech.edu/ Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair SPARC Consulting Group http://www.arl.org/sparc/ The RoMEO Project (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving) http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/ Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) Initiative http://www.surf.nl/en/themas/index2.php?oid=7 Oxford University Press (OUP) http://www.oup.co.uk/ SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Author Details Kurt Paulus 50 Woolley Street Bradford on Avon BA15 1AQ UK Email: kurt1940@fsmail.net Kurt has recently retired as Operations Director at the Institute of Physics Publishing and was Treasurer of ALPSP for 10 years.
Return to top Article Title: "PALS Conference: Institutional repositories and their impact on publishing" Author: Kurt Paulus Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/pals-conf-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Framework for the Future: Access to Digital Skills and Services (Including e-Government) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Framework for the Future: Access to Digital Skills and Services (Including e-Government) Buzz framework database archives metadata copyright e-learning ebook ict e-government url Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod examines further this government blueprint and argues that some have to walk before they can run.
“Unless public services cooperate, broadband Britain will be going nowhere” [1].
“Libraries are sleepwalking to disaster: it’s time they woke up” [2].
Warnings, predictions of failure or even extinction seem to be a recurring theme on email lists, news alerting services, think-tank reports and in the media.
Some refer to public sector failings in general, whilst others attempt to raise the collective public library conscience and consciousness, and galvanise people into action.
For public libraries help has come along in the shape of a document entitled Framework for the Future (or F4F for convenience) [3] F4F, from the DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport), is a sort of ‘blueprint’ for public library activity over the next ten years.
Three key activities are identified in the report: Promotion of reading and informal learning Access to digital skills and services, including e-government Measures to tackle social exclusion, build community identity and develop citizenship In the previous edition of Ariadne (issue 35), I stated that I see these three areas as closely related and inter-dependent.
I also said that I would focus on digital skills and services the second activity mentioned above.
However, before tackling this particular topic, I would like to explore the issue of basic skills or traditional literacy which I feel has an impact on all three of the listed activities.
Literacy versus digital literacy I have been grappling with the practicalities of getting non-library users, non-readers, and people with poor basic skills, to come into a library to use the People’s Network ICT facilities.
Every public library in the UK is now able to offer access to the Internet, email, and a host of other networked services and resources.
These public access computers are aimed at people who do not have access to IT facilities at home or at work, and, in particular, those who have never used a computer before.
Many of these people will have low levels of literacy and can therefore be deemed to be among the socially excluded members of society.
Activity three on the F4F list is developing measures to tackle social exclusion and develop citizenship.
Digital skills are a pre-requisite of e-citizenship.
To become an effective user of the e-Government services and electronic resources currently being developed, you have to know how to use the Internet and complete online forms etc.
However, those with low levels of literacy need to jump this hurdle before they can acquire digital skills.
Literacy is a massive problem in the UK; DCMS state in the framework report that there are around seven million adults in England with literacy problems (paragraph 4.5); they also note that it is hard for people to be active citizens unless they can read.
Getting seven million people to attend literacy classes amounts to an enormous undertaking, but libraries are to promote reading and informal learning, not provide basic literacy tuition this is a specialised area which other organisations are tackling [4].
Libraries may need to tap into these initiatives and provide follow-up sessions for those with some basic literacy.
The Internet as a motivator and promotional tool for reading and learning is only starting to be acknowledged, but how are libraries to encourage those with poor literacy to use their facilities?
Publicity materials are usually in printed form; leaflets, bookmarks and text on a Web site may have limited impact on those just starting to read who may not visit a library.
Local radio is an obvious choice, but there are costs associated with air time, and targeting the appropriate radio station might be difficult, given the diversity of the potential user-base.
e-citizenship and e-Government 2005 is the date by which local and national government services are to be delivered online, and this is fast approaching.
Local authorities are tasked with developing and delivering e-services which meet the needs of local residents.
They then have to promote these services so that people actually use them.
The Government is aware that the take-up of electronic services may be low, and is concerned that time, effort and money is not wasted.
However, acquiring digital skills is only part of the picture.
In addition to literacy skills, people need what might be called ‘information literacy’ or information-handling skills, which are different from IT skills and may or may not include digital literacy.
It could be argued that these skills are necessary steps on the path to digital literacy, and that information literacy is an essential component.
If the Government’s vision of a nation of e-citizens is to become reality, citizens need to have some understanding of the information environment.
If they are to be encouraged and retained as users of e-services then their expectations need to be managed; the advantages, benefits and limitations of the Internet need to be explained and experienced.
The inclusion of metadata may help with the retrieval process, but for lifelong learning people need to be able to evaluate what they find; Google works well for many people, including me, but then, as a colleague pointed out, we information folk do things automatically: we scan long lists of hits quickly; we make judgements before selecting the result which seems most likely to fit our initial enquiry; we guess Web addresses; we look for currency and source and so on.
But you cannot assume that all people can acquire these digital skills overnight.
Reaching target audiences A way forward for libraries, in terms of reaching socially excluded people including those with literacy problems, seems to lie in collaboration with other council departments and other library authorities.
We should not forget social services, schools, the police force, and the health service each service will have staff with in-depth knowledge of local communities including socially excluded groups, and may have ideas regarding the contribution libraries can make.
Collaboration with other library authorities is a good way to spread cost, as well as share expertise and effort.
Libraries within a defined geographical area, or which come within the remit of a Single Regional Agency (e.g.
SWMLACthe South West Museums, Libraries and Archives Council [5] ), or even where there is a shared interest in delivering a specific service, can form partnerships to develop and deliver digital services jointly.
Consortial approaches to digital services Co-East is an example of an established consortium comprising ten public library authorities in the East of England, which aims to adopt ICT solutions to meet current need[6].
Co-East manages established services such as Familia [7] a guide to geealogical resources in public libraries, and Ask a Librarian [8] a virtual reference service currently featuring a live interactive trial.
Co-East is also prepared to experiment with a view to informing the wider library community and is currently working with Essex Public Libraries and Loughborough University on an ebook project [9] with funding from the Laser Foundation [10].
Ebooks may or may not be appropriate for users of UK public libraries, but Co-East, along with the London Borough of Richmond 11plan to find out.
Blackburn with Darwen also plans to trial ebooks, including audio books, using iPAQ handheld devices, and is working in partnership with the London Borough of Richmond on audio book services [13].
Services like these are built upon traditional services, and yet are able to meet the social exclusion agenda.
By targeting specific user groups, such as the housebound, visually impaired people and young people, they bring flexibility, added functionality, choice, and the latest technology into libraries and people’s homes.
Digital services some examples of good practice Hampshire also feature some interesting e-services on their Web site.
There is a link to the ‘library bookshop’ an internet bookshop offered in partnership with Browns Books, Gardner Books and Seek Books [14] and ‘Web Watch’, with links to, for example, The Reading Agency’s ‘Summer Reading Challenge’ [15], and the BBC Proms (with the option to buy tickets online, access mail lists/message boards, and a guide to what’s on).
There is a database of courses in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (Link 2 Learn), and another on community services.
Hantsweb provides users with links to quality information sites, including a separate link to children’s resources, plus popular search engines, such as Google, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo, and the Government’s UKonline site.
This enables new Internet users to gain familiarity with a limited set of carefully selected resources.
Internet ‘taster sessions’ could be designed around these pages, and users could build knowledge, or venture out onto the superhighway, on subsequent visits.
Follow-up sessions, that build on initial ‘tasters’ should form part of the service, so that new users do not leave a session empty-handed and wondering what to do next.
New users must be encouraged to return, and to progress their skills.
Digital skills take a while to develop, and like driving a car, practice develops experience and knowledge.
Providing access to digital skills and services might mean linking reader development work to Web services, as exemplified by the highly successful Stories from the Web [16] service for children, managed by Birmingham Libraries.
E-services can be developed around the needs of specific groups, such as children in care, housebound and disabled people, or rural communities.
Collaborating with colleges of further education, museums and archives, and council departments, such as social services should become the norm for libraries.
They should be seen to be inseparable from other service providers rather than a separate entity.
Libraries need to raise awareness of their role as implementers of national programmes and demonstrate to all stakeholders, especially their respective local authorities, that they are both relevant to people’s lives and able to assist with the delivery of key corporate objectives.
Learning from the post-16 education sector Public libraries can also learn from the recent experiences of institutions of further and higher education.
Higher education has had to adapt quickly to the widening participation agenda and to new disability legislation (the Special Educational Needs Disability Act 2001).
The two initiatives indicate the Government’s commitment to social inclusion, and changes to the curriculum as well as the physical learning environment have been made in order to make them accessible to non traditional learners and disabled students.
Higher education has developed a range of expertise in supporting students from a variety of backgrounds, and a range of disabilities and learning difficulties.
Much of the work has focused on supporting learners in a networked environment, and digital services, portals, gateways, and e-learning and distance learning models have all being developed.
Supporting students with dyslexia using ICT has been a major task for higher education, and public libraries might find it useful to compare their strategies for coping with literacy problems amongst learners.
Conclusion If Charles Leadbeater, quoted in my first paragraph, is to be proved wrong i.e ‘libraries are sleepwalking to disaster’…, then libraries have to act, and act now this is the message I have been hearing for some while.
The framework document simply provides the map; library authorities are expected to use their own compasses and collective brain power to find the route to acceptance of their role and place in the UK networked environment of the 21st Century.
Much of it revolves around local communities and organisations both external and internal, and finding ways to work with them and serve their needs.
The commercial sector offers various models which may not work for the public sector, but thinking around their ideas can stimulate the brain cells, and get library folk thinking along marketing lines.
Having developed e-services you’ve got to tell potential users what they offer and why they should use them.
Its no good just telling other librarians how good your services are.
References Michael Cross.
Life in the fast lane.
Guardian.
16 January 2003, p.12.
Charles Leadbeater.
Creating a modern public library service.
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) Update 2 (7) July 2003, pp.12-13.
Full report: Charles Leadbeater.
Overdue.
How to create a modern public library service.
Demos.
April 2003. http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/default.aspx?id=262 Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Framework for the future: Libraries, Learning and Information in the next decade.
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2003/framework_future.htm Department for Education and Skills.
‘Get on’ campaign.
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/get-on/ also: National Literacy Trust: http://www.readon.org.uk/index.html South West Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.
http://www.swmlac.org.uk Co-East.
http://www.co-east.net/ Familia: http://www.familia.org.uk Ask-a-Librarian: http://www.ask-a-librarian.org.uk/ Electronic Books in public libraries: a feasibility study for developing usage models for web-based and hardware-based electronic books: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/disresearch/e-booksinpublib/index.html The Laser Foundation: http://www.bl.uk/concord/laser-about.html London Borough of Richmond ebook services: http://www.richmond.gov.uk/depts/opps/eal/leisure/libraries/pn/ebookseaudio.htm People’s Network Excellence Fund: http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/news/pressreleasearticle.asp?id=171 Blackburn with Darwen Libraries: http://library.blackburnworld.com/ Hampshire Public Libraries: http://www.hants.gov.uk/library/ The Reading Agency: http://www.readingagency.org.uk Stories from the Web: http://www.storiesfromtheweb.org Author Details Penny Garrod Public Library Focus UKOLN Email: p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/ Return to top Article Title: “Framework for the Future: Access to digital skills and services (including e-government).” Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/public-libraries/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OpenURL Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OpenURL Meeting Buzz data database metadata copyright cataloguing marc ejournal openurl licence authentication url standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Linda Humphreys Frances Boyle and Andy Powell give us a description of the OpenURL Meeting held in London, September 2003.
The JIBS User Group [1] holds regular workshops on issues relating to the use and development of electronic resources by the Higher Education community.
The OpenURL was selected as a topic as JIBS perceived a growing interest in this issue, as shown by correspondence on email lists such as lis-e-journals, and the increasing uptake of OpenURL resolvers by the community.
For example, the number of UK HE subscribers to SFX has risen from 5 in 2001 to 20 in 2003.
Three years ago, SFX was the only OpenURL resolver available, but the number of products has grown and there are now at least six.
In this meeting, JIBS aimed to publicise the usefulness of the OpenURL technology and to provide information about selected products and how they differ.
UKOLN agreed to partner JIBS as they are involved in development of the JISC Information Environment technical architecture in which the OpenURL will play a role, and hence UKOLN also has an interest in explaining and promoting this technology to the community.
The meeting intended to achieve the following: to explain how OpenURL linking works, and define some of the terminology to enable a comparison to be made between different OpenURL products to benefit from the experience of institutions who have already implemented an OpenURL resolver to explore national initiatives concerning the OpenURL Introduction to the OpenURL Andy Powell of UKOLN set the scene by giving a very clear explanation of how the OpenURL works.
He identified the problems associated with linking within the current Web environment, and demonstrated how OpenURL could provide a solution.
Librarians want to maximise the usage of our electronic resources particularly journals by a better joining up of resources, for example linking to the full text of articles from bibliographic databases.
Proprietary linking services are unsatisfactory as they are usually dependent on business agreements between the database and journal suppliers; they give fixed URL links which do not take into account our preferred sources and sometimes lack currency.
In addition, it is not economical in terms of Library staff time to attempt to support a plethora of different linking systems.
Libraries can set up an OpenURL resolver, or link server, which includes a local database (or ‘knowledge base’) of electronic journal subscriptions.
This can replace proprietary linking systems: the library simply has to ask the suppliers of their bibliographic databases to put in a link which points to the OpenURL resolver.
For this system to work, both the database (‘source’) and journals (‘targets’) must be OpenURL-compliant.
Commercial suppliers of OpenURL resolvers Four suppliers were invited to present an overview of their OpenURL products: ExLibris (SFX); Endeavour (LinkFinder Plus); Fretwell Downing (OL2) and EBSCO (Link Source).
Each was supplied with a brief, inviting them to explain how their product differs from that of their competitors, and in particular how the link server is set up and managed.
They were also asked to give an indication of how much library staff time and expertise are required in setting up and running the product, and what type of training and support are available.
The majority of attendees found the product demonstrations useful, but a number commented on the repetitiveness of these presentations.
Since the products effectively all perform the same task, this was difficult to avoid.
This format however facilitated evaluation of the different products on offer for attendees who were at the early stages of reviewing the market place.
Whilst there was the inevitable repetitiveness it was interesting to note the different emphasis and slants on the products that the different speakers made.
All products will perform the key task of providing a resolver, or link server, to join up bibliographic databases with full text or related information.
There are differences in the quality of the knowledge base that is supplied with the resolver.
A major problem still to be addressed is the accuracy of subscription data: neither suppliers nor publishers seem to know exactly what your subscription entitlements are!
Data can be imported into the resolver from a third party such as Serials Solutions, or from a local Access database.
When considering which OpenURL resolver product to purchase, it is important to consider whether a ‘knowledge base’ is supplied with the resolver, and how well does it match your subscriptions.
How many journal titles/publishers are included?
Where does the data come from?
How is it updated and how often?
Other questions to ask include: Is it a hosted or locally managed system?
Is authentication required and how well does the resolver integrate with existing local and national authentication and authorisation mechanisms?
How easy is it to import data?
What import formats will it accept?
Can this be done at publisher level or only title level?
Which targets are pre-configured?
Does it have the ability to generate an A-Z list of electronic journals for the library Web pages?
Can it provide records in MARC format?
Can you batch load data from the resolver into your Library catalogue?
To what extent is local customisation and branding possible?
How much library staff time and expertise are required, both in setting up and continuing to run the product?
What type of training and support are available in the UK?
Some products have special features, for example a citation linker enabling users to input details of an article to try to find the text online, or a facility enabling the library to choose whether to link directly to full text from a database or to offer a range of menu options.
It was clear that you don’t need to use the same supplier for the OpenURL as for your library system: the OpenURL resolver runs independently of the library system.
This undoubtedly has its benefits including freedom of choice of product, but it is a pity that the products cannot make use of the data already in our library catalogues, in order to populate the link server with data.
EBSCO was the only supplier to provide details of pricing, which is dependent upon numbers of FTEs (Full-Time Equivalents).
Implementers of OpenURL There were three presentations in this section, from implementers of three different resolvers: SFX, 1Cate and LinkFinder Plus.
The speakers were asked to provide information on why they had chosen the product; how much library staff time was involved in setting up and maintenance of the resolver; what training was provided; does the resolver assist in any way with existing library processes such as e-journals management or has it replaced existing processes; what sources and targets have been enabled and how well has the linking worked.
It was clear from all of the speakers that the implementation of the resolvers was an opportunity to ‘expose’ their electronic resources and to contextualise them to the local environment for their users.
OpenURL resolvers had been implemented in order to: improve the use of e-journals provide seamless access for users provide a system for e-journal management Owen Stephens from Royal Holloway noted that ‘SFX maintenance equals e-journal maintenance’: the task of keeping up to date subscription information still remains, but SFX has provided a system within which to manage this.
Successful linking depends upon: the quality of the subscription data in the link server the quality of metadata supplied in the OpenURL generated by the OpenURL source A number of sources are not yet OpenURL-compliant.
JIBS and other interested parties are lobbying JISC and CHEST on this issue, to try to make OpenURL compliance a condition of future licence agreements.
National initiatives The Implementing the DNER Technical Architecture at MIMAS (ITAM) Project included the evaluation of SFX as a ‘National Default Resolver’.
MIMAS set up a resolver which had no knowledge of the holdings of individual institutions but provided links to targets which are generally of interest to the community, such as Ingenta journals and Science Direct.
This was tested by three participating Institutions: Plymouth, King’s College and Bath.
Ross MacIntyre identified the ‘big plus’ of this approach as being ‘provision of new links to full text for users and independent of source service/publisher agreements’.
MIMAS has hosted two OpenURL ‘talking shops’ which have provided a forum for UK HE institutions to discuss OpenURL issues [2].
EDINA are involved in two projects using OpenURL.
Andrew Bevan introduced the Balsa linking system, which is the successor to EDINA links for linking from EDINA databases.
EDINA have also proposed a project to JISC to set up an OpenURL router service.
The intention is to route end-users seamlessly to their preferred OpenURL resolver (including a default national resolver if no institutional resolver is available) without having to contact each database provider separately to activate linking from their products.
If successful, this would be extremely beneficial to the community as it would significantly reduce the institutional overhead of setting up OpenURL sources for their users.
Conclusion Feedback from the meeting was very positive, for example: ‘Gave a clear feel of what can/cannot be done, what issues to consider, what work is involved…’.
As with many technological advances it was clear that that technology was the easy part, the key factor for a successful local implementation in any environment is dependent on the accuracy and timeliness of the content of the so-called ‘knowledge base’.
As we are all too well aware in the ever-increasing lean and mean budgetary reality, accountability for any expenditure is increasing.
OpenURL resolvers may be viewed, to a certain extent, as enabling tools exposing resources and as such maximising investment in what are costly resources.The meeting was oversubscribed and JIBS/UKOLN have received several requests to repeat it.
The meeting did not cover all available OpenURL products.
For example, WebBridge is in use at Swansea.
A number of new products are being developed: the forthcoming resolver from Serials Solutions will be interesting since Serials Solutions are also able to supply subscription information.
SIRSI have entered into a partnership with 1Cate and will be able to provide a resolver in the near future.
TDNet have also developed an OpenURL product called TOUR; like Serial Solutions, this is an example of a product that links the technology to the content through its existing subscription-based knowledge base.
The OpenURL standard version 1.0 has recently been announced by NISO (National Information Standards Organization).
This will extend the range of the OpenURL-based extended service that can be supported.
For example, there is still no standard way of supporting ‘subject’-based extended services within the OpenURL resolver at present.
The type of queries that can be used are dependent upon both the standard used and the source.
We hope to keep a watching brief on developments in this area.
JIBS and UKOLN will consider providing another OpenURL event in future, which could include new product information and a discussion of developments resulting from the wider implementation of the OpenURL.
Presentations from this meeting are available on the Web [3].
References The JIBS User Group http://www.jibs.ac.uk MIMAS: ITAM: SFX Trial http://www.mimas.ac.uk/metadata/ITAM/sfx.html OpenURL Meeting, 17 September 2003: Programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/openurl-2003/programme.html Author Details Frances Boyle Electronic Resources Manager Systems and Electronic Resources Service Oxford University Library Services Email: frances.boyle@sers.ox.ac.uk Linda Humphreys Faculty Librarian Library and Learning Centre University of Bath Email: L.J.Humphreys@bath.ac.uk Andy Powell Assistant Director, Distributed Systems and Services UKOLN University of Bath Email: A.Powell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “The JIBS-UKOLN OpenURL Meeting” Authors: Frances Boyle and Linda Humphreys Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/openurl-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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KIM Project Conference: Knowledge and Information Management through Life Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines KIM Project Conference: Knowledge and Information Management through Life Buzz data mobile software framework wiki dissemination usability archives metadata accessibility openoffice repositories video multimedia linux visualisation research Citation BibTex RIS Alex Ball provides an overview of the March 2007 KIM Project Conference.
The KIM Project [1], known in full as Immortal Information and Through Life Knowledge Management: Strategies and Tools for the Emerging Product-Service Paradigm, is a £5.5 million research programme funded primarily by the EPSRC [2] and ESRC [3] and involving eleven UK universities.
The purpose of the project is to find robust ways of handling information and knowledge — for example, product models and documentation of design processes and rationale — over the lifetime of project-services such as PFI hospitals, schools and military equipment, as well as enterprise-level strategies for this new way of working.
The first KIM Project Conference was held on 28–29 March 2007 at Loughborough University.
The purpose of the event was to allow the Project’s many researchers to present the work they had accomplished so far to the rest of the Project team and to get some initial feedback from representatives of the Project’s industrial collaborators.
Information Systems The first set of papers dealt with the issues surrounding the organisation and evaluation of information.
Saikat Kundu of the University of Leeds presented a technique for ascertaining the design requirements of information systems in engineering firms that have made the transition from supplying products to providing services.
The technique involves analysing a ‘service product’ and producing a service blueprint which details the processes involved and how they relate to one another, both logically and chronologically.
This can then be used as the basis of the design of information systems, in much the same way that process models for physical products have been used previously.
Yuyang Zhao of the University of Bath Engineering Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (IMRC) presented a technique for establishing the quality and value of engineering design information, with the aim of using this as a filter to remove low-value ‘hits’ from search results in engineering information systems.
The technique uses a Bayesian network based on a set of information characteristics — accessibility, usability, concurrency, accuracy and trustworthiness — to assess quality, and an additional two factors — relevance and cost — to judge value.
The technique relies on absolute judgements being made, but does distinguish between judgements made on a personal level and those made at the enterprise level.
George Gunendran of Loughborough University presented a paper on using topic maps to help organise both structured and unstructured engineering information.
Topic maps are a way of overlaying structure on a corpus of documentation.
Topics are abstracted from the documents and each topic occurrence recorded as a link; the associations between topics are also recorded, forming the map.
The paper showed how this technique could be used to group model parts into model feature families, and to relate particular features to specific manufacturing methods, while at the same time allowing different perspectives on the same set of data.
Information Capture and Representation The second set of papers dealt with product, process and rationale models, and the automatic capture of metadata and rationale data.
Claudia Eckert of the University of Cambridge detailed some classes of knowledge that need to be preserved across long product lifecycles.
Typically there are four stages to a product lifecycle: new product development, product maintenance, product upgrade (e.g.
putting new technology into old vehicles) and capability continuation (designing a new product to replace the capabilities of an older product).
The information flows that occur along this lifecycle and between products can be complex; for example, in a capability continuation context, information may flow from the most recent product of a similar design, rather than from the product being replaced.
The knowledge most needed along the lifecycle includes: an overview of how the various parts of the design interrelate, the margins within which each part was designed to operate and the consequences of exceeding them, the rationale behind certain design parameters being set and the consequences of changing them, and the function-level importance of the design features.
Alastair Conway of the University of Strathclyde presented a vision of fully mobile shared workspaces with integrated tools for information and knowledge capture.
The starting point for this vision was the LauLima system, developed as part of the DIDET Project [4].
LauLima is made up of two components: the LauLima Learning Environment, a wiki-based collaboration workspace, and the LauLima Digital Library, a digital object repository that also acts as an archive for wiki pages that have run their course.
In essence, the idea is to capture information as it is created, in its raw form, and to apply robust versioning to the information, and automatically to add as much contextual metadata as possible.
Combined with sophisticated search facilities, it should then be possible to generate visualisations of design evolution and the underlying rationale on request.
Robert Sung of Heriot-Watt University presented the results of a case study looking at extracting rationale from log files generated by a simple computer-aided design (CAD) system.
The system in question was a modified version of the BAMZOOKi software provided by the BBC [5].
BAMZOOKi is a game in which one designs and races a ‘zook’ creature; the particular implementation in the research imposed certain design goals that had to be achieved by the zook, requiring the designer to go through several design-test-modify iterations.
Over three hundred log files have been collected and analysed so far.
Csaba Salamon of Heriot-Watt University presented a new technique for watermarking CAD models.
The technique involves rotating the co-ordinate system for each face of the model, and using the differences in orientation to encode data.
The technique is resilient to most migrations between formats that support boundary representations of surfaces, and does not alter the original model or increase the file size in any way.
Alex Ball of UKOLN, University of Bath, gave a presentation on reliably migrating CAD models into and out of lightweight file formats, which are mainly used for visualising and sharing product model data.
Deciding on the most appropriate strategy requires comprehensive information on the capabilities of the various formats and the reliability of the tools available.
Even with one migration tool and destination format, there can be different migration routes giving very different results.
This section concluded with a feedback session allowing the industrial representatives present to comment on the papers presented so far.
There was strong support for the direction taken by the researchers, with only a few points that the Project needed to take on board.
Learning Through Life The third set of papers dealt with tools and techniques for supporting design learning and decision making.
Matt Geiss of the University of Bath Engineering IMRC expanded on George Gunendran’s presentation, looking at how topic maps can be used to unify product, process and rationale models to enable ‘double-loop learning’ [6].
The technique involves labelling all occurrences of a topic, such as a given dimension, across the various documents in which it appears, and using associations to show where the dimension came from and how it is used further.
Topic maps with common elements can be combined to permit analysis across several similar development projects, allowing one to identify and correct systematic errors and erroneous assumptions.
John Rooke of the University of Salford questioned the existence of a product-service paradigm in the construction industry and suggested that such a paradigm might be provided by the software industry.
In software, the design is the product, presenting the industry with a choice between policing the distribution of copies, or offering services around the product.
Elements of open source development models may contribute methods for coping with the unpredictability of built environment lifecycles.
Khadidja Grebici of l’Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, and on placement at the University of Bath, presented a framework based on information maturity for handling uncertainty in collaborative design.
Information maturity is the relative state of the development of the information with respect to satisfying a purpose; thus a set of information may be mature for one purpose and immature for another.
This can lead to conflict and misunderstandings between, say, providers and users, or management and operational groups.
Capturing how maturity evolves, and how compromises are reached between groups with different goals, is key to life-proofing information and improving collaboration.
Decision Making On the second day, the first set of papers outlined the Project’s research into aspects of decision making and decision support.
Lauri Koskela of the University of Salford discussed the various approaches that have been taken over the years to integrate the various stages of the product lifecycle: from systems engineering and lifecycle assessment to public-private partnerships and product lifecycle management.
This move from treating each lifecycle phase separately to treating them all holistically is not a paradigm shift, but rather a coming together of various approaches over the past fifty years.
These approaches need to be unified and any gaps filled.
Murray Sinclair of Loughborough University presented an introduction to lifecycle decision support, with particular reference to organisational complexity.
There are several forms of complexity that need to be addressed: the relationships between partners in extended teams and supply chains, the inherent complexity of products and how to realise them, and the structures within individual organisations.
Put very simply, the only way to overcome complexity is with wisdom, that is, having someone within the organisation with sufficiently broad and deep knowledge of the systems involved.
Unfortunately, Murray ran out of time before he could apply this to decision making systems.
Koray Pekericli of the University of Reading presented an introduction to decision making theory and decision support systems.
Within the construction industry, four-fifths of knowledge is tacit, and tends to be passed from master to apprentice rather than between teams, hence decision support systems have tended to be knowledge-based: for example, directories of experts, networks of knowledge leaders and activists, best practice reviews and communities of practice.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk [7] represents a possible new model of decision support, based on the principle of artificial artificial intelligence — that is, systems that behave like artificial intelligences but are in fact programmed using an ever-expanding set of simple human decisions.
Perhaps by breaking decisions down into millions of small, simple decisions, a more robust decision support system could be produced.
Daniel Geiger of Liverpool University presented the results of a case study looking at the use of communities of practice (CoPs) in an international construction company.
While people claimed to value the hi-tech knowledge management tools available to them, they tended not to use them or contribute to them, and instead relied on informal personal networks.
Two types of CoP were identified: role-based and interest-based.
The role-based CoPs tended to be stable, but were used mainly for top-down dissemination and team building, and therefore lacked innovation.
Interest-based CoPs took a bottom-up approach to developing expertise and dealing with issues, and hence came up with more innovative solutions.
However, the sustainability of interest-based CoPs was fragile; such groups only survived where they were given a physical meeting space, technological support, and real influence within the company.
Julie Jupp of the University of Cambridge presented a model for comparing decision making processes in design work.
Starting from the input conditions, the initial stages of the decision making process are classifying the problem type (from looking at constraints, requirements, specifications, etc.)
and then recognising the problem itself, its ambiguities and risks.
The central part of the decision making process is perspective development, informed by both internal and external design conditions.
Once the synthesis of all these elements has been performed, actions follow, resulting in decisions and their attendant risks and conflicts.
The output conditions of the process are then fed back into the input conditions of other decision making processes.
This model is particularly suited to identifying scenarios where there are strong dependencies between earlier and later decisions, and between decisions on different levels of the design process.
Incentivisation The next set of papers were on the subject of giving contractual incentives to contractors to improve knowledge transfer and innovation within engineering projects.
Weisheng Lu of the University of Reading presented some preliminary thinking about incentivising knowledge and information sharing.
At present, in the construction industry, knowledge and information doesn’t flow particularly well, leading to solutions being reformulated from scratch and mistakes being repeated.
So far, the Project’s research has concentrated on enumerating classes and instances of barriers to knowledge and information flow, and the various incentives that could be used to overcome them.
Field work will determine which incentives work in practice.
Will Hughes of the University of Reading was the only speaker to rebel and give a presentation without using slides; this suited his talk, which challenged commonly-held views about incentivisation.
Contrary to intuition, contractors can make money on a contract while selling their product at a loss, through careful timing of payments to their own suppliers.
Quite often, offering a contractor more money to finish early can be no incentive at all, if the contractor does not have another job to go on to afterwards.
Even pain-share/gain-share contractual clauses can be ineffective if the contractor is forced to share too much of its gain with its supply chain and the client.
Jurong Zheng of the University of Bath Management IMRC presented the results of two case studies, looking at how two early Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects were organised and directed.
In both cases, exhaustive bespoke PFI contracts were used, with the emphasis on penalty clauses rather than benefit clauses; the inflexibility of these contracts caused some problems.
Some benefit sharing was later introduced, some of it financial and some related to prestige.
The issues still to be teased out include the relationships between contractual and relational approaches to running the project, and the role of formal and informal mechanisms for aligning the goals of the clients and the contractors.
Florian Täube outlined some of the research being done by the team at Imperial College, London.
Technological advance is making it easier for globally distributed teams and global networks of organisations to work together.
Increasingly, Indian firms used to providing services are moving along the supply chain into systems integration, thus challenging firms in the UK.
The team are therefore looking at the place of outsourcing and offshoring in through life knowledge management, and how to incentivise work in globally distributed teams.
Selected Industrial Papers The original intention for this last set of papers was to repeat some choice papers from earlier in the conference for the benefit of industrial representatives who were only attending the final afternoon of the Conference.
In the end, there were too many papers accepted for this to be possible, so instead it was a case of saving the best, most industrially relevant, and most general papers till last.
The session began with Project Director Chris McMahon of the University of Bath Engineering IMRC explaining the mission of the Task 1.1 team, which is to come up with a unified model for product, process and rationale.
The team’s research covers the whole spectrum of documentation, across various levels of structure, various ways of working collaboratively, and various stages of design and product lifecycle.
Rob Bracewell of the University of Cambridge introduced his Design Rationale Editor, DREd.
This tool captures rationale in the form of structured spider diagrams, and is already being used with great enthusiasm in industry.
In order to increase the tool’s range, Rob is working on bi-directional linking with other software: already it is possible to link DREd maps to Word documents and vice versa, and to create labels dynamically in DREd maps from data in Excel worksheets.
Forthcoming improvements will see similar integration with OpenOffice.org and a version that runs on Linux.
Alastair Conway of the University of Strathclyde presented the results of an experiment to compare the value of traditional minutes of design meetings with ‘multimedia minutes’: video and audio recordings with coded transcripts.
The key point of comparison was the number of decisions recorded by each method, and how many of these decisions were ‘critical’, that is, impacting directly on the direction of the design process.
On both points, the multimedia minutes recorded between two and three times as many design decisions, even when the traditional minutes were enhanced by sticky-note annotations describing resources used, sketches made and gestures made.
On the down side, coding the transcripts took twenty times longer than producing traditional minutes.
Stuart Green of the University of Reading presented an overview of the various different interpretations and implementations of the product-service paradigm.
Within the literature, the three main interpretations of product-service are: as a shift from delivering a product to providing a service; as a move to providing more integrated, customised solutions to meet customer need; and as a change of emphasis from a customer’s immediate practical needs to a customer’s own service commitments.
In practice, firms are involved in a mixture of product delivery and product-service contracts at any one time, and are having to balance their need for stability and the demand for dynamism.
Stewart Johnstone of Loughborough University presented an analysis of the human resources implications of product-service provision using the analogy of hunters and farmers.
The culture of product provision in civil engineering is rather like hunting: having a set goal and time frame, working pragmatically, giving it one’s best shot then moving on.
The culture of maintenance contractors is rather more like farming: cultivating relationships, building an understanding of the client’s needs and keeping a long-term perspective.
The challenge in PFI contracts and the like is finding a way of joining these two cultures up: it is as much about influencing mentalities as it is about organisational structures.
Mike Lewis of the University of Bath Management IMRC characterised the product-service paradigm as being about buying complex performance outcome.
The research agenda on the procurement of complex services has three dimensions.
The first concerns temporal aspects of inter-organisational issues such as governance modes, passing of incentives along the supply chain, and innovation.
The second concerns the comparison and interaction of interand intra-organisational issues such as information flow, outsourcing and offshoring.
The final dimension concerns the temporal aspects of intra-organisational issues such as organisational structure and the management of contracts in the face of rapid staff turnover.
Closing Plenary Session The final closing session was another industrial feedback session similar to that held on the first day.
Among the topics considered were e-mail (increasingly an important source of evidence in legal proceedings), whether good knowledge management could stifle innovation, and a reminder of the importance of the bottom line.
Industry will always manage to get the job done; the issue is whether the techniques and tools coming out of the Project can save time and money over and above current recovery methods or re-doing from scratch.
Conclusions This was a densely packed conference and a source of some exhaustion to all concerned.
With so many papers to get through, timings had to be strictly controlled, and so this was the first conference I know of where over-running speakers were actually given a red card and sent off.
Nevertheless, it was informative and enjoyable, with high-quality presentations and promising research on display.
The KIM Project Conference was particularly valued by the industrial collaborators, and no doubt a similar event will be held again later in the Project.
References The KIM Project Web site http://www.kimproject.org/ The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Web site http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/ The Economic and Social Research Council Web site http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ The Digital Libraries for Global Distributed Innovative Design, Education and Teamwork Project Web site http://www.didet.ac.uk/ The BAMZOOKi Web site http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/bamzooki/ For information on double-loop learning, see: Argyris, C., On Organizational Learning.
1999, Oxford: Blackwell.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk Web site http://www.mturk.com/ Author Details Alexander Ball Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: a.ball@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “KIM Project Conference: Knowledge and Information Management Through Life” Author: Alexander Ball Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/kim-conf-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Retrospective on the RDN Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Retrospective on the RDN Buzz software framework database portal archives metadata digitisation vocabularies cataloguing z39.50 cache aggregation lom ftp interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Debra Hiom, in the first of a two-part series on the Resource Discovery Network, looks back at the development of the RDN and its activities to date.
Introduction This article will describe the history of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [1], charting the development of subject gateways in the UK since 1993 to the present day.
To help set the history of the gateways in the wider context of the resource discovery landscape in the last decade or so, readers are encouraged to refer to Lorcan Dempsey’s recent article on the development of digital libraries [2].
A timeline of the RDN’s development is also available to serve as a summary of its history.
The RDN is a national service funded by JISC, with support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), to help the education community discover the best of the Web for learning, teaching and research.
The network is made up of an executive based at the University of Manchester, technical support from UKOLN and eight subject-based gateway services.
Together the network encompasses over seventy partner universities and research institutions in the UK.
The current subject services are: Altis: Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism [3] Artifact: Arts and Creative Industries [4] BIOME: Health and Life Sciences [5] EEVL: Engineering, Maths and Computing [6] GEsource: Geography and Environment [7] Humbul: Humanities [8] PSIgate: Physical Sciences [9] SOSIG: Social Sciences, Business and Law [10] Beginnings The origins of the RDN lie in the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme [11], although SOSIG (the Social Science Information Gateway) preceded the eLib Programme by about a year (as a pilot project funded by the ESRC) and Humbul had actually existed as a bulletin board service for the humanities since 1985. eLib was a large and wide ranging programme of projects funded by JISC in 1996 (initially £15m over 3 years but later extended to 2001) as a direct result of the recommendations of the Follet Report [12].
Projects were funded under a number of different tracks including Digitisation, Electronic Journals, Electronic Document Delivery and On-Demand Publishing.
The subject gateways were grouped under the Access to Network Resources (ANR) area, which were projects to support access to high-quality information.
The projects funded under this area were: ADAM: Art, Design, Architecture & Media Information Gateway [13] Biz/ed: Business Education on the Internet [14] CAIN: Conflict Archive on the INternet [15] CATRIONA II [16] EEVL: Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library [6] IHR-Info [17] OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information [18] ROADS: Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-based services [19] RUDI: Resources for Urban Design Information [20] SOSIG: Social Science Information Gateway [10] These projects varied in their approaches and focus, for example CAIN and RUDI were involved in the creation of resources as well creating guides to materials available elsewhere and CATRIONA was investigating the approaches to the management and creation of institutional and departmental electronic resources in Scottish universities.
The ROADS Project was also slightly different to the rest of the group in that it was developing a set of software tools and a standards framework to support some of the information gateways being developed under this strand, specifically ADAM, Biz/ed, OMNI and SOSIG.
In relation to metadata description and resource discovery, this was the early days of the Web, discussions about what was later to become the Dublin Core Initiative [21] had only just begun and the closest to a standard approach to metadata at the time was the IAFA/WHOIS++ [22] templates, which were incorporated into the ROADS software.
As the Dublin Core Initiative became more established, the gateways moved across to support this standard, while still maintaining their own richer discipline-specific metadata where required.
Related Research Projects During this time there were a number of related projects and initiatives with which many staff from the UK subject gateways were closely involved.
These multi-partnered projects often involved European and worldwide collaborations and helped to shape the standards and procedures for creating and maintaining Internet subject gateways.
A couple of these projects are briefly described below.
DESIRE DESIRE (Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education) [23] was a large pan-European project that ran from 1996-2000 as DESIRE I and II.
The overall aim of the project was to promote the use of the Web within the European Research Community and included work packages on security, Web caching and Web creation tools as well as a strand on resource discovery and description.
DESIRE I focused on gateway metadata developments and one of the outputs of this was the Internet Detective Tutorial [24], which taught users critical evaluation skills for Internet information and was a forerunner to the Virtual Training Suite [25].
A major output of the resource discovery strand in the second project was the DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook [26], which examined issues and provided best practice in planning and implementing information gateways.
Renardus The aim of the Renardus Project [27] was to improve academic users’ access to a range of existing Internet-based information services across Europe.
With 14 partners drawn from national libraries, university research centres and other information-related organisations (including the RDN), it provided users with integrated access, through a single interface, to distributed Internet-based services by providing cross-search and cross-browse features.
Renardus’s partners worked on devising models for sharing metadata, agreeing on technical solutions and other standards and developing a pilot system for a fully functional service.
After eLib Towards the end of Phase 2 of eLib funding JISC acknowledged that the subject gateway projects were one of the programme’s success stories [28], with the subject gateway model being widely replicated across the world.
There was a desire to maintain these gateways on a more sustainable long-term basis.
At the same time there was recognition of the need to co-ordinate the activities of these gateways, which up until now had operated independently as research and development projects.
There was also a need to scale up activity to ensure that the coverage of the gateways was expanded to represent all the major academic disciplines.
As a consequence, JISC put out a call for proposals in 1998 to establish a national Resource Discovery Network [29], which would build on the work of the eLib gateways.
This was to consist of a centre to co-ordinate the activities of the gateways and a number of faculty-based services (hubs) to provide the gateways in related subject areas.
The Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC) was established in January 1999 as a partnership between King’s College London and UKOLN at the University of Bath, with support from the University of Hull [30].
As part of the process of creating the network some of the existing subject gateways formed partnerships with high-profile institutions in their subject areas to set up faculty-based hubs.
For example, the medical gateway OMNI partnered with the Natural History Museum, the University of Oxford, the University of Reading, BRIL (BBSRC Research Institutes Librarians Committee) and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons to create the BIOME service.
Similarly SOSIG expanded its subject expertise base through partnerships with Biz/ed, the British Library for Political and Economic Science, the Centre for Social and Anthropological Computing at the University of Canterbury at Kent, the CTI Centre for Psychology (now the HEA Psychology Network), the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey, the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London and the National Institute for Social Work.
The Hub for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing was also created during this time and received additional funding for the MathGate Project, which was developed at the University of Birmingham, in partnership with Heriot-Watt University.
A formal launch of the RDN took place at the Trades Union Congress Hall in London in November 1999, over 270 people attended from a range of sectors including academia, publishing, government, professional societies and commerce.
The event was introduced by Lynne Brindley and Sir Howard Newby and included presentations from the five hubs set up under the new service; Medicine and the Life Sciences; the Social Sciences, Business and Law; the Humanities; the Physical Sciences; and Engineering, Computing and Mathematics.
The three other hubs covering Arts and Humanities, Geography and the Environment and Sports, Leisure and Tourism were gradually added to the service at later dates.
The Virtual Training Suite, which started life as a JISC 5⁄99 project, also became part of the core service in 2002.
Shared Frameworks One of the objectives of the new RDNC was to bring together the expertise and experience the existing gateways had gained throughout eLib and related initiatives, and to formalise this into a shared operational framework.
So while the gateways continued to be developed and maintained at individual institutions, the network centre developed and maintained framework policies to ensure quality, consistency, and interoperability across the services.
These policies include shared terminology, cataloguing guidelines, an interoperability and standards framework and a collections development policy [31].
Outside the network, a partnership project with the Higher Education Academy resulted in the development of the LTSN / RDN (RLLOMAP) LOM application profile and associated vocabularies which are used to share records between the two organisations [32].
RDN Research and Development The environment within which the RDN operates is one that changes at an incredibly fast rate and the network has always been actively engaged in research and development projects to ensure the service keeps up with the changes in the environment.
One of the most significant of these research projects was the RDN Subject Portals Project (SPP) which was funded by JISC as part of its 5⁄99 [33] Learning and Teaching call.
The aim of the call was develop the visibility of the JISC Information Environment-supported information resources (formerly known as the DNER) and the SPP project itself aimed to deliver ‘an aggregated cross-searching tool searching across both JISC supported and non-JISC information resources specially selected by the hubs [gateways] themselves’.
Subject demonstrator portals were set up and tested with users over the summer of 2004.
The feedback from these sessions was largely very positive with considerable interest in the cross-search feature, with aggregated newsfeeds and alerting as other features that were well received.
The original vision was to integrate these subject-based portals into the RDN service so that cross-searching of commercial and non-commercial databases was offered alongside the core Internet catalogue.
The information landscape had changed quite significantly during the project and particularly the introduction of tools such as MetaLib has shifted the emphasis from subject to institutional portals.
However the development strategy of the project was to create portable functionality, which could be embedded into a variety of other environments.
Therefore a series of ‘portlets’ were developed including search and cross-search facilities, news and events aggregation services, which can be easily embedded in institutional portals and virtual learning environments (VLEs).
In Spring 2000, JISC took on support for Further Education and the RDN has worked closely with the FE community to develop its services to ensure their relevance to this audience.
This has resulted in FE-specific Internet tutorials as part of the Virtual Training Suite, a set of case studies detailing how FE staff can use resources found through the RDN in their learning and teaching and working with FE practitioners to map a set of RDN records to the FE curriculum.
Details of all past and current research projects can be found from the main RDN site [34] Current RDN Services Since the launch in 1999, the RDN has been continuously developing its core database of resource descriptions and the combined catalogue now contains over 120,000 records of useful sites and resources, each one chosen by a subject specialist and regularly checked to make sure they are still up to date and being maintained.
In addition to the core Internet Catalogue the RDN offer a number of other services, including: Virtual Training Suite The Virtual Training Suite is a set of free ‘teach-yourself’ tutorials offering Internet training skills in over sixty subject areas ranging from agriculture, food and forestry, the performing arts, social research methods and town and country planning.
Each tutorial offers an introduction to some of the key Internet sites in its subject area as well as how to avoid some of the common pitfalls of using information found on the Internet.
RDN-Include The RDN-Include facility allows institutions or individuals to embed the Internet catalogue within their own Web site.
Subject gateways have always proved especially popular with information professionals who recognise the time and resource commitment required to create and maintain links to highquality Internet sites.
At the same time, research indicates that HE institutions are keen to provide students with links to Web resources from within their own Web sites, retaining the institutional look-and-feel.
Institutions that are using portal software can easily cross-search the RDN alongside other collections using the RDN Z39.50 server.
Institutions without such portal facilities can make use of the RDN-include service, which allows institutions to add the RDN Internet Resource Catalogue (or portions of it) to their own site, giving their users access to a selected database of high-quality Web resources without them leaving the institution’s own site.
Additional Services The subject gateways also present a number of additional services depending on the needs of their particular communities.
Below are a just a few examples of these additional services: EEVL offers free information about jobs and industry news within engineering, maths and computing through their One-Step Services which aggregate content from a range of information providers.
Users of Humbul and SOSIG can choose to set up accounts to allow them to personalise their view of the services and receive weekly email updates in their particular subject areas of interest.
PSIgate provides Spotlight, which is a monthly science magazine with features and news.
A Look to the Future After a period of review, analysis and internal consultation, 2005⁄06 is a year of transition at the RDN.
A programme of change is in process in order to build upon and re-establish the position of the RDN in the Further and Higher Education environment.
These changes include a restructuring of the subject services, an integration of the software and hardware platforms and a new visual identity for the service.
The new service will be relaunched as Intute in July 2006.
In a further article, readers will be able to find out more about the strategic changes taking place within the service and its plans for the future.
In the meantime if you want to keep up with the latest developments please visit the Intute development updates [35].
References Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Dempsey, L. The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After, February 2006, Ariadne Issue 46 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/ Altis http://www.altis.ac.uk/ Artifact http://www.artifact.ac.uk/ BIOME http://www.biome.ac.uk/ EEVL http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ GEsource http://www.gesource.ac.uk/ Humbul http://www.humbul.ac.uk/ PSIgate http://www.psigate.ac.uk/ SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Electronic Libraries Programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/ Joint Funding Council’s Libraries Review Group: report (Follet Report) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ ADAM, the Art, Design, Architecture & Media Information Gateway http://www.adam.ac.uk/ Biz/ed: Business Education on the Internet http://www.bized.ac.uk/ CAIN: Conflict Archive on the INternet http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ CATRIONA II http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/catriona/ IHR-Info http://www.history.ac.uk/ OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information http://www.omni.ac.uk/ ROADS: Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-based services http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/projects/project?search=ROADS RUDI: Resources for Urban Design Information http://www.rudi.net/ History of the Dublin Core Initiative http://dublincore.org/about/history/ Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, Martijn Koster, M Stumpf.
Publishing information on the Internet with anonymous FTP.
Internet Draft.
(working draft now expired) Copy available from http://www.ifla.org/documents/libraries/cataloging/metadata/iafa.txt DESIRE (Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education) http://www.lub.lu.se/desire/ Internet Detective Tutorial (original version no longer live but a second edition will soon be available from http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective).
The Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook, 2000, Copy available from http://www.carnet.hr/CUC/cuc2000/handbook/welcome.html Renardus Project http://www.renardus.org/ Pinfield, S. eLib in Retrospect: a national strategy for digital library development in the 1990s.
Published in: Judith Andrews and Derek Law (ed.s) Digital libraries: policy, planning and practice.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, pp.19-34.
JISC Circular 10⁄98: Subject based information gateway http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=circular_10_98 Dempsey, L. The subject gateway: experiences and issues based on the emergence of the Resource Discovery Network.
Online Information Review, 24(1), 2000, 8-23 Note that a preprint version of an article of the same name is available at: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/ior-2000-02-dempsey/ RDN Policy, Strategy and Guidelines http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/policy/ RDN/LTSN Partnership page http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ Circular 5⁄99: Developing the DNER for Teaching and Learning http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=circular_5_99 RDN Project http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/ Intute development updates http://www.intute.ac.uk/development/ Author Details Debra Hiom SOSIG Director ILRT University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Tel: +44(0)117 928 7117 Email: d.hiom@bris.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Retrospective on the RDN” Author: Debra Hiom Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/hiom/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Curator Tool Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Curator Tool Buzz data software java framework database apache archives metadata sql repositories video preservation cataloguing linux solaris soap mysql tomcat heritrix licence url research standards warc Citation BibTex RIS Philip Beresford tells the story (from The British Library's perspective) of the development of new software to aid all stages of harvesting Web sites for preservation.
In September 2006 The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna M?tauranga o Aotearoa, The British Library and Sytec, announced the successful development of a Web harvesting management system.
The system, known as Web Curator Tool, is designed to assist curators of digital archives in collecting Web-published material for storage and preservation.
The Web Curator Tool is the latest development in the practice of Web site harvesting (using software to 'crawl' through a specified section of the World Wide Web, and gather 'snapshots' of Web sites, including the images and documents posted on them).
The Web Curator Tool is a further advance in the race to ensure the world's digital heritage is preserved for future generations and not lost through obsolescence and the ephemeral nature of Web materials.
The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) seeks to set up and support collaborative projects to develop standards and open source tools of practical benefit in the new field of Web archiving.
In particular, by 2004, several IIPC members were considering the need for a desktop solution to the new challenges of collecting Web materials a tool that would assist curators practically, without requiring a high level of technical understanding of Web site design and construction, the structure and formats of Web sites, or of issues of storage, preservation and access in digital repositories.
During 2005 the IIPC Content Management Working Group reviewed work on requirements independently prepared by the Library of Congress (LC), UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC), National Library of Australia (NLA) and National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ).
The Library of Congress prepared a summary set of requirements and asked the four institutions (LC, UKWAC, NLA and NLNZ) to rate their importance; it compiled the results into a tentative set of functional specifications for a Web Curator Tool.
The LC then prepared an initial set of textual use cases outlining many of the ways the Web Curator Tool was expected to be used, and which served as the basis for software development.
The National Library of New Zealand and The British Library were at that time, like many other IIPC member institutions, in the early stages of building a selective pilot archive of Web sites in anticipation of getting a remit to collect on a domain scale under Legal Deposit regulation.
The BL agreed at the Reykjavik IIPC meeting in June 2005 to collaborate with NLNZ and financially contribute to the proposed development, and confirmed this commitment at the Washington meeting in October 2005.
Both libraries had parallel programmes running to develop digital repositories which would in time be capable of storing and preserving ARC files of harvested Web sites, and potentially of merging in retrospective data acquired by agreement with the Internet Archive.
Both were keen to exploit the Web harvesting extensions to the ARC format, which would allow better preservation and search and retrieval of stored Web materials.
The UK Web Archiving Consortium The British Library meanwhile had been leading the inception of a joint UK pilot scheme to develop a collaborative archive of Web sites.
This came about following a JISC/Wellcome Trust study, and six founder institutions signed a Consortium Agreement in 2004.
They were: The British Library The National Library of Scotland The National Library of Wales / Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru The National Archives The Wellcome Library Higher Education Funding Council / JISC The UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) was given permission to use free of charge the National Library of Australia's PANDAS software, installed and managed by Magus Research Ltd under contract to The British Library.
Pandas uses the HTTrack Web copier tool to gather Web Sites for storage, adding an interface layer over this, and also workflow management processes for selection, recording permissions, targeting and scheduling gathers of recurrent updates, and the ability to correct harvesting errors before submission to the incorporated archive store.
Web sites were to be selected in accordance with the collection development policy of each institution, and permission to archive would have to be obtained in writing or by email before any material was harvested.
The development of the UKWAC archive was originally envisaged as a two-year pilot project, from which it was expected the members would learn much about the selection, capture and storage of Web sites; and by which time Legal Deposit Web-published materials would have come under statutory regulation for the UK.
In fact Legal Deposit regulations have taken longer to be developed than was projected, and UKWAC continues to build its archive using Pandas.
It is now keen to adopt new standards for Web archiving emerging through the IIPC (such as the WARC storage format for Web archives, put forward as a candidate international standard), and to use a new generation of tools exploiting these standards.
UKWAC now expects to continue collaboration for another year.
It will move the operation over from Pandas to using Web Curator Tool and Heritrix for selection, harvesting and acquisition, and WERA (Web ARchive Access) tools for access, before the end of its current Consortium agreement in September 2007.
The UKWAC archive [1] is updated weekly and is freely available to researchers; the site also provides more background descriptive material on this Consortium.
The Project Through a collaboration agreement signed between the two funding libraries in March 2006, it was decided at the outset that The National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ) would lead the project and run the procurement of a software developer.
Steve Knight of the National Digital Heritage Archive within the NLNZ was nominated Project Sponsor.
Sytec, a subsidiary of TelstraClear, was selected to provide the development team, under the immediate direction of Gordon Paynter of NLNZ, the Project Manager.
The Project's scope was to be controlled tightly to a condensed set of essential requirements.
These were reviewed over a week-long start-up workshop in mid-April 2006.
This was the only time the core project team actually ever assembled.
Communications were difficult because of the 12-hour time difference between NZ and UK, and were mainly constrained to email even then it was unusual to be able to respond the same day.
We managed two video conferences held in the evening in the UK, and rather early in the morning in NZ but most of the regular progress reporting and issue discussion was done by regular phone-calls from the BL team to Gordon's home in the evening (for him).
We are very grateful to him for allowing this, as it would otherwise have been a pretty impersonal experience, and control over progress would have been much less efficient.
Project Objectives Both libraries saw this project as an adjunct to their own digital asset management programmes, and were looking to incorporate the selection and acquisition of Web materials into the mainstream of digital collection development.
The key business requirements for the project were: Provide ability to perform scheduled event and selective harvests.
Provide integrated management and workflow for harvesting Web sites.
Use open standards and software in all project outputs, particularly those developed by the IIPC.
Integrate with existing technical architecture and other enterprise applications.
Use the Heritrix crawler developed by the Internet Archive.
These business benefits were expected from the project: Improved ability to harvest Web sites for archival purposes with more efficient and effective workflow.
Automation of harvest activities currently performed manually.
Capture of harvested material with a more sophisticated and widely used crawler.
Capture of harvested material in .arc format, which has stronger storage and archiving characteristics.
Reduced training and induction needs for staff newly deployed on Web archiving (e.g.
ability to spread the collection of Web materials to other e-media acquisitions staff).
So the project began by working on a System Requirements Specification (SRS) for the Web Curator Tool, including: components to manage workflows for the following core processes: Harvest Authorisation: getting permission to harvest Web material and make it available Selection, scoping and scheduling: what will be harvested, how, when and how often?
Description: Dublin Core metadata Harvesting: Downloading the material at the appointed time with the Heritrix Web harvester deployed on multiple machines Quality Review: making sure the harvest worked as expected, and correcting simple harvest errors a user interface, and in-built Help; a scheduler that implements crawls with Heritrix; a process for submitting harvested material to a digital archive; and a modular architecture that allows new components to be substituted, extended or added to support the more specific requirements of other institutions.
Specific exclusions to the project scope were: It is NOT a digital archive or document repository.
It does not incorporate long-term storage or preservation It is NOT an access tool.
It does not provide public access to harvested material.
It submits material to an external archive, which can be accessed using Wayback or WERA access tools Implementing non-generic features which may be required by other IIPC members.
The tool would be sufficiently modular to allow features to be extended or added at a later date.
Implementing tools for cataloguing harvested materials beyond the basic requirements of archive submission (e.g.
information required to create Submission Information Packages).
Ongoing maintenance, development and support of the open source tool after its release.
The Web Curator Tool was to be developed as an enterprise class solution, inter-operable with other organisational systems.
It would have a user-centred design.
It would enable users to select, describe and harvest online publications without requiring an in-depth knowledge of Web harvesting technology.
It would provide auditable logs of major processes for tracking and problem resolution, it would incorporate workflows to identify the content for archiving and then manage it, including permissions, selection, description, scoping, harvesting and quality review, and customisable schedules for capturing regular updates of selected Web sites.
Both The British Library and the National Library of New Zealand aimed to integrate the Web Curator Tool into their own digital asset management programmes.
The project undertook to share the product with other organisations around the world as an open source release before the end of 2006.
Project Timescale Both libraries were keen that this project should deliver core functionality quickly, that could be released as open source software for general adoption, and subsequent shared development in the light of practical usage.
Timescales for the key project stages (all completed on schedule) were: IIPC Functional Requirements IIPC Use Cases To June 2005 To October 2005 Project Definition, Solution Scope Software Requirements Specification November-December 2005 Procurement January-February 2006 Detailed Design March-April 2006 Development May-July 2006 User Acceptance Testing July-August 2006 Open Source Release September 2006 Technical Design Implemented in Java Runs in Apache Tomcat Incorporates parts or all of Acegi Security System Apache Axis (SOAP data transfer) Apache Commons Logging Heritrix (version 1.8) Hibernate (database connectivity) Quartz (scheduling) Spring Application Framework Wayback Platform: Tested on Solaris (version 9) and Red Hat Linux Should work on any platform that supports Apache Tomcat Database: A relational database is required Tested on Oracle and PostgreSQL Installation scripts provided for Oracle and PostgreSQL Should work with any database that Hibernate supports including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and about 20 others Interface Design The Web Curator Tool interface was designed to be user-friendly, easy to use and easy on the eye, as illustrated by the screen shots below: WCT does use some specific terminology for instance: A Target is the defined part(s) of a Web site to be harvested.
A Target Group is a set of URLs that, taken together, comprise a Web publication.
Target instances are the individual harvests that are either scheduled to happen, or are in progress, or which have finished.
Target Instances are created automatically for a Target when that Target is approved.
A Target Instance is created for each harvest that has been scheduled.
Figure 1: Main menu screen, showing the main areas of functionality Workflow Outline The Target is the unit of selection: If there is something you want to harvest, archive and describe, then it is a Target.
You can attach a Schedule to a Target to specify when (and how often) it will be harvested.
But you cannot harvest until you have permission to harvest, and you cannot harvest until the selection is approved.
Figure 2: Target definition (one of several tabs) Scheduled Target Instances are put in a queue.
When their scheduled start time arrives: WCT allocates the harvest to one of the harvesters The harvester invokes Heritrix and harvests the requested material When the harvest is complete, the User is notified Examining the Queue gives you a good idea of the current state of the system: WCT provides a quick view of the instances in the Queue, including Running, Paused, Queued, and Scheduled Instances Figure 3: The User view of Target Instances shows all the instances that the user owns The Owner (or another User) then has to: Quality Review the harvest result to see if it was successful Using the Browse Tool to Browse the harvest result to ensure all the content is there Using the Prune Tool to Delete unwanted material from the harvest Endorse or Reject the harvest Submit the harvest to an Archive (if it has been endorsed) The British Library specified additional multi-agency functionality to support its collaborative Web archiving within UKWAC, which is now built in to the product.
Figure 4: Choice of Quality Review tools: Figure 5: WCT records logs of all harvesting operations, for tracking and problem solving in the Quality Review process Figure 6: Example of a detailed log produced by WCT Conclusion The Web Curator Tool Project has very quickly produced usable software with all the components needed to start harvesting Web sites for addition to an existing digital repository.
One of its success criteria was to have provided the application ready for implementation by the two collaborating libraries in 2006.
This was achieved.
The National Library of New Zealand has since deployed Web Curator Tool and is using it operationally.
The British Library has installed WCT in a test environment, but has been short of technical resource to take it further we now plan to run trials to include UKWAC partners in Spring 2007.
Web Curator Tool open source software [2] is available from its location at SourceForge.net and contains: Source code Documentation: user and administrator guides, FAQ Mailing lists It is released under Apache License, Version 2.0. and the WCT Web site [2] contains further information for readers wishing to know more.
Queries can be addressed to either UK or New Zealand staff [3].
Editor's note: Readers may be interested in a subsequent article: Jackson Pope, Philip Beresford.
"IIPC Web Archiving Toolset Performance Testing at The British Library".
July 2007, Ariadne Issue 52 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/pope-beresford/ References UK Web Archiving Consortium Web site http://www.webarchive.org.uk The Web Curator Tool http://webcurator.sourceforge.net Queries may be addressed to:wct@bl.uk or wct@natlib.govt.nz Author Details Philip Beresford Web Archiving Project Manager The British Library Boston Spa Wetherby West Yorkshire LS23 7BQ Email: philip.beresford@bl.uk Return to top Article Title: "Web Curator Tool " Author: Philip Beresford Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/beresford/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data software xml archives metadata firefox digitisation browser identifier schema blog repositories copyright video preservation oai-pmh multimedia latex aggregation ejournal uri photoshop ebook curation ajax licence e-science droid interoperability algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
UKeiG Training: Developing and managing e-book collections The UK eInformation Group (UKeiG), in co-operation with Academic and National Library Training Co-operative (ANLTC), are pleased to present a course entitled 'Developing and managing e-book collections', to be held in Training Room 1, The Library, Dublin City University, Dublin 9 on Tuesday, 12 September 2006 from 9.30a.m.
to 4.30p.m.
Course Outline This course opens the door to a new electronic format.
In the last six years, there has been an unprecedented growth in the publishing of e-books with an increasing array of different types available for all sectors.
The programme will give you the opportunity to explore a range of different e-books including a range of commercially-published and free reference works, monographs, textbooks, and fiction.
Examples will include individual titles and also collections of e-books, such as those offered by NetLibrary and Oxford University Press.
The course will also facilitate consideration of the new opportunities e-books offer for librarians and users, and the significant collection management and promotional issues which challenge information and library staff.
The course is designed to offer: an understanding of the meaning of the term 'e-book' a familiarity with a range of commercially-produced e-book from publishers and aggregators a familiarity with a range of free e-books an understanding of the nature of e-books (e.g.
reference, textbook) an appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of the medium an appreciation of the collection management issues associated with bibliographical control, selection, acquisition, access, licensing, and archiving a familiarity with the different ways of promoting awareness and use of the format In addition to talks by the presenters, the course includes two practical exercises.
The first allows delegates to explore examples of online e-books in a structured way.
The second comprises an activity in which delegates will be divided into small groups to examine the major collection management, and marketing and promotion issues.
A plenary session led by the course presenters will then be held to enable delegates to discuss their findings in the light of current research, practice, and the work of the JISC e-Book Working Group.
To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details: please email cabaker@ukeig.org.uk ANLTC members should contact Miriam Corcoran, email miriam.corcoran@dcu.ie Further details: Available via the UKeiG Web site http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ and the ANLTC Web site at http://www.anltc.ie/ Back to headlines Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing Scheme (QUADS) Showcase Day 28 September 2006, Museum of London QUADS is the ESRC Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing Scheme, running from April 2005 until October 2006.
The aim of the scheme is to develop and promote innovative methodological approaches to the archiving, sharing, reuse and secondary analysis of qualitative research and data.
A range of new models for increasing access to qualitative data resources, and for extending the reach and impact of qualitative studies will be explored.
The scheme also aims to disseminate good practice in qualitative data sharing and research archiving.
This is part of the ESRC's initiative to increase the UK resource of highly skilled researchers, and to exploit fully the distinctive potential offered by qualitative research and data.
QUADS is a small initiative and is dedicated to the mission of learning more about sharing, representation and reuse of qualitative data, in all of its disparate shapes and forms.
Five small exploratory projects were funded together with a co-ordination role, run by ESDS Qualidata at Essex.
The projects address both methodological, information and technical matters.
Four common challenges were identified for the QUADS scheme: defining and capturing data context; audio-visual archiving; consent, confidentiality and IPR; and Web and metadata standards.
Capturing degrees of context enables informed reuse of data.
QUADS is devising and recommending a minimum set of contextual constructs that would be necessary to document a collection of qualitative data to enable informed secondary use.
The methods of archiving and sharing digital audio-visual data from qualitative research are fairly new.
As many of the QUADS projects are handling these kinds of data, the scheme provided an opportunity to share expertise in presenting and reusing such sources.
Consent, confidentiality and copyright perhaps provide the greatest challenges for reusing qualitative data and many the QUADS projects have addressed specific consent and copyright issues.
This one-day conference will showcase the demonstrators from the five projects and some additional partner projects that cover many of these cutting edge issues.
Participants will have an opportunity to hear about the projects and the teams experiences, and see the Web sites and tools created by the projects.
The projects afford unique case studies that can be used in the future to help inform those wishing to publish online and share qualitative data.
Further details including programme and booking: http://www.esds.ac.uk/qualidata/news/eventdetail.asp?ID=1588 Back to headlines TASI announces Autumn workshops TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) has released details and dates for its forthcoming training programme.
Practical hands-on workshops running between September and December 2006 include: Digital Photography Level 1 Rights and Responsibilities: Copyright and Digital Images Rights and Responsibilities: Using Technology to Manage Rights in Digital Images Image Capture (Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3) Photoshop (Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3) Introduction to Image Metadata Building a Departmental Image Collection There are still places on the following workshops for September: 12 September 2006 Image Capture Level 1 13 September 2006 Image Capture Level 2 28 September 2006 Image Capture Level 3 29 September 2006 Introduction to Image Metadata Full details of all our workshops and the online booking form can be found on TASI's Web site: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ Back to headlines iPRES 2006 The International Conference on the Preservation of Digital Objects The International Conference on the Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2006) will be held over 8-10 October 2006 at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY U.S.A.
The theme of this year's iPRES is Words to Deeds: Collaboration in the Realm of Digital Preservation.
Following on the successful iPRES 2005 held over 14-16 September in Goettingen, Germany, iPRES 2006 Plenary Sessions will kickoff with a keynote presentation by Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada.
Plenary Sessions will explore topics in Preserving Multimedia Objects, e-Journal Preservation, Certification, and National Efforts in Digital Preservation.
Concurrent sessions on Tools of the Trade, eScience and Digital Preservation, Repositories, and New Initiatives will also be held.
The deadline for early registration is 1 September 2006.
For details about the iPRES 2006 agenda and to register, please visit our web site: http://ipres.library.cornell.edu/ Back to headlines Audiovisual Preservation for Culture, Heritage and Academic Collections: 1-day course 10 November 2006, at King's College London, Centre for Computing in the Humanities.
Seventy percent of all audiovisual material is under immediate threat of deterioration, damage or obsolescence and seventy percent of collection managers don't know it.
Surveys have found serious shortages of trained staff and equipment, and an even more serious shortage of concerted preservation actions.
The immediate needs are: awareness and help.
This one-day course will provide basic information on the problems of audiovisual material, what to do about them and where to get help and more information.
The targets are culture, heritage and academic collections, to focus on a group of people and collections with broadly similar issues and solutions.
Fee: £60 includes lunch for non-profit making organisations (VAT will not be charged) or £180 (plus VAT) for the corporate sector (who will be allocated any remaining places not taken).
Early registration is advised, as numbers will be limited to approximately 25 persons.
For registration and further information http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/AVpres.htm Programme for the day: Basics: (1.5 hrs) Welcome and Introduction KDCS Basic facts about audiovisual materials BBC Lessons to be learnt from major film and video digitisation projects BUFVC Digital Audiovisual Preservation: AHDS Arts and Humanities Data Service Case Studies: (1.5 hrs) The ITN News Archive a JISC project The British Library Sound Archive a JISC project Preservation and access at the BFI British Film Institute Preservation and Commercialisation Imperial War Museum Preservation in a Research Institute Welcome Institute Advanced topics: (2 hrs) Preservation Cost models Southampton University (PrestoSpace) Audiovisual Websites and Portals System Simulation Ltd (PrestoSpace) Metadata BBC Sources of Help: PrestoSpace, TAPE, JISC, KDCS, AHDS, EC BBC The JISC strategy for the future of audiovisual collections JISC Open Question and Answer session.
Attendees may book 15 minute individual consultancy sessions with the speakers from BBC, AHDS, KDCS and Prestospace after the end of the course until 6.00pm.
Back to headlines 2nd International Digital Curation Conference opens for bookings Bookings are now open for the 2nd International Digital Curation Conference to be held at the Hilton Glasgow over 21-22 November 2006.
The conference will explore the topic of Digital Data Curation in Practice.
Keynote speeches will be made by Dr Hans F Hoffmann, CMS Team Leader, CERN and Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).
For further details see: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/ Back to headlines Conference: Connecting Culture and Commerce: Getting the Right Balance 26 January 2007, National Gallery, London http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/mcg2007/ The Museums Copyright Group in association with Kings College London has announced the following confirmed speakers: Alan Yentob, BBC's Creative Director, Director of Drama, Entertainment and CBBC.
Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery.
Jon Snow, Channel Four News presenter and a Trustee of the National Gallery and Tate Liaison Trustee.
Professor Charles Oppenheim, Head of Information Science, Loughborough University.
The conference will provide a forum for the invited expert speakers and international representatives from the cultural, media, education, commerce, Government and other interested sectors to debate how to balance cultural and commercial interests.
This is a critical time for owners and users of cultural content.
Issues surrounding creative industries, technology and new media together with discussions about Intellectual Property Rights are being played out at the highest political levels and the landscape has the potential to be reshaped dramatically.
Cultural heritage organisations need to embrace these developments and position themselves to ensure that they are represented as a sector that provides cultural content, free at the point of access, whilst looking to the rights that they own themselves to develop models to sustain their core activities and achieve high levels of service to their commercial users.
This conference will provide an exciting forum to simulate debate and discussion about these key areas with suppliers and users of cultural content set within one of the foremost collections of art in the world.
Programme: http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/mcg2007/programme.htm Registration for the conference has now opened at: http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/mcg2007/registration.htm Back to headlines The MLA releases its 2004-2006 review MLA's biennial review of activities between April 2004 and end of March 2006.
The review reports on key organisational aims and activities: putting museums, libraries and archives at the heart of national, regional and local life; increasing and sustaining participation; leading sector strategy and policy development; and establishing a world class and sustainable sector.
Copies of the review document are available on the MLA Web site at: http://www.mla.gov.uk/website/information/publications [Source: MLA] [Received: August 2006] Back to headlines JIBS User Group Weblog The JIBS User Group has created a Weblog to help to communicate news to the UK HE community about its activities.
It plans to include news from its enhancement groups, announcements of forthcoming events, and also to highlight relevant items from MIMAS, EDINA, JISC and eduserv chest.
The blog is at: http://jibsnews.blogspot.com/ News can only be posted by members of the JIBS Committee see: http://www.jibs.ac.uk/contacts/) but comments on news items which can be added to the blog will be warmly welcomed.
[Source: JIBS User Group Committee] [Received: August 2006] Back to headlines Report now available on Campus Research Computing Cyberinfrastructure Internet2, with support from NSF and Penn State, held a workshop over 25-27 April 2006 dealing with Campus Research Computing Cyberinfrastructure.
The final report of this workshop is now available at http://middleware.internet2.edu/crcc/docs/internet2-crcc-report-200607.html You can find more background on the workshop at http://middleware.internet2.edu/crcc/ This material should be quite helpful for institutions involved in cyberinfrastructure planning and strategy development.
[Source: CNI] [Received: August 2006] Back to headlines The National Archives' DROID tool goes Open Source The National Archives (TNA) has announced the release of a new version of DROID, its automatic file format identification tool.
DROID is being released for the first time under an open source licence, and is freely available to download from the DROID project Web site: http://droid.sourceforge.net/ DROID 1.1 incorporates a number of enhancements, resulting from user feedback, and new TNA requirements.
These include: Enhanced signature syntax in PRONOM Enhanced identification algorithm to minimise multiple identification results Support for identifying URIs and streams Configuration of proxy server settings from the GUI Improved XML schemas To support integration of DROID with other software systems, full documentation, including javadocs, is available from the project Web site.
Existing DROID users are advised that the new DROID signature file schema is not compatible with previous versions of DROID.
Users are recommended to upgrade to DROID 1.1, in order to take advantage of future signature file updates from PRONOM.
TNA will continue to develop PRONOM and DROID as key parts of its preservation programme.
Requirements are currently being defined for the next releases and feedback is welcomed.
Further information on the PRONOM technical registry is available from http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/ Comments and feedback are welcomed at pronom@nationalarchives.gov.uk [Source: Digital Preservation Coalition discussion list] [August 2006] Back to headlines Mellon Foundation provides reports on repository interoperability Over 20-21 April 2006 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation hosted an invitational meeting in New York City, convened jointly by Mellon, Microsoft, CNI, JISC and DLF.
The meeting aimed to explore issues in repository interoperability, with a view to mapping out a development agenda.
General information on the meeting is available at: http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop/ The report from this meeting, entitled "Augmenting Interoperability Across Scholarly Repositories" was prepared by Jeroen Bekaert and Herbert Van de Sompel of LANL, and is available at: http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop/FinalReport Further announcements of additional work in this area are anticipated in the coming months.
[Source: CNI] [Received: August 2006] Back to headlines User feedback results on subject-based cross-repository resource discovery service from PerX One of the PerX (Pilot Engineering Repository X-search) project aims is to assess the potential usefulness of a subject-based cross-repository resource discovery service for engineering.
To do this, PerX developed a Pilot search tool and then used it as a testbed to ascertain from a selection of academic end-users their opinions on the appropriateness of the subject-based approach and the effectiveness of the search tool.
Some initial feedback results from the first batch of testing are now available from: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/userfeedback.htm This includes a report analysing Web Questionnaire Results, and a report from a Focus Group.
Both reports should be of interest to anyone interested in resource discovery services, digital repositories, etc., and not just those in engineering.
The PerX home page is: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/ The Pilot is available from: http://www.engineering.ac.uk/ A news feed is available: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/news/perx.rss [Source: Roddy MacLeod, Senior Subject Librarian, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh] [Received: August 2006] Back to headlines APSR publishes three reports on different issues of digital sustainability The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) has announced the publication of three reports on different issues of digital sustainability.
The PREMIS Requirement Statement (PRESTA) Project Report has been prepared by Bronwyn Lee, Gerard Clifton and Somaya Langley of the National Library of Australia.
The objective of this report was to develop a requirements specification for preservation metadata based on the PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies) final report, the Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata.
Copies of the report are available at http://www.apsr.edu.au/publications/presta/ Preservation of Word-Processing Documents and Preservation of TeX/LaTeX Documents by Ian Barnes both address issues relating to the long-term availability of text documents.
Dr Ian Barnes teaches and conducts research in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University.
Preservation of Word-Processing Documents addresses the questions: What file formats are suitable for long-term storage of word processed text documents?
How can we convert documents into a suitable archival format?
How can we get authors to convert and deposit their work?
Copies of Preservation of Word-Processing Documents are available at http://www.apsr.edu.au/publications/presta/ Copies of Preservation of TeX/LaTeX Documents are available at http://www.apsr.edu.au/publications/LaTeX-preservation.pdf [Source: Margaret Henty, Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories] [Received: August 2006] Back to headlines Repository search integrates with Firefox 2/ IE 7 search feature The latest version of the OJAX metasearch service is now tightly integrated with the Firefox 2 / IE 7 search feature.
Repositories powered by OJAX, a prototype Ajax-powered metasearch service providing a dynamic user interface to a federated search service for OAI-PMH-compatible repository metadata, can now be searched directly from the browser search bar.
There is no need to download or configure extensions or plugins.
OpenSearch Discovery OJAX now supports OpenSearch Discovery.
When users visit any OJAX repository search page, their browser will automatically detect that the repository can be searched via OpenSearch and will offer to add the repository to the set of search plugins installed in their browser.
Once added, OJAX can be selected in the browser search bar and repository searches can be performed at any time without having to navigate back to the repository search page.
Search Suggestions (Auto-Completion) Firefox 2.0 has extended the OpenSearch protocol to allow auto-completion in the browser search bar (which Firefox calls "Search Suggestions").
OJAX is one of the first search engines to implement the server side of this extended OpenSearch protocol, after Google, Yahoo!
and Answers.com.
It is arguably the first open source search engine to do so.
Because OJAX 0.6 uses the increasingly popular OpenSearch 1.1 search descriptions, the new features described above require the latest versions of the two major browsers: Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7.0.
Fof further information, demo and download see: http://ojax.sourceforge.net/ [Source: Dr Judith Wusteman, School of Information and Library Studies, University College Dublin] [Received: August 2006] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Portole Project: Supporting E-learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Portole Project: Supporting E-learning Buzz data software java html database xml portal infrastructure xslt metadata schema sql cataloguing multimedia z39.50 marc e-learning vle marc21 openurl algorithm standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley, Mina Sotiriou and Matthew Dovey provide an overview of a project to produce tools to discover information resources and deploy them within a university VLE.
The PORTOLE (Providing Online Resources To Online Learning Environments) Project [1] was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of the DiVLE Programme (Linking Digital Libraries with Virtual Learning Environments JISC 07/02).
PORTOLE was a consortium undertaking of the Universities of Leeds and Oxford and the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
PORTOLE was a 10-month project which started on 1 October 2002 and completed on 15 August 2003.
The University of Leeds was the lead site for the project.
The project sought to produce a range of tools for tutors which could be used to enable them to discover information resources and to embed these into their course modules from within a University Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
The VLE in use at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford is the Bodington system.
A key deliverable of the project was to produce tools that were designed with the ease of incorporation into other VLE environments in mind.
Access to high quality online information sources is essential for both students and tutors.
A key role for the tutor has always been to guide their students to resources that support their learning whether in traditional printed book form or in online format.
Students rely on their tutors to identify relevant resources, provide a context in which they can be understood and put a quality stamp on these resources.
However, it can often be time-consuming for the tutor to find quality-assured resources to recommend, and in some cases, suitable resources may be difficult to track down, (for example, multimedia materials).
Information resources are also often fragmented for example; a tutor seeking out materials in Social Policy may need to navigate a complex set of different Web resources.
Each of these will have a different search interface and may require the awareness of different search query languages.
Increasingly, when tutors find relevant resources to recommend to their students, they want to do this through a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
The VLE provides the ideal environment for bringing together links to supporting resources with other teaching materials such as lecture notes, online tests and discussion areas.
However, it is often difficult for the tutor to embed information resources into the VLE environment in a coherent and cohesive way as output formats and link structures may differ considerably from resource to resource.
Tutors also face problems with keeping their links up to date.
A tutor managing a number of modules may find it difficult to ensure that links to external sources remain current, and may struggle to find the time to check and update dead links regularly.
Online resources may also lack the required sign-posting which explains context and relevance for the student.
For example, a tutor might want to point students to a certain section of a Web site, which might be relevant for lectures in a specific teaching week.
It is widely recognised that these difficulties inhibit the potential take-up and use of online resources in teaching.
PORTOLE was conceived as a tool which would enable tutors to access the JISC Information Environment via the VLE in order to find and employ appropriate content in support of learning.
The intention was also to integrate access to JISC IE resources with local digital resources.
Key Resources The project initially identified a number of key resources which would be integrated into the tool: The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) The Library ROADS database.
ROADS is an Open Source tool which is used at Leeds University Library to host and manage a Web-based subject gateway Leeds Library Catalogue Oxford Libraries Catalogue The RDN provides access to over 50,000 quality-assured Internet resources across a wide range of subject areas.
All resources have been selected by subject specialists in partner institutions and carefully indexed.
Detailed resource descriptions are also provided.
The inclusion of the RDN in the project enabled us to provide access to quality-assured content which is being externally maintained.
The University of Leeds Library Catalogue provides access to bibliographic information about the 2.6 million-plus resources in print and electronic format held by the University of Leeds Library.
The inclusion of the Library Catalogue in the project enabled us to provide access to the wealth of resources held by the Library, including information about print and electronic journal holdings.
The University of Leeds Library ROADS database is used to provide access to subject-based listings of electronic subscriptions and external Web sites of particular relevance to University of Leeds staff and students.
Over 4000 resources are included in the database.
The inclusion of the ROADS database enabled us to provide access to information about subscription databases and links to other specialist resources.
All resources are quality-assured and maintained by University Library staff.
The Google search engine was also added to the list of key resources.
Google was included as it is a key resource used by a wide number of academic staff to locate resources on the Web.
Google uses a highly effective relevance ranking algorithm, although resource quality issues are still evident.
The intention was for tutors to be able to cross-search these resources and retrieve an integrated set of links which would then be selected for inclusion in the VLE.
A tutor would enter the VLE and use a search interface to cross-search across the selected databases.
An integrated, de-duplicated results set would be returned to the tutor, who would then be able to review and select suitable resources from those listed.
Selected resources would be downloaded to the VLE for display as a dynamic Web page within the VLE environment.
Custom annotations could then be added by the tutor to supplement or replace the resource descriptions provided from the RDN or other databases.
The metadata for each record would be maintained by the source database, so that link checking and maintenance would be performed externally on centrally or nationally supported resources and the tutor would not need to be concerned with this.
Finally, students would view the resources with their associated annotations.
Technical Infrastructure PORTOLE used the JAFER client developed by the University of Oxford under JISC DNER funding in order to provide a Java-based toolkit for building a Z39.50 client.
The Z39.50 search and retrieve protocol is one of the key components of the JISC Information Environment (formerly DNER) and acts as a protocol between middleware and the content providers.
JAFER The JAFER Toolkit [2] was developed under the JISC 5/99 programme.
It is a Java-based toolkit for building Z39.50 clients and servers.
The PORTOLE Project uses the client components of the toolkit.
The core of the JAFER client is a JavaBean called ZClient.
This exposes a fairly simple Java interface for searching a Z39.50 server.
The ZClient bean is passed a query in an XML structure, (the toolkit also includes helper functions for building the XML structure programmatically), and the results can then be retrieved as XML documents.
Internally the ZClient bean handles the intricacies of the Z39.50 connection.
It also includes various automated error-handling techniques, for example attempting multiple retries if network errors are encountered.
Records retrieved via Z39.50 are first serialised into an appropriate XML format, (for example MARC X for MARC records [3]), and if required can be converted to other formats (e.g.
Dublin Core) via XSLT.
The architecture allows a novice user to employ the toolkit fairly quickly but allows the more advanced user a large degree of control over the behaviour of the ZClient bean.
Bodington The Bodington [4] VLE software provides a mechanism for adding new resource types into the system.
A resource consists of the following components: A Template this is an HTML document which is used to render the resource.
In addition to HTML it contains various script instructions A Facility this is a Java class which allows extensions to the scripting language used in the Template.
These extensions allow the template to communicate with, and get data from, the Implementation An Implementation this is the Java class which does most of the work.
A new instance of this class is created for each new resource instance A new resource is registered with Bodington by adding it to the system tables stored in an SQL database (typically Microsoft SQL Server).
The data in these tables define a mapping whereby Java properties can be transferred to and from the SQL database i.e.
the SQL database acts as a persistent store for Java objects, in this case for Java objects representing Bodington resources.
PORTOLE PORTOLE consists of a Template, Facility and Implementation which use the JAFER Client to search external Z39.50 databases.
The basic architecture is shown in Figure 1.
Bodington Room (Directory) Figure 1: PORTOLE Architecture For a Bodington user who has the Edit access right, the PORTOLE ReadingList Implementation allows the searching of multiple databases via JAFER ZClient beans.
Project Results Figure 2: Screenshot of PORTOLE Search Interface The search interface can be used to search simultaneously across the Library Catalogues at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford, in addition with the RDN and Google.
It was not possible to include the Leeds University Library ROADS database during the project as this database required additional technical development which was outside of the immediate scope of the project.
Once a search has been performed, the results are then presented to the tutor (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Screenshot of PORTOLE search results The tutor can select items and then add annotations to provide context for the student.
When the tutor is happy with the list, they can then save it so that students can access a read-only version of the list.
The tutor can modify the list at a later date.
Internally the selected items are stored in an XML format in the underlying Bodington SQL database.
The XML structure stores data from the record, which is used for rendering the reading list to the user, the details of the source database from which the record originates, annotations added by the tutor, and the query used in the original search.
This query can be used when editing the list so that for a given item, the tutor can search for new, similar or related items by using or modifying the original query that located that item.
As the internal structures are XML, it was fairly straightforward to add the ability to import and export the reading list in an XML format.
At present this facility is primarily for transferring reading lists between different Bodington-based VLEs as the XML schema is a proprietary PORTOLE-defined schema, although the export user could transform the XML into any other suitable XML schema.
Indeed the XML is passed through a XSLT engine during the import and export, so other formats could be handled by configuring a suitable XSLT transform.
It transpired during the project that no standard XML schema for resource lists existed; one of the outcomes of the DiVLE Programme has been to motivate IMS to address this omission.
Once such a standard emerges it should be possible to support this by adding a suitable XSLT transform.
A number of key lessons have been learned from the project.
Focus groups were undertaken as part of the project, and the following key issues emerged: The PORTOLE system is unlikely to be of relevance to all courses and subject areas.
Some subjects tend to have a greater reliance on 'classic' texts than others; consequently, reading lists for these subjects tend to be static and not subject to change over time.
PORTOLE is most likely to be of value to those subjects which are developing and changing rapidly and where a large number of new resources are being produced either in paper or Web format.
We believe that there is a role for PORTOLE alongside other tools intended for the management of more 'static' reading lists Academic staff do not seem to value the resources provided by the RDN, and instead prefer to use search engines such as Google.
We hope that the improved visibility of the RDN through the PORTOLE Project may lead to increased recognition of the value of this service PORTOLE will only be of true value to users if we are able to expand the system to incorporate additional search targets.
Users have particularly flagged the need for the inclusion of journal articles.
Potential exists to take these requirements forward; however, additional thought would need to be given to the information architecture of the system.
Consideration would also need to be given to other projects currently underway at Leeds in particular plans for the implementation of a 'Library Portal'.
We need to establish where and how PORTOLE fits into these developments before taking forward any additional development in this area Future Developments A number of long-term issues exist in relation to further development of the system.
A number of suggestions for further development have already been raised, and whilst these were outside the scope of the original project, the project team believes there would be some value in investigating these further.
The ability to provide the Library with alerts when new items are added to resource lists.
This was requested by the Library staff who were involved in the project.
There are a number of alerting and reporting tools within Bodington which might be used for this purpose.
However, a fuller requirements analysis is required before this development can be taken forward.
The addition of further search targets has also been requested.
It is possible to add new Z39.50 targets quite easily and the Leeds Team will undertake a scoping exercise to establish a priority list.
The Leeds Team also intends to investigate the use of an OpenURL resolver to provide functionality for direct linking to journal articles.
The University of Leeds will be implementing an OpenURL resolver in summer 2004.
Once this is implemented, it will be necessary to review how metadata is being stored in PORTOLE in order to establish how best to link to the OpenURL resolver.
The project has also touched on the issue of relevance ranking.
Relevance ranking is a complex area, and very difficult to achieve, as different databases use different ranking algorithms.
Combining these is technically impossible without a substantial understanding of the algorithms used.
Many of our source databases eg library catalogues do not perform relevance ranking.
The project also aimed to explore the transferability to other VLE platforms of the model for resource list creation.
As both institutions are using the Bodington system, the project has not explored how the model could be used within other VLE platforms.
Bodington does not currently interoperate well with other VLEs.
Further JISC funding would be required to extend the model to other VLE systems and work in this area would be most likely to focus on the issue of metadata standards for resource lists.
Developments in this area would create significant added value from the project for the wider JISC community.
Conclusion The PORTOLE Project has been successful in producing a working system, and positive feedback has so far been received from the focus groups and from those staff involved in testing.
A full assessment of the success of the project requires a period of ongoing evaluation, and the project team aims to take this forward over the coming academic year.
The project has assisted in the development of working relationships between the key players; particularly between the VLE Teams at Leeds and Oxford.
This can only be beneficial for the ongoing partnership of the two institutions and for our shared commitment to develop Bodington as an open source VLE.
There will be an ongoing requirement for cross-divisional and cross-institutional collaboration in promoting and disseminating the system.
References PORTOLE Web site: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/portole/index.htm JAFER ToolKit Project -Development Web site http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/jafer/develop.html MARC21 XML Schema Web site http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/ Bodington Common http://www.fldu.leeds.ac.uk/bodingtoncommon.html Author Details Tracey Stanley Head of E-Strategy and Development Leeds University Library Email: t.s.stanley@leeds.ac.uk Web site: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/people/tss.htm Mina Sotiriou E-Strategy Support Assistant (and PORTOLE Project Officer) Leeds University Library Email: a.sotiriou@leeds.ac.uk Web site: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/people/ams.htm Matthew Dovey Technical Manager OeSC Oxford University Email : matthew.dovey@oucs.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://e-science.ox.ac.uk/oesc/ Return to top Article Title: "The Portole Project: Supporting e-learning" Author: Tracey Stanley, Mina Sotiriou and Matthew Dovey Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/portole/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Tiny TV: Streaming Video on the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Tiny TV: Streaming Video on the Web Buzz software javascript database archives copyright video graphics windows streaming quicktime e-business asf asx url standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter squints at the world through RealPlayer and MediaPlayer windows.
Before you will be able to play the resources listed in this article, you should be equipped with the latest versions of at least two pieces of software: the G2 RealPlayer, and the Microsoft Media Player.
Some of the resources listed will work with older versions of these applications, but if you have the latest versions, all of them will run properly.
Some clips have been encoded by the suppliers with the latest codecs precisely to encourage users to upgrade to these latest versions of streaming media players.
The G2 RealPlayer is free, as is the Microsoft Media Player.
The RealPlayer G2 is available from www.realplayer.com.
The Media Player (for ASX format files) is available at Microsoft's Earthstation 1 site at: www.earthstation1.simplenet.com.
The EarthTuner application, which comes with a useful list of sites (updated regularly), is also available from Earthstation 1. this can play both ASX and RAM bitstream formats.
The Media Player should be configured to open when you select a link to an asf or asx format file, and the realplayer should be configured to open when you select ram, rm or similar files.
The quality of the images available in Media Player or Real Player format is significantly different: Real Player images are better at lower bandwidth than those in Media Player format.
However the high speed bitstreams handled by Media Player produce a much more acceptable moving image.
Both allow you to stop and start the stream anywhere, and jump to another part of the stream (provided of course that it is a finite and pre-existing stream, such as a movie).
You can watch half of a film one night, and the second part on another occasion, without having to wade through the whole of the first half again.
In 'Compact' mode, this facility is not available with the Real Player: if you want to jump around the bitstream you have to run the Real Player in Normal Mode.
Ariadne readers with dialup access at the notional 56 kilobits per second should be able access everything except the two highest streaming speeds (100kbps and 250kbps), and those with 28kbps access can use the slowest links.
Readers with direct internet access via ISDN, cable modem or a T1 connection (or better) should be able to access everything if tried at the right time of day, and on the right day of the week.
Early Friday evening in the UK is recommended, or early Sunday morning.
Many of these sites are testing services, so not everything might be available when you look.
All the links were operational at the time of writing.
Users of any of these links also should be aware that standards of what is acceptable broadcasting varies round the world, and that Ariadne is not responsible for the content of these links.
However all the links in this article are to responsible broadcasting sites, as far as we can determine.
Users of the web might imagine that film and television companies are not about to start making digital versions of films available through this medium until (at least) bandwidth stops being a problem, quite apart from the copyright control issues involved.
This view is incorrect however, as will become apparent.
The technical difficulty of supplying watchable quality video on the web is much nearer solution than most users realise.
Bandwidth is a problem for high quality digital video, which is what people will pay significant amounts of money to receive.
However those with good connections to the internet can already find watchable streaming video, and much of it (so far) is free.
Television has never tried to sell itself on the basis that it is the highest technical quality visual medium: it has to do other things to prosper.
So problems of bandwidth alone are not insuperable.
Those who travel by Virgin Atlantic will be familiar with those tiny LCD colour television screens, about 3 inches by four, embedded in the rear of the seat in front.
The pixel count is not high, but as long as the picture is moving, it doesn't seem to matter too much.
Especially when the alternative is that you stare at nothing or else the tops of clouds for seven or eight hours.
Streaming video on the web ought to be better than that to get a big audience, but it doesn't have to be great quality to be watchable.
And we are now getting to the point where the quality is sometimes very good indeed.
I've split up this description of what is available first into geographic groups for standard TV news and general broadcasting.
The geographic categories are: Europe; North America; South America; Asia, and the Middle East.
The Middle East category covers (for the purposes of this article) both the familiar geographic area and the wider Arabic speaking World.
Then a listing by subject area: Drama; Archive Television; Other Educational Resources; Financial Services; Religious Broadcasting; Commercial Film; and Music.
Since I began to put this article together I've stumbled across more and more material, but have included only some of it because of constraints of time.
The range of what is available is worth exploring for yourself, since there is much treasure out there waiting to be discovered.
It was announced in November 1999 that Steven Spielberg is planning to produce movies specifically designed to be viewed on the web.
This is a new departure, since almost everything available so far was originally shot to be seen using a larger viewing format.
Maybe Pixar would be a more obvious candidate to have a shot at this, but, the very fact that Spielberg is interested in undertaking a project of this kind, is a sign of the way things are likely to go.
News Europe The BBC broadcasts its main evening news bulletin on the web, but not yet either of its principal terrestrial channels.
Also, News 24 and more surprisingly, BBC World (the satellite and cable equivalent of its long established radio 'World Service') both prime candidates for web broadcast, are not on the web.
The BBC has pioneered institutional presence on the web it had one of the first significant web services as far back as early 1994 (possibly even earlier I wasn't looking before).
ITN (Independent Television News), the BBC's competitor in the UK also makes a version of its news broadcasts available via streaming video.
Euronews provides a similarly high quality news service, but aims not to over-privilege any national point of view.
N-TV News (Germany) broadcasts at two levels of technical quality: 28 and 56 kilobits per second.
The higher speed stream is impressive.
As far as Spain is concerned, so far I haven't come across any web streamed TV channel emanating from Madrid or Barcelona, but there is a station in Galicia: Radio Galega TV.
A web stream: HRT TV 20K Video (Croatia), broadcasts news and films in Croatian, but actually emanates from an address in Hungary: but no Hungarian stations seem to be available.
News from the perspective of the Greek speaking world emanates from a station in Cyprus, and there seem to be at least four stations broadcasting from Cyprus via web streaming.
This is perhaps a little surprising, but they seem to be unreliable at the moment (why their addresses are not listed here).
Is there a pattern to the establishment of a web-streamed version of television programming?
Organizations with prestige and significant market position run streamed services to maintain their position within the broadcasting community, whereas a number of smaller TV companies are there because of sheer interest in the power of the technology, and/or because they have the time, and the technological skills to make it happen.
It isn't that difficult to make it happen, and also, given the current costs of storage, not that expensive an undertaking.
[Group 1] News North America As might be expected there is a large amount of streaming video emanating from the US.
Fox News supplies a New York based continuous broadcast (arriving at around 20 kilobits per second), which I first saw on the web sometime in 1996.
However you will now look in vain for the address of this stream on the Fox News site: they now want users to select chunks of newscast to make their own newscast.
In this way Fox News can gather information about user preferences, which they may use in the future to devise their programme structures.
Access to both formats for Fox News streaming newscasts are given in the references.
The video should appear in a separate player window.
CNN on the other hand provides an inline player for its news service, available via the CNN home page.
News broadcasting from the ABC and NBC networks does not seem to be available in streaming format, or at least not via their top level home pages.
MSNBC makes both canalised and segmented news broadcasts available from their home page at both 28 and 56 kilobits per second (and higher): very good technical quality.
Moving to what is available from local broadcasting stations, WCPO TV 9 (Cincinnati) is an example of canalized web broadcasting: the news broadcasts from the previous day, plus the sports, health and weather programming, are available as separate options on demand.
Incidentally, the home page of WCPO TV 9 also links to a number of webcams in the Cincinnati area.
San Antonio, Texas, has KENS TV, which makes available its Sunday News broadcast in streaming format.
It also maintains an archive of news broadcasts, accessible to users.
From Portland, Oregon, KGW TV8 supplies live video in a continuous stream.
A station in Canada (DEN Dowco Live video) broadcasts a mixture of talk radio, music and reportage.
This Canadian outfit isn't engaged in expensive broadcasting, but is successfully exploiting the medium, and the result is probably something like the kind of web television broadcasting we can expect in quantity in the future [Group 2] News South America TV Frecuncia Latina broadcasts from Peru what appears to be its standard programming.
News and entertainment appear to be the staple of the station, in Spanish.
As in the case of North American stations, European users have to negotiate the time difference of about six hours: it is possible to see daytime programme first at the time when the Internet starts to slow down for European users at approximately 2pm GMT.
This makes access a little jerky.
If you link to the station at around 9am GMT you will receive overnight programming, which seems to consist only of uninteresting short looping station videos.
Globo news video from Brazil broadcasts a continual stream of what again appears to be its standard programming.
The focus is on news and the language is Portuguese.TV Cancao Nova broadcasts a live video stream from Brazil in Portuguese.
The focus of the stations programming is religious, or at least it has been most times I've dropped in.
Though I once saw a cookery programme in progress.TV Nacional-Noticias broadcasts Chilean national news in Spanish on demand.
The service begins with a thirty second trailer which seems to belong to its service provider (www.openbox.com) rather than the station.
Venevision in Venezuela broadcasts only the audio track from its news programming (at around 16 kilobits per second), which means it is easily one of the most accessible television broadcasts on the web.
Other South American stations are described under the 'Music' heading.
[Group 3] News Asia In the Philippines Sarimanok News Network TV broadcasts a live stream of its regular programming.
The content is very North American in style and content, as might be expected.
Lots of lifestyle and consumer programming, as well as news.
Generally broadcasts in English but not exclusively.
Next, the Doordarshan video stream emanating from the Indian National Television Service.
The colours of the live video stream are strangely washed out all day, and match pretty exactly 16mm films which have been on the circuit for about 25 years.
The site maintains a large archive of interesting programming (not all of which has the same washed-out appearance), accessible through a javascript pull-down menu.
This may be confusing to users, since once you have made your selection, nothing seems to happen.
The trick is to pull down the menu again, and select the specific item which now appears there, rather than displayed as a list of links in the main page (which is what I was expecting, at any rate).
I haven't noticed any programming in English so far, but my peek at what is available was necessarily very brief.
Indian classical music is available from the archive section.Yomiuni News broadcasts on demand news clips in English, accompanied by a sequence of stills.
At least that is what is broadcast while most of Japan is asleep.
Which means that the station doesn't hog that much bandwidth (comes in at 19 kilobits per second).
The station also broadcasts a service in Japanese (both links in references below).
There is at least one other streaming service which I have found in Japan, but it seems to be unreliable at the moment, so I have left it out of the list.
[Group 4] News Middle East Tunisian TV is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the best television feeds on the web, in terms of technical quality.
Beginning with programme music by Vangelis, the fast on demand stream comes hammering in at around 48 kilobits per second, compared with the slowest, which struggle in at around 6 to 8 kilobits per second.
The result is a totally convincing moving image, good sound, and also excellent synchronisation.
One of the few services which looks like a television picture when expanded to fill the whole screen.
The 28.8 transmission is of course the one which should be selected by those with slower internet connections (i.e., dialup).
The news broadcasts are available in both Arabic and in French, but do not seem to be updated regularly.
There is also a live feed from the station which is also high quality (around 60 kilobits per second).
Like most Arab television services, prayers are broadcast several times a day, as well as news, drama, and 'lifestyle programming.'
It also broadcasts coverage of official events and engagements in the kind of depth common to middle east broadcasting.
For instance, if the President of Egypt opens an IT facility at a polytechnic, Egyptian television might broadcast 45 minutes of verité about the event, depending on what else is happening that day.
Tunisian TV seems to have the same kind of programming priorities.
Also broadcasts local popular music.
Bahrain TV is also available on the web, but the quality (when I looked) was pretty poor.
In fact the worst sound quality I have ever heard on the web.
It may be better by the time you follow the link; runs both inline and in a detached viewer (I found the latter worked better).
Iran has two television web streaming feeds currently: both from IRNA one on demand video stream delivers news in English (28 kilobits per second).
The other on demand video stream delivers what appears to be the local Islamic Republic News programming (both listed in the references).
[Group 5] Drama The accompanying text to this on demand film says that all copies of this film of Richard Burton's performance as Hamlet were withdrawn after only two days and ordered by Burton to be destroyed.
However his wife Sally Burton turned up a complete copy four years ago.
It was first made available again on the web via the AEN (the Alternative Entertainment Network).
The site says that: "Burton did not want the film to be re-released because the technical quality was less than ideal, and also because he was still playing on stage at that time and he did not want to be in competition with himself.
He wanted people to see him on stage and that performance was infinitely better than what could be captured on film.
With the technology we have now we have improved the quality and thus we have overcome Richard's first objection.
Secondly, and most obviously, he is no longer here, and thus as an historical record it is appropriate to release it.
This three hour presentation of Richard Burton's Hamlet on AENTV will mark the first broadcast of this filmed masterpiece anywhere in the world.
It has been restored and digitally mastered for superb audio and video.
Hamlet will be available on-demand indefinitely".
The site also includes a link to a short segment of an interview in which Burton talks about the film.
[Group6] Archive Television A number of famous pieces of 1950s and 1960s television are available in streaming video format.
The launch of Apollo 11 (first Apollo flight to land on the moon) is available from Microsoft's Earthstation 1.
Earthstation 1 makes available a vast collection of mainly audio clips in addition to streaming video and still graphics.
Also available from this site is streaming video of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon though you have to wait for about ten minutes before the main part of the clip: fast Forward.
Some of John F. Kennedy's famous television broadcasts are available from the same source, including his famous broadcast on civil rights.
The famous clip of Marilyn Monroe wishing JFK a happy birthday is available (at the time of writing the dress she wore on the occasion was auctioned for a very large sum of money), as well as an equally famous clip of Lee Harvey Oswald being interviewed in New Orleans a few months before JFK's assassination in Dallas, Texas.
Several hours of the television coverage of the JFK assassination and its aftermath are also available from the Earthstation site.
One site in particular which makes available a large archive of TV shows from the fifties is AEN (the Alternative Entertainment Network).
The name of the archive is the Golden Years of Television.
All of the hour long selections are US versions.
A couple of episodes of the sixties series Bonanza are available from westerns.com.
These now look wooden in construction and dialogue.
They probably did at the time, but I was too young to notice, or actually preferred programmes like that.
Lots of them were made and the scripting schedule must have been terrifying.
The commercials have been excised from these versions, so they run for 50 rather than 60 minutes.
Those who recall the phrase "The story you are about to see is true: the names have been changed to protect the innocent" will probably recall the American detective series Dragnet, which aired in the mid to late 1950s, and throughout most of the 1960s too.
An episode is available from AEN, with the original commercials intact.
This episode is worth watching for the sponsor's commercials alone ('Chesterfield' cigarettes), since with the benefit of the passage of time, these have come to look absolutely preposterous.
[Group 7] Educational Resources C-SPAN is a US educational site of very high quality and extensive resources.
It runs two main channels, available throught the pages of the web site: 'C-SPAN' and 'C-SPAN online resource for public affairs' (US).
Two intermittently used other channels are available from the site, and it includes an extensive archive of clips.
The site also includes a substantial collection of video materials of interest to those interested in the work of Parliament and political parties in the UK.
At the time of writing William Hague's Conservative Party Conference speech in Blackpool on October 17 1999 was available here in full, as was Tony Blair's Labour Party Conference speech in Bournemouth, 28th Sept. 1999.
Also available are the White House Daily Briefings.
All of these are currently accessible via the links in the references to this article, though some of them are likely to be removed after a couple of months.
The activities of the Italian Parliament are publicly available on the web through the Senato Della Repubblica Live Home page a which has a realplayer window (Videoparlamento).
There is also a substantial archive available.
In case nothing is broadcasting when you visit, one clip from the archive is linked to directly from this page (session of the 10th September 1999) Court TV.
Highly useful web stream for those interested in the actual workings of a courtroom.
Like many North American television stations, off-peak hours are often given over to Christian religious broadcasting.
Court TV broadcasts during US daylight hours.
[Group 8] Financial Services Bloomberg TV provides Stock Market and Financial News very much in the format of general terrestrial and cable news programming.
Two different video streams, delivering different programming.
Available both in Microsoft ASX and RealPlayer streaming formats.
World Business Review is made available by the Alternative Entertainment Network, and it is a half-hour programme introduced by Caspar Weinberger.
A number of editions deal with Internet Business issues and e-commerce, and it is pretty much a showcase for specific products.
One of the editions available features Vincent Cerf (sometimes described as the father of the Internet) and Mark Collet (of Hitachi) talking about e-commerce in the context of Hitachi software, plus other items.
Users are directed for further details to the World Business Review web site.
Vincent Cerf thinks that shortly it will be possible to dump 2 hour movies through cable modems faster than real time, at several megabits per second.
And he is in a pretty good position to know.
[Group 9] Religious Broadcasting The Jesus Film Project Online.
A two hour twenty minute on demand feature film of the life of Jesus, based on the Gospel of Luke.
The film, made originally in English, is available in fifty different subtitled versions, including Uzbek, Western Farsi, Sindhi, Cebuano, Telegu, Hakka, Tagalog, Marathi and Shanghainese.
It is possible to see the end of the film separately.
Do they have 50 versions of the ram file stacked up on a server, I wonder, or is the soundtrack added on the fly from a database?
The file comes in at 80 kilobits per second.
Given that we know the necessary basic parameters, it took just a few seconds to work out that one copy of the film fills 84 megabytes of space on someone's hard disk.
So since two 9 gigabyte disks would accommodate the whole lot with no problem, the project might well have fifty versions stacked up on a dedicated server.
More typical religious broadcasting is represented by COA Christian Broadcasters TV39 Video, based in the US.
Vatican News: direct from the Vatican.
Unfortunately I've yet to see anything on this yet apart from a 'coat of many colours' test card.
Perhaps fronting the service with the Papal coat of arms would have been a better choice if the station's broadcasting is generally irregular.
[Group 10] Commercial Film Several full length films are available on the web.
Many seem to be amazingly old, cheap and relatively unwanted items which allow companies to test the technology and establish themselves in niche markets at relatively little cost: often the sort of thing that fills up the ovenight schedules on 24 hour television channels.
Expect strange celluloid based glitches and variable speed soundtracks.
There are however a number of interesting films available.
For instance, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Strike are both available from xoom.com's Classic Movies pages.
H.G.
Well's famous film of the 1930s, Things to Come is also available from xoom.com.
Others of historical interest are:Way Down East (1920, starring Lillian Gish; Directed by D.W. Griffith).
Thunder In The City (1937, Drama starring Edward G. Robinson).
And: Of Human Bondage (1934, Drama starring Leslie Howard) These films require a basic registration with xoom.com, in order that the company can track usage of the site, but there is no fee required to view these films.
The Halas and Bachelor animated classic Gulliver's Travels is available on the web, and also a less well-known version of Aladdin.
These are available from Netmoviemania.
Several other high quality video streams are available from the same source, including: The Third Man with Orson Welles; Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks; Zulu with Stanley Baker and Michael Caine (note the variable speed during the titles; it gets better afterwards); John Huston's Beat The Devil with Humphrey Bogart; plus the classic 1939 version of The Thirty Nine Steps with Robert Donat; and Fire Over England; (Francis Drake and the Armada) with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
Liliana Cavani's controversial The Night Porter streams from the same source.
westerns.com has a large collection of variable quality full length movies from the thirties and forties, freely available for viewing on the web.
These include titles such as: Old Louisiana (the story of the Louisiana purchase), starring a completely unrecognisable and dark-haired Rita Hayworth (in 1937, before she met Orson Welles), 56 mins.
The quality of the start and finish of the film is very poor.
Also: Buster Crabbe and Richard Arlen star in Wildcat (1942), 73minutes, and West of the Divide (John Wayne) an agonisingly bad film (unless it improved ten minutes after it started) from 1934, 53mins.
Among sites which maintain lists of films and excerpts which are available in streaming format (ASX, RAM and Quicktime) are: www.hollywood.com; Earthstation 1; www.aentv.com; www.videoseeker.com; as well as windowsmedia.msn.com.
In the references to this article can be found links to trailers for Gone With the Wind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Blair Witch Project, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and Man on the Moon.
Explore.
[Group 11] Music Most of the music specific streams I have seen so far are youth oriented, broadcasting a mix of modern dance music (from ambient through chill-out, jungle, trip-hop, trance: all that stuff, etc., to plain drums and bass).
Three linked on this page originate in Dublin, Ireland.
Two come from the same outfit, at different speeds: 44k.com.
Graphically one of the most interesting video streams.
Sometimes they broadcast film of people jumping around in clubs, sometimes highly ritualised animated quasi-abstract displays.
Sometimes the two are cut together.
The programming for each video stream is not the same, so if you don't like what you are getting from one, you can switch to the other (if you can cope with both stream speeds, that is).The third is from www.isis.ie and generally seems to consist of a variety of shots of a bloke (or blokes) shuffling 12 inch vinyl disks around a double turntable deck.
A similar station broadcasts from Mexico: station tu1/2.
When Mexico is asleep they seem to play a Mexican counterfeit of US AOR, strung out somewhere between Aerosmith and Fleetwood Mac.
Heard an interesting version of 'Whisky in the Jar', which kind of missed the point.
I also found two streaming feeds from the same outfit in Brazil: one shows Frutos da Terra, an on demand stream of entertainment programming; the other is an on demand stream of the music programme: Noites Goianas O Show.
Sound not good when I've looked, but I may just have been unlucky.
I've already mentioned Doordarshan (in the 'Asia' section), which has an archive of performances of Indian classical music available (50 minute programmes).
[Group 12] When I began researching the article I had no idea so much was out there already; but things are moving fast: by the time you read this the map is likely to be out of date.
As a whole the article should remain a useful start to exploring streaming resources on the Web for a year or so.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, and an intimation of what will be available over the next few years.
References Group 1: Europe.
BBC News at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/video/news169.ram.
If the link doesn't work directly, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/ and select the video option at the top of the page.
Two feeds for UK Independent Television News (ITN): http://www.itn.co.uk/video_on_demand/world.ram basic version.
Sectioned version at:http://www.itn.co.uk/video_on_demand/worldg2.ram N-TV News (Live), Germany:http://video.via.t-online.de/ntv/modem.ram an edition for modem access .
Higher quality (ISDN) relay at: http://video.via.t-online.de/ntv/isdn.ram Radio Galega TV Video (Galicia): http://www.crtvg.es/reals/gal_tv.ram.
Spanish TV station.
The home page of the station is at: http://www.crtvg.es/ Euronews: http://www.euronews.net/en/news/news.htm.
Select the video option on this page for the latest news available from the site.
HRT TV 20K Video (Croatia): http://www.hrt.hr/streams/htv1.ram shows general programming and movies.Home page at: http://www.hrt.hr/ Group 2: North America.
CNN News on the Web: http://www.cnn.com/videoselect/.
Home page at: http://www.cnn.com/ Fox News Channel: http://www.foxnews.com/newsnow/video/fnc20.rmm 28.8 Video Stream.
Home page at http://www.foxnews.com/.
MSNBC at: http://www.msnbc.com/m/v/video_news.asp.
General broadcasting.
WCPO TV 9 Noon News (Cincinnati): http://www.cincinow.com/mmgallery/ram/noon.ram WCPO TV 9 5pm News:http://www.cincinow.com/mmgallery/ram/5pm.ram WCPO TV 9 530pm News: http://www.cincinow.com/mmgallery/ram/530pm.ram WCPO TV 9 6pm News: http://www.cincinow.com/mmgallery/ram/6pm.ram WCPO TV 9 11pm News: http://www.cincinow.com/mmgallery/ram/11pm.ram WCPO TV 9 HealthWatchhttp://www.cincinow.com/mmgallery/ram/healthwatch.ram: WCPO TV 9 Sports:http://www.cincinow.com/mmgallery/ram/sports.ram WCPO TV 9 Weatherhttp://www.cincinow.com/mmgallery/ram/weather.ram Home page of WCPO is athttp://www.cincinow.com/.
Skycam also available on this page.
Other Cincinnati web cams at: http://prifarm1.perceptualrobotics.com/pri/icam?func=getimage&name=atp&pan=-80.0&tilt=-10.0&zoom=1.0&scale=0.65&quality=45&brightness=0 (can be directed by clicking part of the picture, or by selecting part of a panorama) KENS TV Sunday News: http://www.broadcast.com/television/kens/archive/kens530sun.ram, Texas Archive of KENS news video reports: http://www.broadcast.com/television/kens/archive.stm KGW TV8, (Portland Oregon) live video:http://www.kgw.com/kgwlive.rpm Canadian broadcast from DEN Dowco Live video: http://www.dowco.net/denvideo.ram.
Home page at: http://www.denradio.com/index.shtml Group 3: South America.
Venevision, Venezuela (audio track only)http://www.venevision.com.ve/rafiles/resumen.ram Peru has: http://www.frecuencialatina.com.pe/video/reel.ram from TV Frecuncia Latina home page at: http://www.frecuencialatina.com.pe/ http://www.redeglobo.com.br/globonews/videos/aovivo.ram Globo news video, Brazil http://www.fastnet.com.br/realaudio/tvcn.ram TV CANCAO NOVA Live (Brazil)home page at:http://www.cancaonova.org.br Chilean TV at: http://www.openbox.com/audio/tvchile.ramTV Nacional-Noticias News Video home page at: http://www.openbox.com/ Group 4: Asia.
Philippines: Sarimanok News Network TV.
http://www.abs-cbn.com/realmedia/snn/snn.ram.
Home page at:http://www.abs-cbn.com/snn/ Doordarshan video stream (India): http://www.ddindia.net/meta/live.rpm.
from the Indian National Television Service, home page at:http://ddindia.net/.
Best seen on page at:http://ddindia.net/live.html Also maintains a large archive of broadcast materials in streaming format.http://www.ddindia.net/cgi-bin/archive.pl RCC Hiroshima (live): mostly a test card and a radar map of the archipelago.
http://www.rcc.net/live/live.ram.
Yomiuni News broadcasts news clips in English: http://www5.yomiuri.co.jp/stream/metafile/english.ram Group 5: Middle East.
Tunisia TV news: http://tunisiatv.com/ram/20h56.ram at 56kbps (very good technical quality) in Arabic; and at 28.8 (Arabic); http://tunisiatv.com/ram/20h28.ram In French at:http://tunisiatv.com/ram/23h56.ram and slower at: http://tunisiatv.com/ram/23h28.ram.
Both these news programmes seem to be irregularly updated streams.
The station broadcasts live at http://tunisiatv.com/ram/direct.ram.
Bahrain TVhttp://moci.arabian.net/tv.ram CREDITS: ALAYAM Newspaper , Developed By: Arabian Network , Broadcast By: Bahrain TV.
Iran has two channels available on the web at the moment: http://www.irna.com/tv/radiotv/23.ram IRNA Video Stream (news in English): http://www.irna.com/tv/radiotv/2230.ram.
Islamic Republic News Video Stream (I'm guessing in Farsi) Home page at: http://www.irna.com Group 6: Drama.
Richard Burton Playing Hamlet: http://www.aentv.com/home/hamlet/mainstage_body1.htm in the film directed by Sir John Gielgud (the whole film in three parts).
From the Alternative Entertainment Network (AEN).
Richard Burton in a short interview about the play.
Two bitstream speeds available: http://www.cummingsvideo.com/test/burton56k.ram and http://www.cummingsvideo.com/test/burton28k.ram Group 7: Archive Television.
Apollo 11: countdown to lift-off and the ascent to orbit.http://earthstation1.simplenet.com/Apollo11/Apollo11Liftoff.ram Prelude to the the Apollo 11 moonwalk by Neil Armstrong, 21st July 1969:http://earthstation1.simplenet.com/Apollo11/Apollo11MoonWalk.ram JFK's famous television broadcast on civil rights in the USA: http://earthstation1.simplenet.com/kennedy/JFK630611CivilRightsSpeech.ram Marilyn Monroe sings 'Happy Birthday' to JFK: http://earthstation1.simplenet.com/kennedy/MarilynMonroe's'HappyBirthday'ToJFK1962.ram Lee Harvey Oswald explaining himself to a reporter in New Orleans: http://earthstation1.simplenet.com/kennedy/LeeHarveyOswaldNewOrleans6308.ram Out-takes from JFK's Senate Race political broadcasts (short):http://earthstation1.simplenet.com/kennedy/JFKSenateRaceTVOuttakes1952.ram The recorded TV coverage of the Dallas assassination (several hours available): http://earthstation1.simplenet.com/kennedy/JFKTVCoverage631122a.ram Golden Years of (US) television shows http://www.aentv.com//home/golden/ (each one hour long).
Episode of 'Bonanza' http://www.westerns.com/asx/bonanza.asx 'The Fear Merchant': (Lorne Green, Michael Landon, Dan Blocker) from westerns.com, 50 minutes.
Episode of 'Dragnet' http://www.aentv.com/home/golden/dragnet.htm (1950s) 60 mins.
From the Alternative Entertainment Network.
Group 8: Other Educational Resources: C-SPAN online resource for public affairs (US): http://www.c-span.org/watch/cspan.htm and: http://www.c-span.org/watch/cspan2.htm.
Two other channels are available from: http://www.c-span.org/watch/, including an archive of clips.
Including a substantial collection of video materials of interest to those in the UK http://www.c-span.org/guide/international/bhoc/archive.htm William Hague's Conservative Party Conference speech in Blackpool on October 17 1999 is here in full (at the time of writing), as is Tony Blair's Labour Party Conference speech in Bournemouth 28th Sept. 1999.
Also available White House Daily Briefings.http://www.c-span.org/guide/executive/briefings.htm Senato Della Repubblica Live Home page at: http://www.radioradicale.it/video/camera/camera.rpm; plus http://www.radioradicale.it/video/camera.html, which has a realplayer window showing the same channel (Videoparlamento).
There is also a substantial archive available.
In case nothing is broadcasting when you visit, here is one clip from the archive (10th September 1999): http://audio-5.radioradicale.it/ramgen/s1.1/uni_marcucci_0_0910113957.rm?start="0:00"&end="4:54" Court TV: http://playlist.broadcast.com/makeram.asp?ID=5952.
(Also features Christian programming at US offpeak hours) Group 9: Financial Services.
Bloomberg Television: fast realvideo stream:http://www.bloomberg.com/streams/video/financial56.ram or slower: http://www.bloomberg.com/streams/video/financial28.ram.
Fast MediaPlayer asx format at: http://www.bloomberg.com/streams/video/financial56.asx or slower at: http://www.bloomberg.com/streams/video/financial28.asx World Business Review: http://www.aentv.com/home/business/wbrshows.htm hosted by Caspar Weinberger (via Alternative Entertainment Network).
One show had e-business as its subject: http://www.aentv.com/wbrvid/show546.ram; another on creating the optical internet: http://www.aentv.com/wbrvid/show533.ram (half-hour shows).
Group 10: Religious Broadcasting.
: Jesus Film Project Online: http://www.jesusfilm.org/realvideo/rv/languages/english.ram Home page at: http://www.jesusfilm.org/realvideo/ with links to versions in fifty different languages.
Based on the Gospel of Luke.
2 hours long.
COA Christian Broadcasters TV39 Video: http://www.coacb.org/video/coacb.ram.
COA Christian Broadcasters TV39 Video home page: http://www.coacb.org/video/ Vatican News, at: http://www.vatican.va/news_services/television/multimedia/ctv56.ram and for slower connections: http://www.vatican.va/news_services/television/multimedia/ctv28.ram Group 11: Commercial Film.
A good place to start looking for currently available streaming video is the Microsoft Network (MSN) pages at: http://windowsmedia.msn.com/ Another useful resource for finding video streams is: http://www.hollywood.com/multimedia/index.fhtml http://xoom.com/cobrand/classicmovies/classicmovies 'Classic Movies' page (have to register, but the service is free).
Types of film available from xoom include: a drama selection: http://xoom.com/cobrand/classicmovies/classic/drama_p1, Including Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' (95 mins) Science fiction: http://xoom.com/cobrand/classicmovies/classic/sci_fi_p1, including the whole of H.G.
Wells 'Things to Come' (100 minutes).
Netmoviemania is another good place to start looking for streaming video at: http://www.kkrs.net/netmoviemaniahome/netmoviemaniahome.html Films available include: Halas and Bachelor's animated 'Gulliver's Travels' (1939), at 3 different transmission speeds: http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/gullivers_travels_100.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/gullivers_travels_56.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/gullivers_travels_250.asf Animated version of 'Aladdin', at 3 different transmission speeds (top speed is 250 kilobits per second):http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/aladdin_56.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/aladdin_100.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/aladdin_250.asf 'The Third Man', with Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, 4 transmission speeds (top speed 250 kilobits per second):http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/third_man_28.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/third_man_56.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/third_man_100.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/third_man_250.asf Marlon Brando's 'One Eyed Jacks', 3 different transmission speeds: http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/one_eyed_28.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/one_eyed_56.asf; http://video1.lmci.net/kanamedia/webevents/freemovies/one_eyed_100.asf 'Zulu', at 3 different transmission speeds: http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia3/webevents/freemovies/zulu_56.asf; http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia3/webevents/freemovies/zulu_100.asf; http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia3/webevents/freemovies/zulu_250.asf John Huston's 'Beat the Devil' (Humphrey Bogart), 2 transmission speeds: http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/beat_the_devil_56.asf; http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/beat_the_devil_100.asf The classic version of 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1939): http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/39_steps_56.asf; http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/39_steps_100.asf 'Fire Over England' (1937), with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, 3 transmission speeds: http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/fire_over_england_56.asf; http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/fire_over_england_100.asf; http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/fire_over_england_250.asf Liliana Cavani's 'The Night Porter' (US 'R' rated).
3 transmission speeds: http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/night_porter_56.asf; http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/night_porter_100.asf; http://video1.lmki.net/kanamedia2/webevents/freemovies/night_porter_250.asf 'West of the Divide': http://www.westerns.com/asx/west_of_divide.asx (John Wayne).
1934, 53mins.Full list of films available at: http://www.westerns.com/movies/graphiclist.htm Buster Crabbe and Richard Arlen in 'Wildcat': http://www.westerns.com/asx/wildcat.asx (1942), 73minutes (B Picture).
See also 'Old Louisiana' (the story of the Louisiana purchase) http://www.westerns.com/asx/inoldlouisiana.asx, starring Rita Hayworth (in 1937, before she met Orson Welles).
the technical quality of the film is very poor, and it looks like a rescue job.
List of Movie clips at: http://www.videoseeker.com/movies/movielounge.html available in streaming format from http://www.videoseeker.com/.
Archive clips available at: http://www.videoseeker.com/television/access_archive.html.
Behind the scenes Blair Witch Project clip (128kbps!)
at http://www.videoseeker.com/play.cgi?30100108:wm:LAN 56k version at: http://www.videoseeker.com/play.cgi?30100108:rv5:56.
Slower speed clips available from the archive.
Also try: http://www.videoseeker.com/vlist/film.html "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" Trailer: http://www.videoseeker.com/play.cgi?80100077:rv5:56 Trailer for "Man on the Moon" (Jim Carrey): http://www.videoseeker.com/play.cgi?80100216:rv5:LAN Trailer for "Gone With the Wind" http://www.videoseeker.com/play.cgi?120100145:rv5:56.
Trailer for "2001: A Space Odyssey": http://www.videoseeker.com/play.cgi?120100010:rv5:56.
Available at other speeds, including 128kbps: http://www.videoseeker.com/play.cgi?120100010:rv5:LAN.
Also available in a format suitable for the Windows Media Player (not listed here).
Group 12: http://www.44k.com/tv/live56.ram Dance music video (streaming not just a clip), coming out of Dublin, Ireland.
A stream for slower connections (28.8) is at: http://www.44k.com/tv/live28.ram.Home page of 44k at:http://www.44k.com/ Also coming from Dublin is XFM Music Video: basically at: http://www.isis.ie/xfm/chill.ram you are watching the DJ at the decks.
http://tumedio.mty.itesm.mx/cgi-cib/nph-live Music video stream from Mexico: Station tu1/2.
Home page at: http://www-cib.mty.itesm.mx/be/tumedio/homedoc.html http://200.241.228.110/tv.ram Frutos da Terra (Brazil): Entertainment programming.
Video delivered on demand.
http://www2.opopular.com.br/tv/index.htm (TV Anhanguera) http://200.241.228.110/noitego.ram Noites Goianas 2 (Brazil).
This is a video stream on demand of a music show (Noites Goianas O Show).
Sound not very good.http://www2.opopular.com.br/tv/index.htm (TV Anhanguera) Author Details Philip Hunter Information Officer UKOLN University of Bath Bath, UK Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Article Title: "Tiny TV" Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 15-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/tiny-tv/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Developing Web-based Instruction Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Developing Web-based Instruction Buzz software framework usability e-learning research Citation BibTex RIS Lyn Parker finds this compilation a useful overview of the issues involved in developing e-learning and a valuable addition to the literature.
Developing Web-based instruction or online information tutorials is a key interest within Higher Education libraries at present as librarians struggle to cope with increasing student numbers, evolving technology, and higher expectations of students that their materials will be delivered electronically.
Therefore, it would be expected that this book would appeal not just to information students but also to practising librarians developing resources in this area.
Although the title and the content relate specifically to 'Web-based instruction' with few references to Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), the principles can be equally applied to designing materials for them.
American Bias Although published in the UK by Facet in 2003, the book has also been released in the States, as part of the Neal-Schuman New Library Series.
The editor, Elizabeth Dupuis, created TILT [1], the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial of the University of Texas-Austin, and all of the contributors are based in American universities.
Not surprising then that there is an American bias among the case studies, and all the references to information literacy standards and frameworks are to those written by the American College Research Libraries Task Force [2], rather than to SCONUL's Seven Pillars of Wisdom [3].
Structure The layout of the book follows a logical sequence with three sections: Planning and management; Evaluation and assessment; and Design and development.
The editor provides a general overview of the book and introduces each section, pulling together the threads between the 14 chapters so that they link together in a meaningful way.
Any potential repetition between some of the chapters, such as Pedagogy and Andragogy, and Goals and Objectives of instructional design has been kept to a minimum.
The first section covers generic project management issues and, consequently, suffers from being too general with few case studies.
Potentially the most useful section for those new to project management guidelines on writing a project proposal is tucked away in an appendix rather than within the body of the book.
A key concern for any developer of online tutorials is to evaluate their impact on the learner, in terms of educational goals, assessment and usability.
The most useful chapters, therefore, are by Dewald, Veldof and Gibson.
The chapter by Dewald on Pedagogy and Andragogy outlines the various learning theories and their application within e-learning.
In the chapter on Usability, Veldof focuses on designing an interface which does not get in the way of the learner, whilst Gibson concentrates on developing an instructional plan in Goals and Objectives.
The chapter by Smith on Interactivity is also useful, offering ideas on how to incorporate interactive components into various learning experiences.
Some of the chapters may date more quickly than others, most notably Macklin's insight into Educational Technology and Glenn's exploration of Putting Content Online.
However, both concentrate on concepts rather than particular software and give useful examples to illustrate their points.
Conclusion Overall, the book is a valuable addition to any librarian working in this area.
However, more specific library case studies to break up the theory would have been helpful.
References TILT http://tilt.lib.utsystem.edu/ ACRL Information Literacy Task Force http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/informationliteracycompetency.htm SCONUL Advisory Committee on Information Literacy http://www.sconul.ac.uk/activities/inf_lit/ Author Details Lyn Parker Academic Services Development Librarian University of Sheffield Email: l.a.parker@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/ Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Developing Web-based Instruction" Author: Lyn Parker Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/parker-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Freedom of Information in University College Dublin 2001-2004 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Freedom of Information in University College Dublin 2001-2004 Buzz data preservation foi foia standards Citation BibTex RIS Rena Lohan outlines how access rights conferred by FOI legislation have affected administrative operations in University College Dublin.
University College Dublin is the largest single university institution in Ireland, with a student population of approximately 22,000.
The Irish Freedom of Information Acts 1997 and 2003 [1], like all similar legislation worldwide, empower individuals to examine, appraise, and analyse government and public sector accountability and transparency.
Applying initially only to departments and offices of central government from 21 April 1998, the legislation was gradually extended over the following years to encompass a range of public sector organisations, designated 'public bodies', with Irish third level educational institutions [2] becoming prescribed public bodies on 21 October 2001.
The rights conferred by the Acts are a right for an individual to access information in the records of public bodies, and in particular to access his or her own personal records; to have his or her own personal information amended where it is found to be incorrect, inaccurate, or misleading; and to receive reasons for decisions made by a public body that have materially affected him or her.
These rights, with certain exceptions, apply to records created after 21 April 1998 in the case of non-personal records, and to all records, irrespective of when created, in the case of personal records.
The Acts impose strict time limits for responding to requests, which must be in writing and must state explicitly that the information is being sought under FOI.
There are two mandatory publications under the legislation that must be prepared by a public body: one outlining the structure, functions and records held, the other describing the policies and procedures that inform all decision-making.
The Acts provide a mechanism whereby a public body must review a decision on a request for access to information in instances where access is refused or part-refused and the requester professes to be dissatisfied with this outcome, and further provide for ultimate external appeal to the statutorily independent Information Commissioner where the outcome of internal review is also deemed to be unsatisfactory by the requester.
Certain fees have been determined.
The administration and processing of FOI requests within the University is a function of central administration, under the management of a designated Freedom of Information Unit, with the responsibility for the decision-making on access requests and the internal review process delegated to a network of academic and administrative staff, usually to heads of department and heads of support units for the initial decision on access requests and to Deans of Faculty and University Officers for the internal review [3].
Figure 1: FOI Requests Received Jan 2001 Nov 2004 Figure 2: Request Outcomes To date, the University has processed 362 FOI requests, 35 of which were internally reviewed and 12 of which were appealed to the Information Commissioner (see pie-charts for statistical breakdown by category of request, request outcome, and category of requester) [4].
Figure 3: Category of Requester The impact of facilitating and processing these requests is described below under the three main rights conferred by the legislation: the general right of access to information in records; the right to access one's own personal records; and the right to obtain reasons for decisions that have materially affected one.
It will also consider how these rights have affected records management practices in the University.
General Right of Access to Information in Records Fifty-four per cent of requests received to date were for non-personal data, the media being by far the greatest user of FOI in the months following implementation, accounting for 49 of the 65 requests received between 21 October and 31 December 2001.
These requests were broad-ranging 'trawls' for information as a precursor to making more focused requests, and included requests for access to the records of almost all University governance and management authorities and committees.
The difficulties encountered were the extent of the records to be retrieved and the time expended in blocking out portions of the records where legal exemptions under FOI were invoked, particularly in relation to the personal information of individuals.
Where these difficulties existed and where it would therefore have been necessary to impose a sizeable search and retrieval and copying fee, it was sometimes possible to assist the requester in narrowing the scope of the request, to reduce the date span of material sought, and in some cases to release information outside the scope of FOI provisions.
In order for this to be acceptable to all concerned, it was important to establish a constructive and positive dialogue between the FOI Unit and members of the media.
As the provision of access to such records sought yielded nothing in the way of headline material, the 'trawling' exercises declined considerably in the following years and are now practically non-existent.
In some respects such trawls for information have been pre-empted through the routine publication of the outcomes of all broad-ranging University deliberations on the University Web site, thus obviating the necessity for the media and others to go through the FOI process for non-personal information.
The general availability of such material has contributed to the formulation of more focused FOI requests and media requests now tend to be more precise and to relate to specific people, processes and events.
The media also seeks to access information in the records of public bodies where the public body may not necessarily be the primary or only record holder, but where the original record holder does not come under the terms of the legislation or where the original record holder is prohibited from releasing it.
The annual request for information on the secondary schools from which students enter the University, and the attendant compilation of so-called 'league tables' of schools' performance, with the inevitable comparison between fee-paying and non-fee paying schools, is a case in point.
Until the first such request, received in November 2001, information of this nature from central government sources had not yet been put into the public domain, and the Department of Education and Science had consistently refused to make public aggregated data concerning the examination success rates of students across the various second level schools, arguing that to make such information available on the relative performance of schools would permit the development of league tables.
Indeed, the Minister for Education and Science is prohibited by law from releasing information that may lead to the compilation of league tables.
As a way of circumventing this, the media now seeks the data from the universities under FOI.
As this information is transmitted to the universities and as none of the legal exemptions provided for under FOI can be invoked to deny access, the information is released.
Non-media requests tend to come from those interested in governance and management issues.
The motivation for such requests is not always clear, but it is suspected that such information is often requested by individuals who have made a request for access to personal records and wish to augment information already received, for example, on the decision-making process with respect to promotion, etc.
Despite the publication of University procedures, practices and functions, whether in print, on the Web site or through the FOI manuals, there is always the desire to see and interpret information in what is perceived as the 'official' record.
Right of Access to Personal Information in Records There were very few general access requests from individuals for all personal information on them held by the University, the vast majority being specific and usually related to a selection process in which they participated, such as non-standard entry to a course, or assessment for a position or for promotion.
This may be because of a process of administrative access to information introduced largely in anticipation of requests for access to personal information.
Before FOI was implemented, there was a perception that the University would be inundated with requests from staff and students.
Advice received from jurisdictions subject to FOI for many years alerted the University to the fact that a substantial number of requests came from staff and that 'administrative' or 'routine' access presented a good method of dealing with such an anticipated category of request.
Shortly before implementation, it was therefore decided that staff would be provided with access to their own personnel records without the necessity to avail themselves of their FOI rights.
Members of staff use this facility, but it is difficult to be certain to what extent the provision of access in this way has deflected FOI requests.
However, one must be careful when providing administrative access to an individual member of staff in a situation where, for instance, there is an industrial relations issue, as it may be necessary to restrict access by invoking one of the exemptions provided for in the legislation, such as that intended to protect records subject to legal professional privilege.
Although the University currently makes every effort to provide administrative access to personnel records to staff, it reserves the right in particular instances to ask staff to use FOI as a means of gaining access to records.
It was anticipated that students would wish to access their examination scripts under FOI, and, similar to the situation with staff, a decision was also made to allow students 'sight only' access to their examination scripts following the publication of results.
Within the University, it is now a requirement that students wishing to lodge an appeal against the result of their examinations gain access to the script in this way in advance of placing the appeal.
If, however, they wish to receive a copy, they must use the FOI provisions.
This process has been successful, with only five requests for scripts under FOI received since October 2001.
Records created in the course of selection processes, while always the subject of particular attention, are now created and maintained with a view to the receipt of requests from individuals for access to their own personal selection records and to the records of the decision-making process.
The need to record the selection process as fully as possible is now an agenda item at all pre-selection panel meetings, and selectors are advised of the necessity for the creation of assessment records that outline clearly and comprehensively the reasons for selection decisions, including, where relevant, assessment of qualifications or failure to meet a benchmark.
Where a selection panel fails to create a sufficiently comprehensive record of the selection process, the record is returned for completion before the selection decision takes effect.
The same process applies in relation to the selection of students for admission to courses of study in the University by a non-standard entry route.
As in the case of non-personal records discussed above, there is an increasing trend to provide certain records routinely or at feedback to the subjects of selection processes as soon as decisions are ratified.
In the case of academic promotions, these are assessment records and references provided by internal referees.
Concern is often expressed about the release of references under FOI, particularly academic references.
Where references are provided by referees in public bodies that are subject to the FOI Acts, confidentiality cannot be claimed in order to withhold access.
While confidentiality may pertain in the case of those who provide references outside the jurisdiction of the Irish legislation, the presumption is that access should be granted, and such referees are initially consulted informally about release.
Where a referee objects to release, the formal consultation process provided for in the Acts is put in place and the referee must make a case against release, which is considered by the decision-maker before a decision is made.
To date, no referee has objected to the informal release of a reference.
Another concern is in relation to notes taken by individual selectors during selection processes.
Where the notes are simply aides-mémoire and are not circulated for discussion, and where a full and comprehensive official record of the assessment process has been compiled, signed by each member of the selection panel, and approved, then any such personal notes may be destroyed.
Right to Obtain Reasons for Decisions The exercise by an individual of the right under FOI to obtain reasons for decisions that have materially affected him or her is perhaps one of the more interesting aspects to the operation of the legislation.
The absence of a clear and comprehensive explanation to a requester of the decision-making process in relation to the decision made that has materially affected him or her may, as with requests for access to records, be reviewed internally and may ultimately be appealed to the Information Commissioner.
The decisions made in relation to the requester must have involved the conferring or withholding of a benefit to the individual and not to a class of individuals.
The overwhelming majority of requests for reasons for decisions are from disappointed candidates for positions or courses of study.
Clear and comprehensive records of decisions made in the course of selection processes, as discussed above, should therefore serve to inform an individual of the reasons for decisions without recourse to further records.
If, however, existing records fail to satisfy the requester, he or she may legally apply for a statement of reasons to be specially prepared, which may involve the re-convening of a selection board.
The extent to which reasons for decisions would be requested under FOI caused some concern prior to implementation, particularly in relation to the examination process.
The issue was clarified, however, in the course of one appeal to the Information Commissioner.
A student who was not satisfied with the marks he obtained in an examination submitted an appeal to the University's Examination Appeals Committee, on grounds of a claim for additional marks on the basis of the re-marking of his examination script by a third party outside the University [5].
Having carried out the appeal, the Examinations Appeals Committee decided that the appeal should fail, subject only to a small percentage increase in the mark awarded.
The student then applied under FOI for a statement setting out the reasons of the examiner and each member of the Examination Appeals Committee for their decision that additional marks claimed by him on the basis of the re-marking of his script, were not due.
The requester was dissatisfied with the outcome of the request and asked for a review by the Commissioner on the ground that the statement of reasons provided by the University was not adequate.
The Commissioner found that the Act requires the head of a public body to provide a statement of reasons which adequately explains why the body acted as it did and that it does not require each and every member of staff who might have contributed to or been involved in the decision-making process to provide an account of his/her reasons for every action he/she carried out during the course of the body's decision-making process.
She further found that, even if the committee had taken separate decisions in relation to each of the points raised by the requester in his examination appeal, as suggested by the requester, those 'secondary' decisions, of themselves, would not have resulted in the withholding or conferring of a benefit.
This was notwithstanding the fact that they would have informed the overall decision-making process and the ultimate outcome, which resulted in the conferring or withholding of a benefit.
She found that the act or decision of the University that affected the requester, and in which he had a material interest, was the decision to refuse his appeal.
On this point, she found that the explanation provided by the University for the decision to refuse the appeal was adequate.
Impact of FOI on Records Management Practices Although FOI is presented as promoting accountability and transparency in the conduct of the official business of public sector bodies, it also brings in its wake a range of improving subsidiary changes to administrative practices, such as the articulation and publication (and sometimes the initial formulation) of procedures governing a wide area of administrative activity and core functions; and the routine publication of official information where possible, as opposed to where necessary or mandatory.
A not insignificant impact of FOI on administration is in the management of its official records.
For the purpose of FOI, all official records of a public body become categorised as public documents, and the manner in which such records are created and managed must take this into account.
Since the advent of FOI, there is now a far sharper focus within public bodies on records management, a discipline less well known outside the Irish archival profession some years ago and, when highlighted to senior management, perceived primarily as facilitating the archival endeavour of identifying and selecting records deserving of permanent preservation.
Until the introduction of FOI, the need for effective records management to facilitate ease of retrieval of records, to integrate document and forms management and record-keeping into administrative processes, and to ensure the creation of reliable, accurate and complete records was not always recognised or else deemed to be of sufficient strategic importance by those in senior management to merit serious attention.
However, FOI has highlighted the fact that records management strategies can be deployed to facilitate compliance with legal and regulatory obligations.
Records management, by organising, controlling and tracking records from origination to disposition, whether by destruction or permanent retention, is now increasingly presented as an essential tool in ensuring accountability through the creation, use and retention of good-quality records, and its integration into business processes and systems can be increasingly justified on that basis.
This focus on the relevance of records management within a regulatory context has been strengthened by the annual reports of the Information Commissioner, which continually stress the critical importance of good records management and the increasing requirement to ensure that records management policies and procedures are put into place to ensure the creation and retention of records that satisfactorily document decision-making processes and that enhance the ability to retrieve records in order to comply with access requests [6].
Where a requester is not satisfied that a thorough search has been undertaken or is informed that records do not exist, and then appeals to the Information Commissioner, the subsequent investigation carried out on the requester's behalf considers the thoroughness of the search for records, the likelihood that records ought to have existed to answer the request, and the extent to which records management policies and procedures are in place and being implemented by the public body.
The University has always had regard to its record-keeping responsibilities, but the experience gained in the processing of FOI requests has brought about certain changes to the way in which it manages its records.
While it was difficult in the past to use the archival imperative where there was no perceivable advantage in undertaking the work necessary to implement good records management for this purpose alone, the perception of records management as an affiliate task in the implementation of FOI was much easier to promote, as the risk of inability to fulfil the terms of the legislation through the creation and maintenance of inadequate records was seen as a serious risk.
Latterly, the necessity for business efficiency is driving the need for a consistent approach to managing information in the University and the management of records is now no longer perceived as simply a local or maintenance exercise, or a compliance issue, but a University-wide information resource management issue.
It is now possible to align records management with the overall goals of the University, which sees compliance with legislation as one in a suite of criteria that includes the aspiration that systems should serve the University's mission and that they should be sufficiently streamlined, efficient and flexible to enable the University to compete in a rapidly changing and competitive external environment; and should recognise the principle of accountability and compliance while protecting academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
The case for records management can be helped by the fact that creating and maintaining complete, accurate and reliable evidence of business activities in the form of records is no longer a matter of choice, but is essential in good business practice.
It follows that if good records management is essential for corporate governance and critical for accountability, it should be strategically and professionally managed and viewed not, as heretofore, as an administrative overhead, but as a corporate asset, and should be structured and managed on corporate lines, rather than to meet individual or local needs.
In seeking to introduce systems that will facilitate the management of records, whether in paper or electronic formats, we can look to the published records management standard, ISO 15489, which serves as a useful tool for defining the characteristics of records, identifying records management responsibilities and designing and implementing robust records management systems.
Before implementation of FOI, there was a perception that, given the rights of access conferred, the creation, reliability and ultimate retention, where necessary, of comprehensive records might be undermined due to a reluctance to create and maintain what could be determined a 'true' record of events.
The legal obligation to provide access to a body of complete, authentic and reliable records that adequately illustrate business activities and decision-making processes within a public body has resulted in an improvement to record-keeping generally.
The publication by a public body of information on its structures and functions, and on its processes and procedures reveals where records of business activities and of decision-making should exist and permits audit of a public body's practices in creating, maintaining and managing records adequately.
It can therefore be argued convincingly that the need to demonstrate transparency and accountability in official activities will actually promote rather than inhibit the creation of relevant records, particularly in a context where it is necessary to provide proof that business activities are in conformity with policies and that procedures are adhered to in their performance and where there is the risk that the correctness of a process could be challenged in the absence of a satisfactory recording of business actions and decisions.
The legal obligation to provide reasons for decisions provides an even more compelling argument in favour of the creation of good-quality records, particularly those documenting selection processes affecting individuals.
FOI might make administrators more circumspect in the way in which they express themselves, but also more accurate and effective in how they communicate ideas.
Conclusion It is important to bear in mind that universities already had systems in place to render their actions accountable to both students and staff before the introduction of FOI.
What the advent of FOI brought was a means of testing how effectively these systems operated.
It also provided an opportunity to reflect on existing policies and procedures and to publish them systematically in a more cohesive manner and the requirement to prepare the mandatory publications under the Acts facilitated the provision of a single point of reference to them.
There was some apprehension in advance of implementation that access to examination scripts would undermine academic judgement, thus threatening and damaging the examination process, however, this proved unfounded.
The existence of defined processes and procedures surrounding the conduct of examinations, including examination appeals, rendered such fears groundless and the FOI process actually confirmed their robustness and vindicated University practices.
As the legislation largely concerns information in records, its extension to the university sector has focused attention on the management of records in a positive way and has opened up a dialogue among administrators on the nature of records and on what needs to be recorded, as well as on record-keeping systems and the need for the management of records, regardless of format, in an integrated manner as a vital support in assisting the University in meeting its legal obligations.
These observations are not and do not purport to be a legal interpretation of the legislation.
The views expressed by the writer are not necessarily those of University College Dublin.
References Irish Freedom of Information legislation is laid down in the Freedom of Information Act, 1997 and the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Act, 2003, both Acts being cited together as the Freedom of Information Acts 1997 and 2003; http://www.foi.gov.ie Editor's note: The third level education system in Ireland encompasses the university sector, the technological sector, the colleges of education and private, independent colleges.
The institutions which fall within the first three groupings are autonomous and self-governing, but substantially state-funded.
http://www.educationireland.ie/ UCD Records Management and Freedom of Information Unit http://www.ucd.ie/foi/ For statistics, analysis and other information on the impact of FOI in Ireland, see the Information Commissioner's Web site at http://www.oic.gov.ie See Annual Report of the Information Commissioner, 2003 http://www.oic.gov.ie/report03/ See Annual Reports of the Information Commissioner, Speeches and Publications http://www.oic.gov.ie/press.htm © University College Dublin 2005 Author Details Rena Lohan University Records Manager University College Dublin Email: rena.lohan@ucd.ie Web site: http://www.ucd.ie/foi/ Return to top Article Title: "Freedom of Information in University College Dublin 2001 2004" Author: Rena Lohan Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/lohan/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet SOSIG Buzz data copyright cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Anne Dimond and Angela Joyce send further news from the planet of social sciences.
Social Science Online National Seminars on Internet Information It is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with the ever-changing world of online information resources, and yet these resources have a vital role to play in higher and further education teaching and research.
The JISC Resource Guide for Social Sciences and SOSIG, in collaboration with LTSNs (Learning and Teaching Support Network), are providing a series of one-day events for all those involved in teaching and researching in Higher and Further Education in the social sciences.
The seminars will present participants with an overview of the major nationally funded Internet resources and services, focusing on five different subject disciplines: Internet for Law: London, Weds 12 November 2003 Internet for Psychology: London, Weds 10 December 2003 Internet for Sociology: Birmingham, Tues 16 December 2003 Internet for Economics: Bristol, Thurs 25 March 2004 In addition to listening to speakers from some of the key national services and data providers, participants will have the opportunity to explore these resources in practical ‘hands-on’ sessions.
There will also be ideas and inspiration for using the services in teaching, learning and research, including materials to take away and use with students and staff.
Further details, costs and an online booking form can be found at http://www.sosig.ac.uk/events/ or by e-mailing socsci-online@sosig.ac.uk.
Editor’s Choice a New Improved Service At the top of most subject sections on the SOSIG catalogue, users will see a highlighted section called Editor’s Choice.
This is not a new service, but recently the SOSIG team have developed a more refined system for selecting these sites.
What is it?
Editor’s Choice is a small selection of key Web sites chosen by SOSIG Section Editors for that subject.
For example, the Editor’s Choice for the Macroeconomics section of SOSIG currently lists five sites: H.M. Treasury The Economic Social and Data Service (ESDS) National Statistics Online The Bureau of Economic Analysis Federal Reserve Economic Data The selections are not static: sometimes a single report may be listed, but will be returned to the ranks of ordinary sites once it is superseded by a newer report.
Sometimes a site can change or become less important and it may be removed from Editor’s Choice.
Why have Editor’s Choice?
At nine years old, SOSIG has reached a “mature” stage as a hub, having over 25,000 records in the catalogue.
It can be daunting for new users, be they students, lecturers or researchers, to be faced with a long list of Web sites.
Editor’s Choice provides a possible starting point for users, rather like a “Recommended” selection in a library.
It could be especially useful for students who are less familiar with social science Web sites, introducing them to the most important organisations, journals, reports or news services.
Using these can lead them on to other links and materials.
Editor’s Choice is controlled by Section Editors, who know their subjects well and frequently consult experts such as lecturers or researchers at their institutions.
With so many Web sites to choose from, the selection can never be considered definitive, and the old saying “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” could even spring to mind.
SOSIG is always receptive to suggestions from its users and they are welcome to email us comments on our subject coverage at sosig-info@bristol.ac.uk.
A Social Science Gateway in a Shifting Digital World What could be the future direction for SOSIG and other digital libraries?
This was the question explored in a paper given at a digital libraries conference in Espoo, Finland on 9 September by Angela Joyce.
The conference was called Toward a User-Centred Approach to Digital Libraries and aimed to explore how users are acting in the new digital information environments.
Angela Joyce and Dr Lesly Huxley of ILRT at Bristol University, co-wrote the paper.
They identify two key challenges for SOSIG: the sustainability of a labour-intensive service and the innovation and evaluation needed to keep pace with users’ needs.
As a large, “mature” subject gateway, SOSIG is well known and has much good content.
It is also very large in terms of catalogue records, (over 25,000 and growing), but the nature of the Internet means that change is constant and it is vital to be aware of user behaviour and competition from other services.
The paper summarises the history of SOSIG and its collaboration with many other services, not least the Resource Discovery Network.
We consider our methods of user evaluation and the findings.
Finally we present possible future scenarios (which must of course be viewed in the context of our funders JISC and ESRC and their policies) including portalisation, increasing exchange of records with other services, more embedding in Virtual Learning Environments and the durability of the SOSIG identity.
The pre-conference versions of the paper and presentation are available at http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/publications/conf/DigLib2003 Conference information available at http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/finelib/digilib/ Author Details Anne Dimond Resource Guide Adviser ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: Anne.Dimond@bristol.ac.uk Website: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=resguides   Angela Joyce SOSIG Research Officer ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: Angela.Joyce@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Author’s name Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Accessibility Revealed: The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Audit Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Accessibility Revealed: The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Audit Buzz data software framework html archives digitisation accessibility browser graphics windows ict wcag e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Marcus Weisen, Helen Petrie, Neil King and Fraser Hamilton describe a comprehensive Web accessibility audit involving extensive user testing as well as automatic testing of Web sites.
In 2004, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) commissioned a Web accessibility audit from City University London.
MLA is the national development agency working for and on behalf of museums, libraries and archives in England and advising government on policy and priorities for the sector.
The audit was inspired by a study conducted by City University London in 2003/2004 on the accessibility of 1,000 general Web sites for the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) [1].
This was the largest and most comprehensive Web accessibility audit undertaken and unusual in prominently involving extensive user testing as well as automatic testing of Web sites.
MLA wanted a similar methodology for the audit of museum, libraries and archives Web sites, thus contributing to the creation of baseline data of unprecedented scope and breadth.
At the Back of the Client's Mind Why did MLA commission this audit of 325 museum, library and archive Web sites?
In the Higher Education sector, where disability legislation has had a profound impact on the development of equality of opportunity between disabled and non-disabled students, UKOLN has undertaken Web accessibility audits.
But a Web accessibility survey of this scope within the cultural sector has not yet been undertaken in the UK or overseas.
The motivation springs from MLA's mission.
Museums, libraries and archives connect people to knowledge and information, creativity and inspiration.
MLA's mission is to lead the drive to unlock this wealth for everyone.
MLA has also developed a widely respected transformational framework for museums, libraries and archives being learning organisations accessible to all [2].
The 'Inspiring Learning for All' framework and tool emphasise social inclusion and access for disabled people.
An accessible Web site is an integral part of an accessible museum, library or archive.
MLA thus needed to find out how accessible museums, libraries and archives are currently.
The policy context is provided by the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) in which the provision of goods and services cover Web sites, although these are only mentioned specifically in the relevant DRC Code of Practice [3].
It is also now widely known that e-government policies [4] require that public sector Web sites meet the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level AA [5].
The findings of the audit should also allow MLA to consolidate its existing commitment to making ICT and ICT services in museums, libraries and archives accessible to disabled people.
For example, 72% of 4,000 public libraries taking part in the People's Network, an MLA-led project, have installed assistive technology.
A couple of years ago, MLA advised the New Opportunities Fund to require NOF-digitise/EnrichUK projects to meet WCAG level AA.
We also produced basic guidance for developers of NOF Digitisation fund Web sites, which looks at how online cultural content can be made accessible to disabled people as this is clearly beyond the scope of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and an area in which the cultural and educational sector can make a unique contribution [6].
MLA is a member of the EU-funded Minerva Consortium, a network of European organisations whose aim is to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities in the digitisation of cultural and scientific content.
The Minerva Consortium has developed a Quality Framework for museum, library and archive Web sites that emphasises Web accessibility [7].
We expected that the findings would provide us with evidence on the basis of which future MLA action to support Web accessibility in the sector could be planned.
This would complement the wealth of MLA's guidance for the sector to develop services which are inclusive of disabled people.
Methodology for the Audit Data were collected from two samples of Web sites: 300 Web sites from museums, libraries and archives in England and an international comparison sample of 25 Web sites from national museums from around the world.
The 300 MLA Web sites covering a variety of categories in each of the three main sectors are shown in Table 1, below.
Table 1: MLA categories in each sector included in the audit Museum Library Archive Academic Local authority Independent National Academic Public Specialist Academic Business Local Authority National Specialists Selection of the samples was undertaken by City University following criteria set out by MLA.
100 Web sites were chosen from each of the three sectors.
They reflected the different types of institutions within each sector, the geographical distribution of these institutions and the size of their Web sites (i.e.
number of pages).
Automated Testing of Web Site Home Pages The home pages of the 325 Web sites were assessed against those WCAG checkpoints that can be automatically tested.
It should be noted that only some of WCAG checkpoints can be automatically tested.
A number of tools are available to conduct such testing [8].
For this audit, the accessibility module of WebXMTM [9] was used.
Following this initial audit, a representative sample of 20 English museum, library and archive Web sites was selected for in-depth automated and user testing.
The selection criteria for the 20 sites was based upon the sub-categories of each sector, the varying popularity of the sites, whether they were embedded into a host site and the results of the automated testing.
For these 20 Web sites, up to 700 pages from each site (or the whole site if smaller) were tested with the WebXMTM accessibility module.
User and Expert Testing of Web Sites A User Panel of 15 disabled people was established, composed of equal numbers of people from three disability groups: blind, partially sighted and dyslexic.
Previous research conducted into Web site accessibility by City University has shown that these three groups are currently the most disenfranchised users of the Web [10].
The Panel members reflected, as much as possible, the diversity of English people with disabilities in terms of a range of relevant factors: age, sex, technology/computing/Internet experience, and assistive technologies used.
Each panel member assessed four Web sites, undertaking two representative tasks with each site.
The representative tasks were selected by MLA and City University experts.
The tasks were representative of what users might typically attempt when visiting the site, such as establishing the opening times for an institution.
Evaluations were run individually at City University.
Panel members were provided with any assistive technologies they would normally use such as JAWS (a screenreader which converts text on a Web page into synthetic speech for blind users [11]), ZoomText (software which allows partially sighted people to enlarge information on a Web page and change parameters such as text and background colour [12]) or ReadPlease (software which allows dyslexic people to make a range of adaptations to information on a Web page [13]).
All 20 sites were evaluated three times once by a member of each of the three disability groups, in a randomised order.
After undertaking the tasks, Panel members were asked a range of questions to gauge their views as to the accessibility of the site, such as how easy it was to perform the tasks.
Results of the Automated Testing The 14 WCAG guidelines comprise 65 checkpoints, and each checkpoint has a priority level (1, 2 or 3) assigned to it based on the checkpoint's perceived impact on accessibility.
Thus violating Priority 1 checkpoints are thought to have the largest impact on a Web site's accessibility, while violating Priority 3 checkpoints are thought to have less impact on accessibility.
If a Web site has no Priority 1 violations, it is said to be Level A-conformant; if it has no Priority 1 or 2 violations, it is said to be Level AA-conformant; and if it has no Priority 1, 2 or 3 violations, it is said to be Level AAA-conformant.
Priority 1 Conformance (Level A) Of the 300 MLA home pages tested 125 home pages (41.6%) had no WCAG Priority 1 checkpoint violations that automated testing could detect.
However, all of these 125 home pages did possess at least two WCAG Priority 1 manual 'warnings' (that is the automatic testing tool suggests you ought to conduct a manual check as it has detected something that might be a violation of a checkpoint).
For pages to be WAI Level A-conformant they must also pass these manual checks.
It is almost certain that some of these home pages would have failed some of the manual checks.
The 100 Web sites from the archive sector achieved the best results with 51 of the home pages satisfying automated Level A conformance.
This compares to 34 in the museum sector and 40 in the library sector.
Priority 1 and 2 Conformance (Level AA) A total of 10 homepages (3.0%) from the 300 Web sites audited had no detectable Priority 1 and Priority 2 checkpoint violations, so were automated Level AA-conformant.
Once again the archive sector was the strongest with 6 sites recording no automated AA violations, compared to 1 museum and 3 library sites.
However, these sites did carry a minimum of 19 Priority 1 and 2 manual 'warnings', so may not have been AA-conformant.
Priority 1, 2 and 3 Conformance (Level AAA) Only one Web site from the 300 MLA sites tested achieved AAA conformance, having no automated Priority 1, 2 or 3 checkpoint violations.
It must be noted though that the site generated 32 manual 'warnings'.
The Web site was from the archive sector.
Frequency of Violations The average number of different WCAG checkpoints violated per page, and the total frequency of violations per page are shown in Table 2, below.
Table 2: Average number of checkpoints violated and total frequency of violations per Web page Type of checkpoint error Average number of different checkpoints violated Frequency of violations Automated Manual 'warning' 5.9 34.3 56.9 159.0 Total 40.2 215.9 The average MLA home page has nearly 216 instances of potential stumbling blocks to users.
This is a particularly worrying situation when we consider as revealed by the user and expert testing results below many of the problems users actually encounter when using Web sites are warnings of possible violations of the checkpoints that do indeed require manual checking.
In relation to the number of checkpoint violations of the three individual sectors, Library Web sites had the most Priority 1, 2 and 3 automated and manual checkpoint violations.
Archive sites had the least Priority 1, 2 and 3 automated violations and instances.
Museum sites had the least Priority 1, 2 and 3 manual 'warning' violations and instances (see Table 3).
Table 3: Number of checkpoints violated and frequency of violations for the different sectors Sector Number of different Checkpoints violated (automated) Instances of checkpoint violations (automated) Number of different Checkpoint warnings Frequency of checkpoint warnings Museum Library Archive 5.8 6.2 5.6 49.4 66.8 54.5 32.4 36.5 34.1 123.8 200.6 152.2 Total 5.9 56.9 34.3 159.0 International museum 6.9 67.9 35.2 171.5 The sub-categories within each of the three sectors also revealed some clear patterns: The sub-categories within each of the three sectors also revealed some clear patterns: Museums National museum Web sites had the largest average number of Priority 1, 2 and 3 automated and manual checkpoint violations (44.0 per page).
Academic (36.9), local authority (35.9) and independent (37.7) museums fared better.
Libraries Academic libraries had fewer violations, and substantially fewer instances of Priority 1, 2 and 3 manual checkpoint violations (111.4), than public (241.8) and specialist (220.9) libraries.
Archives No substantial differences between sub-categories.
The 25 International museum Web sites were also evaluated using the accessibility module of WebXMTM.
A large number of violations (42.1) were recorded, comparable with the English national museum findings, hence both sub-categories showed a similar poor level of conformance with the guidelines.
Overall, the results of the automated testing show that MLA Web sites are not highly conformant to the appropriate accessibility guidelines, with slightly less than half (41.6%) passing the basic accessibility level (Level A) and very few (3%) passing the government target of Level AA.
These results are very similar to those found in a survey of UK university Web sites undertaken in 2002 [14] in which 43.2% of homepages achieved Level A and 2.5% achieved Level AA.
However, it must be noted immediately, that these figures compare very well with those from the DRC study, in which only 19% of general Web site home pages achieved Level A and 0.6% achieved Level AA.
User Testing The 15 members of the panel were asked to complete a total of 120 tasks with the 20 Web sites selected for in-depth testing (20 Web sites x 2 tasks per Web site x 3 evaluators per Web site =120).
Of these 119 (99%) were logged and analysed.
Each evaluation was observed by experts at City University who recorded if a task was successfully completed, any problems that occurred and the participants' responses to a set of questions.
The Panel members succeeded in 75.6% of the attempted tasks and failed in 24.4% of them.
Blind participants experienced the most difficulty with a success rate of only 66.7%, compared to a combined average of 80.0% for the other two user groups.
Failure to complete tasks was not attributed to a minority of the participants, but from a broad cross-section of each User Panel.
Between the three MLA sectors there was also a notable difference in success/failure rates, with archive sites resulting in the most task failures (30.6%).
This failure rate is almost 9% higher than the combined average of the other two sectors (21.7%).
Table 4: Task success rates for the different user groups User Group Tasks successfully completed Blind Dyslexic Partially sighted 66.7% 82.5% 77.5% The members of the Panel were also asked to rate the ease of navigation when attempting a task.
The mean for all groups was 4.6.
No significant effects were noted between the different user groups, but more than half of the Panel members did feel 'lost' on at least one occasion when exploring the Web sites, especially in relation to library and archive sites (60% of panel felt lost at least one time when using sites in these sectors).
The Panel members, when asked about the extent to which their impairments were taken into account, gave a mean rating of 3.4 on a scale of 1 to 7.
This is not a ringing endorsement of MLA organisations' attention to accessibility.
At best we might conclude that the User Panel was 'non-plussed' with the Web sites they used in terms of the extent to which they thought the sites took their impairments into account.
The problems observed by the experts at City University and the problems reported by the Panel members were collated and categorised.
Overall, 189 instances of problems were identified during the user testing evaluations.
147 (78%) directly related to checkpoints in the WAI guidelines, and 42 (22%) were not covered.
Table 5, below, outlines the most common problems that users encountered.
These problems undoubtedly explain the failure rates summarised earlier.
Table 5: Key problems experienced by the User Panel (all disabilities combined) Problem No.
of Instances In WAI?
1.
Target of links not clearly identified 30 Yes 2.
Information presented in dense blocks with no clear headings to identify informational content 17 Yes 3.
Inappropriate use of colours and poor contrast between content and background 14 Yes 4.
Navigation mechanisms used in an inconsistent manner 13 Yes 5.
Links not logically grouped, no facility to skip navigation 10 Yes 6.
Text and images do not increase in scale when browser option selected 7 Yes 7.
External information and navigation on page, not associated with page content 6 No 8.
Important information not located at top of list, page etc 6 Yes 9.
ALT tags on images non-existent or unhelpful 6 Yes 10.
Graphics and text size too small 5 No 11.
Distraction and annoyance caused by spawned and pop-up windows 5 Yes 12.
Labels not associated with their controls 5 Yes 13.
Images and graphical text used instead of plain text 5 Yes The 13 problems listed in Table 5 constitute 68% of the total number of problems uncovered during the user testing.
It is also worth noting that over half of these problems relate to orientation and navigation (problems 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 12).
In fact, of the five most frequent problems that alone account for 44% of the total number of instances, four are orientation and navigation problems.
The Panel members identified many of the same problems, and these were also concentrated around orientation and navigation issues.
Five Most Frequent Problems Poor Page Design Poor page design (in terms of layout) led to a recurrent orientation problem for all the user groups involved in the evaluations.
Both the experts at City University and the members of the User Panel considered many sites to have overly complex and 'cluttered' pages with dense blocks of text.
No clear indication of main headings, secondary headings and so on was a recurring problem throughout the museum, library and archive domains.
While sighted users could infer some of this logic from text sizes, colour coding, etc, blind users did not have access to this and so pages were deemed 'illogical', meaning they lacked a logical structure.
Ambiguously Named Links Ambiguously named links that led to unexpected content were responsible for many of the navigation problems users encountered i.e.
opening times were often found under 'Contact Us'.
As one dyslexic user commented "... important information like opening times and disabled access should not be hidden under other obscure titles ... why can't they just put a link saying 'Opening Times'?"
The Panel members also uncovered issues that were specific to their individual impairment, for example blind users identified that ALT tags for images, pictures and graphical text were often non-existent or unhelpful.
For example, one site used graphical text for their 'Accessible Site' link but failed to provide any form of ALT tag to it, therefore blind users where unaware that this option even existed.
Colour Scheme and Contrast Colour scheme and contrast used for page designs accounted for many of the complaints from the dyslexic and partially sighted members of the User Panel.
While some of these complaints were of a purely subjective nature, the colour scheme often affected these users' ability to perform tasks, particularly when the contrast between the text and the background was inadequate.
Pale text on pale backgrounds was a common problem.
Moreover, different users benefit from different colour schemes.
For example, while many partially sighted users appear to benefit from a very strong contrast such as yellow text on a black background, one dyslexic user found this 'too glaring' and preferred black text on a pastel blue background.
Although colour schemes can be changed by users (e.g.
by attaching their own style sheets to their browser) very few users seemed to be aware of this.
No 'Skip Navigation' Link No 'skip navigation' link at the top of pages enabling blind users to jump to the main content of a page (by-passing the page's top navigation) was a specific problem for Panel members who used screen readers.
When such links were missing, blind participants were compelled to listen to the navigation elements that commonly appeared at the top of pages: repetitive information they often describe as audio 'clutter'.
It was obvious that the users found moving through this clutter very frustrating and exhausting.
While Jaws, the most common screen-reading software the Panel members used, does have some support for skipping over this clutter relatively efficiently, very few users were seen to use this function.
External Navigational Links In respect of external navigational links, the pre-evaluation research conducted by the experts at City University identified that numerous academic and local authority museum, archive and library sites are integrated (relatively) into a host institution's external site.
This specific issue was addressed in the user testing evaluations, where it was noted as causing confusion to all user groups.
The user was commonly unaware that the external navigational links did not directly relate to main content of the page; "keeps giving me information about other things... information about Civic Centre.
Think I must keep wandering off" (comment by partially sighted participant).
Positive Aspects In addition to the specific problems they encountered, the Panel members were also asked to report what they particularly liked about the sites they evaluated.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the positive aspects were the opposite of the problems outlined above.
For example, partially sighted participants appreciated "good use of colours to highlight visited links".
Blind users enjoyed logically structured pages, and as one user put it; "proper links, labelled individually and properly mean no trawling is necessary."
The other user groups appeared to share these sentiments, with users liking sites that had clear navigation mechanisms, logical page layouts, clear contrast, reasonably sized text and straight-forward language.
MLA's Initial Response to the Findings City University presented MLA with a set of recommendations which can be summarised as follows: 1.
Museums, libraries and archives should make Web accessibility an integral part of the Web development process, audit current accessibility, develop policies and plans, make Web accessibility a criterion in the Web design brief and involve disabled people 2.
Promote guidance and good practice 3.
Give consideration to user groups whose requirements are not documented in the WAI guidelines 4.
Recommendation 3: harness the unique contribution of museums, libraries and archives and their presentation and interpretation of their collections in accessible ways to specific groups of disabled people MLA endorses all these recommendations.
A planned approach to change is part of the 'Inspiring Learning for All' transformational vision for the sector (Recommendation 1).
MLA has coordinated the Jodi Mattes Web Accessibility Awards 2005 [15] for museums, libraries and archives, working in partnership with the Museums Computer Group [16] and the Department for Museums Studies of Leicester University [17].
The aim of the awards is to promote good practice on accessibility in the sector (Recommendation 2).
The idea that deaf people should be able to access information in British Sign Language (BSL) has been neglected for too long, probably because we still use a tick box attitude to Web accessibility and limit its meaning to meeting (or not meeting ) guidelines such as WCAG (Recommendation 3).
The Milestones Museum [18] Web site, one of the first to provide visitor information systematically in BSL, won a Commendation for Innovation at the Jodi Mattes Awards.
It demonstrates what should become commonplace in the future (BSL was recognised as an official language of the UK in March 2003 [19]).
Recommendation 4 deserves everyone's attention in the cultural and educational sectors.
An accessible Web site is but the gateway to the enjoyment of accessible online collections and learning resources.
These make our sectors' Web sites different from any other Web sites.
There is no reason why disabled people, including blind and partially sighted people, should be excluded from the enjoyment of online collections and interpretation.
Visual descriptions of online exhibits can be provided.
High-contrast images and illustrations can be provided for partially sighted people and tactile representations of many kinds can be provided for blind people.
For some this may still sound like science fiction, but this is precisely what the highly innovative i-Map Web site of the Tate Modern has aleady done [20].
In the first month of its opening, some 3,000 images suitable for reproducing in tactile format for blind people were downloaded.
In conclusion, the MLA sector does comparatively well at Web accessibility, better than the Web as a whole, though not quite as well as the Higher Education sector.
However what stands out is the scale of the task that lies ahead, as well as the exciting promise for outstanding educational and creative applications.
We need a thousand i-Maps and Milestone museums.
References Disability Rights Commission.
(2004).
The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People.
London: TSO.
Available at: http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/report.asp Inspiring Learning for All http://www.inspiringlearningforall.gov.uk The Disability Rights Commission Codes of Practice http://www.drc-gb.org/thelaw/practice.asp Illustrated Handbook for Web Management Teams (html) http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/resources/handbook/html/htmlindex.asp Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ Good Practice Guide for Developers of Cultural Heritage Web Services http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/gpg/ Minerva.
Ten Quality Principles http://www.minervaeurope.org/publications/tenqualityprinciples.htm A list of accessibility testing tools can be found at: Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/existingtools.html Watchfire http://www.watchfire.com/ Disability Rights Commission.
(2004).
The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People.
London: TSO.
Available at: http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/report.asp Freedom Scientific http://www.freedomscientific.com/ Ai Squared Home Page http://www.aisquared.com/ ReadPlease http://www.readplease.com/ An accessibility analysis of UK university entry points.
Brian Kelly, Ariadne, issue 33, September 2002 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-watch/ MLA Disability http://www.mla.gov.uk/action/learnacc/00access_03.asp Home Page of museums computer group http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/ University of Leicester Department of Museum Studies http://www.le.ac.uk/museumstudies/ Milestones Museum Home Page http://www.milestones-museum.com/ ePolitix.com Forum Brief: Compensation culture http://www.epolitix.com/EN/ForumBriefs/200303/ i-Map http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/ Author Details Marcus Weisen Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Web site: http://www.mla.gov.uk/ Helen Petrie Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design City University London Web site: http://hcid.soi.city.ac.uk/ Neil King Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design City University London Web site: http://hcid.soi.city.ac.uk/ Fraser Hamilton Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design City University London Web site: http://hcid.soi.city.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Web Accessibility Revealed: The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Audit" Author: Marcus Weisen, Helen Petrie, Neil King and Fraser Hamilton Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/petrie-weisen/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IT for Me: Getting Personal in South Yorkshire Public Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IT for Me: Getting Personal in South Yorkshire Public Libraries Buzz data software framework database rss xml infrastructure archives metadata vocabularies oai-pmh z39.50 personalisation sms ict interoperability e-government research standards Citation BibTex RIS Liz Pearce and Neil Smith introduce the IT for Me Project which aims to provide personalised access to online resources in South Yorkshire's public libraries.
Personalisation has become an increasingly salient topic in the UK library and information management sector, yet to date much of the work undertaken has been in the academic and knowledge management sectors [1].
However, the South Yorkshire-based IT for Me Project [2] is looking to bring personalised access to online resources to public libraries.
The project, which began in October 2003, will create a Web-based platform to provide access to personalised resources.
IT for Me is a European Union Objective 1-funded project and is a partnership between the four South Yorkshire public library authorities, the Department of Information Studies, the University of Sheffield, Knowledge Integration, a company specialising in the development of open source software for information retrieval and Mediac, a community-owned media production and training company.
The Objective 1 funding programme [3] is designed to support the economic regeneration of Europe's poorest areas and the IT for Me Project is working, in the first instance, with libraries and communities in five of South Yorkshire's most deprived areas.
Why IT for Me?
Visitors to UK public libraries, or regular readers of Ariadne's Public Library Focus column, will know that the completion of the UK People's Network Project has provided over 4000 public library service points with access to IT infrastructure.
The People's Network aimed to connect: "... all public libraries to the Internet, as part of the Government's commitment to give everyone in the UK the opportunity to get online."
[4] Yet whilst the 'opportunity to get online' in public libraries been seized by many, for others the 'motivation to get online' is still lacking.
Recent statistics show that 42% of UK adults have either never accessed the Internet (36%) or do not access it regularly (6% had not accessed the Internet in the three months prior to the survey) [5].
For those experiencing aspects of 'social exclusion', such as unemployment or low educational achievement, uptake is much lower.
For example, an initial user needs survey conducted in IT for Me's five target communities found that over 50% of respondents had never used the Internet.
Thus, whilst the UK government envisages the widespread development and uptake of e-government services [6], it is doubtful whether access to such services will inspire occasional or reluctant users to develop or acquire the necessary ICT skills.
It is clear that the shift from access to IT facilities to user engagement is reliant on providing access to content which is both interesting and meaningful.
The IT for Me project aims to facilitate user engagement with ICT by making content appropriate to individuals' interests directly available.
Users will register to use the system by completing a simple personal profile which will include information about their hobbies, interests, characteristics and geographical location (via postcode data).
Once a user has established their profile a personalised selection of quality-assured resources will be available to them immediately and on return visits.
User interaction with the system will enable individual profiles to be amended and adapted over time, as interests change and new resources become available.
A Bottom-up Approach In order to understand the types of content required to motivate IT usage the project has undertaken an initial user needs survey in an attempt to gauge subject interests amongst target users.
The survey was conducted in the five participating branch libraries and 289 surveys were returned.
Whilst some of the results were, perhaps, predictable gardening, reading and sports all rated highly the varied level of detail at which participants expressed their interest reflects the need for content to be provided at distinct levels of granularity.
For example, whilst some respondents articulated their reading interests merely as 'fiction', others focused on particular genres (Detective / Romantic / Science Fiction), others on time periods (Modern / Classic fiction) and a more limited number on particular authors.
The survey results will be used to inform both the wording and structure of the user profile and the types of content delivered through the system.
As the project continues, and versions of the user profile and technical platform are delivered, further user consultation will be undertaken to ensure that the system meets the demands of its user population.
By ensuring that the needs of users are central both to the development of the IT for Me system, and the resources provided through it, the project will engage users with ICT in the context of their information landscape.
Engaging Content Three strands of content will provide the basis for the IT for Me system in the first instance: Local Community Resources Working in collaboration with the South Yorkshire Community Information (SYCI) Project [7], IT for Me will present resources developed by, and about, local communities themselves.
SYCI is working with community groups, individuals and small businesses in and around the IT for Me target communities to develop local ICT capacity through the creation of Web content.
Providing users with access to resources relating to their immediate geographical location will provide a familiar point of reference in the, potentially alien, online environment.
Within the first six months of the project over 100 groups and individuals have expressed an interest in developing a Web site ranging from readers groups, handicraft and gardening clubs to single parent support organisations.
Figure 1: Barnsley Mountaineering Club, just one of the sites that has been developed as part of the South Yorkshire Community Information Project.
Community Information Resources Each of South Yorkshire Authorities involved in the project has existing databases of community information.
Figure 2 shows the interface to Sheffield's 'Help Yourself Database' which contains information about over 5000 Sheffield-based groups and organisations.
The project will explore how the information captured in a user profile can be use to 'push' community information to potentially interested users.
Figure 2: The Sheffield Help Yourself Database provides details of clubs, organisation and societies in the Sheffield area.
Quality Online Resources Public library collections have long sought to serve the diverse subject interests and characteristics of their local communities.
Increasingly these collections are encompassing online resources with a number of authorities now providing a recommended links collection.
Building on Web site collection and categorisation work undertaken by the participating library authorities (Figure 3), IT for Me will establish a database of quality-assured links, appropriate to users' interests, which can be matched to user interest profiles.
The project will explore the potential of integrating resources from other public library collections and from quality-assured links collections beyond the public library sector where the focus and level of content are appropriate to the needs of the general public.
Figure 3: Barnsley Libraries' Links to Useful Web sites.
IT for Me will build on the existing collections of quality-assured Web links.
Underlying Technologies The technical architecture which underpins the IT for Me system is based upon open standards and is designed to be compatible with both the eGovernment Interoperability Framework (eGIF) [8] and emerging architectural guidelines such as the Common Information Environment [9].
At its heart the IT for Me system is a database containing information about both the resources outlined above and about users.
The 'clever bit' is in establishing a relationship between these elements to provide a personalised information environment for users.
Information about resources will be gathered using a variety of methods.
Metadata about SYCI-developed local community Web sites will be 'harvested' using open source Web crawlers.
Initially this will rely on metadata tags as suggested by the eGovernment Metadata Standard (eGMS) [10] but we will also be experimenting with approaches to the 'auto-generation' of metadata.
Existing community information databases will either be exported using XML as a data interchange format or, where possible, searched in real time using Z39.50.
Where data is imported into the system, we will be working with data owners to establish efficient updating procedures based upon a Web services architecture [11] and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [12].
As indicated, information about subject resources will be entered onto the system by library staff in each of the participating local authorities or gathered from broader datasets.
We will also investigate the inclusion of more dynamic content, such as localityor subject-based RSS feeds.
Information about users will be gathered via an online profile.
Users will be able to choose how much or how little personal information they provide, though the richer the information submitted the greater the opportunity for personalisation.
By allowing users to control the information they supply, the IT for Me approach is perhaps closer to what some authors would describe as 'customisation'.
However, the system will allow the user profile to be reconfigured based on information collected about user interests.
Perhaps the most technically innovative aspect of the system is the approach taken to matching user interest profiles with metadata describing resources.
Again a phased approach is being adopted beginning with the use of structured vocabularies but working towards a system which allows users to express their interest using natural language and to use the principles of concept mapping [13] to establish semantic proximity to metadata terms describing resources.
The result of the mapping will be a number of resources which will be presented to the user as potential components of his or her personalised environment.
The user will then choose which resources they want to include.
Cliff Lynch refers to systems which operate in this way as 'recommender' systems [14].
In order to ensure that the user's environment is able to adapt over time, we will also be looking at a range of approaches to notifying users when new resources are added.
These might include on-screen alerts or other delivery methods such as email or SMS messaging.
Conclusions By providing direct access to resources relevant to the needs and interests of individuals from quality local, national and international Web resources to community-developed resources and local information IT for Me seeks to allow individuals to explore the potential of online resources on their own terms.
Although fostering user engagement with technology is central to the aims of the project, the ability to 'push' information relating to community organisations, events and activities at potentially interested users will encourage increased participation in local activities and, it is hoped, enhance communities' sense of identity.
The IT for Me Project is funded at sub-regional level by the European Union, yet its objectives have much in common with the UK Department of Culture Media and Sport's Framework for the Future [15] which encourages public libraries to foster community cohesion, develop IT skills and encourage informal learning.
Indeed, it is envisaged that once established as a working service in its pilot communities, the IT for Me system could be rolled out across the sub-region and, potentially, beyond.
Whilst catering to the specific needs of public library users, the use of standards-conformant technologies will allow the IT for Me system to operate within the context of national developments both within and beyond the public libraries sector.
References Bonett, M. (2001).
Personalization of Web Services: Opportunities and Challenges.
Ariadne Issue 28 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/personalization/ IT for Me http://www.itforme.org.uk European Union Objective 1 http://europa.eu.int/comm/regional_policy/objective1/index_en.htm The People's Network http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk Office for National Statistics.
(2003) First Release: Internet Access.
London, ONS http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/intc1203.pdf Cabinet Office.
(2000) e-government: A Strategic Framework For Public Services in the Information Age.
London, Central IT Unit http://e-government.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/00/20/38/04002038.pdf South Yorkshire Community Information http://www.syci.org.uk e-Government Interoperability Framework http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/egif.asp Common Information Environment http://www.jisc.ac.uk/cie/ eGovernment Metadata Standard http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/metadata.asp For an excellent overview of Web services architecture see http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/gardner/ or http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/ for a more detailed technical view.
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org Concept Maps for a useful overview see http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/tutorial/katsumot/conmap.htm Lynch, C (2001) Personalization and Recommender Systems in the Larger Context: New Directions and Research Questions http://www.ercim.org/publication/ws-proceedings/DelNoe02/CliffordLynchAbstract.pdf Department for Culture, Media & Sport.
(2003).
Framework for the Future http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2003/framework_future.htm Author Details Liz Pearce Information Development Officer IT for Me Project Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield Email: e.h.pearce@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.itforme.org.uk Neil Smith Director Knowledge Integration Ltd Email: neil.smith@k-int.com Web site: http://www.k-int.com Return to top Article Title: "IT for Me: Getting personal in South Yorkshire public libraries" Author: Liz Pearce and Neil Smith Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/pearce/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Blended Learning and Online Tutoring Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Blended Learning and Online Tutoring Buzz wiki safari blog e-learning Citation BibTex RIS Lyn Parker considers that this book meets its aim of providing practical advice for tutors and staff developers engaged in online activities and blended learning.
Many universities have adopted a blended learning approach to learning and teaching rather than adopting totally online methods, as strategies for delivering campus-based and distance learning courses converge.
Blended learning has been variously defined as 'a mix of e-learning with traditional learning and teaching methods' [1] or learning that is characterised by 'the interdependence of pedagogy, learning technologies and technology' [2].
Janet MacDonald, in her book 'Blended Learning and Online Tutoring' considers that blended learning has arisen from 'a general sense of disillusionment with the stand-alone adoption of online media'.
Her view is that we should concentrate on supporting network learners effectively rather than discussing 'the appropriate blend'.
Thus her book is aimed at providing practical ideas on introducing online activities into courses and integrating online tutoring into current academic workloads.
As the Learning and Teaching co-ordinator for the Open University in Scotland, with particular responsibility for blended learning, a PhD on online course design and management, and first-hand experience both as an online student and tutor, Janet is certainly qualified to write this introductory guide.
It is very easy to read with summaries at the end of each chapter listing the main points, inset boxes with 'bright ideas' and case studies, and pragmatic advice on setting up e-learning activities.
It is written from a reflective perspective, posing questions as much as providing answers, with liberal quotations from tutors and students involved in 50 different case studies.
Structure The book is divided into 3 parts: Part I concentrates on current practice in blended learning; with particular reference to the Open University in chapters 2 and 3 but then broadening the scope to cover Europe and Australasia in chapters 4 and 5.
Part II covers online tutoring, both asynchronously and synchronously and details various practical tools and methods.
Chapters 7 and 9 are particularly useful in providing 'handy techniques' for moderators for online conferences and online synchronous sessions respectively.
The final section of the book is entitled 'Developing independent learners' and is the area where personally my interests lie.
I would agree totally with the statement ''encouraging students to develop independence and self-direction in learning is an objective that may involve a lengthy and gradual process" but that the "introduction of online use in courses has tended to accelerate the timescale of learning development for students" (pp.
110-111).
In chapter 12, "Developing E-Investigators", MacDonald acknowledges the need for students to be information-literate but, perhaps tactfully, does not offer an opinion as to whether a generic course, such as SAFARI, the OU's online information literacy course, or embedding information literacy within the curriculum is preferable.
She does offer some useful potential activities for students suggesting that they be closely aligned with the assessment.
Chapters 13 and 14 cover the developing E-Writers and E-Communicators but the emphasis is on note taking, mind maps and collaborative Web pages rather than mentioning the use of blogs or wikis explicitly.
The book finishes with a chapter on staff development emphasising the need for academic staff to participate in an online course as a student before acting as an online tutor.
Conclusion Overall, I found the book easy to read, full of practical advice, while challenging me to reflect on my own practice.
The book is clear about the challenges involved in blended learning and online learning and offers suggestions of best practice and 'bright ideas' as possible solutions.
It is a very useful introduction to the subject.
References Hunter, R., Clarke, S. and Shoebridge, M (2005) Change Management.
In Maxine Melling ed.
Supporting e-learning: a guide for library and information managers.
London, Facet Publishing, ISBN 1-85605-535-8.
OCLC E-Learning Task Force (2003) Libraries and the enhancement of e-learning http://www.oclc.org/index/elearning/default.htm Accessed 21 July 2006.
Author Details Lyn Parker Academic Services Development Librarian University of Sheffield Email: l.a.parker@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.shef.ac.uk.library/ Return to top {C}{C} Article Title: "Blended Learning and Online Tutoring: a Good Practice Guide" Author: Lyn Parker Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/parker-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Google Hacks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Google Hacks Buzz javascript html python perl Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at a work offering programming 'know-how' to create resources that will do things with the search engine that might otherwise prove difficult or impossible.
The subtitle for the book is 'Tips and tools for finding and using the world's information' which does neatly sum up its content.
This is the third edition, so it is clearly popular, and has been updated to include information and hacks for Google maps, talk and desktop.
As with any O'Reilly title, it is very clearly laid out, easy to read, with extremely good illustrations, small icons to indicate tips or notes of caution, plus an in-depth and thorough index.
Each hack is clearly indicated by typography, an icon and the top corner of each page indicates the numbered hack.
What exactly is a 'Google hack'?
The authors'description is 'quick and dirty solutions to programming problems or interesting techniques for getting a task done'.
They then continue, focusing specifically on Google, by saying '... show you some tricks for making the best use of a search, to show off just what's possible when you automate your queries with a little programming know-how, and to shine a light into some of the overlooked corners of Google's offerings.'
Consequently one may assume that this particular title is aimed at people with an interest in Google, who want to search more effectively and (this is the salient point) with the ability to use programming 'know-how' to create resources to do things with the search engine that might otherwise be difficult or even impossible.
The first chapter looks in detail at some of the basic ways in which you can use Google to do things of which you were unaware, and covers the use of the advanced search function, setting preferences and so on.
It also provides the reader with some useful background knowledge on how Google gets its results.
Some of the hacks are simple and very sensible, such as Hack 4: Check your spelling.
Others will be of limited value to people outside the United States since they focus on functionality such as searching the Google Phonebook.
The authors primarily use Google, but they also point readers to external resources and Web sites when it sensible to do so, though such occasions are fairly few and far between.
However, I do think that at times they are a little too biased towards Google, and there are times when they could, and should, be more critical.
For example, they refer to the phonebook syntaxes as 'powerful and useful' and make the point that they are case-sensitive.
There's no reason why they need to be case-sensitive, and most people would see this as a flaw with the system.
The majority of the book, and most of the hacks do require some level of programming knowledge however, and this is where many users will quickly lose their way.
Although the methodology of creating a programmed hack is clearly explained, with easy-to-follow examples, I think that it may nonetheless prove too daunting for many users to attempt.
If you are not comfortable creating HTML, playing with Python or fiddling with Perl, then the vast majority of hacks are not for you.
The authors cheerfully make statements such as 'the code behind the scenes... is really very simple: a swatch of JavaScript... A smidge of Python' and finishing the paragraph with a happy 'You can easily use this as the basis of a CGI script that acts in the same manner.'
On the other hand, if you are a programmer, and are happy to play around with scripts and coding, then you will almost certainly enjoy experimenting with many of the hacks.
However, and without wishing to appear disrespectful to the majority of librarians or searchers who may be reading this review, much of the book will make little sense.
It's also worth making the point that much of the work is already dated.
Now, we all know that any book that relates to anything to do with the Internet is going to be dated before it is published we take that as a given and no one expects otherwise.
However, with the dramatic increase in Web 2.0 resources, and the release by Google itself of utilities such as Search Builder, many of the hacks are, to all intents and purposes, rendered pointless.
I was able to go through much of the book looking at different hacks and think of utilities that have been created in the last 6 months that will do the job almost as elegantly (to be fair to the authors, not always as elegantly as their suggestions), without requiring any knowledge of programming.
It would be unfair to dismiss all of the hacks in this way though there are many that require no extensive knowledge; enthusiasm, patience and the confidence to fiddle around, backed up by the authors' detailed explanations, will pay dividends.
Even if you feel unable to try the coded examples yourself, there is a wealth of information in the book which will give you a greater understanding of what Google is capable.
If you bear in mind that it is quite likely that 6 months on from the publication date there is now an easier way of running a hack than is found in the book, simply use the book's suggestions as a starting point.
In conclusion therefore, expect to find this book interesting and informative, but perhaps not quite in the way that the authors originally intended.
Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: "Google Hacks" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/bradley-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Projects Into Services: The UK Experience Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Projects Into Services: The UK Experience Buzz data framework database archives cataloguing opac copac openurl authentication interoperability research sfx Citation BibTex RIS Peter Brophy reviews the experience of the UK academic sector in turning digital library projects into sustainable services.
Introduction: The First Wave It is worth remembering that there is a long history of successful commercialisation of digital library R&D projects in the UK.
While there are probably even earlier examples, the obvious instances are the Birmingham Libraries Co-operative Mechanisation Project (BLCMP) and the South-West Academic Libraries Co-operative Automation Project (SWALCAP) from the 1960s.
Both were initially funded by grants from the then Office for Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI, a body whose responsibilities were to be taken over by the British Library Research & Development Department (BLRDD) and later dispersed among various funders such as the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA)).
BLCMP was a co-operative cataloguing project enabling academic libraries in the Birmingham area to share the costs of creating catalogue records.
SWALCAP, perhaps more ambitiously, was a shared circulation system for academic libraries in South-West England and South Wales, using mainframe computers in Bristol and real-time access across leased lines.
BLCMP began in 1969 and gradually expanded by recruiting member libraries across the UK and developing standalone systems.
For the next thirty years it continued as a cooperative, with members each holding a voting share, until in 1999 it became a limited company, changing its name to Talis Information Ltd. 100% of the initial shareholding was held by the BLCMP member libraries, but the new business model enabled the company to expand by attracting inward investment, entering into partnerships and so on moves which were difficult if not impossible in the former legal model.
Today Talis describes itself, not unreasonably, as “the market leading provider of (IT) products and services for public and academic libraries in the UK and Ireland” [1].
SWALCAP followed a similar trajectory, developing a range of services (including cataloguing, partly through access to BLCMP’s database, and like BLCMP a standalone system (Libertas)).
It became a limited company, SLS, again owned by its university shareholders, before being taken over by Innovative Interfaces of the USA in 1997.
The UK system was quickly dropped in favour of the international product, currently Millennium [2].
This pattern of creating co-operatives which would then be commercialised is one that has been followed elsewhere in the world.
OCLC is an obvious example, though it should be noted that it remains a non-profit, membership organisation within a commercial framework.
The model clearly offered major advantages in the past: long development times within a sheltered and supportive environment of shared ownership being the obvious one.
There are a number of current UK organisations which could well move down this path over time COPAC (the Consortium of Research Libraries OPAC [3]) being an obvious example though it is unlikely to form a suitable path to sustainability for most projects.
Surfing into the Nineties By the beginning of the 1990s it was becoming apparent that there was a new imperative for sharing the development and operational costs of services among academic libraries.
This time, however, rather than administrative systems, the focus was on delivering content services.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s academic libraries had developed the use of electronic content; first through purely bibliographic data, latterly through full text.
However, the arrival first of the PC (or equivalent end-user workstation) to provide processing and display facilities at the desktop and then of local area networks to enable delivery of content from remote servers to those workstations proved a golden opportunity for libraries to demonstrate the benefits of delivery to the end-user.
It was at this time that the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) datacentres were first set up (originally BIDS at Bath [4] and MIDAS (now MIMAS) at Manchester [5], later to be joined by EDINA in Edinburgh [6]).
The option of mounting and maintaining huge datasets at every institution was clearly uneconomic, so sector-managed national datacentres offered an obvious solution in the absence of viable and affordable commercial alternatives.
A critical part of these services was that delivery was “free at the point of use”.
As Lynne Brindley wrote in 1996, “within JISC a very clear and successful policy for dataset provision has been established through a model service, free at the point of use, which has enabled every higher education institution in the UK to obtain unlimited access to a range of data files for a flat subscription.
The success rate is easily measurable and there are inexorable increases in use as each new academic year rolls on.” [7] It is worth recalling at this point that the JISC itself is wholly-owned by the Higher Education funding councils (indeed at some points there have been considerable difficulties because of its lack of independent legal status).
Since the raison d’être of the funding councils is to distribute resources to the individual universities, any expenditure by JISC is ‘top-sliced’ from the total available to the sector and thus reduces the amount available for distribution.
There are two ways to look at this: top-sliced expenditure is in effect a pooling of resources within a consortium of universities which by joining together are able either to buy services at a better price or to undertake development work which no individual institution could achieve.
On this model a high level of JISC expenditure, provided it is properly matched to institutional requirements and well-managed, is a good thing.
top-sliced expenditure is simply a tax on institutions which accept, as individuals often do with personal taxation, that this is unavoidable but seek to keep the level of ‘taxation’ at the absolute minimum.
On this basis, the smaller the JISC budget the better.
And, of course, the sooner any nascent JISC service can be shifted into the commercial (or at least non-publicly-funded) sector, the better.
It is hardly surprising that these attitudes keep emerging in discussion and debate.
Unfortunately the inability of institutions to agree and stick to an agreed position has made the JISC’s work difficult.
As pressures on universities to be competitive have increased, there has been a noticeable emphasis on the second viewpoint though at present there seems to be a partial shift back to the first again!
In any case, the success of the datacentres led to some moves to commercialise service delivery, perhaps the most notable being the changes at the University of Bath where BIDS dataservices moved from a university-run service to an independent company, ingenta [8], in 1998, although the University retained a minority shareholding.
The reasons for this change are informative: ‘Since the JISC wasn’t in a position to underwrite this sort of work, and because it clearly wasn’t a core activity for the University of Bath, early in 1998 the University started discussions with a number of possible partners.
The end result was an agreement to set up a new company, to be known as ingenta ltd, which would take responsibility for BIDS and ingentaJournals and the development of the service.’ [9] A different type of organisation, also spun out of university activity led by the University of Bath, is represented by eduserv [10], which operates as a charity with a board of trustees and covenants its profits to its educational foundation.
The Foundation’s objects are ‘the advancement of education in particular by facilitating teaching, learning and research for the benefit of institutes and centres of education by such means as are charitable’ [11].)
Again drawing on what were originally nationally-funded projects, eduserv is now responsible for the ATHENS [12] authentication and CHEST [13] collaborative purchasing services.
It is clear from this account that commercialisation (or other routes to independence from central funding) has been a successful route for a considerable number of projects/services.
However, it is by no means an easy option and it has rarely been used before a very strong customer base has been developed.
Swimming in the Mainstream Going back to digital library development in the early to mid-1990s in the UK, the major feature was undoubtedly the eLib Programme [14].
eLib was quite explicitly designed as a ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ exercise, at least in its first two phases, and it was unclear at the outset how many of these projects would turn into services in the short to medium term.
The Implementation Group simply recorded the intention to “support of a range of activities to further the development of the electronic library” [15].
However, much of this work has been highly influential and it is legitimate to see it as service development by another route rather than grow individual projects into services, look to embed them within wider initiatives which have great importance in the landscape of academic library operation today.
Chris Rusbridge, reflecting on eLib’s contribution, gave an example of this kind of ‘service development’ when he remarked (in 2001) ‘while all the projects were successful in their way, WoPEc and Cogprints, plus the latter’s JISC/NSF successor, the Open Citation project can genuinely claim to be forerunners of the Open Archives Initiative.
This may turn out to be a crucial development in providing access to a much wider range of “grey” materials, and possibly helping to counter the debilitating effect of the scholarly journals price spiral.’ [16] At an intellectual level, which admittedly is stretching the concept of ‘service’ rather far, the MODELS [17] work has been of immense importance in helping elucidate the framework of the Information Environment and securing the UK’s voice in international debate on these issues.
In the longer term, some of the eLib projects have certainly developed into real services, embedded within the broader framework.
The BIDS JournalsOnline [18] service, for example, was built upon InfoBike [19] even though that project was hardly a success in its immediate objectives and as already noted, the BIDS services are now part of ingenta.
Another innovative project, HERON [20], also became part of ingenta.
Sailing into the New Millennium The largely experimental period of the 1990s gave way to a much more integrated approach with the conceptualisation and development of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [21], rapidly re-titled the JISC Information Environment (IE) [22].
This was a necessary development, not least because the requirement for interoperability between systems made piecemeal development unsustainable and unjustifiable.
However, this approach brought with it its own problems from a service sustainability standpoint.
The first problem is how to shift a project into the service mode when it is intertwined with other projects which might not merit the same treatment at the same time.
One solution is exemplified by the JORUM [23], which represents an attempt to provide a service framework for outputs from programmes like FAIR [24], but its long-term status is by no means secure.
A second problem arises when the project being considered is a piece of middleware, perhaps with no obvious end-user (or human intermediary) visibility.
The issue then becomes how to attract sufficient attention and commitment from potential customers to enable it to be shifted into permanent service mode.
Some middleware projects are able to achieve this kind of profile, the most notable example being authentication/authorisation services (in the UK context so far this means ATHENS [12]).
But others, and currently the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) [25] springs to mind as an example, face a much tougher battle to gain that level of commitment.
Keeping Afloat The big issue in all of this discussion is sustainability.
Projects are generally self-sustaining during their limited lifetime: there is an agreed budget and no matter whether the work follows the predicted track, barring outright disaster it will continue to the end of the funded period.
It is at this point that so many nascent services sink beneath the waves.
There are of course a variety of business models that services could adopt in networked space.
The simplest is to persuade the academic sector, usually represented by the JISC, to fund it long-term though this can be a dangerous path to tread since this ground has a nasty habit of opening up and swallowing the unwary!
What is interesting is that relatively few of the models that can be found in the private sector have proved useful for academic services.
There is in fact quite a restricted range of approaches which have proved useful in the long-term, and virtually all of these are variations on the theme of collaborative or co-operative purchasing.
Sometimes these have survived as academic sector entities; sometimes they have shifted into the private sector as listed companies, but generally retaining their original focus on their academic marketplace; sometimes they are a half-way house, as with charitable bodies.
The difficulties for projects manifest themselves in what sometimes seems to be lack of clear decision-making as to the status of particular projects/services.
The best current example of this is the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [26].
The case for this as a nationally-funded service is in fact fairly clear-cut.
Instead of every university library employing staff (usually expensive subject librarians) to evaluate free Web resources, the effort is pooled and each institution makes use of the resulting service.
While they will undoubtedly want to tailor the data to their own particular subject interests, the bulk of the work should be done for them.
Development of this service with JISC funding, initially under the eLib Programme and more recently within the DNER/IE, proceeded with this in mind.
However, it then became unclear what kind of business model should be adopted to achieve long-term sustainability: there is widespread support, but it has not yet formed itself into a sustainable consortium of interests.
Institutions have not been willing to commit to realistic subscriptions for the long-term, leaving the service in a kind of limbo with short-term JISC funding.
This itself has knock-on effects on forward planning, both for the service and the institutions.
Conclusions So, judging from the experience of the past 30 years or more, what are the criteria which make for successful transition from project to service?
It would appear that the following are among the key issues: A requirement which is recognised as important by a significant part of the target audience, which in the context of this article usually means the UK academic libraries, of which there are about 150 significant players.
Attempts to broaden the focus, for example to take in the Further Education (technician level) or public library sectors have not been conspicuously successful.
The potential for cost savings in individual libraries, provided that the directors of those libraries are convinced that the savings will be real.
Co-operative purchasing, whether through JISC-sponsored deals or through other mechanisms, has proved popular.
Vision and enthusiasm on the part of those promoting the project/service, coupled with a strong existing profile in the target market.
On the latter point it is arguable, for example, that COPAC has succeeded only because the directors of the UK’s largest research libraries reached agreement and had the clout to make it happen.
Had the enthusiasm and vision come from outside the group it would have been far harder to establish the service.
Significant new technological advances.
It is worth remembering that the wave of projects and services spawned in the 1990s was largely concerned with the then new concept of end-user access, coupled fairly rapidly with the emergence of the Web into the mainstream.
The earlier development of administrative systems occurred when new technology enabled new approaches to cataloguing and circulation control but before commercial players had spotted the potential.
What appears to have happened is that libraries realised that there was a need to develop a service, and were willing to invest in that development with additional funding from a national body, in the absence of viable commercial options.
The final requirement for successful transition is thus the lack of a commercially available alternative capable of delivering the service required.
Generally speaking, institutions prefer to buy into commercial products (for good reason) if these are feasible.
A good recent example of this is the way that Ex Libris’ OpenURL resolver, SFX [27], has captured market share.
Despite the barriers, however, it is remarkable how many projects from the last 40 years have made the transition.
As a result we have a panorama richly populated with real services delivering information to literally millions of users scattered across the cyberoceans of the world.
References TALIS http://www.talis.com/about_talis/corporate.shtml Innovative Interfaces Millennium system http://www.iii.com/mill/ COPAC http://copac.ac.uk/ BIDS http://www.bids.ac.uk/ MIMAS http://www.mimas.ac.uk/ EDINA http://www.edina.ac.uk/ Brindley, L. (1996).
“Are they being served?” Ariadne, Issue 4, July 1996 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/user_services/ ingenta http://www.ingenta.com/ Morrow, T. (1998) “BIDS begets ingenta” Ariadne, Issue 18, December 1998 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue18/bids-ingenta/ eduserv http://www.eduserv.org.uk/ eduserv Foundation (2005) Annual Review 2004⁄2005 http://www.eduserv.org.uk/pubs/annrev2004.pdf ATHENS http://www.athensams.net/ CHEST http://www.eduserv.org.uk/chest/ eLib Programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology (1994) Framework for Progressing the Initiative (JISC Circular 4⁄94) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/circulars/4-94/ Rusbridge, C. (2001) “After eLib” Ariadne, Issue 26, January 2001 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/chris/ MODELS http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/ Morrow, T. (1997) JournalsOnline: An Electronic Publishing Service for Higher Education and Research http://www.isoc.org/inet97/proceedings/G1/G1_1.HTM InfoBike http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/infobike/ HERON http://www.heron.ac.uk/ Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=circular_5_99 JISC Information Environment http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=ie_home JORUM http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ FAIR Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) http://iesr.ac.uk/ Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Ex Libris SFX http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/sfx.htm Author Details Peter Brophy Director Centre for Research in Library & Information Management Manchester Metropolitan University Email: p.brophy@mmu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/infocomms/staff-contact-details/profile.php?id=190 Return to top Article Title: “Projects into Services: The UK Experience” Author: Peter Brophy Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/brophy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Cache: The National JANET Web Cache Progress Report Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Cache: The National JANET Web Cache Progress Report Buzz data software copyright linux cache ulcc url Citation BibTex RIS George Neisser discusses the plans of the National Caching Service.
Service Usage In May 1998 (the end of the last academic year) the National Caching Service was receiving over 27,000,000 requests and shipping around 250 GBytes of data on a busy day.
In recent weeks we have exceeded 40,000,000 requests and shipped over 400GBytes per day and these figures are likely to increase in the coming months.
Over 150 institutions currently use the service and this number too is set to increase as Colleges of Further Education and other organisations begin to use us.
We are expanding the service to meet this growth in demand.
We are also undedrtaking some service enhancements to improve performance.
Service Enhancements The current service is provided by over 30 Intel-based machines running the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems and Squid caching software.
There are three caching service nodes located at Manchester, Loughborough and ULCC.
Each node comprises several machines which cooperate with each other using the Cache Digest mechanism.
Institutions are allocated machines at two of these nodes and thereby access to the aggregate filestore at each node comprising hundreds of GBytes of cached information.
Many factors influence the effectiveness of the caching service.
Two of the major ones are machine loading during periods of peak demand and the processing of requests for non-cacheable objects, such as CGI scripts, Web-based email and secure http (https).
The former results in users observing unacceptably high Web object retrieval response times whilst the latter imposes unecessary processing load on the caches, also resulting in increased response times.
One way of reducing response times in general and during periods of peak demand in particular, is to balance the load being processed by a cluster of caches.
We have been investigating various load-balancing mechanisms and have developed a very promising one based on the LVS (Linux Virtual Servers) project.
This system enables a “front-end” machine to balance load, in our case incoming requests, between a group of Linux servers.
Tests with several volunteer sites have indicated that this mechanism is very effective in reducing object retrieval times during periods of peak demand.
Accordingly during the next few months we will transition the national caching service to an LVS based system, details of which are available at our web site at the URL listed below.
Also in the coming months we plan to improve response times further still by addressing the problem of caches handling requests for non-cacheable objects.
Ideally we would wish to route requests for such objects directly to the origin sites bypassing the caches completely.
One way of doing this would be to ask institutions not to send requests for non-cacheable objects to the national caching service.
Another way would be to adopt a “Level 7” switch approach at the national caching service and redirect such requests to their origin sites.
We are investigating these possibilities with some urgency and with a view to implementation as soon as possible.
The introduction of load-balancing and the re-direction of non-cacheable requests will generate a tangible improvement in the effectiveness of the national caching service provided to the academic community.
Future articles will elaborate on the mechanisms used.
In the meantime you will find further information at http://wwwcache.ja.net.
If you have any comments or suggestions please email support@wwwcache.ja.net.
George Neisser JANET Web Caching Service Team George.Neisser@nessie.mcc.ac.uk support@wwwcache.ja.net Article Title: “The National JANET Web Cache: Progress Report” Author: George Neisser Publication Date: 21-Dec-1999 Publication: Ariadne Issue 22 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/web-cache/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EThOSnet: Building a UK E-Theses Community Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EThOSnet: Building a UK E-Theses Community Buzz data xml infrastructure archives metadata digitisation blog repositories preservation cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Jill Russell outlines progress towards an e-theses service for the UK.
EThOSnet is a project funded by JISC, CURL and the project partners, to bring the UK to the forefront of international e-theses provision.
It is a highly practical and participative project to turn the prototype e-theses infrastructure that was developed by EThOS, into a live service that will revolutionise the document supply arrangements for theses and greatly increase the visibility of UK research.
The Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) Project arose after several earlier initiatives in the UK had articulated an urgent need to improve on the present methods for giving researchers access to PhD and other higher-level theses.
Researchers normally consult theses in their paper originals from archives, or via copies on microfilm, and this arrangement no longer meets their needs and expectations.
The EThOS Project phase 2005-2006 achieved its aim of creating a functioning prototype e-theses service capable of replacing the existing document supply arrangements.
The EThOS model is based on a central hub and institutional repositories (IRs), and conforms with current international standards and repository practices.
The project also addressed the two key obstacles identified by those earlier discussions, namely building a service model that is free at the point of use, and agreeing practical ways of dealing with the intellectual property rights (IPR) and disclosure issues surrounding theses.
A wide range of stakeholders was consulted, including postgraduate research students and their supervisors, registrars and university administrators, library staff, IR managers, and many graduate schools and postgraduate committees in individual Higher Education institutions (HEIs).
All welcomed the initiative, recognising the need for HEIs to adopt e-theses for the future (provided that there are adequate safeguards for IPR and non-disclosure), and demanding an urgent upgrade to the service for the retrospective materials that researchers still need to access.
The Achievements of the EThOS Project The official evaluation study for the project [1] was very positive about the achievements of EThOS.
It realised its aims, which were To build a functioning and scaleable prototype service that meets the needs of the stakeholders.
This was developed in collaboration with the British Library and comprises a central hub for storing and preserving copies of digital theses a mechanism for harvesting born-digital theses from IRs a search and download facility a system for requesting theses that are not yet digitised a system for handling any necessary embargoes on access to theses a user registration process for orders, and to safeguard authors’ rights an accounting system for sponsoring institutions a payment system for any additional delivery options chosen by end-users To provide a toolkit of guidance for HEIs adopting e-theses, covering a range of administrative, legal, technical, procedural and policy matters.
To create a model that will work both for new and future born-digital theses and for theses that need to be digitised from paper or microfilm.
To create a financially viable model to cover the costs of procuring a critical mass of retrospective content, while responding rapidly to requests from researchers.
To develop a model for digitising theses on request, within an acceptable timescale and to established technical standards.
To develop practical advice on handling the IPR queries and risks associated with theses.
To consult stakeholders and disseminate information by running a series of workshops and other advocacy events, and publishing articles.
The project workshops were very successful and generated a great deal of interest and discussion together with valuable information and feedback that contributed to the overall success of the project.
In consultation with the participants, EThOS developed practical solutions to the two key challenges of e-theses, namely IPR and covering costs: Intellectual Property Rights The EThOS toolkit recommends practical approaches to dealing with IPR queries [2], in line with the spirit of existing practices when disseminating printed theses via libraries.
A risk-assessment approach and opt-out mechanism will help HEIs decide which theses are safe to supply, and where to be cautious about potentially infringing material.
In some cases (in both the print and online worlds), there may be a requirement for a period of non-disclosure of research findings (eg pending a patent application), and this is supported either through an embargo period controlled at the central hub, or an arrangement with IRs not to harvest designated ‘sensitive’ categories of material at all.
Covering Costs The EThOS business model will create a service that is financed on a cost-recovery basis and is free to researchers at the point of use.
This desire was overwhelmingly expressed by participants, and is in line with moves towards open access in academic circles.
The costs to HEIs will shift from those currently incurred in acquiring theses and in handling document supply of those items, to the effort required to support the central requesting service and the cost of converting theses that are not yet available in digital form.
The digitisation of the theses that are not available in born-digital form is the most expensive part of the service.
HEIs can choose to become sponsors of the service or associate/collaborating institutions.
Sponsoring institutions will be asked to commit funds of £2K to 8K p.a.
(based on their JISC banding) for a minimum of three years, in order to secure the initial start-up work required for the service.
This sponsorship will guarantee a quota of theses to be digitised in response to requests from readers, together with all the benefits and economies of scale of being part of a large collaborative service.
These rates will reduce as time goes by and will eventually dwindle as the requirement to digitise from paper drops away.
The business model is calculated to cover all of the costs of: rapid digitisation to meet demand from researchers for theses that are not yet available in digital form metadata (including classification and authority control) to international standards for theses digitised via the central hub gathering and interpreting metrics to help manage annual digitisation quotas Member HEIs will also benefit from all the central services supported by the EThOS hub at the British Library, including: support for a central one-stop service for e-theses automatic harvesting of digital content from IRs preservation of theses under the British Library’s digital preservation programme Progress during 2007 The EThOS project phase finished in the autumn of 2006, but the partner members continued to work behind the scenes on making a UK-wide e-theses service a reality.
There has been a noticeable cultural shift in this time, in the expectations of researchers who more than ever assume that recent material will be downloadable via the Web, and amongst libraries and archives who now have a great deal of experience in managing electronic materials alongside traditional print-based collections.
Electronic theses are widely recognised as a Good Thing, which combined with a significant growth in institutional repositories in the UK, and gradual moves towards mandating the deposit of electronic versions of theses by new generations of research students, means that the UK is now ready for a fully-fledged and co-ordinated service.
The EThOSnet Project is the implementation phase, building on the sturdy foundations laid down by the EThOS Project, to transform it into the EThOS service.
Over 70 UK HEIs responded formally to a briefing paper [3] and consultation on EThOS carried out by JISC in February 2007, and several others have come forward since to enquire about participating.
Over 50% of libraries who are members of CURL say that their parent institutions (which produce of the majority of UK research theses) already have, or are actively seeking, a formal mandate for researchers to deposit an electronic copy of their thesis as a condition of award of a doctoral degree.
The remaining institutions have some form of voluntary arrangement, or are following developments with a view to adopting e-theses in the near future.
A glance at the OpenDOAR [4] directory of Open Access repositories shows that recent, born-digital theses are gradually being added to IRs.
EThOSnet has set itself the task of supplementing this slowly-growing body of born-digital material with a critical mass of key theses digitised to meet the demands of researchers.
This endeavour will get off to a good start through a separate JISC-funded e-theses digitisation project [5], which will digitise at least 5,300 theses over the coming 12 months.
However, the conversion of theses to digital format remains the biggest task facing the EThOS service.
There was one significant disappointment after the original project phase, which was that the ambitious start date for a live service (predicted for 2007) could not be achieved.
In the first two months of the new EThOSnet Project, the team has learned from the experience of HEIs that have had early successes with e-theses, and noted queries received by the Project.
This information has been used to develop the detail of the project plan and to plan towards a start date for the live service in 2008.
EThOSnet Aims and Objectives As stated in the project description, ‘the overall purpose of the EThOSnet project is to build a strong EThOS sponsorship network amongst the HE community and to achieve a high level of technological and organisational sustainability for a successful move from prototype to ‘live’ service.
In order to achieve this overall aim, the project will seek to meet five main objectives: 1.
To extend the EThOS partnership and encourage ‘early adopters’ this will require stepping up the advocacy campaign initiated by the EThOS project and putting in place a highly visible ‘sign-up’ process with a view to achieving a sufficient level of buy-in to ensure future viability; 2.
To increase the number of e-theses already available in the EThOS prototype, thus enhancing UK repository content by significantly increasing its critical mass and extending its scope to material that is currently poorly represented in digital repositories; 3.
To enhance the procedural infrastructure and upgrade the EThOS Toolkit accordingly with a view to improving institutional workflows in close partnership with registry and academic staff and to addressing the HE community’s concerns, identified by the independent evaluation, regarding the management of third-party rights and the detection of plagiarism; 4.
To scale up the EThOS technological infrastructure for the move from prototype to ‘live’ status; 5.
To monitor and test relevant technology trends in order to identify those technologies which EThOS may be able to adopt in the future to improve further the management of e-theses and consolidate the embedding of the service within institutional practices;’ Plans EThOSnet aims to have as many HEIs as possible participating in the live service, in order to make a comprehensive body of theses available to researchers.
A critical level of participation is also necessary to ensure the viability and sustainability of the service.
EThOSnet hopes to achieve this by fostering a strong community of sponsoring HEIs working together with the British Library.
The Project is developing a suite of resources that participants can use and adapt in order to support the creation of e-theses in their own institutions, whatever stage they are at.
These materials are intended to assist key HEI staff (usually library and registry staff, as well as repository managers, all of whom handle theses at different stages in their lifecycle of creation and consultation), and to support postgraduate student authors and their supervisors.
We are finding that the idea of a comprehensive e-thesis service is now widely accepted, and that the enquiries we receive from prospective participants are shifting away from general matters and moving more towards dealing with the nitty-gritty practicalities and specific issues that arise from handling e-theses and from the advocacy process within their own institutions.
In the light of this, the EThOSnet advocacy team plans to contact prospective participants to guide them through this process.
We will develop a very practical checklist that participants can use to ascertain how near their own HEI is to being ready for the live service, and develop supporting FAQs.
We will work on gathering data on costing old and new models of thesis supply, and gleaning helpful statistics from the existing document supply arrangements, eg on the most frequently requested material by subject, by HEI, by date, etc in order to help participants predict likely future demands and target their efforts to best effect.
We also hope to build a community of participants, through visits and workshops, and by creating a new blog where interested members can discuss issues and share their experience.
EThOSnet will also direct significant efforts into enhancing the Toolkit of advice and guidance, and into technical enhancements.
These include: Enhancements to the Toolkit More detailed legal advice (for institutions and authors, eg on IPR, especially the practicalities of handling third-party rights) Advice on responsible risk-taking in cases where authors cannot be contacted More model documents for HEIs to adapt and use in their own situations (such as suggested text for submission regulation, model embargo procedures and local examples of good practice) A more interactive approach to the toolkit (including space for EThOS participants to contribute experiences, and possible developments such as an interactive cost calculator, and information in XML format for integration into local Web sites) Frequently Asked Questions on aspects of the service Technical updates Service level agreement Technical Enhancements Scaling up the prototype hub, to handle a large-volume operation Integration with institutional repository systems and additional sources of metadata for theses (eg library catalogues) Integration with discovery and delivery systems to facilitate access to e-theses Collaboration with plagiarism detection systems (eg JISC Plagiarism Service) Establishing appropriate metrics and meaningful performance indicators Monitoring and testing technology trends to enable technical sustainability for the service Applying the outcomes of the JISC Digital Repositories Programme to e-theses Born-digital theses from the project’s partner institutions and early participants, and a body of c.7,000 theses being digitised from other project funds will be added to the central hub over the coming months.
Work on testing and refining workflows will result in a ‘soft’ launch in early 2008.
A date for the launch of the full service, and then for the cessation of the present thesis supply service will be announced as soon as possible.
We are also uncovering a great deal of interest amongst HEIs in thesis digitisation projects over and above the immediate needs of the service.
Therefore, EThOSnet will endeavour to assess the extent of this demand and consider ways of meeting this, for example by using any spare capacity in the digitisation service, or running separate supplementary projects alongside the core service.
Get Ready for the Launch If you are a member of staff in a UK HEI and involved with any stage of handling theses, eg a member of library or registry staff, or a repository administrator, there are many things you can be doing to prepare for the launch of the live EThOS service: Join the JISCmail E-THESES-UK [6] mailing list.
News about developments will be disseminated via this list.
Look at the EThOS Toolkit [7] and ensure that you know where your own institution stands on the policy questions.
Consider the likely impact on your current arrangements for thesis handling, consulting and document supply.
Revisit the EThOS Web site [8] over the next few weeks and months.
At present it covers the original EThOS project phase (2005-2006) but several enhancements and developments are planned, and new information will be added as EThOSnet gets fully underway.
If your institution wants to offer free access to its PhD theses, be prepared to vire costs between budgets or to identify a new budget to support the implementation of the service.
EThOSnet will be able to negotiate invoice dates in the latter half of financial year 2007⁄08 or early in 2008⁄09.
The costs are outlined in a JISC briefing paper [3] but for HEIs choosing the sponsorship option, the annual charge is as follows, with an initial commitment period of 3 years: JISC Bands A-C : £8,000 JISC Bands D-F : £4,000 JISC Bands G-J : £2,000 Tell your postgraduate students and supervisors about your plans.
Ensure that IPR issues, especially in relation to third-party material, are covered in your training for postgraduates, and that students adopt the habit of seeking permission to disseminate any third-party material in their thesis.
(See the EThOS Toolkit [2] for guidance.
There are plans to enhance this area of the Web site over the coming months.)
Check, and if necessary, amend official documentation such as thesis author agreements and/or regulations, to allow e-distribution of theses.
Tell your alumni about your plans.
If you have an IR (and if your institution has a plan for checking the authenticity and version of material supplied), invite alumni to supply you with born-digital theses, and, equally, give them the opportunity to opt out of the service.
Watch out for a new project blog (amongst other enhancements to the Web site) and join in the discussions.
Consider how you would go about the practicalities of getting ready to participate in the EThOS service.
Contact info@ethos.ac.uk for further guidance if necessary.
By encouraging HEIs to collaborate, by creating a co-ordinated and comprehensive UK service for researchers, supported by the British Library, and by engaging the expertise and interests of all the players in the UK e-theses and repositories scene, the live EThOS service will be greater than the sum of its parts.
References Key Perspectives Ltd and UCL Library Services (2006), Evaluation of options for a UK electronic thesis service: Study report http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/openaccessarchive/reports/EThOS%20Report%20-%20final%20published%20version.pdf The EThOS Toolkit: Legal Issues http://ethostoolkit.rgu.ac.uk/?page_id=8 JISC (2007) Briefing Paper: Electronic Theses: EThOS the Electronic Theses Online Service http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_ethosbp.aspx The Directory of Open Access Repositories http://www.opendoar.org/ JISC UK theses digitisation project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digitisation/theses.aspx UK discussion list for electronic theses and dissertations http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/E-THESES-UK.html EThOS Toolkit of guidance http://ethostoolkit.rgu.ac.uk/ EThOS Web site (under development) http://www.ethos.ac.uk/ Author Details Jill Russell Digital Assets Project Manager Information Services University of Birmingham (Member of the EThOSnet project team) Email: info@ethos.ac.uk or j.c.russell@bham.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ethos.ac.uk/ (under development) Return to top Article Title: “EThOSnet: Building a UK e-Theses Community” Author: Jill Russell Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/russell/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What's in PSIgate for Further Education?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What's in PSIgate for Further Education?
Buzz database cataloguing e-learning Citation BibTex RIS John Blunden-Ellis describes the materials and services available from the RDN subject service PSIgate in respect of students and practitioners in FE.
PSIgate [1] is the physical sciences hub of the RDN and provides free access to a fully searchable catalogue of high-quality resources on astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences, materials, physics, and history/policy of science.
PSIgate provides a range of material suitable for use by FE.
All the services within PSIgate are interlinked to allow links to be followed and further information on chosen topics to be discovered.
PSIgate aims to provide a service that is always "two clicks away from rich information" and is particularly rich in full-text tutorials, lecture notes and subject guides, many of them relevant to FE study.
Virtual Training Tutorials In conjunction with other hubs of the RDN, PSIgate maintains free eLearning tutorials on the Web that teach Internet information skills.
Originally written with HE students in mind, they have, however, proved of use to those studying FE courses.
There are three single subject tutorials [2] maintained by PSIgate: Internet Chemist Internet Physicist Internet Geologist Interactive Tutorials and Quizzes PSIgate provides access to a 92-page chemistry tutorial [3] that covers all basic physical science concepts by posing questions and providing a complete solution by double clicking on the appropriate key.
There is also a more advanced chemistry online tutorial [4].
PSIgate has developed a number of science quizzes [5] as part of fun science that aim to illustrate basic principles of science.
Quizzes cover such topics as: Chocaholics, chemical confusion, volcanoes, magic moments, nuclear science, and space.
Science Timelines PSIgate has one of the largest science timelines on the Web with over 1,000 entries.
The timeline can be searched as one list, or as separate lists for each of the subjects covered by PSIgate: Astronomy, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Materials Science, and Physics.
Spotlight Magazine Spotlight Magazine currently contains nearly 60 news features on all aspects of current issues in science.
Articles are also well illustrated, are provided with online references and are linked to relevant PSIgate catalogue searches.
The Spotlight articles can be searched by keyword, or browsed by subject.
Spotlight has won two Golden Web Awards.
Spotlight is a valuable source for project ideas and contains such topics as: Slip Sliding Away on oceanic volcanoes; Corrosion Just Say No on polymers in shampoos and how they may prevent leaks in oil and gas pipelines; A Closer Look at a Near-Miss about an asteroid near-miss; Finding Amino about amino acids.
Case studies for FE In common with the other hubs, PSIgate offers a series of case studies on how resources in the PSIgate catalogue may be applied to and adapted for teaching and learning use.
These case studies have been developed in collaboration with FE practitioners.
Topics covered include: Chemistry Using the Internet and IR Spectra Using the Internet and Lattice Enthalpy Using the Internet and Boiling Point pH Titration's and Indicators Using the Internet and Mass Spectra Physics Units, constants and orders of magnitude Paperclip Physics Using Virtual Experiments Assessment Ideas for Lecturers Knowledge of Mechanics Science Health and Safety Regulations for Science Organisations Organic and Biochemical Compounds Genetic Engineering Application of Physics in Modern Medicine Energy Changes in Chemical Systems Internet Resource Catalogue The PSIgate catalogue has many full-text tutorials, lecture notes and essays appropriate to FE learning and teaching.
Currently there are: 512 tutorials in chemistry 422 tutorials in physics/astronomy 136 tutorials in earth sciences 215 tutorials in materials Future plans As with other hubs, PSIgate will be expanding its Further Education coverage during 2004 with the addition of approximately 700 new records of particular relevance to the sector.
Further records, tagged for FE from the existing PSIgate database, will also be added.
References PSIgate Web site http://www.psigate.ac.uk/ PSIgate Training Resources Tutorials http://www.psigate.ac.uk/newsite/training.html PSIgate Introductory University Chemistry Course 1 http://www.psigate.ac.uk/newsite/reference/plambeck/chem1/ua101.html PSIgate Introductory University Chemistry Course 2 http://www.psigate.ac.uk/newsite/reference/plambeck/chem2/ua102.html PSIgate science quizzes http://www.psigate.ac.uk/roads/cgi-bin/quiztest.cgi Author Details John Blunden-Ellis Service Manager PSIgate & Gesource Email: j.blunden-ellis@man.ac.uk Web site: http://www.psigate.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "What's in PSIgate for Further Education?"
Author: John Blunden-Ellis Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/psigate/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Information Architecture Designing Information Environments for Purpose Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information Architecture Designing Information Environments for Purpose Buzz software framework xml archives metadata interoperability Citation BibTex RIS John Paschoud looks at this collection of articles and finds some good parts in a generally ineffective whole.
This is not a book that is intended to be read cover-to-cover, and the editors make this clear in a handy reading guide.
The authors collected here come from a range of backgrounds and organisations across the public and private sectors, but predominantly (like the two editors) from what I would call the information management consultancy industry.
The preface by Peter Morville purports to be 'a brief history of information architecture', covering the period from 1994 (back before we were even talking about 'information landscapes' at the peak of the eLib Programme [1]) to 2002.
Peter certainly has claim to experiencing some key developments of Internet-based information resources, but he writes from a perspective that fails to include many of the significant developments occurring outside that community in the USA.
In particular, the preface (and the whole book for that matter) includes no mention of the work by JISC (and all the UK institutions that have contributed to that work) to develop the Common Information Environment, and the institutional and national standards and services that will support it; this despite the preface which welcomes the 'distinctly European perspective' brought to the discipline by this book.
Inevitably, with a collection of articles there is some repetition of basics and disjointedness of style.
Also unsurprisingly, the essential substance of several of the articles in the book, (if not exactly 'author pre-print archives'), can be found for free online, such as the case study of the SeamlessUK Project (Chapter 3) by Mary Rowlatt et al, which is described in similar detail way back in Ariadne issue 19 [2].
(Readers can do their own searches for the rest).
The strength or added value, therefore, of gathering these articles together in a book, (given they are accessible on the Web), must be the framework it provides to tie these parts into a coherent whole, for an intended reader who wants to create, or manage, (or just understand) these rather intangible things we call 'information environments'.
The editors do something to outline a framework and one possible approach, but it could have been vastly improved by much more than the scant sixteen pages they contribute in the form of an introduction and prefaces to the four main sections of the book, on the design environment, software environments, managing metadata and the user interface.
Overall the book does not seem highly focussed on what I would choose as a definition of information architecture, or the process of designing information environments and the technologies to support them, as the title suggests.
My anticipation that I would find help with some of the information architecture problems I am currently wrestling with myself turned to disappointment when I read further.
The articles stray into such nearby territory as that of how to specify and procure software (Chapter 4) sadly without addressing the issues of how to evaluate open source software alternatives alongside commercial offerings.
Coverage of such related activities is not a wholly negative feature, for readers who need a primer on truisms such as, 'The price [of a software product] is never the price'.
I can certainly think of library middle managers who are daunted by smart-suited systems vendors and could learn from this.
But they would almost certainly not describe themselves as 'information architects'.
The section on metadata and interoperability is also a useful overview of some interoperability concepts.
The article by Derek Sturdy (Chapter 7) will help to demystify XML and its potential uses to some library professionals (the ones who suffer from angle-bracket-phobia [3]), by connecting it to their own language of taxonomies and authority files.
So, this book may give readers who have been stuck for too long in a library in a university some interesting insights into how the other half lives; but it will not tell them all about how to 'do' information architecture.
This is a collection of articles, more of them useful in their own right than not.
The contents list, preface and introduction are available online [4] for potential readers who wish to decide for themselves how many of them they will find useful.
However the book and the editors fail to relate them into a coherent structure that describes 'information architecture' clearly to me at least.
To analogise with the more traditional sort of architecture (of the built environment), it has some very good descriptions of bricks, girders and some clever ways of fixing them together; but it will not turn anyone into Antonio Gaudi or Frank Lloyd Wright.
References Dempsey L., Kilgour A., Kirriemuir J., John MacColl J., eLib Starts to Deliver, Ariadne, issue 1, 1996. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue1/elib/ Rowlatt, Mary et al, A new profile for citizens' (or community) information?, Ariadne, issue 19, 1999. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/rowlatt/ Sperberg-McQueen, CM, Trip report, ACH/ALLC 2003 / Web X: a decade of the World Wide Web Annual joint conference Of the Association for Computers and the Humanities And the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, 3 June 2003 http://www.w3.org/People/cmsmcq/2003/achallc/achallc2003.trip.report.html Gilchrist, Alan and Mahon, Barry (editors), information architecture designing information environments for purpose (contents), Facet Publishing, 2004 http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/497contents.pdf Author Details John Paschoud Infosystems Engineer & Projects Manager London School of Economics Library Email: j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lse.ac.uk/people/j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Information Architecture designing information environments for purpose" Author: John Paschoud Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/paschoud-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data software rdf framework html database rss xml atom portal apache infrastructure archives metadata digitisation tagging xsl namespace repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing windows multimedia z39.50 linux rtf aggregation perl e-learning streaming copac groovy personalisation ebook mysql openurl licence authentication ict interoperability algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Hyper Clumps, Mini Clumps and National Catalogues...
The JISC-funded CC-interop Project completed its work during 2004 and now is holding an event to disseminate the key findings of the project.
The project built on the work of the successful eLib Phase 3 "Clumps" projects and investigated three broad areas to inform about interoperability between physical and distributed union catalogues.
Find out about: how distributed and large physical union catalogues can interact, including the building of a distributed catalogue capable of accepting remote Z39.50 searches from COPAC how to identify collections in the resource landscape and about current and future indexing & cataloguing practices how users behave when searching large union catalogues, both physical and distributed This one-day conference will take place at the British Library Conference Centre on Thursday 11 November 2004.
Attendance at this event will cost £125 which includes all sessions, refreshments and lunch.
Information on the Conference Programme, the venue and booking arrangements is available.
[Received: August 2004] Back to headlines Workshops and online resources from TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/traintasiing.html Putting your images online Thursday 11 November 2004 Bristol Takes participants through the whole process of getting images online, from capturing them to using them within presentations and on Web sites.
Ideal for teachers/lecturers who want to produce high-quality resources with a minimum of fuss.
Finding and using images for learning and teaching Friday 12 November 2004 Bristol Sets out strategies for locating good quality images and using them effectively within teaching; topics include the role of images in learning and how copyright affects their use.
Both workshops are small and hands-on.
Full details and booking information is available on the TASI Web site at: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ New online resources TASI has just released ten new resources on using images in teaching resources, available from: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/using/using.html Topics range from capturing and sourcing images to using them in print, Powerpoint or on the Web.
These short papers are aimed at those new to the subject and include PDF versions designed to be printed on two sides of A4.
We have also just updated our guide to Image Editing Software: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/creating/imgedsw.html TASI is a national service supporting those in FE and HE.
In addition to training it offers a free helpdesk and an extensive Web site at http://www.tasi.ac.uk/ [Received: August 2004] Back to headlines Rediscovering Ceramics and Glass at the Museum of London: Thursday 18 November 2004 Rediscovering Ceramics and Glass at the Museum of London Mortimer Wheeler House, Museum of London, Eagle Wharf Road, Hackney.
In 2001 the Museum of London moved their ceramics and glass collection (over 25,000 items) from the main Museum site at London Wall to their stores at Mortimer Wheeler House in Hackney.
During 2003-2004, with the help of a grant from the MLA Designation Challenge Fund, the Museum was able successfully to re-house and digitise this internationally important collection and make the results available on a new Web site: (http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/ceramics/).
The collection can now be viewed in custom-built storage cabinets with clear fronts to allow good visibility, with some items in drawers and larger items in open storage.
An information zone provides online access to the catalogue as well as literature relevant to the collection.
The collection is available to researchers by appointment.
Information on other ceramics and glass collections held by non-national museums in the London area will be added to the Web site in November, following a recent survey.
To mark the end of this important project, the Museum of London invite you to a seminar at Mortimer Wheeler House on Thursday 18 November, 2004 (11am 5pm).
Here, delegates will have a chance to view the new storage facilities, hear about the collections, their move to the new store as well as the digitisation process and Web site.
Supported by the MLA Designation Challenge Fund, the day will be free to all delegates.
A buffet lunch will be provided.
For a timetable of the seminar and to book a place please email: abromley@museumoflondon.org.uk by 8 November 2004.
[Received: October 2004] Back to headlines Registration is open for the SPARC / SPARC Europe Workshop Institutional Repositories: The Next Stage, Washington, D.C., 18-19 November 2004.
Members of SPARC Europe receive a discount on the registration fee.
See http://db.arl.org/ir2004/reg/ for details.
This conference is sponsored by JISC.
Event Information The Workshop: SPARC and SPARC Europe present a two-day workshop packed with sessions that will help you gain an understanding of strategies critical to implementing and managing the successful long-term growth of your Institutional Repository (IR).
Experienced leaders and supporting players in the IR field will describe practices applicable to a variety of technology platforms.
A special focus will be on tactics for working with faculty and researchers to make IRs a success.
For further information see: http://db.arl.org/ir2004/reg/ A print version of the IR Workshop Program with full information about the planned sessions is also available.
[PDF] http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/docs/SPARC_IRWorkshop_Flier.pdf [Received: August 2004] Back to headlines Association for History and Computing and The Royal Historical Society: 'Recasting the Past: Digital Histories' One-day conference, 27 November 2004 at The National Archives, Kew, London.
'Digital Histories: Recasting the Past' examines the impact of digital information on how history is researched, taught and presented as well as how digital resources for history are selected, created and accessed.
There will be 20 presentations from historians, archivists, information scholars and post-graduate students from the UK and abroad.
Full details of the conference programme, abstracts and registration information can be found on the conference Web site at: http://www.ahc.ac.uk/confweb/index.htm The cost, including refreshments and lunch, is £40.
[Received: October 2004] Back to headlines BECTA Expert Technology Seminars Becta is pleased to announce the next series of one-day Expert Technology Seminars which will commence in autumn 2004 and run through to March 2005.
This continues a series of Expert Technology Seminars organised by the Technical Research team of Becta since July 2000.
The dates and themes of these free seminars are as follows: Thursday, 9 December 2004 e-Assessment NCSL Conference Centre, Nottingham Wednesday, 26 January 2005 Content Creation and Management British Library, London Thursday, 17 March 2005 Network Infrastructures location tbc For further information on these seminars, including registration details, go to Forthcoming events: http://www.becta.org.uk/etseminars/forthcoming.cfm Who should attend?
LEA ICT support staff National and regional organisations involved in advising, delivering or procuring ICT services for schools and colleges Central and local government representatives Government agencies Established educational ICT suppliers and companies wanting to know more about the UK education market Agendas and details of speakers will be published approximately three weeks before each seminar.
An archive of presentations from previous seminars is available.
: http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/corporate.cfm?section=7_1&id=2608 [Received: September 2004] Back to headlines Beyond Personalisation 2005 Workshop on the Next Stage of Recommender Systems Research Call for Papers http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/beyond2005/ In conjunction with the 2005 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2005), San Diego, California, USA, 9-12January , 2005. http://www.iuiconf.org Workshop Topics and Goals This workshop intends to bring recommender systems researchers and practitioners together in order to discuss the current state of recommender systems research, both on existing and emerging research topics, and to determine how research in this area should proceed This workshop will focus on the following four main topics: 1.
Understanding and trusting recommender systems Do users understand and trust the recommendations they receive from recommender systems, what kinds of information do recommenders need to provide to users to build trust, and how difficult is it to regain trust in a recommender if it is lost?
2.
User interfaces for recommender systems What are good ways to present recommendations to users, how do you integrate recommenders into the displays of existing information systems, and how can interfaces encourage users to provide ratings in order to 'close the loop' for recommendations, that is, how can you get users to consume the items recommended and then tell the system how good the recommendations are?
3.
The future of recommendation algorithms and their metrics How can we generate better individual and group recommendations, develop new metrics and evaluation criteria for recommendations, and achieve cross-domain recommendations?
4.
Social consequences and opportunities of recommender systems How do individuals and groups of people respond to recommendations, how can recommendations be integrated with online and real world communities, and in what ways do recommendations affect social organisations?
Intended Audience The workshop is intended for both established researchers and practioners in the domain of recommender systems as well as for new researchers and students with interesting ideas on recommender systems and their future.
Participants do not have to come from a specific application domain, as long as their research or ideas are on one of the main topics of the workshop.
Important Dates 8 Nov 2004: Paper Submission Deadline 28 Nov 2004: Paper Acceptance Notification 6 Dec 2004: Camera-ready Copies Due (and last day of Early Registration for IUI 2005) 10 Dec 2004: Papers Available from Web site 9 Jan 2005: Workshop at IUI 2005 [Received: September 2004] Back to headlines Latest News on Museums & Galleries Month 2005: Building on Success with Objects of Desire: The Art of Collecting Museums and Galleries Month will take place from 1 to 31 May 2005.
Over a thousand museums and galleries around the UK will take part in this countrywide promotion.
Building on 2004, MGM2005 has an multi-faceted theme and a programme of national and regional events are now in the planning stage.
Museums and galleries are also developing events and activities around the theme.
Virginia Tandy, Director of Manchester City Galleries, joins Loyd Grossman, as Co-Chairman of MGM 2005.
Collecting and collections are major issues for museums and galleries and the theme also aims to stimulate debate and interest in individual objects, private and public collections and collecting for the future.
Museums and Galleries Month 2004 was a great success with new regional events in bringing thousands of visitors to museums and galleries.
There was increased promotion, thanks to sponsorship from Eurostar, and greatly increased media coverage.
Web coverage on the 24 Hour Museum was also hugely important.
The full report of MGM2004 is now on the website http://www.mgm.org.uk.
Museums and Galleries Month receives funding from MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Council), Arts Council England and others.
Further information: http://www.mgm.org.uk and http://www.may2005.org.uk [Received: October 2004] Back to headlines ECDL European Conference on Digital Libraries CALL FOR PAPERS (http://www.ecdl2005.org ) 18-23 September 2005, Vienna, Austria Introduction: ECDL 2005 is the 9th conference in the series of European Digital Library conferences.
ECDL has become the major European conference on digital libraries, and associated technical, practical, and social issues, bringing together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field.
ECDL 2005 is jointly organised by the Vienna University of Technology (VUT), the Austrian National Library (ÖNB), and the Austrian Computer Society (OCG).
The conference will take place in the Vienna Technical University.
Important dates: Workshop Proposal Deadline: 28 January Workshop Acceptance Notification: 27 February Paper/Tutorial/Panel submission Deadline: 1 March Acceptance Notifications: 15 May Final version of Papers: 3 June Conference: 18-23 September Topics: Topics of contributions include (but are not limited to): Concepts of Digital Libraries and Digital Documents System Architectures, Integration and Interoperability Information Organisation, Search and Usage User Studies and System Evaluation Digital Preservation Digital Library Applications [Received: October 2004] Back to headlines AHDS announces launch of a new case study on digital rights management http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/case-studies/protecting-rights/ This case study examines the AHDS's rights management framework through the perspective of a digitisation project.
It begins by discussing the methods by which material can be licensed for distribution on the Internet, and the implications of making such material available for use online.
It examines the terms and conditions that users are required to accept in using AHDS collections, and it gives a practical example of how the rights of depositors have been protected.
It provides an exemplar action plan that rights managers may find useful in protecting copyrights that have been entrusted to them.
It concludes by arguing that clarity over rights and responsibilities is as important in the protection of digital assets as authentication or authorisation.
This case study will be relevant to many parties, including those charged with creating digital resources, those who use digital resources, and those who publish resources through the Internet.
Alastair Dunning Arts and Humanities Data Service King's College London 0207 848 1972 [Received: October 2004] Back to headlines OpenURL Standard Adds Greater Functionality and Interoperability to Collection Manager Blackwell's Book Services has implemented the OpenURL standard, a protocol for linking from one information resource to another via a library link resolver, in its Collection Manager™ system.
With the OpenURL standard in place, libraries can seamlessly connect to a variety of online resources, such as WorldCat, book review databases, Blackwell's Online Bookshop, or the library's own ILL service simply by designating or identifying the libraries link resolver in their Collection Manager preferences.
This allows acquisitions staff to make more informed buying and collection development decisions, easily integrated into their local acquisitions workflow at the point of order.
Linking from Collection Manager to a union catalogue without a link resolver is also supported in some cases depending on the URL structure of the union catalogue.
Blackwell's joins a number of leading library suppliers in adopting the Open URL standard.
Hundreds of library databases now support the OpenURL standard and more than a thousand institutions use link resolvers, greatly benefiting library staff and patrons by expanding the number of resources available to them.
Blackwell's Books Services headquarters are located in Lake Oswego, Oregon, USA with offices in Oxford, England, Sydney, Australia, and Blackwood, New Jersey, USA.
[Received: October 2004] Back to headlines Early English Books Online Early English Books Online, is introducing lecturers, students and researchers to the full possibilities of online resources.
It makes available online more than 125,000 titles, in digital page format, published between 1473 and 1700, starting with the earliest printed works in the English language.
A major launch event to be held next month at the British Library will, in addition, introduce a new project the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) to lecturers, researchers and librarians which will see the conversion of 20% of this vast resource to fully searchable text.
In addition, academics will be able to suggest which texts should be included in those being made fully searchable.
On the JISC Web site, guest journalist Pat Leon, reports on this extraordinary resource, as well as this TCP project which will enhance it still further.
To access the article, please go to: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=news_eebo   [Received: September 2004] Back to headlines Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Networked E-Learning A Beginner's Guide for Content Developers As part of its work on the JISC-funded X4L Programme, the L2L Project (http://www.stir.ac.uk/departments/daice/l2l/) was involved in tackling IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) in the context of reusable learning materials and learning objects.
One outcome of this work is a practical guide to help developers and academics to deal with IPR in e-learning content development.
This has been published by the JISC Legal Information Service in Web and RTF formats and can be found at this site: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/publications/johncasey_1.htm Description of the Guide: This guide aims to provide a user-friendly introduction to IPR issues for e-learning content developers and managers.
It is intended to act as a point of entry to the field of IPR in e-learning that will provide a good foundation for building expertise in the e-learning developer community.
It deals with the basic aspects of IPR, especially copyright, in e-learning content development, with an emphasis on reusing third party materials to create new resources.
The guide has been written by an e-learning content developer who has had to deal with these issues in practice.
The style of the guide is practical and approachable with many useful tips and observations but it also provides a sketch of the wider issues.
It also provides flow diagrams, templates, case studies and further sources of information and guidance [Received: October 2004] Back to headlines JISC and The Academic Library announce changes to their agreement for The Academic Library's ebooks collections.
New Collections Institutions can now subscribe to titles from the United Nations University Press via The Academic Library.
These titles cover a wide range of subjects from Humanitarian Intervention and Crisis Management to the Environment, Economic Development and Global Governance.
For further information on the titles available in this collection please see: http://www.theacademiclibrary.com/libraries.asp.
New Subscription Options JISC and The Academic Library have also added a new Pick and Mix option allowing institutions to subscribe to twenty titles from any of the collections.
Institutions will continue to receive unlimited concurrent access to all of the titles they subscribe to.
For further information on pricing please see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_academiclib.html Free access to Classics in Political Economy All subscribers will now be offered free access to the Classics in Political Economy collection for the remainder of year one of this JISC agreement which ends on 28 February 2005 Classics in Political Economy includes key works by Smith, Marx, Ricardo, Engels, Mill and Gramsci.
For a full list of the titles available please see: http://www.theacademiclibrary.com/libraries.asp.
The Academic Library interface allows subscribers to search across the full text of all the titles their institution subscribes to.
This allows users to examine complex content in great depth both quickly and easily.
The Academic Library also organises in-depth training sessions for all subscribing institutions to help them get the most out of ebooks.
For further details on The Academic Library please contact Liam Earney (L.Earney@jisc.ac.uk) or to apply for a free trial, please contact trial_access@jisc.ac.uk.
[Received: August 2004] Back to headlines New X4L Programme Video Demonstration Available A new video demonstration showing how to use current versions of Intralibrary and RELOAD to build and package learning materials is now available.
The video demonstration can be found on the X4L pages of the JISC Web site at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_x4l.
Just click on the link near the top of the page.
[Received: October 2004] Back to headlines JORUM Names Successful Bidder The JORUM procurement process for the purchase, installation, development and support of an online repository system for learning and teaching materials has now been completed.
The contract has been awarded to Intrallect (http://www.intrallect.com/) for their 'intraLibrary Learning-Object Management System'.
The contract was awarded on 24 August 2004 following a European Union procurement process that began in February 2004.
Eight vendors were short-listed to tender from seventeen that submitted pre-qualification questionnaires.
JISC and the two national data centres offered the contract to Intrallect who tendered a very strong bid and were able to demonstrate a robust and flexible standards-based repository system.
The JORUM team will be working with Intrallect to launch the JORUM service for the whole of UK Higher and Further Education from August 2005.
The JORUM service will form a key part of the JISC Information Environment.
The JORUM service technical infrastructure, support and outreach services will be fully supported by the two national data centres, EDINA at the University of Edinburgh (http://edina.ac.uk/) and MIMAS at the University of Manchester (http://www.mimas.ac.uk/).
The set-up and launch project that will lead JORUM into service from August 2005 has now started.
Customisation of the system to meet the user community's requirements will commence shortly, after which the migration of existing JISC project output content, collated content from other sources and content from early adopters will be submitted to the system.
Further information regarding JORUM can be located at http://www.jorum.ac.uk Email: adrian.stevenson@man.ac.uk MIMAS: http://www.mimas.ac.uk JORUM: http://www.jorum.ac.uk [Received: September 2004] Back to headlines West Midlands local authorities combine efforts to develop region-wide knowledge management tool: 270,000 public sector staff to benefit from £650k project A new information management system, and the first online public sector knowledge-sharing infrastructure of such a scale in Europe, is going live on 12 November 2004.
38 local authorities in the West Midlands have collaborated to develop the new system, known as 'the Knowledge Engine' or 'KEN'.
The Web-based tool and one-stop information portal will allow 270,000 local government staff across the region to share their knowledge and experiences.
The development was funded with £400,000 awarded to The West Midlands Telematics Group from the ODPM's Local Government Online Modernisation Fund.
A further £250,000 was allocated to the West Midlands Local Government Association (WMLGA) from the European Regional Development Fund's (ERDF) Innovative Actions campaign, administered by the Regional Development Agency.
This means there will be no subscription or technical cost to local authorities.
Technical Details KEN includes a suite of Web-based collaboration tools from Lotus Sametime and Quickplace to create virtual meeting places for up to 16,000 people simultaneously.
These include structured instant discussion facilities, online whiteboards and document sharing workspaces.
Any collaboration within the spaces is automatically minuted for immediate download and can then be indexed and archived.
This reduces unnecessary administration and makes it easier for local authority colleagues across the region to benefit from others' experiences and creativity without the time and cost of travel.
A fully searchable regional knowledge base includes automatic document harvesting and an intelligent regional search engine.
Authorities decide which documents they wish to include in KEN and the software retrieves, indexes and archives them automatically.
Searching for 'smartcard', for example, would automatically also retrieve documents containing the words 'identity card'.
This could give officers information and case studies on local smartcard schemes, proposed uses or cost models.
The search element is powered by Fretwell-Downing Informatics (FDI), the founding technology partner for the seamlessUK citizens' information portal.
Demo disk A KEN demo disk is available on request from p.kendal@smartregion.org.uk or 0121 245 0190.
Conference and KEN 'go live' date KEN will go live at the 'Governance Partnership in the West Midlands' conference on 12 November in Birmingham.
This event includes speakers from ODPM and West Midlands in Europe and showcases regional 'e' collaboration and smart-working programmes from local authorities across the region.
For more details or to book your place contact: email: p.kendal@smartregion.org.uk, ring 0121 245 0190 or book online at http://www.askken.org.uk/conferenceRegistration.asp.
Refreshments are provided and there is no charge to attend but places are limited, so book soon.
[Received: October 2004] Back to headlines Streaming Goes Mainstream MLA launches online tool to help libraries deliver Web broadcasts MLA has launched a new online tool to help libraries deliver cutting edge People's Network services.
The first stop for many new users of the Internet is the public library through the amazingly successful People's Network project that saw 30,000 PCs installed in libraries right across the UK.
While the ICT skills training given to all public library staff has enabled them to manage the technology and help new users, setting up the PCs to support streaming media effectively has caused some headaches.
Enter a new online support resource just launched by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) designed to help those library staff check out their computers and set them up to give the best access to streamed media.
Developed by streaming media specialists Groovy Gecko, the diagnostic toolkit provides information about two popular software products used to view Web broadcasts and will provide information to MLA, who continue to manage the development of the People's Network, on the use of streaming media in public libraries.
Commenting on the launch Chris Batt, Chief Executive of MLA said that, "Library staff have completed the installation of the People's Network infrastructure on time and in budget, and all library staff have now been trained in IT skills.
The third phase of the project is the delivery of e-services to communities throughout the country, using the People's Network..
This online diagnostic tool will help MLA and libraries to plan more effectively in delivering exciting, cutting edge e-services which employ the use of audio and video."
The tool and instructions to use it can be found at: http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/future/streaming.asp [Received: September 2004] Back to headlines Curriculum Online Getting your cultural content online For the past 18 months MLA has been working with the DfES Curriculum Online Team to promote and facilitate the provision of curriculum based e-learning materials by the cultural sector, with the following aims: To increase the use of educational content, both classroom and teacher-support resources, from the cultural sector by schools.
To improve the quality and usefulness of educational content from the cultural sector.
To make it easier for teachers, pupils and parents to discover educational content from the cultural sector that is relevant to specific curriculum learning objectives."
Run by the DfES, Curriculum Online (www.curriculumonline.gov.uk http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk/) is an online catalogue which gives teachers easy access to a wide range of multimedia teaching and learning resources, all linked to the curriculum in England.
It is a key part of the Government's drive to increase the use of ICT in the classroom.
A pilot study was launched to understand the issues cultural organisations face in becoming registered suppliers.
Four organisations were selected to take part.
The findings of this pilot study were presented at a series of Roadshows that took place earlier in the year, hosted by each of MLA's Regional Agencies.
Based on these findings, the DfES has published two guides which tell you the benefits of becoming a supplier to Curriculum Online, and how to do it.
Guide One: Getting involved in Curriculum Online practical steps for cultural organisations What cultural organisations can gain by becoming a Registered Supplier An in-depth look at the administrative and practical issues involved.
Includes funding, registering, how to measure success, and useful sources of information.
Guide Two: Preparing your content for Curriculum Online a guide for cultural organisations A practical guide to reviewing, adapting and creating content for Curriculum Online.
Full of useful hints and tips to maximise the potential of your content as digital learning resources.
These two guides are now available at http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk/culture The area of the Curriculum Online Web site specially designed for cultural organisations.
As well as everything you need to know about becoming, or being, a supplier, you'll find information about the Pilot Study, key learning points from this research, and the Roadshows where these findings were presented as well as the following key documents: Getting Involved in Curriculum Online: practical steps for cultural organisations Preparing your content for Curriculum Online: a guide for cultural organisations The Curriculum Online Tagging Tool A presentation by MLA on the learnings from the Pilot Study A presentation by the DfES on the role of ICT in schools eLearning case studies from the Regional Agencies ICT in action DfES video case studies This gives an excellent overview for those unable to attend the Roadshows,.
If you did attend, we hope you'll find these resources a useful presentation tool to help you spread the word to other colleagues.
(These resources are also available in limited quantities on CD for those unable to download them from the Web site.
Please contact your local MLA Regional Agency for details http://www.mla.gov.uk/action/regional/regionsmap.asp [Received: October 2004] Back to headlines URCHIN Nature Publishing Group (NPG) are pleased to announce the lastest release of their open-source RSS aggregator 'Urchin' to SourceForge (http://urchin.sf.net).
Initially funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) as one of the Publisher and Library/Learning Systems (PALS, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_pals) Metadata and Interoperability Group projects, Urchin has been substantially improved.
Version 0.92, the current stable release, introduces the following changes: A mod_perl front end for performance and persistence Using XML::LibXSLT to improve performance A new option for using HTTP status codes for error reporting Old items can be now be expunged after an update via an administrator-defined query Access, admin and error logs Web-triggerable remote refresh Configurable RDF output by adminstrator-defined inclusion or exclusion of namespaces The ability to combine several simple RDF query conditions using boolean AND and OR Numerous bug fixes Urchin is a Web based, customisable, RSS aggregator and filter.
Its primary purpose is to allow the generation of new RSS feeds by running queries against the collection of items in the Urchin database.
However, other arbitrary output formats can be defined and generated using XSL transformations or HTML::Template templates.
In other words, the collection of Urchin Perl modules form a foundation for building an RSS aggregation or portal service.
Urchin is a classic LAMP implementation written in Perl using, wherever possible, pre-existing Perl modules.
It uses MySQL for its database functionality and can run using either Apache with a mod_perl handler or any CGI-enabled Web server using the CGI script that is included with the distribution.
While Urchin is developed on a Red Hat Linux system, it has been ported to Mac OS X, and earlier versions have run successfully under Windows 2000, XP and CygWin.
This code has been tested on Red Hat Linux 8.0 running Apache version 2.0.40, MySQL version 4.0.13 and Perl version 5.8.0, and on Mac OS X 10.3.5 running Apache version 2.0.49, MySQL version 4.0.16 and Perl version 5.8.1.
Urchin's feature set includes: Reads RSS 0.9*, 1.0 and 2.0 Stores all incoming data in RSS 0.9x and 1.0 feeds Queryable on arbitrary data fields Supports boolean, simple RDF, full RDF querying Arbitrary output formats Alongside version 0.92, a development code snapshot has been released that includes support for importing Atom feeds, new administrative commands for defining feed aggregates, and the ability to use RSS and Atom auto-discovery links.
Urchin is Free Software.
Portions of the code are licensed under the GNU General Public License, the rest under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
[Received: August 2004] Back to headlines RDN Welcomes New Director Caroline Williams recently started as the new Executive Director of the Resource Discovery Network, taking overall responsibility for the strategic development of the service.
Most recently, Caroline was with Manchester Metropolitan University Library as Manager for Electronic Services Development, leading a range of electronic projects.
In addition, she has been responsible for the strategic development of library support for learning and teaching.
Many will know Caroline through her work as the last Secretary of the Janet User Group for Libraries (JUGL), and as a member of the JIBS Committee.
She is known particularly for her work on libraries and Virtual Learning Environments.
From the RDN Newsletter.
[Received: October 2004] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue41/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The RoMEO Project: Protecting Metadata in an Open Access Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The RoMEO Project: Protecting Metadata in an Open Access Environment Buzz data rdf framework database dissemination xml archives metadata schema repositories eprints copyright oai-pmh provenance uri licence odrl url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Elizabeth Gadd, Charles Oppenheim and Steve Probets describe how the RoMEO Project is seeking to safeguard freely available metadata disclosed and harvested under the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
The Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) enables the ‘disclosure’ of metadata by Data Providers and the harvesting of that metadata by Service Providers.
Although there is nothing to stop commercial providers from utilising this open-source protocol [1], it has its roots in the open access community and as such is used by many open archives.
These include subject-based archives such as ArXiv [2], CogPrints [3], and the increasing number of Institutional Repositories, many of which have been established as a result of funding via the UK JISC FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories) programme [4].
The RoMEO Project The RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open archiving) [5] was also funded under the FAIR programme.
It is investigating all the intellectual property rights (IPR) issues relating to the self-archiving of research papers via institutional repositories.
One key issue is how best to protect such research papers, and the metadata describing those papers, in an open access environment.
The investigations have taken the form of online surveys of academic authors [6][7], journal publishers, Data Providers and Service Providers [8], as well as an interesting analysis of 80 journal publishers’ copyright transfer agreements [9].
There were two principal aims of the data gathered through these surveys.
The first was to inform the development of some simple rights metadata by which academics could protect their open access research papers.
The second was to inform the creation of a means of protecting all the freely available metadata that will soon be circulating as the OAI-PMH is more widely adopted.
The development of the rights metadata solution will be documented fully in the sixth and final study in the RoMEO Studies Series [10].
This article concentrates on the second aim: how to protect freely available metadata disclosed and harvested under the OAI-PMH.
Survey of Data and Service Providers A full report on the online surveys of Data and Service Providers has been written up in RoMEO Studies 5 [8].
However, in summary, responses were received from 22 Data Providers (DPs) and 13 Service Providers (SPs) and some interesting discoveries were made with regards to the protection required by Data and Service Providers over their metadata.
Are there rights in metadata and if so, who owns them?
Perhaps the first question requiring an answer when considering protecting the rights in individual and collections of metadata is this: do such rights exist and if so, who owns them?
This issue is debated fully in RoMEO Studies 5, but we conclude that individual metadata records probably qualify for copyright protection, the owner of which would be either the record’s creator, or the employer of that creator.
Collections of metadata records would certainly qualify for Database Right in the EU, the owner of which would be the maker of the database, namely, the person who takes the initiative in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents of a database and assumes the risk of investing in that obtaining process [11]” or their employer if employed to create the database.
Rights owned by Data Providers Assuming that both individual and collections of metadata qualify for either copyright or database right, we found that in just over three-quarters of cases DPs are at least the joint rights owner, if not the sole owner, of those rights.
However, in five cases where the authors alone created the metadata disclosed by the DP, the author would be the sole rights holder.
Of course, the rights owner has the power to decide how that metadata may be used by third-parties.
As it is unlikely that authors will be interested in how their metadata is used by others (although they would certainly benefit from wide dissemination), DPs may wish to include a statement in their agreement with authors asking for a non-exclusive royalty-free licence to use the metadata in whichever ways they see fit.
Rights owned by Service Providers The majority of SPs (75%) enhanced the metadata that they harvested.
The important question is, do their enhancements merit copyright protection?
The UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act describes works of joint ownership as “a work produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of each author is not distinct from that of the other author or authors [12]“.
Thus, arguably, the enhancements made to a metadata record by the SP would qualify them for joint copyright ownership, because the contribution of one cataloguer is not distinct from that of the other.
However, as one of the original qualifications for copyright ownership is the demonstration of “sweat-of-brow” effort by the creator, it would seem logical that the enhancements would also need to demonstrate such effort in order to qualify.
Thus, enhancements such as normalising field values or adding domain addresses to URLs that lack them may not involve sufficient effort to qualify the resulting enhancements for copyright protection, but subject classification and the addition of name authority might.
Does open-access metadata need protecting?
Views of Data Providers It was clear that most DP’s had not really thought about whether their open-access metadata needed protecting.
The largest group of respondents believed that individual metadata records were facts “and there is no copyright in a fact”.
Sixty-eight per cent acknowledged that their collections theoretically qualified for database right, but they felt this right was “implicitly waived” in the OAI community.
Not surprisingly then, when asked whether they asserted the copyright status of their individual or collections of metadata records, the largest group of respondents in each case answered, “No, never thought about it”.
Slightly more had developed means of protecting their metadata collection than individual records, but twice as many stated that they would like to be able to protect individual records than whole collections.
Views of Service Providers Twice as many Service Providers disclosed both their own metadata and harvested others’ data as those that only harvested others’ data.
This may have influenced their views on the rights status of metadata as they were not only end-users, but creators of such metadata.
However, twice as many did not check the rights status of others’ metadata before harvesting, compared to those that did.
Half of those that did not check held the view that “Metadata is implicitly free in the OAI”, and may have assumed that because they allow their own metadata to be freely harvested, they had the same right to harvest others’ data.
It is a logical assumption, but legally incorrect.
How should it be protected?
Data Providers Although the majority of DPs did not initially see the point of open access metadata protection, a subsequent question about the acceptable use of metadata appeared to raise awareness amongst DPs as to the benefits of it.
Indeed, 90% listed conditions under which they expected their metadata to be used.
Over half of these wanted metadata to be attributed to their DP, to continue to be freely available once disclosed, to remain unaltered and to be used for non-commercial purposes.
These results were corroborated by the list of “unacceptable uses” the respondents came up with.
One issue of concern was some DP’s desire that metadata should remain unaltered.
Were this to be implemented, it would inhibit the function of Service Providers, many of whom need to enhance the metadata (e.g., provide subject indexing or authority control) in order to provide services.
Service Providers Again, despite their general view that metadata was implicitly free under the OAI, the majority of SPs (54.5%) said that they would only be happy for other SPs to harvest their enhanced metadata under certain conditions.
Half of these stated that the condition was “with prior agreement”, thus taking any automation out of the process.
A slightly larger majority (63.6%) said that they would be happy for other SPs then to enhance their enhanced metadata, again on certain conditions.
None said they were happy for unconditional harvesting and/or further enhancing.
The two conditions of importance to SPs were i) attribution through the OAI provenance schema [13], and ii) that freely available enhanced metadata remained freely available once harvested by another SP.
These conditions were also stipulated by the DPs.
However, many DPs also stipulated that metadata should be used for non-commercial purposes and that it should not be altered.
As the business model of some SPs may depend on commercial viability, and on the need to enhance the metadata to provide a service, it is not surprising that such conditions did not appear on their list.
Would a standard means of protection be useful?
Only two DPs had experienced unacceptable use of their metadata; nonetheless, 77.2% agreed that a standard way of describing how their metadata may be used would be helpful.
They felt that such a solution should be simple, flexible, and machine-readable, and recognised that a generalised solution, although not satisfying everyone’s needs, would certainly be a step in the right direction.
As with the DPs, the overwhelming majority of SPs also thought that having a standardised way of describing the rights status of metadata would be useful.
Only one respondent felt the developing of standardised metadata rights information went against the spirit of open access a view initially held by many DPs, until they considered the potential for abuse of their metadata.
Creative Commons One initiative aiming to support open access by providing a ‘public domain plus’ level of copyright protection (that is, more protection than donating a work to the public domain, but less restrictive protection than that provided by copyright law) is Creative Commons (CC) [14].
CC has designed a series of licences by which creators may make their works available on open access whilst retaining some measure of control over them.
The licences allow display, public performance, reproduction, and distribution of a work whilst providing creators with four optional restrictions: attribution, non-commercial use, no derivative works, or permitting derivative works under a “sharealike” condition (meaning that subsequent works have to be made available under the same terms as the original).
Creators select the restrictions they wish to apply.
In total there are a possible 11 alternative licences.
Figure 1: Creative Commons licence restriction options (Developed by Creative Commons and reproduced under licence) Each licence consists of a brief “human-readable” statement called the Commons Deed to communicate the terms quickly to end-users; a full licence document describing the conditions in legal code; and some machine-readable rights metadata expressed in RDF/XML.
Despite having initially specified a ‘perfect fit’ rights metadata solution for protecting academic research papers using ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language) [15], the increasing momentum of the Creative Commons Initiative led us to consider it as an alternative rights metadata option.
We concluded that the CC solution provided a good enough fit with our survey findings to meet the majority of the needs of academic authors’ open access papers, and that the ongoing support CC would provide beyond the life of the RoMEO Project (which ends in September 2003) would be an additional benefit.
When it came to considering the metadata protection solution, CC also seemed to meet the requirements as laid down by the Data and Service Provider surveys; namely, the attribution requirement, prohibiting non-commercial uses and either allowing derivative works under a ‘sharealike’ condition, or prohibiting derivative works completely.
Using CC to protect metadata under the OAI-PMH We then set about considering how best to disclose CC rights information under the OAI-PMH.
Individual metadata records The OAI-PMH specification allows each metadata record to have an optional <about> container.
One of the suggested purposes for this container is to hold rights information about the metadata record itself.
Although the protocol does not suggest how this might be done, it does state that the contents of all <about> containers must conform to an XML schema.
A problem initially arose here in that although CC provides machine-readable rights metadata as part of the licence ‘package’, that metadata is supplied in RDF/XML which as yet does not have an XML schema.
Fortunately, negotiations with CC have proved fruitful and they have kindly agreed to write an XML schema for their RDF.
This work should be completed by September 2003 and will then be published.
The alternative we proposed was to create ODRL versions of the 11 CC licences, taking the form of XML instances which would conform to the pre-existing ODRL XML schema.
Metadata collections Describing the rights status of an entire collection of metadata records depends on all records adhering to a single rights statement.
This is fairly straightforward if all records are owned by a single rights holder (e.g.
the Data Provider); however, it is not so straightforward if a number of rights holders are involved (e.g.
authors).
In response to the OAI-PMH Identify verb, DPs may optionally provide a <description> of their repository.
Again, the contents of such a container must conform to an XML schema.
A schema has been written to describe the contents of an eprints repository (XML Schema to describe content and policies of repositories in the e-print community [16]), which allows for an optional <metadataPolicy> element.
This element may in turn contain <text> and/or <URI> elements.
We propose that the <text> element contains a statement to the effect that all the records within this (named) repository adhere to the chosen CC Licence, and that the <URI> element contains either the URI of the appropriate CC Commons Deed (which in turn links to the legal code), or the URI of a generic RDF/XML instance of the chosen licence.
Future work One issue, not addressed by the RoMEO proposal is how to manage a joint rights ownership situation between Data and Service Provider.
Thus, if a Data Provider allows Service Providers to harvest, enhance and re-disclose their metadata under a different licence to their original one, how will the joint copyright ownership arrangement be specified?
The situation could become increasingly complicated as more Service Providers harvest, enhance and re-disclose the metadata.
Once the proposals resulting from our research are put into circulation, it may well be that other issues arise.
However, what is important at this stage is that some means of protection is made available for others to debate and build upon.
In this vein, the RoMEO Project is currently exploring a collaboration with the OAI aimed at developing a specification and guidelines for disclosing rights information (about both metadata and resources) under the OAI-PMH.
The exact nature of the collaboration and its scope remain to be decided upon, but expectations are that results would be available in the course of Spring 2004.
Acknowledgement The RoMEO Project would like to thank the UK Joint Information Systems Committee for funding this research.
We would also like to thank Herbert van de Sompel of the OAI, Renato Iannella of the ODRL, and Aaron Swartz of the Creative Commons for correspondence which made a significant contribution to our work.
Editor’s note Readers may also be interested by William J. Nixon and Jessie Hey’s article on the JISC Intellectual Property Rights workshop, (May 2003), also in this issue.
References Anon.
“The Institute of Physics adopts OAI technical framework.” Institute of Physics News 2002(25 November 2002) http://www.iop.org/Physics/News/0467j.
ArXiv.
http://www.arXiv.org/ CogPrints.
http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ JISC.
Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair RoMEO Project.
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html Gadd, E., Charles Oppenheim and Steve Probets (2003).
“RoMEO Studies 3: How academics expect to use open-access research papers.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 35(3): In Press.
Gadd, E., Charles Oppenheim and Steve Probets (2003).
“RoMEO Studies 2: How academics want to protect their open-access research papers.” Journal of Information Science 29(5): [In Press].
Gadd, E., Charles Oppenheim and Steve Probets (2003).
“RoMEO Studies 5: The IPR issues facing OAI Data and Service Providers.” Submitted to Journal of Information Law and Technology.
Gadd, E., Charles Oppenheim and Steve Probets (2003).
“RoMEO Studies 4: The author-publisher bargain: an analysis of journal publisher copyright transfer agreements.” Submitted to Learned Publishing.
Gadd, E., Charles Oppenheim and Steve Probets (2003).
“RoMEO Studies 6: Rights metadata for Open Archiving the RoMEO Solutions.” To be submitted to Program.
DIRECTIVE 96/9/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases Great Britain.
(1988).
Copyright, designs and patents Act 1988, Ch.
1.
10(1).
Elizabeth II.
London : HMSO Open Archives Initiative.
“XML schema to hold provenance information in the “about” part of a record”.
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-provenance.htm Creative Commons.
http://www.creativecommons.org/ Open Digital Rights Language Initiative.
http://odrl.net/ Open Archives Initiative.
“XML Schema to describe content and policies of repositories in the e-print community”.
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-eprints.htm Author Details Elizabeth Gadd Research Associate Department of Information Science Loughborough University Email: e.a.gadd@lboro.ac.uk Charles Oppenheim Professor of Information Science Loughborough University Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/ Steve Probets Lecturer Department of Information Science Loughborough University Email: S.G.Probets@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/ Return to top Article Title: “The RoMEO Project: Protecting metadata in an open access environment” Author:Elizabeth Gadd, Charles Oppenheim and Steve Probets Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/romeo/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet-SOSIG: A Variety of Reports Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet-SOSIG: A Variety of Reports Buzz html database archives graphics vle research Citation BibTex RIS This month Neil Jacobs reports on updates to the Regard service, Martin Poulter introduces a new Economics Assessment Bank and Emma Place highlights the programme of training and outreach conducted by SOSIG this spring.
Getting more from Regard Regard is the online research service of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
It is an essential tool for anyone needing to know about UK social science.
There have been some major recent developments on Regard.
OpenURLs Bibliographic information is fine, but users really want to get the actual item, be it a full-text article or a book.
Regard is introducing OpenURLs to many of its most popular records, enabling users to go straight to the full text (if it is available online) or, if it is a book, to the appropriate page in Amazon, to read reviews and perhaps order a copy.
Topic search Every day the Regard team picks a news story, generates a relevant canned search of Regard, and puts the resulting “In the News” item on the front page.
Over the years, the team has built up an archive of over 250 regular news topics, which we have now compiled into an A-Z index, which should prove invaluable to those needing to get behind the headlines.
Newswire If you need to know about ESRC research that is topical, just starting or just finishing, then sign up to the monthly Regard email newswire.
A link from the front page takes you to a simple sign-up where you can pick from the 16 disciplines used by ESRC.
To try out these new services go to http://www.regard.ac.uk/ For more information contact Neil Jacobs at neil.jacobs@bristol.ac.uk New Assessment Bank from LTSN Economics Economics LTSN has launched its Assessment Question Bank for Economics Higher Education, with more than 700 questions that you can browse, search and select, shopping-basket style, to create exams and answer-sheets.
This service is free to teachers of Economics in UK Higher Education.
We only ask that they supply a small number of their own questions to the bank, which they can do via a link on the question bank home page.
This is the first time we have made a “taster” service that is deliberately as frustrating to use as possible, so that people get a hint of how good the service is but are frustrated enough with the limited functionality to register to use the full service.
We face a paradox in that we want the benefits of the service to be visible, but it must be a private service, so the taster is one way to deal with that.
The present version of the question bank includes essay questions and multiple-response questions.
Future developments will include more question types, questions based on graphics and more options for the finished output.
In the future, we hope to add an “import this exam into my VLE” button and other export formats.
The system does not handle graphs or mathematical formalism yet, exporting question and answer sheets separately as HTML.
Since we want output to be print quality, we’re hoping to generate PDFs to include graphs and equations.
Each question is catalogued by educational level, subject and keyword, and we hope to use this as a basis for exchanging foreknowledge with other services.
To try out the question bank taster service go to: http://www.economics.ltsn.ac.uk/qnbank/ For further information please contact Martin Poulter at m.l.poulter@bristol.ac.uk SOSIG Training Events and Outreach SOSIG runs a national programme of training and outreach designed to give those working in the social sciences tips and ideas on Internet skills and training in the use of the key nationally funded Internet services in their field.
SOSIG also presents its own service at key events, to help people learn more about what is on offer.
Training events hosted by SOSIG SOSIG runs a national seminar series called Social Science Online, which includes one-day seminars on key Internet services for different social science disciplines.
Each event offers training in a number of key Internet services, with representatives from each service offering an overview, help with hands-on experience of the main features and a re-useable training worksheet that guides you through the service.
Social Science Online Is now taking bookings for Internet for Politics 12 May, London School of Political and Economic Science Copies of the presentations from all the seminars are available on the Social Science Online Web site, and may be useful for those who do Internet training but were unable to attend these events.
Searching the Social Sciences: Finding the Evidence a practical workshop using the Internet and online databases 26 May, Queen Mary, University of London Hosted by the ESRC Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice and The Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG).
To get further details of these two workshops please email Alan Gomersall at a.gomersall@qmul.ac.uk SOSIG @ other events Recent and upcoming events: CSAP (National Centre for Learning and Teaching for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics) Annual Conference 2004: Looking back, taking Stock: Reflecting on five years of learning and teaching, 18 20 March, 2004, Birmingham JISC conference 2004, 23 March 2004 54th Political Studies Association Annual Conference, 5-8 April 2004, University of Lincoln PLAT 2004: Psychology Learning and Teaching Conference, 5-7 April 2004, University of Strathclyde BEST: Business and Education Support Team 2004 Conference: Reflection on Teaching: The impact on learning, 14 16 April Edinburgh If you would like to find out more about forthcoming SOSIG events, please join the sosig mailing list where all our events are advertised.
If you have ideas for other events that SOSIG might usefully attend please contact Emma Place at emma.place@bristol.ac.uk Author Details Neil Jacobs Regard Manager ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Tel: 0117 928 7057 Email: Neil.Jacobs@bristol.ac.uk Martin Poulter LTSN Economics ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Tel: 0117 928 7086 Email: m.l.poulter@bristol.ac.uk Emma Place SOSIG Information Manager ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Tel: 0117 928 7183 Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Neil Jacobs, Martin Poulter, Emma Place Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Towards a Pragmatic Framework for Accessible E-Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards a Pragmatic Framework for Accessible E-Learning Buzz framework accessibility identifier e-learning ict wcag interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Lawrie Phipps, Neil Witt and Brian Kelly while recognising the importance of accessibility in e-learning resources, query the universal applicability of the Web Accessibility Initiative's guidelines and describe a pragmatic framework which provides a broader context for their use.
From Well Meaning Guideline to Stealth Standard Access to learning for all students is a value that is hard to dispute for anyone working in the education sector.
Within the areas of education that are concerned with supporting disabled students, it has almost become dogma that in order to provide this ‘universal access’ we must have standards in design that can accommodate all (disabled) learner needs.
This view is supported by legislation: ”…it can be seen that there is likely to be a duty on higher and further education institutions to ensure that their online teaching resources and VLEs are provided in a form accessible to disabled students.
Further, institutions will be expected to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to overcome these problems and are unlikely to be able to justify continuing discrimination.” [1] However, unpicking the legislation is a little more difficult and at no point in his article does Sloan state that compliance with any form of standards ensures compliance with legislation.
The rapid development of e-learning and the continuing development of technologies associated with it have generated a host of standards, mainly aimed at ensuring that formats are interoperable, facilitating the sharing of resources.
Whilst there was development in this area, it seemed that many people were quite happy to cite the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a ‘standard’.
This view was perhaps brought about because of the close links that many web developers had with e-learning, and in some areas e-learning is still synonymous with ‘the web’.
With regard to e-learning, what needs to be remembered are the needs of the end user: the learner.
”…Careful and judicious use of internationally recognised pan-disability design guidelines is important, but never forget that the best way of ensuring an accessible piece of e-learning content is to actively involve disabled people while developing it engagement with institutional disability support is an obvious and essential first step.” [2] In education, the long-term strategy must be by treating the issue in a holistic manner, by looking at the role of a web site in the overall delivery of learning and teaching using e-learning to enhance the accessibility of the traditional learning environment.
Accessibility must be embedded into institutional policy through staff development programmes, provision of appropriate tools to help staff create accessible e-learning, and a staged improvement in accessibility of current resources.
Kelly [3] reports that recommendations were made at the national Institutional Web Management Workshop held in September 1999 that the WAI-Quick Tips Card [4] be ordered in bulk and distributed widely in institutions.
Whilst this was appropriate at the time, in context it may have been the beginning of a misunderstanding in the provision of e-learning to a diverse student body.
Undoubtedly, at that stage e-learning developers would have used these quick tips as a starting point for accessibility, whereas it was aimed solely at staff involved in the development of institutional websites.
This approach was reinforced by other agencies (including these authors and TechDis) which in the absence of guidelines for e-learning accessibility grasped the WCAG and suggested that it was a good approach for e-learning accessibility.
In Ideology Or Pragmatism?
Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites [5] begin to identify some of the problems associated with applying a set of guidelines aimed at a web technologies to areas of learning and teaching.
They further argue that the W3C WCAG had in fact become a ‘stealth standard’, whereas the original intention was they were (as stated) guidelines.
These ideas were developed further in papers in both learning technology journals and learning and teaching journals addressing issues such as quality assurance [6] and pedagogic issues [7].
It could be argued that the W3C WCAG have themselves made the situation worse.
Web site authors can be quick to state they comply with a WCAG level, when in reality, they only comply with a limited set of automated checks.
This leads to the authors thinking they have met the accessibility criteria by complying with an ill-defined ‘standard’.
In 2004⁄5 TechDis were asked to provide a defining set of guidelines for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
Initially a review of existing guidelines and standards was undertaken as well as legal clarification in light of disability legislation.
A consultation then sought to bring together a series of guidance notes.
However, it proved very difficult to retain the integrity of the notes and after several wider consultations it became clear that any form of guidance would be interpreted as prescriptive, the antithesis of the original intentions.
A Pragmatic Approach In trying to provide pragmatic guidance what emerged was a suggested framework for developers that could be applied at various points in an e-learning development cycle.
What is demonstrated below is the result of discussions with colleagues in both the disability and e-learning areas of education.
It is also ‘work in progress’; we are not seeking to claim that this is the final answer, but hope that it does help contribute to the discussion.
The final caveat is that this is designed to be applicable to UK education institutions; we are not trying to create a model that will fit all areas of e-learning.
In using the framework below it is suggested that developers document in some way the process as they work through it.
This will be useful if challenged, but also as a means of reflecting on the process when undertaking further developments.
Stage One Stage Two Stage Three Stage Four Awareness Investigation Understanding Implementation Understanding of resources under development in relation to inclusion Identification of existing established practices Assessment of applicability Identification of Alternative, Intervention or Adjustment Stage One Awareness Here the developer is asked to consider specific issues relating to the development of e-learning material and consider the needs of disabled students.
For example, it is suggested that, if an online assessment is being created, the developer should be aware that there are issues related to how someone with a vision impairment would access it.
Stage Two Investigation Here the developer, after becoming aware that there may be some issues with the resource, investigates what existing guidelines, ‘standards’ or practices are available that would support the resource under development in relation to inclusion.
For example, it may be that the use of W3C guidelines are applicable in the creation of some content.
Stage Three Understanding This is where the developer must make a value judgement: are the practices they have identified in stage 2 valid for the resource under development?
Furthermore, they must ensure that the application of the guidelines, ‘standards’ or practices does not compromise the learning objective or outcome.
For example, in an online assessment using images, an alt tag (describing the image) must not give away the answer.
Stage Four Implementation This is probably the most important stage to document, after working through the processes and either developing a resource that is ‘accessible’, or one that may be inaccessible to some audiences it may be necessary to identify other ways of achieving the learning objective.
For example, a totally inaccessible online assessment, due to the material or system constraints, may be overcome by holding a viva voce for the student, or an inaccessible discussion group may result in a small group discussion with other students.
Documenting these areas is important to ensure that the developer recognised the issues and began the process of identifying alternatives or adjustments.
By adopting the framework approach it will be straightforward to include user feedback into the design process at all stages and thus will assist the development of achievable, sustainable services that benefit all users.
The Next Steps Currently TechDis is working with the Higher Education Academy Subject Network [8] and the JISC to identify cases at each stage of this framework as a basis for guidance.
This will occur over the next twelve months and involve various other agencies.
In addition TechDis is also working with the e-Learning Research Centre at Manchester [9], identifying ways in which the process of harvesting practices can be automated and also the formalisation of the process.
References Sloan, M. (2002).
E-Learning and Legislation.
Retrieved September 1, 2004, from TechDis Web site: http://www.techdis.ac.uk/ Witt N.A.J and Sloan D (2004), access as the norm, not an as add-on, Times Higher Education Supplement, ICT in Higher Education, April 30, pp14-15.
Kelly, B.
(1999) Report on the “Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps” Workshop http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/web-focus/ W3C (1999) WAI-Quick Tips, http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/QuickTips.html Kelly, B. Dunning, A.
Guy, M and Phipps L (2003) Ideology Or Pragmatism?
Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites.
Presented at the ichim03 conference held in Paris on 10-12th September 2003.
Paper published in the conference proceedings http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/ichim03/ Kelly, B. Phipps, L and Swift, E. (2004) Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility.
Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2004, Vol.
30, Issue 3 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/cjtl-2004/ Phipps L (2002) Are You Reasonably Adjusted?
Educational Developments 3.4, Staff and Educational Development Association Higher Education Academy Subject Network Page http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/474.htm The e-Learning Research Centre http://www.elrc.ac.uk/ Author Details Lawrie Phipps The Network Centre 4 Innovation Close York Science Park York YO10 5ZF Email: Lawrie.Phipps@heacademy.ac.uk Web site: http://www.techdis.ac.uk/ Neil Witt Institute of Marine Studies University of Plymouth Drake Circus Plymouth PL4 8AA Email: nwitt@plymouth.ac.uk Web site: http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/ Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Towards a Pragmatic Framework for Accessible e-Learning” Author: Lawrie Phipps, Neil Witt and Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/phipps/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries Buzz data software framework archives digitisation copyright url Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod gives her view of day two of the Public Library Authorities Conference 2003 Question: How many librarians does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Er,.. Change?
You can’t beat the old jokes can you, and this variation on an old theme provided some light relief to delegates on day two of this year’s annual Public Library Authorities event [1].
Who said librarians can’t take a joke?
Most people managed a snigger, but then it was après lunch.
This year’s event had the emotive title: Hearts and Lives.
Public Libraries nurturing local communities, and, in case you nodded off at some point during the proceedings (the lunch does tend to have that effect), and woke up wondering where you were, the conference title was emblazoned across the conference room ceiling twice.
So forget hearts and minds its ‘Hearts and Lives’ for public libraries.
Capturing the hearts of library users is what public libraries aim to do in the 21st century, but it doesn’t stop there.
Developing new services and reaching out to local communities is not enough libraries must be able to demonstrate this.
Libraries have to prove that they can change lives, that they are relevant to 21st century society, and that they do listen and respond to the people they serve.
It is the hearts and minds of local authority chiefs and national politicians that need to be ‘nurtured’ when it comes to securing vital funds.
With computers and Web sites to maintain and electronic services to deliver, libraries need budgets to cover replacement costs, upgrades, software licenses, subscription fees, etc.
Lottery funding may provide the necessary kick-start, but sustaining new equipment and systems requires forward planning and flexible budgets.
Funding was a recurrent theme throughout the second day of the conference which was the day I attended as a day delegate.
The main topic of the day, however, was the Framework for the Future report from DCMS [2], plus Resource’s [3] newly released ‘action plan’ detailing how the Framework is to be implemented.
Funding and advocacy were like Tweedledum and Tweedledee and, as the day progressed, a dialectic emerged which went something like this: public libraries and elected members must act to raise the profile of public libraries; they must convince council leaders and politicians that libraries play a key role in delivering national agendas; if libraries raise their profile they will attract bigger slices of local authority and national budgets; funding for libraries is low and does not reflect their contribution to national agendas; funding is low because libraries have a low profile, and politicians and council chief executives do not acknowledge the contribution libraries make; libraries are not recognised for what they do because librarians do not shout loudly enough and politicians are unaware of the contribution libraries make ergo libraries must demonstrate the key role they play in delivering national agendas etc., etc.
Round and round went the funding merry-go-round and, as the same argument has been aired on other occasions and in the professional press, it was very much a case of déjà vu.
However, before the conference got down to the serious Framework stuff we heard from two national digitisation projects: Collect Britain from the British Library [4], and Moving Here from the National Archives [5] both of which were funded through the New Opportunities Fund [6].
Moving Here is a pictorial record of 200 years of migration to England, comprising over 150,000 items.
Visitors to the site can contribute their own stories and send an e-postcard featuring one of the pictures from the collection.
In this case pictures certainly seem to speak louder than words, with photographs, cartoons and drawings providing a sociological and historical record of the daily lives of Irish, Caribbean, Jewish and South Asian settlers to these shores over the years.
The British Library states that Collect Britain is the largest digitisation project to date.
The site went live in May 2003 and by summer 2004 it will contain 100,000 images and sounds from ‘world-renowned collections’.
There are ‘themed tours’ including one around the old East End of London, plus ‘virtual exhibitions’ for example: ‘Literary landscapes’.
The background information pages make fascinating reading; for example, seven full-time photographers are working on the project and they are using high resolution cameras with a pixel equivalent of 7200 x 5000.
However, this was just the first course, the main course was the Framework report.
Martin Malloy, Director of Libraries and Heritage, Derbyshire, had the first slot to evaluate whether the level of funding provided to implement the Framework would be enough to do the job.
Three million pounds has been allocated to Resource in total for three years, so a million pounds will be available each year for the next three years.
The light bulb joke might have been reworded at this point along the lines of: How many pounds (sterling) does it take to change government vision into reality?
Answer: it depends what you mean by reality, but probably more than three million.
Martin debated whether the amount was sufficient to deliver what Resource envisaged in its action plan, for example, developing models for innovative services, and making best use of existing resources.
He reminded the audience that the view expressed in the Framework was that of the former Minister of State for the Arts, Baroness Blackstone, who believed that resources already exist in local authority structures but that they were not being used well.
In his final summing up Martin concluded that DCMS needs to win the argument regarding the role of libraries and their ability to change people’s lives.
He also raised three questions: Will resources be redistributed to enable local delivery of the Framework?
Is enough attention being paid to transformational leadership?
Is libraries’ contribution to shared priorities (of local and national government) recognised through the Comprehensive Spending Review?
This talk prepared the way for a debate on the motion: “This house believes that the Framework for the Future provides the vision and leadership needed to sustain and develop public libraries” [7].
Two arguments for and two against were put forward, and then there was a vote with a display of hands.
Both sides gave plausible accounts for why they supported or opposed the motion, but I felt the opposition’s case was stronger and more forcefully made.
However, the motion was carried, and if the outcome was a bit of a foregone conclusion, then the process of getting there provided some opportunities for home truths and navel gazing.
The opposition argued that the Framework pointed a finger at library chiefs who were responsible for the current state of the public library service.
They also argued that the Framework failed to provide solutions to the funding issue and provided examples of good practice which were not achievable by most library authorities, (for example where Public Finance Initiative (PFI) funds have been obtained).
It left one wondering what the outcome might have been if the vote had swung the other way.
However, in retrospect this seems unlikely; the Framework was the result of extensive consultation with key players in the library community and a vote against would have been like shooting oneself in the foot.
Afternoon sessions included a presentation by David Curtis of the Audit Commission, who suggested that current methods of measuring library performance might account for the low profile.
A new model, which had been devised for the inspection of district councils, was proposed for libraries and cultural services and might help raise their profile.
This model involves self-assessment and peer review.
Full details are available from the Audit Commission Web site [8].
The final panel session however, was the one many of us had been waiting for the unveiling of Resource’s action plan: the turning of vision into reality with 3 million pounds sterling.
Peter Beauchamp, of DCMS was on the panel, but the key speaker was Andrew Stevens, Senior Policy Advisor at Resource, who is the chief architect of the action plan.
These are just some of the points raised during the session: Activities outlined for year one of the action plan are already well under way, but years two and three are open to discussion and need to be more focused Players outside the library profession need to be engaged The British Library’s marketing strategy is an example of good practice which Resource plans to emulate.
Public libraries needed to position themselves in a similar way and develop key objectives Hard data or evidence will be collected to demonstrate the contribution libraries make to local and national priorities; advocacy and leadership development materials are being developed; performance measurement is to be reviewed, as suggested by the Audit Commission For those interested in a concise summary of the 36-page action plan, Andrew Stevens has written a feature length article which appears in the October edition of Library and Information Update [9].
I did not stay for the conference dinner, so I missed the speech by the Right Hon Lord McIntosh of Haringey, Minister for Media and Heritage (I also missed the disco).
It was, however, a grand day out although many of the messages cast a cloud over the event.
The weather was glorious, and the South Hams area of Devon is a beautiful place to be on a summer’s day.
Hearts and lives not easy to achieve; let’s hope the action plan, which looks very ambitious, is able to effect change and assure the future of our public library service.
References Hearts and Lives public libraries nurturing local communities.
Public Library Authorities Conference 2003.
16-19 September.
Palace Hotel, Torquay Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
(February 2003) Framework for the future: Libraries, Learning and Information in the next decade.
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2003/framework_future.htm Resource (September 2003).
Framework for the Future: Action Plan 2003-2006. http://www.resource.gov.uk British Library.
Collect Britain http://www.collectbritain.co.uk The National Archives: Moving Here http://www.movinghere.org.uk New Opportunities Fund http://www.nof.org.uk Hearts and Lives public libraries nurturing local communities.
Public Library Authorities Conference 2003.
16-19 September.
Palace Hotel, Torquay.
Conference Handbook, page 9 Audit Commission http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk see libraries and leisure The Way Forward.
CPA 30 June 2003 Andrew Stevens.
Implementing Framework for the Future.
Library and Information Update.
2 (10) October 2003, pp.
34-36.
Author Details Penny Garrod Public Library Networking Focus UKOLN Email: p.garrod@ukon.ac.uk Website: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/ Return to top Article Title: “A Grand Day Out” Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/public-libraries/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Evaluating the Impact of Your Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Evaluating the Impact of Your Library Buzz data archives research Citation BibTex RIS David Parkes reviews a new book, targeted at managers, which is both a tool to help evaluate your library and an analysis of Impact Evaluation methodology.
More than ever libraries and information services need to be accountable to their users, to their institutions and to their funding bodies.
They need to demonstrate their value, outcomes and impact but how?
Traditionally we have gathered statistics slightly obsessively perhaps as if the very act of gathering the variables provided us with some solace and comfort that we were performing well.
We could inform our funding bodies just how many books we had, how many we had issued, how many we had shelved counting them out and counting them back in again a myriad of variables pouring in from every service point, from every transaction, from access and egress, from dawn to dusk, week to month, year to year we had been quantified.
However this data described the activity around library services rather than our achievements; it described quantity not quality, efficiency not effectiveness, industry not impact.
Impact is where Sharon Markless and David Streatfield come in, they have provided in a single, slim volume a 'tool book' for evaluating this impact and a very readable discourse on the subject.
Both are prolific writers, consultants and respected educationalists.
Markless is a lecturer at King's College London and contributor to Information Management Associates consultants where Streatfield is the Principal.
The book itself is a by-product of the consultancy and facilitation work they both undertook as part of the SCONUL (Society of College, National and University Libraries)/ LIRG (Library and Information Research Group) Impact Measurement Initiative.
This national research project led by Phillip Payne and Angela Conyers explored the impact of Higher Education libraries on learning, teaching, and research, with the aim of developing a toolkit of impact research methodologies for HE libraries.
The research began as a one-year pilot project, running from July 2003 July 2004, with ten Higher Education libraries taking part, each identifying an impact theme and a topic that they wished to explore in depth.
A second phase of the initiative then ran from July 2004 with a new cohort of twelve HE libraries, including my own institution, Staffordshire University.
The details and the results from the participants and the project can be found at the lis-impact JISCmail Web site [1].
The demand for evidence and impact requires that we use the best evidence we can possibly obtain; qualitative and quantitative, using rigorous and authoritative methods.
Impact Analysis methodology is discussed and tools, hints, reflections and suggestions are provided throughout.
The authors open by setting the context and describing the concept, asking and proffering real life explanations of what impact and impact methodology means.
At Staffordshire this meant setting objectives, establishing success criteria and identifying the methodology by which we could measure impact.
Ours was relatively straightforward: a merged help desk a single point of access for IT and Library enquiries.
The objectives were to provide ease of access to IS learning resources and services, to optimise staffing and resources and provide a service where staff can address, answer or refer the majority of learning support enquiries.
Our methodology involved critical incident interviews when, what, why, how and an analysis of usage data, we interviewed preand post-help desk merger, we held focus groups preand post-merger, we held interview-led questionnaires and benchmarked joint help desk services with other institutions a range of robust techniques and methods.
Impact usually means impact on people and we were looking for changes in behaviour (doing things differently), competence (doing things better), levels of knowledge and an improvement in attitudes from our customers to our services and to our staff.
We were very pleased with the result staff were engaged in the process and planning of the project, in defining roles and responsibilities, policies and procedures and importantly also in the evidence-gathering and impact analysis.
Part 2 of the book provides the methodology.
This is where the 'tool book' kicks in; in fact the authors invite those 'whose wishes are purely practical' to 'please go on' to this section.
As described above in the Staffordshire experience, the methodology involves setting objectives, establishing success criteria, activities and outputs, evidence-gathering, analysis, presenting and planning.
The third part of the book provides more discourse and analysis, delving deeper into the concept, exploring the bigger questions and offering more information and sources on evidence-based library work.
Interspersed throughout the book are the 12 'Laws of Impact Evaluation' which are not really laws or rules at all but serve as useful synopses.
A companion Web site provides additional tools and materials [2].
This could be better and I advise readers to visit the lis-impact archives [1] mentioned above for a more comprehensive Web experience.
The strength of the book lies in its duality as both a tool and as an entertaining and insightful analysis of the context, concepts and methodologies required to demonstrate the effectiveness of your library.
References JISCmail archive for lis-impact list http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/lis-impact.html Facet Publishing companion Web page to the publication: Evaluation tools and materials http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/evaluatingimpact/ Author Details David J Parkes Head of Learning Support Staffordshire University Email: d.j.parkes@staffs.ac.uk Web site: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/infoservices/ Return to top Article Title: "Evaluating the Impact of Your Library" Author: David J Parkes Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/parkes-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data mobile software rdf framework database dissemination portfolio rss xml usability archives metadata digitisation standardisation accessibility identifier vocabularies repositories copyright video preservation multimedia visualisation passwords aggregation e-learning ontologies personalisation lom e-business vle curation dspace licence authentication ict interoperability e-government privacy algorithm research standards modelling Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Netskills Workshops in May 2005 Web: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ Netskills will be running the following workshops at North Herts College in Letchworth Garden City in May 2005: 10 May : e-Assessment: Tools & Techniques Focuses on the tools available for creating e-assessment and the practical techniques required to use them effectively.
The tools are considered both in terms of their functionality as well as their interoperability with other systems.
11 May: Design Solutions for e-Learning This workshop examines how to design pedagogically effective e-learning to enhance traditional forms of teaching and learning.
Full details of these workshops, together with booking forms are available from our events web-site: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/workshops/forthcoming.html For those seeking a recognised qualification in e-Learning, both workshops may contribute towards a BTEC-accredited Netskills professional development certificate: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/accreditation/ Back to headlines Public Lecture Series 11 May 8 June 2005 C21st Curation: working with digital assets in the new millennium; challenges and opportunities Chris Batt, MLA Chief Executive, leads the inaugural event in new series of high profile, public lectures organised by the School of Library, Archives, and Information Studies, University College London.
The lectures are aimed to raise awareness and interest in digital curation and preservation, and speakers will all be talking about how the need to manage and preserve digital asset impacts on their organisations and disciplines and the challenges and opportunities presented.
11 May Digital Futures Chris Batt, Chief Executive of MLA, will discuss the value of digital assets from knowledge institutions and how they will need to revise their activities and philosophies in the light of technical and social change.
18 May Digital Lives Neil Beagrie, British Library will discuss the importance of personal digital collections and publishing and their growing impact on institutions and individuals + “Training and Continuous Development for C21st Curators” Maggie Jones, Executive Secretary of the Digital Preservation Coalition will preview plans for a UK digital preservation training programme and online training materials for those curating digital assets.
1 June Digital Curation in the 21st Century: challenges and opportunities Sheila Anderson, Director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) C21st Curation: challenges and opportunities for the British Library Helen Shenton, Head of Collection Care at The British Library.
Sheila Anderson and Helen Shenton will outline and discuss some of the future challenges and opportunities in digital curation and the care of digital collections using examples from the arts and humanities and The British Library.
8 June The National Gallery and the Digital Future Charles Saumarez Smith, Director of the National Gallery C21st Curation: challenges and opportunities for The National Archives Sarah Tyacke, Chief Executive of The National Archives.
Charles Saumarez Smith and Sarah Tyacke will outline and discuss some of the future challenges and opportunities for galleries and archives in the care of digital collections.
To attend the receptions after any of the above lectures please email: k.michaels@ucl.ac.uk For more information visit: http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/press?news=200504111250 Back to headlines LACASIS Half-Day Programme Los Angeles Chapter of the American Society for Information Science (LACASIS) 13 May 2005, Los Angeles, USA 8:00 a.m. 12:30 p.m. Open Source from a Decision-Maker’s Perspective Come and learn how several organizations have dealt with Open Source applications.
(For background info see: http://www.opensource.org) Christina Salazar of the Getty Library will introduce Open Source software, Elisa Cortez, Reference Librarian/Dentistry Liaison of Loma Linda University Libraries, will discuss DSPACE as a tool for disseminating training videos.
Bradley D. Westbrook, Metadata Librarian and Digital Archivist for University of California San Diego Libraries, will focus on the Archivists’ Toolkit, and Erik Y. Adams, Electronic Resources Librarian of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton will present the legal aspects of using Open Source software.
When: Friday, May 13, 2005 8:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Where: The Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles 2141 W. Adams Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90018 http://www.aafla.org/ Cost: Students $25 LACASIS members $32 Non-members $45 Includes Continental breakfast and lunch Registration is available through the LACASIS Web site: http://www.lacasis.org Registration deadline is Friday, May 6, 2005.
Participation limited to 45 attendees so please register early.
Schedule: 8:00 a.m. Continental breakfast / registration 8:30 a.m.
Opening remarks 8:45 a.m.
Intro to Open Source, Christina Salazar 9:15 a.m. DSpace, Elisa Cortezbr /> 10:30 a.m. Archivists’ Toolkit, Bradley Westbrook 11:25 a.m. Legal issues surrounding OpenSource, Erik Adams 12:30 p.m.
Lunch If you have registration questions, please email Belinda Beardt at lacasis@gmail.com Back to headlines The 11th INFORUM Conference on Professional Information Resources 24 26 May 2005, Prague (Czech Republic) http://www.inforum.cz/ http://www.inforum.cz/inforum2005/english/ Conference Topics: User-Friendly Information Services Web site Optimisation for Search Engines New Technologies and Tools for Electronic Information Resources & Services Virtual Access to Cultural and Scientific Heritage Online Services for the 21st Century Information Department Contribution in the Business Environment Electronic Information as a Challenge for Information Professionals EU Opportunities: How Can Libraries Take the Advantage of EU Support?
Search Strategies and Virtual Reference Desk The official conference languages are Czech and English (simultaneous translations will be provided).
Call for Participation To Register Online, please go to our online registration form at http://www.inforum.cz/inforum2005/english/prihlasky.php For queries contact: Jana Machonska (INFORUM co-ordinator) Jana.Machonska@aip.cz Back to headlines 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2005) 29 May to 1 June, 2005 Heraklion, Crete (Greece) Full programme available http://www.eswc2005.org/ The vision of the Semantic Web is to enhance today’s web via the exploitation of machine-processable meta data.
The explicit representation of the semantics of data, accompanied with domain theories (Ontologies), will enable a web that provides a qualitatively new level of service.
It will weave together an incredibly large network of human knowledge and will complement it with machine processability.
Various automated services will help the user to achieve goals by accessing and providing information in machine-understandable form.
This process may ultimately create extremely knowledgeable systems with various specialized reasoning services systems.
Many technologies and methodologies are being developed within Artificial Intelligence, Human Language Technology, Machine Learning, Databases, Software Engineering and Information Systems that can contribute towards the realization of this vision.
The 2nd Annual European Semantic Web Conference will present the latest results in research and application in semantic web technologies (including knowledge mark-up languages, semantic web services, ontology management and more).
ESWC 2005 will also feature a special industry-oriented event providing European industry with an opportunity to become even more familiar with these technologies.
It will offer a tutorial program to get up to speed with European and global developments in this exciting new area.
ESWC 2005 is co-located with a meeting of the Knowledge Web Network of Excellence.
Workshops and meetings of other European Commission 6th Framework Programme projects involved in the semantic web and semantic web technologies will be able to showcase their developments.
ESWC 2005 is sponsored by SDK a group of three European Commission 6th Framework Programme projects known as SEKT, DIP and Knowledge Web.
Together these projects aim to improve world-wide research and standardisation in the area of the Semantic Web.
For more information on SDK, please visit http://www.sdk-cluster.org .
Conference Topics of Interest and Area Keywords Topics of interest to the conference include: Languages, Tools and Methodologies for Semantic Annotation of Web Data (Semi-)automatic ontology learning and metadata generation (Including HLT and machine learning approaches) Ontology Management (creation, alignment, merging, evolution, evaluation, linking, mediation and reconciliation) Semantic Web Services (service description, discovery, invocation, composition) Semantic Web-based Knowledge Management Data Semantics Database Technologies for the Semantic Web Semantic Knowledge Portals Semantic Brokering Semantic Interoperability Semantic Web Mining Semantic Web Inference Schemes Semantic Web Trust, Privacy, Security and Intellectual Property Rights Semantic Web for e-Business and e-Learning Semantic Searching and Querying Reasoning in the Semantic Web Visualization and modelling Dr. York Sure Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe Web: http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/ysu/ Back to headlines Conference/Workshop: Legal Aspects of Online Learning Environments 1-2 June 2005, University of Warwick, UK Legal issues in education are a growing concern.
If it’s not an aggrieved student seeking damages and raising negative publicity, it’s the quality inspection declaring no confidence due to non-compliance.
Yet VLEs and MLEs are often developed on a technology-first, pedagogy-second, anything-else-is-afterthought model.
Soon, you may be faced with: a raft of non-accessible content pages developed by eager and under-aware tutors; or perhaps with a student submitting a s.10 notice under the Data Protection Act 1998 to request non-processing of his data on the MLE; or the discovery that an enthusiastic tutor has scanned in hundreds of pages of journal articles, and the CLA want to know how such a breach of copyright happened; and nothing said of the tutor who has just spent vast amounts of her time writing materials from scratch, when other people’s materials could have been copyright cleared.
The Legal Aspects of Online Learning Environments Conference/Workshop will deal with these issues head on, giving you: informed, practical information from expert speakers knowledgeable about law and practice in the tertiary education sectors practical tools to allow you avoid legal issues and to comply with regulation regarding the development of a VLE or MLE the opportunity to work through case study examples of good practice on the one hand and pitfalls on the other in relation to the legal issues involved in VLE and MLE development and use the chance to quiz lawyers on any particular queries you may have in relation to the legal aspects of online learning environments the ability to send JISC Legal any questions you want answered at the Conference/Workshop a valuable opportunity to network with colleagues facing similar challenges, to share ideas and experience and: an up-to-the-minute briefing on the CLA HE Digitisation Licence agreement in principle, from Professor Sol Picciotto, a member of the UUK/SCOP negotiating committee We’re pleased to have as keynote speakers Dr Anne Wright CBE (DfES E-Learning Strategy Unit) and a Partner from Pinsent Masons Solicitors, experts in technology and tertiary education law.
For further details, visit http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/events/06_OLE_Warwick.htm For a digest of IT Law relevant to FE and HE, subscribe to JISC-LEGAL-NEWS see details at http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/newsletter.html JISC Legal Learning Services University of Strathclyde E-mail: info@jisclegal.ac.uk Back to headlines DELOS Summer School 2005 5-11 June 2005 INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France At its Scientific Board Meeting of July 2004 in Corvara it was agreed that DELOS should run a summer school on ‘Digital Preservation in Digital Libraries’.
The school will take place at Sophia Antipolis (near Nice and Antibes in the South of France).
We hope that the audience will be young researchers and professionals with an interest in the topic.
Internationally established lecturers will each lead one half-day session and most will be available through the week for further discussion.
Further information about the programme, course fees and registration can be found at http://www.dpc.delos.info/registration/ Back to headlines The JCDL 2005 Programme is now available http://www.jcdl2005.org/program.html 7-11 June 2005 Denver, Colorado, USA http://www.jcdl2005.org/ The programme committee reviewed over 270 submissions, and accepted 32 full papers, 27 short papers, 3 panels, 8 tutorials, 5 workshops and over 60 posters and demonstrations.
In support of the conference theme, sessions have been organized into three tracks: Digital Libraries and Cyberinfrastructure Users and Interaction Tools and Techniques The JCDL 2005 workshops are currently seeking papers and participants.
Read the CFP’s http://www.jcdl2005.org/workshops.html The JCDL 2005 tutorials are currently seeking participants.
Read the abstracts http://www.jcdl2005.org/tutorials.html Registration fees have been posted: http://www.jcdl2005.org/registration.html International attendees: For visa documentation support, please contact Ginger Ignatoff at Ignatoff@hq.acm.org Important Dates 9 May 2005: Advance registration closes 10 May 2005: Late Registration fees begin; online reservation still open 15 May 2005: Camera-ready papers due for the Doctoral Consortium 25 May 2005: Last day to cancel and receive an 80% refund on registration; No refunds will be issued after this date.
31 May 2005: Online registration closes; Onsite registration available at the conference Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2005 Digital Libraries: Cyberinfrastructure for Research and Education 7-11 June 2005 Denver, Colorado, USA http://www.jcdl2005.org/ Contact: info@jcdl2005.org Back to headlines Symposium on Intellectual Property Pirates, Thieves and Innocents: Perceptions of Copyright Infringement in the Digital Age 16-17 June 2005 Adelphi, Maryland, USA Hosted by University of Maryland University College http://www.umuc.edu/cip/symposium/ Theme: Exploring the ways in which we think and talk about copyright infringement in our digital age; focusing on issues relevant to the higher education community and the delivery of third-party copyrighted content.
Registration: Early registration ends May 16, 2005.
Space is limited.
https://nighthawk.umuc.edu/CIPReg.nsf/Application?OpenForm.
Some affiliation discounts apply.
Agenda: Visit http://www.umuc.edu/cip/symposium/agenda.html to see the topics to be addressed by our speakers and panelists who are experts in their fields.
Roster: Speakers/panelists are available at http://www.umuc.edu/cip/symposium/speakers.html.
Entertainment: DC After Dark Tour – Have dinner in DC and then see some of the city’s monuments and memorials.
Details at: http://www.umuc.edu/cip/symposium/DC_After_Dark.html.
Sponsor: the Center for Intellectual Property http://www.umuc.edu/cip/ Jack Boeve University of Maryland University College Center for Intellectual Property jboeve@umuc.edu Back to headlines Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Workshop on Persistent Identifiers 30 June 1 July 2005 Wolfson Medical Building, University of Glasgow,UK The persistent identification of digital information can play a vital role in enabling its long-term accessibility and re-use.
In recent years, there have been fragmented attempts to define a set of basic requirements for persistently identifying digital information.
In an attempt to build upon the results of previous events and to help coordinate future efforts, the Digital Curation Centre, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the Electronic Resource Preservation and Access Network (ERPANET), and the Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) are working together to deliver a series of related events which will aim to establish wider agreement of some common requirements for creating globally unique, persistent identifiers.
Further information about the programme, course fees and registration can be found at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/piworkshop.html Back to headlines Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Workshop on Long-term Curation within Digital Repositories 6 July 2005 Møller Centre, Cambridge, UK Digital repositories have become an increasingly recognised means of digitally archiving and enabling access to digital information.
The long-term survival, value and usability of the information stored within digital repositories depends on numerous criteria such as the formats selected for storage, the capture of associated metadata, proactive preservation measures, and the perceived trust in the repository itself.
This event will focus on practical tools and approaches that are currently being used or developed to assist with the long-term curation of digital information within digital repositories.
In particular, this event will examine ingest processes, description of digital information, preservation activity and certification efforts and how they can impact the long-term usability of digital information.
Further information about the programme, course fees and registration can be found at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/drworkshop.html Back to headlines DCC and DPC Joint Workshop on Digital Curation Cost Models 26 July 2005 British Library, London Usable and practical cost models are essential for long-term, sustainable digital curation efforts.
The Digital Curation Centre and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are pleased to announce a joint one-day workshop to explore some of the current work being done on establishing cost models.
Case studies outlining practical examples of cost models currently being developed and overviews of international research activities will be presented during the course of this event.
Further information about the programme, course fees and registration can be found at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/cmworkshop.html Back to headlines DC-2005 Vocabularies in Practice DC-2005 the fifth in a series of conferences will examine the practicalities of maintaining and using controlled sets of terms (“vocabularies”) in the context of the Web.
DC-2005 aims at bringing together several distinct communities of vocabulary users: Users of metadata standards such as Dublin Core and Learning Object Metadata (LOM), with their sets of descriptive “elements” and “properties” The W3C Semantic Web Activity, which has formalized the notion of “ontologies” Users of Knowledge Organization Systems, which encompass value-space structures such as “thesauri” and “subject classifications” The world of corporate intranets, which use “taxonomies” These diverse communities share common problems, from the use of identifiers for terms to practices for developing, maintaining, versioning, translating, and adapting standard vocabularies for specific local needs.
Topics Topics of particular relevance include: Publication of vocabularies as formal schemas Community processes of vocabulary development Vocabulary maintenance and workflows Corporate enterprise metadata and taxonomies Formal ontologies and Semantic Web frameworks Application profiles and vocabulary adaptations Metadata normalization and crosswalks Versioning of vocabularies Use of term identifiers and dereferencing practice Vocabulary registries and registry services Multilingual vocabularies and translations Vocabularies and accessibility Others Back to headlines Libraries Without Walls 6: Evaluating the distributed delivery of library services 16 20 September 2005 Lesvos, Greece http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww6/ An international conference organised by CERLIM The Centre for Research in Library and Information Management To be held on the Aegean Island of Lesvos, Greece, at the Delphinia hotel, Molyvos http://www.molyvoshotel.com/eng/hotel.htm 16 20 September 2005 Cost GBP 450 (including accommodation for four nights) Keynote speaker: Sue McKnight, Director of Libraries and Knowledge Resources, Nottingham Trent University, UK, and formerly of Deakin University, Australia From their beginnings in 1995, the Libraries without Walls conferences have mapped a major change in the practice of librarianship.
While library services are still concerned to provide users with physical access to their buildings, electronic access, often from remote locations, is becoming ever more dominant.
Papers presented at previous LWW conferences have mapped this change and provided examples of how libraries are pushing out the frontiers of their services.
In 2005 we intend to take a different approach.
We want to ask the question, ‘How do we know whether these new services are having a positive impact on our users?’.
We are therefore inviting papers on the following themes: Theoretical approaches to the evaluation of these services, with an emphasis on qualitative methods.
The user experience: what do we know about the users of these services?
Assessment of the usability, including the accessibility, of services.
Measuring the outcomes and impact of services.
Papers will be published by Facet Publishing in the LWW Conference Proceedings series.
For further information please visit the website at http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww6/ All enquiries should be addressed to the organisers: Libraries Without Walls 6 Conference Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) UK Email: LWW-6@mmu.ac.uk Back to headlines Digital Futures: From Digitisation to Delivery Digital Futures: from digitisation to delivery, a 5-day training event on creation, delivery and preservation of digital resources will be held over 26-30 September 2005 in London, UK.
King’s College London and OCLC-PICA are pleased to announce that in September 2005 the second Digital Futures training event will be held in London.
Led by experts of international renown, Digital Futures will focus on the creation, delivery and preservation of digital resources from cultural and memory institutions.
Lasting five days, Digital Futures is aimed at managers and other practitioners from the library, museum, heritage and cultural sectors looking to understand the strategic and management issues of developing digital resources from digitisation to delivery.
Digital Futures will include visits with the National Gallery and another major cultural organisation (to be confirmed) to view their respective digital activities.
Digital Futures will cover the following core areas: Planning and management Fund raising and sustainability Copyright Key technical concepts Creating and delivering textual resources Visual and image based resource creation and delivery Metadata introduction and implementation Implementing digital resources Digital preservation Digital Futures aims for no more than 30 delegates and every delegate will have the opportunity to also spend one-on-one time with a Digital Futures leader to discuss issues specific to them.
Digital Futures will issue a certificate of achievement to each delegate.
Digital Futures leaders are Simon Tanner, Marilyn Deegan and Tom Clareson: Simon Tanner is Director of King’s Digital Consultancy Services Marilyn Deegan is Director of Research Development for the Centre for Computing in the Humanities Tom Clareson is Manager, Education & Planning, Digital Collection & Preservation Services Division, OCLC Inc.
The Digital Futures leaders have over 40 years of experience in the digital realm between them.
Other experts are invited to speak in their areas of expertise.
Cost: £750 (excluding VAT and accommodation) Venue: King’s College London Dates: 26-30 September 2005 To register interest, find more information and to receive a registration form, please contact Gillian McLeod at OCLC-PICA.
Email: g.mcleod@oclcpica.org Phone: 0121 456 7743 For information on the curriculum contact Simon Tanner at King’s College London.
Email: s.tanner@kcl.ac.uk Phone: 07793 403542 See http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kdcs/digifutures.htm for more information Digital Futures is a joint venture between King’s College London and OCLCPICA.
It is run by King’s Digital Consultancy Services and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London.
Back to headlines 1st International Digital Curation Conference 29-30 September 2005 Hilton Bath City, Bath, UK The UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is pleased to announce the dates of the 1st International Digital Curation Conference which will be held at the Hilton Bath City 29th-30th September 2005.
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is jointly funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the EPSRC (Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council) on behalf of the UK Research Councils.
The DCC provides a focus on research into digital curation expertise and best practice for the storage, management and preservation of digital information to enable its use and reuse over time.
The overarching aim of the DCC is to provide leadership in digital curation and data preservation.
The conference will provide an important forum, helping to raise awareness of the key issues and encouraging active participation and feedback from all stakeholder communities.
The programme, which includes Keynote Speakers, will provide an overview of the work of the DCC and an opportunity via a “Symposium” to discuss the concepts and principles of Digital Curation.
There will also be a series of parallel sessions, which will look in more detail at specific topics including Socio-Legal Issues, Format Registries, Storage Media, Training & Staff Development and Certification.
Who should attend The Conference will be of interest to individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains that are engaged in the creation, use and management of digital data from researchers and curators through to policy makers and funders.
Programme Confirmed Speakers The Conference will be chaired by Chris Rusbridge, the Director of the DCC, with contributions from the DCC Directorate: Professor Peter Buneman DCC Research Director Dr David Giaretta DCC Associate Director Development Dr Liz Lyon DCC Associate Director Outreach & Community Support Professor Seamus Ross DCC Associate Director Services Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) will provide the closing address Further details can be found on the Draft Programme Further information For further information regarding the conference please contact events@ukoln.ac.uk Back to headlines The Second International Workshop on Grid Computing and its Application to Data Analysis (GADA’05) http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/gada2005cfp.html Ayia Napa, Cyprus, 31 October 4 November 2005 In conjunction with OnTheMove Federated Conferences (OTM’05) http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/ Proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag Grid computing has become one of the most important topics appeared and widely developed in the computing field in the last decade.
The research area of grid computing is making rapid progress, owing to the increasing necessity of computation in the resolution of complex applications.
Clusters are, in some sense, the predecessors of the grid technology.
Clusters interconnect nodes through a local high-speed network, using commodity hardware, with the aim of reducing the costs of such infrastructures.
Supercomputers have been replaced by cluster of workstations in a huge number of research projects, being the grid technology the natural evolution of clusters.
One of the major goals of grid computing is to provide efficient access to data.
Grids provide access to distributed computing and data resources, allowing data-intensive applications to improve significantly data access, management and analysis.
Nowadays, there is a huge number of data-intensive applications, e.g.
data mining systems extracting knowledge from large volumes of data.
Existing data-intensive applications have been used in several domains, such as physics, climate modelling, biology or visualization.
Grid systems responsible for tackling and managing large amounts of data in geographically distributed environments are usually named data grids.
The great challenge of grid computing is the complete integration of heterogeneous computing systems and data resources with the aim of providing a global computing space.
The achievement of this goal will involve revolutionary changes in the field of computation, because it will enable resource-sharing across networks, being data one of the most important ones.
This workshop is intended for researchers in grid computing, who want to extend their background on this area and more specifically to those that use grid environments for managing and analysing data.
TOPICS OF INTEREST Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Computational grids Data integration on grids Grid-based data mining Grid solutions for data-intensive applications Grid infrastructures for data analysis High-performance computing for data-intensive applications Grid computing infrastructures, middleware and tools Grid computing services Grid and cluster computing Collaboration technologies Data analysis and management Databases and the grid Extracting knowledge from data grids Agent-based management of data in distributed systems Agent architectures for grid environments Semantic Grid Data grids for bioinformatics Security in data grids Submission Requirements All submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression.
All submissions must be in English.
Submissions should be in PDF format and must not exceed 10 pages in the final camera-ready format.
Authors instructions can be found at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html .
The paper submission site is located at: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/gada/2005/papers/ Failure to commit to presentation at the conference automatically excludes a paper from the proceedings.
IMPORTANT DATES Abstract Submission Deadline June 24, 2005 Paper Submission Deadline June 24, 2005 Acceptance Notification July 29, 2005 Final Version Due August 20, 2005 Conference October 31 November 4, 2005 Back to headlines 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering Call for Papers 20-22 November 2005 New York City, New York http://www.cs.txstate.edu/wise05/ WISE 2005 aims at presenting novel topics and approaches to Web engineering in the dynamic, diverse, distributed and ever increasing volume of WWW data and applications.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following: Web services discovery and composition Semantic Web and ontologies Grid computing P2P systems Mobile services Service oriented architecture and systems Service monitoring and management Web mining and warehousing Web security and trust management Stream processing and optimization Web quality of service and transaction E-commerce and E-government Web performance Web information extraction and integration Web agents and Web Intelligence Innovative Web-based Applications Web-based Scientific Data Management Modeling and Learning Collaboration and Coordination XML and Semi-structured data Sponsored by: Telcordia Technologies Inc.
Important Dates Abstracts due 10 June 2005 Papers due 17 June 2005 Decision notification 12 August 2005 Camera-ready copies due 16 September 2005 Tutorial/panel proposal 24 June 2005 Abstracts and papers must be electronically submitted via the conference web site in pdf.
Papers must use at least 11 pt fonts and not exceed 25 double spaced pages (including figures, tables, etc.).
Papers due 11:59 PM US PST, 17 June, 2005.
Industrial Programme The conference programme will include a number of papers and invited presentations devoted to industrial developments.
Papers intended for this program should be clearly marked as industrial track papers and submit to the industry program chair.
The deadlines and requirements for industrial papers are the same as for research paper submissions.
To submit industry paper, contact: Jen Yao Chung (jychung@us.ibm.com) For more information please contact the conference Web site http://www.cs.txstate.edu/wise05/ which will be updated as additional information becomes available.
Back to headlines ICDM ‘05: The 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Call for Papers June 2005 Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society New Orleans, Louisiana, USA 27-30 November 2005 http://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/~icdm05/ (Papers Due: 15 June 2005) The 2005 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (IEEE ICDM ‘05) provides a premier forum for the dissemination of innovative, practical development experiences as well as original research results in data mining, spanning applications, algorithms, software and systems.
The conference draws researchers and application developers from a wide range of data mining related areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases and data warehousing, data visualization, knowledge-based systems and high performance computing.
By promoting high quality and novel research findings, and innovative solutions to challenging data mining problems, the conference seeks to continuously advance the state of the art in data mining.
As an important part of the conference, the workshops program will focus on new research challenges and initiatives, and the tutorials program will cover emerging data mining technologies and the latest developments in data mining.
Topics of Interest Topics related to the design, analysis and implementation of data mining theory, systems and applications are of interest.
These include, but are not limited to the following areas: Foundations of data mining Data mining and machine learning algorithms and methods in traditional areas (such as classification, regression, clustering, probabilistic modeling, and association analysis), and in new areas Mining text and semi-structured data, and mining temporal, spatial and multimedia data Mining data streams Pattern recognition and trend analysis Collaborative filtering/personalization Data and knowledge representation for data mining Query languages and user interfaces for mining Complexity, efficiency, and scalability issues in data mining Data pre-processing, data reduction, feature selection and feature transformation Post-processing of data mining results Statistics and probability in large-scale data mining Soft computing (including neural networks, fuzzy logic, evolutionary computation, and rough sets) and uncertainty management for data mining Integration of data warehousing, OLAP and data mining Human-machine interaction and visual data mining High performance and parallel/distributed data mining Quality assessment and interestingness metrics of data mining results Security, privacy and social impact of data mining Data mining applications in bioinformatics, electronic commerce, Web, intrusion detection, finance, marketing, healthcare, telecommunications and other fields Conference Publications and ICDM Best Paper Awards High quality papers in all data mining areas are solicited.
Original papers exploring new directions will receive especially careful and supportive reviews.
Papers that have already been accepted or are currently under review at other conferences or journals will not be considered for publication at ICDM ‘05.
Paper submissions should be limited to a maximum of 8 pages in the IEEE 2-column format (see the IEEE Computer Society Press Proceedings Author Guidelines at http://www.computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm ).
A selected number of IEEE ICDM ‘05 accepted papers will be invited for possible inclusion, in an expanded and revised form, in the Knowledge and Information Systems journal ( http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~kais/) published by Springer-Verlag.
IEEE ICDM Best Paper Awards will be conferred at the conference on the authors of (1) the best research paper and (2) the best application paper.
Application-oriented submissions will be considered for the best application paper award.
Important Dates June 15, 2005 Paper submissions, Tutorial proposals, Workshop proposals, Panel proposals August 20, 2005 Paper acceptance notices September 7, 2005 Final camera-readies November 27, 2005 Tutorials and Workshops November 28-30, 2005 Conference All paper submissions will be handled electronically.
Detailed instructions are provided on the conference home page at http://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/~icdm05/ For Further Information: Vijay Raghavan University of Louisiana, Lafayette, USA E-mail: raghavan@cacs.louisiana.edu Back to headlines   E-LIS E-prints for Library and Information Science E-LIS http://eprints.rclis.org is an open access repository for the Library and Information Science subject area.
Operating on an international basis, E-LIS offers a means of archiving and providing free access to Librarianship, Information Science and Technology e-prints.
E-LIS aims to: encourage authors to contribute to the e-print archive to further the promotion of global open access.
facilitate communication between librarians and researchers in LIS and related fields.
Their work will be widely read and highly visible.
disseminate material within the LIS community, thus contributing to the development of an international LIS network.
raise awareness of the open access movement, as well as raising awareness of the E-LIS initiative and its benefits.
promote global co-operation between universities, research institutions and libraries, to redefine the mechanisms of scholarly research and publication.
The editors are keen to raise the profile of E-LIS and increase the level of UK-based submissions to the repository, i.e.
to encourage UK-based authors to submit metadata for publications, together with full text versions.
To do so, authors are invited to visit http://eprints.rclis.org/ and register free of charge.
The E-LIS Editors (UK) are: Kristina Brown, Emma McCulloch and Dennis Nicholson Centre for Digital Library Research/BUBL Information Service Computer and Information Sciences Department Livingstone Tower University of Strathclyde Glasgow, G1 1XH, United Kingdom Email: Kristina Brown at kbrown@cis.strath.ac.uk or Emma McCulloch at e.mcculloch@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ [Received: February 2005] Back to headlines Connotea: A Free Online Reference Management Service for Scientists Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group.
Connotea enables you to store your reference list online which means that it’s readily accessible, it’s linked directly into the literature and it’s easily shared with colleagues.
By opening up their references to others, researchers are able to discover new leads by connecting to the reference collections of those with similar interests.
In fact, Connotea allows users to save links to any online content, making it easy to store their entire collection of reference materials in one place.
Connotea also recognises links to certain Web sites, and automatically collects the bibliographic information for the article or book that is being linked to.
See the site guide for the list of currently supported sites.
It is possible to organise a collection of references and Web sites by simply assigning tags (free-form categories or labels) to the links saved and assign as many tags as required to a bookmark.
This is different to the conventional approach of organising links into hierarchical folders, and makes a library of bookmarks much easier to navigate.
Every page of bookmarks on Connotea has a link to an RSS feed.
If another user is discovered to be bookmarking interesting things under a certain tag, it is possible to navigate to the relevant page and subscribe to that RSS feed.
Connotea also maintains an RSS feed for news about Connotea.
Two articles published in the April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine provide a general overview of the social bookmarking tool landscape and then discuss Connotea as a case study.
The core code for Connotea is also open sourced and details are announced in the case study.
[Received: April 2005] Back to headlines Talis Launches New Advisory Board New Talis Advisory Board brings together library leaders from public and private sectors in a forum to share sharing knowledge and debate common issues.
Talis, a provider of library management solutions for the UK and Ireland, is launching the Talis Advisory Board (TAB), an initiative to bring library leaders from the public sector and the business world together for the first time.
The TAB includes key figures from the academic sector, public sector and the business world and encompasses both UK and US perspectives.
Members will meet to debate issues common to both groups, with the aim of tackling shared problems and advancing understanding.
Its aim is to provide members the means of working together at the strategic level in order to influence the future direction of technology for the library sector.
Talis sees the TAB an important next step in its engagement with customers and the wider library community and underpins its continued aim to provide innovative services to this community.
Dr Paul Miller, Director of the Common Information Environment (CIE) and a founder member of the TAB, welcomed the new initiative: “In the past the public sector often only appeared able to engage with commercial companies like Talis in a limited way, through the tendering and purchasing process.
We are far less adept at engaging with the brilliant minds in the commercial sector, in order to tackle shared problems and to advance understanding and capability for ourselves and for our commercial colleagues.
The TAB will move us in this direction.” Talis is a member of many library organisations and a voting member on important standards bodies such as the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Recently it has become a founder member of the Vendor Initiative for Enabling Web Services (VIEWS).
For further information: Alicia Kelly, Marcomms Talis Email: [Received: April 2005] Back to headlines Framework for the Future Spring Update from the MLA Launch of the Public Library Impact Measures The first set of Public Library Impact Measures was launched at a seminar in London on March 9th.
Andrew McIntosh, Minister for the Media and Heritage, commended them to the audience of over two hundred.
The proposed measures for 2005⁄6 have been selected to show the contribution libraries make to five of the seven shared priorities agreed by central and local government.
National Partnerships The Reading Agency is developing a portfolio of national partnerships for libraries, with a special focus on the booktrade and broadcasters.
Framework funding has been used to lever in substantial extra support from the Arts Council and publishers.
The aim is to develop much longer-term, more strategic partnerships, with a calendar of opportunities which libraries can use to enhance services to readers A year’s pilot with BBC Radio is exploring how radio and libraries might work together to give readers and listeners new and richer reading experiences.
Successes so far include a major library presence in Woman’s Hour’s Watershed Women’s Fiction, and links between Radio 7’s children’s programming and the Summer Reading Challenge.
Working with MLA and the Society of Chief Librarians, TRA is leading negotiations on a three-year partnership with BBC learning, aiming to make libraries a partner in the BBC’s big learning campaigns.
The BBC has issued to the sector confidential details of its major new literacy campaign, RaW, which starts in October and runs for a minimum of 3 years.
Designing Libraries Web site Framework for the Future is providing the funding for a pilot Web site which gives local authorities, planners, architects and interior designers an insight into the best new, extended and refurbished public library buildings.
There are currently 32 library projects listed on the Web site (http://www.designinglibraries.org.uk).
The new funding will allow the University of Aberystwyth Information Services team, who created the pilot site, to add further features, increase the size of the database to include good examples from 1995 to present day UK and overseas and provide a greater depth of information under each entry.
The project is being led by The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).
[Received: March 2005] Back to headlines Springer Extends Reach with New Ingenta Deal Over 1000 Springer titles now distributed via IngentaConnect Ingenta Inc., the technology and services provider for the publishing and information industries, and Springer, the specialist publishing group, today announced a revised contract which enables Springer to benefit from Ingenta s global visibility to over 17,000 registered libraries.
The new deal increases the number of Springer titles available on the IngentaConnect platform to over 1000, bringing the total number of electronic titles available via Ingenta to over 8000.
Under the terms of the agreement, Ingenta will now host full text for Springers core journals, including the new Springer Online Backfiles products containing all back publications up to volume 1 issue 1.
The full text will be accessible via subscription or pay-per-view, enabling libraries simply to add their Springer titles to their Ingenta collection, and offering users the opportunity to purchase unsubscribed Springer content using credit cards or their institutions Ingenta deposit account.
http://www.ingenta.com/corporate/company/news/trade/springer.htm [Received: March 2005] Back to headlines Guide to the JISC Model Licence Is Now Available The JISC model licence is a licence drafted by JISC which contains more favourable provisions than any standard commercial licence for access and use of a resource.
JISC negotiates such licences with publishers on behalf of the UK Funding Bodies for FE and HE communities in the UK.
The JISC Model Licenses contain provisions that allow students and staff to make effective use of online resources for learning, teaching and research.
We have produced a Guide to the JISC Model Licence which explains in every day terms the definitions used in the model licence and the permitted uses and restrictions.
We hope you find this Guide of use.
Please let us know if you would like a printed copy by emailing collections@jisc.ac.uk.
Alternatively, the Guide can be accessed online at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_guide_jiscmodel.html Lorraine Estelle Collections Team Manager Joint Information Systems Committee [Received: April 2005] Back to headlines Fedora 2.0 Open-Source Solution for Digital Repositories The Fedora Project http://www.fedora.info has announced the release of version 2.0 of the Fedora open-source digital repository software.
This release represents a significant increase in features and functionality over previous releases.
New features include the ability to represent and query relationships among digital objects, a simple XML encoding for Fedora digital objects, enhanced ingest and export interfaces for interoperability with other repository systems, enhanced administrative features, and improved documentation.
As with prior versions of the software, all Fedora functionality is exposed through Web service interfaces.
At the core of this functionality is the Fedora object model that enables the aggregation of multiple content items into digital objects.
This allows objects to have several accessible “representations.” For example, a digital object can represent an electronic document in multiple formats, a digital image with its descriptive metadata, or a complex science publication containing text, data, and video.
Services can be associated with digital objects, allowing dynamically-produced views, or “virtual representations” of the objects.
Historical views of digital objects are preserved through a powerful content versioning system.
The new Fedora 2.0 introduces the “Resource Index” which is a module that allows a Fedora repository to be viewed as a graph of inter-related objects.
Using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), relationships among objects can be declared, and queries against these relationships are supported by an RDF-based triple store.
Fedora 2.0 also introduces “Fedora Object XML” (FOXML) which is a simple XML format for encoding Fedora digital objects.
The Fedora open-source software is jointly developed by Cornell University and the University of Virginia with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Fedora 2.0 marks the final milestone in Phase I, a three year project to develop the core Fedora Repository system.
For more information, contact Ronda Grizzle rag9b@virginia.edu Technical Coordinator; Sandra Payette (payette@cs.cornell.edu), Co-director Cornell University; or Thornton Staples (tls@virginia.edu), Co-director University of Virginia.
[Received: March 2005] Back to headlines ICT Training Highlights Changing Role of Library Workforce All 40,000 public library staff across the UK have received ICT training and are using new skills to improve services for library users.
A major new study undertaken by the Tavistock Institute and published today assesses the impact of this £20 million training programme, which has been funded as part of the People’s Network, the national project to link all 4200 public libraries to the Internet.
The study highlights a paradigm shift for public libraries, spurred by the introduction of new technologies.
It shows how the People’s Network has helped open up a range of possible future scenarios for libraries and begun to shape new professional identities for library staff.
The changes identified in the report will have a profound impact on the nature of the library workforce, which will need a range of capabilities, dispositions and skills to be effective in the future.
ICT training is seen as just one step towards the organisational changes required.
But already it is having an impact, both on staff and library users.
Welcoming the report, MLA Chief Executive Chris Batt, said, “The People’s Network has been a catalyst for change in the way public libraries serve their communities, and the staff are at the heart of that transformation.
“This training is part of a major transformation programme for public libraries.
As the vision and values of library services evolve, a degree of cultural change is necessary too.
Libraries will have to re-assess how they view themselves and organisational capability must go hand in hand with professional development if we are to meet the needs of both current and future library users.” The report forms a companion piece to the evaluation of the People’s Network, undertaken by the Tavistock Institute for the Big Lottery Fund published in November 2004.
Libraries and Archives Council (MLA): The report is from the MLA Web site at: http://www.mla.gov.uk/information/publications/00pubs.asp [Received: March 2005] Back to headlines New Masters Course in Digital Libraries for the Autumn MSc in Digital Libraries is a brand new course, starting in October 2005, which focuses on start-of-the-art research in the design and deployment of digital libraries.
This course is intended for students who have pertinent experience of library or information work, including membership of a relevant professional body and a good Undergraduate degree and/or a Masters degree in librarianship or a cognate discipline.
Digital libraries are a major area of research expertise in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) at Strathclyde University (Glasgow, Scotland) encompassing several research groups and the work of the CDLR (the Centre for Digital Library Research).
Students will be taught in formal classes but will also participate in research seminars and in actual digital library research work on placement at the CDLR or an equivalent provider.
All students will be provided with a laptop.
It is a full-time course.
In the first semester, students will be given a solid theoretical grounding in digital libraries.
In the second semester students will learn both the practical and research aspects of digital libraries through a placement and seminars covering research foci.
For the award of MSc, students must complete a dissertation of about 20,000 words.
Contact details: Course Director (Digital Libraries) Graduate School of Informatics Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Strathclyde Email: dl-enquiry@gsi.strath.ac.uk Web: http://www.gsi.strath.ac.uk/ [Received: February 2005] Back to headlines Project MUSE Is Athens-compliant Online Journal Collection Becomes More Accessible to British Universities and Colleges For students and researchers at subscribing Higher Education institutions in the U.K., Project MUSE an online collection of scholarly journals in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, has become more user-friendly and accessible, as it is now compliant with Athens authentication.
Athens, developed by Eduserv, is the British standard to access Web-based subscription services for higher education, further education, and research councils.
The system enables these institutions to manage access rights efficiently to multiple online resources.
As a result of this cooperation with Athens, users affiliated with U.K. institutions that subscribe to both Project MUSE and Athens can now access the full text of the 270 scholarly journals that MUSE hosts from a variety of locations, including at home, on campus, while travelling, or from any place that has an Internet connection.
All users need is an Athens password/username which allows them to gain access to any Athens-compliant resource (including MUSE) to which their home institution subscribes.
Through partnerships with several organizations offering gateway bibliographic services, MUSE is linked to the databases of many vendors such as ABC-CLIO, EBSCO, and ProQuest.
MUSE offers subscribing libraries a “For Librarians” Web page to help educate their users about the resource and manage their subscriptions.
This web page enables librarians to download details about MUSE holdings, request promotional materials, and find answers to common questions.
Several new instructional guides are available for downloading, from general tips to subject-specific guides in fifteen major disciplines.
For more information on MUSE: http://muse.jhu.edu.
For more information about Eduserv Athens: http://www.athensams.net/ [Received: April 2005] Back to headlines New Appointments at MLA New Chief Executive Appointed to South West Museums, Libraries and Archives Council SWMLAC is delighted to announce the appointment of Bob Sharpe as its new Chief Executive from July 2005.
Currently Director of Information and Learning Services at the University of Plymouth, Bob has led the transformation of the Library, Media and IT services at the University.
He has also been active in the development of new approaches to the delivery of IT based information services.
As a member of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Integrated Information Environment Committee he has worked on strategies and programmes for resource discovery, digital repositories and electronic libraries.
He chairs the Steering Group for the JISC funded South West Regional Support Centre which supports the development of e-learning in further education and is also a member of the South West Regional Development Agency ICT Strategy Group.
Bob Sharpe has been closely associated with SWMLAC, both as a Board member and leading up a strategy for ICT development.
His appointment comes at a time of major change with an enhanced role for regional agencies within a new integrated national structure to be implemented in 2006.
Head of Digital Futures Team David Dawson has been appointed as Head of the Digital Futures Team at MLA.
The team will be taking forward a wide range of ICT initiatives including the launch of the People’s Network Service and the development of the concept of the Knowledge Web.
[Received: April 2005] Back to headlines Launch of Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry Announced The prestigious Beilstein-Institut today announced the launch of the first major Open Access journal for organic chemistry.
Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry will be published by the Beilstein-Institut in co-operation with BioMed Central, the Open Access publisher.
The peer-reviewed online journal will begin publication during 2005, and a call for papers, providing full information for authors, will be issued in May.
The Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry will publish original research on all aspects of organic chemistry and related disciplines.
Areas covered in the journal will include: organic synthesis, organic reactions and mechanisms, natural products chemistry and chemical biology, organic materials and macroand supramolecular organic chemistry.
As an Open Access journal, the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry will offer the international community of organic chemists the opportunity to make their research results freely available immediately on publication, and permanently available in the public archives of science.
The journal will publish full research articles and short communications, as well as occasional reviews and commentary articles.
Supplementary data will also be published.
There will be particular emphasis on speed of publication and on presentation of the articles in a chemically intelligent way.
The journal will be made freely available online, while an annual print archival edition will be available for purchase at cost.
For more information: For Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry http://www.beilstein-journals.org/ For the Beilstein-Institut bjoc@beilstein-institut.de For BioMed Central Grace Baynes E-mail: press@biomedcentral.com [Received: March 2005] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Rustle of Digital Curation: The JISC Annual Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Rustle of Digital Curation: The JISC Annual Conference Buzz data framework api database wireless xml infrastructure archives metadata digitisation vocabularies blog repositories eprints copyright preservation cataloguing gis e-learning flash curation eportfolio wms e-research ict interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Julie Allinson, Marieke Guy and Maureen Pennock find themselves contemplating e-frameworks, digital curation and repositories at the JISC Annual Conference.
On 14 March 2006 we found ourselves back at the Birmingham International Convention Centre (ICC) for the 2006 JISC Conference.
The annual conference [1] is both an opportunity for JISC to platform the variety of activities it funds and for delegates to learn about the full range of JISC's work by participating in seminars, debates, workshops and demonstrations.
This report tries to capture the air of the event through a series of session snapshots.
Sir Ron Cooke : Welcome The conference got rolling with the traditional welcome by JISC Chairman Sir Ron Cooke.
Sir Ron talked about the current JISC e-Strategy, which is fundamentally unchanged since last year, but is also dynamic and adaptable in the changing ICT landscape, with regard to infrastructure, user requirements, funding and international collaboration.
The JISC vision encompasses three domains (e-Learning, e-Research and e-Administration) and three areas (network, content and the information environment).
For the network, the new SuperJANET 5 will be appearing in late 2006.
For content, the JISC has established JISC Collections to increase efficiency and cost-effectiveness of JISC procurement activities.
Within the information environment, there is a commitment to improving interoperability, access and security, etc.
There were notable mentions of repositories being widely available and cohesively managed, and of the e-Framework, providing the next generation of the e-Environment and offering, potentially, seamless interaction between systems and services.
Sir Ron also touched on the changing financial pressures put on JISC and the JISC community by the reduction in Learning and Skills Council funding.
The implications of these pressures were already apparent to delegates.
This years conference was a somewhat downsized affair in comparison to last years event with only 600 delegates walking the boards.
Also one of the biggest talking points throughout the event was JISCs decision to go environmentally friendly with the provision of brown paper shopping bags instead of the usual delegate bags.
The end result was a steady rustle throughout the conference rather than the usual murmurs.
To close, Sir Ron asked how Higher Education ICT could and should have input into our economy and community, and where JISC can influence this, citing research and learning environments as one example.
Liz Beaty: Opening Keynote Liz Beaty, Director of Learning and Teaching, HEFCE, talked about how ICT is changing learning environments, introducing the notion of the 'permeable campus'.
Learners are increasingly moving away from physical learning spaces.
The vision of lifelong learning encompasses personal learning environments that place learning as a continuing process, aligned with our work and life, and no longer an isolated activity.
This kind of learning delivery needs to be designed and managed and can be seen to challenge traditional HE expertise and authority.
The question of how such informal learning can be accredited is another challenge, as is how to control and manage plagiarism, copyright and ownership issues (rights enforcement vs. free sharing).
If learners increasingly own and manage their own content and ePortfolios, what impact does this have on the learning environment?
Increasing ICT usage could disadvantage those for whom facilities and skills are not so readily available.
Moreover, staff development and professional standards for teachers must take ICT on board.
Intermediates, librarians, learning technologists etc.
have a significant role in ICT provision and uptake by educators.
Liz went on to talk about some HEFCE activities: Lifelong learning networks Personal learning environments Teaching quality enhancement programme CETLs International activity, e.g.
eChina-UK HEFCE are committed to embedding ICT in teaching and learning, for staff, for students and for sharing and communicating.
The HEFCE e-Learning strategy is a 10-year vision in partnership with HE Academy and JISC.
Its vision is dynamic, ready to adapt to changes in technology, education and society.
After refreshments and a quick tour round the exhibition the programme moved on to the morning's parallel sessions.
Exploring the e-Administration Agenda Bob Powell, JISC Sector Support Manager and Steve Bailey, Records Manager, JISC Very much a be-suited management-oriented group, this session looked at the 'third domain' of e-Administration.
This was defined, by Bob Powell, as the co-ordination and control of ICT systems to carry out business processes.
In the e-Administration and e-Management area there are currently no 'off-the-shelf' solutions offering all of these business functions and JISC has committed to establishing and identifying a common set of processes and standards in this area.
Steve Bailey talked in more detail about the role of records management in improving the management of core records and processes within this e-Administration domain.
Where e-Learning and e-Research offer more high-profile, visible, processes, e-Administration is no less complex and important to the effective running of an institution, particularly with the complexity of modern institutions, the growing pressure to be 'lean' and the public scrutiny to which institutions are now subject.
Examples of e-Administration functions include admissions, registry, records management, communication and repositories.
Three records management concerns were discussed: identifying the 'master' information lifecycle mapping lifecycle management Steve outlined the accepted concept of the information lifecycle and some of the intrinsic issues: Creation (metadata; file formats) current use (access; purpose) semi-current use (retention; future purpose) disposal.
Digital preservation and curation are key considerations in this, as is the importance of a managed consistent approach.
As an example, Steve outlined some risks inherent in data duplication, including inconsistent information, version control and wasted resources.
Some JISC activities, significant for e-Administration: Information Governance Gateway (current ITT) E-Framework (service-oriented approach to joining up services and systems) Digital Repositories Programme (broad remit for all institutional data) Further guides and programmes of work aimed at integration and managing ICT, including a book Managing Post-Secondary Education in an E-World The discussion yielded some interesting comments, including a concern about using the word 'control' and the need to engage Management who might see e-Administration as something for administrators to deal with.
There followed a tasty lunch with lots of vegetarian options preceeded by the demonstration sessions.
JORUM Repository Helping to Build a Community of Sharing Jackie Carter, Team Leader Learning and Teaching Materials Delivery, MIMAS and Steve Rogers, Service Co-ordinator, EDINA The JORUM demonstration answered many questions about how the service works and activities planned for future releases.
Although time was tight, Steve Rogers covered all workflow activities, from contribution and publishing to cataloguing and review, using a Flash movie to illustrate how the submission process worked.
Future JORUM releases will include a metadata watch, preservation activities, and cultural change activity.
PathCAL Healthcare and Biomedical Web-based Tutorials and a Vision for Geospatial Resources in UK Academia Rachel Ellaway, e-Learning Manager for Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh; Dr William Kilbride, Assistant Director, Archaeology Data Service/ Arts and Humanities Data Service Centre for Archaeology and James Reid, Projects Manager, EDINA This two-pronged demonstrator session covered some of the most recent e-resources JISC Collections has released.
Rachel Ellaway gave an introduction to PathCAL, a set of Web-based tutorials designed to help undergraduate and postgraduate medical (and related disciplines) students understand basic pathological principles of disease.
Rachel started her presentation with an overview of how PathCAL can be used to support teaching activities and enrich the student learning experience in a range of settings and a quick demonstration of some of PathCAL's key features.
She then went on to discuss some of the issues relating to collections strategy and the choice of JISC Collections as a service.
For example should JISC be building resources the community needs or giving the community improved access to resources that are already out there?
In the question and answer session Rachel touched on the potential new dimensions that new ways of working, like academic blogging, can bring to e-resources.
The second set of e-resources showcased were JISC's geospatial collections.
William Kilbride began by explaining what exactly geospatial resources comprise of.
A simple definition might be 'a lot more than Google Maps!
', in fact a lot more than maps in general.
He explained that the geospatial community is, in comparison to some other e-resource areas, fairly advanced.
This sophistication (for example they have their own language GML (Geography Markup Language) means that one key area of work is in attempting to integrate with other resources and enlighten the rest of the academic community about geospatial potential.
Much discussion of how this can be done is carried out in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
They are working on a set of definitions for 'the way mapping services should speak to each other'.
Other issues that are at the forefront right now are rights, access (what do we do with all our older data?)
and the budget restraints placed on such a diverse community.
Improvements in the current infrastructure might be one possible means of allowing scholars to share and exploit datasets.
James Reid went on to talk about the Geospatial Interoperability Project.
James pointed out that although it's great that people are using the API from various services to create new and interesting outcomes it is important to remember that the Google Maps API is in fact proprietary.
Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) are the emerging geospatial open standards in this area.
It is based on these 3 standards that the current geospatial demonstrators have been developed.
However there remain a number of issues that need to be resolved: security, IPR, metadata, scalability, the expense of datasets and the difficulties involved in technical implementation.
James concluded by saying that full use of open standards is easily achievable and certainly desirable.
What is likely to happen is that a service-orientated or mix-and-match approach will eventually take over.
Medical Journals Digitisation Project and Open Access: A View from the Wellcome Trust Robert Kiley, Head of Systems Strategy, Wellcome Trust Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust gave a short demonstration of a project to digitise the backfiles of a number of medicine-related journals to create a critical mass of freely available digital content, delivered through PubMedCentral (PMC).
Publishers have agreed to the digitisation, in exchange for the access provided by this process.
In addition, the Wellcome Trust insisted that publishers agree to deposit digital content into PMC, in their specified XML format, with a maximum embargo period specified by the Wellcome Trust.
These digitised journals are now available for searching and browsing in PMC, along with added value services such as linked references, cited by information and links to related data.
In the second part of his session, Robert talked about the Wellcome Trust open access policy which is mandating that outputs of Wellcome-funded research must be deposited in PMC.
Their philosophy is that maximising access improves research quality.
To this end, the Wellcome Trust will give additional funding to pay for publication in open access journals.
Future activity includes a UK version of PubMedCentral.
The Wellcome Trust is also working with Sherpa on flagging Wellcome-compliant publisher archiving policies through their Romeo database.
Robert finished by reiterating that 'No amount of advocacy is enough'.
How Can Repositories Benefit Institutions?
Moving Towards a National Infrastructure Rachel Bruce, Programme Director, JISC, Dr Leslie Carr, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton and Professor Alison Littlejohn, Professor of Learning Technology, University of Dundee Les Carr outlined some of the uses and challenges of repositories, going beyond the over-extended view of a database for any content to look specifically at repositories of research output, primarily eprints.
He outlined the role of repositories in the scholarly communications process and stressed the importance of the global audience that repositories can reach via the Web, thereby increasing the impact factor of researchers' output.
He talked also about the confusion between open access 'gold' where the traditional publishing model is changed to make publications free at the point-of-use, and the 'green' strategy where authors deposit their work into a repository.
Benefits of repositories include increased access, increased impact, convenient managed storage and increased personal visibility via the auto-generation of author's publication lists and CVs.
Les pointed to previous and ongoing JISCfunded work in the repositories space through the FAIR and Digital Repositories Programmes.
The main issue for repository uptake is in uptake by researchers.
Without senior management buy-in and mandatory deposit, a repository is unlikely to be well-populated by an institution's researchers statistics show that only 15% of the available material is deposited when deposit is not mandated.
Allison Littlejohn talked about the CD-LOR (Community Dimensions in Learning Object Repositories) project, funded within the JISC Digital Repositories Programme.
This fascinating project is looking at the development of online communities of practice within e-Learning.
Allison pointed to the success of hobby-orientated communities, for example in computer gaming, and similarly to research-led communities.
The project is examining educational theory in order to establish the barriers and enablers to community development.
It is also looking at examples of informal, formal, library and classroom-based repositories.
Allison talked about the three learning frameworks defined within educational theory, outlining some of the issues that arise in practice: Primary (the conceptualisation, e.g.
digital assets these are often re-created rather than discovering a re-usable resource) Secondary (the construction of ideas, e.g.
the reuse of those assets in learning design and activities practice has shown that this a difficult digital activity) Tertiary (the outputs, e.g.
the generated resources from learning activities there is no reward for sharing resources in current practice) The project has identified some dimensions of communities including their scope, subject discipline, educational sector, the purpose of sharing, the type of material being shared and the business model, e.g funded resource or classroom-based.
Out of this work, the project will identify some of the barriers and enablers encompassing the socio-cultural, technical, pedagogical and organisational issues with a view to creating guidelines to inform future development.
Finally, Rachel Bruce outlined new funding within the area of repositories.
Rachel talked about previous and current JISC funding in the area of repositories (FAIR, X4L, DeL and Digital Repositories) and firmly established the importance of the repository layer underpinning the key domains of e-Learning, e-Research and e-Administration, working alongside middleware and network services.
The new funding for repositories amounts to £14m available for work between April 2006 and March 2009.
Calls for proposals will be issued in April and September 2006, and April 2007.
The overall aim is to improve the digital content infrastructure through curation, interoperability and discovery.
Some indication of the funding areas was given and included funding for local repository creation and innovation and, at a national level, money for improving interoperability, infrastructure, shared services and improving repository knowledge and skills.
A network of experts for repositories and a project, by the RDN (the Resource Discovery Network, re-branding as Intute from July 2006), to offer a UK repository cross-search were two specific examples.
Supporting Digital Curation to Safeguard Research Data Dr Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN, Neil Beagrie, JISC/British Library Partnership Manager and Heather Weaver, Information Services Group Manager, Research Councils UK This session on supporting digital curation to safeguard research data was sadly under-attended.
Perhaps this indicates that the people creating and using electronic materials are still not paying enough attention to the curation of the e-resources into which JISC and other bodies are pouring creation funding.
It was an interesting session, with presentations from Liz Lyon (UKOLN), Neil Beagrie (BL/DPC), and Heather Weaver (CCLRC).
Time was once again very tight.
Liz mapped curation stages and activities against the process that underpins e-research, with particular reference to the UK eBank project that focuses on the provision of open access to datasets and enabling linking of research data to publications and derived learning propducts [2].
Neil highlighted the importance of collaboration and identified a wide range of collaborative partnerships critical to different preservation and curation research activities, and Heather Weaver spoke on the Research Councils' activities in supporting curation in research outputs.
Her presentation identified clearly the preservation and curation policies of the different RCs and also introduced the CASPAR, CLADDIER, and SCITATE projects (although the latter is actually the CCLRC institutional repository).
e-Framework for Education and Research What Is It and How Can Your Institution Use It?
Jon Mason, e-Framework Editor, University of South Queensland, Australia and John Paschoud, JISC e-Framework Working Group, London School of Economics Jon Mason, from the Australian Government department of education, science and training (DEST), began this session by attempting the difficult task of defining the e-Framework.
He explained that the e-Framework initiative aims to produce an evolving and sustainable, open standards based, service-oriented technical framework to support the education and research communities.
In short, it hopes to achieve technical interoperability across education and research.
Although the majority of work to date has been carried out by DEST and JISC it is intended that over time other international partners will also come on board.
The e-Framework initiative is a fairly ambitious project, Jon pointed out that agreeing on a definition had already taken several months and that reaching consent on a technical vocabulary was sure to take even longer.
Currently the key guiding principles of the e-framework were: The adoption of a service-oriented approach to system and process integration The development, promotion and adoption of Open Standards Community involvement in the development of the e-Framework Open collaborative development activities Flexible and incremental deployment of the e-Framework Jon finished up by urging people to look at the new e-framework Web site once it was launched in May and if interested to join the JISC e-framework mailing list.
After Jon's overview, John Paschoud offered a more 'from the ground-up' vision entitled 'Never mind the Framework: Here's the real world'.
He pointed out that an initiative like the e-framework would automatically receive opposition from IT departments for a number of reasons.
For example: Many departments currently have autonomy and feel that it is 'their' infrastructure, interoperating sometimes goes against these beliefs.
Some also argue that they have no 'techies' to create interoperable or open source systems.
John's retort to this was that they shouldn't have downsized and replaced them all in the first place (and that the skills deficit should be replaced by re-skilling the existing staff force!)
and that they are weary of disruptive technologies.
He also pointed out that there remains within the academic sector an undercurrent of feeling that other universities are competitors.
John finished by saying that these arguments that interoperability was purely about collecting merit badges were wrong.
The Internet is what makes us want and need to interoperate.
He sees the e-framework as being like 'building aeroplanes in the sky'.
Sounds like the e-framework is exciting stuff!
Clifford Lynch : Closing Keynote With the title of "How technology is changing scholarship", Cliff Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, talked about the increasingly creative use of computational methods throughout the scholarly world.
He drew particular attention to the humanities where technology is being taken up, both in research and within cultural organisations.
He used the example of digitisation, where providing enhanced access to images can enhance scholarship through an increased audience able to provide contextual information about the images.
Other examples included new and sophisticated ways of capturing, sharing and annotating performance.
He also talked about Lorcan Dempsey's notion of 'netflow', where personal workflow is increasingly digital.Ubiquitous connectivity and access, through wireless capabilities and cheaper storage, mean that a learner might carry around a large personal electronic library on a laptop.
Rather than dumbing down education, Cliff saw this and new computational technologies such as text mining as a necessary means of dealing with the wealth of material now available to us.
To end, Cliff stressed the important role of digital curation and preservation in managing this growing core of digital information.
References JISC Conference 2006 Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf06_home Presenters' slides where available are below the programme at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf06_programme Liz Lyon, Supporting Digital Curation to safeguard research data: adding value today and ensuring long-term access, JISC Conference, March 2006 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/presentations.html Author Details Julie Allinson Support Officer for the JISC Digital Repositories Programme, UKOLN University of Bath Email: j.allinson@ukoln.ac.uk Marieke Guy Interoperability Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Maureen Pennock Research Officer for the Digital Curation Centre UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.pennock@ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "The Rustle of Digital Curation: The JISC Annual Conference" Author: Julie Allinson, Marieke Guy and Maureen Pennock Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/jisc-conf-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data mobile software rdf framework wiki api dissemination rss xml portal usability infrastructure archives xslt metadata xhtml digitisation standardisation accessibility tagging blog repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing videoconferencing e-learning microformats podcast xcri youtube rdfa e-science cd-rom ict interoperability algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Introduction to Federated Searching Technology & Developments Date: 11 May 2007 Venue: Conference Room, Southport College, Mornington Road, Southport, PR9 0TT Delegate Fee: £50.00 This one day conference is aimed at further education library and information.
As electronic content and sources of information, provided by academic libraries, become greater and vaster, the need for federated searching technologies has increased.
This seminar will introduce delegates to the concepts of federated searching (also known as meta-searching) of library content, and will illustrate some of the current developments and initiatives within this field.
For further information please visit: http://www.west-cheshire.ac.uk/cofhe-nw/ To register to this event please use our new online booking form.
If you have any issues with the form, or for further information, please contact: Joanne Jenkins Event Co-ordinator JISC RSC Northwest (Lancaster University) 12a Darwin Court Hawking Place Blackpool FY2 0JN Tel: 01253 503 180 Fax: 01253 503 182 email: j.jenkins@lancaster.ac.uk Back to headlines CILIP e-Copyright Executive Briefing A briefing entitled: e-Copyright: is the UK's intellectual property regime fit for the digital age?
will be presented by CILIP on Friday 18 May at CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE http://www.cilip.org.uk/interests/execbriefings/ecopyright/ The speakers will address all the current issues surrounding e-copyright the Gowers Review, digital preservation, orphan works and more.
Some of the questions the programme will address are: Should libraries be allowed to copy and format shift master copies of archival works for the purposes of digital preservation Should copying of a work be permitted where the rightsowner cannot be located even after 'reasonable efforts' have been made to track them down and clear the rights Do the collective licensing societies currently offer or are there any plans for licences which cover the use of born digital content What impact will the Gowers Review recommendations have for the library and information sector The full programme is available on the Briefing Web site: http://www.cilip.org.uk/interests/execbriefings/ecopyright/ The list of speakers is available at: http://www.cilip.org.uk/interests/execbriefings/ecopyright/speakers.html The Briefing is designed for public, academic and corporate librarians keen to debate with independent experts.
Back to headlines Digital Futures: Digitisation for cultural heritage institutions Digital Futures: A 5-day training course on key issues in digitisation for cultural heritage institutions 21-25 May 2007 King's College London, UK http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/ Digital Futures focuses on the strategic, business, and financial aspects for the creation, delivery and preservation of digital resources from cultural and memory institutions.
Digital Futures is aimed at managers and other practitioners from the library, museum, heritage and cultural sectors looking to understand the strategic and management issues of developing digital resources from digitisation to delivery.
Items of special note for 2007 are: Visit to the National Gallery to see digital camera and digital delivery systems Visit to the Imperial War Museum to see audio and photographic digitisation activities Digital Futures will cover the following core areas: Group and individual exercises throughout the week Strategic issues Planning and management Fund raising and finance Sustainability Copyright Metadata introduction and implementation Implementing digital resources Digital preservation See the full programme at: http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/digiprog.htm Registration is available at: http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/digireg.htm Back to headlines Data Sans Frontières: Web Portals and the Historic Environment 25 May 2007 The British Museum, London http://www.britarch.ac.uk/HEIRNET Organised by the Historic Environment Information Resources Network (HEIRNET) and supported by the AHRC ICT Methods Network and the British Museum, this one-day conference takes a comprehensive look at exciting new opportunities to use portal technologies and Web 2.0 approaches to disseminate and integrate historic environment data.
Bringing together speakers from national organisations, national and local government and academia, options for cooperation at both national and international levels will be explored.
The aims of the conference are: to raise awareness of current portal and interoperability technologies to raise awareness of current developments in the online dissemination of Historic Environment Data to set developments in the historic environment sector in a wider national and European information context to create a vision for a way forward for joined-up UK historic environment information provision This conference should be of interest to heritage professionals, researchers and data managers from all sectors.
The conference costs £12.
Further information: A full programme, online registration and payment facilities are available at: http://www.britarch.ac.uk/HEIRNET/ It is also possible to pay by cheque or cash on the day, but please reserve your place by email to dsf@britarch.ac.uk Further background information: HEIRNET is made up of a group of organisations with an interest in information relating to archaeology and the historic environment under the auspices of the Council for British Archaeology.
The HEIRNET consortium is a delegate body with representatives from organisations which have a direct interest in information systems within archaeology and the historic environment.
Its geographical scope is currently the United Kingdom although work is taking place set in the wider context of European and international developments.
For more information, see: http://www.britarch.ac.uk/HEIRNET/ Back to headlines Introduction to Videoconferencing Seminar TDA, MLA and JANET Videoconferencing Awareness Workshop: Introduction to Videoconferencing Seminar 25 May 2007 Isaac Newton Centre for Continuing Professional Development, London http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/vc-awareness-2007/ Videoconferencing is an area that many cultural sector organisations and teacher training providers wish to explore, but feel that they need more help in planning and implementing systems and solutions.
Some organisations are not sure how to proceed, and many projects have experienced delays and several have had to rethink their whole approach before making progress.
However, the potential of this form of outreach was demonstrated by the recent national videoconference to mark the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which included Culture Minister David Lammy and Baroness Amos.
In order to help address the planning and implementation issues, the TDA and MLA in partnership with JANET will be hosting an event dedicated to raising videoconferencing awareness and to promote the use of videoconferencing via the JANET Videoconferencing Service (JVCS).
The event will be held on Friday 25 May 2007 at the Isaac Newton Centre for Continuing Professional Development in London, part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea City Learning Centre.
A detailed programme and booking form can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/vc-awareness-2007/ Back to headlines Netskills Workshops in Belfast in May 1.
Blogs, Wikis & Social Networking, 30 May 2007 As the World Wide Web moves into another phase, sometimes called Web 2.0, it has never been easier to publish and access information online.
Blogs and wikis offer simple, DIY, interactive publishing, while new social software tools enable collaboration online, whether sharing cutting edge research, CVs or holiday snaps.
But is this just the latest craze or does it have the potential to revolutionise online information?
2.
Surviving Web Overload, 31 May 2007 Are you drowning in information and wasting too much time trying to keep up?
This workshop introduces a range of tools to help make the Web work for you.
From online post-it notes and to-do lists to personalising your own Google home page, the Web is awash with tools and gadgets to help you streamline your working and home life.
Further details on these workshops, including prices and booking forms, and of all future Netskills events are available from: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/products/workshops/ For further information contact: Jamie Stogden Netskills University of Newcastle Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 7RU tel: 0191 222 5000 fax: 0191 222 5001 W eb: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ Back to headlines Blogging from the Backroom CIG Seminar CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Seminar.
8 June 2007, 1.30-5pm CILIP HQ, 7 Ridgmount Street, London,C1E 7AE.
Cost: £50 CIG members; £75 non-members Theme: An afternoon of presentations on blogging for the benefit of practitioners engaged in traditional 'backroom' activities such as cataloguing, indexing, acquisitions, and knowledge management.
Speakers include: Caroline De Brun, National Library for Health Christine Goodair, St George's Medical School, University of London Helen Nicol, NHS Connecting for Health Rachel Robbins & Karen George, Home Office Anne Welsh, DrugScope Topics covered will include blogging the catalogue and why cat & class skills translate easily into tagging and basic site navigation; raising your profile through blogging; blogging for managers (based on a case study of health managers); and how the National Library for Health and the Home Office are using blogs, feeds and related technologies.
The focus of the afternoon is sharing ideas for incorporating blogging into your working life and it is suitable for experienced bloggers and non-bloggers alike.
Each participant will receive a CD-ROM of presentations and 'how-to' demos.
For further information contact: Anne Welsh anneb@drugscope.org.uk or follow the announcements at: http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/catalogueandindex/default.aspx Details of the seminar programme and online booking form are available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/CIG/2007/blogs/ Back to headlines UKeiG Course on RSS, Blogs and Wikis RSS, Blogs and Wikis: tools for dissemination, collaboration and information gathering Netskills Training Suite, University of Newcastle Wednesday 11 July 2007, 9.30 16.30 Course Outline Without realising it you are probably already using RSS, blogs and wikis all Web 2.0 technologies.
Awareness of them amongst users will increase as Microsoft incorporates RSS and blogging into Office 2007, Outlook and IE 7.
This workshop will cut through the jargon and hype and suggest ways in which you can use them as information sources, tools of collaboration or as part of your information delivery strategy.
It will look at how they can be used to manage projects, provide users with current awareness, generate newsletters, and promote your expertise to colleagues, users and clients.
There is a substantial practical element to the workshop giving you a chance to try out all three technologies, assess their relevance, and consider how you can implement them within your organisation.
The programme includes: RSS, blogs and wikis defined Why bother key applications and reasons for using them How to use RSS for current awareness and news alerts Identifying relevant RSS feeds and blogs Using RSS and blogs to market your services and keep your users up to date Setting up a blog Blogs and wikis as collaborative tools Impact of the new technologies on information integrity and quality Software comparisons There will be practical sessions during which you can set up your own personal alerts service using RSS, start a blog, and contribute to a wiki.
The techniques and approaches described in this workshop can be applied to all subject areas.
Course Presenter: Karen Blakeman Karen Blakeman has worked in the information profession for over twenty years and has been a freelance consultant since 1989.
Her company (RBA Information Services) provides training and consultancy on the use of the Internet, and on accessing and managing information resources.
Her publications include "Search Strategies for the Internet", now in its sixth edition.
She was recently made an Honorary Fellow of CILIP and in 2002 she received the Information World Review Information Professional of the Year award To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk.
Further details are also available via the UKeiG Web site at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ UKeiG is a Special Interest Group of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
Back to headlines IWMW 2007: Chair Opens Bookings and Provides Homework 11th Institutional Web Management Workshop 16-18 July 2007 University of York http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/ I am pleased to announce that we are now accepting bookings for the eleventh Institutional Web Management Workshop which will be held at the University of York from Monday 16 Wednesday 18 July 2007.
This year's theme is 'Next Steps for the Web Management Community' and there are a number of plenary talks which will explore the concept of community.
Steven Warburton, King's College London, asks 'What does 'Community of Practice' mean for Institutional Web Managers?'
while Alison Wildish, Edge Hill University, suggests we 'Let the Students do the Talking' by encouraging the use of social networking tools.
Paul Boag, Headscape discusses 'Social Participation in Student Recruitment' and Peter Reader, University of Bath, gives the marketing take in his talk 'Marketing Man takes off his Tie: Customers, Communities and Communication'.
There are are also a number of more technical talks including advice on 'Building Highly Scalable Web Applications' from Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services, consideration of whether 'Your Web site can be Your API?'
by Drew McClellan, allinthehead.com, and a look at 'The Promise of Information Architecture' from Keith Doyle, Salford University.
Workshop participants will also be able to attend 2 from a total of 18 parallel sessions which cover a wide range of topics including various aspects of engaging with the user community; usability, accessibility, cultural issues; use of technologies such as XCRI, single sign-on, portable devices; Web 2.0 issues such as using YouTube, 'The Eternal Beta Can it Work in an Institution?'
and geolinking institutional content and much more.
Read Up Before Booking You will be asked to select your parallel workshop sessions when you register so may want to read up on the sessions available in advance: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/sessions/ We will, as usual, be providing a social programme which includes a workshop dinner and a reception at the National Rail Museum.
Further details are available at the workshop Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/ The booking form is available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/bookings/ We hope to see you in York in July.
Marieke Guy IWMW 2007 Chair Interoperability Focus Officer UKOLN Back to headlines Digital Libraries à la Carte Modular International Digital Library Course: Digital Libraries à la Carte Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
27-31 August 2007 http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/ticer/07carte/ The International Ticer School (known for its former International Summer School on the Digital Library) offers a new, modular course for librarians and publishers: "Digital Libraries à la Carte".
The course is recommended by JISC.
Modules From its menu of six one-day modules, you can select: Strategic Developments and Library Management Technological Developments: Threats and Opportunities for Libraries Hands-on: Open Source Software for Libraries and XML Libraries Supporting Research and Open Access Hands-on: Library 2.0 Technologies to Reach out to the Customer Libraries Supporting Teaching and Learning Subjects covered: Science Commons collection development in the digital age understanding user needs performance measurement and accountability search engines and innovative catalogues library chatbots federated identity management open source software for libraries XML libraries supporting eScience Sakai as a virtual research environment Open Access to data sets services based on Open Access repositories podcasting/vodcasting social networking and immersive worlds libraries for NetGen students information literacy learning spaces gaming and libraries For Course Lecturers, see: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/07carte/lecturers.html To guarantee a highly interactive programme, the number of participants will be limited, lectures contain an interactive component, and two modules consist of hands-on sessions in a computer room.
The course is recommended by JISC, DEFF Denmark's Electronic Research Library, CBU/KUB the conference of university libraries in Switzerland, and NFF the Norwegian Association of Special Libraries.
For further information: On the course Web site you can find the full programme, the complete list of lecturers with short biographiess, abstracts of most presentations and practical information about course fee and registration.
http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/ticer/07carte/ If you register before 1 June 2007, you will get a €150 discount.
Or contact: Ms Jola Prinsen Manager Ticer Tilburg University Library and IT Services P.O.
Box 4191 5004 JD Tilburg The Netherlands tel.
+31 13 466 8310 fax +31 13 466 8383 e-mail: jola.prinsen@uvt.nl Web: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/ticer/ Back to headlines Libraries Without Walls 7 Opens for Bookings Libraries Without Walls 7: Exploring 'anywhere, anytime' delivery of library services 14 18 September 2007 Lesvos, Greece http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww7/ This international conference is organised by CERLIM The Centre for Research in Library and Information Management http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/ and will be held on the Aegean island of Lesvos, Greece, from 14 18 September 2007.
Keynote Speaker, Christine Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA The seventh Libraries Without Walls Conference continues the tradition of the LWW Conference series by bringing together an international programme of speakers to give their perspectives on the delivery of library and information services to users who are not in the physical library.
Our speakers for 2007 reveal the diverse current developments in library service delivery.
They reflect upon new kinds of service and new paradigms of 'library', and consider the impact of these changes upon library users.
They illustrate aspects of the library's role within new models of scholarly publishing and digital curation, and the delivery of information skills and literacy through electronic environments.
Librarians from developing countries, especially those which serve scattered rural communities where the infrastructure is sub-optimal, offer their insights into how services are delivered in such challenging environments.
Contributors from Western and Eastern Europe, the USA, Canada, Africa, Asia and Australia will present their perspectives on the 'anywhere, anytime' delivery of library services in a series of papers, workshops and informal discussions.
For full details of the conference, including the programme, booking information, venue details, and FAQs, visit the Conference Web site at: http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww7/ All enquiries should be addressed to the organisers: Email: LWW-7@mmu.ac.uk Tel: ++44 (0)161 247 6142 Fax : ++44 (0) 161 247 6979 Back to headlines Online Educa to Launch First Russian Event in Moscow The first Russian event in the series of Online Educa international conferences will be launched in the autumn of 2007.
The Online Educa Moscow conference will take place: 30 September 3 October 2007 at the President Hotel, Moscow.
http://www.online-educa-moscow.com/ Conference attendees will include experts from the business sector and the academic community, as well as education decision-makers and innovators.
With more than 500 delegates expected from the CIS countries, the EU, the USA, China, and other countries, Online Educa Moscow is set to establish itself as an international event in ICT-supported learning and training in the Russian Federation.
The event looks into latest developments in technology-enhanced learning and will give a particular focus on regional issues within the CIS countries, such as languages, cultures and access to technology.
Presentations and workshops include topics such as the transformation of traditional learning through technology, the impact of emerging tools for learning such as mobile devices, podcasts and video technologies, quality and standardisation issues as well as good practice solutions for e-learning in companies, universities and in the public sector.
The conference will include an exhibition.
The conference languages are Russian and English.
More information about Online Educa Moscow can be found at http://www.online-educa-moscow.com/ Contact details: Ria Kyriazi (Organiser) ICWE GmbH & Market Ds, Leibnizstrasse 32, 10625 Berlin, Germany ria.kyriazi@icwe.net Tel.
: +49 -30 327 6140 Fax: +49 30 324 9833 Back to headlines Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages The GRDDL Working Group at W3C has completed work on the Working Group Note "GRDDL Use Cases: Scenarios of extracting RDF data from XML documents" and is pleased to announce its publication on 6 April 2007.
There are many dialects of XML in use by documents on the web.
In addition, recently two progressive encoding techniques, RDFa and microformats, have emerged to overlay additional semantics onto valid XHTML documents.
While this breadth of expression is quite liberating, it can prove to be a barrier to understanding across different domains or fields.
GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages; that is, for extracting RDF data from XML documents by way of transformation algorithms, typically represented in XSLT and usually producing RDF/XML documents.
This note collects a number of motivating use cases together with their goals and requirements for extracting RDF data from XML documents.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/NOTE-grddl-scenarios-20070406/ [Source: Dr. Fabien Lucien Gandon, INRIA] [Received: April 2007] Back to headlines Blueprint for Excellence: Public Libraries 2008-2011 In a recent announcement the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) stated it regarded the discussion paper Blueprint for Excellence as an invitation to professionals to become involved in the forward thinking and planning for libraries in the years ahead.
As the current Framework action plan moves into its final year, the document seeks to encourage discussion of the direction for libraries from 2008 and the strategic and development priorities for public libraries in the next phase of their development.
Resources available for discussion: A Blueprint for Excellence Public Libraries 2008-2011 (PDF 62KB) http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets/B/blueprint_v2_11233.pdf A questionnaire at: http://mla.wufoo.com/forms/blueprint/ A shortened version of the online questionnaire, designed for group response, is available at http://mla.wufoo.com/forms/blueprintshortversion/ A presentation summarising the consultation document, is now available on the MLA Web site at: http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets//B/blueprint_11254.ppt The presentation includes slides to help facilitate group discussion.
Further information and advice: John Dolan, Head of Library Policy Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Victoria House, Southampton Row, London WC1B 4EA Tel: 07760 477954 Email: john.dolan@mla.gov.uk [Source: MLA] [Received: April 2007] Back to headlines Better Stock, Better Libraries: Progress Update The Better Stock Better Libraries Programme will help public libraries buy cheaper books, better matched to readers' requirements and which are available as quickly as from the high street and online booksellers.
By 2008, foundations will be in place to support chief librarians to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their stock procurement.
The latest Progress Update is available on the MLA Website as a .pdf document.
This outlines the most recent feedback received, outlines key developments in the programme, and comes with a summary from the March Programme Board meeting and a timetable for phase 1 implementation.
MLA would welcome involvement in the programme in a number of areas: Testing the feasibility of an inter-authority marketplace for supplying specialist ethnic language material Working with publishers to test further streamlining processing and procurement Feedback on our approach Contributions to support technical elements; gaps in the programme; sharing good practice.
To participate in the Better Stock Better Libraries Programme in these or in other ways, practitioners are invited respond to bsbl@mla.gov.uk indicating the type of contribution they wish to make.
[Source: MLA] [Received: May 2007] Back to headlines JISC sponsors 'Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year' Award This year, in a call to institutions to 'bring to wider attention examples of innovation in the use of ICT', JISC is sponsoring an 'Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year' award which will showcase the most innovative and potentially far-reaching ICT initiatives across the UK.
The award, one of the Times Higher's 2007 Awards, will 'recognise and reward an institutional ICT initiative which has demonstrated an innovative and strategic use of ICT in support of the goals of that institution.'
The award, for which all Higher Education institutions, teams or departments in the UK are eligible, is now open for entries until 29 June 2007.
The award will be presented at an event on 29 November 2007.
The judges of the award are: Alison Allden Deputy Registrar & Director of Information Services, University of Bristol and Chair of JISC's Integrated Information Environment Committee (JIIE) Professor David Baker Principal of the College of St Mark and St John and Chair of JISC's Content Services committee (JCS) Sarah Porter Head of Development, JISC Norman Wiseman Head of Services and Outreach, JISC Speaking to the Times Higher Education Supplement this week, Professor Baker said: 'There is a need for good practice and examples of innovation to be more widely shared.
With the THES awards having quickly become a showcase for some of the best and most exciting work being done in higher education, we hope this ICT award will likewise bring to wider attention examples of innovative and far-reaching uses of ICT.'
Information on the Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year Award, is available at: http://www.thes.co.uk/Awards/2007/ See also: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/THESAwards For further information: Please contact Philip Pothen (JISC) on 07887 564 006 or p.pothen@jisc.ac.uk [Source: JISC] [Received: May 2007] Back to headlines Art Fund International The Art Fund has committed £5 million to a new initiative, Art Fund International, to develop collections of international contemporary art in UK regional museums and galleries.
The scheme aims to encourage museums and galleries which house permanent collections to work with contemporary arts organisations which do not.
Up to five projects will be selected in 2007 and will be allocated funding to spend over the next five years.
The application process is in two stages.
In the first stage, the Fund will be inviting Expressions of Interest from institutions which wish to participate in the scheme.
The deadline for submitting Expressions of Interest is noon, Friday 22 June 2007 but any institution wishing to participate is asked to contact The Art Fund as soon as possible.
See The Art Fund's Web site for more information on how to apply: http://www.artfund.org/grants/artfundinternational.html [Source:MLA] [Received: April 2007] Back to headlines New Look for UnityUK On 2 April 2007 The Combined Regions (TCR), in partnership with OCLC PICA, went live with the next version of the UnityUK resource sharing service.
The new version delivers significant enhancements in workflow and usability and has been developed in partnership with the service's user community of over 120 libraries.
The new features have been designed to enhance the system in line with the needs of its users.
It has been developed in response to comments and suggestions gathered from numerous discussions, workshops, user groups and surveys with the user community during the 12 months since the service went live, and also from the outcome of the LinkUK integration project.
This is the first major release for the service, which is part-financed by the European Union's European Regional Development Fund delivered through the South Yorkshire Objective 1 Programme.
The new developments are designed to deliver significant enhancements in two key areas.
Firstly, the workflow through the requesting process has been simplified which will make the service easier and quicker to use.
Secondly, the introduction of a new facility that enables UnityUK members and non UnityUK libraries to manage responses through the service.
This new feature removes the need for individual email responses to be updated manually.
All the information that users need in order to make the best of the new release is easily available via the UnityUK Members' Area Web site, which is free to members.
For the first time, users will be able to download short training films which demonstrate the key features of the new version.
OCLC PICA, in conjunction with the UnityUK user community, is planning further new developments for release later in 2007.
Ideas currently under discussion include the integration of fee management in to the service and an end-to-end improvement in the interface and workflow with the British Library.
For further information: See http://www.combinedregions.com/ or contact k.birch@oclcpica.org [Source: TheAnswer Ltd] [Received: April 2007] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet-SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet-SOSIG Buzz usability metadata cataloguing passwords research standards Citation BibTex RIS This month Neil Jacobs introduces a new book for information professionals in the social sciences and Heta Virnes describes her experience of running virtual helpdesks for SOSIG.
Online Information Services for the Social Sciences Fourteen members of staff from the Institute for Learning and Research Technology, at the University of Bristol, have co-authored a book, ‘Online Information Service Provision in the Social Sciences’, aimed mainly, though not exclusively, at information professionals.
It offers an insight into knowledge retrieval today.
Information provision of a very high standard in the social sciences has increased immeasurably with modern technologies including the Internet, but more knowledge and newer technologies have created access problems with users.
This book, published by Chandos, addresses the issues facing users and providers of information in the 21st Century.
The publication arose from a project to investigate the provision of electronic information services.
It includes a range of case studies from across the social science sectors, focusing on users and providers in the UK and Europe.
From the case studies a number of issues, (such as usability, metadata, marketing), are analysed and some future technical and organisational scenarios are presented.More information about the book can be found from the Chandos site [1] or by contacting Neil Jacobs at the address below.
Virtually yours … SOSIG [2] runs a number of email helpdesks to help with its users’ queries.
As a digital library available from the Internet, virtual helpdesks are the only feasible way to communicate with the majority of our users.
We run four different helpdesks depending on what the users’ query: SOSIG-help, SOSIG-info, grapevine-info and SOSIG-feedback.
SOSIG-help is meant for general questions about how to use the SOSIG site and catalogue of Internet resources, as well as reporting any problems.
Typical subjects of emails sent to SOSIG-help include help with searching SOSIG, amendments to the records in the SOSIG catalogue, reporting broken links, asking for permission to link to SOSIG, advertising an event, and requesting publicity material.
Unfortunately, because of the high volume of queries, we are not able to answer questions on how to find a particular item (article, piece of legislation, etc) or specific information within the sites listed on SOSIG.
We often receive queries from students who are trying to find reference material for their assignments, generally very close to their deadline.
We reply with a standard email that details how to find information on SOSIG and some alternative sources to try, even if the reference librarian in us would love to help more!
SOSIG-info is a Web form that allows users to recommend Web sites to add to the SOSIG catalogue.
We greatly value input from our user community and would like to encourage our users to contribute to SOSIG even more by letting us know of useful information they would like to see added to the catalogue.
Grapevine-info is for users who have signed up with the Grapevine part of SOSIG.
Most queries to this list concern forgotten passwords and usernames and other problems with creating or accessing the My Account feature.
Users can also send SOSIG section editors feedback on their section using the Web forms available in each subject section.
The queries are sent directly to the section editors who are the subject specialists who create and maintain the different subject sections on the service.
The type of emails SOSIG receives most has changed over the years.
Unfortunately these days like many services we receive an overwhelming amount of spam (several thousand a month) and before we were able to put a tailor-made spam filter in place, a lot of staff time was spent deleting these messages (now it magically disappears overnight).
There is seasonal fluctuation in the amount of genuine messages we receive and the academic year has a definite affects on this.
The peak time at the helpdesks occurs at the beginning and halfway through each academic term.
Similarly, we receive fewer queries during exam and vacation times.
We work to targets for how quickly we should reply to our users and attempt to answer 90 % of our messages within one working day.
Several members of SOSIG staff run the helpdesks so that they are covered during office hours throughout the week.
We always like to hear from our users in order to find out who is using SOSIG and what they think of it and so enable us to improve the service.
References Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited http://www.library-chandospublishing.com/ Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Author Details Neil Jacobs Regard Manager ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: neil.jacobs@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Heta Virnes SOSIG ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Web site: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Neil Jacobs and Heta Virnes Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 50: Side-Stepping Babel Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 50: Side-Stepping Babel Buzz software wiki dissemination archives repositories eprints preservation onix ict research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne 50.
With Dyson and parts of Burberry disappearing points east, leaving their design departments behind them [1] [2], there are possible grounds for arguing that the (previously) industrialised countries must live by their wits and the emerging knowledge economy.
In Limits to Information Transfer: The Boundary Problem Jon Erland Lervik, Mark Easterby-Smith, Kathryn Fahy and Carole Elliott write that 'the challenge for knowledge management is not only to make knowledge available in repositories for dissemination across the firm' or organisation.
In effect companies must be able to integrate increasingly numerous and growing bodies of specialised knowledge from different communities of expertise if they are to add value to their goods or services and compete effectively.
In this article they describe three approaches to managing knowledge across boundaries within an organisation.
In referring to these boundaries they point out that 'Members of different specialised knowledge communities can be said to reside in different 'thought worlds'.
Central ideas in one community may be considered uninteresting or irrelevant in another.
Collaboration can be difficult across disciplines, because individuals give different meanings to the same concept.'
Project managers and partners on any distributed work package, would, I expect, nod ruefully at the time it has taken sometimes before all partners realise that there is more than one interpretation of a term, conceivably a main target, doing the rounds of their project; not to mention the time it has taken to be able to 'sing from the same hymn sheet'.
Those projects savvy enough to circulate a glossary at the earliest possible stage will doubtless still bemoan the time it takes to reach a working consensus though their approach is nonetheless the surer.
The authors give the example of development of a car engine as an example of how the boundaries between specialisations can be so detrimental to project effort: despite developing the same car, the engine designers and the body stylists had specialised away from each other so much that the project suffered a significant mishap.
This article helps to address a modern paradox: that increasing sophistication is necessary for increasingly advanced design; but the specialisation required can so easily lead to development failures through the loss of common understanding.
As the rate of technological change shows no sign of falling off, the whole issue of how institutions manage inventions and more importantly innovation is addressed by Melanie Bates, Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim in their article Models of Early Adoption of ICT Innovations in Higher Education in which they provide an overview of some considerations for change agents wishing to introduce an innovative new information communication technology service into Higher Education institutions.
Quite properly (I refer you to my earlier remarks about common understanding), the authors define what they mean by both invention and innovation before leading us to consider different theories and models associated with the acceptance and take-up of ICT innovations.
They put me very much in mind of the point made by Marieke Guy in her recent article on wikis and communities; namely that a wiki is far more likely to be adopted by a community that needs one, rather than by a disparate group of enthusiasts without a cause.
In other words, the wiki is given a job to do for a group of people with common or at least some shared aims.
Had Bill Clinton been a technologist rather than a mere President, I expect he would have said to his co-developers, 'It's the Users, Stupid' and it is evident from the research described in this article that the importance and characteristics of early adopters are every bit as important as the bells and whistles on the latest brainwave.
Philip Beresford did indeed carry out his promise, implicit in his Newsline entry of last issue, to provide us with a full article on the Web Curator Tool.
As we have become increasingly aware of the fragility of information on the Internet, there have been moves by organisations such as the Internet Archive to capture material before it disappears.
In this context therefore it is very useful to have the story (from The British Library's perspective) of the development of new software to aid all stages of harvesting Web sites for preservation.
I will risk the wrath of those who hate Amazon's urge to tell them that if they liked one product they may like something similar by referring here to Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library in which Chris Hilton and Dave Thompson discuss plans for work with born digital archival material at the Wellcome Library.
The object of each set of authors is palpably different, but the benefits that their work will have for all who wish to access digital material are equally clear.
Francis Cave, Brian Green and David Martin address a not dissimilar boundary difficulty in their article on ONIX for Licensing Terms: Standards for the Electronic Communication of Usage Terms.
As more and more publications are made available in digital form, so new ways are appearing in which to trade in them, producing a pressing requirement, among others, for a common means of expressing and transmitting usage terms.
The authors describe the work by stakeholders in this area in developing a new set of formats that will support the full range and complexity of licensing terms to be expressed in a machine-readable and easily communicated form called ONIX for Licensing Terms.
I never cease to be amazed by the increasing numbers of search engines and allied formats popping up on the radar screen.
Consequently I can only congratulate Phil Bradley on his ability to keep abreast of all these developments.
In his regular article for us this issue, Phil provides a comprehensive and brief view of all the New Search Engines in 2006.
He recommends or disapproves of each in turn, explaining where a search engine has merits for a particular type of user and humbly reminds us that these are his personal views you are very welcome to disagree!
My colleague Julie Allinson has been working might and main on A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works which she describes, in collaboration with Pete Johnston and Andy Powell.
This work has clearly been attracting interest [3] and I am indebted to all three for their coverage of the application profile which is, it would seem, attracting interest and not necessarily confined to the area of scholarly works.
Referring back to the persistence (or lack of) of Web sites on the World Wide Web, it is always interesting to run through the hot topics that have come (and sometimes gone) in the decade's worth of Ariadne pages, and no prizes for guessing at the current buzzwords such as 'Web 2.0' and 'mash-ups'.
However there were prizes offered by Talis to those developers keen to try their hand and developing some of the latter themselves and Paul Miller details what these entries were and how they relate to What Happens When We Mash the Library?.
While I was not surprised that US entries predominated, it was interesting to note a third emanated from the UK, of which an impressive number from the Open University.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, with reviews on books about digital preservation, integrating content and systems in the context of digital libraries, programming know-how to create resources for Google searching and digital photography by the accomplished American landscape photographer Stephen Johnson.
In addition of course we provide our expanded section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 50.
References BBCi News:UK manufacturers lured overseas http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1806463.stm BBCi News: Protest at label's London stores http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/6159146.stm Focus on UKOLN, Issue 18: Eprints Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/focus/issue18/#18.17 Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 50: Side-Stepping Babel" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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C21st Curation Summer 2005 Public Lecture Series Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines C21st Curation Summer 2005 Public Lecture Series Buzz data software dissemination archives digitisation vocabularies video preservation multimedia curation e-science research Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie and Helen Forde report on the public lecture series 'C21st Curation: working with digital assets in the new Millennium challenges and opportunities' held at University College London over May and June 2005, and on plans for a second series in 2006.
A growing and significant part of the record and culture of the UK is now in digital form.
The lives of staff working in our institutions, current students, and private individuals will be increasingly influenced by these trends and the growing demand for professionals to curate digital assets.
The School of Library, Archives and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London aims to raise awareness and interest amongst students on university vocational courses for museums, libraries and archives in digital stewardship.
As part of this work SLAIS launched a series of four public debates by seven leading speakers open to students, professionals and the general public, organised over the first five weeks of the summer term 2005.
The four evening sessions each attracted an audience, varying between 50 70, of professional librarians, archivists, records managers, practitioners involved in digital preservation and students.
Each session provoked lively discussion and debate.
Speakers and attendees continued informal discussion during the receptions held afterwards.
Some of the key themes and issues which emerged from the series are detailed below.
Chris Batt, Chief Executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, started the series off, with a wide ranging paper on digital futures, urging everyone in cultural heritage institutions to consider how they would need to revise their activities and philosophies in the light of technical and social change.
He discussed the value of digital assets held by cultural heritage organisations and argued that they should increasingly be viewed and promoted as knowledge institutions.
Current difficulties included both that of ensuring the preservation of the digital materials and of finding relevant information.
He argued for persistent and perpetual access to information as a universal entitlement and the need to re-think the vocabulary used for the exploitation of digital assets.
His concluding forecast was that in time everyone would have their own personal knowledge space online and he urged the audience to be passionate about the future and the role of cultural heritage institutions in the digital world.
Neil Beagrie, Partnership Manager for the British Library and JISC, started the second session by focusing on the growing importance and impact of personal digital collections and publishing.
He argued that people are capturing and storing an ever-increasing amount of digital information about or for themselves, including emails, documents, articles, portfolios of work, digital images, and audio and video recordings.
Computer processing, storage, and software tools available to individuals are increasing in power, volume, and ease of use, year on year.
Many issues arise from this more informal and increasingly empowered landscape of personal collection, dissemination, and digital memory.
He discussed potential implications for individuals, libraries and their institutions and urged cultural heritage institutions to engage with and help shape this emerging landscape of digital collection.
He was followed by Maggie Jones, Executive Secretary of the Digital Preservation Coalition, who noted that it not only remains difficult to recruit individuals with appropriate skills in digital preservation but also that the need for such skills is growing.
The potential impact of this long-term skills gap on institutions in the UK is likely to be severe and is a cross-sectoral issue.
She then outlined plans for a UK vocational digital preservation training programme to address this issue, which will focus initially on the Higher and Further Education sector with funding support from JISC.
It builds on existing exemplars of training and information provision and will be developed at multiple levels, to meet the needs of senior managers, existing practitioners and new staff.
Sheila Anderson, Director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service, opened the third session by describing a series of projects illustrating the development of digital resources.
She highlighted the potential challenges for curators of digital research in the arts and humanities caused by the widespread digitisation of source materials, adding interpretation, and then providing access to them as a seamless collection.
She also noted the changing face and pace of scholarly knowledge in relation to Web sites and the ephemeral information they contained.
In conclusion she emphasised the need for global collaboration and shared services.
Helen Shenton, Head of Collection Care, British Library, followed with an outline of the current thinking of the British Library on the curation of digital materials and the challenges and opportunities these presented.
She gave examples of C21st curation at the Library ranging from Web archiving to e-science.
The BL mission of enabling the UK to preserve and use its digital output forever has produced many new challenges.
It has also produced many contrasts with the print environment such as the differing physical characteristics of the actual information carriers, and the worldwide as opposed to national organisation and availability of the information.
The final session began with a paper from Charles Saumarez Smith, Director of the National Gallery, explaining that the expectation of galleries is for on-site visits, enhanced by remote access, rather than as a substitute for them.
As a consequence technology has been used more for enhancing existing experiences than for creating new opportunities, though programmes such as ArtStart (the National Gallery's award-winning interactive multimedia system) are being developed for educational and recreational purposes.
However, he noted that in addition the digital world was having an unexpected and significant impact on traditional gallery services as visitor and staff expectations were changed by online experiences and services.
Sarah Tyacke, Chief Executive of the National Archives, completed the series with a clear indication that the future of archives is digital, and that by adapting, archive offices could become more participatory while retaining earlier roles.
The consequences are new audiences and wider take-up of information, building on the emotional impact of programmes such as 'Who do you think you are?'.
She reiterated the importance of archival expertise and records management in the digital age.
Finally she demonstrated the need to be inclusive within the archival profession and institutions by the proper curation of not only the traditional materials but also the audio-visual and born digital materials.
Future Plans The 2006 series C21st Curation: access and service delivery will run from 26 April to 17 May on Wednesday evenings from 18.00 to 19.15 in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre, University College London (UCL), followed by a reception in the Haldane Room.
Sessions and Speakers will include: 26 April 2006 Scholarly Communication David Brown (British Library) Paul Ayris (UCL) 3 May 2006 Digital Resources in the Humanities Prof. Susan Hockey and Suzanne Keene (Institute of Archaeology) 10 May 2006 Service Delivery in National Institutions Natalie Ceeney (The National Archives) Jemima Rellie (Tate) 17 May 2006 Curation and Access for Scientific Data Neil Beagrie (British Library/JISC) Prof. Mike Wadsworth (UCL) All lectures are free and open to the public.
Author Details Neil Beagrie BL/JISC Partnership Manager The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB Email: neil.beagrie@bl.uk Web sites: http://www.bl.uk/ http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ http://www.beagrie.com Helen Forde Lecturer School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Email: h.forde@ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "C21st Curation Summer 2005 Public Lecture Series" Author: Neil Beagrie and Helen Forde Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/c21st-curation-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Software Choice: Decision-making in a Mixed Economy Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Software Choice: Decision-making in a Mixed Economy Buzz software apache infrastructure copyright linux gpl licence interoperability e-government research standards Citation BibTex RIS Randy Metcalfe considers the role of free and open source software in UK Further and Higher Education.
Imagine a world where software is free.
For the moment, let's not split hairs about this.
In this imagined world software costs virtually nothing to obtain.
And you are free to do things with this software free to study how it works (which means getting access to the underlying code, not just the binaries or executables); free to modify that code to suit your needs and/or improve it; free to re-distribute that modified code.
And everyone else is free to obtain, study, modify, and redistribute software as well as you.
This is not the world you live in.
You live in a world in which some software is free in the sense described above.
Most of the other software and this category might cover the full range of your experience you pay to use.
That is, you pay for the right, in the form of a licence, to use the software.
The licence sets the limits on your use.
Typically, you are not free to study how the software does what it does.
You will almost certainly only have received compiled, executable files with your licence.
It follows you do not have a right (and more importantly your licence probably explicitly states this), to modify the software and redistribute your derived program.
What you have is a right to use the software for whatever time agreed by the licence.
(Some licences require you to pay to renew them on a yearly basis.)
And you have the right to use that software roughly in the manner envisaged by the company that produced it.
There is a struggle going on between those who wish the imagined world to become the real world and those who would prefer it not even to be imaginable.
That struggle, its manifestations and ramifications, is not the subject of this article.
Rather, the subject of this article is software choice, and more specifically the critical choice factors that go in to institutional IT decision-making.
OSS Watch OSS Watch [1] is the national open source software advisory service for UK Further and Higher Education established by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to provide unbiased advice and guidance on free and open source software [2].
We aim to help senior IT decision-makers, IT managers, technicians and academic end-users to understand and work with free and open source software.
It is important to make clear at the outset that OSS Watch is not an advocacy group.
There are many advocacy groups about on all sides of the software debate [3].
They serve a valuable purpose representing and lobbying for the interests of their constituencies.
OSS Watch, for good or ill, must walk the narrow path between them all.
We have no ideological or financial stake in the software decisions made by UK institutions.
Our sole interest is to aid our stakeholders in UK HE and FE gain a better understanding of the issues at hand.
As Colm Butler, Director of the Information Society Policy within the Department of the Taoiseach, noted at the recent Open Standards and Libre Software in Government conference organised by FLOSSPOLS, there is much to be done to help promote understanding through clarity [4].
OSS Watch is part of that project.
If we are clear both on what OSS Watch is and what it is not, it is also sensible to establish from the outset what we understand by the terms free and open source software as a precursor to sensible discussion of software choice in UK institutions.
When 56% of HE and 82% of FE IT strategies in the UK do not even mention free and open source software [5], it seems doubtful that the full range of options are in fact being considered in an effective manner, if at all.
Free and Open Source Fundamentals : Three Views The Licence For our purposes open source software is software distributed under an open source licence.
The open source licences available are those that meet the 10 criteria laid out in The Open Source Definition [6].
The definition itself is maintained by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) [7] which has certified more than 50 licences which do in fact meet these conditions.
The expression free software refers to software that meets the conditions of The Free Software Definition [8].
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) [9] maintains its own list of licences [10] which qualify as free software licences, distinguishing between those that are compatible with the GNU General Public License [11] and those which are incompatible.
It is not surprising to find licences at the root of one view about what free and open source software is.
Software is copyright material.
(I am deliberately setting aside some rather momentous decisions being taken at the moment in Europe concerning software patents [12].)
Along with other copyright material, when you receive a copy of the item in question you also receive some direction as to what can be done with the item.
The licence spells out the range of actions you may perform or are prohibited from performing.
The latest bestseller at the newsstand clearly indicates that all rights are retained by the copyright holder.
You have no right to copy, alter or redistribute the text.
The licence on most proprietary software is similar.
You have the right to use the software, and that is about all.
All open source licences give you considerably more freedom.
Freedom to view and learn from the source code of the program.
Freedom to give a copy to your neighbour.
Freedom to run the program for any purpose.
Freedom to improve the program and share your improvements with others.
The four freedoms of the Free Software Definition find their expression among the 10 criteria of The Open Source Definition.
Together the software licences they recognise mark out a new range of activity (or perhaps a rebirth of practices which were present in the software industry at an earlier age).
And this is why, despite being a simplification, it is true to say that if it is not distributed with an open source licence, it is not open source software.
Development Methodology You may not be terribly concerned by how software is developed.
What matters to you may be that it does what you expect it to do.
Moreover, you may feel that since you will not be involved in development, there is no need for you to acquaint yourself with such esoteric matters.
I sometimes fear that this is precisely the view adopted by some of those who have been burdened with making important IT decisions for their institutions.
The problem with being excessively short-sighted is that one tends to bump into walls.
It is doubtful whether one could seriously consider open source alternatives without some comprehension of either how they have been developed or may continue to develop.
Indeed, for the latter, whether the development community around an open source project is vibrant and ongoing is a vital criterion for evaluating open source software.
How the software gets developed and will continue to be developed does matter.
Eric Raymond famously characterised the open source development methodology as the bazaar [13].
Software, as the computer science departments had taught, and as the proprietary software industry practised, was constructed like a brilliant cathedral from the elaborate blueprints created by engineers reconciling user requirements, functional requirements, financial requirements, and so on.
The blueprint for the cathedral establishes both what will be created and provides a clear test for whether what has been created meets the requirements.
Open source software, Raymond argued, is not developed that way.
It often has no blueprint other than a tentative sketch.
It could develop in many different ways, ways which are never fully determined in advance.
Here, the builders themselves, to the follow the metaphor, shape the ongoing design of the building.
The effect is more like the raucous exchange of goods in a market, or bazaar, than the ethereal realm of cathedral building.
There does seem to be something different about the way open source software gets developed.
Indeed, however it may have been developed, once it is released with an open source licence it may begin to take on the characteristics of the bazaar.
But the world of open source development is vast, and while Raymond's bazaar captures an aspect of it, there are also plenty of projects with detailed blueprints and even with functional requirements.
The point is that open source development is unconstrained.
When evaluating open source software, we really do need to look into the development community for the project because each one is different.
Each is organised along different lines, with different mechanisms for leadership, dispute resolution, delegation and more.
Community The range of development communities leads nicely on to my third fundamental view of free and open source software: community.
Whereas open source licences have criteria which proprietary licences cannot meet, and the nature of the open source licence lends a bazaar-ness to the ongoing development of open source projects which would be difficult to mimic in proprietary software development, community need not be a uniquely distinguishing characteristic of open source software.
There is nothing in the nature of community that limits it to the world of open source.
Indeed there are plenty of cases from the recent past and the present where communities have formed around the use of proprietary software applications.
User support groups are common.
Why then does community often get associated with free and open source software?
Perhaps it has to do with the circle of development.
Figure 1: Community Circle of Development End-users of software are not isolated from the developers in the way that they can be in some proprietary software.
Their observations on how the software functions, its limitations, even bugs, are fed directly back into the development stream.
Of course it does not necessarily follow that all end-users will in fact make direct contributions to development.
But they can.
It is part of what they get with their licence.
And if they felt strongly that the software was not developing in a way they wished, they could take the source code and form their own development community to take it in their preferred direction.
Forking, as this is called, in fact happens far less frequently than might be expected [14].
Equally important is the community that forms around the code.
It is said that there are more than 10,000 developers around the world contributing to the Linux kernel.
Most of course are not contributing huge junks of code.
Rather what they are doing is taking advantage of their freedom to study the code and to learn from it.
This is a remarkable resource.
It has been speculated that if the entire kernel had to be rebuilt from scratch, it would take less than six months.
A speculation we do not really want to put to the test, but it is what triggers the claim that it is the community that is important, not the code.
Open Source in the UK Educational institutions in the UK exist within a nexus of legislation, government policy, funding bodies, market forces and more.
When OSS Watch conducted its initial scoping study in November 2003 it was clear that market forces had already produced a mixed economy.
Many institutions were deploying open source solutions, either in niche areas or more broadly.
53% of FE respondents identified cost as the most important reason for choosing open source solutions.
For HE the most important consideration was interoperability, with cost a close second.
Between 2002 and 2004 the UK government conducted trials on open source use within government [15].
The results of these trials were very positive.
The report stated that Open source software is a viable and credible alternative to proprietary software for infrastructure implementations, and for meeting the requirements of the majority of desktop users.
The policy established through consultation and as a result of the trials was published on 28 October 2004 [16].
The key point for UK HE and FE in that policy is the following: UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements.
Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.
There are other points concerning open source licensing of publicly-funded software development that are also important, but perhaps the procurement point is most significant in the present context.
Where government leads, educational institutions are likely to follow (sometimes).
But given the statistic I gave at the outset on the percentage of institutions that do not even mention free and open source software in their IT strategies, there is some way to go.
Fortunately this is not a government policy without a forward action plan.
It comes as no surprise that the JISC is explicitly mentioned as one of the three groups, along with the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) and the e-Government Unit (eGU), charged with disseminating information on open source licences, development and exploitation.
OSS Watch is merely one of JISC's instruments for carrying this work forward.
Software Choice At the outset I said that this article was about the critical choice factors that go in to institutional IT decision-making.
These are many and various.
Your choice of which software solution to adopt for a particular situation depends on your local situation and your goals.
It is highly unlikely that any one solution will suit all cases.
Moreover it is self-evident that given the range of factors that go into IT decision-making, there will be plenty of room for both proprietary and open source solutions.
The challenge, of course, is how to compare them.
Certainly no single marker will suffice.
Free and open source solutions will almost certainly win any comparison based on cost of software acquisition.
Market lead sounds like a significant factor, but how do we determine market lead for software which may be deployed without being registered on an institution's licence register?
[17] Institutions do a very good job of tracking the licences they are paying fees for, but a very bad job of tracking the licences for which no financial transaction appears in the ledger.
There are two routes forward, both of which fortunately can be taken at the same time.
As institutions begin to rethink their IT strategies in order to include consideration for open source solutions, they will also want to re-examine the principles that guide their strategy.
These include a commitment to interoperability, a desire to make choices that militate against vendor lock-in, a step-wise movement toward modularity.
Modularity here means creating the environment where a decision in one area does not dictate decisions in other areas.
Each of these principles might be glossed as part of the effort to ensure freedom for institutions.
So, there is plenty of work to be done there on thinking through IT strategies.
But equally there is practical work to be done comparing specific solutions.
Fortunately, JISC has already been thinking along these lines.
2005 will see the release of an important study conducted by The University of Strathclyde on how to compare proprietary, in-house, and open source software solutions [18].
Conclusion Free and open source software represents a viable alternative to proprietary software and UK institutions will be increasingly exploring the former in the next few years.
To do this well, and fairly, they need to be equipped with both some fundamentals so as to be clear about their terms and some practical guidance.
OSS Watch is working with colleges and universities across the country to answer their queries, raise awareness about free and open source software, and to develop the kinds of guidance materials that will assist with the difficult IT decisions that lie ahead.
Editor's note: readers may not have seen Support Models for Open Source Deployment and OSS Watch Inaugural Conference: Open Source Deployment and Development.
References OSS Watch home page http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ OSS Watch began operations in July 2003 and, due to demand, increased in size in September 2004.
It is based within the Research Technologies Service of Oxford University Computing Services.
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/ These include: Open Forum Europe http://www.openforumeurope.org/ Free Software Foundation Europe http://www.fsfeurope.org/ Association for Free Software http://www.affs.org.uk/ Colm Butler was speaking at the FLOSSPOLS http://www.flosspols.org/ conference Open Standards and Libre Software in Government at The Hague on 18 November 2004.
See the OSS Watch report on the conference http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/flosspols04.xml OSS Watch Scoping Study http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/studies/scoping/ The scoping study was conducted in Autumn 2003. open source: The Open Source Definition http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html Open Source Initiative (OSI) http://www.opensource.org/ The Free Software Definition http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html GNU Operating System Free Software Foundation http://www.gnu.org/ GNU: Various Licenses and Comments about Them http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html The spelling of licence is a regular source of joy for pedants.
OSS Watch adopts the policy of using standard British English spelling, i.e.
with a c when the word is a noun, and with an s when the word serves in a verbal capacity.
However, when giving the full names of various licences, e.g.
GPL GNU General Public License, we use the spelling that is on the licence itself.
As nearly all open source licences have an American origin, that spelling usually follows the practice of American English with an s even in the case where the word is used as a noun.
At the moment of writing this the Council of Europe is considering whether to implement the Patentability of Computer-implemented Inventions directive, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Directive_on_the_Patentability_of_Computer-Implemented_Inventions This will have considerable implications for how software is developed and used in the Europe.
Its implications deserve considerable scrutiny.
However, it will not change the basis of software as copyright.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ Eric Raymond considers some reasons for the low incidence of forking in 'Homesteading the Noosphere', http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_10/raymond/ Open Source Software Trials in Government Final Report http://www.ogc.gov.uk/index.asp?docid=2190#finalreport Open Source Software: use within UK Government http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/consult_subject_document.asp?docnum=905 Exceptions to this are products such as Web servers the use of which can be measured by independent means.
Apache Web Server holds approximately two-thirds of the market, as measured by Netcraft http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html The outputs of this work are now available here http://www.predict.strath.ac.uk/projects/sw_services/index.htm Author Details Randy Metcalfe Communications Manager OSS Watch University of Oxford Email: info@oss-watch.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Software Choice: Decision-making in a Mixed Economy" Author: Randy Metcalfe Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/metcalfe/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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We Do Not Know We Are Born (Digital) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines We Do Not Know We Are Born (Digital) Buzz data archives tagging identifier repositories ontologies ict research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 54.
In his article Ancient Cultures Inside Modern Universes Edgardo Civallero teases out for us the relationship between notions such as cultural heritage, cultural identity and what he terms intangible cultural heritage, in the context of indigenous peoples.
What becomes immediately apparent for those of us concerned for fellow citizens on the wrong side of the Digital Divide [1][2] is the degree to which even they are fortunate when compared with the indigenous minorities across Latin America [3].
While it is arguable that in globalised post-industrial societies whole groups of citizens risk social exclusion through developments both economic and more general, it is a different order of exclusion being faced by minority indigenous peoples across South America, whose language, culture, indeed their very history, are in danger of disappearing.
While it is possible to maintain that information and communications technologies (ICT) have contributed to the global village that now places many pressures upon these communities, it is also evident that Web-based tools are beginning to offer them a means of preserving their identity and even promoting their cultural aims.
In his article Edgardo provides a panoramic view of the continent and how peoples fare in this Web-based endeavour, where progress is patchy and related to some to degree to their population size.
He provides us with a profile of the principal characteristics of their Web-based material.
It should be emphasised at this juncture that the 'direct involvement of native communities in the digital universe is still very limited, due to several reasons: geographical or social isolation, exclusion, poverty, digital illiteracy, lack of reading and writing skills, language, absence of resources such as electricity, telephone or computers, etc.'
Much of what is being achieved is due to the support of national educational institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), but a path forward for the smaller, more excluded communities is becoming apparent.
It is both heartening to see how Web-based technologies are a source of aid in this context.
For that reason Ariadne cast all constraint to the wind and opted to exclude none of the 126 references submitted in Edgardo's article, since most linked to the Web presence of all the indigenous groups he mentions.
This is certainly an Ariadne record.
Noa Aharony is clearly of the opinion that Web 2.0 technologies are not a passing fad and that they must certainly have their part to play in the library services of the very near future, encompassed in the allied term Library 2.0.
In this context she shares with Ariadne her findings in what she readily accepts is an initial survey into Web 2.0 in US Library and Information Services (LIS) schools and asks the question Are They Missing the Boat?.
Her article also touches upon the notion of culture, but rather in the sense in which it is used in all manner of IT-related organisations.
Noa considers how libraries and their support services should address the changes that are already apparent in the behaviour of students and researchers in their use of ICT.
One has only to compare the floor plans of the Higher Education library in which Ariadne is produced to see how user behaviour has changed and been addressed in the last five years.
It remains to time and the reader's perspective to decide what of Web 2.0 will stay the course and whether policy makers have correctly assessed its importance in the design of LIS courses for the newest members of the profession.
More clear is that Noa's question is both a reasoned and reasonable one.
I am delighted to welcome Phil Bradley back to this issue; his column on Human-powered Search Engines addresses a particular aspect of Web 2.0 which will like as not continue to prove controversial for some time to come.
His subject touches upon a personal area of interest, namely where the effects of human and technological behaviour impinge one upon the other.
In his usual business-like fashion, Phil places various examples of this kind of search engine under his magnifying glass and speaks as he finds.
He left me pondering as to whether even policy makers concerned to widen the opportunities to exercise one's democratic franchise would also do well to consider the implications of voting behaviour.
I am indebted to my colleague Julie Allinson, together with Sebastien François and Stuart Lewis for their article on the JISC-funded SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit, a recent 8-month project with a remit of producing a lightweight protocol for repository deposit.
Not only do the authors provide information on the Project's outcomes, but they also furnish the background and rationale for the Project, including the benefits of a standard deposit mechanism.
They go on to provide the requirements and parameters of SWORD, a definition of the deposit service and associated standards, closing with information on the various implementations of SWORD and related testing.
We are assured that case studies on implementation of SWORD will follow and note that SWORD is already being employed by a number of projects.
Remaining with repository activity, I also welcomed the contribution of Richard Green and Chris Awre for their description of work at Hull to place Web services at the heart of its personalised digital repository provision.
In RepoMMan: Delivering Private Repository Space for Day-to-day Use they describe the intention to make their institutional repository not only the seat of completed digital material but also a widely available workspace in which such material can be developed.
In this RepoMMAn soght to identify how Web services could be formed to provide users with a means of translating their activity from work-in-progress to formally available object with maximum ease.
Richard and Chris point to the obstacles they encountered along the way and also describe future work in this area.
We come, once more, across the path of different cultures when we read the incisive review by Malcolm Heath, Michael Jubb and David Robey of E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK.
In this instance we are invited to consider how the perspective and expectations of researchers in the Arts and Humanities differ from those of their colleagues in the Sciences in the context of use of open access and electronic publications.
Much has been offered in respect of the latter group and so it is most welcome to receive a view of the former.
This article is invaluable for practitioners considering how the use of data is affected by the culture and practice of their intended or likely users.
It must also surely give pause for thought in respect of any potential one-size-fits-all solution; not least on reading the authors' description of the issues that arise both within and beyond the Arts and Humanities research community.
Even within the solution-oriented activity of version identification (one closer to an editor's heart than most authors would ever imagine) the issue of culture, once more in the organisational sense, arises once more in Version Identification: A Growing Problem.
In conducting a survey of differing behaviours in respect of version deposit, Dave Puplett points to a yawning gap between the expectations and preferences of academic staff depositing their output in an institutional repository and those of the information professionals tasked with supporting the process.
The former invariably wanted only their final finished version to be available while the information professionals wished to store all available versions.
It was apparent that depositing academics had major concerns about such an approach; yet, ironically enough, the information professionals were equally committed to assuring the most complete version was exposed, while seeing the means to that end from the entirely opposite direction.
So different is each perspective, or culture, that their common aim becomes potentially mired in mutual distrust [4].
I have no doubt but that social tagging might very well be regarded as anathema by traditional cataloguers and researchers into ontologies.
Yet the rationale of such an activity, also known as collaborative tagging, is that provided researchers can identify a large enough body of tagging of Web resources, it is possible to create a useful folksonomy that could actually support traditional ontologies.
Emma Tonkin, Edward M. Corrado, Heather Lea Moulaison, Margaret E. I. Kipp, Andrea Resmini, Heather D. Pfeiffer and Qiping Zhang report on research presented on a panel at the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) 2007 Annual Conference which investigated the use of social tagging in communities and in context.
Their article, Collaborative and Social Tagging Networks, offers a view of studies around the world investigating the manner in, and extent to, which users reflect their communities of practice in assigning their tags.
It supplies overviews of work in the China, France and the United States.
What becomes evident is that the not inconsiderable amount of work undertaken in this area to date is worthy of further effort.
I am grateful to Eddie Young for supplying us with a further Get Tooled Up article on a topic that is unlikely to go away for the rest of our professional lives.
Of course by Saving Energy in the Workplace we are keeping an organisational grip on the running costs but as is immediately apparent, the wider intention goes deeper.
Eddie provides us with a wealth of information on useful kit for dealing with this undertaking, for example addressing the frequent difficulty of having no access to the electricity meter for statistics.
However, in addition to providing a helpful strategy for organisational self-improvement, Eddie points to an aspect that has marked this overview from start to finish.
Whatever the impact of clever technology, ultimately the strategy outlined will falter and fail without the consensus of the staff within the energy-saving organisation.
In other words there has to be a culture change within any organisation if the aims of radical energy savings are to be realised.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews together with news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 54.
References Broadband reveals digital divide, BBC News Web site, 26 April 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4483065.stm MORI survey uncovers major new trends in UK web use, British Library news release, 3 February 2005 http://www.bl.uk/news/2005/pressrelease20050203.html MLA Programmes: People's Network Service http://www.mla.gov.uk/homeprogrammes/peoples_network/peoples_network_service This issue of potentially conflicting perspectives also arises in "Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library", Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson, January 2007, Ariadne Issue 50 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/hilton-thompson/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial: "Ariadne issue 54" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Weblog Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Weblog Search Engines Buzz portal archives blog copyright graphics url standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at the developments occurring with weblogs and how you can go about searching on or for them.
Weblogs are becoming increasingly important these days and it’s becoming harder to spend any time on the Web without seeing references to people’s weblogs or being invited to ‘read my weblog’ [1] This is all well and good of course, but there’s still a lot of mystery surrounding not only what these creatures are, but how they can best be used and of course, how to find them and once you have found them, how to search them.
Consequently I thought it might be interesting in this column to take a look at the whole subject of weblogs, though primarily from the viewpoint of either searching for them, or searching their content.
However, before we get into that area, it’s quite likely that you’re still a little in the dark over what exactly a weblog is.
(If you do know, congratulations, and as a prize you can skip this paragraph and move straight onto the rest of the article!)
A weblog is a website or page that is the product of (generally) an individual or of non-commercial origin that uses a date-limited or diary format, and which is updated either daily or at least regularly with new information about a subject, range of subjects, or personal details.
This information may have been written by the author of the log, obtained from other sources on the Web, contributed by others, or a combination of those.
They are consequently usually topical and timely, and can be viewed as a developing commentary on a situation, event or subject.
Weblogs are also referred to as logs, Blogs, Web logs and so on.
There appears to be no single standard way of referring to them.
There are a variety of different types of weblog, all doing different things.
The single most popular weblog is probably Slashdot [2] which is the work of programmer and graphic artist Rob Malden and some of his colleagues.
Slashdot is an extended weblog, in that it carries discussion threads that are contributed to by various individuals, and on many subject areas, such as games, hardware, programming and so on.
To this extent, it may appear to be more akin to a portal, rather than a diary, but then again, this is the Internet after all, and things have a habit of merging and morphing into something else, so don’t be overly concerned about a strict definition!
At the other end of the spectrum is for example the weblog of Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, [3] which is a personal weblog of an information professional; it’s one of my own favourites.
Despite their differences, weblogs have several key elements in common: Content changes on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis There is a personal point of view There is an opportunity to contact/collaborate with the author Viewers will find topical material that will (usually) relate to them Issues of the day are generally those that are discussed in detail They respond to, rather than create news They are written in a format with the most recent material at the top, while older material is further down the page, or stored in an archive, which is almost like reading backwards through a book.
It’s therefore rather difficult to search them in a traditional format.
You can certainly use Google for example to identify weblogs that may interest you, simply by doing a subject search and adding in ‘weblog’ as a term.
A search for ‘librarian weblog’ returns almost 57,000 hits and you’ll not only find some interesting weblogs written by librarians you can visit, but also some useful articles about them written for or by librarians themselves.
However, while Google does index weblogs (which incidentally has been the cause of much concern and complaint), what is obviously being missed is the immediacy of weblogs which is their great value and strength.
Therefore, we must turn to other resources that are, dare I say it, better than Google in this area.
Experienced Web searchers will of course be aware that there are various types of search engine available; I identify two types in particular as ‘free text’ such as Google, Alltheweb and so on and index/directory, such as Yahoo!
Exactly the same division exists when looking at weblog search engines, and your choice of engine will depend on what exactly you want to find.
If you already know what you’re interested in, and have some key words to search for, a good first visit would be to Daypop [4] which visits and indexes some 35,000 news sites, weblogs and feeds for new and currently breaking stories.
I ran a search for Patriot Act and got about 400 references, most of which had been written in the last couple of days.
While I’d get a lot more using Google (438,000 in fact) these were not as current, and even when I focussed my search on the Google News function I found that the Daypop results were still bringing me more recent material.
Daypop also provides some other useful functions as well as (it has to be said) a fairly basic search facility.
The Daypop Top 40 is a list of links that are popular with webloggers around the world.
It can be useful to spend some time looking at this to see exactly what people are talking about, though the disadvantage is that a lot of the stories are either related to bizarre ‘you’ll never believe this’ stories, or to news items of interest to the Internet community in general and webloggers in particular.
I’m not convinced that this is therefore as valuable as it could, and I hope, will be in the future.
Their section on top news stories is slightly better, but the emphasis is still very strongly biased towards US news.
The search engine also does something called word and news bursts.
It highlights various words that are either repeated in a lot of different entries in weblogs or in news headlines.
The idea is that if lots of people/news resources are talking about something, it must be of interest.
This idea works well up to a point, but given that some of the current (23 June) word bursts are ‘hellfire’, ‘harvesters’, ‘honeypot’, ‘celestial’, and ‘clatter’, I’ve really got to question their value.
However, I can see how this might be useful in the future if and when the Daypop programmers can tighten their code up.
Daypop also list top weblogs by citation and importance, so if you’re keen to jump into the whole field of weblogs but don’t know where to start, this facility is a good place to begin.
Other search engines in the same ‘free text’ category as Daypop are Blogdex [5], Feedster [6] and Detold Blawg Search [7], which is a search engine that specialises in legal information.
It’s worth noting that this is only a partial list there are many more search engines that focus on weblogs and news stories, and these are just a few.
In my opinion they all seem to be in their infancy and have very limited functionality, though I’m sure that this is going to change in the coming months and years.
However, for the time being they’re pretty much as good as it gets!
The second type of weblog search engine that I mentioned is the index or directory style, and there is a fairly wide choice available; none of them as yet stand out head and shoulders over the others.
The Eatonweb Portal [8] is one of the oldest, and currently has 12,161 logs well categorised into subject, language, country and alphabetical order.
As an aside, I think this last category really does highlight the extent to which weblogs are still in their infancy; can you image Yahoo!
indexing all their listed websites into a single alphabetical list for example?
There is also the Globe of Blogs [9] which currently indexes 5,757 weblogs, and has options to search by topic or location.
Several communities exist which allow webloggers to host and share their logs and these also provide some rudimentary search facilities, such as Network54 [10], Diarist [11] and LiveJournal [12].
Most of these community directories do however tend to emphasise personal weblogs which, it could argued, have little relevance for us in a professional capacity.
However, one nice collection of library weblogs can be found at Library Weblogs [13].
One final good collection is that provided by Guardian Unlimited [14] which arranges their listing by British weblogs, world blogs, news blogs, tech weblogs and other niches.
If you’re interested in some general explorations of the weblog phenomena, any of these would be a good place to begin.
In conclusion I think that weblogs already do have a value to us as information professionals; they keep us current with what people are thinking, writing about and linking to.
They can be useful for current affairs and news stories, and as long as you accept that they can have a considerable personal bias in the way in which they’re written, they can be a useful starting point to obtaining more information.
The weblog search engines are still very basic and have a long way to go before they will be truly useful, but they’re already a good way of gleaning some useful nuggets of information.
References Phil Bradley’s Blog http://www.philb.com/blog/blogger.html Slashdot http://slashdot.org/ The Shifted Librarian http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/ Daypop http://www.daypop.com/ Blogdex http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/search.asp Feedster http://www.feedster.com/ Detold Blawg Search http://blawgs.detod.com/ Eatonweb Portal http://portal.eatonweb.com/ Globe of Blogs http://www.globeofblogs.com/ Network54 http://www.network54.com/ Diarist.Net http://www.diarist.net/ LiveJournal.com http://www.livejournal.com/ Library Weblogs http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/weblog/special/0,10627,744914,00.html Author Details Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens, Feltham, Middlesex Email: philb@philb.com URL: http://www.philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independent Internet Consultant.
Return to top Article Title: “Search Engines: Weblog search engines” Author:Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue36/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories Buzz data software wiki portal infrastructure metadata accessibility repositories eprints copyright video preservation dspace research Citation BibTex RIS Maurits van der Graaf provides results and conclusions from the DRIVER inventory study.
What is the current state of digital repositories for research output in the European Union?
What should be the next steps to stimulate an infrastructure for digital repositories at a European level?
To address these key questions, an inventory study into the digital repositories for research output in the European Union was carried out as part of the EU-financed DRIVER Project [1].
In this article the main results of the inventory study [2] are presented and used to formulate a European agenda for the further establishment of an infrastructure for digital repositories for research output.
The DRIVER Inventory Study The DRIVER inventory study aimed to provide a complete inventory of the current state of digital repositories in the 27 countries of the European Union.
It is a follow-up of an earlier SURF study carried out in 2005, which included 10 European countries [3].
The study was started in June 2006 and completed in February 2007.
By a combination of a Web survey, publishing results on a wiki and telephone interviews, an attempt was made to make the inventory as complete as possible and to generate feedback amongst participants in the study.
In total, 114 respondents with digital repositories participated in the Web survey.
This study focused on OAI-compliant repositories containing research output.
Current State of the Repositories In this section the most important results about repositories themselves are presented from the following perspectives: coverage, contents, access forms for the full-text records, work processes, software packages and accessibility by search engines, gateways or portals.
Coverage The inventory focused on institutes who had already a digital repository implemented.
From various sources addresses of potential digital repositories were collected and these were invited to participate in the Web survey.
A combination of a wiki, an additional Web survey and telephone interviews were used to find additional information.
From the data collection process in this study it was estimated that there are approximately 230 institutes with one or more digital repositories with research output in the European Union (of which nearly 50% participated in this study).
The situation per country differs: In 7 EU countries there appears to be no research institutes with a digital repository for research output [4].
5 EU countries seem to be in a start-up phase, where a few institutions have set up such a repository [5].
In 15 EU countries a sizeable proportion of the research universities has implemented a digital repository for research output: in seven of these countries it is estimated that more than half of the research universities have done so [6].
Contents Figure 1: Contents of the Digital Repositories What are the contents of those digital repositories?
Based on figures given by 104 repositories, it appears that average digital repositories contained nearly 9000 records (8984, as assessed in the second half of 2006).
The large majority of these records (90%) related to textual research materials: these records can be divided into metadata-only records (61%) and full-text records (29%).
5% of the records relate to non-textual materials such as images, video, music and primary datasets.
The 5% ‘other materials’ relate to learning materials, students papers etc.
Figure 2: Types of Textual Materials What types of textual research materials are deposited?
More than half of the textual materials relate to journal articles (53%), a smaller number relates to books or book chapters (18%).
Theses, proceedings and working papers often labelled as grey literature represent some 30%.
Figure 3: How Full Text Materials Are Made Available Access Forms Offered by the Repositories What forms of access for full-text records are offered by the repositories?
Is Open Access the only form of access, or are other variants offered?
The most important other variants are Open Access with embargo for a certain time period, Campus Access or not publicly accessible at all (archival purposes only).
The results are presented in the bar diagram.
Clearly, most repositories (95%) offer Open Access accessibility.
Open Access with an embargo period for full-text records is only offered by 18% of the repositories.
About a quarter of the repositories (26%) offer Campus Access or contain records with no access (14%).
Other forms of access are offered by 8% of the repositories, such as available for a fee, in response to an e-mail request or restricted to members of a project team.
Work Processes Which statement best describes the work processes of depositing of materials in the repository?
N % Self-depositing by academics, quality control by specialised staff members 32 28.1 Delivery by academics, depositing by specialised staff members 30 26.3 Collected by staff members independent of the academics 8 7.0 A combination of the above 32 28.1 Other 12 10.5 114 Answers 100.0 How is the material deposited in a digital repository?
The results of a question about the work processes of depositing the materials in the repository are presented in the table above.
It appears that a procedure of self-depositing by the academics, with quality control by specialized staff members is most common (28%), closely followed by a procedure of delivery by the academics, and depositing by the specialized staff members (26%).
Only 7% of the repositories followed a procedure, whereby the materials were collected by staff members independent of the academics.
However, 28% of the digital repositories of the participating institutes followed a combination of the above-mentioned procedures.
Software Packages Which software package is used for the digital repository?
The results of a question about this are presented in the table.
The main results are: The top two of the most frequently used software packages are GNU Eprints (24%) and DSpace (20%).
Locally developed software packages are also frequently used (17%).
The OPUS software package is also quite frequently used (10,5%), but its usage is mainly restricted to Germany.
14 other software packages were mentioned by the respondents.
In total 17 different software packages have been mentioned, while 19 respondents reported a locally developed software package.
This means that the digital repositories in the European Union use at least 18 and probably more than 30 different software packages.
Which software package is used for the digital repository?
n % GNU Eprints 27 23,7 DSpace 23 20,2 Locally developed software packages 19 16,7 OPUS 12 10,5 DIVA 6 5,3 ARNO 4 3,5 Fedora 3 2,6 CDSWare 1 0,9 iTOR 1 0,9 EDT 0 0,0 other 18 15,8 114 Answers 100,0 Search Engines The contents of your digital repository are searchable via which of the following general engines/gateways/portals: n % General internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
74 64.9 OAIster 66 57.9 Google Scholar 59 51.8 Open DOAR 47 41.2 OAI Search 39 34.2 Scirus 21 18.4 BASE 20 17.5 OPUS 14 12.3 OASE 8 7.0 MetaGer 7 6.1 MEIND 6 5.3 Citeseer: Computer Science 5 4.4 PLEIADI 5 4.4 Other 21 18.4 114 Answers Via which channels is the digital repository searchable/accessible?
The results of this question are presented in the table above.
Over 50% of the participating digital repositories are searchable via general Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, via OAIster and via Google Scholar.
All other search engines or portals access less than 50% of the participating digital repositories.
It has to be emphasised that these findings reflect the answers of the respondents to the questionnaire and not actual searches using the search engines/gateways/ portals mentioned.
Therefore the results might reflect only the awareness of respondents about the searchability of their repositories.
However, if their awareness is accurate, there appears to be no single search engine, portal or gateway that can access all participating digital repositories.
Services Desired at a European level After these factual questions on their repositories, the respondents were asked to give their opinion on a number of issues.
Firstly, they were asked which services should have priority for further development at a European scale.
The top four answers (selected by more than 25% of the respondents) were: general search engines, gateways and portals disciplinary and thematic search engines, gateways and portals citation index services preservation services Factors Influencing Repositories In two questions, the respondents were asked to select the three most important stimuli for the development of their digital repository and the three most important inhibitors out of 14 factors.
In the table below all stimuli and inhibitors selected by more than 25% of the respondents are listed.
The following factors are seen as most important [7]: The increased visibility for the publications of the academics A simple and user-friendly depositing process A mandatory policy for the deposit of research output by the institute An improvement in the situation with regard to the copyright of published materials Requirements by research funding organisations for the deposit of research output in repositories Awareness campaigns for academics Interest from decision-makers in the institute.
What do you see as the most important stimuli for the development of the digital repository and its contents in your institute?
N % increased visibility and citations of the publications of the academics in our institute 53 46.5 our simple and user-friendly depositing process 50 43.9 awareness-raising efforts among the academics in our institute 33 28.9 interest from the decision-makers within our institute 30 26.3 What do you see as the most important inhibitors of the development of the digital repository and its contents in your institute?
N % lack of an institutional policy of mandatory deposit 57 50.0 situation with regard to copyright of (future) published materials and the knowledge about this among academics in our institute 56 49.1 lack of requirements of research funding organisations in our country about depositing research output in Open Access repositories 31 27.2 Towards a European Agenda What is the current state of digital repositories for research output in the European Union?
From this inventory study it is clear that digital research repositories are already well established throughout many countries in the European Union.
In 2006 approximately 230 institutes had one or more digital repositories for research output implemented.
In addition, from the contacts with respondents in various EU countries it appears there is a growing and active interest in implementing digital repositories at other institutes.
Recent surveys in the USA show similar results [8].
Clearly, digital repositories for research output are on their way to becoming a permanent part of the scholarly communication and documentation infrastructure.
What should be the next steps in driving forward a connective and integrative infrastructure for digital repositories at a European level?
The further deployment and development of the digital repositories will follow a two-tier approach: Deployment of digital repositories at research institutions that do not have one yet.
Increasing the coverage of the existing digital repositories of published and unpublished textual research output, with a possible future expansion of the coverage of digital repositories to other, non-textual types of research output (e.g.
images, video, and research datasets).
With regard to such a two-tier approach, an agenda for activity at the European level can be formulated.
Based on the above results of the inventory study, such an agenda should include the following seven action points: Increased visibility by increasing retrievability: The increased visibility of academic publications is seen as a major factor in the development of digital repositories by the participants of this study.
To increase the visibility is to increase the retrievability, which means, among others, accessibility for search engines.
In other results from this study, it appears that no single search engine, portal or gateway can access all 200-plus digital repositories in the European Union.
Indeed, the need for general and disciplinary/thematic search engines has the highest priority for services on a European scale according to the participants of this study.
In addition, retrievability would be enhanced by better metadata, harmonised subject and/or keyword indexing etc.
Best practice in the deposit processes: A simple and user-friendly depositing process is also seen as a major factor by the participants of this study.
In other results from this study, it appears that there are a number of different work procedures for the depositing process in place.
An effort to establish Best Practice for the deposit processes (possibly followed by an harmonisation effort) will facilitate an increase in the delivery of content to the digital repositories.
Mandatory deposit: A mandatory policy for the deposit of the research output by the institute and in line with this requirements by research funding organisations for the deposit of research output in repositories, are seen by many respondents as very desirable in order to maintain and fill their digital repositories.
However, institutional mandates are rather controversial, as some expected them to be counter-productive.
Clearly, a nuanced approach to effective mandatory policies for institutes and for research funding organisations should be part of a European agenda.
Flexibility in forms of access: The situation with regard to copyright of published materials is seen as a major inhibitor to the further development of digital repositories by the participants of this study.
However, it also became apparent in this study that many digital repositories have no facilities for allowing other forms of access besides Open Access, such as Open Access with an embargo period or Campus Access.
These variations in access forms might help to increase the coverage of published materials, in addition to further advocacy efforts with regard to the copyright policies of publishers.
Again, such an approach, without watering down the Open Access vision, could be worked out in a European agenda.
Awareness and interest among academics and decision-makers at research institutes: Other important goals for advocacy efforts, as seen from the perspective of this study, should be to create interest from decision-makers and to stimulate or support awareness campaigns among academics.
Development of services: With regard to other possible services on top of the digital repositories, priority should be given apart from the earlier-mentioned journal and thematic search engines to citation index services and preservation services.
Development of further technical standards and a possible close collaboration between the various software solutions: The need for technical harmonisation by the development of common standards is also evident from the large number of software packages in use by the various digital repositories.
For the development of new services on top of the digital repositories, adherence to agreed standards and possibly close collaboration between various software developers is seen as crucial to the development of services on top of the digital repositories and should be part of any European agenda.
Acknowledgements The author thanks Bill Hubbard (SHERPA), Leo Waaijers and Kasja Weenink (SURFfoundation) for their stimulating comments and suggestions.
References More information on the DRIVER project (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) can be found at the official DRIVER Website: http://www.driver-repository.eu/ The full report is published as a white paper under the title ‘Inventory study into the present type and level of OAI compliant Digital Repository activities in the EU’, which can be downloaded at http://www.driver-support.eu/documents/DRIVER%20Inventory%20study%202007.pdf Academic Institutional Repositories, Deployment Status in 13 Nations as of Mid 2005; Gerard van Westrienen; Clifford A. Lynch; D-Lib Magazine, September 2005, Volume 11 Number 9.
Bulgaria, Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Romania.
Estonia, Ireland, Poland, Slovakia, Slovakia.
Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain; half or more of the research universities: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, United Kingdom.
The other 7 factors listed in the questionnaire were: integration/linking of the digital repository with other systems in the institute; the policy to safeguard the long-term preservation of the deposited material; search services as provided by national and international gateways; our institutional policy of accountability; coordination of a national body for digital repositories; clear guidelines for selection of material for inclusion.
The Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit, Association of Research Libraries (2006, Charles W.
Bailey,Jr.
; Karen Coombs; Jill Emery; Anne Mitchell; Chris Morris; Spencer Simons; and Robert Wright; ISBN: 1-59407-708-8); Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States, MIRACLE Project Research Findings, Karen Markey, Soo Young Rieh, Beth St. Jean, Jihyun Kim, and Elizabeth Yakel, February 2007 Author Details Maurits van der Graaf Pleiade Management and Consultancy Amsterdam The Netherlands Email: m.vdgraaf@pleiade.nl Return to top Article Title: “DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories” Author: Maurits van der Graaf Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/vandergraf/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: 2003, 2004: A Backward Glance and Thoughts on the Future Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: 2003, 2004: A Backward Glance and Thoughts on the Future Buzz data mobile software wiki wireless infrastructure archives digitisation identifier cataloguing e-learning uri ebook mp3 sms rfid ict e-government privacy Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod looks at some of the broader issues affecting public libraries and information professionals.
Spam, privacy and the law Another year gone and the millennium celebrations and Y2K bug already seem to belong to some dim and distant technological past.
As 2003 drew to a close the spotlight was on the use and abuse of Information Technology: never was so much havoc caused by so few.
The language employed by the media to describe events in the online world reflected global concerns about warfare and disease.
Viruses, worms and trojan horses ‘infected’ and ‘invaded’ international networks, and a ‘war’ on spam was declared.
The Internet, long hailed as an empowering and democratising resource, became a weapon in the hands of the spammers and hackers the Luddites of the 21st Century.
The misuse of Information Technology, rather than the technology itself, resulted in mayhem throughout the connected world.
One Microsoft patch after another was required to ward off the invading viruses, which bore names like ‘slammer’, ‘blaster’ and ‘Sobig’.
2003 has been labelled the ‘year of the worm’, according to a news item on the PC World.com Web site, with four major outbreaks in August alone [1].
Email attachments became suspicious packages to be opened only if the contents were from a known or reliable source.
This whole virus phenomenon was able to adapt quickly to any threat posed to their survival, making them virtually unstoppable.
Spammers and hackers also seem quick to adapt; they rapidly learn how to penetrate the patches, filters and firewalls to remain one step ahead of legitimate software developers.
Governments have acknowledged the seriousness of the risk posed by computer viruses, and a new European Community directive or ‘spam law’ came into force on 11 December 2003.
Its full title is: The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 [2], but it is unlikely to improve matters and has met with widespread criticism [3].
Minister of State for e-Commerce and Competitiveness, Stephen Timms, MP, is quoted as saying: “these regulations will help combat the global nuisance of unsolicited emails and texts by enshrining in law rights that give consumers more say over who can use their personal details”.
[4] However, notice that it is ‘consumers’ to whom Mr Timms refers the regulations do not cover business email addresses or UK corporate computer users.
The ‘spam’ law simply states that service providers have the right to “take appropriate technical and organisational measures to safeguard the security of that service”.
However, a measure will only be deemed ‘appropriate’ when it is “proportionate to the risks against which it would safeguard”.
The term ‘appropriate’ like ‘reasonable’ is open to interpretation, and security managers and systems staff will be expected to use judgment when assessing the nature and severity of future threats.
System security therefore remains a concern for local authorities, and public libraries are reliant on the corporate IT serving local authorities.
Security managers will be looking to introduce more powerful anti-spam filtering software, and waiting to see what solutions Microsoft come up with to strengthen the security of its operating systems.
Data Protection Another piece of legislation came under the spotlight towards the end of 2003.
The Data Protection Act has been in force since 1998, and was designed to give individuals certain rights, including the right to know what information about them is held on a computer.
If personal data gets into the wrong hands it can be misused for a variety of reasons, and the Data Protection Act aims to prevent this happening.
However, the law itself has to be interpreted and acted upon by individuals.
For example, public sector staff may have to exercise personal judgment and critical skills when making decisions regarding the retention of data, and how it is used.
Fear of the possible consequences of non-compliance with the law i.e.
litigation, may well cause individuals working in a variety of sectors, including the public sector, to interpret the rules too closely.
Instead of exercising critical judgment they may be abiding by the letter of the law rather that the spirit.
If you are wondering what all this has to do with library and information professionals, I feel it touches upon the wider issue of information and how we use it.
Moreover, digital skills, information literacy etc.
are topics many of us feel strongly about.
These are skills we are supposed to have, and which we are expected to develop in others.
Data may be the raw product at the beginning of the information chain, but the evaluation of what it becomes when analysed, synthesised and interpreted is the bread and butter of the information professional.
Library and information staff are trained to question the reliability and currency of sources, and much more.
In the information-overloaded world of today, where people tend to rush everything and go for the ‘sound-bite’ or quick fix, it is the critical thinking skills which suffer.
In addition, public sector staff are constantly being urged to share information and to collaborate with other sectors and departments, such as social services, as well as the business community.
However, it may seem that companies like British Gas and the police see the Data Protection Act as a barrier to sharing information, sometimes with disastrous results.
Guidelines may not be the answer they also have to be read, digested and interpreted; it is those information and critical analysis skills that are required.
Perhaps information professionals are missing a huge training opportunity here?
2004: Fast Forward for Public Libraries?
Things are starting to shape up well for 2004, although concerns about future funding for sustainability and development continue to dampen enthusiasm.
At the government level, Peter Beauchamp, Chief Library Adviser at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, has taken on an ‘extra’ role as Head of Local Government and Libraries [5].
This will end the separation of library policy for which the DCMS is responsible, and local government funding which comes within the remit of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM).
A new Public Library team and a Local Government team have been appointed to oversee the delivery of cultural services.
The new unit should also help drive the next stage of the ‘WILIP’ project (Wider Information and Library Issues Project), now called ‘Routes to Knowledge’.
Routes to Knowledge is a Resource-led project which aims to raise the profile of all libraries by demonstrating to those who influence and shape information policy the vital role they play in delivering the national, regional and local agenda.
Further details are available on the Resource Web site [6].
My observation is that public libraries are increasingly treading the same path as academic libraries in their support of learning and the provision of ‘hybrid services’ i.e.
electronic and traditional print resources.
The library is becoming a place where reading and quiet study co-exist with the hum of computer-use and group activities.
In the hybrid model, collection management becomes more complex, and staff need a mix of new skills, ranging from the negotiation of site licenses for e-collection development through consortial approaches, to managing digitisation projects, and training and supporting users in the networked environment.
Content Building: The Common Information Environment (CIE) As I have stated in previous columns, the next stage for public libraries now that the ICT infrastructure is in place, is the building of quality content.
To advance this programme the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) has set up a group called the Common Information Environment Working Group [7], which aims to ‘promote educational excellence through technology in the public sector’.
The six members organisations are: The JISC The British Library Grid (Science) NeLH National Electronic Library for Health Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries UKOLN based at the University of Bath These organisations will collaborate to develop an online information environment: ‘based on common standards so that electronic resources and services can be made available to the widest possible audiences’ [8].
Mobile Computing and Wireless Networks In 2004 the issue of providing facilities in public libraries for laptop users became a hot topic on the People’s Network JISCmail discussion list [9].
The discussion was prompted by an email referring to plans to create Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) hotspots in libraries.
However, this was initially hijacked by health and safety concerns regarding public access to library electricity supplies for users of laptop computers.
Setting these concerns aside for the moment, it is the creation of wire-free environments in public libraries which is of most interest.
The notion of Wi-Fi hotspots in public libraries was first mooted in the summer of 2003, when Chris Batt, then Acting Chief Executive of Resource, was asked by Stephen Timms, MP if it was feasible for public libraries to provide these.
This would be a very positive development for public libraries, and would certainly raise their profile by demonstrating that they are relevant, capable of technological innovation and responsive.
However, one must not get too excited about Wi-FI at this stage, as there are a host of issues which have to be addressed before any action can be taken.
Funding is the obvious one, but system security is also a huge concern.
If 2003 was the ‘year of the worm’ who knows what might be in store in 2004?
People’s Network desktop computers in public libraries tend to be ‘bolted down’ for public use, so that disks, memory sticks etc.
can be used without fear of infecting corporate systems with viruses brought in from outside.
Once the public are able to plug-in their own laptops (or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)), local authority systems will once again be open to invasion by any virus that has infected users’ laptops.
Wi-Fi hotspots have been set up in coffee shops and airport lounges, and even Great North Eastern Railway (GNER) trains have them [10].
One or two public libraries already have coffee shops perhaps a pilot project could be set up in one of these?
How about Wi-Fi on the beach?
Yes, Brighton beach is running a free Wi-Fi feasibility pilot, although sun on laptop screens has jokingly been cited as a minor problem [11].
Maybe we should consider mobile libraries with Wi-Fi serving remote coastal areas?
The vehicles could set up on the beach next to ice-cream vendors.
There is a US Web site which lists all the American public libraries offering Wi-Fi hotspots [12].
In New York Wi-Fi is available in every branch of the public library service, and there are over 50 branches [13].
Some have names which JK Rowling would be proud of: ‘Spuyten Duyvil’ and ‘Throg’s Neck’ for example.
A banner on the Web site proclaims: ‘free wireless computing at the library’ an example of effective marketing, as you can’t fail to miss it, and ‘help’ pages are provided telling users how to configure their laptops for WiFi use in the library.
WiFI may be blue sky stuff for UK public libraries at the moment, but interest is strong.
I believe that one or two pilot projects will be funded in the not too distant future.
Personal Digital Assistants and MP3 players are already being piloted in several public libraries to deliver ebooks and e-audio [14][15].
Handheld devices provide an excellent vehicle for the delivery of mobile portable services to specific groups of users, such as people with disabilities or who are housebound.
It is too early to predict how widespread ownership of PDAs and other mobile devices will become, or whether the loaning of these devices by libraries will be a success.
Converged technologies like third generation (3G) mobile phones may prove more popular as they offer the portability, versatility and freedom users expect and value.
3G phones are available but they are expensive, whereas PDAs have dropped in price.
Libraries will have to bide their time, and respond to demand if and when PDAs and 3G mobile phones reach critical mass in ownership.
Texting or SMS (short message service), for example, has been adopted by some public sector departments as a means of communicating with the public or to provide news [16].
Texting offers a cheap, effective and non-threatening method of contacting or informing citizens, particularly young people for whom texting is a popular and often first choice means of communication.
Last Words Well I have no earth-shattering predictions for public libraries in 2004.
‘Joining up’ with other library services, especially in education (further, higher, schools) and the health sector is featured all round; Resource and CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) are actively pursuing this in order to raise both the profile of libraries and that of the information profession.
The British Library (BL) has supported public libraries for some time through the Co-operation and Partnership programme [17].
BL has now positioned itself as a leader and innovator in the information world, as exemplified by its recent initiative with Amazon.co.uk.
If you missed the announcements, BL has made its extensive bibliographic catalogue records (2.55 million records) available to Amazon, enabling rare, antiquarian and pre-ISBN books to be identified and purchased online [18].
New technologies (apart from Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile technologies) which have featured on the JISCmail Peoples Network discussion list include Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) which is used to help machines identify objects using radio waves rather than magnetism.
Libraries can use RFID in place of barcodes for the identification and circulation of stock, including videos, DVDs.
More on this in a future article.
E-learning is another area to watch, and of course libraries have an ongoing commitment to develop electronic services to complement telephone and other more traditional modes of delivery.
On the topic of e-government Resource announced at the end of last year that readers of The Sun tabloid newspaper are to be offered free Internet taster sessions to raise traffic and awareness of the UKonline service [19].
Now that ought to reach a lot of reluctant Internet users.
References Roberts, P. Security worries for 2004.
PC World.com.
2 January 2004. http://www.pcworld.com/news/index.asp The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.
Statutory Instrument 2003 No.
2426. http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032426.htm BBC News.
Anti-spam laws ‘lack bite’.
23 September 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3131252.stm BBC News.
UK bans spam messages.
18 September 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3120628.stm DCMS rejigs for action.
Library and Information Update Vol.
3 (1).
January 2004. page 2.
WILIP: http://www.resource.gov.uk/action/wilip/wilip.asp The JISC Common Information Environment Working Group: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=wg_cie_home Members’ Web sites: The British Library: http://www.bl.uk Grid: http://www.escience-grid.org.uk NeLH: National Electronic Library for Health: http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/ Resource: http://www.resource.gov.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk See Memorandum of Understanding for the JISC Common Information Environment Working Group: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=wg_cie_home JISCMail People’s Network email discussion list see archives for January 2004 and July 2003. http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/peoplesnetwork.html Wi-Fi on GNER trains: http://www.gnermobileoffice.co.uk/GNERMobileOffice/howdoesitwork/ Wi-Fi on Brighton Beach: Pier to pier: http://www.piertopier.net/ Libraries with wireless access in the USA: see Wireless Networking in Libraries http://wiki.webjunctionworks.org/index.php/Wireless_Networking_in_Libraries Editor’s note: Penny’s URI: http://people.morrisville.edu/~drewwe/wireless/wirelesslibraries.htm was superceded in June 2007.
The Web site she cited moved to Wireless Networking in Libraries Wiki in c. May 2007.
Wi-Fi in New York public libraries: http://www.nypl.org/branch/services/wifi.html Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council Library and Information Services: http://library.blackburnworld.com/ Loughborough University and Co-East.
A feasibility study for developing usage Models for Web-based and hardware-based electronic books: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/disresearch/e-booksinpublib/index.html London Borough of Richmond upon Thames ebooks service: http://www.richmond.gov.uk/depts/opps/eal/leisure/libraries/pn/pn_new/default.htm Garrod, P. Ebooks in UK libraries: where are we now?
Ariadne Issue 37. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/ Willis, D. Do it by text.
Government Computing.
December 2003. pp.
14-16. http://www.kablenet.com/ British Library Co-operation and partnership programme: (Concord) http://www.bl.uk/about/cooperation/concord.html Amazon.co.uk teams up with the British Library for dramatic category extension of rare and antiquarian titles.
British Library news item, 26 November 2003. http://www.bl.uk/cgi-bin/news.cgi?story=1392 People’s Network news item.
Option to take part in free internet taster sessions to be offered to Sun readers through UK online centres.
25 November 2003 http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/news/article.asp?id=303 Author Details Penny Garrod Public Library Networking Focus UKOLN Email: p.garrod@ukon.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/ Return to top Article Title: “2003, 2004: A backward glance and thoughts on the future” Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/public-libraries/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet-SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet-SOSIG Buzz data database archives blog research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Place assesses the recent SOSIG Social Science Online seminars, Jacky Clake reports on the ESRC Social Science Week and Debra Hiom updates us on the virtual seminar run by SOSIG as part of Social Science Week.
Academics Look to Improve Their Internet Research Skills Over 130 academics, librarians and researchers attended the SOSIG “Social Science Online” seminars this year, which aimed to help staff develop their Internet research skills and look at ways of teaching these skills to students.
It seems interest in this area is growing, especially as Internet research skills are now recognised as an essential part of the undergraduate curriculum in many subjects according to the Benchmark Statements of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education [1].
Many delegates were keen to consider how they might build Internet research skills into their courses for students.
Learning from the experts Using the Internet effectively for research requires a high level of skill and knowledge and one of the best ways to learn is from the experts.
SOSIG invited speakers from some of the key Internet services for social research: the ESRC, HE Academy, JISC Services and Professional Societies.
Many of these services offer high quality online data, publications and research outputs that will not be accessible via the big search engines, and so form the “hidden Web” with which academics and students need to be familiar.
Internet Searching for Useful References There was plenty of time for hands-on where delegates could try their own Internet searches, with help on hand from the experts so delegates could leave with a list of useful references for their own particular research area.
Worksheets and Presentations to Reuse with Students Worksheets for the key national Internet services were provided which could be adapted for reuse with students.
All the materials are freely available for anyone to use from the Social Science Online Pages [2].
Feedback The feedback from delegates was generally very positive, suggesting there is a need for Internet training for academics, as they work to keep pace with new online developments.
Delegates said they had found it useful to be introduced to a wide range of valuable Web sites and to specific databases.
They also found it helpful to have individual help with Internet searches during the hands-on sessions.
They said that they would use the worksheets again to practise what they had learned, ultimately for use with their students.
98% of respondents considered the content and structure of the seminars to be good or excellent.
“I was most interested in the teaching issues as I’m remodelling a social science research methods module.
A very helpful day.
I will distribute the materials to colleagues and use them on the social science research methods module.” “These resources will be hugely useful for my research” “The sites were all good and will be incorporated in one way or another into my induction/teaching” “I really enjoyed the succinctness of the presentations and the chance for hands-on training” “It was useful to get up-to-date information from key players” 96% of respondents thought the pack of course materials was good or excellent “I will use the pack and resources again for researching my PhD” “I plan to modify the worksheets and use them for teaching materials” “I will go back and show colleagues what resources are available and recommend them to students” Delegates try their hand at Internet searching SOSIG will be planning seminars for 2005-6 this autumn, if you would like any further information please contact sosig-help@bristol.ac.uk ESRC Social Science Week 2005 A week long celebration of the Social Sciences took place across the UK from 20-24 June and proved to be a fascinating insight into some of the country’s leading research.
From politicians to the general public the Week aimed to offer everyone the opportunity to discover what the UK’s social scientists are doing and how social science research can contribute to better policymaking and, ultimately, a better society.
Social scientists analysed the problems of global poverty, the challenges faced by the UK food industry and the highly successful use of ‘pester power’ by Britain’s youngest consumers, among many other activities.
This was the third year that the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK’s leading research funding and training agency, has co-ordinated Social Science Week.
This week-long celebration of the social sciences consisted of over 48 different initiatives across the UK from conferences to workshops and exhibitions to policy briefings.
Just some of the many questions examined during the Week included: What has the public sector done for us?
Why do we donate to charity?
Why don’t we want to participate in politics?
Can the public be trusted to decide on genetic science?
How healthy is the UK food industry?
Does dignity at work exist?
Do we really have any choice in our public services?
Will GM cotton work in India?
The week was launched by the publication of a new ESRC report, which used the seven deadly sins pride, anger, lust, avarice, gluttony, envy and sloth as a way of looking at some pressing issues of modern life: religious conflict, rage in children and adults, sexual behaviour, corporate greed, binge drinking, rising personal debt and political apathy.
The report brings together studies by a group of leading social science researchers using large-scale data resources for example, the three big birth cohort studies of 1958, 1970 and 2000⁄1, the British Household Panel Survey, the General Household Survey, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, and the British Election Study to provide invaluable insights into the patterns of our lives in the early 21st Century.
For more information on the Week or full a copy of the full Seven Sins report see: ESRC Society Today Site [3] Social Sciences Online: Past, Present and Future As part of the ESRC Social Science Week SOSIG ran a virtual event to look at how the Internet is changing the face of social science information and research.
We invited a number of social science specialists to consider how the Internet has changed their own working practices and the impacts that this may have had on their research and/or teaching.
These articles were made available under a number of different themes: Monday 20 June Learning and Teaching Tuesday 21 June Research Methods Wednesday 22 June Access to Data Thursday 23 June e Social Science Each day, two or three invited articles were made available via a weblog (blog); this is a simple technology that allows users to comment on the articles available.
The blog ran for two weeks (originally we had intended to run it for a single week but it became clear that people needed more time to be able to read and comment).
The papers and subsequent discussion provide a fascinating account of how much impact the Internet has had on the social science community in a relatively short period of time.
To look at the archive of this event see the material available at: Social Sciences Online: Past, Present and Future [4].
References QAA Honours Degree Benchmark Statements {C} http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/honours/default.asp Social Science Online Seminars http://www.sosig.ac.uk/events/ ESRC Society Today Site http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ Social Sciences Online: Past, Present and Future http://www.sosig.ac.uk/socsciweek/ Author Details Emma Place SOSIG ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Brtistol BS8 1HH Tel: 0117 928 7183 Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk Jacky Clake Senior Communications and Brand Manager ESRC Polaris House North Star Avenue Swindon SN2 1UJ Tel: 01793 413117 Email: jacky.clake@esrc.ac.uk Debra Hiom SOSIG ILRT 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Tel: 0117 928 7117 Email: d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Emma Place, Jacky Clake and Debra Hiom Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Accoona: Super-Charged Super Target Searching Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Accoona: Super-Charged Super Target Searching Buzz data database rss cache url standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley puts a relative newcomer through its paces and finds some very useful features together with potential for improvement.
I thought that it was about time to take an in-depth peek at a specific search engine again, since many of my recent columns have looked rather more broadly at the search engine industry.
I decided that I would take a look at Accoona since I have seen a few mentions of it recently, it launched a European version at the end of June 2006, and having played around with it myself for a while I have been rather impressed with it.
Accoona: The Background Let’s get the name out of the way to begin with.
The name Accoona is derived from the Swahili phrase, Hakuna Matata, which means “don’t worry, be happy.” Accoona CEO Stuart Kauder says, “The company name was chosen specifically with the end user in mind.
Our goal is to make our users happy by helping them find relevant results to their queries.” [1] The Accoona Corporation was founded in February 2004 and the search engine was released simultaneously in the US and China in December of that year.
The link with China is an important one: the company formed a partnership with Chinadaily.com.cn and expects to get a significant number of hits daily from that particular marketplace.
It has weathered some early criticisms [2] and launched a talking toolbar in April 2006 which aids and assists students (particularly Chinese students) in increasing their knowledge of spoken English [3].
Accoona and the Basics of Search For the purposes of this article I am going to be primarily using the European [4] version of the search engine, though American readers may prefer to concentrate on the American/Global version [5], while Chinese readers may prefer to use their local version [6].
The search interface is very clear and indeed some may say sparse, but it follows the Google approach of keeping things nice and simple.
As well as the search box itself there are three options Web, Business, News, though strangely in the US and Chinese versions the order is News, Business, Web.
I would have preferred to see a help option (regular readers know that this is something of a hobby horse of mine), and irritatingly this is available at http://www.accoona.com/help/ if you can but guess to add help/ in to the URL, but I would much prefer to see it on screen, particularly since most people will not think to hunt for the help options undirected.
The usual search options are supported, with double quotes for a phrase search, the minus symbol to exclude a word (though use of ‘NOT’ fails to do so) and ‘OR’ for one term or another term.
Title:<word>, URL:<word> also worked, although link: did not seem to.
There was not anything particular exciting about that aspect of the search engine, so I suppose the best that can be said for it at this point is that new users will not get lost or confused about what they can do.
News Search The power of the search engine really starts to become apparent when looking at the news options.
A search for “Tony Blair” gives me a total of 36,785 results, as opposed to 13,500 in Google News and 9,244 in Yahoo News.
The default is to sort the results by relevance though I have the option of re-sorting by date (for either all articles or articles in English), which to be fair I can do with both other engines as well, but it is a useful piece of functionality wherever it comes from.
Accoona gives me a number of options to ‘SuperTarget’ the search from the first page of results.
I can limit to date of publication from 1 hour ago to more than 30 days ago, with another 3 options in the mix as well.
While I can do this in the advanced features of both Google and Yahoo, it is necessary to start delving into the options those engines offer.
It is not immediately obvious either, whereas the position of the SuperTarget box on the right hand side of the Accoona results reminds us that it is easy to narrow and focus results, as well as providing a quick and easy way to do it.
One can also emphasise a particular word or phrase to give added weight in the search.
A single phrase search for “tony blair” obviously does not trigger this option, but adding in ‘elections’ allows me to focus on one aspect or another to focus my searches.
I can also limit my results by publisher.
The Accoona pull-down box gives me a listing of all the publishers who include my search term(s) from ABC News to the Yorkshire Post.
Usefully I am also given an indication of the number of results that the limitation will give me.
Not only is this an asset when it comes to getting a small set of results, this function also provides details as to what type of news resources are interested in a particular story, and where they are located.
A large number of results from a local newspaper may for example highlight the fact that the Prime Minister paid a visit to that particular area recently.
Both Google and Yahoo also give me the opportunity to limit results to specific information providers, but, rather unhelpfully, they do not give any examples.
So unless I know for a fact that they take news from, for example, the Pontypridd & Llantrisant Observer I am a little stuck, whereas with Accoona, I not only know that they do index from this source, I know that there will be 349 references to look through.
The next option Accoona gives me is the option to limit my searches by company related to the search that I am running.
Again this is very useful, and it provides a quick shortcut to getting directly to the information needed, especially if I am not sure if I should also try and limit a search with ‘British Airways’ ‘BA’ or ‘British Airways PLC’.
A nice feature is that I am not simply limited to one company either I can run an initial search focused on Tony Blair, then reduce that to those articles mentioning British Airways and further reduce my results to those that also mention Barclays PLC as well.
The ability to limit a search by region is also available and in fact can be carried out in two ways, firstly by country and then narrowed down to county, although in the search engine this is referred to as ‘state’ which is a little confusing and misleading because it also includes regions such as English counties for example.
Targeting my search by limiting results to those that mention specific people is another possibility I can use with the news function of Accoona.
This does throw up one or two slight oddities since some of the people mentioned in my Tony Blair search are ‘India’, ‘Rick’ and ‘Youth’, but this is a very minor quibble.
Languages are an option that is unsurprising (though strangely this is absent in Google News, though it is available in Yahoo), and Media is the last choice, allowing the searcher to choose to limit to (for example) audio, text or pdf.
The Accoona news search option therefore is, in my opinion, very effective.
It is quick and simple to find good quality news stories and the SuperTarget function worked very well.
There are minor disappointments; I would like to have seen images included in the results and both Google and Yahoo offer this as standard, and I particularly missed any option for saving the search and having new stories sent to me via email or RSS.
Overall though, I found the functionality to be of a high quality, and it is certainly something that I will be using for myself in the future.
Web Search Accoona is running its own Web crawler in order to find new Web pages.
This is always a good thing to see, as it gives searchers a nice opportunity to locate, one hopes, new content that has remained hitherto undiscovered.
The disadvantage of the approach is that the database users’ search is usually far smaller than the ones provided by the big names.
However, I was pleasantly surprised when I ran some sample searches.
“Tony Blair” resulted in almost 26 million hits in Accoona, 34 million in Google and 11.6 million in Yahoo.
“Robert E Lee” returned 12 million hits in Accoona, 4 million in Google and 1.6 million in Yahoo.
Other searches produced similar results, so clearly Accoona is in a position to compete on terms of size at the very least.
The SuperTarget feature was again available for use, though slightly changed to reflect the different focus, and provided options for emphasising particular terms, geographical searching, relevant companies, people, languages and publishers.
The last option here also included key Web sites together with number of results, which I could see as being another particularly useful source of data.
The display of information was slightly disappointing; while I had all the basics of page title, URL, and synopsis there was no information on when the page had last been visited, or the chance to look at a cache for example.
I would have also liked to see some sort of clustering, which is becoming very common these days, an option to save the search as an RSS feed and the chance to re-order or limit results by date.
Obviously one huge omission with the search engine is the inability to search for images, which is very disappointing, but is something that I hope will be addressed in the near future.
Business Search Accoona has entered into a partnership with Dun and Bradstreet to provide information to users in the business search area.
Consequently any searches here result in links to basic data such as Web site (if available), company address, telephone number, contacts and company details (number of employees and sales volume).
The basic information is supplemented with a link to D & B where users can purchase more in-depth reports.
SuperTarget also works here as well, though as one would expect, the options are slightly different, with choices including business type, city, state, country, company revenue, employee numbers and people search.
I suspect that experienced business searchers will already have their own information sources to hand, but even then, I think this is worth a look, and certainly more than just a look if you are a user who does not habitually search for this sort of data it may well be a good shortcut to get the business information that you need.
Conclusion Accoona certainly is not a perfect search engine; no image search option, limitations on display of results and so on.
However, I think that it has developed into a very sound and useful search engine.
I particularly like the SuperTarget function, which really does work, and more importantly works without having to do a great deal by the way of thinking, which is always an advantage.
The Web and business search options are very useful, but I think the News function is its best feature by far, and I hope that the other functionality will soon catch up with it.
If you’re looking around for a new search engine to try out, or you’re just fed up with the Googles of this world, I would certainly suggest giving Accoona a spin.
References About Accoona http://www.accoona.com/about/about_accoona.jsp “Accoona: Should Google Worry?“, BusinessWeek online, 9 December 2004 http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2004/tc2004129_0327_tc062.htm “Accoona Launches, But Isn’t Ready for Prime Time”, SearchEngineWatch, 7 December 2004 http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3444321 “Accoona ’s New Toolbar Talks, Teaches”, PC Magazine, 20 April 2006 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1951659,00.asp Accoona.eu http://www.accoona.eu/ Accoona.com http://www.accoona.com/ Accoona.cn http://www.accoona.cn/cn/ Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Search Engines: Accoona: Super-Charged Super Target Searching” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Libraries Without Walls 5 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Libraries Without Walls 5 Buzz data framework wiki database portal usability archives metadata accessibility blog repositories copyright oai-pmh passwords e-learning ebook vle ict webct research Citation BibTex RIS David Parkes reviews the fifth compilation of the biennial Library Without Walls Conference.
He finds how far we have come and how far we have to go in delivering services to distributed learners.
This is the 5th collection of papers from the biennial Libraries Without Walls Conference (LWW5).
Reference to the preceding 4 volumes published in 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002 respectively is rewarding to see how discourse and practice has developed.
Access collaboration is now commonplace; 135 institutions are members of the UK Libraries plus access scheme, 157 are signed up for Sconul Research Extra.
The Peoples Network has put 4000 Internet centres into public libraries, Athens passwords and off-campus access to databases has provided access to a growing collection of electronic content.
The last year has seen a doubling of UK domestic broadband Internet access, the parallel growth of digitised content, images, e-prints and open archives.
All this plus the shift of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) from the fringe to the mainstream and, more recently, the growth of interactive Web technologies such as portals and blogs, have provided learners with unprecedented access to resources, services and learning interactivity.
All of which would have been difficult to imagine when the first LWW took place 9 long years ago.
The emphasis in earlier papers on replicating existing levels of service enjoyed by on-campus students for those unfortunate to be studying away from the library has morphed and shifted, now describing technical projects as well as operational strategies of support.
Librarians' roles too are changing, moving away from the more familiar activities.
They are now carving new niches and describing imaginative new arcs of activity in supporting learning in the distributed electronic environment.
As with the previous editions, this is edited by the prolific Peter Brophy and Shelagh Fisher both of whom have a formidable track record of contribution to the canon of library knowledge and literature.
They have been joined this time by Jenny Craven, Research Associate at the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), and a previous contributor.
The editors chart the amazing progress made in distance learning, and describe how definitions and foci have changed.
They provide a succinct summary of the long journey made.
(It will be the tenth anniversary for LWW6).
As with all editions, this focuses on the international perspectives on the delivery of library and information to learners who are not 'in the building'.
This focus on the user, notes Brophy in his keynote paper, eventually led us to the realisation that it is the library that is distant and not the user.
The range of papers, more than in any other edition, come from nine countries and a wide spectrum of Higher and Further Educational Institutions, national and public bodies and libraries and research units.
There are case studies from the UK, Netherlands, Nigeria, Greece, USA, Nigeria, Denmark, Portugal and Italy.
The book as the conference has 5 themes: The integration of library services and VLEs The relationship between user needs, information skills and information literacies Usability and accessibility of digital library services Designing the information environment: national and institutional perspectives The creation of digital resources by user communities Theme 1: the integration of library services and VLEs In the first paper Black and Roberts from Edge Hill describe an interesting example of the use of a VLE (WebCT) for staff induction and training, which allows, both for a vehicle for staff to learn about the institution, and in the process allows them to understand the VLE and thus be better placed to support students in this environment.
This is an excellent and imaginative strategy which embeds e-learning activity within the daily routines and culture of a service.
Koositra et al from Delft and Utrecht Universities provide a case study demonstrating how they support scientific researchers with the detailed information they need and a place where they can interact with this information and share it with other researchers.
It is not enough for libraries to teach people how to use libraries, they maintain, we must provide user-focused integrated access to a substantial number of resources along with the ability to store, exchange and share information.
A rather difficult appendix of tables takes some effort but it is worth persevering.
Scantlebury and Stevenson's brief paper describes the JISC-funded project work of DEViL (Dynamically Enhancing VLE Information from the Library).
DEViL created tools which can be embedded within search repositories to create resource lists.
Eschewing the technical aspects of the project, Scantlebury and Stevenson seek to identify the key issues in VLE development and explore the often competing perspectives of academics, libraries and learning technologists, They reach some sobering conclusions, there is little evidence of a genuine teamwork approach, a failure to engage, a focus on content rather than outcomes, barriers such as access and authorisation and copyright issues.
Ahtola from Tampere University in Finland reflects on the environmental changes that affect libraries and the activities Tampere University library undertakes.
There is little that is particularly innovative here but Ahtola does describe a comprehensive and interdependent array of services which add value to teaching and learning.
Garoufallou et al write of the experience at the University of Macedonia in Greece, and of the unfortunate experience of having a VLE foisted upon them which they originally felt was inadequate for their needs.
Their perseverance is admirable and the case study describes typical developments in the country.
If there is one criticism of the papers in theme 1 it is that there is little mention of engaging the silent army of IT support workers on help desks and in the background who contribute so much to the distributed learning experience.
Theme 2: the relationship between user needs, information skills and information literacies Theme 2 opens with a paper from Moore.
This is an overview of the experience at Sheffield Hallam in embedding information skills in the subject-based curriculum.
Moore describes the InfoQuest online information skills package delivered through Blackboard.
Sheffield Hallam has adopted a customised and integrated approach which is, they admit, costly and time-consuming, but the dividends they find, are worth it.
Learners don't tend to engage with generic skills.
And as Scantlebury and Stevenson found, faculty engagement can be difficult too.
Both learners and academics are more likely to engage with customised and targeted product.
Widening participation is increasingly an issue which concerns us all and Rutter and Dale provide an overview of interventionist activity in embedding information skills in a foundation degree and a professional social work qualification.
Virkus from Manchester Metropolitan University takes us on a theoretical discourse through the literature on information literacy and learning; it is a useful primer on current thinking and has an excellent references list.
Gill Needham from the Open University asks the question 'Information Literacy who needs it?'
in this final paper in Theme 2; she answers by saying 'that everybody needs it'.
The Prague Declaration 'towards an information literate society' would certainly concur and Needham provides a sound research case study based upon the free-standing short course in Information Literacy called Making Sense of Information in the Connected Age (MOSAIC).
Theme 3: usability and accessibility of digital library services The opening paper from King et al focuses on an evaluation framework for digital libraries, research which was supported by a grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
Good Digital Libraries should support task-based information-seeking behaviour and be highly organised.
The framework is a useful tool to apply and the authors recommend further research and application for researchers and practitioners.
Kolawole describes the relatively low level state of ICT in Nigeria, but the author touches on the critical universal themes of key skills and employability and the roles libraries can play in supporting them.
A research case study from the Italian National Health Institute finds that there is a significant move towards the use of online resources.
Toni recommends monitoring user satisfaction, efficiency and effectiveness of online services, the adoption of federated searching and access to full text.
Botha discusses the impressive African Digital Library which allows free access to anyone living in Africa and has about 7800 e-book titles.
It is the start of a very long journey says the author.
From a continent to a state, Moen et al demonstrate the Library of Texas Resource Discovery Service (LOT RDS).
The LOT RDS is a metasearch application which enables users to identify, select and access or acquire information through a state-wide virtual library.
The usability framework proposed by Moen et al is a more in-depth and resource-targeted tool than the framework proposed by King et al above, though they could be used in tandem.
The authors suggest that users may require new mental models in order to contextualise meta-searching, a veritable challenge for information literacy advocates.
Theme 4: Designing the information environment: national and institutional perspectives.
Williams provides a case study from the Library at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) demonstrating how they support institutional objectives in learning and teaching, research, widening participation, outreach and knowledge transfer.
This is a useful overview of the challenges facing libraries in the context of institutional and national drivers in the UK.
Proenca and Nunes provide an evaluation of Internet services in Portuguese public libraries and make sensible recommendations that are applicable in all circumstances, specifically that there should be clear and precise guidelines for implementing online services and for evaluating quality.
The Danish Electronic Research Library, a national virtual research library is described by Ohrstrom and offers an exemplar of activity for the UKs forthcoming Research Libraries Network with the potential for common licensing, common access and a common portal.
Following on the research theme Wallis and Carpenter survey researchers and resources.
They find that online resources are becoming increasingly important, that researchers need better tools, and that access to print is still important and will continue to be.
They emphasize the important role subject librarians should play.
Theme 5: the creation of digital resources by user communities The fifth theme challenges the traditional perception of users as passive receptors of information.
Kelly and Butters, research associates at MMU, describe the Cultural Objects in Networked Environments project (COINE).
Cultural memory institutions are a growing phenomenon , the rise of Wikis, Blogs and the success of the BBC People's War Project, for example, demonstrate that individuals and communities can and are willing to contribute to the growth in online information and resources.
Another JISC-funded project, DAEDALUS (Data providers for academic e-content and the disclosure of assets for learning, understanding and scholarship) is discussed by Ashworth and Nixon of Glasgow University.
A welcome look at open archives, this e-prints service was actually launched in June 2004 and provides free and unrestricted access to resources using the Open Archives Initiative's protocol for harvesting metadata (OAI-PMH).
Ashworth and Nixon describe the liaison, mechanisms and culture change within the institution.
Cox and Morris explore new roles for librarians in virtual work communities or 'communities of practice'.
A community of practice (CoP) is a group or network of people who share a common interest in a specific area of knowledge or competence and are willing to work and learn together over a period of time to develop and share that knowledge.
These groups probably exist in some form in almost every organisation whether they have been deliberately created and labelled as such or not.
Librarians can play a positive role in communities by creating and sharing organisational knowledge.
The JISC-funded Exchange for Learning Programme (X4L) is an ambitious development.
X4L consists of 25 projects and involves more than 100 institutions and teams from FE colleges, universities, libraries, local authorities and commercial companies.
The programme aims to assess whether re-purposing content -the reuse of learning material after metadata treatment to permit relevant use across different audiences or mediumscan become a popular and sustainable way of producing e-learning materials for the future.
X4L also addresses the challenges and training associated with re-purposing content, and further still provide a national repository with re-purposable learning materials.
Susan Eales the programme manager provides a useful project overview and asks some stimulating questions.
Conclusion The papers included here serve as helpful stand-alone case studies and discourse in delivering services to the distributed learning communities.
But by being brought together they interweave; ideas sparked by reading one paper are further provoked and challenged by reading another, resulting in a cumulative effect which leaves the reader with a critical overview of the contemporary issues and practice.
I'd like to see some future discussion take place on non-users, invisible learning, and as mentioned earlier, the role of IT or merged help desks in providing support.
LWW6 should be very interesting indeed.
Author Details David Parkes Head of Learning Support Information Services Staffordshire University Email: d.j.parkes@staffs.ac.uk Web site: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/uniservices/infoservices/ Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Libraries Without Walls 5" Author: David Parkes Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/parkes-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: Weblogs: Do They Belong in Libraries?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: Weblogs: Do They Belong in Libraries?
Buzz software portfolio rss blog Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod takes a look at weblogs and weblogging activities in libraries and considers some of the ways they can be used to support public library users.
Weblogs in Education Weblogs and weblogging, blogs and blogging many terms are used to describe this increasingly popular Web-based activity, but is a library Web site the right place to host a weblog?
Are weblogs simply another trendy tool for those with time to spare and something to say?
Consider this from the BBC news Web site: ‘Weblogs are sometimes criticised for being the self-obsessed ramblings of people who have little to say and too much time on their hands in which to do it.
But there are gems out there including many sites created by children.’ [1] This news article describes how weblogs are routinely used by children at Hangleton Junior School in Hove, Sussex; a project which has been so successful it has been shortlisted for a New Statesman New Media Award an annual award for best Web development in the UK.
The children, some as young as seven, participate in an after-school weblogging club, and as a result their knowledge of IT has improved beyond that expected of their age group, and literacy levels have also risen.
The children use weblogs to explore subjects which interest them.
Writing in the Education Guardian Stephen O’Hear also believes that weblogs have a key role to play in education, partly because they are so easy to use: ‘Blog software simplifies the process of writing and publishing online creating and editing blog entries is no more difficult than sending an email.’[2] O’Hear argues that weblogs with multiple contributors e.g.
where students, teachers and subject specialists all participate, can successfully support the development of a learning community.
He goes on to describe the setting up of a weblog as a discussion forum for literature students reading the book by Sue Monk Kidd entitled The Secret Life of Bees [3].
The author was invited to participate in the weblog by answering questions and commenting on students publications, and she agreed.
The end product is a weblog which has attracted over 200,000 visitors, and which now serves as a learning resource for other students.
Weblogs can therefore take many forms from virtual soapbox or personal journal to community space for learners, or any community with a shared interest.
The weblog is a democratic and enabling medium which enables people without Web authoring skills or technical knowledge to publish their views and share them with others.
Weblogs can also host features including links to external Web sites and news feeds.
This suggests that weblogs will fit comfortably into the library Web environment, where they can complement existing library services.
A weblog could be used to support local reading groups, clubs and other special interest groups, as well as adult learning and homework activities for children.
Library Weblogs How many libraries currently have a weblog?
A search on Google (using the search terms ‘library weblog’) returned 544,000 hits on 21 June 2004, but this is not indicative of widespread use of weblogs by libraries for user-related activities.
The top ranking site from Libdex [4] is a list of library weblogs by country, which also features articles on weblogging by and for information professionals, most of whom are based in the U.S. and Canada.
Articles carry titles such as ‘Blogging Your Life Away’ and ‘The secret life of tattooed and bellydancing librarians’ (the mind bloggles) [sic] as though to illustrate that librarians can be as hip and cool as the regular guys in the blogging community.
‘England’ and ‘Scotland’ were among the countries listed and clicking on the ‘England’ link brings up ten entries, but Scotland only has a single entry a news feed from the National Library of Scotland.
Top of the England list is the only UK public library listed as having a weblog Gateshead Central Library.
Gateshead’s weblog, et cetera [5], was the first library weblog in the UK; it now has over 150 registered members.
Although most of the entries have been logged by library staff, Gateshead plan to use the weblog for community publishing activities in the future [6].
Figure 1: ET CETERA: Gateshead Libraries Weblog: The first library weblog in the UK Other library weblogs in England are: a National Health Service (NHS) weblog from Ben Toth (on digital libraries in the NHS); ‘Keeping Legal’ by Paul Pedley (legal information for information professionals) and ‘Midwifery Information’ from library staff at the Royal College of Midwives.
There are also several news feeds including information literacy news from Sheffield University, and news from Oxford University Libraries.
Two weblogs listed on this site are likely to be of general interest to UK library and information professionals.
These are Peter Scott’s blog (University of Saskatchewan Library) [7] and my fellow columnist Phil Bradley’s blog [8].
Phil describes his blog as: “for librarians and people interested in search engines, searching the net, design issues and general whitterings and rants”.
Scott’s blog is sponsored by Xrefer and powered by Blogger (the free Google weblogging service) [9].
As well as offering news on conferences, services, software and library jobs worldwide etc., the libraries are categorised by sector.
There are entries for public, school and academic libraries etc.
with around 80 entries listed under the public library category the majority of which are in the USA and Canada, although Gateshead is included and is the only entry under public libraries for the UK.
Library Weblogs for Young Readers Many public library weblogs seem to be devoted to children and teenagers.
Several are described as ‘teen pages’ or ‘teen news’, and are linked to library reading activities.
Spring Valley Library has a ‘teen page’ which offers a prize to readers who have read ten books (how do they know that the book has actually been read rather than just ‘checked out’?)
Caestecker Public Library, Wisconsin, USA, is a library which serves a population of 3000 residents but it still manages to provide a weblog devoted to children’s literature [10].
A posting on the ‘blogroll’ proclaims: ‘why we adore Harry’, (referring to JK Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ books), while another entry relates to the author, Phillip Pullman.
Caestecker’s weblog is an inspiring example of how a modern technology which children enjoy and perceive to be ‘cool’, can be used to support and encourage reading.
Weblogging, in a controlled environment, can provide young people with a safe, shared Web space in which to develop writing skills and share experiences.
Local Councillors’ Weblogs It has been suggested that local councillors in the UK (often referred to as ‘elected members’ in local authority circles) tend to be ill-informed about the role public libraries now play in progressing local and national government agendas.
Library managers have been urged to remedy this situation by ensuring that councillors, with responsibility for public libraries, are well informed and by getting them involved in library activities.
Some forward-thinking local councillors already have weblogs and use them as a simple communication channel between themselves, the local authority and people working and living in the area.
David Boothroyd, Labour councillor for Westbourne ward, Westminster County Council has a weblog called The Westminster Gazette, [11] which provides news and views on local issues such as plans for dealing with unsightly fly-posting, as well as transcripts of council meetings and copies of reports.
Stuart Bruce, Labour councillor for Middleton, Leeds, also has a weblog [12].
Libraries might consider linking to these weblogs, where they exist, from library home pages.
This would mean that anyone visiting library Web pages would automatically see that local politicians are connected to services provided by the council and anyone could post or comment on items posted on the weblog.
Libraries could set up a weblog and invite elected members (with a portfolio for libraries) to contribute on a range of library and related issues.
Culture and heritage, learning and employment opportunities, schools etc.
are all of interest to local people.
Councillors and libraries would share a virtual space and both could be brought closer to the communities they serve.
The weblog might also feature links to other weblogs provided by council services, such as social services, the police and schools.
Resources for Prospective Bloggers Numerous articles and Web sites offer advice to library and information professionals wishing to set up a weblog.
Library+Information Update Magazine has published several useful articles offering facts, ideas and Web site addresses which make the whole process seem easy [13][14][15].
BBCi has two fact sheets in the ‘Ask Bruce’ series: “How do I get my own Blog?” and “What is blogging?” both provide a good introduction and overview of what is involved [16].
Blogger [9], the free weblog tool from Google, lists all the possible forms a weblog can take from personal diary and political soapbox to news-breaking outlet.
It also mentions that the weblog can be a place to collect and share things of interest, and a collaborative space activities which are of most interest to public libraries in terms of supporting users.
Figure 2: Blogger.com: Google’s free weblogging service For those wishing to search for weblogs, Phil Bradley published an article in Ariadne (issue 36) [17] in which he argues that Google is not the ideal tool for this purpose and suggests alternatives.
My own personal favourite weblog is h2g2 [18], ‘a web community based on the Douglas Adam’s idea of an ever-expanding guide to life, the universe and everything the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’.
Postings on the h2g2 weblog are categorised under 6 headings using the following criteria: Instructive, informative and factual entries Entries with a personal writing style Entries containing canny observation and a personal perspective Really thorough entries Well-balanced entries Well-structured entries A quote from Douglas Adams sets the tone for this weblog: “We have the first snowflake.
Now let’s build a blizzard”.
Conclusions I think the late Douglas Adams would have approved of weblogs.
The snowflake/blizzard analogy may refer to something completely different, but it does seem to encapsulate their very essence, i.e.
something which starts life small, but which gradually ‘snowballs’ into something bigger as more people contribute comments, ideas, news, etc.
Above all weblogs can, and should be, fun which is perhaps why they appeal to children and are being used by children’s librarians.
Editor’s note I very much regret that this will be Penny’s last column for Ariadne as she will be leaving UKOLN in August 2004.
I would like to record my thanks for her enthusiastic support of the Magazine and her faithful and telling contributions over the past 3 years.
References Giles Turnbull.
“The seven-year-old bloggers”.
Story from BBC News, published 14 June 2004: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3804773.stm Stephen O’Hear.
“Logs prepare to go on a roll”.
Education Guardian 8 June 2004. http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,1233425,00.html Sue Monk Kidd.
“The Secret Life of Bees” http://www.suemonkkidd.com/ Library Weblogs list of library weblogs by country: http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html et cetera Gateshead Library weblog: http://www.libraryweblog.com/ Rachel Peacock.
“Attracting users on the Web”.
Presentation at UKOLN Public Library Web Managers workshop: Beyond the Website.
University of Bath.
5-6 May 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/public-workshop-04/details.html Peter Scott’s blog: http://blog.xrefer.com/ Phil Bradley’s blog: http://www.philb.com/blog/blogger.html Blogger (free weblog tool from Google): http://www.blogger.com/ Caestecker Library.
“Kidslit” weblog: http://www.greenlakelibrary.org/kidslit/ David Boothroyd’s blog (Labour councillor for Westbourne Ward, Westminster).
The Westminster Gazette.
http://www.20six.co.uk/Westminster/ Stuart Bruce’s blog (Labour councillor for Middleton, Leeds).
http://www.20six.co.uk/middletonpark/ Ian Winship.
“Weblogs and RSS in information work.
How can weblogs be used in a library and information service”?
Library + Information Update, 3 (5) 2004, pp.
30-31. http://www.cilip.org.uk/update/issues/may04/may.html Paul Pedley.
“Have you thought of blogging”?
Library + Information Update 3 (5) 2004, pp.32-33.
http://www.cilip.org.uk/update/issues/may04/may.html H. D’Aguiar.
“Weblogs: the new internet community?” Library + Information Update, 2 (1), January 2003, pp.38-39.
BBCi Ask Bruce.
“What is blogging”?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/askbruce/articles/browse/blogging_1.shtml BBCi Ask Bruce.
“How do I get my own blog”?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/askbruce/articles/browse/makeblog_1.shtml Phil Bradley.
“Search Engines: weblog search engines”.
Ariadne, Issue 36, 30 July 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/search-engines/ ‘h2g2’ (BBC) http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/ Additional Resources Ben Toth.
NHS eLibraries weblog: http://nelh.blogspot.com/ Paul Pedley’s blog.
‘Keeping legal’: http://www.keepinglegal.com/ Guardian Online blog: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/online/ The Shifted Librarian (Jenny Levine, Homer Library, Illinois): http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com Learn 2 Blog: http://www.learn2blog.org/stories/storyReader$15 Robot Wisdom Weblog (Jorn Barger): Weblog resources FAQ: http://robotwisdom.com/weblogs/ MoveableType (weblog tool for developers and professionals): http://www.moveabletype.org/ Blogging glossary: http://www.samizdata.net/blog/glossary.html Will Richardson.
“Weblogg-ed.
Using weblogs and RSS in education” http://www.weblogg-ed.com/about (full list of links to articles plus information) Darlene Fichter.
“Why and How to Use Blogs to Promote Your Library’s Services”.
http://www.infotoday.com/mls/nov03/fichter.shtml Author Details Penny Garrod Public Library Networking Focus UKOLN Email: p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Weblogs: Do they belong in libraries?
“ Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/public-libraries/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Is an Open Repository?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Is an Open Repository?
Buzz data software rdf api portal apache usability archives metadata browser identifier blog repositories eprints flickr preservation oai-pmh gis provenance widget frbr dspace didl e-science authentication interoperability oai-ore research standards opendocument Citation BibTex RIS Julie Allinson, Jessie Hey, Chris Awre and Mahendra Mahey report on the Open Repositories 2007 conference, held in San Antonio, Texas between 23-26 January 2007.
23-26 January 2007 saw the second Open RepositoriesConference [1], this year hosted at the enormous Marriott Rivercenter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, around the corner from the Alamo.
The conference followed on from the inaugural one held last year in Sydney [2], offering the U.S. repositories community an ideal opportunity to gather, together with a generous scattering of attendees from other parts of the world.
With the strap-line 'achieving interoperability in an open world', the conference promoted interoperability and openness in various ways, not just between repositories on a technical level, but also between development communities, technical implementers, librarians and repository managers.
The question posed in the title of this article, was reported in one conference blog [3] whose author pointed to the positive impact of bringing together issues surrounding both open source and open access in one conference.
The very act of blogging, as illustrated in various posts about the conference [4], demonstrates a genuine commitment to open debate.
The three and a half day conference was structured into two halves, with the first one and a half days being dedicated to user group meetings for the main three open-source repository software platforms: EPrints, DSpace and Fedora.
The remainder of the conference was given over to cross-platform plenary, poster and keynote presentations.
The main conference rooms at Open Repositories 2007 Flickr image courtesy of 'Afraid of Ducks' User Group Sessions Tuesday and Wednesday morning hosted six user group sessions.
Non-exclusive, the sessions offered a chance for both experts and those less-familiar with the different software platforms to share practical experience and gather information, perhaps to take back and inform their 'home' user group.
For those with a strictly non-partisan stance, it was a great opportunity to jump from group to group and see many of the exciting and fast-moving developments happening within each community.
With so much going on concurrently, it's impossible to capture it all, but the User Groups drinks reception on the 23rd was a great opportunity for informal exchange and discussion.
DSpace The DSpace user group opened with a session dedicated to 'Governance and Architecture' where Mackenzie Smith and John Ockerbloom talked about the status and proposed new technical architecture of the DSpace software [5].
Use of DSpace is international and growing, and the new architecture plans to support the community needs through growing modularisation.
The DSpace User Interface project, Manakin [6], was introduced by Scott Phillips who demonstrated how a third-party add-on for DSpace can improve customisability.
Through the other DSpace sessions various example were illustrated, showing how the software has been implemented and customised for a range of needs and data types, such as digitised collections, geospatial data and scholarly publications, and for federated access to primary research data in the SPECTRa project [7].
EPrints Les Carr launching EPrints 3.0.
Image courtesy of Jessie Hey EPrints took this conference as an opportunity to launch version 3 [8] officially, a major upgrade over previous versions.
Les Carr offered a detailed walk-through of the software, illustrating the various new and improved features such as extensive use of plug-ins, a more user-friendly workflow, support for publisher embargo periods, auto-suggest for fields such as author name, and easier importing of metadata from other systems.
Some of the other speakers described their EPrints experiences in specific subject-based repositories, such as that of the E-LIS repository, in Europe, outlined by Zeno Tajoli [9].
The presentation prepared by Anita Coleman and Joseph Roback from dLIST, in the USA, described the 'Latest News' feature that they added to EPrints 2.0 a social networking tool that draws on the Web 2.0 ethos to facilitate active participation from the repository user community.
Pauline Simpson spoke of changing research funder attitudes and the example of the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK.
This was complemented by the talk by Stephanie Haas from Florida on the Aquatic Commons [10].
The challenges of useful services such as classification systems were presented by Cheryl Malone and the development of exemplar preservation services for repositories, as envisioned by the UK PRESERV Project [11] were introduced by Jessie Hey.
Fedora Following on from the Fedora User Group meeting at the University of Virginia last June [12], this strand of the Open Repositories 2007 Conference contained a range of presentation describing work that had been done rather than work that was being planned.
This demonstrated a moving on within the Fedora community, and delegates were left much encouraged by what they had heard.
The work behind the development of the National Science Digital Library (nearly 5 million digital objects) [13] was described in two presentations by Dean Krafft, who described plans for developing collaborative services over this huge library, and Chris Wilper and Aaron Birkland, who reported on the development of a new open source RDF triplestore, MPTStore [14], to provide rapid access to users when searching the library.
Smaller scale implementation reports came from Tufts University, Indiana University, and OhioLink.
Talks also covered specific aspects of Fedora use, including ingest of digital objects, their validation and versioning, workflow including work at the University of Hull and the Arts & Humanities Data Service in the UK authentication & authorisation, and editing of repository content.
Two of the Fedora Working Groups also reported.
Carol Minton Morris from the Communications & Outreach group presented the results of a survey of Fedora users, finding users within four distinct but overlapping communities: scholarly communication, museums & libraries, education, and e-science.
Wider promotion of Fedora within these communities of practice is planned for the future.
Ron Jantz from the Preservation Services group reported on activity that had led to the introduction of object integrity checking within Fedora 2.2.
Event messaging is a current interest, and is planned for Fedora 2.3.
The group is working on making Fedora capable of meeting the requirements to be a Trusted Repository according to the criteria of the Research Libraries Group.
Sandy Payette, co-Director of the Fedora project, rounded off the user group session with a look to the future and the establishment of the Fedora Commons as a non-profit foundation upon which future Fedora development can be based and opened up to contribution from all users.
Opening Keynote The opening keynote was given by James L. Hilton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Virginia.
As its title suggests 'Open source for open repositories : new models for software development and sustainability' the presentation focused on software development and changes in education's attitude towards enterprise and open source software.
Hilton argued in favour of community development, collaboration and unbundling software ownership and support, using the development of the Sakai open source courseware system as an exemplar.
Open source is not without its challenges, though, and Hilton accepted that IPR, patents and licencing were all issues.
Nor did he believe that open source equals 'free', likening it to a free puppy which requires time, finances and energy.
Overall, this energetic opening speech was very positive and Hilton ended by asserting that 'we underestimate the extent to which individuals (or collections of individuals) can change the world'.
Plenary and Poster Sessions Figure 3 : Perusing the posters at Open Repositories 2007.
Flickr image courtesy of Julie Allinson Over the ensuing two days, there were eighteen presentations to the assembled conference, organised into six themes, plus a busy and varied poster reception and a presentation on Open Access from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
In the Management Strategy and Policy session, Andrew Treloar gave an overview of the current status of the Australian ARROW project [15], including some reflections on using vanilla Fedora in conjunction with the Fedora-based VITAL repository product from VTLS, a third-party vendor.
Familiar issues of metadata, persistent identification and communication were tackled within the ARROW project.
Leslie Johnston then talked about 'how principles and activities of digital curation guide repository management and operations'.
This speaker looked at the UVA Digital Library Repository (another Fedora instance) and the principles used in building services and curating materials.
The four main principles were: selection, standards, trustworthiness and preservation/sustainability.
To round off this session, Atsuko Takano covered the Chiba University institutional repository and the institutional repository movement in Japan.
She introduced the "principle of principled promiscuity" whereby repositories, in order to encourage deposit, welcome everything.
This formed the basis for the Chiba strategy along with cooperation between faculty and library, and outsourcing metadata creation.
Thursday began with the Preservation session where Mackenzie Smith outlined an approach to expressing actionable preservation policies for repositories, from the PoLicy Enforcement in Data Grid Environments (PLEDGE) project [16].
Joan Smith then talked about archiving websites using the 'mod_oai' Apache web server plugin, allowing them to be harvested using OAI-PMH using MPEG 21 DIDL [17].
Miguel Ferrera described the CRiB [18] recommendation service being developed at the University of Minho, Portugal.
This offers a service-oriented architecture for executing, evaluating and recommending migration-based preservation activities, drawing on services such as PRONOM [19], PANIC [20], TOM [21] and MyMorph [22].
In the User Services and Workflow session, the two presentations went from a technical look at the Fez open source content model and workflow management front-end to fedora [23] to a user-focussed ethnographic study of institutional repository librarians and their experiences of usability.
This particular study found that the attitudes and expectations of academics and librarians differ greatly!
Next up, the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 introduced three technical approaches to creating and accessing content and to populating repositories in a lightweight way.
The DLESE Teaching Boxes [24] are customisable, digital replicas of educators 'teaching boxes' for use in creating and adapting pedagogical content and context.
The SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) project at MIT [25], presented by Richard Rodgers, is using RDF and other semantic web technologies to gather heterogeneous data sources into a single web interface.
The SIMILE project has produced various tools including RDFizers to transform existing data into an RDF representation of it, the Timeline widget for visualizing time-based events and Longwell, a web-based RDF-powered highly-configurable faceted browser.
Eric Larson presented BibApp, a mash-up that uses several lightweight open source technologies for getting information about people and their publications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries and exposing it via a single online interface.
Thursday was wrapped up by a session on Interoperability, where Carl Lagoze presented preliminary ideas about the new OAI-ORE [26] initiative and reported on a recent technical committee meeting.
Lagoze introduced the resource-centric ORE as a companion to the metadata-centric OAI and outlined the ORE view of a compound digital object where constituent parts can be re-used and uniquely referenced.
Julie Allinson went on to describe some related work in the U.K. to create a lightweight service for facilitating deposit across multiple repositories in a standard way [27].
Mahendra Mahey presented preliminary findings from an analysis of scenarios and use cases collected by repository projects funded in the U.K [28].
The closing plenary session on Friday morning was on e-Science and e-Scholarship and opened with Julie Allinson who introduced a Dublin Core Application Profile for describing scholarly works [29] which had made use of the FRBR application model and the Dublin Core Abstract Model to facilitate the capture of multiple descriptions for different entities.
Matthias Razum talked about eSciDoc [30], a collaborative project between the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe to create a scholarly information and communication platform that moves research organisations away from 'information silos' and supports the research process from idea through to completion.
To close, C. Lee Giles introduced work on the ChemXSeer portal [31] for the chemistry discipline.
The repository will be truly hybrid, integrating scientific literature with experimental and analytical data, and automatically harvested materials with user submitted data.
Closing Keynote The closing keynote came from Tony Hey, currently Vice-President for Technical Computing at Microsoft and formerly Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme.
Hey talked about e-Science and Scholarly Communication, presenting a vision of the direction that both will take in the digital age.
Hey believes that we are on 'on the verge of a new type of science paradigm' that will see scientific research becoming increasingly date-centric, using computational methods to enrich the scholarly data lifecycle from data acquisition and ingest, through metadata and annotation, to storage and provenance.
Linking experimental data with publications, analysis and statistical data are also critical elements of the cycle and Hey pointed to a range of examples to illustrate, including the ChemXSeer portal outlined by C. Lee Giles in the final plenary presentation.
Hey ended his talk by making the case for open access and open document formats.
Conclusion As the establishment of repositories continues to grow, and the potential for using repositories to store, manage, aggregate and provide access to a wide range of materials begins to be realised, this conference offered an ideal opportunities to share experience, best practice, new developments and mechanisms for 'achieving interoperability in an open world'.
The mixture of research and production examples gave attendees a real sense that they could take away practical examples to implement in their own repositories but in the knowledge that more is to come.
Continuing to leap across continents, Open Repositories will be coming to the UK in 2008, to be hosted by the University of Southampton [32].
References Open Repositories 2007 http://www.openrepositories.org/ Open Repositories 2006 http://www.apsr.edu.au/Open_Repositories_2006/ Anderson, Bill.
"OR2007, Retrospection 1: 'What is an open repository?'
", PRAXIS101, 27 January 2007 http://praxis101.com/blog/archives/000095.html For some examples see: Musings on Information and Librarianship http://infomotions.com/musings/open-repositories-2007/, Jim Downing http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/downing/?m=200701, the Chronicles of Richard http://chronicles-of-richard.blogspot.com/2007/01/open-repositories-2007-preliminary.html, The Disruptive Library Technology Jester (DLTJ) http://dltj.org/2007/01/open-source-for-open-repositories/ DSpace Federation http://www.dspace.org/ MANAKIN project http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php//Manakin SPECTRa project http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/spectra/ EPrints software http://www.eprints.org/software/ E-LIS http://eprints.rclis.org/ Aquatic Commons http://www.iamslic.org/index.php?section=147 PRESERV Project http://preserv.eprints.org/ Fedora Users Conference, Unversity of Virginia, 18-19th June 2006 http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/fedoraconf/index.shtml National Science Digital Library http://nsdl.org/ MPTStore http://mptstore.sourceforge.net/ Arrow http://www.arrow.edu.au/ PLEDGE Project http://pledge.mit.edu/index.php/Main_Page mod_oai http://www.modoai.org/ CRiB http://crib.dsi.uminho.pt/ PRONOM http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/ PANIC http://metadata.net/panic/ Typed Object Model (TOM) http://tom.library.upenn.edu/ MyMorph http://docmorph.nlm.nih.gov/docmorph/mymorph.htm Fez http://sourceforge.net/projects/fez/ Teaching Boxes http://teachingboxes.org/ SIMILE http://simile.mit.edu/ OAI-ORE http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ Deposit API http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Deposit_API Scenarios and Use Cases http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Scenarios_and_use_cases Eprints Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile eSciDoc http://www.escidoc-project.de/homepage.html ChemXSeer portal http://www.czen.org/node/332 Open Repositories 2008 http://www.openrepositories.org/2008/ Author Details Julie Allinson Repositories Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: j.allinson@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/ Mahendra Mahey Repositories Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/ Chris Awre Integration Architect e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/ Jessie Hey Digital Repositories Services Researcher School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Email: jmnh@ecs.soton.ac.uk Web site: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "What Is an Open Repository?"
Author: Julie Allinson, Jessie Hey, Chris Awre and Mahendra Mahey Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/open-repos-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Centred on Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Centred on Learning Buzz framework ict Citation BibTex RIS Bruce Royan takes a structured look at this series of case studies and analyses their view of the Learning Resource Centre phenomenon.
The list of 25 contributors at the front of this volume is initially rather disheartening to the new reader: it conjures up memories of past encounters with loose compilations of elderly conference papers, only resuscitated because of their perceived relevance to a currently fashionable topic.
This is decidedly not what is on offer here: each of the eight chapters of this book sets out a focused and coherent view of one aspect of the Learning Resource Centre (LRC) phenomenon, based on the distilled experiences of four universities: Aberdeen, Leeds Metropolitan, Lincoln and Sheffield Hallam.
The first chapter is a masterly exposition by Claire Abson of the changing picture of UK higher education, in the context of Follett and of Dearing, and of the need to reconcile 'massification' with the quality agenda.
The context having thus been set, the book provides six sets of case studies, each set compiled by a team of four or more of the aforementioned 25 contributors, under the direction of a nominated sub-editor, and each exploring one facet of the LRC experience.
Edward Oyston discusses organisational frameworks, first comparing the rationale (strategic, managerial and operational drivers) for convergence in each of the four universities.
He then explains the resulting organisational models, in terms of composition, strategic positioning, management arrangements and service model.
Jo Norry describes the changing staff experience in each institution, and the rise of new roles for staff, along the dimensions of hybridisation, learner support, pedagogic partnership and resource development.
This chapter is supported by appendices containing some ten real-world job descriptions and employee specifications.
Midway through the book, and just as central to its argument, is Alison Ward's chapter on the student experience.
Changes in student profile and in learning and teaching methods are outlined and the resultant needs of students in terms of resources, skills and working environment are explained.
The importance of good communication between the learning centre and the student today is emphasised and the chapter concludes with case studies on the specific needs of distance learners, disabled students, and student researchers.
Kay Moore has contributed an interesting chapter on institutional relations.
Changes in teaching and learning, increasing recognition of the centrality of information skills, the impact of ICT and the quality agenda are all shown to have resulted in the development of new expectations, both from academics and students.
Case studies from Sheffield Hallam, Aberdeen and Lincoln Universities indicate how such expectations might be addressed.
Whatever future emphasis may be placed on Virtual Learning Environments, Roger Hines argues for the continuing centrality of an appropriate physical environment to the student learning experience, and with the aid of brief case studies, gives practical advice on the planning, design and operation of physical learning spaces in Higher Education.
Alison Hudson follows this up with a broad and helpful overview of emerging new environments for learning and the continuing need to respond to changing user requirements.
The book is drawn to a conclusion by a future perspective contributed by Graham Bulpitt, which offers the combination of vision and pragmatism one has come to expect from that source.
This relatively slim volume is not cheap at £45, but you get what you pay for.
The content is apposite and well presented and the production values of the physical publication are high.
The references at the end of each chapter are well researched and helpful, although perhaps a little dated, the most recent being 2001.
It would have been useful in this day and age to include more references to online material where available, and for such references to include confirmation of the Accessed Date.
There is a slim but apposite index which this reviewer could not fault.
This is not a handbook on the design, staffing and implementation of Learning Resource Centres, nor does it set out to be.
Yet many practitioners in the field will find the experiences and conclusions of their colleagues very helpful as they ponder such problems in their day-to-day jobs.
Equally, this is not a textbook, yet many of the chapters and individual case studies may easily find their way onto the reading lists of library and information courses across the UK and beyond.
Further Reading Foote, S M An architect's perspective on contemporary academic library design Bulletin of the Medical Library Association; 83 (3) Jul 95, p.351-6 Powell, M Designing library space to facilitate learning: a review of the UK higher education sector Libri; 52 (2) Jun 2002, p.110-20 Author Details Bruce Royan Concurrent Computing Ltd Email: bruce.royan@concurrentcomputing.co.uk Web site: http://www.concurrentcomputing.co.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Centred on Learning" Author: Author's name Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/royan-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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RDN/LTSN Partnerships: Learning Resource Discovery Based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines RDN/LTSN Partnerships: Learning Resource Discovery Based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH Buzz software framework html database xml portal archives xslt metadata identifier vocabularies schema copyright oai-pmh cataloguing multimedia gif e-learning quicktime purl utf-8 uri adl lom dcmes openurl dcmi vcard scorm jacs standards Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell and Phil Barker explore the technical collaboration currently underway between the RDN and the LTSN and describe the RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile and its use to support resource discovery.
Over the last eighteen months or so, the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been funding some collaborative work between the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) Hubs [1] and Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Centres [2].
The primary intention of these subject-based RDN/LTSN partnerships was to: Develop collection policies that clarified the relationships between the two sets of activities.
Enable the sharing of records within and beyond partnerships using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [3].
This second area of work has produced a number of technical specifications, including an 'application profile' of the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) [4] standard and a number of agreed vocabularies.
The application profile is known as the RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile (RLLOMAP) [5].
The RLLOMAP and some of the vocabularies have also had input from the Learning and Teaching Portal team [6], and will be used as the basis for metadata sharing within that activity as well.
This article is intended to provide a technical overview of how records are being shared within the RDN/LTSN partnerships and to provide pointers to further information for those readers that want to understand the more detailed aspects of the work.
Functional requirements One of the key reasons for undertaking the RDN/LTSN partnership work was to encourage greater sharing of metadata records between the two services in order to build better end-user oriented services that allow people to discover learning objects and other resources more efficiently than they are able to currently.
The application profile described in this document was designed to support the following kinds of searches within any services that make use of the metadata: Keyword searches (based on title, description and keywords in the metadata).
Title searches (find resources with known titles).
Author searches (find resources by known authors).
Furthermore, services will be able to filter the results of those searches based on: The publisher (e.g.
only display resources published by the University of Bath).
The resource language (e.g.
only display resources that are written in English).
Educational level (e.g.
only display resources that are appropriate for use in FE).
Services will be able to offer browse interfaces based on: Subject classification.
Publisher.
Educational level.
When resource descriptions are displayed, services will be able to show the following information (in addition to title, author, publisher, keywords and description): Copyright information.
Resource type.
Platform requirements.
Annotations about using the resource in a teaching and learning situation.
Technical solutions The partnership work has selected and/or developed a number of technical solutions intended to meet the functional requirements outlined above.
These solutions fall into five broad areas: A metadata schema (an 'application profile' and an XML binding) that supports the encoding of metadata records.
A transport protocol (in order to exchange the metadata records between services).
Vocabularies (to ensure a greater level of consistency in the values being assigned during cataloguing).
Identifier guidelines (for both metadata records and the resources they describe).
Cataloguing guidelines (to ensure consistent usage of the metadata schema).
Each of these areas is discussed in more detail below.
Metadata schema The partnership work chose to base its metadata schema on the LOM because one of the main focuses of the work was to share metadata about learning objects.
Coincidentally, at the same time that the partnership work was starting, staff at CETIS were collaborating with staff at Learning and Teaching Scotland [7] and others in the development of a UK-specific application profile of the LOM, now known as the UK LOM Core [8].
The aim of the UK LOM Core is to promote common practice in the implementation of the LOM in UK educational contexts, and to align this with important international implementations.
The basis of the work was a comparison of twelve metadata schemas based on the LOM, including those produced by the National Learning Network [9], and University for Industry [10] in the UK; and SCORM [11] and CanCore [12] internationally.
The result is a recommended minimum core set of metadata elements that are widely used in application profiles of the LOM and some associated vocabularies that are suitable for use in all levels of UK education.
Inclusion of these elements in local application profiles of the LOM will increase the opportunity for metadata sharing with other projects with minimal additional overheads by way of inclusion of elements that would not otherwise have been used.
It therefore seemed sensible to align these two bits of work.
As a result, the RLLOMAP is compliant with both the UK LOM Core and with the LOM itself.
Full details of the RLLOMAP are available in the RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile specification.
A summary list of the elements that are used is shown here: 1.1 general.identifier 1.2 general.title 1.3 general.language 1.4 general.description 1.5 general.keyword 1.6 general.coverage 2.3 lifeCycle.contribute 3.1 metaMetadata.identifier 3.2 metaMetadata.contribute 3.3 metaMetadata.metadatascheme 3.4 metaMetadata.language 4.1 technical.format 4.2 technical.size 4.3 technical.location 4.6 technical.otherPlatformRequirements 5.2 educational.learningResourceType 5.6 educational.context 5.10 educational.description 6.2 rights.copyrightAndOtheRrestrictions 6.3 rights.description 7.1 relation.kind 7.2 relation.resource 8.3 annotation.description 9.1 classification.purpose 9.2 classification.taxonPath It is worth noting that within the RDN hubs, most resource description is based on the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) [13].
It has therefore been necessary to map the elements listed above to the DCMES.
Two simple mapping tools based on XSLT were also developed.
Furthermore, two bindings of the RLLOMAP have been defined, one based on the XML binding of the LOM and one based on an XML binding of Dublin Core.
In the main, it is expected that most services will be based on the LOM binding.
Examples of the two bindings can be seen in the 'Example' section below.
Transport protocol A decision was made to adopt a harvesting approach to sharing metadata records within the partnerships.
This follows existing practice in the RDN, where metadata records are harvested from all the RDN hubs into a central database of all records known as ResourceFinder.
The OAI-PMH is well designed to support such a harvesting arrangement.
Although it mandates support for simple Dublin Core metadata records, the OAI-PMH supports the exchange of any metadata that can be encoded using XML and for which there is a valid XML Schema definition.
One of the problems of sharing metadata based on the LOM (such as the RLLOMAP) is that the IEEE standard for an XML binding of the LOM is not yet complete, however a draft version is available.
It is therefore not necessary to define a new XML schema for the RLLOMAP, the draft LOM XML schema [14] can be used directly.
(Actually, in practice this was not quite true.
One or two minor problems with the draft IEEE XML schemas required us to host locally modified copies of the XML schemas on the RDN Web site).
The OAI-PMH will also be used to exchange records between the RDN hubs and LTSN centres and the LTSN Learning and Teaching Portal, as can be seen in the diagram below: Figure 1: Overall architecture of the RDN/LTSN partnerships It should be noted that the overall architecture does not specify which services should harvest which records from which other services.
Nor does it indicate how often harvesting should happen.
The RDN hubs and LTSN centres make these decisions as part of their collection and service development policies.
The architecture simply provides the framework that allows harvesting to take place, if it is deemed to be necessary.
Vocabularies The partnerships have developed or adopted a number of vocabularies in order to ensure a greater level of consistency in the values being assigned during cataloguing: RDN/LTSN learning resource type vocabulary [15] RDN resource types [16] DCMI type vocabulary [17] Three vocabularies, intended to be used in combination, used to indicate the type or genre of resource.
LTSN geographic coverage vocabulary [18] A high-level list of geographic areas in the UK.
LTSN pedagogic terms vocabulary [19] A vocabulary of pedagogic styles.
LTSN policy themes vocabulary [20] A vocabulary of educational policy themes.
Joint Academic Coding System (JACS) [21] learndirect Classification System (LDCS) [22] Two vocabularies that provide high-level subject terms.
UK Educational Levels (UKEL) [23] A list of high-level UK educational levels.
UK Educational Contexts (UKEC) [24] A list of high-level UK educational contexts.
Identifiers and linking The issue of how to assign identifiers to both metadata records and the objects they describe has been fairly problematic during the partnership work.
Because the RDN hubs and LTSN centres are, (in the main), describing other people's resources, the following questions are highly relevant: "Who is responsible for assigning an identifier to a resource?"
"How do you tell if an identifier has already been assigned by another hub or centre?"
"What kinds of identifiers should be used?"
"How much modification of a record is required before a new identifier should be assigned to it?"
"Do physical learning objects have specific identification requirements?"
These are complex issues and it would be disingenuous to claim that they are fully solved.
However, some decisions naturally fall out of the choice of using the OAI-PMH as the transport protocol.
For example, in supporting the OAI-PMH, each RDN hub and LTSN centre must assign a unique identifier to each of its metadata records.
A decision was made to use the OAI Identifier format [25] for this purpose, as recommended by the protocol.
Once a unique identifier is assigned to each metadata record, it is theoretically possible to use it to assign an identifier automatically to the resource it describes.
This is the approach taken by the PURL-based Object Identifier (POI) [26], which offers an automated way of assigning and resolving a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) [27] for each resource with minimal costs to the assigner, because an OAI Identifier has already been assigned to the metadata record about the resource.
It is desirable that each resource have only one identifier in the POI scheme, therefore it follows that only the first person to describe a resource should assign a POI as described above.
In order to allow RDN hubs and LTSN centres to see if a POI has already been assigned to a resource, a POI look-up service [28] has been developed.
For physical learning objects like books, journal articles, videos, etc., simply assigning a POI to the resource is not altogether helpful to the end-user because physical resources cannot be retrieved across the network.
In this scenario, RDN hubs and LTSN centres will generate an OpenURL [29] for the physical resource (encoded in the 4.3 technical.location element).
This will allow the end-user to move seamlessly to an OpenURL resolver, which can provide context-sensitive links to any copies of the resource that are available to them.
Cataloguing guidelines Information and guidelines about the above issues have been brought together in the RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile Compliance Guidelines [30].
The guidelines are intended to encourage a more consistent approach to describing resources by the cataloguer, and a more consistent way of encoding that information in the XML binding of LOM by software developers.
Example By way of example, there follows a relatively simple metadata record that describes a 'learning path' through the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive (WOMDA) [31], encoded using both the XML LOM binding and the Dublin Core binding.
Firstly, here is the LOM binding: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <!-oai:rdn.ac.uk:12345-67890 --> <lom xmlns="http://ltsc.ieee.org/xsd/LOMv1p0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://ltsc.ieee.org/xsd/LOMv1p0 http://www.rdn.ac.uk/oai/lom/lom.xsd"> <general> <identifier> <catalog>URI</catalog> <entry>http://purl.org/poi/rdn.ac.uk/12345-67890</entry> </identifier> <title> <string language="en-GB">Wilfred Owen and Realism</string> </title> <language>en-GB</language> <description> <string language="en-GB"> This pathway should be of use to anyone studying Wilfred Owen at CSE (or High school level in the US).
By looking at visual and other evidence in the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive (WOMDA), it aims to raise the issue of realism in Owen's verse.
</string> </description> <keyword> <string language="en-GB"> Owen, Wilfred </string> </keyword> <keyword> <string language="en-GB"> Poetry </string> </keyword> <keyword> <string language="en-GB"> Realism </string> </keyword> <keyword> <string language="en-GB"> First World War </string> </keyword> <keyword> <string language="en-GB"> WWI </string> </keyword> </general> <lifeCycle> <contribute> <role> <source>LOMv1.0</source> <value>publisher</value> </role> <entity>BEGIN:VCARD\nORG:University of Oxford\nEND:VCARD\n </entity> </contribute> <contribute> <role> <source>LOMv1.0</source> <value>author</value> </role> <entity>BEGIN:VCARD\nORG:City of London School\nEND:VCARD\n </entity> </contribute> </lifeCycle> <metaMetadata> <identifier> <catalog>URI</catalog> <entry>oai:rdn.ac.uk:12345-67890</entry> </identifier> <contribute> <role> <source>LOMv1.0</source> <value>creator</value> </role> <entity>BEGIN:VCARD\nORG:RDN\nEND:VCARD</entity> <date> <dateTime>2003-03-20</dateTime> </date> </contribute> <metadataSchema>LOMv1.0</metadataSchema> <language>en-GB</language> </metaMetadata> <technical> <format>text/html</format> <format>application/gif</format> <format>application/mpeg</format> <format>application/quicktime</format> <location>http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/...</location> <otherPlatformRequirements> <string language="en-GB"> Web browser </string> </otherPlatformRequirements> </technical> <educational> <learningResourceType> <source>RDNLTSNType</source> <value>Computer-basedTutorial</value> </learningResourceType> <learningResourceType> <source>DCMIType</source> <value>InteractiveResource</value> </learningResourceType> <context> <source>UKEC</source> <value>higher education</value> </context> </educational> <rights> <copyrightAndOtherRestrictions> <source>LOMv1.0</source> <value>no</value> </copyrightAndOtherRestrictions> <description> <string language="en-GB"> (c) City of London School, 2003 </string> </description> </rights> <classification> <purpose> <source>LOMv1.0</source> <value>discipline</value> </purpose> <taxonPath> <source> <string language="none">learndirect</string> </source> <taxon> <id>FC.4</id> <entry> <string language="none">English Literature</string> </entry> </taxon> </taxonPath> <taxonPath> <source> <string language="none">JACS</string> </source> <taxon> <id>Q320</id> <entry> <string language="none">English Literature</string> </entry> </taxon> </taxonPath> </classification> <classification> <purpose> <source>LOMv1.0</source> <value>educational level</value> </purpose> <taxonPath> <source> <string language="none">UKEL</string> </source> <taxon> <entry> <string language="none">level5</string> </entry> </taxon> </taxonPath> </classification> </lom> Secondly, here's the same record encoded using the Dublin Core XML binding:   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <!-oai:rdn.ac.uk:12345-67890 --> <rdndc xmlns="http://www.rdn.ac.uk/oai/rdn_dc/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:rdnterms="http://purl.org/rdn/terms/" xmlns:meg="http://purl.org/meg/terms/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.rdn.ac.uk/oai/rdn_dc/ http://www.rdn.ac.uk/oai/rdn_dc/20030323/rdn_dc.xsd"> <dc:title xml:lang="en-GB">Wilfred Owen and Realism</dc:title> <dc:language>en-GB</dc:language> <dc:description xml:lang="en-GB"> This pathway should be of use to anyone studying Wilfred Owen at CSE (or High school level in the US).
By looking at visual and other evidence in the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive (WOMDA), it aims to raise the issue of realism in Owen's verse.
</dc:description> <dc:subject xml:lang="en-GB"> Owen, Wilfred </dc:subject> <dc:subject xml:lang="en-GB"> Poetry </dc:subject> <dc:subject xml:lang="en-GB"> Realism </dc:subject> <dc:subject xml:lang="en-GB"> First World War </dc:subject> <dc:subject xml:lang="en-GB"> WWI </dc:subject> <dc:publisher>University of Oxford</dc:publisher> <dc:creator>City of London School</dc:creator> <dc:format xsi:type="dcterms:IMT">text/html</dc:format> <dc:format xsi:type="dcterms:IMT">application/gif</dc:format> <dc:format xsi:type="dcterms:IMT">application/mpeg</dc:format> <dc:format xsi:type="dcterms:IMT">application/quicktime</dc:format> <dc:identifier xsi:type="dcterms:URI"> http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/...</dc:identifier> <dc:identifier xsi:type="dcterms:URI"> http://purl.org/poi/rdn.ac.uk/12345-67890</dc:identifier> <dc:type xsi:type="rdnterms:RDNLTSNType"> Computer-basedTutorial</dc:type> <dc:type xsi:type="dcterms:DCMIType"> InteractiveResource</dc:type> <dcterms:educationLevel xsi:type="meg:UKEL"> level5</dcterms:educationLevel> <dc:rights xml:lang="en-GB"> (c) City of London School, 2003</dc:rights> <dc:subject xsi:type="rdnterms:Learndirect"> English literature, FC.4</dc:subject> <dc:subject xsi:type="rdnterms:JACS"> Q320 English Literature</dc:subject> </rdndc> Further information The technical specifications developed during this activity are all available under RDN/LTSN Partnerships [32].
Readers are recommended to start with the RDN/LTSN technical FAQ [33] to get an overview of what is happening with this work.
The FAQ covers a range of issues, such as the assignment of OAI item identifiers, the assignment of resource identifiers, workflow issues as records are shared between partners, the use of OpenURL for physical resources, etc.
Acknowledgements The work described in this article has been undertaken by many members of the RDN and LTSN communities, through face-to-face meetings and discussion on the ltsn-technical@jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list.
There are too many to list individually.
References Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Learning and Teaching Support Network http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/ Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/ IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/ RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ap/ Learning and Teaching Portal http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/genericcentre/index.asp?id=18262 Learning and Teaching Scotland http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ UK LOM Core http://www.cetis.ac.uk/profiles/uklomcore National Learning Network http://www.nln.ac.uk/ University for Industry http://www.ufi.com/ ADL SCORM http://www.adlnet.org/ CanCore http://www.cancore.ca/ Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ XML schema for the LOM http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~erikd/LOM/ RDN/LTSN learning resource type vocabulary http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/types/ RDN resource types http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/cat-guide/types/ DCMI type vocabulary http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/ LTSN geographic coverage vocabulary http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/geographic-coverage/ LTSN pedagogic terms vocabulary http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/pedagogic-terms/ LTSN policy themes vocabulary http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/policy-themes/ Joint Academic Coding System (JACS) http://www.hesa.ac.uk/jacs/completeclassification.htm learndirect Classification System (LDCS) http://www.learndirect-advice.co.uk/provider/standardsandclassifications/classpage/ UK Educational Levels (UKEL) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/ukel/ UK Educational Contexts (UKEC) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/ukec/ OAI Identifier format http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-oai-identifier.htm PURL-based Object Identifier (POI) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/poi/ PURL http://purl.org/ POI look-up service http://www.rdn.ac.uk/poi/ OpenURL http://www.niso.org/committees/committee_ax.html RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile Compliance Guidelines http://www.ltsn-01.ac.uk/interoperability/compliance_guidelines A 'learning path' through the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive (WOMDA) http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/jtap/pcs/dispfr.pl?email=Wilfred%20Owen%20and%20Realism RDN/LTSN Partnerships http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ RDN/LTSN technical FAQ http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/faq/ Author Details Andy Powell Assistant Director, Distributed Systems and Services UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell/ Phil Barker Learning Technology Adviser Institute for Computer Based Learning Heriot Watt University Email: philb@icbl.hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/ Return to top Article Title: "RDN/LTSN Partnerships: Learning resource discovery based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH" Author: Andy Powell and Phil Barker Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/powell/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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RepoMMan: Delivering Private Repository Space for Day-to-day Use Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines RepoMMan: Delivering Private Repository Space for Day-to-day Use Buzz data software portal infrastructure metadata browser vocabularies repositories preservation soap bpel ftp authentication uportal research ldap jstor Citation BibTex RIS Richard Green and Chris Awre describe work undertaken at the University of Hull to place Web services at the heart of its personalised digital repository provision.
In the spring of 2005, the University of Hull embarked on the RepoMMan Project [1], a two-year JISC-funded [2] endeavour to investigate a number of aspects of user interaction with an institutional repository.
The vision at Hull was, and is, of a repository placed at the heart of a Web services architecture: a key component of a university's information management.
In this vision the institutional repository provides not only a showcase for finished digital output, but also a workspace in which members of the University can, if they wish, develop those same materials.
The RepoMMan Project set out to consider how a range of Web services could be brought together to allow a user to interact easily with private workspace in an institutional repository and how the Web services might ease the transition from a private work-in-progress to a formally exposed object in the repository complete with metadata.
Three key decisions had been taken before the project proposal was submitted and will not be further discussed here: that open source software should be employed for the project, that the Web services should be orchestrated by an implementation of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL [3]) and that the Fedora repository software [4] should be used.
The remainder of this article describes the work of the project through to its eventual conclusion in September 2007 and briefly looks forward to follow-on work that will realise other parts of Hull's vision for an integrated repository.
User Needs The e-Services Integration Group (eSIG) at the University of Hull has a tradition of placing user needs at the centre of its development work (in contrast to some organisations where the technical work is carried out and then users are 'persuaded' that it is what they wanted).
Consequently RepoMMan started with two key investigations to discover how potential users currently managed their work and what benefits they might gain from using a private repository space as part of their 'toolkit'.
The first such investigation involved interviewing members of University staff.
Colleagues were drawn initially from the research community but also later from the learning and teaching (L&T), and administrative communities.
The interviews each took typically just over an hour and the findings were eventually synthesised into a first user needs report [5].
The second investigation involved a Web-based survey covering the same ground but necessarily in less detail; this was initially restricted to Hull staff but then widened to the Higher Education community generally.
This second piece of work allowed us to check that the needs expressed by our interviewees were typical of those in the wider world.
The findings of the survey were reported separately [6].
Eventually, the findings of all the investigations were synthesised into a combined user needs report [7].
The user needs work identified four overlapping areas in which a repository was seen as being of potential benefit to individuals: storage, access, management and preservation.
Users, particularly those in the research and the learning and teaching communities, were keen to have a storage solution that allowed them to access their works in progress from anywhere they could access the Internet; they preferred this rather than have versions of their materials scattered variously across their office computer, their home computer, their laptop, memory sticks, CDs and (in a frightening number of cases) floppy disks.
Furthermore, this easy availability would offer the potential to access their work in an ad hoc manner away from their normal work environment, perhaps at meetings, conferences, or in a lecture theatre.
Many of the people to whom we talked had well developed strategies for managing developmental versions of work, others were keen to have a system that would allow them easily to identify versions and, if necessary, to revert to a previous stage.
Finally, many could see the potential in a system that would easily take their newly finished work, help them add metadata to it and publish it into a repository space where it could be managed, and potentially preserved for the long term.
The RepoMMan Tool The early technical work of the project concentrated on developing what became known as the RepoMMan tool; this is a browser-based rich Internet application interface that allows a user to transfer work to and fro between their local machine and the repository.
It was a key design goal of this work that the interface should be intuitive to use and, to this end, it was deliberately modelled on a generic design common to ftp clients.
The finished version is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The RepoMMan browser interface The left-hand side of the screen allows users to browse their local computer whilst the right-hand side of the screen shows their private repository space, represented as a familiar file and folder structure.
This is actually a visual metaphor for what is happening in the repository because the 'files' are actually digital objects, whilst the 'folders' are collection objects within the Fedora repository.
The two 'arrow' buttons in the middle of the screen cause the files to be transferred in one direction or the other.
'Files' in the listing at the right-hand side can be double-clicked to expand a list of versions available and these versions can be manipulated individually.
When a user clicks to transfer a file to the repository, a BPEL engine orchestrates a number of Web services to create and save a digital object on the repository server.
This object consists largely of the datastream definitions, relationships and metadata; the binary content associated with the digital object (the actual document, image, or whatever) is time-stamped and transferred to the University's storage area network (SAN).
This time-stamping allows relatively easy storage of the 'same' document in multiple versions.
Using the SAN for digital content, rather than the repository server itself, gives us access to a very large, extensible and secure file store.
Metadata As noted in the introduction, another aspect of the project's work was to consider how the transfer of an object into a public-facing repository space could be eased by the RepoMMan approach.
A crucial element of this transfer is the addition to the object of appropriate metadata; often this has been a stumbling block in repository workflows.
Authors are generally not good at 'doing metadata' and, faced with a blank form to fill in on their screen, may well do the bare minimum.
The RepoMMan tool has been designed for use primarily from within the University of Hull's portal (based on uPortal [8]) or virtual learning or research environments (in the process of transfer to Sakai [9]).
For the purposes of the project, work was undertaken to develop approaches for pre-populating administrative metadata (author's name, department etc) from the portal environment; because the user is logged in to University systems through the portal, Web services can be used to derive useful metadata from them.
When authors do have to provide metadata, perhaps about a specific research project, this is stored in their repository space so that it can be reused with future objects.
The greatest challenge to our team was to provide a set of services that would add meaningful descriptive metadata into a digital object.
When the project proposal was written we were aware of a number of initiatives to develop metadata extraction tools and we had imagined that, by the time we needed one, at least some of these would have borne fruit.
In practice we found only one tool that seemed to do a reasonable job of providing metadata for an unseen document without the provision of a controlled subject vocabulary, this is the iVia metadata tool, a component of the Data Fountains suite [10].
We have deployed this tool as a Web service and use it to prepopulate the descriptive metadata form that is presented to an author.
It is our belief that an author is far more likely to correct and/or expand a filled-in form than to do a good job of filling in a completely blank one.
Once the author 'saves' metadata for an object it can be accessed again for amendment but this does not re-run the Web services unless the author specifically requests it; thus once an author has customised metadata it is not overwritten by our toolset.
For non-text content we currently still need the authors to provide descriptive metadata themselves.
Investigated, but not actually implemented in the lifetime of the project, was a further Web service which will use Harvard University's JHOVE tool [11] to populate a hidden object datastream with technical and/or preservation metadata depending on the content type.
Problems?
What Problems?
Set out in a few brief paragraphs, it might seem that the RepoMMan Project proceeded in a fairly straightforward and trouble-free manner but the careful reader may have noticed in the introduction that this 'two-year' project appears to take more than two years; it did and much has been learned along the way [12].
It transpired that, to a large extent, the project had to pioneer the use of SOAP-based [13] Web services with Fedora repository software.
Almost inevitably, we encountered a number of problems, which took a considerable time, and a considerable amount of joint effort with the Fedora community worldwide, to solve.
We again visited uncharted (and somewhat troubled) waters when we became one of the first teams to try and set up Fedora for use by a very large number of independent users employing an LDAP server [14].
Last, but not least, we were the first to try and deploy the iVia metadata tool on a modest 32-bit computer (rather than the 64-bit system on which it had been designed); some time was spent working with developers in the US to make this work.
All these processes took time to resolve and, in the event, an unfunded extension was granted from the JISC in order to complete the work.
It is good to be able to report that the improvements made to Fedora and to the iVia tool have now been made available to the wider community and that the experience of interacting with the various development teams was generally very positive.
Software The RepoMMan tool uses the open source ActiveBPEL engine to orchestrate a range of Web services in order to achieve its tasks; some of these Web services are necessarily unique to the University of Hull and for that reason it is not possible to offer the tool as an off-the-shelf package to others.
That said, the RepoMMan team will be more than willing to share its experience and code with groups who are interested in following a similar approach to repository work.
Whilst not necessarily directly transferable, our work may be a useful starting point for others.
Future Work The RepoMMan tool, as developed to meet the requirements of the JISC project, stops short of the actual process by which an object can be transferred from a private into a public-facing repository.
This work, represented in simplified overview at Figure 2, is currently being undertaken in-house as part of the wider work that is developing the University's institutional repository infrastructure.
Figure 2: Overview of the process to expose authors' completed materials The authors will be able to 'publish' their work into the University repository via a staging area.
(Ultimately, we shall provide a direct route specifically to support open access publishing.)
After being checked over, the object will then be transferred by repository staff to the public-facing repository where it will available to others subject to appropriate access rights.
This 'publishing' process, which will again be carried out by BPEL-orchestrated Web services, involves copying the author's digital object and using it to construct a new object 'owned' by the repository and conforming to strict 'object models' (internal structures).
The RepoMMan team has received a further two-year grant from the JISC to build into this process a system for ongoing records management and digital preservation (RMDP).
This is the REMAP Project [15], which is due to complete in March 2009.
RMDP will be supported by building into the new digital object a set of date flags which will be used by an external system to trigger records management and/or preservation events.
Thus, for example, when a past undergraduate examination paper has been in the repository for five years the a date flag might trigger a message to the appropriate departmental secretary that the paper is quite likely out of date and should therefore be hidden from future students; the secretary may wish to do this or to extend its life by resetting the flag.
It may be that if the secretary does nothing the system will take a default action, in this case to hide the paper.
As another example, a date flag may trigger a process to undertake a format review of the materials in the repository; this automated review may result in a message to administrators that there are some specific objects in a file format that is no longer widely supported and suggest that something should be done.
The University's REMAP team, working with colleagues in Spoken Word Services at Glasgow Caledonian University*, is investigating a range of possibilities.
The Institutional Repository Finally, and briefly, it should be noted that all this work comes to nothing without an accessible Institutional Repository at the end of the process.
We have noted that Hull's vision is of a repository at the heart of an integrated Web services architecture; as such there will be many ways to access materials within it, and Fedora offers the capability of exposing them through multiple interfaces.
It had been our plan to write a simple browser interface as one of the routes into repository content.
In the event we have been fortunate to coincide with the development of the Mura interface [16] at Macquarie University in Australia, which so closely fitted our needs that independent development would have been unjustifiable; rather we are contributing in a small way to the development work there.
A test implementation of Hull's Institutional Repository running with the Mura interface is available [17] and this is being used in addition to our project Web sites to make available selected reports from the RepoMMan and REMAP Projects [18].
*Editor's note: the authors are too modest to point to the acknowledgement of the project's work in "Capacity Building: Spoken Word at Glasgow Caledonian University", Iain Wallace, Graeme West and David Donald, July 2007, Ariadne Issue 52 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/wallace-et-al/ References The RepoMMan Project http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ The Active Endpoints Web site is a good starting point from which to investigate BPEL http://www.active-endpoints.com/ Now Fedora Commons http://www.fedora-commons.org/ Green, R., "R-D4 Report on research user requirements interview data", University of Hull, 2006.
Select link at: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/documents/ G reen, R., "R-D3 Report on research user requirements on-line survey", University of Hull, 2006.
Select link at: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/documents/ Green, R., Awre, C., "R-D14 RepoMMan User Needs Analysis", University of Hull, 2007, Select link at: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/documents/ Uportal http://www.uportal.org/ The Sakai Project http://sakaiproject.org/ Data Fountains http://dfnsdl.ucr.edu/ The JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/ Readers seeking further details might like to consult: Green, R., Awre, C., Dolphin, I., Lamb, S., Sherratt, R., "RepoMMan Final Project Report", University of Hull, 2007.
Select link at: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/documents/ SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol LDAP: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, commonly used to support authentication processes The REMAP Project.
http://www.hull.ac.uk/remap/ Mura is now known as Muradora.
Web site: http://drama.ramp.org.au/cgi-bin/trac.cgi The University of Hull Institutional Repository http://edocs.hull.ac.uk/ Select link to 'JISC Repositories Projects' at http://edocs.hull.ac.uk/ Author Details Richard Green Manager, RepoMMan and REMAP Projects c/o eSIG, Academic Services Brynmor Jones Library University of Hull Hull HU6 7RX Email: r.green@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ http://www.hull.ac.uk/remap/ Richard Green is an independent consultant working with the eSIG team.
Chris Awre Integration Architect eSIG, Academic Services Brynmor Jones Library University of Hull Hull HU6 7RX Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman http://www.hull.ac.uk/remap/ Return to top Article Title: "RepoMMan: Delivering Private Repository Space for Day-to-day Use" Author: Richard Green and Chris Awre Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/green-awre/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Take a Peek Beneath the EPrints V3 Wrappers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Take a Peek Beneath the EPrints V3 Wrappers Buzz data software wiki api javascript database rss xml atom apache usability archives metadata repositories eprints video windows multimedia gif flash quicktime mysql mets dspace refworks research ldap Citation BibTex RIS With v3 officially launched at the Open Repositories Conference in San Antonio last week, William Nixon and Peter Millington report on the EPrints 3 pre-launch briefing in London, 8 December 2006.
The EPrints 3 unwrapped event at the Congress Centre in London was billed as ‘an early Christmas present’ [1] and was an opportunity for the EPrints community to enjoy a preview of EPrints 3 (hereafter referred to as EP3) scheduled for release at the end of January 2007.
The official launch was held at the Open Repositories Conference [2] in San Antonio, Texas on the 24th of January and the software is now in final release.
The London meeting generated a lot of interest from the delegates, a lot of interaction with the EP3 team and a lot of discussion about new features.
At times there was so much interest and discussion that the timetable occasionally looked in danger of slipping; however that just underscored the interest and the comments from the floor.
It was also an opportunity for Chris Gutteridge, lead developer on EP3, to respond to questions, to make suggestions and to get new ideas in both the morning and afternoon sessions.
The morning session, led by Les Carr, Eprints Technical Director, was a demonstration and a walkthrough of the software.
Jessie Hey then led a discussion about the features and activities which a Librarian/Administrator would like to have in EP3.
The afternoon session, led by Timothy Miles-Board, provided a technical overview of the software and covered installation, upgrades and the configuration/use of new features such as plug-ins, flexible workflows and autocompletion.
Les Carr underlined the fact that EP3 is more than just an upgrade; it is whole new piece of software.
EP3 will bring new features to the repository party: some minor, such as easily re-sorting search results, and some major, for example autocompletion, the architecture and flexible workflows.
For existing users, especially those who have heavily configured their installation, upgrading to EP3 will be challenging but then nothing worth doing is rarely otherwise.
An Introduction to EPrints 3 Leslie Carr, EPrints Technical Director, University of Southampton The EP3 event promised ‘Christmas magic’ and was opened by a very skilful conjuror who used such commonplace items as a newspaper, torn up and then magically reassembled to draw parallels with the search functionality of the new software.
EP3 though is no parlour trick and it looks like an exciting, flexible and feature-rich release which helps to address some of the broader challenges faced by those of us populating our institutional repositories.
These challenges such as metadata quality, ease of self-deposition and the use of embargo options for content not immediately available reflect the ‘on the ground’ reality for many repositories and institutions.
EP3 appears to be evolving in line with many of the needs of its original community base.
Les began with the history of EPrints, from its initial development back in 1999 with funding from JISC.
There are now over 210 repositories using the EPrints software.
He gave an update on the EPrints team and some background on the drivers for the development of EP3 including more flexibility and more power for users and administrators.
He provided a live walkthrough and demonstration of the new EP3 features and enhancements.
An EP3 demonstration repository [3] is live on the EPrints Web site.
Although at first glance it looks similar to EP2 (and familiarity was an element of the redesign), that first glance is deceptive.
There is also new Web site in place for the EP3 software and related files, plug-ins and add-ons [4].
Ironically, at the time of the meeting that site was running EP2.
This site will also host plug-ins and other add-ons for the software.
Range of New Features So what is new and would you want it?
Should you upgrade to EP3, and if so what are the implications?
The upgrade issues were discussed in the afternoon session.
An ‘at-a-glance’ view of the new features in EP3 include: A change in architecture: EP3 will use plug-ins which can configured for import and export options, changes to the interface and new ways for users to enter the data A new ‘autocompletion’ feature to assist in better quality metadata.
This is preset for the author, journal and ISSN fields An embargo option for content which cannot immediately be made publicly available.
The software will ‘release’ it on a specified date.
Flexible workflows which can be set depending on different conditions e.g.
by content type or user Additional content types including video and sound Thumbnails of an image or the front cover of a PDF when a user hovers over the icon in the record display screen More RSS options including the opportunity to turn searches into RSS feeds A Request a copy button for content which is not yet freely available in the repository this will send an e-mail to the author An audit trail which tracks changes and actions to papers deposited into the service Key features and Quicktime demos are now available [5].
Searching or browsing an EP3 repository appears to be much the same as previous versions, although there are some added features including the opportunity to sort results lists by author, title, year etc without having to re-run the search.
An RSS feed can also be created based on particular searches.
The ‘Latest Additions’ page displays the most recently deposited items, with the added option of the list being available as a news feed in Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 formats.
When selecting a deposited item from a list, EP3 now shows all the associated files as a collection of thumbnails, including the first page of a PDF file.
Hovering over the thumbnail brings up a larger version of the image.
This felt like a ‘cool’-feature-looking-for-an-application that could soon become irritating like animated GIF’s and Flash movies.
Administrators might therefore want to switch it off.
On the other hand, there are no doubt document types and applications where this feature would be extremely useful e.g.
multimedia materials although these could perhaps be implemented in a different form, such as the virtual light box for collections of images, as requested by one of the delegates.
The file list also includes files that are not publicly available, typically because of an embargo.
However, in such cases there is a ‘Request a copy’ button to email the depositor.
All readers have to do is enter their email address and the rest is automatic.
When depositors receive the resultant message, they need only click on buttons either to send the requested file, or to send a polite rejection.
This feature is intended to forestall concerns about depositing items before their embargo period has expired, or where an author wishes to retain control over the item’s distribution (hardly within the spirit of the OAI).
The chances are that this is likely to achieve its aim.
Importing and Exporting Data There are numerous format options for exporting search results including Dublin Core and METS as well as bibliographic software formats like Reference Manager.
These are implemented using plug-ins described as ‘kind of cool’, written by Southampton, but to which other users can also contribute.
Another ‘cool’ feature is latitude and longitude fields which can be used to export data to Google Maps and look like fun to play with.
In the context of scholarly publication, the potential uses still need thinking through.
The demonstration showed locations on a Google Map using co-ordinates added into some sample records, but this was hardly a serious application.
There may be scope for using the feature to show the location of field research sites, assuming the depositors/mediators are prepared to provide the necessary metadata.
It is an indicator though of the way in which EP3 is evolving to provide hooks into other services and to provide new opportunities to work with the material deposited.
In summary, there have been some interesting improvements to the search and browse interfaces, but they are, as yet, of unproven usefulness.
Deposit and Workflow There have been major changes to the deposit process, in order to make it more user-friendly and to encourage further take-up of self-deposition.
This is one of the key changes in EP3 and the one which could potentially have the greatest impact on those institutions which are using a mediated deposit model.
When implemented in conjunction with the autocompletion feature, EP3 provides an easier interface for self-depositors.
The first major change is the introduction of a set of tabs for the various deposit stages: Type -> Upload -> Details -> Subjects -> Deposit These feel similar to the ‘sausage bar’ used in DSpace’s deposit process .
The tabs are effective because they make it clear from the outset what stages are involved.
In principle they also show depositors where they are in the process, although the stages do not necessarily have to be completedin the order given, and repositories can customise the sequence.
There is error-checking for obligatory data before final deposition.
Users no longer need to specify the file type they are depositing before they upload it, the EP3 software will now recognise it.
The tabs also mean that if you need to go back to make amendments, you no longer need to navigate sequentially through all the intervening pages to return to the section you need; you can now skip directly to the required section.
The interface is also “Back button-friendly”, a feature of which Chris Gutteridge was very proud and one which could minimise user confusion and frustration.
Further details on how to configure the workflow and the deposit process were covered in the afternoon’s technical session.
Autocompletion There was much play made of various fields having autocompletion.
The default ones are journal, author and ISSN.
Autocompletion uses JavaScript to monitor what is being typed and queries the relevant EPrints MySQL tables.
This means that as more data is added to the archive, the more useful autocompletion becomes.
In theory, the autocompletion features could be made to query an external database (such as Zetoc or SHERPA/RoMEO), but network connections are likely to be too slow for this to be effective.
One exception might be using LDAP on a local network to validate ‘creators’.
The autocompletion for journals in the demonstration archive was linked to Southampton’s version of the RoMEO database.
Matched journals were displayed along with some RoMEO data and Southampton’s version of the RoMEO colour codes.
Another approach could be to create pre-populated local databases of researchers and staff, journals, etc., from such sources as the institution’s publications database, so that they can then be used for look-up and validation.
In the case of journals, there is an opportunity for external databases to offer a facility for checking titles in bulk and returning appropriate data for storage locally.
This could be done through an API and/or something new such as a Web form where a list of titles could be copy-and pasted for processing.
Such a facility would also have other uses.
The autocompletion feature, for authors’ names in particular, raises an interesting authority issue.
Should the repository use the authority name for an author or his or her name as cited in the published paper or research output?
Perhaps there is scope for a separate author authority field?
Autocompletion can also be combined with conditional workflows to provide a customised self-deposit process.
To select a subject or academic unit, the user is no longer presented with one massive hierarchical list.
Instead, only the top levels in the hierarchy are displayed, which can be expanded/contracted to show the lower/higher levels.
This approach is similar to the way folders can be expanded and contracted in Windows Explorer.
It can also be applied to other EPrints pages where little-used fields can be collapsed out of the way until needed.
What is more, these views can be made conditional.
So, for instance, for a depositor from the History Department, the history subject classes could be automatically expanded to their full depth while keeping the other subjects in a collapsed state.
Poor usability is one of the barriers that deters authors from self-archiving their publications.
The suite of new deposit, workflow and autocompletion features in EPrints 3 have gone a long way in making the deposit process much more user-friendly and intuitive.
It will be interesting to see over the next year if repository administrators can exploit these new features to encourage more self-deposit into their repositories.
There still remains the significant barrier of having to create PDF or XML versions of articles, but this is outside the remit of EPrints 3.
A plug-in anyone?
Requests for Features The morning session also provided an opportunity to ask questions and to make suggestions for future developments and enhancements.
These included the addition of a third choice, “unknown” for the refereed field, an option for RefWorks as a format for export and a script for the global updating of authors in the name authority file.
EP3 will also collect and store statistics (including Apache logs) and the team plans to introduce ways to provide access and views to these statistics in future releases.
Although it will not be possible to view statistics via EP3 in the initial release, the software will start collecting data from the moment it is installed and up and running.
The EPrints team will also be looking at COUNTER [6].
It is anticipated that these additional statistics service will be available in 1st Quarter of 2007.
We also raised the idea of an e-mail alert when an embargo is about to be lifted, particularly for theses which would provide a warning that a thesis is soon to be released and should be reviewed.
However, there are situations where we would not want to have embargoes automatically lifted, but would want an alert about them.
What Would a Librarian/Administrator Want to Be Able to Do?
Jessie Hey, University of Southampton Jessie Hey provided a more high-level EP3 view looking at the activities which a Librarian/Administrator would like to do and which could be made easier.
Jessie set the scene for this short session using her experiences at Southampton.
There was some further workflow discussion and also the suggestion for de-duplicating and checking.
This will not be in the final release of EP3 but the software team recognised it as an important feature.
Workflows configuration was also discussed, in particular, how complex or easy it was to set up based on different scenarios.
A full list of the various requests [7] and an opportunity to submit additional ones is available via the EPrints Web site.
EP3 Technical Overview The afternoon session was a technical overview of EP3 by Tim Miles-Board and included installation and upgrades; configuring the deposit process, and working with plug-ins, as well as details on the XML format and the improved indexer.
This session, like the morning’s was interactive and Chris Gutteridge, although not leading it, was in the audience responding to a wide range of queries.
Installation and Upgrades On the face of it, EP3 continues the reputation of its predecessors in being easy to install, with an administration tool called epadmin and a wiki that walks you through the process step by step ideal for new repositories.
The EP3 team did note though that this is a very significant upgrade and migration from EP2 to EP3 should not be attempted as a straight upgrade.
Instead they suggest that EP3 is installed on same server as your current EPrints service but in a different place.
There is a migration tool which when run will copy all of the data, fields and metadata into EP3.
This though is likely to be just the start of the upgrade process, especially if there has been a lot of customisation.
We concur that things will not be simple if a repository is being upgraded from an earlier version.
Upgrades and post-installation modifications may be difficult due to the apparent lack of maintenance utilities and poor advice on customisation.
We have worries that the answer to many of the customisation-related questions from the audience was “just delete it from the config/xml file”.
We would advise that for maintainability, settings should be commented out, not deleted.
Commenting out means that the setting can be reinstated at a later date simply by un-commenting it.
Otherwise (as we have found to our cost), the person doing the modifications may have no clue as to what needs re-inserting, where, and in what format.
More generally, we got the feeling that there was too much reliance on manual editing of configuration files.
No doubt some manual editing may be required, but this should be the exception.
Many things could be implemented using an installation and configuration tool if one existed with radio buttons, check boxes, drop-down pick lists and the like for selecting settings such as the repository’s language, permitted document types, etc.
The EP3 final release is now available and can be downloaded from http://files.eprints.org.
The EP3 team recommends Red Hat Linux as the Unix platform but EP3, like its predecessors, will run on various flavours of Unix.
It will also continue to require the core software of Apache 2.0, mod_perl, perl, mySQL.
The EP3 team also suggested the key activities which should be done once EP3 is up and running.
Although these should be done already, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to repeat their importance: keep the operating system patched and updated, keep EPrints and its plug-ins up to date and make backups.
The backups issue was one about which Chris Gutteridge felt particularly passionate, and he advocated not only the need for backups but also regular checks to ensure that they will restore the system.
The remainder of the technical session focused on a number of new features and gave a broad brush insight into how they could be implemented.
The deposit process can now be configured to provide different workflows but these should still feel familiar to users.
These can be defined using XML and defined into stages.
It is now much easier to group related fields together e.g.
publication data such as ISSN, journal title, publisher; the file upload option can now be done at any stage and EP3 will recognise the file type.
Fields or groups can be collapsed for a more streamlined look (this uses JavaScript).
Text can also be inserted into the workflow to provide further help, guidance and explanation.
For Systems Administrators, EP3 will now provide an alert if the indexing has stopped rather than relying on administrators to keep an eye on it, or worse, to be alerted by a user.
There will continue to be a range of support and help options available for EP3.
EP3 installation information is available on the ePrints wiki.
Wiki.eprints.org Technical mailing list www.eprints.org/software EPrints Service who will do everything for you, at a price This support and the documentation available will continue to develop through each subsequent release of the software.
Extending EP3 functionality with Plug-ins The technical overview also provided more details on the use of plug-ins to extend EP3’s functionality.
Plug-ins can be used for: Import and export: getting data in and out of the repository Interface screens: adding new tools and reports Input components: adding new ways for users to enter data One of the key design goals for the EP3 team was that plug-ins should be easy to write and will require minimal coding.
A couple of slides then followed, looking at the coding for a range of plug-ins: import and export; screen and input component e.g.
draw a molecule in an applet.
Import plug-ins can be harder to write but there are many existing libraries for plug-ins available.
The latest updates and plug-ins will be available from the EPrints Web site and these will also include subject trees, translations and themes.
Conclusions All in all, EP3 looks like a significant improvement over the earlier versions and a significant milestone in the journey towards the ideal repository software.
EP3 addresses real issues for repository managers such as controlling quality, encouraging the take-up of self-deposit and embedding the repository in the broader institutional context.
The deposit process in particular has been made more usable and user-friendly, thus removing one of the deterrents to self-deposition.
The search and browse facilities are fundamentally much the same as before, which some may find disappointing.
It remains to be seen which of the new features are really useful and which are just icing on the cake.
While installation appears to be a straightforward process, we have concerns about how easy it will be to migrate from heavily customised earlier versions but we understand that a migration tool is being developed.
There are concerns about how easy it will be to make post-installation modifications, should they be required, due to the reliance on manual editing of configuration files.
EPrints.org could significantly improve matters by developing a suitable configuration tool for administrators.
EP3 looks like a feature-rich upgrade which builds on the success of the platform to date.
While there are concerns about the upgrade issues, the new features and the shift in architecture render the time required to upgrade worthwhile.
EP3.1 is scheduled for release around Easter 2007 and once the initial upgrade to 3.x has been done, we would anticipate that subsequent 3.x upgrades should prove more straightforward.
References EPrints v3 Briefing http://www.eprints.org/software/v3briefing.php Open Repositories Conference, San Antonio, Texas, USA http://openrepositories.org/ EPrints v3 Demonstration site http://demoprints3.eprints.org/ EPrints filestore http://files.eprints.org/ Introducing EPrints 3 http://www.eprints.org/software/v3/ COUNTER http://www.projectcounter.org/ EP3 Requirements http://www.eprints.org/software/v3/v3requirements.php Author Details Peter Millington SHERPA Technical Development Officer University of Nottingham Email: peter.millington@nottingham.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ William J. Nixon Digital Library Development Manager University of Glasgow Email: w.j.nixon@lib.gla.ac.uk Web site: http://www.gla.ac.uk/enlighten/ Return to top Article Title: “EPrints 3 Pre-Launch Briefing” Author: Peter Millington and William J. Nixon Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/eprints-v3-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Would All New Search Engines Take One Step Forward!
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Would All New Search Engines Take One Step Forward!
Buzz database copyright url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley gives us an overview of emerging, new and newly discovered search engines that we might want to keep an eye on as they develop.
There have been several additions to the world of search engines over the summer, and I thought I’d do a quick round-up of them to see how they perform.
ZapMeta | Netnose | Wotbox Zapmeta ZapMeta [1] is a multi-/meta-search engine that has been around since 2002, but I must confess that it has only just come to my notice.
The home page is very spartan and reminds me of the way in which Google used to look when it first came out.
There is a search box, an option to search the Web or shopping, links to preferences and advanced searches and that’s just about it.
Preferences Let’s start by taking a look at the preferences to see what we can do with this creature.
You can set a timeout of anything between 1-20 seconds, which is very reasonable many multi-search engines don’t give you that option at all, or you’re limited to a smaller set of options.
Results can be grouped, or they can be displayed this means that results will remove duplicates by grouping pages with the same URL under one match.
The number of results per page can be a number of options from 8 to All, which is nicely flexible.
Results can be sorted by relevance, which you’d expect, but also by title and source, and either in ascending or descending order.
I like this it’s rather unusual, I can see ways in which this could allow a searcher to jump much more quickly to particular pages or sites.
Keywords can be highlighted or not; quite why someone wouldn’t want keywords highlighted is a bit of a mystery to me, but if you’re one of those folk, it’s an option for you.
Pages can be opened in the same, or a new window; a useful feature, but nothing startling.
You can choose to display description, sources, URL and page preview.
This again is a nice feature, giving you more flexibility than you’ll find with many other engines.
Finally we have a choice of nine search engines ZapMeta will use to search from.
Oddly enough, not all of these are checked.
Of the nine AltaVista, Open Directory and GigaBlast are unchecked while Yahoo, AlltheWeb, Wisenut, AOL MSN and HotBot are.
I do find this a little strange since the strength of a multi-/meta-search engine is surely to search as broadly as possible as a default, with an option of narrowing down to specific engines afterwards?
Of course, you can easily set the default to search all the available choices, but I suspect that a lot of people won’t think of doing this at once.
The other major point to make here is that Google is obviously missing from the list, but since AOL is included (and is powered by Google) it’s not quite the omission that one might at first assume.
One slight annoyance is that once you’ve set your preferences it’s not immediately clear how you can get back to the search screen, (by clicking on the ZapMeta logo), which may cause a degree of confusion or frustration.
Advanced Search Function The Advanced Web Search functions are not terribly exciting, and they’re what you’d expect to find.
We have the usual boxes for ‘Must contain the words’, ‘Match the exact phrase’ and ‘Exclude the words’ with the options of ‘Anywhere’ ‘In the title’ ‘In the URL’ which are fine a couple of years ago this would have been worth particular mention, but this is fairly pedestrian now.
There’s a Domain filter, with options to limit by any one of 8 regions (it’s a shame there isn’t an option to choose a couple of regions though), by Domain (.com, co.uk, org and so on) or by Host, (phib.com or dell.com).
Nice, but nothing fancy.
The next option allows users to sort by relevance, URL, Popularity, Title and Source.
This is an interesting option, and one that I’ll come back to later when I’m talking about the results that we get from the search engine.
The final options are again uninspiring results per page, display options, timeout and sources used.
So, nothing special it would have been nice to have seen search criteria based on media, news, images and so on.
Searching Moving onto the search function, I did a search on ‘Everton’ and got several sponsored listings before the ‘proper’ results.
These listings weren’t really appropriate at all, though to the right was a small box of ‘related searches’ which did include ‘Everton football’ and ‘Everton fc’, so I’ll give it marks for getting that right or rather, picking up those options from AlltheWeb.
I had the main body of results ranked by order of relevance, and ZapMeta used the standard approach of ranking by number of search engines and position in the top ten.
A nice function is the ‘Quick View’ of the page, which an increasing number of search engines are offering, providing you with an opportunity to view the page without having to actually visit it.
The last section of the page offered me some Related categories, which mainly seemed to have been culled from Dmoz.
Results I re-ranked the search results by clicking on the ‘Popularity’ option, and ZapMeta managed this very quickly, re-ranking the results to give me the official club Web site as top of the listing.
Quite what it based that on I don’t know a failing of the site is that it’s not actually that forthcoming about such things, but as long as it works, I suppose that’s the main thing.
Re-ranking by title was less useful, since I then had 1UpTravel.com as first in the list, which is logical, but of little interest to me.
The Source option again put the official site back at the top of the listing, while the Domain option once again gave me 1UpTravel.
Several other searches confirmed what I was already thinking and by no means alone relevance and popularity are probably the most useful options, followed by title.
However, it’s a refreshing change to be given the option!
Another useful option was ‘search within these results’ which, (although I seldom use it myself), was good to have available.
The layout of the results page was quite clear, although I did have one minor gripe, related to moving to the next page of results.
The options given are: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 next > next 10 Clicking on ‘next 10’ did not take me to results 20-29, but to 101-110.
Clearly, the ‘next 10’ option refers to pages 11 12 13 and so on.
Logical when you think about it, but until you do, I can guarantee a quick double-take when you look at the results!
I also ran some comparative searches with one of the other multi search engines that I use a lot ez2www [2].
On all eight searches ZapMeta performed better than ez2www, and although it’s obviously a subjective viewpoint, the results that I was getting seemed rather better.
Theoretically all the results should have been the same, since the same engines were being used for the same amount of time.
It’s possible that there were problems with timeouts, since I did all the ez2www searches first, and then all the Zapmeta searches next, but for all the results to come out in favour of one search engine does tend to imply that it is doing its job rather better.
I would however encourage anyone to run some searches themselves it’s more than possible that you’ll get a totally different set of results.
Conclusion My conclusion is fairly short and to the point ZapMeta has just taken over as my favourite multi-/meta-search engine.
I’m happy with the features, the display and the results that I’m getting.
I like the options for re-ranking and it just seems to be that bit sharper than the other engines that I use in this category.
That of course doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to use them far from it but I think they’re going to have to do some upgrading pretty quickly in order to compete.
Netnose The first thing to be aware of with the Netnose search engine [3] is that it’s offering users the opportunity of ranking or rating sites.
I’m not particularly convinced that this option works terribly well, and even after having long discussions with their staff I’m still questioning this.
However, let’s look at it as a search engine first, and deal with the ranking element later.
Searching Netnose uses a non-tandard syntax; there isn’t an option to search for a phrase; to search for two or more terms it’s necessary to use and: term1 term2 .
A phrase search for Phil Bradley is therefore and: Phil Bradley (which of course isn’t a ‘real’ phrase search since both terms could be found at different places on the page).
The options to include or exclude are however the same a plus/minus sign.
There is an interesting option which has not yet been fully implemented (and in fairness I should say that Netnose is only in Beta testing at the moment).
This allows searchers to limit to particular types of site, such as commercial or adult.
Consequently, to search just shopping sites the syntax would be buy: car stereo Seven more categories are planned for the future, including Kid safe, Research and Entertainment.
Netnose appears to work with a fairly small database searching on ‘internet’ only returned 26,000 references in comparison to over 188,000,000 that AlltheWeb returned.
Results The displayed results allow the user to interact however, which is the interesting aspect of this search engine it’s possible to vote for a category to place a particular site into, or to indicate to Netnose that the site failed to load or doesn’t belong in the category assigned to it.
Unfortunately this last option doesn’t have an ‘Are you sure?’ option, so my apologies to the site that I maligned when I was trying it out!
Of course in order to do this properly it’s going to be necessary to visit the site first and probably spend some time there in order to do the site justice.
Netnose are of the opinion that their users will do this, but perhaps I’m just being cynical, but I really don’t see it happening myself.
Conclusion Netnose is worth looking at if for no other reason than they’re trying something new.
As well as the option of voting for sites that are returned from your search, there is also an option ‘Rate the Web’.
People who volunteer to take part are given a random Web page and some words to describe that page.
They then match the terms to the content from ‘Wrong’ to ‘Best’.
That is of course a very simplistic overview, and Netnose does explain it in greater detail on their site [4].
Netnose isn’t a search engine that I’ll be using myself, (not yet at least), but it is one that’s going to be worth keeping an eye on in the future.
Wotbox According to their Web site, Wotbox [5] has been in development for almost a year, and it’s still in alpha testing, so it only has a database of some six million pages, though they hope to reach 100 million pages by the end of the year.
Although it’s still only in test, it has a reasonable array of functions in fact, more than some engines of longer standing.
All the usual search options are there phrase, all words, any words, exclude, a country filter and option to search a specific site (although these last two use a non-standard syntax which may cause confusion).
Interestingly, however, Wotbox also allows the use of the wildcard to replace either a single character or multiple characters, and it’s refreshing to see a new engine embracing these options at the outset.
Another function offered by Wotbox is ‘related searches’ which appear with most sets of search results.
Unsurprisingly these are links to searches that are related to the one that has just been completed.
Wotbox is another search engine that I won’t be making any great use of myself at the moment, though again, that’s not a criticism, just based on practicality.
I will however be keeping an eye on its development over the coming months to see how it gets on.
In case readers are confused, until recently Wotbox was called Wotbot, but the owners came under pressure from Lycos and Hotbot to change the name, which they did in mid-September 2003.
Stop Press!
: Almost as this column goes live I’ve been informed of another new search engine this is called Mooter [6] and it’s a little bit like Kartoo [7], in that it’s a graphical search engine.
I’ve not had a chance to play with it yet, but if you have five minutes to spare, take a quick look!
References zapmeta http://www.zapmeta.com ez2find http://ez2www.com NetNose http://www.netnose.com Netnose Search Technology http://www.netnose.com/nnst.htm Wotbox http://www.wotbot.com Mooter http://mooter.com:8080/moot Kartoo http://www.kartoo.com Author Details Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens Feltham Middlesex Email: philb@philb.com Website: http://www.philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independent Internet Consultant.
Return to top Article Title: “Would All New Search Engines Take One Step Forward!” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Users Want: An Academic 'Hybrid' Library Perspective Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Users Want: An Academic 'Hybrid' Library Perspective Buzz data software framework archives digitisation repositories copyright preservation cataloguing intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Reg Carr reflects on the development of a user-centred approach in academic libraries over recent decades and into the era of the hybrid library.
User-focus in the Academic Library It may seem odd to say it but, even in a self-respecting part of the information world like the academic library, users have not always been at the centre of the practitioner’s professional attention.
Over thirty years ago, the writer heard a long-serving Head of Reader Services (in a major university library that will remain nameless) announce, after the redecoration of his library’s main catalogue hall had completely obliterated the library’s original hand-painted directional signs, that ‘if our students are bright enough, they should still be able to find their way around the place’!
It would be good to be able to affirm that this incident was an untypical one-off.
But, at the risk of shocking my younger academic library colleagues, I can only say that in the earlier part of my 36-year career spent in six different UK university libraries it was by no means uncommon to come across this kind of cynical indifference to readers.
In fact in this country at least it was not generally until the 1980s that the ‘customer-oriented’ ethos of the service industries really made serious inroads into the reader service departments of the older and larger university libraries.
Until then, the emphasis in those more ‘traditional’ libraries tended to be placed more overtly on collections (rather than on services to users), on administrative procedures (rather than on ease of use), and on rules and regulations (rather than on what users wanted).
Thankfully, the world has now changed for the better in this respect; but ‘old habits die hard’, and even now there are still a few library staff here and there who prefer, mistakenly, to think that their libraries exist primarily to provide them with employment, rather than first and foremost to serve their users.
The Principal Drivers of Change Two factors above all, perhaps, have combined during the last few decades to bring users’ needs more explicitly into the limelight in academic libraries: the forces of competition (allied with the customer-centred practices of the commercial world), and the advent of information in electronic form (along with the rapid consequential changes in the information-seeking habits and expectations of students and scholars generally).
In retrospect, it was probably the ‘Thatcher years’ of the 1980s that saw the real emergence of information as a commercial commodity.
The ‘monetisation’ of information certainly gathered strength during those years from the large-scale investments in commercial publishing which have since given rise to the ‘big-business’ enterprises which are such a significant part of the landscape in which libraries operate today.
The earlier, more leisurely days, in which an academic library could blithely assume that its users had ‘nowhere else to go’ for the information they needed, gradually became a distant memory; and the cosy assumptions, that ‘librarians knew best’ and that users would supinely continue to accept the services they had always been given, were no longer valid (if they ever had been).
Under pressure of tightening budgets, too, the parent institutions of the UK’s academic libraries were expecting more-for-less from their central services; and competition between institutions within the academic world itself began a perceptible drive towards a more service-oriented approach, in which the notions of choice and convenience, of service quality and performance measurement, and of accountability, became key factors in shaping information provision in libraries throughout the academic sector.
All at once, it seemed, ‘the customer was king’.
Formal research into ‘user studies’ became fashionable [1].
Library user surveys became more frequent, more comprehensive, and more integral to library service planning [2].
Statistics of library use began to be gathered more systematically and evaluated more meaningfully [3].
Internal and external library reviews became the order of the day, with major emphasis being placed on user satisfaction as an explicit objective of library development.
Library staff at all levels began to be sent on ‘customer service’ training courses [4].
And even the more traditional back-room library operations came to be more overtly recognised as an essential part of the library’s ‘front-line’ services to readers.
The largely unquestioned ‘Users get what we give them’ attitude was being transformed into the ‘What do users want?’ approach.
The Computerisation of Information The emergence of information resources in electronic form in the late 1980s and, especially, the advent and pervasive dominance of the Internet in the 1990s served further to accelerate this new and welcome emphasis on giving prominence to the wants of library users, since students and academics generally were beginning to adopt very different forms of information-seeking behaviour.
While some, at least, saw the development of global electronic access to information as a threat to the very future of the physical library, others rightly saw it as an opportunity to rethink, and to refashion, their library’s services according to what their users needed in what had become, for the first time, a fast-changing information environment.
An online catalogue became a sine qua non for most academic libraries: the old manual catalogue was passé, and remained acceptable only to a dying breed of older users whose research habits had been formed in an earlier age.
A wide range of networked electronic resources; a comprehensive local intranet; document delivery to the reader’s desktop; the ‘portalisation’ of Web-based resources; the population of institutional Virtual Learning Environments with information tailored to the needs of students and teachers; and even the digitisation of materials already held locally all of these developments began to come on stream during the closing decades of the millennium as libraries strove to keep their users happy in a world where the commercial search engines were becoming the almost universal choices of first resort.
A new cadre of academic librarians, too, were showing themselves a whole lot more agile at keeping pace with the ‘Google generation’.
Staying in touch with ‘what users want’ had become both a matter of ‘survival’ and a question of professional expertise and self-respect.
The Role of the JISC Academic librarians in the UK can regard themselves as singularly fortunate that, for the past decade and more, they have had the Joint Information Systems Committee (the JISC) working hard at national level to help them transform their services in user-oriented ways in the digital age [5].
Without the cutting-edge experimentation and service-oriented technological developments funded nationally by the JISC since the early 1990s, it is certain that the UK’s academic libraries would have lost much of the relevance that they have managed to retain for so many of their users.
JISC’s internationally-envied ‘flagship’ Electronic Libraries programme (eLib); the national data centres at Manchester and Edinburgh; the Electronic Site Libraries Initiative (NESLI); the huge investment in the Distributed National Electronic Resource (the DNER more recently known as the Integrated Information Environment); the intensive project work on VLEs, on digital preservation, and on institutional repositories; the Resource Discovery Network (the RDN); and the high-quality provision of the JANET network, with the largely invisible hardware, middleware and software that makes the network function so reliably and well all of these things, and many more, have been developed by the JISC and have given the UK’s academic libraries the strategic advantage without which it is inevitable that they would have lacked the resources and expertise to provide adequately for their users’ rapidly changing needs.
But What Do Users Really Need?
There has almost certainly never been a time in the history of academic libraries when more attention has been paid to the needs of users.
Web-based questionnaires; library performance reviews and service quality assessments; continuous feedback loops; the ubiquitous focus groups; summative and formative evaluation of services; and statutory institutional consultative mechanisms all these are now an integral part of academic library management; and, combined with the availability of many surveys of researchers’ needs and behaviours [6], and the publication of regular ‘environmental scans’ [7], they have served to put users’ needs and information-seeking trends at the very forefront of academic library service planning.
But if our libraries are better placed than ever before to identify what users want, this does not necessarily mean that what users currently get is acceptably close enough to what they really need.
The theory may yet be streets away from the actual practice.
And it seems, to me at least, that our academic libraries still have quite some way to go to catch up with what their users want.
This is especially true, I believe, in what might be called the present ‘twilight zone’ of the hybrid library, where the almost endless possibilities of the digital communications era are still bumping up uncomfortably against some of the big ‘legacy’ issues of the era of print-on-paper.
While the JISC undoubtedly stimulated much helpful thinking, and practice-oriented research, into the hybrid library during the 1990s [8], the clear emphasis of the projects funded under the JISC initiative was, perhaps inevitably, on the electronic aspects of the balancing act between digital and paper-based information provision [9].
And this important eLib strand still left the older and larger academic libraries with unanswered questions about the future management, exploitation and use of their important and extensive non-electronic holdings.
For, if large-scale digitisation appears obvious as the ultimate way forward for the integration of such materials into a seamless electronic ‘search and retrieval’ service through a single institutional point of access and delivery, the fact remains that even the most well-resourced academic libraries cannot possibly afford such a ‘solution’ within any reasonably foreseeable time-frame.
And, although the newly-established Research Information Network (RIN) has set itself the laudably ambitious task of addressing the biggest of these legacy issues over time [10], we are still very far from having either the national policies or the national funds that would be required to convert to digital form the countless millions of non-electronic library items which form so much of the ‘stuff’ of study and research, and especially in the Arts and Humanities.
The conversion to digital form of vast historic collections of early printed books, extensive journal back-runs, newspapers, ephemera, theses, manuscripts, archives, photographs, microfilms, and cultural artefacts of every possible kind, has barely begun, and the sums already spent from public or private sources have merely scratched the surface of this issue [11].
And, still almost wholly unresolved, are the issues and constraints associated with the commercial restrictions on the copying or networking of in-copyright materials whether printed or born-digital and which, on their own, represent perhaps the single biggest barrier between ‘what users want’ and what libraries are able, legally, to provide.
So What Do Users ‘Really Really Want’?
The Spice Girls may know what they ‘really really want’ (though the lyrics of their hit single Wannabe are in fact somewhat impenetrable!
[12] ); and librarians may sometimes wish that they had Mel Gibson’s preternatural insights into their users’ minds [13].
But in the potentially long-drawn-out ‘mixed economy’ of the hybrid library, it may prove more difficult than we have hitherto suspected to discern and interpret our users’ real wishes, and even more difficult to meet them fully.
And there are several reasons why this may be so, quite apart from the ‘legacy’, resource, and copyright issues that may well constrain us for years to come.
In the first place, there is a real danger that, armed with the data from all our user studies and surveys, we may again simply assume just as in the bad old days that ‘we know best’ (or at least ‘much better than we did before’), and that we will fall back once more on giving our users what we think is best for them.
The attractive force of wide-ranging surveys like OCLC’s environmental scans, for example, runs the risk of making us over-confident, as professional academic library managers, that we now know enough about our users’ wants.
Impressed by such detailed user feedback, and pressured by the competition from the commercial search engines for our users’ loyalty, we may be motivated to put our energies into finding the elusive ‘killer application’ which could put us once more right at the centre of our users’ attention.
There will be few of us, for example, who are not already convinced that our ultimate aim should be to provide seamless, Google-like searching for everything that our libraries hold.
But might not this widespread conviction be just a new orthodoxy, a knee-jerk reaction to the complex challenges of the digital information explosion?
And though we certainly know a great deal about what our users say, do we actually know enough about what they ‘really really’ want?
The Importance of Context But let me be specific.
For many years now, one of the most experienced researchers in library user studies, Professor Tom Wilson, the former Director of the Centre for Research on User Studies at the University of Sheffield, has been warning us that we have so far paid too little attention to the importance of context in trying to understand what users want.
In an important article published six years ago, but based on research carried out over the previous 20 years, Professor Wilson sounds the following notes of warning about the information user in context: “Paradoxically, user studies has been concerned with almost everything apart from the use to which information is put by the… information seeker.” And he continues: “The reason for this seems to be a desire to draw policy conclusions… from data on aggregated behaviour rather than a desire to understand the user”.
And he concludes: “The ‘user’ may be found in many… contexts; and ‘user studies’ need to distinguish among these contexts… Any partial view demands rigorous definition of which context applies” [14].
So how much attention, in all of our planning to meet users’ needs, do we give to this all-important issue of context?
And how much do we really know about the uses to which our users put the information that we provide, or would like to provide, for them?
Do we really yet understand our users’ wants in such sophisticated terms?
Professor Wilson clearly thinks not; but do we have the professional humility to recognise this?
What it all boils down to, of course, in simple terms, is that ‘users’ are not a conveniently homogeneous group; and even the term ‘academic library users’ does not represent a single category.
Undergraduates, taught postgraduates, full-time researchers, teachers, external users from all walks of life and from many professions (including the general public, too) all these are comprehended in the phrase; and they all have different ‘wants’ and needs.
And those needs may vary at different times; subject disciplines will complicate the picture even further; and library use will be affected in various complex ways by the ‘hybridness’ of the local library.
It behoves us, therefore, not to assume too much, and to be constantly on the lookout for deeper and more sensitive insights into our users’ contextual ‘wants’, and into the myriad ways they need access to information and make use of it.
We must be prepared also to be surprised by such deeper insights, even if they run counter to what we think we already know.
Not many years ago, for example, the writer was involved as an external consultant, in two very different academic libraries, with reviews which revealed a number of mutually exclusive expressions of users’ wants within both institutions.
In both cases, the library authorities and managers were looking for empirical evidence to justify the expansion of networked electronic information.
Yet both reviews using the same in-depth consultations with representative user groups uncovered some diametrically opposing ‘messages’.
‘Longer opening hours, please’ versus ‘Just get it all out on the Web’; ‘More multiple loan copies urgently required’ versus ‘We need more research monographs on the shelves’; ‘More print subscriptions, please’ versus ‘Cancel all the hard copy titles’; ‘More librarians to consult’ versus ‘Spend less on staff and more on stuff’ these were among the contextual ‘surprises’, some of which the library authorities did not really want to hear.
But they all point up one thing: the ‘twilight world’ of the academic hybrid library requires us to be much more locally sensitive to users’ needs in all their complexity than we might have thought.
What to Do, Then?
If therefore, in the light of all this complexity, and in the context of the ‘hybrid’ state of our libraries, our understanding of what users really want is still in need of greater sophistication and sensitivity, how can today’s listening librarians make any meaningful progress towards a service which is better able to benefit those for whom it should be planned and managed?
The following interim and pragmatic conclusions may be helpful.
It is more than ever necessary to understand what library users say they want; and the research which that entails should be an integral part of a professional approach to library service planning.
It is essential to distinguish between the different expressions of ‘want’, and to examine the contextual reasons for the differences.
Every effort should be made to meet the expressed wants of users (even where these are in conflict), and to take an open-minded, and even-handed, approach to the allocation of scarce resources.
Longer-term service planning, allied where possible to the nimble exploitation of new funding opportunities, should be used creatively to follow a development path for the library service which will ultimately ensure its continuing relevance for users, as the technology becomes ‘smarter’, and as the present tensions inherent in the hybrid library are progressively resolved over time.
The ultimate warning note, however, is contained in a recent North American article which picks up many of the issues addressed here and which identifies many of the ‘disconnects’ between the services our academic libraries currently provide and the wants of the so-called ‘Net Generation’ now coming into early adulthood: ‘Finding the right way to achieve balance between traditional values and the expectations and habits of the wired generations will determine whether libraries remain relevant in the social, educational and personal contexts of the Information Age’ [15].
In the final analysis, it is possible that ‘What users want’ may always remain something of a mirage (or at least a moving target).
But one thing is certain: failure to take it properly into account would be sure to leave the academic library high and dry in the desert of lost opportunities.
References From 1975 to 1985, the British Library Research and Development Department, for many years a reliable barometer of the fashionable trends in the library world, invested substantially in the University of Sheffield’s Centre for Research on User Studies (CRUS).
On the development of user studies in the UK see: Rania Siatri, “The Evolution of User Studies”, Libri, 1999, pp.132-41.
Hence the UK’s readiness, in more recent years, to take up the tried and tested North American LibQUAL+ library service assessment software package.
http://www.libqual.org/ The University of Loughborough’s Library and Information Statistics Unit has never been short of work since its establishment in 1987, and has carved out for itself a valuable place on the UK library scene with its authoritative time-series of annual statistical reports.
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dils/lisu/index.html More recently, too, there has been a discernible trend, in library-related training courses, towards the ‘marketing’ of library services.
The JISC Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk extensive though it is barely does justice to the key role played by the JISC in the development of the UK’s academic library services to users.
Such work included, for example, some of the studies undertaken or commissioned during the mid-1990s by the Research Support Libraries Programme http://www.rslp.ac.uk and the British Library/HE Task Force http://www.bl.uk/about/cooperation/pdf/blhe-overview.pdf.
Education for Change Ltd. also undertook a major survey of users for the Research Support Libraries Group in 2002 http://www.rslg.ac.uk/research/libuse/.
Since the late 1990s, the JISC itself has invested heavily in its Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, which includes a longitudinal survey of the use (and non-use) of electronic information services in UK Higher Education http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_jmef.
The UK, however, has nothing quite like the Pew Internet Project http://www.pewinternet.org whose surveys and reports are of particular value in monitoring user behaviour.
For example: The OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition http://www.oclc.org/reports/2003escan.htm, and Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm The ‘Hybrid Library’ concept was developed for a number of years under the third ‘strand’ of JISC’s eLib programme.
Chris Rusbridge, “Towards the Hybrid Library”, D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1998 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/rusbridge/07rusbridge.html Reg Carr, “Towards the hybrid library: the national perspective in the UK”.
Presentation to the MALIBU Conference, King’s College London, 26 March 2001 http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/librarian/malibu2001/malibu2001.htm The first Strategic Plan of the Research Information Network is available at http://www.rin.ac.uk It would cost billions of pounds to digitise the entire contents of just a few of the major academic libraries in the UK.
The cost of digitising the Bodleian Library’s 19th-century printed books alone has been estimated at over £15 million.
These figures stand in stark contrast to the £10 million that the JISC was able to spend on digitisation during 2003-5 from funds obtained under the 2002 Comprehensive Spending Review.
The second verse of the Spice Girls’ major hit single Wannabe (released in 1996) does, however, contain the following potentially significant hint for us in our search to provide user-satisfaction: “If you want my future forget my past,/ If you wanna get with me better make it fast,/ Now don’t go wasting my precious time,/ Get your act together we could be just fine.” The comedy hit movie What Women Want (released in 2000) starred Mel Gibson as a chauvinistic executive who wakes up after an accident to find that he can actually hear what all the women around him are thinking.
T.D.
Wilson, “Recent trends in user studies: action research and qualitative methods”, Information Research, 5(3) http://informationr.net/ir/5-3/paper76.html Charles F. Thomas and Robert H. McDonald, “Millennial Net Value(s): Disconnects between Libraries and the Information Mindset” http://dscholarship.lib.fsu.edu/general/4 Author Details Reg Carr Director of University Library Services & Bodley’s Librarian University of Oxford Email: reg.carr@ouls.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/librarian/ Return to top Article Title: “What Users Want: An Academic ‘Hybrid’ Library Perspective” Author: Reg Carr Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/carr/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Trust in Global Virtual Teams Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Trust in Global Virtual Teams Buzz data videoconferencing research Citation BibTex RIS Niki Panteli identifies ways of developing trust within global virtual teams.
During the last few years there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the importance of trust in business interactions within the management and organisational literatures [1][2].
Trust enables cooperation and becomes the means for complexity reduction even in situations where individuals must act with uncertainty because they are in possession of ambiguous and incomplete information.
It is not therefore surprising that in the current age of global and digital economy and virtuality [3] there has been an enormous interest in trust.
Handy for example, has put the point quite succinctly: 'Virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology on its own is not enough' [4].
As Lipnack and Stamps also put it, 'in the networks and virtual teams of the Information Age, trust is a 'need to have' quality in productive relationships' [5], while according to Platt [6], trust is essential to any virtual team as these teams do not have everyday interaction, and the possibility of losing trust is much higher.
Despite the overwhelming interest, our understanding of trust in this area has remained limited.
To date, there has been no systematic examination of the computer-mediated interactions that take place within a virtual team situation.
Reliance on mediated interactions and especially those that are text-based and asynchronous such as email has been seen to inhibit the development of good working and collaborative relationships [7]; such views often derive from the media richness theory which suggests that face-to-face is a richer information medium [8].
My argument, however, is that even though the value of face-to-face communication in creating and promoting a rich information context needs to be highly appreciated, we also have to acknowledge that significant interactions remain computer-mediated and provide extensive opportunities for the development of trust .
Conceptual Foundations Trust is a state of a positive, confident though subjective [9] expectation regarding the behaviour of somebody or something in a situation which entails risk to the trusting party.
It is a dynamic and emergent social relationship that develops as participants interact with each other over time and depending on the situation.
While trust has been identified as a key feature for the success of virtual interactions, empirical research in this area has remained limited.
Jarvenpaa and Leidner [10] have conducted one of the most detailed research projects into studies on trust and virtual teams thus far.
Their eight-week study of seventy-five teams of university students each consisting of four to six members, highlighted significant differences in the behaviours and strategies between highand low-trust teams and supported the existence of swift trust; this type of trust presumes that roles are clear and that each member has a good understanding of others' roles and responsibilities [11].
While the study by Jarvenpaa and Leidner [10] provides useful insights in this area of research, it does have some limitations when attempting to apply its findings in a business context; tasks and projects may not be as well-articulated in this context, and external factors (e.g.
clients' specifications) may require changes in the direction of an already assigned project.
Panteli and Duncan [12], in a study of a virtual team project, managed by a virtual organisation and involving a group of geographically dispersed contractual employees, finds that the content, both formal and informal, of communication, as well as its frequency helps in building and maintaining an interactive social situation and can act as the frame for reference for constructing the trust relationship.
Accordingly, within a business environment where conflict and power differentials prevail, building trust is not always a swift process.
This argument is further supported by the findings of an empirical study that is presented in the following section.
Linking Trust to Shared Goals and Power Issues: An Empirical Study Tucker and Panteli [13] pursued a study of eighteen global virtual teams within a global IT organisation.
The study involved interviews with individuals who are employed at the specific organisation and who were part of culturally diverse, geographically dispersed and technology-enabled global virtual teams.
Furthermore, the interviewees had worked within a global virtual team for more than 2 months thus allowing some exploration of the changes within the team over time.
Table 1 below details the common features and behaviours observed within the global virtual teams studied in Tucker and Panteli [14].
The teams were categorised as High-Trust teams and Low-Trust teams and are distinguished in terms of the degree of shared goals that they experience, as well as issues of power and communication.
Tables 1 and 2: Differences between High-Trust and Low-Trust Global Virtual Teams: Table 1: High-Trust Global Virtual Teams Table 2: Low-Trust Global Virtual Teams     Factors related to Shared Goals: Factors related to Shared Goals: Awareness of shared goals Lack of awareness of shared goals Time given to build shared goals Lack of shared goals Early and open debate of goals Opinions of others not considered Primacy of team-based goals Primacy of individual goals     Factors related to Power: Factors related to Power: Availability of facilitators Power battles Facilitators' focus on win-win Coercion Recognition of knowledge as power Misunderstandings and conflicts of interest Recognition that power moves; power in many places Use of hierarchical power Power differentials minimised Perception of 'I have power'     Communication: Communication: Face-to-Face where possible Asynchronous CMC Regular synchronous CMC (computer-mediated communication) Adverse effects of time difference Social interaction Little or no social interest Power, defined as the capability of one party to exert an influence on another to act in a prescribed manner, is often a function of both dependence and the use of that dependence as leverage [15].
Indeed, power is an important contextual factor that affects trust [16] in that it suggests the existence of a unilateral dependency or an unbalanced relationship [17].
In considering power within virtual teams there is an increasing recognition in the literature that knowledge is indeed power and that teams are often formed to create knowledge through combination and exchange.
Within these teams, the team member with power at any given time is the one with the most relevant knowledge at that time.
The study found that in high-trust teams, power differentials do not disappear; rather, power shifts from one member to another throughout the life cycle of a project depending on the stage and requirement of each stage.
Several interviewees described the power within their team as originating from knowledge and noted that at any given point in time the most powerful was the individual with the most relevant information.
In these situations coercive power was rarely used, and significant emphasis was placed upon collaboration and the use of persuasive power: "Power tended to move based on whatever activities were going on at that time.
I guess it followed those that were most knowledgeable at any point in time.
This is not surprising as the reason we selected the external design company was because of their knowledge."
Shared goals are and should be a key characteristic of virtual teams.
They could provide a means to developing a common sense of identity for team members which can be of particular benefit to those global virtual teams which meet infrequently or perhaps not at all.
These benefits include the establishment of a foundation upon which to build trust and minimise the use of coercive power in pursuit of a collaborative and productive relationship.
However, the study finds that even though shared goals are important for the success of virtual teams, these should not be taken for granted.
Indeed, goals may not be shared either because they do not exist at all, or team members have not become aware of them, or conversely have their own priorities or share different interpretations of the team's role.
Furthermore, this study has also shown that the construction of shared goals is often by no means a one-off activity, but rather a process that requires the participation of all parties involved.
Though this could be a time-consuming, iterative and difficult process, these findings allow us to argue that it is far better to invest in it (and as early in the project as possible) than deal with the vicious, destructive downward spiral that result from team members with conflicting goals and poor levels of trust.
As shown in Table 1, shared goals were evident in all of the 'high-trust' teams and, not surprisingly, these teams were also considered to be working well.
Conversely in all of the scenarios where trust was described as low, shared goals were lacking.
In the situations where team members were of the opinion that trust had been broken, the level of emotion was high.
Moreover, facilitators are found to have an enabling role in constructing shared goals and minimising destructive power differentials.
The role of a facilitator is to help in team-building techniques at the early stage of the virtual work project.
Similar to the power examples given earlier, situations were described in which facilitators were attempting both to rebuild and improve trust.
In these examples the use of shared goals features prominently: "We had a very definite vision of how we wanted the relationships to work.
We were keen to engage and excite the other companies.
We gave them an overview of our business and worked hard to try and give them the full picture to create a vision if you like."
"At the very start of the project the project managers from each company got together and put together a comprehensive contract...
It was developed jointly and was very comprehensive.
We went through a lot of iterative discussions to make sure that the document was extremely well thought out."
Further to the issues of shared goals and power, Tucker and Panteli [13] found support for the need for face-to-face interaction.
However, the opportunities to meet face-to-face have been severely limited by economic pressures and more recently terrorist attacks.
Under these circumstances, those virtual teams that work well tend to undertake regular communications via synchronous, 'live' such as the telephone and videoconferencing systems.
Participants confirmed that synchronous media offered more feedback and therefore facilitated understanding more effectively than asynchronous technologies such as voicemail and email.
The use of asynchronous technologies was, however, regularly used for documenting and recording agreements and providing brief, simple updates to work progress.
The teams that worked well also included a social and fun element in their interactions that appeared to help in creating a stronger shared social context.
Overall, the study has found that the process of jointly constructing team goals holds significant value as it may provide the 'glue' to hold team members together long enough to make possible the development of mutual trust.
It has illustrated the significance of shared goals and power in influencing trust development; these factors were not identified in the context of university settings as the tasks are often well-articulated in advance while power differentials, which could influence the degree of inter-dependence among members, are not significant in the case of university students.
Conclusion The issues presented in this article have been receiving a lot of attention from both academics and practitioners.
Context is critical to understanding trust and the fragile sphere of virtual relationships requires a much higher level of trust than do conventional hierarchically controlled settings.
The study presented in this article reinforces arguments in the existing literature on the significance and complexity of trust dynamics in building effective virtual teams.
It goes further than the existing research however to identify and illustrate the significance of shared goals and power in influencing the development of trust.
In particular, it was found that a focus on jointly agreed goals can help to provide limits or boundaries within which trust can be nurtured.
However, the study has also clearly indicated that the construction of shared goals is not often a one-off activity and frequently requires the involvement of all parties involved.
Though this could be a time-consuming, iterative and difficult process, this research concludes that it is far better to invest in building trust as early in the project as possible in preference to handling the destructive vicious circle generated by teams with conflicting goals and poor levels of trust.
Furthermore, the findings suggest that shared goals may be used to minimise power imbalances, and the resultant use of coercive power, by driving progress through the pursuit of mutually beneficial objectives based on a perceived equity of return.
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1, pp 23-42.
Allen, D., Colligan, D., Finnie, A., and Kern, T. (2000).
Trust, power and inter-organisational information systems: the case of the electronic trading community TransLease.
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Author Details Dr Niki Panteli Lecturer in Information Systems School of Management University of Bath Email: N.Panteli@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/about/people/122150/ Return to top Article Title: "Trust in Global Virtual Teams" Author: Niki Panteli Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/panteli/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz mobile software framework database archives metadata digitisation blog repositories eprints preservation cataloguing multimedia rtf e-learning ejournal ontologies dvd curation dspace e-science e-research ict interoperability e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Digital Cultural Content Forum 2005 11-13 February 2005, Oxford, UK The Digital Cultural Content Forum (DCCF) is an annual international gathering of key stakeholders in the digitisation and delivery of our global cultural assets.
The focus of the meeting is to explore how public institutions that steward cultural content, the agencies responsible for public policy, and organisations in the public broadcast sectors can collaborate to deliver services to public audiences.
The meeting is organised by UKOLN on behalf of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council of the UK (MLA), the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Back to headlines Framework for the Future Digital Citizenship Workshops February March 2005 Venue and location details for the forthcoming Framework for the Future Digital Citizenship Workshop Series are now available on the MLA Web site at http://www.mla.gov.uk/action/pn/events.asp To register your bookings as soon as possible with Hilary Ahrens by telephone on 020 7273 1419 or by email: hilary.ahrens@mla.gov.uk Back to headlines The 3rd International Conference on Implementing the Berlin Declaration on Open Acess The 3rd international conference on implementing the Berlin Declaration on Open Acess will take place in Southampton February 28 March 1 2005. http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ Highlights from the programme: Key-note address by Professor Tony Hey “E-Science and Open Access” Johannes Fournier “The DFG study of author experience of open access” Recent JISC studies e.g.
the business models study Francoise Vandooren “The EU scientific publishing study” Brief reports from delegates on implementation of the Berlin Declaration in their organisations The OA Policy to Southampton University (NN) The roadmap : presentation on the latest version of the roadmap Contact details for the programme: Dr. Hans F Hoffmann (CERN) hans.falk.hoffmann@cern.ch Tel.
+41 22 7675458⁄2849 Fax +41 22 7823011 Temporary contact for the local host at Southampton: Dr. Steve Hitchcock sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk Back to headlines Two Netskills Workshops on Plagiarism and an Internet Highway Code March 2005 The following Netskills workshops will be running at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff in March: 1.
Detecting and Deterring Plagiarism: The Web: Hindrance or Help?
Tuesday 22nd March 2005 This is a practical workshop aimed at staff in Further and Higher Education institutions which wish to find out more about the impact of the Web on plagiarism, and how to deal with it.
As well as gaining a thorough understanding of issues concerned with plagiarism, participants will also explore essay banks, online plagiarism detection services, and, through discussions and scenarios, consider different approaches to deterring plagiarism.
2.
An Internet Highway Code: Staying Safe, Secure and Legal Online Wednesday 23rd March 2005 Despite the protection offered by institutional systems and procedures, both providers and users of Web services can still face real risks when online.
New evidence suggests that it is people, as much as technology, who compromise security and that many are not aware of the legal, moral and ethical implications of being online and how their actions can have serious repercussions for themselves and their employers.
Full details of these workshops, together with booking forms are available from the Netskills Web site: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/workshops/forthcoming.html Back to headlines Initial Call for Papers Shock of the Old 2005: Implementing Innovation 7 April 2005 University of Oxford, http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/shock2005/ The Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University Computing Services is pleased to announce our fifth annual one-day conference on educational technologies.
This conference will explore the issues arising from using educational technology to bring about innovation in academic practice.
Rather than concentrating solely on the technology itself, papers are invited that will additionally discuss the cultural and organisational factors which hinder true innovation from occurring.
What are the key factors that impact on the implementation and adoption of innovation in e-learning?
We would like to receive abstracts for talks describing how individuals or groups have tackled the implementation of innovative new practices at their own Institution, discussing which challenges were faced, and which problems still remain to be overcome.
Proposals in the following areas are particularly encouraged: Empowering students to create their own learning resources, from simple web sites to creating their own computer games Using novel forms of assessment, particularly initiatives to replace summative assessment by computer based examinations Sharing and self-publishing academic content, in particular managing the legality of publishing through unconventional means Personal publishing for students.
What issues arise if students are introduced to discussion boards, weblogs and Personal Development Planners?
Utilising new channels of communication.
Are PDAs, mobile phones and handheld devices useful tools in our armoury?
In keeping with the theme of innovation, and in order make the day as useful as possible, we request that papers take the format of a formal presentation, and have an interactive element with the audience.
Talks that describe or demonstrate specific projects, tools and technologies are welcome, but we will give priority to those that do so within the context of the conference questions.
As last year, this conference will be in conjunction with the “Beyond debate” on the following day, which will be advertised shortly.
Please send 300 word abstracts (in-message or RTF) to ltg@oucs.ox.ac.uk Email submissions strongly encouraged!
(but address and fax below) DUE DATE: Monday 14th February, 5:00pm.
If you have questions, please contact the coordinators: Peter Robinson: peter.robinson@oucs.ox.ac.uk Sophie Clarke: sophie.clarke@oucs.ox.ac.uk Learning Technologies Group Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN Tel: 01865 273221 | Fax: 01865 273275 Back to headlines Joint Workshop on Electronic Publishing by DELOS, SVEP and ScieCom 14-15 April, 2005 Lund, Sweden: http://www.lub.lu.se/epubl_2005_Lund/ Lund University Libraries are arranging a two-day event on aspects of electronic publishing.
The workshop is being organised by DELOS NoE http://www.delos.info, SVEP project http://www.svep-projekt.se and ScieCom http://www.sciecom.org Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: Authoring tools with features supporting Digital Library management and services Integrating advanced features into institutional repository platforms (DSpace, EPrints etc.)
High quality OAI-services based on metadata improvement and metadata creation/extraction support Supporting semantic interoperability in e-publishing environments E-journal publication software (review features, integration with pre-print archives and digital library services etc.)
Long-term preservation and curation of institutional e-publishing output Other related topics (e.g.
: e-publishing of multimedia formats; e-publishing-related curriculum for a Digital Library PhD programme) Call for Submissions: Extended abstracts are invited for papers and workshop presentations.
The selection will be carried out by the programme committee on the basis of the abstracts.
Extended abstract submission deadline is February 11, 2005.
Advisory length of extended abstracts is one page.
Further information and guidelines on submissions of extended abstracts is to be found at the Workshop Web page http://www.lub.lu.se/epubl_2005_Lund/.
Back to headlines DELOS Workshop 11-13 May 2005, Heraklion, Crete, Greece: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/delos-rep-workshop/ This is a joint workshop of the Semantic Interoperability and Preservation clusters of the DELOS Project.
DELOS is an interdisciplinary Network of Excellence funded by the European Union to support the development of the next generation of digital library technologies.
Digital repositories as ‘managed collections of digital objects’ are an essential part of the architectural framework within many domains.
In this workshop we will focus in particular on the role of repositories within e-learning and e-research and related digital library services, and will consider such repositories as providers of both preservation and access services.
Digital repositories support the requirements of a number of communities, and the workshop welcomes participation from content providers and practitioners, as well as those with a research interest in the development of repositories.
Details of the Call for Papers is available at the above Web site.
Back to headlines 2nd Annual European Semantic Web Conference 29 May 1 June 2005, Heraklion, Crete, Greece: http://www.eswc2005.org/ The 2nd Annual European Semantic Web Conference will be held in Heraklion, Crete over 29 May 1 June 2005.
It will present the latest results in research and application in semantic web technologies (including knowledge markup languages, semantic web services, ontology management and more).
ESWC 2005 will also feature a special industry-oriented event providing European industry with an opportunity to become even more familiar with these technologies.
It will offer a tutorial programme, focusing on the latest in semantic web technologies.
ESWC 2005 is co-located with a meeting of the Knowledge Web network of excellence.
Workshops and meetings of other European Commission 6th Framework Programme projects involved in the semantic web and semantic web technologies will be able to showcase their developments.
Back to headlines DARTS Summer Conference 2005 University, College & Research Group (South West) present: DARTS Discover Academic Research Training & Support Summer 2005 Conference.
http://www.dartington.ac.uk/conferences/conferencedetails.asp?uid=23 This is a two-day residential conference on libraries supporting research in Higher Education.
It is aimed at university librarians and library managers who are actively engaged in supporting research communities.
The conference will address issues relating to how libraries can best support academics and researchers across an ever-changing educational environment.
For more information or to make a booking please contact: Caroline Gale, UCR Treasurer Main Library, University of Exeter, Stocker Road, Exeter, EX1 2SR Tel: 01392 263884 E-mail: caroline.a.gale@exeter.ac.uk Back to headlines Conference Announcement and Call for Papers Libraries Without Walls 6 Evaluating the distributed delivery of library services An international conference organised by CERLIM The Centre for Research in Library and Information Management To be held on the Aegean Island of Lesvos, Greece, at the Delphinia hotel, Molyvos http://www.molyvoshotel.com/eng/hotel.htm 16 20 September 2005 Cost GBP 450 (including accommodation for four nights) All papers will be considered by a panel of independent referees.
Papers will be published by Facet Publishing in the LWW Conference Proceedings series.
Presentations at the conference can either be papers of 30 minutes duration or Workshops of 60 minutes.
To be considered please submit an abstract (between 400 and 800 words) together with a 50 word biographical statement and a 50 word synopsis of the paper.
Please send submissions, preferably by email (as text rather than an attachment), to the address below by 3rd March 2005.
Applicants will be informed whether their submissions have been selected during April 2005.
Please note that, as the conference does not aim to make a profit, we are unable to offer discounted conference rates to presenters.
For further information please visit the website at http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww6/ Back to headlines ECDL 2005 Submission Dates 18-23 September, 2005 : Vienna, Austria http://www.ecdl2005.org ECDL 2005 is the 9th conference in the series of European Digital Library conferences.
ECDL has become the major European conference on digital libraries, and associated technical, practical, and social issues, bringing together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field.
ECDL 2005 is jointly organised by the Vienna University of Technology (VUT), the Austrian National Library ( D6NB), and the Austrian Computer Society (OC G).
ECDL 2005 invites original contributions focusing on research and development supporting information access and exploration both from a technology perspective as well as in different application-domains such as science, e-government, cultural heritage, etc.
Topics of contributions include (but are not limited to): Concepts of Digital Libraries and Digital Documents System Architectures, Integration and Interoperability Information Organisation, Search and Usage User Studies and System Evaluation Digital Preservation Digital Library Applications Important Dates: * Workshop Proposal Deadline: 18 February 2005 Proposals should be sent to workshops@ecdl2005.org.
* Paper Submission Deadline: 1 March 2005 Submissions should be submitted to the ECDL2005 submission system.
* Tutorial Proposal Submission Deadline: 1 March 2005 Proposals should be sent to tutorials@ecdl2005.org.
* Panel Proposal Deadline: 1 March 2005 Proposals should be sent to panels@ecdl2005.org.
* Doctoral Consortium Submission deadline: 4 April 2005 Proposals should be sent to doctoral_consortium@ecdl2005.org * Poster and Demo Submission Deadline: 1 May 2005 Posters and Demos should be submitted to the ECDL2005 submission system.
* Paper Acceptance Notifications: 15 May 2005 * Final Version of Papers: 3 June 2005 * Conference: 18-23 September 2005 Back to headlines Free Access to the Cochrane Library via Athens All UK HE and FE will be able to access The Cochrane Library free of charge via Athens following an agreement between JISC and Wiley InterScience Inc.
The Cochrane Library is a unique source of reliable and up-to-date information on the effects of interventions in health care.
Published on a quarterly basis, The Cochrane Library is designed to provide information and evidence to support decisions taken in health care and to inform those receiving care.
The Cochrane Library consists of a regularly updated collection of evidence-based medicine databases.
In order to register your institution please contact Jackie Cahoon, Senior Account Manager at JCahoon@wiley.co.uk.
For further information and to access The Cochrane Library please go to http://www.thecochranelibrary.com.
For further information on the JISC agreement please contact Liam Earney, JISC Collections Manager, L.Earney@jisc.ac.uk [Received: November 2004] Back to headlines £10m programme to save the world’s historical and cultural records Representatives from the international historical, conservation and diplomatic worlds gathered today at the British Library to mark the launch of the Endangered Archives Programme a £10 million joint initiative between the British Library and the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund to help save the world’s endangered archives.
Speakers at the event included Professor Peter Baldwin trustee of the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund and Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library.
The historian William Dalrymple, writer and presenter Michael Wood, Professor David Cannadine, Director of the Institute of Historical Research, historians Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson also pledged their support for the Programme.
The largest of its kind ever undertaken in the world, the programme will be administered by the British Library in conjunction with a panel of international experts deciding on the allocation of the grants.
Institutions and academic researchers will be able to apply for grants to help identify endangered records and re-locate them to institutional archives in their local region.
A copy will be maintained in a master archive at the British Library.
This will ensure no original material is removed from its cultural home and copies will be accessible on an international basis.
The Programme will also provide bursaries for overseas librarians and archivists for work attachments at the British Library to foster better archival management and preservation in the longer-term.
Application forms for both grants and bursaries are already available on the British Library’s web-site at http://www.bl.uk/endangeredarchives The first round of awards will take place in May 2005.
[Received: November 2004] Back to headlines DigiCULT Thematic Issue 7 Now Available The Future Digital Heritage Space.
An Expedition Report, December 2004 This report summarises the results of an expedition into the possible future of digital heritage in the next 10-15 years.
It is based on contributions from researchers, heritage experts and professionals to a DigiCULT online forum as well as the project’s ongoing research.
The report is intended as a navigation tool for boards and directors of heritage organisations and research centres, IT project managers, and curators of digital collections, virtual exhibitions and environments.
It cautions that the next waves of innovative ICT systems and applications may significantly shape and re-shape the digital landscape in which heritage organisations reside.
For many organisations this could result in becoming ‘blind spots’ in an emerging ambient intelligence environment.
As the places and roles of digital heritage in this environment need to be discussed and prepared, the report also gives recommendations which may be useful for ensuring the creation of a thriving and inclusive future digital heritage space.
Download Thematic Issue 7: (10 MB) http://www.digicult.info/downloads/dc_thematic_issue7.pdf [Received: December 2004] Back to headlines Caring for the Past Made Easier: Conservation Register Available Online All those concerned with the care of art and heritage can now find detailed information on conservation-restoration practices in the UK and Ireland at http://www.conservationregister.com .
The Conservation Register website helps individuals and organisations: find a conservator by choosing from the wide range of categories such as paintings, textiles, books or ceramics view detailed information on each practice including contact details, training and qualifications, professional accreditations, charging policies and descriptions of recent work follow online links to conservators’ email addresses and websites (where available) The website provides guidance on choosing and working with conservators and information on caring for a range of collections and materials.
This, combined with the details provided on individual practices, helps owners and custodians to choose the professional best suited to their needs.
Heritage organisations can login to the website for a wider range of search facilities including project management, technical analysis or exhibition advice.
Organisations may also wish to refer their own enquiries to the Register as an impartial source of advice, either directly to the website or to our supporting telephone service.
The Conservation Register website was created as part of a three year development project which has received financial support from MLA, English Heritage, Historic Scotland, The Pilgrim Trust, the UK Institute for Conservation, the Institute of Paper Conservation, the Clothworkers’ Foundation and the Glaziers Trust.
For further information please contact: Caroline Saye, Register Development Officer 020 7721 8246, register@ukic.org.uk [Received: December 2004] Back to headlines Moving Image and Sound Resources for A-Level English and Drama The BUFVC is introducing a new series of subject specific catalogues with Moving Image Resources for A-Level English and Drama.
This catalogue aims specifically to provide comprehensive details of materials that support the 2004-2005 A-Level English and Drama curricula in the UK, but also includes much that is of wider application and interest to the post-sixteen sector.
Some 250 authors and over 400 of their works have been culled from a variety sources (including the national examination boards), with the express intention of providing reliable and up-to-date information on moving image and sound resources which complement the hundreds of authors and texts selected.
The catalogue identifies videotapes, commercial and specialist DVD releases, CD-ROMs, audio cassettes, compact discs, online materials, and the few remaining titles that can still be obtained on 16mm film.
Details are provided as to suitability, content, format, price and availability, with contact details for all relevant distributors provided.
It also contains a complete list of the texts for the 2004-05 UK exam boards.
Copies can be purchased from the BUFVC.
For more details please call 020 7393 1500 or got to the Web site at: http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/publications/catalogues.html [Received: November 2004] Back to headlines Outstanding library and archive collections to be Designated under national scheme 30 November 2004 The Designation Scheme, which since 1997 has identified the outstanding collections held in England’s non-national museums, opens to applications from England’s libraries and archives today.
The new, extended Scheme, run by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), will identify library and archive collections in non-national institutions which are deemed of national or international importance.
Designation brings a range of benefits.
Amongst advantages reported by museums currently holding Designated collections are: strengthened support form their governing bodies enhanced ability to raise funds to support the collection added profile-raising at a national level through MLA’s promotional materials and press coverage the creation of a local focus for advocacy and awareness-raising MLA is now inviting applications from libraries and archives and joint applications from existing formal partnerships of organisations with complementary collections, which can demonstrate that their collection is of pre-eminent quality and significance.
Full guidance notes and an application form are available to download from the MLA website at http://www.mla.gov.uk/action/designation/00desig.asp or contact Yvette Burrows, Designation Adviser yvette.burrows@mla.gov.uk, tel: 020 7273 1409, to request an application pack.
The deadline for applications is 11 April 2005.
Announcement of successful applicants will be made by the end of September 2005.
[Received: December 2004] Back to headlines Working class heritage celebrated in shortlist for £100,000 Gulbenkian museum prize The UK’s industrial and working class heritage is celebrated in the shortlist for Britain’s biggest single arts prize, The Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year, annoounced 14 January 2005.
Six of the ten shortlisted museums, which cover the length and breadth of the British Isles, owe much to the fast-vanishing heavy industry of the UK.
They include a restored pit in south Wales; the new National Railway Museum in County Durham; the reworked Transport Museum in Coventry, home of the motor industry; 19th century Back to Back housing in Birmingham; a new museum based on the fishing industry in Great Yarmouth; and a community project in north Devon centred on the local furniture manufacturer.
They compete with the lavish new galleries at Compton Verney, a testament to one man’s lifelong passion for art, a multi-million pound building programme at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, London’s newly-opened Foundling Museum, and a tiny community project on the recently storm-swept island of North Uist.
Four finalists will be announced on 18 March, and the winner of the prize, which is supported by MLA, will be announced on 26 May.
For further information contact: Ruth Cairns, Anna Mayall or Liz Sich at Colman Getty PR Telephone: 020 7631 2666 Fax: 020 7631 2699 Email: ruth@colmangettypr.co.uk Press release: http://www.mla.gov.uk/news/press_article.asp?articleid=767 [Received: January 2005] Back to headlines OCLC Research Sponsors Software Contest to Encourage Innovation OCLC Research announced a contest intended to give developers an outlet for creative software development of library services.
Contestants can enter by going to http://www.oclc.org/research/researchworks/contest/ The OCLC Research Software Contest is intended to encourage innovation and development of Web-based services for libraries and library users.
Contestants will be challenged to think differently about their environments by working with deconstructed functional components of library services.
The prize is $2500 US.
Entries will be accepted until 15 May 2005.
Entries will be judged by a panel of expert practitioners and academicians from OCLC and the library/information community: Contest Judges http://www.oclc.org/research/researchworks/contest/judges.htm [Received: January 2005] Back to headlines Success of Renaissance Scheme Spurs Extension to Museums across England Museums across the length and breadth of England will be extending and enriching their services as a result of new long-term funding opportunities for the Renaissance in the Regions programme managed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).
Back in 2002, MLA launched a Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)-funded programme worth £30m a year to transform museums in England’s regions.
The North East, South West and West Midlands received significant levels of Renaissance in the Regions funding and the result has been a resounding success.
A 30% increase in museum visits by school children has been matched by major improvements in collections display and care resulting in significant increases in the loan of collections from the national museums.
DCMS has now allocated additional funding to bring the long-term investment up to £45 million by 2008.
In the light of the successes achieved by the pilot regions, MLA’s Board has agreed that this new funding should be used to raise consistently levels of investment in services in the remaining six English regions.
Welcoming the MLA Board’s decision, Arts Minister Estelle Morris said: “Three years ago the Government decided to put investment directly into the best of our regional collections through the Renaissance programme.
This was a first for us, and showed our commitment to supporting the whole of the museums community.
Further funding was announced last year.
I am delighted that the MLA have decided to use this money to get a nationwide programme underway so that everyone, regardless of where they live, will get better access to the best of our cultural heritage.“ [Received: January 2005] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Domesday Redux: The Rescue of the BBC Domesday Project Videodiscs Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Domesday Redux: The Rescue of the BBC Domesday Project Videodiscs Buzz data software framework database archives digitisation tagging copyright video preservation windows multimedia jpeg ascii cd-rom algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jeffrey Darlington, Andy Finney and Adrian Pearce describe the groundbreaking BBC Domesday Project of 1986, and explain how its unique multimedia collection has been preserved.
Origins William of Normandy, having conquered England, decided in 1086 to take account of his new territory.
The result was the Domesday Book (actually more than one), which now resides in the National Archives [1].
For the BBC, the 900th anniversary in 1986 presented an opportunity to produce a television series, hosted by Michael Wood.
A more unusual production was to use the combination of computer and video known as interactive video to produce a kind of modern-day equivalent of William’s survey.
In 1983, a BBC Television producer named Peter Armstrong, now director of OneWorld International [2], had wondered if it would be possible to harness the Domesday philosophy to modern Britain.
He originally envisaged an interactive documentary and soon found that interactive video was limited in the volume of moving pictures it could carry but there was room for tens of thousands of still images.
With the large user base of microcomputers in British schools (helped by a government subsidy) it was feasible to ask schools around the UK to survey their areas to produce a database of how Britain looked to the British in 1986.
Combine this with thousands of maps, still photographs and central statistical, written and visual information and you have the basic structure of the 1986 Domesday Project.
This was clearly much larger an undertaking than even a television programme.
So a distributed team was assembled including statisticians at the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, software expertise from Logica and video facilities at the BBC Open University Production Centre (OUPC), as well as a core team based in an obscure BBC outpost in West Ealing.
An Editorial Board was set up, chaired by Peter Armstrong, and negotiations were started with outside sources such as the Ordnance Survey, newspaper publishers and photo libraries.
A photographic competition was launched, which would eventually net thousands of photos (and was won by an image that was notoriously difficult to show cleanly on television).
And, through contacts in BBC Education, a plan was devised to ask thousands of schools around the UK to survey, photograph and write about their neighbourhoods.
Peter Armstrong, Head of the 1986 Domesday Project with Sarah Tyacke, Keeper of the Public Records Europe Chips In Some funding for the project was to come from the BBC, but half of the money came from the European Commission as part of its very first Framework Programme for Research (FP1).
Philips Electronics were one of the companies behind videodiscs, in their case called LaserVision.
They were brought into the loop, as were BBC Research at Kingswood Warren in Surrey.
Philips offered a new variant of LaserVision, to be called LV-ROM.
It was possible to replace the part of the baseband signal normally used to carry audio by a data channel later versions of videodiscs used this channel for digital sound.
For the Domesday team this offered a more stable solution than the full-frame teletext they had originally considered, and Philips were sure that the resulting players would be priced so that schools could easily afford them.
At this time there was no such thing as CD-ROM; when this appeared its data storage parameters were to be very similar to LV-ROM.
Although the Domesday data was held digitally on the videodiscs, the audio and video were analogue, the video being standard 625-line PAL (Phase Alternating Line) format.
It was decided to break the project into two parts: the Community Disc and the National Disc.
The National Disc was to contain national statistical information (which could be displayed interactively as charts or mapped onto the user’s choice of map), sets of photographs reflecting all aspects of British life, items from newspapers and magazines, some non-immersive virtual reality tours around diverse locations and a short set of movies documenting the decade so far.
The Community Disc was based around blocks of land, four kilometres by three, onto which the collected data, text and photographs were arranged.
The maps for these blocks were from the 1:50 000 OS mapping.
The user could navigate around these maps by clicking on the screen: itself something of a novelty in the mid-1980s.
There was also information matched to maps at both larger and smaller scales, right up to ‘global’ essays about the British regions and the UK as a whole.
At ‘higher’ levels than the basic four-by-three blocks, users could see aerial photographs and also satellite images aligned to match the map itself.
There were other means of navigation for both discs, the most important being a free-text search system based on an innovative algorithm by Dr Martin Porter [3].
Sending out the Scribes For the Community Disc a data collection template was produced by the BBC team and sent out to schools on floppy discs and on cassette tapes.
(Audiocassettes were a common way of storing data for home computers since floppy disc drives were very expensive at the time.)
The project wanted three photographs per school, up to 20 teletext-sized screens of text about the area and some survey information.
The introduction of a national curriculum and a teachers’ work-to-rule restricted the opportunities for schools and as a result much of the work was done by primary schools and considered to be local studies.
The BBC team collated the community data and the photos were sent to the OUPC for transfer to video, as were the maps.
The OUPC had a special kind of videotape machine that was designed for the production of videodiscs and allowed the recording of individual frames, one by one.
Since television is a moving medium, there were severe technical challenges in doing this reliably in an analogue world.
The photographs were transferred one by one using a telecine machine with a 35mm transparency facility.
The maps, which were actual paper maps bought from the Ordnance survey, were laid flat under a rostrum camera and similarly transferred to analogue videotape.
All the images were transferred to tape following a carefully worked-out algorithm, which was set up to make access and display easier.
All this video content was assembled in batches and then edited onto a master tape for each disc side by the OUPC.
BBC Enterprises produced the side of the National Disc that held the news movies.
Software Development The data retrieval software was written by the Logica team using BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language)[4], a precursor to C. The software on the disc is made up of compiled intermediate code that runs in a virtual machine on the BBC and RM (Research Machines) computers.
The Logica team was led by Jardine Barrington-Cook, who recalls how exciting the project was for the computer people who worked on it.
Advanced new ideas were being shoehorned into the tiny BBC processor, which had so little memory that a block of 256 bytes, initially kept in reserve, proved to make a serious difference to getting the system to work.
The data organisation was specially designed to provide rapid access within the limited resources available.
The enthusiasm was such that people were working night and day and sleeping in the office.
At the same time, large teams of people at the UK Data Archive [5] at Essex University, the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies [6] at Newcastle University and units at Birkbeck and Bangor were working on the data for the National Disc.
It started as government statistics covering the whole country, which were re-processed to fit the Domesday grid of kilometre squares.
This made area-based data from different sources directly inter-comparable in ways that the source data’s incompatible spatial units prevented, potentially opening up local and central government policies to challenge by the public.
This processing required a large amount of computer capacity, and many of the University computers on the JANET Network [7] were pressed into service some of them for free, since charging systems were limited at the time.
The data was collated into large data files (basically ASCII text-based and using simple tagging procedures), which were transferred onto half-inch ANSI data tapes using the Domesday team VAX mini-computer [8] in Ealing.
These tapes and a copy of the master tapes were sent to Philips’ Dutch factory in Eindhoven where the videodiscs themselves were produced.
Delivery Systems The Domesday delivery system consisted of a BBC Master Microcomputer with co-processor, the videodisc player and a monitor.
The micro was a standard machine with three additions.
There was a SCSI card [9], which communicated with the player for data transfer and control, there was a special filing system chip, known as the VFS-ROM (Videodisc Filing System-Read-only memory), so that the player would look like a big read-only floppy disc as far as the computer software was concerned, and there was a trackerball with which the user could move a pointer around the screen and click to action selections.
There was also a configuration for the Research Machines micro that was also used in schools.
It was not technically possible to use a Sinclair Spectrum [10], which was the third type of schools computer.
The BBC Domesday Project system, comprising a BBC Master and a specially produced LV-ROM BBC Enterprises published the discs in November 1986.
They were available as a package together with the necessary hardware for around £4,000, which made them a little expensive for many schools and over twice what the project believed they were to cost.
By this time the British government had changed its policy from subsidising hardware in schools to subsidising software.
The best efforts of Philips and Acorn and even the help of ESPRIT funding from the European Commission could pare the cost down no more.
After a while, a company called Cumana found a way to offer Domesday Systems at a lower price and more were sold.
The targets were schools, universities and libraries.
The project was seen as a success in every way except its sales, although the security services were a little concerned about the ease with which national data was now available.
The project was visited by MI5 and was presented personally to the Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher.
Loyd Grossman with a videodisc of the Domesday Project, at the launch of the Digital Preservation Coalition, February 2002 Enter The National Archives The National Archives first became interested in the preservation of the BBC Domesday videodisc data at the launch of the Digital Preservation Coalition [11] at the House of Commons on 27 February 2002.
At that event, the UK broadcaster Loyd Grossman spoke of the danger that the rapid evolution of computer media and record formats would lead to the irretrievable loss of valuable historic records, and gave the Domesday discs as an example.
Back at the office, Jeffrey Darlington found that the BBC Domesday system presented to the Keeper of the Records in 1986 was still in working order, and it was agreed that its collection of images, text, maps and datasets should be preserved for posterity.
The National Archives then made contact with the CAMiLEON Project [12] and other parties who were interested in rescuing the Domesday data.
A Divergence of Views Andy Finney, the videodisc producer on the original project, described his plan to track down the best surviving copies of the master analogue videotapes from which the videodiscs were produced, and to convert the images into a modern broadcast-quality digital format.
We discussed this plan with the CAMiLEON team, and a difference of opinion emerged.
The purpose of the CAMiLEON project was to demonstrate the value of emulation in preserving not only the data stored in obsolete systems but the behaviour of the systems themselves in this case one of the very first interactive multi-media systems.
The aim was to reproduce the original user experience as accurately as possible, and the CAMiLEON team argued that the slight faults in images as displayed from the analogue discs were a part of that experience, and should not be cleaned up as Andy proposed to do.
Our aim was different we wanted to preserve the data with the highest quality available consistent with longevity.
An analogy in the world of music is the difference of opinions on whether to play Bach on the piano.
The purists argue that since the piano did not exist when the music was written, it should be played only on the harpsichord or other instrument from that era, building new harpsichords as and when required.
Others argue that if Bach had ever heard a piano he would be delighted with the new and richer sound, and therefore it is OK to play his music on the piano and give listeners a different experience.
These schools of thought co-exist, and while agreeing with the value of the CAMiLEON approach we preferred to support Andy’s high-quality preservation of the data.
The question of how to present the material to present-day users remained to be solved.
One approach that was considered was to run the original CINT code in a virtual machine migrated to a PC platform.
This remains an interesting possibility for future research.
Convergence at Leeds The CAMiLEON emulator was demonstrated on 2 December 2002 at an event at Leeds University, using Domesday data grabbed from the videodiscs by a PC interfaced to one of the surviving LV-ROM (LaserVision Read Only Memory) drives.
At this event, Jeffrey and Andy met Adrian Pearce for the first time, and saw a prototype of his new interface to the data from the Domesday Community disc.
This data is organised geographically using maps of the UK at several levels, each map being linked to up to 20 screens of text and up to 7 pictures.
The user can zoom in and out, and move around the country at each level, looking at the maps.
On the original system, limited to a TV screen resolution, the user can then call up the pictures and text separately.
Adrian had realised that on a modern platform the identical organisation could be used but with maps, text and pictures displayed simultaneously in three different panes.
The fourth quarter of the screen could show the first-level context-sensitive help including map references and the picture captions and descriptions.
We all agreed that this was a new realisation of Peter Armstrong’s original vision.
The National Archives then obtained approval from the copyright holder BBC Worldwide [13] to put a re-engineered version of the Domesday system on public display.
Screenshot of the new system The Domesday Project [14] made a lasting impression on many people who took part including Adrian’s wife Sally, who led one of the data collection teams with a group of teacher training students from the University of Brighton.
It was her suggestion in December 2001 to make the Domesday Community data available on Windows PCs for her current generation of undergraduate students.
A complete BBC Domesday system had been stored away at Brighton and Adrian found that it still worked well.
He had no technical documentation for the system, and started by listing the file directory of the Community disc.
He then connected the BBC micro to a PC via the BBC RS423 and the PC RS232 sockets.
This made it possible to download the digital files from the ‘audio’ data channel on the disc.
The stress of long downloads (over 50 hours per file in some cases) soon caused the BBC motherboard to fail.
Fortunately it proved possible to obtain replacements for the motherboard and SCSI interface board.
The download yielded over 300MB of text and hexadecimal data, together with the BCPL-compiled programs.
Reverse engineering: slowly unpicking the hexadecimal puzzle Re-creating the Application Adrian then set out to decipher the data structures using a hexadecimal editor, like an enormous hexadecimal crossword.
Data structure books of the period indicated the style of tree structures being used, and familiarity with the operation of the original system helped to understand them.
Adrian also needed the ability to see hexadecimal patterns, and to think how he might have solved the same problem in 1986 with the languages and data structures of the day.
The Community Disc has similar but different trees on each side representing north and south.
The data incorporates geographic grid references in three systems: British, Irish and French.
The British and Irish have numeric, alpha numeric and alpha representations, some of which are the same in the two systems but refer to different places.
The Community data handles all these variations, but finding out how was another puzzle.
All the system keywords in the index trees used by the search algorithms were stemmed; fortunately Dr Martin Porter had recently published a C implementation of his original word-stemming algorithm, and this formed the basis of Adrian’s new search algorithms.
A custom specification for a cabling to connect the BBC Master to a PC For the video data, Adrian started to frame-grab images from the videodiscs using an RGB frame grabber [15] card in a PC, and a custom cable to connect to the RGB output of the videodisc player [16].
This approach has been used in other resurrection projects, but it takes a lot of time to download thousands of images, and it does not give the highest quality for a number of reasons some to do with the nature of PAL television and some with the inherent problems of videodisc.
After Adrian had grabbed a sample of images sufficient to test out his new system, he agreed to use images derived from the original videotapes that Andy Finney was tracking down.
The earliest copies of the tapes turned up in Peter Armstrong’s loft.
Preserving the Content The migration of the image content from the analogue videotapes was a two-pronged approach.
It was decided to re-archive the video material in a digital video format and also make JPEG images available for the PC version.
The 1-inch analogue videotapes were digitised at BBC Research and transferred onto Digital Betacam (arguably a safe format for another ten years or so) for archiving with both the National Archive and the BBC, and onto an intermediate DV (Digital Video) format that enabled Andy to batch-process the tens of thousands of images on the Community disc into individual JPEGs using desktop computer equipment.
The PAL ‘Transform Decoder’ has been an important part of the BBC’s digitisation of its archive, and it was specially modified to cope with Domesday’s individual frames.
This innovative work in decoding and digitising legacy PAL material, and the retention by the BBC of the ability to play back the 1-inch tapes properly, have been key factors in rescuing the image data.
(For more details, see Andy Finney’s Web page)[17].
The resulting images of both maps and photographs are noticeably better in quality than those on the videodiscs.
The National Archives have now installed Adrian’s system with these high-quality images in their library at Kew and made the Community data available to the public on a modern platform.
Conclusions The rescue project came just in time.
A working original system to compare with and validate the migrated system is invaluable, especially in multimedia migration where the look-and-feel and user interaction is important.
Some original systems and hardware components were still available and could be made to work, but the systems were fragile.
Wear between the videodisc drive spindle and the disc has caused the loading of the disc to be a delicate operation on most systems.
Adrian Pearce, the developer of the 1986 Domesday Community Adrian was in the fortunate position of having access to an original system in working condition, the time to work on the problem for as long as it took and a relevant software development background.
Understanding data structures in hex requires an aptitude for observation and pattern matching but is quite satisfying as long as there is no deadline.
The timescale was unknown at the outset, and it eventually took sixteen months to produce the new Windows version.
The lesson of this digital preservation project is that if you have enough time, individual skill, dedication and imagination then almost anything is possible, provided that you don’t leave it too late.
If you start counting the cost this may seem an expensive project, but then the value of the record is high too and that applies equally to the original Domesday Project.
There is of course a great need to preserve other electronic records in a routine and predictable manner, and this rescue project is not a suitable model to be followed in such cases.
The National Archives is working on ways to make this possible in future.
Andy Finney says: “If I personally have one regret about Domesday it is that many of the people who contributed to it never got to see the results of their efforts.
For that reason alone I am delighted to see it more widely available now that the real world has caught up with our technological vision.
Dare I hope it will be republished by the BBC?” References The National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ OneWorld International http://www.oneworld.net/ Martin Porter’s Home Page http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/ Information on BCPL http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL_programming_language The UK Data Archive, University of Essex http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, Newcastle University http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~ncurds/ The JANET Network http://www.ja.net/ Information on VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX Information on SCSI Small Computer System Interface http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI Information on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/ Creative Archiving at Michigan & Leeds: Emulating the Old on the New (CAMiLEON) http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ BBC Worldwide http://www.bbcworldwide.com/ The Domesday Project http://www.domesday.org.uk RGB Frame Grabber, Introduction to Frame Grabbers http://www.theimagingsource.com/prod/grab/grabintro_2.htm The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of Mark de Weger and Angus Duggan for the XFER3 and 4 software and cable design.
Preservation & Emulation Domesday Redux, Andy Finney, http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html#redux Author Details Jeffrey Darlington Digital Preservation Department The National Archives Email: jeffrey.darlington@nationalarchives.gov.uk Web site: http://www.pro.gov.uk/about/preservation/digital/default.htm Andy Finney ATSF Limited Email: andy@atsf.co.uk Web site: http://www.atsf.co.uk Adrian Pearce LongLife Data Limited Email: adrian.pearce@longlifedata.co.uk Return to top Article Title: “Domesday Redux: The rescue of the BBC Domesday Project videodiscs” Author: Jeffrey Darlington, Andy Finney and Adrian Pearce Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/tna/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet-SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet-SOSIG Buzz data software database dissemination usability metadata repositories multimedia e-learning personalisation research Citation BibTex RIS Angela Joyce shares her personal impressions from the recent European Digital Libraries Conference in Bath; Emma Place introduces a new seminar series to support online information seeking in the social sciences.
A Digital Day in Bath On a stormy wet Tuesday, I battled my way through the Bath University campus to attend the 2004 European Conference on Digital Libraries.
The keynote address by Neil McLean from IMS Australia was called The Ecology of Repository Services: A Cosmic View and it lived up to its name, being a wide-ranging look at the explosion of interest in digital resources and e-learning.
People are just starting to think about the lifecycle of online resources and how to manage them.
Neil sees this as still at the ‘cottage industry’ stage, with much to learn.
He is working on a collaboration between JISC, DEST (Department of Education, Science and Training) Australia and Industry Canada to discuss management of e-learning services.
Neil commented on a real difference of cultures among different stakeholder communities librarians, e-learning communities and various disciplines like science but at least there is an ongoing debate.
Two parallel sessions followed on Personalisation: Ulrich Thiel from the Fraunhofer Institute, Germany, talked about research on Annotations in Digital Libraries and Collaborations Facets, Models and Usage.
Their work pulls together design of software systems for annotating and how to incorporate annotating in digital libraries.
This was a new subject for me, and I found the contents very hard to understand.
Ulrich presented several views of annotations as metadata, dialogue acts or content.
Quiyue Wang from the Institut für Informatik, Augsburg, Germany then presented P-News: Deeply Personalized News Dissemination for MPEG-7 based Digital Libraries, which described a research project developing a system of searching on a database for multimedia resources.
If anything, this was more mystifying for me, but I eventually realised that she was talking about a nested search system, tailored to users’ interests and obtaining best matches rather than exact matches.
The panel session Cross-Cultural Usability of Digital Libraries: User-Centred Design for the Global Society struck more of a chord for me, as I am a linguist and handle European resources in various languages.
Introduced by the Gender Diversities and Technology Institute, Boston, USA, this was a complex and emotive subject.
Should English continue its dominance as the main language of content and access on the Internet, or should access to other languages be extended?
There were some sobering statistics 95% of all computers are in the developed world; 95% of those involved with computer networks are male and 91.8% of the world population are non-English speakers!
Heated debate followed; afterwards I overheard some Scandinavian delegates saying (in English!)
how hard it is to use English constantly.
Finally I headed for the Poster Room, where I presented a poster called Online Information Services in the Social Sciences.
This traced the evolution of a book written by staff from the ILRT (Institute for Learning and Research Technology) at University of Bristol.
The book is aimed mainly, though not exclusively, at information professionals.
It addresses the issues facing users and providers of information in the 21st Century.
There was time to view the other posters, publicising various digital library projects or services.
I enjoyed meeting other colleagues from around the world and catching up on the latest in digital library developments.
See the full ECDL programme [1].
Building Internet Research Skills in the Social Sciences A new Social Science Online [2] seminar series has just been announced, building on the successful events run last year by SOSIG [3] the social science hub of the JISC’s Resource Discovery Network [4].
This year the focus will be on Internet research skills which are now an important part of the academic researcher’s skill set and are also recognised as an essential part of the undergraduate curriculum in many subjects according to the 2004 Benchmark Statements of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education [5].
The seminars are aimed at lecturers and researchers interested in improving their own Internet research skills or in passing them on to their students.
Internet for Business and Economics: 9 December 2004, London Internet for Psychology: 7 April 2005, Birmingham Internet for Social Research: 14 April 2005, Bristol Internet for Law: 27 April 2005, London Internet for Politics: 7 June 2005, London Internet for Sociology: 14 June 2005, Oxford “Conducting a literature review, finding research data and professional networking can all be supported by the online services that these events will showcase.
This year’s seminars will include more than 25 speakers from the professional societies, JISC services and ESRC research programmes, all of whom are keen to spread the word about the online services they offer that can support academic research”.
Alison Allden, Director of Information Service at the University of Bristol (member of the JISC Committee for the Support of Research and the ESRC Research Resources Board) Worksheets for key national Internet services will be provided, which can be adapted for re-use with students.
There will also be hands-on sessions where delegates can try their own Internet searches, with help on hand from friendly experts so you should leave with a list of useful references for your own particular research area.
Full programme information and an online booking form for Social Science Online are available from: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/events/ References ECDL 2004 Conference Programme http://www.ecdl2004.org/programme.html and other reports in this issue on ECDL 2004: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/#at-the-event Social Science Online: National Seminars on Internet information and research skills http://www.sosig.ac.uk/events/ SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ RDN http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ QAA: Honours degree benchmark statements http://www.qaa.ac.uk/crntwork/benchmark/honours.htm Author Details Angela Joyce SOSIG Research Officer ILRT University of Bristol Bristol BS8 1HH Email: angela.joyce@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Emma Place SOSIG Information Manager ILRT University of Bristol Bristol BS8 1HH Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Angela Joyce and Emma Place Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Google and Search: Some of the Latest Developments Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Google and Search: Some of the Latest Developments Buzz database rss video personalisation algorithm Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes a look at some of the new developments at Google.
If, like me, you spend a lot of your time looking at search engines and search engine technology, you like a little variety in your life.
It's always fun to look at new search engines and to see what is happening in the industry.
However, while all roads may well lead to Rome, all discussions on search engines eventually return to Google; there is no getting away from the fact that Google is doing more in the search engine industry than anyone else.
As a result I'm just going to bite the bullet and spend this column talking about Google-related issues.
I'm not, however going to talk about how to search Google since, if you read this column on a regular basis you'll already know about all of the basics; what I'm going to do is to look at a few of the hidden extras that Google is working on which you may not have already discovered.
I'll also pass comment on a few of them, and take a few wild guesstimates on how various Google initiatives may well be changing the face of the Internet as we currently know it.
Google Search: Comparisons We all know about Google search, and as I just said, I'm not going to talk about it.
Well, not directly anyway.
However, there are a few interesting developments in this area that it is worth discussing.
The Google Advanced Search function is an excellent tool, and you can do a great deal with it.
However, it's not always terribly user-friendly for people who are not experienced searchers and who may have difficulties working out the various options.
At this point, enter Soople [1].
Soople is a great little page and it styles itself as 'easy expert search'.
All the major search functions are available, but the nice thing about it is that it offers explanations on all the different options.
If you don't know what searching within a site or domain actually means, simply click on the link for an explanation.
Soople also provides you with the option to search in particular categories such as Career, Health, Images and so on.
You can also register with the service to set up your own version of Soople, with just the options that appeal to you.
It's an excellent resource and well worth for pointing out to people who you feel may have problems searching using the advanced page.
Of course, Google isn't the only search engine that is out there.
(I know that it's sometimes difficult to believe, but there are others, trust me!)
Sometimes it's worth running a comparison between what Google finds and what other search engines find, and there has recently been a rash of comparison tools making their way onto the Internet.
Graball [2] is a really nice tool that allows you to view results from Google in a left-hand pane and the results from Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN, DMOZ, AltaVista, Gigablast or LookSmart in the right-hand pane.
Useful if you really need to see what results different search engines pull up, or you want to illustrate that Google doesn't actually find everything.
Twingine [3] does the same thing, only this time Google is in the right-hand pane, and Yahoo results are in the left-hand pane.
Consequently it's rather more limited than Graball, but useful for a quick search.
DoubleTrust [4] (Two is better than One) is a little more sophisticated since it provides you with a little more information about the pages returned, and shows the relative positions of pages in both Google and Yahoo.
If you're more interested in news and current affairs, try out NEWSiness [5] which compares news results between Google and Yahoo.
There are plenty of other similar tools out there, and any brief roundup would not be complete without mention of Thumbshots Ranking [6] (my personal favourite) and Dogpile's Missing Pieces [7].
Google Personalised There have been several attempts at personalised searching in the past, but none of them have worked terribly well in my experience.
However, Google has now tackled this problem head on.
If you visit the site up in the top left-hand corner is a small 'Sign in' link.
If you click on that, you get taken to a sign-in page (there's a surprise!)
and if you have a Gmail account, or you belong to a Google group for example you can sign in and get your own personalised home page.
Having done that you are then able to set up the Google Home Page by adding in links to your Gmail account, headlines from the New York Times, BBC News, Google news, and also small things such as 'word of the day' or inspirational quotes.
It's still at a very early stage, and I'd like to see them do more in this area, for example by allowing you to add in RSS feeds but it's a reasonable start.
However, that's almost just cosmetic; the real power of the thing is that you can check your own search history.
Google keeps a note of what you have searched for and displays your search activity.
Furthermore, it will also show you the pages that you looked at under the searches that you have run, and you can also run searches within your own search history.
It's a great tool to use on those occasions when you have visited a page but can't remember what or where it was.
The second part of the jigsaw is that Google has done extra work on the whole personalisation front.
Using the personalisation feature Google can monitor the pages that you click on and can work out what particularly interests you.
While they're not yet saying exactly how it works (although there's an excellent article at SearchEngineWatch [8] that goes into detail) it should mean that you'll be able to get results filtered that match your own interests.
So, if Google notices that you're particularly interested in gardening (because those are the type of pages that you view) when you run searches the engine can give you the opportunity of configuring the results to re-rank them so as to give greater emphasis to gardening pages.
This is clearly going to have far-ranging implications, particular as far as the whole search engine optimisation process works.
At the moment an optimiser can write content in such a way that a page gets a high ranking by using the various different algorithms Google uses in order to get a particular page towards the top of the results.
In the future however one could argue that this approach is going to be less valuable, since Google will know what you're interested in and can do this automatically for you.
I certainly don't think it's going to destroy the whole optimisation industry overnight, but it will certainly change the way in which people look at writing their content.
Google Local For some time now our American friends have been able to utilise Google to provide them with local content, and this is now being rolled out to other countries as well.
There are a couple of resources available that will be of particular interest to those of us in the UK.
The first is Google Local UK [9] and this resource allows searchers to put in a particular post code or location and then search for whatever interests them.
For example, if you need to know where you can get a Ministry of Transport roadworthiness certificate for your car (MOT), simply type in your postcode, and 'car MOT'; Google Local will display listings of Web sites in your area, references and even directions.
Not only that, but you can use this function for a variety of other things as well: if you're going on holiday to Cornwall, type in the place where you'll be staying and search for beauty, and you'll have a list of places to visit.
Google UK Maps [10] is another splendid resource.
Type in the place in which you're interested and Google will display a map of the location.
Alternatively, type in a particular feature, such as 'London Eye' or 'Glastonbury Tor'.
You can zoom in reasonably closely to your location, although it doesn't give details on all the streets in the area, just the main ones, which is a slight irritation.
However, there are two features that I particular enjoy: scrolling around the map is very smooth and not at all jerky it's also easy to zoom in or out quickly.
Secondly you can also view a satellite image of the location.
The level that you can go down to is limited in most areas of the country and has little value, but for somewhere like London you can zoom in close enough to make out individual cars!
The picture is often slightly strange, and it looks as though you are viewing the location upside down, but this is apparently caused by the way in which the photograph is taken by the satellite.
Closely allied to the satellite imaging is a new Google offering, Google Earth [11].
This combines satellite imagery, maps and search to allow you to view almost anywhere on earth.
It's a utility that you have to download, but it's quick and easy to do so (though you do need a reasonably recent and powerful machine to get the most out of it).
Once again, although everywhere on earth can be viewed, there are only a few locations (particularly outside the US) that you can view in any great detail.
However, if you like taking virtual tours around the world, this is an excellent application to play with.
Google Video Google has made video search available for some time now [12] and recently invited people to send in their own images for inclusion in its database.
With the addition of the Google viewer these videos can easily be viewed directly from the Web page.
There are currently some problems with this; I've been unable to view all the videos that are available (though other people in the UK have reported that they can see them), and Google has said that searchers in some countries are as yet unable to view them, although this feature will be rolled out in the coming months.
This latest move has raised concerns in some areas and there is an interesting article in the Financial Times [13] that explains this in more detail.
Briefly, Google claims that this move will simply help media companies find a bigger audience, while others are concerned that this will result in publishers losing control of their own work.
The Google 'Wallet' If these recent innovations were not enough, Google is now preparing to launch what has already become know as the Google Wallet; a system for allowing micropayments.
Again, we're at the very early stages of this initiative, and it's not yet clear where Google is going to go with this, although they have already said that they do not intend on going head to head with eBay and PayPal.
However, the service will allow Google to expand into other areas, such as an ability to market the sale of consumer items such as books, text documents, video and audio.
Once the system is in place it will allow Google to sell almost anything.
Micropayments have been talked about for several years now, but it would be possible for an author to publish an article and make it available for the cost of a few pence, paid for and administered via the Google Wallet.
There is also some suggestion that this will have a real impact on the whole Adsense campaign; if authors can sell their work and make money from it they may be less inclined to place adsense advertisements on their sites.
This will therefore mean that it's less viable for Web authors who use adsense to market their sites, or to write short articles that are designed to draw in traffic to click on links.
We may well therefore see far greater concentration on good quality content for which people are prepared to pay, though of course this is simply speculation on my part.
However, if you wish to read more about the possible results of the Google Wallet, it's worth looking at the article from Enterprise News and Reviews [14], and what Gary Price over at SearchEngineWatch [15] has to say about it (which also includes a link to a good article from the Wall Street Journal).
References Soople http://www.soople.com/ Graball http://www.graball.com/ Twingine http://twingine.com/ DoubleTrust http://www.doubletrust.net/ NEWSiness http://www.newsiness.com/googleyahoonews/ Thumbshots Ranking http://ranking.thumbshots.com/ Missing Pieces http://missingpieces.dogpile.com/ SearchEngineWatch http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050628-073541 Google Local UK http://local.google.co.uk/ Google UK Maps http://maps.google.co.uk/ Google Earth http://earth.google.com/ Google Video Search http://video.google.com/ Financial Times, 27 June 2005, 'Google pays the price of being top dog' http://news.ft.com/cms/s/87fef7bc-e72a-11d9-a721-00000e2511c8.html Enterprise News and Reviews, 20 June 2005, 'Electronic 'wallet' makes sense for Google' http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1829828,00.asp Gary Price 'Google Wallet coming to handle online payments' http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050617-204801 Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: "Google and Search: Some of the Latest Developments" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collection-level Description: Thinking Globally before Acting Locally Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collection-level Description: Thinking Globally before Acting Locally Buzz data database portal archives metadata schema lcsh rslp research Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman and Bridget Robinson write on the work of the Collection Description Focus and the links between Tap into Bath, Cornucopia and the Information Environment Service Registry.
Collection Description Focus The UK Collection Description Focus was launched on 1 June 2001.
It was set up as a national post, jointly funded for a twelve-month period by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1], the Research Support Libraries Program (RSLP) [2] and the British Library [3].
The aim of the Focus was to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors.
The Focus was to provide support both for UK projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work.
The Focus has now been in place for three years thanks to the continuing support of the original funders and additional funding from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) [4].
From 1 August 2004 the CD Focus will no longer be funded as a separate project but will become part of core UKOLN Advisory Services.
During its three years of funding the CD Focus [5] has engaged in a range of activities to support its aims.
These have included the organisation of workshops and briefing days, the posting of regular newsletters, the provision of an advisory service and the development of an online tutorial [6].
The work has been centred on the promotion of the collection level description schema developed for the Research Support Libraries Programme and implemented by a number of projects funded under this programme.
The programme finished in 2002.
The RSLP schema has also been used by other projects outside the RSLP programme including: Crossroads [7] a prototype Web site containing collections related to the pottery industry in North Staffordshire funded by MLA.
The project partners were the West Midlands Regional Museums Council, the West Midlands Regional Archive Council and The Libraries Partnership West Midlands Cecilia [8] a project to create an online searchable database of Music Collections in libraries, archives and museums throughout the UK.
Funded by the British Library Cooperation and Partnership Programme and managed by the International Association of Music Libraries (UK and Ireland Branch) Enrich UK [9] a gateway to the lottery-funded collections of 150 sites developed through funding from the New Opportunities Fund NOF-digitise Programme.
The content ranges across culture, history, social and economic development, science and art as well as offering regional and national ‘sense of place’ Web sites from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales Reveal [10] brings together information about services and resources for visually impaired people from organisations across the United Kingdom Collection-level Description and Reusability CD Focus owes much to these projects and those under the auspices of the RSLP Programme.
The workshops especially have been a crucial part of the work of the Focus, bringing together a range of information professionals and providing an invaluable opportunity for practitioners to come together to discuss matters of common concern.
The second workshop “Multi-purpose metadata for Collections creating reusable clds ” held in Birmingham in February 2002 included a session presented by Gordon Dunsire and Dennis Nicholson called SCONE: reusability, granularity, and collection strength [11].
In the course of the presentation they introduced the concept of thinking globally before acting locally in the context of the creation of collection descriptions.
It is a phrase that has gained momentum as the work of the Collection Description Focus has progressed.
It reflects the importance of considering very carefully at the outset of a project the requirement for “reusability”.
Typically, a collection-level description is created within the context of a specific activity or project.
As part of that context, it may be created to support certain functions or to be used by a particular user group for example, to support academic researchers in one subject area.
If such descriptions are to be reused in other contexts, (possibly for different user groups, or to support different activities), a number of issues need to be considered: the selection of collections for inclusion; the way a collection is defined, (“functional granularity”), the use of content/terminology standards and the description/measure of collection strength.
Think Globally before Acting Locally The concept of thinking globally before acting locally is very well illustrated by the three projects described in this issue of Ariadne.
Tap into Bath is an example of a small-scale demonstrator project bringing together collection-level descriptions of local resources.
The collection-level descriptions use the RSLP collection description schema and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
This adherence to standards will ensure that the data can be reused by other projects including the Cornucopia service.
Cornucopia, now entering its fourth year, provides cross-searchable collection-level descriptions for approximately 1800 registered museums in the UK.
The next phase of development will see the inclusion of information from the library and archive domains to create a truly cross-domain online service.
A key part of the development of Cornucopia will be the integration of subject-specific or thematic datasets.
Cecilia will be the first of these to be integrated into the service.
Cornucopia also uses the RSLP collection description schema.
Finally at the end of the continuum comes the JISC Information Environment Service Registry (JISC IESR).
The IESR project has developed a pilot service registry based on the RSLP collection description schema.
The registry provides a central source of information about the range of electronic resources (or collections) available, the services which provide access to these collections, and agents which own or administer the services.
However, unlike Tap into Bath, which provides a Web interface for human users, the IESR is a machine-to-machine service designed to be accessible by other applications e.g.
a portal.
Collection description services like Tap into Bath and Cornucopia could, in theory, provide a collection record for the IESR describing their collection of collection-level descriptions as an electronic resource.
As mentioned above, the articles Tap into Bath [12], Cornucopia: An open collection description service [13] and The Information Environment Service Registry: Promoting the use of electronic resources [14] are to be found in this issue.
References Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Research Support Libraries Programme http://www.rslp.ac.uk British Library http://www.bl.uk/ Museums Libraries and Archives Council http://www.mla.gov.uk/ Collection Description Focus Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/ Collection Description Focus: CD Online Tutorial http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/cdfocus-tutorial/ Crossroads http://www.crossroads-wm.org.uk/html/ Cecila http://www.cecilia-uk.org/ EnrichUK http://www.enrichuk.net/ Reveal http://www.revealweb.org.uk/ Collection Description Focus, Workshop 2: Multi-purpose metadata for collections creating reusable CLDs, 8 February 2002, Aston Business School, Birmingham http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/events/ws2/programme.html Tap into Bath, Alison Baud and Ann Chapman, issue 40, July 2004, Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/baud-chapman/ Cornucopia: An open collection description service, Chris Turner, issue 40, July 2004, Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/turner/ The Information Environment Service Registry: Promoting the use of electronic resources, Amanda Hill, issue 40, July 2004, Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/hill/ Author Details Ann Chapman Collection Description Focus UKOLN Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/ Bridget Robinson Collection Description Focus UKOLN Email:b.r.robinson@ukoln.ac.uk Web Site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff Return to top Article Title: “Collection-level Description: Thinking Globally before Acting Locally” Author: Ann Chapman and Bridget Robinson Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/robinson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Accidental Webmaster Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Accidental Webmaster Buzz copyright privacy Citation BibTex RIS Andy Prue examines a guide aimed at inexperienced Webmasters.
While the book covers some interesting and salient points, Andy raises questions as to the ideal audience.
The World Wide Web has emerged as one of the key platforms for the development and communication of information.
From complex, high-tech organisations like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) [1], through to community sites such as Abington Trails [2], a Pennsylvanian community trails group, the Web has provided effective access to a global audience of billions.
Behind each site, lies a person responsible for its creation currency and operability the Webmaster.
The Accidental Webmaster aims to support those volunteers who through 'choice or under duress' have been assigned this role.
As a consequence, the book is predominantly concerned with smaller, less sophisticated sites such as Abington Trails, a site where the author herself is The Accidental Webmaster.
The preface quickly confirms that the book is not concerned with the technical aspects of running a site.
Instead, it is aimed at providing the reader with a series of guides to site planning and management.
Divided into two parts, each supported with a small bibliography The Accidental Webmaster begins by providing outline coverage to issues concerning the general maintenance of a Web site.
Areas investigated include: setting policies, site hosting, design issues, site content, creating a community, fund-raising, legal concerns and personal Web skills development.
The chapter on site funding generated much initial interest.
Obviously, in a cash-strapped age ideas for generating additional funding are going to jump out at the reader.
However, while the chapter offers some interesting ideas in terms of acquiring corporate and government sponsorship, it also falls into the trap of ignoring the issue of the impact of sponsorship on perceived information credibility.
A patient advocacy site providing information on different forms of depression may carry an implicit question mark over its information objectivity if the site receives sponsorship from a pharmaceutical company that specialises in anti-depressant drugs.
Chapter nine explores certain legal concerns associated in the development of a Web site.
It should be observed that in the first paragraph of this chapter the two most important pieces of advice are presented: 'When in doubt, ask a lawyer.
Better yet, when in doubt, don't post it'.
Knowing that not all accidental Webmasters have access to informed legal advice, this chapter concentrates on three key legal issues: copyright, privacy and disclaimers.
The author does a credible job in highlighting some potential causes for concern in dealing with the issue of privacy.
Indeed in an age of manifest concern over child safety and the Internet, a thought provoking scenario is presented whereby the inclusion of a child's name and image on a site could inadvertently leave that child exposed to the ambitions of the more viciously manipulative elements of society.
The final part of the book provides advice on the establishment of a variety of different special interest sites, including: advocacy, political, religious, cultural, family, fan, professional organisation, child and small business Web sites.
While these chapters have been carefully considered and some key points raised, it could be argued that the adoption of a more structured information architecture/project management methodology would have raised the same concerns.
A great deal of caution should be exercised in the practice of serving up templates for others to fill in the blanks.
Each organisation, be it a religious group or a professional body will have its own nuances as compared to others in a similar field.
To ignore this is to ignore the very passion that may lie behind a particular site, making it seem sterile to its users.
Still this book has indeed raised some sound points in relation to each type of site, but for aspiring Webmasters (and this includes the 'Accidental' type), the methodologies developed by the likes of Morville and Rosenfeld's: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web [3] and Jesse James Garrett's The Elements of User Experience [4] will certainly bring profit with regard to the finished site and the Webmaster's own professional development.
To conclude, the term 'accidental' in The Accidental Webmaster carries an implicit connotation that becoming a Webmaster involves some sort of mistake.
This aura of negativity is further heightened when the role is regarded as not 'likely to be profitable'.
Strong exception should be taken to such a premise.
Profitability can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including personal improvement in terms of new skills acquired and resultant benefit to the parent organisation.
Criticism aside, there is a place for this book as an aide to hobbyists undertaking the development of a site to promote their interests.
To this market, The Accidental Webmaster has much to offer as a first step into Web development.
In terms of supporting the professional information management market this book does not provide the professional edge and valuable methodologies offered by the titles mentioned above.
References The NASA Web site http://www1.nasa.gov/home/ The Abington Trails Web site http://www.abingtontrails.org Louis Rosenfeld, A., Peter Morville.,"Information Architecture for the World Wide Web", O'Reilly, 2002, paperback ISBN 0-59600-035-9 Jesse James Garrett., "The Elements of User Experience", New Riders, 2002, paperback ISBN 0-73571-202-6 Author Details Andy Prue Web Development Librarian Kent, Surrey & Sussex Library and Knowledge Services Development Team, Health Libraries Network Email: andy.prue@stlis.thenhs.com Web site: http://stlis.thenhs.com Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: The Accidental Webmaster" Author: Andy Prue Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/prue-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: The Year 2003 in Perspective Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: The Year 2003 in Perspective Buzz database browser blog adobe standards Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes us through the major trends and highlights in the world of search engines over the course of the past year.
Since 2003 is now drawing to a close, (or at least it is while I'm writing this I suspect that when you get to read it 2004 will have dawned bright and early), I thought that it might be interesting to take a look back at a few of the things that happened in the search engine industry over the past year.
This isn't designed to be an inclusive month by month, blow by blow account, but is just a few of the trends and interesting things that I've noticed.
Google I suppose the place that I should really start is with Google, which has continued its meteoric rise to power and command of all that it surveys.
There are now over 200 million searches a day run on the search engine which represent about 75% of all search engine-generated traffic to Web sites [1].
In 18 months it has quadruped in size, annual revenues have sextupled and pre-tax profits have grown by a factor of 23.
'Google' has now become a verb, though 'To google' should be put in the same category as 'to surf' in my opinion!
In fact, the Google monopoly has grown to such an extent that Fortune magazine recently said "Google's search service has changed the way everyone from CEOs to their teenagers look for and think about information."
[2] This is not to say that everything has been going Google's way.
Competition is still strong, and AOL, eBay and Amazon are all drawing up their own battle plans to take on Google, or at the very least protect their own revenues.
The Google weakspot at the moment appears to be a lack of customer lock-in.
People use Google because they perceive (rightly or wrongly) that it's the 'best' search engine there is.
Consequently, if at some point in the future they see a different search engine appear to take that epithet they will start to use that instead.
It happened to AltaVista, so there is every reason to believe that it can happen again.
Compare how much Google knows about you, (other than the fact that you're currently searching for a specific piece of information), with the amount that Amazon can tell about you what you're interested in and what it is likely that you'll be interested in.
Of course, Google is aware of this, and have been making acquisitions that will add to its ability to focus more closely on the individual it bought Blogger.com and the Kaltix Corporation, so I expect to see a greater emphasis on this area in the coming year.
Google is also facing competition from Yahoo, which has bought Inktomi and Overture and as a result now owns AltaVista and AlltheWeb for example.
Then there is the big question mark peeking over the horizon: Microsoft.
The company is making no secret of the fact that they want a search engine and they're spending millions of dollars to ensure that they get one.
Once they have, it can be incorporated into MSN and their new operating system due out in 2006.
Consequently what we're beginning to see is a reduction in the number of different 'voices' to a smaller number of louder voices, although there are still some new ones piping up now and then, which we'll look at in a few moments.
Google has been adding new search features as well as increasing the size of its database to over 3.3 billion pages.
Some of these are quite frankly of little interest, (well, at least to me), but others are much more exciting.
One of the major problems with search engines has always been their literal nature if you ask for a search using the word 'beginner' that's exactly what you'll get.
Google has added a synonym function, using the tilde symbol (the curly horizontal line or '~' to be exact).
If this is added directly before a word, as in '~beginner', Google will look for and return results that may not include that word, but which will include terms such as 'beginner's', 'novice', 'tutorial', 'tutorials', 'primer', 'learn' and so on.
As can be seen, not only does it serve up results using similar words, it can also deal with related terms dealing with similar concepts.
It's also possible to define words, if you're not entirely sure what they mean.
Simply use the syntax 'define: <word>' and you'll get a series of results from different Web pages.
Consequently some of these definitions will be very useful, while others will be way off course.
It's also possible to do a glossary search using a new beta service [3], though I'm not entirely sure what the difference is!
Another function that I've found interesting is the Google Webquotes service [4]; by typing in a word, words or phrase, Google will hunt around for Web sites that mention the search term(s) and will provide you with quotes.
A search on 'ariadne' for example returned quotes that said "Ariadne reports on information service developments, information networking issues worldwide and current digital library initiatives.
Ariadne is published every three months."
And "Ariadne magazine is aimed at both librarians and information science professionals in academic libraries.
Its principal geographic focus is the UK.
It describes and evaluates sources and services available on " [5] Google has also added a calculator function and news alerts as well.
Other search engine developments Meanwhile the other search engines haven't been resting on what laurels they have either.
Gigablast [6] has been particularly inventive during 2003 and although it dropped the option of sorting by date it has added support for Boolean and nested logic searching [7].
However, in my personal opinion, I still think that AltaVista [8] continues to do a better job.
Ask Jeeves and consequently Teoma have added advanced search functionality to their interfaces [9] [10], although I don't find them particularly advanced -they certainly don't add anything that the other major players haven't been doing for some time.
If you're interested in searching for different file types you will have enjoyed the past year.
Google has had the option of searching for Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Postscript, Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Rich Text Format for some time, but Gigablast (it really has been a busy year for their developers) now allows users to search on PDF, Postscript, Powerpoint, and Excel, while AlltheWeb has added Rich Text Format, Powerpoint, Excel, Postscript, Word Perfect and Star Office.
2003 has also been the year of the toolbar.
For those of you who are uncertain as to exactly what a toolbar is, it's well, let's allow Google's 'define: function' to tell us.
Apparently it's "a row, column, or block of onscreen buttons or icons that, when clicked, activate certain functions of the program.
For example, the standard toolbar in Word includes buttons for changing text to italic, bold, or other styles."
[11] Google has had one for quite some time now, and I've used it a lot, and do like it.
However, certain other search engines have also added them, including HotBot, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves and Infospace.
(I wrote more about version 2 of the Google offering in July and you can read my article from my site if you're interested [12]).
In fairness, HotBot says that it is a Deskbar, and not a toolbar [13].
Google has now developed its own Deskbar [14], but since I have to confess that I've not yet played with it, that's all the comment I can give.
New search engines The year has not entirely been limited to purchases, take-overs or buy outs, because several new search engines have been launched, or if they were around in 2002, they really came to the fore in 2003.
In no particular order we have Mooter [15] (a graphical search engine) Zapmeta [16] and Fazzle [17] (two multi or meta search engines), Wotbox (still very much in development) [18], Netnose [19] (which allows users to rank Web pages for value and usefulness), Babieca [20] (a new pay per click engine) and Turbo10 [21] (designed to search the deep net).
Conclusions All in all it's been a busy year, and although it seems that the scene has been dominated by a small number of players involved in games of Monopoly it's still been busy and, I think, quite healthy.
Indeed, I've not even mentioned weblogs and the developments of search engines to deal with them in this article!
I'm fully expecting that 2004 will be equally as interesting, if not more so.
References ClariNews 24 October 2003 :" Web superstar Google eyes public offering" http://quickstart.clari.net/qs_se/webnews/wed/ak/Qus-internet-google.RmvW_DOO.html Fortune : "Can Google Grow Up?"
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,548765-1,00.html Google glossary http://labs.google.com/glossary Google Webquotes http://labs.google.com/cgi-bin/webquotes Google Webquotes on Ariadne http://labs.google.com/cgi-bin/webquotes?num_quotes=3&q=ariadne&btnG=Google+WebQuotes+ Search&show_titles=1&bold_links=1&snippet_threshold=3 Gigablast http://www.gigablast.com/ Gigablast Help Page http://www.gigablast.com/help.html Altavista http://www.altavista.com Ask Jeeves Advanced Options http://web.ask.com/webadvanced?&o=0 Teoma Advanced Search http://s.teoma.com/advancedsearch?q=&p=0 Google define : <toolbar>: Definitions of 'toolbar' on the Web http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=define%3A+toolbar Phil Bradley's Web site: "The new Google Toolbar version beta 2.0" http://www.philb.com/gtoolbar.htm HotBot tools page http://www.hotbot.com/tools/ Google: Search using Google without opening your browser http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar/index.html Mooter http://www.mooter.com zapmeta http://www.zapmeta.com fazzle http://www.fazzle.com wotbox http://www.wotbot.com/ NetNose http://www.netnose.com Babieca http://www.babieca.com Turbo10 http://turbo10.com Author Details Phil Bradley 5 Walton Gardens Feltham Middlesex Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independent Internet Consultant.
Return to top Article Title: "Search Engines: the year 2003 in perspective" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Second Digital Repositories Programme Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Second Digital Repositories Programme Meeting Buzz data wiki database xml infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus doi browser identifier schema repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh multimedia gis e-learning uri uddi drm curation interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Julie Allinson and Mahendra Mahey report on a 2-day JISC Digital Repositories Meeting focusing on project clusters working together and other related issues held by JISC in Warwick, UK over 27-28 March 2006.
The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Digital Repositories Programme [1] held its second Programme meeting towards the end of March.
Following in the collaborative tradition set by last October's joint Programme meeting with the Digital Preservation and Asset Management Programme [2], this gathering was themed around the cluster groups established by the Digital Repositories Programme [3] and included many guests from other JISC areas of work and beyond.
These clusters seek to encompass many of the diverse issues being considered across the Digital Repositories Programme, including the different repository types (e-Learning and Scientific data), the infrastructural and technical issues (Integrating infrastructure and Machine services) and the social, cultural and legal topics (Legal and policy, Personal resource management strategies and Preservation).
Invited guests included members of the Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group, whose formal meeting followed on the Tuesday afternoon, representatives from other JISC projects, such as those falling within the Digital Preservation and Asset Management Programme, and external invitees from the Wellcome Trust and Key Perspectives Ltd. [4] Informal Meetings On the Monday morning, some time was made available for an informal thematic meeting on personal resource management strategies a topic that cuts across many of the projects, irrespective of domain and cluster.
Personal Resource Management Strategies This session [5] looked at harnessing, supporting and integrating personal resource management strategies within repositories.
Sarah Currier introduced the session and the theme, which is relevant to her project, Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories.
Richard Green then gave a presentation on some of the outcomes of the RepoMMan (Repository Metadata and Management) project [6] .
RepoMMan are building a workflow tool on top of FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) [7] to enable users to use a repository for the entire lifecycle of a document, from inception to publication.
Richard talked about their online user requirements survey, which has had some interesting findings.
These suggested that digital repositories were seen as a welcome addition and could contribute to personal resource management, particularly for users whose current strategies are haphazard.
Chris Pegler then talked about the PROWE (Personal Repositories Online Wiki Environment) [8] project which is looking as the use of wikis and informal mechanisms for part-time, distributed lecturers.
The project is a partnership between the Open University and the University of Leicester, both of whom has large distance learning programmes.
Again personal resource management plays an important role where lecturers might be employed at multiple institutions, in diverse locations and on a part-time basis.
Discussion at the end of this session acknowledged that there were a wide range of issues here, including version control, workflow, the use of file formats, the role of communities and the use of formal and informal approaches.
Plenary Presentation : Monday Rachel Bruce, JISC Programme Director for the Information Environment, gave the keynote address to the meeting on Monday.
The focus was on the current JISC capital spending on repositories.
Rachel outlined how the £14 million would be spent across different workpackages relating to repositories.
Calls for proposals will be issued in April and September 2006, and April 2007.
The overall aim is to improve the digital content infrastructure through curation, interoperability and discovery.
Funding areas included funding for local repository creation and innovation and, at a national level, money for improving interoperability, infrastructure, shared services and improving repository knowledge and skills through a network of experts for repositories.
Plenary Presentation : Tuesday Brian Kelly, from UKOLN, gave a talk on 'Standards For JISC's Digital Repositories Programme' [9].
Brian looked at the approach to the use of standards developed for JISC's development programmes that focuses on the use of open standards wherever possible.
Brian also gave an overview of standards for the digital repositories programme, looking at some specific areas of interest: standards for metadata, harvesting and identifiers.
In addition, Brian gave some suggestions for how feedback might be gathered.
Cluster Sessions The remainder of the meeting was spent in parallel cluster sessions.
E-Learning Cluster Session This session [10] was chaired by Amber Thomas from JISC and was attended by CD-LOR (Community Dimension of Learning Object Repositories) [11], PROWE, Rights and Rewards [12], WM-Share (West Midlands Share) [13], JORUM [14] and TrustDR (Trust in Digital Repositories) [15].
Each project gave a short presentation, focussing on one of two topics: 'Communities finding or building them?'
or 'IPR in Elearning repositories'.
In addition, Phil Barker, CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards) [16], gave a briefing on OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for MetaData Harvesting).
Phil outlined the background of OAI PMH, emerging from the world of sharing e-prints through the web.
He explained the way that the protocol works, and how it is related to metadata harvesting tools.
He showed practical examples of how the query language works over a browser interface or with other systems.
Communities: Finding or Building Them?
Discussion here covered the usefulness of community as a notion, and whether it should encompass set groups such as teaching teams.
It was suggested that there can be dysfunctional communities, and some negative experiences of communities were discussed.
There is evidence from JORUM and other repositories that users do value the community concept and there is an incentive to contribute and use it.
All the projects noted that people are concerned about 'making things visible', the notion of 'reification'.
It seemed that projects all conceptualised groups of users as being key rather than isolated individuals, but whether the groups are tightly defined enough or voluntary enough to be 'communities' was a point for discussion.
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Elearning Repositories Discussion here covered widespread common practices that are contrary to best practice.
They may arise from lack of awareness but there is also calculated risk-taking.
Once the content is more widely available, the risk of the IPR owner finding out about infringements is much greater, so the risk assessment needs reviewing.
Effective notice and takedown procedures are crucial.
It was suggested that attributing third party copyright is good practice and may actually reduce the risk of the IPR owner taking action.
At the end of the session some actions and suggestions for future work were identified and included using the Digital Repositories Programme wiki in various ways to share and collaborate.
Integrating Infrastructure Cluster Session This session [17] was chaired by Neil Jacobs from JISC and attended by a diverse range of projects, including IRI Scotland (Institutional Repository Infrastructure for Scotland) [18], SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) Plus [19], PerX (Pilot Engineering Repository XSearch)[20], MIDESS (Management of Images in a Distributed Environment with Shared Services) [21], Repository Bridge [22], Community Eprints [23], IESR (Information Environment Service Registry) [24], IEMSR (Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry) [25], SPIRE (Secure Personal Institutional and Inter-Institutional Repository Environment) [26], Versions (Versions of Eprints user Requirements Study and Investigation Of the Need for Standards) [27], Geo-X-Walk [28] , STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit) and the JISC Linking UK Repositories Study [29].
Prior to the meeting, projects in this cluster were asked to submit summaries and identify questions and/or topic areas for discussion.
To open the meeting, Neil Jacobs gave a brief outline of the forthcoming JISC funding for repositories before introducing Alma Swan, from Key Perspectives Ltd.[30], to talk bout the Linking Repositories scoping study.
This study is being carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd and the University of Hull, with significant input from SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) [31] and the University of Southampton.
The final report is due at the end of April 2006 and its purpose is to scope technical and organisational models for establishing a national repository services infrastructure.
The study is looking at user requirements, the roles and responsibilities of repositories and services, technical architecture and business models for offering a viable and sustainable infrastructure.
Alma talked about findings to-date identifying a wide range of issues.
In conclusion, Alma stressed that communication is critical to the development of good, viable, sustainable services.
Following on from Alma's presentation, there was discussion of the need to understand the repository landscape, including the role and interrelationship of informal (such as P2P) and formal repositories, where function and context define the standards and technologies used.
The group also discussed the potential for repository coalition(s) which were seen to have roles in helping clarify confusion over the landscape, in supporting repository development, providing a collective voice and drawing together the resources that already exist.
These coalition(s) would naturally grow out of communities, which are created for a range of purposes.
Understanding these communities and their needs would help define repository services, which might need to be specific repository-level services or aggregated services provided at a higher level.
Affecting culture change and changing the notion of publishing were seen as a beneficial outcome of creating a better understood, sustainable and integrated repository landscape.
Scientific Data Cluster Session This session was chaired by Rachel Bruce from JISC.
Attendees at this session [32] included eBank [33], GRADE (Scoping a Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction) [34], R4L (Repository for the Laboratory) [35], StORe (Source-to-Output Repositories) [36] and SPECTra (Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data) [37], User Needs and Potential Users of Public Repositories [38] and CLADDIER (Citation, Location, And Deposition in Discipline and Institutional Repositories) [39] and RepoMMan.
Each project discussed issues around the themes of 'identifiers', 'metadata' and 'digital rights management'.
The session also included a presentation from Robert Terry of the Wellcome Institute, on UK PubMed Central [40].
Identifiers There was general agreement about the fact that it was difficult enough to agree unique identifiers with formal publications but there are even greater difficulties with range of projects present and different data types to identify, e.g.
digital objects, data streams, information packages etc.
The CLADDIER project felt there was too much diversity to standardise on identifiers.
Each archive in the CLADDIER project is therefore using it's own identifier to maintain autonomy.
e-Bank overlaps with R4L and are using DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) [41] to identify datasets.
The cost currently is12 euro cents to register and 2 cents to maintain per year for each identifier.
E-bank stated that 'resolution' (the returning of metadata about the object and not a copy of it) is a big issue around identifiers.
E-bank reported that the DOI database does not cover as much metadata as other identifier systems and so it may be of limited future use in the context of being used to identify datasets.
It was stressed that there needs to be discussion around how to create stable URIs (Universal Resource Indicators) as this is a major issue for e-bank hinging largely on how long the URI provider is around.
GRADE are partners with CLADDIER who use the Handlers system [42] and the project is looking at the use and re-use of geospatial data from formal to informal contexts and including Digital Rights Management (DRM).
One issue emerging for the project is a discussion on when to identify a particular data set.
Probity (integrity) is a therefore an interesting issue in this area and is also related to whole issue of digital rights.
StORE reported that their project is looking at potential relationships between source and output repositories so that is possible to look in both directions from published paper to source data and back.
Currently, there is no evidence to back up how a research article based on data got its results as there is no link back to the data the paper was based.
However, as long as the data the research is based on is also stored in a repository it would be possible to use an identifier from the research article to do this.
Therefore StORE would be interested in the types of identifiers being used by projects to reference articles as well as data.
SPECTRA pointed out that cost becomes a considerable problem with identifiers especially when there is large scale handling of data and therefore potentially thousands of data sets might need identifiers.
E-bank pointed out that one way of approaching large numbers of data sets is to merge several into one report and then register that report as a data set.
SPECTRA also highlighted issues that need to be discussed about versioning of data where a data set becomes unique due to changes made and therefore is not simply another version of the dataset but rather a completely new one.
It was felt by the group that there is a potential role for funding bodies to make money available for identifier registration to make sure identifiers are use to link to datasets available.
Robert Terry from Pub Med Central pointed out that the ADC (Astronomical Data Center) [43] has quite a strict policy on the quality of dataset it accepts and therefore could be a good model for projects to look at as to when to accept one being assigned an identifier.
He made the point that a line needs to be drawn on what data needs to be identified using global identifiers as opposed to local ones.
Also, he mentioned that no one had thought of the additional cost of keeping clinical trial data on computers for ten years and curation issues need to be discussed in relation to all datasets.
Finally, there is not a reward system to making data available and there are significant differences in how data is shared and managed across disciplines.
Planetary research is a good example of how it can take 25 years to get probes developed which then collect data; and then generally the team that runs the instrument gets exclusive use of data and it is only after an embargo period that it goes into a public repository for other researchers to use.
Rights Issues The data cluster then discussed rights issues: The GRADE project identified in the UK geospatial community copyright is retained even over re-mapping.
The team are therefore currently working on what area of law this comes under, particularly for Crown Copyright, which is concerned with paper.
Currently some projects cannot share their data because it is based on OS (Ordinance Survey) base maps.
The Office of Public Sector Information is looking to change their position on availability of the data.
CLADDIER is likely to have to look at rights issues of data at some point in time but has no specific plans to do so at present.
e-BANK have had to think about a rights model, as making data public then negates IPR and patent claims.
Rights can be relatively simple as they usually reside with the institution that created it and making the data publicly available is therefore their responsibility.
One promising area is that of an 'embargo period' where other people's work is now being given away after a fixed period of time which is specified by the depositor when they deposit their work in the repository in the first place.
This could serve as a model for other academic disciplines where this might be an issue.
StORE is not having to find rights answers because repositories owners (usually the institution) make their own rules.
The SPECTRA project communicated that most chemists are worried about other researchers using their material before it goes into a peer review publication and quite often they would like to have a five year embargo on their data.
The open access principle had to be compromised to get chemists on board.
There is therefore an argument that this issue can be resolved by an agreement for chemists not to publish articles using the source data.
SPECTRA poised the interesting question of whether it worth challenging these assumptions to make data more widely available, s academics would be prepared to at least submit their articles for publication if not the associated data.
UK PubMed Central (Robert Terry) and the Wellcome Trust provides funding to cover the costs of publishing for the top 30 universities in the UK.
They felt there was a need to make it as easy as possible for researchers to publish and by doing this would create a critical mass of people which would in turn influence policy.
Robert stated that the service was starting to get a significant international base of published data that could get to the heart of difficulties around standard ways of publishing for the academic community.
Metadata Most projects use standards for metadata that have already been developed due to the need for interoperability.
Further Actions A number of future actions were agreed by this cluster and can be viewed on the wiki [32].
Legal and Policy Issues Cluster Session This session .
This session [44] was chaired by Naomi Korn and attended by TrustDR, GRADE , Rights & Rewards, VERSIONS, EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) [45].
To start the session, each project gave a short presentation about its work.
Following this, Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim provided an update from the JISC IPR consultancy, a 2 year consultancy ongoing until 2007, internal to JISC and supporting projects/programmes and producing reports and news letters for JISC staff.
It differs from JISC which is a front end advisory service that is proactive and reactive to user queries.
There are 3 consultants: Naomi Korn, Charles Oppenheim, and Sol Picciotto.
The session then divided into small groups to discuss the following statement: 'Enforcing contracts is not always possible, so the use, access and contribution of material to repositories will often require varying levels of trust and other methods'.
Key issues reported back to the other cluster groups included agreement that commonalities between projects exist yet they are also diverse and taking different approaches.
Different communities and media types affect the way rights are approached, but diversity of approach may be a good thing.
Through talking to each other, communities can address overlaps and differences and find solutions.
The group agreed that the cluster was a useful forum and should move forward by inviting new projects, holding regular meetings and sharing resources and information via the Programme wiki [44].
Repositories and Preservation Cluster Session This session was chaired by Steve Hitchcock from the University of Southampton.
Attendees at this session [46] included Sherpa DP [47], Sherpa Plus, PARADIGM (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) [48], PRESERV (PReservation Eprint SERVices) [49], Repository Bridge, DCC (Digital Curation Centre) [50] and MIDESS.
Steve Hitchcock introduced the meeting and its aim to enable collaboration between projects.
Thinking about new areas and projects for future JISC funding was also encouraged.
Helen Hockx-Yu then gave a recap of the 12 workpackages for forthcoming JISC funding, outlining some of the preservation elements.
There was some discussion at this point about support for the uptake of XML (Extensible Markup Language).
Steve Hitchcock opened the discussion session with a short presentation on the content-service provider model and talked about projects that are developing practical applications based on this model.
Referring to the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) [51], Steve noted that repositories are well advanced in fulfilling data management functions, but preservation elements are lacking.
Existing expertise, such as that brought together by the cluster, can be used to plug this gap.
Discussion kicked off with some debate around the definition of curation and preservation.
Other broad areas of discussion covered lifecycle and advocacy and issues relating to embedding preservation practices into the workflow at the point of creation, rather than attempting to retrospectively preserve.
The importance of metadata in this process should not be underestimated.
IPR and DRM issues surfaced also in collecting and preserving material, particularly where transfer occurs.
There was some debate about assessment factors and risk, with general agreement that preservation risks should not be over-stated or used as a 'scare tactic'.
It is better to look to the shorter term and at specific needs, such as specifying standards for preserving multimedia and scientific data.
Trust and certification was also discussed, with some concern expressed over developing a high-level certification process which could act as a barrier to repositories taking preservation on board.
Ideas for further work included sharing knowledge and tools through exchanges of code or expertise, DCC-organised events, using the Programme wiki to share and discuss, holding further focussed meetings, ensuring skills are widely used and exploring lightweight approaches to certification.
Machine services This session was chaired by Philip Vaughan from JISC.
Attendees at this session [52] included IESR, IEMSR, RepoMMan, GeoXWalk, HILT (High-Level Thesaurus) [53] and ASK(Accessing and Storing Knowledge) [54].
There was an initial discussion of what machine and shared services were and list of characteristics were drawn up: Open and fuzzy boundaries Almost no human intervention Process hidden from users A human interface is sometimes needed to establish what is happening behind the scenes Can be used to enhance searching Could be called shared infrastructure services?
Is not limited to web services Machine to Machine services are built with some rationale behind it After this, IESR, IEMSR, GeoXWalk and HILT gave presentations which are available on the programme wiki [52].
Each presentation was followed by a question/answer session.
Following this, JISC programme projects present gave a brief overview of how their projects are using machine to machine services (or could use them) and how they could possibly link and use some of the services that were presented earlier.
The following issues and ideas were agreed that would be taken forward: Relationship between OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) [55] and IESR and IEMSR and IESR would be investigated and recorded on the wiki UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) [56] view on IESR How can HILT and GeoXwalk fit into the search infrastructures for repositories Keep an eye on Sherpa ROMEO's (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving) [57] development of machine to machine services Develop scenarios of how to interact with the services presented.
What are the real problems in putting services into practice, real examples are needed.
These could be recorded on the wiki.
It was felt that the further meetings on themed topics would be useful.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Amber Thomas, Sarah Currier and Brian Kelly.
Conclusion Each session reported back to the whole meeting, presenting some of the issues discussed and ideas for further work.
Overall the Second Digital Repositories meeting provided an opportunity for projects within the Programme to meet, network, share experiences, concerns and issues and identify ways of working together within their cluster groups.
By inviting projects from across JISC and beyond, the scope of activity and collaboration was further widened to ensure that repository development is embedded within and across JISC activities over the coming years.
References Digital Repositories Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digital_repositories Joint Programme Meeting: Digital Preservation and Repositories Programmes http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=jpm_preservation_and_repositories and Programme meeting 10-10-2005 summary DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Programme_meeting_10-10-2005_summary Clusters DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Clusters Programme meeting 2006-03-27 DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Programme_meeting_2006-03-27 UKOLN Web Focus Events Second Digital Repositories Programme meeting http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/meetings/jisc-2006-03/ RepoMMan home page http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ Fedora http://www.fedora.info/ PROWE http://www.prowe.ac.uk UKOLN Web Focus Events Second Digital Repositories Programme meeting http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/meetings/jisc-2006-03/ E-learning cluster session 2006-03-27 DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/E-learning_cluster_session_2006-03-27 News http://www.ic-learning.dundee.ac.uk/projects/CD-LOR/ Rights and Rewards Project http://rightsandrewards.lboro.ac.uk/index.php?section=1 University of Worcester West Midlands Share Project http://www2.worc.ac.uk/wm-share/ Jorum Home http://www.jorum.ac.uk The TrustDR Project Home Page http://www.uhi.ac.uk/lis/projects/trustdr/ Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards http://www.cetis.ac.uk Integrating infrastructure cluster session 2006-03-27 DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Integrating_infrastructure_cluster_session_2006-03-27 RIScotland: Institutional Repository Infrastructure for Scotland http://www.iriscotland.lib.ed.ac.uk/index.html SHERPA Plus http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/projects/sherpaplus.html PerX: Pilot Engineering Repository Xsearch Homepage http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/ MIDESS http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/midess/ Repository Bridge Home http://www.inf.aber.ac.uk/bridge/ EPrints Community http://www.eprints.org/community/ http://iesr.ac.uk/ IESR: Information Environment Service Registry http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/iemsr/ SPIRE Trac http://spire.conted.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/trac.cgi VERSIONS http://library-2.lse.ac.uk/versions/ GeoCrossWalk Gazetteer Middleware http://www.geoxwalk.ac.uk STARGATE: Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit: Enabling small publishers to participate in OAI-based services: Home page http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/stargate/ Key perspectives.
Consultants to the scholarly information industry.
Publishing consultants.
Open access.
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/ SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Data repositories cluster session 2006-03-27 DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Data_repositories_cluster_session_2006-03-27 UKOLN eBank UK project http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ebank-uk GRADE Project http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/ R4L: The Repository for the Laboratory a JISC Project http://r4l.eprints.org/ WikiHome JISC STORE JotSpot http://jiscstore.jot.com/WikiHome Spectra Project Home http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/spectra/ User Needs and Potential Users of Public Repositories: An Integrated Analysis http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/DigitalRepositories/ CLADDIER http://claddier.badc.ac.uk/ PubMed Central Homepage http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ The Digital Object Identifier System http://www.doi.org/ The Handle System http://www.handle.net NASA Astronomical Data Center Home page http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Legal and policy issues cluster session 2006-03-27 DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Legal_and_policy_issues_cluster_session_2006-03-27 EThOS Home Page http://www.ethos.ac.uk/ Repositories and preservation cluster session 2006-03-27 DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Repositories_and_preservation_cluster_session_2006-03-27 Arts and Humanities Data Service http://ahds.ac.uk/about/projects/sherpa-dp/index.html Paradigm Home http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/ PRESERV: PReservation Eprint SERVices: a JISC Project http://preserv.eprints.org/ Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk Open Archival Information System http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf Machine services cluster session 2006-03-27 DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Machine_services_cluster_session_2006-03-27 Hilt Homepage http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/index.html Main Page ASK http://ask.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ask/index.php/Main_Page OpenDOAR Directory of Open Access Repositories http://www.opendoar.org/ ASIS Standards and Other Approved Work http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/index.php#uddiv2 SHERPA/RoMEO Project http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/projects/sherparomeo.html Author Details Julie Allinson Digital Repositories Support Officer UKOLN University of Bath BA2 7AY Email: j.allinson@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep Mahendra Mahey Digital Repositories Support Officer UKOLN University of Bath BA2 7AY Email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep Return to top Article Title: "The Second Digital Repositories Programme Meeting" Author: Julie Allinson and Mahendra Mahey Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/jisc-repositories-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Capacity Building: Spoken Word at Glasgow Caledonian University Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Capacity Building: Spoken Word at Glasgow Caledonian University Buzz data software java wiki javascript database dissemination rss xml atom portal usability infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility tagging browser identifier repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing multimedia provenance adobe streaming flash wav php lom mp3 mysql curation podcast licence authentication interoperability plone url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Iain Wallace, Graeme West and David Donald give an account of the origins, nature and establishment of Spoken Word Services at Glasgow Caledonian University.
At Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) the Spoken Word [1], a project in the JISC / NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom (DLiC) programme [2], was conceived in 2001-2002 in response to a set of pedagogical and institutional imperatives.
A small group of social scientists had, since the 1990s, been promoting the idea of using 'an information technology-intensive learning environment' to recapture some of the traditional aspirations of Scottish Higher Education, in particular independent, critical and co-operative learning [3].
And the institution was about to embark on the construction of the SALTIRE [4], a purpose-built learning centre, incorporating a full set of resources to support the contemporary learner.
The partners in the five-year (2003-08) project are: in the USA, the MATRIX [5] unit at Michigan State University (MSU) with the OYEZ project and Academic Technologies [6] at Northwestern University (NU); and, in the UK, Learner Support at GCU with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Information and Archives.
Prior to the submission the project partners were linked through their interests, and cooperation, in developing the academic use of remote digital libraries of audio and video content.
GCU set out to collaborate with these partners to demonstrate how substantial resources of audio (and subsequently video) from the archives of the BBC might be made available to students and their teachers.
The project was to be exemplary of the approaches to learning and scholarship and the concomitant supports offered to the University community from the new SALTIRE learning centre.
It was also intended to build capacities within the support services, and in particular, to embed resources for electronic library development.
General Design Requirements Library standards were important to GCU from the outset.
A stated objective was to induce students to 'write on and for the Internet' using authoritative sources and legitimate rhetoric [7].
To secure the confidence of academic supervisors procedures analogous to those used in traditional text were pursued.
In particular, the citing and referencing of accessible sources of established provenance and persistence had to be possible.
Tools to address digital libraries, retrieve content and support the creation of student projects were needed.
A central aspiration was to develop resources to meet these standards and yet support flexible and adaptable delivery.
The intention was to accommodate 'pedagogical pluralism' allowing for different approaches to, and styles of, teaching by different personalities and within different disciplines.
A range of teachers and disciplines, from GCU and from other universities in the EU and the USA, has been involved throughout.
From 'privatisation and regulation' in economics and 'the ethics of biology' at GCU, through 'hospitality management' at University of Strathclyde and 'the impact of technology from 1945' in history at Northwestern to 'Gandhi' for anthropology and 'women in British politics' for women's studies at Kansas State, the range of disciplines and topics using the service has been considerable.
Over 1,500 registered users have used the service.
A second stated objective of the original project was to 'enhance digital libraries' (of, for example, BBC content) for academic use and that has been a major priority.
High 'usability' was a prerequisite for successful use in the essentially (if symbiotically) linked activities of learning, teaching and research.
The requirement to serve diversity, and a consciousness of relatively rapid and continuous technological change, were the major influences on the design of the service.
Design of the Services Major Features As a general principle, an approach analogous to 'separation of concerns' programming was adopted.
Partitioning of the functions and components of the service provided flexibility and better facilitated the management of change.
This approach allowed a 'division of labour' but the associated 'specialisation of function' has been harder to maintain in a small team.
The general principle of maintaining some separation of: front-end applications / presentation layer; a business logic layer; and a backend storage and delivery layer has not been fully realised but remains a goal.
Thus ideally the tools for searching, collecting items, marking and annotating clips and creating final presentations would be portable and might address a range of content-providing repositories through appropriate middleware.
In the current set-up they are either completely integrated or relatively separate.
The goal is 'plug-in plug-out'.
Acquiring BBC Content Fundamental to the provision of the service was access to a satisfactorily large and appropriate subset of BBC content (programmes and metadata).
'Satisfactorily large' would mean sufficient content to allow users choices and alternatives.
Students would be obliged to choose carefully what was best for their stated purposes.
The negotiation of rights represented the largest obstacle.
GCU and the BBC entered into a legal deposit agreement in which the Corporation gave the University non-exclusive permissions to hold content deposited from the archives and to serve them internationally 'for educational use only' as both streams for access from GCU URLs and as downloads 'for individual study use only'.
The University were required to accept liability for securing third-party rights and thus for undertaking the clearance of such rights.
This necessitated the establishment of a rights clearance team and, in the first instance, the use of a FileMaker database to keep an audit of the processes of clearance and to record data and calculate the basic statistics.
All participants in programmes broadcast from 1988 onwards are searched for and, if found, contacted and asked to give permission for educational use, worldwide through the Web.
Of those successfully contacted, the vast majority has granted permissions.
Full clearance statistics will be published before the end of the project.
The next element in the process was the identification of programmes of potential interest to teachers.
Disciplinary experts (teachers) are assisted by the project librarians to select programmes from the BBC's proprietary catalogue (INFAX).
Initially this process relied on a private Greenstone [8] representation of the BBC catalogue.
Recently, as an aspect of a set of general initiatives to provide wider access to the archives, the BBC has made its catalogue publicly available online [9] and this has been used for selection.
Selected programmes are requested in batches from the BBC which digitises as necessary.
Digitised programmes are delivered to GCU and transcoded from the original .wav files for streaming and downloading from Spoken Word GCU servers.
They are then linked to BBC and additional GCU-generated metadata in a repository and streamed as MPEG4/H264 with MP3/MPEG4 downloads.
Initial Repository Solutions At an early stage (2004), the project successfully ingested the data from the BBC (INFAX) catalogue into a FEDORA [10] repository but the development effort required to use the FEDORA application to create a working service, with acceptable user interfaces, in an acceptable time-frame, was deemed too heavy.
REPOS [11] is a working repository solution (PHP/MySQL) created by MSU.
Although it had shortcomings in relation to the project vision, it enabled the rapid development of a working digital library.
It has supported a working service for the last three years.
However the front end had been not developed for use by teachers and students.
MATRIX at MSU provided a rudimentary version of a more user-friendly interface and GCU developed and elaborated this into Padova, which we describe in more detail below.
Each of the records created is a super-set of the original BBC catalogue entry and has a link to the digitised BBC programme.
The additional information provided always includes the name of the teacher who is the collector and his or her discipline.
The original intention of collecting additional rich information from the expert collectors and for investigating the capture of 'user-generated metadata' has not yet been fully pursued: in the service version we do not, as yet, have the capacity to enable users to write back to the repository.
Finding Aids and Associated Facilities The initial requirement of users of a library of multimedia items is to find programmes or items and then to assess their appropriateness.
The goal of the service is to provide a range of ways to locate resources.
Ideally, searches could be initiated from within tools which collect items for later use and/or enable text or voice annotations of programmes or clips.
Searching from the catalogues (OPACS etc,) to locate books and articles would also be convenient.
Both Sentient Discover and Sirsi Rooms were investigated; however, it was felt their implementation could not be justified within the scope of the project.
On a demonstration and development server we have entries and live links to our repository running in an instance of our University Sirsi Unicorn library catalogue; we hope to achieve a full implementation for the coming session.
But Padova was developed as our main finding aid.
Padova Padova is the name given to the public-facing, Web-delivered, front end to the REPOS repository.
It provides search, browse, citation, notification, and external service integration systems to users, along with delivery of the media itself.
A central concern was maintaining the integrity of its BBC deposit agreement with GCU.
An authentication layer was developed, enabling metadata to be openly searchable but with the BBC media protected behind a registration process which obliged users to accept the terms of a 'student-friendly' End User License Agreement [12].
In pursuit of the vision of enhancing the capacities of learners to write 'on and for the Internet', several features were developed to encourage the use of established scholarly practices in the new repository environment.
Of particular significance is the inclusion of a citation system, enabling consistent references to content to be downloaded for import into standard reference management software.
Citations contain a URL link to the media item, allowing learners to build their own libraries of Spoken Word content.
Padova incorporates notification systems, providing RSS and Atom feeds for searches.
Though now relatively commonplace, Padova was one of the first systems to allow users to generate their own personalised RSS feeds based on any search query with links to media items attached.
This can create, for any feed reading application, a 'live linked' listing of content akin to a bibliography.
When a new item conforming to the search is added, it appears in the list.
Registered users can also access the functionality to create RSS feeds with the media items attached as MP3 files, thus supporting the creation of instant and customised subject-specific podcasts.
External services are integrated throughout and can be further developed.
Currently, automatic links to Wikipedia pages and to Google Scholar provide searches based on names of programme participants parsed out of record metadata, as well as internal links to other Spoken Word resources featuring those individuals.
For example a search for "Bedouin" will find a programme which lists P.J.
O'Rourke as a participant and that entry will be hyper-linked to occurrences in both external services and in the internal catalogue.
Delivery of audio and video material is of course the main purpose of Padova.
The Project has obligations to restrict the use of BBC media on third-party educational Web sites Web to streaming media only.
On teaching sites, including VLEs, a GCU URL must link to the GCU servers.
This led to the integration of Apple's Darwin Streaming Server within the repository infrastructure as a cost-effective solution to the delivery of audio and video in a relatively standards-compliant fashion.
Investigation of Adobe Flash as a media delivery format is underway, and provision is planned as an alternative delivery mechanism.
However, the MPEG family of standards looks set to remain the project's mainstay for the foreseeable future.
Collection and Presentation Tools MATRIX has developed a tool set called MediaMatrix [13] which allows users to visit Web pages and collect resources for subsequent use.
This software supports: the easy assembly of a collection of multimedia resources the referencing of key sections or points ('clippings') and their transfer back to a project or presentation.
Users log onto the server service at MSU.
They then load a 'bookmarklet' (a JavaScript function embedded into a Web browser bookmark) into their browser and navigate to a Web page which can be searched for the presence of any audio, image, or video files (or a text extract).
An item of interest, or a part or point (clipping) of it, can then be selected, marked for collection and annotated.
The located files are not downloaded, but are merely referenced (linked) thus reducing copyright issues (such 'deep linking' may still raise problems in various legal jurisdictions).
A simple presentation facility allows users to present a report containing the references; or they can be pasted into word processing or other software.
The items collected are stored on the user's personal portal page in MATRIX servers.
This page keeps all their annotations and maintains direct links to the marked portions of the original pages.
Users can organise their thoughts on the portal page using folders.
Teachers can create a group for each of their classes and invite students to join that group, allowing both the teacher and students to preview the work of, and collaborate with, other members of the class.
Members of a group have complete control over permissions for access allowing a folder to be shared with the group or kept private.
Annotation Tools Attaching text (or voice) annotations to marked sections of audio, video or images is an attractive goal.
Being able to do that in a shared real-time environment offers a host of teaching, research and development possibilities.
Project Pad [14] from Academic Technologies at Northwestern University delivers that functionality in a particularly attractive and customisable user environment.
It is programmed in Java and Flash (ActiveScript).
Its major functions are: Both transcription and audio annotation: this allows fine-grained annotation of a transcript with word-level synchronisation to an audio stream.
It includes the ability to gather research data using structured annotations.
Timeline-based audio annotation: this supports informal audio annotation and sharing between users.
It supports transcript synchronisation but only at sentence or paragraph level and, unlike the transcript annotation tool, it also allows annotation of audio streams which do not have transcripts.
Timeline-based video annotation tool: this is similar to the audio annotation tool.
It supports Adobe Flash video streams.
Repository search tool: this supports both Fedora and Google searches (other repositories can be added through a plug-in).
It imports digital media objects (actually references to those objects) for annotation.
Metadata editor: a flexible template-based metadata editor that can be used to attach form-based metadata to digital objects.
Templates are included for editing Dublin Core and UK LOM Core metadata for the creation of user-defined collections that serve as learning objects.
Report tools for listing annotations in various ways: these include extracting data sets for statistical processing and the listing of student-generated annotations for a range of teaching purposes including grading.
The project has developed versions running in a Sakai [15] environment and with a Plone [16] back end.
A version addressing a Fedora repository is being investigated by Northwestern.
Futures The Revolution Starts Here The imperatives for the library world of the widely acknowledged and ongoing "Revolution in Scholarly Communication" [17] is dependent upon and supported by trusted digital repositories.
As Spoken Word considered the transition from a project to a set of core digital library services [18], the need for a long-term robust repository solution became clear.
General inquiries as to who was doing what, and existing expertise from our project partners in Academic Technologies at NU led to early investigations into the open source repository software Fedora.
Fedora: Next Thoughts on Repositories Although complex, FEDORA repository software offers a flexible service-oriented architecture for managing and delivering digital content.
In late 2005 meetings in Denmark and in Wales led to the formation of a UK and Ireland Fedora Users Group.
Spoken Word Services attended the first meeting of this group, held in the University of Hull in May 2006.
Subsequent meetings at GCU and the University of Oxford have seen the numbers of participants grow.
A full list of current users, meetings and other activities is available from the Fedora UK&I wiki [19].
This domestic interest and our experience of group discussions and activities further reinforced our decision to investigate actively the migration to Fedora.
Furthermore, membership of the Users Group has led to a number of important developments and collaborations for Spoken Word Services.
Colleagues at the E-Services Integration Group, University of Hull [20] have been particularly supportive and have shared considerable expertise in digital preservation, demonstrated in existing projects such as RepoMMan, the Repository Metadata and Management project [21].
The REMAP Project, funded under the JISC 'Repositories and Preservation' Programme [22], initiates a formal partnership between the Hull group and Spoken Word Services.
It builds on the work of RepoMMan to investigate the use of a digital repository to support the embedding of records management and digital preservation in the context of a UK Higher Education institution.
The Institutional Dimension at GCU Spoken Word Services is increasingly concerned with the curation and preservation of audio and video materials produced by GCU and other partners.
Projects such as REMAP are important in helping us to consider the functionality of the tools required in managing and developing our repository.
Working with Fedora has also led us to discussions with the IRIScotland project [21], which is building an institutional repository infrastructure for Scotland.
The intention is to share from each other's experience.
Other Collaborations Spoken Word Services is a partner in the EDINA-led Visual and Sound Materials (VSM) portal scoping study and demonstrator project [22], funded under the JISC Portals Programme.
The aim of the project is to investigate the value and feasibility of a national portal for both time-based media and image collections dedicated to the needs of the Further and Higher Education communities.
It is anticipated that the portal demonstrator will go live in January 2008 and will continue to be available for a further two years.
The intention is that EDINA will harvest from the Spoken Word FEDORA.
Value for the BBC During the lifetime of the Spoken Word Project, the BBC itself has been through many changes, both institutional and technological.
There has been a considerable push to increase public accessibility to BBC archive material, firstly through the Creative Archive Project [23], and more recently, through the online publication of the BBC Programme Catalogue.
Rights remain a major challenge.
The exclusively educational focus of the Spoken Word, and the related legal deposit agreement with the BBC remains unique.
The experience of careful third-party rights clearance to secure permissions for educational use is proving highly instructive and will be of considerable use to both the BBC and the educational community.
The creation of a metadata repository 'secondary' to the 'primary' data from the BBC INFAX data set suggests a useful strategy for the re-cataloguing for scholarly use of the one million plus items held by the BBC.
Multiple 'secondary' metadata repositories could provide manageable specialist finding aids for a range of disciplines and purposes.
Knowledgeable scholars can collect and annotate resources of direct relevance to their areas of expertise for research, learning and teaching.
In a process analogous to the use of 'slips' for the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary, learned users can enhance digital libraries for scholarly purposes.
In general we have demonstrated to our BBC colleagues the value and use of their digitised materials in the environment of a community-based trusted digital repository.
These materials, which are created and preserved by public funds, form the basis of an extremely rich source of scholarly material both within the BBC and for use by external scholars.
Viewing them as a remote digital library rather than a mere collection of assets has considerable advantages for both preservation and use.
To take full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital repositories, the metadata produced by authoritative expert users must be captured and written back to the repository.
Some aspects of that work are being approached though the linkage of Project Pad to Fedora which is mentioned above.
The XML produced by the application annotations provide the potential for enhancing the metadata but the range of issues raised by 'tagging' and 'social sofware' which relate to authoritative provenance, consistent metadata schemes and so on, are all relevant to the operation of such a system.
Conclusion Capacity Building Spoken Word Services has deliberately invested in capacity building at GCU and now hopes that transfer of knowledge and technology will enable complimentary local institutional repository development.
Personnel for the Spoken Word project was either seconded from University positions or was firstly appointed to the University and then seconded.
As the project nears completion, staff will either be appointed to the Spoken Word Services or will return to their previous positions.
In either event, the expertise and experience gained on the project will be retained by the University.
Knowledge transfer has also occurred.
Spoken Word has worked formally with a number of units in the University and informally with others.
The Library, Learning Resources and Learner Support are all examples of such co-operation.
Teaching and learning has been an important area of collaboration and knowledge transfer.
Impact on Teaching and Learning The selection of the materials to be acquired from the BBC was largely undertaken by teachers.
Most of these teachers, but not all, were at GCU.
This has led to interactions amongst the GCU teachers and between them and teachers elsewhere.
In cooperation with the Caledonian Academy [24], a formal discussion of pedagogical approaches and notions for learning improvement related to multimedia is about to be initiated.
Teachers who have used our content and tools will be asked to reflect on their experience and a new group of teachers will be invited to speculate on their expectations and how these might be realised.
A set of Higher Education Academy [25] projects has been undertaken as part of the project dissemination study.
The disciplines involved have been Social Policy, Political Economy and Hospitality Management.
The resources have been used in a variety of ways including podcasting.
The establishment of a set of digital library services at Glasgow Caledonian University was planned to allow for development beyond 2008.
The building expertise and capacity in relation to repositories and linking them to teaching and learning has been a particularly important aspect of that strategy.
But we are also intending to capitalise further on the links we have created with other institutions and development communities.
A 'Son of Spoken Word' project is currently under discussion with the potential for worldwide scholarly communication using a range of broadcast archives.
The drive for interoperability pushed by the Open Data movement makes 'open access multi-media resources' enormously attractive for scholarly exploitation (both the 'treasures' in 20th century collections and the huge daily outputs from new media sources which are increasingly challenging the dominance of traditional mass media).
Users should be able to access content across media types (e.g.
images, texts, video and audio) and across language boundaries both easily and intuitively.
Demonstrating and asserting the rather special requirements of academics, and promoting the potential of their contributions, is a very valuable project.
It is necessarily international: a lack of this dimension is a major weakness of some current and recent digitisation projects.
Rights are a central issue in this regard.
It is hard to contemplate a satisfactory network of scholarly communications which is limited to a single rights regime.
International, educational rights and their protection would have to be an element for investigation.
We hope that Spoken Word has made a worthwhile contribution to the development of such an international network, and will continue to do so.
References Spoken Word Services http://spokenword.ac.uk/ The Digital Libraries in the Classroom Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_dlitc.aspx Donald, D., Hutton, A.
& Byrne, J.
(2000).
Towards a Communications and Information technology Intensive Learning Environment In P. Davies, S. Hodkinson and Peter Reynolds.
Innovative approaches to learning and teaching in economics and business higher education.
Stoke-on-Trent: Staffordshire University Press.
The Saltire Centre http://www.gcal.ac.uk/thesaltirecentre/ The Matrix unit at MSU http://www.matrix.msu.edu/about/ OYEZ and Academic Technologies at Northwestern University http://www.oyez.org/ http://www.at.northwestern.edu/spoken/p02research.html http://www.it.northwestern.edu/about/departments/at/ McCloskey, D. N. (1990).
If you're so smart : the narrative of economic expertise.
Chicago ; London, University of Chicago Press.
Greenstone http://www.greenstone.org/ BBC Programme Catalogue http://catalogue.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax Fedora http://www.fedora-commons.org/ REPOS http://matrix.msu.edu/research/repos.php Spoken Word Services End-User License Agreement http://www.spokenword.ac.uk/using-audio-video/copyright/spoken-word-end-user-licence-agreement MediaMatrix http://matrix.msu.edu/research/digital.php Project Pad http://dewey.at.northwestern.edu/ppad2/ SAKAI http://sakaiproject.org/ Plone http://plone.org/ Swan, A.
(2006).
Overview of Scholarly Communication In N. Jacobs (Ed.)
Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects.
Oxford: Chandos Publishing Cheryl L. Davis and Barbara B. Moran.
(2005).
Preparing tomorrow's professionals: LIS schools and scholarly communication.
College & Research Libraries News, January 2005 Vol.
66, No.
1. http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2005/january05/preparingprofessionals.htm Fedora UK and Ireland User Group http://www.fedora.info/wiki/index.php/Fedora_UK_and_Ireland_User_Group E-Services Integration Group, University of Hull http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/ RepoMMan, The Repository Metadata and Management Project http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ The REMAP Project http://www.hull.ac.uk/remap/ IRIScotland: Institutional Repository Infrastructure for Scotland http://www.iriscotland.lib.ed.ac.uk/ EVisual and Sound Materials (VSM) portal scoping study and demonstrator project http://edina.ac.uk/projects/vsmportal/ BBC Creative Archive http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/ Caledonian Academy http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/ Higher Education Academy http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ Author Details Iain Wallace Digital Services Development Librarian Learner Support, SALTIRE Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University Email: Iain.Wallace@gcal.ac.uk Web site: http://spokenword.ac.uk/ Graeme West Web Services Development Architect Learner Support, SALTIRE Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University Email: graeme.west@gcal.ac.uk Web site: http://spokenword.ac.uk/ David Donald Principal Investigator (Spoken Word) Learner Support, SALTIRE Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University Email: D.Donald@gcal.ac.uk Web site: http://spokenword.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Capacity Building: Spoken Word at Glasgow Caledonian University" Author: Iain Wallace, Graeme West and David Donald Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/wallace-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography Buzz software research Citation BibTex RIS Nigel Goldsmith reviews a new book on digital photography by the accomplished American landscape photographer Stephen Johnson.
Although there are some hints on the cover, it isn't until you scan the contents page that you can fully appreciate the scope of this book.
Over the course of seven sections Stephen Johnson's book leads the reader on a journey: from the invention of the early electronic fax and cathode ray tube in the 1800s; through his own encounters as a pioneering digital photographer; and ending with his personal digital imaging manifesto.
After a general introduction to human vision and the digital image, the author identifies and explains historic technical landmarks, which have contributed to contemporary digital imaging.
This section is an accessible introduction to a complex subject, which other authors often overlook.
The chapter entitled 'On Photography's Bleeding Edge', which anecdotally highlights the author's early adoption and active contribution to the world of digital imaging, follows this.
Much of the commentary draws on the author's own experience and is illustrated with Johnson's dramatically beautiful landscape photographs.
In addition to working as a photographer, the author has also taught digital photography for some time.
This experience becomes very apparent in the sections on image optimisation.
All features are clearly explained and supported with examples; there are also some useful tips and workarounds.
The author's intention is to enable the reader to edit an image honestly as there is an emphasis on: careful tone and colour adjustment sharpening, and retouching whilst avoiding the more extreme adjustments found in some other titles on the subject.
Colour management is a subject that baffles many users new and old.
Johnson explains the topic in a clear and accessible way though occasionally the reader's level of understanding, skill and access to equipment is taken for granted.
An example of this is in the section on printer profiling: the author writes 'Measure printed target with spectrophotometer' followed by the next point 'Create profile using profile creation software'.
The hardware and software required to undertake this process could cost up to £1000 and the process can be quite complex.
The reviewer would have found a reference to options such as remote profiling useful here.
On the whole this is an entertaining first-hand account of the author's central role in the developments of digital imaging over the last 20 years.
Many of the sections are based on the author's personal experience; complex subjects are clearly explained and supported with attractive illustrations and photographs.
However, the one drawback for me the reviewer, was that I was unsure as to whether the book was aimed at the novice or the advanced user.
My confusion was triggered by extensive references to the large-format scanning camera (which the author used to capture his detailed landscape images), which would not reflect the novice user's experience of digital photography.
The more advanced reader would also potentially find sections such as colour management and image optimisation informative and accessible but perhaps lacking the in-depth detail likely to further their knowledge.
Overall, this title would be a welcome addition to any bookshelf but it is unlikely to be the only book on the subject.
Author Details Nigel Goldsmith Technical Research Officer TASI-Technical Advisory Service for Images ILRT University of Bristol Email: nigel.goldsmith@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography" Author: Nigel Goldsmith Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/goldsmith-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment: Where We Go from Here Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment: Where We Go from Here Buzz data html infrastructure archives metadata preservation ulcc e-government research standards Citation BibTex RIS Najla Semple and Maggie Jones outline the background and findings of the Digital Preservation Coalition's UK Needs Assessment and the Mind the Gap report.
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) was formed in the belief that no single organisation can hope to address single-handedly all the challenges and issues associated with digital preservation.
It was launched in February 2002 with an initial membership of 19, and has grown to 30 members as of June 2006.
Its underlying principle is that intense collaboration and co-operation across and between sectors is essential as there is a far wider range of key players who need to be involved at various different stages in the life cycle of digital resources.
The pressing and increasingly urgent need for advocacy and awareness-raising and to raise the profile of digital preservation among a much broader community was a further impetus for the formation of the DPC and these activities have formed a major part of the DPC work programme.
The UK Needs Assessment A key priority for the DPC has been the gathering of reliable facts and figures which would enable informed planning for a national digital preservation infrastructure.
This infrastructure needs to be able to manage and maintain the rapidly increasing quantities of important digital materials being created by a wide variety of constituents for a broad range of purposes.
The UK Needs Assessment, undertaken by the DPC, aimed to gather and collate a picture of the status quo in the UK with regard to digital preservation; to assess and develop a clear way forward; and, last but not least, to communicate that message to a wide and diverse audience, including those who may not have considered that digital preservation was part of their remit.
This needs assessment culminated three years later in a report, Mind the Gap: assessing digital preservation needs in the UK [1].
The report was launched at the Houses of Parliament on 15 February 2006 by Andrew Stott, Deputy Chief Information Officer & Head of Service Transformation, E-Government Unit.
This article reports on the results of these studies, the implications of these findings for the digital preservation community, and how the DPC plans to take forward the recommendations from the report.
The UK Needs Assessment comprised the following three stages: Stage 1: DPC Members' Survey The DPC is a membership organisation, relying primarily on membership subscriptions to fund its activities, and resources are modest.
To accomplish such an ambitious undertaking as the UK Needs Assessment called for more resources than we could gather in a single year and the DPC Board agreed that it should proceed in stages.
The initial stage was to conduct a survey of DPC members in 2003.
This provided us with some concrete information on what DPC members were doing in terms of managing their own digital collections, and in some cases, managing digital resources on behalf of others.
It also drew attention to what DPC members regarded as key issues and a number of spin-off activities subsequently arose from this survey.
These included gathering some facts and figures relating to loss (or as it turned out in most cases to be, potential loss) of digital information, and the development of digital preservation training.
The training programme, with JISC funding, has now evolved into the successful Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) led by University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) in partnership with Cornell University.
Outcomes from the DPC Members' Survey Case Studies A series of digital preservation case studies was compiled by Duncan Simpson from examples provided by DPC members.
The study, Risk of Loss of Digital Data is available from the 'Members only' part of the DPC Web site [2].
This study compiled scenarios of risk and loss based on real-life practical experiences.
It highlighted some costly data recovery procedures which could serve as a warning of the consequences of not managing data effectively from as early in the life cycle as possible.
It revealed that many problems occur as a result of inadequate management.
These might be a failure to curate the digital resources by the creators, or an interruption in the chain of responsibility.
The study also illustrated that dramatic cases of outright loss of a resource are relatively rare but highlighted more often a complex chain of events which led to the unacceptable deterioration of resources.
It further revealed that in many cases it had been possible to rescue data, but only after the expenditure of considerable time and effort in tracking down the missing parts of the puzzle.
It need hardly be said that this will lead to extremely inefficient management of digital resources given the scale at which they are now being produced.
Digital Preservation Training Programme Training had been flagged as a high priority for many DPC members.
There was a pressing need for practical training which would equip participants with the skills and confidence to apply practical strategies to their own organisational requirements.
Cornell had developed a week-long training programme which offered an excellent model for us to use in the UK, structuring the course around three building blocks of technical, organisational, and economic factors.
A mutually beneficial partnership with Cornell has been made possible with JISC funding, and the pilot of the residential Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) [3] was successfully piloted at Warwick in October 2005 and received excellent feedback.
To date, further DPTPs have been run in Birmingham (March 2006) and another is planned for York in July 2006.
We believe the programmes fill a much-needed gap in digital preservation training, offering in-depth but accessible training and helping to demystify standards and tools such as the Open Archival Information System (OAIS), preservation metadata, and life cycle management.
Stage 2: Sample Survey of Regional Organisations The DPC Members' survey also highlighted a concern among several DPC members at the level of awareness and development of digital preservation activity within smaller local and regional organisations.
The second stage of the UK Needs Assessment was therefore to commission a sample survey of just such organisations.
The Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) agreed to fund a sample survey of two of their regional organisations, the Northeast MLA (NEMLAC) and the West Midlands [4].
With the completion of this survey in 2005, a subtle picture was beginning to emerge which indicated that, while there appeared to be no immediate cause for alarm in terms of imminent catastrophic loss of digital resources, there was no coherent plan in place, especially with regard to roles and responsibilities, both internally within individual organisations and externally.
As with the earlier project to gather facts and figures on loss of digital resources, there were no dramatic results likely either to cause panic (which was good), or to engage the attention of senior decision makers and funders (which was not so good).
Stage 3: Completing the UK Needs Assessment At a DPC Planning Day held in February 2005, it was decided to complete the UK Needs Assessment from DPC resources, building and extending on the data we already had.
We had gathered a useful body of information but we were conscious that it needed to be condensed and presented in such a way that it would be read by a far larger audience than those already converted.
We also felt that more information needed to be gathered, including from commercial companies, to complement and enhance what we already had.
This led to the final stage of the project, which after a competitive tendering process was awarded to Tessella Support Services plc.
The company has over 20 years of proven expertise in the area of reliable and authentic long-term preservation of electronic records.
Tessella were charged with conducting desktop research, a third survey, and then (most challenging of all!)
synthesising the results of all three surveys and desktop research into a report which would simultaneously depict the complexities and nuances of the current situation, while also ensuring that the report was accessible to as wide an audience as possible including those who might not otherwise be interested in digital preservation or with specialist expertise.
This was no mean feat and required Tessella working closely with the Steering Group for the UKNA (UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment) Project, which was drawn from representatives of the diverse organisations with membership of the DPC.
The principal aim of the report was to provide a detailed analysis of priorities for action in the UK.
Other aims were to raise the profile of digital preservation in the UK and to establish what is required in terms of infrastructure to support preservation activities.
A key issue was to raise awareness of the risks associated with the failure to address digital preservation challenges.
An important aspect was to engage senior policy and decision makers who are involved in awarding funding for preservation activities.
Ultimately it was considered fundamental to identify a list of key recommendations for further digital preservation action and to identify who might take these forward.
In addition to assessing and synthesising existing data, a further online survey was carried out by Tessella.
Further qualitative information was gathered through interviews; the respondents represented a range of interests and organisations.
Over 900 individuals were sent the questionnaire and more than 10% responded.
While this might be seen as a low response rate, when the results were combined with the earlier survey results and desktop research, it allowed the development of a detailed picture with many common themes as well as some sectoral differences.
We wanted more than a survey telling us that there were a lot of digital resources being produced but little happening to maintain them for the future.
If the report was to act as a catalyst to accelerate progress, we needed to understand what specific needs and drivers would lead to further action.
Key Results from the Overall UK Needs Assessment Process Given that respondents to all three surveys are those who, by definition, are interested in and sufficiently aware of the issue to bother to participate in the survey, then it can safely be assumed that the reality is worse than the results suggest.
While there were no huge surprises revealed by the report, there was nevertheless a disturbing trend which, if unchecked, would inevitably lead to a gradual trickling away of valuable digital resources, rather than one single catastrophe.
A high level of awareness was revealed, for example, 87% of survey respondents in the latest survey recognised that a failure to address the issue of digital preservation would lead to loss of corporate memory or of key cultural documents [5]; over 60% felt their organisation could lose out financially.
However, this awareness did not often translate into concrete action, with only 20% indicating any kind of digital preservation strategy in place.
Evidence was found in all three surveys that many organisations have not yet assessed the volumes of material they need to preserve.
This was true of over 33% of respondents to the DPC Members' survey and 55% of respondents to the latest survey.
A telling quote from the Mind the Gap report is: 'Given that many organisations do not know the extent of the problem they face, it is not surprising that the loss of digital data is commonplace, and in some circumstances seems to be accepted as an inevitable hazard'.
[6] These results seem reminiscent of 'Boiled Frog Syndrome' in which a frog will sit in a pot of water which is heated very slowly and remain immobile until it is too late, whereas it will immediately leap out of boiling water.
Because there is no evidence of dramatic losses of digital information, it may be tempting to feel complacent.
It is however unsustainable to continue an approach in which most digital resources are retained in an ad hoc manner, with some material of little consequence being retained and more valuable resources being lost in what only can be described as the luck of the draw.
If those organisations which receive digital resources from a variety of sources continually need to look backwards to figure out how to manage them, it will become a practical necessity to ring-fence resources required for this kind of digital archaeology on a smaller scale than need be the case.
It may still be technically possible to rescue digital resources (as evidenced by the DPC commissioned study, Risk of Loss of Digital Data), but it will not be practically feasible to do so if it becomes the norm to leave the task of their salvage to others at a later date.
The Current State of Play The following areas were identified in the Mind the Gap report as reflecting the current state of digital preservation practice in the UK.
Commitment to Digital Preservation The report revealed that only 18% of those responding to the 2005 survey had digital preservation strategies in place for their organisations.
The earlier 2003 survey also indicated that digital preservation policies were not evident in the majority of formal business plans.
Table 1: Commitment to digital preservation (source: 2005 DPC survey).
Responsibility Lack of clarity as to who is responsible for digital preservation is a clear impediment to progress.
Over half of respondents to the 2005 survey indicated that that they were not clear about responsibility and that this hampered any preservation programme.
This was also picked up in the two earlier surveys.
This is characterised by the fact that many skills are required for preservation activities and the boundaries between these roles may be blurred in contrast to traditional roles.
For example, it may be assumed that this is an IT problem, but the professional expertise of archivists and librarians in selecting and organising material for preservation is still valuable.
Digital preservation needs to be cross-disciplinary and may require a change in the structure of some organisations unless, and until, 'hybrid skills', combining both subject and discipline specialisation with IT skills are developed in staff.
Digital preservation confounds any attempts to segregate it neatly and tends to permeate many areas of an organisation which are likely to be structurally separate.
Volume of Data The report revealed a lack of knowledge about the digital data that organisations hold.
Only half of the respondents to the 2005 survey had assessed the volume of material they needed to preserve, however many reported that they needed to retain the data for over 50 years; a period in which a digital preservation strategy is crucial.
Data Loss Loss of digital materials appeared as a frequent occurrence 38% of respondents indicated that they had inaccessible and obsolete data.
More worryingly perhaps, one third stated that they did not know if they had lost data or not.
This is a very basic need, it is impossible to develop a sensible digital preservation strategy without knowing what material is held.
Data Source Creators may also contribute to the digital preservation problem.
Coping with unexpected file formats created outside the holding organisation is a significant problem as it is often the case that holding organisations can do little to persuade data creators to use file formats which are digital preservation-friendly.
As a basic rule of thumb, the more control there is over creation of digital resources, the easier they are to manage over the longer term, which is why creators are so key to successful and cost-effective digital preservation strategies.
Figure 2: Influence over formats of externally sourced data (Source: 2005 DPC survey).
Also available in HTML Solutions Few organisations are implementing digital preservation strategies.
It is some cause for concern that almost half of respondents claim to use portable media on which to store their data and as well as a means of long-term storage.
A large number of organisations still print out digital data, which is not a recognised digital preservation strategy but is apparently still seen by some as the only pragmatic short-term solution .
It was heartening to see however that almost 70% do use off-line back-up as part of a combination of solutions.
Metadata The results revealed that only 31% of organisations felt that they were creating sufficient metadata for their digital objects and 41% of respondents claimed that they would have to add metadata to a digital object at the point of archiving which would be a considerable overhead for the organisation.
Needs and Recommendations An interesting feature of the Mind the Gap report is its analysis of how different sectors approach digital preservation.
For example, gaining funding for digital preservation for the commercial sector appears not to be a major issue providing there is a sufficiently strong business case.
In contrast, the public sector often struggles for funding, even where there is a business case.
Another area of interest is the regulated industries sector.
Due to regulatory inspection, companies in the financial, pharmaceutical and food sectors have had to ensure long-term preservation of digital data by creating effective methodologies.
For competition reasons many of these solutions are confidential and consequently not in the public domain.
The following needs and recommendations were highlighted in the report: 1.
Organisations should continue to raise awareness of the impact of digital preservation beyond the current core of informed individuals and institutions.
2.
Organisations should create long-term proactive information/knowledge management plans and assign responsibility for dealing with digital preservation issues.
Regular audits should also be performed to assess and address digital preservation needs.
5.
Training in digital preservation should be encouraged and programmes should be integrated into the training of professionals such as conservators, librarians and archivists.
6.
Awareness of digital preservation issues should be raised at government level, both nationally and internationally, in order to influence relevant policy making.
7.
An international collaborative 'market' for digital preservation tools should be created.
Such a market should encourage the use of open file formats and standards and consider the long-term preservation needs of digital information.
Conclusion The DPC and its members have worked hard to raise the profile of digital preservation from that of a highly specialised activity affecting relatively few organisations to something that is relevant to all who create and acquire digital data.
The report Mind the Gap is intended to accelerate the process of making digital preservation a standard activity for all.
The study presents a detailed analysis of the status quo revealing the extent of the risk of loss or degradation to digital material held in the UK's public and private sectors.
The report provides ample ammunition for the digital preservation community to use in strengthening its case, whether it is at organisational, local, or national level.
Not everyone needs to establish complex infrastructures capable of retaining digital data forever, but everyone does need to take responsibility at least for material they create themselves, at least for a period until others can take it over (this may be a few years or perhaps decades).
The report highlights the importance of incorporating activities naturally at each stage of the life cycle rather than regarding them as something distinct and which can only be undertaken by specialists.
Mind the Gap is intended to win the hearts and minds of a much wider audience and to encourage all who are involved in creating and acquiring digital information, to seize the opportunity to develop a practical, coherent strategy for responsible management of the vast quantities of digital information being created and used in the UK today.
As the DPC Chair Lynne Brindley noted at the launch of Mind the Gap ' ... many of the needs identified in the report are not "rocket science", they rely on little more than common sense and good management to implement, but there is nevertheless a significant gap between where we are now and where we need to be...'.
Mind the Gap poses a challenge to all organisations to take steps to manage their digital materials according to good practice so that it will be simpler and more cost-effective for others to continue to manage them for the future.
References Mind the Gap: Assessing digital preservation needs in the UK.
Digital Preservation Coalition, 2006. http://www.dpconline.org Risk of Loss of Digital Data: case studies and analysis.
Digital Preservation Coalition, 2004.
Available from the Members only area of the DPC Web site at: http://www.dpconline.org/members/main/ukneeds.html Further information on the DPTP can be found at: http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/dptp/ Simpson, D. Digital preservation in the regions.
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, 2005. http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets//M/mla_dpc_survey_pdf_6636.pdf Mind the Gap: Assessing digital preservation needs in the UK.
Digital Preservation Coalition, 2006.
Section 5.5 p. 18. http://www.dpconline.org Mind the Gap: Assessing digital preservation needs in the UK.
Digital Preservation Coalition, 2006.
Section 5.5 p. 18 http://www.dpconline.org Author Details Maggie Jones DPC Executive Secretary, April 2003-February 2006 Email: maggie.jones@talk21.com Najla Semple Executive Secretary Digital Preservation Coalition Email: najla@dpconline.org Web site: http://www.dpconline.org Return to top Article Title: "Mind the Gap: Digital Preservation Needs in the UK" Author: Maggie Jones and Najla Semple Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/semple-jones/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web Buzz framework wiki infrastructure zip firefox browser blog python passwords e-learning php shibboleth foaf technorati ruby wordpress microformats hcard wayf authentication openid url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell and David Recordon take a brief look at OpenID and ask what relevance it has to e-learning.
OpenID [1][2] is a single sign-on system for the Internet which puts people in charge.
OpenID is a user-centric technology which allows a person to have control over how their Identity is both managed and used online.
By being decentralised there is no single server with which every OpenID-enabled service and every user must register.
Rather, people make their own choice of OpenID Provider, the service that manages their OpenID.
One key function which OpenID supports is the ability for a person to have ‘single sign-on’ across multiple OpenID-enabled services.
Having provided their OpenID to the Relying Party they want to access, users are then redirected to their OpenID Provider in order to check their credentials.
This means that sites which implement OpenID do not ever know the user’s actual password (or other credentials).
The benefit to users is increased security, particularly by employing a strong approach such as a one-time-password to login to their Provider, and a much simpler login experience on the Web.
Note that although true single sign-on is achievable using OpenID it is not a requirement and there may be reasons why an individual will want to retain multiple online identities (i.e.
multiple OpenIDs) for their different online activities.
OpenID grew primarily out of the blogging community where there was a requirement for people to take the identity used to write their own blog and use it when commenting on other people’s blogs.
OpenID was originally deployed to 9 million users on LiveJournal.com; it has since seen steadily increasing adoption across the Internet.
It is particularly interesting to look at its rate of adoption over the past few months.
Not only have the number of OpenID-enabled users grown to around 90 million (estimated from various OpenID 1.1 Providers, with the majority of users coming from AOL) but the number of places where OpenID can be used is growing at an increased rate.
Figure 1: OpenID Relying Party adoption as seen by JanRain’s MyOpenID.com Although OpenID started with the blogging community, it is beginning to see adoption in technologies like the Ruby on Rails framework, the Zend PHP framework, and the Django Python framework.
In addition, services such as Technorati, WordPress.com, 37Signals, and Digg.com (in progress) have added support for OpenID.
Large service providers and enterprises such as AOL, Symantec, VeriSign, Mozilla, Novell, Microsoft, and Reebok have also begun working with OpenID in various products and services.
In the majority of cases, an OpenID is a URL, which means that the Relying Party can easily use it to determine the location of the OpenID Provider without recourse to some kind of directory service (such as the Where Are You From (WAYF) service used in Shibboleth [3]).
Additionally, the formulation of the OpenID as a URL has the added advantage that information about the owner of the identity can be made available to interested parties.
URLs are also fairly easy to remember and can be book-marked for later use in services such as del.icio.us [4].
An example of this can be seen at the OpenID-enabled site Doxory.com [5], a service that tries to discover any friends you have listed via FOAF (Friend of a Friend) [6] at your OpenID URL.
For example, if you log into Doxory using a LiveJournal.com OpenID, Doxory automatically shows you which of your LiveJournal friends are already using the service.
The combination of OpenID and Microformats [7] such as hCard also makes it possible to discover public contact information about the owner of an OpenID.
Thus OpenID begins to provide the core pieces of infrastructure required for truly portable and user-owned social networks.
OpenID is a relatively simple standard that does a relatively simple job single sign-on in a distributed and free environment.
It does not try to provide trust or distributed authorisation solutions but is an enabling technology on which these sorts of services can be built.
For example, it supports the transfer of attributes (information about the owner of the OpenID) upon which decisions about trust and authorisation can be based.
This also means that users are able to easily share information such as their email address, nickname, or zip code when logging into OpenID-enabled sites, if they choose to do so.
It therefore provides the benefit of more accurate information, as users do not need to re-type it every time they sign-up with a new service.
That’s the theory anyway.
Let’s take a closer look at how it works in practice.
An Example As an example, consider registering with and logging into a Web 2.0 social service called Ziki [8].
The OpenID used in these examples is http://andypowell.myopenid.com/, which is often shortened to ‘andypowell.myopenid.com’ for convenience.
This OpenID was obtained by registering with the MyOpenID service [9].
There are now many OpenID Providers to choose from, though people often use the OpenID provided by their blog hosting service.
Note that the process of creating an OpenID is not shown here.
The Ziki home page has an option for signing up for a new Ziki account.
See Figure 2.
Figure 2: Creating a new Ziki account Selecting the ‘Create your Ziki now’ button takes the user to the registration page which indicates that the service supports OpenID as a registration mechanism.
The usual convention is to present the OpenID logo next to any OpenID-enabled login boxes, though at the time of writing Ziki does not seem to have done so.
Figure 3: Ziki sign-up options Putting in the OpenID and selecting the ‘Sign-up with OpenID’ button takes users to their chosen OpenID Provider.
To help protect users from phishing attacks [10], it is recommended that the Provider’s login page is bookmarked and used whenever a new browser session is launched.
Many providers, including MyOpenID, have the notion of a ‘Safe Sign-in Page’ which is displayed instead of the login form when coming from Relying Parties (Ziki in this case).
As we discuss later, using other more secure authentication methods, rather than a password, can greatly help to reduce these sorts of attacks.
Once users are authenticated to their Provider, they will be shown some additional information about the Relying Party that is being logged into.
Notice that the password is only supplied to the OpenID Provider, not directly to the Ziki service.
Information is also provided on which attributes about the user are going to be passed back to Ziki.
The option of authenticating for this session only, forever, or not at all, is offered.
In this case the choice is made to ‘Allow Forever’.
See Figures 4 and 5.
Figure 4: MyOpenID password Figure 5: MyOpenID authentication options At this point the user is passed back to the Ziki site where they can complete the registration process.
Typically this will include supplying additional site-specific registration information, over and above the information that was supplied as attributes by the OpenID Provider.
It may also include an email confirmation step.
See Figures 6 and 7.
Figure 6: Completing the Ziki registration process Note that work currently being done on the OpenID Attribute Exchange specification means that in the future all the required information will be able to be requested from the person at their Provider.
Finally, the button to create an account is selected.
Figure 7: Ziki account activation Now imagine that users then log out of Ziki and sometime later opt to log back in.
They go to the login page and choose to use the OpenID authentication option, putting their OpenID into the box provided.
Figure 8: Ziki login options Selecting the ‘Login’ button takes the user back to their OpenID Identity Provider, where the password or other credentials can be confirmed.
However, because the “Allow Forever” option was previously chosen for the Ziki service, this step is completely invisible.
It takes place behind the scenes.
As far as the user is concerned they are passed directly to their Ziki home page and already logged in.
Figure 9: Logged in to the Ziki service A similar process can be followed for every OpenID-enabled service that the user wishes to use.
Lists of services that support OpenID are beginning to appear, for example, see The OpenID Directory [11], but it is still fairly early days in the development of OpenID.
While they are certainly growing in number, not many of the high profile Web 2.0 services support it yet; we hope this will change in due course.
OpenID and e-Learning So, what is the relevance of OpenID to e-learning?
Proponents of Learning 2.0 [12] and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) argue that we are going to see far greater use of ‘informal’ Web 2.0 services as part of the delivery of learning in our ‘formal’ learning institutions (schools, colleges, universities, etc.).
If we accept this argument, then the use of OpenID is likely to become increasingly important to our learners.
It can also be argued that the rhetoric of ‘single sign-on’ does not carry much weight if what we really mean is one username/password pair for our formal learning services and a second pair for ‘external’ services.
As a community, we need to set ourselves the target of enabling true single sign-on to services delivered both inside and outside our institutions.
Doing so almost inevitably means adopting solutions that come from outside our own sector.
Secondly, it also seems fairly clear that our learners are likely to want an online identity (or several online identities) that span the different phases of their education and that span the individual institutions within any particular phase.
Why should we expect our learners to adopt a different online identity simply because they have moved from school to college or from college to university?
Indeed, why would learners want their online identity to change because they have left formal education and moved into the longer-lasting and more flexible environment of lifelong learning?
Why should learners have to adopt different online identities just because the modules on their chosen course happen to be delivered by several institutions?
Much the same arguments can be made about researchers, as well as for employees and individuals.
In the future, it may be the case that our institutions remain as Identity Providers (i.e.
as the providers of usernames and passwords) in the way they are now.
But it also seems increasingly likely that our students will begin turning up at schools, colleges and universities with perfectly good online identities (in much the same way that they now turn up with perfectly good email addresses) and that our educational institutions will have to begin functioning as Relying Parties (i.e.
as the recipients of externally authenticated users).
In short, students are part of the wider online community and their educational identity (persona) is only one facet of their lives.
OpenID and Shibboleth Within the UK education community there is fairly widespread commitment through JISC [13] and Becta [14] to a Shibboleth-based approach [3] to access and identity management, realised primarily through the development of the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research [15].
Shibboleth leaves identity management within the remit of the institutions (though they may choose to outsource the provision of the service to a third party [16]).
It therefore does not meet all the potential requirements for user-centric, lifelong identity management outlined in the discussion above.
However, one of the key requirements for institutions adopting Shibboleth is to clean up their internal directory service provision and to take a strategic view of the management of their users’ online identities.
In adopting Shibboleth, institutions are likely to put the internal ‘identity’ infrastructure in place that will make it relatively easy for them to become OpenID Providers and Relying Parties.
Although it is clear that a transition to fully open identity technologies such as OpenID will not happen overnight, institutions must start looking at how identity is managed and how that process can be enhanced the better to support the changing world of online learning.
Open Issues Like any standard in the area of access and identity management, OpenID is not without some open issues nor without its critics.
As mentioned above, one potential problem lies in the area commonly known as phishing.
In a phishing attack, a service provider presents a login box on their Web pages that takes users to a page that looks like that of their OpenID Provider, but which is in fact a service hosted by someone else.
Such a service could gather the passwords of unsuspecting OpenID account holders.
There have been some lightweight attempts to circumvent this problem, in part relying on user education about such dangers, the use of HTTPS rather than plain HTTP to communicate with the Provider and user-specific watermarks or other images embedded into the Identity Provider page.
More recently, some OpenID Providers have offered support for browser certificates to get around the phishing problem [17][18].
In addition, the recently launched MyVidoop.com [19] service is designed to help further resolve the phishing issue with OpenID, changing how users authenticate online by removing traditional passwords.
VeriSign has also demonstrated a Firefox extension, to be released at the Internet Identity Workshop in May 2007 [20], which looks to help solve these issues from within the browser itself.
VeriSign’s OpenID Seatbelt plugin [21] is designed both to make OpenID more convenient by automatically filling in a user’s OpenID URL, providing information as to whether the user is logged into his or her Provider or is on the correct page to do so, and looks at the OpenID interactions to help fight phishing proactively.
However, at the time of writing, it remains an issue in need of a complete solution.
Implementation Options Various toolkits and libraries are available to help with OpenID implementation, for both Identity Providers and Relying Parties, in a huge variety of programming languages.
More detail about this can be found on the OpenID wiki [22].
Conclusions OpenID is a technology around which there is a growing interest.
Recent commitments to OpenID by AOL, Microsoft, and many other Web 2.0 services place it very firmly in the centre of online identity and access management discussions.
It seems highly likely to have a significant impact on the services that learners and researchers will use in the future.
It is unfortunate that, at the time of writing, there is not greater adoption of OpenID by some of the better known Web 2.0 services.
However, as time passes it seems clear that we are likely to see its adoption by more and more of them.
We also encourage readers of this article to reach out to services online that you’d like to see OpenID enabled.
For UK educational institutions, OpenID is likely to become one of several access and identity management standards that they need to support.
Therefore, strategic planning in the area of access and identity management needs to take account of the requirement to support multiple standards, and changes to those standards, for some time to come.
References OpenID http://openid.net/ Wikipedia: OpenID http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID Shibboleth http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/ Doxory.com http://doxory.com/ The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project http://www.foaf-project.org/ Microformats http://microformats.org/ Ziki http://www.ziki.com/ MyOpenID https://www.myopenid.com/ Wikipedia: Phishing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing The OpenID Directory http://openiddirectory.com/ Wikipedia: Learning 2.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_2.0 JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Becta http://www.becta.org.uk/ UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/ When outsourcing makes sense.
Posting by Andy Powell to eFoundations, 15 November 2006 http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2006/11/when_outsourcin.html myOpenID release & redesign http://kveton.com/blog/2007/04/17/myopenid-release-redesign/ And then there were none Zero Passwords with Client Certificates http://janrain.com/blog/2007/04/20/and-then-there-were-none-zero-passwords-with-client-certificates/ MyVidoop.com https://myvidoop.com/ Internet Identity Workshop, 14-16 May 2007 http://iiw.windley.com/wiki/Workshop_2007 OpenID at Web 2.0 Expo http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/openid_at_web_20_expo.php OpenID Wiki Libraries http://openid.net/wiki/index.php/Libraries Author Details Andy Powell Head of Development Eduserv Foundation Email: andy.powell@eduserv.org.uk Web site: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/people/andypowell/ David Recordon Advanced Products & Research Group VeriSign Email: drecordon@verisign.com Web site: http://www.verisign.com/research/ Return to top Article Title: “OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for andthe Web” Author: Andy Powell and David Recordon Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/powell-recordon/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Building an Electronic Resource Collection Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Building an Electronic Resource Collection Buzz software portal archives repositories cataloguing aggregation ejournal ebook licence url research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Pearson considers whether the 2nd edition of this practical guide for building an electronic resource collection can satisfy the needs of both new and experienced practitioners.
The 2nd edition of this practical guide to building and delivering electronic resource collections is, like the 1st edition, a compact guide (5 chapters with145 pages excluding bibliography and glossary), with an intended audience of students, new professionals, experienced practitioners and publishers.
To address a subject of this scale and complexity with such a wide audience is, to say the least, a challenge.
However, I found on reading this work that the authors have succeeded in this entirely.
This guide should be essential reading for anyone working in electronic resource management.
What's more, the book is very well structured and laid out.
Each chapter has an introduction, a conclusion and a summary; which serves as a quick reference guide if needed.
The structure and clear use of language makes a technically difficult and jargon strewn area of information work, much easier to navigate.
The book divides into two parts.
The first part (chapters 1-3) is an introduction to e-resources and electronic collection development.
Chapter 1 asks (and answers) the questions; 'what is an electronic resource?'
and 'why buy electronic resources?'
giving the main advantages of electronic over print.
It emphasises the importance of integrating e-resources within a wider collection development policy and this is built on throughout the book.
Chapter 2 discusses the electronic resource landscape, identifying the types of product that fall under the umbrella of e-resources, and some of the technical issues and problems inherent in their delivery.
It also touches on areas such as archiving and institutional repositories which are topical areas at present.
Chapter 3 provides a more detailed look at two main types of electronic products e-books and e-journals.
The authors discuss how e-books and e-journals are delivered, what technological factors must be taken into consideration and how the products are used.
They also give a very topical and frank account of the widely documented concerns over the commercial publishing model, in which authors are, in effect, having to buy back their own work via their institution's subscription.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the practicalities of how electronic resources are assessed, acquired and delivered.
The inclusion of flow diagrams detailing the workflow of electronic resource acquisition is particularly useful.
There is a comprehensive evaluation checklist, a good overview of licence issues and pricing models and a very useful section on electronic resource cataloguing.
The final section of the book entitled 'electronic collection development by numbers' was great.
It summarised the electronic resource lifecycle and is very handy as a checklist for collection developers, be they starting an electronic resource collection from scratch or working within an established environment.
The Glossary section of the book is termed as a 'Select Glossary' so while the definitions are very clear, there are some terms which I would like to have seen included, such as open access; open archives, institutional repository, gateway, portal, virtual private network, proxy server.
Some of these terms are described in the book but it would be useful to see them defined in this section.
The bibliography is immensely useful and I have bookmarked many of the Web sites for future reference!
The book is rich in examples which serve to make the discussion clearer and, where the area requires more depth, refer the reader to other texts or Web sites.
It must be emphasised that this is a guide and cannot cover every area in minute detail, though this can at times be frustrating.
The need to publish a 2nd edition so quickly after the 1st edition soon became apparent.
This is a rapidly changing and advancing subject.
The addition of sections on VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) and reading and resource list software is very useful.
Academic libraries are currently faced with the challenge of integrating their collections with VLEs and reading list software as well as institutional portals and ERM (Electronic Resource Management) systems.
Joining up delivery of resources regardless of point of access is a relatively new area which requires documenting and this addition is well received.
However, in the time since this edition was published, there have been continued changes which have made some parts of the book out of date.
An example of this is in the references to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee hearing on scientific publishing.
There is also not enough discussion for me on the open access model, IRs (institutional repositories) and the Open Archives Initiative.
This may be because the scope of this book excludes freely available electronic resources, concentrating on those which are paid for by the institution either by subscription or as a one-off purchase.
However, IRs are playing and will continue to play a much more important role alongside paid-for resources.
Information professionals working in electronic collection development will increasingly become involved in setting up and promoting institutional repositories.
The authors acknowledge that at the time of writing, it was too early to report findings from projects such as the JISC FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) Programme [1], but a more general discussion on the potential impact on electronic collections I think would have added value.
The issue of archiving and long-term access to electronic resources is a problem facing many institutions which have established electronic resource collections.
As more institutions move towards a predominantly e-access or e-only policy with regards to subscriptions, electronic perpetual access and archiving is of greater importance.
We have been operating in a hybrid environment for some years now, where access to the print resource is maintained alongside the e-resource.
One of the key benefits of electronic resources is the potential for saving space in the physical library.
However, libraries are often loath to go down the road of disposing of print holdings going back many years, 'just in case' electronic access to back files is ever removed.
We need to be confident that electronic access can be guaranteed in perpetuity, regardless of whether we hold a current subscription to the work.
This is difficult when the responsibility for providing perpetual access lies outside the institution, which is often the case with e-journal products.
This work does cover the main concerns in this area, such as inclusion of perpetual access commitments in licences and pricing models which include back file access.
It also highlights the essential difference between print and electronic products, in that we own print but merely lease electronic copies.
However, I would have liked to have seen more practical advice and recommendations to readers involved with establishing and maintaining e-resource collections.
Perhaps a checklist of things to consider in terms of back issues and archiving would have been useful.
The book gave some very useful illustrations of the workflow for electronic resource acquisition and delivery.
Another useful illustration could have been the relationship between the different players in the e-resource market.
I have often struggled with the differences between hosts, aggregators, gateway services, subscription agents and publishers when working in this area.
There is so much overlap in the roles of each of these players that I think an illustration of this marketplace would have been a very welcome addition.
Finally, when faced with managing the selection, acquisition, delivery and ongoing maintenance of a large volume of electronic resources, it is often no longer possible to carry out this role without the aid of a system to manage the lifecycle.
Traditional library management systems have been ill-suited to managing the particular problems we face with areas such as URL maintenance, access rights, licences and perpetual access arrangements.
The DLF ERMI (Digital Library Federation Electronic Resource Management Initiative) [2] and NISO / Editeur Joint Working Party [3] have focussed on ERM system requirements and serials and e-resources information exchange respectively.
They have been important in developing this area and as a result, we are seeing an increasing number of commercial and institutional ERM systems which are taking account of the research carried out by these initiatives.
The book does mention e-journal interfaces such as Serials Solution and TDNET.
However, these products are more focussed on access management.
It would have been useful to hear more about products coming along which can help us manage the 'back-room' processes more effectively.
In conclusion then, I would not hesitate to recommend this book as an excellent introduction to e-resource management and collection development for students and new professionals.
I also believe it is of great use to more experienced professionals working in this area as a reference tool.
Its layout, style and use of language, its examples and illustrations all enable one to dip into this work when information is needed as much as reading it cover to cover.
Because of the nature of the publication and the highly dynamic area of e-resources, it does suffer slightly in its currency but I don't think this is of much concern to the reader.
I therefore believe this book succeeds both in terms of its scope and its intended wide audience.
References JISC FAIR Programme (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair DLF ERMI (Digital Library Federation Electronic Resource Management Initiative) http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm02.htm NISO/EDItEUR Joint Working party for the Exchange of Serials Subscription Information http://www.fcla.edu/~pcaplan/jwp/ Author Details Sarah Pearson E-Resources & Serials Advisor University of Birmingham Email: S.Pearson.1@bham.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Building an Electronic Resource Collection: A Practical Guide" Author: Sarah Pearson Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/pearson-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Widening the Focus for the Future Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Widening the Focus for the Future Buzz software html dissemination infrastructure archives metadata preservation ejournal Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reviews the history of the Web Focus post and describes funding changes which gives Web Focus a much wider remit.
The UK Web Focus post was established by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] to advise the UK Higher Education Committee on Web developments.
The post is based at UKOLN and located at the University of Bath.
As post-holder I began work on 1 November 1996.
UK Web Focus Activities “Advising on Web developments” is a very broad remit, especially when one considers that, for many, the Web is pervasive in many aspects of both our work and, nowadays, social activities.
In order to avoid being deluged by HTML queries, the UK Web Focus has focussed on the use of open standards and best practices for Web development.
Although in the very early days of the Web when I was one of the Web evangelists in the UK [2], I probably had a good understanding of Web architecture, development plans and approaches to implementation; these days the Web architecture is so complex that it is difficult for an individual to have a deep understanding of all aspects.
It is also impossible to keep up to date with all the approaches to implementing Web services or the pros and cons of those different approaches.
In light of this, the approach taken by UK Web Focus has always been one of seeking to work with the Web development community and to facilitate the sharing of best practice across the community.
The most high-profile activity to support this sharing of best practice has been the annual Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) series.
This event has been held every year since 1997; a total of seven workshops.
The initial workshop [3] was held at King’s College London in June 1997 and lasted for one day, with an overnight stay.
The response to the first workshop made it clear that there was a demand for a larger event, so the following year the IWMW 1998 workshop [4] held at the University of Newcastle was spread over three days.
This format was repeated at the IWMW 1999 workshop [5] (Goldsmith’s College) and the IWMW 2000 workshop [6] (University of Bath).
The IWMW 2001 workshop [7] was held at Queen’s University Belfast.
Given the location, most delegates would need to fly the day prior to the workshop, so it was decided to start the workshop first thing on the first day, which provided a valuable additional half-day’s content.
This format was kept for the IWMW 2002 workshop [8] (University of Strathclyde) and the most recent event, IWMW 2003 workshop [9], which was held at the University of Kent.
The responses from the workshop evaluation forms give an indication of the popularity of these workshops across the Web community.
This is due, I feel, to the active contributions made by speakers and workshop facilitators at the events and the culture of collaboration and sharing which is one of the most valuable aspects of working in this community.
In addition to organising the workshop series, UK Web Focus also contributes regularly at conferences and workshops organised by other groups within the sector, on topics ranging from “Disseminating News Within Your Organisation”, “Benchmarking Your IT Services Web Site”, “Finding Resources Locally and Remotely” “WebWatching the UK HE community” and “Web Futures” at UCISA-TLIG conferences; “The Web In The 21st Century”, “Auditing and Monitoring Your Web Site”, “Using Externally-Hosted Web Services; Good Idea or Bad?”, “Advertising On The Network”, “The Next Steps For Institutional Web Services”, “Managing Your Institutional Web Gateway”, “The Latest Web Developments: How Do I Deploy Them?” and “Advances in Web Technologies” at UKERNA’s annual Janet User Support Workshop.
As might be expected, the materials used in these events are freely available on the UK Web Focus Presentations Web page [10].
In addition to involvement with these annual or bi-annual conferences, presentations have also been given at many events which support JISC activities such as JISC programmes and a number of events organised by institutions.
The dissemination activities aimed specifically at the Higher Education sector have been complemented by work in the wider community, which has provided an opportunity to share best practice across related sectors (such as regular participation at the Internet Librarian International Conference) or to seek validation of ideas by presenting papers at peer-reviewed conferences.
This has included papers on “Ideology or Pragmatism?
Open Standards and Cultural Heritage Web Sites” [11], “Developing a Quality Culture for Digital Library Programmes” [12], “Approaches to Validation of Dublin Core Metadata Embedded in (X)HTML Document” [13], “Approaches to the Preservation of Web Sites” [14], “Automated Benchmarking of Local Government Web Sites” [15], “RDN-Include: Re-branding Remote Resources” [16], “Approaches to Indexing in the UK Higher Education Community” [17] and “A Lightweight Approach to Support of Resource Discovery Standards” [18].
Again access to these and other papers is freely available on the UK Web Focus Publications Web page [10].
In addition to these peer-reviewed papers regular columns and articles have also been published in e-journals such as Ariadne , Cultivate Interactive and Exploit Interactive [19].
The dissemination activities outlined above have been informed by engaging in a range of activities.
From the start close links have been developed with the JISC, through involvement with several of JISC’s development programmes from eLib in the 1990s through to the current JISC 5⁄99, FAIR and X4L programmes.
Within UKOLN successful bids for funding led to the WebWatch Project (which involved the development and use of benchmarking software employed to profile Web communities and which led to the regular WebWatch columns in Ariadne), the Exploit Interactive and Cultivate Interactive e-journals (which provided dissemination mechanisms for EU-funded programmes) and the current QA Focus work (which is developing quality assurance methodologies for JISC digital library programmes).
Recent Changes Support For FE The audience for UK Web Focus work extended a few years ago when the Further Education funding bodies agreed to fund the JISC.
A programme of work targeted at the FE sector is currently under way.
The approach to this work is based on close collaboration with the JISC RSCs (Regional Support Centres) which provide an interface to the 400+ FE colleges.
A number of workshops for the JISC RSCs have already been delivered.
This included one that was available to all of the JISC RSCs and which provided an opportunity for Web development staff at the RSCs to assess their Web sites and develop strategies for enhancement.
Recent Changes Support For The Cultural Heritage Sector A more significant change occurred on 1 August 2003.
Since this date the UK Web Focus has been jointly funded by JISC and Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives & Libraries.
This change in funding brings the UK Web Focus post in alignment with UKOLN itself, which has JISC and Resource as its core funders.
This change is a very important one for UK Web Focus.
The challenge is to make a significant impact within the cultural heritage sector.
Ideally the impact will be comparable with the impact UK Web Focus has made within the HE sector.
However in order to do this it will be necessary to gain an understanding of the community; (I should say communities as although museums, libraries and archives are all part of the Resource sector, they have their own challenges and cultures).
A particular issue will be the lack of a communications infrastructure such as that used within Higher Education, where participation on mailing lists such as web-support [20] and website-info-mgt [21] is the norm for members of institutional Web management teams.
Work in engaging with the cultural heritage sector has already begun.
The initial activity was a day’s workshop relating to quality assurance in the context of Museum Web sites [22] which was held prior to the mda 2003 conference.
This provided a valuable opportunity to engage with Web developers within the museum’s community and to gain an understanding of the sector.
The workshop was followed by participation in the ichim03 (International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting) conference.
This provided an opportunity to hear about significant developments in the international digital heritage world.
I was also an active participant and gave a paper on open standards and cultural heritage Web sites [23].
The Future The engagement with the cultural heritage community in England and Wales (the geographical area covered by Resource) has only just begun.
I would expect there to be interest in many of the areas of work addressed and approaches taken under the previous funding regime.
However it will also be necessary to engage with the new communities and develop strategies which are appropriate for these communities.
The changes in funding and the need to begin work developing links with these communities will, of course, have an impact on the involvement with the HE sector, especially as it is intended to engage more with the FE sector.
There will be less participation in activities which have primarily a HE focus although it is intended to continue to provide the annual Institutional Web Management Workshop series.
For the post-16 educational community a dedicated UK Web Focus support service is dead.
For the post-16 educational community, as well as the cultural heritage sector, UK Web Focus is alive and well.
References JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web, James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, Published by Oxford Paperbacks, 2000, ISBN 0192862073 Running An Institutional Web Service, 16-17 July 1997 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-jul1997/ Institutional Web Management Workshop 1998, 15-17 September 1998 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/ Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps, 15-17 September 1999 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1999/ Institutional Web Management: The Joined-Up Web, 6-8 September 2000 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2000/ Institutional Web Management: Organising Chaos, 25-27 June 2001 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/ Institutional Web Management: The Pervasive Web, 18-20 June 2002 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/ Institutional Web Management: Supporting Our Users, 11-13 June 2003 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2003/ UKOLN: UK Web Focus: Presentations http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/presentations Ideology Or Pragmatism?
Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites , B. Kelly, A. Dunning, M. Guy and L. Phipps, ichim 03 Proceedings http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/ichim03/ Developing a Quality Culture For Digital Library Programmes, B. Kelly, EUNIS 2003 Conference Proceedings http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/eunis-2003/ Approaches To Validation Of Dublin Core Metadata Embedded In (X)HTML Document, B. Kelly, P. Johnston and A. Powell, WWW 2003 Conference Poster Proceedings http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www2003/ Approaches To The Preservation Of Web Sites, B. Kelly, Online Information 2002 Conference Proceedings http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/online-information-2002/ Automated Benchmarking Of Local Government Web Sites, B. Kelly, EuroWeb 2001: The Web In Public Administration Conference Proceedings http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/euroweb-2001/ RDN-Include: Re-branding Remote Resources, B. Kelly, P. Cliff and A. Powell, WWW10 Conference Poster Proceedings http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www10/ Approaches To Indexing In The UK Higher Education Community”, B. Kelly, P. Cliff and A. Powell, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www9/indexing/ A Lightweight Approach To Support Of Resource Discovery Standards, B. Kelly, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www9/resource-discovery/ Ariadne Magazine http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Cultivate Interactive Magazine http://www.cultivate-int.org/ Exploit Interactive Magazine http://www.exploit-lib.org/ Archives of WEB-SUPPORT@JISCMAIL.AC.UK WEB-SUPPORT which discusses all issues relating to the World Wide Web http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A0=web-support Archives of WEBSITE-INFO-MGT@JISCMAIL.AC.UK: Managing an institutional Web site http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A0=website-info-mgt Quality Assurance For Museum Web Sites, Workshop, mda 2003 conference, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/mda-2003/ Ideology Or Pragmatism?
Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites, B. Kelly, A. Dunning, M. Guy and L. Phipps, ichim03 Proceedings http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/ichim03/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath.
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Global Research Library 2020 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Global Research Library 2020 Buzz data infrastructure blog repositories preservation ejournal research Citation BibTex RIS Jessie Hey and David Pearson report on a series of strategic workshops on the Global Research Library 2020 the first of which, the Willows Lodge Workshop, was held in the Pacific North West of the US in the Autumn of 2007.
Welcome to the Future and Day One Research, scholarship, science, and discovery have been transformed by the Internet and communication technologies across all sectors on a global basis.
In order for research libraries to play a central role in this increasingly multi-institutional and cross-sector environment, we must find new approaches for how they operate and add value to research and discovery on a global basis.
This was a rare opportunity to make a start on thinking longer term with invitees from across sectors and across countries.
The 1st Global Research Library 2020 (GRL2020) workshop was held in Woodinville, Washington, in the Pacific North West of the United States from 30th September to 3rd October, 2007.
With such an international gathering it was well planned to start a small intensive workshop with a wine tasting hosted at the Novelty Hill winery next door to the venue, the Willows Lodge on the Sammamish River.
The next morning started with scene setting by Betsy Wilson, Dean of University Libraries at the University of Washington.
‘Why GRL 2020?
Why You?’, she asked and pointed to some of the key writings by participants and other key resources in the area we were about to discuss [1].
Lee Dirks, Director, Scholarly Communications, Technical Computing, at Microsoft aimed to keep us tightly focused on Logistics, Expectations, and Intended Workshop Outcomes with the Autumnal Seattle weather allowing few external opportunities for distraction during the day.
Figure 1: Welcome Reception at the state-of the-art Novelty Hill Winery (picture courtesy of Stu Weibel) Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of Technical Computing and External Research at Microsoft in his talk ‘Global Research Library 2020: The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communication – and Research Libraries’ gave a variety of examples to stimulate debate.
These included new forms of research which will depend heavily on curated repositories of scientific data; the influence of the revolution in Scholarly Publishing and the new generations of ‘Web 2.0’ students using libraries in non-traditional ways.
He was followed by Savas Parastatidis, Architect, Technical Computing, Microsoft (and Visiting Fellow, Newcastle University) who focused on transforming technology ideas with ‘The Cloud as the Platform for Research A Technology View’.
The lunchtime talk gave us a real practical example of the global imperative of research.
The local speaker was Ann Marie Kimball who is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Washington but also Director of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Emerging Infections Network (APEC EINET).
The afternoon gave an opportunity to present views from other countries and also from across sectors since complex solutions were anticipated to depend crucially on co-operation and diverse expertise.
Figure 2: Participants from around the world (picture courtesy of Stu Weibel) We completed the day with a dinner cruise on Lake Washington which took us through to Lake Union, past the houseboats from the film Sleepless in Seattle, to see the lights of the Seattle skyline.
Day Two The second day began with Chris Greer, of the National Science Foundation, outlining the recent NSF call for “Sustainable digital data preservation and access network partners (DataNet)” [2].
This $100m funding scheme, planned to be distributed in five $20m grants, has an ambitious vision to integrate the work of libraries, infrastructure developers, researchers and commercial partners to create new kinds of services which will not only preserve research data and make it accessible, but also develop sustainable business models which are self-supporting without needing permanent subsidy.
The NSF plan is to see the grants given on a 5+ 5-year basis, with the money ramping down during the second 5-year period, as other income streams come in.
Although this was most immediately relevant to American colleagues – NSF grant-holders must be US-based – this funding programme is obviously of wider potential interest, not only because partnerships may cross national boundaries but also for its explicit expectations about sustainability (one thinks of the ongoing issues around some of the JISC services, which started life as projects).
The rest of the day was then given to breakout sessions, tasked with identifying critical issues and recommending some action plans to take us forward to the research library of the future.
Unsurprisingly, common themes emerged from many of the groups: the importance of capturing, preserving and making accessible research data as well as outputs; the devising of infrastructures and skill sets to do that; the need for libraries to demonstrate both public and fiscal value.
Representatives for the developing countries reminded us not only that these are genuinely global issues, but also that assumptions about networks and resources which we may take for granted in Europe and North America may not apply once we step across those continental boundaries.
There were also questions concerning where the future was to be mapped out, and by whom: by libraries, with publicly focused missions, or by private corporations with an increasing dominance of the world’s information exchanges?
It was recognised that custody of content is an important issue.
The discussions, and the themes that emerged, are captured more fully by Stu Weibel on his blog [3].
So, what were the outcomes?
It was agreed that we need a published manifesto, setting out a vision of the global research library of the future and the things we want to do in order to get there, and a small group was tasked to take this forward.
The Web site [4] has been updated with the presentations which focused the thoughts of the workshop.
There was broad support across the group for follow-up meetings, probably outside North America, drawing in a wider pool of participants from organisations who should be represented but who couldn’t make it for the first event.
Day Three Redmond, home of Microsoft, is not far away, so we were able opt to join its internal community at the Microsoft Library Summit.
Jon Udell [5] challenged us to remix the library.
In an online world of small pieces loosely joined, he proposed that librarians are among the most well qualified and highly motivated joiners of those pieces.
Library users, meanwhile, are in transition.
Once mainly consumers of information, they are now, on the two-way Web, becoming producers too.
Can libraries function not only as centres of consumption, but also as centres of production?
We saw visual information projects from Microsoft Live Labs [6] such as Photosynth and Seadragon.
We heard more about preservation – moves towards open formats and involvement in the big European PLANETS Project [7].
To keep us on our toes, exploring longer-term ideas, we visited the Home of the Future and the Center for Information Work before the final reception at the Visitor Centre.
Next Stages The workshop was reported on by Jessie Hey at the European Information Space: Infrastructures, Services and Applications Workshop [8].
This was organised by the Diligent Project, with support from the FAO, and took place in Rome over 29 30 October 2007.
The 2nd GRL2020 workshop is also planned to take place in Italy, this time at the end of March 2008 in Pisa: so watch the GRL2020 Web site [4] for future developments.
In the meantime, think back 10 years to the beginnings of the e-journal world and the Open Access movement and see if you can predict how librarians can best facilitate 21st century research.
References GRL2020 Resources and Links http://www.lib.washington.edu/grl2020/readings.html National Science Foundation: Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet) http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503141&org=NSF&sel_org=NSF&from=fund Weibel Lines http://weibel-lines.typepad.com/weibelines/2007/10/grl-2020-a-voic.html Global Research Library 2020 http://www.grl2020.net/ Jon Udell, Remixing the Library, talk given at the Global Research Library summit, October 2007 http://jonudell.net/talks/lib2020/talk.html Microsoft Live Labs http://labs.live.com/CategoryView.aspx?category=nav_Projects Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) Project http://www.planets-project.eu/ Hey, Jessie M.N.
(2007) Global Research Library 2020: a report to Europe.
In, European Information Space: Infrastructures, Services and Applications Workshop, Rome, Italy, 29-30 October 2007.
Pisa, Italy, Diligent Project.
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/50258/ Author Details Jessie Hey Digital Repositories Researcher University of Southampton Email: jesshey@acm.org Web site: http://www.edspace.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ David Pearson Director University of London Research Library Services Senate House Malet Street London WC1E 7HU Email: david.pearson@london.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ulrls.lon.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Global Research Library 2020 “ Author: Jessie Hey and David Pearson Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/grl2020-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Virtual Rooms, Real Meetings Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Virtual Rooms, Real Meetings Buzz mobile software java infrastructure browser video windows linux passwords videoconferencing quicktime url research Citation BibTex RIS Andy Powell takes a brief look at VRVS, a desktop video-conferencing tool that can be used to support collaborative activities between groups of geographically distributed researchers.
As a child I can remember watching an episode of Tomorrow's World (the BBC's weekly popular science programme of the time) [1] that showed the use of a video phone and how people would soon actually be able to see the person to whom they were talking.
"Wow," I thought, "that is the future."
Well, it certainly was the future!
It's probably 30 years since that programme was aired and we still don't see this kind of technology widely deployed in the form of telephone handsets.
What we do see however, is sufficient Internet bandwidth in our homes and workplaces such that desktop audioand video-conferencing tools are now deployable and usable on a day-to-day basis.
Examples of this trend include the one-to-one audio/video communication facilities built into the latest versions of MSN-Messenger [2] and the development of free Internet telephony tools such as Skype [3].
However, in the context of Higher and Further Education collaborative project activities, the Virtual Rooms VideoConferencing System (VRVS) [4] developed by Caltech looks particularly interesting because it takes the large-scale virtual meetings facilitated by the Access Grid [5] and delivers them direct to your desktop.
The Access Grid and VRVS The Access Grid (AG) consists of a large number of AG nodes rooms containing high-end audio and video technology that supports distributed group-to-group interactions across the Grid.
Typically, an AG node is a dedicated meeting room within an institution.
The Access Grid can be used for large-scale distributed meetings, collaborative work sessions, seminars, lectures, tutorials and training.
The Access Grid thus differs from desktop-to-desktop tools, such as MSN Messenger, which focus on individual communication.
The Access Grid is currently used at over 150 institutions worldwide.
However, because setting up an AG node typically requires a dedicated room and the installation of fairly complex audio, video and computing equipment, the investment required by each institution in order to take part in the Access Grid is relatively high.
Researchers at institutions that have not yet made this commitment may begin to feel like they've been locked out of the meeting room.
This is where VRVS comes in.
VRVS is an online audio/video collaboration system that runs on your desktop and that can be installed and run with minimal investment on the part of the end-user.
Although it can be used as a collaborative tool among a group of VRVS-enabled researchers, VRVS also allows people to join Access Grid meetings from their desktop, with no requirement to visit a local AG node.
As a recent VRVS press release [6] states: The VRVS (Virtual Room Videoconferencing System) is a unique, globally scalable next-generation system for real-time collaboration by small workgroups, medium and large teams engaged in research, education and outreach.
... VRVS now provides the global collaboration infrastructure and Web-enabled user interfaces required to meet the research and education needs of many fields.
It covers the full range of existing and emerging network protocols, and the full range of client devices for collaboration, from mobile systems through desktops to installations in large auditoria.
Today, around 12,000 users have been registered on the system.
An average of 800 worldwide collaborative sessions are performed every month, involving more than 3000 users and representing a cumulative time of 4700 hours of research collaboration over the Internet.
...VRVS supports users on Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.
It is entirely web-based, so very user-friendly.
It has a scheduler for organizing collaboration meetings but can also create permanent virtual rooms.
It supports all the common standards (H.323, Mbone and SIP).
It is developed in partnership with Grid projects and integrated the latest Grid monitoring software into the VRVS infrastructure.
Note that VRVS is not the only way to join an Access Grid meeting from your desktop the Access Grid Toolkit [7] supports similar functionality.
The Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC) [8] (which is managed by UKERNA and run by the University of Manchester with funding from the JISC's Committee for the Support of Research) provides support and advice about all aspects of using the Access Grid.
Getting Started This article isn't going to go into much detail about how to use VRVS the VRVS documentation and help pages [9][10] are extremely comprehensive and will tell you everything you need to know.
However, in a nutshell, the steps that you need to take to get started and have your first interaction in the VRVS test room (the "Café") are as follows: 1.
Before using VRVS for the first time, your desktop machine must be equiped with a Web cam and audio equipment (speakers and a microphone or a headset note that a headset is required in order to join Access Grid meetings in order to prevent problems with audio feedback).
The VRVS Web pages make recommendations about compatible operating systems, browsers, audio and video equipment and so on [11].
The VRVS software is written in Java and is therefore supported by most common desktop platforms.
2.
Note that in order to use VRVS you may need changes made to your institutional firewall [12].
If you run a personal firewall on your desktop machine, such as the one now built into Windows XP Service Pack 2, you will also need to make some configuration changes to this as well [13].
3.
Go to the VRVS home page [3] and select the 'START' button.
Figure 1: VRVS Home Page 4.
The VRVS system will then check out your system, including support for pop-up windows, Java version and so on.
At this stage you may need to modify your browser configuration slightly and/or install the latest version of Sun's Java Runtime Environment [14].
Figure 2: VRVS Login Routine 5.
Once your system is correctly configured, select the 'register' button.
Fill in the fields as requested, setting your 'community' to 'Universe'.
You will be sent a confirmation email, after which you will be registered with the VRVS system.
Note that you only need to register once, even if you use VRVS from multiple desktop machines.
6.
Return to the VRVS home page, select the 'START' button again and then select the 'login' button.
You will be challenged for your new VRVS username and password.
Figure 3: VRVS Login Procedure: Username and Password Dialog Box 7.
If you log in successfully you will be presented with a new page containing VRVS news and some additional VRVS buttons in the left-hand menu.
Select the 'ENTER' button to see a list of available meeting rooms.
In VRVS, a 'room' is a virtual place where you can have a meeting with other VRVS users.
More about this in a moment.
For now, scroll to the bottom of the list of rooms and select the 'Café' room.
The Café is the VRVS test room.
It is always open and can be freely accessed by anyone wanting to test his or her VRVS configuration.
Figure 4: VRVS Login 8.
Two new VRVS browser windows will now open one containing a 'chat' tool where you can exchange simple text messages with other members of the meeting room, the other being the main VRVS room page.
Select the 'Connect Mbone Tools' button in order to start the audio and video collaboration tools.
9.
The first time that you do this several Java tools will be automatically downloaded and started.
If this doesn't happen, consult the VRVS help pages [15].
After a while, two new windows should start one containing the audio tool (known as 'RAT'), the other containing the video tool (known as 'VIC').
For details about how these tools work, consult the VRVS help pages.
Figure 5: VRVS Café Virtual Room 10.
Because the VRVS Café is a test room, there are no guarantees about who will be around to see and talk to.
For initial testing, it will probably be helpful to pre-arrange a session with at least one other person, in order to check that your audio and video are working properly.
Note that the scenario described here makes use of the VRVS MBONE tools to provide audio and video.
VRVS can also be used with existing desktop tools like NetMeeting [16] and Quicktime [17].
Real Meetings Using the test Café is all very well, but it doesn't provide a suitable place for real meetings because you have no control over who else is present.
For serious meetings a room can be booked using the VRVS virtual room booking facility.
Every registered VRVS user is given a room-booking quota that can be used to book rooms.
The quota lasts for a month, after which it is refreshed.
Once your quota is used up, you cannot book any more rooms until the next monthly period starts.
When booking a room it is possible to assign a password for the meeting, so that unauthorised access to the meeting by outsiders is prevented.
In order to take part in Access Grid meetings you need to make sure that the Access Grid room that is used is VRVS-enabled (not all Access Grid rooms support VRVS).
Access Grid rooms should be booked by whoever is organising the Access Grid meeting there is no need to book the room using the VRVS room-booking system.
In general, it is recommended that VRVS users join the Access Grid meeting sometime before the real meeting starts so that the audio volume can be set correctly.
Participating in Access Grid meetings from VRVS requires the use of a headset to prevent problems with audio feedback.
Meeting Procedures As with any new collaborative tool, getting used to the dynamics of meetings can be quite difficult.
Even with the addition of video images of the other meeting participants, a VRVS/Access Grid meeting is much more like a telephone conference call than a face-to-face meeting.
As such, setting a few rules of engagement can help the meeting flow more smoothly: Agree who is going to chair the meeting.
Get participants to introduce themselves at the start of the meeting in order to help people recognise each other's voices.
Set an agenda, shared in advance, and stick to it as far as possible.
Share any papers, URLs or other resources in advance and link them to points in the agenda.
Try to agree a protocol for who speaks next, otherwise there is a danger of several participants talking together.
Remember that VRVS (and the Access Grid for that matter) can be used as an audio-only collaboration tool.
If you don't like the video feeds or, worse, you find them distracting, it may still make sense to use VRVS as a free alternative to holding a telephone conference call.
Conclusion Face-to-face meetings can be very expensive, particularly where collaborative activities involve people from a wide geographic area.
Collaborative tools like VRVS and the Access Grid don't necessarily replace the need for all face-to-face meetings, but they can form a very useful additional forum in those cases where it is neither straighforward, economic nor important enough to get people physically together in the same room.
We are now at the stage where the technical challenge and cost of making use of tools like VRVS is very low.
These new collaborative tools may take some getting used to, but the benefits are likely to be well worthwhile.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Michael Daw of the UK Access Grid Support Centre for commenting on previous versions of this article.
References Tomorrow's World axed after 38 years http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/2625699.stm MSN Messenger http://messenger.msn.com/ Skype http://www.skype.com/ VRVS http://www.vrvs.org/ Access Grid http://www.accessgrid.org/ Caltech's VRVS Project Extends Its Research Collaboration Worldwide http://www.vrvs.org/VRVS_NREN_news.html The Access Grid Toolkit http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/fl/research/accessgrid/ Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC) http://www.agsc.ja.net/ Minimum Steps to Join a Meeting http://www.vrvs.org/Documentation/quickstart.html VRVS FAQ http://www.vrvs.org/Documentation/faq.html VRVS Equipment Recommendations http://www.vrvs.org/Documentation/Recommendation/ VRVS Firewall configuration http://www.vrvs.org/Documentation/faq.html#Config04 VRVS under Windows XP Service Pack 2 http://www.vrvs.org/Documentation/vrvs_winsp2.html Java http://www.java.com/ VRVS Documentation http://www.vrvs.org/Documentation/ VRVS and NetMeeting http://www.vrvs.org/Documentation/faq.html#h32301 VRVS and QuickTime http://www.vrvs.org/Documentation/Applications/quicktime-guide.html Author Details Andy Powell Assistant Director, Distributed Systems and Services UKOLN   Email: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Virtual Rooms, Real Meetings" Author: Andy Powell Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/powell/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: WWW 2003 Trip Report Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: WWW 2003 Trip Report Buzz data rdf html xml stylesheet metadata css xhtml accessibility browser vocabularies copyright video dtd visualisation e-learning avi dom smil svg foaf rae mathml wcag url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly writes on the recent WWW 2003 conference and outlines some of the latest Web developments.
WWW 2003 was the 12th in the series of international World Wide Web conferences organised by the IW3C2 (the International World Wide Web Conference Committee).
The international WWW conferences provide an opportunity for the Web research community to describe their research activities.
Other tracks at the conference cover areas such as cultural resources, e-learning, accessibility, etc.
In addition W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) gives a series of presentations which describe many of the new Web standards being developed.
As I did not attend last year’s conference it was particularly useful to see how things had progressed over the past two years.
A summary of some of the highlights of the conference is given below.
Note that many of the papers and presentations from WWW 2003 are available on the conference Web site [1].
Conference Highlights In my trip report of WWW10 held in Hong Kong in 2001 I wrote in issue 28 [2]:”The future of the Semantic Web was one of the main topics of discussion at the conference.
Some felt that the Semantic Web was too much of an abstract research concept and that, in the light of experiences in the field of AI and Expert Systems, it would not be sensible to invest heavily in the development of Semantic Web services.”.
At WWW 2003 it was apparent that the Semantic Web was no longer an abstract concept: many of the papers and posters were concerned with the Semantic Web and we were seeing a number of demonstrators in a range of areas.
Perhaps the ‘coolest’ Semantic Web application is FOAF (Friends of a Friend) [3].
This application is based on the six-degrees-of-separation theory that there are at most six links between you and any other person.
FOAF is a Semantic Web application which enables you to provide links to your friends.
If your friends also have FOAF files you can then follow links from their friends, and so on.
An example of a FOAF application is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The FOAFNAUT Application Figure 1 shows the FOAFNAUT application.
I have given my email address as the entry point.
My friends, defined in my FOAF file, are then displayed.
One of the entries is for Charles McCathieNeville, one of the early FOAF developers.
By clicking on his entry, I can then see a display of his friends, as illustrated.
This example illustrates a number of important concepts: Typed links: the link being followed has the meaning “is a friend of”.
Contrast this with the conventional Web in which links can mean anything Integration of data from diverse sources: when I click on the link to Charles, the data is retrieved from Charles’ Web site.
The data is not stored centrally within a single application as is the case for similar applications Extensibility: the data is not only held remotely, but can also be extended.
For example, Charles’s FOAF file also also contains a link to a photograph and information on the languages he speaks and his interests.
FOAF applications can process such information: FOAFNAUT, for example, will display photographs; other applications, such as a Semantic Web spider, could be programmes to find people who speak the same languages as I do or have similar interests FOAF has become very popular amongst Web geeks.
It may well turn out to be a useful mechanism for promoting the Semantic Web from the grass roots, as opposed to the top-down approach which typically requires significant commitment from organisations.
There is also a need to consider the potential for the Semantic Web from an institutional perspective.
At the conference I was informed of a Semantic Web application which provides an application likely to be of interest to the institutional Web management community.
The application, which has been developed by a research group at the University of Southampton, takes data from a number of public Web sites including the RAE findings (from the HERO Web site) and from Computer Science departmental Web sites within the UK Higher Education community.
These unstructured HTML pages are converted into RDF and are available from the Hyphen Web site [4].
An application has been developed which enables the data, which originally came from multiple sources developed independently of each other, to be integrated.
An example of the AKTiveSpace application [5] (which requires the Mozilla browser) is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The AKTiveSpace Application The AKTiveSpace interface allows the user to view a list of leading researchers ordered by total grant income by expressing constraints which apply to them; for example, by the research groups or by the subject disciplines in which they work.
It should be noted that an AVI file is available which shows a session of the tool [6].
This demonstration shows how it should be possible to integrate data seamlessly from multiple sources and interact with the data.
Of course, in this example the data has been downloaded to a central file store and transformed into RDF.
In order for the Semantic Web to take off the preferred model would be for institutions to store their own data.
W3C Track Although much of the excitement at WWW 2003 focussed on the area of the Semantic Web, the W3C track was also very useful in providing an opportunity to hear about emerging new W3C standards.
Steve Bratt, W3C’s Chief Operating Officer, opened the W3C track by giving a W3C Overview [7].
This was followed by Ivan Harman’s talk which gave a High-Level Overview of W3C Technologies [8].
Following these two overview talks Daniel Weitzner outlined W3C’s new patent policy [9].
The policy, announced on 20 May 2003, (the day before the conference opened), seeks to ensure that W3C recommendations are implementable on a royalty-free basis.
This is very good news, and W3C should be applauded for addressing this tricky legal issue and successfully implementing a policy.
The second W3C track session covered The Future Web Browser.
Stephen Pemberton talked about XHTML 2.0 and XForms [10].
Although XHTML 1.0 should benefit from being an XML application, in reality most XHTML 1.0 resources are, in fact, not compliant with the XML specification.
Since the XML specification requires XML resources to be compliant (unlike HTML, in which the specification expects browsers to attempt to render non-compliant resources) it is difficult to exploit the potential of XML.
XHTML 1.0 is severely compromised by its design aim of providing backwards compatibility with existing Web browsers.
XHTML 2.0 is designed based on following fundamental XML principles.
Backwards compatibility is not a requirement for XHTML 2.0!
This provides an opportunity to reengineer the HTML language for example it is proposed that the <h1>, <h2>, etc.
elements will be replaced by <h> in conjunction with a new <section> element.
The deployment model for XHTML 2.0 is based on use of a new MIME type.
Web browsers which can process XHTML 2.0 resources will identify such resources by the new MIME types and will be able to process them using an XML parser; current XHTML 1.0 and HTML resources will be processed using existing HTML parsers.
The expectation is that the benefits of working in a clean XML world (faster processing based on a document’s DOM; clean integration with other markup languages such as MathML, SVG, etc.
; easier repurposing of data; etc) will be so overwhelming that Web developers will quickly move to an XHTML 2.0 environment.
Although it would be easy to be sceptical as to whether the Web community is ready for such a fundamental change to its native format, it should be pointed out that there will be automated tools available to assist in migration.
In addition we are beginning to see examples of how XHTML 2.0 can be deployed in today’s environment.
The following image illustrates the rendering of an XHTML resource in an existing browser.
Figure 3: Viewing An XHTML 2.0 Document You may wish to see an example of XHTML 2.0 code fragment.
In the second talk in the track Bert Bos described CSS 3 [11].
This talk was not as radical as Stephen Pemberton’s; it covered a number of developments to the CSS stylesheet language, including enhanced ways of rendering hyperlinks, layout for forms (including XForms) and many other improvements such as columns, print, list numbering, wrapping around floats, etc.
The most impressive demonstration was given in the third talk in the track, in which Dean Jackson described Applications of SVG [12].
Most of the demonstrations Dean gave are available online, but it should be noted that you will need to have an SVG plugin in order to view them.
Many of the demonstrations are very visual and interactive and so will not be described here.
However one which should be mentioned is foafCORP [13].
This has many similarities to FOAF (in fact Dean’s ideas were the inspiration for the FOAFnaut application), but it illustrates relationships amongst the boards of directors of large companies in America it describes itself as “a semantic web visualization of the interconnectedness of corporate America”.
Use of a foafCORP viewer [14] is shown below.
The application opens with a list of companies.
After selecting one, you can then expand an icon representing the company (a dollar sign) to obtain details of the directors of the company, (represented by fat cats!)
You can then click on an icon to display other companies where an individual is also on their board of directors.
As can be seen from Figure 4, there is a very short chain between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.
Figure 4: foafCORP This example is particularly noteworthy as, rather than demonstrating interesting visual effects as many of the other SVG demonstrations did, this illustrates the way in which SVG can visualise data elements and provide interaction with the data.
In the final talk in the session on The Future Web Browser, Chris Lilley sought to Pull It All Together [15].
Chris reviewed the new standards which had been shown, (XHTML 2.0, XForms, CSS 3.0, and SVG).
He pointed out there were many other formats and standards which end users would like to access, including SMIL, MathML, RDF metadata, etc.
Chris’ view of the future is not based on a monolithic Web browser which provides support for all these new standards.
This approach is flawed, not only due to the difficulties in developing browsers able to support a large number of standards, (including standards yet to be developed!
), but also because there are a number of fundamental Web architectural challenges which have not yet been resolved: a number of new formats have defined their own mechanisms for hyperlinking; there are problems in identifying ID semantics in XML languages which do not have a DTD, and so on.
In the light of these challenges, Chris feels that there is a need for a browser component architecture.
This architecture will provide a mechanism for aggregating components, ensure that the browser components are separated from the content and will provide better integration.
The W3C is now only involved in developing new standards for the Web.
It also has a QA activity which seeks to support the development process for W3C specifications.
The QA work also addresses the needs of Web developers and maintainers who are responsible for managing Web sites.
Daniel Dardailler gave an outline of the Quality Assurance Goals [16].
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux then described Outreach Resources and Tools For a Better Web [17] and Olivier Thereaux spoke on Community-driven tools development for a better Web [18].
Other W3C sessions covered Five Years and Growing: The XML Family, W3C Standards for Web Services, Semantic Web Update, Preparing for New Devices and Horizontal Essentials.
The slides for all of the talks in these sessions are available from the Talk area of the W3C Web site [19].
Panel Session As well as getting an update on W3C developments and hearing about research activities this year I moderated a panel session on Web Accessibility: Will WCAG 2.0 Better Meet Today’s Challenges?
[20].
The panelists consisted of myself, Jenny Craven (CERLIM, Manchester Metropolitan University) and Judy Brewer and Wendy Chisholm (W3C WAI).
The panel session was meant to provide an opportunity to engage in discussion on the challenges of implementing Web accessibility and compliance with WAI’s Web content accessibility guidelines.
Unfortunately the session did not really provide an opportunity for debate and we really saw a standard update on the forthcoming revision of the Web content accessibility guidelines.
Conclusions Two years ago I felt that the Web was finally losing its momentum and was reaching a period of consolidation, with the emphasis on refinements to the underlying Web architecture (focussing on technologies such as XML and Web Services).
I felt that the W3C would spend its time dealing with political, funding and legal issues (such as patents).
W3C, and the broader Web community have been addressing such issues.
But I think it’s also true to say that with technologies such as Semantic Web applications, SVG and XHTML 2.0 just around the corner that the Web is regaining the excitement of the early years.
If these technologies do take off in real world applications it will be certainly an interesting time for the Web community.
The WWW 2004 conference [21] will take place in New York, USA from 17-22 May.
References The Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, http://www.www2003.org/ Hot News From WWW10, Brian Kelly, Ariadne, issue 28, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/web-focus/ FOAF: the ‘friend of a friend’ vocabulary, RDFweb http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ Hyphen.info, http://www.hyphen.info/ AKT: CS Aktive Space, AKT Triplestore http://triplestore.aktors.org/demo/AKTiveSpace/ View a video of CS AKTiveSpace in action, AKT Triplestore http://triplestore.aktors.org/demo/AKTiveSpace.avi Introduction and W3C’s Process, Steve Bratt, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/0521-sb-wwwintro/ High-Level Overview of W3C Technologies , Ivan Herman, W3C http://www.w3c.org/2003/Talks/0521-BudapestW3CTrack-IH/ W3C Patent Policy , Daniel J. Weitzner, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/0521-www-patent/ XHTML 2.0 and XForms , Stephen Pemberton, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/www2003-steven-xhtml-xforms/ CSS 3.0, Bert Bos, W3C http://www.w3.org/Talks/2003/0521-CSS-WWW2003/all.htm Applications of SVG, Dean Jackson, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/www2003-svg/ FOAFCorp: Corporate Friends of Friends, RDFWeb http://rdfweb.org/foaf/corp/intro.html foafCORP viewer, Dean Jackson, W3C http://www.grorg.org/2002/10/foafcorp/ Pulling It All Together, Chris Lilley, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/www2003-pullingItAllTogether/0.svg Quality Assurance Goals , Daniel Dardailler, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/www2003-qa/ Outreach Resources and Tools For a Better Web , Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/www2003-specGL/ Community-driven tools development for a better Web, Olivier Thereaux, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/www2003-QATools/ W3C Track, W3C http://www.w3.org/2003/03/w3c-track03.html Web Accessibility: Will WCAG 2.0 Better Meet Today’s Challenges?, Brian Kelly, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/www2003/ WWW2004 Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference, http://cat.nyu.edu/www2004/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Return to top Article Title: “Web Focus: WWW 2003 Trip Report” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: A Mixed Bag A Review of Some New Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: A Mixed Bag A Review of Some New Search Engines Buzz data portal personalisation url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes a look at some new search engines to see if they are up to challenging the top dogs.
People are of course aware that Google isn't the only search engine out there, by any manner or means, and although many people regard it as the biggest and the best, this certainly isn't the case for those organisations who decide that they want a share of the search engine market.
This month I'm going to look at some of the new search engines that have appeared, and will see how many of them make the grade.
Euroclips: The definitive European directory At first glance it's hard to see that Euroclips [1] is in fact a search engine it looks much like one of the older style 'portal' services that I thought we'd seen have their heyday a couple of years ago.
The home page is very busy, with the latest news headlines, business news, travel (with information about Valentine's Day breaks together with a broken image) European holiday destinations (clicking on Germany brings up a map, some facts and figures and 'currency' details which are incorrectly spelled).
There are also other sections for shopping, computing, money and so on.
I did eventually find the search button, but there wasn't an advanced search feature, any help guides or indeed any indication of what I could or couldn't do with the search functions.
I tried a search on my name (hey, I'm vain what else can I say?)
and it eventually came up with 10 results.
There was an option to refine my search, so I tried limiting to 'computing' which resulted in 10 different results, almost all of which were commercial in nature.
Perhaps I've misunderstood the meaning of 'refine', but I certainly wasn't expecting the very unhelpful results that I got.
I next tried one of my other favourite searches, for 'Everton' and several of the results were all commercial eBay, and a ticket website for example, but no actual link to the club's own website.
Oddly enough, the refine options were exactly the same as when I searched for my own name, which didn't inspire me with confidence.
I tried one final search, this time for 'internet' and once again, all that I got were commercial sites of one sort or another.
I always like to try and find some positive points about any site or search engine that I look at, since I dislike being entirely negative, but Euroclips is going to prove to be an exception to that rule.
It appears to be wholly dedicated to commerce, and provided very few useful, informative sites.
It's not one that I'll be using myself, though I suppose if you are looking for a product to purchase you could try giving it a go.
YouSearched: The accessible Web search The YouSearched [2] search engine has been specifically designed for people with visual impairments, and has the seal of approval from both the RNIB and Bobby.
The interface was very clear and easy to use the search box in particular has been written to appear with a large, bold typeface.
The search engine also has a category approach, with 15 categories from Arts, to travel, to adult.
Most of the categories provided me with 10-13 sites per page, with a total of 10 pages to look at, and although many of the links were to commercial sites there was some reference to good solid informative sites as well.
The search engine also provided me with several other categories that I could use to refine my search a little further, but even so, a quick comparison with Yahoo!
showed that the engine has a long way to go before it could even begin to compete.
I also wasn't impressed by the icons used for the different categories either while they were clear and reasonably intuitive they were poorly drawn and would be the kind of images that I would expect to find in a primary school.
My immediate thought was that although people might have a visual impairment it doesn't mean that they should be treated like a child!
Turning to look at the free text aspect of the search engine (that is to say, the search box, where you're free to type in any text that you wish), there was no advanced search function, or any help screens at all users were left to fend for themselves once again.
Perhaps I'm just being really picky here, but in my opinion searching is NOT obvious, and even it was, I'd still like to see an indication of the support any search engine gives to Boolean, phrase searching, field searching and so on.
As a user I don't want to have to try and guess what I can do, and I don't believe that I should have to waste my time trying out syntax that isn't supported.
However, I'll get down off that hobby horse fairly quickly and go back to seeing what the search engine could tell me about myself.
The results were a little better than Euroclips, and I did find some reasonable sites listed which gave me useful material.
The left hand menu suggested some categories that I could further search in, but these all related to various people with the forename 'Phil' rather than both forename and surname.
I think it's an excellent idea to provide people with various impairments with a search engine that is specifically tailored to their needs, however once again my cynical thought is that a person with a visual impairment is just that they're no more or less stupid than the rest of us, and I fail to see why a site should expect to get away with providing a second rate search engine even if the visual interface is high quality.
Personally I'd be inclined to use Google with a large font size, since it will give me a better set of search tools and an interface with a similar font size I'm afraid to say that (once again in my opinion) YouSearched really doesn't deliver.
Ujiko Ujiko [3] is rather an unusual looking search engine, in that the search box is at the top of the screen (no surprise there), but almost all of the rest of the page is an empty blank box I reloaded the page twice, since I wasn't sure that the entire page had downloaded correctly.
Thankfully this time however, a help screen was provided, although it still didn't give me a great deal of actual help, but at least it is a nod in the right direction.
Ujiko is based on the Yahoo!
search technology, so it gives you access to over 4 billion web pages, which you can personally rank yourself once you've run a search.
All became clear when I ran a search, since the large empty box soon filled with results, although only seven to a page.
The results were good, giving me informative information rather than more depressing commercial websites.
The right hand side of the screen gave me various options to add to my search, which Ujiko automatically placed into the search box with my original terms which I thought was a nice touch.
As I ran my cursor up and down the list of results, I had the opportunity of deleting results (with the dustbin icon), or giving them weighting (with the heart icon).
Clicking on the heart icon brought me up a list of options, from adding the site to a self defined folder, to adding a title or description, which I also thought was a neat touch.
Leaving the site and then returning to it, then re-running my searches again the search engine remembered my preferences for deleted pages.
Other options allowed me to send the URL of the results page to an email address, to view various self defined folders of pages that I'd added, consulted pages, answered queries and clear memory.
This is an excellent idea, since if I'm researching a query over a couple of days, I'm never able to remember which web pages I've consulted and found useful, and which have been of no use.
Ujiko also gave me a type of filtering option, with a number of pre-set filters for 'trash,' parental, personal and free pages, which, once they're turned on highlight the pages that match that filter in a particular colour.
Not quite what I was expecting to see, but it was an interestingly different approach.
The engine also gave me the opportunity for creating my own filters, (amusingly using the Kartoo search engine as an example) which did seem to work well.
Ujiko is certainly a different type of search engine, and I was impressed with the level of personalisation that it offered me, and I could certainly see times when it would be a useful engine to use.
Personalisation of search results is certainly a hot topic at the moment, and I'm fully expecting more search engines to produce interfaces that offer this functionality in the future and Ujiko has certainly taken some early and interesting steps down this road.
Only one particular question remains in my mind though: why is it called Ujiko?
A9 A9 [4], the last search engine to have attracted my attention in recent months, is the offering from a separately branded and operated subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., which opened its Palo Alto, California, doors in October 2003.
A9 is able to use this connection with Amazon to good effect not only can it offer web search results, (powered by Google) but it can also provide access to excerpts from books (provided you are registered with Amazon).
Another nice feature is that your search history can be stored on their servers so that you can access previous searches from any computer (and also edit the searches as well).
A9 provides access to sites information, so it is possible for the searcher to obtain more information about the site without having to leave A9.
As you might expect, A9 comes with its own toolbar, which almost rivals that provided by Google.
For an in-depth comparison of the two, you may wish to refer to an article that I wrote just after the A9 toolbar was made available you can find the article on my site [5].
The search interface is nice and clear, and draws comparison with the Google front page.
However, once again there is no help screen available, nor is there an advanced search function available.
This is slightly annoying because although the results are powered by Google, A9 doesn't have the same level of functionality as its more popular cousin it wasn't possible to use the 'define' feature, but confusingly, it was possible to do a synonym search using the tilde character.
Consequently, in order to see exactly what is and is not possible it would be necessary to do a lengthy comparison; this wouldn't be necessary if A9 provided help screens.
Results are displayed neatly on the page, with sponsored links at the top as one would expect, and the web pages listed below.
To the right are two tabs 'Open Book Results' and 'Open Search History'.
Cached copies of many of the pages are available, and the site information (as previously mentioned) is supplied via Alexa.
The book results open into a small vertical window, and clicking on a link takes you to the Amazon site (with all its exhortations to buy the product), but also has the option to search inside the book, or to read reviews of it.
It is not clear to me quite why the results are displayed in the order that they are they appear to be taken from the Amazon.com site, which is slightly irritating given that I use the UK version I would not expect it to beyond the wit of their programmers to work out where I'm from by my IP address and direct me to the appropriate Amazon site accordingly, but this is a minor irritation.
The search history option opens up another vertical window, and allows me to see my recent searches, but also has them arranged in monthly folders, which obviously has both advantages and disadvantages to it.
It is however, a nice feature and one that I can see would be of considerable value to information professionals who spend time going from machine to machine.
In summary, A9 is a good search engine taking its results from Google, Amazon and Alexa it could hardly be otherwise.
If you're the type of person who likes to check the content of books as well as web pages and/or moves from computer to computer a lot, this search engine could well become a very attractive proposition.
Conclusion Of the four search engines I've looked at in this column, I'd give two, Ujiko and A9 a definite thumbs up; they both provide good access to data easily and quickly, and both have interesting features that allow for personalisation which is going to be a key battleground in the next couple of years as search engines increase the battle for the hearts and minds of their users.
The two other engines were very disappointing however; both trying to fill gaps in the market, but both having missed the mark somewhat, in my opinion neither of them really provide anything new.
Unfortunately a new search engine isn't news anymore, and being new doesn't make it an attractive proposition there has to be an awful lot more to it than that.
References Euroclips http://www.euroclips.com/uk/ YouSearched http://www.yousearched.com/ Ujiko http://www.ujiko.com/ A9 http://www.a9.com A comparison of the Google and A9 toolbars http://www.philb.com/toolbars.htm Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: "Search Engines: A Mixed Bag; A review of some new search engines" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: ARIST 39 Annual Review of Information Science and Technology Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: ARIST 39 Annual Review of Information Science and Technology Buzz data framework database usability infrastructure archives metadata preservation hypertext visualisation ejournal curation e-science algorithm taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reviews another recent volume of this key annual publication on information science and technology.
The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) is an important annual publication containing review articles on many topics of relevance to library and information science, published on behalf of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST).
Since volume 36 (2002), the editor of ARIST has been Professor Blaise Cronin of Indiana University, Bloomington.
Professor Cronin's introduction to the 2004 volume highlighted some of the difficulties with planning a publication like ARIST, noting that it has a habit of not quite turning out as it was initially conceived [1].
Reflecting on this with a wry reference to the modern trend of 'supersizing,' Cronin's introduction to the latest bumper-sized volume notes that ARIST 39 should contain "something for just about everyone" (p. vii).
Despite this, however, a neat redesign by the publishers has resulted in a volume that actually contains fewer pages than volume 38.
The volume contains fourteen chapters two more than ARIST 38 grouped into five sections relating to information retrieval, technology and systems, social informatics, national intelligence, and theory.
Information Retrieval The opening chapter is a review of recent developments in the use of statistical language modelling for the retrieval of written text by Xiaoyong Liu and Bruce Croft of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The opening pages explain why statistical language modelling techniques, historically mainly used for things like automatic speech recognition or machine translation, have now been applied in support of information retrieval.
The core of the chapter commences with a rather technical introduction to language models and their uses in information retrieval followed by a discussion of the 'smoothing' strategies used to make statistical distributions more uniform.
Following some comparisons with traditional probabilistic information retrieval approaches, Liu and Croft sketch out some of the main application areas where language modelling has been used, including dealing with ambiguity in queries, providing relevance feedback, and supporting distributed and cross-lingual retrieval.
A final section sketches out some future research directions.
Chapter 2, by Kiduk Yang of Indiana University, deals with the specific issue of information retrieval on the World Wide Web.
The chapter starts with a consideration of some of the main characteristics of the Web (size, interconnectivity, etc.)
and of users' information seeking behaviour.
This includes the observation that the analysis of search engine query logs suggests that Web users "expect immediate answers while expending minimum effort" (p. 39).
In his introduction, Yang notes that the Web is rich in types of information not present in most information retrieval test collections, including hyperlinks, usage statistics, markup tags, and subject-based directories (p. 33).
The main body of the chapter explores in more detail how these types of information are used in Web retrieval research.
A major focus is on link analysis algorithms that mine the human thought involved in creating hyperlinks to determine the likely relevance (or authoritativeness) of pages, with more detail provided on the uses of HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Search) [2] and Google's PageRank [3] algorithms.
Further sections deal with the mining of usage data, the Web track activity in TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference) [4], and attempts to bring a level of information organisation to the Web, e.g.
using information from Web directories or automated classification techniques.
The chapter concludes by recommending 'fusion' approaches to retrieval that combine multiple sources of Web evidence.
The statistical analysis of Web linking behaviour is also a key feature of the new research field of webometrics, which is introduced in the following chapter by Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton, Liwen Vaughan of the University of Western Ontario and Lennart Björneborn of the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen.
The concept of webometrics, as first defined by Almind and Ingwersen in 1997, originated from the realisation that informetric methods like citation analysis could also be applied to Web links [5].
The chapter itself focuses on four main areas of webometrics.
Firstly, the authors introduce the basic concepts and methods used, highlighting problems with defining units of analysis and providing an overview of data collection methods and sampling techniques.
A second section reviews research that looks at Web linking behaviour in the context of scholarly communication.
This includes studies looking at research papers in e-journals and services like CiteSeer [6], as well as the country-based analyses of university Web sites pioneered by Thelwall and his colleagues.
The section following covers more general issues, reviewing attempts to analyse the size and nature of the Web, as well as studies of user behaviour and commercial Web sites.
The final section introduces the topological approaches that have done much to uncover the underlying structure of the Web as a complex network, including the discovery of scale-free network features and small-world properties.
The discovery of any structure at all was a surprise for some.
Steven Strogatz has written that while the Web is an "unregulated, unruly labyrinth where anyone can post a document and link it to any page at will ... [it] is apparently ordered in a subtle and mysterious way, following the same power-law pattern that keeps popping up elsewhere" [7].
The interesting behaviour of small-world networks has been explored in more detail in popular books written by Lázló Barabási [8] and Duncan Watts [9].
Technology and Systems The first chapter in the section on technology and systems concerns information visualisation, written by Bin Zhu of Boston University and Hsinchun Chen of the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Visualisation techniques are becoming increasingly important in e-science, e.g.
for helping to understand the large datasets generated by grid-based experiments or simulations [10].
In their introduction, Zhu and Chen (p. 139) note that visualisation provides a means of linking computing power and the human eye to help "identify patterns and to extract insights from large amounts of information."
The opening sections of their chapter provide an overview of the topic, including information on theoretical foundations, application areas, and a framework (taxonomy) of technologies.
Further sections explore emerging applications for visualisation techniques focusing on digital libraries, the Web, and virtual communities and evaluation methods.
Colour versions of all the figures provided in the chapter are freely available from the ARIST Web pages [11].
The 'data deluge' in many scientific disciplines has resulted in a growing awareness of the need for computational tools that can help manage and interpret vast amounts of data.
This is especially true in molecular biology, where the new interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics has emerged to deal with the large amounts of data being generated by sequencing initiatives and other biological projects.
While the curation of data is a major concern, Luscombe, Greenbaum and Gerstein note that the aims of bioinformatics extend much further, i.e.
to develop tools to support the analysis of data and to interpret results in a biologically meaningful manner [12].
Chapter 5 contains the first review of bioinformatics to appear in ARIST, and is written by Gerald Benoît of Simmons College, Boston.
It commences with a very brief overview of biological data gathering techniques e.g., nucleotide and protein sequencing providing some examples of prominent projects and databases.
A second section looks in more detail at definitions of bioinformatics, concluding with a long quotation from the article by Luscombe, et al.
cited above.
A short section on professional communication is followed by a more detailed review of different database types, the roles of data mining and visualisation tools, opportunities for collaboration and links with clinical (medical) informatics.
The chapter is very interesting, but its structure is sometimes confusing and there is the odd inconsistency.
For example, the list of journals publishing 25 or more items annually on bioinformatics in Appendix 5.2 surprisingly omits Nature, the Journal of Computational Biology, and Bioinformatics (these are, however, included in the list provided on p. 188).
Others (Nucleic Acids Research, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) are misspelled.
On one occasion (at least) there is a lack of precision that could potentially be misleading.
The extremely brief account of James Watson and Francis Crick's decoding of the structure of DNA (p. 181) implies that Watson was a British scientist (rather than an American scientist working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge) and that he and Crick themselves used X-ray crystallographic techniques to demonstrate the double helical structure of DNA.
While they certainly did use X-ray evidence to support their theories most famously using data generated by Rosalind Franklin of King's College, London Watson and Crick's own accounts make it clear that their main work was based on model building and intuition [13], [14].
The following chapter is an extremely well written review of research initiatives related to electronic records management by Anne Gilliland-Swetland of the University of California, Los Angeles.
While ARIST has previously covered general digital preservation topics [15], [16], this is the first chapter to specifically review electronic records management as a research topic.
The chapter starts with a discussion of definitional issues, focused on debates about the nature of records and the role of archives, which have themselves (in part) been driven by the challenge of electronic records.
Further sections review the history of electronic records research since the emergence of social science data archives in the 1940s, emphasising the importance of the 1991 meeting report Research Issues in Electronic Records, issued by the US National Historical Publications and Records Commission [17].
Gilliland-Swetland argues that this report marked the emergence of a new approach to electronic records management, one largely recordand evidence-driven, and informed by empirical study (p. 234).
The chapter then reviews several of the research initiatives that embodied this 'second-generation' approach to electronic records management, including projects like the seminal Pittsburgh Project (Functional Requirements for Evidence in Electronic Recordkeeping) [18] and the more-recent InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) collaboration [19].
The remaining sections of the chapter look in more detail at issues relating to the reliability and authenticity of electronic records and the key topic of metadata, which Gilliland-Swetland notes is "likely to be a locus of considerable research and development for the foreseeable future" (p. 244).
Social Informatics Social informatics is an area that has been covered in ARIST before, for example, by Bishop and Star in 1996 [20] and more recently by Sawyer and Eschenfelder in 2002 [21].
The late Rob Kling defined it as a new name for "the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses, and consequences or information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts" [22].
The section contains three chapters, the opening one by Ewa Callahan of Indiana University reviewing the influences that cultural or linguistic differences can have on interface design.
The chapter first looks at definitions of culture and methodological issues in cultural research, then reviews interface design with perspectives on language, graphical elements, structural presentation and usability.
The second chapter in the section investigates "The social worlds of the Web" and is by Caroline Haythornthwaite and Christine Hagar of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
As the title might suggest, this is a preliminary look at the social networks that underpin the Web, concluding that we "are still at an early stage in understanding how the Web is affecting local, national, and global patterns of society" (p. 338).
The final chapter in the section, by Andrew Large of McGill University in Montreal, concerns the use of the Web by children and teenagers.
The chapter reviews a wide-range of topic areas, including national surveys of Web use, studies of Web access and information-seeking behaviour, the use of the Web in educational contexts, and issues relating to content and personal safety.
National Intelligence ARIST 36 included a chapter on "Intelligence, Information Technology, and Information Warfare" by Philip Davies [23].
Volume 39 goes one better and has a whole section devoted to national intelligence.
First, the editor himself provides a chapter on "Intelligence, terrorism and national security," based on a public lecture delivered at St. Anthony's College, Oxford in 2003.
In this, Professor Cronin looks at the nature of extreme terrorism, analysing the challenges faced by intelligence and counterintelligence services in the United States.
The chapter is not primarily a review of information science research, but an analysis of national security challenges based on a comparison of the organisation and culture of US intelligence agencies with the decentralised, distributed networks used by some terrorist groups.
A second chapter, by Lee Strickland, David Baldwin and Marlene Justsen of the University of Maryland looks at "Domestic security surveillance and civil liberties."
Again primarily focused on the United States context, this chapter first reviews the history of government surveillance legislation and guidance, cumulating with the USA Patriot Act of late 2001.
Further sections look at the impact of surveillance on citizen rights and propose a scheme for the management of surveillance in a representative democracy.
This last section includes a brief look at the UK context, including some comments on oversight regimes.
Theory The final section of volume 39 contains chapters on three different theoretical approaches to information science, nicely complimenting Nancy Van House's chapter on science and technology studies in ARIST 38 [24].
Theoretical and philosophical perspectives originating in literary criticism and cultural studies have become extremely influential in the wider social sciences and humanities, and it is probably no surprise that interest in these matters is increasing in information science.
Evidence of this trend can be found in recent special issues of the journals Library Trends and Journal of Documentation focusing on philosophical issues [25], [26].
Theoretical approaches have often been criticised for ignoring practical information science problems, but as Talja, Tuominen and Savolainen comment, practical solutions will always be "developed on the basis of theoretical and epistemological assumptions" [27] whether stated or unstated.
The opening chapter in the theory section of ARIST 39 concerns the management of social capital and is by Elisabeth Davenport of Napier University and Herbert Snyder of North Dakota State University.
Social capital refers to the benefits that accrue to individuals through their social networks, and this chapter investigates how social capital in organisations may be able to be managed with information and communication technologies.
The chapter reviews a number of different approaches but the authors resist synthesising them into a grand narrative because, as they note, the topic is an emerging one and there are few robust, longitudinal studies (p. 539).
Chapter 13 is by Julian Warner of the Queen's University of Belfast and is a study of the role of labour in information systems.
Warner himself acknowledges that no coherent tradition of attention to labour in information systems exists to be reviewed, so here he attempts to synthesise from implied concepts revealed elsewhere (p. 553).
This chapter starts with a quotation from Genesis, then progresses rapidly through John Milton to Karl Marx.
The thinking of Marx seems to underpin much of the chapter's argument, but the frequent use of technical terms means that it is not a particularly pleasant (or easy) read.
The final chapter investigates the (to me at least) unpromising topic of post-structuralism, described by Cronin in his volume introduction as "one of the major paradigms of twentieth-century literary theory" (p. x).
In this chapter, Ronald Day of Wayne State University in Detroit first introduces post-structuralism with reference to some of the fashionable French theorists that first developed the concept here chiefly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.
He then tries to relate post-structuralism to information science, noting the traditional dominance of theoretical approaches focused on particular types of information or users.
From his overview of existing research, Day concludes that information studies theory has largely remained "a positivist exercise, squarely within the metaphysical tradition of Western Philosophy, in so far as it reifies meaning and understanding in language acts, replacing variable pragmatics with idealistic models" (p. 579).
The chapter then proceeds to look at different information science issues from a post-structuralist perspective, focusing on issues like the correspondence of meaning (which is relevant to the development and use of knowledge organisation systems) and the importance of historicity.
Further sections provide more detail on discourse analysis, hermeneutics, and events.
Day argues that post-structuralism provides "a challenge to the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that have, for so long, dominated" information science research and practice (p. 581) and concludes that it merits more attention by information studies researchers (p. 603).
There seems to be at least two things missing from this chapter.
Firstly, there is little attempt to 'position' post-structuralism in its wider philosophical context; although it must be acknowledged that there is no shortage of introductory texts that attempt to do this [28].
Also, it would have been useful to have some comments on the likely practical outcomes of post-structuralist discourse in information science.
In this regard, it is interesting that Gary and Marie Radford elsewhere cite 'best match' retrieval techniques, the development of flexible metadata standards like Dublin Core, and Google's search algorithms as examples of post-structuralist tendencies in library and information science [29].
I do wonder how many of the developers of these tools were actually aware of this.
Conclusions Professor Cronin's volume introduction (p. xi) acknowledges that ARIST will rarely be read from cover to cover.
Reading patterns into what will to some extent be a random selection of topics is likely to be problematic, but it was striking in volume 39 that many chapters were focused on the nature of the Web (or its users) or on the characteristics of networks more generally.
Others will have their own favourites, but I thought that the best chapters in ARIST 39 were Thelwall, Vaughan and Björneborn's introduction to the new research field of webometrics and Gilliland-Swetland's excellent review of electronic records management research.
The most disappointing of all was the chapter on bioinformatics, which could now be supplemented by a new chapter focusing primarily on the biological problems that the field is intended to support.
The final set of theoretical chapters was not to my personal taste, but they do contain ideas that will be of interest to others.
The volume contains over 2,000 bibliographical references, which will provide a mine of information when readers need to investigate new topics of study.
On occasion, ARIST has been criticised for focusing mainly on US research.
In this regard it is perhaps interesting to note that of the 22 contributors, 16 were from the USA, three from the UK, two from Canada, and one from Denmark, resulting in a lower proportion of non-US authors than the previous volume.
That said, the continued high-quality of ARIST means that we can have confidence in the editorial decisions of Professor Cronin, his associate editor Debora Shaw, and the ARIST Advisory Board.
I, for one, am looking forward to the next volume.
References Cronin, B., Introduction.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38, 2004, vii.
Kleinberg, J. M., Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment.
Journal of the ACM, 46(5), 1999, 604-632.
Brin, S., Page, L., The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine.
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1-7), 1998, 107-117.
TREC Web track: http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/test_collections/ Almind, T. C., Ingwersen, P., Informetric analyses on the World Wide Web: methodological approaches to 'webometrics.'
Journal of Documentation, 53(4), 1997, 404-426.
CiteSeer: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ Strogatz, S. Sync: the emerging science of spontaneous order.
London: Penguin, 2004, p. 255.
Barabási, A. L., Linked: the new science of networks.
Cambridge, Mass.
: Perseus, 2002.
Watts, D. J., Six degrees: the science of a connected age.
New York: Norton, 2004.
Ball, P., Picture this.
Nature, 417, 4 July 2002, 11-13.
Information visualization: http://www.asis.org/Publications/ARIST/vol39ZhuFigures.html Luscombe, N. M., Greenbaum, D., Gerstein, M., What is bioinformatics?
A proposed definition and overview of the field.
Methods of Information in Medicine, 4, 2001, 346-358.
Watson, J. D., The double helix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA.
London: Penguin, 1970.
Crick, F., The double helix: a personal view.
Nature, 248, 26 April 1974, 766-769.
Yakel, E., Digital preservation.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 35, 2001, 337-378.
Galloway, P., Preservation of digital objects.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38, 2004, 549-590.
National Historical Publications and Records Commission, Research issues in electronic records: report of the working meeting.
St. Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Historical Society, 1991.
Pittsburgh Project: http://www.archimuse.com/papers/nhprc/ InterPARES: http://www.interpares.org/ Bishop, A. P., Star, S. L., Social informatics of digital library use and infrastructure.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 31, 1996, 301-401.
Sawyer, S., Eschenfelder, K. R., Social informatics: perspectives, examples, and trends.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 36, 2002, 427-465.
Kling, R. Learning about information technologies and social change: the contribution of social informatics.
The Information Society, 16, 2000, 217-232.
Davies, P. H. J., Intelligence, information technology, and warfare.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 36, 2002, 313-353.
Van House, N. A., Science and technology studies and information studies.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38, 2004, 3-86.
Herold, K., ed., The philosophy of information.
Library Trends, 52(3), 2004, 373-670.
Hjørland, B., ed., Library and information science and the philosophy of science.
Journal of Documentation, 61(1), 2005, 5-163.
Talja, S., Tuominen, K., Savolainen, R., "Isms" in information science: constructivism, collectivism and constructionism.
Journal of Documentation, 61(1), 2005, 79-101.
Culler, J., Literary theory: a very short introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Radford, G. P., Radford, M. L., Structuralism, post-structuralism, and the library: de Saussure and Foucault.
Journal of Documentation, 61(1), 2005, 60-78.
Author Details Michael Day UKOLN, University of Bath Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 39, 2005" Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/day-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet-SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet-SOSIG Buzz data software database archives blog gis e-learning url research Citation BibTex RIS Humphrey Southall looks at a new Web site's Vision of Britain while Emma Place examines new changes to the RDN Virtual Training Suite.
Vision of Britain A new Web site allowing free public access to an unrivalled collection of British historic maps, statistics and stories went live in October 2004.
By keying in a postcode or place name, or clicking on a map, users can call up a wealth of information on any locality.
The Lottery-funded Vision of Britain Web site [1] has been created by my team at the Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System [2] based at Portsmouth University.
It includes approaching 10 million words of text describing both Britain as a whole, and individual towns and villages: the introductions to every census 1801-1961; entries from descriptive gazetteers; and journeys around Britain by authors like Celia Fiennes [3].
It also holds three sets of one-inch maps covering Great Britain at different dates.
All this provides a more rounded picture of Britain’s changing communities, but also possibly obscures what is at the heart of the system: probably the biggest unified collection of social statistics for Britain ever assembled.
Most such collections contain data sets, with two distinct levels of organisation and documentation.
This enables social scientists to download data sets for further analysis, but our system is designed for non-experts interested in places as much as topics, and directly generates maps and graphs.
We therefore hold all statistics in one column of a single database table, currently with over 10 million rows.
So how does this work?
Other columns of that table contextualise data, mainly by linking to three major sub-systems, each a significant reference resource: Source: Our primary source is the Census of Population.
The system holds complete lists of censuses covering Great Britain between 1801 and 1961, of all the reports published by each census, and of all the tables in each report.
For each individual data value, we record the table it comes from, the column and the row, so we can reconstruct the original table.
What: Another sub-system implements the Data Documentation Initiative’s [4] Aggregate Data Extension.
It organises values into logical structures called nCubes, defined by the underlying census variable: an nCube might be age in 5-year bands, by sex.
Our software then knows to graph the data as a population pyramid.
This data documentation sub-system is quite independent of the system recording sources, linking data from different censuses to assemble time series.
It includes various classifications of occupations, causes of death and so on, and can map between them.
Where: Every data value is linked to one of over 51,000 administrative units, from “Great Britain” down to individual parishes and below: our gazetteer is a systematic record of what units existed, when and by what names.
It was created by computerising and enhancing the place-name authorities [5] identified by the National Council on Archives.
For over 21,000 of these units, including the main census reporting units, the system holds computerised boundary lines, and our software brings together statistics and boundaries to create statistical maps.
It can include excerpts from scanned historic maps as backcloths.
When: the date or period covered by the data value.
So what data are in there?
Every census parish-level table 1851-1961, the 1851 table listing populations back to 1801.
Full cause of death by age and sex, data by decade, 1851 to 1911.
The enormously detailed 1841 occupation report, listing 3,517 separate occupations.
A large part of the original Key Statistics release of 2001 census data for modern local authorities [6], plus equivalent data from many earlier censuses redistricted to the same units.
All this and much more is in the system.
Currently some data can only be presented in a simplified form.
The Web site presents mainly local information in a user-friendly way, but the underlying data structure is designed to support other access methods.
Firstly, via Web services such as the Open Geospatial Consortium’s [7] Web Map Server protocol, already operational, and the Alexandria Digital Library’s Gazetteer Service Protocol [8].
Secondly, the very regular data structure is well suited to grid computing, and exploration by automated pattern-seekers such as the Geographical Analysis Machine [9].
Changes to the Virtual Training Suite As many readers will already know, SOSIG offers 18 free, ‘teach-yourself’ online tutorials to help students and staff develop their Internet research skills in different social science subject areas [10].
(These tutorials are part of the RDN’s Virtual Training Suite [11] ).
What readers may not realise however is that all these tutorials are being regularly updated, edited and maintained by subject specialists across the UK.
Regular updating of the tutorials is a necessity in order to ensure that it continues to provide high quality advice to staff, students and researchers on searching the Internet effectively in their subject areas.
Recently Updated Tutorials Over the past six months the following tutorials have had a major overhaul.
This doesn’t mean just a link-check, it means subject experts re-assessing what the best advice for those using the Internet for research in their subject would now be, given recent changes and developments in the Internet.
The subject experts are as follows: Internet Anthropologist Dr Hector Blackhurst, John Rylands University Library of Manchester Internet for Business Studies and Internet Business Manager Kate Sharp and Andy Hargrave, Biz/ed, University of Bristol Internet Economist Dr. Martin Poulter of the HE Academy, Economics Network Internet Politician and Internet for Government Heather Dawson, London School of Economics & Political Science Internet for Lawyers Sue Pettit, The Law Library, University of Bristol Internet for Social Research Methods Lousie Corti, UK Data Archive, University of Essex Internet Sociologist Rosarie Coughlan, Royal Holloway, University of London Internet for Women’s Studies Dianne Shepherd, Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University Here are some examples of the edits and updates these editors have made to their tutorials: Internet Updates in Politics and Government Heather Dawson notes a particularly pressing need for updates in the field of government and politics where the constantly evolving nature of current affairs means that new interest groups and political parties arise while others disappear from view.
For instance, she has to constantly check the currency of government departmental names and descriptions as UK public bodies, which have an alarming habit of regularly changing their title and function!
A recent example was the restructuring of the Lord Chancellor’s Department to create a new Department of Constitutional Affairs.
Heather also identified a fundamental change that has been reflected in this year’s revamp of the ‘Internet Politician’ and ‘Internet for Government’ tutorials the increasing use of weblogs to communicate political research.
When the VTS (Virtual Training Suite) was originally created these were almost non-existent, and many of those available were low quality, however, they are now being used by leading think tanks, such as the Adam Smith Institute [12] and DEMOS [13], as a means to develop important new ideas.
Consequently, this summer a section on weblogs was added to these tutorials to ensure that students were aware of this resource and the type of information they might find there.
Finally, Heather points out that the number of e-print and e-thesis archives accessible on the Internet is growing, and so more information about these will be added to the tutorials in the future.
Internet Updates in Economics Dr. Martin Poulter has re-written the ‘Internet Economist’ tutorial to reflect the greater availability of economic discussion and opinion online.
For example, so much of this year’s American election related to economics, that it acted as a catalyst to online postings from economists and think tanks.
This year therefore, he added a whole new section to this tutorial, called ‘Opinions and Commentary’ which lists the sites of some major newspapers which publish their opinion columns online.
He also added some popular blogs written by economics lecturers based in the USA.
Dr. Poulter also notes that there is now greater provision of interactive materials for economics, with networked resources replacing software as the forward-looking medium for eLearning.
He has therefore, added a number of new learning and teaching resources to the TOUR sections of this tutorial.
Internet Updates in Social Research Methods Lousie Corti made extensive changes to the ‘Internet for Social Research methods’ tutorial this year, which reflect some interesting Internet developments in this field.
Firstly, some important new initiatives for social research have emerged in the last two years that needed to be added to the tutorial.
JISC’s new Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) [14] was established as a new federated service; the ESRC launched its new Research Methods Programme [15] and its new National Centre for eSocial Science (NCeSS) [16].
Louise also noticed that electronic journal provision has changed significantly in the three years since she originally wrote the tutorial.
Many more journals are now available electronically, but the access routes to these versions keep changing, especially where subscriptions are involved.
She has therefore updated the journals section of her tutorial.
Likewise bibliographic databases are always changing in their coverage and in the number of items they record and so updates were made to the descriptions of the big databases for social sciences which will be a key tool for researchers.
A lot of server names had changed, making URLs invalid.
This was particularly the case for funded projects which later evolved into services under new funding and organisational models.
JISCmail lists are, by their nature, going to come and go as new online discussion groups are set up and others go quiet or die altogether.
Conclusion The ways in which the Internet supports work in the social sciences is ever-changing, and SOSIG aims to reflect new trends as they emerge in its virtual training tutorials.
Librarians, lecturers and students can therefore rely on this free Internet training service in the knowledge that it is being carefully updated by members of the social science community.
References Vision of Britain Through Time http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk Great Britain Historical GIS project http://www.gbhgis.org Vision of Britain “home page” for Celia Fiennes http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/Travellers/contents_page.jsp?t_id=Fiennes Data Documentation Initiative http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI/ National Council on Archives’ Rules for the Construction of Names http://www.ncaonline.org.uk/materials/rulesfortheconstructionofpersonalplaceandcorporatenames.pdf Office of National Statistics Key Statistics for Local Authorities http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Product.asp?vlnk=10150 Open Geospatial Consortium http://www.opengeospatial.org Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer Development http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/~lhill/adlgaz/ Geographical Analysis Machine http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/smart/gam/gam.html SOSIG Virtual Training Suite http://www.sosig.ac.uk/subject-guides/#virtual RDN Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ Adam Smith Institute Weblog http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/ DEMOS http://www.demosgreenhouse.co.uk/ Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) http://www.esds.ac.uk/ ESRC Research Methods Programme http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods/ ESRC National Centre for eSocial Science (NCeSS) http://www.ncess.ac.uk/ Author Details Dr Humphrey Southall Reader in Geography and Director, Great Britain Historical GIS Project Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE Tel: 02392 842500 Email: humphrey.southall@port.ac.uk Web site: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/ Emma Place SOSIG Information Manager University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: emma.place:Bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sosig.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Planet Sosig” Author: Humphrey Southall and Emma Place Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Implementing Digital Reference Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Implementing Digital Reference Services Buzz software copyright privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Ben Wynne reviews a collection of papers from the Third Annual Virtual Reference Desk Conference.
This book, first published in the United States by Neal-Schuman, brings together revised and updated papers originally presented at the Third Annual Virtual Reference Desk Conference held in Orlando, Florida in 2001.
As such it has an almost entirely American focus although most of the issues addressed are equally relevant to libraries elsewhere.
The papers are organised into six sections.
The intention is to reflect the stages followed in establishing any new service from identifying the need, to project inception, implementation and evaluation.
Part I, entitled ‘Identifying the Need for Digital Reference Services’, takes two e-mail based services as examples.
The three papers in Part II ‘Managing Key Digital Reference Issues’ consider privacy issues, the impact of copyright law and licences on service delivery and the potential use of artificial intelligence in digital reference services (to adopt the term used in the title of the book).
Part III ‘Implementing Real-Time Reference Service’ and Part IV -‘Conceiving and Implementing Collaborative Reference Services’ are largely devoted to case studies, the latter involving collaboration between a number of libraries.
Finally, research into the use of digital reference and the evaluation of digital reference are covered in Parts V and VI respectively.
These papers illustrate a great diversity of digital reference services with respect to the type and level of service offered, the technical complexity or otherwise of the software used and the extent of collaboration between libraries.
Many libraries answer enquiries by e-mail.
There is an increasing trend towards use of software that supports interactive communication with enquirers.
A few libraries are exploring automated enquiry answering systems such as the Open University in its OPAL project, (a solitary UK contribution to this book).
Such diversity makes it difficult to define what is meant by ‘digital reference’.
These papers alone use a variety of terms to refer to reference services in the electronic environment, including ‘virtual reference’, ‘digital reference’, ‘online reference’ and ‘real-time reference’.
In the final analysis, however, surely what matters is the appropriateness and value of such services for their target audiences?
In this respect, this book makes clear that much remains to be achieved.
In particular, in a very useful literature review, Melissa Gross, Charles R. McClure and R. David Lankes note that, particularly compared to non-library providers such as ‘Ask Jeeves’, “ libraries that provide digital reference services report that they receive relatively few requests from users.” (p.173).
They highlight a number of issues that need to be addressed if digital reference services are to really make their mark.
“This review of the literature indicates that while interest in digital reference is strong, progress is hampered by a lack of economic models, strong evaluative research and a lack of user input”.
(p.178) This book does little to address these gaps.
Nonetheless, a clear message comes across that libraries cannot afford to ignore digital reference services.
There is a need to move beyond a stage in which many libraries have been experimenting with digital reference.
More attention needs to be given to finding solutions to shared problems, such as: the need for quality definitions and technical standards, understanding the dynamics of the ‘reference interview’ in the electronic environment and finding ways to market the service effectively.
If you are considering introducing or enhancing a ‘digital reference’ service of some kind, these papers do identify many issues that need to be addressed.
An index is included and many of the papers contain useful lists of references for further reading.
As a collection of conference papers, the book does not, however, add up to a guide to implementing digital reference services as such.
Its title could, therefore, be found somewhat misleading.
Author Details Ben Wynne e-Strategy Leader University of Sussex Library Email: b.b.l.wynne@sussex.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/ Return to top Article Title: “Book Review: Implementing Digital Reference Services” Author: Ben Wynne Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/wynne-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet-SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet-SOSIG Buzz data software rss archives blog cataloguing aggregation syndication personalisation wordpress research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Ayres examines how the SOSIG Subject News blog is keeping users up to date and providing reusable site content at the same time.
ESRC Launches Unique Online Research Resource for Social Sciences A major new Web site offering unrivalled access to high-quality social and economic research is soon to be launched in the UK.
Created by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), ESRC Society Today [1] will provide academics, students and researchers with a valuable free digest of social sciences research currently available, planned and in progress.
As well as bringing together all ESRC-funded research, the Web site will provide a gateway to other key online resources from the UK such as Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG), the UK Data Archive and the Office of National Statistics as well as international coverage from services such as Europa and Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
ESRC Society Today, combining the ESRC sites www.esrc.ac.uk and www.regard.ac.uk, will offer a broad picture of the latest research on the full range of social science subjects, including early findings, full texts and original data sets.
Users can also establish online discussion fora, track down researchers in their key subject fields and find details on ESRC funding and training opportunities.
Notably the site is built on ‘intelligent’ Autonomy software, capable of identifying and relating concepts as well as specific terms.
So, for instance, in the same way a conversation in a noisy room can be understood even if some of the words cannot be heard, the essence of a news article can be systematically identified by the software.
Autonomy skims over the text and ‘understands’ the key concepts.
It is then able to associate and return these concepts based on ‘natural language’ searches, i.e.
using normally structured sentences (or indeed large passages of text) as search terms.
Autonomy also provides powerful personalisation features by familiarising itself with the interests, requirements, and even behaviour of individual users.
The more someone visits the site the more intuitive the experience should become as the software adapts to them and refines their ‘profile’.
Furthermore it is possible to register for regular news bulletins and email alerts on one’s areas of interest, stay abreast of the latest research efficiently and effectively and also access information on ESRC funding opportunities.
ESRC Society Today [1] is currently in the soft-launch phase, as systems are fine-tuned and bugs ironed out.
The site is scheduled to be fully launched at the end of May.
You can register on the site, or join the mailing list for further information by emailing societytoday@esrc.ac.uk SOSIG Subject News Blog SOSIG has started its own blog to provide news of and access to, the latest links to online resources across all areas of the Social Sciences.
Topical in focus, SOSIG Subject News [2] seeks to highlight the research resources behind the latest news.
The original impetus for SOSIG getting involved with blogs was the desire to provide a newsfeed to the pilot JISC News Aggregator [3].
However, it soon became apparent that as well as wanting to produce information about the latest service developments, there was enough enthusiasm within the team to provide a newsfeed that was subject-based and more focussed towards the needs of our users or geared towards attracting new users.
Unpicking the News From a user perspective, what are the key differences between using the SOSIG site and accessing research information via SOSIG Subject News?
Firstly, the blog can be used to highlight an existing topic on SOSIG, which may be the subject of an item in the news, so users can be made aware of the Best of the Web in that area.
News and academia can make for uneasy bedfellows, just think of the reporting of issues such as MMR or GM crops in recent years to see how research information and its reporting can shape public opinion.
Rather than recycling items from dedicated news outlets such as the BBC or the Guardian, SOSIG Subject News seeks to be inspired by topical events, and to provide analysis rather than comment.
In practice, this means pointing to press releases, government publications or research papers in full, rather than the editorialised version of them that may have been in the press and putting this in a wider research context by linking to key sites where further research resources can be tracked down.
For example, concerns within the legal profession about the recent anti-terrorism laws were widely reported.
Unpicking the news provides links to primary source material such as the legislation itself, but also to briefing papers by pressure groups such as Liberty.
This approach can help researchers get beyond the sound bite culture prevalent in the media and start to explore the evidence base behind the news headlines.
Secondly, resources that are strictly time limited, which may not make it onto the full SOSIG catalogue, can be mentioned on the blog as relevant to a particular subject right now, essentially providing a current awareness service.
For example, the US Presidential election in 2004 proved to be a watershed moment for blogs, with the Pew Internet and American Life Project estimating that 75 million Americans went online to find political news [4], with blogs being a major source of that information.
SOSIG Subject News has responded to this by setting up a new blog category specifically for the 2005 General Election [5] here in the UK.
Whilst reflecting the issues of the campaign, this short-term blog category can also help highlight some key resources that will be of use to academics long after the votes have been counted.
News You Can Reuse The blog format of SOSIG Subject News provides a quick and easy way of creating content that has the advantage of being easily repurposed.
It can be read in the same way as any normal blog, with users visiting the site, but the entries are also output as RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) newsfeeds.
These blog-generated RSS feeds complement existing SOSIG services that inform users about upcoming conferences and events or new additions to the Internet Resource Catalogue.
SOSIG now produces over 60 RSS feeds [6], allowing users to keep up to date about what is going on in their subject.
These can be exported and used by other Web sites or read by individual users via news aggregators, which can access the information remotely.
Blog content can also be reused within the SOSIG site itself as a source of news and announcements.
Users can access this information in the way they prefer.
The key for SOSIG content creators is that a single publishing point generates all these possible information outlets using a simple interface.
This has been accomplished by using the WordPress [7] software, which allows multiple authors to contribute to a team blog and enables categories to be assigned to blog posts.
The blog adopts the subject structure that users of SOSIG are familiar with, essentially providing 17 blogs in one, across all the major subject areas in the Social Sciences.
This enables separate Education, Business or Politics channels to be created, which better reflects the needs of users in specific disciplines.
While the driving motivation behind most blogs is the provision of current and timely information, the SOSIG Subject News blog also provides comprehensive archive and search facilities.
Readers are able to follow the course of particular subjects back through time or drill down to items that may be interdisciplinary in nature by using keyword searching.
Conclusion Without a clear reason to set up and write a blog, it is all too easy to fall into the trap that so many others fall in to and quickly lose enthusiasm for blogging after an initial burst of posts.
However, SOSIG Subject News has a sustainable future with a dedicated team of contributors and a clear mission to bring the latest information to the UK Social Science academic community.
References ESRC Society Today http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ SOSIG Subject News blog http://www.sosig.ac.uk/subject-news/ Improving Communications within JISC through News Aggregation, Paul Davey, Roddy Macleod, Malcolm Moffat, October 2004, Ariadne Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/davey/ The Internet and Campaign 2004, Lee Rainie, Michael Cornfield, John Horrigan, 2005 http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/150/report_display.asp SOSIG Subject News: General Election 2005 http://www.sosig.ac.uk/subject-news/index.php?cat=19 RSS newsfeeds from SOSIG and Grapevine http://www.sosig.ac.uk/about_us/rss.html Wordpress http://wordpress.org/ Author Details Paul Ayres SOSIG Research Officer ILRT University of Bristol Email: paul.ayres@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Paul Ayres Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Intute: The New Best of the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Intute: The New Best of the Web Buzz data software wiki database infrastructure accessibility blog repositories eprints cataloguing personalisation vle podcast research Citation BibTex RIS Caroline Williams describes Intute in the context of the online information environment and outlines aspirations for the future.
This article aims to give an overview of Intute [1], the new face of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), in the context of the Internet information environment, and to describe how one JISC service has responded to its changing context.
In order to do this it will briefly describe the environment and context for Intute, and will outline the new Intute service, its blueprint, current project activity, and Intute’s aspirations for the future.
The Context The environment within which we operate is constantly changing, the people we serve are finding new ways of working, and we grapple with finding appropriate measures to demonstrate value for money and develop our services to ensure continuing relevance.
This context is not unique to Intute, but is recognisable for many information services in education in 2006.
In response to this, the RDN, a service which always selected, evaluated and delivered the best of the Web for education and research, has recreated itself as Intute.
Intute signals a re-alignment with the changing context and a new phase of innovation for the service.
Its launch on 13 July 2006 revealed the outputs of an intensive 18-month period of internal review, analysis and change.
From the RDN to Intute For several years our users had been telling us how much they valued the contribution the RDN made to education and research.
They told us that our focus on selecting only the best and most relevant Internet resources was important in helping minimise the use of unreliable and low-quality Internet resources.
They told us that our subjectbased expertise was vital in the selection of resources most relevant to academics, students and researchers within disciplines.
They also told us of their frustrations; particularly those of academics in relation to their students’ use of poor-quality Web sites accessed via search engines.
As an organisation we took the opportunity to re-think the way we operate and evaluate our core business.
The latter stays the same.
There is no doubt in our minds that a service which is concerned with issues of quality and trust in the educational use of freely available content on the Internet is even more relevant now than when the RDN first started over ten years ago [2].
We reflected on the former, our model of working, i.e.
a distributed network of subject groups with a whole host of further collaborators, partners and contributors; and reinforced our commitment to working in a way which provides creative exchange of ideas, a variety of expertise, and integral links within the community we serve.
We operate with a culture of collaboration, aligned to community needs, and at our core we select and evaluate resources in order to deliver the best of the Web.
What Is Different?
‘To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information … With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly.’ [3] The trends we have been watching closely are Web 2.0 [4] [5] and its promise of a move from the information age to the participation age, the semantic web [6], and the changing digital library environment [7].
In addition, more familiar debates and initiatives continue to challenge us, specifically the limitations of search engines in the academic context [8] [9], and the challenges around searching across digital repositories [10].
All this, for Intute, provides opportunities to find new roles and services on a national basis and new ways of delivering and enhancing our core services.
Our Community We enable collaboration and share our expertise; our communities’ needs drive everything we do.
We cover diverse interests but are a single service.
In order to better understand our users and respond to their needs we undertook a marketing exercise.
One outcome of this exercise was a succinct overview of the differing needs of our users: academics, librarians and information professionals, researchers and students.
The Needs of Our Community We found that academics are often immersed in niche academic subject matter, are interested in the work of their peers, and are content advocates.
Librarians and information professionals are focused on educating users on Web resources and want to manage access to multiple sources through a single library-managed interface.
They are worried about escalating costs and user demands, and are keen to provide quality information and services.
We believe that librarians and information professionals can be strong service advocates, particularly with academic staff.
We looked at the needs of researchers, and found that they want to find out the breadth of research available quickly and then drill down into more detailed information.
We believe that researchers generally know what they are looking for, but may browse a bit, and want to network and operate independently.
We have conducted more in-depth research into the needs of researchers and a report will be made available on the Intute Web site; its recommendations will inform future service development (as will other findings produced by national bodies e.g.
CURL (Consortium of Research Libraries)).
Students’ needs and wants, as expected, revolve around the need to get hold of specific information recommended by tutors, and to get ‘just enough’ to be able to do assignments.
They are not keen on browsing or wading through long lists, and place a higher importance on the easy accessibility of content, rather than the high quality of resources.
Students are very familiar with the Web, but often have no formal training in searching for and evaluating academic information.
Meeting These Needs The needs of our community are diverse; however we were able to identify widely applicable themes.
Issues of support, trust, and simplicity are paramount.
Routes which are quick and easy to high-quality relevant information are valued, as is the ability to explore and discover independently.
Therefore Intute offers not only its core database, but also provides help with Internet search and research skills.
We respond to different needs at different levels in different disciplines.
We work towards providing quality, relevance, ease of use and understanding; all enabling the most intelligent use of the Internet for education.
Our Service The needs of our users, the context within which we operate, and the foundation created by the RDN have combined to form Intute.
What this means to the user is that all of our valuable information and services are now available under one identity and in one simple interface.
The best services of the former RDN Hubs are shared across the whole, and inter-disciplinary browsing and searching have been improved.
A database containing all the Internet Resource Catalogue records from each of the eight Hubs has been created with other benefits including improved currency and relevance.
The new database is hosted by MIMAS [11], so we have all of the advantages of being part of a national data centre technical infrastructure (i.e.
fail-safe procedures, speed of response times, etc.).
The discipline focus of our service is delivered through four new subject groups: Science, Engineering and Technology (including geography) Arts and Humanities Social Sciences Health and Life Sciences The Virtual Training Suite [12] is in the process of being updated and has a new look; it will remain one of our most popular services spanning all subject areas.
Value-added Services Intute remains a free online service, providing users with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists.
At the core is our database, but this is only part of our offering.
Valueadded services contextualise the Web for education and bring us one step closer to our users.
For example, Hot Topics [13], Limelight [14] and Behind the Headlines [15] take topical and current news or subject stories, and link them to lists of pertinent resources from our database.
Other examples linked to key strategic partnerships are the Intute Arts and Humanities AHRC Projects database [16], and the Wellcome Trust gateways on Intute Health and Life Sciences.
Our work using new technologies will continue, building on initiatives such as the Social Science Voices podcasts [17] published by Intute Social Science staff.
Current examples include our use of blogs for news and updates from our Subject Groups in our Editors’ Log Web pages [18], and the Intute harvester [19] which offers a much larger database than the core catalogue.
It is created by running a software tool over each site listed in the main Intute database and indexing more pages from that site.
Testimonies from those people who have had a preview of Intute suggest that the transition from the RDN to Intute has been positive.
The Blueprint We have a blueprint for the shortand medium-term future which engages with user needs, context, and the value for money agenda.
It states that by the start of the 2006⁄07 academic year, all currently existing services will be efficiently delivered through one organisation and one technical platform, providing users with continued access to existing resources.
We will reduce duplication of effort across subject areas and share best practice, and leverage the expertise of Intute staff for other related information service developments.
We aim to increase discovery of, and access to, freely available resources via the Web, institutional portals and virtual learning/research environments.
Our first case implementation studies are in their early stages with the University of Leeds and the University of the Arts London.
We are actively developing personalisation tools so that individuals can save, manipulate and tag our data in a way which maximises its potential use.
Again in its early stages, a beta version of our personalisation service, MyIntute, has been made available.
Projects Again in the short and medium term, we are embarking on a number of projects aligned to our mission to advance education and research by promoting the best of the Web, through evaluation and collaboration.
Building upon our strategic alliances in order to serve the needs of the academic community in new ways, we are already harnessing our collective expertise and working on a number of projects [20].
They are The Higher Education Academy resource catalogue integration, INFORMS transition to Intute, and Institutional Repositories search service.
The Higher Education Academy Resource Catalogue Integration The Higher Education Academy [21] and Intute are working together to integrate the Resource Collections of the Academy Subject Centres.
INFORMS Transition to Intute INFORMS [22] is a flexible and adaptive tool that facilitates the design of interactive, bite-sized, online information skills units for students.
It is unique in that it allows the creation of units that are based on searching live quality information databases, and units can be easily customised to create tutorials tailored to the needs of specific groups of students.
The project aims to move INFORMS from the University of Huddersfield to Intute and the MIMAS national data service infrastructure.
Institutional Repositories Search Service Content deposited in institutional repositories is growing, however there is no comprehensive and easy way to search and retrieve this content.
This project aims to facilitate access to scholarly and educational material, by making this content widely accessible to the UK education community.
UKOLN, SHERPA, and Intute have been commissioned by JISC to develop a repository search infrastructure.
This project will build on the outputs of the ePrints UK Project.
In addition, Intute is participating in the eBank Project and has recently completed its work on the Internet Detective Project.
eBank eBank UK [23] is a JISC-funded project which is a part of the Semantic Grid Programme.
The project is being led by UKOLN, the University of Bath, in partnership with the Combechem Project at the University of Southampton, with assistance from the Intute team based at The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester (formerly PSIgate Physical Sciences Information Gateway at the University of Manchester).
It brings together chemists, digital librarians and computer scientists to explore the potential for integrating research datasets into digital libraries.
Internet Detective This project has recently delivered an online tutorial called “Internet Detective” [24] to help students in Higher Education to develop Internet research skills.
The tutorial looks at the critical thinking required when using the Internet for research and offers practical advice on evaluating the quality of Web sites.
The tutorial, which is now available on the Web or as a VLE download, is part of the Intute Virtual Training Suite.
It was developed by Intute staff from ILRT at the University of Bristol in partnership with the Manchester Metropolitan University and the HEFCE Learn Higher Project (CETL).
Additional funding was provided by the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences.
The Future Intute is created by the community for the community and we intend to develop by building and sharing knowledge though community engagement.
The potential of a distributed network of subject-based experts facilitating intelligent use of the Internet in education is limitless.
The seven institutions which make up Intute are: the University of Birmingham, the University of Bristol, Heriot Watt University, the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Nottingham and the University of Oxford.
They are united in the belief that, as the Internet keeps growing, issues of quality and trust become increasingly important to education and research.
New technologies give us opportunities and challenges in the delivery and evolution of our core and value-added services.
Being close to our users ensures that future innovations in service are aligned with their needs.
Our training services work towards developing both generic and subject-based Internet research skills.
We engage with our environment in the broadest sense so that, ultimately, we inspire action in making the most intelligent use of the Internet for education.
Conclusion Intute, as the new best of the Web service, has been created in response to users’ needs and the changing Internet information environment.
It is a free national service enabling lecturers, researchers and students to discover and access quality Internet resources.
Intute exists to advance education and research by promoting the most intelligent use of the Internet.
Intute works through evaluation and collaboration.
It has massive potential to deliver a service on a national level which responds to those fundamental principles of librarians and information professionals, namely trust, quality, and ease of use and user empowerment in the ever-changing and complex world of education.
Intute is hosted by MIMAS at The University of Manchester, and is a collaboration among a whole host of partners and contributors.
At the heart of the organisation is a consortium of seven universities, bringing together a wealth of expertise and knowledge.
Intute is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
If you would like further information or to find out more about working with us, please contact Intute via our feedback form [25].
References Intute Web site http://www.intute.ac.uk/ Hiom, D., “Retrospective on the RDN”, Ariadne issue 47, April 2006 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/hiom/ Kolbitsch, J. and H. Maurer (2006) “The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume”, Journal of Universal Computer Science 12(2), pp.
187-213 O’Reilly, T. (2005).
“What is Web2:0” http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html Miller, P. (2005).
“Web 2.0: Building the New Library”, Ariadne issue 45, October 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/miller/ Matthews, D. B.
(2005).
Semantic Web Technologies, JISC Technology and Standards Watch http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/jisctsw_05_02bpdf.pdf Dempsey, L ‘The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After’, Ariadne issue 46, February 2006 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/ Brophy, J. and D. Bawden (2005).
"Is Google enough?
Comparison of an internet search engine with academic library resources", Aslib Proceedings 57(6): pp.
498-512 Markland, M. (2005).
“Does the student’s love of the search engine mean that high quality online academic resources are being missed?”, Performance Measurement and Metrics: The International Journal for Library and Information Services 6(1): pp.
19-31 Swan, A. and Awre, C. (2006) “Linking UK repositories: technical and organisational models to support user-oriented services across institutional and other digital repositories”.
MIMAS Web site http://www.mimas.ac.uk/ Intute: Virtual Training Suite Web site http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/ Intute: Hot Topics Web sites http://www.intute.ac.uk/healthandlifesciences/hottopics.html http://www.intute.ac.uk/sciences/hottopics.html Intute: Arts and Humanities, Limelight Web site http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/cgi-bin/limelightfront.pl Intute: Behind the Headlines Web site http://www.intute.ac.uk/behindtheheadlines.html Intute: Arts and Humanities, AHRC Projects Web site http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/ahrc.html Social Science Voices Web site http://www.sosig.ac.uk/voices/ Intute Editors’ Logs Web sites: http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/blog/ http://www.intute.ac.uk/healthandlifesciences/blog/ http://www.intute.ac.uk/sciences/blog/ http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/blog/ Intute harvester Web site http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/harvester.html Intute Projects Web site http://www.intute.ac.uk/projects.html The Higher Education Academy Web site http://www.hea.ac.uk/ INFORMS Web site http://informs.hud.ac.uk/cgi-bin/informs.pl eBank Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ebank-uk/ Internet Detective Web site http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/ Intute feedback form http://www.intute.ac.uk/feedback.html Web sites of other organisations referred to in this article: Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) http://www.curl.ac.uk/ Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Learn Higher CETL http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ University of the Arts London http://www.arts.ac.uk/ University of Leeds http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ Author Details Caroline Williams Executive Director of the RDN MIMAS Manchester Computing The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email: caroline.williams@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rdn.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Intute: The New Best of the Web” Author: Caroline Williams Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/williams/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The National Centre for Text Mining: A Vision for the Future Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The National Centre for Text Mining: A Vision for the Future Buzz data software framework database portal usability infrastructure metadata doi identifier vocabularies blog repositories visualisation e-learning ontologies e-science e-research uima interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Sophia Ananiadou describes NaCTeM and the main scientific challenges it helps to solve together with issues related to deployment, use and uptake of NaCTeM's text mining tools and services.
One of the defining challenges of e-Science is dealing with the data deluge [1] information overload and information overlook.
More than 8,000 scientific papers are published every week (on Google Scholar, for example).
Without sophisticated new tools, researchers will be unable to keep abreast of developments in their field and valuable new sources of research data will be under-exploited.
The capability of text mining (TM) to find knowledge hidden in text and to present it in a concise form makes it an essential part of any strategy for addressing these problems.
As text mining matures, it will increasingly enable researchers to collect, maintain, interpret, curate, and discover knowledge needed for research and education, efficiently and systematically.
The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) is playing a critical role in ensuring that UK researchers are aware of and have access to effective TM solutions, and are able to exploit their capabilities to the full.
Text Mining Services for the UK Academic Community There are many kinds of text mining services, with many sub-processes involved, and many types of user in varying domains with different needs, interests, purposes, requirements and degrees of technological aptitude.
NaCTeM has developed a number of high-quality text mining service exemplars for the UK academic community.
The exemplars produced are: TerMine, AcroMine [2][3] extract candidate terms from text, and map them between biology acronyms and their full forms.
TerMine is a foundational service in that terminology is central to many activities and is often a hurdle for humans and language processors alike.
Termine is a service for automatic term recognition which identifies the most important terms in a document ranking them according to their significance and proposing potential expansions of all acronyms found.
It is based on the C-value method for automatic term recognition [4].
Figure 1: TerMine: A service for automatic term recognition AcroMine is based on a novel approach for recognising acronym definitions in a text collection [5].
Applied to the whole MEDLINE, it deals with terminological variation, an integral part of the linguistic ability to realise a concept in different ways.
This is also an obstacle to information retrieval.
Figure 2: AcroMine finds expanded forms of acronyms and disambiguates them AcroMine finds expanded forms of acronyms from a database created from the whole of Medline and disambiguates them.
AcroMine has also been incorporated into the TerMine user interface.
TerMine, moreover, crucially supports Semantic Web activities and has been used as an aid to ontology construction and controlled vocabularies [6].
Figure 3: Overall architecture of TerMine Cheshire/TerMine [7] integrates information retrieval (provided by Cheshire) [8] and TerMine to offer users a search facility based on terms with which they are familiar, and which moreover retrieves documents according to the importance of the terminology they contain.
For example, this service allows the user to search for documents related to a subject area, to find associated terms related with the query and to select the most appropriate documents to view.
This service identifies important terms (that the user may not have known) combining the best of search and browse models of information access.
MEDIE [9] provides real-time semantic information retrieval based on the retrieval of relational concepts from huge texts.
It is an intelligent search engine which uses semantic retrieval technologies to identify sentences containing biomedical correlations for queried terms from Medline abstracts.
The service runs on the whole of Medline and is based on semantically annotated texts using deep parsing and named entity recognition.
Sentences are annotated in advance with semantic structures and stored in a structured database.
User requests are converted on the fly into patterns of these semantic annotations, and texts are retrieved by matching these patterns with the pre-computed semantic annotations [10].
Figure 4: Medie: An intelligent search engine using semantic retrieval technologies InfoPubMed [11] extracts and visualises protein-protein interactions.
Info-PubMed is an efficient PubMed search tool, helping users to find information about biomedical entities such as genes, proteins, and the interactions between them.
Figure 5: InfoPubMed provides information and visualisation of biomedical interactions extracted from Medline It provides information and visualisation of biomedical interactions extracted from Medline using deep semantic parsing technology.
This is supplemented with the GENA term dictionary which consists of over 200,000 protein/gene names and identifications of disease types and organisms NaCTeM services are underpinned by a number of generic natural language processing tools which have already been adapted for the domain of biology.
Most of these tools are currently being adapted for use in the social sciences within the framework of the ASSERT [12][13 Project whose aim is to provide automated assistance to social scientists undertaking systematic reviews of the research literature.
Figure 6 shows how text mining techniques are being used to support the stages of searching, screening and synthesising in systematic reviews.
Figure 6: Text mining technologies for enhancing systematic reviewing Text mining techniques have the potential to revolutionise the way we approach research synthesis but our longer term interest is to understand how we can apply these techniques more widely in a variety of use cases in the social sciences.
To achieve this, we will use systematic reviewing to demonstrate the potential of text mining for the social science research community and to establish requirements for a generic toolkit of text mining services which can be integrated into different research practices.
This provides its own set of issues for development in terms of interoperability with techniques or software currently employed in the systematic review activity but also with other text mining tools and services used by the social science community.
For example a researcher investigating the role of new media in politics could be interested in combining the toolset with Internet news feed or blog readers, their own evidence tracking systems or even other tools for carrying out opinion analysis.
We need to ensure that our tools are therefore flexible and robust enough to allow for this, whilst providing sufficient functionality to ensure interoperability between the many formats and standards that this would entail.
The NaCTeM Roadmap Based on the current service exemplars described previously, NaCTeM's roadmap in figure 7 below outlines our vision for the next 5 years.
This vision situates NaCTeM with respect to: the general goals text mining aims to address the main scientific challenges it helps to solve, thus providing breakthrough to scientific discoveries across domains, and the main issues related to the deployment, use and uptake of NaCTeM text mining solutions and services in respect of a wide variety of users.
The roadmap sets out the core technology underpinning the provision of NaCTeM's text mining services and solutions over this period.
As our services are user-driven these examples will be further refined and developed in close consultation with our user communities.
Figure 7: The NaCTeM Roadmap (larger version) Issues Full paper processing is necessary for the discovery of new knowledge and evidence from literature, but currently there is limited availability of open access collections for the scientific community and there is uncertainty over IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) in data derived via text mining [14], especially as publishers move to new models [15][16].
Standards are needed for the types of annotation we use to represent layers of linguistic and semantic analysis, and thus there is a need for cooperation among stakeholders.
TM tools are increasingly released as open source, but in order to be interoperable, common infrastructure and annotation schemes [17] have to be adopted.
Large-scale resources (annotated corpora, lexicons, ontologies) [18] are required to support TM, but are expensive for one centre to produce (and maintain), requiring collaboration, sharing and co-funding.
TM as a new technology faces potential barriers which must be tackled.
TM tools must match users' requirements and be usable if the technology is to achieve wide adoption.
NaCTeM is working closely with NCeSS [19] to ensure that it is in a position to identify barriers to adoption and develop strategies to address them.
Text Mining Technology Supporting Service Provision An important aspect of the roadmap is the core technology and computational infrastructure needed to allow NaCTeM text-mining services to be developed for use by the community.
Our roadmap lays out the main steps we expect to take.
These steps are, in several cases, related to general rather than specific technological development.
For example, more generally applicable text mining technology to support large-scale services depends on other developments, e.g.
the ability to process full texts [20].
In order to process full texts on a large scale to support user services, a pre-requisite is parallelisation.
Early steps in being able to deploy our text mining services as Web Services lead to processes involving embedding text mining Web Services in workflows, composition of TM services via Web Services, and so on.
Development of highly efficient machine-learning techniques for text processing is a pre-requisite for classification of extracted information that forms the core of large-scale (repository-wide) metadata creation.
The ability more generally to add semantics to textual data on a large scale supports full-text processing.
In order to be able to adapt rapidly to new domains in coming years, adaptive learning technology must be in place.
Integration of data mining and text mining on a large scale becomes possible at a later stage as our enabling tools and services are put in place.
None of the above stages can happen easily without early effort to provide workable levels of interoperability, re-usability and portability.
While NaCTeM will continue to offer a portal enabling users to find out about best-of-breed text mining tools, integration of arbitrary tools demands not only a common infrastructure but also a common linguistic annotation scheme [21].
Although there are solutions for the former there is no solution for the latter.
NaCTeM has actively promoted the idea of interoperability of text mining tools in the wider community.
We are already using IBM's UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) [22] to support interoperability.
UIMA has a set of useful functionalities, such as type definitions shared by modules, management of complex objects, links between multiple annotations and the original text, and a GUI for module integration.
However, it simply provides a framework for, and not the detail of, common annotation schemes.
Thus, the user community has to develop its own platforms with a set of actual software modules.
In addition, simply wrapping existing modules in UIMA does not offer a complete solution for flexible tool integration, necessary for practical applications in a variety of domains.
Users, and this includes both developers and end-users of TM systems, tend to be confused when faced with choosing appropriate modules for their own tasks from a collection of a large number of tools.
NaCTeM has ensured that its own tools and services are interoperable thus providing users with a coherent interoperable text mining suite.
In addition, we have developed a general combinatorial text mining comparator which: generates possible combinations of tools for a specific workflow; compares/evaluates the results; facilitates module integration; and guides the selection of text mining modules [23] Processing full texts on a large scale necessitates the development of an appropriate massively parallel data management infrastructure to support the use of the machine learning text mining tools we use to improve the accuracy of our services and the ease of adaptation of our toolkit for new domains.
Serious use of text mining services implies the ability and the capacity of such services to handle very large amounts of data if e-scientists are to make the kinds of breakthrough they are hoping for.
It is part of the remit of NaCTeM to support such large scale processing.
Taken together with the issue of interoperability this further motivates us to provide services around the tools we develop.
The integration of TM into a workflow environment (e.g.
Taverna, [24]) will allow us to reach a wide community of e-scientists and will provide additional functionality to the widely popular workflow environment by augmenting data with evidence and results from the literature.
Scientific Challenges NaCTem Services Help to Address The challenge of providing evidence for pathways from literature is currently being tackled within the REFINE Project [25].
Our aim is to annotate texts semantically in order to extract biological relations which provide the evidence for the detection and classification of the species and reactions in bio-chemical models.
Although we cannot provide the full answer to the challenge of extracting quantitative data from qualitative materials which is currently exercising the social sciences, we are currently offering ways of eliminating some of its routine and mechanical aspects [12].
Success in this area is a pre-requisite for large-scale harvesting of opinions from qualitative survey data and sophisticated media analysis.
The successful use of TM to integrate heterogeneous knowledge sources in biology is leading to the discovery of gene-disease associations [26]; applied more widely it will lead to TM ushering in and supporting new, data-driven research modes for e-Science.
e-Research and e-Science Goals TM enables the e-researcher and e-scientist in knowledge discovery by finding implicit associations hidden in text.
It facilitates search by providing intelligent ways to retrieve information.
Semantic data derived from TM support new models of e-publishing.
Scientific publications are evolving to allow more collaborative ways of communication via social networks.
Rich metadata and citation analysis enriched with TM allow us to do personalised searching, extracting facts of relevance to the user.
Conclusion NaCTeM's text mining tools and services offer numerous benefits to a wide range of users.
These range from considerable reductions in time and effort for finding and linking pertinent information from large scale textual resources, to customised solutions in semantic data analysis and knowledge management.
Enhancing metadata is one of the important benefits of deploying text mining services.
TM is being used for subject classification, creation of taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, ontology building and Semantic Web activities.
As NaCTeM enters into its second phase we are aiming for improved levels of collaboration with Semantic Grid and Digital Library initiatives and contributions to bridging the gap between the library world and the e-Science world through an improved facility for constructing metadata descriptions from textual descriptions via TM.
References Hey, AJC & Trefethen, A., "The data deluge: an e-science perspective".
In Berman F., Fox GC., Hey AJG (eds) Grid Computing: making the global infrastructure a reality.
2003, Chichester, UK: John Wiley, pp.809-824 Termine Web Demonstrator http://www.nactem.ac.uk/software/termine/ Acromine Web Demonstrator http://www.nactem.ac.uk/software/acromine/ Frantzi, K., Ananiadou, S., and Mima, H., "Automatic Recognition of Multi-Word Terms: the C/NC value method".
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3:2, pp.
115-130.
Okazaki, N. and Ananiadou, S., "Building an Abbreviation Dictionary using a Term Recognition Approach", Bioinformatics 2006 22(24):3089-3095.
Spasi?, I., et al.
"Facilitating the development of controlled vocabularies for metabolomics with text mining", 2007, in ISMB/ECCB, Bio-Ontologies SIG Workshop, Vienna, Austria, pp.
103-106 Cheshire3-Termine Demonstration using Medline Abstracts http://www.nactem.ac.uk/software/ctermine/ Cheshire3 Information Framework http://www.cheshire3.org/ MEDIE http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/medie/ Miyao, Y., et al.
"Semantic Retrieval for the Accurate Identification of Relational Concepts in Massive Textbases", 2006, In Proc.
COLING-ACL, pp.1017-1024.
Info-PubMed https://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/info-pubmed/ ASSERT http://www.nactem.ac.uk/assert/ Ananiadou, S., Procter, R., Rea, B., Sasaki, Y., and Thomas, J., "Supporting Systematic Reviews using Text Mining", 2007, 3rd International Conference on e-Social Science, Ann Arbor.
Korn, N., Oppenheim, C. and Duncan, C., "IPR and Licensing issues in Derived Data", Report submitted to the JISC, April 2007 Doyle H, Gass A, Kennison, R. "Open Access and Scientific Societies" PLoS Biology, 2004, Vol.
2, No.
5, e156: doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.002015 http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020156 Rowlands, I, Nicholas D., "New journal publishing models: An international survey of senior researchers".
2005 http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/papers/dni-20050925.pdf Piao, S., Ananiadou S. and McNaught, J., Integrating Annotation Tools into UIMA for Interoperability, 2007, Sixth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM2007) J. D. Kim, T. Ohta, Y. Tateishi, and J. Tsujii, "GENIA corpus a semantically annotated corpus for biotext mining", Bioinformatics,19(suppl.
1):i180-i182 2003. e-Research Community: About the Enabling Uptake of e-Infrastructure Services Project http://www.e-researchcommunity.org/projects/e-uptake/ Tekiner, F. and Ananiadou, S. Towards Text Mining Terabytes of Text Documents, 2007 Microsoft e-Science Workshop https://www.mses07.net/Main.aspx Hahn, U., Buyko, E., Tomanek, K., Piao, S., McNaught, J., Tsuruoka, Y. and Ananiadou, S. "An Annotation Type System for a Data-Driven NLP Pipeline."
2007, The Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) of ACL 2007 http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/acl-lab/LAW-07.html Lally, A., and Ferrucci, D., "Building an Example Application with the Unstructured Information Management Architecture", 2004, IBM Systems Journal 43, No.
3, 455-475.
Kano, Y., Nguyen, N., Saetre, R., Yoshida, K., Miyao, Y., Tsuruoka, Y., Matsubayashi, Y., Ananiadou, S. and Tsujii, J.
(2008) Filling the gaps between tools and users: a tool comparator, using protein-protein interaction as an example, in PSB 2008, Hawaii http://psb.stanford.edu/ Taverna Project Web site http://taverna.sourceforge.net/ REFINE Project: Representing Evidence For Interacting Network Elements http://dbkgroup.org/refine/ Chun, H., Tsuruoka, Y., Kim, J.D, Shiba, R., Nagata, N., Hishiki, T. and Tsujii, J.
"Automatic Recognition of Topic-Classified Relations between Prostate Cancer and Genes using MEDLINE Abstracts", 2006, BMC-Bioinformatics.
7 (Suppl 3).
Author Details Sophia Ananiadou Reader in Text Mining University of Manchester School of Computer Science National Centre for Text Mining 131 Princess St Manchester M1 7DN UK Email: Sophia.Ananiadou@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ Web site: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/sophia.ananiadou/ Return to top Article Title: "The National Centre for Text Mining: A Vision for the Future" Author: Sophia Ananiadou Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/ananiadou/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Libraries: The Changing Face of the Public Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Libraries: The Changing Face of the Public Library Buzz mobile framework vocabularies cataloguing multimedia ebook research Citation BibTex RIS Penny Garrod looks at developments in Hampshire and comments on the shape of things to come.
It has been said that people only value that which they fear they are about to lose, and the traditional library and its books are no exception.
The library as a quiet place full of books is, in many cases, giving way to the multi-purpose community centre featuring multimedia resources, cybercafés, ranks of computers, and even crèches.
However, this trend, as exemplified in Idea Stores and Discovery Centres is not welcomed by everyone.
The new centres tend to be busier, noisier places, and there are those who cherish the quiet space, books on shelves and solemn dignity of the traditional library.
As for books, there are claims that they are being marginalised in these new community centres; bookshelves are being removed to make space for cafés and rows of computers, and book budgets are being cut to pay for electronic resources.
These arguments tend to go round and round.
But public libraries are having to modernise; they cannot, in the words of Yinnon Ezra, Director of Recreation and Heritage at Hampshire County Council, be allowed to ‘wither on the vine’ but more on this later.
Public libraries were criticised a few years back for the poor quality of their bookstock.
In 2002 the Audit Commission [1] argued that libraries should “buy more of the books people want, and make them available when they want them.” The commission suggested that libraries should aim to emulate high street bookshops, by offering users a wide range of popular titles.
However, consider this: ”.. libraries should not be defined by the equipment they provide nor the stock of materials on their shelves.
Framework for the Future suggests that libraries should be measured by the services they deliver, the experiences they enable and the environment they create.” [2] This is from Overdue, a report by the independent think-tank, Demos, which was published shortly after Framework for the Future 3.
Charles Leadbetter, author of Overdue, argues that the role of libraries is to: ”…promote equality of opportunity in a society in which knowledge, ideas and information are increasingly important in work and hobbies, as a source of individual identity and a focus for a sense of community.” (page 15) Libraries in the Media: the Idea Store Libraries and books appear to be newsworthy and when they are deemed to be under threat the media take an even greater interest.
In March 2003 BBC News Online carried an article by Megan Lane entitled “Is this the library of the future?” [4] The word ‘library’ is set ‘to fade from our vocabulary’ we are told, but this is not because we have ‘fallen out of love with books’.
On the contrary, it is as a result of libraries being refurbished and re-branded; or, in media speak, being given a ‘makeover’.
Lane is referring to the library in Bow, East London, which is now an ‘Idea Store’.
On entering the ‘Idea Store’ [5], she informs us, you will not encounter ‘stern librarians’ or ‘shelves of books’, but a café.
Books do exist, but they are located ‘around the corner, en route to the children’s play area’.
The ‘Idea Store’ brand was launched in 1999, and has been hailed as ‘a groundbreaking concept’ and ‘the future of urban libraries’.
The flagship store is in Whitechapel, East London, and is conveniently placed for shoppers in front of a Sainsbury’s food store.
The ‘Idea Store’ in Bow has been a success; it averages around 1,000 visitors a day, compared to 250-300 in the old library building.
A user, who is now a frequent visitor, is quoted as saying: ”..whenever I’m looking after my granddaughter, I bring her here to play with the other children.
And for me it’s a lovely place to sit with a cup of tea.” Figure 1: The Idea Store Web site Libraries in the Media: the Discovery Centre This brings us to a discussion on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme on 27 February 2004 [6].
In this case, the media homed in on the closure of Gosport Library in Hampshire, which is being refurbished and reopened as a ‘Discovery Centre’ in Spring 2005 at a cost of £2 million.
‘Discovery Centres’ [7] are Hampshire County Council’s version of the London ‘Idea Store’; the figure below shows the layout of a ‘Discovery Centre’ and what it might typically include.
Figure 2: Introducing the Discovery Centre concept to Hampshire The ‘Discovery Centre’ concept is described on the Council Web site as: ”….young people-friendly, with an entertainment zone a thriving environment to meet friends and choose from the latest collections of DVDs and CDs, and a study area for those who want to read or do their homework in peace.
When possible cafés and crèches will be introduced encouraging customers to take a leisurely approach to using the array of facilities.
Technology will play a big part in making services accessible.
Where limited space prevents the physical presence of some facilities, virtual access will be provided via the computers of the People’s Network.” [7] The Today programme saw an opportunity here for some good sound bites on the whole ‘Discovery Centre’ approach.
Edward Stourton presented the programme, and opened the discussion by referring to the “fashion for turning libraries into so-called learning centres”.
We were treated to a chorus of tinies enjoying nursery hour, followed by an unhappy user, who argued that it was wrong of the council to provide mothers with somewhere to dump their children while they had a cup of coffee.
The Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, and the author, Deborah Moggagh provided the writer’s perspective, followed by Yinnon Ezra, Director of Recreation and Heritage at Hampshire County Council who gave the official view.
For Deborah Moggach, the crèches and the re-branding were the problem.
She thought that local authorities were terrified of the word ‘book’, (not, as I thought, the word ‘library’), and that books were being marginalised.
She also felt strongly about noise – it pollutes our lives in the same way as light from cities pollutes the night sky.
The public library should be a quiet haven away from the intrusive sound of mobile phones.
“The wonderfulness of public libraries is unarguable” she said and no one contradicted her.
Michael Morpurgo felt the change of name to ‘Discovery Centre’ was ‘pretty silly’, and he seemed to follow the Audit Commission’s line that libraries did not offer enough choice of books.
Budgets were a problem, he acknowledged, and when money was tight computers were likely to take precedence over books.
The ideal solution, he suggested, was for libraries to be allocated bigger budgets to enable them to buy computers and books in equal measure.
Perhaps writers should get out more, or failing this, they should be locked in a room with local authority chief executives for a week.
Yinnon Ezra told the programme that Hampshire County Council had gone for a ‘radical approach’ for libraries.
He admitted the strategy was ‘risky in some areas’, but the council had to find ways to engage new users.
He denied claims that fewer books were being purchased and felt that libraries were one of most important institutions in the country; so ‘doing nothing was not an option’ as this would result in libraries being ‘marooned’.
Reactions to the Today Broadcast The library debate on the Today programme inspired Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, shoots and leaves” to pen a piece for the Times [8].
In it she recalls a planning meeting she attended some years back to choose a new library for Brighton.
Having cast an eye over, and poked a finger at, the various models on display, Ms Truss asked one of the trio of architects in attendance: “How many books will this one hold?” Needless to say the architect did not have an answer.
However, her recollections of childhood visits to Ham library near Richmond are enough to bring tears to the eyes of anyone old enough (and probably female) to remember the Milly Molly Mandy books.
Ham library is described as a ‘sacred place’ smelling of polish, where the only sound to be heard was ‘catalogue drawers sliding on oiled metal rods’.
Books were the magnet that drew the young Lynne Truss to the public library.
However, the world we inhabit today is a different one and public libraries cannot stand still, they have to evolve to survive.
Striking a balance between the traditional and the new is a difficult task and trying to provide something for everyone, irrespective of age or social group, is a hard task.
Libraries should be for everyone but again this is an ideal that can be hard to realise.
On a final note, Michael Morpurgo referred to the library model adopted in France, which he thought offered the best of both worlds.
In France there are ‘bibliothèques’ and ‘médiathèques’; the former offers books and a quiet place to read and study, whilst the latter has IT facilities and multimedia resources.
A Google search revealed a list of ‘bibliothèques’ and ‘médiathèques’ on the Berkeley Digital Library SunSite Web site [9].
The Bibliothèque de Reims [10] provides information in French and English, and although the English is a bit quirky in places, the message contained in the mission statement is clear in either language: “Our missions are: to maintain and develop the practice of reading for children and adults, to ensure access to the various forms of cultural expression, to help discovering the pleasure of learning, to guarantee free access for all to the new supports of information and new technologies as well as multi-media, to ensure conservation of the written inheritance and particularly local patrimonial collections, to support the initial and permanent formation, to allow everybody the possibility of updating his scholarly or professional assets, to be a place of discovery, meeting, exchanging ideas and promoting well being in the city.
A charter, validated by the municipal authority, written procedures and a regular evaluation guarantee the respect of these principles and a harmonious functioning of the libraries”.
The Bibliothèque de Reims refers to ‘a place of discovery’ which chimes with the naming of the ‘Discovery Centres’ in this country.
Unfortunately, there are other ‘discovery centres’ in the UK which are tourist attractions, so it seems a shame that the word ‘library’ has not been retained unlike ‘Bibliothèque’ in France.
But their culture is different from ours and with a choice of two discrete centres they may not feel the need to rebrand their libraries.
Next time I visit France I might take a peek inside one of these bibliothèques or médiathèques to see what we can learn from them.
References Audit Commission (2002).
Building Better Library Services.
ACKnowledge.
Learning from audit, inspection and research.
Available: http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/ Charles Leadbeater.
Overdue.
How to create a modern public library service.
Demos.
April 2003. http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/default.aspx?id=262 Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Framework for the future: Libraries, Learning and Information in the next decade.
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2003/framework_future.htm Megan Lane.
Is this the library of the future?
BBC News Online.
18 March 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2859845.stm The Idea Store Web site: http://www.ideastore.co.uk/ Radio Four.
The Today Programme.
Presented by Edward Stourton.
Available as an audio clip on Listen again, broadcast on 27 February 2004 at 0843 a.m. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/zfriday_20040227.shtml Discovery Centres, Hampshire County Council.
http://www.hants.gov.uk/rh/discoverycentres/ Lynne Truss.
Shhh!
If only you’d shut up, you’d hear the books screaming.
The Times Online.
28 February 2004. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ or see Lynne Truss article.
Libraries on the Web, Berkeley University.
Libraries in France.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Libweb/France.html Bibliothèque de Reims: http://www.bm-reims.fr/ Further Reading: Related articles in Ariadne: Ebooks in public libraries: where are we now?
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/garrod/ A Grand Day Out http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/public-libraries/ Framework for the future: access to digital skills and services.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/public-libraries/ Which way now?
The future of UK public libraries.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/public-libraries/ Author Details Penny Garrod Public Library Networking Focus UKOLN Email: p.garrod@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/ Return to top Article Title: “Public Libraries: The changing face of the public library” Author: Penny Garrod Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/public-libraries/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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WebWatch: An Update on Search Engines Used in UK University Web Sites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines WebWatch: An Update on Search Engines Used in UK University Web Sites Buzz data software database metadata copyright cataloguing url Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly provides an update of his survey of search engines used in UK Universities.
The initial survey of search engines used on UK University Web sites was carried out during July and August 1999 and the findings were reported in Ariadne issue 21 [1].
Since then the survey has been updated approximately every six months, which allows trends to be identified.
In this article we review the trends since the initial survey was carried out.
Current Findings The most recent update to the survey was carried out in June 2003.
The survey now shows that the most widely used search engine is still ht://Dig which is now used in over 54 institutions.
This is followed by Google (21 institutions) and a Microsoft product (19 institutions).
A summary of the findings is given in Table 1.
Survey Date: June 2003   Search Engine Number Comments 1 ht://Dig 54   2 Google 21   3 Microsoft 19 This includes a number of search engines which are hosted on a Microsoft platform 4 Inktomi/Ultraseek 12   5 ColdFusion 4 This includes a number of search engines which are hosted on a ColdFusion application platform 6 Thunderstone’s Webinator 4     Other 21 This includes search engines used in 3 or fewer Web sites   None 15 This may include Web sites in which the search facility was not easily found Table 1: Search Engines Used in UK University Web Sites The full survey findings [2] are available .
Trends In 1999 a wide range of search engines were in use, as can be seen from the original findings [3].
There is now a clear market leader (ht://Dig), followed, at some distance by Google.
These are followed by a Microsoft search engine.
It should be noted that this category is slightly misleading as it is likely that several different search engines are included in this category however it is difficult to distinguish between different types of search engines hosted on a Microsoft platform.
It is interestng to make a comparison with the initial survey.
A summary of the findings is shown in the following table.
Survey Date: July/August 1999   Search Engine Number Comments 1 ht://Dig 25   2 eXcite 19   3 Microsoft 12 This includes a number of Microsoft search engines 4 Harvest 8   5 Ultraseek 7   6 SWISH/SWISH-E 5   7 Thunderstone’s Webinator 4     Other 20 This includes search engines used in 3 or fewer Web sites.
A total of 15 different search engines are in this category   None 59 This may include Web sites in which the search facility was not easily found Table 2: Search Engines Used in UK University Web Sites (Initial Survey) Discussion We can see that the ht://Dig has consolidated its position as the most popular search engine.
As ht://Dig is an open source solution this would appear to confirm the views of the open source community on two of the main attractions of open source software: the availability of source code allows developments to be easily made and its zero (capital) cost provides a cost-effective solution.
However anecdotal evidence suggests that ht://Dig’s popularity is not due to the availability of the source code.
Indeed the growth in popularity of Google (which is free to use, although it is not an open source solution) would appear to suggest that the free cost of search engines software is an important factor.
From these findings one might deduce that institutions are happy with the service provided by ht://Dig.
Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that institutions find the ht://Dig software limited in its usefulness.
ht://Dig is probably a safe solution, but not the best solution.
Perhaps the most interesting development since the initial survey has been the growth in popularity of Google.
Google is an externally hosted application, meaning that the search software and the data are hosted remotely and that institutions have no control over the software.
However Google, the most popular global search engine for the Web, is renowned for its speed of response.
It is very easy to make use of Google to provide an institutional search facility this simply requires a completed Web form; no software needs to be installed.
Use of Google is free for the University sector.
Another trend we are beginning to see is the use of more than one search engine.
Several institutions make use of ht://Dig and Google, which provides users with a choice of search engines, and provides a degree of redundancy in case one search engine is unavailable.
What of the Future?
What trends might we expect to see in the future?
Can we expect institutions to stabilise on the current market leaders or might we see volatility with the deployment of new products or new approaches?
It is clear that use of Dublin Core metadata has not taken off to any significant extent within conventional Web sites to provide enhanced searching facilities.
However there does appear to be interest in better ways of providing searching, perhaps through approaches such as knowledge management and data mining.
Other issues to consider include the integration of Web search facilities with searching of non-Web databases such as Library OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues), VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) , etc.
and integration with remote search facilities such as Google, the RDN (Resource Discovery Network)[4], etc.
Perhaps the safest approach to take is to expect change and to ensure that any approaches provided today can be migrated to new technologies in the future with the minimum of disruption.
References UK University Search Engines, Ariadne issue 21, Sept 1999 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/webwatch/ Survey Of UK HE Institutional Search Engines June 2003, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/surveys/uk-he-search-engines/2003-06/ WebWatch: UK University Search Engines Survey of UK HE Institutional Search Engines Summer 1999, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/webwatch/survey.html The Resource Discovery Network, http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath Return to top Article Title: “WebWatch: An Update of a Survey of Search Engines Used in UK University Web Sites” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/web-watch/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Mobile Blogs, Personal Reflections and Learning Environments: The RAMBLE Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mobile Blogs, Personal Reflections and Learning Environments: The RAMBLE Project Buzz data mobile software rdf framework html wireless rss xml atom infrastructure stylesheet xslt browser vocabularies blog video cache aggregation syndication e-learning vle sms authentication privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Trafford describes how mobile blogs for personal reflection may be related to institutional learning environments, drawing on experiences from the RAMBLE Project.
Public participation in the Internet has continued to boom, aided in no small measure by the 'weblog' (or, simply, 'blog'), one of the most accessible means of online publication, a term that is rapidly entering common parlance.
Blogs are authored by people from many walks of life and are of many kinds: for instance, Penny Garrod has shown how they can support reading groups and community links, such as news from local councillors [1].
They have also grown in sophistication from their humble origins as personal diaries, similar to the way that a simple solo sonata might lead eventually to a complex orchestral work.
The facility to have multiple authors linking to each other offers exciting research possibilities for exploring social learning networks and their intricate harmonies.
Evidence of the educational benefits is accumulating and has been trumpeted in the media, even for young children [2], though there is relatively little formal literature extolling their merits in scholarly publications, especially for Higher Education (HE).
However, this is gradually emerging: for instance, in 'Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector' [3], Williams and Jacobs conclude that based on case studies, blogs can be an effective aid to teaching and learning, pointing out that students are provided with a high level of autonomy independent of the campus, while simultaneously providing opportunity for greater interaction with peers.
Ferdig and Trammell indicate that blogs support social interaction while giving students full control and ownership over their online content [4].
A fair number of other references are provided in the Educause Resource Center [5], showing an increasing level of positive engagement.
While much of the attention has focused on community interactions, the UK Government's emphasis on widening participation and lifelong learning focuses on an individual's personalised learning and development, where an individual needs to reflect internally.
Blogs can facilitate this process simply and effectively, especially when the object of reflection is their study; and the experiences they have will be of value not just to themselves, but to others.
At some stage the reflective blogs will need to be related to their learning environments.
The Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments (RAMBLE) Project [6] has recognised that these institutional systems are often quite remote from this 'blogosphere'.
Such a recognition has motivated the project to investigate how personal reflections in the HE context may be supported through mobile blogging and the provision of stepping stones into a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), typically core to an institution's e-learning infrastructure.
The methodology and some findings are reported below.
Blogging Terminology For newcomers to blogging, some basic terms are introduced here.
A 'weblog' (or 'web log' or 'blog') can mean any authored content with an underlying chronological basis that is published on the World Wide Web.
The content may be about any topic and consist of any media, including audio, images and video, though presently the majority of blogs are largely text-based.
A blog can be authored by one or more people, who are the blog 'owners', responsible for maintaining the blog.
A blog is made up of 'blog entries', consisting of contributions posted to the blog by the blog owner(s).
Entries generally consist of just a title and body and are usually listed chronologically, the most recent first.
How many depends upon the hosting application and the blog owner.
Typically, entries contain hyperlinks to other Web sites, including other blogs, thus contributing to a more social manner in which the Web is interlinked.
Optionally they may allow response from others, most commonly through a comments system, allowing a critique of ideas, suggestions, etc., which some argue is a defining characteristic of a blog.
Some of the more popular blogs receive many comments and become discussion threads, but as the owners are always originators of the topic, they retain overall control of the flow.
A digital diary may appear in a virtual void without some means for others to find the blog.
Many blog sites host a number of blogs and offer a facility to search across the site's contents, of which usually the title and body fields are indexed.
If the site uses a popular hosting provider, then it may be easily picked up by a search engine and added to their index, as detailed in Phil Bradley's column in issue 36 of Ariadne [7].
However, once someone has found your blog, then how do they keep up to date with the latest thoughts?
Blogs are designed to be viewed over time and most of them are not updated with uniform regularity, so there needs to be a means for keeping readers informed as and when new entries are authored and also for including extracts.
This role is fulfilled by Web content 'syndication' in which a portion of content is made available in a format that can be read by an external source.
The most common means is a 'newsfeed' that displays the most recent articles or postings, which typically use de facto standards in XML of which the most popular are RSS in its variants such as Really Simple Syndication and RDF Rich Site Summary and, more recently, Atom.
Picking up the feeds requires a feed reader, for which there are many clients, both online and for the desktop, a number of these detailed in Bradley's survey [7].
The role of combining feeds from multiple sources is fulfilled by 'aggregation'.
Public sites such as Bloglines [8] provide a flexible service that can harvest and aggregate feeds from blog sites on an ongoing basis, thereby overcoming limitations inherent in the time-limited supply in feeds.
They also provide search and browse facilities to the blogs being subscribed by other users of the service.
Personal Reflective Blogs Personal reflection and internal distillation constitute a large part of the educational process, which takes place independently of the classroom, whether on or off campus.
They can be facilitated by blogs acting as personal diaries, addressing a specific theme or, more generally, offering personal reflection on any matters that affect their daily lives.
They can cover anything from general orientation how to plan leisure and study activities in university life through to figuring out that confusing concept in the last lecture.
Staff can also benefit from maintaining a reflective blog, whether a seasoned senior manager or a first-time lecturer.
For example, a vice-chancellor might consider offering personal reflections on the university's first official inter-faith service, a response to the Indian Ocean disasters of December 2004.
The blog can record its conception and planning, the event itself and any personal reflections.
It thus shows the bigger picture, highlighting some activities and thoughts that may not ordinarily receive much attention.
Personal reflections featured in the early use of blogs.
In 'Bookmarking the world: Weblog applications in education' [9] Oravec states that weblogs foster the development of unique voices associated with particular individuals; the development of Weblogs over time can empower students to become more analytical and critical, responding to the resources they receive.
Indeed, used in this way, blogs are entirely what the author is making of the world and can cast light on implicit assumptions in teaching.
For the educator, especially tutor, blogs have a number of attractions including: through publication on the Web, the tutor may have convenient access to view the blog and also, where appropriate, provide responses; further, it is possible to interact with blogs, to guide the author (tutee, say) to address particular issues; the ongoing nature supports longitudinal surveys on a continual basis; blogs can be grouped together, enabling tutors to gain a broad picture of their students as a whole, and highlighting particular issues.
Personal reflective blogs can be facilitated in a number of ways, including: in form make them intuitive to view and navigate; for contribution make writing and publishing easy; for application developers make the software simple; in use allow free expression without constraining unnecessarily.
Blogs used in this way are characteristic of what may be referred to as a 'Personal Learning Environment' (PLE), which focuses on an individual's own educational space, which can be said to 'wrap around the learner.'
Blogs can fit very comfortably in the PLE context, providing a medium that facilitates reflection about life over an extended period as well as capturing something in an instant an instantaneous note to capture a concept before it escapes.
Many of these kinds of activities (reflecting, recording and so on) are carried out by students in 'Personal Development Planning' (PDP), which UK Higher Education institutions (HEIs) are required to support by September 2005, as detailed by the Higher Education Academy [10].
Students are required to build portfolios that showcase their record of achievement.
Blogging activities can form part of the process, particularly contributing to the portfolios, though much depends upon their nature.
Generally, blogs can be spontaneous, informal and only lightly structured, whereas PDP systems are more deliberate, formal and highly structured, perhaps with checklists and context-specific vocabularies.
What may be possible is to import blog content in PDP systems, to support more structured reflections, or possibly work up the text to a more formal record.
Experiences in Mobile Blogging from the RAMBLE Project While blogs promise a number of potential benefits for personal reflection in the PLE context within an academic institution, there are many constraints, particularly in respect of structures.
Most HEIs have some form of centrally hosted Virtual Learning Environment through which much of the online learning is mediated.
In such environments, the emphasis is on delivery of information, generally not where substantial amounts of original content are authored by students, though submissions may be uploaded through an interface.
Many VLE systems have been designed as self-contained environments with a great deal of functionality, but are often monolithic and complex.
Further, their use often imposes other constraints: for instance, most working has to be carried out while online.
Linking PLEs with VLEs Perhaps not surprisingly then, not a great deal has been done to connect PLEs and VLEs.
Against this background, the JISC-funded RAMBLE Project [6] undertook to develop some linkage between PLEs and VLEs, so that at least the blogging activities could be imported into the VLE context.
Thus RAMBLE's brief was to investigate the use of blogs as a reflective authoring activity in an educational context through two strands of work: The off-line authoring of blog entries on a PDA and subsequent upload to a blog server.
The creation of a blogging component that will allow blog content to be integrated into the Bodington VLE [11].
The project recognised that there are existing patterns of activity that ought to be very amenable to blogging such as the habit of Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging, which can be any place, any time.
Hence, in order to best realise working off site, the blogging was made mobile, i.e.
participants each authored a 'moblog', where: 'A mobile weblog, or moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile device, such as a cellular phone or PDA' [12].
Technical choices had to be made very quickly: after brief investigation, two kinds of PDA-based blogging clients were chosen, one using the Microsoft Pocket PC operating system and the other using Palm OS, which at the time were the two most popular platforms.
Each device was also supplemented with a wireless infra-red foldaway keyboard, which was essential to support more than token input.
The content was subsequently submitted to a blog hosting service ('blog server') on the Web via synchronisation with a networked desktop PC.
Most of the requirements were drawn from moblogging exercises undertaken by two groups of Oxford undergraduates (Year 1 Chemistry, and Year 5 Medical Sciences).
It is worth noting that they were given short and simple briefs the first group was to give feedback on lecture courses, tutorials and practicals, while the other was to record their learning experiences while on a clinical rotation.
The blogs were authored over a period of a month or so, generally a couple of entries submitted each week.
In addition, a project blog was maintained through the project period of about 6 months [13].
Particular attention was given to privacy.
Most blogs, even personal diaries, are viewable by the public, but in the personal learning context, this is not always appropriate.
These requirements made it really necessary to have control over the blog server in-house.
So access to the blogs was set up so that there was only one owner per blog and the only others who could read and respond to the blogs were their peers plus the blog project supervisor and RAMBLE project team.
Reflections from Students The requirements gathering proved unexpectedly rich and deserves closer attention, even though the project was primarily about tool development.
Considerable content was generated, covering learning processes, teaching style, academic provision, timetabling and many other aspects.
Its extent can only be briefly covered by a few paragraphs, but it is hoped that the following, gathered from the Chemistry undergraduates, indicates the range and depth of what was recorded.
Students expressed themselves very freely, showing few signs of reticence.
Their feedback was constructive, for example, commenting if the pace was too fast: one student recorded that a lecturer wrote so much that his hand ached and further there was little pause for explanation so that he could digest the concepts.
This was evidently a disincentive to reading what had been written as in a later entry he noted that he had just come to realise that the notes were actually very thorough, covering most of what he needed for his tutorials.
At the same time, students would give credit where they thought it was due.
'I've found our tutor .. to be clear and very happy to pause in her method to explain what she is doing if we don't quite see something that is usually quite obvious.
This is really helpful to set in the mind the basics of the topic.'
They also remarked on whether lecturers were enthusiastic or appeared uninterested, which affected their own motivation: one whose manner was 'ever-enthusiastic' meant 'i never get bored in his lectures even though usually i find the maths pretty hard.'
Some observations were perspicacious: about one tutor it was written, 'clearly had lined up the topics that he wanted to touch upon and had it in mind where he was going to take the discussion.'
Entries could be instructive and humorous: one student remarked on how practical books were very easy to follow and that a demonstrator was very helpful, especially in providing directions on where to find the dustpan and brush for broken glass!
After a few weeks, some general changes were noted.
Students recorded when they felt they were making progress and gaining in confidence, attributing some of this to they way they were being taught.
'The work load has not increased as much as i thought it would, if anything getting lighter!
Either that or i'm getting used to it!'
This would be encouraging not only for the student, but also for a tutor.
Some of the reflections themselves changed in nature and would consider wider implications.
For instance, one entry compared people's backgrounds in relation to the subject matter: 'I have found it hard to follow a lot of the mathematical content of the course so far, not having studied further maths at school, but there are also students who had taken gap years and have not applied functional maths for nearly 16 months... this in my mind would make the material almost unapproachable.'
Observations were sometimes at several levels.
For instance, in one entry a student makes an observation primarily about lecturing style, in which he feels the lecturer ought to take more time to interact with the audience than the blackboard, as he continues to write new notes on the board while explaining something that he had introduced previously without checking that everyone is following.
The student then reflects on the situation and sees the implications, seeing that this interaction would need extra time and ends up by suggesting the extension of the course by a lecture or two.
Project Observations These blogs were very elementary, with little use made of comments, though students did read other blogs.
There is certainly potential for much richer use of the facilities, especially where the work is more oriented towards making use of online resources.
Yet, this was already a fairly complex operation involving several kinds of PDAs, desktop PCs, and servers, though the complexity was hidden as much as possible from the user, so that the moblogging itself became a fairly simple process.
At the end of the exercises students were asked to fill in a survey to report back on the exercise.
The initial technical barriers seemed to be overcome as can be seen in the feedback obtained, but not everyone takes to blogging, so alternatives may have to be provided.
It is difficult to say to what extent mobility aids the reflection process with a relatively small sample and no control experiment (blogging without PDAs).
However, when asked 'Where there any advantages to using the PDA to write your blogs?'
all but one responded positively, several citing the convenience of writing without constraints on place and time 'even in lectures' and 'easier than sitting at a desk.'
One comment was particularly interesting for its suggestion about note taking 'I could do small pieces at a time and build up a piece.'
Whereas the blog hosting solution proved very satisfactory, the general immaturity of moblogging tools was disappointing.
Few clients were available and most of these were limited to particular platforms, contained bugs, or lacked important functionality; few were released with open source licences.
Setting up the devices and tools can be very fiddly, which raises the question of support from IT staff, who may not have any resources allocated for training in this area.
Current products are generally marketed at mobile phones, reflecting the growth in that market.
However, the phone clients are typically designed for instant capture of events, rather than sustained reflection, with small screens that cannot hold much text and able to store very few entries in the cache.
Altogether, this environment may offer convenience but also may be encouraging short attention spans (as well as large phone bills).
Even so, moblogging did work quite well, despite the scarcity of dependable software.
Issues for Educators For a tutor who might consider offering guidance to a student blogger, there are a number of challenges and caveats.
The quality of the entries can vary considerably: some contributions were difficult to follow, being staccato in style and very lax in grammar, though usually not going quite as far as SMS 'textspeak' with all its abbreviations.
Thus, basic guidelines may be needed on the use of the English language, perhaps assisted by some monitoring.
Further, keeping a blog going for any lengthy period requires a lot of commitment and there is a risk of 'blog rot', in which blogs become neglected and fall into disuse.
So there needs to be a good reason to get started and it must be sustainable for at least some while.
A common complaint is that blogs contain such a diversity of thoughts that it becomes difficult to find relevant points, though it may be argued that many aspects are interdependent and need the bigger picture, which a blog can provide.
There is always the danger of mental proliferation, resulting in blogs going off topic: the empty boxes in blogs don't provide explicit means to take an idea and focus on it and refine it further, so more effort is required by authors to keep contributions relevant, with the need for guidance and vigilance by tutors.
Many blog systems provide some means of structuring blogs, which can mitigate these disadvantages, notably the facility to group entries through categories.
Categories may be from a controlled vocabulary, completely user-defined, or a mixture of both.
Similarly, some systems support tags, which specify a property of an object, and can apply to a particular entry.
Where structuring elements are scarce, the choice can have a very important impact.
Students are likely to put more effort into blogs if they feel that someone is taking notice of their blogs on more than an occasional basis.
However, it would probably take quite a lot of experience to know how to interpret and respond appropriately: an individual might make challenging assertions about workload, which could be well-founded or an indication of other problems that need a pastoral response.
In such cases, having a group of student blogs to compare side by side is valuable.
Blogs in an Institutional Setting Blogs offer considerable potential and so it is natural to ask: How to incorporate blogs in the institutional setting, particularly with existing e-learning systems?
Should the institution offer a blog to all its staff and students?
Very few universities offer blogs as a general service, one of the most well known being 'Warwick Blogs', provided by Warwick University [14].
This is a completely home-grown and heavily customised e-learning system built around blogs and integrated with local directory services, so is currently not an option for other institutions.
So should other educational establishments follow Warwick's example?
It is not easy to give a general answer, but a few observations can be made.
First, if blogs require some degree of privacy, especially within particular groups, then public hosting services are unlikely to be suitable, not least because the institution has no control the extreme scenario being that a hosting service goes offline.
Given the simplicity of blogs, it might be tempting to think that blog hosting is easy.
While it may be straightforward for a small deployment, in a particular department, scaling up across an institution presents a far greater challenge.
If providing an institutional blog, one question that ought to be considered is: How many blogs are appropriate for an individual?
Do people prefer to maintain just one blog in which they can store all their reflections, relating to work and study, or would they prefer to keep separate blogs depending upon the context?
The judicious use of categories might enable a single blog to fulfil these roles, but there is added complexity as personal circumstances (including their learning contexts) change over time.
As blogging continues to grow in popularity, it becomes increasingly likely that schoolchildren will have blog accounts on public services before moving to Further and Higher Education.
Just as it might be the case that there need to be compelling reasons why students ought to drop their Hotmail accounts in favour of the university system, so they will need to have spelt out the value of having university blogs.
As time spent at a particular university is normally only a few years, there is another issue about what happens on departure?
Trends are difficult to predict, but there will quite likely be a need to import and export the content easily in some standards-compliant way, because in contrast to the transience of e-mail, blogs provide a consolidated personal record that can be referenced in the future.
Hence they need to be portable.
Technical Overview: Getting Blogs from PDAs to VLEs Against this backdrop, RAMBLE sought to adopt a flexible architecture that could at least offer the potential to account for different scenarios.
This employed three independent components where the use of communication standards allows different solutions to be easily slotted in.
Figure 1: The RAMBLE Component-based Architecture Pebble Weblog [15] was chosen as the blog server as it provides extensive and flexible means for receiving blogs from PDAs and for supplying newsfeeds to consumers.
A tool was developed in Bodington to read and embed these feeds in the VLE using XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations), together with various display options so that they can appear together in aggregation or separately in their own container.
The example below comes from WebLearn, Oxford's centrally hosted service based on Bodington.
Figure 2: Screenshot of various blogs and newsfeeds in WebLearn, Oxford's VLE Bodington is particularly flexible in that it does not impose particular teaching structures, but instead makes use of generic containers: suites can contain further suites and many tools, so feeds may be introduced into any number of views (course, module, etc).
For instance, a suite of rooms may be created within the Department's undergraduate teaching space, in which all students may have their own suite as a study space, which can include their blog to share as they wish.
Supporting documentation, surveys, other blog feeds, and other tools can help build up a shared area.
For the tutor, there are facilities to display a given number of entries per blog and for blog aggregation, enabling easy comparison.
This was implemented in a small way in RAMBLE, where students were requested to fill in a questionnaire to gain feedback on the project itself.
Details about this approach are discussed in various parts of the project documentation, especially the final report and report on blog servers [16].
The Issue of Privacy Both student exercises required privacy: in the case of the medical students it was needed, for instance, to protect patient confidentiality; with the Chemistry feedback, it was necessary to allow honest appraisal of the teaching etc.
Pebble and other blog hosting services provide some means of restricting access, but this generally assumes that users are accessing the service directly through the Web interface and not via a third-party system.
Yet, perhaps the key benefit of the Bodington VLE is that it can restrict access to selected groups of users that reflect the institutional hierarchy.
Especially useful are the access control mechanisms, available for each resource, which can be anything such as a general container, questionnaire, or discussion area.
In all these cases, access can be set for any number of groups via an interface like the following example taken from Oxford's deployment: Figure 3: Access Control Management in Bodington The left-hand side shows the selection of a particular course-related group (all those involved in Forced Migration studies) which is available from automated feeds from student records data.
On the right-hand side are listed the different kinds of access to resources.
The owner of a resource can thus choose which groups can have 'see' and 'view' access to read the contents.
The system might be further developed so that members of groups with 'post' rights are able to comment on a blog, and so on.
For blogs to be restricted in this way means that most people will come to the blog through the learning context of the VLE.
A very basic proof of concept was achieved, but the technical solution is not appropriate for a production service.
Thus conceived, the blog server is used to store all the blog entries.
At the same time, Bodington VLE users make use of access control systems to set who can access the blog via a display of an RSS/Atom feed.
When authorised users view this resource, Bodington downloads the RSS and renders it to HTML, sending the output to the client (browser).
In this scenario there is implicit co-ordination between the blog server and VLE: when a user is in the VLE and attempts to access a private blog the VLE does the authorization and Pebble has to trust the VLE completely.
This is an illustration of the general problem of secondary authentication, the same issue commonly encountered in portals where there is the need for trust between machines.
It soon becomes evident that interoperating systems need an infrastructure in which authentication and authorisation services stand outside any particular application and are readily accessible by the various applications.
Problems like these have led to the development of component-based frameworks and Service Oriented Architectures, an approach that is being actively promoted by JISC in their E-Learning Framework (ELF) [17].
Demonstrators, toolkits and reference models are being developed for ELF against which existing systems may evolve from monolithic structures to more reusable component-based services.
One of the demonstrator projects is BEWT [18], which will develop an IMS Enterprise service for Bodington Authorisation, the kind of service that should lead to richer communication between blogs and learning environments.
Conclusion Developing a seamless flow from the reflections in personal learning environments to institutional learning environments is a considerable challenge.
However, the experiences from the RAMBLE Project have shown that blogs are generally very useful support for personal reflections and that this can be further enhanced by the mobility of PDAs.
These and other blogs can be read into VLEs using syndicated newsfeeds, for which a new Bodington tool offers considerable flexibly.
However, fuller integration is currently problematic until more modular designs with greater support for open standards improve the situation in future.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the following colleagues: Karl Harrison (Department of Chemistry) and Danny Tucker (Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology) for allowing quotes from the student blogs and Vivien Sieber (Medical Sciences Teaching Centre) and Peter Robinson (Learning Technologies Group) for comments on drafts of this article.
References Garrod, P., Weblogs: Do they belong in libraries?, Ariadne 40, July 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/public-libraries/ "The seven-year-old bloggers", BBC News online, 14 June 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3804773.stm Williams, J.B., Jacobs, J., "Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector", Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2004, 20(2), 232-247 http://ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/williams.html Ferdig, R. E., Trammell K. D., "Content delivery in the Blogosphere", T.H.E.
Journal Online, February 2004, http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/articleprintversion.cfm?aid=4677 Educause Resource Center: Blogs section http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=645&PARENT_ID=645&bhcp=1 Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments, JISC DEL E-Tools Project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/deletramble.html Bradley, P., Search Engines: Weblog search engines, Ariadne 36, July 2003 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/search-engines/ Bloglines http://bloglines.com Oravec, J.
A., "Bookmarking the world: Weblog applications in education", Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Newark, April 2002 Higher Education Academy Personal Development Planning Page http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/PDP.htm Bodington Open Source Project http://bodington.org word iQ: definition of Moblog, http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Moblog.html RAMBLE Project Blog (summary list) http://ramble.oucs.ox.ac.uk/blogs_proj_all.html Warwick Blogs, Warwick University http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/ Pebble Weblog, SourceForge Project site http://pebble.sourceforge.net/ RAMBLE Project Documentation http://ramble.oucs.ox.ac.uk/docs/index.html The E-Learning Framework site, http://www.elframework.org/ Bodington integrated with Enterprise Webservice Toolkit, JISC ELF Demonstrator Project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=elfdemo_uhi Author Details Paul Trafford VLE Administrator Learning Technologies Group University of Oxford Email: paul.trafford@oucs.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/vle/ Return to top Article Title: "Mobile Blogs, Personal Reflections and Learning Environments" Author: Paul Trafford Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/trafford/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What's in SOSIG for Further Education?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What's in SOSIG for Further Education?
Buzz software database cataloguing e-learning ebook ict research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Place gives an insight into the pitfalls that await new users of the Internet in their search for relevant and quality materials and explains how SOSIG has catered for the needs of both FE students and practitioners.
The Internet holds great potential for supporting education at FE level, but it can be fraught with difficulty.
Lecturers often have very little time to spend surfing the 'Net to find useful resources for course materials and teaching, or to help their students develop Internet skills.
Students can lack the skills, confidence or ability to use the Internet effectively for their study, especially given that the Internet is not exclusively about education, containing many materials that are completely inappropriate for coursework or study.
The Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) provides a number of free Internet services designed to make locating information on the Internet quicker, easier and more productive.
It can also help with learning new Internet skills.
SOSIG is aimed specifically at students and lecturers in UK Further and Higher Education working in the fields of Social Science, Business and law.
As one lecturer recently put it: "The Internet is full of excellent information but the difficulty is knowing where to find it.
SOSIG is essential for this."
What services does SOSIG provide that are relevant to those in Further Education?
This articles points you to some of the services likely to be of most relevance.
Virtual training tutorials: to help students develop their Internet skills Students often have varying levels of Internet skills.
Some will be relatively new to ICT and need to build their confidence and skills.
Others may be IT savvy, but will not be familiar with using the Internet to support their education at FE level.
In some cases students can be wildly over confident in their ability to use the Internet and may need guidance to discover new things that they hadn't been aware of.
Help your students to learn how to use the Internet effectively to support their coursework by introducing them to the Virtual Training Suite.
SOSIG offers free eLearning tutorials designed specifically to teach Internet skills of relevance to different areas of study.
The RDN Virtual Training Suite is a set of self-paced tutorials on the Web that teach Internet information skills (eLiteracy) by subject.
These tutorials offer around an hour of self-paced, online learning for students, pointing them to key Internet sites for their subject area, and teaching Internet search skills that will help them to find other resources online.
The importance of Key Skills within FE curricula was recognised at an early stage in the development of these resources.
Advice is given and examples signposted as to how to generate evidence for Key Skills in Communication and IT through using the Virtual Training Suite.
Some of the tutorials have been written specifically for FE students studying social sciences.
Their titles are: Internet for Business Studies Internet for Health and Social Care Others were originally written for HE students, though feedback suggests they can also be used effectively in FE (particularly the TOUR chapter).
These titles are: Internet Anthropologist Internet for Development Internet Economist Internet for Education Internet for European Studies Internet Geographer Internet for Government Internet for Lawyers Internet Politician Internet Psychologist Internet for Social Policy Internet for Social Research Methods Internet for Social Statistics Internet Social Worker Internet Sociologist Internet Town and Country Planner Internet for Women's Studies These tutorials can be accessed via the SOSIG Training page.
Feedback from the FE community on these tutorials has been very positive.
Lecturer feedback: "Superb resource for my students has guided them all and assisted with assessed work" "It is free and online, so I could get my students into an IT room, point them towards the site and tell them to get clicking" Student feedback: "I've never seen anything like it, it wasn't boring and has given me more confidence to go and search for information for my assignment" "A simple way to learn about finding sources on the Internet" Internet Resource Catalogue: to help find quality evaluated Web sites Quality of information is a real issue on the Internet, particularly when it's being used to support education.
An Internet search can often list high quality materials from reliable sources alongside very poor quality information, and students can easily fall into the trap of degrading their work if they use the Internet indiscriminately.
Internet searches can also yield hundreds of thousands of search results, making it difficult for lecturers and students to quickly identify the key resources.
SOSIG's core service is the Internet Resource Catalogue of quality evaluated Web sites and Internet based information.
This contains details of over 26,000 Internet resources in the social sciences, business and law.
All sites are regularly checked for currency, and new sites are added every day.
The catalogue can help teachers to find resources to include in their course materials, reading lists and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).
It's also a safe Internet search environment to point students to, to find resources to help with coursework and assignments.
All the resources are selected and described by subject experts from specialist libraries and university departments in the UK.
For example, the politics section is edited by the British Library of Political and Economic Science edit the Politics section, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies edit the Law section and so on.
The Catalogue can be searched or browsed.
If you know what you're after, try a quick keyword search.
If you want to see what is available more generally, then browse the subject listings.
There are over 1,000 subject sections within SOSIG arranged in a subject hierarchy.
Simply select the relevant main heading from the home page and work through the sub-sections and related sections listed on each page to see what's listed in your subject field.
Many of the browse headings map well to subjects taught within FE.
The list below indicates the main subject headings in SOSIG, highlighting some of the 1,000 subject-headings which map onto FE curriculum subjects: Business and Management including Accountancy ; Marketing ; Advertising Economics Education Environmental Science Ethnography and Anthropology including Folk Traditions European Studies Geography Government Policy Law Philosophy Politics Psychology including: Developmental psychology ; Mental Health Research Tools and Methods Social Welfare including: Social Work ; CommunitY Care ; Children ; Young People ; Families; Disabled People ; People with Learning Difficulties ; Carers ; Community Work ; Social Policy ; Social Services Sociology including: Sociologists; Communication; Sociology of Children Statistics including: Official Statistics ; National Statistics Women's Studies The resources are listed by Resource Type under each subject heading, to help you quickly identify the sort of material being offered.
Many of these resource types are likely to be of particular interest to those in FE.
Examples include: Books Online (eBooks, online textbooks etc) Company Information (links to individual company Web sites) Educational Materials (online materials designed for teaching and learning) Journals Online (note: some are free, some will need a subscription) News (online news services, including newspapers) Organisations/Societies (Web sites of key organisations and professional bodies) Reference Materials (dictionaries, directories, encyclopaedias, etc) Resource Guides (respected lists of links to other Internet resources) Key resources for each subject are flagged as "Editors' Choice" at the top of each subject listing only resources which are particularly important or are of outstanding quality are designated as Editor's Choice, so it's easy to spot key resources for the subject at a glance.
The Social Science Search Engine: help with searching the wider Web If you are not able to find what you're after, then try SOSIG's Social Science Search Engine.
This is ideal for specific subject enquiries or searches on more obscure or specialised topics.
The Social Science Search Engine is a separate online database from the main SOSIG Internet Catalogue.
Whereas the resources found in the SOSIG Internet Catalogue have been selected by subject experts, those in the Social Science Search Engine have been collected by software called a harvester (similar mechanisms used by search engines such as Google).
This method of collecting resource information means we can create large numbers of records hundreds of thousands instead of the thousands in the SOSIG Internet Catalogue.
These have not been randomly picked, but have been harvested from the high quality sites already described on SOSIG.
Using these gives more focused results than the more general search engines such as Google.
Remember, the SOSIG is for HE as well as FE and so not all resources will be suitable.
However, the case studies below illustrate how a bit of creative thinking from teachers can enable all kinds of Internet resources to support teaching in FE.
Case Studies for FE: ideas for using the Internet in teaching A series of case studies on how the resources in SOSIG can be incorporated into courses and teaching and learning materials have been developed in collaboration with FE practitioners.
These might offer ideas and inspiration to teachers thinking of using more Internet resources in their course materials, reading lists and VLEs.
These are listed at the RDN Case Studies: SOSIG page.
Topics covered by the case studies: Business GNVQ/AVCE SOSIG Company Lists My SOSIG Account A Motivation Timeline Psychology A�Level: Diagnosis and Treatment of a Mental Disorder Interactive On Line Cognitive Psychology Experiments Evaluation of Strengths and Limitations of different Research Methods Comparing the Cognitive Development Theories of Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner Economics AS/A2 'Industry' magazine article Student role-play Revision Time Sociology AS/A2 Sociology of Education Crime and Deviance The Sociology of Families and Households Each of these Case Studies is derived from Internet resources found on SOSIG or resources linked to by SOSIG.
Each Case Study has the same structure: aims, specific link, creating the materials, using the materials in teaching.
They may spark some ideas for finding innovative ways of using Internet resources in FE teaching.
Free teaching and training materials SOSIG offers free supporting materials to download, designed to support lecturers and librarians who want to encourage students and other staff to discover how SOSIG can help with Internet searching.
They can be used in local course materials or training courses An overview of the whole SOSIG service is given in the: SOSIG Desktop guide A4 SOSIG Poster There are free leaflets to download, print and photocopy for each main subject section of SOSIG: Anthropology flier (b/w PDF) Anthropology flier (colour PDF) Business & Economics flier (b/w PDF) Business & Economics flier (colour PDF) EuroStudies flier (colour pdf) Law flier (double-sided b/w PDF) Law flier (double-sided colour PDF) Politics & Government flier (b/w PDF) Politics & Government flier (colour PDF) Social Welfare flier (b/w PDF) Social Welfare flier (colour PDF) Sociology flier (b/w PDF) Sociology flier (colour PDF) Women's Studies flier (b/w PDF) You can also order print copies of the desktop guide.
There are also Guidelines on using the Virtual Training Suite in taught courses and VLEs Much of the information in this article is referenced in SOSIG's What Can SOSIG Do For You: Further Education information sheet.
Copies of this sheet will soon be distributed to relevant institutions by the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs), and a pdf version is available from the SOSIG Training Page.
Training events: to help staff learn new Internet skills This year SOSIG has piloted some national seminars on Internet information resources, aimed at lecturers and librarians in UK higher and further education.
These are one-day events introducing staff to the key JISC and national Internet information resources in their subject field.
If successful, we hope we will run these again.
Details will be posted on the SOSIG Training Page Events section.
Details of the events piloted this year can be found at: Social Science Online Future plans and how to keep informed The RDN does have plans to increase the level of service for FE: a new project will add over 14,000 records of particular relevance to Further Education, by 2005.
A proportion of these records will come to SOSIG, and will enhance the records we already have.
Ideally, and this is the plan, the records tagged as of interest to FE will be readily identifiable in the SOSIG Catalogue.
News of new SOSIG events, features and services are publicised directly to the FE community via the JISC Regional Support Centres so watch out for news from the centre near you.
Another way of keeping up with the latest news from SOSIG is to read the SOSIG What's New page.
About SOSIG SOSIG is a guide to the best of the Web for Social Science.
It is a free, national information service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best social science, business and law information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, led by ILRT at the University of Bristol.
SOSIG helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Social Science, Business and Law.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network(RDN).
Author Details Emma Place SOSIG Information Manager, RDN Virtual Training Suite Manager ILRT, University of Bristol Email: emma.place@bristol.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "What's in SOSIG for Further Education?"
Author: Emma Place Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/sosig/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Copyright Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Copyright Buzz data software database archives blog repositories copyright ebook drm podcast licence authentication interoperability foi privacy intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Hannabuss looks at an interesting Nile cruise of a book about intellectual property.
The second edition of Digital Copyright is the print-book counterpart of the original e-book and, as such, will sell particularly well to libraries where training (and self-updating) is taken seriously and to educational establishments where people are trained for 'the profession' (this is so hybrid now that perhaps no one book on information law can satisfy everyone think of electronic communications law, Internet law, computing law, and the like, and specialist authors like Ian Lloyd on IT law).
If, then, such books do well (if they do) and distil complex information into a small compass (if they do), what do they offer?
Pedley starts at the beginning with how digital has and has not changed copyright principles and practice.
'Is digital different?'
is a good place to start.
His focus is the UK only, even though EU directives and some international cases intervene at critical points.
For many readers, I think, the scope and focus of the book will be entirely clear 'digital' highlights three things the digital or electronic dimension of copyright, the work going on in digital rights management (including electronic repositories and Open Archive, though these are not really explored, perhaps matters readers would best pursue for themselves), and wider ramifications for anyone (not just the information professional) dealing with digital material.
In the latter regard I would have ideally liked more on knowledge managers and intellectual capital, but you can't have everything in a short book.
The content of the book is sound and reliable Web sites and deep-linking, e-books and databases, screen-shots and images, digital rights management (DRM), technical protection measures and authentication, 'orphaned' works (difficult to attribute to a known owner), with scoop-up chapters on permitted acts, educational establishments, and authors' rights.
Useful concluding points, too, on copyright and work made during the course of employment (a large beast caught by the tail, if anything is here) and Crown copyright (a topic of particular resonance in the UK).
Some really useful features here: like citing key relevant law, quoting sections from this law, also raising some of the practical questions (say about copyright clearance) likely to come up from day to day.
The book is clearly sectioned and easy to navigate.
Readers keen to follow things up further can subscribe to Pedley's 'Keeping Within the Law' subscription service [1].
Pedley himself works at The Economist Intelligence Unit and has participated in numerous panels and forums on IPR in recent years.
No matter how complex a topic is, it can always be packaged small.
This adage seems more suited to marketing than information practitioners the latter tend to want all the detail but it has a lot of truth when we ask whether being small means being simple (and this can be bad) or being distilled (and this is usually good).
Then there are pragmatic reasons: books for professionals need to be clear, well-organised, and easy to read since the boredom threshold of the proverbial busy manager is no higher than most.
This work demonstrates that complex content can be concisely expressed by an author who knows how people learn, shows a distinct empathy for his readers and provides them with many ladders on the snakes-and-ladders board of professional reading.
That, in a nutshell, is Digital Copyright.
At the risk of spawning metaphors uncontrollably, the second edition of this well-known guide (the first came out as an e-book from Facet in 2005) is a Nile cruise of a book.
It is finite (indeed short) but packed with things of interest, things you want to see and know something about, to say you've actually been there.
Digital or electronic (the terms seem to be used interchangeably now) have both shaped intellectual property rights (IPR) and been shaped by them.
By definition, the field is international and cross-jurisdictional; professional (think of DRM and of fair dealing for prescribed libraries); and popular/populist (think of online music, email and podcasting); clear-cut (copyright subsists online); and ambivalent (what about transient and unattributable copy, what about droit de suite, what about liability and indemnification?).
Maintaining the travel metaphor a moment, where does this journey take us?
Like Pedley's other books, such as Essential Law for Information Professionals (Facet, second edition, 2006), their distinctive achievement is that of distilling what readers want to know, and come to realise they need to know, at a point in time.
They are snapshots, pencil sketches, quick and reliable guides to the terrain.
What that they are not are road maps; something the bevy of books on law for library and information professionals has yet fully to attain, even though those works are going in the right direction.
Law is something you can describe bibliographically think of sources of law and there have been books on that, and legal librarians know how to do that rather well.
That said, for the ideal law books for librarians, written say in Utopia, law comes into being in interesting ways and needs to be implemented and interpreted, and this level of interpretation is needed as well.
For instance, the interpretation of the licence or contract, the cross-over between moral and economic rights, common carrier or editorial responsibility on an intranet.
As a result, knowing the law is just the start, an early stage of that river journey, a quick look at heritage sites on the bank.
How this interpretive process continues, however; how far legal definitions and language are defined; how far precedent understood; and pragmatic contextualisation (eg does the law actually work in a particular context?)
are more advanced matters.
Many of the books for library and information practitioners in this field work well up to a point in presenting applicable law (in this case key acts and regulations, directives and cases), in alerting readers to issues like compliance, technological circumvention, interoperability and decompilation, whether Internet content is a broadcast, getting clearance for digital photographs (your own and those of other people).
Yet many of them, equally, take you so far as in this book on contracts with a nice tour d'horizon of ownership/leasing and model licences and creative commons and open access without interpreting them fully in context.
The relationship between contract and copyright law alone justifies further study.
This is not a criticism : it indicates what books like this are for and what they're doing telling people about things, alerting them to watch out for them rather than providing a master-class in, say, interpreting digital licences.
Durrant's book on Negotiating Licences for Digital Resources [2] takes us a little further there, and sources like the JISC Legal Information Service news [3] can be followed up.
Clearly Pedley's own book points the way.
It is friendly guide suggesting that a trip ashore to look at this tomb (read, say, legal deposit) or that temple (read, say, sui generis database rights) would be well worthwhile.
This also indicates the chosen level and role of such books : this one keeps its eye closely on digital issues (including digital rights management) and sets out to provide an eclectic (in a good sense) gloss on the ways in which digital managers need a working overview of copyright (it is mainly that here, though a wider reach takes us into patent, advertising, and liability law as well), and copyright 'wonks' can see at a glance how IPR applies in digital library work.
On the other hand, some things do not appear in this work in any substantial way: data protection and privacy, freedom of information law, trade marks and domain names, patents and genetics, and digital legal dimensions of archives and records management, where once again helpful material exists elsewhere.
However, observing our tourism metaphor, we are, after all, only visiting Luxor and the Pyramids, not the source of the Nile.
With his experience of teaching law to information practitioners, Pedley knows how to mediate the ideas clearly.
This is why, then, we get a distillation rather than an over-simplification, and at the same time a guide that never pretends to know it all.
Digital Copyright has the gift of keeping to the point, giving readers an idea of what they need to know, and recommending ways of getting into the detail.
'Good of its kind' and 'glad it exists' would be two compliments I'd pay this book, and I believe those busy managers and digital newbies would agree.
After all, that's who the book is for.
One last point (and all reviewers note): for this book, and others like it, to address all the issues it could and should, a step-change is needed.
Since we've had more than enough descriptive explanations of why law matters to practitioners, we now need formal and direct legal interpretation and analysis, with case studies.
Even though Pedley points out he is not a lawyer, and we all know that most of his readers will not be either, the field now needs to navigate to the levels of legal discussion we encounter when lawyers deal with information issues.
Pointers already exist: in legal work on computer software and patents; ISP liability and defamation; as well as contracts and licensing all suitable directions for the future, given an appropriate ship's crew.
Good though legal books for library and information practitioners have been so far, there always comes a point where authors hand over intellectually to the law and lawyers, of necessity backing modestly away from the hard-edged legal implications of a lot of the points they raise.
References Paul Pedley's 'Keeping Within the Law' subscription service, a daily blog, news, in-depth reports, newsletters and so forth, aimed at information suppliers, professionals and providers http://www.kwtl.co.uk/ Fiona Durrant, Negotiating Licences for Digital Resources, Facet, 2006; 168pp; paperback; 978-1-85604-586-5; £39.95 JISC Legal Information Service news http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/news.htm Author Details Dr Stuart Hannabuss Department of Law Aberdeen Business School, and Research Fellow Gray's School of Art Aberdeen Email: s.hannabuss@rgu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Digital Copyright" Author: Dr Stuart Hannabuss Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/hannabuss-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: New and Developing Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: New and Developing Search Engines Buzz data html database browser blog cataloguing personalisation e-business algorithm url research Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at some existing search engines and also some new ones to bring you up to date on what is happening in the world of Internet search engines.
In the last edition of Ariadne, I wrote about a few search engines that had come to my attention.
Obviously the summer months are a fruitful period of development for search engine producers, because I've got a new crop to write about again!
There are also some useful Web pages about search engines and developments in existing search engines that I've also discovered, so I'll be making mention of those as well.
Search Engines A9 A9 [1] is the search engine provided by a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon, and pulls results from the Google database, and I spoke about it in some detail in the last issue of Ariadne [2].
Since describing it, some new features have been added to the search engine which have, in my opinion, improved what was already a very good offering indeed.
There is now a beta test version called 'Discover' which A9 uses to look at the Web pages that you've visited, matches them with information from Alexa [3] and suggests related Web sites, categories, frequently visited sites and movers and shakers, all based on your individual research using the search engine.
You do however need to register and log in before you can use this.
It's a great idea, and clearly A9 is attempting to explore the holy grail of personalisation very quickly, though I suspect that they need to do some more work in this area, since I was being suggested sites that really had nothing whatsoever to do with the sample searches that I'd been running on it, though in fairness they say the results are more accurate if you use their toolbar, but then they would say that.
Another option is to store a list of bookmarks on one of the other Home Page utilities that are available.
It's easy, once you've run a search, to be able to drop a particular page into the bookmark option, and I suppose that it's slightly quicker than using the Favorites option from the browser bar, but if you're doing a particular set of searches it may be preferable to use the A9 feature to avoid cluttering up your Favorites list any more than it is already.
There is also a diary function, which is only available in conjunction with the toolbar offering.
This allows users to take notes on any Web page that they visit, and then find them again using a search function, or by going directly to the diary.
Since these notes are not held locally they are always going to be available regardless of whatever machine you use to access the Internet (with the limiting factor that the toolbar needs to be loaded).
It's a useful function and provides you with a better way of remembering why you visited a Web page in the first place and why it was so useful to you.
How much more useful it would be however if it could be used in conjunction with a group of people, where you and your colleagues could comment on pages and share this information backwards and forwards automatically whenever any of you visited that particular page!
Eurekster [4] is already a long way down that general avenue of sharing data between a group of people, so it shouldn't be long before it appears on the horizon.
Peerbot Peerbot [5] is a strange little search engine, but it was quite fun to play with, so I thought I would bring it to your attention.
This engine just searches for favicons.
A favicon is a small icon that some Web authors use to make their sites slightly different, and to stand out a little bit more.
You're already used to seeing them, even if you didn't realise it.
If you glance up towards the top left of your brower window, and look just to the right of Address, and just to the left of the URL of the page that you're looking at, you'll see a small image probably a piece of paper with a dog eared right top corner, with a lower case 'e' superimposed on the front of it.
That's the default favicon that Internet Explorer adds, though of course if you're using a different browser you may well not see this image at all.
Enterprising Web authors are now starting to make use of favicons themselves, by adding small (16x16 pixel) images into their root directories.
When Explorer visits the page, it will load the author-designed favicon instead of the default version.
You can make your own favicons very easily by visiting the Favicon Web site [6] and you can also learn more about them there as well.
So, that's what a favicon is, and Peerbot simply looks for pages containing the key words that you have asked for and simply displays a listing of all the favicons that it finds.
I suppose that it's useful if you are thinking of creating your own (which is worth doing, because when anyone adds your page to their list of favorites or makes a short cut to your page, they'll see your favicon, so it's a good way of keeping your site at the forefront of people's minds), because you can see what other people have done.
It's also an amusing way to spend some time, just to see how much creativity some people have got.
However, other than that, I'm not exactly sure what the value of the engine would be to most of us.
SMEALSearch Rather more seriously we have SMEALSearch [7] and this is a niche search engine for business literature.
It has been produced by the eBusiness Research Centre [8] of the Pennsylvania State University [9].
It searches the Web and catalogues academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of business (though they don't appear to specify exactly what they mean by that), looking in particular for university Web sites, commercial organisations, research institutes and government departments.
In particular it is looking for academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts.
However, it should also be pointed out that the search engine only looks for documents in PS (or compressed versions) PDF or Word formats, and not straight HTML pages.
Once it has found such items, the search engine then performs a citation analysis of all the academic articles accessed and lists them in order of their citation rates in academic papers and the most cited articles are listed first.
Searches can be run in one of two ways, firstly by Documents, and once a search has been run, and results obtained these can then be narrowed down in number by restricting to keywords in the Header or Title, and ordered by expected citations, hubs, usage or date.
Results provide the title of the article, a short summary with keywords in context, and a very useful link to show which papers or articles have cited the result in question.
The second method that can be used is to search specifically for Citations, and the results can then be restricted by Author or Title and ordered by Expected Citations or Date.
One particularly interesting feature at the bottom of the page of results is a graph showing the year of publication of cited articles.
The search engine has a good help page, (regular readers will know that this is something that I take very seriously and always look for), with some very useful guidance on how to search for articles.
This is worth reading because it does require a slightly different approach to the 'normal' search engines that are out there.
There is also a very useful FAQ section that goes into a great amount of detail on algorithms (most unusual; I've never seen a search engine be quite as upfront about it before), authors and contributors, document formats, general information, legal issues, querying and user modes and statistics.
If you are involved in researching for business-based information, and particularly if you require articles and citations, this is definitely a search engine worth spending some time with.
Other Search Engine News Wotbox [10] now comes in several national flavours Australian, Canadian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, New Zealand, UK and US.
It's currently indexing just over 17 million pages, so it's got a long way to travel before it can start to compete with the big players out there.
Lycos has created a new search facility for searching information contained in forums, bulletin boards and groups (although not USENET [11], since Google already has that particular arena sewn up with Google Groups [12]).
Unfortunately Lycos is not providing any sort of list of which resources it is using, so there's some guess work involved here, but it seems to have taken a fairly wide remit on their definition, since some results have included pages from my site, though they're also indexing data from FreePint [13], .org sites, Yahoo groups and MSN groups, though they're excluding weblogs at the moment.
The service is still in beta test mode, so there isn't as yet an advanced search function, but this may well be added later.
The facility would be useful for anyone who is interested in seeing what people are writing about now, and could well be of value if you need to find that elusive ephemeral information.
I was amused by their adult filter option though; you can use it to block offensive content always, never, or sometimes.
Quite why you'd choose the third option there I'm not entirely sure!
Briefly, Accumo [14] is a search engine of the 'cluster' type, which tries to group similar pages together by subject.
It's not exactly a multi search engine, since it doesn't obtain data from a number of different search engines and collate the results together, but it does allow users to search Google, Yahoo, MSN, Open Directory or Wisenut.
Other search engines are already taking this clustering approach such as Vivisimo [15] and to my mind are doing it rather better, but Accumo is worth looking at if you have a couple of minutes to spare.
ggler [sic] [16] is powered by Google, though it gives rather different sets of results since it doesn't limit itself to one page per site (consequently a search for my name resulted in pages from my site being the top 16 results); but it does show a small thumbshot of each page that it returns.
I'm not however convinced about the value of this, since the thumbnails are so small as to be virtually useless.
Useful Web Pages I found a couple of useful Web pages that provided me with information on how search engines work together who provides database content and which search engines give/receive data from which others.
The search engine relationship chart provided by Bruce Clay [17] allows you to focus on one particular search engine, while the search engine chart at Ihelpyou [18] is an animated image over the relationships found with over 20 different engines.
Both are very useful if you are running training courses on search engines, or just want to get a clearer idea yourself as to what the relationships are between them all, and believe me, it's a very confusing world out there, so worth taking a quick peep!
References A9 http://www.a9.com Ariadne, issue 40 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/search-engines/ Alexa http://www.alexa.com Eurekster http://search.eurekster.com/ Peerbot http://www.peerbot.com/1.seerch.index.html Favicon http://www.favicon.com/ SMEALSearch http://smealsearch.psu.edu/ eBusiness Research Centre http://www.smeal.psu.edu/ebrc/ Pennsylvania State University http://www.psu.edu/ Wotbox http://www.wotbox.com/ Lycos discussion search facility http://discussion.lycos.com/default.asp Google Groups http://www.google.com/grphp FreePint http://www.freepint.com Accumo http://www.accumo.com/ Vivisimo http://vivisimo.com/ ggler http://www.ggler.com/ Bruce Clay's search engine chart http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm Ihelpyou's search engine chart http://www.ihelpyou.com/search-engine-chart.html Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: "New and Developing Search Engines" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ONIX for Licensing Terms: Standards for the Electronic Communication of Usage Terms Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ONIX for Licensing Terms: Standards for the Electronic Communication of Usage Terms Buzz data framework xml metadata schema ejournal ontologies onix licence onix-pl interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Francis Cave, Brian Green and David Martin describe the purpose, development and potential of standards for the electronic communication of licensing terms between publishers, libraries and other licensees.
With an increasing number of publications being made available digitally, and new supply chains and business models emerging for trading them, an urgent need has been identified for a standard way of expressing and communicating usage terms, and linking those terms to the publications.
Reflecting the development pattern of the markets, this need was first identified in the scholarly journals sector.
More recently, a similar requirement has been articulated for the communication of usage terms between publishers' digital repositories and search engines such as Google.
EDItEUR, the international trade standards organisation for the book and journals sectors, has been working with stakeholders to develop ONIX for Licensing Terms, a new set of formats that will enable the full range and complexity of licensing terms to be expressed in a structured machine-readable form and communicated between systems using a standard XML schema.
This article explains why and how these standards have been developed.
The Rights Metadata Working Party EDItEUR formed a joint Rights Metadata Working Party with Book Industry Communication (BIC) in the UK and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in the US as long ago as 1998 'to collaborate with other bodies to help define an international standard for rights metadata elements'.
This work was taken up by the EU <indecs> (Interoperability of Data in Electronic Commerce Systems) Project [1] between 1998 and 2000, culminating in the influential but rather theoretical <indecs> Metadata Framework [2].
Meanwhile, as the number of digital resources in library collections continued to grow, libraries were having difficulty in complying with the widely differing licence terms applied to those resources by their creators and publishers.
The ability to receive these terms into a library's electronic resource management system in a machine-readable form, link them to the appropriate digital resources and communicate them to users was becoming a pressing need.
In the United States, following a report by Tim Jewell at the University of Washington on the selection and presentation of commercially available electronic resources [3], an informal working group was set up to work on the functionality and data elements required to manage these resources.
The Electronic Resource Management Initiative The Digital Library Federation (DLF), a grouping of the major US academic research libraries, co-sponsored with NISO a workshop on Standards for Electronic Resource Management.
It also set up the Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) to aid the rapid development of library systems by providing a series of papers to help both to define requirements and to propose data standards for the management of electronic resources [4].
EDItEUR commissioned an evaluation of the ERMI work from the Rightscom Consultancy.
The aim was to assess the extent to which it might provide a basis for standard XML formats that would take into account the requirements of all the stakeholders in the supply chain, provide for the full complexity of licence expression, and be flexible enough to support any business model as well as all media types.
The assessment paper concluded that the ERMI work would provide extremely valuable input but would require further development in order to meet all these requirements.
A Proof of Concept Project With funding from the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) and the JISC, Rightscom were commissioned to undertake a 'proof of concept' project, working with the EDItEUR ONIX team (David Martin and Francis Cave) to explore the possibility of developing an ONIX for Licenses message that could be used by publishers and online hosts to communicate licence terms to libraries and subscription agents.
The aim of the project was to produce a prototype XML message for communicating in a computable form the terms of a Licence agreement for the use, by libraries, of a publisher's digital works.
The main use case was the licensing of eJournals (electronic Journals), but the structure of the message was to be flexible enough to be extensible to any other type of digital media and licence in the future by adding to its semantics but not significantly changing its structure.
The message therefore needed to be generic in structure but successfully demonstrate an initial, specialised application.
The prototype message was produced as an XML schema and had, in conceptual terms, a relatively simple structure containing the following four main elements: Message Header (details of sender, recipient etc).
Licence Details (parties, date of agreement etc) Usages (Events and EventChains permitted or prohibited by the Licence) Requirements (Events or States required for the Usages to permitted).
In addition the message incorporates the necessary relationship structure between Usages and Requirements to make clear their dependencies on one another as Conditions and Exceptions.
The prototype message demonstrated that each element of the example Licensing clauses could be fully modelled in this way.
The modelling also highlighted the range of possible variations within even apparently simple licensing clauses; and the limitations of the current ERMI approach of defining only a 'typical' set of Usages with no mechanism for variation.
The use of an underlying ontology meets the 'future-proofing' requirements for flexibility and extensibility.
In its current form, the prototype message could express Licensing Terms for any kind of content or use, given the necessary ontology.
The prototype 'ONIX for Licensing Terms' message was produced within the constraints of the above requirements.
It was demonstrated at a dedicated 'proof of concept' workshop held in London in April 2005 which was attended by representatives of the sponsoring organisations, publishers, librarians, agents and systems vendors as well as members of the DLF ERMI team.
There was a consensus view that the approach taken had the potential to fulfil all its objectives.
Further JISC-funded Work This led to two further JISC-funded projects.
The first, undertaken by BIC, Cranfield University and John Wiley, aimed to create an XML expression of a complete sample Licence, ensuring that any questions of interpretation of the semantics of the Licence were as far as possible resolved with the participation of both publisher and library representatives.
At the same time, the terms found necessary to express the Licence would be added to the ONIX Licensing Terms (OLT) Dictionary, which supports the ONIX for Licensing Terms formats.
The second project, undertaken by BIC, Loughborough University and the Association of Learned and Society Publishers (ALPSP), was to promote the benefits of electronic expression of licensing terms to both libraries and publishers, examine the difficulties that not-for profit and smaller publishers, including learned societies, might have in generating an XML version of their library licences, and show how tools and services could be developed to support them.
A particularly valuable deliverable was the specification of tools to help publishers draft XML formats of their licences.
ONIX-PL The first manifestation of ONIX for Licensing Terms arising out of these projects, is an ONIX Publications Licence format, ONIX-PL, intended to support the communication of licensing terms for electronic resources from a publisher to a user institution (e.g.
an academic library or consortium), either directly or through a subscription agent.
The purpose is to enable the licence terms to be loaded into an electronic resources management system maintained by the receiving institution.
The ONIX-PL format may also be used for the communication of licensing terms from a content host system to a user institution; and it should also be possible to extend it for the communication of licensing terms from a publisher to a content host system that carries the publisher's materials.
In order to ensure input and buy-in from the US library and system vendor community, a joint EDItEUR / DLF / NISO / PLS License Expression Working Group was set up with members from all stakeholding sectors including publishers, hosts, agents, libraries and systems vendors.
This is a very large group with sixty members that meets, so far, only by teleconference.
Its role is to monitor and make recommendations regarding the further development of standards relating to electronic resources and licence expression, including, but not limited to, the ERMI and EDItEUR work and to engage actively in the development of the ONIX-PL licence messaging specification.
Most of the major library systems vendors developing electronic resource management systems have already indicated their intention to implement the ONIX-PL format to a greater or lesser extent.
As we write, a workshop is being arranged in Boston at which the EDItEUR consultants, David Martin and Francis Cave, will work with the developers of Electronic Resource Management systems on implementation of ONIX-PL.
On the publisher side, funding has been provided by JISC and PLS, for development of prototype publisher drafting tools, as specified in the second JISC project above.
As readers will see if they look at the ONIX Publications License documentation on the EDItEUR Web site, the message appears very complicated.
This is inevitable if it is to be able to express the full complexity of a conventional written licence.
These drafting tools will enable publishers to choose from, and where necessary extend, a menu of clauses and terms, and create a machine-readable ONIX-PL licence without needing to engage with the format on a technical level.
It was always envisaged that the underlying design of ONIX for Licensing Terms should support the development not just of ONIX-PL but of a whole family of formats for communicating licensing terms between rights owners and any licensed party.
It was therefore identified by some major projects in the electronic book, periodical and newspaper industries as an existing platform on which to build the necessary standards to provide permissions information to search engine "crawlers" so that search engines are able to comply with those terms systematically and, in turn, grant the appropriate access to their users.
All the stakeholders acknowledge that the search engines can only be expected to accept this model if the content providers provide this information in a standard form.
ACAP: An Industry Standard To meet this requirement, ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is being developed as an industry standard, sponsored by the World Association of Newspapers, European Publishers Council and International Publishers Association, working with search engines and other technical and commercial partners.
ACAP will enable the providers of all types of content published on the World Wide Web to communicate permissions information (relating to access and use of that content) in a form that can be automatically recognised and interpreted, so that business partners can systematically comply with the publishers' policies.
ACAP will provide a framework that will allow any publisher, large or small, to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot crawlers can be taught to understand.
ACAP has already expressed its intention to work with EDItEUR and base its protocol on ONIX for Licensing Terms, although it will also be essential to develop simpler methods of expressing permissions that can be interpreted 'on the fly' by crawlers.
Other EDItEUR Work In a separate development, EDItEUR is working with the reproduction rights organisations, both in the UK and, through the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO) to develop ONIX for Licensing Terms-based messages for the communication of rights information between such organisations and, potentially, between them and publishers.
Development of ONIX for Licensing Terms is ongoing; and work-in-progress documentation for ONIX-PL can be found on the EDItEUR Web site [5].
References The <indecs> project Web site http://www.indecs.org/ The <indecs> metadata framework http://www.indecs.org/pdf/framework.pdf Tim Jewell " Selection and Presentation of Commercially Available Electronic Resources: Issues and Practices " 2001 http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub99abst.html The Digital Libraries Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative report http://www.library.cornell.edu/elicensestudy/dlfdeliverables/home.htm ONIX for Licensing on the EDItEUR Web site http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html Author Details Brian Green Executive Director EDItEUR Email: brian@bic.org.uk Web site: http://www.editeur.org David Martin Consultant to EDItEUR Email: david@polecat.dircon.co.uk Francis Cave Consultant to EDItEUR Email: francis@franciscave.com Return to top Article Title: "ONIX for Licensing Terms: Standards for the Electronic Communication of Usage Terms" Author: Francis Cave, Brian Green and David Martin Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/green-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Why Ask Me, and Does 'X' Mark the Spot?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Why Ask Me, and Does 'X' Mark the Spot?
Buzz data rss archives zip thesaurus identifier blog video flickr cache wordnet bmp url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes a look at different versions of Ask to see how it is developing and looks at how it is emerging from its servant roots.
Since I spend the majority of my time looking at new search engines it’s very easy to ignore what’s happening with the existing ones, and particularly those engines that sometimes seem to have been around forever.
For this column I thought that I’d try and correct that imbalance, and take a look in a little more detail at one of the ‘big four’ Ask [1], and see what’s been happening with it.
Slightly confusingly there is more than one version; we have the UK-based version, which in many ways is closest to its Ask Jeeves origins, the US or global version [2], and the ‘test bed’ version Ask X [3].
Why Ask?
I could have chosen any of them of course (the others being Google, Yahoo and Live), but I chose to concentrate on Ask for three specific reasons.
Firstly I read a very interesting post from the Librarian in Black a while ago called ‘Ten reasons librarians should use Ask.com instead of Google’ [4] As with everything else Sarah writes it was a well thought-out piece, with lots of good points, though several of them were more appropriate for an American audience.
However, it did help push me towards the direction of Ask.
Secondly, Ask has been running a campaign in the UK called the Information Revolution [5] which I think is in many ways an extraordinarily poorly thought-out campaign, though I’ll freely admit it did have the effect of getting me to think even more about the engine.
Finally, I wanted an opportunity to properly explore Ask X, which is the Ask ‘test bed’ version, rolling out new features and functionality to see how they are taken up and used.
It’s also worth pointing out that I spent some time talking to Gary Price, who is both Director of Online Information Resources at Ask and also a friend however, he’s not given me any particular favouritism here, since he actively encourages librarians and library groups to talk directly to him with comments, ideas and opinions about the search engine, the direction it’s taking and indeed any other search engines as well.
It’s slightly confusing because I’m looking at the three different versions of the search engine, but since I’m based in the UK I’m focusing on the UK version.
Reasons to Use Ask It’s not Ask Jeeves There are a lot of reasons why librarians in particular, but everyone in general should give Ask a chance.
If you remember it from the days when it was Ask Jeeves (and I am so glad that they got rid of that irritating butler, which I think did more damage to the engine than Google ever could have) you’ll probably remember it as a little bit clunky and, well, not terribly good.
If that’s the case, I’d recommend taking another look at it now, since they have done a tremendous amount of work on it.
As we’ll see, the search engine isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s worth remembering where it was when it had the butler, the developments that have taken place in little more than a year, and extrapolating to see where it’s likely to be by 2008⁄9.
The Interface The Ask interface is simple and straightforward, to the extent that yes, it does look like the one offered by Big G. However, there is something of a difference here, in that the menu of search options is on the right-hand side of the screen, neatly laid out for you to view.
If that’s still too much for you to cope with on the page you can contract the options to a neat collection of icons.
What isn’t clearly obvious is the fact that you can actually change the position of the menu options.
You want News before Images?
Simply click and drag it to the new position.
Ask hasn’t allowed itself to get hamstrung by its layout in the same way that Google is forced into staying with its traditional (and limiting) home page.
There are two obvious radio buttons Search the Web and Search UK pages only.
The second option doesn’t limit itself to just pages with a URL ending in .uk either Ask is intelligent enough to actually work out the location of servers, and act accordingly, so it will include .com addresses in the results if appropriate.
I’m slightly less impressed though by the advert to ‘Join the Movement’ with its ‘click here’ link though.
I hope however this will disappear when the campaign finishes.
The Layout of the Results Page The results page is neatly laid out in the way that we would automatically expect.
Page title, brief summary, URL, and cached copy (though this could be updated the Ask cache of my page was dated 16 April 2007, a full 12 days ago, while the Google cache was 25 April 2007 much more impressive).
There is also a save option which allowed me to save individual pages without having to sign in, which I quite liked.
However, Ask continues to suffer from having a large sponsored links section at the top of the page.
Some searches worked reasonably well a search for my name for example only brought up a single advert from Amazon but a search for ‘digital photo frame’ returned a ridiculous 5 adverts, pushing down the first result to the very bottom of my screen.
This is quite simply stupid.
By all means run adverts I appreciate that the engine has to make money but when it comes at the expense of my ability to start directly looking at results, this is not a good idea.
This is where we see the other side of the problem of using the right-hand side of the screen for something useful (in this case the ability to narrow/expand a search as we’ll shortly see), in that adverts have to go somewhere.
It’s not helped by the fact that there is another collection of adverts at the bottom of the screen.
Interestingly, a search for ‘digital photo frame’ results in 9 adverts in Ask, but 11 in Google, yet the ones in Ask do appear more intrusive.
The situation is rather different when we move across to Ask X, which only delivers 5 adverts; 2 at the top of the organic results and 3 below.
Obviously I would prefer no adverts at all (and you know, I’m beginning to come around to the unthinkable idea that I might well pay for an advert-free version of a search engine, but that’s an entirely different article), but Ask X is actually getting there.
This version of the search engine has a remarkably different look and feel to both the UK and US/Global version.
The search box and narrow/expand options have now moved across to the left-hand side of the screen, with the results in a pane stretching across to the right.
Once again there is an emphasis on putting quality data over on the right-hand side of the screen, which does force users to rethink their notion of what goes where on a search page.
This will be refreshing for some people and a hindrance for others, but I think that Ask is taking the view that someone needs to break the traditional mould, and it may as well be them.
An interesting point with Ask X is that while I’m typing in my search term I get suggestions delivered real time.
Other search engines do this (Google has the Google Suggest variant [6] for example), but with Ask X it’s simply a part of the search and is helpful, though not intrusive.
If I start typing p-h-i-l-B Ask immediately pops up with a link to my own weblog, allowing me to cursor down, click, and go straight to the page.
Some results also come with a binoculars icon next to them.
Hovering the mouse over it allows me to get a snapshot of the page without actually having to visit it, and this is a nice approach since it lets me see a thumbnail without waiting for more than a second, and it doesn’t take up a huge amount of the page in the way that some search engines do.
On the other hand, the thumbnail is very small, and I’d have to question exactly how useful it is.
Another irritating thing with the binoculars is that if you click on them, instead of seeing the thumbnail, you go directly to the site itself.
This is counter intuitive if I want to go to the site I’ll click on the title.
Both of these are however minor annoyances, and what concerns me here is something much more worrying.
A thumbnail should sensibly show you the page as it exists now, or as it did when the page was last cached that’s logical.
After all, what is the point or purpose of showing anything else?
Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be the way that Ask is thinking, because the thumbnail shot of my page is at least a year old.
I checked the page that Ask has against the collection stored at the Wayback Machine [7], and the last time that I used the version of the page Ask returns to me was in April 2006.
I can’t date it any closer than that since the thumbnail is too small for closer identification.
Now, I’m sure that someone at Ask can give me a very good and compelling reason why this is happening, but not surprisingly, I am unable to place much confidence in this function at all or rather, while the function itself is admirable, the actual results are less than appealing.
If Ask can address this failing, it would represent a significant improvement.
Exalead offers the same function, but they are showing a more current version of the page, while ZapMeta does something similar.
However, to return to the layout of the page, that (major) niggle aside, the option to Narrow or Expand the search which is on the right-hand side of the screen is extremely valuable.
A poor search for ‘BBC’ for example gave me the chance to refocus my search to subjects such as BBC weather, BBC radio, BBC sport and so on.
I could also expand the search to ITV, television listings, Eastenders (though to be honest I’m not sure how I can expand a search from a television station to just one of their programmes, but I’ll let that one lie) and so on.
This option is generally really helpful, particularly if you’re not entirely sure what you’re looking for, or that you need a little bit of guidance.
It’s also great for students or novice searchers and a key reason for using Ask in my opinion.
Towards the bottom of the page Ask gives me the chance to view results for my search from Excite and/or Lycos.
Finally at the bottom of the page the search box is repeated, with other search options above it.
Bouncing back to Ask X the layout differs again, making even more use of that right-hand side territory.
My search for BBC gives me the search box on the left-hand side, the expand/narrow options (now joined with Related names) beneath.
The right-hand side of the screen has the results, but in a third column over on the extreme right we are offered still more information again.
We’re presented with Images, Dictionary and News options.
Depending on the content of the search you’re running the options will change accordingly a search for Lost (the science fiction television series) presented me with options to view Images, an All Music Guide, Movies, Dictionary and the latest RSS posts on the subject.
Moreover, with each of these options I can click to expand the available information into that central pane, replacing the original results or I can click on a small magnifying glass to run an entirely different search.
Ask also tries to save time by clarifying exactly what the user wants.
A search for ‘dog’ in most search engines provides users with Web pages that contain the word.
However, in Ask X the searcher is offered a pull down menu of different breeds of dogs, and they can choose whichever is appropriate, and Ask then re-runs the search for the user.
It’s a clever option that really does help the users to consider exactly what they’re searching for.
You may be thinking that this is all getting very complicated, but it’s much more difficult to describe than actually use.
I found it extremely easy to use, once I got used to the different methodology employed, and (whisper it quietly) it was a lot of fun to play around with an entirely different concept of information display.
The search results page becomes much more of a reference resource than a simple set of results, drawing in content from a variety of different places without searchers having to go off and do it for themselves.
This saves a tremendous amount of time, and as Gary Price pointed out to me, one of the jobs of the information professional is to save the time of others, so surely any tool that they use should also save their time too.
Smart Answers Ask provides searchers with a useful piece of functionality called ‘Smart Answers’.
Basically this is a small collection of facts, figures and links to a number of canned searches.
It works well with searches for famous people, bands, countries, and some factual queries.
A search for ‘Winston Churchill’ gives a potted biography, a link through to more detailed information, the opportunity to search for images or products and an option to go to his official Web site.
I particularly liked the result I obtained for my search query ‘longest river in the world’ which simply returned a list of the top five together with their lengths.
Plenty of other search engines are now also trying to give quick answers to queries, but the Ask approach is quick and works neatly.
The addition of the narrow/expand and ‘related names’ option, with a link to ‘news about’ really does provide the searcher with a wealth of information on the page, and may in fact give the answer to a query there and then, without having to search further.
It’s also useful for financial information a search for ‘market cap msft’ for example will tell you what the market capitalisation of Microsoft is (at least up to a 15 minute delay).
Ask is also moving in the direction of adding in links to quality digital libraries as well a search for Shakespeare will list a link to the Library of Shakespeare from the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
There may well be times when it’s worth utilising the US version of the search engine, since Ask hasn’t yet rolled out the same smart answers across the board.
A search for ‘birth rate UK’ on the UK version didn’t give me an immediate answer, but in the US version not only did I get an immediate response (10.78 per thousand in case you’re interested), but there were also links to the World Factbook, the Wikipedia (which is actually masquerading as ‘Encyclopaedia’), BBC profile, US Government Travel Information and Maps.
Once again, Ask is acting as less of a search engine, and more of a reference tool.
It’s interesting to enter either zip or post codes at this point as well.
In the US version the search engine tells me which location the zip code refers to, and gives me options for Weather, Map, local time, population and business listings.
In Ask X the display of information is rather more dramatic, with much of that information immediately displayed on the right-hand side.
In the UK version a postal code will trigger an immediate answer (above the adverts!)
for a small map box showing the area, a link to the full map, driving instructions and link to current weather conditions.
Image Search I was a little disappointed with the Ask image search function.
True, it works well enough in that it returns images that match the search query, at least more or less.
However, I do have to say that a search for one well known television reporter provided me with a list that included 2 photographs of entirely different people in the first 3 results.
Under each image I could get information (the size of the image, name and URL location), with the option of saving it.Clicking on the image took me directly to the URL, but left the Ask results in a frame at the top of the page, taking up a good third of the available screen.
Yes, I had the option of removing the frame, but why should I have to waste my time doing something that should be blazingly obvious?
If I want to look at the image, I want to look at the image, not have the Ask result continually paraded under my nose.
The narrow/expand search option was appreciated, but it would also have been helpful to have options such as narrowing the search by size of image, colour, or black and white.
Other search engines can manage this, why can’t Ask?
Well, apparently it can, if you’re using Ask X.
A pull-down menu at the top of the images does allow for filtering based on size, file type (interestingly enough including .bmp files, which I’ve not seen before) and colour/B&W.
I’m still not that impressed with the functionality here though, since once again I am taken to an intermediary framed page with the Ask X result at the top and the content page below.
So there’s certainly improvement across the range as it were, but I think it still has some way to go.
News The news function worked perfectly well.
The news home page provides links to Top Stories, World News, Entertainment and so on, and the news stories are culled from the Press Association, together with images as and when appropriate.
I’d like to be able to show more enthusiasm for this element, but I must confess to a sense of disappointment by this relatively unimaginative implementation.
Most noticeably, when I ran searches, I noted no opportunity to save the results as a RSS feed; although I know that a lot of people are yet to take up the option of fully utilising RSS feeds, I feel Ask really should be doing more in this area.
To be fair, it looks as though they are now addressing this issue.
Once I jumped across to Ask X a search that was run using the News function did let me rearrange results by date or relevance, and Ask X does offer a number of RSS feeds.
Consequently I think it’s a case that Ask is aware that it needs to improve in different areas and is doing so.
Is it fair to criticise it then?
I would say that it is, because if a searcher goes to Ask UK they’re getting an early (almost ‘Ask Lite’) version of the engine.
If Ask is satisfied with providing us with that, then they have to accept that people won’t find it very enjoyable to use; I’ll stop criticising when Ask UK becomes Ask X UK!
Maps and Directions The maps and directions function provides searches with the option of using search boxes for maps and directions.
Confusingly there are two boxes for each option, although to be fair, Ask does clearly state what searchers can put into each box.
Consequently if I want to search for a map the first box allows me to input street address, City, or Postcode, while the second box is for Town, County or Postcode.
All well and good so far, but unfortunately putting any address in any format into the first box simply returns an error message to me.
I tried inputting my street address, my city and my postcode (singly and in conjunction) to no avail.
Trying the second box, and inputting my postcode did work correctly, and a map was displayed for me.
Initially the map was too small in order to provide me with any useful information, but after peering at the screen for a few moments I was able to find a zoom button.
This did provide a much improved view of the map, though very basic, but which unfortunately did not offer a satellite image.
This is however available in the global version, though you may need to go through the various location options to find London UK for example.
It’s actually worth taking the time to do this because the satellite images are excellent, and I can roughly date when the image was taken because I could see my old car in my driveway and view people sunbathing in Hyde Park.
(Yes, it really is that good!)
I also tried the Directions option.
It’s simple enough to use, by just typing in the start and end addresses, and Ask will display a map, together with written instructions.
Unfortunately the directions given were slightly odd; I requested directions from my father’s home to mine and Ask suggested a route that was 19.5 miles long.
Google’s suggestion however was a more sensible 15.2 miles, although to be fair, the Ask route was quicker; 26 minutes instead of 33 minutes.
Microsoft’s Live engine gave me two options, either to display the shortest or the quickest route.
Confusingly another search service, Live, suggested a shortest route of 28 minutes which was exactly the same route as Google’s suggested 33 minutes, and the shortest distance was 13.1 miles and 32 minutes.
Ask also provides walking directions.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of these inconsistencies.
The only thing that is clear is that none of the search engines I reviewed were particularly good at the whole directions element; but if pressed to reply, I would probably use Live Search simply because the interface was more attractive and easier to use.
Ask would come a very poor third.
However, once again it’s worth taking a look at the US version to see a rather different story.
Using yet another variant, City Ask [8] it’s possible to input a business type and a location.
A map then appears in the right-hand pane with various tagged locations that match the businesses linked in the central pane.
It’s easy to zoom in or out of the map, and below it is a series of icons that allows the user to add text labels, add addresses, draw free-hand and so on.
One function that I particularly liked was the ability to draw a shape (such as a square, circle or polygon) on the map, and limit to searching for businesses, events or movies in that self defined area.
Now, this is what I want.
I really like the idea that Ask is treating space as an information resource in its own right, and it’s an interesting counterpoint to the fact that they’re doing it on the page results as well.
Doubtless my plaintive refrain of ‘Why can’t we have this in the UK now?’ must grate a little, I accept; but I’m a user, so I’m allowed to be permanently discontented with what I am offered.
Weather Ask’s weather offering worked perfectly, and allowed me to check the temperature in both Centigrade and Fahrenheit, gave me a brief two-line summary, and links to 7-day forecasts, seasonal and detailed weather reports.
Within the US and Ask X version I was also offered weather alerts as provided by the US National Weather Service and these are given the prominence they deserve on the page.
It’s also worth mentioning that a search for ‘climate location’ returns a wealth of useful information in a smart answers type format with eleven different climate variables displayed in a table right at the top of the results column.
Dictionary Ask has a dictionary option that can be called up either from the menu or using the dictionary: search syntax.
Definitions are taken from WordNet, [9] and organic results are also used to provide different definitions to give a very broad range of answers.
Incorrectly spelled words did sometimes trigger a spelling suggestions option, but anything that was too badly mangled did leave Ask doing a goldfish impression of helplessness.
Unfortunately I have to raise a slight concern about the search engine when looking at this option.
I chose the ‘Dictionary’ option from the menu, entered my word and obtained a result based on the search ‘dictionary: confederate’.
The search box was clearly indicating that I was using the Dictionary, since it stated quite clearly ‘Ask Dictionary’.
However, what Ask then does is to take the user to the Web search page, inputs the search syntax and provides the result.
My concern is that if searchers fail to notice this, the temptation is just to delete the entire line, type in a new word and expect the dictionary function to provide another definition.
However, since searchers have in fact been placed in the Web search option, Ask actually returns results based on that not on a dictionary search.
I’ll freely admit that I managed to confuse myself as I was not actually looking at the screen; but why should I need to?
Surely if I’m using the dictionary option, I must be receiving dictionary definitions; why should I need to check that I’m still using a dictionary option?
(As a complete aside, someone at Ask should do a dictionary search on the word ‘dictionary’ since the result it returns is not the result you would expect!)
I’ll also admit that it’s a cheap shot, and one that Ask X has pushed right back at me.
Within that version of the search engine I can search for a word (just by typing it in) and as well as doing a search for the word in the central pane, the dictionary definition pops up in the right-hand side.
Not only that, but I can then click on the link to see this information in more detail, including synonyms and derivative terms.
I can employ the small magnifying glass to obtain dictionary definitions of other terms as well, so the confusion that I’ve previously mentioned no longer occurs.
Shopping The shopping search takes users to Kelkoo, which provides photographs of products, prices and so on.
To be fair, my interest in Shopping is best described as ‘trace only’.
So when I need to buy something I’ll happily take another look, but until then, I willingly pass the responsibility of commenting on this aspect to reviewers more interested in this aspect.
Thesaurus The thesaurus function works in exactly the same way as the dictionary function, although the resource used is Roget’s.
Users type in their term into the Thesaurus page, and Ask takes them to Web search and provides the result using the thesaurus: function.
I did a search for the word ‘dictionary’ in the dictionary function, and thought it might be amusing to see what the thesaurus function would make of the word ‘thesaurus’.
Interestingly enough Ask returned “Your search for ‘thesaurus’ did not match any thesaurus results.” I fear at that point we had descended to the level of the schoolboy howler.. For once, Ask X didn’t sort out this issue, and it still remained confused with my ‘thesaurus thesaurus’ search.
However, for other thesauri searches it worked very well; I couldn’t fault it.
Blogs and Feeds Ask works in conjunction with Bloglines [10] to provide users with a superior searching experience.
Within this search option Ask provides 3 different tabs Posts, Feeds and News.
There are some nice touches at this point an ego search for me prompted Ask to display a ‘Top feeds’ option, which listed my own weblog(s) and my Flickr account.
Switching tabs to Feeds gave me the same three results, but with a very handy pull-down menu allowing me to subscribe to the feed in six different resources, such as Bloglines.
The News option gives searchers more options as well the ability to sort on relevance, most recent and popularity.
Another option will show searchers results from anytime, the last hour, day, week or month.
Finally, as well as providing the option to subscribe to a feed Ask gives users the opportunity to post results to resources such as Bloglines, Blogger or del.icio.us.
This last point is actually worth drawing out a little I was impressed by the fact that Ask provides users with the opportunity of using competing products; they don’t pretend that Google, Yahoo and the rest don’t exist and I think it’s further evidence that Ask is there to help save us time.
This is clearly an area in which Ask has worked hard, and represents in my view one of the very best aspects of the search engine; whichever version of the engine that I looked at I was getting useful material, well laid out and displayed.
Video The video function within Ask X is a solid piece of functionality.
Results display a single frame, title, publisher, date, file format and duration and are culled from Blinkx [11].
Absolutely nothing wrong with it, and a useful addition, but there was nothing there I found particularly exciting.
Other Search Options As well as the key search elements as mentioned above, Ask has a number of other attractive search functions, such as a currency converter, movie search option, and video games search.
All of these are nice additions, but that’s all they are not actually compelling reasons to actually use the search engine.
They do however provide users with additional reasons to stay with the search engine a subtle but important point.
Having said that, I did like the ‘Translate this Page’ function and the ‘Conversion’ option; they were neat, functional and effective.
There are other functions that I’d like to see Ask offering, but even I accept that they can’t do everything at once, and it would be churlish to list them here, given that Ask X is quickly pushing back the boundaries of what the engine is capable of.
However, my one single plea would be ‘Can we have Ask X as the UK default as soon as possible, and working with UK content please?’ The Information Revolution As I mentioned earlier, Ask is currently running an advertising campaign on the Internet as well as several television adverts.
The image that’s been promoted is grey, gritty ‘Revolutionistas’ who are suggesting that people should ‘Evolve your search!’ The Web site includes various short video interviews with people from a variety of backgrounds, and the general thrust of their comments tends to be along the lines that using one search engine isn’t a good idea.
This makes sense, and while not exactly late-breaking news, does at least provide food for thought for people who think that using Google is the be all and end all of Internet search.
The concept ‘Search has evolved’ is pushed at every opportunity.
This will really confuse viewers because if they look at the UK version there’s little going on there to demonstrate it.
If they knew about, or were directed to Ask X it would be a different matter, and the slogan would make much more sense.
I really do wonder at the timing of this campaign; they’re really only going to get one opportunity to rebadge and rebuild themselves in most people’s minds and doing this now with Ask X still waiting in the wings seems to be an odd thing to do.
The Web pages from the site are deliberately messy, dirty and employ a font reminiscent of Soviet-era dissident ‘samizdat’ typescript.
On the site Ask is badged as ‘The other search engine’ though I suspect that Yahoo and Microsoft may have something to say about that!
There is a definite call to arms about the site; one section says The Internet needs YOU!
Fight the mind control!
Don’t worry you don’t all have to take to the streets (you can if you want to, but we won’t pay your bail and we’re happy with sofa-bound revolutionaries as well!)
as long as you feel compelled to take action, no matter how small, in support of choice on information.
The site offers downloads of (dreadful red and black) revolutionary poster type wallpapers, and a link to free t-shirts which when I followed it informed me there were not any left just now.
The whole site reeks of ‘getting down and hip with today’s younger generation of happening kids’ as possibly defined by not so hip advertising executives.
To be honest, nothing on this site would encourage me to use Ask, and given some of the feedback that I read in the weblogs, it’s not actually having much of a positive effect on anyone else either.
A much better approach in my opinion would have been a campaign that suggested that we use Ask X because it will save us time and give us more information in one bite of the cherry.
However, I’m just a searcher, not an advertising executive, so what do I know?
Conclusion Ask is an interesting search engine, particularly because it is in a state of transition at the moment.
I hope the people at Ask are leaving the butler image behind them, but in all honesty this is going to be a difficult job for them one of their major challenges at the moment is to get users to look at Ask afresh.
As is clear from this column I’m not a particular fan of the UK version, and it’s an engine that neither excites nor tempts me to use it to any great degree.
Having said that, I would also have to say that it’s in the first transition phrase from Ask Jeeves into something altogether more shiny.
The US/global version is much more advanced, and it’s frustrating for a UK audience that a lot of the (very good) functionality is just not available here for the time being.
(Of course, this isn’t a gripe that is just aimed at Ask most search engines are guilty of an American bias in terms of development.)
At the other end of the spectrum we have Ask X.
Not only is the layout different, but it’s an entirely different resource, both in terms of what it gives searchers, the way in which it provides us with information and more importantly the whole underlying ethos.
Yes, it’s an algorithmic search engine that’s powered by Teoma technology, but, and this is the interesting point, there’s that extra level of human involvement that makes it interesting.
Ask does appear to be attempting something different, which is to reinvent the search space, and the way in which we view information.
To that extent I can see the reason why it is making a claim to being ‘the other search engine’.
If you want a different search experience by all means try the UK offering, but I suspect that like me, you’ll not be overly impressed.
Remember however, this is early in the development approach.
Instead, jump straight across to Ask X and spend some time exploring and enjoying a rather different and better search experience.
References Ask UK http://uk.ask.com/ Ask US/Global version http://www.ask.com/?o=312&L=dir Ask X http://www.ask.com/?ax=5 Sarah Houghton-Jan Ten Reasons Librarians Should Use Ask.com Instead of Google http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2006/09/ten_reasons_lib.html The information revolution http://www.information-revolution.org/ Google Suggest http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en The Internet Archive Wayback machine http://www.archive.org/ City Ask http://city.ask.com/ Word Net http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com Blinkx http://www.blinkx.com/ Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: “Search Engines: Why Ask Me, and Does ‘X’ Mark the Spot?” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Looking for a Google Box?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Looking for a Google Box?
Buzz software database xml stylesheet xslt graphics multimedia rtf passwords cache licence intranet url standards Citation BibTex RIS Sebastian Rahtz gives us his evaluation of the Google Search Appliance.
Most Web sites of any size want to offer a facility to perform a free-text search of their content.
While we all at least claim to believe in the possibilities of the semantic web, and take care over our navigation aids and sitemaps, we know that sooner or later our readers want to type 'hedgehog' into a search box.
Yes, even http://www.microsoft.com [1] returns plenty of hits if you try this.
So how do we provide a search, in the cash-strapped Higher Education world of large, varied and unpredictable Web site setups, often containing a suite of separate servers?
Brian Kelly's surveys (reported for example in Ariadne 36 [2]) have shown that there is no obvious solution.
There are, perhaps, four directions we can take: Evaluate the complete range of closed and open source offerings, pick the best, and be prepared to pay a yearly licence fee of an unknown amount Develop our own private search engine, possibly based on ht://Dig [3] or egothor [4] code Make use of the free Google index of our pages License Google technology to do local indexing Each route has its attractions, but the latter two are particularly attractive because of the high degree of trust in, and familiarity with, Google.
But the public search has problems: Google cannot see inside our protected sites Every search transaction has to leave our site, is dependent on international networks, and uses up bandwidth The depth and frequency of search is not guaranteed Google may withdraw the service at any time So can we consider our own private Google?
At Oxford, we had a Google Search Appliance (GSA) on free trial over the summer, and this article describes our experiences.
A Google Search Appliance is a self-contained sealed computer which is installed within your network; it both indexes Web sites and delivers search results in the familiar Google way.
The indexing is neither affected by, nor influences 'Big Brother' Googles, and the box does not need to communicate at all with the outside world.
Installation and Maintenance The smart bright yellow box was delivered ready to fit in a standard rack mount.
After some swearing and pushing, it was fitted in next to some mail servers in about half an hour.
We plugged in a monitor and watched it boot up successfully.
A laptop connected directly was then used to do the initial configuration, set up an admin password and so on.
Playing around with IP numbers and so on took another hour or two, but we fairly soon arrived at a running Google box, administered via a Web interface, and we did not go back to the hardware while we had the machine.
Each day it sent an email report saying that it was alive and well, and a system software update was easily and successfully managed after a couple of months.
We contacted Google support by email 3 or 4 times with non-urgent queries about setup, and they responded within a day giving sensible answers.
Their online forum for GSA owners is quite good.
We did not have occasion to request hardware support.
Configuration All the configuration work is done via simple Web forms.
Not surprisingly, however, it takes a fair amount of time and experimentation to get straight.
After some initial experiments on the local site only, and making the mistake of putting the box on our internal departmental network, we switched it to being simply an ox.ac.uk machine, so that it had no departmental privileges.
The system works by having initial seed points, and then a list of sites to include when crawling.
Our seed list was simply http://www.ox.ac.uk/-any site not findable from here would not be visited.
The inclusion list was created by getting the registered Web server for each department or college, and then adding other machines as requested.
The second part of the configuration is the list of document types to exclude.
We set it to index Word and PDF files, but exclude Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint, Access and RTF graphics files, fonts, multimedia, etc executables a set of url patterns which foul up locally on experience, either because they are duplicate forms of Web pages, or go into endless loops retrieving from databases.
Some examples, which used extended regular expressions, from our configuration were: contains:PHPSESSID contains:logon.asp?
contains:/homepage/searchresults contains:&&normal_view= contains:timetableweek.asp users.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/safeperl/ www.seh.ox.ac.uk/index.cfm?do=events&date= It is likely that this list would settle down over time as Webmasters learned to understand what the box was doing.
Serving Documents, and Crawling After the configuration described in the previous section, our system settled down to indexing about 547,000 documents.
The admin screens say it had an index of 33.23 GBytes.
How much this would rise to if all Webmasters adjusted their content seriously, and as more facilities came on line, is hard to say, but it seems reasonable to suggest that a capacity of between 500,000 and 750,000 documents would provide a useful service.
The GSA indexes continuously, hitting servers as hard as you let it, and has a scheme to determine how often to revisit pages; generally speaking, it seldom lags more than a few hours behind page changes; it is possible to push pages immediately into the indexing queue by hand, and remove them from the index by hand.
Most Web pages at Oxford seem to be pretty static, judging by the rather low rate crawl after a few weeks of operation.
Changes to the setup take a while to work their way through the system (about 24 hours to get to a clean state after removing a site), but individual sites can be blocked at any time from the search, or individual pages refreshed instantly.
We did not make much adjustment for individual hosts.
The default is to not make more than 5 concurrent connections to a given Web server, but for 5 of our servers this was reduced to 1 concurrent session after complaints from Webmasters.
Collections and Search Forms At the heart of the Googlebox setup are collections.
These are specifications of subsets of the index, allowing departments and colleges to have their own search.
The configuration for a collection has URL patterns to include, and patterns to exclude.
Setting up an individual Web site to have its own search form accessing the GSA is easy.
Here is the one for our Computing Services Web servers:   <form method="GET" action="http://googlebox.ox.ac.uk/search"> <span class="find"> <label for="input-search">Find </label> </span><br/> <input type="text" name="q" id="input-search" size="15" maxlength="255" value="Enter text"/> <br/> <span class="find"><label for="select-search">In </label></span> <br/> <input type="radio" name="site" value="default_collection" />Oxford <br/> <input type="radio" name="site" value="OUCS" checked="checked" />OUCS <input type="hidden" name="client" value="default_frontend"/> <input type="hidden" name="proxystylesheet" value="default_frontend"/> <input type="hidden" name="output" value="xml_no_dtd"/> <input type="submit" name="btnG" value="Go"/> </form>   which produces: Figure 1: Example Search Form The key parameters here are site, which determines the collection to be searched, and proxy stylesheet which determines how the results will be rendered.
The results from the Googlebox come in XML, which can be processed by your own application, but are normally filtered through an XSLT transform.
This is fairly easy to understand and modify, either with direct editing or with Web forms.
The different front ends can be customised in a variety of ways.
One is to force a priority result for a given search term.
For example, we set this for keywords 'open source' and 'webmail', so any use of those words forced chosen sites to the top.
Collections can be administered on the GSA admin pages by non-privileged users who can also see search logs and analyses.
Problems During our trial we had a meeting with representatives from Google and discussed the main difficulties which had arisen during the trial.
These were: We had identified oddities in searching (a search for Pension did not produce the expected pages in the rankings), but we did not find a clean explanation.
Subsequently, the software update and consequent complete re-indexing seemed to solve the problem.
The Oxford setup would require individualised configuration for several hundred separate units (which would be delegated to unit Webmasters).
This is done on the GSA via a Web form, and cannot be created externally and then uploaded; configuration by 'super unit' (ie all science departments) is not directly supported.
This poses a definite maintenance issue for a complex site, and we would expect it to be changed in a future software release.
The Google representatives understood the issue, but could not offer an immediate solution.
The price of the box is not trivial; you have to decide how big a box you need, as the configuration has limits on how many documents it will index.
For a point of comparison, we decided that Oxford would need a capacity of between 0.5 and 0.75 million documents.
Some setups may need the optional security module, which is an extra cost.
The GSA naturally lives inside the firewall, and so has access to sites which are restricted to the internal network.
You cannot therefore simply allow the search interface to be seen outside the site as it would show external users about restricted information (and, via the cache, probably display them).
Therefore we needed a view of the index which takes the restrictions into account.
The Google technical representatives, both at the meeting and in subsequent email discussion, suggested various schemes, none of which we were able to implement.
The simplest suggestion was to buy two boxes, one for outside the firewall and one for inside.
The most likely involved routing all searches through a proxy server maintained separately, which would check all accesses to see if they would work from outside the firewall, and annotating the database according.
It is worth noting that if all Oxford Web sites had put their restricted material on a separate Web server (eg oucs-oxford.ox.ac.uk) or used a naming convention (eg oucs.ox.ac.uk/oxonly/), it would be easy to configure the box to provide the external search as needed.
Some of these problems would likely arise at other similar sites.
Conclusions It is straightforward to describe the Google Search Appliance: It performs as specified, is easy to use, and has powerful configuration and maintenance options.
It provides an effective Web index.
It costs real money (a per-two-year fixed fee), and is dependent on the vendor for support in the case of hardware or software failure.
It is not maintenance-free-Oxford, for example, would expect to continue to devote ongoing time to tuning and analysis (perhaps 0.05 FTE).
It is not clear that a single box can always provide an external search as well as an internal one.
Whether the GSA is the right solution depends on a number of factors; plainly, one is money, but that depends on the relative importance we all attach to our searching.
More important is the setup in which a GSA would be placed, and what it would be expected to do.
To provide an intranet index of a single server, it will provide an instant working system.
If there is no restricted content, or the restricted content is all on one server, it is easy to use the box to provide external and internal searching.
If, however, you have private pages scattered everywhere, using IP ranges to restrict access, the GSA is not necessarily an ideal system.
We decided in the end not to go with the GSA at Oxford, but it would be quite surprising not to see some of the nice yellow boxes emerging in the UK educational community soon.
I would like to thank Google for their patience and helpfulness during our trial.
They asked me not to put any screen dumps in this article, or quote prices, but have otherwise encouraged me to discuss our experiences.
References Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com WebWatch: An Update of a Survey of Search Engines Used in UK University Web Sites, Brian Kelly, July 2003, Ariadne 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/web-watch/ ht://Dig.
ht://Dig.
http://htdig.sf.net/ egothor.
http://www.egothor.org/ Author Details Sebastian Rahtz Information Manager Computing Services Oxford University Oxford UK Email: sebastian.rahtz@oucs.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk Sebastian is also manager of OSS Watch, the JISC Open Source Advisory Service.
Editor's note: Readers may be interested in the another article from OSS Watch in this issue.
Return to top Article Title: "Looking for a Google Box? "
Author: Sebastian Rahtz Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/rahtz/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Principles of Data Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Principles of Data Management Buzz data html database rss xml metadata repositories multimedia interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff takes a look at a new book from the British Computer Society that aims to help readers understand the importance, issues and benefits of data management across an enterprise.
Principles of Data Management might not sound like a thrilling title and, given its business focus, you might think not all that relevant to many readers of Ariadne.
However, before dismissing it out of hand, consider this: may not the research outputs of an institution be regarded as business assets that require management (in, for example, an institutional repository)?
On what other data does a university rely?
Staffing, recruitment, enrolment, courses, library stock, costs?
Without careful management of these disparate data, are not Higher and Further Education institutions ultimately losing money as they reinvent wheels or create complex workarounds to integrate data systems?
Moreover workarounds that fail when a new system is introduced?
Why does it take so long for the IT people to do something as simple as provide the Virtual Learning Environment course information?
If any of these questions interest you, then perhaps the book's subtitle, 'Facilitating Information Management' will persuade you to read on.
Describing itself as a 'professional reference guide', Principles in Data Management attempts to 'explain ... the importance of data management to modern business' as well as discussing the 'issues of those involved'.
Essentially it deals with the coal face of data management, what can go wrong without it and what are the challenges faced by data professionals.
It is important to note that the book's main focus is on data sharing within an organisation, for example, providing customer-facing businesses with the competitive edge through timely and accurate information on a customer's purchase history patterns.
In an increasingly competitive education market, these lessons are as relevant to tertiary educational institutions as they are to businesses and there is a lot in this book for data professionals across our sector.
There are also lessons to be learned here for those who devote their efforts to information sharing more widely, across institutions on the Web for example, though the book is fairly dismissive of XML standards development efforts: "There have been a number of initiatives within particular industries to develop standard XML formats for the exchange of data between companies within that industry, but these initiatives are not coordinated.
You can, therefore, end up with different formats for the same concept in different industries."
Initially this rattled me, but then I remembered the OpenXML and Open Document Format debate and the troubled history of RSS and could see the point.
Perhaps because of this, for the large part, the book avoids interoperability standards, favouring the database and data management systems that underpin them.
This seems sensible to me, because these systems are the foundations of all information sharing; an exchange format is nothing without content.
Chapter One opens the book by introducing the idea that information, alongside money, people, buildings and equipment, is a key business resource.
While this seems rather obvious, it is astounding just how many organisations consider information to be something left up to the Information Technology Department and not an issue for the business as a whole.
The arguments are compelling, and this chapter could have usefully dwelt on them longer; however they are picked up again in Chapter Three, "What is Data Management?
", in the section that explores life without it.
Chapters Two and Four change tack, plunging the reader deep into the technical detail of 'Database Development' and 'Corporate Data Modelling'.
The former introduces relational databases and entity/relationship models, while the latter discusses the issues involved in building a data model for an entire organisation, rather than just one project area.
One reason given for this is to facilitate the sharing of data between applications across the organisation, but the book also states 'There is no definitive role for a corporate data model', suggesting, I think, there are many reasons why you might need one; however it also sounded a little as if one might not always need one, which is perhaps unfortunate.
The ideas of a generic data model introduced in Chapter Four are picked up again in one of the appendices, all of which are used to expand on the themes from the main chapters: Data Modelling Notation, Hierarchical and Network Databases, the aforementioned Generic Data Models, an example Data Naming Convention, a rather confusing Metadata Modelling appendix, Data Mining, HTML & XML and, finally, XML in Relational Databases.
The next four chapters (5 to 8) take the reader through some of the problems faced by data managers, including data definition and naming, ensuring the quality of the data, and ensuring access to the data, explaining database transaction management and discussing backup strategies.
There is also a short chapter on metadata that gives three broad and different explanations for what it is (and within each definition is a series of sentences that end "...is also metadata".
This chapter serves as a timely reminder to this supporter of Institutional Repository Managers of what is confusing and frightening about metadata.
Metadata for data managers is distinguished, in this chapter, from metadata for information professionals and libraries.
The penultimate grouping of book chapters moves to discussing the roles involved in data management, examining the responsibilities of database administrators and how these differ from those of repository managers.
It is important to highlight here that repositories discussed in this book are not the repositories most familiar to Ariadne readers (since the last issue).
Here we are talking about specialist database systems designed to safeguard data definitions and make them available across the enterprise.
It is not about storing, managing and showcasing research output by any stretch.
The final chapter takes us on a whirlwind tour of recent industry trends including data warehousing, data mining, distributed database systems, object-oriented database systems, storing multimedia objects and, of course, the Web.
There is also discussion of a growing trend to buy in data management 'solutions' to perform certain tasks and how this can lead to problems as these packages do not necessarily interoperate.
The content of this chapter is variable in quality – the exploration of multi-dimensional models of data highlights a very powerful mechanism for querying data and the packing section raises some questions; but this chapter is largely undeveloped in examining the Web and this is slightly disappointing.
In the introduction the author claims three target readerships for this book: data management practitioners, for whom it is a reference guide; IT and IS managers, who are looking to fill in the gaps in their knowledge in the data management area; and finally business managers, for whom an understanding of data management issues may help explain why IS keep asking for more data management professionals.
The book probably favours the first two of the target readerships, admitting itself, that business managers should probably avoid the technical chapters (which dominate the book).
It would have been good to see more for business managers, or at least more compelling arguments for why a business should want to invest in data management.
I have entirely selfish reasons for this: increasingly it seems institutional repository managers are being asked to make the business case for the creation and continued funding of an institutional repository.
If you consider the institutional repository to be a useful data management tool (and I do), then the reasons why an organisation needs data management, would apply to institutional repositories too.
There is a fourth, implied, readership for this book: students of the BCS Certificate in Data Management Essentials and often the book reads a lot like a text book, using bullet points that could clearly form the basis of a set of exam questions along the lines of 'In what ways might a database system fail?'.
While useful for students and in keeping with the reference format, this can sometimes feel contrived.
The book also often presents the ideal (theoretical) situation, such as a generic corporate data model, but does not discuss what you might do when this is impossible due to constraints within the organisation.
That, however, would take a much larger book!
In summary, Principles of Data Management: Facilitating Information Sharing, fulfils its remit as a reference guide to data management.
People from different backgrounds can dip into it and find the starting points for a variety of topics but you are left needing more in each topic and so exploring the further reading section is almost essential, though for a reference book this is undoubtedly a good thing.
Occasionally I found myself asking why certain chapters or sections were included.
For example, the HTML/XML appendix explains what each one is and how they differ but does not relate any of that to data management.
The same goes for some of the complex technical explanation of data modelling, which remains firmly theoretical and leaves it up to the reader to work out the practice.
On the whole an interesting and thought-provoking book; but one that would benefit from some serious editing, since in its current form it will leave the reader interested but perhaps slightly unsatisfied.
I look forward to the 2nd Edition!
Author Details Pete Cliff Research Officer Repositories Support Project UKOLN Email: p.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Principles of Data Management: Facilitating Information Sharing" Author: Pete Cliff Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/cliff-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: The Google Backlash Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: The Google Backlash Buzz data database portal privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley reviews and analyses recent criticisms of the giant and takes an objective view from a broader perspective.
When I run my courses on advanced Internet searching I always ask the delegates the question 'Which search engine do you tend to use most often?'
A few years ago I could always expect to get half a dozen different answers, ranging from AltaVista to Yahoo!
with a few others in between.
Now however I can almost guarantee that it will be a single answer, and that's 'Google'.
We're all aware of the power of Google, and the way in which, in the last couple of years, it has almost totally dominated the search engine scene.
However, as is always the case when a leader in a particular field dominates to the extent that Google has, it becomes a target for adverse publicity and has to constantly fight off challenges to its position; and as we move well into 2004 this backlash is beginning to take shape and this year sees us in the year of the search wars.
Several pundits have already said that this is going to be the year that Google faces its greatest challenges, but the seeds were sown early last year.
In this article I'm going to look at the Google backlash and try to assess (or at least provide pointers to) the areas in which this search engine is going to have to compete in order to keep its prime position.
Criticism in 2003 An early article expressing concern over Google was published by the BBC back in February 2003 entitled 'Is Google too powerful?'
[1] A key argument in the article is that Google (even then) had become too powerful for its, and our, own good, and this can be be exemplified by the following quotation: 'Perhaps the time has come to recognise this dominant search engine for what it is a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest.'
Criticism of Google continued in April 2003 with a document entitled 'Empirical analysis of Google SafeSearch', published by Harvard Law School, which criticised the 'safe search' function of Google [2].
To save you the trouble of reading the document, it basically concludes that the safe search didn't work properly, blocking tens of thousands of pages that had no sexual content, either graphical or textual.
While at first glance this appears to be in an entirely different area, the key thrust of the article is the same as the BBC commentary reliance on a single search engine is a bad idea, since you as searcher are handing over a great deal of control to another organisation over which you yourself can have no influence; though to be fair, this criticism is also valid for just about any other search engine out there.
The trend continued in May 2003; an article in the Salt Lake Tribune [3] raised questions relating to the huge amount of data that Google made available, and that it could easily be used for the purpose of stalking someone, together with a concern about the data the search engine can find by collecting details from people who use the service.
Google responded by stating that it only examined a tiny fraction of the data it collected, and that it was anonymous.
Of course, much the same criticism could be levelled against any other search engine; if people put personal information on the Web any search engine could in theory find it and make it available, so it's easy to argue that it's down to individuals to regulate personal data themselves.
While this is true, I found it interesting that, once again, the focal point of the article was on how dangerous Google was, rather than broadening the debate out more widely to cover the dangers that all search engines represent.
An article in the Salon [4] in June 2003 actually uses the phrase 'The Google Backlash', and highlights the concern some analysts had regarding the power of the engine.
In a long and involved article Google was criticised in a great many different areas, covering accuracy, its control over advertising, (and by implication the people who advertise with it), its secrecy and its influence over the results it provides.
At this point, the criticism is beginning to take shape Google is too big, it's too powerful, out of control, secretive and a dangerous tool.
Personally I think this is going too far no one has to use the search engine, and the same criticisms can be levelled at other engines, but the fact that all these articles are criticising Google, rather than search engines generally is significant.
Criticism continued into June 2003, with an article entitled 'Digging for Googleholes Google may be our God, but its not omnipotent' [5].
While the article is (in my opinion fair and unbiased) it does heavily criticise the results Google returns, and this can perhaps best be illustrated with a quotation from the article: 'We're wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source.
It's closer to a collectively authored op-ed page-filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion-than an encyclopedia.
It's still the connected world's most dazzling place to visit, a perfect condensation of the Web's wider anarchy.
Just don't call it an oracle.'
In November 2003 the infamous 'Florida update' was the focus of much attention.
Google did a major update and many sites lost their coveted no.1 position; and some seemed to disappear entirely.
An interesting article in Searchengineguide [6] goes into a lot more detail than I'm able to here; but once again the focal point of the article was that, at least for search engine optimisers like webmasters who rely on Google for traffic and profits, it had become very much a double-edged sword.
So the 'Florida update' proved to be yet another area where the engine, (which until that point for some at least, had been able to do no wrong), looked less than perfect.
Irrespective of the rights or wrongs of Google's approach here, (and it could easily be argued that their concern was to provide more accurate results), another very important group discovered in no uncertain terms that not only could Google do pretty much as it pleased, but that it elected to do so!
One of the unintentional messages generated by the 'Florida' update was that people could no longer rely on Google in the way they had done before.
From a searcher's perspective, I have to say that I think this is no bad thing professional searchers wouldn't just use the same reference book to answer queries, so why should they use the same search engine?
It just doesn't make professional sense to do this.
Criticism in 2004 By the beginning of 2004 competition to Google really started to arise from another important area other search engines.
Yahoo!
dropped Google to use data that it had acquired in purchases of Alltheweb, AltaVista and Inktomi the year before.
This was only to be expected, and was not a large surprise, but in that single stroke, Google lost a large percentage of the market share it had previously enjoyed.
More details on this are to be found in a short article at Pandia [7].
Furthermore, on the searching front Gary Price wrote a depressingly accurate article subtitled 'Google is a great search engine, but it is not perfect.'
[8] and listed ten things that the search engine needed to address.
I'm not going to try and paraphrase everything that Gary said, but I think one phrase was particularly telling 'Google is a fine product and has done good things for web search.
However, it's not the solution.'
On 24 February 2004 the Independent newspaper ran an article entitled 'The hit factory' [9] that really brought the whole question out into the open 'could the Google phenomenon crash as spectacularly as it was born?'
This was quickly followed by another article from Internet Search Engine Database [10] talking about the erosion of the importance of Google, and the rise of the competition, most notably Yahoo and of course Microsoft.
Yet another article in February from the Christian Science Monitor [11] entitled '9,000 Google hits can't be wrong or can they?'
demonstrated the importance of not relying on the results that Google provides.
A telling point made in the article was: 'Sad to say, plugging Google has become almost a telltale sign of sloppy reporting, a hack's version of a Rolodex.
Journalists should be sourcing hard statistics, not search-engine evidence, to bolster their stories.'
While the article was really criticising journalists who simply used Google to provide material for their stories, there's no getting away from the secondary thrust, building on previous articles that Google is not to be trusted.
Again, the same criticism could be levelled at any and all search engines, but it's Google that comes in for the criticism.
If that wasn't enough, 'Google Grumbles' an article in eWeek [12] points out that Google results are becoming less reliable and that Teoma, with its "Subject-Specific Popularity" method of ranking sites could actually be a better way of providing more accurate and useful results rather than Google's reliance on link popularity.
Shortly after that article appeared, Charlene Li, a Principle Analyst at Forrester also raised doubts as to the extent that Google will be able to compete in the search engine wars.
Her article [13] identifies Google weaknesses in the areas where it fails to provide as much value as portals, tries to be all things to all people, has few advantages when it comes to specialised searches, and, because it is an innovator, other search engines can piggy-back off its advances, learning from the mistakes Google makes.
The article certainly doesn't imply that Google is going to vanish at any point; but she feels it will not continue in its unrivalled position for much longer.
Another article from Forrester [14] claims that Google will win only one of the three battles ahead of it it will become the dominant pay-for-performance advertisement network, while Microsoft will come out on top with structured desktop searches and Yahoo will win out on the portal front 'creating a satisfying customer experience.'
Conclusion In summary therefore, criticism of Google has been on the increase in the last year, partly because of its position as the search engine of choice, which is to be expected; but also because it is not, and can never be, all things to all people.
Much of this criticism has been unfair, and could easily be levelled at search engines in general, but I think there is enough of a thread running through it to highlight clearly that Google cannot be relied upon over and above all the others.
Throughout the rest of 2004 and into the next couple of years beyond, my prediction is that Google will be unable to sustain its position as the major competitors, (mainly Yahoo!
and Microsoft, but others such as Ask Jeeves), nibble away at it.
I suspect, and am hoping, that in the not too distant future when I ask the question 'Which search engine do you use?
', we'll return to the 'pre-Google' position of several different responses, and I can only see that as being a good thing.
References BBC article 'Is Google too powerful?'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2786761.stm Benjamin Edelman "Empirical Analysis of Google SafeSearch" http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/google-safesearch/ Mary Anne Ostrom and Matt Marshall, "Search Engine Raises Concerns About its Ranking System, Privacy" Salt Lake Tribune, May 26 2003 http://www.sltrib.com/2003/May/05262003/monday/60149.asp Farhad Manjoo Salon.com June 25 2003 http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/06/25/google/ Steven Johnson "Digging for Googleholes."
Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.
Slate, July 16 2003 http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/ Barry Lloyd Been "Gazumped by Google?
Trying to make Sense of the "Florida" Update!"
Searchengineguide, November 25 2003 http://www.searchengineguide.com/lloyd/2003/1125_bl1.html "Yahoo!
dumps Google" Pandia, February 18 2004 http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/index.html#180204b Gary Price "A Couple of Comments About Google" Pandia, January 2004 http://www.pandia.com/post/020-2.html Charles Arthur "The hit factory", Independent February 24, http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/features/story.jsp?story=494453 Jim Hedger "New Trends in Search Engines and SEO" 25 February 2004 http://www.isedb.com/news/index.php?t=reviews&id=711 Lionel Beehner "9,000 Google hits can't be wrong or can they?"
Christian Science Monitor 27 February 2004 http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0227/p09s01-coop.html Brian Livingston "Google Grumbles" 18 February, 2004 http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1530367,00.asp Charlene Li, Commentary: "Google's soft spot News.com 2 March 2004" http://news.com.com/2030-1069-5168053.html Forrester Research, "Forrester Research Asks, ''Where Is Google Headed?''"
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040308/85555_1.html Author Details Phil Bradley Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Phil Bradley is an Independent Internet Consultant.
Return to top Article Title: "Search Engines: The Google Backlash" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cornucopia: An Open Collection Description Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cornucopia: An Open Collection Description Service Buzz data software java html database apache infrastructure archives metadata browser schema sql repositories preservation oai-pmh windows linux php mysql rslp wsdl ict interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Chris Turner describes the latest phase of Cornucopia development and the opportunities this is opening up for the future.
A Little History Cornucopia is a searchable database of collections held by cultural heritage institutions throughout the UK.
It is developed and managed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and was initially established in response to the Government’s Treasures in Trust report which called for a way to be found of recognising the richness and diversity of our collections.
The original Cornucopia was set up in 1998.
MLA, (then the Museums & Galleries Commission (MGC)), contracted Cognitive Applications to develop the site featuring data from the 62 museums in England holding collections which are ‘Designated’ as being of outstanding importance.
The original Cornucopia site was searchable by a variety of criteria including subject area and geographical location and was based on static HTML pages with little or no database functionality.
The pages relating to each collection could be ‘grouped’ according to search criteria, (subject type, for example), but none of the results were assembled on the fly.
This version went online in October 1998 as part of an evaluation process, and was generally well received.
At the end of 1999 a full evaluation [1] was carried out on this pilot on behalf of MGC by Soloman Business Partners.
In the light of the evaluation, over the next two years, a second version of the database was designed with the aim of extending the model to include information from all Registered museums in the UK.
Stuart Holm was brought in as a consultant to create the data structure for the new Cornucopia, using the model of the original data with amendments derived from the evaluation report.
This data structure referred to a very early report from UKOLN [2] on schema, metadata and interoperable information a precursor to the Research Libraries Support Programme (RSLP) Collection Description schema.
The structure was designed to accommodate information from several sources.
To save time and effort, it was decided to populate Cornucopia with data from the MGC’s Digest of Museum Statistics (DOMUS) database.
This provided top-level institutional information for all Registered museums in the UK.
The structure also had to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate information from a variety of other sources, in particular, data from the West Midlands and South West Area Museum Councils mapping projects.
Between them, these projects cover almost 500 museums, providing detailed information about collections, access arrangements, documentation and a range of other areas.
Key to the design of the original schema was the representation of the relationship between collections and the institutions that hold them.
The database reflected this structure by preserving the concept of three ‘levels’ of information: Institutional data (e.g.
address, access, Web site & institutional (or ‘overall’) collection) Collections data (e.g.
title of collection, subject area, object type, geographical and temporal coverage) Collection strengths (e.g.
objects of particular importance which would not otherwise be retrieved by a collections-level description) This structure was then handed over to database designers System Simulation (SSL), a company with extensive experience of working on museum projects.
Two consultants were contracted to complete records for each of the museums in the South West and West Midlands regions on the basis of this preloaded information, drawing together information from a wide range of sources including: Museum and Galleries Commission (MGC) Registration files Printed documentation of collections Information derived from personal visits and/or telephone interviews Information held at Area Museum Councils In order to manage the process of information-gathering, a system was established whereby the consultants were issued with ‘satellite’ versions of the data-entry client.
These satellite copies held all of the information, edits and updates to the data which were then exported on a regular basis to a ‘master’ version of the database held at MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council).
This approach was adopted to allow the consultants sufficient freedom of movement to gather the information, but also to provide a stable version at MLA in case of machine failure.
In the event, progress with data collection was hampered slightly by technical difficulties with the ‘satellites’ of the data entry client which it was not always possible to replicate on the master copy.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of constructing the data for the two regions was in ensuring consistency in the application of terminology, standards and protocols.
The structure of satellite copies of the data feeding into a master copy enabled Nick Poole at MLA to edit the incoming information to ensure that information from the two regions would be broadly comparable and consistent.
This process was aided greatly by the inclusion of an ‘Editor’s notes’ field in the database, in which the consultants would add any comments or highlight discrepancies in the available information for a given collection.
Much of the editing of the data involved resolving these issues raised by the consultants.
Having established a core dataset of approximately 1250 basic records and approximately 500 detailed entries, plans were drawn up for extending the scope of Cornucopia to provide detailed information across the remaining regions.
Phase 3 had begun … Where We Are Now MLA’s long-term plan for Cornucopia is focussed on its ability to act as a comprehensive information resource on UK collections.
This meant that the Phase 3 development has concentrated on the following key areas: Coverage populating the database with information from all regions, and from other cultural domains (Libraries and Archives) Interoperability enabling the widest possible access and use of the data Sustainability ensuring that content is easily updateable In addressing these areas an early decision was made to adopt the Collections Level Description schema [3] from the RSLP.
It was and is felt that the use of an internationally recognised metadata standard was an essential prerequisite to achieving the objective of widening access and use of the data held within Cornucopia.
This decision necessitated a mapping exercise to map the then existing Cornucopia data structure on to the RSLP Schema; this in turn led to a review of the database structure.
By a happy coincidence the Crossroads Project [4] in the West Midlands was using the RSLP Schema and thus offered the chance to make use of a ready-made database structure.
Furthermore the Crossroads system was built using open source tools and was making use of direct data entry for remote input of data.
A decision was therefore made to migrate from the version 2 database and to contract the developers of the Crossroads system, Orangeleaf Systems [5] , to develop Cornucopia Phase 3.
The new Cornucopia system [6] allows the recording and maintenance of collection descriptions and details of their associated repositories, and makes these available for search and retrieval over the Internet.
The database can be remotely updated by more than one person, using only a common Web browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer; there is no extra software to install.
In addition there is an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [7] interface to the database, so that data may be harvested from Cornucopia for use in other systems.
The latest addition to the system is Web Service access.
A Web Services Description Language (WSDL) [8] file is available which will enable third party application developers to incorporate searches of the Cornucopia database within their own applications.
The system offers faster, more efficient searching and the ability to ‘collect’ CLDs (collection-level descriptions), print them, save them or email them to a friend or colleague.
Users both professional and public will be encouraged to use the descriptions for research, to plan a visit, or simply to find out more about our cultural heritage.
All the data from version 2 has been imported into the system and a team of consultants was employed to input data from the remaining regions which had not been included in previous versions.
The most difficult and time consuming aspect of the project has been the editing and normalising of data from divergent sources.
Indeed, this being the result of human effort, there will still be errors in the data, and I would greatly appreciate these being brought to my attention by anyone discovering them.
The development is based on simple tools: Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language.
This toolset has become known as LAMP [9] and is freely available to download and use.
Whilst other technologies such as Java could equally be used, PHP has the lowest technical barriers to installation and use: it is also available on Windows in a ‘standalone’ development environment.
Where possible, the language implementation of the application has been hidden, by using Apache’s mod_rewrite.
This feature allows core parts of the Web site to be presented without showing .php (or .asp, .exe etc) extensions so that URLs should remain consistent even if areas of underlying technology need to be changed in the future.
The design of the Cornucopia database separates entities in the RSLP model such as collection descriptions, related people, times and places into a normalised relational database.
So, for example, place data is entered once and can be related to many CLDs.
Some tables have been expanded to offer a richer set of data, e.g.
agent contains name (agentName) as well as suffix, prefix, birth and death dates etc.
Having normalised data helps maintain integrity of the records and goes some way in preventing duplication.
Creating a normalised database also allows the presentation of a browse interface to the Web site visitors.
A range of places can be shown which lead to collection descriptions, which in turn have links to related people or times.
However the downside of normalising data into many separate tables is that the speed of global searches may be reduced.
The Crossroads dataset only covers the West Midlands and so searching across a few thousand records in multiple tables is reasonably quick.
When the system was tested with the possible many tens of thousands of Cornucopia records it became obvious that a global search across many tables, (by performing multiple joins in the SQL statements), was going to operate more slowly.
The solution to this problem was to create a single index of data contained in all the tables.
This is updated for the whole dataset regularly, and for each CLD when it is modified.
The indexing script builds each collection description and scans through all the terms and descriptive text, building a dictionary of words (and their metaphone codes) as it goes.
A further table contains the map between words and CLDs, and it is this that is globally searched.
The results are dramatic: a search of ten thousand records was taking 5-10 seconds to return results; the system has now been tested to return results on 1.2 million records in under a second after running the indexing script.
No special tuning of the environment, PHP or MySQL was needed to achieve this.
Cornucopia also possesses a basic content management system that allows a system manager to edit the ancillary pages for ‘help’ and ‘about’ information.
This content is stored within the database, and a simple browser based What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor is provided to make the update tasks easier.
Support for consultants entering collection description data is vital; especially as data entry is through the various available browsers.
The final addition to the original Crossroads design has been an interactive support forum built into the Cornucopia application.
Messages added to it are sent to Orangeleaf for tracking and action but are also available to read and reply to by all the other consultants with a view to fostering a ‘community’.
Such messages have helped us improve both the data entry and public facing areas of the Web site.
The Future The Phase 3 development has left us with 2 aspects to Cornucopia: the database of collection descriptions covering the registered museums in the UK, and an open source software system for the recording, maintenance and searching of collections descriptions conforming to the RSLP Schema.
These will have distinct although inevitably interconnected futures.
The Cornucopia database of museum collection descriptions clearly has a close relationship with the 24 Hour Museum [10] database of museum collections and the details of how that will operate are now being worked out.
Web service capability will be added to the system, as it was always intended that this database would act as a source of collections descriptions to be incorporated in other services rather than a stand alone Web site.
The Cornucopia system is already used by another project Cecilia [11] a database of over 1,800 collection descriptions of music materials held in some 600 museums, libraries and archives in the UK and Ireland.
Cecilia offers an overview of the national music resource enabling all kinds of users to identify, locate and assess materials.
The work to create the database has been funded through the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme, and, for preservation purposes, a copy of the data has been placed with the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) performing Arts.
Because the system interface can be tailored to reflect the unique identity of any project while storing the data and making it available in formats which conform to international standards RSLP Schema, OAI-PMH, Web Services, a number of other collection description projects, covering Libraries and Archives as well as Museums are also proposing to use Cornucopia.
Providing the support infrastructure in terms of system support, consultancy, training and system development represents the next challenge for MLA in the evolution of Cornucopia.
References The full text of the evaluation can be downloaded at: http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/html/assets/pilot_eval.html Collection Level Description a review of existing practice, an eLib supporting study Andy Powell, UKOLN, August 1999. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cld/study/ For more information on the RSLP Schema see: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/ Crossroads: Discovering West Midlands Collections.
http://www.crossroads-wm.org.uk/ Orangeleaf Systems Ltd. http://www.orangeleaf.com/ Cornucopia: Discovering UK Collections.
http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/ The Open Archives Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/ Information on WSDL can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl and the Cornucopia WSDL file can be accessed from the Cornucopia Web site site http://www.cornucopia.org.uk LAMP the Open Source Web Platform http://www.onlamp.com 24 Hour Museum: The National Virtual Museum http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/ Cecilia: Music Collections of the UK and Ireland http://cecilia.orangeleaf.com/ Author Details Chris Turner ICT Advisor Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) 16 Queen Anne’s Gate London SW1H 9AA Email: chris.turner@mla.gov.uk Web site: http://www.mla.gov.uk Return to top Article Title: “Cornucopia: An open collection description service” Author: Chris Turner Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/turner/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: The WWW 2005 Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: The WWW 2005 Conference Buzz data mobile rdf framework wiki html rss xml infrastructure metadata xhtml standardisation accessibility browser blog aggregation adobe soap foaf vcard microformats podcast wcag research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly provides his impressions including reports of areas of doubt and uncertainty but also of an exciting new development.
About the WWW 2005 Conference The WWW 2005 Conference was held in the Nippon Conference Centre in Chiba, Japan over 10-14 May 2005.
This conference is the main event for the Web research community and provides an opportunity for researchers to present papers on research into developments in the Web infrastructure.
In addition to its role for the research community, the conference also attracts delegates who are active in leading edge work in more mainstream areas.
Finally, the conference hosts a W3C Track in which members of staff in the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) describe developments which are being coordinated by the W3C.
Doubts Surfacing I have attended nine in the series of international WWW conferences (although I missed last year’s event and so had some catching up to do).
Previous conferences have helped to identify significant developments to the Web’s technical infrastructure.
For example, WWW 10, as described in Ariadne issue 28 [1], held in Hong Kong in 2001, made me aware of the potential of a pervasive Web, with Web kiosks being available in many of the shopping malls; the mobile Web was a key theme at WWW9 held in Amsterdam in 2000 [2] and, way back in 1997, I described the excitement caused by the release of XML [3].
In contrast to the excitement I felt at those events, this year highlighted the difficulties a number of Web technologies are facing in gaining wide acceptance.
This can be can be seen from the title of panel sessions such as ‘Can Semantic Web Be Made to Flourish?’ and ‘Web Services Considered Harmful’.
The panel session on ‘Can Semantic Web Be Made To Flourish?’ was very well attended, attracting several hundred delegates.
The panel was invited to reflect on the disparity between the high profile which the Semantic Web has had within the Web research community and its apparent failure to gain acceptance within the wider user community.
Although some people argued that the Semantic Web was, in fact, being widely deployed without users necessarily being aware of the fact.
For example, Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) which Eric Miller, W3C’s Semantic Web Activity Lead has described as ‘an important piece that brings the Semantic Web closer to realisation’ [4] is an RDF application used within Adobe’s desktop products.
However many others appeared to sympathise with the concerns that the Semantic Web doesn’t seem to be flourishing and that there may need to be a more coherent marketing push, possibly though techniques such as viral marketing.
As an aside, I suggested that the FOAF (Friends Of A Friend) Semantic Web activity could be used as a bottom-up approach to engaging people in Semantic Web applications, possible for use at next year’s WWW 2006 conference, along the lines suggested in my paper on ‘Using FOAF To Support Community-Building’ [5].
Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Semantic Web and FOAF community in the UK to revive interest in FOAF.
I did not attend the panel session on ‘Web Services Considered Harmful’ although I understand that the complexity of Web Services technologies was discussed (it has been estimated that all of the Web Services specifications and proposals weigh in at several thousand pages!)
and the failure of some of the Web Services specifications to gain momentum although some specifications, such as SOAP, were felt to be successful.
Further concerns were raised in the session on ‘The Future of XML’.
Although XML has been an undoubted success, there are still areas which need to be addressed, including binary XML (for applications in which rapid processing is needed, such as games applications) and wider support for internationalisation.
However, since XML is a key foundation for other parts of the Web and Internet infrastructure (as well as being used within many applications), making changes cannot be done easily.
Whether to grasp the nettle and make such changes or to continue to make use of a critical technology which has known flaws is still very much a matter of debate for the community.
Excitement about Microformats Although I have focussed on the concerns raised at the conference, there were also a number of positive aspects.
In particular I should mention ‘microformats’ or, as it is also (confusingly) termed the ‘lowercase semantic web’.
Microformats have been described as ‘a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards … designed for humans first and machines second’ [6].
More specifically, microformats allow you to make use of the structuring capability provided in HTML though use of <div> and <span> elements and the “rel” attribute to the <a> element to provide simple semantics in existing HTML documents.
For example, rather than making up the date of an event or the contact details of a person in presentational markup, simple semantic markup can be applied: For example: <div class=“vcard”> <a class=“url fn” href=“http://tantek.com/"> Tantek Çelik </a> <div class=“org”>Technorati</div> </div> By agreeing on this lightweight markup it is then possible for third party applications to process the markup.
A typical example could be a browser bookmarklet or extension or a Web-based transformation service which could convert this HTML markup into vCard format.
This would then allow users to select the data which could then be added to their address book, calendar, etc.
Microformats are beginning to be more widely used.
Blogging engines, for example, can make use of this technique, while hiding the implementation for the Blog author.
This technique is being used by the XHTML Friends Network (XFN) [7] to define human relationships between Blog users.
In this case the “rel” attribute to the <a> element is used:   <a href=“http://jane-blog.example.org/" rel=“sweetheart date met”>Jane</a>   Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik ran a workshop on Microformats on the Developer’s Day at the conference.
I did not attend the workshop, but Eric’s blog [8] gives a useful summary.
It was pleasing to read that the ‘lower case semantic web’ folk (the ‘Microformatters’) and the Semantic Web folk appear to be in broad agreement on the challenges to be faced.
However this example of potentially significant development being initiated by the grassroots Web community is very interesting especially in light of the concerns mentioned previously.
This contrasts markedly with the top-down approach whereby initiatives take place within W3C Working Groups, which are formally chartered, the work being approved by W3C membership, including the requirement that the approach fits in with the W3C technical vision and so forth.
Use of Technologies at WWW 2005 Eric Meyer was not the only WWW 2005 participant who used a Blog to report on the conference.
Prior to the start of the conference Kathy Gill ran the ‘2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics’ [9].
Several of the workshop attendees subsequently published Blogs during the conference as did Kathy herself [10].
Kathy Gill also published a Podcast of several of the talks at the conference [11].
The availability of a WiFi network at the conference venue made it much easier to publish blogs, moblogs, podcasts, etc [12] [13] [14] [15] [16].
A very high proportion of delegates brought along laptops which were used during the conference, including during the talks.
This seemed to enrich the event, allowing delegates to provide ‘real-time peer reviewing’ of research presentations, to use the term coined in Paul Shabajee’s article on the WWW 2003 conference [17].
It is clear that the ease with which blogs can be published and the ease of finding blog articles though the use of technologies such as RSS, microformats, etc can enrich conferences by providing more immediacy to reports and discussions and reaching out to an enlarged community.
I feel that I should be making use of such technologies at future events to provide more timely feedback using a more interactive technology.
Incidentally, as described by Miles Banbery elsewhere in this issue [18], this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop was enhanced by the availability of a WiFi network and many though not all of the delegates valued the opportunity to be able to use instant messaging, Wikis and related technologies during the event.
Input from UKOLN and Partners Prior to the conference itself there were several workshop and tutorials.
I am pleased to report that a paper on ‘Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity?
A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World’ [19], by David Sloan, Lawrie Phipps, Helen Petrie, Fraser Hamilton and myself, was accepted for publication and presented at the International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A).
This paper builds on work led by TechDis and UKOLN which argues that the evidence of the low compliance with WAI WCAG guidelines for Web accessibility can be due to limitations in the guidelines themselves, rather than necessarily accessibility problems inherent in the Web resources.
The paper describes the limitations of the WAI approach and argues for an alternative strategy which, while supportive of much of the WAI work, emphasises the importance of users and their needs rather than seeking to implement a checklist approach.
On a related topic, acceptance of a poster on ‘A Quality Framework For Web Site Quality: User Satisfaction And Quality Assurance’ [20] by Professor Richard Vidgen, School of Management, University of Bath and myself was also pleasing.
Temptations of Tokyo I did have time to leave the conference and visit Tokyo itself.
Having a keen interest in new technologies I succumbed to temptation and bought myself an iPod, which I’ve been using not only to listen to my music collection, but also for Podcasting another new technology of great potential to the educational community, as described in the Introduction to Podcasting briefing paper [21].
Next Year WWW 2006 will be held in Edinburgh over 22-26 May 2006.
The conference Web site is already available [22].
As this conference is, for the first time, to be held in the UK, I would like to encourage a high turnout from the Web development and research community within the UK.
See you in Edinburgh!
References Hot News From WWW10, B. Kelly, Ariadne, issue 28, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/web-focus/ Reflections On WWW9, B. Kelly, Ariadne, issue 24, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/web-focus/ Report on the WWW 6 Conference, B. Kelly, Ariadne, issue 9, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/web-focus/ Extensible Metadata Platform, Adobe, http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html Using FOAF To Support Community-Building, B. Kelly and L. Dodds, IADIS Web-Based Communities 2004 Conference http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/iadis-2004/ About Microformats, microformats.org http://microformats.org/about/ XHTML Friends Network http://gmpg.org/xfn/ Microformats and Semantics in Japan, Eric Meyer, 18 May 2005, http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/05/18/microformats-and-semantics-in-japan/ WWW 2005 2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics http://www.blogpulse.com/www2005-workshop.html wiredpen, musings on technology, communication and convergence http://www.wiredpen.com/2005/week19/ wiredpen, Workshop Keynote Podcast Link, 9 May 2005, http://www.wiredpen.com/2005/05/workshop_keynot_1.html WWW 2005 highlights, Timboy, 14 May 2005, http://timconverse.com/blog/index.php?/archives/82_WWW2005_highlights.html WWW 2005 in Tokyo, Dave Beckett, 8 May 2005, http://journal.dajobe.org/journal/archives/2005_05.html#001774 Blogging W3C Conference, Kurt.Cagle, 6 May 2005, http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2005/05/blogging_w3c_co.html Greetings from WWW2005, Chiba, Japan, Molly E. Holzschlag, 9 May 2005 http://www.molly.com/2005/05/09/greetings-from-www2005-chiba-japan/ WWW 2005: We’re here, Erik Sellberg, 5 May 2005 http://www.selberg.org/2005/05/10/www2005-were-here/ ‘Hot’ or Not?
Welcome to real-time peer review, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 1 August 2003 http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~edxps/publications/hot_or_not.html Miles Banbery’s IWMW 2005 report, Ariadne, issue 28 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/iwmw2005-rpt/ Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity?
A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World, Kelly, B., Sloan, D., Phipps, L., Petrie, H. and Hamilton, F. Proceedings of the 2005 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A).
ISBN: 1-59593-036-1. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/w4a-2005/ A Quality Framework For Web Site Quality: User Satisfaction And Quality Assurance, Kelly, B. and Vidgen, R. The 14th International World Wide Web Conference [WWW2005].
Special Interest Tracks & Posters.
ISBN 1-59593-051-5 pp 930-931. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www2005/ Introduction To Podcasting, QA Focus briefing document no.
83, UKOLN, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-83/ WWW 2006 Overview, http://www2006.org/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Web Focus: The WWW 2005 Conference” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Joint Workshop on Future-proofing Institutional Websites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Joint Workshop on Future-proofing Institutional Websites Buzz data software java html archives metadata doi accessibility identifier vocabularies preservation cataloguing rfc purl uri ark tomcat e-government url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Maureen Pennock reports on a two-day workshop on Future-Proofing Web Sites, organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the Wellcome Library at the Wellcome Library, London, over 19-20 January 2006.
This DCC [1] and Wellcome Library [2] workshop sought to provide insight into ways that content creators and curators can ensure ongoing access to reliable Web sites over time.
The issue is not merely one of archiving; it is also about designing and managing a Web site so that it is suitable for long-term preservation with minimum intervention by curators to ensure the content remains reliable and understandable through time.
Practical Approaches to Future Proofing Web Sites John Kunze of the California Digital Library (CDL) [3] chaired the first session, kicking off with an introduction to practical approaches from his perspective at the CDL.
In a presentation that covered a wide range of activities associated with Web site creation, management and preservation, the key was that short-term Web site management activities can be considered indicative of the activities required to preserve Web sites in the long-term.
The key to this is the three R’s -Reduce, Replicate and Redirect.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) plain text online archive of RFC’s (Requests for Comment), which has persisted for almost as long as the Internet itself, was cited as a specific example of Reduction.
Replication requires the preservation of objects in multiple formats.
Redirection is necessary to avoid dead links.
The task is ultimately one of ‘future-improving’ Web sites rather than future-proofing, and downgrading expectations to minimise the worst potential loss applying ‘not-bad’ practices rather than seeking the best solution for each set of data.
Richard Price, Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library [4], followed on the subject of ‘Formulating a collection development policy for Web sites as collections items’.
Such a policy is necessary to attune the issue to a wider organisational remit, and leads directly to selection criteria and guidelines that allow the Web sites to be collected and preserved as part of an organisation’s wider preservation strategy.
This, in effect, future-proofs Web sites that do not future-proof themselves.
Rachel Andrew of the Web Standards Project [5] offered a complementary presentation on using standards to future-proof Web sites at the point of creation, rather than by taking action at a later date.
She quoted Eric Meyer, a web designer and high-profile standards expert, saying ‘Web standards are intended to be a common base… a foundation for the world wide web so that browsers and other software understand the same basic vocabulary’.
Web sites thus designed using standards for modern-day consistent accessibility by a range of software are therefore more easily sustained and likely to endure with minimum interference to the format over the long term.
Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation [6] introduced the topic of Persistent Identifiers (PI’s).
Following on from John’s perception that ‘what’s good for the short term is good for the long term’, Andy raised the issue that ‘the only good long-term identifier is a good short-term identifier’.
He encouraged people to think in terms of 15 20 years, rather than forever, as it is more reasonable to anticipate changes over that period.
On the topic of different types of persistent identifiers, such as PURL’s, HTTP URI’s, ARK and DOI’s, Andy was keen to point out that there is no point having multiple identities for the same resource and made several recommendations on how to make HTTP URI’s, which he recommended as the publicly visible persistent identifier, more persistent than several of those currently designated for identifying Web resources.
Julien Masanès of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) [7] closed the session with a view on important metadata for Web material, based on the IIPC’s experiences harvesting the Web.
Metadata that documents technical dependencies and the tools used to harvest Web sites are more useful and necessary than purely descriptive metadata.
Furthermore, the sampling process by which Web sites are selected for archiving must be documented so that future users can understand the context of the available collection when isolated from its original, networked environment.
Tools and Current Archiving Activity Dave Thompson of the Wellcome Library chaired this session on Tools and Current Activities.
A member of the programme committee, he also spoke on the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) [8] that utilises a customised version of the PANDAS software 9 to collect and archive Web sites flagged by the UKWAC as relevant to consortium members.
Noting that much of the problem in future-proofing Web sites arises from the absence of records management practices, Dave made the point that archiving alone does not necessarily result in future-proofed Web sites.
Implementing records management principles and practices into current Web site management is the key.
However, archiving Web sites is necessary to maintain access to them in the long term.
The UKWAC has a role to play in this by archiving the Web sites of organisations which, for whatever reason, do not archive their own sites.
UKWAC has been granted permission by over 175 Web site owners to collect and archive their sites.
Dave provided several pointers for organisations wishing to future-proof their Web sites: minimise the use of proprietary file formats, use standards (preferably open ones), follow existing Web guidelines, and talk to clients to make sure they understand that Web site design can affect the portability of their Web site into the future.
For organisations wishing to future-proof and archive their own Web sites, Hans Goutier of the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management [10] introduced the Ministry’s pilot efforts to archive old versions of their and affiliated agencies’ Web sites.
Good records management is recognised is fundamental to successful Web site preservation and begins with the initial Web site design.
Records management retention decisions in this context are led by Dutch legislation, which requires preservation of certain records but not the Web sites themselves.
The Ministry can therefore make decisions on exactly what it will try to preserve and this does not necessarily include the entire site.
Based on its experiences to date, the Ministry has issued guidelines for agencies to assist them in designing Web sites with longevity in mind.
Similarly, Web sites that are designed to cater for broad accessibility are far easier to maintain into the future than Web sites which are not.
Hans concluded with several recommendations, including clear delineation of tasks and responsibilities, maintenance of an inventory of Web sites (for organisations with more than one), identification of record-keeping responsibilities for Web site content, and implementation of quality control and a modular design.
Julien Masanès spoke again, this time on IIPC-developed tools to enable Web archiving.
Several of his slides were inaccessible to the audience, but despite this, Julièn gave an enthusiastic presentation on the tools required for harvesting and collecting different types of Web archives, such as local file systems, Web-served archives, and non-Web archives.
The IIPC Toolset is aimed towards middleand large-scale archiving for the Web Served Archives model, and the architecture of tools for Web archives incorporates index, ingest, search, access, and storage.
The tools are open source and so may be obtained and used by a wider audience.
UKOLN’s Brian Kelly [11] followed with a presentation on lessons learnt from experiences with project Web sites.
In contrast to many of the other speakers, for whom technical issues were a focus, Brian spoke about the organisational and human issues that could often lead to Web site failure or loss, such as failure to re-register domain names and failure to prepare and implement an adequate exit strategy for the end of a project.
This was illustrated by the case of the first Web HTML validation service developed and available from webtechs.com [12]: many other sites linked to the webtechs site through their ‘Valid HTML’ icon, but someone forgot to pay the bill for the domain name and it was promptly taken over by a porn site.
This human failure led to the perceived loss of a very valuable site and service and accidental promotion of an undesirable one.
Again, good practice standards were cited as the key to maintaining accessibility in the short term and provided a favourable environment for preservation in the long term.
Matthew Walker of the National Library of Australia introduced PANDAS 3, a software tool from the National Library of Australia (NLA) [13] for managing the process of gathering, archiving, and publishing Web site resources.
Scheduled for release in March 2006, PANDAS 3 is an evolution of PANDAS 2 (released in August 2002).
PANDAS 3 is more robust, operationally faster, with improved error handling, incorporated gatherand processing-related functionality, a new user interface focussed on core workflows, and can run in a standard servlet container/java application server (e.g.
Tomcat) instead of an Apple WebObjects application server.
Important for implementers who wish to adapt the functionality, PANDAS 3 will be available as Open Source software.
International Activity and Legislation The final session was chaired by Seamus Ross, Director of the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) [14] at the University of Glasgow and Associate Director of the DCC.
Adrian Brown, Head of Digital Preservation at The National Archives (TNA) [15] gave a thought-provoking presentation on the UK Government Web Archive.
Web sites are selected on the basis that they are records containing evidence of interactions, specific business processes, or the development of e-government.
Collection frequency varies for different Web sites, using either harvesting or direct transfer.
Authenticity is a key issue for TNA, unlike many of the other organisations featured in the workshop, and is derived from the significant properties of the Web site as displayed on-screen; of course, the significant properties must therefore be defined before attempts can be made to preserve them.
Preservation strategies may transform the source of the records, by normalisation, migration on demand or migration at obsolescence, or they may transform the means of access to the records through a form of emulation or the use of virtual computers.
Preservation management, necessary whichever type of preservation strategy is implemented, must feature three key aspects: passive preservation; active preservation; and managing multiple manifestations.
Legal issues and challenges arising from the presence of dynamic content must also be considered.
Finally, Adrian identified some of the standards for government Web sites and summed up ‘archive-friendly’ sites as those which provide archival access with persistent, stable URL’s, documentation, metadata, and do not use constraining technology.
Matthew Walker gave the final presentation of the workshop and introduced PANDORA, the NLA’s Archive of Web resources.
After briefly discussing the history of PANDORA and its relationship with PANDAS, the presentation focussed on the context surrounding the PANDORA archive and the workflow it used.
The NLA has no legal right to archive Web resources and must obtain permission from every Web site owner for permission to archive (as must the UKWAC).
Theirs is a selective approach with manual Quality Assurance processes, and it is scalable to the available resources.
The lack of resources means that, as with many current other Web harvesting programmes, PANDORA [9] does not include the deep Web and the full linking structure of the Web is not retained.
Subsequently, resources may be perceived as missing in the eyes of future researchers.
There are nine stages to the workflow: nominating/identifying; selection; gathering; processing; archiving; publishing; cataloguing; permissions; and restrictions.
The NLA uses tools such as PANDAS [9] and Xinq [16] , but other tools such as HTTrack [17], pageVault [18], and Heritix [19] are also useful.
Matthew finished with some final recommendations on Web archiving: do something and do it now; build on what you already have; think about what you have done and revise as necessary.
Conclusions DCC Director Chris Rusbridge joined Seamus Ross to bring the workshop to a close.
They presented a mind map [20] Chris had constructed that identified the main issues surrounding future-proofing of Web sites raised during the course of the workshop.
The advice to Web masters had been spread throughout several presentations and gathering it together in a single document was very useful for delegates.
The main issues were: think about the records perspective; reduce, replicate and redirect; protect your domain; be archive-friendly; carry out ‘not-bad practice’; experiment, and; identify unhelpful practice.
The broad conclusions of the workshop placed successful Web site management and archiving firmly in the context of good records management.
As one delegate put it, the topic should be approached from the perspective of good practice for making information available and accessible now, rather than forcing curators to adopt practices for preservation at a later date.
Good practices for consistent and persistent Web site accessibility now make it easier to preserve and provide access to a reliably archived Web site at a later date.
References Digital Curation Centre Web site http://www.dcc.ac.uk Wellcome Library Web site http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ California Digital Library Web site http://www.cdlib.org/ British Library Web site http://www.bl.uk/ Web Standards Project Web site http://www.webstandards.org/ Eduserv Foundation Web site http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Web site http://netpreserve.org/ UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) Web site http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ PANDAS and PANDORA Web site http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pandas.html Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management Web site http://www.verkeerenwaterstaat.nl/ UKOLN Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Versions of this site are still available from the Internet Archive Web site http://www.archive.org/ National Library of Australia Web site http://www.nla.gov.au/ HATII Web site http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/ The National Archives Web site http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ Xinq Web site http://www.nla.gov.au/xinq/ HTTrack Web site http://www.httrack.com/ pageVault Web site http://www.projectcomputing.com/products/pageVault/ Heritix Web site http://crawler.archive.org/ This mindmap is available from the DCC Web site at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/fpw-2006/ along with copies of the presentations.
Author Details Maureen Pennock Digital Curation Centre Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: m.pennock@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk, http://www.dcc.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Future-Proofing Web Sites” Author: Maureen Pennock Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dcc-fpw-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The JISC 5/99 Programme: What's in a Number?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The JISC 5/99 Programme: What's in a Number?
Buzz data software java framework database portal usability infrastructure archives metadata accessibility repositories video cataloguing z39.50 visualisation gis e-learning ejournal rslp openurl licence authentication interoperability research standards sfx jstor Citation BibTex RIS Rachel Bruce and Balviar Notay give an overview of the outputs and influences of the JISC 5/99 Learning and Teaching and Infrastructure Programme.
The 5/99 Programme, as it became known, was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] in the year 2000.
Quite simply the name, 5/99, refers to the number of a JISC circular letter.
It was the fifth circular issued by the JISC in 1999.
So the name is pretty meaningless to those outside the JISC or not involved in one of 54 projects that were funded via the circular.
The majority of the projects have now completed, the programme end date was July 2003.
Some, however, are on-going and many of these digital content and digital library infrastructure developments have evolved beyond the lifetime of the programme.
These are now delivered as services, or have become part of other initiatives now contributing to the JISC Information Environment (IE) [2].
So what was it all about?
The full name of this extensive programme was 'Developing the DNER for Learning and Teaching'.
So it was about the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), which was defined as: The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is a managed environment for accessing quality assured information resources on the Internet which are available from many sources.
These resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections.
[3] And it was about learning and teaching.
The UK Higher Education Funding Councils allocated just over £10 million to the JISC to enhance its DNER development for learning and teaching.
The idea was to make the more traditional digital libraryand research-orientated resources more applicable for learning and teaching.
The funding councils recognised that JISC had been successful in developing datasets for research, for example the 1991 Census data, image collections, e-journals and geospatial data.
These types of collections were beginning to find use in learning and teaching but to help develop this use it was proposed that some targeted resource be allocated.
One of the major thrusts behind the programme was to improve the interaction between those involved in the development of learning environments and the national information systems and services being developed by the JISC.
To address these needs the call for projects included three strands: Implementation and development of the DNER later known as Infrastructure JISC enhancements for learning and teaching Evaluation studies relating to both strands A and B Strand A was concerned with projects that would enhance the developing DNER infrastructure and enable seamless access to quality-assured resources.
Strand B aimed to develop existing JISC services for learning and teaching, focusing on content issues and digital libraries in learning and teaching.
It was quite wide-ranging and it is little wonder the programme has not had a clear identity!
This was further compounded when, a year or so after the projects began, the concept of the DNER evolved to what we now call the 'Information Environment' and the DNER label was no longer used.
Despite the identity crisis an enormously rich set of projects has been taken forward; and in the vast majority of cases with high levels of success.
At the start of the programme the projects were grouped into themed clusters.
These were: Images, Moving Pictures and Sound, Data, Museum, Access to Learning and Teaching, and for those without a clear home, Miscellaneous.
In addition, for the first time within JISC, a large-scale formative evaluation, known as EDNER [4] was funded; this was undertaken by a team from the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) and the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT).
With this ambitious and diverse set of objectives, it is sometimes difficult to identify clearly what inroads the programme has made towards the establishment of a richer digital environment.
The former Head of JISC Development, Dr Alicia Wise, was, as JISC Collections Manager at the time, one of the main authors of the 5/99 circular.
She believed that the programme would: ' help engagement of the JISC and the UK higher education community with a fresh spectrum of content specialists, for example museums and moving pictures and sound providers helping to fuse this expertise with that from the e-learning community to help invigorate [more well established] digital library activities.'
Chris Rusbridge, another of the circular's authors, says in Ariadne Issue 26: 'To me, the idea of the DNER is simple: consistent access to the widest range of stuff.
[5] If we take these as points against which to judge the programme activity, then it appears to have contributed substantially.
Without a doubt the considerable dedication of the project staff in exploring and answering these issues has resulted in new insights, products and greater understanding of how to deliver content and address users' needs.
For example the Implementing the Technical Architecture at MIMAS (ITAM) [6] Project has helped to establish a deeper and more practical understanding of the architecture [7] that supports the Information Environment (formerly the DNER).
ITAM used the MIMAS [8] range of JISC-supported services to build an example of the architecture, focusing on accessibility to heterogenous resources and based on machine-to-machine (M2M) interchange.
The project created collection descriptions of resources and exposed them for harvesting via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).
It also implemented OpenURLs and trialled the SFX OpenURL resolver.
This work has helped to evaluate and demonstrate the value of OpenURL technology, implementing this into Zetoc [9] and JSTOR [10] and trialling SFX across a small number of universities.
In addition the project's work on the Research Support Library Programme (RSLP) collection level description has provided invaluable input to the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) [11] which is now being developed by MIMAS, University of Liverpool and UKOLN as a core shared infrastructure service to support discovery within the Information Environment.
A project that has seen promising take-up is Java Access For Electronic Resources (JAFER) [12].
This project was led by a well established team of programmers at Oxford University Computing Centre and also involved Crossnet.
It set out to create a lightweight useable Z39.50 toolkit.
At the time of funding Z39.50 was the main search protocol promoted as part of the architecture.
However its take-up has always been hindered by the complexity of the configuration required to implement it.
JAFER offers a way around this, the toolkit is Java-based and offers software for both client and server application.
It is available at SourceForge.net with an Open Source licence and has not only been taken up at Oxford University for cross-searching online catalogues but is being used more widely.
Recently it has been a major part of the supporting architecture for some developments looking at the linking of virtual learning environments (VLEs) and digital libraries (DiVLE) [13].
In this way JAFER is helping to ensure consistent access to a wide range of 'stuff'.
Other 5/99 developments that are clearly important in terms of the Information Environment include the Subject Portals Project (SPP) [14].
This project was undertaken initially as a development purely associated with the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [15].
It aimed to raise users' awareness of the resources within the JISC Information Environment by developing portal services for use at five of the RDN hubs: BIOME, EEVL, HUMBUL, PSIGate and SOSIG.
The services included an authentication/authorisation service; a cross-search of specially selected resources and a user profiling and alerting service.
The project has now gone on to develop 'portlet' services that can be embedded into other portal framework software.
The application of these 'portlets' can be beyond subject portals, for instance an institution might use them within a library portal or otherwise.
Portals continue to be a major aspect of the Information Environment's presentation layer (the layer from which users interact with the environment).
There are other portals, such the GeoData portal, (now GoGeo!)
[16] that began life within the 5/99 programme.
As a result of these developments there are practical examples of portals across subjects and data type; these form the basis of the Information Environment Portals Programme that is continuing to develop a wider range of portals with further user testing.
One of the strengths of these projects has been the responsiveness of the teams involved; they have had to be flexible, assess appropriate technology and address user requirements.
The JISC is now undertaking work to examine these aspects more thoroughly in order to inform the future direction of JISC-supported portals.
Before moving on to the content-orientated projects, it is worth mentioning Xgrain [17] as it is a nice example of a broker within the IE.
X-grain, developed at EDINA [18], facilitates crosssearching and like JAFER is based on Z39.50.
The main objective of the Xgrain Project was to enhance the usability of specialist abstracting and indexing, and of electronic tables of contents services across the JISC Information Environment in learning and teaching.
The broker has been promoted as a tool for the novice user to help interrogate specialist databases.
It has achieved a level of success which has helped prove that, with the right tools, types of content more traditionally used by researchers and only rarely by undergraduates will be used more widely and by the novice.
Xgrain is continuing work and looking at further integration within SPP and institutional portals.
As with other outputs from the 5/99 programme, the transfer to service model is complicated and there is still work to be done to ascertain how to test and take outputs forward so that a robust service model supports tools like Xgrain.
Within strand B a number of content projects were funded; these covered areas as indicated by the cluster names outlined earlier.
Previously JISC had hosted various census data at a number of institutions.
While these datasets were valuable for research, they were not easy to translate for learning and teaching purposes.
The Collection of Historical and Contemporary Census Data and Materials (CHCC) Project [19] has provided a one-stop point of access for these census datasets with accompanying learning and teaching resources and built-in interactive visualisation software.
For example a user can select unemployment from the database and this will be translated into a map showing regional variations of unemployment.
The resources are now being used in a joint US and UK venture where the Universities of Leeds, Southampton and California Santa Barbara are embedding technology firmly into undergraduate Geography courses [20].
Still image resources have been created via the programme and various projects have created new learning and teaching material involving digitised images.
The Crafts Study Centre Project [21], led by the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, has developed a digital resource of images of 20th Century crafts.
A high proportion of the artefacts in the Crafts Study Centre's collections of 20th Century crafts and textual items which form part of the archive has been digitised, producing a total resource of 4000 images.
A set of learning and teaching materials to exploit the resource has been developed; these provide content in the area of modern craft, an area which has little material to support it at present.
Museum content was new to the JISC at the time of the 5/99 circular and is a medium that lends itself particularly well to learning and teaching.
The Digital Egypt [22] Project based at The Petrie Museum and University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Studies has developed a resource that allows users to explore the Egyptology content online.
The project has developed a timeline, spatial, audio and 3D virtual reality approach with accompanying learning and teaching materials.
The project promotes new visual media as agents for progress, to support learning in all disciplines from a single online platform.
Similarly rich content has been produced from archival collections as in the Publications and Archives in Teaching Online Information Sources (PATOIS) Project [23] based at the Archaeology Data Service (ADS).
This project has developed four tutorial packs to introduce students to the electronic analysis and use of primary archaeological data resources: monument inventories, excavation archives, research reports and multi-disciplinary datasets.
One of the learning and teaching packages, for example, examines the excavation of the burial vault in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields, allowing users to explore life and death in 18th and 19th Century London.
It introduces the user to the records from those excavations, to the subsequent research by historians and medical scientists and looks at the issues surrounding the excavation of human remains.
Institutions are actively using this resource and a model to support expansion is being developed involving the ADS and the institutions.
A few projects in the area of Moving Pictures and Sound were taken forward.
One example is the Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (TRILT) [24] Project which set out to enhance the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) [25] Television Index service.
TRILT is the most comprehensive online database of its kind ingesting approximately 1.1 million records per year describing UK television and radio programmes, including terrestrial, cable, and satellite television (with regional variations), all national and many local radio stations.
Data is made available at least 10 days before transmission, and is retained, building a unique archive of programme information and schedules.
Selected programmes of likely value to higher and further education are evaluated and enhanced with information including improved descriptions, additional keywords, bibliographies, Web links and indications of sources of post-transmission copies, including the BUFVC Off-Air Recording Back-Up Service.
During the project period TRILT was hosted by EDINA on a database engine that the national data centre developed.
It is now being hosted by the BUFVC and has (since mid-January 2003) been released to the Athens authenticated FE/HE community.
Like PATOIS and CHCC, TRILT is one of the 5/99 projects that has helped to make existing services and data more relevant to learning.
Virtual learning environments (VLEs) were quite immature at the conception of the programme and there was little activity involving the linking of digital libraries to VLEs.
To begin to address this issue, the programme funded the INSPIRAL [26] study, led by the University of Strathclyde.
The purpose of the study was to identify and analyse critically the issues that surround linking VLEs and digital libraries, focusing on institutional and end-user perspectives.
As a result of the INSPIRAL recommendations, the JISC funded a set of projects known as Linking Digital Libraries and Virtual Learning Environments (DiVLE), as mentioned earlier.
These were ten projects of ten months' duration; they mainly focused on pilots that implemented linking between VLEs and digital library systems.
These projects have shown that there are significant changes in the roles and workloads of academics and librarians if such developments are to be fully realised, that more effort is needed in the design of VLEs to support student needs and that making the environment more attractive is required to embed VLEs and digital libraries completely in learning and teaching.
There are also technical issues to be resolved, for example the mapping of library metadata with learning metadata schemas.
These projects have helped identify the next steps as well as helping to share experience widely within the education sector.
The Interactive Content Exchange (ICONEX) [27] Project based at Lincolnshire College and Hull University was an early innovator in the area of repurposeable, shareable and interactive learning objects.
It addressed the issue of the provision, location, exchange and use of interactive learning objects within the JISC Information Environment and how they might connect to VLEs.
The team has established a Web-based repository of interactive content which is browsable by standard metadata and populated this with exemplar interactive content.
The key findings from this project have fed into the Exchange for Learning (X4L) [28] Programme and the ICONEX team and its lessons continue to influence the X4L Programme.
For example the project team has helped develop Xtensis [29], one of the development software platforms being used for the JORUM (X4L Learning Materials Repository).
In addition the project has been involved in the testing of the National Learning Network (NLN) materials [30] using the Xtensis software prior to their hosting at MIMAS.
A number of tools for building interoperable digital architectures are available as a result of the 5/99 programme and many developments have sown the seeds of national infrastructure that help form the Information Environment, for example portals.
Materials developed through 5/99 are available to UK higher and further education either via services or from institutions.
There are hard questions that surround the sustainability of the digital environment to be answered and through these projects probably more questions than answers have arisen in this area.
However there are useful lessons for the projects, the JISC and the community.
For example looking at service models from the start will help.
Moreover the EDNER study found that before embarking on such developments we need to be better at thinking of the intended impacts and uses of the products.
As with all developments these might change along the way but to be clearer at the start can help make something more relevant and therefore more likely to have a significant impact.
Sometimes stating what seems obvious is required.
Conclusions So what was 5/99?
It wasn't just a number.
It was an extensive programme of activity that has laid the foundation for a number of important developments that are being taken further within the JISC or elsewhere in the digital library and learning arena.
Unfortunately this article has only been able to mention a handful of the many projects that have helped to contribute towards the vision of a digital environment that fully supports the needs of learners and teachers.
The enthusiasm and hard work of all the 5/99 project staff have been invaluable in helping to deliver this and the project outputs will undoubtedly continue to have influence and use.
Through the programme we now have more consistent access to 'stuff' and there have been some bridges built between the digital library and learning community with a number of traditional research collections now being more orientated towards learning.
As EDNER reported, there is still a considerable way to go!
The JISC is now looking in more detail at the architectures and frameworks that support e-learning activity.
It is looking at where the Information Environment architecture intersects with these and how they support and require different or the same activities across Further and Higher Education [31].
References The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk JISC Information Environment http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ie Description of the DNER http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=dner_adding_value EDNER http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/edner/welcome.html After eLib, Chris Rusbridge, January 2001, Ariadne Issue 26 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/chris/ Implementing the Technical Architecture at MIMAS (ITAM) http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/itam.html JISC Information Environment Architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ Manchester Information & Associated Services http://www.mimas.ac.uk/ Electronic Tables of Contents from the British Library http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ The UK JSTOR Mirror Service at MIMAS http://www.mimas.ac.uk/jstor/ The Information Environment Service Registry http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/ Java Access For Electronic Resources http://www.jafer.org/ Linking Digital Libraries with Virtual Learning Environments Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_divle The Subject Portals Project http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/ Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Go-Geo Data Portal http://hds.essex.ac.uk/Go-Geo/Background.htm The Xgrain Project http://edina.ac.uk/projects/joinup/xgrain/ EDINA http://edina.ac.uk/ The Collection of Historical and Contemporary Census Data project http://www.chcc.ac.uk/ Digital Libraries in the Classroom Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_dlitc The Crafts Study Centre Project http://www.craftscentre.surrart.ac.uk/ Digital Egypt Project http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/ Publications and Archives in Teaching Online Information Sources Project (PATOIS) http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/patois/ Television and Radio Indexing for Learning and Teaching Project http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/TRILT/ British Universities Film and Video Council http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/ Investigating Portals for Information Resources and Learning (INSPIRAL) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_inspiral Interactive Content Exchange Project http://www.iconex.hull.ac.uk/ Exchange for learning Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_x4l Xtensis software platform http://www.xor.ltd.uk/xtensis/ National Learning Network Materials http://www.nln.ac.uk/materials/ JISC Frameworks Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_frameworks Author Details Rachel Bruce Acting Team Leader for the Information Environment Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Email: r.bruce@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk Balviar Notay 5/99 Learning and Teaching Programme Manager Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Email: b.notay@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "The JISC 5/99 Programme: What's in a number?"
Author: Rachel Bruce and Balviar Notay Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/5-99/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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E-Archiving: An Overview of Some Repository Management Software Tools Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines E-Archiving: An Overview of Some Repository Management Software Tools Buzz data software java html database xml apache archives metadata accessibility identifier schema repositories eprints copyright video preservation linux png cache gif perl solaris ejournal mysql jpg openurl tomcat dspace licence rdbms url research Citation BibTex RIS Marion Prudlo discusses LOCKSS, EPrints, and DSpace in terms of who uses them, their cost, underlying technology, the required know-how, and functionalities.
In recent years initiatives to create software packages for electronic repository management have mushroomed all over the world.
Some institutions engage in these activities in order to preserve content that might otherwise be lost, others in order to provide greater access to material that might otherwise be too obscure to be widely used such as grey literature.
The open access movement has also been an important factor in this development.
Digital initiatives such as pre-print, post-print, and document servers are being created to come up with new ways of publishing.
With journal prices, especially in the science, technical and medical (STM) sector, still out of control, more and more authors and universities want to take an active part in the publishing and preservation process themselves.
In picking a tool, a library has to consider a number of questions: What material should be stored in the repository?
Is long-term preservation an issue?
Which software should be chosen?
What is the cost of setting the system up?
and How much know-how is required?
This article will discuss LOCKSS [1], EPrints [2] and DSpace [3] which are some of the most widely known repository management tools, in terms of who uses them, their cost, underlying technology, the required know-how, and functionalities.
LOCKSS Libraries usually do not purchase the content of an electronic journal but a licence that allows access to the content for a certain period of time.
If the subscription is not renewed the content is usually no longer available.
Before the advent of electronic journals, libraries subscribed to their own print copies since there was no easy and fast way to access journals somewhere else.
Nowadays libraries no longer need to obtain every journal they require in print since they can provide access via databases and e-journal subscriptions.
Subscribing to a print journal means that the library owns the journal for as long as it chooses to maintain the journal by archiving it in some way.
Thus a side effect of owning print copies is that somewhere in the U.S. or elsewhere there are a number of libraries preserving copies of a journal by binding and/or microfilming issues and making them available through interlibrary loan.
It is this system of preservation that Project LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) developed at Stanford University is recreating in cyberspace.
With LOCKSS, content of electronic journals that was available while the library subscribed to it can be archived and will still be available even after a subscription expires.
This works for subscriptions to individual e-journals, titles purchased through consortia, and open access titles.
Due to the nature of LOCKSS, a system that slowly collects new content, it is suitable for archiving stable content that does not change frequently or erratically.
Therefore, the primary aim of the LOCKSS system is to preserve access to electronic journals since journal content is only added at regular intervals.
Key in this project is that an original copy of the journal is preserved instead of a separately created back-up copy to ensure the reliability of the content.
It is estimated that approximately six redundant copies of a title are required to safeguard a title's long-term preservation [4].
Participation in LOCKSS is open to any library.
Nearly 100 institutions from around the world are currently participating in the project, most of them in the United States and in Europe.
Among the publishing platforms that are making content available for archiving are Project Muse, Blackwell Publishers, Emerald Group Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, and Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Additionally, a number of periodicals that are freely available over the Web are being archived as well.
LOCKSS archives publications that appear on a regular schedule and that are delivered through http and have a URL.
Publications like Web sites that change frequently are not suited for archiving with LOCKSS.
If a journal contains advertisements that change, the ads will not be preserved.
Currently, it is being investigated if LOCKSS can be used to archive government documents published on the Web.
In another initiative, LOCKSS is used to archive Web sites that no longer change.
The advantage of preserving content with LOCKSS is that it can be done cheaply and without having to invest much time.
Libraries that participate in the LOCKSS Project need a LOCKSS virtual machine which can be an inexpensive generic computer.
The computer needs to be able to connect to the Internet, although a dial-up connection is not sufficient.
Minimum requirements for this machine are a CPU of at least 600MHz, at least 128MB RAM, and one or two disk drives that can store at least 60GB.
Everything that is needed to create the virtual machine is provided through the LOCKSS software.
LOCKSS boots from a CD which also contains the operating system OpenBSD.
The required software such as the operating system is an open source product [5].
Configuration information is made available on a separate floppy disk.
Detailed step by step downloading and installation information can be found on the LOCKSS site [6].
In order to be able to troubleshoot problems that may occur, the person who installs and configures LOCKSS should have technical skills and experience in configuring software.
Once LOCKSS is set up, it pretty much runs on its own and needs little monitoring from a systems administrator.
For technical support, institutions can join the LOCKSS Alliance.
The Alliance helps participants to facilitate some of the work such as obtaining permissions from publishers.
LOCKSS collects journal content by continuously crawling publisher sites and preserves the content by caching it.
A number of formats are accepted (HTML, jpg, gif, waf, pdf).
LOCKSS preserves only the metadata input from publishers rather than local data input from libraries.
Libraries have the option to create metadata in the administration module for each title that is archived.
When requested, the cache distributes content by acting as a Web proxy.
The system then either retrieves the copy from the publisher's site or if it is no longer available there from its cache.
Crawling publisher sites requires that institutions first obtain permission to do so from the publisher.
This permission is granted through the licence agreement.
A model licence language for the LOCKSS permission is available on the LOCKSS page [7].
Publishers will then add to their Web site a page that lists available volumes for a journal.
The page also indicates that LOCKSS has permission to collect the content.
Since individual journals have their own idiosyncrasies, plug-ins are required to help LOCKSS manage them.
The plug-in gives LOCKSS information like where to find a journal, its publishing frequency, and how often to crawl.
For a publishing platform like HighWire only one plug-in is necessary.
The LOCKSS plug-in generation tool allows the administrator to create and test plug-ins without having to do any programming.
An essential aspect of electronic archiving is to ascertain that the material is available, that it is reliable, and that it does not contain any errors.
With LOCKSS the process of checking content for faults and backing it up is completely automated.
A LOCKSS computer continually compares the content it has for a certain journal in its cache with the content of the same journal in the cache of other LOCKSS computers.
The system conducts polls with those LOCKSS peers.
This process is accomplished with the LCAP (Library Cache Auditing Protocol) peer-to-peer polling system.
If discrepancies are detected between two copies, the problem is fixed by downloading a fresh copy either from the publisher or from another LOCKSS computer without human intervention.
In this system LOCKSS can repair any damage, even if disaster strikes and all content is lost from a cache.
The polling system ensures that content is preserved reliably, that errors are eliminated, and that missing data is fixed.
If journal content on a publisher's Web site is not available, LOCKSS serves the content out of its cache.
This process is invisible to the user.
A good preservation system is a safe system.
Frequent virus attacks and other intrusions make security an especially pressing issue when it comes to archiving content on the Web.
The LOCKSS polling system can detect when a peer is being attacked.
Human intervention is then required to prevent damage.
LOCKSS' goal is to make it as costly and time-consuming as possible for somebody to attack the system.
Even if the system is attacked and some peers are eliminated, the decentralised architecture of LOCKSS is a security measure in itself in so far as there is no single point of failure due to the physically distributed nature of the caches.
LOCKSS is not concerned with the preservation medium itself that is used for archiving.
Should the hardware become obsolete, the entire cached content will have to be moved onto a new storage medium.
However, in order to find answers to the still burning question of how to deal with issues concerning the long-term accessibility of material even when the technology changes, LOCKSS is now addressing the question of format migration.
Changes in technology, for example in file formats, may make electronic resources unreadable.
The LOCKSS creators have now started to develop a system that makes it possible to render content collected in one format into another format.
This works through the 'migration on access' method which means that content is preserved in its format until a reader accesses the content, at which point it is converted into a current format.
In January 2005 the LOCKSS team published an article in which it was announced that, as a proof-of-concept, the team had successfully managed to migrate the GIF format into a PNG format [8].
Currently, LOCKSS is developing format converters that will facilitate format migration on a larger scale.
In order to develop this process, LOCKSS is planning to integrate format and bibliographic metadata extraction.
EPrints A growing number of authors are bypassing the traditional publishers of scholarly communication and are turning towards self-publishing instead.
Some provide their works on preprint servers such as arXiv.org [9], the CERN Document Server [10], or Cogprints [11].
Others make their work freely available in post-print servers to allow publishers to make use of articles for some time first before the copyright goes back to the author.
A number of institutions have also become active in preserving and providing access to grey literature produced on their campuses such as the GrayLIT Network [12], ETH E-Collection [13] or SPIRES [14].
Some repositories are hybrids that store more than one type of material.
EPrints is a tool that is used to manage the archiving of research in the form of books, posters, or conference papers.
Its purpose is not to provide a long-term archiving solution that ensures that material will be readable and accessible through technology changes, but instead to give institutions a means to collect, store and provide Web access to material.
Currently, there are over 140 repositories worldwide that run the EPrints software.
For example, at the University of Queensland in Australia, EPrints is used as 'a deposit collection of papers that showcases the research output of UQ academic staff and postgraduate students across a range of subjects and disciplines, both before and after peer-reviewed publication.'
[15] The University of Pittsburgh maintains a PhilSci Archive for preprints in the philosophy of science [16].
EPrints is a free open source package that was developed at the University of Southampton in the UK [17].
It is OAI (Open Archives Initiative)-compliant which makes it accessible to cross-archive searching.
Once an archive is registered with OAI, 'it will automatically be included in a global program of metadata harvesting and other added-value services run by academic and scientific institutions across the globe.'
[18] The most current version is EPrints 2.3.11.
The initial installation and configuration of EPrints can be time consuming.
If the administrator sticks with the default settings, installation is quick and relatively easy.
EPrints requires no in-depth technical skills on the part of the administrator; however, he or she has to have some skills in the areas of Apache, mySQL, Perl, and XML.
The administrator installs the software on a server, runs scripts, and performs some maintenance.
To set up EPrints, a computer that can run a Linux, Solaris or MacOSX operating system is required.
Apache Web server, mySQL database, and the EPrints software itself are also necessary (all of which are open source products).
For technical support, administrators can consult the EPrints support Web site or subscribe to the EPrints technical mailing list [19].
EPrints comes with a user interface that can be customised.
The interface includes a navigation toolbar that contains links to Home, About, Browse, Search, Register, User Area, and Help pages.
Authors who want to submit material have to register first and are then able to log on in the User Area to upload material.
Authors have to indicate what kind of article they are uploading (book chapter, thesis, etc) and they have to enter the metadata.
Any metadata schema can be used with EPrints.
It is up to the administrator to decide what types of materials will be stored.
Based on those types the administrator then decides which metadata elements should be held for submitted items of a certain type.
Only 'title' and 'author' are mandatory data.
In addition to that a variety of information about the item can be stored such as whether the article has been published or not, abstract, keywords, and subjects.
Once the item has been uploaded, the author will be issued a deposit verification.
Uploaded material is first held in the so-called 'buffer' unless the administrator has disabled the buffer (in which case it is deposited into the archive right away).
The purpose of the buffer is to allow the submitted material to be reviewed before it is finally deposited.
Users of the archive have the option to browse by subject, author, year, EPrint type or latest addition.
They also have the option to search fields such as title, abstract or full text.
Available fields depend on which fields the administrator implemented.
An example of how the user interface works can be seen in the Cogprints archive [11].
In this archive citations on the results list contain the author name, publication date, title, publisher, and page numbers.
If a citation is accessed, the user can link to the full text or read an abstract first.
Subject headings and keywords are also displayed.
At the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, archive visitors and contributors can also view access statistics [20].
DSpace The DSpace open source software [21] has been developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and Hewlett-Packard.
The current version of DSpace is 1.2.1.
According to the DSpace Web site [22], the software allows institutions to capture and describe digital works using a custom workflow process distribute an institution's digital works over the Web, so users can search and retrieve items in the collection preserve digital works over the long term DSpace is used by more than 100 organisations [23].
For example, the Sissa Digital Library is an example of an Italian DSpace-based repositories [24].
It contains preprints, technical reports, working papers, and conference papers.
At the Universiteit Gent in Belgium, DSpace is used as an image archive that contains materials such as photographs, prints, drawings, and maps [25].
MIT itself has a large DSpace repository on its Web site for materials such as preprints, technical reports, working papers, and images [26].
DSpace is more flexible than EPrints in so far as it is intended to archive a large variety of types of content such as articles, datasets, images, audio files, video files, computer programs, and reformatted digital library collections.
DSpace also takes a first step towards archiving Web sites.
It is capable of storing self-contained, non-dynamic HTML documents.
DSpace is also OAIand OpenURL-compliant.
It is suitable for large and complex organisations that anticipate material submissions from many different departments (so-called communities) since DSpace's architecture mimics the structure of the organisation that uses DSpace.
This supports the implementation of workflows that can be customised for specific departments or other institutional entities.
DSpace runs on a UNIX-type operating system like LINUX or Solaris.
It also requires other open source tools such as the Apache Web server, Tomcat a Java servlet engine, a Java compiler, and PostgreSQL, a relational database management system.
As far as hardware is concerned, DSpace needs an appropriate server (for example an HP rx2600 or SunFire 280R) and enough memory and disk storage.
Running DSpace requires an experienced systems administrator.
He or she has to install and configure the system.
A Java programmer will have to perform some customising.
DSpace comes with user interfaces for the public, submitters, and administrators.
The interface used by the public allows for browsing and searching.
The look of the Web user interface can be customised.
Users can browse the content by community, title, author, or date, depending on what options the administrator provides for.
In addition to a basic search, an advanced search option for field searching can also be set up.
DSpace also supports the display of links to new collections and recent submissions on the user interface.
Access to items can be restricted to authorised users only.
A new initiative that DSpace launched earlier in 2004 is a collaboration with Google to enable searching across DSpace repositories.
Before authors can submit material they have to register.
When they are ready to upload items they do so through the MY DSpace page.
Users also have to input metadata which is based on the Dublin Core Metadata Schema.
A second set of data contains preservation metadata and a third set contains structural metadata for an item.
The data elements that are input by the person submitting the item are: author, title, date of issue, series name and report number, identifiers, language, subject keywords, abstract, and sponsors.
Only three data elements are required: title, language, and submission date.
Additional data may be automatically produced by DSpace or input by the administrator.
DSpace's authorisation system gives certain user groups specific rights.
For example administrators can specify who is allowed to submit material, who is allowed to review submitted material, who is allowed to modify items, and who is allowed to administer communities and collections.
Before the material is actually stored, the institution can decide to put it through a review process.
The workflow in DSpace allows for multiple levels of reviewing.
Reviewers can return items that are deemed inappropriate, Approvers check the submissions for errors for example in the metadata, and Metadata Editors have the authority to make changes to the metadata.
DSpace's capabilities go beyond storing items by making provisions for changes in file formats.
DSpace guarantees that the file does not change over time even if the physical media around it change.
It captures the specific format in which an item is submitted: 'In DSpace, a bitstream format is a unique and consistent way to refer to a particular file format.'
[27] The DSpace administrator maintains a bitstream format registry.
If an item is submitted in a format that is not in the registry, the administrator has to decide if that format should be entered into the registry.
There are three types of formats the administrator can select from: supported (the institution will be able to support bitstreams of this format in the long term), known (the institution will preserve the bitstream and make an effort to move it into the 'supported' category), unsupported (the institution will preserve the bitstream).
Systems administrators can refer to the DSpace Web site where they can find installation instructions, a discussion forum and mailing lists.
Institutions can also participate in the DSpace Federation [28] where administrators and designers share information.
Conclusion E-archiving is still in its infancy but nonetheless there are tools for libraries big and small to get an archiving project off the ground.
Any archiving project requires time, planning, and technical know-how.
It is up to the library to match the right tool to its needs and resources.
Participating in the LOCKSS project is feasible for libraries that do not have any content of their own to archive but that want to participate in the effort of preserving scientific works for the long term.
The type of data that can be preserved with LOCKSS is very limited since only material that is published at regular intervals is suitable to be archived with LOCKSS.
However, efforts are underway to explore if LOCKSS can be used for materials other than journals.
As far as administration goes, LOCKSS is easier and cheaper to administrate than EPrints and Dspace.
Moreover, LOCKSS has opened up a promising way to find a solution to the problem of preserving content in the long run through format migration.
Institutions that want to go beyond archiving journal literature can use EPrints or DSpace.
They are suitable for institutions that want to provide access to material that is produced on their campuses in addition to preserving journal literature.
More technical skills are necessary to set them up, but especially with Dspace, just about any kind of material can be archived.
EPrints is a viable option for archiving material on a specific subject matter, while DSpace is especially suitable for large institutions that expect to archive materials on a large scale from a variety of departments, labs and other communities on their campus.
References LOCKSS Web site http://lockss.stanford.edu/ EPrints Web site http://www.eprints.org/ DSpace Web site http://www.dspace.org/ LOCKSS.
(2004, April 1).
Collections Work.
Retrieved November 3, 2004, from http://lockss.stanford.edu/librarians/building.htm It can be downloaded from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lockss/ LOCKSS Web site http://www.lockss.org/publicdocs/install.html LOCKSS licence language http://lockss.stanford.edu/librarians/licenses.htm Rosental, D. S. H., Lipkis, T., Robertson, T. S., & Morabito, S. (2005, January).
Transparent format migration of preserved web content.
D-Lib Magazine, 11.1.
Retrieved March 8, 2005 from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/rosenthal/01rosenthal.html arXiv.org e-Print archive http://arxiv.org/ CERN Document Server http://cdsweb.cern.ch/?c=Preprints Cogprints electronic archive http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ GrayLIT Network http://graylit.osti.gov/ ETH E-Collection http://e-collection.ethbib.ethz.ch/index_e.html SPIRES High-Energy Physics Literature Database http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/hep/ ePrints@UQ http://eprint.uq.edu.au/ PhilSci Archive http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/ It can be downloaded from http://software.eprints.org/ University of Southampton.
(2004).
GNU EPrints 2 EPrints Handbook.
Retrieved March 22, 2005, from http://software.eprints.org/handbook/managing-background.php EPrints Mailing List http://software.eprints.org/docs/php/contact.php QUT ePrints http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ DSace can downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace/ MIT Libraries, & Hewlett-Packard Company.
(2003).
DSpace Federation.
Retrieved March 22, 2005 from http://www.dspace.org/ Denny, H. (2004, April).
DSpace users compare notes.
Retrieved March 22, 2005, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Web site: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/dspace-0414.html SISSA Digital Repository https://digitallibrary.sissa.it/index.jsp Pictorial Archive Ugent Library https://archive.ugent.be/handle/1854/219 DSpace at MIT https://dspace.mit.edu/index.jsp Bass, M. J., Stuve, D., Tansley, R., Branschofsky, M., Breton, P., et al.
(2002, March).
DSpace a sustainable solution for institutional digital asset services spanning the information asset value chain: ingest, manage, preserve, disseminate.
Retrieved March 22, 2005, from DSpace Web site: http://dspace.org/technology/functionality.pdf DSpace Federation http://dspace.org/federation/index.html Author Details Marion Prudlo Head of Acquisitions Stadtund Universitätsbibliothek Bern (Public and University Library Bern) Email: marion.prudlo@stub.unibe.ch Web site: http://www.stub.ch/ Return to top Article Title: "E-Archiving: An Overview of Some Repository Management Software Tools" Author: Marion Prudlo Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/prudlo/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sense of the South West Conference: Collaboration for Sustainability Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sense of the South West Conference: Collaboration for Sustainability Buzz framework database portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility identifier vocabularies preservation z39.50 marc opera e-learning curation ict interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Katie Lusty reports on a one-day conference on the sustainability of digitisation projects, held in Bath on 8 October 2004.
The conference on the sustainability of Big Lottery Fund projects was attended by about fifty participants from across the country and there were displays by members of the Sense of the South West Consortium, who organised the event.
Approaches to Sustainability The first speaker was Chris Anderson, Head of Programmes at the Big Lottery Fund, successor to NOF, (New Opportunities Fund).
He described the nof-digitise [1] projects, funded to the tune of £50m, as a great experiment.
The 150 projects had gained a wealth of experience in particular in the digitisation of learning materials.
Sustainability requirements had to be built in to the projects, covering the infrastructure, content and interactivity.
These were supposed to cover three years after the end of the project.
NOF had provided support including guidance on preparing business plans, workshops and other initiatives to facilitate networking and sharing of experiences.
Several general approaches to sustainability were outlined: Core Need Ensuring that the website becomes a core part of the organisation's operations.
The content should support the core work of the organisation, help it to achieve its performance indicators, make the site so well used and popular that it becomes identified with the organisation's brand image by partners and stakeholders.
Charging Generating income through charges, particularly for access to unique materials.
This includes charging for access to high quality digital images (as Etched is doing on a one-off basis and other projects such as Pathé [2] more systematically).
It could also include group licences to access high quality images (as SCRAN [3] is doing for example) or serving as a sales point for related goods (as with Tate On-line [4]).
There might be potential for licensing similar sites in other countries or packaging materials for provision through Curriculum On-line.
Sponsorship and Advertising The nature of the site might make it attractive to sponsors or the content of the site might make it possible for third parties to deliver their own services.
Specialist sites could be used to support niche marketing.
Using the Resource as a Basis for Services to Third Parties For example, the use of equipment to undertake digitisation, as has been done by Bristol's digitisation service, set up when NOF funding made it possible to purchase some expensive equipment.
Using the Resource as a Platform for Further Development For instance by adding other materials to the database.
On a wider level, experience gained from digitisation could be used to support other initiatives, such as eGovernment, Heritage Lottery Fund or MLA [5] strategies.
In conclusion we were urged to use imagination in finding ways of supporting projects through value-added services, income generation, collaboration, looking for best deals on hosting and encouraging user feedback, possibly using competitions as an encouragement.
Discussion emphasised the problems of small organisations in achieving sustainability.
They were encouraged to look for bigger partners.
It proved impossible to elicit from the Big Lottery Fund any commitment to funding further digitisation the matter was 'out to consultation'.
Susi Woodhouse, Senior Network Adviser, MLA (Museums Library and Archives Council) presented Chris Batt's paper which started by outlining the work of MLA.
It was investing in knowledge leading the drive to unlock the wealth of knowledge in museums, libraries and archives for everyone.
It was doing this through advocacy and drawing up policy guidelines.
Three main strands were: 'Renaissance in the regions' for museums 'Framework for the future' for public libraries The Archives Task Force The People's Network [6] was held up as a major achievement.
On the more immediate theme of digital futures it was clear that the digital content achieved so far through NOF-Digitise and similar initiatives has greatly increased discovery and accessibility.
It has encouraged learning and enjoyment and created virtual collections which supported the national knowledge policy'.
There is a wide range of public programmes in the UK including Culture on-line [7], Curriculum on-line [8] and a raft of lottery-funded programmes.
This has provided added value through virtual collections, new services and wider access, resulting in more active citizens.
The problem was that central government may not see the need to do anything further, pointing to the role of local authorities to fund local digitisation programmes, and to the availability of lottery funding.
More to Cyberspace than Google A significant statistic is the 96:50 ratio while 96% have access to ICT only 50% use it.
Technology must be invisible.
There was a wide range of portals available but for most users Google was the main point of access.
This produced large numbers of undigested hits.
Irrelevance was heightened by the fact that the user was largely invisible to the information provider, collections remained essentially separate and the web was basically supplier-driven, often by commercial suppliers.
The resulting invisibility of many key resources could have a significant adverse effect on sustainability, unless issues such as value and impact, new and more inclusive audiences, co-ordination of resources and a greater user focus were addressed.
MLA is addressing these problems with programmes which aimed to improve the 96:50 ratio.
One initiative was the Common Information Environment Group [9], which included the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [10], the National Health Service, the British Library [11], the National Archives [12] and the Department for Education and Skills [13].
The Information Environment Model they were developing started with the user and was based on identifying relevant content regardless of the institution that might hold it.
The Sense of Place projects were being used as a test demonstrator.
The concept of "Myberspace" meant that the user would be more highly motivated by being presented with objects from diverse collections which reflect personal interests.
This should require fewer search skills but produce greater user satisfaction, supporting people's progress and making for a more informed society.
Discussion revealed some suspicion that what was being proposed was just another portal, and there were already a number of specialist portals available.
If Google was already doing the job to the satisfaction of many, why not work with Google?
Future-proofing a Complex Universe Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN, then spoke on future-proofing technology.
She pointed out that the 'global knowledge space' was a complex universe with: A wide range of providers: culture/heritage/leisure/learning A wide range of resources: text/database/image/sound/3-D A wide range of distribution: local/regional/national/global A wide range of digital repositories: closed/open/curated/non-curated/commercial/official A wide range of user needs: currency/search strategies, etc Interoperability was vital including the development of thesauri which could provide semantic interoperability.
The life cycle approach to building digital collections could help: considering issues of creation, management, development, access, repackaging.
Several information infrastructures or environments were under development: e-Learning, JISC, Virtual Research, Common Information.
Even more standards were available a list of thirty was shown, including Dublin Core [14], Z39/50 [15], MARC [16], etc.
Digital preservation and curation was vital.
The BBC Domesday disc [17] was held up as an example and today the average life of a web site was 44 days the lifespan of a housefly!
Here too there was more than one approach: the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) [18], ERPANET [19], the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [20], the UK Web Archiving Consortium [21].
Persistent digital identifiers could be an answer to the ephemeral nature of the Web but again there was more than one initiative.
Liz then outlined how UKOLN was seeking to help the information community, citing the role of the Technical Advisory Service which drew up technical standards and guidelines, published papers and ran workshops.
UKOLN had also developed the EnrichUK [22] portal which hosts the nof-digitise [1] projects.
In conclusion the landscape was still shifting, vocabularies were varied and there was the ironic situation that standards and interoperability could stifle innovation.
Sustainability in and through Europe Those whose minds were suffering from overload by this stage were not helped in the after-lunch slot when Rob Davies of MDR spoke on the Sustainability of Cultural and Heritage projects in and through Europe.
He outlined his work on SeamlessUK, a finding tool for community information which stretched across local and national providers.
The sustainability of this had been hit by rival programmes, not least one from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, each with different taxonomies.
Work was now in hand to merge the taxonomies and collaborate more closely.
In Europe there seemed even more room for overlap.
Acronyms, abbreviations and projects abounded: IST (the EU's Information Society Technologies), for example, had now reached FP6 (Sixth Framework Programme) eContent had now metamorphosed into eContent+ (150 million Euros available for cultural and educational projects) Digicult forms part of IST (the UK does well, but not, apparently, as well as Italy) E-Ten [23] was targeted at services with a trans-European dimension but only attracted 10% funding An added problem was that the extension of the European Community eastwards means that there are more applicants for the available funding.
Then there were the structural funds more abbreviations: ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) ESF (European Social Fund) EQUAL (funded by ESF) InterregIII (financed by the ERDF) Other programmes of more potential relevance for libraries include: PUBLICA [24] PULMAN [25] CALIMERA [26] (a network for European local cultural institutions) Minerva [27] Michael [28] It's not easy to obtain money from these sources!
Their relevance to the sustainability of existing projects is in any case small they were really looking for innovation.
Applicants had to be ready to submit proposals in a short time-slot and then often had to wait for ages.
They also needed partners in other countries.
The odds were about 5:1 against acceptance; there was no guaranteed continuity; after three years, projects were off chasing funding once more.
However Rob pointed out that not all projects may need to do this: Not every project is intended to produce something sustainable Some projects don't produce anything worth sustaining Some projects merge into wider developments Sustainable doesn't necessarily mean for ever projects should have some idea of their 'best-before' date So, perhaps we should hope that our projects are not quite significant as to require us to explore the labyrinthine corridors of Europe.
Sustainability Closer to Home A return to local practicalities with Tim Badman, who spoke as Team Leader on sustainability issues and partnership working on the Jurassic Coast World Heritage site [29].
He described the site, essentially a walk backwards in time as one progressed from east to west through successive geological layers.
He drew comparative examples from Egypt where environmental preservation had made great strides in recent decades.
He maintained that sustainability was difficult to define and difficult to achieve as things had an inherent tendency to fall apart.
He drew an amusing analogy with an animal.
It has to have: A skeleton: the structure of the project Flesh: the management element Blood: the flow and monitoring of information Skin: presentation and access A heart: people and partners A brain: planning and direction A personality: important for customer relations and community involvement.
It was important to promote the work of a project, to regenerate and consult and (continuing the biological analogy) to produce offspring i.e.
successor projects.
Sustainability through Sponsorship Finally Phil Gibby, Director, Arts and Business South West, discussed how sponsorship could help secure sustainability.
Cultural sponsorship had grown from £500,000 in 1976 to £120m in 2003 and had extended from theatre, opera and dance to a wider range of projects.
Museums received £20m and "heritage" projects some £5m.
Sponsorship had evolved from patronage through tax breaks, through the concept of being a good corporate citizen to looking for some sort of return on investment.
There was therefore a mixture of motives: the more altruistic wish to put something back into the community, or the thought that it might enhance the brand image.
So businesses might want an association with our product or access to our market.
The presentation ended with a six-point guide to chasing sponsorship: Can you deliver?
Know your offer what have you got?
Identify your targets who exactly are you asking?
Get the ask right select the correct level of approach Don't sell yourself short "Always be closing" and make sure you get it in writing!
Conclusions Did the day answer any questions?
For me it simply raised more.
Working in a changing landscape where it will take some time for things to settle, I will be looking for salvation closer to home.
The materials in Devon's collections have been digitised primarily because of their value to Devon.
It is therefore Devon that will have to grasp the nettle and, while we can look for fairy godmothers in Europe, the prospects are dim (or even Grimm).
The way to sustainability in Devon is for digital preservation to become one of the core functions of the MLA community in Devon, using basic, nofrills standards to archive what we have achieved so far.
Thereafter the arrival of special projects will just be the icing on the cake.
References nof-digitise http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/content/digitise.asp British Pathé http://www.britishpathe.com/ SCRAN http://www.scran.ac.uk/ Tate On-line http://www.tate.org.uk/ Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) http://www.mla.gov.uk/ The People's Network http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/ Culture on-line http://www.cultureonline.gov.uk/ Curriculum on-line http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk/ Common Information Environment Group http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=wg_cie_home Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ British Library http://www.bl.uk/ The National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ Department for Education and Skills DfES http://www.dfes.gov.uk/ The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative http://dublincore.org/ Z39/50 http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ MARC http://www.loc.gov/marc/ "Domesday Redux: The rescue of the BBC Domesday Project videodiscs", Jeffrey Darlington, Andy Finney and Adrian Pearce, July 2003, Ariadne Issue 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/tna/ Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) http://www.dpconline.org/ ERPANET http://www.erpanet.org/ Digital Curation Centre (DCC) http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ UK Web Archiving Consortium http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ EnrichUK, portal for the nof-digitise projects http://www.enrichuk.net/ European Teacher Education Network (ETEN) http://www.eten-online.org/ Telematics for Libraries : PUBLICA http://www.cordis.lu/libraries/en/projects/publica.html PULMAN http://www.pulmanweb.org CALIMERA http://www.calimera.org Minerva http://www.minervaeurope.org Michael (Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe) http://www.michael-culture.org Jurassic Coast World Heritage Web site http://www.swgfl.org.uk/jurassic/ Author Details Katie Lusty Professional Services Torbay Council Libraries Devon Email: Katie.Lusty@torbay.gov.uk Web site: http://www.torbay.gov.uk/libraries Return to top Article Title: "Sense of the South West Conference: Collaboration for Sustainability" Author: Katie Lusty Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue41/sustain-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Libraries Policy, Planning and Practice Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Libraries Policy, Planning and Practice Buzz archives repositories preservation url research Citation BibTex RIS Bruce Royan considers the ironies of communicating the state of the art of digital libraries by means of a print publication.
There is an irony in reviewing a printed book about the Digital Library.
The gestation period of monographic print publishing is such that it is unreasonable to expect it to be fully up to date.
From internal evidence it is clear that no chapter in the book under review was completed more recently than April 2003.
This may explain the lack of mention of developments such as the UK Parliamentary Select Committee Report on Scientific Publication [1], or the Public Access Proposal of the US National Institutes of Health [2].
If it is current awareness the reader is seeking, the reader would be better sticking to Ariadne!
On the other hand, the student or library practitioner seeking some guidance on policy and planning for Digital Libraries and some case studies on good practice, will find this book a pretty good place to start.
After background overviews of federally funded digital library research in the USA and the seminal UK eLib programme, the Policy and Planning section contains clear and helpful chapters on issues of funding, content, services, preservation and evaluation, which together go some way towards justifying the book's claim (on the dustcover synopsis) to be a 'handbook'.
Interfiled with these chapters, but different in nature from them, is Stevan Harnad's well-argued 35-page case for author self-archiving and institutional repositories.
The rest of the work consists of a wide variety of interesting case studies, including the Glasgow Digital Library, UCE Electronic Library, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, the Variations projects for music at Indiana University, and the Library of Congress digital programme.
The section is completed by a suitably visionary look into the future by Mel Collier, extrapolating from experiences at the University of Tilburg.
Considering this is the work of 23 contributors across 4 continents, and that the approach to editing has been self-avowedly 'light touch', this book reads consistently well.
The writing is never turgid, usually informative, and sometimes entertaining I particularly liked 'Law's Law': User friendly systems aren't The production values of the book go some way to justifying its cost, and the whole thing is attractively laid out (although I take issue with having as many as 20 pages of preliminary material: the List of Acronyms would have been better at the back, and I'm not sure about the necessity of separate lists of Figures and of Tables).
Each chapter ends with useful references (though confirmation of the Accessed Date for cited urls would have been helpful).
It was impossible to fault the excellent Bibliography and Index.
No book on such a fast-moving topic can truly reflect the state of the art.
The digital library practitioner is likely to be using electronic sources to keep abreast in any case.
But as a starting point for getting up to speed with the issues of digital library policy and planning, and as an introduction to good practice, this book would be a reasonable purchase.
In that sense, it does exactly what it says on the cover.
References Draft House of Commons, Science and Technology Committee, "Scientific Publications: Free for all?"
HC 399-I, July 2004 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf Draft Proposal for Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information, September 2004 http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html Author Details Professor Bruce Royan Principal Consultant Concurrent Computing Ltd Email: bruce.royan@concurrentcomputing.co.uk Web site: http://www.concurrentcomputing.co.uk Return to top Article Title: "Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning and Practice" Author: Bruce Royan Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/royan-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library Buzz data framework html dissemination infrastructure archives metadata repositories copyright preservation cataloguing jpeg provenance mets edrms cd-rom interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Chris Hilton and Dave Thompson discuss plans for work with born digital archival material at the Wellcome Library.
Society trusts libraries and archives to ensure that the report we read or the information we rely on for research will still be available when next we need it.
The digital world presents new challenges of acquisition and life cycle management for libraries, archives and readers.
This article looks at the first steps taken by the Wellcome Library to include born digital material [1] into its collections.
Plans for the Future The Wellcome Library acknowledges that digital material will form part of its collections in the future.
As more members of our donor/creator community produce their records in digital form, we must actively seek out this material if our collections are to grow and remain relevant.
The Library enjoys significant support for its plans to collect digital material both from internal management and from archival staff.
This support is proving crucial in tiding the Library over a period of investigation, trial, evaluation and development.
Yet going digital involves more than simply accepting digital material on CD-ROM or floppy disk from our existing donor community.
We face a number of new challenges.
We need to decide on preferred preservation formats that suit our purpose, we need to identify tools to perform technical processes, and we have yet to determine what technical metadata we will need.
We are already clear on a number of key principles [2].
We intend to hold digital material in a managed environment such as a repository and we will collect descriptive and technical metadata about the material we hold.
What we collect will be in line with our Library collection development policy.
Most importantly we will make the collection and ongoing management of digital material an economically sustainable activity by building it into the everyday business of the Library.
Digital material will be integrated into existing collections, not treated as anything ‘different’.
The work that we have done to date has been to test and further refine these key principles.
Social Change, Not Just Technology Digital material sets its own challenges but will be handled within the broad intellectual framework provided by existing archival practice: respect for provenance and the integrity of the document, selection, structure, context and appraisal remain key to successful long-term life cycle management of digital material.
Existing ways of working will need modification, and the sociology of archive work, the relationship between donor and archivist, will adapt.
Digital material is evanescent and prone to obsolescence: archivists cannot rely on material waiting for decades in a storeroom before they encounter it.
To ensure that this material is captured and its integrity safeguarded, they will have to work with it quickly and establish precisely what we have, that it is what we wanted and expected, and that formats are accessible.
In fact, they will be obliged, where possible, to intervene much earlier in the life cycle of the material.
Archivists may even advise on its creation, offering opinions on the forms of record best suited to long-term survival.
How organisations’ own Electronic Document Records & Management Systems (EDRMS) may affect the process is not yet known, but experience with paper records suggests that there will be a huge range of records management models, from strictly controlled to virtually anarchic; and that even if there is a formal records management system we should be prepared for a similar range.
Even now, where an organisation that has deposited material at the Library has no records manager of its own, archivists may, as part of the maintenance of a good working relationship, provide records management advice.
So it is a possibility that the Library may end up functioning as a de facto EDRMS for some organisations.
The costs will have to be monitored and balanced against the benefits of obtaining the material; but generally all parties profit from this sort of arrangement, since the records received should improve in quality.
The need for much earlier access to material will have to be built into projections of future donation cycles and workloads.
The Library is actively engaging with its donor/creator community to identify ways in which this ideal can be realised.
Clear policy documents help our donors understand what we are trying to achieve and gives them the opportunity to contribute to the process.
Working more closely with organisations or individuals may also have an effect upon access arrangements: material is likely to arrive in semi-current form and to be subject to access restrictions.
There is likely to be a move towards regular, scheduled accessions, perhaps with the same cycle governing new material arriving and older material coming out of access restrictions.
As now, a donor may carry out selection or weeding in advance of transfer, liaising with the archivist.
The experience of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) [3] in preparing for ingest of electronic records suggests that appraisal is likely to take place at series level or higher, rather than file by file; this will probably also be the case when appraisal takes place after material has arrived in the archive.
Social change will also be felt within the Library and it is important to manage this impact.
Workflows must be tailored for use by non-specialists, since digital records will occur increasingly as part of all collections and will become part of the daily work of the Library, not a specialist extra.
As plans develop so increasing numbers of staff are included in the process, increasing levels of engagement.
Work to Date The Library is implementing a three-fold approach to digital materials.
We have implemented a developmental Fedora [4] digital object repository.
We are developing the policy framework within which we will work with material and we are modelling this using workflows, considering every step of the records life cycle from creation to eventual dissemination.
That has allowed us to see what factors may affect the process and where difficulties may arise.
Using the Fedora Digital Object Repository Using Fedora has introduced the Library to the basic concepts and processes of the acquisition and storage of born digital material.
We have shown that we can install a simple out-of-the-box system and use it to ingest and retrieve material.
We have made very few modifications to Fedora and have not yet worked on access to the material we have archived.
This has allowed us to focus on developing our internal processes in a way that does not depend on any one technology.
We have attempted to work with the types of material we expect to be collecting.
We believe these will be mostly textual, word-processed or email type objects along with more complex text objects such as spreadsheets.
These are also formats that Fedora can display using native disseminators.
We have been working with Simple [5] and Simple/Complex [6] objects (emails, both text and HTML; Microsoft Word documents; and JPEG image files).
Objects have been ingested into Fedora in their native format and not normalised or migrated to a preferred archival format.
This has allowed us to focus on repository-based activity but has highlighted the need to decide on the formats we may prefer to acquire and hold.
Development of New Document Tools The Library’s three-year Strategic Plan includes the aim of engaging with digital material.
Three new documents form the foundation of our plans for the future; these are: Preservation Plan, covering all material held in our permanent collections both physical and digital.
A revised donor/loan agreement that covers the acquisition of digital material.
A manifest template that allows us to record all necessary technical information about digital donations at the time of donation/acquisition.
Documents such as the Preservation Plan already existed, but covered only physical materials or talked loosely about ‘material in all formats’.
The new plan contains two sections, one addressing the specific needs of physical, the other the needs of digital material.
This has allowed specific standards to be applied to the management of each type of material whilst allowing for the differences in preservation approaches between physical and digital.
In this way a single coherent plan for the management of materials in our permanent collections is created that outlines our commitment to the preservation of all material.
The revised donor/loan agreement also makes clear distinctions between physical and digital donations to the Library based on the different issues around the management of digital material.
For digital donations the new agreement seeks additional clarification regarding copyright and who else may have rights in the material.
It asks if material has been donated only to our library or to other institutions, and it makes clear the possibility that material may be re-formatted and copied as part of preservation actions in the future.
The bases for the new agreement were the forms developed by the Paradigm Project [7] at the University of Oxford and those developed by the East of England Digital Preservation Pilot Project [8].
Having readily available models to draw on saved the Library considerable time and effort.
The manifest that describes the technical properties of material being donated is also based on models from these two projects.
Again, the use of existing models allowed us to think more closely about what information we needed in our own Library, what we would do with it and what processes would follow from it rather than focusing on designing forms.
A set of high-level workflows have begun to map the processes and responsibilities that will be involved in our handling digital material, showing how these fit together.
Existing workflows for paper materials were examined in detail; it was seen that these require supplementing to take account of digital issues, but not complete replacement.
Issues such as who owns the material, who can see it, who can copy it and on what basis, are common to paper and digital material alike.
However, describing processes and activities on paper has shown where physical and digital materials have different management needs.
It has also begun to highlight staff on whom new workloads may fall, identifying training needs.
The Challenge of Metadata The creation, collection and management of technical metadata for digital material is a new challenge.
It is uncertain what type of metadata and what level of detail will be essential to long-term lifecycle management and dissemination of the material (though standards such as PREMIS [9] provide a framework).
Determining that may take time and further experience with digital material.
Using Fedora provided a starting model for technical metadata .
Fedora’s use of METS [10] offered a relatively simple look at the process of producing and storing technical metadata.
Manual work with METS records highlighted the principle that technical metadata should be automatically derived as far as possible.
It also showed the need for additional work to incorporate technical metadata standards like PREMIS which are not included as the basic Fedora metadata set.
It is clear that for catalogue metadata, the General International Standard for Archival Description (ISAD(G)) as used for our paper holdings provides an appropriate ethos for the description of digital collections, supported by adequate levels of technical metadata.
Cataloguers’ experience in applying ISAD(G) in hierarchical catalogues to achieve informative but slimline records for paper records should be applicable to digital material.
The Library’s cataloguing manual for archivists asks them to balance providing as much information as the reader needs with ‘as little as you can get away with’ and this balancing act will continue to direct our practice.
Within the archives department a useful groundwork of working to standards and mapping between them already exists, thanks to interoperability work between Library catalogues: ISAD(G) data can easily be mapped to Dublin Core and this, if desired, will provide a route whereby ISAD(G) data and METS records can work together.
New Business Collaborations The Library is an associate member of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [11] and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) [12] both of whom provide models and tools that can be applied within the specific context of our Library.
Participation in events hosted by both organisations has allowed the Library to build expertise it would otherwise have struggled to gain alone.
Active participation in DPC and DCC events has also allowed Library staff to express plans to peers who can then provide feedback and comment, as well as put staff in touch with individuals with expertise and skills they are willing to share.
Library staff have also made personal contact with individuals involved in related digital projects.
The Paradigm Project has been a key partner for the Library.
The Library has drawn heavily on its experience and especially its workbook: models, practices and policies developed by the Project have formed the basis of our own.
This has represented a key saving in time and effort in that models and documentation can be re-worked for local use and lessons already learned quickly applied.
The Library has also developed new types of relationships with internal partners such as our IT department.
We need access to new services and hardware and we rely heavily on IT staff to provide guidance and advice on issues such as capacity planning or system design.
Their support and technical expertise has been essential to establishing our first Fedora repository.
Are We Succeeding?
At this early stage it is difficult to identify key success factors, but the most significant step to date has been to acknowledge that the Library needs to start work now if we are to engage with digital material in the future.
As key stakeholders, archival staff have shown great enthusiasm for working with digital material and have been leading the development of workflows, policies and practices that will deal with the practicalities of digital collection development.
As a result we can demonstrate progress towards our goal; progress that is supported internally and built on the best practice of our peers.
Conclusion: Engaging with Digital Material Means Business as Usual Interestingly many of the skills we require have already been found to exist within the Library.
Sound archival practice is proving to be very robust when applied to the management of digital material.
Basing what we do on archival practice has allowed us to advance quickly to the point where the principles of working with this new medium can be readily understood and applied.
As a new business we have found that documentation is indispensible: we have created policies and documented workflow in order to establish and then test our plans and intentions.
The use of workflows has allowed us to model responsibilities, tasks and processes and to fine-tune them based on consensus and shared input.
If going digital is to be business as usual then clear workflows must be set up and documented, and this, plus staff training, will ensure that in the long run the management of this material is not confined to a small cadre of specialists.
Documentation has also acted as a means of recording these early decisions so that they are not lost and has demonstrated that we are indeed progressing towards the reality of collection digital materials.
We have found that collaboration with like partners has proved to be an efficient way of gaining experience as well as of providing peer input.
Collaboration has shown us what is common or best practice where no formal standards yet exist.
At a less formal level, collaboration has allowed staff to exchange ideas with colleagues facing similar challenges.
Collaboration and consensus will continue to be crucial.
Communication and the creation of clear documentation are ensuring that the skills needed to work with digital materials are being distributed throughout the Library.
If going digital is to be business as usual then new skills cannot be locked in silos: they must be distributed amongst all staff.
We are making systematic progress beginning by modelling the basic things such as the development of policy and processes.
Going digital clearly will require a great deal more than accepting digital material from our existing donor community on CD-ROM.
We will need to engage more closely with our donor/creators and at an earlier stage in the creation of material if we are to be responsible for its long-term management.
This means sharing with them our plans, explaining the ways in which we plan to work with them and their digital material and actively seeking their feedback.
The process will not be a trivial one.
There is a steep learning curve that should not be underestimated.
Acquiring and managing born digital collections requires new infrastructure, new skills, commitment of already stretched resources and a determination on the part of management to see the process through both now and into the future.
However, building on existing archival good practice provides a firm foundation for progress.
Editor’s note: Readers may also be interested in the follow-up article “Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library” in Issue 53.
References Hereafter simply referred to as digital material.
We are not yet planning for the dissemination of digital material, which may in some cases be subject to access restrictions imposed by legislation (for example, the Data Protection Act) or by the donor.
Dissemination will require careful thought and developing this will be a separate process ‘Developing a pre-ingest strategy for digital records” Zoë Smyth, PRONI: presentation made at Digital Curation Centre / Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies joint workshop on ingestion of digital records, Liverpool, 30 November 2006 Fedora Digital Object Repository http://www.fedora.info A single email JPEG image or MS Word document MS Word file with an embedded JPEG image The Paradigm Project http://www.paradigm.ac.uk Report of the East of England Digital Preservation Regional Pilot Project, MLA East of England and East of England Regional Archive Council.
2006 Available from http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/news/publications/darp2006.pdf Accessed 1 February 2007.
PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies) maintenance activity http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/ METS (Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard) http://www.loc.gov/mets/ Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Digital Preservation Coalition http://www.dpconline.org/ Author Details Dr Christopher Hilton Senior Archivist Wellcome Library 210 Euston Road London NW1 2BE Email: c.hilton@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ Dave Thompson Digital Curator Wellcome Library 210 Euston Road London NW1 2BE Email: d.thompson@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library” Author: Chris Hilton and Dave Thompson Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/hilton-thompson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Building OAI-PMH Harvesters With Net::OAI::Harvester Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Building OAI-PMH Harvesters With Net::OAI::Harvester Buzz data database xml archives metadata identifier schema repositories oai-pmh perl ead doc dom marc21 mets mods url Citation BibTex RIS Ed Summers describes Net::OAI::Harvester, the Perl package for easily interacting with OAI-PMH repositories as a metadata harvester.
Ed provides examples of how to use Net::OAI::Harvester to write short programs which execute each of the 6 OAI-PMH verbs.
Net::OAI::Harvester is a Perl package for easily interacting with OAI-PMH repositories as a metadata harvester.
The article provides examples of how to use Net::OAI::Harvester to write short programs that execute each of the 6 OAI-PMH verbs.
Issues related to efficient XML parsing of OAI-PMH responses are discussed, as are specific techniques used by Net::OAI::Harvester.
The Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is an increasingly popular protocol for sharing metadata about digital objects.
Part of the reason for this popularity is that the OAI-PMH helps to solve a common problem in a simple and flexible way using familiar technologies.
The OAI-PMH is essentially a set of request/response messages which may be sent over HTTP to retrieve metadata that is encoded in XML.
So if I am interested in the digital assets of a particular repository I can construct a familiar URL and get back an XML document containing the metadata I am interested in.
From a programming perspective there are several issues that arise when writing a OAI-PMH harvesting program: HTTP requests need to be URL-encoded for safe transmission; error conditions can arise which must be handled gracefully; resumption tokens may be used to break up a response into chunks; responses are XML which must be parsed in order to extract the data points that are of interest; and responses can be arbitrarily large at the whim of a given repository.
Of greatest concern here is that all responses are arbitrarily large XML documents.
While XML tools are available in all of today's major programming languages, they are generic tools which must be adapted to the particular needs of OAI-PMH responses.
Furthermore some parsing techniques are more appropriate than others for parsing very large XML documents, and it may not be clear to the beginner which tool to use.
This article does not aim to describe the OAI-PMH in full (since it has been done well elsewhere [1]), or to detail the ins and outs of efficient XML parsing.
Rather, it will examine the use of Net::OAI::Harvester, which is a toolkit for quickly building simple and efficient OAI-PMH harvesters.
Net::OAI::Harvester is a Perl module that abstracts away all the details of generating the HTTP request, handling error conditions, and parsing XML so that extracted data can be easily used.
It is hoped that this article will serve as a cook book for easily building OAI-PMH harvesters.
The examples use real life OAI-PMH repositories, (mostly the American Memory repository at the Library of Congress).
Net::OAI::Harvester and Perl Net::OAI::Harvester is an extension to the Perl programming language which can be found on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network [2].
Perl is a widely used language that has come to live in many different environments: from systems administration, to relational database access, to World Wide Web applications, to genetic sequencing.
The CPAN is a repository of free, reusable object-oriented components which extend Perl's core functionality to work in these (and many more) areas.
Similarly Net::OAI::Harvester extends Perl so that you can easily write programs to interact with OAI-PMH repositories.
Since Perl's database interface (DBI [3]) is able to talk to most of today's popular databases you can easily store the results of your harvesting in the database of your choice.
Assuming you have Perl installed you can install Net::OAI::Harvester with one command: perl -MCPAN -e 'install Net::OAI::Harvester' This command will retrieve the Net::OAI::Harvester module from CPAN, check to make sure that other dependencies are installed, run the test suite, and install the package.
If you run into trouble please jump to the conclusion for more information about where to get help.
Please Identify Yourself Consider this first example of asking a OAI-PMH repository to identify itself using the Identify verb, and finding the name of the repository.
To send the request we construct this URL: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0?verb=Identify which generates this XML as a response: 1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 2 <OAI-PMH xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/" 3 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 4 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 5 http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/OAI-PMH.xsd"> 6 <responseDate>2003-12-07T21:44:24Z</responseDate> 7 <request verb="Identify">http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0 8 <Identify> 9 <repositoryName>Library of Congress Open Archive Initiative Repository 1</repositoryName> 10 <baseURL>http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0 11 <protocolVersion>2.0</protocolVersion> 12 <adminEmail>dwoo&#x0040;loc.gov</adminEmail> 13 <adminEmail>caar&#x0040;loc.gov</adminEmail> 14 <earliestDatestamp>2002-06-01T00:00:00Z</earliestDatestamp> 15 <deletedRecord>no</deletedRecord> 16 <granularity>YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ</granularity> 17 <description> 18 <oai-identifier 19 xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai-identifier" 20 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 21 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai-identifier 22 http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai-identifier.xsd"> 23 <scheme>oai</scheme> 24 <repositoryIdentifier>lcoa1.loc.gov</repositoryIdentifier> 25 <delimiter>:</delimiter> 26 <sampleIdentifier>oai:lcoa1.loc.gov:loc.music/musdi.002 </sampleIdentifier> 27 </oai-identifier> 28 </description> 29 <description> 30 <eprints xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/eprints" 31 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 32 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/eprints 33 http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/eprints.xsd"> 34 <content> 35 <URL>http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/oamh/lcoa1_content.html 36 <text>Selected collections of digitized historical materials from the Library of Congress, including many from American Memory.
Includes photographs, movies, maps, pamphlets and printed 37 ephemera, sheet music and books.</text> 38 </content> 39 <metadataPolicy/> 40 <dataPolicy/> 41 </eprints> 42 </description> 43 <description> 44 <branding xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/branding/" 45 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 46 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/branding/ 47 http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/branding.xsd"> 48 <collectionIcon> 49 <url>http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/oamh/lc-icon.gif</url> 50 <link>http://www.loc.gov</link> 51 <title>Library of Congress</title> 52 <width>100</width> 53 <height>35</height> 54 </collectionIcon> 55 <metadataRendering 56 metadataNamespace="http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim" 57 mimeType="text/xsl"> http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/xslt/MARC21slim2HTML.xsl </metadataRendering> 58 </branding> 59 </description> 60 61 </Identify> 62 </OAI-PMH> [EXAMPLE 1] You can find the repository name hiding on line 9.
Now imagine that you want to write a program to perform the same action, and to extract the repository name from the XML response.
With Net::OAI::Harvester this can be done in just a few lines of code:   1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 3 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 4 baseURL => 'http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0' 5 ); 6 7 my $identity = $harvester->identify(); 8 print $identity->repositoryName(),"\n"; OUTPUT: Library of Congress Open Archive Initiative Repository 1 [EXAMPLE 2] On line 1 the Net::OAI::Harvester program is used which tells Perl to load the extension; lines 3-5 create a harvester object for the Library of Congress OAI-PMH repository; line 7 calls the Identify verb on the repository, which returns a Net::OAI::Identify object; line 8 prints out the repository name using the repositoryName() method.
The program is able call the Identify verb on the OAI-PMH repository, collect the response, and extract the repository name from the XML without having to make the HTTP request explicitly or to do any XML parsing.
When the identify() method is called on line 7 Net::OAI::Harvester generates the HTTP request, stores the response, parses the XML, and bundles up the extracted information in a Net::OAI::Identify object which is then returned.
The call to identify on line 7 is also important because it illustrates how all the 6 OAI-PMH verbs are implemented in Net::OAI::Harvester.
All the verbs correspond to method names that can be called on a Net::OAI::Harvester object.
When called each method returns a corresponding object which has the requested information bundled inside it.
So just as identify() returns a Net::OAI::Identify object, listMetadataFormats() returns a Net::OAI::ListMetadataFormats object, getRecord() returns a Net::OAI::Record object, listRecords() returns a Net::OAI::ListRecords object, listIdentifiers() returns a Net::OAI::ListIdentifiers object, and listSets() returns a Net::OAI::ListSets object.
To obtain the documentation for any of these modules you can issue the perldoc command on the package in question: perldoc Net::OAI::Harvester More Verbage As was explained above the OAI-PMH supports sending all flavours of metadata as long as it can be expressed in XML.
So a repository can make their metadata available as MARC21 using the Library of Congress schema [4], or as an EAD document [5]; however all repositories must provide a baseline Dublin Core support.
The ListMetadataFormats() OAI-PMH verb translates into the listMetadataFormats() method which you can call on your Net::OAI::Harvester object.
1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 3 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 4 baseURL => 'http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0' 5 ); 6 7 my $metadataFormats = $harvester->listMetadataFormats(); 8 print join( ',', $metadataFormats->prefixes(), "\n"; OUTPUT: oai_dc,oai_marc,marc21,mods [EXAMPLE 3] As you can see, much of this looks the same as example 1, lines 1-5 create a Net::OAI::Harvester object for the Library of Congress repository.
The main difference is that the listMetadataFormats() method is being called on line 7, and on line 8 prints out the metadata prefixes for each of the formats.
These formats are important when it comes time to start retrieving metadata from a repository since they are used to specify what flavour of metadata you would like.
The OAI-PMH allows you to query the repository to find out which metadata formats are supported for a specific record using the identifier parameter, which translates exactly into a listMetadataFormats() parameter: 1 my $metadataFormats = $harvester->listMetadataFormats( 2 identifier => 'oai:lcoa1.loc.gov:loc.gmd/g3764p.pm003171' 3 ); [EXAMPLE 4] A single OAI-PMH repository can be divided into groups or sets, which can be retrieved using the ListSets verb.
The listSets() method performs this action, which returns a Net::OAI::ListSets object that contains the set information for the repository in question.
1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 3 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 4 baseURL => 'http://arXiv.org/oai2' 5 ); 6 7 my $sets = $harvester->listSets(); 8 foreach my $spec ( $sets->setSpecs() ) { 9 print "$spec ==> ", $sets->setName($spec), "\n"; 10 } OUTPUT: cs ==> Computer Science math ==> Mathematics nlin ==> Nonlinear Sciences physics ==> Physics physics:acc-phys ==> Accelerator Physics physics:ao-sci ==> Atmospheric-Oceanic Sciences physics:astro-ph ==> Astrophysics physics:atom-ph ==> Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics physics:bayes-an ==> Bayesian Analysis physics:chem-ph ==> Chemical Physics physics:cond-mat ==> Condensed Matter physics:gr-qc ==> General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology physics:hep-ex ==> High Energy Physics Experiment physics:hep-lat ==> High Energy Physics Lattice physics:hep-ph ==> High Energy Physics Phenomenology physics:hep-th ==> High Energy Physics Theory physics:math-ph ==> Mathematical Physics physics:mtrl-th ==> Materials Theory physics:nucl-ex ==> Nuclear Experiment physics:nucl-th ==> Nuclear Theory physics:phys-lib ==> Physics "Library" physics:physics ==> Physics (Other) physics:plasm-ph ==> Plasma Physics physics:quant-ph ==> Quantum Physics physics:supr-con ==> Superconductivity q-bio ==> Quantitative Biology [EXAMPLE 5] Lines 1-5 create a Net::OAI::Harvester object to target the arXiv OAI-PMH preprint archive.
Line 7 calls the listSets() verb on the harvester object which returns a Net::OAI::ListSets object.
On lines 8-10 we then iterate through the setSpecs (unique identifiers for each set), and print each out along with the full name for the set.
Headers and Records All of this has been leading up to the main focus of the OAI-PMH: obtaining metadata.
The OAI-PMH has three verbs which facilitate obtaining metadata from a repository: ListIdentifiers, ListRecords and GetRecord.
Each of these verbs translates into a Net::OAI::Harvester method: listIdentifiers(), listRecords() and getRecord().
The OAI-PMH defines an identifier as unambiguously identifying an item within a repository.
Since metadata records can come in multiple formats, the identifier allows you to target the item you would like.
The idea of the ListIdentifiers verb is that it allows a harvester to see what identifiers exist in the repository and to only request those that are of interest.
1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 3 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 4 baseURL => 'http://arXiv.org/oai2' 5 ); 6 7 my $list = $harvester->listIdentifiers( 8 metadataPrefix => 'oai_dc', 9 set => 'cs' 10 ); 11 12 while ( my $header = $list->next() ) { 13 print $header->identifier(),"\n"; 14 } OUTPUT: oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404001 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404002 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404003 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404004 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404005 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404006 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404007 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404008 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404011 oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9405001 ... [EXAMPLE 6] The output above is actually truncated to 10 rows from 3956, which illustrates the need for using an iterator in lines 12-14.
The call to listIdentifiers() on lines 7-9 includes the required metadataPrefix parameter which tells the repository that we are interested in records that are available as baseline Dublin Core; and an optional parameter set which indicates we are only interested in identifiers from the Computer Science set, (see example 5).
Assuming that our harvester is interested in retrieving identifier oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404001 as a Dublin Core record, it can issue a getRecord() request.
1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 3 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 4 baseURL => 'http://arXiv.org/oai2' 5 ); 6 7 my $record = $harvester->getRecord( 8 identifier => 'oai:arXiv.org:cmp-lg/9404001', 9 metadataPrefix => 'oai_dc', 10 ); 11 12 my $metadata = $record->metadata(); 13 print $metadata->title(); OUTPUT: An Alternative Conception of Tree-Adjoining Derivation [EXAMPLE 7] The call to getRecord() on lines 7-9 requests a Dublin Core record for a specific item from the arXiv.org repository, which is returned as a Net::OAI::Record object.
Since an OAI-PMH record is actually made up of the record header and metadata there are two corresponding methods you can call on your record object: header(), metadata().
On line 12 the metadata() method is being used to get at the metadata, which returns a Net::OAI::Record::OAI_DC object in which all the metadata is stored.
Finally on line 13 we print out the title.
The description of what is going on in examples 6 and 7 is perhaps more complicated than the code itself, which illustrates how you can interact with an OAI-PMH server in just a few lines.
The final OAI-PMH verb to examine is ListRecords which acts somewhat like ListIdentifiers, but returns a list of records (Net::OAI::Record objects) rather than identifiers.
For example if a harvester wanted to extract all the titles and urls from the American Memory LC Photographs collection: 1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 3 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 4 baseURL => 'http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0' 5 ); 6 7 my $list = $harvester->listRecords( 8 metadataPrefix => 'oai_dc', 9 set => 'lcphotos' 10 ); 11 12 while ( my $record = $list->next() ) { 13 my $metadata = $record->metadata(); 14 print "title: ",$metadata->title(),"\n"; 15 print "url: ",$metadata->identifier(),"\n\n"; 16 } OUTPUT: title: Washington Street, Sonora, Tuolumne County, California url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a00517 title: Stanislaus Flour Mill and bridge at Knight's Ferry, Stanislaus County, California url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a00518 title: Stanislaus Flour Mill from the bridge over the river at Knight's Ferry, Stanislaus County url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a00519 title: Sonora Tuolomne County the Court House url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a00520 title: The ram of MONITOR CAMANCHE, San Francisco url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a01294 ... [EXAMPLE 8] Again output here has been truncated, since the result of ListRecords() can be arbitrarily large.
Lines 12-16 show how to iterate over the records obtained by calling listRecords(), and how to extract the two fields of interest from the metadata.
Resumption Tokens One issue that has been glossed over somewhat (until now) is that when an OAI-PMH server receives a ListRecords, ListIdentifiers or ListSets request, it may decide to deliver only a portion of the results, along with a resumption token, which may be used to issue a new request to get the remaining results.
The OAI-PMH designers added this functionality to allow repositiory servers to avoid the cost of having to serve up huge documents in one fell swoop.
From a harvesting perspective then it is really neccessary to check for a resumption token when performing a List action.
The result of calling listRecords() is a Net::OAI::ListRecords object which has a resumptionToken() method.
Using the Net::OAI::ResumptionToken object it is then possible to extract the token, and submit another listRecords() call to get the remaining records.
1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 3 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 4 baseURL => 'http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0' 5 ); 6 7 my $records = $harvester->listRecords( 8 metadataPrefix => 'oai_dc', 9 set => 'lcphotos' 10 ); 11 my $finished = 0; 12 13 while ( !
$finished ) { 14 15 while ( my $record = $records->next() ) { 16 print $record->metadata()->title(),"\n"; 17 } 18 19 my $rToken = $records->resumptionToken(); 20 if ( $rToken ) { 21 $records = $harvester->listRecords( 22 resumptionToken => $rToken->token() 23 ); 24 } else { 25 $finished = 1; 26 } 27 28 } [EXAMPLE 9] However in the spirit of making easy things easy and hard things possible, Net::OAI::Harvester has the methods getAllRecords() and getAllIdentifiers() which will automatically check for and handle resumption tokens.
This means the above code can be rewritten as: 1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 3 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 4 baseURL => 'http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0' 5 ); 6 7 my $records = $harvester->listAllRecords( 8 metadataPrefix => 'oai_dc', 9 set => 'lcphotos' 10 ); 11 12 while ( my $record = $records->next() ) { 13 print $record->metadata()->title(); 14 } [EXAMPLE 10] The use of listAllRecords() on line 7 means that resumption tokens can be handled in half the amount of code, and is much more readable as a result.
A Quick Peek Inside Since OAI-PMH responses to the ListRecords and ListIdentifiers can be arbitrarily large, Net::OAI::Harvester uses some special techniques to make sure that XML parsing is done in a memoryefficient way.
There are two common approaches to parsing XML: building an in-memory data structure of the entire XML document (DOM), and stream-based where the XML is analysed as it is read in (SAX).
Net::OAI::Harvester uses a stream-based parser (XML::SAX [6]), which allows the large documents to be read in without resorting to building a huge Document Object Model in memory.
As the large list responses are parsed, Net::OAI::Harvester builds Net::OAI::Record objects and freezes them on disk using the Storable [7] module.
Then when the parsing is complete you get each of these objects back from disk with each call to next().
Custom Metadata Handlers The true flexibility of the OAI-PMH lies in its ability to allow harvesters to retrieve metadata in any XMLbased format.
So if a site wants to offer metadata records encoded using the MARC21 schema or the Encoded Archival Description it can do so; but the repository must offer Dublin Core records as a lowest common denominator format.
Net::OAI::Harvester includes the module Net::OAI::Record::OAI_DC which is an XML SAX handler for storing basline Dublin Core data that has been encoded using the OAI-PMH schema [8].
It gets called automatically when you are retrieving metadata.
In order to handle other types of metadata formats you can plug your own custom metadata handler into Net::OAI::Harvester.
The handlers work like SAX filters, which are best described elsewhere [9].
Jumping ahead a little bit, if the custom handler has been created with the name MODS, it can be used with the listRecords() call: 1 use Net::OAI::Harvester; 2 use MODS; 3 4 my $harvester = Net::OAI::Harvester->new( 5 baseURL => 'http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0' 6 ); 7 8 my $list = $harvester->listRecords( 9 metadataPrefix => 'mods', 10 set => 'lcphotos', 11 metadataHandler => 'MODS', 12 ); 13 14 while ( my $record = $list->next() ) { 15 print $record->metadata()->title(),"\n"; 16 } On line 2, the custom metadata handler MODS is used (more about that below).
Then on line 11 the metadataHandler parameter is used to tell the harvester object to employ that package name for creating the metadata objects.
The rest of the listRecords() usage stays the same.
Below is an example of what a custom metadata handler would look like.
package MODS; use base qw( XML::SAX::Base ); sub new { my $self = { insideTitleInfo => 0, title => '' }; return( bless $self, 'MyHandler' ); } sub title { my $self = shift; return( $self->{ title } ); } ## SAX Methods sub start_element { my ( $self, $element ) = @_; if ( $element->{ Name } eq 'titleInfo' ) { $self->{ insideTitleInfo } = 1; } } sub end_element { my ( $self, $element ) = @_; if ( $element->{ Name } eq 'titleInfo' ) { $self->{ insideTitleInfo } = 0; } } sub characters { my ( $self, $chars ) = @_; if ( $self->{ insideTitleInfo } ) { $self->{ title } .= $chars->{ Data }; } } Not for the light-hearted, but the idea is that it is possible to extend Net::OAI::Harvester to work with any XML-based metadata format.
The intention is that as people develop plugins they can be added back into the Net::OAI::Harvester distrubution so that everyone can benefit from the work.
Conclusion I hope this article has whetted your appetite for building OAI-PMH harvesters using the Net::OAI::Harvester toolkit.
Knowing a bit about Perl beforehand is helpful, but not mandatory for getting basic usage out of Net::OAI::Harvester.
In addition the perl4lib listserv [10] is a good place to learn more about Perl and using the Net::OAI::Harvester module.
References Special Issue on Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting, Library Hi Tech, Volume 21, Number 2, 2003.
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).
http://www.cpan.org/ Database Interface (DBI).
http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?DBI Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS).
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/ Encoded Archival Description (EAD).
http://www.loc.gov/ead/ XML::SAX.
http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?XML::SAX Storable.
http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Storable OAI-PMH Dublin Core Schema.
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#dublincore Transforming XML with SAX Filters, Kip Hampton, XML.com, 10 October 2001 http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/10/10/sax-filters.html perl4lib http://perl4lib.perl.org/ Author Details Ed Summers Follett Library Resources McHenry Illinois USA Email: ehs@pobox.com Web site: http://www.follett.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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QMSearch: A Quality Metrics-aware Search Framework Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines QMSearch: A Quality Metrics-aware Search Framework Buzz data software java framework javascript html database xml apache usability stylesheet archives xslt metadata css browser identifier xsl schema repositories video visualisation cache aggregation provenance doc lucene interoperability research standards modelling Citation BibTex RIS Aaron Krowne and Urvashi Gadi present a framework which improves searching in the context of scholarly digital libraries by taking a 'quality metrics-aware' approach.
In this article we present a framework, QMSearch, which improves searching in the context of scholarly digital libraries by taking a 'quality metrics-aware' approach.
This means the digital library deployer or end-user can customise how results are presented, including aspects of both ranking and organisation in general, based upon standard metadata attributes and quality indicators derived from the general library information environment.
To achieve this, QMSearch is generalised across metadata fields, quality indicators, and user communities, by abstracting all of these notions and rendering them into one or more 'organisation specifications' which are used by the system to determine how to organise results.
The system is being built as open source software on top of Apache Lucene, to afford sustainability as well as state-of-the art search engine capability.
It is currently at the working prototype stage.
Herein we chiefly motivate and explicate the model, architecture and development of QMSearch.
We also give a summary of the first round of our focus group studies, upon which the development work is based.
While the field of information retrieval (IR) has made great strides in the past few decades, we have found in our work on the MetaScholar Initiative [1] that many problems remain unsolved, particularly in scholarly settings.
Not only are general-purpose metasearch engines and scholarly databases not completely fulfilling to end users, but the IR field [2] has largely been dealing with a specific setting of metadata-poor, general-purpose documents queried by general-interest users.
This setting, as it turns out, is far from comprehensive, and does not match with the scholarly environment.
The IR field has produced many useful metrics--such as precision and recall to evaluate search engine performance--but we have found in our investigations that these metrics fall short of addressing many clarity and usability issues scholars encounter in digital library metasearch systems.
Further, we have come to question the model of having results as a simple linear list, with quantitative evaluation taking the form of objective functions on that list.
On the contrary, we find that metrics like precision and recall cannot tell the digital librarian how different types of metadata should be broken out, emphasised, faceted, filtered, hidden or revealed.
Their usefulness is also biased towards determining the efficiency of known-item retrieval, rather than telling us much about user comprehension and general satisfaction with the metasearch system.
We have also noticed that little formal exploration has been done regarding the needs of different kinds of users (e.g.
novice vs. expert, undergrad vs. grad student vs. professor vs. practitioner, etc.)
or modes of usage (e.g., free exploration vs. known-item retrieval, dabbling vs. working in one's depth, etc.).
These 'facetisations of user space' suggest that most retrieval evaluation work to date has been of limited scope relative to the real world.
The Scholarly Digital Library Setting A key aspect of the data-rich environment of the digital library is that there is a large quantity of latent information which can (to varying extents) be used to make inferences about how desireable primary information resources are to users.
For example, access logs convey information about usages (popularity), citations convey information about scholarly interest, inclusion (as in ''bookbags" or reserves lists) conveys information about pedagogy, and so forth.
We call this quality information in general and quality indicators in specific.
Below we list some quality indicators (i.e., record or metadata attributes or aspects) which typically carry a significant level of discriminatory value for the retrieval task: rating vettedness (how thorough is review) popularity (circulation/activations/views) granularity (collection/archive vs. box/series, individual item) has publication (yes/no, 1/0) reference/citation linkage (cites, is-cited, or both) selection (e.g for pedagogical purposes, or for aggregations/sequences by any user) categorisation Previous work [3] has shown that even when sparse, this kind of information can be collected and integrated into retrieval to yield significant additional utility.
We believe it behooves digital libraries to begin to incorporate this information if they wish to add unique value to users in today's metasearch landscape.
The Quality Metrics Project These insights have limited effect if digital libraries do not have tools to act upon them.
In that spirit, we have undertaken in the Quality Metrics project to build a working prototype of a quality metrics-aware digital library metasearch system, called QMSearch.
We plan to make this system openly available to the digital library community (and of course, any other parties who wish to deploy more flexible search functionality).
We intend this paper to do double-duty; besides reporting, as a call for others in the research and practice communities to try QMSearch in their settings and help it to take shape.
Development Goals and Requirements Contemporary search systems are generally based upon technical analysis of the search problem and assumptions about what users want, for an essentially general notion of documents and search inquiry.
In our estimation, there is a dearth of information in the digital library and information retrieval field on the fundamentals of what users want and need out of search, particularly in a setting with rich metadata, heterogeneous objects, and extensive (though often latent) quality information.
Thus, our primary goal with Quality Metrics is to undertake a fact-finding mission among scholarly users, to determine what their needs and expectations are in this setting.
Our second broad goal, and the focus of this report, is to build a working search system embodying the solutions to the above fundamental problems.
Finally, the third goal is to test this system to determine how well we have solved the problems identified in scholarly metasearch systems.
This last part, being led by Virginia Tech, will take the form of user studies with a more quantitative methodology, to be reported on in the near future.
In the remainder of this section, we flesh out some of the key requirements which have shaped the development of the QMSearch system, satisfying the second broad goal of the project.
System Requirements The System Must Treat Organisation Beyond Ranking There is more to retrieval presentation than just ranking, and QMSearch must be built to support some of these other kinds of organisation.
The system must be able to create flexible groupings, delimitations, embellishments, and so forth, for returned objects of a heterogeneous nature.
This need was instrumental in inspiring the entire project, as we noticed in previous MetaScholar activities [4] that in our heterogeneous collections, users had little idea of what 'kinds' of things they were looking at.
Such is the hazard of any metasearch system by definition, and in fact, many metasearch systems we surveyed made some attempt to address this problem.
However, none did so comprehensively, in a way that was transferable to other settings, either in terms of models or systems or both [5].
The System Must Rank Based on Any Number of Indicators One consequence of the specialised focus of the information retrieval field has been that it has remained wedded to a notion of ranking based upon content-query similarity, with occasional expansion to an additional metric, such as link network-based metrics (e.g., Google's 'PageRank' [6]).
Yet, as discussed above, we know that much more information is available which conveys, or could be interpreted as conveying, some level of information about quality (or fitness).
Thus, a major developmental goal of our project is to find some way to integrate this kind of information into the search system, without building a new one from scratch for every distinct deployment.
Such instances will generally integrate different quality indicators and/or necessitate a different ranking formulas, but should not have to be 'hardcoded' from scratch each time.
The System Must be Modular The system has to be modular, so that digital library developers can 'drop it in' to their existing settings.
In general, we favour a componentised paradigm for digital library architecture (as in ODL [7] or OCKHAM-xform [8]), and we believe that sophisticated search functionality is a good example of a component that should be separated out.
Further, we find that in our experience, it is unlikely that a digital library system which excels at functions like harvesting and aggregating, browsing, or management, will also be likely to excel at search.
Perhaps more importantly, we find that search functionality is especially dependent on scenario, in a way that extremely-standardised modalities like harvesting and (increasingly) repository storage are not (thanks to initiatives like OAI [9] and Fedora [10]).
In fact, we hope a major outcome of our work will be to standardise digital library metasearch, modelling it generally in a way that affords more capable core functionality and better interfacing with other digital library components, without the 'watering-down' effect typical of one-size-fits-all solutions.
The System Must Address the Digital Library Setting We are a library, so we are naturally interested in solving the metasearch problem for our stakeholders.
The digital library setting is much different from the general Web setting.
While metasearch exists in both, characteristics of the users, inquiry scenarios, and data diverge significantly between the two.
Table 1 breaks down some of the key distinctions.
As will be made evident in a later section where we report on the focus group studies, all of these aspects have practical implications with regards to scholarly metasearch.
Table 1: Some differences between the Web and digital library settings, which are key for metasearch in the two realms.
Digital Library Setting Web Setting rich metadata attributes controlled metadata a milieu of quality information domain specialisation scholarly community, subcommunities open, academic general purpose no particular target community commercial (spam and ads) poor or no metadata metadata not uniform obfuscation of ranking Theoretical Model In this section we describe our theoretical model which formally defines all of the conceptual structures and functionalities necessary to solve the core problems described above, as well as to better meet the search needs of digital library users in general.
Theoretical Goal Our goal is to produce a model which will always allow us to present records in a way that is based solidly upon intuitive notions of their inherent quality or fitness, despite varying, missing or unreliable underlying quality indicator information.
This guiding principle of resilience is a property existing ranking frameworks tend to lack.
The thrust of our solution is to achieve this kind of resilience by integrating into comprehensive quality metrics as many of these indicators as possible, and to do so without confusing or overwhelming either the digital library deployer or the end user.
While some of this indicator information might not be present for some individual records, subcollections, or even entire digital libraries, complementary information from other indicators is still likely to be present.
Thus, in most real-world circumstances, there should be considerable value to be added by the QMSearch framework.
5S Rendering of QMSearch We couch our model in the language of 5S; an extant digital library modelling system which breaks DLs down into structures, streams, scenarios, spaces, and societies [11][12].
5S represents these entities, and their relationships to each other, in a formalised manner.
Below we sketch the presentation and scoring sub-models of QMSearch, including their interactions with each other and all of the 5S elements: Streams Search results can be modeled as record identifiers delivered in streams.
Records themselves are streams of XML metadata, which may be returned as part of the results stream.
Structures Search result streams have structure (linear ranked ordering, separation into logical bins, graph-theoretic connections, linkages to taxonomies, etc.).
Spaces Spaces are used to render the structure onto search result streams.
For example, in traditional IR, you have a stream of search results structured (ordered) linearly.
This is a one-dimensional rank space, which is discretised from a continuous, one-dimensional rank space.
The scorings are generated using another space, such as a vector space or probability space.
In our model, we are extending the results organisation space into two or more dimensions, and adding binning into the mix.
As an example of how this might be instantiated, the first second dimension could be viewed as a separation into bins based on media type (image, video, text, sound, etc.).
The second dimension, 'within' this first one, could be the usual text similarity (rendered as a linear list).
Attributes used to map objects to different dimensions and positions along these dimensions should be configurable, because one might want to use various metadata elements and quality indicators for organising along the desired number of dimensions.
Scenarios In different scenarios (serving different information needs) user notions of value and interest change.
Also, the expected mappings of attributes and values to the results organisation spaces dramatically changes.
These different valuations and selections of attributes of interest should be considered by the system.
Societies Different societies have different notions of value, which attach to the various content and collection attributes we consider.
As above, different societies may have different typical notions of how the attributes should effect organisation of results into spaces.
Societies also have different sets of frequently-engaged-upon scenarios, as above.
This all suggests that valuations and attributes of interest should facet for a given user based, firstly, upon the society or societies they belong to, secondly, upon their own unique characteristics, and finally, upon the specific scenarios they are engaged in as they interact with the search system.
Model Detail The detailed theoretical modelling of QMSearch can be broken into two connected but conceptually distinct sub-components: The presentation model Determines how objects should be organised logically, given their attributes and valuations delivered by the scoring model.
The scoring model Determines how quality indicators (either explicit metadata attributes or latent information which must be mined/inferred) are fused into scalar score values upon which the presentation model is built.
The presentation model in fact is closely-tied to much of what is typically described as 'visualisation' as well as 'presentation' or 'reporting'.
Fundamentally, it deals with establishing the informational basis for all of these activities, all of which might be pursued as the end of the process of digital library searching.
Thus the presentation model must solve both the 'dealing with overload' and 'dealing with heterogeneity' problems.
The scoring model actually extends beyond scoring to the gathering of information (quality indicators) which is necessary to perform scoring.
Therefore it addresses both the 'heterogeneity' and 'sparsity' problems, as it deals with extracting and integrating (potentially latent) quality information.
The Presentation Model In our model, we are abstracting the notion of a dimension of organisation separately from the notion of a quality indicator.
A dimension is some aspect of organisation which relies upon a score (which is just a scalar value) to order and group items.
This score may be made up of one or more indicators.
Thus, an organisation of results may integrate more quality indicators than dimensions, with the additional indicators grouped together and mapped to the dimensions by way of the scoring function.
This grouping provides much of the resilience described earlier.
In Figure 1, we give a diagrammatic illustration of these aspects of the presentation model.
Shown are two presentation 'views' incorporating the same three underlying metadata attributes'vettedness' (our made-up term for degree of peer-review), domain (which we define as OAI repository of origin in this case), and query-content similarity (the usual search engine relevance metric).
These attributes are hypothetical, but realistic.
In this figure, each square (or cube) should be thought of as a set of objects 'in the same bin', as determined by whether their keys fall into the appropriate range for the corresponding dimension.
The axes point in the direction of increasing score.
The top portion of the diagram illustrates a logical 'slicing' process, by which we can imagine zooming-in on the 'best' object in the assortment.
The bottom portion displays 'mock-up' screen shots, illustrating a potential way to render the corresponding presentation model in a standard 2-D Web browser interface.
This demonstrates the correspondence between dimensions and implicit 'screen axes', as well as the way indicators and metadata attributes play into this relationship.
Figure 1: An illustration of the presentation model aspect of QMSearch.
Two views are shown, both built upon the same three quality indicators (vettedness, content-query similarity, and OAI repository domain).
However, the overall effect of the views are very different because of the different ways the underlying indicators are mapped to display axes and rendered into a final presentation.
The two hypothetical views shown render these attributes in two different dimensionalities--the first view contains two dimensions, the second three (each logical dimension appears as an axis in this conceptual sketch).
Note that in view 2, each indicator used corresponds to one axis.
However, in view 1, vettedness and query-content similarity are 'squeezed' into a single axis.
This is done with the help of a combination function which takes the two attributes and yields a single score.
When noting the 'presentational rendering' portion of the diagram, it becomes apparent why one might want to select a different number of axes for the same set of attributes: because these different dimensionalities support radically different presentations.
View 1 has a natural rendering as a familiar 'tabbed' display, with the 'domain' axis corresponding to the tabs, and the vettedness + content-query similarity axis corresponding to vertical rank.
Within each tab, we essentially have the same presentation model as Google, which fuses content-query similarity with inferred PageRank values for each object.
However, this is only the vertical organisation: simultaneously we allow the user to switch between various 'horizontal' domains (Web, images, library holdings, books, etc.).
View 2 allows us to construct an 'A9-like' display of the results [13].
Here, three dimensions are all available, despite the fact that the display is only two-dimensional.
This is achieved by mapping domain to columns, vettedness to vertical panels, then query-content similarity to vertical organisation within vettedness bins of the same value.
Perhaps the most important innovation of the presentation model is this packing of many (but arbitrary) indicators into a single logical dimension of organisation (and therefore presentational axis).
This means the system deployer (or even the end-user) has the potential ability to select any and all indicators considered important for retrieval, and display them in as few or as many dimensions as necessary for clarity.
In sum, each display axis used by the presentation model is predicated upon the following components: An underlying scoring function which generates a scalar value based on one or more metadata attributes.
When two or more attributes are the inputs, we call this a combination function.
A function which sorts the scoring values along the axis, given the type of the value (integer, real, character, etc.).
Such a function is generally obvious and natural given the score and underlying attributes.
A function that bins the values.
This function is responsible for giving us the 'solid block' model, as opposed to a scatter-plot field of points corresponding to each object (as in an n-dimensional vector space).
As shown in the presentation model diagram, such a function is critical for enabling presentational elements such as tabs or panels.
Note that the scoring function is the nexus between the scoring model and the presentation model.
Given this model and the above functions, we can thus say the digital library deployer must specify (at minimum) the following items in preparing the presentation of a QMSearch system: Number of display axes (equivalently, logical organisation dimensions).
The grouping of indicators to axes.
The scoring/combination function for each axis.
The sorting function for each axis.
A binning function for each axis.
The stylistic aspects of the presentational rendering.
The Scoring Model The scoring model is critical for mapping quality indicators to display dimensions.
The problem of scoring encompasses both the translation of explicit metadata fields into scalar scores, as well as inferring/extracting new indicators which can subsequently be translated into scores.
An important part of what the scoring subsystem does is to gather sparse information and make it 'dense'.
In Table 2 we give some examples of indicators, whether they are typically explicit (metadata fields) or implicit (part of the general library information environment), where they originate, and the kind of scoring function one might expect to be built upon them to produce an indicator.
Table 2: Quality indicators and potential scoring functions, with attention to whether the attributes are based upon implicit or explicit data, and what the data source is.
indicator type data source scoring function rating explicit numeric ratings AVG (ratings) vettedness explicit peer review data / publication venue count (reviewers) / trust (publisher) citedness implicit citation links Amsler, etc.
popularity implicit activation records %age of views granularity explicit containment data 1/0 (collection / item) topical sim.
implicit coclassification, activation / selection by users in same affinity group sim(topic(query), topic(doc)) Whether a scoring function is based on explicit or implicit indicators actually depends on the situation, and is not universal.
For example, in Table 2, 'popularity' was classified as an 'implicit' indicator.
However, one could implement this indicator as a simple count of views of a record, thus making it quite explicit.
In this case, one would be losing some fidelity, as one could not distinguish between kinds of activation.
An a posteriori estimate of popularity might instead be based on sophisticated analysis of log data, which would be more of an implicit version of the indicator.
Scoring based on implicit indicators may require offline computation, but scoring based on explicit ones never does.
This is because explicit indicators are encoded as actual metadata fields and are usable in scoring computations with minimal transformation.
For example, a vettedness-based score requires no offline computation if peer-review data is stored in a relational database as links between review records, people, and objects, but offline computation would be required if this information incorporated some latent element.
In this example, such a thing might be necessary if an impact factor of publication (journals) were used to estimate trustworthiness.
The scoring model addresses the central "quality metrics" nature of this project, because it has the ability to take latent and explicit digital library information and turn it into actualised scores which are representative of object quality.
These scores can then be manifest to the user through the presentational system.
Related Work Many aspects of our model closely resemble existing work done at Microsoft Research on the 'Data Cube'; a relatively recent relational operator developed to facilitate the comprehension and manipulation of multidimensional data objects [14].
We extend the data cube model here by delving into the aggregation functions (our combination functions) and rendering the selected objects into a presentation.
Thus, others have recognised that there is a need to better comprehend and present multifaceted data objects.
In our case, these objects are metadata records in a digital library metasearch engine, as opposed relations in a DBMS.
Instantiating the Model So far we have discussed how an organisation of results is made up of one or more logical dimensions (which map to display 'axes').
Each dimension has a scoring function, which maps one or more quality indicators to a single scalar value.
This value is then used by a binning function to separate the items out into bins for that dimension.
At this point we supply the missing pieces of the puzzle.
Firstly, all of the above elements must be defined and definable somehow.
This is done through the device of the organisation specification (or "org spec" for brevity's sake).
Secondly, we must account for the presence of many scenarios and societies.
This is done through the definition of multiple org specs by the digital library deployer.
Such multiple org specs select their dimensions and quality indicators (as well as how they are combined) based on the usual needs and values of the constituent societies of the digital library, as well as the usual scenarios of their members.
In Figure 2, some example org specs are shown, in the XML format we have defined.
These specs come from the same QMSearch deployment and define two alternative "profiles" for viewing search results for the collection.
We omit a complete schema for the org specs for brevity's sake (as well as the fact the format is still changing).
<organization> <dim name="collection"> <key> <metadata>oaiset</metadata> </key> <binning type="natural" /> <dim name="textsim"> <key> <metadata>score</metadata> </key> <binning type="trivial" /> </dim> </dim> </organization> <organization> <dim name="collection"> <key> <metadata>oaiset</metadata> </key> <binning type="natural" /> <dim name="views"> <key> <metadata>views</metadata> </key> <binning type="fixed">4</binning> <dim name="textsim"> <key> <metadata>score</metadata> </key> <binning type="trivial" /> </dim> </dim> </dim> </organization> Figure 2: Sample org specs.
Top: This org spec contains two dimensions of organisation.
The outer is named "collection" and has the semantics of grouping items based on the value of their oaiset field ("natural" binning provides for one bin per key value, oaiset in this case).
Within this is a dimension which ranks linearly based on the usual text similarity score ("trivial" binning places all of the results in a single bin).
This org spec underlies the screenshot shown later in this paper.
Bottom: This is a three-dimensional org spec.
The outer dimension is the same, based on oaiset, as is the inner-most, based on text similarity.
However in this case a middle dimension is added which partitions the records into bins based on their value for a views indicator, which is split into four ranges.
The end result is a layout that could be visualised as lists inside table cells, as opposed to inside columns.
The table cells would correspond to a (collection, view range) pair.
Another important aspect of results presentation is the notion of filtering.
This is the act of narrowing-down a results set (or other collection) based on attributes of items in the set.
Typically this means requiring that certain metadata fields have a certain value or fall within a certain range, and is very familiar to users through "advanced search" interfaces.
In our system, we provide the ability to do this kind of filtering within an org spec through use of a <filter> tag (not pictured in the examples).
Within this tag, arbitrary Boolean clauses based on metadata fields can combined into a filter for the results set.
The processing of these filters is independent of the core retrieval and quality metrics organisation functionalities.
Since there is conceptually nothing new here, we will not delve further into the topic.
Finally, the results returned by the QMSearch system must be formally specified in some way.
This output must reflect the organisation for the results as defined by the org spec given at the time of the search.
We have made this provision by defining another XML format for the output stream, which mirrors the input org spec by having the same dimension structure.
On top of this, it adds bins to separate out results within the dimensions, and of course the records themselves (along with their metadata/indicator fields).
An example of this output format, based on real-world results, is shown in Figure 3.
<qm_search_output> <query user="black life"> <term>black</term> <term>life</term> </query> <dim name="collection"> <bin ord="0" value="Florida Center for Library Automation Florida Environment Online" count="2" isNull="0"> <dim name="textsim"> <bin ord="0" count="2"> <item id="oai:harvester.americansouth.org:record/25216"> <score dim="collection">Florida Center for Library Automation Florida Environment Online</score> <score dim="textsim">0.43918777</score> <metadata> <datestamp>2006-03-10T17:40:30Z</datestamp> <identifier> oai:harvester.americansouth.org:record/25216</identifier> <url> http://www.americansouth.org/viewrecord.php?id=25216</url> <title>The widow spiders of Florida [electronic resource] / John D. McCrone, Karl J. Stone.</title> ... </metadata> </item> ... </bin> </dim> </bin> <bin ord="1" value="Florida Center for Library Automation Florida Heritage Collection" count="2" isNull="0"> <dim name="textsim"> <bin ord="0" count="2"> <item id="oai:harvester.americansouth.org:record/30329"> <score dim="collection">Florida Center for Library Automation Florida Heritage Collection</score> <score dim="textsim">0.47943082</score> <metadata> <url> http://www.americansouth.org/viewrecord.php?id=30329</url> <title>Twelve Black Floridians, by Leedell W. Neyland.</title> ... </metadata> </item> ... </bin> </dim> </bin> ... </bin> </dim> </qm_search_output> Figure 3: A sample of QMSearch output.
This output fragment (compressed for comprehensibility) corresponds to the collection/repository column-based profile which is shown rendered in the screenshot Figure 7.
All of the conceptual and organisational structures of QMSearch are shown in the diagrams of Figure 4.
These diagrams show both the containment relationships as well as the cardinality of the elements involved in the system.
Other details, such as where latent quality indicators come from, will be discussed later in the Architecture section.
Figure 4: Diagrams of key theoretical constructs of QMSearch.
Left: Org specs as profiles making up a QMSearch deployment.
Right: The entities that make up a result set returned by QMSearch.
Both: Arrows mean "contains."
Quantifiers +, *, and ?
mean 'one or more', 'zero or more', and 'zero or one', respectively.
The tag d connects the two diagrams, and represents the number of logical dimensions of the results set.
Results of Focus Groups This section consists of an overview of our findings in the first phase of the focus group investigations.
The focus groups were held at Emory University, during the fall of 2005.
Nine of these introductory focus groups were held in total, consisting of graduate students and faculty members from Emory humanities and sciences programs (as well as a few staffers from the library).
The participants were focused towards mock-ups illustrating the proposed QMSearch system, as well as the facilitators' questions and prompting about the participant's experiences and the underlying concepts.
There are a number of reasons we opted to use focus groups for the initial, and bulk of our investigation.
We find that focus groups are very good when there is a general, but not definite idea of how to solve a problem or address user needs.
Having this initial idea gives some kernel that can be commented-upon by participants, who (along with the moderator) are able to give feedback based on their own experiences, opinions, needs, and situations, usually coming to some understanding of differences and similarities.
This property makes focus groups very good for requirements elicitation and participatory design.
Focus groups are also economical, as a single moderator (potentially with supporting note-takers) can 'cover' many users with each session.
Rather than spending 27 hours to to interview the same number of users, focus groups (averaging three participants per group) allow us to do something similar in only nine hours.
Research Hypotheses Before delving into the findings, it is necessary to provide some perspective by making the research hypotheses explicit.
These are basically that: The digital library setting is different from the general Web setting because it has richer metadata, more focused purpose (e.g.
by discipline or topic), and carries more information about a particular scholarly community.
However, metasearch is still useful (and highly-demanded) as a paradigm in this context.
Attributes of digital library information, either explicit (encoded in metadata) or implicit (needing to be extracted by analysis/data mining) convey information about the quality or fitness of resources with respect to each inquiry This quality information can be used to better-organise search results to make the search-centric inquiry process more efficient and fulfilling for users.
Notions of quality will be subjective, varying from DL to DL, subcommunity to subcommunity, individual to individual, and even inquiry to inquiry by the same individual.
Despite this apparent sophistication, a metasearch system could be built that affords the utility described above by exposing and allowing manipulation (either by digital librarians or end users) of quality indicators and their bearing on results organisation (i.e., customisation of quality metrics in metasearch).
This progressive chain of hypotheses, informed by our general experience, intuition and past studies under the MetaScholar initiative, guided our development of the theoretical model and our investigation for the initial round of focus group interviews.
Major Focus Group Findings The focus groups were very successful in the sense of confirming almost all of the research hypotheses above.
What mostly remains to be seen is how useful the QMSearch system is to users.
This is the role of subsequent focus groups and the user studies we are initiating at Virginia Tech.
The key aspects of our hypothesis that the focus groups confirmed were: Metasearch is seen as a useful, if not the most salient paradigm, but existing Web/metasearch solutions fall short for comprehensive scholarly inquiry.
This manifested as lack of comprehensiveness, poor/opaque ranking, and fragmentation, among other complaints.
Metrics that involve some sort of value judgment in their constituent indicators are seen as useful, but must be balanced with alternatives and given in a fully transparent way.
This transparency is perhaps the most-emphasised point we heard, and is a major failing of existing offerings across the board.
Metadata is seen as crucial for faceting the results display.
This is a major 'win' over the generic/Web metasearch scenario, in that scholars actually desire to make use of rich metadata.
A wide variety of indicators are seen as useful but in different ways by different people.
Similarly, different interfaces are liked and disliked by various individuals.
Users do desire the ability to manipulate how ranking/organisation are done, seeing this in basically the same light as 'advanced search' is currently.
Other major findings that we did not anticipate but which did not surprise us were: Users want feedback about availability of library items (e.g.
full text or not, at a subscribing library or not, ability to print or not, etc.)
Searchers want to seem simplest interfaces first, but still have the ability to move to more advanced manipulations progressively.
Most scholars use both basic and advanced searches.
Most scholars are actually using resources from all sorts of 'realms', including the Web, the library, professional organisations, and the mainstream press.
Yet, scholarly metasearch portals rarely draw upon all of these realms.
There is widespread use of commercial/general metasearch systems like Google, Google Scholar, Amazon A9, Amazon's book search, and so forth.
Sometimes these are used in unexpected ways, such as to explore topics in which the scholar is not an expert, to look up general "encyclopedic" information, or to retrieve full text copies of items already located in academic search engines.
Scholars are even using ratings and reviews from the general public, particularly younger scholars.
Terminology for metadata fields, quality indicators, and display facets can be very troublesome.
Many of the findings boil town to the insight that scholars do not want to be told what is good, but rather to be given transparent tools to apply their own nuanced and inquiry-specific notions of what 'good' is.
This capability goes far beyond the metasearch systems that are available today, and seems to counter the commercial-sector wisdom that the search system should simply provide results without any details of how they were attained.
Other Findings In addition to confirming much of what we already expected, the studies provided rich serendipitous insights.
We began integrating many of these in subsequent focus groups as we progressed, as well as in the design and architecture of QMSearch, which was being continuously refined.
Some of the findings are likely to remain outside of the scope of this short project, though we certainly hope to follow up on them with other grant projects or ongoing library systems engineering processes.
Some key unexpected findings were: Relational information is very much in demand; e.g.
to reviews, to categories, to and from citations, to different editions, and so forth.
This kind of network information allows navigation that seems to be closely interspersed with search in the wider inquiry process.
There is a very strong desire to see 'under the hood' of the search engine in order to know how ranking is done and what it means, even if manipulation of ranking is not intended.
In other words, knowing how ranking is done is a trust issue in addition to a functional issue.
We learned of many interesting indicators we didn't think of (e.g., religious vs. non-religious provenance, presence or absence of fields such as abstract, etc.)
A number of participants explicitly requested having more social feedback in the search system, seeing scholarly inquiry as more of a collaborative undertaking.
Social information is generally seen as useful but subject to the subjectivity concerns above.
Other interesting unexpected findings: Scholars are sometimes very averse to 'popularity'-based ranking.
To exemplify, one told us he/she even goes to Altavista sometimes instead of Google because Altavista is based purely upon text similarity.
There was not much complaining about ads or spam.
It is unknown whether this doesn't bother scholars or whether they are simply so used to the phenomenon that they do not think to mention it (however we did not really bring up this issue).
A final noteworthy finding is that scholars are very interested in the prospects of metasearch as applied to archival research.
Many of them echoed a desire to integrate more archival information, even if it was not in the form of completely digitised records.
Discussion The above findings do seem to suggest we are on the right track with regards to core design.
That is, the theoretical model described earlier is basically correct.
However, the findings also hint at some areas where modelling, design and implementation needs to be expanded.
These are tackled later in the section on "Future Work."
Architecture In this section we discuss the implementation of a system based on the above theoretical model.
Software Basis By the start of the Quality Metrics project in 2005, it had long been the case that there were a number of free, open-source search engine systems or digital library systems that included some search facility.
This gave us the opportunity to focus Quality Metrics on solving higher-level metasearch problems and to avoid re-inventing core search engine techniques long-since established.
Thus, we resolved not to produce a search engine from scratch and to instead leverage some existing system.
While none of the ones in our initial survey met the software development goals of Quality Metrics, many had very good search functionality [15].
The system we chose as the basis of our implementation was the Lucene search engine system, a part of the Apache Project.
Besides Lucene's key qualities of having an extensive query syntax (encompassing both ranked keyword and Boolean search, as well as proximity search and much more) and its ability to store and search data in a fielded manner, there are a number of other attractive features of the Lucene project: The system is well architected and coded.
It is modular in design (not coupled to any particular information system).
It is based on Java standards.
Lucene has high 'market share' and user recognition in the open source search engine market.
The project has strong developer and user communities.
Development is very active, while simultaneously capabilities are full.
These non-functional qualities of the system and the project itself improve the odds that our work will remain useful long after the end of the initial grant project phase.
In particular, the open source nature of Lucene combined with the strong developer community means that future deployers of our work will be able to tweak QMSearch, potentially with the help of Lucene developers, if and when we do not have the resources to help them.
The Lucene community also may be able to support aspects of deploying the system (aside from customising it).
It is also likely some members of this informal community will take interest in QMSearch, when it is released.
Document Model In Lucene, an index is made up of documents.
As mentioned above, Lucene has a fielded conception of a document.
This is ideal for our purposes in the digital library setting, because we can map metadata records to documents, and their elements to fields.
A schematic diagram of a Lucene document is shown in Figure 5, along with a comparison of the implicit model of metadata encoding to the explicit document model of the Lucene index.
Correspondences between the entities are indicated with dotted arrows.
Figure 5: The Lucene Document class (left) and logical comparison to the data model of metadata in general (right).
The mapping of entities between the two models, as in our framework, is indicated by dotted arrows.
Solid arrows mean "contains", and the arrow labels +, *, and ?
stand for 'one or more', 'zero or more', and 'zero or one', respectively.
Implicit in this mapping is a 'flattening' of metadata.
That is, fields in Lucene documents cannot contain sub-fields.
While this may seem a major problem, it actually is not.
The first reason is that popular metadata encodings, such as Dublin Core, and the actual usage of other forms which allow nested elements, end up being flat.
More importantly, metadata with complex structure is probably overkill in terms of what is exposed in a "standard" search interface.
It is already rare enough that users use fields; we do not expect much demand for sophisticated querying of sub-fields [16].
Thus, Lucene's simple fielded document model gives us most of the capability we are looking for without much complexity.
Lucene allows us to leverage the query model users are already accustomed to, without any addition development by us.
QMSearch Architecture Since Lucene is so complete, we have needed no modifications to its internals in order to achieve the basic, core functionality of QMSearch.
Instead, we have added a scoring layer which post-processes the Lucene search, and an analysis layer, which pre-processes the Lucene index (i.e.
the underlying data which is being searched).
There is also a presentation layer we have built with XSLT, however, it is only loosely-coupled to the whole system and could be replaced with nearly any kind of presentation component (discussed in detail later).
This overall architecture of the system is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: QMSearch system architecture.
The components of the system fit together as follows: Harvesting or other forms of data collection are done, pulling together the information to be indexed.
The DL deployer must provide the harvester, but there are scores of them available off the shelf [17].
The deployer provides a Lucene indexer, which normalises the metadata and loads it into the Lucene index (rendered as Lucene Documents).
Writing an indexer already must be done in a Lucene deployment, so this is not an additional requirement of QMSearch.
Zero or more QMSearch analyzers (also provided by the deployer) are run on the index, adding indicators to the documents.
These indicators are simply additional fields containing latent, data-mined information (which can be drawn from auxiliary data sources).
Core search functionality is performed by Lucene, on the resulting index.
As far as Lucene is concerned, the data it is searching is no different than usual (it fits the same schema, discussed in Figure 5).
Search results go through the QMSearch scoring layer, which calculates zero or more quality metric scores based on metadata fields and indicators.
The plan for how to do this is given in the organisation specification, discussed later.
The scoring layer outputs the results in a structured XML form (also detailed later).
The presentation layer takes the structured XML and renders it as a user interface (our testbed does this with an XSLT and HTML + CSS + Javascript system).
This layer also handles interface manipulations as well as dispatching modified queries and org specs to the search system core (Step 4 above).
The QMSearch system components are discussed in detail in the following sections.
Analysis The analysis subsystem is actually quite simple.
It is run after the indexing phase, and simply loops through the supplied analyzer modules and executes them.
Each module reads the Lucene index, plus potentially any number of auxiliary data files supplied by the user for that particular analysis task, and distills this data into one or more quality indicator attributes that are added to (or updated in) the records.
The real complexity in the analysis subsystem is wrapped into each analyzer.
They may do extremely simple tasks (such as reading a field from an external database and adding it to each record) or extremely sophisticated ones involving intensive data mining or computation.
{C}{C}{C} Scoring The scoring system structures the results based on the org spec supplied with the query.
The first step of this task is to go through all of the results returned by the Lucene search core and produce as many scores for each result as there are dimensions in the org spec.
This is necessary because, as discussed in the theory section, each dimension of organisation necessitates a score which allows organisation along that dimension.
The second step is to then use these additional scores, along with the binning specification of each dimension, to hierarchically facet the results.
For instance, if the score corresponding to the outer dimension combined with its binning results in three bins, then each of of those bins is recursively descended into and processed with respect to the remaining nested dimensions.
A typical second dimension would be a linear list of results organised by text similarity.
This dimension would then consist of only a single bin (the trivial bin), and there would be no recursion to further nested dimensions.
As discussed in the theory section, this process generates what is essentially a hierarchical facetisation of the output (or forest of facetisation trees).
This is encoded as an XML format that looks something like the sketch given in Figure 3.
The result set is also returned with supplementary information about the query and other attributes of the results (such as matches that weren't returned due to size limits) which is useful for contextualising and manipulating the output.
Presentation Since the search output is delivered as a rigorously-defined, structured XML stream, any system which can read and interpret XML can use the data or construct a user interface around it.
Due to the proliferation of XML tools and libraries, this supports very high portability of the system.
In our testbed deployment (which also constitutes the default for the distribution), we use XSL (along with CSS and Javascript) to turn our results sets into Web-based results displays and full-fledged functioning user interfaces.
In fact, our testbed search system essentially lacks a Web application server, despite being Web-based.
The only module we have in this role simply takes the search parameters as CGI and passes them on to the QMSearch.
It then returns the result as XML directly to the browser.
The XML file is linked declaratively to the corresponding XSL file, so modern browsers will retrieve this file as well and apply the XSL transformation on the client-side.
The end result is that the user sees a Web page (complete with interactive Javascript trimmings) instead of the raw XML file.
There are variants of this setup that still use the XSL-based interface.
One attractive variant would be to use a stylesheet application server like Cocoon to do the XSL transformations server-side.
A benefit of this would be to noticeably speed up the round-trip time of the request, as a separate fetch of the XSL file would not have to be done by the client.
It is also likely that the XSL transformation can be applied faster due to a more powerful server and its ability to cache objects between requests.
Progress Current Status Currently we consider QMSearch to be approaching a "0.75" release.
It supports full Lucene query syntax, org specs with unlimited nested and parallel dimensions, dimensions keyed on values that can be straight or weighted averages of fields, arbitrary Boolean filtering based on fields, and arbitrary analyzer modules.
The current release comes with XSL templates to create interfaces and display results based on four testbed org specs [18].
A number of simple analysers are included, which we are actually using.
These analyzers do little more than load and normalise data gathered from auxiliary databases, however.
Figure 7 shows a screenshot of one org spec and output template on our testbed system as of this writing.
The content is based on the American South collection, which is a harvested collection based on various archives on the topic of the history and culture of the American South.
Figure 7: A screenshot of the QMSearch prototype system, as of March 2006.
In this shot, the user has selected our 'M9' profile (org spec + XSL template).
The collection is populated with content from the American South digital library.
Many features are visible in this screenshot.
We consider it a 'two-dimensional' display because there are two logical dimensions which are encoded in the org spec: collection/archive (horizontal columns), and text similarity (linear lists of items within the columns).
The overall effect is similar to Amazon's A9 [19], which arranges results for a query from many different sources in separate columns.
Also like A9, we have constructed a client-side interface so that the user can easily expand and collapse columns they are interested in (magnifying glass, plus and minus boxes).
In the current settings, four columns (the ones with the most results) default to expanded.
All remaining columns (four in this case) default to collapsed.
A 'sticky' note floats over them to inform the user they can be expanded.
Certain features cannot be shown with a static screenshot, aside from the manipulation of these controls.
In many places, mouse-over hints are present, explaining metadata fields, headings, and controls.
For example, a mouse-over of the "+" or magnifying glass of a collapsed column gives the name of the corresponding collection.
Also not visible is the "more..." link which gives a pop-up of all the results in a column/collection when more than five are present.
This allows access to the full results set without overly cluttering the display.
Finally, visible at the top are four thumbnails, serving as exemplars for our four search profiles.
By clicking on the thumbnails, users can switch views fluidly.
Next Steps While we will release the software to interested parties now, we will not do a general release until 1.0.
Aside from numerous minor enhancements, the key feature on the "roadmap" to 1.0 is an organisation specification editor to serve as an "advanced search" for users and an profile editor for DL deployers.
Such functionality is extremely important in providing the ease of use of deployment we hope to attain, as well as the full search flexibility the framework can logically deliver.
To achieve this, we are exploring the application of the schema-driven metadata editor developed at the Virginia Tech Digital Library Research Lab [20].
We are also in the process of conducting a second round of focus groups with the current working prototype (with the American South and CITIDEL CS collections).
At the same time, Virginia Tech is initiating its quantitative user studies of the prototype.
We will be reporting on these activities shortly.
Research Issues and Future Work The above findings do seem to suggest we are on the right track with regards to core design.
That is, our model of quality indicators and metadata attributes being treated interchangeably; both being source-able for ranking or facetisation of presentation in the form of dimensions and bins, seems to be at least a major component of any successful solution.
However, the findings also suggest the following areas where modelling, design and implementation needs to be expanded: Relational information.
Relational information is inadequately integrated and interconnected in the current model.
Links of primary records to collections, categories, ratings, and alternate versions can be established with the current framework, but only with a lot of a posteriori implementation leg-work by the DL deployer.
To make this process easier, infrastructural provisions would need to be made, likely including some modelling of link graphs in Lucene's index layer, and some exposure of this information to query syntax.
Transparency.
Similarly, there is no methodical way in our framework to date to have the inner workings of the ranking exposed.
Of course, the DL deployer can go as far as adding interface-level prose to do this, but once again this involves 'extra' work on their part.
We could begin to 'mechanise' the transparency process by provisions like 'rendering' organisation specifications based on some transformation template (much like how the HTML output of search results is presently created).
Thus, any org spec the DL deployer can create, we can in theory provide an automated facility to "explain" it to users.
However, the specifics of how to do this so end users would actually understand the org specs would likely require further research with scholarly patrons.
Manipulation.
Our initial design has placed the emphasis for building organisation specs on the DL deployer.
The end users would then be set to have one or more of these specs as the defaults for their search profile, with the ability to switch between them.
However, it became clear in the course of the user studies that scholars were more willing and desirous to have lower-level manipulation of results presentation.
This is why we think the 'advanced search' functionality discussed above in the context of an org spec editor is needed.
The specifics of how to expose this functionality to users will be nontrivial, due to a usability vs. capability trade-off.
In addition, even if such an editor proves useful, a new problem is created of transforming the output of searches based on ad hoc org specs, as the presentation-layer stylesheets are currently static and bound to particular org specs.
This issue may not be solved within the duration of the present grant project.
In addition, our work to date represents only the beginning of maximising the ranking capabilities of the search system.
With the basic QMSearch framework in place, there is a great deal of potential to leverage sophisticated analysis and data mining engines and automated ranking frameworks to strengthen quality information and improve how it is used.
For example, in [21], work was done which combined many sources of evidence, based on different but interconnected objects, into a unified score.
Such a 'link fusion' system could potentially be used to provide a summary indicator value for objects based on an unlimited number and typology of interlinks.
Work [22][23] was done showing that scoring/ranking based on mixtures of indicators could be optimised with genetic algorithms.
Such a technique is very fitting for the QMSearch model.
Finally, a system [24] was constructed to gather and fuse sparse quality information into usable rankings.
Such a system could potentially make for a very useful QMSearch analyser.
Eventually we can envision the use of a tool such as 5SGraph [25] to configure a QMSearch system graphically using a quality metrics 5S metamodel.
Once this formal model is encoded, the system could be instantiated using a tool such as DLGen [26].
Conclusion In this paper we have introduced QMSearch, a system which re-contextualises metasearch by robustly integrating "quality metrics" for heterogeneous digital library objects.
This system has been founded upon focus group user studies, which we used to develop our model and specific ideas for its implementation.
We are currently in the process of testing our working prototype of QMSearch, both in additional focus groups and in quantitative user studies.
The key innovations of QMSearch are: accommodate and provide a framework for integrating (making explicit) implicit quality indicators which are available in the library information landscape, to provide for alternative, multifaceted scoring/ranking metrics based on any number of these indicators or explicit metadata attributes, and to provide results based on these metrics in a hierarchical XML format representing the requested organisation, beyond simple linear ordering, and to allow this output to be templatised into a user interface as a separate step.
The upshot of these advances is to better accommodate the scholarly digital library setting, by fostering flexibility, transparency, and comprehensibility for the end user, as well as superior information integration and modularity for the digital librarian.
While a fully featured system that 'completely' addresses all of the issues in this problem space is likely not in the cards for the scope of this short, largely-investigative project, we believe we have made a great deal of progress in advancing digital library metasearch.
We believe QMSearch will allow digital libraries to better fulfil user needs and expectations, providing a strong contender to more opaque and less-flexible search engine components in the near future.
References The MetaScholar Initiative http://www.metascholar.org/ As epitomised for example by TREC and SIGIR.
For example: Seonho Kim, Uma Murthy, Kapil Ahuja, Sandi Vasile, and Edward A.
Fox.
Effectiveness of implicit rating data on characterizing users in complex information systems.
In European Conference on Digital Libraries, 2005.
For example, MetaArchive, AmericanSouth, and MetaCombine.
Aaron Krowne, Martin Halbert, Urvashi Gadi, and Edward A.
Fox.
Quality metrics interim report 1.
Technical report, Emory University Woodruff Library, July 2005.
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine.
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1-7):107-117, 1998.
Hussein Suleman.
Open Digital Libraries.
PhD thesis, Virginia Tech, November 2002.
Aaron Krowne.
A draft standard for an ockham-based oai transformation service framework (ockham-xform).
Technical report, Emory University Woodruff Library, August 2005.
Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel.
The open archives initiative: Building a low-barrier interoperability framework.
In JCDL, June 2001.
Thornton Staples, Ross Wayland, and Sandra Payette.
The fedora project: An open-source digital object repository management system.
D-Lib Magazine, April 2003.
Marcos Andre; Goncalves, Edward A.
Fox, Layne T. Watson, and Neill A. Kipp.
Streams, structures, spaces, scenarios, societies (5s): A formal model for digital libraries.
ACM Trans.
Inf.
Syst., 22(2):270-312, 2004.
Marcos Goncalves and Edward A.
Fox.
5SL: A language for declarative specification and generation of digital libraries.
In Proceedings of JCDL 2002, June 2002.
See A9.com home page http://www.a9.com/ Jim Gray, Surajit Chaudhuri, Adam Bosworth, Andrew Layman, Don Reichart, Murali Venkatrao, Frank Pellow, and Hamid Pirahesh.
Data cube: A relational aggregation operator generalizing group-by, cross-tab, and sub-totals.
Data Min.
Knowl.
Discov., 1(1):29-53, 1997.
Aaron Krowne, Martin Halbert, Urvashi Gadi, and Edward A.
Fox.
Quality metrics interim report 1.
Technical report, Emory University Woodruff Library, July 2005.
Whether system developers can use this is another matter, which is why we believe there is an important niche for XML databases with XPath/XQuery (or similar) searching.
For Open Archives, see http://www.openarchives.org/tools/tools.html Visible at http://metacluster.library.emory.edu/quality_metrics/ See http://a9.com/ See http://oai.dlib.vt.edu/odl/software/mdedit/ Wensi Xi, Benyu Zhang, Yizhou Lu, Zheng Chen, Shuicheng Yan, Huajun Zeng, Wei-Ying Ma, and Edward A.
Fox.
Link fusion: A unified link analysis framework for multi-type interrelated data objects.
In The Thirteenth World Wide Web conference, 2004.
Weiguo Fan, Michael D. Gordon, Praveen Pathak, Wensi Xi, and Edward A.
Fox.
Ranking function optimization for effective web search by genetic programming: An empirical study.
In HICSS, 2004.
Martin Utesch.
Genetic query optimization in database systems.
In Postgresql 6.3 Documentation.
1997.
Seonho Kim, Uma Murthy, Kapil Ahuja, Sandi Vasile, and Edward A.
Fox.
Effectiveness of implicit rating data on characterizing users in complex information systems.
In European Conference on Digital Libraries, 2005 Qinwei Zhu.
5SGraph: A modeling tool for digital libraries.
Master's thesis, Virginia Tech, 2002.
Rohit Kelapure.
Scenario-based generation of digital library services.
Master's thesis, Virginia Tech, June 2003.
Author Details Aaron Krowne Woodruff Library Emory University Email: akrowne@emory.edu Web site: http://web.library.emory.edu/ Urvashi Gadi Woodruff Library Emory University Email: ugadi@emory.edu Web site: http://web.library.emory.edu/ Return to top Article Title: "QMSearch: A Quality Metrics-aware Search Framework" Author: Aaron Krowne and Urvashi Gadi Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/krowne/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Unicode and Historic Scripts Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Unicode and Historic Scripts Buzz data software html xml tei metadata safari standardisation accessibility browser copyright preservation windows linux unicode url standards Citation BibTex RIS Deborah Anderson provides us an overview of the progress made in bringing historic scripts to the Unicode Standard.
Many digital versions of texts–whether they be the plays of Aeschylus, or stories from this week’s Times–can now be accessed by a worldwide audience, thanks to the Internet and developments in international standards and the computer industry.
But while modern newspapers in English and even the Greek plays of Aeschylus can be viewed on the Internet in their original script, reading articles that cite a line of original text in Egyptian hieroglyphs is more problematic, for this script has not yet been included in the international character encoding standard Unicode.
Because Egyptian hieroglyphs and several other historic scripts are not yet included in the Unicode Standard (“Unicode” henceforth), reading or writing documents with these scripts can be difficult or even impossible on the computer and over the Internet.
This situation has important ramifications for the future of scholarly discourse, teaching, online publishing, and accessing and preserving our cultural heritage generally.
Recent developments seem to suggest that help is on the way: Linear B and Cypriot (early forms of Greek), Ugaritic cuneiform, and Old Italic (used for Etruscan and other languages from ancient Italy) are now included in Unicode 4.0 [1].
Still, over ninety scripts are known to be missing, two-thirds of which are historic scripts, the remainder being modern minority scripts [2].
Since these scripts are lesser-known and are used by smaller groups whose financial and/or political clout may not be considered significant, work to get them included in Unicode is slow and poorly funded.
Corporations, which make up the majority of members of the Unicode Consortium, and national bodies are showing diminishing interest in finishing the task of encoding scripts of the world.
Hence participation from scholars and support from public and private institutions are critical in order to guarantee electronic accessibility to the historic scripts.
Should such scripts be omitted from the Standard, access to texts in these scripts will prove difficult.
This brief introduction will describe the Unicode Standard and give an overview of how it is organised, how to get it to work, provide a list of missing scripts and offer suggestions on how to help the effort to get the scripts into Unicode.
Figure 1: Sample of Chalukya script (“Box-Headed” script) Figure 2: Sample of Balti script What is Unicode and why is it important?
Unicode is an international character encoding standard.
With Unicode, each character of a script receives a unique number that remains the same, regardless of the computer platform, software, or the language.
For example, the letter Latin capital letter “A” has the value (or “character code”) U+0041 in Unicode.
The value assigned to “A” is typically given in hexadecimal notation and preceded by the notation “U+”.
It is this number that the computer stores and uses to refer to “A”; such character codes underlie word-processing (such as MS Word) and Web documents.
In a multi-layered model of text data, character encoding lies on the bottom layer, being just a series of character codes.
It is a “plain text” representation, since it has no formatting information, such as font size, bold style, etc., which are found in “rich text” or “fancy text.” Above this level of character encoding is markup, such as HTML, XML, or TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), while metadata sits on the topmost layer.
Figure 3: Multi-layered Model of Text Data Unicode is synchronised with ISO/IEC 10646, the parallel International Standard that is maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Because Unicode is widely supported by the computer industry and national bodies, text data is accessible across platforms and computer programs and will remain stable through time.
One goal of Unicode is to cover all the scripts of the world, both historic and modern; it has enough space to cover over one million characters.
Attaining universal coverage of the world’s scripts will help users be able to access and use any script in email, Web pages, electronic versions of documents, etc.
With the release of Unicode 4.0, over 96,000 characters are encoded, covering a large number of scripts and their languages [3].
But sending email or documents across computer platforms in scripts currently missing from the Standard can cause problems.
Since there is no standardised assignment of codepoints, problems can occur when transmitting data (i.e., my “A” could appear as an “F” on another user’s computer screen).
Ideally, the missing scripts should be included in Unicode.
Organisation of Unicode and Underlying Concepts Familiarity with the organisation of Unicode and its underlying concepts are key to being able to take full advantage of Unicode, and will help to avoid frustration and confusion.
A brief overview is provided here; the best place to go for information is to the Unicode Standard itself, either in its print version (The Unicode Standard 4.0), or in the PDF version posted on the Unicode Consortium Web site [4].
The Unicode Consortium Web site additionally includes technical reports and annexes, as well as a wealth of other useful information for those new to Unicode and for more advanced users.
Because the Web site includes the latest information on recently approved characters and scripts, it should be consulted first, and references below are hence made to the Web pages.
In Unicode, characters are organized into blocks of scripts (“Greek” and “Cyrillic”) or groups of similar characters (i.e., arrows).
A listing of the various script blocks is included on the “Code charts” page of the Web site [5].
Some characters may be in different blocks, so users may need to look around for appropriate characters.
Several scripts are contained in more than one block.
For example, the Latin script, which is used for a wide variety of languages, is covered by five different blocks: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional.
Punctuation, which is used across a variety of scripts, can appear in its own block.
Each code chart is followed by a list of names of the characters, their codepoints, a representative picture of the character (“glyph”), and often additional information, such as alternative names, cross references to other characters, etc.
Background information on the various scripts is included in the first part of the book, with some implementation and usage guidelines.
While looking through the code charts, a number of important concepts need to be taken into consideration: Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs.
Characters are abstract and reflect “the smallest components of written language that have semantic value” (The Unicode Standard 4.0, p. 15), whereas glyphs are the surface representations of characters.
Glyphs appear on the printed page or on your monitor.
Unicode is concerned with the abstract characters (such as the lower case letter Latin “a”), the font provides the glyphs (a cursive “a”, a Times New Roman “a”, etc.)
Determining a character versus a glyph can be difficult when working with historic texts, because the entire set of characters may not be known or there can be controversy on the details of a script.
Figure 4: Unicode’s domain vs. the font’s domain Some letters or symbols in a script may be created by more than one character.
Unicode offers a productive means of composing characters by using combinations of a base letter and a combining diacritic (for example, if one needed an “M” with a macron above it, it is covered by the capital letter “M” U+004D and a combining macron, U+0304).
The code charts reflect only representative images (glyphs) of the letter or symbol, and these are not intended to be definitive.
Even though the picture in the code chart may not be identical to the one needed, the place to go for the desired glyph shape is in the font, not in Unicode.
Abbreviations, ligatures, variants, and idiosyncratic scribal marks are not likely to be included in Unicode, nor are precomposed characters (characters that can be de-composed into more than one character).
Further details on finding a character, are provided on the Unicode Consortium “Where is my Character?” Web page [6].
Scripts that are in the process of being proposed are also listed on the Unicode Consortium Web site [7].
Scripts that have not yet been formally proposed or are without a proposal, are listed on the “Roadmaps” Web page on the Unicode Consortium Web site [8].
It is important to check Planes 0, 1, and 2.
Scripts in red are missing detailed proposals, those in blue have proposals submitted to one of the two international standards bodies, the Unicode Technical Committee or the Working Group 2 (WG2) of the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 2 (JTC1/SC2).
(Both must ultimately approve the proposal).
Practical Issues: Getting Unicode to Work Having a script in Unicode does not guarantee that its characters can automatically be used in an email message or a word processing program.
Unicode is the underlying standard upon which fonts, keyboards, and software are based, so in order to be able to type and send documents with these scripts and their characters, users need to have Unicode-compliant products.
Because the Standard is continually evolving with more scripts and characters being added, using the most recent fonts and stable software available will, in general, provide better support.
A listing of such products is posted on the Unicode Enabled Products Web page [9] and on Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources Web site [10].
In general, the following are needed: A recent operating system (Mac OS X; Windows 2000, XP; Gnu/Linux with glibc 2.2.2 or newer) A recent browser (IE, Safari, OmniWeb, Mozilla/Netscape) A Unicode text editor (Word 2000, 2002, Unipad, Apple “TextEdit”) An input mechanism (a keyboard, the “insert symbol” mechanism, Apple’s Character Palette) A Unicode-enabled font (Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Code 2000) (Note: Fonts advertised as “Unicode-compliant” may only cover certain scripts or parts of the repertoire, so users should be cautious) If a particular script is not in Unicode, a number of short-term solutions are available, including transliterations or transcriptions in an already encoded script.
Further options are the creation of non-standard fonts or the use of images (i.e.
GIFs).
Again, such measures do not provide a long-term solution for creating access to the original script.
Status of Historic Scripts Missing in Unicode Historic scripts missing in Unicode are listed in the chart below.
“Historic” refers to scripts that are extinct or reserved for liturgical use.
A single asterisk (*) indicates a proposal has been written for this script (but additional work needs to be done), two asterisks () indicates the proposal has been approved by one of the two standardising bodies.
Links to the extant proposals is provided on the Script Encoding Initiative Web site [2].
There are often characters missing from scripts which have been already encoded (i.e., missing alchemical signs, Tibetan punctuation marks, etc.).
Work on these is ongoing; the list below refers to entire scripts that are missing.
Missing Historic Scripts Ahom Alpine Avestan Aztec Pictograms Balti Bamum Brahmi Buthakukye Byblos Carian Chalukya (Box-headed) Chola Coptic Cypro-Minoan Egyptian hieroglyphs* Elbasan Elymaic Glagolitic Grantha Hatran Hungarian Runic Iberian Indus Valley script Jurchin Kaithi Kawi Khamti* Kharosthi Khotanese Kitan Large Script Kitan Small Script Lahnda Linear A Luwian Lycian Lydian Mandaic Manichaean Mayan Hieroglyphs Meroitic Modi Nabataean North Arabic Numidian Old Permic* Old Persian Cuneiform Orkhon Pahlavi Palmyrene ‘Phags-pa Phoenician Proto-Elamite Pyu Rongo Rongo Samaritan Satavahana Sharada Siddham South Arabian Soyombo Sumerian Pictograms Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform Takri Tangut Ideograms Uighur Vedic accents How to Help The door for getting scripts into Unicode 5.0 will remain open for perhaps one more year, until 2004.
After this point it will be increasingly difficult to get scripts into the Standard because of decreased interest in encoding the ‘lesser-known’ and ‘lesser-used’ scripts by large corporations and various national bodies.
Hence, it is incumbent upon the digital library community, scholars, and other interested users to become involved early and support this effort.
Scripts left out of the Standard will mean that documents that use these scripts–many of which make up our cultural and literary heritage–will be difficult to access in the future.
The most pressing needs in the effort to encode missing scripts are publicity, particularly geared toward public and private agencies, and funding so that veteran script proposal authors can write Unicode proposals and work on the development of free fonts.
In response to these needs, I began the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley [11].
SEI was established to raise funds for script encoding proposal authors (including the world’s foremost script encoding author, Michael Everson) to work on proposals, and to develop fonts.
The project has Unicode Technical Directors on its advisory board to help assure that the script proposals move smoothly through the proposal process.
Participation of scholars in the Unicode process is also needed.
Proposals should be reviewed by scholars who are familiar with the scripts.
A set of “best practices” guidelines for using Unicode with particular scripts is also a desideratum.
Moreover, letters of support from the academic field should be sent to the standards bodies, verifying the final proposals are sound and that the encoding for a script is necessary.
Figure 5: Sample of Rongo Rongo script Conclusion The Unicode Standard represents a tremendous advance for multilingual computing, but more work is needed in order to achieve a truly multilingual Web.
The impact will be manifold: it will help in the publication and preservation of materials in ancient and historic scripts, facilitate the online teaching of languages using such scripts, and provide universal access to our cultural and literary heritage.
Acknowledgements All script samples were kindly provided by Michael Everson of Everson Typography.
Note: This article has drawn heavily upon a paper given 25 November 2002 at a panel co-sponsored by the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, and the Society of Biblical Literature on “Electronic Markup and Publication of Ancient Near Eastern Texts” in Toronto, Canada.
References Historic scripts encoded in Version 4.0 of the Unicode Standard, (PDF file excerpt) http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch13.pdf Alphabetical list of scripts missing from Unicode, Scripts Encoding Initiative.
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~dwanders/alpha-script-list.html Unicode Consortium languages and scripts page http://www.unicode.org/onlinedat/languages-scripts.html Unicode Consortium 4.0.0 Web page http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ Unicode Consortium code charts page http://www.unicode.org/charts/ Unicode Consortium “Where is my Character?” Web page http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/where/ Unicode Consortium Proposed New Scripts Web Page http://www.unicode.org/pending/pending.html Unicode Consortium Roadmaps page http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/ Unicode Consortium Enabled Products Web page http://www.unicode.org/onlinedat/products.html Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources Web site http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ Script Encoding Initiative homepage http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~dwanders/ Author Details Deborah Anderson Researcher, Dept.
of Linguistics University of California, Berkeley California, USA.
Email: dwanders@socrates.berkeley.edu Web site: http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~dwanders Return to top Article Title: “Unicode and Historic Scripts” Author: Deborah Anderson Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/anderson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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RDA: A New International Standard Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines RDA: A New International Standard Buzz data software xml metadata identifier schema video cataloguing graphics multimedia marc ead aacr2 isbd dvd frbr dcmi mets mods onix vra standards Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman describes work on the new cataloguing code, Resource Description and Access (RDA), based on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR).
Cataloguing principles and rules ensure that bibliographic / catalogue records contain structured data about information resources and are created in a consistent manner within the various catalogue and metadata formats.
Today ‘catalogues’ (in the widest sense) need to provide access to a wider range of information carriers, with a greater depth and complexity of content.
While building on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), the work on Resource Description and Access (RDA) is going back to basic principles and aiming to develop a resource that can be used internationally by a wide range of personnel working in different areas.
What is RDA?
RDA is the working title of a new cataloguing code based on AACR, which is currently the world’s most used content standard for bibliographic description and access.
It is being developed by the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR (JSC) [1].
Before RDA The origins of AACR go back to previous cataloguing codes.
In 1841, Panizzi’s cataloguing rules for the British Museum [2] set out the concept that each book should have one principle entry in the catalogue, while Cutter’s Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue [3], published in 1876, contained 369 rules for descriptive cataloguing, subject headings and filing.
Separate UK and US rules were then in use up till the middle of the twentieth century.
Two sets of internationally agreed principles were drawn up in the 1960s.
The Paris Principles were the work of the International Conference on Cataloging held in Paris in 1961 [4], which had representation from 53 countries, and drew on the work of Seymour Lubetzky.
The Copenhagen Principles were agreed at the International Meeting of Catalogue Experts in Copenhagen in 1969 [5], and were the impetus for the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) [6] to start work on the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) [7], first published in 1971.
The ISBD organises the description of an item into distinct areas: title, statement of responsibility, edition, resource specific information, publication, physical description, series, notes and standard number identifiers.
The first edition of AACR was published in 1967, in separate British and North American texts.
The second edition (AACR2) published in 1978 unified the two sets of rules, and also made them consistent with the ISBD.
Key principles of AACR include cataloguing from the item ‘in hand’ rather than inferring information from external sources and the concept of the ‘chief source of information’, which is the preferred source where conflicts exist.
Why is RDA Needed?
Since publication in 1978, a number of amendments and revisions have been made to the text of AACR2.
In 1997 the JSC invited experts world-wide to an International Conference on the Principles and Future Developments of AACR in Toronto [8].
Participants identified a number of issues of concern principles, content vs carrier, logical structure of the Rules, seriality and internationalisation.
Revisions of the text post-1997 addressed some issues in a limited way, but there was a growing recognition that a new resource was needed, not simply a third edition of AACR.
This view was supported by the 1998 IFLA study on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [9], which reinforced the basic objectives of catalogues and the importance of relationships for users to carry out the basic tasks of ‘find’, ‘identify’, ‘select’ and ‘obtain’.
The study produced a conceptual model of entities, relationships and attributes that are independent of communications formats or data structure.
The model identified information content as having Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item level characteristics, which were related to a number of entities (persons, corporate bodies, concept, object, event and place).
The structure of this theoretical model allows collocation at Work / Expression level.
The challenge of incorporating this model and its concepts into the new cataloguing rules also contributed to the decision to create RDA in preference to a revision of AACR2, since it is not a simple matter of replacing an old term in AACR with a new term but usually requires complete rewriting of text sections.
So what are the issues and problems with AACR2 that demonstrate the need for RDA?
Simplification Over time, the rules had become more complex, in an attempt to cover increasingly diverse and complex resource formats.
General rules were followed by chapters for specific rules covering books and other printed materials, cartographic materials, manuscripts, music, sound recordings, motion pictures and video recordings, graphic materials, electronic materials, 3D items, microforms and continuing resources (e.g.
serials).
RDA aims to phrase rules more simply so that they can easily be applied to a variety of resources with the minimum of specific instruction, and with the aid of suitably chosen examples.
Structure The current structure of AACR2, noted above, is in itself the source of some problems.
The arrangement of the descriptive chapters by resource type means that the cataloguer must first decide on the format or material type of the resource to be described in order to locate the appropriate chapters to use.
However, there is no clear guidance as to how the decision should be made.
While this may be obvious for some resources (e.g.
a single textual manuscript), in others it will be less so is a music serial primarily ‘music’ or a ‘continuing resource’?
RDA plans to address this by placing identification of the resource type as the first step in the cataloguing process, and therefore at the beginning of the general instructions.
Consistency The AACR2 structure of general and specific rules led to a situation where some resources were catalogued in slightly different ways to other resources.
Alternative rules in some areas and optional additions to rules further complicated things, to the extent that two catalogue records for the same item could be created using AACR and yet have substantial differences.
RDA aims to simplify rules so that they are more easily applied to a range of resources and to limit alternative variations in treatment.
Collocation Today’s information environment is one in which individual information resources are available in a range of formats and often with a number of derivative works.
For example, a novel may exist in hardback and paperback, standard and large print, Braille and Moon tactile formats, digital files and spoken word recordings on audio tape and CD.
Additionally, it may be the source work for films, musicals, operas and ballets, or the inspiration for prequels, sequels and related works by the same or different authors.
There is a whole range of relationships between these entities, which have been described in FRBR, but AACR does not directly reflect this theoretical model and the terms that it uses.
These relationships are important in enabling catalogues to collocate appropriately records that are retrieved from searches to reflect these relationships.
RDA will include a chapter on relationships in addition to incorporating FRBR terminology throughout the text.
Principle-based Rules The general and specific rule structure and the provision of alternative instructions, led to a situation where rule interpretations were developed to assist cataloguers.
RDA aspires to develop a set of rules that is based on clearly stated principles, with limited alternatives, that will enable cataloguers to build their own judgement and expertise.
Content and Formats Bringing AACR into line with ISBD resulted in the use of ‘general material designation’ (GMD) and ‘specific material designation’ (SMD) terms.
Potentially these terms can be used in systems as filtering parameters (find only DVD version(s) of a film and not video), display sequence parameters (for a single work with 8 text versions, 3 spoken word recordings, 1 digital file and 1 Braille text) and content information (musical notation and recorded performances of a musical work).
To date, use of GMD and SMD terms has been limited and patchy, partly due to problems inherent in the lists of terms.
There are 2 GMD lists, one British and a slightly longer North American/Australian one.
Confusingly, GMD terms cover both content (e.g.
music, cartographic material) and format (e.g.
Braille, filmstrip).
Additionally, as the range of information carriers increased rapidly, SMD terms became increasingly out of touch with user practice: authorised terms include ‘sound cassette’ and ‘videodisc’ and not the more commonly used audio tape and DVD.
In an effort to address this, recent revisions of AACR2 have included some options to use such product-related terms.
RDA will replace the GMDs and SMDs with a more flexible approach, within which existing content and carrier terms can be defined without precluding the use of other terms that may be required in the future.
Internationalisation AACR evolved in the English-speaking cultures of Britain and North America and certain aspects of it have an Anglo-American bias.
Meanwhile, other countries had developed their own sets of cataloguing rules, which had both common ground with, and divergence from, AACR.
One example is the Regeln für die alphabetische Katalogisierung (RAK) [10] used in Germany.
RAK is mainly based on the Copenhagen and Paris Principles, and replaced the Prussian Instructions (PI) [11] as the standard cataloguing rules in Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s.
There are major differences between RAK and AACR, although both are based on the Copenhagen and Paris Principles.
The library world was quick to recognise the economic advantage of the ‘create an electronic catalogue record once, and reuse it many times’ principle, with the result that there is globally a great deal of bibliographic data exchange.
As this exchange increases, it has highlighted the obstacles to exchanging data created to different sets of rules.
The Anglo-American bias in the AACR2 is seen as a barrier to wider adoption in some areas of the world, where the information community is increasingly international.
The aim with RDA is therefore to base it on internationally agreed cataloguing principles, and to remove instances of Anglo-American bias in the new rules.
‘Cataloguing’ Today While earlier forms of catalogue still exist, the current environment is of online catalogues and searching across different metadata formats.
There are many new metadata formats and packaging (communications) formats and increasingly these are used in on-the-fly ‘mash-up’ connections.
Today, a wider range of personnel than previously authors, administrators, cataloguers, etc.
create bibliographic metadata, with varying levels of skill and ability.
Some metadata is even created without direct human input, using computer software.
RDA aims to be independent of any communication formats, the number of which has increased greatly in recent years.
The library community is familiar with ISBD and with machine-readable cataloguing, though even this now encompasses a range of formats: UNIMARC [12], MARC 21 [13], MODS [14], MADS [15] and MARCXML [16].
Other communities have developed Dublin Core [17] for Internet resources, EAD [18] for archival descriptions, the VRA Core Element Set [19] for works and images of visual culture, and MPEG-7 [20], the multimedia content description standard.
How the Revision Process Works A structure of committees and organisations underpins AACR.
The Committee of Principals oversees the work of the AACR Fund Trustees/Publishers and the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR (JSC).
The JSC is made up of representatives of the American Library Association (ALA) [21], the Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) [22], the British Library (BL) [23], the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing (CCC) [24], the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) [25] and the Library of Congress (LC) [26].
In the UK, the JSC representatives from CILIP and the BL are members of the CILIP/BL Committee on AACR [27], along with four members nominated by CILIP and three members by the BL.
There are also several invited members with backgrounds in specific areas such as digital or art materials or in the national libraries of Scotland and Wales and the committee contacts specialist groups when considering specific proposals and issues.
Creating the text of RDA is a collaborative process that is timed to work in the context of what are currently twice-yearly meetings of the JSC.
The JSC and/or the Editor (Tom Delsey) create drafts of the text, while any of the constituent committees can put forward proposals for changes to rules or for new rules.
These drafts are issued for constituency review, with JSC members responding on behalf of their respective committees or organisations.
Where there is consensus, the Editor will take the next steps in preparing new drafts.
In other cases, working groups will be set up to review specific areas and make further proposals or recommendations.
A further round of drafts and proposals will then be issued for comment.
This process continues until a final approved text has been agreed.
The JSC has also made the process more open by publishing most documentation online.
It has also engaged with other communities during the review process in order to ensure that RDA can be applied widely.
What Will RDA Be?
The JSC has a number of strategic goals for RDA.
They are to: Continue to base rules on principles, and cover all types of materials.
Foster use world-wide, while deriving rules from Anglophone conventions and customs.
Make rules easy to use and interpret.
Make applicable to an online, networked environment.
Provide effective bibliographic control for all types of media.
Make compatible with other similar standards.
Encourage use beyond the library community.
RDA will contain new introductions, content rules and updated examples, will cover authority control, use FRBR terminology and simplify the text to improve consistency.
It will also reach out to other communities to achieve greater alignments with other standards.
It will be offered as a Web-based product as well as a loose-leaf printed version.
The Web-based version will have added functionality (e.g.
internal and external links) and the option of customisable versions is being explored.
Potentially there could be full, concise and tailored (e.g.
serials, cartographic) versions.
There is also the opportunity for RDA (or parts thereof) to be incorporated into data input templates and task-oriented work-flows by system vendors.
RDA Structure Part A covers description, relationships and related resources.
General guidelines will cover identification of the resource type, technical description, content description, and sourcing and item-specific information.
New categories of carrier and content will be introduced.
The section on relationships will cover those between FRBR bibliographic entities and agents (persons, etc.).
There will be a simplified choice of primary access points for citations of works, and special rules will be simplified or eliminated.
Part B on authority control will cover purpose, scope, and authorised and un-authorised forms.
Appendices will cover display standards, ISBD, capitalisation, abbreviations, numbers and a glossary.
Progress JSC is aiming for an initial release of RDA in 2008.
This will be the culmination of a three-year period of intense activity.
The initial proposals envisaged a three-part structure (covering resource description, relationships and access point control).
The draft of Part 1 issued in December 2004 received much negative comment on the approach being taken, with the result that the JSC decided to abandon the draft and go back to the drawing board.
The prospectus for RDA was issued to the committees in July 2005, followed by a draft of most of Part 1 in December 2005.
Responses were more favourable to the new approach, although a number of issues were identified as requiring further work.
2005 saw additional work on the issue of content and carrier.
JSC set up a working group to review this area; its report recommended that content and carrier information was needed for both search and display purposes and, since current listings of GMDs and SMDs were not appropriate, proposed new sets of terms.
In a parallel initiative, JSC worked with the creators of ONIX [28], the book trade XML message format, on harmonising the ONIX material categories with RDA content and carrier terms.
These two reports were used by the Editor to produce a draft for the relevant sections of RDA.
In April 2006, drafts of the remaining chapters of Part 1, now designated Part A in a new two-part structure, were issued for review.
Responses to these documents will be considered at the October 2006 JSC meeting.
The period between October 2006 and April 2007 will focus on Part B, while the period May to September 2007 will consider the general introduction, appendices and glossary.
Work is already being undertaken in some of these areas.
Two working groups have been set up to look at examples required for inclusion in RDA.
Their remit is to make a thorough review of existing examples, with a view to recommending the omission or replacement of some existing examples and proposing new examples where these are needed.
Work is also underway on revision of the appendices.
At present the following appendices are envisaged: capitalisation, abbreviations, initial articles, presentation of data and a glossary.
There is a move for RDA to permit less use of abbreviations in bibliographic records (for example: s.l.
and c.).
However, this raises issues about the language of full text replacements: ‘date not known’ and ‘date not stated’ are not equivalents.
A counter-argument suggests retaining abbreviations, such that systems could be designed to display full text in the language of the specific catalogue.
Proposals have been put forward to extend the lists of initial articles with lists for several additional languages, with the result that this is now becoming an extensive document.
This increase in size and the question of future additions and maintenance have prompted suggestions that this information should not be part of RDA but a supplementary work.
During early discussions about RDA, the CCC had proposed that there be a mapping of specific RDA rules and the appropriate / relevant field(s) in MARC 21.
The JSC agreed that this would be useful and the task of carrying out this work was devolved to CCC and ACOC.
The work will identify where RDA will affect MARC 21 and also where existing data provision in MARC 21 may indicate a need for inclusion within the rules in RDA.
The JSC plans to submit a discussion paper on these areas to the January 2007 MARBI [29] meeting.
Conclusion RDA is a new standard for resource description and access, designed for the digital environment, aimed at all who need to find, identify, select, obtain, use, manage and organise information.
It is a multinational content description standard covering all media, that is independent of technical communication formats.
Input from a wider range of communities has been sought, and progress can be followed on the JSC and CILIP/BL Web sites.
References Joint Steering Committee on Revision of AACR (JSC) http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/ Panizzi, Anthony.
“Rules for the Compilation of the Catalogue,” Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum, (1841), v. 1, p. [v]-ix.
Cutter, Charles Ammi.
Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue.
Washington, D.C. : Government Printing Office, 1876.
Statement of Principles Adopted at the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles, Paris, October 1961.
Annotated ed.
with commentary and examples / by Eva Verona, assisted by … [others].
London : IFLA Committee on Cataloguing, 1971.
Copenhagen Principles.
International Meeting of Catalogue Experts, Copenhagen, 1969. International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) http://www.ifla.org/ International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/pubs/isbd.htm International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR, Toronto, 23-25 October 1997 http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/intlconf1.html IFLA Study Group.
Functional requirements for bibliographic records.
Munich: K.G.
Saur, 1998. http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm Regeln für die alphabetsiche Katalogisierung (RAK) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeln_f%C3%BCr_die_alphabetische_Katalogisierung Prussian Instructions http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preu%C3%9Fische_Instruktionen UNIMARC Bibliographic Format http://www.ifla.org/VI/3/p1996-1/sec-uni.htm MAchine-Readable Cataloguing Format (MARC 21) http://www.loc.gov/marc/ Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/ Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS) http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/ MARC 21 MXL Schema (MARCXML) http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/ Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) http://dublincore.org/ Encoded Archival Description (EAD) http://www.loc.gov/ead/ VRA Core Element Set (VRA) http://www.vraweb.org/vracore3.htm Moving Picture Experts Group Standard 7 (MPEG-7) http://www.chiariglione.org/MPEG/standards/mpeg-7/mpeg-7.htm American Library Association (ALA) http://www.ala.org/ Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/ The British Library (BL) http://www.bl.uk/ Canadian Committee on Cataloguing (CCC) http://www.collectionscanada.ca/ccc/ccc-e.htm Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) http://www.cilip.org.uk/ The Library of Congress (LC) http://www.loc.gov/ CILIP/BL Committee on AACR http://www.slainte.org.uk/aacr/ ONline Information Exchange (ONIX) http://www.editeur.org/onix.html Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information (MARBI) Committee http://www.ala.org/ala/alcts/divisiongroups/marbi/marbi.htm Author Details Ann Chapman Policy & Advice Team UKOLN University of Bath Chair of CILIP/BL Committee on AACR Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.d.chapman.html Return to top Article Title: “RDA: A New International Standard” Author: Ann Chapman Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/chapman/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The AHDS Is Evolving: Changes at the Arts and Humanities Data Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The AHDS Is Evolving: Changes at the Arts and Humanities Data Service Buzz data framework database infrastructure archives standardisation preservation cataloguing ict research Citation BibTex RIS Alastair Dunning describes the changes afoot at the AHDS and how it intends to adapt to the changes in both technology and the needs of its stakeholders.
Established in 1995, the Arts and Humanities Data Service [1] was created with the objective of developing an infrastructure to manage the growing number of digital resources being created within the arts and humanities.
One medium for discussing this initial development was Ariadne, and Daniel Greenstein and Jennifer Trant's 1996 article [2] gave a detailed account of the aims and organisation of the AHDS.
Since the publication of that article, there has been little deviation in the key aims of the AHDS collecting, describing, disseminating and preserving digital resources related to the arts and humanities, and helping develop a culture of common standards to ensure this happens within as wide a framework as possible.
With the seemingly exponential interest in digital resources, the AHDS has grown and achieved successes in all these areas.
It now delivers collections that comprise almost 20,000 images, over 600 datasets and several thousand electronic texts.
Through Guides to Good Practice, workshops and other media, the AHDS has helped inculcate common standards in data creation.
And, perhaps most importantly, the AHDS has mechanisms in place that ensure the long-term preservation of the scholarly heritage that is being continuously developed within the U.K.
This work has continued to attract the interest of funding bodies.
The AHDS is in the midst of a three-year funding cycle, the responsibility for which is split equally between the JISC and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB).
However there is no intention of standing still.
Progress in technology and research, as well as the development of the strategic needs of funding bodies, demands organisational adaptation.
In the past few years, there has been a proliferation of quality digital resources available on the Internet.
And in terms of research, there has been a push towards cross-disciplinary research, but also greater exploration of digital resources within particular subject areas.
The result is that there is now a much greater need to provide users with a coherent way to exploit the full breadth of the arts and humanities, whilst also responding to their particular needs at a subject level.
Therefore the AHDS has recently undergone some changes.
The changes should be seen very much in an evolutionary light adapting to the shifting environment outlined above rather than revolutionary ones which adjust the key aims of the AHDS.
The changes outlined below are meant to build on its previous work.
Fewer acronyms, no more barcode This evolution has partially been a matter of re-branding.
One might justly criticise the AHDS for the profusion of acronyms it has generated; six in total, when you count the AHDS and its five Service Providers.
The new names for the AHDS Centres (which replace the generic description of the constituent parts of the AHDS as Service Providers) go some way to ending this confusion, as well providing a much more focussed service for the particular subject communities within the arts and humanities.
The names for the new AHDS Centres are as follows: AHDS Executive hosted by King's College London AHDS Archaeology hosted by the Archaeology Data Service, University of York AHDS History hosted by the University of Essex AHDS Languages, Literature and Linguistics hosted by the Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford AHDS Performing Arts hosted by the University of Glasgow AHDS Visual Arts hosted by The Surrey Institute of Art and Design, University College Figure 1: The new names and logos of the AHDS Centres Readers will also spot the new logo; the unloved barcode having been replaced by a less mechanical oval, extensible according to the subject area that is being catered for.
The adoption of new names for the various components of the AHDS has also resulted in the development of a single unified Web site.
A general area remains containing all generic AHDS information; but each of the AHDS Centres has its own section, providing information specific to those working within that subject area.
On reaching the AHDS Web site [1] one click on the subject names in the banner at the top of the page allows users to obtain access to the specific subject areas.
Figure 2: Screenshot of new AHDS Web site homepage Development of a Cross-search Catalogue Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks the AHDS has faced in the past eight years has been to try and provide a mechanism to allow users to search through the full breadth of its collections.
Specifications for the original AHDS Gateway did not anticipate the increasing disparity of collections held by the AHDS (nor the different ways of describing them), and thus the Gateway could not always guarantee to give users a working means for making useful cross-disciplinary searches of AHDS resources.
The AHDS has therefore begun work on a cross-search catalogue, formulating coherent collection descriptions for each of its resources, regardless of subject area.
The AHDS cross-search catalogue [3] currently allows users to search across these descriptions.
Users can then proceed to explore the selected collections in much greater depth.
The cross-search catalogue is very much a work in progress, and many improvements will be made over the next two years.
The search facilities will be expanded to offer cross-searching at the level of individual text, image, recording and so on.
Much work will also be done on the standardisation of subject terminologies and developing a more user-friendly interface.
Future Work for the AHDS The AHDS is aware of the need to keep expanding.
One area in which the AHDS wishes to do so is in making a firmer commitment to subjects such as philosophy, classics and religious studies.
Currently, the AHDS only caters for these subjects on a best effort basis, but the feasibility of separate AHDS Centres for these subjects is being explored.
Recent events at the AHRB should also aid the AHDS.
The AHRB's announcement that it is establishing a funding strand for ICT will increase the involvement of the AHDS in research activities funded by the AHRB.
Specifically, the AHDS will be contributing to the development of a database of research methods and projects in humanities computing; it is hoped that the contents of the database will give both researchers and funding bodies a clearer idea of the direction humanities computing is currently taking.
Projects such as these will not only assist the AHDS in its work with the AHRB, but will allow it to keep evolving as a service that responds to the wide and varied needs of those undertaking digital research in the arts and humanities.
References The Arts and Humanities Data Service Web site http://ahds.ac.uk/ AHDS: Arts and Humanities Data Service, Greenstein D,and Trant J.,Ariadne issue 4, July 1996. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/ahds/ Search AHDS Collections http://ahds.ac.uk/collections/ Author Details Alastair Dunning Communications Manager Arts and Humanities Data Service King's College London Email: alastair.dunning@ahds.ac.uk Web site: http://ahds.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The AHDS is Evolving: Changes at the Arts and Humanities Data Service" Author: Alastair Dunning Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/ahds/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: The Web on Your TV Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: The Web on Your TV Buzz wiki javascript html css xhtml accessibility browser blog windows linux streaming flash mp3 usb url standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly takes a look at a digital TV box which provides Web and email access in your living room.
The potential for use of television for accessing Web resources has been suggested for a number of years without having any significant impact.
However the growth in use of digital TV technologies may provide another opportunity for accessing Web and other networked resources from the comfort of your living room.
This article introduces the Netgem i-Player digital TV player and describes the implications for Web developers if such devices grow in popularity.
The Netgem i-Player The Netgem i-Player [1] is a digital TV receiver which can be used to access Freeview TV [2].
The Netgem i-Player, unlike other Freeview players currently available, has a built-in Web browser and email client.
By connecting the box to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) via a modem connection or, ideally, using a broadband connection, you can access the Web without need for a PC.
Figure 1: The Netgem i-Player Personal Experiences I have been using the Netgem i-Player for several months, having upgraded from one of the original Philips OnDigital players.
I purchased the device partly to have a more modern digital TV player (my OnDigital player was very slow when changing channels) but also to explore the potential of this type of device for accessing the Web.
The Netgem i-Player provides a USB interface which can be used to connect to external devices such as Webcams, printers and hard disk drives.
The USB interface can also be used to provide a network connection.
I have attached a WiFi device which provides the connection with my home network.
Accessing the Web is very easy.
Simply press the Web button on the keyboard, enter a URL and start surfing.
An example of a typical page is shown below.
Figure 2: Display of Web Page On Netgem i-Player I have been impressed with the device.
The response time is usually very impressive and most of the Web resources I have accessed are displayed successfully.
This may, however, be a reflection of the type of Web sites I access, which often tend to be those which use Web standards and avoid use of proprietary formats.
Further investigation has revealed the following: HTML, CSS and JavaScript: Web sites which made use of HTML (or XHTML), CSS and JavaScript in general seemed to work successfully.
Frames: Frames interfaces are supported.
New Windows: The Netgem i-Player browser will only display a single window.
If a new window is created it may not be possible to swap to the original window.
Flash: Macromedia's Flash format is not supported so Web pages containing Flash would not be displayed correctly.
Streaming Media: Streaming media is not supported.
However the MP3 format is supported.
It should also be noted that, as can be seen from Figure 2, only the content of the Web page is displayed; there are no browser buttons or icons, URL display, etc.
as is the norm with conventional Web browsers.
This means, for example, that it is not easy to be aware of the URL of the page being displayed or to use the URL display to move up a directory.
It was very noticeable when using the Netgem browser that Web sites built using W3C standards and best practices (such as the W3C Web site shown below) were much easier to use.
Figure 3: Display of a Page on the W3C Web Site Web sites which provide textual information in image format were more difficult to use, as it was not possible for the text to be resized to take account of the characteristics of a television display the screen resolution, use of colour and the distance from which a television screen is normally viewed.
Beyond Simple Web Access We have seen how the device can be used to access standard Web pages.
The Netgem i-Player will also play MP3 files.
This can be used to listen to music stored on Web sites or on attached disk drives.
However in addition to such social uses there may also be potential for academic use.
A recent development in the Blogging world has been the support for Audio Blogs.
The Audioblog site [3] describes how voice recordings can be submitted using standard telephones to several of the most popular Blog sites, such as Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger and LiveJournal.
The audio clip (in MP3 format) will then be annotated to a Blog entry.
It can be downloaded and listened to on devices with MP3 support including the Netgem i-Player.
Figure 4: Use Of Audioblog Although the Audioblog service is relatively new, and voice submissions can only be made by ringing a phone number in the US, it would appear to have potential for use to support teaching, allowing, for example, lecturers to provide voice annotation of teaching materials.
Potential in the Community Do such devices have any potential for significant use with the Higher and Further Education sectors, or are they likely to remain of minority interest to home users?
The Netgem i-Player device is actually a PC running an embedded Linux operating system [4].
Unlike most Linux PCs, however, the Netgem i-Player is not designed to be managed locally; upgrades to the operating system, installation of new device drives, etc, are carried out by initiating an 'over-the-air' download of new drivers from the manufacturer.
This approach does lose flexibility but has the advantage of minimising support costs.
The box can therefore be regarded as a thin client Web browser device with low maintenance and support costs.
Expressed in those terms such a device would appear to have potential for use within the education sector.
Acknowledging that its main purpose is to provide access to TV channels, there could be scope for providing such a device in halls of residences and student flats.
Implications The impact of access to Web resources using a television is uncertain.
Such devices may fall by the wayside or be only of minority interest.
On the other hand such devices could grow in importance and attract a new user community, such as home users who are unwilling or unable to invest in computer technologies, but do wish to watch the TV and who will be forced to upgrade to digital TV services when the government withdraws analogue TV.
A question which the Web community should be asking is whether we should be making preparations for use of non-standard devices now, or whether we simply need to wait to see if such devices become popular.
To an extent such devices simply confirm the benefits of use of open standards formats and the avoidance of clever tricks when developing Web resources.
It was noticeable, for example, that the W3C Web site could be viewed with ease.
Such devices also highlight the potential for "Through-the-Web" (TTW) editors and other approaches to content creation using a Web interface [5].
It cannot always be assumed that Web authors will be able to update pages using HTML authoring tools.
The ability to be able to update resources using a TTW editor, or with a Wiki or Blog Web-based interface may prove useful.
It would be very useful if Netgem were to provide a simulator for their browser.
Unfortunately none is available; (the screen images in this article were captured and then sent using the Netgem email client).
However, although Netgem does not provide an emulator, an emulator is available [6] for the WebTV device, (a service for accessing the Web using a TV which is available in the US), which provides a similar interface to the Netgem i-Player browser.
An example of the WebTV simulator is shown below.
Figure 5: The WebTV Emulator Using the Netgem i-Player (or the WebTV browser emulator) provides an interesting experience.
The lack of a mouse to move the cursor or to click or double-click on items provides a valuable reminder that not all users can make use of such interfaces which are now taken for granted by most regular Web users.
Filling in Web forms provides a valuable reminder of the importance of ensuring that forms have been designed with sensible tabbing orders it can be frustrating using the keyboard's Tab key to move to the next text field in a form only to lose sight of the cursor because it has moved to an unexpected location on the page.
Conclusions It remains to be seen whether TV access to networked resources represents an uptake by a new community or merely an additional access device for existing users or whether it becomes another technology which fails to gain widespread acceptance.
However institutions may wish to consider the potential of such devices.
Furthermore, professional Web developers should be aware of the potential growth in use of such devices and ensure that their approaches to Web design do not provide a barrier to access by non-traditional devices.
A timely reminder of the importance of open standards and widespread accessibility.
References i-Player, Netgem http://www.netgem.com/ Freeview http://www.freeview.co.uk/ Audioblog.com http://www.audioblog.com/ Hacking the i-Player http://www.endpoint.freeserve.co.uk/iplayer/ Through The Web (TTW) Authoring Tools, P. Browning, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=techwatch_report_0308 Paul Browning, Through the Web Authoring Tools, Ariadne, issue 39, April 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/browning/ The MSN TV Viewer http://developer.msntv.com/Tools/MSNTVVwr.asp Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Web Focus: The Web on your TV" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK Buzz data database dissemination usability archives metadata thesaurus digitisation accessibility repositories preservation ejournal ebook curation rae ict interoperability research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Malcolm Heath, Michael Jubb and David Robey review recent UK discussions and evidence about e-publishing and open access, their impact and implications for researchers in the arts and humanities.
In most of the discussions about e-publications and open access (OA) in recent years, the focus of attention has tended to be on the interests and needs of researchers in the sciences, and of the libraries that seek to serve them.
Significantly less attention has been paid to the needs and interests of researchers in the arts and humanities; and indeed e-publication and open access initiatives, and general awareness of the key issues and debates, are much less advanced in the arts and humanities than in the sciences.
This article reviews some of the discussions that have taken place, and the evidence that has been gathered, about e-publishing and open access and their impact and implications for researchers in the arts and humanities in the UK.
Researchers in these disciplines do not, of course, constitute a homogeneous whole, and they vary as to how they conduct their research and publish their findings.
Across a broad front, however, there are some significant differences between their interests and needs and those of their colleagues in the sciences.
We focus in this paper on the activities of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) [1] and the Research Information Network (RIN) [2], using them to highlight some of the specific issues that have arisen in discussions in the arts and humanities.
But our approach is also a broad one, covering different kinds of publications as well as data and other information sources that may not be formally published.
While the open access agenda has in general so far been primarily concerned with scientific journals, the relative importance of journal literature as an information source is generally less in the arts and humanities than in other domains; monographs and collections of essays in book format remain important as do prestigious outlets and sources of information in many areas, while more and more data resources are being published online.
We therefore include a number of other kinds of online, open-access resource in our discussion, and discuss them alongside comparable subscription-based e-publications.
AHRC Activities The AHRC was established in 2005 and is the principal funder of research in the arts and humanities in the UK.
In 2002-4 its precursor body, the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) held a series of meetings, chaired originally by David Eastwood as its Chief Executive and then by his deputy, Michael Jubb, of an E-publishing Round Table.
This brought together a group of librarians, publishers and academics, with the aim of establishing a dialogue about how best to develop and exploit new models and services for publishing research results and findings.
The Round Table has not met since November 2004; but it influenced the development of the AHRC’s ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme, which has taken forward some of the issues raised by the Round Table, as we shall see.
It also helped to spawn a larger-scale Research Strategy Seminar on E-publishing in the Arts and Humanities, held in May 2005, again bringing together librarians, publishers and academics, and with representation from funding bodies.
The AHRB and AHRC also participated in the lengthy discussions across all of the UK Research Councils (RCUK) in developing a position statement on access to research outputs.
Following the publication of that statement in June 2006, however, it was not until September 2007 that the AHRC followed other Research Councils in producing a policy statement of its own.
RIN Activities The RIN was also established in 2005.
Its role is to gather and analyse evidence about the key developments in the research information landscape across all disciplines; and to provide advice and guidance on the strategic development of policies and services in the interests of UK researchers.
It has sought to establish dialogue between the various players in the scholarly communications process, and has established a Research Communications Group for that purpose, including representatives of research funders, librarians and information specialists, researchers, and publishers.
Through the work of the Research Communications Group, the RIN has been able to establish a number of jointly-sponsored projects and initiatives, including a review of the current state of knowledge about scholarly journal publishing in the UK [3].
A paper has been published [4], endorsed by all the key bodies representing librarians and publishers in the UK, as well as research funders, setting out the key principles and public policy goals we are seeking to achieve through the scholarly communications process.
The RIN has also produced various studies of researchers’ behaviour and use of information services.
A report on researchers’ use of academic libraries and their services [5] shows that arts and humanities researchers differ in a number of ways from their colleagues in the sciences in their use of library services.
It also shows that they are as yet much less aware, and make significantly less use, of e-publications and open access services of all kinds.
We draw on this kind of evidence and the discussions outlined above in the rest of this article.
Journals and Open Access Online publication of journals, whether open access or not, has not yet proceeded so far in the arts and humanities as it has in other disciplines.
Surveys undertaken on behalf of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers [6] clearly demonstrate that in the arts and humanities a lower proportion of scholarly journals are published online than in science, technology and medicine.
Hence print is still an important part of the landscape; and a RIN survey in 2006-7 [5] showed that three fifths of researchers in the arts and humanities (compared with one fifth in the life sciences and physical sciences) still rate print versions of current issues of journals as very useful for their research.
Nevertheless, online publication, usually accompanied by a print version, is becoming increasingly the norm, and the evidence suggests that researchers in the arts and humanities, like their colleagues in other disciplines, welcome the benefits it brings in ease of access.
The popularity of JSTOR’s provision of backruns of journals, which are particularly strong in the humanities, is witness to the speed with which online access has been taken up.
Familiarity and use of online journals is not matched, however, by awareness and take-up of the potential for open access to journal literature.
The RIN survey showed that as authors, only 14% of arts and humanities researchers (compared with 30% in the physical sciences and 36% in the life sciences) say that they are familiar with the options for making their research outputs open access.
Hence only very small proportions of researchers have as yet published in open access journals or made their articles available in open access repositories.
Under 3% (compared with 15% in the life sciences and 9% in the physical sciences) say they normally [7] publish in an open access journal; and 6% (compared with 9% in the life sciences and 21% in the physical sciences) place copies of their articles in an open access repository.
As readers of journal articles, 18% of arts and humanities researchers (compared with 44% in the life sciences and 32% in the physical sciences) say they are familiar with methods for finding open access material.
Just 6% say they use open access journals frequently 8.
The proportion of arts and humanities researchers who say that they visit their own institution’s repository frequently is in line with the average for all disciplines, however, at 7%.
Open Access Journals The low levels of awareness and take-up of open access journals (we consider open access repositories below) stem in part from the nature of research in the arts and humanities, and the way it is funded.
Most research in this group of disciplines is produced by individual researchers without the support of a specific project grant.
There are some 12,000 research-active staff in the arts and humanities in UK universities and colleges; but the AHRC awarded in 2006-7 fewer than 300 research and related grants, along with just over 300 grants to support in conjunction with the relevant university or college a short period of research leave [9].
There are relatively few other sources of project grants, and the great majority of researchers are thus supported not by such grants, but rather through their university or college’s block grant from one of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils.
That block grant is delivered mainly through the so-called QR funding stream which is based on the results of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
This enables institutions to provide researchers with the precious resource of time to conduct their research, with perhaps some small amounts of money for travel, consumables and so on.
Along with the other Research Councils, the AHRC now allows for the inclusion in its grants of provision for the payment of publication fees as indirect costs associated with the project.
But since the AHRC funds only a small proportion of arts and humanities research in the UK, this provides for only a minority strand of such research.
It is unlikely that universities and colleges will be willing to cover a significant amount of authors’ publication costs unless a related funding stream is made available—though it is worth observing that it is not unknown for university departments to contribute to the publishing costs of conventional monographs.
These funding restrictions limit the scope for open access journals in the arts and humanities funded through a publication fee model; and thus it is not surprising that there is no equivalent in these disciplines to BioMedCentral and the Public Library of Science.
Publication fees are not the only model for open access online journals.
Their costs may be subsidised by direct financial support from a university or department, or from membership subscriptions to a learned society, or from sales of the printed edition.
In many cases the subsidy is indirect, in the form of the unpaid time provided by their editors.
Scholarly publication has long been reliant on unpaid effort, such as the input of the referees who undertake peer review for commercially published journals.
But many other demands on researchers’ time make the extension of this practice into the editorial and production process difficult to sustain.
For this reason, it tends to be most suitable for quite specialised ‘niche’ journals.
There were some 500 open access journals in the arts and humanities listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) [10] in summer 2007, and many of them take this form (see, for example, from among the journals published from UK universities, Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, published by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Wales Aberystwyth [11]; and 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies published by the University of Birmingham [12).
Such journals can play an important role in their subject communities, and although they do not all operate rigorous peer-review systems, many can and do.
One interesting possibility for the development and support of these journals in the future may be the concept of the ‘overlay’ journal.
On this model, the journal becomes a specialist peer review service.
The journal is not a publisher of content, but provides an interface to papers deposited in institutional or subject repositories, guaranteeing that they have passed the journal’s quality standards.
Such a redefinition of the journal’s role would make the publication of OA journals much easier and more efficient.
A project under the Institutional Repositories programme being supported by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), is addressing the relevant technical issues [13].
It is worth noting also that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada announced in the spring of 2007 a scheme of aid to open access research journals, with the objective of assisting journals offering barrier-free access to peer-reviewed scholarship in the social sciences and humanities [14].
Open Access Repositories There are advantages for the arts and humanities community as for others in making e-prints of journal articles available in open access repositories as widely and rapidly as possible.
But again the arts and humanities position is in some respects different from that of other disciplines.
Timely access to the latest literature is important in the arts and humanities as elsewhere; but since the pace of the advance of knowledge is typically slower, arts and humanities researchers are more likely to be interested in the final versions of articles, or post-prints, rather than pre-prints.
Although there is a significant amount of informal sharing of drafts, the pre-print culture is much less developed than in many other disciplines.
A closely related issue concerns the very long shelf-life of humanities journals: if researchers are conscientious when they begin a new research project, they may well need to review the relevant literature for a century or so back.
Thus the half-life of the use and citation of journal articles is typically much longer in the arts and humanities than in other disciplines.
One potential consequence is that arts and humanities journal publishers may be less willing to allow open-access posting of e-prints even after an embargo period.
However, it is worth pointing to the success of JSTOR with its provision of backruns of journals behind a ‘moving wall’ (in effect an embargo period) of typically three or five years.
A majority of the JSTOR journals are in the arts and humanities, and they are heavily used by researchers.
It is not clear that JSTOR’s success has had any damaging impact on subscriptions.
In similar vein, it is notable that in practice many arts and humanities journal publishers do allow authors to make their articles available through repositories, albeit in many (but not all) cases after an embargo period; and that they are thus prepared to accept the risk of a fall in subscriptions.
Indeed, the willingness of publishers to allow self-archiving outruns the inclination of researchers in arts and humanities to take advantage of the opportunity.
It is not yet clear whether this is a lag due to the relatively late growth of online publishing in this subject area, or whether there are distinctive features of arts and humanities research and publication practices which make it more difficult in principle to persuade researchers to place their articles in open access repositories.
The longer, less intense pace of scholarly exchange may mean that arts and humanities researchers feel less need of immediate and toll-free online access to the latest journal articles in their subjects, just as they are less interested in pre-prints than in the final published versions.
Some may be willing to save up consultations, if necessary, for occasional trips to major research libraries.
Others, knowing that many items will not in the end have been worth the effort of tracking them down, may make the pragmatic decision to do without them, accepting the risk of missing something important.
Despite these qualifications, anecdotal evidence, as well as access logs and the correspondence received by authors, suggests that arts and humanities material in OA repositories is consulted, and that its accessibility is valued beyond the specialist subject community by academics in countries without well-resourced libraries or without a tradition of study in a given discipline, and also by independent researchers and members of the non-academic public.
Revenues, Costs and Benefits A final distinctive feature of the arts and humanities relates to revenues and costs.
As the RIN’s UK Scholarly Journals 2006 Baseline Report [3] notes, it is difficult to get authoritative and consistent data on journal prices.
But the evidence shows clearly [15][16 that in general, the cost to libraries of subscriptions for arts and humanities journals is lower than in other domains.
Many journals are also available at moderate cost to private subscribers.
On the other hand, it must be recognised that the resources available to support research in the arts and humanities are, as noted above, much more limited than in the sciences; and there is no evidence to suggest that the ratio of the cost of subscriptions to the resources available to support them is more favourable.
Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that library subscriptions to arts and humanities journals have been reduced in some institutions in order to meet the rising costs of science journals.
Resource constraints thus bring particular problems for the arts and humanities in relation both to the established subscription-based model for journals, and to open access models: there is less resource than in other disciplines to support either model.
It is especially important, therefore, that careful thought should be given to the costs, benefits and implications of moving to new models.
The issues include how to sustain the positive role that the established subscription model has played in journal development, the valuable support it has provided for the work of learned societies, and the UK’s strong position as a publisher, and exporter, of learned journals in the arts and humanities.
Moves towards open access to journal literature have the potential, we believe, to bring clear benefits to the arts and humanities; at the very least, they will promote a healthy pluralism, and provide other options to traditional business models and modes of access.
Some of the benefits may be indirect: if one of the longer-term consequences of open access is to reduce the cost of science journals, this could (but of course may not) help to reduce the pressure on library budgets in the arts and humanities.
But overall the benefits may be more limited than in some other domains, and the pace of change is likely to be slower: neither open access journals nor open access archives are likely to have a transforming impact in the arts and humanities for the foreseeable future.
Monographs, e-Texts and Other Kinds of e-Book Monographs probably play a larger role in research in the arts and humanities than in any other domain.
Increases in the number and the prices of monographs, as for journals, put pressure on library budgets.
A market in e-monographs is developing, for instance through Oxford University Press’s Oxford Scholarship Online initiative [17] which makes over 1,650 monographs available on a subscription system, in subjects including classics, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy and religion, and through Cambridge University Press’s eBookstore [18].
There is also some self-publishing of e-monographs.
The pace of development remains relatively slow at present, partly because at present people find e-monographs difficult to read and therefore like to have the traditional printed form.
It is notable, for example, that the Oxford University Press experience to date is that online availability had not so far affected print sales.
In fact, the continuing advantage of printed media for sustained or close study may mean that online availability promotes print sales: if readers have the opportunity to browse a book online, that may help them to decide that the item is one they need to acquire in printed form.
The advantages of printed over electronic media for readers also make print-on-demand a significant development.
It is already used by established publishers to keep older titles available, and may provide a more cost-effective way of publishing monographs of a specialist nature—although to judge from some existing print-on-demand services, it is not guaranteed to lead to reductions in cost to the consumer.
There are other kinds of book in the arts and humanities which are facing increasing difficulty in finding conventional publishers, and may benefit from e-publication: conference proceedings, for instance, or the publications of historical record societies.
So far, however, the possibilities of electronic publication do not seem to have been much exploited in these respects.
The points made above mostly concern ‘secondary’ research literature, rather than ‘primary’ source texts.
It is worth emphasising that e-publication has been immensely important for research in the arts and humanities through the creation of primary text archives (though there are often issues of quality assurance, metadata, and so on).
On the one hand we have well-established resources produced commercially, e.g.
Patrologia Latina [19] and Early English Books On-line [20] or with charitable and other funding, e.g.
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae [21].
These are subscription-based, though often free at the point of use for scholars whose universities have paid the (sometimes substantial) subscription.
On the other hand there are also mass-digitisation projects such as those sponsored by Google, Microsoft, and the Open Content Alliance.
Overall there has been an extraordinary transformation in the accessibility of textual material in the arts and humanities.
A particularly powerful new development is that of new forms of electronic critical edition.
These are especially interesting for their systematic use of hyperlinking and the association of text with images, thus creating a new kind of publication impossible through conventional means.
The reader can move freely backwards and forwards between the edited text, the apparatus of notes and variants, and transcriptions and images of source texts: a well-known example is the series published by the Canterbury Tales Project [22].
We should also keep in mind the prospect of developing other new kinds of multi-media e-book, combining text with still or moving images and with sounds.
This may be particularly important for the creative and performing arts, but is not much developed yet; see for example Douglas Tallack’s 3 Cities Project [23], or the e-books and online writing of Jorn Ebner [224 and Sue Thomas [25].
E-Theses In the arts and humanities, as in the sciences, the UK lags behind a number of other countries in making theses available in digital form.
The EThOS initiative [26] promises to address this issue and to make UK theses available on open access for global use.
The case for this is as strong in the arts and humanities as in other domains.
Most theses do not deserve to be formally published, but they may still contain material that would be useful to a limited number of researchers working in the same area.
At present they are likely to be unknown unless someone cites them and even then, the difficulty of getting hold of them means that people generally will not bother unless there is really strong evidence that they will be essential.
Open access online publication of theses will make it much easier to find out that they exist, and to get access to them.
Routine thesis deposit would also be a way of getting new researchers into the open access repository habit.
Knowing that a thesis will be publicly accessible might even provide an incentive to improve its quality to the examiners, as well as the candidate.
As the EThOS programme develops, however, an issue that will require consideration is the effect it will have on the practice, probably more common in the arts and humanities than in other domains, of turning a thesis into the author’s first book: will publishers be less willing to support this if the original thesis is freely available?
On the other hand the pressure to turn a thesis into a ‘first book’ might be reduced if the thesis itself were publicly accessible, and were regarded (e.g.
for the purposes of research assessment) as a research output.
At present, someone who has just completed a major doctoral research project must, in order to qualify as research-active, either rush it into print prematurely, or produce some new research, at just the time when the treadmill of temporary teaching posts makes it impossible to get any research done.
Data Publication Electronic data production is an important element of arts and humanities research today as it is in other domains.
Almost half of AHRB/AHRC-funded research projects have produced electronic data of some kind.
With the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the AHRC has until recently led the other Research Councils in operating, through the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), a system for the preservation of data output from council-funded projects; now that funding for the AHDS has been withdrawn, however, there are concerns for the sustainability of the data resources that it has, or would have, preserved.
Sustainability raises much broader questions than preservation, especially in the arts and humanities.
The typical AHRC-funded data output is a complex online multi-media database, and this presents major sustainability problems in both academic and technical terms: as regards the need, that is, both to keep the academic content up to date, and to ensure that the resource remains fully functional through the various changes that take place in the surrounding digital environment.
Dealing with the issue of sustainability should also require due attention to issues of usability and reusability, including harmonisation and interoperability, and to quality assurance.
It is fair to say that current and past AHRC-funded data-creation projects could probably benefit, or could have benefited, from more attention to these issues; we need to put structures and procedures in place to ensure that future projects are informed by the right kind of expertise in this respect.
The distinction between publication and mere dissemination should be as important in respect of arts and humanities research data as it is of research literature.
To serve the needs of scholarly research, data outputs need rigorous quality assurance procedures, including peer review, comparable, but not identical, to those operated by reputable research literature publishers.
The AHRC’s ICT Programme has recently funded a project on this issue led by the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society [27].
Based on an extensive online survey, focus groups, interviews, and benchmarking reviews by specialists of a range of Web-based digital resources for history, archaeology and classics, it proposes a multi-staged assessment process after the completion of a resource but before its ‘publication’.
The results of the process, which may involve learned societies and/or subject associations, would be made publicly available and, where appropriate, incorporated in the resource.
The integration of research literature and research data is as important an agenda for research in the arts and humanities as in other domains.
The AHRC ICT Programme is currently funding a trial project at the University of York on linking e-archives and e-publications [28].
Based on the on-line journal Internet Archaeology [29], the aim of the project is ‘to investigate novel ways in which electronic publication over the Internet can provide broad access to research findings in the arts and humanities, and can also make underlying data available in such a way so that readers are enabled to ‘drill down’ seamlessly into online archives to test interpretations and develop their own conclusions’.
This sort of linking is particularly powerful in archaeology, which leads other humanities disciplines in its use of electronic resources, particularly for the preservation of excavation data.
But it is potentially just as important in other disciplines, for instance theatre and design studies, where multi-media data is particularly prominent, as well as in other areas of the humanities.
There is also considerable scope for linking print monographs to (updatable) supporting online data.
General Issues Finally, a number of broader issues that came up in the course of the AHRC discussions, though none of them are specific to the arts and humanities: There is considerable potential for developing the relationship between research on the one hand and teaching and learning on the other.
At the very least, this should mean paying due attention more than is typically the case at present to the teaching and learning potential of research databases.
There is perhaps scope for the development of open peer review, where a preliminary version of a paper or other output is exposed to public commentary leading to revision and perhaps to acceptance of the output for formal publication.
We have not as yet seen in the arts and humanities any development of the kind of platforms now available in the sciences (for example through PLOSOne [30] and Nature Precedings [31]) for presenting lightly peer-reviewed or preliminary research results and inviting comments on them.
Such platforms might not work as well in the arts and humanities as in the sciences: the smaller mass of researchers, and the slower pace of exchange could mean that securing sufficient response would prove difficult.
There is considerable potential also for the development of interactive publications, with scope after peer review for comment and response, so that the publication becomes a site for dialogue.
There is particular potential for incorporating amendments and comments in publications such as critical editions as well as in research databases.
Both of these kinds of research output are almost invariably provisional in status, and would benefit from amendment and annotation.
The degree of editorial control over the dialogue and amendments would of course be an important issue.
The need to ensure that in the assessment of research productivity and quality, whether for appointments and promotions, or for institutional and funding purposes such as the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), due credit is given for e-publications and e-resource projects.
This is no longer a problem for e-journals, so long as they are seen to operate a rigorous peer review system, or for formally published e-monographs (though it is an issue for self-published monographs); but it is almost certainly a problem for developers of data resources, unless we can establish the kind of specialised peer review model set out earlier in this paper.
The roles of institutional and of subject repositories are another issue.
There is a case for using subject repositories as the prime destination for research data, where curation and preservation may bring particular challenges.
For e-prints and other forms of research literature, the location for deposit may be less important than the arrangements for discovery and access.
But, at the very least, more thought should be given to developing effective relationships between the two kinds of repository.
Researchers are not interested so much in the research outputs of a particular institution, but rather in what is available in a particular field.
Hence we need effective mechanisms for harvesting and cross-searching, and much better arrangements for interoperability between different datasets, and between data and publications.
Identifying areas of market failure and market opportunity is of interest.
The AHRC Round Table tended to take the view that in taking the open access agenda forward, careful and specific attention should be given to areas where the present market system has failed not simply in terms of escalating costs, but also as regards the sorts of publication that it does not adequately provide for, and that could be better provided for under an open access regime.
Conversely, more attention should be given to the opportunities that the present market system offers, for instance in terms of journal development.
These points reflect and support the pluralistic, mixed-market approach which the Round Table developed.
As the Round Table noted, however, the rapid change in the scholarly communications system is bringing fundamental changes also in the processes involved, in the nature and incidence of the costs, and in where and how those costs are being met.
There is an urgent need to develop a better understanding of these changes, their impact and implications; and how most effectively to address them.
The need for better awareness and training for researchers about e-publishing and its potential is also important: this applies to all disciplines, but particularly to the arts and humanities.
As noted earlier in this paper, the arts and humanities lag behind other sets of disciplines in skills and awareness, and also in the resources available to tackle these deficiencies.
The need for training must therefore be tackled both at institutional and national levels, making use of such resources as the special funding and programmes to support the training of researchers in generic and transferable skills.
An RIN study is currently under way as to how researchers across the full range of disciplines are being trained in matters relating to the handling and management of information resources, and how such training might be improved.
The wide variety in the kinds of data that researchers in the arts and humanities use and create in texts, images and sounds pose especial challenges in developing and implementing metadata and standards.
Semantic interoperability is a long way off; but there is a need to engage with key sectors of the arts and humanities research community to begin to address the issue.
We should, finally, recall that one distinctive feature of the arts and humanities is the degree to which it is possible for independent researchers, with no formal institutional affiliation, to make a contribution.
For these individuals, the growth of e-publication is creating new obstacles, as well as new opportunities.
Publishers have not traditionally placed restrictions on who libraries may allow to consult printed books and journals; e-publications are often subject to restrictive licensing conditions for example, limiting access to an institution’s current staff and students.
E-publication has untied access from the location of a physical object; but if is to be tied instead to the institutional affiliation of researchers, inequalities of access between researchers will be exacerbated by the very technology that could have eliminated them.
Conclusion This survey may create a frustrating impression of limited penetration and slow progress.
But if we step back and compare the current situation with the situation a decade ago, we may instead find the changes in the arts and humanities research landscape astonishing.
At the very least, we perceive a bridgehead: new concepts and resources have become firmly established; it is possible that developments will accelerate from this point.
A risk is that discussions of e-publishing and open access are dominated by the sciences.
Given the much greater volume and financial weight of scientific research, this is inevitable.
But it is important that the distinctive needs of the arts and humanities are not simply overlooked.
Advocates of Open Access should be more aware of, and receptive to, the perspectives of the arts and humanities disciplines, and extend their advocacy to the arts and humanities community.
For this to be possible, that community itself needs to develop a broader and better-informed internal dialogue about its e-publication needs, and the access issues associated with them.
References Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/ Research Information Network (RIN) http://www.rin.ac.uk/ Research Information Network (2006) UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report, accessed August 2007. http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/UK%20Scholarly%20Journals%202006%20Baseline%20Report.pdf Research Information Network Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: Towards Strategic Goals for Public Policy, March 2007; accessed August 2007 http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/Goals%20for%20Public%20Policy%20-%20Scholarly%20Communications%20Statement%20of%20Principles.pdf Research Information Network (2007).
Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and their Services ; accessed August 2007 http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/libraries-report-2007.pdf Cox J and Cox L (2003 and 2005) Scholarly Publishing Practice: The ALPSP Report on Academic Journal Publishers’ Policies and Practices in Online Publishing (First and Second Surveys).
Executive Summaries accessed August 2007 http://www.alpsp.org/ForceDownload.asp?id=79 and http://www.alpsp.org/ForceDownload.asp?id=60 This finding reflects, of course, the relative lack of established and high-impact open access journals in the arts and humanities, as compared with the sciences.
Again, of course, low frequency of use is related to the small proportion of material published in open access journals in the arts and humanities.
The contrast between arts and humanities and the sciences in the figures for familiarity with methods for finding open access material is perhaps more revealing.
Arts and Humanities Research Council (2007) Annual Report and Accounts, 2006-07; accessed August 2007. http://www.ahrb.ac.uk/images/2006-07.pdf Directory of Open Access Journals; accessed August 2007 http://www.doaj.org/ Refereed Web journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts http://www.aber.ac.uk/cla/ and eventually only at http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/index.htm The 49th Parallel E-Journal http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) Project http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja/ Social Science and Humanities Research Council (2007) Aid to Open Access Research Journals ; accessed August 2007 http://www.sshrc.ca/web/apply/program_descriptions/open_access_journals_e.asp Library and Information Statistics Unit (2006).
LISU Annual Library Statistics 2006; accessed August 2007 http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/pages/publications/als06.html Van Ordsel, LC, and Born, K (2005).
Choosing Sides–Periodical Price Survey 2005, Library Journal, issue 7, April 2005; accessed August 2007 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA516819.html Oxford Scholarship Online http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/ eBookstore Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/ebookstore/ Patrologia Latina http://pld.chadwyck.co.uk/ Early English Books On-line http://eebo.chadwyck.com/ Thesaurus Linguae Graecae http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ The Canterbury Tales Project http://www.canterburytalesproject.org/ The 3Cities Project http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/3cities/ Jorn Ebner http://www.jornebner.info/_files/Ebner_Portfolio.pdf Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media, School of Media and Cultural Production, De Montfort University http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/mcp/staff/sthomas.jsp EThOS http://www.ethos.ac.uk/ Arts and Humanities Research Council (2006), Peer Review and evaluation of digital resources for the arts and humanities ; accessed August 2007 http://www.ahrcict.rdg.ac.uk/activities/strategy_projects/reports/ making the LEAP: linking electronic archives and publications: home http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/leap/ Internet Archaeology http://intarch.ac.uk/ PLOSOne http://www.plosone.org/home.action Nature Precedings http://precedings.nature.com/ Author Details Malcolm Heath Professor of Greek University of Leeds Email: m.f.heath@leeds.ac.uk Web site: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/heath/heath.html Dr Michael Jubb Director Research Information Network 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB Email: Michael.Jubb@rin.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rin.ac.uk/ David Robey Director AHRC ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme Email: d.j.b.robey@reading.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ahrcict.rdg.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK” Author: Malcolm Heath, Michael Jubb and David Robey Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/heath-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC Terminology Services Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC Terminology Services Workshop Buzz data rdf framework portal infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus identifier vocabularies schema lcsh e-learning ontologies ddc owl rslp e-science ict interoperability taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Shreeves reports on a one-day workshop on current developments and future directions for JISC terminology services held in London, February 2004.
Co-sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and UKOLN, the JISC Terminology Services Workshop was held at the CBI Conference Centre in London on 13 February 2004.
Terminology services are networked services which use knowledge organisation systems (such as ontologies, controlled vocabularies, and classification systems) that can be accessed at certain stages of the production and use of metadata.
Chris Rusbridge, Director of Information Services at the University of Glasgow, welcomed the participants and outlined the primary purposes of the workshop: to give an overview of research and work on networked terminology services in multiple domains and to inform future JISC development activities in this area.
He reminded the participants that the ultimate purpose of terminology services is to help whether directly or indirectly users find the appropriate resources.
Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President for Research at OCLC, gave the keynote address.
Noting that terminologies should be regarded as resources in their own right, he argued for the leveraging of these resources through the development of accessible, modular, web-based terminology services rather than a large monolithic service.
He illustrated a modular approach with the demonstration of the integration of the Library of Congress (LC) Name Authority File into the metadata creation module of D-Space.
He advocated that JISC act to encourage experimentation with the development of a diversity of small simple services rather than a single universal service.
The remainder of the workshop was divided into several sessions: panel presentations and discussion on user needs within several specific domains; an assessment of the High Level Thesaurus Phase II Project and an overview and demonstrations of various technological solutions; breakout discussions and report back; and lessons for JISC and group discussion.
Many of the presentations are available at the workshop Web site.
[1] User Requirements Paul Miller, Director of Common Information Environment at JISC, introduced the first session, a panel discussion on user needs for terminologies and terminology services within several specific domains.
Sarah Currier, Librarian for Learning Resources for Social Care at the University of Strathclyde, spoke of user needs within the learning community.
There is a basic need for widely agreed subject vocabularies and classification schemes for learning objects, but there is also a need for specific vocabularies for different levels of education.
These are fundamentally different from the controlled vocabularies typically used in the libraries and other types of cultural heritage institutions.
The wide range of learning objects in the e-learning domain require specialised descriptions.
Nicholas Gibbins, Research Staff at the University of Southampton, reported on needs of researchers and projects in the e-Science domain.
e-Science are large distributed collaborations with large data collections and high-performance computing and storage needs.
e-Science requires metadata and terminologies for both resources and services.
Nicholas observed that some of the features of the Semantic Web (such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL)) are attractive to e-Scientists.
Peter Jordan, Search and Metadata Manager at the Office of the e-Envoy, spoke about the use of the UK Online Web site, a portal to government information [2].
He stepped through an example showing the terms that users of the Web site employ to find information about life-long learning.
He found that the terms entered by users were most often not the terms that were employed by the developers of the portal and that more mapping needed to be done between the two.
Ben Toth, Director of the National Electronic Library for Health, spoke about the use of terminologies at the National Health Service (NHS).
Terminologies and terminology services that map between vocabularies are a key issue because of the electronic patient record initiative which includes a need to create links between the clinical terminologies (such as the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED)) and bibliographic terminologies (such as the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)).
He argued that a business case must be made for terminology services and that in order to do this strong use cases should be developed.
David Dawson, Senior ICT Advisor for the Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council (MLA), spoke on the development of a broad subject terminology for the EnrichUK portal [3] which includes a range of collections digitised through the New Opportunities Fund (NOF).
The NOF-funded projects selected one or more subject terms from a predefined list.
However, these subject terminologies have not matched the search terms entered by users of the portal.
Dawson presented an open directory structure that would allow users to understand what was in the portal before initiating a specific search and would support browsing as an alternative to searching.
Current Developments in Terminology Services The next session of the workshop focused on current research and technologies developed to support terminology services.
Dennis Nicholson, Director of the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, spoke about the High Level Thesaurus (HILT) Phase II Project funded by JISC.
The primary goal of the project was to 'determine specific design requirements' [4] of a terminology service and to design an experimental pilot terminology service at the collection level for the JISC Information Environment which could inform JISC's further development of such services.
The HILT II Project focused on building a mapping between subject schemes by using the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as a spine.
At the search end, a user might enter a term which is mapped to a terminology set (such as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)).
This would then be mapped to DDC and from DCC to other subject terminologies (for example, UNESCO).
This mapping potentially would allow the identification of multiple collections that meet the user's query as well as facilitate cross-collection searching.
Once the subject term has been mapped, the options for terms are presented to the user who can disambiguate between terms as needed.
Dennis noted that there were several areas, including the user interface design and the machine-to-machine interactivity issues, that needed further investigation.
Dennis then posed the question of what the next step should be.
The HILT Phase II Final Report recommended moving forward with the work of the HILT Project [5].
He noted that the rough estimate of the cost of the development of such a service would be approximately £1 million over five years.
He discussed a possible alternative of an automatic subject categorisation matrix which would be based on 'auto-categorising both resources and user queries' and would eliminate the need for mapping between schemas.
The other alternative was the development of a single schema, though this has met with some resistance as found in the first phase of the HILT Project [5].
Rachel Heery, Assistant Director, Research and Development at UKOLN, spoke about delivering HILT as a shared service, i.e.
a machine-to-machine service, within the JISC Information Environment.
She advocated using scenario-based design to develop use cases in order to understand how applications might use terminology services.
She also gave a brief example of how a terminology service might be used to enhance user queries.
Rachel noted moreover that in order to begin fitting HILT into the JISC Information Environment more work is needed on the structured representation of terminologies, queries, and exchange formats and protocols.
Leonard Will of Willpower Information gave a brief evaluation of the HILT Phase II Project.
He noted in particular the challenge for a mapping project like HILT to work with compound concepts as well as mapping from specialised terminologies to more general terminologies.
Until problems such as these are solved and mapping work is complete, he identified a need for users to access easily the local subject terminology used in the relevant collections.
The full evaluation is available in the HILT Phase II Final Report [4].
Douglas Tudhope, Reader in the School of Computing and leader of the Hypermedia Research Unit at the University of Glamorgan, took a step back from specific approaches to terminology services to give an overview of recent research and thinking around knowledge organisation systems.
He began with a taxonomy of knowledge organisation systems including term lists, classification schemes, thesauri and ontologies.
He then reviewed recent research and sources, including citations about the Semantic Web.
Douglas went on to note where networked knowledge organisation systems fit into digital library services and potentially within the JISC Information Environment.
He provided a very useful outline of the life cycle of such systems, (from the creation of the knowledge organisation system to indexing and classification to searching and query expansion to translation support and content integration).
He situated each of the technology demonstrations that were to take place during the lunch hour within this life cycle.
He observed several critical issues to consider when developing knowledge organisation systems: the variety of standards and developing standards; the cost-benefit analysis of any formalisation of a knowledge organisation system; and the critical importance of the user interface and the involvement of users in the development of these systems.
The workshop lunch included demonstrations from several projects and technologies.
Demonstration summaries and links to Web sites can be found on the workshop Web site [6].
Reports from Breakout Sessions The first portion of the afternoon was spent in breakout sessions, each focused on a separate topic.
Each of these groups reported back in a full session.
The reports echoed several of the themes from the morning presentations.
Group One: Roles of automatic and human indexing Chair: Dennis Nicholson, Director of the Centre for Digital Library Research Group One focused on the roles of automatic and human indexing.
They raised the issue of making a business case for terminology services, noted previously by both Ben Toth and Douglas Tudhope.
As part of this business case and in order to determine how to index resources, certain questions need to be asked: What is worth indexing?
Is some content more valuable than others?
For whom is the content valuable?
What value is the indexing to users?
Measurement tools for both value and quality are needed.
It was noted that one can talk about the indexing cost for producers, but it is also critically important to understand the cost to users if a resource is not indexed.
In discussing what method of indexing should be used, the group observed that different domains will have varying demands for quality and precision of indexing.
There are clear limitations to automatic indexing, but there was general agreement in the group that this is not an either/or case.
The use of automated techniques in the background with human intellectual supervision could be an appropriate balance.
Finally, the group noted barriers to the implementation of automatic indexing, particularly staff who are fearful of losing work.
Group Two: User perspectives Chair: Peter Brophy, Director of Centre for Research in Library and Information Management, Manchester Metropolitan University Group Two focused on user behaviours and what their requirements might be for terminology services.
There are many assumptions about user behaviours that are not well tested, although there are many user studies occurring in several domains.
These, however, have not been compiled and coordinated to any great extent, and work towards the coordination of these might yield a better framework in which to situate the usefulness and value of terminology services.
However, user behaviours are often task-based and contextual; it can be problematic to speak of 'the user'.
Picking up Lorcan Dempsey's call for modular 'webulated' terminology services, the group discussed what types of services might have the most impact on users.
The group identified place (geographical terms), name (name authority files), and time (temporal periods) as three terminology sets which could have great impact on users and applications because of their importance across multiple domains and their relatively specific natures.
Group Three: General schemes vs. specific terminologies Chair: Fred Garnett, Head of Community Programmes, British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) Group Three focused on the possibilities of enabling applications to use the context of the user in particular their own terminology to bridge the gap between classification schemes and the terms users employ.
They discussed the explosion of contexts for searching particularly in the Web-based environment.
They noted that the role of expert mediation has changed, but is still needed, particularly at the back end where expert appraisal and classification can add value.
Classification specifically can enable browsing for users.
The group also noted the need for more and better information literacy education.
Group Four Technical aspects of the structure and use of terminologies Chairs: Rachel Heery, Assistant Director, Research and Development at UKOLN and Alan Rector, Professor of Medical Informatics, University of Manchester Group Four explored what technical standards might be needed and used for the development of common terminology services.
The group noted that the technical challenges were quite different for machine-to-machine services than for human-to-machine services.
Machine-to-machine services require well defined and rigorous protocols and standards, while human-to-machine services allow an opportunity for further disambiguation by the user.
The group was divided on whether to focus on the development of small modular services or on a universal ontology (or meta-model) for knowledge organisation systems from which other ontologies could devolve and thus enable greater interoperability.
During the discussions following the last report, a tension implicit during the entire workshop was explicitly drawn out.
The participants were primarily from the library and information science community and the computer science community with a few from the learning objects community.
There is a noticeable gap between these communities' perspectives on how best to go about solving the problems posed by working with knowledge organisation systems.
However, these communities are conducting similar work and have similar interests, and discussions such as these at the workshop were valuable for bringing the communities closer together.
Lessons for JISC and Group Discussion Alan Robiette, Acting Head of Development for JISC, summed up some of the lessons for JISC from this workshop.
He noted that JISC wants to focus on basic services that others can draw from, and that increasingly JISC is thinking beyond the traditional JISC audiences.
A major question for JISC is whether to develop one terminology service or many.
He remarked that multiple services are attractive, and that these different services could be maintained by different communities.
He went on to observe that there is often a dichotomy between what users say they want and what they actually do.
The specialised users and the general users also represent two ends of the spectrum for the development of terminology services.
It can be difficult to keep up with the ever increasing complexity of specialist terminologies.
Developing terminology services for general users must take into account a wide range of background culture and vocabularies.
Alan then invited the participants to discuss further and identify important issues for JISC to consider.
Several themes emerged: JISC should consider development of terminology services (in the plural) for multiple terminologies on small scales so that the infrastructure can be shared easily.
An action research method was suggested; that is, JISC should fund several approaches that are relatively different and inexpensive, but that there should be coordination between these approaches.
Users are a relative unknown in the development of terminology services, but there has been a large amount of research on user behaviours particularly within organisations that could be brought together.
However, it was also noted that some of the terminology services may only have an indirect impact on the user (as in mapping terminologies at the point of metadata creation instead of at the query point).
The maintenance of descriptive metadata and subject schemes used is important.
How resources are described changes over time (particularly in the humanities and social sciences), and developers of terminology services need to remain aware of these changes.
Shared terminology services have to be reliable, but also develop over time in order to reflect changes in both the knowledge organisation systems and technology.
Conclusion As someone who is an outsider to the terminology services community (and to the UK!
), I thought that the JISC Terminology Services Workshop allowed a lively exchange of views on terminology services and knowledge organisation systems from multiple communities.
There seemed to be some agreement that JISC should explore small, modular approaches to terminology services.
Further exploration of the role of the Semantic Web, RDF, and OWL in the development of these and other knowledge organisation systems (as well as the role of library and information scientists in the development of the Semantic Web) was an underlying theme as well.
It was heartening to hear the concept of the monolithic 'user' broken down a bit.
Finally, the engagement of the library and information science community and the computer science community over the issues presented at the workshop was an important, continuing step in a constructive relationship between the two.
References JISC Terminology Services Workshop Programme.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jisc-terminology/programme.html UKOnline.
http://www.ukonline.gov.uk/ EnrichUK.
http://www.enrichuk.net/ Nicholson, D., et al., HILT: High Level Thesaurus Project Phase II.
Final Report to JISC.
January 2004. http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/hilt2web/finalreport.htm Nicholson, D., et al., HILT: High Level Thesaurus Project.
Final Report to RSLP and JISC.
December 2001. http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/Reports/FinalReport.html Demonstration Summaries.
JISC Terminology Services Workshop.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jisc-terminology/demonstration-summaries.html Author Details Sarah Shreeves Sarah is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Library Administration and the Project Coordinator for the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Email: sshreeve@uiuc.edu Web site: http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/ Return to top Article Title: "JISC Terminology Services Workshop" Author: Sarah Shreeves Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/terminologies-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Using the Right Search Engine at the Right Time Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Using the Right Search Engine at the Right Time Buzz data database graphics Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes a look at which search engines to use depending on what you need to find.. My recent articles for Ariadne have tended to focus on specific developments in the field of Internet search, so I thought that it was about time to get back to some basics and have a look at which search engine to use for particular types of query you may have.
The idea for this column arose out of my own bookmarks, which I arrange according to particular criteria, and I created a simple Web page on my own site to list them [1].
This obviously struck something of a chord, as I have days when this particular page has been viewed over 7,000 times.
Consequently I thought I would expand on this a little, and go into slightly more detail on some of them.
I'm often asked, 'Which is the best search engine to use?'
and I always try and answer this tactfully by saying that there isn't a 'best' search engine that's like saying 'what is the best reference book to use?
', which is of course a meaningless question.
Effective researchers or information professionals use the most appropriate resource for the particular circumstances in which they find themselves, but of course in order to do this, it's necessary to appreciate fully all the various options that are available.
The following is therefore a description of some of the search engines that I use on a regular basis; not necessarily the best (although I tend to think that they are), and by no means comlpete.
Precision Searching Most of the time people know exactly what they want to find; they will have a clear idea of the subject matter and appropriate keywords to use.
One tip here before we continue however; it's always a good idea to concentrate slightly less on your question, and slightly more on how it might be answered on a Web page.
Don't look for the question look for the answer!
A quick example here: if you wanted to find out how many companies around the world have Web sites, that's actually quite difficult to find (believe me, I've tried!
), so rather than think of keywords that might narrow your search down, think how that answer might be expressed on a Web page with this example it might well be '95% of companies world wide have Web sites'.
So what you actually want to search for is a phrase 'companies worldwide have Web sites'.
Of course, you'll get some false hits, but you may well quickly strike lucky and find the answer to your question.
If you don't, try and rephrase the 'answer' slightly differently.
However, if we take as a given that you know the information that you want to find and you can define that clearly, a good type of search engine to use in this instance is what I refer to as a 'free text' search engine that is to say, a search engine that leaves you free to type in any text you like.
The obvious search engines to look at here are Google [2], Yahoo!
[3] and the up and coming MSN Search [4].
All of these engines trawl the Internet looking for Web pages and then indexing the content, down to the individual words on the pages.
Consequently they are very good for precision searching.
Type in your keywords and off you go!
However, you'll almost certainly get too many responses this is one of the disadvantages of this type of engine, so you can quickly narrow your search by putting your keywords into a phrase, surrounding it with double quotes.
This will narrow your search and hopefully give you a much more precise answer.
This sometimes falls down slightly though I was recently reading an article that complained that a Google search for "is there a God" didn't work, because Google viewed 'is' and 'a' as stopwords which it ignored, leaving the search strategy as 'there God' which didn't make much sense.
An easy way around this problem is to simply say to Google that you want those search terms included, and this can be done by adding a + symbol immediately preceeding those stopwords.
As a result, "+is there +a god" pulls up the desired pages.
Quick Answers to Quick Questions This is fine as far as it goes, but sometimes you don't want to wade through page after page of results to get the particular piece of information that you need.
Luckily however, it's increasingly less and less necessary to do this, since search engines are being improved to the extent that they can quickly provide you with a simple answer to your question.
MSN Search has incorporated the Microsoft product Encarta into their search interface which is a very sensible idea not only does it give them more leverage, but it allows us, the searching public, to freely use a commercial product.
Simply type in the question that you have, such as 'what is the population of India' and click on Encarta, and the search engine will pull the data directly from that source.
Google has also recently jumped on this bandwagon (and what a surprise that is!
), and you will find that in some, though not all cases, if you type in a question you will get a quick answer at the top of the screen prior to the results that you normally get.
However, there are other options available to you, and it's worth trying these out, just to see if one or other of them tends on the whole to give you better results.
Brainboost [5] is a new search engine, but it seems to work reasonably well, and usually gave me exactly the answer that I was looking for.
Factbites [6] is another engine worth trying, although with this one I found that a more general question worked rather better than something very specific, so rather than asking 'when was such and such born?'
I discovered that just typing in their name gave me all the details that I needed, including place and date of birth.
Another good standby is Answers.com [7] which is viewed by many as the best resource of all for factual information.
Overviews of Subjects You may have frowned slightly earlier when I said that if you know what you're looking for, use a free text search engine, and I wouldn't blame you if you thought 'what else would I want to do with a search engine?'
There may be times when you want a wider variety of options available to you, or you may not know your subject in enough depth to know what keywords to choose, or it may be difficult to decide on the best ones to use in certain situations.
It's at times like these that you may wish to consider using an Index, or Directory search engine.
These search engines list Web sites (rather than pages) in different categories, from the broad to the specific.
They allow you to start your search from the broadest possible base and the sub-headings will help guide you into exactly the right area, finally giving you a listing of Web sites that you can then visit to take your search to the next stage, of trying to find the exact piece of information you need.
The classic example here is Yahoo!
which in the last few months has been hiding what was once its pride and joy, the directory section.
Yahoo!
seems to be concentrating more on rivalling Google, and attacking its main competitor on the free text front, and spending less time on the directory approach.
Consequently it's a good idea to have a couple of other examples to use, and the Open Directory Project [8] is another possible option (which is also used by Google to provide their own Directory).
There are some more rather more specialised engines you can use however, and one that I often fall back on is the Librarian's Index to the Internet [9] or various virtual libraries such as SOSIG [10] that actively promote good quality sites; anything that doesn't match up to their strict criteria for inclusion gets dropped in the bit bucket.
You can find a good listing of virtual libraries at Pinakes [11], and these are also useful if you have an enquirer who wants 'the best Web sites in the world' on a particular subject.
While you can never be sure that the listings always are the best of course, it's a quick, easy and very reliable way of taking a good stab at pointing them towards high quality material.
Alternatively, use search engines to suggest categories for you, created 'on the fly' in accordance with your search.
Teoma [12], Wisenut [13] and the slightly more recent Clusty [14] will all suggest ways of narrowing your search, based on the initial search string that you input.
If you're completely stuck for ideas, it's always worth seeing what one of these can throw up by way of suggestion.
Re-sorting Results Free text search engines work on the basis of relevance ranking; that is to say, they will give you results in the order that they think is most appropriate.
Unfortunately this doesn't always work very well they're only computers after all!
Increasingly search engine providers have realised that searchers like to have a little more control over the way that results appear on the screen in front of them, and there is a slow, but growing trend to allow results to be manipulated.
Although Google itself doesn't allow re-ranking, Google Personalised [15] does; simply set up a profile of general subject areas that particularly interest you, and run the search.
The slider bar that you'll see above the results can be moved to the right, and the results, while still being the same set, will be re-ordered to focus more closely on your particular interests.
It doesn't always work (it is in beta after all), but I've been reasonably impressed with the results.
MSN Search Builder (an option from the main search box) also allows you to re-run a search to pay more attention to 3 specific elements precision, currency and popularity.
Simply move the slider bars up and down, and this adds extra syntax to the search which can then be re-run according to those preferences.
It's not only the big names who are working in this field either.
Some of the smaller engines are also providing options in this area Exalead [16] re-ranks by date, and the multior meta-search engine ZapMeta [17] re-ranks on popularity, title, source and domain.
Multi-search Engines Having already mentioned one or two of these in passing, it's worth pausing for a moment to consider them in a little more detail.
Using a single search engine is like using one reference book, or asking for one person's opinion; can you ever be sure that they're right?
Running a search across a number of search engines helps a lot here if all the search engines are pointing you towards certain sites then you can be reasonably assured that you've found the right material.
Doing this individually is however time-consuming.
A multi-search engine will take your query and pass it out to a number of other search engines, get the results, collate them and then display them to you.
Nothing particularly new with this of course; they've been around almost as long as there have been individual search engines.
My particular favourites are eZ2Find [18] which gives a host of informative categories and not just Web pages and links to specialised databases for example, Ixquick [19] that tends to have a slight UK bias to the engines that it uses and Fazzle [20] that offers a useful percentage indicator of how appropriate it thinks the results are.
Catching What You've Missed Multi-search engines are also useful for something else as well showing you what you're missing!
TurboScout [21] allows searchers to input their search term and then run that search across 23 different engines quickly and easily.
Jux2 [22] has a useful interface that lets searchers view results from Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, and Thumbshots Ranking [23] shows in a graphical format the position of different Web pages between different search engines, and also shows what pages are found by one engine and not by another.
A quick exploration with any of these tools clearly demonstrates that one search engine is not suitable for all needs!
Other Notable Mentions I've already mentioned over 20 different search engines and I've hardly even scratched the surface!
Rather than simply finish at this point I thought I'd quickly refer you to a few other engines that I cannot do without, and hope that you have 5 minutes to spare in order to check some of them out.
Icerocket [24] is a fairly recent addition to the search engine flock, and what particularly impresses me is that they are constantly innovating and adding new resources; they really are racing to catch up with the top names, and while they're not there yet, take a peek you might be pleasantly surprised.
Mooter [25] and WebBrain [26] provide information in a graphic format; it doesn't particularly appeal to me that much, but I know that a number of people (particularly students) really enjoy the unusual presentation format.
Turbo10 [27] is a good engine for searching over 700 'deep Web' engines to locate material that the main engines have probably missed (or more likely been unable to index).
Conclusion: So Many Engines, So Little Time That's just a very brief outline of some of the engines that I use on a regular basis; I'm sure that you'll be familiar with some, or perhaps even most of them, but I hope that I've pointed you towards some that you've not explored yourself, and intrigued you enough to pay them a visit.
I've not even had a chance to touch on finding people, finding images, multi-media or search engines for children but perhaps I'll have an opportunity in another column.
References Which search engine when?
http://www.philb.com/whichengine.htm Google http://www.google.com Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com MSN Search http://search.msn.co.uk/ Brainboost http://www.brainboost.com/ Factbites http://www.factbites.com/ Answers.com http://www.answers.com/ Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org Librarian's Index to the Internet http://lii.org/ SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk Pinakes http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html Teoma http://www.teoma.com Wisenut http://www.wisenut.com Clusty http://clusty.com/ Google Personalized http://labs.google.com/personalized Exalead http://beta.exalead.com/search/C=0/2p=1 Zapmeta http://zapmeta.com/ eZ2Find http://ez2find.com/ Ixquick http://www.ixquick.com/ Fazzle http://www.fazzle.com/log.jsp TurboScout http://www.turboscout.com/ Jux2 http://www.jux2.com/ Thumbshots Ranking http://ranking.thumbshots.com/ IceRocket http://www.icerocket.com/ Mooter http://www.mooter.com/moot WebBrain http://www.webbrain.com/html/default_win.html Turbo10 http://turbo10.com/ Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Using the Right Search Engine at the Right Time" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz software rdf framework rss xml metadata tagging repositories mis mp3 xacml podcast e-science interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Oxford Journals to report on its open access experiments Oxford Journals is to stage a one-day conference to report new results from its open access experiments.
Conference details: Monday 5 June 10.30-16.30 76 Portland Place, London, W1B 1NT Preliminary programme: Martin Richardson and Claire Saxby, Oxford Journals, Oxford University Press Oxford Journals and Open Access Claire Creaser and Eric Davies, LISU, Loughborough University: Counting on Open Access Preliminary Outcomes of an Experiment in Evaluating Scholarly Journal Open Access Models David Nicholas and Paul Huntington, CIBER, University College London: Determining the impact of open access publishing on use and users More information on the programme will be available fro http://www.oxfordjournals.org/news/oa_workshop.html Registration for this event will open on 5 May.
To pre-register to receive further information on this event, please complete the pre-registration form http://www.oxfordjournals.org/news/oa_workshop_registration.html For further information please contact: Mithu Mukherjee mithu.mukherjee@oxfordjournals.org Back to headlines Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2006 14-16 June 2006 University of Bath, Bath Registration is now open for the 10th Institutional Web Management Workshop to be held at the University of Bath.
This 3-day workshop is primarily for those involved in the provision of institutional Web services but covers many library and information science areas.
This year's theme is Quality Matters and there will be a number of talks that consider how this can be applied to both the delivery and organisation of information.
There will also be a debate with one side arguing that Content Management Systems are a key tool for knowledge management, the other claiming that the bubble has burst, resulting in content mis-management.
For further information: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2006/ Back to headlines Fifth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2006) 18-21 September 2006 East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham, UK The aim of the meeting is to provide a forum in which e-Science projects from all disciplines can be discussed, and where the results from projects can be demonstrated.
The conference will therefore feature presentations by groups from throughout the UK who are active in e-Science projects, in addition to poster sessions, mini-workshop sessions, project demonstrations, and birds-of-a-feather sessions.
The schedule will also include a number of invited Keynote speakers involved in leading Grid and e-Science activities.
Further information: http://www.allhands.org.uk/ Back to headlines The 5th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop 21 September 2006 Workshop at the 10th ECDL Conference, Alicante, Spain (http://www.ecdl2006.org/) Entitled "Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services" the workshop aims to address key challenges for KOS posed by the overlapping themes of User-centred design issues KOS Interoperability KOS representations and service protocols Terminology services Social tagging However, other NKOS topics can also be proposed.
For inspiration, visit the NKOS network website at: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/ A significant feature of this NKOS workshop will be a special session highlighting Semantic Web applications of KOS in Digital Libraries.
This builds on Semantic Web contacts established at previous NKOS workshops at ECDL and represents a convergence of semantic Digital Library efforts from the library world and Semantic Web communities.
The session will focus on theoretical and practical issues involved in building next-generation Semantic Digital Libraries that provide machine support for end-users in their search for content and information.
Note the 11 May 2006 deadline for proposals Further information: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nkos/nkos2006/ Back to headlines Fedora announces new release The Fedora Project http://www.fedora.info has announced announce the release of version 2.1.1 of the Fedora open-source digital repository system.
In addition to the standard Fedora features built around Web services, XML, and RDF, this release introduces the new Fedora security architecture, the Fedora Service Framework, and reports significant performance improvement and many other new features and enhancements.
A major new feature of Fedora 2.1.1 is automated enforcement of access control policies using XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language).
Both simple and fine-grained policies can be written to permit or deny access to a Fedora repository.
Also, object-specific policies can be written to control access to a particular object or its components (content or metadata items).
Further information: Details are on the Fedora Web site http://www.fedora.info/community/ General Information: Ronda Grizzle, Technical Coordinator rag9b@virginia.edu [Source: Fedora] [Received: April 2006] Back to headlines Podcast from interview during recent code4lib conference A sixth podcast has been announced in PALINET's Technology Conversation series and features Daniel Chudnov, Staff Programmer at Yale's Center for Medical Informatics.
The interview took place at the code4lib conference.
Daniel discusses the importance of free software and generally shares his wisdom as a leader in library technology and open source software.
The link to the PALINET Technology Conversation page is: http://www.palinet.org/rss/tech-conversations/default.htm The link to the RSS file is: http://www.palinet.org/rss/tech-conversations/tc1.xml The direct link to the MP3 of the podcast is: http://www.palinet.org/rss/tech-conversations/tc6.mp3 Further information: Please send all comments and questions to: John Iliff PALINET Library Technology Development Consultant iliff@palinet.org [Received: April 2006] Back to headlines New report on use of digital resources The Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley has announced the publication of a new report entitled Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
The purpose of the research behind this report was to map the universe of digital resources available to a subset of undergraduate educators in the humanities and social sciences, and investigate how and if available digital resources are actually being used in undergraduate teaching environments.
A variety of methods were empoloyed, including surveys and focus groups.
Contents: Executive Summary Introduction and Rationale for the Project Understanding the Humanities/Social Science Digital Resource Landscape and Where Users Fit Into It How Are Digital Resources Being Used Among Diverse Communities?
Faculty Discussion Groups and Faculty Survey Transaction Log Analysis and Website Surveys Why Study Users?
Interviews with Digital Resource Providers Site Owners and User Researchers Meeting Conclusions Bibliography Appendices Copies of the report are available at: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/digitalresourcestudy/report/ [Received: April 2006] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing a Virtual Research Environment in a Portal Framework: The EVIE Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing a Virtual Research Environment in a Portal Framework: The EVIE Project Buzz data software framework database dissemination portal infrastructure archives accessibility tagging blog repositories preservation cataloguing visualisation personalisation vle shibboleth curation authentication uportal taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tracey Stanley provides an overview of the EVIE Project at the University of Leeds which was funded under the JISC Virtual Research Environments Programme.
Researchers in all disciplines increasingly expect to be able to undertake a variety of research-associated tasks online.
These range from collaborative activities with colleagues around the globe through to information-seeking activities in an electronic library environment.
Many of the tools which enable these activities to take place are already available within the local IT infrastructure.
However, in many cases, the tools are provided through discrete, bespoke interfaces with few links between them.
Researchers face a number of challenges in this environment, including multiple methods of authentication and authorisation, finding information and sharing information between applications.
The EVIE Project intended to address these issues by testing the integration and deployment of key existing software components within a portal framework.
A portal is intended to provide a seamless, Web-based interface to a range of university systems and services.
The key benefit of a portal framework is to bring together disparate resources and systems into a single environment, so that end-users can utilise these tools in an integrated fashion, thus aiding efficiency and effectiveness, and improving the overall user experience.
The University of Leeds is using the Luminis Portal product (from Sungard HE) as its framework for a portal.
Luminis is built upon open standards and v4 is both JSR-168 and Shibboleth compliant, based around uPortal, elements of the Sun JES stack and, optionally, Documentum for content management.
Luminis is widely adopted in the UK and internationally.
Currently the University has a live Student Portal based on the Luminis platform.
The University of Leeds has also developed and deployed a Virtual Research Environment, known as the Virtual Knowledge Park (VKP); although this is now in the process of being withdrawn by the University.
The VKP supported 11 large-scale research programmes which included national research centres, regional research networks, technology institutes and European research consortia within which there were over 200 active research networks.
The University has also developed an in-house VLE the open source Bodington system, and has extensive electronic library services.
The EVIE Project therefore intended to build on this expertise by integrating the VRE, VLE, e-library and other selected corporate resources within an overarching portal framework.
The integration was expected to deliver a range of benefits to researchers, including widening awareness of the tools available, increasing familiarity, uptake and use of tools, aiding ease of use, and improving the ability for researchers to share information across disparate systems.
Aims and Objectives The aims and objectives of the EVIE Project, as stated in the original project plan, were to: Establish a prototype VRE infrastructure based on open standards and existing software components to support a test group of researchers; including users from the School of Medicine, School of Geography, and researchers using the White Rose Grid.
Provide a set of additional resources and services through this environment, including facilities for enhanced search and retrieval.
Deliver simplified-sign-on functionality to enable seamless integration between the identified platforms.
Provide a set of user validated recommendations identifying effective, scaleable and reusable mechanisms for construction of intuitive search and retrieval tools within this environment.
Provision of enhanced resource discovery mechanisms with document visualisation techniques available to indicate relevance.
Develop best practice for the use of taxonomy within a VRE.
Provide support for search and retrieval mechanisms across disparate information resources within a VRE.
Identify long-term options and requirements for digital preservation in a VRE.
Identify requirements for data integration to provide a seamless flow of information between systems integrated through the environment.
Methodology: The EVIE Project has been carried out over three key project phases: Research and user requirements gathering (9 months) Implementation (15 months) Testing, evaluation and dissemination (4 months) The Project has been developed as a series of inter-linked work-packages, broadly covering these key phases.
Phase 1: Research and User Requirements Gathering The research phase included a 6-month user requirements gathering exercise, which incorporated a series of focus groups, semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, and an online questionnaire.
This work was undertaken jointly by the University of Leeds and the British Library.
The research phase also included a scoping study on systems integration requirements, which resulted in a systems integration route-map, and a full technical and functional specification.
These activities drew closely on the outcomes of the user requirements exercise, which provided us with a valuable tool for prioritising development requirements.
As part of this activity, the Project also produced a visual design criteria, accessibility requirements and standards requirements.
A demonstrator system was also produced and tested with key stakeholders, leading to sign-off by the Project Steering Group.
The research phase also included scoping exercises for preservation requirements and taxonomy requirements.
The user requirements gathering phase indicated that respondents were keen to see a unified interface which brought together the various research systems and tools within a single environment.
They flagged that this needs to be easy to use, and that it has to be available to them when they are off-campus.
Respondents prioritised the different aspects that they required as follows: Finding and acquiring published information such as articles, conference proceedings, monographs etc.
Finding out about funding opportunities; applying for funding; managing funding projects.
Collaborating with partners within the University or elsewhere.
Sharing or archiving research results.
Other activities.
Within these initial priorities, respondents flagged the following issues: Finding information: Respondents wanted a simple, easy tool to enable them to search across datasets to find published information.
This should have a Google-like interface, and enable them to search many datasets from a single search point.
They wanted access to native and advanced search interfaces in addition to the above requirement.
They wanted to be able to build up personal lists for searching, and to search across those resources.
They did not want the resources to be chosen for them by someone else (eg: their department or a librarian).
Funding: Respondents wanted to see automatic alerting of new funding opportunities within the portal environment.
They wanted to see various aspects of the grants management process simplified in particular, through access to structured bid templates with a high degree of automation for sign-off.
They also wanted to be able to search, view and download previously submitted proposals.
Collaboration: Respondents wanted access to their own email within the portal, plus the ability to share diaries and meeting organisers with others.
They wanted tools to enable them to work collaboratively on documents and large files.
They wanted to be able to find out who has expertise.
Research outputs: Respondents wanted to be able to find the full-text of an output from the University publications listings.
Processes needed to be put in place to make it as easy as possible for staff to upload their research outputs from a single point of entry.
Other issues raised: Other activities flagged as important include monitoring of financial expenditure and facilities for booking meeting rooms etc.
Respondents wanted to be able to manage data and content across different systems.
From this, an initial priority listing for development was drawn up: Tools for finding information these would include the Library catalogue, access to Library databases, access to Google, and ability to search across multiple sources of information from a single search interface.
Funding these would include alerting tools for new funding opportunities (from sources such as ResearchResearch and RDInfo), tools to support grants submission, facilities for managing grants.
Collaborative tools these would include facilities for collaboratively managing documents and Web content, access to email and diaries, and discussion facilities.
Research outputs these would include facilities for uploading full-text documents to a repository (such as the White Rose Institutional Repository).
Managing data across systems these could include access to the VLE.
Phase 2: Implementation The implementation phase drew closely on the outputs of the user requirements gathering exercise, and on the resulting functional and technical specification.
The specification was further developed as a channel development plan which broke the development work down into key phases for delivery.
Phase 1 was a fairly small phase for delivery, aimed at being easily achieved, and during which valuable skills and lessons would be learned which could be applied to the later phases.
The early phase was intended to be quickly completed, in order to allow for iterative testing and improvements and to maintain project momentum.
Further implementation phases allowed for more complex developments to be undertaken.
The full channel development plan is available on the EVIE Web site [1].
Phase 3: Testing, Evaluation and Dissemination The portal components were installed on the live Portal system at the University in order to allow for a full user testing phase to take place.
A range of user testing and evaluation activities were undertaken; these included: Focus groups, which included a demonstration of the live system, and discussion on the various components.
One-to-one interviews with senior University stakeholders, in order to gauge attitudes and potential for buy-in to the system.
Extended use by a small cohort of volunteers, including academic and research staff, and research postgraduates, and evaluation of this use using a paper-based questionnaire, a series of one-to-one interviews and a focus group.
Development of a set of case studies based around the one-to-one interviews.
Several characteristics of VREs have emerged from the evaluation activities.
In particular it has emerged that researchers have a requirement for highly granular flexibility of both tools and presentation, driven by recognition of the diversity of user needs and requirements the environment is designed to support.
A Portal framework provides a proven architecture for a VRE, in that it has the potential to provide a high level of granularity of service and the flexibility for personalisation and customisation.
VRE frameworks need to be developed with flexibility in mind.
Researchers increasingly expect that they will be able to take a 'plug-and-play' approach, in order to integrate their own personal choice of collaborative tools, library resources etc within the VRE framework.
This presents support and development challenges for institutions, in that a fine granularity of roles will be required.
There is also a requirement to integrate not only with systems within a single institution, but also, driven by the dispersed nature of research communities, with a variety of systems and resources outside the institution.
These might include: Collaboration tools at a collaborating institution or commercial partner.
External Web 2.0 collaboration tools (eg: Google Docs).
Grid services.
Broader Information Environment tools and services.
Integration with the emerging landscape of institutional and other repositories and other publication mechanisms.
Researchers expect flexibility so that they can obtain maximum advantage from the investment being made in this area.
If, for example, they are not using an institutionally-supported blog, they expect that they will be able to switch off this functionality and easily plug-in their own preferred tools.
This fits well with the concept of Web 2.0, but does provide challenges for centrally supported institutional systems in trying to manage this level of flexibility.
Researcher behaviours are extremely varied and it is unwise to attempt to categorise these by discipline.
VRE frameworks therefore need to be built with the flexibility to cater to a wide range of support needs and expectations.
Access to the VRE framework by external collaborators is an expectation rather than an exception, and requirements for this should be considered from the outset of any project.
An external preservation services approach is recommended for the curation of data and objects within the VRE environment.
Such an approach would require policy decisions to be taken at a high level within the institution, and it would also be necessary to have a detailed understanding of the long-term costs and benefits of using such a service.
Taxonomy developments do not appear to be sufficiently mature to facilitate their integration within a VRE, and many of the broad taxonomies currently available would not be sufficiently detailed to enable them to be used in tagging highly specialised content.
Further research on the issues associated with the use of folksonomies is required.
Cultural change issues may act as a potential barrier to VRE take-up within institutions.
Facilitating cultural change is highly resource intensive, and is not often costed into IT development projects.
High-level institutional commitment is necessary in order for a VRE to succeed.
In particular there must be a demonstrable level of commitment to ensuring that existing systems are integrated within a single environment to ensure maximum functionality.
Support for embedding is required over a number of years working practices will change gradually, and a VRE will need time to become widely embedded in institutional practices.
A business case for institutional VRE development should therefore span at least five years, and sustained, long-term support for innovation and development is also required at the national level in order to provide strategic direction for institutional efforts.
It is clear from Phase 1 of the JISC VRE Programme that substantial strides have been made in understanding how a VRE might contribute to supporting research.
EVIE has demonstrated that researchers would welcome a seamless environment where they can access the tools that they need to support their research activities.
However, it is also clear that a number of challenges remain to be addressed before VREs enter mainstream use by researchers.
In particular, it will be necessary to address the cultural challenges to VRE adoption, and this can only be achieved if VRE development and adoption is promoted and resourced by institutions.
The emerging picture of a VRE also contrasts interestingly with the prevailing current perspective of a VLE.
This is usually seen as a relatively tightly integrated set of tools and services bundled in a discrete package or application.
The majority of VLEs are still characterised in this way, despite recent demands for greater pedagogic flexibility.
The JISC e-Framework [2] provides the main challenge to this approach, with its emphasis on a service oriented approach.
The emerging characteristics of a VRE are increasingly linked to requirements to support the development of 'virtual research communities', as identified in the OST Report of March 2006 [3].
This report raises the national and international profile of VRE developments, and flags them as a significant objective for future development.
Conclusion The viable architecture for a VRE, therefore, seems to fit well with the approach being promoted by JISC, and there is an opportunity for the next phase of the VRE Programme to make a substantial contribution to the emerging e-Framework.
The increased use by researchers of social networking applications, for example, adds urgency to the requirement for VREs to adhere to open and published standards and specifications.
Future VRE development must build on a range of existing components, including both collaborative and portal frameworks and standards, and must provide the ability for researchers to customise and personalise the environment.
The extent to which researchers will want to do this is highly dependent on individual characteristics.
For example, some researchers will welcome the provision of a set of standard tools within a VRE, which will significantly reduce the need for them to get involved in setting up tools and services for themselves.
Others will prefer to be able to personalise the environment, adding their own tools and preferred services.
References Embedding a VRE in an Institutional Environment (EVIE) http://www.leeds.ac.uk/evie/workpackages/wp3/EVIEWP3_channel_dev_plan_v8.pdf The e-Framework for Education and Research http://www.e-framework.org/ e-Prints Soton: Report of the Working Group on Virtual Research Communities for the OST e-Infrastructure Steering Group http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/42074/ Author Details Tracey Stanley Head of Planning and Resources JB Morrell Library University of York Heslington York YO10 5DD Tel: +44 1904 433868 Email: tss502@york.ac.uk Web site: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/evie/ Return to top Article Title: "Developing a Virtual Research Environment in a Portal Framework: The EVIE Project" Author: Tracey Stanley Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/stanley/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Content and Workflow Management for Library Web Sites Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Content and Workflow Management for Library Web Sites Buzz software wiki xml portal accessibility blog ejournal intranet Citation BibTex RIS Martin White welcomes the detail but is concerned at the impact that the publishing process has had on the currency and utility of the content.
As the author of three books, and about to start work on a fourth, I do begin to doubt my own sanity.
Last year I wrote The Content Management Handbook in the course of around four months, and even then by the time it was published with great speed by Facet Publishing, several of the comments in the book had been overtaken by events.
This is a constant concern for any author, but especially those working on high technology topics.
In the case of content management software the changes in price, performance and functionality over the last two years have been quite dramatic, as have the expectations of users.
In the UK projects funded by JISC and the enthusiasm, expertise and commitment of university and public library Web teams have resulted in a great many excellent Web applications.
No matter how good these applications might be there is always interest in case studies of how other universities have tackled the technical, organisational and cultural issues.
Learning from Others This book consists of an extended introduction on the current state of library Web content management by the editor.
This is followed by chapters on Library Web Content Management: Needs and Challenges (again by Holly Yu) and Methods and Tools for Managing Library Web Content by Johan Ragetli of the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board, Ontario, Canada.
The remainder of the book comprises case studies from California State University, Indiana University, the University of Albany (the home of the Scratchpad software), Colorado State University, University of Texas Institute for Advanced Technology, Western Michigan University and the University of Oklahoma.
In general the case studies are quite well written, with the emphasis marginally on the technical aspects rather than on the operational aspects.
In a number of cases the authors are candid about the things that went wrong as well as the successes.
The intended readership seems to be a systems development librarian rather than a senior library manager trying to build a business case for investment in Web resources.
As a result there is little information on the costs of development, on the staff resources and more importantly on the reactions of users.
There are some screen shots but probably not enough to understand fully the comments in the text.
Accessibility is not mentioned at all, and subjects such as access to internal and external e-journal collections and other commercial Web-based resources, portal development, and search issues, are almost totally absent.
Indeed the term 'search' does not appear in the index!
The initial chapters are less valuable.
The opening chapter by Yu is largely a review of the literature, and this reveals the major problem I have in recommending this book with enthusiasm.
The literature, and indeed the case studies, stop at the end of 2003.
To make matters worse many of the references date back as far as 1999, when Web content management was a very different matter to the situation today.
Interestingly there are a few references to blogs and wikis, which tend to mask to some extent the dated nature of the references.
Just as disappointing is the lack of analysis by Holly Yu.
From her position as Web Administrator at the Library of the California State University, Los Angeles, I would have thought that she would have been able to do a much more analytical review of the literature.
This is also the case with her introduction on the current state of play in library Web content management, which again is largely a review of pre-2004 (and also pre-XML to a significant extent) literature; she does not really convey any sense of the way in which university libraries are developing innovative Web applications.
Conclusion The overall feel of the book is one that has taken far too long for the publishers to get from manuscript to publication.
The idea was a good one, and the more case studies of Web applications that become available the better in terms of assisting in understanding what is good practice, and learning from the successes and failures in other institutions.
I'm not sure when the editor wrote her chapters, but the book would have benefited from a more current introduction that really did give readers a perspective on the current situation in US academic libraries.
On balance it is a recommendable book, but by the finest of margins and mainly because detailed case studies are difficult to come by.
The last book I reviewed for Ariadne was an edited collection of papers, and looking back I find that the problem of the time taken to publish the book was a significant factor.
In any area where technology plays a major role then it is essential that every effort is made by authors, editors and publishers to bring the title to the library shelf whilst the lessons still have relevance.
Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Return to top Article Title: "Content and Workflow Management for Library Web Sites" Author: Martin White Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/white-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC CETIS Conference, 2006 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC CETIS Conference, 2006 Buzz data framework wiki standardisation blog graphics e-learning mp3 mashup interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Walk reports on the third annual CETIS conference held in Salford, Manchester, over 14 -15 November 2006.
Since its last conference, CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) has undergone a change in status from an eight-year project funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) to a JISC Development Service.
Both the remit and the organisation have changed somewhat, with a physical move from University of Wales, Bangor to University of Bolton.
This, the third annual invitation-only conference, retained the general structure of the previous event a series of keynotes surrounded by plenty of ‘breakout’ sessions.
However, in his introductory speech, Oleg Lieber, explained that feedback from the previous year’s conference had included the view that the session reports, delivered in the plenary session towards the end of the conference, had been too long and over-detailed.
In recognition of this, Oleg instructed us to prepare a single sentence, slide or picture to convey the essence of each breakout group’s conclusions, and to present this sentence at the (much briefer) plenary.
The conference was held this year in Salford, Manchester, at the Lowry Centre.
The Lowry Centre is a complex of conference spaces and galleries.
Painted mostly orange, and with barely a right-angle inside, its architecture tends to demand the adjective ‘funky’, for which I apologise.
As a conference venue, the Lowry is pretty good although, as is still often the case, the WIFI coverage was patchy and intermittent.
Towards Innovating Innovation Bill Olivier, Director of Development (Systems and Technology), JISC Bill Olivier delivered the opening keynote address which gave a number of insights into how JISC is planning to support innovation in education and research.
He pointed out the use of the word ‘innovative’ in JISC’s own mission statement: ‘JISC’s Mission is to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of Information and Communications Technology to support Education and Research.‘ Identifying two areas of tension, ‘demand-pull’ versus ‘technology-push’ imperatives and ‘disruptive’ versus ‘sustainable’ innovation, Bill attempted to layer JISC programme activities onto a diagram abstracting the innovation process.
While pinpointing the problem of moving successful developments from the pilot, or prototype phase, to the status of a more sustainable, assimilated service, Bill also highlighted what he saw as the potential importance of the Users & Innovation Capital Programme in integrating development effort with community practice, via scenario planning and domain mapping.
The slides for Bill’s keynote are available on the CETISwiki [1].
The All New JISC-CETIS Oleg Lieber, Director of JISC-CETIS Oleg gave an overview of JISC-CETIS, now a JISC development service where previously it was a long running project.
To this end, JISC-CETIS is engaging more with the JISC programmes and with the e-Framework [2], and will be building on the reference models recently developed under JISC funding.
While engaging with these new areas however, the service has not forgotten its roots and will continue to concern itself with e-Learning, interoperability and standards.
Oleg suggested that the initial questions about the need for interoperability standards in educational technology, raised in the late 1990s, had gradually become an article of faith over the first five years of this century.
However, he raised the possibility that there was now a need to re-examine not only these assumptions but the nature of educational technology itself.
Introducing the new JISC-CETIS Web site [3] Oleg demonstrated how it has been designed to accommodate a wiki and a series of blogs in fact it is blog technology which generates the dynamic content of the home page.
The slides for Oleg’s speech are available on the CETISwiki [4].
The Philosophical Roots of Games Design Ernest Adams Ernest Adams, speaker and game designer of international repute gave the second keynote address.
Ernest was an engaging speaker.
He began by identifying two separate dichotomies in western culture which he claimed were significant in games design: the classical/romantic divide in western philosophy, and C.P.Snow’s concept of the ‘two cultures’ which describes the breakdown in communications between the sciences and humanities.
Describing how games designers strive to create romantic content by classical means, Ernest used the framework of the various historical categories of western literature.
According to him, the state of the art of games bears closest comparison with the age of Icelandic Sagas.
Much of modern games design strives to create a state of ‘immersion’ for the player.
This is still very difficult to achieve, and once achieved to maintain, for two technical reasons: the poverty of graphical display systems, and the immaturity of artificial intelligence in terms of its constraining effect in creating life-like characters.
Ernest contrasted this situation with the immersive quality of movies, and the ease with which an immersive experience can be created with a book.
Having said this, Ernest did quote Scott Rosenberg who identified the fact that games designers appeared to be deviating from Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, which underpins much of the Romantic literary movement, with their own ‘coerced suspension of disbelief’ deriving from more photo-realistic graphics.
Ernest concluded by suggesting that while modern games are a product of both technology and artistic imagination, the balance is too far tilted in favour of technology.
Interactive narrative, while a feature of many games, is not well understood, and the literary frameworks traditionally used to analyse narrative may not be up to the new task.
He ended with a call for new ‘heroes’ in games design, who could combine ‘technological innovation with aesthetic sensibility’.
More on this, and related subjects, can be found on Ernest’s Web site [5].
Breakout Sessions The breakout sessions are the heart of CETIS conferences.
The general brief was simple: within the theme of each session, delegates were to review the last twelve months of activity, and discuss what should be given priority in the coming year.
There were nine breakout sessions each delegate could attend two.
I attended sessions called ‘Architecture of services & mashups’ and ‘Future of education institutions’.
Both were well-attended and featured lively debates.
The first of these revealed real disagreement on where effort should be prioritised in the coming year.
Suggestions ranged from looking for ‘quick-wins’ in the areas of calendaring and timetabling (with some claiming that there were no quick-wins in this area), to identifying and exposing simpler, non-contentious and public-facing data, with the intention of inviting ‘mash-ups’ in a Web 2.0 style.
The second of the two sessions I attended, ‘Future of education institutions’, achieved more consensus and I found this discussion to be instructive.
The conversation ranged from examining the role of the physical manifestation of the educational institution in an age of rising energy costs and improved communications technology, to the virtues of blended learning.
The single page summary of this session, delivered at the closing plenary, was a drawing of a hamburger, crossed-out, with the phrase ‘keep it weird’ printed above it.
In the words of the official conference session report: ‘This represented our fears that virtualization would lead to too much standardization in education, and our belief in the need to keep things informal, unique and diverse.‘ A report is available for each of the conference sessions, from the main conference Web site [6].
Blended Learning: Pragmatic Innovation Jim Farmer, Centre for Scholarly Systems Architecture, Georgetown University Jim Farmer is no stranger to CETIS, having attended previous conferences and having been involved with some of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs).
In his keynote address Jim started by identifying a list of JISC/CETIS people whose work he has cited in his native US.
This was much appreciated by those listed!
Jim’s approach was, as his title promised, pragmatic much of his talk revolved around the economics of blended learning, particularly in uncovering hidden costs and drawing counter-intuitive conclusions.
Referring to the UK Government’s commitment to raising the percentage of participation in Higher Education from 43% to 50% for instance, Jim noted that (based on experience in the US) the cost per student of providing that education rose steeply.
This seemed to defy any expectations of reduced ‘unit cost’ due to economies of scale.
The reason, he went on to explain, lay in the increased support costs.
There seems to be a threshold which is crossed in the 43%-50% range of participation, where the new participants require a greater degree of support.
Jim also described a significant change in the public’s, and the government’s, view of Higher Education.
In the 1970s, education was seen as a ‘public good’ which should, therefore, be financed by the state whereas now education is seen as something which benefits individual students, and which should be paid for by them.
One result of this gradual change in perspective has been the creation of the student loan industry.
Making several recommendations in the area of e-Learning for the immediate future, Jim suggested that where JISC’s past policy in encouraging innovation had been to ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’, a more selective approach might now be called for, with effort focused on specific, key projects.
One particular recommendation was to implement a ‘cartridge’ specification to ‘achieve critical mass’ and to ‘save publishers from themselves’.
Oleg Lieber thanked Jim for a ‘much needed reality-check’.
The slides for Jim’s keynote are available on the CETISwiki [7].
An audio recording of his address is also available on the CETISwiki [8].
The All-important Coffee-breaks Networking is an important function of the CETIS conferences, and much gets discussed in the coffee breaks between sessions.
During one such break I was treated to an impromptu demonstration by Selwyn Lloyd, Director of Phosphorix, of what he termed ‘remote pair programming’: via Selwyn’s laptop and a WIFI connection, we were able to look over the ‘virtual shoulder’ of one of his developers as he worked, and could discuss with him the particular programming task at hand.
This appeared to work very well.
Conclusion Overall, this conference was an interesting and enjoyable experience, with plenty of opportunity for discussion.
The annual JISC-CETIS conference will continue to be an important event in the community’s year.
References Olivier, B., “Towards Innovating Innovation”, JISC-CETIS Conference Keynote, November 2006 http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/uploads/3/3d/CETIS-2006-Conference-Olivier.ppt (MS Powerpoint slides) The e-Framework http://www.e-framework.org/ The JISC-CETIS Web site http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/ Lieber, O., “The all new JISC-CETIS”, http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/uploads/e/e2/CETIS-2006-conference-Liber.ppt (MS Powerpoint slides) Ernest Adams’ Web site http://www.designersnotebook.com/ CETIS Conference 2006 Web site http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/CETIS_Conference_2006 Farmer, J., “Blended learning: pragmatic innovation”, JISC-CETIS Conference Keynote, November 2006 (MS Powerpoint slides) http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/SOURCE/IMM/I061115F.ppt Farmer, J., “Blended learning: pragmatic innovation”, JISC-CETIS Conference Keynote, November 2006 (MP3 file) http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/MEDIA/ARCHIVES/I061115F.mp3 Author Details Paul Walk Technical Manager UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “JISC CETIS Conference, 2006” Author: Paul Walk Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/jisc-cetis-2006-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DC 2007 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DC 2007 Buzz data software rdf framework wiki xml urn infrastructure archives metadata doi accessibility tagging identifier vocabularies schema video preservation provenance ontologies owl dcmi interoperability dcap research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ann Apps reports on DC2007, the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, held 27-31 August 2007 in Singapore.
The main theme of this year's international conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications was 'Application Profiles: Theory and Practice' [1].
The conference was hosted by the Singapore National Library Board and held in the Intercontinental Hotel, which was across the road from the superb National Library building.
The main conference took place on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
The keynote talks and the presentations of full papers took place in plenary sessions.
Presentations of project report papers were held in parallel with meetings of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) community groups and some special sessions.
The first day, Monday, of the conference, which I did not attend, was a tutorial day, with the aim of bringing newcomers to Dublin Core (DC) 'up to speed'.
On the Friday there were two half-day seminars.
This report is based on the sessions that I attended.
The papers, which were all peer-reviewed, are available via the DCMI Conference Proceedings Web site [2], as well as being published in the printed Proceedings, and the presentations will be available via the conference Web site.
DCMI in the Future Opening Session: Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore's Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports and Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts.
Dr Balakrishnan welcomed us to Singapore and to the conference.
He made an announcement that DCMI [3] is working towards incorporation as an independent legal entity in Singapore as a not-for-profit public company.
DCMI is undertaking this activity in collaboration with the National Library Board Singapore (NLB) [4] which will provide administrative support to the new legal entity once it is established.
Actual incorporation of DCMI as a legal entity in Singapore is foreseen for mid-2008, after consultation between the DCMI Directorate, NLB, OCLC (which is DCMI's current host) and the other DCMI Affiliates.
Figure 1: Singapore National Library Keynotes Keynote 1: Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.
Keynote 2: Zhang Xiaoxing, Deputy Director, National Cultural Information Resource Centre of China.
These talks were about the organisation of information and knowledge management, firstly at the FAO, whose mission is to reduce hunger and poverty in the world by 50% by 2015, and secondly in the cultural heritage domain in China.
The FAO has defined DC-based Application Profiles, or metadata ontologies, as the building blocks for a semantic web space in food and agriculture, which sit alongside subject ontologies.
It aims to standardise the use of agricultural metadata and vocabularies across its entire organisation.
The Chinese National Cultural Information Resource Centre is setting up an organisation based on this national centre, provincial sub-centres, and grass roots centres, such as local libraries and local communities.
The information management is DC-based, resources being described using DC metadata and collections metadata using the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile.
The 'Singapore Framework' Application Profile Model Plenary Session: Mikael Nilsson and Tom Baker.
This session described the new definition of a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP).
The objective is to make a DCAP machine-readable.
The previous understanding of a DCAP was based on guidelines developed by CEN, the European standards organisation.
But these guidelines predate, and so are not consistent with, the Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM).
They have no support for description sets, being a flat list of properties with single values.
A Dublin Core Description Set Profile (DSP) is an information model, which defines the structural constraints on a description set, what descriptions may occur, and what properties may be used.
It is machine-readable, written in XML/RDF.
A Wiki syntax has been developed, which provides one possible means of generating a DSP.
A Dublin Core Application Profile, which is conformant to the Dublin Core Abstract Model, is now a packet of documentation.
At the conference closing session it was announced that it will be called the 'Singapore Framework'.
It consists of: Functional requirements (recommended) Domain model (mandatory) Description Set Profile (mandatory) Usage guidelines (optional) Encoding syntax guidelines (optional) Papers Many of the papers were about Application Profiles, reflecting the theme of the conference.
Jon Mason gave an overview of metadata and Application Profile development in the education sector, finishing with a thought-provoking slide about a future that might include both community content and knowledge management decision support systems.
Diane Hillmann discussed whether machine-readable Application Profiles are a 'good thing', and to what extent they can enhance metadata quality.
Ann Apps' paper was about experiences, benefits and issues in using an Application Profile as the foundation of data specification and application development.
Fredik Enoksson described the implementation of an Application Profile-based metadata editor.
Other themes were ontologies and metadata schema registries.
Shigeo Sugimoto discussed how a metadata schema registry would be used to reuse and customise existing metadata schemas when designing a new metadata schema for a graphical cartoon novel.
There was a paper about semantic integration of metadata using an ontology for cultural heritage collections in Greece.
Douglas Campbell talked about identifying identifiers, deconstructing them to find their purpose.
Akira Miyazawa proposed registering more sub-language scripts in the RFC4646 Internet language vocabulary.
A further theme was metadata generation.
One paper described a comparison of metadata creation by novices and by experts.
Another paper was about an authoring tool for Web-based virtual exhibitions in Singapore.
Community Group Meetings Collection Description Community: Moderator and meeting Chair Ann Apps Ann Apps explained the purpose of the DCMI Collection Description Community, and gave an overview of the history of the development of the DCMI Collections Application Profile (DCCAP) by the previous DCMI Collection Description Working Group.
This included an overview of the domain model, the purpose of collection description, the development of the DCCAP until its current version, which was endorsed as 'conformant' by the DCMI Usage Board in March 2007.
There is further work planned on the DCCAP, including aligning it with the Singapore Framework, which was detailed by Muriel Folonneau, who is a co-chair of the DCMI Collections Application Profile Task Group.
Juha Hakala gave an update on the NISO Metasearch Initiative Collection Description Specification, with a suggestion to make the two specifications identical.
There were a couple of presentations of applications based on collection description.
Robina Clayphan talked about 'The European Library and Collection Descriptions'.
Muriel Folonneau described 'Virtual Collections for researchers: The HAL archive and The Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research'.
Furthermore, the paper that Ann Apps presented to the conference about the JISC Information Environment Service Registry is another example of an application of collection description.
Tools Community: Moderator and meeting Chair Jane Greenberg Discussion was about a proposed Application Profile for describing software tools.
This would be used to provide a consistent format for the DCMI Tools and Software page.
Work required to complete the Application Profile, by a proposed Task Group, was discussed, noting that it will now need to fit in with the Singapore Framework.
This work will include producing a policy document for the Tools and Software page to define the scope of what should be described there, with a possible restriction to tools related to the Dublin Core Abstract Model.
Social Tagging Community: Moderator and meeting Chair Liddy Nevile This was a very interesting session, packed with presentations about a range of relevant work.
Some presentations were pre-recorded as their presenters were unable to be present.
Tagging is the labelling of items.
It includes 'user tagging' and folksonomy.
Sarah Hyman (by audio plus slides) and Pru Mitchell of education.edu in Australia talked about experiments with social tagging for the education community, adding a thread of discussion to an education resource.
Certain identified users are being monitored.
Each user's tags will be different and the same user may create different tags at different times.
Emma Tonkin gave an overview of issues in analysing social tagging.
A tagset is not a finished index, so it is not an endpoint, but it could be analysed.
Tagging, or annotation, is 'language in use', so not really something new.
It is informal, transient, intended for a limited audience, and implicit.
Stu Weibel talked about social networking in the cultural heritage sector.
This is nothing new, social networking being what people do, but it is now wrapped in a technical envelope.
Serendipity may be enabled, or relationships surfaced.
Librarians tend to be slow and careful, offering fixity, being guardians of culture.
Social networking is combining this with fluidity.
Ana Alice Baptista reported on the 'Kinds of Tags' Project (by video but also listening in to the workshop from Portugal via skype).
This project began from a message on the DCMI Social Tagging Community email list.
It is a community project, newcomers being welcome, which is completely Internet-based, with communication between project members being largely asynchronous, and has no financial support.
The project objective is to determine how easily tags can be normalised for interoperability using a standard such as DC.
This is still work-in-progress, with Emma Tonkin leading new developments.
Liddy Nevile presented a structured, top-down approach with a faceted engine in the back end, taken from 'Some Thoughts on the Face Tag Approach' by Andrea Asmni.
Pete Johnston proposed a method of organising tags by using DC properties, essentially as structured tags.
Jennifer Trant reported, by audio recording, on tagging of museum collections in Canada.
Other Community Meetings Because the community meetings were held during parallel sessions, I was unable to attend any others.
The following communities held meetings during the conference to describe their purpose to DC newcomers and to discuss future work: Localisation and Internationalisation; Global Corporate Circle, which plans to reinvent itself to cover knowledge management in co-operative environments; Date; Preservation; Education; Government; Accessibility; Registry; Libraries and Kernel.
All group meetings reported back briefly in the plenary session at the end of each day, and their reports will be available from their DCMI community pages.
Special Sessions Ontology Modelling Using Topic Maps and RDF/OWL: Sam Oh This popular session covered ISO Topic Maps, an international standard for knowledge integration, and W3C RDF/OWL, for ontology definition.
Identifiers: Chair Douglas Campbell This was another popular session, identifiers being a basic need of Internet systems.
It consisted of a series of presentations followed by some discussion.
Juha Hakala talked about some of the identifiers on the ISO agenda.
He covered: ISSN-L ('Linking ISSN'), which addresses the issue of separate identifiers for a serial and its manifestations; DOI (Digital Object Identifier), where there is a need to minimise its use for resources where another ISO identifier is more appropriate; and ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier), an identifier for public identities.
Juha also recommended URN as an actionable identifier system for libraries, with a new, planned European resolver discovery service.
John Kunze gave a report of the NISO 'Round Table on Identifiers'.
Identifiers should be usable with current World Wide Web standards.
There is a new simple name resolver 'n2t' (name to thing), which addresses the problem when the thing identified moves to more than one place.
The use of identifiers in national libraries was the subject of a couple of talks.
The first was about the use of DOIs by the National Library in Singapore.
Then Douglas Campbell talked about identifiers in the National Library of New Zealand, where they are working on mapping all their different identifiers together, via a central pivot identifier.
This work includes a registry of identifiers and resolution of any identifier within their library.
Stu Weibel talked about compromises and principles of identifiers.
He discussed the issues of patterns and of branding within an identifier.
Embedding branding compromises long-term persistence, but it is critical to value recognition, provenance and trust.
Every identifier is a micro-billboard.
Hackable, extensible patterns within identifiers reinforce user expectations, making it easier to find things.
Other Special Sessions Again I was unable to attend the other special session, which was about RDA (Resource Description and Access), of particular interest to librarians.
DCMI have a RDA Task Group to liaise on vocabulary developments.
Seminars Introduction to the Semantic Web: Ivan Herman This seminar was an excellent overview of the semantic web, covering: data integration, relations and graphs; data queries; ontologies and their encoding.
Metadata That Works: Making Good Decisions: Diane Hillmann and Sarah Pulis Diane presented recommendations about metadata and its creation using encoding schemes (controlled vocabularies), and conformance to the Dublin Core Abstract Model.
Sarah followed this with an overview of various standard ways in which metadata is distributed.
Closing Session This successful conference mixed theory and practice, original research and project reports.
It included ten full papers in the plenary sessions and six project report papers during parallel sessions.
There were 190 participants (though not everyone was there for all days) representing 33 countries, the largest contingent being from Singapore.
The Singapore Framework was announced, which lists five requirements for a Dublin Core Application Profile, and bridges the gap between technical and functional issues.
The conclusion of this conference themed around Application Profiles was that mixing and matching of properties requires co-operation amongst standards.
Overall, it was a very interesting, informative and well formulated conference.
Socialising and Sight-Seeing As usual there were lots of opportunities for social interaction.
The conference opened with a reception held in the 'Possibility and Imagination' Rooms of the Singapore National Library.
Although on the fifth floor this was partly outside amongst tropical greenery.
The food served was samples of dishes of the various ethnic communities in Singapore.
On the final Saturday I attended the DCMI Advisory Board meeting on the fourteenth floor of the library, from where the view was stunning.
Figure 2: View from Floor 14 of Singapore National Library The conference dinner was in a restaurant in one of the historical houses of Singapore, the house of one of the Sultan's ministers after the British settlement.
The food was in the local peranakan style and we were entertained by traditional dancing.
Of course I visited various sights in Singapore in the limited free time I had available.
I think my highlight was the Orchid Garden within the Botanic Gardens.
We were made very welcome in Singapore, all those who assisted with the conference, including hotel staff, being very friendly and helpful.
The variety of food provided during the conference, even during the breaks, was amazing.
Figure 3: Orchid Garden in the Singapore Botanic Gardens References DC2007 Conference Web site http://www.dc2007.sg/ DCMI Conference Proceedings http://www.dcmipubs.org/ojs/index.php/pubs The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) http://www.dublincore.org/ The National Library Board Singapore http://www.nlb.gov.sg/ Author Details Ann Apps Research and Development Mimas, The University of Manchester, UK Email: ann.apps@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.mimas.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "DC2007 'Application Profiles: Theory and Practice'" Author: Ann Apps Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/dc-2007-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: No Longer about Search Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: No Longer about Search Buzz firefox browser blog video opera url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley asks 'Is your choice of search engine based on how good it is, or on what else you use?'
2004 was a particularly interesting year for Internet search; we saw a lot of new search engines appearing on the scene, a number of purchases and a lot of innovations, particularly in the last quarter, with Microsoft bringing out its Beta MSN Search [1], Google doubling the size of its index [2], releasing Google Scholar [3] and Google Suggest [4].
We also saw a rise in the number of desktop search applications, particularly from Google [5] and Microsoft [6], and an increase in attempts to provide a personalised version of popular search engines.
Each of these was of interest in its own right, and it was tempting just to choose one or two to write about, but as the year closed I thought it would be interesting to see if and how all of these innovations fitted together.
The Big Problem for the Corporations One of the major problems for search engines is that of loyalty, and it's a Holy Grail that a lot of them have been seeking.
You can find brand loyalty in a lot of places in a library context; librarians will continue to buy new editions of books because they've bought the previous edition, or they'll have huge runs of titles, or they will continue to subscribe to paid services, and indeed one could argue that simply by purchasing a service they have shown their loyalty, at least for the period of the subscription.
However, because search engine usage is free, search engines cannot rely on that level of loyalty, and search engine users can switch from engine to engine as they wish.
I often hear people saying things like 'I really used to like AltaVista, but changed to Google because it was better', and it makes perfect sense to me why use a search engine that isn't as good as the competition?
It's true to say that Google has a huge number of users, but my feeling is that this is because it's a good search engine it provides (usually) good results and it's innovative.
Other people will use Google not because they necessarily think that it's the best search engine out there, but because everyone else uses it.
I don't however see this as a 'brand loyalty', it's more a question of pragmatism; if something better comes along there's every chance that people will switch to that search engine instead.
It's happened before (with AltaVista being a prime example) and it can happen again, and it has to be a major concern for the big players in the market.
Just because Google is Number 1 doesn't mean that will always be the case, and indeed I wrote an article for Ariadne about the Google backlash [7] which I feel illustrates that being Number 1 is a problem in its own right.
What search engines (and the corporations that own them) need to do is to obtain the same kind of loyalty that other companies or products inspire in their users, but it's very difficult to achieve this if the product you are 'selling' is essentially free, as users can migrate from one product to another as they see fit.
Just being very good at what they do isn't really enough; being the best in a particular field doesn't guarantee popularity as the well-worn example of Betamax and VHS video formats has already shown us.
So how can the search engine corporations get that level of loyalty from a fickle public?
The developments and purchases that took place in 2004 give us a fairly clear example of how these corporations feel that they can do it, and that's by providing a whole raft of products that work neatly together, essentially trying to lock us into using one product because we use another.
Being a 'good search engine' isn't really enough these days, and while there will always be a place for good individual search engines (and I could name a dozen or more that fall into that category), it's not going to inspire the sort of loyalty that will keep us going back to them time after time.
So how are the search engine corporations working to get that loyalty?
The Complete Package A good example of how search engines can get us to continue to use their product are the toolbars.
While a toolbar is useful for a searcher, they are even more useful for the engines.
A toolbar sitting in a prominent place in the browser window is constantly reminding us of the existence of that search engine it's very easy (as it is intended to be) to simply click into that little box to run a search, without having to go to the search engine page itself.
I'm as guilty of it as anyone else; if I want to find some information I'll simply type my search into the toolbar window and run it.
It's quick, easy and it works, but what it doesn't encourage me to do is to think 'Is xyz search engine the best choice for me in this instance?'
A toolbar that just offered me that option is not of course going to get very far, so all the toolbars have lots of little extras that encourage me to keep them installed.
We all hate pop-ups, so it's an obvious thing to add a pop-up killer to make our lives easier, while giving us another reason to use that toolbar.
The addition of a pop-up killer was a real reason in the early days to install the Google toolbar [8], because it gave users something that they couldn't easily get elsewhere, and even if you didn't particularly like Google, their product made your life easier, and once the toolbar was installed well, the search box was there, so why not make use of it?
Over the course of 18 months any search engine that was worth its salt produced a toolbar, so the initial attractiveness of a particular toolbar became less valuable, and because these utilities can be installed and uninstalled in a matter of minutes their value diminished very quickly.
I don't think a search engine is wonderful because it has a toolbar now, but I do think it is a bit odd if it doesn't at least provide me with the option of installing it, so while it doesn't increase brand loyalty the omission of one does make me wonder if they're serious about search, so I'm less likely to use them.
Yes, it's unfair, but equally I'm no longer looking at a search engine just because it can search for me, I'm looking at it as part of a bigger package that can provide more than just search.
One for All, All for One: A Killer Application for Each of Us So, while toolbars were a good early foray into trying to get brand loyalty, they only work up to a point.
It's necessary for search engines to look rather more widely than that.
A few years ago there was a lot of talk about the 'killer application' the one thing that would encourage us to use computers (as you can see, I'm really going back a long way here), but we don't hear so much talk of the killer application now, and that's because we all use computers and we use them for a lot of different reasons, so it doesn't actually make that much sense any longer.
However, the concept of a killer application is still important, because when it comes to using the Internet we all have particular, essential requirements.
We all want to search and obtain good results; that's taken as a given, but many people now write weblogs, or they want to be able to find information on their own machines quickly, or they want to be able to share their photographs or music with friends for example.
Consequently, it's a market that the search engine corporations have to look at in some detail.
Google made a very shrewd purchase when they bought Blogger.com [9] because they saw very early on how important blogging was going to become and perceived it as a way of leveraging their hold on the market.
The simple addition of a Blogger icon to their toolbar immediately captured a group of people who were bloggers, but who might not necessarily have used Google.
Once they could see how easy it was to add an entry to their weblog by just clicking on the Blogger icon in the Google toolbar it was an obvious thing to do just add the toolbar because they want to blog, but since the toolbar was now on their machines, they may as well use Google to search as well.
Microsoft has rather belatedly realised the importance of blogging, so it introduced its own concept, Microsoft Spaces, to allow people to create their own weblogs and lo and behold added in a blogging option to its toolbar suite.
Email Another battleground during the course of 2004 has been in the area of email.
Now, email has intrinsically nothing to do with search at all, but Microsoft have Hotmail [11], and Google introduced Gmail [11].
Email is another of those killer applications, so it makes sense for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo as corporations to get involved with it.
Using the Microsoft toolbar I can quickly check to see if I've got any email waiting for me, and when I open my account there's also a nice little search box waiting for me enabling me to search, using, of course, the Microsoft search engine.
Exactly the same thing happens with Gmail; I can either search through my email, or search the Web using Google.
My choice of email package also ties me into a particular search engine not because I have to use MSN Search or Google, but because it's easier to do that than type in the appropriate URL and go to another search engine.
Browsers Another area worthy of note is the resurgence of the browser wars.
The battle between Netscape and Internet Explorer was over several years ago, with Internet Explorer dominant in the field.
That's not to say that it's been the only browser out there, since Opera [12] (as one example) has a following, but it's the browser of choice since it's just there on the desktop waiting to be used.
However, Firefox [13] debuted in 2004, and while no one is saying that it can take on Internet Explorer and win, it should get a healthy slice of the browser market.
Although it's an independent product it's interesting to note that it has understandably allied itself with Google, rather than with Microsoft; indeed one of its selling points is that 'Google Search is built right into the toolbar' [14].
I also found it interesting to note that while MSN Search works quite happily in Firefox, its desktop search (which I'll come to in a moment) does not.
One of the early extensions that users could add to Firefox was the Google toolbar, and while I liked the browser, I wasn't prepared to switch to it until that was available.
Not because I particularly want to use Google, but I wanted that toolbar so that I could continue to add entries to my weblog quickly and easily, which meant waiting for the toolbar with its Blogger icon.
Clearly for me, the 'killer application' is the ability to blog quickly and easily, and I'm not about to use an application which makes this more difficult for me!
Desktop Search Finally we come to desktop search.
Again it could be argued that if you look at search engines in their traditional role (as an application that allows you to search for Web pages), search engines have little to do with what's on my own personal machine.
However, once you start to look at a search engine as part of a corporation, it's an obvious step to provide this type of functionality.
Not because it's a nice thing to provide, but because it ties you into using a particular search engine again.
I can search my desktop from Google as easily as I can search the Web, just by clicking on an icon [15].
In this arena Microsoft does of course have an inherent advantage, since it provides me with my operating system, as it does for millions of other people.
Having played with both the Google and Microsoft offerings I think that Microsoft desktop search [16] is a far superior product to the Google offering; while it's more complex it is far more powerful.
However the major disadvantage is that (currently) I can't use the supplied toolbar in Firefox, only in Internet Explorer.
Consequently I have to make a choice between ease of use, by switching back to the Microsoft browser, or continuing to use Firefox and having slightly less functionality when it comes to desktop search.
Which Corporation Do You Use?
As users, we're now moving into an entirely different arena, where our choice of search engine affects what other products we use.
Alternatively, our choice of other products will inevitably affect our search engine of choice.
If I like using Hotmail, I'm going to be attracted to a product that allows me to get easy access to my account, and the Microsoft Toolbar gives me that.
If I've got the toolbar loaded I'm going to be more likely to use Microsoft Spaces as my blogging tool, and if I use that as well, I'm more likely to use the toolbar to allow me to search, using of course MSN Search.
Alternatively, if I like using Google and have its toolbar installed, it makes it easier to choose Blogger as my weblog tool.
On the other hand, if I like Firefox as a browser that will mean that I can't (yet) use Microsoft Desktop search to its fullest, so I'll mostlikely stick with the Google offering.
Consequently, search engines are becoming much less of an issue as they are tied into a raft of other choices, and increasingly my choice of search engine will come down to what is easiest for me, based on my use of other applications.
I confidently expect that through the rest of 2005 we'll be seeing other search engines providing more add-on utilities; Yahoo is expected to launch its own desktop search function early in the year, Ask Jeeves is launching its own version as well (at the time of writing it is due out in a few days), and other major search engines will also follow suit.
Is this good news for users?
I don't really believe that it is.
As regular readers will know, I firmly believe that good searchers are people who match what they need to know with what they currently know about a subject and choose a search engine based on that information.
The role of other, smaller search engines will continue to be important, and I look to them to provide innovation.
Exalead [17], for example, is in many ways a far superior search engine to either Google or MSN Search, but I'm going to have to remember that it's there and make a conscious effort to use it, and quite frankly, I'm not always going to remember.
For many people who don't appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of search engines, or who don't really understand search (and that's going to be the majority of end-users), they'll use whatever is easiest for them, which ultimately means whichever corporation they become tied into first.
Conclusion My initial point in this article was search engine loyalty.
I don't believe that these innovations do actually increase my loyalty to one search engine or another; there are things that I like in Google, and there are things that are better in MSN Search, or another engine.
As a result, I'll continue to switch between engines to find what I want, as I suspect most information professionals will; but ease of use will increasingly dictate where I go.
It's not loyalty, more like grudging acceptance, which, I suppose, is the next best thing.
References Microsoft Beta Search http://beta.search.msn.com/ Google Press Centre http://www.google.co.uk/press/descriptions.html#websearch Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ Google Suggest http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en Google Desktop utility http://desktop.google.com/?promo=app-gds-en-us Microsoft Desktop suite http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/ Phil Bradley, Search Engines: The Google Backlash, April 2004, Ariadne, Issue 39 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/search-engines/ Google Toolbar http://toolbar.google.com/ Blogger.com http://www.blogger.com Hotmail http://www.hotmail.com Gmail http://www.gmail.com Opera http://www.opera.com/ Firefox http://www.firefox.com Firefox product details http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Google Desktop search http://desktop.google.com/ Microsoft Desktop search http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/ Exalead http://www.exalead.com Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: "Search Engines: No Longer About Search" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Reaching Out to Your Community: Policies and Practice for Public Library Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Reaching Out to Your Community: Policies and Practice for Public Library Service Buzz mobile framework wireless portal infrastructure archives digitisation blog video cataloguing multimedia aggregation e-learning flash ict e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Fiona Leslie gives an overview of this seminar which covered a variety of topics of interest to public library professionals.
The day's programme [1] started with an introduction by Ken Chad, sales director at Talis who welcomed delegates.
Public Libraries and Grids for Learning David Cheetham, project manager for the East Midlands Broadband Consortium (EMBC) gave a speech on the role of the broadband consortium, one of 10 regional networks in England established to deliver high-speed network connectivity to all Britain's schools.
David gave a speech on the activities of EMBC [2] which was set up in the light of the government's pledge to connect all schools to broadband by 2005/06.
The consortium aims to add value to teaching and learning by fostering collaboration in the region and best practice and in the use of ICT as a tool across the entire curriculum.
The consortium has already established a region-wide managed learning network for schools, adult learning centres, libraries and museums.
Because of the way the network is set up, (see diagram below), users in schools can retrieve the information they want far more quickly than if they were using an Internet connection, removing the 'dead time' sometimes associated with Internet use.
The local access node shown in the diagram may be a public library or a secondary school.
EMBC is aiming for 2Mbps (Megabits per second) symmetrical connectivity to all schools by June 2005.
Connected schools already link to SuperJANET4, the higher education network and other regional grids for learning.
Diagram: EMBC's Regional Network Configuration The strategy for developing content is to foster a practice-oriented approach to develop and support e-learning.
Each LEA has purchased its own e-learning platform which facilitates the posting of content by teachers.
David demonstrated some of the learning content that had been created and was being held on one such e-learning platform.
He also impressed upon the audience the innovative uses to which technologies such as Flash were being put in order to enhance the learning experience.
Although schools can limit access to this content, it is hoped that most schools will choose to release it to the wider community.
It is only through making this content widely available for reuse that good practice can be encouraged.
The scheme also makes available to all schools content that was previously difficult to obtain.
For example a partner, Channel 4, makes available learning and teaching content.
Master classes are also facilitated if a visiting US professor gives a lecture at one school, the lecture can be made available to all schools.
David sees the initiative bolstering mobile learning for the many adults who do not undertake adult learning or visit libraries.
As part of the 'wider aggregation agenda', the consortium makes available free laptops with wireless connections to host organisations, for example LEA lifelong learning teams, voluntary organisations and libraries for online information and learning resources.
From a public library perspective, this is an exciting development because it is developing the infrastructure to connect libraries, museums and schools.
Schools (or museum visitors) will be able to view Web-based library OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) from the e-learning platform and to view videos, CDs, books or journals which complement their curriculum.
Critical Literacy and Reader Development: The role of libraries in providing opportunities to develop critical readers Bob Parson and Mark Williams of Coventry City Libraries [3] gave a lively overview of their efforts to promote reader development and to engage socially excluded youngsters in reading activity and showed that initiatives don't have to be digital to be effective.
Bob outlined the strategy for reader development for adults which included setting up reader groups outside libraries in art galleries and coffee bars, for example by putting 'funky' postcards in these venues advertising the groups.
Groups have been established thanks to this initiative and Coventry aims to facilitate these groups, not run them, so that they become self-sustaining.
The library service also aims to support people in their choice of reading, whether they borrow books or buy them.
Another thrust encouraged people to write short book reviews and to send them to the library with the opportunity to win a prize.
The '101 Sensations' book created a real stir among delegates.
The title is a take on 101 Dalmations as the book contains tasters from Bob and Mark's 101 favourite books.
Available as a CD, it is being given away in Coventry libraries and the list is available online at the library Web site.
It encourages people to read and to read authors they might normally dismiss.
There is also a full programme of author events in the libraries, again aiming to bring new readers into libraries or help people widen their reading habits.
The second strand of the talk was by Mark, and focused on the way that Coventry is encouraging its disadvantaged youngsters to read.
It included moving video footage of the youngsters describing their favourite books.
When starting this work, Mark identified existing youth groups and their reading habits and preferences.
He emphasised that when starting a similar project it is important not to expect the young people to want to read but to be on hand to encourage them.
Showing creativity and the importance of getting on the same wavelength as youngsters, Mark reported that some of the most successful aspects of the work had been taking youngsters on book buying trips and then to McDonalds afterwards in fact McDonalds had supported the youth initiative with vouchers for free food.
Digital Citizenship in Gateshead In the post lunch slot, Rachel Peacock, reference and information manager for digital citizenship at Gateshead Library Service [4], outlined Gateshead's 'AskaLibrarian' and WebLog initiatives to engage citizens in digital interactions with the library.
The 'AskaLibrarian' scheme is currently in pilot phase and receiving around four enquiries a day although it has not yet been formally launched.
It is a live help service offering answers to enquiries in real time.
A UK library first, it uses 'page push' technology to offer reference enquiry information in a new format for users in the library, at home or outside the Gateshead area.
If there is a virtual queue for the service, library members have priority over non-members.
The pilot has been running since June 2002 and the enquiries generally fall into these groups: council-related, tourist information-related or obscure!
Rachel highlighted that the breadth of queries demonstrated that users feel the library is a real reference source not 'just' a place where they can borrow books.
In order to reply to the questions (and in real time!
), librarians need to user power search tools such as Copernic, the telephone and books as well as have a good knowledge of library services and the ability to remain calm!
The scheme has been very well received with 100% customer satisfaction reported.
Longer-term, Gateshead plans to offer the service throughout library opening hours, mainly manned by staff at quieter service points and one-stop shops.
The library site is also a new breed of interactive library site.
Live since 1 September 2003, it offers information about library services, access to catalogues, online discussions (for reading groups, for example), events listings, FAQs glossaries, and outputs to mobile and PDA.
It uses the Web site creation and management system Affino, to encourage Web site visitors to engage and interact with the content on the site.
Rachel herself has overall control of the site, including editing it and driving content from local people and organisations; she emphasised the importance of the Web site and library service as the public face of the library service.
Not content with these developments, the team has also started the UK's first library weblog [5] featuring items from shaving a cat's nose to Resource's action plan for public libraries.
Rachel then outlined the FARNE NOF digitisation project [6] to digitise folk music from the North East and the development of an associated weblog [7].
Future weblogs founded by Gateshead libraries will focus on community groups and specialist Web sites.
So what else does Gateshead have in store?
The newly-built Sage building in Gateshead is a state of the art building on Gateshead Quays will house two concert halls, rehearsal rooms, tuition space and library and information sciences which will have an ICT and e-learning focus.
Digital Handsworth Richard Albutt, project manager at Digital Handsworth, Birmingham Library Service, introduced Digital Handsworth as a NOF digitisation project providing a multimedia resource guide on the history of Handsworth to the community.
Part of the EnrichUK portal [8], the Digital Handsworth site [9] covers material from libraries, museums, archives and the community in the parish of Handsworth.
Recording and digitising existing material, (particularly ephemeral resources such as photographs, personal documents and film along with oral history), was the key aim of the project.
These are resources that cannot currently be viewed in one location and will chart the development of the area from a rural village through its rapid urbanisation into today's multicultural suburb.
Screenshot of Digital Handsworth front page The amount of progress that has been made is testament to the enthusiasm of the 75 local groups and individuals who have embraced the project.
When the NOF funding ends, the hope is that the site will continue and be sustained by the community with the help of a library moderator.
Richard added a note of caution for others considering a similar project, stating that their original project goals were over-optimistic and that they are currently negotiating with NOF over targets and resource levels.
One of the high points of the project is the sense of ownership that the community has for the site, reflected in over 180,000 hits in September and several local photographers granting permission to display their portfolios on the site.
It is difficult to convey in words the wealth of images and information available on the site but it's very impressive and the resources instantly evoke the era and conditions of the parish.
Digital Handsworth's interactive learning journeys and online learning role plays have also been well received and will be of interest to schools and adult learners alike.
Vision into Action: Post-F4F a 3-year action plan Andrew Stevens, senior policy advisor (libraries) for Resource, the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries [10], was the final speaker of the day.
His talk focused on Resource's role in drawing up an action plan from the DCMS' (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) Framework for the Future strategy.
He mentioned the relative paucity of resources, (£1m a year for three years), with which to achieve the goals, reminding us that more people go to libraries than to cinemas or football matches.
He emphasised that the goals can only be achieved by working closely with, and having the support of, organisations such as DfES, NHS and SOLACE (Society of local authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers) and in particular local authorities.
The strategy included: devising a high-level national route map; implementing a national framework with local delivery responsive to local needs; introducing a threeyear plan working towards a 10-year vision, (distributed by Resource in September); aims for sustainable improvement; and establishing credibility in improving services.
The transformation of public libraries is the first and principal area of work for national public libraries, comprising: Having a marketing approach to give libraries improved visibility and to communicate their role and value Leadership helping to ensure that the £800m spent yearly by local government on public libraries is allocated as effectively as possible Measuring the value and impact of libraries helping to improve libraries' relevance to people's lives communicating that libraries can offer more than borrowing books Effective advocacy of libraries starting with local authority chief executives and national policymakers Developing and sharing best practice through mentoring, case studies and partnerships Linking library performance into local authority assessments Improving services Ideally placed to introduce the central themes of the framework, Andrew Stevens not only had responsibility for developing the action plan but for driving all the inter-linked work packages, (bar digital citizenship which is led by David Potts).
The themes are: Building capacity to transform public libraries through better quality of leadership and workforce skills Books, reading and e-learning working with services from the Early Years Library Network for the under-5s and their parents through to the University for Industry (Ufi)/Learndirect.
Digital citizenship helping libraries to deliver e-government initiatives Community and civic values libraries can expand their roles to help overcome social exclusion Andrew emphasised that digital citizenship is a key part of Framework for the Future but that it should underpin the other strands of the plan and not be put in a separate box.
The talk concluded with a few words about upcoming key programmes, including: Public library funding analysis 2003/4 Revised library standards 2004/5, which will comprise a review and update of public library standards and research into the impact of standards on performance and external assessment Resource is actively communicating its work through seminars such as Talis' but also through the Resource Web site [10], through the Society of Chief Librarians' newsletter, the regional Society of Chief Librarians, regional agencies and professional and other press.
Concluding Remarks All five presentations offered a differing perspective across a central theme putting the library service at the heart of community.
Libraries understand and value the opportunity they have to offer assistance to the more vulnerable members of their community, and Mark Williams of Coventry City Libraries gave a very moving presentation to illustrate this .
But I wondered whether we had fully considered how the service would cater for those in our community who are "empowered".
I felt that Rachel Peacock's presentation on Gateshead Libraries demonstrated how libraries can and should be interacting with members of the community who are IT-literate and have high service expectations.
And The Digital Handsworth Project offered an interesting twist on the libraries role as a "lobbyist", offering a platform to the community for showcasing its local heritage and its contemporary talent.
Talis was delighted by the quality of the input and extends its thanks to those who participated and the many people who attended.
References Seminar Event: 7th October 2003: Reaching Out to Your Community: Policies and Practice for Public Library Service http://www.talis.com/latestnews/seminar7-10-03.htm EMBC http://www.embc.org.uk/ Coventry City Council Libraries and Information Services http://www.coventry.gov.uk/cocoon/services/educationlibraryservices/librariesandinformationservices/index.xml Gateshead Library Service http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/libraries/ ET CETERA Gateshead Libraries http://www.libraryweblog.com/ FARNE Folk Archive Resource North East http://www.folknortheast.com/ FARNE weblog http://www.farneweblog.com EnrichUK portal http://www.enrichuk.net/ Digital Handsworth site http://www.digitalhandsworth.org.uk Resource http://www.resource.gov.uk/ Author Details Fiona Leslie Product Manager Talis Information Ltd Email: f.leslie@talis.com Web site: http://www.talis.com Fiona is a specialist in technology solutions for academic and public libraries.
Return to top Article Title: "Reaching Out to Your Community: Policies and practice for public library service" Author: Fiona Leslie Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/talis-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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WebWatch: Testing Web Page Design Concepts for Usability Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines WebWatch: Testing Web Page Design Concepts for Usability Buzz data usability wireframe standards Citation BibTex RIS Dey Alexander and Derek Brown demonstrate how the layout of a Web page has a direct influence upon users' capacity and willingness to engage with a Web site.
In order to identify the extent to which visual designs assist users to locate particular elements that might be contained on a Web page (such as search, site-wide navigation, and local navigation), we used a usability testing method described by Tullis [1] to test a set of five Web page design concepts.
All text elements on each of the designs were "greeked", or turned into nonsense text.
This meant that users had to rely on the communicative aspects of each design in order to perform their tasks.
A number of issues influence the usability of a Web site and can be difficult to separate in a traditional usability test [2].
Did the user fail to complete her task because the information architecture was poorly designed?
Or was it because the content was badly written?
Or perhaps the visual design was responsible in some way?
In working on the redesign of the Monash University Web site [3], we were keen to ensure that each aspect of the design effort was evaluated.
We tested paper prototypes to ensure that navigation labels and content groupings made sense to our users.
We developed wireframes to provide basic page layouts and subjected these to usability testing as well.
We were keenly aware that the visual design of the old site was one of the primary factors in its poor usability.
Users could not find the search facility because it was hidden in the footer of each page.
The text was too small.
Local navigation (links to content within a particular section of the site) was not highly visible and often overlooked as a result.
Users frequently became disoriented and had no idea of where they were within the very large and complex site.
The project team was aware of a range of design problems that needed to be addressed.
We had ideas about how the problems might be solved, and detailed these in a visual design brief.
However, we needed to verify that the visual design concepts we had solicited would in fact resolve the issues, and we also wanted to ensure that they did not introduce new usability problems.
We set out then to identify the extent to which visual designs that had been submitted assisted users to locate particular elements that might be contained on a page, such as search, site-wide navigation, and local navigation.
Methodology The project team set up a table in the Campus Centre at the University's Clayton campus and in the Student Lounge at the Caulfield campus.
Test participants were recruited at random.
Participants were advised that testing would take approximately five minutes, and in return for their participation they could enter their name into a draw to win one of four $30 book vouchers.
Three sets of usability tests were conducted one for each of the page levels for which a design concept had been requested: the home page, section home pages, and content pages.
Each set comprised the five short-listed designs, and each user was asked to perform tasks on one set of designs.
Following a method described by Tullis [1], all text elements on each of the designs were "greeked", or turned into nonsense text.
This meant that users had to rely on the communicative aspects of the design in order to perform the tasks.
Logos and images were not altered.
A standard test script was read to the user, explaining the nature and purpose of the test, and demographic data were collected.
Users were then shown each of the five designs in random order and given a set of tasks to perform.
Each task involved the user locating and drawing a circle around a particular page element.
Once all of the tasks had been completed for each design, users were asked to rank the designs in order of their preference.
A total of 135 participants took part in the study, 45 for each set of designs.
Participants included 69 staff (56 general staff and 13 academics) and 66 students (53 undergraduates and 13 postgraduates; 13 were international students).
The "greeked" Web Page Design Concepts The following show the home page version of the "greeked" Web page design concepts that were tested.
Design A Design B Design C Design D Design E For further information on how each of these designs performed, it is possible to examine our findings in detail contained in poster presentations [4].
Performance Results As with the Tullis study, we were quite generous in determining whether a participant had successfully completed a task.
If their selection included the correct element, it was considered correct even if it also included incorrect elements.
Overall, design C performed the best, with 87% percent of tasks correct.
Design B was next best with 85%, followed by Design D at 82% and Design E at 81%.
Design A performed worst overall, with 75% of tasks correct.
Individual results for each of the three sets of tests are shown in table 1 below.
Table 1: Performance Results Overview Percentage of Tasks Correct in Designs A-E Test area A B C D E Home Page 61 72 76 67 68 Section Home Page 96 92 94 93 93 Content Page 67 88 88 80 84 Overall 75 85 87 82 81 In his study, Tullis combined the successful elements of each design and did further testing.
The results indicated improved user performance.
Our project timeline did not permit retesting, but the performance data confirmed our initial (pre-testing) views about the strengths and weaknesses of each of the design concepts.
In terms of the home page designs, we believed a likely weakness of designs D and E was the "Quicklinks" component (shown at the right side of the page) which was more visually prominent than the main content entry points.
Also, the design of the news component could have been improved.
With design A, we felt that users would not easily be able to tell the difference between the news section (the first set of links on the left) and the main content entry points, (the middle and right side set of links).
We were of the view that this design also gave too much prominence to the "Quicklinks" component, (the lower section of the page marked by the use of icons).
The performance data established this: Designs B and C outperformed designs A, D and E in the tasks where users had to locate the main content entry points and news items, as table 2, below, shows.
Table 2: Comparison of home page task success (2 of 4 tasks shown) in Designs A-E Tasks A B C D E Locate main content links 49 67 76 60 54 Locate news items 56 73 82 64 64 With the content page designs we were concerned that the failure to underline hyperlinks in the local navigation component would diminish user performance on designs D and E. We thought users may select the "Related links" section instead as the links in that component were underlined.
In design A, we were of the view that the page title would not be easily located as a sub-heading was given too much prominence on the page.
The performance results again confirmed our views.
Designs A, B and C scored better than designs D and E for locating the local navigation.
Designs B, C, D and E outscored design A in the task that required users to locate the page title.
The results are shown in table 3 below.
Table 3: Comparison of content page task success (2 of 5 tasks shown) in Designs A-E Task A B C D E Locate local navigation 71 89 87 44 44 Location page title 2 89 89 96 96 No obvious usability problems were predicted with the section home page designs, and the performance data for each of these were fairly strong, and even, with only 4 percentage points difference between the top scorer, Design A (96%) and the bottom, Design B (92%).
User Preference Results At the end of the test, users were asked to rank the designs in order of their preference.
The user's first preference was allocated 5 points, their second preference 4 points, and so on, with the user's last preference being allocated 1 point.
During the testing the project team noted that Design A evoked fairly strong reactions from test participants.
A minority reacted to it in a favourable way, but overwhelmingly, the reactions were negative.
Overall, Design E performed best, with 443 points (out of a possible maximum of 675) and was the first preference of 24 percent of participants.
Design A performed worst, with just over half of the participants ranking it last.
Table 4, below, shows the details of the users' preferences.
Table 4: User preferences in Designs A-E Users' preferences A B C D E 1st preference 16.2 21.4 21.4 21.4 23.7 2nd preference 5.9 19.2 23.7 27.4 23.7 3rd preference 15.5 25.0 14.8 20.7 23.7 4th preference 6.6 17.0 32.5 22.2 20.7 5th preference 55.5 18.5 7.4 9.6 9.6 Conclusions The project team felt that testing the design concepts was a useful exercise.
It allowed users to participate in the design process and some were quite excited about getting a sneak preview of the new design.
We were confident that the testing highlighted potential problems because the results matched our initial predictions about design elements that might lead to usability problems.
The test results were welcomed by the management team who found the test result data provided a useful input in deciding which of the designs would be implemented.
References Tullis, TS (1998), A method for evaluating Web page design concepts, in ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, CHI 98 Summary, 18-23 April, pp.
323-4.
Nielsen, J (1998), Testing Whether Web Page Templates are Helpful http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980517.html Monash University Web site http://www.monash.edu.au/ Web page: Testing Web Page Design Concepts for Usability http://deyalexander.com/papers/ausweb03/poster-testing/#posters Authors' Note The design that was ultimately implemented on the Monash University Web site differs in some respects from Design E as shown above.
This is because a new brand and brand architecture was introduced shortly after the testing had concluded.
The project team also made some modifications to the design based on the results of the testing.
Author Details Dey Alexander Usability Specialist Information Technology Services Building 3A, Monash University Victoria, 3800 Australia Email:Dey.Alexander@its.monash.edu.au Web site: http://www.monash.edu.au/ Derek Brown Project Officer Information Technology Services Building 3A, Monash University Victoria 3800.
Australia Email: derek.brown@adm.monash.edu.au Web site: http://www.monash.edu.au/ Return to top Article Title: "Testing Web Page Design Concepts for Usability" Author: Dey Alexander and Derek Brown Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/web-watch/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Dawning of DARE: A Shared Experience Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Dawning of DARE: A Shared Experience Buzz data software framework database dissemination xml portal infrastructure archives metadata doi digitisation identifier namespace schema repositories copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing multimedia z39.50 ejournal utf-8 openurl dspace didl interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Annemiek van der Kuil and Martin Feijen describe the first year of the DARE Project and its foundation of the OAI repositories of Dutch academic output.
The SURF Programme Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) is a joint initiative of Dutch universities to make their academic output digitally accessible.
The KB (National Library of the Netherlands), the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and the NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) also cooperate in this unique programme.
DARE is being coordinated by the SURF Foundation [1].
The programme will run from January 2003 until December 2006.
DARE has several goals: Implementing the basic infrastructure by setting up and linking the repositories; Stimulating the development of services based on the research information made available through the infrastructure; and Initiating and promoting the submission to and use of scientific content from the repositories.
The DARE Programme has been given financial support by the government, through the NAP (National Action Plan electronic highway) fund of €2 million for the period 2003-2006.
With this grant the Dutch government is giving a strong boost to innovation in the provision of academic information in the Netherlands.
General Approach The DARE programme DARE has brought together all (thirteen) Dutch Universities and three major academic institutions to create a network of digital repositories of Dutch academic output.
The first year of DARE focused on implementing the basic infrastructure by setting up and linking the repositories.
This resulted in the creation of a Dutch network of OAI (Open Archives Initiative) data providers.
A demonstrator portal called DAREnet [2] has been set up to access this national network's academic output.
With the DARE management at SURF as the beating OAI heart, all universities agreed on a few basics: the use of relevant standards.
the use of existing systems as tools for creating the OAI institutional repositories one solution does not fit all, and learn hands-on.
Other common agreements were: the repository's infrastructural requirements the amount of items to be harvestable from the repository, all items within a repository are ultimately freely accessible, and the number of university faculties participating in and contributing to the repository.
The above represented the breadth of the ambition of the institutions' libraries as a whole and of the tasks that awaited them.
The DARE management created a platform on which knowledge was developed and shared with all DARE key people in the universities.
This approach led to rapid results instead of (the illusion) of a complete theoretical framework in which all pros and cons were weighed.
The breaking down of the OAI ambition into two levels, i.e.
a data level and a service one, kept issues relatively manageable.
SURF stimulates and supports projects on a data level and funds projects on a service level aiming at the delivery of content from the academic community.
Data and Service Model Figure 1 shows the data and service model that repositories use internationally.
It comprises a) a basic facility (the data level) and b) services (the service level).
These services are developed from the basic facility and provide added value for specific end-users.
The data level is where the infrastructure is set up and maintained.
A scientific institution establishes a repository that stores academic output from that institution and keeps it available for use (or reuse) according to uniform international standards.
This includes working papers/preprints, dissertations, research reports, datasets, conference reports, teaching material, graduate essays, multimedia material, etc.
including the corresponding metadata.
The service level: basic material from the data level can be used to develop services providing added value for scientists, students, universities, funding agencies and other interested parties.
The possibilities are numerous, including developing current or new services (e.g.
management information or the updating of résumés; services the institutions themselves wish to offer, either individually or in association with others (e.g.
subject portals); or services provided by third parties such as publishers (e.g.
e-journals).
The supply and development of services can take place at a local level (e.g.
individual homepages), at a national level (e.g.
national academic output service, e.g.
organised by document type or discipline) or even at an international one (e.g.
virtual communities).
The most appropriate level of co-operation can be decided upon depending on the situation in question.
However, it is crucial that institutions retain control of their own information.
Figure 1: Data-service model The advantage offered by the data-services model is that it also provides a guide to making sound decisions about the level and extent of services that an institution wishes to offer and the costs involved therein.
The data level offers every institution a basic facility for the reliable, structured digital storage of its own intellectual property.
This is an important factor in the digitisation of formal scientific communication.
The DARE Programme ensures that the data level is set up as simply as possible.
As a result, the basic facility can be offered free of unnecessary extras, at the lowest possible operational cost.
This can then also better guarantee its financial sustainability in the long term.
All additions to functionality (and thus work and manpower) aimed at activities above and beyond the basic facility belong to the service level.
This makes it possible to ascertain what the corresponding costs are for each service, for whom such services are intended, whether they are worth the effort, and how best to finance them.
The DARE Programme stimulates the development of services in such a way that good use is made of available (open) technology for improving their effectiveness and efficiency.
Individual Responsibility, Joint Action An important aspect of the DARE programme is the combination of individual responsibilities with joint actions.
Every university is responsible for its own repository, has its own motivation for its implementation and decides itself which services it wants to offer.
Within the DARE community, participants work together for greatest effect, in order to complete the job, share knowledge and experience and to achieve interoperability.
There is no single prescribed standard repository solution, as long as the repository complies with the agreed formats.
The rule is to do locally what can be done locally and restrict centralised activity to the bare essentials like creating a frame of reference, setting preconditions where and when necessary and working together on shared issues.
The DARE Programme stimulates the development of different approaches in concrete projects.
This way the participants learn through practical experience, a pragmatic way of pioneering at both data and service levels.
Preservation It was considered an a priori requirement that public and other data of sufficient importance stored in the repositories would be automatically preserved for long-term future use.
To that end the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Royal Library) has been involved from the very start of the project.
The Royal Library has already set up a system for the long time preservation of data, which will also be used for the data in the DARE repositories.
This is therefore one less task for the local repository managers, but one to be dealt with centrally by the Royal Library.
DAREnet: www.DAREnet.nl DAREnet is a demonstration Web site providing basic information services.
It has been developed to check and demonstrate the interoperability and the potential such a network of institutional repositories can offer scholarly communication.
It has not been set up as a permanent national harvesting service, but merely as a demonstrator.
Implementation DAREnet uses i-Tor [3] for harvesting the metadata of all repositories and for providing services to end-users (service level in Figure 1).
Some of the DARE participants used i-Tor as a data provider for their institutional repository (the data level in Figure 1, see next section).
For end-users, the standard services include the browsing of the repositories and searching the metadata (on specific or all fields).
Full-text searching of the digital objects (referenced in the metadata) is also a standard feature.
For administrators with the appropriate permissions it is possible to edit the Web pages and to manage the harvesting of the various repositories.
The i-Tor tool was selected to implement DAREnet because its goal fits the goals of DARE: providing open access while retaining data at the source.
It uses open standards and is an open source product, providing a Web content management system.
It features the collaboration and coupling of existing data sources, including OAI repositories.
It was this feature in particular which was used especially intensively in DAREnet.
Software Development Whilst DAREnet was being implemented, i-Tor features for handling Open Archives were also under development.
Although this meant occasional bugs, a distinct advantage was that missing features identified by DARE participants during their implementation became part of the I-Tor development process, resulting in a more tailor-made product for DARE.
The fact that the software developers were a division of one of the DARE partners also represented another advantage.
Using i-Tor The ability to manage the site remotely, not needing technicians, turned out to be a very useful feature of i-Tor.
As a consequence, changes could be made swiftly.
The DAREnet site was implemented in both Dutch and English.
Multi-lingual interfaces are a matter of concern in most systems.
As regards Web interface, i-Tor handles matters reasonably well by providing tools to maintain versions of pages for various languages.
With regard to harvesting, however, separate harvesting has to be done for both the Dutch and English version and this unfortunately leads to unnecessary additional work.
Infrastructure Architecture At the start of the DARE Programme, a specification document 'Specifications for a Networked Repository for Dutch Universities' [4] served as our compass for the DARE architecture.
This document describes DARE as a network of local repositories, with local policies, local repository software, linked together via OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).
Evaluation of Technology / Software Starting positions for the DARE partners were very different.
Some institutions already had a repository in place, some had a repository but it was not OAI-compliant or which in some other way failed to satisfy requirements.
Others started from scratch.
Starting from Scratch Those who had to start from the beginning found the choice of software problematic.
It was hard to find up-to-date comparisons of software.
One of the universities had a lot of problems with the available software.
The lack of good installation manuals and with software which had not been tested on various platforms made it impossible to implement their own repository on time.
However by using the repository of another DARE partner, on a temporary basis, they were able to join the effort.
Adapt or Change Some institutions used their existing systems and made them OAI-compliant.
Another university had to make a workaround (with the help of one of the other DARE partners being their data provider) because of problems with their existing system (DigiTool).
For this library, difficulties with crosswalks, XML files and Dublin Core made it necessary to switch to DSpace.
Transferring data from old databases, which had been set up for other purposes, to the new repository proved to be a considerable challenge for some.
Systems Already in Place Three universities were involved in the ARNO-project (Academic Research in the Netherlands Online).
This project, also funded by the SURF Foundation, resulted in an OAI-compliant institutional document server that could function as a repository.
These universities therefore had their repositories up and running, despite the problems caused by a new release.
Another institution already had a lot of experience with their DSpace repository.
Five different systems are in use at present: ARNO is being used for five institutional repositories.
Three of these institutions have been involved in the ARNO Project [5].
Six universities are using DSpace.
Four of them started off with other software but have changed since or are in the process of implementing DSpace.
i-Tor is being used by three organisations, one being the institution that has developed this software.
i-Tor has the advantage of being developed by a DARE partner where tailor-made changes can be made.
However, because i-Tor is a new product it has insufficient documentation and is still under development.
Two institutions use other proprietary software.
Metadata Each element in the repository is described by a set of metadata.
The original specification document for DARE states that the OAI-PMH standard should be used within the DARE Programme.
This affected the standard for metadata.
The OAI protocol requires that repositories offer the 15 metadata elements employed in simple Dublin Core (DC).
DARE Metadata Guidelines The application of standards always leaves room for local choices and implementations and the OAI world is hardly an exception to this rule.
The OAI standard (OAI PMH 2.0) and metadata formats (oai_dc, qdc) led to a short but intensive study of the DARE use of Dublin Core metadata, which, in turn led to a 'version 1.0' that was acceptable for the DARE community to begin with.
This 'DARE use of Dublin Core metadata, version 1.0' [6] benefited a great deal from the best practice observed at UKOLN, Bath, with E-Prints.
In this document, which was endorsed by all DARE partners in October 2003, DARE chose to use simple DC as the mandatory metadata set (because of OAI-PMH), and DARE-qualified DC (dare-qdc) as the optional metadata set within DARE.
This was because the librarians soon concluded that simple Dublin Core was too simple and limited for DARE and its institutions' needs.
At time of writing, all DARE partners use simple DC for data exchange.
The project managers have spent quite some time discussing where to draw the line between the data and service levels.
The basic question here was whether to first define services and then determine the use of metadata or vice versa.
Some people argued that experience of Z39.50 showed that 'garbage in' produces 'garbage out'.
It is difficult to imagine all possible services beforehand and therefore to think of all of the metadata needed in advance.
Hence, you either get caught up in endless discussions on services or those on metadata.
DARE chose the pragmatic solution to work with simple DC and leave more elaborate metadata exchange until such time as it becomes necessary.
We also discovered that discussing metadata within an OAI context is in fact a discussion of data mapping and data exchange.
Each DARE partner has developed some form of mapping from internal systems and richer metadata to the simple DC.
Librarians tend to see DC as a set of cataloguing rules, which it is not, it is for data exchange.
In a networked, co-operative setting like DARE, one needs some guidelines that answer the question what content should go into which DC element.
So some cataloguing rules can be applied to make sure the same language is spoken.
Dublin Core, as is, is not specific enough for that purpose.
Problems Encountered and Resolved Once the DARE metadata guidelines were defined, we decided to freeze them for a period of six months.
During the following months (October 2003 March 2004) we kept track of issues, questions, problems and experiences with mapping, harvesting and using the metadata.
Some issues that arose were: Non-UTF-8 characters in local input: The use of UTF-8 is mandatory in OAI-PMH, but some repositories found that users were uploading special characters into their repositories.
The DC Checker utility helped here; The use of dc:identifier (1): Should it contain the url of the object or the url of a local resolving mechanism like a jump-off page?
And where should the identifier lead the service provider to in case of one record with multiple related digital objects (bit streams))?
The use of dc:identifier (2): should we use OpenURL, the CNRI handle or DOI?
We agreed not to use DOI but a persistent URL to be chosen locally; How do you harvest the object file itself?
OAI-PMH has no provision for this; Should we include metadata of printed and digital objects, or purely digital ones?
Digital-only was decided upon as the ultimate goal (as an intermediate step metadata referring to non-digital objects were accepted temporarily, as long as the goal was to obtain access to the digital object in the end); Should we use sets, and if so what should be the set contents?
Problems with the correct use of the date stamp: i.e.
with the correct use of the date stamp on the protocol level: date of upload to repository or date of mutation.
Challenges with the dare_qdc namespace and XML schema: Use of resumption tokens: we agreed to use one after every 200 records.
During the period when we were building the DARE demonstrator we were obliged to create additional guidelines for metadata in respect of the following elements: name (full name and/or initials) source (to link the digital object to the printed version we used journal title, ISSN, volume, pages in dc:source when applicable) the jump-off page in dc:identifier the direct link in dc:source, etc Within the context of this article it would be inappropriate to explain all the details behind these issues.
Some were solved and some were not.
The biggest remaining issue is the identifier/jump-off page issue.
DARE set up an international OAI expert meeting on this subject in May 2004.
The Implementation Process Looking back on the implementation period, the DARE community is proud of having achieved its first major milestones: A summary of the evaluation by the programme participants of all institutions involved is given below.
Success factors DARE as a national initiative, not only made all universities aware of the necessity of an institutional repository but also made it a reality for all universities to set up and operate an institutional repository.
With the commitment from all parties and the central co-ordination by SURF, an operational network of repositories now exists, demonstrated by DAREnet.
Consequent upon these achievements, a number of new services can now be developed based on this Dutch repository infrastructure.
DARE has given a Dutch boost to the dissemination and use of OAI technology.
A simple standard as defined within the Open Archives Initiative has led to rapid consensus on the way to go about retrieving and exchanging data.
In addition, the fear that, on presentation of the programme at the end of the project, there would be little to show unless all repositories were live, served as a considerable stimulus to activity.
The interoperability of information and the profiling of the different organisations have also proved to be critical success factors.
Obstacles Overcome, Obstacles to Come Significant results have been achieved by a group of diverse people and institutions.
Although the different cultures and approaches were apparent and sometimes represented something of a challenge, they never stood in the way of the common good of the project.
Not all institutions started at the same time.
Those who followed in a later phase had less time to set up servers, install the software and get content ready for the repository.
Copyright issues need a lot of organisation and will be a determining factor for a lot of academics whether to join the 'DARE movement'.
However, this issue, as well as that of filling the repositories with content, will be the major focus for the remainder of 2004 and beyond.
It is therefore important to develop a strategy to engage scientists' and managers' commitment to contributing content to the repositories.
You could say that the technical implementation was the 'easiest' part; the institutional and organisational embedding will undoubtedly embody the challenge for the coming period.
The DARE Community Without a doubt, everyone has experienced the added value of working together.
This added value was felt in both practical and technical terms.
Indeed it turned out that partners frequently provided each other moral support as much as inspiration.
Not all institutions started implementing a repository at the same time.
Those who followed in a later phase were able to profit from the experience of others.
Some confessed it would not have been possible to implement their repository at such short notice without the help of DARE partners.
Those with an existing repository on the other hand were inspired and stimulated to enhance the content and management of their operational repositories.
The central co-ordination and sharing of knowledge certainly represented a critical contribution to the results achieved.
The community proved to be a lively one, although decision-making on technical details was sometimes perceived to be too slow.
To communicate and exchange information and knowledge online, in a private and secure area, an extranet was set up (making use of CommunityZero [7]).
However, this extranet needed a bit of getting used to and the software could perhaps have been more user-friendly.
Nevertheless, it has certainly helped to generate a feeling of community and to the exchange of information and experience.
Programme Management Due to sound project management, local initiatives and the central approach have been combined to create a very good working environment.
Some participants admit that having been urged to have the repository up and running has provided them with a basis for the further development that they needed.
Presentations by the DARE programme manager to different stakeholders have also had a positive effect.
The unbounded enthusiasm from the programme management at SURF represented very tangible support as did good and timely information and communication.
Organisation of the Different Institutions The different institutions developed varying ways of dealing with the organisation of their institutional repositories.
Here are some examples: One university set up a new unit that supports scientists with electronic publishing.
This unit is also responsible for the IR (Institutional Repository).
Another university set up a steering committee and instated project managers for the implementation process, very similar to the national DARE organisation of steering committee and project managers.
These people were also responsible for communication within the university to get the DARE notion across.
Commitment from a number of important users provided the impetus for the creation of a local repository at another university.
Although some universities were not quite ready for the implementation of a repository, the DARE initiative gave them a start: For some universities the lack of human resources was the main reason why they have only implemented the repository on a very small scale meaning, that they have only concentrated on the technical aspects of the IR and on making content more easily available.
Fragmentation within one of the institutions made it impossible for all institutional sub-groups to participate in the DARE Programme.
One group was committed to making a mini-repository available but participants all had different ideas on how to go about this, especially concerning the issue of how to make the digital objects available.
Much persuasion was needed to convince the participants.
However, having seen DAREnet, they do now realise the potential of DARE and the benefits of sharing scientific information.
As for the submission of content, different organisational approaches have become apparent: Most institutions use decentralised ways of collecting content.
The national Metis research information system [8] is being used in several places for (decentralised) submission.
However, such submission is often only done once a year, for the production of annual reports, and this does delay the availability of the digital object.
One university library has started a project to integrate its library catalogue, documentation database and the repository in order to make the submission process more efficient and to improve on the quality of the metadata.
Content All DARE participants started off with readily available content from one or more faculties or departments.
Most universities have dissertations and research reports available.
Today, the content mainly consists of text documents, but some photographs and videos are also included.
Although the repositories can contain digital objects of any kind, this is yet to be the case in practice.
Lessons Learned Organisational Diversity An important success of the DARE Programme is combining individual responsibilities with joint actions.
Each university is responsible for its own repository, has its own motivation for its introduction and decides itself which services it wants to offer.
It was important for the DARE participants to know that they could hold onto their own ways of working, but also to learn of other ways of working.
By using each others' knowledge and expertise, the community was able to achieve interoperability.
The DARE Programme encourages partners to try out different approaches in concrete projects.
In this way the participants learned in a practical, pragmatic and pioneering manner at both data and services level.
Harvesting As soon as a repository was harvestable, testing could begin.
It is important to make sufficient time for the testing phase.
This involves several cycles of adjustment and retesting.
One reason for this is that with such a large number of diverse parties involved, several cycles are needed before the repositories deliver exactly what the harvester needs.
In the DARE case, several problems arose due to the incorrect use, (mostly misinterpretation), of the Dublin Core standard.
In other cases problems were caused by lack of specification (like which character encoding to use, e.g.
OAI-PMH requires UTF-8 but one repository contained non-UTF-8 characters in its metadata).
Another recommendation would be to set strict specifications with which each party has to comply, and provide examples.
The repositories may revert to creating temporary databases, as was done by some of the DAREnet participants, just to be able to deliver the right format for harvesting purposes.
Every time repositories changed their output format, the time-consuming process of harvesting had to be performed again.
New software releases of i-Tor (bug fixes or new features regarding harvesting) also occasionally made re-harvesting of all repositories necessary.
The main bottleneck that made harvesting so time-consuming was the network connection between the DAREnet harvester and the repositories.
This was a matter of trial and error and finally we succeeded in linking all repositories to DAREnet.
Linking to Digital Objects Another issue with harvesting turned out to be local resolving mechanisms, like the 'jump-off pages' often used in Open Archives.
The metadata contains a link to the digital object, but this is not always a link to the object itself but a (jump-off) page on the site of the institution.
That page in turn contains a link to the digital object.
The jump-off page, however, is a more stable url to link to.
When, as is the case with DAREnet, the digital object is needed for the purpose of full text searching, you have a problem with linking to a jump-off page.
This problem still exists and cannot be solved easily.
Technical issues The original assumption that the required technology already existed proved to be true.
Several technical problems encountered during this project point to the importance of good hardware, backups and software as well as measures regarding support and maintenance.
Metadata OAI-PMH is not a set of cataloguing rules.
It is a lingua franca for data exchange between partners who have agreed to use simple DC.
However, OAI-PMH allows for data exchange based on various other formats.
This can be any metadata set.
OAI-PMH does not protocolise the exchange of the digital object file itself.
An additional protocol is needed here as in most cases service providers also want to have the object and not just the metadata.
One solution might be to use MPEG21-DIDL (as described by Herbert van de Sompel in his article in D-Lib Magazine of February 2004, 'Using MPEG-21 DIP and NISO OpenURL for the Dynamic Dissemination of Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library' [9].
However, so far his solution has only been implemented at Los Alamos.)
OAI-PMH is simple enough to get you started.
From a librarian's perspective it might be too simple.
From a user's perspective (scientific author, student, professor), it might be elaborate enough.
At present we have not yet decided whether we need additional qualifiers in DC.
This question is still under discussion and will have to be settled based on experience with actual service development.
The unique identification of metadata, the digital object and its creator has proved to be necessary and useful.
DARE is therefore working on a so-called 'digital author identification'.
Future Plans The libraries' involvement in the DARE experience has shown a movement within traditional library issues of (online) access (i.e.
metadata and infrastructure) and (digital) preservation towards actively publishing and the possibility of the multiple use of metadata and digital objects.
Furthermore, libraries and scientists have found themselves in new, more interactive roles between one another.
DARE fundamentally improves open access to the university's 'hidden' or 'deep Web' in which scientific publications were at best downloadable but less easy to find.
This shift in opportunity, potential and competence is only just being explored and is currently being translated into services that meet the needs of scientists as well as those of the general public.
DARE's focus has been on this process in this its second year, i.e.
2004.
This also implies an emphasis on the more efficient reuse of metadata and digital objects for the whole process of its creation, access and long-term digital preservation and using today's solutions to link the separate systems that manage these sub-processes.
As far as the metadata is concerned, further development in DARE's use of metadata is needed.
Communication and marketing are also important issues for the next year(s) in order to inform academics of the potential of repositories for academic communication and publishing.
The involvement of the scholarly community in the further submission of content and in service development will therefore be a major area of effort.
Directions for (Re)use Certain scientific communities already have long-standing experience of sharing their publications in OAI environments, such as Los Alamos.
One could state that in these early adopter environments the need for quick access to different versions of a paper was an impetus for the use of the OAI protocol.
It served a specific need: the rapid dissemination of information and knowledge and feedback which is often only relevant for a short period of time a process defined as 'science in the making' by Bruno Latour [10].
Latour makes a distinction between 'science in action' the process of 'science becoming fact' and 'science as fact'.
One could stress that the new challenge is to create environments, based on the OAI protocol, to gain access to science as it has been established to be a fact.
In other words: the pre-print phase and demand for quick access serves the 'science in the making' aspect, which has already manifested itself in the early OAI-adopter environments, serving mainly scientists.
The task now is to give the public open access to the static science corpus we now know to be 'scientific establishment', in environments which (re)use data in OAI data providers.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to all DARE project managers involved in the DARE Programme who have given their input to this article.
Also a note of special thanks to Marlon Domingus of Leiden University and Rob Maijers of www.maijers.com.
References SURF Foundation http://www.DAREnet.nl Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) http://www.darenet.nl/ i-Tor: Tools and Technology for Open Repositories http://www.i-tor.org/en/ DARE Report 'Specifications for a Networked Repository for Dutch Universities': http://www.surf.nl/publicaties/index2.php?hb=1&oid=122 ARNO has been developed by the University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University and the University of Twente, as a result of a project funded by the SURF Foundation.
It aims to develop and implement university document servers to make the scientific output of participating institutions available.
Read more on http://www.uba.uva.nl/arno.
Like i-Tor and DSpace, ARNO is an open source programme.
DARE report 'DARE use of Dublin Core metadata': http://www.surf.nl/en/download/DARE%20use%20of%20DC%20v.%201.0.pdf CommunityZero™ http://www.communityzero.com.
This is a research information database system which enables universities, organisational units within universities, research institutes, research groups or individual researchers to register information about their research online and to make this information available worldwide in a multitude of ways.
http://metis.hosting.kun.nl/metis/default.cfm?i=aboutmetis 'Using MPEG-21 DIP and NISO OpenURL for the Dynamic Dissemination of Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library', J. Bekaert, L. Balakireva, P. Hochstenbach and H. van de Sompel, D-Lib Magazine, February 2004: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february04/bekaert/02bekaert.html Author Details Annemiek van der Kuil DARE Community Manager SURF Foundation Email: vanderkuil@surf.nl Web site: http://www.surf.nl/en/oversurf/index.php?cat=Organisatie&oid=21 Martin Feijen Member of DARE Programme Management / Partner and Corporate Coach of Innervation BV Email: feijen@surf.nl Web site: http://www.innervation.nl Return to top Article Title: "The Dawning of the Dutch Network of Digital Academic REpositories (DARE): A Shared Experience" Author: Annemiek van der Kuil and Martin Feijen Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/vanderkuil/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff Buzz data database dissemination infrastructure archives repositories eprints copyright preservation cataloguing url research Citation BibTex RIS Theo Andrew sheds some light on current trends in posting research material online with a case study from The University of Edinburgh.
With the rapid uptake of digital media changing the way scholarly communication is perceived, we are in a privileged position to be part of a movement whose decisions now will help to decide ultimately future courses of action.
A number of strategies have recently emerged to facilitate greatly enhanced access to traditional scholarly content, e.g.
open access journals and institutional repositories.
In this spirit of promoting access to scholarly resources, JISC has funded a number of projects under the banner of its Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [1].
The University of Edinburgh is fortunate to be involved in two of these projects, namely the Theses Alive!
and SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Access and Preservation) projects.
The Theses Alive!
Project [2] , based at the University of Edinburgh, is seeking to promote the adoption of a management system for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in the UK, primarily by initiating an easily searchable and accessible online repository of ETDs at Edinburgh and at five pilot institutions across the UK.
The main thrust of the SHERPA Project [3], led by the University of Nottingham, is the creation, population and management of several e-print repositories based at several partner institutions.
However, the uptake of digital media being used for research dissemination is not just limited to institutions and organisations.
Individual scholars, seeing an opportunity to distribute their work easily to a potentially wide audience and, as a by-product, raise their research profiles, have also seized the opportunity to use new technology by posting research material online.
Currently the scale of this activity is not yet known.
For the institutional repository concept to be successful it would make great sense to look and learn from current trends of digital media usage.
Prior to the implementation of these projects at the University of Edinburgh, it was decided that a baseline survey of research material already held on departmental and personal Web pages in the ed.ac.uk domain would be beneficial in a number of ways: it would provide a qualitative view of Web usage across different subject areas, something that at the present time is poorly understood it would aid the initial population of the repositories by identifying ready material and willing scholarly contributors such a survey would provide an invaluable baseline upon which progress of the projects can be measured during evaluation Methods A number of survey methods to obtain information on the nature and volume of available online research material in the ed.ac.uk domain was initially considered.
However, it was felt that due to the need for prompt and accurate results a questionnaire or sampling technique would not be appropriate.
Instead a systematic approach was taken, whereby each departmental and staff Web page was visited and the content of self-archived material was noted.
The University of Edinburgh’s academic structure is based on three Colleges containing a total of 21 Schools, each comprising a varying number of disciplines.
The University’s online presence follows a similar hierarchy, although there are around half a million pages published within the ed.ac.uk domain, which represent in excess of one-tenth of all Web pages published within the UK HE sector.
The survey looked at each College in turn, searching for content at each level of the hierarchy, down through the School and to individual levels.
During the course of the survey, carried out between 27 May and 13 June 2003, over 2500 staff Web pages were visited.
Initially the survey began with documenting formal research material (e.g.
postprints, preprints, theses and dissertations) within the College of Science and Engineering domain, but when other Colleges within the University were surveyed it became apparent that the type of material archived online varies considerably between subjects.
To represent the different research cultures and Web usage across such a diverse institution, other content, such as book chapters, conference and working papers, was also considered when compiling the data for the other Colleges.
Results The results of the survey are displayed and discussed in the following tables and figures.
It is worth noting that only academic and research staff are considered in the staff totals, and that therefore these figures do not represent the total staff of the University.
Sometimes research material was stored in School-based Web pages and not on individual staff pages.
It was necessary to describe this scenario as a ‘School-based resource’ to distinguish between self-archiving individuals and subject-based archiving.
Where possible the School-based resource is described in a footnote to the table.
Table 1: Formal research material held on departmental and staff WebPages for the College of Science & Engineering College of Science & Engineering Staff Number of Self Archiving staff Papers Pre-prints PhD MSc PhD in Depart’l site % of S.A Staff School of Biological Sciences 177 14 193 0 0 0 0 7.91 Institute of Cell & Molecular Biology 54 7 78 0 0 0 0 12.96 Institute of Cell, Animal & Population Biology 54 7 115 0 0 0 0 12.96 Institute for Stem Cell Research 69 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 School of Chemistry 43 5 114 0 1 0 0 11.63 School of Engineering & Electronics 143 10 27 0 1 0 22 6.99 Inst.
of Materials & Processes 30 2 1 0 1 0 0 6.67 Inst.
of Integrated Micro & Nano Systems 44 3 6 0 0 0 0 6.82 Inst.
of Digital Communications 29 4 14 0 0 0 22 13.79 Inst.
of Energy Systems 15 1 6 0 0 0 0 6.67 Inst.
of Infrastructure & Environment 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 School of GeoScience 107 13 78 0 0 2 0 12.15 Geography 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Geology & Geophysics 43 5 41 0 0 0 0 11.63 Meteorology 17 5 8 0 0 2 0 29.41 Inst.
of Ecology & Resource Management 17 3 29 0 0 0 0 17.65 School of Informatics 150 49 184 0 17 3 31 32.67 School of Mathematics 59 17 187 52 3 0 0 28.81 School of Physics 104 8 71 5 2 0 0 7.69 TOTAL 783 116 854 57 24 5 53 14.81 Table 2: Research material held on departmental and staff WebPages for the College of Humanities & Social Science.
College of Humanities & Social Science.
Staff S.A staff Papers Pre-Prints Conference Papers Working Papers Reports Book Chapters PhD MSc Other Dept.
Resource % of S.A School of Arts, Culture & Environment 62 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 1 3.23 Archaeology 13 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Architecture 18 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Fine Art 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 > 0 0 0 0 0 Music 16 2 0 0 0 0 0 > 0 0 31] 12 12.5 School of Divinity 27 0 0 0 0 0 8 0 0 0 93 2 0 School of Economics & Management Studies 158 5 18 0 12 42 6 0 0 0 17 3 3.16 Economics 26 5 8 0 0 32 0 0 0 0 0 0 19.23 Management School 132 0 5 0 12 10 6 0 0 0 174 3 0 School of History & Classics 69 2 0 0 4 1 0 0 0 0 45 3 2.90 Classics 17 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 History 28 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Economic & Social History 14 2 0 0 4 1 0 0 0 0 4 0 14.29 Scottish History 10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 16 0 School of Law 54 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 17 0 School of Literature, Languages & Cultures 118 0 12 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 49 6 0 English Literature 30 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 28 1 0 Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies 12 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 28 1 0 Celtic & Scottish Studies 16 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 19 0 European Languages & Culture 60 0 12 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4510 311 0 School of Nursing Studies 24 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences 126 16 160 18 107 7 16 19 13 4 7 1 12.70 English Language 10 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 10.00 Theoretical & Applied Linguistics 36 11 130 11 97 7 12 17 12 4 512 113 30.56 Philosophy 21 3 30 6 2 0 4 2 0 0 214 0 14.29 Psychology 59 1 0 0 8 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1.69 School of Social & Political Studies 124 4 5 4 3 0 0 6 0 0 0 0 3.23 Moray House School of Education 151 0 0 0 2 4 9 3 0 0 0 1 0 Total 913 29 195 22 128 54 41 28 13 4 86 19 3.18 1 Sheet Music, 2 Russel Collection Catalogue, 3 Public lectures, 4Data sets/ Newsletters, 5 Maps, 6 Scottish Witchcraft Database, 7 Publication Abstracts Database,8 Newsletters, 9 Sound Clips Archive, 10 Essays, 11 Gadda Journal, Arachnophiles Journal, Christine de Pizan Database, 12 Undergraduate Dissertation/ Reviews, 13 TAAL ePrints server,14 Reviews.
Table 3: Research material held on departmental and staff WebPages for the College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine.
Staff S.A Staff Publications List with link to publishers Papers Abstracts only Unpublished Papers Book Chapters Other % of S.A Staff School of Biomedical & Clinical Lab Sciences 156 0 130 0 0 0 0 0 0 Biomedical Science 83 0 112 0 0 0 0 0 0 Medical Microbiology 57 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Neuroscience 16 0 18 0 0 0 0 0 0 School of Clinical Sciences & Community Health >82 1 0 8 114 3 1 0 Medical & Radiological Sciences                   Dermatology 32 1 0 8 0 3 1 0 3.13 Medical Physics 20 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Cardiovascular Research 30 0 0 0 114 0 0 0 0 Medical Radiology n/a [1]                 Respiratory Medicine n/a                 Community Health Sciences                   General Practice 35 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Public Health Sciences (incl.
Med.
Statistics) 86 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Health Behaviour & Change 13 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Clinical & Surgical Sciences                   Internal Medicine n/a                 Locomotor Science n/a                 Surgical Sciences                   -A&E n/a                 Anaesthesics 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Cardiac Surgery n/a                 Ophthalmology n/a                 Otolaryngology n/a                 Surgery n/a                 Vascular Surgery n/a                 Reproduction & Developmental Sciences                   Child, Life & Health 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Clinical Biochemistry n/a                 Genito-Urinary n/a                 Obstetrics & Gynacology 7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0   Staff S.A Staff Publications List with link to publishers Papers Abstracts only Unpublished Papers Book Chapters Other % of S.A Staff School of Molecular & Clinical Medicine >144 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 Clinical Neurosciences 19 0 0 0 0 0 0 Reference database 0 Medical Sciences n/a [2]                 Oncology 73 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Pathology n/a                 Psychiatry 52 1 0 0 0 0 0 Conference Poster 1.92 Royal Dick) School of Vetinary Studies >94 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Pre-Clinical Vet Sciences 48 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Tropical Vet Medicine 33 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Veterinary Clinical Studies 13 0 0 0 0 0 0 Information sheets 0 Veterinary Pathology n/a             Links to publisher   Total 638 2 130 8 114 3 1 0.32 [1] n/a denotes no website or information not available on website.
Existing trends between subject areas     Figure 1: Self-Archiving baseline for the College of Science and Engineering Figure 2: Self-Archiving baseline for the College of Humanities and Social Science Figure 3: Self-Archiving baseline for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine Figures 1 to 3 show the volume and percentage of scholars currently self-archiving on personal and departmental Web sites in each College and School within the University of Edinburgh.
As expected, there is a clear difference between academic areas.
The average percentage of self-archiving scholars in each College supports this view.
Within the College of Science and Engineering (S&E) this figure is 14.81%, which drops to 3.18% within Humanities and Social Science (HSS) and 0.32% within Medicine and Veterinary Medicine (MVM).
However, the situation is more complex than a simple trend of self-archiving being better established in S&E.
Looking at the averages between Schools shows that even within Colleges there is a wide distribution of values.
In S&E this ranges from 32.67% in Informatics to 6.99% in Engineering and Electronics (Figure 1) and in HSS from 12.70% in Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences to 0% in Divinity and Law (Figure 2).
As self-archiving is rare in MVM this trend is less well defined; 3.13% in Clinical Sciences and Community Health to 0% in the School of Biomedical and Clinical Lab Sciences (Figure 3).
Even within individual Schools there is a noticeable change in self-archiving attitudes.
For example, self-archiving percentages within the School of GeoScience range from 29.41% in Meteorology down to 0% in Geography (Table 1).
This tendency is not just restricted to the College of S&E.
In the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences values span from 30.56% in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics to 1.69% in Psychology (Table 2).
Volume and type of self-archived research material Figure 4: Volume and type of research material presently available in the S&E ed.ac.uk domain Figure 5: Volume and type of research material presently available in the HSS ed.ac.uk domain.
Figure 6: Volume and type of research material presently available in the MVM ed.ac.uk domain Figures 4 to 6 show the volume and breakdown of material presently available in the ed.ac.uk domain.
In the S&E domain there is a total of 993 separate research items freely available (Table 1).
This figure does not include conference papers and technical reports, as they were not included in the original survey for S&E.
With these included, the figure would be closer to 1500.
The majority of surveyed research material, shown in Table 1, consisted of peer-reviewed journal papers (854), commonly in a PDF file format supplied by the publishers themselves.
The next largest element of research material freely available was PhD theses (77), followed by preprints (57) and Masters dissertations (5).
As expected, the HSS domain contained a smaller, but still considerable, volume of research material, with 571 freely available items (Table 2).
Generally, academic staff in HSS were less likely to self-archive journal papers (195) and PhD theses (13).
However the volume of other material, e.g.
essays, maps, sheet music, when combined, was significant (86).
Reflecting the trend of low scholarly self-archiving, the MVM domain contained a small amount of actual material.
Academic staff in MVM were much less likely to place items online, rather favouring placing abstracts only (114) or citing references hyperlinked directly to publishers’ web pages (130).
This reluctance is displayed in the fact that only one scholar in the entire College of MVM placed freely available full-text journal papers and book chapters online.
Discussion and conclusions Considering the wide-ranging self-archiving trends between academic Colleges and even within Schools, it seems there is a direct correlation between willingness to self-archive and the existence of subject-based repositories.
Most of the academic units that have a high percentage of self-archiving scholars already have well-established subject repositories set up in that area.
For example, the School of Informatics (32.67%) has CiteSeer [4], Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (30.56%) has Cogprints [5], Mathematics (28.81%) has the AMS Directory of Mathematics Preprint and e-Print Servers [6], Economics (19.23%) has RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)[7], Chemistry (11.63%) has the Chemistry Preprint Server [8].
The correlation does not hold, however, in the domain in which the world’s most successful subject repository exists, Physics (7.69%) has a lower than expected result, despite the well-known success of the ArXiv subject repository [9].
We would argue that this is because the ArXiv has become so successful in capturing and making persistently available a very high proportion of the output in the domains of high-energy physics and related fields, that academics trust it as their ‘natural’ repository for self-archived material.
The same degree of trust may not yet obtain in the case of the subject repositories mentioned above, which leads to additional self-archiving in home institution repositories.
So, it appears that, where there is a pre-existing culture of self-archiving eprints in subject repositories, scholars are more likely to post research material on their own Web pages, until such time as those subject repositories become trusted for their comprehensiveness and persistence.
A surprising finding from the baseline survey is the relatively low volume of preprints found on personal Web pages.
This could be related to the success of eprint repositories, such as those described above.
Another significant factor is that most papers or theses found online were part of a researcher’s publication list in his or her online CV, which essentially showcases research interests and credentials.
Preprints do not have anywhere near the same impact factor as those papers from accredited journal titles, so it is possible that researchers would favour only putting their most impressive work in their online CV.
One aspect of the survey that is not shown in the results is the lack of consistency in dealing with copyright and IPR issues that scholars face when placing material online.
Some academic units have responded by not self-archiving any material at all.
A rather worrying example of this is the School of Law (do they know something that we don’t?)
A small percentage of individual scholars have responded by using general disclaimers that may or may not be effective.
Others, generally well-established professors, have posted material online that is arguably in breach of copyright agreements, e.g.
whole book chapters.
Most, however, take a middle line of only posting papers from sympathetic publishers who allow some form of self-archiving.
It is apparent that if institutional repositories are going to work, then this general confusion over copyright and IPR issues needs to be addressed right at the source.
Summing up on a lighter note, it is extremely encouraging to see that such an unexpectedly high volume of research material (over 1000 peer-reviewed journal articles) exists online in the ed.ac.uk domain, suggesting that there is already a growing grassroots movement aiming towards freeing up scholarly communication through the use of digital media.
The big problem is that this material is widely dispersed and therefore not easily found.
This is not very useful for the wider dissemination of scholarly work.
Also, personal Web sites tend to be ephemeral, so the long-term preservation of the research material held on them is extremely doubtful.
This is where projects such as SHERPA and Theses Alive!
can step in to help the process by providing a more stable platform for effective collation and dissemination of research.
This study has shown that there is already a substantial corpus of research material available online.
Contacting the pre-existing self-archiving authors and gathering initial content can overcome one of the main barriers in the creation of a successful institutional repository.
The material is already out there; we just have to look for it.
References Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair Theses Alive!
at Edinburgh University Library http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk SHERPA: Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access http://www.sherpa.ac.uk Citeseer Scientific Research Library http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs CogPrints http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ American Mathematical Society Directory of Mathematics Preprint and e-Print Servers http://www.ams.org/global-preprints/index.html RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) http://repec.org/ The Chemistry Preprint Server http://www.chemweb.com/preprint/ arXiv.org e-Print archive http://xxx.arxiv.cornell.edu/ Author Details Dr. Theo Andrew Project Officer for Theses Alive!
and SHERPA University of Edinburgh Email: theo.andrew@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff” Author: Theo Andrew Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/andrew/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Reviews: Digital Information and Knowledge Management, and Print Vs. Digital Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Reviews: Digital Information and Knowledge Management, and Print Vs. Digital Buzz data dissemination archives digitisation vocabularies preservation cataloguing visualisation gis licence research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Sylvie Lafortune looks at two books edited by Sul H. Lee dealing with the impact of digital information on libraries, librarianship, information providers and library users.
Sul H. Lee is professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Oklahoma and Dean of University of Oklahoma Libraries.
He is also the editor of Haworth's Journal of Library Administration.
As a recognised scholar and an administrator of a large university research library, it is not surprising that he is able to bring together some of the leading library administrators in the US to give their insights on the challenges and opportunities that libraries now face from the massive influx of digital resources.
Although the two books deal with the same general theme – libraries adapting to digital information they do offer a different perspective.
The first deals with 'why' academic libraries are moving from collection management to knowledge management and the second examines 'how' this transformation is actually taking shape.
Digital Information and Knowledge Management This first collection of papers examines new directions that libraries may take to remain relevant in the digital environment and the most obvious direction, it seems, is knowledge management.
But as Professor Lee indicates in his introductory remarks, knowledge management is an 'unfamiliar territory' to research libraries and there is no consensus as to how this new approach may best serve them and their users.
Nonetheless, digital resources do provide libraries and librarians with opportunities to redefine their roles, to move beyond managing collections – print or digital.
Paula Kaufman begins the discussion by stating that libraries must not only adapt to the transformation of the 'carbon-based world' to the 'silicon-based world', but more importantly must adjust to the juxtaposition of these two worlds.
Here is how this translates: in the 21st century, no two libraries will be the same, as the silicon culture will continue to shape the choices that libraries make in terms of the services they offer and the personnel they hire.
And we are already witnessing the results of some of these choices as libraries introduce coffee shops, computer labs and Web 2.0 technologies to their complement of services.
Next, Dennis Dillon suggests that Google has completely reshaped the information landscape.
It is a product of modern society 'with its focus on choice, individualism, and instant gratification, all partaken of without context'.
Services like Google, he claims, represent the major problem libraries face today.
However, according to Dillon, knowledge management or the development of 'effective knowledge handling tools' will help libraries compete with Google.
I note here that Dillon is the only contributor who explicitly discusses knowledge management, although rather superficially.
Judith Panitch and Sarah Michalak explore a fundamental question which, in my view, needs to be thoroughly discussed in all academic libraries: 'what are the unique ways that digital libraries create and contribute to knowledge?'
Naturally, the starting point is defining 'digital library' and the authors suggest they are 'collections of analogue materials largely but not exclusively from the library's own holdings, that have been converted to digital form and made available online, plus the technologies and services that support those collections'.
They add to this definition, limited to conversion activities, that it allows for collections that are 'deep, complex, sustained and transformative'.
In this article, there is a very useful section for librarians on the scholarly value of creating a digital library.
In this context, the authors examine six criteria taken from a 1997 study [1] and transpose them to projects such as scholarly digital libraries.
Shirley Baker looks at digital projects from a point of view which should not be overlooked: 'not all digital information or knowledge management efforts are successful'.
In fact, she reminds us that these initiatives are all about change and innovation in Higher Education and that the challenges they bring are 'less technical than they are financial and social'.
She concludes by offering some 'tried and true' advice on what contributes to success such as working with other libraries public or academic, working with faculty in disciplines where 'collaboration is the norm' and repurposing staff instead of 'exploiting the interest and skills of existing staff'.
Charles Cullen asks: 'Is there a digital purgatory?'
and by this, he refers to the increasing need for 'intelligent skepticism' or what in information literacy parlance is referred to as critical thinking when working with massive amounts of digital resources.
Essentially, he is arguing for the necessity of human judgment or knowledge management which, he believes, is 'required at nearly every stage of the research process'.
So, according to Cullen, 'librarians (some at least) are here to stay'.
Nancy Davenport then examines the staffing of the 21st century library in more detail.
She notes that libraries are now increasingly staffed with technology specialists who work in partnership with librarians and scholars on building digital resources to support teaching and research.
Moreover, librarians are now negotiating purchases of e-products within consortia and managing licence agreements.
They tend to perform fewer manual tasks than before and she observes that the work they now do, particularly in academic libraries, requires 'much more in-depth discipline specific knowledge' than in the past.
Davenport concludes by suggesting that the role of librarians is evolving to one of catalyst to help drive scholarship forward and 'to develop connections between the academic disciplines and research libraries'.
The last article by Gary Shirk looks at knowledge management through the use of information visualisation technologies.
More specifically, this author is concerned with how collection assessment and development is evolving when libraries are adding extremely large datasets to their holdings, often in a network environment.
Shirk offers his insights as to how emerging digital tools may pave the way to developing a 'topography of library collections'.
This collection of papers is thought-provoking and provides a good overview of the serious challenges academic libraries face today: selecting and managing a phenomenal amount of resources in digital format while providing timely and efficient access to them.
However, in my opinion, it could present a clearer perspective on knowledge management and how academic librarians can make use of this practice in their work.
Certainly the creation and dissemination of digital information is driving fundamental changes in what librarians currently do but when and how does this become the management of knowledge?
Perhaps it is too soon to provide more than the penetrating observations that this book offers.
Indeed, its strength is in framing intelligent questions that may lead to intelligent answers.
Print vs. Digital: The Future of Coexistence This second set of papers takes on a more practical perspective and adds the balancing of print and digital collections to the challenges of managing increasing amounts of electronic resources.
In his introduction, Sul H. Lee reminds us that the vast amount of work needed to face these challenges is not easy, nor is it free from tension.
Although achieving a balance between print and digital resources represents a goal upon which there is general agreement, there is no consensus as to how and at what pace it should be pursued.
The first article, by Fred Heath, leads us to examine core issues which are driving fundamental changes in research libraries: important shifts in research behaviours and in how university students use libraries.
The author provides an overview of the factors which motivated the University of Texas Libraries to close its undergraduate facility and redesign it as a digital learning commons.
The information-seeking behaviour of a new generation of students was a key factor in these decisions.
Students today value the library as a place and do not use mediated services and print collections as previous generations did.
Heath suggests that with intuitive catalogues, the Internet, and electronic resources, undergraduate libraries are no longer relevant in a large research institution.
The creation of a learning commons at the University of Texas, he concludes: keeps their library sustainable because it remains in line with its core mission to support learning and teaching; and strengthens its ability to support research since it still manages to add 160,000 volumes to its print collection annually.
Next, Joan Lippincott presents a case for libraries to look beyond just co-existence of print and digital resources and instead to seek to create synergies between them.
This is a very constructive viewpoint and the projects that can result from this perspective are only limited by imagination and effort.
This is all about making creative linkages between print and digital collections with the use of technology, physical spaces and knowledgeable staff.
Promotion of library resources may lead to displays of the outcome of their use such as scholarship, learning objects and student-created projects.
Joseph Branin is one of the lucky (or unlucky!)
few who have been given the opportunity to envision a new research library.
In this third article, the author shares some of his findings while planning for the space needed to create a library in the 21st century.
First of all, he soon discovered that during this period of transition brought on by networked digital information, users and librarians are confused about the role of the library and the future directions it should take.
However, after an extensive study, it does appear that libraries need space for two major areas: user information technology services and new storage options for print (for preservation).
While reflecting on this experience, Branin notes that he needed to concentrate on three activities: '1) social learning needs of students, 2) learning commons space, 3) developing library staff commitment to adopt a "learning over service approach"'.
JSTOR has now been in existence since 1995 and Michael Spinella, its Executive Director, provides in this fourth article an overview of the project as well as some directions it may take in the future.
JSTOR [2] was and still is a not-for-profit organisation committed to two goals: 1) preserve scholarly journals in electronic form and 2) provide access to them as widely as possible.
Its growth has been such that it is a standard product in most North American libraries.
However, according to Spinella, there are many unanswered questions about the long-term economic viability of JSTOR.
For example, 'Who owns scholarly literature and how should it be preserved, delivered, and used online?'
In order to plan ahead, JSTOR has attempted to assess its success and durability with the use of four basic criteria: expansion in participation, archiving capabilities, usage, affordability and value.
Most conclusions show that JSTOR is doing very well but after a decade the question remains: Do libraries need print subscriptions anymore?
It seems that none of the players (creators, libraries and publishers) are ready to answer this question yet.
The next two articles look at areas where digitisation is unfortunately falling short for libraries and their users.
Bernard Reilly surveys how 'electronic delivery of newspapers is eroding the relationship between the news industry and libraries'.
He rightly notes that there is very little archiving of newspapers in digital format, that libraries are substantially reducing their subscriptions to foreign newspapers and that large research libraries are weeding their newspaper backfiles.
The author suggests that libraries should work with news organisations to grant libraries rights to archive news content and that NGO's and foundations like UNESCO, Carnegie and Ford should be lobbied to pursue funding for archiving of digital newspapers.
Reilly reminds us that a considerable amount of digital news content has already been lost and that this situation may result in a tendency to 'impoverish public discourse today and collective memory tomorrow'.
Next, Michael Buckland examines why 'the reference collection does not seem to have made an effective transition to the digital networked environment.'
This weakness seems to come from the fact that 'the basic "reference structure" of the print environment: what, where, when, who' is not being transformed adequately in digital format.
The author indicates that current technological efforts seem to concentrate more on supporting the work of reference librarians rather than developing efficient user-friendly interfaces to reference resources.
It may be that solutions like those he offers mapping between topic vocabularies and searching across different media forms are not proving to be as viable as one might think.
The last two papers both argue for a structural change in how libraries operate as they increasingly work in a network environment.
First, Dan Hazen looks at how digital information can alter co-operative activities among academic libraries that all support: '1) teaching, 2) research, 3) all organised human expression – or – raw material for future scholarship, 4) unorganised raw data'.
Although there have been some collective efforts in purchasing 'expensive, obscure, low-demand resources', by and large, libraries still operate fairly independently.
Hazen presents the work that was done at the Janus Conference [3] to 'implement practical measures to better position academic libraries to improve their services to students and scholars.'
The result of this conference was an action plan covering six areas where research libraries can mobilise to take charge of change.
Hazen concludes by stating that libraries now 'need to act, to complement rhetoric with work'.
Unfortunately, this sounds very familiar.
The final paper by Karen Hunter, Senior Vice President, Elsevier, addresses the end of the print production of journals from the perspective of all five major players: librarians, university administrators, authors, readers, and publishers.
This is a very good overview of the current issues that need to be resolved before taking the 'giant step'.
Publishers are still playing the waiting game: 'there is no plan yet in place among major publishers – no date in mind'.
Scholars still worry about the prestige of a title if it is no longer offered in print as well as the impact of publishing in digital format only on their career advancement.
Authors and readers are concerned with affordable, continuing access to a secure definitive e-version of articles.
All parties seem to agree on questions related to archiving.
Indeed, Hunter reports that 'preservation is still not sustainable in terms of policy, technology and economics'.
How, then, will all players agree to end the publishing of print journals?
According to Hunter, to get 'bullet-proof digital archiving', all stakeholders must work in partnership and she adds that for publishers, this may mean taking risks.
She does not give any indication of such a partnership arising anytime soon.
Conclusion This second collection of papers indeed provides us with concrete examples of how libraries are adapting to change brought on by an environment that is increasingly digital.
Although both books appeared in 2007, the papers were delivered at conferences held respectively in 2005 and 2006.
This succession of conferences on the same theme is an indication of how rapidly the situation is evolving and the transformation is unfolding.
Overall, both books are worth reading and were a pleasure to review.
They do present an American perspective but I would be inclined to think that most academic libraries outside North America face the same challenges.
References Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene I. Maeroff, Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professorate (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997).
'Originally conceived as a project at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR began as an effort to ease the increasing problems faced by libraries seeking to provide adequate shelf space for the long runs of backfiles of scholarly journals.'
This text is taken from the JSTOR Web site, accessed 19 December 2007 http://www.jstor.org/about/desc.html The Janus Conference on Research Library Collections: Managing the Shifting Ground Between Writers and Readers, Cornell University, 2005.
Author Details Sylvie Lafortune Government Documents, Data and GIS Librarian J.N.
Desmarais Library Laurentian.University Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6 CANADA Email: slafortune@laurentian.ca Web site: http://www.laurentian.ca/Laurentian/Home/Departments/Library/ Return to top Article Title: "Digital Information and Knowledge Management: New Opportunities for Research Libraries | Print vs. Digital: The Future of Coexistence" Author: Sylvie Lafortune Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/lafortune-rvws/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Immaculate Catalogues, Indexes and Monsters Too... Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Immaculate Catalogues, Indexes and Monsters Too... Buzz software rdf framework database restful xml portal usability archives metadata thesaurus accessibility tagging identifier vocabularies repositories video cataloguing opac multimedia z39.50 ascii marc aggregation ocr e-learning aacr2 unicode isbd ontologies onix rae interoperability e-government algorithm taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS David E. Bennett reports on the three day residential CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Annual Conference, University of East Anglia, during September 2006.
Restful accommodation and pleasant food prepared the delegates for the carefully balanced mix of social networking sessions and challenging seminars.
Everyone was extremely friendly and most proved to be erudite socialites, networking in some cases with great assertiveness and sense of purpose.
Cataloguing and classification was revealed as an area of library and information science that has survived years of neglect by most library schools to reveal itself as the much-needed solution to online resource accessibility.
Cutting-edge advances in information technology were showcased, including the promising prototype AUTINDEX indexing software for indexing digital and digitised documents, the latest research into novel methods for automated image compression and indexing, searching and retrieval methods, and reviews of user operability studies of image retrieval search interfaces.
Traditional print material cataloguing was not neglected.
The development of the powerful yet simplified set of cataloguing rules known as the Research Development and Access protocol, set to replace the current Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2 rev.)
in 2008, was reviewed and the latest developments modelled.
The technology behind the newly released union serials catalogue SUNCAT for attaching and tagging minimally described institutional holdings records to full bibliographic records using uniquely tailored MARC bibliographic fields and bibliographic record retrieval was explained.
The questions and answers sessions following each seminar were almost as informative as the seminars themselves, probing and teasing out diverse threads of discussion from both within and beyond the scope of the original seminars.
Day 1: Overview and 5th UK Cataloguing and Indexing Standards Forum Immaculate Catalogues: taxonomy, metadata and resource-discovery in the 21st century Alan Danskin, British Library Challenges facing cataloguing The exponential increase in the rate of print resource publication [1], the arrival of an ever-expanding collection of online material, rising costs and falling numbers of cataloguers were cited as reasons for selecting and filtering material for cataloguing on the basis of academic worth [2].
It was suggested that by necessity, non-academic resources now need to be catalogued and classified using simplified and derived metadata, including the automated and social indexing of Web resources.
Current collaboration efforts to engineer interoperable metadata standards for resource description for publishers and librarians and automation of metadata extraction were suggested as ways of transforming cataloguing from a cottage industry into a means of mass production.
The benefits of cataloguing should also be marketed [3].
Library OPACs RIP It was asserted that online public access catalogues (OPACs) must be rapidly transformed from antiquated browsing interfaces with crude search tools useful only for locating specified materials into intuitive, aesthetically pleasing search tools which produce high-quality search results and aggregate similar resources, in a similar way to commercial book retailers.
Moving from AACR2 to RDA Ann Chapman, CILIP/BL Committee on AACR The Research Development and Access protocol (RDA) was developed to satisfy the perceived need to simplify the cataloguing rules, increase their international acceptance and to permit cataloguing of new resource types together with technical improvements such as the separation of general and specific material designator terms [*].
The committees [4] and processes [5] set up to develop the new cataloguing rules, and attempts to map them to MARC 21 machine-readable cataloguing format were discussed.
Alan Danskin demonstrated the current version of RDA on Day 2 (not described).
MARC 21 Update Corine Deliot, British Library The process for submitting and evaluating proposed changes to the MARC 21 machine-readable cataloguing format was described.
Methods for converting from Unicode to the archaic MARC-8 format where records included characters not recognised in MARC-8 due to its much smaller character set were appraised.
Deleting records or unrecognised characters was agreed to be unacceptable.
Substituting a numeric character reference identifying the Unicode character in hexadecimal would have allowed the character to be mapped back into Unicode without information loss.
This method may be adopted in the future.
For the moment, the chosen method is to use a single placeholder character, the vertical bar (ASCII hex 7C), in place of all unrecognised Unicode characters.
Recent changes to MARC 21 were described and discussion papers introduced.
When the Rules Change: Cataloguing rare books Dr Karen Attar, Senate House Library The unique cataloguing requirements of rare and antiquarian materials were described, including the need for extensive physical descriptions, clear citation and aggregation of different publications and imprints of the same work on OPACs.
Cataloguing standards and codes applicable to the description of antiquarian and rare books were compared.
Controversial developments, such as the International Standardised Book Description guidelines for Antiquarian materials (ISBD(A)), Area 4, Option B to enter bibliographic information as printed in the book rather than as described under standards, were explored.
Instances where the Bibliographic Standards Committee (BSC) objected to changes to standards were highlighted, such as changes to pagination descriptions under the 2006 re-draft of the ISBD (A) standard, which the BSC attacked as being less clear and less parsimonious.
Day 2: Collections, Technology and Users Image, shape and multimedia resource discovery Steven Rüger, Imperial College, University of London and Prof Frederic Fol Leymarie, Goldsmiths College, University of London Novel multimedia search interfaces Novel search interfaces for retrieval of image and multimedia resources were showcased.
Medicine, personal collections, multimedia digital libraries, media archives, entertainment, tourism, e-learning and retail, especially multimedia catalogues were suggested as potential applications.
Bridging the semantic gap Methods for bridging the 'semantic gap' between locations, structures, people and names and iconic meanings, and what computers can recognise by simplifying images and comparing them with a database of pre-labelled structures were discussed.
It was suggested that, given approximately 30,000 indexed examples, computers could use statistical methods to identify and index similar images.
Different objects and regions of an image can be labelled using simple terms.
Aggregations of such objects within an image can then used to convey complex ideas, such as grass, sky, and people arranged around a dark object signifying 'barbecue'.
Novel image search interfaces Prototype visual search methods were described, where the image to be searched for is presented centrally and similar images selected by lateral browsing are displayed in a circle around it, users dragging these images towards or away from the central image to increase or decrease their weighting in the search.
Existing document supply and OPAC catalogues were again attacked for their failure to match the intuitive and powerful platforms offered by commercial resource providers which also offer summary information, story boards and key frame summaries for video material, document clustering and cluster summaries.
Professor Leymarie described methods of simplifying twoand three-dimensional images to various simple components for compressed image storage.
He confessed that accurate automated indexing and classification of such compressed elements was still difficult.
Three Blind Men and the Elephant: Current and future directions in image retrieval Colin Venters, University of Manchester Automated indexing of images Computer methods used to analyse images were described as a Euclidian comparison of local physical properties, such as reflectance, brightness, hue, chroma and brilliance, in different regions of the image.
It was suggested that following on from traditional cataloguing codes that attach concept-based metadata to images, semi-automated systems could use the physics of an image to extract, index, retrieve and cluster search results based on the physical similarity of images.
Computers still fail to distinguish between visually similar images of different objects or with different iconic meanings.
Other problems include noise and difficulties with inference, for example computers struggle to infer shapes composed of parallel lines or unconnected smaller shapes.
Evaluation of different user interface designs for image retrieval Users dislike making repeated fine adjustments to search parameters.
Querying by browsing is possible only if images are classified according to an intuitive taxonomy.
A usability study conducted on a small group of computer science students suggested that classifying images by their predominant colour impedes searching.
Most students sought images of specific objects, even when asked to find images to represent abstract concepts.
Studies showed that searching for images by sketching components using drawing applications was time-consuming and difficult for untrained users.
Classifying images by iconic meaning was criticised because it relies on the same interpretation being placed on an icon by both cataloguer and end-user.
From Spectator to Annotator: Possibilities offered by user-generated metadata for digital cultural heritage collections Seth van Hooland, Université Libre de Bruxelles Overview of distributed indexation of images Retrieval of high-level semantics within image databases traditionally relies entirely on human indexing.
This is extremely time-consuming and therefore expensive, especially where digital images are created on a large scale.
Social indexing comments can put diverse and scattered information into context and add information to images [6].
Social tagging also allows subjective accounts of personal experiences and memories to be added to images.
For cultural heritage archives this could be considered important.
The relevance, quality and even the accessibility of such metadata after large amounts of text have accrued is, however, questionable, although van Hooland was optimistic.
Neither the form nor content of the indexation is usually controlled.
Fitness for purpose, the overriding criterion for judging the value of semantic tagging, is reduced by polysemy, synonymy and the low semantic value of social tags, together with the uncertainty that a researcher could trace a tag back to the person who made it in order to investigate their story.
Emotional responses, especially superlatives, also reduce the accessibility of useful comments to users, although most can be removed by automated processes.
Analysis of comments and search purposes Queries of the image database of the National Archives of the Netherlands and comments attached by social tagging to images held in the database were categorised using the Shatford-Panofsky grid.
82.5% of queries were for specific person(s), event(s), location(s) or date(s).
No queries for abstract subjects were found.
Comments attached to images similarly focussed on specifics.
Only 2.86% of comments concentrated on emotion or abstraction.
Few comments reflected on personal experiences regarding the image.
Some users pose questions, turning the metadata into a dialogue, helping to create virtual communities around heritage institutions.
Swings and Roundabouts: A look at the role of Cat and Class in the LIS curriculum today Kathleen Whalen Moss A comparison of cataloguing and classification training in the 15 UK universities offering library and information science education library school syllabi from across the country country was appraised by means of semi-structured interviews, a Web survey, telephone interviews, and a literature review.
In 2005/06, only five undergraduate courses taught cataloguing and classification.
Only ten postgraduate courses offered six or more weeks practical cataloguing and classification training.
With different members of the information and library science community speaking out for and against cataloguing and classification as a necessary skill, different library schools have chosen to teach it to varying degrees.
Some schools ignore it altogether in favour of specialised modules, such as those in business information, which standing alone have been denounced as 'satisfactory for no one'; others have thoroughly endorsed it as a core skill that underpins a clear understanding of metadata and the description of online resources and as a pre-requisite for being able to interpret catalogues for end-users [7].
Owing to the lack of cataloguing and classification training provided to an entire generation of librarians, a skills gap has opened up which is putting library schools willing to support cataloguing and classification modules under pressure to find suitable lecturers with practical workplace experience.
Increasing interest in metadata may encourage a more thorough treatment of cataloguing and indexing.
Experts in the field have stated that their sophisticated concepts of cataloguing and classification are ideally suited to describing Web resources [8].
Despite RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) pressures, a reluctance to spend money on working materials, shortages of skilled teaching staff and pressures on teaching time brought about by the modularisation of syllabi, cataloguing and classification instruction is increasing in library schools' curricula, supported by CILIP and assisted by the increasing status of metadata research.
Post-professional university tuition is thriving, and co-operative schemes may help to fill gaps in tuition.
SUNCAT: The creation, maintenance and challenges of a national union catalogue of serials in the UK Natasha Aburrow-Jones, SUNCAT Launched in August 2006, SUNCAT aims to provide researchers with a union catalogue for all academic serials that details holdings and associated access rights and provides librarians with a central repository of high-quality bibliographic records [9], which may be downloaded using the z39.50 file transfer protocol [10], in exchange for serial holdings records from the downloading institutions.
It acts as a tool for locating resources for document supply and attempts to raise awareness of the need for quality serials information among librarians and researchers.
Serial holdings are updated regularly.
Different serial titles tagged using 'ONIX for serials' formats, given a unique SUNCAT identification numbers (SC-IDs) and automatically matched using an algorithm to the most complete bibliographic record available for that title, i.e.
with a matching SC-ID.
Inadequately or incorrectly catalogued records uploaded into SUNCAT do not automatically merge and are instead highlighted and merged manually by the SUNCAT team [11].
Librarians are alerted to non-merged records and encouraged to inform SUNCAT of mismatches and other errors.
Day 3: Subject Access Tools for the 21st Century: Ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri Terminology mapping for subject cross-browsing in distributed information environments Libo Si, Loughborough University Approaches to mapping semantics between the different metadata standards used in different databases in order to provide platforms capable of simultaneously searching several databases with different individual metadata standards and controlled vocabularies were reviewed.
Derivation of metadata standards, recombining metadata elements from different metadata schemes into one application profile, "crosswalk", i.e.
metadata mapping specifications, metadata registries [12], aggregation, i.e.
conversion of heterogeneous metadata standards into a consistent form and, for Web resources, the use of the Resource Development Framework (RDF) as a platform for integrating different metadata schemes were all raised.
Switch languages and co-occurrence mapping were discussed.
Metathesauri merging concepts from different controlled vocabularies were posed as one method of resolving differences between controlled vocabularies.
It was recommended that resource providers publish metadata their schemes in semantic web-enabled format, e.g.
RDF, XML, to facilitate their reuse.
The development of a common metadata scheme that can accommodate elements from other metadata schemes and upper-level ontologies, onto which metadata schemes, concepts, intraand inter-relationships in different knowledge organisation systems could be mapped was cited as a promising solution.
AUTINDEX: Automatic indexing and classification of texts Catherine Pease and Paul Schmidt, Institute of Applied Information Science (IAI), Saarbrücken The shift in user focus from library-centred to Internet-based research was blamed in part on the poor quality of search results resulting from inconsistent and over-generalised human indexation, which together with the need for a full text match by most library search tools and inflexibility in semantic relations.
AUTINDEX is a prototype indexation and classification application [13].
Digitised texts are subjected to morpho-syntactic analysis, isolating the lemma of each word and then tagging it with relevant information including which part of speech in which it occurs.
Shallow parsing then resolves grammatical ambiguities and identifies noun phrases that may be used for indexation.
Multiword terms and their syntactic variants are located and keywords, ignoring inflectional differences, identified, based on their frequency, and nouns are weighted according to semantic type.
140 semantic types are included in AUTINDEX's morpheme dictionaries.
If the client organisation provides a thesaurus of controlled terms, AUTINDEX maps identified keywords to thesaurus terms.
If a classification system is provided, AUTINDEX annotates text descriptors with classification codes and uses the frequency of thesaurus descriptor terms, hyperonym and synonym relations to calculate topic classification and assign a suitable class mark to the document.
Weaknesses identified in the application were that it can only index digitised documents and, although extensible, it currently only indexes English and German texts.
Print materials therefore need to be scanned in and converted to text documents using OCR technology to facilitate automated indexation.
No comparison was made between the time taken to scan in and convert printed materials to text documents using OCR technology and manual indexation.
The Epidemiology of IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) Stella G. Dextre Clarke, Independent information consultant Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) was a product of the 1999 "Modernising government" white paper, which specified that all dealings with government should be deliverable electronically by 2008, enabled by an e-Government Interoperability Framework.
The evolution of the IPSV from 1999 until 2006 was described and factors in its success were identified.
The original idea of indexing all e-government documentation for keyword searching using a single pan-governmental thesaurus was abandoned in 2002 in favour of the Government Category List (GCL) of just 360 preferred terms and 1000 synonyms used to classify documents broadly for efficient browsing.
Local authorities developed the Local Government Category List (LGCL) of 1400 more specialised preferred terms with support for indexing local government subjects.
The Seamless Consortium, led by Essex County Council, independently developed a portal of 2600 preferred terms.
Some local authorities were then obliged to index resources with GCL, LGCL and Seamless taxonomy.
In April 2005, IPSV was launched to rationalise e-government.
Its use was made compulsory.
Whilst IPSV has 3000 preferred terms and detailed indexation support for local government and community information, most government departments are able to use an abridged version of only 500 preferred terms for broad classification.
A longitudinal study to evaluate the quality of e-government indexing is underway.
It is speculated that the success of the initiative can only be judged after it has become established, a process that will take at least ten years.
Conclusion Cutting edge information and computer science research promises to simplify information searching and provide high-quality semantic, concept-orientated descriptions for all materials, together with more detailed and consistent indexation.
Library catalogue platforms need to be developed to compete with the intuitive interfaces, powerful search engines and the ability to aggregate similar resources offered by commercial services.
Cataloguing and classification education is gradually recovering in universities.
Changes to working practices, social indexing, and automated cataloguing, indexing and classification may ease the financial constraints threatening traditional cataloguing practice.
Note that most of the presentations for this conference [14] are now available.
References Whitaker Information Sciences (1996-2002).
Nielsen Bookscan (2005).
Leysen, J.M.
and Boydston, J.M.K.
(2006).
Supply and demand for cataloguers present and future.
Library Resources & Technical Services 49(4), 250-265.
Measuring our value: results of an independent economic impact study http://www.bl.uk/about/valueconf/pdf/value.pdf CILIP-BL Committee on AACR http://www.slainte.org.uk/aacr/ Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (JSC) http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/ Example of a socially tagged digital archive http://na.memorix.nl/ Broughton, V. (2004).
Classification come back all is forgiven.
Library and Information Gazette 17 December, 1.
Rupp, N. and Burke, D. (2004).
From catalogers to ontologists: changing roles and opportunities for technical services librarians.
The Serials Librarian 46 (3/4), 221-226.
SUNCAT: a brief history http://www.suncat.ac.uk/description.shtml SUNCAT: processing files from contributing libraries http://www.suncat.ac.uk/librarians/data_processing_initial_load.html AIMSS: automatic ingest of metadata on serial subscriptions http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_pals2/project_aimss.aspx CORES: an example of a metadata scheme registry http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cores/ AUTINDEX Web site (in German) http://www.iai.uni-sb.de/iaien/de/autindex_dfg.htm Presentations from the conference http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/CIG-2006/programme/ * Editor's note: this issue carries an article by Ann Chapman entitled RDA: A New International Standard.
Author Details David E. Bennett Graduate Trainee Oxford University Library Services University of Oxford Email: Pharm2_uk@yahoo.co.uk Return to top Article Title: "Immaculate Catalogues, Indexes and Monsters Too..." Author: David E. Bennett Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/cig-2006-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Knowledge by Networking: Digitising Culture in Germany and Europe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Knowledge by Networking: Digitising Culture in Germany and Europe Buzz data software framework portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation oai-pmh url research Citation BibTex RIS Alastair Dunning reports on an international conference exploring the current state of digitisation in the worlds of culture and scholarship, held in Berlin over 21-22 June 2007.
The idiom of the ‘elephant in the room’ is one often conjured up when an obvious fact or presence is not acknowledged for fear that doing so will radically disturb people’s acceptance of the status quo.
The conference in Berlin, Knowledge By Networking, Digitising Culture in Germany and Europe [1], had something of the elephant in the room.
In this case the unmentioned presence was not the elephant, but the search engine Google.
Much of the focus of the conference was on portal development and indexing metadata relating to the extraordinary richness of Europe’s cultural heritage.
In particular much time was dedicated to the twin development of the Michael collection-level inventory of museums, libraries and archives of the European Union (EU) and The European Library, which is indexing the items of digital collections held by the EU’s national libraries [2].
The idea is to use these two bases to form the European Digital Library, a one-stop shop for Europe’s cultural heritage.
There was also focus on national portals with similar tasks such as the French offering culture.fr [3] and the forthcoming Cultura Italiana [4].
But the fact that an American search engine is already doing some (but not all) of this work was not discussed as fully as it could have been.
(Indeed, the French delegate went as far as admitting that he had been told not to make comparisons between the cultural portal being developed by the French and the American giant.)
When one is shown such portals, there is the nagging suspicion that such portals will not draw in the number of users hoped for, precisely because so much user behaviour is centred on Google.
Too often there is an untested assumption that this commonly cited amorphous mass, the general public, will automatically be attracted to using such sites.
Surely, the assumption runs, we are allowing the user to conquer the jungle of the Internet by providing all of a nation’s or a continent’s cultural resources in one place!
But, in actual fact, what is the unique selling point that will persuade members of the general public to leave the familiar comfort of Google to a unfamiliar Web site that may or may not provide the results they are looking for?
It was this question that required further debate at this conference.
But the ubiquity of Google does not mean such endeavours are futile, far from it.
One can draw many positives from the development of such technologies the fertilisation of shared work among European countries; the clear emphasis on developing and using standards that can be applied elsewhere (DC, OAI-PMH), the commitment to open source software.
One is also aware of the heroic national efforts in bringing sundry institutions together to work to a common goal the Italian effort of bringing 1,346 cultural institutions together was particularly noteworthy.
More specifically, in developing a sound technical platform to underpin such a collection of records, the EU is developing an infrastructure that could easily be exploited by other, more focused services around the continent (and further afield if needs be).
Being able to embed European Digital Library tools in the resource discovery mechanisms of other more specific Web sites allows such services to provide specific, targeted search results which are far more relevant to the users’ needs.
One particular example was cited.
A Web site dedicated to the study of Richard Wagner could import records relating to the composer from the European Digital Library and then, it was hoped, gather results from other trusted sources on the same topic, to ensure an intelligent, trusted set of results for the end-user.
Users may not be interested in searching through all European collections, but may well appreciate the opportunity to search according to the topics, places or eras they are interested in.
Such was the broad tenor of the conference discussions.
Other issues focused on concerns of particular member states.
Representatives of various German institutions gave details of the digitisation work being undertaken in Germany.
What struck home here was the commitment to build an infrastructure to provide a structure for such digitisation work.
Not only had the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG) invested in digitisation work but it had also developed data capture centres and was in the process of developing an organisational framework to ensure that results about the process of digitisation were shared around rather than developing their knowledge and tools separately [5].
Elsewhere, Maltese delegate Luciano Mule’Stagno illustrated their 3-D recreations of megalithic temples [6].
Maria Sliwinska, from Poland, made a valuable point about the importance of not neglecting small collections held by smaller institutions (this dovetailed nicely with the aims of Michael).
But despite the interesting contributions of many of the presenters, one sensed the opportunity for informed debate had been missed.
The absence of any voices from North America, or indeed from outside Europe, meant there was not the proper opportunity to argue and discuss some of the larger assumptions that underpin the surfacing of so much cultural heritage material on the Web.
Only by engaging with a wide range of critical and friendly voices will we be able to push the elephant out of the room.
References The conference programme is available at http://www.knowbynet.de/index.php?ln=en&to=programme Information on Michael is available at http://www.michael-culture.eu/ The URL for The European Library is http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/index.html The French portal Culture.fr is available at http://www.culture.fr/ There is currently a placeholder for the Italian portal http://www.culturaitalia.it/ (Retrieved 15 August 2007) The planned ‘knowledge centre’ for information and sharing of ideas about digitisation will be based at http://www.kulturerbe-digital.de Heritage Malta http://www.heritagemalta.org/ Author Details Alastair Dunning JISC Digitisation Programme Manager JISC Office (1st Floor) Brettenham House (South Entrance) 5 Lancaster Place London WC2E 7EN Email: a.dunning@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation/ Web site: http://availableonline.wordpress.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Knowledge by Networking: Digitising Culture in Germany and Europe” Author: Alastair Dunning Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/digitising-culture-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Shibboleth Installation Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Shibboleth Installation Workshop Buzz data software portal infrastructure identifier ejournal shibboleth authentication privacy research jstor Citation BibTex RIS James Sankar and Masha Garibyan report on the first ever Shibboleth Installation Workshop in the UK.
Staff and students in Higher and Further Education institutions currently experience an overload of information.
In many cases, this information is held on different systems, available via widely differing levels of access control, ranging from open to strictly controlled access.
Access controls are also subject to data protection legislation and/or tough licensing conditions.
One way of overcoming the problem of accessing information from various systems is to build Web portals.
These can provide a superficial environment for the presentation of information from various sources.
However, for a portal to be effective, it needs to have intelligent access controls to authenticate users and authorisation management systems to match user attributes and privileges to grant access to information whilst adhering to licensing/access conditions.
This can be achieved with the help of middleware.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) defines middleware as 'a layer of software or 'glue' between the network and applications' [1].
The most important function for portal middleware is authorisation management to the hybrid collections of resources, for institutional learning, teaching, research and administration resolving (with minimal human intervention) questions of 'who can access what'.
Shibboleth technology, developed by Internet2 [2], is the most up-to-date open source software under development that can be used for developing middleware architectures.
Shibboleth is a standards-based protocol for securely transferring user credentials and attributes (information about the user and the resource the user wants to access) between the user's home site (e.g.
a university or its library) and resource site (e.g.
the publisher) to establish whether the user should have access to the requested information.
Access to Shibboleth can be independent of the location of the user's institution.
A useful demonstration of how Shibboleth works can be found on the Swiss Education and Research Network's (SWITCH) Web site [3].
The JISC is currently investing in Core Middleware (the central services essential to middleware as a whole, such as access and authorisation management) [4] and is intending to build a UK Core Middleware architecture based on Shibboleth technology.
The JISC has funded a number of projects investigating the possibilities of Shibboleth.
For example, the PERSEUS Project (Portal-enabled Resources via Shibbolized End-User Security) [5] at the LSE Library is investigating the challenge of Shibboleth-based access management to information resources via an institutional portal.
Workshop The main aim of this 'hands-on' workshop was to configure a Shibboleth origin site.
An origin site is a site that contains users who want to access Web-based content (e.g.
a university), such as academic e-journals, but who must be authenticated as recognised members of the origin site in order to be granted access to authorised content.
One of the advantages of the Shibboleth model is that it has the option to protect users' privacy by enabling them to control the release of their attributes to a target site (e.g.
the publisher hosting content) after successful authentication.
The event was led by Nate Klingenstein and Walter Hoehn, Shibboleth technical developers from the USA representing Internet2.
This was the first Shibboleth installation event (or Shib InstallFest as it is more commonly known) held outside the USA.
The workshop was attended by approximately thirty delegates from eighteen institutions.
The delegates were mainly IT professionals.
In order to participate in the workshop, the delegates had to choose a server to be configured as the Shibboleth origin site at their institution beforehand as well as ensure appropriate supporting settings and communications were in place.
A small proportion of the delegates had prepared beforehand, whilst other delegates attended as observers to enhance their understanding of how Shibboleth works.
The day comprised of three practical sessions and followed the Shibboleth Installation Checklist that is available online [6].
Infrastructure, Security, Configuration The first session focused on checking that all delegates had all the surrounding infrastructure necessary to support Shibboleth in place.
The second session focused on the creation of a secure environment for exchanging user credentials and attributes.
With the growing use of the Internet, the need for 'confidentiality and positive identification of all parties involved' cannot be underestimated [7].
Therefore, the origin and target sites must initially go through the process of proving each other's identity.
Specific configurations of various software components underpinning Shibboleth were also made.
The final session focused solely on configuring Shibboleth with site-specific information.
As there was some remaining time, the workshop included a hands-on section on how to configure user attributes to access additional resources.
The delegates were also shown some examples of 'Shibbolized' resources produced by target sites (e.g.
JSTOR and EBSCO Publishing).
At the end of the last session, the delegates had an opportunity to discuss their experiences and ask questions.
The general consensus was that it had been extremely useful to see the installation performed.
A number of delegates managed to install Shibboleth successfully and many were interested in how Shibboleth could be used in their own institutional environments.
All delegates felt more confident about Shibboleth having experienced it first hand, which was much better than just hearing about it.
It was also felt useful to establish a UK-only Shibboleth mailing list, in addition to the mailing lists provided by Internet2 [8].
Conclusion In conclusion, the workshop was a success.
A number of delegates were able to configure Shibboleth successfully.
There was an acknowledgement that configuring Shibboleth did require a high level of technical expertise and that this may be a barrier to the rate of future deployment.
All agreed that work should continue to develop Shibboleth documentation in order to simplify the configuration process where possible.
Furthermore, it was also recommended that service providers hosting content should be more closely involved in the configuration of target sites.
Participants equally acknowledged the need to create a federation for UK origin and target sites with links to other international federations, a move which would encourage a more supportive environment for the use of Shibboleth in this country.
References JISC, Middleware http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=middleware_team Internet2, Shibboleth http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ SWITCH, Shibboleth demo http://www.switch.ch/aai/demo/ JISC Core Middleware Programmes http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_middleware PERSEUS Project Web site http://www.angel.ac.uk/PERSEUS/ Shibboleth Identity Provider Installation Checklist http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/guides/identity-provider-checklist.html Walder, B., "Public key infrastructure overview", TechOnline, 12 June 2002 http://www.techonline.com/community/ed_resource/feature_article/20689 Shibboleth Internet2 mailing lists http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/shib-misc.html#mailinglist Author Details James Sankar Authentication and Authorisation Project Manager UKERNA Email: j.sankar@ukerna.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ja.net/development/aa/ Mariam Garibyan Project and Communications Officer PERSEUS Project London School of Economics and Political Science Email: M.Garibyan@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.angel.ac.uk/PERSEUS/ Return to top Article Title: "Shibboleth Installation Workshop" Author: James Sankar and Mariam Garibyan Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/shibboleth-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Can We Save Our Audio-visual Heritage?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Can We Save Our Audio-visual Heritage?
Buzz data software dissemination infrastructure archives metadata digitisation repositories video preservation interoperability algorithm url research Citation BibTex RIS Daniel Teruggi describes PrestoSpace, the new FP6 Integrated project for the preservation of our disappearing audio-visual heritage.
Memory is our major link to the past; it has greatly influenced the evolution of humankind.
Since the beginning of humanity, we have sought to preserve memories through the creation of artefacts that will transcend our own lifetime and so assure ourselves some form of posterity, perhaps even eternity.
For some time writing has been the major complex medium of preserved reality.
Not only does writing record human actions, beliefs and emotions, but it is an intellectual tool in itself, giving a temporal perspective on our thought as well as providing increasing levels of abstraction.
Other forms have always existed: drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, music; all of them trying to grasp the essence of a moment, of a belief, or of a way of thinking.
At the end of the 19th Century new forms of external memory appeared; first came photography, that brought a totally new sense of realism to images; then sound transmission and sound recording, which separated the space-time unity of perception.
Finally came moving images which gave the illusion that life could be recorded, simulated and invented.
These new approaches to memory gave birth to new media: radio, cinema, television, and their further evolutions.
Common to all these media was the fact that they could only exist through intermediates; for the first time humanity's perception could only address information through an intermediary, which transformed electric or digital information to an accessible form for our senses [1].
Cinema used moving images and progressively sound to create a new art form, initially similar to existing performing arts, but gradually developing its own aesthetic, techniques and standing with the public.
Cinema's capacity to evoke reality and to build new realities in people's minds has perhaps represented the greatest artistic revolution of the 20th Century.
Sound recording brought about music recording, and in time, electronic music and hence the ability to create music through any kind of sound, be it synthetic or natural.
Sound recording and moving images paved the way for yet more new media: radio and television; yet another technological but also social departure, for neither could be characterised as special events which an audience attended.
Rather they became progressively part of everyday life, complementary artefacts of communication between individuals and the world around them.
However, the nature of the information conveyed by radio and television conferred upon these latest media an entirely new position in our relationship with the world about us: for they transmitted an immediacy like no other.
They reflected everyday life; they brought the world into every home, mixing information with fiction, entertainment with culture, and became the window through which we now access our environment.
Conveying such immediacy also meant keeping a memory of and for society, building a historical record through both trivial and historic events that have accumulated over time and so have created a huge repository of our collective memory.
But radio and television were not the only mass producers of information; all areas of human endeavour introduced recording technology so as to keep track of their own activity.
Science, research, museums, government bodies, corporations, as well as private individuals, began to record their own memory and organise it in collections, either as a working tool or simply in order to document their activity.
The Birth of Audiovisual Archives It took time before the new technological society became aware of the progressive and massive accumulation of material it was producing and of its future importance.
It took a long time before the first archives were founded in order to organise that burgeoning material and describe it properly so that it might be made accessible for reuse.
Audiovisual archives were built within the production structures; audiovisual objects (boxes with audio-tapes, films or video) were kept on shelves with labels as if they were books stored in libraries.
Yet some objects differed greatly from books in one particular regard: they were difficult to access due to their time-dependent nature and, even more unexpectedly, their life span was proving terrifyingly short, no more than 50 years even under the best of conservation conditions.
Admittedly occasional problems arose, (defective tapes or mishaps during operation or processing), but nonetheless there was a degree of confidence in the likely evolution of the required technology and the general durability of the media.
The arrival of digital systems somehow reinforced the idea that these media were eternal.
The fact that a digital signal was less susceptible to the ravages of time and that it could easily be cloned without loss of data gave rise firstly to the belief that digital description would prove more durable and, secondly, that, thanks to the emerging concept of 'migration', a solution to overcome the deterioration over time of magnetic tapes was within our grasp.
(However this was far from the case: the advent of digital media brought about a far worse state of affairs; namely, the increasingly rapid and relentless alteration in media formats which created an ever-changing technological environment with which it became increasingly difficult to keep up).
As a consequence, the mistaken belief developed that analogue material was no longer in danger, because 'some day' all the analogue tapes would be efficiently transferred for good.
There was too much confidence in the future and insufficient awareness of the potential problems that have subsequently proved all too real.
And so we waited for the perfect digital medium and format to come along that would guarantee long-term preservation.
Thus the problem of conservation was put to one side; some problems were encountered here and there but these were regarded as local difficulties that did not affect the general approach adopted.
Consequently, grounded in the double and mistaken beliefs that analogue magnetic tape would last for a long time and that digital storage would solve the problem of magnetic decay in analogue tapes once a definite format had been decided, no major action was undertaken until the end of the 1980s.
First Initiatives During the 1990s, it became clear that analogue media were decaying at a far greater speed than anticipated and that initiatives had to be undertaken in order to prevent a major loss of audiovisual heritage.
But the ideal digital storage format did not appear and the resultant and ever-increasing volume of stored media brought with it a second problem: access.
Navigation through tapes and films was a rather clumsy process and most archives were kept closed to external users.
Archive documentation which could provide descriptions capable of facilitating access was frequently entirely lacking.
Major European archives, such as the BBC, INA and RAI, initiated plans for inventory, documentation, preservation and digitisation in order to conserve their rich heritage for future generations.
There was an implicit economic interest in these initiatives, since these organisations employed a large amount of archive material in new internal or external productions; but there was also a heritage-related concern to preserve the history of their country through these archives.
The First Attempt: Presto However, preservation is expensive both financially and in terms of human effort.
The technology is not particularly adapted to old media and keeping audiovisual archives means keeping the technology with which old media was produced.
In 2001, INA, RAI and the BBC worked together in a FP5 project named Presto [2] [3] in order to conduct an initial survey of the volume of European archives and to develop specially adapted machines and tools which would reduce the costs of preservation.
This project was the first initiative to develop specific tools for archiving and to address problems chiefly requiring solutions to improve digitisation control for audio and video and an automatic re-splicing machine for films.
The results of the survey conducted on European holdings proved quite simply staggering: for broadcast archives alone, the estimate was in the order of 50 million hours of audio, film and video material.
But for all audiovisual archives, the estimate doubled, bringing the figure to almost 100 million hours!
Only 2% is preserved and an even smaller amount is digitised, accessible and browsable online.
It was then clear that, unless a major initiative was brought to bear, most audiovisual archives would disappear due to chemical degradation and technological obsolescence, as the investment required to sustain a programme of systematic preservation would be almost impossible to drum up in the light of current preservation costs.
Concerted action had to be taken to inform both the political and cultural communities to make them sensible of the magnitude of the problem and the real danger of losing this aspect of our cultural heritage altogether [2].
Digitisation Opens the Door to Access These investigations into preservation and digitisation brought further disturbing news: nearly all audiovisual archives were inaccessible.
Most archives were closed to external access, either due to technical or rights issues.
So the overwhelming majority of production of the 20th Century was not accessible to the public except by dint of random and eventual reuse of material in subsequent television productions.
Thus research for historical, societal or sociological purposes is currently almost impossible.
It was then clear that the only way to open access was through digitisation, i.e.
via online access to digital content.
However, access could only be obtained if that content is placed in a digital format, so the major impediment remained the fact that most of our audiovisual memory is in one analogue format or another.
Preservation and Access: The two motors of PrestoSpace PrestoSpace was founded with the intention of providing solutions to this huge cultural heritage problem.
The main objective is to develop systems that will permit quick, efficient and economically accessible preservation of analogue media.
Such a preservation programme brings together all the components essential to the comprehensive exploitation of material, namely: restoration, storage, archive management and description (metadata).
These processes are all essential to the provision of access to large communities of users of cultural heritage and so to their understanding of the evolution and richness of our culture through the study and use of this digital content.
The Project aims to provide technical solutions and integrated systems for digital preservation of all types of audio-visual collections.
Institutions traditionally responsible for preserving audio-visual collections, (broadcasters, research institutions, libraries, museums, etc.
), now face major technical, organisational, resource, and legal challenges in taking on the migration to digital formats as well as the preservation of already digitised holdings.
Technical obsolescence and the sheer physical deterioration of their assets call for a wide-ranging and concerted policy to provide efficient technical services to guarantee long-term digital preservation.
Audiovisual content is widely distributed while archive owners are heterogeneous in nature and size: institutions, commercial enterprises, regional and local government bodies and communities.
Up to now, the economic cost and technological complexity have prevented these stakeholders from elaborating and implementing their own cultural heritage policy; meanwhile they have to hope for governmental guidelines and subsidies from on high.
The principal aim of the Project is to establish preservation factories which will make available affordable services to the custodians of all kinds of collection so that they may manage and exploit their assets effectively.
Breakdown of PrestoSpace Project Activity Project Workplan These developments will be implemented in the following four distinctive Work Areas (groups of Workpackages): Preservation Work Area: providing and integrating tools for the preservation process Restoration Work Area: providing and integrating tools for the restoration process Storage and Archive Management Work Area: addressing planning, financial and management tasks in respect of processing and storage technology.
Metadata, Access, and Delivery Work Area: ensuring proper delivery to the archives, with access tools and rich content descriptions.
The Work Breakdown structure has one common integrated view which is sustained by a number of Project-wide Workpackages in respect of: User Requirements System Architecture & Specifications Integration Services Exploitation & Tests.
These Workpackages operate therefore at the project level maintaining an overview of all developments within the project.
Their key objective is to verify that the resultant solutions are interoperable and easily integrated.
Moreover two further items, Training and Dissemination, will contribute to the spreading of know-how.
The project intends to provide deliverables (devices, software, reports, and recommendations) for the preservation process and its management.
Some examples of results are as follows: Preservation: A fast, affordable datacine (a device which digitally scans archive films at high speeds) A contact-less playback tool for audio disks An automated audio preservation tool An automated video preservation tool A manual tape condition assessment tool and An information system for preservation management Restoration: A restoration management tool A defect analysis and description infrastructure A set of high-level restoration algorithms A disk-to-disk real-time restoration tool A film restoration software tool Storage and Archive Management: A Web guide and software tool for storage planning for audio-visual preservation A guide and software tool for business-case planning for audio-visual preservation and organisation A logistics and Quality Assurance system for audio-visual preservation Metadata, Delivery and Access: A semi-automatic description tool An export system for delivering preservation results to medium and large archives A turnkey system for delivering preservation results to small archives Partnerships Archive owners, service providers, industrial bodies, universities and institutes of applied research from 8 European countries and the US are participating in the PrestoSpace Project [4].
A strong group of users, service providers and representatives from industry will provide the requirements, functional feedback and knowledge on current practices and will test the solutions developed.
The partners contribute by directly addressing the archiving problems, implementing the results of research and building the tools and components necessary for the preservation process, for new restorative technology and for access provision.
8 archive institutions and their R&D departments: INA, BBC, B&G, ORF, RAI, Netherlands Film Museum, Österreichischer Mediatek and NOB.
3 applied R&D institutions: Joanneum Research, CRCDG-CNRS, IT Innovation.
6 universities: University of Sheffield, Gdansk University, Surrey University, Trinity College Dublin, Université de La Rochelle, University Roma Tor Vergata.
15 industrial partners, all of them are SMEs: ACS, CTM Debrie, Eurix, CubeTec, Hi-Stor, HS-Art digital, Centrimage, Sirma AI Ltd, Media-Matters, Snell & Wilcox, SSL, StreamUK, TI Partners, Studio Hamburg, Vectracom.
PrestoSpace started on 1 February 2004 with a project duration of 40 months.
An Integrated Approach The way to achieve the goal of 'preservation for all collections' is with an integrated approach, to produce sustainable assets with easy access for wider exploitation and distribution to both specialists and the public alike.
The basic concept is simple enough: an accessible item is more valuable than an item on a shelf.
An integrated process will provide this access, generating revenue that will fund activity and developing the resources to finance collection maintenance.
Access requirements involve: providing whole documents or excerpts with the adequate metadata, rights clearance and rights management; quality restoration where needed and effective delivery systems for commercial and public access.
There are unsolved problems with regard to digitisation, metadata extraction, restoration, storage, network bandwidth, secure interaction, and end-user delivery.
Partial solutions exist, but in general they are not robust, scalable or affordable and definitely not integrated end-to-end within a sustainable commercial and legal model.
Today many initiatives are funded on a project-by-project basis which offers a poor foundation for long-term strategic pan-European collaborative effort in this field.
In order to enable any European archive owner, from small collections to the largest, to manage an autonomous and realistic cultural heritage policy, including preservation and exploitation of digital assets, PrestoSpace will push the limits of the current technology beyond the state of the art, bringing together industry, research institutes and stakeholders at European level to provide products and services for bringing automated preservation and access to Europe's diverse audio-visual collections.
Conclusion The 20th Century radically changed our relationship with information and therefore our environment.
Radio and television are not only powerful and influential media they constitute the essential record of our memory.
This memory is in danger, the risk of losing it remains very high, mainly because it decays over time.
It is not the role of archives to decide what will be conserved or what can be forgotten, it is their role to preserve for future generations the maximum of human production in the domain.
If no effective solutions are found, most of society's audiovisual memory could be lost over a period of ten years; but in order to save this memory, specific technology and procedures have to be conceived and developed.
It is the mission of PrestoSpace [4] to develop answers that will help in the battle against time, by simplifying methods, lowering preservation costs, accelerating the preservation process and proposing efficient and economic solutions to archive owners.
References Monaco, J., "How to read a film", Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 2000.
Presto project: http://presto.joanneum.at/index.asp Wright, R. "Preserving Europe's Memory", Cultivate Interactive, issue 7, 11 July 2002 http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/presto/ Project information: PrestoSpace: An integrated solution for Audio-visual preservation and access http://www.prestospace.org/ Author Details Daniel Teruggi Research and Experimentation Manager INA (National Audiovisual Institute) 4, Av.
de l'Europe 94366 Bry-sur-Marne Cedex Tel: 0033 1 49 83 29 08 Fax: 0033 1 49 83 25 82 Email: dteruggi@ina.fr Web site url: http://www.ina.fr/recherches/index.fr.html Return to top Article Title: "Can We Save Our Audio-visual Heritage?"
Author: Daniel Teruggi Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/teruggi/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Improving the Quality of Your HTML Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Improving the Quality of Your HTML Buzz html css xhtml blog interoperability standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly outlines a strategy for fixing the most important HTML resources on a Web site.
The Importance of HTML Compliance A recent Web Focus article [1] argued that there was a need to ensure HTML resources complied strictly with HTML standards in order to ensure that they would be functional, widely accessible and interoperable.
The importance of HTML compliance is growing as the HTML format develops from being primarily an output format used for display by Web browsers to its use as XHTML in which the resource can be transformed for a variety of purposes.
This will enable XHTML to be a much richer and more widely accessible format; however the cost of this is the requirement that XHTML resources must comply with the XHTML standard.
Approaches to Compliance Insisting that HTML resources must be compliant is, of course, insufficient in itself.
There is a need to ensure that the authoring environment is capable of creating compliant resources and, ideally, enforcing compliance.
In addition, if the publishing system is not capable of enforcing compliance, there is a need to make use of tools which can check for compliance failures.
An ideal solution would be to make use of a Content Management System (CMS) which provided, as part of the workflow process, a mechanism for validating the resource prior to publication.
In many cases, however, such systems are not available.
It is probably the case that conventional HTML authoring tools such as DreamWeaver and FrontPage or basic text editors are still the most common way of creating HTML pages.
Although such tools may provide validation mechanisms, there can be no guarantee that authors will make use of them, or even fix any errors which are reported.
In such circumstances there is a need to validate resources after they have been published.
There are many HTML validation tools available, including both online validation services such as the W3C MarkUp Validation Service [2] and WDG HTML Validator [3] and desktop tools such as CSE HTML Validator [4].
However if you have ever used a tool such as the CSE HTML Validator to validate an entire Web site, you may well have been inundated with a large number of error messages.
In a situation such as this you may well feel that the problem is insurmountable and simply abandon any attempt to ensure your Web site complies with HTML standards.
This will mean that your Web site is likely to degrade even further, if new resources are published which are not compliant.
W3C Log Validator Rather than abandon any attempt to ensure that a Web site complies with HTML standards there are approaches which can be taken which can help to identify the key resources which should be fixed.
W3C have developed a Log Validator [5] which provides a useful tool for Web managers.
The Log Validator is a Web server log analysis tool which finds the most popular documents which are non-compliant.
This can then be used by the Web manager to prioritise the resources to fix.
This tool takes a Web server’s last logs and processes it through validation modules.
Use of Log Validator on the QA Focus Web Site The JISC-funded QA Project makes use of the Log Validator on the QA Focus Web site [6].
We have a HTML policy [7] which states that: “QA Focus Web pages will be based primarily on XHTML 1.0 Transitional and Cascading Stylesheets (CSS).
Resources should comply fully with the appropriate standards.” Since resources are maintained using an HTML editor and there is no automated publishing process which can guarantee compliance with standards, we have adopted manual procedures [8] for validating resources: “When new resources are added to the Web site or existing resources updated, QA Focus will check XHTML validation using ‘ ,validate’ after each page is created.
QA Focus will run a monthly batch validation check on the whole site using ‘ ,rvalidate’.
All manually created pages will be checked.” The approach of documenting technical policies and ensuring that there are procedures in place is the approach to quality assurance [9] which QA Focus is recommending for projects funded under JISC’s digital library programmes.
However since the QA Focus procedures require active use by authors there will inevitably be occasions when the procedures are not implemented.
There is therefore a need to provide additional validation procedures.
The approach taken has been to deploy the Log Validator tool.
The tool has been configured to run automatically once a month.
The tool creates a report which lists the top ten most popular pages which are non-compliant.
The monthly reports [10] are published on the QA Focus Web site.
An example of a report is illustrated below.
Log Validator results Results for module HTMLValidator Here are the 10 most popular invalid document(s) that I could find in the logs for www.ukoln.ac.uk.
Hits Address Error Number 49 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/ 1 46 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/print-all/ 31 38 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-38/html/ 1 34 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-07/html/ 1 33 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-39.html 4 30 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/qa/audits/599sites/ 10 22 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-43/html/ 9 22 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/news/archives/000097.html 2 16 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/news/archives/000096.html 8 16 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/news/archives/000090.html 2 Conclusion: I had to check 291 document(s) in order to find 10 invalid HTML documents.
This means that about 3.43% of your most popular documents was invalid.
This report helps to prioritise the resources which need to be fixed.
As well as identifying pages which contain errors which need to be fixed, the report also helps to spot systematic errors.
Integration with Web Publishing Strategy This tool can help to improve the quality of HTML resources by providing a summary of the most popular pages which are non-compliant.
This tool will be used as part of a formal Web publishing policy.
For example, an organisation could implement a policy which states that non-compliant resources reported by the tool will be fixed within a specified period.
Even better would be a policy which stated that the causes of the problems would be identified and the workflow procedures updated to ensure that such errors would not re-occur.
There may, however, be occasions when it is not possible to fix errors (for example your recommended HTML authoring tool may fail to create compliant HTML and replacing the tool with one which can create compliant HTML would be expensive).
In such circumstances it would be desirable to ensure that a record of the decision and justification for the decision is kept, as this should inform future planning.
A record of Web Log Validator reports and notes of actions taken [11] is used on the QA Focus Web site, as illustrated below.
Figure 1: Web Log Validator Reports and Notes for QA Focus Conclusions W3C’s Web Log Validator is a simple tool which should be of interest to Web authors and developers for whom compliance with HTML standards is of importance.
However it is only a reporting tool, so it should be used in conjunction not only with a Web publishing approach which aims to ensure that HTML resources are compliant with HTML standards but also with quality assurance procedures which can ensure that the publishing process works correctly and problem areas are addressed.
References Let’s Get Serious About HTML Standards, Brian Kelly, Ariadne 33, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-focus/ MarkUp Validation Service, W3C, http://validator.w3.org/ WDG HTML Validator, Web Design Group, http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ CSE HTML Validator, HTMLvalidator.com, http://www.htmlvalidator.com/ Log Validator, W3C, http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/LogValidator/ QA Focus Web site, QA Focus, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/ QA Focus Policy On Web Standards, QA Focus, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/qa/policies/web/ Procedures for Web Standards, QA Focus, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/qa/procedures/web/ Summary of the QA Focus Methodology, QA Focus, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-30/ Log Validator results, QA Focus, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/statistics/web-log-validator/web-log-validation2003-11.html A Focus Statistics: Non-Compliant HTML Pages, QA Focus, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/statistics/web-log-validator/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/ Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus.
He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath.
Return to top Article Title: “Web Focus: Improving the Quality of Your HTML” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30 January 2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The W3C Technical Architecture Group Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The W3C Technical Architecture Group Buzz rdf html xml urn archives metadata xhtml doi identifier namespace schema cataloguing sgml passwords uri research Citation BibTex RIS Henry S. Thompson introduces the W3C Technical Architecture Group and its work.
Background: The W3C and Its Process The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was set up by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 to preserve and enhance the public utility of the Web for everyone, to “lead the Web to its full potential”.
It is a consortium of industrial and institutional members (around 450 at the time of writing) who pay on a sliding scale proportional to size.
It produces Recommendations which are widely recognised as de facto standards.
The actual work of writing those standards is carried out by Working Groups mostly made up of representatives of members, aided by a permanent staff.
At the moment there are over fifty active Working Groups, with over 700 members, working on around 100 documents at various stages of their progress towards Recommendation status.
The permanent staff numbers around 60, attached to one of the three host institutions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, MA, USA; the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, in Sophia Antipolis, France and Keio University, in Tokyo, Japan.
The W3C manages its work according to a formal Process, with an emphasis on consensus and community review, which specifies a progression from Working Draft through Candidate Recommendation and Proposed Recommendation, before the Director (currently Tim Berners-Lee) seeks formal reviews from the membership and either approves publication as an official W3C Recommendation, or returns it to the Working Group for further work.
One of the responsibilities of the Director is to consider the architectural impact of Working Groups’ output, particularly of Proposed Recommendations.
As the consortium grew, and the scope of its work expanded, it became increasingly difficult for one person to bear the responsibility for articulating ‘the architecture’.
Working Groups needed a concrete expression of what came to be called “Web Architecture”, to which they and others could refer as the basis for planning and decision making.
In 2001 the membership agreed to create a Technical Architecture Group (TAG), to take on the task of identifying and documenting the architecture of the World Wide Web.
TAG Makeup and Remit The TAG has nine members: the Director ex officio and eight others who serve twoyear terms.
Of these nine, three are appointed by the Director and five are elected by the W3C membership (although they need not be associated with the W3C themselves).
Although the Director is nominally the Chair, in practice he delegates this responsibility to one of the appointees.
The following photograph shows the current TAG membership, with the exception of Dave Orchard of BEA Systems: Norm Walsh (Sun Microsystems), Rhys Lewis (Volantis), Tim Berners-Lee (W3C), Henry S. Thompson (University of Edinburgh), (Vincent Quint, INRIA, membership term now expired), Noah Mendelsohn (IBM), Dan Connolly (W3C), Stuart Williams (HP), T.V.
Raman (Google) Photo courtesy of Norm Walsh.
The TAG’s remit is described in the W3C Process document [1] as follows: “[T]he mission of the TAG is stewardship of the Web architecture.
There are three aspects to this mission: “to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary; “to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG; “to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.” In practice this has meant that a lot of the TAG’s work has been a kind of industrial archaeology: exploring and analysing the ways in which the technologies which comprise the World Wide Web are used and abused, to try to articulate what is important and what is not, what really underpins the success of the Web so far, what is incidental and what actually threatens the success of the Web going forward.
TAG History The primary focus of the first three years of the TAG was on documenting in a clear and easily understood manner the architectural foundations of the Web.
The result was published at the end of 2004 as Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One [2] often referred to as ‘WebArch’.
It is written in a relatively informal style, with illustrations, and many of its conclusions are expressed in succinct ‘principles’, ‘constraints’ and ‘good practice notes’, such as: Principle: Global Identifiers Global naming leads to global network effects.
Good practice: Identify with URIs To benefit from and increase the value of the World Wide Web, agents should provide URIs as identifiers for resources.
Constraint: URIs Identify a Single Resource Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.
As these examples show, WebArch tries hard to address the basic issues of web architecture clearly and straightforwardly, and as a result it has proved useful not just for the Working Groups of the W3C, but for teachers, students and the general public.
A short note on terminology: The TAG distinguishes three crucial participants in the thing at the heart of the Web, that is, links: URI The starting point.
The TAG focuses on http: URIs, for example http://weather.example.com/oaxaca.
resource The end point, which we say is identified by a URI.
It can be anything at all.
representation Something that can be sent in a message, typically from a server to a client, in response to a request.
WebArch includes the following picture of the relationship between these three: Figure 2.
The Oaxaca weather report on the Web WebArch also distinguishes an important subclass of resources, called information resources, as those resources ‘all of [whose] essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message.’ Most of the URIs we browse, search for and author, identify information resources: Web pages, images, product catalogues, etc., but URIs can also be created for non-information resources, such as: concepts (http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator) or real-world objects (http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i), typically in the context of the Semantic Web.
Since the publication of WebArch, the TAG has been in more reactive mode, responding to requests from within and outside W3C to address issues and reconcile competing practices.
Some of the issues which have been raised and addressed, usually by publishing short documents known as ‘findings’, are listed below: Is an XML namespace a small set of qualified names, such that it makes sense to talk about adding to a namespace, or is it an infinite set of qualified names, only a few of which have definitions at any given time?
The TAG ratified the latter view: The Disposition of Names in an XML Namespace [3].
Is the metadata in a message, for example the “Content-Type” header, definitive, or advisory?
The TAG confirmed that it is definitive, and explained why: Authoritative Metadata [4].
If a URI does not identify an information resource, that is, one which is pretty completely represented by a message (for example, a message consisting of an HTML document), but rather identifies something like Beethoven, or the Eiffel Tower, about which a server has some meta-information, perhaps in the form of RDF, is it OK to supply that information if someone tries to retrieve from the URI?
The TAG said “Yes, but not with a 200 response code – use 303 instead, to make the difference clear”: [httpRange-14] Resolved[5].
Often resource owners offer more than one representation of a resource – different formats, different languages, etc.
Both human and machine consumers of such resources need help understanding the relationships between them.
The TAG offers recommendations about link patterns and metadata for Linking Alternative Representations To Enable Discovery And Publishing [6].
Although strictly speaking URIs are opaque, and there is no required relationship between the structure of a set of URIs and the relationships of the resources they identify, in practice resource owners who publish representations of related resources use related URIs to identify them.
The TAG has issued guidelines on The use of Metadata in URIs [7].
Current TAG Concerns The TAG is currently engaged with a number of issues.
In some cases draft findings are available, in others things are still at the preliminary fact-finding and discussion stage.
The following sections give brief summaries of these issues and where the TAG is in its consideration of them.
Versioning The TAG has been working on a number of aspects of the complex problem of versioning and extensibility for formally defined languages in general, and XML languages in particular, for over three years.
The work has been both analytical – trying to pin down what the language-evolution aspects of HTML have been and to give clear and well-grounded definitions for the relevant terminology – and proactive, trying to identify and recommend good practice both for the schema languages which are used to define languages, and for the languages themselves.
The work is currently expressed in two draft findings: The first, Extending and Versioning Languages Part 1 [8], is concerned with versioning as a whole, and with the definition of relevant terms.
The second, Extending and Versioning Languages: XML Languages [9], is concerned with versioning XML languages in particular, and with techniques for using W3C XML Schema to support different versioning strategies.
A number of case studies are included.
(Almost) Always Use http: URIs The TAG’s analysis of how the Web works, building on previous work, has identified a few key properties of how http: URIs and the HTTP protocol combine and which are hugely powerful and beneficial.
Accordingly the TAG is concerned by the number of new URI schemes (for example info:, xri:, doi:) and URN (sub-)namespaces (for example urn:nzl, urn:ietf:params:xml, urn:oasis:names:tc:ubl) being promoted for use in identifying resources on the Web, because they threaten not only to dilute that value for others, but also fail to deliver the intended benefits to their users.
Accordingly the TAG has undertaken to analyse the technical arguments most often advanced in support of new approaches to naming things on the Web, and, wherever possible, identify the ways in which these arguments misunderstand or misrepresent the properties of http:-based naming.
This work, along with several extended examples, is available as a draft finding: URNs, Namespaces and Registries [10].
Passwords in the Clear That user agents should not send passwords over the Internet in the clear, or trivially encoded, seems obvious; but formulating guidelines for user agents on when and how to warn users that they are at risk of doing so has proved surprisingly difficult.
The current state of the TAG’s efforts to express this can be found in a draft finding: Passwords in the Clear [11].
URI Abbreviation The TAG has recently begun discussions on the potential architectural impact of a proposal to introduce a new means of abbreviation for URIs, known as Compact URIs (or CURIEs, for short) [12].
No conclusions have been reached so far.
The Self-describing Web One of the key aspects of the Web as the TAG understands it lies in the extent to which it supports, to put it informally, ‘following your nose’ to find things out.
This is not just a matter of the way the Web allows a user to click a link to go from one Web page to another, but also in the way Web-accessible resources carry with themselves a kind of audit-trail concerning their own interpretation, via for example media types and namespaces.
The phrase ‘self-describing Web’ refers to this part of the Web’s value proposition.
One draft finding has been published about one aspect of this, namely the question of what ‘best practice’ should be with respect to XML namespace documents.
By this it is meant the information resource, if any, whose representation can be retrieved from an XML namespace URI.
The TAG is still working to identify the best combination of current practice, particularly the use of RDDL [13] with the evident potential of the Semantic Web in this area.
The most recent draft finding is somewhat out of date: Associating Resources with Namespaces [14], more recent discussion can be found on the www-tag mailing list namespaceDocument-8 background [15].
The Future of (X)HTML Another area where the TAG is in exploratory mode, where no draft finding has been issued, concerns the architectural background of the recent restructuring of the W3C’s HTML work.
The message announcing the TAG’s interest in this area [16] introduced it as follows: “Is the indefinite persistence of ‘tag soup’ HTML consistent with a sound architecture for the Web?
If so, (and the starting assumption is that it is so), what changes, if any, to fundamental Web technologies are necessary to integrate ‘tag soup’ with SGML-valid HTML and well-formed XML?” (By way of explanation: ‘By “‘tag soup’ HTML” is meant documents which are not well-formed XHTML, or even SGML-valid HTML, but which none-the-less are more-or-less successfully and consistently rendered by some HTML browsers.‘) The Future?
As well as driving the issues summarised in the preceding section to a resolution, what else is the TAG looking forward to considering?
Some topics which we hope to consider in the near future are: The architecture of the Semantic Web – what is it and how does it relate to the architecture of the ordinary Web: the same, overlapping, or distinct?
To what extent is peer-to-peer Internet usage consistent with the architecture of the Web as the TAG has articulated it?
To the extent it is not, is this a cause for alarm or rather, what, if anything, should the TAG consider doing?
The W3C has publicly committed to the notion of “One Web”, encompassing as widely as possible, a range of delivery media.
What are the architectural implications of this commitment?
The most frequently asked question of anyone seen as ‘responsible’ for the Web: ‘What are you going to do about spam/phishing/botnets/…’?
Can the TAG say anything useful about security and trust for the Web?
Getting Involved The TAG carries out all its work in public.
In particular, there are two public mailing lists where TAG business can be observed: www-tag@w3.org High-bandwidth.
Discussion of open and potential TAG issues.
Announcements of draft findings.
Agendas and minutes for weekly telcons and quarterly face-to-face meetings.
Open to anyone to subscribe (send ‘subscribe’ to www-tag-request@w3.org) and to post.
Publicly-readable archives [17].
public-tag-announce@w3.org Low bandwidth.
Announcements of findings, quarterly summaries of work undertaken.
Open to anyone to subscribe (send ‘subscribe’ to public-tag-announce-request@w3.org), but closed to public posting.
Publicly-readable archives [18].
The TAG home page [19] has links to a wide range of TAG-related information.
The TAG depends on the whole Web community to review its work and point it in new and fruitful directions – please help!
References The W3C Team: Technical Architecture Group (TAG) http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/organization.html#TAG Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004 http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/ The Disposition of Names in an XML Namespace, TAG Finding 9 January 2006 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/namespaceState.html Authoritative Metadata, TAG Finding 12 April 2006 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect-20060412 [httpRange-14] Resolved: Message from Roy T. Fielding to www-tag@w3.org 8 Jun 2005 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Jun/0039.html On Linking Alternative Representations To Enable Discovery And Publishing, TAG Finding 1 November 2006 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/alternatives-discovery.html The use of Metadata in URIs, TAG Finding 2 January 2007 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31.html [Editorial Draft] Extending and Versioning Languages Part 1, Draft TAG Finding 26 March 2007 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-20070326.html [Editorial Draft] Extending and Versioning Languages: XML Languages, Draft TAG Finding 26 March 2007 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-xml-20070326.html URNs, Namespaces and Registries, [Editor’s Draft] TAG Finding, 17 August 2006 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/URNsAndRegistries-50 Passwords in the Clear, [Editor’s Draft] TAG Finding 12 December 2006 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/passwordsInTheClear-52.html CURIE Syntax 1.0: A syntax for expressing Compact URIs, W3C Working Draft 7 March 2007 http://www.w3.org/TR/curie/ Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL) http://www.rddl.org/ Associating Resources with Namespaces, Draft TAG Finding 13 December 2005 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/nsDocuments/ namespaceDocument-8 background: Message from Norman Walsh to www-tag@w3.org on 5 March 2007 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2007Mar/0012.html Draft description of new TAG issue TagSoupIntegration-54, Message from Henry S. Thompson to www-tag@w3.org on 24 Oct 2006 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2006Oct/0062.html www-tag@w3.org Mail Archives http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/ public-tag-announce@w3.org Mail Archives http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tag-announce/ Technical Architecture Group (TAG) http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ Author Details Henry S. Thompson Reader HCRC Language Technology Group School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Email: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ Return to top Article Title: “The W3C Technical Architecture Group” Author: Henry S. Thompson Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/thompson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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United Kingdom Serials Group Conference 2005 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines United Kingdom Serials Group Conference 2005 Buzz data database dissemination portal archives digitisation blog repositories copyright cataloguing aggregation e-learning ejournal ebook vle licence rae authentication interoperability research sfx Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Pearson reports on the annual 3-day UK Serials Group (UKSG) conference recently held at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
Introduction Does More Access Mean Less Library?
Commercial Scholarly Publishing in the World of Open Access Walking Away from the Big Deal: the Consequences and Achievements All or Nothing: Towards an Orderly Retreat from the Big Deals The IReL Experience: Irish Research Electronic Library Experimenting with Open Access Publishing The Impact of Open Access Publishing on Research Libraries Public Access, Open Archives: A Funder's Perspective VLEs: Setting the Scene The Implementation of a VLE: Not So Virtual After All How Usage Statistics Can Inform National Negotiations and Strategies The Library View of Usage Metrics Change and Continuity in a World of Information Snap, Crackle and Ultimately Pop?
The Future for Serials Conclusion Introduction The UKSG (UK Serials Group) annual conference is the highlight of the year for the serials publishing and information community.
It provides a forum for discussion of the major issues affecting the serials industry and brings together all sectors of the supply chain not just from the UK but from all over the world.
The mixture of presentations, workshops, briefing sessions, exhibitions and social gatherings, involving publishers, intermediaries, vendors and libraries is an ideal opportunity to meet colleagues, look at new products and services and generally keep up to date in this rapidly changing environment.
The content of the conference is an indication of current concerns and a barometer of future emerging trends in the world of serials provision.
The themes of this year's conference were very much based around commercial publishing versus the open access model and how the two can work side by side; the big deal and its alternatives; usage statistics; VLEs (virtual learning environments); access to information in developing countries; and the future for serials.
In addition to the main conference stream, the breakout workshops and briefing sessions covered a range of topics which are highlighted in the conference programme and not discussed here [1].
The conference opened with an address from the chair of UKSG, Keith Courtney, who discussed some of the issues and challenges that the UKSG has been facing since the last conference.
It was followed by a short update from NASIG (the North America Serials Interest Group).
Back to table of contents Plenary Session 1 Does More Access Mean Less Library?
Simon Mayes-Smith, Credit Suisse First Boston This was the first time that UKSG has invited a member of the financial investment community to talk at the conference.
The financial market has a strong interest in scientific publishing and media equities.
It has a strategic analysis role in the publishing industry for the benefit of investors, pension funds and investment opportunities.
Simon Mayes-Smith described how the static state of library budgets is currently undermining the research activity of academic institutions.
There are three main areas where universities are hoping to ease this problem unbundling; the author-pays open access model; and open archives.
Examining each one in turn, he went on to describe why none of these options will ease the current crisis in e-resource funding.
The speaker produced statistics to show that bundled deals work out cheaper than expected due to the level of use.
He then went on to explain that open access will cost authors up to 6.5% of their annual income, reducing the cost benefit of the model to researchers and that the model takes no account of corporate funding from sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry.
It will also produce more fragmentation of research across the Web.
Finally, he explained that while mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a good thing, it still relies on a copy being deposited in a commercial publication.
Back to table of contents Commercial Scholarly Publishing in the World of Open Access Derk Haank, Springer Science & Business Media This paper looked at the current state of commercial publishing in the light of new business models and changing technology.
The database licensing model is now dominant, rather than the individual subscription model.
Pricing models are increasingly value-based.
Derk Hannk argues that the author-pays model is possible because of the cost structure of e-publications.
The author-pays model is available for all 1400 Springer titles.
The only thing that has changed in this model is that the author pays and selects that article as available open access.
The Springer subscription income continues to pay for non-open access articles.
The journal subscription cost is then adjusted annually dependent on the scale of open access.
However, the open access model requires change in institutional budgets.
The speaker predicts that in future there will be a situation of unlimited access through database licence, author Web sites, institutional repositories and open access articles.
But the speaker predicts that not more than 5% of total research output will be available without subscription or licence.
Back to table of contents Plenary Session 2 Walking Away from the Big Deal: the Consequences and Achievements Nancy J Gibbs, Duke University Libraries Nancy Gibbs discussed in this paper the route which Duke University took as an alternative to the big deal.
Duke University is a member of the Triangle Research Libraries network.
A variety of consortial e-deals were negotiated.
The consortium committee started looking at the Elsevier Science Direct and Blackwell Synergy packages.
They found that there was little or no cancellation allowance.
This meant that the library couldn't add to its collections due to static budget and rising journal prices.
After user consultation, each university opted not to renew the consortium licence.
Instead, they paid individual subscriptions only to the titles which were required by each institution.
Over 500 titles were cancelled.
Each institution found that they paid more per title for journals after the big deal was cancelled but they paid only for what was needed which worked out at an overall saving.
They were then able to purchase more titles.
If the publishers had been more flexible in their cancellation and pricing policy, there would not have been so many cancellations.
Back to table of contents All or Nothing: Towards an Orderly Retreat from the Big Deals Recent Negotiations in the Netherlands Nol Verhagen, University of Amsterdam This paper looked at the recent experiences of the UKB consortium in The Netherlands which is a consortium of 13 university libraries.
Nol Verhagen described the benefits and drawbacks of the big deal and the results of recent negotiations in the Netherlands with various publishers.
The consortium administers bundle deals for full collections, subject-specific collections, e-access to print collections and e-only access to former print collections.
The speaker listed some of the benefits of the big deal: Users always have access to required material; librarians find it easier to administer a single deal rather than individual subscriptions and publishers benefit from having no intermediaries to deal with.
The drawbacks are lack of flexibility; the administrative burden of cost-sharing and consortial and inter-departmental decision-making.
Negotiations in the Netherlands led to better value for money and more flexibility overall.
Back to table of contents The IReL Experience: Irish Research Electronic Library Fiona McGoldrick, IRIS: the Consortium of Irish University and Research Libraries The IReL initiative was formed to provide electronic access to journals, databases and packages for the IRIS consortium of 7 universities in the area of STM publishing, initially for a 5 year period.
The project members selected 30 major services or databases and 90 individual titles.
The total coverage was 3,500 titles from 20 publishers.
The priority list for negotiation included e-only; no 'no cancellation' clauses; authentication must be via IP or Athens; perpetual access must be available; material must be available for ILL and coursepacks and there must be COUNTER-compliant usage statistics available.
The subscriptions were paid directly from IRIS, thereby bypassing university finance.
Access to titles was maintained through individual library Web sites and catalogues rather than through a central Web site.
There were problems.
For example, it was complex to administer and not very flexible.
However, overall it has been seen as a success and the completion of licences on the remainder of the required packages is now underway.
Back to table of contents Plenary Session 3 Experimenting with Open Access Publishing Martin Richardson, OUP (Oxford University Press) OUP has experimented with open access recently to see if it can be widely adopted and whether it is financially viable.
In this highly informative presentation, Martin Richardson described the two open access models provided and measured their success: The partial open access model The author pays to make the article available as open access.
There is a fee waiver system for UK authors to increase uptake.
The subscription price for 2005 was held for the open access title involved in this experiment.
There was a 25% open access take-up in this journal.
The full open access model: There is a larger fee for authors than the partial model.
The articles are deposited in PubMed Central simultaneously.
Findings were: 10% increase in article submission rates An increase in article rejection rate The author-pays model does not appear to have put authors off.
Full-text downloads have increased Journal is freely available after 6 months.
Price per article / download has decreased as the articles available have increased.
OUP will be analysing usage, citation and impact factor changes in the near future based on the introduction of the open access model.
It was great to see a practical case study of the new model in operation and discussed at the conference.
Back to table of contents Are They Open Yet?
The Impact of Open Access Publishing on Research Libraries Paul Ayris, UCL (University College London) The information landscape is driven by academic strategies.
In his paper, Paul Ayris described surveys done of different user types within the institution and how it affects the information landscape.
The paper looked at the user as researcher and the student as learner.
In a survey of students the single most important thing that a library can provide to improve the service was set textbooks.
E-learning and e-resource provision did not rank highly with taught students.
The provision of e-resources is still a research-led issue.
Drivers to improve visibility of e-resources to taught students will be market-led students as consumers.
The new policy from RCUK (Research Council UK) mandates deposit in open access sources for their funded research from October 2005.
The RCUK will also pay for author article submission for funded research.
UCL is moving towards mandating deposit into their IR (Institutional Repository).
One way to do this is to link repository development to the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise).
Paul Ayris concluded that current models of provision support research in STM.
The UK has to examine new subscription models.
Learners are currently not well served by e-learning strategies.
IRs are in their infancy but open access and archives are on institutional agendas.
Mandates of funding bodies are crucial to future developments in this area.
Back to table of contents Public Access, Open Archives: A Funder's Perspective Mark Walport, Wellcome Trust Mark Walport then discussed open access from a funder's perspective in his excellent paper.
Part of the funder's mission is to ensure the widest possible dissemination of research findings.
University research is publicly funded and should therefore be publicly available.
The publishing community is one of the barriers to this mission.
Brand is still important.
Researchers have no visibility of the economic cycle because a) no money changes hands between author and publisher and b) they then go to the library and their article is there.
Mark Walport listed the benefits of publishing in an open access journal: Immediate global availability; increased usage and therefore increased citation and impact.
It won't necessarily cost more.
The cost can be divided between a submission fee and a publication fee.
This will help journals with high rejection rates sustain the model.
He then went on to list the benefits of storing articles in an IR:Immediate access to a copy with no delay; long-term archiving of papers; it is future-proof and searchable.
There are increasing developments in digitisation which are receiving more support from funders.
The speaker concluded that it is important for funders to take the lead on depositing information.
Funders need to pay for open access deposit.
They need to encourage and enforce author copyright retention.
Back to table of contents Concurrent Session 1 VLEs: Setting the Scene Alicia Wise, Publishers Licensing Society This thought-provoking paper looked at the role of VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) within institutions from the viewpoint of librarians, publishers, VLE vendors and e-learning practitioners.
In particular, Alicia Wise has researched the role of journal and book content in VLEs and the issues that these have brought to the surface.
The VLE has a role in widening participation in learning and challenging expectations of how students learn.
There have been differing views in the role and value of e-journal and e-book content in VLEs.
Questions which continue to be asked are 'whose job is it to get e-journal and e-book content into the VLE?
'; 'Do users have legitimate access to the content?'
and 'How is access to content authenticated in a VLE?'
Barriers to using e-journal content in a VLE stem from commercial publishing and business models.
Breach of copyright is an issue.
Where does the institution stand on the re-purposing of content?
Are there any restrictions on the format of content and the timing of it's delivery in a VLE?
The speaker concluded that collaboration between libraries and publishers is important.
Libraries must input into the institutional strategy to achieve objectives.
Publishers must clarify their role in e-learning.
Back to table of contents The Implementation of a VLE: Not So Virtual After All Frances Boyle, Oxford University Library Services Oxford University has developed its own VLEs and this has been the role of OUCS (Oxford University Computing Services).
The aim was to create a VLE that specifically fits the University with its individual colleges.
In this paper Frances Boyle detailed the range of information that a VLE would need to incorporate and link to.
Feedback showed that the users liked the one-stop shop approach.
Tutorials were available 24/7 with opportunities to get feedback electronically and for staff to monitor progress.
Library staff found it easy to re-purpose tutorials for different groups.
No technical knowledge was needed.
It is easy to control access.
It links course materials and e-resources.
There were various issues that came to the surface such as access management, copyright and Intellectual Property Rights; cultural and organisational issues; portal and repository integration and interoperability.
Back to table of contents Plenary Session 4 How Usage Statistics Can Inform National Negotiations and Strategies: a report on the JISC NESLi2 usage statistics project Simon J Bevan, Cranfield University Simon Bevan reported in his paper on the results of the JISC usage statistics project [2].
However, he was unable to report on specific findings as they were confidential due to their commercially sensitive nature.
The principle aim of the project was to report back to the JISC working group.
Participants were 4 publishers, aggregators, libraries and a study team.
Data was collated from libraries and publishers.
The COUNTER JR1 report was analysed alongside data on the titles subscribed to by the participants.
A number of libraries were also interviewed for case studies.
Conclusions from the data analysis were that smaller institutions have more unused titles; there was an increase in usage over the study period; there is quite a low average cost per title; a small percentage of titles generate high usage; and high-use titles are generally high in cost.
The case studies reported concerns that price caps were above library budget levels.
Big deal costs are harder to justify.
E-only barriers included VAT payments and the reluctance of users.
SFX was found to increase usage.
Print versions were being made harder to access as libraries moved to e-only.
Participating libraries requested clearer explanations of pricing and more information on print dependencies.
The role of NESLI (National Electronic Site Licensing Initiative) was considered very favourably with perhaps speedier conclusion of deals needed.
Recommendations of the study included single national deals; simpler payment; a portal site for statistics; toolkits for usage statistics; aggregator statistics; and to separate backfile usage data from current subscription.
Back to table of contents The Library View of Usage Metrics Jill Taylor-Roe, Newcastle University In her paper on usage statistics, Jill Taylor-Roe examined why we need usage metrics, the disadvantages of using them and what they have highlighted at Newcastle University.
Usage metrics are invaluable in highlighting trends, assessing effectiveness, informing strategic planning and funding bids and demonstrating value for money, demand for library services and user satisfaction.
Disadvantages include the fact that it is time-consuming to collate usage statistics and report on them; they are not always directly comparable; a high level of IT skill is required and there are concerns about accuracy.
Newcastle University statistics show that ILL, photocopies and issues have decreased drastically in recent years.
This is thought to be due to e-resources but has not been measured.
They have also found that subscription titles have the heaviest use.
Usage statistics are being used as a basis for cancellation decisions.
They are now adding impact factors to the equation and are looking at RAE subject headings in big deals to analyse against impact factors.
The statistics are being used to develop more robust models for e-journal procurement and development of more effective KPIs.
In future, Newcastle University will be looking at extending metrics to databases and e-books; doing more work with turnaway statistics; considering the impact of IRs, SFX / Metalib and Google Scholar.
This was an excellent presentation with interesting arguments for the use of usage metrics.
Back to table of contents Change and Continuity in a World of Information Mike Clark, GeoData Institute, University of Southampton In the tradition of great last session papers, this was an inspirational and entertaining look at the world of electronic information as it stands now and what it could be like in the future.
Mike Clark looked at technologies such as blogs and how they could affect the e-journal world.
Technology is out of date very quickly.
The coverage in this conference has demonstrated that the medium is the message.
Technology constrains what we do with information.
The explosion of information is restricting the process of informing.
Throwing information into the world can be counter-productive.
'Quantity' is very much now; 'quality' should be tomorrow.
The speaker sees real-time publication, perpetual access, interactive, searchable serials with sound and animation, VLEs and open access as the future.
Technological advancement could mean an overhaul of the peer-review system with a move towards the merging of journal content and online discussion and review.
Journals could be customised.
The conference discussed the recent pattern of moving toward e-only provision.
This can still be seen as elitist and exclusive.
There are some parts of the world that will never be on the same playing field in terms of having the technology to receive information.
This paper gave a different perspective on the world of e-information and what it could mean in the future and was very refreshing.
Back to table of contents Snap, Crackle and Ultimately Pop?
The Future for Serials Colin Steele, Australian National University I'm afraid that it is impossible to write a review of this final paper as it was very much a visual presentation with a number of photographs and captions summing up much of the discussion content of the conference.
It was a highly entertaining last paper and looked at issues which will continue to be discussed over the coming 12 months.
These include the acquisition costs of serials, serial resource management in a digital environment, user behaviour patterns, the future of open access and the impact of research assessment on the serial publishing industry.
Back to table of contents Conclusion As always, this year's conference provided discussions from a variety of industry and information community experts on the most topical issues affecting libraries and the publishing community today.
The groupings of the sessions around the key themes was very good and combined with the more practical workshops and briefing sessions to provide the right level of discussion for everyone.
The conference presentations will shortly be available on the UKSG Web site [3].
Back to table of contents References UKSG 2005 Conference programme http://www.uksg.org.uk/events/annualprog05.pdf JISC Journals Working Group Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/wg_journals_home.html UKSG 2005 Annual Conference presentations http://www.uksg.org.uk/events/annualconference.asp Author Details Sarah Pearson E-Resources & Serials Advisor University of Birmingham Email: s.pearson.1@bham.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "The UK Serials Group Annual Conference 2005" Author: Sarah Pearson Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/uksg2005-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Limits to Information Transfer: The Boundary Problem Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Limits to Information Transfer: The Boundary Problem Buzz framework database dissemination infrastructure browser vocabularies repositories hypertext visualisation gis ontologies ict research Citation BibTex RIS Jon E. Lervik, Mark Easterby-Smith, Kathryn Fahy and Carole Elliott discuss the challenges in integrating knowledge across boundaries between specialised knowledge communities within an organisation.
Since the early 1980s the aim of knowledge management researchers and practitioners has been to develop technologies and systems to codify and share explicit knowledge efficiently through electronic means.
With the growing appreciation of the importance of tacit knowledge [1], we have a new problem: how to facilitate other forms of systematic organisational learning and knowledge exchange where knowledge cannot be codified.
In this article we take a further step by looking at the problem of analysing and managing complex knowledge in organisations that have multiple specialised knowledge communities.
Here the challenge for knowledge management is not only to make knowledge available in repositories for dissemination across the firm.
More broadly, if firms are to deliver value-creating goods and services, they now need to be able to combine and integrate specialised forms of knowledge from different communities each with their own professional languages, traditions and objectives.
In this paper we present and develop a framework which elaborates on this problem and offers some guidance about how it might be tackled.
Three Approaches to Knowledge Integration across Boundaries There is a trend towards increasing specialisation both in academia and practice.
In science we have a proliferation of disciplines and sub-disciplines.
In organisations, technologies and specialised knowledge domains become more specialised.
For example, the first cell phones required 5 distinct technologies to be combined, while third-generation cell phones incorporated 14 distinct sub-technologies [2].
Knowledge-intensive firms consist of multiple communities with specialised technologies and knowledge domains.
A high degree of shared knowledge within specialised knowledge communities facilitates interaction and exchange.
At the same time there are boundaries between different knowledge communities e.g.
between design, manufacturing and sales with a lower degree of shared knowledge.
Sharing and integrating knowledge across these boundaries is vital for firms to coordinate their activities and deliver their products and services.
In this context, knowledge management is not only making explicit information available in repositories across the firm, but more broadly to facilitate organisations’ ability to share and integrate knowledge efficiently across domains.
This is especially a challenge with novel knowledge and high interdependencies between knowledge domains.
Carlile [3] [4] developed a useful framework for managing knowledge across boundaries.
There are three approaches or levels for managing increasingly complex knowledge and interdependencies between knowledge communities.
Table 1: Three approaches to managing knowledge across boundaries Image of the process The knowledge-sharing challenge in this approach Mechanisms for overcoming the boundary Syntactic approach Information processing Conduit model of communication Effective transmission of messages between knowledge communities Developing shared syntax and language for coding and decoding Semantic approach Language game Local conventions of meaning and interpretations Developing shared understanding and uncovering different perspectives Co-location, cross-functional teams, job rotation Pragmatic approach Interdependent system Hard-won knowledge in one community may negatively affect others Discovering differences and dependencies between knowledge communities and reaching informed trade-offs Boundary objects to represent and make available the knowledge of each community to others Adapted from Carlile [4] The first a syntactic approach conceives of knowledge transfer as the process of sending and receiving messages, and is useful in conditions of low novelty and highly shared context.
The second a semantic approach builds on the first, but also recognise the importance of interpretation and meaning that can vary across knowledge communities.
The third a pragmatic approach incorporates the first two, and recognises that new knowledge in one knowledge domain may have costs in other domains, requiring joint problem-solving and negotiations of interests and trade-offs.
Syntactic Approach: Shared Syntax as a Basis for Information Processing Models and systems for knowledge sharing in organisations are often informed by a syntactic model of communication or a conduit model, inspired by the communications theory of Shannon and Weaver [5].
This portrays communication as a process of sending and receiving messages through a transmission channel with limited channel capacity.
Noise can distort messages between sender and recipient, and this can be alleviated by improving the channel capacity (for example going from e-mail to telephone or face-to-face), or by refining procedures for coding and decoding messages (for example Morse code).
In this approach, accurate and reliable communication can be secured by establishing a shared and stable syntax for coding and decoding of messages.
Web pages must follow the protocol of Hypertext Markup Language for a Web browser to be able to read and display it.
During military operations, to achieve communication efficiency and reduce risk of errors, units co-ordinate tactical manoeuvres by communicating through messages from a pre-defined set of codes and signals.
In a scientific community, the stronger and more developed a shared perspective is (regarding ontology, theories, methods, and empirical phenomena of interest), the more useful is a syntactic approach.
‘As theories, puzzles, measures and accepted results are clarified and institutionalised within the community, the more likely it is that messages can be thought of as selections from a predefined set’ [6].
To understand a journal article, for example on breakthrough neuroscientific discoveries, one requires a high level of training in that field, having acquired an overview of existing research, proper methods and terminology.
The lay public does not have the same vocabulary and fore-knowledge to decode messages in research articles.
These examples show how a common syntax, definition of concepts and defined methodologies for constructing knowledge are required for effective knowledge transfer.
The syntactic perspective conceives the process as information processing, with coding and decoding of messages.
However, the syntactic approach has one weakness; it treats the meaning of a message as unproblematic.
Encoding and decoding is seen as selection of messages from a pre-selected set.
The problem of human meaning is not considered.
A semantic approach acknowledges interpretation as a central element in communication and knowledge integration.
Semantic Approach: Interpreting Novel Knowledge ‘A semantic approach recognizes that even if a common syntax or knowledge is present, interpretations are often different which make communication and collaboration difficult.’ [7] Within scientific communities, one uses definition of concepts and clearly specified methodologies to reduce risks of differing interpretations.
Fellow researchers can still arrive at very different interpretations and conclusions when reading a research paper, based on their interests, values and previous related knowledge.
Dougherty [8] provided an example from a product development process, where a cross-disciplinary team had agreed on making the product ‘market-oriented’.
However the concept of being market-oriented was interpreted in very different ways.
For product designers this meant incorporating increased functionality in the product; production managers laid emphasis on manufacturing a reliable product; whereas sales personnel wanted to be able to tailor the product to each customer’s wishes.
Sometimes interpretation is so automatic we are not aware that interpretation is involved in decoding a message.
A false consensus was created, based on the belief that each knowledge community took its interpretation of ‘market-oriented’ as natural and self-evident, and thus shared with other communities.
Members of different specialised knowledge communities can be said to reside in different ‘thought worlds’ [8].
Central ideas in one community may be considered uninteresting or irrelevant in another.
Collaboration can be difficult across disciplines, because individuals give different meanings to the same concept.
Researchers in cognate areas may use the same terms, but define them differently (Kroeber and Kluckhohn [9] found over 150 definitions of the concept ‘culture’).
Vice versa, researchers may address the same empirical phenomena with different theories and concepts.
Organisations thus need tools and mechanisms to reconcile discrepancies in meaning and develop shared understanding of knowledge across boundaries.
Co-location of personnel, cross-functional teams [10], and job rotation between locations and functions [11] are some organisational mechanisms to facilitate shared understanding.
Carlile [3] also points to the important role of boundary objects such as visualisation tools, drawings, spreadsheets to provide a shared locus for collaborative inquiry e.g.
in a cross-functional team to examine each other’s understandings and interpretations of shared knowledge.
Various knowledge communities have dominant forms of representation that capture important aspects of knowledge in their domains, but render other communities’ concerns invisible.
Carlile reports on a product development process, where two-dimensional engineering design drawings did not contain nor visualise critical dependencies for manufacturing on tolerances between components; nor did they address how to achieve a manufacturing-friendly design.
On the other hand, 3D manufacturing engineering drawings worked well as a boundary object between design and engineering managers, because they supported informed discussion of critical issues as seen by both communities.
The Pragmatic Approach: Negotiating and Transforming Knowledge The semantic approach goes further than the syntactic approach in framing challenges for managing knowledge between different knowledge communities.
Being aware of possible differences in interpretation and meaning, and using tools and mechanisms to develop shared understanding is an important step.
However, the semantic perspective does not incorporate the fact that interdependencies between knowledge communities also involve vested interests in certain technologies, solutions and knowledge from one’s own knowledge domain.
Knowledge within a community is geared towards solving problems or making things work within that community’s knowledge domain.
A ‘hard-won outcome’ [3] means that the community has invested material and mental effort in developing solutions.
These solutions may have costs and negatively affect other knowledge domains.
The pragmatic dimension of knowledge integration resonates with the somewhat too simplistic equation ‘knowledge is power’.
What for one group or knowledge community constitutes a big leap forward in terms of knowledge or a radical innovation, may incur costs for another community.
Likewise, knowledge stored within corporate databases or information systems is not neutral.
A so-called best practice can be challenged or controversial.
A particular approach or procedure may shift the balance between professions.
A new best practice from one unit may render the practices of other units obsolete.
Here we do not focus on knowledge sharing between similar, independent units.
We focus, rather, on the knowledge sharing and integration between interdependent but different knowledge communities.
On the boundary between knowledge communities one needs not only to uncover different interpretations and develop shared understanding.
In order to develop workable solutions, one needs to engage in joint problem solving and developing new knowledge, as well as negotiating interests and trade-offs as technologies from various domains influence other domains.
Carlile [4] describes how an engine engineering community of a car company had developed a larger, more powerful, yet energy-efficient engine in conjunction with a new car model under development.
It was only later recognised that this necessitated a higher bonnet to house the new engine.
This negatively affected the lines of the bonnet, which was the responsibility of the styling group.
There is a high degree of dependency between various knowledge communities designing a car.
New knowledge in one sub-system (engine) affects the boundary conditions that other design groups have to work within (height of the hood given the size of the engine, types of suspension and brakes, given the weight of the car, etc.).
The traditional boundary object of a clay model of the car was, in this case, inadequate to discover this interdependency.
This is not simply a situation of choice under uncertainty among groups that vary in their preferences.
The novelty of knowledge is central, because the novelty of the engine solution from one community may not be recognised by another.
This failure to discover interdependencies early in the process led to redesign, a reduced collaborative climate, additional costs and delays in launching the new car model.
Again, boundary objects that can represent knowledge from various communities and facilitate understanding and interaction between communities are important.
For infrastructure investments that affect landscape and the natural environment, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can provide boundary objects that represent complex relationships in a way that facilitates an informed discussion on costs, benefits and trade-offs for various stakeholders.
In a planning project for a wind farm in western Norway, there were several important interdependencies with this relatively new technology, accompanied by significant uncertainty about the environmental impact.
GIS was used to visualise the effects of the planned wind farm areas containing important bird reserves, areas that would be within sight of the wind farms, areas and levels of sound pollution for residents, areas of cultural significance, major tourist shipping lanes etc.
GIS proved to be an efficient tool for visualising the effects, thereby developing the means to a shared understanding of the environmental impact of the project among stakeholders such as local inhabitants, wildlife conservationists, government.
Furthermore it consequently permitted informed discussion on actual trade-offs.
Relying solely on verbal or written arguments would have been less likely to reveal the actual impact of, and interdependencies existing within the project.
Moreover the risk of parties failing to convey their particular priorities and concerns to other stakeholders would have been far higher.
Summary Knowledge sharing in organisations is traditionally conceived as the process of sending and receiving messages.
This reflects the first approach in this framework.
In this perspective, effective knowledge transfer hinges on shared syntax and language for individuals to be able to decode messages.
This perspective is suitable for knowledge sharing within specialised knowledge communities where there is a high level of shared knowledge.
However, the perspective is somewhat limited for managing knowledge sharing and knowledge integration between communities with specialisation in different knowledge domains.
With a lower degree of shared language one needs more elaborate mechanisms in order to cope.
The second approach emphasises differences in interpretation and meaning.
Different knowledge communities have their own language, important issues and methodologies.
With interdependencies, where novel knowledge from multiple communities is to be integrated, organisations need effective mechanisms for reconciling differences and developing shared understanding.
The third approach a pragmatic approach points out that new knowledge in one community can have negative impacts on other communities.
Collaboration on the boundaries between knowledge communities is thus not only about joint knowledge production, but also about identifying interdependencies and trade-offs, and negotiating interests.
This framework, with three approaches for managing interdependent knowledge on the boundaries between knowledge communities, identifies boundary objects as important tools for knowledge integration.
Boundary objects such as documents, Geographic Information Systems, design drawings, and Excel sheets can facilitate development of shared understanding, exploring the perspectives of others, and uncovering interdependencies and interests.
The fast pace of technological development in information and communication technologies has opened up many new avenues for technology-mediated interaction.
Boland and Tenkasi [12] point out that ‘Any design of an electronic communication system implies a model of human communication and human cognition’.
Often the model underlying a KM system is implicit and not much reflected upon.
Many of the early developments in knowledge management were grounded on a somewhat limited model of communication as information processing, as sending and receiving of messages.
It is our hope that future developments in ICT-mediated communication systems will be informed by richer and more nuanced models of human cognition together with the organisational dynamics of sharing knowledge between specialised communities in organisations.
References Polanyi, M. The tacit dimension 1967, London: Doubleday.
Granstrand, O., et al., External technology acquisition in large multi-technology corporations.
Research and Development Management, 1992.
22(2): p. 111-133.
Carlile, P.R., A pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries: Boundary objects in new product development.
Organization Science, 2002.
13(4): p. 442-455.
Carlile, P.R., Transferring, translating and transforming: An integrative framework for managing knowledge across boundaries.
Organization Science, 2004.
15(5): p. 555-568.
Shannon, C. and W. Weaver, The mathematical theory of communications.
1949, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press.
Boland, R.J.J.
and R.V.
Tenkasi, Perspective making and perspective taking in communities of knowing.
Organization Science, 1995.
6(4): p. 350-372.
See page 355.
Carlile, P.R., A pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries: Boundary objects in new product development.
Organization Science, 2002.
13(4): p. 442-455.
See page 444.
Dougherty, D., Interpretive barriers to successful product innovation in large firms.
Organization Science, 1992.
3(2): p. 179-202.
Kroeber, A.L.
and C. Kluckhohn, Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions.
1952, Cambridge, Ma.
: Harvard University Press.
Nonaka, I. and H. Takeuchi, The knowledge-creating company.
1995, New York: Oxford University Press.
XII, 284 s. Maruyama, M., Polyocular Vision or Subunderstanding?
Organization Studies, 2006.
25(3): p. 467-480 Boland, R.J.J.
and R.V.
Tenkasi, Perspective making and perspective taking in communities of knowing.
Organization Science, 1995.
6(4): p. 350-372.
See page 369.
Author Details Jon E. Lervik Research Associate Lancaster University Management School Email: j.lervik@lancaster.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/ Mark Easterby-Smith Professor Lancaster University Management School Email: m.easterby-smith@lancaster.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/dml/profiles/64/ Kathryn Fahy Research Associate Lancaster University Management School Email: k-fahy@lancaster.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/ Carole Elliott Lecturer Lancaster University Management School Email: c.j.elliott@lancaster.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/dml/profiles/142/ Return to top Article Title: “Limits to Information Transfer: The Boundary Problem” Author: on E. Lervik, Mark Easterby-Smith, Kathryn Fahy and Carole Elliott Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/lervik-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metasearch: Building a Shared, Metadata-driven Knowledge Base System Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metasearch: Building a Shared, Metadata-driven Knowledge Base System Buzz data software framework api database xml infrastructure metadata schema repositories z39.50 gis aggregation widget openurl mods authentication algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Terry Reese discusses the creation of a shared knowledge base system within OSU's open-source metasearch development.
Surveying the current metasearch tools landscape, it is somewhat surprising to find so few non-commercial implementations available.
This is especially true considering that, as a group, the library community has cultivated a very vibrant open source community over the past ten or so years.
One wonders then, why this particular service has been ceded to the world of commercial vendors.
One can speculate that the creation and management of a metasearch knowledge base has likely played a large role [1].
It could be argued that the creation and maintenance of a knowledge base is simply too big a task for a single organisation.
In purchasing a metasearch tool, one is really purchasing the accompanying knowledge base in the hope that having a set of pre-defined resources will reduce the overall cost of ownership [2].
And while it is true that vendor-based products do simplify the support and maintenance of a metasearch knowledge base, certainly this ease of use is not simply restricted to this vendor model.
At Oregon State University (OSU), we hope to show that a metasearch tool developed outside the vendor-based model can indeed be successful.
Through the assistance of an LSTA (Library Services and Technology Act) grant, OSU is currently in the process of developing an open source metasearch tool for the state of Oregon.
However, in developing such a tool, questions relating to the knowledge base and knowledge base management need to be addressed.
Moreover, given the relatively low technical expertise in many of the smaller public libraries in Oregon, the tool needs to be developed in a way that limits technical barriers to implementation.
This means that the metasearch tool could not be developed using the traditional code-based connector structure employed in many vendor tools such as Innovative Interfaces' MetaFind or WebFeat's metasearch offerings.
Rather, OSU's metasearch tool needed to be designed in a way that limited exposure to connection protocols such as Z39.50, OAI, etc.
while still allowing users the ability to configure specific resources for search.
Likewise, the tools should be designed to allow for the collaborative management of a system's knowledge base, while allowing for local customisations as well.
The result of this vision was the development of a shared, metadata-driven knowledge base that uses an abstract connector architecture the net goal being the separation of the knowledge base from the underlying components and protocols that execute requests within the tool.
Moreover, this resource has been designed to be collaborative in that knowledge base repositories can be configured to allow shared knowledge base management between groups of users.
Metasearch Knowledge Base Systems While metasearch tools themselves have been around for years [3] (note the Federal Geographic Data Committee's use of metasearch as regards FGDC GIS data nodes), their importance and usage within the library community has been a relatively new phenomenon.
As libraries see more and more of their physical collections made available in digital formats, libraries are turning to metasearching tools as a strategy for bridging the gap between traditional print and electronic services.
And while many recognise the inherent limitations linked to metasearch services, it has not prevented libraries from looking to these services as a tool that can bring together one's many heterogeneous collections and present them as part of coherent whole.
This is the primary goal of the metasearch software, to present the user with a unified discovery experience [4].
But if the primary goal of metasearch software is shared, the methodology for creating these linkages is not.
The vendor community has offered two competing methods for creating the required knowledge base needed to interact with the various targets within a metasearch utility.
These two methodologies can be broken down into two primary camps, code-base connector systems used by tools such as Innovative Interfaces MetaFind and other resources employing the Muse Global connection repositories and metadata-driven knowledge base systems used by tools like ExLibris's MetaSearch and OSU's metasearch application.
Code-driven Systems The two different approaches to knowledge base management are characterised by the degrees of separation of the knowledge base from the underlying components that interact with a set of metasearch target resources.
For example, within a code-driven knowledge base system, a small code-based connector, or widget, must be created in order for the metasearch tool to interact with a target resource.
Figure 1: Search progress displayed by OSU's Metafind The above image is taken from OSU's MetaFind implementation, which uses a code-driven knowledge base system.
Through simple observation, it is easy to see how MetaFind is using individual code-based widgets to connect to each of the target resources.
One can see how each target query opens a unique connector class (i.e., NewsBank.jar, EBSCOASE.jar, etc.)
within the MetaFind application.
This means that the metadata structure and format tend to be hard-coded directly into the resource connector, making these connectors susceptible to failure as target resources modify or change their metadata structures.
In fact, allowing MetaFind to complete a search on the five resources above results in the following error: Figure 2: Error display by OSU's Metafind Since these connectors are code-driven, maintenance must take place at the code level.
For this reason, most metasearch tools that employ a code-driven metasearch knowledge base generally restrict access to it frequently providing sites with hosted solutions that are managed at the vendor level.
Services like WebFeat, Proquest, Serials Solutions, etc.
all use the hosted solution approach, limiting to some degree the customisation and integration options available.
OSU's MetaFind implementation, for example, is completely managed through Innovative Interfaces, meaning that broken connectors or even user interface (UI) changes must be handled through the vendor.
Moreover, changes to the UI tend to be strictly limited to the cosmetic in nature and functionality is limited to what is provided by the vendor.
Furthermore, since adding additional resources may require the creation of a code-driven connector, adding local or non-traditional resources to this type of system can often be expensive and time-consuming.
Metadata-driven Systems Metadata-driven metasearch tools have a number of distinct advantages over their code-driven counterparts.
Firstly, there is an inherent separation between the defined resource and the underlying connection/formatting components in the system.
Unlike a code based system, which has failure points associated with both protocol and metadata format within a given connector metadata-driven systems separate those two distinct operations, better isolating failures at the component level.
This separation of connection and formatting makes it much easier for a metadata-driven system to open up connector management at the user level since modifications to the knowledge base do not take place at the code level.
In practical terms, this allows metadata-driven systems to be more nimble, as organisations have more flexibility to add/edit/remove resources from their knowledge base without having the go through the mediation of a third-party.
At the same time, this greater level of control requires users of metadata-driven systems to take a more active role in their knowledge base management.
Unlike code-driven systems, which are traditionally reliant upon a third-party for knowledge base management, users of metadata-driven systems must take a much more active role in defining how the metasearch tool should communicate with a specific target.
OSU Metasearch Tool Knowledge Base Architecture As noted above, OSU's metasearch tool uses an enhanced metadata-driven knowledge base system designed specifically around the issues of ease of use.
Within the current application architecture, knowledge base development and management has been completely divorced from the underlying connection objects.
Below is a rudimentary diagram of the tool's current infrastructure: Figure 3: Infrastructure of OSU Metasearch Tool Within the current application design, requests are passed via the API (Application Programming Interface) layer, which interacts with the knowledge base to gather information about the resources being queried.
This information includes both the communication protocol information, as well as a metadata profile of the resource to be queried.
The metadata profile itself stores a number of pieces of information, including information relating to the target metadata schema, the characterset-encoding of the target schema and instructions relating to the interpretation of the target schema.
Once this information has been gathered, the API layer uses that information to initiate the abstract protocol connectors and retrieve the raw metadata from the targets.
Within this infrastructure, the use of abstract protocol classes is paramount, since no connection class can be tied to any particular resource or metadata type.
This also means that OSU's metasearch tool will only be able to query targets that make their resources available using a standard query protocol or XML gateway interface.
Targets available only through traditional HTTP requests are not available within OSU's tool since these resources would require code connectors to screen scrape content, thus violating the abstract connector model.
Moreover, the architecture requires that the connection class retain no information regarding the handling of supported metadata types.
This is handled instead through a specialised translation service.
Metadata is filtered through this translation service which is configured using the target's metadata profile retrieved from the knowledge base to normalise the metadata into an internal XML format.
At this point, the items are resolved through an OpenURL resolver (to establish direct linking to resources) and passed through a custom relevancy-ranking algorithm before returning the enriched metadata back to the calling process.
Since the knowledge base plays such a critical role in ensuring the functionality of the application, a great deal of time was spent creating a knowledge base structure that would facilitate the maintenance and growth of the application.
In thinking about how to structure the knowledge base, a number of issues were considered [5]: Within a knowledge base, targets often share many properties.
This is especially true of aggregate resources like EBSCOHost.
For example, a user could have access to 14 different databases through EBSCOHost, but for the purposes of the knowledge base, many of the resources attributes will be shared between these 14 databases.
For example, the connection host and metadata format would quite likely be identical between connection resources, meaning that the knowledge base should be able to share attributes between targets.
Targets may share logistical groupings that may need to be preserved to facilitate group searching of targets.
Some resources may provide multiple access points to resources outside the traditional metadata profile.
Of the 160 items or so initially targeted for metasearch at OSU, it was found that all of these resources existed within some 33 parent items.
A parent item in this context is defined as the principal aggregator from which multiple resource databases could be accessed.
An example of a parent item within this relationship is EBSCOHost, an aggregator that hosts access to a number of subject-specific databases.
Using this information, the following knowledge base structure was developed: Figure 4: OSU Metasearch Knowledge Base Structure Within this knowledge base structure, there exists a top-level grouping element.
This element is defined at the parent object level and inherited by the child.
This grouping element allows users to create virtual collections, or sets within the knowledge base that can then be acted upon without knowing what elements are actually a part of the group.
Therefore, if a request was made by the API to query all known image targets within the knowledge base, the application would simply have to pull all targets found in the image group object.
Moreover, since the group attribute is inherited through the parent, child objects of the parent are automatically placed into the group.
However, the child element can also be explicitly taken out of the group by overriding the appropriate attributes.
As defined, the parent?child object structure allows metadata to be defined at both the parent and child level.
Parent objects act as primitives, defining the default object properties that are then inherited by their child objects.
However, the option exists to override each value inherited by the parent, allowing custom properties to be set when the child and parent objects differ.
So using EBSCOHost as an example, a parent object for EBSCOHost could be configured for all EBSCOHost resources.
Once the parent resource has been constructed, one simply needs to generate the children objects defining each specific resource available within the parent.
However, as noted above, each child element inherits all the common attributes of the parent, allowing specific information to be overridden at the child level.
Figure 5: Parent?Child inheritance diagram Ideally, this parent?child relationship should have the effect of simplifying ongoing maintenance of a resource.
Since the metadata profiles, hosts and authentication information of child objects would rarely differ from its parent, the job of the knowledge base administrator becomes much simpler.
Moreover, if a change to the metadata profile, host or connection information did occur, one would only need to modify the parent object so that all its children could inherit those changes.
Using OSU as a test case, the implementation of parent?child objects reduces the number of primary maintenance targets, (those that define metadata profiles, connection or authentication information) from some 160 resources to around 33, representing something like a 79% reduction in targets needing active maintenance.
Collaborative Knowledge Base Design One of the shared disadvantages to any knowledge base is the need to develop a metadata profile for each particular target.
Within a code-driven system, these profiles remain hidden from the collection administrator.
On the other hand, a metadata-driven system remains open to collection administrators largely due to the fact that administrators are responsible for the creation and maintenance of these resources [4].
While protocols and metadata formats remain standard, how these protocols or metadata formats are implemented may vary widely between organisations [1].
Users are likely to encounter repositories that: Do not delineate their metadata Example: (=773 \\$aQuaternary International May2006, Vol.
148 Issue 1, p113 25p, 1040-6182 vs. =773 \\$tQuaternary International$gMay2006, Vol.
148 Issue 1, p113$h25p$x1040-6182) Use invalid XML structures: Example:   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!DOCTYPE dublin-core-simple> <record-list> <dc-record> <type></type> <title>100 hikes in Oregon : °bMount Hood, Crater Lake, Columbia Gorge, Eagle Cap Wilderness, Steens Mountain, Three Sisters Wilderness /°cRhonda &amp; George Ostertag ; [maps maker, George Ostertag ; photographer, George Ostertag].</title> <creator>Ostertag, Rhonda, °d1957-</creator> <creator>Ostertag, George, °d1957-</creator> Use varied or custom implementation of metadata schemas like Dublin Core, MODS, etc.
Fortunately, though metadata profiles will vary significantly between targets, these profiles should not vary between institutions.
This means that once a profile has been created for one institution, it should be valid for other institutions using the same resource.
Code-driven repositories use this principle, creating a single code-based connector for a particular database and then making that connector available to all users.
Metadata connectors have always been a bit trickier given the varied nature of the metadata that could be captured for a particular resource and the desired level of information granularity set to be captured from a target resource.
However, those issues aside, a good argument can be made for creating a sharable metadata knowledge base.
As a part of the LSTA grant requirements, a number of Oregon public libraries have been selected to implement this tool upon completion.
Since this tool is currently still in active development at OSU, this part of the project has yet to be realised though should occur sometime in the late summer of 2006.
Keeping in mind the wide variety of organisations that would eventually make use of the OSU metasearch tool, a hierarchical knowledge base management system has been folded into the application framework to aid organisations in managing their metadata knowledge bases.
The framework works as follows: Figure 6: Application framework to support management of metadata knowledge base The metasearch application has the ability to configure a clustered knowledge base management structure.
An institution would set up a knowledge base repository as the master node but would run a separate implementation of the metasearch tool as a child node within the cluster.
In this way, the master knowledge base is not directly associated with any active metasearch tool implementation.
The master repository's position within the cluster is special, in so much that its purpose is to notify each registered node on the cluster when resources have been added or changed.
Likewise, the master repository acts as a clearinghouse of definitions for those nodes within the cluster.
Knowledge base entries are resolved nightly, with changes being propagated throughout the registered nodes either automatically or via notification.
What is more, the system uses an opt-out methodology, in that register nodes can 'localise' instances of a metadata profile for their own node without contributing the changes to the central repository and the rest of the cluster.
At this point, OSU's metasearch tool has yet to be installed outside OSU, so we have yet to see how this collaborative approach to knowledge base management will work within the real world.
But this is obviously the next logical step.
As outside organisations adopt its usage, we will be able more fully to examine the feasibility of this model and its problems.
For example, how conflicts are resolved between custom local metadata profiles is still up in the air and needs to be discussed.
Moreover, how master repositories link and share metadata is an issue that has yet to be addressed.
What we hope to find is that this collaborative approach to knowledge base management will lower barriers for organisations that might not otherwise have had the resources to use a metasearch application as well as exponentially reducing the maintenance burden for each organisation within the cluster.
Conclusion At this point, the OSU metasearch tool is still very much a research project on many fronts.
And as part of that research, this metasearch tool will be an exploration in collaborative knowledge base maintenance.
As additional user nodes are added to the cluster, it is our hope that this shared metadata infrastructure will help to keep maintenance costs down for each institution, allowing staff time to focus on building exciting new tools and services upon their metasearch platforms.
References Brogan, Martha.
A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services Washington, DC: The Digital Library Foundation and the Council on Library and Information Resources, 2003. http://www.diglib.org/pubs/brogan/ Mischo, William H. Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influencial Work.
July/August 2005, D-Lib Magazine http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/mischo/07mischo.html National Information Standards Organization.
NISO MetaSearch Initiative.
NISO.
Viewed March 21, 2006. http://www.niso.org/committees/MS_initiative.html Dempsey, Lorcan.
The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After.
February 2006, Ariadne Issue 46 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/ Christenson, Heather and Roy Tennant.
I. Oakland, CA: California Digital Library, August 15, 2005. http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/nsdl/nsdl_report2.pdf Author Details Terry Reese Cataloguer for Networked Resources Digital Production Unit Head Oregon State University Libraries Corvallis, OR 97331 USA Email: terry.reese@oregonstate.edu Web site: http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset Return to top Article Title: "Metasearch: Building a Shared, Metadata-driven Knowledge Base System" Author: Terry Reese Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/reese/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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World Wide Web Conference 2004 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines World Wide Web Conference 2004 Buzz data mobile rdf wireless rss xml thesaurus standardisation browser blog repositories hypertext dns ontologies owl uri lucene mobi skos cookie privacy algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dave Beckett reports on the international WWW2004 conference held in New York, 19-21 May 2004.
WWW2004 [1] was the 13th conference in the series of international World Wide Web conferences organised by the IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee).
This was the annual gathering of Web researchers and technologists to present the latest work on the Web and Web standardisation at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
This conference is very much a networking event in both the technical and personal sense.
For the last 3 years it has had pervasive wireless networking ('wi-fi') available, allowing interaction with the sessions and the speakers during the conference.
For the last two years, I have been involved in providing community coverage [2][3] via IRC and weblogging (with the help of the XMLhack people) to take a contemporaneous record of the event, thereby allowing users onand off-site to participate as well as making it possible to keep an eye on multiple sessions, which is tricky in multiple parallel-track conferences such as this.
It also means that a more permanent public record of the event appears rather quickly.
Conference Tutorials and Workshops One of my favourite sessions was something that (sadly) I could not attend all day, a fascinating workshop Beyond the Click: Interaction Design and the Semantic Web [4].
This discussed many interesting research problems about dealing with representing richer information which the Semantic Web can provide.
I dipped into this a few times and wished I could have seen more.
This looks like an area to watch.
Opening Keynote The conference opened with a declaration that 19 May was 'World Wide Web Day in New York City', read by Gino Menchini, standing in for the Mayor of New York who was attending the 9/11 hearings.
This was followed by the opening keynote from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the W3C and inventor of the Web.
This year he celebrated the achievements and discussed some topical Web-related technologies in his keynote Celebrations and Challenges [5].
Berners-Lee described how the foundation of the Web rested not only on the use of URIs for naming Web pages, but that it was critically based on a lower-level technology, the Domain Name System (DNS).
The DNS provides the distributed naming system that allows the Web to scale by removing the need to pre-cordinate names; this was one of the big problems affecting earlier closed hypertext systems with centralised linkbases.
This meant making links between Web pages became cheap and easy, although they could now fail (i.e.
error 404).
He described how domain names are now brands that people use like www.something.com when they want to find out about a brand or company.
Short domain names are one of the few limited resources on the Web.
Most recently there have been proposals to expand the Top Level Domains (TLDs) such as .com, .org etc.
to include many more.
Author's Aside: There have already been domain name expansions but I have never seen an .aero or .museum web address used prominently.
More popular recent expansions have included .name for personal sites.
The new domains being suggested tend to be for particular content such as .xxx to fence off a space for pornography.
This has been suggested in the past and the key issue remains: whose community or legal standard defines this term?
He suggested that these are more motivated by the desire to print money in the form of domain names.
Only the largest organisations can afford to keep buying up bigco.abc etc.
for each new .abc to protect their brands, this despite the fact that nobody is ever likely to seek out the bigco site people will just add .com and try that first.
Berners-Lee cited the .mobi domain proposal for mobile phone content as a good example of a bad idea.
If you are using a .mobi Web site on your phone and synchronise with your laptop or desktop, does the bookmark still work?
Why not?
It was a wrong-headed choice and there are better solutions for the actual problem such as dynamically adjusting the content for the device through the server, a solution which works right now.
Burning that single content choice into the URI will not work; 'small devices' are changing all the time and acquiring more features, thereby making it a choice that will soon be out of date.
Imagine a .html1 domain for all original Web content and new domains each time a new type of content is needed [6].
Consequently Berners-Lee was of the view that we should avoid the temptation to create new top-level domains except in special circumstances, for example in order to identify phones, (for which there are several proposals).
However the approach should be to identify the device not its properties.
( I should add that I was just picking one topic from a larger speech a lot of which has been reported elsewhere [5]).
Main Conference As my research interest for some time has been RDF and the Semantic Web, this is the main conference for that area and indeed there were multiple tracks that essentially served as a mini-conference with several interesting papers from practitioners.
On the first day I attended a panel entitled Will the Semantic Web Scale whose members, for the most part, appeared not to have noticed that it already had.
There were several audience members who vigorously disagreed with the panel.
One other highlight of the first day was in the Web of Communities track presentation The Role of Standards in Creating Community by Kathi Martin, Drexel University.
It included an analysis of words taken from subtitle indexing of President Bush's State of the Union speech; this was run in parallel with a display of retrieved images matching the words which gave a novel form of display.
Kathi also discussed other work being done on the Digimuse Project [7] at Drexel.
Later that day in Semantic Interfaces and OWL Tools, the Haystack browser was again demonstrated by Dennis Quan of IBM.
It's a powerful interface but rather scary, you could call it a 'Shrek' if you like!
The second day started with a pair of plenary talks.
The first one, Empowering the Individual, by Rick Rashid of Microsoft, was more of a rush through possible future technologies than anything profound.
The buzzword density was huge.
Following that was an interesting presentation by Udi Manber from search company A9.com, (an Amazon company), on their work on search innovations and the problems they had found, including their work on long-term search problems.
He was limited in talking about the cool stuff coming up, but it was good to see a serious competitor and innovator to match Google.
If you try A9.com you may be surprised to see it recognise your name, this is because as part of Amazon, it reads your amazon.com cookie and can link the items together.
There were several questions raised about their site privacy and Udi pointed out that there was a cookie-free anonymous site [8] that people could use without all the cool bits.
The sessions on the second day that stood out for me were in the Semantic Web Applications track, CS AKTive Space: Representing Computer Science in the Semantic Web presented by Les Carr and Monica M.C.
Schraefel from the University of Southampton.
I've seen some of the CS AKTive Space work before, but it's always interesting since it shows the use of real data in a Semantic Web of information which, to a UK computer scientist such as myself, is very topical.
The other fun, fact-filled talk in the Reputation Networks track, Information Diffusion through Blogspace, was presented by Andrew Tomkins of IBM.
He showed multiple ways of presenting information grabbed from 12,000 RSS feeds over time to synthesize such things as current, and especially evolving blog topics.
It's probably unclear whether this is yet a robust source of information, but it was certainly interesting, in the style of the Google Zeitgeist [9], or Yahoo!
Buzz [10], but more detailed.
On the final day of the main conference, Friday 21 May, the best presentations that I saw were Newsjunkie and Information Diffusion through Blogspace by Gruhl et al in the Mining New Media track.
More delving into blogspace for fascinating facts, which seems to be a bit of a trend here.
As a Semantic Web developer I also found Index Structures and Algorithms for Querying Distributed RDF Repositories by Heiner Stuckenschmidt et al in the Distributed Semantic Querying track, a very useful analysis for future consideration.
This session was a highlight of the conference for several Semantic Web developers to whom I talked, as it presented results of practical work.
Although I missed it, I heard that the Semantic Web Foundations track was pretty good and A Proposal for an OWL Rules Language by Horrocks et al will probably be a good pointer to future work at the high-end of Semantic Web development.
Developer's Day My favourite part of the WWW2004 series is the Developer's Day, this year even larger than ever and with lots of interesting things in parallel tracks how to choose between a track called "cool stuff" and "Semantic Web" for example?
I went to see Doug Cutting about the Nutch [11] open source Web search engine.
Doug was one of the creators of the well-regarded Lucene search engine, and Nutch is his latest work.
It seems really handy and looks like it might be a replacement for the venerable ht://Dig.
He was aiming to improve the transparency of Web search, (what the commercial engines won't tell you), such as how the results were created.
This presentation was very well received and I expect there were more than a few downloads during the talk.
As last year, Tim Berners-Lee did a live question-and-answer walkabout over lunch and the topics ranged from the general Web to applications for the Semantic Web.
Maybe not as good as last year.
After lunch I saw Tucana [12] demonstrate their Semantic Web work, (the core of which is open source, the rest commercial), which includes a high performance and scalable Semantic Web system.
They have reached over 1 billion triples on 64-bit PCs which they provide with advanced inferencing and searching; which somewhat contradicted the earlier panel on scaling the Semantic Web.
Jim Hendler of the University of Maryland and his group demonstated their SWOOP [13] ontology browser and editor.
They showed how much easier it was to create OWL ontologies and work with them.
If you have ever had a brush with the Protege editor, and come off worse, this is the friendly version, designed for OWL and still being improved.
The final session I attended was that of my colleague Alistair Miles from RAL who was presenting on our SWADE Project Thesaurus Activity [14] which has produced the SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems) set of schemas and documents and is generating good feedback.
Conclusions A great conference to attend in a central venue in Manhattan, five minutes from Times Square and lots of innovation going on.
It feels a bit like the Web conference from the late 1990s as the Web grew.
References WWW2004 Conference http://www2004.org/ Kelly, B., "WWW 2003 Trip Report", Ariadne 36, July 2003, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/web-focus/ Various, "WWW2004 Community Coverage", http://www2004.xmlhack.com/ WWW2004 workshop Beyond the Click: Interaction Design and the Semantic Web 2004 (IDSW04), http://interaction.ecs.soton.ac.uk/idsw04/ • Berners-Lee, T., "Celebrations and Challenges, WWW2004 Keynote", 19 May 2004, http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/0519-tbl-keynote/ • Foley, M-J., "Berners-Lee: Just Say No to More Domain Names", Microsoft Watch, 19 May 2004, http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1595457,00.asp • Ford, P., "Berners-Lee Keeps WWW2004 Focused on Semantic Web", XML.com, 20 May 2004, http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/05/20/www-timbl.html • Ford, P., "WWW2004 Semantic Web Roundup", XML.com, 26 May 2004, http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/05/26/www2004.html Berners-Lee, T., "New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful", W3C, 30 April 2004, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD Digmuse Project, Drexel University http://digimuse.cis.drexel.edu/ A9 cookie-free anonymous site http://generic.a9.com/ Google Zeitgeist http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html Yahoo!
Buzz Index http://buzz.yahoo.com/ Yahoo!
Labs demo of Nutch http://labs.yahoo.com/demo/nutch Tucana Technologies http://www.tucanatech.com/ Semantic Web Ontology Overview and Perusal (SWOOP), Mindswap lab, University of Maryland, http://www.mindswap.org/2004/SWOOP/ Semantic Web Advanced Development for Europe (SWADE) Thesaurus Activity http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/ Author Details Dave Beckett Senior Technical Researcher Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol Email: dave.beckett@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "World Wide Web Conference 2004" Author: Dave Beckett Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/www2004-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Updated JISC Guides Are Now Available Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Updated JISC Guides Are Now Available Buzz data software framework infrastructure archives video cataloguing multimedia ict url research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Beer describes the new JISC Resource Guides.
The huge growth in Internet resources to support learning, teaching and research can make the business of finding high-quality relevant resources both time-consuming and frustrating.
JISC Resource Guides, and a dedicated team of Resource Guide Advisers across seven subject areas direct researchers in UK Higher Education to a selection of key, high-quality resources.
The Resource Guide team aims to raise awareness of key resources through a Web-based and print-based Guide with a subject-specific focus, and through awareness-raising via presentations and series of workshops with a hands-on focus.
Resource Guide Advisers work closely with the Resource Discovery Network hubs [1].
New guides A suite of new Guides are available now and may be ordered for free over the Internet [2].
The Guide has been entirely revamped in format and in design and will provide an inviting addition to library display stands as well as assisting learners, teachers and researchers in higher education to find the best resources for their learning and teaching needs.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [3] is a publicly funded agency supporting higher and further education funding bodies within the UK.
Its role is to support the use of information and communications technology through the provision of infrastructure, digital collections and services for resource delivery and discovery.
The Resource Guides initiative evolved out of pilot studies of Resource Guides in the Social Sciences and the Arts and Humanities.
These early Guides aimed to raise subject-specific resources as well as resources that were growing to support different aspects of ICT in the form of support, training, and advisory services.
Having found that the Guides fulfilled a demand in these subject areas, the initiative grew to incorporate five subject areas.
Each Resource Guide Adviser provides: An overview of the quality-assured information about electronic resources and support services, selected by subject specialists Resources and services designed specifically to support learning, teaching and research at all levels of higher education Support materials, presentations and workshops to help those providing information skills training in higher education Having been in post a year now, each Resource Guide Adviser has distributed tens of thousands of guides, has been involved in outreach activities and has by now developed a second updated and revamped Guide after an intensive Consultation Day in June with key representatives from our user community.
Expansion of the Initiative The seven Resource Guides are: Arts and Humanities Engineering, Mathematics and Computing Geography and Environment Health and Life Sciences Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Physical Sciences Social Sciences The new look JISC Resource Guide for Arts and Humanities New Framework The revamped design has been accompanied by a more user-friendly system of collating the resources across all seven guides.
The resources are categorised under the following headings: Bibliographic information General reference Publications online Subject gateways Data and multimedia resources Learning and teaching Support services Bibliographic information Searchable resources for sourcing and locating research material, including: abstracts, indexes, and tables of contents from journals, conference papers, proceedings, technical reports, standards, dissertations and research papers; library catalogue information; archive material; and current awareness services.
General reference A range of resources for sourcing and locating reference material for learning, teaching and research needs.
Publications online Publications, which include books, journals, pamphlets, abstracts, monographs and full-text articles that can be viewed online and saved for your reference.
The level of access, e.g.
full text, will depend on an institution’s subscription.
Libraries hold information regarding subscriptions and access conditions.
Subject gateways Subject-based catalogues of Internet resources, which have been selected, evaluated and classified by subject specialists in accordance with criteria designed to ensure resource quality.
Data and multimedia resources These include digital mapping, datasets from governmental, national and international organisations, and a range of Web-based interfaces and tools for analysing data.
Multimedia resources feature online images, film and video resources available for download.
Learning and teaching Resources developed to support learning and teaching practices (including the provision of learning method case studies, advice, software and guidance on their integration into the curriculum) and also online self-learning packages and tutorials.
Support services A range of services to encourage and develop the use of networked information within the education community.
These services provide advice, information and training in the effective use of electronic resources and address the legal and organisational implications of using them.
As digital resources expand exponentially, the Resource Guides, updated every six months, provide an important time saver for information professionals and academics alike.
Once the new guides are disseminated much work will be focussed not only on outreach activities, but also on providing Web-based training materials for resources on each of the Resource Guide Web sites, to ensure that all Higher Education institutions in the UK are able to keep themselves updated.
Outreach activities Further information about available outreach activities can be found on the back of each Guide, along with contact information for each Resource Guide Adviser.
Keeping Updated It is possible to keep updated through the Resource Guide announcements list [4].
All Resource Guide Advisers have their own individual announcement lists to which you may also sign up.
References Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk JISC Resource Guides http://www.jisc.ac.uk/resourceguides/ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Archives of RG-ALL-ANNOUNCE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, Superlist for RGmailing lists http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/RG-ALL-ANNOUNCE.html Author Details Emma Beer Resource Guide Adviser for Arts and Humanities Arts and Humanities Data Service King’s College, London Email: emma.beer@ahds.ac.uk Website: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/resourceguides/artshum/ Return to top Article Title: “Updated Jisc Resource Guides Now Available” Author: Emma Beer Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/beer/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Teach Beyond Your Reach Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Teach Beyond Your Reach Buzz blog multimedia e-learning ebook webinar Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho looks at this Instructor's guide to developing and running successful distance learning classes, workshops, training sessions and more.
One of the things that makes the author of this book particularly well-qualified to write on the subject is the fact that she had to overcome her own scepticism of distance learning in the course of gaining her creative writing degree.
Robin Neidorf has since built a successful business, Electric Muse, which is dedicated to providing high standards of online learning through training and related services.
From the position of her experience the author can now argue that teaching through distance learning is even more rewarding than teaching face-to-face and through this book she sets out to help trainers make the journey equally rewarding for the student.
The main difference between face-to-face and distance learning is that in the online context, apart from decisions on content, you have to think about which platform to use, how to integrate technology in order to enhance learning and how to guide students effectively through the virtual classroom experience.
The author expands on ideas about the creative possibilities in distance learning and proactive knowledge and explains why Web-based education dominates the field.
There are many different options for delivering online training from the Webinar (real-time Web-based presentation) to downloadable e-books and personalised e-mail support.
The book covers a wide range of topics including tools, best practice, e-learning behaviour, learning styles and attitudes, ideas on how to create content and choosing appropriate design for it, interactive activities and tips on how to do the hardest thing build an on-line learning community.
Robin Neidorf convinces you that like a face-to-face teacher cannot fake commitment, neither can an on-line one.
You need the ability to create connections, communicate and motivate to an even higher degree.
In addition you must understand the impact of the choice of tools on delivery and satisfaction.
There are many options to consider: e-mail, teleconferencing synchronous and asynchronous discussions, lists, blogs, multimedia, proprietary and open source Web-based course management systems.
The author also looks to the future the extended use of palmtop appliances, cell-phones and e-book readers and the need for further functionality in order to take the leap and deliver just-in-time learning.
The text is well structured with tables, examples, case studies and tips outlined in highly visible tables and boxes.
This book is very good at setting out the characteristics of adult learners and how instructors should approach teaching them with true understanding of their motivation, of the multi-dimensional demands on their lives and above all with respect for their life wisdom.
There is useful advice on how to work with designers, and how to create effective, targeted and engaging content, how to balance textual, visual and other information in crafting a suitable 'container for the learning experience'.
Specific requirements such as the expectation of interactivity, variety, single purpose documents, non-linear approaches and customised pathways, screen design and testing your course are addressed in detail.
There are suggestions on how to deal with problems such as anti-social online behaviour, slackening motivation and difficulties with written English and the hardest of all problems creating a community of online learners infused with positive peer energy.
The three appendices cover further online sources, sample introductory material, netiquette and a lecture on how to beat writer's block.
This is a non-technical book with potentially a very diverse readership such as college teachers, consultants and instructors.
I read it as a student on the receiving end of Web-based distance learning and wished some of its suggestions had been picked up by those designing my courses.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian The British Medical Association Email: lina.coelho@bma.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "Teach Beyond Your Reach" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Putting the Library Into the Institution: Using JSR 168 and WSRP to Enable Search Within Portal Frameworks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Putting the Library Into the Institution: Using JSR 168 and WSRP to Enable Search Within Portal Frameworks Buzz data software java framework api html xml portal apache infrastructure stylesheet xslt schema repositories cataloguing z39.50 gis aggregation perl vle wsrp uportal interoperability intranet url standards Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre, Stewart Waller, Jon Allen, Matthew J Dovey, Jon Hunter and Ian Dolphin describe the investigations and technical development undertaken within the JISC-funded Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment (CREE) Project to enable the presentation of existing search tools within portal frameworks using the JSR 168 and WSRP portlet standards.
Under the aegis of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) Portals Programme [1] development projects have taken place to investigate the use of portals as the presentation path for a variety of search tools.
A major output from these projects has been the development of a portal interface, a Web site that users could come to in order to make use of the functionality that the portal provided, particularly searching.
Each project, as a key part of its investigations, created its own such interface and Web site.
These were tested with end-users to establish that the portal was presenting its services in the most useful manner.
The work the projects have carried out on portal interfaces has been valuable in understanding better the types of services end-users wish to interact with and where they perceive value to sit within the portals.
Towards the end of the portal projects it became apparent, though, that the presentation of services through a dedicated Web site was just one way in which they could be delivered.
Many institutions are now making use of virtual learning environments/course management systems (VLE/CMS) and a number are starting to implement institutional portals to facilitate the aggregation and presentation of applications, services and information to their staff and students [2].
All universities also work heavily within the general Web environment, providing a vast collection of information to those both inside and outside the institution.
These institutional environments offered the capability of bringing information and services to the end-user in the context of their work and/or study.
This delivery of information and services, including search, to the end-user contrasts with the more traditional approach of building dedicated Web sites and then expecting or requiring the end-user to find and access them.
Whilst the provision of dedicated Web sites is still the predominant route for the delivery of Internet-based search services, it was considered important to examine more closely the integration of Internet-based search tools within institutional environments to establish how this might take place.
The CREE Project was funded by JISC to investigate this.
The CREE (Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment) Project The CREE Project [3] has been structured around two main goals.
The investigation of user requirements for the presentation and delivery of search tools through a variety of institutional environments and contexts.
The University of Hull undertook this work in conjunction with colleagues at the University of Oxford and Newark and Sherwood College.
The cross-section of institutions allowed variances to be identified between institutions and different end-user groups, but also validation of results in common across the three taking part.
The investigation of the JSR 168 [4] and WSRP [5] portlet standards to allow the presentation of search tools within conformant portal frameworks (e.g., uPortal [6]).
This work was undertaken primarily by project technical partners at the University of Oxford, the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York, the EDINA National Data Centre at the University of Edinburgh, and instructional media + magic, inc., a software consultancy in Washington D.C., each investigating the use of these standards with a different type of search tool.
This article, following a previous introduction to the project in Ariadne in 2004 [7], focuses primarily on the technical work undertaken by the project.
User requirements investigations from the project are reported in a companion article in D-Lib [8].
Technical Investigations Supporting User Requirements Gathering The two goals of the project came together in the development of a series of fully functional interactive demonstrators.
A clear aim of the user requirements gathering was the use of multiple methodologies to validate the results; the theoretical approaches of a survey and series of focus groups were complemented by the more practical approach of showing users the possibilities of presenting search tools through different institutional environments within demonstrators.
The investigation of the JSR 168 and WSRP standards supported the development of the portal demonstrator and enabled a view of the types of services that might be delivered within this environment to be offered.
Portal Frameworks Web portals have been in existence for many years now, offering "...a starting point ... to other resources on the Internet or an intranet."
[9].
Many of these were and still are advanced web pages, presenting a range of services and starting points all as part of one page.
The use of such Web portals within organisations (often equivalent to intranets) followed much the same path.
In order to provide more advanced services, however, a common set of services has become necessary to underpin the portal and provide the framework upon which services, information and applications could be presented, aggregated and customised for the needs of the organisation and individuals within it.
As the uPortal FAQ indicates, "...the framework takes care of the common functionality that every portal needs, so that you can implement the parts that are important and specific to your campus."
[10].
As indicated in Wikipedia [9], many such frameworks, commercial and open source now exist.
Portals have also been discussed frequently in the context of libraries as a means for delivering a wide range of services [11] [12].
Systems available under this 'library portal' banner do not yet appear to offer the same level of infrastructure as portal frameworks.
They are geared specifically to the needs of the library, but would struggle to play a role in delivering non-library services alongside.
Portal frameworks such as uPortal, Oracle portal, IBM WebSphere etc.
aim for a more generic approach to enable diverse services, including those from the library, to be delivered so long as they can be technically served through the framework.
As portal frameworks have developed each has developed its own way of programming and building services, or portlets, for presentation within the framework its own portlet API.
Each service, or portlet, has to be able to communicate with the framework to function properly and each framework has offered its own mechanism [13].
This has implications for development, and prevents portlets from being exchanged for use across portal frameworks (which can prevent duplication of effort).
This lack of interoperability has led to the two standards processes that have produced the JSR 168 and WSRP portlet API standards [14].
Both are now being widely adopted by commercial and open source portal framework developers.
The portal framework used within the CREE Project has been uPortal.
This open source framework has been in use at the University of Hull to deliver its institutional portal since September 2003 [15], and aggregates a range of services, applications and information from across the University.
The development of the portal demonstrator also used uPortal, version 2.4.1, and the technical development partners in the project similarly made use of this framework for consistency and ease of availability.
Portlet Development The intention of the technical strand of CREE was to see whether or not existing library search tools could be adapted for use within a portal framework using the JSR 168 and WSRP standards.
The search tools investigated were as follows: The GetRef [16] and GetCopy [17] services from EDINA [18] The JAFER Toolkit [19], used in this instance for access to library catalogues The HEIRPORT [20] portal from the Archaeology Data Service [21] Google All but the Google portlet relied on Z39.50 as its underpinning search protocol.
As previously reported, initial development was with the JSR 168 standard.
The WSRP4J toolkit was then used to enable the search tools to be exposed as Web services via WSRP.
Full details of the work undertaken by technical partners can be found on the CREE Project Web site [22].
JSR 168 Development The JSR 168 standard is a Java Community Process standard and, hence, Java knowledge, skills and software are required in order to make use of it.
This is the case even where the original tool being adapted is written in another language, as it was in the case of GetRef and GetCopy (written in Perl).
Mapping the search tool functionality to the JSR 168 portlet API was complicated by this fact, but was achievable.
Ideally, JSR 168 works best with tools that are originally Java-based, though this limitation is by no means absolute.
Three different possibilities offered themselves for the development of JSR 168 portlets: Port as much of the existing code/structure as possible to create a new application offering the same functionality as the original, only within a portal environment Use the JSR 168 as a wrapper around the existing system, adding enhancements where deemed suitable Rewrite the application completely from the ground up as a native JSR 168 portlet application For the most part, design 2 was selected.
Design 1 was not considered feasible due to dependencies within the existing applications, and the project did not permit the time required to follow design 3.
The JSR 168 portlets thus developed acted as a means to send a search to the host application (search tools in the case of CREE) from the portal framework and then receive back and present the results from this search.
The application could be located locally (which is the intended role for JSR 168) or remotely, communicating via HTTP or Z39.50, for example.
Notwithstanding the aim of presenting portlets through the uPortal portal framework, portlet development itself was found to be simpler using just the Pluto portlet container [23].
Portlet containers such as Pluto are used by portal frameworks to store available portlets: Pluto itself is used within uPortal.
However, it can also be used in its own right for development purposes.
The use of Pluto also allowed any dependencies on uPortal itself to be removed from the development path.
Although the use of the JSR 168 standard aims to allow JSR 168 portlets to be used within different conformant portal frameworks, different frameworks have tended to offer optional 'extras' beyond what the standard offers, making interoperability practical but potentially non-trivial.
Use of Pluto avoids this.
It was found to be valuable to make use of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern [24] to assist with the building of the portlets (See Figure 1).
This way of structuring the Java programming required offers a means to separate out the business logic of the portlet from its presentation and also the control logic that connects them.
This flexibility allows different types of presentation, e.g.
viewing search results, editing preferences, viewing help, to make use of the same business logic in a controlled fashion.
Figure 1: MVC design pattern (See Reference [24]) The issue of presentation was one that affected all portlets being developed.
The development of the Google portlet by im+m was based around an XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) portlet framework, a methodology that fits the MVC design pattern by creating a clear separation between business and presentation logic.
The development of the JAFER portlet made use of this portlet framework, whilst both the GetRef and HEIRPORT portlets also made use of XSLT to transform XML-formatted search results for presentation within the portal framework.
XSLT mark-up was used to enhance the look and feel of the results, as well as the ability to alter the presentation according to the role of the user (e.g., staff or student).
Elsewhere, basic HTML tags were also used for fixed text.
JSR 168 does define a set of cascading stylesheets that can be used to render text etc, but XSLT techniques were found to be more flexible.
The mechanism JSR 168 uses to carry out its interaction with the search tool involves a two-step process (processAction and doView).
This fitted in neatly with the QUERY-PRESENT logic of the Z39.50 protocol.
However, with each processAction step the portal refreshes its entire display: this prevents progress updates of a search being presented within the portal, as each one would require an entire screen refresh.
All search tools under investigation were successfully adapted for use within a portal framework using JSR 168.
Deployment of these portlets at the University of Hull for the portal demonstrator took a little time to master, but was relatively straightforward: a key addition to the deployment process is the definition of a portlet.xml configuration file alongside the standard web.xml deployment descriptor for a Java Web application.
The portal demonstrator was able to offer access to the portlets in a number of scenarios (on the front page, collected together on a 'library' page (See Figure 2), or singly) and display these for users to comment on: feedback on the views expressed on the presentation of search tools within a portal environment can be found in the companion paper in D-Lib [8].
Figure 2: Portal demonstrator screenshot WSRP Development As previously reported, the development path of choice taken by the project's technical partners led from the development of JSR 168 portlets to Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) portlets through the use of the Apache WSRP4J toolkit [25].
This toolkit is not yet a fully mature technology, although it is certainly able to achieve the transition to WSRP required.
Two main issues affected use of WSRP4J by technical partners: the documentation available was not as clear as it could be; and the status of the toolkit at Apache as an incubator project.
This means that the code needs to be pulled straight from the development Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) repository in order to make use of it locally, (incubator projects do not have specific versions available), which can lead to some instability.
A presentation given by Matthew Dovey from Oxford University at a NeSC workshop on Portlets and GridSphere in March 2005 discusses some of the issues surrounding the use of WSRP4J at this time [26].
WSRP is itself a more complex specification than JSR 168.
To overcome these difficulties and document a procedure for using WSRP4J to produce a WSRP portlet from a JSR 168 start point, a step-by-step guide was developed for local use at Oxford [27].
These were subsequently adopted successfully by other project technical partners and have been used by developers outside the project as well (e.g.
Connect Embedding Project [28], which also gives additional details of the steps required).
A summary of the necessary steps is as follows: Install WSRP4J on a Web application server.
Scripts are supplied with the WSRP4J software to do this.
Deploy the portlet as a separate Web application on the same Web server.
Configure the WSRP4J Web application (via the portletentityregistry.xml file) to publish the portlet via WSRP.
Configure a WSRP consumer channel for the chosen consuming application.
This requires the portal administrator to assign values to the four WSRP endpoints (markup interface URL, service description interface URL, registration interface URL, and portlet management interface URL).
As with all Web services, a producer and consumer exist at opposite ends of the interaction occurring.
In this instance, WSRP4J acts as the producer, while the portal application displaying the search tool at the other end is the consumer.
Note that the communication between the Pluto portlet container and WSRP4J also follows this producer/consumer relationship.
Figure 3 shows the overall architecture for the JAFER portlet, including the links between the portlet and the application itself.
Figure 3: JAFER portlet architecture (Matthew Dovey) All the JSR 168 portlets produced were successfully deployed as WSRP portlets using this step-by-step guide, highlighting the ability of the chosen development path to deliver portlets that can be presented using either standard according to need.
As mentioned above, JSR 168 portlets were selected for the portal demonstrator because of the level of local control these offered.
WSRP portlets are delivering Web services, and there was a degree of uncertainty about the stability of services being available when required.
By way of comparison in using WSRP, the Go-Geo!
team at EDINA, working alongside the CREE development there, developed a procedure to produce a WSRP portlet directly from a Perl application, without going via JSR 168 [29].
Additional Portlet Functionality In addition to the search functionality provided by the JAFER, GetRef, HEIRPORT and Google portlets, a number of additional functions were developed to support the search process.
These functions highlighted some examples of what it is possible to deliver through a portlet.
The GetRef service is closely associated with the GetCopy service, which provides the user with a link from the search results to potential locations for the full text of an article.
Initially, the project had intended to develop separate portlets for these services.
However, the JSR 168 specification does not currently make any provision for inter-portlet communication, a requirement if GetRef were to have to pass information to GetCopy for it to seek a location for an article.
More specifically, it is not currently possible to create a new portlet (the potential GetCopy portlet) from an existing portlet (GetRef) on demand.
As such, GetCopy functionality was delivered through an additional page within the GetRef portlet.
The user clicks on an 'Attempt to locate article' button displayed next to the GetRef search results, and this then invokes a call to GetCopy.
The development of the HEIRPORT portlet did manage to identify a way in which some form of inter-portlet communication might take place, though this lay outside the JSR 168 specification.
This allows for an additional, though existing, portlet to be called when certain conditions are met and information displayed within this rather than the original portlet.
In the case of HEIRPORT this was used to display detailed search results and a map showing the location of the archaeological object in question alongside the original search results.
An example of this mechanism can be seen in Figure 4.
Figure 4: HEIRPORT portlet screenshot with dual portlets The HEIRPORT development also provided a notepad facility that allows the user to save results and export them for later use.
One feature of the JAFER portlet is the ability to search more than one resource at the same time.
The display of results in such circumstances is problematical: should the results be merged or displayed separately?
A possible scenario was drawn up whereby the results from each resource are displayed in additional portlets, separate from the search portlet itself, and this appeared to meet user requirements in feedback.
The issue of inter-portlet communication, and specifically the generation of new portlets, unfortunately meant that this could not be put into practice within the project's lifetime.
Inter-portlet communication is expected to be a part of the WSRP version 2.0 specification due in 2006, but it remains to be seen exactly how this will enable connection between portlets.
The development of the Google portlet focused not so much on portlet functionality but on making the most of available portlet capability.
All portlets have three modes: View, Edit and Help.
The View mode consists of the normal content displayed by the portlet (the search box, results etc.).
im+m also made extensive use of the Edit mode, allowing the number of results displayed to be altered and allowing for internationalisation through the use of XLIFF [30].
A Google Web API key is required for the portlet and this can again be entered in the Edit mode of the portlet.
Finally, a contextual help XML schema was developed to enable structured help to be delivered for any individual portlet.
Conclusions The development of portlets for use within the CREE Project has been a highly successful one, allowing user testing to take place at a detailed level.
The JSR 168 specification offered a relatively straightforward means for creating a portlet from scratch, notwithstanding the preference for a starting point in Java.
This allows the basic search functionality of the selected search tools to be reproduced in a portal environment, allowing the user to make use of them within the portal and not have to jump to other Web pages.
A certain degree of additional functionality was also included where feasible.
The full extent to which search functionality can be reproduced within a portlet, and how this might be displayed using XSLT, will however require further work as CREE has, in the end, only scratched the surface of what is possible.
Experience suggests that viewing a range of other JSR 168 portlets greatly helps with their development and there are an increasing number of these now available through sites like POST [31].
The use of WSRP was greatly eased by the use of the WSRP4J step-by-step guide developed at Oxford.
The ability of WSRP effectively to serve applications remotely through the use of Web services appears to favour the use of this standard over JSR 168 for many search service providers.
A number of issues remain to be resolved, though, not least the security of the Web service messages concerned.
From the viewpoint of a service provider, the additional support of a WSRP portlet, alongside supporting access via the search tool's home Web site, also needs to be considered.
WSRP4J itself, although used within a number of commercial enterprise portal frameworks to some degree, is yet to mature fully and requires additional effort.
Notwithstanding this, the CREE Project has demonstrated the ability to take existing applications (search tools) and present these within alternative institutional environments such as an institutional portal.
Where other environments choose to make use of the JSR 168 and/or WSRP standards, for example virtual learning environments (VLEs), then the same portlets can be used within these.
The standards open up flexible options for the presentation of search tools and allow search to be presented wherever it is most useful.
Further Information All reports from the CREE Project are available via the CREE Web site [3].
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Wayne Thompson in the e-Services Integration Group at the University of Hull for his work in creating the portal demonstrator.
References JISC Portals Programme, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_portals.html JISC Study of MLE activity, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/project_mle_activity.html CREE Project Web site, http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/ Introduction to JSR 168 the portlet specification, http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/portalserver/reference/techart/jsr168/ OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets Technical Committee, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsrp uPortal, http://www.uportal.org/ Awre, C., Dovey, MJ., Hunter, J., Kilbride, W. and Dolphin, I., "Developing Portal Services and Evaluating How Users Want to Use Them: The CREE Project" Ariadne 41, October 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/awre-cree/ The CREE Project: Investigating User Requirements for Searching within Institutional Environments, Chris Awre, Gabriel Hanganu, Caroline Ingram, Tony Brett and Ian Dolphin, D-Lib Magazine, October 2005, Volume 11 Number 10 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october05/awre/10awre.html Web portal entry in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal uPortal FAQ, http://www.uportal.org/faq.html#4_2 LibPortal: Library Portal Survey and Review, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_libportal Davies, R., "Library portals today and tomorrow" Online Information 2004 Proceedings, 2004, 237-241 http://www.online-information.co.uk/2004proceedings/thurspm/davies_r.pdf Schaeck, T., Hepper, S., "Portal standards for Web services" Network World, 2002, 19(35): 33 Moore, C., "Portal standards set for takeoff" InfoWorld, 2003, 25(30): 20 University of Hull portal tour, http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/portaltour/ GetRef, http://www.edina.ac.uk/getref/ GetCopy, http://www.edina.ac.uk/getcopy/ EDINA National Data Centre, http://www.edina.ac.uk/ JAFER toolkit, http://www.jafer.org/ HEIRPORT, http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/heirport/ Archaeology Data Service, http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ CREE Project Web site presentations page, http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/presentations Apache Pluto portlet container project, http://portals.apache.org/pluto/ Model-View-Controller description, http://java.sun.com/blueprints/patterns/MVC-detailed.html Apache WSRP4J project, http://ws.apache.org/wsrp4j/ Presentation available at http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/presentations/ JSR 168/WSRP environment (developed by Matthew Dovey), http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/portal/developers/environment.xml Connect Embedding Project documentation, http://demo.ssl.co.uk:8080/index.html Description of portlet work done for the Go-Geo!
Project, http://www.gogeo.ac.uk/geoPortal10/PortletInfo.html OASIS XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) Technical Committee, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xliff Portlet Open Source Trading (POST) Web site, http://portlet-opensrc.sourceforge.net/ Author Details Chris Awre Integration Architect and CREE Project Manager e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/ Ian Dolphin Head of e-Strategy and e-Services Integration and CREE Project Director e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: i.dolphin@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/ Stewart Waller Curatorial Officer Archaeology Data Service AHDS Archaeology University of York Email: sjw143@york.ac.uk Web site: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk Jon Allen Media Producer instructional media + magic, inc. Washington, D.C. Email: jfa@immagic.com Web site: http://www.immagic.com Matthew J Dovey JAFER Project Manager Oxford University Computing Services University of Oxford Email: matthew.dovey@oucs.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jafer.org/ Jonathan Hunter System Developer EDINA University of Edinburgh Email: jon.hunter@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.edina.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Putting the Library into the Institution: Using JSR 168 and WSRP to Enable Search within Portal Frameworks" Author: Chris Awre, Stewart Waller, Jon Allen, Matthew J Dovey, Jon Hunter and Ian Dolphin Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/awre/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Developing Academic Library Staff for Future Success Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Developing Academic Library Staff for Future Success Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Town considers this new multi-author volume, appreciates its many qualities and reflects on the key issues for library staff development in the digital future.
This book promises to address the place of staff development in the current and future strategic management of academic libraries.
The editor has assembled an impressive cast of those who are active in this field, and the authors are well able to reflect state of the art thinking.
The book is informed by their close association with innovative staff development initiatives, some through involvement with the SCONUL (Society of College, National & University Libraries) Advisory Committee on Staffing.
The social, technological and organisational changes underpinning this work are probably very familiar to Ariadne readers.
I will not dwell on them in this review, but they do justify this new publication, which is a worthy successor to Margaret Oldroyd's previous well-regarded text.
The first chapter is by Sally Neocosmos, former Chief Executive of HESDA, and the only non-Librarian to contribute.
This sets the context of development needs for HE in the 21st Century.
The author certainly has all the relevant facts at her fingertips, and correctly diagnoses that a managed approach will be needed for the future, and that effective management and leadership skills will be needed at all levels.
The following three chapters are all by well-known authorities, and reflect both the strategic and practical experience of the authors as well as their significant contributions over the last decade to successful national initiatives in this field.
Sheila Corrall in rethinking professional competence for the networked environment effectively links strategic developments back to staff roles.
Pat Noon in a chapter on developing future managers clearly identifies the needs, the gaps and some solutions.
Biddy Fisher provides the quote from Charles Handy which sums up precisely what the book is about, before tackling the convergence issue and recognising the recent strategic shift in this area from managerial to educational priorities.
Not all the following chapters might be described as strategic, but they do meet the question of future success in staff development through coverage of some important issues and methods.
Chris Powis addresses another critical challenge of developing the librarian as teacher and learning facilitator, and Jo Webb the crucial subject of library support staff.
Sue White and Margaret Weaver consider the flexible workforce, Moira Bent the practical use of VLEs in staff development, and Philippa Dolphin surveys collaborative and consortial approaches.
The book is completed by an effectively analytical summary and conclusion by Margaret Oldroyd.
I found it possible to read the book straight through, and care has been taken with the editing to ensure linkage between chapters and a sense of progression.
Indeed I often found myself being led towards an issue which the work then addressed more fully in the next chapter.
The book is well produced with all the appropriate elements, as one has come to expect from Facet.
Full information on contributors, an introduction by the editor summarising the contributions, a glossary, and a serviceable index are included.
References are at the end of each chapter, which I prefer, but there is also an argument for an additional complete listing.
They are as up to date as one would expect from this group of authors who are also well aware of unpublished developments.
It is a pity that the publication of this book immediately precedes the findings of the Higher Education Consultancy Group's research into HE staff development drivers [1].
This work is likely to be both influential and valuable in the consideration of any future staff development activities, and particularly in fields where there may be a reluctance to engage with developing skills for new technologies.
The book seems good value for money, given that tight editing has produced both a wide range and serious depth of content in a comfortable package.
My only reservation is perhaps an unfair one given the scope and aim of the book.
All the evidence presented in the book implies that libraries and information services need to change their staff development process from a reactive TNA (Training Needs Analysis) or self-motivated basis to one based on future business need.
Whilst this book gives as good a picture as might be possible now of what that future need might be, it does not suggest a complete method for designing programmes to achieve it.
My experience from consultancy is that libraries want a vision of the future role-model staff member, and a specific plan for how to get people to become it [2].
I felt the book would have been improved by a synthetic chapter (in addition to the final summary chapter) which laid out an attempt at this vision, and a best practice staff development cycle and methods.
The book would then be even more likely to help achieve future success.
It is perhaps not the role of a multi-author work covering all UK HE to take the risk of a single choice of future scenario, but in our role as strategic managers we are obliged to do so in practice.
This musing should not detract from the fact that this is an excellent and timely piece of work.
This is probably about as good as a multi-author work gets.
The right people write here about things they know about from an up-to-date informed perspective, and Margaret Oldroyd has edited the volume thoughtfully into a coherent whole.
Like its predecessor it will be an essential item on academic library managers' bookshelves, and deserves wider reading given the excellent record of academic libraries in staff development activity and thought.
References Schofield, A., Staff development drivers: a paper delivered at the JISC Workshop on Staff Information Skills Sets, Birmingham, 28 January, 2004.
Higher Education Consultancy Group, 2004 (unpublished).
Town, J.S.
, Developing the library workforce: a training and development review prepared for the London Library and Information Development Unit.
Cranfield University/NHS, 2001.
Author Details Stephen Town Director of Information Services Royal Military College of Science & Deputy University Librarian Cranfield University Email: j.s.town@cranfield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rmcs.cranfield.ac.uk/infoserv/ Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Developing Academic Library Staff for Future Success" Author: Stephen Town Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/town-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Tap Into Bath Takes Off Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Tap Into Bath Takes Off Buzz software database archives cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Stephanie Round covers the launch of a small but promising collaborative effort.
As Local Studies Librarian for Bath & North East Somerset, UK, I am expected to know the whereabouts of original material and collections relating to the history of the local area.
The recently launched Tap Into Bath online database is the ideal format for discovering this.
The background to the project and the technicalities of the database were previously reported in Ariadne 40 [1] in July 2004 by Alison Baud and Ann Chapman.
I will therefore concentrate on what it meant to be a major contributor to the project, and how it will be useful to researchers at all levels.
Prior to the implementation of the online database there had been no single gateway to uncover material held by the myriad institutions in Bath.
A researcher wanting material on John Wood, creator of England's most famous neo-classical city, might initially approach the Building of Bath Museum, but might not realise that Bath Central Library and No 1 The Royal Crescent also have important holdings of relevant material.
It is the cross-domain searching that gives the database its unique selling point.
A researcher no longer has to guess which institution's collections might be useful.
Searching for the subject 'sewage purification' will direct you to Wessex Water's Library, while a 'name' search on Sir Isaac Pitman will direct you to the University of Bath Library.
The advanced search facility allows many combinations eg Agriculture and Bath, Hats and 20th Century.
My only complaint is that I could not delete a criterion once selected I had to start an advanced search all over again.
Once a search has located a match, you can call up 'brief' or 'full' details of the collection, and there is a link to the owner's Web site, although not currently to any online catalogue.
(Clockwise from bottom left): David Hill, Head of Development, SWMLAC, Alison Baud, Bibliographic Services Librarian University of Bath Library,Ann Chapman, UKOLN and Councillor Loraine Morgan-Brinkhurst representing the Mayor of Bath (Photo by kind permission of The Bath Chronicle) So how did we get involved?
Back in early 2004 my colleague, Julia Burton, and I were invited to an exploratory seminar at which the concept of the online collection description database was discussed.
It soon became clear that, as I had responsibility for many of the collections held in Bath Central Library, I would be the one to produce our contribution to the database.
At that time, I knew that the Library Service had a number of named collections (eg Boodle, Hunt, Irvine) but I did not know how many, nor did I know where the relevant background information on them might be found.
I started by physically looking around our closed access stores, listing the named collections and 'creating' names for holdings that had not previously been considered as separate collections, such as our Theatre Royal archive, or our collections of ephemera.
I checked my list with colleagues until finally we ended up with 31 distinct collections that we could describe.
The next step was to describe them, using the templates provided, highlighting 'star items', estimating the size of the collections, listing people associated with them and uncovering the custodial history who had owned them previously, and why they were now in the ownership of Bath & North East Somerset's Library Service.
Some of this information was extracted from 'Libraries in Bath, 1618-1964' by V J Kite, a former Chief Librarian of the City.
This explained the donations and bequests that made up much of the early stock of the public library movement in Bath.
Other details were extracted from longer-serving members of staff, and even retired members, so it has been an extremely useful knowledge management exercise for us, and we now understand far more about the collections we have in our care.
It has also enabled me to produce an annotated list of collections, indicating where in the library they can be found, particularly useful for newer members of staff.
Some of the most difficult details to produce were the date ranges of the collections and the dates when they were collected.
The latter could only really be guessed at from the date of donation, and the former by close study of the material, something for which we had no time.
Amassing details of over 30 collections and typing them into the templates took a considerable amount of time, but, purely from an internal viewpoint, was thoroughly worthwhile.
The launch of the Tap Into Bath online database was held on 8 December 2004 in the Guildhall in Bath.
Many of the partners who had contributed details of their collections to the database were present, including the archivist of Bath Abbey, the curator of the William Herschel Museum and the librarian of the American Museum in Bath, to name but a few.
Howard Nicholson, Librarian at the University of Bath, gave an introduction to the project, describing Bath as a 'City of Treasures' which needed a virtual link to these treasures for both public awareness and access.
Alison Baud explained the involvement of UKOLN and the project's aim to promote collaboration, cooperation and networking between institutions in Bath.
At the launch many of us renewed old acquaintances and made new ones.
There are 26 partner organisations, and it is hoped both to approach more, and that others will approach UKOLN themselves when they see how useful the database is.
Alison thanked the members of the team, its funders and contributors.
Future developments include publicising the database, links from partners' Web sites, maintenance and updating of the details, and cloning Tap Into Bath around the UK and the world!
The software is open source and can be freely downloaded from the Web site and customised.
Already the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, and Milton Keynes Learning City have expressed interest.
Ann Chapman of UKOLN demonstrated how to search the database on the Tap into Bath Web site [2] with either brief or full details of the items located.
Search criteria are displayed: title, description, subject, star item, name, place, time.
The advanced search allows combinations of criteria, together with language, personal and corporate names, and to whom the collection might be of interest.
The latter is of particular importance as it indicates whether a collection is suitable for school children (such as that at the Bath Postal Museum) or for researchers (such as the Jenyns Herbarium at the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution).
Access arrangements are also explained.
At Bath Central Library, for example, researchers may only see certain items from the Strong Room on production of ID, and other material is held at a remote store and so is not available on demand.
Elsewhere, particularly at institutions that are not normally open to the public, appointments must be made in advance.
Particular arrangements may apply for school parties or for disabled access.
Given that Bath is a World Heritage Site, attracting thousands of visitors and researchers every year, this gateway to the collections held by its museums, libraries and archives should be of great benefit to everyone interested in its history.
References Alison Baud and Ann Chapman, "Tap into Bath", Ariadne issue 40, July 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/baud-chapman/ Tap into Bath Web site http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/tapintobath/ Author Details Stephanie Round Local Studies Librarian Bath & North East Somerset Bath Central Library Email: Stephanie_Round@bathnes.gov.uk Web site: http://www.bathnes.gov.uk/BathNES/libraries/ Return to top Article Title: "Tap into Bath Takes Off" Author: Stephanie Round Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tapintobath-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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MCN 2007: Building Content, Building Community 40 Years of Museum Information and Technology Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MCN 2007: Building Content, Building Community 40 Years of Museum Information and Technology Buzz data software framework database dissemination xml infrastructure archives metadata schema blog copyright oai-pmh cataloguing marc aggregation ead mp3 cdwa ulan licence interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Guenter Waibel and Jean Godby report on the Museum Computer Network annual meeting, held 7-10 November, 2007 in Chicago, Illinois.
The Museum Computer Network (MCN) celebrated its 40th anniversary during its annual meeting, this year held at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza.
In 1967, museum professionals in New York City gathered to discuss the utility of computers in museum settings.
This initial meeting provided the seed for what would become the Museum Computer Network [1].
40 years later, 310 delegates from 14 countries and 32 states in the US gathered to take stock of successes and issues in the networked museum.
The conference programme acknowledged the anniversary with a President's Roundtable embedded in a day-long plenary session tackling key issues in the community ranging from professionalisation of the museum field to a conversation between museum directors and their IT staff [2].
This brief report represents the subjective observations on themes which particularly resonated with the authors, and should not be construed as a comprehensive or objective accounting of the entire conference [3].
Full disclosure: Günter Waibel is a second term Board Member of MCN and has attended this conference for 10 years; Jean Godby is a first-time MCN delegate; they both work in OCLC's Programs and Research Division.
Access to Museum Collections James Cuno (Director, Art Institute of Chicago) set the stage for discussions around access to museum collections during the plenary Directors and IT Professionals: A Conversation about Leadership: "We have a moral obligation to provide people with information about our collections equal to our moral obligation to preserve the physical collections in our care."
During the panels Learning How to Share I: Making CDWA Lite Work for You and Learning How to Share II: Exploring Natural History Collections, it became evident that this moral obligation has propelled both art museums and natural history institutions towards an increased effort to provide more comprehensive access beyond local Web sites.
Alan Seal (Victoria & Albert Museum) reported on the V&A's efforts to open up their entire collections information systems (120,000 records) to the public by 2008.
Alan sees the combination of Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) with the descriptive standard Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA Lite XML) as a "means of bringing people back to our site" and making collections available "without losing control."
It also helps the V&A to "keep track of who got what and when" as they share data with different aggregators.
Michael Jenkins (Metropolitan Museum of Art) spoke about the role CDWA Lite has played in the Met's effort to provide fee-free image licensing for academic use in the context of the Scholar's License Project.
Both the Metropolitan and the Victoria & Albert have growing fee-free initiatives in the area of scholarly publishing.
Michael also acknowledged that institutional buy-in around licensing programmes and sharing digital content remains an issue.
While Alan and Michael represented the vanguard of the art museum community, the panel on data sharing in the natural history indicated that the "moral obligation" has had an even more profound and widespread impact in the realm of the natural sciences and biodiversity.
During Learning How to Share II: Exploring Natural History Collections, Stan Blum (California Academy of Sciences & Executive Committee Member, Biodiversity Information Standards) presented on the international umbrella organisations Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Biodiversity Information Standards (formerly TDWG).
Within five years, GBIF built an infrastructure to provide access to 130 million records from 200 providers, representing 1,000 collections.
Biodiversity Information Standards is tasked with creating the standards infrastructure for sharing in the natural history realm, and is working on a sophisticated framework called the Universal Biodiversity Data Bus.
According to Stan Blum, data integration is a 'no-brainer' in biodiversity: "Interrogating partial datasets makes no sense at all if you can get much better answers from all collections combined."
Since arguably nothing less than the survival of the planet is at stake in biodiversity, the community galvanised around data sharing about ten years ago.
During the public CDWA Lite Advisory Committee meeting, Inge Stein (Konrad-Zuse Zentrum für Informationstechnik, Berlin) presented on Museumdat [4], a harmonisation of CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) Lite with the CIDOC (Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums) Conceptual Reference Model).
One of the motivations for this effort: with a small amount of changes, CDWA Lite could be used for all objects across the cultural heritage spectrum, whereas currently it is optimised exclusively for fine art.
All delegates agreed that the changes proposed by the German museum community should form the basis for the next version of CDWA Lite.
Monika Hagedorn-Saupe (Institute for Museums Studies, Germany), Inge Stein and the Advisory Committee agreed that a single international version of the standard would be desirable.
Intellectual Property Rights and Licensing If the panel Collections, Copyright, and Carl Malamud: Balancing Risk Management with Audience Expectations in the Display of Online Images is an indication, some museums are becoming more comfortable with claiming fair use: David Sturtevant (Harvard University Art Museums) presented on a new policy to provide a thumbnail (256 pixels/longest dimension) for each collection item to the world at large under the provision of fair use, regardless of its copyright status.
A possible extension of the policy to 512 pixels is under review.
David's last slide displayed the mantra "Have faith.
Don't pay," and he encouraged other museums to rally around claiming fair use for thumbnail display.
The Town Hall Meeting on Intellectual Property: Museum Image Licensing – The Next Generation provoked a lively debate, with many points of view represented by both presenters and delegates, and little evidence of an emerging consensus around the business model for sustaining digital image provision: the room seemed divided between those who feel that the museum community can make the most impact in our information economy by providing open access whenever legally possible, and those who favour business models of cost recovery or even revenue generation.
Amalyah Keshet (Israel Museum) describes the amount of work rights and reproduction requests make, and why the Israel Museum charges to cover cost.
Alan Newman (National Gallery of Art) contends that recovering costs for service seems reasonable, while disseminating existing images requires a different model.
Alan also reads a statement by Ken Hamma, which beseeches museums to investigate the "irrational paternal instinct" they feel towards their collections.
Tyler Ochoa (Professor of IP Law, Santa Clara University) and Theodore Feder (President, ARS/NY and Art Resource) agree to disagree: Tyler claims that case law supports the position that a photograph of a museum object can not be copyrighted, while Theodor claims it can.
Jeff Sedlik (President & CEO, PLUS Coalition) posits that with licensing an image comes the responsibility to clearly ascertain and communicate rights, and plugs the Picture Licensing Universal System (PLUS) as a framework for doing so.
Museums, Libraries, Archives MCN always attracts a fair number of librarians and archivists, and provides good opportunities for discussing the convergence of these allied communities.
During International Spotlight: Taiwan, Chiung-min Tsai (Digital Museums Project at National Taiwan University(NTU)) reported on an effort to integrate access to all museum collections within the NTU campus so they could be queried in a similar way to distributed library holdings across various university libraries.
He remarked on the changing roles of university art museums: their identity is transitioning from the confines of the university context to a broader audience; their value is transitioning from academic research to enriching public discourse; and their function is transitioning from 'on-premises access' to broad dissemination.
On the panel Digital Libraries, Virtual Museums: Same Difference?, Chuck Patch (formerly of the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC)) gave a talk about library, archive and museum integration at HNOC over a time-frame of ten years.
He touched on a variety of different facets of integration which have to be considered to produce a sustainable outcome: while integrated systems can be a catalyst, a number of changes in the organisational structure finally engendered the shift in mindsets required for success.
After many fits and starts, HNOC integrated cataloguing for all collections under a single "Processing Department."
Several models for sharing data among stakeholder institutions emerged from the presentations, discussions, and vendor exhibits.
IDEA Information Systems [5] offers a turnkey system for building and and accessing a database of heterogeneous resources that may be described by MARC, EAD, or Dublin Core.
Once populated with descriptions of a given community's library and museum resources, a user could issue a single search and retrieve links to published works about an artist as well as descriptions of related museum objects.
OCLC's WorldCat Identities [6] offers another model.
As described by Jean Godby in a CDWALite panel discussion, data obtained from MARC records in OCLC's WorldCat database is assembled to create a page of links about an artist or any other personal name represented in the published record.
Users can click on these links for a focused but rich browsing experience that brings together works by and about the artist (or related names and subjects) in WorldCat and a growing list of community-created resources such as Wikipedia.
Audience members suggested that the browsing experience could be improved by integrating authority files from the art museum community.
For example, Getty's ULAN [7] could provide labelled relationships among artists, which would notify users that an associated name is a colleague, teacher, or student of the artist being investigated.
These examples of integrated library and museum resources are promising developments, but much work remains to be done.
Library materials are not represented very well in museum resources and vice versa.
And when they can be accessed through a single resource, the user still has to do too much work to integrate them.
To improve this experience, the library and museum communities will have to make progress in defining interoperable standards and deploying collection-level descriptions.
But the fact that all parties are excited about the prospects of sharing data and expertise is a harbinger of future results.
Open Source MCN released MuseTech Central: MCN Project Registry [8] during a coffee break.
The Project Registry is a platform for sharing information about technology projects in museums.
The open source code for the registry was largely developed under the auspices of the Open Software Foundation [9], which also packed a table during one of the popular Case Study Showcases.
The Open Software hopes to become the de facto platform for collaboratively developed code in the museum community, and currently hosts a distributed project management package to foster collaboration.
Museums can now share their data by using OAICatMuseumBeta [10], an OAI-PMH data provider (based on the open source OAICat) made available by OCLC Programs and Research.
Further interest in the potential of open source development was spurred by OpenCollection [11], an open source collections management system funded by Institute of Museum and Library Services and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Carl Goodman (Museum of the Moving Image) and Chris Mackie (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) created a buzz with the news of likely Mellon funding for a community design process to take OpenCollection to the next level.
Conclusions Obviously, the MCN 2007 Conference offered many more sessions and events than the authors were able to attend or report on.
From the selective summary above it should have become clear that the museum community finds itself at cross-roads.
During MCN, museums were negotiating their way between their educational mission and financial sustainability; open access to digital resources and licensing; local concerns and the wider library, archive, museum community; open source tools and vendor-supplied software.
No doubt these discussions will continue during MCN 2008 in Washington DC.
References For more information on the formation of MCN (Museum Computer Network), Richard Urban (Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Library and Information and a current member of the MCN Board of Directors) provides a history of the formative days of MCN at http://musematic.net/?p=215.
A full account of the history of MCN, written by Richard Urban and immediate past President of MCN Marla Misunas, can be found at http://www.mcn.edu/about/index.asp?subkey=1942.
An mp3 recording of this conversation will be available at http://www.mcn.edu/ shortly.
The slides used by moderator Nik Honeysett are available at http://musematic.net/?p=279.
Other complimentary accounts may be found at http://conference.archimuse.com/tags/mcn, http://musematic.net/?p=313 and http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/11/greetings-from-.html Documentation on Museumdat as well as an XML Schema is available from http://www.museumdat.org/index.php?ln=en IDEA Information Systems http://www.IDEA-ALM.com/ OCLC's WorldCat Identities http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/ Getty's ULAN http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/ulan/ MuseTech Central: MCN Project Registry http://www.musetechcentral.org/ Open Software Foundation http://www.museumsoftwarefoundation.org/ OAICatMuseumBeta http://www.oclc.org/research/software/oai/oaicatmuseum.htm OpenCollection http://www.opencollection.org/ Author Details Günter Waibel Program Officer OCLC Programs and Research Email: waibelg@oclc.org Blog: http://www.hangingtogether.org/ Jean Godby Research Scientist OCLC Programs and Research Email: godby@oclc.org Return to top Article Title: "MCN 2007" Author: Günter Waibel and Jean Godby Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/mcn-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Waking Up in the British Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Waking Up in the British Library Buzz data accessibility research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Beer reports on a one-day conference on using Early English Books Online in teaching and research in history and English literature.
‘The existence of EEBO has completely transformed my teaching as well as my own scholarly life -both entirely for the better’.
Regius Professor Quentin Skinner, University of Cambridge.
Delegates may have been surprised to hear about a pamphlet discussing Mary II’s breasts as the subject for academic discussion at the ‘Waking up in the British Library’ event hosted by the John Rylands University Library.
But it served only to illustrate the kind of serendipitous discoveries that Early English Books Online (EEBO) [1] facilitates in teaching and research.
Following on from the success of the launch of Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership [2] in autumn last year, this event aimed to look in detail at the teaching and research applications of this resource in English literature and history.
Early English Books Online contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every book printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works elsewhere from 1473-1700 from the first book printed in English by William Caxton through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
The Text Creation Partnership has converted many of these images into fully-searchable texts.
The four academics speaking at the event each found that EEBO democratised research into England’s cultural heritage and made access possible to a much wider audience of undergraduates.
EEBO has transformed the way in which research and teaching is undertaken.
Analogies drawn with the revolution in scholarly practices following the invention of the printing press were convincing enough for one institution to sign up to EEBO-TCP the following day.
Our keynote speaker, Prof. Justin Champion, discussed the way in which EEBO not only influences teaching and research in a traditional sense, but also shifts the dynamic between teacher and learner, invigorating new avenues of research for both.
Rather than seeing innovative technology as detracting from traditional modes of research, Champion saw developments such as EEBO facilitating the elementary objectives of teaching.
‘If we collectively assume that one of the central functions of an arts and humanities degree is to develop skills of assessment, interpretation, and analysis, that’s best done in dialogue with primary sources.’ What else does EEBO offer for the academic user?
Social, spatial and intellectual accessibility organised Champion’s thoughts on the subject.
Greater numbers of people from more diverse backgrounds now have access to the rare book rooms of the major research libraries, ‘anywhere, anytime’.
Intellectually, resources of the quality of EEBO are likely to encourage uptake of other resources too.
They also make for a more harmonious partnership between teaching and learning.
Dr. Alan Marshall also identified the changing dynamic between students and lecturers.
Organising tutorials around EEBO allowed him to join his undergraduate students in their hunt for research topics.
They all, essentially, became ‘historical researchers’ working with non-canonical texts and critically engaging with them.
Moreover, he added, ‘What they are turning out is actually helping me’.
Other speakers included Dr. Clare Pilsworth, a Research Fellow from the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, and Dr. Matthew Steggle, from Sheffield Hallam University.
Dr. Pilsworth found that using EEBO in the classroom certainly reduced her workload and stimulated interest with her students.
Dr. Steggle found a sympathetic audience to his observation that ‘There is a problem with EEBO..when you start playing with it you find yourself doing all sorts of things that weren’t what you imagined..it’s as addictive as a computer game’.
He was also enthralled by the new ways it enabled research across texts.
Years of his PhD research were overshadowed by a search of EEBO-TCP that took just a couple of minutes.
The conference also welcomed guest speakers from University of Michigan (Dr. Mark Sandler), the Text Creation Partnership at the University of Oxford (Emma Leeson) and the publishers, ProQuest Information and Learning (Dr. Peter White) who gave delegates a full sense of the history and continuing development of the resource.
Dr. Jonathan Gibson, from the Higher Education Academy for English ran a taster tutorial in the hands-on session.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) would like to thank the ‘visionary librarian’ and chair Dr. Diana Leitch, who has had a long association with the EEBO resource.
Academic Events Involving EEBO 29 April Maughan Library, King’s College London ‘Using EEBO in teaching and research’ Higher Education Academy for English 8-9 September (De)materialising the early modern text: Early English Books Online in Teaching & Research [3] EEBO in Undergraduate Studies Essay Competition for 2005 ProQuest Information and Learning and the Early English Books Online (EEBO) Text Creation Partnership are sponsoring an essay competition for undergraduate students.
Deadline for receipt of essays is 31October 2005.
Prizes will be announced in January 2006 [4].
References Early English Books Online http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home EEBO-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/ Details of the Call for Papers at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=de_materialising_event For further details, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/edu/edu_essay.html Further Details Power point presentations from the day are available from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/wakingup.html .
Thanks to a JISC-sponsored deal, EEBO-TCP is available for all FE and HE institutions for a nominal hosting charge.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=coll_eebo&src=alpha The JISC is very interested in hearing about the ways in which academics are using EEBO in their teaching and research.
Please email emma.beer@ahds.ac.uk Author Details Emma Beer Resource Co-ordinator Arts and Humanities Data Service King’s College London Email: emma.beer@ahds.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ahds.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Waking up in the British Library “ Author: Emma Beer Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/wakingupinbl-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What the Resource Discovery Network Is Doing for Further Education Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What the Resource Discovery Network Is Doing for Further Education Buzz software infrastructure cataloguing vle Citation BibTex RIS Mark Williams highlights some of the services that the RDN provides for the benefit of FE users.
The Further Education sector has put significant resources into the development of managed learning environments to support their learners, but however good the technical infrastructure, the learner experience will only be as good as the resources they can access.
This is where the RDN [1] can help.
The RDN provides access to leading high-quality Web sites and resources on the Internet for use in learning and teaching.
It is a free service, funded by the JISC [2], specifically designed to meet the needs of students and staff in Further and Higher Education.
The RDN provides a number of services designed to make locating information on the Internet quicker, easier and more productive.
Locating Resources: The Internet Resource Catalogue The RDN selects and evaluates over 70,000 of the foremost Web sites and resources.
These are chosen by subject specialists, and listed by subject area and resource type.
All sites are regularly checked for currency, and new sites are added every day.
This means unlike when using other search engines, you can be certain that the sites you find will be useful, relevant to UK education, up-to-date and reliable.
The RDN can be used to find: product news, jobs and recruitment sites, resources for vocational careers, tutorials, software, online journals and magazines, company sites etc.
Locating Resources: The subject-based services Go directly to one of the subject-based services of the RDN to find additional information in your subject area.
The RDN Subject services are: ALTIS for hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism [3] Artifact for arts and creative industries [4] BIOME for health and life sciences [5] EEVL for engineering, mathematics and computing [6] GEsource for geography and environment [7] Humbul for humanities [8] PSIgate for physical sciences [9] SOSIG for social sciences, business and law [10] Training using the Internet: VTS The RDN has responded to the need of the sector to develop the necessary skills to use the Internet effectively with the creation of the RDN Virtual Training Suite for Further Education.
This currently comprises 16 free online subject-based tutorials on developing effective information skills for FE students.
They can be used stand-alone or within a VLE.
They provide both a means for staff and students to learn how to use the Internet within their own area of interest and an excellent introduction to online resources available for a given subject area.
They develop both search and evaluation skills of learners.
More information is available in the Virtual Training Suite [11] on the RDN Web site.
RDN in FE teaching: RDN case studies The RDN recognises that many tutors in the FE sector will not always have the time required to search out the sites that they may want to use with their students or the time to integrate the sites within their own teaching plan.
The RDN case studies have been developed in order to signpost the most useful resources for delivering specific elements of the curriculum and provide clear ideas on how they can be integrated into a scheme of work.
More information is available from the Case Studies area [12] on the RDN Web site.
Topical Resources: Behind the Headlines BTH gives you background information on topical news stories.
It is updated every day and the stories are selected with their relevance to the FE curriculum in mind.
So if FE lecturers want their students to find out more about a particular current affairs story, they can direct them to the Behind the Headlines hotlink on the RDN homepage and this will point out the resources guaranteed to be relevant to that topic.
Training Materials Although the RDN offers training sessions through the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs), we obviously encourage institutions to incorporate training concerning the service within their own staff development programmes.
To support this, RDN posters and presentations describing how to get the best from the Web are available in the Training area [13] of the RDN Web site.
Specific support or advice on running staff development on the RDN within FE institutions is readily available from the RDN [1] or the author.
Supporting your VLE The RDN can obviously be accessed directly through its own hyperlink [1], but the RDN's services can also be used from within one's own Web site or as part of course materials.
A downloadable RDN searchbox, RDN-Include [14] allows searching of the RDN from within one's site.
It can be easily incorporated within an institution's VLE or Internet site allowing bespoke customisation.
An example of how the University of Glamorgan has done this is available on its Web site [15].
You can also include a news feed of the latest RDN resources into your site which will automatically be updated daily.
More information is available on the RDN-Include [14] page.
Developing for the Future The RDN serves both the FE and HE community but recognises that while both have much in common, FE also has many particular demands.
In order to meet these demands the RDN is enhancing its Internet record catalogue with over 14,000 Internet resources that will sit within an FE-specific catalogue with a bespoke search interface.
These records will contain information on the resources of particular interest to FE users, such as mapping to curriculum area and level as well as an FE notes field.
In order to meet the FE requirements of ready-to-use resources, 24 learning pathways highlighting the curriculum uses of many of these resources will also be developed.
As ever, the work will be done by subject specialists (and in this case from the FE sector), with the quality assurance which the RDN regards as essential.
Finally, the RDN is working with FERL [16] and other FE agencies, looking not only to make resources easier to find but also to make the FE sector online environment simpler to navigate.
What the RDN Hubs Can Do for Your Subject Discover in what specific ways the RDN subject services can support your subject by following links below to information in this issue from each subject service with respect to FE resources.
ALTIS, the guide to Internet resources in hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism [17] artifact, the guide to quality Internet resources in the Arts and Creative Industries [18] BIOME, the guide to quality Internet resources in the health and life sciences [19] EEVL, the internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing [20] GEsource, the geography and environment gateway [21] Humbul, the humanities hub for accessing online humanities resources [22] PSIgate, the physical sciences information gateway [23] SOSIG, the guide to the best of the Web for Social Science [24] References The Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Altis http://www.altis.ac.uk/ Artifact http://www.artifact.ac.uk/ BIOME http://biome.ac.uk/ EEVL http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ Gesource http://www.gesource.ac.uk/ Humbul http://www.humbul.ac.uk/ PSIgate http://www.psigate.ac.uk/ SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ RDN Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ RDN Case Studies http://www.rdn.ac.uk/casestudies/ Training Materials http://www.rdn.ac.uk/training/ RDN-Include http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rdn-i/ "Search the Internet Find quality Web resources with the Resource Discovery Network" University of Glamorgan Web site page, http://www.glam.ac.uk/findit/elib/internet/search.php/ FERL http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?page=1 How Altis Can Help the Further Education Sector, Ariadne Issue 38, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/altis/ What's in Artifact for Further Education?, Ariadne Issue 38, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/artifact/ Further Education and BIOME, Ariadne Issue 38, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/biome/ What's in EEVL for Further Education?, Ariadne Issue 38, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/eevl/ What's in GEsource for Further Education?, Ariadne Issue 38, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/gesource/ What's in Humbul for Further Education?, Ariadne Issue 38, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/humbul/ What's in PSIgate for Further Education?, Ariadne Issue 38, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/psigate/ What's in SOSIG for Further Education?, Ariadne Issue 38, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/sosig/ Author Details Mark Williams RDN FE Manager, Resource Discovery Network Email: mark.5.williams@kcl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Tel: 020 78482501 Return to top Article Title: "What the Resource Discovery Network is Doing for Further Education" Author: Mark Williams Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/williams/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Buzz data framework database xml portal archives xslt metadata accessibility copyright cataloguing interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Donald Mackay reports on BIOME participation in a major project to enhance interoperability between the BIOME core database and those projected by LTSN Subject Centres.
BIOME is currently participating in a major project to enhance interoperability between the BIOME core database and those being created by our cognate Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Subject Centres.
The partners in the project are the Resource Description Network (RDN) Hubs BIOME and ALTIS and five LTSN centres: Bioscience; Health Sciences and Practice; Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism; Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine; and Psychology.
The overall aim of this project is to provide members of the health and life science communities in the UK with richer and easier access to learning and teaching resources and to act as a starting off point for future Hub/LTSN Subject Centre collaborations.
An interoperability framework will be created that will allow the partners to share data with each other, to create new resource descriptions, to add value to existing Internet resource descriptions (such as reviews and educational levels) and to allow members of our user communities to cross-search all of our catalogues.
The project will use a range of common standards to ensure interoperability between all of the partners.
This will involve the use of a core set of common metadata and the Open Archive Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting as a standard for metadata exchange, ensuring that records from different LTSN subject centres and ALTIS/BIOME will be comparable and can be combined into a single database that can be searched from the Hubs and the Subject Centres.
This work is being undertaken as part of a wider RDN/LTSN project and uses funding that has been made available by JISC to develop partnership arrangements between LTSN and RDN.
BIOME Web Site Developments BIOME will soon be introducing some changes to the look and feel of our site and to our search interface.
Because of increasing popularity, (from 30,000 page returns per month in 1995 to 1.7 million per month in 2003), our old search interface was starting to suffer under the weight of searches that it had to handle.
We decided therefore to introduce a new search interface to coincide with the increase in searches that occurs at the beginning of each academic year.
In light of ever changing Internet accessibility and other standards we have also decided to introduce a new content management system.
This uses XML and XSLT (eXstensible Style Language Transformations) to enable us make our gateways more accessible and easier to update.
We took advantage of this situation to introduce some new features and to change slightly some existing parts of the site.
This was partly in response to user feedback obtained during our recent Portal focus groups, (summary to be made available on our Web page in the near future) and also in response to previous user comments about the look and feel of the site.
These new aspects include a new wildcard feature in our search interface, (to replace the existing automatic stemming) and the ability to sort results by a range of options.
As a service we are keen to make sure that these changes reflect the needs of our users and to find out what other aspects of our Web pages and service can be further developed or improved.
If you have any comments or suggestions about the new search interface or about any other aspect of our service, please let us know.
You can contact us through our e-mail address at help@biome.ac.uk We look forward to hearing from you!
Author Details Donald Mackay Service Manager BIOME Email: dmm@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Interoperability for Learning and Teaching” Author: Donald Mackay Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Buzz cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Hall reports on recent news from BIOME, the Health and Life Sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network .
OMNI Is 10 Years Old!
Happy birthday to OMNI [1], our medical gateway.
OMNI (Organised Medical Information Network) was launched in November 1995 as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme (ELib) [2] in response to the increasing pressures on UK university library resources and the explosion in uncontrolled and unorganised information resources on the Internet.
Internet resources were selected for their quality and relevance to a particular audience and this was the subject gateway approach.
Like the other eLib gateways, OMNI proved to be popular and served 30,000 page views in its first month alone.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [3] decided to develop a national Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [4] with a view to deliver, in time, comprehensive and coordinated subject coverage across the whole UK Higher and Further Education subject range.
From this BIOME [5] was created in 1999 to become a hub for the health and life sciences and not just medicine.
Last month saw BIOME serve 3 million page views.
With a catalogue of over 30,000 records now and a strong user base, its success and popularity is a testament to the hard work and commitment of staff and stakeholders.
Check out the article about OMNI in the first edition of Ariadne [6] from 1996.
Changes at BIOME BIOME has a new Service Manager.
Jackie Wickham started in mid-October and we are delighted to have her on board.
Jackie started her career in public libraries in Nottingham.
She has worked in health information for patients and the public since 1989 and set up one of the first telephone health information services.
The last four years has seen Jackie in a national role as Head of Health Information for NHS Direct.
References OMNI Home page http://omni.ac.uk/ Electronic Libraries Programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ RDN http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ BIOME http://biome.ac.uk/ Ariadne issue 1, January 1996 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue1/ Author Details Jenny Hall BIOME Admin Officer Email: jh@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Jenny Hall Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ECDL 2007 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ECDL 2007 Buzz data software framework database wireless xml infrastructure metadata thesaurus accessibility tagging identifier vocabularies repositories preservation windows multimedia linux aggregation ocr ontologies ebook dcmi dspace interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Mahendra Mahey, Emma Tonkin and Robert John Robertson report on the 2007 European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, held in Budapest, Hungary, over 16-22 September, 2007.
This was the first time this event was held in the majestic and architecturally impressive city of Budapest.
It was organised by The Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) [1] and held at the Europa Congress Centre.
The event brought together a very mixed group of people from computer scientists, researchers, librarians, professors and managers.
There were over 200 participants, from 36 countries.
There were a total of 119 full paper submissions of which 36 were accepted after peer review, giving an acceptance rate of 30%.
Also 24 poster / demo submissions and another 15 papers from the full paper submissions were accepted for poster presentation and publication in the proceedings volume.
The papers were organised into the following areas: ontologies, digital libraries and the Web, models, multimedia and multilingual digital libraries, grid and peer-to-peer, preservation, user interfaces, document linking, information retrieval, personal information management, new Digital Library applications, and user studies.
The proceedings from the conference are available on the Web [2], although access may be restricted and dependent on the subscription that your institution or organisation holds.
Sunday Tutorials For those that arrived early at the conference they we were able to attend all day tutorials on the Sunday.
Brief reports follow on the sessions we were able to attend.
Thesauri and Ontologies Dagobert Soergel, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland The morning session examined the structure and use in knowledge-based assistance to users using thesauri and ontologies in digital libraries.
There was a general introduction, looking at some of the main challenges for digital libraries, e.g.
improving the retrieval effectiveness to handle the sheer mass of material and how thesauri, ontologies and taxonomies are needed to support such functions together with an overview of thesauri functions.
There was also a look at thesaurus structure, the implementation and evaluation of thesauri (using Yahoo's classification as an example), resources available and then other examples of classifications and thesauri e.g.
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT).
The afternoon session looked at the design, evaluation, and development of systems based on thesauri and ontologies.
It examined the process of thesauri construction and how a conceptual structure is developed by examining facet analysis and the rules for the selection of preferred terms and concepts as descriptors.
Then we carried out an activity based on developing a conceptual structure using facets.
The session concluded by examining the structure and processing of thesauri data, specifically the interoperability of thesauri and ontologies, the structure of a thesaurus/ontology database, the forms of Knowledge Organisation Systems and a look at thesauri software and evaluation.
Approaches for Large-scale Digital Library Infrastructures by Example Thomas Risse and Claudia Niederée, L3S Research Center, Carlo Meghini, CNR-ISTI, and Heiko Schuldt, University of Basel The organisers addressed various key issues facing large-scale digital library infrastructure that have been examined in two EU-funded initiatives (the BRICKS Project [3] and the Digital Library Management System strand of the DELOS Project [4].
One of the goals of their work which they presented has been to investigate the possibility of dynamic digital library infrastructure.
This has fallen into four main areas: the development of a Service-Oriented Architecture approach to the creation of digital library services, peer-to-peer hosting and discovery of such services, the development of a tool to support the dynamic creation of virtual collections, and the development of the high-level software tools needed to support the three other goals.
The tutorial explored the issues and reasons for these goals and local versions of the prototype tools were demonstrated.
Introduction to (Teaching and Learning about) Digital Libraries An all-day tutorial run by Edward A.
Fox, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech The second half of the tutorial addressed two main areas: the application of the 5S model [5] and work on the development of a digital library curriculum [6].
A case study was presented that used the 5S model to support interoperability mapping between a group of archaeological digital libraries.
Other applications of the model presented included using the model to examine repository quality and create a template to install and configure DSpace.
The work on the development of a digital library curriculum followed on from this neatly and presented the progress of a NSF-funded project to map out a course of study on digital libraries.
The composition of the curriculum has been based on numbers of papers presented at key digital library conferences and articles in targeted journals.
It should become a key point of reference for educators interested in the area.
Keynote Sessions There were two keynote sessions this year, delivered on the mornings of Monday 17 and Tuesday 18 September.
Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries Professor Seamus Ross, Director, HATII Seamus Ross, Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation, and Director of Humanities Computing and Information Management at the University of Glasgow, runs HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) of which he is the founding director.
He is also Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre in the UK (since 2004), a co-principal investigator in the DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence (since 2002), Principal Director of Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) (since 2006).
Seamus gave an interesting overview of the use of preservation (starting from the 17th century) to the role of digital libraries (especially over the past twenty years) in digital preservation.
He argued that digital libraries, whether commercial, public or personal, lie at the heart of the information society.
He then went on to demonstrate that there has been little research into the long-term sustainability and meaningful accessibility of content from digital libraries.
He also presented the case that much more work was needed on the actual theories, methods, and technologies that can either foster or ensure digital longevity.
Seamus outlined the key research challenges, theoretical, methodological, and technological requiring attention from researchers in digital libraries during the coming years.
Seamus concluded that digital preservation in digital libraries needs to be based on a theoretical framework of archival science if DLs are to retain long-term viability at the centre of the information society.
The full transcript of his presentation is available [7].
Wi-Fi Trondheim: An Experiment in Providing Broadband Everywhere for All Professor Arne Sølvberg, Department of Computer Science, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway Professor Sølvberg is also Dean of NTNU's Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering.
He is chair of the Board of Wi-Fi Trondheim.
On the second day of the conference Arne gave a keynote presentation on Wi-Fi Trondheim [8], which allows users full Wi-Fi access throughout Trondheim.
Arne Solverberg described how they had 'carpet-bombed' Trondheim with wireless devices so that as many people as possible could have wireless access.
This was a very impressive demonstration of collaboration funded between the University, the City Council, the County, the local bank, the local electricity provider, and the local newspaper.
He envisaged that broadband connectivity to everyone in Trondheim (population over 161, 000) would be a reality by 2009.
Arne then went on to present some of the technical, business, regulatory, as well as service provision challenges involved.
One interesting question focused on the reaction of local Internet Service Providers to this project, and how threatened they felt by it.
Highlights from Monday to Wednesday In addition to the two keynote sessions, there were several parallel sessions that were delivered over 3 days that covered the following topics: ontologies, digital libraries and the Web, panel discussion on the experiences of several European projects examining different aspects of digital libraries (BRICKS, TEL, MICHAEL and DELOS), as well as topics such as Multimedia and Multilingual Digital Libraries, Grid and Peer-to-Peer, Preservation, User Interfaces, and Digital Libraries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Mention should also be made of: Infrastructure Challenges for the New Europe, Document Linking, Information Retrieval, Personal Information Management, New DL Applications and User Studies.
Of course we were not able to attend all the sessions and you are able to see the full papers in the proceedings of the conference [2].
Instead, we have highlighted a few presentations that caught our eye over these three days.
Multimedia & Multilingual Digital Libraries Chair: Vittore Casarosa One particular presentation by Riccardo Miotto and Nicola Orio on the Automatic Identification of Music Works through Audio Matching was fascinating.
The project looked at thousands of recordings of rehearsals for classical concerts that have no metadata.
The study was trying to identify 'fingerprints' of performances (for which there are metadata) and trying to use them to match metadata with recordings of rehearsals where no descriptions exist, therefore automatically classifying them.
The presenters also discussed possible commercial applications of their work.
Preservation Chair: Seamus Ross One paper in particular stood out, partly because of the catchy title: Opening Schrödingers Library: Semi-automatic QA Reduces Uncertainty in Object Transformation.
This paper, by Lars R. Clausen of the State and University Library in Århus, Denmark, describes an approach to semi-automated quality assurance and applications designed to support the goals of preservation.
Poster and Demo Session The poster session began by employing the successful format in which each poster presenter is permitted a few sentences describing their work referred to in some conferences as 'one-minute madness'.
Posters showcased ideas, developments and work in progress from various fields, from social tagging to repositories and services.
However the primary value of the session for participants was probably the lively discussions that took place between participants, and with delegates in general.
38 posters and demos were accepted for the conference, a full list is available [9].
New Digital Library Applications Chair: Hussesin Suleman This session contained three papers on the theme of novel applications in the digital library sphere.
The first described an OCR-free approach of establishing layout similarity measurements for pages, information which can be employed as a novel retrieval metric.
The second discussed assessment techniques for data integrity in the scientific digital library context.
The third, by Hussein Suleman, discussed the Bleek and Lloyd collection, a set of books and drawings that document the language and culture of some Bushman groups in Southern Africa, which was designed to employ no database technologies due to preservation concerns XML-based records were employed instead.
Scalability was described as a principal limiting factor in employing this strategy.
Personal Information Management Chair: Edward A.
Fox One particular presentation stood out for its applicability to everyone at the conference and anyone that uses a computer with a desktop.
This was the presentation on the way we organise our desktops and folder structures, 'Personal Environment Management' by Anna Zacchi and Frank Shipman from Texas A&M University.
It was clear that this was of interest to the whole audience and the results showed that there is great variance in the way we organise our desktops.
The presenter showed very different desktops, on a range of different operating systems (Windows, OSX and Linux).
It was fascinating to see how much one's desktop tells us about the individual; one would not necessarily wish to have one's own desktop so analysed!
Official Conference Dinner The official conference dinner was held on a cruise ship on the blue Danube, although at that time of day the river in fact looked very nearly black.
The view from the conference dinner cruise ship, Budapest, Hungary.
Conference Finale As is tradition at ECDL, the official conference finale involved presentations and awards to the best paper and best poster.
This year the winner of the best paper was Investigating Document Triage on Paper and Electronic Media by George Buchanan and Fernando Loizides from the Future Interaction Technology Laboratory, University of Wales, Swansea.
Document triage is the decision that is made in information-seeking when the user first decides on the relevance of a document to the information required.
The award of the best poster was shared jointly between: Location and Format Independent Distributed Annotations for Collaborative Research by Fabio Corubolo, Paul B. Watry and John Harrison of the University of Liverpool and EOD European Network of Libraries for eBooks on Demand by Zoltán Mezõ, Sonja Svolšjak and Silvia Gstrein of the National Széchényi Library, Budapest, Hungary, National University Library, Ljubljana, Slovenia and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, respectively.
Workshops Towards a European Repository Ecology Workshop The repository ecology workshop was organised by Robert John Robertson and Mahendra Mahey.
The purpose of the workshop was to enable delegates to explore how the ecology metaphor can be applied to examine how users, repositories, and services interact within an information environment.
The concept of a repository ecology was presented along with illustrative examples of repository ecologies drawn from different domains.
Throughout the day there were also presentations from researchers about their own understanding and interpretation of the repository ecology from their domain or area of work.
There were presentations from: Phil Barker: Cross-Search Aggregation Service Management: a case study of a habitat in the repository ecology Panayiota Polydoratou: Aspects of repositories use: employing an ecology-based approach to report on user requirements in chemistry and the biosciences Caroline Drury: Building the foundations of an ecology Wolfram Horstmann: The Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research in a repository ecology or Why DRIVER is not a pond!
Delegates in the workshop were given very practical activities which involved the identification of: components in a repository ecology; opportunities for interaction; and gaps in the ecology.
Delegates were then encouraged to produce a model of their ecology and present it to the group, as can be seen below: A model of a repository ecology showing how presentations are disseminated after a conference using various Web 2.0 technologies, repositories, and overlay journals.
Further information about this workshop is available [10].
NKOS Workshop This year's Networked Knowledge Organisation Systems (NKOS) workshop was the sixth European event in the series, which has been held at ECDL in the years 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006.
NKOS events have also been held concurrently with JCDL and DCMI conferences.
The programme covered a number of topics.
The day began with several presentations in the area of social tagging, including a literature review in the area by Ali Shiri and two pieces of work in the area of exploration of patterns of tag use.
Next came a panel on the topic of ISO NP 25964 structured vocabularies for information retrieval, revising existing international standards for monolingual and multilingual thesauri.
The third section of the day was entitled Implications of online KOS applications, and brought together a discussion of facet analysis by Vanda Broughton and a case study by Michael Panzer discussing the 'webification' of controlled vocabularies so that vocabularies are exposed online as building blocks intended for use and reuse.
The afternoon was principally employed in discussion of semantic mappings between vocabularies and terminologies, together with a presentation by Mateusz Kaczmarek and colleagues, who discussed the possibility of collaboratively building crosswalks between terminologies.
Conclusion The conference was very well organised, and special thanks must go to Magdolna Zsivnovszki and her team from the Department of Distributed System, Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Conferences like this offer a great opportunity to network with people from varied backgrounds and countries.
Our only regret was that we did not get a chance to see the very impressivelooking city of Budapest.
Next year's conference will be held in Aarhus, Denmark from 14 19 September 2008 and will be organised by the State and University Library and Åarhus University [11].
References The Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences MTA SZTAKI http://www.sztaki.hu/ Springer Link http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-540-74850-2/ BRICKS Building resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services http://www.brickscommunity.org/ Delos DLMS Prototype http://dbis.cs.unibas.ch/delos_website/delosdlms.html 5S Model/5S Language http://www.dlib.vt.edu/projects/5S-Model/ DL Curriculum Project Homepage http://curric.dlib.vt.edu/ Seamus Ross, Keynote speech at ECDL 2007 http://www.ecdl2007.org/Keynote_ECDL2007_SROSS.pdf Wi-Fi Trondheim http://www.tradlosetrondheim.no/ Posters and demo sessions at ECDL 2007 http://www.ecdl2007.org/postersanddemos.php Towards a European Ecology Workshop at ECDL 2007 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/ECDL2007Workshop:Towards_an_European_repository_ecology ECDL 2008 in Åarhus, Denmark http://www.ecdl2008.org/ Author Details Mahendra Mahey Repositories Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/ Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Robert John Robertson Repositories Research Officer (JISC CETIS), Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement University of Strathclyde Email: robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/ Return to top Article Title: "ECDL 2007: Budapest, Hungary" Author: Mahendra Mahey, Emma Tonkin and Robert John Robertson Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/ecdl-2007-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: QA Focus Has Finished Let's Start Embedding QA Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: QA Focus Has Finished Let's Start Embedding QA Buzz data software framework html infrastructure archives metadata digitisation uri licence interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly reviews the JISC-funded QA Focus Project and argues that developers should be using quality assurance principles.
About QA Focus The JISC-funded QA Focus Project officially finished on 31 July 2004.
The project, which started on 1 January 2002, supported JISC’s digital library programmes.
QA Focus developed a quality assurance (QA) framework which could be used by projects funded by JISC’s Information Environment programmes to ensure that project deliverables were functional, widely accessible and interoperable.
The quality assurance framework was supported by a wide range of briefing documents which provided brief, focussed advice on use of standards and best practices in a range of areas including selection of standards, digitisation, Web, metadata, software and service deployment.
In addition to the briefing documents QA Focus published a range of case studies which described the approaches taken by projects themselves in the use of standards and best practices.
During 2002 the QA Focus Project was provided by UKOLN in conjunction with ILRT (Institute for Learning and Research Technology).
However, following ILRT’s decision to refocus on their core activities, the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) replaced ILRT from January 2003 until the end of the project.
QA Focus Deliverables The key deliverable was a lightweight quality assurance framework.
The QA framework is based on a requirement for documented policies which describe the technical architecture for project’s technical infrastructure together with systematic compliance checking procedures which will ensure that the policies are being implemented correctly.
The development of this methodology recognised the resource constraints which projects are likely to face and so was deliberately designed to be easy to understand and simple to implement.
The methodology is described in the Summary of the QA Focus Methodology briefing document on the QA Focus Web site [1].
The QA framework is supported by over 70 briefing documents which provide advice covering the need for particular standards, brief details of approaches to using them and ways and means of ensuring the standards are used correctly.
The briefing documents are available from the QA Focus Web site [1], in Microsoft Word and HTML formats as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: QA Focus Briefing Documents As well as the briefing documents over 30 case studies have been published which describe the approaches taken by the projects themselves to implementing best practices.
The briefing documents, case studies, together with related resources have been brought together in a series of QA Focus Handbooks [2] which are designed to provide comprehensive advice in a form suitable for printing.
The eight handbooks range in length from 13 to 82 pages, which provides an indication of the wide coverage of the resources.
Validating Our Approach During the development of the QA framework the QA Focus team sought to validate their approaches by presenting their work at several peer-reviewed conferences.
This included presentations at the EUNIS 2003 Conference in July 2003, the ichim03 Conference in September 2003, the IADIS Internet/WWW 2003 Conference in November 2003, the Online Information 2003 conference in December 2003 and the ECDL 2004 conference in September 2004.
These papers, together with accompanying slides, are also available from the QA Focus Web site [3].
Embedding QA Although QA Focus was funded to support JISC’s digital library programmes, we recognised that QA was more likely to be embedded as a normal part of development processes if QA was integrated within the development culture of the organisation hosting the project.
We therefore sought to give presentations and run seminars not only at events aimed specifically for JISC projects but also the wider community.
In particular we ran workshops on QA at the Institutional Web Management Workshops in 2003 [4] and 2004 [5] and described the approach to QA in several workshops organised for the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs).
Although much valuable advice is provided in the briefing documents, due to the variety of approaches which projects are likely to take (due to their differing aims, technical environments, etc.)
the documents cannot provide specific advice but have to be general.
There is a danger that the advice may be read without the principles being implemented in an appropriate fashion.
In order to help to embed QA in project development processes we have developed a series of online toolkits which aim to provide some level of interactivity.
The toolkits currently cover selection of standards, best practices for Web sites, mothballing Web sites and use of metadata.
An example of an online toolkit is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: QA Focus Online Toolkit The intention is that the project-specific responses to the issues raised in the toolkit will be addressed by the project in, say, project reports to the project funders, within the project’s advisory or steering group or with the project’s peers.
Rather than provide detailed answers to the issues covered, the toolkit provides links to relevant QA Focus resources which proffer examples of the issues which projects will need to address.
Licence for Use of QA Resources The funding for the QA Focus Project finished on 31 July 2004.
Although no further funding is available to provide support to JISC programmes, we intend to use the resources and the methodology we have developed for the benefit of the communities we support.
In addition we are seeking to maximise the impact of the QA Focus deliverables.
We intend to make the QA Focus briefing documents available under a Creative Commons licence [6] which will allow the documents to be updated, copied and distributed for non-commercial use provided that acknowledgements are given to UKOLN and AHDS.
We feel this will help to ensure that the benefits of the JISC funding are maximised and will avoid others having to repeat the work we have carried out.
This should be of particular benefit to sectors such as the museums, libraries and archives communities as UKOLN is well-placed to ensure that this sector is made aware of these resources.
We are currently clarifying legal issues to ensure that this licence can be provided (for example we still need to ensure that we can provide a Creative Commons licence for the small number of briefing documents which were commissioned).
Once this has been done we intend that the briefing documents will include licence details along the lines illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Creative Common Licences for QA Focus Briefing Documents What Next?
The QA Focus Project has successfully developed a quality assurance methodology which can be used to support digital library development programmes.
A range of support documents are available, together with advice of simple tools which can be used for testing Web sites (see, for example, details of the URL-interface to Web validation tools [7]).
We hope that that the work described in this article will be of interest to a wider community, such as Web developers in the UK Higher and Further Education sectors and the cultural heritage sectors.
An example of the perceived value of the work can be gauged from a comment given by a participant at the QA for Web Sites Workshop held at the Institutional Web Management Workshop at the University of Birmingham in July 2004: Without doubt I found this to be the most useful thing of the entire workshop.
Practical and thought through fully.
I think, without doubt, this will be the area [QA] of our Website which will benefit the most from attending the workshop.
We look forward to the wider community exploiting the methodology and resources which have been developed thanks to the JISC funding.
Acknowledgements As project leader for QA Focus I would like to thank JISC for funding the project, JISC staff including Caroline Ingram (during the early days of the project) and Rachel Bruce and Balviar Notay, together with Karla Youngs and Ed Bremner of ILRT for their involvement in the first year of the project and the QA Focus project officers: Marieke Guy and Amanda Closier (UKOLN) and Gareth Knight and Hamish James (AHDS).
References QA Focus Web site, QA Focus, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/ QA Focus Handbooks, QA Focus, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/handbook/ QA Focus Papers, QA Focus, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/ QA For Web Sites What Goes Wrong And How Can We Prevent It?, Workshop at Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/sessions/closier/ Catching Mistakes: QA For Your Web Site, Workshop at Institutional Web Management Workshop 2003 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2003/sessions/guy/ Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ A URI Interface To Web Testing Tools, QA Focus Briefing Document No.
59, QA Focus, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-59/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Web Focus: QA Focus Has Finished Let’s Start Embedding QA” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Net Effects Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Net Effects Buzz rss archives accessibility blog repositories preservation cataloguing research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Grant Young reviews a compilation of articles showcasing librarians' efforts to wrest control of new technologies and reassert some traditional values.
Marylaine Block will be well-known to many readers of Ariadne perhaps chiefly for her 'Neat New Stuff' and ExLibris bulletins.
As its name suggests, 'Neat New Stuff' is a weekly compilation of noteworthy sites Block has discovered in her Web crawling.
Her other weekly online publication, ExLibris, is an 'e-zine' containing interesting and provocative articles, reviews and tidbits of information from Block and others.
If you were setting out to do this kind of current awarenessand consciousness-raising these days, you'd probably choose to set up a blog with RSS feed.
However, Block has been doing this kind of thing since the mid-nineties well before blogging and she's stuck to more or less the same formula, because it works well.
Marylaine Block is an expert Web searcher and is, herself, a searcher's delight.
There's no need for me to provide hyperlinks to her work: simply type 'Marylaine' into any search engine and you'll bring up numerous links (a consequence of her being so well enmeshed in the Web and having such an uncommon first name).
In addition to her own extensive online presence, Block is a frequent contributor to other publications, (electronic and print) and a popular speaker on the North American library conference circuit.
Marylaine Block labels herself a 'writer, Internet trainer, "Librarian without walls"' so I was interested to discover that some of her Web-writing was now contained within book covers and shelved on library stacks.
Although Block is the editor of Net Effects, a compilation of more than fifty articles by as many different authors, this is very much her work.
The articles are carefully selected and arranged to address issues she identifies, are introduced by her and, where necessary, brought up to date.
Seven of the articles are written by Block herself, (most of these are from ExLibris).
This is no criticism Block's work is provocative and well-written and, as she says, 'I have only tried to use my own work when I couldn't find anybody other than me proposing a solution'.
Net Effects is structured around problems and solutions.
The Internet may be a wonderful thing, Block says, but it has brought about many 'unintended consequences' or negative 'side effects'.
Let's run through those covered in this book (my paraphrasing): librarians have lost control over the selection process (Chapter 1); the book is in decline (Chapter 2); library users lack good reference skills (Chapter 3); library staff lack good information technology skills (Chapter 7) or are stuck in their old ways (Chapter 4); the new Internet technologies are too expensive (Chapter 6), they pose accessibility or legal issues (Chapters 5 and 8), and they present a preservation nightmare (Chapter 9).
To X-Z-generation librarians these might sound like headlines from library tabloids or the rants of the neo-Luddite fraternity, but, Block argues, they're issues that we should be taking seriously and are being addressed in very creative ways by librarians.
This book is neither a catalogue of woes, nor a radical manifesto for change, but rather a showcase of some of the pragmatic solutions that librarians have tried.
Net Effects has a consistent pattern: problem stated, various solutions offered, references to further information or readings.
The latter are extended further by pages on Block's Web site, which are intended to complement her book (if you want to get a sense of the book's content, look up these pages [1]).
This book had its genesis in an ExLibris article Block wrote in 2001.
This is reproduced in her introduction and can also be found online [2]: 'Planning for Side Effects: The Case for Semi-Luddite Management.'
The original Luddites, Block argues, were right about some things.
They knew that when the new technologies came along there would be new groups of winners and losers and that they were likely to be among the losers.
Block is certainly not advocating that librarians should adopt a Luddite position most of the librarian-writers in this book are innovators and early adopters but she is suggesting that we befriend our Luddite colleagues, take them to lunch, listen to what they say, because they'll help us to recognise the unintended side effects of the technologies we are embracing.
What, then, of the solutions offered?
As these articles have been collected from other contexts rather than commissioned for the purpose, they do not necessarily address the problems head-on.
But they do all, to varying extents, illustrate an approach or a partial solution to the issue Block has identified.
Her selection is generally very good.
While there is little from the extremes, (revolutionary or reactionary) and nothing much in the way of polemic, (counter-posed solutions), there is much good, practical advice to be had.
Don't be put off by the first chapter, which seems to suggest a few solutions that are beyond ordinary means.
Want to regain control over library selection?, it asks, then build something like JSTOR, boss your journal vendors around, or band together with other librarians to build a better version of Yahoo!
(the Fiat Lux proposal of a couple of years back).
As well as containing some very big ideas, Net Effects includes many small solutions that are easy to implement and quite obvious when you think about it.
See, for example, Block's article 'Reference as a teachable moment' (pp.
76-79), which reminds us that it's not much more effort to explain to our users how we arrived at the answer we're giving them and it means they take away a lot more from their reference encounter.
While Net Effects contains much of interest and value, the reader cannot expect to find every article of relevance or use.
Many of these articles will be of more interest to public librarians; others, to special or academic librarians.
As all of the writing is from North America, parts of this book will be of less relevance to British librarians, especially Chapter 8, which covers legal issues such as filtering or the Patriot Act.
I read the entire book in preparation for this review.
While this proved a worthwhile experience, few other readers are likely to do the same.
It is a book to dip into.
'Think of this as an idea book,' Block writes in her introduction, and it seems to me that this is exactly what it is and where its value lies.
As a compilation of previously published work, Net Effects also represents a valuable archive of some very good writing by librarians from the late 90s and the new century.
Although its primary intention may be to spark ideas, it additionally forms a useful record of past achievements, detailing, for example, the origins of institutions like JSTOR (Ron Chepesiuk, pp.20-27) and the 'one city, one book' reading programmes that have become popular in recent years (Nancy Pearl, pp.49-50).
It documents many key moments and movements in the early history of the Web, such as the debates over journal subscriptions, the open source movement and the establishment of scholarly repositories.
Inevitably, over time, a book like this will become much more of a historical record and much less of a to-do book.
When Net Effects was published (September 2003), approximately 40% of the articles were more than two years old.
Now (mid-2004), this figure will be nearer 75%.
However, had the articles been especially commissioned rather than collected, this book would have been all of one moment and, I suspect, likely to have dated more quickly.
When reading Net Effects readers will certainly want to check the publication date (which should probably have been put at the beginning of the articles rather than the end).
They may need to do a little research to check on the outcome or progress of the matters discussed.
But they should not dismiss the work too quickly as out-dated.
While some of the information is very timeand context-specific, a great deal of it is generic and highly transferable.
References Home page for Net Effects: These pages, designed as a bonus for readers .., feature links to sites recommended by the editor.
http://marylaine.com/book/ Ex Libris--an E-Zine for Librarians and Information Junkies issue 112 http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib112.html Author Details Grant Young Technical Research Officer Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol Email: grant.young@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Net Effects" Author: Grant Young Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/young-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After Buzz data software framework wiki api html database wireless portfolio rss portal infrastructure archives metadata firefox digitisation standardisation tagging browser vocabularies schema blog repositories copyright flickr preservation oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 visualisation cache aggregation e-learning copac ontologies personalisation vle openurl curation dspace sru eportfolio itunes crm e-research rae authentication uportal url taxonomy research netvibes Citation BibTex RIS Lorcan Dempsey considers how the digital library environment has changed in the ten years since Ariadne was first published.
We have recently come through several decennial celebrations: the W3C, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, D-Lib Magazine, and now Ariadne.
What happened clearly in the mid-nineties was the convergence of the Web with more pervasive network connectivity, and this made our sense of the network as a shared space for research and learning, work and play, a more real and apparently achievable goal.
What also emerged at least in the library and research domains was a sense that it was also a propitious time for digital libraries to move from niche to central role as part of the information infrastructure of this new shared space.
However, the story did not quite develop this way.
We have built digital libraries and distributed information systems, but they are not necessarily central.
A new information infrastructure has been built, supported by technical development and new business models.
The world caught up and moved on.
What does this mean for the library and the digital library?
In this article I will spend a little time looking at the environment in the early and mid-nineties, but this is really a prelude to thinking about where we are today, and saying something about libraries, digital libraries and related issues in the context of current changes.
Because, in a tidy calendrical symmetry, we are now again at a turning point.
Ten years ago we saw the convergence of the human-readable Web with increased connectivity.
This time, we are seeing the convergence of communicating applications and more pervasive, broadband connectivity.
We are seeing the emergence of several large gravitational hubs of information infrastructure (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, iTunes, ...), the streamlining of workflow and process integration in a Web services idiom, and new social and service possibilities in a flatter network world.
The world is flatter because computing and communications is more pervasive of our working and learning lives: we create, share and use digital content and services.
I focus on the UK, given Ariadne's scope, but will draw in other examples as appropriate.
The Ariadne story, and the UK digital library story, mesh with the JISC story in various ways.
The JISC development agenda brings together digital libraries, e-learning, and e-research, reflecting the broad entry of academic activities into a network space over this time.
One of the main stories of this period is how the library will develop to support changed research and learning behaviours.
As I am focusing on libraries, I will discuss these changes in the context of their impact on the library.
Here is how this article develops: I talk about the library environment ten years ago; this includes a look at the digital library programmes of the time.
Then I spend some time talking about the environment in which libraries now have to work, before looking at the current library situation and some trends.
Finally, I return to some thoughts about 'project' working, leading up to a brief conclusion.
Yesterday: A Decade Ago A New Foundation: The Programmatic Perspective Our early sense of digital libraries or virtual libraries or electronic libraries was heavily influenced by several funding programmes.
In the early and mid-nineties, the sense of digital library potential received programmatic amplification through funded initiatives within the European Union, through the Digital Library Initiatives of the NSF in the US, and, here in the UK, through the Electronic Libraries Programme of JISC, colloquially known as eLib.
Because of their foundational nature these programmes were more visibly momentous than their many successor initiatives: they galvanised the discussion about the electronic library, they created high expectations for change, and they corroborated with a flourish the growing recognition that living in the network world was going to be different.
We are now used to thinking about 'grand challenges'; these were 'grand responses' [1][2][3].
The planning for these programmes began several years before the decade of interest here.
The first EU call for proposals in the libraries area was as far back as July 1991.
The motivating framework for this and later calls was established in the Libraries Action Plan, a document first circulated in 1988.
A further Libraries Work Programme was developed in 1994.
The Follett Report, which released the funding for eLib, was published in 1993, and eLib had calls for proposals in 1994 and 1995.
These programmes had very different emphases and motivations.
The NSF digital library initiative had a research focus.
The EU Libraries Programme aimed to facilitate change, but was spread across many European countries.
The impact of eLib was felt very strongly in the UK.
What they shared was a competitive project-based approach, remorseless generation of acronyms, and a pre-production focus.
It is difficult to assess their impact, except to say that it is diffuse.
Of course, one could point to some specific outcomes.
Certainly, Index Data and Fretwell Downing Informatics participated in EU and JISC projects, and some of their products are influenced by that participation.
One might wonder to what extent eLib project funding supported some of the product development in BIDS (Bath Information and Data Services) that later showed up in Ingenta.
EU projects certainly supported some of the intellectual work on formats and protocols, for example in early EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) work between libraries and the book trade.
Further exploration of this question is not my purpose here, however interesting it might be.
These programmes definitely provided learning opportunities for involved staff, and a general frame of reference for community discussion.
What I will suggest though, and return to below, is that this project-based focus is a very inefficient way of achieving systemic state-of-the-art change, a goal that the EU and JISC, with their more applied focus, certainly have.
Chris Rusbridge interestingly contrasts the 'development' focus of eLib with the more research focus of the DLI projects in a D-Lib article discussing 'the hybrid library', a term he originated [4].
The later NSDL programme from NSF shows more of this 'development' emphasis, as it aims to build services for education.
Reductively, one can identify two overarching and linked themes for much of this work, and, indeed, for much subsequent work in the digital library arena.
The first I will call discovery to delivery (D2D).
This looks at services which mediate access between a user and a distributed library resource, which streamline supply chains, and which focus on user-oriented process integration.
Here cluster issues of resource discovery, linking, and requesting.
Topics which have emerged over the years are search/metasearch, portals/brokers, federation, and, later, harvesting and resolution.
There has been much work on metadata formats and protocols for search and request.
Some of this activity built on earlier work.
For example, in the early nineties there was a strong EU focus on OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) and on developing an OSI protocol framework for library applications.
Certainly, a major issue for EUfunded projects was the move away from OSI and towards the Internet and its associated protocols.
This activity saw the emergence of several niche library protocols, notably ISO-ILL and Z39.50, developed in an OSI framework [5].
This probably limited their more widespread adoption later with significant implications for the development of distributed library systems.
One can also note a focus on metadata, and exploration of a range of approaches, notably Dublin Core, initiated in 1995 [6].
The second theme is repository and content management, where the dominant emphasis is on managing large repositories of digital content, and on making it available in various ways.
This emphasis developed later, evolving alongside the growing availability of digital materials whether those were born digital or reborn digital (converted from another format).
A more recent interest, then, is integrating emerging repository infrastructures with the evolving discovery to delivery apparatus.
This is in line with the trajectory in this period from a focus on metadata (as the materials of interest were still largely print) to a focus on full-blown digital environments.
Chris Rusbridge's hybrid library article charts the interests through Phases 1 and 2 of eLib and into Phase 3.
Phases 1 and 2 focused on electronic publishing, learning and teaching (on demand publishing and electronic reserve), and access to resources (subject gateways and document delivery), as well as on training and awareness, and on some supporting studies.
Phase 3 focused on the hybrid library as an integrating strategy, and on digital preservation (these two strands echo the D2D and content management emphases I mention above).
So, it is interesting that these initiatives were planned before the real emergence of the Web, that they spoke about a need to find shared ways of addressing needs in a time of real change, and they established a project-based funding culture.
Interestingly, the Follett Report which motivated eLib does not mention the Web at all.
They highlighted the challenge of designing and building new services, and they galvanised discussion of what virtual, digital, or electronic libraries were.
I was closely involved with the EU and eLib programmes, as a programme and call drafter, evaluator, bidder, project reviewer and project participant.
I had little direct involvement with the original NSF programme, but had some later contacts at project and programme level.
Looking back, I take away five things from these foundational programmes, particularly from the eLib and EU programmes: They were major learning experiences for participants, many of whom have gone on to do important work in the library community.
They showed that the development of new services depends on organisational and business changes that it is difficult for project-based programmes to bring about.
This is a continuing issue.
Many of the assumptions about technical architecture, service models and user behaviours in emerging digital library developments were formed pre-Web.
In particular, we have become accustomed to a model within which presentation, application and data are tightly integrated.
This restricts data flow and system communication leading to a silo environment which looks increasingly at odds with our flatter network world.
The distributed approaches developed in this period have not been widely adopted in end-user services: they have a B2B pre-webby feel and are mostly used in that context.
Their impact has been diffuse and indirect, and is difficult to assess.
Compared to the overall number of deliverables, there is a small number of ongoing products or services which are direct project outcomes.
In fact, many of their goals have been moved forward independently in the commercial sector.
See, for example, current developments in metasearch and the collections of digitised historic materials which are available commercially.
How does one transfer innovation into routine service?
Certainly, alongside the project work there was service innovation in the JISC environment, but it flowed from central planning.
Libraries Yesterday: Libraries, Networks and Services What about actual library services and organisation during this 'digital library decade'.
Think system-wide and think local.
System-wide, there was an ambition to achieve systemic change in how information services were provided as part of the wider provision of research and learning support [7][8].
Infrastructure was developed at various levels to help create system-wide efficiencies.
This included a national authentication system, several data centres whose remit was to consolidate hosting of data and services, and also caching and mirroring services.
We also saw consolidated procurement, management and delivery of information services at a national level.
Some of these were licensed third-party databases, made available through the data centres, and some were research materials curated at discipline-specific data services.
Resource discovery services were also put in place, through the subject gateways which went on to become the Resource Discovery Network, and through COPAC, the CURL union catalogue which began to receive central funding.
The Archives Hub was added later.
The full range of JISC services is impressive and is looked upon with a mixture of bemusement and envy from elsewhere.
Bemusement because of the ever-changing tangle of committees, projects, people, programmes, and acronyms.
Envy because of the ability to mobilise collective resources to identify and achieve system-wide goals.
One advantage of this approach is that it is a good way of securing infrastructure, an issue that is problematic for environments without this centralised capacity for decision-making and deployment.
Of course, this infrastructure has national boundaries, which will be more of an issue as we move forward.
Service registries provide an example of where it would be good to have international coverage.
At the institutional level, change was more evolutionary than some of the programmatic rhetoric might have suggested.
Systems investment continued to focus on the 'integrated library system'.
The move to more openly available abstracting and indexing services, and then electronic journals, proceeded apace, with support from several JISC initiatives.
The introduction of a shared authentication system in Athens greatly facilitated access to this licensed resource, and created an environment in which publishers and vendors were more comfortable with national deals.
Digital content management initiatives were generally not large scale, and, as noted above, outside some commercial offerings we have seen little large-scale aggregation of digital collections.
It is not until quite recently with the introduction of resolution and metasearch services that machine-to-machine services achieve any prominence in general library activities.
At the same time, there was a general updating of interfaces to the Web environment, but databases remain siloed behind these interfaces.
The common pattern of provision becomes one of multiple Web sites, each relatively standalone with its user interface.
And as I discuss later, this remains the dominant delivery mode, which is increasingly problematic when library users have so many places where they can spend their 'attention'.
Today: The New Environment Let us now fast-forward to the present.
How is the world different at the end of the decade?
We know that academic libraries are not ends in themselves: they support the research, learning and teaching missions of their institutions.
Libraries must co-evolve with changing research and learning behaviours in a new network space.
We tend to focus on the impact of technology on libraries, however the real long-term issue is how technology will influence how library users behave and what they expect.
Here I try and characterise some of the ways in which change in the current environment will affect library responses.
I focus on general systems trends, on the emergence of information infrastructure around long tail aggregators, and on changing user behaviours and patterns of research and learning.
Systems in the Webby World Three broad topics occur to me as I think about systems in the network world.
Here is a summary: Flat Applications and Liquid Content We are moving to a flatter network world, where the gap between the Web and business applications is narrowing.
Applications are working over the Web.
Data is flowing more readily into user environments.
Web services and RSS are important parts of a spreading connective tissue which allows users to compose services in different environments.
In this context, workflows and business processes are being further automated, data is more accessible and malleable, and applications may be more flexibly built and reconfigured from components.
Closely related is the emphasis on open source and on-demand services.
Examples here are services like salesforce.com [9] (the poster child of the on-demand software phenomenon, it provides Customer Relationship Management services) or WebEx [10] (a conferencing and online meeting provider).
The idea here is that rather than installing local instances of an application (CRM or conferencing/meeting management in these two cases respectively) an organisation can use a central, Web-based application.
Potential advantages are lower cost of ownership, less risk, and smoother and more frequent upgrade.
Potential disadvantages include less local customisation and flexibility.
More processes are data-driven.
Activities shed data, and this data is being consolidated and mined for intelligence to drive services and decisions.
Of course, significant applications are still being built, but the ways in which they are articulated and woven into the world of work are changing.
At the same time, content is being unbundled and recombined.
Think how we manage photographs, or music, or TV programmes as pieces which can be recombined: in albums, in playlists, in slideshows, across personal and hosting sites [11].
New Social and Service Affordances Flat applications and liquid content create new opportunities.
Think of three things.
Workflow and process standardisation allows organisations to think about how best to source activities, perhaps outsourcing some activities so as to concentrate on where they most add value.
Organisations are moving away from needing to integrate all their operations vertically.
One way of thinking about this change is to note a progression from database, through Web site/portal, to workflow as the locus of interaction with the Web.
This is a natural consequence of moving more activities on to the network.
New support structures need to be created and these in turn reshape organisations and their activities.
Thomas Davenport describes how this trend is forcing organisations really to focus on what is distinctive about what they do, and source what is less central externally, perhaps even sharing capacity with their rivals [12].
Second, flatter applications and liquid data allow greater collaborative working, maybe through sharing of components, collaboratively sourcing shared activities, or working on shared problems.
Platform services, which consolidate particular functionality or data, may be used by many other applications to build value.
Major network services such as Google, Amazon and eBay, are at once major gravitational hubs for users but are also increasingly platforms upon which others build services.
And finally, we are seeing a great upsurge in social networking services, where a flat connective tissue based on blogs, wikis, IM (Instant Messaging) and other tools create social and communication spaces in which new services are being built.
New Business and Organisational Patterns Business models and organisational structures are co-evolving with the technical developments and new services that they allow.
Again, think of three topics here, which flow from the points made above.
The first is the way in which information resources are flowing onto the network, free at the point of use or available for a small fee.
Google is an intelligent ad placement service: its revenues are overwhelmingly from this source.
It has recently moved to establish a similar role in radio.
The more people use Google to find things, or the more people use other services where Google places ads, the better it is for Google.
Fuelled by this, we are seeing more and more content flow onto the open Web, and, correspondingly, users increasingly expecting to find resources of interest 'on Web', where on-Web means being found in one of the major search engines.
Materials that are 'off-Web' are visible only to the persistent user.
We have to see whether more sophisticated 'vertical' services emerge, which cater for more specific needs, but for the moment the search engines and other large presences are major hubs.
On-demand and platform services supported by automated workflows and process standardisation are becoming more viable options.
In his book, The World is Flat [13],Thomas Friedman charts how these developments are driving business change.
Increasingly, organisations will focus on their strengths, and rely on horisontally specialised third parties for common services.
(Think of how UK Universities rely on a shared authentication service.)
This continued interdependence in a flatter world means that services are increasingly co-created, and this co-creation is extending to the relationship between a service provider and its users.
Think of eBay which provides an infrastructure to bring sellers and buyers together.
Indeed we see a growing experimentation with such co-creation models whether in the form of user-contributed content on Amazon or in various of the social networking services.
Information Hubs, the Long Tail and Attention A distinctive feature of the latter part of the decade has been the emergence of major Internet presences with strong gravitational pull [14].
Think Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay, iTunes.
These services have been developed in a Web environment, and some of their characteristics are: Comprehensive: They offer the user a sufficiently encompassing experience that they need go no further, or do not believe that they need to go further.
Google or Amazon searchers, for example, may believe that they have prospected the full Web, or all the books in print, and even if they do not, they are often disinclined to expend the additional effort required to look elsewhere.
Integrated D2D: They are interested in fulfilment, in ensuring that users leave with what they want.
This means that they integrate services for location, request and deliver into the original discover experience.
On the open Web, this is a matter of minimising clicks.
For other services, it means building appropriate supply chain and workflow support.
So, for example, if you buy something from Amazon, they will try to manage your transactions to fulfilment, and try to keep you informed about progress.
In the background, they have worked hard on the infrastructure necessary to reduce the transaction costs of the discovery to deliver chain, in terms of how they efficiently manage and deliver inventory, in terms of online payment for services, and in terms of trust mechanisms.
Making data work hard: They collect data about use and usage and adapt their services based on this.
There are interested in enhancing your experience, and your connection with them.
Think of how Google and Amazon reflexively use data to modify the service, whether in personalisation features, page ranking, or targeted advertising.
Horizontal: platforms and interfaces.
One issue for these services is that they are 'horizontal' in the sense that they cater for a broad undifferentiated interest.
They attack this through engagement, allowing some individual customisation.
They have explored ways in which they extend their reach by being available in forms which support integration into other workflows.
This may be in the form of toolbars, APIs, RSS feeds and various other affiliate and partner programs.
Their Web interface is important, but it is not the only place that they will rendezvous with their users.
They also allow vertical services to develop on top of their APIs, and this model is likely to continue as these services become background platforms driving many foreground services.
Over time we may see these services deliver much more of their value in other people's applications, which are more targeted to particular needs.
Think of the variety of ways in which Amazon data and services are available.
A co-created experience.
Many large Internet presences involve the user in the creation of the service or in their own experience of it.
Each is leveraging a growing amount of data to create additional value.
This may be usercontributed data, as with Amazon reviews or eBay ratings, or data that is collected by the services about resources and about user behaviours and preferences.
These services recognise that they need to fight for the attention of the user.
And they are important case studies of what Chris Anderson has called The Long Tail [15].
The argument is about how the Internet changes markets.
In the 'physical world', the costs of distribution, retail and consumption mean that an item has to generate enough sales to justify its use of scarce shelf, theatre or spectrum space.
This leads to a limit on what is available through physical outlets and a corresponding limit on the selection potential of users.
At the same time, the demand for a particular product or service is limited by the size of the population to which the physical location is accessible.
These Internet services have two important characteristics which alter the dynamic of markets.
They aggregate supply, and they aggregate demand.
I noted above that Google is a massive ad placement service.
What does Google do?
Google services the long tail of advertising those for whom the bar was too high in earlier times of scarce column inches or broadcast minutes.
And by aggregating demand, delivering a large volume of users, they increase the chances of the advert being seen by somebody to whom it is relevant.
This matching of demand to supply is supported by their use of data.
Think of Netflix: it aggregates supply as discussed here.
It makes the long tail of available movies visible for inspection by potential viewers.
However, importantly, it also aggregates demand: a larger pool of potential users is available to inspect any particular item, increasing the chances that it will be borrowed by somebody.
Again, it is interesting to think of library services against this background, repeating some of the topics mentioned above.
Aggregation of supply and demand.
Aggregation of supply involves comprehensive discovery and low transaction costs in the D2D chain.
Aggregation of demand involves making sure that resources are 'discoverable' by anybody who may have an interest in them.
Despite many years of activity the library resource is fragmented both within the library, and across libraries.
The links between discover-locate-request-deliver are still intermittent, and it may not be possible to track the status of an item easily.
Think of the UK Higher Education system for example: there is no comprehensive union catalogue, and resource-sharing infrastructure is fragmented.
Non-appearance on the Web, or in user environments, means that demand may be less than it could be.
Together these factors suggest that library resources are not being provided in a way that exploits the changed network model of information discovery and use.
The long tail is not simply about having a lot of material: it is about ensuring that that material is readily discoverable and accessible, and that it is seen by those who need to see it.
Making data work hard, engagement and co-creation.
Data is inert in our systems.
We do not release the investment in structured data in engaging and interesting user experiences.
We are seeing signs that this is changing, but it has taken some time.
Nor do we make much use of 'intentional' data, data about choices, use and usage, to refine and manage services.
Holdings data, circulation data, database usage data, resolution data: much more could be done to mine this for intelligence about how to develop services.
Think of services like 'people who borrowed this, also borrowed that' for example.
Platforms and interfaces.
Libraries present an interesting case here.
In some ways, the library community is very advanced, as it needs to be as a 'broker' organisation.
It has developed an ecosystem of resource sharing which is supported by shared cataloguing platforms, messaging and delivery systems.
It is accustomed to depending on others for service, and, indeed, cataloguing is an early 'co-creation' model.
However, more recent distributed library development has so far not resulted in similar organisational evolution.
I think that such evolution is very likely as libraries move other operations into shared platform services which serve many organisations (for example, is there any value in shared knowledge bases or Electronic Resource Management approaches?).
I return to this topic later.
In fact, the library composes many of its services from an array of external providers.
However, in the network world it is struggling to fit many 'silo' services into metasearch or Web environments.
The library presentation to the user or to the user applications remains locked within a particular human interface.
It is also not always straightforward moving data in and out of library systems.
So, it is difficult to place library resources at the 'point of need' in the other places their users are.
These topics all have an important bearing on attention.
An important question facing libraries is how to build services in an environment where content is increasingly abundant, where the costs of production and distribution are declining, where the preferred modes of interaction and engagement with research and learning materials is changing.
Where, crucially, attention is scarcer.
The current academic library is a construct of a time when the production and distribution of research and learning materials was restricted to a few channels, and where there was less competition for the attention of potential library users.
Some things you just had to go to the library for.
In the current Web environment, this is no longer the case.
There are many demands on attention and many resources are available.
We see several approaches emerging.
There is an increased interest in marketing in libraries, even if it is not called this.
Related to this, the library 'offer' needs to be clearer, and we see renewed attention to how resources are presented, moving away from long lists of databases for example.
And, as I have been discussing, we see a growing discussion of how to engage with user environments and workflows.
Where attention is scarce, the library needs to provide services which save time, which are built around user workflow, and which are targeted and engaging.
This means that the library will have to shape its offering in the digital environment more actively.
Aggregating resources may not be enough.
They will be shaped and projected into user environments in ways that support learning and research objectives.
For example, how do you tailor network resources for particular courses or for particular technical environments (RSS aggregator, courseware management system)?
How do you make resources visible in search engine results?
How do you provide links back from other discovery venues to the library, so that the user can actually get the resource of interest?
How do you support metadata creation, document deposit, or research assessment reporting?
User Behaviours: The Changing Patterns of Research and Learning In a flat network world, where data and content flow more freely, much of what might have happened in the library is pushed out into network user environments.
And a variety of other services have emerged to support network management and use of learning and research materials.
This raises three interesting issues which I touch on here.
The first is that remixing, of content or of services, becomes an integral part of routine personal activity on the network.
This in turn raises questions about workflow and curation, as the available personal, institutional, academic, and consumer choices multiply.
Think for a moment of the impact of Flickr or iTunes here.
In each case, they offer 'consumer' services, and because of their centrality to how people use and manage their resources, they are being integrated in various ways into university and library offerings [16].
The network evolution of research and learning practices across disciplines and institutions is something that we need to know more about it.
Libraries need to understand how best to co-evolve with these changes, and need more evidence upon which to base their planning.
For example, Carole Palmer has been doing very interesting work looking at practices in humanities and biomedical research, and thinking about how those in turn influence research library services [17].
She points to new types of scholarly resource, new ways of prospecting the scholarly record through digital resources, and new support needs as researchers work with digital applications and data.
This type of work goes beyond looking at how people are using library resources to suggest what requirements will emerge from their changing behaviours.
Remixing and scholarly work.
In Raymond Yee's words, we increasingly want to 'gather, create and share' resources [18].
This means resources need to be accessible to manipulation, to be locally managed, and to be recombined and transformed in various ways.
We need to be able to pull disparate resources into custom collections.
These may be content resources, or, increasingly, services, where a user can manipulate and connect functionality from different places.
Persistent linking, RSS feeds, and simple protocol interfaces become important.
We do not currently have a widely used 'service composition framework' which allows users to pull together resources easily in a work environment.
Toolbars and FireFox extensions are current examples of simple service composition.
Arranging services in my.yahoo is another.
Resources may be sourced from personal, institutional and third-party environments.
We are developing an extended collection vocabulary: playlist, blogroll, slideshow, dataset.
Tools for manipulation, analysis and visualisation are becoming a part of routine behaviour for many.
And of course, the reuse of materials in the gather, create, share model presents an issue for many library-supplied materials given the restrictions that there may be on some of this material.
Workflows.
Historically, library users have adapted their workflow to the library.
As the network becomes more important, libraries need to adapt their services to the network workflows of their users.
Think reductively of two workflow end-points [19].
The first is demand-side: we are constructing flows and integrating resources in our own personal spaces.
We are drawing on social networking sites, blogs, RSS aggregators, bookmarklets, toolbars, extensions, plug-ins.
Some people may be developing elaborate digital identities, a personal 'bricolage' of network services.
Others are less actively constructive, working with what comes straight out of the box.
However, whether built into our browser or available from a growing number of network services, we will increasingly have rich demand-side flow construction and resource integration facilities 'straight out of the box', more mature 'service composition frameworks'.
The second is supply-side, where workflow and integration have been pre-fabricated to support particular tasks.
Think of a course management system, or a lab book application, or how a depositor interacts with an institutional repository, or an e-portfolio, or a collection of research support services such as those provided in Community of Science.
One reason that supply-side customisation and personalisation services have not been more actively taken up is that it may be less important to me to be able to manipulate flows and resources within a pre-fabricated supply-side environment than to be able to integrate them into my self-constructed demand-side environment.
So, for example the most important thing for me may not be to manipulate components within a portal interface, or to have email alerts sent to me, it may be to have an RSS feed so that I can interact with a range of resources in a uniform way.
Or I may prefer to add stuff to my My.Yahoo page, if that is the place where I compose my digital landscape.
The value may be adapting to my preferred 'composition framework' rather than asking me to use yet another one elsewhere.
What does this mean for libraries?
Libraries need to think more strongly about how to project services into those workflows, and the 'composition frameworks' that support them.
Many of our recent discussions have in fact been about this very issue, about putting the library in the flow.
Think of the course management system.
If this helps structure the 'learnflow' then the library needs to think about how to be in that flow.
Think of Google.
It has reached into the browser and the cellphone.
It is firmly in the flow of user behaviour, and as libraries and information providers want to be in that flow also they are discussing how best to expose their data to Google and other search engines.
Think of the iPod.
If this is the preferred place to manage my liquid content, what does this mean for library content?
Think of the RSS aggregator: if I structure my consumption around this what does this mean for stuff that is not available as a feed?
Here are a couple of examples: one in a 'research' context, one in a 'learning' one.
For the first think of institutional repositories.
The institutional repository is a set of services for researchers.
It may have a number of goals: support open access, curate institutional intellectual assets, centralised management of research outputs, preservation, and so on.
What seems likely to happen is that what is now called the institutional repository will be a part of a range of services which support the creation, curation, and disclosure of research outputs.
We can see how its role is being extended to support workflow better.
Consider this account from the University of Rochester which seeks to understand research work practices as a basis for further service development [20].
In the long run, we envision a system that, first and foremost, supports our faculty members' efforts to "do their own work"--that is, to organise their resources, do their writing, work with co-authors, and so on.
Such a system will include the self-publishing and self-archiving features that the DSpace code already supports, and will rely heavily on preservation, metadata, persistent URLs, and other existing features of DSpace.
When we build this system, we will include a simple mechanism for converting works in progress into self-published or self-archived works, that is, moving documents from an in-progress folder into the IR.
We believe that if we support the research process as a whole, and if faculty members find that the product meets their needs and fits their way of work, they will use it, and "naturally" put more of their work into the IR.
Looking forward we might surmise that future success will be more assured to the extent to which the new support is a natural extension of current workflows.
In a UK context, look at the IRRA (Institutional Repositories and Research Assessment) project which is exploring how institutional repositories might be extended to support some of the recording and reporting needs of the Research Assessment Exercise.
Again, this is looking at broadening workflow support, which in turn should make the institutional repository more valuable [21][22].
Figure 1: A Learning Landscape A learning example comes from a presentation by David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller which draws on their work modelling 'learning landscapes' in the context of the evolution of e-portfolios [23] (see Figure 1 above).
They see the e-portfolio as a place where the student constructs a digital identity, which connects resources, experiences, and tutors.
Connection is important, because learning happens in contexts of communication and exchange beyond the formal course structures.
The VLE (Virtual Learning Environment also known as a course management system) which, in the terms presented above, is a supply-side workflow manager, is one part of this landscape.
A focus of this work appears to be to develop capacity for richer demand-side integration.
Now, I think this has nice illustrative value for a couple of reasons.
One, the 'library' is not present in this iteration of the landscape.
But, more importantly, how would one represent the library if it were to be dropped in?
As 'the library'?
As a set of services (catalogue, virtual reference, ...)?
If as a set of services, which services?
And, if a particular set of services, how well would they 'play' in this environment?
What would need to be done for them to be in the flow?
Curation.
As the creation, sharing and use of digital resources becomes central to research and learning, so does curation.
Think of the data-intensive nature of modern science, of the accumulation of learning materials, of personal and institutional records, of digitised collections.
Data is flowing through multiple professional, institutional, and personal circuits, which have yet to be institutionalised in a set of university responsibilities.
Figure 2 below shows a schematic of flows of research and learning materials [24].The nature of infrastructure necessary to support these resources is being investigated, as are the services that will help users get their work done effectively.
We are really in the very early stages of working through what it means efficiently to manage this range.
What does seem clear is that much of this activity is unsustainably expensive given the lack of common metadata approaches, the redundancy of server and development resources, and the hand-crafted nature of much activity.
To what extent this activity can be supported by fewer systems and services is yet to be seen.
In general, libraries face the challenge of domain specialisation, where particular disciplines will have different practices, metadata schema, ontologies and so on.
What can be done to support institutional activity in terms of shared storage and preservation solutions, metadata creation and taxonomy tools which reduce overall costs?
How does this fit in with broader systems of research support?
Figure 2: Research and Learning Flows The UK has seen the emergence of several data services, some within the JISC world, some supported by the Research Councils.
Presumably these will continue, and the balance between institutional role and data service will vary with the service.
Libraries Today and Tomorrow: The Challenge of Working in a Flat World Figure 3 below shows the library at the centre of a flattened world.
It needs to project its services into the user environment, and those services in turn rely on bringing together a range of other services and products.
We can describe these two emphases in the context of the discussion so far.
The library in the user environment is about how the library responds to changing network behaviours.
It cannot simply aggregate resources.
It has to configure them, and shape them to support research and learning activities that are also being changed by the network.
Figure 3: Libraries in a Flat World How the library organises its own capacities to provide services is also changing as the network becomes more central.
Libraries, and libraries acting collectively, are thinking about how best to allocate resources, how to source new solutions collaboratively, and how to look for system-wide efficiencies.
Of course these two issues are related.
The library needs to focus on its distinctive contribution, which, I would argue, is to create services which enhance research and learning experiences.
To do this, it needs to routinise as much as possible the apparatus from which it creates services.
Labour-intensive, redundant activities represent a serious opportunity cost for the library.
Of course, the picture is misleading in one sense: the library is one source only of materials for the user, it is not necessarily at the centre of their information world.
Delivering Library Services: The Library in the User Environment I spoke about the evolution of library services during the digital library decade earlier.
Where are we now, and how are we moving forward?
The integrated library system?
The integrated library system (ILS) remains a central library investment, although one wonders how long this will continue in its current form [25][26].
The financial and operational burden of periodically transitioning such a monolithic system seems too high to sustain and is one incentive for disintegration of the ILS into more manageable components.
Another is that the library is acquiring additional systems: the ILS is managing a progressively smaller part of the overall library operation.
Another is discussion about how one might find other ways of sourcing some of the ILS functionality, especially in the context of broader institutional enterprise systems (ordering materials for example through the university-wide apparatus).
The case of the catalogue is especially interesting, where there is a growing desire to provide a discovery experience in another environment (a standalone catalogue application with more features, from other databases, from Amazon, from reading lists or social bookmarking systems, and so on).
In each of these cases, there is a need to connect the discovery experience back to the library system for further action (using a mix of COinS (ContextObjects in Spans), scripting and scraping techniques all that is available at the moment).
All these factors point to a reduced interest in the ILS per se, as it becomes more of a back-office application.
And the library vendors are certainly competing around other components, which include a resolver, a metasearch application, an electronic resource management system, maybe an institutional repository, and other digital asset management systems.
The existing library system is very much a silo application with limited data flow and interconnection.
It sits as an inhospitable peak in the flat Web environment.
Over the next while we will likely see this change.
Service frameworks may not be clear now, but service and commercial imperatives will drive clarification.
Flattening silos.
The silo nature of library systems becomes apparent when we try to present them in Web sites.
They have not been developed as an integrated suite in a Web context.
In fact, most library Web sites wrap a thin Web interface around a set of systems which have not been built to talk to each other or to emerging user environments.
The user experience is driven by the systems constraints and arbitrary database boundaries which reflect a supply-driven service.
Consider the long list of databases that is often presented to the user: how do they know where to look?
Resolution services have been a major innovation in creating linkages.
Recently there has been a strong focus on metasearch to try to overcome some of the fragmentation of supply, and respond to demand-driven requirement for consolidation.
But, there is a growing awareness that metasearch is a partial solution only, and perhaps not best offered as a one-stop-shop search-all interface.
Again, we will see this improve over time, but there are major structural and business issues.
For example, why should the library discovery experience be split across so many databases (catalogue included) which may mean little to the user?
Is there merit in pooling resources in larger data reservoirs, rather than going through the multiplied local cost and effort of metasearch?
Creation to curation.
I have discussed how the creation, organisation and curation of resources by users creates new service opportunities and issues for libraries.
There are issues of creating services which fit into a variety of user workflows, of supporting learning and research remix behaviours, and of providing curation support.
The challenge is that the support required potentially stretches across the full research and learning lifecycle as, albeit variably, more of this activity is coming onto the network in different ways.
And it stretches across very different modes of behaviour and requirement from curation of large datasets; to advice about resource creation, analysis and exposure; to metadata creation and repository services; to copyright advice; and so on.
Take just one example: various commentators see the emergence of the Thematic Research Collection as an important new scholarly genre [27][28].
Scholars at the University of Virginia have pioneered this approach, and several deep archives support focused investigation of particular topics.
Examples include the Rosetti Archive [29] and the Valley of the Shadow [30], an extensive documentary record of two communities during the American Civil War period.
If this becomes a common mode of scholarly production, what support should the library provide?
The new bibliography.
Reading lists, citation managers, and emerging social bookmarking sites are all places where data pools.
This data reflects choices, recommendations, intentions.
They provide interesting sites of intersection: between personal workspaces and available resources, between libraries and learning management systems, between the individual and the group.
I include this note here because I think that they are underrated sites of integration and connection.
Think of what might happen if Microsoft Word allowed you to format references in a document in a way that they could be exported in a structured format, say including COinS.
Contribution and communication.
A notable trend discussed above was the growing importance of user participation, in the form of tagging, reviews and annotation.
How this might be accommodated in library services is a question that has only just begun to be explored.
Again, there is probably merit in looking at this activity at some aggregate level for scale reasons.
The long tail.
And finally, we face the large issue of what arrangements are best to unite users and resources in a network environment.
The library offer is fragmented within the library.
The library community itself is imperfectly articulated in terms of the discover-locate-request-deliver chain.
The fragmentation of the discovery experience and the transaction costs of using library resources whether local or system-wide require the user to spend more of their scarce attention if they want to make best use of them, an expense many are increasingly less prepared to incur.
Just as supply side aggregation is limited, so is demand side aggregation.
Typically, library services are only seen by the audience which makes its way into the library Web presence and finds what they are looking for.
The resources are not visible to the many other people who may find them valuable.
This is one reason for wondering about exposure to the search engines or emerging vertical services like Google Scholar, or being better able to link people back from other discovery venues to the library.
The library offer is largely 'off-Web'.
This is further discussed in the next section, as it is an area where shared solutions are required.
Much of this is about how targeted services can add value, saving the scarce time of the user and creating value at the point of need.
Some of it can be achieved within an institutional context; some of it relies on system-wide development.
Logistics and Consolidation: System-wide Efficiencies The burden of much of what I have been saying is that there is benefit in consolidation at certain levels, to remove redundancy and build capacity.
It is not possible for libraries individually to address many of the issues identified in the last section and throughout this paper.
Solutions depend on systemic or shared approaches.
Libraries are very used to this type of activity.
Over the years they have given more of their activities over to 'the network'.
Think of cataloguing for example, or more recently of experiments with virtual reference.
Think of how they have moved to a 'rental' model for the journal literature (for good or ill).
Historically, the British Library Document Supply Centre represented an important consolidation of resource in the UK which provided an effective back-up to individual libraries.
Interestingly, the BLDSC was set up to consolidate inventory and minimise distribution costs.
It was a long tail aggregator before the term existed: an organisation devoted to library logistics.
It aggregated supply, and perhaps its effectiveness meant that the UK union catalogue and resource-sharing apparatus is less well developed than in some other countries.
I have already described how the UK has also benefited from some consolidation of services through the activities of JISC, which has created system-wide efficiencies through central provision of networking, authentication, purchasing, hosting and other services.
Effectively, JISC and British Library services have removed redundancy from library activities and built shared capacity.
Interestingly, the 'traditional' resource-sharing infrastructure is becoming more important again.
We moved through a period where more distributed approaches were discussed and explored, but the pendulum seems to be swinging towards consolidation again.
Think of two looming issues for the academic library for example: mass digitisation and off-site storage of print materials.
In each case, an effective response depends on available data about the composition of collections, about overlap between collections, about distribution of rare or unique items, about disciplinary or format distributions, about demand for materials expressed through circulation or interlibrary lending traffic.
Think of preservation of book and journal literature.
Again, there is a dependency on shared data which may not be there.
Making these types of decisions without consolidated data will be difficult.
Developing services in the network environment suggest other ways in which libraries may benefit from consolidation and sharing.
Here are some examples related to a UK Higher Education context.
For convenience of discussion, I cluster them under discovery to delivery and creation to curation.
Here are some areas where collective attention might better support discovery to delivery in the network environment: A unified discovery experience.
Think about this range of materials under library management: books, journals, cultural heritage materials, research and learning outputs, Web resources.
What about a union catalogue for books, a consolidated articles database which reduces the cost of local metasearch, a harvest of institutional repositories?
Each of these would involve a different approach, and there may be merit in thinking of them together.
Whereas the rationale may be to support discovery, other uses follow from having this consolidation: comparative collection analysis for example.
A service which collects and further exposes metadata in institutional repositories is an incentive to academic staff to deposit materials.
There are several consolidations of article-level metadata: would it be possible to create a resource which would actually meet a large part of local needs?
This consolidation also provides a potential point for collection of user-contributed tagging, reviews, and so on.
Syndicating the discovery experience.
A consolidated resource might be a Web destination itself.
However, it can also be used in other ways, as a platform in the way that was discussed above.
There are several services one can imagine here.
Exposing the data to search engines and other services is one, and I come back to that when talking about service routing in a moment.
Offering subject or regional views is another.
Offering 'alerts' for new or relevant materials is another.
This may be made available in ways in which it can be surfaced in local environments: RSS feeds and various protocol interfaces.
A service router: extending the discovery experience.
If libraries expose data to search engines individually, various issues emerge.
How do you match just the library resource to just those users who are entitled to use them?
Unless, the search engine does consolidation you will end up with masses of redundant data being indexed.
This suggests the benefit of a switch or router, which can connect users to relevant resources when they find something.
There are various ways in which you could do this.
And, of course, going beyond this, one does not only want to discover information objects which may be in a library, one may want to use other library services: virtual reference, a resolver (behind the scenes), interlibrary lending, and so on.
This requires some description of these services, and a way of having the user rendezvous with them.
Again, one could imagine various ways of doing this.
(This service routing model is a part of OCLC's Open WorldCat approach.
At present, a user who finds a WorldCat record in a participating search engine is directed to a 'rendezvous' page.
More services may be offered there [31].)
Reducing transaction costs: Wherever libraries want to work collectively there is an infrastructure issue.
One wants to lower the transaction costs of the shared activity, to make it affordable and provide an incentive to use it.
So, for example, infrastructure is needed to reduce the need for user-initiated connections between stages on the discovery-locate-request-deliver chain.
For example, the OpenURL is a major piece of infrastructure here and Resolver Registry services are emerging in the UK and elsewhere.
More generally, such chains can be hardwired.
However, increasingly, one will want to allow different combinations to be articulated in response to particular need which will depend on 'intelligence' in the network in the form of registries of services, policies, and so on.
Such infrastructure may be provided in various ways.
Think also of a virtual reference network if this is to work effectively, there needs to be management of the support infrastructure.
These activities involve transactions, which need tracking to support audit, fee adjustments, and so on.
Perhaps, a PayPal-like solution for the academic community!
Refining service through feedback.
We have holdings data, circulation data, database usage data, resolver data, download data, and lots of other data which tells us things about preferences, intentions, choices.
And which can in turn be used to improve services by providing feedback, or by being used to provide recommender and filtering services.
There is value in aggregating such data, and in managing it to create value-added services.
And here are some examples of how collective approaches might help creation, organisation and curation.
Data creation and management.
Libraries have various approaches to creating and sharing bibliographic data.
Newer systems have created new data requirements.
For example, libraries are investing in knowledge bases, and are beginning to consider Electronic Resource Management systems.
These systems are populated in various ways.
What options are there for reducing the cost of this activity through consolidation?
Storage and preservation.
It may not make sense for every institution to invest in a complete storage and preservation solution.
One could imagine the ability to save resources to a shared storage substrate with defined preservation capabilities.
The articulation of local, centralised and replicated approaches is an area where collective strategising is needed.
Print content distribution layer.
On the network a 'content distribution layer' may consist of caches, mirrors, redundant servers which ensure efficient distribution of digital resource and effective use of network resources.
Interestingly, we may be moving to a situation where we would like to see such a system for the print collections in our libraries.
This system would consist of a co-ordinated repository and delivery framework [32].
As Chris Rusbridge notes in his article in this issue, the costs of storage and preservation of the collective print resource are high.
Over time, we will probably see attempts made to reduce that cost by consolidating print collections and putting in place effective distribution mechanisms between repositories and points of demand.
On-demand system components.
The library systems environment is becoming more complex, with a variety of components.
Academic libraries are figuring out what to do with a set of systems which in some ways are immature and in development.
The institutional repository is an example.
Another is the creation of metadata across a variety of areas.
Institutions are spending a lot of time looking at various metadata creation environments, developing schema, thinking about moving metadata about, thinking about taxonomies.
Some of this could be provided as a configurable service.
There is potential here for on-demand services.
It is clear that the above is far from a comprehensive list.
Indeed, one could argue that most library processes might be looked at in this way, considering whether there are benefits in shared approaches or in externalising some activities.
It is also clear that many of these services are about logistics, using that term broadly to mean the effective management and distribution of materials through a network to meet particular needs.
And as I suggested above, the Document Supply Centre was set up as a central part of library logistics in the UK.
Logistics or supply chain management becomes very important in a network environment.
Just as workflow co-ordinates components for the user, so supply chain management or logistics services co-ordinate the assembly of components to support particular processes.
Much of what logistics does is use data to configure a network of participants for efficient working.
This data is the 'intelligence' in the network.
I have already mentioned some of the data that is useful in this regard: Registries of system entities (services, collections, policies, institutions, licences, ...).
Pieces of this exist.
See for example the Information Environment Service Registry or openurl.ac.uk, or the various aggregations of collection descriptions.
Aggregation of data about behaviours, preferences, choices (for example circulation records, holdings data, resolver traffic, database usage data, ...).
This aggregate data is useful for driving management decisions (which books to digitise for example) or developing services (eg recommender services).
Registry of statements about information objects.
This is a somewhat clumsy formulation, but what I am thinking of are initiatives like the registry of digital masters which records digitisation and preservation intent.
We may want to associate copyright statements with objects: think of the requirements of the mass digitisation initiatives.
Having said that libraries will benefit from further shared services, which consolidate effort and build capacity, how should those services be secured?
This question can be asked at several levels.
For example, one could have collective strategising about futures.
One could have collective procurement of consolidated resources.
One could operate consolidated resources.
To some extent JISC does all of this now, but not across the range of library activity.
The Research Information Network is developing a collective strategising role.
The British Library was a 'logistics hub' historically; will it develop into some of these newer services?
And there are a variety of commercial and other players who can offer services.
In fact, there are now many organisations which are looking at removing redundancy and building capacity in various contexts: think of the California Digital Library within the University of California; think of OhioLink; of OCLC or Bibsys; or the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEF); and so on.
Putting Libraries on the Network From a network service point of view, much of what I have discussed, in the last section and earlier, leads to the same architectural conclusion: the modularisation of services so that they can be recombined as occasion demands, whether brought together in the library offering or brought together in the user environment, and the ability of data and content to flow between systems and into user environments.
This is the case whether the library wants to pull together services and context from various external services, or whether it wants to project particular combinations of services into user environments.
In some cases we are looking at very new ways of doing things, within environments which are increasingly stitched together with the light-weight approaches which have emerged in recent years: RSS, URL-based protocol approaches, and an array of browser-based toolbars, extensions and scripts.
In fact, I have emphasised that there is a proliferation of potential 'composition frameworks', environments in which people are organising their personal, learning or work digital lives, and are creating workflows.
In no particular order, think of RSS aggregators, services like my.yahoo or netvibes, SAKAI, uPortal, the MicroSoft Reseach pane, or its successors.
How does one reach into all of those, particularly as things change so quickly?
Approaches like the JISC/DEST e-Framework may help in enumerating services, but there is a prior question: what are the services that the library should provide, what is going to the be the service portfolio in 2010 or 2015, in what ways will the library create value in the research and learning process?
Put another way, what library services do I want to see in my.yahoo, or in my RSS aggregator, or the Microsoft Research Pane, etc ?
How does the library expose content and services that can be remixed, that can be integrated into workflows, and that can be repurposed to meet specific needs?
In this article I have been guided by a sense of the library which has the following broad service areas: Discovery to delivery (discover, locate, request, deliver) providing services which unite users with relevant resources.
Create to Curate (creation, organisation, curation) providing services which allow users and the library to create, analyse, organise, select, acquire, store, and preserve resources.
Connect, advise and collaborate providing services that connect users to expertise, to each other, to library staff, to collaborators.
But within those very broad areas, there is much scope for discussion about emphasis and value.
More specifically, here are some examples of where there is active discussion of how services should be exposed: A service layer for repositories.
We have various repository frameworks, but no generally agreed consistent machine interfaces for search/harvest/get/put/update.
A service layer for integrated library system functions.
Various services will need to talk to the integrated library system.
Think for example of wanting to check availability or place a hold or search the system from within another interface.
Currently, people are using brittle scripting and scraping mechanisms, or proprietary URL syntaxes.
An agreed set of simple interfaces would be good.
A registries framework.
As I noted, we are building registries in many places.
Registries for services, collections, institutions, and so on are increasingly important.
Should we have a consistent way of exposing such registries on the network, again for search/harvest/get/put/update?
One could multiply these examples.
The same issue arises with already familiar processes, where we want to expose them in new ways, as does occur when we think of more transformative scenarios [33].
More generally, we are seeing some convergence on OpenURL, OAI-PMH and SRU/W and its family of retrieval approaches.
However, these increasingly need to interface at various levels with the 'sloppier' general approaches of OpenSearch, RSS, and simple Web services.
We may have to expose services as 'portlets' for integration into various portal frameworks.
This all points to the need for greater agility in service development, which further emphasises the need for other areas of work to be carried out in shared venues.
The library needs solutions which meet user needs.
Systemic Working: The Project Phenomenon I began by talking about the programmatic initiatives that were very much alive in the early to mid-nineties.
Those centrally funded programmatic activities were very important in supporting a community discussion about what it meant to move into a network environment.
They are foundational in that sense.
They were followed by major investment in project-based activity in subsequent years.
Project activity is useful for staff development, maybe for plugging particular gaps or achieving some local goals, for getting institutions to work together.
The skills developed in particular projects may later be deployed in developing new services or initiatives.
But project-based funding is not the way to go to introduce much of the systemic change that is now again required.
Projects tend to be institutional or consortial: it is difficult for these to operate at the level of the system.
Of course, their results may be transferable, but this does not always happen.
And it does not happen for good reason: a project will develop its own requirements and deliverables, which may not transfer easily into a production environment somewhere else.
There is often a large gap between a project output and a 'product' in the sense that something is ready to meet broader objectives.
Projects may not produce portable solutions.
Widescale project working also has another interesting dynamic.
It disperses rather than concentrates expertise, and given that expertise is a finite resource it means that many individual projects may achieve less than fewer larger ones would.
There is also an opportunity cost, as expertise is devoted to projects, and it may be difficult to align project goals and institutional needs.
Of course, this is to state the extreme case: there may be some institutional benefit.
The absence of systemic attention, the dispersal of expertise, and the lack of a 'product' focus can be seen as issues in several recent programmes.
Think of the range of digitisation projects in recent years in the UK [34].
This is not to say that there should not be support for R&D.
Or that we should not find ways to reward and sustain creativity and innovation.
Clearly we should.
But we should realise what a programme of projects can produce.
This should not be confused with designing, building and sustaining the library services that will effectively support research and learning into the future.
Conclusion At the end of the Ariadne decade, we are still looking at change.
I have suggested that there is a neat coincidence in that each end of the decade falls at a significant moment.
The first saw the convergence of the Web and broad-based connectivity to create a new social space for research and learning.
The second, whether one wants to use the Web 2.0 label or not, involves the convergence of the programmable Web and connectivity which is broadband and wireless.
It is the age of Amazoogle.
I have discussed some of the system changes in the flat network world, how research and learning behaviours are changing as they become meshed with the network, and what some of these things mean for library services.
In summary, I have emphasised three broad issues: Much of our work, learning and research activity is being reshaped in a network environment.
This will have a profound effect on library services.
In fact, the effect of technology on research and learning behaviours will have a greater impact than the direct effect of technology on library systems and services themselves.
In the medium term, the library will need to engage with major shifts in research and learning practice.
In the short term, the library needs to begin building services around user workflows, supporting the remix of content and services in user environments, and developing digital curation services.
The network has created a new dynamic of discovery and use around major hubs of information infrastructure: Google, Amazon, iTunes and so on.
They have aggregated supply (unified discovery and reduced transaction costs), aggregated demand (brought a large audience to bear), and are developing into platforms which help other applications reach their goals.
These will not replace library services, but they have caused us to think about how to deliver service on the Web.
Although the collective library resource is deep, fragmentation of discovery and high transaction costs have reduced impact.
Libraries are exploring how better to project a targeted service into user environments, how to develop a switch between the open Web and rich library services, and how to make services more engaging.
It is not possible for every library to support and manage all of its 'business processes', especially as the demand on the library grows, and service expectations and technologies change so quickly.
Libraries have historically depended on shared platforms for services, and we may be about to see another step change in adoption.
The motivation is to remove redundancy and to build capacity through collaboratively sourcing solutions, so as better to focus library effort on where it can make a distinctive local impact on the quality of the research and learning environment.
The notion of the 'well-found' library was current in the UK some years ago.
What does it mean to be well-equipped for the job?
What is the nature of a library service that appropriately supports research and learning needs in our current environment, or a few years hence?
Jerry Cambpell, writing in Educause Review, recently asked this question in different terms.
Although these emerging, digital-age library services may be important, even critical, in the present era, there is no consensus on their significance to the future academic library-or even on whether they should remain as library functions carried out by librarians.
In addition, at this point, the discussion of the future of the academic library has been limited to librarians and has not widened, as it should, to involve the larger academic community.
Consequently, neither academic librarians nor others in the academy have a crisp notion of where exactly academic libraries fit in the emerging twenty-first-century information panoply.
[35] This is an ongoing question as research, learning and information use are reconfigured.
The UK is well placed to collectively strategise about the future contours of the academic library, and about what collective steps should now be taken so that the library remains a vital partner in the academic enterprise.
References For a discussion of eLib see: Chris Rusbridge.
"Towards the hybrid library".
D-lib Magazine, July/August 1998. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/rusbridge/07rusbridge.html For a discussion of the European Libraries Programme and UK participation see: Lorcan Dempsey.
"The UK, networking and the European Libraries Programme."
Library and Information Briefings, Issue 57, February 1995.
For a discussion of the NSF Digital Library Initiative from this period, see the special issue of D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1996 at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july96/07contents.html For discussion of the hybrid library see Chris Rusbridge, op cit.
and Stephen Pinfield and Lorcan Dempsey.
"The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and the hybrid library".
Ariadne, January 2001, Issue 26 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/dner/ For an overview of OSI, the library OSI protocol framework, and library network activity from the early nineties see Lorcan Dempsey.
Libraries, networks and OSI.
2nd Edition.
Westport, CT and London: Meckler, 1992.
Stuart Weibel.
Metadata: the foundation of resource description.
D-Lib Magazine, July 2005. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/July95/07weibel.html (I include this reference as it is from the first issue of D-Lib Magazine!)
Derek Law.
"The development of a national policy for dataset provision in the UK: a historical perspective".
Journal of Information Networking, 1(2), 1994, p.103-116.
Derek Law and Lorcan Dempsey.
"A policy context eLib and the emergence of the subject gateways".
Ariadne, September 2000, Issue 25. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/subject-gateways/ salesforce.com http://www.salesforce.com/ WebEx http://www.webex.com/ Of course, the discussion of distributed applications is familiar from a decade ago and more: what is different here is that we are seeing more being built from lighter-weight technologies.
Thomas Davenport.
The coming commoditization of processes.
Harvard Business Review, June 2005. pp 101-108.
Thomas L Friedman.
The world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century.
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/0374292884 This discussion is based on: Lorcan Dempsey.
"The user interface that isn't".
May 2005. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000667.html Chris Anderson.
"The long tail".
Wired Magazine, Issue 12.10 October 2004 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html Examples here are the use of FlickR by the National Library of Australia (http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,17983872%5E15317%5E%5Enbv%5E15306,00.html) and the use of iTunes by Stanford (http://itunes.stanford.edu/) Palmer, Carole L. (2005).
Scholarly Work and the Shaping of Digital Access.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science 56, no.
11: 1140-1153.
Raymond Yee.
GatherCreateShare.
http://raymondyee.net/wiki/GatherCreateShare This section is based on: Lorcan Dempsey.
"In the flow".
June 24, 2005. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000688.html Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons.
"Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories".
D-lib Magazine, January 2005. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html IRRA.
Institutional repositories and research assessment.
http://irra.eprints.org/ For an overview of institutional repositories see the following articles.
Gerard van Westrienen and Clifford A. Lynch.
"Academic Institutional Repositories: Deployment Status in 13 Nations as of Mid 2005".
D-Lib Magazine, September 2005. ttp://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/westrienen/09westrienen.html Clifford Lynch and Joan Lippincott.
"Institutional Repository Deployment in the United States as of Early 2005".
D-Lib Magazine, September 2005 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lynch/09lynch.html Figure 1: "A Learning Landscape" comes courtesy of David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller of the Elgg Development Team, see http://elgg.org/ .
Their presentation was entitled: Creation of a learning landscape: weblogging and social networking in the context of e-portfolios.
Powerpoint at http://elgg.net/dtosh/files/260/568/creation_of_a_learning_landscape.ppt Figure 2 is adapted from the OCLC Environmental Scan (see http://www.oclc.org/reports/escan/research/newflows.htm), which is in turn adapted from Liz Lyon, Lyon, Liz .
"eBank UK: Building the links between research data, scholarly communication and learning," Ariadne, July 2003, Issue 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/lyon/ Lorcan Dempsey.
The integrated library system that isn't.
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000585.html Roland Dietz & Carl Grant.
"The Dis-Integrating World of Library Automation" Library Journal, June 15, 2005. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA606392.html Carole Palmer.
Thematic research collections.
In: A companion to digital humanities.
Susan Schreibman , Raymond George Siemens , John Unsworth (eds).
Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., ©2004.
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/1405103213 (Preprint at http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~clpalmer/bwell-eprint.pdf) John Unsworth.
The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing: Remarks at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies.
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/mirrored/acls.5-2003.html The Rossetti Archive http://www.rossettiarchive.org/ Edward L Ayers.
"The valley of the shadow: two communities in the American Civil War".
http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/ Further details about Open WorldCat at http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/default.htm Chems Consulting.
Optimising Storage and Access in UK Research Libraries.
A report for CURL and the British Library.
September 2005. http://www.curl.ac.uk/about/documents/CURL_BLStorageReportFinal-endSept2005.pdf Herbert Van de Sompel et al.
Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve.
D-Lib Magazine, Volume 10 Number 9, September 2004. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september04/vandesompel/09vandesompel.html Barbara Bultman et al.
Digitized content in the UK research library and archives sector.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-Digi-in-UK-FULL-v1-final.pdf Jerry D. Campbell.
Changing a Cultural Icon: The Academic Library as a Virtual Destination.
EDUCAUSE Review, vol.
41, no.
1 (January/February 2006): 16-31. http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0610.asp Author Details Lorcan Dempsey VP Research & Chief Strategist OCLC Email: dempseyl@oclc.org Web site: http://orweblog.oclc.org Return to top Article Title: "The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After" Author: Lorcan Dempsey Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ARROW, DART and ARCHER: A Quiver Full of Research Repository and Related Projects Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ARROW, DART and ARCHER: A Quiver Full of Research Repository and Related Projects Buzz data software framework dissemination portal infrastructure archives metadata accessibility identifier schema repositories eprints oai-pmh cataloguing cache ontologies shibboleth curation srw dspace sru e-research interoperability privacy url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Treloar and David Groenewegen describe three inter-related projects to support scholarly outputs and the e-research life cycle which have been funded by the Australian Commonwealth Government.
This paper describes three inter-related repository projects.
These projects were all funded by the Australian Commonwealth Government through the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative as part of the Commonwealth Government’s Backing Australia’s Ability An Innovation Action Plan for the Future.
The article will describe the background to all three projects and the way in which their development has been inter-related and co-ordinated.
The article will conclude by examining how Monash University (the lead institution in all three projects) is re-conceiving the relationship between its different repositories.
ARROW The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) Project came into existence in response to a call for proposals issued in June 2003 by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST).
DEST was interested in furthering the discovery, creation, management and dissemination of Australian research information in a digital environment.
Specifically, it wanted to fund proposals that would help promote Australian research output and build the Australian research information infrastructure through the development of distributed digital repositories and the common technical services supporting access and authorisation to them.
In response to this a consortium, consisting of Monash University (lead institution), University of New South Wales, Swinburne University and the National Library of Australia, submitted a bid and was successful in attracting $A3.66M over three years (2004-6), with follow-up funding in 2007 of $4.5M for ARROW2 and a sub-project called Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PILIN).
Design The design of the ARROW repository solution was informed by the desire to: use a common underlying repository for a range of content types provide content management modules for different use cases expose the content as widely as possible using a number of different technologies The resulting high-level design is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: ARROW High-level Architecture Development After careful analysis of the available candidates at the time, the ARROW Project decided to use the Fedora Open Source software [1] as the foundation of the repository [2].
Fedora provides an underlying engine, but at the time offered little in the way of software to run on top of this engine, so ARROW needed to build this separately.
One of the requirements from the funding agency was that the project address the sustainability of any solution after the project funding concluded.
The ARROW Project therefore decided to collaborate with a commercial software developer to produce much of the ARROW software.
The developer, VTLS Inc [3] already had a basic digital image collection management tool on the market called VITAL that was built on top of Fedora.
ARROW Consortium members licensed VITAL 1.0 and then worked with VTLS to extend the functionality of both VITAL and Fedora.
In the former case, this was through working with VTLS to specify a series of VITAL releases (1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0).
In the latter case, ARROW commissioned VTLS to produce a series of open-source modules to either extend or complement Fedora.
This unusual partnership has been generally successful, with significant sharing of intellectual property.
At the end of the ARROW Project, those members who have adopted VITAL will have a normal commercial relationship with VTLS, and will receive both support and successive versions of VITAL as long as they continue to pay software maintenance.
The selected search and exposure services were the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [4], Search/Retrieve Web & Search/Retrieve URL (SRU/SRW) [5], Web spidering, and a native Web access portal.
SRU/SRW support was one of the open-source components written by VTLS.
In addition to providing support for these search and exposure protocols, the National Library of Australia (as part of its contribution to the ARROW consortium) has developed a National Discovery Service [6] that harvests metadata from ARROW, DSpace and ePrints repositories within Australia.
Deployment Since the commencement of the ARROW Project a total of 15 Australian universities (out of a total of 40) have licensed the VITAL software.
The emergence of this large community (in addition to overseas licensees) augurs well for the viability of the software solution.
More information on ARROW is available [7].
DART In early 2005, the Australian Government called for a second round of Systemic Infrastructure Initiative proposals for collaborative projects that brought together consortia to improve accessibility to Australian research.
This call for proposals identified four areas of interest: maximising access to digital resources in Australian universities, especially regional universities; creating new types of digital libraries to manage extremely large datasets; adopting a national approach to improving open access to the results of publicly funded research; providing effective linkages between sets of research information to enable seamless access by researchers.
The call for proposals also identified a number of key trends that are changing the ways in which research is conducted and its outputs consumed.
These include new technologies, such as computer simulations, synchrotrons and sensor networks, the expanding size of the datasets on which research is based, increasing volumes of information generated through research, greater complexity, and the recognition of the need to work across traditional disciplinary, institutional and national borders.
To this one might add a growth in research practices that are producing a paradigm change in the types of research that this new large-scale computing/data management environment can support.
These emerging research practices are intensely collaborative (often involving trans-national teams), require high-quality network access, and are dataand simulation-intensive.
In response to this second call, Monash University again took the lead and submitted a bid entitled Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotations e-Research Technologies (DART).
The DART request for funding built on the work already done in the ARROW Project in establishing the basis for institutional research publication repositories, as well as antecedent activity at each of the three DART partners (James Cook University, Monash University and the University of Queensland).
It did this by extending its areas of interest to tackle issues associated with large datasets and sensors, as well as annotation technologies and collaborative, composite documents.
The DART bid was successful and received $A3.23M in August 2005, with an original project end date of December 2006 (later extended to June 2007).
Design Figure 2 shows the high-level design for DART.
In the uppermost layer are researchers, readers and computer programs.
The middle layer shows the proposed repositories (including traditional publications as research outputs, and raw data) and the data flows between them and the datasets in the lowest layer.
The lowest layer shows the data sources and their associated storage.
The figure has been annotated to indicate the work packages that are involved for each component.
For instance, the process of editing dynamic collaborative documents is described in work package AA4.
Details of the work packages can be found on the DART Web site [8], and are briefly outlined below.
Figure 2: DART High-Level Architecture The DART Project was structured as a number of thematically grouped but inter-related sets of work packages.
In the Data Collection, Monitoring and Quality Assurance (DMQ) theme, DART is tackling the issues surrounding high-rate and large-volume data streams, particularly those generated by instruments and sensors.
There is a number of requirements that are unique to the challenges inherent in dealing with digital objects generated by and derived from instruments and sensors.
These include: two-way communication with the instruments and sensors so that their status and information can be probed and monitored remotely (work packages DMQ1, DMQ2) implementing a standard approach for detecting faulty or poor-quality data early in the experiment (DMQ3) providing enhanced security and access to the instruments and sensors (DMQ4) triggering the download of data contained in temporary data storage (data cache) into the permanent data storage (DMQ5) In the Storage and Interoperability (SI) theme, DART is: working to integrate Fedora and the Storage Resource Broker 9 (SI1, SI2) semantically augmenting the SRB Metadata Catalogue (MCAT) (SI3) providing a secure service for transferring data from sensors/instruments to repositories using Grid security (SI4) developing an abstraction layer that supports a range of data replication systems (SI5) allowing simulation data to be retrieved from repositories or regenerated dynamically using computational services (SI6) developing a cost-effective data pre-processing system for the secondary storage (SI7) piloting long-distance high-speed and secure data transfer between repositories (SI8) scoping and piloting storage infrastructure requirements (SI9) In the Contents and Rights (CR) theme, DART is: developing simple user interfaces, guidelines, and workflows to enable researchers to deposit documents, research data and results easily into institutional repositories (CR1, CR5) producing tools and services to enable researchers easily to select and attach standardised licenses defining access and re-use rights to their data and research results (CR3) creating guidelines for information management best practice in research teams, arising from embedding information professionals into such teams as research partners (CR4) identifying and clarifying legal issues around IP (Intellectual Property), information security and privacy (CR6) The Annotation and Assessment (AA) theme is looking at how best to support adding value to the contents of repositories post-publication through: extending and refining existing annotation tools to enable annotation of digital objects held within the Fedora and SRB research repositories (AA1) enhancing existing tools to support collaborative annotations, thus enabling research communities to document shared practices and assessments (AA2) development of secure authenticated access to annotation servers (AA3) investigating the use of Web-based collaborative tools to support distributed teams (AA4) The final theme, Discovery and Access (DA) aims to improve the accessibility of publications and datasets by: allowing the creators of digital objects better to control end-user access, thus reducing their reluctance to contribute (DA1) developing a portal to provide seamless search interfaces across distributed archives implemented in SRB and Fedora (DA2) developing and providing access to a centralised repository/registry of metadata schemas and ontologies (DA3) Demonstrators DART was designed as a proof-of-concept project.
In order to ground the development activity in the needs of real researchers, DART has been working with researchers in three different domains: x-ray crystallography, digital history and climate research.
Of these, the x-ray crystallography demonstrator is the one that has progressed to the greatest extent.
A Gridsphere [10] portal has been created which supports elements of all the DART themes, and which is being used by one of the lead proteomics research teams at Monash University.
In addition to the demonstrators, the outputs of the various work packages are progressively being documented and made available on the DART Web site.
ARCHER The Australian ResearCH Enabling enviRonment (ARCHER) Project was funded under the third round of SII finding, receiving $A4.5M.
The project effectively commenced in early 2007 and is required to complete by the end of 2007 (a very tight timeframe).
ARCHER aims to take the best of the proof-of-concept work from DART and turn it into robust software, ready for deployment.
At the time of writing, ARCHER had just completed the refinement of requirements and was engaged in detailed project planning.
Further details can be found at the ARCHER Web site [11].
ARCHER will also be working with a number of groups of leading Australian researchers to make sure it meets their needs.
These researchers are drawn from a selection of the capability groups under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
This is another Australian Commonwealth Government programme, designed in part to succeed the SII programme and in part to support particular research areas of interest to, or relevance for Australia.
The NCRIS funding programme runs from 2007 to 2011.
As the ARCHER funding is only for the first year of the NCRIS timeframe, one of the ARCHER tasks will be to identify a long-term deployment provider who can take over the ARCHER deliverables and provide a service to NCRIS.
Design The ARCHER design has tried to focus on what is likely to be of benefit to researchers across a range of disciplines.
After a careful process of requirements development, this has been narrowed down to the following set of functions: a component integration framework based on the Gridsphere portal environment and the Kepler [12] workflow engine a security architecture that supports Shibboleth [13], Public Key Infrastructure and Grid security as required, while trying to maximise the use of Shibboleth data collection support for sensors, instruments and major national facilities rich metadata support including extraction and management a metadata schema/ontology registry a storage fabric based on the Storage Resource Broker SRB that also supports offline work integration of capability-specific data analysis packages annotation tools the ability automatically to publish data to discipline/journal repositories, as well as export it in different formats search and browse functionality Figure 3 shows the way in which these components relate to the research process, as well as how ARCHER tools complement those likely to be provided already by institutions at which researchers work.
Figure 3: ARCHER and the research life cycle Text-only version Development ARCHER has four possible strategies for completing this ambitious work schedule: Assign work to existing clusters of DART activity this will probably produce the least delays, but writing robust production quality code is a very different thing to producing proof-of-concept code Adopt/adapt existing open source components this builds on already mature work Commission work from existing open source developers this builds on their existing talent pools and also improves the chances that the result will be integrated into their codebase Call for bids for components in an open tender process while initially attractive, it seems unlikely that the tight time constraints will permit this In practice, all but the last of these strategies will probably be adopted to varying degrees.
Relationships between the Projects ARROW was initially envisaged as a total solution for the storage and access of digital materials.
Work on the project demonstrated that it was too ambitious a project, and that building the tools necessary into a single space was unlikely to be realistic.
The DART Project gave us the beginnings of an understanding of the type of tools that would be needed in the collaborative space we originally envisaged.
As ARCHER progresses the linkages between it and ARROW will become stronger.
Between them we envisage a ‘curation boundary’ a software-based workflow that will use human intervention to decide what moves from the collaborative space that ARCHER represents, into the ‘publishing’ section that ARROW provides.
This curation boundary will not be rigidly defined, but will be designed to ensure that any material that crosses it adheres to the needs and rules of the area it is entering.
Conclusion The original ARROW bid envisaged a single underlying repository that would underpin all the research outputs of a university.
The process of moving from ARROW to DART and now ARCHER has suggested an alternative model.
This is based on two different kinds of repository: one optimised for collaboration and one for publication.
As both ARROW and ARCHER move out of the project phase and into production, these ideas will be further developed, enabling a more mature assessment of the value of this approach.
Until then, it is safe to conclude that ARROW is clearly a success in its own terms, DART has made significant advances and ARCHER is showing early promise.
References Fedora Web site http://www.fedora.info/ For more background on the reasons for this decision see Treloar, A., “ARROW Targets: Institutional Repositories, Open-Source, and Web Services”, Proceedings of AusWeb05, the Eleventh Australian World Wide Web Conference, Southern Cross University Press, Southern Cross University, July 2005. http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw05/papers/refereed/treloar/ Visionary Technology in Library Solutions (VTLS) Web site http://www.vtls.com/ OAI-PMH Web site http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html SRU/SRW Web site http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/ Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) National Discovery Service Web site http://search.arrow.edu.au/ Payne, G and Treloar, A., “The ARROW Project after two years: are we hitting our targets?“, Proceedings of VALA 2006, Melbourne, January 2006.
Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e-Research Technologies (DART) Web site http://dart.edu.au/ Storage Resource Broker (SRB) Web site http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/ Gridsphere portal Web site http://www.gridsphere.org/ Australian ResearCH Enabling environment (ARCHER) Web site http://archer.edu.au/ Kepler workflow engine Web site http://www.kepler-project.org/ Shibboleth security system Web site http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ Author Details Dr Andrew Treloar Director and Chief Architect, ARCHER Project Monash University Victoria 3800 Australia Email: Andrew.Treloar@its.monash.edu.au Web site: http://andrew.treloar.net/ David Groenewegen Project Manager, ARROW Project Monash University Victoria 3800 Australia Email: David.Groenewegen@lib.monash.edu.au Web site: http://arrow.edu.au/ Return to top Article Title: “ARROW, DART and ARCHER: A Quiver Full of Research Repository and Related Projects” Author: Andrew Treloar and David Groenewegen Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/treloar-groenewegen/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Stargate: Exploring Static Repositories for Small Publishers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Stargate: Exploring Static Repositories for Small Publishers Buzz data software framework database dissemination rss xml archives metadata repositories eprints copyright oai-pmh e-learning ebook dspace interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS R. John Robertson introduces a project examining the potential benefits of OAI-PMH Static Repositories as a means of enabling small publishers to participate more fully in the information environment.
With the wider deployment of repositories, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is becoming a common method of supporting interoperability between repositories and services.
It provides 'an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting' [1].
Nodes in a network using this protocol are 'data providers' or 'service providers'.
Although repository software supporting OAI-PMH is not overly complex [2], without programming skills or access to technical support, implementing and supporting a repository is not an entirely straightforward task.
Static repositories and static repository gateways [3] are a development of the OAI-PMH specification that makes participation in networks of data and service providers even simpler.
In essence a static repository is an XML file publicly available online at a persistent address.
This file is registered in a static repository gateway which then presents it as a (slightly limited) OAI-PMH data provider.
One community that the static repository approach might benefit is the community of small publishers, particularly those publishers who only produce one or two journals.
Such publishers, who may not have dedicated technical support, are less likely to be able to implement and maintain a repository supporting the full OAI-PMH.
They might however be able to maintain a static repository, and participate in these wider networks in this way.
This article introduces STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit: Enabling small publishers to participate in OAI-PMH-based services) [4], a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and based in the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, which is undertaking an investigation of the applicability of this technology to small publishers.
OAI-PMH grew out of an attempt by members of the e-print community to improve access to and dissemination of scholarly communication [5].
The success of the protocol is demonstrated in its implementation, not only in the software commonly used to create e-print repositories (such as Eprints, Dspace, and Fedora) but also in the growth of services that take advantage of the increased access to metadata it allows.
The experimental registry at UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) currently lists 987 existing repositories supporting OAI-PMH [6].
The protocol has found extensive use among data providers, not only because it facilitates the exchange of data (and so has allowed the construction of federated collections of metadata) but also because of the development of a number of specific services that use this metadata.
Examples of these include: OAIster [7] aiming to provide 'a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone' and Citebase [8] providing 'a semi-autonomous citation index for the free, online research literature.
It harvests preand postprints (most author self-archived) from OAI-PMH-compliant archives, parses and links their references and indexes the metadata in a search engine'.
The Benefits and Problems of OAI-PMH Exposure The OAI-PMH based exposure of metadata held in databases allows services and search engines to index records not otherwise visible to automated processes.
For example, Google is harvesting and indexing materials from the National Library of Australia's digital collections through OAI-PMH [9].
The greater availability of metadata to search engines that this technology allows has resulted in increased visibility for scholarly works and other types of assets whose metadata had previously only been visible through a specific interface at a specific location (physical or virtual).
This 'unlocking' of metadata has enabled greater access to information about articles and in many cases to copies of the articles themselves benefiting not only the scholarly community but also the general public.
Although this process has benefited scholars and others, it has also created a problem about which version of an article is being described and linked to.
The version of an article an author can provide to a repository is dependent on the copyright agreement between the author and publisher.
Thus the metadata record for any given article can link to the deposited copy (pre-print or post-print), the publisher's copy, both copies, or no copy.
This variety creates a difficulty for users and publishers; in that, for any given article, the metadata and link(s) to a copy of the paper which are retrieved by a search may not correspond to the formally-published peer-reviewed version (irrespective of users' rights to access the final formal version), and, even if it is the formal version, users may not necessarily have enough information to allow them to cite the article properly.
The potential problem for both publishers and academics is multiplied in that, if the final version is not linked to by the data provider (i.e.
the repository), the correct citation (i.e.
publishers' final version accessed through their designated provider) of a paper will not occur in higher-level services.
This creates the potential for scholars to be referring to the same intellectual effort but in different instantiations for example, there may be differences in page numbering, content, date of publication, and even author attribution.
Another difficulty is that some of the value of a journal article comes from its co-location with other articles.
The focus of a journal, the progression of relevant topics in sequential issues, and the editorial selection of complementary or conflicting articles within an issue (in particular in a themed issue) is lost as any given repository (institutional or subject) will not contain an entire journal run or even a complete issue.
Even within higher-level services based on many repositories, retrieving a journal issue is currently almost impossible as the basic metadata set exposed and harvested through OAI-PMH does not explicitly record the journal issue.
A Way Forward One way to begin obviating these problems is for publishers to become involved in OAI-PMH based services by exposing their metadata.
This would not only increase the visibility of the citable formal version, but would, as services provided on the basis of harvested metadata grow in sophistication, also ensure that compound records, produced by services aggregating and disambiguating metadata, include a link to the publisher's version.
Although the involvement of publishers in the interoperability framework provided by OAI-PMH was envisioned at the start of the protocol [5], take-up by the publishing community has been slow.
One example of publisher participation in OAI-PMH is that of Inderscience, a publisher of journals 'in the fields of engineering and technology, management and business administration, and energy, environment and sustainable development' [10].
Inderscience worked together with a project team from EEVL (The Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing) to integrate metadata about their products into external services, in particular cross-referencing services.
The development of the Inderscience OAI-PMH repository was in part funded by JISC as part of the Metadata and Interoperability Projects (5/03) strand.
The experience of EEVL and Inderscience, and Inderscience's ongoing participation in OAI-PMH, suggests that, in practice as well as in theory, publishers can benefit from exposing their metadata.
An Obstacle to Participation in OAI-PMH and a Proposed Solution There are however publishers for whom establishing and maintaining such a full OAI-PMH repository may be problematic.
The case study provided by EEVL on the above repository development comments that 'the generic task of configuring a web server to handle OAI-PMH requests and parsing out the arguments should involve less than a day of work for someone experienced with setting up Web servers and writing CGI scripts' [11].
Although this task may be straightforward compared to developing other Web services, for small publishers without technical support it may still remain a significant challenge.
The community developing the Open Archives Initiative has striven to make participation in OAI-PMH as easy as possible and has developed a simpler solution.
This solution uses a combination of static repositories (XML files) and a static repository gateway.
All the participant has to do is create a compliant XML file, place it on a Web server, and register it with a gateway.
The static repository is then available for harvesting via the gateway [12].
The utility of static repositories to lower the barriers to participation has been demonstrated in the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), which has fostered a community 'creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources' [13].
OLAC's network includes both full repositories and static repositories, and they have, alongside the OAI_DC metadata set, implemented community-specific metadata sets to extend the services they can offer.
The potential value of static repositories to lower the technical barrier to participation was also highlighted as one of the key outcomes of the HaIRST Project [14].
As the name suggests, static repositories are designed for relatively static collections of metadata.
The specification of the protocol, however, allows for changes to the contents of a collection, implying that the use of static repositories for more dynamic collections is certainly possible.
Static repositories may, therefore, present an apt technical solution to allow small publishers to participate in OAI-PMH based services.
This use of static repositories would represent an innovative use of the technology as it is being applied to collections of metadata that change as each issue of the journal is released.
The STARGATE Project is investigating the applicability of this solution.
The STARGATE Project The project will demonstrate the applicability of OAI-PMH static repositories by creating a series of static repositories containing publisher metadata, a gateway in which publishers' static repositories are registered and exposed.
It will also demonstrate the harvesting of publisher metadata, using HaIRST's ARC harvester, and cross-searching of the exposed metadata, using the EEVL Xtra service.
The project will create case studies documenting the set-up of the static repositories, the initial tools used to support the creation of these static repositories, and will critically reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the static repositories approach to exposing publisher metadata.
This reflective analysis will draw on the publishers' impressions of the processes involved and will also draw comparisons with alternative approaches to exposing publisher metadata.
The outcome of this will be to make recommendations on how, and in what circumstances, publishers might choose to implement the static repositories approach.
The four journals (all from the field of Library and Information Science) participating in the project are: Journal of Digital Information (JoDI) [15], an international peer-reviewed open access journal published by Texas A&M University Information Research [16], an independently published international peer-reviewed open access journal Library and Information Research (LIR) [17], a journal with a mix of peer reviewed and practitioner articles published by the Library and Information Research Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) Information Scotland [18], a professional journal published by the Scottish Library and Information Council on behalf of CILIPS (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals Scotland) Although all of these publishers provide electronic versions of their journal, they have different publication processes and different technical support available to them.
The differences between the journals (frequency of publication, method, staff involved, metadata created) allow the applicability and efficiency of static repositories to be assessed in a variety of settings.
One of the publishers, Texas A&M University, is in the process of setting up its own OAI-PMH repository, which may allow a comparison between static and full repositories.
Creating static repositories for publisher metadata will not in itself resolve the difficulties with identifying consecutive articles from particular issues of a journal.
It will, however, allow for searches to be restricted to a particular journal and may inform the future development of appropriate metadata elements or extensions.
Conclusion The outcomes of this project exploring the benefits of static repositories to the publishing community will support both the greater participation of that community within the OAI community and the wider use of static repositories.
Enabling small publishers of professional and peer-reviewed journals to expose their metadata increases the visibility of the citable final version and provides other repositories with a clear link to this version.
Testing the flexibility of static repositories promotes their use for other, perhaps more dynamic, content such as e-books, e-learning materials and other digital resources.
The project [4] is underway and will finish at the end of May 2006.
References The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html Chumbe, S., Macleod, R. "Developing Seamless Discovery of Scholarly and Trade Journal Resources Via OAI and RSS", Isaias, P., Karmakar, N. eds.
Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2003 Algarve, Portugal, 5-8 November 2003 Volume 2 853-856.
Specification for an OAI Static Repository and an OAI Static Repository Gateway http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-static-repository.htm STARGATE http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/stargate/ Lagoze, C., Van de Sompel, H., "Building a low-barrier interoperability framework", JCDL '01, June 17-23, 2001, Roanoke, VA. http://www.openarchives.org/documents/jcdl2001-oai.pdf Experimental OAI Registry at UIUC http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/ OAIster http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ Citebase http://www.citebase.org/ National Library of Australia Digital Object Repository http://www.nla.gov.au/digicoll/oai/ Inderscience Publishers Ltd. http://www.inderscience.com/mapper.php?id=11 Kerr, L., Corlett J., Chumbe S. (2003) Case Study for the creation of an OAI repository in a small/medium sized publishers http://www.eevl.ac.uk/projects_503.htm Specification for an OAI Static Repository and an OAI Static Repository Gateway http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-static-repository.htm Open Language Archives Community http://www.language-archives.org/ Brophy, P. HaIRST Project summative evaluation: report.
Manchester: CERLIM.
(2005) http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents/HAIRST-Summative-Evaluation-Final.pdf Journal of Digital Information http://jodi.tamu.edu/ Information Research http://informationr.net/ir/ Library and Information Research http://www.cilip.org.uk/specialinterestgroups/bysubject/research/publications/journal Information Scotland http://www.slainte.org.uk/publications/serials/infoscot/contents.html Author Details R. John Robertson Researcher / Stargate Project Officer Centre for Digital Library Research Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Strathclyde Email: robert.robertson@cis.strath.ac.uk Web site: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Stargate: Exploring Static Repositories for Small Publishers" Author: R. John Robertson Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/robertson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Happens When We Mash the Library?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Happens When We Mash the Library?
Buzz data software portal firefox browser blog cataloguing librarything mashup facebook research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller looks at recent attempts to make library resources more appealing, including the Talis competition to build library 'mashups'.
Over the summer of 2006, there was much talk about extending and enriching the online offerings of the library.
Reports for the Library of Congress [1] and University of California [2] were still being cogitated upon.
North Carolina State University's [3] Endeca-powered catalogue was attracting a lot of interest [4].
The Next Generation Catalog list [5] was going from strength to strength, and two competitions in particular invited entrants to re-imagine the library and aspects of its online service delivery.
OCLC [6] ran their software contest [7] for the second year, inviting non-profit entrants to make interesting use of OCLC services.
And Talis [8] gathered an international team of judges [9] to invite anyone, anywhere, to use anything in order to demonstrate an interesting new take on the library's online presence.
A Rationale for Competition For all those users of libraries who have ever wished they could bring information from their library to life outside the virtual walls of its Web site, the Talis competition presented an ideal opportunity to see some of what the future might hold.
From Jon Udell's early work with LibraryLookup [10] to the current fashion for Greasemonkey [11] plug-ins and the more structured exposure of Web Services by Talis, Amazon, Google and others, there are significant advances being made in the ways in which libraries offer their services to the outside world.
At least as important is the revolution occurring outside the library, as those beyond the walls take and manipulate library data on their own.
Modern approaches to thinking about provision of library data and services online create opportunities for numerous applications beyond the traditionally defined library management system.
By adhering to standards from the wider Web community, by considering the library system as an interlocking set of functional components rather than a monolithic black box, and by taking a bold new approach to defining the ways in which information from and about libraries are 'owned' and exposed to others, we make it straightforward for information from the library to find its way to other places online.
Rather than being locked inside the library system, data can add value to the experience of users wherever they are, whether it is Google, Amazon, the institutional portal, or one of the social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook.
By unlocking data and the services that make use of it, the possibilities are literally endless, and it is here that efforts such as those around the construction of a library 'Platform' [12] become important.
One very early example of combining library data with other sources in order to add value to both is the whole area of the 'Mashup'.
Mashups are not only found in the library world, but are proving increasingly prevalent in association with a whole host of Web 2.0 companies and ideas.
Wikipedia [13], the online encyclopaedia, defines a Mashup as; "... a website or web application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service."
[14] This competition was for anyone in the community that had harboured a yearning to see information from or about libraries put to best use and displayed to optimal effect alongside information or services from other sources.
The Mashing Up The Library competition [15] was open to all, and carried a first prize of £1,000 for the strongest entry.
This competition was intended to celebrate and showcase all that is best in these efforts to push library information out to existing audiences in new ways, or to reach totally new audiences with compelling and captivating applications.
The 2006 competition marks a beginning, and we look forward to watching the sector grow in coming years.
Announcement of the Mashing Up The Library competition in June generated great enthusiasm amongst diverse groups across the world.
Tim Spalding of LibraryThing [16] commented "LibraryThing draws on libraries for its data, so I'm well aware how rich this is, and how relatively unexploited by programmers in general.
I'm looking forward to seeing what creative mashers do".
Helene Blowers, Public Service Technology Director, Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County [17] Charlotte, North Carolina congratulated Talis on its initiative, noting with approval that not only was the competition open to all-comers (rather than just its customer base) but also that contestants were not obliged to use or interface with Talis' products to create an entry.
Darlene Fichter, Data Library Co-ordinator for the University of Saskatchewan [18] felt it would 'kick-start the creation of several mashups using library data which will benefit everyone'.
The Judges An expert panel of international judges gathered to promote and judge the competition.
They comprised; Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelist for Amazon.com; Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technologies & Research at Vanderbilt University; Jenny Levine, well established library blogger as The Shifted Librarian and newly of the American Library Association (ALA); Paul Miller, Talis; Andrew Pace, Head of Information Technology at North Carolina State University Libraries; Chris Pirillo, Lockergnome; Gary Price, Director of Online Information Resources at Ask.com and Publisher of ResourceShelf.com; Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing; Jon Udell, InfoWorld; Ed Vielmetti, Superpatron.com.
The Entries A total of eighteen entries were received for the competition, spanning everything from very simple enhancements to existing library functions right through to a collaborative effort to provide library services inside the Second Life 3D online digital world.
Entries came in from public and academic libraries, as well as from the commercial sector.
As is the trend with Mashups more generally, map-based Mashups proved common.
All eighteen entries are described in detail [19], and comprise; Alliance Second Life Library 2.0, submitted by the Alliance Library System in East Peoria, Illinois, USA on behalf of the gobal staff of the Second Life Library [20]; Amazon2OU Library Pivot Browsing, submitted by Tony Hirst of the Open University, UK [21]; BiblioPage.com, submitted by Aaron Huber of the Broward County Library System in Broward County, Florida, USA [22]; Book Cover Browser, submitted by Mike Cunningham of Cambridge Libraries in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada [23]; Book Trackr, submitted by Jim Robertson of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA [24]; Consuming Library New Book Feeds, submitted by Tony Hirst of the Open University, UK [25]; Danish contribution, submitted by Jens Hofman Hansen of the State and University Library, Aarhus, Denmark, on behalf of the summa development team [26]; Feed Based Library Interface, submitted by Tony Hirst of the Open University, UK [27]; Go-Go-Google-Gadget, submitted by John F. Blyberg of the Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA [28]; Lib 2.0 library toolbar, submitted by Casey Durfee of Lib20 Consulting, Washington, D.C., USA [29]; The Library Catalogue in Google Desktop, submitted by Art Rhyno of the University of Windsor and Ross Singer of Georgia Tech Library, USA [30]; LibMap, submitted by Tim Hodson of Herefordshire Libraries, UK [31]; Library Map Mashup, submitted by Michael McDonnell on behalf of 'the Bruncherati', members of a library interest group in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada [32]; Library Patrons Who Borrow Create, submitted by Michael L. Johnson [33]; Lillian A Virtual Librarian, submitted by David Burden of DADEN Ltd in Birmingham, UK [34]; Maps of Place of Publication, submitted by 'MMcM' [35]; OU Traveller, submitted by Tony Hirst of the Open University, UK [36]; NJIT catalog, submitted by Jim Robertson of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA [37].
John Blyberg John's winning entry, Go-Go-Google-Gadget.
This image by kind permission of John Blyberg.
© All rights reserved The First prize of £1,000 was awarded to John Blyberg [38] of Ann Arbor District Library [39] in Ann Arbor, MI.
His entry, Go-Go-Google-Gadget [28], showed how simply library information can be integrated into the personalised home page offered by Google, and was an excellent example of taking information previously locked inside the library catalogue and making it available to users in other contexts where they may spend more time than they do in their catalogue.
Available information includes new and the most popular material in the library, and user-specific information on checked-out and requested items.
'Superpatron' Ed Vielmetti [40] applauded the simplicity of this entry, remarking in a clear invitation for others to follow John's lead that "the visible source code is very tiny and easily hackable."
Vanderbilt University's Marshall Breeding [41] concluded, "I like this entry's spirit of opening up information in the library system and putting it under the control of the user."
In recognition of the strong pound at the time, the sum of $2,000 was paid to John.
The Second Prize   Figure 5: a view across part of the library territory inside Second Life from the top of the Talis tower The Second prize of £500 was awarded to the Alliance Library System [42] in East Peoria, IL, and their global partners in the Second Life [43] Library [44].
Their entry, the Alliance Second Life Library 2.0 [20], was both a testament to international co-operation amongst libraries and a compelling demonstration of the ways in which traditional library functions can be extended into cyberspace, reaching new audiences.
In recognition of the exchange rate at the time, the sum of $1,000 was paid to the Alliance Library System, and they used the funds to finance a number of building projects inside Second Life.
Since the competition, Talis has also been involved in sponsoring a further library venture inside Second Life; Talis Cybrary City [45].
This new island provides a free home to more than thirty libraries around the world, and offers them a space in which to project their own identity and services, separate to the communal effort they put into the main Second Life Library.
Individuals well known to Ariadne readers, including Eduserv's Andy Powell, are taking to the opportunities in Cybrary City like the proverbial ducks to water [46].
What's Next?
The Mashing Up The Library competition marked an important step forward in encouraging open and inclusive innovation from libraries around the world, regardless of their consortial memberships or vendor allegiance.
As we move forward and traditional library groupings become less appropriate and sustainable in today's rapidly changing environment, it becomes increasingly important to encourage open approaches such as these.
Talis is committed to helping libraries to reach out to existing and new markets for their capabilities, and the ongoing support of this competition is one aspect of that strategy.
Rather than re-run the same competition again in 2007, we wish to encourage innovative work on an ongoing basis.
As such, the competition Web site [15] remains open, and is accepting new entries.
We will periodically assemble a team of judges to select the best submissions since the last time entries were judged.
In addition, we will seek to reward particularly innovative or compelling examples on an ad hoc basis, outside the normal cycle of judging.
For those not interested for whatever reason in entering the competition itself, we also maintain an Innovation Directory [47] within which any piece of innovative work in this field may be registered.
Current entries include contestants in our competition, those we are aware of from the OCLC competition [7], and more.
We invite others to come forward and nominate their own work and that of others, in order that we can build a resource from which the whole community may learn.
Conclusion The 'mashup' is a point in time; a means to an end.
Our purpose is not, necessarily, to encourage the neverending development of small tweaks and hacks around existing systems.
Our purpose is to create a safe and incentivised environment within which the whole sector can begin to give serious thought to what they actually want in the future.
Should we continue to change the systems we have incrementally, or are we approaching the point at which some revolutionary change is required?
Mashups are 'easy', mashups are quick.
Mashups free their creator to think differently, and to try the unexpected.
Some of that which they learn will inform our collective thinking as we move forward.
More sustainable than an explosion of individual mashups is a robust and scalable ecosystem upon which system builders can rely, and within which a wide range of stakeholders can maintain existing niches or carve new ones.
Mashups certainly point in an interesting direction.
The sustainable future, whilst learning an awful lot from them, is far more likely to look like the vision forming around the Talis Platform [12], with its robust technical footing and powerful Web services [48] that enable integration with Amazon [49], LibraryThing [50], Google, and more, and that make it feasible to construct a whole new application [51] in a matter of days rather than months or years.
Figure 6: Talis' Project Cenote, an experimental interface rapidly deployed on top of an underlying Platform to showcase the possibilities offered by large pools of data and consistent means of access The world is a-changing.
'Playing' in Second Life and 'mucking around' with mashups tells us a great deal about how; and an awful lot more about how to change with it.
References Calhoun, K., 2006, "The changing nature of the catalog and its integration with other Discovery Tools" http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf Bibliographic Services Task Force, 2005, "Rethinking how we provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California", http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.pdf North Carolina State University http://www.ncsu.edu/ Endeca at the NCSU Libraries http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/ Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries mailing list http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mailing-lists/ngc4lib/ OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center http://www.oclc.org/ Second OCLC Research Software Contest http://www.oclc.org/research/researchworks/contest/ Talis http://www.talis.com/ Mashing up the Library competition 2006 judges http://www.talis.com/tdn/competition_judges LibraryLookup http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/LibraryLookup/ Greasemonkey http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ Talis Platform http://www.talis.com/platform/ Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/ Mashup, as defined by Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29 Mashing up the Library competition http://www.talis.com/tdn/competition/ LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/ Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, Charlotte, North Carolina http://www.plcmc.org/ University of Saskatchewan http://www.usask.ca/ Mashing up the Library competition entries http://www.talis.com/tdn/forum/84 Alliance Second Life Library 2.0 http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1506 Amazon2OU Library Pivot Browsing http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1508 BiblioPage http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1503 Book Cover Browser http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1517 Book Trackr http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1522 Consuming Library New Book Feeds http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1513 Danish Contribution http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1519 Feed Based Library Interface http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1504 Go-Go-Google-Gadget http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1524 Lib 2.0 library toolbar http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1521 The Library Catalogue in Google Desktop http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1526 LibMap http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1516 Library Map Mashup http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1525 Library Patrons who borrow to create http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1518 Lillian a virtual librarian http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1507 Maps of Place of Publication http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1511 OU Traveller http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1520 NJIT Catalog http://www.talis.com/tdn/node/1523 John Blyberg http://blyberg.net/ Ann Arbor District Library http://www.aadl.org/ Superpatron blog http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/ Marshall Breeding http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/breeding/ Alliance Library System http://www.alliancelibrarysystem.com/ Second Life http://www.secondlife.com/ InfoIsland.org, the blog of the Second Life Library http://www.infoisland.org/ 'Talis sponsors Cybrary City' press release http://infoisland.org/2006/11/07/talis-sponsors-cybrary-city/ ArtsPlace SL blog http://artfossett.blogspot.com/ The Innovation Directory http://www.talis.com/tdn/innovationdir/ Talis Platform web services http://www.talis.com/tdn/platform/ Amazon@Libraries Firefox browser extension http://www.talis.com/tdn/greasemonkey/amazon-libraries LibraryThingThing Firefox browser extension http://www.talis.com/tdn/greasemonkey/librarythingthing Project Cenote http://cenote.talis.com/ Author Details Paul Miller Technology Evangelist Talis Email: paul.miller@talis.com Web site: http://www.talis.com/ Return to top Article Title: "What Happens When We Mash The Library?"
Author: Paul Miller Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/miller/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Towards Library Groupware With Personalised Link Routing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Towards Library Groupware With Personalised Link Routing Buzz data software java rdf html database xml vocabularies namespace visualisation svg foaf Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly takes a look at the FOAF Semantic Web application and suggests it is time to start evaluating this technology.
What Is FOAF?
The term FOAF [1] stands for Friend of a Friend.
As might be deduced from this phrase one of the key applications of FOAF is to provide a mechanism for creating links to one’s friends.
From the links to one’s immediate circle of friends automated software can be used to process links from your friends, which can provide a visualisation of ‘friends of a friend’.
FOAF is a Semantic Web application which can be used to provide personal information in a form suitable for automated processing.
On a page created in HTML Web authors often provide personal information, such as contact details, interests, etc.
Such information is ideally suited for reading but cannot easily be repurposed by automated tools.
FOAF was designed to enable such information to be provided in a form which could not only be displayed as conventional Web page content but also to be used for automated processing.
An example of a FOAF application is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: A Graphical Visualisation of Friend of a Friend It should be pointed out that this illustrates the original thinking behind FOAF.
However FOAF is inherently extensible and so can be used in richer ways.
Case Study: FOAF and conferences As an example of a FOAF application we will explore its potential for use in conferences.
The ideas provided are based on a paper written by Brian Kelly and Leigh Dodds on “Using FOAF to Support Community Building” which was presented at the IADIS Web-Based Communities 2004 conference held in Lisbon in March 2004 [2].
Participants at a conference will be aware that conference organisers normally seek not only to provide an opportunity for participants to listen to talks and ask questions of the speakers but also for participants to make links with other delegates.
Social events at conferences provide a valuable opportunity to support this community building.
However it can be difficult to track down fellow participants with whom you have similar interests, especially at large events and overseas conferences.
A number of conferences have sought to address this difficulty by allowing participants to provide their contact details, interests, etc.
prior to the event, typically using a Web-based form.
This information can then be viewed by participants with the potential for facilitating meetings, ‘birds-of-a-feather’ sessions, etc.
In practice, however, such facilities do not appear to have been entirely successful.
This may, in part, be due to reluctance to provide such information for every conference, the lack of ownership of the data once it has been uploaded, with the inevitable consequence that it becomes out of date.
In addition each conference is likely to have its own application which can require additional learning time.
The approach advocated in the paper “Using FOAF to Support Community Building” is based on an extension to FOAF.
As well as using FOAF to describe one’s contact details the paper also proposes using FOAF to record the conferences one has attended, or plans to attend.
Leigh Dodds is updating the Foafnaut viewer [3] to provide support for such events information, as illustrated below.
(Note that at time of writing this update has not yet been released into the publicly available Foafnaut application).
Figure 2: Viewing Conference Participation In this image we can see that Leigh Dodds knows Edd.
Leigh and Edd have both attended the XML Europe 2000 conferences.
In addition Edd has also attended the XML Europe 2003 and ETCON 2004 conferences.
Advantages of the FOAF Approach The application illustrated above could be implemented by using conventional database technologies.
However it is important to understand that FOAF enables data to be integrated even if the data is stored on distributed systems.
In addition the FOAF data can be extended without the need for universal agreement on data structures.
The distributed nature of FOAF is enabling enthusiasts to create their own FOAF data files easily which can then be processed by FOAF applications.
This grass-roots approach is reminiscent of the early days of the Web when early adopters installed Web servers on departmental servers, prior to a recognition of the Web’s strategic importance to organisations.
And unlike running a Web server, involvement with FOAF does not require special privileges to run server software you simply need to create a FOAF file and then register it with appropriate FOAF harvesters.
Issues With any emerging technology there will inevitably be limitations and issues which have not been fully resolved.
With FOAF the main issues to be aware of are: Trust Trust is acknowledged as a major issue.
If a FOAF file contains information saying the owner knows Nelson Mandela, say, and has attended a particular event, can this information be trusted?
It should be acknowledged, however, that the position is no different from conventional Web pages.
Data Protection This article outlines an approach based on individuals creating and maintaining their own FOAF files.
It would be possible for FOAF files to be created centrally.
Although there are advantages with this approach, a potential barrier may be data protection legislation.
As with any system which stores personal data, organisations need to consider carefully the implications of data protection legislation.
Limitation of the “Friend of a Friend” Relationship Concerns have been raised of the value of the ‘friend-of-a-friend’ relationship model.
In retrospect it could be argued that although this phrase has resonances for many and the FOAF acronym is memorable and can be easily pronounced, concerns over the effectiveness of ‘friend-of-a-friend’ relationships may act as a barrier to acceptance of FOAF, (see next point).
You may wish to regard FOAF as an open and extensible format for providing personal information which may include friends, but is not restricted to them.
Uncertainty over the Meaning of the Term ‘Friend‘ FOAF has been criticised because of the lack of clarify of the term ‘friend’.
The FOAF specification provides a mechanism to define different categories of friends, such as close friend, relative, business colleague, etc.
However it is still possible to make use of FOAF applications while still using a loose definition of the term friend.
Harvesting Data When using FOAF viewers for performance reasons the data is not normally processed dynamically.
Instead FOAF files are harvested and the data stored allows the relationships to be batch-processed.
This allows for a speedy display of FOAF data.
However this model has its limitations when data is created or updated.
This is a known limitation and the issues are being addressed within the FOAF development community.
Agreement on Namespaces Although FOAF is extensible it is desirable to seek agreements on the XML namespaces which define the extensions.
Application Support For Data Extensions FOAF viewers will not provide a graphical display for every extension.
There is therefore a need to ensure that use of extensions goes hand in hand with the development of parses which process new extensions.
Creating FOAF Despite FOAF having unresolved issues, this should not necessarily act as a barrier to use of FOAF after all the limitations of the Web did not stop it being deployed in many organisations over 10 years ago, despite that fact that many of its limitations have still to be resolved.
One of the most popular FOAF authoring tools is FOAF-a-matic [4] which is illustrated below.
Figure 3: The FOAF-a-matic Authoring Tool As can be seen, FOAF-a-matic is a simple Web-based authoring tool.
You fill in the form and press the Save button.
The FOAF file you have created should then be saved on the Web, typically with a .rdf (or .xrdf) extension.
For example the author’s FOAF file has the address <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly/foaf/bkelly-foaf.xrdf> You can use FOAF-a-matic to add the address of the FOAF file of your friends.
For example, if you know the author you can add the address given above.
An alternative approach is to use a FOAF viewer.
The FOAF Explorer application [5], for example, allows you not only to explore FOAF space but can also update your FOAF file with information on people you have found.
For example, as shown in Figure 4, if you explore my friends of a friend you may find that you also know Tom Heath.
Clicking on the appropriate icon (the red symbol) will update a copy of your FOAF file with the appropriate data.
Figure 4: Adding FOAF Data Using FOAF Explorer Another approach for creating FOAF data is to create and edit your FOAF file using a simple text editor.
As can be seen from the FOAF fragment shown below it need not be too difficult to implement.
The data held in the <foaf:Person> element should be self-explanatory, with the nickname, name, email address, home page and location of my friend’s FOAF file defined using appropriate <foaf> elements, preceeded by the namespace for the FOAF vocabulary.
<foaf:knows xmlns:rel= “http://www.perceive.net/schemas/20021119/relationship/relationship.rdf#" xmlns:dcterms=“http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <foaf:Person> <foaf:nick>Leigh</foaf:nick> <foaf:name>Leigh Dodds</foaf:name> <foaf:mbox rdf:resource=“mailto:ldodds@ingenta.com”/> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource=“http://www.ldodds.com/"/> <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource=“http://www.ldodds.com/ldodds.rdf"/> </foaf:Person> </foaf:knows> Viewing FOAF A number of FOAF viewers are available including Foafnaut 3, FOAF Explorer [5], Plink [6] and Semaview 7.
Images from the Foafnaut and FOAF Explorer viewers are shown elsewhere in this article.
An illustration of another viewer, illustrating the extensibility of FOAF is shown below.
Figure 5: The Plink FOAF Viewer As can be seen, Plink not only provides links to people I know and people who know me, but also people who are local to me.
In my FOAF file I have described the geographical location of my place of work.
Plink has processed this information and matched it against the FOAF data Plink has harvested.
Plink can therefore display not only people I have defined as my friends, but also people who work near me.
It is also possible to compare various FOAF viewers’ links to these viewers and links which illustrate use of the viewers on live FOAF data [8].
Conclusion This article has sought to describe FOAF and outline its potential, in particular for use to support community building at events.
At the presentation of the paper “Using FOAF to Support Community Building” at the IADIS Web-Based Collaboration conference in March 2004, I proposed that its future conferences should seek to encourage use of FOAF to support community building across delegates.
This suggestion was accepted by the conference organisers and we will consider how to implement it.
Following this initial acceptance of FOAF’s potential, participants at the annual Institutional Web Management Workshop event [9], (to be held at the University of Birmingham, 27-29 July 2004), will have an opportunity to use FOAF.
A page providing information on how to get involved in the use of FOAF at the workshop has been created [10].
References FOAF, http://www.foaf-project.org/ Kelly, B. and Dodds, L. “Using FOAF to Support Community Building”, IADIS Web-Based Collaboration 2004 Conference, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/iadis-2004/foaf/ Foafnaut, http://www.foafnaut.org/ FOAF-a-matic, http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic FOAF Explorer, http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/ Plink, http://beta.plink.org/ Semaview, http://www.semaview.com/foafwalk/viewer.html Brian Kelly, FOAF Information, UKOLN, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly/foaf/ Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/ Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004: Use of FOAF http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/foaf/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Web Focus: Towards Library Groupware With Personalised Link Routing” Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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WebWatch: How Accessible Are Australian University Web Sites?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines WebWatch: How Accessible Are Australian University Web Sites?
Buzz data software java javascript html usability stylesheet css accessibility browser identifier video graphics windows rtf gif ocr adobe flash doc wcag url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dey Alexander reports on a recent study of the accessibility of Australian university Web sites.
This article reports on a recent study of the accessibility of Australian university Web sites.
A selection of key pages from all 45 Australian tertiary education Web sites were analysed to assess their compliance with basic accessibility standards, as required by Australian anti-discrimination legislation.
The results–98% of sites failed to comply–suggest that Australian university Web sites are likely to present significant barriers to access for people with disabilities.
Web accessibility is poorly understood by university Web publishers, and procedures are not in place to ensure that university Web sites provide equitable access to important online resources.
Today, it is difficult to imagine university life without the Web.
Like many organisations, universities have gradually moved business operations online and significant aspects of student recruitment, teaching, research and support functions are now operating on the Web.
The delivery of services, resources and information online is becoming the norm, and many of us appreciate the convenience and time-saving opportunities associated with this trend.
For some people with disabilities, the Web is not just a convenient means of access to information but allows them to do things that may have been impossible, or at least extremely difficult, in the past.
For instance, blind persons can read the newspaper online whenever they choose, rather than having to wait for someone to read it to them.
And a person confined to a wheelchair can reach all the grocery items on the virtual supermarket shelf, where those on the upper shelves in the physical supermarket proved inaccessible.
However, while the technology that supports the Web offers this opportunity for increased independence, many Web sites obstruct access to disabled users through poor design.
This is despite the fact that international standards for Web accessibility have been codified since 1999, and that policy and legislation now exists in many countries to protect the rights of those with disabilities [1].
With the increasing emphasis placed on the delivery of core university services via the Web, it is important to ensure that equitable access is provided.
Many universities have, or are in the process of developing, policies concerning Web accessibility.
Many believe they are close to achieving the goals set out in those policies [2].
But is that belief well-founded?
So I will discuss the findings from a recent study of Australian university Web sites.
The study aimed to identify: whether basic accessibility standards are being met; if there are any areas in which accessibility standards are poorly understood; and what measures might be needed to ensure or improve equitable access.
What is Web accessibility?
In its broadest definition, “Web accessibility” is an approach to Web design that aims for maximal inclusion, both in terms of people who use Web sites, and the technologies that are utilised in the process.
This notion of Web accessibility was Tim Berners-Lee’s vision when he created the Web: The concept of the Web is of universal readership.
If you publish a document on the Web, it is important that anyone who has access to it can read it and link to it.
These days Web accessibility generally refers to accessibility for disabled user groups.
This is an important aspect of the original goal for the Web, and the push for Web accessibility for disabled users has largely come from within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which Berners-Lee is the Director.
Legal requirements for Web accessibility The W3C has overseen the development of a set of international standards for the design of Web content: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) [3].
Published in May 1999, these guidelines have influenced the development of policy and legislation around the world, including in Australia.
In this country, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) makes it unlawful to design Web pages that create barriers to access for disabled users.
The relevant provision of the Act is Section 24: 24 Goods, services and facilities (1) It is unlawful for a person who, whether for payment or not, provides goods or services, or makes facilities available, to discriminate against another person on the ground of the other person’s disability or a disability of any of that other person’s associates: (a) by refusing to provide the other person with those goods or services or to make those facilities available to the other person; or (b) in the terms or conditions on which the first-mentioned person provides the other person with those goods or services or makes those facilities available to the other person; or © in the manner in which the first-mentioned person provides the other person with those goods or services or makes those facilities available to the other person.
The DDA does not specify standards for Web accessibility.
Instead, it empowers the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) to issue “Advisory Notes”, or guidelines, in order to assist organisations to discharge their responsibilities under the Act.
HREOC’s advisory note concerning Section 24 of the DDA endorses the W3C’s WCAG as the standard for Web accessibility in Australia [4].
Disabilities that affect use of the Web The definition of disability in the DDA is very broad.
In Section 4, the Act states that: disability, in relation to a person, means: (a) total or partial loss of the person’s bodily or mental functions; or (b) total or partial loss of a part of the body; or © the presence in the body of organisms causing disease or illness; or (d) the presence in the body of organisms capable of causing disease or illness; or (e) the malfunction, malformation or disfigurement of a part of the person’s body; or (f) a disorder or malfunction that results in the person learning differently from a person without the disorder or malfunction; or (g) a disorder, illness or disease that affects a person’s thought processes, perception of reality, emotions or judgment or that results in disturbed behaviour; and includes a disability that: (h) presently exists; or (i) previously existed but no longer exists; or (j) may exist in the future; or (k) is imputed to a person.
Given this definition, almost one in five Australians has a disability [4].
However, not all disabilities affect people’s use of the Web.
Those that do include visual, hearing and cognitive impairments, some mobility impairments and seizure disorders [5].
The effects of visual impairments such as blindness, low vision and colour blindness are probably best understood.
This group of users may have difficulty with visual media including graphical representations of text, photos, animations and movies.
Small text sizes may cause problems for those with low vision, and the use of certain colours and in some combinations may cause difficulties for those with low vision and colour blindness.
Mobility impairments, on the other hand, are not as well understood.
These can include complete or partial loss of hand or arm movements, muscle weakness or involuntary movement, tremor or loss of fine motor control.
Mobility impairments can make the use of a mouse impossible or extremely difficult.
Navigating a Web site with only the use of a keyboard can be challenging.
Selecting and activating small controls–for example radio buttons and checkboxes or small navigation images–are also highly problematic.
The impact of hearing impairments is often overlooked since much of the Web is visual.
However, it is important to note that for some in the deaf community, English is a second language: Auslan or another sign language may be their primary linguistic orientation.
While the use of audio without captioning poses an obvious barrier to access, so too may the use of overly complex language.
For those with cognitive impairments, issues which may present barriers to access are also poorly understood.
Many people have reading or learning disorders, and these are often unrecognised or undiagnosed.
Writing in plain language and breaking text into manageable-sized chunks is recommended.
Clear labelling and organisation of content, consistent use of navigation, and supplementing text with images and audio will also greatly assist access for this group.
Seizure disorders may be triggered by page elements that flicker in the range of 2-55 Hz.
In the early days of JavaScript, there was a tendency to cause page flickering through rapid loading of different page background colours.
Currently the greatest threat to those with seizure disorders are animated banner ads and other moving or blinking elements that flicker within this frequency.
It is worth noting that many of the design techniques that improve accessibility for disabled users, also improve usability for other users.
For instance, research shows that few people read text closely on the Web [6] .
Breaking text into small chunks and using plain language improves readability for everyone.
Likewise, clear and consistent layout and navigation structures benefit all users of the Web.
Methodology Nature and goals of the research This study of Web accessibility sought to address two primary questions.
Do Australian university Web sites meet the basic standards for Web accessibility?
And, are there any areas in which the basic requirements for Web accessibility are poorly understood and/or implemented?
Sites included in the study were measured against the standards set out in the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Efforts to comply with the Australian Disability Discrimination Act 1992 are judged against these standards [4].
WCAG is also an international standard, developed with input from amongst the 300 W3C member organisations around the world [7].
WCAG specifies 14 guidelines or “general principles of accessible design” [7].
Each guideline has an associated set of one or more checkpoints, with 65 checkpoints in total.
The checkpoints are categorised into three priority levels, each level providing greater access [3]: Priority 1 checkpoints A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint.
Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document.
Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.
Priority 2 checkpoints A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint.
Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document.
Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.
Priority 3 checkpoints A Web content developer may address this checkpoint.
Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document.
Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.
Associated with these three sets of prioritised checkpoints is a WCAG conformance level.
If a site satisfies all priority one checkpoints it can claim level-A conformance.
Where all priority one and two checkpoints are met, the site can be said to have reached conformance level-AA.
Conformance level-AAA can be claimed when the requirements of all priority one, two and three checkpoints have been fulfilled.
In this study, Australian university Web sites were assessed against only the priority one checkpoints.
These are the minimum requirements for accessibility that all sites must meet.
However, even if a site is found to be level-A compliant it might still present accessibility problems for some disabled users.
It is important to point out that this study does not directly measure the degree to which disabled people can access Web content provided by university Web sites.
Instead, compliance with the WCAG guidelines is used as an indicator of accessibility.
To determine more precisely the extent to which university Web sites facilitate access, the experience of users with various disabilities would need to be studied.
Research scope All 45 Australian university Web sites listed on the Department of Education, Science and Training Web site were included in the research [8].
See Appendix A for the complete list.
From each site, a selection of four key pages was chosen for analysis.
These were: the home page the prospective students page (or an equivalent) the orientation page (or an alternative) a student accommodation page (or an alternative) These pages were chosen for several reasons.
First, it is important to compare pages that are of similar significance to the core business of the institution.
The comparison should be made across pages that provide a similar function for similar target audience groups.
Second, each of the four pages is likely to have had the benefit of significant development and maintenance attention.
Two are key entry points for each Web site.
The other two–the orientation and student accommodation pages–are likely to be of most interest at the time of year in which the analysis was undertaken (in the month prior to the commencement of first semester).
Finally, it was necessary to examine pages which did not require authenticated access.
An examination of only four pages is of course not sufficient to declare that any site positively conforms to WCAG level A–the data set is appreciably incomplete.
However, given the significance of the pages chosen for the analysis, a negative result for any institution is a strong sign that there are insufficient procedures in place to ensure that accessibility standards are being met.
Evaluation method and tools The evaluation method used for this analysis was based loosely on that suggested by the W3C [5].
A six-step method was used.
Each page was viewed in Internet Explorer (version 6, running on Windows XP Professional).
A screen capture was taken of each page.
Each page was viewed in Internet Explorer (version 6, running on Windows XP Professional) with the accessibility options (ignore colours, font styles and sizes) turned on.
These options override the styles defined by the site’s author and show how a page would appear when rendered without stylesheets.
Pages were viewed twice using Delorie’s Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer [9], a Web-based utility that simulates the behaviour of browsers with variable functionality.
First, the support for stylesheets was turned off, simulating how a page would appear when rendered by a browser that does not fully support stylesheets.
Browsers such as Netscape versions 1, 2 and 3 fall into this category, along with Internet Explorer versions 1, 2 and 3.
The second page view was done with support for scripting turned off.
This allowed a simulation of how a page would function when client-side scripting was not supported or turned off.
Lynx (version 2.8.4, running in a DOS window on Windows XP Professional) was then used to view each page.
Lynx is a text-only browser available for a number of operating system platforms.
A screen capture of a text-only view of each page was taken using Delorie’s Lynx Viewer [10], a Web-based Lynx emulation utility that facilitates an environment in which screen captures of long pages can be achieved.
Pages were then checked using Webaim’s The Wave 11.
The Wave provides a visual analysis of compliance with several WCAG checkpoints.
It is particularly practical for evaluating the use of text alternatives for non-text elements on a page.
A screen capture of the output from the Wave was saved.
Development on The Wave occurred during the month in which the analysis took place.
As a result, some of the pages were checked with alpha version 2.02, others with alpha version 3.0, and those analysed in the later stages of the project were checked with beta version 3.0.
Where a text-only alternative to a page was provided, it was analysed in place of the original page.
Text-only pages are generally provided as part of an accessibility effort by site owners, and may be selected in preference to the original page by users with certain types of disabilities.
All pages were viewed between 27 January and 15 February, 2003.
Some pages may have been redesigned or updated since.
Analysis of results An analysis of the results shows 98 per cent of Australian university Web sites failed to meet the most basic standards for Web accessibility.
Only one Australian university Web site’s set of four key pages was found to be WCAG level-A compliant.
Of the 180 pages included in the analysis, 153 pages failed on at least one checkpoint [12].
Most errors were recorded against checkpoint 1.1 with 138 pages, across 44 sites, failing to comply.
No failures were recorded against eight of the 16 priority one checkpoints: checkpoints 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 4.1, 7.1, 9.1 and 14.1.
As a result, they will not be discussed.
Instead, the rationale behind the requirements of the eight remaining checkpoints will be considered along with the failures recorded against them and some examples of the problems encountered.
Provide equivalent text alternatives for non-text elements on a page (checkpoint 1.1 138 page failures, 98% site failures) One of the most fundamental requirements for accessibility is the provision of text equivalents for non-text elements.
As the W3C points out “both words in ‘text equivalent’ are important” [3]: Text is considered accessible because it can be rendered by the widest range of user agents–from graphical browsers to text and voice browsers, including screen and braille readers–making content accessible to people from various disability groups [13].
Text alternatives are considered equivalent to other content “when both fulfill essentially the same function or purpose upon presentation to the user” [14].
WCAG checkpoint 1.1 requires the use of text equivalents for a range of Web content elements that might otherwise not be accessible, including: Images (photos and graphic content, animations, text rendered as images, images used for decorative purposes and layout, image maps and their clickable regions) Media such as video and audio Applets and scripts Frames Of the 180 pages analysed, 138 failed to comply with the requirements of this important checkpoint.
This indicates a serious lack of understanding of the role of text equivalents, and should be of great concern to university Web site administrators.
The nature of these page failures is discussed below.
Text equivalents for images (133 page failures, 95.5% of sites) Those who are blind or who suffer significant loss of vision are not able to make use of graphical content provided on Web pages.
Therefore Web designers are required to include a text equivalent for all graphical elements by using the “alt” attribute of the “img” element and, where necessary, the “longdesc” attribute.
95.5% of Australian university Web sites failed to meet this checkpoint.
A number of problems relating to the use of text equivalents for images were found.
These have been categorised into seven sub-groups.
Five relate to images that convey content, and two concern images used solely for layout or decorative purposes.
They are discussed below.
While some of the errors that were found may be attributed to limitations of the particular markup tool being used, the data strongly suggests that university Web authors do not understand why they must provide text alternatives for images.
This lack of understanding is not confined to university Web sites: Many authors haven’t figured out exactly what they are trying to present; they don’t know what it is about the image that’s important to the page’s intended audience.
The reason you can’t figure out why their alt [texts] aren’t working is that they don’t know why the images are there.
Every graphic has a reason for being on that page: because it either enhances the theme/mood/atmosphere or it is critical to what the page is trying to explain.
Knowing what the image is for makes the labels easier to write [15].
In addition, it is clear that either an inadequate quality assurance procedure is in place or it is being ignored.
Image “alt” attributes were not equivalent to the information conveyed by the image (41 pages) On 41 pages, text alternatives for images did not provide equivalent information or functionality.
For example, on the Murdoch University home page, an image drew attention to the University’s Orientation Week activities and provided the date on which these would occur.
For non-sighted users or those relying on the text alternative for the image, the date of Orientation Week was not included.
On the James Cook University’s student accommodation page, an image linking to an online application for on-campus accommodation was given the text alternative of “Apply online” without indicating what the application was for.
Given that both on and off-campus accommodation options were discussed on the page, this ambiguity may lead to a user error.
On LaTrobe University’s orientation page, the text alternative for an image linking to the staff telephone directory failed to include the information that the directory was for internal use only.
And on the University of Technology Sydney’s home page, a news item was given the text alternative of “news”, omitting the substantive content.
Commonly, text alternatives were treated as though the author believed they should provide meta data or information about the image, rather than the information the image was conveying [15].
For instance, on the Australian Catholic University Web site, an image that contained the name of the university and each of its campus locations was given the text alternative “ACU locations”.
On the Bond University site, an image showing a map of Australia with Bond’s location relative to Brisbane and some photographs of the campus and the Gold Coast area was given the text alternative “Location guide and Bond scenes”.
On ten further pages, less critical differences between the text alternative and the information provided by the image were found.
These were not recorded as checkpoint failures in this study, although some may think they ought to have been.
In any case, they represent a less than ideal approach to writing text alternatives.
On the Deakin University home page an image containing a welcome message as well as the University logo was given the text alternative “Deakin logo”.
While this signalled to the user that they were on the Deakin site, it did not provide the same sort of experience that a sighted user would have.
A different example was found on the Curtin University home page.
There, an image at the bottom of the page presented the University’s tagline or slogan: ‘Look ever forward’.
While the visual presentation indicated to sighted users that this was a slogan or tagline, the text presentation did not, leaving open the possibility that users may be confused about what the text was intending to convey.
Image “alt” attributes included unnecessary data (21 pages) Unnecessary information was included in the text alternative provided for images on 21 pages.
The most common example involved the repetition of a text alternative for an image that had been sliced to allow greater control over layout.
The logo on the University of Western Australia’s orientation page was sliced in three and each segment given a text alternative.
In similar fashion, the University of Newcastle’s logo that appears on the home page has been sliced in two, and both slices have the same text alternative.
And “University of Ballarat Welcome to orientation week” was repeated four times on the University’s orientation page.
Unnecessary data was also included by some page authors when they added the words “link to” or “click here to go ” at the beginning of text alternatives for images that acted as links to another page.
This approach was found on many pages on the Charles Sturt University site.
User agents provide their own mechanisms for identifying links.
JAWS, for instance, will say aloud “link graphic” prior to reading the text alternative provided by the page author.
Adding text such as “link to” means that those accessing the Web with screenreaders or speech synthesisers will be forced to listen to text that is, in fact, redundant.
A further annoyance might result for skilled users of screenreading software.
The software provides a feature that allows users to access a list of all the links on a page, rather than having to read through the page in order to locate a link.
The list of links can be sorted and browsed alphabetically.
Users can skip to a particular part of the list, say to section H, to quickly locate the link to the home page.
Adding “Link to” to every text alternative for a link renders this feature useless.
(Note: the errors mentioned in this section were not recorded as checkpoint failures.
They are included here as they indicate the extent to which the function of text alternatives is misunderstood).
Image “alt” attributes were left blank (11 pages) On 11 pages empty “alt” attributes for images that conveyed important information, or acted as links to other pages, were found.
E.g.
<img src=“sitemap.gif” alt=“”> instead of <img src=“sitemap.gif” alt=“Sitemap”> An image with the words “Click enrolment info”, found on the University of Adelaide’s home page, had an empty “alt” attribute.
On the Flinders University home page, an image link to the orientation Web page had no “alt” attribute.
Images providing key navigation options on the Notre Dame University home page had no “alt” attribute.
In each of these cases, users would have no idea of the target of the link.
On a further 2 pages, empty “alt” attributes were also found for images conveying text of less than critical importance.
These were not counted as checkpoint failures.
An example, from the James Cook University Web site, was a blank “alt” attribute for a graphical tagline or slogan, “Always Thinking Ahead”.
While this omission may not be serious from the user’s point of view, its use on the home page was presumably part of the University’s marketing strategy.
One would assume the intention of the University is to apply that strategy to all parts of its prospective student market–not just to those who can see.
Images without an “alt” attribute (65 pages) The second most common error concerning text alternatives for images was the failure to include the “alt” attribute on “img” elements where the images conveyed content.
E.g.
<img src=“sitemap.gif”> instead of <img src=“sitemap.gif” alt=“Sitemap”> In some cases, the error would have been frustrating for users reliant on text alternatives for orientation.
For instance, on the Australian Defence Force Academy Web site, the logo and crest that acted as the site identification on each page had no “alt” attribute.
In other cases, the failure to provide an “alt” attribute would have had more dire consequences.
Consider the Avondale College Web site where none of the navigation images used on the site had an “alt” attribute, or the Deakin University accommodation page, where global navigation images were treated similarly.
Background images convey content that is not repeated in text elsewhere on the page (1 page) When an image is used as a background for a page, it is not possible to include an “alt” attribute.
As a result, it is recommended that background images should not be used to convey content.
Where they are, the content must be repeated in an accessible format elsewhere on the page.
The background image used on the University of Canberra prospective students page shows the location of Canberra on the east coast in relation to Sydney and Brisbane.
This information is not provided elsewhere on the page.
Decorative or spacer images with “alt” attributes that included unnecessary data (53 pages) The use of “alt” attributes on images used for layout or decorative purposes was also highly problematic.
Unnecessary text alternatives were found on 53 pages.
Common examples included images bearing the text alternative “banner” or “curve” and photographs with the text alternative “pic1” or “library image”, as were found on the Macquarie University, Northern Territory University, and University of Southern Queensland pages.
Many sites use images to act as bullet points or horizontal lines, and use text alternatives of “asterisk” or “bullet” for the former, and “line” for the latter.
The Australian Maritime College, Australian Catholic University and James Cook University sites provide examples of this.
There is a degree of disagreement about appropriate text alternatives for images used in these ways, but the situation only arises because of the failure to use structural markup [15][16][17].
Lists should be indicated by the use of the unordered list element, ‘ul’ and items within it by its child element “li”.
This indicates to screenreaders that the data is a list, and saves users from having to listen to several instances of “Asterisk [item name], asterisk [item name]..” or “Bullet [item name], bullet [item name] “.
Similarly, structural markup can solve the problem of indicating the end of a page section.
Here, the use of heading elements, ‘h1’ through to ‘h6’ would be appropriate.
“H1” indicates the page title, and each instance of “h2” indicates a new section.
Using “h3”, “h4”, “h5” and “h6” within a section marked by “h2” provides as much flexibility and meaning as could be indicated by horizontal lines or image bars.
Use of heading styles can then optionally be supplemented for sighted users by using horizontal lines or image bars–bearing blank “alt” attributes to prevent interfering with readability for non-sighted users [13].
As with section 4.1.1.2, the errors discussed here were not recorded as checkpoint failures but are included as areas in which Web authoring practices could be improved.
Decorative or spacer images without an “alt” attribute (89 pages) Finally, the most common error concerning the use of text alternatives was the failure to include an ‘alt’ attribute on decorative images and those used for page layout purposes, such as the single-pixel gif image.
This error was found on 89 pages across 37 of the 45 sites evaluated in this study.
<img src=“spacer.gif”> instead of <img src=“spacer.gif” alt=” “> The “alt” attribute is not optional.
It must be included on all “img” elements.
Where it is not, the user agent will attempt to compensate, by including the filename or another text string such as “[inline]“, or by giving some sort of auditory signal to the user that an image is present–just in case the image is important.
This kind of compensation will unnecessarily interfere with the reading of the page and cause the user to wonder whether they are missing important content.
Text equivalents for frames (22 page failures, 22% of sites) Designers are required to provide an equivalent alternative to pages where content is presented via a set of frames.
This ensures access to content and functionality for those with user agents that do not support frames.
Accessible alternatives for frames can be achieved by providing equivalent content within a “noframes” element or by providing a link within that element to an equivalent accessible page.
<frameset> <frame src=“main.html> <frame src=“nav.html” <noframes> <a href=“text.html”>Text version of this site</a> </noframes> < /frameset> Frames were used on 26 of the pages analysed in this study.
Of those, 22 failed to provide an accessible equivalent.
Sixteen had either no “noframes” element, or no useful content within it.
These included the prospective students page at Murdoch University, three of the four Open Learning Australia pages and all four pages from the National Institute of Dramatic Art Web site.
Six provided some content, but it was not equivalent to the content provided on the original framed page.
The Marcus Oldham College Web site was an example.
Text equivalents for PDF content (13 page failures, 24% of sites) The Portable Document Format (PDF) is widely used on the Web.
There are at least two main reasons for its popularity as a content format.
First, it is very easy to produce content in this format: with little more than a click of a button a document can be converted to the PDF format.
Second, the availability of a free PDF reader for multiple platforms has given many the impression that PDF is as appropriate for publishing on the Web as HTML–or at the very least, that it is preferable to publishing content in Microsoft Word DOC format.
Within universities, PDF is often seen as a solution for protecting intellectual property when publishing to the Web.
This belief arises because PDF documents can be created with copy, edit or print functionality disabled.
But of course anyone who is sufficiently determined can copy or reproduce “secure” PDF content without a great deal of effort using screen capture and OCR scanning software.
A recent development that may have added to the impetus for publishing Web content in PDF format involves accessibility enhancements to PDF documents.
By leveraging Microsoft’s Active Accessibility (MSAA) technology, Adobe Acrobat version 5 now facilitates the creation of PDF documents that can be accessed by the latest screen reading technology [18].
While this development is to be applauded, PDF can not be considered an accessible format–at least not at this point in time.
Only recent versions of screenreading software can utilise this technology, and only when running on a Windows platform with Adobe PDF reader version 5.0.5 (or higher) installed.
Screenreading software is expensive–the latest version of one of the more popular screenreaders, JAWS, retails at around $US900 and has an upgrade price of between $US120 to $US550, depending on the user’s existing version.
The purchase price is therefore prohibitive for many users.
And of course, not all blind users own Windows machines.
Unix or Macintosh users are still locked out of content provided only in PDF format.
An additional limitation is that only documents created using Adobe Acrobat version 5 (or paper documents scanned and captured with Acrobat Capture version 3) and authored in Microsoft Word 2000 (or higher) can be made accessible.
Even then, authors must understand and use appropriate authoring techniques, such as structural formatting, before the document can be made accessible [19].
And there is a further catch–particularly relevant to the use of PDF within universities.
None of the accessibility features in Acrobat version 5 will work if the PDF document is secured to prevent copying or editing.
As a result of these limitations, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) have issued the following advice: The Commission’s view is that organisations who distribute content only in PDF format, and who do not also make this content available in another format such as RTF, HTML, or plain text, are liable for complaints under the DDA (HREOC 2002).
Despite HREOC’s advice, 13 pages of those analysed, had links to information that appeared to be provided in PDF format only.
These included the Curtin University of Technology’s course prospectus, news items linked from the home page of the Edith Cowan University Web site, orientation information at Griffith University, information about pathways from TAFE to university provided on the University of South Australia Web site, and information about scholarships linked from the University of Queensland prospective students page.
In this study, the provision of content in PDF format only has been recorded as a failure against checkpoint 1.1, but others reference it against checkpoint 11.4 (see for instance documentation related to use of the accessibility diagnostic tool, The Wave).
However, failures against checkpoint 11.4 occur when the content is an alternative rendering of inaccessible content, and it is not equivalent to the original provided.
In each of the cases recorded here, PDF format was not used as an alternative content format.
Text equivalents for scripts (6 page failures, 11% of sites) Some user agents do not support the use of client-side scripting such as JavaScript or Java applets.
In addition, some users turn JavaScript off for a variety of reasons including security concerns.
Designers must then ensure that an accessible equivalent is provided for content generated by scripts and applets.
<object classid=“java:motto.class” width=“500” height=“500”> Our motto is: I am still learning < /object> One way of doing this is by using the “noscript” element.
This allows a text alternative of script-generated content to be delivered to those users browsing a page without JavaScript enabled.
If the “object” element is used, then a text equivalent should be provided within the object.
And where the “applet” element is used, a text equivalent must be provided with the “alt” attribute and in the content of the “applet” element.
This enables the content to transform gracefully for those user agents that only support one of the two mechanisms (“alt” or content).
Another method that can be used is to provide a link to an alternative accessible rendering of the content.
In this study, 6 failures to provide a text alternative for script-generated content were found.
These included Java applets and JavaScript used primarily to generate news sections on pages and were found on the Marcus Oldham College home and prospective students pages and the Charles Sturt orientation page.
Text equivalents for Flash content (4 page failures, 9% of sites) Flash provides a visually rich environment for the presentation of Web content and is widely used on commercial Web sites as a result.
Ongoing enhancements to its capabilities have seen it adopted as a Web application environment as it provides a more functional user interface than can be provided through the use of plain or dynamic HTML.
There have also been improvements to the accessibility of Flash.
However, as with the caveats that apply to PDF content, the improvements to Flash accessibility do not mean that Flash is universally accessible.
Flash content needs to be authored specifically to meet the needs of disabled users.
And users must have the technology that allows them to take advantage of this.
As a result, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission have also issued a caution about the use of Flash as a presentation format for the Web: While some positive progress has been made, it will be a considerable time before most users will benefit, and even then, Flash may be accessible only in certain specific circumstances.
It is certainly wrong for Web designers to assume that improvements in the accessibility of a technology mean that it can be used indiscriminately without regard for the principles of accessible Web design [4].
Four pages included in the study contained Flash content.
These were the Avondale College and National Institute of Dramatic Art home pages, and the accommodation pages on the Murdoch and Central Queensland University Web sites.
All failed to provide an accessible equivalent.
Ensure documents can be read without stylesheets (checkpoint 6.1 59 page failures, 56% of sites) Users with colour blindness or low vision may choose to override the styles used on Web pages in order to avoid colours that they cannot distinguish, increase the contrast between text and background colours, or make font sizes larger.
In addition, some user agents–such as text browsers and older graphical browsers–do not utilise stylesheets, or do so poorly.
As a result, it is important to ensure that documents are readable when stylesheets are either not fully supported, or overridden by user preferences.
Several problems can occur when a page is viewed without stylesheet support.
First, there are several mechanisms for including stylesheet-generated content in a page using pseudo-elements and the content property [20].
Any content generated in this way will be missing.
Second, where content has been positioned on the page through the use of styles and the HTML “div” element, it may not display in the correct order when stylesheets are not in use.
Content needs to be positioned in a logical order within the HTML document to overcome this problem.
Neither of these problems were observed on the pages analysed.
However, three additional issues were, all related to legibility.
The most common of these was found when checking page readability via graphical browsers with little or no support for stylesheets.
Many pages were difficult to read because of insufficient contrast between text and background colours.
In each case the page author had used HTML coding to handle the background colour–making it, say, dark blue–and stylesheets for controlling the text colour–for example, white.
The result was that the styled text reverted to its default colour, black, and was rendered on the HTML-controlled dark blue background.
Some examples of this problem were found on the Flinders University, University of Adelaide and Northern Territory University Web sites.
This is an area in which design practices could easily be improved.
Designers ought to take a consistent approach to presentation, ensuring that all colour–rather than only text and hyperlink colour–is handled by stylesheets.
All version 4 browsers are capable of handling stylesheet-generated colours.
For users accessing the Web with older browsers, the pages will degrade to use the default browser colours or those chosen by the user.
The second problem was found on pages where images with transparent background colours were used, most notably when images contained text.
In many cases, the image presented white text on a dark background.
The background colour was made transparent in the image creation process, and was intended to be replaced by a dark background controlled by stylesheets.
Once the stylesheets were overridden, trying to read white text on a white background–save for the few pixels of dark colour that are left behind in the process of making the image background transparent–becomes very difficult.
Some examples of this problem were found on the prospective students pages at the University of New England and the University of Canberra.
This appears to be a difficult issue to resolve as it is considered good design practice to make the image background transparent when it is displayed on top of a coloured background generated by a stylesheet or HTML.
The reason designers use this approach is because of colour shifts that can occur between colours generated by stylesheets or HTML and those that are part of an image [21].
However, this problem only arises on displays where the colour depth is set to 256 colours or less, and this is becoming less and less frequent.
Designers should therefore check for the image transparency problem and use solid rather than transparent backgrounds where problems with readability occur.
Finally, where stylesheets were used to provide solid background colours for dynamically generated drop down or flyout menus, these became impossible to read without stylesheet support.
The text of the menu items was displayed on top of body text and other elements.
Some sites where this occurred include the Avondale College site, and the University of Western Australia home page.
Provide frame titles to facilitate identification and navigation (checkpoint 12.1 26 page failures, 24% of sites) Framesets are a collection of two or more HTML documents loaded into individual frames to create the appearance of a single page.
The use of frames is generally not recommended as they give rise to a series of potential usability issues, particularly when they are not skilfully implemented [22].
The potential problems exist for all users, not just those with disabilities.
They include: being unable to bookmark a page within a site that uses frames unpredictable behaviour of the browser back button in some frameset implementations difficulty printing framed pages pages from a linked site “accidentally” loading inside the frameset of a the page providing the link frames in which the content does not quite fit, requiring horizontal scrolling of multiple parts of the page or simply preventing the user from seeing all of the content Moving around within a frameset adds a layer of complexity to navigation for those unable to use graphical browsers.
Frames appear as a series of separate zones on a page when read by some screenreaders, and users can then jump between frames–as long as they know what each contains–to access the content in each zone.
In text browsers and some screen readers, frames do not appear as a single page with separate zones, but as links to separate pages.
In both cases, frame titles are important to user orientation.
They should be descriptive enough to enable users to identify the contents of a particular frame, understand how one frame relates to another, and navigate between the frames that comprise a page.
In this study, frames were used on 26 pages.
Unfortunately, none of those pages complied with the requirement to provide descriptive frame titles.
When frame titles are missing, user agents may display the “name” or “src” attribute of the frame element instead.
Given that these are markup attributes rather than content intended to be displayed to users, the results may be far from optimal.
Some examples found in this study included a frameset with frames named “left” and “right” as used on the Australian Defence Force Academy home page, and the home page of the University of the Sunshine Coast with four frames: “homepage”, “homepage”, “links” and “nav”.
Ensure that pages are usable when scripts are turned off or not supported (checkpoint 6.3 23 page failures, 20% of sites) As mentioned in section 4.1.4 above, some user agents do not support client-side scripting and some users turn it off.
Where this is the case, developers must ensure that pages are still functional despite the limitations of the user agent or the preferences of the user.
One of the key areas in which scripting can create problems is when it is used to control site navigation elements or generate links [23].
In these situations, disabled users may be denied access to some parts of the site, or may not be able to navigate at all.
Twenty-three pages in this study failed this checkpoint.
Most failures related to the use of JavaScript-generated navigation–either as flyout menus, where no accessible default options existed, or as drop-down quicklink-style menus.
The worst of these was found on the Avondale College Web site where navigation on every page would be severely limited.
On the Monash University accommodation page, java applet-controlled navigation would result in some users being unable to move around within the accommodation site.
And on the Open Learning Australia site, users may not be able to proceed beyond the site’s splash page as JavaScript is used to generate the entry link.
Ensure that text-only page alternatives provide equivalent content (checkpoint 11.4 9 page failures, 13% of sites) Some organisations choose to approach designing for accessibility by providing a text-only page as an alternative to the main content page.
WCAG allows for this approach, but indicates it should only be adopted when “best efforts” at attempting to make content directly accessible have failed [12].
Of the pages analysed in this study, 15 offered a text-only version (four of these were alternatives to pages using framesets).
In each case, the original page could have been made directly accessible.
A difficulty with opting for the creation of text-only pages is that maintenance requires greater effort unless the process can be automated in some way.
When it can not, maintenance of text-only alternatives may fall behind that of the original page, with the result that disabled users are not given access to the same information or resources as other users.
The pages surveyed as part of this research illustrate that problem: 60 percent of the text-only pages did not provide content or functionality equivalent to the original page.
Some example include the accommodation page provided by the University of Sydney, the University of Ballarat’s home page, several text-only pages on the University of South Australia Web site, and the home and prospective students pages at the Australian National University.
Ensure that data tables are properly marked up (checkpoints 5.1 and 5.2 2 page failures, 4% of sites) An important principle in accessible Web design is the separation of content from presentation.
The ideal approach is to use structural elements that have meaning independent of their presentation style, and to handle presentation through the use of stylesheets.
Using structural markup ensures that meaning can be conveyed regardless of the user agent rendering the page.
For instance, using the ‘strong’ element to indicate a passage of text that the author wishes to draw the user’s attention to is preferable to using ‘bold’.
The latter will only be rendered by graphical browsers, whereas the former will be given emphasis by any user agent, even a screenreader.
Data tables present data in a matrix or grid.
To be accessible to those who cannot see them, data tables must include structural information such as row and/or column header elements.
In complex tables, further structural elements must be provided, and associating headers with data cells is recommended [24].
Using structural table markup provides context to users of screenreaders as they negotiate the content in a data table.
Without this, an unacceptable cognitive load is likely to result.
Blind users would need to remember table header labels in the correct order and do a mental association between them and the data, on the fly.
Few data tables were encountered in this study.
Only two failures were recorded against this checkpoint.
One of these was found on the University of Western Sydney orientation page.
The other occurred on the Queensland University of Technology accommodation page.
Do not convey meaning by colour alone (checkpoint 2.1 1 page failure, 2% of sites) Structural markup is also the principle that motivates checkpoint 2.1, which requires that meaning be conveyed by more than just colour [13].
The checkpoint aims to ensure that those who are colourblind, or not able to use a graphical browser, can make sense of content even when they cannot see or distinguish between colours used on the page.
Only one page included in this study was found to have failed this checkpoint.
Required fields on a form on the Avondale College Web site were indicated solely through the use of the colour red.
Ensure that equivalents for dynamic content are updated as dynamic content updates (checkpoint 6.2 1 page failure, 2% of sites) The aim of this checkpoint is to ensure that page authors are aware of the need to dynamically update accessible equivalents for dynamically-generated content, otherwise some disabled groups will be denied access to that content.
Using images as the source files for frames was an early concern related to this checkpoint because it is not possible to include an accessible equivalent for an image if it is the source file for a frame [24] [25] [26].
More recently, the use of scripting to dynamically generate Web content requires monitoring for compliance and equity of access.
Only one failure related to dynamically-generated content was noted in this study.
This occurred on the University of Queensland orientation page.
An image provided a link to a student’s testimonial about their orientation experience at the University.
The image and associated link were randomly generated each time the page loaded, however, the text alternative for the image failed to change.
Anyone using a screenreader, or Braille or text browser would not be aware that the link changed each time they revisited the page and that a series of testimonials were available.
Concluding remarks The results of this research suggest that Australian university Web sites are likely to present significant barriers to access for some disabled user groups.
Although many universities have policies governing Web accessibility, the policies are apparently ineffective.
This may be due to any one or more of the following: The role of text equivalents for non-text elements, particularly images, is poorly understood amongst university Web designers.
There is insufficient knowledge of accessible Web design practices amongst those who are charged with design, development or maintenance of university Web sites.
Web publishing quality assurance procedures either do not exist, do not address issues related to Web accessibility, or are not adhered to.
In order to discharge their obligations under the DDA, universities need to take immediate steps to improve the accessibility of their Web sites.
The implementation of Web accessibility policies needs to be supported by a broad educative process.
All those involved in the design of university Web sites or the markup of Web content need to be given thorough training in accessible Web design techniques.
In addition, quality assurance processes need to be strengthened: sign-off authorisation should include not just the acceptance of responsibility for the accuracy of page content, but for the accessibility of that content as well.
References W3C, 2003, “Policies Relating to Web Accessiblity” http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/ Alexander, D. 2002, “Web Accessibility in Australian Universities: A Telephone Survey” http://deyalexander.com/papers/accessibility-survey.html W3C, 1999, “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0” http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2002, “ World Wide Web Access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes”, Version 3.2 http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/standards/www_3/www_3.html W3C, 2001, “How People with Disabilities Use the Web” http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/PWD-Use-Web/ Morkes, J.
& Nielsen, J., 1997, “Concise, Scannable, and Objective: How to Write for the Web” http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/writing.html W3C, 1999, “Fact sheet for ‘Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0’” http://www.w3.org/1999/05/WCAG-REC-fact Department of Education, Science and Training Web site, 2002 http://www.detya.gov.au/tenfields/detya/which_uni.html Delorie, Web Page Compatibility Viewer http://www.delorie.com/web/wpbcv.html Delorie, Lynx Viewer http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html Webaim, The Wave http://wave.webaim.org/ W3C, 1999, “Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0” http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html W3C, 2000, “Core Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0” http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS W3C, 1999, “Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0” http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/ Flavell, A., 2003, “Use of ALT texts in IMGS” http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~eflavell/alt/alt-text.html Korpela, J., 2002, “Guidelines on alt texts in img elements” http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html Bohman, P., 2002, “How to create accessible graphics” http://www.webaim.org/howto/graphics/index.php Adobe, 2003, “Acrobat Accessibility” http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/solutionsacc.html Adobe, 2003, “How to Create Accessible Adobe PDF files” http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_booklet.html W3C, 2000, “CSS Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0” http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/ Lehn, D. & Stern, H., 2000, “Death of the Websafe Color Palette?” http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/index2a.html?tw=design Nielsen, J., 1996, “Why Frames Suck (Most of the Time)” http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html W3C, 2000, “Example for Checkpoint 6.3: WAI Web Content Accessibility Curriculum” http://www.w3.org/WAI/wcag-curric/sam56-0.htm W3C, 2000, “HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0” http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/ W3C, 2000, “Example for Checkpoint 6.2: WAI Web Content Accessibility Curriculum” http://www.w3.org/WAI/wcag-curric/sam54-0.htm McMullin, B., 2002, “WARP: Web Accessibility Reporting Project Ireland 2002 Baseline Study” http://eacess.rince.ie/white-papers/2002/warp-2002-00/ Further Reading W3C, 2002, “Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility” http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/ Watchfire Corporation, 2002, “Bobby: Report Help Files” http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/browsereport.jsp Appendices Appendix A: List of sites included in the study: http://deyalexander.com/papers/ausweb03/sites-list.html Appendix B: An Excel spreadsheet showing the results of study: http://deyalexander.com/papers/ausweb03/results.xls Appendix C: Results and screenshots for each site included in the study: http://deyalexander.com/articles/ausweb03/ Author Details Dey Alexander Usability Specialist, Information Technology Services Building 3A, Monash University Victoria, 3800 Australia Email:Dey.Alexander@its.monash.edu.au Web site: http://www.monash.edu.au/ Return to top Article Title: “How Accessible Are Australian University Web Sites?” Author: Dey Alexander Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/alexander/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Knowledge Management Lessons Learned Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Knowledge Management Lessons Learned Buzz data xml infrastructure intranet taxonomy Citation BibTex RIS Martin White praises the work of the editors on the 32 essays covering how KM initiatives can deliver tangible outcomes and takes a practical and balanced view of their overall value.
The problems of being an editor of a multi-author book probably do not escalate as the square of the number of contributors, but nevertheless it must be quite a significant function.
You have the problems of selecting the authors in the first place, replacing those that drop out, coping with the 80% of contributors that miss the original deadline and then carrying out remedial work on authors that have failed to abide by the scope notes.
On that basis alone, the co-editors deserve considerable credit that the book exists at all.
For a reviewer there are also challenges, because the individual contributions are usually quite variable, and rarely long enough to deserve more than passing reference.
The Easy Bit The editors state that the objective of the book is to assemble in one publication the experiences, perceptions, knowledge, and wisdom of a number of KM practitioners and theoreticians.
Among the wide range of topics covered are KM strategy, KM costs and economics, taxonomy, standards, roles in KM and KM applications in government.
Those you might expect.
Then there are contributions on content management, portals and visual design, and competitive intelligence in KM.
One of the neat aspects of this book is the way that the editors have diligently set out these themes and then guide the reader as to how the themes are then covered by contributors beyond the basic chapter categorisation.
This 'road map' has been well devised, as you would expect from two editors with such a distinguished record as authors and academics in KM.
In addition to the chapters, most of which are around 20 pages long, there is a select bibliography of articles and Web sources on the lessons learned from KM initiatives.
The production quality is good, and the book is readable from a design viewpoint.
However the index is variable!
Why is it that indexers rarely seem to ask themselves whether any one is going to look up the Journal of Universal Computer Science in order to locate a passing reference to the extent to which the journal published articles on KM?
The Difficult Bit Is it worth buying?
There is much that I like about this book.
I have to say that I am somewhat sceptical about KM, mainly about the 'M' bit.
I'm not sure you can manage knowledge, but I do think you can manage an environment that fosters the exchange of knowledge.
In general this is a very practical book, full of insights from people who have struggled to make KM work in their organisations, and 20 pages is about right to set the scene and then discuss the problems, benefits and challenges.
Mary Durham (Genzyme Corporation) on 'Three Critical Roles for Knowledge Management Workspaces: Moderators, Thought Leaders, and Managers' is one good example, and Jack Borbely (Towers Perrin) on 'Lessons from Five-Plus Years of Knowledge Management' is another.
However there are also some chapters which seem to be out of place in a book with this title.
Steve Arnold writes well on 'Content Management: Role and Reality', and Frank Cervone and Darlene Fichter do a good job on 'XML: Data Infrastructure for Knowledge Management', but neither chapter, nor the three chapters on KM and competitive intelligence, seem to fit into the overall theme of the book's title.
I get the sense that the book is designed more for a student text than for a knowledge/information manager.
What is missing is any contribution on KM from outside the USA, with the exception of a chapter on 'Interpersonal Knowledge and Organizational Foresight' from Elisabeth Davenport, which is about her work on the Online Partner Lens Project.
Interesting though this project is, the chapter is largely a rather dry report of the project and is not integrated by either the author or the editors into the overall section on Communities of Practice.
There is no reference to the work done by Angela Abell and her colleagues at TFPL, or to Anne Jubert and her team at the European Commission, just to give two examples.
Indeed the issues of KM and business culture are scarcely mentioned, especially as they arise in multi-national organisations.
One final concern that I have is that most of the literature references are no later than 2002 and the Web sources in the bibliography were checked in April 2003.
This is always a problem in hard-back publishing, especially in multi-author works, so I won't mark the book down too hard on this basis.
However I am intrigued as to why European Web sites of the quality of Knowledgeboard are not listed, and there are no articles cited from UK magazines such as Knowledge Management and KM News.
Conclusion On balance this is a book that is a useful addition to the literature, but mainly for experienced practitioners who will gain much from dipping into individual chapters for ideas and inspiration.
It is that sort of book, rather than one that should be read cover-to-cover and adorned with multiple-colour marker pen ink.
I can also see it being a good student text so long as the US bias in contributors and in the bibliographic coverage is recognised.
If you want to meet Michael Koenig in person then he will a speaker at Online Information 2004 [1].
References Online Information Web site http://www.online-information.co.uk Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Knowledge Management Lessons Learned" Author: Martin White Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/white-rvw Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DC 2006: Metadata for Knowledge and Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DC 2006: Metadata for Knowledge and Learning Buzz data software framework javascript database xml archives metadata accessibility tagging vocabularies schema blog repositories eprints preservation cataloguing marc lcsh e-learning aacr2 ontologies owl lom frbr dcmi uml mods skos json interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Julie Allinson, Rachel Heery, Pete Johnston and Rosemary Russell report on DC 2006, the sixth international conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, held 3 6 October 2006.
DC-2006 [1], the annual conference of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), took place this year in the city of Manzanillo, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, with a subtitle of ‘Metadata for Knowledge and Learning’.
The four-day conference was organised by the University of Colima [2], and the venue for the event was the Karmina Palace Hotel, a large hotel set within its own complex of restaurants, bars, shops and swimming pools.
The conferences of the DCMI emerged from the earlier series of workshops focused primarily on the activity of DCMI’s own working groups.
Working group meetings remain a significant feature of the conferences, providing an opportunity for members to discuss progress and to disseminate information on their activities to a larger audience.
However, the conferences also offer a platform for a broader community to present their thoughts and experiences in the form of research papers.
A third strand of the conference is that of the ‘special sessions’, which typically combine a few short presentations with informal discussion around some particular topic of interest.
This account seeks only to highlight a few of the contributions and discussions which took place during the four days.
Presentations for all sessions remain available on the Conference Web site [3].
Conference Opening After an early morning tutorial on basic semantics, the conference was formally opened by Makx Dekkers, DCMI Managing Director, with some brief remarks about the conference which brought together approximately 200 delegates gathered from across the world.
This was the second DCMI conference to be held in a Spanishspeaking country and the first to take place in Latin America.
Thomas Baker, DCMI Director of Specifications and Documentation and Chair of the Usage Board, continued the opening with a description of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative today, looking beyond the core elements (ISO 15836) to the interoperability framework (an essential building block for Semantic Web applications) and DCMI support for communities.
Drawing out some key themes for the conference, Tom pointed to vocabularies, with papers on SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) core and registries, a tutorial and the Registry Working Group.
With a paper session on ‘metadata models’ and the Architecture Working Group, Tuesday was branded ‘architecture day’, with frameworks and models another key theme of the conference.
The issue of metadata interoperability was tackled through a DCMI/IEEE LTSC Task Force session, the DCMI Libraries Working Group session and a special session on Resource Description and Access (RDA).
Education was well represented with a paper session on ‘metadata for education’, a ‘reports from the field session’, the Education Working Group and a closing keynote from Michael Crandall.
Discussions of application profiles for the description of ePrints, Collections, and for Kernel metadata, papers on implementation and deployment and special topics such as dates, social networks and tagging and productivity all contributed to sharing application experience.
The conference also sought to provide a forum for the various communities that have coalesced around DC implementation.
In the opening plenary, Abel Packer of BIREME, the Latin-American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information [4], took as his starting point the view that information was the raw material of society.
He examined how networks facilitated access to information in flexible and continuously changing ways, so that a ‘virtuous cycle’ developed in which information generated new information.
He highlighted some particular features of present-day information networks: we are all globally interconnected (‘no one is more than a few handshakes away from anyone else’), but we also see the phenomenon of ‘preferential attachment’ where popularity becomes attractive and, for example, pages with many inward hyperlinks attract more inward links.
He examined how a number of Web-based services in Latin America had developed around access to scientific, technical and medical publications, and he proposed a three-layer model of data, indexes (metadata) and interfaces, and argued that the principle of open access to publicly funded resources was compatible with a market of services built on those resources.
He closed on a cautionary note, highlighting the “know-do gap” between theory and practice, and emphasising that there remained fundamental inequalities in access to information networks.
Models and Frameworks Three of the four contributions in the first session of research paper presentations were closely related to the recent work within DCMI to develop the DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM) [5], a specification which describes the components and constructs which make up the information structure which it calls a DC ‘description set’ and how that information structure is to be interpreted.
Mikael Nilsson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, argued that the DCMI Abstract Model was just one component within a larger set of components that constitute a ‘metadata framework’ used by DCMI, consisting of an abstract model, a vocabulary model (and instances of that model in the form of the metadata vocabularies owned and maintained by DCMI), a profile model (and instances of that model in the form of specific DC application profiles), and a set of metadata formats.
While these components have been formalised to a greater or lesser degree within DCMI, they are clearly identifiable as distinct parts of the whole.
Mikael extended his analysis to the IEEE LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard and the Semantic Web set of specifications, pointing to corresponding components in those contexts.
He concluded with the suggestion that we should abandon, or at least clearly qualify, our use of terms such as ‘metadata standard’ and ‘metadata schema’, and specify instead which of the components within the framework we are concerned with.
Pete Johnston, Eduserv Foundation, presented DC-Text, a simple text-based format for DC metadata [6], introducing a simple method for writing descriptions and description sets based on the DCMI Abstract Model.
As a human-readable format, DC-Text has proved useful for the exchange of examples during discussions of the DCAM, and also for the presentation of examples in the new ‘encoding guidelines’ specifications which are currently under development.
The usefulness of DC-Text as a machine-readable format is less clear at this point.
A Backus-Naur Form (BNF) description of the format is available, but if a machine-readable plain text format for DC metadata is required, it may be more effective to develop an encoding based on YAML [7] or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) [8].
Sarah Pulis, La Trobe University, Australia, approached the DCMI Abstract Model from the viewpoint of a vehicle for communication between the developers of DC application profiles and system developers using UML, and developed modified, UML-conformant versions of the DCAM resource model and description model which are usable by system architects using UML.
In the course of this work she encountered a number of characteristics of the DCAM which made that process difficult, and made some suggestions for changes and clarifications.
In a meeting of the DCMI Architecture Working Group [9] Pete summarised the current work in progress on producing a revised version of the DCAM.
This work makes explicit some of the (currently implicit) distinctions between components within the model highlighted by Mikael (particularly the articulation of a ‘vocabulary model’ describing the types of terms referenced in DC metadata descriptions and the type of relationships which may exist between terms); it also corrects some errors and omissions, including at least some of the problems identified by Sarah.
One of the most significant changes will be a clarification of the concept of Vocabulary Encoding Scheme in order to dovetail better with DCMI’s historical use of that term and to produce a closer correspondence with the notion of a ‘Concept Scheme’ as that term is used in the context of SKOS.
Metadata Interoperability The thorny questions of interoperability between ‘metadata standards’ across specifications developed within frameworks using different, often incompatible, abstract models was an issue in at least three sessions.
In the course of their work on the development of a DC application profile, the DCMI Libraries Working Group [10] has been grappling with the differences between the hierarchical model used by XML Schema-based specifications such as MODS and the statement-oriented model described by the DCAM.
The DCMI/IEEE LTSC Task Force [11], whose work was presented in a ‘special session’, seeks to illustrate how this question can be addressed for the case of the IEEE LOM standard and Dublin Core, by producing a mapping between the set of data elements described by the IEEE LOM standard strictly speaking from the particular ‘application profile’ described within the standard to a set of terms that can be used within DC metadata description sets.
Related to the DCMI Libraries Working Group was a special session on RDA (Resource Description and Access) [12] that looked at the new content standard being developed to replace AACR2 [].
Such rules are an important aspect of interoperability and this session, which included presentations by Mikael Nilsson and Robina Clayphan, British Library, sought comments from the assembled Dublin Core community to contribute into the current comment period for this new standard, being undertaken to align RDA with other metadata standards.
Vocabularies In the paper session on ‘ontologies and controlled vocabularies’, Alistair Miles, CCLRC, presented a novel perspective on SKOS [13], by taking as his starting point not existing models for thesauri and controlled vocabularies, but rather an examination of the scope and purpose of SKOS.
He identified two usage patterns for a SKOS workflow of creation, indexing and retrieval, where, in the first, a single vocabulary is used for both indexing and retrieval, or, in the second, two different vocabularies are used by the indexer and by the retriever, with the additional need to tie the two together.
Use cases will help to establish the requirements for SKOS, and Alistair presented a hypothetical case to demonstrate this.
SKOS again featured in a presentation by Corey Harper, University of Oregon, which looked at approaches to encoding Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
Corey explained his efforts to respond to Tim Berners-Lee’s exhortation to make the content of existing databases available on the Semantic Web, in this case by transforming a MARC representation of LCSH to a representation based on SKOS.
He concluded with various suggestions for tools and services which might be built on top of such a resource, including facilitating the use of LCSH (or other controlled vocabularies) in the context of ‘social tagging’ applications.
Other papers focusing on vocabularies included a review of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) registry project which is supporting the NSDL’s requirement for development and reuse of small vocabularies, particularly in the area of education; and use of OWL to express relationships within the AGROVOC vocabulary to support an Agricultural Ontology Service.
The Cornell NSDL Registry team, Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps, gave a more detailed update and demonstration of the NSDL Registry in the DCMI Registries Working Group meeting.
Other registry activity updates covered The European Library Metadata registry, introduced by Christine Frodl, Die Deutsche Bibliothek, and the JISC Information Environment Metadata Registry, presented by Rachel Heery, UKOLN [14].
The Registry Working Group went on to consider management of change within vocabularies, a topic of interest across metadata registries.
Joe Tennis, University of British Columbia, also associated with the NSDL Registry project, led a discussion on modelling concept change within vocabularies, and how such changes might be encoded using SKOS.
There was some lively debate on how the notion of ‘concept’ was being used, and the validity of distinguishing ‘snapshots’ of terms and vocabularies from ‘versions’.
Once again the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Information (FRBR) model was invoked to help analysis, for example in distinguishing an ‘abstract concept’ from a ‘concept instance’.
Time was too short to come to any conclusions, there will be further discussion on the Registry mailing list of this and other topics that, due to pressure of time, slid off the agenda.
Application Experience Implementations A paper session on implementations gave an opportunity to learn how Dublin Core is being used ‘in the wild’.
Papers from implementers provide valuable insights into the ways DC can be used to meet requirements.
Chiung-min Tsai, National Taiwan University, related experience of implementing an institutional repository for Digital Archive Communities at the University.
In this system the original rich metadata is used for display, and is mapped to simple Dublin Core for search purposes.
Leif Andresen, Danish National Library Authority, gave an account of DC providing a common presentation for data from archives, libraries and museums.
He outlined mappings from sector specific formats and the DC extensions required.
Michael Toth, Michael Toth Associates, fascinated the audience with a description of the role of DC metadata within the Archimedes Palimpsest Manuscript Imaging project.
Multispectral imaging has been used to identify layers of text in this thousand year-old manuscript, and the content of the resulting images described using DC, alongside richer metadata.
For those who have been associated with the DCMI over the years it is a real thrill to see how DC is proving useful in providing access to such a significant cultural artefact [15].
Collection Description Marty Kurth and Jim LeBlanc of Cornell University Library presented a paper on their use of the model developed by Michael Heaney in An Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues [16] and of the application profile being developed by the DCMI Collection Description Working Group [17] to support the description of operations on catalogues, i.e.
on collections of metadata records.
While the profile developed by the DCMI CD WG encompasses the concept of services related to collections, it concerns itself only with services which implement a generic retrieval operation, with ‘services which provide access to the items within collections’.
Kurth and LeBlanc, on the other hand, extended their view to services performing a range of ‘maintenance’ functions on the catalogue (including accrual, deletion, modification, migration etc).
ePrints Application Profile The ePrints Application Profile [18] was a new piece of work presented this year in the form of a special session.
The profile was developed in the UK by Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation, and Julie Allinson, UKOLN, with funding from JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).
This session in Mexico provided an opportunity to seek validation of the profile from the assembled expert community.
Julie and Andy presented an introduction to and overview of the work and the different work elements.
The requirements-gathering exercise that formed the initial part of this work demonstrated the need for a more complex application model than that provided by ‘Simple DC’.
The ensuing model adopted the FRBR entities and was based on the DCMI Abstract Model notion of a ‘description set’ to capture descriptions about each of the main FRBR entities (works, expressions, manifestations and items).
The resulting application profile provides a richer metadata set, in terms of both the properties captured about the eprint and also in the relationships expressed between entities.
Reactions to this more complex approach were generally positive.
There was some concern expressed about the retrospective editing for repositories and also some questions relating to the implementation by software developers.
It was also accepted that there is still work to do, particularly in creating an XML schema.
There were some useful suggestions for example that we talk to citation services about the work; and that we look to extend the profile to model e-theses fully.
The final question put to the group was whether they felt a DC taskforce for eprints would be useful at which there was universal agreement.
FRBR also featured in a presentation by another conference newcomer, Ayako Morozumi, University of Tsukuba, who outlined Japanese work to map Dublin Core, and other metadata models to FRBR, in order to assess the usefulness of this model for an inclusive information environment.
Communities, and the Rest Such a varied programme with a wealth of parallel sessions presents a considerable challenge to capture in such a relatively short report.
Other highlights of the conference included well-attended early morning tutorials on basic semantics (Marty Kurth, Cornell University Library), basic syntax (Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation), Vocabularies (Joe Tennis, University of British Columbia) and Application Profiles (Diane Hillman, Cornell University).
In addition to those already mentioned, Working Group meetings were held for the Kernel, Date, Agents, Accessibility, Tools, Government and Localization and Internationalization groups [19], along with the Global Corporate Circle and special sessions for French Language Projects and Portuguese and Spanish Language Projects.
Paper sessions and topics ranged from the interoperability framework and application profile development, through SKOS, OWL and the LCSH, to DC implementations in imaging projects and cultural heritage preservation databases, metadata for French PhD theses, semantic mediacasting and digital signatures.
For Education there was a Working Group meeting, reports from the field and a paper session on Metadata for Education featuring a presentation from CETIS colleagues on the JISC scoping study on vocabularies for describing pedagogical approaches in e-learning.
Finally, the special session on metadata and social tagging highlighted the importance of the more informal and community-oriented approaches to metadata creation that have emerged through social bookmarking and other ‘tagging’-based services, and suggested that this is an area that DCMI may wish to explore further in the future.
Conference Closing On the final day, Mike Crandall continued the theme of DC-Education with his closing keynote presentation.
Mike talked about the Product, the Process and the People involved in DCMI.
By taking the products (the element set and abstract model), the processes of collaboration and community development and the enthusiasm of the people involved in DCMI, Mike outlined success stories already out there on the Web.
For the future, he talked about taking forward the DCMI message to educate the wider metadata community, reiterating opening comments by Thomas Baker on the advantages offered by the metadata element set and the Abstract Model working together to create community-specific application profiles.
Reflections Overall impressions of DC-2006 was that it was characterised not so much by any Big New Ideas which set people talking animatedly in the sessions and in the bars afterwards, but rather by a sense of consolidation.
As Andy Powell [20] and Stu Weibel [21] note in their weblog posts, at DC-2006 there was a strong feeling that this was the year in which the DCMI Abstract Model became firmly ‘embedded’ in the activity of DCMI, of working groups and of DC implementers.
Whereas in 2004 and 2005, the feeling may have been one of people asking, ‘What is this thing?’ and ‘Do I really need this?
Why should I bother?’, at DC 2006, in both the working group meetings and the research paper sessions, there was a clear sense that people were using the DCAM as their foundation, and indeed in some cases providing critical feedback on the DCAM itself.
Of course, there is much work still to be done in this area, not least in the revisions to the model itself that are currently under discussion, and in the finalisation of the ‘encoding guidelines’ specifications which build directly on the DCAM to describe how to represent DC metadata description sets in concrete forms.
But it seems the value of an abstract model in capturing a shared conception of ‘what DC metadata is’ has been accepted, and the use of that model is becoming well established amongst implementers.
As before, one of the most rewarding and interesting parts of the conference was to meet new people, particularly from the Latin American community.
It is in meeting and conversing with those new to the DC conference that one learns what is of interest from the wider international perspective.
Delegates left the Karmina Palace Hotel having enjoyed a stimulating conference, and having made many new friends and professional contacts.
We hope the DCMI can build on the outcomes of this successful conference over the next year.
References DC-2006, International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications: Metadata for Knowledge and Learning.
October 3-6, 2006.
Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico http://dc2006.ucol.mx/ University of Colima, Mexico http://www.ucol.mx/ International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Programme http://dc2006.ucol.mx/program.htm BIREME http://www.virtualhealthlibrary.org/ Powell, Andy, Nilsson, Mikael, Naeve, Ambjorn and Johnston, Pete.
DCMI Abstract Model.
DCMI Recommendation.
March 2005. http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/ Johnston, Pete.
DC-Text: A Text Syntax for DC Metadata.
Working Draft.
YAML http://www.yaml.org/ JavaScript Object Notation http://json.org/ DCMI Architecture WG http://dublincore.org/groups/architecture/ DCMI Libraries WG http://dublincore.org/groups/libraries/ DCMI/IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) Task Force http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DCMIIEEELTSCTaskforce RDA http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/rda.html Editor’s note: this issue carries an article by Ann Chapman of UKOLN and Chair of CILIP/BL Committee on AACR, entitled RDA: A New International Standard.
Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) DCMI Registry WG http://dublincore.org/groups/registry/ Archimedes Palimpsest Program Documentation http://archimedespalimpsest.org/programmanage_documents.html Heaney, Michael.
An Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/model/ DCMI Collection Description Application Profile http://dublincore.org/groups/collections/collection-application-profile/ ePrints Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile DCMI Working Groups http://dublincore.org/groups/ Powell, Andy.
‘Big Crashing Sounds I can hear you’, eFoundations, 6 October 2006 http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2006/10/big_crashing_so.html Weibel, Stu.
‘It’s the model, stupid’, Weibel Lines, 4 October 2006 http://weibel-lines.typepad.com/weibelines/2006/10/its_the_model_s.html Author Details Julie Allinson Repositories Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: j.allinson@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Rachel Heery Assistant Director, Research and Development UKOLN University of Bath Email: r.heery@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Pete Johnston Technical Researcher Eduserv Foundation Email: pete.johnston@eduserv.org.uk Web site: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/people/petejohnston/ Rosemary Russell Interoperability Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “DC 2006: Metadata for Knowledge and Learning” Author: Julie Allinson, Rachel Heery, Pete Johnston and Rosemary Russell Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/dc-2006-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 53: Unlocking Our Televisual Past Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 53: Unlocking Our Televisual Past Buzz portal infrastructure archives repositories video preservation podcast youtube interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 53.
Given Ariadne's recent attempts to gather in contributions in the field of digital cultural heritage, which once upon a time would have found a home in Cultivate Interactive, I am particularly pleased, after some enquiries and kind offers of help along the way, to secure an article entitled The Video Active Consortium: Europe's Television History Online by Johan Ooman and Vassilis Tzouvaras.
There will come a time when our civilisation will be assessed as much upon its cultural development as its historical path or scientific progress.
The assessors, provided they can migrate the material successfully, will almost certainly turn to the digital cultural heritage of 20-21st century television for a view of how our society informed, educated and entertained itself in these times, to borrow the Reithian formula for a moment [1] i.e.
television as social history.
Even a cursory glance within this magazine will lead readers to realise that the amount of broadcast material in need of rescue [2] is already massive and the challenge not inconsiderable [3].
While there have been developments in this field [4] thanks to the continued support for preservation measures, I doubt many are claiming we are out of the woods as yet.
Despite the mountain of material in question, however, the authors point out something of a surprising irony.
While there can be no doubting the considerable degree of interest in broadcast material across Europe and beyond, emanating from heritage professionals, educators and the general public at large, the current degree of access to this material is severely limited.
That the demand is most definitely there is proven by the enormous success of sites such as YouTube which has come from nowhere in the space of two years or so.
Thus it is to be welcomed that one of the principal aims of the Video Active Project is to provide much greater access to European broadcast material.
It is evident from this article that the challenges are not insignificant.
Quite apart from matters such as Intellectual Property Rights and interoperability, this project inevitably encounters a difficulty that would trouble a US equivalent considerably less: the need to provide information and access to the material to speakers of a wide range of European languages.
The intention in the first release of the portal will be to cater for ten.
The barriers to success might be regarded by some as high; but equally the benefits accruing from this work are probably higher.
I am indebted to Martin Feijen, Wolfram Horstmann, Paolo Manghi, Mary Robinson and Rosemary Russell for their contribution on DRIVER: Building the Network for Accessing Digital Repositories across Europe.
They contend, "Local efforts to embed the repository within the research processes of an institution are not always successful.
What is needed is the embedding of repository use in research and research publication processes on a large scale, across Europe."
However they also identify an issue with institutional repositories which is likely to persist for some while, namely the manner in which they are perceived by researchers and writers of scholarly material.
Unless, as the authors maintain, a repository is able to meet what nowadays are the high expectations of users in terms of search and retrieval as much as the ease of the deposit process for contributors, matters may not progress as desired.
In the third of this issue's contributions from mainland Europe, Leo Waaijers picks up the thread of Ariadne's material on Dutch initiatives and provides and overview of recent achievements in The DARE Chronicle: Open Access to Research Results and Teaching Material in the Netherlands in which he remarks that while notable successes such as Cream of Science, Promise of Science and the HBO Knowledge Bank are among the welcome products of the DARE Programme, there should be no underestimating the importance of a new infrastructure which in the long run will support easy and reliable open access to research results and teaching material right across Dutch Higher Education and research institutions.
This puts me in mind of Martin Feijen and his colleagues' assertion that operations on the grand (and in their context European) scale are required if there is to be a sea change in behaviours.
Given that we have many of us have long passed the point where we will ever be able to listen to our music collection all over again, even stored on an iPod, no one will be particularly surprised that keeping up with the amount of information generated these days is practically impossible in any average-sized field of activity.
This has major consequences for professionals, for example in the area of medicine, the oft-quoted example; but the ramifications are no less significant for researchers in whatever domain as the magnitude of material that might be relevant to research being undertaken constantly increases.
Sophia Ananiadou writing on The National Centre for Text Mining mentions a weekly output of 8,000 scientific papers.
Even if scientists did not have to engage in the process of seeking funding for their research as an integral part of that work, their capacity even to identify in outline the research likely to be relevant to their undertaking is seriously compromised by the sheer amount of reading required to achieve such an outline.
As a consequence text mining will prove a major support to researchers in their efforts to get their hands round the edges of the field they are investigating.
I am grateful to Sophia for picking up the thread for us from the initial article on NaCTeM.
While perceptions and opinions of Second Life not only vary between practitioners but even between tea breaks, I have hesitated to commission contributions on the topic until SL had managed to work itself at least part-way round the Gartner Hype Cycle.
As a consequence, the contribution from John Kirriemuir, a former editor of this organ, has been most welcome.
The article usefully provides a succinct description for any readers who have never quite got around to investigating it.
Then The Second Life of UK Academics embarks on a consideration of the uses to which SL can be put in our sector, using the outcomes of one of a series of rolling reports examining the take-up of Second Life across UK Higher and Further Education.
John is to be congratulated for achieving a helpful balance far from the extremes of unquestioning enthusiasm and the equally counter-productive stance that condemns before the technology can have possibly reached the point of either nascent viability or utter oblivion.
I am glad I waited.
I am also indebted to Chris Hilton and Dave Thompson for describing Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library in which they provide their approach to the building of sound procedures and relations in their work with donors and creators of born-digital material.
It is more than evident since their initial article that they have learnt a lot in the interim.
Practitioners in a similar situation will most certainly find something useful in the procedures they describe and the conclusions they draw.
Not for the first time in such partnerships as they describe, the importance of good communications and the establishment of trust is not to be under-estimated.
Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim set a hare running in Googlepository and the University Library as they ask, 'What effect is Google having on the information-seeking strategies of students, researchers and teachers?
Where do libraries fit within the information continuum?
And ultimately, what services should they look to provide for their users?'
They point out that the concept of Google as a form of repository was raised at this year's JISC Conference.
In addition to considering how librarians have responded to the changing scene driven by the development of digital resources, the authors look into the use of Google in HE libraries and make us aware of the drawbacks with Google that still persist (even if not all users are necessarily aware of them).
They consider Google as a repository in terms of information literacy and resource provision and go on to consider the distinct features associated with repositories and the value they hold for the Higher Education Community.
Their conclusions are inevitably thought-provoking.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on on the principles of the data management, podcasting and a new edition on the use of regular expressions for text processing, as well as a review of a trenchant critic of Web 2.0.
Finally, I am grateful to Lorcan Dempsey for completing Ariadne's review of the massive The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland begun last issue by John MacColl.
In addition of course we provide our usual section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 53.
References BBC Hardtalk interview, 10 July 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/6288668.stm "Can We Save Our Audio-visual Heritage?
", Daniel Teruggi, April 2004, Ariadne Issue 39 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/teruggi/ Wright, R. "Preserving Europe's Memory", Cultivate Interactive, issue 7, 11 July 2002 http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/presto/ "Digitising an Archive: The Factory Approach", Duncan Burbidge, April 2006, Ariadne Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/burbridge/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 53: Unlocking Our Televisual Past" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Improving DSpace@OSU With a Usability Study of the ET/D Submission Process Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Improving DSpace@OSU With a Usability Study of the ET/D Submission Process Buzz software database usability metadata accessibility browser passwords dspace licence authentication url research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Boock discusses the ease and usefulness of conducting a usability study and provides an example of usability testing at Oregon State University undertaken to improve the DSpace ET/D submission process.
Can a student find relevant research articles from your library Web pages efficiently?
Do faculty effortlessly locate the full text of articles from a licensed database?
You can answer these questions and dozens more by conducting a usability study.
It can be as simple and painless as gathering students in a room together, asking them to do something and analysing their behaviour.
Usability studies have been in wide use in libraries for years, particularly since the advent of the Internet, and a great deal of research has been published on how to conduct them.
There are 485 articles with a subject of "use studies/Internet" in the Wilson Library Literature and Information Science database.
Many of these articles present examples of how libraries have conducted usability studies to answer particular questions pertaining to Web design.
What libraries may not realise, particularly those that fret about the details, is just how simple a process it is.
It requires at least these steps: Get at least five students (though obviously, the more the better) in a room together.
Ask them to do a task.
Record or watch what happens.
Ask a question or two (though this is optional).
You do not need hordes of testers to identify most of the issues with your product or process.
Jakob Nielsen claims that five users are sufficient to reveal problems and answer questions you have about a product or service [1][2].
Knowing what you want to test is critical, and sometimes short and repeated tests are most useful.
Don't just rely on what the users tell you, but observe what happens.
You can always ask questions if you have missed something or do not understand what they did.
ET/D Submission Usability Test Here is an example of just how easy and useful usability testing can be.
At Oregon State University Libraries, we are in the midst of launching the use of DSpace for the submission, storage and accessibility of electronic theses/dissertations (ET/Ds) produced at the University.
As a member of the project team, I have been working with the Graduate School on the workflow and submission process.
We customised the DSpace metadata registry and submission screens so that students are asked to enter fields that pertain to their thesis such as Advisor or College rather than more generic field names such as Description.
We also revised the instructions (see Appendix) on the submission screens so that they were more understandable.
As the launch date approached, there was concern about the complexity of the multiple steps in the DSpace submission process and whether the customisation made it easier for students to submit their thesis.
Rather than accept anecdotal information from other universities that are using DSpace or merely rely on staff testing, I tested the usability of the submission process with a group of students.
On a summer morning, I recruited six undergraduate students to test the usability of the electronic thesis and dissertation submission process.
The students are OSU Library employees.
None of them had any familiarity with the DSpace software or the submission process.
I figured that if undergraduate students of widely differing experience and age could successfully complete the submission process, then graduate students completing their degrees should also find the process simple.
I supplied the students with a sample dissertation as a PDF file and the "Submitting Electronic Theses and Dissertation" instruction form (Appendix) and asked the students to submit the thesis to the DSpace@OSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation collection.
The study quickly pointed out a few problems, but also validated my assumption that the process was basically sound and that the changes we made were helpful.
Results Four of the six students completed the submission process quickly.
Two encountered a problem with the registration process; they registered with a different email address than the one that DSpace expected.
All students agreed that logging in with the campus authentication system would be an improvement.
That became the Libraries' biggest DSpace customisation priority and has since been accomplished.
There was some confusion about the first submission screen that asks if the thesis consists of more than one file.
Students seemed unsure about what to do at this point, but they all figured it out on their own and selected the "Next" button appropriately (see Figure 1).
We noticed that the instruction needed to refer to a single box and have since edited that.
All students submitted and uploaded their PDF file and entered the basic metadata within five minutes.
This included author, title, advisor and other pertinent information.
Figure 1: ET/D Submission Step One Most students thought they were finished when the file was uploaded, when in fact there were two additional steps (Figure 2).
There was also a comment that there should be instructions for logging off.
Figure 2: ET/D Submission Step Five One student commented, and all agreed: 'Aside from the email mix up, this is a breeze.
[The Graduate Students] will find this very easy to use.'
Conclusion The entire process of determining what to test, how to test it, gathering students, conducting the study and writing up the results took approximately two hours.
As a result of the comments, we have enabled automatic login with the campus authentication system, revised the instruction sheet, and are considering changes to the appropriate DSpace submission screens.
Usability testing proved we were on the right track and was well worth the two hours invested.
Try it; it's easy.
References Nielsen, Jakob.
2000.
Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.
Available online: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html Nielsen, Jakob & Thoman K. Landauer.
1993.
A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems.
In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands pp.206-213.
Appendix Instructions SUBMITTING ELECTRONIC THESIS Remember to first convert your thesis to PDF format Go to the D-Space Web Site Click on 'My Dspace' link that appears underneath DSpace@OSU in the left hand column.
If you haven't yet registered in DSpace, click on New user?
to register.
Enter email address (that you've supplied to Graduate School?)
and submit.
You will receive an email with DSpace Account Registration in the subject line.
Click on the URL in the email.
Select a password.
You can now submit your thesis/dissertation.
You are now in DSpace, so click on "Start a New Submission".
Choose collection: Electronic Theses and Dissertations.
Next you need to describe your Thesis.
Normally your thesis consists of one file.
If your thesis consists of only one file, leave blank and click Next.
If more than one PDF file, check the box and click Next.
Now you are ready to enter your name in the field labelled Author.
Enter your last name, then first name and middle initial.
The field labelled Title, copy and paste the title of your thesis from the PDF file.
The field labelled Advisor, enter your advisor's last name, then first name and middle initial.
The field labelled Committee Member, enter your committee member's last name, then first name and middle initial.
Click on Add More to enter another committee member, until all committee members have been listed.
The field labelled Abstract, copy and paste the abstract from the PDF file.
The field labelled Keywords, enter keywords on the topic of the content of your thesis.
If you need to add additional words, click on Add More.
The field labelled Degree Name, click on the name of your degree, such as Master of Science.
The field labelled Degree Level, click on either Master or Doctoral.
The field labelled College/Department, click on the name of the college or department.
The field labelled Granting Institution, click on Oregon State University The field labelled Type, click on thesis or dissertation.
The field labelled Language, select the language of the main content of the thesis.
Now ready to upload a file.
The field labelled Document File, click on Browse and locate your PDF file, and enter.
Click on Next.
You will receive the message 'Your file was successfully uploaded'.
BUT YOU ARE NOT DONE YET.
Verify that the correct file was uploaded by: Clicking on the filename listed.
This will download the file in a new browser window, so that you can check the contents.
YOU ARE STILL NOT DONE.
Now take a few minutes to examine what you've just submitted below.
If anything is wrong, please go back and correct it by using the buttons next to the error.
If everything is ok, please click on the Next button at the bottom of the page.
Read the licence and click on 'I Grant the License'.
Submission is now complete!
Click on Go to My DSpace.
Log out by clicking on Log Out in the left hand column alongside your name.
Author Details Michael Boock Head of Technical Services Oregon State University Libraries 121 The Valley Library Corvallis, OR 97331 Email: michael.boock@oregonstate.edu Web site: http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/ Return to top Article Title: "Improving DSpace@OSU with a Usability Study of the ET/D Submission Process" Author: Michael Boock Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue45/boock/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Making the Case for a Wiki Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Making the Case for a Wiki Buzz data software wiki html database rss xml archives blog repositories python hypertext perl syndication soap php ruby authentication interoperability intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin examines wikis and considers the feasibility of their deployment and the danger of the 'tumbleweed' syndrome.
Introduction: What is a Wiki?
Software use cases are necessarily incomplete, a failing which seems to intensify in reverse proportion to the degree of simplicity in the software in question.
Complex software responds to a given set of requirements, simple software as a partial solution to a much broader problem set.
More concisely put, certain ideas just seem to catch on, particularly the simple, brilliant, ‘now why didn’t I think of that’ class of ideas.
Examples include IP, the Internet protocol, the point-and-click user interface that arose from Xerox PARC to conquer computing, or HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol upon which the Web is built.
Although these ideas are often traceable to one inventor, today’s implementations tend, broadly speaking, to be the result of a fairly long evolution and a number of sources.
These are ‘killer applications’, software that has changed the world, and membership in this exclusive club is strictly limited, but there exists a rather larger and fuzzier class of other ideas that have enjoyed a more gradual rise to fame, the classic example being the message board or the online journal that received very little attention before its felicitous re-birth as a ‘blog’.
Most of these are software concepts that have become a recurring theme for the Web, recreated perhaps a thousand times in various forms by web developers because of their wide appeal and broad spectrum of potential applications, yet largely ignored until re-branded into a buzzword.
The wiki is another such concept, that could be christened ‘simple user-editable data storage’.
It was born in 1995 to hold a pattern repository, the term ‘Wiki’ famously being taken from the Hawaiian term ‘WikiWiki’, or ‘Super fast’.
The image below shows a simple wiki such as I might have used to gather my thoughts before beginning to write this article, one theme, or WikiWord, per page, with various links between the pages showing where I have referenced one from another.
Figure 1: Example of a simple Wiki representing this article The wiki was rather aptly described by Ward Cunningham as ‘the simplest online database that could possibly work’.
Although this description is entirely accurate and very concise, it isn’t entirely sufficient.
In terms of features, wikis generally, although not invariably, include: A space containing pages that can be freely written or edited by anybody depending on the aim of the wiki, this capability may be limited to certain authorised members.
A basic wiki consists of one page per WikiWord, with one editable text area.
Pages may be added by the use of WikiWords, words that are automatically linked to a page referred to by that name.
In certain wikis, this is restricted to linking of all words that contain two or more capital letters (LikeThis), in what is usually referred to as CamelCase.
More recently, the use of CamelCase has lost favour, and is often considered to be untidy or difficult to read, leading to alternative conventions such as the use of double square brackets [[such as these]] to denote a WikiWord.
Wikis are not usually written directly in HTML, though some do allow HTML formatting to be used; most provide a simplified system of markup [1].
The details of the markup used tend to reflect the intentions of the wiki’s developers.
Many simple wiki applications make use of traditional tricks such as marking underlined text with underscores and bold text with asterisks i.e.
underline to underline and bold to bold, for example whilst Wikipedia, the Web-based, multi-lingual encyclopedia designed to be read and changed by anyone, has introduced additional markup for definitions, references and mathematics markup.
Many are similar enough to provide a fairly consistent user experience for the less demanding, which lowers the learning curve for novice user participation in a wiki.
The above features merely tell us the defining features of a wiki; they do not tell us anything about the actual purpose of the system.
In fact, they show that the purpose to which the wiki is put can demand radical differences to its structure and functionality.
To pin this down, it might be helpful to examine a few hypothetical use cases.
Use Cases: Mental Models of the Wiki Single-user Wikis Talking to yourself may well be the first sign of madness, but what about writing to yourself?
At first sight, it seems peculiar to imagine a single author making good use of a wiki.
Wikis are collaborative environments, after all or they’re fast flexible multi-user web development platforms.
What can one person do with a wiki?
Or, rephrased, what on earth is the good of wiki software for a handheld or PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)?
They can map concepts; wikis are extremely useful for brainstorming.
Exploring a topic by means of a wikiweb is a curiously comfortable feeling, and often very rewarding.
Authoring a wiki on a given topic produces a linked network of web pages roughly analogous to a concept map, a visual technique for representing knowledge and information.
More can be read about concept mapping in Novak’s online introduction [2].
One cannot take this analogy too far, although the similarity has often been discussed in the past.
Few wikis offer plugins that provide visual representations, for the reason that wikis tend to be rather more confused than a pure concept map; moreover an arbitrary number of links may be made between pages, which tends to result in a network which, though valuable, is rather too complex to be displayed in a simple diagram.
One or two have been developed, for example the VisualTour that is sometimes available on c2.com.
Perhaps instead of offering a general overview of the entire content of a wiki, a tool that displays all of the concepts within a given number of links, or a tool that attempts to separate keywords into themes based on the interlinking, will prove more useful.
Nonetheless, a single user wiki is a marvellous way of collecting and presenting information over a period of time.
Lab Book Students requiring a place to keep an online lab book or research notebook are in much the same situation as the ‘single user’ jotting down brainstorming ideas, except for a number of details: The students may wish to impose a more formal structure, such as an index and entries cross-referenced by date and by content.
In order to store other resources, the wiki may need to be extended or twinned with a separate application to provide file storage and description functionality.
Page export facilities in various forms are useful, if not necessary; for example, if the student can export their completed pages as a well typeset PDF document, the results can easily be used and shared in a variety of scenarios, or even bound into a book and used as a permanent record.
Collaborative Writing Wikis are available online, for anybody granted access, and usually include the vital versioning information that allows authors to track the history of their documents.
They appear to be an ideal platform for collaborative authorship, and indeed certain projects such as the Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia, have proved to be entirely successful.
Not all wikis are suitable for this task; some have no page locking system, so if two people edit the page simultaneously, one set of changes will be silently deleted.
Those that do will permit only one author to edit the page.
Some wikis do not include a versioning system, making them inappropriate for the task.
Finally, there are the social issues that occasionally crop up, particularly on very large projects such as the Wikipedia.
Certain pages on the Wikipedia that deal with particularly controversial topics, eg.
abortion or evolution, are periodically subjected to a phenomenon known as an edit war, which is to say the continued editing or reversion of the text by wikipedia contributors, often for social or political reasons.
The easiest way to call a halt to such disagreements is to place a block on the page edit functionality for a period of time [3].
Wikis destined for collaborative writing should therefore include: a page locking system a versioning system the ability to temporarily remove the edit functionality for a given page Knowledge Base Any good technical support team needs to retain their experiences somewhere, and a wiki makes a reasonably good knowledge base.
Essentially, this is a collaborative authoring system, but the need to access the correct data as quickly as possible means that a wiki used for this purpose will also require an advanced search functionality, not to mention tight integration with file management software.
Since quick access is so important, an effective navigational structure will also be useful.
A knowledge base wiki will therefore benefit from: an efficient search function effective navigation and categorisation file management abilities Choosing a Wiki Lightweight implementations of the concept are available for most existing environments or interpreters in a variety of programming languages.
That being said, various more complex wiki implementations are not entirely interchangeable, as each one is generally the result of customisation processes to increase the application’s usefulness for a given purpose.
The original wiki included no authentication features and no rollback or logging of diffs; nor did it boast an RSS feed nor any export facilities.
It is still used, along with several clones, but authentication has become increasingly necessary due to the risk of overwriting, not by hostile individuals, but by spambots (programs that extract email addresses from Web pages for the purposes of spam) using the wiki space to link to a set of sites in the hope of earning an improved search engine page ranking.
At the other end of the scale lie the content management systems with wiki components, including complex structure, presentation and navigational elements, as well as an authentication and identity model sufficient for corporate intranet use.
The following tables compare a few features of a number of possible wiki implementations.
No such list can hope to be exhaustive, but it is hoped this comparison will provide an idea of the span of available software and their dissimilar use cases.
A more complete list is available at Cunningham’s original C2 wiki [4].
Table 1 : Comparison of features of wiki implementations   Language Ease of Install Version control Access control File attachments Data storage Tipiwiki PHP Easy No No No Flatfile WikiAsp ASP Easy No No No MS Access Kwiki Perl/Cgi Fair Yes, as option Yes,  as option Yes, as option Filesystem JSPWiki JSP Fairly easy Yes, as option No Yes Filesystem Instiki Ruby Very easy Yes Basic Yes, as option Filesystem Twiki Perl/Cgi Fair Yes Advanced Yes Filesystem Perspective .Net Fair (XP SP2 issues) Yes Yes Yes Filesystem MoinMoin Python Moderate Yes Yes (ACL) Yes Filesystem TikiWiki PHP Hard Yes Advanced Yes Database Table 2: Comparison of external features of wiki implementations   Syndication Data export Search Locking Suggested use Tipiwiki No No Yes No Simple applications WikiAsp RSS XML Yes Collision protection Small scale sites Kwiki RSS option Not default Yes, as option Collision protection Midscale sites JSPWiki RSS No Yes Yes Small-medium scale sites Instiki RSS XML, TeX, PDF Yes Yes Small-medium scale sites Twiki Extensive Yes, as option Yes Yes Intranet/internet site Perspective RSS No Yes Yes Intranet (good Office integration) MoinMoin RSS No Yes Yes Small-medium scale sites TikiWiki Yes Yes, eg PDF Yes Yes Intranet CMS Issues in Deployment Despite the clear use cases that appear to underlie its design, the wiki remains largely a laboratory animal.
Even in the event of a wiki being made available, there is no guarantee that the opportunity will be seen as useful.
As with chat rooms, bulletin boards, or blogs, many installations quickly fall into disuse.
A colleague remarked recently that, ‘there’s nothing sadder than tumbleweed blowing through an abandoned messageboard’.
Very true.
But is it inevitable?
In some cases, yes; not every perceived user community will accept a technology.
The underlying factors, surprisingly, are much the same on the Internet as elsewhere: communication difficulties; lack of common ground; status issues in human relationships.
For quite some time, the nascent Internet was assumed to be a force for democratisation and gender equality.
The popular lore suggested that the newly formed means of communication in cyberspace would provide equality of opportunity, as though by displacing communication from physical media to cyberspace, one becomes somehow symbolically disembodied.
Unfortunately, this optimism has been shown to be somewhat misplaced.
Research from the 1990s discussing gender in computer-mediated communication began to show that off-line status and hierarchy was reflected in the online world, and that factors such as levels of aggression tend to dictate the membership of a given online community.
In effect, disparity of gender is still very much with us in the new media.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in many situations gender differences ‘tend to disfavour women’ as Herring would maintain [5].
The above could be restated rather more gently as follows: people tend to form communities.
Those communities depend upon a given set of social interactions and behaviours.
The specific choice of technology chosen to mediate that activity has a relatively small influence, provided it is adequate.
Missing features are often successfully bypassed, as with the paucity of emotional cues or turntaking signals in IRC (Internet relay Chat).
It is due to this phenomenally successful robustness of communication that the communication problems that plague us off-line join us online as well.
Proof of this assertion is easy.
Examination of a few mailing list archives, or comparison of the aggressive writing style at slashdot.org [6] with the positive reinforcement (‘Good job!’) displayed on the discussion boards at Ballet talk [7] will suffice to persuade the reader that something is going on.
Rather less obvious is the applicability of this research to the wiki.
Herring’s examination of the blog suggests that, although bloggers come from all walks of life, disproportionate attention in various forms is paid to the adult, male bloggers [8]; it is justifiable to theorise that wiki use – and indeed motivation to contribute – is likely to vary by gender, status, and relationship to the apparent community.
The details are another question; one might imagine that a significant difference in use profile might arise between applications that label contributions by username, and those that do not.
One might suspect that beginning a new wiki page is a task that offers the same risk of writers’ block as any other new work, and that the additional burden that the wiki places on the first author of any section defining its structure might weigh heavier on some than on others.
Further, one might imagine that correcting a wiki page is an act that comes easier to certain individuals than to others, and one in which aggression plays a significant role.
Generally speaking, a golden rule of successful software deployment is, ‘get to know your audience’.
There are any number of approaches to this goal; from the approach advocated in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum [9], thinking yourself into the user’s perspective in a manner reminiscent of method acting, to Lucy Suchman’s pioneering approach to ethnography in the office environment.
These vary in efficacy, but it is very worthwhile attempting to fit time for such analysis, investigation, or roleplay into the early stages of any technology deployment.
Knowing your audience, in computer-mediated communication, means gaining an understanding of the target community.
Be warned: with only rare exceptions, if you cannot imagine your target group conversing comfortably together under normal circumstances, the chances are fairly slim that they will imagine they can either much less online.
In practice, it is not easy to get to know each and every user group quite this well, so the second best option both from the user perspective and from the perspective of the site’s administrator is flexibility, a minimal imposition of structure, and support for unexpectedly advantageous effects.
This is typically at odds with the system administrator’s need for a simple, well constrained system that requires little maintenance.
It is usually possible to create a system that works well both for the system administrator and with the users’ needs, but it is an extremely difficult problem; not only are users’ needs deeply intertwined with cultural and social factors, they are also in a constant state of flux.
Successful attempts tend to be either inspired guesses, the result of a great deal of up-front research, or the result of evolution through several iterations.
Remember: a user in an uncomfortable situation will (unless bound by corporate policy) generally choose to leave Dodge City to the midday shoot-outs and, eventually, the tumbleweed.
Future Trends It sometimes seems that every combination of consonants, plus the suffix ‘-iki’ have been used for some form of project or another.
The latest in this string of tongue-twisting derivatives is the ‘bliki’, a mixture between the blog and the wiki, in which articles are posted on a journal in date order, but remain editable by other users.
Effectively, the bliki is simply a wiki in which articles may be added not by keyword, but by date.
There is therefore no initial obligation for topics to be linked according to any sort of concept mapping.
Bliki applications are currently rare, partly because the idea is still relatively new and possibly because the place the blog holds in present-day online dialogue is generally different to that of the wiki.
Authoring a blog is a little like holding speeches from atop a soap box, and tends to prioritise feedback while wikis, due to the ease with which they can be vandalised, are more usually employed for topics of a less emotive and immediate nature.
However, it is possible to imagine that once bliki technology matures to adulthood, the combination will present a useful approach to the integration of the two systems.
Conclusion Wiki implementations are available for almost every system, even the most unexpected, and the concept is mature enough to take seriously as one of a number of possible enabling technologies for computer-mediated communication and information storage and retrieval.
When considering the addition of a wiki implementation into a given environment, it is nonetheless important to ensure that the application chosen has the right span of features for the user requirements; furthermore that the expected users are comfortable with the software, its capabilities, and the intended community.
Although the technology clearly provides a number of potential advantages, there are many circumstances in which factors conspire to reduce its usefulness or possibly even make a deployment counterproductive, so it is important to consider the actual needs of the user base as a priority.
There exists a large number of available wikis, and many are of high quality, meaning that it is possible to choose one based on factors such as preferred development or use platform, current support or continuing development, in addition to the availability of required features for a given use case.
Bear in mind that wikis differ in all sorts of detail, and therefore that it is generally worth test-driving a selection of possible software packages before coming to a decision.
Familiarisation with wiki technology is a goal best accomplished by trying out an implementation or two, either alone or with a small sample of the user base that might make use of it in the future.
References Wikipedia : authoring instructions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page Novak, Joseph D. The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How To Construct Them http://cmap.coginst.uwf.edu/info/ Wikipedia : the edit war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_war WikiWiki reference list: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines Herring, S. C. Gender and power in online communication.
In J Holmes & M Meyerhoff (Ed.
), The Handbook of Language and Gender (pp.202-228), 2003.
Oxford: Blackwells Publishers Slashdot News for Nerds.
Stuff that matters.
http://slashdot.org/ Ballet talk http://balletalert.com/dancersforum/ Herring, S. C., Kouper I., Scheidt, L. A., and Wright, E. L., Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html Cooper, A.
The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, 1st edition, April 6, 1999.
Sams.
Author Details Emma Tonkin Interoperability Focus Officer UKOLN Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/ Return to top Article Title: “Making the Case for a Wiki” Author: Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tonkin/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata and Interoperability in a Complex World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata and Interoperability in a Complex World Buzz data framework wireless metadata standardisation vocabularies schema repositories preservation gis e-learning dcmi interoperability intranet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Pete Johnston reflects on the 2003 Dublin Core conference, held in Seattle, Washington.
The 2003 Dublin Core conference, DC-2003, took place in Seattle, Washington, USA, from 28 September to 1 October [1].
This was the eleventh Dublin Core meeting: the first eight events were categorised as ‘workshops’ and this was the third time it has taken the form of a ‘conference’ with peer-reviewed papers and posters, and a tutorial track.
The 2003 conference attracted some 300 participants, from over 20 countries.
The event took place in the Bell Harbor Conference Centre, located directly on the waterfront overlooking Elliott Bay on the Puget Sound.
The facilities were generally excellent, with wireless Internet access available in all the meeting rooms.
The organisers had thoughtfully arranged the rooms’ seating so that late afternoon speakers did not have to contend with the challenge of their audience’s attention wandering to the spectacular views across the bay.
Stuart Sutton, University of Washington, and Jane Greenberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Co-Chairs of the Programme Committee, welcomed us to Seattle, and sketched out the programme for the event.
Stuart described the role of Dublin Core as contributing to the ‘management of a messy world’, a phrase that seemed to encapsulate several of the threads that surfaced over the course of the week.
Jane emphasised the varied nature of the sessions that made up the programme, particularly the six topic-based ‘Special Sessions’ that were intended to be less formal than the conference paper sessions and structured so as to encourage dialogue.
Tutorial sessions were available on encoding DC metadata in various syntaxes; application profiles; Creative Commons [2]; and the Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) [3].
At events such as this, it can be quite difficult to develop a feel for underlying common themes, and perhaps my strongest impression from DC-2003 was one of just how many distinct and diverse communities are working under (or around the edges of!)
the DC ‘umbrella’ so the following is necessarily a personal impression of a few selected topics and themes that surfaced over the four days.
Plenaries The opening plenary session was given by Mary Lee Kennedy, Director of the Knowledge Network Group at Microsoft, and concentrated on how she and her team were tackling the problem of connecting Microsoft staff with the information they needed via their corporate intranet services.
She suggested that staff should be able to: find the right quantity and quality of information determine the relevance of information and understand its context trust the authority of information find out who else has relevant knowledge find the same information from multiple starting points learn about new resources of relevance as they become available The focus of the presentation was on the steps taken to date to develop good practices for ‘information excellence’.
These included both technical measures (e.g.
developing a directory of intranet sites, including metadata about the audience, subject, language and lifespan of the content) and non-technical (e.g.
instilling an understanding of the information lifecycle).
Particular emphasis was placed on capturing and disclosing information about people and their relationships to information resources: a user may be just as likely to want a human being to talk to as a document or dataset.
Mary Lee acknowledged that at Microsoft the task was incomplete, and several challenges remained: The expectation that all information is managed effectively, both for reasons of productivity and for regulatory purposes, is still only partly met Users need information content placed in context, and contexts change rapidly The use of automated tools can certainly help, but the key is in how individual tools are used together Increasingly information must be integrated from multiple sources, both inside and outside the organisation Neil McLean, Director, IMS Australia, revisited some of these challenges in a session later in the week.
Neil sought to move the focus beyond the organisation and to place these issues in a broader context of cross-community, cross-domain interoperability.
He reiterated the importance of recognising the human and cultural facets of that interoperability.
He also emphasised the ‘multi-dimensional’ nature of an information environment in which complex relations exist between people, services and information content, and the challenge of developing shared models for that world.
He noted that we continue to face the problems that arise because different communities have different perceptions and understandings of the challenges.
He acknowledged that progress was being made: he gave the example of the widespread sense of the value and usefulness of ‘shared services’.
However, a note of caution was in order: in practice many existing services remain communityor domainspecific, even though many are potentially more broadly useful.
During subsequent discussion, it was highlighted that while many parties may wish to use shared services, they are perhaps less ready to provide the resources to develop and sustain those services!
Similarly, the concept of the ‘application profile’ the idea that metadata standards are necessarily localised and optimised for specific contexts was clearly valuable and had been widely adopted.
But the development of application profiles should not be interpreted as a guarantee of interoperability; it should not be ignored that, in many cases, there remained a tension between solving local problems and addressing the wider service environment.
He also raised the question of the cost-effectiveness and sustainability of the approaches we adopt the tension between the need for high quality metadata and the costs involved in producing that metadata was a recurring theme throughout the conference.
Neil stressed that funders expect that as researchers and implementers we demonstrate the value of their investment, and he urged us to take practical measures to ensure that (good) tools do actually make the transition from the research labs to the user communities where they are urgently required.
Themes An ‘abstract model’ for Dublin Core metadata Much of my time at DC-2003 was spent in meetings of DCMI Working Groups, and one of the key topics for the conference as a whole emerged from the discussions of the DC Architecture Working Group [4] In the first of two meetings of the Architecture WG in Seattle, Andy Powell (UKOLN, University of Bath) presented a revised, more generic, version of his draft ‘Dublin Core Abstract Model’ document, which had been the subject of considerable discussion during the weeks before the conference [5] [6].
The document seeks to present a description of what constitutes a Dublin Core metadata description, and it does so without reference to the characteristics or constraints of any one representational form or syntax.
Andy argued that we need to understand what information we are seeking to represent or encode in order to assess the relative capabilities of different syntactical forms to express that information.
Furthermore, looking beyond the Dublin Core metadata community, such a model provides a firmer basis for making comparisons between DC and other metadata vocabularies and the models within which those other vocabularies are formulated.
This work also highlights that some anomalies exist within the wording of the current definitions of DC metadata elements.
A good deal more discussion will be required to move this work forward and to explore its implications but perhaps facing that “messy world” does mean starting close to home.
Balancing cost, quality and functionality Neil McLean emphasised that in the real world, interoperability involved trade-offs, and issues of the quality of metadata required to support functional services, and the costs associated with generating such quality metadata emerged in a number of discussions.
Sarah Currier (Centre for Academic Practice, University of Strathclyde) and Jessie Hey (University of Southampton) presented a well-received paper on issues of metadata quality within two communities of practice (the learning objects community and the e-Prints community) [7].
Drawing on a number of case studies, Sarah, Jessie and co-author Jane Barton argued that metadata creation is not a trivial task and that metadata quality has a serious impact on the functionality of services that can be built.
Perhaps contrary to expectations that resource creators will assume responsibility for metadata creation, some mediation and control perhaps a collaborative approach between resource creators and information specialists may be beneficial.
While post-creation processing might offer some improvement, it is unlikely to compensate fully for the impact of low quality metadata.
And, most importantly, many of these issues surrounding metadata creation are under-researched and require urgent attention.
The issues of the cost and complexity of metadata creation were noted in a number of other papers.
In his consideration of metadata required to support preservation, Michael Day (UKOLN, University of Bath) acknowledged the potential costs, but also the need to balance those costs against the risk of data becoming inaccessible: there were, however, means of avoiding or minimising unnecessary costs (capturing the right metadata’, automating capture where possible and reusing existing metadata) [8].
Elaine Westbrooks emphasised that cost-effectiveness and the removal of redundancy were key imperatives for the Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository (CUGIR) initiative in the development of their approaches to generating metadata for geospatial objects [9].
Looking outwards As part of his concluding comments, Makx Dekkers, Managing Director, DCMI, emphasised cooperation between DCMI and other initiatives.
Several members of the DC community have contributed to the activity of the MMI-DC Workshop under the Information Society Standards System (ISSS) of CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, and further collaborative effort is planned for the future [10].
For the first time the tutorial programme at the conference included sessions by external contributors (one on Creative Commons from Mike Linksvayer and one on FAST by Ed O’Neill).
DC-2003 also benefited from the fact that the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) [11] held its meeting in Seattle at the same time, enabling some joint meetings and discussions of opportunities for collaborative work in the area of metadata for describing educational resources.
Finally, the DCMI Affiliate Programme represents a channel to develop firmer links between local communities of practice and the DCMI, with Affiliates becoming the local custodians of the global DCMI brand and assuming a role in the governance of the DCMI .
Conclusions In his introduction to the conference proceedings, Stuart Weibel, former Executive Director of DCMI, expressed his hope that the conference was an event of ‘significant scholarship as well as community building’, and DC-2003 certainly went a long way towards meeting those twin aims.
The organisation of the event was excellent, both the content and delivery of the papers were very good, and the context provided plenty of opportunities for discussion.
My own experience of DC-2003 probably emphasised the ‘workshop’ elements more than the ‘conference’ aspects, and I had a firm sense that activities in Seattle were part of an ongoing process that had existed before the conference and would continue afterwards.
There was also a clear sense that Dublin Core as a metadata standard and DCMI as an organisation were situated within a complex landscape, alongside other metadata vocabularies, within the frameworks of other standards and protocols, and the communities and organisations that develop and sustain them.
The challenge of ensuring that the deployment of DC is effective is only partly technological.
The successful development of truly shared services depends just as much on the ability of those communities and individuals working on standards to come together to articulate, compare and debate the assumptions and expectations that underlie them.
The papers and posters from DC-2003 are available from the conference Web site.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Michael Day, Rachel Heery and Andy Powell (UKOLN, University of Bath) for sharing their comments on sessions that I did not attend.
References DC-2003: 2003 Dublin Core Conference: Supporting Communities of Discourse and Practice: Metadata Research & Applications http://www.ischool.washington.edu/dc2003/ Creative Commons http://www.creativecommons.org/ Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/fast/ DC Architecture Working Group http://dublincore.org/groups/architecture/ Andy Powell, Dublin Core Abstract Model.
DCMI Working Draft.
11 August 2003 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/abstract-model/ Andy Powell, An abstract model for DCMI metadata descriptions.
Presentation to DC Architecture WG meeting, DC-2003.
30 September 2003 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/dc2003/abstract-model/ Jane Barton, Sarah Currier & Jessie M.N.
Hey.
“Building Quality Assurance into Metadata Creation: an Anlysis based on the Learning Object and e-Prints Communities of Practice”, DC-2003 http://www.siderean.com/dc2003/201_paper60.pdf Michael Day.
“Integrating metadata schema registries with digital preservation systems to support interoperability: a proposal”, DC-2003 http://www.siderean.com/dc2003/101_paper38.pdf Elaine Westbrooks.
“Efficient Distribution and Synchronization of Heterogeneous Metadata for Digital Library Management and Geospatial Information Repositories”, DC-2003 http://www.siderean.com/dc2003/204_Paper78.pdf CEN MMI DC Workshop IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee http://ltsc.ieee.org/ Author Details Pete Johnston Pete is a Research Officer at UKOLN, University of Bath.
He is a member of the Dublin Core Advisory Board and Chair of the Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group.
E-mail: p.johnston@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.johnston/ Return to top Article Title: “Metadata and Interoperability in a Complex World” Author: Pete Johnston Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/dc-2003-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The European Library: Integrated Access to the National Libraries of Europe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The European Library: Integrated Access to the National Libraries of Europe Buzz data software javascript html database xml portal infrastructure archives metadata xhtml browser identifier xsl namespace copyright python oai-pmh cataloguing hypertext z39.50 soap e-business rslp openurl dcmi srw sru authentication interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Britta Woldering describes the findings of the recently completed EU Project The European Library, focusing on technical solutions and metadata development.
The European Library (TEL) Project [1] completed at the end of January 2004.
The key aim of TEL was to investigate the feasibility of establishing a new Pan-European service which would ultimately give access to the combined resources of the national libraries of Europe [2].
The project was partly funded by the European Commission as an accompanying measure under the cultural heritage applications area of Key Action 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme.
The project ran for 36 months with the following partners: the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), the national libraries of Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with ICCU, the national central cataloguing institute from Italy.
The main strands of work in the accompanying measure were: Investigation of the potential agreements such a service might negotiate with publishers concerning the provision of digital resources across Europe Establishing a consensus among the national libraries of Europe on the service requirements and the creation of a model for the development, management and funding of a service acceptable to all the libraries Development of metadata profiles to which national libraries supplying data to the service agreed to conform and a metadata environment which would enable the evolution of these profiles as required The testing of a technical environment which would combine access via some kind of portal to existing national library distributed Z39.50 targets and an XML-based central index of data collected from various national libraries' databases.
At the end of the accompanying measure the partners had established with sufficient confidence that it was feasible to develop an operational service on the basis of the work done.
Development of the service, to be known as "The European Library", started in January 2004 and the first version of it is expected to be launched by late 2004 early 2005.
The Nature of The European Library Service The European Library service will be a portal which offers integrated access to the combined resources of the national libraries of Europe.
It will offer free searching for both digital and non-digital resources and will deliver digital objects some free, some priced.
At launch there will be no central authentication mechanisms, any authentication will be carried out via services offered by the national libraries themselves.
There will be limited multi-lingual features at launch the partners are committed to multi-lingual interfaces, with links to translation services, but there will be no integrated multi-lingual search facility.
A languages working group will be set up to investigate the development of multi-lingual searching.
The service will grow incrementally both in terms of collections available and additional contributing partners.
What is unique about The European Library: It will bring together on the desktop disparate collections and will allow for cross-collection searching It will present integrated results and will deliver digital objects It will enable types of collection-level searching which would otherwise be impossible It will be a major contribution to research both in making resources widely available and by making possible new connections through exploitation of a huge virtual library collection The European Library will itself encourage new research The European Library will be integrated at a service level with Gabriel [3], the World Wide Web service for the 43 European national libraries represented in the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).
The mission of Gabriel is to provide information about Europe's national libraries, their collections and their services in order to facilitate access to them, and to foster the development of new services based on a shared infrastructure.
Given the closeness of purpose of Gabriel and TEL, it has become clear that there is synergy between Gabriel and the proposed European Library operational service.
The European Library service is aimed at informed citizens world-wide who want a powerful and simple way of finding European cultural resources.
Moreover, it is expected to attract researchers as there will be a vast virtual collection of material from all disciplines.
It will offer anyone with an interest a simple route to access European cultural resources.
Technical solution The technical starting point at the beginning of the project was the heterogeneous nature of access to the data of the partner libraries: some offered access to bibliographic data via the Z39.50 protocol, some did not.
Furthermore, not all collections were included in the Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) of the national libraries.
The first task for TEL was to find a solution for pooling the metadata of all collections and to offer solutions for integrated search.
Two testbeds were established: one for Z39.50 targets and one for the metadata not offered via Z39.50 for which a different protocol was required.
For this data it was decided to use the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the record structure and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).
The Z39.50 testbed was built up at Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB), while the HTTP /XML testbed was established by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) in The Hague.
Meanwhile the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) published the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
This protocol was adopted by TEL for the harvesting of metadata for the central index of those resources not available via Z39.50.
While the Z39.50 testbed already offered all functionality necessary for search and retrieve, the HTTP /XML testbed lacked the required search functionality.
This was achieved by indexing the XML metadata and adding an interface for searching.
SRU Protocol During the time the decision for a search protocol was on the TEL agenda, the ZING initiative (Z39.50 International Next Generation) developed a new search protocol called SRW (Search and Retrieve for the Web).
SRW is a Web-based protocol which aims to integrate access across networked resources and to promote interoperability between distributed databases by providing a common platform.
A sibling of this protocol is the SRU protocol (Search and Retrieve for the Web using Unified Resource Locators) [4] which places the search parameters within the URL.
At present this is considered to be simpler to implement within Web browsers than say, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
For this reason the SRU protocol was adopted for the HTTP/XML testbed.
Another task of the technical workpackage of TEL was to explore how these different approaches could be integrated into some kind of portal.
Using a portal would allow the potential user access to all information and services offered by the participating databases and servers.
The workpackage produced an exhaustive list of requirements for the portal software which was sent out to nine software vendors in a "Call for Information".
It was expected that this Call would help to recommend a specific portal software for the eventual TEL service.
None of the responses from vendors fully matched the requirements and it became clear that significant costs and implementation effort would be involved.
The project partners began to explore alternative solutions for the integration of the distributed and centralised resources.
Meanwhile the client component of the HTTP/XML testbed had been improved significantly, evolving from a simple testbed to an elaborated SRU search interface which proved to be fast and stable.
The success of this development prompted the idea of integrating Z39.50 searching into the SRU client through the use of a protocol converter.
SRU searches would be converted into Z39.50 searches and the associated responses converted back from Z39.50 to SRU.
In order to test this concept a prototype gateway was developed to convert between SRU and Z39.50 searches.
Using an open source Python implementation of ZOOM, (The Z39.50 Object Model, another development arising from ZING), this proved a simple task and the outline concept was quickly proved.
The initial prototype is now being developed into a fully working SRU/Z39.50 gateway on which the TEL service will be based.
The software will be open source [5].
The gateway can be both centralised and distributed amongst the TEL participants, the central gateway being used for Z39.50 targets that are not under the control of The European Library.
Fig.
1: SRU portal for The European Library Functionality of the SRU Portal The aim of The European Library is to offer integrated access to the collections and catalogues of the European national libraries.
This is achieved by encoding collection descriptions as metadata records within the central database.
TEL participants can incorporate new collections and catalogues into The European Library by adding new records.
The collection descriptions contain data which identify the mechanism for searching a collection or catalogue.
Thus the user, by searching for and making specific collection descriptions can invoke new searches selectively or simultaneously across the chosen collections and catalogues.
The services available through the portal are thus data-driven.
The SRU protocol generates the search result in a common format using XML encoding.
To transform a collection-level description or an object record into a user display, the XML is converted by XSL style sheets to XHTML, which incorporates JavaScript functions to provide the user interface.
These functions include for example the selection of collections, simultaneous searching, help and invoking a service for a particular object record.
The services available include direct links to documents, access to linking services using OpenURL, translations, searches generated from the content of specific fields and other services such as document requesting.
As the user interface is driven by the use of style sheets, an alternative presentation of the interface can be provided by the use of a different style sheet.
This feature will be used to accommodate the large number of native language interfaces that will need to be supported by The European Library.
But the feature can also be used by TEL participants to tailor the system to their own requirements, including the addition of their own collection descriptions.
Thanks to this solution the implementation of a central portal became superfluous.
Instead the TEL portal runs in the user's browser and the partners keep the control over the functionality and the collection and catalogues through the use of collection description records.
As a result the solution has some interesting characteristics in terms of scalability.
For example, the portal is highly distributed thus avoiding bottlenecks typically associated with a central portal.
The solution to integrate both Z39.50 and SRU searches into the portal system was reviewed and strongly recommended by an external expert.
Although TEL had never intended to develop a prototype for the TEL service, it turned out that the project finished with a prototype which serves as a basis for the implementation of the functional TEL service.
Metadata Development To obtain satisfactory search results from a distributed retrieval in heterogeneous data, as far as possible, homogeneous metadata are necessary.
To obtain this, a TEL application profile for metadata was developed during the TEL Project.
Metadata to search, find, identify, describe and give access to materials and related services are required.
The TEL partners as well as publishers all produce and use metadata but the formats, the terminology and the classifications into groups are quite different.
It was the task of the metadata workpackage of TEL to develop a TEL metadata model which would facilitate effective access to the collections of the libraries via The European Library.
At the beginning of the project XML was chosen as the record syntax because most relevant formats can be converted to XML in a reversible way without information loss.
Moreover, with regard to the semantic aspect, it was decided to use the Dublin Core Library Application Profile (DC-Lib) as the starting point.
Dublin Core Simple was expected to be too limited for the purposes of TEL.
To determine which metadata might be needed, current and potential services and functionalities related to publication types had to be investigated.
The defined functionalities for TEL and the DC-Lib were mapped in a matrix, missing elements were added and so the TEL application profile was developed.
A TEL namespace was introduced for the TEL specific elements, refinements and encoding schemes.
The user scenario which the project group set up to determine which metadata might be needed in TEL, was as follows (with the basic functions that will be addressed in parentheses): When a user accesses the TEL portal: He will see a list of collections and catalogues and may select those he would like to search (collection level services) Then he enters the query (search service) He may get help in entering the correct terms from a name authority file (authority service) or from a facility that translates his query in different languages (multilingual service) The result will be a list of short records that enables him to select the relevant ones (identification and description) Then he retrieves the full record (retrieval) and will further inspect the metadata to determine whether this is the object he wants to access (identification and description) Next he will move up or down in the object hierarchy or jump to related metadata records (navigation) or he may decide to retrieve the object (link service) Before that he wants to know whether he has permission or the rights to access the object or how he can obtain permission (authorisation) and whether he has the right equipment (hardand software) Finally metadata might be exchanged with other systems or downloaded The relations between functionality and metadata can be expressed in a matrix (see Figure 2).
This matrix is subject to continuous development.
It will be adopted to new technological and other developments in TEL (e. g. adding new collections with special requirements).
Therefore the matrix shown here is just a snapshot and a starting point for further developments.
Not all of the functionalities in the matrix will be available in the service at launch.
Figure 2: Matrix of functionalities and metadata of TEL [HTML format] • [PDF format] • [Word format] There is a distinction between metadata that are used by the TEL portal and metadata that are only used by the actual back-end services.
The latter are not part of the TEL application profile.
The TEL portal may neglect metadata that are present in metadata records but that are not part of the application profile or may indicate the presence of such metadata depending on the type of presentation that has been selected.
Collection-Level Descriptions In the eventual TEL service collections will play an important role: TEL can be described as a "collection of collections".
As the number of collections can become quite large the TEL user should be able to search for a collection in the same way as searching for objects.
For this reason an application profile for collections has been introduced additionally to the one for objects.
With this application profile metadata which describe collections (collection-level descriptions) can be included in a search which makes it possible not only to search in a collection but also to search collections themselves.
If a collection is part of a search result, it can be transformed into a search target so that the user can start a new search in this special collection.
The Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) initiated a number of relevant studies with respect to collection-level descriptions and an extensive study on this subject was carried out by Michael Heaney [6].
The metadata proposed in the RSLP model [7] is used as the basis for the TEL application profile, with the namespace for the collection description element set as it is expected to be registered by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).
During the development of the TEL application profile it became clear that the model should remain flexible because the TEL functionality would expand.
A controlled evolution of the application profile was needed to introduce new collections and services.
The TEL metadata registry was set up to allow for such controlled evolution.
The registry contains all actual metadata terms and characteristics as well as information about proposed, rejected or obsolete elements.
Furthermore it may contain extra characteristics that are specifically meant for use in TEL.
The registry is open for inspection by anyone but submission of proposals for new elements has to be done via the national libraries only.
To maintain the TEL application profile, the collection-level descriptions and the TEL registry, and to guarantee a controlled evolution and adjustment to future developments, the establishment of a working group was considered to be sensible.
This working group will keep up with external developments on metadata standards, metadata usage and protocols and will review these for The European Library.
The European Library and the Publishers When the metadata of the collections of European national libraries are offered by an integrated search and access facility, enriched by links to local services, the question of how to handle networked electronic publications arises.
From the technical point of view, networked electronic publications could be offered very easily to the end-user via the Internet.
However, it is not only copyright law that presents an obstacle in this respect.
Publishers submit their publications to deposit libraries (including all national libraries) for archiving purposes without charge.
With regard to conventional materials usage is normally limited to library reading rooms since deposit material is not usually available for lending.
The same agreements between publishers and deposit libraries were applied in respect of networked electronic material.
Most national libraries are not able to provide any e-business tools; therefore negotiations with publishers about charging for networked deposit materials supplied over the Internet are currently impossible.
But The European Library's major potential still remains the provision of access to the entire networked electronic material of the partner libraries across the continent.
Therefore only freely available electronic networked publications and digitised material from the national libraries will be available at the start of The European Library together with the metadata of conventional material.
Publisher Relations The workpackage which dealt with publisher relations during the project comprised two objectives: to study the state of play in respect of the law of digital deposit in Europe on the one hand, and the handling of electronic publications in European national libraries on the other.
The aim of this workpackage was to reach a common approach on negotiating legal and voluntary deposit agreements with publishers and to establish co-operative approaches to business, licensing and copyright matters.
The current situation in the European national libraries and the view of the publishers were determined by two questionnaires at the beginning of the project.
The results can be viewed at the TEL Project home page [1].
To summarise, one can say that deposit laws which include networked electronic materials are few and far between in most of Europe; however in many countries the deposit laws are under revision with a view to adapting them to reflect the new developments in publishing.
Most of the national libraries have made agreements with publishers on voluntary deposit of electronic networked publications and are acquiring experience in handling these materials.
On the publishers' side, the European working group CENL / FEP (Federation of European Publishers) produced the CENL/FEP International Declaration on the Deposit of Electronic Publications in 2001; this is now under review again in order to take account of new developments and the experience acquired since the declaration was adopted by deposit libraries [8].
The publishers's view on The European Library is mixed.
On the one hand, they see the possibility of new distribution channels by including their networked electronic publications in the national bibliographies and consequently in the catalogues of the national libraries.
On the other hand, they fear that their commercial interests could be jeopardised.
Provided it is possible to reach individual agreements between publishers and national libraries, especially concerning copyright matters and payment for usage beyond the library reading room, the publishers are willing to become partners of The European Library.
A lot of work has to be done before the access to networked publications of commercial publishers via The European Library can become a reality.
The deposit laws have to be amended and negotiations on deposit procedures and the conditions of use have to be completed.
Thereafter agreement will have to be reached on the pricing of expanded and remote access for off-site users.
The introduction of e-business tools in national libraries will be an essential issue in such negotiations.
CENL Resolution The results of the TEL Project were presented in detail at the TEL Final Conference at the National Library of Lithuania in Vilnius on 24 September 2003 and at the Annual Meeting of the CENL the following day.
The TEL partners made an application to the CENL to merge the project results and the Gabriel service into a single common Web service entitled "The European Library" under the business model described below.
The CENL adopted this unanimously and therefore The European Library will be established after the end of the project phase from February 2004 under the aegis of the CENL.
Outlook In effect The European Library will become 'the public face of the CENL', steered by a board and hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) in The Hague, Netherlands.
The day-to-day work will be done by a small team of 3-4 persons responsible for the management, marketing, implementation and maintenance of the Web site and the portal, as well as for the technical support of the participants.
The European Library team will be established in February 2004 and start to transfer the project results into an operational service, including the parts of Gabriel of interest to the public.
The project Web site as well as Gabriel will remain online until the launch of The European Library which is planned for the end of 2004.
Initially there will be two levels of participation in The European Library: basic and full participation.
All CENL libraries will be basic participants at the outset, offering information about their libraries and their services via The European Library service.
Libraries offering their metadata for the complete integrated search facilities of The European Library will become full participants.
The original partners in the European Commission-funded project will all be full participants at the launch of the service and other national libraries will be gradually assimilated once the service is launched.
It is the aim of The European Library that all national libraries in the CENL will eventually become full partners but this will remain a medium-term objective.
Other medium-term objectives are the expansion of the functionality of The European Library e. g. by integrating e-business tools and multilingual search functions.
A Handbook will be available online which describes all organisational, financial and technical terms and conditions for participating in The European Library.
As one part of this Handbook a metadata handbook was compiled.
It comprises the TEL metadata application profile, the TEL metadata registry and the database of the collection-level descriptions.
Furthermore it specifies the requirements for the metadata to be accepted for TEL and it contains tools, input forms and links to relevant information.
References Homepage of the TEL Project http://www.europeanlibrary.org Schwens, U., Solberg.
S., Woldering, B. and Dale, P. "The European Library (TEL) The Gate to Europe's Knowledge", Cultivate Interactive, issue 5, 1 October 2001 http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/tel/ Gabriel Web site: http://www.bl.uk/gabriel/ Search and retrieve for the web using Unified Resource Locators (URL): http://www.loc.gov./z3950/agency/zing/srw/sru.html SRU-/ Z39.50-Gateway: http://herbie.bl.uk:9080/ Comprehensive study on collection level descriptions by Michael Heany (Research Support Libraries Programme, RSLP): http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/model/amcc-v31.pdf RSLP model for collection level descriptions: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/ CENL/FEP International Declaration on the Deposit of Electronic Publications: http://www.ddb.de/news/epubstat.htm Author Details Dr Britta Woldering Senior Librarian Die Deutsche Bibliothek (German National Library) Frankfurt am Main Germany E-mail: woldering@dbf.ddb.de Web site: http://www.ddb.de/ Return to top Article Title: "The European Library: Integrated access to the national libraries of Europe" Author: Britta Woldering Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/woldering/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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How Altis Can Help the Further Education Sector Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines How Altis Can Help the Further Education Sector Buzz cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Steven Hewitt gives advice on finding quality Internet resources in hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism Anyone who uses the Internet on a regular basis is only too aware of the problem of finding good quality, reliable information using commercial search engines such as Google and Alta Vista.
For students and teachers, short on time to complete assignments or prepare lessons, sifting through thousands of search results to find relevant information can be daunting.
Altis [1] is a free, national information service.
It aims to provide a trusted source for selected, high quality Internet information for students and lecturers by providing free access to the best hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism information on the Internet.
These are chosen by subject specialists, and listed by subject area and resource type.
All sites are regularly checked for currency, and new sites are added every day.
Altis can either be searched, by using keywords, or browsed via a hierarchical list of subject headings.
Users can select a heading and then browse through the resource descriptions to locate appropriate resources.
It is also possible to refine your search by resource type, for example, to search for books, journals, learning materials, resource guides or statistics.
Examples of the kinds of resources to be found in Altis are: A-level physical education: online study guide http://www.humankinetics.com/courses/alevelpe/index.cfm P.E.
Centre: resources for teachers, students and educators.
http://www.physicaleducation.co.uk/ Academy of Culinary Arts http://www.academyofculinaryarts.org.uk/ Tips for using a knife http://www.onlinechef.com/getstart3.html Star UK: statistics on tourism and research http://www.staruk.org.uk/ Vitamin Demonstration (interactive game) http://www.ag.uiuc.edu/food-lab/vitamins/ How Food Works http://home.howstuffworks.com/food.htm In addition to its Internet Resources Catalogue, Altis provides a number of other services that can help users make the most of what they discover on the Web.
Within the Virtual Training Suite [2], a collection of self-paced online tutorials to assist students build up their e-literacy skills, Altis users will find a number of subject-relevant tutorials written by FE practitioners.
These are: Hospitality and Catering http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/tutorial/hospit Leisure, Sport and Recreation http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/tutorial/sport Travel and Tourism http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/tutorial/travel These tutorials can be accessed via the Altis Learning Materials page [3].
A series of case studies on how the resources in Altis can be used to develop FE teaching materials is also available [4].
These studies were written in collaboration with FE practitioners.
The relevant topics are: Leisure, Sport and Recreation Safety of Life at Sea Introduction of a 10 M.P.H.
speed limit on Lake Windermere Working in Leisure and Recreation Travel and Tourism Employment Personnel to Personal Specification The Seven Wonders Timelines Promoting Travel and Tourism Hospitality and Catering Food Preparation Food Service Using Online Learning Materials Getting a Job Comparing Industrial Products These may provide ideas for teachers who are thinking of incorporating more Web resources into their course materials.
Further information A leaflet advertising Altis is available, in PDF format, at: http://altis.ac.uk/publications/leaflets/altisgeneric.pdf References Altis http://www.altis.ac.uk/ RDN Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ Altis Learning Materials page http://altis.ac.uk/learningmaterials/ Altis case studies http://www.rdn.ac.uk/casestudies/altis/ Author Details Steve Hewett Altis Service Manager Information Services University of Birmingham Email: s.j.r.hewett@bham.ac.uk Web site: http://www.altis.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "How Altis Can Help the Further Education Sector" Author: Steve Hewett Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/altis/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Using Collaborative Technologies When on the Road Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Using Collaborative Technologies When on the Road Buzz mobile software wiki browser blog passwords interoperability privacy Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly argues that since conference delegates now expect to be able to read email on the road, there are additional technologies which might enhance our effectiveness when away from the office.
In today's networked environment conference delegates expect to be able to access their email when attending events away from their normal place of work.
It is increasingly the norm to be given a guest username and password which can be used in PC areas, primarily to access email and the Web.
However such facilities are not always flexible enough to support the changed working environment in which conference delegates may find themselves, such as being out-of-sync with local working hours during a conference on the other side of the globe.
This article provides a case study which illustrates the potential of a richer set of communication tools.
The article acknowledges that there are likely to be risks associated with use of new technologies, and potential problems are described.
The article concludes by describing a deployment strategy which acknowledges potential dangers but permits the evaluation needed prior to making a significant investment in a technology.
Scenario: Finalising a Conference Paper In March 2005 I found myself having to finalise a conference paper being co-authored by people scattered throughout the UK.
As might be expected, following initial face-to-face meetings, email was then used to discuss the structure of the paper and to pass it around to allow co-authors to add their contribution.
However finishing the paper with imminent deadlines was complicated by the fact that one of the co-authors was just about to travel to California to attend a conference.
The eight hours difference in the time zones meant that it would be difficult to have the interactive discussion required to complete the paper.
The Solution: Instant Messaging In order to provide the necessary immediacy we made use of Instant Messaging technology.
This enabled three of the authors to engage in discussion without the delays inherent in the use of email.
This solution did not, of course, address the differences in time zones we were perhaps fortunate that the author in the US was suffering from jet lag and was still awake at 1a.m.!
Having acknowledged the benefits which could be obtained through use of an instant messaging chat room, we needed to agree on the software to be used.
Fortunately we all had an account with MSN and access to the MSN Messenger software.
We were therefore able to use this software once details of our MSN accounts were exchanged.
Consequently we managed to discuss some of the contentious aspects of our paper and reach agreement on our approach, and so update, complete and submit the paper by the agreed deadline.
Beyond Instant Messaging: The Potential for Internet Telephony Although use of instant messaging enabled us to successfully complete our task, a richer environment would have been possible if we had all had access to an Internet telephony application.
The current leading Internet telephony application is probably Skype [1].
Skype allows free telephone calls to other Skype users (assuming the microphone and sound capabilities are in place in order to speak and listen).
In addition Skype users can buy credit which enables them to make cheap calls to landlines or mobile phones (the cost of the calls may be less than 1p per minute).
Applications such as Skype are currently being used by conference participants for both social (phoning home while abroad) and business purposes (allowing remote users to listen in to conference presentations and to engage in discussions).
Use of Skype for such purposes has been evaluated at a joint UCISA/UKOLN workshop [2] and, as described in a report on the workshop, "One very useful thing to come out of the workshop was learning about Skype which describes itself as 'Free Internet telephony that just works'.
I'd second that!"
[3].
Deployment Challenges Having made use of instant messaging and Internet telephony applications to support my work on a regular basis over the past year, I am now convinced of the benefits these applications can provide, by complementing applications such as email.
However it should be recognised that there are a number of issues associated with use of such technologies.
These include: Disclosing IDs: Many users will be reluctant to disclose their IDs for instant messaging and Internet telephony applications.
They may regard such IDs as being used primarily for personal use (as is the case with mobile phone numbers for many people) or be concerned over potential misuse.
Spam and Spim: Email users are aware of the annoyances causes by spam messages.
There is a legitimate concern over the potential annoyances which could be caused by instant messaging spam (sometimes referred to as 'spim').
Interruptions: When using the telephone we receive one call at a time.
With instant messaging and Internet telephony applications, however, we can receive an unlimited number of calls simultaneously.
The threat of such an interruptive environment may be a barrier to deployment for some.
Privacy: It is possible to configure instant messaging and Internet telephony applications so that you can see when your colleagues are online.
For some, this may be regarded as an infringement of privacy.
Performance degradation: Concern has been expressed in some quarters that the reasons for Skype's success (it provides high-quality sound and is easy to configure) may infringe organisations' Internet management policies.
Interoperability: Ideally the collaborative tools we have described will be based on open standards and users should be able to choose their preferred application which supports such standards.
However both MSN Messenger and Skype are proprietary products.
Addressing These Challenges Do such challenges provide an insurmountable barrier to deployment?
My view is that, as long as these issues are recognised, it can be possible to make use of the applications described above.
The issues of privacy, disclosure of IDs and minimising spam can be addressed by careful management of one's own ID.
Nowadays experienced email users (aware of the approaches spammers take to harvesting email addresses) take precautions to minimise the chances of new email addresses being harvested.
We should take similar precautions to avoid IDs for instant messaging accounts suffering the same fate.
Such techniques can be complemented by developing a culture for the use of instant messaging and Internet telephony applications.
For example, when first making contact, ask if the person is free to chat, and acknowledge their right to say they are busy.
It is also important to gain an understanding of instant messaging and Internet telephony applications management techniques e.g.
how to block users, how to set 'do not disturb' notices, etc.
Although both MSN Messenger and Skype are proprietary applications, it is perhaps important not to be dogmatic.
There are, of course, dangers in being trapped into use of proprietary solutions: if their use becomes widely embedded within an organisation, moving to more interoperable solutions may be expensive we know this from our experiences with Microsoft Office applications.
However it could be argued that there is a need to establish initially whether an application provides a useful function, and, once this is established, issues such as deployment strategies will then need to be addressed.
During this evaluation period the important thing is to be aware of potential dangers and to ensure that migration strategies can be deployed if the dangers turn out to be real.
An issue of concern (not just to individuals seeking to make use of such technologies but also to IT service departments responsible for policy on Internet technologies) is whether the technologies mentioned above could actually prove dangerous.
A number of concerns over Skype have been raised, for example.
One reason for its popularity has been the ease with which it can be set up and used, even within an organisation with an Internet firewall.
In some quarters the ease of installation may conflict with the need to be able to manage applications which connect to the Internet.
Similarly the high-quality sound which Skype users enjoy is due to the way in which Skype maximises bandwidth connectivity.
Again, in some quarters, such techniques are regarded as potentially hindering other network users.
Although there is a clear need to provide a safe and secure networked environment there is the potential danger of technical policies failing to recognise innovation.
Looking at other examples of innovation can be useful in identifying general principles.
Back in 1994 when the Netscape browser was first released many users familiar with the Mosaic Web browser were impressed with the performance gains provided by Netscape.
Closer analysis revealed that one reason for the speed with which Netscape rendered Web pages containing multiple images was that Netscape sent several parallel requests for embedded resources, unlike Mosaic which sent sequential requests.
Some hardliners regarded Netscape's approach as unethical, arguing that the Netscape browser was effectively masquerading as several conventional browsers.
However, we can now see that Netscape were innovative in developing an approach which is now implemented widely within Web browsers.
Conclusion We cannot yet say whether Skype will be regarded as an innovator or a pariah.
However current experiences using Skype seem to show that there is a need for this type of application.
Whether this will be provided by Skype in its present form, by a modified version which addresses the concerns which have been raised, or by an alternative Internet telephony application remains to be seen.
Currently the advice to the user can be summarised as: be willing to try out new technologies, be aware of possible problems and be prepared to be flexible if the problems prove insurmountable.
References Skype Web site http://www.skype.com/ UCISA WLF/UKOLN Workshop, November 2004 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/ucisa-wlf-2004-11/ Beyond Email: Wikis, Blogs and Other Strange Beasts, R. Bristow, Ariadne, issue 42, January 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/beyond-email-rpt/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Web Focus: Using Collaborative Technologies When on the Road" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC and SURF International Workshop on Electronic Theses Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC and SURF International Workshop on Electronic Theses Buzz data framework database xml infrastructure archives metadata schema repositories copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing multimedia z39.50 ddc sru licence interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Neil Jacobs reports on a JISC-SURF-CURL-sponsored event at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, over 19-20 January 2006.
Doctoral theses contain some of the most current and valuable research produced within universities, but are underused as research resources.
Where electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are open access, they are used many times more often than paper theses that are available only via inter-library loan.
Many universities and other organisations across Europe are now working hard to make ETDs more openly available and useful.
In an attempt to co-ordinate this activity, an invitation-only workshop was held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in January, to see what could be learned from existing examples of best practice and to see how the participants might work together in the future.
The workshop was attended by representatives from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the UK.
A representative from the USA (Johns Hopkins University) also attended to ensure join-up with initiatives there.
National Activities Prior to the workshop, representatives from the 11 participating European countries submitted a brief description of national ETD activities under a consistent set of headings, and these are summarised here.
1.
Are electronic doctoral (PhD) theses being collected digitally and made accessible?
In most countries, ETDs are being collected and made available, but in only a minority of countries is this systematic at a national level.
For example, in Germany, Die Deutsche Bibliothek collects ETDs from universities, although the arrangement is voluntary pending new legal deposit arrangements.
In most countries, the online availability of ETDs is a matter for the university granting the doctorate, so there can be considerable variation between institutions.
In Belgium, for example, one university has only just started collecting ETDs, whereas in another it has been mandatory for some years.
There are a number of national projects ongoing to develop better availability, such as EThOS [1] in the UK, and 'Promise of Science' in the Netherlands.
2.
How many per year?
What percentage of the total of ETDs?
As you might expect from the answer above, this varies dramatically between, and within, countries.
In Sweden over 4500 ETDs are available (mostly via the DiVA [2] service), in France the figure is around 6000 (via the TEL [3] and Cyberdocs [4] projects), in the Netherlands around 6,600 ETDs are accessible via the DAREnet [5] and in Germany the figure is 40,000 via DissOnline [6].
In Finland, about 60% of the 1430 doctorates awarded in 2005 resulted in an ETD (the equivalent percentage in Germany for 2004 was around 30%, and for France in 2005 it was 10-20%), whereas in the UK there are perhaps only a few hundred ETDs available.
3.
Is anyone identifying and resolving legal (eg copyright) or plagiarism issues?
Responsibility for warranting that ETDs can legally be shared is generally devolved to the first point in the chain, either the library or the author.
Some good practice exists, for example in Finland there is a contract for publishing the thesis in the university archive, which mentions the requirement on the author to clear third party rights.
Plagiarism issues are rarely addressed, the notable exception being in Sweden.
4.
Is anyone preserving ETDs?
At a basic level, libraries / institutions holding ETDs have disk backup and similar procedures but, where long-term preservation is addressed, this is mostly by the national library, either using dedicated systems such as DIAS [7] in Germany or ENCompass [8] in Finland, or by Web archiving techniques, as in Norway.
Many aspects of best practice are in place in Sweden, as a result of the SVEP [9] and DiVA [2] projects implementing elements of the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) model at both local and national levels.
In the Netherlands e-theses form an integral part of the DARE [5] network of Institutional Repositories.
They are therefore included in the agreement with the Royal Library of the Netherlands for preservation of the publications in their e-Depot [10].
5.
Is anyone linking ETDs with related material on which they are based (including data, statistics, multimedia, etc)?
The overwhelming impression is that, while practice in this area is patchy or non-existent at present, most countries expect it to assume much greater importance in future.
Where repositories link ETDs to supporting files, notably in Germany, this is usually by wrapping those files into a single package, and linking from the primary ETD file.
A project in Sweden, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, intends to build an infrastructure that will support persistent links between textual (eg ETD) repositories and data archives.
6.
How are countries implementing syntactic interoperability (eg, simple / advanced cross-search, use of OAI-PMH harvesting protocol)?
National-level interoperability obviously depends on where the ETDs are held.
Where they are held centrally, typically by the national library, then discovery services are available via the online catalogue, services based on interoperability standards such as the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), Z39.50 and SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL), full text indexing by Google, and so on.
Where they are held locally, the situation is more patchy, and there is a need for a common metadata profile to support the harvesting model.
Such profiles are developed in the UK, Germany, Finland and Sweden.
7.
How are countries implementing semantic interoperability (eg, access via disciplines / subjects, multilingual access)?
Where the national library takes a leading role, they have often agreed on a single classification scheme, notably Germany (Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC)), Portugal (Universal Decimal Classification), and Sweden (a national scheme).
Elsewhere, subject classification is much less likely, and variable where implemented locally.
Multilingual access seems to mean mostly the native language plus English, with abstracts and interfaces often available in both.
The use of English for the thesis itself seems to be growing, in Portugal, Finland and The Netherlands for example.
The DiVA Project [2] is worth a special mention as a rare example addressing semantic markup of the ETD document itself, using an XML schema.
Similar work has taken place in France in the Cybertheses Project [11].
8.
What are the business models (financial sustainability who pays?)
Where the ETD service is run by the national library, this may be as a result of theses being included in the scope of national legal deposit arrangements (Germany, Norway, Portugal), although such arrangements do not always provide the business model for a comprehensive thesis service (Italy).
Otherwise, the responsibility and business model may be owned by the university (Finland, Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, France) or in co-operation between university library and the national library (Sweden).
9.
What are the organisational / roles and responsibilities (who does what?)
The business models are a reflection of the organisational roles.
These roles, and the associated workflows, depend on the national legal deposit arrangements, on academic custom and practice, and on whether or not the thesis is commercially published.
There are roles for the author, the faculty, the university library, the university administration and, often, the national library.
10. Who manages legal issues (copyright/licences, liability, etc)?
Again, this varies widely.
Some theses are collections of published articles and some are research reports, though with individual chapters, perhaps, being the basis for published articles either before or after the theses is submitted and made available.
Where theses are research reports, copyright and responsibility for checking for third-party copyright material typically rests with each author, though questions may be raised about these checks.
Where theses are collections of published articles, then university libraries sometimes attempt to negotiate with publishers to make them available.
Thematic Discussions After an opening keynote by Susan Copeland (UK EThOS Project [1] and NDLTD [12] Board member), much of the workshop consisted of breakout groups, discussing three overlapping themes that covered many of the issues noted above: Interoperability (syntactic and semantic) Enriching ETDs (links to datasets and multimedia, preservation) Management issues (legal issues, business models) The aim of the discussions was to identify areas of work where either co-ordination or development would be valuable at a European level.
The discussions were informed by a presentation on Framework 7 by Chris Reilly from the UK Office of Science and Technology, who noted four criteria that might be used to assess such value, namely: European added value will the activity add value that would not be realised if undertaken by member states?
Additionality is the work itself something that would not be undertaken anyway by member states?
Political and economic will can the activity demonstrate economic benefit?
Capacity can the sector absorb and use funds effectively?
Interoperability Discussion Group Informed by a briefing paper by Traugott Koch (UKOLN [13]), and after agreement that the problem addressed by interoperability is discovery and access, much of the discussion centred on the value and practicalities of subject classification and providing multilingual access.
The group agreed that we don't know enough about why and how people might access ETDs, and that further work would be useful on these questions.
An animated discussion of the value of multilingual access ended with agreement that a mixed approach would be necessary, to cater for cases where English was acceptable as a common language, and where this was not the case.
While DDC is translated into many languages, is this to a sufficient level of granularity to be useful when applied to the very highly specific work in ETDs?
The group agreed that access based on DDC might need to be supplemented by using newer techniques that exploit full text indexing, machine learning, etc.
Finally, though importantly, the group saw a real need for interoperable rights information, both in terms of resource-specific expression (that is, licences), and in terms of repository-specific granting of certain rights to certain users (that is, policies).
Enriching (Links to Data/Multimedia, and Preservation) Discussion Group This discussion was informed by a briefing paper by Sayeed Choudhury (John Hopkins University) and Eva Müller (Uppsala University, Sweden).
Given the sheer scale and complexity of data and multimedia material that may support ETDs, the group agreed that dedicated repositories would be needed for it.
Therefore, there would be a need both for a persistent linking infrastructure between ETDs (perhaps in institutional repositories) and supporting material, and for a means of deciding on the boundary conditions between the two.
However, would the supporting material, datasets for example, change over time, or would they have to be fixed?
This issue illustrates the dual nature of theses, both as an examination (and hence referencing a fixed point in time), and as a research output (and therefore, perhaps, evolving).
Other possibilities for enriching or adding value to ETDs exist, such as plagiarism detection and print-on-demand.
Management Issues Discussion Group Wilma Mossink (SURF [14]) introduced her briefing paper on this topic.
In terms of legal issues, there were two possibilities.
Where the author retains copyright in a thesis, then there needs to be greater clarity over what rights she should grant to a repository that makes the thesis available.
Perhaps a European model licence or toolkit could be useful.
Where the thesis includes published material, then access depends on the terms and conditions of the agreement between the author and the publisher.
Is it possible that such terms and conditions can be documented in the same way as done for journals by the Sherpa/RoMEO [15] database?
On more general management issues, the group discussed the need for theses workflow to be determined locally, but for some co-ordination of these workflows at a national or (given the Bologna process [16]) a European level.
Some sharing of best practice could be valuable at this stage.
However, for those seeking to make ETDs open access, cultural change is likely to be at least as big a challenge as policies and formally agreed workflows.
Like the interoperability group, this group felt that we need to know more about the users of ETDs services, both depositors and those wanting to use ETDs.
General Discussion While the thematic discussion groups had identified plenty of areas where work at a European level could really make a difference, there was one question that haunted the event from this point, which was whether or not any of the issues discussed were specific enough to ETDs (as compared with research outputs more generally) to warrant a specific programme of work.
The workshop heard from two European projects, one (DART Europe [17]) that is founded on the belief that there are sufficient ETD issues to warrant European action, and one (DRIVER) that is building a generic repository infrastructure into which ETDs might fit.
The remainder of the meeting was centred on this question, and good arguments were put for both sides of the debate.
Those arguing for a specific programme of work for ETDs noted that such a programme would address a clear, focused area, with a number of aspects that were particular to it.
For example, the workflows associated with ETDs are not shared by other research outputs, and the copyright situation is often, though not always, different.
As openly available, and highly detailed, records of research, ETDs do have value as resources for other researchers in many disciplines.
They may also be a useful resource for social network services based on, for example, standardised citation listings.
Furthermore, the Bologna process [16] of harmonisation within tertiary education may well bring into existence several reasons for making ETDs available, such as the need for metrics relating to the process, the need to compare doctoral (Ph.D.) theses, and the need to harmonise the extent to which doctoral students reflect on all aspects of research reporting (including the permissions they grant) as an integral aspect of their trade.
Those arguing that a dedicated ETD programme of work should not take place at a European level noted that there is no compelling reason to treat either ETDs (as a research output) or Europe (as a place) as separate.
ETDs form but one element in an international research scene.
Some argued that, in fact, theses are not useful research resources, being inferior in a number of ways to published papers.
Finally, if a proposal were developed for European funding, this would need to be for a substantial amount of money to justify the considerable investment that would be necessary in putting the proposal together.
There is no clear case for this kind of substantial funding, although there may be one for less ambitious co-ordination work, including with initiatives elsewhere in the world, particularly the USA.
The meeting did not reach consensus on this issue.
It may be that ETDs and services based around them are just one set of bricks in a larger wall of research services.
If so, then is the right approach to build these bricks, in co-operation with others working on nearby bricks, or to work on a whole region of the wall and have ETDs as just a single workpackage within that effort?
To an extent, the answer will depend on the funding instruments available to us.
We agreed to nominate a small task group to develop a workplan for European co-ordination on ETDs.
This workplan will describe both proposed activities and their rationale, bearing in mind Chris Reilly's four criteria, noted above.
It will be circulated to those who attended the workshop, and to anyone else who is interested.
There may be an email list, a shared Web area, and a follow-up meeting during 2006.
Those interested in being involved should contact either Neil Jacobs or Gerard van Westrienen.
References EThOS http://www.ethos.ac.uk/ DiVA (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet) http://www.diva-portal.org/ TEL (The European Library) http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ Cyberdocs http://sourcesup.cru.fr/cybertheses/ DAREnet http://www.darenet.nl/en/page/language.view/home DissOnline http://www.dissonline.de/ DIAS (Digital Information Archiving System) http://www-5.ibm.com/nl/dias/ ENCompass http://www.endinfosys.com/ SVEP (Samordning av den Svenska Högskolans Elektroniska Publicering) http://www.svep-projekt.se/english/ e-Depot http://www.kb.nl/dnp/e-depot/e-depot-en.html Cybertheses http://mirror-fr.cybertheses.org/ NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) http://www.ndltd.org/ UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ SURF http://www.surf.nl/en/home/index.php Sherpa/RoMEO database http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php Bologna Process http://www.dfes.gov.uk/bologna/ DART Europe http://www.dartington.ac.uk/dart/ Author Details Neil Jacobs JISC Executive Email: n.jacobs@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "International Workshop on e-Theses" Author: Neil Jacobs Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/e-theses-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing Portal Services and Evaluating How Users Want to Use Them: The CREE Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing Portal Services and Evaluating How Users Want to Use Them: The CREE Project Buzz data software java framework database dissemination portal stylesheet archives xslt accessibility cataloguing z39.50 perl copac vle openurl srw wsrp sru uportal interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre, Matthew J Dovey, Jon Hunter, William Kilbride and Ian Dolphin describe the JISC-funded Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment (CREE) Project and its user and technical investigations to examine how users wish to use library search services.
The JISC-funded PORTAL Project [1] examined and established which services users wished to have made available through an institutional portal.
The results of this project have provided firm guidance to institutional portal developers in planning the services they wished to present.
In particular, there was common demand amongst users for access to library-based services and resources within a portal environment.
Portal technology developments at the time of the PORTAL Project were not, unfortunately, at a stage that allowed full testing of the findings from this research.
Technologies have now matured to allow the investigation of how users wish to see the services they requested presented to them in portal and non-portal environments and in which contexts.
The Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment (CREE) Project [2] has been funded by JISC to carry out this investigation, focussing on the library-based services that generated so much interest.
The CREE Project is carrying out a mixture of user requirements evaluations and technical investigations, including user testing against services presented in different contexts through demonstrators.
JISC has previously funded the development of a number of portal services and other tools to support access to library-based resources [3][4]; CREE is providing a platform to test a range of these with users in different environments.
The technical development strand will make use of standards that have emerged since the PORTAL Project (JSR 168 [5] and WSRP [6]) to enable the delivery of such services through a portal framework.
There has been much discussion on how specific library-based search tools might be used alongside more generic Internet search tools, and CREE will also test this relationship through the inclusion of Google in the demonstrators.
The emergence of the JISC Information Environment [7] has occurred in parallel to significant interest in, and adoption of, portal technology across the Higher Education sector and beyond.
Each development addresses, in part, similar questions: how do users relate to, organise and work with the vastly increased number of resources and information systems available to them?
How does an organisation ensure that the substantial investment they make in these services achieves the maximum possible take up and use?
Portals of whatever type seek to address these questions by presenting the user with a coherent view of disparate resources, data and applications.
Much within this emerging landscape remains unknown.
The user is frequently faced with a contextual 'jump' which is driven by limitations in the systems themselves rather than by user need.
These 'jumps' may range from institutional portal to VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) to library system, and to the broader range of subject, media and community portals and other search tools available in the Information Environment and externally.
For library-based services it is uncertain where it will be most valuable to present relevant search tools: should they be delivered through the institutional portal, a VLE, the library Web site, or a combination of these?
Little evidence is available to support how users might want them to appear in practice in the daily contexts of learning, teaching and research.
Standards have recently emerged which may provide technical solutions for these 'jumps'.
A Java Community Process standard, Java Specification Request (JSR) 168, describes a common method of rendering a 'portlet' (a portal component sometimes also referred to as a 'channel') within a Java-based portal framework.
JSR 168 complements the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard, which enables remote application functionality to be accessed and used from a 'local' portal.
The portal vendor community is rapidly adopting JSR 168 and WSRP and this is providing an impetus to develop services making use of these standards.
Taken together, these standards potentially offer a great deal of flexibility in the integration of nationally and locally provided services.
They suggest a technical means of providing integration to portals within the Information Environment and to an institutional portal in particular.
The work undertaken as part of the PORTAL Project generated considerable data regarding which services users wished to access.
CREE seeks to use these emerging standards and build on this evidence by extending it to the domain of how users wish to access and use library-based services, and where those services might best be presented in a series of specific and generic demonstrator contexts.
CREE: Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment CREE aims to: Assess, test and document user requirements of portal-embedded and non portal-embedded search and resource-push interfaces, together with other aspects of JISC portal functionality and integration, in a broad range of user contexts.
Investigate and document generic aspects of adapting a range of existing search tools to be conformant with the WSRP and JSR 168 standards, facilitating their integration with any conformant national or institutional portal.
Investigate in detail, test and document the practical integration of these tools with reference portal implementations.
This integration will be tested with a broad range of users, evaluating the effectiveness of different modes of searching using combinations of embedded and dedicated interfaces.
It is a key objective of CREE that the results of these activities are disseminated effectively to both the HE/FE community and relevant standards bodies.
The project Web site [2] will act as the conduit for this dissemination and will be updated regularly.
A consortium of partners from across Higher and Further Education has been created to take these aims forward through two parallel strands of activity covering user requirements evaluation and technical development.
These will each produce results in their own accord, but are also linked to enable user evaluation against systems that users can see and use for real.
The CREE Consortium The University of Hull has been delivering services through its institutional portal since September 2003.
The portal is built around the uPortal framework [8] and was established as part of the University's Digital University initiative [9] to develop e-services to support the business processes of the University.
Hull's work in this area has been rewarded with Sun Centre of Excellence status [10].
This experience with uPortal will be used to develop the demonstrators for user testing.
It is the intention of the JSR 168 and WSRP standards that functionality can be presented in any conformant portal, and Hull will carry out interoperability testing within the Sun JES Portal [11] and tested against Oracle's Portal Verification Service [12] to examine this.
The user requirements evaluation work within CREE is also being co-ordinated through Hull, working with partners at Newark and Sherwood College and the University of Oxford, representing Further and Higher Education, to gather as wide a range of views as possible from different constituencies.
The library-based resources being adapted for use within the demonstrator(s) have been developed through JISC and other publicly-funded projects in recent years.
All have proved themselves to be robust and valuable services that are now being used in a variety of environments in their own right.
They are thus ideal to enable a comparison to be carried out within portal and non-portal environments, as well as being prime candidates for testing the practicality of the JSR 168 and WSRP standards.
The Xgrain [13] and Zblsa [14] projects at EDINA [15] have developed tools to enable the cross-searching of abstracting and indexing databases and lightweight OpenURL resolution, respectively.
The Xgrain software is now the basis of the GetRef service [16], whilst Zblsa has led to the development of the Openurl router service [17] and the GetCopy service [18].
The JAFER (Java Access For Electronic Resources) Toolkit [19] was developed at the University of Oxford [20] and provides an easy-to-use visual toolkit to enable access to resources using Z39.50 [21].
This has been used as underlying technology within a number of further projects, including CCInterop [22] and PORTOLE [23], and can also now provide access using the SRW protocol [24].
The Archaeology Data Service [25] developed the HEIRPORT service in 2001, and is now being delivered as HEIRPORT 2 [26], on behalf of HEIRNET, the Historic Environment Information Resources NETwork [27].
This is a Z39.50 portal allowing access to four key resources in the historic environment field, and has been used as the basis for demonstrating cross-domain searching within the Common Information Environment [28].
In addition to examining existing tools, CREE is also seeking to test out how these tools might be presented alongside more generic Internet search engines.
To enable this, Google is being adapted for use within a portal environment by instructional media + magic (im+m) [29], a US consultancy and software development company that has been at the forefront in the development of uPortal and contributed much to this.
The use of XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) to assist with presentation of resources through a portlet will also be examined by im+m.
User requirements evaluation When users interact with the range of systems and services they encounter within an institution, they are guided to these through a variety of routes (see Figure 1).
The factors that determine these routes are both organisational and technical.
Institutions commonly have a library catalogue and quite often a VLE; many are examining or are running a portal at either the institutional and/or library level.
Direct access to external and internal services is commonplace through a myriad of interfaces, and internal systems such as the VLE often need to interact with these.
Existing methods to deliver these systems and services are often proprietary and limit the choices organisations have to build services around them; processes are too often built around what the system can do rather than the other way round.
The use of open standards can provide flexibility and choice in the way organisations, and individuals within them, access services.
However, such technical solutions are only valuable if they are guided by evidence of how users would like to see services and information presented to them getting the systems to do what the user needs.
This evidence can be both theoretical, gathered through asking users what they want, and practical, through showing users what possibilities there are and gathering their feedback.
Figure 1: Which route shall I choose today?
CREE is addressing both the theoretical and practical angles.
A national user survey [30] is examining how users currently search using existing services and gathering user opinion on suggested methods for integrating these within local systems.
Of particular interest here are links into the VLE, in order to support the learning process more fully and enable integration of library and administrative systems within this.
The findings from this survey will be tested and expanded through a series of focus groups with both staff and students within both Higher and Further Education institutions.
Combining evidence from these two sources will then underpin the development of demonstrators to allow users to see what might be possible and provide feedback on this.
The results of this evaluation will provide evidence to assist with the effective use of technologies in delivering services to users through both portal and non-portal environments.
The evaluation will be given further depth by analysing user needs and behaviours across one disciplinary community.
The historic environment sector is a microcosm of the problems faced by portal developers.
There is a broad range of organisations that require access to information about the historic environment, and in turn produce information about it, from national agencies to local public archives and museums to universities and schools.
Across these there is huge and under-exploited public interest.
So, like many datasets used in teaching and research, services often come from outside Higher Education, and are of much wider interest than to universities and colleges alone.
CREE, in partnership with the Historic Environment Information Resources Network, is aiming to take a snapshot of user needs for research data services right across this spectrum of interest.
The national user survey of Higher and Further Education users will be adapted for a national survey of those using historic environment information services (e.g., Archsearch [31] and the British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography [32]).
The differences and similarities between the results across the two surveys will make interesting reading.
Technical Development Technical development of the demonstrators to assist with the user evaluation has provided an opportunity to carry out a detailed examination of the standards produced recently to facilitate the delivery of services through a portal.
JSR 168 [5] and WSRP [6] largely aim to achieve the same end, the presentation of services through portlets within an overall portal framework.
JSR 168, being a Java standard, specifies a route for doing this with Java-based portals, and many of the portal frameworks currently available, including uPortal, Sun JES, OracleAS [33], IBM WebSphere [34] and BEA WebLogic [35] fall into this category.
WSRP, following a Web services path, is platform agnostic and can be used to present services through any WSRP-conformant portal, and many of those listed above also support this in varying degrees.
The two standards could be seen as competing with each other on this basis, both offering similar routes to presenting services but differing on the specificity of the portal framework platform.
There is, though, also a difference of focus in where the service or tool being presented is located, locally for JSR 168 or remotely for WSRP.
To assess fully the possibilities of using these standards to build the demonstrators it was thus decided that portlets using both standards would be developed for each tool.
Initial investigations [36] by the CREE partners examined the requirements for using each standard and how this related to their existing tool(s): JAFER and HEIRPORT are Java-based already, whilst Xgrain and Balsa are written in Perl.
This initial investigation revealed independently at each partner that from a development viewpoint JSR 168 has proven easier to work with at this stage.
Factors such as the software being used to build the portlets, the requirements of the standards, and the requirements of the main testbed portal framework being used within CREE, uPortal, have contributed to this finding.
For the Java-based tools, this was a logical choice in any case.
Interestingly, it also proved to be a logical choice for the Perl-based tools as there is no current toolkit to enable Perl tools to be presented as WSRP portlets.
There is, however, an existing tool to enable Java tools to be presented as WSRP portlets, WSRP4J [37].
This toolkit can be used with both Java tools and JSR 168 portlets.
Developing a JSR 168 portlet can thus be used as a standard way of presenting Java-based services to facilitate the development of WSRP portlets using the WSRP4J toolkit (see Figure 2).
Using this route, both standards can be used and maximum exposure can be gained through the full range of conformant portals.
As the services being examined within CREE will be accessed remotely for the most part, this path to WSRP potentially offers great benefits for the project.
Figure 2: Development path for standards-based portlets A specific case of how JSR 168 and WSRP can be used in this way is demonstrated by the development of JAFER.
Each JAFER service (Z39.50, SRW, Distributed search) is being adapted as a JSR 168 portlet.
WSRP4J is then being used to present, or 'wrap' these as WSRP portlets (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: JAFER workflow for portlet development (Matthew Dovey) It should be noted that WSRP and emerging JSR 168 best practice, tested through work carried out within CREE by im+m, enables control of portlet look-and-feel within the portal framework by style sheet transformations applied by the host portal.
This has implications not only for 'branding' issues, enabling visual integration and consistency, but also for accessibility for individuals with disabilities, for whom specific presentations of the portlets can be designed.
Conclusion The CREE Project, through its user requirements evaluation and technical development work, aims to provide a body of evidence that can support the development of services for presentation through a portal.
Beyond this, CREE is more widely seeking to discover how users wish to interact with services in the context of their learning, teaching and research.
There is likely to be no one answer to this, as individuals will have individual requirements.
However, identifying trends and preferences will enable the technology and standards to be used in a flexible manner to meet user, and organisational, needs.
References PORTAL (Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally) http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk CREE (Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment) http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree JISC Portals Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_portals.html JISC JOIN-UP cluster http://edina.ac.uk/projects/joinup/ JSR-168 standard, http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/portalserver/reference/techart/jsr168/ WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) standard, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsrp JISC Information Environment, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ie_home.html uPortal, http://www.uportal.org/ University of Hull Digital University Project, http://www.digital.hull.ac.uk/ Sun Centers of Excellence program http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/programs/coe/index.html Sun JES Portal, http://wwws.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/ Oracle AS Portal Verification Service, http://portalstandards.oracle.com/portal/page?_pageid=34,31863,34_31867&_dad=wsrp&_schema=WSRP Xgrain Project, http://edina.ed.ac.uk/projects/joinup/xgrain/ Zblsa Project, http://edina.ed.ac.uk/projects/joinup/zblsa/ EDINA National Data Centre, http://edina.ed.ac.uk/ GetRef service, http://edina.ac.uk/getref/ OpenURL Router service, http://openurl.ac.uk/doc GetCopy service, http://edina.ac.uk/getcopy/ JAFER toolkit, http://www.jafer.org/ Systems and Electronic Resources Service, http://www.sers.ox.ac.uk/ 39.50, http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ CCInterop (COPAC/Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation Project), http://ccinterop.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ PORTOLE (Providing Online Resources To Online Learning Environments) http://www.leeds.ac.uk/portole/ ;Editor's note: see also "The Portole Project: Supporting e-learning", Tracey Stanley, Mina Sotiriou and Matthew Dovey, January 2004, Ariadne Issue 38 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/portole/ SRW (Search/Retrieve Web Service) http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/ ; Editor's note: readers may also be interested in "An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU)", Eric Lease Morgan, July 2004, Ariadne Issue 40 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/morgan/ Archaeology Data Service, http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ HEIRPORT 2, http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/heirport/ HEIRNET (Historic Environment Information Resources NETwork), http://www.britarch.ac.uk/HEIRNET/index.html Common Information Environment, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/wg_cie_home.html instructional media + magic inc., http://www.immagic.com CREE National Survey, http://www.learndev.hull.ac.uk/creesurvey/ Archsearch, http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography, http://www.biab.ac.uk OracleAS Portal, http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/index.html IBM WebSphere, http://www-306.ibm.com/software/websphere/ BEA WebLogic, http://dev2dev.bea.com/products/wlportal81/index.jsp Initial investigation of JSR 168 and WSRP by CREE partners, http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/documents.html WSRP4J toolkit, http://ws.apache.org/wsrp4j/ Author Details Chris Awre Integration Architect and CREE Project Manager e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree Ian Dolphin Head of e-Strategy and e-Services Integration and CREE Project Director e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: i.dolphin@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/ Matthew J Dovey JAFER Project Manager Oxford University Computing Services University of Oxford Email: matthew.dovey@oucs.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jafer.org Jonathan Hunter System Developer EDINA University of Edinburgh Email: jon.hunter@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.edina.ac.uk William Kilbride Assistant Director Archaeology Data Service AHDS Archaeology University of York Email: wgk1@york.ac.uk Web site: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Developing Portal Services and Evaluating How Users Want to Use Them: The CREE Project" Author: Chris Awre, Matthew J Dovey, Jon Hunter, William Kilbride and Ian Dolphin Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/awre-cree/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Towards Virtualisation: A New Approach in Server Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards Virtualisation: A New Approach in Server Management Buzz data software wiki apache infrastructure blog windows linux solaris ssh research standards Citation BibTex RIS Eddie Young provides an account of trials and implementations carried out here after Matt Thrower gives us the background and benefits of employing virtualisation.
Virtualisation is a hot buzzword in the IT industry right now, with major players including Microsoft and IBM making multi-million pound investments into the technology.
In essence the idea of virtualisation is that you allow one server, with one set of hardware to masquerade as a number of separate servers with ‘virtual hardware’, each of which can run its own operating system and set of applications.
As you might imagine, the details of this technology are somewhat complex and its potential uses are myriad, but we’ll return to those points later.
What you might find more surprising is that the history of this idea goes right back to the beginnings of modern computing all that’s happened is that it’s become a hot topic again, boosted of course with the assistance of the latest hardware.
History The first mention of virtualisation has been traced back to a paper published in 1959 that intended to address the problem of a computer mounting peripheral devices at the same time as a programmer was working on the machine [1].
The original concept, which emerged out of the scientific community was called “time sharing”.
It was proposed as a means of getting the vastly expensive computers of the day to run more efficiently by allowing multiple users to input data simultaneously.
The reason that this eventually morphed into the modern concept of virtualisation is that the processes set in motion by the various users had to be run separately from one another.
The first genuine time-sharing systems were built in 1961 at MIT and christened CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System) [2].
Having set up the first instance of the emerging technology, academics at MIT and elsewhere began to put pressure on commercial vendors to produce improved versions for wider use.
As a direct result of this pressure, IBM produced an experimental product called CP-40 time-sharing software which made the first successful use of virtualised hardware.
This evolved through a number of increasingly successful iterations until other companies started to muscle in on the technology, leading to the crowded marketplace that can be seen today.
What Is Virtualisation?
As noted above, the end goal of virtualisation is to have a single piece of hardware running a number of discrete instances of operating systems.
To do this a piece of software called a Virtual Machine Monitor or Hypervisor is installed on the server.
Hypervisors come in two flavours [3].
The first (Type I) runs directly on the server hardware itself and provides the capability to run instances of operating systems above that.
This is a three-layer model the hardware forms the base layer, then the hypervisor sits above that with the operating systems on the top layer.
Type 2 hypervisors are designed to run within an initial operating system (OS) installed on the box forming a 4-layer model: the hardware, then the initial OS, then the hypervisor followed by the virtualised operating systems.
Type I is usually the preferred approach because for obvious reasons it’s the more efficient of the two.
However, the overheads for developing and deploying Type 2 systems are lower and so they are sometimes used in situations where cost factors outweigh the need for efficiency.
The number of different operating systems supported by a hypervisor varies.
Some, such as industry leader VMWare will support almost any operating system.
Others are limited to running instances of Linux and/or Solaris.
Again, it is usual to find that the scope of supported OSs is dependent on the price of your Virtualisation software.
It’s important to realise that a virtual machine can run a variety of different operating systems on a single server, so long as the OS is supported.
You could, for example, have a single server running Windows, Red Hat Linux, Debian and Solaris, all as independent entities.
Approaches to Virtualisation There are various broad methods adopted by virtualisation software to achieve the desired goal.
Each has various advantages and disadvantages that need to be understood in order to pick the best solution.
In reality only two of the paths taken toward virtualisation actually achieve the aim covered by this article: running multiple operating systems at near full speed on a single server.
The first of these is called ‘native’ or ‘full’ virtualisation.
In this scenario the software attempts to simulate enough of the essential hardware of the server to enable multiple OSs to run, providing they are all designed to run on the same style of processor.
Given the dominance of the Intel x86 chipset in the current market this means that software is available that can run almost any of the commonly installed operating systems on a single server.
The popular commercial package VMWare [4] was created on this basis.
Unfortunately for advocates of full virtualisation the very thing that gives strength to this approach the ubiquity of the x86 processor architecture is also its downfall.
The basis of this architecture has been around for over 20 years and in its first instance it wasn’t designed to be virtualisation-friendly [5].
Up until very recently it still wasn’t, meaning that you can have trouble trying to run full virtualisation packages on anything except the latest hardware.
If you’re worried, check with your hardware vendor that what you’re ordering implements IVT (Intel Virtualization Technology sometimes called Vanderpool) for Intel chips, or AMD-V (AMD Virtualization sometimes called Pacifica) for AMD chips.
The other technique is called paravirtualisation, which does not attempt to simulate hardware but rather offers a set of functions for the operating system to use to enable it to do the jobs normally associated with interacting with hardware [6].
In order to do this the operating systems running on the virtual machine need to be modified to work with the virtualisation software vendors usually make patches available for this purpose.
Virtualisation software that takes this approach includes Xen [7] and the current version of Sun’s virtualisation software, Logical Domains.
There are some suggestions that paravirtualisation is a dead-end technology; partly because the x86 compatibility issues that made it necessary in the first place have now been solved, and partly because the ever-increasing computing power available makes native virtualisation faster and faster [8].
The chief differentiator between these techniques is one of speed versus convenience.
Paravirtualisation is faster because the virtual machine is doing a relatively simple job compared with trying to simulate hardware, as in full virtualisation.
This leaves more server resources free to run the operating systems.
However there is clearly an issue raised by the need to modify the operating system software to run under paravirtualisation not least that the OS vendor may refuse to allow the changes.
Many paravirtualisation software packages cannot run Windows for this very reason.
Applications and Advantages By now you may well be asking why you’d want to go to all this trouble just to make different operating systems run on the same server when you’ve already got different servers doing the job perfectly well right now.
It’s a good question and it’s about time we addressed it.
Probably the primary and most obvious reason is one of resources.
VMWare, one of the leading suppliers of virtual software, estimates that, on average, modern servers run at around 5-10% of capacity at any one time [9].
If that’s correct then it means that you could effectively replace ten of your existing servers with a single server running virtualisation software.
The potential savings in terms of space, power and time spent working on server infrastructure should be obvious.
Even if your servers are running at a higher capacity, or you need to save capacity in case of a sudden spike in demand, you can still make significant savings by switching to virtual machines.
Another potential application is the ability to run legacy software.
Some older software is simply not designed to run on modern operating systems or even on modern hardware architecture.
By using virtualisation the problem is easily solved and in addition you’re not committed to using an entire server to run a single old and most probably resource-light application.
There are a large number of other uses for this technology when it comes to modern software production environments.
This may be of no immediate concern to you but you may find that by encouraging your IT departments to experiment with virtualisation they can drastically improve the service they offer as well as earning the undying gratitude of techies who are usually champing at the bit to try out the latest ideas in computing!
We’ve started to make use of virtualisation at UKOLN, currently as a test to see how we can set it up and what it can do for us.
What follows is a case study of our experiences: we hope you find it useful.
Server Virtualisation at UKOLN Rationale At any one time UKOLN staff are engaged in a number of different projects, with particular specific technical software requirements.
It isn’t always convenient (particularly if the project requires a significant amount of software development, or (re)configuration of existing code) to install packages onto existing servers.
In the past UKON had one (SUN) development server, called scoop, which struggled to serve everyone’s needs.
Software was installed by one person, reconfigured, tested, changed.
Then new software would be added to it, and so on.
Coupled with the increase in and variety of new projects proposed, this machine rapidly became very unwieldy to administer.
(Not to mention the security implications such as external user accounts remaining on the machine, the chance that ports might be inadvertently left open once a project was completed, etc.)
So an alternative approach is needed to provide this service to staff engaged in this kind of work.
Our Options One solution might be to buy a new dedicated machine for each project that needed it with a vanilla set-up that could be reconfigured and worked on without any concern that such work might affect other existing projects running on that machine.
There are some problems with doing this; for example some projects can be fairly short-lived (a couple of years) and once the project has finished, we can be left with unwanted hardware to dispose of.
There are also concerns in respect of power usage and physical storage space if we simply continued to add new servers to the UKOLN rack.
Its clearly a wasteful approach, and can be complicated to support for the systems team.
So long as the virtualisation technology is sound and our single hosting machine is robust and fast enough, it could be entirely suitable to use a smaller number of ‘virtual’ servers, rather than many more physical servers and entirely supportive of green initiatives taking place at UKOLN.
I think this could be a more efficient and streamlined approach, as compared with maintaining many physical machines.
So it seemed an ideal process to investigate.
After considering the options we chose to take a look at Xen [10].
The Current Choice Xen has many of the features that we might need.
It has a central administration area and supports Linux and Windows servers.
It has the ability to create a virtual ‘version’ of an already existing server; so there is the potential to move current servers over to run as a Xen virtual server and then decommission the original computer.
It also provides the capacity to back up and recover servers running on it, apparently quite simply.
Although these features are offered by other Virtualisation software, there are advantages.
Xen offers a free version, it runs on Linux, (which means it could fit into our current server set-up quite easily, as UKOLN servers predominantly run Slackware Linux) and there is a is a good active online user community.
Running an open source solution is quite an attractive option in our view, supportive as it is of our inclination to encourage this kind of R&D, as well as possibly providing opportunities to participate in some way in the Xen project.
As a trial I wanted to try creating 4 different virtual servers.
One would be a standard Linux server, maybe running no more than Apache and serving some Web pages.
Another would be Linux, which we could configure and test and break if need be, to see how robust the Xen software is.
The third would be a Windows 2003 server, and finally the fourth could be a server copied from one of our existing machines, to see how easily (or not) it would be to migrate existing servers and services to a Xen Virtual Server, thereby being able to decommisson that machine).
A quick search for Xen turns up a lot of information [10].
Xen produces 3 different versions of its software [11][12].
We are only interested at the moment in Xen Express, which supports 4 different virtual machines, on one box.
The potential here is the option to upgrade to the other versions pretty easily if need be, and it might give us a chance to tweak the code to customise it to our needs.
Xen Express is available as a single download.
You can download the CD image from the Xen Web site, and then boot from this and install it cleanly onto your server, it overwrites the disk with its own cut-down version of Linux.
You then install an Administrator’s Console onto another machine and administer your virtual machines from there.
The Process We had an unused Slackware Linux server waiting to go for this, and originally I just tried to download the open source package of Xen.
(You install this yourself onto your server like any other applications) and install it onto the available server.
It seemed sensible given that our other servers run Slackware Linux.
However I had problems getting it to run and configuring it, and so decided eventually to scrap the Slackware install, download their CD and install from there.
When I installed it I got an error saying that the hardware didn’t support virtualisation, did I want to proceed?
This seemed pretty final.
There are hardware issues that should be considered when running a virtual platform.
Our SUN Fire v20Z server has 2 Opteron 250 processors.
These processors do not fully support the form of virtualisation that Xen uses.
This means that although we may be able to get some Linux Virtual Servers running, we would not be able to run Windows Servers on this machine.
There is more information on Opteron processors and virtualisation available [13].
Xen also maintains a wiki [14] to discuss these kinds of issues (and more) and where some hardware issues can be also be found.
Other than that the installation was completely painless.
You configure your server as before with an IP address, and hostname, get it connected to the network and reboot.
You now have a server primed to add some virtual services.
The Xen server is divided into two parts.
The Xen server host (the machine onto which you just installed Xen) and the Administrator Console.
The Administrator Console is a remote machine, from which you create, edit, remove, etc.
your virtual servers.
Once you have created a virtual server (installed it, given it a name and IP) you can connect to it through the Admin console (or ssh to it from elsewhere) to work on it.
The Admin Console then becomes your main access to the host server and the virtual servers on it.
Since our hardware doesn’t support virtualisation, I could only install the supported versions of Linux as virtual servers.
It wouldn’t run Windows.
This means I couldn’t proceed with my original plan of creating 4 servers on this machine.
So knowledge of the operating systems that Xen supports [15] [16] was a compulsory stop on any plan to try this approach out.
I tried experimenting with others, I created a new VM (virtual machine) and tried installing Linux Fedora, and Slackware Linux which both failed to install.
I also attempted to install Windows XP; this failed as expected.
The Xen distribution comes with templates to install Debian Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
I (quite) effortlessly created 2 virtual machines on the server with the Debian images.
I then gave these machine IP addresses and hostnames and added users to allow access to log on.
To date they appear to work fine.
Conclusions Much remains to be done.
I have yet to try creating a virtual server from an existing server, and it’s obviously vital to set this up on a machine with processors that will support Windows Virtualisation.
But we now have two extra servers at UKOLN, waiting to be used and tested.
Although our testing of this technology is far from complete I think that there may be a lot of mileage in UKOLN pursuing Xen for our Virtualisation solution.
Certainly for development and testing machines, although Xen boast a number of production servers already in place (for well-known organisations) running on Xen hosts.
I am a bit disappointed in the current OS support but perhaps I am expecting too much from free software!
I hope this will not impede our use of it.
In addition to this Xen employs paravirtualisation, rather than a full virtualisation.
There is some argument that paravirtualisation is not the way forward (particularly when taking into account advances in hardware technology [8] ) so if we choose to use Xen this may need to be revisited.
I think the technology of virtualisation appears to have considerable potential for UKOLN; Xen seems a good starting point, with some easily available tools and support [17].
Consolidating servers onto one piece of hardware seems very sensible (so long as backups are reliable and the machines run quickly enough) but it may be the commercial VMware, might prove a preferable solution for us.
We hope to write further articles about this and how we fare with virtualisation.
References C. Strachey, “Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Processing, UNESCO, June 1959, paper B.
2.
19.
F. J. Corbató, M. Merwin-Daggett, and R. C. Daley, “An Experimental Time-sharing System,” Proc.
Spring Joint Computer Conference (AFIPS) 21, pp.
335-344 (1962) IBM Systems Virtualization, IBM Corporation, Version 2 Release 1 (2005) available at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r2/topic/eicay/eicay.pdf VMW http://www.vmware.com/ Lawton, K. P., “Running multiple operating systems concurrently on an IA32 PC using virtualization techniques”, Floobydust, Nov. (1999).
http://www.floobydust.com/virtualization/lawton_1999.txt A. Whitaker, M. Shaw, and S. D. Gribble, “Denali: Lightweight Virtual Machines for Distributed and Networked Applications”, Univ.
of Washington Technical Report 02-02-01, (2002 http://denali.cs.washington.edu/pubs/distpubs/papers/denali_usenix2002.pdf Xen http://www.xensource.com/ Virtualization Blog Paravirtualization is a Dead-End Approach.
Posted by Tim Walsh, 7 July 2006 http://www.virtualiron.com/fusetalk/blog/blogpost.cfm?threadid=10&catid=3 ZDNet.com: At the Whiteboard: What is virtualization?
Dan Chu, 2005 http://news.zdnet.com/html/z/wb/6058678.html Xen documentation http://download.esd.licensetech.com/xensource/xe310r1/pro/UserGuide-3.1.0.pdf and the original home of the Xen research team: University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Xen virtual machine monitor http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/ XenSource Products http://www.xensource.com/products/ XenSource: Delivering the Power of Xen http://www.xensource.com/?gclid=CLmRvraB14sCFQcXEAodfFgXVA Introducing AMD Virtualization http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_8796_14287,00.html HVM Compatible Processors-Xen Wiki http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/HVM_Compatible_Processors XenSource Knowledge Base : What versions of Linux can be run as XenVMs on a XenServer Host?
http://kb.xensource.com/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=5&externalID=55&fromSearchPage=true XenSource Knowledge Base : What versions of Windows can be run as XenVMs on a XenServer Host http://kb.xensource.com/entry.jspa?externalID=56&categoryID=5 Useful software downloads and Xen discussion available at: http://jailtime.org/ Author Details Eddie Young Networked Systems Officer Systems Team UKOLN Email: e.young@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Matt Thrower Systems Support Co-ordinator UKOLN Email: m.thrower@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Towards Virtualisation: A New Approach in Server Management” Author: Eddie Young and Matt Thrower Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/young-thrower/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Tap Into Bath Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Tap Into Bath Buzz data software html database archives metadata thesaurus xhtml accessibility vocabularies schema lcsh mysql rslp interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alison Baud and Ann Chapman describe the development of a database of archive, library and museum collections in Bath.
Since 1999, when it was first proposed to use metadata for collection-level description within the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) [1], there has been steadily growing interest in this new method of supporting resource discovery.
A number of collection-level description databases have now been created in the UK, funded through national initiatives.
However, little documentation is available on how these were designed and created.
This project explores setting up a database for a small geographic area, using best practice and with full documentation to support other local projects in this field.
How the Project Came About The development of the Government's regional agenda with the creation of single regional agencies as strategic bodies for museums, libraries and archives has resulted in a growth of cross-sectoral collaborative initiatives.
In May 2003, senior staff from public libraries and Further and Higher Education libraries in Bath met to discuss possible areas for regional cross-sectoral collaboration.
This resulted in the formation of an informal network of libraries working in Bath and the North-East Somerset area called the Bath Area Libraries Initiative.
The aims are: to support awareness of strategic and cross-sectoral library developments to co-operate to enable the communities to gain access to resources that will support their learning and information needs to co-operate in the support of cross-sectoral staff training and professional development to carry forward where practicable, with funding, specific cross-sectoral library initiatives All libraries would not necessarily participate in every initiative, as this would depend on the relevance of the topic to the organisation's mission.
The main areas of shared interest were identified as learning within the communities; cultural and community information; supporting private research and access to study space.
The objectives of the Bath Area Libraries Initiative correspond closely with the recommendations of the LIC report "Empowering the learning community" [2] which investigated how to improve and stimulate co-operation between public and education libraries in support of life-long learning.
First Thoughts One possible initiative that emerged at the meeting was to establish a shared Web site with a community access focus to provide information on resources within libraries including a "Frequently Asked Questions" section and broad collection-level descriptions and strengths.
It was thought that the Web site could, perhaps, become the kernel of an "access map" for libraries in the City of Bath and surrounding area of North East Somerset.
The "Empowering the learning community" report had also recommended that public and education libraries draw up access maps to enable learners to make use of the full range of resources available.
The concept of an access map was further defined in a feasibility study by the Cultural Heritage Consortium in March 2003 [3] as a tool which would enable a learner to answer the question "Where and how can I gain access to resources that will support my learning?"
The Bath initiative was, at this initial stage, still confined to cross-sectoral library collaboration.
Given its expertise in library networking and collection description as well as geographic proximity, the University of Bath Library agreed to approach UKOLN for technical advice on setting up such a project.
No funding had been identified so what the Librarians initially envisaged was a low-cost simple Web site with details about the libraries.
It was hoped, however, that with more work and some funding, something along the lines of what the London Learning Group had achieved with their Find it in London Project might be possible [4].
Final Direction UKOLN strongly advised against a simple text Web page and recommended the use of more structured data, such as a collection-level description schema, which would be easier to maintain, exchange and develop in the future.
Furthermore, it was agreed that obtaining funding would depend on this interoperability and a standard format that could be used by others.
What was proposed was a demonstrator project using best practice that could be used as a case study to support other local collection description projects.
It was also agreed to widen the scope of the project to include collections in museums and archives as well as libraries and with that, Tap into Bath has progressed from the initial cross-sectoral initiative to a uniquely cross-domain project.
Finding Partners The City of Bath is a world heritage site with many rich sources of information relating to cultural, historical and local studies.
It is also a respected centre for education with major HE and FE library collections.
It was relatively easy, therefore, to compile a list of almost 30 potential participants.
These include The American Museum in Britain, Bath Abbey Archives, Bath Central Public Library, Bath Record Office, City of Bath College, King Edward's School, The Roman Baths, The Royal United Hospital and Wessex Water.
While information about some of these collections has already been collated in various publicly available databases, for example, Archon [5], Cornucopia [6], the SWMLAC Directory [7] and of course institutional Web sites, there is, at present, no single gateway for cross-domain searching.
In addition, some collections are not listed anywhere and the searcher must know at least part of the collection name to have any chance of finding what information, if any, the collection itself has put on the Internet.
Although limited geographically to collections held in Bath with links to any associated collections, the intention is that Tap into Bath will be more inclusive in scope than many other collection description projects.
Collections may include archives (which may be public or private or embedded within museum and library collections), all types of libraries (public, HE, FE, commercial NHS, government organisations) and museums (both public and privately funded).
Finding Funding Project management, technical expertise and data collectors are being provided by UKOLN and the University of Bath Library and a small amount of funding from existing budgets was set aside to pay for data collection work and development of the Web interfaces.
It was essential, however, to obtain the full co-operation of the collection managers (librarians, curators and archivists) to assist the project staff to describe the collections as accurately and consistently as possible.
Each potential partner was contacted by telephone to introduce the project proposal and to check contact details.
The most efficient method of encouraging co-operation was to hold an introductory briefing session on Tap into Bath and the concept of collection description and its benefits.
It was also an excellent opportunity to promote co-operation between colleagues working in the Museums, Libraries and Archives Sector in Bath.
The South West Museums Libraries and Archives Council (SWMLAC) was approached for a small grant to cover this event and also a second event towards the end of the project to describe the project outcomes, demonstrate the database and discuss future possibilities.
The first SWMLAC Briefing session was held in April 2004 and was very well-attended.
The response to the project was extremely positive and a number of benefits from participation are envisaged.
Tap into Bath will enable collection providers to disclose information about their collections to users, some of which have not been catalogued at item level.
Collection level description is a new concept for some of the smaller organisations and all the information professionals involved will benefit from the expertise that UKOLN has developed in this area.
Many participants indicated that they had already been asked to provide collection descriptions to other projects and the Tap into Bath Project will support them to complete high-quality descriptions using recognised standards for their collections that can be used elsewhere.
The Schema and the Database As the intention was to use the database as a demonstrator project, it was important that recognised standards, such as the RSLP Collection Description Schema [8], and open source software were used when available.
In the early stages of the project, the option of re-using databases created for other collection description projects was examined.
However, this proved unfeasible; some databases had either extended, cut down and/or modified the RSLP Schema, while in others the database software could not be reused for a variety of reasons.
The Schema In the field of collection description the RSLP Collection Description Schema has become the 'de facto' standard.
The schema uses metadata to identify all the elements of information, also known as attributes, that relate to a collection.
It is not tied to a specific implementation but is usually used to create a relational database accessible online via the Internet.
Using the RSLP Schema means that descriptions created for Tap into Bath could, at a later stage, be contributed to other collection databases.
This might be a single record contributed to a subject specific database, or the whole set of records contributed to a geographically based database that included Bath.
The schema does not prescribe whether elements are mandatory or may have multiple occurrences, nor is it tied to specific software; these decisions are left to the implementer.
The first stage therefore was to review the schema and decide on mandatory elements, repeatable elements and which would contain free text and which controlled vocabulary, together with the sets of controlled vocabulary terms.
The Database Since no suitable database had been identified for re-use, the project had to design the database from scratch.
The open source software MySql was chosen as the relational database.
This is hosted on a Unix server.
UKOLN and the library drew up the details of the database structure, identifying mandatory and repeatable elements and notes on content.
A member of library staff then created the database in MySql using the schema and the project decisions on mandatory and repeatable fields.
The Interfaces Three different interfaces are required for data entry, for public search and display and for administrator access.
The interfaces will use XHTML or HTML pages and will be designed with accessibility in mind.
At this point the partners had no one with the required expertise and time to construct these interfaces, so a programmer is being employed on a short-term contract to do this.
Collecting the Data Data collection was carried out in parallel with the design and creation of the database so that data would be available for entry at the point the database was complete.
Phase 1 Since administrators for the target collections had no prior knowledge of collection description, it was decided to produce a draft description using details that could be found on the Internet and a post-graduate student was recruited to collect this initial data.
Information found in this way proved to be variable, and in the case of opening hours and admission charges, it was unclear how up to date these were.
A member of the library staff searched for appropriate Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
All data was recorded in table form in Word documents.
Phase 2 It was decided that in certain areas (for example the Strength element) specific wording was required for consistency and several lists of terms were created and the draft descriptions edited.
The administrators of individual collections were then contacted and arrangements made to send each their draft description and to set up a telephone interview to review, supplement and correct those descriptions.
The revised descriptions will undergo a final editing before data entry.
Data Entry Phase 2 is still in progress, so no data has yet been entered.
A prototype data entry interface has been created and early drafts of collection records have been used as test data.
The final data entry interface is expected to be available in late June.
Terminology Using recognised terminology sets or schemas for subject indexing supports interoperability in the contribution of record(s) to other database or cross-searching with other databases using the same sets.
Terminology sets may be general (LCSH), or subject-specific, for example Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) or the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT).
Potential users of the Tap into Bath database are expected to include a range of people the general public, schools, tourists, students, researchers with a variety of searching skills.
It was therefore decided to use a general set with wide usage in libraries (LCSH) for initial subject indexing.
In consultation with partner collections, it may be that terms from other sets will be added for some collections at a later stage.
Conclusions At mid-June 2004, the project is still in progress.
The interfaces for data entry and searching are due for completion at the end of June.
Data collection should be almost complete at that point and data entry can then take place.
The project is hoping to launch the database in July.
Having encountered minimal documentation on the creation of other collection databases, the project is committed to providing full documentation.
The programmer will provide a generalist and a technical version of his documentation.
Tap into Bath will also feature as a Collection Description Focus Case Study [9] and further documentation on the project will go into the Collection Description Online Tutorial [10].
This project has already proved to be a worthwhile venture.
The opportunity for information professionals from archives, libraries and museums from all sectors to work together and to learn about a new tool has been widely welcomed.
It is also evident that more people are becoming aware of the potential of collection descriptions and the project has already had a number of enquiries regarding re-use of the database and its interfaces.
References Research Support Libraries Programme http://www.rslp.ac.uk/ Library and Information Commission.
Empowering the learning community: report of the Education and Libraries Task Group to the Secretaries of State for Culture, Media and Sport and for Education and Employment.
March 2000. http://www.mla.gov.uk/action/learnacc/emplearn00.asp Cultural Heritage Consortium.
Feasibility study of access mapping.
Final report March 2003. http://www.mla.gov.uk/documents/id555rep.pdf Find it in London http://www.fiil.org.uk/docs/FiiL-Final-report.doc Archon http://www.hmc.gov.uk/archon/ Cornucopia http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/ SWMLAC Directory http://www.swmlac.org.uk/directory/ RSLP Collection Description Schema http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/ Collection Description Focus Case Study series http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/case-studies/ Collection Description Focus Online Tutorial http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/cdfocus-tutorial/ Author Details Alison Baud Bibliographic Services Librarian The Library University of Bath Email: a.baud@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/contacts/people/acb.html Ann Chapman Collection Description Focus UKOLN Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/ Return to top Article Title: "Tap into Bath" Author: Alison Baud and Ann Chapman Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/baud-chapman/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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e-Collaboration Workshop: Access Grid, Portals and Other VREs for the Social Sciences Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines e-Collaboration Workshop: Access Grid, Portals and Other VREs for the Social Sciences Buzz software java framework wiki portal video visualisation e-science e-research research standards Citation BibTex RIS Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley and Michael Daw cover a one-day workshop reporting on the latest developments in e-Collaboration technology and applications.
This workshop was held on 28 June 2006 at Manchester Metropolitan University as part of the 2nd International Conference on e-Social Science hosted by the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS).
The aim of the workshop was to bring together conference attendees interested in e-Collaboration as part of their research activities, to review requirements and to see what is currently going on in various JISC-funded projects.
Several of these are funded by the Virtual Research Environments Programme [1].
Fifteen projects were funded in this programme (starting in early 2005), using a range of collaboration tools and online technologies to deliver research services to end-users across a range of disciplines.
In addition there is the Access Grid Support Centre and the ReDReSS Training and Awareness Project, both described below.
We have attempted to “crosspollinate” these projects through a number of jointly organised workshops and an online Wiki (itself a form of Web-based collaboration tool) with links to related information [2].
This workshop was broadly scoped into two sessions, one on portals and the other on Access Grid focussing on e-Collaboration as an increasingly vital element of today’s complex research activities.
Figure 1: Charles Severance presenting on Collaborative e-Science captured in ReDRESS.
We were very pleased that Charles Severance from University of Michigan was able to attend and present work in the Sakai portal project to support distributed research teams.
His stimulating talk, entitled Collaborative e-Science, Evolving Approaches, discussed different ways for scientists to interact in ‘virtual collaborations’.
Charles explained that early emphasis was being placed on sharing resources with a pre-defined set of Web-based tools, bringing people together interactively later on.
During work spanning some 15 years it is clear that re-usable software is necessary to be able to respond quickly to such changing requirements as users adapt their work practices to the technology available.
This also demonstrated the requirement to link together many different tools and to put an emphasis on user interfaces.
Inter-operability between them rather than reliance on middleware is key to this.
Adrian Fish and Miguel Gonzalez, both of University of Lancaster, described the LUCeS Conferencing Tool which is being included as a component for Sakai.
It includes functionality such as video conferencing (via a free, open source Java applet), shared desktop, and whiteboard, chat and “moviecaster” from one simple user interface.
This work is being conducted as part of the Sakai VRE Demonstrator, and user requirements have indicated that such tools are useful.
Adrian and Miguel demonstrated some of the tools working between two laptop PCs.
Rahim Lakhoo, University of Portsmouth, presented his work in a talk entitled Audio Visual Conferencing Tools, Narada Broker and MAST.
This is also part of the Sakai VRE Demonstrator project and is exploring other aspects of video conferencing tools with the aim of linking portal and desktop applications into Access Grid with associated development of video and chat services.
These are being developed using the GridSphere portal and Java Media Framework.
Paul Watry, University of Liverpool, described the Cheshire III VRE Project, in particular the MultiValent component which is used for shared interpretation of documents in a variety of formats.
The Access Grid (AG) session began with a presentation from Michael Daw, University of Manchester, on recent updates in the work of the Access Grid Support Centre.
This was followed by three talks illustrating the success of the AG in various applications.
He first spoke on Memetic as a Virtual Research Environment.
Memetic is now being used by several groups to record meetings and other activities taking place in an AG environment.
It enables sessions to be marked up by a ‘reporter’ to act as a record for subsequent analysis.
In addition to standard meetings, at which key decision points and supporting information might be recorded, its use is also being explored as an evaluation tool for the performing arts.
Examples of dance and music were shown and it was illustrated how the Memetic markup language could be extended to indicate positive or negative socio-emotional areas or task areas.
Martin Turner, University of Manchester, described work on Portals and 3D Visualisation for non-Scientific Users, currently being undertaken in the CSAGE (Collaborative Stereoscopic Access Grid Environment) Project.
This has many applications ranging from archaeology, the learning of foreign languages to performing art with distributed participants in a virtual 3D installation.
Finally, Paul Beckett, Univeristy of East Anglia, illustrated the use of portals and AG working together in a presentation entitled e-Collaboration in the History of Political Discourse.
In this project, M.A.
students at several universities work together in reading groups with experts to interpret texts.
Ergonomic aspects of using the AG had been addressed and an e-Texts Forum had been set up in which the students could contribute and share opinions in an uninhibited way.
This also employed the Sakai Wiki tool developed at University of Cambridge in another VRE project.
The workshop ended with a number of demonstrations and discussion on further ways that AG and Portals could usefully be combined.
Online Version of Presentations The ReDReSS Training and Awareness Project (Resource Discovery for Researchers in e-Social Science) was set up in 2003 jointly funded by JISC and ESRC.
It is co-ordinated by the Collaboration for Quantitative e-Social Science, a joint venture of University of Lancaster and Daresbury Laboratory which is now a node of NCeSS.
Paul Dolby of the ReDRESS Project has made audio-visual recordings of a number of workshops held over the last two years on topics such as Grid applications, Internet security and confidentiality, and information and knowledge management.
A previous workshop, Portals and VREs, held at last year’s 1st International Conference on e-Social Science is also available online [3].
Presentations at this workshop now form an online record and are accessible to all [4].
References JISC Virtual Research Environments Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_vre.html Home of TWiki.EResearch http://www.grids.ac.uk/eResearch Portals and VREs Workshop at 1st International Conference on e-Social Science 2005 http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference/2005/workshops/#crouchley NCeSS Winter Training School 27 February 2 March 2006, Manchester University UK http://redress.lancs.ac.uk/Workshops/Presentations.html#ncess2nd Author Details Rob Allan Leader of Grid Technology Group, e-Science Centre, CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington WA4 4AD Email: r.j.allan@dl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.e-science.cclrc.ac.uk Rob Crouchley Centre for e-Science Lancaster University C Floor Bowland Annexe Lancaster LA1 4YT Email: r.crouchley@lancaster.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/asarc/ Michael Daw Team Leader Collaborative Working Developments University of Manchester Email: michael.daw@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sve.man.ac.uk/General/Staff/daw Return to top Article Title: “e-Collaboration Workshop: Access Grid, Portals and other VREs for the Social Sciences” Author: Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley and Michael Daw Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/e-collab-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Building the Info Grid Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Building the Info Grid Buzz data software framework infrastructure identifier repositories soa shibboleth authentication interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Wolfram Horstmann, Liv Fugl and Jessica Lindholm report on the two-day conference Building the Info Grid on trends and perspectives in digital library technology and services held in Copenhagen in September.
The Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF) [1] offered a two-day event, Building the Info Grid [2], focusing on the recent and upcoming developments in digital information management, more specifically on the possibilites and challenges of providing integrated access to scholarly content and communication, via distributed technological services and infrastructural software.
In this report we will not cover all aspects of the conference, but rather focus on the specific topics that were the binding glue throughout the conference: Service-oriented Architecture (SOA); the Grid/Information Grid; Rights Management; Single Sign-on; and Google Scholar [3] development.
The conference gave both overview and in-depth insights into terminology as well as more specific choices of solution such as Fedora [4] and Shibboleth [5].
The overall perspective of the conference bridged interests of libraries, computing centres, administration, scientific institutes, funding bodies, national research organisations and vendors, which contributed to a blend of participants and delegates from as many as nineteen countries.
Global, National, Local: Collaboration and/or Competition The first theme of the conference, "Global, national, local collaboration and/or competition", as well as the introductory remarks by Kim Østrup, Chairman of DEFF Steering committee and Deputy Director of IBM Denmark, dealt with one of the general challenges for building the information grid, namely on which level and under what disposition it is optimally tackled.
A collaborative disposition became evident throughout the presentations, by the massive and manifold co-operative scenarios between public service providers and between nations.
The issue of competition was predominantly broached by stating that vendors and companies should be 'taken on board'.
Correspondingly, presentations of companies like Google and Elsevier stressed developmental activities and the ease of integrating their products.
Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer at Google presented Google Scholar and, later, Ale de Vries of Elsevier's Science Direct shared experiences from implementing new authentication technologies (i.e.
Shibboleth).
A general scenario for building the information grid from a library perspective, was proposed by Peter Brantley, Director of Technology at California Digital Library, namely a complete reconceptualisation of libraries' self-image towards being service providers committed to evolving in a changing information world.
Peter focused on the theme of 'Deploying Services and not Libraries'.
Many telling points were made on the focus of digital libraries and the surrounding community: 'Libraries need to change radically, engage in institutional stakeholders and different allies, participate in the open-source community and to deploy service-oriented architectures and not more digital library silos.'
Or, as it was simply stated in the end: 'Service-oriented Architectures are about putting down the paving, the yellow median stripe, and the shoulders for a fast road.'
Google Scholar's Anurag Acharya gave a vivid presentation on the ongoing Google Scholar work where the ultimate goal is to provide worldwide visibility to all research.
The first and foremost task is not only about indexing full texts but to be indexing any parts of a document available, which might in the end be just a citation.
The reality of achieving these goals seems however to be a long way off yet, as only a fraction of all research is currently available online.
Furthermore, identifying duplicates and normalising the many shapes of a citation is a difficult task requiring many hours of analysis within the Google Scholar department where would we be today if researchers had come across a common standard many years ago?
The Knowledge Exchange Office (KEO), a new joint collaborative initiative between the research funding organisations in Denmark (DEFF), Germany (DFG, the German Research Foundation), the Netherlands (SURF Foundation) and the United Kingdom (JISC Joint Information Systems Committee), was presented by the newly appointed Programme Director, Diann Rusch-Feja.
She gave an in-depth presentation on the plans and forthcoming years of work within the KEO.
The KEO initiative has its official launch in December 2005, and will be aiming at developing closer working relationships between national agencies and bodies within Europe which are responsible for the strategic development of infrastructure and services.
The KEO aims to be a point of contact for other organisations which are attempting to co-ordinate national activities in parallel areas, and facilitate joint policy development and identification of best practices, e.g.
collaborative development and implementation of common standards for interoperability, including digital rights management and authorisation.
As part of the second day overviews of current activities in the KEO partner countries were given by Liz Lyon, UKOLN (UK), Norbert Lossau, Bielefeld University (Germany), Martin Feijen, SURF (Netherlands) and Mogens Sandfær, DTU Center for Knowledge Technology (Denmark).
Service-oriented Architectures: The Framework of the Grid?
The idea of Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) as a framework of the grid, was elaborated in the technical sessions.
The repository software Fedora was presented by Sandy Payette, Researcher at Cornell Information Science, as a basic infrastructural element in SOAs that is generic enough to represent arbitrary data structures and yet specific as well as flexible enough to provide the technological interfaces and concepts for connecting heterogenic tools, services and functions that provide the basis of the structure.
Carl Lagoze, Senior Research Associate at Cornell Information Science, provided a proof of concept for this approach by explaining the Fedora based project National Science Digital library funded by the US National Science Foundation.
A paradigm of contextualising resources in an information network overlay architecture should supplant the currently prevailing "Search and Access" approach.
Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, extended the quest of managing complex and distributed digital content in a semantically significant manner by retrieving and integrating content from different repositories deploying specifications and standards such as MPEG-21 and IMS-Content Packaging.
It is worthy of note that these approaches lead away from standards particular to the library world towards a more direct connection with industry and business standards.
Identity and Rights Management: Single Sign-on to the Grid?
A final group of contributions raised the issue of user and rights management, i.e.
authentication and authorisation, which is, obviously, a tremendously significant and simultaneously extraordinarily difficult task in a network of distributed systems operating on SOAs: seamless connection between system components and elegant transfer mechanisms for individual user profiles must be an essential characteristic of services in order to prevent confusing or even overtaxing end-users with ever-changing GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) and authentication procedures while navigating between bibliographic systems, administrative tools or distributed directory services.
Shibboleth, emerging from the Internet2 Project the technical-organisational development co-operative of over 200 universities in the USA and other partners across government and industry was put forward by speakers such as Peter Brantley as a promising technical approach.
Vendors such as Elsevier are also running trials with these technologies.
Further implementations of Shibboleth and alternative solutions were presented on behalf of the London School of Economics (John Paschoud), the Joint Information Systems Committee JISC (Terry Morrow) and DEFF (Arne Sørensen).
As part of the spin-off activities and further collaboration after the conference, the first European Fedora User Meeting [6] took place at the Center for Knowledge Technology at the Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark [7].
Most of the presentations [8] can be found at the conference Web site.
References The Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF) http://www.deff.dk/default.aspx?lang=english Building the Info Grid http://seminar.deff.dk/ Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ Fedora http://www.fedora.info/ Shibboleth http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ European Fedora User Meeting 2005 http://fedora.cvt.dk/meeting-2005/ Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark http://www.dtv.dk/English.aspx Building the Info Grid: Speakers and Abstracts http://seminar.deff.dk/index.php?content=speakers Author Details Liv Fugl Information Architect Institute for Product Development Denmark Email: lf@ipu.dk Web site: http://www.ipu.dk/ Wolfram Horstmann Programme Manager, hbz Digital Peer Publishing (DiPP) Germany Email: horstmann@hbz-nrw.de Web site: http://www.dipp.nrw.de/ Jessica Lindholm Information Architect Institute for Product Development Denmark Email: jel@ipu.dk Web site: http://www.ipu.dk/ Return to top Article Title: "Building the Info Grid" Author: Liv Fugl, Wolfram Horstmann and Jessica Lindholm Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/buildinginfogrid-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web Focus: Experiences of Using a Wiki for Note-taking at a Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web Focus: Experiences of Using a Wiki for Note-taking at a Workshop Buzz mobile software wiki portal firefox browser blog hypertext php url research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly describes how the Wikalong Wiki tool was used to support note-taking at a workshop.
Wikis: are they the latest cool Web technology or a pointless tool which merely duplicates features provided in content management systems and virtual learning environments?
I have heard both views expressed recently.
To some extent both views have some validity: a Wiki is a technology which has been adopted initially by those in Web developer communities (such as the Semantic Web community) to enable collaborative documents to be produced quickly and easily.
But it is also true to say that the functionality provided by Wikis is becoming available in systems such as content management systems and virtual learning environments.
This article describes the experience of using a Wiki tool to support note-taking in discussion groups at a recent joint UCISA/UKOLN workshop and describes one potential role for Wiki software.
What is a Wiki?
A Wiki (pronounced "wicky" or "weekee) is "a Web site (or other hypertext document collection) that allows a user to add content ... but also allows that content to be edited by anybody" [1].
The key characteristics of a Wiki are: Ease of creating and updating content, typically through use of a Web-based editor and a simple markup language.
Ease of creating links to resources and avoiding broken links.
Initially links were defined by typing words containing capitalised letters; this is known as CamelCase.
A CamelCase word is automatically a link and the first user to follow the link can then create the content of the new page.
Ease of updating by people other than the original author.
Many Wikis are open for anyone to edit, although this is not a requirement of a Wiki access to Wikis can be restricted to authorised users.
The best known example of a Wiki is the Wikipedia [2] which is a global encyclopaedia which allows entries to be created and updated by anyone.
An entry from the Wikipedia is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Wikipedia It should be noted that the Wikipedia is just one example of a Wiki application and should not be confused with Wiki software in general.
Many Wiki applications are available as described in the Wikipedia [3].
What is Wikalong?
Wikalong [4] was originally developed as an extension to the Firefox browser [5] which embeds a Wiki in the browser sidebar.
Wikalong can then be used to annotate the page the user is currently viewing.
An illustration is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Wikalong The sidebar is visible on the left and the page being visited (in this case, the Wikalong home page) in the main window.
The content in the Wikalong sidebar can be created by anyone.
Wikalong therefore makes use of Wiki technology to provide an annotation service.
Although initially developed for use in the Firefox browser, a Wikalong redirection tool [6] allows a link to the annotation page to be embedded within a page.
This allows users of any browser to annotate a page, provided an appropriate link is embedded in the page.
More recently a Wikalong Bookmarklet has been released [7] which allows the Wikalong to be used by many browsers without the need for an embedded link in the page to be annotated.
Using Wikalong for Note-taking The Wikalong tool was used during the joint UCISA/UKOLN workshop "Beyond Email Strategies For Collaborative Working in the 21st Century" [8] which was held at Weetwood Hall, Leeds on 22 November 2004an overview of the event is given in Robert Bristow's At The Event article elsewhere in this issue [9].
As a WiFi network was available at the workshop venue it was thought appropriate to make use of the tools which would be discussed at the event.
A few days prior to the workshop delegates were notified of the tools and encouraged to try them out in advance, including Wikalong.
A test area was set up and, as illustrated below, several of the delegates did just that.
Figure 3: Using Wikalong This trial had the added benefit of allowing the delegates to introduce themselves and describe their prior experience of Wikis without having to use the event's mailing list (which was provided for event announcements and not for general discussion).
The main use of the Wikalong tool was, however, for note-taking during the breakout sessions (although it was also used for annotation of the three main presentations).
In the morning the four discussion groups were asked to address deployment issues concerned with use of instant messaging (covered by two of the discussion groups), news feeds and mobile devices.
In the afternoon two discussion groups addressed deployment issues concerned with use of Wikis and two addressed deployment issues concerned with use of Blogs.
All discussion groups made use of Wikalong as illustrated below.
Figure 4: Using Wikalong Discussion What Did Use of Wikis Provide?
The initial evaluation of the event was very positive.
The delegates were considerably interested in learning more about the potential for technologies such as instant messaging, Blogs and Wikis as much as about their actual use.
The use of a Wiki for taking notes of discussion groups can provide a number of benefits: More than one person in a discussion group can contribute to the notes.
The notes can be updated after leaving the discussion group room and prior to reporting they were not locked on the reporter's PC.
Delegates in other discussion groups can view other group discussions.
The resources are available for use after the workshop has finished.
Importance of Persistent and Unambiguous URLs One aspect of the use of Wikalong to annotate pages which may not be immediately apparent is the importance of having an unambiguous and persistent address of the page being annotated.
The URL of the Wiki discussion group page is: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/ucisa-wlf-2004-11/discuss ion-groups/discussion-wikis> and the address of the annotation page created by Wikalong is: <http://wikalong.phunnel.org/kwiki/index.cgi?0cab234dd21c6658412510179f2b7d25>.
The address of the annotation page is derived from the address of the page being annotated.
This has the side effect that if the URL changes, any annotations of the original page will effectively be lost.
Perhaps less obvious is that an unambiguous form of a URL must be used.
The page at <.../discussion-wikis> is actually at <.../discussion-wikis.php>.
If the latter address is viewed, Wikalong will use a different address for any annotations.
Keep Your Public Wiki Area Safe As with any Wiki which allows anyone to update the content there is a danger that the content will be vandalised or deleted (either accidentally or malevolently).
Use of the public Wikalong service during the workshop entailed a certain risk there was a possibility that notes made in the Wiki could be lost.
The risk was taken as it was felt to be important to provide an opportunity for the workshop participants to be able to see the technology being used.
However shortly after the workshop had finished, a copy of the Wikalong notes was kept on the main workshop Web site.
If the Wiki is felt to provide a useful function, a locally managed or an externally-hosted Wiki which provided a safer environment could be used at future workshops.
Conclusions Is a Wiki really needed?
A number of technologies can be used to provide shared note-taking and exchange of ideas.
Indeed at the workshop use was made of instant messaging and Blog software (and transcripts are available of instant messaging discussions [8] and the two Blog reports of the event [10] [11]).
As well as dedicated Wiki applications, easy-to-use authoring and annotation functionality may be embedded in Virtual Learning Environments, Portal software, etc.
Perhaps it is appropriate to leave the final words to the participants at the workshop.
In his Blog, Owen Stephens wrote: "I remain to be convinced that wikis will take off.
It seems to me that most of the use of wikis today could have been much better served by blogs and Instant Messaging."
[10] On the other hand one of the discussion groups on Wikis wrote, in response to the question "Should we be promoting/providing Wikis?"
commented: "Yes.
There could be real benefit and exciting possibilities in every area of institutional activities: teaching & learning, research, administration and user support.
We need to get in there first and understand what users need and what they might do.
We also need first to make better use of wikis ourselves so we can fully understand them and consider how we can then deploy them in an easy to use and manageable service."
[12] Acknowledgements I would like to thank John Heap, Alison Pope and Paul Buckley, fellow workshop organisers who provided valuable support in the planning and delivery of the workshop, Paul Shabajee and Derek Morrison for their valuable case studies which described practical implementations of the technologies mentioned at the workshop but most importantly the workshop delegates who contributed fully to the workshop by sharing their views and experience and also documenting the discussions which helped to provide a valuable shared resource for the wider community.
These notes are now available from the workshop Web site [13].
References Wiki, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/ Wiki Software, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software Wikalong http://wikalong.phunnel.org/wiki/ Firefox http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Wikalong Redirection Tool http://mateusz-adamowski.qwe.pl/GoWikalong.php?about Wikalong bookmarklet http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2004/10/wikalong-bookmarklet_02.html Transcripts of the virtual rooms http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/ucisa-wlf-2004-11/virtual-rooms/ Bristow, R., "Beyond Email Wikis, Blogs and Other Strange Beasts", Ariadne issue 42, January 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/beyond-email-rpt/ Typing Fatigue, Owen Stephens, Blog entry http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2004/11/typing_fatigue.html Beyond E-Mail: The Final Word, Alison Pope, Blog entry http://myndsi.blogspot.com/2004/11/ucisaukoln-beyond-e-mail-event.html Notes on the discussion group on Wikis | Actual URL Beyond Email Strategies For Collaborative Working In The 21st Century, Workshop Feedback http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/ucisa-wlf-2004-11/#feedback Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Web Focus: Experiences of Using a Wiki for Note-taking at a Workshop" Author: Brian Kelly Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/web-focus/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Hall reports on recent news form BIOME, the Health and Life Sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network.
BIOME Resource Booklets New editions of the popular (and free) BIOME booklets, “Internet Resources for Healthcare and Medicine” and “Internet Resources for Animal Health” are now available.
The BIOME team have fully revised the content and produced the booklets, for the first time, in full-colour with a more professional design.
The booklets will provide students (HE and FE), academics, lecturers and practitioners with a taster of some of the many high-quality resources in two of our subject areas: healthcare and medicine, and animal health.
Users can find all these resources in our OMNI, NMAP and VetGate gateways.
While stocks last we are happy to provide up to 300 copies of the booklet to any library or information service providing services to UK HE or FE users and up to 50 copies to libraries providing services to other groups.
However, we can make available larger numbers just contact us to discuss your requirements.
We are now taking orders for booklets for immediate distribution.
Normally these booklets are regularly oversubscribed and numbers are limited so please place your orders as soon as possible.
For orders, please go to leaflets [1].
Our “Internet Resources for Healthcare” and our “Internet Resources for Animal Health” booklets are also available for downloading from the publications area of our site as a PDF file downloads [2].
The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine [3] and OVID [4] have given generous support to the production of “Internet Resources in Healthcare and Medicine”.
Furthermore, the production of “Internet Resources in Animal Health” would not have been possible without the sponsorship of Lipincott, Williams and Wilkins [5] and AHIS [6].
BIOME Questionnaire We would like to find out your views on the new and improved Internet Resource booklets from BIOME.
For entry into the prize draw to win a £30 book token, please complete the short questionnaire.
To access the questionnaire please visit feedback [7].
The deadline for the prize draw is 31 October 2005 and BIOME will notify winners within 7 days.
The survey will continue to be available after this date and further responses are welcome.
Changes at BIOME Martin Stower, our Technical Officer left us at the end of July 2005.
Our thanks go to Martin and we wish him lots of luck in all future endeavours.
References Resource booklet orders http://biome.ac.uk/cgi/biome-mail/mailform.cgi?handle=leaflets Downloading booklets http://biome.ac.uk/about/publications/ Wellcome Trust library http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ OVID http://www.ovid.com/ Lipincott, Williams and Wilkins http://www.lww.com/ AHIS http://www.ahis.org/ BIOME questionnaire http://biome.ac.uk/feedback/ Author Details Jenny Hall BIOME Admin Officer Email: jh@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Jenny Hall Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Delivering OAI Records As RSS: An IMesh Toolkit Module for Facilitating Resource Sharing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Delivering OAI Records As RSS: An IMesh Toolkit Module for Facilitating Resource Sharing Buzz software rdf framework html rss xml portal urn archives metadata doi identifier schema repositories copyright oai-pmh cataloguing aggregation perl uri interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Monica Duke provides an overview of a means of providing records in RSS through the use of an IMesh Toolkit module that supports resource sharing.
The content of this article was presented at the 4th Open Archives Forum Workshop Subject Gateways act as a main point of access to high-quality resources on the Web.
They are resource discovery guides that provide links to information resources which can be whole Web sites, organisational home pages and other collections or services, themed around a specific subject, such as the physical sciences or humanities.
At their core is a catalogue of rich metadata records that describe Internet resources subject specialists identify and select the resources and create the descriptions.
This high level of manual intervention, coupled with collection management policies and procedures, ensures a high level of quality control.
The descriptions can be searched or browsed through a Web interface.
Subject Gateways developed in the UK as part of the e-Lib programme [1], whilst similar initiatives are also found throughout Europe [2], in Australia [3] and in the United States of America [4].
In the United Kingdom, Subject Gateways operate under the umbrella of the Joint Information Systems Commission (JISC) and continue to develop within the JISC Information Environment [5].
The IMesh Toolkit Project [6] was funded in 1999 under the JISC/NSF Digital Library Initiative [7] to develop tools for subject gateways with partners in the UK (UKOLN, University of Bath and Institute of Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol) and in the United States (Internet Scout Project, University of Wisconsin, Madison).
Over the last few years, collaborative efforts between gateways have led to Renardus [2], a pan-European service formed by collaborating gateway services across Europe.
The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [8] is a co-operative national network in the UK that brings together a number of hubs with each hub specialising in a subject area and creating records within its domain.
The RDN has taken the approach of using OAI as a mechanism to share records between gateways and provide a central search service [9].
Metadata records created within the RDN are based on the Dublin Core element set.
Although some divergence across gateways for particular elements is allowed, there is consistent use of the title, description and identifier fields [10].
Motivation There has been an increasing interest in embedding subject gateway content into other Web sites.
The RDN provides a facility, called RDN-Include, which functions similarly to the Google toolbar, allowing the RDN service to be searched without visiting the central RDN home page.
When records are presented to users through frameworks external to the gateway, they become accessible in alternative ways, adding value through reuse.
The IMesh Toolkit Project has provided a module that supports the delivery of subject gateway records as a newsfeed, using the RSS (RDF Site Summary) standard.
By integrating the IMesh Module, subject gateway services will be able to support the export of their records in the RSS format, thus encouraging the sharing of gateway content.
Having identified a selection of resources discovered through the subject gateway, the user will be able to generate a file containing an RSS document, or newsfeed, which can then be made available to other users through some form of presentation system, for example an institutional portal or a course Web site.
RSS RSS is an XML-based format for sharing content on the Web, best suited for list-oriented content such as news items and job listings.
An RSS file (also known as an RSS feed or RSS channel) consists of a list of items, each of which contains a title, description and a link to a Web page.
The link in the RSS file leads to the full content.
There is a convenient one-to-one mapping between the record title, description and identifier in RDN records, and the title, description and indentifier of RSS list items.
The RSS format can thus be a basis for presenting a reading list, consisting of a subset of gateway records.
Each gateway record corresponds to an item in the RSS list, showing the title, description and URL to the full content.
A channel title and description can also be added.
Further information on RSS is available [11].
Figure 1: The correspondence between record metadata on the left and an RSS item on the right.
The IMesh Toolkit Module The IMesh Toolkit module, written in Perl, generates an RSS file that contains a list of reading list materials, made up of a number of subject gateway records.
Given a list of URLs each of which retrieves a record which complies to the OAI_dc schema for GetRecord responses, the module will output an RSS-formatted list of items together with a channel title and description.
Figure 2: Using the IMesh Toolkit Module It is left up to the individual service to decide how best to design the interface for the selection of the individual resources and the underlying code to create a list of suitable URLs to be submitted to the IMesh Toolkit module.
This ensures that to a certain extent the module is independent of the technologies used to deliver the interface of the gateway service.
The RSS file that is generated can be used in a number of ways.
The file can be edited using an RSS editor, such as RSSxpress [12] to make changes, add comments or even links to other related resources.
The RSS file can then be presented to users through a presentation system that understands RSS e.g.
a desktop reader or newsfeed aggregator, such as Feedreader [13].
Alternatively, newsfeeds can very easily be displayed in Web pages, by transforming the XML into HTML, for example by using RSSxpress-lite [14].
Figure 3: An example of a reading list generated from a search on the RDN, viewed using RSSxpress Interoperability Issues For the purposes of interoperability, to date the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting requires repositories to disseminate Dublin Core, without any qualification.
This provides a baseline of interoperability since the schema [15] mandated by the protocol accommodates the three fields of description that can be reused in the RSS item description (dc:title, dc:identifier, dc:description, equivalent to the RSS item title, item link and item description respectively).
However the schema does not mandate any of the fields, therefore there are no guarantees that the fields will be present in all the records returned.
Where no descriptions of resources are available in the record, this makes for a rather limited RSS feed.
The user may, of course, add a description after generating the RSS, by using an additional tool, for example an RSS Editor.
A more problematic aspect is the use of dc:identifier.
For the purposes of reading lists, the linkage between the record and the identifier of the associated resource is rather important, since the aim of the end-user of the reading list is to access that associated resource.
It is clearly a problem if this link cannot be established.
With respect to the resource identifier, the OAI-PMH states “the nature of a resource identifier is outside the scope of the OAI-PMH.
To facilitate access to the resource associated with harvested metadata, repositories should use an element in metadata records to establish a linkage between the record (and the identifier of its item) and the identifier (URL, URN, DOI, etc.)
of the associated resource.
The mandatory Dublin Core format provides the identifier element that should be used for this purpose.” We have encountered two examples of difficulties in defining the URL of the resource that the record describes.
These are: multiple IDs are given in the record, i.e.
the dc:identifier field is repeated.
RSS items only allow one URL link per item.
Where two or more IDs are present in the OAI record, if a URL which contains http in the address is found, this is chosen as the ID to be used in the RSS feed.
In the case of two identifiers with http URLs, the choice is currently arbitrary (the first one listed gets picked).
the dc:identifier is not a URL but a link to the OAI repository identifier Other Issues: Branding and Copyright Given the intellectual effort invested by gateways in the creation of metadata records, there may be a reluctance to give away their content, and in particular, to allow that content to appear in a context where the branding associated with the service is lost.
On the other hand, it has been argued that RSS can help to drive traffic and increase brand awareness by making content available in a more convenient manner for the user [11].
For example a search box can be included in the news feed (see the RDN example above), which may entice users to carry out further searches and lead them to the central service.
Moreover, gateways may be funded specifically for an intended audience, for which reuse of the records may be restricted.
The gateways own the copyright to the content of the records, which carry a statement to this effect, describing acceptable use.
Conclusion The IMesh Toolkit project has provided a simple module which enables the sharing of subject gateway content (and indeed any other repository which supports the OAI-PMH) by means of another recent and popular XML-based format (RSS).
Some requirements for optimal use of the module are that the metadata records contain the dc:title and dc:description elements, and that the dc:identifier field contains a URI that leads to the full resource content.
Further information and downloads are available from the Project Web page [16].
Acknowledgments Thanks are due to Rachel Heery and Andy Powell of UKOLN for ideas and feedback.
The IMesh Toolkit Project was funded under the JISC/NSF Digital Libraries Initiative II.
The content of this article was presented at the poster session of the 4th Open Archives Forum Workshop, University of Bath, UK.
4-5 September 2003.
References Dempsey, L. (2000), “The subject gateway: experiences and issues based on the emergence of the Resource Discovery Network”, Online Information Review, Vol.
24 No.
1, pp.
8-23.
Also available: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/ior-2000-02-dempsey/ Renardus http://www.renardus.org/ The National Library of Australia: Australian Subject Gateways http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/sg/ The Internet Scout Project http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ JISC Information Environment Development http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=ie_home The IMesh Toolkit Project http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/ International Digital Libraries Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_nsf The Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Andy Powell “An OAI Approach to Sharing Subject Gateway Content” Poster paper, 10th WWW conference, Hong Kong.
May 2001. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/www10/oaiposter/ RDN Cataloguing Guidelines http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/cat-guide/ RSS A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/ RSSxpress http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/ FeedReader http://www.feedreader.com/ RSSxpress-Lite http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/include/ Schema mandated by the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd The IMesh Toolkit: Reading Lists http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/work/components/readinglists/ Author Details Monica Duke Software Developer UKOLN University of Bath Email: M.Duke@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Delivering OAI Records as RSS: An IMesh Toolkit module for facilitating resource sharing” Author: Monica Duke Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/duke/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Institutional Repository Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Institutional Repository Buzz software archives metadata identifier repositories copyright preservation cataloguing mets dspace interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sally Rumsey recommends a new book about institutional repositories.
This timely publication has arrived at a point where a number of UK Higher Education (HE) establishments have set up, have started, or have at least considered setting up their own institutional repository (IR).
This is a new area for all involved, many experiences so far have been ground-breaking and there are few (if any) IRs which would describe themselves as mature.
Not only is the technology developing rapidly, but user needs are continuing to be determined and institutions are expanding the ways in which an IR can serve their needs.
Fortunately for all involved, "The institutional repository" has appeared, written by three members of the library and information community who have won well earned respect for their contributions in this field.
Other contributors include individuals with extensive and varied experience in IR circles, despite it being such a new area.
Who Should Read This Book?
According to the publisher's Web site, the intended readership is "implementers of institution repositories, digital librarians, academic librarians, library managers, librarians, information scientists and library studies students."
A personal view would be that the first chapters should be compulsory reading for every vice chancellor and senior manager within a university in order that they understand the environment and the importance that IRs will/could play in information management.
Overall, this book is a text for the practitioner.
Its main audience is likely to be those responsible for setting up and running the repository within an institution.
No matter how far down the IR path the IR manager has ventured, there is something within the book for everyone, whatever their experience or lack of it.
Because this is such a developing area, all those involved are pioneers.
The librarian responsible for the IR (and it is usually a librarian) needs a plethora of knowledge and skills, as well as support from others within their institution in order to undertake the task of repository management.
This includes a mixture of technical commonsense together with 'softer' customer service skills.
"The institutional repository" addresses all the relevant topics including digital preservation, advocacy, persistent identifiers, metadata, technical issues and rights.
Why Should They Read It?
The book enables readers to learn from the experiences of people who have actually 'got their hands dirty.'
The examples and case study use the Edinburgh experience, particularly of e-theses [1].
It is designed to offer ideas and suggestions without being prescriptive.
This book acts as an inspiration for individuals at other institutions: managers can expect to encounter any number of variations on the theme as well as unexpected surprises at a local level.
Managers should not be afraid to experiment either, and the text provides inspiration for adapting and enhancing the general set-up to improve repository performance, functionality and provision.
As a manager of a fairly immature repository, I found that many of the situations described are familiar.
The book inspires confidence even though the breadth of content is vast.
The authors have elected not to go into great depth, or examine the minutiae of each topic, but refer the reader to other sources for the detail.
This mainly works as it makes the book a particularly good starting point and keeps the text readable.
How Does the Book Tackle the Topic?
The book opens with the 'why' and then goes on to explain the 'how' of setting up a repository.
It outlines the ideal situation, whilst being extremely pragmatic with advice.
Take for example, the description regarding establishing a repository: "Acquiring the content is slow and laborious work, and at the present time we pay for it with the sweat of our brow, rather than by dipping into our materials budget."
One other example is the advice concerning risks associated with the IR.
The advice is to be realistic and not worry about negligible risks such as plagiarism, but to be vigilant about more real concerns such as third party copyright and defamation.
The text is interspersed with clear and useful diagrams and tables.
These enhance the text and enable the reader to comprehend a complex situation easily.
The appendix comprises descriptions of six major open source platforms for institutional repository software which have been written by their developers or user communities.
Those at the stage of selecting a platform will find these, coupled with the section on evaluating software, invaluable.
Setting the Scene Reasons why an institution should spend resources on building and maintaining an IR are dealt with in some depth in the opening chapters.
The main thrusts of the argument are: the concept of the digital library as an organised collection built for a purpose the co-existence of institutional and subject repositories the multifarious possibilities of the digital library use of repositories to store multiple content types ie research, learning objects (whose 'troublingly elastic definition' will evoke a knowing smile from many) and 'corporate assets' the role of libraries in the scholarly communication process (or risks of not being involved) the existing expertise within libraries to describe objects using standard schemes (ie cataloguing and metadata creation including the charming description of the metadata expert as an artisan) enhancing the impact of scholarly output To some extent the authors consider differences of needs between disciplines.
However, the answer to the authors' question of 'Why set up a repository?'
is given as the immediacy and speed of publication.
It is worth remembering that this is not the case in all disciplines: to many scientists and economists speed is crucial; to most philosophers and historians it is not.
It might have been preferable for the studies showing increased reading and citation of open access papers mentioned in the first chapter, to be backed up by some references.
The issue of publisher profits and serials costs is discussed in the book although it is arguable whether or not repository managers see this as a main reason in the first instance for setting up their repository.
The focus of the 'why' is neatly defined as making "more efficient use of the institution's resources; allows the digital content to be preserved over time; provides a comprehensive view of the institutional product; supports high-quality searching; and permits interoperability with similar repositories across the Web, so contributing to a global service."
I suspect these reasons will be incorporated into many a document heading towards the offices of senior management in HE institutions.
How to Create Your Own IR The central body of the work is given over to a discussion of methods by which an IR may be established including the estimated resources required (both in terms of staff time and costs).
These chapters set out some of the traps to be aware of at the outset which, if not resolved, may come back to haunt the IR manager later, for example, incorporating common metadata standards from the start.
As any IR manager will confirm, one of the main challenges is how to change the culture of scholarly communication and academic workflows so that authors/creators deposit their output into the IR.
There is a substantive section devoted to explaining diffusion innovation theory as a model for observing patterns of change within the institution.
This model does not make the elusive culture change and widespread adoption of the IR any easier, but it will help any manager anticipate the rate of change and where the main sticking points may occur.
As might be expected, the authors explain that the use of mandates for deposit or at the very least, an opinion leader with enough clout to force change are the most effective means of making use of the IR the norm.
Use of statistics as a vehicle for persuasion are given.
It may be prudent to be somewhat cautious in their use, firstly because of any political backwash and secondly because of the fallability of such figures: academics can be extremely scathing of figures used without clear explanation and interpretation.
Impressive the statistics can be, and persuasive, but it may be advisable to use with care.
The book sets out some of the main concerns and barriers to persuading researchers to deposit (for example lack of time and subject differences).
It does not address the problems involved with the often many and various versions of an item [2] and associated problems of what might be construed as the same object, not least including academics' concerns over which version is or is not included in the IR.
The advantages of federated systems are briefly described.
For many this will be something of a 'holy grail' to which a manager will aspire but which may seem some distance away.
Nonetheless, it is an important aspect to be considered, even if not resolved when planning a repository.
Another problem which is discussed is that of encountering increasingly complex items and knowing how to deal with them.
It is all very well being able to include single unrelated files within a repository, but the IR needs to be able to deal with the structure of items to some degree of granularity and also with multiple related items and this will become paramount as repositories expand.
There is a neat, if brief, explanation of this issue including a description of the inclusion of 'wrappers' and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard).
The excellent section on workflows will be of great use to repository and library managers.
The explanations and diagrams will enable managers to work through requirements and processes at their own institution.
The workflows are limited to those within the boundaries of the IR ie they do not include the workflows of the academic who is producing the material and how they might fit with deposit [3].
As mentioned above, IR managers could use this book as inspiration for their own situation.
This chapter deals with workflows as a separate entity for the repository.
In reality it is likely that, in time, they will fit with existing processes within the digital library.
Does It Provide All the Answers?
This book certainly goes most of the way towards addressing all the major issues in a succinct and readable way.
It clearly indicates just how complex setting up, developing and running a repository is and what a large commitment it is for any institution.
It also assures the reader that if one were to try to sort out every possible aspect before accepting items, the repository would never get going.
Conclusion: Three Good Reasons for Reading This Book Reading this book confirms the feeling of this repository manager that we are on the brink of a major change in scholarly communication and management of research output.
We are so tantalisingly close, but not yet in a position to state that the change has definitely taken place.
In ten years time the community may be wondering how life was before repositories were the norm.
For example, the use of an IR as a means of doctoral thesis submission and retention seems so obvious when compared with the current situation.
Three reasons for any IR manager to read this book are: it is clearly written and explains a complex topic in easy to understand terms it covers most aspects of this subject and any IR manager would do well to work through all the issues covered it is the seminal monograph on the topic It is also a pleasure to read [4].
The Edinburgh team states that "this book has been one of our contributions to the community in the hope that the hard-won lessons we have learned will make this process for other institutions a much more enriched and enlightened one."
I think the team has achieved this aim.
References Editor's note: Ariadne has covered work in Edinburgh: Stephen Pinfield, Mike Gardner and John MacColl, Setting up an institutional e-print archive, April 2002, Ariadne Issue 31 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ John MacColl, Electronic Theses and Dissertations: a Strategy for the UK, July 2002, Ariadne Issue 32, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/theses-dissertations/ Theo Andrew, Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff, October 2003, Ariadne Issue 37 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/andrew/ Richard D Jones, DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations, January 2004, Ariadne Issue 38 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/jones/ Richard Jones, The Tapir: Adding E-Theses Functionality to Dspace, October 2004, Ariadne Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/jones/ Moreover, there is also work by William Nixon and Morag Greig at Glasgow which has been covered and of possible interest to readers.
These problems are being investigated by the VERSIONS Project.
See http://www.lse.ac.uk/versions There is interesting work being carried out by the RepoMMan Project at the University of Hull in this area see http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ In fact two chapters are online and available for free download from the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA): Chapter 1: The institutional repository in the digital library http://hdl.handle.net/1842/858 Chapter 7: Case study: The Edinburgh Research Archive http://hdl.handle.net/1842/859 Author Details Sally Rumsey Library London School of Economics and Political Science 10 Portugal Street London WC2A 2HD Email: s.a.rumsey@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/ Return to top Article Title: "The Institutional Repository" Author: Sally Rumsey Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/rumsey-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Information Representation and Retrieval in the Digital Age Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information Representation and Retrieval in the Digital Age Buzz usability metadata research Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre finds a useful if limited introduction for those coming new to the field of information representation and retrieval, but is unconvinced by its overall coverage and depth.
There are two distinct aspects covered by this book: information representation and information retrieval.
It is refreshing to see a book seek to address these together, as it is important to recognise how interlinked they are.
As the author herself indicates in the preface, ' two chapters of this book are devoted exclusively to information representation, a step that must be taken before information becomes retrievable'.
These two chapters certainly bring a fresh perspective to considerations of information retrieval, coming as they do at the start of the book and influencing later discussion.
The author herself suggests that the book should be read sequentially and although this is generally true the chapters can be referenced in their own right if the reader has some background knowledge.
Having said that, those with some knowledge will find more comprehensive and potentially more useful sources elsewhere.
The author does also suggest that this book will be most useful to those who are newly interested in learning about the field.
In this she has mainly succeeded, as many basic aspects and areas are described; it is clear that Professor Chu is coming from a teacher's background, wishing to introduce new students to issues in the field of information representation and retrieval (IRR).
That is the field of IRR that is focused on research and theory.
Readers of this book will get a good grasp of underlying IRR concepts and research in the area; they will not get any great overview of the practical application of these concepts or trends in the exploitation and practice of them.
This is a shame, as where specific examples are given to explain a concept the meaning shines through far more clearly.
But there are too few such examples.
It is also a shame that having set up the importance of information representation alongside retrieval, that this area is then treated rather meagrely.
The two chapters certainly lay out the ground, but there was much detail not covered.
For example, the section on metadata would leave readers with a rather skewed and underdone understanding of this essential area.
This seems a missed opportunity as information retrieval is covered in far greater depth; links are made subsequently to the relationship between representation and retrieval, but these are on the surface and are not followed up.
There is a suspicion that Professor Chu's area of expertise is information retrieval, and representation has been included as a side issue.
The other aspect included in the title is that of IRR in the digital age.
This is certainly addressed and the discussion of applicability of information retrieval (note, not information representation) concepts to Internet search engines is useful.
There is again, however, not as much integrated discussion of how the digital age, or more accurately the Internet in this book, has affected IRR, which again seems a missed opportunity.
These missed opportunities should not, though, undermine what is welcome in this book.
The chapters on language in IRR, retrieval techniques (for the most part), retrieval models, and retrieval of information unique in content or format (again, in parts) are very useful summaries, if at times somewhat dependent on particular key sources.
The author is at her best when discussing the theoretical basis of information retrieval.
The evaluation of IRR systems is also covered well, albeit that what the chapter really covers is the evaluation of information retrieval systems, not representation.
When she moves outside these clearly more comfortable areas the text is not so helpful.
The chapter on the user dimension of IRR manages to avoid mention of usability at all, albeit that the issues covered are certainly relevant.
The section on the use of artificial intelligence appears an add-on at the end, not really reflecting the level of work in this area.
In summary, this book sets out its aims and meets them on the whole.
But it is frustrating that a book that appeared to want to address the connections between information representation and retrieval has only scratched the surface.
This may, of course, reflect the lack of research and work on this connection, in which case more is needed, but along with other areas of this book there are gaps that do not appear to have been filled.
This may push new students onto other texts in these areas, and I hope it does.
So long as they don't feel let down by where they started.
Author Details Chris Awre Integration Architect e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Information Representation and Retrieval in the Digital Age" Author: Chris Awre Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/awre-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UkeiG Course: Information Law for Information Professionals Information Law for Information Professionals: What you need to know about Copyright, Data Protection, Freedom of Information and Accessibility and Disability Discrimination Laws CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE 19 February 2008, 9.30-16.30 Course outline In particular, four key legal areas currently affect the work of many information professionals in the digital environment copyright, data protection, freedom of information, and disability discrimination and accessibility.
This one-day introductory course will chart a path through the complexities of these subjects.
Each area will be succinctly overviewed and the key aspects of the legal regime and requirements in each area will be outlined and explained.
Delegates will be taken step-by-step through the fundamentals of each area.
An understanding of each topic will be illuminated by real-life examples or scenarios explaining the application of the laws in a wide range of contexts.
The day will also highlight the inter-relationships between each of these important areas of information law.
There will be opportunities for discussion and exchanges of experience.
The day will close with a presentation on how to manage legal compliance actively in these areas in an institutional or organisational context.
The sessions will include: Copyright: everything the information professional needs to know Copyright in action: scenarios and key issues in copyright in an electronic context Data protection: overview of the data protection regime for information professionals Data protection in action: specific issues in information, publishing and library contexts Freedom of information: outline of UK freedom of information laws (including Scotland) Freedom of information in action: compliance and making it work for information professionals Accessibility and disability discrimination law: overview of the legal regime Accessibility in action: key issues in provision of digital information and services to users Managing compliance with information laws in your organisation Who should attend The course is relevant to anyone involved with the legal issues relating to the creation, storage, accessing, publishing or use of information.
Anyone working with information, especially digital information, or who needs a sound grasp of the foundations of each of these areas will benefit from the Course.
Those with responsibility for managing one or more of these areas in their organisation and who need a sound grounding in each of them will also benefit.
Course presenter Laurence Bebbington is Law Librarian and Information Services Copyright Officer at the University of Nottingham.
He is a former Vice Chair of UKOLUG.
He has presented papers or taken seminars on various aspects of legal issues in information work.
He has published various articles and papers and is a joint editor (with C.J.
Armstrong) and contributor to the 2nd edition of Staying Legal: A Guide To Issues And Practice Affecting the Library, Information and Publishing Sectors, FACET (2003).
Costs (including lunch and refreshments): UKeiG members £130 + VAT (£152.75); others £160 + VAT (£188.00) Contact: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk For more information check the UKeiG Web site Back to headlines TASI Workshops February April 2008 February April 2008 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) has announced dates and details of its workshops for mid-February to April 2008: Beyond Google: Strategies for Finding Images Online, 15 February 2008 Introduction to Image Metadata, 22 February 2008 or 10 April 2008 Photoshop Level 1, 28 February 2008 Photoshop Level 2, 29 February 2008 Photoshop Level 3, 15 April 2008 Colour Management, 5 March 2008 Protecting your Images: Using Technology to Manage Rights in Digital Images, 6 March 2008 Rights and Responsibilities: Copyright and Digital Images, 14 March 2008 Image Optimisation Correcting and Preparing Images, 28 March 2008 Digital Photography Level 1, 1 April 2008 Digital Photography Level 2, 2 April 2008 Image Capture Level 3, 8 April 2008 Building a Departmental Image Collection, 25 April 2008 Full details of these and all TASI workshops are available from the Training page http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html It is possible to subscribe to TASI’s Forthcoming Workshops RSS feed http://www.tasi.ac.uk/rss.html TASI offers a free helpdesk for your image related enquiries: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/helpdesk.html Back to headlines Research Data Management Forum First Forum Workshop 19-20 March 2008, Manchester This new forum, created by the Digital Curation Centre in partnership with the Research Information Network, will hold its first workshop in Manchester on 19-20 March 2008.
Themes to be explored are: the future shape of the research data management community; and the provision of appropriate skills and effort for data curation.
A briefing paper that explains the rationale of the forum is available.
Contact: Intending delegates should e-mail the UKOLN Events Team placing ‘DATA FORUM’ in the subject line.
Back to headlines UKeiG Workshop: Image Management: New Directions The Headley Lecture Theatre, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford 13 March, 2008: 9.30 16.30 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/ Workshop outline In this increasingly visual age, subject librarians and information specialists are frequently required to source images in a wide variety of formats, advise on their use and organise their retention as part of their day-to-day jobs, but often with little or no specialist experience or training.
This workshop aims to help the non-specialist navigate successfully across this unfamiliar territory, pointing out useful shortcuts and pitfalls to avoid, and showcasing examples of good practice that can help inspire us in the use of a wide spectrum of information resources ranging from historic manuscripts to genomic databanks.
Achieving holistic management of such diverse resources to allow easy correlation of their information content is challenging, especially for small information units and ‘one-man-bands’.
Developing technologies may offer new opportunities but can themselves produce new demands in devising effective strategies for their use.
This workshop is an opportunity to share experiences and float ideas in areas where there are as yet few ‘right answers’!
The workshop will comprise a mix of presentations and group discussion.
Topics are expected to range over: Locating sources: what to look for and where to look Digital libraries and repositories: creating and searching Embedded images: searching within documents Metadata content and ontologies: requirements for effective retrieval Rights issues and commercial factors Storage and preservation: shortand long-term issues Using images in teaching and learning: the role of the information specialist The impact of social networking tools: salvation or hype?
Who should attend Anyone whose work involves the use of images will benefit from this meeting, from any sector university, college, government, NHS, charity, learned society, commercial etc.
We hope for a good mix as we all have much to learn from each other!
Presenters: A panel of speakers will be chaired by Roger Mills, Bioand Environmental Sciences Librarian, Oxford University Library Services.
Roger is currently President of EBHL (European Botanical and Horticultural Libraries) and co-ordinator of IUFRO (International Union of Forest Research Organisations) Unit 6.03.00 Information Services and Knowledge Organisation.
He is co-author of The New Walford: Volume 1: Science Technology and Medicine, Facet, 2005, as subject specialist for Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries and Food.
The panel will include: Dr David Shotton, Oxford e-Research Centre and Dept of Zoology, University of Oxford Michael Popham, Head of the Oxford Digital Library, Oxford University Library Services Further details of the speakers and programme will be announced on http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/ as available.
Costs (including lunch and refreshments): UKeiG members £130 + VAT (£152.75); others £160 + VAT (£188.00) Back to headlines The Practicalities of Web 2.0: Essential information for information professionals Kings College London, Guy’s Campus, London Bridge, London 19 March 2008, 9.30 16.30 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/March/Web2.html Getting to grips with Web 2.0 is not an easy task, since it’s difficult to even find a standard definition to use!
You can be forgiven for doubting that it even exists in fact, or if it does, will it really make any kind of difference to what you do as an information professional, and how you serve the different client groups that you have.
Rather than spend a lot of time wondering and worrying about the theoretical aspects perhaps the best way to view the use of Web 2.0 is to consider practical aspects what exactly can information professionals do with these tools?
The course will include: A session to ground the concept of Web 2.0 in terms of practicalities.
How to use a variety of different tools, both in order to save you time and effort in your daily work, but also how to use them to help clients.
Some of the tools covered will be start pages, building your own search engines, creating Web sites without technical knowledge, using community knowledge with social networking tools, and keeping colleagues up to date with weblogs and bookmarking tools.
The course will have a strong practical element, and delegates will go away having created tools that they will then be able to pick up when back and work and start to use.
Who should attend: Information professionals who are involved in current awareness services, selective dissemination of information, those who need to research subject areas and keep up to speed on them and professionals who offer quick reference services.
In fact, anyone who wants to save time and work more effectively!
A technical background or knowledge is certainly not required or needed.
Delegates should have access to personal email accounts such as Hotmail or Gmail since they will need to register with various tools before using them.
Please note: Places on this course are strictly limited because of access to PCs so please book early to avoid disappointment.
Course Presenter: Phil Bradley Phil Bradley is well known as a librarian and Internet consultant who has close ties with both CILIP and UKeiG.
Phil is closely involved with developments in Web 2.0 technologies and his book How to Use Web 2.0 in Your Library has recently been published by Facet Publishing.
To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk Further details are also available at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/March/Web2.html Costs (including lunch and refreshments): UKeiG members £150 + VAT (£176.25); others £180 + VAT (£211.50) Back to headlines NISO Forum on Digital Preservation: Planning Today for Tomorrow’s Resources Washington, DC 14 March 2008 http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/digpres08/ The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will host a forum on Digital Preservation: Planning Today for Tomorrow’s Resources to be held 14 March 2008 in Washington, DC, USA.
With the increasing number of digital objects, both those born digital and those that have been converted to digital formats to enhance access, delivery, and creative use of library collections, the need to focus on how these digital objects themselves will be preserved is paramount.
Good business practices require attention to interoperability with various systems and platforms, a focus on accessibility, and use of and attention to formats that will allow for extensibility and flexibility.
By creating well-formed content at the outset and by paying attention to digital preservation issues as part of the collection management plan, we can better ensure the longevity of these collections.
The keynote speaker will be Evan Owens, Chief Technology Officer for Portico, a not-for-profit service that provides a permanent archive of scholarly literature.
Other confirmed speakers include Lucy Nowell (National Science Foundation), Tom Clareson (PALINET), Martin Kalfatovic (Smithsonian Institution Libraries), and Deborah Thomas and David Brunton (National Digital Newspaper Program, Library of Congress).
Registration is now open http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/digpres08/registration.cfm The early bird discount closes 25 February 2008.
NISO members are eligible for substantial discounts.
Visit the event Web page http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/digpres08/ for more information or contact Karen Wetzel, NISO Standards Program Manager, at kwetzel@niso.org.
Back to headlines JISC/BL/DPC Workshop: What to preserve?
Significant Properties of Digital Objects 7 April 2008 British Library Conference Centre, London http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/080407workshop.html Significant properties are essential characteristics of a digital object which must be preserved over time for the digital object to remain accessible and meaningful.
Proper understanding of the significant properties of digital objects is critical to establish best practices and helps answer the fundamental question related to digital preservation: what to preserve?
The importance of significant properties has been highlighted by a number of notable digital preservation initiatives in recent years.
These include a range of projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the European Union, in which work has been undertaken to investigate the factors affecting decisions on significant properties, to establish generic models for determining them, to develop tools and services for describing and extracting them, or simply to understand complex digital object types, using the concept of significant properties as a starting point.
JISC, the British Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are organising a joint workshop on 7 April 2008 at the British Library Conference Centre, London.
The intention is to bring together the relevant projects and report on progress to date.
It is also hoped that the workshop will lead to collective recommendations for future areas of research and development.
The workshop should in addition further our understanding of and provide insight into a number of specific types of digital objects, including documents, images, software, scientific data, government records and e-learning objects.
Who should attend?
Repository managers, librarians, archivists, information management specialists, software vendors, service providers.
Benefits of Attendance An opportunity to input into future research and development in the area of significant properties To get up to speed with the outcomes from the major projects already working in this important area To gain an understanding of some of the issues and challenges when dealing with complex digital objects Full details of the programme and registration will be announced shortly on: http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/080407workshop.html Back to headlines Open Repositories 2008 1 4 April 2008 Southampton, UK http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Repositories play a pivotal role in the evolving scholarly information environment of open access research outputs and scholarly collections.
With its theme of “Practice and Innovation”, OR08 will create an opportunity for practitioners and researchers to share experiences and to explore the challenges of the new scholarly communication.
The conference will be hosted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, which has a 20 year history of research into hypertext, multimedia, digital libraries and open access, spawning products like the Microcosm open hypertext system and the EPrints repository platform.
During the four-day conference, Open Repositories 2008 will provide focused workshops and tutorials, followed by general conference sessions that cover cross-cutting and overarching issues and EPrints/DSPace and Fedora user group meetings.
The conference programme will cover the following themes: transformational change in the knowledge workplace professionalism and practice sustainability legal issues successful interoperability models, architectures and frameworks value chains and scholarly communications services built on repositories use cases for repositories Registration & Accommodation: http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/registration.html Back to headlines INFORUM 2008 INFORUM 2008: The 14th INFORUM Conference on Professional Information Resources 28-30 May 2008 Prague (Czech Republic) http://www.inforum.cz/en/ Call for speakers: 21 February 2008 Conference Topics Searching the Web and Heterogeneous Information Resources for Institutions Digital Libraries Trends, Technologies, Solutions Trends and Updates in the Field of Electronic Information Resources Sharing and Flowing of Information in Business Sector Operational Aspects of Using Electronic Information Resources Evaluation of Results of Scientific Research with a Help of Electronic Information Resources Electronic Information Resources in e-learning and e-learning in Electronic Information Resources Poster Session Speakers Ralph Catts, Patrick Danowski, James McGinty and Debbi Boden are guest speakers this year.
The official conference languages are Czech and English (simultaneous translations will be provided).
If you are interested in taking part in the conference, either as a speaker or as a participant, you can find detailed information at the INFORUM 2008 Web site http://www.inforum.cz/en/(which includes main conference topics, paper submission form, etc.).
Papers are now being invited for inclusion in the INFORUM 2008 programme.
The delegate’s registration forms will be available along with the preliminary conference programme by the beginning of March 2008.
Andrea Kutnarova (INFORUM co-ordinator) Albertina icome Praha s.r.o.
Stepanska 16 110 00 Praha 1 Czech Republic tel.
: +420-2-2223 1212 fax: +420-2-2223 1313 Andrea.Kutnarova@aip.cz Back to headlines DC-2008: International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications “Metadata for Semantic and Social Applications” 22-26 September 2008 Berlin http://dc2008.de/ The annual Dublin Core conferences bring together leading metadata researchers and professionals from around the world.
DC-2008 in Berlin will be the eighth in a series of conferences held previously in Tokyo, Florence, Seattle, Shanghai, Madrid, Manzanillo, and Singapore.
The conference is organized jointly by the Competence Centre for Interoperable Metadata (KIM), Max Planck Digital Library, Goettingen State and University Library, the German National Library, Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin, and Dublin Core Metadata Initiative with sponsorship from Wikimedia Deutschland.
Conference Theme DC-2008 will focus on metadata challenges, solutions, and innovation in initiatives and activities underlying semantic and social applications.
Metadata is part of the fabric of social computing, which includes the use of wikis, blogs, and tagging for collaboration and participation.
Metadata also underlies the development of semantic applications, and the Semantic Web – the representation and integration of multimedia knowledge structures on the basis of semantic models.
These two trends flow together in applications such as Wikipedia, where authors collectively create structured information that can be extracted and used to enhance access to and use of information sources.
DC-2008 will explore conceptual and practical issues in the development and deployment of semantic and social applications to meet the needs of specific communities of practice.
Papers, reports, and poster submissions are welcome on a wide range of metadata topics, such as: Metadata generation (methods, tools, and practices) Semantic Web metadata and applications Conceptual models and frameworks (e.g., RDF, DCAM, OAIS) Social tagging Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) and Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS) (e.g., ontologies, taxonomies, authority files, folksonomies, and thesauri) Metadata in e-Science and grid applications Metadata interoperability and internationalization Metadata quality, normalization, and mapping Cross-domain metadata uses (e.g., record keeping, preservation, institutional repositories) Vocabulary registries and registry services Domain metadata (e.g., for corporations, cultural memory institutions, education, government, and scientific fields) Application profiles Accessibility metadata Search engines and metadata Metadata principles, guidelines, and best practices Bibliographic standards (e.g., Resource Description and Access (RDA), Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), subject headings) as Semantic Web vocabularies All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the International Programme Committee and published in the conference proceedings.
Online Submission: Authors wishing to submit papers, reports, or poster proposals may do so through the DCMI Peer Review System at http://www.dcmipubs.org/ojs/index.php/pubs/ Author registration and links to the submission process appear under the “Information for Authors” link.
Deadlines and Important Dates Papers/reports/posters submission: 30 March 2008 Acceptance notification: 15 May 2008 Camera-ready copy due: 15 June 2008 Back to headlines ALT-C 2008: Rethinking the digital divide 9-11 September 2008, Leeds, England http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2008/ Keynote speakers: David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for One Laptop per Child, and Head of the Future of Learning Research Group at MIT Media Lab; Dr Itiel Dror, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Southampton; Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation.
Proposals should address up to three of the conference dimensions: global or local; institutional or individual; pedagogy or technology; access or exclusion; open or proprietary; private or public; for the learner or by the learner.
For more detail on these, see: http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2008/papers.html The online submission system for ALT-C 2008 is now open at: https://alt.conference-services.net/ Prior to submitting please read the Guidelines for Research Papers and for Abstracts http://www.alt.ac.uk/guidelines_papers.html and download the Research Paper Template if you intend to to submit a research paper.
Important note Some projects or teams will have more to report in September 2008 than they can summarise in an abstract written in February 2008.
To take account of this, the Co-Chairs of the Conference Committee emphasise that: “in judging proposals, ALT Reviewers will take an understanding attitude regarding proposals referring to or reporting on work taking place between now and the date of the conference”.
Key dates: Submissions open 14 December 2007 Submissions close 29 February 2008 Presenters’ registration deadline: 6 June 2008 Early bird registration deadline: 30 June 2008 Registrations close: 15 August 2008 For sponsorship and exhibition opportunities got to: http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2008/sponsor_information.html or contact Hayley Willis, Events Administrator: hayley.willis@alt.ac.uk Back to headlines   The Research Information Network Principles on Stewardship of Research Data Research data are an increasingly important and expensive output of the scholarly research process, across all disciplines.
They are an essential part of the evidence necessary to evaluate research results, and to reconstruct the events and processes leading to them.
Their value increases as they are aggregated into collections and as they become more available for re-use to address new and challenging research questions.
But we shall realise the value of data only if we move beyond research policies, practices and support systems developed in a different era.
We need new approaches to managing and providing access to research data.
In order to address these issues, the Research Information Network (RIN) has set out a framework of key principles and guidelines which is founded on the fundamental policy objective that ideas and knowledge, including data, derived from publicly funded research should be made available for public use, interrogation, and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable.
The framework, which was the subject of a consultation during 2007, was published in January 2008.
It is structured around five broad principles which provide a guide to the development of policy and practice for a range of key players: universities, research institutions, libraries and other information providers, publishers, and research funders as well as researchers themselves.
Each of these principles serves as a basis for a series of questions that serves a practical purpose by pointing to how the various players might address the challenges of effective data stewardship.
The principles relate to: Roles and responsibilities of researchers, research institutions and funders; Standards of data creation and collection, and quality assurance; Access, usage and credit; Benefits and cost-effectiveness of good data management; Preservation and sustainability of data for long-term access.
In seeking to develop the framework further, all parties need to work collaboratively and to ensure that it is sensitive to the needs of researchers and the different contexts in which they work.
All parties must also take account of relevant technical and policy-making developments in the UK and overseas.
Full and summary versions of the framework, along with a list of relevant current initiatives and developments, can be found at: http://www.rin.ac.uk/data-principles/ [Source: RIN] [Received: January 2008] Back to headlines Continental Visits Offer Professional Development Opportunity As part of the Their Past Your Future 2 Programme, Imperial War Museum is running InSite, which gives teachers and museum, library and archive educators an expenses-paid opportunity to visit Germany, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 2008.
Visits include access to historical sites, museum collections, eyewitnesses, museum directors, historians and other educators.
The visits will inspire, excite, and provide fresh teaching and learning ideas.
It is a free and truly innovative career and professional development opportunity.
For more information see: http://www.theirpast-yourfuture.org.uk/InSite Their Past Your Future 2 (TPYF2) is the second phase of a successful programme that runs to the end of 2009.
It is led by a partnership of the MLA, Imperial War Museum, Scottish Museums Council, Northern Ireland Museums Council, and The National Library of Wales.
It is supported by the Big Lottery Fund.
All partners will be focussing on the impact of conflict within their own specific programmes.
MLA is running a three-year grant programme.
Its second year will open at the end of February (dates to be announced).
[Source: MLA] [Received: January 2008] Back to headlines DLF Aquifer Funded to Evaluate MetadataTools for Cultural Heritage Materials The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation has awarded $18,000 to the Digital Library Federation (DLF) to study methods for enhancing access to cultural heritage materials.
The assessment will be done within DLF Aquifer, a Digital Library Federation initiative focused on making digital content especially cultural heritage materials pertinent to American culture and life easier for scholars to find and use.
The grant will enable a metadata librarian and a library school intern to identify tools that could be used to improve metadata for digital material that is difficult to find and use.
“DLF appreciates The Delmas Foundation support for this key activity,” DLF President Carol Mandel said.
“Results of this assessment will benefit the entire cultural heritage community.” DLF Aquifer has developed a set of implementation guidelines designed to make metadata more effective in aggregations.
To assist libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage organisations in meeting the guidelines, DLF Aquifer proposes to offer a range of mapping and remediation services.
Although a number of discrete prototypes such as date normalisation and topical clustering tools have been developed, these tools are not yet robust enough to be used in production for reliable results.
DLF proposes to conduct an inventory of existing tools and examine the feasibility of developing them into production services.
The Digital Library Federation, founded in 1995, is a partnership organisation of research libraries and related organisations that are pioneering the use of electronic information technologies to extend their collections and services.
Through its strategic and allied members, DLF provides leadership for libraries by identifying standards and best practice for digital collections and network access; co-ordinating research and development in the libraries’ use of technology; and incubating projects and services that libraries need but cannot develop individually.
More information about DLF is available at http://www.diglib.org/ [Source: DLF] [Received: February 2008] Back to headlines What Young People Have a Right to Expect from Their Library A statement defining what young people should be entitled to in their local library has been launched this week.
The statement is part of the wider agenda to ensure children and young people, both through schools and other institutions such as libraries, have increasing access to cultural services and learning opportunities.
Launching the offer at a conference at Local Government House, MLA Director of Policy Sue Wilkinson said: “This is a short, simple, but very significant statement designed to help all councils ensure that the local library is a free, safe and welcoming space where young people can meet and access relevant and up-to-date books and other information.” Young people should expect from their library: Participation in shaping the future of library services Volunteering opportunities with younger or older library users A place to develop citizenship skills and community engagement Free, safe and welcoming spaces in the local community Formal and informal learning support for educational attainment Inspiring books and reading materials supported by positive activities Information on education, training and careers opportunities Miranda McKearney, Director of the Reading Agency, said: “Libraries are changing fast; becoming the place of choice for more young people!
They have a key role to play in helping local authorities achieve their ambitions for and with young people.
The new offer articulates the richness of what libraries can do for young people, and the need to involve young people in shaping future services.” The offer has been developed as a result of consultation with young people from across the country about what they want and expect their local library to provide.
It follows on from the national libraries change programme Fulfilling their Potential, which has inspired innovative partnership projects with young people, including the HeadSpace™ Big Lottery project.
The statement has been developed by the National Youth Libraries Board, a partnership chaired by the MLA and managed by the Reading Agency.
Other members include government departments, the Society of Chief Librarians, the LGA, the National Youth Agency and other national bodies.
Further information: http://www.mla.gov.uk/homewebsite/programmes/framework/framework_programmes/libs_and_young_people [Source: MLA] [Received: February 2008] Back to headlines DRIVER II Project Summit On 16 and 17 January 2008, DRIVER II successfully carried out its first Summit in Goettingen, Germany.
Approximately 100 invited representatives from the European Community, including representatives of the European Commission, over 20 spokespersons of European repository initiatives as well as experts in different repository related fields from Europe, the U.S., Canada and South Africa came together to discuss their experiences and concrete actions with respect to the further building of cross-national repository infrastructures.
The first DRIVER Summit was a successful milestone on the way to building a professional, active repository community.
Over the course of 2008, DRIVER II will invite various stakeholders to support DRIVER in an advisory capacity and to prepare the building of a Confederation, by exploring models of and potential liaisons with, existing organisations and initiatives (like SPARC, LIBER, the European Digital Library, Alliance for Permanent Access, etc.).
On behalf of the DRIVER II Consortium, Dr Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator, has prepared a brief report on the Summit, available on the DRIVER Web site and at the following location: http://www.driver-support.eu/multi/news.php About DRIVER II: The EC-funded DRIVER II Project aims to enhance repository development worldwide.
Its main objective is to build a virtual, European-scale network of existing institutional repositories using technology that will manage the physically distributed repositories as one large-scale virtual content source.
For further information please go to the central entry point of the DRIVER initiative: http://www.driver-community.eu/ [Source: DRIVER II] [Received: January 2008] Back to headlines The Future of Bibliographic Control The final report of the Library of Congress Task Force on the Future of Bibliographic Control is now available at: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/ This report discusses future directions for cataloguing and related bibliographic control activities such as authority control both in terms of proposed actions by the US Library of Congress and by the broader library community.
Background information on the Task Force can be found at: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/ This information was supplied by Clifford Lynch, Director, CNI, who points out that he served as a member of the Task Force.
[Source: CNI] [Received: January 2008] Back to headlines Two Reports on Identity Management Published by JISC As recent events in the political world have shown, all of us are affected by how organisations manage our identity, and all of us need to become aware of the importance of sound identity management.
This is as true in education and research as it is in everyday life.
Following two 12-month projects to investigate identity management in Higher Education and the levels of assurance needed to prove an individual’s identity, JISC has just published two reports which both provide important findings on Higher Education’s current practice and approaches to identity management.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/identityprojectfinalreport The Identity Project The Identity Project report reviews how identity is being addressed across UK Higher Education and, in more detail, at 10 representative institutions.
Identifying the need for greater understanding of some of the key issues involved in identity management, it also calls for improved documentation and standards, greater awareness and training amongst staff and the introduction of regular audits to ensure implementation of appropriate measures across the institution.
e-Infrastructure Security: Levels of Assurance Levels of assurance (LoAs) are about how much proof is needed of an individual’s identity to access online resources; whether via a simple user name and password or a more complex system of biometrics and tokens.
The JISC report on levels of assurance looks at how LoAs can be defined, agreed and then applied to different resources.
For more information: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/einfrastructurefinalreport Among the findings of this report is that 70% of respondents think that more valuable or sensitive resources should be protected by a stronger form of user identification and authentication than they currently have.
Furthermore, almost all respondents (92%) were willing to respect national or international standards in this area, underlining the importance of national approaches and the interoperability of standards.
James Farnhill, JISC Programme Manager, said, ‘Identity is becoming increasingly important in society, meaning that students and staff in Further and Higher Education are starting to ask what their institution is doing to manage their identities.
This means that all systems, including those in functions not normally associated with identity such as Human Resources [Personnel] and Finance, are going to have to face the new challenges being posed by identity.
JISC is addressing identity management in a number of ways, including the commissioning and publication of these important reports, in order to help institutions offer enhanced services to their staff and students in a safe environment.’ For further information, please go to: Identity http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/identityprojectfinalreport and ES-LoA http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/einfrastructurefinalreport [Source: JISC] [Received: December 2007] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DRIVER: Building the Network for Accessing Digital Repositories Across Europe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DRIVER: Building the Network for Accessing Digital Repositories Across Europe Buzz data software framework wiki database infrastructure archives metadata browser repositories preservation oai-pmh multimedia aggregation provenance soap curation srw cql e-research authentication interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Martin Feijen, Wolfram Horstmann, Paolo Manghi, Mary Robinson and Rosemary Russell present an outline of the DRIVER Project and its achievements so far in supporting and enhancing digital repository development in Europe.
Introduction: Why DRIVER Is Needed OpenDOAR [1] lists over 900 Open Access repositories worldwide.
Approximately half of them are based in Europe, most of which are institutional repositories.
Across Europe many more repositories are being set up and supported by national and regional initiatives such as the Repositories Support Project [2] in the UK and IREL-Open [3] in Ireland.
A recurring challenge for repositories is that of engaging researchers in Open Access and motivating them to deposit their work in OA repositories.
Local efforts to embed the repository within the research processes of an institution are not always successful.
What is needed is the embedding of repository use in research and research publication processes on a large scale, across Europe.
Researchers and indeed other users of digital information systems have high expectations for the provision of digital content.
Retrieval should be fast, direct, and versatile.
Ideally, retrieval of full text should be just one click away.
The current state of institutional repositories does not fully support these expectations.
While many valuable services such as OAIster [4] and BASE [5] have been established to search and retrieve bibliographic records (metadata), the resource itself is sometimes hidden behind several intermediate pages, obscured by authorisation procedures, not fully presented, or not retrievable at all.
What is needed is a unified approach to managing this challenging and evolving repository landscape.
This approach must ensure a high level of interoperability across repositories and allow the development and improvement of retrieval services providing fast and efficient retrieval of content.
DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) [6] is an EU-funded project which provides such a unified approach.
It is the largest initiative of its kind and is leading the way in supporting and enhancing repository development in Europe and indeed worldwide.
DRIVER makes possible the development of high-quality search and associated services for the research community, which will enable effective retrieval and use of content held in repositories.
A unified European approach will also ensure that repositories and their use become an accepted part of research and research publication processes across Europe.
This article outlines the aims of the DRIVER Project, its achievements so far, their implications for the European repository and research community and the future aims of DRIVER.
DRIVER Aims DRIVER is a multi-phase effort, the initial phase lasting 18 months, and is funded under the EU Sixth Framework Programme, Research Networking Testbeds.
It sets out to build a testbed for a future knowledge infrastructure of the European Research Area.
The DRIVER partnership has ten partners from eight EU countries and benefits from a wide range of experience.
Many partners are already well known to the European repository community through their involvement in national and international repository initiatives (CNRS, SHERPA, SURF, UKOLN, University of Ghent) while other partners are experienced in the development of technical infrastructure and services (University of Athens, University of Bielefeld, CNR, ICM, University of Goettingen) to support such a community.
The DRIVER Project aims to deliver any form of textual scientific output, including scientific/technical reports, working papers, pre-prints, articles and original research data, to the various user groups.
Work on the current testbed began in June 2006 and has five main objectives: To organise and build a virtual, European scale network of existing institutional repositories from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Belgium.
To assess and implement state-of-the-art technical infrastructure, which manages the physically distributed repositories as one large-scale virtual content resource.
To assess and implement a number of fundamental user services.
To identify, implement and promote a relevant set of standards.
To prepare the future expansion and upgrade of the digital repository infrastructure across Europe and to ensure widest possible involvement and exploitation by users.
Below we present an outline of the DRIVER studies, guidelines and technical infrastructure services, as well as the benefits and implications of DRIVER for research in Europe and elaborate on the future development of the project.
Studies Within the DRIVER Project a number of strategic and co-ordinated studies on digital repositories and related topics have been carried out.
Maurits van der Graaf and Kwame van Eijndhoven (SURF) conducted an inventory study of OAI-compliant repository activities in the EU [7].
The DRIVER’s Guide to Repositories edited by Kasja Weenink, Leo Waaijers and Karen van Godtsenhoven (SURF and University of Ghent), is due to be published by Amsterdam University Press in December 2007.
It aims to motivate and promote the further creation, development and networking of repositories.
It contains comprehensive and current information on digital repository-related issues particularly relevant to repository managers, decision makers, funding agencies and infrastructure services as stakeholders.
DRIVER has identified five specific, complex and long-term issues which are essential to the establishment, development or sustainability of a digital repository: the business of digital repositories; stimuli for depositing materials into repositories; intellectual property rights; data curation; and long-term preservation.
The success of a repository is dependent on having addressed these five issues sufficiently.
Good practice and lessons learned as part of this report will assist stakeholders in both their day-to-day and long-term challenges, and can help them avoid reinventing the wheel.
The DRIVER’s Guide focuses on international and trans-national approaches which go beyond local interests.
The Investigative Study of Standards for Digital Repositories and Related Services [8] by Muriel Foulonneau and Francis André (CNRS) reviews the current standards, protocols and applications in the domain of digital repositories.
Special attention is paid to the interoperability of repositories to enhance the exchange of repository data.
The study is aimed at institutional repository managers, service providers, repository software developers and all players taking an active part in the creation of the digital repository infrastructure for e-research.
It aims to raise discussion on these topics and to support initiatives for the integration and in some cases the development of new standards, in addition to the current interoperability mechanisms that have been implemented in digital repositories.
The study not only looks at the current situation, but also at the near future: what steps should be taken now in order to support future demands?
This study is also due to be published in December 2007.
Repositories as Content Networks The landscape of digital repositories is multi-faceted with respect to different countries, different resources such as text, data or multimedia, different technological platforms, different metadata policies, etc.
However there is also a considerable degree of homogeneity across parts of this landscape: the main resource type provided by digital repositories is text (see Figure 1) and the common approach for offering textual resources is via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
Therefore the current test-bed phase of DRIVER is focusing on textual resources that can be aggregated across many repositories and made directly accessible via OAI-PMH.
These resources are mainly articles, but also include lectures, theses, reports etc.
Direct access means that the user can download and use the full text of these resources with only a few clicks, anytime, anywhere, and without payment.
Figure 1: Types of textual materials held by digital repositories Why Have Guidelines?
As distributed systems, repository networks critically depend on interoperability in terms of technology and content provision.
Practical experience with repository networks using OAI-PMH (e.g.
DAREnet [9], HAL [10]) reveals firstly that homogenous use of the protocol considerably strengthens the quality of services for the end-user.
A number of additional issues around the use of the protocol have been defined and listed in Investigative Study of Standards for Digital Repositories and Related Services [8].
They can be grouped around three themes: the harmonisation of the metadata content (e.g.
use of the inverted name form in DC element i.e.
Author: Smith, John) the uniform use of the OAI-PMH protocol (e.g.
use of the transient parameter for deleted records) the lack of a mechanism for the transport of metadata that relate to a resource that consists of multiple digital files (e.g.
a thesis that has 15 separate PDF files) These themes have been addressed in DRIVER by highlighting the implications for local repository managers.
He/she can support DRIVER locally by offering content in a specific manner.
For this purpose the project has drawn up the DRIVER Guidelines for Content Providers: Exposing textual resources with OAI-PMH [11].
The main goals are to provide guidance for managers of new repositories in defining their local data management policies for textual resources; for managers of existing repositories to take steps towards improved services; and for developers of repository platforms to add supportive functionalities in future versions.
Aspects of content provision other than exposing textual resources e.g.
managing versions or exposing scientific data may be addressed in future versions of the guidelines.
Compliance with the guidelines is needed to enable the full range of services available through the DRIVER infrastructure.
A search service, for example, that promises to list only records that provide a full-text link, cannot process all contents of a repository that offers metadata-only records or obscures full-text by authorisation procedures.
Compliance with the guidelines will help to differentiate between those records.
However repositories that do not conform to all the mandatory or recommended guidelines will still be harvested, but depending on the degree of conformance, content may not be retrievable.
The guidelines do not, of course, prescribe which records should be held in a local repository.
DRIVER offers support to local repositories to implement the guidelines on an individual basis.
Support can be delivered through the Internet [12] or via the DRIVER helpdesk [13].
DRIVER is committed to any possible solution that can be realised by central data processing.
However the sustainable, transparent and scalable road to improved services is via the local repositories.
Retrieval of full text with bibliographic data is a basic but necessary step forward to approach rich information services based on digital repositories.
Future guidelines will elaborate on further steps with respect to other information types such as primary data or multimedia and on more complex information objects that are composed of several resources.
Infrastructure The DRIVER guidelines take a ‘top-down’ approach, in trying to ensure that repository data is exposed in a standard way.
At the same time the DRIVER infrastructure takes a ‘bottom-up’ approach and provides the technology to harvest content from multiple repositories and manage its transformation into a common and uniform ‘shared information space’.
The relevant aspects of this information space are that: the services needed to maintain it (stores, indexes, aggregators) are distributed on computers under the jurisdiction of several organisations, thereby reducing their individual effort and cost; such services can be added to the infrastructure at any time, in order to provide additional content and functionality; special enabling services automatically administrate the resources of the available services in order to maximise quality of service; content in the information space, i.e.
DRIVER records, is that harvested from repositories, after cleaning and enrichment with provenance information; all records in the system can be reused via standard interfaces and protocols (SRW/CQL for querying, OAI-PMH for harvesting, etc.)
by DRIVER services, such as a search service and OAI-Publisher service, but they can also be used by external applications.
DRIVER’s software infrastructure is operated as a service-oriented architecture based on open Web standards such as SOAP [14] and provides ‘core’ functionalities for administering distributed services and content.
Data from distributed repositories are harvested and indexed based on extensive experience with content aggregation in BASE [5].
Interfaces for a wide range of functionality services such as ‘search’, ‘recommend’ or the management of digital collections and communities support the use and integration of software services.
Deployment of these services in a robust hardware environment as well as authentication and authorisation procedures complement this scheme.
Figure 2: DRIVER infrastructure layers The infrastructure will offer tools that enable repository managers to register their repositories within the DRIVER information space and obtain immediate feedback on the conformance of their OAI-PMH interfaces and their degree of alignment with the guidelines.
Repositories from any country will be able to register with the infrastructure and expect their content to be extracted, ‘cleaned’, and aggregated within an information space for integrated use.
The information space describes all documents according to a rich and uniform metadata format, which extends typical digital resource information (e.g.
author, title, year) with provenance information (e.g.
country, language, institution) and technical information (e.g.
metadata formats available for the resource, repository platform).
Reuse is a key feature of DRIVER.
Traditional approaches have involved each organisation deploying a new system with high maintenance costs (possibly installing, customising services and constructing from scratch, i.e.
harvesting/cleaning, a new information space).
However in DRIVER organisations can reduce costs and effort by relying on the DRIVER infrastructure and co-operating in order to populate and reuse the global information space as needed.
Services developed by external organisations can also be shared.
DRIVER records can therefore be accessed through different standard interfaces and protocols, thereby opening the information space to the external world (SRW/CQL for querying, OAI-PMH for harvesting).
Benefits for DRIVER Users DRIVER has wide-ranging benefits for both end-users and users of the DRIVER infrastructure.
Benefits for End-users High quality of content.
Only high-quality resources that have been selected by participating institutions will form part of the DRIVER services.
High quality of search results.
Search results are relevant because DRIVER is using validated metadata supplied by its partners to build its search indexes.
High quality of service.
As a result of DRIVER’s innovative distributed technical infrastructure, using services distributed over different nodes in Europe, the services are available at any time, anywhere.
Easy to use.
All that is needed is a browser and Internet access.
Access to the full text is only one click away.
Full-text access.
All references link to the full text (usually a pdf file) that can be read online or printed for later use.
No fee, no restrictions.
All documents are open access, for everyone, worldwide.
Broad spectrum.
Covers all scientific domains and all of Europe.
In the initial testbed version (2007) there will be 60 partners in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
This number will grow rapidly in 2008 from 60 to over 200 and partners will come from almost all European countries.
Benefits for Infrastructure Users DRIVER provides a shared information space that can be reused by service providers.
The repository community can use the DRIVER infrastructure to provide national or regional repository search services which draw only from repositories in that country or region.
Such customised searches can be made available from the national or regional Web sites.
Individual repositories and their institutions can enjoy the increased visibility afforded by being harvested by DRIVER.
Any document returned in a search will display the logo and reference of the host repository and institution.
DRIVER also provides assistance and support for external service providers to enhance the search and other services they provide.
The testbed phase of DRIVER is a first step.
The services, content, partners and quality will continue to be expanded in DRIVER-II.
DRIVER and the Research and Repository Community in Europe As a European project, DRIVER provides a clear voice for the repository community in Europe.
DRIVER is working to increase awareness of Open Access and repositories among those directly involved in research such as researchers and research funders as well as raising the awareness of the issues among the general public.
DRIVER can also lobby policy makers on behalf of the community.
Through the experience of its partners in the development of national networks e.g.
DAREnet [9], DINI [15], Archives Ouvertes /HAL [10] and SHERPA [16], DRIVER can provide advice to national initiatives and groups in the development of such networks as well as providing information and support through the DRIVER Support Web site [12] and Wiki [17].
The DRIVER Support Web site provides links to national groups, projects and services and acts as a source of news and information to the research and repository community in Europe.
DRIVER is working with national groups e.g.
Belgian repositories [18], to facilitate the development of national Web sites in association with the DRIVER Support Web site.
The DRIVER Wiki provides a space for contributions from the general repository community.
Information on individual repositories, local projects, and events or news may be added to the Wiki to inform the wider community.
Where national co-ordinating groups or projects do not exist, the Wiki will provide a platform for their initial development.
Existing networks can benefit from an increased visibility in the European repository community through linking with the DRIVER Support Web site and through participation in the Wiki.
DRIVER Services Since the focus of DRIVER has been on developing infrastructure, it has not aimed to provide a pre-defined set of services.
The infrastructure includes open, defined interfaces which allow any service providers working at a local, national or subject-based level, to build services on top.
They will be able to reuse the data infrastructure (the Information Space) and the software infrastructure to build or enhance their systems.
Services can therefore be developed according to the needs of users.
However in order to demonstrate exemplary functionality, and the potential of repository infrastructures, several services are being developed by the project.
These include end user services (e.g.
search) and services for repository managers (e.g.
the validator tool), as outlined below.
Further services will be developed in the future.
Search The search service is particularly important in demonstrating the functionalities and capabilities of the DRIVER infrastructure.
It is a generic search tool for querying the DRIVER information space, designed both for end-users (to gain an idea of DRIVER functionality) and also for service providers (to demonstrate the potential of the infrastructure).
DRIVER search is intended only to provide access to full-text records.
The current version of the search interface offers an ‘advanced search’ which allows searching by selected field, as well as refinement by document type, language, date of publication etc.
In addition it uses the concept of ‘collections’ and ‘communities’.
A sample range of collections is offered for searching at a broad subject level e.g.
medical science, biology, history.
Users will be able to subscribe to communities (containing a set of collections) and will be informed of changes to relevant collections.
Customisation for local or subject needs could be implemented through the use of collections, i.e.
search services could be built around a specific subset of the available records.
Subsets could be chosen based on geographical location, or document type e.g.
e-theses.
Browsing and navigating will also be available at a later date.
A list of all the repositories currently included in the search is available via the interface, together with the number of documents held within each repository.
The public search final release will contain two search options: ‘search clean’ and ‘search all’.
By narrowing searches to ‘search clean’, users will query only those repositories in the information space whose content is strictly conformant to the DRIVER guidelines.
The DRIVER search test release is due to be made publicly available on the Web in the latter part of October 2007.
Validator The Validator tool will validate repositories for conformance to 1) the DRIVER guidelines, 2) standard OAI-PMH functionality, and 3) OAI-PMH functionalities specific to DRIVER issues.
It is currently in a test phase but will allow repository managers to check their repositories for conformance.
Once the validator service is fully integrated into the DRIVER infrastructure, it will automatically provide feedback to the harvester in real-time and will assist in informing the decision whether to harvest a specific record or not.
The Validator will be on public release (i.e.
beyond testbed countries) towards the end of 2007.
Mentor Service A mentor service is being developed to assist developers and managers of institutional repositories across Europe.
The purpose of this service is to introduce those who are developing and managing institutional repositories to their peers on a one-to-one basis to enable the sharing of experience and the development of a supportive and active repository community.
This service is not an alternative to materials or advisory services already available online or to email discussion lists, but instead will provide advice on issues not typically available through formal sources of information.
The service operates on the goodwill of the mentors and as such, is free of charge.
Requests for mentors can be submitted via the DRIVER Support Web site.
The mentor team consider each request individually.
Where mentoring is considered suitable, the mentor team will identify and contact several possible mentors from the database of mentors.
This service will be expanded and developed further as DRIVER progresses.
The Future: DRIVER-II As a result of a successful bid for Framework 7 funding, DRIVER-II will commence at the end of 2007.
A further three partners will join the core DRIVER partnership and a further six countries have been identified as likely future partners.
It is important to remember that any repository or network of repositories can benefit from the DRIVER infrastructure and services.
DRIVER has thus far concentrated its effort on the support of institutional repositories and the management of textual content in repositories.
Through DRIVER-II, it is acknowledged that subject repositories and subject-specific services are key services needed by the research community.
Therefore, in DRIVER-II, subject communities will be invited to become involved in the project and DRIVER technical developments will focus on the development and enhancement of services for specific communities.
Moreover, subject-based communities introduce other forms of information management: scientific data and other non-textual content play an important role.
Textual publications together with supplementary materials can form new aggregated types of content, sometimes referred to as ‘enhanced publications’.
In DRIVER-II the technical focus will therefore expand from the management of textual content in repositories also to include the handling of such complex objects.
References OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/ Repositories Support Project http://www.rsp.ac.uk/ IREL-Open http://www.irel-open.ie/ OAIster http://www.oaister.org/ Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/index_english.html DRIVER http://www.driver-community.eu/ van der Graaf, M., “DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories”, Ariadne Issue 52, July 2007. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/vandergraf/ A preprint is available: ‘DRIVER review of technical standards’ http://www.driver-support.eu/en/about.html DAREnet http://www.darenet.nl HAL http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ DRIVER Guidelines http://www.driver-support.eu/en/guidelines.html DRIVER Support Web site http://www.driver-support.eu DRIVER helpdesk helpdesk@driver-support.eu SOAP http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/ DINI http://www.dini.de SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ DRIVER Wiki http://www.driver-support.eu/pmwiki/ DRIVER Belgium http://www.driver-repository.be/ Author Details Martin Feijen SURFfoundation Email: Feijen@surf.nl Web site: http://www.surffoundation.nl/ Wolfram Horstmann Goettingen State and University Library Email: whorstmann@sub.uni-goettingen.de Web site: http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/ Paolo Manghi CNR-ISTI Email: paolo.manghi@isti.cnr.it Web site: http://www.isti.cnr.it/ Mary Robinson SHERPA European Development Officer University of Nottingham Email: Mary.Robinson@nottingham.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Rosemary Russell Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “DRIVER: Building the Network for Accessing Digital Repositories across Europe” Author: Martin Feijen, Wolfram Horstmann, Paolo Manghi, Mary Robinson and Rosemary Russell Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/feijen-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ALPSP Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ALPSP Conference Buzz data wiki archives accessibility blog repositories copyright preservation cataloguing curation licence rae privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Kara Jones reports on the ALPSP 'Publishing and the Library of the Future' one-day seminar held at St Anthony's College, Oxford, in July 2007.
The provision of scholarly information is undergoing well-documented change, affecting libraries, publishers and researchers.
The Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) presented a one-day seminar to discuss these changes and their impact, with perspectives on the near future from an academic librarian, society publishers, a scientific researcher and library technology providers.
The seminar looked ‘at what the library will look like in the future, and how publishers will need to adapt to keep pace with rapid change, not only to the online content that they provide to their scholarly users, but to the way they retrieve and deliver it’ [1].
The seminar was designed for publishers from the sales, marketing and editorial sides of the profession as well as for librarians.
The event was chaired by Dr Diana Leitch, Deputy University Librarian at the University of Manchester.
Diana opened the session by welcoming the group, and outlining a few of the challenges facing her library.
These included removing print journals, the increased demand for non-English language material, the influence of the Research Assessment Exercise on staffing commitments and the reallocation of library space from storage of print to study and social areas.
Speakers The first speaker was Andreas Mittrowann from the Bertelsmann Foundation, speaking on ‘The Library User’s Perspective of the Future’.
Andreas presented an engaging vision of libraries of the future, with the global trends of individuality, mobility and the portability of information.
An important issue for library users of the future, said Andreas, is that information is experienced-based and always accessible.
Interactivity, particularly for younger learners means that it is easy to consume knowledge.
Possible futures were outlined with examples from the Bertelsmann Foundation’s work on designing the Sheikh Zayed Knowledge Centre in the United Arab Emirates.
Helen Cook from SAGE Publications was next to step up to the podium.
Helen spoke on ‘How publishers are changing the way they deal with libraries’, noting that customer expectations are raising the game in terms of journal content and technology.
Major issues for discussion were archives and back issues, usage data and pricing models.
Pricing models, for example, are evolving with changing customer preferences for print to online provision of content.
Usage statistics in particular are important when negotiating subscriptions, especially when it is difficult to see actual users anymore.
The next presentation came from Adam Marshall of Portland Press.
Adam spoke on the impact of changes for small publishers, from changing pricing models with print and online to the increasing complexities of marketing costs (such as materials in other languages) and the need for sales staff.
One of Adam’s key points was the difficulty in employing usage statistics to inform subscription decisions when articles are being accessed via repositories such as PubMed Central.
Clearly moves towards open access are presenting challenges to society publishers, and questions were raised about the sustainability of OA without funder support.
Portland Press have commenced looking at hybrid open-choice models and attempting to engage in debate on scholarly communication to inform decision-making.
Robert Bley from Exlibris spoke next, looking to the past to help make predictions for the future.
Futurists of the past saw the library catalogue as central to library development, and failed to predict the impact of Intellectual Property Rights, and a competitive information landscape brought about by the Internet.
Perhaps, Robert suggested, future-gazing needs to look outside the area we are in.
He then offered a vision for electronic resource management systems of the future which focused on managing relationships (between interfaces, packages, licence terms) and a focus on standards such as Web services to build service-oriented features allowing the backend records to be presented more neatly.
The first session after lunch came from Dr Sarah Coulthurst, a research biochemist at the University of Cambridge.
Sarah outlined the processes likely to be used by a researcher to identify needed information and to gather targeted or speculative information.
These were a combination of search and alerting services.
Sarah stressed the importance of quality information, using peer-reviewed international journals and called for accompanying appropriate supplementary data depositions.
Sarah also spoke on aspects of choosing journals in which to publish, with good communication and clarity of instructions for authors being paramount.
The availability of the journal and accuracy of the final article were also important.
Finally, she noted that the appeal of a particular journal goes beyond the scientific articles it contains to the other interesting information it contains such as funding and conference announcements and opinion or debate articles.
David Smith from CABI presented the next session entitled ‘A parallel universe blogs, wikis, web 2.0 and a complicated future for scholarly communication’.
David spoke on the opportunities presented by web 2.0 technologies and suggested publishers and libraries modify their approaches and look to build trusted, reputable communities in this new information environment.
Issues associated with this include privacy, identity, authority, reputation and copyright.
The final speaker was Kara Jones from the University of Bath Library, presenting on the challenges for academic libraries in the future, and the evolving role of the librarian.
Academic libraries were experiencing a plethora of influences on their provision of scholarly communication resources.
Future decisions will revolve around collaborative efforts, preservation, standards and accessibility, findability and the changing demands on library space.
The role of the librarian in the future is likely to be a varied one, ranging from traditional curation of print materials, to information skills instruction to research access advisors and coordinators.
Challenges for the future include trying to keep up with new technologies and dealing with a deluge of information.
Conclusion As often occurs at events such as this, the coffee breaks and lunch are often as useful as the presentations, allowing conversation with seminar attendees.
The open panel at the end of the day was lively with comments on institutional repositories, publishing and librarians, obviously from various viewpoints.
Comments and questions from the audience showed that many publishers are thinking outside the box in terms of how to evolve in a changing scholarly communication system.
It was unfortunate there were not more librarians present to put forward their perspectives.
As the chair commented at the end of the session, events like this go a long way towards breaking down silos and opening up a discussion between libraries, publishers and researchers to talk about the future of scholarly communication.
Presentations and an additional summary of the event are available from the ALPSP Web site [1].
Presenters at the ALPSP one-day seminar ‘Publishing and the Library of the Future’, from left to right: Dr Sarah Coulthurst, Kara Jones, Helen Cooke, Adam Marshall, Robert Bley, Andreas Mittrowann, David Smith, Dr Diana Leitch (chair) References ALPSP Past Events.
Publishing and the Library of the Future.
http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=335&did=47&aid=877&st=&oaid=-1 Author Details Kara Jones Research Publications Librarian University of Bath Email: k.l.jones@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/contacts/people/klj.html Return to top Article Title: “Publishing and the Library of the Future” Author: Kara Jones Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/alpsp-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The National Centre for Text Mining: Aims and Objectives Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The National Centre for Text Mining: Aims and Objectives Buzz data software framework database dissemination portal archives metadata identifier vocabularies repositories cataloguing cache ontologies curation crm algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sophia Ananiadou, Julia Chruszcz, John Keane, John McNaught and Paul Watry describe NaCTeM's plans to provide text mining services for UK academics.
In this article we describe the role of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM).
NaCTeM is operated by a consortium of three Universities: the University of Manchester which leads the consortium, the University of Liverpool and the University of Salford.
The service activity is run by the National Centre for Dataset Services (MIMAS), based within Manchester Computing (MC).
As part of previous and ongoing collaboration, NaCTeM involves, as self-funded partners, world-leading groups at San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), the University of Geneva and the University of Tokyo.
NaCTeM's initial focus is on bioscience and biomedical texts as there is an increasing need for bio-text mining and automated methods to search, access, extract, integrate and manage textual information from large-scale bio-resources.
NaCTeM was established in Summer 2004 with funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with the consortium itself investing almost the same amount as it received in funding.
Need for Text Mining in Biology Dynamic development and new discoveries in the domains of bioscience and biomedicine have resulted in a huge volume of domain literature, which is constantly expanding both in size and thematic coverage.
With the overwhelming amount of textual information presented in scientific literature, there is a need for effective automated processing that can help scientists to locate, gather and make use of knowledge encoded in electronically available literature [1] [2].
Although a great deal of crucial biomedical information is stored in factual databases, the most relevant and useful information is still represented in domain literature [3].
Medline [4] contains over 14 million records, extending its coverage with more than 40,000 abstracts each month.
Open access publishers such as BioMed Central have growing collections of full-text scientific articles.
There is increasing activity and interest in linking factual biodatabases to the literature, in using the literature to check, complete or complement the contents of such databases.
However currently such curation is laborious, being done largely manually with few sophisticated aids, thus the risks of introducing errors or leaving unsuspected lacunae are non-negligible.
There is also great interest among biologists in exploiting the results of mining the literature in a tripartite discovery process involving factual biodatabases and their own experimental data.
Therefore, techniques for literature mining are no longer an option, but a prerequisite for effective knowledge discovery, management, maintenance and update in the long term.
To illustrate the growing scale of the task facing specialists trying to discover precise information of interest within the biobibliome, a query such as 'breast cancer treatment' submitted to Medline's search engine in 2004 returned almost 70,000 references while it resulted in 20,000 abstracts in 2001.
Effective management of biomedical information is, therefore, a critical issue, as researchers have to be able to process the information both rapidly and systematically.
Traditionally, bioscientists search biomedical literature using the PUBMED interface to retrieve MEDLINE documents.
PUBMED is an indexing and retrieval repository that manages several million documents.
These documents are manually indexed, where index terms are selected and assigned to documents from a standard controlled vocabulary (the Medical Subject Headings, MESH).
The retrieval is implemented as a Boolean keyword search, so documents that fully satisfy a query are retrieved.
Another problem is the selection of the appropriate index terms which would retrieve the most relevant documents.
Index terms do not necessarily characterise documents semantically, but are used to discriminate among documents.
Classic Information Retrieval (IR) techniques do not use any linguistic techniques to cope with language variability such as synonymy and polysemy which may produce many false positives.
Even controlled indexing approaches are inconsistent and limited since knowledge repositories are static and cannot cope with the dynamic nature of documents.
Using classic IR methods is not sufficient because the number of documents returned in response to a query is huge.
Therefore, with the overwhelming amount of new terms being introduced in the literature on a daily basis, text mining devices such as automatic term management tools are indispensable for the systematic and efficient collection of biomedical data which go beyond keyword indexing and retrieval.
Manually controlled vocabularies are error-prone, subjective and limited in coverage.
However, once a highly relevant set of documents is returned through exploitation of term-based indexing and searching, this will typically still be large and, more importantly, will still not yield precise facts at this stage.
Processing biomedical literature faces many challenges, including both technical and linguistic.
Technical challenges are posed by, for example, restricted availability and access, heterogeneous representation (storage) formats, extensive usage of non-textual contents, such as tables, graphs, figures, etc.
and linguistic challenges are posed by the particularities of the biomedical sub-language.
One of the main challenges in bio-text mining is the identification of biological terminology, which is a key factor for accessing the information stored in literature, as information across scientific articles is conveyed through the terms and their relationships.
Terms (which here are taken to include names of genes, proteins, gene products, organisms, drugs, chemical compounds, etc.)
are the means of scientific communication as they are used to refer to domain concepts: in order to understand the meaning of an article and to extract appropriate information, precise identification and association of terms is required [5].
New terms are introduced in the domain vocabulary on a daily basis, and given the number of names introduced around the world it is practically impossible to have up-to-date terminologies that are produced and curated manually.
There are almost 300 biomedical databases containing terminological information.
Many of such resources contain descriptors rather than terms as used in documents, which makes matching controlled sets of terms in literature difficult.
Terminological processing (i.e.
identification, classification and association of terms) has been recognised as the main bottleneck in biomedical text mining [6], severely reducing the success rates of 'higher-level' text mining processes which crucially depend on accurate identification and labelling of terms.
Various approaches have been suggested for automatic recognition of terms in running text [7][8][5].
Crucially, technical terms of the kind we consider here are to be distinguished from index terms used to characterise documents for retrieval: a good index term might not be a technical term; a technical term is of potential interest for text analysis even if it occurs infrequently in a collection; all technical terms in a document are of potential interest for text analysis.
Recognition of terms in text is not the ultimate aim: terms should be also related to existing knowledge and/or to each other; classes of terms and hierarchies of classes need to be established, as it is terms that provide the link between the world of text and the world of ontologies and other such classification schemes; the ontological elements terms map to serve further to drive ontology-based information extraction, discussed further below.
Several approaches have been suggested for the extraction of term relations from literature.
The most common approach for discovering term associations is based on shallow parsing and Information Extraction (IE) techniques.
These are based either on pattern matching or on IE-based semantic templates.
While pattern-matching approaches are typically effective, the cost for preparing domain-oriented patterns is too high.
Recall may be affected if there is not a broad coverage of patterns.
Since the separate use of either statistical, knowledge-intensive or machine learning approaches cannot capture all the semantic features needed by users, the combination of these approaches is more promising.
Given the dynamic nature of biomedicine, any method should be tunable and applicationindependent.
We believe that the usage of available knowledge sources has to be combined with the dynamic management of concepts (terms) encountered in texts.
Most current systems address known relationships, and aim at the extraction of semantic or conceptual entities, properties of entities, and factual information involving identified entities.
We propose to support not only the extraction of entities, properties and facts but also, through data mining, the discovery of associations and relationships not explicitly mentioned.
Or indeed totally unsuspected (discovery of new knowledge): this is the true power of text mining.
Our view of text mining, thus, is that it involves advanced information retrieval yielding all precisely relevant texts, followed by information extraction processes that result in extraction of facts of interest to the user, followed by data mining to discover previously unsuspected associations.
Role of the National Centre for Text Mining The paramount responsibility of NaCTeM is to establish high-quality service provision in text mining for the UK academic community, with particular focus on biological and biomedical science.
Initial activity will establish the framework to enable a quality service, and to identify 'best of breed' tools.
Evaluation and choice of appropriate tools is ongoing, and tools will be customised in cooperation with partners and customers, bearing in mind existing competition and advantages to be gained from cooperation with technology providers.
The overall aims of NaCTeM are: to provide a one-stop resource and focus primarily for the UK text mining community for user support and advice, service provision, dissemination, training, data access, expertise and knowledge in related emerging technologies, consultative services, tutorials, courses and materials, and demonstrator projects; to drive the international and national research agenda in text mining informed by the collected experiences of the user community, allied to existing and developing knowledge and evaluation of the state of the art; to consolidate, evolve, and promulgate best practice from bio-related text mining into other domains; to widen awareness of and participation in text mining to all science and engineering disciplines, and further to social sciences and humanities, including business and management; to maintain and develop links with industry and tool suppliers, to establish best practice and provision.
The vision informing NaCTeM is to harness the synergy from service provision and user needs within varied domains, allied to development and research within text mining.
The establishment of a virtuous feedback cycle of service provision based both on commercial software and on innovative tools and techniques, themselves in turn derived from user feedback, is intended to enable a quality service whilst ensuring advances within each associated domain.
This paradigm is how advances within bio-text mining have occurred, not least within the NaCTeM consortium's recent activity.
NaCTeM is working to consolidate existing successes, activity, and working relationships and models, and transfer them to related science and engineering activities and humanities.
Importantly, the expectation is that NaCTeM will shortly (Summer 2005) be housed in an interdisciplinary bio-centre co-locating life scientists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, informaticians, computer scientists and language engineers with service providers and tool developers.
Such co-location promises a step-change in awareness and use of text mining such that very definite advances can be both realised and sustained.
The services offered by NaCTeM are expected to be available via a Web-based portal.
Three types of service are envisaged: those facilitating access to tools, resources and support; those offering online use of resources and tools, including tools to guide and instruct; and those offering a one-stop shop for complete, end-to-end processing by the centre with appropriate packaging of results.
Services will thus include: Access to state of the art text mining tools developed from leading edge research Access to a selection of commercial text mining tools at a preferential rate Access to ontology libraries Access to large and varied data sources guidance, and purchase of data sets at preferential rates Access to a library of data filtering tools Online tutorials, briefings and white papers Online advice on matching of specific requirements to text mining solutions Online performance of text mining and packaging of results involving GRID-based flexible composition of tools, resources and data by users to carry out mining tasks via a portal Marketing and dissemination activities: e.g.
training and course materials; conference and workshop organisation Collaborative development/enhancement of text mining tools, annotated corpora and ontologies Text mining tool trials and evaluations Initially users of NaCTeM will be members of academic and research institutions, and later companies throughout the supply chain in the biotechnological and pharmaceutical industries.
In addition, potential users will be public sector information organisations; SMEs (Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises) in the life sciences sector and IT (knowledge management services) sector; regional development agencies; health service trusts and the NHS information authority; major corporates in the pharmaceutical, agropharmaceutical and life sciences industries including food and healthcare; government and the media.
NaCTeM integrates areas such as: Bioinformatics and genomics Research involves predicting and extracting properties of biological entities through combining large-scale text analysis with experimental biological data and genomic information resources.
The use of supervised learning over both text and biological data sources increases novelty detection.
Recently, work has started on non-supervised learning approaches using sophisticated term and term relationship extraction.
The overall goal is to discover strategies and methods that facilitate user comprehension of experimental data, genomic information and biomedical literature simultaneously.
Ontologies, Lexica and Annotated Text Corpora.
Ontologies describe domain-specific knowledge and facilitate information exchange They store information in a structured way and are crucial resources for the Semantic Web.
In an expanding domain such as biomedicine it is also necessary for ontologies to be easily extensible.
Since ontologies are needed for automatic knowledge acquisition in biomedicine the challenge is their automatic update.
Since manual expansion is almost impossible in a dynamic domain such as biomedicine, text mining solutions such as term clustering and term classification are beneficial for the automatisation of ontologies.
Term clustering offers potential association between related terms, which can be used to verify or update instances of semantic relations in an ontology.
Term classification results can be used to verify or update the taxonomic aspects of an ontology.
Lexical resources (dictionaries, glossaries, taxonomies) and annotated text corpora are equally important for text mining.
Electronic dictionaries give formal linguistic information on wordforms.
Furthermore, as ontologies represent concepts and have no link with the surface world of words, a means is needed to link canonical text strings (words) with ontological concepts: dictionaries and taxonomies aid in establishing this mapping.
Annotated text corpora (GENIA) [9] are essential for rule development, for training in machine learning techniques and for evaluation.
Meeting the Needs of Users We now elaborate on some of the above points where these concern the core text mining components provided by the consortium to underpin the national service.
Overall, the text mining process involves many steps, hence potentially many tools, and potentially large amounts of text and data to be analysed and stored at least temporarily, including all the intermediate results, and the need to access large resources, such as ontologies, terminologies, document collections, lexicons, training corpora and rule sets, potentially widely distributed.
Much of the processing is compute-intensive and scalability of algorithms and processes is thus a challenge for the service to meet the requirements of users.
Moreover, we expect that many users will want to process the same data again and again (e.g.
Medline), with perhaps variation of need only at the higher levels of analysis (fact extraction) or during the data mining stage.
It is thus inappropriate to, say, expensively analyse the entire contents of Medline for each text mining request.
Essentially, parts of the analysis of some collections will remain unchanged, or will change only slowly with the advent of improved analysis techniques.
Thus, once a collection has been processed once to annotate terms and named entities, and properties of these, there is no need to do so again in the general case: there is only a need to analyse new additions to a collection since the last analysis.
We expect therefore that part of the service will be devoted to elaborating techniques to reuse previously analysed material, while also developing and exploiting caching techniques to cut down on the amount of processing and data transfer that may otherwise be required.
For example, one need only think of the overhead involved in simple lookup of an ontology or dictionary for every concept or word in a collection of several million documents, where numerous requests are received to process that collection: lookup is one of the more straightforward mechanisms of text mining, but the scale of the task here is the point at issue, within a national service.
Users may in fact prefer or have to use distributed high-speed processing facilities for large-scale processing rather than their desktop PC.
In this case, it is essential to consider portals, GRID capabilities, and access to hosts capable of handling high-dimensional data for the academic community.
We thus, in the national service, face a challenge typically irrelevant to or unaddressed by many current text mining systems: the need to provide scalable, robust, efficient and rapidly responsive services for very large collections that will be the target of many simultaneous requests, in a processing workflow where each process may have to consult massively large-scale resources, manage massive amounts of intermediate results and take advantage wherever possible of sophisticated optimisation mechanisms, distributed and parallel computing techniques.
Then again, we must do all this while further recognising the need of many users for security and confidentiality especially with respect to the high-level fact extraction and data mining results that they obtain, which leads us naturally into consideration of secure portals and management of levels of sharing of intermediate data and results.
Development work at NaCTeM will thus be emphasising scalability and efficiency issues, in an environment where different levels of access may need to be managed relative to certain types of intermediate data and results.
Moreover, as we recognise that there are many different types of text mining, and that a user may not be interested at any one time in all stages, just in some sub-set (e.g.
the user may want to stop after applying IR, term extraction and fact extraction processes, or may want simply to do sentence splitting, tokenisation and document zoning), we do not intend to offer a monolithic service consisting of a single workflow of mandatory tools.
It is rather our intention to offer flexibility and the potential to reconfigure workflows as required.
Hence, we shall be investing effort in elaborating a model that will allow flexible combination of components (tools and resources) to achieve some text mining task, in a GRID or otherwise distributed environment.
This further implies a strong interest in standards: adopting appropriate standards or pushing the development of de facto standards where required.
For the user, the advantage is that third party tools and resources, along with the user's own components, can be integrated in a distributed workflow, assuming interface standards are adhered to (e.g.
Web services, although with linguistic processing we must remember that standards are required at the linguistic level, not just at the transport protocol level, to ensure that linguistic data tags and attributes, for example, are consistently labeled and interpreted).
We must also not forget that there are many types of user of a national service, and that we must support therefore the expert bioinformatician who is conversant with construction and deployment of components as much as the user who is a domain expert but has no knowledge of or interest in how things work: but a keen interest in getting appropriate results with modest effort in reasonable time.
We shall thus also be working to develop environments that will guide users in the identification of appropriate components and resources, or indeed overall off-the-shelf workflows, to accomplish their text mining task.
This may well involve an initial interaction with an environment to figure out what the scope of the text mining task is, what kind of facts are being sought, what kind of associations should be looked for, and so on.
Our partners from the University of Geneva have long experience in designing and applying quality in use evaluation techniques to guide users in making appropriate choices of natural language processing tools to suit their needs and they will be working closely with us in this area.
As discussed above, term management is a crucial activity in text mining and one that is not at all well handled by the majority of text mining systems.
We will be working to render scalable the highly successful ATRACT (Automatic Term Recognition and Clustering for Terms) terminology management system of the University of Salford [10], which is based on a proven, language-independent hybrid statistical and linguistic approach, and to integrate it in text mining workflows.
Ontology-based information extraction is currently in its infancy, at least insofar as sophisticated use of ontologies of events is concerned.
Our development work here will focus on developing the University of Manchester's CAFETIERE (Conceptual Annotation of Events, Terms, Individual Entities and RElations) information extraction system to take full advantage of distributed and parallel computing, to render it scalable, and to augment its caching and data reuse capabilities.
CAFETIERE is a rule-based analyser whose rules can access user ontologies of entities and events: facts are extracted from texts by looking for instances of entities that participate in ontological events.
The onus of rule writing is much reduced by this approach, as the rule writer can write fewer and more generally applicable rules thanks to the efforts of ontology building by others: there is thus a direct, beneficial relationship between the world of ontology construction and the world of information extraction.
CAFETIERE can, moreover, perform temporal information extraction, which is important not only for text mining of ephemera (newswires for competitive intelligence purposes) but also for any domain where there is volatility of terminology, of knowledge, as we see in the biobibliome: there is a need to anchor extracted facts temporally with respect to the terminology used and the state of knowledge at the time.
This has a further bearing on curation of data over time and the relationship between a future user's state of knowledge and terminological vocabulary and those of the archived texts being analysed.
CAFETIERE is in fact a complex package of individual components including tokenisers, part of speech taggers, named entity recognisers, etc.
Each of these will be made available for separate use.
The University of Liverpool and UCB have jointly developed a third-generation online IR system, Cheshire, based on national and international standards and in use by a wide variety of national services and projects throughout the UK.
The software addresses the need for developing and implementing advanced networking technologies required to support digital library services and online learning environments.
We will use Cheshire to harvest and index data using an advanced clustering technique which will enable items to be interlinked automatically and retrieved quickly.
This will include Cheshire support as a cross-protocol data harvester and as a transformation engine operating in a distributed, highly parallel environment.
Development work on Cheshire will concentrate on meeting the IR needs of text mining, with particular work on advanced indexing and retrieval, focusing on metadata, on improved index term weighting, on search interfaces, and on ontology management.
A key development will be the use of the SKIDL (SDSC Knowledge and Information Discovery Lab) toolkit and Cheshire to enhance index term weighting approaches in an automatic text retrieval context, by combining Latent Semantic Analysis with probabilistic retrieval methods to yield salient text fragments as input for following information extraction components.
The SKIDL data mining toolkit will be integrated not only to allow data mining over classic information extraction results, but also to associate biological entities, such as parsed genome data with bioscientific texts and bibliographic data.
The primary advantage is that Cheshire will be able to support hybrid text mining (e.g.
from a journal and from textual representations of DNA) in a transparent and efficient manner.
Data mining techniques have traditionally been used in domains that have structured data, such as customer relationship management in banking and retail.
The focus of these techniques is the discovery of unknown but useful knowledge that is hidden within such data.
Text mining extends this role to the semi-structured and unstructured world of textual documents.
Text mining has been defined as 'the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information from different written resources' [11].
Mining techniques are thus used to link together in a variety of ways the entities extracted from the IE activity.
A number of approaches are possible: for example, clustering is an unsupervised technique that produces groupings of related entities based on similarity criteria; classification is a supervised technique that learns from instances, for example, of user-classified documents of different types to auto-classify unseen documents; and association rules enumerate the frequency of occurrences of sets of entities, and in particular can derive the likelihood of a document containing specific entities given that the document is known to contain another entity.
Conclusions The services provided by NaCTeM will not all be available instantly.
It will be appreciated that the configuration and deployment of a range of scalable, efficient text mining services cannot happen overnight.
Work is planned over 3 years, with increasing evolution towards full service capability.
Initially, while development work is under way, we will be acting partially as a clearing house, catalogue and repository for third party, open source or GNU-licensed text mining tools, as a means of easily finding useful text mining tools and resources on the Web; and as an advice, consultancy and training centre.
As our infrastructural text mining tools are developed, these will be released when appropriate for test purposes in order to gain feedback, before being fully deployed.
At present, we are in the setting-up and requirements gathering phase.
Throughout, close contacts will be established and maintained with the target user community, to ensure that needs and requirements are met, and that the range of possibilities for text mining is communicated and discussed in sufficient measure to inform the requirements gathering process.
We also actively invite contact and discussion with potential users of text mining services from all other domains, as it is part of our remit to reach out to users in other areas in expectation and preparation of future evolution to serve their needs.
Our events calendar testifies to the range of contacts we have had, presentations given and workshops attended thus far and we fully expect this activity to grow, given the high degree of interest that has been generated in the community in the centre's aims and activities.
References Blaschke, C., Hirschman, L. & Valencia, A.
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Information Extraction in Molecular Biology.
Briefings in Bioinformatics, 3(2): 154-165.
Bretonnel Cohen, K. and Hunter, L. (in press) Natural Language Processing and Systems Biology.
In Dubitzky and Pereira (eds) Artificial intelligence methods and tools for systems biology.
Springer Verlag.
Hirschman, L., Park, J., Tsujii, J., Wong, L. & Wu, C. 2002.
Accomplishments and Challenges in Literature Data Mining for Biology, in Bioinformatics, vol.
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1553-1561 MEDLINE.
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Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/ Krauthammer, M. & Nenadic, G. (2004) Term Identification in the Biomedical Literature, in Ananiadou, S., Friedman, C. & Tsujii, J.
(eds) Special Issue on Named Entity Recognition in Biomedicine, Journal of Biomedical Informatics.
Ananiadou, S., 2004: Challenges of term extraction in biomedical texts, available at: http://www.pdg.cnb.uam.es/BioLink/workshop_BioCreative_04/handout/ Jacquemin, C., 2001: Spotting and Discovering Terms through NLP, MIT Press, Cambridge MA Ananiadou, S., Friedman, C. & Tsujii, J (eds) (2004) Named Entity Recognition in Biomedicine, Special Issue, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, vol.
37 (6) GENIA, 2004: GENIA resources available at : http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~genia/ Mima, H., Ananiadou, S. & Nenadic, G. (2001) The ATRACT Workbench: Automatic term recognition and clustering for terms.
In Matousek, V., Mautner, P., Moucek, R. and Tauser, K.
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Text, Speech and Dialogue.
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2166.
Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, 126 133.
Hearst, M., 2003: What is Text Mining?
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hearst/text-mining.html, October 2003.
Author Details Sophia Ananiadou Reader, School of Computing, Science and Engineering University of Salford Email: S.Ananiadou@salford.ac.uk Web site: http://www.cse.salford.ac.uk/nlp/ Julia Chruszcz MIMAS University of Manchester Email: julia.chruszcz@man.ac.uk John Keane Professor, School of Informatics University of Manchester Email: john.keane@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.co.umist.ac.uk/research/group_dde.php John McNaught School of Informatics University of Manchester Email: john.mcnaught@manchester.ac.uk Paul Watry Projects Manager Special Collections and Archives University of Liverpool Email: p.b.watry@liverpool.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "The National Centre for Text Mining: Aims and Objectives" Author: Sophia Ananiadou, Julia Chruszcz, John Keane, John McNaught and Paul Watry Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/ananiadou/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 49: Technology Is Only Part of the Story Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 49: Technology Is Only Part of the Story Buzz data wiki database portal metadata identifier repositories video cataloguing streaming aacr2 flash ebook frbr research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 49.
It was rather pleasantly brought to my attention a little while back that Ariadne has made its own small contribution to the various discussions in respect of institutional repositories when I noticed a very kind acknowledgement of the Magazine from the authors of The Institutional Repository as I set about organising its review.
Indeed those readers who have seen the review will have noted the references to related articles, some indeed by the very same authors.
But it may be worth remarking that while the discussions have revolved around the technical advantages of one system over another, (equally there has been much discussion about mandating of content and other issues) we are also now interested in the whole strategy of encouraging people to use them.
Over part of that period I have been in regular correspondence with Shigeki SUGITA of Hokkaido University Library about the use of Ariadne articles in this area and I have been delighted to learn that they have been translated and of benefit to him and his colleagues.
It was more than apparent when he and Masako SUZUKI visited UKOLN at the University of Bath recently that he and his colleagues had been extremely busy, and successful, promoting the usefulness of Hokaido University's own repository.
Indeed we already had the evidence before us since Masako SUZUKI and Shigeki SUGITA had described Hokkaido University's efforts to populate its institutional repository with journal articles in From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project.
What strikes one is that the key to their strategy lies in their industrious face-to-face awareness programme and the constant contact with their target audience all very human.
It is also clear that the HUSCAP Project did not achieve momentum without a degree of flexibility and the application of some sensible basic psychology.
Despite its basis in a very sophisticated and scientific marketing approach, Heleen Gierveld's article Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository appears to identify the problems and the solutions to populating a repository in some of the same terms.
It is interesting to note that she too mentions the Sherpa/Romeo database, and the University of Rochester while, like our colleagues at Hokkaido, recognising that the researchers themselves are central to the success of any campaign to encourage take-up of an institutional repository.
Furthermore Heleen writes, 'To summarise the marketing challenge of the IR somewhat controversially: Scientists need to act in order to make the IR 'product' successful, yet it is a product which they did not ask for in the first place.'
Here she has of course identified the conundrum which, in their own way, the Hokkaido librarians recognised: the success of the repository is far more about human involvement than the fact that it works and that, rationally speaking, it is a Good Thing.
It is only when the perception of researchers and scientists alters such that the existing barriers cease to be important that progress will be made.
Heleen demonstrates in her own way that getting to know properly the group you need to convince is an essential element in her strategy: 'The IR is a novel, complex product, still under development and subject to overall changes in the scholarly communication process.
For this reason it is also important to consult scientists and if possible, involve them in the development of an IR.
After all, only scientists can actually tell what constitutes a real asset to them.'
In asking Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?, Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim discuss the history and merits of using Creative Commons licences which seem to be empowering rights holders with the knowledge and tools to decide under what terms they will permit third parties to use their work.
The authors point however to the fact that there are critics of Creative Commons licences despite their apparent popularity, critics who point to issues surrounding the ethics, legality and politics of their use.
They point to how the validity of using Creative Commons within teaching, learning and research has been subject to re-examination and consider Creative Commons and their use in Higher and Further Education.
They look into the circumstances in which Creative Commons licences may be considered fit for purpose, or otherwise, looking at instances that may encourage Higher and Further Education institutions to reconsider using Creative Commons licences.
I am exceedingly grateful to Brian Whalley who has picked up the baton of e-books from my former colleague Penny Garrod and outlines in his article e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?
some developments in e-book technologies and links them to existing ways of presenting textbook information.
In what I would describe as a telling tour d'horizon, Brian takes us round issues such as the latest hardware for the purposes of reading e-books but also covers books, magazines and scholarly monographs together with reusable educational objects, digital asset repositories and management systems.
He also points to the emergence and potential of PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) and examines Wikipedia, 'portal wikis' and wiki-books.
Brian also gives his views on the current position of publishers and their textbooks, all which prompts him to speculate about the likely nature of future e-textbooks and express the hope that their integration with other elements into a more diverse and user-friendly system 'offers a better student experience than 'chalk, talk and a textbook'.
Moreover readers who will have been interested in Brian's remarks on wikis will doubtless be drawn to the article by Marieke Guy who asks Wiki or Won't He?
A Tale of Public Sector Wikis in response to recent sightings in the press of the emergence of the public service wiki.
Marieke takes a dispassionate view of these claims and goes on to consider the wider issues of the barriers to participation in this collaborative tool while also pointing to the potential that wikis truly represent, albeit as yet not entirely understood.
In her article on RDA: A New International Standard, Ann Chapman gives the background to cataloguing rules in general but also points out that something more than just a third edition of the AACR (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules) rules is being generally recognised as necessary, and hence the planned move to RDA (Resource Description and Access).
A 1998 IFLA study on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) produced a conceptual model of entities, relationships and attributes that are independent of communications formats or data structure.
The latter point is at the base of the drive to revise the current rules.
Ann points out that the challenge of incorporating this model and its concepts into the new cataloguing rules was a contributory factor in the decision to create RDA in preference to a revision of AACR2.
In GROW: Building a High-quality Civil Engineering Learning Object Repository and Portal Yan Han provides a general overview of the Geotechnical, Rock and Water Digital Library and demonstrates GROW's role as a learning object repository while covering metadata standards, related authority control, and learning objects using Flash technology.
The author describes the design philosophy with regard to learning objects and the associated hierarchical structure of granularity.
I am indebted to Roddy MacLeod for his good offices in commissioning this contribution.
As long-standing readers of Ariadne will have noticed, the Magazine no longer carries a discrete section for the decidedly technical articles on new technologies and the nitty gritty of how they are installed, configured or used.
However, as editors will know, there are few editorial fates worse than a regular section that you cannot easily fill, since for editors commissioning is the invisible part of the iceberg.
Nonetheless I am very happy to point out here and now that Ariadne will continue to seek and accept articles on the use of new tools and technologies whenever we can persuade our technical colleagues to pick up the figurative pen and put it to virtual paper.
There is no distinction in my mind between these more technical contributions and the majority of our main articles, hence my decision to amalgamate the two.
In this issue Greg Tourte and Emma Tonkin describe in Video Streaming of Events the set-up and use of video streaming technology at the recent IWMW 2006 event.
Working to a budget and mindful of a plethora of constraints including licensing, the type of filming involved and a host of other matters, the authors came up with a solution for readers' consideration together with some background to the technologies involved.
It is hoped this article will engender interest and contributions from other colleagues with an eye on this field.
In his article on the latest developments from the search giant, Phil Bradley asks Is Google Building on Shaky Foundations?
and proceeds to investigate the most recent offerings from Google while comparing them against many of the products and services that he has covered in his columns for Ariadne over the years.
Phil rightly points out the high degree to which Google has penetrated the search engine market and the degree to which users make use of its search services.
However he may be wisely seen, and no disrespect here, as the slave, according to Tertullian, who follows the Roman Emperor and ever and anon whispered in the ear of the Imperator the warning words "Respice post te, hominem memento te" [1]; the 'post te' being most apposite given Phil's identification of the services coming up behind.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on essential law for information professionals, ambient findability (which the author says 'describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.')
and an instructor's guide to developing and running successful distance learning classes.
In addition of course we provide our section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 49.
References 'Look behind you, remember you are human.'
From 'Triumphus', article by William Ramsay, M.A., Professor of Humanity, University of Glasgow, on pp1163-7 of William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1875, London, John Murray http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Triumphus.html Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 49: Technology Is Only Part of the Story" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 46: Ten Years of Pathfinding Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 46: Ten Years of Pathfinding Buzz software framework digitisation blog video cataloguing ejournal rae url research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl, Lorcan Dempsey and John Kirriemuir reflect in turn on the rationale and history of the founding of Ariadne.
Ten Years of Pathfinding John MacColl reflects upon the choice of Ariadne’s name in the light of the publication’s guiding mission.
The Follett Report [1] which started everything off, appeared in December 1993.
When the subsequent JISC call for proposals for electronic library project activity appeared in the summer of 1994, I was only a few months into my new post as a Depute Librarian at Britain’s newest (and probably smallest) university, the University of Abertay Dundee.
We were keen to let people know we existed, and anxious to be associated with e-library developments, and so we formulated a proposal for a parallel print and Web newsletter for the emerging Programme, soon to be called eLib.
My eldest son was six at the time, and one of his favourite books was The Orchard Book of Greek Myths.
I remember, as I struggled to think of a name for our proposed newsletter, fetching the book from his bookshelf in order to refresh my memory of the Ariadne story the unjust reward of abandonment for her cleverness in helping Theseus out of the labyrinth with her thread only assuaged in the final paragraph when Theseus meets his own unhappy fate.
The notion of the Internet as a labyrinth was a common one at that time, and we librarians fretted about how difficult it could be to find exactly what you were looking for on the Internet, even as we were aware of the beginnings of the flight of content to networked digital form.
Those were the early days of the Web, and although search engines existed (but not Google, at that point), today’s notion of everyone and everything having a Web presence was still far off.
As a community dedicated to discovery, Ariadne seemed an appropriate symbol for us to adopt as we moved our users and our content onto the net.
She was also an appropriate symbol for an electronic library programme which sought to guide the profession towards the future we partly inhabit now, where everyone can be a Web publisher, content is found around every bend (though sometimes behind a locked door), and the Minotaur may be a rampaging publisher, software house, or ad-supported search engine, depending on where we are trying to go.
Ten years and 46 issues later, I think it is fair to assume that Ariadne has been a success.
Many people have been associated with that success.
The original ‘Gang of Four’ consisted of John Kirriemuir and Lorcan Dempsey at UKOLN, and Alison Kilgour and me at Abertay.
John departed after 10 issues to be followed by a succession of Web Editors at UKOLN Isobel Stark, Philip Hunter, Bernadette Daly and (at least for one issue), Marieke Guy (née Napier).
Brian Kelly also provided strong support.
At Abertay, Alison and I were helped over the print production for the first three years by Terry Burns and Alison Ure.
Lyndon Pugh became print editor for the third year of the parallel publication (which was granted us by an eLib funding extension), and he and I tried our best to keep the print version going beyond that year, but unfortunately we couldn’t find the means to fund it, and moving to a subscription basis for a publication which was already free on the Web was simply too risky a strategy.
We had to abandon Ariadne’s printed expression, therefore, but she shrugged it off without any damage to her essential spirit, and carried on as before.
UKOLN has done a great job in making the Web version a core part of its business, and I am grateful to Liz Lyon, its current Director, for maintaining the focus.
Special thanks are due also to Philip Hunter, whose stint as editor lasted a record-breaking five and a half years, and the present incumbent, Richard Waller, who has now been doing the job excellently for two and a half.
I would also like to thank Lorcan for contributing a huge range of interests and a network of many important thinkers, both of which helped Ariadne to be taken seriously by interested professionals across the world right from the outset.
Ariadne is ten years old, and she is still the best guide I know to what is going on in the digital library world.
There appears to be no suggestion of abandonment upon her horizon at the present time, and I hope she continues to delight for many years to come.
References Joint Funding Council’s Libraries Review Group: Report (The Follett Report) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ Author Details John MacColl Head, Digital Library Division Edinburgh University Library Email: john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/ Return to top The Ariadne Decade Lorcan Dempsey gives a concise and telling view of the part Ariadne has played within its community and looks to the future.
Ariadne first appeared in Web and print formats.
A high-quality magazine-style publication appeared on people’s desks, and an extended version appeared on the Web.
It met two needs: it provided both a general update on the progress of the eLib programme and related national information services, and a forum for reflection and discussion about changing times.
It was an important community-building tool.
In the intervening years, Ariadne has been an important venue.
The benefits of having an open, Web-based publication like this are enormous: articles can be shared with a URL and they are part of google-space.
Ariadne has connected people across projects and institutions, and has extended the discussion internationally.
Ariadne has been kept going by the efforts of successive editors, often working on other projects as well.
They are named above, and have made Ariadne consistently compelling with their enthusiasm and passion.
The changes we face at the end of the Ariadne decade are similar to those we anticipated at the beginning.
Then, we were about to experience the convergence of the Web and broad-based connectivity which has so changed our information, research and learning landscape.
We are now seeing the emergence of the programmable Web and the continuing reshaping of research and learning experiences in a shared network space.
As UKOLN and its funders plan for the next decade of Ariadne, it would be great to know that it will have a secure and expanded role to help us understand and discuss those changes.
It is time to consider again what the role of a community-building tool like this is, and to consider what resource is needed to support it as a vital part of the shared resource of UK research, learning and information support.
Author Details Lorcan Dempsey VP Research & Chief Strategist OCLC Email: dempseyl@oclc.org Web site: http://orweblog.oclc.org Return to top Bright Young Things John Kirriemuir reminisces about the launch of Ariadne, and charts the emergence of a new breed of library staff.
Getting Started Ariadne was a project within the eLib [1] Programme and quickly became a prime channel for publicising the progress and outcomes of other eLib projects.
Consequently, Ariadne and eLib were inextricably linked throughout the lifetime of the programme.
I was appointed web editor of Ariadne, with Lorcan Dempsey (Director of UKOLN) [2] as my line manager.
In 1995, Web or e-journals were thin on the ground, as were standards, guidelines, and many other frameworks now commonplace.
We started with, literally, a blank sheet (and an empty Web site), and a remit to report on eLib projects.
The launch, in particular, was problematic.
Many projects had nothing yet to report.
Some could find no one to write for Ariadne, as the appallingly slow procedures for hiring people within universities resulted in initial staffing problems for many projects.
Mechanisms for exchanging content between the print and Web versions had to be invented.
48 hours before the launch, only three pages of the Web version of issue 1 existed.
At this point, builders in the room above drilled through water pipes.
As it happened, water cascading down the wall just behind the PC and monitor was useful, as it focused the mind on completing the issue, having something to launch in front of an audience, and avoiding being electrocuted.
Ariadne relied heavily on content generated by other people, especially those working on eLib projects.
Obtaining content rapidly became easier.
With Chris Rusbridge [3] appointed Director of eLib, a strong emphasis was placed on projects publicising their successes, and also their problems, failures and lessons that could benefit the wider community.
Projects were regularly reminded that raising their profile would help in securing their continuation or extension through the JISC or other funding streams.
The result was that eLib aggressively publicised its progress, content, services and achievements like no UK digital library programme before or, arguably, since.
And so content arrived on the Ariadne editors’ desks.
By the fourth issue, it was gushing in, and by just issue 5 of the Web version, the contents page listed 54 items (compared to 21 in issue 1).
Mechanisms for managing the flow, content scheduling and timetabling had to be put in place.
However, by this time various patterns and trends among the articles being submitted were becoming apparent; one such trend concerned the demographic of the authors.
The Emergence of ‘Bright Young Things’ We soon noticed a trend emerging in many of the staff contributing content to Ariadne.
They tended to be young, often going straight from library school to work on an eLib project.
They also tended to be bright, not just intellectually but in attitude and even attire.
Some of these people were keen to write for Ariadne.
Others were pushed into it, as their project manager was often too busy, and their head librarian was shuttling between international conferences.
These young enthusiasts were spread thinly across the wide range of projects and programme areas.
However, through eLib’s many workshops and conferences, they were regularly brought together to share ideas, experiences and information.
A sense of ‘community’ emerged; after several days of meeting, swapping anecdotes and socialising, you could go back to your institution, confidence bolstered by knowing that there were similar people, doing similar things, in other libraries.
They, as individuals, were not alone.
The Bright Young Things (BYTs) had arrived.
BYTs and the Library Schools BYTs tended to be recently out of library schools clutching MAs or MScs in Librarianship or Information Science.
Certainly at Sheffield [4] in the earlyto mid-1990s, the MA courses emphasised a more traditional range of library skills, while the MSc course increasingly focused on technology-driven information retrieval and manipulation.
In the early 1990s, I was a researcher in the library school in Sheffield, involved in developing and tutoring a number of courses to supplement my income.
One such course was ‘Cataloguing in the Electronic Age’, an experimental notion taught by Nigel Ford and myself [5].
The students took to the course with almost frightening enthusiasm.
Many had an aptitude and keenness for grappling with digital information technologies and the issues they threw up.
It was clear that eLib, which began the next year, had arrived at the right time for students such as these; indeed, many of that year’s group from Sheffield eventually found themselves working on eLib projects.
From the ‘Cataloguing in the Electronic Age’ course alone, six students would eventually write articles for Ariadne over the next few years.
The relationship between the library schools and eLib worked in both ways.
The former supplied the latter with new staff, and several of the projects funded by eLib were based within the library schools.
Though (perhaps oddly) we never did a feature explicitly on the library schools, the tightly bound relationship between their presence and electronic library services in UK Higher Education is obvious in the authorship and content of many articles across all ten years of Ariadne.
Cuckoos and Monkeys Now qualified and employed by eLib projects, BYTs did not always have it easy.
Many projects were based within academic libraries, a situation not always enthusiastically embraced by all other staff.
One BYT and frequent contributor to Ariadne described feeling that his project was perceived as a ‘cuckoo in the nest’.
However, the energy of youth, a belief in what they were doing, and the community fostered by the eLib programme office helped build the confidence of many BYTs.
They became adept at justifying their project to the more cynical or change-resistant staff in their institution.
Producing parallel Web and print versions of Ariadne was a canny move that ‘covered all bases’.
From the perspective of cultural change, the dual-delivery model made Ariadne difficult to ignore.
Library staff with Luddite tendencies could ignore the Internet.
However, it was impossible to escape all mention of eLib, as the sanctuary of the staff common room often contained the print version of Ariadne.
On principle, BYTs in several university libraries ensured that these print copies remained prominently on display.
As an Ariadne ‘roving reporter’, I attended a wide variety of public and academic library and information science events.
The Internet was not welcomed with open arms, despite the likes of Brian Kelly evangelising about its usefulness.
Even in 1995 and early 1996, speakers would query whether online services, or the Internet, should play a role in academic libraries, and even whether such things should be allowed inside the building.
However, BYTs were often unafraid to counter this argument vocally, pointing out that such services were now a necessity and not a luxury, and that there was an increasing expectation of their availability.
Crucially, BYTs were not afraid to query long-established, or traditional, principles within the library sector: ‘Why do we still do it this way, especially as it’s easier to do it online?’.
By the end of 1996 the argument was largely won; debate regarding the use of online digital services, resources and content shifted from ‘Should we?’ to ‘How should we?’.
Where Art Thou, Now?
What happened to the BYTs who contributed so much to eLib projects (and Ariadne), and helped to change the culture in the UK academic library sector?
Many eLib project officers still work in university libraries, as directors, service managers and in other ranks of management.
What I wrote at the end of 1998 still holds true, seven years later: ‘eLib projects have directly employed several hundred people, and indirectly several hundred more.
Many of these people now work in useful positions in museums, universities, colleges, publishers and other organisations, with the skills, contacts and knowledge gained through their eLib days.’ [6] Alumni boards, Google searches, and existing networks of contacts reveal that the BYTs have moved successfully into many other industries.
Aeronautics, engineering, the medical sector, the military, video games, the arts, farming and fishing; ex-eLib BYTs are employed in these sectors in roles involving IT and digital information management.
Several ex-BYTs who have remained in libraries speak of the increasing need to justify the services of their library against a variety of online services, especially Google.
In this regard, the skills they learnt, and thick skins they developed as ‘cuckoos,’ are becoming useful again.
For the future: library schools are still producing BYTs, who will gain employment on new and existing digital library services and projects.
And it is here where the web version of Ariadne is still an essential component of the sector.
New developments, projects, standards, content, services and resources need publicising, to raise awareness amongst BYTs and others.
BYTs can ‘cut their teeth’ on writing about their service or project in Ariadne, helping to raise their personal profile and gain some authoring experience before tackling peer-reviewed papers as part of the next RAE.
Epilogue: ‘Cultural Change’ Did It?
So did eLib (and, with it, Ariadne) cause the prevailing culture to change?
The loftiest goal of eLib was ironically the hardest to measure, which led to much debate, research [7] and conjecture [6].
However, there was clear evidence that some things did change: The image of a librarian being averse to technology, was buried.
The image of academic libraries being solely about books and journals was buried.
Publishers found themselves having to engage deeply with libraries on many aspects of electronic content access, delivery and pricing.
Many people in Higher Education were ‘tooled up’ in information technology skills and knowledge.
Partially through Ariadne, debate was engaged and made public on issues such as standards, information quality, access to digital content, and charging mechanisms.
Subject specialisation became, and remained, a focal point in digital content discovery and delivery.
For example, many of the subject gateways [8] would continue to thrive, even in an increasingly Google-obsessed world.
Ten years on, the gateways (now hubs) are undergoing another transformation, reorganising into four subject groupings and merging their hardware and software platforms in order to sharpen their delivery and extend their longevity.
Would these changes have happened without eLib?
Possibly, due to the awareness of the technology and the changes in other countries.
But would they have happened to such an extent, and so rapidly?
Unlikely.
As a concluding point, eLib cost roughly 20 million pounds; even allowing for inflation, this pales into insignificance compared with a number of national digitisation, information access and management initiatives over the last decade.
Considering the number of skills generated by the programme, the quantity of content and services that are still available, and the influence on (and cultural change within) the academic, library and publishing sectors, eLib arguably exceeded all other similar initiatives in terms of value for money.
References eLib: The Electronic Libraries Programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ Lorcan Dempsey: portrait.
From Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog, 21 October 2005. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000834.html Chris Rusbridge becomes Director of the Digital Curation Centre.
Edinburgh BITS, April 2005. http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/bits/2005/april_2005/item2.html Alumni of Library School students (and other people) from the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield.
http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/people/alumni.html Kirriemuir, J., Ford, N., “Cataloguing in the Electronic Age: future librarians’ cataloguing of Internet Resources”, Vine, 99 June 1995, p.55-60.
Abstract at: http://www.aslib.co.uk/caa/abstracts/open/95-1739.html Kirriemuir, J., “eLib: Was it good for you?“, Ariadne 18, December 1998 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue18/elib-review/ Davies, C., Scammell, A., Hall, M., “eLib: Changing the Lightbulb er, the Culture”, Ariadne 10, July 1997 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/cultural/ Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Author Details John Kirriemuir Consultant Silversprite Berneray Outer Hebrides Email: john at silversprite.com Web site: http://www.silversprite.com/ Return to top A Word of Thanks You may have noticed a change or two in Ariadne and there will be more.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank John MacColl and Lorcan Dempsey for the unstinting support they have given as chief editors of this special issue, a project which began many months ago.
Their advice and the input they have devoted to this decennial issue has been invaluable.
I would like to thank all the current authors for their enthusiasm and above all, time.
The editor advises: In addition to the specially commissioned main articles we offer, as usual, our At the Event section, and reviews on a slightly broader spectrum of topics than is usual to reflect the broader approach the decennial issue is taking generally.
We are also pleased to welcome a further addition by Patrick Lauke to our Get Tooled Up section.
In addition of course we provide our customary selection of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Decennial Issue 46.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Editorial Introduction to Issue 46: Ten Years of Pathfinding” Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The OpenURL and OpenURL Framework: Demystifying Link Resolution Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The OpenURL and OpenURL Framework: Demystifying Link Resolution Buzz data software framework database portfolio rss xml usability infrastructure archives metadata doi standardisation identifier schema repositories oai-pmh syndication ejournal soap personalisation openurl shibboleth z39.88 authentication interoperability cookie research standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Ann Apps reports on a conference about current and future uses of the proposed OpenURL Framework Standard Z39.88-2004.
The Event at a Glance Welcome Pat Harris The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services Standard Eric Van de Velde The Promise and History of the OpenURL Oliver Pesch Related Linking Standards: CrossRef and DOI Ed Pentz Why Should Publishers Implement the OpenURL Framework?
Andrew Pace Panel 1: Link Resolvers Explained Panel 2: Practical Perspectives for Librarians Translating Your Needs into Visions for the Future Herbert Van de Sompel Questions This one-day conference, held by NISO (US National Information Standards Organization) on Wednesday 29 October at the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC, USA, attended by 150 people, was so popular it was ‘sold out’ a week before the event.
It was held ‘back to back’ with a Metasearch conference the following day, a substantial majority attending both conferences.
The largest proportion of attendees were librarians but vendors of library systems and publishers were also well represented.
Some of the librarians already have OpenURL resolvers, whereas others were there to find out what is involved in hosting such a resolver and the benefits of doing so.
Most participants were from the US, but there were also attendees from places as far afield as New Zealand, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and the UK.
The workshop programme was comprehensive covering both existing OpenURL technologies and the new proposed OpenURL Framework standard (Z39.88-2004) [1] [2].
Speakers gave the perspectives of librarians, publishers, resolver vendors, and ‘home-grown’ resolver developers, as well as various aspects of the OpenURL Framework.
Following are brief reports of each of the talks during the day.
The PowerPoint presentations and details of the sponsors of the event are available from the NISO Web site [3].
Welcome Pat Harris, Executive Director, NISO Pat welcomed attendees to the workshop which she introduced as part of the new era of standards development.
New publishing and delivery methods have increased the expectation from users of services provided.
Standards are not static, cast in concrete, but are organic, responsive and collaborative.
Standards development by a committee involves many complex steps between brain-storming to final writing, such as requirements setting, problem solving and consensus building, not forgetting of course socialising (and in my case travelling!)
The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services Standard Eric Van de Velde, Director of Library Information Technology, California Institute of Technology Eric, the chair of the NISO Committee AX that has developed the OpenURL Framework standard, formally handed over the finished Standard to Pat Harris for NISO, and introduced the members of the committee in attendance at the workshop.
The committee held its final meeting on the two days preceding the conference and unanimously agreed to freeze version 1.0 of the OpenURL Framework apart from some minor editing.
Pat announced that the standard will now be copy edited.
It should be released in January 2004 for ballot to NISO voting members.
It will then also be available for public review, reflecting NISO’s commitment to a transparent, open process for standards development.
It is expected that a Registration Agency to manage the OpenURL Registry [4] will be appointed in the first quarter of 2004.
The latest version of the OpenURL Framework standard is available on the NISO Committee AX Web site, along with the Implementation Guidelines for the KEV (Key/Encoded-Value) format [5].
The Promise and History of the OpenURL Oliver Pesch, Chief Architect and Senior Vice-President, EBSCO Publishing Oliver gave an overview of OpenURL 1.0, indicating its advantages with new features making it much improved over the old, draft version 0.1 [6].
He described the history of linking development from early proprietary ‘within service’ linking to the new interoperable links expected, in fact demanded, by users.
Pre-defined links can be inconsistent and require complex management.
With a standard linking syntax like OpenURL it is only necessary to teach link resolvers how to link ‘out’ and teach services how to link to resolvers.
It also makes possible ‘appropriate copy’ linking so that users are not sent straight to a publisher’s site.
OpenURL is about communicating information not about what a resolver has to do.
The new OpenURL Framework is self-describing, meaning it can be extended without needing to redefine it.
Oliver showed how the simple draft OpenURL works aided by an ‘HTTP delivery truck’ on his Powerpoint presentation.
He then showed how the ContextObject has been introduced as an extensible framework, by changing the delivery truck into a flatbed truck that transports ContextObject containers.
At the point where the OpenURL Framework standard is agreed by NISO ballot, a maintenance agency and a registration agency can be set up.
Once this infrastructure is in place, people could facilitate interest groups to develop new applications and new profiles for new communities.
Related Linking Standards: CrossRef and DOI Ed Pentz, Executive Director, CrossRef Ed described Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) [7], including the current status of the DOI community, and how DOIs are used in the CrossRef [8] system for reference linking.
CrossRef is used by publishers to deposit XML metadata for content identified by DOIs.
They also use it to retrieve DOIs for references in journal articles in order to embed DOI links with those references.
Secondary databases and ‘Abstracting and Indexing’ services use CrossRef to create links from abstract records to full text articles.
Libraries, who now have free access to CrossRef, use it to discover DOIs from metadata, and also to look up metadata from DOIs.
But there are administrative issues with libraries at present and more automation is needed.
End users use CrossRef when they click on DOI links, and they are able to find DOIs using a free Web form on the CrossRef site.
It is now even possible to search by DOI in Google.
Ed described how DOIs and OpenURL can work together.
It is proposed that in future OpenURL will be the main way to interoperate with DOI services.
Why Should Publishers Implement the OpenURL Framework?
Andrew Pace, Head of Systems, North Carolina State University (Or: ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love standards’) ’ “Because” is “because” good enough for you?‘.
Libraries are constrained by their budgets and so have a big interest in getting their people to the content they pay for.
Hence the libraries’ interest in OpenURL.
Publishers will include linking if the libraries want it.
But why should publishers care?
‘What goes round comes around’.
Links are reciprocal, some going back to the publishers, especially with metasearching, which needs standard data too.
So ultimately OpenURL is to the publishers’ benefit also.
And reciprocity works.
It may seem like a gamble to the publishers, but in fact there will be as many users coming in as going out.
If this is not the case, it is not the fault of OpenURL but rather the fault of the content.
But NISO needs to do some more publicity to publishers to encourage them to implement OpenURL linking.
Panel: Link Resolvers Explained Oren Beit-Arie, President, Information Services Division, Ex Libris (USA) Oren described the functionality of generic link resolvers, not specifically SFX, although inevitably his examples were from SFX.
Before the introduction of link resolvers, libraries had little say in how linking was done, but were involved in high maintenance of proprietary linking solutions.
Libraries have expensive collections that were not being used optimally so users were not being well served.
OpenURL makes possible links that are not hard-wired.
The OpenURL linking workflow for users is: from link source; to link server menu; to link target.
The link server menu is under a library’s control with many possibilities of customisation.
It is even possible for a library to implement direct linking, where a user doesn’t see the link server menu at all, and in the OpenURL Framework there is the possibility of this being requested as a service type.
The OpenURL Framework now introduces the possibility of server-to-server rather than menu-based linking.
Currently there are: 10+ commercial link servers, plus some home-grown ones; hundreds of resources actively using OpenURLs; hundreds or thousands of institutions with link servers; so hundreds of thousands of users are benefiting.
The growth has been frightening.
At the heart of a resolver is the knowledge base, where a library’s collections are defined, thus enabling a resolver to determine appropriate services for a user.
The knowledge base contains information about: potential services; collections; rules.
A resolver generally includes the capability of augmenting data where metadata is sparse or of poor quality.
The resolver has to de-reference identifiers and by-reference metadata, for example fetching metadata from DOIs.
The knowledge base will normalise and enhance the metadata provided by a link source, for instance determining a journal ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), which is not usually included in a reference, or expanding abbreviated journal titles.
For a service to be a target in a knowledge base it must have a defined ‘link-to’ syntax.
Currently a ‘link-to’ standard is missing but some services are adopting OpenURL for this.
Also targets are lacking a standard for description of their collections, such as details of packages and date ranges.
Source services should provide good metadata.
Currently most services are based on institutional affiliation.
For the future, more granular attributes of the user are needed, for example is the user: faculty, thus entitled to ILL (Inter-Library Loan); technical services; undergraduate; etc?
Personalisation of services would make them really context-sensitive.
Information about the requester is currently passed in environment variables, such as IP address, cookies, or certificates.
More sophisticated authentication frameworks such as Shibboleth are being developed and details could be passed in the ContextObject’s requester entity.
The knowledge base describes an institution’s collection.
But collections can and will be distributed, rather than all being held at the home institution.
This introduces the need for a distributed rights evaluation model.
When knowledge bases become distributed it will be possible to use OpenURL to enable the interaction between link servers.
OpenURL could have other uses beyond linking.
It could be used for document delivery, for instance, to query a link server to find holdings information including print versions.
Such functionality could use multiple ContextObjects to return results.
Link servers could be seen as a library’s central repository: of ejournal subscriptions; of A-Z journal listings; providing an OpenURL generator for end-users; to populate OPACS; to integrate with research or course materials and tools; to become the centre piece of ERM (Electronic Records Management) systems.
Mark Needleman, Product Manager Standards, SIRSI Corporation Mark talked about ‘Implementing an OpenURL Resolver Challenges and Opportunities’.
Why should a library system vendor implement a link server?
It assists integration between the library system and the link server, providing more opportunity for customisation, and better support.
The challenges with resolvers are: keeping the knowledge base up-to-date; keeping up-to-date records of ‘link-to’ syntaxes; dealing with variations in source data; providing services; maintaining relationships.
The OpenURL Framework introduces new opportunities and challenges: standardisation of data elements; expanded scope of linking opportunities; a larger set of services becoming possible; a potential for new applications such as linking to simulations of scientific experiments.
Until now OpenURL has been seen as an end-user system but there are now possibilities for its use as server-to-server communication.
Matt Goldner, Executive Vice-President, Fretwell-Downing Informatics Matt highlighted the need for co-operation in future developments with: The NISO Metasearch initiative.
This involves six working groups on: meta search identifiers; access management; collection descriptions; search options; result-set metadata; and statistics.
In the area of result-set metadata, currently content providers are sending citation data in proprietary ways, meaning separate parsing rules in resolvers, and citations that work with one vendor and not another.
Again it was highlighted that data quality is an issue.
OpenURL is only as good as the metadata provided by a source The NISO/EDItEUR joint working party.
They are developing an XML schema to standardise the format of data for population of a knowledge base Vendor to vendor relations.
We’re gradually moving into an interoperable world.
Standards help to solve problems.
A free flow of information is critical Panel: Practical Perspectives for Librarians on Link Resolver Selection, Implementation, Maintenance, Usability and User Education Link Resolver Selection and Implementation Frances Knudson, Research Library, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Frances described the selection and setting up of a link resolver at LANL.
Before selecting a resolver it is necessary to: list the collections in the library’s electronic portfolio, ranking the importance of the resources; list the services you want to provide; and decide on the level of customisation and control you want and are able to provide.
It is important to involve the whole library team because this will be a core product of the library and not just part of the systems department.
After selection, staff training and system testing are very important, as is its introduction to users through focus groups and user support.
Once a resolver is in place, usage statistics are vital to see how its use can be improved, as well as usage levels of particular sources and targets.
The Link Resolver Do-It-Yourself Option Thomas Dowling, Assistant Director of Library Systems, Client/ServerApplications for OhioLINK, the Ohio Library and Information Network Thomas described the development of a ‘home-grown’ resolver within an environment where all major resources are hosted locally.
Part of the reason for building their own resolver was budget constraints.
The option of total customisability was also a consideration.
One of the major issues is maintaining the knowledge base.
The software will be released as open source soon, but it is unlikely to include a significant knowledge base of pre-loaded data.
If they were looking at the issue now they may consider going for a customisable vendor solution.
Using the Enhanced OpenURL Framework: Upgrading from Version 0.1 to 1.0 Ann Apps, MIMAS, University of Manchester, UK This talk was based on the OpenURL Framework Implementation Guidelines for the KEV format.
I described the OpenURL Framework with emphasis on its support for the scholarly information community, where OpenURL began, with the San Antonio Profiles.
I illustrated the talk with examples of OpenURL linking in the zetoc [9] current awareness and document delivery service showing how existing version 0.1 OpenURLs can be upgraded simply to version 1.0 using San Antonio Profile, Key/Encoded-Value, Inline OpenURLs.
I briefly discussed the OpenURL Framework trial and zetoc’s part in that.
Examples from the zetoc OpenURL Trial application demonstrated the viability of using hybrid (version 0.1 and version 1.0) OpenURLs during the transition period when it will be difficult for information sources to determine whether all their users’ resolvers have been upgraded.
Then I gave some pointers to conformance requirements on both referrers and resolvers.
How Should Link Servers and Metasearch Work Together Eric Hellman, President, Openly Informatics Eric showed some of the similarities and differences between the functionality of OpenURLs and metasearching.
He suggested ways they could be working together by giving each other ‘a big hug’.
Translating Your Needs into Visions for the Future Herbert Van de Sompel, Digital Library Research and Prototyping, Los Alamos National Laboratory Herbert described the OpenURL Framework using the metaphor of climbing a mountain.
OpenURL version 0.1 was at a camp on the first stages of the ascent.
OpenURL version 1.0 represents the summit of the committee’s climb while it was developing the standard.
We have now descended to the base camp of the Profiles and Implementation Guidelines.
Implementers need to read only the appropriate profiles and implementation guidelines not the whole standard.
Herbert gave indications of communities where OpenURL would be applicable beyond the scholarly information San Antonio profiles.
The Simple Dublin Core profile [10] could be used in any domain.
The cultural heritage community is investigating implementing a virtual collection over their physical distributed collections, an application that will need context-sensitive linking.
There is work in progress developing non-text metadata formats, and on using OpenURL within RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
OpenURL should be disseminated to the digital library community.
It could be used for integrating learning systems into digital libraries.
The Semantic Web does not currently provide context-sensitive linking.
This standard has the potential to change the linking experience of Web users in general.
The OpenURL Registry is fundamental to the standard when expanding to other communities.
A maintenance agency will be appointed by NISO and processes defined.
Use of OpenURL in current practice is menu-driven using Web pages.
Herbert described some new developments being researched at LANL that go beyond current practice.
A repository of complex digital objects.
A complex digital object contains multiple data streams, eg.
XML, Microsoft Word, etc., possibly also including code, within an XML wrapper.
OpenURL is being used to interface to this repository A general shopping cart service.
This shopping cart can go through several different online shops, then checkout in the bank.
This service is implemented using multiple XML ContextObjects in a container, transported over SOAP Journal article reference lists in a repository that can be harvested using OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).
Each citation is self-contained in an XML ContextObject, meaning that the referring article, (i.e.
in OpenURL Framework terms, the ReferringEntity), is always remembered along with the reference The OpenURL Framework has the potential to change the linking experience on the Web.
Realising its use beyond the scholarly information community is a challenge.
The registry and liaison by NISO are crucial to meeting this challenge.
Questions Many questions from the audience arose during the day.
This is a selection of some of the significant questions and their answers.
Many questions related to resolver behaviour.
In fact resolver behaviour is specifically out of scope in the OpenURL Framework standard.
Also the standard is not a protocol, and is not intended as a search interface although there is no proscription against its use for searching.
However it is clear that some guidance is needed on the issues of resolver behaviour.
Q.
What if an OpenURL sent to a resolver results in more than one item being matched?
A.
This is up to the resolver.
It may give the users a set of links, or it may return nothing.
Q.
Service types.
Can I ask for and get full text when I don’t have subscription to it?
A.
No.
The resolver would not provide full text in this case.
Service types can’t be used to overcome subscription restrictions.
Q. OpenURL version 0.1 and the current metadata formats in the San Antonio Profiles of OpenURL version 1.0 do not include ‘subject’.
A.
The Simple Dublin Core metadata format (experimental) does include ‘subject’.
Q.
Is there a minimum recommendation of metadata that referrers should supply?
A.
No, everything is optional and the standard is not a protocol.
However, in practice minimalist source OpenURLs would not be useful.
The Implementation Guidelines encourage referrers to supply as much data as they have available.
Q.
Is there a length problem with hybrid OpenURLs?
A. OpenURLs over 2048 bytes sent by HTTP GET will not work in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Long OpenURLs are better sent by POST.
Q.
Is there a way for a resolver to indicate, or send back, information about what it is able to resolve.
A.
No.
The standard is not a search protocol.
A resolver can claim to support a profile, this claim being by information not in a machine readable way.
There are machine-readable definitions of the profiles in the registry, so this claim could subsequently be checked by machine.
But this functionality is not part of the standard.
Q.
One large information provider is tracking the quality of target links coming in from resolvers, the number of which is increasing dramatically.
They are resolving at about the 90% rate.
Is there any way of improving this?
A.
Not really.
This is a problem of metadata quality.
Q.
What is the relationship between metadata formats and profiles?
A. Metadata formats are in the registry independent of profiles.
Profiles can subscribe to a selection of metadata formats.
One metadata format can be in several profiles.
Profiles are really for supporting compliance claims when advertising / purchasing resolvers and referrers.
A metadata format is indicated in actual ContextObjects for the particular entities described using it, whereas a profile is not.
Q.
Are there plans for a SOAP binding for ContextObjects?
A.
Not at the moment.
This is outside the scope of the NISO Committee AX’s remit.
Maybe a future standard committee will define a SOAP binding.
References ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004, Part 1.
The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services: ContextObject and Transport Mechanisms.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web via: http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/Standard.htm ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004, Part 2.
The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services: Initial Registry Content.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web via: http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/Standard.htm NISO.
(2003).
The Next Generation of Access: OpenURL and Metasearch.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web: http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/MS-2003_workshop.html Registry for the OpenURL Framework ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web: http://www.openurl.info/registry/ NISO Committee AX, Apps, A.(2003).
Z39.88-2004: The Key/Encoded-Value Format Implementation Guidelines.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web via: http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/Standard.htm Van de Sompel, H., Beit-Arie, O.
(2000).
OpenURL Syntax Description.
Draft version 0.1.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web: http://www.openurl.info/registry/docs/pdf/openurl-01.pdf The Digital Object Identifier System.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web: http://www.doi.org CrossRef.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web: http://www.crossref.org zetoc: Electronic Table of Contents of the British Library http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk NISO Committee AX.
(2003).
Dublin Core Community Profile (DCCP) for Simple Dublin Core in KEV Format.
[online] [cited 2003-11-21] Available from World Wide Web via: http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/Public_Comments.htm Author Details Ann Apps Senior Analyst (R&D) MIMAS University of Manchester UK Email: ann.apps@man.ac.uk Web site: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk Ann is a member of the NISO Standards Committee AX, OpenURL Framework.
Return to top Article Title: “The OpenURL and OpenURL Framework: Demystifying Link Resolution” Author: Ann Apps Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/apps-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Buzz data database metadata vocabularies repositories eprints cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Hall and Donald Mackay report on recent news form BIOME, the Health and Life Sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network.
BIOME Hot Topics BIOME contains a wealth of information on a wide range of topics in the health and life sciences and we aim to keep introducing new features in line with user needs.
As of October 2004 we are trialling a new fortnightly feature ‘Hot Topics’.
Subject experts within the BIOME team will choose an area of interest or a current topic and provide links to key sites in our database for that theme.
BIOME ‘Hot Topics’ are useful for those seeking inspiration for project work, possible ideas for essay themes, or simply as a quick route into subjects of interest.
Topics covered so far include dyslexia and chocolate.
To see more, check out Hot Topics [1].
If you would like to see a particular topic covered, or would like to provide us with feedback on this feature, please email us [2].
Expanding and Developing BIOME Content Since our inception, we have worked with a wide range of UK universities, professional organisations, charities and other groups within the UK to obtain content for the core BIOME database.
For example we have recently signed an agreement with the Midwives Information and Resource Service (MIDIRS) [3].
Over the last year this work has been taken further by the establishment of agreements with other information providers in the health and life sciences to display their content within the BIOME Gateways and vice versa.
We are keen to avoid duplication of effort especially with services elsewhere in the public sector.
Given the overlap (both in terms of content and in terms of potential users) between BIOME and the range of NHS online information services in the UK, we have been keen to work together with these services.
With this in mind, we have recently signed formal agreements to swap or cross-search and display data in each other’s gateways with NHS Education Scotland (developers of the NHS Scotland eLibrary) [4] and Queen’s University Belfast (developers of Health on the Net Northern Ireland HONNI) [5].
We hope to extend this to include other NHS information providers over the next few months.
Overall we are undertaking a range of partnership, project and other activities to expand the content that can be searched for from the BIOME gateways and to expand and enrich the core content held within the core BIOME database.
To give some examples: Our collaboration with the LTSN Subject Centres [6] within the health and life sciences will come to fruition in 2004⁄2005.
The outputs of this collaboration will enable our users to cross-search a union catalogue of descriptions of learning and teaching resources.
It will also mean that over 700 BIOME records will have additional pedagogically controlled vocabularies added to them.
As a result of the ‘RDN for FE’ Project [7], we hope soon to be able to provide access to a far wider collection of new and enhanced records aimed specifically at users from Further Education.
BIOME’s participation in the ePrints UK Project [8] will bring the ability to cross-search the metadata contained in the project’s central repository of eprint metadata from the BIOME Web site.
We have restructured our content provider model over the last year, cutting internal content production and actively recruiting additional individual and institutional content providers.
The new providers bring the benefits of direct and live experience of working directly with our core users staff and students in UK HE and FE helping to ensure that the our core catalogue remains relevant to their needs.
We will soon be undertaking a complete review of our content addition and content reviewing processes to ensure that the content of collections remains up to date and of relevance to our users’ needs.
To expand further the content that users can search within the BIOME hub we plan to develop a BIOME Web Search Engine.
User Feedback We would like to find out your views on BIOME and its future development.
Complete our short (should take less than ten minutes to complete) questionnaire [9] and you will be entered into a monthly draw to receive one of six £30 Book tokens or Amazon gift vouchers.
The deadline for the next prize draw (drawn from survey responses received after 18 October) is 12th November 2004.
Prizes will be drawn on 15 November.
The survey will continue to be available after this date and further responses are welcome.
Changes at BIOME Peter Hoare has been recruited to the BIOME service.
Peter brings with him a wealth of experience in health and agricultural information and we are delighted to have him on board as a BIOME Service Officer.
References Hot Topics http://biome.ac.uk/hot_topics/ BIOME Feedback feedback@biome.ac.uk MIDIRS http://www.midirs.org/ eLibrary Scotland http://www.elib.scot.nhs.uk/ HONNI http://www.honni.qub.ac.uk/ LTSN Subject Centres http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/home.asp RDN for FE project http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/rdnfe/ ePrints UK http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ BIOME questionnaire http://biome.ac.uk/questionnaire/ Author Details Jenny Hall BIOME Admin Officer Email: jh@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Donald M Mackay BIOME Service Manager Email: dmm@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Jenny Hall and Donald Mackay Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
See our explanations of Access Terms and Copyright and Privacy Statement.
News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data software database dissemination rss atom apache infrastructure archives metadata firefox digitisation accessibility tagging namespace blog repositories copyright video preservation oai-pmh cataloguing multimedia gis marc syndication ontologies photoshop lucene ajax youtube licence ict interoperability privacy url taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) Training Programme Either: Birmingham, Bristol or London, 8 February to 27 April 2007 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ The TASI programme of practical hands-on training includes three brand new workshops: Digital Photography Level 2 Provides an introduction to the effective operation of a digital SLR, explaining how the camera's manual controls can be used to improve photography.
The course also explains how to illuminate small 2D and 3D objects using tungsten studio lights.
Scanning from Print A practical overview of digitising printed resources using a scanner or camera.
Particularly for those using the CLA trial scanning licence, but useful for anyone digitising from print.
Beyond Google: Strategies for Finding Images Online Provides a practical overview of finding and storing quality images from online sources and how to deal successfully with issues of copyright.
8 February 2007: Image Capture Level 1, Bristol 9 February 2007: Image Capture Level 2, Bristol 23 February 2007: Image Capture Level 3, Bristol 7 March 2007: Beyond Google: Strategies for Finding Images Online, Birmingham 14 March 2007: Photoshop Level 1, Birmingham 15 March 2007: Photoshop Level 2, Birmingham 23 March 2007: Digital Photography Level 1, Bristol 29 March 2007: Building a Departmental Image Collection, London 30 March 2007: Scanning from Print, Bristol 4 April 2007: Beyond Google: Strategies for Finding Images Online, Birmingham 13 April 2007: Image Optimisation Correcting and Preparing Images, Bristol 20 April 2007: Colour Management, Bristol 25 April 2007: Beyond Google: Strategies for Finding Images Online, Birmingham 27 April 2007: Digital Photography Level 2, Bristol Full details and the online booking form can be found on TASI's Training page: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ Back to headlines De Lange Conference VI: Emerging Libraries Host: Rice University via the Fondren Library and Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) Location: Alice Pratt Brown Auditorium, Shepherd School, Rice University, 6100 Main St., Houston, Texas Date: 5-7 March 2007 Theme How knowledge will be accessed, discovered, and disseminated in the age of digital information.
Speakers will include John Seely Brown, Harold Varmus, James Duderstadt, Paul Ginsparg, and Donald Kennedy.
More information has been produced in the last few decades than in the entire previous history of humanity, and most of this has been in digital format.
Libraries are not storage places any more; they are less and less a place.
The critical issues now include: How can that information be efficiently accessed and used?
How do we extract knowledge from such an abundance of often poorly organized information?
How might these enormous digital resources affect our concept of identity, our privacy, and the way we conduct business in the new century?
Insight from many disciplines and perspectives is requisite to begin to understand this phenomenon to identify ways to help chart a future course.
The De Lange 2007 Conference will examine the transformational influences these astonishing emerging libraries may entail.
For more detailed information about the speakers and programme, see http://delange.rice.edu/conferenceVI.cfm Back to headlines UKeiG Course: Virtual Rules OK?
Developing a Policy for the Digital Collection The John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, 28 March, 2007 Course outline One of the greatest responsibilities librarians have is that of developing and managing a pertinent and dynamic collection indeed, it may be one of the fundamental arts of the librarian.
Collection management comprises a series of complex activities and procedures which now encompass the virtual collection as well as the physical collection.
These activities include selection, evaluation, acquisition, collection evaluation and review, preservation and promotion.
If such activities are to be undertaken in a coherent and consistent fashion, one of the requirements is that the librarian establishes and administers a pragmatic written collection development policy (CDP).
The overarching aim of the workshop is to enable you to formulate or re-evaluate and implement a CDP for e-resources for your library.
By the end of the workshop you should: Understand the nature and content of a CDP Be aware of the policy issues surrounding e-resources Appreciate the value and uses of a CDP Understand the issues surrounding the implementation and administration of the policy Know how to promote the policy within your institution or authority The workshop will involve practical work.
In addition to talks and demonstrations from the workshop leaders, you will be undertaking small group exercises of different kinds.
If your library already has a CDP, then you are encouraged to bring a copy to the workshop.
Course Presenters Ray Lonsdale, Reader in Information Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Chris Armstrong, Consultant, Information Automation Limited.
Cost Costs (including lunch and refreshments): UKeiG members £130 + VAT (£152.75); others £160 + VAT (£188.00) To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk.
Further details are also available via the UKeiG website at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2007/march/virtual_rules.html Back to headlines Museums and the Web 2007 San Francisco, California, USA, April 11 14, 2007 http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/ Arguably the only annual conference exploring the on-line presentation of cultural and heritage content across institutions and around the world, the eleventh annual Museums and the Web will offer 43 papers, 14 mini-workshops and 4 Professional Forums on the MW2007 programme.
Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive, will be giving the Keynote Address in the Opening Plenary on April 12.
Long a leader in the open access movement, Brewster will talk about defining roles, rights and responsibilities, and introduce the Open Content Alliance.
Programme Full abstracts of all accepted papers, workshops, mini-workshops, professional forums and interactions are now on the MW2007 Web site, along with biographies of presenters.
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/sessions/ Regular Registration Deadline: 31 January 2007 If you haven't already registered, the deadline for early registration is coming up soon.
Payment for early registrations must be *received* by 31 January 2007.
Register on-line with a credit card to ensure early rates.
See https://www2.archimuse.com/mw2007/mw2007.registrationForm.html Speakers List On-line http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/speakers/ Joining On-line http://conference.archimuse.com/ The conference chairs advise that the conference is building an on-line community to complement its annual conference get-togethers.
You can register for your account, and join the discussion today.
Contact Contact the MW2007 Conference Co-Chairs David Bearman and Jennifer Trant , Archives & Museum Informatics e-mail: mw2007@archimuse.com Back to headlines CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI5) CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18 20 April 2007.
Conference Web site: http://cern.ch/oai5 The OAI series of workshops is one of the biggest international meetings of technical repository-developers, library Open Access policy formulators, and the funders and researchers that they serve.
The programme contains a mix of practical tutorials given by experts in the field, presentations from cutting-edge projects and research, posters from the community, breakout discussion groups, and an intense social programme which has helped to build a strong network amongst previous participants.
The event is almost unique in bringing together these scholarly communication communities.
For further information: contact the organising committee via: Joanne Yeomans joanne.yeomans@cern.ch Back to headlines TAPE Workshop on Management of Audiovisual Collections Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 18-24 April 2007 Venue: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam Librarians, archivists and curators in charge of audiovisual collections need to know about the role of new technology in collection management.
Digitisation offers unprecedented opportunities for access to historical materials.
But how can it be combined with established preservation methods in an integrated strategy, to ensure optimal access today as well as in the future?
In this 5-day workshop, the characteristics of film, video and sound recordings and the different recording systems and devices will be reviewed.
Specific requirements for their handling and preservation will be related to the nature and function of different kinds of audiovisual materials.
The workshop will explore the different transfer and conversion methods, technical requirements in relation to quality, and long-term management of digital files.
Issues will be approached as management problems, and due attention will be given to aspects like needs assessment, setting priorities, planning, budgeting and outsourcing, as well as project management.
Participants will acquire knowledge of technical issues that will enable them to make informed decisions about the role of digitisation in care and management of audiovisual collections.
The speakers will present outlines of issues and practical cases, and a substantial part of the workshops will be spent on discussions and group assignments to develop participants' skills in finding their own solutions.
Audience All those responsible for audiovisual collections in archives, museums and libraries.
For this introductory course, no specific technical expertise is required.
The workshop will be in English.
Organisation European Commission on Preservation and Access, Amsterdam, the Netherlands The workshops are supported by the Culture 2000-programme of the EU as = part of the TAPE project Registration fee 600 euros, this includes coffees, teas, lunches and a course pack with reading materials.
Participants from institutes who are TAPE partners or ECPA contributors will pay 500 euros.
How to apply For online registration: http://www.tape-online.net/courses.html The registration deadline is 9 February 2007.
For more information on the TAPE project: http://www.tape-online.net For more information on the workshop contact the ECPA: European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA) c/o KNAW, P.O.
Box 19121, NL-1000 GC Amsterdam visiting address: Trippenhuis, Kloveniersburgwal 29, NL-1011 JV Amsterdam, The Netherlands tel.
++31 20 551 08 39 fax ++31 20 620 49 41 URL: http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/ Back to headlines 10th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD2007): Added Value for E-theses Uppsala, Sweden, 13-16 June, 2007 http://epc.ub.uu.se/ETD2007/ This meeting offers scope for an exchange of experience and consolidation of cooperation in the field of electronic theses and dissertations at local, national and international levels.
Under the general theme "Added Value for E-theses", ETD 2007 is organised around two main themes: "Integrating ETDs with institutional processes and practices" and "Value-added services".
The themes of the conference call for reflection on opportunities for joint efforts among various players in the production and information chain, both inside and outside our universities.
Registration is now open.
The Conference Committee invites for the submission of papers and posters in all areas relevant to Electronic Theses and Dissertations, including but not limited to: Integrating e-theses into local services (student portals, educational portals and platforms, research databases, electronic prepublication processes) Integrating e-theses into the research process (i.e., linking with research projects etc.)
Integrating e-theses in national and international services (syndication, OAI-PMH, discovery services, syntactic and semantic interoperability) Local practices regarding e-theses Linking ETDs with related material such as data sets, statistics, multimedia Long-term preservation Business models and sustainability Enhancing graduate education through ETD programs Enhancing graduate knowledge about intellectual property (copyrights, patents, plagiarism policies Improving scholarly communication globally through ETDs Important dates 15 February 2007: Final deadline for submission of abstracts of papers and posters 15 March 2007: Notification of acceptance 15 May 2007: Deadline for final paper submission 13-16 June 2007: ETD Conference 2007 Back to headlines First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Vancouver, Canada, 11-13 July 2007 Web site: http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/493 The Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University has indicated that the Conference will provide opportunities for those involved in the organisation, promotion, and study of scholarly communication to share and discuss innovative work in scholarly publishing, with a focus on the contribution that open source publishing technologies (such as Open Journal Systems) can make to improving access to research and scholarship on a global and public scale.
The conference will appeal to all those with an interest in the future of scholarly publishing community: software developers and technical support specialists; journal publishers, editors, and staff; librarians; and researchers in scholarly publishing.
The conference stream for those involved in the practices and study of journal publishing will focus on the following themes and topics: Scholarly publishing in developing countries; Open access and the academy: reforming and opening the peer review process, implications for academic freedom; New journals, new models: the how and why of starting a new journal, new economic models for old journals, encouraging open data and related practices; Promotion and growth: building readership, authorship, and reviewership; open access is public access challenges and benefits; Improving the features and design of publishing software The conference stream for librarians and information specialists will focus on the following themes and topics: The role of libraries in supporting and developing emerging or alternate forms of scholarly communication, e.g., the library as publisher, implications for collections budgets and policies; Incorporating and supporting open access publications as part of current collections and related services; Using PKP software and related open source tools in libraries, e.g., best practice or case studies.
The conference stream for open source software developers and other technical experts working with PKP software will address the following: Understanding and working with PKP software and its "plug-in" architecture; Building a PKP developers community including software contributions and collaborative projects; PKP software development priorities and plans.
Back to headlines Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2007 University of York, 16 18 July 2007 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/ The theme for this year's event is "Next Steps for the Web Management Community" and the organisers particularly welcome submissions which reflect this theme.
Given that this event has come as far as the 11th IWMW workshop, it is appropriate both to look back on the strengths developed by the Web management community and to look forward to ways in which it can build on those strengths.
In particular, it may be timely to exploit the potential of social networking tools and to explore whether the ideas behind the notion of a community of practice can be applied to the Web Management profession.
The call for speakers and facilitators is now open.
If you are interested, please see details online at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/call/ Back to headlines DC-2007 International Conference On Dublin Core And Metadata Applications: Application Profiles: Theory and Practice 27-31 August 2007, Singapore http://conferences.nlb.gov.sg/dc2007/ Conference Theme The DC-2007 theme focuses on the theory and practice of developing application profiles.
Application profiles provide the means to document the use of metadata terms within specific contexts and to combine terms from disparate namespaces.
Application profiles may apply to communities of practice (e.g.
cooperation projects) as well as to organizations in the public and private sectors.
Emerging experience in the creation of application profiles reveals layers of complexity involved in combining terms from mixed abstract models.
DC-2007 seeks to explore the conceptual and practical issues in the development and deployment of application profiles to meet the needs of specific communities of practice.
In addition to contributions focusing on the DC-2007 conference theme, papers and workshop proposals are welcome on a wide range of metadata topics, such as: Accessibility Business Models for Metadata Conceptual Models Cross-domain Processes (e.g., Recordkeeping, Preservation, Institutional Repositories) Domain Metadata (e.g., Commerce, Corporate/Enterprise, Cultural Heritage Institutions (Museums, Libaries, and Archives), Education, Geo-Spatial, Government, Social Spaces) Metadata Generation Processes (e.g., Human, Automatic, and Hybrid) Metadata Harvesting Multilingual Issues Interoperability Knowledge Organisation Systems (e.g., Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Thesauri) Localisation and Internationalisation Normalisation and Crosswalks Quality and Evaluation Registries and Registry Services Search Engines and Metadata Social Tagging Submissions Deadlines and Important Dates Submission of papers: 2 April 2007 Acceptance notification: 1 June 2007 Camera-ready copy due: 2 July 2007 Back to headlines Libraries Without Walls 7: Exploring anywhere, anytime delivery of library services Lesvos, Greece, 14 18 September 2007 http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww7/ An international conference organised by The Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/ To be held on the Aegean Island of Lesvos, Greece, at the Delphinia Hotel, Molyvos http://www.molyvoshotel.com/eng/hotel.htm Cost Cost 495 GBP (including accommodation and breakfast for four nights, with lunches and refreshments during the Conference, and two evening dinners) Keynote Speaker Christine Borgman, Professor & Presidential Chair in Information Studies within the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles.
Conference Themes From their beginnings in 1995, the Libraries without Walls conferences have mapped a major change in the practice of librarianship.
While library services are still concerned to provide users with physical access to their buildings, electronic access, often from remote locations, is becoming ever more dominant.
Library services are being integrated into virtual learning, research and personal environments.
Papers presented at previous LWW conferences have mapped this change and provided examples of how libraries are delivering their services whenever and wherever their users need them.
LWW7 wishes to encourage the widest possible range of papers to reflect the diverse current developments in library service delivery and anticipates that papers may cover: New kinds of service, especially those which open up new paradigms of library perhaps the library equivalent of YouTube or MySpace?
Papers which describe the library's role within new models of scholarly publishing, including experience of developing services based on institutional or other repositories, and papers examining the responsibility of the library for digital curation.
Service delivery in challenging environments, especially where the infrastructure may be sub-optimal as in some developing countries, or where the user group represents particular challenges.
New technological solutions, provided these are presented to illustrate the impact on users of the improved services they make possible Delivery and assessment of information skills/literacies, especially where this is achieved through electronic environments.
As in the past these themes are indicative and LWW7 remains open to proposals which, while in the general area of interest of the conference, do not fit neatly into the defined themes.
In addition to research papers, papers based on truly innovative practice will be welcomed, but these should assess the more general lessons to be learned rather than simply presenting a localised case study.
Submissions Closing date for submissions: Submissions by Friday 2nd March 2007.
For further information please visit the Web site at http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww7/ All enquiries should be addressed to the organisers: Libraries Without Walls 7 Conference Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) Department of Information and Communications Manchester Metropolitan University Geoffrey Manton Building Rosamond Street West Manchester M15 6LL United Kingdom Email: lww-7@mmu.ac.uk Tel: ++44 (0)161 247 6142 Fax: ++44 (0) 161 247 6979 Back to headlines Latest Digest of Key Statistics for Museums, Libraries and Archives in England The latest Digest of Statistics for the sector is now available on the MLA Web site.
Produced by the Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU) on the MLA's behalf, it gathers together some key data covering the museums, libraries and archives domains and is a valuable source of information.
The MLA's Research and Evidence Team will review the publication in line with the MLA's new Research and Evidence Strategy.
Please send any comments you might have on the publication to: javier.stanziola@mla.gov.uk The Digest can be downloaded from: http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets/D/digest_of_statistics_2006_10589.pdf Source: MLA [Received: January 2007] Back to headlines INIST-CNRS: First French Partner of the LOCKSS Alliance Researchers need to have the guarantee that they will be able to have long-term access to scientific publications.
What would happen today if a publisher were to close down, a publication were discontinued or a library or research laboratory were to cancel a subscription?
To guarantee that researchers will have long-term access to scientific publications, the Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (INIST) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) became the first French member of the LOCKSS Alliance.
LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) The LOCKSS Alliance was founded in 2004 and about a hundred libraries around the world are members.
They form a community centered around the use of LOCKSS, a free software for preserving electronic journals to which they subscribe.
The LOCKSS Project was launched in 1999 in the United-States.
In 2002, Stanford University was selected, after an initial test phase, to develop the software which was released in April 2004.
LOCKSS operates as a network of journal duplicates associated with a control protocol.
Then, to ensure its preservation, a journal only needs to be archived on six different sites in the world.
Therefore LOCKSS is a cost-effective solution, since members no longer need to save their entire digital collections.
For further details about the LOCKSS Alliance: http://www.lockss.org/alliance/alliance.htm The CNRS's Institute for Scientific and Technical Information: For over a decade and a half, INIST-CNRS has been fostering the dissemination of research findings through services facilitating access to scientific information.
To fulfil its mission, INIST-CNRS relies on one of the largest scientific collections in Europe and on its teams of scientific information professionals and ICT specialists.
Press Contact Eric Goettmann eric.goettmann@inist.fr Source: INIST [Received: January 2007] Back to headlines JISC and Partners Launch European Petition JISC is among a group of European organisations which today launched a petition to the European Commission calling on it to support public access to research outputs shortly after their publication.
Organised by SPARC Europe, JISC and its Knowledge Exchange partners, the petition urges the Commission to follow the lead of other research funding agencies in mandating the publication of articles arising from EC-related funding after a given time period in open access archives.
It also calls on the Commission to explore a European-wide approach to policies and practices surrounding the development of digital repositories as a means of making more visible the fruits of European research and maximising the return on public investment in research.
In January 2006 the European Commission published the Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets of Europe.
The Study resulted from a detailed analysis of the current scholarly journal publication market, together with extensive consultation with all the major stakeholders within the scholarly communication process (researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, research policymakers, etc.).
The Study noted that 'dissemination and access to research results is a pillar in the development of the European Research Area' and it made a number of balanced and reasonable recommendations to improve the visibility and usefulness of European research outputs.
Now, a year after publication of the Study, JISC, along with its partners, is urging the EC to endorse the recommendations in full.
'Research must be widely disseminated and read to be useful,' the petition suggests, going on to outline the economic advantages of widening access to publicly funded research, including the encouragement of further research and promotion of European research outputs worldwide.
Rachel Bruce, JISC director, Information Environment, said: 'Over the past year there has been significant progress in improving access to publicly funded research.
This has included statements and policies from research funding bodies as well as investment in open repository networks.
This progress will be strengthened by the implementation of the recommendations of the Commission's study.
With the backing of organisations across Europe, this petition demonstrates the level of support for rapid and open access to publicly funded research.'
For further information on the petition, and to sign it, please go to: EC Petition http://www.ec-petition.eu/ See also: SPARC http://www.sparceurope.org/ JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Knowledge Exchange http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/ Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets of Europe http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf Contact: Philip Pothen on 07887 564 006 or p.pothen@jisc.ac.uk Source: JISC [Received: January 2007] Back to headlines New Blog for Cataloguing and Indexing Group Ann Chapman of UKOLN and Assistant Secretary of the Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG) of the Chartered Institution of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) informs us that the Group blog was launched on 1 January 2007.
The blog is the new online presence of the group's journal, Catalogue and Index, which itself will move to electronic publication during 2007.
The blog will enable the group to keep members and the wider community up to date with news about cataloguing, indexing, metadata and taxonomy design as well as CIG events and activities.
URL: http://catalogueandindex.blogspot.com/ Source: CIG [Received: January 2007] Back to headlines New Web Site for BIC Bibliographic Standards Group The BIC Bibliographic Standards Group (BIC BSG) committee's has launched the Group's new Web site this January.
The committee reviews and promotes bibliographic and related standards, with particular reference to libraries.
It is the UK advisory committee to the British Library for the revision of the MARC 21 (MAchine-Readable Cataloguing) formats.
URL: http://www.bic.org.uk/productinfo-bibliostandards.html Source: BIC Bibliographic Standards Group [Received: January 2007] Back to headlines Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) Offers a Free Helpdesk Service http://www.tasi.ac.uk/helpdesk.html In addition to its workshops, the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) now offers a free helpdesk service for anyone working within UK Further or Higher Education.
The helpdesk answers questions on any issue relating to digital images, from finding or making them, through to storing and using them.
Users can expect an acknowledgement within a day and a full answer within 5 days.
TASI often answers simple questions on the day received.
Where enquiries are more complicated, the desk may phone or email back for more details.
User feedback shows that more than 99% would recommend this service to others.
Source: TASI [Received: January 2007] Back to headlines OJAX Federated Search Service Software: Beta Release OJAX federated search service software is now in Beta release and available for download.
Version 0.7 has improved performance, stability and user feedback, as well as additional features such as RSS/Atom feed support.
(Atom feeds of stored searches alert users when new content matching their interests is harvested.)
OJAX illustrates how federated search services can respond to new user expectations generated by Web 2.0: Rich, dynamic user experience.
OJAX uses Ajax technology to provide immediate dynamic response to user input.
Intuitive interface.
The OJAX interface provides the simplicity and familiarity of Google but with the power of advanced search Integration, interoperability and reuse.
OJAX uses loosely coupled Web Services and supports the OpenSearch RSS standard, thus facilitating integration with a range of virtual library environments, institutional repositories, course management systems and institutional portals.
Open source standards-compliance.
OJAX supports best-practice open source standards and software, including OpenSearch, OAI-PMH, StAX and Apache Lucene.
Features of OJAX: Auto-completion of search terms Triggering of auto-searches Dynamically scrollable search results no more navigating between pages Auto-expansion of search result details Rapid sorting of results Integrated with the Firefox 2 / IE 7 search feature Supports OpenSearch Discovery Stored searches as Atom feeds Includes an OAI-PMH harvester Easy to install in your own institution Further information, demo and download: http://ojax.sourceforge.net/ Two alternative packages are available: OJAX GUI, Web Services & Harvester OJAX GUI, Web Services, Harvester & example repository index Source: Dr Judith Wusteman UCD School of Information and Library Studies, University College Dublin [Received: January 2007] Back to headlines Changes to the Governance Structures of CILIP As a first step in the process of changing the governance structures at CILIP, the Implementation Group has published the Principles which will act as the benchmark against which all governance activities are judged.
The principles are divided into those which relate directly to governance and those which relate to organisational communications.
The principles can be found at: http://www.cilip.org.uk/aboutcilip/governance/governanceimplementation.htm Chris Armstrong National Councillor (CILIP) New Governance Implementation Group Chris.Armstrong@cilip.org.uk Source: CILIP [Received: December 2006] Back to headlines Intute: New Internet tutorials for the Social Sciences in the VTS Intute has released a number of new Internet tutorials for the Social Sciences in the Virtual Training Suite this year.
They are free to access on the Web and take around an hour each to complete.
The tutorials teach Internet research skills and are designed for students and staff in UK universities and colleges.
They are ideal for supporting research methods, information literacy or study skills courses.
The following tutorials have been completely updated and revised by subject experts from UK universities in 2006: Internet Business Manager (HE) By Andy Hargrave, Content Developer, Biz/ed http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/busman Internet for Business Studies By Andy Hargrave, Content Developer, Biz/ed http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/fe/tutorial/business-studies/ Internet Economist By Dr. Poulter of the The Economics Network of the Higher Education Academy, University of Bristol http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/economist Internet for Education By Gwyneth Price, Rozz Evans, Andy Welshman and colleagues in the Library of the Institute of Education, University of London http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/education Internet for Government and Politics By Heather Dawson, London School of Economics (LSE) Library http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/government Internet for International Relations By Heather Dawson, London School of Economics (LSE) Library http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/intlrelations Internet for Lawyers By Sue Pettit, Subject Librarian for Law, University of Bristol http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/lawyers Internet for Social Policy By Angela Upton, Information Manager, Social Care Institute for Excellence http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/social-policy Internet for Social Statistics By Robin Rice, Data Librarian, University of Edinburgh http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/social-statistics Internet Social Worker By Angela Upton, Information Manager, Social Care Institute for Excellence http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/social-worker This the first stage of a major programme of change to update and revise all the tutorials in the Virtual Training Suite over the coming year.
A national network of authors has been commissioned to re-write the content of each tutorial to bring it in line with recent Internet developments and to ensure the tutorials continue to offer authoritative and timely advice on Internet research.
The recommended lists of key Internet resources are being completely updated; there is new advice on Internet searching, with improved interactive exercises; and a new section called "Success Stories" in each tutorial to illustrate how the Internet can be used effectively to support education and research.
The tutorials are also being given a new look and feel to make them more graphical and visually appealing.
New editions of the remaining tutorials will be released incrementally over the coming months watch the Intute website for details: Intute http://www.intute.ac.uk Source: Intute [Received: December 2007] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 2004 (Volume 38) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 2004 (Volume 38) Buzz data software database xml usability archives metadata identifier repositories copyright video preservation cache ict e-government algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reviews a recent volume of this key annual publication on information science and technology.
The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) is an important annual publication containing review articles on many topics of relevance to library and information science, published on behalf of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST).
Since volume 36, the editor of ARIST has been Professor Blaise Cronin of Indiana University, Bloomington.
The twelve chapters in volume 38 are divided into three sections, dealing with theory, technology, and policy.
Theory The opening chapter in the theory section is an investigation into the relevance of science and technology studies (STS) to information studies by Nancy Van House of the University of California, Berkeley.
STS is a very interdisciplinary field, using insights from disciplines as diverse as sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology and cultural studies to explore the social contexts of science and technology.
While some of the more nebulous consequences of science studies have been explored in debates like the Social Text affair [1], Van House contents herself with an introductory review of key developments in STS and workplace studies followed by an analysis of the influence both actual and potential of such approaches on information studies.
For example, the chapter discusses some of the ways in which STS concepts and methodologies are being used to help understand the complex 'ecologies' of scholarly communication [2] or the hidden ethical and moral consequences of knowledge representation technologies like classification [3].
The second chapter, by Yvonne Rogers of the University of Sussex, is an introduction to new theoretical approaches being developed for human-computer interaction (HCI).
On one level, this means that the field is very interesting, but Rogers (p. 88) warns that what "was originally a bounded problem space with a clear focus and a small set of methods for designing computer systems that were easier and more efficient to use by a single user is now turning into a diffuse problem space with less clarity in terms of its objects of study."
The chapter first reviews early theoretical developments in applying cognitive theory to HCI, before explaining why in the 1980s researchers began to adopt methodologies developed in other disciplines, including ecological psychology, Activity Theory and cultural anthropology (including ethnography).
Rogers own studies have suggested that while the designers and implementers of systems are familiar with (at least) some of these theoretical approaches, they do not always know how to use them in practice.
The chapter ends with some suggestions as to how theory can best be used in both research and interface design.
The final chapter in the theory section deals with the relatively new topic of virtual communities and was written by David Ellis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Rachel Oldridge, University of Hertfordshire and Ana Vasconcelos, Sheffield Hallam University.
The chapter first explores the origins of online communities and how they are perceived to interact with other forms of social interaction.
Sections follow this on communities of practice, virtual arenas and networked virtual communities, the last popular in research contexts (e.g.
for sharing papers and datasets) and in Higher Education.
The authors conclude (p. 175) that virtual communities provide researchers with the opportunity "to study the behavior, or perceptions, of dispersed communities in real time, as well as over time."
Technology The section on technology begins with a chapter on latent semantic analysis (LSA) by Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research.
LSA is a technique for improving information retrieval by using statistical techniques to analyse large collections of texts in order to induce knowledge about the meaning of documents (p. 191).
Dumais notes that LSA is purely statistical, and does not use natural language processing techniques or human-generated knowledge representation systems.
The chapter provides a short mathematical overview of LSA and a summary of its use in information retrieval, information filtering, cross-language retrieval and in other contexts, e.g.
text classification and the link analysis performed by algorithms like PageRank [4] and the hyperlink-induced topic search (HITS) [5].
A further section elaborates the use of LSA in the cognitive sciences to model aspects of human memory.
Chapter five is by Judit Bar-Ilan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and concerns the use of Web search engines in information science research.
After the usual sections discussing definitions, Bar-Ilan goes on to discuss two main categories of search engine research: firstly the study of search engines as objects of investigation in themselves, secondly the use of search engines as a means of collecting data for information science research [6].
The topics covered in more detail include the social study of search engine use through log analysis and the social and political aspects of Web searching.
A section on information-theoretic work covers research relating to the structure of the Web and link analysis, looking in detail at the latter's influence on search engine ranking algorithms (e.g.
Google's PageRank) and in developing evaluation metrics like Web Impact Factors [7].
A final section looks at applications, including problems with the evaluation of search engine performance and effectiveness.
In her introduction (p. 238), Bar-Ilan expresses the concern that the fast moving nature of Web technologies means that the chapter may be out of date by the time of publication.
While it is clear that later volumes of ARIST will need to return to this topic, Bar-Ilan's chapter provides a good summary of the state-of-the-art in early 2003.
Hsinchun Chen and Michael Chau of the University of Arizona then tackle a slightly different aspect of information science research on the Web, i.e.
that of mining Web content and related data to create new information or knowledge.
Introductory sections introduce various aspects of machine learning research and their application in pre-Web contexts, e.g.
for named-entity extraction or the provision of relevance feedback in information retrieval contexts.
The remaining sections look at Web mining in more detail, focusing in turn on the mining of Web content, structure and usage.
The next chapter, by Peter Bath of the University of Sheffield, looks in more detail at the use of data mining techniques for health and medical information.
After a section discussing different definitions, Bath goes on to explore the potential for using data mining techniques in health and medicine.
This includes a brief review of the different types of data being generated and integrated in data warehouses or clinical data repositories, e.g.
medical records, laboratory test reports and medical images.
The remainder of the chapter looks at data mining techniques that have already been applied to medical/health data e.g.
their application for the diagnosis and prognosis of disease and a review of challenges, including the quality of data, the validity and usability of data mining methods and tools, and user acceptance.
The final chapter in the technology section focuses on the indexing, browsing, and searching of digital video.
In this chapter, Alan Smeaton of Dublin City University first provides a succinct introduction to the coding of digital video emphasising the importance of compression and the family of standards developed under the auspices of MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group).
The next sections introduce various techniques for providing access to digital video.
This first describes conventional approaches based on the manual annotation of video segments, which Smeaton concludes is sufficient for some applications but "expensive, not scalable, and not always very effective" (p. 386).
The chapter then goes on to explore the potential for automatically extracting some information from video content, including the division of video clips into shots (shot boundary detection) and the identification of basic features (indexing primitives) and how such structured video can be used to support searching, browsing and summarisation.
A section on the evaluation of the effectiveness of video information retrieval refers to experiments being undertaken by the TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) video track, which has since 2003 become an independent evaluation activity known as TRECVID [8].
A final section on trends speculates on the potential influence of new technological developments, notes the importance of user issues, and predicts the increased take-up of MPEG-7, a format for the description of video features.
Policy Chapter nine is a review of the roles that information and technologies (ICT) play in political life, written by Alice Robbin, Christina Courtright and Leah Davis of Indiana University, Bloomington.
The chapter looks at both theoretical and practical aspects of the relationships between governments and citizens, focusing on three main categories: e-government, e-governance and e-democracy.
They conclude that it is too early to know whether ICTs will have a significant effect on political life and politics, suggesting that "we are witnessing small and incremental behavioral and structural changes" (pp.
463-464).
They recommend that future research into these topics should rigorously examine normative claims and empirical evidence.
The following chapter is a comprehensive introduction to legal aspects of the World Wide Web by Alexandre López Borrull of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Charles Oppenheim of Loughborough University.
The chapter first deals with copyright issues, noting recent changes in the law that have tilted the balance of rights away from users in favour of owners.
This section also deals with copyright in libraries, music sharing Web sites like Napster, and digital rights management technologies.
Rather depressingly, López Borrull and Oppenheim conclude that "problems associated with copyright on the Internet are likely to increase rather than decrease in the future" (p. 498).
The next sections deal with legal issues that are more specific to the Internet, e.g.
domain name disputes, litigation over deep linking, framing, caching and 'spamdexing.'
After a short section on software patents, the authors move on to a wide-ranging discussion of issues relating to pornography and censorship, defamation and the legal liabilities of employers and ISPs (Internet Service Providers).
Final sections deal with topics as varied as legal jurisdiction (differences in law between countries), the legal deposit of networked publications, and unsolicited e-mail.
López Borrull and Oppenheim recommend that information professionals "should maintain a watching brief on legal developments in their countries and, where necessary, take appropriate legal advice or consult their professional associations" (p. 529).
While most of the chapters in ARIST 38 would be of most interest to researchers, this chapter can be firmly recommended to practitioners who need an overview of the legal aspects of the Web.
Chapter eleven returns to the subject of the preservation of digital objects, previously discussed in a 2001 ARIST chapter by Elizabeth Yakel [9].
In her introduction, Patricia Galloway of the University of Texas-Austin provides some practical examples of digital preservation, e.g.
the development of standard formats for social science data, the use of XML as a preservation strategy for the preservation of digital text files by the Public Record Office of Victoria, Australia.
After some preliminary definitions, Galloway then briefly introduces some of the main stakeholders in digital preservation, including digital libraries, archives and museums, computer scientists, the software industry, commercial content providers, the creators and users of digital content.
The chapter's overview of research since 2000 focuses mainly on recordkeeping developments, like the Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records (MoReq) [10] and the InterPARES Project [11].
The next section deals with 'genre-specific' preservation problems, focusing on e-mail, office files, Web pages, databases and audiovisual objects.
A short section introducing the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) is followed by further analysis of preservation methods and metadata standards.
The final section outlines some possible future directions for digital preservation research and practice.
For those new to this topic, the chapter would be usefully supplemented by a reading of the earlier article by Yakel and another recent review article produced by Helen Tibbo [12].
The final chapter is a review of the Internet and unrefereed scholarly publishing by the late Rob Kling of Indiana University, Bloomington.
This starts with a brief look at recent developments in scholarly communication and publication, focusing on the growth of communication existing outside the traditional peer-reviewed journal system.
In his definitions, Kling prefers to use the term 'manuscript' rather than the more conventional 'preprint' to refer to the documents that authors circulate before their acceptance for publication.
Further sections look at the development of 'guild publishing' the publication of manuscript series by institutions, e.g.
series of working papers or technical reports and the use of disciplinary repositories (like arXiv.org) for the sharing of unpublished manuscripts.
Conclusions ARIST 38 is a worthy addition to its predecessor volumes.
The nature of the publication precludes any generic conclusions.
However, the sections on theory and technology attest to the wide range of analytical techniques that are now being used in information science.
These techniques originate in many other subject disciplines, most notably in ethnography, anthropology, sociology and psychology.
Secondly, the chapters on data mining suggest that the use of statistical techniques in some areas of information science and technology is becoming more widespread.
This volume as ever will not often be read from cover-to-cover.
The strength of ARIST is that chapters together with corresponding ones in predecessor volumes provide a good way for readers to investigate a new topic as well as a means of them keeping up-to-date with an existing one.
It is perhaps worth noting that the volume as a whole contains almost 2,000 bibliographical references, reflecting its importance in directing readers to work published elsewhere.
While in the past, ARIST has (on occasion) been criticised for its bias towards US research, it is perhaps worth noting that six out of the twelve chapters in volume 38 were produced by authors with an institutional affiliation outside that country.
Of the nine authors who produced these chapters, six were based in the United Kingdom, the remainder in Ireland, Israel and Spain.
It may be even more useful if chapters in future volumes could begin to include research that is not published in the English language.
The consistency of recent ARIST volumes suggests that it remains in very good editorial hands, despite the practical problems elaborated in the editor's introduction.
Cronin and his associate editor Debora Shaw are to be congratulated on the production of another excellent volume of ARIST.
References Sokal, A., Bricmont, J., Fashionable nonsense: postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science.
New York: Picador, 1998.
Kling, R., McKim, G., King, A., A bit more to IT: scholarly communications forums as socio-technological interaction networks.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54, 2003, 47-67.
Bowker, G. C., Star, S. L., Sorting things out: classification and its consequences.
Cambridge, Ma.
: MIT Press, 1999.
Brin, S., Page, L., The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine.
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1-7), 1998, 107-117.
Also available at: http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/1998-8 Kleinberg, J. M., Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment.
Journal of the ACM, 46(5), 1999, 604-632.
Bar-Ilan, J., Data collection methods on the Web for informetric purposes: a review and analysis.
Scientometrics, 50(1), 2000, 7-32.
Ingwersen, P., The calculation of Web impact factors.
Journal of Documentation, 54(2), 1998, 236-243.
TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation: http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/894.02/projects/trecvid/ Yakel, E., Digital preservation.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 35, 2001, 337-378.
MoReq: http://www.cornwell.co.uk/moreq.html InterPARES: http://www.interpares.org/ Tibbo, H., On the nature and importance of archiving in the digital age.
Advances in Computers, 57, 2003, 1-67.
Author Details Michael Day UKOLN Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 38, 2004" Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue45/day-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Buzz database rss portal cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Hall reports on recent news form BIOME, the Health and Life Sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network.
BIOME Database Continues to Increase The BIOME database [1] now contains over 25,000 resources and continues to grow.
To see the weekly additions go to BIOME what’s new [2].
BIOME Straight to your Desktop BIOME has been making lots of changes to its Web site.
With the help of Vicky Wiseman, our Portal Development Officer, a new feature added to the site is an RSS newsfeed of the latest headlines form BIOME.
RSS allows news headlines to be shared between different Web sites; they can be embedded directly into your own or you institutional Web page very simply.
The BIOME Search Box can also quickly be placed on your sites, allowing you to search across the BIOME Internet resource catalogues from within your own Web site.
Details on these services can be found at BIOME about pages [3].
BIOME is committed to being a user-responsive service.
We plan, therefore, to undertake an online questionnaire over the summer requesting users for their feedback.
Look out for the up-coming link on our home page.
New Internet Resource Booklets The 7th edition of the Internet Resources for Health and Medicine is now available.
This is a free booklet that gives a flavour of the many resources within the OMNI (Medical and Health Sciences) and NMAP (Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions) collections.
If you would like copies of the resource booklet then instructions for ordering are available from BIOME publications [4].
Resource Guide for Health and Life Sciences It is with regret that BIOME announces that the popular Resource Guide for the Health and Life Sciences initiative will be ending on 31 July 2004.
The project has been a great success in raising the awareness of electronic resources with thousands of printed guides distributed, thousands of hits a month to the online Web site and many talks and presentations given at both national and international conferences across the country.
In particular the series of Roadshows held around the UK and Scotland in spring and summer of 2004 were highly successful and produced excellent feedback.
BIOME would like to take this opportunity to thank the two Resource Guide Advisers for the Health and Life Sciences, Dr Jo Badge and Dr Rachael Stacey for all their hard work and dedication to the Initiative.
We wish them all the best for the future.
There are still guides left in stock and these can be ordered online Resource Guide for the Health and Life Sciences [5].
At present there are no plans for any further editions of the Resource Guide therefore we advise you to place your order quickly!
Please also note that the Web pages will no longer be updated as there will not be a Resource Guide Adviser in post to update them.
JISC (The Joint Information Systems Committee) has no plans to continue the upkeep of the online resource guides.
If you have any further questions or queries on the Resource Guide initiative please contact: Dicky Maidment-Otlet (dicky.maidment-otlet@bristol.ac.uk).
Changes at BIOME Nicola Smart, NMAP Service Officer left the BIOME Service at the end of June 2004.
She has taken up a new post at Nottingham City Hospital so we’d like to thank her for her hard work and wish her good luck in her new job.
Frances Singfield returned from maternity leave in June 2004.
The BIOME Service has recently recruited a number of new Content Providers.
They are subject experts from backgrounds in all fields of the health and life sciences and they work on a part time consultancy basis.
They contribute records to the BIOME database and help to review existing records ensuring that our links to Internet Resources stay as up to date as possible.
Come and Talk to BIOME Staff Members of the BIOME team will be present at the following events: NeLH Roadshow [6] 11 August 2004 9th European Conference for Medical and Health Libraries (BIOME paper) [7] 20 25 September, Santander, Spain Paper to be given by the BIOME Service Manager, Donald Mackay References BIOME database http://biome.ac.uk/ What’s new http://biome.ac.uk/whatsnew/index.html#newrecords BIOME about pages http://biome.ac.uk/about/contribute.html BIOME publications http://biome.ac.uk/about/publications.html Resource Guide for Health and Life Sciences http://www.jisc.ac.uk/resorder.html NeLH Roadshow http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/dlnet/roadshows04.asp EAHIL Conference https://ibio.humv.es/biblioteca/eahil/ Author Details Jenny Hall BIOME Admin Officer Email: jh@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Jenny Hall Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Seeing Is Believing: The JISC Information Environment Presentation Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Seeing Is Believing: The JISC Information Environment Presentation Programme Buzz data framework usability infrastructure metadata accessibility visualisation personalisation authentication Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre reviews the JISC Information Environment Presentation Programme and offers an insight to the outcomes of recent studies.
When using various Web sites for work or leisure most of us have favourites that we start with and prefer interacting with.
The reasons why we prefer one site over another may not be clear to us, but the interface of many Web sites is commonly tested to make using them as easy and straightforward as possible.
Making that interface between the user and the functionality of the Web site intuitive and easy to navigate will encourage users and increase traffic.
In the commercial world this can lead to higher sales or greater awareness of a product.
In education, the intention may be to assist the discovery of information and/or increase learning.
JISC has sought to investigate how the interface to Web-based services within education might be enhanced in this way by funding a range of studies under its Presentation Programme.
The Information Environment Technical Architecture [1] has an existing presentation layer.
FIgure 1: The JISC Information Environment Architecture This comprises the range of systems with which users will interact in order to access the brokers, indexes, content, and shared infrastructure etc.
available.
As indicated in the diagram, this may comprise portals of different kinds, learner management systems or resolver services.
These are the tools and systems that can present the information landscape to the user and make it accessible via the open standards of the Information Environment [2].
The different functionality that these systems offer is the subject of various JISC programmes and projects [3].
The Presentation Programme has been set up to investigate not the functionality but the interface that these systems offer to the user, the route by which users actually use the functionality available.
Inasmuch as other components within the Information Environment can present an interface to users, and many of them can and do, the Presentation Programme also seeks to investigate these and discover mechanisms through which they can be enhanced.
The differentiation between functionality and interface is highlighted by the original vision of the Information Environment.
In the Technical Architecture document [4] portals are envisaged as having a dual role in the fusion of metadata from different content providers, and in the presentation of this metadata to users allowing interaction with it.
Portals are now considered to be one of a range of presentation services, but this separation of roles is applicable across this range.
Programme Aims The aims of the Presentation Programme are as given in the Information Environment Development Strategy [5] document and cover the period 2002-2005.
These are: To have significantly improved the usability of JISC Services and resources offered through the Information Environment To have established the most effective means of embedding the presentation of resources within institutional, departmental, local and personal environments To have established and disseminated best practice wherever possible in design of interfaces to support the requirements of access to diverse types of digital resources These aims have guided the work undertaken within the programme.
The Information Environment Development Strategy was itself guided by the JISC Strategy for 2001-2005.
This Strategy has recently been revised [6] to take account of the current rapid changes in technology and new areas of work will stem from this up to 2006.
Areas of Work In taking forward the aims of the Presentation Programme, five areas of work are being developed.
These are: Usability Human-computer interaction (HCI) design Visualisation Embedding Personalisation Usability As the aims of the programme make clear, usability is viewed as a vital part of making interfaces more accessible and intuitive for users.
Usability within the Information Environment can be defined as in 'ISO 9241-11: Guidance on Usability' "the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use".
Usability testing is undertaken by many Web-based services during their development, where it can be essential to make sure the service achieves its goals; testing can also be used within existing services, though, as a means of enhancing their usefulness to the target audience.
The assessment of usability is indeed a sizeable industry.
Professional companies can be hired to carry out a full usability assessment, possibly using usability labs.
Whilst comprehensive, this route can also be very expensive.
An alternative camp [7] suggests that usability testing can be carried out on a simpler scale, often by the service owners, and big improvements to usability can be achieved through fairly small tests.
Within education, and particularly the digital library field, the discovery of information is a key task and establishing how the usability of services providing this functionality can be enhanced is a key part of the Presentation Programme.
HCI Usability, though extremely important in itself, is, however, just one aspect of how humans and computers interact.
Human-computer interaction (HCI) design considers the broader and more detailed perspectives of how this takes place.
Usability is task-oriented, examining the achievement of goals through the use of a service/product; HCI design considers the design process that takes place in the development of a service, and can influence changes to existing services.
These changes may include detailed aspects such as the exact placing of text and images on a Web page.
The key to HCI is user-centred design, placing the needs of users at the centre of the development activity and building round this using the knowledge and experience of the development team.
It is this user-centred design approach that the Presentation Programme is focussing on.
Visualisation A different subset of HCI design is how the interface actually displays the information it is presenting.
In the education and library fields, much information is text-based.
Displaying this as text is often clear and straightforward.
Indeed, it may well fulfil the requirements stated above for a usable service in achieving a certain goal.
However, as search engines like KartOO [8] have shown, it is possible to take text-based information and display this in a graphical form to highlight relationships and links between different pieces of information that the text-based display is unable to show.
This visualisation of the information allows extra interaction between the user and the service.
In addition, visual techniques can be used to create the query for information in the first place and to manipulate the results where appropriate.
Visualisation can, of course, be used in a variety of arenas and some disciplines lend themselves to visual techniques more than others, e.g., genetic data.
Within the Information Environment, with the emphasis on sharing and discovery of metadata, it is the visualisation of metadata, or information visualisation, that the Presentation Programme is addressing.
Embedding The flexibility of the Information Environment architecture, with components interoperating with each other using standards, allows for some areas of functionality to be embedded within others.
Institutional developments within Higher and Further Education, both portals and learner management systems such as VLEs, encourage the users to interact with external services through these.
An area of presentation that is growing in importance is how external services might be embedded within these institutional systems.
Investigation of this embedding is ongoing in a range of current JISC projects [9].
In addition to these, the Presentation Programme will seek to investigate generic tools to facilitate this embedding and consider the technologies involved in the light of the usability, HCI design and visualisation work.
Personalisation Another area of growing interest is how much services can facilitate interaction with users by knowing who they are incorporating personalisation within them.
Such techniques are commonly used by commercial services such as Amazon and lastminute.com.
However, their possible role within the Information Environment, and within education more widely, is less well understood.
Personalisation can be implicit, where it is presented without the user realising, through tracking activity or identifying users through some form of authentication or authorisation; or it can be explicit, which requires an acknowledgement from the user that personalisation will take place.
In either case, personalisation has the potential to make interaction with Web-based services more targeted and assist the user in achieving their goals more directly.
Projects A range of studies has been undertaken so far within the Presentation Programme.
These are as follows: Usability Foundation Study and Investigation of Usability in JISC Services [10] Human-Computer Interaction Design Foundation Study [11] Visualisation Foundation Study [12] Two further pieces of work are currently ongoing: Investigation of embedding within the JISC Framework Programme [13] Investigation into Personalisation within Presentation Services [14] The focus of all the projects has been on services delivered within the Information Environment, and particularly focussed on existing services operated through JISC.
However, the findings from the studies are intended to have wider applicability and are relevant for anyone in education designing a Web-based service.
The usability studies served two purposes.
The foundation study has reviewed existing usability practice, both in the UK and worldwide, and has made recommendations on the usability techniques that will be most applicable for JISC Services, bearing in mind that different techniques might be appropriate in different situations.
A usability and accessibility evaluation framework has been developed to allow service developers to assess which usability techniques will be most relevant for them.
Use of the framework is intended to raise awareness of different usability techniques and show how these can be used at different stages of development.
The report and framework documents from this study can be found on the project Web site.
The second usability study, the investigation of usability within JISC services, took the findings from the foundation study and applied them to a sample of JISC services, in order to test out the findings and to provide a benchmark for usability within JISC services.
These four services found the assessment both useful and encouraging and provided a great deal of valuable information.
It is recognised that time and effort is required to make full use of the usability techniques suggested as a result of the assessment and the results of this study will be used by JISC to assess how usability can be enhanced across all JISC services.
However, it is also recognised that application on a limited scale, (and the investigation demonstrated that the level of usability testing was already reasonably high), also helps in the production of services.
The HCI design foundation study has performed a similar task to the usability foundation study in assessing current HCI practice and considering the applicability of relevant design principles to JISC services and the Information Environment.
The study has very successfully collated a number of design principle documents into a single list and has evaluated these, with very positive results, with JISC services and institutional Web developers.
Additional guidance is provided for the design of online courses, portals, and digital libraries.
The principles are available for all to use as required via the project Web site.
The visualisation foundation study has provided another good review of existing practice, with a wide-ranging assessment of current information visualisation techniques and discussion of these in the context of JISC with key individuals in this emerging field.
The study has also used paper-based prototypes to investigate the applicability of individual visualisation techniques to a range of JISC services delivering different types of content.
The full report can be found via the project Web site.
Next steps As indicated above, there are two areas of work currently ongoing within the Programme.
These will add to the body of knowledge being accumulated.
Having examined current practice in the various presentation fields, the Programme now needs to examine more closely how the guidelines and principles highlighted can be effectively embedded within service design and development.
Consideration of the many different types of content that can be disclosed within the Information Environment, and their different presentation requirements, will also benefit from further investigation and the Programme will seek to take this forward.
Conclusion In building components within the Information Environment there are many presentation issues that can be addressed to make the service easy and valuable to use; indeed it is hoped it will be one of those Web sites to which users instinctively refer when seeking to achieve a particular goal.
Usability, HCI design, visualisation, embedding and personalisation can all be used to enhance a service and make it more visible and usable.
There is, of course, a possible danger that adopting all the different guidelines available can be viewed as taking up too much time and effort.
When applied extensively there is no doubt that they can take up a lot of resources.
But it is equally true that application of selected guidelines and principles can have benefits far in excess of the effort involved.
The Presentation Programme will continue to investigate these issues and seek to make the guidelines themselves as usable as possible.
References The JISC Information Environment Architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ JISC Information Environment Architecture Standards Framework http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/standards/ JISC Projects http://www.jisc.ac.uk/projects/ Powell, A., Lyon, L., The DNER Technical Architecture: scoping the information environment, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/dner-arch.html JISC Information Environment Development Strategy http://www.jisc.ac.uk/strat_ieds0105_draft2.html JISC Strategy review http://www.jisc.ac.uk/jisc_strategy_review_update_250803.html Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design http://www.useit.com/ KartOO http://www.kartoo.com/ For example, see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_portals.html and http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/ Usability Foundation Study and Investigation of Usability in JISC Services http://www.jisc.ac.uk/project_usability1.html Human-Computer Interaction Design Foundation Study http://www.jisc.ac.uk/project_hci_design.html Visualisation Foundation Study http://www.jisc.ac.uk/project_visualization.html JISC Framework Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_frameworks.html Investigation into Personalisation within Presentation Services http://www.jisc.ac.uk/project_personalise.html Author Details Chris Awre Programme Manager JISC Email: c.awre@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/people_awre_c.html Return to top Article Title: "Seeing is Believing: The JISC Information Environment Presentation Programme" Author: Chris Awre Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/awre/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Where We Were, Are Now, and Will Ever Be Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Where We Were, Are Now, and Will Ever Be Buzz mobile database portal archives identifier blog video graphics aggregation personalisation rfid Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes a look at the development of search engines over the lifetime of Ariadne and points to what we might anticipate in the years to come.
Unfortunately, I was unable to contribute to the decennial issue at the editors' invitation due to a family bereavement, but since it was such a good idea to take a look back at where we were, and then relate it to the present day and beyond, I did not want to miss the opportunity in this issue.
Where Were We?
When starting any kind of retrospective, the first place to visit is always going to be the Wayback Machine, or the Internet Archive [1] as it is also known.
The immediate temptation is to see what Google was like ten years ago, and it comes as something of a shock to realise that it did not make its debut for another couple of years.
The search engine of choice for many people then was AltaVista [2], and looking at early iterations of the home page are actually quite shocking in many ways while it fits onto one screen the graphics are very poor, a large advert dominates the page and the search options are limited to searching the web or USENET and three display formats are offered.
An advanced search option was offered, but this was also fairly limited.
The other two 'options' on the page (if indeed they can be called that) are 'Contests' and 'Create a site'.
It's a very untidy looking page, and if anyone produced such a page today the kindest description that could be given would be 'amateurish'.
What, however, is interesting about the page is not what it says, but what we can divine from it of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but nonetheless the impression is that AltaVista was just an experiment (which is not far from the truth), and not to be taken particularly seriously, yet at the time we were amazed at what it was able to do for us.
Ironically however, some of the options, such as limiting a search to upper or lower case have since disappeared, and it is doubtful that they will return.
In those far-off days the simple fact that a search engine could index Web pages and return them to us in a list was quite remarkable, and we gave little thought to Web page design, and were happy to accept whatever we could get, however poor (with twenty-first century vision) it was.
Yahoo!
[3], which was the other major contender for the king of search engines, was also very basic, with poor graphics and few options.
The main emphasis on the page was of course the directory or index element, with a dozen options available, which interestingly enough have not really changed to the present day although of course the emphasis placed upon them has, quite dramatically.
The overall sense that I got from both sites (which is of course just my impression) is that both companies were taking the approach of 'we don't know what we're doing, but it looks promising, so we'll see where we go'.
Over the next few months, from mid-1997, we began to see the advent of the search engine wars, which were largely fought out over the size of their indexes, and there's an interesting article on that by Danny Sullivan [4].
More search engines began to appear, notably Northern Light, which was a pioneer in the field of clustering and query refinement.
The buzzword in the mid-1990s was 'portal', as the search engines began to realise that they needed to do rather more than simply offer a search service, and Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite and Infoseek began experimenting with the concept of adding more services and greater value for their users.
At that particular time it was quite hard to get a search engine to admit that that was what it was they were all emphasising the fact that search was only a part of what they were doing.
However, this in turn changed with the dot.com bust of 2000, with many engines disappearing, while the rest tried to recoup as best they could and return to the basic core structure of their business.
Google itself did not appear until late 1998 in any significant form [5], and the early home pages really underline the concept of simple, clear and uncluttered search engine interfaces.
During the course of 1999 Google experimented with slightly different designs, but the home page has remained remarkably consistent over the 8 years of its development.
More importantly however, the importance of ranking, and how to achieve a good ranking with the search engines moved to centre stage, and increased the need to get on that elusive first page.
At the end of 1999, Google introduced advertising linked to searches, and set other search engines on the same path.
But I still find it strange to think that something so obvious and now so ubiquitous took such a long time to develop; today we think nothing of this, but towards the turn of the century it was still something quite novel.
In many respects, while search engines continued to expand, finding new revenue streams and creating a niche for themselves, very little work was actually done on the search and retrieval options that users were offered.
It was as true then as it is today that most users are reasonably satisfied with simple quick and dirty searches, rather than more in-depth and detailed strategies.
Rather than improving existing facilities, some search engines began to take a slightly different route with natural language search and direct answers to specific questions, which again was quite revolutionary, but which is now an aspect of search that is incorporated into the major search engines and something users expect to find as a given.
Since 2000 Google has continued to increase its dominance in the search engine market place, but ironically I feel that it's managed to do this at least in part because it has ignored search itself and diversified into many other areas.
Indeed, if you look at its mission statement 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'
[6], it does not actually mention search at all.
Rather, Google is in the business of audience aggregation, and with a few notable exceptions it develops into areas where it can attract and also maintain an audience.
Blogger [7], Gmail [8], a personalised home page and so on are increasingly integrated.
Other major search engines are also doing exactly the same thing themselves with both Yahoo!
and MSN producing their own functions and facilities designed to catch, keep and grow an audience, with a clear aim of making money from them through advertising.
While the big three, or four, if you include Ask [9], are concentrating on diversifying and building up their markets, this is not leading to a monopoly at least in terms of numbers.
Hardly a day goes by that I do not discover a new search engine in April alone I have written about 8 new search engines or significant developments to smaller existing engines in my weblog [10], and there are a number of smaller engines (at least in terms of audience) which are continually innovating with new functionality, such as Exalead [11] and Accoona [12].
However, one particular victim of search engine evolution seems to be the index or directory type engine.
Yahoo!
has relegated its directory on its home page to the extent that it is almost invisible now, and DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project [13] is seldom talked about.
The only area in which this type of engine is still thriving is in country or regional search engines, and there are still a good two thousand or more of these available.
Meta or multi search engines (engines that draw results from a variety of other search engines, de-duplicate the results and then display them) are continuing to thrive.
'Traditional' search engines are also facing a slight threat from some of the Web 2.0based applications.
There is a strong trend now towards the personalisation of results, which actually started some years ago, as users realised that the results they were obtaining from engines were not always the most appropriate ones for them.
The big three in particular have worked hard in this area, Google with its personalised home page, MSN with the search builder refine results option, and Yahoo!
with the Mindset [14] approach.
However, applications such as Rollyo [15], Eurekster swicki [16] and Squidoo [17] are all offering users the ability to create their own search tools and resources to a much greater extent than ever before.
While I do not think this is going to be a major concern for search engines in the near future, it does help to point to possible new developments with which they will have to contend.
Emerging Trends Search engines are moving into the 'local' area, by offering tailored results and resources based on the physical location in which an enquirer happens to be.
If we add mobile communication into the mix, the entire concept of search engines begins to take an interesting new twist.
While making prophecies about the future is always risky, and doubly so when talking about the Internet it does not take a genius to work out that being in constant or semi-constant contact with a search engine is going to have considerable appeal to many people.
If you are in a different city, and need a hotel for the night, it is not going to be too difficult for the search engines to work out where you are, based on GPS and your mobile phone and recommend an appropriate hotel.
If your search is personalised, the search engine will be able to learn that you prefer hotels within a particular budget range and to return those results to you first.
Adding in the mapping features that the big search engines already have, they can also guide you directly to the front door.
News services will constantly be updated and the search engine could quite easily then inform you that your favourite band was playing in the same city the next evening, and you would be able to book a ticket there and then (with the search engine taking a suitable fee of course).
If we then complicate things even further, the increased use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips will mean that a visit to a supermarket will become interesting, as the mobile device will be able to recognise products, interrogate a search engine database and tell you if the item you want to buy is cheaper down the road.
As search engines are now getting involved in the entertainment industry with features such as video search, it no longer represents a great stretch of the imagination to assume that they will also want to tie in with supermarket chains.
This then opens up huge commercial possibilities, since you will be able to tell your personalised search engine what you want to eat for supper, and by talking to the mobile device via the supermarket you can be directed around the store to pick up each of the ingredients that is, if you prefer to do it manually, rather than sitting at home and ordering online through your Google Supermarket interface.
Conclusion Consequently, search engines will become more pervasive than they already are, but paradoxically less visible, if you allow them to personalise increasingly your own search experience.
Alerting services will become even more commonplace as search engines learn your interests and preferences and can inform you of new developments, news, new Web sites and so on without users having to do anything at all, since the engines can monitor what you do and where you go.
Of course, this could easily turn into some form of Orwellian dystopia, so I think that users will need to consider very carefully exactly to what extent they let search engines into their lives.
What is certain however is that the future will grow increasingly interesting and search engines in one form or another will be with us for a very long time to come.
References The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ Altavista http://www.altavista.com Yahoo http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/ Danny Sullivan, The Alta Vista Size Controversy, July 1997, SearchEngineWatch http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2165321 Google circa 1998 http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/ Google's mission statement http://www.google.com/corporate/ Blogger http://www.blogger.com Gmail http://www.gmail.com Ask http://www.ask.com Phil Bradley's weblog http://www.philbradley.typepad.com/ Exalead http://www.exalead.com Accoona http://www.accoona.com/ DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org/ Yahoo!
Mindset http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/ Rollyo http://www.rollyo.com Eurekster swicki http://swicki.eurekster.com/ Squidoo http://www.squidoo.com Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Search Engines: Where We Were, Are Now, and Will Ever Be" Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Blogging from the Backroom Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Blogging from the Backroom Buzz software wiki rss archives tagging blog cataloguing cd-rom research Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman reports on a seminar on blogging, designed for those working in the traditional 'backroom' professions such as cataloguing and indexing, held by the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group in London, on 8 June 2007.
Blogging and the use of wikis and RSS feeds can seem daunting to many library and information professionals who are now encountering them for the first time.
People think ‘Surely blogs are just online diaries?’ and ‘What use are wikis and RSS feeds really, aren’t they just for the ‘techies’?’ Then there’s the ‘I’m scared, it’s all too technical for me.’ And finally ‘Is it really ‘work’?’ and ‘Will my employer see it as ‘work’?’ The CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG) decided to address the concerns of this group and design this event, the first in a new occasional seminar series, for those working in the traditional ‘backroom’ professions of cataloguing, indexing, acquisitions and knowledge management, with a focus on sharing ideas for incorporating blogging into working life.
Delegates came from a wide range of organisations; libraries and information units in academic, public, commercial and government organisations as well as archives, art galleries and museums, were all represented.
Information Blogs by Information Professionals: How Acquisitions, Cataloguing and Subject Librarianship Are Good Blog Fodder Anne Welsh, Drugscope Interestingly, this presentation took the form of a blog [1].
Anne reminded us that Blogger’s help notes still define blogs as online diaries, and that one of the earliest blogs Ref Grunt, begun in November 2003 is still around.
However, she stressed that content is more important than format we value the content of books and journals not their actual printing (unless you have a special interest in this) and the same applies in Web 2.0.
Blogs need to be targeted to draw people in, and intuitive and easy to use if you want to keep your readership.
Anne went on to point out that traditional skills in cataloguing, acquisitions and subject knowledge are as important in the 2.0 era as they were in the 1.0 period.
The same skills that produced catalogue records can produce blog feeds from the catalogue and help in-site navigation.
Understanding a user group’s information needs is as relevant in acquiring Web documents and references and creating social bookmark sets as it is in buying print works.
Finally she noted that advances in technology have also made it easier to use; where once RSS feeds had to be individually and manually created, now the process is semi-automated.
Tagging software such as del.icio.us [2] and Connotea [3] enable indexing and subject retrieval via user group terms and, since tagging is here to stay, we should be using it to our advantage.
Combining tagging with traditional indexing could provide a whole new search (and search again) experience.
In this area she noted how the STEVE Art Museum Social Tagging Project [4] aims to exploit a user community’s willingness to participate in extending the indexing of its resources.
Marketing and Profile-Raising through Blogging Christine Goodair, International Centre for Drug Policy, St. George’s Medical School, London University Christine discovered the value of social software in her previous post at Drugscope.
Like similar organisations, Drugscope wanted to raise its profile but had no budget for this, so the challenge was to get publicity at no, or at least very little, cost so the Drugscope blog was born [5].
Christine paid tribute to Anne Welsh’s enthusiasm and ability in getting this up and running within a very short time.
Christine noted the value of a staged release to the blog’s core audience of drug service professionals first before opening up to a wider audience and noted that trying it out internally had made the library and information service more visible to the organisation.
Evidence was also collected to demonstrate the value of the blog to senior management; this included site metering, a request by Italian workers in this field to translate it (permission was given), and the fact that academics in the field are starting to follow the blog and cite it in lectures and references.
Experience showed the importance of keeping the blog fresh so that users could expect something new every week.
Drugscope publishes weekly articles which are available as PDF downloads via the blog these can sometimes be tied into events.
For example a tie-in with National Reading Day looked at the coverage of drug and alcohol addiction in fiction for teenagers.
It was also noted that the blog was a useful way of repurposing information; donations could be mentioned on the blog, providing a way of thanking the donor and raising awareness that donations were important.
Discussion raised queries over potential conflicts of interest and situations where internal blogs would be more appropriate, such as law firms and commercial organisations.
Is Blogging Good for Your Professional Health?
Helen Nicol, NHS Connecting for Health This presentation focused on internal corporate blogs.
Helen described the Connecting for Health initiative, whose purpose is to connect the various parts of the NHS.
The team members of each project are usually in geographically disparate locations, and some way was needed to enable people to share experiences and build communities.
This tied in with Helen’s need for a topic for her MEd in Training and Development dissertation, and she decided to investigate blogs as an internal knowledge-sharing tool a ‘dark blog’ or as Helen preferred to think of it, an online notebook.
Helen described the setting up of the blog using Jotspot, a wiki tool with blog functionality.
Her research found a strong misconception, based on experiences of older Web technology, that blogging is difficult.
Getting people to participate was difficult, especially where teams were too small to provide the core of pioneers and active participants who will support the participators who read posts but don’t contribute.
The result was few posts of a very general nature; if what they wanted to know wasn’t there, they didn’t ask.
Helen noted that specialist, targeted blogs are more successful than generalist blogs.
From the Backroom to the Frontline and Back Again: Library Current Awareness Services to the Home Office Rachel Robbins and Karen George, Home Office Rachel and Karen gave an interesting insight into running a library and information service for a large government department.
Figures quoted underlined the sheer scale of their work and individual examples gave some good context to specific issues.
They explained that the current awareness service is delivered by email alerts and newsletters, feeds, blogs and other tailored services.
Any of these may result in the information service being requested to find more resources on a specific topic.
Delivering the service relies on collecting information.
Every day some 600 incoming email alerts and 3,000 RSS feeds are reviewed, filtered and channelled out in the form of 450 current awareness bulletins per fortnight, 40+ alerts to the Press Office daily, and alerts to other Home Office staff.
Rachel and Karen explained that staff have to be both impartial and very good at sifting items in order to exclude what is not relevant while relaying what is in an appropriate manner.
They gave the example of a single news item on the experience of a young woman in a forced marriage, which would be fed back to staff dealing with forced marriages, domestic violence and illegal immigration.
Building Bridges: Improving Patient Care with Social Software Caroline De Brun, NHS National Knowledge Service The final presentation focused on the National Library for Health uses of social software to keep clinicians up to date.
More large numbers were quoted (the National Health Service England is the largest organisation in Europe and the 5th largest in the world) to illustrate the scale of the work and Caroline highlighted the fact that the NHS has undergone three major re-organisations since 1999.
Caroline then outlined how the National Knowledge Service uses blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, social bookmarking and networks to support NHS staff.
She also acknowledged the fear factor many staff have not had to use IT till now and the impression that it is not really ‘work’.
The different technologies are used for different purposes.
One example given was a glossary maintained in a wiki; in addition to a definition for each entry there is also a linked article that illustrates its usage in context.
Conclusion This was a valuable starter session for those wanting to move into this area.
In place of the traditional paper handouts, participants each received a CD-ROM of presentations and ‘how-to’ demos.
The presentations are also available from the Blogging from the Backroom event page on the UKOLN Web site [6].
References Backroom Blogging http://backroomblogging8june.blogspot.com del.icio.us social bookmarking http://del.icio.us/ Connotea online reference management http://www.connotea.org/ STEVE: The Art Museum Tagging Project http://steve.thinkdesign.com/steve.php Drugscope http://www.drugscope.org.uk/ Blogging from the Backroom http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/CIG/2007/blogs/ Author Details Ann Chapman Policy and Advice Team UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.d.chapman.html Return to top Article Title: “Blogging from the Backroom” Author: Ann Chapman Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/blogging-backroom-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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10th CETIS-TechDis Accessibility Special Interest Group Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 10th CETIS-TechDis Accessibility Special Interest Group Meeting Buzz data mobile software java html usability metadata accessibility passwords perl e-learning flash vle usb Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman reports on a one-day meeting that focused among other things on accessibility in virtual learning environments and personal learning profiles.
Having recently joined the CETIS-TechDis Accessibility SIG (Special Interest Group), I attended the 10th meeting of the group in York on 16 March 2005.
The meeting was held in the very new (opened that week) Higher Education Academy Building on the University of York campus where TechDis now has its offices.
There was in interesting mix of digital artists, metadata officers, lecturers, project staff and programmers from both universities and colleges, along with people from Becta, JORUM and Key2Access Ltd.
There were three presentations and the day finished with a short discussion session.
Sharing Current Issues and Practice Sal Cooke, TechDis Sal Cooke first gave a brief introduction into the aims of TechDis to enhance provision for disabled students and staff in Higher, Further and Specialist Education, and in Adult and Community Learning, through the use of technology.
She also mentioned the things that they don't do (e.g.
develop standards) and then went on to discuss some current issues.
A report on accessibility guidelines and standards is in preparation; this will compare 13 different sets of accessibility guidelines, specifications and standards.
Most of the guidelines are concerned with technology and do not cover the pedagogical aspects of e-learning.
However, we need to remember that learning objectives can be achieved via a number of routes and providing an alternative accessible learning experience may, in some cases, be a better solution than attempting to make particular learning materials accessible.
There seems to be a particular problem over the Special Educational Needs Act (SENDA) with some fear of the legislation and potential litigation apparent in a number of institutions.
TechDis have heard of a few cases where institutions are apparently telling lecturers not to use Word, Powerpoint, etc.
as they are not accessible; there also appears to be a number of cases where institutions are reluctant to use e-learning as they do not think they can comply with the Act.
So there needs to be more information out there to help dispel the misunderstanding and misinformation.
In passing Sal mentioned that newer versions of Word and Powerpoint do have some accessibility features but that not everyone knows what they are and how to use them; Flash can also be made more accessible.
CourseGenie software converts Word documents into accessible HTML.
She also mentioned SayPad, a freeware talking text editor.
However, to make things accessible, you also need to look at the type of information to be passed on, the learning objectives and the needs of individual students.
There was also mention of the Dunn Report [1], which looks at the extent of accessibility within educational VLEs; this identifies problems and recommended solutions but notes that there is still some way to go.
Moving Goalposts Sam Rowley and Ray Reid, Staffordshire University The focus here was on the problems encountered and lessons learned in developing an accessible version of the Creation of Study Environments (COSE) VLE software [2].
The COSE software is now available free in version 2.11, but is still being developed (hence the presentation title of 'Moving Goalposts').
Accessibility was not part of the original development, and has had to be added to the existing interface.
Version 3 is planned and will be designed from the start with accessibility in mind.
COSE uses a Java client and Perl server scripts.
There was mention of accessibility guidelines such as those of IBM and W3C; also the Sun Java Tutorial and the more general Sun Design Guidelines, and the IMS Guidelines for developing accessible learning applications.
Sam and Ray emphasised the need for multiple testing (including guideline conformance, end user, usability and functionality testing with all types of assistive technology, together with the need to test throughout a project rather than just at the end).
Two tools were noted: Ferret, which shows accessibility information for text under the mouse cursor, and Monkey, which displays trees of assistive components and their equivalents.
Implementation of the ACCLIP Specification Fiona Henry, Loughborough College This presentation looked at the implementation of the Progress Profile, which is part of the Accessibility for the Learner Information Packaging (ACCLIP) specification [3] at Loughborough College.
A major factor in this has been the geographical proximity of Loughborough University, Loughborough College and an RNIB College resulting in a number of students transferring from the RNIB College to Loughborough College (e.g.
to take foundation courses) and then on to the University.
The Progress File is used to record information about a student's progress.
Students access their file via a home page; the first time they access the home page they can set display preferences.
There is server-side recording of user preferences on text font and size, and colour or monochrome, so that every time the user logs on they see things in their preferred way.
Tutors also have access to the files, but log on from a different page; they can also set their own display preferences.
Security was noted as an issue, not least because students in the 16-19 years age group are very helpful to each other even to the extent of letting another student use their login and password on occasion.
Loughborough College is also experimenting with text messages to remind students to check their email and update their progress reports; it seems that this age group uses mobile phones routinely and not email.
The Progress File is kept for 3 yrs (Data Protection Act) and students can request copies for job and course applications.
The file can be sent as email, USB (memory sticks) or hard copy.
Loughborough College is now trialling the transfer of information to Loughborough University in respect of its foundation students who move on there.
This talk generated a lot of discussion about the future of user preferences and possible ways in which users might be able to record their preferences for use across all sites.
Discussion and Mini-AT Session There was brief discussion about the proposed joint CETIS Pedagogy Forum and Accessibility SIG meeting to be held on 23 May at the University of Wales, Bangor.
There was an overview of the contents of the TechDis AT (accessible technology) boxes, which are used for demonstrations.
The boxes contain reading tools, screen readers, alternative input devices, recording tools, planning tools, writing tools, and communication tools.
Jenny Craven of CERLIM at Manchester Metropolitan University spoke about the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) Project [4], which will assess the accessibility of European Web sites and is part of a cluster of projects to develop a European Accessibility Methodology.
Conclusion This was an interesting and useful event.
The meeting covered a lot of ground in the accessibility arena, and the breaks afforded good opportunities to meet a wide range of people.
I hope to attend further meetings of the SIG, which are held four times a year in different locations.
Official notes of the meeting have now been posted on the SIG Web site [5].
References Dunn, Sara.
"Return to SENDA" October 2003 http://www.saradunn.net/VLEproject/ The COSE Web site http://www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/ The ACCLIP specification http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content/20030428173016 European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) Project http://eiao1.eiao.net/ The CETIS-TechDis Accessibility Web site http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/accessibility/meetings/meetingsindex Author Details Ann Chapman Policy and Advice Team UKOLN Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "10th CETIS-TechDis Accessibility SIG Meeting" Author: Ann Chapman Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/acc-sig-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ECDL-2003 Web Archiving Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ECDL-2003 Web Archiving Buzz data software html database xml portal usability urn archives metadata identifier schema repositories preservation cataloguing rfc ark frbr mets mods naan url research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reports on the 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives held in Trondheim, August 2003.
On 21 August 2003, the 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives [1] [2] was held in Trondheim, Norway in association with the 7th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) [3].
This event was the third in a series of annual workshops that have been held in association with the ECDL conferences held in Darmstadt [4] and Rome [5].
These earlier workshops primarily focused on the activities of legal deposit libraries and the collection strategies and technologies being used by Web archiving initiatives [6].
At the start of the workshop, Julien Masanès of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) welcomed participants on behalf of the organising committee.
He noted that, for the first time, the workshop had issued a call for papers and that, following the peer-review process, ten papers had been accepted for presentation at the workshop.
These had been grouped into three broad themes: the design and use of persistent identifiers, the tools being developed and used to support Web archiving, and reports on some experiences.
Identifiers The first three presentations dealt with the ever-important issue of identifiers.
John Kunze of the California Digital Library began with an introduction to the ARK (Archival Resource Key) persistent identifier scheme [7].
Before introducing the scheme itself, Kunze first noted some problems with existing approaches to persistent identification.
These tend to be based on the concept of indirection, e.g.
names that resolve to URLs at the point of access.
In themselves, however, identification schemes based on indirection cannot guarantee persistent access because this is dependent on the stewardship of the objects themselves.
Kunze proposes a new approach to persistent identification based on statements of institutional commitment.
The ARK identifier is a means of linking to three things, the object itself, its metadata, and a commitment statement from its current provider.
The ARK scheme has four components: an (optional) name mapping authority hostport (NMAH) typically a hostname, the ARK label, a name assigning authority number (NAAN) that would be a globally unique number assigned by the name assigning authority, and the Name assigned by the name mapping authority.
An example of an ARK URL (taken from Kunze’s full paper) would be: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4w10060w The NMAH (e.g.
in this example: ark.cdlib.org/) is optional, so that it can be ignored or replaced when technologies and/or service providers change.
Full details of the ARK scheme have been published as an Internet-Draft [8].
This was followed by a presentation on the identification of network accessible documents by Carol van Nuys and Ketil Albertsen of the National Library of Norway [9].
The context was the National Library’s Paradigma (Preservation, Arrangement & Retrieval of Assorted DIGital MAterials) Project, which is investigating procedures for the selection, registration, and long-term preservation of digital objects [10][11].
Albertsen introduced some of the problems that were associated with identification at different levels of granularity (e.g.
items in anthologies) and looked at ways of defining identifiable units at all four levels of IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model [12].
As part of this, it was proposed that objects needed identifiers to be assigned at higher abstract levels, i.e.
the expression and work levels in FRBR.
In the next presentation, Eva Müller of the Electronic Publishing Centre of Uppsala University Library (Sweden) described how the URN:NBN (Uniform Resource Name : National Bibliography Number) had been implemented within the DiVA (Digitala vetenskapliga arkivet) system [13].
The DiVA (Digital Scientific Archive) system [14] was developed at Uppsala and is used to publish various types of scientific output e.g., doctoral theses, working papers, etc.
The system is currently used by Uppsala University and four other co-operating Swedish universities (Stockholm, Umeå, and Örebro universities, Södertörns högskola) and is soon to be used by one Danish one (Århus University).
The DiVA system is also an archival store, and the project has developed an XML schema (the DiVA Document Format) that contains metadata and those parts of the full text that can be converted to XML [15].
Müller’s presentation described the workflows that allow the DiVA system to reuse and enhance information provided by authors, (through the use of document templates), assign URN:NBNs to documents, and ‘deposit’ the latter with the Royal Library, the National Library of Sweden.
The assignment of URN:NBN [16] identifiers is done locally, and DiVA has been assigned sub-domains that can be used by project participants, e.g.
: URN:NBN:se:uu:diva for Uppsala University.
These identifiers are a key part of the workflow that DiVA uses to deposit ‘archiving packages’ with the national library.
These packages contain the object itself (e.g.
a PDF or PostScript file), the DiVA Document Format (providing metadata and as much content as possible in XML) and its XML schema.
Tools The following two presentations looked at tools being developed for Web archiving.
The first was an outline of the Nordic Web Archive toolset by Thorsteinn Hallgrímsson of the National and University Library of Iceland and Sverre Bang of the National Library of Norway [17].
The Nordic Web Archive (NWA), a co-operative project of the national libraries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, is developing a modular set of software tools known as the NWA toolset for improving the management of and access to harvested Web archives [18].
The toolset has three main components: a document retriever (the interface to the Web archive), an exporter (prepares objects for indexing), and an access module.
The exporter outputs data in the XML-based NWA Document Format, which can then be sent to the indexer.
The search engine currently supported by the NWA project is a commercial product developed by FAST [19], but it is hoped that this will be replaced by an open-source alternative.
There remained concerns about usability, the increasing size of the Web, relevance, and scalability, but Hallgrímsson concluded by stressing that Web archiving and indexing should be seen as a tremendous but challenging opportunity, not as a problem or liability.
After, this Ketil Albertsen of the National Library of Norway returned to introduce the Paradigma Web Harvesting Environment [20].
The Paradigma Project has produced a workflow for the harvesting and management of a Web archive.
One key issue is the balance between the automatic processing of objects and manual intervention.
The project has estimated that, at most, only 1% of network documents would be able to be described in the bibliographic system, so the challenge is to be able to analyse automatically, group and rank objects so that human effort can be focused on the small proportion that requires manual intervention.
Experiences Before lunch there was some time for some short verbal updates from organisations not represented on the programme.
These included the National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ), the National Archives of the UK, the National Diet Library of Japan, the National and University Library, Ljubljana (Slovenia) the Royal Library, Copenhagen (Denmark), Die Deutsche Bibliothek, and the National Library of Portugal.
So, for example, Steve Knight of the NLNZ noted that New Zealand would soon have a revised mandate for legal deposit that would include online materials and that the library would be experimenting with both selective and harvesting approaches to collecting the New Zealand domain.
The UK National Archives announced that a contract had recently been signed with the Internet Archive [21] to collect 50 UK Government Web sites at varying frequencies.
The first results of this are now available from the National Archives Web pages [22].
After lunch, the opening presentation was an attempt to characterise the Portuguese Web space [23] by Daniel Gomez of the University of Lisbon.
He outlined the results of a harvest of the Portuguese Web undertaken in April/May 2003.
The researchers configured the Viúva Negra crawler [24] to gather information about the Portuguese Web defined as the .pt domain, sites in .com, .org, etc.
in Portuguese, and those with incoming links to the .pt domain and ‘seeded’ it with 112,146 URLs.
The crawler visited 131,864 sites, processed over 4 million URLs, and downloaded 78 Gb.
of data.
Analysis of the results concerned the length of URLs (between 5 and 1386 characters), last modified dates (53.5% unknown), MIME types (95% text/HTML), language distribution (73% of documents in the .pt domain are in Portuguese), the presence of meta-tags, and content replication.
The final three presentations looked at the experiences of particular Web archiving initiatives.
First, Gina Jones of the Library of Congress (USA) talked about the challenges of building thematic Web collections [25] based on the experiences of developing the September 11 Web Archive [26] and the Election 2002 Web Archive [27].
Both of these collections were the result of collaborations between the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive and the research group Archivist.org [28].
One group of challenges related to scoping the coverage of the collections, e.g.
the problems of selecting the initial sets of ‘seed URLs,’ defining the number of links to be followed, both internally and externally, and the periodicity of collection.
Others related to what processes had to be followed after harvesting: the level of cataloguing, the maintenance of large amounts of data in ways that are scalable and accessible, and providing meaningful access.
For example, each of the Library of Congress’s thematic collections will have a collection-level record, while all sites in the Election 2002 collection and around 10% of the September 11 collection will be described using MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) [29].
At the other end of the scale, Jennifer Gross of the Institute of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) next introduced the Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS) [30].
Scholars of Chinese studies initiated this project because they had an awareness of the importance of the Web in China, e.g.
for communication between dissidents, and were aware of its fragility.
Because of its small size and relatively limited focus, DACHS can make use of the background knowledge of Chinese studies specialists, who know exactly what might be of interest for other scholars.
After selection, sites are collected using non-specialist tools (e.g.
Web browsers), some metadata is created, access is then provided through the Institute’s library catalogue and an index and full-text search available on the DACHS Web pages [31].
The final presentation concerned “Archiving the Czech Web” [32] and was given by Petr Žabicka of the Moravian Library in Brno (Czech Republic).
He first described a project funded between 2000 and 2001 that decided on a ‘breadth first’ approach to harvesting the .cz domain, defined some collection criteria, and a pilot crawl undertaken in September 2001 using the NEDLIB Harvester [33].
A second project called WebArchiv [34] initiated a second crawl in April 2002.
This was more successful than the first crawl, but highlighted problems with the harvester, chiefly relating to the length of time it took to download pages.
The final workshop discussion centred on the continuing need for initiatives and organisations concerned with Web archiving to co-operate.
Part of the discussion was based on the recent establishment of an International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) a group that links some national libraries and the Internet Archive and which will act as an focus for the establishment of working groups and projects to deal with specific issues.
In addition, there were a number of issues raised that need to be considered in more detail.
One of these concerns the development of better tools (new crawlers, software capable of indexing large-scale collections, etc.
), which would need to be done collaboratively and with significant support from funding bodies.
Another issue that will need to be faced soon is how users both researchers and the general public might be able in the future to access seamlessly Web collections fragmented by nationality, subject and resource type.
Other important factors will be legal constraints on Web archiving, the (so-called) ‘deep Web,’ and the exact role of replication in preservation strategies.
One paper accepted for the workshop (on Political Communications Web Archiving) could not be delivered due to illness.
However, the full texts of all papers are available from the workshop Web site [1].
Summing-up A year appears to be a very long time in Web archiving terms.
I felt that the Trondheim workshop had moved well beyond the previous workshops’ focus on collection strategies and crawler technologies.
Other participants will undoubtedly come up with other things, but I felt that there were a couple of points that came out of the nine presentations and workshop discussion.
Firstly, the focus of many presentations was not just on the collection of Web sites, but on what needs to be done after this to facilitate access and use.
One strand of this concerned requirements for descriptive data (metadata), identifiers and indexing technologies.
In many cases, initiatives are looking for a balance between what can be done in an automated way essential when we are considering such large volumes of data and what requires human intervention.
The Paradigma Project, for example, is looking for ways of automatically identifying those resources that need manual input.
A second, if related, point is the need for Web archives to take account of granularity.
Web objects are granular in a number of different ways and this influences the levels at which metadata needs to be captured or created.
For example, the Library of Congress has decided to catalogue its thematic collections at collection level, with additional metadata (using MODS) at selected lower levels of granularity.
The Paradigma Project has considered the granularity of objects as they relate to the FRBR model.
Finally, a more general point.
The increased discussion of ‘deep Web’ sites has led me to think in more detail about what we mean when we talk about ‘Web archiving.’ I was struck when reading the BrightPlanet white paper on the deep Web [35] just how many of the largest sites listed were large databases that offer Web interfaces because this is the way that most of their current users want to gain access to them.
Many of these (e.g.
NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), the US Census, Lexis-Nexis, INSPEC, etc.)
existed long before the Web was developed, and presumably the interfaces to these will in due course migrate to whatever access technologies succeed it.
Just because something can be accessed via the Web, does that mean that it should be within the scope of Web archiving initiatives?
I’m not suggesting that libraries and other cultural heritage organisations should ignore the preservation needs of these key resources, just that Web archiving needs to be seen as just one part of more comprehensive digital preservation strategies.
References 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ Nuys, C. van.
(2003).
“ECDL 2003 workshop report: Web archives.” D-Lib Magazine, 9(9), September.
Available at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/09inbrief.html#VAN_NUYS 7th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2003), Trondheim, Norway, 17-22 August 2003.
Available at: http://www.ecdl2003.org/ What’s next for Digital Deposit Libraries?
ECDL Workshop, Darmstadt, 8th September 2001.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2001/ 2nd ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving, Rome, 19th September 2002.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2002/ Day, M. (2002).
“2nd ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving.” Cultivate Interactive, 8, November.
Available at: http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/ecdlws2/ Kunze, J.A.
(2003).
“Towards electronic persistence using ARK identifiers.” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ Also available at: http://ark.cdlib.org/arkcdl.pdf Kunze, J., & Rodgers, R.P.C.
(2003).
“The ARK Persistent Identifier Scheme.” IETF Internet-Draft, July.
Available at: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kunze-ark-06.txt Nuys, C. van, & Albertsen, K. (2003).
“Identification of network accessible documents: problem areas and suggested solutions.” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ National Library of Norway, Paradigma project.
Available at: http://www.nb.no/paradigma/ Nuys, C. van.
(2003).
“The Paradigma Project.” RLG DigiNews, 7(2), 15 April.
Available at: http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/v7_n2_feature2.html IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.
(1998).
Functional requirements for bibliographic records: final report.
UBCIM Publications, New series., Vol.
19.
Munich: K. G. Saur.
Available at: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm Müller, E., Klosa, U., Hansson, P. & Andersson, S. (2003).
“Archiving workflow between a local repository and the national archive: experiences from the DiVA project.” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ Also available at: http://publications.uu.se/epcentre/presentations.xsql DiVA portal.
Available at: http://www.diva-portal.se/ Hansson, P., Klosa, U., Müller, E., Siira, E., & Andersson, S. (2003).
“Using XML for long-term preservation: experiences from the DiVA project.” 6th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2003), Berlin, Germany, 20-24 May 2003.
Available at: http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/etd2003/hansson-peter/ Hakala, J.
(2001).
“Using National Bibliography Numbers as Uniform Resource Names.” RFC 3188, October.
Available at: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3188.txt Hallgrímsson, Þ., & Bang, S. (2003).
“Nordic Web Archive.” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ Nordic Web Archive: Available at: http://nwa.nb.no/ FAST.
Available at: http://www.fastsearch.com/ Albertsen, K. (2003).
“The Paradigma Web harvesting environment.” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ Internet Archive.
Available at: http://www.archive.org/ The National Archives, UK Central Government Web Archive.
Available at: http://www.pro.gov.uk/webarchive/ Gomes, D., & Silva, M.J. (2003).
“A characterization of the Portuguese Web.” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ Tumba, Viúva Negra crawler.
Available at: http://www.tumba.pt/crawler.html Schneider, S. M., Foot, K., Kimpton, M., & Jones, G. (2003).
“Building thematic web collections: challenges and experiences from the September 11 Web Archive and the Election 2002 Web Archive.” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ September 11 Web Archive.
Available at: http://september11.archive.org/ Election 2002 Web Archive.
Available at: http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/elec2002/ Search available at: http://webarchivist.org/minerva/DrillSearch webArchivist.org.
Available at: http://www.webarchivist.org/ Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS): Available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/ Gross, J.
(2003).
“Learning by doing: the Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS).” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ DACHS Digital Archive for Chinese Studies: Available at: http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/dachs/ Žabicka, P. (2003).
“Archiving the Czech Web: issues and challenges.” 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, Trondheim, Norway, 21 August 2003.
Available at: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/ Hakala, J.
(2001).
“The NEDLIB Harvester.” Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, 48, 211-216.
WebArchiv.
Available at: http://www.webarchiv.cz/ Bergman, M.K.
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“The deep Web: surfacing hidden value.” Journal of Electronic Publishing, 7(1).
Available at: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-01/bergman.html Author Details Michael Day UKOLN University of Bath Email:m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving”  Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 30-October-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 37 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/ecdl-web-archiving-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What's in Artifact for Further Education?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What's in Artifact for Further Education?
Buzz archives cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Jayne Everard writes about the areas covered by the new subject service Artifact and takes us through the facilities on offer to FE practitioners.
Artifact [1] is the arts and creative industries hub of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) [2] providing free searchable access to high-quality resources on the Web in the following subjects: Architecture, Art, Communications and Media, Culture, Design, Fashion and Beauty, Performing Arts and a range of general subjects such as business advice, events and exhibitions, funding, training and employment opportunities, and much more.
The Artifact Internet Resource Catalogue Artifact’s core service is the Internet Resource Catalogue containing descriptions of and links to high-quality, evaluated Web sites for the arts and creative industries.
All sites have been selected by subject experts from across the UK teaching and learning community and the resources are checked regularly for currency, with new sites being added every day.
The Artifact catalogue can help teachers to find resources to include in their lessons, course materials and reading lists.
It can also help students and researchers with a wide range of quality-assured resources to aid with coursework, assignments and research.
Search Options Artifact search box Enter a search term to search across the entire Artifact catalogue Subject browsing search or browse one of the main top-level subjects covered by Artifact Browse the A-Z subject list Advanced search the advanced search enables you to refine your search by: •a particular subject category •resource type, for instance Events •anyword, part of a word or a phrase A new service for the UK Arts and Creative Industries teaching, learning and research community Artifact was launched on 10 November 2003 at the Manchester Art Gallery and the London Institute Gallery.
Sir George Sweeney, Principal of Knowsley Community College and Alexandra Burslem, Vice-Chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University launched the service in Manchester, as the host city to Artifact and Loyd Grossman, journalist, writer and TV presenter together with Sir Michael Bichard KCB, Rector of the London Institute, launched the service in London.
Speaking about Artifact at the launch event, Loyd Grossman said: "It hasn't officially been launched yet but I've already bookmarked it!"
Loyd went on to say: "One of the interesting things about this site is that it has a quality assurance element to it and they've managed to introduce some quality assurance without making it censorious and boring, so you get the right sort of information but you also get serendipity and stimulation as...there's some really wonderful things to be found through Artifact."
Virtual Training Suite Tutorials Artifact will be maintaining free tutorials on the Web which teach Internet information skills in the following subjects: Internet for Art, Design & Media Internet for Hairdressing & Beauty Internet for Performing Arts These tutorials can be accessed at the Virtual Training Suite of the RDN [3].
Case studies for FE Working directly with FE practitioners, the RDN has developed practical examples that describe the way in which RDN subject resources can be used to help lecturers deliver particular courses and subject areas.
The following topics are available on the Artifact Case Studies page [4]: Art and Design Summary The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Infotrack Digital Arts Resources for Education (DARE) White Cube Gallery, Hoxton Media: Communication and Production Photography Techniques Research Techniques Professional Practice in the Media Industry Intermediate Health and Safety for Media Production Students Performing Arts Key Organisations Composition Stimulus Funding Organisations Future plans As Artifact is a new service, it will continue to develop both its catalogue of resources and additional services over the next 12 months based on user feedback and surveys.
It is possible to keep up to date on the development of Artifact by joining the JISC Artifact list[5].
Feedback Constructive criticism is vital to ensure Artifact is built for the community by the community.
Let us know what you think about Artifact by completing our online feedback form at: http://www.artifact.ac.uk/feedback.php Let us know about your favourite Web resource for inclusion in Artifact by completing the online suggestion form at: Suggest a resource Let us know about your favourite Web resource for inclusion in Artifact by completing the online suggestion form at: http://www.artifact.ac.uk/suggest.php Enhancing the RDN for Further Education Specifically for Further Education, the Exchange for Learning (X4L) Project [6] will increase the number of records of particular relevance to FE by adding over 14,000 records to the RDN by 2005.
A high proportion of these records will be directly relevant to Artifact and its users and these resources will be tagged as of interest to FE to ensure they are easily identified by the FE community.
References Artifact Web site http://www.artifact.ac.uk/ The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ RDN Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ Artifact Case Studies http://www.artifact.ac.uk/cases.php Archives of ARTIFACT the arts and creative industries hub of the RDN http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ARTIFACT.html Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_x4l Author Details Jayne Everard Service Manager —Artifact Manchester Metropolitan University Email: J.Everard@mmu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.artifact.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "What’s in Artifact for Further Education?"
Author: Jayne Everard Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/artifact/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Accessibility: The Current Situation and New Directions Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Accessibility: The Current Situation and New Directions Buzz data mobile software framework usability metadata accessibility browser video graphics windows multimedia aggregation gif dvd sms taxonomy research standards avatar Citation BibTex RIS Kevin Carey describes accessibility by disabled people to digital information systems across broadcasting, telecommunications and the Internet, looks into the future and makes recommendations.
Accessibility and Usability Before embarking on the major strands of my argument it would be as well to consider definitions.
There is now a fine old Pharisaic, or perhaps we might better say Scholastic, discussion about the delineation of accessibility the capability of a system to cater for the needs of disabled people as a highly specific segment in the usability the capability of a system to behave in a way which most closely accords with human behaviour sector as a whole.
This is best imagined as an accessibility core versus a usability outer section, with accessibility accounting for the most severe functional gap between person and system but the division defies the tactics of conventional turf wars.
Whereas execrable taxonomy, for example, the most salient and frequent shortcoming of Web sites, is usually classified as a usability issue, the inability to use keyboard input, as opposed to the use of the mouse, is classically an accessibility issue; but good accessibility through the use of the keyboard, can overcome bad taxonomy.
What we have learned, most notably in the framework for the outstanding Disability Rights Commission (DRC) research on Web accessibility [1], is that the key issue for those experiencing problems with digital information systems is the unified concept of task completion whose use of time and success rate can be measured, as opposed to much more abstract measurements of accessibility and usability.
Only those who seek grants to split hairs will quarrel with the fundamental premise that what matters is the system’s fitness for purpose which allows, for example, box offices to issue tickets, shops to sell goods and information systems to inform.
On this basis, then, one should properly refer to task completion in the context of a functional gap between digital information systems and people but, having recognised this, I will use the traditional language of ‘Accessibility’ as it refers in a shorthand way to the problems that disabled people experience with information systems but this shorthand will embrace some characteristics which are often described in terms of ‘Usability’.
For brevity, let us assume that the core of people who experience accessibility problems as the primary barrier in their use of digital information systems are classifiable as ‘Disabled’.
Admittedly, this term is usually epidemiologically or administratively defined whereas many disabled people would prefer it to be self-referential; but for the purposes of this article, I will assume the hybrid schedule of definitions in the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) [2], as amended by the DDA (2005) [3].
Whatever definitions are used, I believe that the following propositions are beyond dispute: Disability is almost entirely an adventitious phenomenon (in spite of the emphasis on paediatric disability in charity fund raising) whose incidence rises proportionately with age In almost all cases, as disabilities become more mild their incidence rises The four ‘clusters’ of disabling syndromes rank in descending order of incidence as follows: Learning/cognitive/developmental Physical/motor Deafness/hearing impairment Blindness/visual impairment Policy making and strategies for tackling paediatric disability challenges are radically different from those for adventitious disability The functionality gap between disabled people and information systems widens by cluster as follows: Deafness/Hearing impairment Physical/motor Learning/Cognitive/Developmental Blind/visually impaired [4][5][6].
These figures are related to PC-based systems largely presenting text and static graphics; one would expect the ranking to alter, with problems for deaf and hearing impaired people increased, with the growth of multimedia products without sub-titling.
Accessibility Methodology As already noted, it is dangerous to define accessibility, as opposed to usability, features in the enabling of task completion but the following is a summary, most of which is embraced by the idea dealt with later of creating data multi-modally; the exception is in the area of enabling simplification which is primarily required for those with learning, cognitive and developmental difficulties.
The terms in brackets show where the original technique was developed but all of these will move in time across channels: Audio/Video Description (broadcasting): primarily used by blind and visually impaired people but useful for data access through devices without a screen or where the screen is not in the line of sight; this is a highly specialised skill which involves selecting and ranking material from the visual data which must be included in the audio file in speech gaps in the audio visual product.
The material is mostly created but in some cases it simply involves providing audio information being shown on screen.
Print Modification (publishing): primarily used by visually impaired people but also useful for those with learning, cognitive and developmental difficulties, this involves the enablement of customisation of print size and font but it should also include the ability to moderate foreground and background colours and display intensity.
This is often referred to as a ‘Large print’ function but some visually impaired people require very small print.
It is also important to allow an unjustified right margin and the turning off of proportionate spacing.
Signing (broadcasting): exclusively for deaf and hearing-impaired people, this subject is somewhat controversial as there is no call for this service in North America and its use in Europe is limited.
It involves producing sign language on screen simultaneously with the finished broadcast; this can now be produced automatically with an avatar.
Simplification (publishing): primarily required by those with learning, cognitive and developmental difficulties but also useful for those who find the written text difficult, this involves using integrated tools to simplify lexicography and/or summarise a document; NB: the two processes may produce opposite effects as conventional shortening often involves jargon Speech synthesis (publishing): primarily used by blind and visually impaired people but also useful to those unfamiliar or unskilled with the written language being displayed, this involves translating the text file into synthetic speech.
Sub-titling (broadcasting): Primarily for those who are deaf or hearing impaired but useful for those unfamiliar with the language delivered on the audio track.
Many deaf people want the full text plus sound effects which may amount to 180 words per minute Digital Information Systems The second major issue of definition is my use of the term digital information system.
This generic description is necessarily much wider than the usual concern with Internet and Web access.
Public policy in the area of social inclusion or the ‘Digital divide’ has erroneously concentrated on PC-based, as opposed to telephone and television-based, user interface experiences out of historical snobbery but the necessary analogue boundaries between the three channels will disappear and so it is much more helpful to think of digital information systems generically.
One of the conclusions which will naturally emerge from this discussion, incidentally, is that Internet publishers have much to learn from broadcasters about the culture of accessibility whereas broadcasters have much to learn from Internet publishers about plasticity and interactivity.
The Functional Gap Finally, on the subject of definition, I have already used the term ‘functional gap’ to describe the inadequate transactional outcome between digital information systems and people.
I use this term most deliberately because the public policy analysis of why people have problems with digital information systems, notably those dependent upon the PC, has been predominantly anthropocentric.
If only, politicians say, we could get alienated people to master word processing, the world would be a better place.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, the much more crucial issue is why these people have problems with PC/Windows bundles when they have no problems using VCR equipment, navigating the Sky Electronic Programme Guide, manipulating mobile phone settings, using SMS or, in a different field, passing a driving test, understanding the soccer off-side rule and finding items in supermarkets.
We should see this functionality gap as arising because of two major factors: the lack of skills or incentive on the part of the human user on the one hand, and the deficiency in the design of the system and its user interface on the other.
There is, to cite an apparently trivial example, something perverse about a system which requires the activation of the ‘on’ switch to turn it off.
Computer users with an incentive to master a system, easily forget its perversity until it either spontaneously modifies itself or an accidental operation is performed where in either case the correction is not susceptible to rational investigation.
In a fundamental sense, almost universally overlooked by analysts and lobbyists who have an obsession with skills development, training in the use of systems is a cost shift from the producer to the consumer; the better the design, the more intuitive the functionality, the lower the degree of skill and training which are required to close the gap between system and user.
Fundamental Issues In considering the functionality gap between disabled people and digital information systems, I will deal with three fundamental issues: First, the design of digital information; Secondly, the design of the user interface; and Thirdly, the impact on these of the convergence of digital publishing and broadcasting.
Having considered these general issues I will make some specific remarks on accessibility in the context of the formal learning process.
The Design and Accessibility of Digital Information and User Interfaces Digital Information Design The extent and degree of accessibility of digital information to disabled people is in inverse ratio to the extent and degree of legislation and regulation governing its publishing or broadcasting; thus: The least accessible sector is DVD production (where standard setting is voluntarily and secretively undertaken by a cartel of multi-national companies) followed by Internet and Web publishing where accessibility is determined by publisher with Broadcasting taking most account of accessibility, particularly those parts with statutory or regulatory public service obligations.
Indeed, broadcasting is a good starting point for an accessibility discussion because as a medium it inherited the cinematographic tradition of creating its content multi modally, that is using moving pictures, static text and graphics and music and audio simultaneously.
This practice, when deliberatively enhanced to include text sub titling for deaf and hearing impaired people and audio description for blind and visually impaired people, fulfils the first basic rule for creating accessible digital information: Create multi modally and enable multi modal interaction [7] Where broadcasting has, on the other hand, been conspicuously less accessible is in the area of user control.
There are two reasons why broadcasting tends not to think in terms of plasticity: first, it was born in an analogue era and, even more significantly, it deals in intellectual property where a high value is placed on integrity.
Unlike the Internet environment which is a product of the digital age and which frequently aims to generate interaction with the system, broadcasting has only encouraged interaction through the use of different back channels such as mailed letters, the telephone and most recently email.
Paradoxically, the area where there is least plasticity in digital information available on the Internet is in the public sector whose stated mission it is to communicate effectively with all citizens.
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is ideally suited to curtail the interference with documents and maintain their integrity and so it has precisely the opposite characteristics from a fully accessible document which allows the user to choose foreground and background colours, print size and font, etc.
There is now a comprehensive PDF accessibility package but in general the format performs less well in accessibility terms than standard Microsoft documents.
At the other end of the spectrum accessibility is being threatened by the increasing use of image files such as Graphics Interchange/tagged image file formats GIF/TIF) which contain text.
There will be a further challenge when Internet standards are set by global entertainment companies with the primary purpose of delivering entertainment rather than by text and static graphics publishers.
There are many standards and rules which attempt to capture the various aspects of digital information accessibility [7] but these boil down to a simple principle: Enable customisation and simplification.
The long-term future of digital information accessibility lies in the development of authoring tools which prompt good practice.
There is also the possibility that broadcasters, accustomed to conforming to regulated accessibility criteria, will seek a ‘level playing field’ in the context of convergence to ensure that their competitors comply with accessibility standards.
There is a good deal to be said here for cross-fertilisation: broadcasters can learn from the Internet culture of plasticity and interactivity and Internet publishers can acquire the accessibility culture from broadcasters.
A further aspect of digital information design involves the adoption of a neutral stance with respect to channels and their user interfaces.
A good example of this is the need to design Web pages in such a way that they are appropriate for a high resolution PC screen but can be simplified, through the use of tools, so that they are suitable for the small screen of a mobile phone; this might involve, for example, using a tool which works on a macro for eliminating illustrative graphics for the smaller screen.
This kind of channel and user interface flexibility is summarised in my third general rule: Enable channel and user interface choice [7] Content Creation Taken together, these three general principles of creating multi modally, enabling customisation and simplification and enabling channel and user interface choice call for an approach to digital information design and content creation which constitutes a radical departure from most analogue practice.
In this context there are three fundamental characteristics of the way in which digital information is designed which must be borne in mind: Creative collaboration Data granularity Tools enablement [8] Creative collaboration has been a salient feature of the cinema and television but it has made relatively little headway in traditional and in Internet publishing.
It would be preposterous to suggest that an individual could make a television programme single-handed but almost as preposterous in our culture to suggest that a major piece of text fiction could be created collaboratively.
There is a tradition of book illustrators working with authors but there are still a very large number of Web sites being designed and built by individuals, even though a high aesthetic sense is rarely matched by a deep insight into taxonomy.
There is also a marked tendency, repeating the mistakes of television with cinema products, to transfer text intended for printing to an on-screen environment instead of writing specifically for the screen.
Data granularity is essential for customisation and simplification and for the selective application of tools.
In the analogue era the objective was to take granular data and to render it in a holistic, bound format to preserve its integrity.
With digital data it is much more helpful to assemble all the elements but enable them to be discretely manipulable, e.g.
a user may wish to leave unaltered the background to an etching but sharpen the foreground outline but if the two layers are ‘bound’ they cannot be modified and rendered separately.
A much more important example in our context is the separation of on-screen text elements from the graphics file of the picture, enable text enlargement, simplification or audio rendering.
In the analogue age the data did not come with manipulation and rendering tools but these should be seen as an integral part of any document so that the user can customise the rendering.
Data creators, aggregators, brokers and publishers generally assume that the user has access to standard tools, although this frequently does not apply in the area of summarising and simplification (and altering browser settings can be difficult) but the separation in the broadcasting field is radical; there have been instances where regulators have insisted upon the creation of audio-described broadcasting although receivers lack software to decode the extra material.
As the access to digital data penetrates further into ‘lower’ socio-economic markets, the need for integrated tools will increase.
The lack of integrated data manipulation tools has a particularly damaging effect on disabled people.
Microsoft, as a near monopoly supplier of computer operating systems and software, insists that to bundle accessibility into its standard offer would be a breach of competition law.
Unfortunately, accessibility software such as ‘Screen readers’ and screen magnification software is supplied by a tiny handful of developers operating in a cartel on low R&D budgets.
Their products work most reliably in ‘turnkey’ hardware which is expensive relative to the standard PC/Apple market but if the software is used on standard systems there are compatibility problems.
In the broadcasting market access to audio description involves the use of an additional set top box or card.
User Interfaces Although, strictly speaking, a hearing aid is a data user interface, I will not be dealing with this class of item but will focus on: Keyboards Numeric Keypads Remote control devices Screens The chief problem with all user interface control panels is that they are non-standard.
The European Union made a serious error with disastrous but unintended consequences for disabled people when it deregulated hardware design except in respect of health and safety requirements.
The open market in design has left disabled people increasingly impotent as technology has miniaturised and become less standardised.
Many people with poor vision or learning problems, for example, find it very difficult to learn how to use a qwerty keyboard but their problems are complicated by layout variations outside those keys which are absolutely standard.
Even where the numbers layout 0-9 is standard across a large number of numeric keypads, the exact location of these ten buttons varies, as do the associated features on remote controllers and telephones.
A blind person checking into a hotel may find herself both unable to use the television and unable to call for help!
The obvious answer to the problem with qwerty-centred keyboards and numeric keypads is the individual, all purpose, programmable user interface which can be ‘BlueToothed’ to any processor and/or receiver.
This might take the form of familiar-looking devices with customised key assignment but in many cases the device will be a flat surface with programmable and movable buttons which might, for example, deliberately limit the user to five television channels instead of the approximately 400 on current Sky electronic Programme Guides.
Such a user interface would allow for the organic development of functionality based on user need and user skill.
It would overcome one of the greatest obstacles to accessibility at a low cost and would eliminate a substantial amount of hardware duplication.
The same principle applies to screen technology.
The physical separation of the screen from the processor offers a wealth of opportunities for heightened accessibility.
A user could carry her own screen or portable screens of a variety of specifications could be provided in public places.
Again, connectivity could be through Blue Tooth or a similar convention.
For some people the personal screen and the programmable user interface could be a single device.
In either case, the cost of acquiring these devices would be much less than that of duplicated hardware.
The Challenge of Convergence As has already been noted, there is much to be gained from convergence in the creation, transmission, reception and processing of digital content, particularly if the industries emerging from the analogue era can learn from each other and can, in addition, develop new standards.
In this context, the mobile telephone industry provides a very good case study.
It has developed some data organisation ideas (menus) from the computer sector but it is already beginning to behave like an entertainment library and a broadcaster; but at the centre there is voice and text interaction, combining the traditional telephone use with revolutionary SMS.
Related to this are developments in text to speech and speech to text which constitute a fundamental component of accessibility, particularly in respect of the second half of the multi modality principle, namely enable multi modal interaction.
Thus, although there are two distinctive traditions in broadcasting on the one hand and publishing on the other, the key driver for convergence may be the telephone which borrows from both traditions.
What it lacks is an accessibility regulatory framework similar to that of broadcasting or a self-regulatory framework similar to that for the World Wide Web.
In summary, then, all the components for effective accessibility in a converged digital data ecology exist but they need to be creatively combined.
Accessibility and Formal Learning Over and above the general problems of accessibility, there are some specific problems which need to be considered largely in the context of formal learning, although these present themselves in the general digital information environment: Navigation Evaluating sources Blended learning For disabled people, even more than for the population in general, navigation is a crucial issue.
Most disabled people are measurably slower at task completion in the digital environment [9] and a good deal of that extra time is taken up with navigation.
For all people the exploding quantity of information presents a serious problem but blind and visually impaired people are forced to plough through masses of report lines because they cannot scan and Internet page changes produce large quantities of repeat metadata which it is difficult to ‘skip’.
They also have problems with understanding the way that data choices are displayed, a disadvantage they share with many people who have learning, cognitive and developmental difficulties.
In the context of convergence, navigation might be facilitated through a much closer adherence to the (7 + or 2) rule [10].
By coincidence, the outer limit of this rule is nine which accounts for the 1-9 digits on a numeric keypad.
Taxonomy by nine presents major commercial opportunities and offers a degree of usability and familiarity of approach [11] [12].
Closely related to navigation is the issue of evaluation, of assigning weight and significance to sources.
A student does not want tabloid journalism on his subject but neither does the general reader want monographs.
In other words, it is the relevance not the intrinsic merit of the information which is in question.
Again, blind and visually impaired people and those with learning difficulties are most disadvantaged by being presented with massive search reports of undifferentiated information.
The answer for many of us is to learn how to define a search but a more satisfactory solution is the use of a system which adjusts to user behaviour over time which therefore allows the user to work deliberatively, as opposed to serendipitously.
Such a system can ‘learn’ what the user is interested in and the professional level of that interest.
This is by far the most important assistance that most disabled people can be given.
Another aspect of the learning process which ought to be considered carefully is the role of blended learning.
The development of broadband telephony has greatly enhanced the possibilities of students and tutors sharing on-screen displays and discussing work in progress but these facilities are even more important for disabled people who tend to ‘get stuck’, sometimes thwarted by what to most people would be trivial barriers.
Conclusion In conclusion, here is a short summary of what needs to be done to enhance accessibility and to break away from the traditional approach: First, concentrate on digital data design and creation to see that it accords with basic rules Secondly, develop programmable user interfaces Thirdly, take advantage of cable-free user interfaces, particularly screens and keyboards Fourthly, install data provision systems which respond to user behaviour Finally, provide blended learning facilities.
None of these proposed solutions are science fiction they are all available now but we must stop travelling into the future with our back to the engine; it is time to turn round and face the future.
References Disability Rights Commission (DRC UK): The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People: A Formal Investigation conducted by the Disability Rights Commission, TSO, London, 2004 http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/report.asp United Kingdom Parliament: Disability Discrimination Act 1995, HMSO, London, 1995 http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1995/1995050.htm ISBN 0 10 545095 2 United Kingdom Parliament: Disability Discrimination Act 2005, The Stationery Office Limited, London 2005, ISBN 0 10 541105 1 http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2005/20050013.htm Forrester Research, Inc.: “Phase I: The Market for Accessible Technology, and Phase II: Accessible Technology in Computing”: Forrester 2003 (for Microsoft Corp.) http://www.microsoft.com/enable/research/ Carey, Kevin.
: Managing Information, July 2004 pp 56 http://www.managinginformation.com/Catalogue/contentsjulyaugust2004.htm Carey, Kevin.
: Managing Information June 2004, pp 56 http://www.managinginformation.com/Catalogue/contentsjune2004.htm Carey, Kevin.
: ‘A Comparative Analysis of Guidelines for Access by Disabled People to Digital Information Systems : Some Proposals for Simplification’: Inaugural Lecture, City University, London, 25th May 2005 Carey, K.: ‘The importance of Digital Information and Tools Design in Enhancing Accessibility’: In: Digital Divide.
BECTA/Toshiba, London 2002, pp 32-44 Disability Rights Commission (DRC UK): The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People: A Formal Investigation conducted by the Disability Rights Commission, TSO, London, 2004 : see Tables 1, 2 and 3 as follows: TABLE 1: Task success rate by impairment group TABLE 2: Mean ease of task ratings by different impairment groups TABLE 3: Task completion times for high and low accessibility sites (in seconds) http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/report.asp Miller, George A.: “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”: The Psychological Review, 1956, vol.
63, pp.
81-97 http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html Carey, Kevin.
and Stringer, Roy.
: “The Power of Nine”: Library and Information Commission Research Report 74: London 2000: ISBN 1-902394-46-1 ISSN 1466-2949 and 1470-9007 Carey, Kevin.
: “The Power of Nine in a Converged Environment”: NESTA, Futurelab, Bristol, UK: 7th June 2005 http://www.nestafuturelab.org/ Author Details Kevin Carey Director humanITy Email: humanity@atlas.co.uk Web site: http://www.humanity.org.uk Return to top Article Title: “Accessibility: The Current Situation and New Directions” Author: Kevin Carey Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/carey/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Assessing the Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the FE and HE Sectors Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Assessing the Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the FE and HE Sectors Buzz framework foi foia privacy Citation BibTex RIS Steve Bailey describes how the FE and HE sectors have prepared for the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act and what challenges still lay ahead.
As with the rest of the public sector, the Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) sectors have had over four years to prepare for the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
Much has been achieved during this period in terms of assigning responsibility for overseeing preparations, raising awareness and putting a framework of policies and procedures in place to move towards compliance.
However, it is also true to say that for most institutions there is still much to do.
Most organisations understandably focused on the 'sharp end' of request management in the last hectic months leading up to 1 January 2005.
In most cases there is now a real need to focus attention on the broader, more nebulous topics of information creation and management which, though currently of a lower profile, will actually form the bedrock for ongoing compliance.
Countdown to Compliance It is probably fair to say that the passing of the FOIA in 2000 caused little immediate comment or concern amongst senior management within most institutions.
Indeed, one of the unintended by-products of the long introduction before full commencement which was granted by the Act seems to have been a general feeling that it was too far off to worry much about in the first few years of the new millennium.
Consequently those members of staff who did realise the breadth and likely impact of the Act, or who suspected that the responsibility for ensuring compliance was likely to come their way, often faced an uphill task to try to persuade senior management that this was an urgent enough issue to take immediate steps.
There is nothing like a short deadline to stir action, nor a long one to encourage a more laissez-faire approach.
The requirement within UK legislation for all public authorities to create and maintain a 'publication scheme' in essence a proactive guide to those classes of information most likely to be of interest to the public in advance of the full implementation of the Act proved extremely useful for leading the sector down the road to compliance.
It put the whole issue of FOI compliance on the agenda for senior management, required institutions to nominate staff to oversee the process and introduced the vital link between access rights under FOI and the management of the information to which they pertain an association to which we shall return in more depth later.
Work by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] and other agencies in the creation of Model Publication Schemes for both sectors approved by the Office of the Information Commissioner served to ensure that virtually all of the sector met this first requirement of the Act and had its publication scheme in place by the stated deadline.
Following the implementation of their publication scheme, most institutions rightly focused on the twin themes of raising awareness of FOI among all staff and establishing procedures for the processing and handling requests for information to ensure compliance with the stipulations of the Act and the Code of Practice [2].
The FOIA can be accurately described as 'total legislation'.
You cannot achieve compliance by focusing on a few small and well-defined areas.
It requires all staff to be aware of the Act and their obligations under it not just those engaged in the formal administrative functions of the institution.
All staff must treat the requests they receive in accordance with the Act and manage the information they hold according to agreed 'corporate' policies and standards.
For some of the more conservative members of staff within our universities and colleges this may require a substantial change in their working methods.
So even where new policies, procedures and systems have been introduced it may be some time before cultural change of the scale required is achieved and new practices embedded into the day-to-day life of the institution.
For example, although many institutions are creating specific FOI request channels such as a generic 'FOI@institution.ac.uk' email address, it is widely recognised that not all requests will come through this route but that all FOI requests must be logged and actioned as soon as possible upon receipt, regardless of where within the institution they are received.
What happens if the academic to whom the request is sent is on extended study leave, maternity leave or sabbatical?
One apparently simple answer is to sanction the checking of staff mail and email in their absence by a departmental administrator or the like, but this then raises questions of privacy and confidentiality.
Many staff will rightly or wrongly object to this as an invasion of their privacy.
What if a student with personal problems has written specifically to that member of staff with a sensitive issue?
What if the member of staff is a trade union representative receiving official union mail?
None of these issues are insurmountable, but neither are they necessarily as straightforward as at first they might appear, demonstrating that the achievement of such cultural change in practice is often far harder than the comparatively simple drafting of policy.
Current Conundrums Though we are only less than a month into the full implementation of the Act, reports indicate that most institutions have received at least one clear FOI request and already some interesting issues are emerging.
The first is the likely use of the Act by commercial companies looking for information on current suppliers and possible commercial opportunities.
Many institutions receive regular surveys and questionnaires seeking to garner knowledge about the institution which may be of interest when formulating marketing strategies or responding to tenders.
Prior to FOI many of these would have been given scant attention by over-burdened staff, but what about now?
Do these count as FOI requests and if so are there any exemptions preventing each and every one having to be answered?
In many respects the private sector may consider themselves doubly blessed not subject to the Act themselves, but able to take advantage of it in relation to information held by potential public-sector clients.
That said, many private sector suppliers to institutions may not be aware that information provided by them to or held about them by a public authority is subject to the Act and potentially disclosable upon request.
Companies who try to insist that the any information provided to a public authority be automatically considered 'confidential' are also likely to frustrated.
There is clear guidance to public authorities preventing them from entering into contracts which include unnecessary confidentiality restrictions.
What is therefore required is a process of dialogue between institutions and their suppliers to ensure that all parties are aware that information may need to be disclosed and that consensus is reached as to which parts could genuinely be considered exempt from disclosure.
What is still unknown in these first few weeks and months is the likely number of requests that institutions will receive and how much resource it will take to answer them.
The announcement by Lord Falconer in December 2004 [3] that for requests costing up to £450 to answer no charge may be levied finally put an end to the speculation but did little to reassure the sector.
This £450 is taken to equate to approximately 2.5 days to locate, collate and prepare the material requested.
On that basis, if an institution receives just two requests a week that require the maximum time allocated for the provision of 'free' information, it could represent the activities of one full-time equivalent member of staff without any financial recompense to the institution.
It is true that a charge for 'disbursements' (e.g.
printing, photocopying, postage) can always be charged on a cost-recovery basis, no matter how small the request, but then the institution faces the age-old dilemma of the cost of processing the invoice outweighing the amount being recovered.
Information Management Implications The importance of records management is often mentioned as a key component of freedom of information legislation.
But just why is the effective management of records and information now seen as such a priority?
As the legislation itself makes clear, any FOI regime can only ever be as good as the quality of the information to which it relates.
Put simply, if there is no record of it, you cannot provide access to it and without such evidence there can be no transparency and no accountability.
This then not only puts the emphasis on ensuring that information is retained as long as required and is readily accessible, but also that the right information is being created in the first place in order to document accurately the decisions being made or transactions undertaken.
Given that the FOIA is fully retrospective there are more prosaic reasons for institutions to ensure that their information is managed as effectively as possible.
Most colleges and universities are decades, if not centuries old and often hold within them a vast accumulated backlog of unmanaged, duplicate or surplus information.
What was once merely a tolerated inconvenience filling up a dusty room or cupboard now has the potential to severely hamper the ability of an institution to comply with the Act and will certainly increase the resources required to respond to requests.
Logic dictates that the less information that is held and the better it is described the easier it will be to find when required.
Of course it is equally important not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.
There are a myriad of drivers of either an operational or legal/regulatory nature which dictate how long information must be kept to provide evidence of what has occurred and these must continue to be observed.
It is this process of identifying and separating the information 'wheat' from the 'chaff' which is now key and is where the concepts of appraisal and retention management which lie at the heart of records management theory come into their own.
But the Act also raises its own challenges to which the discipline and profession of records management must respond.
There is an inherent contradiction in, on the one hand, discussing a freedom of information act, and on the other, espousing the importance of a records management programme for while all records are information, not all information is records.
Traditional records management theory seeks to identify and deal only with that small subset of information which can be categorised as a business 'record', with such decisions being based on questions of form, content and context.
This of course makes the whole business of managing the entire 'lifecycle' of such records far easier as we are dealing with only a relatively small proportion of the information held by an organisation.
Now, however, we are faced with the challenge of needing to extend the same level of management and control to the entirety of paper and electronic information created or held by an institution from student file to Post-it Note.
Many institutions are coming relatively new to the field of institutional records management.
That is not to say that any form of management control has not existed in the past far from it.
But what has often been lacking until now is a sense of a consistent, institution-wide approach with good practice not confined to individual departments, but spread equally across all.
Once again this leads us back to where we started and the issue of cultural change.
It is easy to create a records management policy.
It is comparatively easy to agree a corporate file plan and retention schedule.
It is far harder to convince staff that they should cease filing their information locally and managing it according to their own ways and should embrace new, shared ways of working.
Now that the last minute preparations for the implementation of the Act are completed it is critical that institutions resist the temptation to take their foot off the pedal.
FOI is not like the Y2K issue [4] with great hype surrounding a specific date, which once come and gone can be safely forgotten.
FOI is here to stay, so 1 January 2005 should mark the beginning, not the end of the process of change required and FOI must continue to remain a priority and driving force for change within organisations in the months and even years to come.
References Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) : JISC's Records Management related activity http://www.jisc.ac.uk/recordsman_home.html Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs' Code of Practice on the discharge of public authorities' functions under Part 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 http://www.foi.gov.uk/codepafunc.htm Speech of Lord Falconer of Thoroton, Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and Lord Chancellor, to the Law for Journalists Conference, at the RSA, London, 26 November 2004 http://www.dca.gov.uk/speeches/2004/lc261104.htm Editor's note : Y2K, the Year 2000 or Millenium Bug: Y2K Information and Resources http://www.y2ktimebomb.com/ US Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/ The Register: UK Y2K supremo says plan for Armageddon, December 1998 http://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/12/13/uk_y2k_supremo_says_plan/ Modernising Government in Action: Realising the Benefits of Y2K, April 2000 http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm47/4703/4703-fw.htm Author Details Steve Bailey Information & Records Manager JISC Email: s.bailey@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Assessing the Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the FE and HE Sectors" Author: Steve Bailey Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/bailey/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Workshop on E-Research, Digital Repositories and Portals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Workshop on E-Research, Digital Repositories and Portals Buzz data java framework api database dissemination rss portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation tagging browser identifier repositories preservation oai-pmh gis e-learning uddi wsrp usb e-science e-research rae uportal interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley and Caroline Ingram report on a two-day workshop held at University of Lancaster over 6-7 September 2006 This workshop was held at the University of Lancaster Centre for e-Science.
The organisers were Rob Crouchley, Rob Allan and Caroline Ingram, there were 17 other attendees.
The main aim of this workshop was to explore the relationship between digital repositories, e-Research and Portals in the UK with a view to discovering e-infrastructure gaps and articulating requirements.
The hosts had been commissioned by JISC to undertake the ITT: JISC Information Environment Portal activity supporting the needs of e-Research [1].
The aims and objectives of the study were: To scope the requirements of e-research within the area of resource discovery with reference to portal type services and tools; To identify gaps and duplication within the current provision (with reference to JISC portal and other relevant activity) therefore to identify potential areas for network and possibly synergies that could offer a more holistic approach than currently available; To highlight issues and challenges that will need to be addressed in terms of serving e-Research requirements and in terms of enhancing portal activity for the Information Environment (IE) more generally; To make recommendations for portal-related activity that could be taken forward by JISC.
The workshop was recorded and will be made available as a resource on the Web for future reference (as has been done with previous workshops)[2].
The event was a lively one with a wide range of talks, these included: Data Webs and repositories for subject-specific collections in Zoology and for Geospatial Information; Open Archival publication and Digital Curation; the need to provide a greater variety of Information Environment tools, inter-operating with existing ones such as the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR); the need to link data with information and make both available in the ‘Discovery to Delivery’ cycle.
Most of the speakers are involved with JISC-funded projects, or have been at one time.
We now provide a short summary of each presentation.
Digital Repositories as a Mechanism for the Capture, Management and Dissemination of Chemical Data Simon Coles, National Crystallography Service, University of Southampton Simon gave a far-ranging introduction from the perspective of a practising chemist who is also the head of the UK Crystallography Service run from University of Southampton.
He has been inspirational in the e-Bank and R4L projects which are investigating tools to support the research life cycle and linking repositories directly into the laboratory for archival of data and associated meta-data.
A key message was that underlying data is not suitable for the ‘printed page’ as attempts to represent it result in a loss of information.
Published papers should contain the interpretation and intellectual input and a link to the actual data for re-evaluation if necessary.
Current tools to discover and interpret data are however barely adequate.
Simon reported that Google copes quite well with the chemical identifiers (InChI) used for indexing purposes.
Current interfaces to the UK Crystallography Service are included in portals such as Intute: Science, Engineering and Technology (formerly PSIGate), and OAI is used for the repositories.
Is the Institutional or Subject Repository Best for Researchers’ Needs?
Fred Friend, University College London Fred continued the line of discussion started by Simon, but addressed the question of where the archives should be hosted.
There are several “factors” involved in this which include: cultural/ loyalty; political; convenience.
In the end it was suggested that there is no perfect solution and that multiple repository types would persist.
There were questions such as “who holds my publications if I change institution?” and “how do we classify a facility provider such as CCLRC which fits neither the institution nor subject category?”.
In the end, users will probably choose either: what is easiest; what their colleagues are using; or the most prestigious because of external factors like the RAE.
Repository providers will need to supply tools which enable cross searching.
Institutional Management of Portals: Facilitating Portal Use across Boundaries Chris Awre, University of Hull Chris outlined the history of portals as we now see them and some JISC-funded projects.
There are many different portals for different purposes.
Within an institution this has to be managed and a common interface provided for the users with single sign-on.
Standards such as WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) and JSR-168 facilitate this and are supported by many Java frameworks.
uPortal is the most commonly used open-source institutional portal.
Administration, library and teaching/ learning functionalities are being brought together in the institutional portal.
A portal can now be viewed as a thin layer that aggregates, integrates, personalises and presents information, transactions and applications to the user seamlessly and securely, according to their role, location and preferences, and in a manner independent of browser platform or device.
Portals complement repositories by providing a user interface to the content.
CCLRC’s Institutional Repository Catherine Jones, CCLRC Cathy outlined CCLRC’s ePubs Project to develop an open archival repository for publications by its staff and facility users.
Several interesting factors have emerged from this work.
Take-up of ePubs is strongest in departments with an existing culture of publication and information collection.
There can be a competitive element when staff see how many publications their peers are producing.
Organisation of the content is also important.
There needs to be a culture change in the deposit of publications for the success of ePubs.
One possibility is keeping a version which can be deposited (e.g.
a preprint).
Cathy also mentioned some related work on the JISC-funded CLADDIER Project which is investigating linking data to publications, and on a digitisation programme for older technical reports going back to the early 1960s.
This aims to capture much research-related technical information which would otherwise be hard to access.
EVIE: What Real Researchers Want (from their institutional environment) Derek Sergeant, University of Leeds Derek’s presentation took us through a survey of user needs for the JISC-funded EVIE Project Embedding a VRE in an Institutional Environment [3].
This analysed the research life cycle from the perspective of several different research disciplines.
The main findings of this study were: that resource discovery was deemed most essential for the portal but provision of support for research outputs less so; that users wanted to see all databases and resources that are available for their subject, but want a single Google-style search box however, no one size fits all users.
The collaboration tools that were most popularly indicated were a meeting organiser and the ability to share files.
Integrative Biology Virtual Rtesearch Environment (IB VRE) Matthew Mascord, University of Oxford Matthew presented subject-specific work to enhance the IB project through the provision of a portal.
A 3-month research process analysis was carried out with some key users from the heart disease and cancer modelling communities.
This identified tools to be provided in the portal, including a repository interface for studies and results of model runs, a collaboration tool for sharing and annotating moving images (Vannotea is being evaluated), and a management tool (Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) is being used).
The use of a USB digital pen is also being investigated as this is a means of remote sharing discussions of the underlying mathematics, particularly for the cancer models.
Using Familiar Data: The Link between e-Research, Portals and Preservation David Giaretta, Digital Curation Centre, CCLRC David explained some work going on in the EU-funded CASPAR Project which is concerned with ingestion and publication of scientific data.
A key part of this process is the ‘representation information’ which captures knowledge of data bit structure and any other information needed to interpret it in the future.
JISC IE and Portals: Meeting the Needs of e-Research Rob Allan, CCLRC Rob presented the work which had been done to date in the JISC ITT mentioned in the Introduction to this paper.
A full final report and additional background information will be available soon.
In addition to the issues identified by the earlier presenters, Rob mentioned the need for researchers to combine and cross-search data and information, possibly in a collaborative manner, as well as the need for both wide (e.g.
Google) and deep (e.g.
subject-based) discovery facilities.
IESR: The Information Environment Service Registry Ann Apps, MIMAS, Manchester Ann presented the current status and functionality of the IESR, which is an example of the components of the IE.
It is a machine-to-machine registry providing: descriptions of collections of resources (e.g.
census, e-learning resources); descriptions of services that make resources available; agents; transactional services, all of which are needed for resource discovery.
A portal builder would not need to know about all the separate underlying services.
A number of protocols are supported and integration with other services, such as UDDI and RSS, is being considered.
The biggest problem at present seems to be take-up of the IESR and people need to be made aware of the advantages of using it.
StORe: Source to Output Repositories Ken Miller, UK Data Archive, Essex Ken’s talk also addressed the linking of data (source) to publications (research output) in the JISC/ CURL-funded StORe Project.
Ken reported on a detailed survey of researcher method and practice in the use and management of digital repositories, involving the research communities of 7 scientific disciplines [4].
Implementations are now beginning to address issues of how researchers can deposit and link data and share it with known peers.
The New Improved OpenDOAR (linked to SHERPA Project) Peter Millington, University of Nottingham Peter described a directory of open archive repositories, OpenDOAR, which includes institutional and subject repositories, funder’s OA archives, but not OA journals.
An aim is to provide access to authoritative, evaluated data.
Two related projects RoMEO and JULIET, are concerned with publishers’ policies, prototype API available and funders’ policies on mandatory deposition of results of research respectively.
Although the project is relatively new, interest is growing.
Only 33% of OAI archives currently have policies published via OAI-PMH and more are being encouraged to submit them via suggested defaults.
More machine-to-machine interfaces are being developed.
Data Webs: New Visions for Research Data on the Web David Shotton, University of Oxford Zoologists are developing the BioImage database and finding ways to populate it.
David described the difference between a database, in which data is confined, and a Data Web, in which metadata harvesting is used to discover data and information from independent sources.
The BioImage Data Web registry provides interoperability, gathering, ordering and integrating the metadata from across the Web into a single searchable graph, then directs users to original sources.
Primary data holders benefit by increased user traffic, but retain control locally.
The project leverages many of the advantages of Web 2.0 and includes subject-specific semantic tagging.
The Geospatial Repository for Academic Data and Extraction (GRADE) Project James Reid, EDINA James looked at an infrastructure for improved geospatial data sharing through improving access via digital repositories.
It addresses the issues of: lack of willingness to share; locating data; and explores mechanisms for sharing and locating data.
A demonstrator is currently linked into LandMap and DigiMap services and has search, upload and download tools.
Discussion Session Caroline Ingram, CSI Consultancy The second day ended with an active discussion session lead by Caroline Ingram.
The main research resource discovery issues drawn out from this meeting were: Need to emphasise relationship between data and outputs for both preservation and later access; Users need easy access to resources and tools to find resources; Perceived barriers to use are not just technical examples include awareness, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), prestige, how the success of a project is judged; There have to be more resources for people to discover should there be incentives to encourage more researchers to deposit data, results, reports and publications in repositories available to them?
Sharing data is perceived to be important, but in some disciplines more than others we need to explain the benefits; The need for people to adopt and use services such as IESR and OpenDOAR as these could facilitate easier resource discovery and reuse; How researchers handle their own research data is currently different to how they use other people’s data tools to facilitate interoperability are needed; It was stated that “It is better to address un-satisfied requirements now than to deploy new frameworks”.
But David Shotton reminded the group that a tool has to be fit for purpose, not shoehorned into place.
Conclusion In conclusion, the workshop was extremely useful and interesting, not only in terms of contributing to the e-research and portals study, but also more generally for the community with regard to considerations to make during future development for portals and digital repositories.
Thanks again from the organisers to all participants, who contributed considerably to a successful couple of days discussions.
References JISC ITT: JISC Information Environment portal activity http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2006/03/funding_portaleresearch.aspx ReDRess Presentations http://redress.lancs.ac.uk/Presentations.html D.M.
Sergeant, S. Andrews and A. Farquhar Embedding a VRE in an Institutional Environment (EVIE).
Workpackage 2: User Requirements Analysis.
User Requirements Analysis Report (University of Leeds, 2006) http://www.leeds.ac.uk/evie/workpackages/wp2/evieWP2_UserRequirementsAnalysis_v1_0.pdf StORe: the Source to Output Repositories.
Reports available via JISCStore http://jiscstore.jot.com/WikiHome or CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) http://www.curl.ac.uk/ Author Details Rob Allan Leader of Grid Technology Group, e-Science Centre, CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington WA4 4AD Email: r.j.allan@dl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.e-science.cclrc.ac.uk Rob Crouchley Centre for e-Science Lancaster University C Floor Bowland Annexe Lancaster LA1 4YT Email: r.crouchley@lancaster.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/asarc/ Caroline Ingram CSI Consultancy 42 Coquet Terrace Newcastle upon Tyne NE6 5LE Email: caroline@csiconsultancy.co.uk Web site: http://www.csiconsultancy.co.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Workshop on e-Research, Digital Repositories and Portals” Author: Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley and Caroline Ingram Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/escience-lancaster-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Buzz portal usability archives accessibility repositories eprints cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Hall reports on recent news from BIOME, the Health and Life Sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network.
New Internet Resource Booklets We are delighted to announce that the brand new VetGate booklet is available for ordering or downloading from our web site.
Sponsored by the Animal Health Information Specialists Group (AHIS), it covers key, evaluated, quality Internet resources in animal health.
Written by subject experts at BIOME the booklet is aimed at students, researchers, academics, and practitioners in this area.
The booklets are free of charge to those in the UK and further details on how to order or download Internet Resources for Animal Health are available from BIOME Publications [1].
We still have a limited number of our free booklet Internet Resources for Health and Medicine (sponsored by the Wellcome Trust) available to order.
If you would like copies of the resource booklet then instructions are available from BIOME Publications [1].
ePrints There are still a number of places available on the ePrints UK Workshop in Nottingham (hosted by BIOME) on Monday 24 May 2004.
These workshops, organised by the ePrints UK Project [2] will provide an introduction to eprints and institutional repositories and the issues surrounding them.
They are aimed at HE/FE librarians, information systems staff, and academics.
No prior knowledge is necessary and they are free to attend.
The first workshop held at the University of Bath was well attended and encouraged much discussion.
The Bath workshop [3] slides presented are now available and an ‘At the Event’ article [4] will appear in this issue of Ariadne.
The ePrints UK Project is developing a series of national, discipline-focused services through which the Higher and Further Education community can access the collective output of e-print papers available from compliant Open Archive repositories, particularly those provided by UK universities and colleges.
Further details are available on the Nottingham workshop [5] or contact Natasha Piper on tel: 01225 38 6256 or n.piper@ukoln.ac.uk Health and Life Sciences Online A series of one-day seminars have been arranged that introduce you to key resources in your subject area.
These seminars are aimed at teachers and researchers, post-graduate students, staff development officers, subject librarians, IT subject specialists, departmental IT representatives, all those responsible for promotion and provision of online resources in health and life sciences within their institution.
Each seminar will offer the following: An overview of the Resource Guide for Health and Life Sciences Hands-on workshops from leading resource providers Interactive worksheets to use with students and staff in universities and colleges The opportunity to ask questions at an open forum discussion with key representatives from the services represented The chance to hear ways in which future national developments in online provision can support and enhance institutional developments Limited places are still available for the health and life sciences online seminar on Friday 11 June 2004 at the University of Oxford and Thursday 8 July 2004 at the University of Stirling.
More information and booking forms are available from Health and Life Sciences Online Seminars [6].
New Updated Guides An updated version of the JISC Health and Life Sciences Resource Guide is now available [7].
It is also possible to order free printed copies.
Changes at BIOME BIOME is pleased to announce the appointment of a Content Coordinator.
Laurian Williamson has taken up the post and will initially concentrate on identifying external content providers, coordinating cataloguing output, and ensuring that service content targets are met.
BIOME would also like to welcome two new members of the team.
Liz Stevenson has joined us on a temporary basis and is concentrating on adding new resources to the BIOME catalogue.
Vicky Wiseman started in the new role of Portal Development Officer in February.
She will be working alongside the existing technical development team at BIOME together with colleagues across the RDN to implement and evaluate the outcomes of the Subject Portals Project at BIOME.
Her remit also includes general Web site development, usability and accessibility and contributing to the further development and enhancement of the BIOME service.
Vicky joins us from the NHS, where she held the post of Knowledge Manager at Airedale NHS Trust.
Prior to that, she worked as a User Support Officer at MIMAS at the University of Manchester; her roles there included user support for the zetoc service, technical support for the NLN materials delivery project and liaison with the FE community.
Finally, Jen Sewell left the BIOME Service at the end of January.
She has taken up a new post at the University of Sheffield and we wish her all the best for the future.
Come and Talk to BIOME Staff Members of the BIOME team will be present at the following events: Libraries for Nursing Study Day (BIOME participating) Friday 14 May 2004, University of Nottingham JISC Health and Life Sciences Online (BIOME presentation and hands-on workshop) [8] Friday 11 June 2004, University of Oxford JISC Health and Life Sciences Online (BIOME presentation and hands-on workshop) [8] Thursday 8 July 2004, University of Stirling ALLCU Conference 2004 (BIOME exhibiting) [9] 14 16 July 2004, Harper Adams University College References BIOME Publications http://biome.ac.uk/about/publications.html The ePrints UK Project http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ ePrints UK Bath Workshop http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/workshops/bath/ At the Event: ePrints UK Workshop http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/eprints-rpt/ ePrints UK Nottingham Workshop http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/workshops/nottingham/ Health and Life Sciences Online Seminars http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=rg_lifehealth_events Resource Guide for Health and Life Sciences http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=rg_lifehealth_main JISC Health and Life Sciences Online http://www.jisc.ac.uk/resourceguides/hls ALLCU 26th Annual Conference, 2004 http://www.allcu.org.uk/ Author Details Jenny Hall BIOME Admin Officer Email: jh@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Jenny Hall Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Version Identification: A Growing Problem Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Version Identification: A Growing Problem Buzz data software framework metadata identifier vocabularies repositories eprints video preservation multimedia gis aggregation provenance taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Dave Puplett outlines the issues associated with versions in institutional repositories, and discusses the solutions being developed by the Version Identification Framework (VIF) Project.
The problem of version identification in institutional repositories is multifaceted and growing.
It affects most types of digital object now being deposited, and will continue to grow if left unaddressed as the proliferation of repositories continues and as they are populated with more and more content.
The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has consequently funded the VIF Project as part of the Repositories and Preservation Programme, running from June 2007 to May 2008.
The project is tasked with developing a framework for the identification of versions of digital objects in repositories and working to secure community acceptance of the recommendations made within the framework.
This article describes the current situation, informed by the results of two surveys undertaken as part of the project, and previews the solutions likely to be proposed by the project in the form of the framework.
The Problem and Previous Studies The project team, through study of previous work on the issues surrounding versioning and through the use of the results of the VIF requirements exercise, identified the major issues that repository users and managers have encountered with identifying versions with repositories.
Most significant in our examination of previous work in this area were the VERSIONS Project (Versions of Eprints – a user Requirements Study and Investigation Of the Need for Standards) [1], and the RIVER (Scoping Study on Repository Version Identification) study [2] which both examined aspects of version identification in the light of the open access movement.
VERSIONS, led by LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science), recently found that 59% of researchers produce four or more types of research output from each research project [3].
Types discussed were articles, book chapters, working papers, conference papers, and presentations, amongst others.
The VERSIONS project focused upon e-prints in Economics, and found that not only do researchers output these different types of object, but also that each one of these may be developed through several draft versions.
These different outputs are increasingly likely to be made available as working papers, work in progress or pre-prints during the development of a piece of research, and VERSIONS found that this was leading to confusion and time-consuming inspection of objects for end-users who were trying to identify the work they were finding online.
Prior to the VERSIONS Project, the RIVER study concluded that: ‘The issue of version identification is not simply (indeed not primarily) one of unique identification of resources but rather of defining the relationship between resources.
While it is important that each of those resources should be uniquely referenceable, from a user standpoint the more significant questions to ask are In what way are these two things the same?
In what way are these two things different (and to what extent does that difference matter to me)?’ [4] The number of potential versions created as part of a contemporary research project is clearly large, and the relationships between iterations, variations and manifestations are theoretically enormous.
This is further complicated by projects with co-authorship and collaborative work.
Although the VIF project team has remained wary of wading into the controversial subject of how open access affects the publishing industry, it is clear from both VERSIONS [3] and VIF’s own research that a great deal of versioning problems arise from reader confusion over the publication status of the content that they find in a repository.
The significant problem for repository managers is how best to organise these multiple versions within a repository, and how best to describe them so they can be properly found and understood.
This problem extends beyond the confines of the single repository implementations and interface to include cross-repository searches and other open access harvesters.
Problems identified include: Confusion over whether an article is the published version, a copy that is identical in content to this but unformatted, a draft version, an edited version and so on.
Repository searches often yielding many results of items which ostensibly appear to be the same thing, but actually vary in terms of content, formatting or propriety file type.
Research outputs with co-authors being deposited in different places at different stages of development without guidance as to which is authoritative or most recent.
Multimedia items being handled poorly by repositories which treat them as text, and the failure of the repository to define their relationship to other objects that form part of the research project.
Vastly inconsistent approaches by different repository software packages and implementations in the way they deal with versions.
The VIF Project has moved on in two significant ways from this earlier research.
Firstly, we have looked at the requirements for a variety of digital objects, not just text documents, and across the whole range of disciplines.
Secondly, the VIF team has described our approach to versions as agnostic.
The research carried out so far prior to VIF has taken a different approach, with much discussion already having taken place on defining and using labels to describe work in the context of the publication process.
VIF therefore defines a version as ‘a digital object (in whatever format) that exists in time and place and has a context within a larger body of work’.
This definition allows for ultimately user-defined opinions on what constitutes a version, and underpins the project team’s desire to remain neutral and produce a clear and transparent framework.
A central aim of this framework is to make available to end-users and repository managers the important information which facilitates clear and effective version identification.
The Results of the VIF User Requirements Survey The project undertook two surveys in the autumn of 2007 of over 100 information professionals working in repositories and 70 academics (mainly in the UK with some international respondents).
There are clear results from the surveys, identifying a common feeling amongst repository staff in respect of the following: how great a problem they perceive version identification to be; which versions of research repositories should be ingesting; and what version identification solutions would be expected to work best.
The survey highlighted some striking realities about version identification.
Important to the success of the framework is the knowledge that approximately a third of information professionals with responsibilities toward a repository stated that either they have no system currently in place or ‘don’t know’ how they deal with versioning at present.
There were few instances where opinion was shared between academics and information professionals, but both groups agreed that identification of versions is a problem – only 5% of academics and 6.5% of information professionals surveyed found it easy to identify versions of digital objects within institutional repositories.
The situation becomes even worse across multiple repositories (1.8% and 1.1% respectively).
When asked what types of material they currently stored in their repositories, 95.4% of information professionals claimed that they currently store, or plan to store, text documents with many also stating that they store, or plan to store, audio files (73.6%), datasets (77.9%), images (83.3%), learning objects (46.5%) and video files (75.3%).
This awareness of a wider range of object types being created and the desire on the part of information professionals to store them are positive signs, especially in the context of the results of the survey of academics, which suggested a large number of researchers either already create or intend to create audio files (47.2%), datasets (68%), images (72.5%), learning objects (74.6%) and video files (57.6%).
As expected, the vast majority also intend to continue working with text documents.
Most notable from the survey of academics was the concern that only the most complete version of their work be made available in repositories.
This is in direct contrast to the wishes of information professionals, who overwhelmingly wanted to store all versions that a researcher has made available.
The academics we surveyed were very clear about their wish to only make the finished version of their output ultimately available.
The strength of feeling on this issue was demonstrated by the comments we received as free text, often even in answers to questions on different subjects.
A corollary of this is the behaviour therefore expected of information professionals by academics when it comes to organising versions of their work within a repository.
The project team realised that as well as addressing practical issues about version identification we will also need to examine issues such as whether repository managers should replace objects when newer versions become available, or retain all versions as representative of the research process.
There are subsequent questions about the value of keeping all versions for future research purposes and preservation, and developing policies that suit individual researchers, disciplines, institutions and their repositories.
The project team offered several broad potential solutions to the problem of version identification to all survey respondents.
These included chronological and numeric approaches, taxonomies and the use of id tags.
Although support was high for all of the suggestions (only one solution had less than 60% support across the respondents)[5] free text comments revealed numerous and varied misgivings.
No one solution stood out as having more support than any other.
We encouraged free text responses with each suggested solution, and many qualifications and caveats were given.
The most contentious example is that of using a taxonomy to define the version status.
The notion is clearly attractive, and has been addressed previously with NISO / ALPSP (National Information Standards Organisation / Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) [6], RIVER and VERSIONS all offering possible vocabularies to describe versions.
Many free text comments remarked that whilst the idea is a sound one in principle, implementing such a taxonomy would be virtually impossible without some sort of enforcing body.
Also, getting community agreement on the terminology used would be a very controversial subject due to the frequently polarised standpoints of publishers and information professionals.
Serving the best interests of the research itself by setting up a descriptive taxonomy sounds a worthy concept, but insulating it from the pre-established terminology and bias of certain camps would clearly be a very serious undertaking.
This was a blessing and curse for the project team when developing solutions for the framework, as none of the suggested solutions had been eliminated and the options remaining were complex and by no means generically applicable.
Therefore, we chose to detail many solutions, making both their benefits and problems explicit, and to allow the eventual audience of the framework to choose the solutions that suit their needs best.
Ultimately the lack of a ‘silver bullet’ to solve the version identification problem came as no surprise when one considers the different needs across disciplines and the different types of object.
Identifying Key Stakeholders and Developing a Suitable Framework of Solutions The project identified three major stakeholder audiences to address with the framework.
Each has a role to play in facilitating easier version identification in the future.
The most ideal and reliable source of version information about an object must be the author or creator of that object.
Awareness of versioning issues amongst content creators when disseminating their work in repositories is low, and the framework should promote better practice in both embedding version information within an object, and supplying repository staff with the right information when their work is deposited.
Much care must be taken here to keep a light touch and minimise the bureaucracy surrounding repository deposit, while still ensuring that sufficient attention is paid to identifying an object when it is disseminated in this way.
The project is committed to improving the experience of using a repository, not placing obstacles in the path of users’ success.
It is essential therefore for VIF to consider the role of repositories through the eyes of the content creators – what versions are visible, etc.
The staff working on actual and future repositories are the key audience for VIF.
Repositories across the UK and worldwide are at early stages of development, and each implementation is different.
Different in terms of content stored, with different subjects, object type, collection policies.
The staff time available to repositories also varies enormously, from some institutions having full time staff to others subsisting on only a few hours here and there.
Therefore the framework must be implementable by staff with a range of resources available to them.
The most powerful group the VIF will address are repository software developers, as this group is able to control the exact way versions are organised and represented in repositories (acknowledging of course that much repository software is often open source and customisable by users with the right know-how).
The repository software packages currently available deal with versions in different ways.
There are clear pros and cons associated with different systems.
For example, Fedora allows the depositor to place new versions on top of old ones, which gives a clear identification of the newest work.
However it deals less well with lateral versions, such a Microsoft Word file and a PDF file kept alongside each other.
Eprints has a different approach of allowing versions to be kept in separate records that are then linked to each other.
However, this only allows for a linear arrangement, as each document can only be either a successor or a predecessor of another.
A further issue concerning the repository software currently available is that even with good intentions, most are still primarily designed, or implemented, to deal with text documents.
Work is going on to improve this situation and investigate ways of broadening the use of repositories to deal with different file types better, such as the DataShare Project [7], and the Application Profiles for Images [8], Geospatial data [9] and Time-based media.
These variations will be taken into account by the VIF project team as we try to address future repository software development.
The VIF project team consists of Jenny Brace and Dave Puplett, LSE, Paul Cave, University of Leeds, and Catherine Jones, Science and Technology Facilities Council.
This team has worked in conjunction with an invited expert group, details of which can be found on the VIF Web page [10], to develop the framework itself and the solutions that it will contain.
How Solutions Are Taking Shape Having identified the three major stakeholders that the project wishes to address, the project team decided to target the framework towards each of these audiences by creating advice and recommendations specific to each group.
Content Creators The first step in the chain of establishing the version status of an item should be to ensure the item identifies itself.
This is fairly straightforward for text documents as they usually contain at least title and author on a front page.
This can easily be expanded to include some sort of version information.
This could be specific dates, a description, a version number or so on.
Such information can also be embedded into the file itself by using the properties fields that most desktop applications employ.
The framework gives advice on how to embed version metadata in all sorts of digital object, from text documents written in Word or converted to PDF, data in spreadsheets, through to images, video and audio created or compressed in a variety of file formats.
If a document is imbued with version information by its creator, such information becomes authoritative and available to anybody who then comes into contact with the item, including the repository manager.
It is crucial for version identification that metadata stored for items with multiple and/or ambiguous versions is rich enough to support the disambiguation of versions.
The project will be making recommendations on ways of achieving this, and what information on an object or set of objects in a repository needs to be made transparent to enable the end-user to establish the version status clearly.
One of the messages we will be promoting to content creators is the need to communicate version information as well as traditional bibliographic information when an item is deposited to a repository.
Ideally this will also include information about anywhere else an item might have been deposited, which will begin to address the problem of version identification across multiple repositories.
This message must be carefully communicated however, as it is important to minimise the burden upon authors and content creators, which is already seen as a barrier to the success of repositories.
Repository Managers The staff who run repositories on the ground are undoubtedly our most significant audience and the framework is at its greatest depth here.
The advice offered is practical, wide-ranging and addresses several different aspects of repository maintenance.
VIF will be recommending that repositories include a statement about versioning in appropriate policy documents, and will provide guidance on what to include.
We have also made approaches to the OpenDOAR [11] team about improving the support that their template policies offer regarding versions.
The ingest and metadata capture process of an item is the best opportunity for a repository manager to establish the version status of an item.
We will detail ways of incorporating version awareness into both self-deposit systems and proxy deposit undertaken by library staff.
How this information is then incorporated into the metadata for an object, what parts of this information are made transparent to the end-user, and what information survives the harvesting process of cross-repository search mechanisms represent central issues that the framework must address.
We will be looking closely at how best to use current metadata standards, especially in the light of the recently completed Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) (previously known as Eprints Application Profile) [12].
The use of a FRBRised structure in the SWAP particularly appeals to the VIF Project because of the way that metadata is tied more closely, and less ambiguously, to individual ‘entities’, or objects as I have referred to them here.
This application profile allows metadata to describe not only the work in question (such as a particular research project) but its individual versions, right down to the level of the actual format of each version and its distinct copies.
The project team will also discuss how to make the best use of other metadata schemes to describe versions, detailing how to use available fields to describe version status, and encourage their uniform usage to enhance version identification across different repositories.
We will also look at recommendations for the future, to raise awareness of version identification as an issue for future metadata development projects.
The framework will also make more minor recommendations that could benefit certain repositories, such as considering implementing uniform file naming within a repository.
Another solution discussed has been the use of cover sheets.
Some repositories (for example LSE [13) insert a cover sheet on the front of their text documents, which can contain detailed information about the provenance of an item, including version information.
However the use of cover sheets is mainly limited to text documents.
Software Developers VIF’s approach to developers of repository software will take the form of specifications for future software improvements that would make version identification easier.
Part of this task is to improve awareness of the issue amongst this audience that version identification is a significant problem.
Some of the specifications have already been implemented by some repository software developers, but the project recommends that the following features are highly desirable across repositories.
The specifications are grouped into two broad categories; those which affect the ‘on-site’ usage of a repository, and those which relate to how metadata is structured within the repository ready to be searched or harvested by a third-party aggregator.
The first proposed software improvement will be to introduce automatic checking of title and author upon deposit to guard against duplication, and to help make sure versions are identified as such at this early stage.
This feature would prevent an object related to another already held within the repository being deposited with the relationship being flagged up by whatever versioning structure the repository employs.
Ideally this feature would also be able to compare the deposited item to the contents of other repositories and flag up any overlap or relation to other external objects.
This would be particularly useful in the case of work by multiple authors working at different institutions.
The challenge for software developers is to integrate this into both templates for a self-deposit process or in the back end of the software interface for repository staff.
VIF will also recommend the wider use of thumbnailing to preview objects.
This is especially useful for previewing images and multimedia items, where versions are likely to include cropped versions.
Much work has already been undertaken on the development of Dublin Core application profiles that provide richer metadata options for repositories to provide for harvesting by open access aggregating services.
The framework will recommend that future repository software be designed to support richer metadata export for crossrepository searches, such as these application profiles.
This could possibly include exporting a thumbnail of an object as part of the metadata, for example.
The project has identified considerable room for improvement in the way that versions are ranked by third-party searches or repositories.
The very strong evidence of the VIF survey makes it clear that academics want the latest version of their work to be the one that is found first by end-users.
Repositories that hold more than one version of an object may well know or record which one supersedes another, but this information is not communicated well externally, leading to erratic ranking results in external searches and confusion over which is the most appropriate version to use.
Summary and Conclusions Open access has made work freely available and opened up many new possibilities for scholarly communication, but managing the way this work is identified and found is essential if repositories are to flourish.
If as we all hope, repositories continue to grow, the need for better and clearer version identification will become more and more important as more content is deposited, in various stages of development, in different forms and at diverse locations.
VIF aims to raise awareness of the issues associated with version identification and offer both shortand longer-term solutions to the problems identified.
Repository managers can do much to improve the situation, beginning with some recommendations that are easy to implement.
Other solutions that we will be offering, such as those to software developers, are intended for the longer term.
We will recommend the framework to all three stakeholder groups and encourage its advocacy by those who are working in this community to make repositories more accessible, more popular and more successful.
If you are interested in the work of the project, please contact us or visit the VIF Web page [10].
The framework itself will be officially launched in late February 2008 and the project team will be disseminating the framework at events through the Spring and early Summer.
References VERSIONS Project http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/versions/ Rumsey, S. et al, “Scoping Study on Repository Version Identification (RIVER) Final Report” , Rightscom, 2006 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/RIVER%20Final%20Report.pdf VERSIONS Project Poster http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/versions/VERSIONS_A1_poster_final_(2).pdf Rumsey, S. et al, “Scoping Study on Repository Version Identification (RIVER) Final Report” , 2006, p38 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/RIVER%20Final%20Report.pdf Cave, P. “Work package 2: Requirements exercise report of a survey of Academics and Information Professionals” 2007, p.3 http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/documents.html Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP Working Group on Versions of Journal Articles, 2006, http://www.niso.org/committees/Journal_versioning/Recommendations_TechnicalWG.pdf DataShare Project http://www.disc-uk.org/datashare.html Images Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Images_Application_Profile Geospatial Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Geospatial_Application_Profile VIF Web page http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/ OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/tools/en/policies.php SWAP http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile LSE On Line http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the hard work of Paul Cave, Project Officer for VIF based at University of Leeds, on the VIF survey and his subsequent report, from which this article draws results and analysis.
Author Details Dave Puplett Project and Communications Officer London School of Economics and Political Science Email: d.puplett@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/ Return to top Article Title: “Version Identification: A Growing Problem” Author: Dave Puplett Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/puplett/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Progress Towards Addressing Digital Preservation Challenges Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Progress Towards Addressing Digital Preservation Challenges Buzz data software framework dissemination portfolio usability infrastructure archives digitisation identifier repositories copyright preservation multimedia visualisation curation ict interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Helen Hockx-Yu reports on the 2nd Planets, CASPAR and DPE annual conference, held on 5-6 September 2007 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Digital preservation has become an area of strategic importance for the European Union in recent years.
This has been reflected in the investment of €17 million in co-funding three major digital preservation projects under call 5 of its Framework Programme 6 in September 2005.
Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) [1], CASPAR (Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval) [2] and DPE (DigitalPreservationEurope) [3] are all co-ordinated by British organisations: Planets by the British Library, CASPAR by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (formerly CCLRC) and DPE by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow.
This is an indication of the UK’s leading position in digital preservation research and development.
Planets and CASPAR are both termed ‘integrated projects’ with new knowledge as their primary deliverable.
DPE is a ‘co-ordination action’ project, funded to foster collaboration and synergies between existing national initiatives and to improve co-ordination, co-operation and consistency in current digital preservation activities.
All three projects commenced in the first half of 2006.
The purpose of the 2nd joint annual conference was to report the projects’ progress to date but also to place the latter in the context of the wider international digital preservation and curation landscape.
Furthermore, it was intended to provide a forum for networking and bridge-building, with collaboration as the key objective.
The conference was presented under ‘wePreserve’, the umbrella for PLANETS, CASPAR and DPE’s synergistic activities.
A Web site with the same name has also been set up to deliver a collaborative Web platform shared by the projects [4].
Day One Setting the Scene Seamus Ross, Director of HATII, opened the conference on behalf of DPE.
HATII is not only the lead partner in DPE but also a partner in both Planets and CASPAR.
Seamus welcomed the participants and thanked the European Commission for supporting the conference.
The opening presentation was given by Carlos Oliveira, Deputy Head of the Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning Unit, Directorate General Information Society and Media, European Commission (EC).
Carlos emphasised the importance of digital preservation in knowledge economy and explained that the purpose of public investment was to support emergence of a coherent policy framework covering the organisational, economic, legal and technological aspects of digital preservation.
He then gave an overview of the EC’s activities in digital preservation, including initiatives at policy level and various strands of work funded under the Framework Programmes.
Carlos also presented an action plan for digitisation, online access and digital preservation which included ambitious goals to develop national strategies for long-term preservation and deposit with quantitative and qualitative targets, standards for digital preservation and a legislative framework supporting digital preservation.
There is an increased level of funding in the new Framework Programme 7, which is intended to fund areas which complement the current portfolio of projects and explore possibilities offered by new ICT (Information Communications Technology) to consider new approaches to digital preservation.
Carlos concluded the presentation by flagging up some areas of challenge for digital preservation, such as analysis, identification and spread of good practices, self-assessment and certification, models for long-term sustainability and expansion beyond the ‘knowing community’.
Herbert van de Sompel of the US Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) presented the aDORe Project, supported by the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).
aDORe is a standards-based, repository federation architecture which has been implemented at the LANL for local storage of digital assets.
The flexible, highly modular architecture facilitates the presentation of autonomous distributed repositories as a single logical repository.
aDORE is not a digital preservation solution itself but the interoperability it provides is an enabler and eases the digital preservation tasks across distributed, heterogeneous repositories.
Ross Harvey of the Charles Sturt University, Australia, who is currently a visiting research fellow at the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in the UK, presented an international overview of digital preservation activities to analyse trends and directions.
Ross started with an exploration of the definition of ‘digital preservation’ and related terms.
He introduced Nancy McGovern’s definition for digital preservation as a three-legged stool: the organisational leg (the ‘what’) and the technological leg (‘the how’) need to be backed by the resources leg (the ‘how much’) and co-ordinated to develop compliant and feasible digital preservation strategies [5].
He pointed out the strong research focus in European initiatives, as well as the theme of dissemination and collaboration.
Skills development and links with the industry have also been seen in a number of major projects.
The US initiatives cover a wide range of activities but much is happening in the areas of electronic records and digital repositories.
Australia and New Zealand were given as examples to illustrate the development in other countries, where practice varies considerably.
Ross concluded the presentation by summarising the trends in digital preservation in 2007.
There is an ongoing strong emphasis on ‘community’, dissemination, testing and evaluation, and toolkit development.
The new emphases are standards, public policy and strategy development, skills identification and development, and links with the ICT industry.
Helen Hockx-Yu of the British Library gave a general introduction to the Planets project.
She presented the aims and objectives of the project and outlined Planets’ approach to digital preservation.
Involving 16 national libraries and archives, educational institutions and technology companies, Planets is developing practical digital preservation solutions to meet the needs of libraries and archives.
Its work on automation of digital preservation processes should also provide useful answers for the wider digital preservation community.
Helen reported on Planets’ progress to date and referred to a number of prototype tools and services which were going to be presented at the conference by other Planets colleagues.
She also highlighted the key deliverables by November 2008, explicitly demonstrating what could be expected of Planets in the near future.
David Giaretta of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) introduced the CASPAR Project, which aims to develop techniques and services to meet the challenge of understanding and using digitally encoded information in the future when software, systems, and everyday knowledge will have changed.
The CASPAR consortium includes data holders, research universities, national organisations and a number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and industrial partners.
CASPAR focuses on scientific, cultural and artistic data which are complex and need to be rendered as well as processed.
David argued that the key to address the challenge is Representation Information, which is used to convert the bit sequences within a digital object into more meaningful information.
One of the objectives for CASPAR is to design the infrastructure for capturing and storing various types of representation information, taking into account the knowledge base of the designated community.
Collaboration and Co-ordination Echoing Ross Harvery’s observation on the strong emphasis on collaboration and co-ordination, Luigi Briguglio of Engineering Ingegneria Informatica presented the Alliance for Permanent Access, a membership initiative formed by major stakeholders from the world of science, including national and pan-European research organisations, research support organisations such as national libraries and publishers, and funding organisations for research.
The primary goal for the Alliance is to develop a shared vision and framework for a sustainable organisational infrastructure for permanent access to scientific information.
Luigi explained in detail the proposed mechanisms to achieve this goal, including collaboration within and between communities, development of general policies/practices and sustainable business models for preservation, as well as a research and development programme focusing on prototyping and testing of new knowledge.
The Alliance will work closely with national governments and the European Union (EU) to strengthen strategies, policies and their implementation.
Maurizio Lunghi of Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale presented DPE’s work in benchmarking competence centres.
‘Competence centre’ is the concept used by the DPE to review the current international landscape with regard to the availability and provision of digital curation and preservation expertise in the EU and beyond.
Maurizio explained in detail the ‘7C’s’ benchmarking model DPE developed to assess competence centre sources and models, including: Capacity, Context, Credibility, Commitment, Certification, Competition and Communication.
Based on the results of its assessment using the ‘7C’s’ benchmarking model, DPE recommends a federated approach to the provision of support and guidance for digital preservation.
Maurizio concluded the presentation by outlining the benefits of establishing federated competence centres which should help nurture strong community relationships from a range of disparate stakeholders.
Planets, CASPAR and DPE all have a mandate to disseminate their findings and to provide dedicated training.
In addition there are other organisations such as the DCC which provide training in digital preservation.
The increasing number of training events being offered can potentially cause confusion amongst participants.
A natural course of action is to join forces and collaborate.
Joy Davidson of the DCC gave a presentation entitled ‘Collaboration in Training Provision’, in which she outlined the importance and benefits of collaboration, both for training providers and participants.
Joy explained that collaboration can take many formats, ranging from simply sharing information to more formal collaboration and the delivery of joint events.
She then reported on the effort of DCC, Planets, CASPAR and DPE in establishing an international curation and preservation training roadmap to ensure a coherent approach to training development and provision.
A workshop took place in March 2007, involving key European stakeholders in digital preservation training.
Issues discussed at the workshop included target audiences, training options, methods and themes, promotion and branding and business models.
There was a consensus among participants that collaboration is extremely important, but that there is a serious lack of dedicated time available to participants.
Joy argued that any follow-up meetings and activities must be carefully scheduled to maximise the potential benefits while minimising the time required to participate and plan joint events.
She ended the presentation by announcing that the first DPE/Planets/nestor collaborative training event would be held in Vilnius, Lithuania on 1-5 October 2007.
Day Two Having set the scene and covered the wider context, the conference proceeded on day two to provide insight into different aspects of Planets and CASPAR.
Curation Challenges Esther Conway of STFC gave a presentation on the complexity of data and the related digital preservation problems.
In the context of specifying user requirements and scenarios, CASPAR had surveyed a number of data archives to understand the practices related to data sources, data access and use, and rights issues.
The intention was also to understand aspects of changes which might affect the preservability of the information encoded in bit sequences.
Having faced a large variety of proprietary data formats, Esther argued that there is room for standardising the representation of data and that SAFE (Standard Archive Format for Europe) is a positive step in this direction.
SAFE has been designed to act as a common format for archiving and conveying data within the European Space Agency Earth Observation archiving facilities.
She then gave detailed examples of the changes that affect our ability to understand data, such as changes in hardware, software and environment and termination of organisational support.
In addition, retirement of key personnel, changes in copyright ownership or legal restrictions could all affect the knowledge base required to understand data.
Jérôme Barthélemy of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), France presented the Planets Performing Arts Testbed, where work has been undertaken to identify requirements and preservation scenarios for electro-acoustic music and allied fields.
Jérôme explained that musical work in digital form suffers from accelerated obsolescence due to some of its unique properties.
Some work created as recently as the 1980s and 1990s has already been lost.
He then focused on the preservation of interactive multimedia performances and analysed a complex set of components of such performances, ranging from people, documents and musical instruments to mapping and content-generation applications, multimedia outputs and supporting applications for processing and rendering.
Preserving individual components is already a challenge.
More daunting still is assembling the components in a logical and temporal order, while preserving the knowledge about the performances’ internal logical and temporal relationships over time.
Using case studies, it was possible to derive a set of detailed preservation requirements by identifying the scenarios in which changes occur and how they affect any component of a performance.
Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard of the State and University Library, Denmark, presented the ongoing study of users within Planets.
The purpose was to understand how the digital revolution affects the way in which the research community functions and how users access and employ digital collections.
Answers to these questions will influence preservation strategies and quality measures, and consequently the preservation tools and services Planets is developing.
Birte introduced in detail the methodology for the user study, the techniques used to observe users and analyse data.
In order to anticipate future trends, interviews have been held with a number of futurologists, to tap into their anticipatory thinking about the changes in storing and using knowledge in the context of libraries.
Preservation Models David Giaretta presented the CASPAR conceptual model, which is guided by the OAIS Reference Model.
David opened the presentation by stressing the importance of information and saying that the ultimate goal for digital preservation is to ensure that information to be preserved is independently understandable to (and usable by) the designated community.
He explained that there is a strong focus on representation information within CASPAR, which is vital to the interpretation of data objects.
An added bonus is that a piece of representation information can be associated with a large number of different digital objects, hence sharing the burden of preservation.
David presented the key preservation components of CASPAR, describing in detail the information flow in a couple of scenarios in which representation information is created or retrieved from one or more registry/Repository of representation information, in case the representation information packaged with the data is not sufficient.
He also explained the role of virtualisation within CASPAR, which is a technique of isolating dependencies on hardware, software and environment.
Virtualisation creates external interfaces that hide an underlying implementation.
The benefits for preservation arise from hiding the specific, changing technologies from the higher level applications which use them.
David concluded the talk by saying the conceptual model had led to the CASPAR architecture which is broadly applicable and useful both for preservation and for interoperability.
Adam Farquhar of the British Library gave a presentation entitled ‘Planets: Integrated services for digital preservation’ and detailed the types of problems Planets is addressing as well as the rationale for project partners’ involvement in the project.
Adam started by examining the scale of the problem and concluded that losing digital information costs money and hurts everyone.
All partners within Planets have vested interests in digital preservation and in the success of the project.
For the national libraries and archives involved in Planets, preservation and access over the long term is their primary mission.
Planets, for example, is expected to provide the technology component of the British Library’s digital preservation solution.
For researchers, digital preservation touches upon complex disciplinary issues and has a potentially huge impact on a broad spectrum of society.
For the technology companies, this is an opportunity to introduce innovative services and products and to increase competitiveness.
Adam then presented the Planets architecture, explaining the functions of the key components, including preservation planning, preservation action, preservation characterisation, the testbed and the interoperability framework, which integrate the different tools and services to provide one easily managed digital preservation system.
In the context of two scenarios, Adam demonstrated how Planets methods, tools, and services can help organisations diagnose and treat obsolescence problems with their digital objects.
He hoped that Planets’ high levels of automation and scalable components will reduce the costs and improve the quality of digital preservation.
Solutions or Snakeoil There is a Planets testbed and there are CASPAR ‘testbeds’.
Attentive readers will have noticed that one is singular and the other is plural.
Some may have thought that both have something to do with validation.
The details are hard to tell just from the names.
There have been questions from outside the projects as to how the two differ.
This was fortunately to a great extent clarified by two presentations, one on the CASPAR testbeds by David Giaretta and one on the Planets testbed by Max Kaizer of the Austrian National Library.
Both presentations contained a great deal of detail and included a look into the future.
The ‘CASPAR testbeds’ seems to be the collective name for the following three aspects of work: A set of proposed metrics which can be used to validate digital preservation tools and techniques A methodology for simulating the effect upon the usability of digital information caused by changes over time in hardware, software, environment and the knowledge base of the designated communities.
The application of the metrics and the methodology to a variety of digital objects from the domains of science, cultural heritage and contemporary performing arts.
The Planets testbed is a software system which provides a controlled environment for experimentation which enables benchmarking of preservation tools, services and strategies.
Its role within Planets is two-fold: Test and validate the technical solutions and approaches developed in PLANETS, more specifically: provide a controlled hardware and software environment for testing and evaluating preservation action (migration, emulation) and characterisation tools and services record data from experiments in registries for further analysis and comparison assist the validation of the effectiveness of different digital preservation plans Assess the suitability of the approaches across ‘real life’ scenarios in various organisations: analyse applicability of the outcomes of PLANETS in existing workflows and organisational contexts evaluate their efficiency in providing practicable solutions for organisations engaged in digital preservation At a later stage testbed services will be offered to organisations outside Planets so that they can test preservation tools and services against benchmark content and validate preservation plans against organisational policies and content profiles.
The first release of the Planets testbed is expected in early 2008.
Key Components for Preservation Infrastructures from CASPAR Adam Farquhar chaired this session which included three presentations from CASPAR, providing a focused view of the various aspects of the project at detailed and technical level.
Luigi Briguglio presented the CASPAR architecture.
He explained the iterative and traceable process used to develop the CASPAR architecture and reported on its current status.
The architecture is based on the conceptual model and will go through a number of stages to specify eventually key components interfaces.
Although the main focus is on representation information, the overall architecture also includes key components such as data access and the security manager, digital rights manager, authenticity manager and visualisation manager.
Luigi also provided a useful mapping of the CASPAR architecture to the OAIS functional model.
A second presentation from Luigi focused on the concept of intelligibility of digital objects, which can be defined as the capacity to be correctly understood.
Luigi argued that the intelligibility of digital objects is something that must be preserved along with the objects in addition to the bit sequences.
Based on a model developed by Yannis Tzitzikas, it is possible to formalise the intelligibility of digital objects, using the notions of modules and dependencies.
This can also be mapped onto the representation information requirements with the OAIS and formally model the community’s knowledge and the gaps within it.
David Giaretta has touched upon representation information in a number of previous presentations.
His presentation in this session was dedicated to it.
He analysed in detail and provided examples of different types of representation information.
He then focused on the Registry / Repository for representation information, explaining how it can be used and how the link is maintained between the data and the representation information.
David also talked about the various desired properties of the Registry / Repository itself, such as its trustworthiness, extensibility and distributed nature.
Planets Integrated Preservation Services David Giaretta chaired this session which included three presentations from Planets, providing a focused view of a number of key components at detailed and technical level.
Christoph Becker of Vienna University of Technology presented a methodology for specifying preservation plans, which allows explicit definition of preservation requirements and offers a systematic way to compare candidate preservation strategies.
The ultimate goal is to make an informed and accountable selection of the preservation strategy which is most appropriate to the orgnaisation.
The methodology has been implemented in the context of a number of case studies.
Christoph provided a sneak preview of the software tool called Planets Preservation Planning Tool (Plato), which is being developed to implement the methodology and automate the preservation planning process.
Plato (including decision support and risk assessment modules) is expected to be released in August 2008.
Adrian Brown of the National Archive of the UK presented the content characterisation work.
Tools and services are being developed within Planets to characterise the significant properties of digital objects, which are necessary to support the development of preservation plans and validate preservation actions (evaluating change).
The aims and objectives of this strand of work are to define methodologies for describing significant properties, to develop tools and services for automating measurement and comparison of these properties and to make recommendations on improving the preservation characteristics of digital object types.
Adrian then reported on achievements to date and provided technical details on the characterisation registry, the Extensible Characterisation Description Language (XCDL) and the Extensible Characterisation Extraction Language (XCEL), and the registry-driven characterisation tool framework.
Adrian ended the presentation by sharing with the participants the planned year 2 activities.
Jeffrey van der Hoeven of the National Library of the Netherlands gave a presentation on emulation, a digital preservation technique which adapts the computer environment to render the digital object authentically.
There has been some level of scepticism around emulation due to its technical complexity and high initial costs.
Emulation has never been applied in an operational digital archiving environment.
Work within Planets on emulation continues from the Dioscuri project, funded by the National Library and National Archive of the Netherlands in 2004, in recognition of the need for emulation, especially for rendering complex digital objects in the future without affecting their authenticity and integrity.
Jeffrey offered a detailed description of the project’s achievements.
The Dioscuri emulator has been designed for durability and flexibility.
It is built on top of a virtual layer, called a virtual machine (VM), which reduces the dependency of the emulator on the actual hardware and software it runs on.
It is also highly component-based.
Each component, called a module, imitates the functionality of a particular hardware component (i.e.
processor, memory, hard disk, etc.).
By combining various modules any computer emulation can be created.
Jeffrey explained the areas where improvements are needed and presented a plan to take things forward within Planets.
Jeffrey ended the presentation by presenting a diagram showing how emulation tools and services fit with other Planets tools and services.
Conclusion It has been two intensive yet fascinating days.
The participants went home with answers and expectations as well as further questions no doubt.
Even for people directly involved in the projects, it has been a great opportunity to understand each other’s work and discuss many digital preservation related issues.
One could not help remarking upon the strategy behind the funding of three very different but highly complimentary projects.
Planets focuses on the immediate problems of libraries and archives and aims to offer solutions here and now.
CASPAR deals with more complex scientific and artistic data and provides a valuable insight into more generic systems for digital preservation.
DPE is the glue which binds the synergies of PLANETS, CASPAR and ongoing national initiatives.
References Planets http://www.planets-project.eu/ CASPAR: http://www.casparpreserves.eu/ DPE: http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/ wePreserve: http://www.wepreserve.eu McGovern, Nancy (2007) ‘A Digital Decade: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going in Digital Preservation?’ RLG DigiNews v11 no1: http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=21033#article3 Author Details Helen Hockx-Yu Planets Project Manager The British Library Email: Helen.hockx-yu@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Progress towards Addressing Digital Preservation Challenges” Author: Helen Hockx-Yu Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/fp6-2007-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DC 2005 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DC 2005 Buzz data rdf framework database infrastructure metadata digitisation vocabularies cataloguing z39.50 provenance uri personalisation frbr dcmes dcmi sru skos interoperability dcap standards Citation BibTex RIS Robina Clayphan reports on the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications: Vocabularies in Practice held at the University of Carlos III, Madrid in September 2005.
This year's DC Conference took place over four days in the excellent facilities of the University of Carlos III in Leganes, which is a few minutes train ride south of Madrid in Spain.
In excess of two hundred people attended coming from 34 countries around the world.
As always it was a busy conference with many parallel strands to choose between.
The rest of this report therefore covers only a fraction of all the papers and work that happened there: it is a fairly personal selection drawn from some of the sessions I attended.
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) celebrated its tenth birthday in March this year.
From small beginnings in 1995, when the idea of defining a core set of elements to facilitate resource discovery on the Internet was articulated, the activity developed from a series of workshops through to annual conference status five years later in 2001.
The DCMI workshops were open events and, as awareness of the emergent standard spread, people turned up to them in increasing numbers.
Their reasons for being there were not homogeneous some were motivated to contribute to the development work, some to learn and some to share information about their particular implementation and the lessons it may have for other practitioners.
To provide the parallel strands necessary to meet the needs of this growing community the conference series was established.
Padre Soler Building of the University Carlos III of Madrid The main impact of accommodating these differing needs is that the annual DC conference usually has a lot going on at any one time.
This year, for those coming to learn, a programme of Tutorials was offered at the start of each day.
These covered the basics of syntax, semantics and application profiles plus a couple more covering the theme of this year, vocabularies in practice.
The plenary sessions each morning opened with a keynote speaker, to set the landscape and context, followed by papers from practitioners addressing the main theme of the day.
The afternoon schedule required attendees to make some tough decisions between three different strands: listening to the short papers describing projects and other metadata-related activities; participating in one of the working group meetings to help drive forward the work of DCMI; attending one of the Special Sessions focusing on a related activity.
It is an encouraging development that the number of Special Sessions has increased over the years.
DCMI and other groups working in areas such as semantics, sectoral standards and metadata have recognised converging or complementary interests and sought to harmonise development where possible.
Keynotes and Papers Diverse Vocabularies in a Common Model: Dublin Core at 10 Years Tom Baker, DCMI Director of Specifications and Documentation To open the substantive part of the proceedings Tom Baker's address looked both backwards at the evolution of the Dublin Core Metadata Set (DCMES), its semantics, models and vocabularies and also outlined the priorities for the future.
With the realisation in 1994 that this new information resource, the World Wide Web, was not going to go away, librarians recognised that their normal practices in resource description and discovery were not going to scale to what was coming.
Something simpler was needed that could be understood and created by non-experts.
Several lively, cross-sectoral workshops later, the original core 15 terms were established and DCMES took its place amongst the many established metadata formats used to improve access to resources.
Early implementations indicated a desire for greater precision in the metadata: "Not just any Date, but Date Created, not just any subject but a Library of Congress Subject Heading."
So the original DC vocabulary grew into a set of 15 terms each of which could be qualified either by a refinement that narrowed the meaning of the term or by use of an encoding scheme to indicate something about the interpretation of the associated value.
With increasing use of DC it became apparent that a small number of prescribed terms could never meet the requirements of diverse applications.
Implementers were developing terms around the edges to meet the need for more precision for specialised purposes and adding local rules and guidelines.
They were taking what they wanted from DC and creating what they needed to supplement it, the end result being a customised profile of DC.
These bottom-up developments have been complemented by top-down work to produce an abstract model against which such application profiles can be validated.
The DCMI Abstract Model [1] was approved earlier this year and will underpin the DCMI shift in emphasis.
This move will be away from the development of the underlying vocabularies to the establishment of application profiles that can be used by others and the provision of guidelines for how to make such application profiles.
The profile being produced by the Collection Description working group will probably be the first to be put through the formal Usage Board review procedure.
All the foregoing results in a model of DCMI with a core vocabulary, an underlying data model and the development of application profiles.
These elements reflect three identified legs of interoperability: shared semantics, a shared model and content-level agreement (for example,the same way to write a date (2005-09-12) or a name (Baker, Thomas).
This last point regarding content-level rules was of particular interest to me in the context of the DC Libraries activity described below.
From User Queries and Actions to Metadata Ricardo Baeza-Yates, University of Chile.
The second keynote was an interesting paper with the central theme that, in the world of information, context is everything.
He started with the observation that the use of filenames was the imposition of the functions of human memory onto computers when computers can handle remembering a lot better than we can.
They can not only retrieve directly from the content but can generate a lot of other metadata about dates and usage as well.
Going further, some knowledge of users and their context (who and where they are, what they are doing and when) allows personalisation in information retrieval.
Ricardo referred to the book "The Social Life of Information" by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid which I have since acquired and can commend to anyone interested in the wider context of information and its uses.
The Semantic Web in Practice Eric Miller, W3C Eric is very familiar with DCMI and started this final keynote presentation with enthusiastic congratulations to DCMI for what it has achieved in the last ten years.
DC is now a pervasive phrase in the world of metadata and has done a lot to raise awareness of the importance of metadata in that time.
He continued with an overview of the key aspects of the semantic web including: data integration across applications, organisations and community boundaries; the need to represent data in a way that is free of the application that created it so it can be reused in many services; the need to relate concepts in a clean and consistent way with the use of URIs for each term; in summary, the move from a web of human readable documents to a web of data exposing the data that is within the documents.
To help achieve this he identified a few key collaborations for DC amongst which are: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) in relation to DC Subject, the representation of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) in RDF (to bring together the library world and RDF) and the need for citation information for scholarly use.
Using Dublin Core Application Profiles to Manage Diverse Metadata Developments Robina Clayphan and Bill Oldroyd, The British Library The paper presented by my colleague and me exemplified the concept of Dublin Core application profiles.
It is a solution we have been working with at the British Library (BL) for some years now in the context of a wider resource discovery strategy.
The BL has a legacy of many different systems and bibliographic formats arising from its history of incorporation of a number of separate organisations.
This mix has been compounded by the output of the on-going digitisation activities that began in the more recent past many produced before interoperability became the watchword for digital information.
In an attempt to control the proliferation of such metadata formats and to bring a degree of harmonisation to the older legacy systems, a British Library application profile (B-LAP) has been developed.
Consisting largely of terms from the DC vocabulary it is supplemented by a few coined locally and is documented according to the CEN DCAP Guidelines [2].
All digitisation projects are now asked to base their own metadata profiles on the B-LAP and to create additional terms only where needed.
This ensures that there will always be an interoperable core of metadata to facilitate the implementation of cross-searching the library's resources.
To be useful, an application profile which is applied across an organisation's metadata requires a technical implementation that will take account of the complete database infrastructure.
Using the recently developed SRU protocol in conjunction with both the B-LAP and a gateway that can translate between Z39.50 and SRU, the BL has been able to experiment with the provision of a uniform method of access across its collections.
Working Group Sessions Libraries Working Group Amongst the objectives in the Charter of this working group are the following two aspirations: to foster increased interoperability between DC-based metadata and other metadata used in libraries and to provide a platform for feedback from other bibliographic bodies.
It was therefore rewarding to spend one of the working sessions of the meeting considering how the DC community (seen as embodying an emergent standard) could best contribute to the work of the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) community (regarded as a traditional standard).
Earlier this year the AACR authorities had elected to reassess the principles behind the rules and develop a standard applicable to a wider set of resources than traditional library materials and designed for use in a digital environment.
In this light Matthew Beacom had been invited to outline the development plans for what is now being called Resource Description and Access (RDA) [3].
Characterised as a library domain content-level agreement, this departure converges with one of the three aspects of interoperability referred to by Tom Baker and may help in identifying a way for users to share practice about how values are expressed within descriptions.
This work will be taken forward by a sub-group of DC Libraries which will participate in the review of the drafts of RDA.
Collection Description (CD) Working Group Collection descriptions are seen as essential if meta-searching and portals are to work effectively.
This working group has been very active over the past year developing an application profile to describe collections [4] and is closely aligned with the Collection Description Sub-Group of the NISO Metasearch Initiative (MI).
The first three functional requirements for collection description, of discover, identify, and select a collection coincide with those defined for bibliographic records.
Then the models diverge as the CD requirement is to identify the location of the collection and identify services that supply access to it.
This recognises the reality in the meta-searching world, that more than one service can provide access to the same digital collection.
A profile for describing such services is beyond the scope of the DC CD but is under development by the NISO initiative.
It is anticipated that the CD application profile will be the first to undergo the new review process proposed by the DCMI Usage Board.
A few outstanding issues remain to be resolved in the coming year.
Conclusion Through project work in partnership with other national libraries and UKOLN I learned about DC at a relatively early stage in its development.
In 1999 I had the opportunity to attend what turned out to be one of the last of the workshop series and I have since been fortunate enough to attend the conferences.
My principal interest in DC reflected the objectives of the initiative in that I needed to find a simple metadata set that could be applied in various digital contexts.
Another aspect of my interest has been as an observer of the process: seeing an idea born in the early days of the Internet grow into a significant global activity responsible for an ISO standard.
A process that started as an idea pursued by a small group of individuals has evolved into an entity with all the trappings of a formal international organisation and links with the other siginifcant communities in the information world.
DCMI still retains the open, participative methods it started out with and although global in its reach, as demonstrated by the provenance of participants at this conference, it remains an admirable, grass-roots, collaborative initiative.
References DCMI Abstract Model http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/ CEN Dublin Core Application Profile Guidelines http://www.cenorm.be/sh/mmi-dc Resource Description and Access Prospectus http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/rdaprospectus.html Current draft of the DC Collection Description Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/collection-application-profile/2005-08-25/ Author Details Robina Clayphan Co-ordinator of Bibliographic Standards The British Library Email: robina.clayphan@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk Return to top Article Title: "DC-2005: Vocabularies in Practice" Author: Robina Clayphan Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/dc-2005-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing the Test People Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing the Test People Buzz software Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho expected a book that would challenge her technical knowledge and understanding but found a readable and useful guide for the time-pressed manager.
I chose this title from the list of review items with trepidation expecting to find a technological beast.
To my surprise the cover showed the pixelated image of a conductor and the only beast I found inside the covers was the metaphorical image of Judy McKay's team.
In the preface the author suggests that the book provides 'practical advice for the novice and affirmation for the expert'.
In my view it does much more than that.
Whilst using examples from the field of software quality assurance, the author manages to cover a vast range of topics which could be a useful reference tool for all those facing everyday management challenges in any environment.
Judy McKay makes the point that being a successful manager requires 'resourcefulness, common sense, confidence and humility'.
New managers must step lightly.
They have only two weeks to make a good impression and it is not only about bringing bagels on Friday.
Judy shows you how to rent loyalty before you can earn it and how to ensure that your team is well regarded in the organisation even when its job is to find faults with others' work, as quality assurance often requires.
All managers should be aware that they are only as good as their teams and this demands skills in choosing the team members, allocating tasks to fit with abilities, managing workflows and asking the right questions.
From tips on how to read 500 résumés and covering letters in eight hours, to choosing the right interview questions to ensure fit with the organisational culture; from avoiding legal challenges by unsuccessful applicants to finding the necessary skills, there is something that will help busy managers in all the steps from hiring the best to dismissing those the organisation no longer needs without losing sleep.
Management skills are often diminished by being described as common sense.
This book does not argue otherwise but shows how much thoughtfulness, sensitivity and people-awareness management needs in the technological as well as any other field.
Some of the advice is aimed specifically at those working in software engineering and there are industry-specific examples of job descriptions and reward systems; some advice is general and full of humour, but all the hints are tested and helpful.
Judy McKay does not expect individuals to have perfect skills but teams must have perfect skills mix and she gives a lot of advice on how to ensure this through matching jobs to people, developing your staff and allocating projects.
Thoughtful feedback is essential too and all managers who intend to deliver non-constructive criticism of their employees should do so only in front of their dog.
Managing the Test People is full of intelligent observation, passion and a good sense of the ridiculous situations we sometimes find ourselves in at work.
But most of all this is a book written by somebody who has a sense of perspective and who has the humility to ask herself daily, 'Would I like to work for me?'.
An informative, easy read, a diary of a manager you would wish you worked for.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub Librarian British Medical Association Email: lcoelho@bma.org.uk Web site: http://www.bma.org.uk/library Return to top Article Title: "Managing the Test People" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Further Education and BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Further Education and BIOME Buzz software cataloguing Citation BibTex RIS Donald Mackay gives an overview of BIOME, the hub for the health and life sciences in the context of its services for Further Education.
BIOME is a free service from the Resource Discovery Network that offers free access to an easy-to-use and searchable catalogue of high-quality Internet resources covering the health and life sciences.
The Internet holds a plethora of information and is a key source of material to support health and life science teaching and learning in Further Education.
It can be, however, difficult to find high-quality and relevant materials.
A range of commercial and other search engines can help simplify the process of finding information on the Web, but many have no mechanisms to filter out unreliable information.
Unlike generic search engines, BIOME only guides you to Internet resources that have been hand selected and quality evaluated by subject and information specialists.
BIOME is for students, researchers, lecturers, teachers, and practitioners who need relevant and reliable health and life science information from the Internet.
BIOME Gateways There are six dedicated subject Gateways within BIOME each of which covers a specific area within the health and life sciences.
These gateways are: AgriFor covering agriculture, food, and forestry VetGate covering animal health OMNI covering health and medicine NMAP covering nursing, midwifery, and allied health BioResearch covering biological and biomedical sciences Natural Selection covering the natural world Each BIOME Gateway offers the ability to search or browse the collection by subject, which obtains more focused results than more general search engines.
Students and staff in Further Education can find a huge amount of useful information through the BIOME Gateways.
At present BIOME contains over 23,000 carefully evaluated resources.
New resources are added weekly and existing resources are regularly reviewed.
BIOME can be used to find online journals and magazines, software, news services, teaching and learning materials, documents and reports, organisational home pages, mailing lists, and jobs.
The BIOME Virtual Training Suite The Virtual Training Suite is a collection of free interactive online tutorials created to help our users effectively search the Internet in their subject fields.
Aimed at lecturers, students, teachers, and researchers, the Virtual Training Suites maintained by the BIOME team include: Internet Medic Internet for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting Internet for Allied Health Internet Vet Internet BioResearcher Internet for Nature Internet for Agriculture, Food and Forestry Internet for Health and Social Care BIOME also provides ideas for using resources in learning and teaching in Further Education.
RDN case studies have been prepared by experienced practitioners from the FE sector, in collaboration with BIOME, in the following areas: Biology Composition and structures of DNA and RNA Structure and function of Dicotyledonous root tissues Cell Cycle and Mitosis Health and Social Care Good Practice in Study Skills Risk and Assessment Food Diary Agriculture and Horticulture Investigation into the Foot & Mouth Outbreak in 2001 An investigation into some of the issues relating to conversion from conventional agricultural production into organic production Using images in assignments Alternative land uses case study Each case study gives some practical ideas and suggestions for incorporating BIOME and other Internet resources into teaching and learning activities for Further Education.
They also give ideas and inspiration on how further to use Internet resources in FE.
BIOME offers a range of free training materials for those involved in FE.
A number of different fliers and training materials describing the service are available and BIOME also produces free Internet resource booklets that give examples of some of the many key Web sites that BIOME describes.
Any of these materials can be ordered in hardcopy from the BIOME Service or can also be downloaded from http://biome.ac.uk/about/publications.html If you would like to tell your colleagues, students or classmates about BIOME, you can find the majority of the information in this article in our new flier, 'What BIOME can do for you: Further Education'.
This will soon be available in print format and downloadable PDF.
BIOME has ongoing plans to enhance its services for Further Education and over the next year we will be developing a range of services specifically for FE.
We are keen to involve students and teachers in this process.
If you would like to participate then please contact the author.
Author Details Donald Mackay BIOME Service Manager Email: dmm@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Further Education and BIOME" Author: Donald Mackay Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/biome Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing Electronic Records Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing Electronic Records Buzz archives metadata preservation perl mp3 foi url research Citation BibTex RIS Lise Foster finds much to think about in this wide-ranging collection of essays on the fast-developing field of electronic records management.
As someone with some theoretical knowledge and technical skills getting involved in the practicalities for the first time, I found considerable food for thought in this book.
Combining a truly international selection of contributors offering perspectives from Australia, France, South Africa, Canada and the US with backgrounds in records, document and knowledge management as well as archives with case studies from both private and public companies, the book gives a thorough grounding in the subject for 'newbies' as well as placing records management firmly in the sphere of business processes and benefits.
The editors even thoughtfully offer a list of the Web sites referred to in the text on the publisher's Web site to save tedious inputting of the URLs.
In the Beginning John MacDonald starts off by recalling an article he wrote ten years ago considering the future direction and environment for records management and so gives the reader an overview of the main issues at that time and which, all too often, still blight progress now.
I found myself very familiar with his scenario of haphazard storage in cluttered C: drives and shares with so many office workers still chafing at the restraints records management seems to impose and often taking the all too human way out of protesting through non-compliance.
Laws and standards have been implemented in the last ten years, but compliance is still patchy and many businesses of all kinds have still not woken up to the importance of effective records management and ineffective silos are still plentiful.
In the technological domain, there has been considerable progress made in the past ten years, with user-friendly systems providing seamless records and document management in one package.
He also makes the useful point that familiarity with and use of IT in the office environment and at home has increased exponentially and everyone is now dealing with electronic records of some kind.
This is leading to more understanding of the issues involved, as people find the principles of good file management also apply to their personal collections of digital photos and mp3 files!
In chapter two, we move on to the use of standards and models with Hans Hofman, who covers everything from why we have standards to why we resist them.
There is a bewildering array of these standards, both national and international, some of which are actually conflicting; I found this chapter usefully focused attention on those which really matter.
A major theme of this book also starts to emerge here, which is that records management is primarily about business needs whether the need to comply with legislation and evidence laws, promote efficiency or preserve historical records it is vital to focus first on the business then select the appropriate standards and other tools for the task.
Next, Kate Cumming considers metadata, which in the records management context, also serves to make the connection between groups and individuals and the documents they produce.
She considers in more detail business processes and how these influence the standards of metadata and makes the comment that too many businesses invest in this expensive and specialist technology without first considering what exactly they plan to do with it.
She goes on to include a detailed and very useful checklist to use when identifying a potential system for purchase.
David Ryan moves onto digital preservation and looks at the born-digital environment as well as the shift from printing to e-delivery in whatever format the customer prefers even audio or Braille.
Xiaomi An looks at research activity in the field while Marciano and Moore discuss technologies used in some detail, including the applications of perl and regular expressions.
David O. Stephens looks at the legal background and how recent changes in law including Sarbanes-Oxley and Freedom of Information have driven progress in recent years, while Verne Harris offers a very different viewpoint from South Africa where an environment with some excellent laws but a culture of non-compliance and government secrecy has led to massive 'loss of memory' by the state.
Thijs Loeven moves onto the human dimension one very often overlooked in these technology-intensive projects and discusses the competencies required by staff in setting up and managing the systems and providing leadership for these large projects.
Again, useful tables and examples are provided which make interesting reading and are certainly applicable beyond the records/document management field.
Pierre Fuzeau contributes two interesting case studies from France one from the private sector and one from the public.
These highlight the importance of not underestimating or being put off by staff resistance but concentrating on the message and the overall aim.
In the case of one business, there was a 75% reduction in errors caused through duplication and outdated documents which helped increase user confidence and buy-in substantially although constant vigilance was still required to prevent staff slipping back into their former idiosyncratic ways.
These were very valuable insights as encouraging and getting compliance from staff is always the highest mountain to climb.
Judith Ellis, contributing a case study on the Australian public sector, includes a long and helpful checklist for system selection.
The editors close the book with a counterpoint to the opening chapter in which they focus on the long view, the importance of considering the organisation holistically and making sure the tools fit the task.
Conclusion This book has many strengths: the authors and editors are all experts in their fields and write well, the editors themselves have done an excellent job in organising and shaping the content so the text as a whole moves smoothly through the chapters, each considering a different aspect of the field while building on the groundwork already laid by the preceding chapters, rather than falling into the trap of appearing a disparate set of essays.
My own institution is in the early stages of considering these issues and I shall certainly be making use of many of the ideas and lists in this book, which truly offers something for everyone, whatever their specific area of responsibility in the field.
Author Details Lise Foster eServices & Systems Manager London South Bank University Email: lise.foster@lsbu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lisa.lsbu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Managing Electronic Records" Author: Lise Foster Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/foster-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Libraries Principles and Practice in a Global Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Libraries Principles and Practice in a Global Environment Buzz accessibility interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre welcomes a useful overview of the global digital library scene that will help both those coming new to this area and those wishing to broaden their appreciation of what is involved in developing a digital library.
In seeking to widen my understanding of digital library developments, this book appeared on the face of it to offer a useful and broad overview of developments in this field.
The authors are at pains to indicate what the book is not: it is not a 'detailed technical treatise on digital library design and implementation'; it is not 'a book on information seeking'; it has 'no pretensions as a technical manual'; and it is not 'focused upon designing and developing digital libraries'.
For detailed knowledge of digital libraries and all their many different aspects other sources are to be recommended.
And they are, by the authors, as part of, not a detailed book, but a clear description and overview of all the many different facets of a digital library.
Each chapter succinctly covers its aims and the book overall spells out the many considerations that need to be taken into account when planning a digital library.
For the most part the book is well referenced, so that readers wishing to delve more deeply are able to.
It is a book that can be read through and also used as a reference tool in its own right, dipping in where necessary to pick out a useful nugget of information.
The authors have incorporated a large number of checklists from other authors, for example the six aspects of interoperability from Paul Miller's article in Ariadne Issue 24 [1], and bringing these together is valuable in its own right.
The book contains a large number of screenshots from relevant Web sites to highlight many of the principles and practice being described.
This doesn't always work as the design-rich screens lose much in translation to black and white images.
It is acknowledged by the authors that these Web sites will change, and may well have done so by the time of publication, but that the principles underlying them will stick around for longer.
Only time will be able to pass judgement on this, though there are already one or two areas where developments seem to have moved ahead.
For example, an unstated assumption is that the digital library is a 'thing', an entity in its own right that can be created and managed in a distinct fashion with its own requirements and characteristics.
Looking at the evidence of digital library developments from around the world, and the global perspective is one of this book's biggest assets, this has clearly been the case in many of the developments undertaken.
But this more often than not places the digital library in isolation from other systems.
Current digital library and other systems research are looking more at the provision of services within a broader service-oriented architectural approach that has the digital library as part of a wider network of systems and services that are working together.
Confining thoughts of a digital library to a single entity in its own right limits its potential for delivering the riches such a library can offer.
Chapter 1 puts the digital library in context, placing it against traditional library development.
It notes that technology within libraries is not a new phenomenon by any means, quoting Vannevar Bush's concept of the Memex machine to capture all one's stores of information [2].
It is interesting to note that many early digital library developments had no involvement from libraries, being situated almost entirely in the world of computer science.
The ensuing use of these technical developments, though, has seen libraries making information available on a truly global basis using the Internet that might otherwise have been hidden away for only those able to travel and visit the library in question.
The boundaries of the digital library are addressed and, if truth be told, somewhat skipped round, the authors confining themselves to reviewing definitions from others rather than braving their own.
The following chapters address the different aspects that are involved in the development of a digital library.
Chapter 2 covers users it is good to see them right up at the front and addresses key barriers in their use of digital libraries; not just accessibility but also technology and language barriers, depending on where in the world you are accessing a digital library.
The use of the Internet as the delivery mechanism for many digital libraries raises the issue of where the distinction is between the two, and whether, for the user, this actually matters.
It is frustrating that many of the sources quoted appear to express the opinions of the researchers rather than the users themselves; more direct evidence from users would provide a stronger case for how a digital library is developed.
This and following chapters take a review-type approach, each section making its case through the use of referencing other sources, and this works well in raising a wide number of issues in limited space.
Chapter 3 considers the range of digital information sources, Chapter 4 looks at standards and interoperability, Chapter 5 reviews some of the systems that can be used in building a digital library.
The downside of this approach is that much is simply skipped over and even though there are references to take you further, a little more depth and consideration would have been helpful.
Indeed it would have been valuable to hear the authors' views more, rather than just their take on what others have said.
Chapters 6, 7 and 8, on interface design, searching and browsing, and practical issues, work better and feel like they are more of the meat of a digital library, where the previous chapters had provided more a snapshot of the current situation only.
Occasionally, again, individual points are made simply by reference to a single example, but the examples themselves are usually worthwhile and bear further consideration in their own right.
Thinking globally again, and 'global' here is used in terms of audience as much as geographically, there are good sections on interface design and children and those with a visual impairment and the effect of languages and cultural differences on the interface.
Much attention is given to searching multilingual collections and searching visual and sound sources in addition to more generic thoughts on searching and browsing.
And a wide range of non-technical practical issues are addressed, if at times somewhat patchily.
The final chapter is a series of case studies that highlight further many of the principles and practice described in earlier chapters.
These are fascinating in their own right and highlight the truly global nature of digital libraries.
I am not sure they fully manage to capture what has gone before, though much can be learnt from them and the priorities they set.
I have learnt much from this book and there is also much I will need to follow up on in order to reap the greatest benefit.
But at least I know where to follow up now more than I did before.
Students of library and information science will find this book useful and in their stated aim the authors have succeeded.
It will be interesting to see whether revised editions are produced to update this snapshot of principles and practice and to see if the principles laid down so far still stand.
References Miller, P. (2000) Interoperability: What is it and why should I want it?
Ariadne, issue 24.
Available at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/interoperability/ Bush, V. (1945) As we may think.
Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108.
Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/194507/bush/ Author Details Chris Awre Integration Architect e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Digital Libraries: Principles and Practice in a Global Environment" Author: Chris Awre Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/awre-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Extreme Searchers' Internet Handbook Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Extreme Searchers' Internet Handbook Buzz html browser copyright video multimedia url research Citation BibTex RIS Verity Brack reviews a book on Internet resources and finds it a useful volume for Internet beginners and Google-centric searchers.
The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook has been written aiming to fill the gaps in Internet users' knowledge by providing a better understanding of what is out there, and by illustrating useful starting points, in order to help users find their way to the most useful 'nooks and crannies' in this global information resource.
Randolph Hocks' years of experience as an information professional, trainer, and reference librarian have shown him that far too many people rely on a single search tool (currently Google, as research and personal experience have demonstrated [1]) and are unaware of the other possibilities; searchers are in need of guidance and education.
This book aims to address these.
The book starts with a general overview of the chapters and an explanation of why specific sites have been chosen for inclusion.
As the author is American, the selected sites have a US bias but that is probably only to be expected.
The author maintains his own Web site the Extreme Searcher's Web Page [2] which also advertises his previous book, the Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines [3].
His Web site supplements the books with lists of links to the sites from the Internet Handbook plus a search engine comparison chart, news of updates and changes to search engines, and associated articles.
Although written for relative newcomers to Internet and/or Web searching, (the terms are used interchangeably), it assumes that searchers are familiar with the basics of Internet use how to get connected, how to use a browser etc.
so this book is not for the complete beginner.
The Basics chapter has general discussions around 'finding tools' and search strategies, in particular the differences between directories and search engines; Hock usefully provides a six-point list of basic strategies to follow when beginning a search.
Another list provides check points for evaluation of the quality of an Internet resource, something which would have benefited from greater coverage, as it is an important aspect of Internet use that is often ignored.
Other useful but brief inclusions in this chapter are retrospective coverage of Internet content, the invisible Web, copyright, and how to cite Internet resources.
Subsequent chapters discuss directories and portals, both general and specialised, and search engines in detail, with illustrations and further details of selected sites.
It is gratifying to see that Hock does not restrict himself to US sites and mentions a number of UK favourites including BUBL, SOSIG, and EEVL, which he describes as 'undoubtedly one of the best specialized directories on the Internet'.
The Search Engines chapter (Chapter 4) is a cut-down version of what is in Hocks' Guide to Web Search Engines with sections on the basic operation of search engines, typical search options, use of Boolean operators, and how results are presented.
Five major search engines are profiled in detail (AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Google, HotBot, and Teoma), followed by information on more specialised search engines, including meta search engines, and hints on keeping up to date with developments.
Chapter 5 covers, rather briefly, group communication via newsgroups, mailing lists, interactive forums, and instant messaging, with a final page on netiquette.
Unfortunately, there is no mention of Jiscmail here.
Chapter 6 is entitled ' An Internet Reference Shelf' with pointers to encyclopaedias, dictionaries, almanacs, directories, currency converters, maps, and other such on-line reference material.
It is obviously very difficult to be comprehensive here and this is a personal selection of resources but nonetheless this introduces users to the range of material available and, it is to be hoped, inspires them to look further.
Searching for multimedia information in the form of image, audio and video files is discussed in Chapter 7 and news resources and company and product information in chapters 8 and 9.
The final chapter is something of an afterthought in that it covers publishing your own information on the Web.
It does not go into any detail of HTML authoring but mentions the main steps required of a would-be Web publisher, with a few well-chosen URLs.
A few points could have been expanded upon, particularly the discussion on copyright, which is, to my mind, too brief even for a 'Basics' chapter, and is also focussed entirely on US copyright without making it clear that copyright laws are different in different countries.
The section on citing Internet resources could also have been enlarged and illustrated with some examples in my experience students are very uncertain how to cite Web pages, and consequently may not do so at all, thus leading to charges of plagiarism.
This is a well-written book, easy to digest, with 'handy tips' printed in the margins, and useful illustrations.
It complements the author's previous book and in fact, is probably more useful as it is more up to date.
This book is ideal for Internet beginners and for those with 'little to moderate' searching experience, as the information from the publisher states.
However, I do not consider that experienced online searchers will 'discover a wealth of new ideas, techniques and resources' as they claim.
This is a book I would recommend as core reading for any introductory Internet course.
Finally, one little nit-picking point for the author: the ~ character is known as a tilde, not a cedilla!
References EDNER (Formative Evaluation of the Distributed National Electronic Resource) Project (2002).
How students search: information seeking and electronic resource use.
Issues Paper 8. http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/edner/ip/ip08.rtf The Extreme Searcher's Web Page http://www.extremesearcher.com Randolph E. Hock, The Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines: a Handbook for the Serious Searcher; 2nd ed.
CyberAge Books, Medford, New Jersey, 2001.
ISBN 0-910965-47-1.
Dr Verity Brack Insititute for Lifelong Learning University of Sheffield Email: v.brack@shef.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook" Author: Verity Brack Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/brack-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Towards Library Groupware With Personalised Link Routing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards Library Groupware With Personalised Link Routing Buzz software framework database portal archives metadata blog repositories cataloguing personalisation shibboleth mets technorati authentication uportal url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Daniel Chudnov, Jeremy Frumkin, Jennifer Weintraub, Matthew Wilcox and Raymond Yee describe a potential groupware framework for integrating access to diverse information resources and distributed personal collection development.
'Library groupware' a set of networked tools supporting information management for individuals and for distributed groups is a new class of service we may choose to provide in our libraries.
In its simplest form, library groupware would help people manage information as they move through the diversity of online resources and online communities that make up today's information landscape.
Complex implementations might integrate equally well with enterprise-wide systems such as courseware and portals on a university campus, and desktop file storage on private individual computers.
Ideally, successful library groupware should provide individuals and groups with a common set of information functions they may apply to any information they find anywhere.
In this article we make a simple case for library groupware as a unifying service model across disparate information environments.
We consider the distributed, personalised collection development model that groupware would serve, and propose an architectural model which might provide a first step in an evolutionary path from today's commonplace digital library services towards integrated library groupware.
Why Do We Need Groupware?
Consider three networked applications that are already used constantly: link resolvers [1], which short-cut access from one Web resource to related resources or library services; bibliographic reference managers, which enable users to manage records about information resources they might need to reference again; and weblogs, which let anyone write whatever they want about anything they like.
Support for each of these applications varies widely in today's libraries.
Link resolvers are centralised tools used via the Web by users and library staff to connect licensed resources and library services; traditional tools for reference management are desktop applications introduced to library visitors via bibliographic instruction, although recent versions and new products make Web-based reference management possible; weblogs are typically managed by weblog users themselves, with only a few examples of weblog support provided by libraries or campus computing services to be found.
It is interesting to examine the relationships between these tools and what they help users to do.
For example, is following a cited reference link to a link resolver the same kind of action as following a link on someone's weblog?
Are citing a work in a peer-reviewed paper and citing a work on a weblog the same action, or are they different somehow?
Because the support levels libraries provide for each kind of application vary widely, it might seem natural to consider that these applications and their functions are quite different.
But it also seems likely that to the library users following and citing many references from many sources as they manage the bibliographic lifecycle of their ongoing work, the functions these applications provide are quite similar.
In a fluid world where users move regularly between informal discussion and scholarly/research domains, we can consider the functional areas of linking, reference management, and weblogging to be service points on a single continuum of information gathering, study, and creation.
Following a reference from a weblog or from a scholarly article are each similar steps in exploring threads of related ideas.
Capturing a reference in your own weblog or reference library indicates that the citation somehow relates to your own thought process.
Publicly citing a reference more closely associates your thinking with that of others.
The link resolver solution works because it simplifies navigation through diverse library resources.
There are so many online resources with so many different interfaces that it can become nearly impossible for users to move naturally through the threads of ideas embodied in the content of those resources without link resolvers.
Libraries that provide reference-linking services with link resolvers provide navigational clarity to this sea of interface complexity.
Resolver services also let librarians customise the connections between the formally published resources contained within the centralised information space defined by library collections.
Although these are major improvements for users and librarians, the benefits are limited to the use of centrally collected library resources.
The broader information landscape including library resources among weblogs, pre-print archives, and decentralised information resources and repositories mingling with enormous desktop computing power and storage on private devices is where users and groups find, collect, and use information today.
We would do well to consider how we might bring better navigational clarity and the ability to customise connections to this more diverse and decentralised information landscape.
Formalising Personal Collection Development The increasing network-savvy of information consumers, always connected in multi-user gaming, chat, and file-sharing environments, symbolises a shift from a model of centralised collection development [2].
To consider the relationship between these newer patterns of information usage and traditional library collection development is to realise quickly that we have enlarged the idea of what collection development means.
More than ever, libraries are sharing collection development responsibilities with library users.
As decision-making about how to organise information expands from the centre (libraries) to the edge (users and user groups), we need to find ways to make the resources libraries provide fit more easily into a larger and more dynamic information landscape.
We are beginning to see efforts addressing this need.
The Interactive University at UC Berkeley is building the Scholar's Box [3] application to enable users better to integrate digital resources from libraries with other information sources and tools.
The Scholar's Box makes it easier to create personalised and themed collections of digital cultural objects for use as research and learning materials.
Benefits of such a tool include simplifying integration of digital primary source materials into teaching and learning, and simplifying integration of user-built collections with other end-user and institutional tools for managing and sharing information.
The Scholar's Box application enables these functions by bundling the ability to import, export, and transform collections packaged using contemporary standards such as the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) and the IMS Content Packaging specification (IMS-CP) the ability to search databases internal (library public access catalogues) and external (Amazon, Google) to academic environments, and the ability to publish collections in standard document formats and to personalised resources like weblogs.
A core motto of the Scholar's Box project is 'Gather, Create, Share.'
This motto speaks of the need to put more control in the hands of individuals to select information from a diversity of sources, to collect and organise that information as they see fit, and to enable broad use in a manner not limited by the boundaries of traditional systems and individual applications.
These objectives match those already sought by the aforementioned information consumers as they navigate their own information landscapes.
Managing Information Across Communities The most prominent current example of individuals and groups defining the shape of their own information landscapes is the tremendous growth of weblogs.
No longer just the realm of undergraduates talking about their online friends and social lives, scholars use weblogs for both scholarly and avocational reasons [4].
Some use weblogs to keep up with their own academic work and that of their colleagues.
Other academics use weblogs for personal material or to write about personal opinions that may or may not have to do with their scholarly work.
These sites can be particularly illuminating, as academics seem to feel freer to express their opinions in their own places on the Web.
Among technologists and scientists, Web pages and weblogs are (and have been for a while) quite common.
As scientific communication has moved online, scientists have begun to post pages with reprints, supplemental materials, and other publications more frequently.
In the last few years a larger community of social scientists, humanists, and scholars from many other disciplines have also moved online, especially as new software has made starting and contributing to weblogs easier.
We are in the early stages of understanding how people use weblogs for research, but it seems clear that weblogs have already become essential methods of interaction in academia, where weblogs help academics to connect, augmenting formal scholarly communications.
In a way, weblogs represent the informal end of the continuum from formal to informal scholarly communications: starting at the other end with peer-reviewed publications, we can envision pre-print and e-print archives, institutional repositories, online community forums, mailing lists, and weblogs as tending to have varying degrees of formality depending on the level and character of administrative policy, peer review, and institutional stewardship brought to each.
Weblogs can also be seen as a new tool for controlling and personalising both formal and informal aspects of research and teaching.
Keeping weblog pages with results of saved searches or tables of contents, for instance, is an easy way to link storage and sharing with traditional information-seeking tools.
Course weblogs are also proving to be useful, directing students to Internet resources on certain topics, and allowing teachers to post material and get feedback (often through comments) from students.
In this context, the boundaries between scholarly communication systems, weblogs, and dedicated courseware systems as teaching tools are not so clearly drawn.
Indeed, much like bibliometric techniques for formal communication systems, tools for connecting weblogs to each other and to other information services are already in widespread use.
'TrackBack,' for example, allows a weblog author to connect their own comments directly to others' posts: "In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, 'This is something you may be interested in.'
To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B... the TrackBack ping has created an explicit reference between my site and yours.
These references can be utilized to build a diagram of the distributed conversation.
Say, for example, that another weblogger posted her thoughts on what I wrote, and sent me a TrackBack ping.
The conversation could then be traced from your original post, to my post, then to her post.
This threaded conversation can be automatically mapped out using the TrackBack metadata."
[5] TrackBack looks much like the same kinds of citation practices followed in scholarly and other publishing contexts for generations.
That members of the blogosphere have defined techniques for accomplishing this indicates that people are perhaps more willing than ever to speak informally, and to speak publicly, in ways that bolster connections forward (by leaving TrackBack ping URLs) for others as readily as backward (by citing preceding sources).
For instance, other tools gaining prominence include Blogdex [6], which generates a summary of popular links anywhere on the Web by analysing the outward link patterns from weblogs, and Technorati [7], which provides an impact factor-like ranking of weblogs by inbound links from other weblogs.
Delicious [8], Furl [9] and the authors' unalog [10] are 'shared link logs' allowing distributed individuals and groups to quickly categorise and share bookmarks and recently read links.
Biologging [11] directly connects weblogging to the Pubmed database by allowing users of a custom Pubmed interface to add entries for interesting citations to a shared weblog.
These new services and tools indicate that increasingly people want to share information about what they are reading, and what they have to say about it, and what others have to say about what they say.
Many new services such as weblogs are quickly becoming mainstream, as major institutions such as Harvard Law School and MIT are bringing up public weblog services for their community members.
Information-sharing innovations are also coming from within academia.
The University of Minnesota Libraries, for example, has added their community weblogging system UThink as a target in their link resolver system, so users can post a citation directly onto their own weblogs [12].
In the current library software marketplace, where digital library services can include metasearch portals with citation clipboards and UThink with private weblogs connected to link resolvers, it seems clear that we are in the middle of a wave of innovation and integration of these new services.
The common thread running through these innovations is that each new service helps individuals move and connect more kinds of information from more diverse resources through the various information communities in which they participate.
We are still at a stage where each innovation adds value within a well-defined community or information context, even while we are learning that we will have to meet the needs of users who regularly move between formal and informal communities, and between public and private contexts.
Before long, our ability to meet these users' needs will be limited by our inability to allow users to create and connect information sources and services as they see fit.
A Simple Architectural Solution: Personalised link routing Because these services have so much in common, it seems likely that one or more common architectural patterns could help formalise the roles and relationships of each.
One view of how to build these services can be found in a reconception of our first-generation link resolution systems.
In most deployments (aside from UThink), link resolvers take a single anonymous user at a single library from one information source to one of many services of use for that source: from a reference to a full-text article, for instance, or from an article to a cited reference list, or from a metadata record to an inter-library loan form.
Hence the term 'resolver': the system reports which services as pre-defined by librarians are available relative to a given information object, and resolves a user service choice by redirecting users to their chosen site.
The entire transaction is stateless, in that which service one user chooses for any arbitrary source has no effect on his next choice for a different source, or on the next user's available choices for the same source.
For each source item, one set of suggested services for that source appears, and usually one service request is then resolved.
There are many potentially interesting artifacts from these transactions, such as usage logs, and analysis thereof, or anecdotal user feedback.
But typically there is no remembered state, in that there is no attempt within each separate transaction for the system to recognise the user involved (aside from simple authentication and authorisation in, say, an off-campus proxy context), and there is no attempt to determine any preferences that user might have for potential service targets.
A user cannot specify her own source and target categories; she is left to enter the process only from and exit only to sources and targets defined by library staff.
There is no opportunity for insertion of per-user rules that will trigger secondary services for a given source link, such as link logging to a private or group weblog, or automated subject-specific indexing based on the referring source.
Users cannot configure resolvers to automate services to be performed, for instance, in the background at the same time as they select a resolution service, (e.g.
'log all my links automatically but this time I want to read the full text').
And users cannot stipulate that, perhaps, they want resolution to happen within a different library's resolver, (e.g.
'I'm just visiting this university library for the week, please forward these requests to the resolver at my home institution').
These missing features can be summarised in the phrase 'personalised link routing.'
'Personalised' means the addition of functions that will vary depending on the user, either as predetermined by librarians or as specified by the user.
'Link routing' means arbitrary rewiring of the current single transaction paradigm (source -> service list -> target).
'Personalised link routing' would allow hooks at and between each phase of the current resolver pipeline, which would support multiple, arbitrary, parallel, or sequential actions to be specified by either librarians, as at present, or by users.
Scenarios To explore this model further, here are examples of how some personalised and routable actions might be wired in to the various steps: Adding a bibliographic reference to a weblog As UThink demonstrates, this can be a new target added to the list of resolver services.
In UThink, the resolver offers to send the reference to a campus-based weblog.
In contrast, a personalised router would expand on this by allowing a user to customise a list of additional targets, such as other weblogs, and then to send the bibliographic reference to one or more of those.
Weblog targets need only to be able to parse, store, and later render the reference.
To become a link router source, the weblog target needs to be able to send the reference back to the router, or resolve the bibliographic reference itself.
Routing to multiple targets From the previous example, it is also easy to imagine sending reference information to multiple targets, such as courses in a courseware server.
In this scenario, a lecturer could quickly add current news links to a list of course readings, and simultaneously route the same references to both his own personal reference library, and a group link log shared with colleagues from the same discipline.
Ideally these diverse options would be presented in the same screen where users now see a choice between resolver targets.
The lecturer could choose to send references automatically to his own reference library by default, and from one reference to the next, which other resources (the course reading list, the group link log) he chooses might vary.
Visiting researcher router bounce For a visiting researcher without a local account, the router could offer temporary guest access, during which the researcher could specify his home institution.
Within the same session, router lookups could be automatically bounced to his home library's router, where that router's knowledge of the researcher's own preferences would manage what happens next saving the reference in one of his course collections, for instance.
This model of 'bouncing' or 'chaining' routers makes sense in today's world, where remote resources guess a user's affiliation based on IP addresses (and, thus, might continue first to send the visiting researcher to the local link router, rather than his home library's router, even if he enters databases from his home library's home page).
Request 'chaining' might come into play if the researcher wants both to read a full-text article locally (in the institution he is visiting) and also store the reference in his home institution course collection or perhaps publish it to a weblog.
This 'personalised routing' model seems very conducive to imagining additional scenarios and information paths, with a variety of potential connections between information and services in any of these systems.
For instance, an instructor using a system like Scholar's Box to build collections for use in teaching could seamlessly route found items to colleagues, or to a reference library for later use in authoring research articles.
The same instructor could also route information in the other direction, from a reference library or a colleague's weblog back into one or more teaching collections.
Implementation Choices To build personalised link routers, two implementation paths are available which involve enhancements to existing systems.
The first, and most straightforward, would involve layering personalised routing services onto existing resolvers.
Enhancing link resolution rule engines to add new hooks in the different request phases and more flexible routing/bouncing/chaining should be feasible.
Layering in user and group management services should also be feasible, especially if we leverage recent work such as the Open Knowledge Initiative [13] or Shibboleth [14] specifications, among others, for which enterprise-class implementations are available or under development.
A second implementation path might involve integration with MyLibrary and UPortal-type systems, which are 'personalisation' services by definition.
Interesting questions along this path might include how close a binding might be necessary between personalised link routers and portals.
Should all the personalisation happen in a portal, with routers just serving as rule engines for service resolution?
Or should portal systems just be tuned to be well-behaved sources and targets, with personalised routing functions living in the routers?
It is easy to imagine different institutions with different I.T.
administration models preferring a design that allows different pieces to live under different management branches.
In considering either of these implementation models, issues of distributed storage, security, portability and descriptive models quickly come to the fore.
Fortunately, significant progress is being made on each of these issues, and it seems possible that modular solutions might be ready for integration very soon.
Indeed, modular separation of services and easy integration was a core design principle largely responsible for the success of the link resolver paradigm.
Ideally, it should also be possible to integrate next-generation groupware services with external non-library toolkits (with 'non-library' meaning 'blogosphere and otherwise from the general Internet community').
As highlighted earlier in this article, many of these technical innovations occur far away from libraries.
Supporting users who define and implement their own processing models reinforces the pattern of increasingly distributed collection development.
Conclusion When faced with the difficulties involved in integrating link resolvers, federated search engines, courseware servers, and other contemporary systems, the library community has solved one set of problems related to collection development and navigation.
At the same time, we have amplified the integration problem by investing in our own incompatible resources with their own administration and navigation nightmares.
If we can be successful in delivering a second-generation user front-end to these disparate services and resources that successfully integrates with how users move through and manage information in 2004, we will have taken a significant step toward a vision of integrated groupware.
The idea of 'library groupware' suggests a change in library services and philosophy, but helping users manage information across their diverse personal collections and information communities remains true to the core mission of libraries.
References The canonical overview of the general link resolver model is Van de Sompel H., Hochstenbach, P., "Reference Linking in a Hybrid Library Environment: Part 1: Frameworks for Linking", D-Lib Magazine 5(4), April 1999, http://dlib.org/dlib/april99/van_de_sompel/04van_de_sompel-pt1.html An excellent overview of the social shift toward "information consumption" can be found in 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition, available online at http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan/ More information on Scholar's Box can be found at http://iu.berkeley.edu/IU/SB and http://raymondyee.net/wiki/ScholarsBox Glenn D., "Scholars Who Blog: The soapbox of the digital age draws a crowd of academics."
The Chronicle of Higher Education 49(39), June 2003, available online at http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39a01401.htm Trott M., Trott B., "A Beginner's Guide to TrackBack."
Available online at http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/ Blogdex, available online at http://blogdex.net/ "Top 100 Technorati," available online at http://technorati.com/cosmos/top100.html Delicious, available online at http://del.icio.us/ Furl, available online at http://furl.net/ unalog, available online at http://unalog.org/ Biologging, available online at http://www.biologging.com/ Nackerud S., "Post Database Citations in Your Blog!"
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/archives/000477.html Open Knowledge Initiative specifications, available online at http://web.mit.edu/oki/specs/ Shibboleth, available online at http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ Author Details Daniel Chudnov Librarian/Programmer Yale Center for Medical Informatics Email: daniel.chudnov@yale.edu Web site: http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/ Jeremy Frumkin Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services Oregon State University Libraries Email: jeremy.frumkin@oregonstate.edu Jennifer Weintraub Digital Collections Specialist Yale University Library Email: jennifer.weintraub@yale.edu Matthew Wilcox Epidemiology and Public Health Librarian Yale University School of Public Health Email: matthew.wilcox@yale.edu Raymond Yee Technology Architect University of California, Berkeley Interactive University Project Email: yee@berkeley.edu Web site: http://iu.berkeley.edu/rdhyee Return to top Article Title: "Towards Library Groupware with Personalised Link Routing" Author: Daniel Chudnov, Jeremy Frumkin, Jennifer Weintraub, Matthew Wilcox, Raymond Yee Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/chudnov/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The University of Google Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The University of Google Buzz database cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Judy Reading reviews a work that may engender considerable debate in months to come.
This book has generated a lot of discussion on the Internet which seems mostly to focus on Tara Brabazon's comments such as: 'Google offers easy answers to difficult questions.
But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments.'
[1].
It is easy to find this discussion – just Google the author and/or title!
[1][2] Professor Brabazon's book is about more than the effects of Google on the study habits of students.
She brings the depth of knowledge of a professor of Media [3] to a discussion of the effects of technology on our world.
To pick out a few issues from the many she covers: she discusses the politics of our Internet still controlled by the US rather than the UN; and the effects of information technology on ordinary working people as jobs change arguing that old class structures and life chances are being perpetuated by new style education and technology.
She considers the effects of a combination of technological developments and recent historical, economic and political influences on Higher Education, with particular reference to the USA, Australia and the UK.
She reflects on the continuing exclusion of working-class people, women, ethnic minorities and disabled people from education and the lack of support for people who need it during their time in education.
Brabazon contends such exclusion persists despite the universities' rhetoric which while supporting 'widening access' and offering 'student-centred' curricula, tries to mask cost-cutting measures, and where new technologies are used to cope with increasing student numbers.
She talks of the difficulties faced by academics as they struggle with an ever-increasing workload compounded rather than relieved by new technologies such as email.
In her own case this workload is made heavier by a refusal to compromise on the quality of education offered students, despite staffing and budget cuts plus increased student numbers, together with an equal determination to find time to research and write.
It is a very dense academic book filled with evidence of her thinking and wide reading pulled from academic and popular sources but I found the revelations of the author's own story very engaging.
She weaves in descriptions of life routines, battles with university administrators and discussions with individual students (usually in the form of student emails).
Her prose style I also found compelling in places, for example, when discussing the 11 September 2001 attack in New York, she writes: 'Images still scar the mind: of skyscrapers sliced open like sardine cans, bilious black smoke erupting from concrete and iron, of grey streets and people, stained by tonnes of expelled paper, ash and dust' (p.194) However most of the discussion she provokes is in relation to her comments about Google.
Librarians are facing a radical challenge to their traditional role in Higher Education with students and academics turning to Google and Google Scholar rather than accessing research literature through their subscription journal indexes.
If they find enough for their needs, does it matter that they are missing out on the gradually reducing proportion of peer-reviewed subscription material which is not open to Google to index?
There is a lot that could be (and is) said here on both sides.
From a librarian's perspective it is pleasant to hear Professor Brabazon championing the expertise of librarians in this book as gatekeepers to quality information sources; but in my opinion librarians will need to reinvent and realign their role if they are going to operate effectively in the Internet age.
The use of Google and Google Scholar does not mean that students and researchers are necessarily displaying a shallow approach to learning and research; it all depends on how they use what they find.
Sophisticated researchers are likely to use a blended approach of Internet search engines as well as catalogues and subscription library databases [4].
Certainly our subscription databases have a lot to learn from Google's clever search engines in terms of user-friendly interfaces; the new generation of metasearch portals look to Google for inspiration.
However Professor Brabazon's students are not all sophisticated and motivated researchers; to her exasperation some exhibit a shallow cut-and-paste approach and do not spend any time thinking about the information they find on the Web, either in terms of assessing its quality or thinking about and learning from the content (see, for example, p.20-1).
She, quite rightly, wants to ensure that students have to read, reflect and learn from quality learning resources during her courses and has gone so far as forbidding the use of Google and Wikipedia; instead she expects her students to read a pack of materials supplied to them.
Cutting and pasting indiscriminately from Google Web searches is on a par with the disrespect for education shown in student behaviour such as missing lectures and tutorials and expecting afterwards to be able to catch up through reading copies of Powerpoint slides and notes.
Professor Brabazon suggests that university administrators can compound the problem by insisting that students are able to substitute notes and slides for attendance and participation.
The resultant drawback, she feels, is that students, especially those who are not motivated or who lack the skills to engage with the information, will not learn from the experience.
This book has some important things to say about what we should be doing to safeguard the quality of education, about what education is, its purpose, and how technology should be our servant not the servant of our masters.
I recommend it strongly.
References White bread for young minds, says university professor Times Online, from The Times, 14 January 2008 http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3182091.ece Google is white bread for the mind inaugural lecture from Professor Tara Brabazon, University of Brighton News and events, 7 January 2008 http://www.brighton.ac.uk/news/2008/080107googleiswhitebread.php Professor Brabazon's Web site http://brabazon.net/ Researchers and discovery services : behaviour, perceptions and needs / A study commissioned by the Research Information Network.
RIN.
November 2006 http://www.rin.ac.uk/researchers-discovery-services Author Details Judy Reading User Education Co-ordinator Oxford University Library Services Email: judy.reading@ouls.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/training Return to top Article Title: "The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age" Author: Judy Reading Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/reading-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Beyond Email: Wikis, Blogs and Other Strange Beasts Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Beyond Email: Wikis, Blogs and Other Strange Beasts Buzz mobile wiki html wireless rss portal infrastructure archives blog vle sms eportfolio interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Robert Bristow reports on a one-day workshop 'Beyond Email: Strategies for Collaborative Working and Learning in the 21st Century'.
Many working in Higher Education are now thoroughly familiar with the particular problems and opportunities presented by the use of the Web and email, the applications that up to now have been the 'killer' applications which made the Internet such a vital part of the communications armoury of universities.
However, new applications and ways of communicating are now starting to appear which push the accepted paradigms and demand both new perceptions and levels of technical awareness.
This one-day workshop was promoted with the aim of helping IT Services and the UK Higher Education Web community work out how to respond to use of new devices.
A particular problem that has been identified is that many of these devices are personally owned by students or staff, and are not under the control of IT services in the usual way.
An innovative feature of this workshop was the accent on collaborative working within the workshop.
A wireless LAN (Local Area Network) was provided with a gateway to the Internet.
A Wiki was established for participants to add their own comments as the workshop sessions developed, and a number of participants were able to download, install and run applications mentioned in the sessions.
The participants were a mixture of senior IT and IS managers from universities, IT and ISA staff and Web professionals.
The Event at a Glance Welcome and Introduction Talk: About / Wiki page Talk 1: Setting the Context Emerging Collaborative Environments Case Study 1 'The Perspective from the Research User' Paul Shabajee, ILRT, University of Bristol Discussion Groups: IM (Instant Messaging), Newsfeeds and Mobile Devices Case Study 2 'Weblogs: Niche or Nucleus?'
Derek Morrison, CDNTL, University of Bath Discussion Groups: Blogs and Wikis A Vendor View from Mirapoint Addressing the Challenges of New Devices and New Web Technologies Brian Kelly, Web Focus, UKOLN Brian Kelly outlined the day.
He made the point that although we all believe that content is king, it is in fact communication that rules.
Pointing to the extraordinary growth in Short Message Service (SMS or text messaging), he drew the conclusion that if communication is a social activity, then people will learn from each other and the content will flow.
Brian went on to discuss the importance of interoperability given the plethora of handheld and mobile devices now available.
Another challenge facing IT departments is the question of the need for and the contents of an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).
It has to be recognised that students will have grown up using Instant Messaging (IM) and SMS with far more confidence than the IT departments of the universities that they attend.
There are also major questions for pedagogy around these emerging technologies and issues to be resolved about the balance of use between email, by now a traditional and well-embedded technology with almost complete take-up by users, and the new paradigms.
Case Study 1 The Perspective from the Research User Paul Shabajee, Institute of Learning and Teaching Research (ILRT), University of Bristol Paul Shabajee shared experiences of previous events where live Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or blogging had been made available for real time discussion of the sessions.
He also explained the way that ILRT use an IRC channel to facilitate team working.
Problems that have been encountered in the use of IRC chat or blogs at conferences were outlined.
These included the worries expressed by presenters that either participants would be writing critical things about the presenter, or perhaps more worryingly, would be chatting among themselves or playing 'Quake'!
One major benefit of live use of interactive devices at a conference or lecture was the ability it conferred on participants quickly, and in real time, to look up references, links, other relevant matter, and to post this information to the IRC channel.
This provides a really powerful multiplier effect to the process of enquiry and changes the paradigm of a conference presentation considerably.
Discussion Groups: IM, Newsfeeds and Mobile Devices For each of these discussions, groups were asked to hold the following questions in mind: What uses do you envisage making of the technology within your institution?
How do you intend evaluating the technology?
What are the key requirements?
What are the 'softer' issues which you will need to address before deploying the technology in a service environment?
Instant Messaging (IM) The thrust of this discussion was that while the use of IM in Higher Education was happening in some places, there were reservations about whether it could ever move beyond an adjunct to email.
The fact that IM is synchronous makes it more suitable for small group use in an academic setting, and its use in answering questions from prospective students was cited.
One point made was that it very often comes down to infrastructure, and that a good approach is to make this available and allow the users to see what use they can make of it.
Newsfeeds Newsfeeds were reported to be in use in various institutions' portals, with a mixture of external and internal newsfeeds being offered.
Some organisations are aggregating blogs used internally for communications into a newsfeed.
There was discussion of RSS (Rich Site Summary), but confusion about the various standards that exist in that area.
One problem was that of actually getting people to start using the portal in which the newsfeeds are offered.
It was seen as vital to deal with the editorial and news generation issues and not get bogged down in technology for its own sake.
Mobile Devices Among the issues identified here were the difficulty of interoperability and the increase in support needs to which use of such devices in institutions can lead to.
There was a need for small-scale pilot schemes and for bringing support teams on board at an early stage.
At some point a choice would have to be made about which platform to support, for instance Pocket PC or Palm OS.
Case Study 2 Weblogs: Niche or Nucleus?
Derek Morrison, CDNTL, University of Bath Maybe weblogs (blogs) are nothing new.
Cave art and scribbled notes are in the same vein as they are about communication.
Weblogs are 'An online journal or commentary usually written by an individual or a small group of people', and are: 'space where individual writers can easily publish texts that are easily accessed by interested readers'.
This is true micro-publishing; a system where individuals and groups can reach out to influence, inform, debate, campaign or just stay in touch.
In the past five years of their existence, they have influenced politics and provided a platform for all kinds of political, religious and technical issues which can be expounded and then commented on.
Crucially Blogs are easy to use, requiring no knowledge of HTML or configuration of systems.
Commonly they offer searching, indexing, categorisation tools, and trackback/shareback mechanisms, whereby content on a given topic can be aggregated and tracked.
A fundamental part of the Blog paradigm is the 'discrete addressability of information objects'.
This contrasts with email, where 'information goes to die'.
This discreteness allows the content of Blogs to be pulled onto an individual's desktop via an RSS feed.
This ability does not, however, spare the user the work of finding Blogs and other news sources that deliver quality content.
Some possible uses of Blogs in an academic environment were listed: Personal knowledge management Class/cohort Web site (announcements, schedules, readings etc) Posting student work for viewing/comment by peers Personal journal with viewing/comment by teacher/tutor Publication of tutor essays, links or commentary to seed discussion Community forum, e.g.
Crooked Timber 'Citizen' reporting ePortfolio/PDP It is clear that the use of Blogs in these ways in an academic environment is at an early and exciting stage of development at the present.
There are issues, though, for academic institutions if they make this technology available to students, faculty or other staff.
What should be done about messages that are 'off message' or slate the institution or are in conflict with perceived notions of taste and decency.
Organisations may well want to look at the development of an acceptable use policy for Blogs running on university systems.
They may also wonder why Blogs are of interest when they have a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in place but the point was made that the pace of development of a monolithic VLE is inevitably slower than that of Blogs where the open source movement timescales are what matter.
Some VLEs are starting to asdd in Blog capabilities, while some organisations are looking to integrate Blogs into existing systems.
One final thought is that Blogs may well be being written, read and responded to on many different hardware systems from PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), iPods and even devices yet to be conceived.
Discussion Groups: Blogs and Wikis Blogs The point was made that many Blog implementations are not really designed with academic use in mind, and that universities may well want to tailor levels of access to take account of their different interest groups, viz: students, staff, academics, alumni, other academic institutions and the whole world.
Wikis There was some discussion about the differences and similarities of a Blog and a Wiki.
A Wiki was seen as a 'read/write' Web page.
One use identified would be in the development of system administration documentation.
The capability of a Wiki to be made both searchable and indexed makes this an ideal Wiki application.
Some people see content in Wikis as being tied up and inaccessible in a way that information in Blogs is not.
One problem of Wikis is that some of them are a bit cryptic to use, needing knowledge and experience of sometimes rather arcane mark-up languages, although some do have WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get), although many of these have problems with different browsers on different platforms.
As with Blogs, making a Wiki available to staff and students within an academic institution means thinking about and implementing an acceptable use policy and also working out mechanisms for exporting and maybe archiving the contents.
Uses for a Wiki could include: Virtual group study rooms Timetabling and course administration Shared resources for research groups User support and documentation A Vendor View from Mirapoint The final part of the workshop was a presentation from Mirapoint a vendor of turnkey Email systems that provide: 'fast, reliable delivery to desktops and mobile workers.
They'll protect your message network against spam and email-borne viruses.
They'll provide extra collaboration features like calendar and address book.
And they'll do it all at a TCO that's hundreds of dollars lower than competitive products with minimal management requirements.'
[1] Mirapoint made the point that they were mostly at the workshop to learn what the UK academic community was doing with these technologies, but did make the point that a lot of the services that the workshop had dealt with were in fact available integrated with the email experience.
Conclusion I came away from this workshop somewhat overloaded with information, and have found myself going back to the workshop Web site [2] many times for clarification and further information.
On the Web site are not only links to the speakers' presentations, but also the Wiki pages that were being annotated as the speakers were talking, as well as the reporting from the various discussions sessions.
I could not help but wonder how I was ever to find the time to keep up with all this information this is a rapidly changing field, and it seems the amount of information to be absorbed and tracked is growing exponentially.
One day when I have a few moments I intend to set up a Wiki for use in the school where I work for the new Information Services committee we are setting up, and an RSS feed for the relevant Blogs that may help me keep up to date with this technology.
One very useful thing to come out of the workshop was learning about Skype [3]which describes itself as 'Free Internet telephony that just works'.
I'd second that!
Editor's note: A main article and a Get Tooled Up column on Wikis are also available in this issue.
References Mirapoint Web site : "A Message from the Messaging Experts" http://www.mirapoint.com Workshop Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/ucisa-wlf-2004-11/ Skype http://www.skype.com/ Author Details Robert Bristow Information Services Manager Graduate School of Education University of Bristol Email: Robert.bristow@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/education Return to top Article Title: "Beyond Email: Wikis, Blogs and Other Strange Beasts" Author: Robert Bristow Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/beyond-email-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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How the Use of Standards Is Transforming Australian Digital Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines How the Use of Standards Is Transforming Australian Digital Libraries Buzz data software framework html database infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus browser identifier schema repositories eprints preservation oai-pmh cataloguing marc lcsh aacr2 uri marc21 e-science url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Debbie Campbell explains how the exploitation of recent standards has allowed the National Library of Australia to digitise its collections and host federated search services and provide an improved service.
The National Library of Australia (NLA) has been able to achieve new business practices such as digitising its collections and hosting federated search services by exploiting recent standards including the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), handles for persistent identification, and metadata schemas for new types of content.
Each instantiation of the OAI-PMH opens up new ways of creating and managing our digital libraries while making them more accessible for learning, teaching and research purposes.
Using handles as the basis for managing the persistence of a large, digitised collection has allowed information to be identified and cited in many different ways.
Standards have transformed, and continue to transform, the way in which the National Library conducts its core business of making its digital library collections available for all to use.
Although the National Library of Australia has always adhered to the use of standards such as MARC21 and AACR2 for the creation and management of bibliographic data [1], our adoption of newer Web-based protocols has allowed users distant from the Library to experience digital and digitised collections in virtual ways.
The Library has been able to retain legacy system investments by surfacing rich metadata into new services.
This process has encouraged the exploration of the ongoing suitability of metadata schemas, as well as contributing to the assessment of the need for new schemas.
The Library promotes the standards it uses with a comprehensive overview on its Web site providing links to more detailed documents which can act as guidelines for other service providers [2].
This article focuses specifically on the application of standards in three areas: the creation of national resource discovery services; the assignment of persistent identifiers to digital objects; the generation of metadata to support the management and discovery of academic research outputs.
National Resource Discovery Under the imprimatur of its Australian National Bibliographic Database (NBD) [3], the Library has supported federated resource discovery for more than two decades.
Australian libraries have contributed cataloguing and holdings records for finding and copying in a centralised framework since 1981.
Even when these processes gradually changed to a hybrid model, where records were created on individual open access catalogues, the contribution to a central discovery point remained intact.
There is still a commitment to sharing information at this national level.
The arrival of other metadata schemas such as the Dublin Core allowed the National Library to emulate the hybrid model for the discovery of digital objects.
The Library first became interested in the Open Archives Initiative when its harvesting protocol was known as the Santa Fe convention [4].
However, it was not until the stable OAI-PMH version 1.1 became available that the Library implemented it, initially in the PictureAustralia service [5].
The service was able to move from a clunky http/HTML method of harvesting to the more streamlined use of the OAI-PMH.
This decision enabled other cultural agencies such as state and regional libraries and museums to become familiar with its use.
Australian university libraries and cultural institutions overseas are now also providing digitised images to the service [6].
Before using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, complete Web harvesting for PictureAustralia took about 14 days every two months.
Harvesting larger sites with around 200,000 metadata records took up to five days and was not completely reliable.
Sometimes a harvest of these large sites would fail and have to be completely re-done.
The PictureAustralia service was really only up to date six times per year.
After implementing OAI, a complete OAI harvest of the large sites took about 4 hours.
Incremental OAI harvests take less than one minute.
At present the Library uses a hybrid model where the larger sites which have OAI are incrementally harvested every day.
The smaller sites are Web-harvested once per week.
PictureAustralia is therefore completely up to date once a week, which represents an improvement in the currency of the more than one million records in the service.
Experience with the OAI-PMH and the use of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)'s OAICat software [7] with the Library's digital object repository opened up our digital libraries of cultural heritage materials for inclusion in international federated resource discovery services such as Google [8], OAIster [9] and the Research Library Group's Cultural Materials Initiative [10].
Use of the Protocol in open services, which are available 24 hours and 7 days a week, gives the National Library a solid platform from which to move to the next stage of new service development.
The Library has been encouraging the university sector to work with OAI infrastructure by using a small prototype to harvest research outputs and collocate materials useful for research purposes [11].
This work is being progressed as part of the Australian Higher Education sector's ARROW Project [12].
The Library is developing a national discovery layer, which will harvest the metadata for all research outputs from individual institutional repositories and provide cross-searching services.
Additional functionality is still being considered.
Persistent identification One area where it has been difficult to obtain international agreement is in the establishment of a single Universal Resource Naming scheme for digital or digitised objects [13].
The Library considers persistent identification of digital objects to be a necessary part of managing a digital library, just as ISBN and International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) assignments are essential components of managing a print-based collection.
Identification schemes for print-based objects such as books (ISBNs) or journals (ISSNs) or sheet music (International Standard Music Numbering ISMNs) were tested, and in some cases were successfully redeployed as a component part of a digital identifier for digital materials, but they do not match requirements exactly for objects which do not emulate print forms.
The Library introduced a persistent identification scheme in 2001 to assign identifiers to objects in sub-collections, such as Web sites captured into the digital archive PANDORA [14].
Based on the Handle system, the scheme was extended to provide further intelligence for composite digitised objects such as manuscripts.
For example, <collection id>-<collection no.>-<series no.>-<item no.>-<sequence no.>-< role code>-<generation code> becomes nla.ms-ms8822-001-0001-002-d for the file which is the display image of the second page of the first item in series 1 of the Mabo papers [15].
The Library has recently registered its persistence schemes in the Info-URI registry hosted by OCLC [16].
"Using persistent identifiers provides the ability to guarantee: long term citation of online documents; archiving digital materials; managing multiple copies, particularly at different locations; no ambiguity, in order to support rights management; transfer to new hardware and software platforms; and browser bookmarks."
[17] A persistent identifier scheme is also being used in the ARROW Project, which provides an additional commitment to the delivery of a top-quality service.
Metadata Principles The National Library has worked with descriptive metadata standards such as MARC21 and AARC2 since the 1960s.
But there has been a well-recognised controversy over the use of bibliographic standards in recent times.
The return on investment in the metadata creation process has been challenged [18].
It is true that there has been an explosion in the amounts of information, in packaged or unpackaged form, which needs describing.
There are simply not enough qualified professionals such as librarians and indexers available to create the necessary descriptions for subsequent discovery and management of information objects.
Providers of tertiary-level information services have started to query this.
The ARROW Project is exploring a combination of solutions for the creation of metadata, which will adhere to the following seven principles: A digital work instantiates the metadata and provides additional information about itself which does not need to be encoded.
The Dublin Core metadata schema itself is an exemplar of this principle [19].
Bibliographic standards such as MARC21 needed to be extensive because the item being described is not available to the researcher in the first step of their researching process.
Discovery and selection could only be satisfied by assessing the metadata.
For digital works, while some metadata is necessary to save time while searching, for example to refine large results sets, further decision-making about the suitability of the material can be made by looking at the work itself.
This principle is also being tested by the Australian Higher Education sector, and some early results have been made available by the Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services (COLIS) Project [20].
Metadata can be used to integrate access to all research output including research mid-process such as scientific analysis and musical composition, not just an end-product of that research.
The eBank UK Project is developing a holistic approach to metadata creation which must support 'the perceived hierarchy of data and metadata from raw data up to "published" results' [21].
Sharing a common schema for harvesting by service providers will achieve integration of access both intra-institutionally and across the higher education sector.
This principle has been proven by the National Bibliographic Database.
The metadata schema needs to be cost-effective to encourage creation.
The return on investment of the creation process must be convincing in order to encourage ongoing, consistent practice.
The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting itself is an example of this principle.
Originally designed to operate in the academic sector, the Protocol was quickly adapted by a broader range of agencies because of its simplicity and efficiency.
If someone makes the decision to create metadata, then the work is worthy.
The investment in the automated software tools made by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Office of Research to exploit pre-existing metadata illustrates this principle.
A range of new tools being developed by OCLC illustrate its commitment to the creative use of metadata, which will further extend the availability and value of both unpublished and published research outputs [22].
The process of metadata creation is a commitment to quality.
The University of British Columbia's Public Knowledge Project (PKP) [23] provides a test case for quality metadata.
While the Dublin Core schema has been chosen as a baseline, the metadata profile created by the PKP is a rich instantiation of it.
For metadata to serve the purpose of future resource discovery, enhanced metadata is required to ensure the longevity of resources.
One way of achieving enhanced metadata, without placing an extra burden on creators, is by generating it.
The National Library of New Zealand has developed a suite of tools to capture pertinent metadata at the time of ingest of a digital object into its repository [24].
Similarly, it is possible for the metadata creation tool used during deposit and update to capture system information from these processes.
The persistent identifier(s) of a digital object and its component parts are a specific example of enhanced metadata.
Metadata creation guidelines can change to reflect the current working environment, for example, the deployment of the Australian Standard Research Classification list as a thesaurus for subject terms [25] to describe the topics of Australian research output.
An internationally recognised thesaurus would be preferred, but remains a contentious issue.
Nevertheless, guidelines need to be reviewed and refreshed to ensure they remain relevant to as many services as possible.
The working environment will also dictate in part who creates the metadata.
The ARROW Project is investigating whether a shared approach will deliver the best result.
This concept has already been explored to a certain extent for the UK Higher Education sector by the ePrints UK service [26].
Metadata Workflows The creation/addition of metadata in any working environment is not necessarily undertaken in the implied linear order of the diagram below (provided by UKOLN) it should be an iterative process but it does exemplify how multiple roles in the metadata creation process are possible.
The new business cases for the management of research outputs, postulated by the establishment of individual institutional repositories, allows for metadata workflows to be engineered afresh.
They are not restricted by pre-existing data conditions often imposed by legacy metadata [27].
Figure 1: Metadata creation workflow (Diagram Source: Improving the Quality of Metadata in Eprint Archives, Marieke Guy, Andy Powell and Michael Day, Ariadne Issue 38 [26]).
The ARROW Project is keen to explore how workflows for metadata creation can be transformed by this approach.
Automated approaches may require review combined with enhancement.
Information specialists including librarians and indexers can add metadata from rich schemes such as Library of Congress Subject Headings after the creator of the work creates a skeleton metadata record.
Metadata, the bread and butter of cataloguing services such as the Australian National Bibliographic Database, can attract a dual responsibility and continue to facilitate the sharing of information by libraries for the benefit of everyone else.
A shared approach provides a response to the concerns expressed recently by Tony Hey, Director of the e-Science Project [28].
Capturing the metadata, using a combination of people with a stake in the longevity of their work and automated software is the first step in changing the way digital objects, the foundation stone of digital libraries, can be identified, captured and managed in perpetuity.
What better way to transform services to become our digital libraries of the future?
Acknowledgements The author is grateful to colleagues Jasmine Cameron, Assistant Director-General and Tony Boston, Director Digital Services, both of the National Library of Australia, for their assistance in reviewing this article.
References All URLs accessed 14 April 2004 Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) Standards http://www.loc.gov/marc/ ; Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/docs.html National Library Standards Activities http://www.nla.gov.au/services/standards.html The National Bibliographic Database http://www.nla.gov.au/libraries/resource/nbd.html The Santa Fe convention http://www.openarchives.org/meetings/SantaFe1999/sfc_entry.htm How PictureAustralia works http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2003/boston1.html Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN), http://www.pictureaustralia.org/scran.html; the National Library of New Zealand, http://www.pictureaustralia.org/nlnz.html National Library of Australia Digital Object Repository http://www.nla.gov.au/digicoll/oai/ Simply seeding search engines http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2003/dcampbell2.html OAIster; http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ Cultural Materials Initiative http://culturalmaterials.rlg.org/ Resource Discovery Service http://www.nla.gov.au/rds/ the ARROW (Australian Research Resources Online to the World) Project http://www.arrow.edu.au The ARROW Project is sponsored as part of the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability http://backingaus.innovation.gov.au/ Persistent Identification Systems, Part 1 : Background http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/persistence/PIpart1.html Persistent Identifiers and the NLA http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/persistence/PIpart2.html ; Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia (PANDORA), http://pandora.nla.gov.au The Papers of Edward Koiki Mabo (1936-1992) are described in full http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms8822 The persistent identifier is explained at http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/nlapi.html "Info" URI scheme http://info-uri.info/registry/ Persistent Identification Systems, Part 3: The Achievement of Persistent Access to Resources, National Library of Australia http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/persistence/PIpart3.html To Meta-tag or not to meta-tag, A skeptical view http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au/documents/MD.Debate.Dalziel.ppt Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ Key Findings, University of Tasmania consortium; http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au/projects/Key%20Findings.pdf eBank UK http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ebank-uk/ OCLC Research Works http://www.oclc.org/research/researchworks/default.htm Public Knowledge Project http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/harvester/ National Library of New Zealand Preservation Metadata Extraction Tool http://www.natlib.govt.nz/files/Project%20Description_v3-final.pdf This scheme is used exclusively by the Australian Higher Education sector.
Its maintenance agency is the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
A copy is provided by the University of Queensland http://eprint.uq.edu.au/view/subjects/subjects.html Improving the Quality of Metadata in Eprint Archives, Marieke Guy, Andy Powell and Michael Day, January 2004, Ariadne Issue 38 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/guy/ MusicAustralia: Experiments with DC.Relation http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2003/ayres1.html Why engage with e-Science http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine/archive/archive2004/march/update0403b.htm Author Details Debbie Campbell Director, Coordination Support Branch, National Library of Australia Parkes Place Canberra ACT 2600 Australia Email: dcampbel@nla.gov.au Web site: http://www.nla.gov.au/ Return to top Article Title: "How the Use of Standards Is Transforming Australian Digital Libraries" Author: Debbie Campbell Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/campbell/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Revealing All Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Revealing All Buzz data software database wireless archives metadata accessibility schema copyright cataloguing z39.50 ascii marc lcsh personalisation rslp licence standards Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman describes Revealweb, a Web site that brings together information about accessible resources for visually impaired people.
The launch of Revealweb [1] on 16 September 2003 was a big step forward for anyone with visual impairment in the UK.
For the first time, they had access to a Web-based union catalogue of resources in accessible formats and information about the producers and suppliers of these materials.
Until that point there had been no single place which provided information accessible by everyone; in effect, these people were second-class citizens in the information world.
Revealweb has not solved all the problems.
If you are unable to read standard print, even with the help of corrective lenses, you still face a series of obstacles in trying to access anything you want to 'read' whether this is fiction, poetry, music scores, study materials or newspapers.
In the first place, very little of the annual publishing output of the UK (less than 5%) will be transcribed into a format other than standard print.
Secondly, of the titles that are transcribed, some will be available in perhaps only one or two formats which you may or may not be able to use.
These formats are produced, lent and sold by a wide variety of organisations voluntary organisations of varying sizes, transcription services (including prison workshops), education support services and schools, and public libraries.
None of that has changed.
What has changed is the ability to find the items that are available.
In 1999, there were no resources equivalent to 'Books in Print' or the British National Bibliography, the British Library had no remit for these materials under its founding Act of Parliament, and there was no co-ordination of the resources that did exist.
But now Revealweb provides an easy way to find out who has the title you want in the format you need.
In 1999 the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) made a grant, to be administered by the Library and Information Commission and Share the Vision, to improve library and information services for visually impaired people, and a programme of key projects was drawn up.
As part of the programme, UKOLN was commissioned to review the role of a national union database of accessible formats and to make a technical specification of the data elements required.
The study concluded that the existing National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats (NUCAF) had the potential to provide a valuable service, but that a number of factors prevented this: NUCAF was not directly accessible by end-users, the data it held was incomplete and sometimes incorrect; and its creator, the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) [2], did not have the resources to improve and maintain it.
The study report [3] recommended that a new Web-accessible database should replace NUCAF; this was accepted by the programme steering committee in January 2000 and designated a priority project.
A feasibility study was carried out to develop a management structure, business plan and technical system specification for the Revealweb database; partners working on the study were UKOLN, the National Library for the Blind (NLB) [4], RNIB and Juliet Leeves, a library automation consultant.
The study was funded through a grant from the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme and a report submitted in September 2000.
Funding was finally secured from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) [5] to create Revealweb, and NLB and RNIB signed a partnership agreement to jointly develop the resource.
UKOLN was responsible for the creation of the bibliographic standard (MARC 21 with some extension), with the assistance of cataloguing staff from both NLB and RNIB, while Juliet Leeves produced the technical specification.
Geac Library Solutions [6] were contracted to supply the Geac Advance system in late 2002.
The test database was in place by spring 2003 and test downloads of data from NUCAF were made from spring to early summer.
The final loading of data from NUCAF and from the NLB catalogue took place in summer 2003, followed by a phase of merging, de-duplication, cleanup and enhancement ready for the launch in September 2003.
In addition to the union database of items, a Register of Suppliers (holders, producers and sellers) was also created using the RSLP Collection Description Schema [7].
Scope Revealweb enables users to find books available in accessible formats, find titles currently in production to avoid duplication, and find who produces, loans or sells accessible material.
It also acts as the copyright notification register.
Revealweb's union database contains the details of accessible resources available to visually impaired people in the UK.
When it was launched in 2003, it held around 100,000 records, for items primarily held by RNIB, NLB and Calibre Cassette Library.
Since then the holdings of many other agencies have been added, so that there are now more than 112,000 records.
Revealweb now includes titles from Ulverscroft Large Print, Talking Newspapers, Torch Trust, Living Paintings Trust, Listening Books, Inside Out Trust and a number of local education authority specialist support services, among others.
Work is ongoing to add titles from other producers, including commercial producers.
Resources listed on Revealweb are available in one or more accessible formats: Braille, Moon, Braille music, Braille and print, Moon and print, tactile maps and diagrams, audio cassettes (2 track and 4 track), Talking Books 8 track cassettes, CD-ROMs (spoken word), DAISY format, electronic text files, electronic Braille music files, electronic Braille files, large print (all font sizes) and audio-described videos.
Additional accessible formats will be considered as they develop.
Items in standard print are not included, but the Register of Suppliers will include links to useful collections in standard print where possible (for example materials on visual impairment in general and on specific conditions).
All subject matter is included, unless it contains information of a potentially harmful or illegal nature such items will be excluded.
Content warnings are included as required on records; this means that users can avoid certain material if they wish, or can choose how to use it in certain settings.
For example, a user may wish to avoid listening to an audio recording of a text which includes strong language altogether, or to avoid listening in situations when other people, especially children, can also hear the text.
Similarly, subject matter covers all levels of difficulty enabling as many people as possible to find material at their required level, from pre-school to degree level and beyond.
Materials may be in languages other than English; in addition to those studying a foreign language, there are people in ethnic minority groups with visual impairment who want items in their home language.
Some materials with a limited lifespan may not be included at the discretion of the producer: for example, Clear Vision children's picture books with interleaved Braille pages get very heavy use and individual titles may not be produced again.
The Register of Suppliers complements the union database of items.
It holds details about a range of organisations and individuals (107 are currently listed) who produce, lend or sell accessible materials.
Information is provided on the scope of the service on offer, any fees or charges made, and contact details.
Revealweb is also the place to notify details of accessible copies that have been produced; this satisfies the notification requirement of the Copyright Licensing Authority (CLA).
However, neither the CLA VIP License nor the Section 31B exception apply if there is a suitable commercial edition available; Revealweb is working to include details of more of the commercial accessible editions making it easier to check.
Accessibility of the Database Revealweb was designed to be as accessible as possible, which meant detailed planning in the design stages.
In addition to the usual bibliographic requirements, the display interface needed to work with speech synthesis software which 'reads' text to the user, user personalisation of screen magnification and colour of text and/or background, and the use of keyboard shortcuts as an alternative to using the mouse.
It proved very useful that the vendor of the library management system, Geac, had already had experience of working in this field as it had previously supplied a system to the Canadian Institute of the Blind.
Following the launch, the accessibility has been further improved by following up comments and suggestions from focus groups, user testing and email feedback via the site.
However, some improvements will need the involvement of the library system supplier and also some funding, so may take longer to implement.
Cataloguing It was also important to keep accessibility in mind when making decisions on the bibliographic format and the content of records.
It was therefore decided to use the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format and Holdings Formats [8].
A bibliographic record is created for each standard print item that has been used to create accessible versions.
Attached to this record are the details of all the accessible versions that have been created from that work.
The top level display enables users to find the title they want and see quickly the formats in which it is available.
This is in contrast to the alternative approach of a bibliographic record for every transcription which means that users can be confronted with long lists of the same title, which they have to read through one by one.
It was necessary to do a small amount of extension to accommodate additional data about the accessible formats.
Visually impaired people need as much information as is known about a format in order to assess whether they can use an item.
For example, Braille exists in three grades; in grade 1 each letter, number and punctuation mark has a Braille code.
Grades 2 and 3 use contractions (where, for example, one Braille code represents a common word such as 'and', another code for a common word ending such as 'ed' or 'ing').
Someone who can read grade 3 can also read grades 1 and 2; but someone who can only read grade 1 will have some difficulty with grades 2 and 3.
With other formats, the required information is about the physical carrier (e.g.
a specific playback machine is needed for RNIB Talking Books) or the digital file (e.g.
ASCII files contain little formatting and so can be used easily with speech synthesis software).
The 007 field coding was not specific enough and additional codes were added.
A few local fields were also added.
Cataloguing guidelines had to be prepared to ensure that cataloguing of certain materials was done in a consistent way.
For example, the books of the Bible, and collections of short stories are often transcribed separately and the catalogue records needed to give information about other related works.
Some items, often produced for specific needs, are transcriptions of only part of a work; for example, a student may be told that they only need certain chapters of a work and therefore only request those sections from the transcription agency.
Indexing records was also important.
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are used in both non-fiction and many fiction records; and fiction records are additionally indexed for genre using the Guidelines for Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction and Drama (GSAFD).
This means that a user can, for example, use a character's name to locate all works in which they appear (although Hercule Poirot appears in many works by Agatha Christie, his name is in the title of only a few), search for science fiction or spy novels, works in Spanish, or find novels for children on the theme of adoption or bullying.
As the Revealweb database is Z39.50compatible, users can also cross-search the database with other Web-based services that use the Z39.50 standard.
In addition to material that has been produced, records are also created for transcriptions that are in process.
This means that users can see, for example, that although a Braille version is not currently available, one is in production and expected to be available in a couple of months.
Although most materials have direct location information attached (Braille copy held by NLB, audio copy held by Calibre), some materials do not for example, the Ulverscroft titles are held in public libraries; in these cases there is a location statement telling the user how to locate the item.
Another important feature is that the database should always be up-to-date.
For the NLB and RNIB cataloguers to do all additions and deletions on top of their own workload was not practical or possible with current project funding.
Therefore, contributor interfaces have been designed so that producers and holders of materials can easily add details of new titles and notify withdrawn titles themselves.
However this data is checked by a cataloguer at either NLB or RNIB before release to public view.
Producers have found this a simple process, using a template and there is always support from the Revealweb cataloguers.
Impact Revealweb now has details of 112,528 titles, with 107 organisations on the register of suppliers, and the site receives around 30,000 hits a month; with over 500,000 hits since its launch.
But the best judge of the real impact is the target audience those who need these materials, and their intermediaries (teachers, support workers and carers)[9].
It has been welcomed by users like John Godber of RNIB.
Using a laptop PC, wirelessly connected to a BBC Web site 'listen again' page, he was enjoying a play based on a book.
Through the wireless connection he then connected to Revealweb and located a Braille copy at NLB.
Pasting the details into the email link for NLB he requested the item, which arrived three days later.
He says: 'No more wondering if you've got the strength to wade through catalogues from various organisations, no more having to make several phone calls.
It's now easier for me as a blind person to borrow a book than it is for a sighted person.
I don't have to wait for the library to open.
Revealweb is 24/7.'
Another user is Chris Tattersall, who lost his sight 10 years ago and has since learnt both Braille and Moon.
Always an avid reader, his wife had to read out lists of book titles from RNIB catalogues to him, or helpful staff at his local public library would read out the details on the back covers of audio books.
Revealweb has enabled Chris to be more independent; he says "Nothing can beat the thrill of being able to access information without needing someone else's help."
He further notes "Revealweb opens up a world of choice for me.
If one organisation doesn't have the book I want to read, Revealweb allows me to easily find out if someone else has it."
A response to the on-line survey included the following comment: 'I have been using speech output computers for the last 15 years.
I see so much potential in this form of communication but until now we have just had to put up with adapted systems that always fall very short of being ideal.
You have simply produced a very 'visually impaired people-friendly' system that I feel should be a model for future developments in communications systems for people with sight loss.'
Revealweb has been demonstrated at a number of exhibitions since its launch, and a great deal of interest has been shown from the computer literate who are quite happy to play around with Revealweb, to the elderly lady who had just lost the sight in her remaining good eye and was going to go to her local public library and ask them to search for her.
And many teachers and parents thought that Revealweb would make life easier for them in tracking down leisure reading and study material.
The database is also proving useful to the producers of accessible materials.
They can check the database for titles they are considering transcribing to avoid duplication; their effort can then be redirected to producing another title in the same subject area, or fiction genre, or producing a different format for a title that already has some transcriptions.
This means that the resources available for transcription are used in the most effective way.
Revealweb was singled out for praise in the recent House of Commons Select Committee report on public libraries.
It notes: 'Revealweb is an important resource which serves as a national database of materials in accessible formats.
This is a multi-functional, state of the art, web-based, freely accessible service which is the cornerstone of an integrated network of services for visually disabled people and is part funded by MLA.'
However, the Select Committee report noted concern that funding was only guaranteed up to March 2006, and recommended that: '...secure funding is made available for the maintenance and development of Revealweb over the longer term.'
And at the Jodi Mattes Award ceremony held on Tuesday 12th April 2005, Revealweb received a Commendation of Widening Access to Information.
The Awards are for a museum, gallery, library, archive or heritage Web site in England which demonstrates active commitment to meeting Web accessibility standards, involves users and develops practical and imaginative ways of making cultural and learning resources accessible to disabled people.
The judges said: "This library catalogue, for which there was a compelling need, is an initiative of the voluntary sector.
A number of organisations working for visually impaired people, such as RNIB and NLB, have joined forces to bring together for the first time in an accessible library catalogue more than 100,000 materials in accessible formats, such as Braille, large-print and audio.
The catalogue lists specialist library collections from the voluntary sector as well as commercial producers.
Extensive partnership work forms the basis of its success.
It can be used by visually impaired users as well as librarians.
It makes finding out about reading materials and obtaining them considerably easier for visually impaired people."
The Future Revealweb continues to be a joint project between NLB and RNIB, led by the Revealweb Manager, Deborah Ryan [10], who reports to the Joint Management Group.
Its usefulness is such that the MLA has initiated a feasibility study about the possibility of Revealweb extending its coverage of materials to those for people with a variety of disabilities.
If you would like to be involved in that discussion contact the Revealweb Manager.
However, despite its evident value to the visually impaired community, and the praise from government and community alike, the future of Revealweb remains uncertain unless secure funding can be found to continue the service past March 2006.
One of the major tasks of the Revealweb Policy Advisory Group is to put such secure funding in place.
References Revealweb Web site http://www.revealweb.org.uk/ Royal National Institute of the Blind Web site http://www.rnib.org.uk/ Project One part A: The future role of NUCAF and a technical specification of the metadata requirements.
Report to the Steering Committee by Ann Chapman.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/sharethevision/ National Library for the Blind Web site http://www.nlb-online.org/ Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Web site http://www.mla.gov.uk/ Geac Library Solutions Web site http://www.library.geac.com/ RSLP Collection Description Schema http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/ MARC 21 Formats http://www.loc.gov/marc/ Revealweb: Feedback on Revealweb http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bib-man/projects/revealweb/feedback/ Deborah Ryan, Revealweb Manager manager@revealweb.org.uk Author Details Ann Chapman Policy and Advice Team UKOLN Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Revealing All" Author: Ann Chapman Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/chapman/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Super Searchers Make It on Their Own Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Super Searchers Make It on Their Own Buzz database archives research Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho looks at the work and lives of independent information professionals prepared to share their secrets for starting and running a research business.
If you love Boolean logic, online research and would like to work from home this book is for you.
But before you get carried away just a reminder that you need more than a computer and a phone line to make it on your own as an independent information professional.
This is a collection of interviews with eleven successful 'super searchers' who run their own businesses.
They share their secrets, the challenges, the rewards, the big picture and the detail.
The stories are both serious and funny.
We hear from an aviation expert, a business researcher, a patent researcher, a search engine analyst, an expert on public records and more.
They remind us of the many faces of information work and that we often search in archives, as well as on the Web or use commercial databases as well as phone interviews and personal contacts to find that elusive piece of the puzzle.
The book offers rich examples of exciting and imaginative ways of looking for clues and sources.
The stories are not only useful, as a practical collection of tips and ideas but also have a very strong personal element which demonstrates that no two 'super searchers' are the same.
There are those who cannot live without their palmtop and those who barely look at it, those who love having an office at home and those who appreciate the journey to work.
The 'searchers' featured in this book do a mix of generalist and niche research and share a wealth of tips summed up at the end of each chapter in useful bullet-point lists.
These eleven information professionals let us in on more than their favourite Web sites and marketing methods.
Running a business can be a daunting task and can make you feel very exposed these people give you the courage to try it through their inspirational stories.
They teach you how to establish visibility, how to learn to trust the experience of others and how to stay cool in the face of unexpected events.
The interviews deal with all aspects of working for yourself from the practicalities of dealing with too much work, through subcontracting and careful negotiations with clients, to the merits of advertising through your Web site or through networking.
Running a business is tough and the 'searchers' share their good and bad experiences in this respect as well.
The stories highlight the need for getting professional help as appropriate and ensuring that all is legal and credible.
Personal accountability, liability, the careful eye on contracts, claims and confidentiality agreements are all covered.
In spite of the diversity featured in the book, the 'searchers' all seem to agree that clients today require value-added work and that the shift is towards providing analysis rather than just information.
Most users are relatively proficient Web searchers but coming up against the difficulties of finding the relevant information, they seek professional help and this inevitably increases the credibility of the information worker.
What comes across throughout the book is the need for hard work, an intelligent approach and the acceptance of calculated risk.
Thirst for information, good time management and organisational skills, and a flair for networking are also a must.
The 'super searchers' agree that information professionals will have to become more topically orientated and niche-specific and will, of course, do a better job if interested in the matter being researched.
And since you never know where you'd find the answer you need an experimental streak and excellent imagination as well.
Because of their various backgrounds it is unlikely that all of the interviews would be interesting to you from a technical point of view.
But they are human stories as well, and even where researchers have ended up as independent professionals only because of a series of accidents, their commitment to information work comes through.
Making it on your own as a 'super searcher' is no part-time job.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian The British Medical Association Email: lina.coelho@bma.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "Review: Super Searchers Make It On Their Own" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Models of Early Adoption of ICT Innovations in Higher Education Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Models of Early Adoption of ICT Innovations in Higher Education Buzz data framework dissemination infrastructure identifier repositories windows e-learning vle ict e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Melanie Bates, Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim provide an overview of some considerations for change agents attempting to introduce an innovative new information communication technology service into Higher Education institutions.
One of the common dilemmas faced by developers of information communication technology (ICT) initiatives is how to go about identifying potential early adopters of their service.
This article outlines background research into this area and details the approaches taken within the JISC-funded Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project to locate these key individuals within a Higher Education (HE) environment.
The concept of an innovation is discussed and the differences between the terms innovation and invention are outlined.
Models and frameworks for describing the process of introducing an innovation to an organisation are described.
These suggest influential institutional factors, key characteristics of individuals, the innovation, and the organisation that affect the diffusion of an innovation.
Together these features create the environment in which new innovations are explored.
This research, combined with the experience of the project team in introducing new e-learning innovations into the Higher Education environment, leads to the formulation of a strategy for an institutional framework for adoption of change.
Denning defines innovation as: ‘a transformation of practice in a community’ [1].
This statement carries with it the concept that a successful innovation is one that is taken up by a community with an accompanying adjustment to expected work methods and/or practices.
There is an important distinction between the meaning of ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’.
Carayannis, Alexander, and Mason state that: ‘Invention is the development of a new idea that has useful application.
Innovation is a more complex term, referring to how an invention is brought into commercial usage.’ [2] Newell and Turner introduce the concept of the degree to which individuals will have to adjust their current practices as a result of the innovation.
They state that: “Innovation means change: sometimes radical change… … ., and sometimes incremental change” [3].
Theories and Models Certain theories and models associated with the acceptance and take-up of ICT innovations have been developed in association with commercial products and business organisations.
It is possible that some of the principles involved in introducing an innovative service or product will differ in the education sector.
However, the following underlying principles are applicable across sectors: Adopter characteristics and motives for embracing innovations The innovation’s characteristics, its benefits, costs, and associated learning curve, and Factors in relation to the institution, its culture and services Some of these theories and models are presented in the following section.
Diffusion of Innovation Theory The factors that affect the spread of innovations are described in several well-known theories.
Perry states that scholars in the diffusion theory field ‘define diffusion as the process through which some innovation is communicated within a social system.’ Perry introduces the idea that ‘time’ is an important factor in the rate of diffusion.
He also stresses the role of individuals and their social influence in the diffusion process [4].
An upsurge of research into diffusion in the late 1960s included practical studies looking at commercial products.
These focused on innovations in business settings and were designed to provide insights into improving marketing, as well as describing product dissemination.
Scholars, like Rogers, who study communication, have concentrated on more theoretical approaches.
Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory incorporates ‘the innovation-decision process, innovation characteristics, adopter characteristics, and opinion leadership’ [4].
Rogers’ theory can be divided into three main components: The innovation-decision process The characteristics of an innovation, and Adopter characteristics These components are presented below.
Innovation Decision Process The ‘innovation decision process’ categorises the steps an individual takes from awareness of an innovation, through the formulation of an attitude to the innovation, on to the decision as to whether to implement, and finally confirmation of this approach.
These five categories are [5]: Knowledge Persuasion Decision Implementation Confirmation Characteristics of Innovation Perry states that ‘Different innovations have different probabilities of adoption and hence, different adoption rates’ [4].
Therefore, the characteristics of an innovation have an impact on the likelihood of acceptance and adoption, and also on the rate at which this process develops.
These innovation characteristics have been classified into five criteria: Compatibility Complexity Observability Relative advantage Trialibility Adopter Characteristics Rogers has defined the socio-economic characteristics of early adopters under three headings [5]: Socio-economic Personality values Communication behaviour He identifies the following characteristics as being typical to early adopters: Socio-economic High social status No relationship between early adopters’ age and adoption Upward social mobility High level of education Personality Ability to deal with abstract concepts Favourable attitude to change, risk and science Greater empathy Intelligence Less than average dogmatic outlook Less than average degree of fatalism Greater than average level of aspiration Rational outlook Communication Greater degree of contact with change agents Greater degree of exposure to mass media communications Higher degree of opinion leadership Inter-connectedness in social networks More cosmopolitan outlook Greater degree of social participation Tendency to seek information about innovation, and consequently a greater degree of knowledge about innovation The degree of interpersonal influence an early adopter possesses within the ‘innovation decision process’ will affect the dissemination of the innovation to others.
Three issues are identified: 1) information flow, 2) opinion leadership, and 3) diffusion networks.
At different stages in the diffusion of the innovation, individuals may be either leaders or followers [4].
Leaders have the ability to exert a positive influence over their contacts and to encourage the use of an innovation.
Rogers also defines five adopter categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards [5].
Marcus’s Theoretical Model of Adoption Ankem [6] describes Marcus’s theoretical model of adoption that has been derived from the diffusion of innovation theory and the social learning theory.
Marcus’s model highlights the importance of innovative behaviour and the phenomenon of others modelling themselves on this.
Communication channels are a vital component in spreading this modelling behaviour to other potential adopters.
Ankem explains how the model sets out a range of influential factors in the take-up of innovations including [6]: The associated ‘costs’ personal and institutional The availability of necessary ‘resources’ money, equipment, training, time, prior experience and relevant skills The ‘value’ of the innovation This illustrates the need to bring together a mix of personal and institutional factors for optimal take-up of innovations.
Those factors relating to the institutions’ ability to provide the conditions conducive to the introduction and acceptance of IT innovations could be used to map out an institutional framework for adoption.
Technology Acceptance Model The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is similar to diffusion theory although it places more emphasis on psychological predispositions and social influences.
Thus, ‘beliefs, attitudes and intentions are important factors in the adoption of computer technologies.’ [7].
Bagozzi et al stress the importance of the learning process associated with using computers.
Their theoretical model places computer learning within three distinct components: “attitude toward success, attitude toward failure and attitude towards the process” [7].
A combination of the diffusion of innovation theory and TAM has been used by Dimitrova and Chen to examine the effects of non-demographic characteristics on the adoption of e-government services in the United States [8].
Their findings illustrate the importance of perceived usefulness, perceived uncertainty and prior interest in the take-up of these services.
They concluded that targeting early adopters of e-government services would be best achieved through mass media channels rather than interpersonal channels.
This view is also expressed by Rogers, who asserts that mass media channels provide a more reliable means of alerting potential adopters to an innovation, while interpersonal channels are better for persuading individuals as to the benefits of a new idea [5].
Characteristics of Early Adopters Chau and Hui conducted a study of early adopters of the Windows 95 operating system [9].
This user group comprised predominantly: Experienced microcomputer users Individuals displaying opinion leadership qualities Individuals more likely to investigate new developments Males However, the authors of the study do stress the limitations of these findings, which were based on one new IT product.
They caution that generalisations in respect of other products may not be appropriate.
Another factor that may need to be considered is that this study was accepted for publication in 1997.
It could be argued that, since this study, the proliferation of computers in the home and workplace will have had an effect on the profile of today’s early adopters.
A recent study by Simon investigated the views of women on technological change within a society driven by access to information [10].
The sample included women from different backgrounds, of differing employment status, and with a variety of job roles (although almost half the sample had a background in library or information work).
Simon’s investigation discovered that their attitude towards ICT largely expressed itself in both positive terms born of practical experience and in those of either ambivalence or outright negativity.
The less positive reactions were for the most part generated by their recognition of the pervasive nature of ITC in society in juxtaposition with their own feeling of ‘being left out’, based either on personal experience or their identification with others subjected to such exclusion.
Identifying early adopter characteristics can provide useful information, but this data, of itself, is not helpful in directing us to early adopters.
However, the literature does provide some key information on early adopter characteristics and on the conditions under which they are able to interact with new innovations.
These studies have highlighted the problems associated with identifying early adopters.
Resource Stores Morón-García has evaluated lecturers’ usage of their institution’s virtual learning environment (VLE) to discover [11]: Whether they are able to make effective use of ICT Whether technical support is provided to enable them to engage actively with the VLE Whether environmental factors affect use (the culture of the institution and department) Whether it is a suitable tool to use with students, and finally Whether the VLE delivers in terms of functionality and ease of use Some of the barriers to use identified by individuals were: The time it takes to learn a new system Individual needs for support varied Provision and type of support depended, in part, on institutional strategy Knowing how to locate support Early adopters did provide support for their colleagues using the VLE at a later stage.
Morón-García also uncovered issues for institutions adopting innovative teaching technologies.
These included: finding time in busy workloads to make use of the VLE, the intention behind the introduction of a VLE, and ensuring that ICT was an accepted part of the role of a lecturer.
One necessary requirement was that the ‘institutional culture supported teaching innovation’ [11].
Other determinants were the ability of IT infrastructure to support use and incentives to use the VLE (funds or equipment).
An additional barrier that prevents use of the VLE was insufficient confidence on the part of certain users of the system and consequent low self-esteem, thereby generating a reluctance to “show oneself up” by using it.
This was especially true of individuals lacking confidence in their own ICT skills.
The following sections focus on some of the key factors for change agents and early adopters in HEIs (Higher Education Institutions).
The discussions are structured around three broad classifications: early adopters, innovations, and organisations.
Early Adopter Considerations As we have seen, the potential ‘value’ an innovation represents to individuals affects their decision whether to adopt it at an early stage in the diffusion process.
As Denning remarks: “A transformation of practice in the community won’t happen unless the new practice generates more value to the members than the old” [1].
This value can be measured with reference to the associated benefits weighed against the costs [6].
Therefore, value is closely associated with the ‘need’ for the new innovation.
If existing products or services are perceived as being adequate for accomplishing the necessary work, there is no real driver for change.
Conversely, if it becomes increasingly difficult to execute an existing task, then a stronger driver for change emerges.
Additionally, where the introduction of a new task or practice occurs in this scenario, the need within the community for a new ICT product or service to cope with the added difficulty becomes all the stronger.
Early Adopter Characteristics Understanding early adopter characteristics can aid the process of targeting their involvement in the initial stages in the diffusion of an innovation.
Initiatives for targeting early adopters within HEIs may be assisted by understanding the demographics of the group.
For example: Are early adopters scattered across campus?
Are there any university committees where they are more likely to be represented?
Are they more likely to be located in certain types of departments than others?
Are they employed within specific types of job roles?
Is there one place, meeting, or event (other than for the next new ICT initiative), where they are typically to be found (e.g.
Web Management Workshop, staff development session, research seminar)?
Factors relating to the specifics of the nature of the innovation may also impact on the process of targeting the right early adopters for an innovation.
These factors can include: the complexity of the innovation, whether it comes from within or outside the institution, the levels of expertise required to participate in the initiative, and whether the innovation is generic or specific to a certain group, or groups, of individuals.
Communication Channels Which channels of communication provide the best means of targeting early adopters?
Interpersonal communications informal methods, or Mass media communications formal channels Rogers states, “Mass media channels are usually the most rapid and efficient means of informing potential adopters about the existence of an innovation that is, to create awareness-knowledge.” [5] He continues that interpersonal communications provide a more effective means of persuading individuals of the benefits of a new innovation.
This is especially true of communications where individuals have a similar status (socio-economic status and education).
Within HEI advertising through central mass media channels, e.g., email, notice boards, university publications, could be tested as an appropriate approach to inform potential early adopters of an ICT innovation.
This could be combined with interpersonal contacts to known early adopters.
The adoption rates within these two groups could then be compared and levels of trust, adopter characteristics, perceived benefits of the initiative, and any perceived barriers to adoption evaluated.
Rogers also introduces the effectiveness of ‘audience segmentation’ when considering methods of communicating with potential adopters [5].
Targeting by means of the type of contact, source of approach, and the content of the message would seem to offer the most appropriate means of alerting potential adopters to a new innovation.
Within HEIs this could include specific mailings to departments, faculties, special interest groups or research groups.
The reasons why the new product or service is being developed will also have an influence on the method chosen to alert adopters to its presence.
If the need for the product or service was identified by the intended community of users, or if members in that community are developing it, then a bottom-up approach is appropriate.
If however, management is introducing the new product or service, then a top-down approach is appropriate.
Background Activities Prior to Early Adoption If we accept that early adopters are an important component in a framework for acceptance of ICT innovations within HEIs, then being able to identify these individuals plays a pivotal role in the success of such a project.
Targeting early adopters may be a critical factor for success, but how can they be located?
When devising a framework for this activity, the background activities prior to the initiative set the scene.
Therefore, we can assume that the need for the ICT initiative has been determined, the stakeholders identified, a steering group assembled, a budget secured and staff time allocated.
The individuals engaged in the initiative, their contacts, and the approach taken to introduce the initiative to others starts the spread of the initiative.
Broadly speaking in the early phases, news of an innovation spreads through a range of communication channels, including face-to-face, email (one-to-one or one-to-many) or telephone.
These initial contacts are likely to be with trusted colleagues and a high degree of control over the information imparted is assured.
As the introduction of the innovation progresses, other forms of dissemination are introduced.
This might be via a Web site or newsletter, through focus groups, at committees or departmental staff meetings.
These approaches exploit existing communication channels and people networks, although they may also involve the creation of new networks specific to the innovation.
As communications spread outwards, the originators of the initiative are less able to control which individuals receive information, and the content of the correspondence.
There is also a greater potential for sceptics to be encountered.
Despite this, awareness of the initiative grows, is diffused across campus, and clusters of individuals with greater awareness appear.
Sources of Information on Early Adopters Within HEIs, a number of ICT projects may be underway at any given time.
These might include formal institutional large-scale projects, which will ultimately have an impact on all employees, smaller scale departmental or team projects, or externally funded projects that can be either largeor small-scale.
The latter category is a more problematic one in terms of early adopter identification.
This is because there may be no existing networks and channels for communication along which news of the innovation can be spread.
The time scale of the projects is also a factor when identifying early adopters, as projects with a larger timescale can be more systematic in their approach compared to short timescales that may rely more on personal social networks.
Externally funded projects having team members with prior experience of setting up ICT initiatives within the local institution may achieve a more successful outcome.
Prior experience affords the advantage of greater awareness of existing early adopters and an understanding of the institution’s practices and cultures.
The role played by individual members of the project team, its partners and steering group within the institution might also prove to be a deciding factor in adoption.
If they have a central role in the institution and the ICT initiative is broad in scope, then successful adoption may be more likely.
If, however, individuals’ roles are within departments and the aims of the initiative are broad, then a match to suitable early adopters via personal contacts may be more difficult.
For those new to the area of ICT initiatives, or to a particular institution, the task of identifying early adopters becomes even more difficult.
One solution might be to make contact with central departments likely to have involvement in institutional ICT initiatives.
Alternatively, contact with those associated with prior projects at the institution that have resulted in the successful adoption of new ICT systems or services may prove useful.
In summary, successful selection of early adopters may be dependent upon: Availability and use of existing directories of staff interests and expertise The degree of mutual acquaintance among a project’s members Levels of experience within the project team ICT Innovation There are five distinct phases in the emergence of a new technology.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle [*] defines these phases for Emerging Technologies.
The graphical model for this cycle demonstrates how a ‘Technology Trigger’ or product launch event sets the cycle off by generating significant press interest.
This leads to the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ phase where further publicity generates expectations at a point where the product is unlikely to be at mature enough a stage of development to satisfy them.
Next comes the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’: having failed to live up to expectations, the product is deemed unfashionable and media interest diminishes.
This is followed by the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’, where some organisations continue to use the technology and through its practical application discover its benefits.
The final stage in the cycle is the ‘Plateau of Productivity’: the benefits of the technology become known and accepted since it has evolved into a stable product [12].
Gartner’s Hype Cycle omits the development process prior to the ‘Technology Trigger’ phase.
This early development stage should involve product creation, testing, and feedback efforts.
These background activities are not recognised in the Gartner Hype Cycle because one of the requirements at the trigger stage is a significant degree of press interest.
As identified in the Technology Acceptance Model, the process of adopting any new tool involves a learning curve for individuals.
White describes the need for learners to be creative in their approaches to learning in a rapidly changing environment.
An organisation that is devoted to change is the most likely environment for a culture of learning to flourish [13].
This in turn enables learners to share experiences thus enhancing the learning process.
Positive experience with technology inclines an individual towards adoption of other technologies [14].
Marcus’ model asserts that potential adopters of innovation evaluate the possible ‘value’ that the innovation has to them [6].
This value can be measured in terms of ‘cost’ and ‘benefit’, with the value being determined by the balance of these two factors.
Marcus also introduces the importance of ‘resources’ and ‘communication’.
Thus, personal and institutional factors combine to determine adoption of an IT initiative.
These factors are listed below: Personal factors Costs Effort to acquire new skills Time Resources Necessary skills Prior experience with similar innovation Risks of failure Loss of self-esteem Loss of social approval Institutional factors Resources Equipment Finances Training It could be argued that some of the factors that are classified as ‘personal’ are equally applicable to institutions.
For example, the risk of failure is a consideration for a university committee that is approached to support a scheme.
The costs in respect of time and effort are also valid considerations for the institution as a whole.
Diffusion theory defines the attributes of an innovation and these determine the likely rate of adoption.
Rogers lists these attributes and describes them as follows [5]: Relative advantage Compatibility Complexity Trialibility Observability If the perceived advantage to the use of an innovation is positive there is a greater likelihood that it will be adopted rapidly.
Change agents can ease this learning process for potential adopters by creating advertising materials outlining the benefits of use and to provide general information about the innovation.
The perceived compatibility with existing values, experiences and needs of potential adopters is another important factor in the rate of adoption.
Complex innovations that are difficult for adopters to understand will result in slow rates of adoption.
Being able to participate in trials of the innovation are more likely to result in rapid rates of adoption, particularly if the testing is limited, and if the innovation can be broken down into component parts.
The lifecycle of the innovation’s development is thus a determinant in use and uptake.
If testing, feedback and further development to meet the needs of the users are possible, then the rate of adoption will be faster than it would be if these factors were not present.
The final attribute of an innovation is observability; if the results of an innovation are readily available and good networks are present for discussions on the innovation, then diffusion of the innovation is accelerated [5].
Marcus’ model emphasises that communication between early adopters is not an influential factor in terms of take-up of the initiative as it is for late adopters [6].
However, we argue that communication networks are crucially important for the introduction of the new innovation to the early adopter group.
By this we mean that networking activities undertaken by system developers sharing ideas, project members forming contacts with allied initiatives, and cultivating advocates within the institution, all form an important part in setting the scene for the introduction of the innovation to the early adopter group.
Additional factors to be considered include: The nature of the initiative whether it is a local, national, collaborative or distributed venture The aspects of institutional activity that are set to gain from the innovation these may be related to teaching and learning, research, administrative functions or a combination of these Pervasive political climate this has an impact on the themes outlined above Rewards and incentives to engage with the innovation The project team plays a central role in ensuring the successful linkage of early adopters and the environmental conditions outlined here.
Institutional Framework for Change Adoption Both personal and organisational processes influence a culture of innovation.
Denning lists these organisational processes as: “management values, rewards, prohibitions, encouragement of new ideas, encouragement of risk-taking, and the like” [1].
To this list we can add services, support, communication channels and staff networks.
An institution with these key components in place is better placed to ensure that innovations are facilitated, encouraged, accepted and diffused across its campus.
Thus, the institutional environment shapes the development of the ICT initiative, its adoption and implementation.
Culture also affects the success or failure of a new ICT innovation.
As Denning states: “In a culture of innovation, people will have a habit of constantly looking for ways to improve things” [1].
Organisational culture can be seen as the “values and beliefs shared by personnel in an organisation” [15].
These cultural beliefs translate into “communication and mutual understanding” and they influence the beliefs and behaviours of individuals.
Martins and Terblanche state that: “Organisations use different resources and processes to guide behaviour and change”.
This emphasises the importance of the pervading culture within an organisation in relation to the degree of acceptance of a new innovation [15].
Martins and Terblanche have devised a model to show the influence of organisational culture on creativity and innovation [15].
They view the main determinants as being: strategy, structure, support mechanisms, behaviours that encourage innovation, and communication.
The model highlights the requirement for institutions to encourage: flexibility, autonomy and co-operation at the ‘structure’ level; reward, recognition and resources at the ‘support mechanism’ level; support for risk taking, change, learning and conflict handling at the ‘behaviours that encourage innovation’ level; and finally open communication.
Dimitrova and Chen’s conceptual framework for e-government adoption determinants [8] can be repurposed to represent broad factors that are influential for the adoption of innovation within HEI.
Figure 1: Broad framework for change adoption Each of the sections illustrated in Figure 1 has a variety of conditions or factors associated with it, as do individuals and groups affected under each section.
Some of these influential conditions include: Allocation of support staff Benefits Cost (personal) Drivers for change from practitioners or the institution Existing solutions these may be perceived to be good enough Matters relating to employment contracts, pay, conditions or disputes Maturity of the technology Political climate Sufficient funding Sufficient numbers of practitioners willing to investigate an innovation Suitable environment for exploration of new innovations trial and error, with minimal risk of loss of self-esteem Two important determinants are ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors.
Institutional push factors might be rewards offered by an institution to encourage the adoption and use of a new innovation, or mandate to enforce adoption.
Personal pull factors include the perceived need for the resource and the benefits to be gained by using it.
The institutional framework is bounded by external influences, which in turn influence decisions taken at institutional, faculty, department, and project level.
The strength of the boundaries between faculties and departments, or the existence of cross-disciplinary collaborations can affect diffusion of innovations across an institution.
Figure 2: Institutional framework for change adoption Figure 2 illustrates the complexity of the framework within which new innovations are situated.
It provides an indication of the task change agents face when attempting to introduce a new service into an HEI setting.
Having an awareness of early adopter characteristics and the most appropriate methods for targeting these individuals may give projects a head start in achieving institutional adoption for their ICT product or service.
The next section sets out some conclusions to be drawn from the Rights and Rewards Project’s [16] experiences, to date, in attempting to generate interest and enthusiasm in its innovative teaching and learning repository.
Conclusion There are numerous conditions to be met before ICT innovations can be introduced, adopted and diffused through an institution.
By investigating a range of theories devised to describe and understand attitudes towards, and uptake of, ITC innovations, a number of key factors in a framework for early adoption have been identified.
These key considerations are associated with early adopter characteristics, communication channels, features associated with the innovation, scale and source of the initiative, the time-scale for introduction of the new product, and a range of institutional characteristics and processes.
Institutional factors include cultural values (management and personnel), communication and social networks, provision of suitable support, a safe environment for the exploration of new technologies and for creativity, as well as recognition and reward.
Influences from outside the institution also have an impact on adoption of an innovation.
External influences, such as the political climate and the aims of funding bodies, are broader in scope but no less important in setting the scene for new initiatives.
Mapping specific and individual factors that may have a potential impact on an innovation can assist with the process of identification and targeting of key early adopters.
Broad theories and frameworks are evident, and these can be used as a starting point for individual projects.
No one theory provided the solution to devising a generic framework for the adoption of an innovation.
Additionally, the number of variables that can affect such a framework make it difficult to provide sufficient a degree of detail to be useful to individual projects.
What is clear is that the approach of identifying and targeting early adopters appears to be a sensible one to take.
In addition, mass media channels should be used for a more comprehensive approach to potential early adopters.
Utilising both of these means might ensure that potential enthusiasts are made aware of the innovation at an early stage.
Furthermore, the presence of a suitable sustainable environment for the exploration of initiatives can play a crucial role in the acceptance of innovation.
Editor’s note: For sight of a diagram of the Gartner Hype Cycle see “Integration and Impact: The JISC Annual Conference”, Marieke Guy, July 2005, Ariadne, Issue 44.
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(2006) Profiling the adopters of e-government information and services: the influence of psychological characteristics, civic mindedness, and information channels.
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Information & Management, 33 (1998), 225-230.
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Morón-García, S. What lecturers say helps and hinders their use of a virtual learning environment to support face-to-face teaching.
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Technology supported learning and teaching: a staff perspective, 2006, 15-33.
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Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project Web site http://rightsandrewards.lboro.ac.uk/ Author Details Melanie Bates Learning Technology Co-ordinator, Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Email: m.r.bates@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.engcetl.ac.uk/about/staff/profile/29 Sue Manuel Research Assistant, Loughborough University Email: s.manuel@lboro.ac.uk Charles Oppenheim Head of Department of Information Science, Loughborough University Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/people/coppenheim.html Editor’s note: As of August 2008, Melanie Bates is now contactable as Melanie King at M.R.N.King@lboro.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Models of Early Adoption of ICT Innovations in Higher Education “ Author: Melanie Bates, Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/oppenheim-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-text Tagging Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-text Tagging Buzz data mobile software rdf database usability archives metadata xhtml doi standardisation tagging browser vocabularies blog repositories eprints copyright windows linux ascii provenance uri mp3 microformats exif interoperability algorithm research semiotic standards Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin suggests that rising new ideas are often on their second circuit and none the worse for that.
Despite the stability of many key technologies underlying today's Internet, venerable workhorses such as TCP/IP and HTTP, the rise of new candidate specifications frequently leads to a sort of collaborative manic depression.
Every now and then, a new idea comes along and sparks a wave of interest, the first stage in the Internet hype cycle.
Transformed with the addition of a series of relatively content-free conceptual buzzwords, the fragile idea is transmitted between and within communities until disillusionment sets in, when the terminology becomes an out-of-date reminder of a slightly embarrassing era that tomorrow's computer industry professionals will laugh about over a pint of beer.
Eventually, the idea is retrieved, repackaged in a less sensational envelope, and filed for later use.
This phenomenon is graphically represented as the Gartner hype cycle [1].
This effect is significant for several reasons.
Firstly, a solution may prove to be useful long after its buzzword sell-by date has been exceeded and it is lost from view.
Secondly, the initial enthusiasm and the obscurity into which previous years' ideas are cast means that they are relatively difficult to retrieve and analyse objectively.
This is a result of the apparent fact that the surrounding semiotic structure and the mental model that we share of an idea is a powerful element in our understanding of, and our discourse about, that technology.
Computer science speaks in terms of algorithms and abstract mathematics.
Programmers often talk in terms of design patterns, standard solutions to common problems.
Discourse on the Internet is often conducted on a far less abstract level; an accepted or rejected buzzword may be seen as an indicator of political stance or of character, rather than being a decision framed in terms of the underlying technology or use case.
Today's 'hot topic' is collaborative tagging; the classification of items using free-text tags, unconstrained and arbitrary values.
Tagging services are separated into two general classifications: 'broad', meaning that many different users can tag a single resource, or 'narrow', meaning that a resource is tagged by only one or a few users [2].
For a full introduction to folksonomic tagging, read Hammond et al [3].
There are now a large number of tagging services, many general-purpose, attracting a large and diverse audience.
Some are intended for specialised purposes, targeted to a smaller, well-defined audience.
Resources may be pointed to by any number of different databases, each of which is aimed at a different set of communities on the Web.
The result is a large network of metadata records, containing a tuple of free-text descriptions and a pointer to a resource.
The sum of the records from the various tagging services creates a sort of 'tag ensemble' the sum of taggers' contributions regarding a certain resource.
Figure 1: The sum of the records from various tagging services creates a 'tag ensemble' Folksonomic tagging is popular; as it turns out, many Web users are more than happy to describe resources in this manner.
Possible reasons for this have been identified: it is easy, enjoyable and quick to complete; it is an activity with low cognitive cost, which provides immediate self and social feedback [4].
Formal categorisation is, classically, a stylised way of dividing elements into appropriate groupings, which themselves are recognised as common or standard terms.
In formal categorisation, there is a correct answer, implying necessarily that there is also a much larger set of incorrect answers.
In tagging, there is a very large group of correct answers short of intentional abuse of the system, it is doubtful as to whether any incorrect answers exist at all.
But certain apparent disadvantages to the approach have been identified, such as the potential for abuse, the variation and lack of standardisation resultant from the unbounded nature of free-text tagging, and difficulties in reusing the information effectively as a result [5].
For those of us more accustomed to dealing with formal classification methods, folksonomic tagging brings the potential of disruption, headaches and annoyance; how are such techniques supposed to fit into our tidy world?
As unexpected as the success of tagging is, as novel and original as the technique seems, can we do anything but wait and see what the future will bring?
Fortunately, there is applicable research at least two separate strands of research pre-existing on similar topics.
In computing, the phrase popularly attributed to Marie Antoinette's milliner is particularly accurate.
'There is nothing new, except that which has been forgotten'.
We proceed with identifying a number of related research strands.
Following this, we will review some examples of relevant literature from each strand, conducting a short literature review.
We may then be in a position to discuss the issues that arise from each, and how each approach relates to the others.
Talking about Metadata Human-computer interaction (HCI) is, by definition, about the transfer of information from one place to another.
Sometimes, that information is transient in nature, but often it is not.
In the latter case, we find ourselves with some data on our hands that we need to store and at some point in the future retrieve.
From the perspective of the machine, the task simply involves copying that data into an empty space, or series of empty spaces, in an appropriate manner and leaving it there until it is required again.
When this occurs, the machine will simply retrieve the file corresponding to the reference ID provided.
From the human perspective, this is an entirely different problem; we do not in general have the ability faultlessly to recall long strings of alphanumeric characters, so we must use a method that is more accessible to our own understanding of the task.
For this reason, the file system designer must consider not only the questions surrounding file storage, structure, access, use, protection and implementation, but also critically how the file system appears to the user.
According to Tanenbaum [6], probably the most important characteristic of any abstraction mechanism is the way the objects being managed are named.
The general solution is to provide each file with a human-readable attribute set.
The user provides a certain quantity of metadata information about the data in the file.
On the most basic level, this might be a filename.
On a more elaborate level, there are various metadata standards that the user could apply in order to create and store a relatively complete description of the content of their data file.
While we generally think of a filename as a characteristic of that file, this is not the case from the point of view of the file system designer, who thinks of a file as an array of blocks, a collection, containing binary data.
As files are typically discovered by looking through the contents of a directory, it is the directory structure that is to be read, since it is this structure that typically contains the metadata required to retrieve the file.
The 'Standard Model' for a directory entry in a very simple filesystem might look something like the following, adapted from 'the MS/DOS filesystem', Tanenbaum (p420) [6]: Figure 2: The 'Standard Model' for a directory entry in a simple filesystem This design is fairly simple.
Any number of possible extensions can be imagined; these raise a number of questions for the intrepid file system designer, including but not limited to: What metadata/attributes are relevant?
(Of these, which are relevant to the user?
Which to the machine?
Which require user intervention, or visibility to the user?)
Does a single attribute set suffice?
Should all users see the same metadata?
Does metadata remain relevant in the long term?
What metadata will be most helpful for the user in browsing a filesystem?
Do all users have similar needs?
Many of these questions are essentially speculative, though some have been extensively researched and discussed, with results that have greatly influenced the design of most modern operating systems.
Some relevant research will be reviewed later in this article.
There are reasons to expect the relevance of a piece of metadata to be influenced by a number of variables, including age; no representation of the world is either complete or permanent [7].
The choice of metadata is necessarily strongly influenced by user behaviour and habit.
Context-independent metadata is relatively exempt from the ageing process context-dependent metadata becomes less useful as the background context is lost.
These issues aside, the filesystem is not the only place that supports an essentially similar structure.
Examples might include the metadata records stored in an institutional repository, which may be exposed as a simple Dublin Core description of a resource and a pointer towards the resource (perhaps via a related jump-off page), browser-based bookmarks (and the hyperlink itself), peer-to-peer technologies such as the .torrent records used in BitTorrent to store metadata about a file so that it can be located and retrieved from a network, the metadata stores underlying many citation databases and most recently of all in folksonomic tagging.
That is not to say that there are not very clear differences between these various types of metadata; there are many, including: Each type may contain a different set of attributes They are stored and accessed differently; as database tuples, RDF, ASCII text, a binary data structure and so forth.
Differing use case and intent Some are part of a collection; others are not Each example is designed to fulfil a particular aim or requirement The origin of the metadata stored; it may be automatically generated, retrieved from elsewhere, provided by a human expert or a typical user.
Some metadata is open-access, or generally available; other metadata is restricted to certain users The observation here is simply that none of these differences are critical; despite the differences, there may be sufficient underlying similarity between these examples to make it possible to consider one technology in the light of an understanding of another.
We will begin by looking at a few pieces of research that relate to metadata within the filesystem a field of research sometimes referred to in terms of Personal Information Management (PIM), defined by Lansdale [8] in Kljun & Carr [9] as, 'the acquisition, storage, organization, and retrieval of digital information collections by an individual in their digital environment'.
Strand 1: The Rich Filesystem A Brief History of the Rich Filesystem Filenames are possibly the simplest form of free-text tagging on a limited data set.
The computer on which I am typing this will permit me to choose any filename for this document, provided it is no greater than 255 characters in length and contains only the permitted characters.
Each operating system has its own set of limitations; for example, DOS filesystems used to permit only 11-character filenames, which were displayed as 8 characters followed by a '.
', with a three-character file extension.
This extension was and still is, on Windows used to indicate the type of file, such as '.txt' for text, '.mp3', and so forth.
Although filenames are no longer limited to a few upper-case characters, this convention has survived and is in wide use.
In practice, then, a file is generally named with a 2-tuple, a pair (N,E), where N is a mnemonic word or phrase and E is the filename extension.
N is a free-text value, whilst E is a formally-defined term taken from the relevant controlled vocabulary.
This, though, is not the end of the story for filenames.
Many people make use of naming conventions in order to simplify organisation and storage of files.
For example, a common file-naming convention in storage of conference papers might be a 4-tuple, such as (Y,C,N,E) year-conference-author's name.extension.
Storing a PDF of a book chapter is sometimes done by using a simple convention such as (Y,B,C,A,E) year-book title-chapter-author's surname.extension.
When saving a paper on my own machine, though, I am likely to add an additional term to indicate the purpose for which I downloaded it, in order that I can separate out resources according to the purpose for which I originally downloaded them the convention that I use for naming is representative of the task with which the items are associated.
Of course, the filename is not the end of the story; in a conventional file system, files are organised into a hierarchy.
This provides neat alternative solutions to problems such as the one for which my naming convention was designed arranging files into sets.
As a solution, however, it is less than perfect.
To see why, consider the question of how to store a downloaded file.
Should it be stored according to the source from which it was downloaded, according to the subject matter or the content, or with reference to the task for which it was downloaded?
In most traditional filesystems, an artificial restriction is placed upon the system, such that a file can only inhabit one directory at a time.
There is no absolute reason why this must be the case; an appropriately-written file system could store any number of filename records pointing to the same location however, this would confer additional responsibilities onto the filesystem.
A delete operation, for example, would imply not only deleting the original reference to the file, but also locating and deleting all other records referencing that file.
The Windows-based '.lnk' shortcut or the UNIX concept of 'soft' symbolic linking are designed as solutions to this problem a soft link is simply an OS-readable metadata record comprising a filename and a pointer referencing a filename (eg.
"mytempfile.txt" might contain a pointer that forwards to C:\tmp\filename.txt), while a hard link is a 'standard' filename record, a metadata record comprising a filename and a pointer to the data.
Usability concerns relating to file links (or symlinks) do not appear to be a popular research topic, but it is reasonable to conclude that both soft and hard linking are sufficiently complex to be difficult to use.
Similarly, it is often said of the hierarchical filesystem paradigm that it is not intuitive or usable; although this is rooted in the observation that classifying is a task involving a high cognitive load [10], the most frequently cited source for the hypothesis is Barreau and Nardi (1995) [11].
This paper is at the root of today's general perception that the usability of the hierarchical filesystem is low.
While this assertion is widely, though neither universally nor unreservedly, accepted today, the paper has received a certain amount of criticism and discussion e.g.
Fertig et al, (1996) [12], and the generally accepted rationale behind the assertion has since changed.
In Ravaiso et al, (2004) [10], an overview is given of user experience with modern desktop systems.
Some are illuminating: Systematic separation of files, emails and bookmarks was seen by users as inconvenient The filename and path were not of significant use in resource discovery Background context behind the creation of a document played a part in storing and accessing that file, because of relevant background knowledge or due to the use of contextually relevant metadata.
Users were reluctant to use search functionality, preferring to search manually Manual classification 'required considerable effort' users thought that this was a task that their computer could address, although they also wanted to be able to adjust the result Users felt the need for a 'comfortable, flexible, easy-to-use method for adding notes and remarks to documents' a form of free-text annotation, perhaps?
Ravaiso et al [10] also identify three separate viewpoints on data, which may all be used by a given user at different times.
They note that specific tools tend to support only one of these, neglecting the others; Task-oriented the task within which the file is defined Context-oriented other documents, programs and tasks related to the file Content-oriented Whatever the ultimate truth on the usability of hierarchical filesystems in general, a large number of research efforts have since appeared that, largely agreeing with the concerns voiced by Barreau and Nardi [11], dedicated their effort to searching for alternatives.
In fact, this process had already begun; for example, MIT's 1991-1992 Semantic Filesystem project [13] had outlined a method by which attributes could be automatically extracted from files, and could then be used as a basis for separating content into 'virtual directories' in this view, files are collected into virtual directories according to automatically extracted features.
Various further alternatives were proposed, such as the 'pile' metaphor for the sorting of documents [14].
Of particular interest is the Placeless Documents project of Xerox PARC, beginning in 1999.
This project was essentially designed to replace the hierarchical filing structure with an alternative the Presto prototype, a document management system that made use of 'meaningful, user-level document attributes, such as "Word file", "published paper", "shared with Jim" or "Currently in progress"' [15].
The Placeless Documents project was designed to solve problems like the 'single-inheritance' structure in the filesystem that is, the previously mentioned problem that a file can inhabit only one place in the filesystem, to provide the ability to reorganise large sets of files quickly and simply, and to provide a set of faceted views on a filesystem according to the task currently in hand.
This latter capability would expose what Dourish et al referred to as the multivalent nature of documents the fact that a given document may 'represent different things to different people'.
Realising that the high cost of metadata was an issue, since the existence of a large quantity of annotations was pivotal to the success of the prototype, the Presto developers envisaged that documents would be tagged/annotated both by users and with metadata extracted automatically by software services performing content analysis.
Furthermore, a third category of annotations existed active categories.
Whether produced automatically or added by a user, these tags caused an action to take place.
For example, a tag such as 'backup.frequency = nightly' would cause the filesystem to back up the document at the frequency given.
These actions may also be user-defined for example, a user who tags a file with the term 'readme' might set the system to maintain an up-to-date copy of similarly tagged files on his laptop.
Further refinements to the Presto system were made, in the form of the Macadam project [16].
This took advantage of the underlying design of Presto the annotated documents exposed through Presto were not themselves files, but simply pointers to a file that itself was held in a more traditional underlying data repository.
This enabled the creation of a further structure abstract documents.
These documents hold no content of their own, but simply hold properties, representing structured data.
The Presto system itself holds auditing information and changes, while the Macadam system holds a variety of views on the Presto records this is reminiscent of an eprints archive, in which metadata records are held pointing towards resources that, themselves, may well be out of the control of the archivist.
'Macadam properties' could be attached to abstract documents, which themselves could be used to create category types, each one of which represented a set of possible tag values.
Folksonomic tagging aficionados will recognise this as bearing some similarities to the 'tag bundle' concept, which exist on sites such as del.icio.us, and permit a collection of related tags to be gathered together under a parent category (for example, one might wish to store 'Nikon', 'Canon', 'Pentax', 'Minolta' and 'Konica' in a tag bundle labelled 'photography').
However, categories in the Macadam project were designed to be used for a number of purposes, such as: in order to search a search for 'photography' using a Macadam category with the categories given above would return matches corresponding to all of the companies mentioned above For filing, in order to resolve ambiguities Documents could also inherit general attributes, in order to permit access control some tags could be set as private and others are public.
Dourish et al (2000) [16], while introducing Macadam, discuss some of the limitations of the original Presto project that were solved in the latter project.
They highlight the fact that the key-value pairs were untyped that is, that the properties that users set were arbitrary, that there was no facility for organising document property values in a hierarchy (that is, it was not possible to define one property value as a 'child' of another, which would allow for a lot of useful functionality).
Finally, the MIT's Haystack project took over from Presto, and developed the idea of multiple categorisable documents further.
Due to the high cost of metadata, especially formal information such as classification, in terms of user time and effort, an absolutely central issue to many of these efforts has been the question of the extent to which metadata can be retrieved automatically.
The quantity of information available is central to the user experience.
Each of the systems mentioned here was designed for use on the small-to-medium scale.
Today, the issue of the metadata-rich filesystem is resurfacing; the as-yet-unreleased WinFS is designed to retrieve files based on content criteria; many common Linux/Unix filesystems permit arbitrary text attributes to be added to files (using the 'extended attributes' system); the Reiser4 filesystem provides hooks for metadata-aware plugins, and Apple's 'Spotlight' feature allows searches based on all sorts of metadata attributes.
They are not the first examples of commercial OS that do this BeOS had a sophisticated model with a base set of file attributes, extended according to the type of the file, and indexed access.
Unfortunately, while filesystems are growing smarter, the question of interoperable transfer of metadata between filesystems has not yet been solved, and is very likely a joy yet awaiting us.
Strand 2: Approaches to Classification on the Internet Classification on the Internet has necessarily approached the problem from a different angle.
A principal difficulty for the metadata-rich filesystem designer is the limitation in terms of data as mentioned previously, producing a system that searches accurately and in a satisfactory manner in the small scale is an extraordinarily difficult problem.
The Web, on the other hand, is the largest data set with which anybody could ever hope to work.
That is not to say that there have been no attempts to work with limited data sets on the Web for example, formal metadata systems such as digital repositories often expose relatively small metadata collections.
On the other hand, the Amazon Web services expose massive quantities of formal metadata; these by contrast can be searched using simple keyword matching.
Other formal metadata systems use contributed formal metadata, such as Yahoo!
Directories, or automatically extracted or machine-generated metadata resulting from search engine techniques or data mining this may be proofread before publication.
The semantic web is a particularly interesting approach, which rather than encapsulating a particular type of metadata simply provides the tools for any form of data to be exposed.
However, it is very likely fair to say that the most commonplace Web search services, such as Google, operate according to search methods that owe very little to formal metadata; rather, Google makes use of techniques such as statistical analysis, content analysis and data retrieved from analysis of links and link text.
The emergence of folksonomy tagging services on the Web continues the trend of informal metadata use.
It is interesting to note that, as the trend towards more informal metadata continues in the filesystem, the trend toward formal metadata continues on the Web.
Discussion A very large number of systems exist, on a variety of scales, that share sympathetic aims at some level to enable description, search and retrieval of data by providing access to metadata.
Planned projects, and several currently under development, are in the process of making the metadata-rich filesystem an everyday reality.
However, as the work of Ravaiso et al [10] indicates, the separation of local filesystem metadata from Internet-based services may appear unnecessary to the user.
The question has been asked in the del.icio.us 'delicious-discuss' mailing list, for example would it be possible to tag files on a user's local filesystem using the del.icio.us interface?
If not, could the capability be added?
At first glance, the suggestion appears unlikely.
Del.icio.us is a collaborative tagging system, after all; what relevance is there in users' personal information management needs?
How much sense does it make to tag local files on a distributed system?
However, from the user's perspective the separation between local and Internet-based content may itself appear arbitrary and unnecessary; a unified view of the data collection is ideal.
Is it possible to perform all of one's information management online?
Why is it necessary to replicate essentially the same structure locally and on a server?
This is prinicipally necessary because ubiquitous Internet access is unavailable.
Few mobile devices are permanently online, and indeed, significantly less than a fifth of British households have broadband access according to OECD statistics [17], making it impractical to assume that the centralised system can subsume the other.
On the other hand, attempting to link local and Internet-based metadata sources implies the need to solve several interoperability issues.
How should the two interact?
Folksonomic tagging is already usefully mixed with other approaches, such as faceted classification, much as occurred in the Placeless Documents project.
Allowing customised views in categorisation is now widely understood to be desirable, but a rich metadata environment would be a logical requirement in making this possible.
Yet a rich, 'heterogeneous' metadata environment is some way away.
As of today, each service on the Web stands in relative isolation.
To achieve a world in which information from several sources could be harvested and reused would imply a change of culture, not merely from the traditional Web to Web 2.0, but from the client-server Web to a peer-to-peer structure.
Here, provenance is measured not in the source URI of a piece of information but according to the original source (perhaps according to the digital signature upon the metadata fragment, with trust and community issues to be handled accordingly).
Digital repositories would not be the single source of metadata records, but one source of formal metadata in a sea of providers.
It is an improbable idea, in a world in which digital repositories make use of conflicting metadata standards, and where the policy and copyright issues surrounding metadata harvesting issues have not yet been solved.
But as a thought experiment, it raises some interesting questions; if a user downloads, stores and annotates a record off-line, and then uploads the result into a public content database, how are those annotations handled?
How should record and data object versioning, updating and deletion be handled?
Today, del.icio.us does not detect duplicate or near-duplicate objects (if one object is placed at two different URIs, del.icio.us does not connect the records) this is a direct analogue of the classic eprints problem, how metadata from one object should be related to another manifestation of the same object.
Many of these issues are research topics in the digital repositories world.
Other options exist that do not involve handing around external metadata records, the design pattern discussed here; for example, embedded metadata schemas like EXIF or ID3 store metadata directly within files.
Similarly, embedded metadata on the Web such as that offered by microformats or structured blogging provide a method for storing metadata directly within XHTML pages.
However, these involve their own challenges, such as synchronisation of metadata between copies of the same file.
Conclusion The collaborative phenomenon of tagging is an interesting large-scale adaption of something previously attempted in various contexts, and it currently offers a (rapidly expanding) subset of the functionality potentially available from a system like Placeless Documents.
Functionality such as that offered by active tagging is becoming available in certain situations, such as in the case of geotagging, in which tags are used that identify a resource as being tagged in such a way that it can be represented according to the geographical information provided (eg, placed on a map, sorted according to location, etc).
Dourish et al recognised explicitly that the more tags available for a document, the better the placeless documents system functions (as a result of the 'long tail' effect [18]) and that there is no realistic likelihood that a single user or group of users will produce a sufficiently large number of tags, thus the need for automated tagging.
So the technique has succeeded on the larger scale where it would not on the smaller.
On the other hand, the tags referring to a given resource may be useful as descriptive metadata on the small scale, so there is a reason to retain that metadata on transferring an object to a new filesystem.
For example, a file downloaded from the Web might be described with a certain metadata set on one service, and tagged with a number of terms on another.
Retaining this information on saving the file locally would lower the cost of collecting local metadata, without requiring the use of automatic metadata extraction tools as the sole solution.
In short, what has until recently been largely treated as a number of dissimilar problems is now undergoing a process of conversion to the point where some attention will have to be paid to the issues if only because required functionality is now appearing in commercial tools and operating systems.
Effective strategies may combine formal and informal, objective and interpretive metadata from a variety of sources.
However, local filesystems and Internet-based indexers are dissimilar in context and identical approaches will not necessarily work across both contexts.
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Ravasio, P., Schär, S. G., Krueger, H. (2004): In pursuit of desktop evolution: User problems and practices with modern desktop systems.
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Fertig, S., Freeman, E. and Gelernter, D. (1996).
"Finding and reminding" reconsidered.
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Retrieved May 2006 from http://www.oecd.org/document/16/0,2340,en_2649_34225_35526608_1_1_1_1,00.html Wired 12:10: The Long Tail http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html Author Details Emma Tonkin Interoperability Focus Officer UKOLN Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/ Return to top Article Title: "Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-text Tagging" Author: Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/tonkin/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library Buzz data software framework infrastructure archives metadata digitisation repositories preservation provenance Citation BibTex RIS Chris Hilton and Dave Thompson continue discussing plans for the engagement with born digital archival material at the Wellcome Library.
In a previous article [1] we discussed how the Wellcome Library had accepted that born digital material [2] will form part of its collections in the future.
Work is now under way to give practical shape to these plans, and in the last six months born digital archival material has begun to be acquired by the Library.
This article assesses the progress that has been made and discusses the experiences, and challenges, of dealing with real digital material.
Rules of Engagement To recap from our previous report, the Library has acknowledged that much of the expertise necessary for dealing with digital material already resides with the archivists who work in the Library.
The processes for acquiring and managing digital material are being built on sound archival practice, and driven by the archivists, supported by one new appointment, a digital curator to provide technical support.
To date, this approach has proved to be robust, flexible and practicable.
We have begun to identify opportunities for acquiring digital material, initially from existing donor/creators, since in these cases we can build on an existing relationship.
Much work has taken place to set out and make explicit the workflows that will determine the flow of digital material into the Library, and the sequence of activities that will track its course from negotiation to ingest into a repository.
We have described how the workflows we were setting up for digital material were found to mirror quite closely those in existence for traditional paper material.
However, digital material is ‘diverted’ down new paths for processes such as anti-virus checking and the creation of file listings.
These processes generate new data, ‘digital provenance’, as well as technical metadata and some new information flows between archivist and donor/creator.
Though we are far from clear about exactly what sorts of metadata we will eventually require and define more clearly what we shall require from these tools.
We confirm receipt of digital material and its virus-free status (or otherwise) and provide donor/creators with a ‘manifest’ that details the material they have transferred to us.
These new workflow paths can be seen as short loops added to existing workflows; indeed, one can see virus scanning before ingest as analogous to fumigation of paper records from a suspect source before allowing them into the strong room.
These parallelisms provide something of a familiar model for donor/creators and for archivists facing this new medium.
We also supply donor/creators with an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) that sets out the broad steps we take in dealing with their digital material, as well as encouraging them to contact us with any concerns that they may have.
In this way we aim to maintain the trust of our donor/creator community by providing processes that are transparent and predictable.
Experiences with Digital Materials Working with digital material has proven more dynamic than we had anticipated.
Each transfer varies in format, in size/total volume and the challenges associated with rendering it.
Each has different and often new issues relating to selection, appraisal, arrangement and description.
The design of our process has been cyclical: plan implement evaluate plan.
This iterative approach is designed to build a framework to structure our work.
It allows us to change and adapt any of our plans very quickly in response to either learning or circumstance.
By applying a consistent set of processes we ensure consistency across these widely differing situations.
There seems to be a fear of digital material and some uncertainty about how to move this material efficiently into the future.
Understanding this has helped the Library identify how and when it has a role to play.
As a collector of material the Library has to deal with many organisations as well as material in a variety of formats.
We have a choice as to what we accept and the terms on which we do so.
Equally, donor/creators have no obligation to provide us with material.
We have to work hard to convince them that we can be trusted.
The ‘fear’ of digital material cuts two ways: donor/creators can be nervous, and have to feel sure that the Library’s strategy is appropriate for their material and addresses their concerns.
Equally there is an awareness of the evanescence of digital material, and the need for urgent action to preserve it that can work in the Library’s favour, provided our strategy convinces.
To date our approach is succeeding with donor/creators.
Feedback seems to indicate they value honesty about what we can promise and what remains to be addressed.
For example, for the moment our focus is upon collection, ingestion and safe custody, with production of the material to researchers representing a separate problem to be addressed later.
Donor/creators respond positively to our setting this out clearly.
It also means that their learning curve is not so steep as to be manageable.
Emphasising that this is a learning process for both parties has proved a productive approach.
In addition to working with material that has survived to be passed to us, we now understand better how material is lost.
For example, one organisation promised us material but subsequently could not find it on their network.
It later transpired the material in question had probably been deleted when it was discovered that the ‘old’ formats were incompatible with the new ‘office’ type software the organisation had adopted.
Another organisation approached us after its digitisation project failed.
It had looked to digitisation to provide gains in economic and operational efficiency; but it had not thought through the storage and access issues.
The project failed leaving it with the original paper files as well as a considerable amount of unorganised and unstructured digital material.
Others assume that we will want to receive all material only in PDF, particularly PDF (A) format.
Management support for our plans to collect digital material has remained crucial.
Communication has been an essential strategy in maintaining this support.
Staff involved have been communicating ideas, progress, and intentions to management, as well as to those staff members less closely involved, on a regular basis.
This is not a trivial activity: it takes the time and effort of the Library’s Digital Curator and two archivists, as well as affecting, to a lesser extent, the available time of other archivists.
‘Going digital’ is proving neither a cheap nor easy option.
As noted above, leveraging the existing goodwill and trust of our donor/creator community is crucial.
However, the transition to working digitally is not completely smooth for some organisations.
Stressing the experimental nature of our current operations, we have suggested that paper transfers should continue as normal, whilst we also receive digital material, with the donor/creator and the archive both taking a relaxed attitude to any resulting duplication.
It was hoped that this would take some of the pressure off the donor/creator, who could operate knowing that there would be a paper insurance copy of the digital material transferred.
In fact, if anything, this can lead to more complex interactions.
Many organisations do not have any sort of organised records management policy for digital material and, accordingly, different staff may handle the different record formats.
Paper records may be handled by a records/information management section, with varying degrees of corporate support, whilst, on the other hand, locating and transferring digital material may be the responsibility of an IT department with different perspectives upon what constitutes important material.
Digital material can be found ‘on request’ by those responsible but we have much work to do if we are to build regular transfer schedules into their everyday business.
A good relationship with the section handling paper records is crucial and can be leveraged into an entrée to the IT staff when a direct approach might be more difficult.
There is a degree of redundancy involved in explaining again concepts with which the manager of paper records is already familiar, and in building once again that relationship of trust.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and the plan to create pages on our Library web site should help make this education role more economical of effort.
From the outset we knew that the support of our own IT department would be crucial.
We have continued to work with these colleagues, to seek their advice and to keep them informed of our plans and activities.
With their support we have established a process for quarantining incoming digital material.
We have also established procedures for virus checking and have secured stand-alone hardware for this purpose.
Working with our IT colleagues has demonstrated to them our understanding of the issues and risks of bringing digital material into our corporate IT environment.
In turn we are trusted to carry out anti-virus checks, and so retain full control over the material we are acquiring.
As in our relations with donor/creators, openness and communication build the relationships on which the work succeeds.
The Library is clear that the only sustainable way to hold and manage digital material is through the use of a digital object repository.
Work began on defining requirements for a repository in autumn 2007.
Our requirements build on our experience with the Fedora repository, requirements documents from other institutions and with significant input from the Library’s archivists.
The requirements are supported by documents outlining our workflows in relation to digital materials, our Preservation Policy [3], and work to identify those file formats we believe we have the ability and resources to preserve adequately.
Practical Problems Encountered Our work to date has taken the form of trial runs, engaging for the first time with the practical issues of acquiring digital material.
So far the Library has not encountered any major problems: for instance, we have not yet met any virus-infected material.
There have, however, been some problems with validation keys assigned by the donor/creator.
For some the use of such tools is an unfamiliar concept.
In other cases we have not always been told what tools were used; even when we have, it can still be difficult to validate material successfully.
Greater experience on our part and on the part of donor/creators is expected to smooth this process.
One trend that seems to be emerging is the role of digitisation programmes.
It is, of course, traditional that transfer of archives is often driven by running out of storage space.
Our experience in the past few months which may or may not turn out to be representative suggests that organisations which formerly would simply have sought a home for bulky paper records may now reach for digitisation as the solution for bulk storage problems; sometimes without a clear picture of the preservation and storage requirements that such a programme would have.
We noted above the nervousness that exists around digital material, and resistance to transferring digital material to the Library.
Issues and concerns seem to centre on uncertainty of the permanence of the material, or there is confusion about what material we are attempting to acquire and for what reason.
Somehow digital material is being perceived as ‘different’.
It is essential that we continue to work with our donor/creator community and further develop an education programme.
This will acknowledge that for the near future paper and digital materials may be looked after by different officers in an organisation, who will have different skills, concerns and priorities.
What Remains to Be Done?
We still lack experience in dealing with digital material, and we have only just begun to engage with our donor/creators.
We need to communicate widely that the Wellcome Trust is collecting digital material if we are to gain donor/creator trust.
We will be making a space on the Wellcome Library Web site for digital curation and these pages will make our FAQs and other model documents publicly available.
Nonetheless we anticipate that this education role will always represent a part of our work.
There still remains a gap between our plans and their implementation.
We lack the practical tools to make working with digital material easier and more reliable.
In particular we lack the tools to acquire technical metadata automatically.
In the short term this may not represent too large a problem since we are ‘learning by doing’.
In the longer term greater experience with digital material will help us fill this gap.
As an institution that collects from a potentially huge variety of sources we are likely to acquire a wide range of material and formats.
We know that much of the management of this material could be automated.
We are not yet in a position to achieve this.
We lack practical tools and infrastructure for the automated extraction of technical metadata and we have not yet done much work to identify what metadata, especially technical metadata, we will require for long-term preservation.
We also have further work to do with donor/creators to ensure that they provide us with regular transfers of material, ideally in ‘preferred’ formats along with some of the necessary metadata.
In the short term we will have to undertake manual management of most incoming material, which is not sustainable in the long term, although it is a great learning opportunity.
Are We Succeeding?
Clearly we are embarking on a long journey and it is too early to talk of success or failure, but based on our recent work the signs are promising.
We are acquiring real digital material and donor/creators seem receptive to the way in which we are engaging with them.
To date we can demonstrate progress, which feeds into the growth of confidence in our work and makes further progress likely.
Success, we trust, will build upon success.
Conclusions Going digital is clearly not a easy option nor one to be undertaken lightly.
Yet engaging with digital material has proved to be a valuable practical step.
Only by engaging with it can we test our hypotheses, learn from our experience and move forward.
Building on the professional skills of archivists has been a useful example of this very practical and successful approach.
The key to this has been staying flexible and being prepared to change any plans in the light of experience.
Examining the differences and/or similarities between digital and physical confirms for us that we are building processes that are meaningful for our library.
Increasingly similarities between digital and physical material suggest that we should re-examine our professional practice and apply more consistency of process between digital and physical material.
This makes for more economically sustainable activities, leverages existing skills and experience and makes it easier to assimilate new material into our collections.
We also recognise the value of documenting our processes.
By documenting how we plan to work, we are creating tools to feed into our cyclical planning process of plan implement evaluate plan.
Communication is proving crucial to supporting this work.
Not only are we communicating what we are doing with our donor/creator community, but with our own senior management and with our own IT department.
Transparency and openness are being successfully used as tools to build trust and confidence.
The process is slow, especially with external donor/creators, but those that we work with and keep informed feel engaged in our processes and supportive of our long-term strategy.
It also means making changes to our business as we go.
In working through how we will deal with incoming digital material we are finding ourselves re-examining how we deal with physical material and making explicit processes that had hitherto been taken for granted.
We are looking at how we communicate with our donor/creator community, how and why we record actions and activities we undertake, and the ways in which we appraise incoming material.
This willingness to re-examine the way we work and to change it where necessary is an important step in the right direction.
The Wellcome Library has accepted that born digital material will form part of its collections in the future: we have only made first steps towards the achievement of that aim but it is proving to be an interesting and fruitful journey.
References “Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library”, Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson, January 2007, Ariadne Issue 50 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/hilton-thompson/ Hereafter simply referred to as digital material.
“Wellcome Library Preservation Policy for Materials Held in Collections”, http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtx038065.pdf Author Details Dr Christopher Hilton Archives Team Leader Wellcome Library 183 Euston Road London NW1 2BE Email: c.hilton@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ Dave Thompson Digital Curator Wellcome Library 183 Euston Road London NW1 2BE Email: d.thompson@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library” Author: Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/hilton-thompson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Accessibility Testing and Reporting With TAW3 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Accessibility Testing and Reporting With TAW3 Buzz software java html xml css firefox accessibility browser schema wcag standards Citation BibTex RIS Patrick Lauke gives a run-down of the free TAW3 tool to aid in accessibility testing of Web pages.
When it comes to assessing a Web site's accessibility, any Web designer should know by now that simply running the mark-up though an automated testing tool is not enough.
Automated tools are limited, purely testing for syntax, easily ascertained "yes or no" situations and a set of (sometimes quite arbitrary) heuristics, which are often based on an interpretation of accessibility guidelines on the part of the tool's developers.
Nonetheless, automated checkers are a useful tool in the arsenal of accessibility-conscious designers, provided that their results are checked for false positives/negatives [1] and backed up by the necessary manual checks, carried out by a knowledgeable human tester who is familiar with any potential access issues and how they manifest themselves in a Web site.
This article gives a quick run-down of Testo Accesibilidad Web (TAW)3 [2], a free tool developed by the Spanish Fundación CTIC (Centre for the Development of Information and Communication Technologies in Asturias) to test Web pages against WCAG 1.0.
TAW3 is available both as an online version (similar to other tools such as Cynthia [3] and Wave [4]) and as a stand-alone java application.
In this article, we will concentrate on the stand-alone version, which in version 3 is now also available in English.
Application Interface The interface consists of a single window, divided into three main areas: Figure 1: General layout of the TAW3 interface standard menu bar; quick access buttons; analyser tab, which is further broken down into: a) analysis scope, b) action buttons, c) analyser settings, d) analysis result, e) source code view.
The analyser panel represents the main work area of the application.
It is possible to work on any number of analyser panels within the same application window, which can act independently.
Figure 2: Scope section of the analyser tab, showing the different options available to spider multiple pages of a Web site In the scope section of each analyser we can choose to test a single page, or to "spider" a site by defining the types of links to follow, the depth level and the overall number of pages to test.
Figure 3: Summary of the analysis of a single page After the initial automated part of the analysis has been completed, TAW presents us with a summary of all issues it found, as well as the number of points that require human judgement on the part of the tester.
Figure 4: Analyser tab showing a list of priority 1 issues found on the current page Switching to the individual "Priority 1", "Priority 2" and "Priority 3" tabs, we get a comprehensive list of all the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints.
From here, we can see which particular part of the page's mark-up triggered an error or requires human review.
Right-clicking on any of the checkpoints brings up a context menu to aid the tester in assessing the related issues: Figure 5: 'Techniques' context menu option for an individual checkpoint, which opens the relevant part of the WCAG 1.0 page in a Web browser 'techniques' provides a direct link to the particular checkpoint in the W3C WCAG 1.0 document, which gives the expanded explanation of the checkpoint itself, relevant examples, and suggested techniques that satisfy the checkpoint Figure 6: For 'visual checking' of the current Web page a customised version of the page is opened in a Web browser "visual checking" creates a customised local copy of the currently analysed Web page, which adds mark-up and styling in order to visually highlight the potential issues and facilitate manual assessment.
This approach of 'assisted manual testing' is similar to that of HERA [5], a Web-based tool produced by the Spanish Fundación Sidar.
Of course, this step can be further complemented by additional manual checking methodologies, such as those outlined in my previous article on "Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox" [6] Figure 7: 'Validity level' context menu for an individual checkpoint once the tester has carried out the manual check, the result can be recorded via the 'validity level' sub-menu; the checkpoint can be marked as a clear pass or fail, as well as 'not tested', 'cannot tell' and 'not applicable'.
Figure 8: Checkpoint annotation dialog window Where necessary, it is possible to make specific annotations for each checkpoint tested (for instance, to back up a particular validity level that was chosen).
So, for a comprehensive test, we work through each of the checkpoints, ensuring that all automated checks have yielded the correct result and assigning a validity level to all of the human checks.
Figure 9: Checkpoints checklist dialog window At any point, we can get a slightly more compact checklist for the current analyser via the Checkpoint › Checklist menu option.
Figure 10: An HTML Guidelines settings dialog, with two priority 3 'until user agents' checkpoints unchecked.
An interesting feature of TAW is the ability to create sub-sets of WCAG 1.0 to test against.
From the "Guidelines settings" dialog we can choose not only which level of compliance we're assessing (single A, double A, triple A), but also exclude specific checkpoints.
For instance, if we make a conscious judgement that the priority 3 checkpoint 10.4 'Until user agents handle empty controls correctly, include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas' is not relevant any more (i.e.
that the 'until user agents' clause has been satisfied for all user agents in common use today), we can explicitly omit this point from our testing regime.
Figure 11: User check dialog and the associated regular expression attribute wizard Although very limited in scope (particularly due to a bug, see below), TAW also allows us to define additional checks via the User checkings' dialog.
Currently, we are only able to select the HTML element the check applies to and (through a regular or wizard-based dialog) define which attribute this element is either required or not allowed to have in order to pass the check.
For instance, we could create a rule to ensure that all BLOCKQUOTE elements found in a page also have a CITE attribute.
Figure 12: An HTML 'TAW report' opened in a Web browser Once we are finished with the overall test, we can save our results in three different ways: as an HTML summary (which simply presents the frequency of errors encountered in tabular format), as an HTML "TAW report" (which adds markers and error descriptions to the analysed page, in the same way as TAW's online version) and as an Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) [7] file (a recent XML format which was specifically created with this type of application in mind).
Figure 13: An EARL report opened in Notepad Problems and Bugs The main problem with TAW lies with its interface.
Currently, there seems to be a large amount of unnecessary redundancy: in most cases, the same functions can be accessed via a button, menu option and context menu.
This is not a bad thing in itself, but becomes confusing when it's not carried through consistently.
For instance, the checkpoint checklist dialog provides buttons for "Visual checking" and "Checkpoint annotations", but does not offer the tester any way to set the checkpoints' validity levels.
The order in which some steps need to be carried out also matters, but no indication is given via the interface.
For instance, "Reports" and "Guidelines" settings need to be chosen before an analysis is started.
Changing the settings in an existing analyser pane has no effect, even after hitting the "refresh" button.
Some of the errors reported by the automated test are contentious and based on an interpretation of the relevant WCAG checkpoint.
For example, the tool fails priority 2 checkpoint 3.5 "Use header elements to convey document structure and use them according to specification" if, for whatever reason, header levels "jump" by more than one level (e.g.
having an H3 immediately follow an H1 , completely skipping H2 ) neither WCAG nor the HTML specification explicitly forbid this (although it's admittedly not the best of practices).
Figure 14: Analyser summary of spidering multiple pages within a Web site Although the tool allows for the "spidering" of an entire site, if the same issue appears on multiple pages (which can happen, particularly if a site is based on a common template), it is not possible currently to review the issue only once and then set the validity level across all tested pages.
This makes using the tool for more than one page at a time quite a tedious experience.
Guideline settings, and even the entire current TAW project, can be saved for future use, but surprisingly the developers opted for a proprietary file format.
Personally, I would have welcomed the use of some flavour of XML, which would have opened up these files for potential reuse and manipulation outside of the TAW application itself.
Figure 15: Application bug: the context menu for user-defined checkpoints does not allow you to set the validity level Lastly, what I can only assume is a bug in the program: although it is possible to create user-defined checks, the tool does not allow the tester to set the validity level the option is simply greyed out.
This renders the whole concept of user checks fairly pointless for anything other than purely automated types of checks where the validity can be determined, without margin for error or human judgement, by the software.
Conclusion TAW3 is certainly not as powerful and comprehensive as some of the commercial, enterprise level testing packages (such as the accessibility module of Watchfire WebXM [8]).
In its current implementation, the application has a few bugs and an overall clumsy interface, which make it look unnecessarily complicated and confusing at first glance.
However, the strong emphasis on human checking and some of the advanced features (like the capability to export an EARL report, to test only against a sub-set of WCAG 1.0, and to create user-defined checks) make this a very interesting free tool for small-scale testing.
References Davies, M. "Sitemorse fails due diligence", http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/SiteMorseFailsDueDiligence Fundación CTIC, Testo Accesibilidad Web online tool and download page, http://www.tawdis.net/taw3/cms/en HiSoftware Cynthia Says, http://www.contentquality.com/ Wave 3.0 Accessibility Tool, http://wave.webaim.org/ Fundación Sidar, 'HERA: Cascading Style Sheets for Accessibility Review' tool, http://www.sidar.org/ex_hera/ Lauke, P.H.
"Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox", Ariadne 44, July 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/lauke/ W3C Evaluation and Reporting Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema, http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-EARL10-Schema-20050909/ Watchfire WebXM product page, http://www.watchfire.com/products/webxm/ Author Details Patrick H. Lauke Web Editor University of Salford Email: p.h.lauke@salford.ac.uk Web site: http://www.salford.ac.uk Personal web site: http://www.splintered.co.uk Return to top Article Title: "Accessibility Testing and Reporting with TAW3" Author: Patrick H. Lauke Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/lauke/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Buzz data database portal archives firefox browser Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Hall reports on recent news form BIOME, the Health and Life Sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network.
BIOME Hot Topics BIOME “Hot Topics” are proving extremely popular with lots of positive feedback.
We have received suggestions for particular areas of interest and recent themes have included breast cancer, AIDS, and pet ownership.
So check out the new topics at Hot Topics [1].
BIOME Mailing List Are you interested in finding out more about BIOME?
Join the BIOME JISCmail to keep up to date with developments [2].
BIOME Search Plugin for Firefox Users of the Mozilla Firefox browser may have noticed that up in the top right corner of Firefox, there is a handy search box that allows you to search various databases and search engines from within the browser.
Developers at BIOME have created a search plugin to enable you to add the BIOME database to the search box.
Just click Search Plugin [3] to install.
This currently searches across all the BIOME gateways.
If you would like to see a search plugin for a particular gateway, please contact us [4].
User Feedback We would like to thank all those that completed the BIOME questionnaire.
In total, we received 350 responses and 12 winners received £30 each.
We are currently analysing the data and results will be available shortly.
BIOME Continuing Professional Development Training Events for NHS Librarians Laurian Williamson, BIOME’s Content Coordinator ran two separate CPD (Continuing Professional Development) events for NHS Librarians.
These were held in November 2004, one at the United Bristol Healthcare Trust Education Centre and one at the Health Services Library, Southampton General Hospital, University of Southampton.
This BIOME-focussed CPD training session covered BIOME and the health-related subject gateways.
The day consisted of several sessions with both presentations and hands-on practicals.
These were: How OMNI (Organising Medical Networked Information) became the BIOME Service (history of elib programmes and the role of the JISC) Web site evaluation issues, criteria, health quackery and health fraud The Virtual Training Suite (VTS) of BIOME authored tutorials (Internet Medic, Allied Health, Nursing, Pharmacist, and BioResearch) Simple and advanced searching of OMNI/NMAP (Nursing, Midwifery and Allied health Professions) Browsing and the role of the browsable structures within OMNI and NMAP ‘From start to finish resource discovery’: evaluating and adding a high-quality Internet resource into BIOME (a practical example of finding, evaluating and including a resource) BIOME’s past and present collaborations For further details, or to express interest in hosting similar events please contact Laurian Williamson on lw@biome.ac.uk or 0115 8493251 BIOME and Libraries for Nursing Study Day Laurian Williamson and Robert Abbott attended the LfN Study Day at The Royal College of Nursing, London on Friday 12 November 2004 Laurian gave a 45-minute presentation entitled “Collection development for BIOME (health and life sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network).
How we ensure BIOME provides access to evaluated, high-quality Internet resources in the health and life sciences, aimed specifically at students, researchers, academics and practitioners.” The issues covered included the history of BIOME and the development of NMAP; collection development policies for OMNI and NMAP; quality and evaluation issues of Internet resources; resource discovery for OMNI and NMAP; collection development and sustainability.
Changes at BIOME We are pleased to announce the recruitment of another part-time Service Officer.
Robert Abbott joined the team at the beginning of November and works on our NMAP and OMNI gateways.
Previously a practising Information Scientist in Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare, he will be a valuable member of the team.
Unfortunately, our Portal Development Officer, Vicky Wiseman, left the Service at the end of 2004.
We are sad to lose Vicky and would like to thank her for the hard work and commitment she has put into the BIOME Service.
We wish her all the best in her new post as Head Librarian at Duncan Macmillan House, Psychiatric Medical Library for Nottinghamshire Healthcare.
References BIOME Hot Topics http://biome.ac.uk/hot_topics/ Archives of BIOME@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Medical, Biological and Health Sciences mailing list http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/BIOME.html Biome Search Plugin http://biome.ac.uk/searchplugin/ Contacting BIOME http://biome.ac.uk/about/contacts.html Author Details Jenny Hall BIOME Admin Officer Email: jh@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Jenny Hall Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Curation: Where Do We Go from Here?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Curation: Where Do We Go from Here?
Buzz data database infrastructure archives accessibility identifier repositories copyright preservation cataloguing curation dspace e-science interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Peter Kerr, Fiona Reddington and Max Wilkinson report on the 1st International Digital Curation Conference held in Bath in September 2005.
The conference aimed to raise awareness of key issues in digital curation and to encourage active participation and feedback from the relevant stakeholder communities.
The conference attracted an impressive range of keynote speakers and focused on the following areas: the work of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) the concepts and principles of digital curation global curation policies socio-legal issues, sustainability, user requirements and the research agenda The participants were a mix of researchers, curators, policy makers and representatives from funding agencies that are engaged, or have an interest, in the creation, use and management of digital data.
The conference was officially opened by Chris Rusbridge, Director of the DCC, who welcomed everyone to the event and encouraged attendees to ask plenty of questions and actively participate in the discussion sessions to make the conference as interactive as possible.
Graham Cameron, Associate Director at EBI, opens the Conference with his Keynote Speech Day 1 Data Curation and the Scientific Record: Opportunities, Challenges and Pitfalls Graham Cameron, Associate Director.
European Bioinformatics Institute Graham Cameron explained the EBI's experience with biomolecular data and illustrated the remarkable enhancement to the conduct of science offered by shared curated databases.
He illustrated the usefulness of biomolecular data to scientific communities by providing compelling data about the submission rates for primary research data and the global access to the EBI Web site (both of which are exponential in growth) [1].
However, it is the integration of databases that now provides the greatest challenge.
Graham stimulated discussion about long-established conventions in constructing and maintaining databases and repositories of biological data and concluded that the integrity of the conventional (printed) record is woefully inadequate in the electronic era.
Overview of the Digital Curation Centre Chris Rusbridge, DCC Director Chris Rusbridge outlined the main objectives, membership, establishment and work to date of the DCC.
It was explained that the DCC will not provide any data storage facilities but will focus on providing researchers with useful tools, advice and services which they will need to help them properly curate their data.
Several projects from a variety of disciplines were described which highlighted the explosion in data generation that has occurred alongside the emergence of new technologies.
Attention was drawn to the issue of long-term sustainability of databases and the need for the adoption of data policies by large-scale institutions and funding agencies.
The issue of the scope of the DCC was also discussed.
The importance of participation in the Associates Network was highlighted and a summary of future workshops and the launch of The International Journal of Digital Curation was also presented [2].
Following lunch, Chris Rusbridge chaired a symposium entitled "What is Digital Curation?"
Professor Peter Buneman and Dr David Giaretta gave short presentations designed to provoke discussion from the attendees regarding the topics of the different approaches to data curation and the skills, strategies and partnerships that need to be put in place to ensure effective data curation takes place.
The main topics discussed were: Should the definition of data curation encompass preservation and access strategies to data.
Opinions differed but a clear definition, in terms of the remit of the DCC, will need to be agreed.
What data should be preserved?
It will not be possible to preserve and/or curate all the data that is generated.
Careful thought will need to be given to the strategies used to decide what data to preserve, these strategies are likely to differ between disciplines.
The issue of ensuring sufficient interaction between the data generators (domain experts) and librarians/archivists (preservation experts).
What is the best way to do this?
Is it realistic to expect people to have expertise in both?
Training will need to be addressed alongside encouraging individuals with different expertise to work together.
How can we future-proof what is archived?
We need to ensure that the technologies used currently are not obsolete in the future and that sufficient migration strategies are put in place and funded.
How do we achieve policy changes at the level of academic institutions and funding agencies?
Data sharing policies, which encourage thinking about data preservation and curation at the early stages of project lifespan would be beneficial.
The National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Informatics Initiative has generated a data-sharing policy [3] that is now being adopted by the top 20 cancer funders in the UK how could this approach apply to other areas?
Sustainable resources: It is all very well encouraging people to submit their data for archiving and preservation but we need to ensure that the resources which hold the data are sustainable in the long term After a well deserved coffee break, the afternoon session dealt with "Global Policy for Curation" and was chaired by Richard Boulderstone, Director of e-Strategy at the British Library.
nestor the German Approach to Digital Curation Stefan Strathmann, Goettingen State and University Library Stefan Strathmann provided the meeting with an update of the 'nestor' Project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [4].
Along with organised workshops and conferences, nestor has or is due to deliver a number of expert reports regarding the German experience and approach to digital curation.
These reports will form the basis of guidelines to stakeholders regarding digital preservation, translations of articles, future teaching materials and project glossary.
NDIIPP and Approaches to Digital Curation in the US Caroline Arms, Office of Strategic Initiatives, Library of Congress Caroline Arms described the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) [5].
Created in 2002, the NDIIPP aims to work with public and private stakeholders to support the preservation of significant 'born-digital' data that is at risk.
The NDIIPP operates as an external focus to encourage collaboration across different sectors and to establish connections between stakeholder communities.
Awards are provided to form co-operative agreements and promote four principles: identify content at risk leverage resources and experience promote standards and best practice learn how to build and maintain partnerships that differ in both scope and nature.
The last session of the day was the poster session which preceded the hugely enjoyable conference dinner at the Roman Baths and Pump Rooms.
Drinks at the Roman Baths Day 2 Day two of the conference opened with the issue of "Data Curation: A Question of Scale", which was chaired by Professor Malcolm Atkinson, Director, National eScience Centre.
The Data Challenge in Astronomy Professor Andy Lawrence, Regius Professor of Astronomy and Head of the School of Physics, University of Edinburgh Andy Lawrence described the imbalance in funding for IT in astronomy in that facility operations and facility output processing tended to be well funded whereas the science archives and end-user tools attracted less money.
Astronomical archives are growing in size very quickly; however the issue is one of management and data access rather than storage.
The amount of data itself is not a technical problem but the data is heterogeneous and end-users of the data have different demands.
The astronomy field has recognised that the issue is one of interoperability of archives and there is a need for standards, transparent infrastructure and specialised data centres.
To address this the Virtual Observatory is being established the concept is one of all databases being easily accessible to the end-user.
Rather than a warehouse it will consist of a small set of service centres and large populations of end-users.
The International Virtual Observatory Alliance [6] has set up technical working groups to agree on the standards necessary and the key projects include AstroGrid, US-NVO and Euro-VO.
This interoperability should drive future scientific developments in the astronomy field.
Following a coffee break, there were parallel sessions addressing "Sustainability: Technical and Economic Challenges" and "Meeting User Requirements": Sustainability: Technical and Economic Challenges Chair: Kevin Ashley, Head of Archive, University of London Computing Centre Kevin Ashley explained that this session would provide an introduction to the DSpace Project, which is providing a cross-disciplinary data archiving solution, as well as an overview to the technical and economic challenges that need to be considered with regard to the sustainability of data resources and the data they contain.
Managing MIT's Digital Research Data with DSpace Mackenzie Smith, MIT Libraries Mackenzie Smith spoke about the growing realisation that data management is an important issue for large-scale institutions to address, both to enhance research programmes and address the business need of data validation and mining in the future.
The disparity between the approaches of different disciplines to the access to, and sharing of, data was discussed and the differing availability of large-scale repositories to support disciplines was also highlighted.
The complex nature of research data was described, the tasks needed for effective curation and archiving and the need for an in-depth understanding of the subject were highlighted.
The DSpace Project was explained [7] and the benefit of being able to store different data types in an open and interoperable way was described.
It was explained that the preservation policy being adopted was that it is better to preserve what we can now and refine this as needs and technologies change over time.
This is deemed to minimise the risk of losing data completely while trying to devise the 'perfect' solution.
Sustainability: Technical and Economic Challenges, the DPC Perspective Maggie Jones, Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Maggie Jones spoke about the challenge of effectively archiving and preserving digital collections as the pace of data generation grows ever faster.
Maggie explained that a more collaborative approach will be needed to provide multi-disciplinary, cost-effective archiving solutions and that we should aim to manage data from its creation onwards.
However, we need to take a pragmatic approach and Maggie echoed the approach of the previous speaker in preserving what we can now to minimise losing data.
Several initiatives are now addressing key issues [8] [9].
The future work-plan of the DPC was outlined, including the provision of targeted training courses, and attendees were encouraged to complete the DPC survey [10].
This survey will identify, not only what is being created in digital format and how it is being preserved, but will assess the level of risk and vulnerability to loss, and determine priorities for action.
The results will enable the DPC to accelerate, influence and inform the development of a UK digital preservation strategy.
Meeting User Requirements Chair: Professor Kevin Edge, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Bath Professor Kevin Edge chaired a session looking at how user requirements are being met in the digital curation age.
This took the form of a panel discussion with Sheila Anderson, Professor Kevin Schurer and Mark Thorley on the panel.
The discussion centred on a number of topics including what the main threats are in providing continued access to the research and teaching digital objects in a collection over time.
The group discussed what could be done to minimise these threats.
The role of research councils in supporting the preservation of and access to data was examined and how researchers or data creators could minimise the risk of data being lost, or being inaccessible in the longer term.
Following lunch, there were once again parallel sessions addressing "Socio-legal Issues" and "The Research Agenda": Socio-legal Issues Neil Beagrie, JISC Legal issues surrounding data curation are complex.
This is most generally a result of heterogeneous data, the ownership and custodian roles of researchers and curators and uncertainty of the responsibility of persistence and preservation of data.
Much of the conference up until now had dealt with identifying a curator's role, identification of data to preserve and the programmes that have developed to address these issues.
This session dealt with the curation of data in the context of copyright and access rights and how these issues were shaping the way data creators, curators and funders approach data preservation and reuse.
An Exploration of the Legal Issues associated with Data Curation Andrew Charlesworth, University of Bristol Andrew Charlesworth, Senior Research Fellow in IT and Law at the University of Bristol, spoke on the role of copyright law in data curation.
Andrew noted that recent events had led to increased expectations and influence of rights holders and that this had generated a backlash, which considers copyright law to be over-strength, over-regulated and over-rated.
The result of this backlash has been the emergence of open-source movements and Creative Commons where some copyright agreements exist but to a much lesser degree.
Andrew then presented a Science Commons where standardised licences are voluntarily agreed but still manage to create areas of free access and inquiry.
The major areas of this commons can be found in publishing, licensing and the use (or more correctly reuse) of data.
Andrew suggested the copyright should be more focused on the researcher, the so-called 'researcher rights' but this required more clarification and was dependent on engaging the data creators and curators to work out what these 'researcher rights' should be.
Curation Case Study: e-Diamond Dr Paul Taylor, Centre for health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education, University College London Paul Taylor presented a case study of curation based on the e-Diamond Project, which aimed to deliver a prototype Grid-based image repository that could be used as a training tool in breast screening, epidemiology and data mining and would exemplify the utility of data reuse and added value [11].
Paul introduced the breast-screening programme in the UK and provided an overview of why digitising and archiving mammograms would be beneficial for researchers, healthcare professionals and patients.
Paul talked about the problems with ethical and consent issues which presented significant barriers to the project but suggested that the barriers were a result of both complex and bureaucratic ethics approval processes and the project team's under-estimation of their complexity.
Paul concluded his presentation by summarising the significant output of e-Diamond, a valuable set of mammograms and a proof of concept for the value of Grid infrastructure for evidence-based medicine and research application.
The Research Agenda Chair: Professor Peter Buneman, DCC Associate Director (Research) Professor Peter Buneman chaired this parallel session which highlighted some of the research occurring in the field of digital curation.
There was standing-room only for this well-attended session.
AstroDAS and Mondrian: New Approaches for Annotating Scientific Databases Dr Rajendra Bose, DCC Dr Rajendra Bose introduced new approaches to annotation and described the relevance of annotation to digital curation.
He firstly described the AstroDAS Project which built on the distributed annotation system (DAS) from the bioinformatics field (BioDAS).
This prototype aims to link the annotated entries across diverse astronomy sky catalogues that correspond to the same sky object.
The Mondrian Project was also presented another model of annotation, it allows annotations of the associations between attribute values as well as the attribute values themselves.
Immortal Information, Engineering Grand Challenge Project Professor Chris McMahon, University of Bath Professor Chris McMahon described how engineering companies are dealing with a shift from product delivery to a situation where firms both supply products and support them through their lifetime.
This creates a need for effective information creation, management, storage, access and possibly re-creation through many generations of information technology and systems.
The Engineering Grand Challenge Project involves a number of Innovative Manufacturing Research Centres, as well as other partners.
and has three streams: How can the product, its design and the rationale behind the decisions be represented?
How can we capture the understanding of products and their impact on users throughout the product life?
How can the dynamics of knowledge use throughout the life cycle of complex product-service systems be managed and used to make recommendations?
Many of the issues described echoed the digital curation issues of other communities.
The Long-term Preservation of Scientific Models Professor Jane Hunter, University of Queensland Professor Jane Hunter started by describing the PANIC Project [12] which aims to address the preservation and accessibility of composite digital objects using semantic Web services.
Scientific data is organised into scientific models which encapsulate contextual information, processing steps and derived knowledge as well as links to the raw data itself.
There was also discussion of the tools and services that might be needed as these scientific model packages evolve over time.
Closing Keynote Address Dr Clifford Lynch, Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) Dr Clifford Lynch provided an entertaining and informative overview of the conference and highlighted some of the key issues that had been raised.
In particular, the rising importance of digital data in research, learning and teaching was emphasised and the need to adapt our institutional and individual practices to reflect this was highlighted.
The need for a collaborative approach was reiterated and the usefulness of conferences such as this one, as a forum for discussion, was reinforced.
Conclusions The conference ended with Chris Rusbridge thanking the speakers and attendees for their participation in what had proved to be a very enjoyable and informative conference.
It is clear that a lot of work will need to be done to address the issues raised at the conference and that community participation is going to be key to making the DCC a success.
We at the NCRI Informatics Initiative look forward to remaining involved, attending future events and monitoring the progress of the project.
References European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ International Journal of Digital Curation http://www.ijdc.net/ NCRI Data Sharing Documents http://www.cancerinformatics.org.uk/documents.htm#datasharing nestor http://nestor.sub.uni-goettingen.de/?lang=en National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) http://www.ivoa.net/ DSpace http://www.dspace.org/ UK Web Archiving Consortium http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) http://netpreserve.org UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment survey http://www.tessella.com/dpcsurvey/ eDiaMoND http://www.ediamond.ox.ac.uk/ The PANIC (Preservation webservices Architecture for Newmedia and Interactive Collections) Project http://metadata.net/panic/ Author Details Dr Peter Kerr Scientific Programme Manager NCRI Informatics Coordination Unit 61 Lincoln's Inn Fields PO Box 123 London WC2A 3PX Email: peter.kerr@ncri.org.uk Web site: http://www.cancerinformatics.org.uk Dr Fiona Reddington Scientific Programme Manager NCRI Informatics Coordination Unit 61 Lincoln's Inn Fields PO Box 123 London WC2A 3PX Email: fiona.reddington@ncri.org.uk Web site: http://www.cancerinformatics.org.uk Dr Max Wilkinson Scientific Programme Manager NCRI Informatics Coordination Unit 61 Lincoln's Inn Fields PO Box 123 London WC2A 3PX Email: max.wilkinson@ncri.org.uk Web site: http://www.cancerinformatics.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "Digital Curation: Where Do We Go From Here?"
Author: Dr Peter Kerr, Dr Fiona Reddington and Dr Max Wilkinson Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/dcc-1st-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Future of Cataloguing: Cataloguing and Indexing Group Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Future of Cataloguing: Cataloguing and Indexing Group Conference Buzz data software framework database xml archives metadata tagging vocabularies schema cataloguing marc aggregation gif aacr2 unicode isbd frbr marc21 interoperability e-government taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Paola Stillone reports on a three-day annual conference of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG), held at the University of Bath, 30 June 2 July.
The conference was aimed at information professionals interested in looking at issues that are changing cataloguing and indexing.
The latest international developments in metadata standards, cataloguing codes, taxonomies and controlled languages unlock new opportunities for cataloguers' involvement.
They also raise complex interoperability issues which go beyond traditional cataloguing and highlight the need for the acquisition of new skills in the digital information environment.
The event focused on three interlinked themes: new and emerging standards, collection-level description and professional education.
It incorporated the 4th UK Cataloguing and Indexing Standards Forum, the 39th CIG Annual General Meeting and the CIG Committee Meeting.
The event was wittily chaired by Alan Danskin, Chair of the CILIP CIG [1] who gave the keynote address and introduced each speaker.
New and Emerging Standards Brave New FRBR World The conference started with a presentation by Patrick Le Boeuf of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Patrick chairs the IFLA FRBR Review Group [2].
FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) is a model developed and recommended by IFLA (International Association of Library Associations and Institutions) in 1998 [3] as a consequence of one of the nine resolutions adopted in 1990 at the Stockholm Seminar on Bibliographic Records.
It aims to produce a framework, based on user needs, for restructuring bibliographic databases to reflect the conceptual structure of information resources.
The FRBR framework uses an entity-relationship model which conceptualises three groups of entities: Group 1 consists of the products of intellectual or artistic endeavour, subdivided into four types of inter-related entities (e. g. a work, realised through one or more expressions, embodied in their manifestations, exemplified by items) Group 2 comprises the entities responsible for intellectual or artistic content (a person or corporate body) Group 3 includes the entities that constitute subjects of intellectual or artistic endeavour (concept, object, event and place) Traditional cataloguing using AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition) is based on the flat record concept and focused on the manifestation of the work, identified by an ISBN.
FRBR insists on the contextualisation of the work and on bringing together all of its expressions and manifestations, as exemplified in its current implementations, mostly using XML, which include: AusLit Gateway, Virtua, OCLC's FRBR projects such as FictionFinder and the planned FRBRisation of WorldCat, the Research Libraries Group's RedLightGreen and the Library of Congress's FRBR Display Tool.
If applied to ISBD (International Standard for Bibliographic Description), AACR and FRANAR (Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records), FRBR will have a strong impact on cataloguing standards and information retrieval over the next twenty years.
4th UK Cataloguing and Indexing Standards Forum Update on AACR Sally Strutt, who chairs the CILIP/British Library Committee on AACR, described the changes in the pipeline for 2004 and 2005 and gave a broad overview of future developments for AACR.
While 2004 revisions, to be published this August, focus on Chapter 9 (electronic resources) and multipart items, 2005 revisions will include changes to allow unusual capitalisation and to make explicit the designations of function (AACR2 21.0D).
Sally announced that the project to develop a new edition of AACR is now underway with the working title AACR3: Resource Description and Access.
The overall aim of the project, due for completion in 2007, is to introduce a simplified principle-based approach to cataloguing, encouraging its use as a content standard for metadata schema, implementation of the FRBR model and international applicability.
MARC 21 Developments 2004 / ISBN-13 Alan Danskin, Manager of Data Quality, Collection Acquisition and Description at the British Library, pointed out that, as UNICODE is adopted by a growing number of library systems worldwide, it has become apparent that its implementations are restricted by the limited MARC-8 characters repertoire.
A range of proposals have been put forward in a Library of Congress report [4] on how to handle the transition and implement full UNICODE character encodings in MARC21.
In his critique of the proposals, Alan outlined the key issues underlying the transition and illustrated changes to the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format, with the introduction of a new version in November.
He proceeded to outline the benefits of the Metadata Authority Description Set [5], an XML schema for authority data influenced by FRBR and now available for review.
Finally, he announced that ISBN-13, a 13-digit form, will replace ISBN-10 on 1 January 2007, and will also appear on publications prior to that date [6].
Collection-level Description Collection level: Library Collections, catalogue, clumps, and common information environments On the following day, Gordon Dunsire, Deputy Director, Centre for Digital Library Research, University of Strathclyde, introduced the concept of collection-level description (CLD), defined as 'metadata at the level of aggregation'.
CLD enables resource retrieval, discovery and landscaping at the level of aggregation, and therefore presents some advantages over item-level description, particularly in distributed digital information environments.
Gordon described the development of information services in the UK, which include the Scottish Collections Network (SCONE) and JISC Information Environment (JISC IE), to illustrate the possible applications of CLDs and their outcomes.
Collection level: Museum Collections descriptions at the Natural History Museum: a practical application Rachel Perkins of the Natural History Museum then gave a persuasive presentation about the benefits of CLD to museums and its extension to all domains, including libraries, archives and digital and electronic collections.
She described its uses as a collection and record management tool.
Rachel concluded that CLD provides added value to museum services by encouraging the use of records across departments, thus preventing duplication, facilitating auditing of objects and resources, increasing security and enabling data capture.
Linnaeus Link Project: An international cooperative initiative to improve access to the works of Linnaeus and his students Cathy Broad of the Linnaen Society of London, ended the morning session by describing the Linnaeus Link Project [7], based at the Natural History Museum.
Its aim is to create a comprehensive union catalogue of Linnaean publications held in both national institutions and special collections worldwide and provide access through a free international Web resource.
There will also be added information on every significant collection of published works, manuscripts and specimen.
New and Emerging Standards: Government Category List (GCL) The View from the Centre Stella Dextre Clarke, Information Consultant to the Cabinet Office, outlined the development of e-Government Metadata Standards (e-GMS) [8] and the Government Category List (GCL) for content management as part of the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF), which aims to provide citizens with access to information held by every public body by 2004.
GCL is a simple citizen-oriented taxonomy which consists of just 400 categories covering the whole of the UK public sector.
It uses natural language rather than a controlled vocabulary and enables browsing rather than precise searching.
Although guidance is provided in GCL maintenance, meta-tagging and software selection criteria, its implementation will pose some serious challenges.
Local Government Case Study The last presentation of the day was by Mary Rowlatt, Strategic Information Manager, who described how Essex County Council responded to the challenge of adopting e-GMS to develop seamlessUK Citizen's Information Gateway in cooperation with eight other local authorities and other partners.
The system is designed to provide local and national data in one search and enable browsing.
Its taxonomy, which is displayed on the screen during a search, includes 2,800 terms and their synonyms.
Mary reported problems experienced in getting organisations to apply metadata consistently and suggested a combined GCL/LGCL/seamlessUK list of terms and semi-automated metadata tagging as possible solutions.
Professional Education Renaissance or Enlightenment?
The re-emergence of unique professional skills Biddy Fisher, Head of Academic Services and Development, Sheffield Hallam University, looked at professional education from the employer's perspective.
She started by examining the findings of research carried out in the context of the CILIP Professional Development Framework, and pointed out that three of five elements of the Body of Professional Knowledge listed by researchers are part of cataloguing and classification work: Organisation and representation of conceptual knowledge Document processing Collection management Biddy emphasised the need for cataloguers with information organisation and retrieval skills in digital environments.
She also described the personal qualities, knowledge and experience required by employers, notably critical thinking, awareness of organisational imperatives, project working, and creative problem solving.
The Education of Cataloguers Rodney Brunt, Leeds Metropolitan University, then put forward the educator's perspective, presenting a convincing case for the inclusion of the formal teaching of cataloguing in library and information studies curricula.
He emphasised the essential role of cataloguing as the means by which the existence of all other library services is made possible.
Rodney stated that original cataloguers will always be needed, regardless of current trends towards the development of new library services and outsourcing.
Cataloguing principles and practice are also relevant to the development and application of metadata schema, Web site design, reader education, controlled vocabularies, machine-readable codes and other professional activities.
He urged cataloguers to market their skills by contributing to current developments and publicising the outcomes and benefits of the services they deliver.
Outsourcing In the closing session Lesley White, Managing Director, Bibliographic Data Services (BDS), described the impact of outsourcing on library services, its history and potential benefits.
She expressed the view that outsourcing enhances the catalogue by maintaining high standards of accuracy, currency and integrity at a time when the introduction of new standards and bibliographic tools has made cataloguing a more complex task which fewer practitioners are able to undertake.
One of the most exciting outcomes of outsourcing is the incorporation of Scandisk technology aiming to make the catalogue more attractive to users and the use of dynamic XML, which has made it possible for data to be stored remotely and accessed from the library catalogue.
Conclusion The conference was well worth attending, although the terminology used in some of the presentations on complex technical subjects constituted a challenge, while nonetheless offering opportunities for further exploration.
It attracted delegates from a variety of backgrounds and institutions, facilitating networking and communication across sectors.
Participants made favourable comments on the affordability of the event, the excellent catering arrangements at the University of Bath and how much they enjoyed social functions such as the reception, sponsored by Bibliographic Data Services (BDS), and the conference dinner.
Special thanks ought to go to Diane Tough, Head of Cataloguing, Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum, for her part in organising the conference and dealing effectively with all sorts of unforeseen situations.
Many of the presentations can be accessed at the CILIP CIG Web site [1].
Conference papers are due for publication in the next few issues of Catalogue & Index: periodical of CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group.
References Indexing and Cataloguing Group Web Site http://www.cilip.org.uk/groups/cig/cig.html IFLA FRBR Review Group Web Site http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/wgfrbr/wgfrbr.htm IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.
Functional requirements for bibliographic records: final report http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm Cain, J.
Assessment of options for handling full UNICODE Character Encodings in MARC 21: a study for Library of Congress.
Part 1: New Scripts http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2004/2004-report01.pdf Metadata Authority Description Schema http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/ Editor's note: Ann Chapman of UKOLN will be addressing ISBN-13 in an article in issue 41 of Ariadne.
Linnaeus Link Project http://www.nhm.ac.uk/library/linn/ e-Government Metadata Standard http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/metadata.asp Author Details Paola Stillone Senior Library Assistant (Cataloguing) Medical Library Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust and Royal Free and University College Medical School of UCL Email: P.Stillone@medsch.ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/medicalschool/facilities/rfhmedlib/ Return to top Article Title: "The Future of Cataloguing" Author: Paola Stillone Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/cilip-cig-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 38: The Quality of Metadata Is Not Strained Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 38: The Quality of Metadata Is Not Strained Buzz data software xml archives metadata accessibility repositories eprints oai-pmh z39.50 perl e-learning dspace interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 38.
At a time when long-running institutions such as Ariadne are understandably mindful of their independence [1], the decision not to persist in the editorial inclination to lead on articles slightly at a tangent to the main thrust of Ariadne’s work might be considered craven.
However, under any other circumstances it might justifiably have been considered perverse and hence I begin by drawing your attention to the article by Marieke Guy, Andy Powell and Michael Day.
In proffering suggestions for Improving the Quality of Metadata in Eprint Archives they take us away from considerations of the cultural and institutional barriers to self-archiving which have restricted the proliferation of eprint archives in the UK and concentrate on ways to ensure that the metadata created is of a standard that supports service providers in meeting the needs of their end-users.
Although they consider in passing the usefulness of current metadata creation tools, they prefer to emphasise the effectiveness of clear user requirements, careful assessment and objective judgement of the existing eprint archive metadata and their ability to satisfy the aforementioned users’ requirements.
Therefore functionally correct metadata will not be strained but evolve naturally from their approach to its creation.
Failure to adhere to an effective quality assurance cycle and the concept of interoperability may lead to a ‘collision’ of metadata formats that is waiting to happen.
Meanwhile Ed Summers takes us from metadata creation to harvesting in Building OAI-PMH Harvesters with Net::OAI::Harvester in which he describes this Perl package for easy interaction with OAI-PMH repositories and gives examples of the relative ease with which it is possible to write short programs that will carry out each of the six verbs associated with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
Ed maintains that while not for the light-hearted, itis also possible to extend the package to work with any XML-based metadata format.
On a parallel tack we learn from Britta Woldering that the OAI-PMH has turned out to be the protocol of choice for The European Library where it was used to by the Library for the harvesting of metadata for the central index of resources that were not available through Z39.50.
Britta takes us from the rationale of the TEL Project through its aims to its conclusions, and happily, its future work now that the actual project period has terminated.
Of particular interest is the problem that the Project was formed to solve: how to overcome the difficulties posed by the heterogenous nature of access to data in respect of partner libraries right across Europe.
Britta’s description of metadata development and the overall technical solution in this project will be of interest.
Ever keen to see topics raised in one issue revisited in another, I can advise readers who appreciated William Nixon’s piece in issue 37 on DAEDALUS: Initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace may very well do the same with Richard Jones ‘ article on DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations I will not steal his thunder by writing about his conclusions.
For those not conversant with its work, the 5⁄99 Programme would perhaps mean very little, but Rachel Bruce and Balviar Notay are able to give us a better answer than most to The JISC 5⁄99 Programme: What’s in a number?.
They examine what might be termed the programme’s identity crisis and its causes and comment on many of the projects which have developed through the programme into much greater things.
They measure its effectiveness against the benchmark implied by Chris Rusbridge in the 5⁄99 circular: ‘consistent access to the widest range of stuff’.
Of particular note to colleagues working in the Further Education sector, it has been possible to offer not only a lead article from Mark Williams on What the Resource Discovery Network is Doing for Further Education but also supplementary and parallel articles from each of the RDN hubs who describe what their particiular subject service has on offer.
We are also fortunate to have articles from Tracey Stanley, Mina Sotiriou and Matthew Dovey on The Portole Project: Supporting e-learning and Alastair Dunning, who explains how The AHDS is Evolving.
Once again I am indebted to the writers of our regular columns and equally to those of another large crop of at the Event articles.
With another hat on I am also keen to direct you to a pair of articles on accessibility issues which most certainly repay careful reading: How Accessible Are Australian University Web Sites?
by Dey Alexander and Developing and Publicising a Workable Accessibility Strategy by Lawrie Phipps, Sue Harrison, David Sloan and Betty Willder represent a wealth of of useful information on this increasingly important topic.
All the above of course supported by contributions from Web Focus and an expanded Newsline section followed by three further reviews of books of possible interest to our readers.
Once again this issue comes to you thanks to the commitment of its authors together with support from colleagues at UKOLN, in particular Shirley Keane for her work on the news section.
I hope you will enjoy it.
References ‘Hutton will affect BBC charter’, BBCi News, 30 January, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3444219.stm Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Editorial: “Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 38: The Quality of Metadata Is Not Strained” Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue38/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Preservation: Best Practice and Its Dissemination Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Preservation: Best Practice and Its Dissemination Buzz data dissemination archives digitisation preservation curation url research Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie describes the development and subsequent use of a digital preservation handbook and future plans for expansion of its use in training and professional practice.
Digital information is increasingly important to our culture, knowledge base and economy.
Long-term management of this material is a vital part of curation practice.
This paper outlines the development and subsequent use of an international guide to digital preservation Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook [1] and its use in training and professional practice.
The Handbook was published in 2001 in hard copy by The British Library and is also available digitally online via the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) [2].
It has been used as the basis of a series of one-day training workshops organised by the DPC in the UK and will shortly be integrated into the development of a modular digital preservation training course organised jointly by the University of London Computer Centre, Cornell University, The British Library, and the DPC.
In addition the Handbook has been used extensively internationally in both its print and electronic form by institutions and individuals for personal development and taught courses.
The Handbook is intended to help institutions and their staff to manage the rapidly increasing volume of information which exists in digital form.
Whether created as a result of digitising non-digital collections, created as a digital publication, or created as part of the day-to-day business of an organisation, more and more information is being created digitally and the pace at which it is being created is accelerating.
This activity is occurring in an environment in which there is a growing awareness of the significant challenges associated with ensuring continued access to these materials, even in the short term.
The combination of these two factors is both challenging and troublesome.
On the one hand, there are considerable opportunities offered by digital technology to provide rapid and efficient access to information.
On the other hand, there is a very real threat that the digital materials will be created in such a way that not even their short-term viability can be assured, much less the prospect that future generations will also have access to them.
The need to create and have widespread access to digital materials has raced ahead of the level of general awareness and understanding of what it takes to manage them effectively.
A clear picture has emerged of a complex and rapidly changing environment in which those creating and/or acquiring digital resources will require guidance in how to manage those resources most effectively.
Given this conjunction of factors, it seemed timely in 1999 to embark on a writing a Handbook which aimed at both identifying good practice in creating, managing and preserving digital materials as well as providing a range of practical tools to assist in that process.
The Handbook was produced at a time when an important body of experience was emerging from recent research projects into digital preservation and from established data archives in the sciences and social sciences.
Although many challenges remain, it is now possible to point to many examples of good practice and to suggest ways in which institutions can begin to address digital preservation.
By providing a strategic overview of the key issues, discussion and guidance on strategies and activities, and pointers to key projects and reports, the Handbook aims to provide guidance for institutions and individuals and a range of tools to help them identify and take appropriate actions.
An Advisory Group consisting of experts in the field of digital preservation was formed, all of whom had first-hand knowledge of the range of complex issues involved.
An early decision was that a Handbook would be the most appropriate mechanism to provide the range of advice and guidance required for such a diverse audience.
Research to compile the Handbook combined traditional desktop research, using the World Wide Web as a source of freely available current information, as well as subscription-based print and electronic journals, supplemented by case studies and specialist interviews.
Three very different case studies were selected to help develop the practical nature of the Handbook and to ensure that it addressed key issues currently being faced by organisations.
Through structured interviews with selected specialists, workshops and conference presentations, and the case studies, it was possible to gauge the overall level of awareness and understanding of digital preservation and to transfer that knowledge to the development of the Handbook.
A consultation period for peer review and assessment of a pre-publication draft was provided.
Comments were also accepted up until the end of the project to allow those wishing to comment to do so.
Figure 1: Cover of the print edition of Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook In general, the research for the Handbook found that the level of awareness of and interest in digital preservation is gradually increasing but is not keeping pace with the level of digital resource creation.
In particular, institutions that have not played a role in preserving traditional collections do not have a strong sense of playing a role in preserving digital materials.
Individual researchers were keen to 'do the right thing' but frequently lacked the clear guidance and institutional backing to enable them to feel confident of what they should be doing.
The difficulties of allocating responsibilities for preservation and maintenance in an environment in which digital resource creation is frequently a by-product of collaborative projects, which may well be funded by yet another external agency, was also mentioned.
Overall, it appears that there is still a need to raise the level of awareness of digital preservation, particularly among funding agencies and senior administrators with responsibility for the strategic direction of an institution.
This needs to be combined with more detailed guidance and training at the operational level.
Moreover, the guidance needs to be able to accommodate people with varying levels of awareness and understanding of digital preservation, in a wide range of institutional settings, all of whom have significant constraints on their time.
Audience and Purpose Digital preservation has many parallels with traditional preservation in matters of broad principle but differs markedly at the operational level and never more so than in the wide range of decision makers who play a crucial role at various stages in the lifecycle of a digital resource.
Consequently, the Handbook is aiming at a very broad audience.
In the first instance it is intended to provide guidance to institutions at national, regional and local levels which are involved in or are contemplating creation or acquisition of digital materials.
Within those institutions, the Handbook is aiming at both administrators and practitioners and is accordingly structured to include a mix of high-level strategic overviews and detailed guidance.
In addition, the Handbook is aimed at service providers who may be in a position to provide all or part of the services needed to preserve digital materials.
It is also relevant to funding agencies which will need to be aware of the implications of creation of digital materials.
Finally, it will be of interest to data creators whose involvement in the preservation of their digital publications is still crucial, despite being restricted by the overarching business needs of their organisation.
The Handbook fully recognises that these groups may have different interests and involvement with digital materials at different times.
By adopting the life-cycle approach to digital preservation it aims to help identify dependencies, barriers and mechanisms to assist communication and collaboration between these communities.
The need to tailor the Handbook to the needs of individual institutions, including those where digital preservation may be outsourced and those where digital preservation may only be short-term, means that the Handbook needs to be seen as acting as a catalyst for further concerted action within and between institutions.
The broad issues associated with digital preservation are global in nature and examples of good practice, research activity and sources of advice and guidance have been drawn from around the world.
However there is a UK focus in terms of the background to the study and some examples, e.g.
legislation, are UK-specific.
The text of the Handbook indicates a UK focus whenever relevant.
The Handbook has proved relevant to an international audience: many of the models and references provided are not UK-based and are in any case applicable to any country.
Wherever their country of origin, the users of the Handbook will need to tailor it to their specific needs.
The overall theme of the Handbook is that while the issues are complex and much remains to be clarified (and may never be definitively resolved), there is nevertheless much that has already been achieved and much that can be undertaken immediately by all involved in creating or acquiring digital materials.
This activity will help to protect the initial investment in digital materials creation and offer considerably improved prospects for the long term.
Major Objectives of the Handbook 1.
Awareness raising: as mentioned earlier, this was regarded as still being very necessary and relating largely to the considerably different approach needed for digital preservation than that for traditional preservation.
The word 'preservation' seems not to resonate with people who are not archivists or preservation managers.
They tend to assume a traditional model of preservation: an 'end of the line' activity, undertaken by highly specialised staff, that does not really involve them to any degree.
In reality, digital preservation is very different from this traditional model: it requires intervention and management at, or close, to the point of creation, and the active engagement of a wider range of players who are not preservation specialists.
So this Handbook plays a role in trying to reach a large number of people who may not, to date, have considered that digital preservation has anything to do with them.
2.
Collating existing relevant advice and guidance: there is a great deal of helpful information out there, especially in terms of creating digital resources.
But these resources are not necessarily readily accessible, especially to those people who are relatively new to this area.
The sheer volume of information can be quite bewildering so an important aim is to help people navigate their way through the mass of existing information, making it simpler to find the resource which best suits their particular purpose.
3.
Providing advice and guidance: in addition to providing links to guidance documents which already exist, the Handbook aims to provide guidance in the form of a decision tree, checklists and tables which go through the stages in creating and acquiring digital resources, drawing attention to issues which may not necessarily have been thought of.
A major theme running through the Handbook is that it is much better to take decisions as early as possible, preferably at creation, to avoid the risk of losing access to the digital material at a relatively early stage.
4.
Empowering organisations to take action: this final aim is an important one, given the complexity of the issues and the speed of developments.
It would be easy to simply defer developing any corporate policies and strategies relating to digital preservation until the whole scene has settled down and the results of research are known.
This is an area where this Handbook meshes quite well with the Cedars [3] and CAMiLEON [4] projects, which have conducted critically important research into preservation methods.
In particular their work has been crucial in helping to identify the most appropriate long-term digital preservation strategies for particular categories of digital materials.
However it is important for institutions to know that they can and should take some action now; they do not need to wait until everything is resolved.
Indeed there is likely to continue to be a state of uncertainty and rapid change for the foreseeable future, but that need not prevent institutions from developing an approach to creating and acquiring digital materials based on sound principles and policies.
This approach will help to provide those materials with a significantly improved chance of survival.
Figure 2: Digitisation checklist: an example of guidance and tools in the Handbook Testing and Feedback on the Handbook A consultation period for peer review and assessment of a pre-publication draft was provided between 8 August and 4 September 2000.
A total of sixty-seven individuals, including the advisory group, case study interviewees, and a number of experts either in digital preservation or a related area of expertise, were invited to comment on the Handbook.
The invited respondents represented a very diverse geographic and sectoral constituency, in keeping with the broad audience the Handbook intended.
A total of twenty-seven responses were received by the end of September 2000, representing around a 40% response rate.
The overall quality of the responses was very high with several incredibly detailed commentaries.
The value of this feedback, in terms of testing the effectiveness of the Handbook and providing constructive suggestions for improvements, would be difficult to overestimate.
Sales and Reviews The work undertaken to road-test the Handbook as a pre-publication draft has paid substantial dividends both in terms of reviews and subsequent sales.
Reviews of the Handbook have been exceptionally positive and over 1,300 copies of the print edition of the Handbook have now been sold.
Sales have been pre-dominantly to the UK, elsewhere in Europe, and North America, as follows: UK and mainland Europe 1021 North America 375 Web Version of the Handbook In such a rapidly developing environment, it was clearly necessary to maintain the Handbook to ensure its currency.
This has been achieved through an electronic version and supporting materials available on the Web, which are updated on a regular basis to ensure currency of Web references and cited projects.
A commercial link-checking service has been used to provide monthly reports on broken and modified url links cited in the Handbook.
These reports are then used as the basis for making updates to the electronic edition.
It is envisaged that part of the development of the training course noted below will be to undertake a more extensive process of reviewing and extending the content of the Handbook.
This will effectively produce the first major new edition of the Handbook online.
Digital Preservation Coalition Training Workshops The DPC was formed in 2001 as a membership organisation [5].
Its mission is to foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base.
From its foundation one of its goals has been producing and disseminating information on current research and practice as well as building expertise among its members to accelerate their learning and generally widen the pool of professionals skilled in digital preservation.
The DPC responded to the recognised need for training by organising one-day training workshops for its members.
The one-day workshop was structured around the Handbook which was provided in advance of the workshop to participants.
Presenters spoke on aspects of digital preservation, such as myths and legends, developing policies, advocacy and awareness raising, as well as roles and responsibilities.
Breakout groups worked through developing a policy together with a matrix of roles and responsibilities for different categories of digital materials.
Each workshop included a practical case study provided by the host institution.
The workshops were limited to a maximum of 30 participants, and were held in Belfast, Edinburgh and London.
Structured feedback on the workshops was obtained via delegate evaluation forms.
These demonstrated very positive feedback on the Handbook and the workshops but also highlighted the opportunity for more extensive training to be developed.
Training Needs Analysis At the same time, a number of reports and studies funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under its Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy had identified training in long-term management and preservation of digital assets as a major issue for the Higher and Further Education sector in the UK [6].
It remains difficult to recruit individuals with appropriate skills and the need for such skills is growing.
The potential impact of this long-term skills gap on institutions in the UK was likely to be severe and is a cross-sectoral issue.
Concurrently, a DPC survey of its members also revealed the need for training as a high priority.
Consequently, both the JISC and the DPC wished to explore commissioning the development of a training programme for their respective constituencies.
As a founding member of the DPC, the JISC recognised that such an initiative would benefit from input from a wide range of partners within the membership and might ultimately be more sustainable on a cross-sectoral basis.
The JISC therefore grant-aided the DPC and Cornwell Management Consultants plc to prepare a study of training needs and a report with recommendations.
The purpose of the project was to determine training needs for digital preservation, determine the course content as well as identify training providers, delivery methods and likely training costs.
The consultants gathered information by surveying and interviewing selected Subject Matter Experts identified by the DPC and JISC.
They developed a semi-structured interview questionnaire and a short survey.
These aimed to elicit the challenges faced by interviewees, their perceptions of various strategies for digital preservation, and implications for training provision.
Following completion of the analysis of these inputs, the consultants developed a course outline, and contacted potential suppliers (selected in agreement with DPC and JISC) to request training course design and estimated costs.
The final report was then published on the JISC Web site [7].
Next Steps: A Modular Digital Preservation Training Programme In the summer of 2003 JISC issued a call for proposals for Projects in Supporting Institutional Digital Preservation and Asset Management [8].
One theme of the call invited proposals for 'Training programmes for staff development, aimed at developing the appropriate level of knowledge and skills necessary for digital preservation and asset management at institutions.'
A proposal in response to the call was submitted by a consortium led by the University of London Computer Centre.
This proposal was successful and is now underway.
It will develop a modular training programme in digital preservation, with class-taught, online and off-line components to meet the needs identified in the training needs analysis study, carried out by Cornwell Management Consultants.
It builds on existing exemplars of training and information provision, including the Cornell University digital preservation course, the DPC's one-day workshop, the Handbook, and existing training from JISC-funded services.
The training will be developed at multiple levels, to meet the needs of senior managers as well as practitioners and new staff.
By including self-paced material as well as taught components and group exercises, it will impart information in a way suited to a variety of requirements.
With the backing of the DPC, the course will be made available outside the JISC community, bringing in revenue which will aid the long-term sustainability of the project's outputs.
The Cornell Training Workshops and Online Tutorial, developed with National Endowment for the Humanities funding, offered a model for the kind of programme envisaged.
Excellent links have already been formed with the Cornell team by the UK consortium.
They propose building on this still further by developing with Cornell a core set of generic training modules, which can also be tailored for specific UK or US settings.
The intention is to develop a core set of training modules which are equally applicable in either country.
The modular content developed will include accommodating different skill levels (basic, intermediate, and advanced) and will also be aimed at different organisational staffing levels (senior managers, operational staff, technical/non technical staff).
The programme will produce a revised and updated online version of the Handbook, enabling not only more recent developments to be included, but also introducing interactive features.
It will also form the basis for some of the modules in the programme, enabling a structured and easily understood introduction to digital preservation and providing a continuing source of guidance following the training.
The DPC Web site already provides a focal point for digital preservation, so this will continue to be the primary mechanism for access to the online Handbook and details of the programme.
In summary, the following characteristics of the training programme will facilitate these wide-ranging requirements: Modular programme accommodating different levels of knowledge and expertise In collaboration with Cornell, development of a set of core modules Extensive use of practical case studies and visits Extensive use of UK, other European and overseas experts Limiting course attendance to a maximum of circa 25 delegates Developing the online edition of the Handbook to enable preparatory work and ongoing support and guidance post-training Conclusion The Handbook is part of a growing number of resources and initiatives focusing on digital preservation.
The increasing prominence given to digital preservation world wide is an indication of how seriously it is being treated.
There is unlikely ever to be a single definitive solution and certainly nothing will preclude the need for individual institutions to commit time and effort to addressing their specific requirements.
However there is now much to build on and increasing practical examples to provide both inspiration and guidance.
The analysis of training needs and feedback from existing training workshops in the UK have demonstrated the value of the Handbook both as a stand-alone tool and in conjunction with structured tuition.
The proposed future development of the Handbook and its integration with online tutorials and modular workshops promises to address a growing need in institutions.
The overall theme of the Handbook is that while the issues are complex and much remains to be clarified (and may never be definitively resolved), there is nevertheless much that can still be undertaken immediately.
This activity will help to protect the initial investment in digital resource creation, improve knowledge transfer between practitioners, and offer considerably improved prospects for the long-term management of these materials.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Maggie Jones and Kevin Ashley for reading and commenting on a preliminary draft of this article.
References Beagrie, N. and Jones, M. 2001, Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook (British Library, London) The online version of the Handbook can be accessed from the home page of the Digital Preservation Coalition Web site at http://www.dpconline.org/ The Cedars project completed in 2002.
The project Web site is at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/ The Camileon project completed in 2003.
The project Web site is at http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ Beagrie, N. 2002, An Update on the Digital Preservation Coalition, D-Lib Magazine Volume 8, Number 4, April 2002.
Available online from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/beagrie/04beagrie.html JISC 2002, The JISC Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy 2002-5.
The Strategy is available from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=pres_continuing Details of the feasibility studies funded under the Strategy are available from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_preservation Cornwell Consultants Ltd 2004, Digital Preservation Coalition Training Needs Analysis Final Report: A study funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, 251345v2.0 October 2004.
Available from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/finalReport.pdf JISC 2003, JISC Circular 4/04, Call for Projects in Supporting Institutional Digital Preservation and Asset Management.
Available online from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=funding_circular4_04 Author Details Neil Beagrie British Library/JISC Partnership Manager The British Library Email: neil.beagrie@bl.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk and http://www.bl.uk Return to top Article Title: "Digital Preservation: Best Practice and its Dissemination" Author: Neil Beagrie Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/beagrie/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Repositories: Dealing With the Digital Deluge Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Repositories: Dealing With the Digital Deluge Buzz data metadata tagging repositories preservation mis curation eportfolio research Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff gives an overall view of the multi-stranded JISC conference held in Manchester over 5-6 June 2007.
It was that rare thing, a sunny morning in Manchester, and it was almost with regret that I entered the dark entrance hall of the Manchester Conference Centre in search of coffee and the start of the JISC conference Digital Repositories: Dealing with the Digital Deluge [1].
Day One Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation [2], and co-author of the JISC Digital Repositories Roadmap [3] kicked off by suggesting that ‘roadmap’ documents in this domain should be treated like satellite navigation systems rather than a traditional paper-based route planners [4].
SatNav comes with the ability to adapt to wrong turns, changing road conditions and, presumably, the simple desire of the driver to make unscheduled stops at interesting places.
It is an interesting and useful metaphor I think, highlighting the need to be agile and adaptable in the shifting sands of IT and the Web.
The road conditions are changing, particularly with the emergence of ‘Web 2.0’ [5] and all that this increment implies, and because of this, Andy suggested, revisiting the roadmap would be no bad thing.
Having thus justified the need to critique the roadmap (and I got the impression that such a critique was welcomed by the delegation, but that could just have been me), Andy continued, after a summary of the key milestones, to suggest that while the policy, cultural and legal milestones remain valid, perhaps the technical milestones needed rethinking.
“Web 2.0” is user-centric.
To the end-user a repository is essentially just another Web page.
Therefore, Andy argued, shouldn’t we be trying to make our repositories more user-centric too?
This means not worrying too much about preservation as a function of the repository, not worrying too much about metadata aside from simple tagging, and trying, instead to create compelling, “obvious and intuitive” repositories that people will want to use.
It was a rousing start, and refreshing to see a little controversy introduced early on in a conference focussed on a much hyped topic.
After this the work began for real for the delegates this meant ploughing through the conference programme and trying to work out which parts of the seven parallel strands to follow; for the events staff this meant trying to shepherd some two hundred people into the right rooms in effective but unobtrusive ways, ensuring the tight schedule was kept.
In this task the events staff performed admirably, though occasionally it felt like being the last in the bar at closing time.
Sometimes I felt breakout session conversations were cut short and sometimes a mysterious person arriving at the back of the room to indicate “5 minutes” remaining, was distracting, other times a welcome relief.
However one felt about the interruptions, one could not help but notice that the conference, in spite of the complexity of the programme, ran to schedule.
The crowded nature of the programme (the conference Web page lists some 48 Power Point files linked from it, and this is not all of the presentations by a long way) was reflected in the breakout sessions, where (at least on the two strands I visited) it felt that rapid-fire presentations took precedence over exploration of the issues.
This was, presumably, to ensure as many of the projects as possible were represented and it is true to say that the sessions left a sense of awe at the high quality of the digital repository work.
However, some of the breakout rooms were a little dark, small and crowded testament, perhaps, to the popularity of some of the strands.
It would be impossible for me to cover the details of the strands here so I am not going to try, especially when it has been done already by the rapporteurs at the sessions and I would recommend you read these as they are excellent summaries of life in those dark rooms [6].
The second plenary of the day, by Professor Keith Jeffery [7] of the Science and Technology Facilities Council [8], presented both starkly different and strikingly similar points of view to Andy Powell’s first session.
Professor Jeffery agreed with Andy in his support of repositories, stating that the advancement of research supported by the creation of repositories can fuel innovation, generate wealth and improve quality of life.
Big claims perhaps, but claims we want to believe nonetheless; otherwise why were we there?
The difference was that where Andy suggested repositories should be learning from the informal, user-centric developments of the “Web 2.0” community, Professor Jeffery, informed by his work with euroCRIS [9], a European initiative examining and specifying a research information system, of which a repository is an integral part, argued for a large, institution-centric system, relying on detailed (presumably expert-created) semantic metadata to facilitate discovery and integration of repositories in the research workflow.
This “Current Research Information System”, or CRIS, is designed to interoperate with other CRISs at other institutions.
Taken together, the plenaries from day one provided a balanced view of where repositories may sit in the Web of the future, and provided two very interesting positions.
What was reassuring was that both speakers, while coming from different places, readily converged on the need for repositories and how they may be achieved and there is no reason why large formal systems could not underpin informal access points as institutional-scale management information systems may underpin address books.
Perhaps the talks were not so different after all.
Immediately after Professor Jeffery, we were treated to the formal launch of “The Depot” [10], a new JISC service aimed at bridging the gap between an academic community that has a desire to deposit e-prints into a repository and the institution that is still in the process of developing one.
The Depot is useful in promoting self-deposit prior to, or as part of, institutional repository development and has the added advantage of providing persistent links to papers submitted, even if they are subsequently deposited into an institutional repository.
Day Two Day two, a half day, began with a rally call by Professor James Drummond Bone [11], President of Universities UK [12].
His high-level talk discussed why UK Higher Education should be interested in repositories, providing the rationale for the projects represented at the conference.
It was reassuring to hear that repositories were starting to be addressed by an organisation like Universities UK, and the reasons presented were compelling, grounded as they were in current political and economic thinking (for example repositories to support e-portfolios [13]) as well as ethical and evangelical notions of Open Access [14].
However, there was recognition of the potential controversy of repositories, and when pushed by a question from the floor, Professor Bone admitted ‘one is running a business as well as an intellectual endeavour’, acknowledging that research and research data can give an institution the ‘business edge’.
The final plenary of the conference came just before the farewell lunch, with Rachel Bruce and Neil Jacobs presenting how they saw JISC delivering the ‘Roadmap Vision’ [15], addressing some of the more controversial things to arise at the conference: “We don’t need metadata” and “Other [non-repository] people can handle preservation”, extreme forms of the “Let us learn from Web 2.0” argument The programme was “a bit of a failure” because there is no content in the repositories “Let us ignore the legal issues and just get on with it” There seems to be an increasing need to juggle the traditional, institutionalised buzzwords like “curation”, “open access” and “reward structures” with the modern, agile innovation and glossy success of Web 2.0.
The conference closed with the ubiquitous panel discussion session.
There is little doubt that as a showcase of the talent and hard work coming out of the JISC Digital Repositories projects the conference was an overwhelming success.
The sheer weight of the programme, coupled with the stature of the plenary speakers, stands testament to the importance of repositories and their role in supporting learning, teaching and (especially) research, to the JISC and the Higher Education community.
The conference also highlighted the diverse ways in which repositories may be created and used, be that as part of a mash-up of repository ‘services’ or integrated into a formal information system.
References JISC ‘Digital Respositories: Dealing with the Digital Deluge’ http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2007/06/repositories_conference.aspx Eduserv Foundation http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ Digital Repositories Roadmap, Rachel Heery and Andy Powell, April 2006 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/publications/roadmap-200604/ The Repository Road Map: are we heading in the right direction, Andy Powell, June 2007 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2007/06/andy_powell_presentation.ppt “Web 2.0” Wikipedia entry, retrieved 13 August 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2 See “Session Notes” section on conference Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2007/06/repositories_conference.aspx Repositories in the Research Life Cycle, Professor Keith Jeffery, June 2007 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2007/06/keith_jeffery_presentation.ppt Science & Technology Facilites Council http://www.stfc.ac.uk/Home.aspx euroCRIS http://www.eurocris.org/ The Depot http://www.depot.ac.uk The role of repositories in supporting research, teaching and learning in UK universities, Prof. Drummond Bone, presentation, JISC Repositories Conference, 6 June 2007 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2007/06/drummond_bone_ppt.ppt Universities UK http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/ JISC briefing paper: e-Portfolios: What institutions really need to know, March 2006 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-BP-ePortfolio-v1-final.pdf Open Access, Wikipedia entry, retrieved 13 August 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access and not the same as http://www.openaccess.gov.uk/ unfortunately!
Progressing Towards the Roadmap Vision, Rachel Bruce and Neil Jacobs, June 2007 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2007/06/rachelbruce_neiljacobs_presentation.ppt Author Details Pete Cliff UKOLN Email: p.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Digital Repositories: Dealing with the Digital Deluge” Author: Pete Cliff Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/digital-deluge-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Successful Academic Librarian Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Successful Academic Librarian Buzz framework research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Town finds this US multi-author work may not meet the needs of readers in the UK, and offers some ideas which a UK version might incorporate.
Never judge a book by its cover?
In this case the cover contains some apt symbolism for what one might expect from this US multi-author text.
Presumably the picture on the front is supposed to be the eponymous 'successful academic librarian', well-groomed and smartly suited, climbing the rungs of the career ladder.
The aluminium ladder itself looks more suitable for DIY, but perhaps this is also accurate, as this work is very much a positive view of how to take your career in hand and develop it.
However the mischievous might question whether this is a case of being all dressed up but with nowhere to go after the top rung.
Gwen Meyer Gregory leads a team of eighteen other contributors.
Ms Gregory's biography indicates previous publications and a broad career in academic and special librarianship culminating in Head of Bibliographic Services at Colorado College.
In keeping with the homely style of the book, we also know she has a dog.
The other contributors are mainly middle-ranking library staff from a broad range of institutions.
I would question the implied contention in the title that these are leading thinkers in US academic librarianship, but perhaps that is not necessary in what is intended to be a practical career manual.
Part One starts with 'The basics getting off to a good start'.
This encompasses five chapters: the first covers 'job responsibilities' by Rebecca Miller and Nancy Bohm; the second 'collaborative relationships with faculty' by Elizabeth Hutchins; 'research' and 'publication' by Joan Beam and Cathy Cranston; 'service' by Michelle Mach; and 'faculty status, promotion and tenure' by Gwen Gregory and Mary Beth Chambers.
Part 2 is entitled 'Things to think about getting and keeping a great job'.
Six chapters here: the first on 'interviews' by Karl Bridges; the second on 'mentors' by Verla Peterson; 'continuing education' by Kris Swank contains some bullet point 'sidebars' , an approach which would have benefited the work if adopted throughout; 'unions' by Tina Hovekamp; 'career documentation' by McKinley Sielaff; and a final 'Up North' chapter on US and Canadian contrasts.
The Canadian experience seems more akin to our own.
Part Three on 'Tales from the trenches academic librarians share their stories' appears inviting, but I found the promise of a share of useful experience here mainly unfulfilled.
The four chapters here include: 'notes from a cataloguer' by Wendy Baia; 'tenure in the library' by Molly Molloy; 'moving to the academy in mid-careeer' by Anna Gold; and 'a view from the top' by Benjamin Wakashige and Emily Asch.
There is a brief preface and introduction, an afterword and an annotated bibliography containing one British item among the twenty-three citations.
There are some useful and interesting ideas presented.
The framework assumption that academic librarians will be required to involve themselves in not only the task, but also 'service', 'research' and 'teaching', and that these will be supported and encouraged by the Library Director are the positive benefits of the 'faculty status' and tenure environment in the US.
It does seem here in the UK that these activities are being increasingly squeezed out because they are viewed as extras rather than fundamental to the position.
'Service' here means not only professional activities, but also campus and what we would call extramural involvements.
The explicit assumption that academic librarians will be teaching at a minimum on information literacy programmes, and potentially also on academic programmes, is laudable, but may still be an optimistic aspiration in some UK contexts.
The book is mainly consistent in style.
This may not please all UK readers.
The unremittingly positive and intimate writing approach taken by most contributors might be described as 'folksy', but this also results in most contributions being less organised than this reviewer at least would have found valuable.
It also occasionally results in bizarre advice being offered, which while humorous, distracts from, rather than enhances, the message.
While most of the points made in most of the content might be viewed as sound, the deployment of a progressive argument or a clear development of points towards a conclusion often appears to be lacking.
Some of the clearer chapters are unfortunately the ones of least relevance to the UK context.
I would question whether this book contains 'strategies'.
While there may be an implicit strategy underpinning the work, most of the content is more a list of tactics and advice.
The book requires more shaping and organisation both within and across chapters to make it a coherent and accessible template for the successful academic librarian.
Because of its US basis and its overall style of approach, I would not recommend this book either to a UK or international audience or to my own staff or students.
My opinion is that there is a gap in the market for a UK version of this type of text.
It would be valuable to have a work to recommend to staff starting and progressing through the ranks of the academic library.
To be useful such a work would need in my view to clarify from a specific and practical (as opposed to a career progression) perspective what the tasks of being an information or subject specialist are, and what knowledge, skills and aptitudes are required for these; what other career paths and roles are currently open in both academic libraries and related services (particularly in converged or broader knowledge-based services) and how the requirements for these may differ; and most crucially what the differences in requirements are as one progresses up the ladder.
Thus the work might spell out the additional attributes needed to move from an individual role to leading a team; the implications of the next step to broader responsibility where the compromise between being a librarian and being a manager begins to bite; and the subsequent development required to attain and fulfil leadership positions where special pleading must be tempered by corporate responsibility, helpful responsiveness by political robustness, and detailed knowledge by a broader visionary perspective.
Author Details Stephen Town Director of Information Services, Defence College of Management & Technology, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom & Deputy University Librarian, Cranfield University UK Email: J.S.Town@cranfield.ac.uk Web site: http://diglib.shrivenham.cranfield.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The Successful Academic Librarian: Winning Strategies from Library Leaders" Author: Stephen Town Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/town-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Preservation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Preservation Buzz data archives metadata identifier repositories preservation research Citation BibTex RIS Maureen Pennock reviews a release in Facet's Digital Futures series.
Digital Preservation is a promising volume that will prove useful to information professionals wishing to learn more about digital preservation, particularly in a cultural heritage context.
This edited collection offers perspectives and overviews of different aspects of preservation, such as strategies, costs and metadata, by a select number of widely acknowledged experts.
Other chapters cover Web archiving and Web archiving initiatives, European approaches to preservation, and digital preservation projects from around the globe.
Overall the book is an interesting, if somewhat segmented, read.
Chapter One provides a fairly detailed introduction to the subject of digital preservation.
Written by editors Marilyn Deegan and Simon Tanner, this chapter acts as a springboard for subsequent chapters and encompasses some engaging and thought-provoking discussion of some of the key issues in digital preservation.
Much of the chapter is fairly academic, discussing such issues as authenticity, surrogacy, data complexity, legal issues, and asset value, but this is a good stimulus for those approaching this subject anew to consider how these matters may be relevant in their own organisations.
The chapter refers to numerous external initiatives and tools, including the Selection Decision Tree produced by the Digital Preservation Coalition and JISC/BL lifecycle collection management project (LIFE); it also offers sufficient references for readers later to locate external sources of information that provide more detail.
Chapter Two by David Holdsworth is a fascinating discussion of strategies for digital preservation.
The chapter does not focus on the traditional options for preservation strategies namely migration, emulation, printing to paper and technology museums perhaps because these are already explored in Chapter One.
It offers instead a more technical overview of a specific approach developed by Holdsworth and colleagues over a number of research projects.
This rather technical approach, which is integrated with certain aspects of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model, requires preservation of original data objects as byte streams alongside sufficient representation information to enable the significant properties of the object to be rendered as an integral whole at a later date.
Although efforts have certainly been made to make this chapter widely accessible, it is without doubt the most technical chapter in the book and certain elements may to be too technical for readers without practical and technical experience.
Chapter Three explores a very different facet of digital preservation, that of preservation metadata.
Authored by Robin Wendler, the chapter provides readers with an overview of the state of the art in preservation metadata within the digital library community.
Much of the thinking in this chapter appears based on the author's own experiences with preservation metadata research, particularly development of the PREMIS preservation metadata data model and dictionary.
This is no bad thing.
The chapter also introduces a number of related metadata standards and initiatives for different preservation purposes and different types of digital objects.
Chapters Four and Five are dedicated to archiving a particular type of digital resource: Web sites.
Chapter Four by Julien Masanès identifies the characteristics of Web sites as a particular digital resource type, and describes some strategies for collecting and storing Web content.
Discussion of preservation per se is minimal, perhaps because most Web archiving activities have not yet reached the stage where preservation actions (for example, migration to combat obsolescence of downloadable files such as hosted text documents) are in place.
Chapter Five by Elisa Mason introduces some of the main international initiatives in Web archiving, including the PANDORA archive at the National Library of Australia, the UK Web archiving initiative UKWAC, the Kulturarw Project to harvest and collect Web sites from the National Library of Sweden, the Minerva Web preservation project at the US Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, and the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).
This is a brief yet useful overview of the main Web archiving initiatives and tools.
In Chapters Six and Seven, Brian F. Lavoie and Stephen Chapman offer complementary perspectives on digital preservation costing issues.
Lavoie discusses valuation and costs of digital preservation activities, with particular attention to how different strategies may impact on final costs.
Whilst it cannot offer any final answers on how much digital preservation will cost, this chapter does provide the reader with useful and broad-ranging insight into the factors that may affect digital preservation costs.
Chapman on the other hand, approaches the issue of digital preservation costs from a repository-based perspective, discussing different repository preservation service models and arguing that money must be made available to meet the challenge of preserving digital content.
In Chapter Eight, the book moves away from examining specific aspects of preservation and explores whether there is a particularly European approach to digital preservation.
Peter McKinney provides here a thoughtful overview of the European digital preservation landscape.
A select number of European projects are discussed, alongside the role of the European Commission as a funding and motivating body, and McKinney recounts some experiences acquired during the course of the ERPANET Project.
Finally, Chapter Nine by Jasmine Kelly and Elisa Mason provides brief overviews of over fifty digital preservation projects or initiatives from around the globe.
An extensive bibliography and list of references is also included, comprising a mix of Web sites, Web-accessible papers and print-only reports.
The main advantage of the book is its identification and discussion of some of the main issues in digital preservation, alongside an introduction to several national or international initiatives that address the problem.
This is not a book for digital preservation professionals; rather it is aimed at information managers, archivists and librarians, as well as others in the information and cultural world such as museum curators and students, who perhaps are already acquainted with some of the problems in digital preservation but need to increase their knowledge and understanding of main issues and current developments.
It is not, however, and does not claim to be, a practical manual, and should not be purchased with that expectation.
However some chapters do go some way towards solving specific problems that people may face in a given situation.
Overall, the book is a useful introduction to the multi-faceted nature of digital preservation and explains in varying detail the complexities of some of the issues that preservation encompasses.
The book has the advantage of providing a range of views from acknowledged experts in their given field, but suffers to a degree in terms of focus and continuity of thought.
This is to be expected from an edited anthology and it would be unreasonable to expect an edited work to be singing entirely from a single hymn sheet.
Deegan and Tanner do an admirable job in providing an initial and broad overview of the digital preservation challenge, which essentially gives readers a basic grasp of the issues and arms them with sufficient knowledge to understand subsequent chapters.
Yet there is little to bring together the subsequent individually authored chapters into a coherent whole, and future editions of the book would benefit from a conclusion to address this.
The promised 'case studies' referred to on the back cover are also somewhat disappointing: they do not go into great depth about the projects or initiatives they describe and are more of an introduction to archiving or preservation initiatives rather than preservation in a given institution or setting.
As is common with published works from a dynamic field, the fast pace of research and developments in digital preservation mean that some sections of the book have already begun to date: aspects of the chapters on preservation metadata and European approaches to digital preservation, for example, could already benefit from updating.
Furthermore, given the high profile and prolific rate of publications from many of the contributing experts, it is perhaps inevitable that information on several of the subjects discussed can also be found freely on the Web.
Despite this, identifying and discussing these issues as part of a collected and edited anthology should still be valuable for those who are new to the subject; and for those who wish to learn more about the current state of affairs and the main issues and trends in contemporary digital preservation.
The book remains valuable as a reflection of the state-of-the-art in digital preservation knowledge at a given period and is to be recommended for information professions who are not experts in the area but wish to develop their knowledge of the issues further.
This book will certainly enable them to do that.
Author Details Maureen Pennock Research Officer Digital Curation Centre UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.pennock@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Digital Preservation" Author: Maureen Pennock Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/pennock-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ISBN-13: New Number on the Block Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ISBN-13: New Number on the Block Buzz data software database metadata doi identifier copyright cataloguing z39.50 marc ebook z39.88 url standards Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman outlines the planned changes to the ISBN standard and its impact on the information community and the book trade.
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a unique machine-readable identification number, defined in ISO Standard 2108, which is applied to books.
As a result of electronic publishing and other changes in the publishing industry, the numbering capacity of the ISBN system is being consumed at a much faster rate than was originally anticipated when the standard was designed in the late 1960s.
While we will not run out of ISBNs tomorrow, it will happen before too long and plans are already in hand to provide a solution before the crisis point is reached.
However, since the solution is to re-structure the ISBN, this will have an impact to varying degrees on all users of ISBNs: publishers, distributors, booksellers, libraries, and suppliers of systems and software to the information community and the book trade.
Changing the ISBN The ISBN was first standardised in 1972 as ISO 2108 and last revised in 1992, using a 10-digit number structure.
A 10-digit ISBN (now starting to be referred to as ISBN-10) has, in theory, the capacity to assign 1 billion numbers.
However, the internal hierarchical structure of the ISBN governs the way the numbers are assigned.
ISBNs have been assigned over almost 35 years in over 150 countries or territories.
The ISBN-10 is divided into four parts of variable length: the group identifier, the publisher identifier, the title identifier and the check digit; for example, ISBN 1-85375-390-4.
Blocks of ISBNs are allocated by the International ISBN Agency [1] to specific regional groups or countries (the group identifier).
Within each regional group or country, blocks of ISBNs are allocated by the national ISBN agency to specific publishers according to their output (the publisher identifier or publisher prefix).
Finally, publishers allocate ISBNs to specific titles.
This hierarchical allocation reduces the total number of ISBNs available, and has resulted in over-allocation in some areas and under-allocation in others.
It is these areas of under-allocation where the ISBNs will run out first.
Revising the ISBN The International Standards Organisation (ISO) Technical Committee 46 (TC 46) is responsible for information and documentation standards.
Within TC 46, Subcommittee 9 (SC 9) [2] develops and maintains standards on the identification and description of information resources and Working Group 4 (WG 4) was established in January 2002 to revise the ISBN standard.
The project leader is Michael Healy of Nielson BookData Ltd.
The revised standard will specify all changes to the ISBN system.
The ISO process has several stages, all of which have now been completed: project proposal, working draft, committee draft, draft international standard (comments at this stage may result in further changes), final draft international standard (yes or no vote by ISO members) and publication.
Voting on the draft international standard ended on 19 July 2004 with 100% approval from the 23 P-member countries that voted, with no negative votes and 4 abstentions.
On 15 October 2004, the ISO TC46 SC9 Web site [2] reported that the final draft international standard had now been unanimously approved by a formal vote of ISO member organisations.
The aim is to publish the new standard, ISO 2108 4th edition, by the end of 2004.
It specifies an implementation date of 1 January 2007.
All users of ISBNs need to have made any necessary changes to systems before that point.
ISBN-13 In looking for a revised numbering system for the ISBN, the Working Group took into account a number of other issues, such as the need for standardized metadata for ISBN assignments, and funding and support for administration of the ISBN system.
The revision is also reviewing the criteria and conditions that are used to decide how the ISBN is assigned to certain types of monographic publications (e.g.
digital files, print-on-demand materials, and discrete parts of monographic publications).
The present ISBN is used in its 10-digit form by a range of information community and book trade organisations.
However, the bar code system (the bar code printed on the back cover of paperback books for example) used by retail systems throughout the supply chain is the 13-digit European Article Number (EAN) code.
An ISBN can be transformed into an EAN by adding the 3-digit EAN product code for books (978) in front of the ISBN and recalculating the check digit.
So ISBN 0-901690-54-6 becomes EAN 978-0-901690-54-8.
At the same time that the ISBN was being revised, the United States decided to migrate from its 12-digit Universal Product Code (UPC) to the EAN, which has now been renamed the EAN-UCC-13 international standard for product coding [3].
The Working Group proposed that the ISBN should also move to integrate with the EAN-UCC.
This aligns the ISBN with all other product numbering, making trade with non-book retailers (e.g.
supermarkets selling paperback books) much easier.
It will also be more efficient and cost-effective to introduce the new ISBN-13 while North American users are already adapting to an equivalent change in their UPC bar code system.
Existing ISBNs can be transformed into ISBN-13 by the addition of the book code prefix 978 and another product code prefix 979 has been made available, which will open up a new range of numbers.
Numbers in the new range will only be allocated once numbers from the old range have been exhausted.
The Working Group considered using an alphanumeric or hexadecimal ISBN within the 10-digit format, but rejected these options as they would be incompatible with most bar code systems.
They also rejected the idea of changing the ISBN into a 'dumb' number (eliminating the region/country and publisher identifiers) and culling all unassigned numbers for use elsewhere: because of the need for a strong central database to administer assignment and prevent duplication, this would be a costly and complex solution.
Impact How will this change affect users of ISBNs?
The major changes to be aware of include the following: The ISBN will change from 10 to 13 digits on 1 January 2007.
Existing ISBNs will be prefixed by 978.
The resulting 13-digit number will be identical with the EAN-13 number that is currently encoded in the bar code.
The 979 prefix will be introduced when the current stock of numbers is exhausted.
Publishers' identifier prefixes are not likely to remain the same for ISBNs using the 979 prefix.
Bar codes will carry the 13-digit ISBN with hyphenation above the bar code and the EAN-13, the identical number without hyphens or spaces, below the bar code.
Publishers, Distributors, Booksellers All publishers, distributors and booksellers need to review all of their processes as the ISBN is embedded in a variety of ways.
They need to be aware of the changes and how it impacts on both internal and external processes.
Publishers are advised to include the ISBN-13 on the copyright pages of published items, on marketing and sales material and on bibliographic data, as soon as possible.
The ISBN printed above the bar code on items must be in the ISBN-13 format from January 2007.
All internal systems have to be changed to support both ISBN and ISBN-13.
This is a big task and should not be under-estimated.
There are two options that could be used to modify existing systems: these are to set up an intermediate key file, or to translate the number each time you read and write.
Any ISBN that has already been assigned will not be replaced by a new ISBN for the same product.
The change will be in how those 10-digit ISBNs are displayed or written; these should in the future be displayed in the 13-digit format.
All existing ISBNs can be transformed to ISBN-13 by prefixing the ISBN with 978 and recalculating the check digit.
Publishers with stocks of unused ISBNs can continue using them until they are used up, but should use the ISBN-13 version of the number.
When publishers have used up existing ISBN allocations, new blocks of ISBNs from the 979 range will be allocated; however these will not have the same publisher prefix as in current allocations.
Any reference to a publisher's prefix will have to include the EAN prefix as well.
So a publisher prefix currently cited as '0-671' should be referred to as '978-0671'.
Distributors will need to able to use the ISBN-13 from January 2007.
The transition from ISBN to ISBN-13 is planned to take place during 2006.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) messages will need to show EAN-13 and ISBN from January 2006.
All internal systems have to be changed to support both ISBN and ISBN-13; the scale of the problem and the possible solutions are the same as for publishers.
For booksellers the transition from ISBN to ISBN-13 will take place during 2006.
From January 2007 all orders sent out on paper or by electronic ordering systems will need to use the ISBN-13 system.
EDI messages will need to show EAN-13 and ISBN from January 2006.
All internal systems have to be changed to support both ISBN and ISBN-13; the scale of the problem and the possible solutions are the same as for publishers and distributors.
Libraries Libraries find the ISBN a valuable, efficient access point for procurement, resource discovery and auto-record matching.
The change to ISBN-13 will therefore affect various processes: acquisitions, cataloguing, information retrieval, inter-library loans (ILL), circulation, serials and binding, and past practice in use of the ISBN will also have an effect.
ISBN assignment rules and cataloguing rules differ, with the result that a bibliographic record may carry two or more ISBNs (e.g.
for hardback, paperback, and multipart set) and a further complication is that some serials have ISBNs.
Some library systems use the ISBN as a control number; this is now recognised as bad practice but systems designed in this way still exist.
Libraries have to cope with the misuse of ISBNs by publishers and errors in their assignment; e.g.
reprints mistakenly assigned a new ISBN, new editions issued under an old ISBN, etc.
And while for the book trade the 10-digit ISBN will at some point become a thing of the past, books with 10-digit ISBNs will exist in libraries indefinitely.
Acquisitions In acquisitions, the ISBN is a crucial identifier in EDI messages.
All trading must use ISBN-13 from 1 January 2007, even where the MARC record has ISBN-10.
BIC (Book Industry Communication) guidelines advise using both ISBN-10 and EAN during the transition year, 2006, and to adapt systems to use only EAN from 1 January 2007, at which point there will be a need for procedures to cope with any incomplete orders.
Cataloguing For cataloguing, the issue is how the cataloguing system is set up and not the bibliographic format.
The MARC 21 format does not limit the length of the ISBN in field 020 and either ISBN-10 or ISBN-13 can be entered.
Field 020 is repeatable so a bibliographic record can hold both versions of the ISBN for an item.
However, since some cataloguing systems do limit the length of this field to 10 characters, libraries will need to check with their system supplier.
Many libraries now import records from library suppliers and bibliographic agencies; such records will increasingly contain ISBN-13 and library systems must be able to cope with this.
This will happen in the near future as US publishers are planning to start using ISBN-13 from 2005, and both the Library of Congress and the British Library will be including ISBN-13 in their bibliographic records once these appear on books.
Searching The use of the ISBN as a search key is widespread.
Library catalogues and portals support searching by ISBN, including the use of the ISBN in non-specific search fields, e.g.
keyword.
ISBNs are displayed in brief and full records this may be linked to the way they are stored, and again this may need modification.
Links to and from external content and services may be affected open URL (Z39.88), institutional portals, enrichments, booksellers, Whichbook.net, reading list systems, ebooks, etc., as may be metasearching and merging and de-duplication of results, and using Z39.50 targets.
Inter-Library Loans Libraries use ISBNs for other purposes.
The ISBN is used as an identifier in ILL systems, and changes need to be co-ordinated with ILL partners.
Not only will individual libraries have to address this problem, but so will union catalogues.
They will have to be able to accept ISBN-13 contributed records, so holdings notification systems need to be checked they may well be using fixed field length for ISBN data as well as search and display processes.
The ISBN is also used as the NCIP (NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol)(Z39.83) bib item identifier and in the LookUpItem service.
It may also be used as an identifier for binding control systems.
Other Considerations ISBNs may also appear in other bibliographic metadata: digital content management systems, learning object management systems, and the 'Identifier' element in Dublin Core and other formats.
In each of these areas, the metadata structure may have been set up with a fixed length, which will need to be changed.
ISBNs can also be incorporated into other systems that make use of existing identifiers.
For example, ISBN-13 could be incorporated into the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) as the suffix portion of a DOI [4].
Libraries will also need to review their bar code scanners.
When used for searching, these will need to be re-programmed to output ISBN-13 when indexes are modified.
If used for data entry, they will need to be able to deal with both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 indefinitely.
So libraries need to plan for change and talk to system supplier(s) a key issue if a library is about to change or upgrade a system, stock suppliers, bibliographic record suppliers, consortial and ILL partners, and linked content and service providers and users.
Systems and software suppliers System and software vendors are also affected.
Each vendor will need to assess the impact of the change on each of its products.
This is important as this change will have international impact in every country using ISBNs the same changes will happen.
For vendors there are the added complications that the various trading partners will have different timetables.
Publishers will vary in exactly when they start using ISBN but it appears that libraries will be faced with at least a few ISBN-13 in bibliographic records in late 2005.
Changes to products will also vary: libraries will require catalogues to accept both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 indefinitely while the majority of the book trade (apart perhaps from second-hand dealers) will only require the dual capacity for a limited period.
The change to the ISBN will affect EDI in all its forms, warehouse management systems, Web-based systems, financial systems, printing and forms systems, data warehouse systems, and interfaces to other trading partners such as carrier services and print-on-demand services, etc.
Not only does the change have an impact on internal functioning, but also on report layouts, screen displays and business forms (invoices, credits, etc.).
All of this has to be implemented by IT and tested by the users.
ISBN and EDI Both TRADACOMS (the UK EDI message standard) and EDIFACT (the international EDI message standard) can already handle both ISBN-10 and the EAN (ISBN-13).In every context where an ISBN is used, an EAN number can also be used, so there is no problem in carrying the new format.
All senders of TRADACOMS and EDIFACT messages should include both ISBN and EAN by January 2006 All receivers of TRADACOMS and EDIFACT messages should modify systems to use EAN and ignore 10-digit ISBNs during 2006.
All senders of TRADACOMS and EDIFACT messages should cease including 10-digit ISBNs on 1 January 2007.
BIC guidelines for the transition process, and supporting technical detail, are available on the BIC Web site [5].
Conclusion 1 January 2007 may seem a long way ahead, but there is much to be done by a wide variety of organisations.
During the transition year of 2006, both versions of the ISBN will be in use, and organisations may find themselves using one or other with each of their trading and service partners.
2007 will see the use of ISBN-13 only for trading purposes, although libraries will continue to use ISBN-10 indefinitely.
BIC have produced guidelines to assist organisations through the process, but each organisation will need to review the impact on their systems, how the changes can be made and what it will cost, as well as disseminate the news of the change throughout their organisation.
References International ISBN Agency Web site http://www.isbn-international.org/ SO Technical Committee 46 Subcommittee 9 Web site http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/iso/tc46sc9/isbn.htm Information on the EAN-UCC-13 is available from the Uniform Code Council Web site http://www.uc-council.org/ean_ucc_system/stnds_and_tech/2005_sunrise.html DOI Handbook: Numbering http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/enumeration.html BIC Web site http://www.bic.org.uk/ Author Details Ann Chapman Collection Description Focus UKOLN Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/ Return to top Article Title: "ISBN-13: New Number on the Block" Author: Ann Chapman Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue41/chapman/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository Buzz data framework database dissemination portal infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus doi digitisation accessibility identifier repositories copyright preservation windows url research Citation BibTex RIS Heleen Gierveld proposes a market-oriented approach to increase the rate of deposit to an institutional repository.
Institutional Repositories (IR) are a result of the vision to collect, secure, and provide access to scholarly publications in a novel, digital way, mostly initiated by the institutional library.
Various factors have contributed to the emergence of these repositories, including technological innovations which allow a new form of collection management of a university's output, the desire to counteract the 'serials crisis', and the opportunity of promoting wide dissemination and quick access to publications.
The benefits of an IR may be clear to librarians, but IRs have not as yet proven to be particularly attractive to authors.
Many IRs face the difficulty of attracting content, which is the critical success factor for any IR.
This article takes a marketing approach towards the IR: The IR as a product that needs to attract a market.
In order to do this, a few main marketing and communication principles are presented and translated into an IR setting.
The aim of this article is to lay out a marketing and communications perspective, encouraging IR managers to think in marketing terms: to place the target audience and their needs centre-stage, to examine the trends and external factors affecting scientists working in this area, and to translate the librarian's notions of an IR into a product and language fitting the needs of such scientists.
Firstly, this article considers the scientists and places them centre-stage in the development of the IR.
Secondly, it presents the elements of a social marketing strategy, suitable for projects that aim to change the behaviour of the target audience for a benefit beyond its direct interest.
The rest of the article focuses on two of these elements: product development and the communication strategy necessary for a product for which a change in behaviour is a critical success factor.
Only when scientists act and deposit their material, can the IR establish itself as an important tool for the distribution of knowledge.
The Market Researchers and Scholarly Communication Scientists want to conduct research.
They basically want to spend their time doing research, sharing it, writing and reading about it, and keeping up with their field.
Activities that distract from this 'core business' are unpopular and preferably avoided [1].
For an IR this obvious fact would imply that scientists will only use and contribute to the IR when it helps them in their own goals the conduct of science.
The IR is only a tool towards this end, and not an aim in itself.
Scientists are driven to research and publish because of their intrinsic motivation to inquire and to share, but also because of the way the scholarly system is organised: to publish in order to gain recognition, credit, funds and tenure.
Digitisation has an impact on the way science is conducted, allowing new ways of collecting and analysing data, of collaborating and communicating, as well as approaches to publishing and dissemination.
For this reason it is important to see publications as an integral part of the scholarly process, preceded by two earlier phases: gathering data and ideas and communicating this informally with colleagues; and combining them and shaping them into a preliminary presentation.
The actual publication is thus the third and final phase, which again feeds into the first phase, as the basis for further research [2].
Segmentation Different disciplines have different ways of working and different attitudes.
The target audience is as varied as the number of disciplines, with different motivations, behaviours and working processes.
This calls for segmentation of the target audience.
Segmentation is a subdivision of the target audience in a homogeneous group for which a specific set of benefits and features can be developed.
A second condition for segmentation is that the group can be reached and addressed as such.
Cronin and Thorin [3] describe and explain how the conduct of science differs by discipline, leading to different preferences and ways of working, communicating, sharing, evaluating, appraising, publishing, and collaborating.
For example, physicists are keen to share and collaborate (hence the booming success of the ArXives), while chemists prefer an official, peer-reviewed publication track.
Information scientists accept open access journals as good publication outlets, while economists value the prestige of an established journal.
Computer scientists like to publish through conference proceedings, while historians like to write and publish monographs.
Furthermore, the impact and benefits of digital technology differ by discipline.
For archaeologists, digitisation represents the opportunity to bring literature and data to their field location; for linguists, it means, for example, the creation of large, well-structured corpi.
For historians, digitisation means quick searches in and easy access to archives; for architects, it provides different ways of presenting and visualising their work; and for musicologists, the digital technique provides new methods of including and comparing sound.
Social Marketing Strategy An IR is not developed in response to a market demand.
Instead, it is a technology-driven product, initiated by librarians who see the long-term benefits: an improved exchange of scholarly communication one that is faster, more effective and cheaper.
Yet, the crucial factor for the success of an IR is whether the scientists will deposit their materials.
To summarise the marketing challenge of the IR somewhat controversially: Scientists need to act in order to make the IR 'product' successful, yet it is a product which they did not ask for in the first place.
This need to act is central to social marketing.
Social marketing focuses on changing behaviour for the good of society or the target audience concerned.
Its strategies are, for example, used in health programmes, education, and environmental management.
Voluntary change of behaviour is best achieved by creating an attractive environment (e.g., easy to use, little effort, clear benefits, various incentives) in which the target audience can easily act and receives the benefits it seeks.
Barriers that concern the target audience need to be reduced and positive reinforcement needs to be enacted [4].
In addition, the audience needs to be educated and made aware of the issues involved.
This will improve both its motivation and willingness to contribute.
The Marketing Mix in Social Marketing Marketing a product involves a marketing mix also known as the four P's: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.
In social marketing, four more P's are added: Public, Partnership, Policy, Purse String [5].
The first four P's provide the environment in which people can act; the last four P's provide the strength and support for the programme to operate in an efficient and effective way.
Space deters me from elaborating on every element and the following table (Table 1) provides a brief overview of these P's in relation to the IR.
The rest of this article will concentrate on the first four P's, creating together the environment in which scientists can deposit their material.
For an IR, the Price (efforts to be made) and Place (for a virtual product) are inherent to the way the product is designed and for that reason the rest of this article concentrates on the two other P's: the Product and the Promotion, or rather, Communications.
The 8 p's What they mean Examples in an IR setting Product The actual product, providing the desired benefits, features and qualities.
The IR with all its facilities--  see next section Price The lower the price or effort, the more likely people will act: or the more the audience is convinced of the benefits / rewards,  the more one is prepared to pay.
Price in terms of time or effort spent depositing material.
Low effort / high rewards.
Promotion The effort and activity to promote the product.
How to promote the message and make people use the product.
The communication activities undertaken to gain interest / explain the concept / to stimulate the deposit of material / use.
Place The point of access to the product: its accessibility, its user-friendliness, its clear information and contact details.
Clear contact details and upload instructions / facilities.
Public All stakeholders, internal & external.
Each stakeholders group has its own interests in the IR.
Each group should be understood and addressed in terms of  its own interests and in its own language.
Scientists, students, post-doctoral researchers,  co-operating partners, library staff,  board of management, sponsors, policy makers, politicians.
Partnership The parties that co-operate.
Joint library initiative; a joint effort  of partners from various industries; cooperation with an established subject archive.
Policy Inclusion and involvement of the policy makers.
Including the importance of information dissemination in the overall university policy; support of free dissemination principles by government or funding agencies.
Purse string Funding for the product, its development and its sustainability in the long run.
Lobbying, influencing, and presenting results that fit in with the interests of the subsidising parties.
Table 1: The 8 P's in social marketing and the IR The IR as a Product An IR allows the authors of a particular university to store, archive, disseminate or refer to their work and the library facilitates this.
The IR in itself is then a service for the benefit of a scholarly community, developed and supported by the library.
For example, Lynch [6] defines an IR as a 'set of services that a university offers to members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members'.
In marketing terms, a service qualifies as an intangible product.
And successful products either bring in money or generate usage and provide benefits.
Three Product Levels In marketing theory, Kotler et al.
[7] distinguish between three levels inherent in a product: the core level, the actual level, and the augmented level.
This may be characterised as follows: At its core level, the core product represents the core benefit or the problem-solving service it provides; At its actual level, the actual product turns the core product into a perceivable set of characteristics; and At its augmented level, the augmented product provides additional services and benefits to enhance the core and actual product.
The actual level is readily recognisable.
A product has features, offers a certain quality, includes a design, sometimes a brand, as well as an image and a label.
These are the product characteristics which give the product a tangible identity.
It is the product that is actually offered to the market.
The other two levels are more abstract.
The core level stands for the main benefit a product delivers and the core function of the product.
It represents the essence of the product and can in effect be described in twenty seconds or one sentence.
Being able to define the core level demands vision and knowledge of the market: why use this product and what will it do for the target audience.
The augmented level includes facilities that make the product easy to use, lowering possible barriers and guaranteeing customer satisfaction, for example good customer service, clear instructions or preventing long waiting.
In the case of the IR, clear copyright information and aids are also an example of the augmented level, as they reduce the barrier to deposit.
With each IR, the core product will depend on the vision of its management as to the function of the IR, as well as on the needs of the scientists.
Needless to say, the various choices and product characteristics are inter-dependent.
Three levels of the product What they do: Some examples: Core product   The core benefit of the product or the problem-solving service it provides.
Archiving, organisation of work (i), preservation, dissemination, visibility.
Actual product in 5 characteristics Product Quality The qualities of an IR.
The choice of these qualities and their level of consistency in maintaining these qualities influence the core product.
They address levels of accuracy, reliability, ease of use, comprehensiveness.
Consistent metadata, accurate hyperlinks, implementation of DOI (Digital Object Identifier).
Features The parts and facilities of an IR.
They make the IR worthwhile to use and address the direct needs of the community.
A search engine; a home page facility (e.g.
Rochester (ii), a community space, datasets facilities.
Product Design The functionality and appearance of the product, contributing to the usefulness and attractiveness of the product.
Interface, Web display, navigation, upload facilities, data organisation, choice of metadata inclusion   Brand (name, logo, etc)  The way an IR or the IR provider is perceived (e.g., prestigious, reliable, relevant, useful, innovative).
Cream of Science (iii).
Targeted presentation of parts of the IR via targeted audiences (e.g., a subjectoriented portal, harvesting across various IRs).
MIT two-fold identity (iv).
Packaging & Labelling The information about the product carried on the product itself.
Information which increases the attractiveness of the product to potential users.
Clear instructions, contact details, attractive Web design, thesaurus or classification scheme.
Augmented product   Provides facilities to make the product easy to use and in a satisfactory way, encouraging use and re-use, reducing barriers.
Good customer support, (i.e.
helpful, accessible, fast), 'after-care' , easy to find contact details.
Copyright aids, Romea/Sherpa database (v).
Table 2: The Three Product Levels and Some Examples for an IR Notes to Table 2 MIT has defined the core of the IR as preserving and organising the work of faculties in line with perceived demand.
[8] The University of Rochester has translated the institutional goal of the IR (i.e., collecting and organising the output of the whole university) into a direct benefit for the individual researcher: the IR of the University of Rochester provides a personal home page equipped with well-designed upload facilities.
This allows researchers to organise and display professionally their own output through easy-to-use and well-designed upload facilities [1].
This home page facility is a feature of the IR.
Cream of Science [9] was an initiative to improve the image of the IR by including the work of prestigious Dutch scientists.
The Cream of Science initiative is an example of a branding characteristic.
MIT gave its IR a two-fold identity, distinguishing between the research and the educational material.
This distinction is an example of a branding characteristic, made in order to counteract the hesitancy of faculty staff to deposit research material in the same archive as that of unpublished materials [8].
The Sherpa/Romeo database [10] is an aid to help authors overcome their reluctance to deposit because of copyright issues.
This qualifies as a facility on the augmented level.
To illustrate the relationship between these three Product levels, the following analogy is offered: A train is a wagon with wheels, windows and seats.
It runs impeccably on time and connects all the towns on its route.
It runs on rails; there are stations for passengers to board and alight (all characteristics of an actual product).
There are ticket machines, parking lots for cars, customers services and well-posted information, etc.
(Augmented level).
But at its core, the train provides transport.
It conveys people from A to B.
With the characteristics of the actual and augmented product, the core of the product becomes apparent, in a way that distinguishes itself from the competition and in such a fashion that customers are satisfied, willing to pay the price and willing to include such train travel in their daily behaviour.
A Four-strand Communication Strategy A successful IR is a repository that receives content, which above all, requires a change in behaviour on the part of scientists.
Developing a good product with good facilities will encourage the depositing rate.
But appropriate communication activities are just as indispensable.
This section presents a communication strategy that helps instigate change and encourages action for a product that is free but requires effort.
Mee et al.
[11] developed a communications strategy for a recycling project, encouraging people to recycle more.
Citizens needed to alter actively their usual behaviour.
Their strategy provides us with a workable framework for developing a communications strategy to persuade scientists to deposit their work in an IR.
It is divided into four strands: A profiling strategy, branding the programme and raising awareness of the issue(s); A pull strategy, making the IR attractive to potential depositors.
A push strategy, reinforcing a positive attitude and encouraging conditions that make depositing work in an IR an attractive option; and A consultation strategy, seeking to establish two-way communication and the involvement of the target audience.
Profiling Strategy A profiling strategy is about convincing the audience of the benefits of the IR programme and the usefulness of the product.
Scientists become aware and adopt a more positive attitude towards it.
The use of independent media, public relations (PR), brochures, newsletters and Web sites are all appropriate to this type of strategy.
A profiling strategy may comprise information as to why an IR is useful and on the trends in scholarly communication.
Information Web sites like those of the California Digital Library [12] and the Library of North Carolina State University [13] are examples of this.
Pull Strategy Through a pull strategy, scientists are attracted, rewarded and encouraged to deposit their work in the repository.
The strategy encourages their engagement by offering immediate rewards.
Examples could be a free gadget or a quid pro quo, e.g.
a free service, or even an invitation to lunch, as was done at ETH in 2002.
Such 'carrots' are useful for specific initiatives with a clear goal and a specific timeline.
The challenge for this, however, is to find the right sort of incentive that will effectively generate more interest and engagement.
Incentives have to reflect the scientists' interests, and fit their work schedules.
Push Strategy The push strategy reinforces a positive attitude towards the IR and shows the positive effect once the materials have been deposited.
This is either done in advance of the action, by informing potential users and thus stimulating them to deposit the material, or it is done afterwards, by giving actual information on the work deposited.
In that case the scientist's action is affirmed.
Examples of such a push strategy would include communication about the ease of deposit, reports on the current average time it takes people to deposit materials, the number of citations or hits one's work has received after 6 months, the total number of documents in the IR, their quality, or the number of search engines that pick up such resources.
A push strategy can also focus on lowering barriers that are perceived by potential users, such as a poor image of an IR, unclear copyright issues, an unclear location, or unclear or inaccessible instructions.
This can be done by effective communication of the benefits and by clear information refuting misperceptions.
Consultation Strategy Instead of sending one-way messages to scientists, a two-way communication is important.
Their feedback will provide the right arguments to send out convincing messages, appealing to their own interests and in their own language [14].
Two-way communication can be achieved through surveys, meetings, informal conversations, by holding panels, and by including scientists in projects and working groups.
Secondly, it is important to encourage scientists to promote the IR to their peers as an effective means of communication, (e.g., testimonials, word-of-mouth, or 'viral marketing' [15).
The message will get dispersed more widely and more quickly and will have more impact when spread by colleagues.
The four strands of the communications strategy What How By means of Profile strategy 'make the issue important' Position your IR by profiling the  programme, its rationale and benefits.
Inform Raise awareness Educate Re-tell success stories PR, Media Awareness Web site Newsletters Viral Marketing [15] Pull Strategy 'make the IR an attractive location in which  to deposit' Create an environment that makes it attractive to deposit.
Make it easy Make it attractive Offer a bonus for cooperation Praise, thank Persuade Remind Specific actions   Inform about the practicalities (where and how) Send reminders to encourage required action.
Push Strategy 'reinforce a positive attitude or give that little extra push to deposit' Encourage conditions that make  an IR attractive and that promote the habit of depositing.
Involve innovators and opinion leaders Involve policy makers, administration and  management.
Include stakeholders in the communications plan Provide feedback on usage of IR Lobby, provide feedback Encourage incentives from a management level Provide logfile data and/or citation data (through automatically generated messages) Consultation Strategy 'know your audience well' 'let scientists do part of the promotion' Seek two-way communication and involve people from the target audience.
Talk with them Seek feedback Be domain-specific Look at the digital developments in their field Mobilise and involve scientists in promoting the IR Surveys, face-to-face meetings, informal conversations,  working groups, panels.
Scientists' endorsements Viral Marketing [15] Table 3 : A Four-fold Communication Strategy for an IR The Four Strands in Product Development The reader may have noticed that each of these four strands can also be addressed by product development, and a few examples have already been shown in the previous section.
A profiling issue was addressed by the Cream of Science initiative and the two-fold identity of MIT.
A pull strategy was followed by the development of the home page facility at the University of Rochester: the home pages themselves provide the direct reward for depositing material.
An example of a push strategy would be if the IR provided positive feedback on material deposited, e.g.
providing scientists with statistics of the hit rate of their work.
And the consultation strategy is just as important for the development of the IR as it is for the communications.
The IR is a novel, complex product, still under development and subject to overall changes in the scholarly communication process.
For this reason it is also important to consult scientists and if possible, involve them in the development of an IR.
After all, only scientists can actually tell what constitutes a real asset to them.
Conclusion This article takes researchers as the target audience for the IR.
Their benefits should be the starting point for developing the product in order to make them deposit their work.
The IR should be an aid, helping researchers in exercising their profession.
As the communication of results and the implications of digitisation differ per discipline, the needs of scientists and the benefits should not be generalised beforehand, but should be seen in light of these differences between disciplines.
The marketing mix of the IR comprises 8 P's; Four of these P's relate directly to the IR itself: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
The other four P's relate to the strength and support for the IR project to operate efficiently and to be sustained in the long run: Public, Partnership, Policy and Purse String.
Of these eight P's, the Product and the Promotion, or rather Communications, have been highlighted as important parts of IR management, and the article has given a framework for product development and communications strategy.
Developing and managing an IR is a marketing matter.
Marketing is an approach and attitude that transpires in the marketing mix.
It places its market centre-stage, it knows the audiences, their requirements, market trends and the competition.
Communications is part of the marketing mix and specialises in how to tell and sell, presenting the right story, at the right time, within the right context.
Good communications attracts attention, informs, explains, repeats, educates, involves, invites, reminds, stimulates, seduces and convinces.
Knowledge of the market is indispensable to effective communications.
The bottom line, however, is the product itself.
Without a good product that meets needs and expectations, even the best communications strategy will, in the end, not pay off.
Applying a marketing approach to institutional repositories may not be easy, nor will it immediately provide answers to complex questions; nonetheless, asking such marketing questions may shed fresh light on how to develop a novel and exciting information tool.
References Foster, Nancy Fried and Susan Gibbons (2005), Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories D-Lib Magazine, January 2005, 12 pages.
http://dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html Thorin, Suzanne E. (2003) Global Changes in Scholarly Communication Paper presented at the e-workshop on Scholarly Communication in the Digital Era, August 2003, Taiwan.
http://www.arl.org/scomm/disciplines/Thorin.pdf Cronin, Blaise (2003) Scholarly Communication and Epistemic Cultures Keynote address Symposium Scholarly Tribes and Tribulations, ARL, October 2003. http://www.arl.org/scomm/disciplines/Cronin.pdf Rothschild, Michael L. (1999), Carrots, Sticks, and Promises: A Conceptual Framework for the Management of Public Health and Social Issue Behaviors Journal of Marketing, Vol.
63.1, pp.
24-37 Kline Weinreich, Nedra 1999, Hand-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide, Sage Publications, 1999, 262 p. Lynch, Clifford A.
(2003) Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age, Newsletter ARL February 2003, 11 pages.
http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html Kotler, Philip, Gary Armstrong, John Saunders, Veronica Wong Principles of Marketing: Second European Edition, Prentice Hall, 1999, 1031 p. Foster, Andrea L. (2004) Online Archives Run by Universities Struggle to Attract Material The Chronicle of Higher Education, Section Information Technology, Vol.
50.42, Page A37 Feijen, Martin and Annemiek van der Kuil (2005) A recipe for Cream of Science: Special Content Recruitment for Dutch Institutional Repositories, Ariadne, Issue 45, October.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/vanderkuil/ SHERPA/RoMEO http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php Mee, Nicky et al.
(2004) Effective Implementation of a Marketing Communciations Strategy for Kerbside Recycling: A Case Study from Rushcliffe, UK Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Vol.
42.1, pp 1-26 California Digital Library http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/scholarly/ Library of North Carolina State University http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/scc/ Faculty staff do not always understand the jargon used by librarians.
The assurance of their work being found on the Web is better understood than the need for consistent metadata, and an unbreakable link better than a persistent URL.
Gibbons also points to this aspect in her presentation.
Gibbons, Susan (2005) Institutional Repositories as a Research Tool for Faculty Presentation given at the CNI-JISC-SURF Meeting, May 2005, Amsterdam.
http://docushare.lib.rochester.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-19725/amsterdam.ppt Viral marketing may have connotations of sending unwanted messages i.e.
spam.
That is not what is meant.
It is basically the idea of using the Internet and e-mail for recommendation and promotion among peers.
A preferred definition might be a 'marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message' http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/viral_marketing/ For example, a logo or a note on the scientist's home page endorsing the use of the IR; or a message of support at the bottom of the scientist's e-mail.
Further Reading Shaw, Eleanor (2004) Marketing in the Social Enterprise Context: Is It Entrepreneurial?
Qualitative Market Research, Vol.
7.3, pp 194-205 Swan, Alma and Sheridan Brown (2005) Open Access Self-Archiving: An Author Study, JISC 2005 Author Details Heleen Gierveld Publisher / Consultant Techne Press / Publishing and Visibility Email: h.gierveld@technepress.nl Web site: http://www.technepress.nl Editor's note: Heleen Gierveld holds a BA in Library Science (1986) and an MA in Information Sciences (2002), in which she focused on the digital developments and changes in the scholarly communication chain.
Since 1990 she has been working in academic publishing and her marketing knowledge was built up through a degree in marketing as well as through working experience as a marketing manager and publisher for academic publishing houses.
Heleen is the owner of Techne Press, a publishing house dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly work, either in traditional paper format as well as in more innovative ways, even open to open access publication models for institutions.
Furthermore, she works as a marketing and promotion consultant for the publishing and dissemination projects of research organisations.
This paper has evolved from material prepared when she gave a workshop to Dutch university librarians, in co-operation with SURF.
Return to top Article Title: "Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository" Author: Heleen Gierveld Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/gierveld/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: How to Find Information Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: How to Find Information Buzz data database copyright video cataloguing research standards Citation BibTex RIS Verity Brack reviews a new practical guide for researchers wanting to improve their information skills and finds it a very useful addition.
This book is the result of efforts by the library at the University of Surrey (and the University of Surrey Roehampton) to improve library provision for researchers, and it is also based on the experience of 'front-line' library staff in their day-to-day interaction with academic staff and students.
Anyone who has worked on a library help-desk or information point will recognise the content of this book, and will be pleased to find that there is now something that researchers can use to help themselves, all put together in a slim volume.
Sally Rumsey notes in the preface that Christopher West [1], in a response to a report by the Research Libraries Support Group in 2003 [2], said that 'the implication is that all HE researchers arrive, like Botticelli's Venus, fully-formed with advanced information skills... Everyone who works in HE libraries knows this isn't the case' The book aims to address this problem, starting with a chapter on the information-gathering process and including short sections on defining the subject, and the purpose and scope of the research.
Getting started can often be a bigger hurdle than it should be for researchers, and the hints and tips in this chapter are invaluable.
Chapter 2 covers using a library, something that one assumes researchers should already know but it can be surprising how little undergraduates use a library, and how little they know of its facilities, so new researchers may well find the information here of use.
It explains briefly normal library services and resources, including special collections, goes into more detail about classification systems and number codes in use in a library (ISBN, call numbers etc.
), and ends with sections on library catalogues, catalogue records and searching catalogues.
Chapter 3 covers the different types of format an information source can occur in, ranging from monographs, serials and other printed material, through electronic information, audio and video formats, to artefacts and people.
The advantages and disadvantages of accessing and using these resources are discussed.
The next chapter briefly pulls together useful sources for finding information on existing research, mentioning the UK research councils and other organisations.
Chapters 5-11 cover the standard steps in information seeking, from identifying the information need, resource discovery and searching, to locating and accessing the information.
The chapter on resource discovery is particularly useful, offering explanations of abstracts and indexes, catalogues and bibliographies, and going into detail about using online databases, as well as understanding the results returned from such sources.
Planning a search strategy for online searching has a chapter all to itself, which contains some excellent examples with tables and diagrams.
Search strategies can be difficult to explain to users without actually demonstrating a live search, but Rumsey has provided a very clear set of instructions and guidelines.
Citation searching also has its own chapter, as does using the Web for research (Chapter 10), which covers subject gateways, portals, search engines and directories, plus criteria for evaluating Web information.
A discussion on access to materials, both physical and electronic, concludes this group of chapters.
The latter chapters of the book cover evaluation of sources in general, methods for citing references, the importance of keeping records of searches, and ways of managing your own bibliographic records.
Intellectual property and copyright, and considerations of these issues in research comprise Chapter 15, which also has a brief section on plagiarism.
Finally, Chapters 16 and 17 demonstrate how researchers can keep up to date with developments in their areas, and how the nature of the information landscape is changing.
As Rumsey stresses, the information landscape is undergoing enormous change, mostly due to the development of electronic sources and the growth of the Web; users have desktop access to these sources and so may be less likely to visit a library and consult an information professional than in the past.
Consequently, information overload and inefficient searching can hamper research, even though researchers have access to more information resources than ever before.
It is vitally important that modern researchers know about the types of resources available, understand how to use them efficiently, and manage their own bibliographic information efficiently.
There are few really practical books available for helping people along the road to information literacy so this publication is particularly timely when information literacy is a hot topic.
The book is primarily aimed at new researchers and final year undergraduates who are writing dissertations but, in fact, this guide has a wider audience as it pulls together a lot of practical information, and is arranged so that users can dip in and out for what they want rather than having to read the book through from cover to cover anyone who is not a researcher can ignore the research-specific parts.
It would be difficult, not to say impossible, to cover everything a researcher might need to know about finding information but this book has attempted to be as comprehensive as possible, and is written for researchers based in the UK in that it concentrates on UK resources.
The addition of a section about the JISC data centres, services and projects [3] would have been useful; some services such as JISCmail are included but others, such as the Plagiarism Advisory Service, have been omitted.
I am sure many readers will find that there are other information sources that are not mentioned in this book maybe these could be included in a second edition?
The many lists, diagrams, and tables in this book are also useful, as are the Web sites that helped create this book [4].
I would recommend this book to all new researchers, and also to existing researchers; even if you think your level of information literacy is high, I'm sure you will find something that you didn't know about!
References West, C. "Reactions to the Research Support Libraries Group: a view from Wales".
The New Review of Academic Librarianship 8; 139-151, 2002 RSLG (Research Support Libraries Group).
Final Report.
2003.
London: HEFCE (Higher Education funding Council for England) http://www.rslg.ac.uk/final/final.pdf The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ The Researcher's Gateway, a dedicated Web site at the University of Surrey http://portal.surrey.ac.uk:7778/portal/page?_pageid=734,200137&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL and the Researcher's Companion, an online tutorial in information retrieval http://www.federalsurrey.ac.uk/researcherscompanion/ Author Details Dr Verity Brack Insititute for Lifelong Learning University of Sheffield Email: v.brack@shef.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "How to Find Information: A Guide for Researchers" Author: Dr Verity Brack Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/brack-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Involving Users in the Development of a Web Accessibility Tool Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Involving Users in the Development of a Web Accessibility Tool Buzz data mobile software framework javascript database dissemination portal accessibility schema multimedia flash licence wcag research Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Craven and Mikael Snaprud describe how the EC-funded European Internet Accessibility Observatory Project is involving users in the development of a Web accessibility checking and monitoring tool.
The European Union (EU) is increasingly focused on design for all issues and ensuring that access to information and telecommunications meets the needs of all people in order to address the digital divide and create an information society for all.
This includes the estimated 37 million people with disabilities in the EU, as well as other groups who could face barriers to e-inclusion such as older people and people with access limitations.
This could include users of alternative devices (e.g.
PDAs) or with limited bandwidth.
Member States of the EU are required to take the needs of disabled people (including access to information) into account according to Declaration 22 of the Amsterdam Treaty [1].
Advice and guidance is available, such as Europe's Information Society Thematic Portal [2] which provides information to raise awareness of the potential barriers to access and how they can be easily avoided if Web site designers follow Web accessibility guidelines.
EU activities to support Web accessibility and design for all include: A recommendation for a European curriculum for designers and engineers through the eEurope initiative.
The adoption of the W3C/WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for public Web sites in the EU.
The EU Research Framework Programme supports research and development efforts in this area.
This includes the Information Society Technologies Programme Priority 2 (FP6/IST 2003-2006), which has funded the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) Project [3] together with two other 'cluster' projects SupportEAM [4] and BenToWeb [5].
This article will focus on the European Internet Accessibility Observatory Project (EIAO) which began in September 2004 and is being undertaken in co-operation and partnership with industry and service providers and brings together the following institutions from 6 countries across Europe: Agder University College, Norway (Co-ordinating partner).
Vista Utredning AS, Norway.
FTB-Volmarstein, Germany.
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
Nettroken AS, Norway.
University of Tromsø, Norway.
FBL, Italy.
Technical University of Warsaw, Poland.
Aalborg University, Denmark.
Intermediaum AS, Norway.
The goal of the EIAO Project is to contribute to better e-accessibility for all citizens and to increase the use of standards for online resources.
The project will establish the technical basis for a possible European Internet Accessibility Observatory.
A collection of Web accessibility metrics (WAMs), based on the checkpoints developed by World Wide Web Consortium for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 1.0 [6] (with potential migration to 2.0), and the tools for automated data collection and dissemination will be developed and continuously improved upon throughout the project by feedback from users and user testing to sharpen the relevance of the automatically collected data.
The work is carried out in collaboration with the cluster projects (BenToWeb and Support EAM) and in co-ordination with the World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C/WAI).
The European Internet Accessibility Observatory will consist of the following elements: A set of Web Accessibility Metrics (WAMs) based on the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints (with a view to conversion to version 2.0 when appropriate).
An Internet robot (ROBACC ROBot assessing web ACCessibility) for automatic and frequent collection of data on Web accessibility and deviations from Web standards (i.e.
the WAI guidelines) A data warehouse (ROBACC DW) providing online access to collected accessibility data.
All software developed in the project will be released under an open source licence.
The combined elements of EIAO (i.e.
WAMs, ROBACC, ROBACC DW) illustrated below in Figure 1, will be referred to as the Observatory throughout this article.
Figure 1: Elements of the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (The relations among the elements indicate how user testing is planned to improve the automatic evaluation.)
The overall aim is that all kinds of Web sites should be evaluated for accessibility, but the focus initially is on EU public services, governmental and local authorities, and private service providers such as banks and public transport.
By providing frequently updated data on Web accessibility metrics, as well as deviations from standards, the Observatory aims to: Provide quantitative background for policy-making and targeted actions to improve Web accessibility.
This may be of special importance for the discussion going on about legislation (anti-discrimination laws) for equal rights related to Web accessibility.
Promote e-accessibility by raising awareness and encouraging competition through benchmarking of accessibility metrics and deviations from standards.
Provide background for the discussion of standards and the development of new standards.
Contribute to the Lisbon strategy of making Europe the World's most competitive knowledge-based economy by 2010.
EIAO is funded by the EU Sixth Framework Programme, Priority 2: Information Society Technologies.
The project is carried out as part of a Web Accessibility Benchmarking cluster together with projects Support-EAM and BenToWeb.
The three projects are working together to develop an EU-harmonised Web evaluation methodology based on the W3C/WAI Guidelines.
User Requirements Data Gathering By involving users throughout the EIAO Project, it will be possible to use the findings from each user group to influence the technical development of the project in terms of interface and schema design.
Also, by identifying statements provided by the users, a clearer picture will be provided of what users actually want to get from the Observatory.
Figure 2 illustrates the involvement of users (through requirements gathering and user testing) throughout the project development cycle: Figure 2: EIAO Development Cycle At present there is little evidence of user involvement in the development of standards and guidelines for Web accessibility, or for the development of automated tools for testing.
However it is becoming increasingly evident that to be able to create Web sites that are accessible to a greater number of people, with a greater number of needs and requirements, it is essential to include users in the process from the start.
The work that has been undertaken tends to focus on the testing of specific Web sites or features provided on a Web page (such as the search function, or login process) rather than on the gathering of user requirements, perceptions and attitudes to the Web.
Studies which consider more generally the needs of users provide interesting results.
For example, the Disability Rights Commission study of the accessibility of Web sites [7] revealed that all categories of disabled user find Web site designs take insufficient account of their specific needs.
Another example is an evaluation of an online database conducted by House et al [8], where the team made initial assumptions relating to what user requirements would be, but the assessments revealed a variety of needs which differed between groups of users (library staff, information officers, lawyers etc) thus indicating that requirements can and must be defined more specifically, and that they vary from group to group.
The EIAO Project has set out to identify more generally what users want from an accessible Web site and the problems they have encountered.
Having established general requirements and problems experienced, the project has compared and identified relevant checkpoints based on the WCAG, which are being used to develop the WAMs for the Observatory.
To identify user requirements, two main groups of users were identified: end-users and stakeholder groups: End-users were identified as users who could benefit from accessible content and for whom accessibility may be an issue.
This could include people with disabilities, people who use specific devices such as a PDA or mobile phone and people who have other access limitations such as limited bandwidth.
Stakeholders were identified as groups of users such as Web developers, policy makers, and Web site owners.
The methods chosen to identify the requirements of end-users and the stakeholder groups were a combination of questionnaires and follow-up interviews.
Drawing on experiences from other surveys where significant response rates have been difficult to achieve, the project focused on obtaining richer, more qualitative data rather than large-scale quantitative results.
This approach will provide the Project Team with 'statements' on accessibility which will help with the development of the first iteration (and possibly further iterations) of the ROBACC WAMs.
End-users Around 500 questionnaires were distributed to potential end-users.
Responses were received from 109 people and follow-up interviews conducted with 30 people.
Although it was not possible to ensure a truly representative spread across age range, gender, and disability group, genders were well represented and a reasonable spread across the range of ages achieved with the exception of people over the age of 65.
The disability groups identified for the study were all represented (e.g visual, hearing, physical, cognitive/learning, access), but a greater number of responses were received from people with visual and/or physical disabilities.
This may be due to several factors, such as the design of the questionnaire, method of returning responses or simply that people with visual or physical disabilities felt more strongly about Web accessibility.
Stakeholders Distribution took place to an initial sample of 50 organisations identified as potential stakeholders.
Respondents were asked at the end of the questionnaire if they would be willing to take part in a follow-up interview.
The initial number of responses was low, therefore a decision to undertake further distribution was made.
This was done via relevant email lists (e.g.
EdeAN, CETIS, TechDis) and via the Europa Information Society News Thematic Portal.
As a result of this extra distribution, the response rate increased to a satisfactory level for the purposes of the project.
It was particularly pleasing that many respondents provided comments to back up their quantitative responses, which then provided the Project Team with a better insight into their requirements.
The data gathered from the questionnaires was explored further through follow-up interviews.
From the 43 questionnaire responses received, 23 agreed to take part in the interviews.
This work is ongoing at the time of writing.
End-User Requirements The first phase of gathering feedback on what users want from an accessible Web enabled the Project Team to identify the main accessibility problems experienced by users, which could then be compared with the Web accessibility metrics identified for inclusion (based on WCAG 1.0).
At present 20 WCAG checkpoints (priority levels 1, 2 and 3) have been identified for inclusion (although 3 may be withdrawn because they are likely to be deprecated in WCAG version 2.0).
Main Accessibility Problems The results revealed keyboard access (shortcut keys, tab navigation and/or keyboard navigation) to be the most frequently mentioned accessibility problem, followed by problems either with lack of ALT text or poor use of ALT text.
Users also mentioned problems relating to the organisation of the page, an inability to navigate the site, poor use of titles for Web pages, and confusing use of language such as acronyms and abbreviations that are not fully explained.
Users indicated they felt excluded from a number of elements found in Web pages such as images, multimedia and forms.
This was illustrated further during the interviews where users talked about problems accessing Flash, PDF, and JavaScript, and how complex forms could be tiring to complete with added accessibility problems particularly when using a screen reader.
When asked to suggest ways in which to improve accessibility, the most popular suggestion (from a list of possibilities) related to the organisation of the page or site 'a clear design with menus'.
Appropriate markup (e.g.Titles and Headings) to help inform the user about the content of the page were mentioned quite frequently, as were the design of forms that are easy to navigate and to complete.
Other accessibility issues mentioned by the users related to slow download times when not on broadband, and having to register on some Web sites before being allowed to access the information on the page.
Comparison with WCAG The user requirements identified in this study have been compared with the WAMs and the corresponding Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (1.0) and each problem identified by the respondents has been linked to a potentially relevant checkpoint.
Overall, nine Priority 1, twenty-one Priority 2, and eleven Priority 3 checkpoints were identified as being of relevance to accessibility problems identified by the respondents either from questionnaire responses or via the follow-up interviews.
The fact that more accessibility issues can be related to Priority 2 of the WCAG (version 1.0) suggests that there are differences between some users' needs and their perceptions of accessibility, and the formal recommendations such as those produced by the WCAG.
It also suggests that some aspects of Priority 1 checkpoints are either not as relevant to real users or are being handled well by Web developers.
Further investigation of this aspect is needed.
Some of the problems indicated by users could not be identified in the WAMs proposed for the first iteration.
This situation will be monitored over each iteration and during the user testing stage of the project (to be undertaken in late 2005).
Stakeholder Requirements Accessibility Awareness The findings reported in Section 3 suggest stakeholders are in a position that would be open to the services offered by the Observatory because they have an understanding of the importance of accessibility issues and of methods available to help and guide them towards creating better Web sites.
However, it cannot be assumed that all stakeholders will have this level of awareness as some respondents commented that people they have to liaise with (e.g.
managers, policy makers, externally appointed Web designers) are often less aware and therefore need to have the information they receive tailored to their needs.
Despite the fact that the majority of stakeholders surveyed showed awareness of accessibility issues and were in support of 'design for all' principles, not all were actively involved in creating accessible Web sites.
This was often dependent on the nature of their organisation and work (i.e.
customer-driven, resource-driven, outsourcing etc).
Stakeholders who were involved in addressing accessibility (through design, liaison, advice, etc) cited a number of tools used to help them design accessible content, the most popular methods being the use of guidelines and standards.
Respondents who said they regularly checked their sites for accessibility cited a combination of tools (automated, manual, external audits) rather than any one particular tool.
Accessibility Checking Respondents were asked what accessibility data they might find useful for their work, and were given some options to comment on.
Comparisons and benchmarking prompted mixed responses.
While generally in favour of being able to compare the accessibility of their Web site with other similar organisations, and to be able to have benchmarks of best practice for comparison with their Web sites, respondents had concerns about the methods used to benchmark in particular the sole use of automated tools, or the accessibility criteria used.
Respondents were very positive about the usefulness of Web accessibility indicators, of monitoring of accessibility (e.g.
of a Web site) over time, and of examples of good practice.
They had more reservations about automatically collected data on accessibility mainly because they associated this with automated testing and were unsure of the capability of automated tools.
They were very positive about receiving extra information such as suggestions on how to repair faults, also a ranked list of improvements needed to make their site more accessible.
They were also positive about being able to integrate manual and automated tests (if this could be done), and of receiving a regular accessibility report about their site.
When asked about accessibility checks and accessibility reports, respondents in favour of this type of data said they would like to be able to configure the depth or level themselves, according to circumstances and to their target audience.
Respondents also said it would be useful to have the answers to more technical questions, as well as being able to assess the compatibility of their Web sites with different assistive technologies.
Respondents also mentioned the need to raise awareness about accessibility, so that people know why it is important, not just what needs to be done.
Many talked about the importance of user testing and user feedback, in particular because of the limitations that were identified in respect of automated testing.
Issues for Consideration Overall, respondents were very positive about the Observatory.
The main issues raised by respondents which require further consideration related to the limitations of automated testing and the difficulty of including users in this type of data collection.
This is something the Project Team will need to address, based on the user testing sections of the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM).
The work of the UWEM should also help to address concerns over the accuracy and reliability of automated testing.
In relation to legal issues that the Project Team may need to consider, the main concern related to making claims about accessibility levels that might be used in a legal case, or with which organisations do not agree.
One useful suggestion was for the Project Team to include some kind of disclaimer on the site, clearly stating the scope of the Observatory.
Conclusion These findings show the current situation and defines the work needed for the project to progress.
Responses from the end-users have provided an initial picture of end-user requirements and their perceptions of accessibility, which can be fed into development of the WAMs, the Cluster work and other relevant EIAO project work.
The questionnaires were important to establish general levels of awareness.
However they also identified the main difficulties experienced by developers, owners, and decision makers when dealing with accessibility in their context which would lead to the development of a tool that will meet their requirements.
The follow-up interviews were important to identify any concerns users may have with such an Observatory.
The Project Team will therefore take great care to give all opinions close consideration.
The next stage of user involvement will take place after the first release of the Observatory software.
This will comprise the validation of the software through a series of user testing and validation exercises.
This stage of the project is scheduled to take place towards the end of 2005 and will run over several iterations according to each release of the software.
Further iterations of user requirements gathering are also planned after each release of the software, providing invaluable feedback at each of the development stages.
The EIAO Project is co-funded by the European Commission under the IST contract 2003-004526-STREP.
Further details are available on the Project Web site [3].
References The Amsterdam Treaty http://europa.eu.int/abc/obj/amst/en/ Europe's Information Society Thematic Portal http://europa.eu.int/information_society/index_en.htm The European Internet Accessibility Observatory http://www.eiao.net/ SupportEAM Project http://www.support-eam.org BenToWeb Project http://www.bentoweb.org World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ Disability Rights Commission (DRC).
The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled people.
A formal Investigation conducted by the Disability Rights Commission.
London: DRC, 2004.
House Van, Nancy A. et al.
User-Centered Iterative Design for Digital Libraries: The Cypress Experience, February 1996, Dlib Magazine http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february96/02vanhouse.html Author Details Jenny Craven Research Associate Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) Manchester Metropolitan University UK Email: j.craven@mmu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/ Mikael H. Snaprud Associate Professor Faculty of Engineering and Science Agder University College Norway Email: mikael.snaprud@hia.no Web site: http://www.hia.no Return to top Article Title: "Involving Users in the Development of a Web Accessibility Tool" Author: Jenny Craven and Mikael Snaprud Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/craven/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Through the Web Authoring Tools Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Through the Web Authoring Tools Buzz software java framework api javascript html xml apache stylesheet xslt metadata css xhtml browser schema windows linux passwords perl flash dom php widget chrome xul licence telnet ftp dhtml plone url standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Browning offers a technical review of new approaches to Web publishing.
The Web is over ten years old but it has yet to realise the vision of its founder '.... it should be possible for grandma to take a photo of grandchildren and put it on the web immediately and without fuss ....'[1].
The Web, for most of its users, remains a read-only medium.
The 'Universal Canvas' is a term introduced by Microsoft; two definitions are [2]: It builds upon XML schema to transform the Internet from a read-only environment into a read/write platform, enabling users to interactively create, browse, edit, annotate and analyze information A surface on which we view, but also create and edit, words and tables and charts and pictures Central to the concept of the Universal Canvas is the idea of the write-enabled or 'Two-way-Web' [3].
Universities and colleges seem to be a long way from realising the write-enabled Web; they appear to make a rod for their own backs by providing their users with a set of authoring tools that may be one or more of: expensive (both in terms of purchase cost and subsequent cost of ownership) bloated unintuitive insecure poor supporters of standards The local implementation of such tools may also be over-complicated and undesirable in that it encourages a model of content management in which the same information is stored in at least two places.
TTW editing technologies, when combined with a CMS (Content Management System), can provide a 'de-skilled frictionless publishing environment' [4] a write-enabled Web in which: a good separation of content and presentation is achieved by use of templates creation, editing and publishing becomes as easy as (or still easier than) using a word-processor and sending documents as e-mail attachments single instances of content can be managed on an enterprise scale new opportunities for doing better with information emerge Technologies TTW authoring is achieved using a number of approaches some of the technologies have been available since 1996.
Essentially three major categories of solution can be distinguished and examples of each of these are listed in Table 1.
TTW authoring is of course possible via a textarea box if the user is prepared to enter whatever sort of markup (e.g.
HTML, Structured Text) is required.
However, the focus of this article is on tools that allow both a TTW and a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) environment to be provided.
The article is restricted in scope to the most common desktop computer platforms (i.e.
MS Windows, MacOS and Unix) and to the most common browsers still under active development (i.e.
Internet Explorer and Gecko-based browsers exemplified by Mozilla).
Some of the examples illustrated use Zope (sometimes in concert with Apache or Plone) as the server-side component(s); these components are outstanding examples of successful open source software.
The Zope component could be replaced by one of many other server-side technologies (e.g.
Perl, PHP, JSP, ASP).
The use of open source software in the examples properly reflects the dominance achieved by such CMS solutions within the government, public and not-for-profit sectors [5].
Recent informal surveys [6] of UCISA members suggest that Zope is currently the most popular content management framework within the UK Higher Education arena.
Whole page Textarea replacement Context sensitive AOLpress     Amaya     Netscape Gold 2.0     Netscape Communicator 4.0 Composer     IE4 DHTML Edit Control (DEC) IE4 DHTML Edit Control (DEC) IE4 DHTML Edit Control (DEC)   Ektron DHTML Edit Control     Java applets   IE5.5 MSHTML editor IE5.5 MSHTML editor IE5.5 MSHTML editor Mozilla Composer       ComposIte       Lime     Xopus   Midas       Mozile     Bitflux   Flash   Table 1: The major categories of TTW authoring solutions.
A rough chronological order is implied from top to bottom.
Whole page AOLpress is mentioned for historical interest.
It was one of the first WYSIWYG authoring tools to implement the HTTP PUT mechanism but, whilst it could browse Web pages, it could not be considered an 'everyday browser application' (just as modern WYSIWYG authoring tools such as Dreamweaver could not be considered 'everyday browser applications').
Like AOLpress, Amaya also implements HTTP PUT.
Unlike AOLpress, Amaya is still under active development and is freely available for MS Windows, MacOS and Unix platforms.
Amaya is more a reference implementation than a viable everyday application.
It lacks SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support; this makes use of the HTTP PUT mechanism in a production environment risky.
It might be argued that the security issues around plain text password interception have done more to prevent the introduction of frictionless Web publishing in campus environments than any other factor.
The key point about Netscape and its descendents is the support for SSL the security issues around HTTP PUT are ameliorated.
In contrast to Amaya, the editor component of Netscape is a separate application but, as noted below, it shares enough code with the browser component that we can consider Composer to be a 'Whole page' TTW solution.
Mozilla Composer is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Mozilla Composer.
(a) The view in the Mozilla browser showing a Page Template rendered by Zope in University of Bristol Information Services house style.
(b) The user inserts '/Source' into the URL which causes Apache to re-direct the browser over an SSL connection to the unrendered WebDAV source port (the user being forced to authenticate at this point against the campus-wide Active Directory domain).
(c) Ctrl+E has just been pressed which loads the unrendered Page Template into Composer.
Clicking on the Publish button commits any changes from Composer into Zope.
A server-side PUT_factory can be used to perform various forms of post-edit processing.
The editor is currently used in three different ways in the Mozilla codebase, though each application shares the same underlying code: Composer a fully-fledged HTML editor, for writing Web pages.
Embeddable HTML editing widget a rich text editing tool (Midas), used in mail compose, instant messaging and other areas.
Text widget the editor is used for text input and text areas (e.g.
the URL bar) and in HTML form controls.
The second and third modes allow Mozilla also to be a player in the 'Textarea replacement' and 'Context-sensitive' categories of TTW authoring solutions (see below).
Internet Explorer has become increasingly capable in terms of WYSIWYG editing since version 4.
The evolutionary route to the capabilities we now find available in the latest version started with what was known as the 'DHTML Editing Control' (or DEC) which was available as an ActiveX component.
By the arrival of version 5.5 this had been subsumed into the 'MSHTML editor' and its use considerably enriched and simplified as the following example shows.
Create a .htm file containing this single line of text: <SPAN CONTENTEDITABLE WIDTH=100%>MY EDITOR</SPAN> Open the .htm file in Internet Explorer.
The browser wraps your line of text in HTML and BODY tags due to the .htm file extension, and you have a simple, live HTML Editor; when you click the text that your browser displays you will find that you can add text to the page just by typing!
Keystrokes such as Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I also do what you would expect.
This is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Internet Explorer.
The entire body of the html file has been tagged as contentEditable.
The user may click anywhere and start editing within the browser.
The insertion point was placed at the end of the first paragraph, the text 'The Universal Canvas arrives?'
was typed.
The text was selected by clicking and dragging, and then Ctrl+B was pressed.
Although initially restricted to Internet Explorer, the contentEditable property opened up incredibly rich possibilities.
Not only did Internet Explorer become a 'Whole page' TTW editor solution, it also stole a march in the 'Context-sensitive' category as evidenced by developments such as Lime and Xopus (see below).
Textarea replacement There are several Java-based textarea replacement TTW authoring solutions.
The cross-platform, cross-browser potential is an obvious attraction as Java offered the nirvana of 'write once, run everywhere'.
The reality, in the early years at least, was nearer 'write once, debug everywhere' which reflects in part the sensitivity of many Java applications to the client-side JVM (Java Virtual Machine).
Today, real world experience suggests that things are more robust (though not without the maintenance overhead of ensuring the right JVM exists and is configured client-side).
edit-on Pro from RealObjects is available with an unlimited use license and with an educational discount; for the price of two high-end desktop PCs you can provide access to all users on your campus providing you have the in-house skills to integrate edit-on Pro into your CMS or can afford to purchase such skills from elsewhere.
edit-on Pro is illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3: edit-on Pro integrated within Plone.
(a) The anonymous Item view in Mozilla of a Plone Document object.
(b) The authenticated Contents view in Mozilla.
(c) The authenticated Item view in Mozilla note the view, edit, properties and state tabs are now visible.
(d) Clicking on the edit tab reveals the Edit Document view but with the body text available within edit-on Pro rather than the standard textarea box.
Integration by NetSpot Pty Ltd who kindly provided permission for these screenshots to be reproduced here.
The edit-on Pro outputs well-formed XHTML which can be easily parsed and automatically transformed using XSLT.
By implementing its API (application programme interface), integrators have a wide range of customisation and extension possibilities.
The editor toolbar can be fully customised to match the available editing functionality to the needs of the user.
The custom tags feature allows developers to implement solutions which mimic aspects of the 'Context-sensitive' category (see below).
Developed in Java 1.1, edit-on Pro does not require special libraries or client plugins edit-on Pro will run on the most common OS/Browser combinations.
RealObjects claim edit-on Pro 3.x to be the only online WYSIWYG editor which runs also on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.
ComposIte is a chrome overlay which enables a streamlined Mozilla Editor (i.e.
Composer) for HTML composition in textareas.
ComposIte is illustrated in Figure 4.
Figure 4: ComposIte.
The standard Zope Management Interface is shown in the background.
The Edit tab of a Page Template object has been opened and the source of the object is available to edit via a textarea box.
Typing Ctrl+E causes ComposIte to pop up; changes are committed via the Apply menu.
ComposIte installs as an XPI (cross-platform installation) all users need do is restart their browser.
Once it is installed, users just need to type Ctrl+E in any textarea box to cause ComposIte to spring into action as a pop-up.
Alternately, you can cause, via the ComposIte preferences within Mozilla, an 'Edit with ComposIte' button to be added on pages adjacent to all textareas, or have the pop-up appear whenever you click in a textarea.
ComposIte become broken in Mozilla 1.3 but a fix has been produced which has also been tested on Mozilla 1.4.
The current direction of the development effort is to make ComposIte work in-line (i.e.
no pop-up) so that it quite literally replaces every textarea box.
The Rich Text Editing component within Mozilla is known as Midas.
Given a document, you can add the attribute 'designMode' and set it to 'on' to get an editable document.
For example, in JavaScript, if you have an iframe with an id of 'edit', you can get its contentDocument and enable designMode like this: document.getElementById('edit').contentDocument.designMode='on'; Midas has been implemented in several ways.
One of the most impressive implementations is Epoz 0.x.
This variant of Epoz allows you to edit Zopeor Plone-objects in a TTW WYSIWYG editor Internet Explorer is also supported (but not via Midas).
Epoz for Plone (a Zope super-skin) is illustrated in Figure 5.
Epoz 1.x is considered in the 'Context-sensitive' category of solution.
Figure 5: Epoz 0.x for Plone.
(a) The anonymous view in Mozilla of a Plone document object.
(b) After the user authenticates an Edit tab appears for the document object.
(c) Clicking on the Edit tab provides access to various metadata fields and the Body Text field which is seen available within the Midas-based editor.
IEDocument is a Zope product based on IEMethod and HTMLDocument.
The original trail for this approach was blazed by IE Editor for Zope.
IEDocument is illustrated in Figure 6.
Figure 6: IEDocument.
(a) The standard Zope Management Interface.
One IEDocument object has been added to the folder.
The pencil icon is part of External Editor (see 'Links to other technologies' section).
(b) The IEDocument component of the management interface note the Editor IE5 only tab.
The regular textarea box for source editing can been seen.
(c) Clicking on the Editor IE5 only tab opens the IEDocument within an editor based on the Internet Explorer DEC. IEDocument is but one of many options both open source and commercial.
In the latter category the Ektron's eWebEditPro and eWebEditPro+XML deserve mention as the most highly developed versions of this category of solution.
Ektron was the first commercial player in the market place and continues to be perceived as market leader; their pricing reflects this and is generally beyond reach for any university or college considering implementation on a campus scale.
However, despite offering support for Netscape and Mozilla, the Ektron products are not cross-platform as they still require the Internet Explorer to have been installed (to make the Microsoft DEC available) and so are restricted to MS Windows as an operating system; this constraint does not apply to the Flash-based Ektron eWebWP product (see below).
Ektron's eWebWP is based on Macromedia Flash technology which allows it to run on client OS platforms including MS Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
Flash-based solutions therefore compete with Java-based in allowing cross-platform, cross-browser access.
eWebWP is illustrated in Figure 7.
Figure 7: eWebWP.
A view in Mozilla of the a test page distributed with the 30-day evaluation version available from Ektron which was installed on to a Zope server without modification.
Context-sensitive Mozile or Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows the user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from within Mozilla itself.
It can act as the client-side of a content-editing system or as a self-contained 'Web word processor'.
Mozile has been built using eDOM (or editor Document Object Model) and is illustrated in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Mozile (a) The view in Mozilla with the editable area shown as a dotted box controlled by the stylesheet.
(b) Clicking in the box causes the toolbar to appear.
This software was tested successfully under Windows 2000 with Zope as a back-end server.
No additional configuration was necessary other than to ensure that the supporting stylesheets were imported as File objects with Content Type set to text/css.
Whilst Mozile remains a project in development, the demonstration of how it can be integrated into the Mozilla toolbar using XUL (XML User-interface Language) and the involvement of Bitflux (who contributed the WebDAV code) underline the potential on offer.
The Bitflux XML Editor is based on Mozile and eDOM.
Currently the latest version is in alpha release but the demo site shows the direction in which context-sensitive editors based on Mozilla are heading.
Bitflux is one of the editor components in the recently announced Apache Lenya project.
Epoz 1.x is a 'document-centric' client-side editor for Mozilla, Netscape and Internet Explorer.
Like Epoz 0.x, Epoz 1.x uses JavaScript but has been completely rewritten to improve the architecture, plugability, standards support, support for servers other than Zope (which was the original target platform for Epoz 0.x) and configurability.
Epoz uses CSS in favour of HTML for layout and presentation; it uses DOM functionality to construct the HTML.
Lime ('Less Is More Editor') is a content-sensitive HTML editor from Q42, the same company that wrote Xopus (see below).
Lime is illustrated in Figure 9.
Figure 9: Lime in use with Internet Explorer on its demo site [7].
The page elements that are editable by the user are highlighted in boxes as the mouse passes over them.
Numerous keyboard shortcuts are available including: Ctrl+U, HTML-ify the current selection, Ctrl+Shift+U, unHTML-ify the current selection (which allows source editing in-line).
Adapting pages for use inside Lime is claimed to be relatively straightforward.
Inside the page the parts that are allowed to be edited must be marked by the following: <span limetype='content'> this text will be editable </span limetype='content'> Q42 supply a 'make-editable'-wizard to ease the task of converting existing pages.
Xopus, also from Q42, is claimed to be the world's first WYSIWYG XML editor that uses XSLT.
Xopus develops the context-sensitive nature of the editing experience delivered by Lime by extending it to include XML validation.
Xopus can load and save using several protocols including HTTP and WebDAV.
Xopus is illustrated in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Xopus in use with Internet Explorer on the Xopus demo site [8].
An XML Schema is used to control the editing process in a very precise way.
Page elements may be edited in place and also moved up or down, (the relevant pull-down is displayed).
Xopus was demonstrated to rave reviews at OSCOM2 (Open Source CMS conference 2).
Currently Xopus is only available as a commercial product.
At one time it looked as though Xopus would be open sourced but it appears that the necessary partnerships to sustain such a development did not materialise.
Developments The Pre-millennial Web [4] was characterised by a poor separation of content and presentation.
It might be argued that the arrival of the Post-millennial Web saw many pages becoming more like a sandwich with a clear separation into the bread (the presentational wrapping) and the meat (the content filling).
A CMS allows many unskilled users to edit the meat without messing up the bread; only a minority of skilled designers, usually aided by heavyweight tools, get to go near the bread.
The development of standards such as XHTML, CSS and XML have played a vital role in facilitating this templating approach, providing CMS technologies with an underlying but flexible content framework.
The leading edge of TTW and WYSIWYG authoring is now characterised by the development of 'Context-sensitive' tools (e.g.
Mozile, Bitflux, Epoz 1.x, Lime and Xopus).
These tools mark an exciting new direction that will see unskilled users being able to edit individual page elements within the browser, but with validation being imposed by an underlying stylesheet.
The simple sandwich analogy is no longer adequate there are now multiple bits of meat inside the bread, each editable or transformable has the era of the baguette sandwich Web page now arrived?
The 'Context-sensitive' category of solution is starting to provide tools that can now deal with markup with semantic overtones, e.g.
: <span class='person'>Albert Einstein</span> might be displayed as italics depending on the prevailing CSS.
Two theatres of activity would seem to dominate the future development of these new generation tools currently the Mozilla Community and Microsoft.
Assessment Institutions would seem to be spoilt for choice; the current options are summarised in Table 2.
Composer is available as a 'Whole page' solution for all operating systems but there is uncertainty over the future of this application.
MS Windows users have the widest choice of 'Textarea replacement' solutions.
Java-based solutions are likely to be favoured by those sites needing to support a range of operating systems; selection is likely to determined by the available feature set (e.g.
XHTML, XML or CSS support, spell checker or copy-and-paste from Word).
The Java-based solutions may be feature-rich but they tend to be sensitive to the JVM in use and have an overhead in terms of time to load.
The other textarea solutions tend to be lighter in features but correspondingly quicker to load.
TTW Solution Whole page Textarea replacement Context sensitive MS Windows Composer Java-based Netscape-derived Netscape-derived Internet Explorer DEC-based Internet Explorer DEC-based Flash-based Unix Composer Java-based Netscape-derived Netscape-derived Flash-based Mac Composer Java-based Netscape-derived Netscape-derived Flash-based Table 2: Available TTW and WYSIWYG solutions depending on operating system.
It should not be overlooked that the Microsoft DEC-based options will offer less control to the developer over the parsing, code generation and editing behaviour of the tool because the DEC is distributed as binary components.
The same is true of Java applets for which the source code is unavailable except that a smaller vendor is likely to be more responsive to developer requests than a global mega-corporation.
The quality of the HTML produced by some solutions leaves much to be desired; as so many are based on the Microsoft DEC, which is notorious in this regard, then this is not unexpected.
All is not lost, however; within a flexible CMS framework it should be possible to implement a server-side process that intercepts and transforms the incoming (and maybe badly formed) HTML into something acceptable.
In Zope parlance this piece of machinery is known as the PUT_factory.
Inevitably the CMS solution becomes more complex; it is best to use components that generate good quality markup in the the first place.
Some solutions allow cleansing to be triggered client-side edit-on Pro, for example, has an API that allows any filter to be used (and by default this is HTML Tidy).
MS Windows users also have the widest choice of 'Context-sensitive' solutions.
The Netscape-derived solutions are still maturing, but the Internet Explorer-based offerings of Lime and Xopus by Q42 seem sufficiently robust for one to claim that the new generation tools have now arrived.
Such a claim is given weight by the news in October 2003 that Arbortext has launched a product called Contributor a WYSIWYG XML editing solution based on the latest version of Xopus with Arbortext specific extensions.
Contributor is fully integrated in the Arbortext Enterprise E-Content Engine (E3).
Many institutions are now withdrawing, or at least firewalling, telnetand ftp-based services because of their vulnerability to password interception.
TTW editing approaches can side-step these issues and have the potential to increase greatly the availability to users both on and off campus in a way that is both scalable and secure.
It is one thing to claim that that there is an abundance of TTW and WYSIWYG authoring solutions; it is another to claim that these are all readily available to universities and colleges for immediate benefit.
The focus of this article has been on authoring tools; but standalone the tool cannot offer benefit it needs to be integrated as part of a CMS.
The buy vs. build vs. buy-then-build CMS routes have been rehearsed elsewhere [4].
If you are buying a CMS today it is probably safe to say that a TTW and WYSIWYG authoring tool will already be part of the product.
If you are building a CMS then you need access to the skills, either in-house or third party, that can integrate the tool of choice into your content management framework.
If your institution already has a toe in the open source water then you are likely to be more comfortable with the build or buy-then-build routes.
The 'Whole page' and 'Textarea replacement' categories of solution have a more modest skills requirement than the 'Context-sensitive' route.
Neither is it a foregone conclusion that every institution will wish to go the TTW tool + CMS route.
Some organisations may prefer the model (as exemplified by Macromedia) of two (or more) instances of content in several places.
A requirement for off-line working, a need to protect an existing software and/or training investment or a preference for 'content on the file system which I can manipulate and manage with tools that I know work and which I've already got' (e.g.
a source control system) may demand this.
Ultimately your approach will boil down to answering the question 'Where do I wish to manage the complexity?'
Content management is complex underneath the surface but, if we are to realise the Universal Canvas, it must be a simple and intuitive experience for the majority of users.
Advocates of the Macromedia model will be prepared to manage more of the complexity on the desktop.
Protagonists of the TTW tool + CMS route will wish to partition the complexity server side.
But both camps will be unanimous on one thing: 'We want loosely coupled, standards-compliant components from which we can build a content management framework to meet our continually changing needs.'
Acknowledgements Participants at the the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2003 parallel session The WWW Web Widgeted, WebDAVed and Write-enabled Web [9] helped to inform this work.
Note: This article is a revised and abridged version of JISC Technology and Standards Watch Report TSW 03-08 'Through the Web (TTW) authoring tools' [10] which was published in December 2003.
References Ferguson, N., Report from WWW8 conference Toronto, 1999 http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/%7Eecnf/www8.html MacManus, R., Universal Canvas In the Beginning..., 2003 http://www.readwriteweb.com/2003/06/15.html Winer, D, The Two-Way-Web, 2000 http://www.thetwowayweb.com/ Browning, P. and Lowndes, M., Content Management Systems, 2001, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=techwatch_report_0102 Yaici, K., Open Source CMS Survey Results, 2003, http://www.soton.ac.uk/~ky202/survey_results.htm Browning, P., UK HE & FE Open Source CMS sites, 2003 http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/projects/cms/zope/open_source_cms Lime Editor Demonstrator http://lime.platvorm.com/lime/users/editor/ Xopus Web site demo page http://xopus.com/demo/ Browning, P., WWW Web Widgeted, WebDAVed and Write-enabled Web, 2003 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2003/sessions/#workshop-a6 Through The Web (TTW) authoring tools, Paul Browning, December 2003 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/techwatch_report_0308.html Author Details Paul Browning Assistant Director, Information Strategy University of Bristol Email: paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/ Return to top Article Title: "Through the Web Authoring Tools" Author: Paul Browning Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/browning/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Human-powered Search Engines: An Overview and Roundup Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Human-powered Search Engines: An Overview and Roundup Buzz data software java database rss video flickr technorati facebook algorithm url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at the major contenders and discusses the value of this type of search engine.
‘Human-powered search engines’ is perhaps a slightly unfortunate term, since it makes me think of lots of people running around on treadmills providing the energy to keep the servers powered up!
However, it’s the term in general use, so we’ll go with it.
Essentially it means a search engine which can, and will have its results (or at least the position of its results) affected by human intervention, usually by people rating individual results further up or further down the rankings.
The major search engines that you’ll be familiar with all use complex computer algorithms to work out why one result, or Web page, should rank higher than another.
These algorithms will take into account the position of words on a page, the repetition, the number of links pointing to a page and so on.
Search engines will make particular claims for their own methodology, all claiming that they provide better and more relevant rankings than the opposition.
As a result, each engine keeps its exact ‘recipe’ secret, which is one of the reasons why you receive different results for the same search with each and every engine you use – apart of course from the obvious point that they’re each searching different databases.
Unfair Gaming While this approach generally works reasonably well there are of course flaws in the system.
If people can work out how a search engine ranks, they can rewrite their individual Web pages to attract higher rankings – often known as ‘gaming’ a search engine.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to achieve a high ranking with a search engine; and after all, it’s in the interests of the end-users to receive sound, relevant results; yet all too often this manipulation is done for quite different reasons.
There is a huge industry involved in achieving high rankings, and the methods used are not always as ethical as perhaps they should be, with hundreds if not thousands of Web sites being artificially created to point to each other, or to one site in particular in order to boost it up the rankings.
Even in situations where this isn’t the case mistakes can occur – a simple search for ‘Martin Luther King’ over at Google returns a racist Web site in a high position – at the time of writing this particular site (which I won’t mention in more detail since I don’t want to give it even more publicity!)
is in 3rd position, though this is of course subject to change.
Part of the reason for this is that people link to it, using it as an example of inaccurate information, but Google sees any link as a positive thing; not always the case.
Consequently the ‘traditional’ approach does have considerable drawbacks, and people often look for better ways of providing access to data.
Early versions of human-powered or moderated sites were what I term ‘directory’ or ‘index’ sites, where real live people did (and indeed still do) check individual sites before adding them into their hierarchical collections.
Strictly speaking however, such sites are not what most of us would consider as ‘search engines’ these days.
A number of approaches have been taken to add other human touches to results, in most instances by allowing individuals to engage in the ranking process, by voting for or against specific results and/or writing their own results for particular searches.
In this article I’ll take a look at some of these approaches and consider how well they work, and indeed at the extent to which the concept is either successful, or as flawed as the traditional method.
Anoox An early entrant into the field is Anoox [1] which traces its origins back to 2005.
It’s a very straightforward search engine which provides very brief listings of results (title and URL), together with a voting button – to move a result up or down the rankings, or to vote it as spam.
I will confess that it does not inspire me with confidence – the first result returned for a search on ‘librarian’ is a placeholder site.
Moreover, I couldn’t see any of the more usual librarian Web sites appearing on the first page of results.
A perfect opportunity to affect the results surely?
Unfortunately not.
Before I can vote results up and down I have to register, declaring my name, address, telephone number, area of expertise and email address.
My registration will, I am promised, take about 24 hours, and I’ll then be able to become a democratic member of the voting community.
This hiccough takes us straight to the heart of the problem with human-powered search engines – the element of fraud or spam.
It’s all too easy to game the engine artificially by voting one particular site higher and another lower.
Even registration isn’t going to stop anyone who really wants to achieve a high ranking since they can register repeatedly or indeed employ people to do so on their behalf.
While it’s equally true that other people can vote sites down, or report them as spam, it’s going to be very difficult to stop anyone who is really determined.
In fact, it’s much easier to affect the rankings in this way than by the traditional method of re-writing pages, getting more links and so on.
One just has to hope that most people will play fairly, but this is not always the case.
Meanwhile my attempt to bring some sense to the poor search result has floundered at the first step.
I’m prepared and indeed happy to register with these search engines, but a 24-hour turn-around time?
It’s just not realistic.
This brings us to a second problem, and it’s one of self-interest.
It’s easy to make the case with a site like Wikipedia, that it’s a huge joint effort on the part of thousands of people, and if nothing else one can feel a glow of satisfaction in having made a contribution.
If I’m doing a search once (as most of mine are), in order to do justice to the system, I’m going to have to look at least a few results to see which ones are the best, then go back and rate the results accordingly.
All this for a search that I’m never going to do again, or indeed which no-one may ever do again?
I simply cannot see the value in spending my time in this way.
The only people who are going to do it are those who wish to gain financially, as the search term ‘internet’ shows – almost all the first page of results point towards business Web sites, poker sites, optimisation services and so on.
Now, I don’t know if these sites have been voted for – the interface doesn’t provide me with that data, but being the cynic I am, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Consequently, we have arrived very quickly at the exact opposite of the initial concept!
ChaCha ChaCha [2] is a search engine that’s twisted the concept of human-powered slightly.
It was launched in September 2006 and provides straightforward results in exactly the manner you would expect – sponsored links followed by results with titles, reasonable summaries and URLs.
It also provides ‘related searches’ as well.
The interesting point with ChaCha however is the ‘search with a guide’ option – and you need to register in order to be able to use this.
ChaCha employs guides who are paid $5 an hour to search for results with you.
They are not employed by the organisation, and are probably best considered to be ‘home workers’.
Rather than users running their own searches they can click on the ‘Search with guide’ option.
After a few seconds a sidebar window opens with a chat box and connects you to a named guide, who asks what your query is, and then attempts to find answers for you.
Your searches are saved and you can return to them at any point in the next three months.
The service is very slick, the guide is very helpful and polite, but unfortunately the answer that I got to my question ‘What were the names of the invasion beaches on Sicily during World War 2?’ was only partially answered, as I discovered when later I checked out the answer myself.
ChaCha isn’t so much a human-powered search engine as a personalised questions and answers service that uses a search engine, so it’s really a glorified version of Yahoo Answers.
Collarity Relevance Engine Collarity [3] is taking a different approach to the concept of human-powered search engines.
The emphasis this engine takes is to individualise searching, down to the level of a single individual or group.
Collarity learns over time by watching the searches that are performed and matching them to appropriate results.
This is best explained by way of an example.
I used Collarity to find Web pages that related to alternative health therapies in the area in which I live, in Billericay, Essex, UK and my searches generally took the form of <name_of_therapy> <Billericay>.
A few days later I returned to the engine to continue searching and, as soon as I typed in a new form of alternative therapy that I hadn’t searched for previously, the search engine immediately suggested an association with Billericay.
However, when I then tried a search for <butcher> the same association did not appear.
While it wasn’t possible to affect the rankings by voting for or against sites as with many of the other search engines in this category, nonetheless the associations did at least arise from my previous searches.
It is possible to take Collarity further however, and use it with a group of individuals, by integrating their search functionality into a Web site.
However, there is a commercial aspect to this enterprise, so it may not be appropriate for everyone.
A rather cheaper alternative may be the Eurekster Swicki, mentioned below.
Earthfrisk Earthfrisk [4] is a multior meta-search engine, which pulls Web results from Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask and Clusty.
Earthfrisk also takes data from social networking sources such as digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Reddit under the guise of ‘social media’ and reference sources such as Wikipedia, Britannica Online Encyclopedia, Infoplease and WebMD.
It offers Web, video, image, map and directory search.
The results, in common with most of these engines, are very basic – title, brief summary and URL.
There is an option to discuss and vote on any result that you see.
Moreover, it’s possible to ‘claim your name’ and if you’ve registered with the engine you’ll be able to add a few lines of text, including links and a photograph.
Individual sites can be added to the database, tagged and described.
It is also possible to view the actions of individuals, to see what their comments have been, what they have voted on and this can be saved as an RSS feed.
Not exactly social networking, but it’s a nod in that direction.
There is a toolbar that can be installed, although to be honest, I’m only going to have one toolbar running at any moment in time, and it’s not their turn.
The toolbar does offer extra functionality, in that it’s possible to see the colour coding given to any particular site, but Earthfrisk seems slightly vague about how this is supposed to work, which does not engender confidence or enthusiasm.
Clicking on the voting option opens up a new window with a comments box and radio buttons for ‘very good’, ‘good’, ‘not good’.
I have voted on and commented on several results, but this doesn’t appear to be reflected in the position of results.
Nor is it clearly obvious that results have been voted on or comments made – it’s necessary to go into the link option to check this out.
This seems rather foolish to me – surely the whole point of the exercise is to quickly see what people are saying about pages and sites and to be able to affect positioning?
I certainly think that Earthfrisk is heading in the right direction, but it’s not quite there yet; if I can’t see the work that I’ve put in there, it’s not really going to motivate me; and if my recommendations and votes do not alter the position of results I have to question the value of doing it.
iRazoo The iRazoo search engine[5] attempts to provide a solution to my earlier question regarding self-interest, in that searchers get points for searching, voting and commenting on Web sites.
Once registered users can perform regular searches as normal, with fairly basic results of title, brief summary and URL.
When users click on a result a new window opens and they are taken to the appropriate page and can then vote for or against it.
Points can then be exchanged for prizes.
In order to obtain a Apple 30 GB iPod video Black (5.5 Generation), a user would need to amass 73,000 points; and since the top ‘earner’ had not yet reached 10,000 points I don’t think iRazoo is going to have to buy in very many!
That information bar can be closed or ignored as preferred.
Irritatingly however, there is an option to click to go back to the search results, but these load in the same window, so in a very short space of time you can amass a lot of tabs for no good reason.
Once a page has been recommended, it is pulled to the top of the list of results, and the number of times it has been recommended is shown and searchers can view the comments that have been made about it, and add their own.
A search for ‘bbc’ showed that the BBC news site had been recommended 9 times and commented on twice.
Oddly however the opposite was not true of sites that had not been recommended.
I located the Martin Luther King racist site and clicked against recommending it, but this was not taken into account by the software, and I was also unable to see the comment that I had made about the site.
I found this slightly odd; while positive recommendation is obviously helpful, surely so is a negative response to a Web site?
The only way that I could see the ‘anti’ recommendation system working was when I voted against a site that already had votes – when I looked again at the number of people who voted for the site the figure had dropped by one, but the fact that it had had votes against it wasn’t mentioned.
Consequently the most that will happen is that a site remains static, so really bad sites will not suffer, although to be fair, good sites should flourish.
Mahalo The Mahalo engine [6] was launched last year in a welter of publicity, mainly due to the reputation and background of the creator, Jason Calacanis [7].
Mahalo styles itself as the world’s first human-powered search engine, but I suspect that one or two other engines may well disagree with that description.
However, it would be fair to say that it is the engine that has drawn most attention since its debut.
The search interface is clear and uncluttered, offering suggestions as the searcher types.
Once the search is run, Mahalo comes back with various types of information.
It gives searchers the opportunity to view tabbed results from 8 different resources (the major search engines, Wikipedia, Flickr and so on) as well as information from Mahalo itself.
The ‘human-powered’ element can be seen in the form of guides that have been written by volunteers.
They attempt to create quick fact files, links to appropriate sites, the opportunity to email the information to contacts, and to share the page via various social bookmarking systems.
The guides are paradoxically the greatest strength and biggest weakness of the system in my opinion.
On the one hand, it’s very useful to have all that information pulled together for me in one place, rather similar to a virtual library such as Intute.
On the other hand, I have to ask myself if I’m prepared to trust the word of a ‘guide’ about which I know nothing.
The page on Everton FC was written by an individual who appears to have no link to or particular knowledge of English football, and though I don’t have issue with any of the content on the page, it’s not as useful as the entry at the Wikipedia for example.
Worse, it was last updated in early August 2007.
Consequently much of the ‘current’ information was already out of date, without details of the new players who had arrived or the fact that the assistant manager has now changed.
The Wikipedia provides better quality content, and the Google tab provides me with current information as well.
Now, it could easily be argued that I could do something about this, as there is an option to comment, once I have registered and logged in.
There is nothing to say however that my comments will have any effect, and they are quite simply that – just comments.
As a searcher I would still need to check the information from other sources.
Mahalo suffers the same type of limitations as Wikipedia, only more so; at least with Wikipedia the currency is better (as opposed to Malaho’s update being 5 months old, Wikipedia’s Everton article had been updated less than 5 hours beforehand!).
Moreover, I am not relying on one person to get everything correct, but a group of people.
Mahalo has however recently expanded and is now emphasising the social aspect of the site more than it has done in the past.
Its toolbar (remember the blissful days when we didn’t have any toolbars?)
allows users to recommend sites quickly, always view Mahalo results when their search matches a Mahalo page and detects relevant Mahalo pages based on the content of the page being viewed.
There is also a ‘Mahalo Social’ section, which allows users to register, create profiles, create and share recommendations, recommend links for searches, and discuss specific pages with other users.
This is a very interesting development and Mahalo is taking some of the best elements of existing social networking systems such as Facebook, as well as social bookmarking systems and blending them into a new style network.
However, once again there is a problem here, because I have friends and colleagues with widely different areas of interests which do not necessarily overlap.
While my contacts may be interested in anything that I find which relates to search engines it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will be equally interested in material on the football team I support or my photography interests.
Furthermore, when people use search engines the information required will not always be in the same subject area; my search interests are continually changing, and a social networking system will simply reflect the complete hodgepodge of my information requirements at any particular time.
This leads to another problem with the concept of human-powered searching, or social searching.
If I’m running a search for ‘java’ it will make no difference to me if most people have voted and commented in the computing context of the word if I have searched in the coffee context, or vice versa.
In actual fact, it could be argued that being able to vote for sites is going to make it more, not less difficult to find the information that I need.
My ‘coffee’ interest is going to get buried under all those votes for programming aspects of java; whereas at least when using more traditional search engines, I tend to be offered better options for narrowing or widening my search.
Human-powered searching is often seen as being ‘better’ searching, but I have so far seen little to suggest that is actually the case.
Furthermore, if I want to be social, I’ll sit on Facebook for a while and chat with friends, or play stupid games.
When I want to search, searching is what, and all, I want to do.
I confess I am not particularly interested in making search results better for other people; I have neither the time nor inclination.
All I want is sound, accurate information, delivered quickly, without fuss.
Usually I’m searching for information and data that I do not know – that’s why I’m looking for it.
Consequently, I am not in a position to say if a certain page is good, bad or indifferent until I’ve spent considerable time researching, by which time I’m keen to use the information, not return to the search engine to comment on its value, (which is going to change over time anyway).
Just because I think a page is rubbish or excellent is no guarantee it will be tomorrow, and I’m not going to keep going back to check.
Sproose Sproose [8] has a small number of search options available to users – Web, video, popular tags (basically just an active tag cloud displayed on the screen) and users.
Search results are fairly straightforward, with title, brief summary, URL, vote count number and the option of commenting on a result.
It did have the advantage of providing an RSS feed for searches though, which was welcome.
The voting process was easy; simply click on the ‘I like it’ button to the left of each result.
While it is possible to unvote or remove your vote, it is not possible to vote against a site – the most that can be done in that direction is to write an adverse comment which is displayed with the page result.
Interestingly a comment will also move a result up in the rankings.
This is not necessarily a welcome feature, since commenting that a particular site was racist and that the information should not be trusted actually placed that specific site right on the top of the results, consequently giving it more publicity, not less.
There is a slight ‘social’ element to the search engine in that it’s possible to look at other users and see what they have commented on, but there doesn’t appear to be any way of connecting with users, or subscribing to what they’re doing, and so on.
I ran a variety of searches and there didn’t appear to be any particular attempts to force higher ratings for inappropriate sites or to ‘game’ the index, though the top result for George Bush was ‘George W Bush or Chimpanzee?’ which is not particularly encouraging!
Wikia Search Wikia Search [9] is the latest human-powered search engine that has entered the fray and it was launched at the beginning of January 2008.
Most commentators have shown an interest in this product primarily because the leading light behind it is Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia.
The general response to the engine has been critical, to say the least.
It is stated on the site that ‘We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.’ (Their emphasis) [10].
It is also pointed out however that Wikia Search is not a search engine, it is a project to build a search engine, rather in the same way that when the Wikipedia was launched it wasn’t an encyclopedia and didn’t have anything by the way of entries.
Wales himself estimates that it will take 2 years or more for the engine to reach a satisfactory level.
At the moment there is little to see.
Search results are poor, there is a 5-star rating system which doesn’t work yet, it’s not possible to affect the ratings and all that it’s really possible to do is to create a profile and contribute mini articles to search results.
Given that the search engine has only just launched there is little point in being too critical; it’s probably worth looking at again in six to twelve months, but it will be much longer than that before it’s a viable engine to use.
A Possible Alternative: Build Your Own Engine There are flaws to all of the engines previously discussed, and perhaps more importantly, there are flaws which are inherent in the very concept of human-powered search engines.
However, there are various options which I’ve briefly mentioned in a previous Ariadne article [11].
Various resources now exist that allow users to create their own search engines, limiting results to a small (or in some cases, large) number of Web sites.
The concept is straightforward – if you know a lot about a subject area you will be in a good position to judge useful and authoritative Web sites, and can create a search engine that just searches those sites, excluding everything else.
This means that it’s possible to tailor a search engine very precisely to reflect a specific interest, be that subject-based, vertical, by demographics and so on.
The major players in this area are Rollyo [12] Eurekster [13] Yahoo search builder [14] and Google Custom Search [15].
I’m not going to go into detail on this occasion about such engines since that would require a column in its own right, but they all work in a similar fashion.
The principal characteristic of these resources is that they allow individuals to ‘cherrypick’ sites that they think are reliable or which emphasise a specific aspect of a subject.
A search engine can then be created which limits search to just those sites.
While with the exception of the Eureskter swicki it is true they do not permit users to rank results, vote for sites, and neither do they offer much by way of a social aspect, there is still a high element of human intervention.
For example, (and with a lack of modesty) if you want to search for Web 2.0 resources you could do worse than try my Web 2.0 search engine [16] or if you have an interest in UK-based information you could try my UK search engine which searches 90 other [17].
Conclusion While there is a variety of human-powered search engines, they all have drawbacks as well as advantages.
To come full circle, my major concern remains that they are still just as easy to ‘game’ as more traditional engines (despite what their creators say) and in order for them to work a lot of people do need to buy into the concept.
Even then, users will end up with a group consensus of what is a good result, and that will not actually help a searcher who wants Apple the record company rather than apple the fruit.
From a purely personal standpoint, the only search engine that I return to on a regular basis from the list above is Collarity [3] and the search engines that I’ve created myself.
Perhaps success lies less in human-powered search engines and more in personally powered search engines.
References Anoox http://www.anoox.com/ ChaCha http://www.chacha.com/ Collarity http://www.collarity.com/ Earthfrisk http://earthfrisk.org/ iRazoo http://www.irazoo.com/ Mahalo http://www.mahalo.com Wikipedia entry on Jason Calacanis, 29 January 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Calacanis Sproose http://www.sproose.com Wikia Search http://alpha.search.wikia.com/ About Wikia Search http://alpha.search.wikia.com/about.html “Search Engines: Where We Were, Are Now, and Will Ever Be”, Phil Bradley, April 2006, Ariadne Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/search-engines/ Rollyo http://www.rollyo.com/ Eurekster http://www.eurekster.com/ Yahoo search builder http://builder.search.yahoo.com/ Google Custom Search http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ Web 2.0 search engine http://moourl.com/philsweb2engine United Kingdom search engine of search engines http://moourl.com/philsukengine Author Details Phil Bradley Independent Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: “Human-powered Search Engines: An Overview and Roundup” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Delivering Open Access: From Promise to Practice Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Delivering Open Access: From Promise to Practice Buzz data database wireless dissemination infrastructure archives repositories copyright video dvd rae gopher ftp research standards Citation BibTex RIS Derek Law predicts how the open access agenda will develop over the next ten years.
Training as a mediaeval historian encourages one to look backwards before looking forwards.
In doing so it is difficult to overestimate the impact of technology push.
The combination of increased speed, increased power and increased storage has transformed the opportunities available to the community at large and academics in particular.
Twenty years ago we saw the first CD-ROMs with 650Mb capacity; today a standard entry-level PC will have 80Gb of storage, while 200-1000Gb is not uncommon.
Indeed the iPod revolution has made higher storage capacity a requirement for a much larger number of users.
Ten years ago NCSA Mosaic was still a novelty and the Web barely acknowledged.
FTP, WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) and Gopher were still the technologies of choice.
Ten years ago Google did not exist.
Ten years ago Superjanet2 was launched with speeds ranging from 8-155Mb while dial-up from home could reach as much as 28Kb; today a 100Gb campus network is commonplace and wireless broadband in the home quite normal.
It seems not unreasonable to claim that information technologies have been growing at an explosive rate.
We are in a paradigm shift and at some point in the next decade we will reach what will be seen as a tipping point in the provision of content.
During that period the nature of research has also changed, or at least developed.
Technology has produced a large development of complicated instrumentation which produces deluges of information.
The Internet has encouraged the globalisation of research so that international and inter-institutional research is normal.
It has also allowed the development of the concept of the a-literate researcher to move from the improbable to the possible.
Pluchak memorably coined the phrase 'the satisfied inept' for those who relied unthinkingly on the Web and the a-literate are a logical, if not yet inevitable consequence of this.
It is almost conceivable that a scientist could read no literature, but rely on networking and video links to gain information; to devise and conduct experiments and analysis on sophisticated instrumentation and to spread the results on the Web and through conferences.
Because this can happen does not mean it will, of course, but that scholarly paradigm which has existed for centuries does now have an alternative.
The journal was created in a text-based society where communication of complicated arguments could only be done through the postal service.
The development of the Internet which allows complicated datasets and argument to be distributed instantly and simultaneously to everyone interested gives a fundamentally different set of requirements.
Open Access It is then perhaps something of a paradox that the Open Access debate has made much less marked progress in the last decade.
The tireless proselytising of a host of John the Baptist-like figures from Paul Ginsparg to Stevan Harnad has been unceasing throughout that period, has won many battles, has chipped away at the edifice of scholarly communication, has moved the debate from the fringes of discourse to the mainstream, has probably won the argument, but so far has not won the war.
A decade ago Joshua Lederberg, the eminent scientist and Nobel prize-winner talked of the change in technology at a UNESCO sponsored meeting [1] and said: 'Now what are some of the foreseeable consequences?
I really have nothing to ask of the print publishers or of the "for profit" electronic purveyors.
Unless they are very selective and they sometimes will be about their value added, they will fall of their own weight as scientists become empowered to manage their own communications without the benefit of intermediaries.'
This simply has not happened in mainstream science.
Although Swan's work [2] has demonstrated the willingness of researchers to deposit articles in repositories, this has tended to be a passive rather than an active agreement, judging by the thin population of most institutional repositories.
Open Access journals have also grown in numbers.
In November 2005, the Directory of Open Access Journals [3] lists almost 1900 open access journals.
But open access is a long way from being at the heart of scholarly communication and is ranged against large commercial forces in the STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishing area; and although optimists will feel that the tide has turned on Open Access and that moves such as the much heralded but still awaited Research Councils' mandating of deposit will tip the balance, it has to be acknowledged that the UK scientific community looks more like donkeys led by lions (to paraphrase Max Hoffmann) than the reverse.
The community looks remarkably unmoved by considerations of the future of scholarly communication.
And yet it is common ground between at least some publishers and some proponents of open access that the present model is disintegrating and cannot survive [4].
It can be argued that the position in the UK is skewed by the Research Assessment Exercise.
If that is the case it hardly affects what is a global problem and in any case should be self-correcting in two years time when the RAE is over.
In sum then Open Access has made good progress (although as the mailing lists show there remains substantial confusion between the green and gold routes, between Open Access and Open Archives), but commercial STM publishing remains in rude and profitable health.
And in an expanding market of scientific communication the commercial sector also continues to grow.
Change Drivers Google is a concept and product which librarians love to hate as an example of dumbing down.
But its phenomenal growth suggests that it understands its market, while its commitment to new product development, though scattergun in nature, has rapidly developed services which in some cases have become very popular very quickly.
It has effortlessly achieved a dominant position in the marketplace and is now a fundamental tool for teaching and research as well as coping with everyday life.
It has clearly demonstrated its capacity to mould user behaviour.
Google's plan to digitise major library collections has promptly landed it with a legal action, but it has the financial power to fight this and to make huge amounts of data available.
Coupled with the ability of personal technologies to store and display such data, there is the potential for radical change through the so-called googlization of research.
The Analogy of the Entertainment Industry There is an interesting and perhaps instructive comparison to be made with the entertainment industry.
That industry has been obsessed with copyright since personal domestic players became widespread.
From tape recording to video cassettes and DVD the industry has attempted to crack down on illicit copying and use of copyright material.
A vast bureaucracy was created to stop people doing things.
Peer to peer downloading of music files was at first seen as simply the latest manifestation of the public's wilful contravention of legislation on ownership.
Napster began this in 1999 through a central server and was first taken to court then taken over.
But very quickly a series of true peer-to-peer open source services came into being.
The response of the entertainment industry remained however that of prevention.
Then came the iPod.
Apple has transformed the industry by transforming the model from the album to the single track and making purchase both cheap and easy.
As a result revenue streams to the major companies have been transformed with music sales growing at a phenomenal rate.
The newly launched video iPod will no doubt do the same for film and television material.
The technology and a simple but imaginative shift of the model has created a new approach, a new market and the corporate muscle to drive change.
The cynical might also draw a parallel with the claim of music publishers to be acting in the interests of their bands and the claims of STM publishers to be acting in support of their authors.
There is also a body of evidence that Napster and others actually promoted sales of legitimate products and that the slump in CD sales followed the sacking of Napster.
In fact there is a widespread belief that it is counterfeiting which is the only real threat.
Google Scholar Within a few months of its launch in November 2004, Google Scholar has established itself as a rival to powerful multinational companies such as Thomson and Elsevier that offer huge (and, for libraries, hugely expensive) databases of scholarly material [5].
Google's somewhat grandiose mission is 'to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'
With a market valuation in July of more than $US 80 billion and quarterly earnings of $US 343 million, the company is in a far better financial position than any library.
It is at least worth speculating whether Google's mission, its ever expanding set of new products such as Google Scholar and its financial muscle will also begin to provide a real and readily available alternative to the tyranny of citation indices and whether it will prove, like the iPod, to be the technical platform which encourages desirable change to happen.
The Small Country Effect Another key driver is national ambition of small countries.
A number of programmes have begun in Europe [6][7] in countries as disparate as the Netherlands, Portugal and Scotland, where Open Access is seen as a key element of national strategy to cover everything from the dissemination of publicly funded research to encouraging inward investment.
The DARE Project in the Netherlands is the most developed of such programmes but pragmatism rather than optimism encourages one to believe that other countries will see advantage in co-ordinating and optimising the dissemination of their research.
In Europe research accounts for between 2-4% of GDP, a figure large enough to warrant government policy initiatives.
The Needs of the Researcher The whole concept of information overload is also relevant.
Increasingly researchers need intelligent access to a spectrum of news, datasets, journal articles, abstracts and other forms of information where some form of filtering is applied in advance.
While librarians have played with the concept of moving from just-in-case to just-in-time libraries, they have failed to understand that for most purposes what the user requires is just enough to complete the task in hand.
There has been a very substantial debate about the future of the journal and how it should be funded and made available, but very little debate over whether the journal will continue to be the standard form of scholarly communication.
As technology changes the way in which research is conducted, there is a need to consider how far the journal article is the appropriate format for reporting research outcomes.
Coupled with this is the future of the library.
There is a substantial and growing literature on this subject [8], at least part of which can be summarised as a move from content to service.
This will both contribute to the demise of the journal as we know it and will see the library's role as providing the infrastructure and services which allow the intelligent access which will further change the model of scholarly communication.
Conclusion Open Access is a battle where a ragamuffin band of academics and librarians are challenging the imperial pomp of billion dollar global companies.
In those terms the contest is both unequal and unwinnable, since too much inertia is built into the system.
However, as this article has tried to show there are powerful drivers and change agents in place technology; the nature of research; Google; national interest which coupled with the sheer bloody-mindedness and persistence of the proponents of open access will lead to its growth as the dominant form of scholarly discourse.
Whether that scholarly discourse will still include the journal article as we know it is a much more difficult question.
Predicting the future is a hopeless task, but perhaps a necessary one.
Mitchell [9] was quoted on his experiences with futures research concerning the digital divide.
He explained that when considering this 'it becomes obvious that neither the past nor the future actually exists; only memories, projections, and perceptions exist.
However, both the past and the future guide current action.
When blended with the topics of social change and leadership, the value of futures research emerges as an absolute imperative.
Without the ability to plan, project, and forecast, the ability to prepare for the future is hopeless.
However, without hope, there is no future'.
On the other hand, one can perhaps do no better than heed Winston Churchill's words that a good politician should have the ability to foretell what is going to happen next week, next month and next year.
And afterwards to explain why it did not happen.
References Lederberg, Joshua Options for the Future D-Lib Magazine, May 1996 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may96/05lederberg.html Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2004) Authors and open access publishing.
Learned Publishing 17(3): 219-224.
Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/ British Computer Society Thought Leadership Debate on Open Access.
http://www.bcs.org/BCS/News/ThoughtLeadership/pastdebates/openaccess/ Crawley, Devin The Infinite Library University of Toronto Magazine Autumn 2005. http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/05autumn/library.asp Law, Derek, MacGregor, G., McCulloch, E. ; Wallis, J.
Developing a national information strategy in Scotland.
Cadernos Bad (2005) pp49-63 Van der Kuil & Feijen, Martin.
The Dawning of the Dutch Network of Digital Academic REpositories (DARE): A Shared Experience Ariadne Issue 41, October 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/vanderkuil/ Marcum, J.W Visions: The academic library in 2012 D-Lib Magazine 2003 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may03/marcum/05marcum.html Mitchell, M.M.
(2002), "Exploring the future of the digital divide through ethnographic futures research", First Monday, 7(11).
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/mitchell/index.html Author Details Derek Law Professor, Centre for Digital Library Research University of Strathclyde Email: d.law@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.strath.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Delivering Open Access: From Promise to Practice" Author: Derek Law Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue46/law/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News from BIOME Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News from BIOME Buzz e-learning Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Hall reports on recent news form BIOME, the Health and Life Sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network.
BIOME Hot Topics New Hot Topics [1] are proving of interest to our users and the number of hits continues to increase.
Check out what is new in April and May.
BIOME as Resource of the Month BIOME was chosen to be shown as a key Resource of the Month by Information Services, University of Nottingham.
Introduced in January 2005 the ‘Resource of the Month’ programme promotes and publicises key electronic resources to target audiences in the academic and student community at the University of Nottingham.
BIOME Events BIOME staff have been busy, among other things, attending relevant events held for the health and life sciences community: BIOME session at RSC Using ILT in Biology event, Derby College.
Organised by the Regional Support Centre East Midlands [2] the event helped to demonstrate how to incorporate ILT into learning programmes for biology and related subjects.
Laurian Williamson, BIOME Content Coordinator demonstrated how BIOME could be used.
Exhibition and demonstration at E-learning in health and social care [3] conference at NEWI by Rob Abbott, BIOME Service Officer.
North East Wales Institute hosted an exciting one-day conference exploring the use of e-learning in health and social care, organised by a group of nurse lecturers working at NEWI.
Jenny Hall attended the launch of the NLH Skin Conditions Specialist Library [4] on 8 March 2005.
BIOME Service Officer, Rob Abbott gave a Seminar at this year’s Royal College of Nursing Congress [5] on 25 April 2005.
In a 45-minute presentation, Rob introduced NMAP, the gateway to nursing, midwifery and allied health.
Changes to the Virtual Training Suite The RDN’s Virtual Training Suite [6] is a collection of free, interactive online tutorials, designed to teach Internet information skills to the Higher and Further Education communities in the UK.
Aimed at lecturers, students, teachers and researchers, the tutorials provide training for those who want to discover what the Internet can offer in their subject area.
The BIOME team has authored seven of these tutorials and as part of the VTS’s commitment to providing high-quality advice these tutorials are regularly updated.
The following tutorials have undergone a complete link-check: Internet Medic Internet for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting Internet for Allied Health Internet Vet Internet BioResearcher Internet for Nature Internet for Agriculture, Food and Forestry The ways in which the Internet supports work in the health and life sciences is ever changing, and BIOME aims to reflect new trends as they emerge in its virtual training tutorials.
Librarians, lecturers, and students can therefore rely on this free Internet training service in the knowledge that members of the BIOME team are carefully updating it.
Changes at BIOME Donald Mackay, BIOME Service Manager, left in March 2004 to take up a new post as Head of Healthcare Libraries at the University of Oxford.
Many thanks to Donald for the commitment and hard work he put into running the Service and we wish him well in his new job.
References BIOME Hot Topics http://biome.ac.uk/hot_topics/ Regional Support Centre East Midlands http://www.rsc-east-midlands.ac.uk/ E-learning in health and social care http://www.newi.ac.uk/elearninghealth/ NLH Skin Conditions Specialist Library http://libraries.nelh.nhs.uk/skin/ Royal College of Nursing Congress 2005 http://www.rcn.org.uk/news/congress2005/ Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ Author Details Jenny Hall BIOME Admin Officer Email: jh@biome.ac.uk Web site: http://biome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Jenny Hall Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/biome/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data software framework html database portfolio archives metadata thesaurus tagging vocabularies blog repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing multimedia visualisation lcsh e-learning wordnet ontologies soap ddc personalisation lom shibboleth curation srw skos saml youtube cdwa licence e-science e-research authentication ict interoperability oai-ore e-government privacy intranet url research standards sharepoint Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
UKeiG Courses over May – October 2008 Searching the Internet: Google and Beyond Karen Blakeman Friday 16 May 2008 University of Liverpool http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/May/beyondgoogle.html Searching the Internet: Google and Beyond Karen Blakeman Wednesday 11 June 2008 King’s College London, Guy’s Campus http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/June/beyondgoogle.html UKeiG Annual Seminar Web 2 in action making social networking tools work to enhance organisational efficiency Thursday 12 June SOAS, London Understanding metadata and controlled vocabularies the key to integrated networking Stella Dextre Clarke Thursday 3 July 2008 Cilip, London http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/July/UnderstandingMetadata.html Sharepoint for Intranets Janus Boye Tuesday 15 July 2008 Cilip, London details will be available shortly from http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Information Literacy: workplace perspectives Sheila Webber Wednesday 22 October 2008 Cilip, London details will be available shortly from http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Plus regular Intranet Forum meetings for UKeiG members Back to headlines 2008 Sakai Community Conference Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France 1-3 July 2008 https://sakai.educonference.com/conferences/ The Sakai Foundation has announced that the 2008 Sakai Community Conference will be held in Paris, France.
The dates will be Tuesday-Thursday, 1-3 July, with pre-conference sessions and activities On Monday, 30 June.
All meetings and conference sessions will be held at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie.
The Sakai technical demonstrations will take place on Wednesday evening, 2 July 2008, at the Marriott Rive Gauche Hotel and Conference Centre, which is located nearby.
If you wish to submit a proposal, register for the conference, or make a reservation at the conference hotel, visit: https://sakai.educonference.com/conferences/ Sakai community conferences offer extended face-to-face interactions between our community of designers, developers, pedagogists, faculty, students, user support specialists, system administrators, educational and collaborative technology managers.
Sakai conferences seek to provide a welcoming and informative venue for all interested in seeing what the Sakai community and software are all about.
For general information: contact Mary Miles mmiles@sakaifoundation.org Mary Miles Sakai Foundation Administrative Coordinator Phone: 734-764-3614 Fax: 734-763-7829 Cell: 734-395-2650 Back to headlines UKeiG Course on Metadata and Controlled Vocabularies Understanding metadata and controlled vocabularies the key to integrated networking CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE Thursday, 3 July 2008, 9.30-16.30 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/July/UnderstandingMetadata.html Course Outline This one-day workshop will provide an introduction to some widely used metadata schemas (such as Dublin Core, CDWA, e-GMS, IEEE-LOM) and discuss how to adapt and exploit them for our own needs.
It will also explore the different types of vocabulary (taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, etc.)
that may be used for labelling the subject content of our resources.
We’ll be looking very practically at how to handle the vocabulary tools, in order to achieve integrated information management.
Examples and exercises will be drawn from public and private sector applications.
The programme will include: Different metadata schemas key features and applications Controlled vocabularies choosing the type of vocabulary we need Mapping between vocabularies Human indexing or automatic categorisation?
Software for vocabulary maintenance and use Progress towards the Semantic Web?
The role of social tagging/folksonomies Return on investment (ROI) how do we justify the effort?
Bringing it all together in a plan The course will include a combination of presentations and practical exercises, with participation encouraged and plenty of opportunity for questions and answers.
Who Should Attend Anyone who is planning efficient ways of managing information flows around the organisation should attend.
Likewise webmasters who want to maximise the impact of the resources on their websites, especially by presenting them so that users can find what they want and external portals can harvest the information.
Effective implementation of metadata relies on cooperative working between information professionals and their information technology colleagues, and it is good to have both sides of the house represented.
Course Presenter A Fellow of CILIP, Stella Dextre Clarke is an independent consultant who specialises in the design and implementation of controlled vocabularies for private and public sector clients.
While working with the Cabinet Office, she played a key role in development of the UK’s e-Government Metadata Standard and built the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary which forms part of it.
In 2006 she won the Tony Kent Strix Award (sponsored by UKeiG), for outstanding contributions to the field of information retrieval.
To book a place please contact Christine Baker (see below) or visit http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/July/UnderstandingMetadata.html Christine Baker, UKeiG Administration, Piglet Cottage, Redmire, LEYBURN, DL8 4EH, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom Tel & Fax: +44 (0)1969 625751 Email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk Back to headlines JISC/CNI 2008 The JISC/CNI Meeting: Transforming the User Experience Hastings Europa Hotel, Belfast 10-11 July 2008 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jisc-cni-2008/ Following the success of previous conferences held in Brighton and York, The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are proud to announce the 7th International Meeting which will be held at the Europa Hastings Hotel, Belfast, on 10 and 11 July 2008.
The meeting will bring together experts from the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom.
Parallel sessions will explore and contrast major developments that are happening on both sides of the Atlantic.
It should be of interest to all senior management in information systems in the education community and to practitioners responsible for delivering digital services and resources for learning, teaching and research.
Further information: JISC/CNI 2008 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jisc-cni-2008/ CNI http://www.cni.org/ JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Back to headlines Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008 (IWMW 2008) IWMW 2008: “The Great Debate” University of Aberdeen 22-24 July 2008 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2008/ The Web management community is increasingly working in an environment in which users are making significant use of Web 2.0 services.
We need to ask: How does the availability of services by Web 2.0 companies affect the existing provision of institutional Web services?
Are Web 2.0 services a distraction to traditional, well-managed high-quality Web resources or do they signal the direction for in-house development activities?
Are Web 2.0 companies and others in a position to provide a credible and sustainable alternative to institutional services?
Has the vision of the “network as the computer” arrived, providing users with choice in their selection of services?
How is the role of the institutional Web manager changing?
What does this debate tell us about the role of the Higher Education institution in a globally networked environment?
These are some of the issues our institutions are currently facing.
And it seems there may be disagreements within the Web management community regarding the benefits and risks associated with the use of a distributed portfolio of services.
Further information: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2008/ Back to headlines The Red Island Repository Institute Fedora-focused Workshop Red Island Repository Institute: 1st Fedora Summer Institute Prince Edward Island, Canada 11-15 August 2008 http://vre.upei.ca/riri/ Register now for The Red Island Repository Institute on Prince Edward Island August 11-15, 2008 Register by 16 May 2008 and reserve your spot at the Fedora-focused Repository Institute on Prince Edward Island, one of Canada’s premier travel destinations known for its sandy beaches, golfing, seafood and iconic red dirt roads.
The 1-week hands-on workshop will be led by well-known Fedora “natives” Sandy Payette, Fedora Commons Executive Director; Richard Green, Manager, RIDIR, REMAP and RepoMMan Projects, e-SIG, Academic Services, University of Hull, and; Matt Zumwalt, MediaShelf.
The Institute is hands-on and is designed for individuals from institutions planning or running a repository programme and is intended for users with a wide range of experience, from managers to programmers.
Attendees will be provided all the information and tools needed to implement and maintain a flexible repository programme using Fedora.
Since the Institute is a combination of lecture and hands-on experience, we encourage all participants to bring their own laptops.
This will allow participants to return to their place of work with a fully-functional Fedora installation for further development and testing.
Those participants who are not able to bring a laptop will be provided with one to use for the duration of the Institute.
Register by 16 May for the reduced early-bird fee of $1,500 after that the fee is $1,800.
Registration includes meals (except dinners for Tuesday to Thursday), special events and all materials.
A preliminary workshop agenda and registration form are now available at http://vre.upei.ca/riri/ Further information about the Red Island Repository Institute: Contact Mark Leggott riri@upei.ca Back to headlines Modular International Digital Library Course Modular International Digital Library Course: Digital Libraries à la Carte Tilburg University, The Netherlands, 25-29 August 2008 http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/ticer/08carte/ Ticer’s new, modular course for librarians and publishers “Digital Libraries à la Carte” will be held at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, 25-29 August 2008.
From its ‘menu’ of seven one-day modules (some held in parallel on the same day), you can pick your choice: Module 1: Strategic Developments and Library Management Module 2: Technological Developments – Threats and Opportunities Module 3a: Hands-on – Library 2.0 Module 3b: Change – Making it Happen in Your Library Module 4: Libraries – Partners in Research and Open Access Module 5a: Libraries – Partners in Teaching and Learning Module 5b: Put Yourself in the DRIVER’s Seat – Practical Training for Building a European Repository Network Some subjects covered: Scholars – their behaviour and workflow Marketing research libraries Performance and outcome measures Library automation challenges Intelligent catalogues MESUR project – scholarly usage data OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) Libraries in Second Life Change management Open Access Research data Institutional repositories The library’s educational role Information literacy Librarian faculty and teaching faculty collaboration Physical learning spaces Practical training in the DRIVER environment Course director is Silvia Van Peteghem, chief librarian at Ghent University.
Top speakers will present their views.
Below is just a small selection.
Stephen Abram, Vice President Innovation, SirsiDynix, was listed by Library Journal as one of their first “Movers and Shakers” Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technologies and Research at Vanderbilt University, is creator and editor of the Library Technology Guides Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard is Director of Development at the Aarhus State and University Library in Denmark, where the Summa integrated search interface is being developed Barbara Galik is Executive Director at Bradley University, US and involved in many educational activities in Second Life Wendy P. Lougee, University librarian and McKnight Presidential Professor at the University of Minnesota, has engaged her library in significant assessments of scholarly behaviour Roswitha Poll is an internationally acknowledged expert in the field of performance and outcome measures David Prosser, as Director of SPARC Europe, is much sought-after speaker on Open Access Christina Tovoté, Pedagogical Developer at Stockholm University Library, is responsible for the integration of information literacy in university courses Jan Wilkinson, University Librarian and Director at The University of Manchester, has chaired very successful change management courses at Ticer before Alex Wright is Writer and Information Architect and authored “Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages” To guarantee a highly interactive programme, the number of participants is limited, lectures contain an interactive component, and two modules offer hands-on sessions in a computer room.
The course is recommended by JISC, DEFF – Denmark’s Electronic Research Library, CBU/KUB – the conference of university libraries in Switzerland, NFF – the Norwegian Association of Special Libraries, the DRIVER II project, and The Helsinki University Libraries.
The course Web site can be found at: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/ticer/08carte/ If you register before 1 June 2008, you will get a €150 discount.
There are special discounts for DRIVER II participants and associates.
Further information Ms Jola Prinsen Manager Ticer Tilburg University Library and IT Services P.O.
Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg The Netherlands Tel.
+31 13 466 8310 Fax +31 13 466 8383 jola.prinsen@uvt.nl http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/ Back to headlines Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH) Workshop Aarhus, Denmark 18 September 2008 http://www.lsi.uned.es/IACH2008/ Organised in conjunction with the 12th European Conference On Research And Advanced Technology For Digital Libraries (ECDL 2008) http://www.ecdl2008.org The Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH) workshop held in conjunction with ECDL 2008 will bring together academics carrying out research in the area of information access and practitioners working in the cultural heritage field.
The goal of the workshop is promoting exchange of ideas concerning creation, curation, storage, retrieval and use of cultural heritage information.
In particular, the workshop will focus on the question of how the keepers of cultural heritage resources can improve information access by applying information technology and principles currently being developed in the area of information access.
Following current trends, users are actively engaging with cultural heritage on the Web, prompting heritage institutions to stimulate communities to grow around them.
The workshop places an additional emphasis on active user participation, which creates new modes of access and contextualisation.
These are challenging developments for cultural heritage organisations, due both to the variety and richness of cultural heritage resources and to the diverse range of users with varying information needs and search behaviours.
Issues in the scope of the workshop include: 1.
Emerging communities of users of cultural heritage information User-generated content and metadata Online user communities Drawing in wider audiences for cultural heritage collections Understanding and modelling diverse user needs User interaction and interface design Visualisation of cultural heritage resources 2.
Information retrieval technology for improved access to cultural heritage resources Exploiting user contributions in the representation and indexing of cultural heritage information Retrieval of structured and unstructured text Multimedia retrieval (images, video, audio,…) Access to distributed repositories Access to multilingual resources Evaluation and test collections 3.
Innovative solutions for accessing cultural heritage on-line Case studies 4.
Panel session focused on identifying key challenges facing access to cultural information today.
Position papers We welcome the submission poster papers, position papers (for panel participation) and extended abstracts (i.e., proposals for full papers) which should be written in English and prepared according to the Springer LNCS format guidelines.
Submissions should be a maximum of 2 pages and manuscripts should be in PDF format.
For further information, see http://www.lsi.uned.es/IACH2008/ Important Dates: Call for papers: 8 April 2008 Abstracts for full length papers: 8, June 2008 Full Poster Papers/Full Position papers due: 8 June 2008 Notification: 8 July 2008 Final version full papers due: 18 August 2008 Workshop: 18 September 2008 The IACH 2008 Organising Committee Martha Larson, University of Amsterdam Johan Oomen, Sound & Vision, Kate Fernie Juan Manuel Cigarren Recuero, UNED http://www.lsi.uned.es/IACH2008/ Back to headlines DCC Digital Curation 101 DCC Digital Curation 101 Training Programme 6-10 October 2008 The National e-Science Centre 13-15 South College Street Edinburgh EH8 9AA http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/digital-curation-101-2008/ In recent years there have been a number of useful training events devoted to the preservation of digital information.
However, there is a still a need to provide practical hands-on training in a life cycle approach to conceptualising, creating, preserving access to and re-using data over time.
The Digital Curation Centre is developing a new residential programme to deliver practical training and develop these skills amongst the information services and scientific communities.
The DCC Digital Curation 101 training programme will take place in Edinburgh in October 2008.
It will produce a dynamic, practical, replicable, and extendable educational framework that will provide participants with the skills they will need to conceptualise, create, manage, describe, store, and reuse data over time.
Participation in DC101 will introduce attendees to the DCC Digital Curation Life-Cycle Model and provide them with a firm understanding of the individual role(s) they play in this life-cycle over time.
The training programme will focus on the practical, rather than the theoretical, and will contribute towards bridging the gap that currently exists between a general awareness of curation and preservation issues amongst the information services and scientific community, and their ability to practically address digital curation and preservation challenges within their actual working environment.
In addition, DC101 will offer students an opportunity to network with other scientific researchers, international experts, and practitioners across disciplinary and national boundaries.
More information will soon be available from the DCC Web site.
Back to headlines 4th International Digital Curation Conference 4th International Digital Curation Conference: “Radical Sharing: Transforming Science?” Hilton Grosvenor Hotel, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK 1-3 December 2008 http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2008/ In partnership with the National e-Science Centre we are holding our 4th International Digital Curation Conference on 1-3 December 2008 at the Hilton Grosvenor Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The DCC invites the submission of full papers, posters and demos from individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains engaged in the creation, use and management of digital data, especially those involved in the challenge of curating data in e-science and e-research.
Full details are available at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2008/ Sent on behalf of: Chris Rusbridge Director of the Digital Curation Centre Back to headlines Online Educa Berlin 2008 Online Educa Berlin 2008: 14th International Conference on Technology Supported Learning and Training Hotel InterContinental Berlin, Budapester Str.
2, D-10787 Berlin, Germany 3-5 December 2008 http://www.online-educa.com/ Online Educa Berlin 2008 welcomes Michael Wesch as a keynote speaker.
The event is the largest global e-learning conference for the corporate, education and public service sectors and will take place from December 3 5 at the Hotel InterContinential in Berlin.
Michael Wesch is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, USA.
In his work he explores the impacts of new media on human interaction.
Wesch is well known for his groundbreaking work in digital ethnography, and he is also active in developing innovative teaching techniques.
His research gained broader attention as the result of his award-winning video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”, in which he describes in short sequences the power of Web 2.0 applications.
The video which is available on YouTube has been viewed by more than five million people so far and instantly made him a household name within the blogosphere.
Michael Wesch’s presentation at Online Educa Berlin 2008 will contribute to one of the event’s overriding themes: “Meeting the learning needs of Generation Y”.
International experts will be discussing the challenges of teaching and training media-savvy students who grew up with the Internet.
In his speech, Wesch will take a closer look at how emerging technologies affect our understanding of teaching and how Web 2.0 tools can help solve the crisis of significance that education is facing today, especially in the eyes of our students.
Further information: For more information on Micheal Wesch, visit his blog “Digital Ethnography”: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/ The “Digital Ethnography” YouTube Channel with all his videos can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/user/mwesch Organisers: ICWE GmbH, Leibnizstr.
32, 10625 Berlin, Germany Tel: +49 (0)30 310 18 18-0 info@online-educa.com http://www.online-educa.com/ Back to headlines {C}{C}{C} New Deal Gives Library Users Access to World-class Online Reference Material A new agreement, managed by the MLA, will enable public libraries in England to achieve significant financial discounts on high-quality online reference resources.
The last such agreement resulted in over £3.5m savings for public libraries in England.
The ground-breaking Reference Online initiative was originally launched in February 2006 with the intention of finding ways in which public libraries in England could provide their users with the best possible range of online resources at the most economic price and to streamline the procurement process for both libraries and suppliers.
The second Reference Online Framework Agreement, which comes into force this month, offers subscription opportunities to all public libraries in England.
The 2008 agreement will last for four years and sees an increase in the number of MLA-approved suppliers to 22 and the number of products double to fifty.
The resources offered for libraries to choose from via Reference Online include general reference material, business, legal and financial information, subject-based encyclopaedias, dictionaries, directories, serials, newspapers and newspaper archives, and for the first time materials for children and streamed music services.
Materials to which libraries subscribe will be available either in the library or remotely 24⁄7 to anyone with library membership.
Roy Clare said: “MLA’s Reference Online programme enables library services to purchase world class online resources at lower costs.
The agreement opens up a huge amount of reference material to library users both at home and in their local library.
It also represents very good value for money and I welcome very warmly the successful outcome of a great deal of work by Susi Woodhouse of the MLA, and others who have supported her in negotiating this outcome.” For further information, including a full list of all available products and services visit http://www.mla.gov.uk/programmes/digital_initiatives/reference_online [Source: MLA] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines Relaunch of Online Resource Provides Access to Visual Arts Collections Students and academics looking for visual arts images now have online access to a collection of over 100,000 images with the launch of the Web site at: http://www.vads.ac.uk/ The Web site has been developed by VADS (Visual Arts Data Service) which rebranded and re-launched itself in April 2008 and contains collections as diverse as the National Inventory of Continental European Paintings, the Woolmark Company Archive, and the Central Saint Martins Museum and Study Collection.
VADS has been providing services to the academic community for some 11 years and has built up a portfolio of visual art collections.
The image resources are free and copyright-cleared for use in UK Higher and Further Education, providing a valuable resource to students and academics which can be incorporated into lectures, seminar presentations and essays.
VADS is continuously adding to its catalogue and just this year has added a collection of photographs from the East End Archival Project which includes 500 images of the Spitalfields area from the 1970s to the 1990s a period of rapid social and physical change; furniture from the Frederick Parker Chair Collection which demonstrate 350 years of British chair design and manufacture; as well as the archive of post-war British sculptor Peter King.
Other memorable collections available online through the site are ‘Spanish Civil War Posters’, ‘Concise Art’, and ‘Posters of Conflict’ all from the Imperial War Museum, and the Design Council Archives.
In addition to providing and building on its online visual arts resource, VADS also offers expert guidance and help for digital projects in arts education.
The expert VADS team also offers web development and hosting services for visual arts organisations and projects.
For further information: Amy Robinson VADS +44 (0)1252 892723 amy@vads.ac.uk http://www.vads.ac.uk/ [Source: VADS] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines SPARC Europe Award 2008 for Leo Waaijers Dr Leo Waaijers has won the 2008 SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.
The award was presented to him during the fourth Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communications at the University of Lund, Sweden.
Over recent years Leo Waaijers has proved himself an advocate for open access to research results via the Internet for SURF, the collaborative organisation for Higher Education institutions and research institutes aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT.
SPARC encourages better communication between researchers and between the scientific community and the public.
By presenting Leo Waaijers with this award, the jury has acknowledged his unceasing efforts to promote open access to research results via the Internet.
It was under his leadership that SURF’s DARE Programme created DAREnet, which provides access to the 150,000 publications contained in the repositories of all the Dutch universities.
More than a hundred publications are added every day.
Waaijers’ influence is not limited to the Netherlands.
DAREnet has made the country a frontrunner in Europe and has served as the model for the European DRIVER programme.
Waaijers also initiated the successful petition asking the European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly financed research results.
The petition garnered worldwide support.
This is the third SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.
The first Award, in 2006, went to the UK’s Wellcome Trust (which finances medical research provided that the results are published via Open Access) and the second, in 2007, went to the SHERPA Group (the University of Nottingham’s Open Access programme).
This is the first time that the Award has been presented to an individual.
For more information: SURFshare programme: http://www.surf.nl/surfshare SURF’s view on Open: http://www.surf.nl/en/OverSURF/Pages/SURFenOpen.aspx SPARC Europe: http://www.sparceurope.nl DRIVER: http://www.driver-community.eu EC Open Access petition: http://www.ec-petition.eu/ Leo Waaijers has written for Ariadne: “The DARE Chronicle: Open Access to Research Results and Teaching Material in the Netherlands” by Leo Waaijers, October 2007, Ariadne Issue 53 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/waaijers/ Other relevant articles in Ariadne: Article Title: “DRIVER: Building the Network for Accessing Digital Repositories across Europe” Authors: Martin Feijen, Wolfram Horstmann, Paolo Manghi, Mary Robinson and Rosemary Russell Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/feijen-et-al/ Article Title: “DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories” Author: Maurits van der Graaf Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/vandergraf/ Article Title: “A Recipe for Cream of Science: Special Content Recruitment for Dutch Institutional Repositories” Author: Martin Feijen and Annemiek van der Kuil Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/vanderkuil/ Article Title: “The Dawning of the Dutch Network of Digital Academic REpositories (DARE): A Shared Experience” Author: Annemiek van der Kuil and Martin Feijen Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/vanderkuil/ Article Title: “ The SURF foundation “ Authors: Jaqueline Pieters Publication Date: September-1996 Publication: Ariadne Issue 5 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue5/surf/ [Source: SURF] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines Internet2 Community Releases Shibboleth Version 2.0 New Major Release of Open Source Federated Authentication Suite Provides Enhanced Functionality; Enables More Seamless Installation and Operation Internet2 recently announced that it has released Shibboleth 2.0, the latest major version of a widely-deployed federated authentication implementation.
Developed by the Internet2 community and its partners around the world, the latest release greatly enhances several key elements of Shibboleth in an effort to ensure interoperability with other commercial and open-source federated identity solutions; to improve personalisation and security; as well as to ease installation, management and operation processes.
The goal is to provide a more robust and interoperable platform that will help catalyze the worldwide growth of higher education and research federations like the InCommon Federation which serves the U.S. Higher Education sector and provides a framework for participating organisations to collaborate and share resources using Shibboleth technology.
“We are grateful for the tremendous collaboration in developing this important new release and look forward to working with the worldwide Shibboleth community to further roll out and refine this technology,” said Ken Klingenstein, Internet2 senior director of middleware and security.
Shibboleth 2.0 adds an open source implementation of the OASIS SAML 2.0 standard to the suite of protocol implementations available in previous releases.
The software provides a secure, single-sign on mechanism for institutions to enable their users to access protected online resources within their campuses and from their external service provider partners while at the same time protecting individual user privacy.
Shibboleth 2.0 also adds new security features to ensure additional protection of user information.
It includes encryption technology specified in the SAML 2.0 standard and provides an improved method for usage logging at the home institution to better track abuse or inappropriate use of the system.
As organisations continue to deploy identity management solutions like Shibboleth, the vision is to move these institutions and their service providers into “trust federations.” Federations bring together multiple organisations with common needs into one group or association to leverage the use of a common set of attributes, practices and policies to exchange information about their users and resources to simplify the management of collaborations and transactions.
To support the continued growth of federations, Shibboleth 2.0 enables organisations to seamlessly comply with a federation’s policies and practices without changing campus directory infrastructures, and extends automated support for federation processes.
For instance, as new service providers or institutions are added to a federation, new “metadata” is required to setup the technical exchange for collaboration.
In the past, adding new metadata required IT staff to develop their own methods to update the information.
Shibboleth 2.0 automatically downloads the metadata as often as the organisation specifies.
In addition, as federations continue to proliferate, it becomes increasingly important to support multiple protocols to ensure interoperability between federations.
Using Shibboleth, federations and partners that use any authentication architecture built on popular standards such as SAML 2.0 and Active Directory Federation Services specifications will have the ability to interoperate and interfederate with any federation or partner using those standards.
Beyond the multi-protocol support, Shibboleth offers additional features for the Higher Education and research communities: management of attribute release policies on a site, group and user basis; policy-based management of attribute acceptance; real scalable support for large-scale federations; and strong support for application integration.
Further information: Internet2 and its partners announced the release of Shibboleth 2.0 at the annual Internet2 Spring Member Meeting held in Arlington, VA, USA from 21-23 April 2008.
Meeting sessions on middleware technology like Shibboleth and InCommon, include: http://www.internet2.edu/middleware/2008SMM-MW.html For more information on Shibboleth, visit: http://Shibboleth.internet2.edu For more information on InCommon, visit: http://www.incommonfederation.org/ [Source: CNI] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines New Intute Subject Booklets Eight new Intute subject booklets have been published this month, each providing a taster of the scholarly Internet resources that can be found by using Intute: Internet resources for environmental science Internet resources for materials engineering Internet resources for film and theatre Internet resources for philosophy Internet resources for education Internet resources for Olympic studies Internet resources for biological sciences Internet resources for pregnancy and childbirth Print copies of the booklets are being distributed to teaching staff in UK universities, to remind lecturers that they can use the Intute database to guide their students to Web sites that are relevant to Higher Education courses, and the Intute Virtual Training Suite to help their students develop Internet research skills for university work.
Online versions (pdf for downloading and printing, and HTML for online access with clickable links) are freely available to everyone via the Intute Web site at: http://www.intute.ac.uk/subjectbooklets.html Over 24 booklets have been published by Intute in recent years, and readers are welcome to copy, re-purpose and distribute the printed or electronic versions for non-profit, educational use with suitable attribution, as the work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
Staff in UK universities are welcome to order further print copies of the booklets via the Intute Help Desk (while stocks last): http://www.intute.ac.uk/feedback.html [Source: Intute] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines Portico announces agreement with the National Library of the Netherlands Portico and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands (the KB) have announced they have reached an agreement for an off-line copy of the Portico archive, which exceeds 6 million articles and 60 million files, to be held for safekeeping by the KB.
Through its e-Depot programme the KB has demonstrated its role in the vanguard of digital preservation.
Placing a Portico-owned copy of the archive, in a secure accessand climate-controlled facility operated by the KB is one component of the replication strategy Portico is working to ensure the safety and security of the archive upon which a growing, international community relies.
“I am very pleased that Portico will work with the KB, an internationally recognized leader in digital preservation, to strengthen the network of archives meeting the digital preservation challenge” said Eileen Fenton, Executive Director of Portico.
Noting the KB has worked vigorously to advance the digital preservation agenda, Dr. W. van Drimmelen, Director General of the KB, said, “Preserving electronic scholarly publications is a key priority for the KB, and formalizing this arrangement with Portico is a natural extension of the KB’s active archival role.” Additional information about Portico is available at http://www.portico.org/.
Additional information about the KB’s digital preservation programme, including the e-Depot, is available at: http://www.kb.nl/dnp/e-depot/e-depot-en.html Eileen Fenton, Executive Director of Portico, has written for Ariadne: “Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico” Eileen Fenton April 2006, Ariadne, Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/ [Source: PORTICO] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines NSF Cyberinfrastructure Director Daniel Atkins to Receive Paul Evan Peters Award The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE are pleased to announce that Daniel E. Atkins, inaugural Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a distinguished professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, has been named the 2008 recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award.
The award recognises notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity through communication networks.
“Dan’s long and diverse record of accomplishments, and his continuing vision for the changes that information technologies can enable for the future of scholarship worldwide, make him a perfect choice for this award.
I’m thrilled to see his work recognised in this way, particularly because the values that inform Dan’s work resonate so closely with those of the late Paul Peters,” said Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information.
In 2003, the NSF Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, chaired by Atkins, issued the highly influential report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure.
The document, now referred to as “The Atkins Report,” catalyzed new priorities and led to the establishment of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) at NSF.
The OCI coordinates and supports the acquisition, development, and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools, and services essential to the conduct of 21st-century science and engineering research and education.
Cyberinfrastructure includes supercomputers, information management systems, high-capacity networks, digitally enabled observatories and scientific instruments, and an interoperable suite of software and middleware services and tools for computation, visualisation, and collaboration.
In June 2006, Atkins joined NSF, on leave from the University of Michigan, to lead the cyberinfrastructure effort.
Atkins has focused on research and teaching in the area of distributed knowledge communities and open learning resources.
He has directed several large experimental digital library projects as well as projects to explore the socio-technical design and application of “collaboratories” for scientific research.
Three nonprofit organisations—the Coalition for Networked Information, the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE—sponsor the Paul Evan Peters Award, which was established with additional funding from Microsoft and Xerox Corporations.
The award honors the memory and accomplishments of Paul Evan Peters (1947–1996).
Peters was a visionary and a coalition builder in higher education and the world of scholarly communication.
He led CNI from its founding in 1990 with informed insight, exuberant direction, eloquence, and awareness of the needs of its varied constituencies of librarians, technologists, publishers, and others in the digital world.
For more information visit the award Web site at http://www.educause.edu/PaulEvanPetersAward/852 or contact CNI Communications Coordinator Diane Goldenberg-Hart at diane@cni.org [Source: CNI] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines TAPE Publishes Overview of Audio and Video Carriers The TAPE Project has issued an overview of audio and video carriers by Dietrich Schüller of the Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Sciences.
The text systematically describes recording principles, storage and handling, maintenance of equipment, format and equipment obsolence, for each type of carrier, and includes a list of recommended reading.
It provides a solid, non-technical introduction for all those professionally managing sound and video collections.
The overview is a full text version of presentations used in TAPE workshops by Dietrich Schüller and Albrecht Haefner.
It is available as a PDF file (330 KB) at: http://www.tape-online.net/docs/audio_and_video_carriers.pdf Further information: The TAPE (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe) Project is supported by the Culture 2000-programme of the EU.
See: http://www.tape-online.net [Source: European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA)] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines HILT Project Phase IV: Making Terminology Services Useful to Information Services The JISC-funded HILT (High-Level Thesaurus) Project is looking to make contact with staff in information services or projects interested in helping it test and refine its developing terminology services.
The project, now in Phase IV, is currently working to create pilot Web services that will deliver machine-readable terminology and cross-terminology mappings data likely to be useful to information services wishing to extend or enhance the efficacy of their subject search or browse services.
Based on SRW/U, SOAP, and SKOS, the HILT facilities, when fully operational, will permit such services to improve their own subject search-and-browse mechanisms by using HILT data in a fashion transparent to their users.
On request, HILT will serve up machine-processable data on individual subject schemes (broader terms, narrower terms, hierarchy information, preferred and non-preferred terms, and so on) and interoperability data (usually intellectual or automated mappings between schemes, but the architecture allows for the use of other methods) data that can be used to enhance user services.
The project is also developing an associated toolkit that will help service technical staff to embed HILT-related functionality into their services.
The primary aim is to serve JISC-funded information services or services at JISC institutions, but information services outside the JISC domain may also find the proposed services useful and wish to participate in the test and refine process.
Although the primary focus of the work is to improve interoperability during cross-search or browse by subject, the facilities offered can also be used for other purposes.
Examples of possible uses include: Providing the best terms for a subject search in a remote service that uses a subject scheme unfamiliar to ‘home service’ users.
HILT currently has the following KOS* mounted and available: AAT, CAB, GCMD, HASSET, IPSV, LCSH, MeSH, NMR, SCAS, UNESCO, and DDC.
Improving recall in a subject search of one or more databases by enriching the set of terms known to a user by providing synonyms and related terms.
Generating an interactive browse structure where a scheme is arranged hierarchically.
Taking a user’s subject term and using it to identify available information services with subject coverage relevant to the query via collections and/or services databases such as IESR and SCONE.
The project is also looking to test other associated facilities it intends to offer for embedding in JISC or institutional information services for example a spell-check mechanism and machine to machine delivery of Wordnet data.
The test and refine process began in April 2008 and will continue until at least autumn 2008.
Individuals or services interested in participating, should begin by joining the HILT-Collaborators email list.
Note that, at this stage, both the facilities and the subject schemes are only being made available for testing purposes to allow services to help us test and refine them (and, in time, evaluate their usefulness).
They cannot and should not be built into operational services.
Further information: Knowledge Organisation Systems: see, for example: http://www.db.dk/bh/lifeboat_ko/CONCEPTS/knowledge_organization_systems.htm HILT-Collaborators email list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=hilt-collaborators HILT Contacts: Emma McCulloch, Project Manager e.mcculloch@strath.ac.uk Anu Joseph, Programmer anu.joseph@strath.ac.uk Dennis Nicholson, Project Director d.m.nicholson@strath.ac.uk [Source: HILT] [Received: April 2008] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cultural Heritage Online: The Challenge of Accessibility and Preservation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cultural Heritage Online: The Challenge of Accessibility and Preservation Buzz data framework infrastructure archives digitisation accessibility video preservation Citation BibTex RIS Alastair Dunning reports on a conference in Florence about the preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage material.
Hosting a conference next to Florence's Uffizi Gallery and the sculpture-studded Piazza dei Signori is not a bad place for a conference on preservation and access to digital cultural heritage.
And the condition of the courtyards, palaces, frescoes around the city show that someone has done a pretty good job at old-style preservation give or take the occasional flood.
But could the same be said of the preservation of digital culture being created in the present?
Such were the questions being debated in Florence at Cultural Heritage online: the challenges of accessibility and preservation, held over 14-15 December 2006, and supported by both UNESCO and the European Commission [1].
As with many European conferences, the number of initiatives, projects, Web sites and outcomes on show was both impressive and overwhelming.
Pat Manson, Head of Unit 'Learning and cultural heritage' within the EU's Information Society Technologies division, partially explained why this was the case.
The EU has recognised the value of digitised culture; indeed the past Framework Programme 6 and the forthcoming Framework Programme 7 both call for preservation issues to be tackled within the digital library and content strand.
Moreover, broader EU targets for digitisation are creating more and more digital content, and with each silent click of the digital camera, the related preservation issues become more pressing.
Figure 1: Dinner was held in the splendid Palazzo Medici-Riccardi.
This is a seventeenth-century ceiling by Luca Giordano.
So we heard, amongst many others, Catherine Lupovici speaking on Web archiving at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; Vito Capellini on new advances in invisible watermarking; Philippe Poncin on the colossal audio-video collection at the Institut National de l'Audioviseul and Rowena Loverance on the dilemmas museums face when deciding whether to preserve user-generated content.
A couple of speakers went into more technical detail.
The presentation of Giovanni Bergamin, from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, was particularly interesting.
He outlined the Digital Stacks Project, and the hardware solutions chosen for its data management.
Taking the lead from Google and the Internet Archive, the Florence team eschewed vendor-specific servers and instead used a rack of desktop PCs for their file store.
Being able to incorporate around 2TB per PC, the team just needed a few computers to provide preservation, access and back-up services, all without being tied to a specific seller.
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, changing hardware in case of failure was a reasonably straightforward task.
Borje Justrell, of the Riksarkivet (National Archives), Stockholm, relayed results of a Swedish survey into costs of digital preservation.
The point was forcefully made that the future will see falling hardware costs; rather it is support and service costs for digital preservation that will begin to bite into libraries' and archives' budgets.
Figure 2: The opening presentations were held in the Salone del Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio.
This is a detail of the ceiling, with paintings by Giorgio Vasari.
But the general tenor of the presentations was less about the technical issues than the broader strategic ones.
The understanding is quickly growing that just as the Web is distributed, so are the expertise, approaches and practices that manage cultural material on the Web.
Building shared networks of collaboration between different venues is an essential part of developing successful infrastructures.
Elizabeth Dulabahan's case study on Library of Congress work, and in particular its development of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, showed such infrastructures were just as essential on the other side of the Atlantic.
Not only could such a programme allow for planned content building, but it could also experiment with models for sharing preservation tasks and costs, as well as sharing expertise in developing tools and technologies.
Other national perspectives were introduced Ute Schwens reviewed three years of Germany's nestor Project, while Paolo Buonora spoke of the need for greater thinking at a national level in Italy.
EU-wide projects such as Caspar, Planets and Kopal were also introduced.
Despite the title of the conference, preservation was more of a buzzword than accessibility, but there were two forceful presentations related to access and user experience.
Opening speaker Paolo Galluzzi pointed to the development of Web 2.0 technologies and how many digitisation programmes are ignoring its potential; much more needs to be done to provide meaningful connections between different collections, certainly something much more effective than collections of hyperlinks.
One of the other keynote speakers, Seamus Ross, pointed out the need for far greater understanding of user needs and user behaviour.
Far too often thinking on online digital culture is based on poorly-handled user surveys, the exaggerated importance of quantitative statistics and anecdotal 'evidence'.
In general, he continued, there is a lack of clear methodologies for understanding user needs.
Only once more robust methodologies are developed will we have a much better understanding of users' needs, and how that will affect long-term preservation.
References Conference abstracts are available from http://www.rinascimento-digitale.it/index.php?SEZ=412 Author Details Alastair Dunning Communications Manager Arts and Humanities Data Service King's College London Email: alastair.dunning@ahds.ac.uk Web site: http://ahds.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Cultural Heritage Online: The Challenge of Accessibility and Preservation" Author: Alastair Dunning Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/rinascimento-digitale-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 52: The New Invisible Industry Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 52: The New Invisible Industry Buzz software framework portal usability infrastructure archives repositories preservation rae research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 52.
We are frequently reminded that, in a globalised market place, industrialised countries must ever look to a developing knowledge-based economy to ensure the green shoots of competitive innovation keep sprouting.
Whether all governments have been as quick to invest whole-heartedly in the research that sustains that knowledge-based economy remains to be seen.
However, if the industrialised nations think they have got their problems, then, like Barbara Kirsop, Leslie Chan and Subbiah Arunachalam, they would do well to consider the situation of the developing countries which must not only compete in a ferocious global market but do so without the depth of infrastructure and investment which the Western Hemisphere takes for granted.
It is now possible to argue that, alongside roads, railways and hospitals, research and development is as much a part of any national infrastructure as financial services are in a post-industrial economy.
As a consequence, developing countries need to establish a strong research base as much as they need machine tools.
In Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries the authors consider the issue of access to peer-reviewed research material in developing countries and in particular provide a comparison of two broad approaches, donations and free open access, in terms of their ability to build scientific research capacity for sustainable economic growth.
When I used to have a spare moment I would carry out an analysis of the content of Ariadne over its preceding 4 issues and few long-standing friends of the Magazine will be surprised to learn that Ariadne tended to highlight the burning issues of the day in the number of articles which would reflect the latest must-have technological development.
For example, when I took up this role some 4 years ago the word on everyone's lips seemed to be 'portals'.
There will not be a prize for working out the hot topic from this issue's contents page.
It is fortunate that an electronic publication such as Ariadne makes it relatively simple to identify such trends even over the space of a decade, but we may well find that when some future analytical eye comes to rest upon digital repositories, it will turn to Repository Thrills and Spills for an overall view of activity to date.
Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim write about the current context, the marketplace for repositories, actors and their roles, managing expectations, and service requirements.
They also offer a light-hearted metaphorical view of the Rights and Rewards Project's 'repository adventure' as well as discussion of areas for additional research activity.
I think readers new to the topic of IRs and those who may even feel they have already been around them too long, will be grateful to Dana McKay who has pulled together in her article Institutional Repositories and Their 'Other' Users: Usability Beyond Authors the wealth of material already penned on the subject, though it will quickly become apparent that the coverage is by no means balanced when one analyses it from the standpoint of the different users of institutional repositories.
Dana points out the weaknesses and also suggests how progress may be made despite the lack of research in certain areas.
Not for the first time, this article draws to our attention the impact of human reactions to technology and explains why it is that adoption of new systems can never be taken for granted.
I am indebted to Maurits van der Graaf for the European perspective that he brings to this issue in DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories where he is able to cast some light on the state of play with digital repositories for research output in the European Union.
Maurits provides results on various aspects such as types of software, the role of search engines and the roles and reactions of the practitioners involved in their institution's repository.
His description of the outcomes of the DRIVER inventory study provides clues to the next steps along the road towards an infrastructure for digital repositories in Europe, a goal which some may regard as less attainable than the Holy Grail, but which is nonetheless a worthwhile journey.
David Groenewegen and Andrew Treloar describe in ARROW and the RQF: Meeting the Needs of the Research Quality Framework Using an Institutional Research Repository the work of the ARROW Project in Australia as it attempts to meet the requirements of the forthcoming Research Quality Framework (RQF).
The RQF is a government initiative to measure the quality and impact of Australian research, and is based on the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) held here in the UK.
The RQF differs from the RAE in its reliance on local institutional repositories for the provision of access to research outputs, and this article explains how it is envisaged that this role will be filled, and the challenges that will doubtless arise.
Jill Russell rightly maintains that "Electronic theses are widely recognised as a Good Thing" and argues that, combined with a significant growth in institutional repositories in the UK, and gradual moves towards mandating the deposit of electronic versions of theses by new generations of research students, the UK is now ready for a fully-fledged and co-ordinated service.
The EThOSnet Project is the implementation phase, building on the sturdy foundations laid down by the EThOS Project, to transform it into the EThOS service.
In EThOSnet: Building a UK e-Theses Community, Jill provides us with the history of the EThOS Project as well as offering a view of the aims and objectives of EThOSnet in order to strengthen the operations and business model of e-theses services and so provide future students and researchers with a significant support to their work.
Virginia Knight provides us with useful background to the Subject Portals Project (SPP) and highlights an aspect which assumed greater importance in its second phase, namely portlets.
Here she concentrates on the alerting portlet which was one of the two types of portlet identified by the Project as being of particular usefulness to users of institutional portals.
The alerting portlet evolved from the concept of the aggregated newsfeed searching portlet and is designed to notify users about new resources in their subject areas and to allow them to register those areas with the portlet software.
In The SPP Alerting Portlet: Delivering Personalised Updates Virginia provides us with an overview of the portlet as well as detailing the outcomes of two case studies, one for the end-user and the other for a portal administrator.
I am extremely grateful to Iain Wallace, Graeme West and David Donald who have been able, despite very challenging circumstances to provide Ariadne with their article Capacity Building: Spoken Word at Glasgow Caledonian University.
The Project, as the authors write, 'was conceived … in response to a set of pedagogical and institutional imperatives' and they add, somewhat intriguingly, that it was associated with a move to 'recapture some of the traditional aspirations of Scottish Higher Education' through the use of 'an information technology-intensive learning environment'.
What we also discover, apart from the powerful mix of partners ranging from the BBC Information and Archives to groups at GCU, Michigan State University and Northwestern University, is the Project's commitment to a library standards-based approach and the intention of offering high-quality digital resources to encourage the adoption of the highest standards of scholarship in the students using them.
It is heartening that, when the belief abounds that digital technologies are only used to adulterate academic activity, practitioners are proving that technological innovation in media beyond the still dominant largely text-based resources can offer challenging learning opportunities using the wealth of resources held by the BBC.
I am grateful to Jon Pratty for his article on 24 Hour Museum: From Past to Future in which he provides an overview of 24HM's development to date and how the Museum is looking to the future.
We learn from Jackson Pope and Philip Beresford that The British Library is adopting the International Internet Preservation Consortium Toolset (comprising the Web Curator Tool, NutchWax and the Open Source Wayback Machine for its evolving Web archiving operations, designed to meet the demands of the Legal Deposit legislation being introduced within the next few years.
Picking up the story of the Web Curator Tool, this latest contribution Web Archiving at the British Library: Trials with the Web Curator Tool now provides us with information on the performance-testing stage designed to evaluate what hardware will be required to run the toolset in a production environment.
The article covers all three components of the IIPC Toolset and offers recommendations on bugs, gathering and reviewing, indexing, searching and storage issues.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, change management in information services and the art of managing technical people.
In addition of course we provide our usual section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 52.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 52: The New Invisible Industry" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Web Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Web Library Buzz blog copyright ebook Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho looks at a book she feels is destined to repay its purchase price even if you never manage to read it all.
One question this book doesn't answer is how many hours the author spent researching it.
From the point of view of the reader I can assure you that you can get lost in its richness and spend weeks investigating the sites and resources listed in it.
Many people are sceptical about Web directories because they go out of date so readily but this issue has been addressed by the author as well through the companion Web site.
Whatever topic you think of, Nicholas Tomaiuolo has it covered from scientific pre-prints and weblogs to breaking news, e-book, images, toolbars and plug-ins.
The author's meticulous and intelligent approach answers a lot more questions than the titles of the chapters suggest.
There is room for comment, jargon-busting asides, the occasional story and humour.
Although written by an academic librarian, this is not a book for librarians alone.
Anybody interested in the Web will find it fascinating in its breadth of coverage.
These are not common everyday sites that even librarians or addicted surfers already know.
In fact the only complaints posted by Amazon reviewers about this book were to do with the fact that it kept disappearing from their desk at work.
What makes an otherwise daunting book to review, given its dense factual content, becomes enjoyable because of the interviews with professionals slotted in the appropriate sections.
Just as questions about business models, viability of resources and copyright pop into your head, they are answered by exciting insights from an array of professionals ranging from the Smithsonian Institution to the Museum of Modern Art.
There are interviews with a professional travel photographer, numerous Web library professionals and with my personal favourite, the founder of Project Gutenberg Michael S Hart.
His project is not guided by altruism he simply says.
"I want the world this way".
His vision of what is possible has made thousands of texts available to anyone connected to the Internet, and his ambition is to add 200 new titles every month during 2004.
It is a metaphor for what drives free Web content.
At the end of each chapter there is an estimated saving from accessing resources on-line but also a little pointer to the intrinsic value of Web-based resources, listed under the heading 'priceless'.
If you buy a copy of this book and use even a small fraction of the resources listed in it you will be saving more than money and shelf space, you will be saving hours of frustration trying to locate appropriate free or low-cost sites to answer your query.
The book is also well presented with numerous screen shots and comparison tables, clear page layout and a list of all the sites under appropriate headings as an appendix.
The author is realistic about what is missing from the Web and points to resources which for strong commercial reasons will never be available free, such as sensitive business information, copyrighted materials and today's edition of your favourite magazine in full.
But there is so much out there for free already and the vastness of it is breathtaking.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian The British Medical Association Email: lina.coelho@bma.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: The Web Library" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What's in EEVL for Further Education Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What's in EEVL for Further Education Buzz data software database rss portal cataloguing perl e-learning ejournal ict research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod gives an overview of the services and plans EEVL has for students and practitioners in the Further Education sector.
"Indispensible, much better than using Google" was a comment about EEVL, the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing, from one FE Tutor who attended an RSC (Regional Support Centre) event last year.
It is not surprising that he was enthusiastic as there is a great deal of content in EEVL of interest to staff and students in Further Education (FE).
In fact, EEVL has a surprisingly wide appeal, as was recognised recently by Schoolzone, a service which features Web sites reviewed by UK teachers.
Schoolzone "Highly Recommends" EEVL as a site of "special educational merit".
What exactly does EEVL provide which is relevant to practitioners in Further Education?
Firstly, some general information about the service.
EEVL provides access to the foremost engineering, mathematics and computing information on the Internet.
It is a free service specifically designed to meet the needs of students and staff in Higher and Further Education.
EEVL provides a number of services designed to make locating information on the Internet quicker, easier and more productive.
Of particular interest to those in FE are the following: Industry News and Job Announcements     OneStep Industry News and OneStep Jobs announcements are two new EEVL services, launched in November 2003.
OneStep Industry News gathers industry news data (in the form of RSS Feeds) from top sources, aggregates these sources together, and provides a searchable and browsable interface.
The overall aim is to give an easy means of monitoring a range of useful sources with minimum effort, hence the name 'OneStep'.
OneStep Industry News contains the latest news items available from a range of content providers not their full content, which is available in one-click from the source sites.
OneStep Jobs gathers job announcements from top sources and delivers results in a very similar way.
In addition to 'intermingling' results from each source, subject cluster views of sources are available, and items from individual sources can also be viewed.
Trade news can be very important for those studying or teaching engineering and computing in FE, as they often need to keep up with industrial trends and the latest products, developments, and commercial announcements.
Most of the news announcements included in OneStep Industry News are specific to particular trades or industrial sectors, and/or are produced by trade publications, unlike the items which appear in the more widely known news announcement services, which also often focus only on financial concerns.
In addition to the OneStep Industry News service, EEVL also highlights other news sources of interest in Latest News in Engineering, Latest News in Mathematics and Statistics, and Latest News in Computing.
Job announcements are important for anyone looking for work or a new job, but particularly those in FE, who are often studying on a short-term or part-time basis.
EEVL's OneStep Jobs service makes it possible to scan the very latest vacancies from a number of recruitment agencies, thus making the task of job searching so much easier than having to visit numerous sites individually.
Sources for the OneStep services include: e4engineering.com, Buildingtalk, Manufacturingtalk, Electronicstalk, Nature Materials Update, Moreover, LTSN Engineering, LTSN Materials, the Institute of Physics (Optics.org News, Fibers.org News, Nanotechweb.org News, Compoundsemiconductor.net News), scenta, LTSN Maths, The Register, Slashdot, Nanodot, general technology newsfeeds such as BBC Tech News and CNN Technology, Jobsite, theengineerjobs.co.uk, jobs.ac.uk, Nanotechweb.org Jobs, and Perl Jobs.
More sources will be added in the future.
Trade Journals Trade journals feature in other parts of EEVL.
It is possible to subscribe, free, to a number of print trade journals through an arrangement with TradePub.
There are no hidden or trial offers, and no purchase is necessary.
Publications are absolutely free to those who qualify (though it should be noted that some are only available to qualifying individuals in the US).
Titles which might interest those in FE, and which are available to those in the UK as well as elsewhere, include: Water & Wastewater International, Advanced Packaging, Control Solutions International, BioProcess International and Marine Log.
It is also worth noting that some trade journals likely to be of interest to FE are indexed by EEVL's Engineering E-journal Search Engine, which searches the full text of over 100 engineering e-journals.
Web Tutorials for FE There are five Virtual Training Suite (VTS) Web tutorials available via EEVL which are specifically aimed at FE.
These are: Construction Engineering (General and Automotive) Information and Communication Technology Internet for Maths & Adult Numeracy Internet for Health and Safety at Work These, plus other VTS tutorials, are listed on EEVL's Web Tutorials page.
The VTS is a popular national initiative designed to teach internet information skills to the higher and further education communities in the UK.
The tutorials offer a subject-based approach to internet skills training, with the VTS for FE tutorials listed above including only those resources likely to be of interest to those in FE.
Evaluated Web sites in subjects relevant to FE EEVL's core service is the Internet Resource Catalogue of quality evaluated Web sites.
This contains details of over 10,000 resources in engineering, mathematics and computing which have been chosen by subject specialists and listed by subject area and resource type.
All sites are regularly checked for currency, and new sites are added every day.
The Catalogue can be searched or browsed, and many of the browse headings map well to subjects taught within FE.
Examples include: Aerospace and Defence Engineering.
Chemical Engineering, included in which is Chemical Process Operations and Chemica Plant.
Civil Engineering, including Construction and Building Engineering and Transportation and Planning.
Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, including Electronics Engineering.
Engineering Design.
Environmental Engineering.
Manufacturing Engineering, including Manufacturing Operation and Systems and Product Design and Development Materials Engineering, including Construction and Building Materials, Metals, Metallurgy and Corrosion and Polymers, Ceramics and Composites Mechanical Engineering and Related Industries, including Automotive Engineering and Naval and Marine Engineering.
General Mathematics Resources, General Mathematics Education, including Psychology of and Research in Mathematics Education, Education and Instruction in Mathematics, and Educational Material and Media and Educational Technology .
Computing Milieux, included in which are The Computer Industry, History of Computing, Computers and Education, Computers and Society, Legal Aspects of Computing, Management of Computing and Information Systems, The Computing Profession and Personal Computing.
Software.
All of the resources in the Internet Resource Catalogue have been allocated resource types to indicate their content, and many of these resource types are likely to be of particular interest to those in FE.
Examples include: Product Information Product News News Software Company/Commercial Society/Institution All the above resource types can be further sub-divided by subject: Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
In addition, there is a list of Further Education resources in the Internet Resource Catalogue, and also a list of resources specifically of interest toYoung Engineers.
EEVL's Key Sites are core resources only resources which are particularly important or are of outstanding quality are designated Key Sites.
These are indicated by the Key Site logo on search result lists, and catalogues of key sites in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing are also available.
Also of use for those more specific subject enquiries are separate Web site search engines for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
Using these gives more focused results than the more general search engines such as Google.
It is as well to note that the Internet Resource Catalogue contains details of Web sites which may, or may not, be of specific interest to those in FE.
Some resources can easily be identified as being specifically of interest to FE.
In other cases, for example with respect to recruitment agencies, product directories, e-journals, news sites and company sites, there may be content of interest, and some content which is not of interest.
Learning & Teaching Catalogue EEVL provides a catalogue of learning and teaching resources for engineering, evaluated by academic staff.
These are mostly HE-ased, but some may be of interest to FE.
The service is called SearchLT.
Case Studies for Further Education A series of studies on how the resources in EEVL can be incorporated into teaching and learning materials have been developed in collaboration with FE practitioners.
These are listed at the RDN Case Studies: EEVL page.
Topics include The Impact of ICT on Society, The Role of New Technology in Engineering and Statistical Data on the Web.
Publications of relevance to Further Education There are three EEVL booklets which have been particularly popular with FE.
These booklets describe a selection of the leading Internet Resources in Engineering, Internet Resources in Mathematics, and Internet Resources in Computing.
Sadly, printed copies have run out, and current funding limitations do not permit a reprint, but pdf versions are available from EEVL's Publications page.
Much of the above is detailed in EEVL's What Can EEVL Do For You: Further Education information sheet.
Copies of this sheet are currently being distributed to relevant institutions by the RSCs, and a pdf version is available from the EEVL Publications page.
Future plans and Further Education Plans for the future EEVL service include several features of interest to FE.
The Subject Portal Project (SPP) has been developing portal functionality for five of the subject Hubs of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), including EEVL.
Although SPP was aimed specifically at HE, this does not mean that the services resulting from it, if funded and implemented, will not be relevant to FE.
In particular, SPP is developing e-journal search engines which will provide more functionality than EEVL's current Engineering E-journal Search Engine, and these might include landscapes (pre-selected targets) which feature only trade journals or titles of particular relevance to FE.
Another area that the SPP is working on is a cross-search portlet which could be implemented as a Hub service allowing cross-searching of selected databases of interest.
Databases which have been identified as being of relevance to FE (to which some FE institutions at present subscribe), include: Abstracts in New Technology and Engineering (ANTE), Weldasearch, info4 education, ESDU, RAM, Wiley Electonic Reference Works, Applied Science and Technology Index (ASTI), and Barbour Index Construction Expert.
Some, including info4education and Wiley Electonic Reference Works, are full text services, and many of the others are developing improved links to full text.
SPP could also make it possible to create relevant default landscapes just for those registering from FE.
Other plans include improving the OneStep services through the inclusion of more sources, and possibly new OneStep services specifically for product news or professional society news.
The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) has initiated a project which will add over 14,000 records of relevance to Further Education, by 2005.
A proportion of these records will come to EEVL, and will enhance the records we already have.
Ideally, and this is the plan, the records tagged as being of interest to FE will be readily identifiable in the EEVL Catalogue.
About EEVL EEVL is the Internet guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the RDN.
Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Return to top Article Title: "What's in EEVL for Further Education" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 30-January-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 38 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/eevl/intro.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Collection Description Schema Forum Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Collection Description Schema Forum Buzz database metadata accessibility vocabularies namespace schema cataloguing rslp dcmi interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Gordon Dunsire describes the one-day seminar on standard schemas for collection-level description held by UKOLN in February.
This seminar was aimed at information professionals involved in the policy, development and implementation of services based on collection-level description.
Such services use a single record to describe a collection as a unit, rather than recording information about its constituent parts at the item level.
There has been a great deal of activity in the United Kingdom in this area since the work carried out by Michael Heaney and UKOLN in 1999 on An Analytical model of collections and their catalogues [1].
The main focus of the seminar was to discuss the development of a standard schema for collection description with particular reference to the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) schema [2] derived from Heaney's model, and the more recent work of the Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group [3] on a Dublin Core collection description application profile [4].
The day was split into two parts, with presentations in the morning followed by breakout sessions in the afternoon.
Presentations The seminar was chaired and introduced by Ronald Milne.
He pointed out that the implementation of collection-level description had proved more complex than originally envisaged, but was still regarded as an essential building block for creating distributed national collections of print and digital resources.
In the model for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Information Environment [5], collection-level descriptions are used to create and survey 'landscapes' which indicate potentially fruitful areas for more detailed searching at the item level.
Such landscapes may be generated with a focus on subject, accessibility, geographical location, language, and other criteria for identifying concentrations of information resources.
Interoperability is a key issue when descriptions from many different sources are to be used.
Constructing the Collection Model The first presentation was by Michael Heaney, the author of the analytical model on which most UK descriptions are based.
Michael emphasised that he had taken a very abstract approach in developing the model, which was not tied to any particular implementation.
The model is presented as an entity-relationship diagram which focusses on structural elements rather than transactions.
The model is for a single collection and its associated finding aids, and Michael pointed out that the RSLP schema was only a partial implementation.
From Analytical Model to Implementation and Beyond Ann Chapman and Bridget Robinson of UKOLN's CD Focus then gave a presentation on how the model has been implemented in a number of services in the UK.
They pointed out areas where elements had been added, omitted, or relabelled to illustrate how well the model fitted service needs.
They also discussed some of the generic user and manager requirements of collection-level description, and generally set the scene for the afternoon breakout sessions.
NISO and Collection-level Descriptions Pat Stevens of OCLC then surveyed some of the activities related to collection-level description that NISO is involved with.
These include the Metasearch Initiative [6] and projects involving virtual reference and resource-sharing services.
She emphasised the desire for a single service point for finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining resources; for a task-based approach; for reliable indicators of collection subject strength; and for disclosure of institutional collection policies.
The Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile The last presentation of the morning was by Pete Johnston of UKOLN.
Pete chairs the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Collection Description Working Group (DCMI CD WG) [7], and he brought us up to date with current work in establishing Dublin Core standards for collection-level description.
This involves defining vocabularies ('namespaces' in DC-speak) for labelling metadata elements and the development of an application profile which specifies how the metadata elements should be used.
The profile is intended for simple descriptions suitable for a range of collections and is a partial implementation of the RSLP schema; that is, an even simpler instantiation of Heaney's model.
Pete gets the prize for best diagram of the day, three concentric circles showing the relationship of DC to the RSLP schema; in other words, a CD (compact disc) view of CD (collection description).
The work of Pete's group is still in progress.
Breakout Sessions For the afternoon, delegates split into three groups.
One group discussed a strategy for collection-description standards while the other two concentrated on developing the standards.
I was in one of the latter groups and we certainly had a lively discussion on the use of standard schemas and our practical experiences in implementing them.
We clarified that the intended role of the RSLP schema (and DC CD AP) was to facilitate interoperability of descriptions from different services, rather than something that was mandatory within any specific service.
The service with which I am involved, SCONE (Scottish Collections Network) [8], uses Heaney's full analysis rather than the cut-down RSLP schema.
SCONE carried out a comparison of schemas in use in the UK in 2001 [9] and as a result has added extra entities and relationships.
SCONE descriptions map to the RSLP schema, however, and in this form can be cross-searched with records from other services.
SCONE was not the only service which had used elements not included in the RSLP schema and one of our recommendations was that the schema required further development if it was to meet the needs of the UK.
This was also a conclusion of the other breakout groups.
The full set of recommendations has been published [10].
Perhaps the most significant is that future activity needs to be carried out in an international context rather than just within the UK and requires participation by appropriate national agencies.
Conclusion All in all, this was a most enjoyable day despite yet another slew of acronyms and occasional mind-boggling technical complexity.
As usual, it was a great opportunity to meet colleagues working in this field and catch up with the latest gossip.
It was important, too, for sustaining and building on the efforts of the past five years in establishing collection-level description as a key component of the global information environment.
References Heaney, M., "An analytical model of collections and their catalogues" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/model/ Powell, A., "RSLP collection description: collection description schema" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/ DCMI Collection Description Working Group http://dublincore.org/groups/collections/ Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/collection-application-profile/ Powell, A., Lyon, L., "JISC Information Environment: functional model" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/functional-model/ Metasearch Initiative http://www.niso.org/committees/MetaSearch-info.html DCMI Collection Description Working Group http://dublincore.org/groups/collections/ SCONE: Scottish collections network http://scone.strath.ac.uk/service/index.cfm Dunsire, G., "Extending the SCONE collection descriptions database for cc-interop: report for Work Package B of the cc-interop JISC project", 2002 http://ccinterop.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents/extendsconereport.pdf Collection Description Schema Forum recommendations February 2004 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/cdfocus-schema-forum/recommendations-2004.html Author Details Gordon Dunsire Deputy Director Centre for Digital Library Research University of Strathclyde Glasgow Email: g.dunsire@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Collection description schema forum" Author: Gordon Dunsire Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/cdfocus-schema-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Distributed Services Registry Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Distributed Services Registry Workshop Buzz data framework wiki rss xml portal infrastructure archives metadata schema repositories oai-pmh z39.50 dns marc provenance e-learning soap rslp openurl uddi srw sru cordra e-science authentication url research standards Citation BibTex RIS John Gilby reports on the UKOLN/IESR two-day workshop at Scarman House, University of Warwick on 14-15 July 2005.
The number of available online digital collections is growing all the time and with this comes the need to discover these collections, both by machine (m2m) and by end-users.
There is also a trend towards service-orientated architectures and a likely critical part of this will be service registries to assist with discovering services andtheir associated collections.
UKOLN and the JISC Information Environment Services Registry Project (IESR) [1] organised a two-day workshop to look at some of the issues that are likely to be present in building a distributed approach.
All presentations from the workshop are available on the UKOLN Web site [2].
Presentations Andy Powell, UKOLN, began proceedings by outlining the purpose of the workshop.
The first day was an opportunity via a number of presentations for sharing knowledge of current approaches to service registries and was not limited to the UK.
Andy then went on to say that delegates would be required to be more active on Day 2 by taking part in the planned breakout sessions considering the many issues with service registries that are distributed.
It was hoped that future work could be agreed and potential partnerships and funding sources identified at the end of the workshop.
The next session was a series of three short presentations from the IESR Project.
Amanda Hill, MIMAS gave an overview of the project, currently in its third phase and holding data on around 260 electronic resources contained within the JISC Information Environment.
Pete Johnston, UKOLN, then described the background and outline workings of the RSLP Collection Description Schema [3] which forms the basis of the IESR collection metadata.
He then concluded his session by outlining the Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile and the NISO Metasearch Initiative.
The final IESR presentation was given by Ann Apps, MIMAS, who spoke in more detail about how the IESR works.
The metadata describes the resources and includes information on how to access them by various methods such as Z39.50, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), Web/CGI and by location URL.
All IESR records are covered by Creative Commons licences and all resource providers have agreed to this as it effectively advertises their services in the registry.
IESR records can be accessed at present via the Web, Z39.50 and OAI-PMH.
Ann concluded her presentation by sharing some thoughts on some current issues identified by the project (scope, scalability, manageability, data ownership, relationship with library portal products) and a distributed service registry model.
Following a sumptuous lunch and the opportunity to network, Jeremy Frumkin, Oregon State University, detailed what they were doing in creating the OCKHAM Digital Library Services Registry (DLSR) [4].
The broad goals of the project were to create a registry for all possible digital library services and to enable m2m digital library service resolving.
The DLSR is distributed from the outset, having many nodes over the network and the approach was partly based on the DNS with its hierarchical design and de-centralised administration.
Each node has a local copy of the complete registry and OAI is used for propagating data across the network.
Similar to the IESR, the DLSR needs to be scalable, manageable, use existing standards and technologies and offers OAI-PMH, Z39.50, SRU/W (Search and Retrieve URL Service/Search and Retrieve Web Service) and Web interfaces to its metadata.
Rob Sanderson, University of Liverpool, then gave an overview of the NISO Metasearch Initiative, concentrating on one of three task groups, Collection and Service Descriptions.
The purpose for the group was defined as being "To enable the discovery of appropriate, remotely maintained content and a means of retrieving that content", and the scope for the group was enabling the retrieval of items.
The group have devised a draft Collection Description Schema based on the Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile and it provides a core set of collection description properties suitable for collection discovery (rather than item discovery).
Service descriptions form the other element of the group's work, and it has been decided to use the ZeeRex [5] schema for service information.
Rob concluded by commenting that the Metasearch Initiative does not consider service registries within their remit, tending rather to concentrate on recommending best practice.
Next up was Thomas Habing, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), who described the UIUC OAI registry.
The catalyst for the registry was an identified need for finding relevant repositories to harvest.
The registry itself is not distributed but receives regular metadata feeds from distributed services.
Registry entries come from various existing registries, from use of OAI Protocol features of Friends and Provenance, from periodic searching of Google Web indexes and by manual addition.
There was a desire to make the registry's contents available m2m and this is achieved via OAI-PMH, an RSS feed (to notify changes in the registry) and via an SRU service for searching the registry.
Following a short break, Wilbert Kraan, CETIS, presented some thoughts on service registries and e-learning, starting off by describing the Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture Project (CORDRA) [6] that has developed a model of how to create local federations of repositories and has also built practical implementations of the model.
Wilbert then spoke about registries in the eFramework, some lightweight solutions and finished by raising a number of open issues including relationships between national and local services with local and national registries respectively, authentication, authorisation and access control.
Matthew Dovey, Oxford University e-Science Centre, spoke about an evaluation of Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) [7] for the UK e-Science GRID and began by giving an overview of UDDI.
Following details of the evaluation, Matthew concluded that UDDI could be used to provide an infrastructure for UK e-Science but that there also remained issues which it was hoped would be addressed by the next version of UDDI.
The last presentation was given by Jeffrey Young, OCLC Office of Research, and introduced their work on WikiD (Wiki Data).
WikiD extends the Wiki model to "..support the creation and maintenance of structured data..".
WikiD thus could support such things as MARC data and field level data editing and searching.
Jeffrey did a walkthrough of a normal WikiPage creation and contrasted this with the creation of a WikiD 'collection' which also entailed the addition of a new XML schema.
WikiD supports a variety of protocols including OAI-PMH, SRW/U, OpenURL and RSS.
The eating theme returned during the evening with the Workshop Dinner which, with fantastic food and suitable lubrication, provided a good forum for discussing the day's presentations, networking and generally chatting about issues as diverse as rock groups and Z39.50!
Breakout Groups and Discussions After yet more food at the breakfast bar, the second day required a greater degree of delegate participation.
Three breakout groups were formed to consider what issues exist in creating a viable, globally distributed service registry.
In case anyone thought that task was easy, delegates were also asked where possible to suggest appropriate solutions to the issues.
Feedback from the breakout sessions has been grouped together under three headings for the purposes of this report.
As often happens, there are more questions raised than there are answers identified.
Usage Issues The purpose and value of a Distributed Service Registry is unclear, is there a cost benefit for creating a DSR?
Who are the likely users and how will they want to use the registry?
To provide evidence of need, it was suggested that different user communities be asked what they want.
It is likely that the different communities would require different approaches and standards so perhaps some form of minimum input standard could be devised which suits the needs of most.
Technical Issues Should the registry be serviceor collection-driven?
Perhaps co-locating service and collection descriptions should be avoided?
Start with services, as services have associated collections; but in terms of the DSR, what is a service?
How would the DSR be searched ?
It may be better to avoid cloning the whole registry, there could be local registries as sub-sets of the global whole or there could be 'core' metadata for sharing with extensions for specific user groups.
How feasible will it be to agree a reference model?
There is also the matter of the appropriate record: there are likely to be multiple records describing the same resource; which one should be used and where?
Is there a role for ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language)?
Management Issues Intellectual property rights (IPR) of the metadata within the DSR are also an important issue: can the records be used (or reused) by system vendors?
What about access control to the records, will there be public and private elements of the records and will the same access control and IPR cover the whole record?
Who sets up nodes in the DSR, who is responsible for updating records, and ultimately, who pays for it all?
How can organisations be motivated to keep entries up to date?
What should be done about ensuring consistency with regard to the quality of records?
Conclusions Where do we go from here?
I might have missed something, but to me, there did not seem an obvious way forward.
Certainly delegates agreed that the framework in which the DSR would sit will benefit from being clarified and use cases need to be investigated across digital libraries, eScience, eLearning, museums, etc.. Development of an agreed reference model for service registries would also be an important task along with practical experimentation between projects/services such as OCKHAM, IESR and eScience.
Leona Carpenter, JISC, summed up the workshop and commented that funding appeared to be the biggest issue.
It was not clear what future activities would require funding or were covered in existing project budgets.
There was support from delegates for collaborative (cross domain/country) funding and this is an area that ought to be explored further.
References The IESR Project Web site: http://iesr.ac.uk/ Workshop presentations: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/dsr-workshop-2005/programme.html RSLP Collection Description Schema: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/ The OCKHAM Digital Library Service Registry: http://www.ockham.org/ ZeeRex Web site: http://explain.z3950.org/ CORDRA Web site: http://cordra.lsal.cmu.edu/cordra/ UDDI Web site: http://www.uddi.org/ Author Details John Gilby Project Manager M25 Systems Team London School of Economics Email: j.gilby@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/M25link/ Return to top Article Title: "Distributed Services Registry Workshop" Author: John Gilby Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/dsr-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Rights Management and Digital Library Requirements Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Rights Management and Digital Library Requirements Buzz data software framework dissemination archives metadata standardisation schema copyright multimedia provenance adobe ebook drm mets licence odrl interoperability privacy algorithm taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Karen Coyle describes some aspects of rights expression languages favoured by the commercial content industries and how these may differ from the rights needs of digital libraries.
It is common to hear members of the digital library community debating the relative merits of the two most common rights expression languages (RELs) the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and the rights language developed for the Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) and recently adopted by the International Organization for Standardization [1] and which is preferable for digital library systems.
Such debates are, in my opinion, premature and should be postponed until this community has developed a clear set of requirements for rights management in its environment, including rights expression, the encoding of license terms, and file protection.
This article is intended to provoke discussion of those requirements, and it attempts to do so by illustrating aspects of the current developments in rights management that may be problematic for digital libraries.
This does not mean that the digital library community will need to develop its own rights language and rights management solution, separate from the existing standards in this area.
It means that at this moment in time we do not have sufficient information about our own rights management needs to evaluate any particular solution nor to negotiate for extensions to accommodate digital library functionality.
DRM Today 'Many content owners fear that digital works are easy to use, duplicate and distribute without authorization or compensation.'
[2] The sharing of millions of music files over the peer-to-peer network Napster has become a symbol of the failure of copyright law to protect digital files.
The solution to the problem is often referred to as Digital Rights Management (DRM), although that term means different things to different people.
It is used in this article to refer to the general concept of expression of terms of access and use, as well as the enforcement of those terms through technology.
Work on the technology of Digital Rights Management is taking place primarily in the area of commercial content.
The most active areas of development currently are media and entertainment [3] and enterprise systems.
Enterprise systems serve individual companies and institutions that have a need to control the flow of information within their boundaries, and to make sure that only approved files leave the protected network.
Media and entertainment have a particularly difficult task because their environment requires developers to find a way to protect digital content that is distributed to consumer devices and to a potentially uncooperative user base.
After the experience with peer-to-peer networks in which millions of consumers wilfully violated the copyrights of media companies, that sector is understandably wary of releasing its products in digital form to the general consumer.
Both of these areas are of interest to developers because they appear to be economically viable: entertainment because consumers have proven a willingness to pay well for entertainment, at least when no free alternative is available; and enterprise systems because some companies have a strong stake in protecting trade secrets and market strategies in order to be successful.
The media and entertainment solution will have the greatest effect on libraries, both as consumers of commercially produced information products and as distributors of resources to the general public.
The requirements of rights management systems are complex, but there are certain requirements that are key to understanding the direction that DRM is taking today.
Underlying the systems that are envisioned in the media and entertainment area are the following basic requirements: to support electronic commerce of digital resources to provide end-to-end control over those resources to implement machine-actionable licenses To understand how these requirements affect decisions about DRM development, we will look at them in greater detail in the sections that follow.
The E-Commerce Solution 'By "digital publishing", we mean the on-line sale and distribution of digital works.'
[4] The implications of an e-commerce solution are fairly easy to intuit: the product focus is current, commercially viable materials; the customer focus is individual consumers; costs can be recovered through volume sales or increased prices.
It also isn't difficult to see that these differ from the main goals of libraries Focus on Commercial Materials Libraries do purchase and lend current commercially produced materials.
But they represent only a portion of the content disseminated by libraries; depending upon the type of library and its user base, popular commercial content may not be the predominant material in a given library.
A primarily commercial market solution may not take into account materials whose copyright has expired, materials issued in the public domain, (as in the case with some government documents), and materials of low commercial value.
The media and publishing industries have little interest in public domain materials and low-profit materials since the revenue from them is limited.
Although it may be possible to maintain public domain materials outside the trusted environment, it may also be convenient to treat them like other materials in terms of delivery systems and rendering software.
An example from today's technology is the Microsoft Reader format.
The Microsoft Reader software can only process and display materials in its .lit format.
There are different degrees of protection which can be applied to files, but even with the least amount of protection there is no capability to print from the Microsoft Reader software.
Public domain materials in .lit format receive this minimal protection even though the printing of such materials is permitted by law.
The Individual Consumer The focus on the consumer as an individual affects a number of design decisions for digital content delivery systems.
When ebooks were first introduced, they could only be purchased through online bookstores using a credit card, a model that works well for consumers but not for libraries.
Fortunately, some ebook producers saw the value in creating a sales model for libraries, but there are publishers who choose to sell ebooks to individual consumers but will not sell those same titles to libraries.
This is a major change from the analogue world, where libraries are able to purchase the same titles as consumers even though they may do so through different retail methods.
The individual consumer model also affects the design of rendering systems and devices.
Current versions of Microsoft Reader and Adobe Acrobat Reader are commonly used on general-purpose computers for the display of ebooks.
Both require that the computer be identified through a unique hardware-based certificate, either a Microsoft .NET Passport account (used by both Microsoft and Adobe for their products) or an Adobe DRM activation account.
The nature of this activation indicates an assumption that each machine is used by only one person, who can be identified with an email account.
This is not the correct model for institutions with machines that are available for public use.
The Cost of Rights Management 'DRM tools and systems of wide application comprise highly sophisticated technologies which in turn require enormous resources to develop, the kind of resources that, in practice, only very big enterprises can muster.'
[5] In Hollywood movies everyone is lovely, slender, healthy, and young.
In Hollywood's version of DRM every digital resource is a highly desirable best-seller that must be protected at all costs and there is no question that there are costs associated with the effective management of digital rights.
First, there are costs to early research and development activities, including the specification and standards effort.
Additional costs can be expected for the creation of rights-managed content and for the devices which will conform to the requirements of the DRM solution [6].
What is still unknown is how those costs will be paid.
One theory is that media companies will recuperate the cost of DRM through the reduction of piracy.
If that does not pay the rights management costs, however, companies will most likely pass the costs along to their customers.
Any added costs that DRM imposes on products is clearly an issue for libraries: when your services are provided for free you cannot pass such costs on to your users.
It could be difficult for libraries to afford popular protected publications.
But libraries, especially academic libraries, are often focused on less popular materials.
Economic theory would imply that materials that are less affected by piracy, such as research materials, would also have to bear less of the cost of any rights management technology that is applied.
This, however, posits a sales and delivery environment that distinguishes between popular and less popular works, and assumes that 'less technology' means less cost.
In fact we see today that public domain works are being sold in digital format using the same technology as copyrighted works.
These public domain works are inexpensive, but they are not free, and we can assume that at least some of the cost is added by the rights management environment that is common across all products delivered in that particular electronic format.
In other words, DRM could add costs to all digital materials regardless of whether piracy is a problem, and not in proportion to the risk of piracy.
End-to-End Control: Trusting the System 'A maker of generic computer systems cannot guarantee that their platform will not be used to make unauthorized copies.'
[7] The primary goal of rights management in the commercial environment is easy to state although much harder actually to realise: the protection of digital resources from unauthorised use.
What it actually takes to achieve this goal is quite complex.
In the case of resources that will be distributed to individual consumers, there are a number of challenges, most having to do with the creation of a hardware, software, and network environment in which content producers can be sure that their products will not be susceptible to piracy.
The main requirement for these systems is security, and the systems that will achieve the required level of security are referred to as 'trusted systems.'
Mark Stefik, one of the early developers of the rights management concept, defined trusted systems in this way: 'Trusted systems vary in their hardware and software security arrangements, but in general, they automatically enforce terms and conditions under which digital works can be used .
Trusted systems differentiate between different uses such as making a digital copy, rendering a work on a screen, printing a work on a color printer, or extracting a portion of a work for inclusion in a new work.
When asked to perform an operation not licensed by a work's specific terms and conditions, a trusted system refuses to carry it out.'
[8] Although the rights that can be expressed in such a system can vary from one implementation to another and even from one transaction to another, there are some goals that the trusted systems being developed today have in common, and often these are expressed as system requirements.
Some key requirements are: Only a trusted device (hardware and/or software) will be able to render (display or play) the digital content for the consumer.
The trusted device must only allow those actions that are explicitly granted by the rights license.
The rights license is issued to an identified individual; the universe of 'all consumers' cannot be a license target.
Trusted Device In all likelihood, trusted systems will arrive on the desktop in future versions of operating systems, and like all software upgrades will take some years before trusted systems are viable on a majority of machines.
There will also be specific software needed to render protected content and some features will be built into consumer devices like handheld computers and telephones.
This imposes a burden on consumers to purchase specific devices or obtain specific software in order to make use of protected content.
As we have seen with the ebook market, this does not necessarily mean that there will be only one kind of device on the market.
In fact, companies seek to differentiate themselves from their competitors by producing proprietary and branded solutions [9].
For libraries this means that each user may need content delivered in a specific format, and that each format may represent a separate purchase for the library.
We have some experience with this today with the many ebook formats: Adobe PDF, Microsoft Reader, MobiPocket, and at least a dozen others [10].
This will have an increasing impact on libraries as more content is produced in digital form.
Explicit Granting of Rights 'A Permission that is not specified in any Rights Expressions is not granted.
That is, no assumptions should be made with regard to Permissions if they are not explicitly mentioned in the ODRL expression.'
[11] ' The rights for a digital work are explicitly listed.
Any right not in the list is not granted.'
[12] The rule in rights languages rendering systems is that all rights that are permitted must be expressly granted in the machine-readable license.
This rule reduces the burden on software and device developers because it means that they do not have to anticipate any uses that are not in the rights language, and that each right is, or should be, clearly defined in the terms of the license.
While such a rule may be necessary for system development, it shifts the burden to the person or entity that is assigning the rights, with the effect that the more rights that one wishes to grant, the more effort it will take to define and assign the rights.
While this burden should be mitigated by the rights assignment system, it still has unfortunate implications for open access and public domain materials.
The rights license for a public domain item must specify every conceivable use of the resource, today and in the future, in order to make those uses possible.
Explicit specification of every such right is clearly not possible, so the choice may have to be made between isolating these materials in their own distribution systems or giving up some rights in their regard.
The other aspect of the rule that all rights must be explicitly granted has to do with the longevity of protected digital content.
Over time we can assume that new capabilities will arise in our computing environment.
These capabilities will not, of course, be explicitly granted by machine-readable licenses created in the past.
This has an impact on innovation in the creator community and an impact on the ability of libraries and archives to provide long-term access to digital materials.
Licensing to Individuals The use of individual contracts as the controlling mechanism for distribution makes, to a degree, even more fundamental changes than the purchase method.
One of the great differences between law and contracts is that law refers to a broad class of persons generally known as 'the public.'
This is as true for copyright law as it is for the laws that govern real property, the use of the roads, or civil rights.
Dissemination of intellectual works to the public is known as 'publishing.'
Publishers of hard-copy materials have no idea who has purchased their products, much less who has actually made use of them through re-sale or borrowing.
Even publishers of subscription materials, although they deliver to a named subscriber, are aware that their works are consumed by unnamed members of households, friends, and those sitting in dentists' waiting rooms.
The change from public dissemination to individual license means it may require a special effort to make materials available for anonymous reading, if that is possible at all, and could put reader privacy at risk.
Developing Requirements for Rights Management in Libraries Development of a full set of rights management requirements for libraries will be a considerable task, but it is one that must be undertaken, ideally before there is extensive use of DRM in the consumer area and definitely before digital libraries can make decisions about rights management for content that they disseminate.
Efforts to define requirements may begin with general principles (e.g.
'must allow archival copy to be made'), but to be effective they need to be informed by the capabilities of technology and information about the digital content market.
It is precisely because the needs of libraries are not identical to those of the media and entertainment industries, currently dominating development of this technology, that a clear and public statement of library requirements is vital.
That does not guarantee that the needs of digital libraries will be met, of course.
In spite of library participation in the DRM requirements for ebooks through the Open eBook Forum, the Forum has proposed (and will soon pass) a standard based on the MPEG21 rights expression language that does not include the right to lend ebooks [13].
What follows are some examples of requirements that might be in the rights management requirements list for digital libraries.
A statement of requirements does not mean that the requirements will be met; it is at best a clarification of issues that have to be discussed as technology is developed.
A requirements statement will inform design and makes explicit the inevitable compromises that will be required as the law and practices of the analogue world are adjusted for digital content distribution.
Copyright Law 'An REL is a type of policy authorization language where the focus of the language is on expressing and transferring rights (capabilities) from one party to another in an interoperable level.'
[14] 'Trusted systems can also respect the type of fair-use provisions that currently apply to libraries and some other institutions Members of the public with special needs -librarians, researchers and teachers -could receive licenses from an organization representing publishers that let them make a certain number of free or discounted copies of a work .'
[15] DRM can be many things, but it is not a digital expression of copyright law.
Rights management is invariably presented as a license rather than an expression of law, and thus as a specific agreement between named parties for particular, identified resources.
Indeed, it is quite common for discussion papers and standards documents in the area of rights management to make no mention of copyright law.
Library and education institutions and their users rely heavily on copyright law, which permits liberal use of copyrighted materials for education, research, and personal use.
These uses are not authorised by the copyright holder and no permission need be requested.
Unlike the assumptions in the quote by Stefik above, one need not be associated with an institution nor be certified as having 'special needs' in order to engage in the personal and educational use that copyright law allows; the permissions in the law pertain to all members of the general public.
Unfortunately, 'general public' is not an easy concept for rights management systems using the trusted computing platform.
A general requirement for libraries will be that any rights management must not eliminate public, educational, and library user rights that copyright law allows.
There is no possibility of a true technological implementation of fair use/fair dealing; copyright law's exceptions are relative, subjective and contextual in nature, and cannot be reduced to an algorithm in a computing device.
It does seem plausible, however, to require open and unlimited use within personal space, and liberal use within educational environments, if such environments can be defined for the purposes of rights management.
The experience academic libraries have already of reasonable access controls and no limits on usage should be promoted as a viable rights paradigm for some categories of materials.
Access and Use Digital libraries today are already disseminating materials to users.
The difference between those systems and the ones being developed for media and entertainment products is that digital library systems control access to materials but the digital materials themselves are not generally usage-controlled [16].
Once a user obtains a resource, such as a journal article, the resource is not protected by software or hardware controls.
This would not be an acceptable solution for some types of content, but it appears to work within the academic and research market.
This would indicate that, even within a digital library, different materials may need different types of controls, such as greater control over 'popular' materials than over research materials.
This may also mean that library users are not always able to exercise their legal right to make personal, unauthorised use of some protected materials.
The key point, however, is that the most strict control of rights management should only be applied to those materials that absolutely need it.
And this means that there may not be a single rights management solution that is appropriate to all materials.
Technology Independence It would be quite disadvantageous to libraries for content to be disseminated in proprietary packages that require particular software and hardware, or that are accessed through proprietary services.
This trend has already begun for digital materials, in part because the market conditions are such that the greatest commercial advantage is gained from proprietary solutions.
Library Systems Independence It should be possible for libraries or library vendors to develop and manage their own DRM solutions for libraries.
This can only be achieved if the basis for rights management systems are open standards.
It should also be possible for libraries to use a single solution for the dissemination of all library materials, regardless of their commercial value or provenance.
While this may be technically difficult to achieve, it should not be forbidden by law or by the marketplace.
Lending It may seem obvious that libraries will want to be able to lend digital materials, but we already have evidence that this is a right that we will need to promote.
Lending is not just for libraries; all members of the public have the right to lend materials in the analogue world, and should be able to lend digital materials as well.
The primary goal of DRM being developed in the media and entertainment sector is sales, of course.
Lending may be seen as a simple loss of revenue.
Low Cost For the dissemination of digital content to be possible for libraries, for educational institutions and for government and various non-governmental not-for-profit organisations, costs of participation in a rights management technology must be kept relatively low.
Solutions that satisfy the needs of a few large media companies will probably not take these less profitable sectors into account.
In this area, libraries can form partnerships with other organisations, such as government and education, to seek solutions appropriate to their budgets.
Accountability Creators of technology protection for digital content are understandably reluctant to reveal details of their solutions or to make them available to public scrutiny for fear of being 'hacked.'
Libraries, as well as members of the public, have a right to know that there is accountability behind digital content products, to understand exactly what rights they have as users, and to have recourse if or when such technology fails.
Confidentiality Confidentiality in libraries generally refers to the rights of library users to make use of the library and its materials without that use being revealed to others.
In the area of licensing and rights management, confidentiality is primarily a security consideration that protects the digital resource [17].
We have seen tensions between the commercial marketplace's interest in consumer data and the public's desire for privacy; this same tension will be present in DRM systems, especially if they are designed only to confer license terms on individuals.
Libraries must insist on providing a privacy barrier between their users and content providers.
The Long Term With the rapid evolution of technology, few technology solutions last for more than a few short years.
Digital archives already struggle with the prospect of keeping content usable over decades, and much of that is content in open formats and which is unprotected.
There seems to be no hope that files with technology protections will be usable over the passage of time, given likely changes in technology, and perhaps even the demise of the companies that hold the keys to unlock the content.
If we are to continue the archival function of libraries for digital materials, we will need exit strategies to release protected content either at the end of its copyright term, or so that new entities can take over the custodial function when previous interests decline to do so.
Conclusion The question is not whether digital libraries will disseminate materials with rights management information and technological protection measures; the question is whether digital libraries will be able to perform basic library functions like lending, archiving, and protecting the confidentiality of their users of rights-managed content.
It is unreasonable to expect that solutions designed by and for other communities will happen to satisfy the requirements of digital libraries.
There are two areas where libraries can have an influence over rights management technology: one is at the point where libraries will interact with the resources of other communities, for example as consumers of digital publishing; the other is where digital libraries are taking on the role of disseminators of digital works.
The latter is an area where digital libraries can craft and promulgate their own solution to the issue of rights management, either in the place of or as an extension of existing industry standards.
Work that has already begun in electronic resource management [18] and archival metadata [19] [20] is important in defining the rights environment as viewed from the library and archive perspective.
Already the work being done in those projects shows that the management of rights in digital libraries may have a very different character from the developments being fostered by media and entertainment.
References Information Technology Multimedia Framework Part 5: Rights Expression Language.
ISO/IEC FDIS 21000-5:2003(E).
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29.
2003 XrML: the Technology Standard for Trusted Systems in the eContent Marketplace.
ContentGuard.
(2002?
), p. 2 A Committee for Economic Development report defined 'digital piracy' as: ' the theft of entertainment products in digital form from the Internet '.
Promoting Innovation in the on-line world: the problem of digital intellectual property.
Washington, DC, CED, 2004. p. viii Stefik, Mark and Alex Silverman.
'The Bit and the Pendulum: Balancing the Interests of Stakeholders in Digital Publishing'.
1997. p.2 http://www.xrml.org/reference/Pendulum97Jul29.pdf Digital Rights Management: Missing Links in the Broadband Value Chain.
Broadband Stakeholder Group.
July, 2003. p. 5 http://www.broadbanduk.org/reports/report03_appendix3.pdf Rosenblatt, Bill.
'Paying for DRM.'
July 4, 2003 http://www.drmwatch.com/resources/whitepapers/article.php/3111851 System For Controlling The Distribution And Use Of Digital Works Having Attached Usage Rights Where The Usage Rights Are Defined By A Usage Rights Grammar.
U. S. Patent number 5,715,403.
Feb. 3, 1998. p. 13 Stefik and Silverman.
'The Bit and the Pendulum.'
p. 2 Coyle, Karen.
'Stakeholders and Standards in the Ebook Economy: or It's the Economics, Stupid!'
Library Hi Tech, v. 19, n. 4, 2001. pp.
314-324 Two sites that list current ebook reading and creation software are: e-books.org http://e-books.org/software.htm and ebook news http://www.ebooknews.org/ Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), Version: 1.1, 2002-08-08. p. 9 http://odrl.net/1.1/ODRL-11.pdf and http://w3.org/TR/odrl/ XrML: Extensible rights Markup Language, version 1.3, June 23, 2000.
ContentGuard.
p. 29 Open eBook Forum http://www.openebook.org The OeBF extensions to the MPEG21 rights language are currently only available to OeBF members, but will be posted in the public area of the Web site once passed by the membership.
LaMacchia, Brian.
'Key Challenges in DRM: An Industry Perspective.'
Published in: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, J. Feigenbaum, ed., Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2696, Springer-Verlag, NY (2003).
Also available at http://www.farcaster.com/papers/drm2002/index.htm Stefik, Mark.
'Trusted Systems.'
Scientific American, March, 1997. p. 81 Coyle, Karen.
'Rights Expression Languages: A Report for the Library of Congress.'
February, 2004. http://www.loc.gov/standards/Coylereport_final1single.pdf p. 17 However, for a view of individual confidentiality and privacy in rights language that is closer to the concerns of the library community, see the work of the OASIS Technical Committee on the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xacml The Digital Library Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI), http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm02.htm The Metadata Coding & Transmission Standard (METS) http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ and the METS Rights schema http://www.loc.gov/standards/rights/METSRights.xsd RoMEO Rights Metadata for Open Archiving http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/ Editor's note: Karen produced a white paper [16] for the Library of Congress in February of this year.
Her report uses four rights languages (CreativeCommons, METSRights, Open Digital Rights Language, and the MPEG21/Part5) to develop a taxonomy of purposes of RELs and to explore how they approach the goals she terms as "Copyright, Contract and Control."
Author Details Karen Coyle Email: kcoyle@kcoyle.net Web site: http://www.kcoyle.net Karen Coyle worked for over 20 years on the University of California's digital library projects and is now a consultant in various aspects of digital libraries.
She has contributed to traditional and emerging metadata standards, and has written extensively on the effect of technology on privacy, copyright, and intellectual freedom.
Return to top Article Title: "Rights Management and Digital Library Requirements" Author: Karen Coyle Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/coyle/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DCC Workshop on Persistent Identifiers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DCC Workshop on Persistent Identifiers Buzz data framework database xml metadata doi identifier repositories preservation e-learning uri mp3 drm curation e-science e-research interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter gives a personal view of this workshop held in Glasgow, 30 June 1 July, supported by NISO, CETIS, ERPANET, UKOLN and the DCC.
A Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Meeting on Persistent Identifiers was held over 30 June 1 July 2005 at the Wolfson Building at the University of Glasgow.
This is a new construction (2002) just opposite the 1970s Boyd-Orr building, mentioned before in Ariadne's pages.
The architecture of this building is quite unlike the Boyd-Orr building however, being light and airy, with more imaginative use of space: the lecture theatre in which the meeting took place is in the shape of an eye, situated at the edge of the main open space.
Walking around the outside of the wood-panelled theatre it seems very small, but it can accommodate around sixty comfortably.
I've focused on a selection of speakers to illustrate the range of the meeting.
There were other important contributions to the discussion, not reflected here.
All of the presentations are available on the DCC Web site [1].
Chris Rusbridge introduced the meeting by suggesting that the business of identifiers seems easy, but in fact it is not at all easy to understand the world of Persistent Identifiers (PIs), and there are some 'seriously hard' questions.
Identifiers are not just URIs (Unique Resource Identifiers) such as isbn, issn, credit card numbers, star names, proteins, standards, keys, etc.
Identifiers relate to different things (with different requirements).
But identifiers also relate to quite different classes of things, such as services, collections, series, etc.
Identifiers can be used to refer to the abstract concept of a work versus particular versions (editions).
The use of identifiers for both the abstract work and its manifestations and representations has an impact on the requirement for uniqueness.
The 'persistent' bit isn't really a technical issue but is rather bound up with social economic issues and factors.
The binding between identifier and resource is what needs to be persistent.
Tim Berners-Lee once said that 'Cool URIs don't change'.
Chris summed up his introduction by saying that the aim of the workshop was to understand the requirements pertaining to this particular space from the preservation and curation angle.
The speakers for the event included Rick Rogers of the National Library of Medicine in the US, Charles Duncan of Intrallect Ltd, Stefan Gradmann of the University of Hannover, John Kunze of the California Digital Library, Stuart Weibel, OCLC, Henry S. Thompson from the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh (also representing the W3C Technical Architecture Group), Andy Powell (UKOLN), Sean Reilly of CNRI, Peter Buneman of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and Norman Paskin of the International DOI Foundation.
In addition there were many contributions to the discussions from members of the DCC and others in the audience.
Altogether there were around thirty-five participants for this important two-day event.
The Ancient History of Identifiers To kick off the meeting, the history of identifiers was briefly explored during this workshop by Rick Rogers of the National Library of Medicine and the NISO standards organisation.
This was in the nature of a whirlwind tour, from the Ancient Near East up to the current use of the Dewey system, via the Greeks, and the identifier system of Robert Cotton (1571-1631), which persists to this day in the way his collection of manuscripts is referenced by the British Library.
Rogers made the point that even very quirky identifiers can be persistent, and also that any identifier is better than none.
He also drew attention to the fact that (as in the case of Robert Cotton's library) identifiers rely heavily on their context.
The eScience Approach Peter Buneman of the DCC and the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh contributed a presentation which reflected views about identifiers among the community for whom databases and data mining are principal concerns.
These differ significantly from the views of other communities, not least when it comes to discussing whether or not useful metadata about resources ought or ought not to be contained in files paths.
Or whether or not we ought to represent mined information in the form of file paths.
In the case of digital objects such as databases, they have internal structures and are subject to change over time.
This dynamic information is obviously important in the preservation and curation of the data.
The issues are difficult to define precisely: are we talking about parsing (digital object) identifiers, or digital (object identifiers)?
Some things can easily be converted to XML (Swissprot was cited as an example).
He suggested that Ad hoc annotation or citation actually requires 'some notion of location to make the annotation or citation 'stick'.
The idea of filepath supplies this order.
XML -wrapped data contains information which hierarchically specifies the location of objects.
And if you are generating data which is to be cited in some way, you need to have a stable hierarchy and keys to the information.
This information needs to be published in a standardised interoperable way, plus you need to keep all previous versions of your data, and to give these versions numbers (again requiring interoperable standards).
Citing with time and date he suggested is unreliable, and that it is better to push the time down into the data via version numbers, not time.
The Learning Object Approach Charles Duncan of Intrallect looked at use cases of persistent identifiers, particularly in the context of learning objects.
He claimed not to know much about these identifiers (as many speakers said at this meeting), but knows what he could do with them.
He suggested that there were two communities those who want to define the functional specifications of PI and their resolvers, and those who don't care about that at all, but want to do things that are only possible if identifiers are working in the background.
Communities need identifiers and things need to work together, whatever decisions are made about identifiers.
Some degree of local autonomy is also needed.
We also need to know about decision-making processes for the creation of identifiers, and these to some extent need to be standardised.
He suggested that we might have some lessons to learn from the experience of ISBN (International Standard Book Number) a large number of different communities and people are now accustomed to one kind of identifier, though (perhaps) the process of becoming acclimatised to ISBNs involved heartache over a number of years.
He cited exchanges on the CETIS Metadata list where questions are asked such as 'do I need identifiers for both objects and metadata in my repository?'
One of the answers was: 'it depends on what you want to use them for.'
In practice not that helpful an answer.
Someone else on the list said: 'You shouldn't need to worry too much, appropriate identifiers should be generated automatically by your repository'.
We need to separate what the technology supports from what in fact can be done with identifiers.
Discussing some use cases originally presented two years earlier at a CETIS meeting in London he said that he thought that 'we in the e-learning world are no further forward now than we were then about making decisions about identifiers'.
'Respository Z' for example has some metadata (both entity identifiers and metadata identifiers).
Someone creates a new version of an object, and new metadata for that new version.
Obviously there is a need to relate one to the other i.e., something like: '+relation ident (isVersionOf)'.
It is important to be able to modify original metadata, giving the location of the new version.
Say for example an object is duplicated in another repository should the identifier for that object be added to that object?
Essentially we want identifiers to be persistent.
So in this case the object retains its identifier, and gets new metadata.
Duncan suggested that we shouldn't define the solution until we have defined the problem.
Defining the processes for using identifiers is as/more important than choosing identifiers.
We need to think about the cost at the point of issue of identifiers.
We need to know what needs an identifier.
We need to focus on the properties of identifiers, the services which can be built on identifiers, and whether it matters which identifiers are being used.
OA Publishing and Identifiers Stefan Gradmann looked at the Identifiers question from the point of view of the specific requirements of the OA Publishing and Repository Management communities, and made some general remarks regarding the conceptual framework.
He looked at the functional context German Academic Publishers (GAP), and at questions arising from this context relating to versioning, integrity, rights/restrictions management, social aspects, granularity, citation and scientometrics.
Questions he thought of importance included: what is persistent object, metadata, or the relationship between the two?
And who is entitled to alter document integrity statements?
Other questions include rights/restrictions management (who may access documents, and under what conditions).
We need to determine what is protected the object alone, or object plus access method?
What frameworks do we use?
Can identifiers and DRM (Digital Rights Management) technical frameworks be separated effectively and neatly over time?
If not, the consequences in terms of persistency might well be catastrophic, especially in highly interwoven scientific contexts.
Another question, addressing the social dimension to the assignment of identifiers: Is the only guarantee of persistence the commitment of the organisations?
It boils down to whom we trust.
Authors?
Institutions?
Companies?
Stefan also addressed questions of granularity of citation and references, which used to be very simple: i.e., author, title, ISBN, 'page 231, paragraph 3', etc.
But this notion of linear documents will decompose, and will need different schemes for referencing.
So, what level of identifier granularity is required for citing scientific works and for citations to work over time?
Do we assign identifiers at work, expression or manifestation level?
What level of identifier granularity is required for current and future scientometric methods to work as intended?
Gradmann took the most philosophical approach of the speakers at this event, but was careful to indicate that though he was prepared to move away from use cases, he wasn't going to address the question of identity!
We have to decide whether or not we identify files, bits and bytes, documents, data, locations, text, images, concepts, information or signs.
Also the nature of the relation between identifier and object (likeness, signification, descriptive representation, etc.).
He took a short excursion into semiology and suggested that some of the confusion we are facing could be clarified if we look at the language model which is not a pointer and object model (i.e., word -thing) Hence worth looking at Saussure's model of the linguistic sign.
This is not (he assured us) to provide a new methodological framework, but it enables us to understand more precisely some of the questions already present in various presentations given at the preceding workshop in Cork.
Such as: are identifiers referential surrogates, or do they function as signs, pointers, locators, as names, etc.?
Should they have a meaning?
How do we guarantee the persistency of the link beween identifiers and objects as well as the one between identifiers and context, persistently?
We need to understand e-research scenarios (with identifiers as a core constituent).
One member of the audience suggested that some of the more universal and abstract questions were a waste of time.
Stefan replied that if we didn't ask these questions, we'd create identifiers which at some point we would have to throw away.
The Digital Library and Identifiers John Kunze reflected on the California Digital Library (CDL) as a case study it has no books, students, or faculty.
It has affiliations with state libraries in California.
It does content hosting, electronic texts etc, and came up with a digital preservation programme about 2 years ago, and they are still getting their bearings.
What is a persistent identifier?
Kunze suggested that 'an identifier is valid for long enough'.
Though we'd like to say forever, we know we can't say that (there are dumpsters at the back of libraries).
An identifier is a 'relation' between a string and a thing.
An ID is not a string (very important).
An ID is a matter of opinion, not fact: there will be at least one other provider, serial if not in parallel, or otherwise your objects die with you (not pretty and not convenient, but we have to live with that).
Multiple copies will have divergent metadata, but it is better to have multiple copies.
It helps to accept a certain amount of disorder.
Long-term preservation won't happen unless objects can change residence and diverge.
It is better if an object lives in several places at once the alternative (loss) is worse.
We need to agree to disagree.
What we say but shouldn't say is that we should not reassign persistent IDs to something else.
Or that we shouldn't replace a persistent object with another.
But we do.
We honestly provide a real kind of persistence, but with very different replacement policies.
CDL identifiers must identify the object, whether or not it is to hand.
Metadata is needed.
The identifiers must convey different flavours of permanence, and must lead to access.
They must be valid for some longish period, and be carried on, in or with the object.
Issues Arising As the two-day workshop progressed, it was possible to see that there were two broad schools of thought in the field currently, pointing in quite different directions.
The conversations which occurred both during and after the presentations reflected the difficulty of bringing together these opposing notions about how identifiers ought to work.
Some speakers argued for identifiers essentially as unique strings to reference any kind of digital item, others emphasised the need for metadata, either in the unique string, or which ought to be associated with the string in some way.
Andy Powell expressed the view that all identifiers should be of the HTTP variety.
But for the purpose of identification, not location.
This view produced a good deal of discussion in the course of the event.
Especially on the implications of using the HTTP format as a persistent identifier, since it looks like an address.
Identifying something is not the same as granting access.
Henry Thompson published a document on Architectural Guidelines for Naming on the first day of the workshop which (section 4) argues that 'A URI owner should provide representations of the resource it identifies'.
A representation of a resource is not the resource itself however, so a URI might, when the identifier is used to provide a representation say, of someone's medical records, return something other than the records themselves (possibly a description of the contents of the records, or possibly just a confirmation of the name of the person whose records have that URI).
Which begs the question of what the identifier actually identifies the resource or the representation.
And we ought to ask, does the representation have a separate identifier?
An answer provided by the W3C Architectures document to the above is that responsibility for the uniqueness of the identifiers belongs (not exclusively) to the owner of the URI.
A feature of the discussion was that a number of speakers were sticking closely to the W3C Architecture document on the subject of identifiers, and others were taking a more abstract view of the questions coming up.
Those sticking close to the W3C view tended to fall back on the actual wording of the Architecture document, which I think was the source of some of the periodic cross-purposes evident in the discussion.
Broadly the workshop appeared to revolve around two key areas which are problematic in some respects, either for the practical application of identifiers to the real world, or for those who might wish to work within the scope of the W3C architecture.
The first key area has already been mentioned, and is the question of whether identifiers ought to be treated as random strings (even if they look like HTTP URLs), or whether what we want is something which has metadata either contained within the identifier, or indeed whether metadata about the resource is completely irrelevant to the matter of identifiers.
The second concerns a theoretical distinction contained in the W3C Architecture, which seems to generate a good deal of misunderstanding, annoyance and difficulty in the discussion of identifiers.
This distinction is between the URI identifying a resource, and the actual location of a resource.
In other words, if a resource is identified by (say) http://www.dcc.ac.uk/dcc/workshops/pi-dcc/, it does not follow that using (for example) the HTTP GET request will return the resource, a representation of that resource, or indeed anything at all.
There is no absolute obligation within the W3C model for the owner of an identified resource to return anything.
As long as the two concepts are understood as separate concepts (as they are supposed to be), W3C would argue that there is no problem.
Yet the expectation of the user community not involved in theoretical discussion, is that an HTTP identifier is an address (since that is what it looks like), and thus it ought to return something when the URI is 'dereferenced' (W3C technical language for 'used as a link').
For W3C, the HTTP identifier format (they don't exclude others) is perhaps just a convenient way of creating a unique string.
However the distinction between a URI and a URL is not signified in any way in the formal appearance of the HTTP identifier, and it cannot be determined by a user without at least sending a request for an HTTP header.
Thus the concepts are not separately indicated at the identifier level.
Conclusion For anyone interested in the future of identifiers for digital objects this was an extremely interesting event, covering a huge amount of territory in two days.
There were a couple of sessions where much of the discussion came from the floor, and one session was devoted entirely to questions of interest to the community at large, rather than the more arcane theoretical issues.
However it was clear that there are many more questions around than there are answers, and that there is still a great deal to do before identifiers can be subsumed into applications, and, to the user of services, become an invisible aspect of the technology.
References The DCC Web Site contains all presentations given at this event, plus mp3 audio of the sessions: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/pi-2005/ Author Details Philip Hunter Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: DCC Workshop on Persistent Identifiers Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/dcc-pi-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Serving Services in Web 2.0 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Serving Services in Web 2.0 Buzz data framework api javascript html database xml portal usability stylesheet archives xslt metadata thesaurus firefox standardisation tagging browser identifier xsl schema oai-pmh cataloguing soap owl personalisation openurl wsdl uddi soa sru z39.88 microformats ajax algorithm url standards Citation BibTex RIS Theo van Veen shows with the help of an example, how standardised descriptions of services can help users control the integration of services from different providers.
"I want my browser to recognise information in Web pages and offer me functionality to remix it with relevant information from other services.
I want to control which services are offered to me and how they are offered."
In this article I discuss the ingredients that enable users to benefit from a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by combining services according to their preferences.
This concept can be summarised as a user-accessible machine-readable knowledge base of service descriptions in combination with a user agent.
These service descriptions contain, amongst others, information on how output of services can be used as input for other services.
The user agent interprets the response of services and can generate relevant additional links in the response using information in the knowledge base.
This concept is an extrapolation of the use of OpenURL [1] and goes beyond linking to an appropriate copy.
Publishing and formalising these service descriptions lowers the barrier for users wishing to build their own knowledge base, makes it fun to integrate services and will contribute to the standardisation of existing non-standard services.
I hope that publishing this concept at such an early stage of its development will encourage contributions from others.
Trend and Goals The concept described in this article is inspired by the observation of a trend and the expectation that we can take advantage of this trend in reaching the following goals: Improve sharing of information and services Offer the user enriched context-sensitive information within the reach of a mouse click Lower the implementation barriers to create new functionality by combining existing services Enhance personalisation, thereby making it easier for the user to choose which services to integrate This trend is partly based on Web 2.0 [2]: mixing the services from different providers and users in a user controlled way.
A user may find information in one place and may find the algorithms to use that information in another.
The intelligent combination of both may offer the user extra functionality, more comfort or just more fun.
One of the components often associated with Web 2.0 is Ajax, (Asynchronous, JavaScript and XML).
Ajax is a mechanism whereby XML responses from different targets can be requested from a single Web page and retrieved asynchronously without the screen freezing while waiting for responses.
It also allows such responses to be dynamically transformed and mixed into a new presentation.
I consider Web 2.0 to be not so much a technical change but rather a change in mindset.
Service and data providers realise that their products are part of a larger environment and can gain in value when they optimally integrate with that environment.
Not protecting one's own data but making it easily accessible for other services is the major difference in that modern mindset.
It is likely that many users will want to control the integration of information as they control their bookmarks or favourites rather than let their institution or Internet provider control it.
Personalisation will go beyond the preferences offered by each single service provider.
By enabling users to mix the different options and services offered by several service and data providers, a more personal browser environment is created.
Static links make room for dynamically generated links based on intelligent use of context and knowledge of the user's preferences.
Part of this process may even happen in the background, invisible to the user, only becoming visible when the results are relevant to the user based on user-defined criteria.
For example, a pop-up with the message "I found something!"
may appear after a 'no hits' result, because a user agent tried other searches without bothering the user.
The Philosophy Enhancing the integration of services begins with lowering the barrier to find and generate requests to them automatically through the: Standardisation of access to services Publication of standardised service descriptions Creation of services description registries to facilitate finding of services However if we address the situation as it stands rather than waiting for it to become what we would prefer, we need to describe non-standard services as well.
Describing non-standard services as they actually exist, in a machine-readable and standardised way, allows us to make use of what is currently available and facilitates the standardisation process for those services and might help to combine (the best of) different native standards and evolve them into new ones.
A major component in the proposed service descriptions is the relation between services, metadata and the criteria that might invoke those services.
This concept of context-sensitive linking is known from OpenURL, but the approach of this article takes it further.
In the end it should resemble what the human brain does: a certain response generates possible activities not based on exact definitions but based on a user's experience and preference.
A 'standard' for this purpose might therefore not be a conventional one, as it should be developed according to the world as experienced by a new generation of users rather than by a standardisation committee.
The Components To explain the philosophy of the integration of services in practice let me first identify the components involved: The starting point each time is a response from a service, for example an XML metadata record or a Web page containing machine-readable metadata.
The services.
In this article any application invoked by a URL that returns data is regarded as a service.
Examples of services are: SRU services (Search and Retrieval via URLs) [3] that access a library catalogue, resolution services, linking services, translation services, services that zoom in on a remote image, etc.
But the collection of documents which are linked by static URLs could, in some cases, be considered a service.
The URL invoking the service identifies the service.
A part of this URL will be variable.
A knowledge base containing information on services, how the service is accessed, which metadata should trigger them (or trigger the presentation of a link) and the user preferences with respect to handling such services.
A user agent.
This is the active component that interprets the response from a service and uses information from the knowledge base to generate new links to other services possibly invoking the services automatically.
The user agent can be one of the following: A browser extension (Firefox browser), loaded as part of the browser, able to access and change the current Web page A portal running in the browser (Ajax), that generates a presentation based on the XML response.
An example of such a portal is The European Library portal [4] A server side application that intercepts user requests and server responses A conventional OpenURL link resolver It is proposed here that, whatever user agent is being employed, they could all make use of the same knowledge bases.
Description of the Process How does it work?
Consider an information service as a Web-application that is identified by a base-URL like "http://host/application" and which takes some URL-parameters following the question mark like "request=whatever&parameter=xyz" resulting in the URL: http://host/application?request=whatever&parameter=xyz Now suppose there is a registry of services (the knowledge base) that contains, for each service, a description and data about how to access the service, such as the URL, the input parameters, the response etc.
For each service the description contains the metadata fields that trigger the user agent to create a link to this service.
For example when the metadata contain an abstract a link to a translation service can be presented to the user.
A simplified overview of such a knowledge base can be seen in figure 1.
In figure 4 an example is shown where this information is being used to create links.
Figure 1: Overview of simplified service descriptions as an example of a knowledge base.
The entries highlighted are used in Figure 4.
In conventional situations, when the user wants the abstract to be translated, he or she needs to cut and paste it into another Web site.
However, if this knowledge is contained in a knowledge base similar to that described above, and is accessible by a user agent, this agent may create a link to the translation service based on the fact that the field 'abstract' was defined as a trigger.
The user agent may modify the response by attaching a link to the abstract field.
Clicking on this link will invoke the translation service with the abstract automatically being used as one of the input fields.
In figure 1 the subsequent steps are illustrated graphically.
Figure 2: Steps in the process of using the output from service A as input to services B based on information in the knowledge database Of course the above description is oversimplified.
The trigger to create a link may be based on much more complex criteria than only the presence of a metadata field and how the service will be invoked, e.g.
automatically or on request, and will depend on the user's preferences.
Describing the relation between input and output of services in a machineinterpretable way will allow intelligent applications to take information from a response and provide the user with a new mix of information or with suggestions for accessing new services.
In this way information of mutually independent services can be integrated without the services having to be aware of each other (loosely coupled services).
This becomes more valuable when it can be personalised in a simple way where the user determines which relations and which services are relevant and how they are invoked.
Services can be invoked automatically (e.g.
requesting a thumbnail); they can be suggested to the user if relevant (e.g.
doing a new search based on results in a thesaurus) or they can be selected on request from a context-sensitive menu.
An Example Implementation Using Ajax To develop a standard schema for service descriptions in a knowledge database a prototype implementation has been made based on the Ajax concept.
Figure 3 shows the architecture.
The basic components are the XML containing the descriptions (name and address) of SRU-searchable targets and a stylesheet that transforms the XML to a JavaScript portal running in the browser.
The portal sends requests to these targets and transforms the SRU responses from these targets to HTML.
To illustrate the integration of services a knowledge base containing service descriptions in XML has been added together with a XSL user agent.
This user agent is nothing more than a stylesheet that transforms the XML knowledge base into HTML and JavaScript, in which dynamic links are created to services in the knowledge base for the metadata fields that are defined as a "trigger" for a service.
Figure 3: Architecture of a Ajax implementation of a portal with a user agent and a services knowledge database The implementation is at http://krait.kb.nl/coop/tel/SRUportal.
In Figure 4 a screenshot is shown to illustrate what a response may look like.
Figure 4: Screenshot illustrating the linking driven by service descriptions.
Note the services for creator field as described in Figure 1.
The screenshot shows a record with Orson Welles as creator.
In the knowledge base displayed in Figure 1 there is an entry for a service 'Google images' and this entry contains the field "creator" as one of the triggers for the service.
The XSL user agent has therefore created a link so that clicking on the creator name shows a menu of services in which 'Find pictures in Google' is present as an option.
Additionally there is an entry to the service named 'Dead or alive' resulting in an extra menu item 'Check if this person is still alive'.
Clicking on the menu items makes a 'deep link' to the requested information.
In this implementation users may specify their own knowledge base (service description file) under 'preferences' and therefore let the user agent automatically generate links to all kind of services such as translation services and searches in other databases based on triggers in the service descriptions in their knowledge base.
Semantic Tagging Ideally the response of a service is, as in the above example, in XML.
However not all services provide the response in XML.
Branding is often a reason for using HTML instead of XML: the data provider wants their Web pages to be 'visible' and sending only raw data in XML makes them invisible to the user.
This makes it difficult for the user agent to identify the relevant fields.
To understand HTML pages and provide additional services based on the interpretation of those pages, we need semantic tagging.
For example, in a library catalogue, metadata are presented to the user in HTML.
Some fields may be clickable to search for other records with the same contents.
Now consider a catalogue record containing an ISBN.
The user may want to have this field presented as clickable to be able to find the book on Amazon.
The user agent (e.g.
a browser extension) has to recognise the ISBN to make it clickable in the user's preferred way.
The simplest way, one would think, is to put in the Web page something like: <isbn>12345678</isbn>.
Browsers will only display 12345678 but the user agent may recognise the <isbn> tag and manipulate the presentation of that tag to become a link.
This probably does not work in all browsers but in Firefox such a tagged field can be processed quite easily.
A new generation standard for this purpose, usable in most browsers is CoinS [5], (Context Objects in Spans).
With CoinS context information (metadata) is stored in span tags in an HTML page.
These spans are recognised by their class attribute being "Z3988".
An example of a COinS span is: The author of this book is <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book&rft.isbn=12345678&rft.author=Shakespeare" />Shakespeare</span>   The HTML just shows: "The author of this book is Shakespeare".
A user agent may use the context information to offer a service with the contents of the span as input.
In this example a user agent may change the text in the span to a clickable link to, for instance, Amazon to request a book with ISBN=12345678 or to Google to search for images of Shakespeare.
Currently COinS is mostly used to link to an OpenURL link server to find articles that are identified by Context Objects.
COinS identifies an object with all its accompanying metadata and can be sent to a link resolver as a single entity.
For tagging individual metadata I prefer a more user-friendly form like: <dc:creator>Shakespeare</dc:creator> and <dc:identifier>ISBN:12345678</dc:identifier>.
Very recently Dan Chudnov introduced the concept of unAPI [6], which corresponds to the above idea, also based on the use of spans.
Without going into details this can be seen as a "microformat" for semantic tagging but with more generic usage than only for OpenURL.
When the response is not XML and the data provider does not make the data machine-readable by semantic tagging, we have to escape to screen scraping techniques by the user agent.
Examples of this are the several user agents, available as browser extensions or bookmarklets, that interpret the response of Google Scholar to provide OpenURL links for articles and books [7].
Bookmarklets are pieces of JavaScript that are accessible as a link in the browsers' link bar.
However, the value and usability of human-readable Web pages will be enhanced when they are made machine-readable with standardised semantic tags.
Providers might be afraid that only the machine-readable part of their data will be used, thereby losing the possibility of branding, but I suspect the opposite will be true.
Their Web pages will still be found via Google and will gain added value by the enhanced usability of the presented data without suppression of the original Web page.
Extrapolation of the OpenURL Concept The philosophy presented here can be considered as an extrapolation of the OpenURL concept.
OpenURL found its origin in the need to be able to link from a description of an object to the appropriate copy for a specific user.
This was realised by using a standard URL request format containing the identification of the object.
The host part of the URL is set to the location of the link resolver of the user's institution.
This link resolver interprets the metadata in the URL to generate a page with context-sensitive links, for example, a link to the full text of an article or a link to search the title in Google etc.
The characteristics of most OpenURL implementations are: a Web page, controlled by the user's institution with links to the link resolver a link resolver that is controlled by the user's institution a vendor-specific knowledge base with information about services to which links might be created depending on the metadata in the OpenURL The differences between the concept described in this article and the OpenURL concept are: Service providers describe their services in a standardised format instead of a vendor-specific format Users select their preferred services and store their descriptions in a personal knowledge base rather than using the vendor's knowledge base Users control the criteria for invoking the service instead of the user's institution controlling them Linking to the service is direct, automatic or on user request, based on user preferences, thereby skipping the OpenURL resolver Most OpenURL implementations consist of two parts: Web pages containing bibliographic metadata from which an OpenURL can be generated The link resolver that takes the metadata from this OpenURL to create new context-sensitive links.
In case of a user agent both the interpretation of the bibliographic record and the generation of the context-sensitive links are combined and therefore replaces the OpenURL link resolver.
This has some major advantages, such as the links being more direct.
There is little added value in 'adding a link to an OpenURL resolver' when the metadata are machine-readable and the appropriate links can be generated in the user's display directly.
The different types of user agents have their pros and cons.
Bookmarklets and browser extensions are bound to a workstation.
Ajax implementations are suffering from the cross-domain security issue: browsers do not always allow the manipulation of pages taken from one domain with scripts coming from another domain.
The disadvantage of user agents that run on a server is that such an application is often not under the user's control.
The method being used depends on the situation, the user's Internet device and the user's preferences.
Of course, not all users will have their own user agent or even be aware of anything about OpenURL.
However, Google Scholar offers the user the option to enter a library name in the Google Scholar preferences.
This will result in the addition of a link to that library's OpenURL resolver in the responses from Google Scholar.
Obviously this is a first step in users being aware of the possibility of controlling context-sensitive linking.
In fact Google is doing here what I would rather like to be part of what user agents do.
The Knowledge Database Our aim is to standardise the format and semantics of the knowledge base so it will allow different types of user agents to use the same knowledge base regardless of whether the user agent is a browser extension, an XSLT file of an Ajax portal, a bookmarklet or even a conventional link resolver.
It should also facilitate the exchange of service descriptions stored in different knowledge bases.
It should be easy to write user agents or browser extensions using the service description to create dynamic links to services using URL-GET, URL-POST or SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) [8].
The knowledge base shown in Figure 1 is just a first step in work in progress.
Collecting many examples of existing non-standard services and describing them in a machine-readable way might become the basis for a generic service description model.
To enable users to feed their personal knowledge base with service descriptions, it would be useful if service and data providers published their services in exactly the same format as the knowledge base in order to allow extraction of specific entries and copy them to the user's own knowledge base.
This publishing can take the form of registries that hold many service descriptions, but it would also be useful when services explain themselves in a machine-readable way such as the 'explain' record in the SRU protocol.
Requesting the explain record is, in fact, requesting the service description.
Additionally, a simple indication that a Web page is accessible, via parameters, with the syntax being described in the service description, would enable user agents to gather relevant services and store that description in a knowledge base.
The use of service descriptions as above does not remove the need for service-specific registries with service-specific descriptions.
Service registries are needed to help user agents find services with specific properties e.g.
: SRU-services.
There are several ways to describe services in a structured or more or less formal way like Zeerex [9], WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) [10], OWL-S [11], OAI-identify etc.
These descriptions are mainly available for services that are already standardised and can be used in conjunction with the knowledge database.
People who are familiar with Web Services will probably ask "why not use UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) [12] as the mechanism for sharing service descriptions?".
A combination of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI might be considered to be the appropriate technical mechanism for implementing the concept described here.
However, this combination does not have a low implementation barrier, and certainly not for creating and using personal knowledge bases.
Metadata Metadata can be seen as the glue between services: integrating services is through metadata and it is therefore desirable that these metadata be standardised as much as possible for both input and output.
So whether we provide semantic tagging or data in XML or COinS we must be able to input this data e.g.
as URL parameters and therefore we need standard metadata models and standard names.
Because metadata is encoded in different ways user agents have to map the information in the knowledge base to the appropriate input and output syntax and semantics for different services.
For example a name of a person in a Web page might be used in an author or subject search but does not have to be an author or a subject.
Similarly the user agent has to map 'dc.title' in a HTML page, 'dc:title' in a XML metadata record and 'atitle' or 'jtitle' in an OpenURL all to the same concept of 'title'.
The knowledge base is supposed to be generic enough to cover this.
Standardisation By describing different services from different providers that actually do the same thing, it is possible to find common input parameters and common output fields.
By specifying these common variables and by parameterisation of the potential differences between implementations, we are actually almost defining a standard.
For example, every search service needs a query and a start record for the first record to be presented.
By describing this for different native search services we soon find that we need those parameters for each search service.
Thus a description of that type of service will contain information on the parameter used for the query and the parameter that is used for the start record.
Generic names for parameters with the same meaning will be defined, as well as for parameters that classify the differences between different implementations.
The description can be used to define a universal interface to different services, for example a universal interface to SRU and Opensearch [13].
Such a description is in fact almost a specification of a possible standard for a service.
Thus describing non-standard services may help the standardisation process.
A question remains over what will happen with overlapping standards like SRU, Opensearch, OpenURL and OAI-PMH [14] or what would have happened if these standards had been developed at the same time with people contributing to all four standards?
Personally I think that these four standards could easily have been merged into a single standard without losing functionality or adding complexity.
When new services are implemented it might be useful to have already existing standards in mind.
Moreover the requirement to describe the service and that requests for a service might be generated automatically should be taken into account when implementing a new service.
The Role of Google It seems unavoidable that Google will be often used as a starting point for searching information and will compete with metasearch via SRU.
The advantage of metasearch via SRU is that search results are available in XML and therefore easily usable as input for other services.
It is questionable whether search engines like Google are willing to provide search results in XML on a large scale, thereby losing all opportunity of presenting branding information or advertisements.
For example, inserting the OpenURL in Google Scholar is done by Google based on the user's IP number instead of Google enabling users to insert their own OpenURL in Google's Web pages.
It is to be hoped that Google will support initiatives like COinS or semantic tagging to have the best of both worlds: the presentation of a Web page remains as it is but at certain points a tag is provided containing information which can be recognised by a browser extension to generate user-controlled context-sensitive links.
When COinS is available in Web pages, Google might copy existing COinS to the related item in the results page or, for metadata describing objects, Google might create a COinS itself.
Google could also play a role in finding and identifying service descriptions or other XML files.
When Google makes the entries for XML files machine-readable, a user agent may pick out the relevant entries automatically and offer to store for the user the base-URLs of these services or the complete service description for later use without the user needing to link to these services directly.
Cross-domain Security Ideally a user would load a personal browser environment containing a user agent from a central place so it is not bound to a specific location.
However this introduces the cross-domain security issue, which is the main showstopper for Ajax-like applications.
The cross-domain issue is where a user agent loaded from one server is not allowed to manipulate the response from another server.
The Ajax concept is needed to allow integration of services by a user agent running on the user's workstation.
Browser extensions do not suffer from this problem because they are installed on the user's workstation; however, they are therefore not location-independent.
Running an Ajax-enabled portal should not require changes to the local settings of the workstation and I expect that enabling data sources across domains is the only relevant security setting that currently should be changed during the browser session to allow a user agent located on any server to access data retrieved from any source.
So browser vendors may contribute to the user-controlled integration of services by solving the cross-domain security issue.
Equally neither is the security issue solved by routing all request and responses through a central server.
This central server is then used as proxy to user-specified services, which may not always be desirable.
Making users responsible for their own security and helping them to restrict the access to trusted parties might be a possible alternative.
Work to Be Done What is shown and discussed here is only a beginning and reflects work in progress.
It needs a little bit of imagination to see how this may develop in the near future: Services might be triggered by more complex criteria rather than the presence of a single metadata field in a structured metadata record Services can be activated in the background and only appear when there is something to show rather than bothering the user in advance Services can trigger other services, for example from location to co-ordinates to display on a map Web pages can be analysed (semi-automatically) to discover potential services and generate new service descriptions.
Users may add the descriptions to their personal knowledge base (like their favourites) By formalisation or standardisation of service descriptions users or user agents may exchange 'working' service descriptions Data and service providers are encouraged to: Provide their metadata in XML or use semantic tagging of HTML pages with CoinS or unAPI Provide service descriptions for any service that is usable in this context at a standard location e.g.
: http://your.host/services.xml.
This mechanism is comparable to the mechanism of a Web site's icon by placing this icon as 'favicon.gif' in the Web servers' root directory.
Create registries with service descriptions Use user-friendly URL's for access to their services.
This will make it easier to describe the access to services and will lower the barrier for implementation of user agents to generate their URLs and describe the URL in a knowledge base.
Keep in mind that a provided service may be useful for other services; in other words prevent complex interpretation of output and prevent complexity in the generation of input Use wherever possible existing standards Conclusion It has been shown that integration of services is easy and simple.
Most of the ideas presented in this article have been technically possible for a long time.
There is however a trend visible whereby access to services is increasingly based on http.
This allows access to services via an http request from a user's display.
In other words, integration can take place in a Web page at the user's desktop rather than via an API in the back-office of services.
Users may take advantage of this trend and can change the presentation of a response to create their own links to bring enriched information 'mouse clicks closer'.
The major change proposed in this article is to standardise the description of non-standard services to lower the barrier for this type of integration and add the relation between services and the criteria that trigger them.
When more providers contribute to this approach by providing this type of service description, I think that users will take advantage of this concept by selecting their preferred services and storing them in a personal knowledge base.
I hope this idea moves us towards a more intelligent Web and offers what the semantic web promised but, as I perceive it, has not yet delivered.
References The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services, http://www.niso.org/committees/committee_ax.html Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html SRU : Search and Retrieval via URL, http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ The European Library portal, http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ OpenURL COinS: A Convention to Embed Bibliographic Metadata in HTML, http://ocoins.info/ Dan Chudnov, unAPI version 0 http://www.code4lib.org/specs/unapi/version-0 Peter Binkley, Google Scholar OpenURLs Firefox Extension, http://www.ualberta.ca/~pbinkley/gso/ Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1, http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/ ZeeRex: The Explainable "Explain" Service, http://explain.z3950.org/ Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1, http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl OWL-S 1.0 Release, http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/1.0/ UDDI http://www.uddi.org/ Opensearch, http://opensearch.a9.com/ The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html Author Details Theo van Veen Project Advisor Koninklijke Bibliotheek Email: theo.vanveen@kb.nl Web site: http://www.kb.nl/ Return to top Article Title: "Serving Services in Web 2.0" Author: Theo van Veen Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/vanveen/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Custom-built Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Custom-built Search Engines Buzz data html database blog windows passwords url pageflakes Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley reviews a means of enhancing the relevance of search results through the use of custom-built search engines.
I’ve mentioned custom-built search engines a couple of times in the past in my Ariadne columns, so it would seem to make sense actually to spend a little time looking at exactly what they are and how you might use them.
This article will cover the major contenders and provide an overview of how to create and use them, as well as answering the basic question of why you should.
Why Create Your Own Search Engines?
Given that there are thousands of search engines already available, it might, at first glance, seem to be slightly puzzling why people are spending time and energy creating even more of them.
The reason is quite simple – search engines can only do so much, and unfortunately that’s a good deal less than we imagine.
Any search engine is trying to do the impossible: namely, to match up your queries with Web pages that will answer the query, yet without really knowing anything about either other than what it is able to guess.
Quite frankly, I find it remarkable that they’re able to work as well as they do, and it’s a tribute to their designers and engineers.
However, all search engines have limitations – lots of them.
Let’s take Google as an example.
Now, I’m not particularly savaging Google here – I could make the same case for many of the other engines that are out there; but let’s face it – Google is the one that most people are familiar with.
For any search you care to do, Google will give you thousands, if not millions of results.
This is neither reassuring nor helpful, especially since very few of us go past the first page of results unless we’re really desperate.
In fact, the sheer size of the database makes it harder to get a good result given that the search engine has to weight the pros and cons of each page against the others before making a decision as to which result is ranked where.
It’s still possible for people to manipulate the results that Google returns – so called ‘Google bombs’ – the best example of which was ‘miserable failure’ which took searchers to President George W. Bush’s biography [1], although this no longer works.
However, if you know how the search engine ranks results, and many do, it’s possible to get a top ten result even if the page is not particularly relevant to the search term entered.
A useful, if depressing example, is a search for Martin Luther King: one of the top results returned by Google is a racist Web site that has a high ranking simply because so many sites link to it as an illustration of the fact that you cannot trust the content you find on the Internet.
Some celebrities have been taking their own measures by employing firms to ensure that the first ten results on their name in Google are all positive; the material about drug-taking or broken relationships slides down onto the second results page.
More examples can of course be cited, but I think the point is made: just because a page gets a high ranking in a search engine doesn’t mean that it’s any good.
That’s not a particular problem if you are already an expert in a subject area; but if you’re new to that subject, or indeed new to searching itself, these distortions can become a real problem.
Not only are there too many results, inexperienced searchers are not in a position to decide which results to trust.
Moreover, they may have an interest in a particular type of site, such as academic sites or government sites; unless they know the syntax to use in order to narrow a search down to just those, any search is going to be a good deal less than optimal.
How Customised Search Engines Make Things Easier Putting it as simply as possible, a customised search engine automates a search such as (site a OR site b OR site C etc) AND search_term.
That is to say, we start by creating our own sample of Web sites (or indeed Web pages) and simply run searches based on that sample or search universe.
Now of course I can just go right ahead and do that, but if I want to search a large number of sites (but still apply my own particular search criteria) this may take a considerable amount of time.
Furthermore, it’s not particularly friendly, in that I can’t easily share such a search or provide access to it in any way.
However, a customised search engine can be used to create and populate one’s own search universe with just those sites in which one is interested.
Moreover, it will generally host the search engine (providing searchers with a URL they can share with others), as well as the code they need to embed the engine on a Web page, blog, start page and so on.
Consequently you can create your own portable search engines and the uses are almost endless.
You could create a search engine to help answer a query for a user, and either provide them with the URL of said engine, or embed it onto a web page.
If you run a subject-specific Web site or weblog it makes sense to embed one or more search engines to search for that subject – probably including your own Web site as well.
Of course, you might still need to run searches for the user, but equally you can point out that a search run with that search engine is going to give a small number of high-quality results.
It doesn’t actually take very long to create a search engine – in fact what usually takes up most time is typing in the list of URLs you want to be included in the search!
However, this process can be made a little more painless if you collect a number of them prior to starting.
Ideally if you can find a Web page that lists them (such as the URLs of all the UK universities for example) you can use a free tool such as the Link Extractor [2], which will create a listing you can simply cut and paste.
One point worth mentioning at this juncture is that your search engine can only find material that has already been indexed by the search engine; so this will exclude the hidden web, databases that are password-protected, and so on.
Other Options Rollyo Rollyo (short for ‘Roll your own (search engine)’ [3]) was the first of these resources to come online.
It makes use of the Yahoo database, so you might want to run some sample searches on that to begin with to make sure that you’re happy with the results that you’re getting.
While you can actually make search engines (or as they prefer to put it, searchrolls) without registering, it makes sense to do so if you’re intending to use it more than a couple of times.
The process for creating your customised search engine is virtually identical across all the various options; so to save repetition I’ll explain it in detail the once here and simply identify any differences when looking at the other options.
You have to give the engine a name (Rollyo has a limit of 20 characters, which is annoying, but manageable), and a brief description.
Next, you list all the Web addresses of the sites that you want to search on – your own search ‘universe’.
Rollyo limits you to a maximum of 25 sites which is disappointing, but if you only have a small universe it’s not a nuisance.
You can then choose a category and keywords if you wish to include the search roll in their public collection, or you can ignore this step if you want to keep it private.
That’s pretty much all there is to it!
You can see a Rollyo Web 2.0 search engine that I created in about 5 minutes [4].
Alternatively, I could take the code as provided by Rollyo and put the same search engine anywhere else that I chose.
Moreover, Rollyo has produced a bookmarklet [5] that allows users to add sites quickly to their search rolls, have immediate access to them, and to create a new one from anywhere.
Rollyo is a robust service and has been used by thousands of people.
If you just want to explore quickly the possibilities afforded to you by resources like this, I’d certainly recommend it.
Google Custom Search Engines Before you can create a search engine using the Google resource you need to have an account with them, which is free, quick and easy to set up.
The process for this utility differs in a few small, but important ways from Rollyo.
First, and unsurprising, this one uses the Google database, not Yahoo.
It’s also rather more powerful, in that there is no limit on the number of sites you can include in the search universe.
This is helpful if you want to create a search engine that would search all UK university sites for example.
A third difference is that you can limit your search to just the sites that you have listed, or simply give them priority in a ‘normal’ Google search – essentially what you’d be doing here would be to get Google to re-rank results in a limited way.
Once your search engine has been created, Google provides you with a URL that you can use (the one for my Web 2.0 search engine, which is rather more effective than the Rollyo one) is http://tinyurl.com/2dztw5 and the embedded version on my Web site is at http://www.philb.com/ just down on the right-hand side.
Finally, there is another version on my Web 2.0 Pagecast [6].
As you’ll see these things are very portable and you can put them almost anywhere!
Unsurprisingly Google custom search engines have been produced in their thousands; if you want to check to see if an engine has been created so that you don’t have to, a good site to use is the Guide to Custom Search Engines [7].
Alternatively, why not use Google to find them for yourself?
The base URL is always the same, so you can start with ‘site:google.com inurl:cse inurl:coop’.
This produces about 48,000 results, and then you can simply add on more terms as needed.
Adding ‘library’ for example reduces the number to 448 engines.
I did try librar* as my search term, but Google decided that my search was too similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application and declined to complete it.
I got around that by adding in (library OR librarian OR libraries), generating a total of 470 custom search engines.
Google also provides users with lots of statistical information about the way the engine is being used, ways of refining it, changing the look-and-feel and more besides.
This really is an ‘industrial-strength’ custom search engine, and I use dozens of them – particularly on my country search engines pages, since I can create a custom search engine that will search, index or directory-search engines that present their data in a flat HTML format, in other words, a search engine of search engines.
Finally, because Google makes its money from advertising, it’s also possible to make very small amounts of pocket money from the adverts that are displayed – some of the money goes to Google, the rest to the person who created the engine.
Yahoo!
Search Builder The Yahoo version [8] also requires creators of search engines to register with the site.
Other than a slightly different ordering of information required to set up the engine, it’s exactly the same as previously described.
I didn’t find anything that particularly attracted me to this resource, but as I don’t use Yahoo a great deal this says rather more about me than the utility in question.
If Yahoo is your preferred engine you’ll certainly warm to this very quickly.
Microsoft Macros Of course, Microsoft does not want to be left behind, so it has produced its own version search macros.
A listing of them is available [9].
You can of course create your own (although you’re limited to a total of 30 sites) though you do need to be registered with Microsoft in some way.
To be honest, it does not appear to be a service that Microsoft is promoting very much, since at time of writing there are only 31,159 search macros which have been created by 24,992 users.
Gigablast Gigablast has also got involved, although in a very basic way.
Its help page on the subject [10] provides us with some HTML code which can look quite daunting to someone not used to such things.
The code is hand-edited to list up to 500 sites that can be searched from the form that is created.
To be honest, with the easy approach shown by the other search engines, this is an insane idea; I can’t think of anyone who would want to take this approach, and while I respect Gigablast as a good search engine, this offering is virtually useless.
Quintura Quintura [11] is a search engine that specialises in tag clouds as a means to assist with searching, and it has an invitation-only option for adding a custom search engine to a site.
The engine requires (as always) a number of URLs which are then crawled and the search box and subsequent tag cloud are then created.
However, since this is not publicly available, I’ll simply draw it to your attention.
If you like the ‘tag cloud’ search approach, you may wish to explore this directly with Quintura.
Eurekster Swicki The Eurekster Swicki [12] has a slightly different way of approaching the concept of personalised search engines.
With the other resources that we’ve looked at so far, it’s only the author of the search engine who can change it (although Google does allow for the option of multiple authors).
With a Swicki, the search engine results can be affected by the people who use it.
Users create a search engine as previously described, with the slight difference that they can add in some keywords which are appropriate to the subject content and these keywords appear under the search box.
This ‘buzz cloud’ will grow and change automatically depending on the searches that are run on it.
The search engine can be embedded in your site (you can see one in action on my Web site [13] on the top of the right hand side column or on the hosted page [14]) and users can run their searches.
They will then get taken to a results page at which point they can, if they wish, ‘vote’ for or against specific results.
These results will then move up or down the results ranking depending on the number of votes received [15].
They can also comment on results and add their own as well.
Consequently this type of custom search engine will be of most use in situations where there is a group of users with a common interest in a particular subject area and which is prepared to put in a small amount of work in order to tailor a search to mirror its own interests.
Topicle Topicle [16] is also a community-based resource, based on the Google database.
When first visiting the site users can search for appropriate search engines that other Topicle users have made and can simply reuse them if they so choose.
They are also able to suggest other URLs appropriate to the subject of the custom search engine as well.
These suggestions can then be voted on by other users, in terms of quality of the site and fitness for the subject area, or they can be marked as spam.
Custom search engine creation is, if anything, easier than with Rollyo.
Simple create an engine by adding some Web sites and that is about it.
You can then go in and edit as necessary to add more sites, or to import a collection of bookmarks.
It does not however appear possible to delete sites from an existing engine – not even if you are the person who created it!
It also does not appear possible to ‘own’ an engine as you can with the other examples we’ve looked at so far; it really does seem to be a case of letting your creation out into the wild to fend for itself.
Consequently I’d have to doubt the value of Topicle as a serious tool, given that there really is little or no control over the engines created.
I created one engine that simply searches my site and weblogs and which is available [17] in case you want to take a look and edit it yourself.
Conclusion The custom search engine market has grown in a very short space of time, both in terms of the number of resources or utilities that can be used and the number of custom search engines that have been built.
As search engines carry on trying to understand what we want, staggering under an increasingly heavy load of indexed Web pages, it seems to make perfect sense to take a little weight off them by producing our own.
They are quick and simple to produce and can be used, edited, re-edited and thrown away as appropriate.
If you haven’t created one of these before, I would thoroughly recommend them.
References Gaming the Search Engine, in a Political Season, Tom Zeller Jr., The New York Times, 6 November, 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/business/media/06link.html Webmaster Toolkit: Link extractor http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-extractor.shtml Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine http://www.rollyo.com/ Phil Bradley’s Web 2.0 resources search engine http://www.rollyo.com/philbradley/web_2.0_resources/ Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine: Add a Rollyo RollBar Bookmarklet to your Bookmark Bar http://www.rollyo.com/bookmarklet.html Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/philipbradley/19806400 Guide To Custom Search Engines (CSEs) http://www.customsearchguide.com/ Yahoo!
Search Builder http://builder.search.yahoo.com/m/promo Windows Live Gallery http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?pl=4&bt=13 Gigablast Custom Topic Search http://www.gigablast.com/index.php?page=help#cts Quintura http://www.quintura.com/ Eurekster Swicki http://www.eurekster.com/ Phil Bradley Home Page http://www.philb.com/ Website swicki by Phil Bradley http://website-swicki-swicki.eurekster.com/ Readers may be interested to read more about this aspect in: “Human-powered Search Engines: An Overview and Roundup”, Phil Bradley, January 2008, Ariadne, Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/search-engines/ Topicle http://www.topicle.com/ Web 2.0 for libraries http://webforlibraries.topicle.com/ Author Details Phil Bradley Independent Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Custom-built Search Engines” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks Buzz data software wiki portfolio portal blog video flickr passwords streaming youtube facebook twitter privacy research avatar Citation BibTex RIS Gill Ferrell reports on a one-day workshop about Blogs and Social Networks, held in Birmingham in November 2007.
As you might expect from an event organised by Brian Kelly this was an interesting workshop that tried to do something a bit different and to stimulate debate, if not open controversy, amongst the participants.
One of the recurring themes throughout the day was anticipating the consequences of our digital actions.
I should maybe have done this before I replied to an email inviting me to write up an event that had already been blogged to within an inch of its life by the time I opened my laptop on New Street Station.
I’ve asked myself ‘Is it really worth doing this write up?’ and from a personal perspective I think the answer is ‘Yes’.
Looking back I suspect this day will stand out as one of those defining moments when it suddenly dawns on you that the world around you has changed beyond recognition without you really noticing.
This revelation happened while I was scanning the blog posts about the workshop this morning but I think I’ll keep that bit for later because, after all, I haven’t much to say that hasn’t already been said… For this reason my review is a highly selective summary of the bits that tickled, provoked or intrigued me and I’ll include links to the Web site [1], wiki [2] and blogs [3] that can give you all the facts.
Event Introduction Brian Kelly, UKOLN Brian opened the event with the encouragement that we should feel free to photograph and record the speakers which I found very refreshing.
The talks were also being video streamed onto the Web and to Second Life (SL).
Andy Powell of Eduserv was the ‘Wizard of Oz’ pulling the strings (more of this later).
At the start of the day there were around 80 people in the room, 8 people were logged in on SL (and goodness knows what reality the 15-20 stranded on a train from Liverpool were in).
Brian’s view is clearly that the future is Web 2.0 and user-generated content.
Indeed one-third of the 100 or so audience had used SL, 25% were bloggers, most read blogs systematically and 75% were on Facebook.
However 50% of the audience described themselves as IT people so maybe this was only to be expected.
Interestingly, only 8-10 people said their institutions had a policy on blogging, while 3-4 had a policy on social networking.
Brian showed us an example of a blog.
It was Chris Sexton’s and, as well as being suitably impressed by her IQ, a number in the audience were to discover her passion for Rapper Sword dancing similar to Brian’s.
Brian went on to explain that the issue of embarrassing photos appearing on the Web isn’t necessarily due to naivety on the part of the subject – it is often friends who have taken, uploaded and tagged the photos (it’s a good job Brian didn’t know what Chris had on her laptop ready to upload if he put a foot out of order…).
He also made a similar point about embarrassing information and showed us a random extract from a blog that said ‘I watched my drunk Mam paint smiley faces on his knees with lipstick.’ If Mam doesn’t have a Facebook account she may never find out that she has been portrayed in this way.
It is also interesting that people blog about things that they would never tell their Mams.
Brian also hinted at the dangers of not having a digital past.
I was rather intrigued by this.
I don’t think there are too many photos of me doing embarrassing things in student bars (film was expensive in those days) but I am aware that my younger self did do a good line in righteous indignation and I suspect any commentary I posted might be less temperate than I would now consider appropriate.
Finally he noted the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) report ‘Sharing, privacy and trust in our networked world’ [4] found that users don’t trust our organisations and libraries – they think the commercial world is more honest about the fact that they just want our money.
He left us with the question should we provide such services or should we just point our users elsewhere?
We then had speakers in support of managed services pitted against those in favour of a looser approach.
Case Study 1: Blackboard as a Blogging Platform Stephen Clarke, University of Birmingham Stephen doesn’t feel that blogging in a managed environment is a contradiction in terms.
He believes it has educational value and the low cost and ease of use of software makes it a viable classroom activity.
It does however carry a certain element of risk.
He made a point dear to my own heart that identifying this risk isn’t the same as saying ‘No’.
The simple truth is that you don’t create a risk just by pointing out that it exists.
The risk is still there however much you choose to ignore it.
For more on this take a look at JISC infoNet’s Risk Management infoKit [5].
Stephen then looked at a number of anonymised blogs and, with some audience participation, identified good and bad points about them.
We were encouraged to think about the concept of what constitutes an acceptable risk?
He identified good blogs as secure, safe and reliable (and where we control the Acceptable Use Policy).
This protects students in the same way you would protect them from physical bullying etc.
This is particularly important if you are requiring them to use the facility.
We were also reminded that it is public money we spend on this.
Bad blogs are a fact of life and Stephen’s advice is to keep your distance rather than try to clean up the outside world.
He also made the point that ‘managed’ doesn’t have to mean ‘hosted by the university’ so long as you have the right contract and service level agreement.
Birmingham leaves it up to individual academics to moderate blogs.
Where the academics are active participants, the blogs flourish; where the students are left to get on with it, they don’t.
Case Study 2: Leedsfeeds: A Blogging Service Based on the Open Source Elgg Application Melissa Highton, University of Leeds Melissa spoke from a staff development perspective.
Leeds has 3,000 staff of whom 50% are academics (lots of whom have long service) and she sees real benefits in long-term blogs.
Web 2.0 words such as ‘open’, ‘sharing’, ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘community’ are similar to Leeds values.
She would like academics to be blogging about their research in the Leeds Web space.
Facebook on the other hand is for social and private life.
It isn’t fair to ask staff to make their single identity about work.
Melissa was involved in some JISC i-Skills research last year about how people find, use and store information in their work.
This elicited lots of responses about networking and knowing who knows.
One quote from the project was ‘Networking with people there is far more useful than anything that comes out of meetings.’ I can sympathise with the sentiment but then again, given that we tend to have meetings with people, why does the problem seem so insoluble?
Leeds opted for Elgg as a blogging tool and hosts the content on its own servers.
Elgg offers the opportunity for them to have community blogs rather than just single user blogs with comments.
Leeds has a similar experience to Birmingham in finding that the most successful blogs are those where students are invited in by a teacher.
The students seem to have no issue with distinguishing this kind of blog from their personal blog and it seems that allowing students to have a readership improves their research skills.
I had one of my ‘how the world is changing’ moments when Melissa pointed out that much of the content of her slides was ‘reused’ from Brian’s slides and she used his notes to challenge some of his assertions.
‘How interesting’ I thought but things were to get wackier still before long… Case Study 3: Put Yourself Out There Alison Wildish, Edge Hill University Alison is from Edge Hill which was awarded university status as recently as 2006 and wants to raise awareness about itself; so it believes that all publicity is good publicity.
Alison doesn’t see the blurring of work/study and social life in digital media as anything other than normal.
It is no different to the fact that people don’t switch into another mode the moment they walk into the student union or the pub – they will still talk shop and have a moan.
The Edge Hill approach is to say this is good, embrace people using the new tools and make it easier for them to do so.
The University has a portal but is looking to interface this to Facebook and other tools.
The policy and strategy on blogging and social networking is not to have one (even in relation to teaching and learning).
The University will use the tools while it can but accepts that the same tools may not be there tomorrow.
This means not putting all your eggs in one basket i.e.
seeing this as an added extra to traditional communication channels and using those multiple tools where available.
The University has faced issues such as a group of students on Facebook making both very serious and false allegations against members of staff.
As the allegations were on an external site the University had to go through Facebook channels to get it shut down.
The prompt response from Facebook was reassuring; but it was noted that it is unlikely the students would have behaved in such a way had it meant approaching the local newspaper, identifying a need to educate them about appropriate use of social networking sites.
Keele University has taken a very different approach following a similar incident and has warned students to watch their digital mouths when on social networking sites.
Interestingly it won an O2 award (run via Facebook) as the UK’s favourite university – is there a message about the value of openness etc for us there?
Alison summed up Edge Hill’s approach as ‘Open, accept, allow, encourage.’ The University portal already allows students to embed their Instant Messenger, YouTube and Flickr profiles into their home page and has identified that only 25% of its students still use email.
I was still reeling from the revelation that ‘email is for old people’ from last week’s UCISA CISG Conference so this seemed to be another nail in my digital coffin.
Case Study 4: The Student Perspective Tom Milburn, University of Bath In a refreshing change from the splendid isolation we maintain at most events UKOLN took the daring step of getting a student perspective on the issue.
Tom is Vice President for Education at Bath Student Union and believes that the UK is the leading social network user in Europe.
He reported that c.1,300 of the 2,000 freshers at Bath belong to a social networking community and student course reps consistently give feedback that such sites are useful especially for peer-to-peer support and getting opinions from others for project work.
He did however warn us of the need to ‘Beware of your digital footprint’.
Students he said can be somewhat naïve about the consequences of their digital actions, they view posts as ephemeral and have a false sense of security as a result of having a username and password.
Tom feels universities should give more guidance on the use of social networks especially in relation to harassment and bullying – the ‘flyers’ on Facebook used at the University of Bath are a good example.
Tom thinks blogs aren’t as well used as social networks and their devotees are mainly travellers wanting to keep in touch.
In the main students complain that they are harder to find and aren’t updated sufficiently regularly.
Once again we heard that the success of such sites as part of a course depends on how much effort staff put in.
Plenary 1: The Hidden Dangers of Social Networks Stuart Lee, University of Oxford Stuart ‘I can’t believe anyone normal uses the word folksonomy’ Lee got up prepared to invite healthy debate on his views but it turned out that his presentation had already caused a bit of a storm before he even gave it – this is where things started to get really freaky.
It seems that his slides (posted beforehand on the workshop Web page) occasioned comment in a certain blog post which led to one ‘Mr Angry’ denouncing what he was about to say before he even said it.
The bit that really got me was that the (non-inflammatory) original blog post was by Gráinne Conole at 10.03 am on Friday 23 November.
Now at that precise time I was sitting chatting to the blogging Gráinne at a totally different event both of us blissfully unaware that she was about to start a row, which I would later report on, at a workshop which hadn’t yet happened.
It takes a bit of getting my head round that but as a fan of Chaos theory (Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?
and all that stuff) [6] this was the first time I’d really experienced it in action.
How different from the turgid exchange of ideas via academic journals that took two years to see the light of day.
Once Stuart managed to get a word out in Real Life, it was hard not to think he talked a lot of sense.
He asked whether Web 2.0 really is disruptive?
Stuart’s viewpoint at Oxford is quite similar to Edge Hill’s i.e.
to see it as an opportunity rather than a problem on the basis that anything that gets people talking to each other must be a good thing.
As Head of a central IT function he doesn’t want to build brick walls between the two types of service but does advocate caution about how much we blur the two.
There are resource implications for the IT service and there is a need to educate users.
96% of Oxford freshers use Facebook yet most say they prefer only moderate technology use as part of their course.
Evidence from this source also seems to point to the fact that students do not use email any more.
Stuart finds it ‘shocking’ how much information students are prepared to disclose for questionable benefits (such as advertisers using it to target them).
Oxford hit the headlines when it used photos from Facebook to penalise students indulging in ‘Trashing’ (pelting others with eggs and flour at the end of the exams).
In one case a student was identified due to photos her friends had uploaded and tagged.
Many students found this shocking as they saw this as their social space and hadn’t realised how their various identities were coming together or, as Stuart put it, how the ‘web of horror builds up around you’.
Other students penalised for defamation had either ‘forgotten they’d done it’ or thought their comments were very ephemeral.
Oxford has also experimented with an island in Second Life.
The very fact that it has a presence there has fuelled rumours about ‘the end of tutorials as we know them’ and drawn criticism from a range of sources.
Stuart relates this to the fact that SL features prominently in the media at the moment so everyone has an opinion on it (however ill-informed).
Another aspect of the changing world that struck me for the first time was the revelation that class boundaries are recognised within social networking sites.
Apparently Oxford students don’t use MySpace because ‘it’s full of Chavs’.
Plenary 2: Disruptive Technology and Its Implications for University Information Services David Harrison, Cardiff University David also used the phrase disruptive technology in his title and described the difference as relating to issues that are user-centric rather than organisation-centric and which challenge many traditional security and privacy models.
Cardiff has taken the view that there is nothing ‘new’ in disruptive technologies and that existing codes of acceptable use and related disciplinary procedures still apply.
What is different is that the user has a greater degree of control (and hence responsibility) and the IT service needs to see itself as a partner rather than a service provider.
After all we (most of us) manage to moderate our behaviour in face-to-face settings so why should we be unable to do so online?
David had some interesting things to say on the subject of multiple identities.
I had a strange sense of déjà vu about this and wondered whose blog had leaked his presentation until I remembered I had been talking to him about the subject in a bar only the other night – how old fashioned is that?
He looked at how we all operate in multiple realms and how shielding our true identities (e.g.
via an avatar in SL) can sometimes be a barrier to things we want to bring into the real world in order to explore and develop them further.
Discussion Groups: How Should Institutions Respond?
We broke into discussion groups and our thoughts on the various topics were ably recorded by a set of reporters and can be found on the workshop wiki [7]; so here are just a few snippets.
It seems that merely blogging isn’t enough; some people micro-blog (regularly updating one’s status on Facebook counts as micro-blogging) and some even twitter in the bath.
There was general concern about the potentially transient nature of many popular sites and the issue of what happens if you use a service for critical activities only to find it disappears or isn’t scalable.
It was suggested that low cost contractual agreements may be a better option than free sites.
The wide range of potential users was noted which gives rise to the issue of whether it is possible to apply your Acceptable Use Policy to applicants or alumni.
Andy Stewart, a relatively recent graduate, became quite incensed when it was suggested that much of this activity was peripheral to actual learning.
He felt very strongly that a university education is about more than just getting a grade and it struck me that people like myself who studied in an era of much lower participation rates can easily underestimate the importance of social networking sites in creating a sense of community within large institutions.
Brian Kelly came back to the question ‘Will it ever be embarrassing not to have a digital past?’ and suggested in future there may be companies who will compete to create one for you.
The experiment in streaming into SL didn’t quite go as planned due to the bandwidth at the venue being inadequate to send the data out.
The Wizard of Oz analogy was thus quite apt.
Andy did however come up with a Plan B and managed to stream audio whilst clicking through the slides himself ‘in world’.
His message was ‘In principle the technology is within reach but you need to understand your network’.
Conclusion In summary this was an interesting and thought-provoking event.
One of the key messages from many quarters was ‘There is nothing new about Web 2.0’.
In one sense I find this reassuring whilst in another it disturbs me greatly.
It is reassuring to think that we are engaging with the technologies rather than blocking them and given the context that most of the participants were from an IT background the willingness to include Web 2.0 resources within the portfolio is a good thing.
What worries me is that if the same attitude pervades in the learning and teaching community we will miss all sorts of opportunities to do things differently and better.
The sociologist Robert Murphy [8] describes very well this ready capacity of the human mind to try to fit the new into a preconceived order and context.
He states that, had anyone reported to the Roman authorities that Christ had raised Lazarus from the dead, their main concern would have been over whether or not they ought to issue him with a new birth certificate.
We must beware that in our keenness to be seen to be keeping up and coping with something that is new and different we do not fail to seek and exploit ways of doing things differently.
Lest I provoke a tirade of outraged blogging I think this audience was doing a lot more than merely coping with Web 2.0 (death threats via ye olde email please if you want a prompt response).
I shall however give the last word to the delegate who warned us, ‘I’m starting to think we are totally missing the point about what students want – we’re a generation away from how they operate’.
References Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks event Web site, accessed 30 November 2007 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/blogs-social-networks-2007/.
Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs And Social Networks event wiki, accessed 30 November 2007 http://blog-social-networks-2007.wetpaint.com/ Brian Kelly’s UK Web Focus Blog on the event, accessed 30 November 2007 http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/exploiting-the-potential-of-blogs-and-social-networks-2/ OCLC.
Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World, accessed 30 November 2007 http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/default.htm JISC infoNet’s Risk Management infoKit, accessed 30 November 2007 http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/risk-management Lorenz, Edward, N. ‘Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?’ address at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington, 29 December 1979.
Notes from the Discussion Groups http://blog-social-networks-2007.wetpaint.com/page/Discussion+Groups Murphy, Robert, F. The Dialectics of Social Life.
Alarms and Excursions in Anthropological Theory.
George Allen & Unwin Ltd. London.
1972.
Author Details Dr Gill Ferrell Director JISC infoNet Northumbria University Hadrian House Higham Place Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8AF Email: gill.ferrell@northumbria.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks” Author: Dr Gill Ferrell Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/social-networking-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007: Virtual Worlds, Real Learning?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007: Virtual Worlds, Real Learning?
Buzz data software database accessibility video visualisation e-learning privacy intranet research avatar Citation BibTex RIS Paul Walk reports on the Eduserv Foundation Symposium which took as its theme 'Virtual Worlds, Real Learning?'
and which was primarily concerned with educational uses for Second Life.
I was pleased this year to accept a place as a delegate at the Eduserv Foundation Symposium, which was held at Congress House, London on 10 May 2007.
The Symposium was primarily concerned with Second Life and its relevance and applicability to learning.
Second Life is a ‘virtual-world’ created and commercially operated by a company called Linden Lab.
It has gained a significant amount of media coverage in recent months.
Although the calls for papers and the description of this event referred to virtual worlds in general, Andy Powell, Head of Development for the Foundation likened Second Life’s relationship to virtual worlds as being much like Hoover’s relationships to vacuum cleaners, where the successful brand became synonymous with the generic technology.
In order to describe an event which included elements of a traditional conference together with the more experimental aspects of a ‘virtual event’, it is important to clarify some terminology.
To that end, the following terms are defined for the purposes of this report: ‘in-world’ refers to something happening in the virtual world which is Second Life ‘real-life’ refers to the stuff going on around you in the physical world After a while, these distinctions can get a bit blurred: as a rule of thumb, if you find that you don’t seem to be able create things by just pointing at the ground and willing them into existence then you’re most probably not ‘in-world’.
I’ve used real-life names throughout, rather than in-world (avatar) names so that the person called Andy Powell, for example, is someone you could shake by the hand without needing a computer to mediate.
Delegates, real and virtual The Symposium was actually comprised of two, connected events.
One, the real-life event, had the traditional elements: an auditorium, speakers, an audience, question-and-answer sessions, a panel session, coffee breaks and lunch.
The other event was situated in-world, in a number of discrete virtual locations to spread the load on the servers.
One of the most impressive aspects of what was a largely successful symposium was the effort that was made to ‘blend’ the physical and virtual worlds.
The speakers were all physically present in the real-life event, but their presentations, together with a video feed of them speaking were displayed on virtual screens in-world.
This meant that the virtual delegates, represented by their avatars sitting in a space modelled on the Congress Centre [1], could watch the real-life event, with a six-second delay.
Not that the participation of the virtual delegates was necessarily passive: they could, and did, raise questions using Second Life’s text-based ‘chat’ facility.
However, the virtual delegates were let down in one respect no lunch was provided for them in-world.
As well as the virtual delegates watching the real-life speakers on virtual screens, the real-life delegates were able to see the virtual delegates on very impressive, large plasma screens positioned around the auditorium.
I thought this was a great idea, well executed and very effective.
From my position, sitting in the real-life auditorium, it felt rather like being able to look through a large window into another room, with more delegates, in the conference centre.
From any kind of distance, the ‘artificiality’ of the virtual world on screen became less apparent until one of the delegates decided to fly out of his seat of course.
The organisation and coordination of a ‘blended’ event of this type clearly required some real effort, to match the slick technical arrangement.
Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation’s Head of Development, acted as real-life master of ceremonies, while Pete Johnston, the Foundation’s Technical Researcher, worked hard to coordinate the virtual event, while sitting in the real-life auditorium.
Between them, they conveyed information, particularly questions from the virtual delegates, between the two worlds.
The conference agenda consisted mainly of a series of presentations from people working in industry as well as education.
I’ll give a very brief account of these for more information the presentation slides, together with a video recording of the actual delivery of the presentation, are available for viewing or downloading from the Eduserv Foundation Web site [2].
Learning in Second Life Jim Purbrick, Linden Lab From Jim Purbrick we heard how Second Life is a ‘creation engine’.
He described the range of creative activities going on in SL, such as building sophisticated working machines, artificial life research and film-making.
Supplying us with some demographics, Jim pointed out that the majority of SL users are now European rather than North American.
According to him, some of SL’s best aspects include the ‘instant gratification’ of being able to start creating immediately, coupled with the fact that the creation environment is not separate from the normal user experience, resulting in what he termed ‘always on creation’.
IBM’s Use of Virtual Worlds Roo Reynolds, Metaverse Evangelist, IBM Roo described IBM’s (considerable) activities in Second Life, the ways in which they are exploring the use of Second Life as a business tool for meetings, and the relatively complex developments they have undertaken in-world.
The most impressive, from my point of view, was the model of the Rod Laver Arena which contained a simulation of the Australian Open Tennis Tournament, with the trajectory of the virtual tennis ball being dictated by a live feed of data from the real-life ‘Hawkeye’ system.
Roo made much of the impact of meetings in SL, explaining how social interactions can occur ‘naturally’ and even accidentally or serendipitously something which does not happen with more conventional virtual meeting tools.
Apparently, the information conveyed by just the direction of an avatar’s gaze can be quite significant in determining who is giving attention to whom.
In a similar vein, it is possible to ‘see’ the social networking going on in a virtual meeting by simply observing the clusters of people just as in RL.
I found this aspect of Second Life’s potential particularly interesting.
Roo also revealed that IBM were concerned to address the problem of privacy, or the lack of guarantee of same, in Second Life.
To this end, it is starting to look at building something similar for its corporate intranet with an off-the-shelf ‘game-engine’ product, as a place in which to hold secret, secure meetings.
Holyrood Park: A Virtual Campus for Edinburgh Hamish MacLeod, University of Edinburgh Hamish described an initiative at the University of Edinburgh to attempt to use Second Life as a practical tool to aid teaching and learning.
His team elected to use the local Holyrood Park as a model for the virtual space it is creating, as the Park has a rich variety of history, geology and local resonances.
Hamish explained how Second Life was chosen because it allowed them to practice teaching and learning in a ‘constructivist/constructionist context’.
The virtual environment can offer tasks, experiences and reflection together with ‘appropriate disequilibrium’.
While not being a game per se, Hamish described Second Life as ‘playful’.
More generally, Hamish explained how Second Life could be important to the University as a new ‘point of access’, and that the University benefited from his team’s work as it gained a place in what he described as an ‘important media space’.
The University was now starting to consider some issues associated with the use of Second Life, such as the legal aspects of the relationship between the institution and the service-provider, together with the technical demands of the software as well as their effect on the accessibility of the virtual world for students.
Hamish reported that the Law School had considered using Second Life for teaching but had postponed any such activity on the grounds that it could not guarantee that all of its students would have the hardware resources necessary to access it.
Second Nature Joanna Scott, Nature Publishing Group Joanna outlined Nature’s considerable presence in Second Life, in particular its activities on and around its virtual island called ‘Second Nature’.
Describing Second Nature as ‘a sandpit for scientists’, Joanna suggested that there are two aspects of Second Life which are significant for Nature and scientists: the ‘social’ aspect of the collaborative environment, and the ‘visualisation’ aspect made possible by the in-world building tools.
Nature regularly publishes diagrams of three-dimensional molecular structures on paper: Second Life offers an opportunity for ‘real’ and even interactive three-dimensional models.
Second Nature now hosts the M4 (Magical Molecular Model Maker) which interrogates the PubChem database for the data needed to generate a molecular model in Second Life.
One particular issue with Second Life in terms of its ability to render complex objects is the built-in limitation on the number of ‘prims’, or primitive building-blocks, which any one parcel of virtual land can support.
Refreshingly, Joanna revealed that Nature’s approach to Second Life was to ‘try it’, and if they found it to be wanting, to cut its ‘not very significant’ losses.
Nature had also adopted a stance of hosting other people’s work, rather than developing new material itself.
A Second Guess at the Future Gilly Salmon, University of Leicester Gilly presented on SEAL (Second Environment, Advanced Learning) and her activities in establishing a Learning Futures Academy.
Throughout her talk she emphasised the need to work with students to arrive at a vision which would allow institutions to plan for a different future.
Second Life’s potential in this work is to facilitate the creation of an interactive and creative environment within which ‘events’ can be hosted.
The idea is that the ‘immersion’ of users in such events will encourage them to express their own desires for a ‘learning future’.
Echoing Hamish MacLeod’s ‘appropriate disequilibrium’, Gilly explained how the immersion in a different world is designed to ‘free up the mindset’ of the participants.
Noting that many real-life research techniques do not apply very well to virtual worlds like Second Life, Gilly outlined the intention to use a ‘cognitive mapping’ technique to the logs of in-world ‘chats’.
Virtual Worlds in Context Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada Last up was Stephen Downes.
It became clear fairly early on that Stephen is sceptical about the value of Second Life in learning.
For much of his talk he argued that Second Life is not very new in concept, and that its appeal comes from the fact that it is a rather conservative, hence comforting, experience.
The only significant innovation in Second Life, he argued, is the in-world economy, which is connected to real-life economies through normal currency-exchange mechanisms.
Stephen questioned the future worth of Second Life, inviting us to imagine what the Web would be like if we had commissioned a private company to develop it for us.
Conclusion Eduserv should be commended for an ambitious and innovative symposium, well executed on the day.
I came away convinced that the use of Second Life to facilitate a ‘hybrid’ conference, part real-life, part virtual, is worthwhile.
I remained slightly more sceptical about its real power to affect e-learning to a significant degree, but I was nonetheless subjected to an array of interesting ideas and compelling visualisations.
A day after the symposium, I found myself re-visiting Second Life as a result.
References Congress Centre, London http://www.congresscentre.co.uk/ Index of presentations on Eduserv Foundation Web site http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/presentations/ Author Details Paul Walk Technical Manager UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007: Virtual Worlds, Real Learning?” Author: Paul Walk Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/eduserv-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 39: Humanity V Technology, Which Is in the Driving Seat?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 39: Humanity V Technology, Which Is in the Driving Seat?
Buzz archives repositories preservation personalisation lom telnet ftp Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 39.
Why it is in this particular issue that I should perceive two forces in ceaseless conflict, I do not know.
Nonetheless my very imprecise recollection of Newton's Third Law speaks of every action having an equal and opposite reaction which puts me in mind of something Paul Browning wrote about the timeliness of Through the Web Authoring Tools .
As institutions, rightly concerned by hostile attacks over networks, opt to remove telnet and ftp access, either permanently or to behind a firewall, so TTW authoring tools would be able to sidestep these issues in time.
It would be fanciful to imagine them having been devised as a solution but institutional authors denied ftp access may very naturally turn toward the newcomer.
Paul, heading up our Get Tooled Up section gives an analysis of trends in writing for and through the Web and considers the options now emerging for institutions considering new content production and management models.
Not for the first time Ariadne has carried articles on the issues of institutional repositories and associated matters and if ever there was an area subject to the pressures of action and reaction, this is surely it.
Morag Mackie's thoughts on Filling Institutional Repositories provide us with some of the strategies devised by her project and also some of the difficulties encountered in gathering content.
Being involved in gathering content myself I have considerable sympathy and it is true that those who promise content have sympathy but not always much content.
Machines of course have no sympathy, which is why it should be simpler to order them about.
But as Penny Garrod demonstrates in The changing face of the public library they still cannot get it right for some; if, that is, the machines proceed to supplant resources to which people have become accustomed.
Penny's column highlights the competing pressures on resources in public libraries she even sympathises with the local authority chief executives who must decide who wins the tussle.
However, it would be ridiculously simplistic to characterise these pressures as the sort of conflict that made the Governor of California his second or third million.
In truth the divide lies not between humans and machines but between those who can influence the development of machines in their interest and those who, currently, cannot.
No clearer illustration is necessary that that supplied in our At the Event section by John Paschoud in his report on The Biggest Digital Library Conference in the World.
Here the divide between those with the 4 x 4 as opposed to those unable to place even a foot on the hard shoulder of the information highway could not be starker.
Yet India is trying to broaden access and as John suggests, we would be unwise to underestimate her potential to expand.
The sheer dimensions of ICDL2004 bear adequate witness to that, as does the massive undertaking to bring electronic voting to the largest democracy in the world [1].
Back in the UK, while the percentage of network connections is naturally higher, the degree of exclusion for those unconnected is no less.
Liz Pearce and Neil Smith however demonstrate in IT for Me that the EU-funded project is tackling social exclusion of a more complex nature than just whether the wire reaches the socket: developments in personalisation are set to make a difference in currently low levels of user engagement.
At a more strategic level Paul Miller considers how best the Digital Aquifer will meet the diverse needs of current and future users.
Moreover the National Archives are building a National Archive of Datasets from government agencies that date back as far as 1963 and are working towards making them more accessible to the public online.
Jeffrey Darlington gives a good description of TNA's strategies, solutions and plans for the future.
Meanwhile back at the coalface, Andy Powell and Phil Barker look at how a particular partnership is progressing with a LOM Application Profile and how it is being used to support resource discovery while Chris Awre reckons Seeing is Believing and explains how the JISC IE Presentation Programme is investigating in a variety of ways how to make the interface between users and the functionality of a Web site more intuitive and so attract more users and traffic.
And with a quick sortie on my hobbyhorse I must mention Michael Day's report on the recent Erpanet conference and Daniel Teruggi's burning question Can We Save our Audio-visual Heritage?.
Daniel places the development of our audio-visual content in the context of our general cultural development and makes a compelling case not only for its high ranking but also its preservation.
It has already been established that a truly staggering amount of audio-visual running time is in need of preservation.
Now PrestoSpace is tasked with the rescue of yet another endangered species, victim of our collective insouciance.
All the above of course supported by contributions from Web Focus and a Newsline section followed by four further reviews of books of possible interest to our readers.
Once again this issue comes to you thanks to the commitment of its authors together with support from colleagues at UKOLN, in particular Shirley Keane for her work on Ariadne.
I hope you will enjoy it.
References 'Indians vote in hi-tech election', BBCi News, 20 April, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3641419.stm Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 39: Humanity V Technology, Which Is in the Driving Seat?"
Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The KIDMM Community's 'MetaKnowledge Mash-up' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The KIDMM Community's 'MetaKnowledge Mash-up' Buzz data software framework wiki database portfolio xml archives metadata thesaurus tagging browser identifier vocabularies repositories preservation cataloguing sgml ascii gis ead provenance adobe e-learning mis ontologies csv eportfolio cybernetics interoperability e-government foia algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Conrad Taylor reports on the KIDMM knowledge community and its September 2007 one-day conference about data, information and knowledge management issues.
About KIDMM The British Computer Society [1], which in 2007 celebrates 50 years of existence, has a self-image around engineering, software, and systems design and implementation.
However, within the BCS there are over fifty Specialist Groups (SGs); among these, some have a major focus on ‘informatics’, or the content of information systems.
At a BCS SG Assembly in 2005, a workshop discussed shared-interest topics around which SGs could collaborate.
Knowledge, information and data management was identified as a candidate.
This led to a workshop in March 2006 [2], from which emerged KIDMM (Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management.
About a third of subscribers are from communities outside the BCS [3].
The MetaKnowledge Mash-up conference was billed as a ‘sharing and thinking day’, the name reflecting KIDMM’s aspiration to put together, in new ways, knowledge that different communities have about managing knowledge, data and information.
‘Handles and Labels’ The day was chaired and introduced by Conrad Taylor, who acts as co-ordinator for KIDMM.
Conrad identified three ways in which we add ‘handles and labels’ to information within computer systems, to make it easier to manage.
In a database, data obtains meaning from its container: a number is made meaningful by being placed in a ‘date of birth’ field, or a ‘unique customer ID’ field, etc.
Explicitly documenting the meaning of fields and their inter-relationships becomes important when databases need to be merged or queried.
Since the 1970s the term metadata has been used within the data management community to refer to information that describes the allowed content types, purposes and so on of database fields and look-up relationships.
This meaning may surprise librarians and information scientists, who started using ‘metadata’ to mean something different in the early nineties (Lorcan Dempsey of UKOLN being perhaps to blame).
As a result, any conversation about metadata within the KIDMM community, which bridges management of textual information and data, has to include disambiguation about which of these meanings is intended [4].
Information in text form tends to lack ‘handles’.
There are exceptions: mark-up languages such as SGML and XML allow entities within text to be given machine-readable semantic contexts.
Military systems documentation has used SGML/XML structure in support of information retrieval for a couple of decades.
Failing that, we rely on free text search, with all its frustrations.
The third ‘handle-adding’ approach which Conrad described is the attaching of cataloguing data labels, or ‘metadata’ in the librarians’ sense of the word.
This may live outside the information resource, as in a library catalogue, or be embedded in the resource.
Dublin Core is a well-known starter-kit of metadata fields.
One troublesome Dublin Core field is the Subject field: here we bump into problems of classification.
Conrad called on Leonard Will to give the conference a briefing on the issues later in the day.
Information Retrieval Today: An Overview of Issues and Methods Tony Rose, of the BCS Information Retrieval SG, offered us Wikipedia’s definition of information retrieval: search for information in documents, or the documents themselves, or metadata which describes documents.
The ‘naive science’ view of how search engines like Google function is that they understand what users want to find.
However, all search engines do is count words and apply simple equations; they measure ‘conceptual distance’ between a user’s query and each document in their database.
Authors of documents express concepts in words as do searchers, in the search terms they choose.
The central problem in IR is whether a good conceptual match can be found between the searcher’s terms and the author’s.
To process searches, a search engine must represent the search terms and author’s terms internally.
The usual ‘bag of words’ approach treats every document as a collection of disconnected words.
The similarity of the contents of the ‘bag’ to the search terms is calculated by set theory, algebraic or probabilistic methods, the algebraic approach being the most common.
In evaluating the effectiveness of information retrieval systems, two key terms are ‘precision’ and ‘recall’.
A search is insufficiently precise if it brings back lots of irrelevant documents, and scores poorly on recall if many documents relevant to the searcher’s query are not retrieved.
Unfortunately improvements in precision are usually to the detriment of recall, and vice-versa.
What makes search hard?
The bag-of-words model has the weakness of treating ‘venetian blind’ and ‘blind Venetian’ as equivalents.
Words shouldn’t be treated so independently in documents; word order is important; and relevance is affected by many structural and discourse dependencies and other linguistic phenomena.
In many search engines, the database is reduced in size by excluding words such as the, and or of (the ‘stop words’ approach).
The trouble is, these are useful function words: by excluding them, much linguistic structure is thrown away.
Then there is the problem of named entity recognition.
‘New York’ as an entity is destroyed by the bag-of-words approach.
One solution is to add a gazetteer of geographic entities.
One could do the same for people’s or organisations’ names.
Moving from syntax to semantics, matching concepts presents greater challenges.
It would be nice if a system would recognise car and automobile as synonymous.
Some systems use a thesaurus, but it can be problematic to decide at what level of abstraction to set equivalence (in some use-cases car and bus might be equivalent, in other cases not), and building thesauri always involves a huge amount of human editorial input.
The flip side of concept matching is the problem of disambiguation: there are at least three meanings for the word ‘bank’.
One should have the riverside distinguished from the financial institution and the aerobatic manoevre.
If search is so hard, how come Google gets it right so often?
Google’s originators had the insight that on the Web there is another index of relevance: the links to document being indexed.
The more links point to a page, the more highly it is rated by users.
Discussion ensued Data Mining, Text Mining and the Predictive Enterprise Tom Khazaba of SPSS focused on data mining issues in commercial and government contexts.
Most large organisations may derive insights of practical use by applying an analytical process to the data they keep.
‘Data mining’ refers to the core of that analytical process.
‘Predictive analytics’ is a term encompassing the broader context of use: it ‘helps connect data to effective action by drawing reliable conclusions about current conditions and future events’.
In business, a common goal of predictive analytics is to get customers more efficiently and cheaply; identify services to sell to existing customers, and avoid trying to sell them things they don’t want.
By analysing why customers close accounts, banks could learn how to retain customers.
The second largest group of business applications of predictive analytics is in risk detection and analysis, e.g.
detecting fraud and suspicious behaviour.
Predictive analysis has many uses right across government.
Describing the technology, Tom introduced a commonly used algorithm called a ‘decision tree’.
In data mining, a decision tree breaks a population into subsets with particular properties, and can do so repeatedly, sifting data to map from known observations about items, to target categorisations with predictive use.
Clustering algorithms, which find natural groups within data, are often used in statistical analysis; in data mining they are commonly used to find anomalies.
In summary, data mining algorithms discover patterns and relationships in the data, and from this they generate insight into things one had not noticed before, which can lead to productive change.
They also have predictive capability.
SNOMED Clinical Terms: The Language for Healthcare Ian Herbert Vice Chair, BCS Health Informatics Forum SNOMED-CT stands for ‘Systematized Nomenclature for Medicine Clinical Terms’, and is the result of the 2002 merger of the American SNOMED Reference Terminology (RT) with the UK National Health Service Clinical Terms, Version 3.
The latter was developed from the ‘Read Codes’ made commercially available by UK physician Dr. James Read, and purchased by the NHS in 1998.
Ian introduced SNOMED-CT as ‘a terminological resource that can be implemented in software applications to represent clinically relevant information reliably and reproducibly.’ It has been adopted by the NHS Care Records Service.
The purpose of SNOMED-CT is to enable consistent representation of clinical information, leading to consistent retrieval.
In direct patient care, clinical information documents people’s health state and treatment, through entries in electronic patient records.
Decision support information assists health professionals in deciding what action is appropriate.
Because people move between different health providers (GP, hospital, specialist clinic), there is a need for semantic interoperability between the information systems of all providers: meaning must transfer accurately from system to system.
A controlled terminology will help deliver this.
Nobody believes that all clinical information can be structured and coded; there will always be a role for diagrams, drawings, speech recordings, movie clips and text.
However, SNOMED enables consistent ‘tagging’ of information about individual patients, plus knowledge sources such as drug formularies.
Further information.
How will we know when SNOMED-CT is successful?
Ian closed with a quotation from Alan Rector of the Medical Informatics Group at the University of Manchester: ‘We will know we have succeeded when clinical terminologies in software are used and re-used, and when multiple independently developed medical records, decision support and clinical information retrieval systems sharing the same information using the same terminology are in routine use’ [8] Discussion ensued Geospatial Information and Its Applications Dan Rickman, Geospatial Specialist Group Geospatial information systems (GIS) ‘[allow] the capture, modelling, storage and retrieval, sharing, manipulation and analysis of geographically referenced data.’ At the heart of any GIS is a database, containing objects with attribute data.
In the past, GIS has been ‘sold’ with a more pictorial view, with the map at its heart.
The more recent trend is to emphasise the data, and say that any map is a spatial representation of what is in the database.
This is a paradigm shift in thinking about GIS, which its practitioners are encouraging.
Presentation of geospatial information doesn’t even have to be map-based.
If you want to know which stores are nearest, search may be spatial, but delivery could be a list of addresses.
Geospatial data used to be a simple join-the-dots model.
These days we have concepts of topology, structure, objects etc.
GIS requires metadata: at its simplest, a co-ordinate system, without which the co-ordinates would be as useless as a financial database that did not define its currency.
Who uses geospatial data?
Examples include central and national government agencies, public utilities, insurance companies (consider flooding!)
and health (especially epidemiology).
Travel is a large field of application: SatNav of course, multimodal route planning and optimisation of delivery routes.
Historically, much geospatial data has been sidelined in proprietary formats, sitting outside the database, not readily accessible by other systems.
There is now a shift towards moving spatial data into mainstream database technology, so spatial data is modelled as a complex data type inside databases.
Dan showed three kinds of GIS representation applied to an urban area: old-style Ordnance Survey Landline ‘join the dots’ mapping; the object-oriented approach, in which each building is a database object with a ‘TOID’ (Topological Identifier); and aerial photography, which is rich in features but hard to interpret.
Figure 1: A montage of various types of geospatial data and imagery GIS databases now support more structure than in the past.
An initiative called the Digital National Framework encourages organisations to structure their data with reference to objects, rather than to recapture and duplicate it.
The principles of the DNF are: Capture information once, use it many times.
Capture the highest resolution possible, avoiding the need for later re-capture, and improving the potential for data interoperability.
Where possible, use existing proven standards.
Recently there has been a ‘quest’ to define the BLPU (Basic Land and Property Unit).
However, entities one wants to keep track of can be complex.
On the Ordnance Survey Master Map, ‘St Mary’s football stadium, Southampton’ is a single unit.
The nearby railway station is recorded as multiple objects main building, several platforms, pedestrian bridge.
As for hospitals, there are a number of buildings, and ownership may be complex.
Clinics off-site are organisationally part of the hospital but not contiguous with it.
How these relationships are described can also change according to requirements for data use.
To make sense of scanned images of maps in GIS, metadata such as the co-ordinate system and projection system used is needed.
There is a trend to placing scans in databases as BLOBs (Binary Large Objects).
Raster map data is problematic because it requires human interpretation; progress in map-based pattern recognition systems is slow.
The Geospatial SG believes that geospatiality is a field whose time has come.
There is greatly increased public awareness, thanks to Google Maps and SatNav.
This can only increase in the future as more phones will incorporate GPS, driving a host of location-based services.
Discussion ensued Integrating Museum Systems: Accessing Collections Information at the Victoria and Albert Museum Christopher Marsden A challenge often faced in data management is when databases, independently developed, have to be integrated together.
The problems are not purely technical; the component databases reflect a particular way of looking at their subjects, and there may be organisational politics involved.
The Core Systems Integration Project (CSIP) at the V&A is a case in point.
The Victoria and Albert Museum contains about 1.5 million objects.
These are inventoried and in some cases catalogued electronically in the V&A’s Collections Information System, based on SSL’s MUSIMS software [10]; this conforms to the MDA’s SPECTRUM standard.
In addition, there is a large amount of paper-based documentation about objects in the collections.
There are about 1.5 million items in the National Art Library, plus vast archives.
The library database is a standard system supplied by Horizon.
There is no database for archives; these are stored as Encoded Archival Description (EAD) XML files [11].
The Museum also holds about 160,000 images of objects in the collections.
These are documented in the Digital Asset Management database, and images are available for purchase online.
The information systems for the library, archive and collections are all large, well established, and based on different recognised international standards.
The separate standards are of long standing, have been carefully developed, and there are justifiable reasons for the differences.
But it does create problems in getting such different systems to work together.
The Museum staff have begun to have larger aspirations about ways in which data owned by the V&A could be used; and it may be regarded almost as a scandal that despite the huge amounts of data the Museum has, the public is unable to access quite a lot of it.
From this starting point, the aims and objectives of the Core Systems Integration Project were: to develop a system architecture whereby various applications could access information about objects in the collection through a Virtual Repository, rather than mastering object data locally; and to integrate the Museum’s core systems, and remove the dependencies on manual data manipulation inherent in existing practice, thus improving efficiency and accuracy of data delivery.
The Virtual Repository is now in place and it works.
A prototype Gallery Services application exists, serving information and pictures in a way that Gallery staff and the public can use, but it isn’t installed yet.
Progress has slowed recently, but Christopher is optimistic that they will be able to push ahead and deliver.
Further information on the development of CSIP Discussion ensued Preservation of Datasets Terence Freedman, NDAD, The National Archive The National Archives (TNA) was created in 2003 as a merger of the Public Record Office, the Historic Manuscripts Commission and the Family Records Centre; the Office of Public Sector Information merged with TNA in 2006.
The information they look after goes way back to the Domesday Book!
The Public Records Act 1958 stipulated that government data should be released after 30 years (the ‘30 year rule’).
Later the threshold dropped to seven years; thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, much government data can now be accessed immediately.
In theory.
But in practice, some information is ‘redacted’ edited out of the record, through a decision of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee.
Thus there are blanks in some released documents.
The National Archives has responsibility for documents, records and datasets.
Documents come from the Electronic Document and Records Management Systems of government departments; they have provenance, and various sorts of metadata attached; they certainly have sufficient attached data to make cataloguing them fairly straightforward.
But the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) mostly deals with tabular data much more problematic.
NDAD acquires ‘born digital’ data, which can be up to 30 years old.
That might mean punched cards, paper or magnetic tape.
The threat of loss of data through decay is quite pressing in the case of magnetic records.
Surrounding information is often missing what methodologies were used for collecting that data; why it was collected; who collected it; what format it was contained in and how it was encoded.
The aim is to improve access to this data by indexing it.
This does work!
Type ‘NDAD’ into Google and you will be into TNA’s data in no time at all, promised Terry: type in ‘NDAD badgers’ or ‘NDAD trees’ and you will be into that particular selection of datasets.
(Though Richard Millwood later noted that when he tried the latter, Google asked if he had meant ‘dead trees’ instead!)
To make access possible, it is vital to move rescued data in its typical chaotic state through common processes, resulting in a standard encoding; for example, tabular data is converted to CSV files (comma-separated values), and relationships are created between tables, such that they are maintainable from that point on.
That done, the original software can be forgotten; it is no longer relevant once data has been freed from those dependencies.
Nothing in the record must change it is inviolable, even if the original data was wrong.
Other agencies, such as the Department for Work and Pensions, or the Office for National Statistics, do correct this data, resulting in highly usable results.
But NDAD’s role is strictly preservation.
Recovering information from government departments can be difficult, involving liaison with Digital Records Officers (DROs).
NDAD staff acquire the datasets, check them for completeness and consistency, and transport them to the University of London Computer Centre (the contractors) for processing.
Early in the process, materials are copied literally bit-for-bit from the original media onto current media; then the original data carrier is disposed of securely.
A further bit-copy is made, and conversion to current encodings and standard formats proceeds from there.
‘Fixity checking’ is performed at frequent intervals to ensure that data has been copied faithfully, and multiple redundant back-ups are maintained via remote storage.
When NDAD acquires digital data created with obsolete software, certain assumptions are made at the start, such as ASCII encoding.
Then there is a process of testing against the bit-copy until the record is ‘cracked’ and becomes legible.
The target is to shift data into a canonical representation that frees it from dependency on any software.
Access to NDAD data is free.
On average there are 55,000 Web page accesses each month; there are 116 million records currently, spread across 400 datasets.
Access to data has remained excellent, with only a few hours outage in a year.
Discussion ensued Classification Leonard Will (Willpower Information) is a consultant in information management, with an interest in libraries, archives and museums; also a member of a BSI working party on structured vocabularies for information retrieval (BS 8723).
He told us we must distinguish between making descriptions of documents and providing access points to them.
When you retrieve a list of documents, you should be presented with information allowing you to assess which documents are relevant.
We should also distinguish between (a) the structured form of data that you need for consistent indexing and (b) information presented about the document once you have found it, which can be free text.
Controlled vocabularies are used to bring consistency in indexing, so there is a better chance of matching terms used by a searcher with terms applied by an indexer.
In human (intellectual) indexing, the first step is a subject analysis to decide what the document is about.
Having identified the concepts represented in documents, you translate them into the controlled vocabulary for labelling those documents.
In a controlled vocabulary, we define concepts, and give them a preferred term.
We may also give them other, non-preferred terms.
The preferred term is used as an indexing label, and is to some extent arbitrary.
It should be equally possible to achieve access using any non-preferred term.
The definition of the scope of a concept what it means is best expressed in a scope note.
This should say what’s included in the concept, what’s excluded, and what related concepts should be looked for under another label.
Concepts can be grouped in various ways within a controlled vocabulary.
In a thesaurus, they can be labelled separately, with relations between them specified.
The relations in a thesaurus are paradigmatic true in any context.
For example, the term ‘computers’ may be related to ‘magnetic tapes’.
Broader and narrower terms are common forms of relation, e.g.
‘computers’ and ‘minicomputers’.
However, it is not the job of a thesaurus to link terms like ‘computers’ and ‘banking’.
Such a relationship is not inherent in the concepts themselves.
In dealing with documents about computers and banking, the relationship between the concepts is said to be syntagmatic they come together in syntax to express the compound concept: ‘computer applications in banking’.
‘In a classification scheme, we build things using concepts which come from different parts of the thesaurus from different facets, if you like,’ said Leonard.
The term ‘facet’ is fashionable, and often mis-used.
A ‘fundamental facet’ is a particular category such as objects, organisms, materials, actions, places, times.
These categories are mutually exclusive: something cannot be an action and an object at the same time.
Facets can be expressed in a thesaurus, and you can only have broader-narrower, or ‘is-a’ relationships between terms within the same facet.
But in a classification, we can combine facets together: e.g.
banking as an activity and computers as objects, combining to express a compound concept.
When combining facets to create compounds in a classification, you have to do it in a consistent way.
Therefore we establish a facet citation order.
The Classification Research Group citation order for facets starts with things, kinds of things, actions, agents, patients (things that are operated on) and so on, ending up with place and time.
This is an elaboration of the facet scheme proposed by Ranganathan, the ‘father’ of faceted classification; his formula for the citation order was PMEST, for Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time.
A classification scheme doesn’t bring things together alphabetically, so it is often necessary to have a notation, such as a numbering scheme, which allows you to sort and maintain things systematically.
Otherwise you’d get Animals at the beginning and Zoos at the end; yet because they are related, we expect to find them close together.
This brought Leonard to the difference between the thesaurus approach and classification approach.
A thesaurus approach lets you do post-coordinate searching, and find things by particular terms.
In post-coordinate searching, you combine concepts after indexing, i.e.
at search time.
Pre-coordination means that terms are combined at the point of indexing into a compound term.
The value of a classification is that you can browse it usefully.
Leonard thought it a pity that in modern online library catalogue systems, we can no longer browse as one used to be able to do in a card catalogue, finding related concepts to either side.
Whereas a classification scheme should allow this kind of browsing, a thesaurus is useful for searching.
The two are complementary: it is best if you can have both.
All too often we see a user interface with a tiny box, into which we are asked to type search terms, without any guidance about what we can do.
Even our advanced interfaces often give insufficient guidance about how to compile a sensible search statement.
Whereas Google often says ‘Did you mean X?’, a thesaurus could do much more.
It could say, ‘I’ve got this, but I index it under this term; I’ll do the search on that instead,’ or, ‘You’ve searched for this, would you also be interested in searching for the following related terms?’ This kind of interaction is what librarians call the reference interview: for example when somebody asks ‘Where are the chemistry books?’ when what they really want is to find out if the weedkiller they put down their drain is dangerous.
People are generally thought to ask for topics broader than they really want, because they are frightened to be too specific.
Ideally a search interface should be able to lead the enquirer through that kind of reference interview.
A computer can do it in principle; but the systems we have at present do not.
Discussion: Taxonomies and Tagging Enabling Knowledge Communities Richard Millwood is the Director of Core Education UK, and a Reader at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton.
He was formerly the Director of Ultralab at Anglia Ruskin University, where he worked on the Ultraversity project.
Richard is also a consultant to the Improvement and Development Agency (I&DeA).
Introducing him, Conrad referred how impressed he and Genevieve Hibbs had been with I&DeA’s knowledge community support systems.
They had recommended Richard to lead discussion of how we can build and foster such communities online.
Ultraversity The Ultraversity degree is a BA (Hons) in Learning Technology Research (LTR).
It’s a ‘learn while you earn’ course, with a full-time credit rating, and combines a number of innovations.
LTR is inquiry-based learning, with an action-research methodology.
Students focus on improving the work they already do, based in their own work environment.
The course is personalised: each student negotiates a study focus with the university to create an individual learning plan.
Assessment is by dissertation and presentation of an e-portfolio, assisted by a peer-review process.
Most relevant from KIDMM’s point of view is that the Ultraversity system contextualises learning within an online community which offers support and critical feedback, with input from experts and access to an online library.
The LTR course was shaped additionally to give participants skills, knowledge and confidence in the use of online services, equipping them for lifelong learning as online practitioners beyond the point of qualification.
Ultraversity provides its students with a safe space, a ‘launch pad’ for public identity online.
Before constructing the Ultraversity scheme, Richard and his Ultralab colleagues had worked on prior projects with teachers such as Talking Heads, the purpose of which was to ensure that head teachers keep up with each others’ learning and skills.
The Ultralab team discovered that as these online communities developed in strength -creating spaces in which participants could trust each other it raised the quality of debate and led to deeper learning [17].
Learning in Ultraversity arises through students expressing ideas, then evaluating these expressions.
For this to happen, people must feel safe from ridicule.
Students’ prior experience of schooling meant that they did not trust the concept of learning from other ‘ordinary’ people; one student wanted all information volunteered online to be validated by her Learning Facilitator.
Over time, she realised her fellow students ‘were extraordinary people, with a wealth of knowledge and especially experience among them.’ I&DeA Knowledge In January 2007, Richard went to work with Marilyn Leask’s team at the Improvement and Development Agency.
I&DeA Knowledge is a ‘one-stop shop’ Web site giving rapid access to background knowledge required to do the job of local government effectively.
It pools national, regional and local perspectives; provides a means of communicating with experts in other local authorities; and is a source of authoritative and reliable information.
This last point is of interest in relation to the issue of authority: if you work in a local authority, whom would you trust for knowledge about tackling climate change at local level: central government?
or the local authority that’s been winning prizes for its climate change policy?
The I&DeA team set about trying to explain to local authorities how the agency can help them learn from best practice.
For example: on the I&DeA Knowledge Web site, they pulled together knowledge about climate change from local authorities which are particularly forward-looking about the issue.
Richard displayed a page with links to relevant discussions on the site: encouraging sustainable travel behaviour, calculating CO2 emissions, carbon and ecological footprinting for local authorities, and sustainability training materials.
Such discussions are not, strictly speaking, online communities they are bulletin boards hosted on the system, where people make contributions.
These are not contexts in which people form relationships, by and large.
Richard repeated the point to hammer it home: Online Community does not equal discussion forums they are collections of people, not a software facility.
Some resources are centrally produced: toolkits to support a range of actions, and documents to support learning and staff development.
But for KIDMM, the I&DeA Communities of Practice are of greater interest.
There are about fifty of these.
Joining a CoP helps people quickly obtain practical solutions to issues; access cutting-edge practices and thinking; and network to share knowledge and experience.
In a CoP, you can share bookmarks, post slides or documents, and otherwise communicate with colleagues in a form that stays ‘on the record’.
The I&DeA system also has a wiki functionality, used for developing shared, collaboratively-authored documents.
Richard showed us an event announcement which he had tagged it with keywords.
‘Taggers’ choose their own keywords; but the system displays a list of the most commonly used, so the tagging terms with which people feel most comfortable are rising to the top of the heap.
Further information Discussion ensued Conclusions and Aftermath Outputs from the Mash-up are being made available on the KIDMM Web site, including slides, some audio from talks, and a more comprehensive version of this Report [18].
Several more people have joined the discussion e-list [3], and an e-newsletter service has been set up so that people who want to keep an eye on KIDMM’s activities can be informed on a fortnightly basis [19].
Inspired by Richard Millwood’s advocacy of online community, the new domain www.kidmm.org has been registered, and the aim is to develop there an electronic discussion space eventually open to wider participation.
The other major current KIDMM project is the construction of a portable consciousness-raising exhibition, Issues in Informatics, two prototype panels of which were on display at the event.
References BCS Web site http://www.bcs.org 6 March KIDMM workshop report http://www.epsg.org.uk/KIDMM/workshop.html BCS-KIDMM@JISCmail.ac.uk membership list with affiliations is at http://www.epsg.org.uk/KIDMM/email-list.html Conrad Taylor, 2007, Metadata’s many meanings and uses briefing paper http://www.ideography.co.uk/briefings Danny Budzak, Metadata, e-government and the language of democracy.
http://www.epsg.org.uk/dcsg/docs/Metademocracy.pdf Workshop report Information Literacy, the Information Society and international development http://www.epsg.org.uk/wsis-focus/meeting/21jan2003report.html CRISP-DM http://www.crisp-dm.org/ Alan Rector.
2000.
‘Clinical Terminology: Why is it so hard?’ Methods of Information in Medicine 38(4):239-252; also available as PDF from http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~rector/papers/Why-is-terminology-hard-single-r2.pdf See http://www.openehr.org/ See comprehensive description of MUSIMS at the MDA Software Survey: http://www.mda.org.uk/musims.htm Official EAD site at the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/ead/ See also Wikipedia description at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoded_Archival_Description Accessed 25 October 2007.
See CIDOC Web site: http://cidoc.mediahost.org/standard_crm(en)(E1).xml SCULPTEUR http://www.sculpteurweb.org/ Includes ‘a web-based demonstrator for navigating, searching and retrieving 2D images, 3D models and textual metadata from the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The demonstrator combines traditional metadata based searching with 2D and 3D content based searching, and also includes a graphical ontology browser so that users unfamiliar to the museum collection can visualise, understand and explore this rich cultural heritage information space.’ Seamless Flow Programme http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/electronicrecords/seamless_flow/programme.htm See results table for the 2 September 2007 ballot at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML_Ballot_Results Accessed 25 October 2007.
See Adobe Labs Web site http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mars/ Carole Chapman, Leonie Ramondt, Glenn Smiley, ‘Strong community, deep learning: exploring the link’.
In Innovations in Education & Teaching International, Vol 42, No.
3, August 2005.
Outputs are being posted at http://www.epsg.org.uk/KIDMM/mashup2007/outputs.html The KIDMM News e-newsletter can be subscribed to at http://lists.topica.com/lists/KIDMM_news Author Details Conrad Taylor Chair, BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group; Project Officer for the KIDMM project Email: conrad@ideograf.demon.co.uk Web site: http://www.ideography.co.uk Return to top Article Title: “The KIDMM Community’s ‘MetaKnowledge Mash-up’” Author: Conrad Taylor Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/kidmm-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions Buzz data software framework dissemination infrastructure archives metadata digitisation identifier vocabularies schema repositories eprints preservation e-learning ejournal curation mets dspace e-science interoperability foi research standards Citation BibTex RIS Leona Carpenter describes a JISC development programme tackling the organisational and technical challenges facing Higher and Further Education in the UK.
In the early days of the shift from paper-based to digital means of holding administrative records, research data, publications and other academic resources, those responsible for its safety tended to breathe a sigh of relief once they had got a category of material into digital form.
Reduced to bits and bytes, all they would have to do is make regular backups, perhaps keeping a copy off-site in case of disaster, and all would be well.
Increasingly, material of value to Further and Higher Education is produced and held only in digital form.
Increasingly, those with responsibility for the care of this material are becoming aware that sound backup procedures are only the beginning of care.
Physical carriers of digital material deteriorate; digital data can become corrupted; the hardware that reads particular carriers wears out and cannot be replaced when it has become obsolete; file formats become obsolete in the course of software evolution, as backward compatibility is lost over a succession of versions; older versions of software, even when these are available, may not work on new hardware or operating systems.
Valuable digital assets of institutions are at risk of loss, in the medium-term as well as long-term future.
Challenges to preserving access to these assets are (at least) as much related to organisational process, policy and culture issues as to technical issues.
The ways of working that worked in the pre-digital era may not transfer well or easily to a time when a high proportion of the information assets of institutions exist (and indeed are meaningful) only in digital form.
Senior managers with finance responsibilities need support in assessing the costs and benefits of digital preservation.
Institutions need processes in place to support decision making about what material requires active intervention and when.
These decisions must be based not only on selection and retention policies, sometimes related to legal compliance requirements, but also on judgements of levels of risk to material, and on levels of risk from the loss of particular material or classes of material.
These challenges are common across Further and Higher Education institutions, and institutions can benefit from collaboration and sharing of experience in meeting the challenges.
They need support in developing organisational processes and technical systems for digital preservation and access management.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) aims to raise awareness of digital preservation issues across Further and Higher Education institutions, and to set in motion a process of integrating digital preservation and asset management into institutional strategies and operations.
JISC is doing this through a programme of initiatives supporting digital preservation and asset management in institutions.
£700,000 was set aside for this initiative, and proposals for projects were invited through JISC Circular 4/04 in the spring of 2004.
An extremely strong field of proposals was received, so much so that further funding was allocated in order to fund more of the projects than originally planned.
Eleven projects were funded, involving nineteen institutions, including those in Further and Higher Education, archives, and other bodies.
Varying in length from six to twenty-four months, the projects began in late 2004 or early 2005, and all will have been completed by early 2007 at the latest.
The focus of the projects is on providing practical support to institutions in ensuring ongoing availability of and future access to digital information of value to the Further and Higher Education community.
The Projects Three themes for development were set out in the call for proposals.
1st Theme: Institutional Management Support and Collaboration Theme one, institutional management support and collaboration, attracted six successful proposals.
Two of the projects are producing and delivering training, while the other four will provide exemplar strategies for developing institutional digital preservation strategies and business processes underpinning long-term digital preservation or digital asset management.
The aim of the University of Glasgow project, An effective Strategic model for the Preservation and disposal of Institutional Digital Assets (eSPIDA) [1], is to develop and implement a sustainable business-focussed model for digital preservation, as part of a knowledge management agenda in Higher Education institutions.
The model will include the relationships, roles and responsibilities, costs, benefits and risks inherent in institutional digital preservation, building on the experience of the DAEDALUS [2] and Effective Records Management (ERM) [3] projects, and on engagement with a range of stakeholders.
A key to success is the building of trust between those who promote digital preservation and the University's decision makers, such that the latter can judge whether digital preservation is simply a cost, or whether it provides tangible and intangible benefits.
Librarians, archivists, and information technology specialists at Glasgow will be engaged, alongside those with responsibility for business processes and strategic and financial planning.
External expert advisors will be consulted, as well.
The digital assets under consideration are materials related to research inputs and outputs, to institutional record keeping, and, to a lesser extent, teaching materials.
The modelling will be implemented at the University of Glasgow, and this work will provide guidelines and a documented implemented case study for dissemination across the UK Further and Higher Education community.
Lifecycle Information for E-Literature (LIFE) [4] is a project that aims to explore and develop a life cycle approach to costing digital archiving for e-journals.
University College London in partnership with the British Library will investigate financial and other issues around long-term digital archiving, including cost and risk comparisons of preserving a paper and digital copy of the same publication, and of a library in Higher or Further Education undertaking preservation in collaboration with another institution.
The project will attempt to identify the point at which will there be sufficient confidence in the stability and maturity of digital preservation to switch from paper to digital archives for publications available in parallel formats.
Based on a review of the existing state of knowledge, various methodologies will be implemented to provide case studies.
A lifecycle approach takes a long-term view of stewardship of collections, starting at the point of acquisition (whether by creation, deposit or purchase), and defining the relationships between stages of an item's existence over time, identifying the costs of each stage.
The extent to which the costing and risk models used for print format material can be applied to digital format material will be considered.
Although the focus here is on journal articles, it is assumed that the lifecycle approach developed could be applied to other categories of material, such as e-learning objects and the products of digitisation projects.
The findings will be evaluated and validated in the context of an international conference of practitioners.
John Wheatley College (JWC), in partnership with the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) at Strathclyde University and the Scottish Library and Information Council, is undertaking a project focussed on curriculum-related material.
Managing Digital Assets in Tertiary Education (MANDATE) [5] aims to develop a toolkit for digital asset management and preservation.
In this case, the material to be preserved is that created in the development of a new programme of study, and includes learning/teaching materials, assessment materials and procedural documents relating to a comprehensive approval process.
The toolkit will support a college-wide strategy for development and storage of this material.
It will take into account issues of workflow within an OAIS (Open Archival Information System) framework, and the creation, storage, retention, retrieval, and preservation of material.
The requirement for Freedom of Information compliance will be taken into consideration.
Templates and software components to support the course development and approval process will be selected, created or further developed where required, and integrated.
Based on a needs analysis, training will be provided to enable JWC staff to implement the workflow.
The management toolkit, based on a research pilot in JWC, will be tuned to the Further Education environment, but might also have application within Higher Education.
It builds on previous work undertaken by JCW within the JISC Records Management Programme, and will draw on the outcomes of the JISC-funded Metadata Workflow Investigation [6] of metadata creation and management processes within the JISC Information Environment (currently being undertaken by CDLR).
The aim of Managing Risk A Model Business Strategy For Corporate Digital Assets [7] is to address the requirement for a digital asset strategy which combines academic and learning resources and corporate information at King's College London (KCL), and in so doing to provide a case study and model business preservation strategy which will address this common institutional need.
The project will focus on the digital assets of the KCL Registry, Estates, and Facilities and Services divisions, the School of Nursing, and the School of Social Science and Public Policy.
This will result in a strategy that bridges institutional requirements for business continuity and for digital preservation of academic resources.
Examples of the range of material under consideration include records of the training of nurses, and commissioned teaching material for an e-degree in War Studies.
As well as addressing the basic issues of 'who should do what, when and how', the project will evaluate the costs, benefits and risks of using external contractors to manage corporate digital assets and the use of consultants for asset survey work.
This case study will be published during the current academic year.
It will be of value to Further and Higher Education institutions, all of which must manage the risks of losing valuable digital assets through degradation of the physical medium and content corruption, of loss of reputation and income through breaks in business continuity, and of breaches of Data Protection, Freedom of Information and a wide range of equality law through poor coordination of the handling of assets required in respect of legislation.
Oxford University Library Services' METS Awareness Training project [8] aims to raise awareness of the Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard (METS) [9], particularly with regard to its potential usefulness in the context of digital asset management.
METS provides a schema for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata about objects in a digital library.
It is designed not only to meet the needs of an individual digital library, but also to support interoperability across digital libraries.
The project will revise an Oxford Digital Library-developed course, both to update it and to make it relevant beyond the Oxford Digital Library context.
Revision will be followed by the delivery of the course in a series of seminars at six separate locations around the UK.
The course seminars will include a brainstorming session on the possible usefulness of METS in institutions' own digital object management.
Not intended as technical training, the course will provide advice on sources for those who need to know more about METS, and prepare them to pursue further training as needed, for example the two-day METS tutorial workshops which the METS Editorial Board will run.
The training materials developed within the project will be made freely available for use by libraries.
A much more broadly-based training project, the Digital Preservation Training Programme [10] has the backing of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), the Digital Curation Centre and Cornell University.
With this backing, the University of London in partnership with the British Library aims to develop a modular training programme in digital preservation, with class-taught, online and off-line components.
Training will be available to the widest possible audience through this mix of self-paced material, taught components and group exercises.
The project builds on existing training initiative and material exemplars.
These include the Cornell University digital preservation course, the DPC travelling one-day workshop, the Preservation Management of Digital Material Handbook [11], and training from existing JISC-funded services such as the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).
Modules will be provided that are appropriate to meet the requirements of senior managers as well as practitioners and staff who are newcomers in the field of digital preservation.
2nd Theme: Digital Preservation Assessment Tools One project was funded under theme two, digital preservation assessment tools.
The Digital Asset Assessment Tool (DAAT) Project [12], will develop a tool to assess the preservation needs of digital holdings, allowing resources to be focussed on assets where risk of loss and cost of loss is greatest.
The feasibility of building directly on the existing National Preservation Office Preservation Assessment Survey (NPO PAS) methodology and tool will be assessed.
The development is lead by the University of London Computer Centre in partnership with the AHDS, and with piloting, testing and evaluation by the NPO, The National Archives, the British Library and the School of Advanced Study of the University of London, with further input from the DPC and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).
The piloting phase will be followed by revision and then beta testing followed by final revision.
Guidance in its use will be provided when the final version of the tool is made available across the UK FE/HE community.
Release of the DAAT tool will be supported by dissemination and training activities.
The tool will be appropriate for use in a broad range of settings, including archives, libraries, data centres, computer services, and by research groups.
3rd Theme: Institutional Repository Infrastructure Development Institutional repository infrastructure development is the third theme.
There are few UK implementations of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model [13].
In spite of this, the OAIS model is a point of common reference and source of shared vocabulary among those concerned with digital archives, including institutional repositories.
Funded projects will explore implementations of the OAIS model, and also the use of the Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard (METS) in the context of preservation.
Most currently available open source repository software applications do not have long-term digital preservation as a key goal of their design.
In order to facilitate the incorporation of preservation planning and management into repository development, some projects are exploring the integration of preservation functionality in current open source repository software.
Three projects were funded under this theme.
Assessment of UK Data Archive and The National Archives compliance with Open Archival Information System and Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (OAIS/METS) [14] is being carried out by the UK Data Archive (UKDA) at the University of Essex in partnership with The National Archives (TNA).
Both organisations have mapped their systems and metadata to the OAIS Reference Model and METS to test the assumption that both broadly comply with the standards.
Because UKDA and TNA have had responsibilities for digital preservation of material created in electronic form for some years, their systems and procedures were put in place before and during the development of these standards.
The systems and procedures of the two organisations are similar, but there are differences.
The assessment will provide a case study of how such institutions' operational structures can be informed by such standards, and can in turn inform the application of these standards in organisations generally, particularly with regard to their relevance to institutional goals and practical needs.
The project is about to report at time of publication of this article.
The Preservation Eprint Services (PRESERV) Project [15] aims to implement an ingest service, based on the OAIS Reference Model, for archives built using Eprints.org software.
(In OAIS, ingest is the process by which an item is brought in to an OAIS-modelled repository.)
The University of Southampton, with The National Archives, will provide modular tools for metadata capture and file format identification and verification, the latter by linking Eprints through a Web service to PRONOM software.
While these tools will be automated to the extent that this is feasible, it is recognised that fully automated file format recognition requires a higher level of up-to-date coverage and breadth of coverage than is likely to be possible.
For the purposes of evaluation, the ingest service will be integrated into the deposit process of two existing institutional archives, at Southampton and Oxford Universities, subject to prior satisfactory testing on pilot archives.
The British Library and Southampton University will build and test an exemplar OAI-based preservation service using preservation metadata collected using Eprints.org software.
This service could in principle be used with any OAI-compatible preservation archive to create a software-independent preservation archive.
The archives at Southampton and Oxford Universities will be used as the testbed for this service to provide additional distributed archival capability.
In the longer term, this approach could be used to build an OAIS implementation over a network of distributed and cooperating services.
SHERPA Digital Preservation: Creating a Persistent Environment for Institutional Repositories [16] is a project that aims to create a collaborative, shared preservation environment for the SHERPA Project [17] framed around the OAIS Reference Model.
The AHDS with the University of Nottingham will carry out this work, with additional support from the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL).
The JISCand CURL-funded SHERPA project set up open access e-print repositories in twenty partner institutions, and investigated key issues in creating, populating and maintaining e-print collections.
Extending this collaboration into a full preservation service, by bringing together the SHERPA institutional repository systems with the AHDS preservation repository, will remove from each individual institutional repository the burden of adding its own preservation layer.
The project will investigate the business case for this model and seek to establish an economic cost model that could be used to ensure its long-term sustainability.
The technical challenges, metadata requirements, administrative and workflow processes of the preservation environment will be investigated.
The model and working processes that the project will develop and implement are intended to be transferable to other repositories and services.
Cross-theme Project Themes 1 and 3 One cross-theme project was funded, addressing both the institutional management support and collaboration theme and the institutional repository infrastructure development theme.
The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (PARADIGM) Project [18] aims to provide a best-practice template for establishing long-term access to private papers in digital form.
(Initially, this project was named Digital Archival Exemplars for Private Papers.)
As an exemplar, it will enable long-term access to the private papers of at least two contemporary politicians, one Conservative and one Labour.
Project partners are Manchester University and Oxford University, whose libraries have strong archival collections of personal papers.
Oxford administers the Conservative Party Archives, while Manchester administers the papers of the Labour Party on behalf of the People's History Museum.
The strategies developed will be of use to any institution which collects, preserves and maintains access to private papers, and the results of the project will be made available as best-practice guidelines in the form of a workbook.
In addition, the project will report on the experience of testing the application or relevant software such as DSpace or Fedora.
The PARADIGM Project will address issues relating to various content types, organisational problems, and compliance with the Freedom of Information, Data Protection and Intellectual Property legislation, as well as comparing OAIS Reference Model and traditional archival accessioning workflows.
Conclusion This initiative to support digital preservation and asset management in institutions is set within the broader context of the JISC Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme [19].
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [20], launched in November 2004, is a major outcome of that programme.
In addition, a number of studies have been commissioned, including the eScience Curation Report [21].
JISC also supports the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) [22], and actively seeks collaboration with appropriate initiatives and organisations beyond the UK.
An example of the latter is its participation in the Europe-based Task Force Permanent Access.
In the near future, further studies will be commissioned and projects may be funded in the specialist areas of preservation of learning objects, images, and moving images and sound.
Another related programme is the Digital Repositories Programme [23] in which innovative development projects are moving forward with issues in setting up and using repositories.
It brings together people and practices from across various domains, including research, learning, information services, institutional policy, management and administration, and records management.
It aims to ensure coordination in the development of digital repositories, in both their technical and organisational aspects.
Taken together, the projects in this programme and related programmes have the potential to make a significant contribution to embedding within UK Higher and Further Education the digital preservation and asset management processes and the technical and human resources that make these processes possible.
References An effective Strategic model for the Preservation and disposal of Institutional Digital Assets (eSPIDA) http://www.gla.ac.uk/espida/dp.shtml DAEDALUS http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/ Effective Records Management (ERM) http://www.gla.ac.uk/infostrat/ERM/ Lifecycle Information for E-Literature (LIFE) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_life&src=alpha Managing Digital Assets in Tertiary Education (MANDATE) http://www.jwheatley.ac.uk/mandate/ Metadata Workflow Investigation http://mwi.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Managing Risk a model business strategy for corporate digital assets http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_managingrisk&src=alpha METS Awareness Training http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_mets&src=alpha METS Official Web Site http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ Digital Preservation Training Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_dptp&src=alpha Preservation Management of Digital Materials http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/handbook/ Editor's note: see also the article in this issue by Neil Beagrie on the development and use of the handbook entitled Digital Preservation: Best Practice and its Dissemination DAAT (Digital Asset Assessment Tool) http://ahds.ac.uk/about/projects/daat/ Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html Assessment of UK Data Archive and The National Archives compliance with Open Archival Information System and Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (OAIS/METS) http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/home/oaismets.asp Preservation Eprint Services (PRESERV) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_preserv SHERPA Digital Preservation: Creating a persistent environment for institutional repositories http://ahds.ac.uk/about/projects/sherpa-dp/ SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (PARADIGM) http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/ Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_preservation Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Lord, P., and Macdonald, A., "eScience Curation Report: Data curation for e-Science in the UK an audit to establish requirements for future curation and provision", prepared for the JISC Support of Research Committee (JCSR), JISC, 2003 [final report, appendices and summary briefing paper linked from] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_escience Digital Preservation Coalition http://www.dpconline.org/ Digital Repositories Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digital_repositories Author Details Leona Carpenter Programme Manager (Digital Preservation, Shared Services) Development Group Joint Information Systems Committee Email: l.carpenter@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions" Author: Leona Carpenter Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/carpenter/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Research Libraries Engage the Digital World: A US-UK Comparative Examination of Recent History and Future Prospects Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Research Libraries Engage the Digital World: A US-UK Comparative Examination of Recent History and Future Prospects Buzz data software framework database dissemination infrastructure archives digitisation blog repositories preservation multimedia curation e-science e-research authentication research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Clifford Lynch looks at how the emergence of e-research has changed our thinking about the future of research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.
This brief paper explores changing conceptions of digital libraries and how they fit into the broader information flows and information landscapes in Higher Education and beyond.
It includes a few observations comparing how thinking about these questions has evolved within the very different planning, funding and implementation contexts in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The central argument here is that, over the past decade in the Higher Education and research sphere, we have seen several large-scale technological shifts, with all of the accompanying organisational, social and cultural changes, proceeding largely independently the transformations of scholarly practice, of teaching and learning, of scholarly communication, and of 'traditional' research library services.
In particular, the resulting transformation of traditional research library services is not necessarily well matched to the range of needs presented by the other transformations.
The independent and parallel nature of these transformations has led to a great deal of focus on questions that may ultimately be proven to be, at best, poorly posed, and at worst, of little importance; notably 'what is a digital library?
', or 'what do digital libraries have to do with research libraries?'
Backdrop: The Transformation of Scholarship and Teaching I do not have space to detail the enormous changes that are well advanced in the practice of scholarship both in the US and the UK (and indeed worldwide).
But it is important to sketch some of these changes at a high level to provide context for the discussion of libraries, digital libraries and new infrastructure for research and education that is to follow.
To provide a sense of timeframe, while these developments have roots that go back decades, they really emerged in the mid-1990s and gathered tremendous momentum (and really substantial funding) around the turn of the new century.
These changes include the growing reliance on computational resources for modelling, simulation, analysis, and data collection; advanced observational and data capture instrumentation; the use of advanced networks, to access and share data and computational resources and experimental and observational apparatus; collaboration technologies that allow groups of scholars to work together independent of geography, both synchronously and asynchronously; the increased importance of very large datasets and databases both as evidence to support scholarly inquiry and as a means of documenting, structuring and communicating scholarship.
One might think that these are mostly applicable to the sciences and engineering disciplines, and indeed much of the early adoption did come from those sectors -'e-science' was an early shorthand term for these changes in scientific practice.
(Perversely, in the United States, we refer to 'cyber-infrastructure' as the shorthand term, taking about what is needed to support the changes rather than the disciplinary changes themselves, largely as a result of the ground-breaking report of the Atkins committee [1].
The terminology of grid computing is also often used as a shorthand for many of these developments, and in anthologies like [2] or [3] one can find many disciplinary case studies of scientific transformation.
But in more recent years, we refer to e-research or e-scholarship as well, as a way of recognising that these same shifts are rapidly sweeping the social sciences, the humanities and even areas of the arts, and that indeed some of the most creative and transformative applications of information technology and digital content are emerging in these sectors [4].
As the practices of scholarship change, so of course does scholarly communication, which reflects current practices of scholarship.
Thus, we see traditional books and journal articles, for example, being supplemented by a deluge of data, multimedia, computer software, simulations, interactive tools, Web sites, databases, and, continually updated online community information resources of various types.
Teaching and learning has also changed, with the emergence of learning management systems (or virtual learning environments, as they are commonly called in the UK); the commonplace use of not only online courses but 'blended' courses that include both online and face-to-face components; and of course the transfer and adaptation of much of the e-science technology (remote access to equipment, virtual lab benches to perform experiments by simulation, etc).
For a wide-reaching look at these developments from a US perspective, see [5].
The Transformation of the Library and the Invention of Digital Libraries Starting in the early 1990s, research libraries in both the US and UK began seriously to ponder what the growing onslaught of digital data, advanced information technology, and high-performance networking meant for their future.
It is striking to me how differently this future unfolded on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
In the UK, explorations were characterised largely by the eLib Programme [6] and considerations of how the overall system of scholarly publishing and communication might evolve, and the place of libraries in this evolution.
It was also characterised by a much greater emphasis on the deployment of a national system of library services than we found in the US, which I will discuss in the next section.
In the United States, while research libraries also adapted to the modernisation of the traditional scholarly publishing system as it moved to electronic publications, and moved into local digital collection building and digital dissemination roles, they did so much more on an institution by institution basis, sometimes forming statewide or regional consortia, and certainly sharing experiences and evolving best practices, but not as acting as a national system.
In the mid-1990s the US National Science Foundation launched a digital libraries research programme [7].
This involved levels of funding that were very different from the kinds of grants most research libraries were accustomed to; furthermore, these grants were targeted mostly at groups of computer scientists building research prototypes, with libraries (and publishers) typically only peripherally involved, along with social scientists trying to understand how these prototypes were being used.
(To be sure, some of the NSF phase I projects did involve libraries or publishers in more than peripheral ways, but this was the exception, and the culture of the projects was firmly disconnected from the research library community.
Indeed, how could a research library make sense of an information management and retrieval system that was being deliberately designed to be short-term and experimental in nature as anything other than a technology prototype?)
But digital libraries were fashionable, they were well-funded, they generated great interest during the great 'dot-com' bubble, and they were frankly sometimes threatening (and sometimes deliberately used as a way of threatening) research libraries in the US if these libraries were not on the road to becoming digital libraries, they were backwaters, obsolete, 'book museums'; they were in danger of being supplanted or overtaken by commercial competitors.
Much of this was, to be blunt, complete rubbish, at least in the near term, but the development of these information management and retrieval systems that were called 'digital libraries' and the confusion between these and what actual libraries as organisations do, and the systems that they might use to accomplish those missions, gave rise to a major problem in public perception.
In the US during the latter half of the 1990s there was great obsession within the library (and broader Higher Education) communities about how to define a digital library [8] [9] [10] and about how with the present and future forms of research libraries.
As most of the funding for digital library research and particularly for massive prototype projects dried up, and the NSF-lead programmes focused much more on technologies that might be helpful in a wide range of information management and retrieval settings, the character of this debate shifted and became, I think, more constructive.
The focus shifted to questions of how research libraries could more effectively support teaching, learning and scholarship in a changing environment.
By about 2000 the collection of network-based information resources and services supporting Higher Education had become extraordinarily complex, diverse and crowded.
Another aspect of this shift of focus away from the teleology of digital libraries was an interest in understanding these other information resources and services, determining how library-provided resources and services might best interact and interface, and ultimately often trying to determine which functions and purposes might be best assigned to which class of resource or service.
The UK library community was perhaps a bit earlier than the US in explicitly recognising some of these issues, for example with the important 1998 conference on 'Information Landscapes for a Learning Society: Networking and the Future of Libraries 3' [11], but the issues here have received growing attention on both sides of the Atlantic as this information landscape (or information ecology) has continued to grow and diversify.
Today, this includes systems and services such as Learning Management Systems/Virtual Learning Environments, Institutional Repositories, Portals, Digital Libraries, Digital Collections, Digital Asset management system, and various departmental, workgroup and personal systems at the local institutional level, access to similar systems at other Higher Education institutions, plus a range of national and international data archives and more general repositories, specialised research corpora, commercial offerings from publishers, scholarly societies and other, and collaboration environments of all types.
Creating a System of Libraries In UK Higher Education planning and funding for libraries and information technology has a strong centralised element; this has facilitated developments as diverse as Super Janet, national site licensing; national authentication strategies such as Athens [12] ; the implementation of national disciplinary data archives such as the Arts & Humanities Data Service [13], or support services such as the Digital Curation Centre [14].
It has allowed the development of strategies to address the information landscape problem discussed earlier such as the Resource Discovery Network [15] and a system of specialised subject gateways.
I would not want to describe any of these developments as 'easy' I know that they were not, and that in fact they required a great deal of thoughtful crafting and consensus building by the UK Higher Education, library and information technology leadership but from the perspective of an American, it seems such initiatives are 'easily' accomplished in the UK in comparison to the situation in the United States.
The key element in the UK system which is lacking in the United States is a well-established way to move from conceptual thinking to programmes and implementation.
In the United States, with relatively little funding or central planning for Higher Education as a system, it is very hard, complex and time-consuming for the library community to translate intellectual consensus into programmes and from there into deployment and operation.
The typical pattern is a series of individual institutional choices (within the context of sharing of thinking, plans and best practice through various national organisations); perhaps the development of regional consortia or the use of existing ones; or the construction of not-for-profit organisations that can channel and aggregate funding from libraries or Higher Education institutions, such as Internet 2 (properly the University Consortium for Advanced Internet Development [16]), JSTOR [17], ICPSR [18] or OCLC [19].
Research libraries in the US as well as the UK recognise that they are going to need to follow the path of greater interdependence and interreliance, of institutions specialising and offering specialist expertise broadly throughout the Higher Education community, of more common infrastructure, but it is very hard to do within the US framework.
Interestingly, there is considerable organisational and economic innovation going on in this area, much of it involving the design of mediating not-for-profit organisations; both Ithaka [20] and Educause [21] are doing some very sophisticated thinking about these issues.
Infrastructure and Support Needs for the New Educational and Research Enterprise The scholarly literature to say nothing of the broader cultural record that forms part of the essential evidence that underpins future scholarly inquiry is enormous; the systems of publishing and cultural production that create it are large, complex, and diverse.
Neither change quickly.
It is really just in the last few years that research libraries have begun to take effective action national deposit agreements; the JSTOR Portico programme; the Stanford LOCKSS system in order to deal with the transition of the scholarly journal publishing system from printed to electronic editions.
As with so many of the changes libraries face in the digital environment, the solutions involve interdependence, specialisation and service provision; and co-ordinated collective actions; they involve the design of solutions for the system of research libraries.
Similarly, it is just in the past few years that advances in information technology price/performance have reached the point that massive digitisation of the historical scholarly and broader cultural record has become possible, although there are still profound non-technical barriers to such digitisation due to intellectual property issues.
Here again, we see emerging discussions in the US about how libraries might coordinate the digitisation of public domain materials, and national projects in the UK to address major national collections.
Third-party not-for-profit players like JSTOR have emerged to digitise and preserve large swaths of the historical scholarly record on behalf of the higher education community.
We are also seeing the emergence of centralised commercial players, notably Google, in the mass digitisation sphere.
These mass digitisation efforts are too important to the future of scholarship for any research library to ignore, but also too large for any research library to take on independently.
One issue that I predict will move to center stage soon for the higher education community and its libraries: As the historical scholarly and cultural records shift to digital form, the way scholars, commercial companies, and many other groups will make use of them will also change.
We will move from reading first to searching (where technologies and practices are already well established, including internet search engines) and then quickly from searching to much more complex and sophisticated computation text mining, inference, correlation, analysis.
To the extent that this offers results of importance to the research community and particularly to the public help in scientific or medical breakthroughs, for example, there will be growing demand to facilitate it.
(It is no accident that some of the heaviest investment in these technologies for the analysis of literature corpora, both in the public research sector and the private sector, are aimed at the biomedical literature.)
The legal, licensing, and technical problems in supporting this kind of computational use of major literature corpora are immense.
Looking to the future, it is also taken some years to begin to understand how changes in scholarly practice as part of e-research create requirements that go far beyond the modernisation of the traditional scholarly system into questions of data curation and stewardship, for example; or strategies for managing very large and complex software collections over time; or the demand for disciplinary informatics specialists to support faculty research.
This understanding and the underlying requirements are of course still evolving, and indeed will always continue to evolve, but the broad outlines of the new scholarly communication practices seem to be getting clearer.
Perhaps we are at the point now where research libraries, in collaboration with information technologists, scholars and researchers, and others, can move to the next stage in the co-evolution of these institutions and the services they offer.
Perhaps the great mistake that we made during the late 1990s in all of the discussion about digital libraries and the transformation of the research library (presumably into some sort of appropriately defined digital library) was that we were trying to translate artifacts of existing scholarly workflow and social practice into the digital realm rather than starting with an understanding of how the workflows and social practices of research, scholarship, teaching and learning, managing and preserving the scholarly record changed in the digital world, and indeed how we might make them more effective and robust; and only then looking round for the institutions and services necessary to support these new practices.
We started with the question of how the library should change, rather than the question of how the world of scholarship that the research library serves was changing, and what that demanded from libraries.
There is an insightful and important arc of research on the connection of library and information services to the changing demands and practices of research see [10] for one set of perspectives, and some of Lorcan Dempsey's excellent recent thinking about 'networkflows' (a classic Dempsey punning coinage) (see for example, [22]) recently refocusing attention on this in a more pragmatic way .
Interestingly, Dempsey points not just at the intensively-discussed issue of changing practices of scholarship that I've emphasised here, but also at the emergence in the UK and elsewhere, in response to research assessment and funding practices, of 'research support systems' which help to automate support for the administrative workflows imposed on academic departments by these developments.
And there is much more that is relevant: studies about data curation and preservation needs (for example, [23]); studies of faculty informatics needs and practices [24]; studies of disciplinary data sharing, deposit, and reuse norms and practices; studies of changing practices of scholarly authoring (see, for example, the work of Peter Murray-Rust in Chemistry or the work of Ed Ayers and Will Thomas in History); and studies of how institutional repositories are being used (see, for instance [25] [26] [27] to name but a few).
Conclusions So what has happened to the digital library?
At least as I define digital libraries, what happened was that we realised that they are just tools, a bundle of technologies and engineering techniques that find applications in a surprisingly wide range of settings beyond higher education and research.
They are now providing essential services in many areas of commerce and professional practice for example, law (a very early adopter with Westlaw and Lexis), medicine, finance, etc.
Digital libraries also play an essential role in the service offerings from a huge range of government entities.
Interestingly, they do not show up in these settings with all the library context and baggage that made them so confusing in the research libraries setting; there is no expectation of stewardship beyond the point of regulatory requirements or economic viability for content in most of these digital libraries.
Even questions about the broad public access that networked information makes possible is contextual: for public government information, this is an advantage, but many of these systems are designed for closed, high-paying user communities and there is no pretence of democratising access.
One can also ask very good questions about what happens to public libraries in a world more and more infused with information technology and digital connectivity but also, at least in the United States, a world where there is more and more contention for diminishing public funds, where society is getting more competitive and economically stratified and the social safety net is vanishing, leaving a substantial number of people desperately needing access to education, and social services, including information-oriented social services, and relying on the public library to provide these services.
In the United States, I do not think that most public libraries have had an identity crisis over their potential future as digital libraries they do not have the time, being overrun with demand and under-resourced.
(I am in no position to make informed comments on what is happening with public libraries in the UK.)
Or and I would argue that it is getting clearer this is probably a very distinct question one might ask questions about what happens to cultural memory, its creation, its care, and its use in an ever more digital world, and the roles of public libraries and other cultural memory organisations in the future of cultural memory; one might also speculate about the roles that digital library technologies might play in this future.
But these would take us far from the focus here on libraries, and specifically research libraries, embedded within the research and higher education sector.
I mention them here only to suggest to the reader that the history and future outside the research libraries in higher education follows different paths.
As we look at how developments may continue to unfold in the coming years, the defining differences in the US and UK future are not just how research libraries and other parts of the infrastructure supporting research and higher education are funded, and the structural provisions for translating a conceptual consensus into planning and then into funding and implementation within higher education.
Also crucial here are the differences in the dynamics of the strange mix of community, collaboration and competition that characterises relations between and among higher education institutions in a given national context.
Just as the shift to a network-based world has mandated that research libraries function as a coherent system, we will see similar pressures on the overall higher education system over time; but the specifics here will vary greatly across the Atlantic.
We are in the middle of a very large-scale shift.
The nature of that shift is that we are at last building a real linkage between research libraries and the new processes of scholarly communication and scholarly practice, as opposed to just repackaging existing products and services of the traditional scholarly publishing system and the historic research library.
In this shift we have left the debate about digital libraries behind, recognising this now as simply shorthand for just one set of technologies and systems among many that are likely to be important.
Thinking about infrastructure for the practice of scholarship, the conduct of science, teaching and learning, management of the intellectual and cultural record; thinking about workflow or, to use Dempsey's term, 'networkflow' -as all of these activities are increasingly facilitated by the networked information environment: these are the ways forward to understanding the future of research libraries in Higher Education over the next decade.
Acknowledgement A special thanks to Richard Waller for his patience and steady encouragement as I prepared this article, and for his superb editorial help.
References Revolutionizing science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the NSF Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on CyberInfrastructure, January 2003.
Available at http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/toc.jsp The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman (eds.
), Morgan Kauffman, 2004.
Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality, Fran Berman, Geoffrey Fox and Anthony J.G.
Hey (eds.
), John Wiley, 2003.
The Draft Report of the American Council of Learned Societies' Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences (November 5, 2005) Available at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber_report.htm Higher Education in the Digital Age: Technology Issues and Strategies for American Colleges and Universities, James J. Duderstadt, Daniel E. Atkins, Douglas Van Houweling, American Council of Learned Societies, 2002. eLib: The Electronic Libraries Programme: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2 (DLI2) http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/ Phase I of the programme is described at http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/dlione/ From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World, Christine L. Borgman, MIT Press, 2000.
See in particular Chapter 2.
"Digital Libraries and the Problem of Purpose".
D-Lib Magazine, 6 (1), (January 2000), David Levy.
Available at http://www.dlib.org/ Digital Library Use: Social Practice in Design and Evaluation, Ann Peterson Bishop, Nancy A.
Van House and Barbara P. Buttenfield (eds.
), MIT Press, 2003.
Information Landscapes for A Learning Society: Networking and the Future of Libraries 3, Sally Criddle, Lorcan Dempsey and Richard Heseltine, (eds.
), Library Association Press, 1999.
Athens http://www.athens.ac.uk/ Arts & Humanities Data Service http://ahds.ac.uk/ Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ Internet 2 (the University Consortium for Advanced Internet Development) http://www.internet2.edu/ JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/ Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ OCLC Online Computer Library Center http://www.oclc.org/ Ithaka http://www.ithaka.org/ EDUCAUSE http://www.educause.edu/ Lorcan Dempsey's weblog, Networkflows, January 28, 2006, online at http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000933.html Long Lived Digital Data Collections: Enabling Research and Education in the 21st Century: Report of the National Science Board (NSB-05-40, Revised May 23, 2005).
Online at http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/ See the work of Sarah Pritchard and her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, online at http://www.library.ucsb.edu/informatics/ "Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories", D-Lib Magazine 11 (1) (January 2005), Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons, online at http://www.dlib.org/ Gerard van Westrienen and Clifford A. Lynch, "Academic Institutional Repositories: Deployment Status in 13 Nations as of Mid 2005, "D-Lib Magazine 11:9 (September 2005).
Online at http://www.dlib.org/ Clifford A. Lynch and Joan K. Lippincott, "Institutional Repository Deployment in the United States as of Early 2005," D-Lib Magazine 11:9 (September 2005).
Online at http://www.dlib.org/ Author Details Clifford A. Lynch Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information Washington, DC, USA Email: clifford@cni.org Web site: http://www.cni.org/ Return to top Article Title: "Research Libraries Engage the Digital World: A US-UK Comparative Examination of Recent History and Future Prospects" Author: Clifford A. Lynch Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/lynch/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Improving Communications Within JISC through News Aggregation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Improving Communications Within JISC through News Aggregation Buzz data software html database rss xml archives aggregation syndication copac intranet research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Paul Davey explains what JISC is doing to improve communications through more effective news promotion.
Roddy MacLeod and Malcolm Moffat examine the technology EEVL has developed in this area.
JISC currently funds thirty-four services across the UK.
These can be divided into Network Services (e.g.
JANET), Content Services (e.g.
BizEd, BUFVC), Development Services (e.g.
TechWatch, UKOLN), Support Services (e.g.
Regional Support Centres) and Expert Services (e.g.
JISC Legal).
The people and communities that they serve are varied, but what unites them is that, through JISC-funding, they all carry out some function which supports the needs of UK Further and Higher Education and research.
A problem for people working for a JISC Service, for the JISC Executive or indeed for those amongst projects funded by JISC, is one which is faced by any distributed organisation.
The issue relates to effective communication, targeted to ensure that the right people are informed about issues that matter to them.
We detail how a pilot project, called JISCnews Pilot, being undertaken by JISC might provide some solutions to effective internal communication, the cultural steps needed to ensure its success, and some insight into the technology which has been developed to ensure objectives are met.
Starting Point: Audit of the Present Environment In December 2003, JISC created a dedicated Communications and Marketing team.
Concurrently, a more strategic approach to increasing JISC's media profile was initiated.
JISC wanted to demonstrate, even more effectively, how the tactics needed to fulfil this approach required an overlying strategy which would ensure ease of use, a motivated rationale for getting involved, and occasionally the requirement to stand back and blow a trumpet or two.
JISC Services play a vital role in ensuring that the JISC can communicate consistent messages about its activities to the press and key audiences, such as funding councils, government bodies, agencies and staff and students from institutions.
These messages need to be timely, focused and consistent, whether at the local, regional, national or international levels.
Just as importantly, Services should be encouraged to realise how they contribute, as part of a unique, distributed entity, to improving the education experience of over six million people and growing.
JISC invited representatives from its funded services to form a News Working Group, whose main aim was to examine the cultural and technical requirements of pooling news about service activity.
The intention was to encourage services to identify opportunities in running events with other services, targeting the press, ensuring important activities are reported on the JISC and other Web sites and raising the standard of news items and features.
One of the first tasks addressed by the group was to examine what media was presently being used to disseminate news internally (between services) and externally (to audiences served within the community).
The group were looking for a mechanism that brought news together in a simple way, in one place.
Newsletters, JISCmail lists and standard email messages all serve their purpose, but one means of collation that stood out was Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the main advantage of the technology being that items are added, updated and deleted dynamically.
Several of the RDN Hubs use RSS to disseminate news items and have done so for a number of years.
It was by luck that Roddy MacLeod, (EEVL Manager) and his colleagues Malcolm Moffat (EEVL Project Officer) and Geir Granam (EEVL Technical Officer) had already developed software which could aggregate news feeds into one place.
This software is used to deliver EEVL's popular OneStep Industry News [1] and OneStep Jobs [2] services.
There were potentially a number of advantages to adopting an enhanced and further developed version of this technology for the purpose of achieving one of the group's main aims: to bring news items together from various services.
RSS and the JISCnews Aggregator RSS is an XML format which allows the easy sharing of snippets of content.
For more information about RSS, see EEVL's RSS Primer [3].
The snippets themselves normally consist of a headline/title and a brief description.
A hyperlink from the headline/title leads to the full news item, which is often a more detailed press release at another part of the Web site.
Snippets from a source are collectively referred to as a 'feed' or 'news feed'.
Figure 1: A typical RSS news item RSS feeds can be viewed in a number of ways.
Traditionally, the standard method has been through a desktop reader, but it is also possible for them to be viewed via the Web.
In addition, different RSS feeds can be aggregated together on one Web site, and this is what the OneStep Industry News and OneStep Jobs services do.
Whereas a general aggregator such as Bloglines [4] provides Web access to a very large number of RSS feeds on all subjects and from thousands of sources, EEVL's OneStep services concentrate on two particular topics (industry news in engineering, mathematics and computing, and job announcements in the same subject areas) and features only specially selected feeds relevant to those topics.
The RSS feeds being aggregated are produced by a number of different 'sources'.
In the main, these are publishers, or in the case of OneStep Jobs, recruitment agencies.
Visitors to the Web site of the OneStep aggregators can, thus, scan the latest industry news items or job announcements from various top sources; if one or more particular snippet looks of interest, they can easily click through to the full item, and later return to the aggregator to scan for more snippets of interest.
For more information see 'RSS and EEVL: Syndicating industry news and job announcements' in Ariadne 37 [5].
It was this technology which was further developed by EEVL in line with the News Working Group specifications, in order to make it suitable for a JISCnews aggregator featuring feeds produced by various JISC Services.
The JISCnews aggregator therefore allows those with access to the service (currently restricted to staff of JISC, JISC Services and JISC projects) to scan the latest news from those services easily, on one Web site.
Figure 2 : JISC News aggregator displaying all newsfeeds The news item displays, shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3 below, illustrate how the headlines and corresponding descriptions provide fast access to news items.
Services and JISC can quickly monitor what is happening within the JISC community.
The JISC News headline and description about Early English Books Online shown in Figure 3 linked to a more extensive item published on the JISC Web site.
Figure 3: JISCnews Aggregator Linking to full text news item Several enhancements to the fairly basic software behind the original OneStep services were required for the Pilot.
The default display for EEVL's OneStep services intermingles snippets from each source, ensuring that one snippet from one source is followed by another snippet from another source, giving each content provider equal exposure overall.
This was not suitable for the JISCnews service.
Instead, the requirement was for a chronological default display, to ensure that the most recent news items produced by any of the sources (the JISC Services) appeared at the top of the list of items (see Figure 2).
This was also important because in some cases, for example with that of the smaller JISC Services, fresh news items might only be added to a feed on an irregular basis, and without this enhancement the JISCnews aggregator might have given undue prominence to dated news items submitted by other Services.
Enhanced search capability and phrase searching were the next features to be added.
The database behind JISCnews is relatively small (the size varies according to how many snippets are produced by the services, but is unlikely to be more than a couple of hundred items).
As long as this is born in mind, searching can be a useful way to find items of interest.
If a service produces relatively infrequent news snippets, it is possible that their most recent item included in the aggregator might be a few weeks old.
This in itself causes no problems, but to enable retrieval of only the latest snippets, a drop-down filtering option was added which allows retrieval of only those snippets added in the last twenty-four hours, or in the last seven days.
To ensure currency, which is obviously very important for a news service, all RSS feeds are harvested hourly.
As an experiment to see whether it might prove useful in some circumstances, a weekly email accumulation of newly added news items is produced automatically.
This is sent to Paul Davey, who is managing the Pilot (for details of the Pilot see below), and can be forwarded to others within JISC on request.
A further requirement was to enable monitoring of snippets being added to the aggregator and, if necessary, permit their deletion.
This was achieved through the creation of an administration interface, which facilitates not only monitoring, but also allows new RSS feeds to be added and edited.
The JISCnews software has great potential for use by other JISC services, or indeed anyone, either in an intranet, or as a public service aggregating content on a particular topic or resource type, etc.
'RSS: less hype, more action' [6] examines a number of such ideas for RSS aggregation.
The final requirement was therefore to enable the downloading of the JISCnews software and provide instructions for Webmasters who may want to configure it in various ways.
Initially, this software will be made available to JISC Services, but may be released at a later date for public use.
Services Included in the JISCnews Aggregator JISC are encouraging all Services to submit a feed for the aggregator.
At present the following have produced feeds: The Arts and Humanities Data Service (http://www.ahds.ac.uk) The Archaeology Data Service and the Arts and Humanities Data Service Archaeology (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/) Biz/ed (http://www.bized.ac.uk/) British Universities Film Council (http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/software/graphics/BUFC/) MIMAS data centre (http://www.mimas.ac.uk) and services it hosts: Archives Hub (http://www.arhiveshub.ac.uk) CENSUS (http://census.ac.uk/cdu/) COPAC (http://copac.ac.uk) ESDS International (http://www.esds.ac.uk/international/) jstor (http://www.mimas.ac.uk/jstor/) Spatial Data (http://www.mimas.ac.uk/spatial/) Web of Knowledge (http://wok.mimas.ac.uk) ZETOC (http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/) Resource Discovery Network (http://www.rdn.ac.uk/news/) and some representative hubs: EEVL (http://www.eevl.ac.uk) PSIgate (http://www.psigate.ac.uk) BIOME (http://www.biome.ac.uk) Virtual Training Suite (http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/) EDINA data centre (http://www.edina.ac.uk) Cetis (http://www.cetis.ac.uk) JISCmail (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk) OSS Watch (http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk) UKOLN (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/) Production of RSS feeds RSS feeds can be produced in various ways, both manually and automatically.
Online editors exist which can produce an RSS channel simply by filling in an HTML form with no code writing required.
Examples include UKOLN's RSSxpress channel editor [7] which creates RSS 1.0 feeds and the RSS Channel Editor from WebWeference [8] which creates RSS version 0.91 feeds.
Once created, these feeds can be saved locally and uploaded to a Web server for public use.
For feeds which change on a regular basis such manual updating may be cumbersome and it may be more appropriate to generate RSS automatically from a database or content management system.
The EEVL RSS Primer [3] contains background information and case studies illustrating a range of possible mechanisms and tools for automated RSS Production.
Whilst Services can produce RSS channels in any way compatible with the aggregator, they will be encouraged to use UKOLN's RSSxpress [7].
Pilot Study Now the technology is in place and some representative services have registered feeds with the aggregator, JISC will begin a pilot study in October.
This will evaluate the organisational and cultural aspects as well as the technological considerations before the aggregator service is launched in 2005.
Those services that have not already produced feeds will be invited to do so, and will be offered draft guidelines drawn up by the News Working Group.
The Group has already identified a number of early difficulties to be overcome.
Initially pre-pilot, some snippets being aggregated had quite lengthy descriptions.
In some instances, this meant that other snippets might appear 'below the fold'.
Long descriptions are now restricted to the first fifty words with the message "(truncated) click header to see full article."
There were some initial issues with the actual RSS feeds being produced by some services.
RSS has many 'flavours' and although all are based on XML and have general similarities in structure, some feeds could not be read correctly by the aggregator, necessitating the use of an updated XML parser.
Other issues included the content of the feeds themselves.
Paul Miller in a previous Ariadne article, 'Syndicated content: it's more than just some file formats' [9], discusses the ad hoc manner in which RSS feeds are populated with content and suggests some good practice guidelines.
Issues such as the inclusion of HTML markup within feeds and the use of inappropriately sized feed logos necessitated contact with feed providers and resulted in a few small changes.
Another apparent issue identified was that news snippets sometimes hadirrelevant or forgettable headlines and descriptions.
It will take time for services to develop practices that demonstrably make a difference to various perceived audiences and evolve to improve JISC's external profile further.
Services will have the chance to examine how they too can pitch news which is of interest to their audiences, and whether the quality of news is bringing attention from hitherto unrecognised, but influential corners.
The benefit is that more people will find out how JISC and its Services enhance the experience and process of education and research in a large number of ways.
Another issue which the Pilot will seek to evaluate and resolve is how services which incorporate other services, such as MIMAS, which hosts COPAC, ZETOC and others, should manage their news feeds to the best advantage.
Should news be handled by each service component, or by MIMAS as a whole?
Conclusion Distributed organisations and their subsidiaries have their own cultural values and beliefs.
Bringing these together to form a coherent approach to news and PR is a challenge.
These are aspects which the News Working Group cannot expect to change within a short space of time.
It is hoped that the very fact individual services will themselves be able to scan news from other services will provide opportunities for creating greater awareness of the wide range of activities being undertaken.
News being 'brought together' in one place will certainly enable JISC, as it reproduces items on its Web site, to demonstrate what style and focus it is after in terms of raising a broad profile of its activities.
All JISC staff, whether based within services, the executive, or further afield, will benefit from being able to get an interesting and accurate overview of just what is going on in the complex JISC community.
In setting up systems used for collating information from a distributed environment, a degree of mediation must be expected, certainly initially.
JISC will be keen to engage actively with its services to discover what is needed to hone the Pilot to introduce a service which can continue to improve.
References OneStep Industry News http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepnews/ OneStep Jobs http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepjobs/ EEVL's RSS Primer http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/ Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com RSS and EEVL: Syndicating industry news and job announcements, Roddy MacLeod, October 2003, Ariadne Issue 37 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/eevl/ RSS: less hype, more action, Roddy MacLeod, June 2004, Freepint Issue 161 http://www.freepint.com/issues/170604.htm#feature UKOLN's RSSxpress channel editor http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/ RSS Channel Editor from WebReference http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/rssedit.pl 'Syndicated content: it's more than just some file formats', Paul Miller, April 2003, Ariadne Issue 35 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/miller/ Author Details Paul Davey JISC Executive King's College London Email: p.davey@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot Watt University Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/libram/roddy.html Malcolm Moffat EEVL Project Officer Heriot Watt University Email: m.moffat@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Improving Communications within JISC through News Aggregation" Author: Paul Davey, Roddy MacLeod and Malcolm Moffat Publication Date: 30-October-2004  Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/davey/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 45: Smaller Might Be Beautiful Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 45: Smaller Might Be Beautiful Buzz framework portal digitisation blog repositories eprints copyright cataloguing e-learning wsrp research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 45.
While as a fully paid-up cynic I could be forgiven for fingering the metaphorical revolver on sighting a technology evangelist, the evangelist in question has an excellent track record as Ariadne readers will know.
Paul Miller in his article Web 2.0: Building the New Library would seem to lift our eyes above the merely technological and in a series of 'Principles' underpinning Web 2.0 provides us with a set of aims with which relatively few might argue violently on the face of it.
Irrespective of whether Web 2.0 becomes reality or yet another Holy Grail, the debate it has engendered over recent months, centred upon its usefulness to end-users, must be a welcome one.
While cautiously recalling previous false dawns, Paul provides an overview of the potential Web 2.0 represents for us, as a concept at least.
In detailing his principles, Paul indicates, for example, the possible capacity of Web 2.0 to address the demands of the Long Tail which is already beginning to rival traditional market behaviours for the attentions of innovators and entrepreneurs alike.
But it is the potential for what Tim O'Reilly terms an 'architecture of participation' which should interest us, (in particular the cynics).
In an era in which every other politician on the stump bangs on about community values while (sometimes unwittingly) condoning measures which serve only to dilute them, Web 1.0, for all its sins, has fanned, however gently, the embers of community activity.
It has provided a means of communication and information for concerned but increasingly isolated citizens who no longer have the time to operate along the traditional but rusting lines of community activity.
The capacity of Web 2.0 through technologies such as blogging, file sharing, etc.
to empower the ordinary user with more effective means of communication remains to be seen.
But it could bring enormous support and even clout to consumer and pressure groups and those at the grass roots of the democratic process.
If indeed small is beautiful, flexible, re-combinative, disaggregating, modular and sharing, then Web 2.0 might just be beautiful too.
Shifting in to a more technical gear, Chris Awre, Stewart Waller, Jon Allen, Matthew J Dovey, Jon Hunter and Ian Dolphin in their article Putting the Library into the Institution: Using JSR 168 and WSRP to Enable Search within Portal Frameworks nonetheless touch upon one of the elements in the principles behind Web 2.0 mentioned above when they write of institutions bringing information to students and staff.
The approach they mention outperforms the long-held expectation that end-users will continue not only to seek out one's Web site and but also seek access.
The CREE Project has been funded by JISC to investigate how the integration of Internet-based search tools within institutional environments can support the emerging user-oriented approach.
In this companion article to Investigating User Requirements for Searching within Institutional Environments in this month's D-Lib Magazine, the authors describe work undertaken by the CREE Project to enable the presentation of existing search tools within portal frameworks using the JSR 168 and WSRP portlet standards.
Readers new to this area might also wish to read Developing Portal Services and Evaluating How Users Want to Use Them which appeared in Issue 41 of Ariadne.
While no one bats an eyelid these days at the encyclopaedia packages employed by children in their schoolwork and general learning activity, and while few educationalists would argue with the reasoning that says we have many more (and frquently more effective) ways to learn than via the written word, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of learning materials currently available in our airspace are predominantly text-based.
Balviar Notay and Catherine Grout explain how that is set to change and in Looking for More than Text?
they provide an overview of developments in digitisation programmes, online delivery services and specialised search engines which cater for searching and locating still images and time-based media.
They also give a useful survey of developments in content with particular focus on JISC-funded activity and outline the developments forthcoming in the JISC's work with portals in digital visual and sound material.
For those of us particular focusing upon digital image material, I can also do no more than recommend visiting Phil Bradley's column on Search Engines in which he provides results not only of his tests of recently emerged image search engines but also of those engines he surveyed in his column back in 2000.
One of the words on many practitioners' lips these days is 'repositories' and while we may first think of them in the context of purely research materials, we should not forget the work of repositories of learning materials and the contribution they are making to e-learning.
In Online Repositories for Learning Materials: The User Perspective, Amber Thomas and Andrew Rothery explore how online repositories are being used to store and share e-learning content, and show how taking the user perspective might challenge the emerging approaches to repository development, consequently reminding us that nothing should be written in concrete at this juncture.
I am delighted that we have been able to pick up on their work since last year.
Remaining in the context of repositories we welcome back two contributors from the Netherlands, Martin Feijen and Annemiek van der Kuil who precisely a year ago today provided us with a description of the first year of the DARE Project and who now pick up the thread for us again in their article on Special Content Recruitment for Dutch Institutional Repositories.
In this article they describe the Cream of Science Project, a highlight of the DARE Programme, which generated a Web site offering open access to almost 25,000 publications by 207 prominent scholars across the Netherlands.
I am equally pleased to be able to update readers on a project we have tracked for some while and so I am indebted to Morag Greig and William Nixon who write on DAEDALUS: Delivering the Glasgow ePrints Service and provide both the key aims and findings of the DAEDALUS Project and the Glasgow ePrints Service and I feel confident that many readers interested in their work will be particularly drawn to what they write on the issue of advocacy.
At a time when some consider that recent changes in the law have altered the balance of rights away from users in favour of owners, Esther Hoorn tackles one of the perennial problems for many practitioners in her article on Repositories, Copyright and Creative Commons for Scholarly Communication and considers ways in which librarians can support scholars in managing the demands of copyright so as to respond to the needs of scholarly communication.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as the helpful updates in our Regular Columns and reviews on cataloguing and organising digital resources; managing acquisitions in library and information services; and Volume 38 of ARIST.
In addition of course we provide our usual news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 45.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 45: Smaller Might Be Beautiful" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue45/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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New Search Engines in 2006 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines New Search Engines in 2006 Buzz data zip blog video windows ebook privacy algorithm url research Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes a look at some of the search engines that he noticed in 2006 and provides quick assessments.
It’s very easy simply to concentrate on the ‘Big Four’ search engines Ask, Google, Live and Yahoo, while missing out on what is happening elsewhere.
I know that I’m as guilty of that as anyone else and so for this column I thought I would look back over 2006 and see which search engines have come to my attention, what I think of them, and see how well they have actually fared.
This is of course by no means a comprehensive list, and I will inevitably have missed out some but I hope I will have caught the main contenders.
Finally it’s worth emphasising that my comments and opinions are just that mine.
You may well feel completely different and may well love one that I hate or vice versa, so I would encourage you to visit and try out as many of these search engines as you have time for, and make up your own mind as to their value.
Collarity Collarity [1] is a social search engine that combines a variety of different types of functionality to produce results in a new and interesting way.
The basic concept is very straightforward, and is something that we’ve seen before searchers begin to type in their search and as they do a little box pops up suggesting appropriate terms for the search a little like Google Suggest [2] but rather more sophisticated.
I found the approach that Collarity is taking to be very intuitive, and, based on a very small sample of searches, extremely accurate.
The bottom line: it’s worth looking at, most especially if you take the few seconds to register and start to personalise your searches.
Healia Healia [3], described as a personalized consumer health search engine, has a very clear interface (think Google and you’re there).
When you’ve run a search you’re rewarded with a dazzling array of information.
Firstly you are offered similar searches, more general and more specific, with various suggestions.
Worth noting that this is at the top of the results, where you might expect to see the sponsored links (they’re over at the side).
We then get straight into the results, with title, key word in context summary, more from this site, and a link to the cached version.
On some results we’re also offered an ‘Attributes’ function, that details things such as ‘advanced reading’, ‘privacy policy’ or ‘fast loading’.
Down the left hand side there are a number of filters, allowing you to filter the content, and a few of these I’ve never seen before.
There are filters for/about Professionals, Male, Female, Kids, Teens, Seniors, African/Asian/Hispanic/Native heritage, basic/advanced reading, easy to scan, fast loading, for text browsers and interactive tools.
There is also a search history for the last 10 searches that have been run.
But wait, there’s more.
Running a search for a specific drug pops up a little information box (think quick answers and you’ve got the concept) with more data.
I tried ‘aspirin’ and was given information on what it might also be known as, data from MedlinePlus, an image link from Drug Digest, and a quick overview.
Within the results I was given tabbed options for ‘All’, ‘Dosage’, ‘Uses’, and ‘Side effects’.
There’s also a useful ‘help’ option as well something far too many search engines are ignoring these days plus the option of choosing from 3 different font sizes.
Healia was created over a 4-year period under an award from the National Cancer Institute, and while this is obviously a good thing it does allow me to mention my only real criticism of the engine which is the strong US bias to it (as you might already have noticed with one or two of the filters) and this is a real shame.
I’d like to see another set of filters for Geographic content for example, but perhaps I’m just being really greedy at this point.
The bottom line: excellent resource and one that I thoroughly recommend.
Huckabuck Huckabuck [4] is a metasearch interface that takes the words you type into its search box, and queries Google, Yahoo!, and MSN simultaneously to deliver results that are more comprehensive and more relevant than results from a single engine.
You can fine-tune it to give more weighting to one search engine, but if you’re going to do that, why not just use that search engine in the first place?
Bottom line: seems to be a perfectly fine multi-search engine, but with nothing particularly exciting or innovative to recommend it.
Hot Daddy Hot Daddy [5] is another Google ‘all-in-one’ search interface.
This one is slightly different because it also allows you to search Wikipedia, Digg, Creative Commons, IMDb, AltaVista, Wisenut, MSN, Teoma(?)
or Yahoo!
I suppose that can be helpful, but you do need to know what all the little icons mean in order to use it quickly (though a mouseover tells you).
What is odd though is that once you’ve done a search and inspected the results you can’t use your back button to return to the interface.
Bottom line: useful in that it has a lot of options available on the page in an easy-touse format, but the inability to go back to the page quickly renders it close to valueless.
iBoogie iBoogie [6] isn’t bad at all, and it reminds me very much of Clusty, the clustering search engine.
Type in your search as normal and get a bunch of results.
On the lefthand side you can see a really good collection of categories to narrow down your search to something more useful.
There is also the option of adding in your own tabs to include searches on a couple of dozen or so other resources.
Bottom line: worth trying out.
IncyWincy IncyWincy [7] has spidered and indexed 150,000,000 pages so far.
It’s a reasonable search engine, and had found a few things that I’d not come across before, but it doesn’t cluster results, so a test search on my own site turned up a lot of results one after another, which wasn’t helpful.
Bottom line: if you’re looking to search the hidden/invisible/deep Web, this is worth trialling, but be prepared for some very unusual results.
Jatalla Jatalla [8] is a neat idea users rank results.
You get results and vote (sorry, you lexivote) for a result that works for you, and this pushes it up the rankings.
Only… it’s very hard to get anything to work with.
My usual egotistical search for “Phil Bradley” produced no results.
The solution to this problem is to do another search that does pull up results on which you can then vote, making it more likely that your preferred site does come up next time around.
What other searches bring up my name?
“Internet Consultant” usually works well 0 results.
“Internet librarian” 0 results.
“CILIP” (UK version of ALA) 0 results.
“Search Engine Watch” 0 results.
Clearly this approach isn’t working, so let’s just work more broadly BBC gives me 3 results; not exactly a stunning result.
I really dislike being negative, but surely a search engine needs to start somewhere and to be blunt, what’s in it for the users?
I can already get good results, or I can personalise my results, or I can use a search builder to really focus what I’m doing, so where is the value for me in this system?
The bottom line: I think I’ll pass on it and use an engine that gives me some data.
Kahzam Would you like to go back to the early years of the decade and take a peek at what it was like?
Visit Kahzam [9] and do just that it has a very strong ‘early 2000s’ feel to it specifically it reminds me of Yahoo’s home page though I’m not sure why.
Anyway, Kahzam has little to recommend it to users, I’m afraid.
The home page is full of junk, and is very long, with big adverts and horrible little module headline boxes.
To be fair, it does offer options for Web, Images, Audio, Reference, News, Directory and Shopping, but it has precious little else going for it.
What made me laugh was that when I tried to do a search for say, “country search engines” it just stripped the double quotation marks out when it loaded the results page, and a voice in my head kept saying ‘Nope, we don’t like double quotes you’re not having them!’ No advanced search, no help screens it really doesn’t have much to offer.
The bottom line: in the ‘hit/miss/maybe’ stakes, this is a definite miss, I’m sorry to say.
Kosmix Kosmix [10] comes in several flavours of vertical search health, video games, finance, travel, US politics and automobiles.
I checked out the health version, and results are available in two formats ‘classic search’ and ‘smart search’.
The latter appeared more useful (funny that), and displayed data in a more helpful style, with links into news items, basic information, support groups, natural remedies, professional content and specific patients.
There was a strong US bias, with the option of finding a local hospital via zip code, and links to top US hospitals.
The results were clear, easy to read on the screen, with no distracting advertising, and fairly intuitive.
Each vertical engine, while working in the same way, was obviously tailored for the specific subject area, and so the video games engine offered results in categories such as news, hints, reviews, media and what other users were saying.
I did however notice advertising in the games and automobiles engines.
The bottom line: worth taking a peek if you have an interest in one of its areas of subject coverage, although I would be surprised if it were to replace your current preferred option.
Mojeek Mojeek [11] comes in two flavours, a .com and a .co.uk versions.
Results for the British version appear in a rather unusual manner rather than the usual listing down the page, each hit is displayed in its own little box on the screen in a two-column grid, with alternative grey/white backgrounds.
I have to say that I found it very confusing, and it was really difficult to make any kind of sense of what I was seeing on the screen.
At the top of the screen were two further boxes, one giving information on the search result (scope, approximate matches and so on) and related news stories, which on the searches that I ran appeared wholly unconnected with the subject of the search.
The global version looks much more like we normally expect with search page results.
Interestingly there were options to change the ranking method, although they were labelled as ‘one’ and ‘two’ the ranking did change, but unfortunately it wasn’t obvious (at least to me) as to what algorithm had been used to effect the change, and no indication on the site of how I could find out either.
Other interesting things about the search engine were no adverts of any sort and the opportunity to create your own personalised search engine.
Unfortunately though this was somewhat spoiled by the fact that you had to contact them directly if you wanted to set this up, and if the designers are hoping to make a success of this search engine that is something that they need to fix really quickly, since there are plenty of other search builders out there now.
The bottom line: not particularly interesting and of very limited value or appeal.
Opsdo Opsdo [12] is a multi-search engine providing access to over 70 different search engines.
Results are displayed on a search engine by search engine basis in a series of small windows, allowing users to move easily from one set of results to another.
The search engine makes use of lots of icons and is quite confusing; I found it really hard to navigate my way around it.
However, it’s worth using if you want to try some different search engines.
The bottom line: Give Opsdo a try if you have some time available to experiment with it, but be prepared to persevere.
Quintura Quintura [13] is the latest in the line of visual search engines such as Kartoo [14, Mooter [15] and WebBrain [16].
Quintura basically takes your search term, runs a search and then translates the results into a tag cloud effect on the screen.
Users can then simply look at the results (powered by Yahoo) listed under the tag cloud and click on the link as per normal, or they can explore words displayed in the semantic map to focus the query more closely.
After the search runs the search terms appear on the screen and are surrounded with other hopefully appropriate terms.
My search on ‘search engine watch’ for example returned keyword suggestions such as ‘blog’, ‘forum’, ‘search engines’ and so on.
The closer to the search terms, the larger the keyword suggestions (both in terms of font size and bold), the more relevant they are deemed.
Holding the mouse over a term note that you don’t need to click will display a new set of results in the bottom window and will also show another keyword cloud overlaying the original, which does get a little confusing at times, and it’s quite hard to work out exactly what you’re searching on.
The bottom line: it’s an interesting approach to search, and users who enjoy different approaches to the display of search results will enjoy using it.
Scandoo Scandoo [17] is an interesting search engine.
It’s a bolt on interface to Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.
Type your search as normal, and you then get taken to the results page from that engine.
However, what Scandoo then does is to flag each result with a ggreen tick, red cross or orange question mark to indicate the trustworthiness of the sites in the results.
I did a couple of quick searches it clearly indicated that my site was ok for my ‘phil bradley’ search, but gave a red cross against the porn sites for my namesake.
I also tried a search for ‘gay’ and it again correctly identified good informative sites as well as the porn stuff.
However, other searches did manage to fool it rather more easily, so it’s not a replacement for common sense.
The bottom line: it’s a good idea, but still keep your wits about you.
SearchMedica SearchMedica [18] is a search engine that has been specifically designed for GPs (General Practitioners or Doctors) to use.
The search interface screen is clean and clear, giving searchers the opportunity to search for their subject limited to medical sites as chosen by doctors, NHS (National Health Service) sites, or the entire web.
Once a search has been run the searcher has the option of running it a second time, with the option of further limiting to various sub categories such as evidence, patient information, guidelines or reference.
There is also an option to limit results to the UK only.
There is a very neat and tidy option to narrow or broaden a search clicking on the link slides out various suggested approaches.
The main results are presented in the usual fashion; numbered, with the title, brief summary with keyword in context and link to the site/page.
The bottom line: quite simply it’s excellent and will become a firm favourite, and not only with medical professionals.
Search Stomper!
SearchStomper [19] styles itself ‘The lean mean searchin’ machine’.
Straightforward choice of websites, images, videos, news, products and local links.
Results give some images (regardless of asking for them) first, then the ads, then the data, with thumbnails in most cases.
I didn’t find the results particularly impressive, and it missed out on a lot of sites that I’m expecting to see with my test searches.
The bottom line: less of a stomp, more of a tiptoe.
WebFetch WebFetch [20] is another multi search engine, searching Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Kelkoo ‘and more’.
It’s reasonably good, though I prefer eZ2find [21] myself.
To be fair, it has further options for searching images, audio, video, news, business and people.
There’s also a ‘Are you looking for’ sidebar, plus a recent searches box, a maps option, weather, horoscope and latest news links.
The bottom line: multi-search engines are ten a penny and this one really doesn’t have anything outstanding to offer.
WebWobot I’m mentioning WebWobot [22] for the sake of completeness really, and because it was brought to my attention.
It is a very basic engine using Google ads for revenue.
It can do a global search as well as just within the UK, but there’s nothing yet to particularly recommend it, I’m afraid.
Perhaps it’ll improve with more functionality in a few months.
However, since it’s already had 4 months and I can’t see anything having changed, I’m not too optimistic.
The bottom line: I really can’t see any value to it at all.
Whonu This is an interesting search engine Whonu (which I guess should be read as ‘Who knew?’) [23] It’s basically a meta-/multi-search engine of sorts.
Input the search terms that you want, and it’ll produce a bunch of links for you to click on and these will then take you to the appropriate search engine and run the search.
Engines included are MSN, Ask, Clusty, Google, Yahoo (and Google/Yahoo images and video).
You can focus your search by choosing one of the icons under the search box to limit your search to people, place, thing, health, word, history, question and so on.
While it doesn’t collate the answers for you, the way that most engines do, it does provide some clever short cuts for you to use.
The interface is unfortunately very complicated though, and I think it’s going to discourage the vast majority of users right from the very beginning.
Bottom line: worth fighting with the interface for a while because it can bring back useful data that you’d find difficult to obtain elsewhere.
WordIQ WordIQ [24] is an interesting search engine.
It’s really good for words you can search for definitions, e-books, reference, articles, the Web and dreams (i.e.
as in their interpretation).
WordIQ worked reasonably well, although some of the links to the actual articles it found just took me back to the home page, which was a bit of a shame.
Not bad if you’re looking for words and want a bunch of resources all together in one place.
The bottom line: a very nice niche search engine and worth adding to your bookmarks for just that moment when you need to know all about a particular word.
Yurnet Yurnet [25] is a nice simple-to-use search engine.
Clean and crisp front page, with two boxes one for the search term and one above it for the type of search you prefer.
It has various options, such as Google versus Yahoo!
and Google versus MSN (with results from both engines appearing as frames on the same screen).
It also provides other options, pulled from various search engines, such as blog search, images, person, school/college, library, Web site and so on.
It’s a nice fast way to search.
Bottom line: try it out you may very well like it.
Zepti Zepti Search the Web [26] or not, as the case may be.
I’m only mentioning this one because I try to mention all the search engines that I discover.
Zepti appears to be an index/directory type of affair, but the options available are a bit strange ‘bodyart’ gets the same prominence as ‘medicine’, for example.
The search option seems only to search their (small) collection of resources, and has next to no value I’m afraid.
Bottom line: Don’t even waste your time going there.
Zoo Zoo [27] is a search engine designed for children.
Actually, it’s not particularly designed for children at all, other than having the funky backdrop to the page, and the use of a simple font.
What they really mean is that they’ve provided access to a subset of data from Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia, with news from ABC, Fox and Yahoo.
I can’t say it really does much to attract me.
All Zoo has done is impose a blanket block on certain search terms in certain situations, as my own test searches demonstrated.
For example, the term ‘sex’ is totally blocked.
As is ‘tits’.
So much for youngsters who want to do research into biology and bird-watching.
I accept that was a cheap shot at the search engine, but just because a searcher happens to be a child it does not mean, per se, that he or she is not going to have serious queries.
Completely blocking the use of certain terms is a cheap and unjustifiable measure.
All that will happen is that children will shrug their shoulders and move to a search engine that will provide the information that they want.
Blocking children’s legitimate searches in this manner just isn’t going to work.
Moreover, the engine is not even consistent in this apparent policy: the search functionality is only limited to banning sexual terms, so I could still do searches for ethnically derogative terms for example, without any difficulty.
A further and major source of irritation is that some of the results are ‘sponsored’.
I have no problem whatsoever with search engines trying to make money far from it.
However, this really is not the way to do it, because you receive the title of the page, a bit of description and then ‘Sponsored by: <name of sponsor>‘ instead of a URL.
As a result it’s not always possible to see exactly where I’m going when I click on the link.
The bottom line: I really cannot see the point of this search engine at all; I certainly wouldn’t recommend it in a school situation!
Conclusions As you might expect from a sample of search engines based entirely on chronology, it’s rather a mixed bag.
Everyone will have their own particular favourites and ones that make them shudder, and they’ll probably be different to mine.
Of all of them however, the ones that stand out for me are Healia, because it’s so flexible and has a interesting variety of options that I haven’t seen elsewhere; and Collarity, which, though flawed in places, is very clever.
References Collarity http://www.collarity.com/ Google Suggest http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en Healia http://www.healia.com/healia/en/index.jsp?
Huckabuck http://huckabuck.com/ Daddy http://www.hotdaddy.com/ iBoogie http://www.iboogie.com/ IncyWincy http://www.incywincy.com/ https://jatalla.com/beta/ Kahzam http://www.kahzam.com/ Kosmix http://www.kosmix.com/ Mojeek http://www.mojeek.com | http://www.mojeek.co.uk Opsdo http://www.opsdo.com/ Quintura http://www.quintura.com/ Kartoo http://www.kartoo.com/ Mooter http://www.mooter.com/ WebBrain http://www.webbrain.com/ Scandoo http://www.scandoo.com/ SearchMedica http://www.searchmedica.co.uk/ SearchStomper http://www.searchstomper.com/ WebFetch http://www.webfetch.com/ eZ2find http://www.ez2find.net/ WebWobot http://www.webwobot.com/ Whonu http://www.whonu.com/ WordIQ http://www.wordiq.com/ Yurnet http://ww2.yurnet.com:8080/ Zepti http://www.zepti.org/ Zoo http://www.zoo.com/ Author Details Phil Bradley Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: “Search Engines: New Search Engines in 2006” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Wiki Or Won't He?
A Tale of Public Sector Wikis Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wiki Or Won't He?
A Tale of Public Sector Wikis Buzz data software wiki database wireless rss archives metadata standardisation tagging blog repositories copyright preservation cataloguing syndication e-learning eportfolio podcast moodle wikimania licence authentication interoperability intranet url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy revisits a topic receiving considerable attention these days and reflects on wiki use by public organisations.
In February of this year an article was published by Steven Andrew Mathieson in Guardian Unlimited on public sector wikis [1].
Mathieson proclaimed the rise in creation and use of wikis by UK state sector organisations.
This article will look objectively at this apparent rise and will consider whether wikimania has truly hit the public sector.
Setting the Scene In the Web 2.0 world those of us working with the Web now live, there is an increasing awareness of changing audiences and expectations.
The digital natives are growing up, packing up their winter woollies, laptops and iPods and heading on down to University.
Some have even stepped onto the career ladder.
The Web 2.0 attitude of scalability, remixing, participation and collective intelligence has already hit the mainstream.
It seems the public sector needs to move with the times.
With the Web 2.0 label comes a range of ‘new’ technologies to be exploited.
Few can fail to have heard mention of RSS, blogs, podcasts and wikis.
However the public sector still has limited resources, existing expectations to manage, funders to keep happy and users to support.
The question is can the public sector find the balance between adopting these new technologies and offering the quality service it is required to provide?
Is it already walking this tricky tightrope?
So what is a wiki?
Ward Cunningham (the originator of the wiki way back in 1994 [2]) originally described them as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.
For those less interested in their technical architecture, a wiki is, quite simply, a Web site that allows users to add and edit content as a group.
The key characteristics of a wiki are actually few in number.
They function in two complementary states.
Firstly a read state, where they play the role of a normal Web site and can be read by any user; and secondly an edit state which consists of Web space that can be freely and easily written to or edited by anybody (allowing for collaborative writing).
They use a simple markup language (wikitext or wikisyntax) for the editing of these pages.
Many offer a choice between user logins or an open site and most wikis now provide users with the ability to compare previous versions of a page and revert back and track who has edited a page.
Some wikis also allow users to discuss issues prior to making changes.
Wikis are both organic, in that they evolve naturally over time, and incremental, in that they can grow bigger, fast.
For a more in-depth definition, refer to Emma Tonkin’s January 2005 Ariadne article Making the Case for a Wiki [3].
The popularity of wikis has increased in the last few years with the rise of social software and building of communities.
Right now we are experiencing an exciting time in wiki history with wiki software being available by the dozen (e.g.
Mediawiki, Twiki, Kwiki, Moin Moin, Instiki, Confluence, SeedWiki) and a new wiki community being created every day.
We have even seen a rise in wiki indexes and search engines (wiki Index [4], Switch wiki, wikisearch, Qwika) and sites comparing wiki functionality (wikimatrix).
This new culture of collaboration alongside the creation of successful wikis like wikipedia [5], wikitravel [6] and more recently Ganfyd [7], a medical wiki, has started talk of ‘wikimania’.
But what of the public sector wiki?
Is it thriving, as Mathieson’s article suggests, or is there still a way to go?
Public Sector Wikis: Not Very Public?
A quick search on Google for public sector wikis brings back a lot of hits but very little actual activity.
Although the US is currently much further ahead of the UK when it comes to use of wikis, it does not take long to realise that interesting and notable collaboratively created wikis are still few and far between on either side of the Atlantic.
Admittedly there may be much more wiki action buried down the Internet haystack in access-restricted sites, but the idea that every man and his dog has a wiki just does not seem to ring true.
A few examples of the more worthy public sector wikis openly available are given below.
Voluntary and Government Wikis Dowire.org [8], is a wiki tied in with the DoWire Web site, a primary source for important developments concerning the convergence of democracy and the Internet around the world.
The wiki is essentially a one-man shop run by Steven Clift, a researcher based in Minneapolis.
Bristol wireless [9] on the other hand is a co-operative set up to develop a free-to-access broadband intranet using radio to communities around Bristol, UK, that find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide.
The project is supported by the NHS and charitable organisations but is primarily led by volunteers.
Flu wiki [10], is a national online resource created to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic; once again it is not government-led but was set up by local citizens.
The e-innovations [11] wiki, originally cited in Mathieson’s aforementioned article, was created to house discussion and debate around innovation in local government in areas such as improving the quality of services, delivering efficiency, joined-up working and community engagement.
The site is government-led but not particularly well used and low on edits.
There is as yet no sign of a number of the other government wikis mentioned by Mathieson, unless they are being used internally only.
For example, the wiki proposed for fire authority staff by the local government partnership IdeA (Improvement and Development Agency) [12] has not yet surfaced.
Recently the plug was pulled on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) wiki, David Miliband’s project.
The suspension of postings was attributed to malicious editing problems.
Other government departments also seem reluctant to put a toe in the wiki water.
The NHS has still to establish an external wiki, despite many rumours.
It seems necessary to reiterate that it is difficult to know what is going on behind closed doors and wikis may be being used internally or are currently ‘under development’, but at the moment the ‘out there’ number seems low.
Library Wikis Library and Information Science has been one of the first public sector areas to adopt wikis for a range of uses including staff development.
In the United States libraries are slowly beginning to experiment with wikis and use them in different practical and interesting ways.
In time the UK could easily follow suit (more on this later); however there are few UK libraries currently using wikis externally.
Some examples of well-used sites in the States include Ohio University Libraries Biz wiki [13], State University of New York Library wiki [14] and St. Joseph County Subject Guides [15].
Another valuable resource is Library Success [16], a best practice wiki for librarians, created by Meredith Farkas, Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University, Vermont.
It is a one-stop-shop for ideas and information for librarians, whether public, academic or specialist.
LIS wiki [17] is a similar resource and was established to give the library community a chance to explore the usefulness of wikis.
It is not intended to replace or detract from the wikipedia library and information science articles but to exist as a ‘niche encyclopedia’ covering library-related issues.
In the UK, a fledgling site set up by Kara Jones, a librarian at the University of Bath Library and Learning Centre, is the library podcast group [18].
The wiki is being used as the collective memory for the library’s podcasting experiences.
Kara explains that the wiki is being trialled as a way to move on from using emails.
“We do send emails but it’s easy to forget how you got from decision A to decision B with emails, they don’t give an overall picture in one place whereas the wiki allows you to follow a train of thought all on one page…whenever I browse the site I realise how far we’ve come with our tasks.
It’s also easy to set up, and looks quite professional.“ Higher and Further Education Wikis Although there are examples of wikis being used as part of learning and teaching courses, once again education sector wikis are few on the ground.
The OSS Watch wiki [19] has now been running for almost a year and is for everyone interested in open source in Higher and Further education in the UK.
The Moin Moin wiki they use works well as an area for discussion among the core OSSwatch team but although well read it has only a few external contributors, but has still been an important community building tool.
The DigiRepwiki [20] is intended for all those working on the JISC Digital Repositories Programme and other experts in the field of Digital Repositories.
The wiki is maintained by the Digital Repositories Support team at UKOLN and CETIS and again although it is well used it has not had a huge amount of input from the community.
A number of universities have begun looking at wiki software for use as an information source and for e-learning.
One useful idea tried out by Manchester University is the wikispectus [21], an alternative prospectus.
A wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities using the same MediaWiki software) of known university wikis [22] is also worth visiting, but currently covers some countries, such as Germany, much better than others.
Other useful wikis aimed at the education sector include Meatballwiki [23], a community of active practitioners striving to teach each other how to organise people using online tools, and Wikiversity [24], a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.
Wikiversity is a multi-dimensional social organisation dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service.
Both services have built up an established community of users.
Striving for Success One example of a truly successful public service wiki is the BBC’s h2g2 25.
The site, like wikipedia, covers many general topics and has enjoyed considerable take-up by the BBC Web site users.
No doubt it is h2g2’s very general nature that grants it such a large audience.
This brief look at the relatively small number of public sector wikis that are easily accessible raises two questions: Are they actually successful and being used?
Are they just corporate views on a subject or are they collaborative efforts?
Success, like impact, is a very difficult entity to measure.
Does a wiki have to have many contributors to make it a success or does having a group of interested readers count?
One could argue that success should be measured by an object’s ability to do the job it was intended for (hints of Quality Assurance here?).
If this is the case, then collaboration is at times only a by-product.
As part of a recent dialogue held on the Web4Lib list 27 attempting to establish if practices are emerging in terms of the use of wikis in libraries, Tom Keays, Science and Technology Librarian at Syracuse University, made the following comment: “Something that has been bothering me about this discussion is a sort of creeping assumption that for a wiki to considered successful, then everybody who uses it has to also be an author.
Where is this actually the case?
On regular websites?
On user-contributed product review sections of shopping sites?
On this listserv or any other listserv?
The actual case seems to be that the majority of people read the content of all of these examples and benefit (or not) from reading them, but few of them are authors.
So why insist that wikis are unsuccessful if only a small percentage of people learn the syntax and write content?” Discussion lists themselves offer a good example of a service that centres on participation but equally has benefits for those who read but never post, and even for those who stumble upon the archives by accident.
Discussion aside, the potential uses of wikis are many.
They can be easy to use, great for collaborative work and have many useful features such as versioning control.
Yet, if it is the case that only a few public sector organisations are using them, what is the underlying explanation?
Barriers to Wiki Use Technical Barriers The actual physical setting up of a wiki is fairly straightforward.
Once a decision is made to use a wiki for a particular task, the first step would be to think about what software to use and whether to go for an open source or commercial solution.
Given the number of good-quality free and open source products out on the market, it would seem a shame to take another approach.
The software would then need to be loaded locally on to the organisation’s Web server.
At this point it would be useful to agree on details (such as permission levels, licences, URL etc.)
Once the basics have been decided, a core group would need to take on the responsibility of creating the basic structure.
This would include customising areas, setting up templates, adding extensions and features.
When the site is ‘established’ it would need to be populated with some core documentation (such as help and editing information), and content.
It always makes sense to have some copy on your site already before you release it to the Web.
There is nothing so discouraging to potential contributors as an empty wiki.
Once the site is ready publicise it (initially to a small group), train and coach users and let it evolve.
Hey presto!
It all sounds so easy.
However there are underlying issues that are more complex than the physical establishment of a wiki.
Firstly there still remains the danger of never-ending experimentation or the ‘perpetual beta’.
The war of wiki software has yet to be won and although your organisation may be currently committed to a system, it is quite possible that at some point it will find itself migrating from this system to another.
Though doing so is not necessarily as much trouble as it sounds; in the future it is likely that there will be greater consensus and wider interoperability between systems.
However pledging allegiance to a particular software product, especially when the dust has yet to settle, is always difficult with new technologies.
Any potential instigators will need to balance the challenges of improving functionality through new software against the benefits to users from its adoption.
Another obstacle to use is that non-technical users who want to take the initiative on creation of a wiki will usually need to do so through their systems team.
Sometimes pushing a new technology that has yet to demonstrate its worth conclusively can be difficult.
Without the systems team on side, would-be users may find themselves side-tracked and never make the leap.
Then there remains the fact that many people are not completely technically savvy and are still daunted by the prospect of using a tool that they are not even sure if they are pronouncing correctly!
Although some wikis offer WYSIWYG capabilities, most will require creators to learn, at the very least, the rudiments of a particular wikitext.
The wiki concept has still a way to go before it reaches the consciousness of the ‘not so technical’.
Cultural Barriers When creating a wiki within an organisation there are likely to be a number of organisational concerns that may need to be taken into account.
Wikis give users the freedom to move away from the usual design, protocols and habits that a standard Web site imposes.
The leaders in some organisations may feel threatened by this freedom and some aspects of wiki usage may go against the organisation’s acceptable use policy.
Wikis, by their very nature, provide a collective view and this may not always represent an unbiased perspective.
External users may ask whose opinion is it anyway?
And an organisation may need to say ‘not ours’.
Such issues may have more prominence in larger hierarchical organisations with more ‘chiefs and indians’ rather than those with a flatter structure, or a virtual community.
There is definite value in an agreed policy on usage, as is probably the case for any outward-facing technology.
Organisations may also worry about accountability and liability regarding copyright and IPR issues.
Most wikis tackle copyright by using liberal licences such as public domain, copyleft and community copyright.
Many also explain where they stand regarding copyright explicitly on the wiki in a policy section.
As with any new organisational tool there are also the usual resource issues, where will the staff training time come from?
What about the extra technical support time required?
What about the time taken for content moderation?
What about organisational buy-in?
If internal staff are not on-side then how can a wiki even progress beyond the idea stage?
One barrier to operation currently producing considerable debate is possible vandalism.
Established wikis, like Wikipedia, have suffered severely at the hands of vandals; the most prominent case to date being journalist John Seigenthaler’s entry in Wikipedia.
One user edited the entry to claim Seigenthaler was connected with the Kennedy assassination [28], an allegation that Seigenthaler obviously took very seriously [29].
Those responsible for setting up a wiki will need to consider how they will deal with mischief-makers, be they human or electronic (sent by spambots).
Possible solutions are having moderators on hand and community policing or ‘soft security’ (allowing the community to weed out trouble-makers).
It also makes sense to set up guidelines for usage or allow users to alert moderators to inappropriate posts.
By using the roll back functionality most wikis could trace comments back to people and revert back to a previous state, but by this time the damage may already be done.
But as the Educause introductory leaflet on wikis points out: “while the potential for mischief exists, wikis can be surprisingly robust, open-ended, collaborative group sites.” [30] The element of community works well and also assists in the establishment of wiki etiquette: encouraging users to remain civil, credit work, keep on topic and edit rather than delete.
Other possible hindrances to the creation and take-up of a wiki include hesitations over consideration of preservation issues (how do we archive constantly changing ephemera?
), worries about sustainability and the lack of metadata for pages, poor mark-up standardisation and issues with the quality of information on the wiki (is it out of date, are the wrong words being used, does it translate, is it readable?).
These are all matters for another article but all need to be weighed up alongside the go ahead on a new technology.
However the biggest barrier of all is getting people to use a wiki.
In her Ariadne article Emma Tonkin quoted a colleague as saying ‘there’s nothing sadder than tumbleweed blowing through an abandoned messageboard’.
This tumbleweed syndrome is a valid fear for those establishing a wiki; and will be the reality of many.
The notion of ownership remains so deeply embedded in our society that many users still find it difficult to change things on another person’s Web site.
We are so used to the idea of Web sites as entities that are controlled by their creators that challenging this control is unnatural.
Neither is contributing online a common habit for most.
The 1% rule suggests that for every 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will ‘interact’ with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it [31].
Many will want to contribute but feel too self-conscious or are unsure of exactly how they can contribute.
It was also suggested in the aforementioned Ariadne article that correcting a wiki page requires aggression.
Does your community have that aggression?
People may be looking at your wiki, but stopping it from becoming an unmaintained storehouse of out-of-date information will remain the biggest challenge.
How can you encourage participation, be it internal or external?
This said a wiki still goes a long way to breaking down the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality that authored Web sites create.
Although participation levels on wikis remain low, any wiki lowers the barriers to participation because you can edit the site if you want to with relative ease.
An option not offered by any traditional Web site.
Wiki Case Studies At this point it might be useful to consider two case studies: Interoperability Focus Community Wiki In May 2006 UKOLN set up the Interoperability Focus Community wiki using Mediawiki, UKOLN’s current wiki of choice, as an experimental service.
A content management system (CMS) wiki was requested as part of the feedback from the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005 32 and it was acknowledged that a knowledge base and discussion place would be useful.
Prior to the creation of the site a wiki peer group was established for feedback on areas like licence, registration details, basic structure etc.
After much deliberation a dual licence was decided on (CC and GNU FDL) and the pilot site was rolled out for use at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 and used as an event tool.
[33] The wiki remains very much a pilot site and it is hoped that lessons learnt from the use of the site will support the creation of a more permanent resource intended for Institutional Web Management Community in 2007.
So what have been the main successes of the wiki?
At this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop the wiki was used extensively for small group working (parallel session groups) as a collaboration tool.
This worked well because the site was open access and all changes to text were immediate and visible.
The Intranet discussion area of the site has also seen considerable interest.
However, possibly due to lack of promotion, and having no stated champion, the CMS discussion attracted relatively little interest.
Use of the pilot wiki has been helpful in considering a specification for a long-term site.
One of the key changes to be made will be a branding change and name change to tie the wiki in more closely with the Institutional Web Management Community (and related events).
There also needs to be more space given to discussion, further promotion and adding in some Web 2.0 ideas, such as syndication, tagging, etc.
There have been many useful lessons learnt from the Interoperability Focus Community Wiki experience.
These include ensuring you choose the right features and thinking about access/version control and the ease of use in advance.
Also make sure you and your community are ready to try out a new way of thinking.
The most useful lesson has been that wikis need three people to give them a long and healthy life: a midwife, a champion and a minder!
Hard work if you have only a small amount of one person’s time available.
WebDevWiki One internal wiki that is used locally here at the University of Bath is the WebDevWiki.
Installed in December 2005 by the Bath University Computing Service the project has been a great success.
Phil Wilson, Web Developer, who worked on the establishment of the wiki explains: “I was new to the team and there were a lot of different discussions going on about a lot of different projects, and the team was spread throughout a number of rooms so it was very easy to miss part of the conversation or lose track of what was going on and none of it was ever documented.
Every now and again someone would create a Word document and put it in a shared network drive, but this only happened on exceedingly rare occasions and as a result, no one ever checked it, and it was impossible to find out automatically when changes were made.
I’d rolled out a wiki at my last place of work and so I knew what kind of improvements it could make to knowledge sharing and collaboration, and so set up a team wiki to see if it would be useful here.
It was, and we now have hundreds of pages detailing everything we’ve done, how we did it and what we’re planning to do.
The wiki’s main aim is to make sure that everyone in the team is aware of everything that is going on, and provide a degree of transparency to the rest of the department, anyone in the department can read and edit our team wiki.
We get questions left about certain policies and directions, which we’re then able to consider and answer.
It’s being used exactly as intended, which is really great.
As well as documenting official team activity we also have several pages which just document things that might be interesting to others, code snippets and project wishlists.
We had no way of easily sharing this information before.
Apart from the meeting its main aim of better documentation and knowledge sharing, the biggest success has been that other teams in the department have seen how the wiki works and how we use it, and we have since rolled out four other team wikis, which are used with varying degrees of success.
The biggest failure is based on the success, which has caused users to make requests for other wikis to be rolled out.
We have rolled out separate wikis with separate authentication procedures and have thus created ourselves a maintenance and scalability problem.
We hope to address this in the near future by rolling out a wiki-farm system, which can host any number of wikis with minimal administrative overhead.
In particular I have learned two lessons: 1) The success of a team wiki is dependent on someone within that team really championing its cause and ensuring that the information on it is valuable to the rest of the team.
Without at least one person making sure it gets used then no one will ever look at it.
2) Do it!
There was a little scepticism when we started out, about pages getting out of date, becoming unmaintained and so on, but it turns out that there’s very little data we use which really needs updating all that often and we’ve really benefitted by getting everything else in a central location.
Unless you try, you’ll never know!” The Potential of Wikis for the Public Sector This article has intimated that take up of wikis in the public sector is still slow.
However this does not mean that things will not change, and fairly rapidly at that!
There are two key areas worth watching: e-learning and libraries.
Wiki Uses for Libraries Meredith Farkas, the founder of Library Success [17], has written extensively on the use of wikis by the LIS community and has said, “The possibilities for what libraries can do with wikis are endless.
At their least, they are spaces for quick and easy collaborative work.
At their best, they can become true community resources that can position the library as a an online hub of their local community.” A number of ways in which libraries are starting to use wikis have already been mentioned, but the true potential for library wikis lies in getting the community on board.
A library wiki could have an area for book reviews, comments and a suggestion box.
It could try out community-led frequently asked questions (FAQs) or commonly asked questions in either reference or general library, or community-driven subject guides.
Users could create their own local history repositories or personal story stores.
Wikis could also be used for library project work, input for research work, course collaboration and e-portfolios.
There is also great scope for tying together the catalogue and the wiki and supporting annotation of the catalogue.
OCLC is currently working on putting wiki functionality into Open WorldCat [34], so that people can add reviews to book entries.
More has been written on how the LIS community can take things further in Jane Klobas’ recent book Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration.
[35] Wiki Uses for Learning With the take-off of collaborative learning, the second area that holds great potential for wikis is e-learning.
Much of the current pedagogical thinking advocates active learning and asserts that learning itself is inherently social.
With this in mind, much more use could be made of wikis in the education arena; because they support sharing and collaboration, wikis are great for group project work and peer-to-peer activities.
They can allow students to create conference style presentations, work on specific activities and are good for reflection on written work (critical assessment and peer review), contextualising, etc.
The discussion page functionality can encourage debate of topics.
They also allow the creation of shared repositories of resources and shared reading lists.
One important aspect of wikis is that they allot ownership by handing it to the user.
This said, there can be tensions when using wikis; for example between the individual and the group, between the people creating the wiki and those using it and between the teachers and the learners, partly due to the loss of control mentioned earlier.
Many of these tensions have already been looked into in more detail in the wider e-learning world and by various learning environment providers.
The open source course management system Moodle hosts a number of colloquiums dedicated to discussing technology and pedagogy.
[36] One interesting article that reports on a teacher’s attempt to use a wiki in the classroom is My Brilliant Failure: Wikis In Classrooms [37] by Heather James.
James realises that to really get a wiki to work as a learning tool, “the participants need to be in control of the content you have to give it over fully.” She concludes that when using a new technology like a wiki, time and access are important factors and that it is important to reconstruct our concept of schools.
Ultimately she felt that for her experiment to have worked, it would have been better for students to “identify the blanks themselves” and for her to have let go of the reins.
It seems that the old e-learning problem of changing social norms and practices applies just as much to wikis.
Another institution that has trialled wikis in the classroom is Deakin University [38], Australia, where a wiki was used in the form of icebreaker exercise for students to complete.
Their positive experience shows the potential of truly involving students.
Matt Barton [39], assistant professor of English at St.
Cloud State University in Minnesota, consistently uses wikis on his courses.
He feels that the wiki ideology is in line with creative writing teaching ideology: “I believe that writing should be approached with the same sort of playful creativity with which hackers approach programming.
After all, language is a sort of “code” made up of various parts and routines that we assemble together to speak, write, or even think.” Wikis have great applicability to the e-learning environment but there are serious pedagogical implications and many hurdles to jump.
For a start, many teachers and lecturers need to become more comfortable with the actual wiki technology, many might feel that it is just another obstruction to letting them do some ‘real teaching’ rather than seeing it as a tool to be used.
A recent book entitled Using Wikis in Education [40] considers these issues further.
It was actually written in a wiki and is available online for users to edit.
Conclusions This article has surmised that there is still little use of wikis among public sector organisations and suggested some barriers as to why this is the case.
However there is little doubt that wikis hold great promise for the public sector and if registrations to the UKOLN Wiki Workshop 41 are any indication, then it is clear that general interest in wikis is continuing to grow.
However global adoption at present remains the other side of a chasm.
Geoffrey Moore, in his 1991 book of the same name, talked of how Crossing the Chasm needed to be the primary focus for those pushing any new technology.
Most new technologies initially get taken on board by a few visionary people, later on they move to the mainstream market dominated by a large group of people who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation.
The chasm marks the gap between these two points.
For wikis to make this leap, in the public sector, there needs to be a significant number of success stories.
So what is the key to a successful wiki?
We’ve established that success is not written in stone, but one factor that significantly influences adoption is community.
As Clay Shirky puts it “A wiki in the hands of a healthy community works.
A wiki in the hands of an indifferent community fails.” [42] Before you even begin to develop a wiki you need to know your audience and think about whether this is what they want.
Are they a group who can and will converse?
The likelihood is that if they cannot converse offline then they probably will not online.
As the guiding force behind a wiki you need to support the group and encourage accountability and group cohesion, you need to expand your community’s involvement.
You should have strategies for encouraging contributors, such as offering a service to check contributions from newbies and supporting those unsure of etiquette.
Building a community takes time.
It is important to make sure people understand why it makes sense to share, and to provide them with an environment that makes it easy for them to do so.
Nonetheless, remember that just because a wiki allows anyone the ability to take part in the creation and editing of Web content it does not mean everyone will.
While community is a significant contributor, a wiki also needs flexibility to fulfil its promise.
A successful wiki needs to be dynamic and reactive, changing appropriately to fit users’ needs.
It may well take an implementation (or two) to get it right but you need to be patient.
At this relatively early stage in the game for wikis it probably makes sense for us to avoid ‘pigeon-holing’ the wikis that are emerging (“it’s for collaboration”, “it’s to get people involved”) and just allowing them to develop organically.
In the aforementioned Web4Lib discussion [27] KG Schneider suggests that there is “room for employing a technology when you aren’t entirely sure what the benefits are… Every deployment has its elements of a gamble.
You can be confident something will be a big hit, and it fizzles.
Something that seems like a fad turns out to become central to your services.
Or you install a product to do X but it turns out to be only OK for X but surprisingly fabulous for Y and Z, which you had not at all considered in advance.” While we may not all have the time or money to experiment, it is important to recognise that the line between ‘fad’ and ‘something we can no longer do without’ is relatively indistinct and highly dependent on the culture in which we work.
Given the current level of development and innovation in this area, it would be fair to conclude that a flexible and pragmatic approach is most likely to inform effectively any strategy for adoption of a wiki; and that flexibility must also comprehend the uses to which its intended community puts it, uses which it may take a little time to identify.
References Public sector catches wikimania, Guardian Unlimited, 22 February, 2006 http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1714618,00.html wikiwikiWeb http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki Emma Tonkin “Making the case for a Wiki”, Ariadne issue 42, January 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tonkin/ wiki Index http://www.wikiindex.com wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/ wikitravel http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page Ganfyd http://ganfyd.org/ DoWire’s E-Democracy Best Practices wiki http://dowire.org/wiki/Main_Page Bristol Wireless wiki http://www.bristolwireless.net/wiki/ Fluwiki http://www.fluwikie.com/ e-innovations wiki http://e-innovations.jot.com/wikiHome IDeA http://www.idea-knowledge.gov.uk/i Ohio University Libraries Biz wiki http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/bizwiki/index.php/Main_Page SUNYLA New Tech wiki http://sunylanewtechwiki.pbwiki.com/ SJCPL’s Subject Guides http://sjcpl.lib.in.us/subjectguides/index.php/Main_Page Library Success http://www.libsuccess.org/ LIS wiki http://liswiki.org/wiki/ Library Podcast Group, Bath Uni (University of Bath) http://bathlibpod.wetpaint.com/ OSS Watch wiki http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/FrontPage JISC Digital Repository wiki: JISC Digital Repository wiki: JISC Digital Repository wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/ Manchester wikispectus http://www.umsu.manchester.ac.uk/wikispectus/ University wikia http://universitywikinodewiki.wikia.com/wiki/University-wikis Meatball wiki http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?Meatballwiki wikiversity http://en.wikiversity.org BBC hg2g http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy BBC Web site http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/ Initial Web4Lib post: Wikis in libraries http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/web4lib/2006-October/041865.html It’s online, but is it true?
USA Today, 6 June 2006 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2005-12-06-wikipedia-truth_x.htm John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy 7 Things You Should Know About wikis, Educause Learning Initiative http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7004.pdf What is the 1% rule?
Charles Arthur, Guardian Unlimited, 20 July, 2006 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1823959,00.html Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Whose Web Is It Anyway?
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/ Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006: Quality Matters Wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/community/index/IWMW2006 wiki WorldCat (wikiD) Pilot http://www.oclc.org/productworks/wcwiki.htm Klobas, J.
(2006) Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration, Chandos Publishing Oxford Ltd., ISBN 1843341786 http://www.booki.info/display/website/Home Moodle technology and pedagogy discussion groups http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=44 My Brilliant Failure: wikis In Classrooms Kairosnews 21 May 2004 http://kairosnews.org/node/3794 Naomi Augar, Ruth Raitman and Wanlei Zhou, Teaching and learning online with wikis, proceedings from ASCILITE 2004 Proceedings Contents http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/augar.html Matt Barton Twikiwiki http://www.mattbarton.net/ Using Wiki in Education: Case Studies from the Classroom, Editor Stewart Mader, 2008. http://www.lulu.com/content/2175253 Exploiting the Potential of Wikis: UKOLN Workshop http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/wiki-workshop-2006/ Clay Shirky, Wikis, Grafitti, and Process, August 2003 http://many.corante.com/20030801.shtml#50187 Author Details Marieke Guy Interoperability Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Return to top Article Title: “Wiki or Won’t He?
A Tale of Public Sector Wikis” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/guy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 44: One Day We All Learn the Hard Way Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 44: One Day We All Learn the Hard Way Buzz data mobile framework infrastructure archives firefox accessibility blog cataloguing e-learning licence wcag research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 44.
Having opined elsewhere in this august organ that it would not be my policy to produce themed issues, I suppose I had better put my hand up at least to accumulating a majority of main articles which address the theme of accessibility from various and interesting perspectives.
Having argued on the grounds that Ariadne issues which concentrate unduly on one topic inevitably leave a lot of readers feeling excluded, I can see that that the majority of readers who do not live with significant visual, physical or other impairments will feel hurt and almost certainly betrayed.
Those who do: might be forgiven for thinking "That makes a change."
So how do I answer the charge of at least inconsistency?
As an avid listener to In Touch [1] (and BBC Radio 4 in general) and as a very minor contributor to UKOLN's work on Revealweb, the issues raised and activity described in all these articles do, to my mind, really affect the majority of the readership.
Whether directly affected by living with a disability or seeking as part of our professional activity to increase access to resources, electronic or otherwise, few of us are in any position to disregard the information and opinions they contain.
I for one am still learning and need to do more.
Moreover there comes a time when we all have to learn the hard way literally.
Much has been accomplished in improving provision, not least, in my span of experience, the widening realisation that much more can and should be achieved.
Nowhere more so than in the fields of digital information and electronic resources.
It is against such a broad horizon that Kevin Carey, Director of humanITy, looks at Accessibility: The Current Situation and New Directions for our benefit, based on his considerable experience and authority.
Despite the broad scope of his discussion, covering as he does digital information systems across broadcasting, telecommunications and the Internet, the conclusions he draws eschew the traditional approach while being very down-to-earth and highly practical.
Indeed as he states quite starkly, "None of these proposed solutions are science fiction they are all available now" and we ignore them at our collective peril.
So Ariadne 44 contains a variety of approaches to the topic of accessibility including the very practical as exemplified by the above-mentioned Revealweb.
My colleague Ann Chapman, in her article Revealing All, describes how the project has provided some very useful solutions to people with visual impairments here in the UK.
Ann has been involved with Revealweb for some time now but her enthusiasm has never waned for the way Revealweb has promoted readers with visual impairments from second-class citizens in the information world to people with 24/7 access to this Web-based union catalogue of resources in accessible formats.
This catalogue, the first of its kind in this country, has made an enormous difference to its users, as described in Ann's section on impact.
Consequently it is all the more a source of considerable concern, despite official and community praise for this project, that its financial and thus long-term security is currently in doubt.
Another practical take on accessibility is provided by Patrick Lauke who has been Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox .
In his Get Tooled Up article, which comes as a most welcome sequel to his contribution in issue 42, he gives us a very useful tour d'horizon of the potential of a Web Developer Toolbar extension.
Patrick addresses a raft of issues featured in the W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and shows how developers can evaluate their work with increased confidence.
Patrick has not been alone in his work of assessment as Marcus Weisen, Helen Petrie, Neil King and Fraser Hamilton describe a comprehensive audit commissioned by MLA in Web Accessibility Revealed: The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Audit .
This audit is notable for the degree to and manner in which users with a wide range of disablities were involved in the evaluation of the Web sites assessed.
The authors provide a wealth of statistical information and analysis of Web site features that cause unnecessary difficulty.
Another project which equally prizes the opinions of users in its work is described by Jenny Craven and Mikael Snaprud in Involving Users in the Development of a Web Accessibility Tool.
Their description of the European Internet Accessibility Observatory Project provides an EU perspective on improving accessibility for the European citizen and explains the goal of producing a collection of Web accessibility metrics and associated tools.
Almost inevitably any discussion of accessibility runs the risk of flirting with the 'standards' word; Lawrie Phipps, Neil Witt and Brian Kelly consider the WAI guidelines in the context of e-learning and float the suggestion of some movement Towards a Pragmatic Framework for Accessible e-Learning.
In their article they put the relationship between guidelines, standards and the encompassing legislation under examination and suggest a more pragmatic approach.
The tiny majority with no interest whatsoever in accessibility issues are more than compensated by the rest of the issue.
Paul Gerhardt, Co-director of the Creative Archive at the BBC provides us with his authoratative view of the potential for radical change that the Archive represents.
What he describes as a 'small act' of the launch of the Creative Archive Licence could completely change the landscape of broadcasting and media creation in general.
Michael Fraser has contributed an overview of Virtual Research Environments and provides information on those JISC-funded projects in which his institution of Oxford University is involved.
He gives a current definition, always welcome, of a VRE and considers its relationship to the existing research infrastructure.
Michael draws conclusions in his article of inevitable interest to any institution engaged in research.
I am most grateful to Paul Trafford who has written interesting thoughts on the relationship of mobile blogs for personal reflection to institutional learning environments.
He bases his contribution on his work with The RAMBLE Project.
This article will prove a useful addition to our reading on current developments in blogs, not least for its consideration of blogs in an institutional learning context and for its recognition of the advent of mobile devices within the new generation of students.
I am equally indebted to Luis Martinez and Stuart Macdonald whose article on Supporting Local Data Users in the UK Academic Community provides readers with less experience in the field with an overview of the evolution of data gathering and local data support in the UK academic community.
Readers with greater experience in this area will be interested in their views on how this area is likely to develop.
Local data support will inevitably be affected by developments in Web and telecommunications technologies, and in the field of educational technology as a whole.
The authors invite us to consider in the light of those developments a range of issues, each of which would merit a lengthy panel discussion for the professionals in this domain.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as the helpful updates in our Regular Columns and reviews on works involving library Web content management, the academic library, disaster management for libraries and archives and the importance of partnerships in the modern academic library.
In addition, of course, we provide our expanded section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 44.
References In Touch, BBC Radio 4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/intouch.shtml Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 44: One Day We All Learn the Hard Way" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Hyper Clumps, Mini Clumps and National Catalogues: Resource Discovery for the 21st Century Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hyper Clumps, Mini Clumps and National Catalogues: Resource Discovery for the 21st Century Buzz data software java metadata schema video cataloguing z39.50 aggregation copac rslp marc21 srw ftp interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS John Gilby reports on a one-day conference about resource discovery, held at the British Library Conference Centre, London in November.
Introduction Keynote Speech: The Concept of a ‘National Catalogue’ Jean Sykes Interoperability: Architectures and Connections John Gilby & Ashley Sanders Making Sense of Hybrid Union Catalogues: Collection Landscaping in Complex Information Environments Gordon Dunsire Interoperability: The Performance of Institutional Catalogues Fraser Nicolaides & George Macgregor User Behaviour in Large-scale Resource Discovery Contexts Dick Hartley Futures and Plenary Question & Answer Session Jean Sykes & Bob Sharpe Conclusion Introduction The JISC-funded Copac/Clumps Continuing Cooperation (CC-interop) Project completed its work during 2004 and this event was planned to disseminate the key findings of the project.
The day was chaired by Bob Sharpe, Director of ILS, University of Plymouth, Member of the JISC Integrated Information Environment Committee and Chair of the project Steering Group.
Bob put the day in context by explaining that CC-interop had its background in the eLib Phase 3 Programme [1] and the Copac service [2].
The Large Scale Resource Discovery strand of eLib consisted of four distributed union catalogues or clumps, three of which were regional and have shown good sustainability by continuing beyond the project stage, now being live subscription-funded services.
Copac gives free access to the online catalogues of major UK research libraries and is a JISC-funded service based at MIMAS.
At the end of the eLib programme, a gap was identified within the JISC development activities and the CC-interop partners were invited by the (then) JISC Committee for the Information Environment to submit a free-standing bid.
This was successful and the project ran from May 2002 to April 2004.
Project partners were the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) based at Strathclyde and responsible for the CAIRNS Clump [3], the Copac Team based at MIMAS and the M25 Systems Team based at the LSE and responsible for the InforM25 service [4].
Staff with responsibilities for the RIDING service were initially partners also.
Bob noted that the project was not part of a specific JISC programme which was unusual, but filled an important niche.
The project was split into three work packages: A: looking at technical and semantic interoperability B: investigating collection description schemas C: analysing user behaviour in large scale resource discovery contexts The aim of the conference was threefold: to allow the project staff to report their findings to consider resource discovery issues to share and openly discuss possible ways forward Presentations Keynote Speech: The Concept of a ‘National Catalogue’ Jean Sykes, Librarian and Director of Information Services at the LSE and Project Director, delivered the keynote speech on the ‘concept of a “national catalogue”’.
She began her presentation with a reminder of the UK National Union Catalogue (UKNUC) Feasibility Study that took place in 2000-2001.
Included in the ‘Final Report’ [5] were recommendations that a National Catalogue (as it is now referred to) should have its foundation in a physical union catalogue consisting of Copac (including the British Library) and additional important research collections.
A further recommendation was that the architecture should be flexible to include distributed catalogues as technology improved and developed.
Jean indicated that a national serials catalogue was strongly recommended and this was now taking place with the Serials Union Catalogue (SUNCAT) Project [6] being developed by EDINA in partnership with Ex Libris and funded by JISC and RSLP (Research Support Libraries Programme).
Support for a National Catalogue of printed material was also indicated in the Research Support Libraries Group (RSLG) recommendations [7].
The final impetus for further research into the technology that might be utilised in the architecture for a National Catalogue came from a report looking back at the eLib Phase 3 Programme [8].
This recommended that ‘Further research and development work should be carried out on Z39.50’.
Jean summed up her presentation by stating that the overall aims of the project were to see how feasible it was to interlink distributed and physical catalogues, to identify technical and organisation issues to be addressed in a National Catalogue, and to inform the future development of such a service.
Interoperability: Architectures and Connections Following a break, John Gilby, M25 Systems Team, LSE and Ashley Sanders, Copac Team, MIMAS, began the first of a series of four sessions looking at specific outcomes of the project.
John began by reminding the audience of how the Z39.50 protocol operates using a client/server relationship and its popularity in the search and retrieval of bibliographic records.
This was followed by a brief overview of Copac and a typical distributed catalogue service, comparing and contrasting the differing technical architectures and amount of control over the searching process and subsequent results presentation to the user.
Difficulties for both architectures can arise with the variable quality of institutional catalogue records, a theme that was mentioned throughout the day.
John then introduced the concept of Z39.50 to Z39.50 middleware, probably best illustrated by a slide from his presentation: Figure 1: Z39.50 to Z39.50 Middleware Z-Z middleware is a piece of software that ‘sits’ in the communication train between a Z-client and the distributed institutional Z-servers.
It has to act as a Z-server (to what is referred to as the remote user Z-client) and as a Z-client (to the institutional Z-servers).
It accepts and then distributes Z39.50 messages, forwarding user queries to the institutional Z-servers and then it needs to create an aggregated response from the Z-servers to send back to the user.
CC-interop used the JAFER [9] software to implement Z-Z middleware for further testing and this was installed by the Copac Team at MIMAS.
A copy of the Copac Z-client was set up as the user interface, and the middleware configured to connect to a number of M25 library Z-servers.
Ashley began his part of the presentation by successfully demonstrating a live search using the JAFER software, proving that the Z-Z middleware architecture does work and that distributed catalogues can be accessible to external users and services via Z39.50.
Library system Z-servers interpret incoming queries in different ways which can affect the search results.
Middleware can be configured to transform the original query into a form more suitable for the individually connected Z-servers.
This can increase the chance of a successful search but does remove an element of user control of the query.
Z-Z middleware makes it easier to connect to multiple Z-servers, as the user only needs to know how to connect to the middleware.
Staff supporting the middleware maintain the query transformations and individual Z-server connections, and would be well placed to solve any problems that arise.
Ashley then went on to describe the methods used to monitor Z39.50 response times using the JAFER middleware.
An hourly Author search was carried out for a three-month period and the time for the institutional Z-servers to respond was logged.
Responses varied broadly with library system type but over 90% of responses were received in under 2 seconds and some in under 0.125 seconds.
It was noticeable that, generally, slower responses occurred overnight and that some of the fastest were during the late morning/afternoon period when institutional OPACs experience heavy usage.
Ashley concluded by reminding the audience that Z-Z middleware was a potential architecture for the distributed elements of a National Catalogue, enabling clumps to be ‘plugged into’ an information environment.
There is interest from the eLib clump services (and others) in the potential implementation of JAFER for their services which would go some way to building part of the JISC Information Environment or National Catalogue.
Making Sense of Hybrid Union Catalogues: Collection Landscaping in Complex Information Environments Gordon Dunsire, Depute Director, CDLR, Strathclyde, described how metadata for the same copy of an item might be offered within multiple catalogues in the same information environment; for example, a record might appear in Copac, in a clump and also be harvested in one or more catalogues, and complexity arises due to this duplication, leading to confusing and inefficient results for the user.
The JISC functional model of the Information Environment advocates the use of Collection Level Description (CLD) to create user-defined ‘landscapes’ for resource discovery.
For CC-interop, the Scottish Collections Network (SCONE) [10] was used as a test-bed to investigate some of the issues involved in landscaping an environment of hybrid union catalogues.
SCONE was found to be a suitable test-bed, as close scrutiny of SCONE and other popular CLD schemas in use in the UK, including RSLP and DC, showed a high degree of compatibility.
CLDs were also examined to see if it was possible to map or describe Copac, InforM25 and RIDING metadata with the SCONE schema.
The concept of ‘functional granularity’ (the level of aggregation described in CLDs deemed useful for resource discovery or collection management) was found to be a key tool allowing a collection to be defined on the basis of its metadata aggregations.
CLDs based on union catalogues can be related hierarchically to existing CLDs based on contributors’ own (local) collections.
Thus the ‘landscape’ can be simplified by only including the ‘closest’ most appropriate metadata aggregation matching the user’s definition.
This requires the metadata aggregators to contribute union catalogue information to CLD services, and the services themselves to ensure collection hierarchies are maintained.
Gordon concluded that further research could be undertaken in defining metadata aggregation parameters and in developing tools for more flexible landscaping of differing information environments.
Interoperability: The Performance of Institutional Catalogues Another ‘double act’, Fraser Nicolaides, M25 Systems Team, LSE and George Macgregor, Researcher, CDLR, Strathclyde, looked in more detail of what was going on in libraries, in particular with cataloguing practices and Z-server behaviour.
Fraser began by reporting on the outcomes of a study that looked at the relative performance of institutional Z-servers and Copac, focussing on non-system architecture issues (semantic interoperability).
Searches were conducted against Copac and six CURL libraries using Z39.50.
Four consistent differences in performance were identified: the currency of data within a physical union catalogue the availability of records that describe electronic resources the definition and processing of searches the cataloguing and indexing policies and practices at the individual institution The latter two differences merited further consideration.
There still exist considerable variations between all of the systems tested in their support for Bib-1 attributes [11] to the extent that there was difficulty in finding attribute combinations that were shared by all of the tested systems.
Exacerbating these difficulties was Z-server default behaviour where query attributes were ignored or replaced due to their being unsupported.
The solution to these difficulties is the vendor support of a common suite of Bib-1 attribute combinations such as the Bath Profile [12].
There is a noticeable vendor reluctance to support Bath for a variety of reasons and also customer ignorance of the profile and the areas and levels of the profile relevant to them.
Fraser concluded his part of the session by talking about the bibliographical completeness of catalogue records and the indexing policies that effectively determine how those records are accessed.
Physical union catalogues, such as Copac, have a distinct advantage over distributed systems in that records can be cumulatively enriched by records from the contributing institutions.
Institutional indexing policies determine which record fields are indexed and to which (Z39.50) access points or Bib-1 Use attributes these indexes are mapped.
Libraries which wish to participate effectively in distributed catalogues must detail to their system vendor the measure of semantic interoperability they require for their Z-server.
Variations in cataloguing and indexing policies are often the product of historical and local requirements and it is arguable whether these policies should, or indeed, could be challenged.
George raised the question of what could be done to improve system interoperability through coordination of cataloguing and indexing policies.
As part of the eLib-funded CAIRNS Project, a Catalogue Issues Working Group was set up and this body continues to meet regularly.
The key output from the group was a set of guidelines for cataloguing and indexing in Scotland.
These have been successful with a number of institutions changing their policies and practices to fit better with non-local information environments.
CC-interop sought to build on the CAIRNS guidelines and to that end, held workshops that were attended by SCURL, CURL, M25 and Scottish FE cataloguers.
At the workshops there was a strong consensus that prescriptive guidelines were essential to assist with interoperability and that libraries need to ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’.
One recommendation was that the Bath Profile should be developed to encompass the scope and content of specified indexes, for example to enable standard mappings from MARC21 fields to Z39.50 access points.
It was also proposed to produce guidelines on required Bath conformance for any given service, on the premise that reducing choice in consortia would benefit interoperability.
User Behaviour in Large-scale Resource Discovery Contexts Dick Hartley, Head of Information and Communications, Manchester Metropolitan University and representing the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) began the final project outcomes presentation by giving full credit to his colleague, Helen Booth (CERLIM) who had carried out a lot of the tasks involved in data gathering, analysis and reporting.
CERLIM was sub-contracted by the CC-interop Project to study user behaviour in searching both physical and distributed union catalogues.
The full report [13] is available on the project Web site and contains full details of the methodology used for data gathering and analysis.
Some of the key findings noted in Dick’s presentation are detailed below.
Searchers use a wide range of search criteria The term ‘union catalogue’ was mostly unknown system providers take terminology for granted and there was confusion with terminology used on the services Performance and ease of mastering the services is gauged by other Web tools, typically Google but also Amazon Duplicate records within results are not liked and most searchers are unwilling to plough through large result sets.
(Arguably the opposite can be true with Google where searchers seem less concerned about duplicates and large result sets) Many expected a fast response time and some abandoned searches as they were perceived as slow Librarians were well aware of different union catalogues but had reservations with both architectures Librarians felt that Serials union catalogues are the most important and after this, rare books and regional catalogues.
There is clearly a demand for union catalogues (as Copac usage data shows) and this demand could be higher if there was greater awareness of the existence of the services.
The design of these services needs to take into account the user expectations, such as simple interface, speedy response and not losing the user.
Comments indicate that the current investment in SUNCAT appears to be the correct decision.
Futures and Plenary Question & Answer Session Jean Sykes and Bob Sharpe each gave short presentations to start off the final session of the day.
Jean commented that the project was the only known investigation of interoperability between physical and distributed union catalogues and that as far as the partners were aware, the first project to investigate user behaviour (when searching union catalogues) through observation.
Jean then summarised the various outcomes of the project and suggested areas where further research could take place.
Bob began by looking at what were the big issues from the project.
He suggested that semantic interoperability and user behaviour in federated searching are issues that should be taken further.
Technical interoperability, not only with Z39.50 but with Search/Retrieve Web Service (SRW) also, needs to move forward.
He related the outcomes of the CC-interop Project to the work he had been involved with in the JISC Development Strategy Working Group.
He showed slides of what a user’s resource discovery world might look like in 2014, suggesting intelligent agents that learn about a user’s world and inform the user of new resources as they appear would be commonplace.
These agents form part of the technical vision with a user having myGoogle (possibly an academic or a local community Google), myBlog, myIP, myCredit, myCommunities, myID, MyProfile and myResources.
A key element in this is the myCommunities in which a user forms different relationships depending on which community it is.
Work has begun in looking at how the ‘Google approach’ can benefit these different communities.
Bob reiterated the view that user behaviour in federated searching is a big area to pursue.
Semantic interoperability is important, not only in the ways referred to during the day, but also in others such as where words mean different things in different disciplines.
Searching and knowledge extraction is also an important area as is technical interoperability, especially when looking to the future and taking into account Web services and related developments.
What has happened with the CC-interop project outcomes?
A report from the project went to the JISC Integrated Information Environment Committee in June 2004 where it was agreed that there needs to be a wider focus for resource discovery.
During July 2004 a case was made to the JISC sub-committee chairs for a resource discovery landscaping study, as issues raised were relevant to several of the JISC committees.
Bob suggested that resource discovery warranted its own programme of work within JISC as it is an important area and he drew a parallel to the ‘gap’ identified when the CC-interop Project came about.
UKOLN has been tasked with the landscaping study which potentially has a large remit and will need to be kept manageable.
The study is planned to be ready in January 2005 and might lead to a new programme of work during 2005.
Bob then moved on to the plenary open question and answer session.
The first area of discussion was that the systems tend to be thought about in terms of today’s users.
Perhaps there is benefit in looking at how children carry out searches as there are differences in the way they find information (e.g.
often browsing more) and they are the users of the future.
Studying children’s searching behaviour at an early age and then looking at the same group again a few years later could reveal how their methods have changed.
There was an extended discussion about possible trends in the future searching strategies and, not surprisingly, Google was mentioned a number of times.
There is the Google Desktop Search (which searches files, emails, etc) and the tie-up with searching WorldCat which shows that the nature of searching is changing.
Google are known to be talking to libraries and similar organisations about deep-level searching.
The integration of the ‘Google approach’ and the more traditional structured information approach is being tested.
Searching nowadays can be extremely complicated with users being in local or global communities (sometimes both at the same time).
Sustainability at a practical level of the different architectures presented during the day was considered.
It was put forward that distributed catalogues were relatively low cost to maintain and that, as was shown by services such as CAIRNS and InforM25, their main user communities contribute or fully meet the costs involved.
The final area of discussion considered issues around searching for material such as video and images, by visual means rather than by textual metadata.
CC-interop perforce had been investigating searching issues after the metadata had been created but the issue was interesting.
Images could be scanned for a particular shape or colour, the results from which become the metadata aggregation that is relevant in the distributed catalogue scenario.
Much useful work has been done on image retrieval but there exists a huge gap in what can be achieved and what is needed.
Conclusion The event proved that resource discovery is an important area for continued research.
CC-interop has looked at specific interoperability issues, has found some solutions but also raised more questions.
The trend to relate every search to Google is increasing and it will be interesting to see how this trend continues.
Z39.50 is maturing and unlikely to be replaced in the short to medium term.
The distributed catalogue services are well established and can work alongside, and interoperate with, large physical union catalogues.
The feedback from delegates was very positive proving that the library community continue to regard resource discovery issues as highly relevant.
All presentations are available on the CC-interop Project Web site [14].
References The Electronic Libraries Programme Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ Copac home page http://www.copac.ac.uk/ Co-operative Information Retrieval Network for Scotland (CAIRNS) http://cairns.lib.strath.ac.uk/ M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries InforM25 service http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/ Stubley, P, Bull, R, Kidd, A, “Feasibility Study for a National Union Catalogue: Final Report”, 25 April 2001 http://www.uknuc.shef.ac.uk/NUCrep.pdf SUNCAT Project Web site http://www.suncat.ac.uk/ Research Support Libraries Group Final Report, 2003 http://www.rslg.ac.uk/final/final.pdf Pinfield, S, ‘Beyond eLib: Lessons from Phase 3 of the Electronic Libraries Programme’ 23 January 2001 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/pinfield-elib/elibreport.html Java Access For Electronic Resources (JAFER) Toolkit Project, JISC 5⁄99 http://www.jafer.org/ Scottish Collections Network (SCONE) http://scone.strath.ac.uk/service/ Attribute Set Bib-1 (Z39.50-1995): Semantics, ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/z3950/defs/bib1.txt The Bath Profile: An International Z39.50 Specification for Library Applications and Resource Discovery, Release 2.0, 2004, http://www.collectionscanada.ca/bath/tp-bath2-e.htm Booth, H, Hartley, R J, “User behaviour in the searching of union catalogues: an investigation for Work Package C of CC-interop”, CERLIM, February 2004, http://ccinterop.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents/finalreportWPC.pdf CC-interop Project Web site http://ccinterop.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/hyperclumps.htm Author Details John Gilby Project Manager M25 Systems Team London School of Economics Email: j.gilby@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/M25link/ Return to top Article Title: “Hyper Clumps, Mini Clumps and National Catalogues: Resource Discovery for the 21st Century” Author: John Gilby Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/cc-interops-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Adding Value to the National Information Infrastructure: The EDINA Exchange Day, Edinburgh Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Adding Value to the National Information Infrastructure: The EDINA Exchange Day, Edinburgh Buzz data software framework database portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing multimedia z39.50 visualisation gis openurl shibboleth curation srw e-science webct algorithm research jstor Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl provides us with a report of EDINA's first general information event for the HE and FE communities held at the National E-Science Centre.
EDINA [1] held its first general information event for the Higher and Further Education communities on Tuesday 11 May 2004.
EDINA Exchange took place in the National E-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh.
The day began with an introduction by EDINA Director Peter Burnhill, who took us through the programme for the day, and highlighted some of EDINA's notable recent achievements.
The morning session then began with presentations on the various subject and resource type clusters in which EDINA is active.
Bibliographic Data and Tools The first of these was made by Christine Rees, Team Manager for Bibliographic and Multimedia Services, who explained that bibliographic services are primarily based on abstract and index (A&I) databases.
EDINA provides a search interface onto these, either by developing and hosting an interface, or by taking an interface from a data provider.
Coverage within EDINA services at present is strong in several areas.
In health, agricultural and life sciences there is BIOSIS Previews, Update and CAB Abstracts.
In the arts, humanities and social sciences EDINA offers Index to the Times, EconLit, PAIS and MLA.
INSPEC covers engineering, informatics and physical sciences (INSPEC).
Several of these services have Ovid interfaces, including EconLit, PAIS and INSPEC.
Ovid is moving to offer its own gateway service in the UK from this summer, though EDINA will continue to offer INSPEC and CAB Abstracts.
Two significant infrastructure projects in this area are Xgrain and zBlsa.
These have been funded by JISC in order to provide services based upon new digital library technologies but at the national, as opposed to the merely institutional level.
Xgrain performs federated searching across a range of bibliographic databases, while zBlsa using a resolver service called 'Balsa' performs link resolution, presenting services which exist upon specific citations.
As these functions of the national Information Environment mature out of the project phase to become services, their names will change to become, respectively, GetRef and GetCopy.
GetRef searches across a range of A&I databases some free, and others commercial as well as the British Library's ZETOC table of contents service.
It searches across common indexes, and is made available either via an EDINA-hosted interface, or as a portlet.
GetRef supports a number of search protocols, including Z39.50, SRW/U and HTTP.
The interface uses a simple Google-like search box, and presents results from various targets in a common format.
GetCopy provides services on records, taking users from citations to full text by acting as an OpenURL resolver.
EDINA call it a 'lightweight broker', since there is no institutional installation required hence the original name 'Balsa'.
GetCopy will tell users about services to which they have rights of access.
E-BioSci is an EU-funded project.
EDINA is working with the RDN's BIOME hub service and will eventually host the UK e-BioSci platform.
A prototype service is now available.
In the bibliographic tools area, EDINA offers SALSER a union catalogue of serials holdings of Scottish universities, the National Library of Scotland and the Edinburgh and Glasgow public libraries.
SALSER is a free service.
A major related project is SUNCAT, the UK's new Serials Union Catalogue, being developed by EDINA in association with Ex Libris.
A pilot service should be available from the end of 2004.
It will provide a search service across the UK, and allow downloading of high-quality serials records.
Images for Learning Rick Loup, Multimedia Services Development Officer, gave a presentation on the Education Image Gallery (EIG) and Education Media Online.
EIG includes 50,000 images from Getty Images, 10,000 selected by consultation with the user community.
It is hosted by EDINA as a pilot service until 31 July 2004.
The content was selected by leading academics across a broad range of subjects and is ideal for embedding into presentations or for use in learning materials, and images have comprehensive metadata attached.
The images are all copyright-cleared and free to download for educational use.
All are in screen-resolution format, and free of watermarking.
Images incorporated into printed materials are available in perpetuity.
There are currently 40 subscribing institutions since the launch in January 2004.
Images normally cost over £100 each to purchase so these represent extremely good value (institutional licences range from £250 to £1,600).
Education Media Online has been produced by MAAS (the Managing Agent Advisory Service run by the Open University (OU) and the British Universities Film and Video Council) and EDINA.
MAAS does selection, rights acquisition, digitisation, encoding, metadata creation and promotion.
EDINA does hosting, design and development, delivery and user support.
The service was launched in January 2003, and over 150 institutions currently subscribe, (although at present it is still free to use).
The content is currently evolving and sources include Anglia TV, Films of Scotland, the International Wildlife Foundation, the Imperial War Museum, St George's Hospital Medical School and several others, with more in the pipeline, including OU Worldwide next year.
Films can be easily imported and embedded in learning materials.
Metadata is provided for each record.
Geospatial Data for All Disciplines EDINA is well known for its geospatial data services, and David Medyckyj-Scott, Team Manager for Geographic Data and Research Services, gave the next presentation on what EDINA currently offers in this area.
With the UKBORDERS service, EDINA acts as the primary platform for census data in the UK, with around 100 datasets of digitised boundary data.
Recent developments include an easy download service for pre-built datasets, and a new boundary selector facility is currently in testing.
UKBORDERS delivers around 2,000 downloads each month.
Digimap is an online map delivery service for Ordnance Survey data.
It divides into Digimap Classic and Digimap Carto (which provides users with maps to take away).
There are currently 84 subscribing universities and colleges, and nearly 17,000 registered users less than 20% of whom are geographers.
The service also receives a high level (around 50%) of undergraduate use.
The value of Digimap to UK HE and FE is illustrated by the fact that the data downloaded in the last year would cost £6.5m at commercial prices.
From September 2004, the product range will include a new range of scales for colour maps 1:10,000, 1:25,000 and 1:50,000.
Coming soon will be a redesigned download service, a new version of Carto, and a new subscription service for historical map data.
On the latter, EDINA has been in discussion with the Landmark Information Group and the Ordnance Survey.
Another developing service is geological map and other data for Great Britain from the British Geological Survey.
Hydrographic data from the UK Hydrographic Office will also be coming soon as a subscription service.
EDINA is also looking to expand into global and regional map data, rather than concentrating just on the UK.
Stuart MacDonald, Assistant Data Librarian, gave a presentation on the agricultural census service Agcensus.
The census itself has been conducted every June since 1866.
Data is collected separately in England, Scotland and Wales and EDINA staff have developed algorithms to convert the data into grid square estimates.
The data has been used in epidemiology (public health), market research, GIS (Geographic Information Systems) modelling and agricultural planning.
The new service offers both data downloads, suitable for use with GIS packages, and data visualisation.
Projects to develop geospatial tools include Go-Geo!
the geo-data portal, which provides a one-stop shop to geographic data services.
geoXwalk is a digital gazetteer service for enhancing geographical querying of resources through geographical parsing.
Geospatial teaching materials in a number of subjects are now available through the E-MapScholar Project.
These have been developed by academics across the UK for use in real teaching contexts, serving up Digimap Ordnance Survey data.
Learning and Teaching Projects Coordinator Moira Massey described how St Helen's College is producing case studies using E-MapScholar, including Blackboard courses in animal management, hairdressing, surveying and construction, sports sciences, public services and in foundation degree courses.
A content management system underpins the application, assisting academics to construct learning materials.
Users have been positive about the value to students provided in assisting them to develop concepts in geospatial data use.
An example of a sophisticated learning resource which has been developed is a 'virtual work placement' built around a case study for a wind-farm proposal in Wales.
Supporting Scottish History Moving into the realm of historic data, Helen Chisholm, User Support Team Manager, described the Statistical Accounts of Scotland which comprises two sets of accounts and is a Scottish national treasure the equivalent of the Domesday Book.
It represents an early exercise in population survey and record, making it a particularly appropriate resource for EDINA.
The First Account covers the period from 1791-99.
The Second Account was commissioned by the Church of Scotland in 1832, ran to 15 volumes and was published in 1845.
Sir John Sinclair, who instigated the First Account, asked 938 parish ministers to furnish information on the basis of 166 questions on class, wealth, poverty, industry and the 'moral health of the nation'.
As the 20th Century drew to a close, it was clear that the pages of the original volumes had become delicate and fragile and the data was becoming difficult to access.
A service to digitise them was commissioned, run by a consortium representing universities, colleges, schools, archives and public libraries.
The service was launched in January 2001, free to academic users, public libraries, archives and state schools, and it receives some 5,000 logins per month.
It provides both the digitised text and its transcript.
Teaching modules based on the Accounts are planned for delivery and indexes to the tables are in preparation.
Managing Data into the Future Data Librarian Robin Rice then described EDINA's contribution to the newly established Digital Curation Centre (DCC).
In June 2003, JISC and the e-Science Programme issued a joint call for tenders for this new Centre.
An Edinburgh-led bid was declared successful early in 2004, and work began in March.
Peter Burnhill, EDINA Director, coordinated the bid and is currently acting as interim Director of the DCC during its set-up phase.
The intention is to commence a service in October 2004.
'Digital curation' represents an approach to data management which embraces both digital preservation and data curation.
A national centre has been established because it is considered that the challenges involved are too great to leave to institutional solutions alone.
Digital data curation embraces the needs of both the static documentary world and the new world of massive and dynamic data generated by eScience.
The DCC will be run by a strong partnership including the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, UKOLN and the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC).
National Solutions for Learning and Teaching Moira Massey described EDINA's work in supporting learning and teaching.
EDINA is a partner in the National Learning Network (NLN) delivery service, along with MIMAS, JISC and Becta.
EDINA provides a backup server and helpdesk, as well as administrative support.
The JISC Online Repository for Learning and Teaching Materials (JORUM) will become a service from August 2005.
This is designed to meet JISC's need for a repository for the learning materials it has commissioned over the past few years and into the future.
It will provide a library for learning resources and the upload and publication of academics' own learning materials will be strongly encouraged.
Resources can be delivered via institutional Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).
A National Solution for Authorisation IT Team Manager Alan Ferguson then described the Shibboleth Project which EDINA has just embarked on as part of the Core Middleware Programme.
Shibboleth is an authorisation framework for access to Web resources which has emerged from the US Internet2 Programme.
Shibboleth has international momentum now and is developing not just in the US but also in Switzerland, Canada, Australia and Finland.
A number of vendors (including Blackboard, Ebsco, JSTOR OCLC, WebCT and Ex Libris) are developing 'Shib' interfaces already.
Shibboleth is essentially a system for attribute transfer rather than username access.
It permits role-based authorisation via attributes and works by users authenticating to their local institution, requesting a remote resource, and being asked for an attribute from the local institution.
These are expected to be propagated from local human resources department databases.
Future Challenges In the afternoon, delegates divided into groups to discuss a range of issues relevant to EDINA services and projects.
Obviously stimulated by the morning's presentations, they came up with a number of salient points and questions.
Some of the most interesting of these, which are now being discussed within EDINA and JISC, are listed here: Could we have an advisory service for geospatial data?
We need better usage information: what happens to data once it is downloaded?
Could we make more use of student champions in promoting resources?
The new Digimap services are welcome, but there remains a 'desiderata list' of several services not yet available.
Fees should be considered for EDINA training courses.
Could some training be done in the form of Web-based learning materials?
More case studies are needed to encourage use.
Could JORUM users have a software tool to help them identify embedded images and other potentially rights-protected components?
JORUM could provide a local learning materials repository service for sites which do not have their own.
Conclusions This was a very useful event which served both to raise awareness of the range of service and project activity covered by EDINA and to inform EDINA of the needs and wishes of its user community.
EDINA staff were encouraged by the positive feedback the day received in the evaluation, and will ponder the various points and questions raised above, as well as some more general questions relating to boundaries of a different sort from those which can be customised through UKBORDERS.
For example, where should the boundary lie between JISC and EDINA when it comes to promoting EDINA services?
And similarly, where does it lie between EDINA and local institutions?
What about the boundaries which frame institutional information environments and the national Information Environment?
When should an institution use GetCopy in preference to a local link resolver, or GetRef rather than a local federated search service?
And how can these plug in to a secure national authorisation service?
In developing repositories of objects, should the boundary be local, at the institutional level, or national, via JORUM, or both?
Among the many hybridities to be resolved in the developing Information Environment, that of the local as opposed to the national solution to particular problems is a relatively new one when it comes to learning objects and discovery tools though a well-known one in respect of bibliographic and other data hosting services.
EDINA has been at the forefront of the solution to the data hosting needs of the community for many years.
The EDINA Exchange event highlighted the new challenges which lie ahead of it as it moves towards its 10th birthday in 2005.
References EDINA Web site http://edina.ac.uk/ Author Details John MacColl Sub-Librarian Digital Library Edinburgh University Library and User Support & Projects Coordination Manager, EDINA Email: John.MacColl@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Adding Value to the National Information Infrastructure: EDINA Exchange, Edinburgh, May 2004" Author: John MacColl Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/edina-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Information and Emotion Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information and Emotion Buzz data framework identifier research standards Citation BibTex RIS Stephanie Taylor finds in Information and Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory new ways to understand the emotions of users in a collection of work from the US information behaviour community.
Information is often linked to the scientific domain and perceived as a known and measured quantity, a fixed point.
Terms such as 'information science', and 'information management' contribute to the view of information as an objective tool.
Information behaviour research, though, takes a different view, by exploring the relationship between the emotions and personal experiences of users and the information they find and use.
For any library and information professional, the study of information behaviour offers many valuable insights into the inner workings of that most elusive of subjects, the mind of the user.
The idea of exploring the emotional aspects of interacting with information tilts the horizons somewhat, but of course the discovery and use of information is not an objective process.
Information and Emotion brings together some very useful case studies and research papers that examine user emotions interacting with information.
In assembling this set of research papers, editors Diane Nahl and Dania Bilal provide us with a view of information from this very different perspective.
Here, information is viewed through the perceptions of individual users.
The interaction of users with the information they search for, find, and, ultimately, make use of, is shown as being coloured by the users themselves.
The research shows how the environment, personal expectations, level of expertise, prejudices and interests of the users create a unique experience between the user and information.
Personality is shown as a very important contributing factor in the user experience [1].
It is, though, one that is often not so much ignored as just not even noticed in many standard user surveys, where the focus is on the mechanics of how the user interacts with a system.
The collection presented by Nahl and Bilal acts as an introduction to the work of information behaviour researchers to those unfamiliar with this area of research.
It also neatly encapsulates current thinking for practitioners more versed in the subject.
Detailed references along with notes on all the contributing authors encourage further exploration of the subject, but equally offer a quick route to keeping up to speed with the leading US thinkers and researchers in this area.
Although interested in the area of emotion and technologies in general, I have not read much in the specific field of information technologies and emotion; so I came to the book as a novice in some respects, and found it a good introduction.
This work would still, in my opinion, be suitable for someone just beginning to investigate the subject.
None of the authors are too rarefied in their approach to presenting their research or in discussing the implications of their findings, so their methodology and terminology is accessible.
That said, the collection is also full of interesting chapters that would inform and inspire anyone already familiar with the subject.
I also found the authors' writing to be firmly rooted in the practical application of their research, an essential component of any work I read in a professional capacity.
The book is divided into four sections: "Theoretical Frameworks", "Macro-Emotional Information Environment", "Micro-Emotional Information Environment" and "Special Information Environments".
This organisation divides the book in a useful way and works equally well whether one is quickly checking on a particular area or engaged in more detailed, progressive reading through the entire volume.
"Theoretical Frameworks" gives an introduction to the concepts of information behaviour and more general research into emotional behaviour and works well as a guide and a reference point for subsequent sections.
I found that I skim-read this section initially, then referred back to it as I read various chapters in the book.
I tend to dip in and out of collections of papers/research such as this, where each chapter is a self-contained unit.
As some aspects of this subject area were new to me I found it very useful to have this section to refer to as required.
Another handy point of reference is the well-designed Subject Index.
Using these sections in conjunction, I was able to look up new ideas that interested me and follow them through the book.
Sections two and three "Macro-Emotional Information Environment" and "Micro-Emotional Information Environment" – offer empirical studies in the different environments.
Section four, "Special Information Environments" deals with disruptions in the information environment.
The detailed studies in all sections give methodologies used to collect data, lots of examples and an analysis of results that relates the findings to the library and information environment.
I found many things in each section that I will use in my own work; but also something in each section that really made me stop and think.
Rich Gazan's chapter on "Understanding the Rogue User" [1], for example, explored the interesting area of online identities.
This chapter shows how these virtual personalities can not only reflect the real-life individuals who create them but also exaggerate some of the personality traits that an individual exhibits in real-life social interaction.
In the case of the rogue user, this can result in behaviour that is destructive to other online users.
Gazan not only gives insights into this kind of behaviour, but also offers some hope of, 'productive ways to channel the emotional needs behind them, to keep online communities useful and sustainable for all.
This practical application of research back into the library and information environment is much needed as libraries in all sectors provide more and more online services for users.
Library and information professionals need to be as aware of and as familiar with the issues around inappropriate or destructive behaviour as they are with similar behaviour in the physical library space.
If online initiatives are to grow into communities of users, then anyone who is taking a real-life community into a virtual space, or looking to create and build an online community, needs to be aware of such issues as anti-social behaviour and have some strategies in place.
In addition, the different personae people adopt in a virtual environment are worthy of further consideration.
In an environment where, perhaps, identification is not as immediate as in the real world, how might the personality of an individual be affected?
And in this new environment how is social interaction defined as appropriate or inappropriate?
These questions have been asked before, but putting them in the library and information context is an interesting exercise.
Michelynn McKnight's study, "Affective Dimensions of Critical Care Nurses' Informative Interactions: Gentle Nurse Jekyll and Harried Nurse Hyde" [2] investigates how nurses in a high-pressure environment swap their behaviour in seconds when dealing with machines/systems and then with people.
My initial impression was that the study was rather obvious – taking a nurse in a critical care ward, where her job often is a matter of life and death and contrasting this with her attitude to a computer system for patient records is bound to result in the 'Jekyll and Hyde' character reference of the title.
However, McKnight's chapter puts the frustration of the nurses into a context that is worth considering – that of a professional using technology as a tool, and one on which they cannot afford to lavish time.
In one of the examples from the data, the nurse talks calmly to a patient who is frightened and in a critical state, then takes out her frustration at the situation she is dealing with when she is back in the private room with the information system.
Another nurse admits, 'One thing about the computer is that I can growl at the computer.'
The nurses routinely complain about the system, but it also acts as a safety valve and they are aware of this.
I was led to speculate that a survey of their use of the system may well have uncovered negative feelings about the technologies, perhaps leading to spurious improvements to the system.
And further, this would have missed the point.
However fast the answer sought comes back, when the user is searching for something to stop a person in serious pain, it will never be quick enough.
Indeed, it will never be enough in itself.
Moreover the context in which the nurses accessed the system – a private room where patients and families had no access – meant their frustrations and fears were at the forefront in a way that was not possible in front of the patient.
I was left pondering that the nurses were in an extreme situation; but that served to highlight the very complex relationship between users and technologies.
User experiences do not occur in a vacuum and research into the emotions the user brings to the information environment is of use in planning and managing systems which people feel happy and confident in using.
Many of the chapters made me stop and think, and not just in a 'blue-skies' way.
The studies into the different emotions experienced by cross-cultural users, visually-impaired users, children, stay-at-home mothers and critical care nurses, among others, brought a new dimension not only to viewing the user as an individual, but also thinking about support strategies for their emotional needs.
My initial interest in this book was, I thought, quite specialist within the library and information sector.
After reading it, I would encourage all information professionals to add it to their essential reading list.
It will open up a new way of looking at services and assessing requirements.
You may never look at your users in the same way again.
References Gazen, R. "Understanding the Rogue User" , in Nahl, D. and Bilal, D. (Eds) Information and Emotion, ASIST Monograph Series, 2007, Chapter 9.
McKnight, M. "Affective Dimensions of Critical Care Nurses' Informative Interactions: Gentle Nurse Jekyll and Harried Nurse Hyde", in Nahl, D. and Bilal, D. (Eds), Information and Emotion, ASIST Monograph Series, 2007, Chapter 6.
Author Details Stephanie Taylor UKOLN and Critical Eye Communications Limited Email: s.taylor@ukoln.ac.uk Web sites: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk | http://www.criticaleyecommunications.co.uk Return to top {C} Article Title: "Information and Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory" Author: Stephanie Taylor Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/taylor-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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C21st Curation Spring 2006 Public Lecture Series Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines C21st Curation Spring 2006 Public Lecture Series Buzz data framework infrastructure archives metadata digitisation flickr preservation curation podcast research Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie and Helen Forde report on the public lecture series 'C21st Curation: access and service delivery' held at University College London over April and May 2006.
A growing and significant part of the record and culture of the UK is now in digital form.
The lives of staff working in our institutions, current students, and private individuals will be increasingly influenced by these trends and the growing demand for professionals to curate digital assets.
The School of Library, Archives and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London aims to raise awareness of digital stewardship.
Following the highly successful inaugural series of C21st Curation public lectures last year, SLAIS organised a second series of public lectures by eight leading speakers, open to students, professionals and general public during April and May 2006.
Podcasts and presentations from the series are being made available online [1].
The four evening sessions each attracted an audience of professional librarians, archivists, records managers, museum curators, publishers, and students.
Each session provoked lively discussion and debate.
Speakers and attendees continued informal discussion during the receptions held afterwards which were kindly sponsored by Tessella Support Services.
Some of the key themes and issues which emerged from the series are detailed below.
Scholarly Communications Astrid Wissenburg, Director of Communications at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), argued that research funders provide much of the support leading to the creation and use of many scholarly communications activities (publications, data, conferences, etc) through their funding for research and training.
They also have an interest in a healthy scholarly communications infrastructure to support their researchers.
The Research Councils UK (RCUK) started considering its strategies regarding supporting scholarly communications in 2004, across the many disciplines the 8 individual research councils cover.
Two specific areas are under active consideration: publishing of journals and conference proceedings; creation, sharing and reuse of research data.
The presentation described the many challenges and opportunities encountered by the research councils whilst exploring these areas, with specific examples from the Economic and Social Research Council’s ongoing activities.
The presentation for this lecture is available on the SLAIS Web site [2].
David Brown of the British Library discussing developments in scholarly communications David Brown, Head of Scholarly Communications at The British Library remarked that the times are turbulent: scholarly communication is experiencing major changes in business models, paradigms, technology, products and services and user requirements in comparison with the comparatively tranquil period of the last century.
Under the formal, print-based communication system, journals became the icon for informing the global research community of new developments, and when the existing infrastructure in support of journals began to creak under the ‘serials’ crisis, journal publishers adapted by introducing Big Deals and libraries formed consortia.
But essentially the print paradigm remained inviolate, until the Internet and the World Wide Web introduced new technological options which promised speedier, more efficient and in some cases more equitable distribution of the information relating to society’s research efforts.
Open access, in all its forms, has challenged the business model which had sustained commercial and learned society publishers so well.
As the Internet allowed and fostered the exchange of vast amounts of data between worldwide ‘collaboratories’, interest in access to raw data increased.
The semantic Web became a rallying cry for some pundits operating at the frontiers of Web developments.
More recently, the hierarchical structure of even the semantic Web school of thought has been put to the test by the emergence of a new form of scholarly communication built around social publishing, social bookmarking and a general networking of researchers all outside the traditional journal publication system.
This movement has spawned Connotea, flickr, del.icio.us, mySpace, blogniscient, lulu, wikipedia, etc.
These are essentially part of a free movement, generating a new sense of community.and though the origins may lie in the fields of information, news, and entertainment, it spills over to the scholarly and academic community, particularly in the USA.
The result has been the emergence of new stakeholders ‘from the edge’ who are offering ambient ‘findability’ within the morass of new data, information and sources which has become such a significant feature of scholarly communication.
The challenge of accessing, storing and maintaining these new forms and new sources in a way which enables the ‘minutes of science’ to be effectively recorded and supported has become a crucial issue.
The presentation for this lecture is available on the SLAIS Web site [3].
Digital Resources in the Humanities Professor Susan Hockey argued that recent funding opportunities have led to the creation of digital content within institutions, such as libraries, archives and publishing houses, which previously functioned as intermediaries and managers of existing information.
Unlike books, which are static and inflexible physical objects, digital resources, especially those representing humanities primary material, offer almost unlimited flexibility.
How can that flexibility be harnessed to meet the needs of the 21st century?
Imitating books limits the functionality of digital resources, but what else do users want to do with them?
What new systems are needed to handle integrated metadata and content?
How far should the librarian, archivist or publisher go in interfering with the intellectual content by enhancing images or encoding text?
What will the world of humanities research and teaching be like when users no longer go to the library and the information world is dominated by Google and Amazon?
She posed many stimulating questions and then explored them further with the audience.
The podcast and presentation for this lecture are available on the SLAIS Web site [4].
Suzanne Keene from UCL noted that digital technologies, notably the Internet, are often said to be ‘disruptive technologies’.
She explored this concept as it might affect museums as knowledge organisations and information sources.
Such technologies could, crucially, help in making the stored collections of museums a usable resource: they are presently drastically underused.
A consequence might be that museums treated their collections much more as a service to be provided, as are records and archives, rather than as a resource to be strictly controlled and released only with careful ‘interpretation’.
This would have fundamental and disruptive resource and business implications.
Potential users would need to be much more active as well, in using collections for teaching, research, creativity and enjoyment.
The presentation for this lecture is available on the SLAIS Web site [5].
Service Delivery in National Institutions Natalie Ceeney of the National Archives and Jemima Rellie of the Tate discussing service delivery in national institutions Natalie Ceeney, the new Chief Executive of The National Archives, noted that the digital environment is causing the most significant paradigm shift yet for archives.
Every ‘norm’ is changing.
On one hand, the increase in e-decision making in government is requiring new approaches to managing information, not only in terms of new (Electronic Document and Records Management) systems, but also a fundamental change in who needs to make decisions about the capture and archiving of key information.
Preservation is different in a paper world ‘benign neglect’ is an option in a digital world, disastrous.
And everyone now has access to data and can do research previously undertaken by the few.
The 21st century has made Google, the Internet, and BBC television programmes such as ‘Who do you think you are?’ tools to turn every UK citizen into a potential researcher, with unrealistic expectations of instant digital information.
The National Archives is at the forefront of work to address these issues, by providing increasing leadership to government over electronic records management and digital preservation, and through ambitious digitisation programmes, aiming to achieve 90% of use of those records online.
Little ‘best practice’ exists to guide this direction, and no extra funding to deliver the change.
Service delivery in the national institutions has to change in order to rise to these challenges.
The podcast and presentation for this lecture are available on the SLAIS Web site [6].
Jemima Rellie, Head of Digital Programmes at the Tate, argued museums are changing.
They are changing from hermetic containers of material culture to porous platforms for cultural exchange and debate.
Digital technologies are both the catalyst and the support for this change, empowering visitors and increasing their expectations while simultaneously blurring the traditional distinctions between museums, libraries, archives and public service broadcasters.
Museums have embraced digital technologies and already provide extensive free and on-demand programming, catering to a range of audiences.
But while the public appetite for this content shows no sign of abating, the resources required to deliver it are in short supply.
It will never be possible for museums to do everything that all audiences desire in the digital age, but some rationale must be devised so that museums can prioritise their digital programming.
She then explored the challenges that continue to frustrate museums in digitising delivery; focusing on Tate’s digital programmes, she suggested the most significant issues facing museums include planning, audience development, content management, competition, funding and measuring success, and presented some possible solutions.
The podcast and presentation for this lecture are available on the SLAIS Web site [7].
Curation and Access for Scientific Data Neil Beagrie from the British Library and JISC, introduced the UK Government’s Science and Innovation Investment Framework which has argued that over the next decade the growing UK research base must have ready and efficient access to digital information of all kinds such as experimental datasets, journals, theses, conference proceedings and patents.
This is the life blood of research and innovation but presents a number of major risks due to unresolved challenges in their long-term management.
Neil chaired and authored the report of the DTI e-infrastructure Preservation and Curation Working Group and summarised its work and recommendations.
The podcast and presentation for this lecture are available on the SLAIS Web site [8].
Prof. Michael Wadsworth of UCL Prof. Michael Wadsworth from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, presented a case study of the curation of a medical research project that began in 1945 and has continued ever since.
The data record the development, adolescence, and adulthood of a large study population from birth onwards funded by the Medical Research Council.
The aims of the study are concerned with health, and in particular now, with the processes of ageing.
He emphasised that a very long-running study requires curation that is forward-looking and flexible The curation of the data was described in terms of preservation, conservation and access management, emphasising the influence of policy concerns, in terms of health care as well as scientific policy.
The issues relating to the changing demands made on scientific data over a long time frame were made very clear and the scientific value of longitudinal or life course information was ably demonstrated.
The podcast and presentation for this lecture are available on the SLAIS Web site [9].
Conclusions Feedback from those attending the lecture series has been overwhelmingly positive.
We are extremely grateful to all the speakers who gave their time to make the second series of public lectures so enjoyable and stimulating intellectually and professionally for the audience.
We hope making podcasts and presentations from the lectures available online this year will be welcomed by those who were unable to attend some of the lectures and by the many individuals from overseas who asked if this would be possible.
We would welcome further feedback from those who attended or download the lectures as well as any suggestions on topics for future public lecture series.
References C21st Curation: access and service delivery http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/ Scholarly communications and the role of research funders, presentation, Astrid Wissenburg http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/Wissenburg/ Scholarly Communication trends and developments, presentation, David Brown http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/Brown/ Digital Resources in the Humanities: why is digital information different?
presentation, Susan Hockey http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/Hockey/ 21st Century Curation, presentation, Suzanne Keene http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/Keene/ The Digital Revolution and Service Delivery in National Institutions, presentation, Natalie Ceeney http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/Ceeney/ Digitising Delivery at Tate Online, presentation, Jemima Rellie http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/Rellie/ Curation and Access for Scientific Research, presentation, Neil Beagrie http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/Beagrie/ Data curation in the MRC National Survey of Health & Development, presentation, Michael Wadsworth http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/c21/Wadsworth/ Author Details Neil Beagrie BL/JISC Partnership Manager The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB Email: neil.beagrie@bl.uk Web sites: http://www.bl.uk/, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/, http://www.beagrie.com Helen Forde Lecturer School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Email: h.forde@ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “C21st Curation Spring 2006 Public Lecture Series” Author: Neil Beagrie and Helen Forde Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/c21stcuration-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Resources for the Humanities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Resources for the Humanities Buzz data database metadata digitisation ict research Citation BibTex RIS Alastair Dunning reviews for us this year's conference on Digital Resources in the Humanities held at the University of Newcastle over 5-8 September 2004.
Project Management: Can there be a duller two words to start off any kind of article?
Well, possibly 'economic costing' or 'stakeholder pensions', but project management is not far behind.
But judging from presentations given at this year's Digital Resources in the Humanities Conference, it's a term with which many of those undertaking digitisation projects are going to have to become familiar.
The Digital Resources in the Humanities Conference [1] is a yearly event.
Since its inception in 1996, the conference has sought to explore latest trends in the digitisation of cultural heritage; investigating how digital resources are created, managed, disseminated and exploited in research, teaching and learning.
This year's conference, held at the University of Newcastle, asked delegates to explore four key themes: Methods in humanities computing; Cross-sector exchange between heritage bodies, national and local government, and educational institutions; Broadening the humanities computing base; and finally New forms of scholarly publication.
Plenary Speakers The conference's opening plenary speaker, Iain Watson (Assistant Director, Tyne and Wear Museums [2]) dealt with the second of these themes.
He demonstrated how Tyne and Wear has interacted with ICT not only to focus on the traditional aims of museums (such as managing physical collections) but also on trying to help alleviate the social disadvantages faced by many in the region.
He explained how it used a range of digital resources to improve illiteracy and engage the population with the cultural heritage around them.
The Rt.
Hon.
Chris Patten, the second plenary speaker of the event, provided a global counterpoint to Iain Watson's regional outlook.
He highlighted the fact that Europe still lags behind Japan and the United Stated in terms of research and development in technology and the subsequent development of intellectual property.
He urged that universities continue to be considered a primary site for the uptake of such research, combining both public and private investment.
The final plenary speaker, David Robey, sat, in a metaphorical sense, between the two previous speakers.
As Director of the AHRB's (Arts and Humanities Research Board) ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme, Professor Robey's presentation had a national focus.
He ran through the type of projects which had received funding from the AHRB in the past and gave an indication of the AHRB's strategic plans for ICT in the future.
Project Management The tenor of the presentation, plus citations of some of the more experimental resources funded by the AHRB, brings us back to the subject of project management.
It is clear that, even though there will always be scope for research carried out by individuals, for the funding bodies there is an increasing focus on team-based digital projects, where costs and workflows and outputs are much more clearly defined.
An excellent example of this was Jenny Ball's presentation on the Online Historical Population Reports Project, being run by AHDS History [3].
The project, which is developing Web-based user interface for browsing, searching, viewing and downloading almost 200,000 images of historical population reports, is unusual in employing a dedicated Project Manager.
Thus Jenny's task is not focussed on structuring a database or creating appropriate metadata, but to develop workflows and documentation to ensure that the project runs smoothly and to time.
Other projects demonstrated the importance of good management.
The numbers in Robert Faber's presentation on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [4] spoke for themselves: 54,922 entries, 60 million words and over 10,000 contributors to organise.
It would take more than a few notes on a card index system to manage a project of this magnitude.
Mike Pringle, of AHDS Visual Arts [5], illustrated what happened when project management went wrong.
Citing the great hopes for the concept of virtual reality in the 1990s, Dr Pringle looked at projects of the time and some of the flaws in their execution.
With better procedures now in place, he concluded, it should be possible to organise more robust virtual realities.
Perhaps one of the most pleasing aspects of the conference was a jam-packed poster and exhibitions space.
Previous hosts of DRH, the University of Gloucestershire, had put forward a prize of a digital camera for the best poster.
This had inspired a flurry of submissions and the room was filled with colourful, informative posters, outlining a variety of digital projects taking place throughout the country.
Delegates were asked to survey and vote for the best posters.
James Cummings, on behalf of the Digital Medievalist Project, took third place, while Gabriel Bodard and Juan Garces, of King's College London, took second place for their poster outlining some of the challenges in digitising ancient texts.
The winners, however, were Nigel Williamson and Carl Smith, of the University of Sheffield, for the Cistercians in Yorkshire Project [6].
The project's recreation of abbeys such as Kirkstall, Rivelaux and Fountains illustrated that, when it is managed and well executed, virtual reality really can be astoundingly good.
The Future for Humanities Computing The conference closed with presentations from Marilyn Deegan, from the Centre for Computing and Humanities at King's College London, and Seamus Ross, of the University of Glasgow's Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute.
Both had been asked to 'speculate and imagine' what the future for humanities computing would look like.
Dr Deegan took the natural world as her reference point, drawing out interesting ideas from the similarities between Internet usage and organic forms.
One visual example she used showed global maps indicating the voyages of Internet-based information and their similarity to organic forms such as flowers and jellyfish.
Dr Deegan also made some points about the retrieval and analysis of digital information; while there is plenty of digital information in the world (such as, she demonstrated, the various different versions of the Gutenberg Bible) bringing all this information together to compare is still a cumbersome task.
Professor Ross also indicated that there was work still to do for the community.
For too long, projects had been happy to showcase their resources, indicating how the technology had made the creation of their data resource feasible.
Now it was time to move on from championing the technology, and re-engage with the wider scholarly community what new discoveries does humanities computing bring to the research agenda at large?
With these questions the conference signed off, leaving Michael Fraser, outgoing Chair of the DRH Standing Committee, to thank the organisers of the Conference: Brian Stimpson, Geoff Hare, Sheila Anderson and Alastair Dunning and to invite delegates to the next two DRH conferences at the University of Lancaster in 2005 and at Dartington College of the Arts, Devon in 2006.
References Digital Resources for the Humanities http://drh.org.uk/ Tyne & Wear Museums (TWM) http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/ Online Historical Population Reports Project http://www.histpop.org.uk AHDS History http://ahds.ac.uk/history/ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/ AHDS Visual Arts http://ahds.ac.uk/visualarts/ The Cistercians in Yorkshire http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/ Author Details Alastair Dunning Arts and Humanities Data Service Email: alastair.dunning@ahds.ac.uk Web site: http://ahds.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Digital Resources in the Humanities: DRH2004" Author: Alastair Dunning Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/drh2004-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ARROW and the RQF: Meeting the Needs of the Research Quality Framework Using an Institutional Research Repository Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ARROW and the RQF: Meeting the Needs of the Research Quality Framework Using an Institutional Research Repository Buzz data software framework dissemination xml infrastructure metadata accessibility identifier repositories eprints copyright preservation dspace xacml rae authentication research standards Citation BibTex RIS David Groenewegen and Andrew Treloar describe the role of repositories in the forthcoming Australian Research Quality Framework (RQF) and the responses of the ARROW Project to the needs of the RQF.
This paper describes the work of the ARROW Project to meet the requirements of the forthcoming Research Quality Framework (RQF).
The RQF is an Australian Federal Government initiative designed to measure the quality and impact of Australian research, and is based partly on the existing Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) held in the UK.
The RQF differs from the RAE in its reliance on local institutional repositories for the provision of access to research outputs, and this paper will explain how it is envisaged that this role will be filled, and the challenges that arise from this role.
ARROW The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) Project came into existence in response to a call for proposals issued in June 2003 by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST).
DEST was interested in furthering the discovery, creation, management and dissemination of Australian research information in a digital environment.
Specifically, it wanted to fund proposals that would help promote Australian research output and build the Australian research information infrastructure through the development of distributed digital repositories and the common technical services supporting access and authorisation to them.
In response to this a consortium, consisting of Monash University (lead institution), University of New South Wales, Swinburne University and the National Library of Australia, submitted a bid and was successful in attracting $A3.66M over three years (2004-6), with follow-up funding of $4.5M for ARROW2 and a sub-project called Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PILIN) in 2007 [1].
The ARROW Project has been working with VTLS Inc to develop a supported repository software solution called VITAL.
This software has been licensed by fifteen universities in Australia, and ARROW's work at present is focussed on refining and supporting this software, and aiding these universities in their use of it.
The ARROW Community It was decided that a framework was needed to provide this support, and this has taken the form of a developing ARROW Community.
The Community was established in 2006 to enable the sharing of knowledge and experiences by institutions using the ARROW software solution.
This sharing has occurred through regular meetings and update sessions, the establishment of virtual contact processes and attempts to co-ordinate the common needs of the repositories.
Working groups (ARROW Repository Managers Group, ARROW Development Group and Metadata Advisory Committee for Australian Repositories) have been established to create structures and relationships that will survive beyond the end of the project funding.
Each of these groups regularly discusses RQF issues as they relate to repositories.
It is expected that at the conclusion of the formal project that these activities will continue through self-funded co-operation and sharing of resources by the community members.
This is not dissimilar to other Internet-related activities that rely on a shared commitment to a successful outcome.
RQF The Australian Federal Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) began the process of establishing the RQF in 2004, based on the model adopted by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), used in the UK for many years.
The rationale and intentions for the RQF are described on the DEST Web site: "The aim of the Research Quality Framework initiative is to develop the basis for an improved assessment of the quality and impact of publicly funded research and an effective process to achieve this.
The Framework should: be transparent to government and taxpayers so that they are better informed about the results of the public investment in research; ensure that all publicly funded research agencies and research providers are encouraged to focus on the quality and relevance of their research; and avoid a high cost of implementation and imposing a high administration burden on research providers."
[2] The RQF has been undergoing a substantial planning and development process since then, with an Expert Advisory Group providing the original framework in 2005.
This was then reviewed and revised by a RQF Development Advisory Group in 2006.
The ARROW Project provided technical and structural advice on the potential use of repositories to the latter group.
DEST is continuing to work on final specifications for the process at time of writing.
When it was originally announced, DEST stated that there would be both a Research Quality Framework and a Research Accessibility Framework.
Latterly it has been emphasising the accessibility components of the RQF.
The RQF is expected to create a greater level of accessibility to Australian research, as the best of it will be stored in repositories, which should then make a considerable amount of it freely available for harvesting and discovery.
The Proposed RQF Model While the details of the RQF as a whole are complicated and at time of writing not completely settled, the basic model as it relates to repositories is quite straightforward: Each institution that is subject to the process collates and assembles information about "research groups" from within their institution.
All members of a group are required to nominate their four "best" research outputs for assessment.
It is expected that the substantial majority of these outputs will be journal articles or refereed conference papers.
Copies of these outputs and their metadata are stored within an institutional repository.
DEST has not mandated any specific software solution for this, and Dspace, ePrints, VITAL, Fez and Digital Commons are all expected to be used.
The institution then packages the information about groups, together with statements about the quality and impact of their research [3], as well as other information that might be relevant to the assessment (such as funding attracted or usage metrics), and stable links to the research outputs (rather than copies of the outputs themselves) into a defined XML format.
This is submitted electronically to the DEST Information Management System (IMS).
An online submission process will also be available.
Nominated assessors log in to the IMS system to view this information.
Within the IMS the information is displayed for the assessors in a uniform style, to exclude the danger of presentation being used to outshine inadequate content.
Each research output that can be displayed electronically will have a link back to the repository that holds it.
The link will need to resolve directly to the research output, without displaying any intermediate pages from the repository, and the IMS system will pass on anonymised authentication information.
The reason for specifying no intermediate pages is to ensure that institutions do not try to 'gild the research output lily'.
The reason for anonymising access is discussed below.
Figure 1: How the RQF Will Work The Role of Repositories in the RQF As can be seen from the model described above, institutional repositories have a key role to play in the RQF.
They will serve as the predominant source of research outputs for assessors to view.
This has been a deliberate choice by DEST, as it ensures that the outputs are available to assessors throughout the world, without the necessity of making paper copies available, as was used in the RAE model.
It also helps to fill repositories, thus avoiding the oft-cited problem that academics are reluctant to submit work to repositories themselves.
This fits into DEST's broader desire to encourage the population of repositories, and make more Australian research accessible to the world.
Challenges Arising from the RQF Model There are a number of key challenges that arise from this model for making outputs available.
These include: Copyright It is the belief of ARROW and DEST that, for most assessors, the preferred version of most research outputs will be one which has clearly been vetted by a peer review process, and which takes the form of the final published version (i.e.
with the formatting and pagination of a standard journal article).
This is in conflict with the copyright policies of most academic publishers, especially if the outputs are made freely available online, as part of a repository.
Access control The assumption therefore is that if publishers are to give permission to use their articles in this form, some type of access control will be required to restrict viewing of them to the designated assessors.
For DEST's purposes however, this access control will have to be implemented in a scalable and anonymous fashion.
The process is more workable if assessors can be identified to the repository without the institution owning the repository being obliged to create an identity for all possible assessors.
Furthermore, DEST does not want institutions to be able to identify any assessors, as this may compromise the process; nor does it want assessors to have to log in to each repository individually.
So the repository will need to be able to restrict access, based on a machine-to-machine transfer of a pre-defined identity.
Integration with other institutional systems The research outputs are only one part of the process of information collection, as detailed in the previous section.
Therefore the more integration there is between the repository and the other data collection systems used at an institution, the less work there is for those collecting the data.
The data collection process is a substantial piece of work, especially as this is the first time this exercise has been run.
Integration with the DEST IMS A repository being used for the RQF must be able to provide a stable link to the standard demanded by the DEST IMS (i.e.
one that resolves directly to the output, not to an intermediate page, for the reasons given above).
It must also respond correctly to the https-based authentication challenge that is delivered by the IMS when following a link.
Storage and access to research outputs other than journal articles The RQF is intended to measure the quality and impact of research outputs outside the traditional areas of journal articles and conference papers.
Performances, artwork, reports and installations, among other things, can be submitted.
The fact that such outputs need to be viewable online presents particular challenges for the repository manager.
ARROW's Responses to the Challenges Copyright This remains a significant issue for the RQF.
At time of writing, DEST is examining how a sector-wide solution can be achieved.
This is not a problem that ARROW can or should attempt to solve in isolation.
Fall-back positions could include the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs) that resolve to publisher versions or the use of author versions of papers where available, however DEST have indicated they would prefer not to use these methods.
Both involve extra work and/or authentication issues.
Access control ARROW has been testing the XACML [4] access control language as implemented in Fedora 2.2.
This will be used to provide datastream-level control of the research outputs.
VTLS, the providers of the VITAL software used by ARROW has also enhanced its access control implementation to enable the software to understand the authentication information sent by the DEST IMS.
Integration with other university systems A large number of Australian institutions use the Research Master management software [5] to record and manage their research performance and outputs.
ARROW has been working with Research Master P/L to provide a seamless input mechanism for copies of the outputs.
The intention is that an output can be attached briefly to a record in the Research Master software, then sent to the repository, and then a handle (a unique, permanent identifier) is returned to Research Master and recorded.
The output itself will only be stored in the repository, and not in Research Master.
This is designed to simplify the ingest process.
Once an output is submitted it will still be subject to review by the repository manager so that access control can be applied if needed, and metadata can be checked.
Integration with the DEST IMS VITAL can be configured to allow for a direct link to a research output stored within the repository, using a handle.
As discussed above, work is underway to ensure that the DEST authentication standard can be understood by VITAL.
Storage and access to research outputs other than journal articles ARROW has been working on this issue in a number of mock exercises.
A key strategy has been trying to understand what an assessor might be looking for by asking academics what aspects of their own work they would want to see in order to assess it.
ARROW has also been experimenting with different file types, and has been able to load and display most popular formats.
There is an ongoing tension associated with this approach some outputs are being loaded in a format that has a limited life because preservation standards are still unknown, or because of rapid development.
However the short-term needs of the RQF have to be met, even if this means that some objects are less permanent than is ideal.
Conclusion There is a considerable amount of work that still needs to be done before the RQF goes 'live' in April 2008, and it is quite probable that some aspects of this paper will be superseded as events unfold.
However, the basic model as proposed above seems sound, and should provide easy online access to research outputs, as well as promoting an expanding use of repositories within Australian institutions.
Acknowledgement The ARROW Project wishes to acknowledge the support of the Systematic Infrastructure Initiative as part of the Australian Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability An Innovation Action Plan for the Future (BAA).
References For more details on the ARROW Project see: Treloar, A and Groenewegen, D, "ARROW, DART and ARCHER: A Quiver Full of Research Repository and Related Projects" Ariadne, Issue 51, April 30, 2007, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/treloar-groenewegen/ Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training Web site: Research Quality Framework: Assessing the quality and impact of research in Australia http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews/key_issues/research_quality_framework/default.htm Note that 'quality' and 'impact' have very specific meanings within the RQF.
'Impact' in particular is used quite differently in this context to the commonly understood use of the term in academia.
In the RQF it refers to the impact of research on the wider community and Australian society in particular.
Wikipedia entry on eXtensible Access Control Markup Language, retrieved 29 July 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XACML ResearchMaster Pty Ltd http://www.researchmaster.com.au/ Author Details David Groenewegen Project Manager, ARROW Project Monash University Email: David.Groenewegen@lib.monash.edu.au Dr Andrew Treloar Director and Chief Architect, ARCHER Project Monash University Email: Andrew.Treloar@its.monash.edu.au Web site: http://andrew.treloar.net/ Return to top Article Title: "ARROW and the RQF: Meeting the Needs of the Research Quality Framework Using an Institutional Research Repository " Author: David Groenewegen and Andrew Treloar Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/groenewegen-treloar/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL News: EEVL, VLEs, Institutional and Library Portals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL News: EEVL, VLEs, Institutional and Library Portals Buzz data html database rss xml portal cataloguing z39.50 passwords soap vle srw interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Malcolm Moffat discusses the use of EEVL functionality in VLEs and Portals.
EEVL is the Internet guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet.
It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University.
EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in Higher and Further Education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.
It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
What are VLEs, Institutional Portals and Library Portals?
The term Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) is used to describe 'online interactions of various kinds which take place between learners and tutors' [1].
VLEs typically comprise a range of tools and features that aim to facilitate teaching and learning, (e.g.
delivery of learning materials, on-line assessment, communication and collaboration tools, etc).
One aspect of VLEs which is particularly relevant to RDN services is that they are often used to link to further resources which are available online.
The JISC FAQ on portals [2] provides concise answers to many common questions relating to portals and defines an institutional portal as providing: 'a personalised, single point of access to the online resources that support members of an institution in all aspects of their learning, teaching, research and other activities.
The resources may be internal or external and include local and remote 'information resources' (books, journals, databases, Web-sites, learning objects, images, student information systems etc.
), 'transaction-based services' (room bookings, finance, registration, assignment submission, assessment, etc.)
and 'collaborative tools' (calendars, email, chat, etc.)'
A library portal can be thought of as providing users with a single point of access to high quality information resources.
As such, Cox [3] describes the core functions of library portals as providing cross searching of multiple resources and linking to 'appropriate copy' via the use of Open URLs.
Popular commercially available library portal products include Metalib [4] from Ex Libris, Fretwell-Downing's ZPortal [5] and Endeavor ENCompass [6].
Actual interoperability between systems at the library, institutional and learning environment level is currently in a fairly embryonic state [7].
Much useful work is ongoing in this area and projects such as COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning & Information Services) [8] are illustrating some of the benefits closer standards-based integration may bring.
EEVL's policy on VLEs and portals is clear: EEVL functionality may be freely reused or embedded in VLEs or portals of UK HE and FE institutions for the purposes of enhancing teaching, learning or research.
Institutions using EEVL functionality in this way are simply asked to provide notification of their intended mode of use to help usage monitoring.
Use for commercial purposes is via prior written agreement only.
The remainder of this article considers why EEVL resources may be useful to those searching for material to use in VLEs or portals and also provides some examples of how EEVL functionality can be used within such environments.
Why use EEVL resources?
Why use services such as EEVL to locate resources?
What is wrong with simply using a search engine?
The short answer is that there is nothing wrong with search engines but they are a very different sort of tool from subject gateways.
Automatically created search engines (such as Google or Alta Vista) aim to index indiscriminately the full text of all the Web pages and documents available.
Gateways are hand-crafted collections of only selected high quality resources; (EEVL's Internet Resource Catalogue (IRC) currently has over 10,000 resource descriptions).
They are different tools suitable for different jobs.
Markland [9] recently conducted research exploring what kinds of resources lecturers were selecting for use in their VLE courses and how these resources were actually discovered.
Most lecturers in the study were familiar with JISC resources and 'found much to praise especially the Resource Discovery Network'.
The Virtual Training Suite (VTS) tutorials were also singled out as valuable resources by a number of lecturers.
The most popular means of locating suitable online resources were reported to be via conducting Web searches or by recommendations from teaching colleagues.
A number of difficulties were raised regarding the selection and use of online resources by lecturers including the lack of suitable online materials, the impermanence of Web sites and 'content churn'.
These lecturers were also aware that many of their students experienced difficulty when selecting materials for projects and coursework.
This was attributed to the sheer volume of materials combined with student's poor information-seeking behaviour and evaluation skills.
EEVL and the other subject gateways of the RDN offer some significant advantages over search engines for staff trying to locate suitable online resources.
The resources in these catalogues have already been assessed by subject experts as being of suitable quality for HE and FE audiences.
The resources have been described and catalogued by subject and by resource type in order to facilitate their discovery.
The currency of the links and descriptions are regularly checked to ensure that they are up to date and that the resources are actually available.
As such the catalogues offer a more reliable source of suitable materials for staff and students alike.
For example, students can browse EEVL to find only the best Web sites in their subject area, and lecturers can search for quality learning and teaching materials which have been evaluated by academic staff.
Clearly, the depth of coverage of subject gateways can never hope to rival that of search engines that index billions of pages, and while EEVL has attempted to tackle this issue by the creation of focused subject-specific search engines, suggestions [10] for new resources which could be included in EEVL are always welcomed.
Using EEVL Functionality in VLEs and Portals There are a number of ways in which EEVL resources and services could be used in VLEs or portals.
These range from incorporating EEVL's search facilities, to using the EEVL service as part of a learning activity within a VLE.
Some illustrative examples of how EEVL might be used in VLEs and portals are provided below.
Technical details for some of these options are provided in the 'Working with EEVL' [11] pages.
1.
Providing EEVL search facilities Providing search facilities within a VLE or portal may be a useful means to facilitate discovery of quality-assessed resources from within an institutional environment.
Essentially this provides VLE or portal users with a collection of online resources of guaranteed quality, availability and reliability.
At the simplest level an EEVL search box can be added to pages using a small piece of HTML.
Figure 1 illustrates the use of the EEVL search box by the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
In this scenario, search results are returned within the EEVL interface rather than the VLE or portal interface in which the EEVL search box is embedded.
Figure1: EEVL Search box in use on the Institution of Electrical Engineers site More sophisticated means of integration can be achieved by using the Z39.50 Information Retrieval protocol [12] to search the EEVL Internet resource catalogue.
Figure 2 illustrates searching of EEVL within Metalib at the University of East Anglia.
Here, search results are presented without users having to leave the native interface used by the institution.
Figure 2: Search of EEVL within Metalib at the University of East Anglia In the future EEVL plans to provide a public SOAP [13] search interface to the Internet Resource Catalogue.
The SOAP interface will be based on Search Retrieve Web (SRW) [14].
2.
Embedding the latest EEVL News and resources via RSS RSS [15] is an XML-based format for sharing content, such as news headlines, on the Web.
RSS is essentially data without any formatting which makes it possible to embed an RSS 'channel' containing headlines readily into a Web site, portal or VLE.
EEVL currently produces nine different RSS channels, which cover new resources and learning materials for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing, as well as the latest EEVL news headlines.
By using any of these RSS channels sites can easily present a subset of EEVL's resources within their preferred environment, allowing users to monitor new resources which may be of interest in their subject area.
In Figure 3 EEVL's RSS feed of new resources is being used by the LTSN Centre for Materials Science and Engineering to display a listing of new resources relevant to their subject area.
Figure 3: LTSN Centre for Materials Science and Engineering using an EEVL RSS feed to display new resources While the EEVL RSS feeds described above have proved popular, EEVL plans to expand the range of RSS Feeds produced by allowing users to create feeds based on search terms or individually selected records.
This will allow lecturers to hand-pick items from the EEVL catalogue, which could then be embedded in a VLE via RSS.
3.
Embedding training and learning materials The Virtual Training Suite [16] produced by EEVL and the other RDN services offer a set of free online tutorials designed to help students, lecturers and researchers improve their Internet information literacy skills.
A number of tutorials are available covering specific subject areas such as Construction, Engineering and Mathematics.
Guidelines [17] are available for including the best means of including VTS materials within Virtual Learning Environments.
The University of Glamorgan has made use of EEVL for training and learning in another context (Figure 4).
Here EEVL has been used within a VLE as part of a learning activity aimed at developing online information skills of students.
Learners are guided in a stepwise manner through a set of tasks using the EEVL catalogue for resource discovery.
Figure 4: Using EEVL as part of a learning activity exercise within a VLE at University of Glamorgan 4.
Finding relevant subject-specific news Services such as EEVL's OneStep Industry News and OneStep Jobs [18] can assist portal developers by acting as a 'shop window' for subject-specific resources which may be suitable for embedding into their portals.
For example, MUSE, the institutional portal at the University of Sheffield, has been designed to give students and staff personalised access to the University's online resources.
Among the features on offer is an RSS Newsfeed facility which allows users to customise the news they wish to view within the portal (Figure 5).
EEVL's OneStep services, which collect together RSS feeds on a subject-specific basis, have been recommended to MUSE portal users as starting points for discovering relevant news or job feeds as these can currently be difficult to locate by other means.
Figure 5.
Muse Portal at University of Sheffield which offers RSS Newsfeed facilities Conclusions EEVL is striving to unbundle functional components from the current user-oriented EEVL Web site in order to provide the means by which elements may be usefully deployed at the institutional level in portals and VLEs.
Due to the nature of such environments, which are often password-protected, the effectiveness and usefulness of such efforts is not always simple to measure.
We are keen to engage with those involved in portal/VLE development and welcome ideas for future developments or collaborations.
References MLEs and VLEs explained http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=mle_briefings_1 Portals: Frequently Asked Questions http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=ie_portalsfaq Cox, A.
(2003).
"Choosing a library Portal System".
VINE: The Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, 33(1), p37-41 Metalib http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/metalib.htm ZPortal http://www.fdusa.com/products/zportal.html ENCompass http://encompass.endinfosys.com/ Mclean, N. & Lynch, C. (2003).
"Interoperability between Information and Learning Environments Bridging the Gaps".
A Joint white paper on behalf of the IMS Global Learning Consortium and the Coalition for Networked Information.
http://www.imsglobal.org/DLims_white_paper_publicdraft_1.pdf COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning & Information Services) Project http://www.colis.mq.edu.au/ Markland, M. (2003).
"Embedding online information resources in Virtual Learning Environments: some implications for lecturers and librarians of the move towards delivering teaching in the online environment".
Information Research, 8(4), paper no.
158 http://informationr.net/ir/8-4/paper158.html EEVL Suggest a Site http://www.eevl.ac.uk/suggest.htm Working With EEVL http://www.eevl.ac.uk/workingwith.htm Z39.50 http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/ Search/Retrieve Web Service (SRW) http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/ Moffat, M. (2003).
"RSS A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers".
http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/ Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ Guidelines for including the RDN Virtual Training Suite within Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/teachers/guidelines.html EEVL OneStep Services http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestep/ Author Details Malcolm Moffat EEVL Development Officer Heriot-Watt University Library Edinburgh EH14 4AS E-mail: m.moffat@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.eevl.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "EEVL, VLEs, Institutional and Library Portals" Author: Malcolm Moffat Publication Date: 30-April-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 39 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DAEDALUS: Delivering the Glasgow EPrints Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DAEDALUS: Delivering the Glasgow EPrints Service Buzz data software java database dissemination infrastructure archives metadata repositories eprints copyright oai-pmh perl solaris ejournal dspace research Citation BibTex RIS Morag Greig and William Nixon describe the key aims and findings of the DAEDALUS Project and the Glasgow ePrints Service.
DAEDALUS [1] was a three-year project (August 2002-July 2005) based at the University of Glasgow and funded by JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [2].
The project established a number of different services for research material at the University of Glasgow.
This approach enabled us to explore an institutional repository model which used different software (ePrints, DSpace and PKP Harvester) for different content, including: Published and peer-reviewed papers Pre-prints, grey literature and theses Additional services were also developed including an open access e-journal (JeLit) and a subject-based repository for the Erpanet Project (ERPAePRINTS).
The project finished at the end of July 2005 but its range of services and activities are now being taken forward by the University of the Glasgow.
Its key service, the Glasgow ePrints Service [3] is the focus of this article.
Key Aims The key aims of the project were: to establish and populate a range of OAI-compliant digital collections at the University of Glasgow using a range of different OAI-compliant pieces of software.
to act as a catalyst for cultural change and ongoing discussions about the "crisis in Scholarly Communication" within the University of Glasgow and the wider community.
to disseminate our experiences and findings to the wider community through reports, workshops, exemplars and guides to best practice in the development of these services.
The DAEDALUS Project met these key aims and established a successful "proof of concept" advocacy campaign, a range of OAI-compliant data providers and a rich collection of high-quality research papers and other scholarly content.
The project also set up a pilot local OAI-compliant search provider to enable ease of access to these collections.
Over the three years of the project's lifetime this work has been widely, and internationally disseminated at conferences, workshops and JISC meetings.
In June 2005 we ran an institutional repositories workshop [4] which was attended by 35 colleagues from other Scottish and UK institutions .
A complete listing of the project's dissemination activities can be found on the DAEDALUS Web site [5].
Approach and Findings The project's overall approach was a twin-track one of service development and advocacy activities.
This approach recognised the critical nature of advocacy (and cultural change) and ensured that engagement with academics was maintained throughout the project.
The key findings of the project included the: Demonstration of the success of the twin-track approach of Advocacy and Service Development Importance of ongoing and active engagement with academic colleagues.
This is a critical component of Advocacy and has assisted our institution's culture to move more towards one of open access Effectiveness of the mediated submission model in pump-priming content for populating the services Need to address and understand the challenges which copyright poses for different content including published and peer-reviewed papers and theses.
Recognition of the range of technical expertise necessary to install, develop and maintain the institutional repository service.
The project has also written a range of reports, in addition to the presentations and papers produced which cover these findings in much greater detail and these are available on the project Web site.
Advocacy The development of an institutional advocacy campaign was one of the key activities undertaken by the project.
While there was some awareness of the concept of open access at Glasgow, the majority of academics were not familiar with repositories.
A wide range of strategies for securing content for the repository were employed these are detailed in a previous article in Ariadne [6].
These were successful in helping to populate the repository, while being very resource intensive.
The project was successful in gaining the support of a number of academic departments which agreed to contact being added for all members of staff subject to availability of full text and copyright transfer agreements.
By the end of the project an increasing number of departments had made similar requests.
This was a very satisfying development, as it indicated that the advocacy campaign had achieved the desired effect.
Further details of the institutional advocacy campaign pursued by the project are available in guidelines produced by document staff [7].
Closely related to the advocacy campaign was the need to work with authors and publishers on copyright issues.
Early on in the project it became clear that copyright was a major concern for authors, and most authors wanted to be reassured that publisher copyright agreements would be checked by project staff before papers were made available in the repository.
There have been significant changes in publishers' attitudes to repositories during the three years of the project.
Initially many publishers did not permit deposit in repositories, although some did give permission if contacted directly.
Publishers have since started to become more responsive to demands from authors and many now permit authors to deposit their final version of a paper in repositories.
While this is a positive move, discussions with authors have revealed that many do not have a suitable copy and do not have time to create one.
The problem of multiple versions of a paper being deposited in multiple repositories is also an issue.
While the majority of content in the Glasgow ePrints Service consists of published papers and conference papers, a number of books and book chapters have now been made available.
Copyright checking for this sort of material is fairly labour-intensive as each publisher has to be contacted individually to seek permission.
Agreements signed by book authors with publishers do not tend to indicate whether deposit in a repository is permitted.
So far publishers have been willing to allow deposit where the material is a few years old or indeed out of print, presumably on the basis that there are likely to be few further opportunities to generate revenue.
The books and book chapters available in the ePrints Service have been downloaded heavily since their deposit, and feedback from the authors concerned has been extremely positive.
In particular, an out of print book in the area of Celtic studies deposited towards the end of August 2005 has already been downloaded over 600 times (by the end of October 2005).
The inclusion of books in a repository raises the issue of the possible implications on author royalties.
However, some authors are more interested in seeing their work widely read.
It is also the case that some studies have demonstrated that making a book available online can have a positive impact on sales.
One of the key outcomes of the project that has helped to persuade academics of the benefits of deposit has been the usage statistics for publications held in the ePrints Service.
As mentioned previously, books available in the ePrints Service have been heavily used.
Journal articles are also attracting impressive access and downloads.
At the time of writing the most frequently used item in the repository has been downloaded over 1700 times; the top 50 items have all been downloaded over 200 times.
Such statistics are critical in demonstrating that making articles available in repositories has the effect of making them more visible.
Our content is also available in Yahoo and Google and has been registered with Google Scholar and Elsevier's SCIRUS search tool.
This has enabled us to demonstrate further this increased visibility.
Service Development The project used a range of software including GNU EPrints, DSpace, ETD-db and the initial installation of these was completed by the end of the first year.
The work was then focussed on the development and configuration of the services in parallel with the advocacy work.
A pilot search service using the PKP Harvester was installed in the final year.
All of the software was installed on a single Sun server running Solaris.
Details of our initial experiences with GNU EPrints and DSpace are available in Ariadne [8].
With this range of software we took the strategic decision at the outset to second (on a part-time basis) technical expertise from the Computing Service department in the University.
The risk of a loss of this expert support if we had recruited a temporary post was felt to be too great for a project which relied on a (new) technical infrastructure.
This decision also provided us with long term sustainability and technical expertise beyond the life of the project which will support its ongoing development.
The open source software we have used is less straightforward to install, support and configure than commercial software and requires more expertise to troubleshoot and test.
We are using both GNU EPrints and DSpace for different content types but have done more work with the ePrints Service and have more experience with Perl rather than Java (which DSpace uses).
The project's key service is running on GNU EPrints.
The Glasgow ePrints Service was launched in June 2004 and it now has over 1800 records with over 360 full text papers.
Figure 1: Screenshot of the Glasgow ePrints Service Home Page Early in the first year it was decided to include both bibliographic records as well as those for full text in the ePrints service.
This decision reflected the challenges which copyright posed in securing the full text of papers and was similar to that of the University of Southampton's TARDis Project which also decided to accept both full text and bibliographic records [9].
We felt that it was important to find full text papers in our service easily, so a new field was added which indicated whether a record held the full text of a paper or not; this has enabled us easily to limit searches to full text content only.
The default search in ePrints was initially set to search only for full text records but by late 2004 this was changed to search for all records in the service.
The proportion of records which only had bibliographic details at that time was 3 to 1 and it was felt that the default results did not reflect the full range of content available.
Academic colleagues had also indicated that they felt it was confusing if a search for their papers only listed the full text papers held in the service and not all of their publications.
In addition to this, our decision to hold, initially, just published and peer-reviewed journal papers in the Glasgow ePrints Service enabled us to make a wide range of changes to both the default deposit process (to remove the mandatory deposit of full text) and the metadata fields which would be used and displayed.
These included an acknowledgement of prior publication and an indication of any permissions which we had sought to make the content publicly available.
We have mapped these fields to the appropriate unqualified Dublin Core fields for OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) harvesting, e.g.
copyright, reproduction rights map to the Dublin Core 'rights' fields.
Figure 2: Screenshot of an ePrints Record We have also written scripts to allow bibliographic details to be imported from publications databases using software such as Reference Manager and EndNote into the ePrints Service.
Many departments within the University were already using these software packages to hold publications internally, and we felt that it would be important to be able to work with these systems rather than expecting existing data to be entered into the ePrints Service from scratch.
The scripts are available in our DSpace service [10].
These scripts have been a key component in the mediated submission model which we have used to populate our ePrints Service; further details about this model are available in the report "Populating the Glasgow ePrints Service: A mediated model and workflow" [11].
During the lifetime of the project a number of unexpected outcomes and opportunities emerged.
Most notably the development of additional services to support interest in open access publishing across the University: JeLit (Journal of eLiteracy) an open access journal [12] ERPAePRINTS: a subject-based institutional repository [13] Conclusion The repository services set up by DAEDALUS have given us an opportunity to work closely with academic departments which previously did not have much involvement with the Library.
This has included opportunities to work with publications databases created by departments and to advise them on the range of metadata required.
It has also enabled us to host content such as working papers, technical reports and user manuals they have created in DSpace.
At the University of Glasgow we see the Glasgow ePrints Service and the Glasgow DSpace Service [14] as complementary, and this has enabled us to take a twin-track approach to our advocacy work in gathering differing content which presents different challenges.
The work of DAEDALUS has demonstrated that an institutional repository service is greater than the sum of its parts and requires a range of skills and staff to implement it effectively and ensure its ongoing sustainability.
Both these services are now being taken forward by the University and our challenge now is to maintain the momentum of advocacy and cultural change which DAEDALUS has started.
Early indications from departments and faculties are encouraging with an increasing number ready to add their content to the service.
Acknowledgements Our thanks to our DAEDALUS colleagues Stephen Gallacher, Lesley Drysdale and Joan Keenan whose work and assistance have been invaluable in delivering our range of services.
References DAEDALUS Web site http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus FAIR Programme Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair Glasgow ePrints Service Web site http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Developing an institutional repository: issues and challenges http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/workshop/ DAEDALUS Documentation http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/docs/index.html Mackie, M., "Filling Institutional Repositories: Practical strategies from the DAEDALUS Project", Ariadne 39, April 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/mackie/ Greig, M., "Institutional Advocacy Campaign: Guidelines and Practical Advice", DAEDALUS Project Report, 2005 http://hdl.handle.net/1905/377 Nixon, William "DAEDALUS: Initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace", Ariadne 37, October 2003 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/nixon/ Simpson, P., "TARDis Project Final Report.
Southampton UK, University of Southampton, "University Library, 2005 http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/16122/ Drysdale, Lesley, "Importing Records from Reference Manager into GNU EPrints", DAEDALUS Project Report, 2005 http://hdl.handle.net/1905/175 Nixon, William J. and Greig, Morag, "Populating the Glasgow ePrints Service: A mediated model and workflow", DAEDALUS Project Report, 2005 http://hdl.handle.net/1905/387 JeLit, Journal of eLiteracy http://www.jelit.org ERPAePRINTS Repository http://eprints.erpanet.org Glasgow DSpace Service http://dspace.gla.ac.uk Author Details Morag Greig Project Manager (Advocacy), DAEDALUS University of Glasgow Email: m.greig@lib.gla.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus William J Nixon Project Manager (Service Development), DAEDALUS University of Glasgow Email: w.nixon@lib.gla.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus Return to top Article Title: " DAEDALUS: Delivering the Glasgow ePrints Service" Author: Morag Greig and William J Nixon Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/greig-nixon/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 40: Horses for Courses Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 40: Horses for Courses Buzz usability archives metadata blog repositories oai-pmh srw sru intranet url research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 40.
Reading the interesting points Karen Coyle has to make in Rights Management and Digital Library Requirements puts me in mind, not so much of horses actually, as of one of cartoonist Gary Larson's cows.
The bovine unfortunate in question, bedecked with shower cap, is being pushed along by the rest of the herd and complaining that no sooner has she stepped into the shower than some fool cries 'Stampede!'
Much the same effect may be claimed from the fallout of the Napster affair and the sharing of millions of music files.
This had a profound influence on the behaviour of the media and entertainment industries, which, as Karen points out, are now the driving force behind the technology of Digital Rights Management in respect of commercial content.
This pressure has provoked debates within the digital library community about the most appropriate rights expression language, when in fact such discussions, she feels, are way too premature.
In her article Karen sets about illustrating aspects of developments in rights management likely to prove problematic for digital libraries and invites us to consider more carefully what their needs are going to be, as distinct from those of the stampeding commercial sectors.
Fitness for purpose would seem to be the watchwords here or horses for courses.
Meanwhile Daniel Chudnov, Jeremy Frumkin, Jennifer Weintraub, Matthew Wilcox and Raymond Yee have all contributed to Towards Library Groupware with Personalised Link Routing and set us thinking about library groupware, a new class of service to help people manage the myriad of information they encounter as they navigate the increasingly complex range of online resources and communities that constitute the current information landscape.
The aim of such a service would be to provide users with a common set of information functions applicable to any information anywhere.
They illustrate their proposition with three heavily used network applications we might not all automatically club together: link resolvers, bibliographic reference managers and weblogs.
They ultimately suggest an architectural solution arguing that it represents a significant step towards a vision of integrated groupware and an effective means of employing all the disparate resources and services that now abound.
We have Eric Lease Morgan to thank for An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service in which he describes the 'brother and sister' Web Service protocols SRW and SRU, with an emphasis on the latter.
Eric not only provides a sound rationale for these protocols but goes on to show how SRU is being used by a project to facilitate an alerting service.
He furnishes us with tranches of the actual code to illustrate his points.
Furthermore he comments upon the complementary nature of OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and SRW/U and their respective strengths.
An extremely sound introduction to two protocols that are beginning to attract more attention.
A significant proportion of this issue is devoted to the Collection-level Description Focus and Ann Chapman and Bridget Robinson start us off with the notion of Thinking globally before acting locally and in so doing illustrate their point by referring us to three projects which have followed this premise: Alison Baud and Ann Chapman write on a project entitled Tap Into Bath , a small-scale demonstrator project bringing together collection-level descriptions of resources local to Bath, UK; Chris Turner writes on Cornucopia now entering its fourth year and currently providing cross-searchable collection-level descriptions to some 1800 British museums; and at the other end of the spectrum Amanda Hill explains what the Information Environment Service Registry will mean for its stakeholders in its role of promoting the use of electronic resources.
On another tack, Jessie Hey keeps the matter of scholarly publishing ticking over nicely with her description of Targeting Academic Research with Southampton's Institutional Repository.
Jessie, based on her experience with the TARDis Project, explains how the needs of users have contributed to the evolution of e-Prints Soton.
As usual the foregoing are all supported by our other sections, including our Regular Columns added to which is another raft of At the Event and Get Tooled Up articles, as well as News and Reviews.
In the latter we have reviews of works on information architecture, managing Internet and intranet services, the issue of staying legal, Web-based instruction and how librarians can manage the unintended consequences of the Internet.
I am pleased to see this section continue to grow and am very grateful to the many readers of Ariadne and members of academic lists who have offered to review for us.
Equally the Ariadne Newsline has been re-organised to be, I hope, a little more user-friendly.
My thanks to Shirley Keane for her support in this regard.
In addition to Brian Kelly's exposé on Web Focus: The Web on your TV, our Get Tooled Up section is also carrying another article from Dey Alexander, this time in concert with Derek Brown on the subject of Testing Web Page Design Concepts for Usability.
While the geographical context is once again Australian Higher Education, as with How Accessible Are Australian University Web Sites?, there can be no disputing the universal applicability of its content.
I am of course indebted to Ariadne's columnists for their reliable and regular contributions and in particular to Penny Garrod who has been writing her column for public libraries since December 2001.
Penny will be moving on from UKOLN at the end of August.
Not only has she always approached her columns with a spirit of investigation and a propensity for calling a spade a refreshing spade, but she has also been greatly valued here for her sense of curiosity and humour.
As editor I am indebted to Penny for her unflagging support and advice in matters public libraries as well as her unfailing patience with some of my dafter questions!
I hope you will enjoy issue 40.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 40: Horses for Courses" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Wikido: Exploiting the Potential of Wikis Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wikido: Exploiting the Potential of Wikis Buzz data software wiki api wireless usability metadata firefox blog flickr e-learning shibboleth authentication ict interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy reports on a one-day workshop, held in Birmingham in November 2006, which took a closer look at the potential of Wikis for educational institutions.
The ‘Wikido’ [pron.
‘wiki-doo’], as I have come to refer to it affectionately, was held at Austin Court, Birmingham on Friday 3 November 2006.
Its organisation by Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, was as a direct result of feedback and discussions carried out by the Web Management Community at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 and on the JISCmail web-support list.
It was therefore interesting (and encouraging) to see so many delegates from communities in addition to that of Web management attending.
The 80 delegates included members of IT Services, library and information services and the research community.
Initially I wondered whether the mixture of delegates reflected the dearth of knowledge in these particular communities.
However a show of hands established that one third of the delegates already used a wiki in their working environment and over the course of the day it became apparent that this was a fairly wiki-savvy lot who really wanted more than just an introduction, they wanted to know how to take wikis forward in an educational environment.
Austin Court was a really comfortable, relaxed venue.
Wireless access was issued by scratch cards, no lottery prizes though, and coffee was livened up by exciting wrapped chocolate bars displayed in what looked like big, glass fish tanks.
It seemed a fitting setting in which to think about using new technologies to create a community space.
All materials from the event are available from the workshop Web site [1], photos of the event are available on Flickr [2].
Morning Session: Wikis: What Can They Provide?
The morning session got rolling with a quick introduction to the day and scene setting by co-chair and organiser Brian Kelly.
He also explained that there were a couple of remote participants who were listening to the talks using Skype.
They could also view the slides which were on the Web in Slideshare.
The morning’s session was to cover user needs for Wikis and consider what they could provide to support us in our institutions.
Wikis and Collaboration: Approaches to Deploying Wikis in Educational Settings The first plenary was presented by the other co-chair, Steven Warburton, e-learning ICT manager at King’s College London.
Steven, having a wealth of experience in the implementation and evaluation of learning technology, took a very e-learning-focused look at wikis.
He began by asking if wikis truly require a paradigm shift given that they are a relatively old technology.
He outlined the move away from the cognitive model of pedagogy to the more recent socio-constructivism approach that emphasises the social nature of learning.
This shift along with recent socio-technical and cultural changes, such as the rise of Web 2.0, has been the tipping point.
Steven then asked if wikis can be put to effective educational use and fit into the current e-learning world.
It seems they can.
Their pedagogical potential lies around a number of key truths noted by Renée Fountain.
These include: wikis maximise interplay, they are democratic, work in real time and promote negotiation, they permit collaboration and enable complete anonymity.
One particular area of interest for Steven is the theoretical implications of ‘communities of practice’ and ‘networked collaborative e-learning’ which can use wikis to promote a democratic engagement with learning where students can operate both as consumers and producers of knowledge.
Steven then went on to consider what wiki-based educational activities might look like and consider some of the issues that might need addressing such as the tensions between individual and group and how we can support strong community formation.
He concluded by saying that to get wikis to work we need to display trust and let go.
In the words of Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, “The basic thing I think makes it work is turning from a model of permissions to a model of accountability”.
Figure 1: Steven Warburton and his Web 2.0 slide Wikis and (Meta)data Rich Environments: a Model for Scholarly Publishing The second plenary was given by Henry Rzepa, Professor of Computational Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, London.
Henry had a stab at ‘eating his own dog food’ (i.e.
‘practising what he preached’) and actually gave his presentation using a wiki [3].
Henry’s talk sought to persuade the audience that wikis are an excellent medium for enabling both students and researchers in ‘data -rich’ subjects to collaborate and communicate in a sensible manner.
In order to do this Henry advocated the use of semantic wikis, or wikis that allow the insertion of metadata and ‘learn’ from this metadata.
Henry felt that these semantic steps are leading us in the right direction for human 2.0, an upgraded human created through advances in nanotechnology.
He demonstrated the MediaWiki wiki currently used by his own Chemistry students to carry out research.
Mediawiki has a growing number of extensions available to it and Henry demonstrated some of the more appropriate ones for science students; for example, it is possible to have molecules rendered in 3D.
Henry expressed the view that the wiki environment has potential for the scholarly journal.
He asked the audience if publishers could either accept such models, or find a way to make money from them and also what would this mean for tertiary science/technical/medical publishers, who have traditionally held a monopoly on ‘added value’ publishing.
Delegates’ comments after the talk seemed to suggest that such an approach would not be a viable one given the issues concerning control over information.
Discussion Groups: Wikis: The User Requirements After the coffee break (an opportunity for us to catch breath) came the discussion groups.
Delegates were divided into 5 groups all looking at wikis from slightly different angles, considering: the needs of users; the needs of institutions; the needs of students; the needs beyond the institution; the needs of wiki power users.
Each group was provided with Wetpaint wiki space on which to record their thoughts and answers to the questions.
The morning session focused on the wikis that are already out there and considered whether they add educational value and stimulate new ways of thinking about learning and teaching or merely support established pedagogical approaches.
The second set of issues considered were: who exactly are the users of wikis?
how can user communities benefit from the provision of wikis?
The conclusions of the first discussion session were fed back immediately after lunch (giving people time get their wikis into an orderly fashion).
The full text of the various discussions is available on the workshop wiki [4] but some of the most interesting thoughts included: How do you get valid assessment from a wiki?
Can a wiki help with understand collaboration i.e who is contributing and why?
Who owns the content?
How do you get staff to look at these types of technology?
Amongst academics there is a reluctance to share.
Academics talk about lessons, but wikis offer no container constraint.
Do wikis offer more student ownership?
Is there a danger of wiki overload?
Are the problems being faced in respect of digital repositories the same for wikis?
More wiki case studies are needed.
What about control of the message at institutional level?
Do we have enough confidence in our institution?
Can we take criticism?
Wikis tend to attract a ‘geeky’ audience and could be dominated by a certain element, certain students will feel challenged What about single sign-on and Shibboleth?
To whom do you grant access?
Will all technologies blur over time?
Or will technologies become more specific over time?
We can’t prescribe what wikis are to do, merely observe patterns of usage.
We need to bear in mind that technology should be secondary to learning What about metadata?
With wikis we need to get the right mix of usability and resilience How can we encourage engagement?
Figure 2: Networking at the Wikido Afternoon Session: Wikis: Developing a Deployment Strategy The afternoon session addressed ways in which organisations can deploy wikis that meet specific requirements.
Reflections on Personal Experiences of Using Wikis Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus gave the first plenary of the afternoon, a review of his experiences over the past two years with a range of Wiki tools.
His first attempt to use a wiki was at his Beyond Email workshop in November 2004.
Brian installed a Firefox plug-in called Wikalong, a hosted service for annotating Web pages.
The service allowed delegates to record notes on their discussions, annotate them and access them on their return from the workshop.
His first encounter with a successful wiki in action was through reading and editing entries in Wikipedia.
Brian established an entry on Rapper Sword Dancing.
Brian and his team then trialled a number of different wikis Twiki, MediaWiki, MoodleJot, Wetpaint, Writely to get a feel for their different strengths and weaknesses.
His final reflections centred largely on the apparent tensions arising over the choice of wiki to deploy.
Should you consider technical features (such as the back end or whether it’s open source) over user features (interface and ease of use)?
Should you outsource, develop in-house, centralise or distribute?
The answers lie in the needs of each individual institution.
Evaluating Wikis: A Case Study In the final plenary of the day Phil Wilson, Web Software Developer, University of Bath, outlined the Wiki evaluation work that took place at Bath.
Phil explained that the team at Bath had decided to set up a wiki originally intended only for internal use by IT services to co-ordinate their work.
The team’s brief had been to create something that had a flexible permissions system, could hook into IT services authentication, had a WYSIWYG interface, could be hosted by the Bath University Computing Service, would allow wiki farming and would require very little effort.
Initially the team looked at 5 different wikis: JSPWiki, MediaWiki, Confluence, JotSpot (which has now been aquired by Google) and Xwiki.
After some research, use of wikimatrix and a little testing, Confluence came out on top.
Confluence, a proprietary solution produced by Atlassian, has a very useable API and does a great job of supporting multiple wikis.
Phil’s concluding remark was that if you were truly serious about taking on a robust, flexible wiki then you needed to pay out with hard cash.
Discussion Groups: Deployment Strategies The second discussion session of the day involved working on a Wiki strategy for institutions and considering the pros and cons of the approach.
Possible options for delegates to consider were: to create a large-scale enterprise Wiki service for use within an institution.
to adopt a distributed and decentralised approach, in which departments, ad hoc groups, individuals, etc.
may choose their own preferred Wiki tools, which could be installed locally or use of free or licensed externally-hosted services.
to make use of Wiki functionality provided in other enterprise tools, such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), Blogs, etc.
to undertake in-house development of a Wiki service.
to do nothing, either because: effort is limited and priority is given to other areas; or a view that Wikis are of marginal relevance to the institution.
Most groups could recognise the benefits of different approaches but few felt able to commit to one approach at this stage, at least not without IT services on board!
It was evident that a choice would be highly dependent on the culture of individual institutions, with some favouring open source while others always required an institutional stamp.
One of the key requirements in the context of migration was that the wiki service must provide routes in and out to avoid lock-in.
Most concluded that at this stage there are two main players emerging in this respect: MediaWiki (the wiki behind Wikipedia), which is open source but suffers from its flat file structure, or Confluence, the commercial solution advocated by Phil Wilson.
Figure 3: Elaine Swift and Matt Thrower, University of Bath Conclusion The Wikido was a thought-provoking day and an interesting opportunity to explore some of the bigger-picture issues relating to wikis.
Delegates seemed to be in agreement that wikis do have a part to play in education and learning, but what this part is exactly has yet to emerge fully.
For me, as the writer of this trip report, I feel obliged to say that the use of wikis has actually made writing this article more difficult in one way… Quite often on return from a conference you just have your own notes to consider; but because of the use of wikis to record the discussion session’s feedback I actually had the delegates’ entire stream of consciousness to wade through!
Obviously this can be an advantage, but it does raise a few questions.
Is it overload?
Do we want everything to be recorded and shared?
Who is to say that 6 months down the line we might wish we had not said ‘X’ in our discussion group, but now it has its place in Web history?
And how can one person consolidate all these thoughts into a single piece of work?
Collaboration is the very essence of a wiki but collaboration doesn’t come easy.
Arguably I should have written this article in a wiki then I might have had a little help with it!
References Exploiting the potential of Wikis: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/wiki-workshop-2006/ Flickr Photos from the event http://www.flickr.com/photos/24358121@N00/sets/72157594363137090/ Why Wiki: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/wiki2/index.php/Main_Page WIKI Workshop’s Wiki http://wiki-workshop-2006-11.wetpaint.com/ Author Details Marieke Guy Interoperability Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Wikido: Exploiting the Potential of Wikis” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-January-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 50 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/wikido-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Advanced Collaboration With the Access Grid Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Advanced Collaboration With the Access Grid Buzz data software archives browser video videoconferencing jabber interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Daw describes the Access Grid system and its claim to be an Advanced Collaboration Environment.
Collaboration between institutions based in different cities, countries or continents is becoming the norm in both commercial and academic worlds.
The ability to attend meetings and interact with people effectively without incurring all the negative implications associated with travel such as cost, expense, environmental impact and reduction in productivity is a truly worthwhile goal.
Access Grid [1] was invented by the Futures Group within Argonne National Laboratory [2] in 1998 as a response to perceived weaknesses of traditional videoconferencing in handling group-to-group collaboration between large numbers of sites and its lack of emphasis on advanced data sharing.
Access Grid takes the concept of collaboration further than merely sharing voice and video into what is termed as an Advanced Collaboration Environment.
Accessing the Grid The Access Grid is based upon the metaphor of virtual venues.
Just as one can meet other people in physical rooms and interact with objects in that room, virtual venues are places in which participants can see and hear each other.
They are also places in which virtual objects can be left, such as data, applications or services.
The original intention of the Access Grid was to do for humans what the Grid [3] does for machines.
Recent releases of research software, known as 'Access Grid 2' [4], have focussed more on integrating core Grid technology, utilising X.509 certificates for security and looking more at the integration of applications and services to support 'virtual organisations', such as groups of biologists or physicists who work across institutional boundaries.
Figure 1: The Access Grid 2 client interface Human Factors Access Grid has attempted to prioritise human factors issues.
A typical Access Grid node has a large display: often a whole wall is used to show three projector images side by side.
A large pixel-space is necessary for three reasons: so that video streams of each of the potentially huge number of sites taking part is displayed; to display data sharing tools that are increasingly a component of complex collaborations; and to show life-size images of participants so that facial expressions and body language ('non-verbal cues') may be seen.
Gaining maximum benefit from non-verbal cues is also the reasoning behind having multiple cameras many nodes have three or four positioned strategically around the room.
This enables a single camera to be devoted to as few participants as possible preferably one camera per person to allow a newsreader-type head-and-shoulders shot.
Figure 2: A typical Access Grid meeting The audio in Access Grid is currently a single, mono stream, although there is research looking to enhance this to stereo or even to enable 'sound localisation', where the sound appears to come from different parts of the room.
However, in any videoconferencing or collaboration environment, it is vital that the audio is of excellent quality.
Any imperfection, such as buzzes or hiss, will detract from the effectiveness of the meeting as participants will be unable to concentrate on what people say.
Poor quality audio is also hard work and it can be very tiring to take part in such a meeting.
Therefore, a major element in the cost of an Access Grid node is on the purchase of top quality audio equipment, such as speakers, microphones and vitally an echo canceller, which prevents sound from one site being fed back to that site through another's microphones.
Multicast The sharing of data within the Access Grid, including video and audio streams, is performed over the Internet and there is no technological limit to the number of sites that may participate.
For example, a recent conference held using Access Grid technology, SC Global 2004 [5], had sessions involving up to 50 sites from all around the globe.
With this many sites interacting, each sending multiple video and audio streams to every other participant, efficient use of network bandwidth is vital.
This is achieved using a peer-to-peer architecture (i.e.
no central server distributes data between participants: they each send to each other), implemented by using multicast networking [6].
Figure 3: Access Grid in use in SC Global 2004 (© Carl Bentley, 2004) Multicast differs from unicast, or conventional networking, by the fact that each sender only transmits one copy of the data, no matter how many recipients are involved.
Network routers between sender and receiver determine when copies need to be made to ensure correct delivery.
This means huge savings in the amount of bandwidth and processing power that is required for large, multi-site meetings.
Figure 4: Multiple copies of packets sent over unicast Figure 5: Copies of packets only made when necessary over multicast However, multicast is not yet ubiquitous: new academic sites which are installing Access Grid may start out with no multicast provision because the default is not to enable it; multicast is not supported by commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs); multicast may go 'down' upon upgrades to router software (although this problem is becoming less frequent); and there are often multicast connectivity problems internationally.
Therefore, for the foreseeable future, there remains a requirement for multicast-unicast bridges that reflect packets to and from unicast-only sites.
The Access Grid Support Centre In April 2004, the Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC) [7] was established at the University of Manchester to provide support for UK academic Access Grid sites, including the provision of such multicast-unicast bridges.
Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [8] and managed by UKERNA [9], its aim is to improve the Access Grid experience through training, support, Quality Assurance (QA) tests and the provision of a number of services.
In-depth training consists of a series of courses, which cover issues from introductions to Access Grid through to debugging and fault-finding techniques.
QA tests improve the quality of facilities by checking audio, video and network quality at remote nodes, as well as the use of shared presentation software and Jabber [10] messaging software used for sideband conversations between participants or technicians.
A virtual venue server supports UK-only venues in addition to the standard venues.
A number of multicast-unicast bridge services are provided for users of commercial and research software and also to assist users who may wish to connect with low-bandwidth capability, such as broadband at home.
For the first time for many UK sites, the AGSC runs a service that allows the presentation of Microsoft PowerPoint™ over a Web browser without the need to distribute slides beforehand.
Also available is a facility to record meetings.
Figure 6: The AGSC Access Grid Recorder (using inSORS IG Recorder) It is anticipated that in the coming years, collaborative tools will come to be developed that enhance, or that can be used alongside, the Access Grid.
The AGSC is likely to be a major player in ensuring that these tools are rolled out so that users of Access Grid facilities can extract maximum benefit from them.
The aim of the AGSC is to help the UK to realise fully the potential of Access Grid as a tool for highly effective remote collaboration.
Conclusion Although users of Access Grid are enthusiastic, there remain hurdles to a dominance of this technology over alternatives.
Perhaps the most significant is the inability of Access Grid to interoperate with more conventional videoconferencing.
H.323/H.320 systems are very widespread, particularly in industry, and the requirement to have Access Grid technology at each endpoint may be a barrier to further expansion.
There have been attempts to implement interoperability between the systems, most notably by inSORS Integrated Communications Inc.[11], a commercial provider of an Access Grid-like product, but there remain problems because of inherent differences between the technologies, such as inconsistencies in the way in which they handle large numbers of multiple sites [12].
There are also profound problems with robustness, ease of installation and maintenance associated with recent releases of the Access Grid research software and there are signs of frustration among the user community [13].
The future of the Access Grid concept may well lie in a commercialised version of the product that concentrates on robustness and ease of use.
The aforementioned inSORS offers a solution that interoperates almost seamlessly with Access Grid.
However, there is also research currently being undertaken by a certain major software company into a product that borrows many features of the Access Grid, which is known as ConferenceXP [14].
Whatever the future of Access Grid, there is a pressing need to implement usable and effective alternatives to travel, which, if undertaken to excess, will have increasing and serious negative consequences in terms of the productivity (not to mention the sanity!)
of the frequent travellers among us, as well as adding immense pressure to the environment, which many believe is already showing worrying signs of strain through global warming.
The Access Grid, whilst it may not be the ultimate solution, has helped to show us glimpses of the direction in which we might be heading.
References The Access Grid http://www.accessgrid.org/ The Argonne Futures Laboratory http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/fl/ For a definition, see for example : Grid Computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing The Access Grid Toolkit (AGTk) http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/fl/research/accessgrid/ SC Global 2004 http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/scglobal.html For a definition, see for example : Multicast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast The Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC) http://www.agsc.ja.net/ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ About UKERNA http://www.ukerna.ac.uk/aboutukerna.html What is Jabber?
http://www.jabber.org/about/overview.php inSORS Integrated Communications http://www.insors.com/ Investigation into Solutions to Maximise Interoperability Between Access Grid and H.323/H.320, June 2004 http://www.ja.net/development/e-Science/Report5.pdf For example see ag-tech mailing list archives at: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/web-mail-archive/lists/ag-tech/maillist.html (searchable at http://www.accessgrid.org/) Introducing ConferenceXP http://www.conferencexp.net/community/default.aspx Author Details Michael Daw Team Leader Collaborative Working Developments University of Manchester Email: michael.daw@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sve.man.ac.uk/General/Staff/daw Return to top Article Title: "Advanced Collaboration with the Access Grid" Author: Michael Daw Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/daw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Essential Law for Information Professionals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Essential Law for Information Professionals Buzz data framework database archives copyright ebook foi privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Hannabuss picks another winner but wonders whether legal essentialism is enough for information professionals.
When you see a retail centre in a town, it is natural to wonder how central it really is : is it merely a claim?
So when words like 'essential' appear in book titles, we again wonder whether it is really so.
Years of publishers' blurbs and puffs induce irony, especially as we look along shelves of books with similar titles (and claims), above all for students and young professionals essential psychology, essential statistics, essentials for Continuing Professional Development, essential law.
However, in this case, with Paul Pedley's Essential Law for Information Professionals, 'essential' is really so, and it doesn't merely float about like a Platonic idea.
The first edition of the book appeared in 2003 and immediately established itself as a popular training and student text.
It covered copyright and data protection, freedom of information and defamation, breach of confidence and privacy, professional liability, contracts and licensing agreements, Internet and e-commerce law, and computer misuse.
Its context was applicable law at the time in England and Wales, though the issues it raised applied even more widely.
It was a clear, business-like introduction, as one would expect from anyone associated with The Economist (Pedley is head of research at The Economist Intelligence Unit).
He is also a popular speaker and trainer on the information circuit, and author/editor of two other recent works likely to interest readers of this review.
One is Managing Digital Rights: A Practitioner's Guide (Facet Publishing, 2005, good though uneven) and the other is Digital Copyright (an ebook from Facet Publishing, 2005, no print version planned, that has good priorities with Web sites and databases, legal and technical protections, linking and downloading, licences and open access and virtual learning up front, and conventional material like economic and moral rights at the end).
Two further useful texts, then, to add to the growing stable of sources available to information professionals [1-9].
By including commentary on things like legal deposit for Web sites and the re-use of public sector and Crown copyright material, Digital Copyright revealingly pointed forward to what was in the pipeline for the second edition of Essential Law.
Now it's here so what and what new and better (because things always improve) has it got?
There are brand new chapters on the re-use of public sector information and its associated schemes, two new chapters on disability discrimination and human rights (relevant case law in the second, and helpful cross-references in the index to related issues like privacy and confidence), and another on the legal deposit and harvesting of electronic sources like databases, post-Legal Deposit Act 2003.
Pedley has provided an eclectic glossary of terms like 'civil law' and 'phishing', prescribed library and 'sui generis', and the usual lists of statutes and European Directives and case law.
New chapters and old (revised versions of those which appeared in the first edition) all start with clear summaries of contents, and end with notes (good for sources) and further information about relevant organisations.
The new edition is pleasantly printed and robust for a paperback these days (where paper quality often suffers), and the price is predictable for libraries and affordable for personal purchase at today's rates.
The blurb calls it 'a classic text' and there is far more than a grain of truth in that claim.
If I had to take a book of its type to a desert island, this might well be the one (though, to be honest, I think The Oxford Book of Exploration or a copy of the Metaphysical poets might go in first).
Essential Law also updates things from the first edition.
We find droit de suite in the chapter on copyright (librarians involved with art works will find this relevant, otherwise it is a lawyerly matter), the impact of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 in the chapter on data protection, a new short chapter on the Information Commissioner (who in both England & Wales and in Scotland is responsible for both data protection and freedom of information) (though this chapter should have been an appendix), new material on contracts and licensing, and a larger chapter on cybercrime (following the 2004 All-Party Internet Group report on revising the Computer Misuse Act 1990).
It was at this point that, fresh from reading Whither the Legal Web?
by Nick Holmes and Delia Venables (accessible by way of Nick Holmes's infolaw Web site [10]) that I started wondering whether 'essential' things were rather too 'essentialist'.
Whither the Legal Web is full of good things, and not just for information professionals, and has the strength, along with many other formally legal interpretations of law, of pointing to what happens when things go right or wrong (or, more usually, something in between).
As everyone knows, essentialism is the belief that entities can be defined by their characteristics, that murder can be defined in objective terms, that biological species are what they are, and that gender and race are definable from fixed traits.
So how does this rather speculative philosophical stuff apply to Essential Law and its ilk?
Take cybercrime and computer misuse : all the information about legislation and interpretation, phishing and pharming and intellectual property infringement in the world takes us only so far.
The law is big and slow and costly day-to-day decisions (usually not between right-and-wrong but between right-and-right) work on a more immediate and complex level, so knowing the framework of the law is just the beginning.
Take disability discrimination : disability discrimination law keeps changing in the UK, and elsewhere, and case law applies and interprets and extends statutory law.
Pedley cites Maguire v Sydney, an Australian sports case, codes of practice for online services to the disabled, new duties of compliance on public bodies, but, for anyone that bit further on than the mere student wanting to know the ground rules, a feel for something more tangible and work-based would be welcome.
So, while the second edition provides its customary (and expected) good guidance about breach of confidence and privacy, about re-use of public sector information, about FOI and professional liability (the last, rightly, with a sidelong glance at professional ethics), about AUPs (acceptable use policies) and human rights (leaning on media-related cases like von Hannover), and sources like JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) for contracts and licensing, while all this is so, that's where it stops.
A long walk off a short pier.
Too many legal textbooks in this field do this.
They say 'we're not lawyers', 'this book is not intended for lawyers', but 'a knowledge of the law is essential today for information professionals'.
Suitable disclaimers are made on the verso of the title page or in the preface.
There are identifiable reasons for this, and exonerations for it, notably the existence (if you look hard) of some good journal articles that probe further and deeper), but what we have in law textbooks for information professionals at present is a pervasive essentialism.
It rests on the view that it is enough to define the legal, and what information professionals need to know, merely by presenting areas of relevant law, and then leaving it up to them to apply it.
Somehow.
Ethics is a field rather like it, though some change can be seen there.
Essential Law is a text I shall use and recommend confidently to students and practitioners alike.
It will do well and deserves to do so.
Yet there is an essentialism hovering over the current spate of legal books for information professionals (and these are, increasingly, starting to duplicate each other, despite the ever-changing character of applicable law, above all international and Internet law).
This is very much a hybrid field because information professionals, IT and KM, telecoms and other folk are all involved, (with a range of publishers from Facet and Ashgate to Kluwer and The MIT Press).
If this field is to mature, it should go beyond essentialism and start applying really applying and interpreting the legal stuff out there.
Such a progression would give it credibility, above all with the information professionals who really deal with legal and ethical dilemmas every day and often at quite a strategic level (for example FOI administrators and records managers).
Even at more operational levels, experienced information professionals want to compare notes not about what the law is but about interpreting and applying it pragmatically, in the real world, where conflicts of interest arise, advice is confusing or contradictory, or where mistakes provoke shame.
Some uneven steps in this direction are being made, as in otherwise uneven publications from the Howarth Information Press like Croft on legal solutions in electronic reserves, Austin on electronic reserves and copyright, and Rupp-Serrano on library licensing, though these are not always transferable or the best examples [11-13].
Smith took a good line, too, and Cornish's FAQ approach is helpful in a piece-meal sort of way.
Conclusion So a two-handed clap for Essential Law which, for what it is and of its type, is an excellent book that I'm very pleased to have and would want for my students and my library.
But a one-handed clap for the genre as a whole, for its essentialism and for the frustrations it often sets up when you get to the end of a section and ask 'so what?'
or 'what about me?'.
The genre is in transition to a new stage of market maturity on the creative curve, it needs to jump up to a new level, or else, like all mature products ('Marmite' springs to mind), it will go steadily into decline.
In one sense, we've already had enough, at one level, of law books for information professionals.
In another, the real challenge has only just begun.
References Armstrong, Chris and Bebbington, Laurence W (2004) Staying Legal: A Guide to Issues and Practice Affecting the Library, Information and Publishing Sectors.
Second edition.
London, Facet Publishing.
Austin, Brice (2004) Reserves, Electronic Reserves, and Copyright.
Binghamton NY, The Haworth Information Press.
Brennan, Paul (2003) Law for IT Professionals.
Welwyn Garden City, Emis Professional Publishing.
Cornish, Graham (2004) Copyright: Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services.
Fourth edition.
London, Facet Publishing.
Croft, Janet Brennan (2004) Legal Solutions in Electronic Reserves and the Electronic Delivery of Interlibrary Loan.
Binghamton NY, The Haworth Information Press.
Lloyd, Ian (2000) Information Technology Law.
Fourth edition.
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Manton, Steve (2006) Integrated Intellectual Asset Management: A Guide to Exploiting and Protecting your Organization's Intellectual Assets.
Aldershot and Burlington VT, Gower.
Norman, Sandy (2004) Practical Copyright for Information Professionals.
London, Facet Publishing.
Oppenheim, Charles (2001) The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information.
Tetbury, Infonortics.
Infolaw Web site http://www.infolaw.co.uk/ Rupp-Serrano, Karen ed.
(2005) Licensing in Libraries: Practical and Ethical Aspects.
Binghamton NY, The Haworth Information Press.
Sammons, Peter (2005) Buying Knowledge: Effective Acquisition of External Knowledge.
Aldershot and Burlington VT, Gower.
Smith, Kelvin (2004) Freedom of Information: A Practical Guide to Implementing the Act.
London, Facet Publishing.
Further Reading Marett, Paul (2002) Information Law in Practice.
Second edition.
Aldershot, Aldgate.
Padfield, Tim (2004) Copyright for Archivists and Users of Archives.
London, Facet Publishing.
Schulz, Robert A (2006) Contemporary Issues in Ethics and Information Technology.
Hershey PA and London, IRM Press (Idea Group Inc.).
Weimann, Gabriel (2006) Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges.
Washington DC, United States Institute of Peace Press.
Author Details Dr Stuart Hannabuss Aberdeen Business School Email: s.hannabuss@rgu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Essential Law for Information Professionals" Author: Stuart Hannabuss Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/hannabuss-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Second Life of UK Academics Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Second Life of UK Academics Buzz infrastructure browser visualisation e-learning ict interoperability url research avatar Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir introduces a series of studies investigating how the Second Life environment is being used in UK Higher and Further Education.
Introduction: Second Life Second Life (SL) [1] is an Internet-based virtual world developed by Linden Research Inc (commonly referred to as Linden Lab) and launched in 2003.
A downloadable client program called the ‘Second Life Viewer’ enables its users (‘residents’) to interact with each other through avatars, providing an advanced level of social networking in the setting of a virtual world.
Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialise, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade items (virtual property) and services.
Interest in SL among academics has been growing for some time.
This has been fostered by Linden Lab, who provide various information resources [2], support and (heavily trafficked) mailing lists [3] for educators developing within SL.
Various surveys into education use, such as that recently released by the New Media Consortium (NMC) [4], has also stoked academic curiosity.
Consequently, an increasing number of universities, colleges, libraries, research centres and other academic entities have created a presence within SL (more commonly known as being ‘in-world’).
In the UK Higher and Further Education sector, it is not just universities and colleges which are developing in SL.
For example, JISCmail [5] and the JISC Regional Support Centres [6] have an SL presence, as has the Scottish Further Education Unit [7].
UCAS [8] even built an island to assist potential students going through the clearing process this year.
Figure 1: An in-world class at the University of Huddersfield This article introduces a series of ‘snapshot’ reports, funded by the Eduserv Foundation, which record and examine the use of SL in the UK Higher and Further Education sector.
However, it is frankly impossible to gain a realistic idea of the SL environment from merely reading about it.
Although this article illustrates, with quotations, how UK academics are using SL, it is no substitute for trying it yourself.
The viewer, and a basic ‘resident’ account, are free.
Once orientation (such as moving, flying and communicating) is mastered, it is recommended that academics explore a few of the wide variety of ever-increasing developments in-world, especially education and library facilities.
The Snapshot Reports The Eduserv Foundation [9] is dedicated to ‘realising the effective use of ICT for learners and researchers’ by offering research grants, contributing to international interoperability standards-making activities, seed-funding and developing pilot projects and offering advice on good practice.
Part of this activity concerns the application of virtual environments, and SL in particular, to teaching and learning.
The Foundation supports experimentation with, and evaluation of, the use of SL through funding of several research projects [10], symposiums and other events held in-world and in the real world [11], and by developing its own island [12] through which it provides various facilities, exhibitions and housing for academic projects.
In 2007, the Foundation decided to examine the use of SL in the education sector more formally, with these goals: to determine the ‘state of play’ of SL developments within the Higher and Further Education sector to discover how these developments are supported, in terms of time, funding and other resources to explore the functionality of these developments, i.e.
which types of media or interactive service they incorporate to establish how ‘busy’, or well-used, the developments have been and discover any impact resulting from their implementation and use When the research started, there was only a small number of visible UK academic SL developments; therefore, the work took a global perspective.
However, through the spring of 2007, a considerable number of UK Higher and Further Education SL activities were discovered and the research turned its focus to this country alone.
The resulting snapshot report [13] was released in July 2007.
The report’s appendix gives the SLURLs (in-world addresses, accessible through the Web browser and the SL viewer of any SL resident) of the various universities and colleges which were discovered (where public access is allowed) in-world, and therefore provides a good starting point for UK academics beginning their exploration and evaluation of SL.
Soon after the original snapshot was released, several readers pointed out other UK academics developing in-world.
Along with some fine-tuning, an updated version of the report was released in September 2007.
Nine Types of SL Use Eight (overlapping) categories of SL use were defined in the original survey, and nine in the update, in order to group similar development activities.
Here, we show a typical example from each category; note that ‘academic’ is meant in the broadest sense, i.e.
students, lecturers, teachers, professors, administrators basically anyone who works, researches or studies within a Higher or Further Education institution.
1.
Thinking or Grouping Together In this category, academics and groups of academics were discussing using SL in some way, but had not yet reached the stage of formally planning activities.
For example, Colette Lynch posted on the JISCmail Secondlife mailing list in mid-September: I run a small unit within the Belfast Metropolitan College which is one of the largest FE/HE colleges in the UK.
My unit, mallni6, produces rich media content for Broadband I am very keen to explore the opportunities which second life offers for our Foundation degree multi media students as a way of enhancing their digital media skills by involving them in active projects.
2.
Actively Planning an SL Presence Here, academics have secured some resources (staff and/or financial), and are planning activities in-world.
Toni Sants from the School of Arts and New Media at the University of Hull describes their plans: The purpose of our current SL development is purely exploratory.
We want to see what we can do with/in SL by being in-world.
We know we’d like to establish a presence for our department and campus (but not necessarily the whole university) in the coming months, but it’s more important to understand what SL is all about than just building it and hope they show up.
3.
Research within SL SL is being examined by many academics for use as a research tool or environment, or as a subject of research in itself.
At the University of the West of England Manuel Frutos-Perez, the Deputy Head of the E-learning Development Unit, describes their SL research development: We are aiming to build a Research Observatory in Second Life for our research students.
We have just announced internally a design competition so that students can put forward their ideas about how we could use our space in Second Life.
Later on in the year we will design collaborative tasks that groups of students will complete in Second Life.
The tasks will seek to maximise group creativity and will encourage students to be enterprising and to engage in discovery, synthesis and fact-finding missions.
The tasks will be structured and facilitated by academic staff but will essentially be learner-centric.
4.
Developing Tools and Simulations A smaller number of academics are using SL as a platform to develop tools.
Dr Peter Miller, from the Biological Sciences department in the University of Liverpool, introduced his work in the first snapshot: I am currently developing a series of visualization tools that I intend to use in cell and molecular biology lectures and make available in-world for informal student use from September 2007 onwards.
They currently comprise two workstations with a strong focus on providing an end-user building capability, one in the context of protein domain structure, the other as a means of animating regulatory networks in gene expression.
5.
Staging an Exhibition Art and design staff, in their responses, were keen to ‘test the boundaries’ of what they can achieve in SL.
For example, Julia Gaimster, involved in developing the SL London College of Fashion building, replied: We are not aiming to replicate the college but to create areas that enable creative thinking and activities and we are keen to develop collaborative projects using the space.
And indeed, the college did put on a successful exhibition, as Julia noted in September 2007: We did manage to stream keynote speeches from the designs on elearning conference to LCF and LCC islands.
The LCF exhibition continues to attract visitors over 1660 to date.
6.
Department or Centre Presence Several departments, centres and groups have developed their own individual presence.
At Bromley College, Clive Gould developed an interactive area for prospective students of his computing courses to use: Over the years I have come across applicants for the courses who did not have prior experience of programming.
This year I have been able to recommend the sim to such applicants.
There they can learn LSL (Linden Script Language) programming in a fun environment and see if they enjoy programming and are good at it, before committing themselves to an HE course involving a lot of programming.
7.
Using SL to Support a Course or Module By far the largest number of respondents fell into the category of academics running courses, or planning to run courses, using Second Life.
Simon Bignell, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Derby, describes the use of SL in the teaching of 30 psychology students: The SL-Labs project at University of Derby is up and running encouraging Derby psychology undergraduates to engage with the unique attributes of a 3D virtual world to learn about basic Psychology skills.
We are currently taking a group of 30 psychology undergraduates into Second Life on a supplementary module option of our Psychology Skills module.
Here students learn core psychological skills including experimental design, essay writing, presentation preparation, critical thinking skills, and plagiarism avoidance and referencing.
8.
Supporting Developments across Several Departments Some academic developments are designed to support academics and courses across several institutions.
Daniel Livingstone describes collaborative SL developments being built by the University of Paisley: We have an island (virtuALBA) which is still in development, but which hosts a share of the Eduserv Foundation-funded Sloodle project (along with virtual neighbour and collaborator, San Jose State University).
The island currently also hosts an exhibition, university information centre as well as a corner for the University of Aberdeen medical school and a small area in use by the University of Strathclyde (who now have their own island).
Last year we taught a class (Collaborative Virtual Environments) which used a range of technologies including SL and which should be repeated this year.
Figure 2: Meeting up at VirtuALBA 9.
Building a Campus-wide Presence Several universities, such as Anglia Ruskin, Edinburgh, Hertfordshire, Oxford and Sunderland, are at different stages in developing a campus in-world.
Coventry University was the first such UK institution to launch, in September 2007, as part of the Serious Virtual World 2007 Conference.
The launch was observed both at the real world conference, and within SL itself: Last night the vice chancellor (Madeleine Atkins, who avatar name is Phoenix Watkins) launched the island at a formal launch at Coventry University in a lecture packed with academics and business.
In world she cut the virtual tape and set off the fireworks.
Many people came to the launch in world as well.
We have had a lots of local and national media interest.
We also had the first serious virtual world conference outside the USA and it was all streamed into Second Life over the last 2 days.
We have more courses starting to use it now, including transport design, fashion design, theatre studies and an MSc in clinical management.
Issues Faced by Academic SL Developers Numerous issues confront academics wishing to develop in-world; they are discussed in great detail on several of the mailing lists dedicated to academic developers.
Three issues in particular are frequently debated.
1.
Cost and Time To develop a presence in SL requires an area of land, which conventionally costs money.
Funding is also required for related costs, such as search listing, apparel and items constructed in SL by third-party developers.
Other significant costs for building and maintaining a presence in-world are up-to-date PCs or Macs that have sufficient processing power to cope with Second Life, and staff time.
UK academics developing in SL received their funding from a variety of sources.
Some received funding from grants and awards.
For example, the OU developments were funded by NAGTY, the Innovation Unit, BECTA and NESTA, while the Department of Information Science at the University of Loughborough, according to James Dearnley, ‘ …received a HEFCE grant (which was distributed by the University) for the island.’ Others used internal institution money; Maggi Savin-Baden explained that Coventry University funded ‘… the cost of the island and £20k to purchase team to build (students flying squad) and to help staff time.’ Figure 3: At the entrance to Coventry University For academics struggling to find money, various schemes exist to give discounted or free land or facilities for genuine education development.
EDTECH island is: … a free, 24⁄7 open-access resource to support educators in the study and use of virtual world environments for teaching and learning.
We offer any educator the ability to use the facilities on the island to support and research virtual world teaching.
UK academics can also apply to one of the calls for proposals from the Education UK initiative [14], which offers free areas of land and building space on an island dedicated to teaching and learning.
Estimating the amount of time needed to develop in-world is difficult, as responses varied tremendously.
Some academics spent relatively little time in constructing their site in-world, such as the team including Maged Kamel Boulos at Plymouth University: The actual building in SL doesn’t take much time.
A week or two would usually be enough, thanks to prefab objects that can be edited and customised.
However, others spent considerable time and effort, often cutting into their time outside contractual working hours.
Ian Truelove from Leeds Metropolitan University reveals: … if only I’d kept a log.
At least 40 hours a week between myself and Graham Hibbert.
Often a lot more.
We’ve had the sims since April, so probably about 500 hours.
The vast majority of that time was not in official work time, although LeedsMet have been very supportive, and allowed us to be flexible with our work time to develop the island.
We have time allocated for research and scholarly activities, so some of the time fits into this.
It is a form of entertainment for us, so we don’t feel hard done by.
It’s better than watching TV.
2.
Simulate Reality or Create Anew A topic that frequently appears in SL discussion forums is whether to ‘mimic’ a structure from the real world, or to create something that uses the opportunities afforded by the design tools of Second Life.
The mimic argument is often given on mailing lists; for example [15]: One of the basic principles of good teaching is to begin on familiar ground and use it as a launch zone for stepping into the unknown.
If a learner has to deal with too many new experiences at once, she can be distracted from the one you intended as the focus.
I believe that if SL were NOT full of familiar RL features, it would not be an effective learning environment.
Some institutions are adopting the mimic ethos, creating an image of their campus in-world.
Ian Truelove explains Leeds Metropolitan University’s reason for recreating its campus in SL: We recreated our RL building to provide an initial bridge for new users (to stop them feeling too scared by this strange new world and to give them a sense of ownership).
The opposite, anti-mimic stance is taken by people wishing to overcome the physical and psychological limitations of RL environments.
Paul Maharg explains the approach being taken by the law department in Strathclyde University: We want to create a form of education that’s quite different from RL forms & genres.
There’s a lot in SL that merely mimics RL forms of education.
Figure 4: The Coventry University launch party fireworks aplenty!
Imperial College London uses both approaches, mimicking the exteriors of their buildings, but using SL to add functionality to the interiors.
Maria Toro-Troconis explains: We developed Imperial College’s Queen’s Tower as the main land mark.
We also developed the Sir Alexander Fleming Building.
The inside of the building doesn’t represent the real structure.
This is because we wanted to make it available as a teaching hospital.
Inside the hospital our Head of Undergraduate Medicine gives a welcome message as well as the Student Union President.
Course Guides can be downloaded from the main reception and different links to the Student Union website, e.g.
welfare area, are provided in the Student Union’s office.
3.
Getting Support from Your Institution Successful SL developments often seem to be the product of a determined academic who has the support of senior management.
For example, Tony Sant stated that, ‘Our activity is sanctioned by a Dean and the Head of my department.’ Some academics received support from the top tier of university management; Mike Hobbs from Anglia Ruskin University reported in July that: … the position is that the VC was proud to announce the purchase of an Island, the head of the IT and communications infrastructure has set up a ‘working group’ for coordinating the use of SL.
Keeping senior people informed, and subtly training them at the same time, seems to be a successful tactic.
Andrew Marunchak from the University of Hertfordshire explains his approach: I did a presentation about our Second Life activities to the Senior Executive Team, which included the Vice Chancellor, and no objections were raised.
However, it isn’t all good news.
Several academics mostly in the ‘older’ universities reported obstructions to their plans for developing in-world.
Mostly, the problems came not from other academics, but from administrative and support units in their institution.
These included: IT services blocking the ports, or the wider network access, required for SL development the finance department refusing to recognise, or accept, purchase of ‘virtual’ land the media or PR unit wishing to control all aspects of development so as to have a uniform institutional appearance in Second Life units such as alumni services pushing for an institutional presence to have less of a focus on teaching and learning and more on income generation Some academics have worked around these obstacles in various ways.
Several have purchased small plots of land or buildings themselves and are developing unofficially though this will create problems later on should they wish their development to become part of an official island for their institution elsewhere.
Trends An accurate figure for the number of UK education developments is difficult to determine, due to some institutions and academics developing in a closed (non-public) manner.
In addition, those who give their island a different name to that of their institution are difficult to locate, as they will not be picked up by searches in SL on university and college names.
However, what is clear is that the number of UK institutions (and academics within institutions) developing in SL grew in the two months between the original snapshot and the update.
In the few weeks since that update, several more UK academics have appeared ‘in-world’, signs of an ongoing trend in terms of experimentation and development using SL.
There are now at least 40 UK universities developing at an institutional, departmental or (lone) academic level, in addition to various colleges.
The original and updated snapshots showed that SL developments are more prevalent in colleges and the ‘newer’ universities (82% of university responses for the original survey), rather than the ‘older’ universities (18% of responses).
Why SL is used disproportionately more in newer universities is unclear; possibilities include: colleges and ‘new’ universities offering vocational subjects which are more suited to SL use additional, accumulated bureaucracy in older universities, that is not (yet) present in ‘new’ universities, hindering SL development As various UK universities and colleges create individual presences in-world, it is hoped that successful examples will emerge showing teaching, research and support units (such as income generation) living happily alongside each other.
These, and the series of Eduserv Foundation snapshot reports, will, it is to be hoped, provide evidence and models for other academics and institutions to study and adapt, helping them make better use of this intriguing development tool.
Figure 5: An in-world discussion on “How should librarians present themselves” Future Snapshots Many academics have said they will run courses in-world during the 2007-2008 academic year.
Feedback from these courses should make the advantages and limitations of using SL in teaching and learning clearer.
This information (or evidence) is increasingly requested by academics trying to determine whether SL is ‘right for them’, or trying to make a case internally to proceed with development.
Consequently, the next two snapshots (March and September 2008) will focus more on the impact of using SL within formal Higher and Further Education.
On an ongoing basis, the Eduserv Foundation is looking for examples of SL being used within UK universities, colleges and schools, i.e.
the UK education sector.
This includes, but is not limited to: initiatives listed or described in the snapshot reports which have progressed in some way institutions constructing their own presence departments constructing their own presence individual academics running courses within SL support centres active in-world departments or academics experimenting (‘testing the water’) with SL before committing to a full-scale development researchers conducting research within SL students developing and exhibiting course-related work in-world We are also interested in developments that are not yet publicly accessible.
Please contact the author if you are undertaking one of the aforementioned activities and are in the UK education sector.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Ed Barker, Pete Johnston and Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation, and the considerable number of respondents to both surveys, for their input and content.
My thanks also go to Cheryl Reynolds, Maggi Savin-Baden, Daniel Livingstone and Sheila Webber for the screenshots from Second Life used in this article.
References Editor’s note: The Second Life URLs (SLURLs) in these references can only be accessed by Second Life residents, i.e.
users already registered with Second Life.
The Wikipedia entry for Second Life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life Accessed 25 October 2007 Second Life Education http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/education Second Life Mailing lists http://lists.secondlife.com/ NMC Publishes Results of Educators in Second Life Survey, October 2007 http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/sl-educator-survey JISCmail SL presence http://slurl.com/secondlife/Education%20UK/200/128/22 JISC Regional Support Centres SL presence http://slurl.com/secondlife/Education%20UK/240/78/21 Scottish Further Education Unit SL presence http://slurl.com/secondlife/Education%20UK/30/180/21 UCAS clearing house island http://slurl.com/secondlife/UCAS/128/128/0 Eduserv Foundation Web site http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation Eduserv Foundation research grants http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/grants Eduserv Foundation 2007 symposium http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/ Eduserv SL presence http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduserv%20Island/97/41/30 ‘Snapshots’ of SL use by UK Higher and Further Education http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/studies/slsnapshots/ Education UK Islands free educational space programme, 2007 http://www.sleducationuk.net/?q=node/5 Loon, R. (2007).
The copying of RL into SL is rather silly.
Educators’ mailing list.
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators Author Details John Kirriemuir Consultant Silversprite Berneray Outer Hebrides Email: john at silversprite.com Web site: http://www.silversprite.com/ Return to top Article Title: “The Second Life of UK Academics” Author: John Kirriemuir Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/kirriemuir/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Google Challenges for Academic Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Google Challenges for Academic Libraries Buzz database portfolio atom digitisation vocabularies blog copyright flash ebook openurl algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl analyses the reactions many academic libraries may be having to the range of tools Google is currently rolling out and outlines a strategy for institutions in the face of such potentially radical developments.
Introduction: A ‘Googly’ for Libraries?
A googly, or a ‘wrong’un’, is a delivery which looks like a normal leg spinner but actually turns towards the batsmen, like an off break, rather than away from the bat.
(BBC Sport Academic Web site [1].
Search result found in Google).
How should we understand Google?
Libraries still feel like the batsman at whom something has been bowled which looks familiar, but then turns out to be a nasty threat.
At Edinburgh University Library, as I suspect in many academic libraries, the suite of tools introduced in recent years by Google is a topic of daily conversation.
What is sometimes interesting is the reaction to this fact.
At a presentation to academic staff of the Library Committee in December 2005, we found that some academics were puzzled even annoyed at the idea that the Library should perceive any sort of a challenge from Google.
This attitude is also echoed in a recent posting by RLG’s Walt Crawford writing on the subject of ‘Library 2.0’ who is irritated by the view of some library and information world pundits that Amazon and Google together have bowled a googly at libraries: Amazon is an online store network with interesting added capabilities.
Google is an ad-supported search engine with interesting added capabilities.
Neither replaces libraries or intends to.
[2] Crawford is of the school which opposes the idea that libraries are at the heart of the universe, and it is indeed surely arrogance to say that libraries must reclaim the entire search territory which Google has taken, as though people ever did consult a library in response to every question mark in their heads.
We use Google frequently for the sort of information we would previously have sought in places other than the library.
Who, for example, in pre-Google days, would have asked their public library for a recommendation about the best quad bike on the market?
Libraries, we must never forget, are selections, defined by what they exclude though we rarely state what that is.
Google, on the other hand, is truly universal in a way even our most universal libraries have never been.
Libraries aim to be deep selections and the use of that depth is our challenge.
Google also has depth, in the penetration of its indexing, but its depth is not judicious, and it lacks the objectively described scope which is required by authoritative bibliographic tools.
Libraries struggle to know how to present it, given that we have no influence over it, not having the familiar vendoror licensor-client relationship.
Libraries and the Google Portfolio Librarians talk about Google with their colleagues, of course, but also in blogs, several of which are now devoted to the company and its products.
Some of us profess to love it; others profess to hate it.
Some of the world’s major libraries have become very active collaborators with it.
Some librarians think that Google wants to work with libraries to create a better information environment for the world.
Google claims that itself, and has recently launched a newsletter for libraries.
Others think that Google wants to take libraries’ business away from them, believing that, in a digital world, it can do it better.
Some think that Google is still just a flash in the pan, and will disappear, or be replaced by other products in time, through the force of competition.
Others see it as the ultimate ‘killer application’ which libraries have sought since the arrival of digital information an affordable, comprehensive discovery tool which is gradually acquiring all of the content needed by the communities they serve, and which is differentiating its services so that it can reliably serve up respectable, scholarly information on a grand scale, at no cost to the end-user, thus sweeping away the jumble of subject-based discovery tools which libraries currently provide in a painful, ragged way, and replacing them with a final solution.
Which view is correct?
The library partners in the Google Print Library Program, now rechristened ‘Google Book Search’, believe that Google is an opportunity.
This programme has set about digitising millions of books from five of the world’s top libraries Stanford, Michigan, Harvard, New York Public Library, and Oxford.
For books out of copyright, it seems clear that this programme should do us all a major service, pushing rapidly forward a book digitisation initiative which has been underway via a number of other smaller initiatives (such as Project Gutenberg) for several years now, and filling in the gap between the last 70 years or so, and the Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online publisher initiatives.
But what sort of job will Google do in its first venture into full-content services?
The main problem comes with the in-copyright works (which OCLC has calculated represents more than 80% of the total for the ‘Google Five’ [3]).
By digitising those, claims the Association of American University Presses, Google is infringing copyright even before it creates any sort of a service from the digitised texts.
What Google wants to do, of course, is to create massive word-by-word indexes, so that users can find copies of books which meet their search arguments.
Where the books are out of copyright, then they can be viewed online.
Where they are in copyright, then users should see only a few ‘snippets’, and then be given some easy options of pursuing the book they have identified as meeting their search need by ordering it from Amazon, or by discovering a holding in a local library (via a tie-up with OCLC’s OpenWorldCat initiative).
Google argues that this should in fact increase book sales and increase library usage, but several publishers are unhappy.
Google Book Search: The Business Model Not all Library Directors share the publishers’ objections.
Some indeed believe that the law suit which the publishers have launched against Google is entirely based on greed: they have suddenly decided that they want some of Google’s immense store of cash in return for allowing their books to be digitised.
This is of course not a claim which can be made about all publishers, since several are already participating in the Google Program for Publishers, giving Google their digital full-text for its index, with a direct aim of generating online book orders.
So the programme has stalled while the law suit is pending, and the ‘Google Five’ libraries are all avoiding giving Google any in-copyright materials for the time being.
Meanwhile, there are indications that Google is planning to rent out online books: a one-week online loan for one-tenth of the book purchase price has been suggested [4].
This is the sort of service which might literally buy off publisher objections eventually, assuming that they receive a proportion of the income from the service, but the library community may perceive a threat from it.
The business model is rental the same model which NetLibrary uses: an online replication of physical book borrowing.
Many librarians at first greeted with horror the idea that the usage of digital material could be circumscribed by print-age practices in this way.
Surely the point about digitisation was that it made objects into a free good, capable of being consumed ‘non-rivalrously’, to use the economic jargon?
Why on earth would we perpetuate a print library practice in this brave new world of promiscuous digital objects, available for free to everyone, happy to be used multiply and simultaneously across the globe?
But of course, we see better now that this was a naïve reaction.
Without business models, the digital age will never acquire the support of the commercial interests which produce and distribute the goods, and so the digital library which we may be able to parade as utopian will be filled primarily with content of little real value, online ephemera and grey literature.
There is a difference here in the way we view legitimately commercial content, such as textbooks, and what we might regard as illegitimately commercial content, such as research outputs -articles published in academic journals.
Stevan Harnad has long made the distinction between the ‘for trade’ and ‘for free’ literature [5].
Textbooks are usually written by academic or other authors with an intention to reap some financial benefit; research outputs are rarely written with that intention.
The publishing industry, however, has treated both types as though they were trade literature, except that, in the case of research outputs, it has kept all of the profits from sales, rather than split them with authors on a royalty basis as happens with books.
As the digital age develops, we need to have a sophisticated approach to the commercialisation of content, and to be able to accept different business models for different types, provided that they are appropriate to each.
But as with much of what Google offers we find ourselves in a condition of febrile speculation about exactly how it will develop, and therefore what it will mean for us in the longer term.
The business model is unclear, and we cannot gauge its impact upon us.
This makes librarians uneasy about Google in general.
Leaving aside rental, what exactly is Google Book Search’s business model?
It can certainly be argued that it has the potential to drive traffic both to bookshops physical and online and to libraries physical and online.
The American university publishers are crying foul over its plans to digitise full-text of copyrighted content in order to generate indexes from it.
But the indexing of in-copyright material is not new.
What else is Current Contents or indeed the indexing and abstracting of journal articles in the services we have used for years in our academic libraries, in both printed and online forms?
Admittedly, that is content which has been indexed manually or semi-manually in the case of the ISI offerings, but that makes no difference.
An index is a means literally of advertising content, and Google understands advertising better than anybody.
Publishers do not worry about Current Contents because they see it as driving traffic to their journals, not replacing it.
The big difference with the Google Book Search initiative is that it creates digital versions of whole texts as a derivative of the indexing process.
To the publishers, this is the plutonium, the dangerous by-product, which results from the good and healthy activity of generating indexes.
Who knows what Google might do with all of that digitised content when the backs of libraries and publishers are turned, or when it decides to mount a legal challenge to the established order?
It might divide and rule the publishing community by offering rentals at 10% of the list price, as has now been suggested.
And if it get its foot into that door, then might our patrons decide not to come to our libraries, once all books are available either to buy or to rent, online?
At the very least, Google has produced a very rich post-coordinate index to huge quantities of content, allowing users to ‘meta-read’ texts much more easily than they could do conventionally by having to visit a bookshop or library, skimming through a book with the help of a back-of-the-book index, if one is available.
Having ubiquitous anytime access to Google’s gigantic index is likely to mean that where users do decide to purchase, or rent, a book, they do so because they know that ‘meta-reading’ it won’t be sufficient for their purpose.
This should therefore make book purchase or rental a more judicious activity, but at the same time perhaps a more frequent one as well.
The Book Search programme, by getting inside vast quantities of printed books and generating indexes from their content, is splitting the information atom for our community.
This is radical and new.
Google splits open resources of all kinds now even books and indexes the atomic contents word-by-word.
The power of Google’s word-by-word indexes is much greater than that of indexes we are used to because of the extent of the content it reaches.
Its creation is mundane, and robotic compared to the efforts of human indexers but it goes much further, much deeper, than any previous index could, and unearths material which was largely unfindable.
If it were ever able to index the entire book contents of a universal library then it would undoubtedly have created a genuinely significant library product.
Since this is very far from being true or even likely at the present time, Google Book Search is at least likely to be successful in its appeal to advertisers in that it gives hits a more thought-processed feel.
Hits from published books will have more authority than hits from amateur Web sites, or indeed almost any Web sites, because they surface content which is deep both in being essentially off-Web, and in being the product of intellectual effort and research, which others have deemed worthy of publication.
Google Scholar: Scholarly Credibility?
On the face of it, Google Scholar is a tool with a huge amount of potential.
It capitalises on Google’s already large embeddedness in the search practices of researchers.
Its coverage, however, is of academic material journal articles, reports, conference proceedings, and e-theses and dissertations.
It occupies a large portion of that selected territory which is the purview of libraries, and so must therefore be seen either as a parasitic threat or an assistive tool.
It ranks results by relevance, as with the general Google engine, but its algorithm in this case includes citedness, and so it is engineered for the academic quality and reward system in which academics and researchers work.
And it can plug into the holdings of individual libraries to allow resolution to full-text on the basis of subscribed content.
It therefore contains all of the elements of the sort of search service which we in our libraries are trying to provide by purchasing federated search tools.
Even better, it is not based on federated search technology, which some have argued is a ‘broken technology’ [6] at least in many of its vendor manifestations to date.
In his weblog earlier this year, Lorcan Dempsey wrote: How quickly things can change!
Last year there were discussions about the Google-busting potential of metasearch.
How naive.
This year there are discussions about the metasearch-busting potential of Google Scholar.
Let us wait and see.
[7] Here is our dream an interface to all of our subscribed content which is as fast and responsive and clean and as solidly branded as Google’s (because it is Google’s).
Again, Dempsey sums this up well: Libraries struggle because they manage a resource which is fragmented and ‘off-web’.
It is fragmented by user interface, by title, by subject division, by vocabulary.
It is a resource very much organised by publisher interest, rather than by user need, and the user may struggle to know which databases are of potential value.
By off-web, I mean that a resource hides its content behind its user interface and is not available to open web approaches.
Increasingly, to be on-web is to be available in Google or other open web approaches.
These factors mean that library resources exercise a weak gravitational pull.
They impose high transaction costs on a potential user.
They also make it difficult to build services out on top of an integrated resource, to make it more interesting to users than a collection of databases.
[7] But there are aspects of Google Scholar which fail to satisfy us, as librarians.
Most unacceptably, Google does not tell us exactly what its coverage is.
Even in its list of FAQs, it does not include the question which would surely be the most commonly asked question by librarians, ‘Which journals do you index?’ It does not permit subject searching either, as we understand it.
You cannot, of course, search keyword descriptors, as you would be able to do with any of the abstracting and indexing services we take on subscription.
Subject searching in Google Scholar therefore relies on judicious use of keyword or phrase searching the same natural language limitations as apply to vanilla Google, and not really as precise as we would wish to provide for academic searching.
But for known item searching for that paper by this author on this topic for instance it is often as good as any of the abstracting and indexing services we take, and better in that it is Google easy and free and used by everyone.
Ultimately, what disconcerts us is its opacity.
We cannot see under its bonnet, and so we cannot really trust it.
It is fine for our users to use if they choose, but we find it difficult to give it our imprimatur.
Google Scholar therefore gives us a public relations headache.
Where we do have the full-text content which fulfils results it provides, and we have hooked our environment up to Google Scholar (via IP range definition and our OpenURL resolver), we want our libraries to be identified with Google Scholar’s success in bringing users to it (‘Look’, we say, ‘You only got to the full text of that reference because we have purchased it’).
Where we do not, we want users to know that we do not endorse such a fickle service.
In short, Google has put us in a new dilemma which is difficult for us culturally as a controlling profession: should we collaborate with a service whose limitations we cannot justify, and which we have not evaluated or selected?
Or are we being too librarian-like about this?
Too ‘Library 1.0’, to use the recent definition of Michael Casey [8] and the Talis White Paper?
[9] After all, Google Scholar is free, and it gives us much of what we profess to want from a multi-database search tool.
In addition, we know that our users are already using it.
Maybe we should just go with it, explaining to our users its potential shortcomings, and offering a disclaimer on our part: that we cannot give it our unqualified blessing as information professionals, but nonetheless it does a reasonably good job though we have other offerings which have passed our quality assessment tests and which we therefore recommend more strongly.
If, on the other hand, we believe that the vendors are finally beginning to deliver federated search services which work (and the fact that WebFeat was awarded a patent last year for its federated search engine might indicate that they are), then we have to face the difficult task of convincing our users that a new tool is better because its depths are known and understood, and we have some control over the shape of them.
Libraries cannot expect their patrons to stop using Google for academic and scholarly purposes.
They can and must face the challenge of providing something better.
Google and the Nature of Our Business Google’s new technologies for indexing, ranking and digitising, operating on the vast scale of the Internet, have brought us into a nuclear age of information.
That means that we librarians need to rethink our own organisations, but it does not mean that they are now not needed, or have been replaced.
We can be impressed, but we should not be overawed.
New technologies do not change principles.
The challenge for us is that we have not been here before.
Google is an inevitable consequence of the Web.
Valued now at $US80 billions, it meets a clear need.
It is unbeatable for natural language searching, but it is not the answer to all searching.
In researching this article, for instance, I did the majority of research via weblogs I use regularly, because I wanted access to minds I respect and their processed ideas.
Google is new and big, and it intrudes on our landscape.
It comes to us offering peace, but on its own terms, which we cannot change, having no purchaser power.
The challenge we face is one of understanding both the extant power and the potential of such a major force.
We must be cautious, try to see ahead, and predict where Google is going next.
As Google moves into for-fee services, such as book rental, we must try to reach deals before they are forced upon us.
And we must work out our own position so that if we are to take a stand and resist Google in any form be it Google Scholar, ‘Google Book Rental’ or any other new service then we should do so together, in a united way.
We must work out the business models which suit our business.
This is the age of nuclear information power, and our services, to use Lorcan Dempsey’s memorable phrase, need to strengthen their ‘gravitational pull’.
In our traditional business relationships with suppliers of federated search engines, or e-books we must use the Google factor to our advantage by demanding better services, which incorporate Google’s strengths of speed and cleanness, and avoid its weaknesses opacity and blurred scope.
As librarians, running pleasant study environments, containing expert staff, providing havens on our campus which are well respected, and building and running high-quality Web-based services, we will decide which of Google’s offerings we wish to promote, and which we are prepared to pay for.
And we will stand up no matter how wealthy we assume our students and academic users to be for the principle of free and equal access to content, and for the principle of high-quality index provision, whether free or at a cost, because without those principles we are no longer running libraries.
References BBCi News: Sport Academy: Cricket Skills: Googly http://news.bbc.co.uk/sportacademy/hi/sa/cricket/skills/newsid_3207000/3207939.stm Crawford, Walt.
‘Cites & Insights’ (Midwinter 2006) http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ6i2.pdf Lavoie, B., Connaway, L., Dempsey, L. ‘Anatomy of aggregate collections’.
D-Lib Magazine, 11 (9) September 2005s See Search Engine Watch: Google Exploring Book Rental Plan http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051114-104612 Harnad, S. ‘The paper house of cards (and why it’s taking so long to collapse)’.
Ariadne the Web Version issue 8, March 1997 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/harnad/ ‘The integrated library service that isn’t’, Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog , 22 February 2005 http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000585.html ‘Metasearch, Google and the rest’, Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog 20 March 2005 http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000615.html Case, M. ‘Who controls it?’, Library Crunch Weblog, 19 November 2005 http://www.librarycrunch.com/2005/11/post.html Chad, K. and Miller, P. ‘Do libraries matter?
The rise of Library 2.0: a white paper’, Version 1.0, November 2005 http://www.talis.com/downloads/white_papers/DoLibrariesMatter.pdf Author Details John MacColl Head, Digital Library Division Edinburgh University Library Email: john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Google Challenges for Academic Libraries” Author: John MacColl Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/maccoll/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Persistent Identifiers: Considering the Options Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Persistent Identifiers: Considering the Options Buzz data software database dissemination urn infrastructure archives metadata doi standardisation browser identifier namespace blog video preservation cataloguing multimedia rfc dns unicode purl utf-8 uri ark openurl z39.88 naan licence ftp url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin looks at the current landscape of persistent identifiers, describes several current services, and examines the theoretical background behind their structure and use.
What Is a Persistent Identifier, and Why?
Persistent identifiers (PIs) are simply maintainable identifiers that allow us to refer to a digital object – a file or set of files, such as an e-print (article, paper or report), an image or an installation file for a piece of software.
The only interesting persistent identifiers are also persistently actionable (that is, you can “click” them); however, unlike a simple hyperlink, persistent identifiers are supposed to continue to provide access to the resource, even when it moves to other servers or even to other organisations.
A digital object may be moved, removed or renamed for many reasons.
This article looks at the current landscape of persistent identifiers, describes several current services, and examines the theoretical background behind their structure and use.
Issues are raised of likely relevance to anybody who is considering deployment of a standard for their own purposes.
URLs are often implemented using the server’s filesystem as a kind of lookup database: for example, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/index.html is a file called ‘index.html’ that is situated in the root directory of the Web server running on port 80 of the machine responding to www.ukoln.ac.uk.
Because it was very simple to get up and running quickly, many early servers tended to refer to digital objects in this way.
For example, while http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/index.html means “The digital object that is provided when you ask the Web server (running on port 80 of the IP that is currently returned by a DNS server for the domain ‘www.ukoln.ac.uk’) about the string ‘/index.html’”, for many servers this has meant “The file named ‘index.html’ at the root level”.
There are certain advantages to this approach: for example, a clear mapping between the filesystem and the structure of the Web site can make it easier for maintainers to understand how the site is structured, but with no other mechanism in place, if someone removes the file the link will break – easy come, easy go.
Recognition of the vulnerabilities associated with this design approach is changing the way that URLs are being implemented.
To take another example, many Web applications assign different syntax to elements within a URL.
The technology-specific URL extension applied to Web objects (.asp, .php3, .jsp) is often mapped by an interpreter (such as Apache’s mod-rewrite) in a way that hides the server’s internal filesystem structure.
For example, a piece of blogging software may be designed to apply simple rewrite rules to read a semantically meaningful URL such as ‘http://joansmith.com/2007/11/30' as a request for a listing of any blog postings written by Joan Smith on the 30th of November, 2007.
Replacing the software with a new version will not break these links, assuming that the new version is also capable of interpreting the URL appropriately.
While this goes a long way to reduce identifier fragility within a server, all actionable identifiers are vulnerable to a different kind of breakage that is related to the name of the server itself.
For example, if Joan’s blog becomes very popular for news on a given topic, she might choose to allow others with similar interests to post articles to the blog.
As a result of the change of focus from a personal to a topic-driven site, it might be appropriate for her to change the site’s hostname to reflect the topic.
In another example, if a Web site is owned by a company, it is very likely that the name will be changed on occasion for commercial reasons, perhaps as the result of a corporate take-over, merge or rebranding.
The content of the site may change for similar reasons, or for any number of other reasons related to the roles that Web-based publishing play in our lives, and in the marketing and image of individuals and enterprise.
Such URLs cannot be made persistent after-the-fact, but going forward publishing URLs under hostnames in a manner that won’t be under pressure to change (e.g., free of brands or other meaning) will reduce the chance of this kind of breakage.
Should normal server administration, including name changes, break identifiers that you want to be persistent?
The opinion of the persistent identifier community is that they should not.
Redirection and Resolution Most clickable identifiers are brittle.
This is to be expected because persistence takes planning and monitoring, which cannot feasibly apply to every object and rarely appears high up the list of most organisations’ priorities.
What is easiest to set up is often not what lasts.
Organisations need to plan for persistence, be aware of the pitfalls, and stay on top of their commitments.
Questions that one may ask oneself during this planning process include: ‘Which identifier parts are vulnerable to commercial/political, technical, and organisational change?’ ‘To which identifiers are we committed?’ and ‘How are they shaping user expectations about those to which we are not committed?’ As time moves on, few institutions keep a record of all the URLs they have published, and all too often a massive technical or structural re-organisation causes large numbers of URLs simply to be abandoned.
The above is unpalatable; as Tim Berners-Lee once put it, Cool URIs Don’t Change [1].
The trouble is that many organisations today, for a variety of reasons, fail to decide which of their URLs are ‘cool’ and to develop a strategy that ensures that they remain so.
URIs vs. URLs URIs or Uniform Resource Identifiers, post-date the URL or Uniform Resource Locator by three years.
URLs describe the ‘street address’ of a resource – where it can be found.
The URI, on the other hand, can describe ‘a name, a locator, or both a name and a locator’ [2].
The technical background is the following: in order to retrieve an object, the browser needs to communicate with a service that is able to provide the location of that object.
If the link turns out to be broken, this results in a ‘404 Not Found’ error message.
There are, of course, many subtler failure cases, such as the possibility that the wrong object is retrieved.
An important strategy to help reduce the danger of failing to retrieve an object is to add a layer of indirection between the browser and the target object.
The persistent identifier itself provides some form of description of the digital object, rather than referring to a specific instance (a copy of the object).
Indirect identifiers require a resolver that forwards you to a current copy of the object.
Describing the object to a resolver permits the browser to find a specific instance of it at the last minute; for example, indirection is a common fix for servers that rely on the previously mentioned use of the filesystem as lookup database.
The resolver service, which could be as simple as a set of rewrite rules on a server or as complex as a global network of special purpose servers (e.g.
DNS, Handle), is intended to redirect the browser to an appropriate or current copy of the object.
Indirection is often invisible to the user.
Link resolvers are useful for a multitude of reasons.
They may recognise the user’s geographical location or access rights for that object and forward the user to the appropriate version of the digital object.
Furthermore, there may be any number of secondary services related to that object, to which a URI resolver may be able to link, such as bibliographic information, production credits, content management services, rights management and licence administration [3].
Figure 1: The functionality of a persistent URI resolver Much of this subsidiary functionality, though interesting in its own right, should not be seen as directly related to the primary subject of this article, namely persistence.
Factors Driving the Design and Adoption of a PI Standard Several issues are particularly relevant to design and adoption of persistent identifier systems: The actionability of the persistent identifier – can it be used directly?
Does it do something when you copy it into a browser location bar and press ‘enter’, or is it necessary to copy it into a resolver service in order to retrieve a link to the digital object in question?
The scope of the identifier standard – does it link only to digital objects or can it be used more widely, for example as a semantically valid way of referring to physical objects within a given domain or description language?
The architecture and infrastructure underlying the standard are of relevance as regards issues such as reliability, maintenance cost, and risk.
The status of the standard – is it a formal standard, having undergone the process of standardisation, a de facto standard or an ad hoc approach?
In the following section we examine several standards on the basis of these metrics, in order to gain an overview of the current persistent identifier landscape.
Current Standards for Persistent Identifiers There are several standards currently at a mature stage of development: the Uniform Resource Name (URN); the persistent URL (PURL); the Handle system; the digital object identifier (DOI); National Bibliography Numbers (NBNs); the Archival Resource Key (ARK); the Open URL.
Many of these are described in ‘Request for Comments’ (RFC) documents, a commonly used means of proposing an Internet standard.
Where this is the case, the RFC in question has been linked from within the text.
Others are described via other publishing strategies.
There are also many ‘informal’ standards for content-based persistent identification.
Content-based identifiers of various kinds, such as message digests and characteristic word sequences for which to search or ed2k hashes used for peer-to-peer object discovery purposes on filesharing networks, can permit a digital object to be characterised and perhaps retrieved by searching and matching for the characteristic ‘fingerprint’ of the document.
These schemes will not be discussed here, but it is worth contrasting the following standard set with the ‘fingerprinting’ – that is, feature extraction and application to identify a digital object – approaches that are sometimes applied with success elsewhere.
The dates given here are typically either the date of the first full specification, or the date on which the service became available, rather than the origin of the idea.
Those looking for a more in-depth discussion of many of these standards may wish to start with the report on persistent identifiers authored in 2006 by Hans-Werner Hilse and Jochen Kothe [2].
The Uniform Resource Name The URN (Uniform Resource Name) was fully specified in May 1997.
Its requirements were originally defined in RFC 1737 and the specification was published in RFC 2141.
The use of a URN does not necessarily imply that the resource to which it refers is available.
URNs are designed to describe an identity rather than a location; for example, a URN may contain an ISBN (International Standard Book Number, used as a unique, commercial book identifier).
For example, the following URN describes a book called The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution, written by Partha Nyogi.
urn:isbn:0262140942 URN encodings exist for many types of objects; the ISSN for magazines (International Standard Serial Number), the ISAN for films and video (International Standard Audiovisual Number), Internet Engineering Task Force Requests for comment (RFCs), etc.
Using the OID (Object IDentifier) system, it is even possible for a URN to reference Great Britain.
urn:oid:1.2.826 URN namespace assignments are handled via the IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
URN namespace definition mechanisms are described in RFC 3406.
The document makes provision potentially for namespace registration to incur a cost.
National Bibliography Numbers The refined specification for National Bibliography Numbers (NBNs) was published in 2001.
The NBN is a URN namespace used solely by national libraries, in order to identify deposited publications which lack an identifier, or to reference descriptive metadata (cataloguing) that describe the resources (RFC3188).
These can be used either for objects with a digital representation, or for objects that are solely physical, in which case available bibliographic data is provided instead.
NBNs are a fall-back mechanism; if an alternative identifier is available such as an ISBN, it should be used instead.
If not, an NBN is assigned.
NBNs are encoded within a URN according to the encoding described in RFC 3188.
The Digital Object Identifier The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) was introduced to the public in 1998.
The DOI is an indirect identifier for electronic documents based on Handle resolvers.
According to the International DOI Foundation (IDF), formed in October 1997 to be responsible for governance of the DOI System, it is a ‘mechanism for permanent identification of digital content’.
It is primarily applied to electronic documents rather than physical objects.
It has global scope and a single centralised management system.
It does not replace alternative systems such as ISBN, but is designed to complement them [34].
DOIs consist of two sections: a numeric identification consisting of a prefix identifying the term as a DOI (10.)
and a suffix identifying the document’s publisher.
The document is then identified with a separate term.
The document and publisher are separated by a forward slash, in the form: doi:10.345/document.identifier12345 The suffix following the forward slash is either automatically generated by the agency registering the DOI, or is contributed by the registrant.
In practice, the suffix is limited to characters that can be encoded within a URL.
DOIs are not case-sensitive.
In general, no meaning should be inferred to the content of the suffix beyond its use as a unique ID.
DOIs may be resolved via the Handle system.
Although DOIs are designed for Unicode-2 (ISO/IEC 10646), the required encoding is UTF-8 due to the fact that the Handle.net resolver uses UTF-8.
The DOI is formalised as ANSI/NISO Z39.84-2005, and is currently in the later stages of the ISO certification process.
DOI registration incurs a cost both for membership and for registration and membership of each document, and as such it may in some situations be considered preferable to make use of the Handle.net resolver without the use of DOIs.
A piece by Tim Berners-Lee and others, ‘Creating a Science of the Web’, provides a real-world example.
It has been given the DOI: 10.1126/science.1126902 This DOI may be resolved by going to the following URL (dx.doi.org functions as a DOI resolver, an implementation of the Handle system): http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1126902 The user should then be forwarded to the appropriate page.
Persistent Uniform Resource Locators Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), proposed in 1995 and developed by OCLC, are actionable identifiers.
A PURL consists of a URL; instead of pointing directly to the location of a digital object, the PURL points to a resolver, which looks up the appropriate URL for that resource and returns it to the client as an HTTP redirect, which then proceeds as normal to retrieve the resource.
PURLs are compatible with other document identification standards such as the URN.
In this sense, PURLs are sometimes described as an interim solution prior to the widespread use of URNs.
A software package implementing a PURL resolver may be freely downloaded from the OCLC [5].
PURLs can also be created on the public PURL server [6].
PURL is primarily linked to OCLC [7], which continues to run the oldest PURL resolver in existence.
It has however been strongly influenced by the active participation of OCLC’s Office of Research in the Internet Engineering Task Force Uniform Resource Identifier working groups [6].
There is no cost associated with the use of PURLs.
The Handle System The Handle system, first implemented in 1994, was published as an RFC in November 2003.
It is primarily used as a DOI resolver (see example above).
In practice, it is a distributed, general-purpose means for identifying and resolving identifiers.
Both master and mirror sites are administrated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), and the distributed nature of the service ensures reliable availability.
An overview of the Handle system is available from Lannom [8] and relevant RFCs [9][10].
The Handle.net system may also be used separately to the DOI system.
The underlying software package may be downloaded and installed for institutional use.
This system was designed by the CNRI, initially with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
It was published as RFC 3650, RFC 3651, RFC 3652 in November 2003.
OpenURL OpenURL, dating from 2000, contains resource metadata encoded within a URL and is designed to support mediated linking between information resources and library services.
The OpenURL contains various metadata elements; the resolver extracts them, locates appropriate services and returns this information.
It is sometimes described as a metadata transport protocol.
This standard is not primarily designed as a persistent identifier/resolver.
There are many other issues that make an institutional resolver service useful – such as the problem of access rights and the need to find a source that the user has permission to read.
Moreover, although of less significance in the matter of text documents, issues of bandwidth and efficiency would make it desirable to use a local mirror.
This is still very much an issue in multimedia resource or software distribution.
An OpenURL is formed of a prefix (a valid HTTP URL linking to the user’s institutional OpenURL resolver) and a suffix, which is simply a query string encoded according to the URI RFCs, eg.
RFC3986– which deprecates RFC2396, against which OpenURL was initially defined.
Here is an example of an OpenURL: http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=journal&issn=0942-4962 This example describes the Multimedia Systems journal (ISSN 0942-4962), and is resolved by the SpringerLink resolver.
The following example describes a book, Understanding Search Engines.
Note that, whilst these examples both include a unique identifier (the ISBN), OpenURLs can also validly contain only part of this information (for example, title or author).
http://www.example.domain/resolver.cgi?genre=book&isbn=0898714370&title=Understanding%20Search%20Engines OpenURL was initially drafted in 2000 [11], then formalised into NISO OpenURL Version 0.1 in 2003.
Since then, it has been developed into ANSI standard Z39.88.
The standard is maintained by the OCLC.
The Archival Resource Key The Archival Resource Key (ARK), dating from March 2001, is a URL scheme developed at the US National Library of Medicine and maintained by the California Digital Library.
ARKS are designed to identify objects of any type – both digital and physical objects.
In general, ARK syntax is of the form (brackets indicate [optional] elements): [http://NMA/]ark:/NAAN/Name[Qualifier] The Name Assigning Authority (NAA) refers to the organisation responsible for this particular object naming.
This information is encoded into each ARK via the Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN).
The NAAN is a unique identifier for this organisation, registered in a manner similar to URN namespaces.
The Name Mapping Authority (NMA) is the the current service provider (e.g., the Web site) responsible for the object itself.
NAAs often run their own NMA, although this is not mandatory.
While the ARK scheme encourages semantically opaque identifiers for core objects, it tolerates branding in the hostname (NMA); however, recognizing that this does not always play well with persistence, in no case does the hostname participate in comparing two ARKs for identity.
Semantic extension (Qualifier) is also tolerated, as this often names transient service access points.
An example ARK is given as follows [12]: Figure 2: Example of Archival Resource Key syntax   Unlike an ordinary URL, an ARK is used to retrieve three things: the object itself, its metadata (by appending a single ‘?’), and a commitment statement from its current provider (by appending ‘??’).
An ARK may retrieve various types of metadata, and is metadata-format agnostic.
One metadata format with which its use is closely related, however, is the Electronic Resource Citation (defined in draft RFC draft-kunze-erc-01), which contains Kernel metadata, defined in the same draft document.
The full ARK specification is also available [13].
WebCite WebCite, dating from 2003, and a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, takes a slightly different approach to preservation, starting from the observation that systems such as DOI require a unique identifier to be assigned for each new revision of the document, and that therefore they are relatively ineffectual when used on resources that are less stable and are not formally published.
First published in 1998 in an article in the British Medical Journal that discussed the possibility of a Web-based citation index [14], the idea was briefly tested, laid aside for several years and revived in 2003 when it was noted that obsolescence and unavailability of cited Web references remained a serious issue.
WebCite is not precisely a persistent identifier system.
Rather, it offers a form of on-demand archiving of online resources, so that the cached copy may be cited with a greater likelihood that it remains available in future.
For this reason, it encounters a different set of problems; for example, some information cannot be cached because it is not available to the service, perhaps because it is behind a firewall or available only to those with a subscription to a certain digital library.
Site maintainers may additionally choose to write a robots.txt file, disallowing the use of Internet robots or spiders on their Web sites for various reasons.
Discussion There are many practical differences between the above systems and specifications.
Inevitably, the story of persistent identifiers subsumes that of semantic identifiers, such as the URN and the DOI.
As a result, many of the distinctions between these standards have to do with the aim and scope of the relevant identifier standards rather than with the resolver in question.
1.
Opacity Some systems promote the use of opaque identifiers over the use of semantically meaningful strings.
There are legitimate reasons to prefer the use of opaque terms.
Firstly, branding and nomenclature are not static, but evolve along with the organisation, topic and task.
They are also culturally and socially situated.
Hence, an opaque identifier removes one motivation for name changes – i.e.
rebranding or redefinition (semantic shift and drift) – but does so at the cost of a certain amount of convenience for the user.
There is a trade-off between the ability to track down a resource, should the persistent identifier fail to resolve, from the semantic information available in the string, and the increased likelihood that a string containing meaningful semantics will at some point be altered.
The ARK system lies at one extreme of this spectrum (at least for the core object identifier), with the OpenURL at the other.
2.
Authority and Centrality The ARK and PURL (indeed, even the URL) specifications describe a system that anybody could host.
Similarly, the Handle server can be locally installed in a manner similar to any other Web server.
By comparison, the DOI identifier has a number of associated fees, and is centrally administrated by the International DOI Foundation.
Fees are often associated with reliability and authority.
There is a perception that those willing to invest in a system have made a financial commitment to that organisation.
This, however, assumes facts not in evidence.
It is not an unreasonable assumption that a financial commitment implies that an organisation has made a considered decision to the cause, but the possibility exists that use of DOIs may be seen as part of ‘the cost of doing business’.
3.
Semantics, Flexibility and Complexity Increased flexibility in an identifier standard comes at the cost of complexity.
The URN is a superclass of many different namespaces and encodings.
It also results in some philosophical (epistemological) problems; what does a URN describing Britain have in common with a URN describing a magazine article?
A URN can function as a surrogate for an ambiguous verbal description, but can it be considered as a candidate for a persistent identifier scheme?
The above also raises the question: if the recognition of the four British home nations results in Scotland electing to leave the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, what will this do to our URN namespace?
Ambitious identifiers, particularly the URN, are not in general applied to the full capability of the standard.
There is a cost to increased flexibility, which manifests itself in the added costs of complete implementation on the application level and potentially an increased load on interface design.
4.
Present-day Availability and Viability Clearly, these standards have a very heterogeneous level of adoption in the present day.
Although many organisations have shown an interest in ARK, serious production implementation is seen in only a few places (such as the National Library of France, Portico, CDL, and the University of California).
By comparison, DOIs are widely used, particularly in certain disciplines – this asymmetry is likely to be due to the fact that certain journals have picked up the concept of the persistent URI more quickly than others.
5.
Technical Solution versus Social Commitment The cost of the DOI is often justified by describing the investment as a means of making visible to the public the commitment of one’s organisation to the long-term availability of digital resources.
This argument echoes a common theme threaded throughout the many discussions that have been held over the last few years on the topic of persistent URIs: the centrality of organisational commitment to the process.
The ability to manage and quickly update a set of persistent identifiers centrally is valuable.
However, it is inevitably necessary for the maintenance process to be honoured in terms of working hours set aside for the purpose on an ongoing basis, and this task is in most cases set aside for the publishers of that persistent identifier.
Practical Concerns From the perspective of someone looking at persistent identifiers for the first time, this collection of standards is somewhat overwhelming.
Each has been built to respond to different needs, and it is perhaps only with the benefit of hindsight that it is possible to look through these many standards and see the number of common threads that link these initiatives together.
Choosing from these options on the basis of a brief written description is difficult if not impossible.
In general, most software deployment processes start with requirements gathering and analysis, and the choice of a persistent identifier system is no exception.
The context in which the system will be used is an important factor, particularly since adoption of these standards is quite uneven and very dependent on the intended usage and topic area.
The precise patterns of adoption across disciplines and thematic areas are not yet known, although there are many bodies discussing adoption in particular contexts.
Particular attention has been put into a number of user scenario-related issues for the ARK; for example, practical issues such as the difficulties encountered copying a URL from paper into a browser location bar have been incorporated into the design.
For this reason, the ARK specification and documentation are recommended reading for those looking into the various options for a persistent identifier standard.
However, the standard that has achieved widest market penetration is likely to be the URN/DOI and associated resolver (taking the DOI as an interim manifestation of the general URN concept).
Open Questions and Research Issues There is ample proof that the eventual ‘decay’ of hyperlinks is a problem.
Statistics are available giving the number of resources in general that remain available after publication, such as results from a small study of around 600 links providing supplementary resources in biomedical publications [15], which found that 71 92% of supplementary data remained available via the links provided by authors, and that there was a higher chance of links becoming unavailable if they were moved to sites beyond the publisher’s control.
A 2004 study of URLs in Medline found that 12% of URLs were published with typos or other formatting errors, around two-thirds of HTTP URLs were consistently available, and another 19% were available intermittently.
FTP fared far worse, with just over a third of sites responding [16].
The most important question, given the focus of the effort, is this: how effective are persistent identifiers at ensuring the long-term availability of resources?
Each of these standards is still quite new.
How well do they work?
Do they all have similar success?
What will the failure modes be?
Other important issues for those looking to deploy persistent identifiers include the relevance and longevity of the standard within their own domain; it is possible that, for instance, a standard optimised for a business environment will prove to be inappropriate for an academic one.
Additionally, it is useful to ascertain the standard, if any, that will be most familiar to users in the intended domain of use, by engagement with users and perhaps a statistical survey of the area.
There are a number of other considerations.
For instance, if a persistent identifier standard is primarily destined for use in the print medium, does this influence the required feature set, as is suggested by the ARK specification?
Would a checksum/error-correction mechanism be appropriate?
If the semantic readability of identifiers indeed has a negative impact on their longevity (as described above), can this effect be quantitatively demonstrated?
On the other hand, the ability to extract appropriate information from an identifier that no longer resolves correctly may permit one to search via a search engine or a library catalogue and retrieve the new location of the lost resource.
Which of these effects is more noticeable, and where should the trade-off lie?
Does the end-user understand the significance of persistent identifiers, and in which cases at present are they correctly applied?
Conclusion Technology cannot create a persistent identifier, in the digital library community’s sense of the term.
This is primarily due to the fact that the longevity of each of these persistent identifier schemes (other than OpenURL) is closely linked to the information provider’s long-term commitment to keeping records pertaining to their data available and up to date.
To offer a persistent identifier for a document via a given resolver additionally implies entering into a long-term commitment with the organisation maintaining that resolver.
However, picking the right standard is an important step in ensuring that the infrastructure remains available.
Software will age with time, so a more complex infrastructure implies a greater commitment from the organisation that developed and made available the resolver package.
There is likely to be space for several persistent identifier standards, both within the digital library world and elsewhere.
Internet infrastructure in general will benefit from similar standards, and indeed many resolver services have sprung up that offer some of the functionality of the persistent identifier, such as TinyURL (tinyurl.com), SNURL (snipurl.com) and elfurl (elfurl.com).
However, they do not offer a commitment to persistence or high availability.
That said, they are very much more widely used than the formal persistent identifier services of the digital library world.
Much the same is true of the content-based persistent identification approaches mentioned above.
Whilst it is tempting to suggest that this simply results from the fact that the most common applications of some such schemes are for peer-to-peer download purposes, there is another side to this.
They demonstrate that, given a comfortable interface and clear description of the purpose of the application, average end-users are able and willing to make use of resolver services.
In summary, this is an important area, and one in which there are more questions than answers.
The valuable services and standards that are presently available form an excellent base for further exploration of this area; but it remains a confusing landscape for the end-user and for the potential contributor of persistent identifiers.
Much more needs to be done in terms of articulating pragmatic use cases and publicising the reasons to invest in persistent identifier definition and maintenance.
Equally, each standard can learn from the successes, failures and insights of the others.
It is crucial to accept that managed persistence in some contexts may be unachievable.
There are limited resources available for ensuring availability of old data, an operating overhead that grows with each year of output, and as such there may indeed be a motivation for providing a coherent mechanism for withdrawing that assumed obligation to manage persistent identification, moving perhaps instead into a cheaper if less trustworthy scheme for information discovery.
Finally, whilst we must acknowledge that solving the problem in the general sense is almost certainly asking too much, there are now many options available for institutions which count long-term availability as a priority.
This is a complex space with many players, from national libraries and major journals to small publishers and individuals, and it is unlikely that ‘one size will fit all’.
As oxymoronic as it may seem to ‘experiment with preservation’, that is perhaps what we must do.
Acknowedgement Many thanks to John A. Kunze for his enthusiasm, and the comments and suggestions he contributed during the writing of this article.
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2004 Mar 22; 20(5):668-72.
PMID: 15033874.
Retrieved from http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/5/668 Further Reading Relevant RFCs Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1737 URN Syntax http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2141 Using National Bibliography Numbers as Uniform Resource Names http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3188.txt Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespace Definition Mechanisms http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3406 Handle System Overview http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3650.txt Handle System Namespace and Service Definition http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3651 Handle System Protocol (ver 2.1) Specification http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3652 Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax http://gbiv.com/protocols/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html Author Details Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Persistent Identifiers: Considering the Options” Author: Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/tonkin/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion Buzz software framework infrastructure repositories provenance interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin reviews a fascinating introduction to over two decades of research into computerisation movements.
This book is all about computerisation movements – CMs, for short.
CMs are social, professional, intellectual and/or scientific movements [1], collective movements fuelled by a group of people who share a vision of the way that things should be, and are ready to promote that vision.
For some readers, this may sound a little abstract, so I will begin with a little descriptive preamble, which others are welcome to skip.
The worlds of computer science and information technology are, whilst in many ways disjoint, brought together by a shared love of the elevator pitch.
If you can explain your idea in thirty seconds or less – say, when you have succeeded in trapping your prospective venture capitalist into a trip up to the twenty-fifth floor with you – and have it understood and appreciated, then this will simplify many things for you and your business.
To do that means that you must anchor your idea as seamlessly as possible to ideas that are well-known and widely shared, because as little of that time as possible should be taken up in describing necessary background.
It is easy to design a back-of-the-envelope model for the subset of all elevator pitches that are likely to be successful, like so: Full space of possible elevator pitches.
Areas of knowledge shared by you and the auditor Space of plausible ideas Probability of acceptance Naturally, there are some ideas that (as plausible or eventually important as they may turn out to be) aren't easy to get across.
And there are others that, although less plausible to the 20-20 vision provided by hindsight, are more likely to succeed in the elevator-pitch test.
These same communicative mechanisms are at play in business, research and indeed any other field of human endeavour, although various details must differ – the length of attention you get, the number and variety of prospective funders, the motivating factors, and so forth.
Elliott and Kraemer's book is about drawing out the social, cultural and political landscape behind the process of deciding which of the really big ideas get time, effort, promotion and encouragement, and what ideas are to be quietly ignored – why, how and when organisations adopt and promote computing technologies.
This book contains twenty chapters, research papers on the topic of CMs that, as the Acknowledgements state, further the work of the late professor Rob Kling, who died in May 2003.
A foreword by Susan Iacono sketches out the material, and the context in which it was written.
Chapter 1 of this volume provides an introduction and sketches out the structure for the succeeding nineteen chapters which are as follows: Part I: Introduction 1.
Computerization Movements and the Diffusion of Technological Innovations 2.
Reprints of Seminal Research Papers on Computerization Movements: Paper 1: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for Computerization Paper 2: Computerization Movements: The Rise of the Internet and Distant Forms of Work Part II: Productivity 3.
The Computerization Movement in the U.S. Home Mortgage Industry: Automated Underwriting from 1980 to 2004 4.
Visions of the Next Big Thing: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for New Technologies 5.
Framing the Photographs: Understanding Digital Photography as a Computerization Movement Part III: Democratization 6.
From the Computerization Movement to Computerization: Communication Networks in a High-Tech Organization 7.
Internetworking in the Small 8.
Online Communities: Infrastructure, Relational Cohesion, and Sustainability Part IV: Death of Distance 9.
Virtual Teams: High-Tech Rhetoric and Low-Tech Experience 10.
Large-Scale Distributed Collaboration: Tension in a New Interaction Order 11.
Examining the Proliferation of Intranets Part V: Freedom and Information Rights 12.
Information/ Communications Rights as a New Environmentalism?
Core Environmental Concepts for Linking Rights-Oriented Computerization Movements 13.
Examining the Success of Computerization Movements in the Ubiquitous Computing Era: Free and Open Source Software Movements 14.
Emerging Patterns of Intersection and Segmentation When Computerization Movements Interact 15.
Seeking Reliability in Freedom: The Case of F/OSS 16.
Movement Ideology vs.
User Pragmatism in the Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software Part VI: Ubiquitous Computing 17.
The Professional's Everyday Struggle with Ubiquitous Computing 18.
Politics of Design: Next-Generation Computational Environments 19.
Social Movements Shaping the Internet: The Outcome of an Ecology of Games Part VII Conclusion 20: Comparative Perspective on Computerization Movements: Implications for Ubiquitous Computing.
In Chapter 1, the CM is defined as 'a broad environmental dynamic of interacting organizations and institutions that shape utopian visions of what technology should do and how it should be used' (p.3).
Iacono's preface points to five basic assumptions of computerisation movements' ideologies, the belief structure that underlies the promotion of information systems: Computer-based technologies are central for a reformed world Improved computer-based technologies can further reform society More computing is better than less, and there are no conceptual limits to the scope of appropriate computerisation No one loses from computerisation Uncooperative people are the main barriers to social reform though computing Here, already, we see what becomes increasingly evident throughout this book; far from being as dry a topic as the politely worded back cover would state, research into CMs is mercilessly realist.
The actual state of clothing of the Emperor is a factor in the way that rhetoric – 'discourse aimed at an audience to gain either intellectual or active adherence' [2] – shifts over time, but a critical point here is that a computerisation movement can exist no matter what the actual state of the Emperor's underwear drawer may happen to be – a continuing gap is observed 'between CM visions and the reality of technology use in organisations and society' (p. xviii).
In other words, new technologies are described via utopian visions, and as a result of all this rhetoric, it is not unusual for technology to be adopted, but to identify the real-world technology as a manifestation of that vision may be no easy feat.
Rhetoric, we are told, is used to convince stakeholders that a new IT concept is the next big thing, that it is not the next big thing, and what should be learnt from the preceding experiences [3].
Most of the papers herein are based on a seminal paper by Kling and Iacono [1] (1988).
This paper, The mobilization of support for computerization: the role of computerization movements, is reprinted in Chapter 2 of this volume.
Chapter 2 also contains Computerization movements: the rise of the Internet and distant forms of work, by Iacono and Kling [4], a view of the assertions of social transformation that 'selectively frame' what the Internet should mean.
The paper casts aside the question of the 'fidelity... to truth' of assertions such as "The Internet is the dawning of a new social epoch... distance will be overcome, a new social order will emerge, and lives will be transformed" and focuses on examining these assertions themselves, and the way in which the 'meaning of the Internet' is built up in macro-level discourses.
Further chapters cover application of the CM viewpoint to specific topics, via the case studies, empirical studies, theoretical analyses and field-based studies described on the book's cover matter.
This includes discussion of the promises of increased productivity (Chapters 3-5), democratisation (Chapters 6-8), the 'death of distance' (Chapters 9-11), Freedom and Information Rights (Chapters 12-16), and the section of the book that is my personal favourite, Ubiquitous Computing (Chapters 17-19).
The Ubiquitous Computing section is particularly interesting because of the differences in language use between these chapters and those that appear previously.
Rather than providing a dispassionate viewpoint, there are a few spirited swipes at the ideals that underlie the area – for example, Chapter 17 identifies Weiser as the most famous proponent of ubiquitous computing discourse; Weiser 'seeks to convince us that the miniaturization of computing equipment and sensor technology... will bring about a situation where not only are computers everywhere, but these computers will also disappear into the fabric of life and provide unnoticed advantages' (pp.
457).
In discussing failed adoption of the PDA (pp.
459) the author adds that 'The PDA generally disappeared completely out of sight and into desk drawers'.
Chapter 18 juxtaposes the Semantic Web and pervasive computing.
This must have been a somewhat difficult comparison to write, since SW components are very often proposed as middleware components for pervasive computing applications, so it is a little like comparing the rhetoric surrounding motorway design and that which motivates the design of touring coaches.
The chapter is rendered livelier by an impression drawn largely from observation of word choice – that Ackerman writes as an embedded journalist, that is, from within one of the camps.
Perhaps there is a clue in here as to the level of difficulty of writing in a dispassionate and distant manner about a topic that remains directly relevant.
After all, to compare and contrast two present-day CMs is to contribute actively to an ongoing debate.
There are a few minor issues with the structure: for example, it would be useful to have a little more information about the provenance of each chapter such as any source material on which it is based, perhaps presented in a very brief foreword for each chapter complete with a little background and introductory information.
However, this is a minor recommendation.
The conclusion recaps the previous chapters in a sweeping manner, which gives rise to a small quibble – a couple more pages of discussion of specific highlights of the papers in preceding chapters would have been welcome.
Conclusions are drawn, and five generalisations are drawn on the basis of the four eras of computerisation discussed throughout the book: Mainframe, PC, Internet and Ubiquitous Computing.
These conclusions are (beginning p. 522) as follows: There is a continuing gap between CM visions and the reality of technology use in organisations and society CM rhetoric tends to shift from the utopian to the pragmatic with experience and contending discourse Technologies that require a support infrastructure to be built as part of their implementation take longer to diffuse than those that can use existing infrastructures, resulting in a lower probablity that a CM requiring a new infrastructure will lead to successful diffusion The realities of day-to-day use of a CM's promoted technology cannot be predicted precisely in advance, but informed technology assessments can be made by better understanding of similarities and differences of emerging and earlier technologies.
Such assessments can improve the success of a CM.
The social context shapes technology use as much if not more than the technology per se.
New technology often reinforces existing organisational and social arrangements, rather than disrupting, changing or transforming them.
CMs that leverage the technology-organisation linkage will be more successful than those that do not.
I suspect that some will look at the conclusions presented here and think that this book represents a set of well-chosen statements of the obvious, and in a certain sense this analysis would not be inaccurate.
But the most important aspect of the book is not in its conclusions.
Rather, it lies in the fact that the conclusions are constructed on the basis of over 500 pages of research.
The book is a delight, because it is rare for busy professional academics and researchers to have the time, the opportunity and the motivation to lay down their pen (or, as it may be, their Blackberry) and reflect deeply and thoughtfully on the equally deeply and sincerely held beliefs and assumptions that underlie their work.
As a professional cynic I am aware that it is even rarer to be able to do so productively, thoughtfully and without cynicism.
The synopsis on the back cover finishes with the oblique comment that 'The empirical studies presented here show the need... to be aware that CM rhetoric can propose grand visions that never become part of a reality, and reinforce the need for critical and scholarly review of promising new technologies'.
I would add that the tools offered here comprise a framework for analysis of computerisation movements; while the studies offered here represent a comprehensive set of examples of how these tools can be applied, and at the same time provide an illustration by example of the most productive attitude to take while doing so.
There is therefore ample opportunity to step out of the embedded political discourse in which computing is mired and take the time to apply this analysis in other contexts, including sectors such as institutional repositories, registries and the many faces of social software.
References Kling Rob & Suzanne Iacono.
1988.
The mobilization of support for computerization: The role of computerization movements.
Social Problems 35(3)(June): 226-43.
Perelman, Chaim.
(1982).
The realm of rhetoric (William Kluback, Trans.).
Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press: pp.147.
Allen, Jonathan P., "Visions of the Next Big Thing: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for New Technologies."
Forthcoming in K. Kraemer and M. Elliott (eds.
), Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion: From Mainframes to Ubiquitous Computing.
Information Today: p. 147.
Iacono, S. and R. Kling (2001).
In: Information Technology and Organizational Transformation: History, Rhetoric, and Practice, edited by J. Yates and J.
Van Maanen.
Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, California.
Author Details Emma Tonkin Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion.
From Mainframes to Ubiquitous Computing" Author: Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/tonkin-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Cataloging and Organizing Digital Resources Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Cataloging and Organizing Digital Resources Buzz rdf framework database xml metadata repositories preservation cataloguing multimedia marc aggregation ead e-learning aacr2 frbr mets standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Higgins learns how to incorporate online resources into a library catalogue using AACR2 and MARC, but wonders why the wider issue of organising and describing a full range of digital resources is not addressed.
The title of this book will be bewitching for any library struggling with integrating the myriad of digital resources, to which they provide access, into its organisational and cataloguing workflows.
However, the manual has a very narrow focus and gives an unscalable solution, which fails to address the problems faced by hybrid libraries, with a wide range of complex digital resources requiring lifecycle control.
Content As a simple manual the book will be very helpful for libraries which are starting to provide access to licensed online resources for the first time.
The first two chapters explain in good detail the problems encountered with selection and acquisition, user access through authorisation, and how to establish a cataloguing workflow.
Chapter 3 looks at the pros and cons of providing additional access points to users through Web lists, context-sensitive linking and federated searching.
This includes a very good explanation of why libraries need to bother in the Google age.
After a brief look at bibliographic control, the next five chapters of the book are given over to detailed instructions for cataloguing the resources using Anglo American Cataloguing Rules, edition 2 (AACR2) and Machine Readable Cataloguing 21 Standard (MARC 21).
The chapters contain a large number of fully coded examples which will exhaustively aid any cataloguer wanting to use AACR2 and MARC to integrate online resources into the catalogue.
Therein lies the problem.
The book has a very narrow view of the types of digital resources a library may wish to deliver, and what constitutes cataloguing.
It is not really about digital resources in the wider sense, but licensed online resources, a definition which is not made explicit until page 96.
It does not define what it means by cataloguing, but it is implicit that really the only methodology under consideration is AACR2 / MARC.
The book starts promisingly with discussion of the wider concept of a digital library.
Chapter 1 shows that the authors are obviously aware of the hybrid nature of a digital library and the problems associated with the delivery of complex digital objects.
They discuss developments such as institutional repositories and specialised digital collections which describe and deliver different formats of material such as images and multimedia.
They also seem to be aware that AACR2 and MARC are not the only established metadata standards for cataloguing.
They include short sections on descriptive, administrative and technical metadata and discuss a number of options for these, along with a brief explanation of Dublin Core.
They also discuss the possibilities of describing the relationships between objects through the use of Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) standards such as Metadata Transmission Encoding Standard (METS) and Encoded Archival Description (EAD).
Cataloguing to aid digital preservation also gets a passing mention.
Chapter 4 does consider the possibility of dealing with digital resources separately from the main library catalogue and discusses some drawbacks.
However, these early glimpses of the complex needs of a fully integrated digital library are a side issue to the main premise of the book: that integration into the library's established catalogue, using established methodologies and workflows, is the best way of dealing with online resources.
Add-ons such as Web lists or federated searching can be nice, but these are messy and may require some unexpected, and possibly unwelcome, development work.
'Libraries have long since established what standards will be followed and who is responsible for new input, database maintenance, technical upkeep and development decisions with respect to their online catalogs, but they are starting from scratch with their Web lists' p63 The book gives scant information on the problems associated with managing the licences to online resources, providing only one short paragraph (p15).
It does not address the sustainability of business models associated with aggregator databases, or the likely loss of material to a library if licences are discontinued.
The final chapter gives some indications of trends to watch.
This seems both limited and dated with open access institutional repositories now well established services for many libraries and Functional Requirements for Bibliograhic Records (FRBR) the only issues addressed.
There is no mention of a large number of problems of organisation and cataloguing currently being addressed by the library community learning objects, e-learning resources, digital curation and preservation, open source delivery solutions, the use of XML and the possibilities afforded by the Resources Description Framework (RDF) to name a few.
Conclusion If a library needs a simple model, as a starting point, to help organise and catalogue licensed online resources into the established library catalogue using established workflows, then this book is ideal.
However, it would seem to have been published too late for many institutions, which will have already solved the problems it addresses, and are now seeking to deal with a wider variety of digital resources through creative solutions.
Institutions in such a position will find this book both frustrating and disappointing.
Author Details Sarah Higgins Metadata Coordinator Edinburgh University Library Email: Sarah.Higgins@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Cataloguing and Organizing Digital Resources: a How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians" Author: Sarah Higgins Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/higgins-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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e-Culture Horizons: from Digitisation to Creating Cultural Experiences Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines e-Culture Horizons: from Digitisation to Creating Cultural Experiences Buzz mobile software framework infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility preservation cataloguing graphics multimedia marc e-learning ontologies research Citation BibTex RIS Andreas Strasser reports on a two-day symposium hosted and organised by Salzburg Research in Salzburg, Austria, over 27-28 September 2004.
The eCulture symposium held for the second time in Salzburg from 27 28 September 2004, represents the annual gathering of leading thinkers brought together by the eCulture Group of Salzburg Research [1] to tackle specific themes in the area of research and technology development for the cultural heritage application field.
This year's theme drew an audience of regional, national, and international experts from a broad selection of research institutions, multimedia companies and technology providers, as well as political decision makers, to explore the transition from digitisation to creating cultural experiences.
Key note speeches, presentations and workshops looked at how cultural institutions can better plan, manage and finance digitisation projects and add value to their communities by creating digital cultural experiences.
Promising new technologies and interfaces to enable and enhance these experiences were at the centre of discussion.
In fact, the symposium offered much room for discussing the experts' contributions, as well as intensive workshops in which small groups of participants gathered to work on topics such as tomorrow's cultural memory and new concepts of eCulture and cultural experiences.
New Challenges for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Nestled in the foothills of Mönchsberg and in the shadow of the 900-year-old Hohensalzburg Fortress, the symposium was given an appropriate setting to tackle the notion of eCulture.
As the largest fully-preserved fortress in central Europe it remained impenetrable to marauding armies, and, it was hoped, that the strategies to tackle the nature of digital cultural artefacts and create engaging eCulture experiences would similarly stand the test of time.
A large part of the vast amount of information produced in the world today is born digital.
Abdelaziz Abid from UNESCO argued that cultural institutions traditionally entrusted with collecting and preserving cultural heritage were increasingly pressured as to which of these materials should be kept for future generations, and how to go about selecting and preserving them.
Aware of the importance of these issues, on 17 October 2003 UNESCO adopted the Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage [2] laying out the main principles for preserving digital heritage.
Mr Abid encouraged the audience to exploit UNESCO as a resource in the promotion of digital preservation at the national and regional level.
He highlighted the recently published Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage [3] which provides a checklist of issues and responsibilities that programmes need to take into account when approaching the task of preserving digital heritage.
Symposium location, University of Salzburg.
© Salzburg Research 2004.
How Best to Digitise Analogue Cultural Heritage?
Mr Abid focused on the need for preserving born-digital heritage, but the immediate concern for most museums, archives and libraries remained the challenge of digitising their analogue cultural heritage.
In order to optimise the use of restricted resources, it was necessary to co-ordinate and harmonise activities in the area in the digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage across Europe.
Hence, the symposium endorsed the aims and activities of the European Minerva initiative [4] which seeks to streamline and co-ordinate national activities and provides recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, accessibility and long-term preservation.
As a partner in the Minerva+ Project, the symposium organiser Salzburg Research invited project members to use the conference as an opportunity to meet and exchange opinions on digitisation practices.
This was used by project members and other interested institutions from Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Serbia & Montenegro.
The symposium featured presentations focusing on various issues relevant to the successful implementation of digitisation projects.
To focus the minds of the audience, Norbert Kanter from ZetCOM AG, Berlin [5], presented a number of online and on-site showcase projects of museums which have created digital collections in recent years.
Christian Dögl from uma information technology AG [6] introduced a catalogue of provisions for the planning and managing of digitisation projects which could enable cultural institutions to optimise the financing, the usage and ultimately the overall lifespan of their cultural artefacts.
To reduce risks and ensure successful digitisation projects, the economics of digitisation, in particular in respect of large and comprehensive collections, needs to be managed carefully.
Therefore, Josef Riegler from the Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv [7] introduced ways of how to finance digitisation projects.
Alfred Schmidt and Christa Müller, basing their presentation on the Austrian National Library's [8] extensive experience of digitising its collections, highlighted both the potential threats and benefits of digitisation projects.
From Digitisation to Cultural Experiences As mentioned above, the focus of the symposium was to develop 'visions of eCulture': What will be the face of digital culture in the future?
Most presenters seemed to agree that the digital cultural experience of the future would take place in a free-associating digital environment that will permeate today's institutional, social and political constructs.
Indeed the current demarcations between user and creator will melt and fuse.
Marc Federman, the Chief Strategist of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology of the University of Toronto [9], as key note speaker began the journey into the future by asking the audience to strap on their seat belts, stow away prior assumptions and preconceived notions in the luggage compartment above, and hold on tight.
He provided the audience with a fascinating philosophical insight into his vision for the future of cultural experiences, a vision that he described as the 'ephemeral artefact'.
In this vision, we are not merely spectators, or consumers of cultural artefacts, we actually become the creators.
Today's networked media, he argues; allow each one of us to participate actively in the creation of cultural 'expressions' which we perceive simultaneously and with immediate 'proximity'.
We cease to be bound by geographic location or time; we are able to participate anytime and anywhere.
He sees this proximity as the realisation of McLuhan's 'global village', which anticipates the emergence of a true global culture.
The cultural expressions that we create in this global environment and under today's conditions of instantaneous, multi-way communication, he argued, are ephemeral in nature they exist precisely in, and can only be experienced in, the present.
Gail Durbin, the head of the Victoria and Albert's On-Line Museum [10], provided examples of how this is already taking place.
She maintained that true added value can only be created if some power is handed to the visitor.
Digital assets have to be made available to serve the purpose of the visitor and not the institution.
She accepted this strategy involved risks, but could pay off in creative returns, in particular for the benefit and inspiration of users.
The Victoria and Albert Museum had explored a variety of ways to place the user in the centre of engaging cultural experiences.
Quizzes, for example, had proven successful in raising the online visitor's interest in the Museum's collections.
But the Museum has also found ways of making the visitor the actual creator of cultural artefacts.
The project A Modern Icon [11] is one such example.
Here the Museum had acquired the chair from the notorious Christine Keeler photograph, which became a classic Sixties icon.
Using a replica of this chair as a motif, people were invited to present themselves for a portrait.
The resulting photographs are now part of the Museum's collection.
In another project, Wish You Were Here [12], drop-in visitors were invited to create a museum postcard using a digital camera and graphic software.
The inspiration came from the photographs by Lady Hawarden in the Photography Gallery of the Museum.
After taking photographs in the galleries, the visitors were able to manipulate and finally print their images as postcards.
These postcards are now part of the Museum's photography collections.
New Technologies for eCulture Experiences Symposium moderator John Pereira, Salzburg Research's manager of the DigiCULT Project [13], opened a new session which presented promising new technologies, interfaces and actual applications to realise these experiences.
The Semantic Web is one of these promising technologies, according to Ziva Ben-Porat from Tel Aviv University [14] and Wernher Behrendt from Salzburg Research.
They proposed a roadmap towards semantically enabled e-learning spaces for cultural heritage content.
Drawing on the results of the CULTOS Project [15], their presentation focused on the need to build productivity tools for authoring in the Semantic Web environment and on the infrastructure for sharing such standardised, ontology-based content.
To further the development towards semantic-based systems, Alexander Wahler from NIWA Web Solutions [16] highlighted the importance of providing innovative entry points to cultural content, such as, location-based services which support nomadic eCulture users.
Bernhard Angerer from the Vienna-based non-profit organisation Polygon presented thecrystalwebx [17], a virtual museum sponsored by the renowned Austrian company Swarovski.
This museum integrates content from more than 300 institutions and engages the user in an innovative semantic-driven, adaptive interface.
Further promising technologies, according to Christian Breiteneder, head of the Interactive Media Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology [18] are pervasive computing and augmented reality.
The vision of pervasive computing is to some extent a projection of the future fusion of two phenomena of today: the Internet and mobile telephony.
Breiteneder predicted the emergence of large networks of communicating smart devices which means that computing will no longer be performed by just 'traditional' computers but rather by all manner of devices.
But how will these new technologies interact with such an invisible distributed computing system?
Augmented reality, Breiteneder maintained, would represent an excellent user interface for such an environment.
In an augmented reality system the user's perception of the real world is enhanced by computer-generated entities such as 2D images and 3D objects.
The interaction with these entities occurs in real-time to provide convincing feedback to the user and to give the impression of natural interaction.
From the commercial sector, Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Interactive Labs [19], one of Europe's leading e-Learning and new media publishing technologies companies, presented the role of the publishing sector at the dawn of this 'new era'.
He argued that a major challenge in the use of these new technologies will be the development and deployment of new content, using new formats and models optimised for new media.
As one example, Cardinali showcased the SCULPTEUR Project [20] which Giunti Interactive Labs is developing as an application that assists curators, instructional designers and educators to build virtual environments of 3-dimensional cultural learning objects.
Conclusion The Salzburg Research eCulture symposium provided the audience with a comprehensive and engaging overview of the transition from digitisation to eCulture experiences.
Along with developments towards a theoretical framework, the symposium presented emerging technologies and showcased applications that are moving us towards the eCulture vision.
All presentations will be made available for download from the symposium Web site [21].
References Salzburg Research / eCulture Group http://www.salzburgresearch.at/research/projects_show_e.php?art=thema&search=eCulture UNESCO: Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=17721&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html UNESCO: Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001300/130071e.pdf Minerva http://www.minervaeurope.org/ ZetCOM AG http://www.zetcom.ch/ uma information technology GmbH http://www.uma.at/ Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv http://www.verwaltung.steiermark.at/cms/ziel/8581/DE/ Austrian National Library http://www.onb.ac.at/ McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/ Victoria & Albert Museum http://www.vam.ac.uk/ V&A Museum project: A Modern Icon, http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photography/past_exhns/seeing/modern_icon/index.html V&A Museum project: Wish You Were Here http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/wishyouwerehere/ DigiCULT project http://www.digicult.info/ Tel Aviv University http://www.tau.ac.il/ CULTOS project http://www.cultos.org/ NIWA Web Solutions http://www.niwa.at/ thecrystalweb http://www.thecrystalweb.org/ Interactive Media Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology http://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/ Giunti Interactive Labs http://www.giuntilabs.com/ SCULPTEUR Project http://www.sculpteurweb.org/ Salzburg Research Symposium 2004 http://eculture.salzburgresearch.at/ Author Details Andreas Strasser Research Associate eCulture Group / Information Society Research Salzburg Research Austria Email: andreas.strasser@salzburgresearch.at Web site: http://www.salzburgresearch.at Return to top Article Title: "eCulture Horizons: From Digitisation to Creating Cultural Experiences" Author: Andreas Strasser Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/e-culture-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Opening Up OpenURLs with Autodiscovery Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Opening Up OpenURLs with Autodiscovery Buzz data software framework javascript html database rss xml usability infrastructure archives metadata firefox browser identifier schema blog repositories oai-pmh cataloguing personalisation openurl wsdl uddi srw mets mods sru lucene technorati wordpress bison interoperability cookie url research standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Daniel Chudnov, Richard Cameron, Jeremy Frumkin, Ross Singer and Raymond Yee demonstrate a 'gather locally, share globally' approach to OpenURLs and metadata autodiscovery in scholarly and non-scholarly environments.
Library users have never before had so many options for finding, collecting and sharing information.
Many users abandon old information management tools whenever new tools are easier, faster, more comprehensive, more intuitive, or simply 'cooler.'
Many successful new tools adhere to a principle of simplicity HTML made it simple for anyone to publish on the Web; XML made it simple for anyone to exchange more strictly defined data; and RSS made it simple to extract and repurpose information from any kind of published resource [1].
Recent efforts within the digital library community (OAI-PMH [2], SRW/U [3] and METS/MODS/MADS [4] [5] [6]) similarly lower the technological costs of implementing robust information sharing, search and description.
A wide gap remains, however, between 'cool' new applications (photo sharing, link logging and weblogging) and library services.
On one hand, by observing Web sites like Blogdex and Technorati, we can see how tools like RSS make it easier for anyone to build layer upon layer of new services on top of one base technology.
On the other hand, there are fewer examples of our nascent library-borne tools and standards being extended outside the relatively narrow sphere of library-specific applications and services.
In this article, we focus on one opportunity to bridge this gap by promoting the broader application of OpenURL-based metadata sharing.
We show how simple designs operating separately on the two components of OpenURLs can not only solve the appropriate copy problem, but also foster the sharing of references between a much broader variety of applications and users.
We claim that doing so will promote innovation by making the OpenURL model more accessible to anyone wanting to layer services on top of it.
This, we argue, will lead to the wider adoption of the standard to share references in both scholarly and non-scholarly environments, and broader use of our library-provided resources.
The NISO AX specifications for OpenURLs provide a framework to solve the 'appropriate copy/service' problem [7] [8].
An OpenURL consists of two logically distinct components [9][10]: the address of an OpenURL resolver and bibliographic metadata which describes the referent article.
When users visit OpenURL links with both components, the resolver presents a list of local services (e.g.
a link to a locally subscribed full-text copy, a citation report, an interlibrary loan request) for that referent.
Note that the first component (the resolver address) is institution-dependent , and the second component (metadata) is institution-independent.
Most current OpenURL-implementing services automatically bind these two parts together based on users' incoming network addresses.
In practice, this implementation pattern only scratches the surface of what the OpenURL model makes possible.
As originally conceived, and as the standard is written, the two OpenURL components can easily be separated, reconfigured, and reattached as required by distinct information sharing applications.
We can imagine a variety of applications for more adaptable OpenURLs that would allow users and applications to make more choices about when to resolve OpenURLs: when to redirect them from one resolver to another when to store their bibliographic metadata components for later reuse and when to exchange bibliographic metadata between non-resolver applications Indeed, the broader need to share links to information resources has led to a variety of approaches already implemented without the OpenURL standard.
One widely seen pattern is a weblog 'What I'm Reading' section; these typically present readers with useful bibliographic metadata and a link to a record for that item in an online vendor catalogue.
That so many weblog authors use this pattern indicates that demand for simple ways to connect authors and readers to bibliographic metadata (and, implicitly, convenient ways to obtain described items) is much greater than the demand solely for links to full text versions of scholarly journal articles.
In an earlier article [11], the authors argued that: ' ...we can consider the functional areas of linking, reference management, and weblogging to be service points on a single continuum of information gathering, study, and creation.
Following a reference from a weblog or from a scholarly article are each similar steps in exploring threads of related ideas.
Capturing a reference in your own weblog or reference library indicates that the citation somehow relates to your own thought process.
Publicly citing a reference more closely associates your thinking with that of others.'
It is so common for webloggers to read widely and to cite and comment upon other weblogs that the authors of weblog publishing systems make the process of citing an external Web site as quick and automated as possible.
Consider the approach taken by the Wordpress weblog system: Figure 1: Screenshot of 'Blog This' Bookmarklet In Figure 1 we see that a user can click on a special 'Blog This' bookmarklet (a Web browser bookmark containing JavaScript to perform a particular operation) to send the title, URL, and optionally selected text from a page they wish to reference to a weblog.
The captured URL is an ordinary URL (not an OpenURL), and the captured title is whatever the page author placed into the HTML <TITLE> tag.
While it is also possible for webloggers to create such references manually, this simple technology allows them to make citations more quickly and more accurately by reducing the risk of copy-and-paste errors.
Now consider an academic example where a researcher finds an article to read via Pubmed.
In Figure 2 we see the familiar OpenURL two-step: from a reference at Pubmed (at top left), to a direct full-text link (at bottom).
Additionally, if a user enters Pubmed through a specially crafted URL available on a medical library Web site, they might also be able to follow that reference to their institutional OpenURL resolver (at right).
Figure 2: Irreversible OpenURLs in Best-of-Breed Environment In Figure 2, the researcher might want to click that same 'Blog This' bookmarklet at any of the three screens, hoping to capture the article title, the link to the clicked-after page, and (ideally) additional metadata about the article such as authors, volume, issue, pages, and source.
We can see, however, that the same 'Blog This' bookmarklet, trained only to capture a URL and <TITLE>, would not provide the researcher with useful information.
In each screenshot, the URL displayed on the browser's location bar is a publisher-specific version, which is, in many cases, not a stable URL which can be cited.
It may contain session information, which will expire in the future; it might contain Web application parameters that are later changed by the publisher; it might even simply point to a server that is later replaced or moved.
Moreover, the contents of the HTML <TITLE> field do not necessarily correspond to the title of the article.
In many cases we may only have a generic title ('Full text') or simply the name of the vendor ('SFX At Yale') or database publisher ('Entrez Pubmed').
A better choice of 'what to Blog' would be the OpenURL passed between pairs of services in Figure 2.
The OpenURL would contain the necessary metadata, or an identifier resolvable to the necessary metadata, for researchers to capture the citation itself for immediate republication into a weblog.
Few researchers, however, would be likely to take the trouble to capture the OpenURL from the clickstream between applications, and to paste the OpenURL by hand into their weblogs.
And most weblog engines have yet to accommodate the OpenURL model by helping to simplify this process the way bookmarklets currently simplify the process of posting comments about other sites.
Even if this process could be simplified (some resolver products, for instance, provide an easy way to capture such a 'stable link'), their weblog readers would not be able to reach services presented by researchers' own institutional OpenURL resolver (pointed to in the captured OpenURL) if they were not members of the same institutional community.
Even more frustratingly, many high-end resources like Pubmed and full-text database themselves provide alternate application interfaces to their metadata and search functions, but tool providers cannot simply 'scrape' that knowledge without coding resource-specific (and, therefore, expensive to maintain) rules into Web browsers or other tools.
What weblog authors should be able to do is to get all of the OpenURL metadata back into their weblog with that one 'Blog This' click, instead of just a random HTML 'title' and an arbitrary remote-application-defined URL.
We can see, however, that the transient model of currently-implemented OpenURL service connectivity makes it difficult for individuals to pass OpenURLs further along to additional applications of their choosing.
And, even if aspects of these tasks are made simpler, the OpenURLs they do share remain limited in usefulness.
Several initiatives demonstrate promise towards solving these problems.
The OpenURL Router [12] serves hundreds of European institutions with a resolver-bounce model.
This lets publishers use a single base domain in their OpenURLs, obviating the need to maintain institution-specific network information.
This solution is only in place in one part of the world, however, and because it remains closed to outside resolvers, it does not yet speak to how, say, small UK publishers might let readers from other regions bounce to their own resolvers.
That being the case, we can imagine that linking such routers across regions might help.
OCLC has been developing a resolver registry that perhaps might support such inter-regional router linking, but it has not yet been publicly released.
Separately, a more general model of service registries is being developed in the UK by the IESR [13] [14] initiative and the NSF-funded OCKHAM Project [15] in the US.
Both of these efforts, overlapping in scope and working together, offer much promise, but are still under development and therefore are not yet in widespread use.
At the same time, our community has recognised that computer users want to simplify how they collect and share information.
The 'Gather, Create, Share' motto evident in the Flecker/McLean Report [16] from the DLF (Digital Library Foundation), which describes interoperability issues in digital library services, personal collection tools, course management systems, and online portfolios, articulates this model of user demand succinctly.
Specifications from IMS [17] and collections of common information-sharing use cases gathered by participants in the Sakai Project [18], among other efforts, further document and clarify the need to deliver scholarly and learning management services that plug in to this mentality.
Problem Statement To meet this demand, any information-rich resource anyone provides anywhere would be made to work, in part, like this: User sees something they wish to capture/cite/copy/share/get services for, so User clicks one button, and The desired object moves, magically, to wherever it is told to go, along with its metadata (or just its metadata, depending)...
...Even if that is a different place (or places) from one time to the next.
Fortunately, wherever bibliographic information needs to be exchanged between applications, users, or diverse services, the OpenURL specification already provides a robust framework for doing so.
Its model is easy-to-implement and vendor-, platformand genre-neutral.
A variety of developers and users outside our comparatively small academic library community are already stitching new information-sharing applications together faster than we can collect use cases, but without benefiting from the simplicity of OpenURLs.
In the short term, it might benefit all to find simpler ways to interject our OpenURL resolvers among other services -into the broader world of personal library development.
Demonstration: Simple OpenURL Autodiscovery This might seem like a lot to ask for, but examples of such simplicity at work already abound.
Take, for instance, RSS Autodiscovery [19].
By embedding a simple metadata element (a <LINK> tag) in the HTML header element of a weblog or other site template, Web publishers can simply advertise the availability of one or more RSS feeds for their site.
Because the manner in which this tag is used is simple and well-known, Web browser developers have seen fit to include support for automatically discovering, or 'autodiscovering,' RSS feeds, and making it easy for users to subscribe quickly to autodiscovered RSS feeds within the browser's core interface with a special icon.
Thus, by embedding a pointer to a site's RSS feed on every page of a site, and by ensuring that pointer matches an agreed-upon pattern, users and their software tools can be made to find RSS feeds automatically.
The agreed link syntax is itself very simple:   <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://example.net/rss" />   What if OpenURLs could also be autodiscovered?
The authors have experimented with this in several applications, and the results are promising.
Aiming for simplicity for users and implementers alike, we have cast OpenURLs on several of our own sites' pages with a few simple additions that enable similar functionality.
For our prototypes, we changed services we operate to generate 'bare' OpenURLs using the HTML "name" element, and we also added two simple attributes: 'title' and 'rel':   <a name='issn=0367-326X&volume=75&issue=7-8&spage=782' rel='alternate' title='OpenURL'>   The "name" attribute is intended to identify a single, specific location within an HTML document, and is useful here because "name" anchors are typically not visible.
This allowed us to experiment with inserting discoverable links into existing services without disturbing unsuspecting users.
Note that while using both the "title" and "rel" attributes in this manner are technically valid according to the HTML specifications, use of the "name", "title", and "rel" attributes on the "a" element in this exact way is an experiment [20].
The authors readily admit that this combination feels like a bit of a 'quick hack.'
That said, annotating bare OpenURLs in this manner made it simple for all of us quickly to meet our prototyping objective of 'making quick hacks easy.'
Also, because the "title" and "rel" attributes are both components of the RSS autodiscovery pattern used for "link" elements, this approach seemed to be a reasonable starting point for discussion.
This general approach, of JavaScript code operating dynamically to change OpenURLs as befits distinct users, is not itself original, either [9][10].
Our approach simplifies previously described techniques in that client applications only operate on user preferences (for a particular resolver) rather than the exchange of cookies across applications.
We hope this simpler model might expand the variety of application types and publishers that leverage these well established, but under-utilised, ideas.
After adding this new OpenURL pattern to our services, we focused on adding OpenURL autodiscovery support to client applications, starting with Web browsers.
This required two steps: first, because we needed a list of resolvers to demonstrate the feasibility of dynamically assigning appropriate resolver links to meet users' institutional affiliations, we invited colleagues subscribed to a library mailing list to share basic information about their local resolvers for experimental purposes.
This yielded for use a list of a dozen resolvers from institutions in five different countries, including resolver service names, locations, 'catch phrases' and link button images.
Next, we generated a set of JavaScript bookmarklets that would allow users from any of those dozen institutions to rewrite OpenURLs that match the autodiscovery pattern specified above [21].
There follow several examples of prototype OpenURL autodiscovery in action in systems developed independently by the authors.
Figure 3 shows CiteULike, a research article 'linklogging' system [22].
Figure 3: OpenURL Autodiscovery in CiteULike Figure 4 shows the Canary Database, an interdisciplinary resource [23].
Figure 4: OpenURL Autodiscovery in the Canary Database Neither author's service maintains a list of institutional resolvers, or network address ranges, or even user-specified resolver preferences, but in both figures, user-appropriate OpenURL buttons appear next to citations.
For both CiteULike and the Canary Database, the authors needed only to change their sites' respective HTML templates slightly.
Only the autodiscoverable OpenURLs, with the "rel" and "title" attributes as described above, were added, with no special additional knowledge of their users.
Demonstration: Generic OpenURLs in Weblogs Both of these are custom-built applications for scholarly researchers.
To demonstrate autodiscoverable OpenURLs in a broader context weblogs we wrote plug-ins designed to work with the popular Wordpress and PyBlosxom weblog toolkits.
Once a weblog plugin is installed (quickly, as each is only a few lines of code), a weblog author can then add a Wordpress "custom field" called "openurl" to any entry, with a value of the OpenURL query string, or a line in any PyBlosxom entry that looks like this to any entry:   "openurl::Lucene in Action (book)::title=Lucene in action&isbn=1932392481"   With these simple extra actions taken by weblog authors, users with the JavaScript "appropriate resolver" piece installed in their Web browser will then see the resolver buttons pop up in the browser window, as depicted in Figure 5.
Figure 5: OpenURL Autodiscovery via Simple Weblog Plug-ins For all of the above screenshots, Web browsers were configured to use JavaScript in one of two ways.
First, a bookmarklet could be enabled in a browser toolbar that users can click whenever they see an 'OpenURL' icon, or simply as text, on any page they visit.
Bookmarklets can be easily configured in this way for all major browsers on all major platforms.
Alternatively, a browser extension (in this case, Greasemonkey [24] for Firefox) can be loaded with a slight variation on the bookmarklet script, and configured by default to execute the script automatically on all (or only user-specified) pages visited by the user.
A benefit of this latter approach is that users need to do nothing once they have installed the extension and script; simply visiting pages will pop up appropriate resolver buttons whenever autodiscoverable OpenURLs are included on any page from any site anywhere on the Web.
Note how these examples demonstrate how simple and inexpensive publishing (and, in turn, following) appropriately routable OpenURL links could become with this model.
Demonstration: Integration with Scholar's Box Figure 6 demonstrates an extension of the Scholar's Box toolkit for personal collections to support OpenURL autodiscovery [25][26].
In this example, the Scholar's Box has been used to export collected references directly into a weblog entry from the Scholar's Box itself.
Figure 6: OpenURL Autodiscovery from Scholar's Box Export to Weblog By exporting references matching our prototypical 'standard' pattern, the Scholar's Box demonstrates an important aspect of the full 'Gather, Create, Share' cycle: that newly shared materials can be easily gathered again by others.
That is, the Scholar's Box user has 'gathered' the item (possibly from its original location), and then 'created' a weblog entry that itself 'shares' the citation again.
People visiting this page could, in turn, 'gather' the cited resource for themselves, through their own resolver.
Although they would be gathering a 'shared' copy of the citation (not the original), they are equally empowered to further 'create' and 'share' as they see fit.
This way, every user involved can gather locally and share globally.
Demonstration: Integration with the WAG the Dog Web Localizer Figures 7 and 8 demonstrate application of OpenURL autodiscovery within a Web localisation application.
In Figure 7, Georgia Institute of Technology's WAG the Dog Web Localizer [27] has altered the output of Google Scholar to both insert local OpenURL links for the Georgia Tech community, and to check availability within Georgia Tech's holdings by querying the resolver inline before inserting the links at all.
Figure 7: WAG the Dog Web Localizer at Georgia Tech and Google Scholar Figure 8 further demonstrates the WAG the Dog Web Localizer leaving OpenURL autodiscovery tags in its wake, allowing localisation for any user.
In this example, the Georgia Tech 'WAGged' page is then localised for a Yale user via a bookmarklet click.
This might be useful for scholars from one institution while visiting another, and it might also be useful in letting collaborating researchers use links published at other institutions to connect to article full text or other services at their own institution.
Figure 8: WAG the Dog Web Localizer at Georgia Tech and Yale, and Scirus By knowing something about what the user is looking at, the Web Localizer can push other, similar services to the user wherever they are.
The idea of advertising related resources is an especially useful side effect of being able to parse objects on the page, as links into those resources can be prepopulated with information from the OpenURL or other data from the page or about the site.
This provides a new way to expose library collections and services in a contextually relevant manner, wherever users may be.
Adding a Layer on Top of OpenURL Autodiscovery Consider that the RSS and OpenURL autodiscovery techniques involve two cooperating software tools: a client browser (or other application) that knows where to look for a certain kind of information, and a Web resource that specifies that exact kind of information.
When the client application sees that information, it can offer additional functionality to its user; if that information is not present, the functionality is not offered.
Either way, no additional information has passed between the two cooperating tools.
A more complex version might entail a similar first step, where a client finds information matching a known pattern in a page, and then operates on that information by either looking for more information elsewhere on the same page, or by sending one or more additional requests to the server (or some other resource, depending on the earlier information).
We can imagine that this model might be useful in the kind of personal collection system environment provided by tools like the Scholar's Box, which try to 'gather' as much information about a collected item as possible from the item's original location.
The Scholar's Box needs to be able to pull down as much 'trustworthy' metadata for an object at 'gather-time' as possible.
Prototypes of Scholar's Box and similar efforts make heavy use of locally-available resources, and tend to have specific resource-to-resource conduits crafted for optimal transfer of information between systems, such as a direct (hard-coded) connection between a digital collection and a local catalogue.
Stated as a general problem, collection tools like these need to be able to ask the question: "For some resource in which a user is interested, what kinds of metadata records do you have, and may I have them please?"
Then, they must be able to follow through on the answers provided by collecting and managing those records.
Fortunately, the OAI-PMH can provide the answers we would need.
If a site provided both a Web interface to content and a OAI-PMH interface for harvesting, simple hooks between the user interface and the OAI-PMH interface could allow Scholar's Box or similar tools to pull down metadata for a given item as needed, without any guesswork.
Take, for instance, a map from the United States Library of Congress American Memory site [28].
Note that the Memory server which indeed does have a parallel OAI-PMH interface -provides its items' digital identifiers on each item page (labelled "DIGITAL ID").
Unlike the simpler OpenURL autodiscovery examples above, Scholar's Box would need at least two pieces of information from the Memory page to 'collect' that map fully into a personal collection.
First, the map's "DIGITAL ID" would need to be encoded in some standard format.
Because OpenURL supports local identifiers, the same link pattern we used before could also work here:   <a name='id=memoryid:g3732a.np000050' rel='alternate' title='OpenURL' />   This would provide critical information to a browser extension or other remote application like the Scholar's Box the desired item's unique identifier within the system in an agreed format.
Second, all content-rendering pages within the Memory site could also provide an HTML element like this:   <link rel='meta' type='application/xml' title='OAI-PMH 2.0' href='http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0?'
/>   With just these two pieces of information the object's local identifier, and the site's OAI-PMH service location the Scholar's Box or any other client that knows to look for the one when it sees the other could discover and then harvest preferred-format metadata for this particular map.
Because there might be many separate objects of interest on any single page, and therefore a number of separate identifiers, great care would be needed to devise an agreed technique for associating the distinct identifiers with their objects within the information structure of the page.
Assuming such a technique can be agreed, tools as simple as our prototype Web browser bookmarklets and extensions could also offer up additional user interface components highlighting the presence of robustly identified objects, and perhaps even a pre-processed 'right-click' menu of possible services based on the combination of the OpenURL and knowledge about the type of available metadata services.
In a way, this potential kind of use of an OAI-PMH interface mirrors the kind of 'User Interface for OAI-PMH' described in a 2003 article [29].
In that article, public user interface front-ends are created dynamically from information inside an OAI-PMH repository.
In the service described roughly here, access to data via OAI-PMH is dynamically provided from an existing public view of collections, not the other way around.
If it might be so easy to add OAI-PMH-backed metadata options, and embed OpenURL link information, many other pieces might be added into the mix.
Quick access to parseable rights information might be manageable simply through OAI-PMH, for instance, and services like the aforementioned Pubmed could easily tie 'discoverable' pointers to their many Entrez services directly from their user interfaces.
Discussion and Next Steps Much work has already gone into making specifications like WSDL (for Web service interface descriptions [30]) and UDDI [31] (for service directories) stable and scalable.
As easily as we can imagine simple techniques for autodiscovery succeeding, we can also imagine that many service providers would want to deliver more robustly defined tiers of services via these widely known standards.
The difference between industrial-strength standards like WSDL and UDDI and the autodiscovery examples discussed here is simplicity: anyone can add a weblog plugin and start posting OpenURLs into their weblog, but UDDI-advertised Web services require serious development.
Perhaps each has its place, and indeed, providers choosing to implement a Web services approach could, for instance, also provide a user interface link into already-discoverable service interfaces.
The Entrez tools behind Pubmed, and many nascent OCLC services, to take two already-mentioned examples, already provide WSDL documents and Web services.
The only thing missing in those cases is tools for end-user-manageable connectivity between human and machine interfaces.
One concern not yet mentioned is that many potential casual users of techniques like OpenURL autodiscovery are not affiliated with an institution providing resolver services.
It is likely that before OpenURLs can ever truly take off, some form of broadly usable resolver services for general use outside academia will be necessary.
That might entail anything from a small number of very large resolvers smart enough to route users to vendor-partners, to a micro-resolver model wherein even individual user applications have OpenURL resolution services built-in.
It is difficult to guess what might be necessary without more experience, but it is easy to see that without resolvers for everybody, OpenURL use will remain limited to scholarly environments.
The authors hope this article leads to discussion among OpenURL implementers regarding whether the ideas presented here are sound, and if so, how they might be best codified into a simple statement of best practices for wide publication.
Additionally, we hope that information services which publish OpenURLs might consider opportunities to ensure the data they provide meets whatever additional recommendations might come out of any public discussions or further documents related to this work.
Similarly, any institution publishing local collections might also consider these simple ways to provide discoverable OpenURL metadata within their own services to enable their local users or users anywhere else better to utilise their materials.
The authors also intend to continue exploring opportunities to integrate and test the techniques discussed here, and invite comment from all interested parties.
We look forward to the expected availability of large-scale OpenURL resolver registry services and intend to expand our existing demonstration applications to make use of any such services when they become available.
Conclusion The concrete examples presented above, and the more speculative discussion following the examples, perhaps represent a simplistic view of how to implement information services.
Even so, at this point in the development of digital library services, we have too many standards and service models finding too few users.
In the particular case of extending autodiscovery to OpenURLs and metadata, the rapid uptake of RSS autodiscovery indicates a strong market demand for simplistic implementations of extremely useful service integration techniques.
Because of this, we believe a new type of information resource optimisation is now needed to help fix the problem of insufficient integration.
It is no longer sufficient to work only to improve human interfaces for usability and wayfinding, and, separately, to improve automated interfaces for harvesting and scalability.
We now also need to design our services to accommodate the needs of both users and systems to move freely between human and automated interfaces.
Because the information services we provide and manage make up only a small fraction of the many information communities in which our users participate, we now need to design for the likelihood that users enter our resources from a wide variety of directions: from search engines, from their friends' weblogs, from course pages, from sharing networks, and from hand-coded Web pages.
Once users arrive at a resource we provide (however they got there), they might want to take some or all of that resource with them over into another of those environments, or have their computers (or ours) send it around to one or several other places on their behalf.
Above all, we must find ways to help them do all of that with only one or two clicks.
To meet these expectations, we need to make our systems accommodate information pathways we cannot ourselves anticipate.
Autodiscovery for OpenURLs and metadata might support some of those pathways, because the autodiscovery model has already successfully demonstrated the potential for a level of integration that would have been difficult to anticipate even a few years ago.
Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC has referred to this technique of better preparing resources and services to be sewn together in new ways as 'intrastructure' (rather than 'infrastructure') [32].
The autodiscovery model provides one early pattern to follow on the way to building out library intrastructure, with which we can perhaps accomplish many kinds of integration at a very low marginal cost.
Authors' note: We would refer readers to a new proposal defining a convention for the use of "Latent OpenURLs" such as those discussed in this article [33].
This proposal arose from interest in the ideas and prototypes discussed above and in previous work, and is being developed collaboratively by a variety of interested parties.
Please refer to the proposal for information about how to work with these techniques, and how to communicate with its developers.
References Hammond T., Hannay T., Lund B.
"The Role of RSS in Science Publishing", D-Lib Magazine, 10(12): December 2004 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/hammond/12hammond.html The Open Archives Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/ SRW/SRU Search/Retrieve Web Service http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/ Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ Metadata Object Description Schema http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/ Metadata Authority Description Schema http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/ The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services http://www.niso.org/committees/committee_ax.html Apps, A., "The OpenURL and OpenURL Framework: Demystifying Link Resolution", Ariadne 38 January 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/apps-rpt/ Van de Sompel, H., Beit-Arie, O., "Generalizing the OpenURL Framework beyond References to Scholarly Works: The Bison-Futé Model", D-Lib 7 (7/8) July 2001 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/vandesompel/07vandesompel.html Powell, A., "OpenResolver: a Simple OpenURL Resolver", Ariadne 28 June 2001 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/resolver/ Chudnov, D., Frumkin, J., Weintraub, J., Wilcox, M., Yee, R., "Towards Library Groupware with Personalised Link Routing", Ariadne 40 July 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/chudnov/ The OpenURL Router http://openurl.ac.uk/doc/ Information Environment Service Registry http://iesr.ac.uk/ Brack, V., Closier, A., "Developing the JISC Information Environment Service Registry", Ariadne 36 July 2003 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/ The OCKHAM Initiative Digital Library Registry http://ockham.org/registry.php Flecker, D., McLean, N., "Digital Library Content and Course Management Systems: Issues of Interoperation: Report of a study group", July 2004 http://www.diglib.org/pubs/cmsdl0407/ IMS Global Learning Consortium http://www.imsglobal.org/ Sakai Project http://www.sakaiproject.org/ Pilgrim, M., "RSS auto-discovery", May 2002 http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/05/30/rss_autodiscovery Ragget, D., Le Hors, A., Jacobs, I., editors, "HTML 4.01 Specification: Basic HTML data types: Link Types", December 24 1999 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#h-6.12 Chudnov, D., "Appropriate Resolvers, Dynamically: Adding rel and title attributes to OpenURLs.
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", http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/resolvable/ CiteULike http://citeulike.org/ Canary Database http://canarydatabase.org/ Greasemonkey http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ Functional and Technical Overview of the Scholar's Box http://iu.berkeley.edu/IU/SB Scholar's Box http://raymondyee.net/wiki/ScholarsBox The WAG the Dog Web Localizer http://rsinger.library.gatech.edu/localizer/localizer.html United States National Park Service, "Acadia National Park, Maine, official map and guide / National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior."
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ed., Washington, D.C., http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3732a.np000050 Van de Sompel, H., Young, J.A, Hickey, T.B., "Using the OAI-PMH ...
Differently", D-Lib 9(7/8) July/August 2003, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july03/young/07young.html Christensen, E., Curbera, F., Meredith, G., Weerawarana, S., editors, "Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) 1.1", March 15 2001 http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl UDDI.org http://www.uddi.org/ Dempsey, L., "Stitching services into user environments intrastructure", December 9 2004 http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000505.html Hellman, E. et al.
"Latent OpenURLs in HTML for Resource Autodiscovery, Localization and Personalization (draft)", online at http://www.openly.com/openurlref/latent.html Author Details Daniel Chudnov Librarian/Programmer Yale Center for Medical Informatics Email: daniel.chudnov@yale.edu Web site: http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/ Richard Cameron Founder, Developer CiteULike.org Email: camster@citeulike.org Web site: http://citeulike.org/ Jeremy Frumkin Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services Oregon State University Libraries Email: jeremy.frumkin@oregonstate.edu Ross Singer Application Developer Georgia Tech Library Email: ross.singer@library.gatech.edu Raymond Yee Technology Architect University of California, Berkeley Interactive University Project Email: yee@berkeley.edu Web site: http://iu.berkeley.edu/rdhyee/ Return to top Article Title: "Opening up OpenURLs with Autodiscovery" Author: Daniel Chudnov, Richard Cameron, Jeremy Frumkin, Ross Singer and Raymond Yee Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/chudnov/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collaborative and Social Tagging Networks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collaborative and Social Tagging Networks Buzz data software framework wiki usability metadata thesaurus tagging vocabularies blog video hypertext multimedia aggregation ontologies technorati interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin, Edward M. Corrado, Heather Lea Moulaison, Margaret E. I. Kipp, Andrea Resmini, Heather D. Pfeiffer and Qiping Zhang gather a series of international perspectives on the practice of social tagging of documents within a community context.
Social tagging, which is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, and social indexing, allows ordinary users to assign keywords, or tags, to items.
Typically these items are Web-based resources and the tags become immediately available for others to see and use.
Unlike traditional classification, social tagging keywords are typically freely chosen instead of using a controlled vocabulary.
Social tagging is of interest to researchers because it is possible that with a sufficiently large number of tags, useful folksonomies will emerge that can either augment or even replace traditional ontologies.
As a result, social tagging has created a renewed level of interest in manual indexing [1].
In order for researchers to understand the benefits and limitations of using user-generated tags for indexing and retrieval purposes, it is important to investigate to what extent community influences tagging behaviour, characteristic effects on tag datasets, and whether this influence helps or hinders search and retrieval.
This article reports on research presented on a panel at The American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) 2007 annual conference which investigated the use of social tagging in communities and in context.
The panel was co-sponsored by SIG-TAG, a special interest group of ASIS&T that is interested in the study of social tagging, the Special Interest Group on Knowledge Management (SIG-KM), and the Special Interest Group on Classification Research (SIG-CR).
Panel participants described studies around the world that explore to what extent and in what manner users, consciously or unconsciously, take into account their communities of practice when assigning tags.
Through the use of these tags, community members may retrieve and view relevant Web sites and online videos.
Each study examines how different communities use social tagging to disseminate information to other community members in the online environment.
Two of the studies are exploratory in nature, investigating tagging within specific communities of practice.
One of these looks at the Code4lib community which has a primarily North American focus while the other examines the use of tagging on video sharing sites used by a cmmunity of French teenagers.
Other studies described here explore cognitive and social factors of tagging in China, collaborative classification practices in social tagging tools, and the many roles of terminology in a collaborative work environment.
Additionally, this article describes FaceTag, a working prototype of a collaborative tool conceived for social tagging of specialised domains.
There are many possible approaches toward examining the panel's theme, of which these studies form a representative sample.
Tags may be examined 'by hand', which is time-intensive but information-rich.
Various forms of automated statistical analysis may be applied, trading accuracy against scale.
The latter has the benefit of suggesting that practical application of the approach may be plausible.
Models of user behaviour may be examined through development of tools designed to test hypotheses or elicit feedback from users such as FaceTag.
Several models of tagging behaviour, aimed at describing the ways in which people tag, are invoked in these studies along with metrics such as the number of tags given, tag co-occurrence and measured frequency.
This reflects an ongoing dialogue between researchers; some apply methods from social network analysis, some from the many subfields of linguistics, knowledge management and classification research.
Tagging practice is generally from a known stance, such as metadata, keyword or thesaurus provision, a matter of situating the relevance of the concept to known disciplines.
Here too, we begin with a familiar theme; writ large, this panel examines certain facets of contextuality in information retrieval.
Social Tagging in the Code4Lib Community The first case study explores the social tagging practices of the Code4Lib community of practice.
Social tagging can be described as 'the collective assignment of keywords to resources' [2].
The free-form nature of social tagging tools allows users to assign their own verbal descriptors [3].
It has been suggested that once enough user-generated tags have been supplied, social tagging could lead to interesting folksonomies with benefits similar to a formal controlled vocabulary [4].
However, people have varying motivators for tagging [5] and often use tags for purposes other than assigning subject terms.
Kipp and Campbell [6], for example, found that people often use time and task-related tags such as 'toread'� -tags are sometimes used to describe intended action rather than semantic content.
This case study began from the hypothesis that an individual applying tags for themselves might make use of these tags in a manner that differs from the the approach taken by an individual who is consciously targeting their annotation at a community's collective attention.
Online communities of practice may use a specific tag on social bookmarking sites that enable resources to be 'advertised'� within that community.
Through the study of these tags, it is possible to investigate the community"s influence on the individual"s choice of tags, and to what extent community members consider community while tagging.
If members of a community do not tag differently for the community than they do for themselves, is it truly social tagging?
Code4Lib is an organic community consisting of librarians and library software developers.
One way Code4Lib shares information is by bookmarking items in del.icio.us [7], a popular social tagging Web site, with the tag "code4lib".
Once an item is tagged with "code4lib", it is shared in three ways: on a Web page created through the del.icio.us site, on the Planet Code4Lib blog aggregator, and on the Code4Lib Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel.
It is assumed that members of the Code4Lib community want to share an online resource with the community if the set of tags applied to the bookmark includes the tag "code4lib".
Conversely, it is assumed that community members are bookmarking resources for their own personal use when they do not include the "code4lib" tag in the set of social tags they assign.
Tags of fifteen Code4Lib members who bookmarked at least five items with the tag "code4lib" on del.icio.us were reviewed.
All users whose tags were reviewed are active community members and are aware that items tagged with "code4lib" are shared with the community.
Ten recent bookmarks tagged with "code4lib" (community) were analysed.
If community members tagged less than 10 items with "code4lib", all bookmarks with the tag were reviewed.
Ten items bookmarked by these members that did not include the "code4lib" tag (personal) were also examined.
All tags (n=872) associated with bookmarked resources were analysed according to Golder and Huberman"s [6] seven categories of tags.
Sets of tags were separated by user and were placed into categories based on the inclusion or exclusion of the "code4lib" tag within the set.
Both the overall number of tags and the numbers of tags in each category were analysed using the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranked tests to determine if there was any statistical difference in kinds or number of tags used.
While casual observation shows differences in how some individuals tagged for themselves (set of tags which did not include "code4lib") versus for the community (set of tags which included "code4lib"), overall, there was no significant difference in types of tags used in each set.
There was a significant difference (α = 0.01) found in the number of tags applied for the two sets.
The average number of tags used in a set when 'code4lib' was included as a tag was 3.70 compared to only 2.97 tags when 'code4lib' was not included.
A larger number of tags was applied when tagging for the community.
This may indicate that community members do indeed tag differently for a community than they do for themselves.
However, when the tag code4lib is excluded from the count of tags for these resources, the difference does not turn out to be statistically significant.
This suggests that the only difference is the inclusion of the community tag.
The results of this study call into question the idea that people tag differently when they tag for communities as opposed to when they tag for themselves.
One explanation is that, regardless of whether they are actively tagging for a community, community members always take into account how other people use their tags.
Conversely, community members may never take into account how the community of practice will use tags, even when those members are actively sharing bookmarks with their peers.
Social Tagging in France: Communities of Practice In France, an engaged community of social taggers has emerged in online video sharing sites.
Current French teenagers are very comfortable with new communication-rich technologies through the use of social networking resources like blogs and cell phone text messaging.
They are now applying their social networking skills to tagging and sharing community-based uploaded videos.
Certain French secondary school students are engaging in dance battles in a movement called Tecktonic Killer [9].
Members of this counter-culture community of dancers stereotypically have Mohawk haircuts, listen to techno music, and try actively to out-perform their peers in these dance battles.
The merging of the online and offline world is a part of the French net-generation reality [10].
Beside the analogue competitions, dancers make videos of themselves in their homes and upload them to video-sharing Web sites.
Postings include videos, social tags, and descriptions.
Community members then view and comment on each other"s videos, recreating the competitive environment that exists in the analogue world.
For the current study, twelve videos of Tecktonic Killer dancing that encouraged community interaction by using tags and enabling comments were selected from three video-sharing sites used by the French teenagers.
Reasonable attempts were made to select home-made videos from each of four categories: average videos, popular or highly rated videos, beginners, and parody videos.
Use of the tags by this community reflect established social tag usage in the Anglo world [6].
A total of 77 tags were assigned to the twelve videos.
Tags included numerous proper nouns such as personal names of dancers, video site usernames, dance club affiliations, and city/country names.
There were also 28 generic terms designed to help users navigate to the pages.
Of the name of the dance mentioned in tags, there were 13 variants of spelling and terminology, many in the same tag set.
There were a total of seven terms that used English-language words including dance, fake, and fashion.
The parodies averaged 12 tags per video; the serious ones averaged between four and five tags, with many having only two or three tags.
Community members who post videos are actively tagging for the community and not strictly speaking for themselves.
They are in search of the notoriety that comes from a well-received and often-viewed video, and actively solicit viewers and comments.
Viewers contribute to the community process by adding comments, marking videos as favourites, rating the quality of the dancing in the video, or making the poster a "friend".
By participating in the feedback loop, viewers actively contribute to the success or failure of a dancer"s video.
Implications for future study specific to this community are many-fold.
Studying the Tecktonic Killer tags in other Web 2.0 environments as identified by Technorati [11] would also serve to show how these users act in different social tagging environments.
Using only the video posting sites as the focus of study, one community member"s tags, comments, and favourites could be studied, or the interaction of users with others" videos and other tags would also be considered and compared.
As the phenomenon becomes mainstream and perhaps if it moves outside mainland France, its adaptation and migration can also be studied via the use of community-based social tags.
Metadata Tagging in China: Three Models of Tag Use With the development of Web 2.0, where multi-author contribution will be common, collaborative tagging becomes a popular concept.
The tagging metadata contributed by users are used for individual-based activities like searching, filtering, navigating, and group-based social networking like finding people with common interest and so on.
Tagging data will help to reveal the knowledge sharing and topic networks based on the relations among tagging words.
Tagging data will also constitute a social interaction among taggers.
It was seen how tagging fosters social information organisation and collaboration, and how to leverage the explosive volume of metadata.
Tagging can also promote information by making it seem more important, i.e.
by raising its profile.
Tags can be seen as a way to 'vote' on the relevance or level of interest of content.
As seen in the image below, from the size of the tag one can infer its social popularity.
Figure 1: Research Web Page There are three models of how tagging is used in China as metadata [12].
The first way is where the user employs tagging to link information through the tag to the user.
This is tagging being used as a way to indicate the relationship of the user to the information, showing how the user perceives ('reads') that information object.
Figure 2: Model 1 'User Tag Information' The second model portrays users that are connected together through their use of tags.
This is where real social networking comes in, as users are tagging to relate their concept of information to another user's concept of some piece of information.
This type of tagging is also heavily misused, either consciously ('tagspam') or unintentionally.
It may be used inconsistently, by tagging in order that other users see desired information despite the fact that the information is not really classified under their expected concept of that tag.
Figure 3: Model 2 'User Tag User' Within the final model, tags are used to link banks of data (or information) to other information.
The tags are acting as metadata to allow search engines to know which information is related to other information.
This type of tagging is used greatly within ontologies.
Figure 4: Model 3: 'Information Tag Information' Tags have only recently become popular in the Chinese language and are used mainly in the second model form.
There are currently several terms in use on Chinese Web sites: What Do People Call Tags in Chinese?
Figure 5: Examples of Tags in Chinese alternative version A brief inspection shows that tag use varies between keywords, like 'Music' and 'Novels', to opinions, like 'dislike', personal descriptions such as 'I am happy today', or 'Very tired', and finally dates or date information with respect to events in a person's life.
They may be used as a means of introducing oneself.
Tags may contain complete sentences (written Chinese does not have to contain spaces).
Users of tagging systems in China do not generally have an in-depth understanding of tagging; similarly, service providers generally do not recognise the importance of tagging systems as a resource or a service.
They are, however, widely used; blog search, wikis, social bookmarking, photo and video sharing, and social networking sites all provide a mechanism.
Tag systems are still quite new to China, and research in Chinese-language tagging is equally in its infancy.
However, it is an interesting area that is likely to merit further research in the future.
Collaborative Classification Practices in Social Tagging Tools The previous three studies examined coherent user groups and their approaches to tagging.
The following three studies examined social bookmarking and tagging in various contexts as they compare to more traditional hierarchical classification systems used in libraries.
The first study examined tag usage for highly tagged sites on del.icio.us exploring the convergence of tag usage and the co-occurrence of terms in tag clouds.
The second study examined journal articles tagged on CiteULike [13] and compared these terms to professionally assigned index terms and author keywords associated with the same article.
Common themes in both studies led to a third study examining time and task management and affective tag use on del.icio.us, CiteULike and Connotea [14] [6][3][15].
While del.icio.us is commonly known in the Web 2.0 community, CiteULike and Connotea have garnered a smaller audience with their focus on academics and academic articles.
Like del.icio.us, however, both raise interesting issues concerning the organisation of knowledge where personal organisational systems developed by users to keep track of their own materials are aggregated on the Web to form a novel way to organise and store material.
These tools lead to a series of interesting questions about the social organisation of information: What does tag convergence on frequency graphs and co-word usage suggest about the utility of tagging?
Are categories emerging in social tagging that will complement those developed through professional methods?
What implications does the use of affective or timeand task-related tags have for the organisation of information?
Each study examined one of these questions.
The first study, using del.icio.us, examined tag usage for highly tagged sites.
Specifically, it examined the frequency of use of specific keywords on these sites and how they were used in conjunction with each other.
Tags were collected from del.icio.us for 64 highly tagged sites and graphed by frequency of occurrence to see whether a consensus would form in the use of tags to describe an item.
A consensus appeared in all cases in the frequency graph with a curve showing a rapidly decaying level of usage.
This is commonly described in terms of Zipf's law (a power-law distribution); however, many graphs showed a much steeper drop off than Zipf's law would suggest.
Figure 6: Tag frequency for pocketmod.com in early 2006 This suggests that consensus does exist in the aggregate.
The terms that are most common tended to provide a reasonable description of the content of the site and remained constant over time.
Data collection in November 2007, almost two years after the initial collection, showed that the seven most frequent terms remained constant over time.
Figure 7: Tag frequency for pocketmod.com in late 2007 Co-occurrence graphs of tags, examining the frequency of use of groups of tags together, showed interesting clusters of terms.
Some graphs had what appeared to be different user groups with differing priorities.
Clusters of similar terms provided an adequate description of the site using differing terminology.
Figure 8: del.icio.us tags associated with http://www.bellybytes.com/articles/29foods.shtml The second study, involving CiteULike, studied tag use and the types of tags used on academic articles compared to author keywords and subject headings assigned to those same articles by their authors or by professional indexers.
Mathes [16] suggested that since users and professional indexers have different contexts in which they relate to the document, it would be worthwhile to study their differing use of terminology.
The comparison was done using standard thesaurus terms -equivalence (EQ), synonym (SYN), narrower terms (NT), broader terms (BT), related terms (RT), etc.)
based on a modification of a system used by Voorbij [17].
His categories included all the common thesaural relations (SYN, NT, BT, RT) and additional categories were added for "related but not in the thesaurus" and not related [3].
The most common relationship found between the three groups of terms was "related but not in the thesaurus."
The next most common was RT and then equivalence (equivalence included plurals and variant spellings but did not include acronyms which were listed as synonyms).
The third study examined commonalities found between the two studies.
Many studies have discovered similarities in common tag characteristics (e.g.
spelling variations, sesquipedalians -compound words, acronyms, etc) [8][5][6][3] and remarked on the use of timeand task-related tags (e.g. '
@toread", "todo") or affective tags (e.g.
"cool" and "interesting").
However, most studies tend to dismiss these terms as noise in the tag cloud despite studies showing that time, task or project labels factor heavily in personal information management [18][19].
In the first study of del.icio.us, these tags formed ~16% of the total number of unique tags and the second study of CiteULike showed high usage of these tags as well.
The tags "cool", "funny" and "toread" appear in the main del.icio.us tag cloud .
Figure 9: Popular tags on del.icio.us This suggests that these tags may form an important part of tagging and are worthy of further study.
The third study examined these tags and found that "toread" and "fun" were popular on all three sites studied [15].
Affective terms appeared more frequently on Citeulike and Connotea than expected considering their focus on academic articles.
In the study, biology articles were most often listed as "toread"; while maths and physics articles were listed as "fun"[15].
Studies show that tagging has all the problems of free-text search/indexing, though tag groups tend to converge on a useful set of terms after a threshold number of users.
Though new terminology may alter this profile.
While users do use some terms from thesauri and subject heading lists, users also use terminology which is rare or completely absent from subject heading lists (e.g.
time and task tags) or is not part of a formal thesaurus.
Distributed user tagging demonstrates need for examination of how users associate groups of documents (time and task management).
What is the effect of personal and subjective terms such as "cool", "fun" and "toread" in a social bookmarking system?
What happens when these terms are aggregated?
Amazon and Google use personal information to generate popularity or relevance indicators, do non-subject tags offer any similar advantages?
While consensus exists in the aggregate, as seen in frequency graphs of del.icio.us tag usage, there are suggestions in the individual tag lists and in coword graphs that there are different but equally descriptive clusters of terminology in the tag clouds which are worthy of further study.
The differing terminology use in tag lists suggests that tagging may be a working example of Vannevar Bush's associative trails.
He argued that associative trails better represented how users actually work with their documents: as a holistic process of association closely tied to themselves and their work rather than by categorisation.
[20].
This suggests that user tagging could provide additional access points to traditional controlled vocabularies and provide users with the associative classifications necessary to tie documents and articles to time, task and project relationships as well as other associations which are new and novel.
FaceTag FaceTag is a collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking resources in a given domain.
Its main goal is to show how in communities of practice the flat keywords space of user-generated tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classification scheme to improve the information architecture of a social tagging system.
FaceTag was designed to take advantage of the capability of tags to match the user's language, which was expected to carry a number of advantages.
The low cognitive cost of tagging items is partially resultant from the fact that no formal structure or vocabulary is involved, and in many cases those searching for objects also benefit from the idiosyncratic nature of tags, since specialised or dialect uses of terminology are represented as well.
Tags have great value in serendipitous browsing -that is, unstructured or undirected searches through which interesting objects are found, although the user may not have set out to find that particular object [21].
However, despite their low cognitive cost, their capability of matching the user's language, and their great value in unstructured browsing, folksonomies are haunted by a number of important issues related to intrinsic language variability and imprecision: polysemy, homonymy, plurals, synonymy and basic level variation are linguistic issues which do not appear easy to solve, and which can dramatically reduce the effectiveness and benefits brought on by the very use of a tagging system [22].
FaceTag introduces a number of correctives to address these issues: It allows tag hierarchies.
Users have the opportunity to organize their resources by means of parent-child relationships.
By means of the underlying, domain-related faceted classification structure [23], tag hierarchies are semantically assigned to established facets.
These are used to section and navigate the resource domain flexibly.
Tagging and searching can be mixed to maximize findability, browsability and user-discovery.
For the test implementation, the reference domain was Information Architecture (IA).
Although the final facets have been reviewed to fit into a more semantic perspective, the initial choices in the FaceTag system are directly based on the Classification Research Group (CRG) findings, which postulate 11-13 general categories.
Table 1 shows the matching between CRG standard categories and IA-related categories that were used to define the facets, while Table 2 shows actual tags or other terms used in those facets.
This is being constantly revised upon users' feedback, as guidelines and not as a restrictive framework.
User needs are paramount and should be employed to determine the most valuable facets for every system and community of practice.
Table 1.
FaceTag facets definition by CRG standard categories.
(Facets in brackets have been considered of secondary importance and discarded.)
Table 2.
Actual FaceTag facets and examples of tags.
Hierarchical groups of tags are set off with commas.
Tags following a greater than (>) symbol are on the next lower level of the hierarchy.
The language facet is an exception, since it uses a predefined list of languages in the ISO 639-2 notation.
Usability studies show that information seekers in domains with a large number of objects prefer that related items be in meaningful groups to enable them to understand relationships quickly and thus decide how to proceed: without any means to explore and make sense of large quantities of similar items, users feel lost and fail.
Providing ways to generate and navigate such groups from a flat set of objects is a challenge, as both clustering and faceted classification have been proposed in the past.
FaceTag works differently.
At the heart of FaceTag is a zooming engine which maintains a history of all tags and searches a user is requesting (engaging).
When users engage a tag, the interface adjusts and zooms in providing a filtered view, a subset of all available resources based on this active selection.
By selecting more tags from different meaningful facets (as they are editorially chosen for the current domain), users can effectively shrink the results they obtain until they find either what they are looking for, or the last possible result set arising from the intersection of all active tags.
This feature set enables considerably enhanced, berrypicking-like [24] search strategies: since tags can be disengaged freely and in whatever order suits the users, opening up new unpredicted result sets, users might decide to pursue another search and enter new different subsets following some other information scent (that is, a theme or term that appears promising), or start anew by clearing up their history completely, never finding themselves facing dead-ends which produce no results at all.
The term 'berrypicking' is often used in information science to refer to models in which, instead of a search that completes in a single query-response, the user tries a set of (usually evolving) search terms, finding many different pieces of relevant information.
Figure 10: Using FaceTag: refining and zooming in by engaging tags from different facets: 5 bookmarks in FaceTag Figure 11: Using FaceTag: refining and zooming in by engaging tags from different facets: 3 bookmarks in FaceTag Figure 12: Using FaceTag: refining and zooming in by engaging tags from different facets: 1 bookmark in FaceTag Currently, research is underway to pinpoint both a stable set of facets in the IA domain [25] and an effective UI [26].
Samples of IA-related bookmarks from the IAI Library and from del.icio.us are being collected in order to perform iterative card sorting tests with different user groups.
The purpose of such tests is to map some of the mental models by which users represent the IA knowledge domain.
These results will provide the basis to tune the facet architecture.
Similarly, the user interface is being designed through documented heuristics and patterns and verified at each iterative step by small usability tests.
More extensive user research will involve the use of think-aloud protocol sessions with more than five testers for each session.
Scenarios will include storing bookmarks and retrieving them.
Looking at preliminary results, a critical task addressed by the application is the assignment of new bookmarks and the association of tags to relevant facets.
The current interface is rather simple but other options, leveraging advanced tag suggestion and tag/facet association, are beginning to be evaluated.
FaceTag began from the assumption that bottom-up and top-down classification methods are complementary: tagging is inclusive, simple and matches the user's real needs and use of language, whilst formal methods provide coherent, consistent systems for organising data but are expensive and do not have the advantage of corresponding to the user's use of language.
The system that was built as a result combines both approaches, to mutual benefit.
As evaluation is now underway it is hoped that results will become available later this year.
Social Networking and Annotation Language, it can be said, acquires associations through use.
As Chalmers [27] writes, "The individual and their prejudice are changed through the use of language, and the language changes through its use by individuals".
Language shifts, evolving along with the context of use; as language shifts, so does perception.
Language is often used characteristically within a community, which has led to the description of the "speech" or "discourse" community both as a means to characterise the terminology and language use shared between participants; it is also possible to look on the speech community as a community to which one claims membership by attaining that set of characteristics in speech.
Swales [28] describes discourse communities — "spatially dispersed, formed around sociorhetorical functions, and mainly mediated by texts" [29] — as sharing: common public goals mechanisms for intercommunication participatory mechanisms to provide members with feedback and information discourse expectations reflected in genres specialised terminology, and a critical mass of experts However, the reality is more complex than a simple social network.
According to researchers in the area, the idea of a large, stable meta-structure containing a linguistically stable group of individuals can be discounted; Prior quotes Marilyn Cooper as arguing for "seeing discourse communities... as the products of continual hermeneutic work, as social phenomena where varied values and practices intersected, as ways of being in the world, not narrow intellectual commitments."
Studies have found that in academic and disciplinary writing, where one might expect to find a discourse community, one finds complex spaces [30] that display apparently stable emergent characteristics resultant from many local interactions, discourses, practices and identities.
The various studies discussed during this article would seem to bear out this assertion.
A Chinese study has shown that the existence of a tagging system can itself constitute a social statement, situating its publishers as progressive; by comparison, functionality of the service comes a remote second.
From the evidence of the American study of 'code4lib', a community brought together by a joint occupation and interest, showing no evidence for the 'social', in 'social tagging', to the description of French youths applying community-specific terminology in a declarative act, establishing an identity as a member of a community, it is clear that, as Ellis & Larsen-Freeman state [31], "there are many agencies and variables that underpin language phenomena."
Characteristics of tags depend on specifics of the user interface, the use case and user population, and the user's own motivation for using the interface.
Tags are "language-in-use", which is to say that only a subset are formal or explicit (as for example are keywords); many or even most tags are informal, contain limited explicit information, transient, and are intended for a limited audience.
If semantic annotation and literal annotations are taken to be linked, then it follows that semantic annotations may be no more formal than any other marginal note, implying that frameworks such as Marshall"s dimensions of annotation [32][33] have descriptive power in analysing tag sets.
We are left with several preoccupations: the context in which a tag is written, and the context in which it is read; the community interactions which underlie both processes; untangling the confusions that result from the many and varied uses of the terms 'context' and 'community.
A fourth expression can be added to this list, to form a quartet of interests: caution.
Without investigation and analysis, seeing named social entities in a dataset may simply reflect our own preconceptions.
Conclusions and Future Work In these studies, the uses made of tags in several communities was examined.
We have seen many diverse definitions and uses of the term "community": language communities, speakers of Chinese, English or French; nations; discourse communities, or communities of practice, united by shared discussion, participation and terminology; task groups, held together by a shared aim.
Some of these uses are more functional in practice than others.
Some metrics show no effect; others suggest more.
In discussing these results, our interest was drawn collectively to linking the various phenomena described and the approaches applied within these studies, feeling that these present studies have only scratched the surface.
Open questions abound: to which fields might one look for inspiration, applicable methods, or illustrative results?
In general, we believe that there is further interesting work to be done in the various ways in which tagging systems are used -whether as an indexing resource, a status symbol for a Chinese startup, a central resource for community organisation and development or as a channel for communication between members of a community.
The SIG-TAG mailing list [34], an informal resource for discussion and joint work for researchers and those with an interest in the fields brought together in this article, may be joined online.
References Voss, Jakob (2007).
"Tagging, Folksonomy & Co Renaissance of Manual Indexing?".
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Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museums: Proof of concept.
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Kipp, Margaret E.I.
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Complementary or Discrete Contexts in Online Indexing: A Comparison of User, Creator, and Intermediary Keywords.
Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 30(3).
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Retrieved 16 November 2007 http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html Hammond, Tony, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott.
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Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review.
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Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Practices: An Examination of Tagging Practices.
Proceedings of the Annual General Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Austin, TX, November 3-8, 2006.
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Le Monde Vincent, Catherine.
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Les enfants de la Net-génération Le Monde.
Le Deuff, Olivier.
(2006).
Folksononomies: Les usagers indexent le web.
Bulletin des Bibliothèques de France, 51(4), 66-70.
Zhen, Z.
(2007).
'Introduction to Tag and the analysis of its application'�.
Chinalab Technical Report, Beijing, China.
CiteULike http://www.citeulike.org/ See also 'Citeulike: A Researcher's Social Bookmarking Service'�, Kevin Emamy and Richard Cameron, April 2007, Ariadne, Issue 51 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/emamy-cameron/ Conntoea http://www.connotea.org/ Kipp, Margaret E.I.
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@toread and Cool: Tagging for Time, Task and Emotion.
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(2004).
Folksonomies cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata.
http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html Voorbij, H. J.
(1998).
Title keywords and subject descriptors: a comparison of subject search entries of books in the humanities and social sciences.
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Kwasnik, Barbara H. (1991).
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Available from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/berrypicking.html Quintarelli, E., Resmini, A., and Rosati L., FaceTag: integrating bottom-up and top-down classification in a social tagging system, International IA Summit 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States.
Available at http://www.facetag.org/download/facetag-20070325.pdf Mascaro, L. (2007).
UI for Web 2.0 applications: FaceTag, from the Second Italian IA Summit Web site http://www.iasummit.it/download/05-siias2007.pdf Chalmers, M. (2004).
"Hermeneutics, information and representation," European Journal of Information Systems (13:3), p 210 Swales, J. M. (1990) Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings.
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Prior, P. (2003).
Are communities of practice really an alternative to discourse communities?
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de Moora, Aldo and Weigand, Hans (2005).
Formalizing the evolution of virtual communities.
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Marshall, C. C. (1998) Towards an ecology of hypertext annotation.
Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, pp.
40 — 49 Marshall, C. The Future of Annotation in a Digital (Paper) World.
In Successes and Failures of Digital Libraries (Harum and Twidale, eds).
Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 2000, pp.
97-117. http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/uiuc-paper-complete.pdf SIG-TAG mailing list http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigtag-l Author Details Emma Tonkin Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Edward M. Corrado Systems Librarian The College of New Jersey Email: ecorrado@ecorrado.us Web site: http://www.ecorrado.us Heather Lea Moulaison Doctoral Student Rutgers University Email: heather.moulaison@rutgers.edu Web site: http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~moulaiso/ Margaret E. I. Kipp Instructor College of Information and Computer Science Long Island University Email: margaret.kipp@gmail.com Web site: http://www.eskimo.com/~meik/ Andrea Resmini Information Architect CIRSFID, Università di Bologna Email: andrea.resmini@unibo.it Web site: http://www.resmini.net Heather D. Pfeiffer, PhD Computer Systems Analyst and Researcher New Mexico State University Email: hdp@cs.nmsu.edu Web site: http://www.CS.NMSU.Edu/~hdp/ Qiping Zhang, PhD Assistant Professor College of Information and Computer Science Long Island University Email: qiping.zhang@liu.edu Web site: http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/qzhang/ Return to top Article Title: "Collaborative and Social Tagging Networks" Author: Emma Tonkin, Edward M. Corrado, Heather Lea Moulaison, Margaret E. I. Kipp, Andrea Resmini, Heather D. Pfeiffer and Qiping Zhang Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/tonkin-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL Xtra: The Hidden Web at Your Fingertips Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL Xtra: The Hidden Web at Your Fingertips Buzz data software database portal archives eprints oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 copac ejournal ict research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod looks at the latest service from EEVL.
EEVL Xtra In a Nutshell EEVL Xtra [1] is an exciting new, free service which helps people find articles, books, the best Web sites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing.
EEVL Xtra cross-searches (hence the ‘X’ in Xtra) over twenty different collections/ databases relevant to engineering, mathematics and computing, and includes content from over fifty publishers and providers.
EEVL Xtra doesn’t simply point users towards these databases, but rather allows their content to be searched directly from the EEVL Xtra Web site.
Limiting results to particular resource types is made easy via a drop-down menu which restricts results to a choice of different types of material (e.g.
articles, books, industry news, etc).
An ‘All’ category is also available, as well as advanced search options.
In all, several million documents, including articles, abstracts, eprints, books, Web sites, news items, job announcements, news items, and teaching and learning materials are indexed by EEVL Xtra.
Although the reach of the popular search engines is constantly expanding, they do not index some of these resources, and do not provide such a subject perspective, hence EEVL Xtra can justifiably claim to provide access to the ‘hidden web’ for engineering, mathematics and computing.
EEVL Xtra is aimed at academics, researchers, students, lecturers, practising professionals and anyone else looking for information in engineering, mathematics and computing.
Figure 1: Screenshot of the EEVL Xtra home page Origins In a previous issue of Ariadne [2] I reported on the results of a 2004 Web-based questionnaire about EEVL, which was completed by 364 people.
As well as providing valuable feedback on the existing EEVL service, entrants were asked to rate six ideas for possible new EEVL services.
Top of the list, with 80 ranking it a ‘Very good idea’, 113 ‘Good’ and 107 ‘OK’, came a proposed service which would allow searching of a range of free databases from one place.
This is, essentially, what the new EEVL Xtra service now provides.
Content Using software developed by the Subject Portals Project [3], and using Z39.50 and OAI-PMH protocols, EEVL Xtra enables multiple databases to be queried simultaneously from one search box.
The list of databases currently includes: arXiv [4] An e-print archive database for research papers the full text of included papers is freely available.
Areas covered include physics and related disciplines, mathematics and computer science.
arXiv is provided by Cornell University with support from the National Science Foundation.
EEVL Xtra indexes a subset of arXive most relevant to the fields of engineering, mathematics and computing.
ePrints UK [5] This database provides access to resources from around thirty institutional open archives in the United Kingdom.
Subject coverage is broad and a range of resource types (e.g.
journal articles, thesis, technical reports) is covered.
CISTI [6] The CISTI (Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) Resource Collection includes details of over 50,000 different serial titles, over 600,000 books and conference proceedings, 2 million technical reports, and journals indexed in scientific databases.
CSA Hot Topics [7] The Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) Hot Topics series provides in-depth reports on topical engineering, mathematics and technology issues.
The full text of the reports are freely available and include an overview of the issue in question, key citations with abstracts, and links to selected Web sites.
CiteSeer [8] Computer and Information Science Articles provides access to the full text of research articles in the areas of computer and information science.
Over 700k documents are indexed, including PostScript and PDF research articles.
Citations made by indexed documents are also listed.
The CiteSeer database is provided by the NEC Research Institute.
Copac [9] Copac is a union catalogue, giving access to the merged online catalogues of 24 major university libraries in the UK, plus the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the National Library of Wales/Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru.
EEVL [10] The EEVL Best of the Web database contains descriptions of over 11,000 quality-assessed Internet resources.
EEVL Ejournal Search Engine (EESE) [11] EESE indexes the full text of over 250 freely available, full text ejournals in engineering, mathematics and computing.
EEVL Web site Search Engine [12] The EEVL Web site Search Engine harvests the full text from selected engineering, mathematics and computing Web sites and allows the actual content of these sites to be searched.
In effect it acts like a conventional search engine but provides a greater level of subject focus.
Euclid Mathematics and Statistics Journals [13] The Euclid database provides access to information from over 30 journals in theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics.
Some of these journals provide full text articles for free in PostScript or PDF format, others provide abstracts with the full text being available to subscribers.
Inderscience Journals [14] Inderscience is a publisher of high quality peer-reviewed international journals in the fields of engineering and technology, and management and business administration.
The Inderscience database contains details of articles in these subjects, with significant coverage in the areas of automotive engineering/management; ICT; product development (including materials and manufacturing); energy, environment and sustainable development; technology management; and entrepreneurship.
Access to the full text is via subscription or pay-per-view.
IoP Electronic Journals [15] The Institute of Physics Electronic Journals database allows free full text searching of the IOP electronic journals archive back to 1874.
The archive includes over 172,000 articles.
The search result provides an abstract with the full text article available (in PDF) to users from subscribing institutions.
NACA Technical Reports [16] The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was the predecessor organisation to NASA and was operational from 1917 until 1958.
NACA produced around 30,000 technical reports, a subset of which is available in full text in PDF format from the NACA Technical Report Server.
NASA Technical Reports [17] The NASA Technical Reports collection consists of scientific and technical information aggregated from 12 NASA technical report servers.
Over 500,000 technical reports are freely available.
The report servers include; GENESIS (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center, NASA Kennedy Space Center, NASA Langley Research Center, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA Stennis Space Center, and RIACS (NASA Ames Research Center).
OneStep Industry News [18] OneStep Industry News provides access to the latest news items from a selection of engineering, mathematics and computing industry news services.
OneStep Jobs [19] OneStep Industry Jobs provides access to the latest job vacancies from a selection of engineering, mathematics and computing recruitment/job services.
Pearson Education Books [20] This is the book catalogue of Pearson Education publishers.
Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) [21] RAM is a database of bibliographic information for manufacturing and related areas.
It covers over 500 niche and mainstream journals and magazines, and also includes details of books, videos and conference proceedings.
SearchLT Engineering description [22] SearchLT Engineering is a catalogue of computer-based resources suitable for learning and teaching work, with independently produced reviews on these resources.
zetoc Articles & Conference Records [23] The database of the British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC) contains details of approximately 20,000 current journals and 16,000 conference proceedings published per year.
Several more databases are due to be added to the cross-search, providing access to information about publications from Morgan & Claypool [24], IHS [25] and Emerald [26].
As other databases become available, more will, we hope, be added in the future.
Figure 2: Screenshot of EEVL Xtra results summary page Figure 2 shows the Results Summary for a typical search in ‘All’ databases.
Figure 3: Screenshot of EEVL Xtra results page Figure 3 shows the Results page from the ePrints database for a search for ‘metals’.
The Results Summary (see Figure 2 above) is shown to the left of the screen.
On the EEVL Xtra home page there are several ‘Xtra Extras’ which link directly to some of the databases included in the cross-search, plus: Free Civil Engineering Trends articles from Emerald [27] Validated Engineering Design Data information from ESDU [28] Free engineering newsletters from Pro-Talk [29] Trade Publications free to qualified professionals [30] The EEVL On-line bookstore [31] The Offshore Engineering Information Service [32] VTS Internet information skills tutorials [33] The Internet Resources Newsletter [34] The Pinakes subject launchpad [35] The EEVL Xtra service has several limitations.
The range of databases cross-searched is, so far, relatively limited, results from different databases are not de-duplicated, ranking is dependent on how results are returned to the server via external M2M links, and like all cross-search services, search features are limited.
In addition, EEVL Xtra does not have the functionality provided by, for example, commercial library portal services.
Despite these limitations, as a simple-to-use, free tool which does not require logging in or registration, EEVL Xtra is useful for scanning what resources are available from a number of important sources on a subject basis.
Its value was recognised by the popular ResourceShelf, which made it Resource of the Week on 2 June 2005 [36].
The Xtra Team EEVL Xtra is an initiative of Heriot Watt University.
Figure 4: The Xtra men Pictured above are some of the Heriot Watt staff who have worked on the EEVL Xtra service: left to right Roddy MacLeod, Geir Granum, Santy Chumbe and Daniel Pacey.
Not pictured are Malcolm Moffat and Colin Gruber, who have also contributed to the effort.
About EEVL EEVL, the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing, is a UK-based not-for-profit free guide.
It was created and is run by a team of information specialists from Heriot Watt University, with input from a number of other universities in the UK, including the University of Birmingham and Cranfield University.
EEVL provides academics, researchers, students, and anyone else looking for quality-assured information in engineering, mathematics and computing, with a centralised access point on the Internet.
EEVL, which is funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), is available on the Web at: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ References EEVL Xtra http://www.eevlxtra.ac.uk/ EEVL News: What EEVL Users Really Want , July 2004, Issue 40 July Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/eevl/ Subject Portals Project Phase II http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/ arXiv.org e-Print archive http://arxiv.org/ ePrints-UK Service Demo http://eprints-uk.rdn.ac.uk/ Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) http://cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cisti_e.html CSA Hot Topics http://www.csa.com/hottopics/hottopics-main.php The RDN ePrints-UK Project http://eprints-uk.rdn.ac.uk/ Copac Home Page http://copac.ac.uk/ The EEVL Web site http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ EEVL’s Ejournal Search Engines http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/ EEVL Web Site Search Engine http://www.eevl.ac.uk/search-engine.htm Project Euclid Home Page http://projecteuclid.org/Dienst/UI/1.0/Home Inderscience Publishers http://www.inderscience.com/ CrossRef Search http://www.iop.org/EJ/S/3/542/search National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Technical Report Server http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/ NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ EEVL OneStep Industry News http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepnews/ EEVL OneStep Jobs http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepjobs/ Pearson Education http://www.pearsoned.co.uk/ Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) Database http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ram/ SearchLT Engineering http://searchlt.engineering.ac.uk/ Zetoc British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ Morgan & Claypool Publishers http://www.morganclaypool.com/ IHS University Resource Centre http://www.ihsurc.com/index.html Emerald http://www.emerald-library.com/ Emerald Abstracts Civil Engineering Trends http://titania.emeraldinsight.com/vl=3493257/cl=92/nw=1/rpsv/abstracts/icea/trends/ EEVL Xtra Quick Search ESDU http://www.eevlxtra.ac.uk/esdu.php Pro-Talk internet publishing http://www.pro-talk.com/ EEVL Trade Publications http://eevl.tradepub.com/ Pearson Education EEVL On-Line Bookstore http://www.pearsoned.co.uk/bookshop/subject.asp?item=6252&affid=EVL Offshore Engineering Information Service (OEIS) Heriot-Watt University http://www.eevl.ac.uk/offshore/ EEVL Web Tutorials: The RDN Virtual Training Suite (VTS) http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/index.htm Internet Resources Newsletter http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/irn/irn.html PINAKES, A Subject LaunchPad http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html ResourceShelf Thursday, June 02, 2005 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2005/06/new-from-eevl-eevl-xtra.html Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot Watt University Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Return to top Article Title: “EEVL Xtra: The Hidden Web at Your Fingertips” Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Tradition of Scholarly Documentation for Digital Objects: The Launch of the Digital Curation Centre Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Tradition of Scholarly Documentation for Digital Objects: The Launch of the Digital Curation Centre Buzz data infrastructure archives metadata repositories preservation provenance curation e-science e-research research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter reports on the launch of the DCC at the National eScience Centre in Edinburgh, November 2004.
The Digital Curation Centre had its official launch in Edinburgh on 5 November 2004.
Perhaps an odd date to pick for the launch of such an important international initiative, but it justified the inclusion of some virtual fireworks on the home page of the DCC launch Web site.
The DCC is one of three major activities in Phase 2 of the UK e-Science Programme, along with the National Grid service and the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute, as well as being a key activity of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
e-Science requires sound preservation and curation techniques for handling and processing digital objects of many kinds, and a principal function of the DCC is to provide policy and advice for those who use and reuse large datasets, both dynamic and static.
Prince Philip, Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, was the principal VIP expected to attend the event.
However the death of Princess Alice occurred earlier in the week, and the Duke was unable to attend.
This was a pity, since his interest in computing and technologies in general is well known.
It was announced at the beginning of the proceedings that an alternative date for a visit by the Duke had been arranged for February, which, given the busy nature of his schedule, booked up sometimes years in advance, indicates how important the Duke regards the creation of the DCC.
(left to right) Professor Tony Hey, Professor Tim O'Shea, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (representing Prince Philip) and Sir Muir Russell The VIPs on the platform were, Tim O'Shea, Principal of the University of Edinburgh, Sir Muir Russell, Principal of the University of Glasgow, Sir Stewart Sutherland (Lord Sutherland of Houndwood); Professor Tony Hey, head of the UK eScience programme and Professor of Computation at the University of Southampton; Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA and head of DCC Phase 1.
Representing the Duke was Lord Sutherland, the former principal of Edinburgh University, now President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and also President of the Saltire Society.
The opening was quite formal since it had been rehearsed with the Duke of Edinburgh in mind.
So we had a number of speeches by the VIPs.
The current principal of the University of Edinburgh, Tim O'Shea, emphasised that the importance of the DCC had been taken on board by its host institution and this was echoed by Sir Muir Russell, Principal of Glasgow University.
Tony Hey told the audience that he was conscious that the importance of the DCC transcends e-Science and that it should also address the concerns and needs of digital librarians.
Lord Sutherland also emphasised the long-term future for the work of the DCC, and that its greatest benefits would be reaped by the generation now rising.
The demonstrations and displays set up for the inspection of the visitors on their arrival included a number of projects already wrestling with the issues of preservation and data curation on a daily basis.
Also present was a display of obsolete media, put together by Adam Rusbridge of the University of Glasgow in conjunction with the Museum of Computing in Swindon.
One which caught my eye was a thin black vinyl flexidisc of the sort which used to be given away with Private Eye magazine, and used to distribute programmes for the popular Sinclair ZX81 in the early 1980s.
There followed a number of presentations by the principals of the DCC, aimed at the press as well as the invited audience, outlining the main tasks of the DCC, and the important issues which have to be addressed by anyone working with digital datasets, and more broadly, with digital information of any kind.
The presentations were by Seamus Ross, Director of HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute), Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, David Giaretta of CCLRC (Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils), Peter Burnhill of EDINA, and Peter Buneman of the Department of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Each of them illustrated the importance of the work of the DCC principally from their own perspective some from the point of view of computer science, some from the perspective of data processing, some from the point of view of humanities computing.
However each of the presenters was aware that the need for digital curation techniques and policies runs across the whole gamut of digital objects, particularly to avoid the loss of unique sets and sequences of data.
Peter Buneman emphasised that sometimes a good deal of metadata which we might want to capture is already present in file paths, so the automation of its collection is possible.
The information pack distributed contained flyers for specific upcoming activities of the DCC, including the proposed online peer-reviewed journal, the International Journal of Digital Curation.
There was also documentation on the various demonstrations on show.
The brochure represents a cross-section of current views on the importance of digital curation.
The field is fast developing though the need for some formal approach to the management of digital data at a variety of levels has been obvious for some time, the term 'digital curation' isn't very old.
Peter Burnhill suggests in his contribution that 'the key task is the deployment of a digital curation strategy, or set of strategies, that ensures provenance and manages representation information, as well as preserving the integrity of digital bits on long-lasting media.'
The challenges faced by the DCC are 'of first order significance with hardly a trivial problem in sight.'
Tony Hey suggests that '...the deluge of scientific data expected from the next generation of experiments, simulations, sensors and satellites, together with the data that is now being used to record annotation and opinion, must be managed in a new, more pro-active way and we must also recognise the wisdom of preserving this information to be used and re-used for generations to come.
The time is ripe for the document tradition of scholarly research to be integrated into this vision in the rapid progression as Research becomes e-Research.'
Lynne Brindley, the Chief Executive of the British Library, adds that 'centres of excellence, strong and enduring partnerships and technical innovation will be required to respond to the challenge of making research results reusable and available for future generations'.
Cliff Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is of the view 'that the DCC will have importance and impact worldwide, both because scholarship broadly and e-science particularly is a global enterprise, and also because the technologies, intellectual strategies and best practices being pioneered and advanced by the DCC will serve as models for other national cyberinfrastructure initiatives and for local institutional repository programmes in many countries'.
Sarah Tyacke, the Chief Executive of the National Archives (formerly known as the Public Record Office), said that 'as we have found in the development of our digital archive, the management of the 'seamless flow' of electronic records into the archives, the curation and preservation of digital records, is the biggest challenge facing the archival community.
The DCC, by becoming a centre of expertise, support and advice, will play a vital role in helping practitioners to ensure that the digital historical record will be preserved for future generations'.
So the DCC represents an important and extensive commitment both to its funders and to its stakeholder community.
One of its earliest hurdles is to make the importance of digital curation obvious to those who do not yet realise it is about their own projects and business processes, not just about superscience and massive systems manipulating terabytes or petabytes of data.
An institution like CERN already knows its need for curation in the future, and is building this into its plans.
But the need for a tradition of curation in the digital field embraces everyone who has the need to preserve and reuse information.
The DCC has now announced that its Director for the next stage of its operations will be Chris Rusbridge, currently Director of Information Services at the University of Glasgow, and formerly Director of the JISC-funded eLib Programme in the mid-nineties.
Further details can be obtained from the DCC Web site [1].
References Digital Curation Centre home page http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Author Details Philip Hunter UKOLN Email: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "A Tradition of Scholarly Documentation for Digital Objects: The Launch of the Digital Curation Centre " Author: Philip Hunter Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/dcc-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Memory Bytes History, Technology, and Digital Culture Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Memory Bytes History, Technology, and Digital Culture Buzz archives video streaming quicktime cybernetics research Citation BibTex RIS Ingrid Mason takes a look at this collection of essays and analyses how these authors contribute to our understanding of digital culture by placing digital technology in an historical context.
It seemed a good idea to look at the definition of 'digital culture' offered in Wikipedia [1] and consider this alongside the ideas presented in this text.
The definition was marked for possible deletion, then, a few days later the definition had changed, and the matter seems settled (for the moment) [2].
Somewhat serendipitously the Wikipedia definition had moved from two broad expressions of 'digital culture' that arises from the use of digital technologies, to one that refers to it as a discrete field of study that examines the effect on people.
This process of community contribution to Wikipedia illustrates key assumptions that underlie digital culture outlined in Memory Bytes: the uptake of new technologies that enable information creation and sharing and distributed communication.
The resulting definition in Wikipedia reflects a considerable interest in how this activity is influencing human behaviour and what the writers in Memory Bytes are focused upon.
They are more interested in exposing how digital culture is: '..transformative of the individual and of the group.
Most importantly, as a means of framing cultural experience it serves as a conduit for the confluence of power that technology, the government, and the corporation intertwine in the modern state.'
[3] Rabinovitz and Geil argue the case well for this social view of digital culture and outline four themes that run through the essays: the definition of digital culture as a social phenomenon larger than that implied by the idea of an information age; the placement of digital technology in an historical context or continuum with antecedent technologies; the presence of subjectivity in human interaction with technology; and the materiality of technology, both actual and economic.
The themes provided by Rabinovitz and Geil are a better guide to the thinking and analysis of the writers than the overwrought section titles.
The titles of the essays lead the reader into their content and the contributions are intriguing and well researched.
A few pieces veer off the discussion of historicity into the cultural territory they are examining and the discussion becomes esoteric.
Where the writers maintain focus on the main contention, the themes, and their own area of interest and expertise, they provide a thoroughly satisfying read.
The four sections are briefly summarised and a review of an essay from each is provided as a means of giving insight to the diversity of content offered in this text.
Section one has reflections upon the intellectual analyses of ideologies underlying historical technological development and how that thinking might (or not) contribute to an understanding of the ideologies driving digital technological development today.
David Depew's essay 'From heat engines to digital printouts: machine models of the body from the Victorian era to the Human Genome Project' is a provocative investigation of the reductionist ideology he perceives underlying genetic mapping and engineering, where the use of computer programming is disconcertingly exploited as a metaphor by the biotechnology industry.
This essay prompted a rethink about the endgame of the Human Genome Project [4].
Section two focuses on the historical relationship between technologies, that are audio-visual or that provide somatic experiences, and resulting states of consciousness.
Judith Babbitts' essay 'Stereographs and the construction of a visual culture in the United States' credits stereographs, introduced into leisure and educational contexts in the early twentieth century to the United States, with having significantly influenced its visual culture.
'They presaged temporary cultural and technological studies of disembodied realities, such as virtual reality and simulated computer environments, and they deserve to be restored to that tradition.'
[5] Babbitts also claims that stereographs were promoted as a way for people to gather more information, about other lands, and peoples.
To see was to know, so simply viewing the images provided an intellectual appreciation of the cultural experience or learning, as the armchair traveller or scholar.
The accrual of technical and visual knowledge through this innovation became synonymous with ideas of modernity and fed into socio-economic aspirations.
Babbitts does not make the link to underlying consumerism driving technological innovation explicit in her essay, but by implication the advertising pitch for stereographs is not dissimilar to that of the latest video or digital camera, portable music players, video games, or game player today.
Section three covers the history of human physical interaction with technology and its materiality.
Scott Curtis' essay 'Still/Moving: digital imaging and medical hermeneutics' aligns the humanities and medicine through the use of technology in their examination of human existence which seems a long bow to draw.
His dialectic is compelling though, as he deftly correlates and threads together the nature of life and death reflected in film and photography, physiology and anatomy, movement and stillness, the synthetic and analytic, fluidity and fragmentation.
This essay prompted a revisit to the Visible Human Project [6] and reflection on the impact of technological advances on medical practice, and, the social and legal ramifications.
'Preventative medicine, organ replacement, life support all have made the criterion of death technological rather than biological, robbing death of its privilege and authority and giving it to those in control of the technology.
Death still reigns, but modern medicine does not believe in it anymore.'
[7] An example is the legal furore over switching off Terri Schiavo's life support machine.
Her parents believed in the ability to rehabilitate her, while the medical fraternity's view was that semiconscious and persistent vegetative states can only be assessed clinically by neurologists or through the use of brain scans.
The courts ruled in favour of medical opinion and technology [8].
Section four highlights the historical traditions of aesthetics that re-emerge, are reformed or become redundant in the aesthetics of digital culture.
Vivian Sobchack's essay 'Nostalgia for a digital object: regrets on the quickening of QuickTime' articulates and affirms the aesthetics of the imperfections and miniaturisation in QuickTime's functionality.
The mementos, bits and bytes, and idiosyncratic linking of all types of files in QuickTime parallel for Sobchack the fragments or artefacts in personal archives or ephemera collections, museum displays or the Wunderkammer (cabinets of curiosities) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Homologies are drawn between the opening and closing of the computer to view QuickTime's 'memory box' and the discoveries made by viewing relics stored in boxes, browsing photo albums, souvenirs or dolls houses.
An intense sense of intimacy and nostalgia is experienced in these small and personal spaces.
Sobchack creates a distinction between the cinematic experience of big screen and that of the moving image and sound in QuickTime.
'The miniature, then, is always to some degree secretive, pointing to hidden dimensions and unseen narratives.
Its "nestedness" within a larger whole draws us not only beyond its frame, but also into and beneath it.'
[9] She shares her qualms about the effects of increasing perfection and sophistication being built into audio-visual digital technology like that of QuickTime.
It is somewhat ironic that what is gained in terms of smooth streaming, file compression and quality in increasing sophistication of this technology is what is lost in terms of the appeal.
The sentimentality associated with the crackling sounds of old recordings is perhaps another example of this nostalgia for the qualities of redundant technologies.
Memory Bytes is like the curate's egg good in parts.
Though the essays did not reach concertedly enough into the main contention, they reveal, albeit in very specific contexts, 'the multiple relationships between culture and techne that have always been grounded in purpose and specific social interests.'
[10].
This is invaluable if there is to be better understanding of the social impact of digital technology and thus the emergence of 'digital culture'.
The variety provided by interdisciplinary contribution adds a piquancy that makes collections like this stimulating reading.
There should be a place on research library shelves for this book alongside Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, Neil Spillers' Cyber Reader, Paul Lunenfeld's The Digital Dialectic, Katherine Haye's How We Become PostHuman, and Cameron and Kenderdine's Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage [11].
References Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Last accessed: 05/01/2006 The two definitions up for deletion were: Patterns and expressions of human behaviour made possible by computer technology and the information it enables.
The habits, customs and patterns of behavior that emerge from the process of digital communication.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Digital Culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_culture Last Accessed: 05/01/2006 Returning to it several days later that the definition was a new one provided by the Digital Think Tank.
A distinct field of study that seeks to explore the cultural ramifications of digital technology, and how the alterations in the patterns of communication, information processing, and archiving resulting from the use of digital technology have influenced human behavior.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Digital Culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_culture Last Accessed: 09/01/2006 Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture.
Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (eds).
Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2004, p5.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Human Genome Project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project Last accessed: 11/01/2006.
BBC News, Newsnight, Who owns the map of the human body?
Susan Watts 12/2/01 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1173801.stm Last accessed: 11/01/2006 Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, p128.
National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project http://www.nlm.nih.gov/resea rch/visible/ Last accessed: 11/01/2006.
D-Lib Magazine, October 1995, Accessing the visible human project, Michael J. Ackerman http://www.dlib.or g/dlib/october95/10ackerman.html Last accessed: 11/01/2006 Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, p245.
ABC News, Health, Persistent Vegetative State vs. Minimally Conscious, Diagnosing a patient's level of awareness involves complex analysis, tests, Amanda Onion, March 21, 2005 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Schiavo/story?id=600523&page=1 Last accessed 11/01/2006.
CNN.com, Law Center, Schiavo's feeding tube removed, March 18, 2005, Ninette Sosa, Carol Lin, Ted Barrett, Joe Johns, Rich Phillips and Jen Yuille http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/18/schiavo.brain-damaged/ Last accessed 11/01/2006 Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, p318.
Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, p2.
The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2002; Cyber Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era, Neil Spiller (ed), London, Phaidon Press, 2002; The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Paul Lunefeld, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000; How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Katherine Hayes, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999; Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: a Critical Discourse, Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (eds), Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2006.
Author Details Ingrid Mason Epublications Librarian Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand Email: ingrid.mason@natlib.govt.nz Web site: http://www.natlib.govt.nz Return to top Article Title: "Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture" Author: Ingrid Mason Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/mason-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IWMW 2007: Next Steps for the Web Management Community Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IWMW 2007: Next Steps for the Web Management Community Buzz data software wiki api html xml portal usability thesaurus firefox accessibility blog copyright cataloguing e-business vcard technorati microformats mashup facebook hcard research Citation BibTex RIS Shirley Keane reports on the wide range of presentations given at this year's Institutional Web Management Workshop.
Torrential rain, thunder and lightening provided the backdrop to the Institutional Web Management Workshop [1], held this year at the University of York.
Dramatic as they were, the conditions did not in any way dampen the enthusiasm of the delegates over the three days.
The programme this year consisted of plenary sessions, discussion groups, parallel sessions and the famed social events.
New this year was the IWMW Innovation Competition, where participants were invited to submit lightweight examples of innovative uses of Web technologies as well as the IWMW logo.
As I work through the presentations I intend to cover, readers can refer to further information on the speakers and their talks [2].
Day One Opening Session: What Is A Community?
Chair: Brian Kelly, UKOLN Welcome to York Dr Miranda Stephenson, Deputy Director of the National Science Learning Centre, welcomed delegates to the University of York and expressed how privileged the University felt to be hosting the conference, particularly with such a current and important theme: Web 2.0.
The latter represented a balance of resource implications and educational benefits and the services it provided were very important.
Moreover, Miranda added, those who worked, largely unseen, in support of such services deserved greater recognition.
IWMW logo Brian Kelly then gave an overview of this year's IWMW programme.
He explained that Marieke Guy, the official IWMW Chair, was unable to attend this year as she had just given birth to a baby boy and that she would be back next year.
Marieke had worked very hard to make this year's conference as successful as IWMW 2006 which had been voted the 'best ever' IWMW workshop.
Brian introduced a new feature this year, the 'Innovation Competition', to be judged on the final day [3].
Plenary 1: Sustainable Communities: What Does 'Community of Practice' Mean for Institutional Web Managers?
Dr Steven Warburton, School of Law, King's College London The title of Steven Warburton's presentation was 'From individuals to networks and sustainable communities?'
in which he discussed the dimensions of communities and how they are a fundamental aspect within descriptions of shared human activity and group bonding; he described architecture in a virtual learning environment and asked where we would find the 'locus of power' and the 'discourse of control', explaining how policy is dictated from institutional level through Web managers to the users.
Steven Warburton presenting Policies are in place at institutional level, web management level.
There are policies around design and branding; information architecture, access and accessibility, Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and so on; yet there is little feedback invited from students.
He suggested there is possibly a paradigm shift now to a less hierarchical system with more freedom of choice, sharing and collaboration, creativity and creative commons.
Steven also mentioned 'digital identity' and the question of 'personal reputation management' versus 'institutional reputation management and how these are now dependent on each other.
He also alluded to ethical issues such as consent and how to reconcile personal freedoms and institutional responsibilities; and also spoke on digital literacy for participation (the art of reading visual representations), of creative recycling of existing material, socio-emotional literacy, empowerment and the role of the institutional Web management community; developing shared purpose, and how and where to articulate understanding of self, role and community.
He concluded by reminding us that the role and identity of an institutional Web manager is 'inseparable from a field of practice that remains dynamic, fluid and under constant negotiation'.
[4] Plenary 2: Let the Students Do the Talking... Alison Wildish, Head of Web Services, Edge Hill University This presentation from Alison Wildish was on how Edge Hill University decided to take a radical approach to updating its Web site after receiving University status in 2006, by using the latest trends to develop: A student portal which embeds social networking and user-owned technologies with its own institutional systems.
An applicant community Web site which allows applicants to chat directly to current students to discover all there is to know about University life.
Alison described how the Web was constantly changing and current trends in the world of social networking included Web sites such as Facebook [5], MySpace [6] and Bebo [7] used by 98% of Edge Hill students.
Facebook, for example, had not even figured on the UK radar in September 2006; yet now it is in widespread use and there is even a developer platform available.
As users become more sophisticated in how they use the Web, they have a strong desire to do things 'their way' and they speak as they find.
With many free tools to choose from, the Web development and marketing teams at Edgehill thought they should review how the Web site should be re-developed.
Rather than try to force the traditional 'way of the Web' on students, they embraced Web 2.0 and provided a portal to blogs, feeds, and so on [8] to make the site more attractive to potential students.
By featuring social networking elements, the University sought to help students visiting its Web sites feel part of the community before they arrived, and so able to gain a flavour of the Edgehill Community, as well as of the education the University could provide.
Day Two Morning Session: Getting Technical #1 Chair: Helen Sargan, Cambridge University Plenary 3: Building Highly Scalable Web Applications Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services In this session, Jeff Barr discussed Amazon's approach to Web-scale computing and how, by using this new approach, developers can use Amazon's services to build scalable and flexible Web applications both rapidly and cost-effectively.
He spoke of the issues facing developers, describing how approximately 70% of developers' work could be described as 'muck'the must-do elements of the job such as running data centres; managing bandwidth, power and cooling issues; maintaining operations and looking after issues of staffing.
Scaling was difficult and expensive, requiring large, up-front investment ahead of demand, but where load was unpredictable.
It is possible to prepare for large, seasonal spikes, but it can be expensive to run this level of service for the short time that might be used to capacity.
He believed the solution was 'Web-scale computing' that is, to scale capacity on demand, turn fixed costs into variable costs and have reliability allowing you to focus on product and core competencies.
Jeff went on to describe in detail Amazon's newest services, including the Simple Queue Service, the Simple Storage Service, and the Elastic Compute Cloud; and how the services are being used by customers worldwide.
Jeff described Amazon's unique "Mechanical Turk" [9] service, 'a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do'.
[10] Plenary 4: Can Your Website Be Your API?
Drew McLellan, allinthehead.com In this session, Drew McLellan discussed the issues around non-semantic markup and how HTML, with its basic tags, did not offer much in the way of semantics thus allowing data to "die all over the Web".
"Every time non-semantic markup is used, a piece of data dies.
Data was born to be shared."
Drew spoke of a community project that is addressing this by using microformats, based on hAtom, hCard, hCal and so forth: "Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns."
[11] It is possible to begin on a small scale by adding microfomats to existing pages to build up a more semantic set of Web pages.
An example, based on vCard might be:   <p class="vCard"> <span class="org">Apple</span> <span class="role">CEO</span> <span class="fn">Smith</span> </p>   Firefox has an extension for showing and exporting microformats; its 'tails' extension [12] exposes microformats and Dreamweaver extensions for this can be downloaded [13].
XML has failed to support this and now companies such as Yahoo are publishing millions of microformats [14].
Getting Technical #2 Chair: Jeremy Speller, UCL Plenary 5: The Promise of Information Architecture Keith Doyle, Salford University Keith Doyle talked about how Information Architecture (IA) is concerned with 'finding things' and how vital IA is to any Web site.
He highlighted how the IA role at institutions is often 'squeezed' into a multitude of tasks, and asked the question as to whether this should, in fact, be a specific post.
The Institute of Information Architecture [15] defines IA as "...the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability."
Unlike a library, with its sophisticated cataloguing systems, we tend to add pages rather randomly to Web sites.
It is clear that it is important for users to be able to find information and, if they can't, they will give up and go elsewhere.
The probability of finding what you are looking for on the Web is the same as for winning the lottery...1 in 2,330,636...so there is a specific need to reduce such odds, and IA could help insofar as every Web site already has information architecture (IA) in some form.
In terms of navigation, there are methods to choose from in order to provide a better experience for the user: Wayfinding such as using the logo to link back to 'home'; or including a clear 'home page' link and a site map.
User testing has proved how useful this is.
Berry picking: where the user ends up finding something completely different.
Information foraging: like bees [16] 'Satisficing': doing the minimum possible to satisfy user needs Breadcrumbs Taxonomies Design for the user's convenience, not yours (Nielsen) Search engines Thesaurus management By designing for the user's convenience, rather than your own, a visit to your Web site should be a better experience for the user.
The keywords are: findability, responsibility, user testing and community of practice.
Many institutions squeeze this kind of work into the life of busy staff but Keith Doyle suggests a full-time Information Architect on the team would be extremely valuable.
Plenary 6: Trends in Web Attacks Arthur Clune, University of York Attacks on web servers, and on Internet-connected devices in general, have become both more common and more sophisticated in recent years.
Arthur Clune looked at how people attack Web servers, and what they hope to gain from it.
This presentation was based on data from the Honeynet Project's [17] deployment of Honeypot servers worldwide.
People are breaking in for various reasons: out of curiosity, for status, fame and for monetary gain.
Since the first attacks on the Web, the Distributed Denial of Service (DDS) is a constant threat and current trends point to much activity in: Blog spam Wiki spam Calendar spam Harvesting of text for use in above.
This problem is not going to go way and needs to be addressed with some urgency.
Educational institutions are often attacked due to the large bandwidth available and attacks on the servers can affect reputation, violate copyright on services, can spread the exploit code and so on.
It is important, therefore, that institutions follow best practice and do not multiply servers unnecessarily.
They should undertake code audits, build firewalls, and create a perimeter security network called a demilitarised zone (DMZ) that separates the internal network from the outside world.
Most importantly, it is important to talk to staff responsible for security to ensure proper plans are in place to combat such attacks.
The main auditorium Afternoon Session: A Viral Marketing Vision Chair: Patrick Lauke, University of Salford Plenary 7: Marketing Man Takes off His Tie: Customers, Communities and Communication Peter Reader, University of Bath Peter Reader began by describing how e-communications, e-marketing and social media are hot topics for university marketing and communications staff, with old ideas of 'control' looking more and more unrealistic.
Talk now is of students as 'customers', of 'client management', of 'influence' and of 'viral marketing'.
The Web and its technologies are now being seen as important marketing tools and new challenges have now arisen for marketers as the customer becomes more demanding.
Peter continued by saying that marketing and communications departments are often misunderstood by VCs downward, and as university courses become 'products', university league tables will become even more important for positioning your institution..
Currently, there is no national marketing for universities.
He presented statistics that indicate 86% of students in the North East of England remain within the area when taking up university places; 92% in the North West stay within their local area.
Branding seems to terrify VCs, yet it is well known that 'your brand is what people say about you when you leave the room' and can no longer be ignored.
Peter went on to say that the subject of gender imbalance, to take one example, needs to be addressed by marketers and communicators.
Statistics show that in 1999 the numbers of male/female students in Further Education (FE) were equal; however, in 2006, 59% of the intake into FE were female.
How the Web site communicates to its audience is of paramount importance: the message must be correct, and over-communication must be addressed.
Peter described how young people today are using media in a different way, characterised by the following pointers: More online than on TV More than one need at a time One in seven has their own blog Young women are online a great deal Email is the most frequent e-activity Facebook captured the UK Higher Education (HE) market in 18 months; attracting 80% in 2007 Today, the customer is in control, not the marketing manager and we need to know: how to become part of students' conversation, how universities can involve themselves in social media without facing rejection; track what is coming next and try to see what will expand and what will die.
He concluded that, when all is said and done, universities must be more open and truthful with their messages: trying to continue to 'manage' communication is dangerous and can lead to alienation in the wider community.
Plenary 8: Social Participation in Student Recruitment Paul Boag, Headscape Paul Boag talked about social participation and how it has been around for a long time in the form of mailing lists, newsgroups, chat rooms and community sites and, at the heart of the development of these communities, is the HE sector.
Trends come and go and forums have dominated social participation for a long time, supporting both large and small communities.
The problem with forums is that they are not so easy to set up.
Blogging, however, has changed this and it can be said that Web 2.0 has refreshed social participation.
Businesses have been quick to take this up and are buying up small Web 2.0 companies; however, the HE sector is struggling a little, preferring to play it safe, being risk-averse.
There are, however, some universities who are tackling this head on: for example Warwick and Edge Hill.
And the sector as a whole should not be afraid of negative comments it might receive by entering this virtual arena, as the influence it would gain by embracing these technologies would in his view far outweigh the risks.
Indeed, negative comments reinforce the positive.
While it is true that issues of moderating postings and dealing with flaming, etc, as well as legal implications, should be borne in mind, the corporate sector is already overcoming these difficulties by responding in a timely manner, providing examples of how to deal with these aspects.
The FE sector has a choice as to whether it builds its own services or use existing ones, using social participation to aid student recruitment; whatever it decides, it should not let fear stand in its way.
Paul's 'recommendations' were: embrace change recognise potential take some risks dedicate resources innovate content ... and finally 'Don't give up!
Fight!'
Day Three Morning Session: Conclusions Chair: Stephen Emmott, LSE Panel Session: Dealing with the Commercial World: Saviour or Satan?
John Harrison and Adam Hulme, Maxsi Ltd, discussed the potential benefits and pitfalls of commercial advertising on university Web sites.
Potential ways of advertising included: payment each time the page is seen a "click through rate" payment (i.e.
how many times a banner is clicked) cost per acquisition (CPA) the user clicks via banner to a third-party site where a purchase is made 'slot banner rental': payment for hosting a link (usually on a monthly basis) sponsorship: eg: 'sponsored by....' with logo or a link The advertiser sees one advantage of advertising on a university site as being able to target an audience which would otherwise be hard to reach; however, a major disadvantage is the relatively low volume compared with other sources.
Nonetheless, it was pointed out that universities could create consortia to bring numbers up should they wish to go down this route.
It is very hard to find out how much this market is worth and the institutions would need a good analytics system, to research this.
Isabel Allen, independent consultant, former head of eBusiness, Nottingham Trent University, talked about how Nottingham Trent University has streamlined the 150 Web sites it used to maintain, all with varying designs and content, through the installation of a commercial CMS.
Project Slimfast was thus named as the remit was that the Web site had to become skinny in eight weeks.
The main goals were to: reduce size to become more attractive create consistency in accessibility implement a Content Management System become more competitive The project team looked at industry benchmarking, spoke to commercial organisations, went to industry events for research into various aspects of the new site, including how to introduce an online payment system.
There were pitfalls, but not only did the project succeed, it brought with it new skills and helped staff to develop professionally.
Paul Boag described the main stages involved with good Web design and what his company provides: front end, interface, design is main work usability/accessibility testing Information Architecture stakeholder interviews to get people on board stakeholder training (explaining basics of the Web) help with selecting a suitable CMS Brian Kelly argued that the use, or not, of commercial services is just one dimension of a more complex set of issues.
He discussed the tensions between the role of the institutional Web management team in ensuring standards and best practice are observed (in order to provide quality Web sites) and the role of meeting the diverse needs of current and future users in in our institutions (in order to provide a quality Web experience) .
Here is a summary of the main discussion points: we shouldn't take commercial as meaning 'money', it should really be viewed as using external suppliers we should consider using backup and support for software from the commercial world it might be possible to pull revenue out of students' union income we should use the fact that advertisers are moving in a big way onto the Web as TV audiences fall and there is plenty of opportunity for everyone we must maintain standards adverts can create accessibility problems whatever software we use, it must be sustainable and robust, be it open source or commercial some talk of the 'dishonesty' in commercial world .
If you are going to purchase commercial products, then make sure you obtain a test version and talk to the developers.
The bottom line: it's your responsibility University of York grounds Discussion Groups and Parallel Sessions A variety of important issues were covered and more can be found on the IWMW wiki [18].
Here you can find details of all the discussions and also view recorded sessions.
Final Session Chair: Brian Kelly Competition This session began with the judging of the Innovation Competition which aimed to provide an opportunity to experiment in a friendly environment and to help towards professional development.
There were fifteen submissions [19] and winners were: Sebastian Rahtz's Community Focus Mashup [20], Oxford University Computing Services (first) Michael Nolan's How To Find Us and Hi from Edge Hill [21], Edge Hill University (second place) Paul Walk's Community Focus Mashup [22] (equal third) Mike Ellis' Mashed Museums Directory [23] (equal third) Reflections on IWMW 2007: Saviour or Satan?
Brian Kelly reflected on the workshop content and felt the balance had been about right; however, he thought the question we should be asking was perhaps not "Commercial World: Saviour or Satan?"
but rather "Web Managers: Saviour or Satan?"
Brian then thanked the organising committee, speakers and workshop facilitors, sponsors [24] and all the helpers who had contributed to the success of the workshop.
IWMW 2008 Brian concluded the workshop by telling us that the 2008 Workshop will be held at University of Aberdeen.
Conclusion As well as the very interesting range of talks, discussions and workshops, the social events were a great success, in particular the magician who wowed the whole conference dinner with his sleight of hand.
As I was busy scribing, I was unable to take any photos and the rain didn't help either so there are some posted on the technorati Web site, from which you will be able to get a flavour of the occasion [25].
And there is much more information on the IWMW Web site [1].
To quote someone I overheard "the bar has been raised even higher this year", and I hope I have been able to do justice to this year's workshop.
I would like to sign off with my own homage to the event: Tag Cloud IWMW 2007 © Shirley Keane 2007 References Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/ IWMW 2007 speakers http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/speakers/ IWMW talks http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/talks/ IWMW Innovation Competition http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/competition/ Presentation: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/talks/warburton/ Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ MySpace http://www.myspace.com/ Bebo http://www.bebo.com/ Edghill blogs http://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/ Amazon Mechanical Turk http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome Wikipedia entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk, retrieved 15 August 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk microformats http://microformats.org/ Tails Export:: Firefox Add-ons https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2240 Microformats Extensions: The Web Standards Project http://www.webstandards.org/action/dwtf/microformats microformats weblog: Yahoo Local Supports Microformats http://microformats.org/blog/2006/06/21/yahoo-local-supports-microformats/ The Information Architecture Institute http://iainstitute.org/ Information Architecture: Consequencing http://consequencing.com/tag/information-architecture/ UK Honeynet Project http://www.honeynet.org.uk/ IWMW 2007 Wiki http://iwmw2007.wetpaint.com/ IWMW 2007 Innovation Competition http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/competition/ Competition entry by Sebastian Rahtz: Alternative course discovery using calendars and maps http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/competition/submissions/#submission-15 Competition entry by Michael Nolan: How To Find Us http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/competition/submissions/#submission-10 and Hi From Edge Hill http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/competition/submissions/#submission-11 Competition entry by Paul Walk: Community Focus Mashup http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/competition/submissions/#submission-2 Competition entry by Mike Ellis: Mashed Museums Directory http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/competition/submissions/#submission-5 IWMW 2007 Workshop Sponsors http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/sponsors/ IWMW 2007 Conference photos http://www.technorati.com/photos/tag/iwmw-2007 Author Details Shirley Keane UKOLN Email: s.keane@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "IWMW 2007: Next Steps for the Web Management Community" Author: Shirley Keane Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/iwmw-2007-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?
Buzz framework database archives copyright e-learning youtube licence research standards Citation BibTex RIS Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim discuss the history and merits of using Creative Commons licences while questioning whether these licences are indeed a panacea.
Creative Commons [1] is helping to instigate cultural change: it is empowering rights holders with the knowledge and tools to decide under what terms they wish third parties to use their creations, whilst permitting users easy and user-friendly means to use content lawfully without the necessity of requesting permission.
The release of the Creative Commons licences has inspired a global revolution, supported by a sub-culture with its own identity, ideology, activities and membership [2] and the spawning of other model licences developed with a similar philosophy, such as Science Commons [3], Patent Commons [4] and Creative Archive [5].
However, despite the remarkable widespread use of these licences, there are critics of Creative Commons licences who raise concerns about the ethics, legality and politics of their use [6].
The recent incorporation of Creative Commons licences within Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications via a downloadable plug-in [7] now provides an integrated method for the creation and licensing of content.
It is a brilliant way of encouraging consideration about who is allowed access to digital content and under what conditions, at the time that the content is generated.
This development has enormous potential for nurturing educated and mature approaches to copyright and access, but at the same time had also necessitated the need to re-examine the validity of using Creative Commons within teaching, learning and research activities.
It has precipitated a critical assessment of their use and the need to set clear parameters about when they can and cannot be used.
History of Copyright Copyright and Balances Historically, international copyright legislation has been about balances.
Balances that strive to cater for the rights of users and those of rights holders.
Balances which also aim to create a fair legislative framework: an equilibrium that addresses the fundamental right of creators of original content to benefit economically from the fruits of their intellectual and creative endeavours and offering them the means to protect what they have created, whilst acknowledging legitimate and fair uses of works which enable the furtherance of society, culture and personal well-being.
In order to achieve the correct balance, within reasonable parameters, some of these copying activities have been excluded from the shackles of copyright law, (lawyers refer to them as the “exceptions to copyright”), to allow users the rights to use works lawfully without needing a licence to do so.
This is the best-known example of this important and often delicate balance.
However, critics of the current copyright law, most notably Lawrence Lessig [8], the founder of Creative Commons and advocate of free culture [9], has argued strongly that the balance has in recent years shifted too far in favour of rights holders and to the detriment of users.
Rights Holders and New Technology The evolution of the Internet has created dynamic pockets of sharing, collaboration and access to content, through sites such as YouTube [10] and others which have the potential to test the constraints of copyright law, by providing easy means for unauthorised use of content.
The knee-jerk reaction of major industry players has been to employ technological, contractual and legislative approaches to control both legitimate activities which cut across some of their business models, as well curtailing infringing practices.
Digital Rights Management, and in particular Technical Protection Measures (TPMS) are typical technological solutions which have been widely engaged, although these have been publicly criticised, for example by LACA (Library and Archive Copyright Alliance) in its submission to the All Parliamentary Internet Group’s consultation on Digital Rights Management [11].
Significant criticisms of TPMS include the locking down of digital content which have not only eroded fair dealing provisions, but also are effectively creating works that are in copyright in perpetuity, by preventing access to them beyond the term of copyright protection.
These measures have been supported by contractual agreements with users which can also override legitimate access rights.
This is because in most countries (but not all, notable exceptions are Eire and Belgium) a signed contract can override exceptions to copyright.
Rights holders have also exerted lobbying pressure and in recent years, the US, Australia and member states within the European Union have implemented a raft of legislative measures which have tightened the digital copyright regime.
These include the criminalisation of copyright infringements, embodied with the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 [12] which includes the criminalisation of the removal of TPMS.
Fair dealing or similar provisions have also been severely curtailed, and this in particular has eroded the delicate balance between rights holders and rights users.
Creative Commons Introduction to Creative Commons The Creative Commons philosophy is driven by those who believe in free and open exchange of digital content and to create a middle way between “…the extremes of copyright-control, and the uncontrolled exploitation, of intellectual property.” [1] The licence was inspired by the open source movement and follows the principles enshrined within copyleft [13] which encourage the free distribution of works and any derivatives made of it.
The use of Creative Commons licences therefore has the potential to redress the copyright equilibrium disrupted by recent developments.
Recent test cases in Dutch and Spanish courts have upheld the validity of Creative Commons licences in infringement of copyright cases [14].
Creative Commons offers the creators of digital content a range of digital licences attached to their content that permit different access rights to it.
These licences are available in various forms that permit the rights holder to retain a level of control over how their work is treated (“Some Rights Reserved”).
Availability in different formats, comprising machine-readable code for search engines and other applications to identify the work by its terms of use, a detailed licence and a summary of the licence using symbols to represent key licence terms offer enormous benefits.
The dramatic uptake and continual publicity surrounding Creative Commons licences means that individuals are likely to encounter content on the Internet which is governed by the terms and conditions of Creative Commons licences.
Creative Commons and Their Use in Higher and Further Education Certainly, the take-up of these licences within Higher and Further Education institutions is believed to have been significant and, in many cases, possibly unquestioned because of the alignment of the Creative Commons philosophy and the broad sign-up to the benefits of open access.
Examples of the use of Creative Commons licences include the Open University’s OpenLearn initiative [15].
Indeed, the full extent and implications of the use of Creative Commons licences within HE and FE contexts within the UK will shortly be assessed as part of commissioned research by the JISC.
But, in a climate where we really need to know what we are signing up to, should we not be looking beyond the ideology of these licences and checking whether they are really fit for our purposes?
Are Creative Commons Licences Fit for Purpose?
Creative Commons actively encourages the sharing of educational material, with an ‘educational’ link [16] on their homepage through to the opportunity to search for material for commercial use and incorporation within other works, as well as to a licence.
This ‘standard licence’ is not specific for educational purposes and users can only choose, as in the case of the majority of Creative Commons licences, to make the content available either for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
Creative Commons licences do not specifically cater for educational purposes.
It is also worth noting that there is a significant difference between the information that is provided within the full-length licence in comparison to that which appears within the shortened code of Creative Commons licences.
Indeed, the significant ‘irrevocable’ and ‘worldwide’ terms which form part of the full licence, are absent from the shortened ‘commons deeds’ version of the licence.
This means that HE/FE institutions may not be aware that any content that they make available to the public under any of the Creative Commons licences, can be used by anyone, anywhere, for the full term of copyright and they do not retain the ability to retract the permission.
This does not, however, preclude them from ceasing to make the content available under these terms, but it will not include any content that has already been licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons licence.
Other instances that may encourage HE and FE institutions to think twice about using Creative Commons licences include: If the work includes third party rights for which the Higher or Further Education institution has not secured permission for them to then be disseminated under a CC licence.
This might include the use of photographs, text, images, etc., generated by third parties, or indeed images of third parties for which permission would need to be sought.
As an employee, unless there is an agreement with the employer to the contrary, the employer is likely to own the rights in the work created (as is the case with course material, research outputs, etc).
In this case, as the employee does not own the rights in the work that is produced, he or she will need to check with the institution that it is happy for it to be made available under a Creative Commons licence.
Reasons for refusal might include those that are ethical, political, financial or legal.
We are, of course, aware that in many institutions, custom and practice leaves such decisions to the employee.
The recent HEFCE Good Practice Guide [17], however, strongly encourages such institutions to assert ownership of copyright in e-learning materials, and such advice may well occasion changes in policy in the future.
The terms of the Creative Commons licence may cut across some of the activities for which an institution or department might normally charge, the business activities of the department or institution, or undermine existing licensing arrangements with third parties.
Creative Commons licences are global licences without providing any means to restrict the countries in which material may be used.
This is important if contractual agreements, relationships, political or ethical reasons preclude the release of certain types of learning material or research outputs in particular countries.
The department or institution may want more control over the context of use of the work and want to prevent any implied or direct endorsement.
This is not currently one of the areas which is covered by the licence.
It maybe important to know who accesses and uses the material that is generated, for evaluation, marketing and other in-house purposes.
The Creative Commons licences have no provision for user accountability, or tracing of usage.
There are also many instances where you cannot use TPMS (Technical Protection Measures) in conjunction with the use of Creative Commons licences, if TPMS undermine any of the provisions of the licences.
Thus, for example, restricting access to students within the institution is incompatible with a Creative Commons licence.
The Creative Commons licence does not cover database rights, yet much output from FE and HE institutions is protected by such rights.
Thus, even with a Creative Commons licence, users may not infringe any database rights.
It is, in any case, unclear if Creative Commons licences are valid in UK law, as they do not provide any ‘consideration’ or payment, and there is no ‘I agree’ button to accept.
Concluding Remarks The well-known JORUM service [18] decided not to use Creative Commons licences in the past because of some of the points made within this article.
So, are Creative Commons licences a panacea?
No.
Should we worry?
Probably not, but we need to be aware of the implications and limitations of using Creative Commons licences and remember that their use is only as good as staff awareness about copyright issues, rights management procedures and robust policies underpinning the operations of educational institutions.
HE and FE institutions need to be clear about their policies towards access and broader strategic and commercial goals, before committing themselves to the irrevocable terms of Creative Commons licences.
It might be advisable instead for institutions to explore the use of Creative Archive licences [5], which are a set of more restrictive licences, based upon the same premise as Creative Commons but with limits upon the use of content for educational and non-commercial purposes and restrictions relating to the territories in which they may be used.
AUTHORS’ NOTE: Ms Korn and Professor Oppenheim currently act as IPR consultants to JISC.
Nothing in this article should, however, be construed as representing JISC’s own opinions or policies.
References Creative Commons Web site http://creativecommons.org/ iCommons Web site http://www.creativecommons.com/ Science Commons Web site http://sciencecommons.org/ Patent Commons Web site http://www.patentcommons.org/ Creative Archive Web site http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/ Critical article of Creative Commons http://www.indicare.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=118 Microsoft Office plug-in http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=113B53DD-1CC0-4FBE-9E1D-B91D07C76504&displaylang=en/ Web site of Lawrence Lessig http://www.lessig.org/ Free Culture epublication by Lawrence Lessig http://free-culture.cc/ YouTube Web site http://www.youtube.com/ LACA submission to the All Parliamentary Internet Group enquiry into Digital Rights Management http://www.apig.org.uk/current-activities/apig-inquiry-into-digital-rights-management/apig-drm-written-evidence/LACA_APIG_response_FINAL_2.doc Full text of the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003, from the Web site of the Office for Public Sector Information http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032498.htm Wikipedia entry on copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft News item referencing Creative Commons licences upheld in Dutch and Spanish courts http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.6/ccdecisions Web site link to OpenLearn http://oci.open.ac.uk/background.html Web site link to the ‘education’ section of the Creative Commons Web site http://creativecommons.org/education/ HEFCE Good practice guide on Intellectual Property Rights in eLearning Programme http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2006/06_20/ JORUM Web site http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ Author Details Naomi Korn Copyright Consultant Email: naomi@naomikorn.com Web site: http://www.naomikorn.com Professor Charles Oppenheim Head of Department of Information Science, Loughborough University Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/people/coppenheim.html Return to top Article Title: “Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?
“ Author: Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/korn-oppenheim/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: E-learning and Disability in Higher Education Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: E-learning and Disability in Higher Education Buzz framework usability accessibility cataloguing multimedia e-learning research Citation BibTex RIS Simon Ball reviews a comprehensive discussion of e-learning and accessibility that gives support and guidance to effect good practice from individual to institutional level.
Jane Seale begins her book by explaining the reticence of e-learning practitioners to embrace accessibility concepts as if they were waiting 'for the magic fairy to miraculously transform all e-learning material with one wave of her magic wand'.
It is probably human nature that we would mostly prefer to be handed a ready-made meal than a lesson in farming, but we all know deep down that only the latter will lead to long-term success.
Seale sets about providing a very effective lesson in farming not a finished meal.
She then takes on this modified 'magic fairy' role by providing an engaging and easy-to-grasp discussion of the context of disability, accessibility and e-learning; a useful resource for e-learning practitioners in addressing the issues pertinent to their own context; and an overview of the political overtones and strategic efforts that are required if individual practitioners are to be successful in modifying their practice in the longer term.
Part 1: Contextualising the Scene In the first of the book's three major sections, Seale provides a background to the relationship between disability and Higher Education and, subsequently, e-learning.
While the legislative driver for accessibility is discussed, the feel of this section is more personal and role-oriented, including a section on technical guidelines that will be valuable to the more technically minded, but which does not spill over into other areas so as to deter the non-specialist.
This section also focuses upon the needs of the learner and the practitioner as partners in the process of creating an accessible e-learning experience.
Importantly, the author acknowledges very early on that 'just as technology on its own is not a panacea, neither is e-learning'.
Giving brief introductory reference to some of the aspects of e-learning that need to be accessible, she outlines that attention needs to be paid to courseware, library resources, text documents, presentations and multimedia.
Every teacher and lecturer in Higher Education will find at least some of their activities covered by this introduction, and by the encouraging tone of the text will feel compelled to read on, to find the lessons and tools needed to make their teaching more accessible.
As a further enticement, before leaving this section for the second and most voluminous section, Seale gives the reader an overview of existing guidelines relevant to accessible e-learning.
There is much debate about the questionable applicability of the widely known 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines' [1] to e-learning practice, although Seale does not dwell upon this, instead highlighting contexts in which they may still have the most usefulness.
She then introduces guidelines in other arenas that e-learning practitioners might draw upon in a variety of contexts, including disability, technology or media-specific guidelines, and those drawn up by individual organisations, companies or services, whose remit may in fact bear close resemblance to the situation of many an e-learning practitioner (including the standards and guidelines produced by BBC New Media to support its commitment to making its output as accessible as possible).
Part 2: Surveying the Scene For most readers this section will be both the most interesting and the most useful.
With the background and justification for accessibility having been covered in the earlier section, Seale gets to the heart of the matter from the off in Part 2, launching directly into a frequently omitted but most vital area of accessibility, namely 'The student's perspective'.
The provision of IT equipment and of assistive technology is discussed almost entirely through the voices of students in case studies before the somewhat controversial topic of 'non-electronic alternatives' is introduced; (i.e.
if a student requires a hard copy text rather than reading from the screen is it still e-learning?).
This then leads into possibly the most critical argument at present raging in the accessible e-learning arena, and one which resurfaces at intervals throughout the book: the tension between the desire to provide one single learning experience that is accessible to all learners, and to produce a range of materials and pathways, many of which present barriers to specific individuals but which, taken as a whole, allow all learners to seek a pathway that best fits their individual needs and learning style.
Entirely appropriately, this argument is at the forefront again in the following chapter subtitled 'The lecturer's perspective'.
Seale introduces the various sides of the debate as: Inclusive design: designing curricula that aim to include disabilities from the outset.
Universal instructional design: seven key principles that if observed allow access to all users, sometimes perceived as encouraging a 'one size fits all' approach, and sometimes as reflecting the need for a 'varied and flexible approach to teaching, exactly because no single method can support or provide appropriate challenges for all students'.
Holistic design: providing accessible learning experiences rather than necessarily accessible e-learning experiences.
She then trumps all three with 'proactive and flexible design' which 'involves thinking about the needs of students with disabilities at the beginning of the design process' and 'thinking of appropriate ways to offer equivalent and alternative access to the curriculum... which may or may not involve e-learning'.
This hybrid is designed to avoid frightening off academics who may be so concerned about doing the wrong thing that they take the perceived safer path of not doing anything at all.
Judging by the accessibility (in the non-disability-related sense of the word) of this book, I would argue she achieves this with considerable success.
'The learning technologist's perspective' discusses another hotly debated issue, this time the very fine and flexible lines between 'Universal design', 'Usability' and 'User-centred design'.
The chapter's real focus arrives subsequent to this, in the form of an overview of the use and relevance to the learning technologist of the plethora of freely available evaluation and repair tools.
If I have a single criticism of this book it would be the amount of space devoted to this topic which can best be summed up in the phrase 'there are many tools out there use them as part of a suite of testing but they are never a substitute for real user testing and relying entirely on the output of tools alone will land you in big trouble'.
By giving it so much prominence, Seale will perpetuate the importance given to such tools by a large (but thankfully decreasing) proportion of learning technologists, whereas they could be more usefully directed to other techniques for evaluating a resource's accessibility and perhaps a discussion of best practice in user testing.
By including a section devoted to 'The student support service perspective' Seale rightly acknowledges the vital role these staff play in the creation of accessible (e-)learning experiences.
Learning technologists and lecturers rarely have the expertise (or the time to devote to developing the expertise) in assistive technologies to understand fully the role they play in the learning experiences of the students who use them.
Emphasising the knowledge contained in these units (knowledge rarely given sufficient opportunity to become embedded across institutional practice) in terms of assessing the needs of learners for technological support or adaptation, making appropriate specialist equipment available, negotiating its interface with existing networks, virtual learning environments, library catalogues and so on, is a commendable feature of Seale's book that sets it apart from many others that have tried to cover similar ground.
If, after reading this book, one lecturer seeks timely input from the student support service at the stage of course design instead of expecting them to run around afterwards hurriedly designing and implementing adaptations, then Seale's effort will have been worthwhile for that alone.
Seale strikes another blow for the under-acknowledged by including a chapter examining 'The staff developer's perspective'.
Staff developers have possibly the most intriguing role in the creation of an accessible e-learning experience, because they rarely deal directly with students, and yet can have a major influence on the approach lecturers take in creating course materials.
In reminding staff developers of their responsibilities towards the creation of an accessible e-learning experience, Seale signposts a huge range of ready-made resources to aid them in their task.
This is the closest the 'magic fairy' gets to preparing a finished meal for her audience, but in this instance it can be justified by enticing diners into a restaurant they may otherwise not consider of relevance to them.
Seale describes how strategic partnerships need to be formed between staff developers, disability services and academic staff, and the 'development of partnerships with disabled advocates' a key feature of the Disability Equality Duty [2].
In the final paragraph of this chapter Seale says succinctly: 'Staff developers have a great deal of potential to make a positive impact on the accessibility practices of different stakeholders within an institution; they tend, however, not to be targeted by accessibility related literature... it is time, however, that their perspectives and needs were taken into account'.
This is a need that TechDis [3], the service I work for, has been trying to fulfil for a number of years, and as we are possibly the only major organisation supporting the accessibility-related needs of staff developers in UK Higher Education, I applaud Seale's attempt to bring this issue to a wider audience.
The second part of the book is concluded with a section that is arguably the most vital, although possibly the one whose intended audience, namely senior managers, are least likely to read the book.
The author covers issues that any institution's senior management will need to grapple with over the coming months and years, namely the development of accessibility procurement procedures and the development of an institutional accessibility policy (now of course a legal requirement under the Disability Equality Duty).
Seale strips it down to basics, answering first 'what do we mean by an accessibility policy' and then 'what should be included in an accessibility policy' before offering guidance on 'developing and implementing accessibility policies'.
In many senses this is the most direct chapter of the book, with the least discussion and rationale and a sharp focus upon tasks and requirements.
However, given that the intended audience for this chapter is unlikely to read the book directly (if they do they need a 'quick hit' with the key information, which is exactly what this chapter delivers) this information may in fact be taken up by others to influence policy makers, and therefore the simple straightforward approach will be invaluable.
Part 3: Conceptualising the Scene The final of the book's main sections could also be subtitled 'First Steps to Effecting Change'.
The first chapter spotlights 'Institutional responses to accessibility' and introduces framework suggestions to guide institutional change.
While avoiding getting bogged down in legislative requirements, the author provides a sprinkling of appropriate international case law while discussing the roles of various contributors to the process of change, including students, learning technologists, accessibility consultants, disability advocates and researchers.
This chapter is perhaps disappointing in its overtly theoretical stance; however, when taken in conjunction with the subsequent chapter, the two halves make a satisfactory whole.
The focus of the second chapter 'Individual responses to accessibility' is much more oriented to practicality and pragmatism than its predecessor.
A discussion of Activity Theory leads into an application of its concepts to accessibility and e-learning.
Seale acknowledges that 'auditing e-learning is one of the most difficult actions', but dives headlong into attempting to make sense of the process for the reader to undertake.
By acknowledging the myriad contradictions in the process, Seale legitimises the reader in undertaking a task that can never be faultless and seamless, and gives credibility to efforts towards achieving accessibility in this way, however imperfectly achieved.
Once again, the book is worth its production costs for this alone.
The penultimate section of the book is perhaps the most wildly hopeful, in that it postulates the result of an idealistic partnership between all of the key players in the process of creating accessible e-learning.
Achieving any kind of valuable dialogue between, for example, senior managers, staff developers, support services, learning technologists, lecturers and students is going to be a very tall order for any reader to achieve.
However, as an aspiration it is vital, and there are certainly institutions in the UK which have achieved these dialogues and moved great strides forward in their quest for accessible (e-)learning.
Seale does indeed recognise the magnitude of this task, and provides an overview of boundaries and brokers, before introducing the author's own concept of 'boundary practices' as a potentially useful tool to facilitate these discussions.
Conclusions Seale's conclusion is a vehicle by which the 'Rainbow Bridge' metaphor is introduced.
This is a metaphor by which the various stakeholder groups in the process of creating accessible e-learning provide linkages between partial and optimal levels of accessibility, between the real world and the ideal world, between 'earth' and 'heaven', if you will.
This metaphor is a commendable platform on which to build the interweaving facets of an optimally accessible e-learning experience, extending perfectly as it does into the different 'colours' of the intermediaries in the process, and the 'pot of gold' of optimal accessibility.
The author then moves on to discuss useful models that may be applied to this arena, before drawing her own conclusions.
As she rightly states, practitioners have been drawn by the focus on standards and guidelines into 'thinking that their objective is to comply with rules', whereas their objective should of course 'be to address the needs of students'.
Seale hopes this book will 'expand thinking beyond that of how to comply with rules, towards how to meet the needs of students with disabilities, within context'.
She also hopes that the book will 'facilitate interaction and discussion between the different stakeholders of accessible e-learning' to develop and progress beyond the actions of individual practitioners or stakeholders alone.
It is my opinion that this book, if read by the right people in the right positions across the UK Higher Education sector, will not only help to achieve those goals, but, further, will move us wholesale towards a learning experience that is more optimally accessible for everyone who wishes to access it, and built upon a foundation of research-supported best practice in teaching and learning.
If you are a member of any of the stakeholder groups mentioned in this review, I would urge you to acquire a copy of this book.
It could be a life-changing decision, if not for you directly, then for the lives of those students whose learning experiences will become more accessible as a result of changes in your approach.
In my role helping the UK Higher Education sector uncover, develop and build upon best practice in inclusive learning and teaching, Jane Seale's book has provided a potent and indispensable manual for which I am very grateful.
References W3C (1999) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ accessed 14 February 2007 Disability Equality Duty (2006) http://www.dotheduty.org accessed 14 February 2007 TechDis, a JISC Advisory Service http://www.techdis.ac.uk accessed 14 February 2007 Author Details Simon Ball Senior Advisor TechDis Email: simon@techdis.ac.uk Web site: http://www.techdis.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "E-Learning and Disability in Higher Education: Accessibility Research and Practice" Author: Simon Ball Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/ball-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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National Library Goes Local Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines National Library Goes Local Buzz video licence research Citation BibTex RIS Stephanie Kenna and Sue Cook tell the story behind the British Library's online training package for public library staff.
In response to a challenge from the Society of Chief Librarians, the British Library has launched an online training package [1] to its services and the wealth of information in its collections for the benefit of staff in public libraries and their users.
In this article we describe how the training package was conceived and created, how it is being rolled out and evaluated, and our plans for future developments.
The Challenge Improving services and making our collections visible and accessible to all are key objectives for libraries in all sectors.
So, when in December 2001 Martin Molloy, then Chair of the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL), challenged the British Library (BL) to reveal the depth and breadth of its collections and services to public library staff and to users of public libraries, the British Library's Co-operation and Partnership Programme (CPP) was keen to respond.
The CPP was originally set up in 1999 to promote collaborative working and to test different models for collaborative collection development and management as well as for resource discovery.
CPP has moved away from project-based funding to delivering a targeted programme in support of the BL's chosen stakeholders: the researcher, the general public, business and the learner.
CPP was beginning to develop new partnerships, especially with public libraries and other bodies in the regions to improve access to BL collections and services and to deliver them alongside local and regional resources, underpinning local and regional provision.
This was a perfect fit.
The support of the SCL executive was central to the project.
Members acted as a sounding board for our ideas and committed to piloting the training package and rolling it out across the SCL membership.
The Solution We considered various methods of delivery.
Who would lead the project?
There was a danger that a BL-led approach might be regarded as patronising or not relevant to the public library sector.
Moreover it would not be evidence-based.
We decided instead to offer a personal career development opportunity to someone currently working in a public library, someone with both front-line and middle management experience.
The invitation was to spend a total of eight weeks at the BL, to immerse him/herself in the Library and to highlight those collections and services likely to be most relevant in a public library context.
We felt this would make the end-product more credible to the intended audience as well as offering an opportunity for BL colleagues to learn more about the public library world.
What exactly would the product be?
A folder of leaflets would become out of date and might end up unused and forgotten in a drawer.
Training courses or visits would be resource intensive for the BL while public libraries would find it difficult to release staff.
The impact would be limited.
The BL was however increasingly moving to Web-based delivery and we were keen to build on the People's Network and on European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) training which all public library staff have undergone.
We wanted to offer a new and interesting learning experience which would serve to boost confidence in Web site navigation.
We therefore proposed a Web-based tool and positioned it as part of continuing professional development.
The candidate's brief was to: visit key staff across the Boston Spa, Colindale and St Pancras sites review BL leaflet and Web information and evaluate its usefulness for inclusion in the training package identify gaps and draft new material propose a structure which could be translated into a Web package consider the relative merits of various Web sites as the host for the finished product outline proposals for promotion of the training package recommend new ways BL and public libraries could work together to improve the provision of resources and services to end users We were just beginning to explore the potential for partnership working with Leeds Library and Information Service the public library authority for the Boston Spa area and were delighted when Sue Cook agreed to join us from Leeds early in 2003.
She takes up the story.
The Designer's Tale When I first read the e-mail outlining the project I was intrigued.
Like many public library colleagues, I suspect, I still harboured vague notions of our national library as a remote institution, featherbedded from the day to day realities of performance targets and budgetary concerns, peopled by an elite whose only point of contact with my sector was in supplying the odd book or photocopied article through the interloan scheme.
Meeting the BL staff working on the project for the first time I began to revise my opinions.
The Library, they assured me, had undergone a sea change but even so I was still more than a little taken aback when I was parachuted into an organisation that struck me as forward-looking and ready to employ the latest technology to deliver its services worldwide.
I was given free licence to roam, access to a raft of strategic plans and relevant documents and generous amounts of time with a wide range of staff who were eager to share their enthusiasm for their Library and its collections and were equally keen to engage with and learn about libraries in the public sector.
Also extremely useful was all the BL promotional literature and the time to browse the Web site to assess its relevance to the training programme content.
I press-ganged four colleagues, with widely disparate IT skills and interest in accessing information electronically into assisting with my assessment of the BL Web site.
On observing them, I noticed they all strayed off into other areas as individual items on the page caught their interest.
At that stage no decision had been taken as to which Web site would host the final product (both CILIP and SCL were close contenders); but my 'guinea pigs' had unconsciously demonstrated that direct access to BL's main Web site content was essential if we were to interest people and encourage them to explore beyond the limits of the training package.
I also came to the conclusion that given the high quality of material in print format and the ongoing upgrading of the Web site, no re-drafting was required.
Supplied with public awareness surveys undertaken by the Library, I adapted them for use with volunteers from Leeds and Derbyshire public libraries.
These were drawn from all levels of their organisation, from chief officer down, to ensure a balanced view was obtained.
I was delighted to have more than 90% of the forms returned.
They made interesting reading.
Whilst 85% of respondents considered the British Library key to their work, as one would suppose, 72% had never visited any of the three sites.
I took this as further evidence of the relevance and timeliness of the project.
The survey results informed what was ultimately included in the package in that we focused on those areas less familiar to respondents.
By the halfway stage I realised I had not yet considered how I would structure and present the course.
Soft market testing, (also known as bothering friends and acquaintances across the profession), gave no clear steer as everyone seemed to have different learning preferences.
It was here the survey results were helpful once again.
If 72% of respondents had never visited the BL, it was high time they did, and in the least expensive and most time-efficient way possible, i.e.
virtually.
The outcomes we wished to see were also clear: we hoped public library staff would become enthusiastic and knowledgeable advocates for the Library and would increasingly choose to use the Web site as a resource; that independent learners would see the Web site as a means to acquire IT skills; that other virtual visitors would be advised on membership requirements beforehand and be saved unnecessary trips to St Pancras; and that best use would be made of the Boston Spa reading room.
Once I had established the concept, the next step was to script and storyboard.
I prepared an initial draft which was presented to SCL and which was adjudged to have exceeded expectations.
Another month saw the final draft completed and the start of discussions with the BL Web team about converting it into electronic format.
We were all aware that what we had created could be no more than a taster.
I likened it to trying to fit a Steinway grand piano into a shoebox; a lot had to be omitted and what was included barely does justice to the original.
Our aims, however, were clear.
The tour, as it was now termed, had to be flexible so staff could break off and return to it as their workload demanded and should take no longer than three hours to work through.
It needed a high visual content to support the concept of making a visit which is why it opens with a video sequence about the Library and its services.
Nor did it need to be overly academic in its approach.
In order to add a lighter touch, therefore, I finished each section with an unexpected fact or two that I had unearthed during my research.
Conclusion: Outcomes Sue Cook's continued involvement and encouragement were critical in enabling us to turn the concept into reality as were the technical skills of the Library's Web Services team.
We updated an existing introductory video, created some 45 Web pages, added approximately 110 images and created some 100 links to the main BL Web pages.
By January 2004 we felt ready for public library staff in Leeds and Derbyshire to test it for us.
The response was positive and the feedback constructive and, after only a few minor tweaks, we finally went live with a launch at the June meeting of the SCL Executive.
Since then SCL members have been rolling out the tour nationally.
It would be impossible to take every librarian on a physical tour of the British Library, but without this insight local library users would be missing out on the real treasures housed there.
This e learning package offers the next best thing.
It is packed with information broken down into manageable chunks and the learner can really get inside the British Library and all its outlets.
While many of us know a bit, this package opens up the British Library in detail for the first time.
It is a joy to work through the package and the real winners are local people in every library service up and down the land as they will have access to much better informed staff who can guide them to the nation's resources.
Catherine Blanshard, Chair of SCL The tour includes a workbook so individual progress through the site can be recorded and also a feedback form [2] which we encourage all visitors to the virtual tour to complete.
We do not intend this to be a static site but trust that it will continue to evolve in response both to feedback and the development of new BL products and services.
We would also like to add case studies to illustrate how it has benefited staff in public libraries and, in particular, their users.
Hits on the tour home page now average 1,000 per month and we are beginning to evaluate the impact the tour has had through a mystery shopping exercise.
We are also conducting a repeat of the original awareness survey in some of the pilot libraries.
Looking to the future, we are exploring the potential for re-purposing the tour for other library sectors and for general professional training.
As for Sue Cook, the personal development opportunity led to a move to the senior post of City Wide Services Manager in Manchester Library and Information Service.
References The British Library: a tour for public library staff: http://www.bl.uk/training_package/introduction.html The British Library: public libraries training package feedback form and sample of feedback from visitors Author Details Sue Cook City Wide Services Manager Manchester Library and Information Service Email: S.Cook2@notes.manchester.gov.uk Web site: http://www.manchester.gov.uk Stephanie Kenna Manager, Regional and Library Programmes (formerly Manager of the Co-operation and Partnership Programme) The British Library Email: stephanie.kenna@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk Return to top Article Title: "National Library Goes Local" Author: Sue Cook and Stephanie Kenna Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/cook-kenna/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ECDL2004: 4th International Web Archiving Workshop, September 2004 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ECDL2004: 4th International Web Archiving Workshop, September 2004 Buzz data software framework api archives metadata tagging identifier preservation cataloguing multimedia visualisation heritrix url taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reports on the 4th International Web Archiving Workshop held at the University of Bath in September as part of ECDL 2004.
An annual Web archiving workshop has been held in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) since the 5th conference, held in September 2001 [1].
The University of Bath, UK hosted the 4th workshop in the series now renamed the International Web Archiving Workshop on 16 September 2004 [2].
Julien Masanès of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) welcomed around 60 delegates to Bath to listen to ten presentations and hoped that these would prompt much useful discussion.
Technologies Julien Masanès himself gave the first presentation, on the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) [3].
The objectives of the consortium were primarily practical, organised into research projects and working groups.
The consortium was co-ordinated by the BnF; members currently included the Internet Archive and eleven national libraries from Europe, North America and Australia.
There were six working groups.
The 'framework' working group was investigating the technical basis of Web archiving, including architectural designs, API (application programming interface) specifications, exchange formats, etc.
This group would be producing a general overview document, a new version of the Internet Archive's ARC storage format, and a metadata specification that could be used to document the context of Web resources.
The 'metrics and testbeds' group had already published two reports [4] [5], both focused on the practical issue of developing a test bed for Web crawlers.
The 'Deep Web' group was focusing on developing tools for deposit-driven Web archiving and the capture of Web content inaccessible to crawlers.
The 'researchers requirements' working group was working with the potential users of Web archives to help define a common vision on, for example, selection criteria, update frequencies and associated documentation.
Other working groups covered 'access tools' and 'content management.'
In addition to the working groups, IIPC also included some projects, e.g.
the development of the open-source Heritrix crawler and some 'smart modules' for the characterisation of Web sites or for citation linking.
Gordon Mohr of the Internet Archive then gave an introduction to the Heritrix crawler [6].
He explained that while the Internet Archive had extremely large collections (around 40 billion resources, 400+ terabytes), the vast majority of this data had come from Alexa Internet, and the archive had no control over the proprietary crawlers that were being used.
With the archive itself doing some crawling e.g.
on behalf of the Library of Congress or the UK National Archives it had a requirement for an open-source, extensible, Web scale, archival quality crawler.
Use cases were developed for broad, focused, continuous and experimental crawling and a highly modular program was developed and released in 2004.
From that year the program had been used for all crawling done by the Internet Archive.
The crawler has a Web interface and is highly configurable, making it particularly good for focused or experimental crawls.
The discussion raised the question of scalability and the need for crawlers to interface with other systems, e.g.
the PANDAS archive management software.
Keeping to the technical theme, Younès Hafri of the Ecole Polytechnique de Nantes and the French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) then introduced a new distributed crawler system called Dominos.
This system had been developed in the context of a research programme investigating the possibility of extending the legal deposit law in France to cover the Web.
Within this, the INA were responsible for looking at the feasibility of collecting and managing multimedia resources.
An essential requirement for this is the ability to crawl a large number of Web resources in the fastest possible time.
Hafri argued that such large-scale crawlers needed to be flexible, have high performance, be tolerant of faults, e.g.
in network and server behaviour, and to be configurable and easy to maintain.
The Dominos system was specifically designed to maintain very high download rates, e.g.
storing most data in memory rather than on disks and delegating tasks to reduce the number of active processes in the system.
A fuller technical description of the Dominos system is available elsewhere [7].
Identifying Web pages that have been changed are an important way of avoiding the repeated harvesting of Web pages.
Lars Clausen of the State and University Library in Århus introduced a survey of the use in the Danish Web domain of two indicators of change available in the HTTP header, the datestamp and etag [8].
A survey of the front pages of the Danish domain was used to investigate the reliability and usefulness of the indicators, both individually and in combination.
The study discovered that in this particular dataset, the etag, though often missing, was a more reliable indicator of change than the datestamp.
Also where the etag was missing, the datestamp was not to be trusted.
The initial conclusion was that the indicators were perhaps more reliable than had previously been thought, although this may have been a reflection of the unrepresentative nature of the dataset.
In any case, more research into this is required.
Jose Coch of Lingway gave a presentation on a French Ministry of Research-funded project called WATSON (Web: analyse de textes, sélection et outils nouveaux).
This used language-engineering techniques for supporting decisions on measuring the 'importance' of sites, which was especially significant for the deep Web problem.
The approach was broadly similar to Google's PageRank, and correlated reasonably well with manual assessments made by librarians, with some specific exceptions.
The aim was to develop tools that would be able to identify less important sites, to help the librarian select which ones should be collected, and ultimately to help the user of the archived site.
Coch described the main components of the system, which included modules for site characterisation, the logical structuring of Web sites, the recognition of named entities (persons, organisations, places and dates), the semantic markup of sentences, and morphological tagging.
The resulting summaries can be used to support the manual evaluation of sites and provide information to future researchers.
In the final presentation of the technologies session, Niels H. Christensen of the Royal Library of Denmark introduced the potential of format registries for Web archiving.
He started by noting that Web archives are unable to control what exact formats they collect, and that access would depend on relating objects to the correct application.
Format registries would need to include ways of finding out what a particular format was and give access to viewers and converters.
Current initiatives included the Global Digital Format Registry [9] and the UK National Archives PRONOM service [10].
The lively discussion that followed this presentation demonstrated the current perceived importance of format registries, although concerns were raised about embedded formats and intellectual property rights.
Experiences After lunch, Yan Hongfei of Peking University, Beijing, gave the first presentation in the case studies session.
He gave an overview of Web archiving developments in China and in particular the Web Infomall Project, which has been collecting Chinese Web pages on a regular basis since 2002.
The project uses a configurable crawler program called Tianwang to collect pages on an incremental basis, only downloading pages that are new or modified.
For storage, the Web Infomall uses the Tianwang storage format, which includes the content and some basic metadata, e.g.
the URL, date of download and IP address.
Additional metadata is generated at the time of capture, e.g.
the last modified date, the content type of the page, character encoding and language, and a MD5 signature.
Each downloaded page is assigned a unique identifier and is made freely available through the Web Infomall site [11].
Paul Koerbin of the National Library of Australia (NLA) then gave an introduction to the latest developments with the PANDORA Web archive [12].
He started by noting that PANDORA had always been a pragmatic and practical initiative and that it was now seen as part of the routine work of the national library and its partners.
The initiative is selective in what it collects and negotiates permissions with the site owners.
The collection process involves a great deal of manual quality assurance, which adds considerable value but is extremely labour intensive.
The archive in August 2004 had around 6,500 titles, with 21 million files, comprising 680 Gigabytes for the display copies only.
For management, the NLA had developed and continued to enhance the PANDAS (PANDORA Digital Archiving System) workflow management system [13].
This is used to collect and store administrative metadata, initiate the harvesting and quality assurance processes, and to prepare resources for display.
The system currently works with the HTtrack crawler, but will be moving to include Heritrix in the future.
Some key Web archiving processes still remain outside the scope of PANDAS, e.g.
the Web site selection process and the generation of descriptive metadata.
For preservation, PANDORA keep a number of master copies including a 'preservation master' which is not touched at all which are stored on tape in the NLA's Digital Object Storage System.
Koerbin noted that the NLA remained committed to the selective approach, although there was a realisation of the future need to scale up, for better ways of identifying and selecting candidate sites.
There was also a perceived need to develop PANDAS further, e.g.
to cope with the automatic ingest of large volumes of Web data, to comply with standards like those being developed by the IIPC, and to operate with complete domain harvesting approaches.
The current priority was to make the software more stable and open source, so that development effort could be shared with others.
Alenka Kavcic-Colic of the National and University Library of Slovenia introduced a project that was experimenting with collecting the Slovenian Web.
The project started in 2002 and was a co-operation between the National and University Library and the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana.
The project used crawler programs to harvest the Slovenian Web domain, those sites physically located in Slovenia, and those that used the Slovenian language or included topics relevant to Slovenia.
Some classes of document, e.g.
journals and maps, were enhanced by the creation of descriptive metadata and can be found through the library's catalogue.
The Jožef Stefan Institute had focused on using data mining techniques like link analysis, named entity extraction, text categorisation, and context visualisation, to support end-user access.
The discussion after the presentation concentrated on the difficulties of defining national domains for Web harvesting.
This raised the important issue of co-ordination between national initiatives and the need for standardised mechanisms to support discovery and the exchange of information between archives.
Jared A. Lyle of the University of Michigan gave the final presentation on approaches to appraising the Web.
Lyle was interested in whether sampling techniques developed by archivists in the paper era could be used for the selection of Web sites.
After a brief introduction to archival appraisal and its use in the twentieth century, Lyle noted that in the digital age, with falling storage costs, archives were perhaps becoming less selective.
In the 1970s and 1980s, archivists widely used sampling as a way of reducing the bulk of some classes of paper-based record while maintaining a representative amount for future use.
The types of sampling technique used included purposive (i.e.
those records judged to be of lasting value), systematic, random, that based on certain physical characteristics, or mixed mode.
Some experiments had been done with sampling on 4 million pages captured from the University of Michigan's Web domain (umich.edu).
The first approach tried to apply purposive sampling, through identifying pages with high levels of content, large file sizes or short URLs, but the results were unsatisfactory.
Further approaches used pure random sampling, the results of which are not representative, although Lyle thought it might have uses in selecting some particular types of page, e.g.
personal student pages.
The conclusions were that sampling is cheaper than other approaches, can help reduce redundancy, may be less biased, but will definitely not solve all selection problems.
The discussion afterwards revealed a strong scepticism about the use of sampling techniques, although it was acknowledged that Web archiving initiatives already do some ad hoc sampling, e.g.
based on the technical limitations of crawler programs.
The final discussion mostly concerned the feasibility (or wisdom) of keeping all human knowledge.
Differing opinions were offered, but several delegates noted that collecting and preserving the Web represented a much smaller task at least in storage terms than, for example, television and radio broadcasts.
Summing Up As in past years, the International Web Archiving Workshop was a useful forum for those involved or interested in Web archiving initiatives to gather together to hear about new technologies and projects, and to discuss some key issues.
In a previous workshop report, I noted a move away from talk about collection strategies and crawler technologies towards a better consideration of user needs and access requirements [14].
The main 'theme' of the 2004 workshop seemed to be co-operation between Web archives, both in terms of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, but also more widely.
ECDL 2005 will be held next September in Vienna, Austria [15], so it is hoped that IWAW will return there so that we can continue the discussion.
The full text of all presented papers will be available from the IWAW Web pages in late 2004.
References International Web Archiving Workshops.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/ 4th International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW04).
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.iwaw.net/04/ International Internet Preservation Consortium.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.netpreserve.org/ Boyko, A.
(2004).
Test bed taxonomy for crawler, v. 1.0. International Internet Preservation Consortium, 20 July.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.netpreserve.org/publications/iipc-r-002.pdf Marill, J., Boyko, A., & Ashenfelder, M. (2004).
Web harvesting survey, v. 1. International Internet Preservation Consortium, 20 July.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.netpreserve.org/publications/iipc-r-001.pdf Heritrix crawler.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://crawler.archive.org/ Hafri, Y., & Djeraba, C. (2004).
"High performance crawling system."
In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, New York, USA, 15-16 October 2004, New York: ACM Press, pp.
299-306.
Clausen, L. (2004).
"Concerning etags and datestamps."
State and University Library, Århus and Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark, July.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.netarchive.dk/website/publications/Etags-2004.pdf Global Digital Format Registry.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr/ The National Archives, PRONOM.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/ Web Infomall.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.infomall.cn/index-eng.htm PANDORA Archive.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://pandora.nla.gov.au/ PANDORA Digital Archiving System (PANDAS).
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pandas.html Day, M. (2003).
"3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving."
Ariadne, 37.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/ecdl-web-archiving-rpt/ ECDL 2005, Vienna, Austria, 18-23 September 2005.
Retrieved 29 October 2004 from http://www.ecdl2005.org/ Author Details Michael Day UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The 4th International Web Archiving Workshop" Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 30-October-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 41 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/ecdl-web-archiving-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The 2008 Mashed Museum Day and UK Museums on the Web Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The 2008 Mashed Museum Day and UK Museums on the Web Conference Buzz data rdf framework api database rss xml infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation accessibility vocabularies blog repositories copyright video flickr cataloguing visualisation gis aggregation syndication ontologies csv exif twitter rdfa ict foi research Citation BibTex RIS Mia Ridge reports on the Mashed Museum day and the Museums Computer Group UK Museums on the Web Conference, held at the University of Leicester in June 2008.
Following the success of the inaugural event last year [1], the Mashed Museum day was again held the day before the Museums Computer Group UK Museums on the Web Conference.
The theme of the conference was 'connecting collections online', and the Mashed Museum day was a chance for museum ICT staff to put this into practice.
The Mashed Museum Day Earlier this year I received an email that read: You are invited to a day of coding, thinking and idea sharing with a select group of museum colleagues.
Mashed Museum 2008 will be a day of free-form thinking and doing with only enough structure to make sure we actually get something out of the (considerable) collective brainpower in the room.
A few weeks later, a small group of people who work in museum or cultural heritage ICT met at the University of Leicester to spend a day prototyping and using lightweight application development tools and 'Web services to experiment with museum data in innovative ways.
Delegates included 'Web and database programmers, academics and digital media mavens' * from a range of museums, universities, and from the commercial sector (with the occasional contribution from international colleagues who were watching the live video feed, or following the twitter conversations).
As many of us work in relative isolation, the company of our peers can be as inspiring as it is informative.
We work closely with cultural heritage data and often have a good understanding of those who use our content, but we rarely have time to experiment, to update our skills, or to try new tools, programming frameworks or development methodologies.
The Mashed Museum day was an invaluable chance to work on interesting projects in the company of our peers.
We experimented with a variety of technologies and data sources, including MIT Simile, Yahoo!
Pipes, Freebase, Wikipedia, IBM's Many Eyes, Yahoo!
's term extraction service, Poly9, OpenCalais, FireEagle, twitter, PicLens, RSS ('really simple syndication' or 'RDF site summary'), XML, unofficial or internal museum APIs (application programming interfaces) and an aggregated feed of screen-scraped museum collection items [2].
These tools were variously used to create maps, timelines, geo-located RSS feeds, games, several new ways of browsing and visualising museum data and the links between individual records, and to add meaning and layers of metadata to existing data.
These were quite impressive results, but perhaps the most important outcome of the day was the range of experimentation, and the conversations and cooperation between participants.
As with last year's 'mashed museum' event, the lack of reusable data with clear use and rights statements was an issue.
However, progress has been made since last year, though some supplied data sources could not be used outside the experimental day itself.
Mike Ellis, the organiser of the day in conjunction with Ross Parry, has made a ten-minute video in which some participants demonstrate and explain their experiments [3].
You can also find blog posts, images and videos from various attendees by searching the Web for the tag 'ukmw08'.
UK Museums on the Web: Connecting Collections Online This year's UK Museums on the Web conference was concerned with questions of 'how (and why) should museums connect their online collections' [4].
The issue was tackled by speakers from within and outside the museum sector, by practitioners and theorists and by representatives of largeand small-scale projects.
Keynote Speech: Tom Loosemore: The Future of Public Service Content Tom Loosemore of Ofcom gave the keynote speech.
It was bound to be of interest, as Ofcom, the 'independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries', had recently caused a stir in the digital cultural heritage world for its assessment of the extent to which public sector Web sites delivered on 'public service purposes and characteristics' in its review of public service broadcasting, entitled The Digital Opportunity [5].
He began by asking, 'how many of you are on the main board of your institution?'.
He sees the Internet as a platform for public service and enlightenment and would like to see museums contribute more.
However, the crucial missing link between being able to realise the potential of museums and the cultural sector in public service broadcasting is the lack of leadership and vision, and the lack of recognition of the potential of the Web by organisational heads.
Later, in the discussion after the first session, he stated that, 'letting go [of data] is how you win, but it's a profound challenge to institutions and their desire to maintain authority'.
He discussed the BBC's 15 'Web Principles [6], and urged delegates to think about the 'native opportunities' that could only happen on the Internet.
How could they help their institution achieve its purpose?
He talked about the importance of 'measuring enlightenment' and of providing real evidence for funders of the value of online material.
If value is defined as 'reach multiplied by quality', how do you measure quality?
He discussed the use of the 'net promoter' method at the BBC.
e discussed the use of the 'net promoter' [7] method at the BBC.
Overall, his keynote speech was a great start to the conference and provided an interesting perspective from outside the museum sector.
One might question the applicability of a broadcast model in a 'participatory' online environment, and look for a version of the 'net promoter' model that works with extremely niche audiences, but he left the audience with some important challenges: 'how do you take the opportunity to digitise your collections and reach a whole new audience?'
'How can you make better use of cultural objects that were previously constrained by physicality?'.
Lee Iverson: How Does the Web Connect Content?
Lee Iverson of the University of British Columbia framed his talk as 'semantic pragmatics' the what, how and why of semantic technologies for museums.
He said that museums have a significant opportunity to push things forward, but they must understand the potential and limitations of the environment.
Museums can be an order of magnitude better if they can federate and aggregate content.
He discussed the benefits of connecting between museums, and from museums to outside the sector.
His steps for becoming connected were summarised as: expose your own data from behind presentation layers; find other data; integrate with that other data, and engage with users.
He provided an overview of 'the pragmatics of standards' that could be summarised as 'just do it' make agreements, get the project to work, and then engage in the standardisation process.
He also discussed the practical differences between XML, RDF (Resource Description Framework), and RDFa (Resource Description Framework attributes).
His advice, 'ignore the term "ontology" it's just a way of talking about a vocabulary' is extremely useful because connected collection projects often struggle with the issue of ontologies.
Paul Marty: Engaging Audiences by Connecting to Collections Online Paul Marty of Florida State University asked, 'What does it mean to say x% of your collection is online?
For whom is it useful?'.
He said that research shows audiences want engagement, and that there is a virtuous circle between physical museum visits and Web site visits.
He believes museums should not just give the general public a list of collection items but rather 'give them a way to engage'.
It's not without challenges 'engaging a community around a collection is harder than providing access to data about a collection'.
Paul expanded on some of his points in the discussion, and some of the audience may have been relieved to hear that the US and UK museum sectors have made some of the same mistakes with the digitisation of collections and the production of Web sites that do not have reusable data.
Bridget McKenzie: Introduction to Sector-wide Initiatives Session Bridget McKenzie of Flow Associates discussed the need for gentleness when working with 'bottom-up' or experimental approaches in the cultural heritage sector, the role of institutional constraints, and the value in building on the emerging framework of the Web.
She said that people are more likely to be engaged if they feel they can shape something or make a personal connection through it.
She suggested that 'critical mass' in digital collections really means 'contextual mass' the potential to create new contexts for interpretation by combining collections.
In an interesting concurrence with Ross Parry's earlier musings about whether museums would be different if they were built today, she asked whether the frame of 'the museum' makes sense anymore, particularly on the Web.
What are our responsibilities when we collaborate?
If the sector does not provide these contextual spaces or masses, are we missing the chance to share expertise in meaningful ways?
She pointed out that it is easy to revert to the ways in which previous projects have been delivered, especially in a sector where funding plans do not allow for iterative, new and emergent technologies.
She concluded that hearing from two emergent projects in the presentations that followed is a step towards sharing learning and resolving current questions.
Carolyn Royston & Richard Morgan: The National Museums Online Learning Project Carolyn introduced the The National Museums Online Learning Project (NMOLP), a partnership designed to increase use of the digital collections of nine museums.
She focused on the partnership issues involved, describing the reality as 'like herding cats'.
She found that partnership issues are not necessarily built into the project plan but they had to be addressed in order to avoid problems later in project.
The project focussed on developing a common vision and a set of principles for working together.
The project also worked to identify the things uniquely achievable through partnership, the barriers to success, and the types of content or functionality that added value for users.
She identified three levels of 'barriers to success': the new undertaking of working in a collaborative inter-museum way (a first for those partners); the organisational issues working inter-departmentally with learning, Web, IT, etc.
specialists who were not used to working together; and the personal issues around challenges to people's identities as specialists with particular roles.
The challenges specific to the project deliverables included: creating meaningful collection links; sending people to collections sites while knowing that content they would find there was not written for those audiences; providing support for pupils when searching collections; and creating sustainable content authoring tools and processes.
Other issues included the question of how individual museums and the partnership would build and sustain the Creative Journeys (user-generated content) communities; the challenge to curatorial authority and reputation; working models to deal with the messiness and complexity around new ways of communicating and using collections; and copyright and moderation issues.
Richard discussed the technologies used in the project and the ways in which they could be deployed to maximise flexibility and encourage reuse.
A federated search that could be deployed across the partner sites was required and is being implemented as part of the project, though not originally part of the project plan.
The project has been designed so that the back-end is decoupled from the front-end applications.
RSS feeds are used to syndicate user interactions with the collections.
They have used lightweight solutions for 'rapid (and reliable) application development'.
Jeremy Ottevanger: The European Digital Library Jeremy Ottevanger of the Museum of London provided some background on his involvement with the European Digital Library (also called 'Europeana') and his hopes and concerns for the project.
The aim of the EDL is to provide 'cross-domain access to Europe's cultural heritage', as 'our content is more valuable together than scattered around'.
The prototype will launch in November 2008, but the project still does not have enough members from the UK, and very few museums; Jeremy was interested to know why that is.
Unfortunately the project will not provide an API or integrate user-generated content in the first iteration, however the interface may appear in three or four major languages and some item metadata may be multilingual.
The Europeana site will direct visitors to the original records on the contributing institutions' sites which should assuage fears about reduced visitor numbers, and there are many other benefits for participating institutions.
Discussion Some participants in the discussion raised concerns about the requirement to implement an OAI repository to contribute to sector-wide projects, suggesting there is a need for more information about the ability of existing OAI projects to ingest data in a variety of common formats.
The phrase 'aggregation fatigue' was another response to the presentations.
It was suggested that museums could build APIs into their collections so their data could be used in projects without placing any further requirements on the museum when engaging in new partnerships.
This may not work for smaller museums, but a combination of museum APIs and the ability of museums without APIs to contribute records to shared repositories might provide a workable solution allowing museum data to be reused in any number of projects or initiatives.
George Oates: Sharing Museum Collections through Flickr George Oates of Flickr introduced the Flickr Commons [8] Project.
The project began when the Library of Congress, which has over 1 million digitised photos, was thinking about how to engage with Web 2.0 and approached Flickr.
What are the advantages of Flickr?
It's 'a great place to be a photo'.
Flickr is designed specifically to search and browse photographs, supports interfaces in eight languages, has a huge infrastructure to support 2.4 billion photos and 40 million unique visits a month but more importantly, said George, 'it's made of people'.
As collecting institution, the Library of Congress does not necessarily own the copyright to its images, or know who the copyright holder might be.
It had to devise a new statement, 'no known copyright restrictions', to provide a way to use the Library of Congress content in cases when the institution was not able to trace the copyright holders.
It has had impressive results for viewing figures, relationships with audiences and user-contributed content.
The Powerhouse Museum had more views of the collection it had put on the Commons in one month than in the whole previous year it was online on its own site.
Users have identified places and people, transcribed signs and provided information about the history behind photos.
People have used the comments functionality in Flickr to link to their recent photos of a location.
The information that the community provides is proving useful for the institutions involved.
The Library of Congress has updated 176 records in catalogue, recording that it's based on 'information provided by Flickr Commons Project 2008', and expects to update more as its staff research the leads provided in notes and comments [9].
However, the project can be challenging for museums, and they should try to 'grow gently' to ensure that the institution can handle the changes and respond to the interactions.
Frankie Roberto: The Guerrilla Approach to Aggregating Online Collections The projects of Frankie Roberto (Science Museum) came out of last year's mashed museum day where the lack of public, reusable cultural heritage data online was a real issue.
Discussion after the 2007 mashed museum event eventually turned to extra-institutional methods of obtaining data screen scraping and Freedom of Information (FoI) requests were suggested.
As a result, Frankie sent FoI requests to national museums for their collections data, asking for it in any electronic format as long as it had some kind of structure.
He has previously presented the results of this process and will release it on a Web site soon.
He had concerns about big top-down projects in the museum sector and so he suggested five small or niche projects.
In order to devise the projects he asked himself, 'how do people relate to objects?'.
He is willing to give the domain names to anyone who is interested in taking the projects further.
His five suggested projects and their rationales: Lots of people say, "I've got one of these" so: ivegotoneofthose.com list museum objects online, people can hit a button to say 'I have one of those'.
He suggests the raw numbers could be interesting.
Looking at TheyWorkForYou.com [10], he suggests: TheyCollectForYou.com museums could scan acquisition forms and publish feeds of which curators have bought what objects.
Looking at howstuffworks.com, what about howstuffworked.com?
The question 'what should we collect next?'
opens up a discourse on acquisitions.
Frankie took a quote from Indiana Jones for: thatbelongsinamuseum.com people can nominate things that should be in a museum.
Pricelessartefact.com could allow the comparison of objects to see which is the most valuable, however 'valuable' is defined.
Fiona Romeo: Different Ways of Seeing Online Collections Fiona Romeo of the National Maritime Museum presented a quick case study undertaken to find out if she and her colleagues could make more of their collections datasets with information visualisation.
They had a set of data about memorials around the world that included the text on the memorials.
It was quite rich content and they felt that a catalogue was probably not the best way to display it.
They commissioned Stamen Design for the project and sent them CSV (comma-separated values) files for each table in the database without any further documentation.
Fiona Romeo presents data visualisations at the National Maritime Museum The direct outcome was beautiful and meaningful visualisation of the memorial data, and the process provided them with a better understanding of their data.
The project also shows that giving your data out for creative reuse can be as easy as providing a CSV file, though ideally every collection Web site should provide an API or feed of the data.
Fiona also spoke about her experiments at the mashed museum day; she cut and pasted transcript data into IBM's free Many Eyes tool.
Her experiment shows that really good tools are available, even if you do not have the financial resources to work with a company like Stamen.
In the discussion that followed, Fiona said that her personal measure of success was creating a culture of innovation and engagement, and creating a vibrant environment, and this small case study was a good step towards that end.
At the end of this session, Mike Ellis presented a summary of the 'mashed museum' day held the day before.
Discussion The final open discussion included the idea that the provision of an API for any collections Web site should be a given, fears about putting content online reducing use of the physical collections (neatly rebutted by Paul Marty with 'since the State of Florida put pictures of their beaches on their Web site, no one goes to the beach anymore'), EXIF (exchangeable image file format) metadata on Flickr, and the need for more meaningful metrics.
It was suggested that the sector 'push data to DCMS instead of expecting them to know what they could ask for' and that we should use the opportunity to change the way success is measured.
The debate engaged with the idea of watermarking or micro-marketing metadata, of sending it out in a wrapper and making it embeddable.
The importance of wrappers and metadata for curators was described with the statement, 'they're more willing to let things go if people can get back to the original source'.
The discussion returned to the use of 'net promoter', with some saying it was a flawed metric because people do not recommend new or difficult knowledge or something they disagree with; 'what gets recommended is a video of a cute 8 year-old playing Guitar Hero really well.
People avoid things that challenge them'.
Others said that the advantage of the 'net promoter' is it takes the judgement of quality outside the originating institution.
Ross Parry summarised the 'take-home' ideas for the conference, pointing out that the discussions conflated many definitions of 'collections' including items, images, records, and Web pages about collections.
Ross reminded us that technology is not the problem: it is the cultural and human factors, and that 'we need to talk about where the tensions are, we've been papering over the cracks'.
The sector is changing, with a realignment of the 'axis of powers' creating a vacuum that might be filled by the Collections Trust, National Museum Directors' Conference.
In that context, what's the role of the Museums Computer Group [11]?
What should it do, and how?
Finally, he noted that the language has changed: previously it was about 'digitisation, accessibility, funding'.
Three words today he heard at the conference were 'beauty, poetry, life'.
As he said, we're entering an exciting moment.
Conclusion In many ways, this conference provided an overview or review of the discussions on the Museums Computer Group email list [12], and of the progress (or lack of it) towards the ideals proposed by many working in ICT in the cultural heritage sector over the past years.
It also allowed the sector to consolidate and share the learning from previous digitisation projects at a time when we have many exciting and challenging opportunities.
New opportunities have been opened up by lightweight technologies and development frameworks.
New tools are emerging to enable audiences to engage with our collections and each other in personal ways; and just as importantly, tools that allow us to engage directly with our audiences.
One lesson from the Mashed Museum day was that in a sector where innovation is often hampered by a lack of financial resources, time is a valuable commodity.
A day away from the normal concerns of the office in 'an environment free from political or monetary constraints' [13] is valuable and achievable without the framework of an organised event.
An experimental day could also be run with ICT and curatorial or audience-facing staff experimenting with collections data together.
Taking a wider view, what social, technical, financial and legal issues need to be resolved so we can take full advantage of these opportunities?
Copyright and metrics are areas where progress is clearly required.
What institutional and personal fears do we need to address?
Loss of control, authority, relevance, revenue?
To return to Tom Loosemore's opening question, with whom do we need to work to make sure all these ideas for new approaches to data, to aggregation and federation, and for new types of experiences of cultural heritage data actually go somewhere?
*Editor's note: definitions of 'maven' References 24 Hour Museum, 'Museum Computer Boffins Get Together For Museum 'Web Mash Up' http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART48264.html http://simile.mit.edu/, http://pipes.yahoo.com/, http://www.freebase.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/, http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home, http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V1/termExtraction.html, http://freeearth.poly9.com/, http://www.opencalais.com/, http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/, http://twitter.com/, http://www.piclens.com/.
Mashed Museum 2008, 12 minute video, blip.tv http://blip.tv/file/1029060 2008 MCG conference Connecting Collections Online programme http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/meetings/2-2008.shtml Ofcom's Second Public Service Broadcasting Review — Phase One: The Digital Opportunity Interactive Executive Summary http://ofcompsbreview.typepad.com/summary/ BBC's 15 'Web Principles at Tom Loosemore's blog http://www.tomski.com/archive/new_archive/000063.html Wikipedia entry for Net promoter score, 17 August 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter_Score Flickr Commons http://www.flickr.com/commons/ You can view the latest corrections and contributions made to the Library of Congress catalogue by searching for 'Flickr' in their online catalogue search: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html TheyWorkForYou.com http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ Museums Computer Group http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/ Subscribe or read the archives of the Museums Computer Group discussion list at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email.shtml Mashed Museum invitation, Mike Ellis Author Details Mia Ridge Analyst/Programmer Museum of London Email: ariadne@miaridge.com Web site: http://www.miaridge.com/, http://openobjects.blogspot.com Return to top Article Title: "The 2008 Mashed Museum Day and UK Museums on the Web Conference" Author: Mia Ridge Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/ukmw08-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Introducing UnAPI Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Introducing UnAPI Buzz data software rdf framework wiki api javascript html database rss xml atom apache archives xslt metadata firefox browser identifier namespace schema blog repositories flickr oai-pmh cataloguing opac z39.50 rfc syndication uri php openurl srw foaf mods sru z39.88 didl ruby wordpress microformats json interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Dan Chudnov and a team of colleagues describe unAPI, a tiny HTTP API for serving information objects in next-generation Web applications.
Common Web tools and techniques cannot easily manipulate library resources.
While photo sharing, link logging, and Web logging sites make it easy to use and reuse content, barriers still exist that limit the reuse of library resources within new Web services.
[1][2] To support the reuse of library information in Web 2.0-style services, we need to allow many types of applications to connect with our information resources more easily.
One such connection is a universal method to copy any resource of interest.
Because the copy-and-paste paradigm resonates with both users and Web developers, it makes sense that users should be able to copy items they see online and paste them into desktop applications or other Web applications.
Recent developments proposed in weblogs [3][4] and discussed at technical conferences [5] [6] suggest exactly this: extending the 'clipboard' copy-and-paste paradigm onto the Web.
To fit this new, extended paradigm, we need to provide a uniform, simple method for copying rich digital objects out of any Web application.
Barriers to Web Clipboard Integration The initial Microsoft Live Clipboard specification provides a straightforward way of accomplishing Web clipboard copy and paste.
It uses a combination of JavaScript-based in-browser code and an XML wrapper for item content, to provide users with clipboard functionality for some common types of objects defined by microformat specifications [7].
Early work using the Live Clipboard technique in the National Science Digital Library, a U.S. National Science Foundation programme, integrates this technique with more robust digital library protocols, providing for clipboard copy and paste of complex digital objects in software environments with robust architectures [8].
These are tremendously exciting innovations and demonstrate the potential of this approach.
The Live Clipboard demonstrations show copying of event or business card-like information by copying these simple objects between commonly used Web sites and desktop applications.
The NSDL demonstration moves complex objects [9][10] between what are presumed to be scholarly communications tools.
Both sets of demonstrations are alike in that they are driven by interface events whereby users click and choose to perform clipboard actions in menus.
However, the Web 2.0 approach calls for an additional blurring of the lines between userand machine-driven operations, so it is necessary to devise an approach that also allows software to drive clipboard-style copy and paste functions on users' behalf.
Requirements for Automating Object 'Copy' In an automated processing model that supports scripted copying of objects found on Web pages, the following three functional criteria must be met: A standard way to identify individual objects on Web pages; A standard way to discover a path to an API for retrieving objects; A standard API to retrieve object copies in all available formats.
Without a standard way for software to identify objects on Web pages, scripts must resort to screen scraping and other unsustainable techniques for guessing where objects start and end.
The same logic applies to the requirements of a standard way to find an API entry point, and a common definition of an API for retrieving objects.
Without these, third-party applications have to hard-code or guess at the locations and protocols offered by the plethora of Web 2.0 and digital library APIs and their various implementations across the Web.
Almost There Already Fortunately, the digital library community already comes close to satisfying each of these requirements.
Protocols such as OAI-PMH [11] and OpenURL [12] each provide frameworks for implementing services that support standardised object fetching through an API.
The COinS convention for embedding OpenURL ContextObjects in the HTML SPAN element [13] provides a standard way of identifying objects on Web pages whenever a ContextObject contains an identifier reference.
Initial Approach Members of the gcs-pcs-list [14] first experimented in this area by starting with these digital library tools, because they were already available and well-known.
To provide scriptable object copying from Web pages, we combined COinS (with identifiers) on Web pages with JavaScript-based calls to the OAI-PMH functions ListMetadataFormats and GetRecord.
To enable Javascript code to find OAI-PMH services automatically, we added HTML LINK tags pointing to relevant OAI-PMH services for our resources, following the pattern for feed auto-discovery now widely implemented across the Internet [15].
These experiments took the form of Greasemonkey scripts [16] which, upon finding COinS with identifiers and OAI-PMH LINK elements, would automatically query the OAI-PMH services' ListMetadataFormats functions and present users with direct links to OAI-PMH GetRecord functions for each available format [17].
This worked quite well, and provided an interesting set of demonstrations.
We wrote connectors for a variety of well-known Web sites the Library of Congress American Memory collections, the arXiv.org pre-print service, Google Books, Amazon.com, and more [18].
These connectors, combined with the 'get this item in formats X, Y, or Z' links that were automatically written into Web pages for users to click, showed great promise and interested our colleagues.
Problems Selling COinS and OAI-PMH The main problem with this approach was the difficulty explaining how it worked, especially to those less familiar with library-specific technologies.
Despite the widespread adoption of OpenURL and the proliferation of OAI-PMH-based content and service providers, few people in the library profession understand the steps necessary to implement these services, and far fewer people outside the library profession can successfully wade through the jargon necessary to understand either.
Even if each were readily understood, still more barriers make this approach unlikely to succeed.
Firstly, relatively few resources are actually available over OAI-PMH; among the few collections with OAI-PMH interfaces, most typically provide access only to metadata, not full objects [19].
Secondly, many OAI-PMH providers use item identifiers unique to metadata records, and therefore items are not cross-referenced by more widely-known content identifiers.
Given these conditions, it would be a mistake to presume that this approach could quickly scale to provide bare object access to a much larger swathe of library resources.
Ultimately we want to provide automated access to our resources through clearly defined and familiar techniques that can be implemented in only a few hours of work by a typical Web developer.
These rapid implementations need to accommodate both the data provider making resources accessible as well as the downstream clients that need to access such resources.
For such a framework to succeed, these techniques must be understandable to the Web community at large without prior knowledge of specific digital library standards.
The unAPI Specification We addressed this problem by writing a much simpler specification that meets the requirements listed above and remains easy to understand and implement.
The 'unAPI' specification [20] is less than two pages long and defines only three components, one to address each of the functional criteria listed previously: An HTML convention for identifying objects in Web pages; An HTML LINK tag for autodiscovery of an unAPI service relevant to items on a given page; An API consisting of three HTTP functions to retrieve objects by their identifiers in any available format.
We developed this specification on the public gcs-pcs-list between January and June 2006.
Revisions were released nearly every month during this period and made publicly available at http://unapi.info .
At every revision stage, after discussing and deciding on issues collected along the way, participants developed at least three independent test implementations similar to those described in the next section.
This helped ensure that the specification was indeed manageable, and it enabled us to understand the issues raised during implementation.
We completed and published unAPI Version 1 on 23 June, 2006 [21].
unAPI in Action: Examples The unAPI specification itself contains a simple informative example, excerpted here.
The unAPI HTML convention for identifying objects in Web pages is patterned after the technique developed by the microformats.org community for combining machine-readable data values as attribute values in ABBR elements with human-readable representations of that data as text content inside the ABBR: <abbr class="unapi-id" title="http://unapi.info/news/archives/9"></abbr> The unAPI LINK autodiscovery pattern mimics the pattern used by Web browsers to discover news feeds: <link rel="unapi-server" type="application/xml" title="unAPI" href="http://unapi.info/news/unapi.php" /> The unAPI HTTP functions comprise a 'list all object formats' function with no parameters, a 'list formats for a particular object' function with an identifier parameter, and a 'get a particular format for a particular object' function with identifier and format parameters.
The first two functions return a simple XML response listing formats that are supported for all items available from the unAPI service.
For example, a call to an unAPI service such as this: http://unapi.info/news/unapi.php?id=http://unapi.info/news/archives/9 ...might return an XML response like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <formats id="http://unapi.info/news/archives/9"> <format name="oai_dc" type="application/xml" docs="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd"/> <format name="mods" type="application/xml" /> </formats> The following examples all implement unAPI Version 1.
Each example includes a link to user-visible records and unAPI links to one of the records in that view.
Follow the links to see for yourself what unAPI looks like.
unAPI in OPACs and Other Databases Evergreen: The main OPAC for the Evergreen ILS (Integrated Library System) inserts unAPI identifiers into all result and detail pages, allowing users of unAPI harvesting tools to extract and reuse records from our catalogue in new and interesting ways.
In addition to the main OPAC, the text-only alternate OPAC for Evergreen uses OpenSearch [22] and unAPI exclusively for the display of search and detail results.
The HTML version of the hit list from OpenSearch is generated as an Atom XML [23] feed with identifiers suitable for unAPI resolution, and an XSLT transformation is applied to create unAPI links to the record and holdings page.
The unAPI autodiscovery link is inserted into the HTML head, and unAPI identifiers, supplied inside the Atom entity elements, are used to build direct links to the bibliographic and holdings data.
By leveraging unAPI, OpenSearch and Atom in this way, we provide a mechanism for automated harvesting of the exposed data as well as enabling end-user tools for building local bibliographies.
Sample record view: http://dev.gapines.org/opac/extras/opensearch/1.1/-/html-full/title/Tales+of+the+gross+and+gruesome Sample unAPI formats list: http://dev.gapines.org/opac/extras/unapi?id=tag:dev.gapines.org,2006:biblio-record_entry/307171/Sample object via unAPI: http://dev.gapines.org/opac/extras/unapi?id=tag:dev.gapines.org,2006:biblio-record_entry/307171/-&format=marcxml Figure 1: Screenshot of Evergreen Record University of Alberta: The University of Alberta Libraries are experimenting with a unAPI service that uses an SRU [24] proxy to retrieve records in various formats from the catalogue.
This project is an example of the ease with which unAPI services can be layered on top of existing services.
At the unAPI level, all that is required is an SRU server that can retrieve records using the "rec.id" field: a minimally-configured installation of IndexData's YAZ Proxy [25] (which provides an SRU interface in front of the catalogue's Z39.50 server) will do the trick.
Our unAPI server is an Apache Cocoon installation with a set of custom pipelines that convert unAPI requests into SRU requests, retrieve the record, strip off the SRU wrapper, and return the record to the unAPI client.
Another pipeline handles errors.
The result is that with very little effort, and with no disruption of service to non-unAPI-aware clients, a unAPI service could be added to the catalogue.
The biggest problem was determining how to embed the record id in a unAPI tag within our OPAC's templating system.
The Cocoon code is freely available [26] and can be deployed in front of any SRU server; all it needs to know is the address of the SRU server and the record formats that can be requested.
Sample record view: http://ualweb.library.ualberta.ca/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/57/5?user_id=WUAARCHIVE&searchdata1=1565847547%7B020%7D Sample unAPI formats list: http://chelsea.library.ualberta.ca/unapi/server?id=2623311 Sample object via unAPI: http://chelsea.library.ualberta.ca/unapi/server?id=2623311&format=mods Figure 2: Cocoon pipeline for SRU Proxy Canary Database: The Canary Database of animals as sentinels of human environmental health hazards collects article references from several abstracting and indexing services for additional indexing by researchers who classify studies of animal sentinels according to several criteria.
Because the ability to save citations to a reference management tool is critical, the Canary Database provides easy links for users to download citations in a variety of useful formats.
This feature, which supports export of a single record or sets of records in Pubmed, RIS, BibTeX, and MODS, is implemented via an unAPI interface.
The links a user might click to export a record to a particular format are also unAPI links to those formats, so no distinction between the user and machine interfaces is necessary, simplifying code development and maintenance.
Sample record view: http://canarydatabase.org/record/488?view=export Sample unAPI formats list: http://canarydatabase.org/unapi?id=http://canarydatabase.org/record/488 Sample object via unAPI: http://canarydatabase.org/unapi?id=http://canarydatabase.org/record/488&format=bibtex Figure 3: Canary Database record export links unAPI with OpenURL Resolvers and Other Services Umlaut: The Umlaut OpenURL resolver at Georgia Tech provides unAPI services to OpenURL ContextObjects.
Using a Key Encoded Value ContextObject as the identifier, the service analyses the incoming citation and aggregates appropriate metadata from other services such as link resolvers, catalogues, OAI-PMH repositories, Pubmed, Google, Yahoo and Connotea.
For any given identifier it will return an XML-encoded ContextObject and any of the above services that are applicable.
It also will return an 'Umlaut document' which bundles all responding services in either XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).
The advantage here is that as the link resolver assumes an increasingly important role in bridging the library to the outside world, users will find they can enable unAPI services for any OpenURL-enabled resource.
The fact that it uses COinS as its identifier lowers the barrier for resources that already support OpenURL to adopting unAPI.
Umlaut unAPI service: http://umlaut.library.gatech.edu/unapi?
Sample unAPI formats list: http://umlaut.library.gatech.edu/unapi?id=ctx_ver%3DZ39.88-2004%26ctx_enc %3Dinfo%253Aofi%252Fenc %253AUTF-8%26rft_id%3Dinfo%253Adoi%252F10.1038%252F438531a Sample object via unAPI: http://umlaut.library.gatech.edu/unapi?id=ctx_ver%3DZ39.88-2004%26ctx_enc%3Dinfo%253Aofi%252Fenc %253AUTF-8%26rft_id%3Dinfo%253Adoi%252F10.1038%252F438531a&format=umlaut-xml OPA: 'OPA Proxies APIs', or OPA for short, is a unAPI demonstration tool which proxies a variety of remote APIs through its own unAPI service.
Its purpose is to show how some basic functions of otherwise incompatible third-party APIs may be quickly unified by unAPI.
The latest revision of OPA proxies the Amazon, Flickr, and Pubmed APIs as well as arbitrary OAI-PMH services through a two-line-per-service configuration file.
OPA provides several metadata and object format options for each of Amazon, Flickr, and Pubmed, and will proxy any available format from an OAI-PMH service.
OPA also provides a simplistic object-wrapping format that uses JSON to package multiple object formats and metadata records into a single file, modelled after the MPEG21 DID object packaging strategy.
Sample Flickr.com record view: http://flickr.com/photos/dchud/31568800/ Sample unAPI formats list: http://opa.onebiglibrary.net/?id=http://flickr.com/photos/dchud/31568800/ Sample object via unAPI: http://opa.onebiglibrary.net/?id=http://flickr.com/photos/dchud/31568800/&format=jpeg_Medium unAPI in Weblogs WordPress plug-in: The unAPI plug-in for WordPress [27] provides records for each blog post and page in the following formats: OAI-Dublin Core , MODS, SRW-Dublin Core, MARCXML, and RSS.
WordPress, a PHP application, allows external applications and plug-ins to use its functions and gain access to information stored within a blog via standard PHP functions, therefore the plug-in was also coded in PHP.
Technosophia: Technosophia, a blog about 'Libraries, Technology, and Infotainment,' provides an unAPI service via the WordPress plug-in.
Posts are available in each format supported by the plug-in.
Sample blog view: http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/ Sample unAPI formats list: http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi.php?id=oai:lackoftalent.org:technosophia:45 Sample object via unAPI: http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi.php?id=oai:lackoftalent.org:technosophia:45&format=marcxml Figure 4: MARCXML from WordPress unapi.info: The news weblog for the unAPI specification is also a WordPress weblog with the unAPI plug-in installed.
Sample blog entry view: http://unapi.info/news/archives/16 Sample unAPI formats list: http://unapi.info/news/unapi.php?id=http%3A//unapi.info/news/archives/16 Sample object via unAPI: http://unapi.info/news/unapi.php?id=http%3A//unapi.info/news/archives/16&format=oai_dc Tools for Working with unAPI Greasemonkey scripts: unAPI links are not necessarily visible to users by default.
Client-side page rewriting scripts can provide a visual indicator of available unAPI links and formats where such indicators might not otherwise be present in page design.
The following Greasemonkey scripts both provide visual indicators of available unAPI links using different styles; both are based on the same code.
By Xiaoming Liu: http://lxming.blogspot.com/2006_05_21_lxming_archive.html By Alf Eaton: http://cipolo.med.yale.edu/pipermail/gcs-pcs-list/2006-June/000951.html To use these scripts, first install Greasemonkey [16], restart your Firefox browser, and then install one or both of these scripts.
Both will work on all of the sample record views listed above.
The unAPI Ruby gem [30] provides an easy to install client library for interacting with unAPI services from Ruby.
The client library also includes a command line version of the validation service.
The unAPI Validator [31] supports implementers by providing instant feedback on how well a service implements the specification.
It is a RubyOnRails application built on top of the unAPI Ruby gem, and it provides detailed warning recommendations and failure indicators in an easy-to-read summary table A Validator bookmarklet is also available to make it even easier for implementers to test any page in their applications by sending any page open in a browser right into the validation suite.
Figure 5: Web-based unAPI Validator Highlights of Issues Considered Like any other standards development process, the unAPI specification process had its share of difficult and contentious issues.
Ultimately we chose the simplest solutions that would work in the widest possible set of applications.
Some of these issues included: Use of identifiers: initially unAPI required URIs, but this was broadened to enable a wider range of resources to participate.
Response format: the relative merits of plain text, JSON, and XML were debated, and the group chose a simplistic XML structure without namespaces or a schema.
Microformats: participants in the unAPI process engaged the microformats.org community in discussion of a microformat for identifiers, but a consensus did not quickly emerge, so we followed the spirit and style of earlier microformats.
Deferring to HTTP: we wavered on whether to specify HTTP status codes, finally agreeing to 'recommend' particular codes, again requiring less of publishers [28].
Overlap with OpenURL / OAI-PMH: we felt that to meet the goal of broad adoption, imposing the complexity of OpenURL and the structure of OAI-PMH would be a losing proposition.
unAPI could, however, serve as a 'gateway specification' to these protocols, an easier bridge for general Web developers to cross when interacting with structured information objects.
Next Steps With unAPI Version 1 complete, it is now available for general use.
We have started to experiment by combining the unAPI copying functions with the Atom Publishing Protocol or with the Live Clipboard as a paste function.
For example, we enhanced the unalog social bookmarking application to copy out objects found via unAPI in bookmarked pages, and to paste these objects in using Atom.
Objects pasted into unalog are then available to other users in both the unalog user interface and through a new unAPI interface in unalog.
Figure 6 demonstrates this; the images, from Flickr, were obtained through OPA's unAPI interface and its JSON object wrapping format.
Figure 6: unAPI Copy and Atom Paste in unalog.
As we move forward with implementing unAPI Version 1, we continue to watch related developing techniques such as microformats and HTTP header Link Templates [29].
If a microformat for identifying arbitrary identifiers in HTML or a similar technique within HTML itself emerged, unAPI would not need to specify use of the ABBR pattern.
Similarly, if Link Templates or another technique made API patterns more easily discovered and specified, unAPI would not even need to define its own parameter names or LINK element semantics.
If all of these missing pieces were to appear in widely accepted solutions, the unAPI object-copy paradigm could exist as a mere one-paragraph convention (a significant reduction from the present length of one and a half pages).
In the meantime, we believe that unAPI Version 1 can help to get more out of library or any other Web applications.
It follows the Unix traditions of doing one thing well and being easily connected and combined to form more complex functionality.
We hope that it proves useful and helps to bring the library community closer to the level of simplified integration demanded by users today.
References van Veen, T., "Serving Services in Web 2.0", Ariadne 47, April 2006 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/vanveen/ Chudnov, D., Frumkin, J., Weintraub, J., Wilcox, M., Yee, R., "Towards Library Groupware with Personalised Link Routing", Ariadne 40, July 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/chudnov/ Rhyno, A., "WebDAV and Lessons from Blackfoot Physics", LibraryCog weblog, February 19, 2004 http://librarycog.uwindsor.ca:8087/artblog/librarycog/1077044415/1077205713/1077219993 Burcham, B., "Baby Steps to Synergistic Web Apps", lesscode weblog, October 21, 2005 http://lesscode.org/2005/10/21/baby-steps-to-synergistic-web-apps/ Ozzie, R., "Wiring the Web", Ray Ozzie's weblog, March 7, 2006 http://rayozzie.spaces.msn.com/blog/cns!FB3017FBB9B2E142!285.entry Ozzie, R. et al., "Live Clipboard Technical Introduction", MSN Spaces, March 2006 http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclipsample/techPreview.html Microformats project home, http://microformats.org/ Van de Sompel, H., et al., "Augmenting Interoperability: Presentations", Andrew W. Mellon Foundation wiki, April 25, 2006, http://msc.mellong.org/Meetings/Interop/presentations Bekaert, J., Hochstenbach, P., Van de Sompel, H., "Using MPEG-21 DIDL to Represent Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library", D-Lib Magazine 9(11), November 2003, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november03/bekaert/11bekaert.html Fedora Project, "Fedora Digital Objects: Fedora Release 2.1.1", April 4, 2004, http://www.fedora.info/download/2.1.1/userdocs/digitalobjects/ Lagoze, C., Van de Sompel, H., Nelson, M., Warner, S., "The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: Protocol Version 2.0", June 14, 2002, http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html Van de Velde, E.F. (chair), et al., "ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004: The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services", NISO Press, April 15, 2005 http://www.niso.org/standards/standard_detail.cfm?std_id=783 Hellman, E., editor, "OpenURL ContextObjects in SPANs (COinS): stable version 1.0", August 8, 2005, http://ocoins.info/ gcs-pcs-list, Internet Email List, http://cipolo.med.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/gcs-pcs-list "Icons: It's still orange", Microsoft Team RSS Blog, December 14, 2005, http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/12/14/503778.aspx Boodman, A., Dunck, J., "Greasemonkey", Firefox browser extension, http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ Chudnov, D., "ROGUE #1 COinS-PMH", dchud's work log, September 27, 2005, http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/log/project/rogue/rogue-no.1-coins-pmh Chudnov, D., "Photos tagged with 'coinspmh'", Flickr.com, http://flickr.com/photos/dchud/tags/coinspmh Van de Sompel, H., Nelson, M.L., Lagoze, C., Warner, S., "Resource Harvesting within the OAI-PMH Framework", D-Lib Magazine, December 2004, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/vandesompel/12vandesompel.html Chudnov, D., et al.
"unAPI: An un-API for Webapps", June 23, 2006, http://unapi.info/ Chudnov, D., et al.
"unAPI Version 1", June 23, 2006, http://unapi.info/specs/unapi-version-1.html A9.com, "OpenSearch", http://opensearch.a9.com/ Nottingham, M., Sayre, R., editors, "RFC 4287: The Atom Syndication Format", December 2005, http://rfc.net/rfc4287.html The Library of Congress, "SRU: Search and Retrieve via URL", May 30, 2006, http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ IndexData ApS, "YAZ Proxy", 2006, http://www.indexdata.dk/yazproxy/ Binkley, P., "unAPI over SRU with Cocoon", Quaedam cuiusdam weblog, July 2006, http://www.wallandbinkley.com/quaedam/?p=69 Giarlo, M., Binkley, P. "unAPI WordPress Plug-in", Technosophia weblog, June 2006, http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/ Dodds, L., "Connecting Social Content Services using FOAF, RDF, and REST", XTech 2005 Conference, http://www.idealliance.org/proceedings/xtech05/papers/02-07-04/ Nottingham, M., "HTTP Header Linking Internet Draft", June 16, 2006, http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-00.txt Summers, E., "unapi", textualize Web site, July 2006, http://www.textualize.com/unapi Summers, E., "unAPI Validator", July 2006, http://validator.unapi.info/ Author Details Daniel Chudnov Librarian/Programmer Yale Center for Medical Informatics Email: daniel.chudnov@yale.edu Web site: http://onebiglibrary.net/ Peter Binkley Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian University of Alberta Libraries Email: peter.binkley@ualberta.ca Web site: http://www.wallandbinkley.com/quaedam/ Jeremy Frumkin The Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services Oregon State University Libraries Email: jeremy.frumkin@oregonstate.edu Web site: http://digitallibrarian.org Michael J. Giarlo Senior Computer Specialist University of Washington Libraries Email: leftwing@alumni.rutgers.edu Web site: http://purl.org/net/leftwing/blog Mike Rylander Database Developer Georgia Public Library Service PINES Development Email: mrylander@gmail.com Web site: http://open-ils.org/ Ross Singer Application Developer Georgia Tech Libraries Email: ross.singer@library.gatech.edu Web site: http://rsinger.library.gatech.edu/bio/ Ed Summers Software Developer CIAC Email: ehs@pobox.com Web site: http://textualize.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Introducing unAPI" Author: Daniel Chudnov, Peter Binkley, Jeremy Frumkin, Michael J. Giarlo, Mike Rylander, Ross Singer and Ed Summers Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/chudnov-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Repositories, Copyright and Creative Commons for Scholarly Communication Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Repositories, Copyright and Creative Commons for Scholarly Communication Buzz data software framework dissemination archives metadata repositories copyright multimedia licence ict research standards Citation BibTex RIS Esther Hoorn considers ways librarians can support scholars in managing the demands of copyright so as to respond to the needs of scholarly communication.
Intellectual Property Rights have become increasingly powerful and far-reaching.
This has grown to be the standard opening line of papers in the field of law addressing issues of copyright for scientific research and scholarly publishing [1].
Concerns are expressed about the likelihood of preserving the public domain in the Internet era [2].
Currently new ways to safeguard the values and the entire potential of scholarly publishing and communication are being explored within the framework of existing copyright law.
To date copyright law has always been reasonably balanced, weighing the interests of rights owners against those of users and the public interest generally.
As explicitly expressed in the wording actually proposed by EBLIDA [3] in the preamble to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty [4]: 'The Contracting Parties, recognising the need to maintain a balance between the right of authors and the larger public interest, particularly education, research and access to information, as reflected in the Berne convention, ...' So from this rather abstract point of view, copyright serves the same interests as those inextricably linked with scholarly communication.
This is why a practical first step to adjusting to an Open Access environment can be found within the existing framework of copyright law.
The use of Creative Commons licences, agreements, guidelines and regulation through technical developments (such as integrating licences in metadata) can be seen as a means of adjusting copyright to the needs of scholarly communication without changing the law.
Moreover the potential of using Creative Commons licences as an advocacy tool is equally worthy of investigation.
In tweaking the use of Creative Commons licences for scholarly use it may be important to re-examine research norms.
Solutions can be found in better understanding of the values as well as the aims and purposes of scholarly communication [5].
This is an issue in which scholars need to be involved and where it is important to come up with discipline-specific answers.
The Berlin Declaration recognises the view that community standards will continue to be important in the enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work.
Repositories and Open Access Copyright Inside Out Open Access grants a right to the end-user to access freely and make use of scholarly materials.
This represents a radical shift in the paradigm.
Copyright is based on a 'state-given' exclusive right to an author to publish, with some limitations to safeguard the interests of end-users.
Open Access can be achieved when rights holders decide to give some of their rights away to the end-user.
Because copyright law is regulatory, rights holders are entitled to decide whether to cede some of their rights.
The full merit of the strict reading of the definition of a Open Access contribution according to the Berlin Declaration is that it makes clear that initiatives by (groups of) private authors are required to advance a public goal.
The Rights Roadmap in the Berlin Declaration Now more and more institutions are signing the Berlin Declaration, it is useful to examine the definition of Open Access in some detail.
On an initial reading there seems to be two conditions for Open Access: the author grants free access to the end-user and a complete version of the work is placed in a repository.
In fact, in the current quest for content, libraries tend to be satisfied when just the second condition is met.
As a consequence there is every chance that they miss out on the richer roadmap to Open Access that is hidden in the following definition which with its preamble reads as follows: "Definition of an Open Access Contribution Establishing Open Access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage.
Open Access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.
Open Access contributions must satisfy two conditions: 1.
The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
2.
A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable Open Access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving."
[6] The definition of an Open Access contribution holds an important pre-condition where it states that Open Access ideally requires the active commitment from each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge.
As explained above, this is also an important point from a lawyer's perspective.
The first-mentioned condition can only be met if the rights holder [7] decides that he or she wants to do two things, i.e.
grant free access to end-users -which can be done in a straight-forward way but also grant a licence to reuse the material for any responsible purpose.
This is an important condition, for in so doing the rights holder helps to widen the legal public domain.
Furthermore the licence offers the opportunity to reduce transaction costs currently associated with the reuse of scholarly materials for educational purposes.
The suggested reach of the licence as described in the first condition does not apply to printed material.
Instead it is limited to reuse in any digital medium for any responsible use.
Lawyers should refer to 'any responsible use' as a vague norm.
This requires further clarification: communities should decide on the licences appropriate to their field of research.
Guidelines and publication agreements with the option of a licence to make an Open Access contribution can be worked out by faculties, learned societies and the boards of journals.
And it would seem sensible that they take account of the reasonable interests of those publishers who facilitate self-archiving or an Open Access business model in their guidelines [8].
I do not agree with the view that this licence is merely a formalistic condition and likely to lead to problems in enforcement [9].
The ever-vigorous Creative Commons initiative has proven otherwise.
In broader research on institutional deployment of Creative Commons licences the preliminary report states that there is no reason to suggest that Creative Commons licences could not be used by public sector organisations [10].
The second condition in the definition of an Open Access contribution states that the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository.
The holder of a repository can facilitate this by offering information on the use of searchable standard licences like the Creative Commons licences.
Towards Good Practice in Awareness-Raising As part of a collaborative programme by SURF and JISC, a survey was carried out on the views on copyright of authors publishing in Open Access journals.
I was involved in this investigation.
The report Towards Good Practices on Copyright in Open Access Journals is now available online [11].
The recommendations should also prove valuable to the process of awareness-raising in respect of the use of repositories.
It was established that author involvement in copyright matters even among authors who already publish in Open Access journals is still low.
Let me quote from this recommendation: 'Maybe the most important stakeholder in the scholarly communication system consists of the scientific authors themselves.
However, this stakeholder seems insufficiently involved in developing new copyright practices: stumbling blocks in reaching the academic community are low involvement and ignorance among scientists.
This can also be concluded from this study, in which 30% of the respondents don't know who initially owns the copyright of their own research articles and in which 26% of the respondents indicate to have a low interest in the copyright issues of their own research articles.'
[11] One of the main recommendations is to use the Creative Commons licences as models for awareness-raising.
These licences are used in a wide variety of Open Access journals.
The example of the PLOS (Public Library of Science) magazines demonstrates that there is a relationship between the business model of the publisher and the freedom of end-users to use a work as they see fit.
With these magazines the publisher is in no way dependent on income from access or reuse of the work.
Therefore PLOS can agree that the producer makes his or her work available under a Creative Commons attribution licence.
As long as the end-user gives a proper attribution, he or she is free to reuse the material.
Even commercial reuse is allowed.
PLOS explains that the publisher and the producer both have an interest in the work being widely disseminated.
Therefore there will be no objection if, for instance, a book appears on the Indian market with translated articles from PLOS magazines.
In general the survey shows that authors want a limited copyright role for the journal publisher.
The attitudes of the authors on copyright issues in relation to traditional journal publishers are surprising: although most are involved in traditional journal publishing, only 2% prefer the transfer of copyright to the journal publisher and only 10% think that the publisher should handle permission requests to reuse the article.
A large majority (71%) wants the authors to retain the copyright; an equally large majority wants to see the author handling permission requests as well.
This also holds true, judging from the replies of the respondents, as regards the editorial board members of traditional journals.
Authors want unlimited reuse for scholarly and educational purposes for everyone, but limitations on commercial reuse by others.
This could be achieved by the NON COMMERCIAL USE licence.
The Berlin Declaration apparently considers it to be proper to scholarly communication that the author keeps the right to be attributed.
This can be done by adding the ATTRIBUTION licence.
A third Creative Commons option gives rights to end-users on the condition that they make their work freely accessible under this Creative Commons licence as well.
I will come back to the value of this SHARE ALIKE licence for scholarly communication after a general introduction to the Creative Commons initiative.
Creative Commons Figure 1: Decision Tree for the Main Options with Standard Creative Commons Licences The fact that the general issue and the specific matter of enforcement of copyright have gained in importance with the advance of the Internet is largely due to a strong lobby of the music and film industries.
Laws and technical protection measures are used to safeguard their interests.
However at the same time the dissemination of culture and knowledge, which copyright tries to encourage, is in fact also jeopardised at the same time.
As a counter-movement Lawrence Lessig [12] instigated the Creative Commons.
This initiative offers people who would like to share music, photos or text the opportunity to do so within the parameters of copyright law by means of contracts between the author and the end-user.
In such a contract the author indicates the degree of licence the end-user has in using the product.
These contracts are standardised and legally sound and they are offered in natural language and as metadata for the purposes of machine searches.
For instance, when someone makes a photo available with a Creative Commons licence, stipulating that the author's name be quoted and that no commercial reuse be allowed, then a student who wishes to use this photo in an assignment knows that there is no impediment in this instance, and can publish the assignment without further ado, as long as he or she acknowledges the name of the photographer.
From the user's perspective the ideal situation would be for clear indications as to user rights to be offered within the search process through descriptive metadata in respect of copyright status.
An example of this functionality can be found on the Creative Commons Web site under the Find button.
Some work still has to be done to add information on user rights to the metadata used in the OAI protocol used for institutional repositories.
In the long run, a search including the question whether the material may be reused for scholarly, non-commercial use could well result in a vast number of articles, thereby demonstrating that scholarly communities value the opportunity to share their work.
SHARE ALIKE Using the SHARE ALIKE licence recognises that it will require a collective effort to achieve freely accessible scientific research and scholarly communication over the Internet.
Such use seems to resonate with a central value in scholarly communication, namely constructing knowledge through sharing information [13].
A limitation on an author's rights to cite from a work has always been part of copyright law.
From this perspective it might be reasonable to ask whether, in the context of scholarly communication, it is practical for the author to add the condition that his or her work be made available under the same licence.
This licence can be valuable in circumstances where scholars work together on the Internet using software for collaborative peer production [14].
Creative Commons Licences: The Berlin Declaration and the Repository Integrating the Creative Commons licences under the conditions of the Berlin Declaration demands the following steps.
In the light of the second condition of the definition of the Berlin Declaration, the holder of a repository should start to offer information on the standard Creative Commons licences to the depositor.
Individual depositors who retain their copyright should be encouraged by an institutional policy to use Creative Commons licences.
Communities of researchers should be encouraged to develop guidelines and agreements on the use of Creative Commons licences appropriate to their areas of work.
Further searching for works published under a specific Creative Commons licence should be enabled through the development of descriptive metadata on the copyright status.
Since a repository can also contain materials of which the institution is the rights holder (i.e.
educational materials), institutions could further the aims of the Berlin Declaration by developing a policy that such materials are made available under a Creative Commons licence.
Conclusion I hope to have demonstrated that the Creative Commons licences can add value to the aims of the Open Access movement.
As the Berlin Declaration has indicated, it is crucial that authors are involved in the process.
Using the standardised Creative Commons licence models can achieve this goal.
A further advantage of this approach is that what is now largely a library-driven movement can be broadened in scope.
As regards further development it is essential that every holder of an institutional repository work in co-operation with the appropriate scholars in the department of law and other relevant departments.
It is to be hoped that collective discussion will help to raise awareness of the potential, for instance, of regulating an internationally distributed networked environment, adopting practical approaches to the sharing of information and maximising the chances of embedding a new generation of peer-to-peer software into the scholarly communication process [15].
Acknowledgements I would like to record my thanks to the Ticer [16] community for giving me the opportunity to contribute to work on which this article is based.
References Samuelson, Pamela, Preserving the positive functions of the public domain in science, Data Science Journal, Volume 2, 24, November 2003 p.192 http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/dsj_Nov_2003.pdf Also: C Waelde and M McGinley, "Public Domain; Public Interest; Public Funding: focussing on the 'three Ps' in scientific research", (2005) 2:1 SCRIPT-ed 83 available at: http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/script-ed/vol2-1/3ps.asp Boyle, J., The second enclosure movement and the construction of the public domain 66 Law & Contemp.
Probs.
33 (Winter/Spring 2003) http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/66LCPBoyle S. Norman, IFLA Copyright Adviser, Report of the WIPO Diplomatic Conference 2-20th December 1996, http://www.ifla.org/III/pb/pr970122.htm WIPO Copyright Treaty, Official Journal L 089, 11/04/2000 P. 0008 0014 http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/lex/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:22000A0411(01):EN:HTML H. Nissenbaum, New Research Norms for a New Medium, The Commodification of Information.
N. Elkin-Koren and N. Netanel (editors) The Hague: Kluwer Academic Press, 2002.
433-457 Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities 20 22 Oct 2003, Berlin http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html For research works the author is generally assumed to be the rights holder.
Institutions in some jurisdictions hold the rights on educational materials.
An interesting example of this approach can be found in the Open Access Law Programme http://science.creativecommons.org/literature/oalaw A possible next step to facilitate enforcement and tune the distinction between proper scholarly use and commercial use would be to introduce a copyright dispute resolution system.
See: Lemley, Mark A. and Reese, R. Anthony, "A Quick and Inexpensive System for Resolving Digital Copyright Disputes" (March 24, 2004).
UC Berkeley Public Law Research No.
525682. http://ssrn.com/abstract=525682 Creative Commons Licensing Solutions for the Common Information Environment http://www.intrallect.com/cie-study/index.htm E. Hoorn, M. van der Graaf, Towards good practices of copyright in Open Access Journals http://www.surf.nl/en/publicaties/index2.php?oid=50 Lessig, L., Code and other laws of cyberspace, Basic Books, New York, 1999 Recently a collaborative effort to update this book has been undertaken.
Read more: http://www.lessig.org/blog/ Benkler, Y.
"Sharing Nicely": On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production , The Yale Law Journal, Vol.
114, pp.
273-358 http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf An example of this can be found in the project JurisPedia, the shared law http://en.jurispedia.org/index.php/Main_Page A good example is the German Mediaconomy Project.
In this research partnership a workshop on Legal Aspects of Open Access has taken place and a series of lectures were held: http://www.mediaconomy.de/ringvorlesung/ringvorlesung.pdf Ticer http://www.ticer.nl/ Author Details Esther Hoorn Information Specialist and Researcher, Law and ICT Faculty of Law University of Groningen The Netherlands Email: E.Hoorn@rug.nl Web site: http://www.ticer.nl/05carte/curric.htm#Hoorn Return to top Article Title: "Repositories, Copyright and Creative Commons for Scholarly Communication " Author: Esther Hoorn Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/hoorn/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Data Preservation and Long-term Analysis in High-Energy Physics Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Data Preservation and Long-term Analysis in High-Energy Physics Buzz data software framework database portfolio infrastructure archives preservation linux ascii ocr interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Mount reports on the First Workshop on Data Preservation and Long-Term Analysis in High-Energy Physics, held at DESY (Deutsche Elektronen-Synchrotron), Hamburg, Germany, on 26-28 January 2008.
High-energy physics (HEP) experiments acquire huge datasets that may not be superseded by new and better measurements for decades or centuries.
Nevertheless, the cost and difficulty of preserving both the data and the understanding of how to use them are daunting.
The small number of cases in which data over ten years old have been reanalysed has only served to underline that such analyses are currently very close to impossible.
The recent termination of data taking by the H1 and ZEUS experiments at DESY’s HERA collider, and by the BaBar experiment at SLAC, plus the imminent termination of other major experiments, prompted the organisation of this workshop.
Almost 50 physicists and IT experts participated.
The workshop heard from HEP experiments long past (‘it’s hopeless to try now’), recent or almost past (‘we really must do something’) and included representatives form experiments just starting (‘interesting issue, but we’re really very busy right now’).
We were told how luck and industry had succeeded in obtaining new results from 20-year-old data from the JADE experiment, and how the astronomy community apparently shames HEP by taking a formalised approach to preserving data in an intelligible format.
Technical issues including preserving the bits and preserving the ability to run ancient software on long-dead operating systems were also addressed.
The final input to the workshop was a somewhat asymmetric picture of the funding agency interests from the two sides of the Atlantic.
Parallel working sessions addressed the different needs and issues in e+e-, ep and pp experiments.
The likelihood of future data rendering old datasets uninteresting can be very different in these three types of collision.
The workshop then tried to lay out a path forward.
Apart from the obvious ‘hold another workshop’ imperative, it seemed clear that experimental programmes that felt ‘we really must do something’ should be used as drivers.
A first step must be to examine issues of cost, difficulty and benefit as quantitatively as possible so that the next workshop could have concrete discussions on the science case for various levels of data preservation.
The next workshop is planned to be held early Summer 2009 at the SLAC National Laboratory, Menlo Park, USA.
The workshop programme, and copies of presentations are available on the Web [1].
It is planned that the workshop proceedings will appear as a DESY preprint.
Welcome to the Workshop Cristinel Diaconu (CPP Marseille and DESY) Workshop Chair Cristinel described how his immediate concern for preservation of the H1 data had led to the formation of an informal study group comprising experimental HEP scientists and IT experts.
In September 2008, this group had agreed on the programme for this workshop.
Reports from Experiments: Data Analysis and Computing Models Chairs: Homer Neal (SLAC, USA), Robert Roser (Fermilab, USA) Below I report in some detail on the presentation by H1, to give the flavour of the type of information presented.
From the remaining experiment presentations I select some key issues that add to the overall picture.
H1 Analysis and Computing Model David South (Technische Universität Dortmund) H1 acquired ep collision data from 1992 to 2007.
The original software was written in Fortran, some parts of which continue to be developed.
The BOS (Bank Object System) tool is used to handle the event data structures, for which task Fortran 77 alone was quite inadequate.
The Fortran code continues to be used for reconstruction and simulation down to the level of the DST (Data Summary Tape) dataset (18Kbytes/event for data, and twice that for simulation).
From that point on the data are converted to an object-oriented representation allowing analysis to be performed in the modern ROOT framework.
H1 has formed a ‘Data Preservation Task force’ that is planning the continued availability of around 500 terabytes of data ranging from raw and simulated collisions and dedicated calibration runs, to a version of the DST and the derived object-oriented datasets.
Preserving these data at DESY should not be a problem.
But what about the software?
Paradoxically the old Fortran/BOS software gives rise to fewer concerns than the new ROOT-based system.
The old Fortran system is stable, and all under the control of H1.
The new software draws heavily on the ROOT system that is under continued vigorous development with a consequent need to modify, recompile and verify the H1 software at regular intervals.
Much documentation for the whole system is already in place but a ‘concentrated effort [is] still needed in the coming years.’ ZEUS Analysis and Computing Model Janusz Szuba (DESY) ZEUS reconstruction and simulation code is also Fortran-based with a different set of utilities performing the BOS-like functions.
Their jump into the modern ROOT world is at the ntuple rather than DST level, resulting in less ROOT dependence, but arguably a more restricted capability for those unwilling to brave the Fortran.
They see no way to keep their full system alive beyond about the year 2013, but are actively exploring a simple ntuple format as a way to make the data available to a wider community in the longer term.
CDF Analysis and Computing Model Robert Roser (Fermilab) CDF and D0 at Fermilab’s proton-antiproton collider are still taking data and hope to do so for several more years barring (regrettably not impossible) budget catastrophes.
Perhaps understandably the talk described the data processing and analysis strategy in elegant detail, but did not venture into ideas for long-term preservation and analysis.
D0 Analysis and Computing Model Qizhong Li (Fermilab) D0 did address data preservation stating that ‘the only sensible solution would be a high-level format, in which most calibrations and corrections have already been applied to the data.’ Offsetting this assertion, Qizhong described the Qaero Project that had supplied just such a data format to D0 physicists some five years ago, and had been received by physicists with five years of indifference.
Belle Analysis and Computing Model (via EVO) Nobuhiko Katayama (KEK, Japan) Belle and BaBar are two ‘B-factory’ experiments that have acquired huge datasets at exactly the same e+ecollision energy.
Belle is still running and hopes to ‘keep data/software intact at KEK until Super KEKB takes overwhelmingly large amounts of data.’ This will be a sound strategy if the funding gods smile on the Super KEKB proposal!
BES-III Analysis and Computing Model (via EVO) Gongxing Sun (IHEP, Beijing) The upgraded Beijing Electron Synchrotron, BES-III, will run for a decade generating e+ecollision at a few GeV.
BES-III data will supersede decades-old data taken at US and European e+ecolliders.
However, no successor to BES-III is on the horizon so data preservation is already taken seriously.
They plan to preserve access to complete, as opposed to simplified, datasets for about 15 years, but already acknowledge that there are ‘anticipated software headaches.’ They cannot see how to make the data (usefully) available to the public.
BaBar Analysis and Computing Model Homer Neal (SLAC) BaBar took its last data in April 2008 and has formed a task force on data preservation.
The planning addresses migration of code to current platforms, simplification to remove dependencies on third-party software and virtualisation to lessen or obviate the need for migration.
CLEO Analysis and Computing Model Daniel Riley (Cornell University, USA) Like Babar, CLEO took its final data in April 2008.
Their examination of data preservation issues led project staff to conclude that it would be: a) very difficult, given the complexities of their software and its dependencies; b) probably not needed since BaBar and Belle have superseded their earlier data, and BES-III will supersede their newer data, and c) there is no funding model for data preservation!
Computing Centres and Technologies Chairs: Volker Guelzow (DESY), Frederic Hemmer (CERN, Switzerland) A Multi-purpose Computing Centre: CC-IN2P3 (Lyon, France) Fabio Hernandez (IN2P3/CNRS Computing Centre, France) ‘Currently, we don’t really preserve data, we preserve [tape] cartridges(!
)’ There is ‘no strategy for long-term data preservation,’ and ‘a collective and co-ordinated effort from experiments, funding agencies and data centres seems essential for dealing with this issue.’ A Multi-purpose Computing Centre: FNAL (USA) Stephen Wolbers (Fermilab) Prior to 2002, Fermilab physics data were written to Exabyte cartridges that had reliability issues from the moment they were written.
These tapes are physically preserved at Fermilab, but their readability is not assured.
From 2002 experimental data has been stored using more robust robotic mass storage systems managed by software that makes it possible to migrate data to new tape technologies in the future.
Open issues include, how long to preserve the tape data, and how to maintain or migrate the experiments’ software.
A Distributed Computing Centre (NDGF, Nordics) Erik Mattias Wadenstein (NGDF) The talk acknowledged a commitment to keep ‘data available at least until 10 years after LHC shutdown’ but did not elaborate.
The NGDF itself is a truly distributed facility that is truly walking the Grid walk.
Storage Systems: Status and Perspectives Martin Gasthuber (DESY) Turning the focus to technologies, Martin set the scene by tracing the history of storage from stone tablets (very low density but huge lifetime) to modern technologies with stupendous densities and very uncertain lifetimes.
There are modern technical solutions for dense, very stable, archives, but the market volume favours devices that require ‘endless migration’.
Virtualisation Yves Kemp (DESY) Yves addressed how software systems could be kept alive using emulation, virtualisation or continuous test-driven migration (a.k.a.
brute force).
Emulation makes inefficient use of CPU, but Moore’s Law can render the CPU issue moot.
Emulation allows Commodore 64 software to be executed today, but (my note) the C64 presented a single stable environment unlike Linux-x86 today.
Virtualisation is an attractive way to run a variety of current operating systems.
In discussions it emerged that there is no clear evidence that it will be a good solution for a variety of ancient operating systems.
To quote Yves: ‘Virtualisation alone will not be sufficient,’ and ‘Everything will be different anyhow.
‘ Reports from Past Experiences of Data Preservation Chairs: Tobias Haas (DESY), Takashi Sasaki (KEK) Experience from Re-analysis of PETRA (and LEP) Data Siegfried Bethke (Max-Planck-Institut für Physik) For me, this was the most fascinating talk of the workshop.
It described ‘the only example of reviving and still using 25-30 year old data & software in HEP.’ JADE was an e+eexperiment at DESY’s PETRA collider.
The PETRA (and SLAC’s PEP) data are unlikely to be superseded, and improved theoretical understanding of QCD (Quantum ChromoDynamics) now allows valuable new physics results to be obtained if it is possible to analyse the old data.
Only JADE has succeeded in this, and that by a combination of industry and luck.
A sample luck and industry anecdote: ‘The file containing the recorded luminosities of each run and fill, was stored on a private account and therefore lost when [the] DESY archive was cleaned up.
Jan Olsson, when cleaning up his office in ~1997, found an old ASCII-printout of the luminosity file.
Unfortunately, it was printed on green recycling paper not suitable for scanning and OCR-ing.
A secretary at Aachen re-typed it within 4 weeks.
A checksum routine found (and recovered) only 4 typos.’ The key conclusion of the talk was: ‘archiving & re-use of data & software must be planned while [an] experiment is still in running mode!’ The fact that the talk documented how to succeed when no such planning had been done only served to strengthen the conclusion.
Experience from the LEP Higgs Working Group Peter Igo-Kemenes (CERN / Gjøvik) This talk laid bare the sociological challenges involved in making data available to outsiders, and, in this case, competitors.
The experiments at CERN’s LEP e+ecollider could not bring themselves to allow ‘insight into each-other’s “kitchen”.’ As a result, the potential for reuse of even this limited Higgs search data is ‘strongly restrained.’ Data Conservation at LEP (ALEPH, DELPHI, L3) Andre Georg Holzner (ETH Zürich) LEP (Large Electron-Positron Collider) was shut down at the end of 2000.
Although most experiments are still producing final publications, the preservation of the analysis capability is in a sorry state.
Andre gave most details about L3.
His L3 summary seems widely true: ‘Preservation effort started too late.
We consider it failed.
(However, [the] publication effort was a success!).
Among possible reasons for the failure of the preservation effort: Effort started too late (after data taking was completed) Based on 1-2 persons, not even working 100% on it Everybody’s analysis code was ‘private’ (stored in user’s directory, not in central storage) Inheriting of analysis typically by person-to-person oral training instead of providing documentation Private corrections (e.g.
additional smearing of MC) often did not go into central code People left to other experiments quickly after end of data taking.’ ALEPH is in somewhat better shape.
Each institute has a laptop with a frozen analysis system and 2 TB of data, and there is a long-term effort to keep experts accessible.
ALEPH has also addressed the ‘who can publish’ minefield with a policy that collaboration members can publish their own papers on most ALEPH data.
All the LEP experiments seemed to feel let down by the long-scheduled dropping of support for the CERNLIB software library.
Data Conservation at LEP (OPAL) Matthias Schroeder (CERN) OPAL reported all the same issues as L3, but were overall in a somewhat better state, for example in having a ‘Long-Term Editorial Board’ to advise on the validity of analyses.
Management of Astronomical Data Archives and Their Interoperability through the Virtual Observatory Standards Fabio Pasian (INAF, Trieste) HEP studies (we hope) immutable physical laws, whereas astronomy studies a changing universe.
Thus in astronomy ‘every single observation must be kept.’ Astronomy culture differs from HEP in other ways: data are made available to the public after some time, and since 1977, the FITS standard has been used as the format for analysis data.
My own reaction, in reporting this information on the astronomy and virtual observatory story is that I find it deeply disturbing.
Can I put their preservation and sharing success down to the simplicity of photographic plates and CCD cameras?
Will they fail as spectacularly as HEP on the next generation of space observatories that are nothing less than HEP detectors in space?
We must be able to learn something from astronomy, but what is it?
Challenges in Long-term Computing Models and ROOT Solutions René Brun (CERN) The ROOT software package now has close to a monopoly of support for data persistency and latter-stage analysis in HEP.
René presented a picture of continued vigorous development and responsiveness to community needs.
For more than a decade, René has called for a strict avoidance of commercial software packages because of their uncertain lifetimes and development cycles.
His repeated call resonated with the anecdotes from the experiments.
Open Access and Long Term Collaborative Governance Chair: Richard Mount (SLAC) The HEP Survey for Long Term Data Persistency and Open Access Salvatore Mele (CERN) Salvatore reported on an HEP survey that had been funded by the European Union as a first step towards strategic funding decisions on data preservation.
The survey had generated some 1200 responses (one of which was from this reporter) from a reasonably representative set of physicists – the Europe/US, experiment/theory, young/old balances looked much like those in the physics population.
A large majority of respondents thought data preservation was important, but only 16% thought that their experiment or organisation would preserve data, perhaps because 43% thought preservation would cost a significant fraction of the original effort to produce and analyse the data and only 6% thought the cost would be minimal.
Apart from technical and cost issues, most respondents were concerned about invalid results being obtained from preserved data and about the extent to which the original owners of the data would get credit for its use.
EU/FP7 Policies and Programmes Salvatore Mele The European Union has at least two programmes that could fund HEP data preservation efforts.
The most promising is the huge FP7 programme that funded the study Salvatore just described, but the funding processes have a long lead time, making the programme more relevant to LHC (Large Hadron Collider) than to experiments that currently need help.
US/DoE Policies and Programmes Amber Boehnlein (US Department of Energy (DOE)) Amber was clear about the DoE/HEP policy on data preservation: ‘there isn’t one.’ Her aim was to listen and learn about all aspects of HEP data preservation including the policies and programmes of other funding agencies.
UK/STFC Policies and Programmes David Corney (STFC) The Science and Technology Facilities Council funds HEP, nuclear physics, astronomy and space, plus major research facilities in the UK and Europe.
Included in its portfolio is the 80-person UK Digital Curation Centre.
The picture painted was one of areas of enviable progress, but with very far to go.
David noted that STFC was among several UK Research Councils with no reference to a Data Policy on its Web site.
He concluded: ‘Data Preservation is complex, expensive and unsolved.
HEP needs to clarify what they are trying to achieve, understand the costs and potential benefits, and decide if they are worth it.’ Report from SPIRES Travis Brooks (SLAC) The SPIRES database of HEP preprints and publications is used worldwide.
Originating at SLAC in the 1970s it is now supported by a US-Europe collaboration and is undergoing vital re-engineering under the new name of INSPIRE.
Workshop Discussions: Options for Long-term Data Analysis Chair: Cristinel Diaconu The e+e-, ep and pp groups met in parallel and reported back the next day.
Report from ee Experiments Homer Neal (SLAC) An implicit background to the e+ereport was the near uniqueness, and consequent long-term value, of e+ecollision data at each centre of mass energy.
The experiments favoured the creation of a common data definition format, recognising it to be necessary while far from sufficient.
Book-keeping tools, luminosity information and community wisdom, such as the BaBar Hypernews would all be necessary to perform analysis in the long term.
Babar experience with ‘amazingly sensitive’ code already showed that virtualisation was no silver bullet!
Report from ep Experiments David South The HERA ep data will remain unique for the foreseeable future.
Some principal justifications for preserving the data, such as testing new or improved theories, required the ability to improve the reconstruction of raw data – demanding that all data and software be ‘alive’.
The parallel session served mainly to set out the issues and the ep experiments planned to meet again soon to make further progress.
Report from pp Experiments Qizhong Li The pp discussions focused on the Fermilab proton-antiproton data.
The Fermilab experiments essentially lost their Run I data, perhaps justifiable given the greater luminosity of Run II.
CDF and D0 plan to keep all Run II raw, reconstructed and analysis data, plus their infrastructure and environment alive for about five years.
At this point there is a good chance that LHC data will have substantially superseded the Run II data.
Scenarios for Long-term Analysis Stephen Wolbers A good summary of the issues including: Preservation requires a physics case strong enough to produce a real shift of resources; Issues of authorship and collaboration ownership of the [preserved] data.
Working Directions Homer Neal Homer set out a plan for work leading up to the next workshop.
In his words: ‘establish the clear justification for Data Preservation & Long Term Analysis establish the means (and the feasibility of these means) by which this will be achieved give guidance to the past, present and future experiments a draft document by the next meeting @SLAC.’ Next Workshop / Blueprint Plans Richard Mount / Cristinel Diaconu I proposed a two-and-a-half day workshop, if possible in the early summer of this year.
My proposals for the programme structure were discussed vigorously along with ideas from Cristinel Diaconu.
The experiments that had just ceased data taking had been the motive force behind this first workshop and they should continue to lead the drive towards common work on data preservation.
The next workshop should aim to make real progress on: the science cases for data preservation; the technical approaches to be adopted; non-technical policies on ownership and access.
Conclusion The workshop raised far more questions than it delivered answers.
Nevertheless, the way forward became reasonably clear.
HEP has to acknowledge and act on its responsibility to make explicit decisions on the science and business case for various levels of data preservation.
In those areas where data should be preserved, we must strive to organise a cost-effective inter-experiment and inter-funding-agency programme of work.
References Workshop programme and copies of presentations: http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=42722 Author Details Richard P. Mount Head of Scientific Computing SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory 2575 Sand Hill Road Menlo Park, California 94025, USA Email: richard.mount@stanford.edu Return to top Article Title: “Data Preservation and Long-term Analysis in High-Energy Physics” Author: Richard P. Mount Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/dplta-hep-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: E-metrics for Library and Information Professionals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: E-metrics for Library and Information Professionals Buzz data database infrastructure Citation BibTex RIS Elizabeth McHugh learns about the importance of locally produced e-metrics and how they could be produced using available technologies.
The sub-title of this book provides a broader explanation for those who may be puzzled by the use of the term "e-metrics".
The book suggests that to reach a real understanding of how digital and virtual library collections are used and who is using them, generating data on a local level as well as employing vendor-generated data which conforms, or otherwise, to emerging standards, is important for libraries.
Content Overview The book starts with a preface which summarises its contents, allowing the reader to choose between 3 sections What e-metrics are; Why they are required by libraries; How libraries can build local collections of e-metrics data.
This may encourage the more experienced collections manager to skip over the first section, which is largely historical in content.
However, for the inexperienced collections manager the first section is a useful reminder of how and why data is collected and the sorts of information that can be gleaned from it.
In its examples, the book is talking about resources in the sense of paid-for, subscription-based electronic resources but primarily journals and databases.
Its tone is slanted towards academic libraries, but the examples given throughout the book could be equally applied to public or business libraries where they subscribe to the same types of content.
The first 3 chapters of the book provide an explanation and background for the user in the emergence and development of e-metrics and why they are important for libraries, with the first chapter making comparisons with the use of e-metrics in business.
The following two chapters look at the emerging standards for data generation and illustrate how companies provide data complying with those standards, alongside data generated by the companies themselves.
This section also sets the scene for the following two, as it emphasises the viewpoint that vendor data, in whatever form it is received, while useful, should be augmented by locally produced data.
It sets up three imaginary scenarios of small, medium and large general library configurations to demonstrate later on in the book how libraries of these types can implement local e-metrics solutions with the probable resources they have available to them.
Chapters 4-6 are the chapters of justification why libraries should collect detailed e-metrics information, and the purposes to which the results could be put to justify the role they play in their institution.
The age of seemingly freely available information, via the Internet, can make managers question the relevancy of purchasing electronic resources.
These chapters pose a series of generic hypothetical frequently asked questions to provide libraries with ideas on what sort of information could be gathered with locally produced e-metrics to assist them in justifying their role in the institution.
Questions are posed to give examples, using e-metrics, to show how the resources are being used, who is using them and when they are being used.
The role of e-metrics in collection management and development, library administration, costs and infrastructure is also highlighted.
A number of the questions posed, and the answers provided, may seem obvious to persons who have been dealing with e-collections for some time.
However, for the newcomer to this area, they act as a guide to the sorts of e-metrics which could be produced, even at a basic level, and the uses to which they could be put in justifying collection development and management as well as staffing in the library.
The final section of the book looks at the technology and work processes involved in getting e-metrics implemented on a local level, rather than relying on vendor-produced data.
It looks at local e-metrics projects from both the technical and administrative implementation perspectives.
This is not a stepby-step in-depth explanation of how libraries should go about these projects.
Rather, the chapters seek to provide guidelines on what would be required to make local projects work the sorts of technology and personnel that would be required, the types of data to be included, along with an indication of potential problems that might be encountered during the process of extracting the local e-metrics information.
It provides examples of basic, middle and advanced level projects.
There is an assumption of some technical knowledge, and in general the explanations are clear.
The chapters point out that often the basic technical infrastructure exists in the libraries' computer network, and that working in partnership with other areas of the organisation can make a project feasible, although it does not rule out the possibility of outsourcing the project if necessary.
The final chapter attempts to look into the future and see what issues could affect the production of local and vendor-produced e-metrics.
One chapter cannot hope to go into great depth on issues such as Open Access, consolidation in the publishing sector, federated searching, etc, but as these issues and others develop in the sector, the need to revisit these areas to see how e-metrics are being implemented is highlighted.
Conclusion The book is useful for people new to the field of e-resource management.
It is not a complete step-by-step "how-to-do-it" manual, which may be a slight concern for the novice.
However, it encourages e-resource managers to think why locally produced data is relevant for their libraries (rather than just relying on vendor data), what data could be extracted, and also provides scenarios on how this could be achieved from a technology and personnel standpoint.
While this may seem 'old hat' for experienced e-resource managers, this book could nonetheless serve as a useful aide-mémoire.
Author Details Elizabeth McHugh Electronic Resources Manager UHI Millennium Institute Email: elizabeth.mchugh@uhi.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.uhi.ac.uk/index.php Return to top Article Title: "E-Metrics for Library and Information Professionals: How to Use Data for Managing and Evaluating Electronic Resource Collections" Author: Elizabeth McHugh Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/mchugh-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Buzz data infrastructure archives digitisation identifier repositories cataloguing copac curation itunes research Citation BibTex RIS Lorcan Dempsey reviews Volume III of a landmark collection on the history of libraries in 'Britain and Ireland' from 1850 to 2000.
First, a note about this reviewer.
I am not a library historian although I am interested in our professional and institutional development.
I received my library education in Ireland, although I have worked for much of my career in the UK and am now in the US.
I observed the developments discussed in the latter parts of this volume and have contributed to the literature about them.
I have met many of the contributors and am familiar with the writings of others.
The third volume of this landmark work covers the period of major institutional development of libraries of all types, 'an unprecedented expansion and diversification of library activity' as the Preface puts it.
We also read that the 'lush texture' (sic) of modern library history requires 'a rigorous structuring of the varied types of libraries to be described'.
The editors note that library historians have available a 'considerable amount of contextual knowledge' from this period, given the intense historical scrutiny it has received.
They also note that the documentary record of this period is extensive, as it coincides with the emergence of bureaucracy and the records management practices that that entails.
And they sketch the sources relevant to the library: the administrative records of libraries themselves, the recollections of librarians, and the treatment of libraries by others in the more general media.
In these opening pages also there is some discussion of methodology.
The editors provide a simple and useful framing of approaches to library history in the modern period.
They set up a contrast between 'description and analysis, between fact-grubbing and theory'.
This suggests a continuum of activity, from where empirical research is required to gather the evidence for further research and analysis (they suggest, for example, that this is the case with 'hidden' libraries, libraries in community centres, pubs, hotels, and so on), to situations where there is a need for a balance between theory and factual discovery (here they place, for example, research into Higher Education libraries), finally to situations where there has already been significant empirical research synthesised in a range of secondary resources which can provide the basis for more theoretical approaches (here they place public library history).
In Chapter 1, the editors do a good job of sketching some library issues in the context of social and institutional development during this period.
They focus on 'modernity' and draw on relevant theoretical and historical sources.
Indeed, these opening sections set up strong expectations, for a library story informed by nuanced understanding of social context based on a rich historical record, for a treatment which has an appropriate balance between analysis and empirical research, and for a history which is adequate to the richness and range of libraries themselves based on multiple library and other sources.
Peter Hoare is the editor of the three volume set.
Alistair Black and Peter Hoare edited this volume.
The earlier two volumes were edited by different hands.
Alistair Black is Professor of Library and Information History at Leeds Metropolitan University.
In my view, Black does the most interesting work to come out of library and information schools in 'Britain and Ireland'.
In addition to his work in public libraries, his historical research has taken other rewarding directions.
He is sensibly alert to broader theoretical interests in history and the social sciences.
Peter Hoare was formerly University Librarian at the University of Nottingham and has written widely on library history.
The editors, and many of the contributors, have been associated with what is, now, the Library and Information History Group of CILIP.
Clearly, this history has been a major intellectual and logistical undertaking.
In this volume alone, by my count, there are 50 chapters and 42 authors.
Do they meet the expectations set out in the opening pages?
Well, yes and no.
They have provided a very useful volume that pulls together a great deal of description, commentary and analysis.
There are some excellent contributions.
However, this is very much a work of parts, indeed, it is difficult to grasp the volume as an integral piece.
Individual contributions stick in the mind like Frederick W Ratcliffe's interesting discussion of the interaction between city and university in Manchester rather than broader pattern.
The editors have not consistently drawn on the resources and expertise and, to be fair, maybe they are not always available to fulfil their commendable ambitions.
What Does It Cover?
There is some prefatory material, an introduction about methodology and sources, and a good opening chapter on 'Libraries and the modern world'.
This is then followed by thematic Parts, each comprising several chapters following a brief introduction: Enlightening the masses: the public library as concept and reality This Part has several thematic chapters, each about an aspect of the public library during this period.
There are for example chapters on reference work, children's services, outreach services and public library people (regrettably not a topic that is repeated in other Parts).
The thematic approach complements Black's own major work in this area, published separately in the last few years [1][2], and Black himself has a fine 'analytic' chapter exploring different interpretive strategies.
I thought this was the most achieved Part in the volume, maybe because, as the editors suggest, it is the most mature area of historical enquiry; a broad 'descriptive' base is already in place elsewhere, so that the 'analytical' approach works well.
The voluntary ethic: libraries of our own This Part covers personal and institutional collections which are found outside the sectoral lines of public, national, academic and special covered elsewhere [3].
There are chapters on circulating libraries, independent working class libraries and private libraries.
For me, this was the most interesting Part, as I knew rather less about these topics than others and the quality of contributions was generally high.
I particularly enjoyed and learned from Simon Eliot's discussion of circulating libraries and David Pearson's examination of private collections.
Each of the chapters embedded discussion of its topic in more general cultural and social issues, giving a good mix of description and framing analysis.
Libraries for national needs: library provision in the public sphere in the countries of the British Isles This Part aims to look at libraries in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, with some focus on national and public libraries.
There is also a chapter on library development in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 'a typical English city'.
In his short introduction, Peter Hoare notes the 'quite different library traditions reflecting the history and culture of each country', however the contributions here stand alone and do not take a comparative perspective.
There are inevitably broad overviews of developments in Wales, Ireland and Scotland by Philip Henry Jones, Catherine Moran and Pearl Quinn, and John C Crawford, respectively.
I was very interested in the robust discussion of Welsh language issues by Jones.
The contribution of the National Library of Wales to Welsh and Celtic scholarship is taken up by Lionel Madden in a chapter which explicitly links the work of the Library to Wales as a 'nation'.
Madden is a former librarian of the National Library of Wales, and the chapter on the National Library of Scotland is also by its former Librarian, Ian McGowan.
The chapter on the National Library of Ireland is by Gerard Long, an assistant keeper at that institution, who has written interestingly elsewhere of the Library's role in the cultural life of Dublin and Ireland as national and institutional concerns connect [4].
His contribution here is a short but interesting discussion focusing on successive library directors and the role of the library in the emerging state.
I come back to the treatment of the 'nations' of 'Britain and Ireland' below.
The nation's treasury: Britain's national library as concept and reality This Part covers the evolution of the British Library and its antecedents.
There is a chapter on the development of the British Museum Library by P.R.Harris drawing on earlier published work [5].
A second chapter considers the organisational and political contexts as previously distinct organisations, including the British Museum Library, coalesce into the The British Library, and traces the subsequent development of the BL.
This is a very internally focused chronological narrative.
To employ a phrase used by Black elsewhere in the volume, it is 'narrowly conceived, descriptive research'.
It is well told and interesting, but does little to tie developments to broader cultural or other contexts, and much of the material is available elsewhere.
It would have been interesting to have learnt more about the establishment and management of the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and its subsequent development.
The trajectory of this service is fascinating: it is described by Ian Cornelius in his contribution to the volume as the 'one clearly internationally successful British library institution'.
Consciously designed for efficiencies it developed into a major hub of the UK library community and beyond, influencing the course of resource sharing and co-operation.
It was a real institutional innovation.
As the pattern of article distribution and consumption is re-shaped by the digital turn, the rationale for the service changes, and the revenues which support it decline.
How the British Library addresses this is one of the more interesting questions facing it in the new century.
(There is also some discussion of this service in the chapter on co-operation in Part Seven.)
The spirit of enquiry: Higher Education and libraries This Part covers the emergence of Higher Education libraries, as a unit since the 1960s, and with separate chapters on the prior evolution of the libraries of the University of London, of the 'ancient universities', and of the civic universities.
This is really a discussion of Higher Education libraries in the (current) UK (with some reference to Trinity College Dublin).
As such, it is an interesting collection.
The authors are respected and reflective senior practitioners, and each was a major actor in the development of academic libraries in the latter part of the twentieth century.
They are Peter Hoare, Bernard Naylor, F.W.
Ratcliffe, and Ian R.M.
Mowatt.
This means that this section has a pragmatic focus, with due weight given to the political and social contexts for organisational and service development.
It is well done.
The rise of professional society: libraries for specialist areas This Part covers special libraries: specialist information services serving industry, medicine, law, religion, and government interests.
Rare-book librarianship also finds a place in this Part, with a contribution by B.C.Bloomfield.
There is an excellent, introductory chapter by Jack Meadows, nuanced and richly documented, which looks at the rise of special libraries, and at the professional and intellectual relationships between library and information science traditions.
Meadows also contributes an interesting chapter on information services for the scientist and engineer.
There is another fine chapter by Alistair Black, focusing on company libraries, one of his research specialisms.
The trade and its tools: librarians and libraries in action This is a somewhat scrappy Part, covering the evolution and interpretation of the professional identity of the librarian, library education, library co-operation, knowledge organisation, and architecture.
There are also two short articles on aspects of women and libraries.
Treatment across the chapters here is very different, and is a good example of the general heterogeneity of presentation.
For example, consider the chapters which discuss issues of professional identity: they are very different in tone.
Ian Cornelius has a suggestive, if elliptical, theoretical discussion of professional identity drawing on categories established by Alistair Black and by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and looking at the literature of professionalisation.
Julia Taylor McCain takes a very different approach to the discussion of women and libraries in a pragmatic and short sketch of the historical emergence of women into professional roles, with some interesting quotes from Melvil Dewey and other detail.
It does not look outside the professional literature to general economic, sociological or historic discussion of the structure or self-characterisation of professions, nor does it compare librarianship to other professions, maleor female-dominated, to see how general experiences within libraries are.
The chapter on knowledge organisation by Rodney Brunt is a straightforward technical account of the emergence of some techniques, accompanying an unreflective assertion surely now untenable?
that these techniques are at the core of the profession.
Other chapters here are similarly diverse: a brief review of library co-operation, a reflective and informative review of library education by a library educator, an interesting review of library architecture by an academic architect, and another brief discussion of 'the feminisation of librarianship' based on the writings of Margaret Reed.
Automation pasts, electronic futures: the digital revolution And finally, this Part presents some chapters on the digital turn in libraries, looking at the automation of processes, access to information resources, and closing with some general conclusions about technology, libraries and social policy.
This volume is a history of libraries from 1850 to 2000.
The last twenty years have seen major changes in how we think about services in a network environment, and given the stated period of enquiry, it may be reasonable not to cover them here.
Interestingly, given how much it looms library conversation, there is no mention of Google in the index.
I return to these questions when discussing co-operation and technology more generally below.
There are three chapters.
One is a pedestrian and partial discussion of library process automation.
Another looks at the evolution of electronic information services.
A final chapter by Liz Chapman and Frank Webster relates recent developments to general technology policy and changing political priorities.
The arguments will be familiar to those who have followed Frank Webster's writings about libraries and broader information society issues, and it is good to see library issues related to a wider context in this way.
So, Parts on public, academic and special libraries are well done, as is the Part on independent libraries.
National libraries are treated less well as a group, and their shared issues are not really addressed.
Other Parts seemed to me to be less well achieved and there is some difference of organisation and presentation.
The level and type of treatment can vary considerably between chapters: some are theoretical, some less so; some are scholarly, some less so; some weave library developments into broader social and cultural contexts; some are very internally focused on the library.
A small final point: I can't help thinking that more straightforward titles for the various Parts would have helped quite a bit, and done much to reveal the intended 'shape' of the volume (e.g.
Public libraries, Academic libraries, Special libraries, ...).
As it is, I felt that the current titles obstruct rather than advance understanding.
Some Topics and Themes Having introduced the volume in general terms, I propose to look more closely at some particular topics suggested by the prefatory and introductory materials.
Context, Analysis and Anecdotes As the editors note, the period covered by this volume is one of major growth and institutional formation for libraries.
Of course, libraries are not ends in themselves, and this development has been in service of evolving educational, civic, business and cultural goals established within wider organisational settings.
The institutions of education, government and business have evolved rapidly in the context of the progressively reconfigured and multiply labelled influences of industrialisation, modernity, globalisation, and so on.
These changes are discussed in the Introduction and by Chapman and Webster in their concluding chapter.
The editors take a sensibly mixed approach.
However the balance between editorial framing, individual contributions and 'horizontal' thematic pieces along the lines of the Chapman and Webster or Cornelius contributions, or in a different way the Part on library automation does not quite come together and contributes to the sense I have that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
There is a reliance on individual contributors to supply context so that it is not very evenly spread.
In some cases, this is well done.
The section on academic libraries, for example, relates changes to changes in the policy context of Higher Education.
Jack Meadows' section locates special libraries quite well.
However, much of the volume is quite internally focused, without really connecting libraries to that wider context.
The sophistication in this regard of Black's own contributions to the volume highlights its absence elsewhere.
Perhaps fuller Part introductions might have helped.
I think that the general introductory material to the volume is strong and well done, but this contextual framing is not carried through the volume.
The Chapman and Webster chapter prompts some thought about other such general topics.
It places a library discussion in the context of general political trends, particularly a move they see from public to private provision of goods.
I can think of three other topics where a general picture would have been interesting but does not come through.
The introduction talks about the 'public sphere' (in Habermas's sense) and 'social capital', and Alistair Black talks about public libraries as 'important agencies of modernity, fashioning alongside other rational institutions a public sphere of open, democratic discourse and social and individual progress'.
Frank Webster, joint author of the final chapter, writing elsewhere about Habermas, has claimed that public libraries are the nearest thing in the UK to an 'achieved public sphere'[6].
This prompted me to expect Part 3, which has Public Sphere in its title, to pick up some of these issues in general terms.
This is not really the case.
Here, and more generally, there is little stepping back from the individual stories to talk about libraries' broader public sphere role.
Their relationship to communications, to publishing, and to debates about information policy, participation and social and educational policy receive fragmented and limited attention.
Second, the general relationship between libraries and broader cultural life, social change and identity formation does not come through very strongly, although there are occasional localised references.
For example, the relationship between collections and interpretation comes through in several places, for example in John C. Crawford's discussion of the Scottish library scene or in Chris Baggs's discussion of 'radical reading' and 'working class libraries'.
I mentioned how Lionel Madden touches on the relationship between the National Library of Wales and national self-identity, and Philip Henry Jones' discussion of Welsh public libraries and the Welsh language.
However, these examples underline the absence of discussion of general issues of representation, cultural diplomacy, interpretation and the role of national institutions in shaping and being shaped by evolving national identities.
Also absent are general discussion of race and immigration, and their impact on library provision.
The influence of British models on countries of the Empire and the cultural diplomacy role of the British Council are mentioned in early pages but this is not a topic for later discussion.
The role of national and other institutions in tourism, genealogy, and cultural relations do not figure.
And third, libraries support readers and writers whose own behaviours change over time.
The information and education environment evolves.
Learning, teaching and research practices change, and this is certainly an area where technology is having a big impact.
This perspective came through in places, but again not consistently.
There were also some notable omissions of 'description'.
Most striking for me was a general shortage of numbers.
Numbers of libraries.
Budgets.
Collection sizes.
Circulation and inter-library loan data.
And so on.
The presence of numerical data within contributions (with Ian Mowat on Higher Education since the 1960s, for example, or Evelyn Kerslake writing about Margaret Reed and the composition of the UK labour market) was striking given the general gap.
There was also little discussion of the industry that supports libraries, whether in terms of system vendors, subscription agents, publishers and booksellers.
It would have been interesting to have followed through the note in the introductory material about the portrayal of libraries in literature, cinema and television.
Of course, there are not yet good secondary sources for much of what is covered in this volume.
This is a general issue as we approach the present.
I think it is noticeable that the discussion of more recent developments is often less good than material covering earlier stages, and less good than in the earlier volumes.
It is also difficult to marshal expertise across the full range of what is included, especially across countries.
There is less original research or synthesis to draw on, in organisational records, in the grey literature of reports, or in personal memoirs.
Finally there is an occasional over-reliance on personal and anecdotal knowledge, or on a sampling of existing literature.
For example, one of the weakest of the Parts is the technology one, which is not really an adequate description of developments in the last 30 years or so, either in terms of the actual detail of what happened, or in terms of appropriate contexts.
In particular, Eric Hunter's chapter on the automation of library processes has a very anecdotal feel.
It does not delve into the administrative records of the organisations he talks about, or the grey literature of the period, or very deeply into the newsletter/journal literature.
Indeed, it does not really go much beyond some readily available secondary resources and personal knowledge.
'Theory' In one of the few strongly theoretical pieces in the book, Ian Cornelius remarks: 'We meet the complexities of the information age without having developed a character to legitimate the profession by giving it a moral force that helps define the age rather than just accommodating to it'.
Cornelius suggests that as library professionalism 'has increasingly emphasised organizational technique and technical competence' it has lost the moral fervour of earlier identities.
Indeed, I think that the naïve identification of professional bodies and others with opportunity in the 'information age' or the 'knowledge economy' is particularly misplaced.
One of the purported characteristics, after all, of such an age is that many professions need to develop these competencies.
Cornelius points to the 'information manager' as the profession's preferred legitimating self-image.
This may have been the case.
I sense a recent shift towards education and learning, and the librarian as a crucial partner in learning, whether this is formal or informal.
For example, Bob Martin, the last Director of the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) in the US made this a central plank of his message while in role: 'Libraries are essential educational institutions.
We often say that libraries are in the information business, that they select, organize, retrieve, transmit and preserve information.
That's true.
But those are activities of the library, not the mission.
The primary role of the library-any type of library-is to provide resources and services that support education.
And education is what the public wants from the library."
[7] And certainly we have seen much more emphasis on the educational role of the library in academic library thinking.
Some corroboration of Cornelius's views is offered by consideration of this volume as a whole.
I have observed a strong internal professional focus, which places the library in broader political, educational or cultural contexts in limited ways.
One has a sense of a profession more comfortable in asserting rather than demonstrating value, which focuses on means rather than ends, and which does not do a good job of connecting its agendas to broader social and political agendas.
Nations and Politics During this period there were major developments in the political composition of what the title calls 'Britain and Ireland', and in the relationship between the changing political entities on 'these islands'.
The relationship between the parts is complex and evolving, and the impact of different jurisdictional, policy and funding regimes is an important part of the story of libraries in 'Britain and Ireland', as is acknowledged in the introduction to Part 3.
There, Peter Hoare discusses the plural 'home nations' that make up 'Britain and Ireland', and suggests that perspectives in this section will 'cross-cut' the experiences described in other chapters.
It might have been useful to the readers to have sketched some more historical context about the make-up of 'Britain and Ireland' during this time, or to have provided a timeline which communicated some of the shifting contexts within which developments occurred.
This context would have been useful to readers; indeed it may also have been useful for contributors.
However, again, decisions about context seem to lie with individual authors and practices vary.
Consider for example Part 6, The rise of professional society.
B.C.Bloomfield's chapter on rare books and special collections is interesting but is almost exclusively about England.
Jack Meadow's references to the Royal Dublin Society in the excellent chapter on support for the scientist and engineer seem perfunctory, as does the treatment of libraries in Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the concluding paragraph of Christopher Murray's chapter on government and parliamentary libraries.
On the other hand, Guy Holborn has parallel sections on England and Wales and on Scotland and Ireland in his chapter on law libraries.
In discussing medical libraries, Antonia Bunch notes that in the absence of extensive published materials on Irish medical libraries, she has consulted an Irish colleague.
And it is interesting that the only references to the libraries of Queen's University Belfast, and University Colleges Dublin, Cork and Galway, in the index are to mentions of medical libraries in her chapter.
The only other mentions of Queen's and University College Dublin are to their library schools in a very good chapter by David Muddiman on the emergence of library education, which, again, does actually consider developments across all the 'nations'.
Incidentally, this almost total absence of discussion of general academic library development in Ireland seems a debilitating gap in a volume of this title.
(There is also one mention of Maynooth in the index, pointing to the chapter on religious libraries.
Trinity gets pulled in to more discussions.)
Despite this acknowledgement of a plurality of nations, we revert to a singular nation in the title of Part 3, on the British Library, The nation's treasury.
Which nation?
I have already mentioned Lionel Madden's discussion of 'library and nation' in respect of Wales and the role of the National Library of Wales.
This inconsistency points to a general editorial gap around issues of cultural and national identity.
It is reasonable for English experiences to occupy the larger part of the narrative given the relative scale of library activity involved.
However, the allocation of attention should be the result of conscious editorial judgement, rather than the side effect of habitual ways of thinking.
Networks and Systems Libraries congregate in a variety of co-operative arrangements.
Antonia J Bunch has a short chapter providing some detail of co-operation (again, one looks for central parts of the literature: there is no mention for example of Peter Stubley's book on BLCMP (Birmingham Libraries Cooperative Mechanization Project) in the bibliography [8]).
The recent story of co-operation is closely bound up with technology as digital networks reconfigure organisational networks and alter the pattern of services.
Again, the editors in Chapter 1 make an interesting point that is not picked up later in the volume: the UK is untypical in that the emergence of lending and document supply services from the British Library has meant that more co-operative, or national, apparatus common in other counties is less well developed here.
In fact, it is interesting to observe the development of SWALCAP (South West Academic Libraries Co-operative Automation Project), BLCMP, SCOLCAP (Scottish Libraries Cooperative Automation Project) and LASER in different directions, and later of COPAC, and to note similarity and differences from the bibliographic and resource sharing arrangements that emerged in Europe [9] and North America [10].
It is also interesting to observe the later development of shared infrastructure in the academic sector through JISC.
Writing about library provision across the University of London, Bernard Naylor draws a contrast between 'strength through diversity' and 'diseconomy through dispersal'.
The pervasiveness of networking makes this a general and pressing question.
Since the digital turn libraries have seen two major reconfigurations, one around shared cataloguing and resource sharing, and another around the externalisation of A&I services and electronic journals.
What we are now seeing is a set of questions about further reconfiguration: mass digitisation, offsite storage, shared procurement, disclosure to search engines, and so on.
The balance between shared centralised provision through the BL and JISC, or other organisations, collaborative sourcing through co-operative arrangements, outsourcing to third parties, and local innovation is an unexplored but central one.
Graham Jefcoate poses a series of suggestive questions at the beginning of Part Eight, the chapter on library technology.
He notes the profound impact of digital developments and wonders if a future History will recognise major change or whether it will acknowledge that libraries and librarians could not 'be untied from the "legacy" media of manuscript and print'.
However, more generally, this volume is surprisingly tentative about the impact of technology.
There are many conventional references to recent technical changes and to likely future change.
But actual engagement with the issues is limited.
However, recent developments also affect how we see the trajectory of library services and library institutions and surely this should influence how we tell the story of that trajectory?
So, for example, I questioned Rodney Brunt's claim about cataloguing and classification above.
Can we quite tell that story in the same way when we now look at the abundance of resources that need to be managed?
Think of national libraries archiving the Web, large image repositories or other newly digitised materials, the computational analysis enabled by mass digitisation, and so on.
It is becoming clearer that many of our current approaches were developed in a time when information resources were scarce, were 'fixed' and were amenable to this type of manual attention.
How do these approaches sit alongside approaches taken in the abstracting and indexing field, or in newer network services?
This is one reason why the treatment of technology is disappointing.
Not because one wants a discussion of latest trends, but because the co-evolution of libraries with developing network services and behaviours does raise questions about ends.
And it touches on core issues.
Think about knowledge organisation, the curation of the scholarly record, changing scholarly communications, the impact of major gravitational network hubs like iTunes, Google and Amazon, on personal information behaviours and the changing patterns of learning and research.
As our sense of where we are going changes, so does our sense of where we have been.
It is a pity therefore that the volume is not more comfortable with the impact of technology.
Indeed, much of it could have been written 25 years ago.
Conclusion The volume is handsomely assembled and there is a pleasing consistency of layout.
The multiple contributions might have benefited from some cross-referencing.
I thought that a couple of critical remarks reflected more on their authors than on their subjects and could have been removed without loss.
I am thinking of B.C.
Bloomfield's disparagement of 'continental literary theorists' and Alistair Duff's mention of 'a fashionable social theorist', when citing Manuel Castells, who incidentally is favourably mentioned elsewhere in the volume.
That the footnotes were not indexed was an inconvenience: unless somebody was explicitly mentioned in the text it was not possible to find them through the index.
I thought that there was some editorial laziness around names, consistent with the general treatment of the 'home nations' issue.
Many of the contributors, including the editors, use the contested term 'British Isles'.
Sometimes Britain or Great Britain is used when the United Kingdom may be intended (see for example page 298 which talks about Britain and Great Britain).
It would have been useful to have been consistent.
In conclusion, this volume brings together a lot of material in a very valuable way.
I think that the volume makes a very fine collection of essays.
Some contributions were excellent.
However, the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
I think that it does less well as a synthetic history of the development of libraries in 'Britain and Ireland' during this period.
Ironically, some of the ways in which it might have been better are highlighted in the fine opening chapters by the editors.
References Black, A.
(1996).
A new history of the English public library: social and intellectual contexts, 1850-1914.
London: Leicester University Press.
Black, A.
(2000).
The public library in Britain, 1914-2000.
London: British Library.
In preparing this review I took out my copy of Alasdair Macintyre's After Virtue which is discussed in Ian Cornelius's contribution.
I was interested to see that he thanked the staffs of the Boston Athenaeum and the London Library.
See: MacIntyre, A. C. (1981).
After virtue: a study in moral theory.
London: Duckworth.
Long, G. (2005).
A twinge of recollection the National Library in 1904 and thereabouts.
Dublin: National Library of Ireland.
Harris, P. R. (1998).
A history of the British Museum library, 1753-1973.
London: British Library.
Webster, F. (2006).
Theories of the information society.
International library of sociology.
London: Routledge.
Page 176.
Stubley, P. (1988).
BLCMP: a guide for librarians and systems managers.
Aldershot, Hants, England: Gower.
Robert Martin and Tom Storey (interview).
Libraries: Their role and relationship to other cultural institutions.
OCLC Newsletter, April 2003.
Available at http://www5.oclc.org/downloads/design/e-newsletter/260/interview.htm.
Accessed 10 October 2007 Dempsey, L. (1992).
Library bibliographic networks in Europe: a LIBER directory.
The Hague: NBLC.
"Networks and resource sharing", Chapter 9 In: Dempsey, L. (1992).
Libraries, networks and OSI: a review with a report on North American developments.
Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing.
Author Details Lorcan Dempsey Vice President OCLC Email: dempseyl@oclc.org Web site: http://orweblog.oclc.org Return to top Article Title: "The History of Libraries in Modern 'Britain and Ireland'" Author: Lorcan Dempsey Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/maccoll-dempsey-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JASIG June 2007 Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JASIG June 2007 Conference Buzz software java framework wiki portal usability infrastructure repositories personalisation saml moodle ajax facebook authentication uportal openid research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ian Dolphin and Robert Sherratt report on the JASIG Conference, which took place in Denver, Colorado over 24-27 June 2007.
JASIG, the organisation formerly known as the Java Architectures Special Interest Group, but which now is known more simply by its acronym, celebrated its 16th conference in Denver in June.
JASIG was in many senses the first of the small wave of ‘Community Source’ organisations formed within Higher Education, mainly in North America, and largely spinning out of Andrew J Mellon Foundation-funded projects, in the first half of the decade.
Community Source attempts to draw together elements of open source software development, but, to one extent or another, blend these elements with the central coordination and direction of a more conventional consortium-based approach.
Historically if one can use the term for organisations so new JASIG has always tended towards the conventional ‘open source’ end of the Community Source spectrum.
For the last few months, however, JASIG has been an organisation in transition.
The June conference can therefore be seen from a number of perspectives; as providing an update on the JASIG ‘products’, uPortal and CAS (Common Authentication System), as a meeting point for many of the Community Source projects, such as Sakai and Kuali, and as marking a new stage in the evolution of JASIG as an organised community.
In a very real sense, JASIG conferences have also provided a useful bellweather role for indicating the issues taxing Higher Education IT.
The June conference was no exception.
uPortal JASIG is probably best known as the parent organisation for the uPortal framework.
Portals may not be this year’s Higher Education technology ‘fashion item’, but three interrelated discernable trends were noticeable from presentations at the conference: Adoption Institutional adoption, whether of the open source uPortal framework or the commercially integrated and supported Sungard Luminis portal offering (which incorporates uPortal), continues to rise.
It’s often difficult to come up with hard figures for the adoption of open source software; it is, after all, freely downloadable, even if all downloads do not result in enterprise deployments.
Taking the Luminis instances, and known uPortal deployments, it seems highly likely that uPortal is in use at around 1000 institutions worldwide.
Whilst a strong signal of the success of uPortal, this large installed base brings with it a raft of issues to address, both technical and organisational.
Although designed ‘by and for’ Higher Education, uPortal is also beginning to be used in a number of commercial environments, and is operating at significant scale.
The Pearson deployment, which is an interesting example of a large-scale service-oriented approach to systems design fronted by uPortal, is running to 80,000 users per hour.
Customisation and Content A small number of institutions are beginning to experiment with portal frameworks as a means of integrating social software and a range of external “Web 2.0” technologies.
This is being accompanied by an increased tendency to enable customisation by users of institutional portals, and improvements in usability in the means by which users can manage customisation.
Personalisation and customisation were always a significant part of the early promise of portals, but have proved difficult to implement practically for a number of reasons.
Personalisation relies on a consolidated identity infrastructure that many institutions are only now beginning to put in place.
Many institutions were understandably wary of enabling customisation without a deeper understanding of the impact this might have on performance, and the potential impact on support and helpdesks.
The Yale contribution of Ajax-based customisation tools to the uPortal codebase has dramatically improved user experience in this respect.
Ease of customisation is, however, far from providing a compelling reason for users to customise.
The experience of Duke University is of interest in this respect.
Duke began providing a number of configurable social tools, such as Facebook and del.icio.us portlets in addition to its largely administrative existing content.
Student usage rose by 400% in the course of 12 months.
The portal is now being used as a place where institutions can begin to experiment with creative content combinations.
Common Specifications and ‘Portalisation’ Portal deployment and usage is maturing, and there are signs that common specifications and standards surrounding portals are maturing similarly.
Few institutions with a deployed instance of uPortal have developed anything but JSR168 [1] portlets, despite many perceived limitations, in the last eighteen months to two years.
The injection of Pluto1.1 [2] portlet reference implementation into uPortal 3, and a proposed merger of the 2.x and 3 uPortal lines, positions uPortal not only to take advantage of existing JSR168 portlets, but also for the next iteration of the specification, JSR286.
Charles Severance of the Sakai Foundation presented a further perspective.
In addition to the reuse of Pluto code in uPortal, Pluto has been incorporated into the latest version of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment.
There is therefore the perspective not only of re-using JSR168 conformant portlets between conforming portal frameworks, but also learning and research collaboration environments.
Given the range of resource discovery, grid-enabled and other portlets being produced, this potentially marks a significant step towards a more component and ‘toolkit’-based approach to research and learning collaboration.
As institutions move towards more personalised and customisable environments to support learning, teaching and research, these developments can only be welcomed.
CAS The Common Authentication System (CAS), a widely used single sign-on service for the Web, originally developed at Yale, is the other major JASIG ‘product’.
CAS is a typical middleware success story, which is to say, it is largely invisible to end-users.
CAS has achieved a similarly sized installed user base to uPortal, but is already used much more widely in the commercial sector.
Organisations as diverse as Sony and World of Warcraft make use of CAS for Web ISO, in addition to many hundreds of Higher Education institutions.
In a presentation on the latest release of CAS, version 3.1, the lead architect Scott Battaglia of Rutgers highlighted support for standards and a number of new features.
CAS offers support for both Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OpenID.
The latter is currently generating much interest as it offers a decentralised framework for user-centred digital identities.
CAS 3.1 also includes an attribute repository allowing the secure release of attributes as required to specific services.
In addition to the themes relating to specific areas of JASIG activity, Identity Management, and the organisation of the community, were recurring themes of the conference.
Jens Haeusser of UBC gave an extremely valuable survey of Identity Management developments and projected developments, from today’s centralised systems through Federated ID and towards distributed and user-centric ID [3].
The integration of identity information users carry with them when joining a college or university is likely to be a considerable challenge for the future.
Community Development As an organisation and as a community, JASIG continues to evolve.
The active participation of the ESUP-Portail consortium, representing around ninety French institutions that have organised to produce a pre-integrated open source software stack for Higher Education (including uPortal and CAS, but also Moodle) has shifted the focus from North America and the UK.
JASIG is now a membership organisation [4], with relatively modest fees designed to sustain coordination and collaboration.
Elections for the Board of Directors, and formal project management groups for the JASIG ‘products’ are to be held shortly.
The latter groups are designed to bring together developers and other strategic stakeholders both to chart a forward path and act in an advocacy role.
However, the new organisational structures are designed to be flexible and enable growth and further development, rather than be constraining.
The Educause Catalyst Award The strength of adoption of uPortal, and its maturity as a component in an enterprise framework was marked by the announcement at the JASIG conference that uPortal had been named as the recipient of this years Educause “Catalyst Award”.
The award is granted to “…innovations and initiatives centred on information technologies that provide groundbreaking solutions to major challenges in higher education.
[5]” Further Reading The JASIG wiki has a page which acts as a repository for presentation materials and Birds of A Feather notes from the JA-SIG Summer 2007 conference [6].
Presentation materials are linked from their session slot.
References Java Specification Request 168 is a standard for developing those fragments which render content into a portal framework portlets.
Pluto http://portals.apache.org/pluto/ Jens Haeusser, The Future of Identity Management in Higher Education.
Presentation to JA-SIG, June 2007.
(Powerpoint file) http://tinyurl.com/2c96xt JA-SIG Membership http://www.ja-sig.org/membership.html The full text of the Press release is available from http://www.ja-sig.org/ or as MS Word document http://www.uportal.org./news/resources/educause-award.doc JA-SIG Wiki: JA-SIG Conferences: Denver 2007 presentations http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JCON/Denver+2007+presentations Author Details Ian Dolphin Head of eStrategy and eServices Integration The University of Hull Email: i.dolphin@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/ Robert Sherratt Head of Systems Integration The University of Hull Email: r.sherratt@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/ Return to top Article Title: “JASIG June 2007 Conference” Author: Ian Dolphin and Robert Sherratt Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/ja-sig-2007-06-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL News: What EEVL Users Really Want Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL News: What EEVL Users Really Want Buzz data software database portal archives cataloguing graphics aggregation ejournal ebook research Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod looks at the results of the recent questionnaire which surveyed opinions about the EEVL service.
What do the users of EEVL [1], the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing, really want from the service?
Do they want EEVL to develop more portal services?
Do they want more expansion of EEVL's catalogue of Internet resources?
Do they want other things?
The only way to find out what users of an information service really want is to ask them.
This is what EEVL did earlier this year through a Web-based questionnaire.
The questionnaire is now closed, but an archive version is available [2].
In order to encourage people to complete the questionnaire, four £25 Amazon vouchers were offered, with winners chosen at random.
The questionnaire was available for three months, and at the end of each of the first two months one winner was chosen and announced on various JISCmail lists, with a final two winners being chosen at the end of the exercise.
Questionnaire A considerable number of entries were received 364.
Of these, 7 were completely blank, and 8 were obviously duplicate entries, leaving a total of 349 valid entries.
Good questionnaires are not so long that entrants become frustrated.
There were 18 questions in EEVL's, requiring an estimated 10 minutes to complete.
The EEVL Questionnaire 2004 It may seem obvious to state this, but meaningful answers are only generated from meaningful questions, and therefore considerable thought was given to the formulation of the questionnaire.
In addition, there were several opportunities for entrants to note their own comments or to expand on any opinions they might have of the EEVL service.
The data collected from the questionnaire is proving to be very useful for planning developments to the EEVL service, and many thanks go to everyone who entered.
Users A reasonable cross-section of different types of users completed the questionnaire, with the highest number (140) being undergraduate students, followed by information professionals (67), postgraduate students (57), researchers (33), lecturers (22), practising professionals (12), and 18 'others'.
The relatively small number of lecturers was disappointing, as EEVL is very keen to encourage use by academic staff.
Most entrants were from the UK (304), with a high proportion being based in Higher Education (232) and a smaller number in Further Education (62).
The latter figure was again a little disappointing, given that the questionnaire had been deliberately promoted to several FE-related mailing lists, and considering that the EEVL service is potentially very useful to those in FE.
Most entrants 'main' subject area was engineering (191), but a healthy number (96) came from computing.
As computing is the most recent subject to be added to EEVL, it was encouraging that feedback was received from this sector.
How do people find out about EEVL?
Most entrants stated 'personal recommendation', which reinforces evidence which has shown how important the 'invisible college' is to those involved in technological subjects.
An encouraging number of 71 stated that they had heard of EEVL via promotional efforts, which suggests that those efforts have considerable effect on usage.
A disappointingly high proportion of entrants (144) had not used EEVL before, which implies that some other questions might have been completed without a great deal of knowledge about the service, though it does show that questionnaires and prizes help to promote services.
Services The main body of the questionnaire concerned EEVL's Internet Resource Catalogue of over 10,000 quality resources, plus EEVL's other services such as Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) [3], the Engineering E-journal Search Engine (EESE) [4], the Virtual Training Suite (VTS) [5] and the OneStep news and job announcement aggregators [6][7].
Some questions also invited opinions on possible new services which could be developed.
A high proportion thought that the EEVL Catalogue was easy to use.
Slightly less thought that searching the Catalogue produced useful results, and slightly fewer, though still a considerable number (172), reckoned it to be a valuable alternative to search engines such as Google or AltaVista.
223 thought the IRC descriptions were useful, and only 8 thought they were not useful.
A fairly high proportion of entrants had not used EEVL's additional services, which is surprising as these services are very popular.
Perhaps it suggests that more effort should be made to promote the additional services or make them more visible from the home page, and in fact this was suggested by more than one respondent.
Of those who had used the additional services, many found EESE either OK or good.
This in itself is a little surprising, in that at the time of the questionnaire, EESE was in need of maintenance.
Obviously, the concept of a search engine which searches freely available full-text engineering e-journals is popular, and effort is currently going into not only upgrading EESE but also into producing equivalents for mathematics and computing.
The VTS, as expected, received a high level of user satisfaction (64 OK, 51 Good, 10 Poor), with OneStep Jobs sharing similar results (61 OK, 27 Good, 9 Poor).
Entrants were asked to rate six ideas for possible new EEVL services, and the results were not completely as expected.
There was considerable support (80 ranking it Very good idea, 113 Good and 107 OK) for a service which allows searching a range of free databases from one place.
There was slightly less support for the same type of service searching subscription databases, with 26 thinking this was actually a poor idea.
Considering that they might be thought of as niche services, there was an unanticipated level of support for a journal Table of Contents (TOC) announcement service, a new book announcement service, and an events and conference announcing service, with only slightly less enthusiasm (165 OK, 75 Good, 40 Very Good) for a service which gave details of funding calls.
A very encouraging 86.8% of respondents rated the service EEVL currently provides as Very Good, Good or OK, with the highest appreciation shown by information professionals (77.6% rating either Very Good or Good).
Undergraduates were slightly less appreciative (44.3% rated the service OK and 41.5% Very Good or Good), but this figure may have been influenced by the fact that proportionately more undergraduates had indicated that they had not used the service before.
9.1% of lecturers (two respondents), thought the service was poor.
Highest satisfaction came from those in engineering, followed by computing and then mathematics.
Perhaps the most useful information resulting from the questionnaire came from answers given to specific questions and comments on various aspects of the service.
A considerable amount of time and effort goes into writing Internet Resource Catalogue records, in particular the resource descriptions, and it was therefore important to discover whether, and to what extent, these descriptions were useful or not.
One question dealt with this, and respondents were asked to "Please explain briefly why you find EEVL Internet Catalogue descriptions useful/not useful."
The vast majority found the descriptions useful.
In fact, there were very few negative comments, and even these tended to show that the descriptions were to some extent appreciated.
For example: "I very rarely read more than one or two lines before deciding whether or not to look at a site itself" and "Quite useful, would appreciate a little more detail" and "Some are useful, some not".
Most comments were along the lines of "Descriptions are necessary because the names of the resources are not self-explanatory" and "Evaluation distinguishes EEVL from search engines" and "They help me decide if the level and content of the materials is appropriate".
Recently, the style of EEVL's resource descriptions has been changed, and the content of a resource is now described in the first few lines, so even users who only read the beginning should be able to evaluate a resource's potential.
The answers given to the question "What type of resources would you like to see more of in the EEVL Internet Catalogue" were far less clear cut, and demonstrate that the Catalogue is used in many different ways by different users.
In fact, more of most types of resources were identified at least once, ranging from preprint servers, tutorials, ebooks, news, book reviews, current awareness resources, databases, quality bookshops, and free e-journals, and contradicting this, more resources which are not journals.
In a similar way, many subject areas were identified once.
However, there were numerous requests for more resources in computing, in particular software engineering, programming, artificial intelligence and reviews of software.
As stated previously, the computing section of EEVL is younger than the other two subject areas, and considerable effort is currently going into its development, so hopefully these requests for more records will in time be satisfied.
There were also a few requests for more resources in learning and teaching, although fewer, perhaps, than might have been anticipated in the light of the emphasis currently placed on learning and teaching e-resources in academia.
More resources of a suitable level for further education cropped up three times.
This category within the Catalogue will also be increased in the future when the outcomes of the RDNFE Project [8] are incorporated into EEVL.
Although several people stated that the existing balance was about right, and that there was not really a need for more of any type of resources, this sentiment was contradicted by a number of responses received to the next question: "What type of resources would you like to see less of in the EEVL Internet Catalogue?"
Over thirty responses of 'None' were given.
Most people were of the opinion that there was a need to increase the size of the Catalogue rather than decrease it.
This results in a considerable conundrum for the EEVL service.
As the size of the Catalogue grows, so too does the amount of maintenance required to keep it current.
Two of the subjects covered by EEVL (engineering and computing) are particularly volatile in terms of Internet resources.
Many sites in these constantly developing subject areas are not static and the records for these resources require regular editing and review.
In addition, what are cutting edge subjects this year often fade into obscurity next year.
How to increase the size of the Catalogue without increasing the budget for the service presents a considerable problem.
One way to achieve a similar, if not identical, net effect, would be to concentrate on particular type(s) of resources in the Catalogue, but supplement retrieval of other type(s) of resources through further development of EEVL's full-text harvested Web sites.
In other words, it will almost certainly become necessary to reduce the rate of increase of the Catalogue for entries which are fully described and catalogued by subject experts, and instead use machine-harvested data from other Web sites to supplement search results.
This possibility is currently being investigated by the EEVL team.
Although responses to the type of resources users would like to see more of in EEVL included both company resources and departmental sites, several responses to types users would like to see less of included the very same resource types.
Company information was identified in many responses as being an intrusion.
One again, this presents something of a conundrum, as some company sites have relatively high click-through rates from the EEVL Catalogue, showing that, for some, they serve a function.
Other evaluation exercises, plus incidental evidence, have shown that some users find the inclusion of company sites in EEVL very useful.
Both engineering and computing are applied subjects, and it is therefore not surprising that some users have close connections with the commercial world or are looking for information related to industry.
The solution is therefore complex.
EEVL should almost certainly identify existing Catalogue records for company sites which have not generated many click-throughs, and weed these from the Catalogue.
Company sites remaining in the Catalogue should include only the top companies in each sector plus those whose Web sites contain a particularly substantial amount of useful information.
Perhaps company sites should have a lower ranking in search and browse results than other resource types.
In addition, it should be made much easier for those users not wanting to retrieve company sites to filter them out of results.
At present, the only way this can be achieved is by selecting all other resource types from the advanced search page [9], and this involves much effort.
Perhaps a toggle option on the main search page which easily allows users to edit company sites out or in would achieve this.
All of these options are currently being investigated.
Another resource type which was mentioned several times in the 'less records of this type' category was subscription-based services, especially subscription e-journals.
Once again, some of these have high click-through rates.
Also, subscription e-journals are included in most other subject gateways.
An Internet guide which does not include the top (subscription-based) journals in its subject areas would certainly be less useful to some users (especially those who have subscriptions, or who have the means to pay-per-view), yet at the same time it is also clearly annoying for other users to be directed to resources which require a paid subscription when their institution does not subscribe.
The solution is probably for such resources to be very clearly identified, at the beginning of the description and also through the use of suitable graphics, as requiring a subscription.
Better still would be if EEVL could identify whether a user is likely to have a subscription or not, and this is one aspect of the work currently being undertaken as part of the Subject Portal Project [10].
It should be noted that those subscription-based e-journals which are currently included in EEVL offer at least tables of contents and abstracts, and even where a user is not able to immediately click through to the full text, they can identify articles of interest and apply for the full text via inter-library loans services.
Though this will be useful for some, it may not satisfy others.
The next two questions asked, in turn, "What do you consider to be the most useful aspect(s) of the current EEVL service, and why?"
and "What do you consider to be the least useful aspect(s) of the current EEVL service, and why?"
It was encouraging that far more useful aspects of the service were identified (128) than less useful ones (59), and several took the opportunity of saying that "nothing is not useful".
Confusingly, some features appeared in both lists!
The full-text harvested search engines were highlighted by several respondents as particularly useful, though two said it was difficult to get good results from these.
This is another area which it is hoped can be improved in the future.
The OneStep Industry News and Jobs services were identified by 14 respondents as being useful, and by 14 as not being useful.
However, of those who identified them as not useful, the reasons included "because I am first year", "not personally relevant" and "because I am not an engineer, but I think it is definitely a good thing to have on the site".
A couple of entries questioned the need for news, stating that news was available from other sources, including the BBC.
This was a bit surprising, as the news sources included in OneStep Industry News have been selected because they concentrate on sector-specific industry news, and many of the feeds are not generally available elsewhere.
Clearly, as with commercial information, industry news is relevant to some users, but not to others.
The Virtual Training Suite, RAM and EESE were all identified several times as being useful.
More generally, the service as a whole, its role in providing subject-specific access to quality information, the ease of use of the site, the fact that it is intuitive, its currency and its focus were all highlighted by several respondents.
Less useful aspects included the speed of the site.
This has already been addressed since the time of the questionnaire through the purchase of a new server resulting in far quicker response times.
Another service which was selected as being less useful was the Current Awareness page [11], though it is recognised that this might be more useful for LIS (Library and Information Science) professionals and researchers than students.
In fact, the Current Awareness page has quite a healthy hit rate.
Other criticisms included "patchy coverage", "coverage of databases that are too high-level for my teaching needs" and the fact that EEVL had not been advertised sufficiently.
A couple of respondents had difficulty understanding the difference between Catalogue results and the harvested search engine results, and also with locating some of the additional services from the home page.
Both of these points will be addressed in the redesign of the site.
A number of very varied responses were received to the question "Are there any other services/features which you would like to see from EEVL?
Please describe."
Information on learning materials, including those which can be included in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), was mentioned more than once, as was information on funding opportunities.
Confirming the interest in books, which was identified previously as a potentially popular service, a facility to purchase books was identified.
It is already possible to buy books from one publisher (Pearson) at discounted prices via the EEVL On-line bookstore [12], and so, perhaps, this service should be extended to include other publishers.
Better browsing for university departments was mentioned by one respondent, (though, perversely, too many records for departmental sites was mentioned as a less useful aspect of the service in a response to a previous question).
Interestingly, the ability to cross-search Google was identified.
It may be possible to include this in a future service development.
Databases of research, useful references by subject area, more full text services, as well as expert opinions in subject areas, were further suggestions.
It is hoped that future developments to the EEVL service will help satisfy all of these.
Some of the answers to the next question "Please provide any examples of how you have used EEVL services in your study, research, teaching or work?
We are interested to hear examples of both positive and negative experiences" were slightly disappointing, in that in many instances the answers were fairly imprecise or similar to: "to find technical information in engineering".
Although in responses to other questions it was apparent that there was a high level of satisfaction with the EEVL service, some responses to this question were slightly negative, along the lines of "I show it to students.
I don't use it much myself".
More typical responses, however, were "I recommend it to all my undergraduate and postgraduate students as part of their information skills/literacy sessions."
and "I recommend EEVL to Engineering students, as an easy way to find reputable Internet-based information.
I use EEVL to discover useful engineering Web sites, and for information gathering on specific subjects in engineering."
Another positive response was "We suggest EEVL to students who are beginning project work in engineering and computing with examples showing that it can pick up hits they won't find in Google in a recent example, a search for bridge construction picked up 12 EEVL sites, 10 of which did not come up in the first few pages of a Google search.
I don't know how much they actually go on to use EEVL.
I suspect a lot of them are so used to doing a Google search that they don't bother, but we do try!"
It is obvious that EEVL is much appreciated by the LIS community, and also that this community does much to promote EEVL to students.
In other answers to this question, once again, the potential of the Computing section of EEVL was identified by several respondents.
The final question asked how EEVL could be made more useful, and additional comments or suggestions were invited.
Some very interesting responses were received.
More promotion of the service was requested several times, along with several requests for more printed flyers.
There were suggestions for cross-searching EEVL with OMNI, for having an alert scheme, for providing the very latest information in selected subjects, for providing improved access to full-text materials, and for including access to other information sources allowing the retrieval of papers via cross-searching of subscription-based databases.
All of these things should become available via the forthcoming EEVL Subject Portal Demonstrator.
Some suggested less subscription-based information, and others requested more.
One person said the service should be faster, and another stated that it was already very fast.
Various particular subjects were identified as areas for improving coverage, and once again, computing was pinpointed.
More resources for researchers was mentioned several times, as were links to recommended text books.
There was an indication that the site design could be improved, and once again, this will be addressed in the not too distant future.
Conclusion Though in a couple of instances the questionnaire provided conflicting feedback, on the whole it has proved to be a very worthwhile exercise.
It has provided EEVL with a great deal of useful data and opinion, and once again many thanks go to those who completed the questions.
On the whole, respondents were very positive about the EEVL service and its usefulness.
They found the Internet Resource Catalogue, and resource descriptions, useful.
It is particularly satisfying to note than many of the suggestions for improvements are already being processed, and that there appears to be considerable support, by the users of EEVL, for several new features which will become available as part of the Subject Portal Demonstrator.
In other areas, there is still considerable work to be done to improve subject coverage, particularly in computing, and to provide the necessary filtering options or some other facility to allow for more successful searching and browsing of the service.
References EEVL the Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ EEVL Questionnaire 2004 http://www.eevl.ac.uk/2004-questionaire/index_old.htm RAM Database http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ram/index.php The Engineering E-journal Search Engine (EESE) http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/ Web Tutorials: The RDN Virtual Training Suite (VTS) http://www.eevl.ac.uk/vts/ EEVL : OneStep Industry News http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepnews/ EEVL : OneStep Jobs http://www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepjobs/ Enhancing the RDN for Further Education (RDNFE) http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/rdnfe/ EEVL Catalogue Search http://www.eevl.ac.uk/catalogue.htm Subject Portals Project Phase II http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/ EEVL Current Awareness Services for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing http://www.eevl.ac.uk/current_awareness_services.html EEVL On-Line Bookstore http://www.pearsoned.co.uk/bookshop/subject.asp?item=6252&affid=EVL Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot Watt University Email: r.a.macleod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/libram/roddy.html Return to top Article Title: "EEVL News: What EEVL Users Really Want" Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Recasting the Past: Digital Histories Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Recasting the Past: Digital Histories Buzz data database dissemination portal archives digitisation vocabularies preservation hypertext multimedia gis ocr ontologies licence research Citation BibTex RIS Vanessa Carr reports on a one day conference about digitising historical records, held jointly by the Association for History and Computing UK and the Royal Historical Society.
For the last three years the RHS has held a seminar in memory of Gerald Aylmer, the purpose of which is an exchange of ideas between historians and archivists.
Digitisation was to be the subject for 2004.
The AHC proposing a conference on the same subject, the two bodies came together to present this joint event.
The format of the conference was that of four sessions, each with two panels, except for the last.
I attended Panel A in each instance.
Welcome The proceedings were opened on behalf of the AHC by Dr Ian Anderson, convenor of the AHC-UK Conference, and lecturer at the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), University of Glasgow.
Ian pointed out that digitisation presents considerable possibilities for the presentation of history, and transcends all traditional boundaries; but he also asked what implications this has for the interpreter of history.
Moreover he voiced three concerns commonly expressed: how to select and then prioritise material to be digitised which techniques to adopt, including the possibility of losing or inserting data access considerations and sustainability Dr Christopher Kitching, Chairman of the Research Policy Committee, then welcomed participants on behalf of the RHS, to what promised to be an interesting and thought-provoking day.
Session 1: Chaired by Christopher Kitching 200 Years of Migration History on One Web Site : Elizabeth Lovell, TNA, Project Manager for the Moving Here Project This session commenced with a very informative presentation about the Moving Here Project [1], hosted on TNA's Web site.
Moving Here is an exhibition of digital images with supporting narrative on the subject of migration to the United Kingdom.
It provides availability and interpretation, and is particularly aimed at a traditionally under-represented group among those who access TNA and its record holdings.
Some 30 archives, museums and libraries contributed to Moving Here, and there was also a large contribution of stories from community groups.
It has also generated country-wide exhibitions, and has, thus, provided outreach far beyond the traditional activities of an archive.
The impact has been enormous, and feedback good.
Looking to the future, sustaining the site, and medium and long-term strategies were big issues, and financial support would be vital here.
The National Archives, the State Papers, and the World Wide Web Helen Good, University of Hull Helen Good is a PhD student digitising the State Papers Domestic of the reign of Elizabeth I (series SP12) which are held in TNA.
Other Elizabethan State Papers, not subject to this exercise, are held in the British Library and at Hatfield House.
Helen's intention was to move presentation of the records from reliance on the original calendars to the presentation of digital images of the originals.
Her thought-provoking talk encompassed details of the project, the archive user's view of this procedure, and problems encountered.
She felt that the calendars would never be adequate for the academic user, even where they were scholarly productions, as users did not want their material pre-digested.
She did not even feel, for example, that the calendars relating to the SP 12 records were particularly adequate.
She reported she was taking digital images of all the records, transcribing them and putting them up, under non-commercial licence from TNA, on the Hull University Web site [2] [3].
While she accepted that TNA was a large and complex organisation with many considerations that needed to be prioritised against each other, Helen said she would like to see TNA undertaking this type of activity, thus giving due consideration to academic users, as well as to the more numerically significant other users.
Funding, Availability and Access Aidan Lawes, TNA, Academic Publications Manager Aidan Lawes began his informative and measured presentation by describing the academic publications remit and programme within TNA.
The purpose was to produce resource-based packages for the academic audience.
Projects within this required external funding and were co-published either with an academic or commercial partner.
Internal publications within TNA covered the more popular market.
There was a fine tradition of academic publication within TNA, and one question now being asked was whether there still existed a market for the traditional paper publication, especially as these were expensive and slow to produce.
Clearly much thought was now being given to electronic publications as well as digitised images of documents, but one of the big questions here was sustainability a calendar would still be going strong after 200 years, but would a CD?
Furthermore, not all academics felt that digitised images addressed all their requirements.
Moreover these images were not cheap to produce.
There was even the feeling that some academics bore hostility towards electronic sources.
Charging mechanisms were a factor here.
Another big issue for TNA was how to prioritise among the products of 1000 years of record keeping.
Advisory Panels and an Editorial Board now helped to inform and advise in this area, and Aidan welcomed any suggestions which might be fed back to these bodies.
Most partnerships in TNA were with medievalists, who seemed to be more 'joined up' than others, and, again TNA would welcome overtures from other areas.
Session 2: Chaired by Dr Sarah Richardson, University of Warwick Digital London: Creating a Searchable Web of Interlinked Sources on Eighteenth Century London Professor Robert Shoemaker and Jamie Maclaughlin, University of Sheffield This presentation provided a fascinating introduction to the proceedings of the Old Bailey online [4], and the very valuable linkages of data employed.
This project was now almost complete.
In addition to the proceedings both local authority and charity records have been used to provide additional related information.
Links have been made from the trial proceedings to these associated records, thus enhancing the basic Web product.
Robert Shoemaker highlighted the problem of dealing with name spellings, and how these were standardised, but linked to variant spellings.
Place names have been mapped, as partial and exact matches, using Geographic Information System (GIS) maps.
This meant that all instances of a much used name, such as 'Stable Yard', could be brought up.
It was also possible to bring up all the trials relating to a certain place.
Linkages could also be made via occupation.
The emphasis has been on providing the maximum amount of information, with the minimum of assumptions and allowing for full interpretation and use of judgement on the part of the user or researcher.
Care has been taken to preserve the original archival structure of the documents and to avoid taking them out of context.
Digitisation Selection Strategies Preserving and Uncovering Hidden Histories Jacqueline Spence, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Archives Administration and Records Management School Jacqueline Spence's paper looked generally at some of the issues surrounding both decisions to digitise, and born-digital records.
She highlighted the fact that keeping all data in the 21st Century is a real issue.
The challenges were to use technology productively, expand human understanding and widen our scope.
At the same time we had to protect history and prevent censorship, as well as creating a cultural memory.
However, there was also the opportunity to bring disparate material together, facilitate comparative research and allow for deeper analysis more easily than ever before.
This was aided by the fact that many projects are international.
Expectations might well be considerable, and had to be matched.
Again the issue of sustainability was raised.
Finance to set up projects was not hard to come by, but sustaining them might be.
The main issue with born-digital records was access not preservation; they were a new form of primary source for historians to deal with, and could be manipulated in new ways.
They were often disconnected and unfocused, and their ownership was not always clear, and would provide challenges for individuals and small organisations.
The catchword for their preservation ought to be devolution, not de-selection.
Technical service centres to help with migration and access would be welcomed.
She concluded that history was now much more immediate, and this gave the user a new role; more social responsibility was required than previously.
Preserving the Historical Record Dr Matthew Woollard, Head of Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), History, University of Essex Matthew Woollard provided a very useful and informative description of the remit and activities of the history strand of the AHDS [5], which is one of five strands, and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB).
The AHDS provided the balance between preservation functionality and the historical functionality.
Mostly AHRB-funded projects were preserved here among the 40 years' worth of data collection in more than 600 collections.
The aim is to preserve the bits, the information content, and the experience (layout, display etc), with the remit of preserving the content and enough explanatory material to enable it to be used.
The AHDS strategy is to keep the original version of material presented, create a preservation version, and, from this, to create dissemination versions.
Part of all this is the history of computing.
Material is also acquired which is then re-formatted to provide data to the academic historian.
An example of this is the database of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills, digitised by TNA.
Matthew also spoke about the themes represented.
Most material was statistical; currently, political, social and economic material was variously in decline.
Session 3: Chaired by Prof Ludmilla Jordanova, University of Cambridge Building an Ontology for History: Lessons Learned and A 21st Century History Portal: The Semantic Web and Contextualising European History Richard Deswarte, University of East Anglia, and Dr Jan Oosthoek, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne These were two very thought-provoking papers inviting participants to consider the complexities of digital searching and hyper-linking.
Jan Oosthoek summarised the problem as one of how you make searching sophisticated yet helpful, and how you know whether you have all sources.
The European Union-funded Visual Contextualisation of Digital Content Web site (VICODI) [6] addressed this issue.
This was a visual contextualisation portal, providing contextualisation for history and the ability for the users to build their own queries using a historical ontology.
Contextualisation considered how terms or documents related to each other.
For storage, retrieval, presentation and navigation, the system used a methodology called LATCH, standing for Location, Alphabetical Order, Time, Category and Hierarchy.
It weighed the relevance of references and scored them.
(For example, in a search for 'Newton', 'Newton', '1660-1680' and 'gravity' would have high ratings, while 'apple' would have a low rating).
Afterthoughts on this project were that it was over-complicated and made some false assumptions about history, ontologies and thesauri.
There should have been input from historians, and different components should have been separately developed.
Richard Deswarte described the development of the ontology, defined by him here as a formal knowledge structure.
The challenges were the quantity of historical sources, how to populate the ontology, and carrying out the quality control.
The successes of the project were the opportunities it provided for a wide grasp of the complexities of history, the use of 2000 historical documents, and good quality control.
The problems were that it was very labour-intensive and expensive, the concepts were very complex, there were limited property relationships and extensibility was an issue.
The Role of Hypermedia History Dr Isobel Falconer, Open University, and Dr Ian Anderson, University of Glasgow This was a very interesting presentation of a concept which was, I suspect, novel to many of the audience.
Hypermedia represents a conflation of hypertext and multimedia.
It offers an alternative to traditional linear narrative, using all the potential of Web-enabled developments, and is, above all, a teaching tool.
Isobel Falconer commenced with a concept of 'good history', which was that which included no more than was needed to explain past events.
Whether the historian was regarded as an interpreter or enabler affected the criteria by which we evaluated the understanding of the audience.
It also had implications for the ways in which historians would communicate.
Different modes of understanding were best suited to different sorts of media, of which hypermedia was clearly just one.
By their choice of the medium and architecture of their communication, historians would be seeking to control their audience.
Use of hypermedia may seem to be donating control to the audience in a large number of areas, but these were effective only if the historian had built in hidden controls, including an appropriate architecture and adherence to protocols and standards.
For communicating a large number of interacting causes, or for historians wishing to act as enablers, the multiple links of hypermedia might be appropriate.
Hypermedia were good at linking multiple signs, but currently were weak at showing the nature of the links.
The cost of designing the architecture meant that hypermedia history was very expensive compared with narrative history.
Realising the potential in this area was still in its infancy.
Session 4: Chaired by Dr Ian Anderson, University of Glasgow The Effectiveness of Various Retrieval Strategies for Digital Archives in Ireland Dr Andrew White, Archivist, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland This paper described several digitisation exercises, and some interesting conclusions were drawn from these.
The records were digitised to preserve them, to widen access, and to improve research efficiency through sophisticated search strategies.
There was a perceived democratisation of archives through bringing together geographically diffuse archives.
This saved users physical travel, but it also generated a demand for original records.
It was also perceived that the historian was able to add multimedia features without compromising academic value.
The input of historians was very important, as they determined the research needs of users, developed a controlled vocabulary, quality assured the products, and highlighted areas which could be enhanced with annotations.
Retrieval was by bibliographic elements, by special features, and by use of natural language searching incorporating a controlled vocabulary.
Fuzzy searching was also incorporated.
These projects were deemed a success as the use of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and re-keying guaranteed a high level of accuracy, a wide interest was generated, and audiences had been broadened.
Re-exploring Alnwick: How Digitisation of Data Can Give a New Insight on Methodology Dr Elwin Koster, Groningen University, Department of Humanities Computing and Department of Art History This last paper was a very interesting insight into something totally different from previous presentations.
The urban geographer MTG Conzen carried out two surveys in Alnwick in 1953 and 1964.
Elwin Koster digitised these two surveys using a GIS, and then mapped these against each other for comparison.
He then carried out a survey of his own in 2003-2004 for further comparison.
In particular, he highlighted difficulties with descriptions particularly, such as trying to match fast food outlets or charity shops against the 1953 and 1964 retail use categories.
Summing up There were, fortunately, opportunities for comments and questions at the end of each session.
The main issues raised in the summing up were that funding is a crucial issue, particularly for sustainability; in particular, what would happen if funding for digitisation were to dry up?
Preservation is more important than digitisation for its own sake.
It would be useful if figures of influence were to be drawn into the debate and proceedings in the area of digitisation of historical records.
The choice of content, and prioritisation of content are major issues.
Historians need to take the lead here or commercial considerations will dictate decisions.
In particular, there is a need for input from contemporary historians.
Conclusion This was an interesting and wide-ranging conference, and set an agenda for future discussion and consideration.
Not only was the subject matter extremely varied, but the areas covered, from the factual and practical to the theoretical and technical.
I'm sure that there was something here for every participant, and I only wish it had been possible to attend all the sessions!
References Moving Here Web site http://www.movinghere.org.uk/ Transcriptions Web site http://www.hull.ac.uk/sp12/ Images Web site http://www.hull.ac.uk/sp12/images Proceedings of the Old Bailey Web site http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ AHDS Web site http://www.ahds.ac.uk/history/ VICODI Web site http://www.vicodi.org/ Author Details Vanessa Carr Head of Research, Knowledge and Academic Services The National Archives Email: vanessa.carr@nationalarchives.gov.uk Web site: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Recasting the Past: Digital Histories " Author: Vanessa Carr Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/digi-histories-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Blended Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Blended Learning Buzz blog video perl e-learning ajax ict standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley reviews Barbara Allan's book on blended learning for Information and Library Science staff and educational developers.
As the author says, 'The overall aim of this book is to provide a practical guide to library and information workers who are involved in education and training, and who are interested in designing and delivering blended learning experiences to their colleagues and customers'.
I come from an academic geology background but with an interest in teaching and ICT in teaching.
My review is thus coloured by my history but I hope embraces the potential readers of this book for, again from the author, 'the needs and expectations of learners are constantly changing and, increasingly, they expect technology-rich and flexible learning opportunities'.
So what does this book offer and how well do the objectives live up to the task?
I shall review each chapter after the introduction separately for, within the book's holistic intent, they were designed to be read in any order.
Chapters and Subjects Covered Chapter 2: Tools and Technologies This chapter reviews, albeit briefly, a range of technologies from audio to weblogs, some of the uses to which they can be put as well as advantages and disadvantages.
With regard to technologies, attention is given to things like video-conferencing and VoIP rather than aspects such as AJAX and Perl so technophobes should not worry about the technological demands.
Most Information and Library Science (ILS) staff will have 'tame' developers on hand to help implement tools mentioned here.
Unfortunately, this may not be true of others, Further and Higher Education lecturers for example, who are paid up members of the 'Technophobic Luddite Tendency'.
In truth, they are probably unlikely to be reading this book anyway; a shame since as it has plenty to offer aside from the technology.
Chapter 3: Models of Teaching and Learning As Allan states, this is an important topic, not just for blended or e-learning, but in general; 'learning is a complex and messy business'.
Although a short chapter it provides a useful overview of student-centred approaches to teaching and learning that Allan thinks will be particularly useful in blended learning approaches.
The chapter looks at learning styles as well as inquiry-based and problem-based learning.
The main advantages (and some disadvantages) of each are laid out in bullet points, tables and a few diagrams.
This makes perusal easy if you don't want (or perhaps need) to get into the nitty-gritty of pedagogy.
This chapter would make a good read for new lecturers and tutors about to embark on any new module or course redesign.
It is of particular help in exploring the following chapters.
Chapter 4: Planning and Designing Blended Learning Programmes This chapter is specifically designed to help ILS staff in developing programmes and builds upon pedagogic issues raised in the previous chapter.
It covers: the design and development cycle, developing the experience, documentation as well as delivery and evaluation – an important but oft-neglected aspect of module design.
Lists and checklists abound in this chapter.
A very good thing; far too often learning units are put together from a tutor perspective asking 'what do these students have to learn?'
rather than, 'how do we best convey a good learning experience?'.
This chapter guides you through the process to provide a rationale for any unit, not just eor blended, so that it helps produce a logical, student-centred, learning experience.
Perhaps this chapter hit me hardest, do I really plan and use this approach in my own modules, even those I have developed and blended over the years?
Do I evaluate what I have been doing?
I would certainly have behaved differently had this chapter been available from the outset of my teaching career.
Anyone developing a course or module would benefit from this chapter.
Chapter 5: Planning and Designing Learning Activities I suspect many readers will head to this chapter first; for new ideas, to see what the author has to say about particular methods and activities.
After a first examination of ten design principles it then looks at ideas from Action Plan to Visits using, unsurprisingly, Gilly Salmon's 'e-tivities' as a starting point.
Table 5.1 is a good place to explore a variety of learning activities.
Coverage includes samples and examples of practice.
Readers will be able to view these and pick and mix according to their own requirements for, as Allan says, they can be adapted for face to face or online use.
This chapter should be read by all those who think HE and FE are (or perhaps should be) primarily lecture-based.
Chapter 6: Working with Groups An important chapter which can be read on its own for, yet again, this is an oft-neglected area and one which employers say they require of students and customers.
There is much more to this than allocation of students into groups and letting them get on with a task.
I prefer to think of the development of groups into teams.
This chapter provides a basis for that transformation with examples, ideas and references to published work on group learning processes.
Gilly Salmon's model for e-learning appears in adapted form and the chapter also includes sections on working with large groups and mass lectures.
In the latter are a few ideas for a 'mid-lecture break', an unknown construct in many lecture series.
I found lots of ideas here and I wonder how many postgraduate teaching courses include some of them.
Chapter 7: Working as a Tutor More ideas here and this should be a compulsory read for postgraduates doing tutorials as well as official tutors of courses.
Teaching and training skills are required in many aspects of education and this chapter provides a valuable student-centred view.
Chapter 8: Communities of Practice There are a few standard works on communities of practice, a relatively recent term but one which can be well developed in a teaching context.
Indeed, as Allan says, ILS staff are often such participants.
Here the emphasis is on the practitioners rather than the student or learner body.
Of course the ideas and methods discussed in this chapter are useful for enhancing group work and indeed developing group work so that it becomes teamwork.
Engendering team skills, motivation and best practice by tutors and instructors is itself important.
Chapter 9: Managing Blended Learning Projects This final chapter builds upon and extracts from Allan's previous guide in this area [1].
We are back to managing teams as well as individuals for maximum benefit of the project or course.
Once again, lots of sensible ideas and checklists and the chapter also includes sections on looking for funding and accreditation.
Not necessarily a chapter for everyone but if you are putting in a funding proposal then an informative one.
Summary I am not alone in disliking the name 'blended learning'.
It makes for a snappy title but even knowing that it relates to 'e-learning' does not help (Isn't blended teaching what I have been trying to do all these years, use field trips, practicals, tutorials etc as part of a general educational remit?)
Where does 'e' help?
Barbara Allan shows that it can and does.
The book includes enough references, especially related to 'how to do it' topics, at the end of each chapter.
Useful Web sites are also here, although sometimes these are in the main text and even in example 'boxes' so can get a bit lost.
One thing that is not covered in this book is 'assessment' (as opposed to project evaluation), despite this being a very important topic.
Without assessment students will often not participate, their rewards having to come as marks rather than learning experiences.
Books have been written about assessment so maybe there is scope for a further book on including assessment with 'blended learning'.
Perhaps one problem with 'blended learning' is the impression of throwing perfectly fine ingredients in to an electric blender and ending up with an amorphous mass of 'stuff' which is supposed to be better than the sum of the individual ingredients.
So maybe 'mixed ingredient learning' might be better.
If we take this then Barbara Allan's book comes out very highly on the star rating.
You can leave bits of it out if you wish or concentrate on particular aspects for a particular course if you would rather.
All are important flavours.
As such, it should be of use to a wide range of teachers, tutors and instructors involved in 21st century education.
Conclusion Barbara Allan's book does offer, 'a holistic blended learning approach, combining the best of traditional and new approaches to learning and teaching to make optimum use of the advantages of each while minimizing the disadvantages'.
I hope I have shown why it is a valuable book.
It is not a polemic for the advantages of eor blended learning but offers experience and examples of how to do things and what you might try.
Although the price seems a bit steep at £39.95, it is value for money.
Maybe it is not meant for individual purchase; some creative accounting in a project submission should hide it nicely.
It certainly should be available in any educational developer's library and, furthermore, as multiple copies in any teaching department's professional library.
I hope it obtains a wider readership than the target ILS community.
References Allan, B.
(2006) Supervising and Leading Teams in ILS.
London.
Facet Publishing Author Details W. Brian Whalley Professor of Geomorphology School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology Queen's University of Belfast Belfast BT7 1NN Email: b.whalley@qub.ac.uk Web site: http://geognet.qub.ac.uk/people/staff/whalley/ Return to top Article Title: "Blended Learning: Tools for Teaching and Training" Author: W. Brian Whalley Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/whalley-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide, 2nd Edition Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide, 2nd Edition Buzz rss blog Citation BibTex RIS Re-visiting this work in its new and second edition for Ariadne, Lina Coelho finds it amply repays the effort.
I never read a book twice, but when I was asked to review the second edition of The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide, I welcomed the chance, as I was reminded why I'd loved this book so much when I first reviewed it in 2003.
This expanded and updated edition should be at every reference desk as it is not only a useful guide to quality resources but also a motivational tool for librarians everywhere.
Irene McDermott helps us find our professional identity in a world where we feel threatened by ubiquitous search engines which give instant answers.
Her viewpoint is reassuring and challenging reassuring because she convinces us that the public will always need librarians and challenging because librarians will have to work very hard to keep up with the constant changes around them.
In the first edition of this book the author concluded that the only constant on the Internet is change, a worrying prospect for our profession.
But this second edition is strangely reassuring because, in spite of the substantial amount of new information, many of the sites have retained their virtual co-ordinates.
Of course there are new sites Google Earth, Google Scholar; there are blogs and RSS feeds and new tips on how to deal with spyware and viruses.
Looking through the pages of this guide I was reminded of the author's enthusiasm and energy, of her sense of humour and her dedication to the profession.
Whatever you are looking for, she has made it easier by compiling and keeping up-to-date this guide to resources which is wide-ranging and amusing.
Whether you are a poetry lover looking for a place to read an Eliza Rutherford poem, or a worried parent trying to ensure their child is adequately protected from the hazards of the Web, or a hassled librarian asked where to find a Strindberg play in Swedish, or for a site which will help a patron protect their investment (several of these are inspired by the Enron scandal) Irene McDermott comes to the rescue.
There are outstanding practical tips from when 'to wiggle' the wire and reboot, to how to get rid of pop-ups and spyware.
Even in the most technical bits there are little amusing details which keep you reading on.
(Computer boffins can be romantic too how would you like a search and destroy anti-spy programme dedicated to you!)
You can see Irene McDermott's professional enthusiasm when she suggests that public libraries should support patrons in their efforts from their home computers too, in order to demonstrate good will and for publicity's sake.
But she can also be tough on those who are abusive and demanding beyond reason of the limited resources of libraries.
Apart from helping you assert your professional authority, this is a reference tool which will help you keep up-to-date, show you short cuts to knowledge and encourage you to explore and stretch the limits of your own abilities.
You might be inspired to work on your own Web pages and to use the author's suggestions to check out how they would look to somebody who is colour-blind, or you might follow her tips and impress your patrons with your technical trouble-shooting skills.
Many people are sceptical about books on the Internet, I was equally sceptical about reading a book twice (even a second edition) but I have to admit that Irene McDermott's enthusiasm is enough to dispel any reservations one might have.
So my advice: read this book, keep it by your computer and recommend it to your friends.
I am already looking forward to the third edition.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian The British Medical Association Email: lina.coelho@bma.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide: Strategies for the High-Tech Reference Desk" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Web Accessibility Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Web Accessibility Buzz software html accessibility cookie intranet research standards sharepoint Citation BibTex RIS Martin White reviews a book that provides advice for managers on how to ensure that Web sites, intranets and library services are fully compliant with guidelines and legislation on accessibility.
There are many books on Web accessibility but they tend to come at the subject from quite a narrow area of Web design.
This is especially true of books published in the USA, a country which has quite limited Federal legislation on the need to implement accessible Web sites and intranets.
It is a subject that should be of passionate interest to our profession in its commitment to providing access to information to all who request it.
We not only have a duty under legislation to provide accessible access but, as the back cover of the book highlights, also a moral duty.
When I opened this book I was immediately struck by the immense experience of the contributors to this book, and even more so by the very considered and elegant introduction by the Editor.
Jenny Craven is a Research Associate at the Centre for Research and Information Management (CERLIM) at Manchester Metropolitan University and an acknowledged expert in this area.
Chapters and Subjects Covered After the very well written introduction by the Editor, E.A.Draffan (University of Southampton) reviews the tools used for widening access to the Web, including changing some of the default settings on a PC as well as various third-party keyboards and screen reader/text-to-speech applications.
Chapter 3 is written by Dr. Simon Ball (Senior Advisor, JISC TechDis Service) and covers Web design principles and good practice.
I was disappointed that there were no illustrations in this section, or links to sites that exemplify good practice.
The motivations and arguments for accessibility are then elegantly outlined in Chapter 4 by David Sloan (Project Lead, Digital Media Access Group, University of Dundee), covering social, technical, economic, legal and policy factors.
His discussion about the lack of clarity concerning Web accessibility requirements in the UK Disability Discrimination Act is especially valuable.
Chapter 5 on accessibility and guidance is written by Julie Howell, who was on the staff of the RNIB for over a decade and is now Director of Accessibility at Fortune Cookie.
I've had the pleasure of several discussions with Julie over years and have always been impressed by her combination of passion and professionalism in the advancement of Web accessibility.
Both qualities are evident in her analysis of the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines and related regulations.
In Chapter 6 David Sloan discusses approaches to accessibility evaluation and assessment, listing some of the automated tools that are now available as well as the issues to be considered in user evaluations with disabled users.
Professor Peter Brophy (Director of CERLIM and Professor of Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University) contributes a very elegant analysis of the issues for library and information service managers in Chapter 7, setting out a seven-step approach towards the development of a policy towards providing the best possible level of Web accessibility.
I especially commend Richard Eskins (Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University) and Jennie Craven for tackling the subject of the inclusion of Web accessibility in library and information science curricula, illustrated by examples of good practice from UK courses.
In Chapter 8 Jenny Craven then sets out some best practice examples of Web accessibility world-wide, with an excellent bibliography.
However again there are no illustrations in the text, though I appreciate that there is always the danger that the Web site will no longer be such a good example by the time the book is published.
Finally Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus advisor UKOLN, University of Bath) takes a look into the future, examining the limitations of the current Web Accessibility Initiatives and the work that is now in hand to revise them.
Conclusion This is an excellent book on two levels.
First it is an admirable handbook on a very broad cross-section of Web accessibility issues, and even if I would like to have seen more examples of good (and poor!)
design this is but a small criticism of this book.
As I said in my introduction to this review there are many books that get into the detail or HTML-implementation of accessible design, but this book complements these in a very well-considered way.
Two topics are missing from this otherwise very comprehensive book.
The first is commentary on the way in which content management software (CMS) applications facilitate the inclusion of accessible content in Web sites and intranets.
In general CMS products from UK vendors offer significantly better functionality than products from US vendors.
Amazingly the initial release of the new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 application has poor support for the creation of accessible content.
The second is a warning about search software.
Many search software products offer only a limited ability to configure the search interface to be Web-accessible.
The result is that a perfectly accessible Web or intranet site can be degraded substantially by the search application.
All managers responsible for ensuring that Web resources are accessible to users with any form of disability should have a copy of this book on their bookshelf without delay, but only after reading it.
In addition Jennie Craven, the Editor of the book, and Facet Publishing, deserve credit for an exemplary example of a multi-author book.
The Editor's introduction to the book is one of the best I have come across.
The authors write to a consistently high standard with good current bibliographies and lists of Web resources, and each chapter complements the others without anything more than an inevitable but limited amount of duplication.
The best accolade I can offer is that if the author names were excluded the reader would have no sense that the chapters were written by different people.
A note to other publishers: it can be done!
Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd 12 Allcard Close Horsham RH12 5AJ Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Return to top Article Title: "Web Accessibility: Practical Advice for the Library and Information Professional" Author: Martin White Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/white-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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South African Repositories: Bridging Knowledge Divides Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines South African Repositories: Bridging Knowledge Divides Buzz data software framework wiki database dissemination portfolio portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation repositories eprints copyright video preservation dspace e-science e-research authentication ict research standards Citation BibTex RIS Martie van Deventer and Heila Pienaar provide us with background to recent South African repository initiatives and detail an example of knowledge transfer from one institution to another.
Knowledge exchange is critical for development.
'Bridging the knowledge divide' does not only refer to the North-South divide.
It also refers to the divide between richer and poorer countries within the same region as well as to the divide between larger and smaller organisations within one country.
Lastly it refers to the divide between those individuals who have access to an environment that allows for rapid knowledge creation and those less fortunate.
Developing countries, such as South Africa, tend to think that they themselves have very little to offer in terms of knowledge creation and transfer.
This is not entirely true.
Creating and maintaining repositories have created, for us, the opportunity to learn but also to teach.
It has also provided us with a foot in the door when it comes to participating in eResearch.
In this article we give a brief overview of the background to the South African repository development initiatives and then mention the existing repositories.
We discuss the e-strategies implemented at the University of Pretoria (UP) and elaborate upon the transfer of their knowledge to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
We mention the technologies used, and reflect on the perceived opportunities and challenges of the knowledge transfer project.
In the last instance we elaborate upon the initiatives now being implemented to ensure that effective knowledge transfer takes place in the hope that South Africa will soon show an abundance of institutional repositories.
Ultimately the aim is to bridge knowledge divides that hamper progress and stifle development.
Worldwide, the research paradigm is in the process of expanding into eResearch and open scholarship.
This implies new ways of collaboration, dissemination and reuse of research results, specifically via the Web.
Developing countries are also able to exploit the opportunity to make their knowledge output more widely known and accessible.
In the South African context the implication of eResearch is not yet being fully supported in any co-ordinated way.
One initiative to make key stakeholders aware of the changing needs in research, the SARIS (South African Research Information Services) research project report, recommended that South Africa should position itself in the forefront of the new research paradigm [1].
This implied that individual research institutions should take the necessary steps to implement such strategies, collaborate amongst one another and lobby Government to support open access initiatives.
The most recent but perhaps most noteworthy of such open access initiatives is the inaugural meeting of the Academy of Science of South Africa's (ASSAf's) Journal Editors' Forum that took place in late July 2007.
Gray [2] reported that the event marks the first step in implementing the recommendations of the Academy's study of the state of scholarly publication in South Africa.
Although the study focused primarily on the strengthening of both the quality and the volume of scholarly publishing, it specifically mentions the use of an open access model to increase the output and reach of South African research publishing.
It is anticipated that open access would greatly enhance the impact, reach and speed of the dissemination of South African scholarship – just as it is doing for other developing countries.
Open scholarship, open-access scholarship and open-access scholarly publication all refer to approximately the same phenomenon, viz.
the free and unrestricted access to scholarly publications via the Internet [3][4] [5] [6][7].
Based on the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, Bailey [7] lists the following characteristics of open access literature: It "is freely available"; It "is online"; It "is scholarly and royalty free"; and It "can be used with minimal restrictions".
Bailey states that open access can be achieved through self-archiving and open access journals.
Self-archiving typically occurs in open archives or open digital repositories, managed by research institutes or by universities.
Clifford Lynch defines his view of an institutional repository as: '...a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.
It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution' [8].
This shift in scholarly publishing is accompanied by a transformation in research practice.
'Research is becoming more multidisciplinary, more collaborative, and more global.
The term e-science has been used to describe large-scale, distributed, collaborative science enabled by the Internet and related technologies.
eResearch is a broader term that includes non-scientific research but that also refers to large-scale, distributed, national, or global collaboration in research.
It typically entails harnessing the capacity of information and communication technology (ICT) systems, particularly the power of high capacity distributed computing, and the vast distributed storage capacity fuelled by the reducing cost of memory, to study complex problems across the research landscape.'
[9] The fact is that until 2004 much of this activity was obscured to the average South African information worker.
The University of Pretoria (UP) and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) formed an alliance specifically to investigate new trends.
This alliance soon led to a project wider in scope than just the two organisations.
South African Research Information Services (SARIS) Project A national research and development strategy for South Africa was published in 2002.
It invited all players in the national innovation system to rethink their role and to find opportunities to face the challenge of increasing economic growth and improve the quality of life for all South Africans.
It was clear that the strategy called for a renewal in the information services sector.
The SARIS Project was started inter alia because of the extremely high costs to South African research institutes and university libraries to access the global research literature.
From the research it was very soon clear though that a new research paradigm, sometimes called eResearch, was emerging and that this paradigm presented 'a broader range of information support service challenges' [1].
The project team established that 'activities making up the family of eResearch were to be found in various stages of development in the research life of South Africa in 2004 but, typically, a "Team South Africa" approach was not evident'.
It was therefore recommended that a framework for eResearch services to the entire South African research community should be created as depicted in Figure 1.
Figure 1: 2004 version of a proposed structure for eResearch support service for SA – a governance and management model [1] The intention was that the 'eResearch development and innovation services' would be jointly funded as projects (conducted by competent agents in the system).
Those projects that proved to be essential would then be transferred to the 'service delivery' arm (see Figure 1), where sustainable funding would be generated by those who made use of the service.
The whole system was to be co-ordinated at country level.
However, it soon became evident that there would be no national co-ordination of these efforts in the near future, and that individual institutions would have to start their own initiatives.
Fortunately organisations such as eIFL and the Mellon Foundation have been playing an important role in the development of the South African information industry and with their assistance several initiatives were kickstarted.
Established South African Repositories and Their Associated Content eIFL in particular has been very supportive of open access and the development of repositories in South Africa – especially at the academic institutions [10] [11].
At a 2007 workshop, to review progress, several institutions were able to share their learning [10] [12] [13] [14]).
South Africa currently gives access to at least nine open access repository collections at several of its academic institutions.
In addition the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has also established its repository.
Obviously these repositories, as a collection, have become a vehicle through which South African collections could be made accessible to the rest of Africa and ultimately to the rest of the world.
Detailed information about each of the repositories is available from OpenDOAR [15].
Institution When established Typical content Application UP 2000 Electronic theses and dissertations.
ETD-db University of Johannesburg 2003 Electronic theses and dissertations ETD-db University of the Western Cape 2004 Electronic theses and dissertations.
ETD-db Rhodes University 2005 Publication output of the university ePrints University of Cape Town 2005 Subject based university repository.
Publication output and theses and dissertations from its Computer Science department are provided.
ePrints UP 2006 Publication output of the university as well as digitised historical and archival materials donated to the university.
DSpace Stellenbosch University 2006 Theses and dissertations but also contains maps and items from the university's special and manuscript collections.
DSpace University of the Western Cape 2007 Materials related to the study, practice and governance of higher education inSouth Africa .
AHERO platform CSIR 2007 Research outputs (publication and reports) of the institution.
DSpace Durban University of Technology 2008 Electronic theses and dissertations.
DSpace Table 1: South African institutional repositories The majority of these repositories were apparently established in isolation with very little known interaction amongst those who were actively involved.
The situation changed drastically early in 2007.
Many more institutions are investigating the development of repositories and a large number of special collections has been identified to digitise and bring online.
Funding remains a concern.
An informal mailing list [16] was created for members from African and South African institutions with a common interest in institutional repositories.
The list is hosted by UP and is actively used by the community.
Individuals are starting to collaborate, to share ideas, find solutions, and come up with innovative ideas regarding the use of their institutional repositories.
Electronic theses and dissertations was clearly the initial focus.
More and more of the institutions are now investigating the possibility of making their special collections accessible to the wider South African community and researchers internationally.
Repository Establishment at the University of Pretoria Bothma, Pienaar and Hammes [17] provide a full description of the process followed.
In essence the University decided to align itself with the proposals put forward by the SARIS project team.
This decision was captured in various strategic plans of the University and the Department of Library Services.
The Strategic Plan of the University for 2007-2011, for example, states: '[w]e believe it to be essential that the opportunities afforded us by these developments [ the development of new technologies] should be fully exploited.
We intend ensuring that this is the case' and '[t]he University of Pretoria will enhance the impact of its research and leverage the potential of its academic staff, students and networks of cooperation' [18] Based on this the Department of Library Services (previously known as the Academic Information Service or as AIS) developed its own e-strategy, which has as its goal the creation of an integrated seamless eService for the University of Pretoria.
The objectives of the e-strategy are: To support education innovation and research excellence at UP; To deliver optimal e-information portal services (workflow) to our clients, and To take part in and make a contribution to international and national e-information phenomena, e.g.
open access, digital preservation, e-Science, content management.
[19][20][21] Key projects were initiated to support these objectives.
This paper focuses on only two of these projects, viz.
the UP electronic theses and dissertations database and the UP digital repository, with a number of collections, such as a repository of all UP research articles and special collections.
UPeTD: The UP Electronic Theses and Dissertations Database The University decided in 2000 to start with a pilot project to make theses and dissertations available online.
'Our theses and dissertations are proof of excellent research work done at high cost for the university as well as for the country: they deserve to be read widely' [22].
Within the IT framework of the UP it was decided to use open source software and open standards.
At the time the ETD-db software developed by researchers at Virginia Tech was the only real solution for theses and dissertations and was chosen as platform.
It is freely available through the NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations), an 'international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations'.
In the near future however, the database will migrate to one of the newer platforms.
The required policies and procedures were developed, and detailed workflow was documented, as indicated in Figure 2.
In 2003 the first manuscripts were uploaded.
Initially submission was voluntary, but a decision was taken by Senate that all students registered for a Masters or a doctorate from January 2004 had to submit their research in electronic format, either directly to the repository or on CD to Faculty Administration, before graduation.
Minimum specifications [23] for ETDs were set and detailed guidelines and tutorials [24] were made available to students to simplify the process.
Figure 2: UPeTD workflow [22] Titles and abstracts of all theses and dissertations at the UP have been retrospectively added to the database, even though not all theses and dissertations are available in full text.
Currently there are 3,226 titles in the database, of which 3,108 are available in full text.
Once the data has been submitted to the database it is automatically harvested by various harvesters, inter alia Google Scholar.
A recent survey of doctorate holders whose theses are available in the database indicated a number of very positive outcomes for their careers and scholarly collaboration [25].
It is evident that the UPeTD has made theses and dissertations at the University of Pretoria much more accessible and widely read.
This then lead to a decision also to investigate the possibility of expanding the service to other collections and the digital repository project team was established.
Figure 3: The home page of UPeTD [26] UPSpace: The UP Digital Research Repository The UP digital repository project team evaluated, over a six-month period in 2004, several open source and commercial software platforms, e.g.
Greenstone, Innovative, Fedora, E-prints, DSpace, and I-Tor.
DSpace was eventually chosen because it fitted the UP IT architecture and supports a distributed approach to an institutional digital repository.
The DSpace digital repository model is illustrated in Figure 4.
DSpace is modular and therefore supports the creation of different repositories, even across institutional boundaries [27].
Figure 4: The DSpace digital repository model [27] DSpace was further developed in 2005 to support UP requirements, e.g.
authentication via the UP portal and extensions to the metadata.
A UP digital repository management team was created with specific areas of responsibility; see Figure 5.
Specialist roles were identified and allocated to individuals to manage.
Collection managers were appointed for different focus areas, e.g.
scholarly communication (including e-prints), special and Africana collections, Veterinary Science Faculty, Department of Architecture, Education Faculty and the Mapungubwe Museum.
The collection of scholarly articles is known as openUP, and comprises a sub-collection of the larger UPSpace collection.
Figure 5: UP digital research repository management team At the time of writing 2,845 full-text items had been uploaded to UPSpace.
Figures 6-8 provide screen captures of examples from the different collections, viz.
the general home page of UPSpace (Figure 6), a research article in openUP (Figure 7), and a compilation of images from various cultural collections in UPSpace (Figure 8).
Figure 6: The home page of UPSpace [28] Figure 7: UPSpace – example of a published article Figure 8: A compilation of images from various cultural collections in UPSpace The ideal is to create an integrated view of UP research and researchers, by linking researchers' CVs, the University's annual research report and the full-text articles: Researchers can, at present, provide links from their CVs on their personal and/or departmental Web pages to their full-text articles in UPSpace.
The Research Office of the University is tasked to compile a full bibliographic list of all research at the University, and this is published in the annual Research Report.
These annual reports are available online [29].
At present there is no direct link between the bibliographic listings in the annual research reports and the repository but it is envisaged that this will be in place for the 2008 report.
Initially researchers were very hesitant to have their research archived in the UP repository.
Many reasons were offered for this reluctance, which included issues about copyright and the extra work it entailed.
However, more and more researchers are being convinced that the effort is worthwhile because their research is becoming much more visible to the international scholarly community.
Top management at the University has also been convinced of the value of the digital repositories, and a strategy is being developed to make submission of full-text articles in the repository compulsory, as in the case of theses and dissertations.
Transferring Experience and Knowledge to the Special/Corporate Library Environment: The CSIR Experience Although its core activity is research, the CSIR, in South Africa, falls outside the academic environment and functions rather as an implementation arm for government.
The CSIR turned 60 in October 2005.
This event marked major changes in the organisation.
The two most relevant aspects here, are that the CSIR was given the responsibility to drive South Africa's Open Source initiative and that the organisation started investigating Open Access as a way to make its research accessible.
In October 2006 the CSIR Information Services (CSIRIS) was formally assigned the responsibility and mandate to establish an institutional repository for the organisation.
CSIRIS staff members were already familiar with the issues associated with open access and institutional repositories and UP agreed to assist in the practical implementation and to support the fast-tracking the learning required.
It was therefore seen as feasible to have a repository set up by January 2007!
From the outside it appeared that a repository is just another database and that the knowledge gained at UP could easily be transferred to the CSIR staff.
For example it was necessary to know: Which is the best repository software to use?
UP shared their research results and CSIRIS also decided to adopt DSpace Is the 'vanilla version' sufficient or are enhancements really essential?
UP facilitated meetings with their information technology consultants and it was decided not to make enhancements to the latest version of DSpace.
What is the server set-up, how much computational power is required and how is security managed?
The discussions that followed convinced the CSIR staff that it would be better to establish a separate server and the necessary server was ordered.
What items could be selected and under what circumstances may these items be placed in the repository?
UP gave directions to SHERPA and shared their experience.
CSIRIS developed a three-phase implementation plan to ensure that any and every suitable artefact could be uploaded to the repository.
Why use handles?
An introduction to Handles.net was provided and it was also decided to subscribe to the service.
Even ... "How does the metadata-data 'thing' really work and why Dublin Core?"
was asked.
A Demonstration and notes on the use of metadata and metadata standards were provided.
What formats should be used?
Oops ... UP introduced the system help file!
What documentation needed to be prepared?
UP provided its templates and the CSIRIS staff were able to adapt these for own use.
Fortunately the selection of content was less problematic than was expected.
CSIRIS had been managing the CSIR's internal database (which was established in the early 1980's) since 2004.
It was therefore not necessary to approach researchers to find appropriate content.
However, the January 2007 date proved to be totally unrealistic – mainly because the CSIR had also adopted a shared services management model which had removed all information technology (IT) expertise (as well as all servers) out of the library and into a central pool.
This meant that CSIRIS had to queue its request for repository installation and technical assistance.
Rather than halting all activity, the collaboration history between UP and the CSIR libraries came to the rescue.
It was agreed that CSIRIS staff would create a collection within the UP repository and that items would be added there.
This procedure ensured that it was at least possible to gain the necessary skills in creating communities and submitting contributions on a daily basis.
Simultaneously it was decided to soften the urgent need to have a repository up and running immediately and instead to take some time to learn and to experiment.
There was, for example, at that stage, no clear-cut proof that a repository would be the right tool for the CSIR.
CSIRIS staff therefore identified a collection of 450 documents with which to experiment.
These documents were manually uploaded to UPSpace, the UP's repository.
Simultaneously our IT department revived the CSIR's eShop software which was previously used to sell documents.
The same set of documents was uploaded to the eShop mainly to compare effort and system functionality.
It was not communicated that open access content had been added to the CSIR site.
Fortunately the fact that the CSIR site is indexed by Google was overlooked.
CSIRIS staff members were still in the process of uploading documents when the IT department became aware of additional activity on their server.
By the end of April 2007 just fewer than 6,000 copies of documents had been downloaded from the eShop site.
By the end of June, this figure had become more than 28,000 documents.
After several presentations and discussions it was as if the organisation suddenly saw the potential of the initiative and a formal decision was taken to make the repository part of the integral design of the organisation's new Internet site.
By this time the additional functionality available through repository software was clear and the decision to move to DSpace was widely supported.
The repository became known as CSIR Research Space.
Obviously the look and feel of the repository design was influenced by that of the University.
When it came to populating Research Space [30], the CSIR's repository started deviating considerably from that of UP's.
Although CSIRIS is the owner, the responsibility for the repository is now shared equally by three departments (Communications, IT and CSIRIS).
The repository is currently in phase two of its development where it mainly contains copies of published material but where the organisation is actively identifying research report content that could be placed in open access.
A good example of such report collections is visible in its deep level mining collection where especially mine health and safety reports have already been uploaded.
From the usage statistics, researchers from around the world appear to find these reports useful.
Obviously the key stakeholders, government departments, are also pleased because, in support of the CSIR's core mandate (to improve the quality of lives of ordinary South Africans), publicly funded research has become more accessible to a wider community.
Full-scale digitisation of collections is not currently a realistic option.
Digitisation forms part of phase three activities and is planned to take place once the backlog of all born digital items have been uploaded.
Currently a 'scan-on-demand' option is followed where, once a paper copy is identified and requested by any client, the item is digitised and uploaded to the repository.
Although the repository does also contain isolated instances of video, sound and data files, it will for the next three years, at least, contain predominantly textual artefacts.
CSIRIS' activity is initially focused on adding content but it is also starting to do analysis of use.
Previously impossible statistics, regarding the use of material created by the organisation is suddenly possible and the availability of such information would in future become very useful.
Opportunities and Challenges of the Knowledge Transfer Exercise The majority of the challenges could be linked to change management issues although there were also technical constraints.
The opportunity to collaborate and to fast-track the development of at least one repository, we believe, has suddenly made the activity a viable option for other institutions.
UP is currently in the process of assisting two academic institutions in their endeavours while the CSIR is influencing other science councils to follow a similar route.
Some of the obvious opportunities from this knowledge transfer process were that: The standard time that it takes to set up a successful repository could be considerably reduced.
Every new installation is unique and therefore every installation will bring about further learning that could be applied to the benefit of the community as a whole.
Learning gained while creating linkages to the CSIR's Internet site led to new linkages between UPSpace and the UP's CV database.
Every installation allows for new experimentation and further skills development an aspect which is extremely important in the South African context.
This initiative led to the employment of several newly graduated interns at the CSIR.
All of them have since been employed full time at a variety of employers releasing new skills to the wider community.
Being within a community of peers (not isolated and struggling) gave practitioners considerably more confidence especially to experiment with new ideas.
The library is now also seen as a 'publisher' of information and knowledge and not only as a user and conduit of published information.
Open source and open access accelerate learning.
Tips and techniques are available from a wide variety of Internet sources!
The more people actively seeking them out with the intention of improving the repository system as a whole, the better!
Commitment from organisation leadership is extremely important also when developing repositories.
Sometimes activities work serendipitously, and when such opportunities become visible, they have to be exploited for what they are worth.
The fact that CSIRIS staff could use IT's statistics and convince management of the importance of the endeavour is a prime example.
The first step in exploiting new opportunities is to establish trust and to honour the trust amongst all participants.
Only then does the learning, the experimentation, the hard work and the sheer pleasure of accomplishment become a reality.
The most important challenge is not to plan the perfect repository!
Repositories should not be equated to brain surgery – no one will die if the repository is not perfect with all possible bells and whistles.
Other key challenges are that: One should not expect to have the same in-depth understanding of the inner workings and the background as the original investigator.
It often feels as if this approach is a continuous process of 'catch-up'.
It is only when one is able to start contributing small titbits of additional learning that the process starts becoming manageable.
Much patience and time is needed when knowledge is 'action' transferred – often when it is least available!
Interaction needs to be planned and managed or the teaching process could become all-consuming!
If one allows IT infrastructure and/or software to be stumbling blocks they will be.
The repository software is not the issue.
The repository is.
It is much more important to make the content available than using what constitutes the state-of-the-art technology.
Knowledge transfer is not the same as playing a game of catch-up.
There is the added responsibility of putting back into the system any new learning.
It is important not to disregard what may appear to be trivial learning since this hinders the interchange of ideas and encourages distrust.
Personal knowledge transfer and personal networks remain key to ensuring successful learning partnerships.
Ultimately people make the initiative successful and therefore people skills are extremely important!
It could be necessary to invest new time and resources.
CSIR had to invest in a new server and it employed extra hands (interns) to cope with the additional workload.
Notwithstanding these challenges – South Africa's knowledge needs to be set free and launching a repository is one step closer to that goal.
Once the organisation and the researcher become aware of the benefits, there is no back-tracking it is just a question of getting past the initial hurdle!
Sharing Knowledge to Encourage Repository Activity in Southern Africa The creation of the various digital repositories has had a huge influence on the working lives of many librarians / information specialists.
Many had to be retrained (or had to retrain themselves) to adapt to the new environment, to become collection managers, digitisation specialists, metadata specialists, open access managers, etc.
There are many new challenges for information specialists as well, which include the following; they have to: support the strategies and objectives of the institutional repository projects; influence the mindsets of colleagues in the library and also of researchers that may be hesitant to accept these new ideas; encourage knowledge transfer; motivate others to share, learn, apply their new knowledge; communicate new ideas and new ways of working effectively to their colleagues; identify new opportunities; and mentor others that may be struggling in the new work environment [31].
A number of communities of practice emerged spontaneously to share the required knowledge to work effectively in the new environment.
Many are willing to share their experience in public forums.
For example the process to assist the CSIR was documented and presented at the IFLA Knowledge Management Workshop in Durban in 2007 [32].
The expertise that the UP team has developed is starting to have a wider influence as well.
Representatives from SARUA (the Southern African Regional Universities Association, an umbrella organisation for universities in the southern part of Africa) visited UP in October 2007; they were most impressed with what the team at UP has accomplished and they are looking forward to working with UP on the development of institutional repositories at all universities in the region [33].
This sharing of knowledge is happening across institutional boundaries within South Africa as well.
Members of the UPSpace team now work closely with information specialists from a number of academic institutions to help them develop digital repositories as well.
Many additional initiatives for sharing knowledge about institutional repositories are envisaged.
This includes the creation of UP's 'The Institutional Repository Toolbox' workshop which will guide information specialists to set up institutional repositories in their own organisations.
A wiki with references and links to articles on institutional repositories is being developed.
Conclusion Initially it took a huge amount of time and effort to initiate an institutional repository – this was evident both at UP and also at the CSIR.
Many people, inter alia senior management, had to be convinced that these are worthwhile efforts.
Hardware and software had to be evaluated, bought and installed, policies and procedures had to be put in place; information professionals had to be retrained; the mindsets of researchers (and a number of information professionals!)
had to be changed.
Only then could the real work of populating the repositories be started.
However, as the collections grew, the enthusiasm for the digital repositories also grew, and senior management realised that their support for the endeavours was justified.
More and more researchers are becoming convinced that open access and open scholarship work to their advantage.
The skills that the information professionals have acquired have empowered them to work effectively and efficiently in this new digital environment.
They have acquired new skills and new confidence.
Through communities of practice, listservers, presentations, personal interaction and consultation, they have been able to share their knowledge and expertise with information specialists from many institutions in South Africa and further afield.
Through the direct involvement in this project we are convinced that the hard work of transferring the knowledge to set up the CSIR's repository was worth every second spent on the process.
It is clear that: UP, CSIR and research from the other South African repositories have become much more visible to the rest of the world.
This combined effort has also made South African research more visible.
(The downloaded dissertations and research articles provide silent testimony.
); Researchers, who were originally rather reluctant to participate in the different projects, have become enthusiastic supporters.
(Once they realise that their research is being accessed by a much wider international audience they become very active supporters.
); Information professionals feel empowered through the process of re-training.
The spontaneous establishment of various communities of practice is but one manifestation of new-found confidence; and that The skills and expertise of the information professionals keep on growing.
This growth in knowledge and professionalism is essential once we start consulting each other to set up more repositories.
In short: the gains outweigh the problems by far.
All that is needed is the gumption to identify a learning partner and to start experimenting.
We are very positive about the future of repositories in South Africa.
True: repositories will not totally eradicate the many knowledge divides that exist in the country but they, at least, will continue to provide a narrow bridge that could be used to access knowledge that could change lives.
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Accessed November 2007 from https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/handle/2263/3810 Author Details Martie van Deventer Portfolio Manager: CSIR Information Services CSIR Council for Scientific and Industrial Research South Africa Email: mvandeve@csir.co.za Web site: http://www.csir.co.za/ Heila Pienaar Deputy Director e-Information Strategy & e-Research Enablement Library Services University of Pretoria South Africa Email: heila.pienaar@up.ac.za Web site: http://www.ais.up.ac.za/profile/heila_pienaar/index.htm Return to top Article Title: "South African Repositories: Bridging Knowledge Divides" Author: Martie van Deventer and Heila Pienaar Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/vandeventer-pienaar/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Data Curation in Practice: The Second International Digital Curation Conference The second International Digital Curation Conference will take place over 21-22 November 2006 at the City Centre Hilton in Glasgow.
The theme of the conference will be Digital Data Curation in Practice.
The programme comprises a series of peer-reviewed papers covering a range of disciplines from social sciences and neurosciences to astronomy.
The programme will also focus on a number of different aspects of the curation life cycle including the management of repositories, educating the data scientist and the role of policy and strategy.
There will be a panel session on Open Science.
For further information: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/ Back to headlines Workshop on Semantics for Web Services (SemWS'06) ..in conjunction with 4th European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS'06), 4-6 December 2006, Zurich, Switzerland.
http://events.deri.at/semws06 Workshop Theme Semantic Web and Web Services have been envisioned as Semantic Web Services for dynamic discovery, selection, composition, negotiation and invocation of Web Services.
Significant work has already been done in this decade to apply Semantic Web technologies for Web Services and a large body of relevant work exists from earlier decades, in fields such as formal languages, knowledge representation, planning, agent-based systems and artificial intelligence.
Nevertheless many difficult research challenges remain, and much work is needed to adapt relevant existing technologies to the context of Web services and the Semantic Web, and to prepare the more mature models, languages, capabilities and architectures for widespread deployment.
This workshop under the umbrella of the ECOWS conference as being on of the premier conferences for both researchers and practitioners to exchange the latest advances in the state of the art and practices of Web Services, aims to cover the semantic aspects for Web Services.
This workshop will provide a forum to focus on technical challenges for applying Semantic Web technologies to Web Services (i.e.
Semantic Web Services), provide guidance to early adopters of Semantic Web Services technology, particularly in the business community and facilitate the formation of new communities of Semantic Web Services users.
Workshop Topics (include following, but not limited to) Semantics with W3C Web services technologies Semantics-enabled services designs Semantic Web technologies in Web services discovery, composition, ... Mapping Web Services technologies to Semantic Web Web services and agent technologies Semantic Web and agent technologies for Web Services OWL-S, WSMO, WSDL-S based systems Ontologies for modeling (semantic) Web services Formal languages for describing (semantic) Web services Quality of services (QoS) in Web Services Advertising, discovery, matchmaking, selection, and brokering of (semantic) Web services Semantic Web Services architectures, tools, middleware Security and privacy for (semantic) Web services Use cases for using semantics in Web Services For further information: Omair Shafiq omair.shafiq@deri.org Back to headlines Discovery and Access: Standards and the Information Chain Thursday 7 December 2006, London JISC is holding a seminar on standards and the information chain, co-sponsored by ALPSP, the Publishers Association, and CrossRef.
Academic users want to discover and get access to relevant publications quickly and easily.
Publishers, intermediaries, libraries, and their solutions vendors all develop services to make this happen.
This seminar is about how they can use standards more effectively to share data about publications and enable these services.
Using standards is more than a technical issue.
The seminar will cover what key standards are important, why they are important, and what they support at the user end of the information chain.
It will also cover new developments and innovative applications.
It will conclude with a panel discussion on the future and what needs to happen from different stakeholder perspectives.
The aim is to explore how publishers, intermediaries, libraries, and their solutions vendors can use standards more effectively and agree any action needed to move things forward.
JISC has done much work to specify the standards for information environments at the user end.
JISC has also worked with publishers on standards through the PALS Metadata and Interoperability Group and by funding projects to explore the innovative use of key standards.
This seminar is an opportunity for all participants in the information chain to reflect on where we are, share views, and agree how to move things forward in a collaborative way.
Publishers, intermediaries, librarians, and solutions vendors are all invited, and there is no charge to attend the seminar.
For further information, the programme and an online booking form: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/pals-2006/ [Source: Christine Baldwin, Programme Manager, JISC PALS 2 Programme] Back to headlines Technical Advisory Service for Images Workshops TASI courses enable you to get hands-on experience of using digital imaging equipment and software allowing you to experiment, with the supervision and guidance of a professional practitioner.
However, in addition to their practical element the courses also cover vital digital imaging theory in an understandable way.
The programme for the autumn is as follows: * 9th November 2006: Photoshop Level I http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html#ps1 *10th November 2006: Photoshop Level II http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html#ps2 * 17th November 2006: Introduction to Image Metadata http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html#met All TASI courses are regularly reviewed and updated and full descriptions can be found at the URLs given, along with booking information.
Other workshops being run towards the end of the year are: * 7th December 2006: Image Capture Level I http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html#ic1 * 8th December 2006: Image Capture Level II http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html#ic2 * 15th December 2006: Rights and Responsibilities: Using Technology to Manage Rights in Digital Images.
http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html#cp2 * 20th December 2006: Photoshop Level III http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html#ps3 To book your place on any of the workshops, follow the links from the relevant URL.
For further information Grant Young, TASI Technical Research Officer grant.young@bristol.ac.uk http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/aboutus/staff?search=cmgay TASI Technical Advisory Service for Images A JISC Service http://www.tasi.ac.uk/ Back to headlines Netskills Workshops at the University of Leeds 1.
Detecting and Deterring Plagiarism, 15 November 2006 This practical workshop explores the impact of the Web on plagiarism in education, and enables attendees to examine online and other methods of deterring and detecting it.
2.
Effective e-Learning with Moodle, 16 November 2006 The Moodle learning environment is becoming increasingly popular in the UK education sector.
It is free to use and is designed using sound pedagogical principles.
This workshop introduces Moodle, its main features and demonstrates why Moodle is different from other learning environments.
3.
Assessment Solutions for e-Learning, 17 November 2006 This workshop is aimed at individuals who are either currently delivering or are preparing to deliver assessment online.
The workshop covers analysis, evaluation, planning and design stages leading to the development of pedagogically effective online assessment.
4.
Problem-based e-Learning, 22 November 2006 Delivering higher order e-learning requires the application of thinking skills.
This workshop introduces these concepts through the application of problem solving scenarios.
5.
Mobile Learning: Education on Demand, 23 November 2006 Mobile Learning: the next stage of e-Learning, or a whole new learning experience?
Learning without barriers, or the latest fad?
This workshop explores the principles and practice of m-Learning.
It is for anyone who is interested in the application of mobile technologies in education, or those who simply wish to know more about the emerging technologies and potential uses.
6.
Communication and Collaboration for e-Learning, 24 November 2006 Are two heads really better than one?
Discover how to use online communication and collaboration to enhance learning and teaching.
Topics covered include designing collaborative e-learning, using tools such as blogs, wikis and podcasts and effective group moderation.
These workshops also support our BTEC-accredited qualifications: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/products/accreditation/ Further information: Further details for these workshops and of all Netskills events are available from: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/products/workshops/ Back to headlines Project Management for the Education Sector 8 December 2006, Edinburgh This workshop introduces a project management methodology that can be adapted for any size of project and is specifically tailored to the needs of the education sector.
The day is interactive, providing a structured approach to project management and investigating a number of examples.
It is provided in conjunction with JISC infoNet, the advisory service for managers in the post-compulsory education sector promoting effective planning, implementation and management of information and learning technology.
Further details of this workshop and of all Netskills events are available from: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/products/workshops/ Further information: JISC infoNet http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/ Back to headlines EPrints User Group Meeting You are invited to participate in an EPrints User Group meeting at the Open Repositories Conference (San Antonio, January 2007) at which EPrints v3.0 will be formally launched.
A wide range of potential themes and topics (technical and managerial) is suggested below.
Proposals for presentations, panels and discussions are invited for submission by 13 November 2006.
For full details, including submission instructions, see http://www.openrepositories.org/call/eprints/ Potential Themes and Topics: Embedding EPrints within an Institution Interoperability between EPrints and Other Systems Portals Management Information Systems Research Assessment Procedures Realistic Costings: how many people does it take to run an EPrints repository?
Policy Development and Enforcment Marketing Your Organisation and Its Research Branding Your Repository Tracking Article Usage (e.g.
Google Analytics) Co-ordinating Deposits with Press Releases Practical Experiences and War Stories Content Growth: how to stimulate regular deposits Gaining Support from Faculty and Senior Management Mandates and Recommendations: what works where?
Best Practice and Otherwise Repository Management Optimizing Workflows Versioning Keeping Data and Metadata Fresh and Relevant Implementing Achievable Preservation Policies Technical Solutions for De-duplication, Metadata Improvement and other Information Updates Critical Success Factors: what makes a good repository Diversifying your EPrints Repository Extending the EPrints biodiversity: image collections, theses, data collections, e-portfolios, teaching/learning collections Managing diversification Technical Issues and Enhancements Web 2.0: Social Tagging and Social Networking?
Better User Interfaces and Improved User Experience Repository Architectures Your Improvements and Your Wish List for future features NB: EPrints Version 3 will be launched on the second day of the workshop.
The above themes are not exhaustivepresentations on other issues relevant to EPrints users are welcomed.
Back to headlines Course: Selecting and Implementing Web and Intranet Search 22 February 2007 CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE Course Outline Effective search is a vital element in ensuring that users of Web sites and intranets can be certain that they have found all the relevant information that is available.
Search has to work, and work well.
This workshop provides practical advice on selecting, installing and implementing search for Web sites and intranets.
The opening sessions of the workshop explain how search technology works, an essential precursor to understanding how to get the best from commercial and open source search software.
The workshop then goes on to illustrate the importance of the design and usability of the search results pages, and highlights the similarities and differences between searching Web sites and searching intranets.
Desk top and enterprise search applications will also be discussed.
Note that this workshop does not cover search engine optimisation.
The sessions will include: How search engines work A survey of search engine suppliers Making a business case for search Search usability issues Specifying and selecting a search engine Ten steps to implementing web site search Ten steps to implementing intranet search Who should attend: This workshop will be of benefit to Web and intranet managers who want to provide a better search experience for users, either through implementing a new search engine or through improving the usability of their current application.
No technical knowledge of search software is required to gain the maximum benefit from this workshop.
Course Presenter: Martin White FCLIP Martin White is Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd. Martin consults on the design and management of intranets and extranets, and on the specification and selection of content management and search software.
He is the author of The Content Management Handbook published by Facet Publishing) and has just finished writing Making Search Work for publication by Facet in early 2007.
Martin has been the Chairman of the Online Information Conference since 2000.
Costs (including lunch and refreshments): UKeiG members £130 + VAT (£152.75); others £160 + VAT (£188.00) Please register by 15 February 2007.
Further information: To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details: meetings@ukeig.org.uk UKeiG is a Special Interest Group of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals UKeiG Website http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Back to headlines DRIVER: Networking European Scientific Repositories An international partnership has started work on a project to build a large-scale public infrastructure for research information across Europe.
The "Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research" (DRIVER) project responds to the vision that any form of scientific-content resource, including scientific/technical reports, research articles, experimental or observational data, rich media and other digital objects should be freely accessible through simple Internet-based infrastructures.
Like GEANT2, the successful European network for computing resources, data storage and transport, the new DRIVER repository infrastructure will enable researchers to plug into the new knowledge base and use scientific content in a standardised, open way.
The project is funded by the European Commission under the auspices of the "Research Infrastructure" unit.
Open Access to research information is vital for researchers and helps the public appreciation and understanding of science.
DRIVER will be helping countries to create networks of openly-accessible repositories for research information.
The project is a joint collaboration between ten international partners with the intention to create a knowledge base of European research.
DRIVER will put a test-bed in place across Europe to assist the development of a knowledge infrastructure for the European Research Area.
The project will develop over the next 18 months, building upon existing institutional repositories and networks, from countries including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium and the UK.
The aim is for one large-scale virtual content resource to be created to access and integrate individual repositories.
DRIVER will also prepare for the future expansion and upgrade of the Digital Repository infrastructure across Europe and will ensure the widest possible user involvement.
Workshops will be run to establish communication and act as open forums for discussion and feedback to assist the development of the infrastructure and will facilitate the set-up and international networking of institutional repositories for the envisioned European DR infrastructure.
The DRIVER Consortium: University of Athens, Greece Bielefeld University, Germany Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, Italy STICHTING SURF, Netherlands University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique DIS, France University of Bath, United Kingdom Uniwesytet Warszawski, Poland Universiteit Gent, Belgium Goettingen University, Germany More information is available from: The Project Web site: http://www.driver-repository.eu/ the individual project partners from participating countries or the project coordinators: Prof. Mike Hatzopolous (administrative) mike@di.uoa.gr and Dr. Norbert Lossau (scientific-technical) norbert.lossau@uni-bielefeld.de [Source: Bill Hubbard, SHERPA Manager] [Received: November 2006] Back to headlines Open-source Web Curator Tool developed by the National Library of New Zealand and the British Library The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, The British Library and Sytec, a subsidiary of TelstraClear, have announced the successful development of a web harvesting management system to be shared with other organisations around the world as open source software.
Its initial release is now available, along with documentation on installation and operation.
Further details are available below.
The system, known as the Web Curator Tool, is the latest development in the practice of Web harvesting (using software to 'crawl' through a specified section of the World Wide Web, and gather 'snapshots' of Web sites, including the images and documents posted on them).
The Web Curator Tool is a further advance in the race to ensure the world's digital heritage is preserved for future generations and not lost through obsolescence and the temporary nature of the Web.
The National Library of New Zealand and The British Library aim to integrate the Web Curator Tool into their own digital preservation programmes.
The Web Curator Tool has been developed as an enterprise class solution.
It is interoperable with other organisational systems and has a user-centred design.
The Web Curator Tool enables users to select, describe and harvest online publications without requiring an in-depth knowledge of Web harvesting technology.
It is auditable, has workflows and identifies the content for archiving and then manages it, including permissions, selection, descriptions, scoping, harvesting and quality review.
The partnership was brought together under the auspices of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), with members contributing to initial requirements.
The project goal was to find a desktop solution to the challenge of collecting Web material that would allow widespread implementation of Web harvesting without requiring a high level of technical understanding.
The project was funded entirely by the national libraries.
Now available for download from http://webcurator.sf.net/ Manuals Source code (Released under Apache License, Version 2.0) Documentation: user and administrator guides, FAQ Mailing lists for more information, visit http://webcurator.sf.net for enquiries please email: wct@natlib.gov.nz ; wct@bl.uk Editor's note: Ariadne will carry a main article on this topic in its winter issue.
[Received: October 2006] Back to headlines Dutch National Site for Doctoral Theses Officially Launched Professor Blom, the University Rector of the Radboud University Nijmegen, has launched the National site for Doctoral Theses 'Promise of Science' on behalf of all University Rectors in the Netherlands.
At the initiative of the SURF Foundation over 10,000 doctoral theses are currently available worldwide on the http://www.DAREnet.nl/promiseofscience Web site.
The doctoral theses originate from all universities in the Netherlands.
The National Site for Doctoral Theses 'Promise of Science' was developed within the national DARE (Digital Academic REpositories) programme.
This is a joint collaboration of all universities in the Netherlands, a number of scientific organisations and SURF.
The aim of the DARE programme is to make research publications publicly accessible without any restrictions.
The Web site DAREnet has been developed to realise public access to this material, through one site.
DAREnet also contains a selection of 'Cream of Science', this gives access to publications of 200 prominent scientists in the Netherlands.
With Promise of Science there is now also room for young, rising researchers next to the 'established' scientists.
Further information: http://www.darenet.nl/ or Gerard van Westrienen Project Manager National Site for Doctoral Theses: westrienen@surf.nl [Source: SURF Foundation] [Received: October 2006] Back to headlines UK Reports on Digital Games in Education For librarians interested in the use of digital games in education, two significant UK reports have been made public recently: 1.
Teaching with games (downloadable report and surveys): FutureLab have been working on a one-year project, supported by Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Take-Two and ISFE, where several COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) games were used in classroom conditions to evaluate their relevance and usefulness.
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/teachingwithgames/findings.htm 2.
Unlimited learning: computer and video games in the learning landscape http://tinyurl.com/mkool (1.2Mb PDF) ELSPA (Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association), in association with the Department for Education and Skills' personalised content team have produced a good overview of the area with some nice examples and bang up-to-date information on games.
[Source: John Kirriemuir] [Received: October 2006] Back to headlines Culture Secretary announces MLA Board appointments Michael Walsh, Roy Clare, Yinnon Ezra, Nicholas Dodd and Sara Selwood have been appointed as Members of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) Board.
Sir Geoffrey Holland, Sarah Carthew, Glen Lawes, John Hicks, Geoffrey Bond, Alexander Cunningham, John Tarrant, Helen Forde and Robert Wand have been appointed as Regional Chairs and National Members to the Board of the MLA.
The appointments of current serving regional chairs Geoffrey Bond, Sir Geoffrey Holland, Sarah Carthew, John Hicks, Helen Forde and Alexander Cunningham will run for three years from 1 October 2006 to 30 September 2009.
All the other appointments will run for four years from 1 October 2006 to 30 September 2010.
The MLA is chaired by Mark Wood, who was appointed for four years in June 2003.
Details of the announcement can be found on the DCMS Web site http://www.culture.gov.uk/Reference_library/Press_notices/archive_2006/dcms117_06.htm [Source: MLA] [Received: October 2006] Back to headlines Lorraine Estelle appointed CEO of JISC Collections The Board of the newly-formed limited company, JISC Collections, has announced that Lorraine Estelle is to be the first CEO of the company formed to build on the success of JISC's collection development activities.
With many years' experience in the publishing industry and having led the JISC Collections team and its negotiations for national licensing agreements for four years, Lorraine is, said David House, Chair of the company, 'the ideal choice to lead the new organisation into what is an exciting time of development for the provision of national online content for education.'
JISC Collections was formed as a limited company on 1 August 2006 in order to allow it to operate within a commercial framework and to place it on an equal footing with the commercial content providers it negotiates with.
Further and Higher Education institutions are now being invited to join the company and will in time be directly represented on its Board.
Further information: http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/ [Source: JISC Collections] [Received: October 2006] Back to headlines WWW2007: Paper submissions due 20 November The deadline for paper submissions to WWW2007 is less than a month away!
WWW2007 seeks original papers describing research in all areas of the Web.
All refereed papers must be submitted on or before 20 November, 2006 (by 11:59pm Hawaii time).
This is a hard deadline.
In addition to regular papers, we also solicit submissions of position papers articulating high-level architectural visions, describing challenging future directions, or critiquing current design wisdom.
The WWW2007 technical programme will be divided into 13 tracks, and authors of the best papers will be invited to submit an enhanced version of their work for a special issue of the ACM Transactions on the Web.
The Call For Papers, with the complete list of research tracks, programme committee members, as well as formatting and submission details can be found at http://www2007.org/cfp.php Note also: Tutorial proposals are due 27 November: http://www2007.org/prog-Tutorials.php [Source: WWW2007 Newsletter] [Received: October 2006] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue49/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Teaching Web Search Skills Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Teaching Web Search Skills Buzz html database portal firefox accessibility browser copyright multimedia url research Citation BibTex RIS Verity Brack takes a look at this book for Web trainers, teachers and instructors.
Greg Notess has brought together techniques and strategies for Web search training not only from his own experience but also from a number of well known Web search trainers; readers will recognise the names of Joe Barker, Paul Barron, Phil Bradley, John Ferguson, Alice Fulbright, Ran Hock, Jeff Humphrey, Diane Kovacs, Gary Price, Danny Sullivan, Rita Vine, and Sheila Webber.
As the author notes, 'Teaching web search engines is complex', and this book is an attempt to recognise the diversity of approaches by offering different styles, techniques and examples.
There is a new Internet audience carrying out frequent searching but which has little or no formal instruction, and little understanding of how complex the search process really is.
The need for adaptability and the use of different approaches is emphasised.
The book covers general training topics such as understanding your audience and instructional session gaols, along with more detailed chapters on Web search features, terminology and concepts.
All these are enhanced by the inclusion of comments, suggestions, advice and anecdotes from the group of 'super trainers' above.
Notess devotes a section of his Web site to providing updates to the URLs mentioned in the book [1].
Chapters 1, 2 and 3 provide an overview of the key issues and challenges of Web search teaching now that we are in the 'Google Age', plus discussions regarding the need to understand your audience, and how to select the appropriate type of instructional session for your users.
Chapter 4 looks at the advantages and disadvantages of online tutorials, and lists a number of favourites, including, I'm pleased to report, the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) Virtual Training Suite (now the Intute Virtual Training Suite [2]).
Chapter 5 then goes on to look at the organisation of training sessions, their focus, length and goals.
So far the book offers nothing particularly new for the experienced trainer, although for people beginning a career in training or teaching there is a lot of useful advice.
However, Chapter 6 onwards contains far more that I personally found useful and interesting there are some real gems of information and ideas that have made me look again at what and how I teach.
Chapter 6 looks at the terminology of Web search services, explaining and defining terms such as 'metasite' and 'portal'.
It is fascinating to read the variations of these terms as used by the expert trainers, and how they are explained to the students.
Chapter 7 discusses what search features to teach; the experts all agree that phrase searching is a key concept but differ on whether or not it is important to teach Boolean searching and the '+ or -' operators.
Discussions of other features such as field searching, limiting searches, sorting and stop words are also included.
Chapter 8 runs through a number of the most frequently taught primary concepts, such as defining the research process and analysing the question, using more than one search tool, and search engines vs directories.
Evaluation of Web information is included here but surprisingly only briefly for such an important topic; although the book does refer you to a number of excellent resources on evaluating information, including the Bibliography on Evaluating Web Information [3].
Additional useful concepts to teach, for example, how to identify Web advertising, and understanding databases, are also covered.
Chapter 9 then follows on with additional types of content to include, such as image searching, news, multimedia, and the invisible web.
Brief descriptions of various search engines and their main features comprise Chapter 10, and I certainly found this a useful section of the book.
I consider Chapter 11 to be a slight digression from the main focus of the volume, in that it goes into detail on creating workshop Web pages using frames in HTML.
While the author obviously finds these a useful addition to his teaching resources, unfortunately there is no mention of accessibility problems that the use of frames causes (and, of course, in the UK it is a legal requirement for all Web sites to be accessible see the Royal National Institute of the Blind Web site [4]).
Chapter 12 is a short but very useful section on presentation tips, including a table of browser keyboard shortcuts for Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla/Netscape 7 and Firefox something that I shall copy and pin up in my office!
The final chapter is 'Tales from the Trenches', a selection of anecdotes and examples from the group of expert trainers, to my mind the most interesting part of the book.
Finally, the book contains three appendices, with Appendix B reproducing a selection of handouts created by the experts.
These are there to give you ideas for your own training and teaching; if you do want to use any of the materials, remember that the copyright belongs to the authors or their organisations, and you must obtain permission before using them.
In summary, I found this an interesting book, particularly the latter part plus the sample handouts.
It has prompted me to rethink my approach to Web searching and to include some new topics.
It has also provided some comfort in that, when things go wrong in a training session, I am not alone: Notess has 'spoken with many trainers who, in a hands-on instructional setting, have had an entire group do the exact same search on the exact same search engine and still get different results.'
References The companion Web site http://www.notess.com/teaching/ Intute Virtual Training Suite http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/ Bibliography on Evaluating Web Information http://www.lib.vt.edu/help/instruct/evaluate/evalbiblio.html Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) Web Access Centre http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/code/public_rnib008789.hcsp Author Details Dr. Verity Brack IT Programme Director Institute for Lifelong Learning University of Sheffield Email: v.brack@shef.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Teaching Web Search Skills: Techniques and Strategies of Top Trainers" Author: Verity Brack Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/brack-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EThOS: from Project to Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EThOS: from Project to Service Buzz database dissemination archives metadata digitisation accessibility repositories copyright preservation cataloguing research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jill Russell describes the impact the new Electronic Theses Online Service is making on the availability of UK doctoral theses.
EThOS 1 opened up access to UK doctoral theses in January 2009.
It is a service by and for the research community.
Although EThOS is still in beta version, it is already changing the way theses are accessed and is helping to raise the visibility of UK research.
Background Doctoral theses represent a special category of research writing and are the culmination of several years of intensive work.
Traditionally difficult to access, they have as a result remained underused; so modernising access to research theses has been on the Higher Education agenda for many years in line with the changing characteristics of the working environment: Researchers expect immediate access to documents, especially recent ones, from anywhere in the world, over the Web Theses begin life as electronic documents, and registries and systems recording student progress are largely administered electronically The Higher Education libraries that hold theses provide a high proportion of their information resources through Web-delivered services Two projects [2], funded by JISC, Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL)/ Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the British Library (BL) and the project partners, enabled the BL and partner Higher Education institutions (HEIs) to undertake detailed planning and consultation to meet the needs and preferences expressed by the UK Higher Education community in achieving a modern document delivery service for theses.
Details of the approach were published previously in Ariadne [3] and elsewhere [4].
In summary, the aims were: to encourage HEIs to adopt e-thesis submission and dissemination, and raise awareness of the cultural and practical issues surrounding this move to work in the spirit of the open access movement, making e-theses free at the point of use, and adopting accepted international standards and good practice to provide guidance for dealing with concerns about intellectual property rights (IPR) and confidential material in theses, and provide an appropriate risk-management strategy to create a new service that would replace the existing document supply arrangements for theses with a ‘one-stop shop’ providing access to UK doctoral theses from any source, whether they be harvested from existing repositories digitised via past projects digitised on demand to meet end-user requests to create a viable and sustainable model that would allow any UK HEI to participate at a level appropriate for their size current thesis submission processes budget to increase the numbers of available e-theses, to achieve the critical mass expected by users to preserve e-theses’ content The EThOS service itself is the most visible result of this work.
It is exciting and gratifying to see an initiative move from project to a real service, but in addition to this, the projects played a key role in addressing the concerns of students, alumni, supervisors, administrators and librarians in HEIs, in order to encourage the adoption of e-theses in UK universities.
The majority of institutions who award higher degrees are somewhere along the path to accepting e-theses, in line with the general trend towards opening up access to completed research work.
Some now require research students to submit an electronic copy of their work, while others have voluntary arrangements, or are putting measures in place for e-submission.
The EThOS Toolkit [5] provides a great deal of advice, guidance, model documentation and answers to frequently asked questions.
Launching a New Service The EThOSnet project team followed up HEI contacts who had expressed an interest in the service, to guide them through the options available for participation and to offer advice relevant to each institution’s own circumstances.
The details of the EThOS system had been planned through wide consultation with many different stakeholder groups, but in the time between the initial project stages and the service launch, changes of personnel meant that, in some HEIs, the issues and queries needed to be revisited and reconsidered.
So far, over 100 UK HEIs are participating in EThOS, and several more are finalising their position.
Most people involved do appreciate the benefits of electronic dissemination, and the potential advantages for authors and their institutions [6].
A centrally co-ordinated service for finding and ordering theses has also been welcomed by users and libraries.
As anticipated, the most frequent hurdle to participation has been the management of the risks associated with IPR and disclosure of thesis content, but most HEIs are comfortable with the processes recommended by EThOS.
These include: improving the training for current students and their supervisors, in the use of copyright material in their thesis and on the implications of disclosure of the content of their thesis attempting to obtain permissions from authors and other rights holders in advance, and keeping track of permissions granted or refused, and of theses which are embargoed, or not available for some other reason publicising EThOS through alumni channels and giving past authors the opportunity to volunteer their own e-versions or to opt out of e-dissemination assessing requested theses for any evidence of sensitive content or substantial third-party content For its part, EThOS: requires all readers to register with EThOS and to accept the conditions of use before viewing the full text or requesting digitisation has a rapid take-down process in the event of any complaint from a rights holder Further details of the measures to address these risks, together with guidance for authors and HEIs, are available in the EThOS Toolkit already cited.
The majority of participating HEIs are supporting the service financially, by choosing one of the open access options.
This means that the HEI that holds the thesis covers the cost of digitising it when it is ordered.
Many libraries regard this as a shift of costs from the acquisition of theses via purchase or document supply to the conversion of locally held content that will reduce workload in the longer term.
EThOS will monitor usage of the service, producing measures of the numbers of theses requested, the numbers of downloads, etc, to help HEIs see the take-up and usage of their theses, and to budget for their ongoing contribution to the service.
EThOS also provides a valuable service to HEIs by including all theses that are digitised or harvested into the system in the BL’s digital preservation programme.
Participating institutions are encouraged to contribute to the ongoing development of the service.
Suggestions for improvement have been prioritised by the project team for action, and will continue to be welcomed after the project phase and beta phase come to an end.
There is also a general discussion list for HEI staff interested in e-theses developments [7].
EThOS metadata will be available for harvesting via the usual OAI [8] channels, and available for incorporation in suitable general or specialised repository search engines.
Supplying Full-text Content In some subjects, recently completed theses are in demand as sources of current research on a topic, but in others, unique work, completed years or decades ago, is still of interest to current researchers.
This means that readers are requesting a wide variety of work from different disciplines, institutions and eras.
A growing number of recently completed theses is beginning to become available in institutional repositories.
They are being harvested and included in EThOS, but they are only a small proportion of the research work completed for doctoral degrees.
Some of the institutions which run repositories are taking their own steps to source digital copies of theses from authors.
Their aim is to increase the availability of electronic copies, and in turn to increase the amount of full-text content available in EThOS.
Selected theses that had been most popular at the BL in recent years were digitised in advance of the service going live, through a JISC-funded digitisation project [9].
These are available in EThOS, and many of them feature amongst the titles recording the most frequent downloads in the first weeks of the live service.
The EThOS database contains metadata for over 250,000 theses from the BL catalogue, of which approximately 16,000 are already available for immediate download.
However, with a vast body of unique work contained in theses from all eras, the immediately available full text represents only a fraction of the material expected to be required by readers.
The unique feature of EThOS is that it not only provides a central point of access to existing digital material and a repository system to store and preserve it, but also provides a facility for readers to request theses that are not yet available in electronic form.
This is achieved with the active support and participation of the HEIs which hold the theses.
The EThOS system generates a request to the appropriate HEI.
Staff there (usually in the library), locate the thesis, and provided there are no known barriers to its use, supply it to EThOS for scanning.
The HEI benefits from such a simple system for getting the requested work digitised to a high standard, and at a reasonable cost.
Once the thesis is in the system, it is there to satisfy all future requests, and the HEI is also entitled to the digitised copy, and associated metadata, for upload to its own repository.
Initial Reaction from Users The service proved to be phenomenally popular with users right from the start.
In the first quarter of operation (20 January to 20 April 2009), the volume of requests via EThOS was more than 10 times the level of activity under the previous thesis service.
It is fair to say that although we knew the service would be popular, this increase in demand exceeded all expectations and has had an impact on everyone concerned.
On the one hand, e-theses that are already available for immediate download are available to satisfy multiple requests, with no effort on the part of the reader or the staff who would previously have been involved in the document supply process.
They accounted for 28,000 downloads in the first quarter, and have already saved a great deal of time and effort for both parties.
They represent a growing proportion of transactions on the system, and of course this was exactly the benefit expected from providing electronic access to materials.
There have been many complimentary remarks from readers who have downloaded theses and appreciate their ready accessibility.
However, on the other hand, many new requests were received in respect of material that was not yet available in electronic form.
This in turn generated work for the EThOS digitisation team, and for the HEIs which supply the theses for scanning, leading to backlogs.
Such requests in respect of as yet undigitised material also have budgetary implications for the (majority of) institutions which support open access to their theses in terms of covering the costs of that unscheduled digitisation work.
The three main groups involved in the supply have all been affected by this unprecedented demand: The EThOS team members at BL set up extra shifts and upgraded equipment to increase throughput, and are steadily working their way through that backlog.
The team is also monitoring any unusual levels of activity that may suggest unreasonable or improper use of the system.
It is a sad fact that when a Web service is offered free of charge, some users may be tempted to abuse it.
HEIs found their own ways of coping with the increase in orders for their theses, though some were more able to allocate extra staff time and funds to the task than others.
On the positive side, these early orders will help front-load the availability of full-text content, which once it is in the system, is available for repeated downloads, incurring no additional effort.
Furthermore, many HEIs are reporting that time has been freed up for their document supply staff who no longer need to mediate requests for UK theses required by their readers.
Readers found themselves having to wait longer than expected for newly digitised theses to be delivered.
An online system raises people’s expectations of speed and convenience of access; those with longer memories realised that the system was still a great deal faster than the old theses supply system… and mostly free of charge!
Conclusion Moving a document supply system from an expensive and slow paperand microfilm-based system to an open access service has seen a huge rise in expectations, and brought its fair share of challenges.
Moving from a project to a live service brings new relationships amongst the practitioners involved.
However, the British Library and the HEIs are rising to those challenges in the context of current approaches to electronic delivery of information and open access.
Let us leave the last word to the thesis writers and readers at the beginning and end of the chain, who have recently made (unsolicited) comments: A past thesis author: ‘thanks a really great facility that would have been indispensable when i was searching for existing research.
best wishes,’ A recent thesis author: ‘I just want to say hi.
I’m in [Africa] working to give something back to my nation for sponsoring my studies abroad.
I also checked and saw the e-copy of my thesis.
Grateful indeed.’ A current researcher ‘customer’ of EThOS: ‘I wanted to say congratulations on providing a real service to scholarship.
EThOS is very quickly going to become one of those things that leaves us thinking ‘how did I ever manage without it?’… Overall EThOS is well-designed, easy to use, and a huge help to serious research.
Many thanks for all your hard work.’ References EThOS Web site http://ethos.bl.uk/ Details of the two projects are at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitalrepositories2005/ethos.aspx and http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres/sue/ethosnet.aspx Russell, J.
“EThOSnet: Building a UK e-Theses Community”.
Ariadne 52, July 2007. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/russell/ Key articles and presentations are listed on the project Web site at http://www.ethos.ac.uk/003_Resources.html EThOS Toolkit http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/ A summary of these benefits is at http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/tiki-index.php?page=Who+benefits+from+e-theses%3F UK discussion list for electronic theses and dissertations http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/E-THESES-UK.html Open Archives Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/ JISC UK theses digitisation project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digitisation/theses.aspx Author Details Jill Russell Digital Assets Programme Manager Library Services University of Birmingham (Member of the EThOSnet project team) Email: info@ethos.ac.uk or j.c.russell@bham.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ethos.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “EThOS: From Project to Service” Author: Jill Russell Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/russell/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Virtual Research Environments: Overview and Activity Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Virtual Research Environments: Overview and Activity Buzz data software java framework wiki database wireless dissemination portal infrastructure metadata browser schema repositories eprints video preservation z39.50 visualisation aggregation e-learning vle shibboleth curation srw wsrp e-science rae ict uportal interoperability privacy taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Fraser provides an overview of the virtual research environment (VRE) and introduces three JISC-funded projects in which Oxford University is participating.
Virtual research environments (VREs), as one hopes the name suggests, comprise digital infrastructure and services which enable research to take place.
The idea of a VRE, which in this context includes cyberinfrastructure and e-infrastructure, arises from and remains intrinsically linked with, the development of e-science.
The VRE helps to broaden the popular definition of e-science from grid-based distributed computing for scientists with huge amounts of data to the development of online tools, content, and middleware within a coherent framework for all disciplines and all types of research.
This article highlights some of the issues relating to the development and deployment of VREs and introduces three VRE projects in which Oxford University is leading or playing a significant role.
The VRE as Currently Defined A VRE is best viewed as a framework into which tools, services and resources can be plugged.
VREs are part of infrastructure, albeit in digital form, rather than a free-standing product.
It would be difficult for an institution or a research group to procure a VRE in quite the same way as VLEs have tended to be deployed.
A VRE shares more in common with a Managed Learning Environment, that sum of services and systems which together support the learning and teaching processes within an institution.
The VRE, for its part, is the result of joining together new and existing components to support as much of the research process as appropriate for any given activity or role.
It is usually assumed that a large proportion of existing components will be distributed and heterogeneous.
As with other virtual environments (e.g.
an information environment) the emphasis is on architecture and standards rather than specific applications.
The VRE as infrastructure or framework is a view shared by the JISC in its 'Roadmap for a UK VRE' [1] and by those who have reported on the needs and implications of cyberinfrastructure development in theUS [2].
For the most part, the terms VRE, cyberor e-infrastructure are synonymous.
If there is a difference between a VRE and cyber/e-infrastructure then it is this: the VRE presents a holistic view of the context in which research takes place whereas e-infrastructure focusses on the core, shared services over which the VRE is expected to operate.
A VRE is more than mddleware and yet that function remains important (as discussed later).
A VRE will not be able to facilitate much research if is not integrated with existing research infrastructure and policies.
Much of the existing research infrastructure already has a digital representation or replacement.
For example: The Research Councils' Joint Electronic Submission (JE-S) system and institutions' own proposal costing and submission systems; The heterogeneous and distributed digital collections licensed or developed for the community by the JISC/Research Councils and institutions' own digital libraries and research repositories; The national Athens access management service, the planned implementation of Shibboleth and institutions' own single/multiple sign-on systems; The National Grid Service and institutions' own Campus Grid and super-computing facilities; National portals and institutions' own portals and VLEs; The Access Grid and institutions' own supported communication technologies; The Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII), the Open Source Software Advisory Service (OSS Watch) and institutions' own IPR and technology-transfer frameworks; The Digital Curation Centre and institutions' own emerging digital preservation and curation strategies, and storage networks.
And so on... Research-support also includes a university's research, contracts and technology transfer offices; IT support; archivists and curators.
A VRE which stands isolated from existing infrastructure and the research way of life will not be a research environment but probably only another underused Web portal.
The JISC in its Roadmap notes that the VRE idea is still evolving (and will be informed by the various projects funded under the VRE Programme), but it is difficult to envisage a VRE sitting outside institutional structures even if the VRE belonged to a distributed research group.
(This is particularly true within the context of sustainability and preservation.)
In which case, the building blocks of a VRE will comprise a mixture of institutional, (inter)national and discipline-based systems and services.
Given also the multiple roles which members of the research and research-support communities tend to have both within their own institutions and within multiple inter-institutional research activities, the convergence between local/national middleware, access management and VRE development activities is obvious.
The development of VREs is not only about the needs of 'big science' (in simplistic terms: large, often virtual, teams; high-performance distributed computing; huge amounts of data; and big budgets).
Within a VRE framework access to grid-based computing resources may be one suite of services among others [3].
An institutional VRE, for example, with common infrastructure, shared services and specialised, but sharable, applications has the potential to encourage take-up or experimentation of grid-centric services by communities hitherto unsupported within e-science programmes.
Likewise, while the social science community are well aware that their methodologies and research interests have much to inform the development and management of e-science, this is not necessarily the case in the arts and humanities (for some good reason) [4].
VREs are about enabling better collaboration.
In much of the current literature the project team (whether distributed or not) tends to be accepted as the smallest unit served by the VRE.
This may acknowledge that the so-called 'lone' scholar does not, and probably never has, existed.
On the other hand, privileging the team or group may limit the VRE to a particular kind of research team with well-defined roles and boundaries and neglect more informal teams and collaborations which exist in other research contexts.
Multidisciplinary Focus VREs have the potential to be profoundly multidisciplinary, both in their use and in their development.
For the most part, it is expected that computer science will act in partnership with other disciplines to lay the foundations, integrating methods and knowledge from the relevant subject areas.
Humanities scholars, for example, cannot necessarily be expected to apply tools and processes (initially developed for the e-science community) effectively to their own subjects.
Better to articulate the challenges and methods and sit down with the computer scientists.
This is not an alien idea for many in the humanities there is a long history of such partnerships.
Indeed, while the humanities and social sciences may not have the scale of data to contend with, they certainly have the variety and complexity of data to continue to provide interesting problems for computer science and engineering.
A common infrastructure for a VRE, even remaining at the level of agreed standards and policies, facilitates the sharing and reuse of tools, data and results.
Tools created for one subject-based presentation of a VRE have the potential to be plugged in and available to other subject-based views.
In addition, as part of the development of the common infrastructure, one would expect an enumeration of generic tools and services to take place.
A number of these, especially collaboration and communication tools, may currently be a normal part of the research workflow within some subjects but not in others.
Exposing such tools within a common framework provides the potential for experimentation within other disciplines.
The same observation applies to the availability of more specialist tools, analogous to how different disciplines have appropriated methodologies from other subject areas in order to help address (or re-address) specific research questions.
The AHDS, for example, has published a taxonomy of computation methods within the arts and humanities, many of which have their origin elsewhere [5].
User Requirements The development and presentation of a VRE must be embedded and owned by the communities served and cannot realistically be developed for the research communities by others in isolation.
Since the intention is to improve the research process and not simply to pilot technologies for their own sake, the research must drive the requirements.
Undertaking a 'day in the life of your research' can be instructive and, if nothing else, will generally hammer home the point that the majority of the research community operate in a world which mixes the digital with the tangible, machines with people.
In effect, the development of VREs should encourage research communities to be inward looking, reflecting on the types of research questions, the means to address them, and the acceptable ways of disseminating the answers.
Understanding and articulating the research methods and culture of any given research area is key to developing a VRE.
The Building a VRE for the Humanities Project (BVREH), described below, is almost exclusively focussed on user requirements.
The ISME Project, also funded under the VRE Programme, is led by an end-user.
ISME (Integration & Steering of Multi-site Experiments to Assemble Engineering Body Scans) aims to develop a prototype VRE to enable material scientists and engineers to collaborate on enquiry-based experiments (using multiple sources of archived data) [6].
Research Life Cycle Advanced computing methods pervade many of the scientific disciplines (e.g.
earth modelling systems, simulated ecosystems, DNA sequence analysis, 3D modelling of the human body, whole sky surveys, high energy physics at CERN etc all noted by the US Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure).
Within the humanities the recently-funded Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network will promote the use of advanced ICT methods in the arts and humanities, drawing on and disseminating knowledge based within centres of expertise in the UK and elsewhere [7].
As well as facilitating multidisciplinary research, a VRE is intended to effect a transformation in how research is undertaken within a particular discipline.
This effect may apply at various points in the research 'life cycle'.
However, It is difficult to divide the research process into discrete elements.
The research process is neither simply linear nor cyclical.
Each element generalised below overlaps with others and may have its own identifiable life cycle.
The research machine, so to speak, comprises cogs (and pistons and spindles) rather than a single wheel [8].
Having said that, the remainder of this section briefly comments on the role of a VRE with respect to some more general aspects of a research life cycle.
Research Administration and Project Management A sometimes forgotten but clearly essential element of the research life cycle is the administration and management processes associated with research activities.
Very few, if any, of the workpackages being undertaken by the projects funded under the JISC VRE Programme are investigating the role of the VRE in the initial search for funds, the research proposal itself, and the subsequent management operations associated with a project (including financial and reporting).
Indeed, research administration (at least in the initial and final stages of a research project) is normally a well-established function within an institution.
Research contracts offices and technology-transfer units presumably have a stake in the development of supporting tools and interoperability with existing systems within a VRE.
The forthcoming RAE exercise will require the management of the institution's research record (and thus a link to the publishing element of the life cycle).
The increasing emphasis on project management as a role distinct from the principle investigator and the impact of Full Economic Costing on research suggests that the e-administration aspect of VREs will be a key challenge to address in the near future.
Discovery, Collection, Analysis A challenge common to many subjects is the creation of tools which enable intelligent searching of distributed heterogeneous databases.
The connections made between data by a researcher can be quite different to the connections made by a software agent.
Getting to a position whereby meaningful connections can begin to be analysed depends on having an understanding of the data sources in the first place.
Gaining that understanding might not be particularly practical if the data is unstructured, inconsistent and plentiful.
Even Google has not enabled federated searching across even its own indexes.
What Google cannot do, and what many would like a VRE to do, is to facilitate the linking, integration and subsequent analysis of data.
Virtual worlds, modelling and simulation from large amounts of numerical or other forms of data are becoming increasingly common across the disciplines.
The demand for the virtual construction of the past, for example, applies as much to climate prediction as it does to ancient theatres.
Digital video is now a common tool for recording the present.
The need to retrieve information from and analyse multiple video and audio sources is also an increasingly urgent challenge within the humanities and social sciences [9].
Since access to a VRE is not necessarily confined to desktop browser technologies, and given the improved wireless technologies (whether Bluetooth, 3G or 801.11x) data collection and analysis in the field has the potential to be both efficient and collaborative whether through time or space.
The Silchester VRE Project, for example, is developing VRE-based components for online data collection, analysis and storage together with virtual seminars.
Data can be collected and analysed remotely.
This applies to both the operation of remote scientific apparatus and the collection of survey data online [10].
The sharing and reuse of tools assumes the implementation of agreed standards (as well as perhaps a careful separation of the tool from the data for which it was originally designed).
In many subjects 'data' comes with privacy, security, commercial or complex IPR issues that cannot be resolved by the researcher or research group alone.
Communications Grid infrastructure includes the Access Grid, used for group-based video conferencing and collaborative working, whether from dedicated rooms, portable nodes, or the desktop.
Relatively simple video conferencing technologies, readily accessible and inexpensive at the point of use, support the continued need to engage with fellow humans.
The Memetic Project is extending the functionality of the Access Grid to enable better support for meetings together with a range of information management tools.
The CSAGE Project, on the other hand, is investigating the use of an Access Grid enhanced with a stereoscopic module to permit the full-sized stereo viewing and recording of performances.
The project has its basis in an experimental dance performance within a 3D virtual environment centre [11].
Scholarly Publishing Common to all disciplines is the impetus to publish and for that process to include peer-review.
The dissemination of research is frequently undertaken by third-party publishers.
There is a growing emphasis on institutional repositories for research publications, an example of an e-infrastructure component with which a VRE must interoperate.
The RCUK's recently released draft policy on open access to the outputs of research and other similar policies for publicly-funded research may, if properly funded, drive the implementation of institutional repositories as part of the core research infrastructure [12].
The forthcoming Research Assessment Exercise for 2008 and the vast amount of record management which accompanies it is likely to be another motivator [13].
Either way, research repositories providing deposit and access services for research outputs (whatever status) are a key component of an institution's e-infrastructure and thus a key set of services within a VRE.
The longer-term research repository is not just about eprints and research outputs, however.
There is an increasingly urgent requirement for the long-term curation and preservation of not only research output but the data resulting from collection, creation and analysis.
Indeed, preserving the 'project', comprising data, publications, workflows and the 'grey' material of reports, notebooks and other forms of more nebulous communications is important in a research environment where much of the material is born and raised digital.
The development of today's research by tomorrow's scholars depends on it [14].
The VRE and the VLE The BVREH Project, described below, makes the point that, in a research-led university, the relationship between the research and teaching environments is particularly important.
This principle is relevant to any consideration of the place of the typical VLE within a VRE.
There is certainly technical convergence between, for example, the service-oriented architecture approach taken by the JISC e-Learning Framework and the standards espoused by many of the VRE activities.
Indeed, the e-Learning Framework is evolving into an e-framework for education and research which recognises that the learning, research and administration processes of the university utilise and depend on both common, shared infrastructure and resources as well as a series of domain-specific services [15].
The glue which binds together and enables interaction between the various components is an agreed set of open standards (especially relating to Web Services and metadata schema).
A VRE framework should be able to expose some combination of resources, data, and tools.
The VLE should be able to consume and represent it as appropriate a direct link in the virtual environment between research and learning.
Conversely, in some contexts it may be possible to re-purpose the existing VLE as a presentation layer, if not the framework itself, for a VRE.
The BVREH Project includes a task to survey existing use of the Bodington VLE at Oxford for supporting research activities.
The Sakai framework was designed as a collaborative learning environment and is now the focus of a number of JISC VRE projects.
The History of Political Discourse Project, led by the University of East Anglia in partnership with the University of Hull, is piloting the use and development of Sakai as a VRE to support a taught MA programme together with the use of the Access Grid for collaborative research skills training.
But, if necessary, the project will also consider the possibilities an existing VLE, such as Blackboard, might offer in place of Sakai [16].
The Integrative Biology (IB) VRE Project, described further below, envisages capturing workflows within the VRE, for example, for potential reuse within a learning environment.
The IB Project feeds into the EPSRC-funded Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre, supported by the Bodington VLE [17].
The EVIE Project, led by the University of Leeds, is establishing an institutional VRE infrastructure which integrates the Bodington VLE with the Leeds University Virtual Knowledge Park [18].
For both of these projects, integration with the VLE together with JSR 168 and/or Web Services is key to overall VRE development.
Developing VRE(s) at Oxford Oxford University is participating in three VRE Projects funded under the JISC VRE Programme.
Each of the three is briefly described below and each represents a different approach to the development of VREs.
In common across the projects, however, are the twin pillars of user requirements and technical open standards as well as the institutional context in which all three operate.
Further information about Oxford's involvement in the VRE programme is available [19].
Integrative Biology VRE The Integrative Biology VRE Project arises from and is intended to address the specific requirements of a large international research consortium.
Integrative Biology is an e-Science Pilot Project, led by Oxford University Computing Laboratory (OUCL) and distributed across seven UK universities, the University of Auckland and including a partnership with IBM.
The project is developing Grid infrastructure to support computer simulation of whole bodily organs based on molecular and cellular models.
The project addresses the needs of researchers studying cardiovascular disease and cancer in particular [20].
Thus, the IB Project is already, in a sense, building a virtual research environment which supports the research process from laboratory experimentation to mathematical model building and simulation, using distributed high-performance computing.
The results of the in silico [21] experiments feed back to laboratory experimentation.
Data capture, storage and analysis is an important component of this process.
Funding from the JISC VRE Programme effectively enables the IB Project to extend its support for the research environment beyond a service-oriented Grid architecture to acting as a testbed for a large-scale distributed, interdisciplinary research project.
The requirements of a real and active research community is the central focus of the IB VRE Project.
Under the IB Project itself a detailed user requirements analysis was carried out in order to inform the development of the system architecture.
The IB VRE Project extends this requirements analysis to encompass the entire research process as well as the in silico experiment process.
The IB VRE Project, with staff in both the OUCL and the Research Technologies Service (RTS), is deploying the Open Grid Computing Environment (OGCE) framework which, like Sakai, provides a standards-based approach to delivering tools to the user, in this case a core set of Grid portlets.
Indeed, OGCE has migrated to compliance with the JSR 168 portlet specification which currently means implementers have a choice of deploying uPortal or Gridsphere as the containing framework.
The convergence is obvious.
uPortal, for example, is a popular choice for an institutional portal [22] and yet an institutional portal seems very far removed from the requirements of a specialised and highly advanced academic research team.
Sakai is also moving towards standards-based communication with uPortal and there is on-going work to migrate OGCE tools to Sakai [23].
The IB VRE Project, like the Sakai VRE Project below, while ostensibly testing a particular framework, is committed to the development of portlets to conform with Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and, where Java-based, JSR 168.
As already noted, the IB Project itself is already committed to this service-oriented approach for its Grid toolset.
The IB VRE architecture includes support for presentation (from a Web page to a complex visualisation client); a series of front-end services to provide access to the core IB functionality required by the research community, including a workflow capture portlet; and a key set of underlying services which enable access to the computational and data resources, aggregation and presentation, and the overall management of the user's virtual research environment.
The VRE will expose not only the computational and data resources currently part of the IB infrastructure but also other resources to support the research process, including peer-reviewed literature and project management tools.
If the IB Project succeeds, researchers will be able to access the VRE securely, consult their own task list and calendar, edit an existing workflow, set up a new experiment and initiate the job on a remote Grid-enabled computing resource while undertaking some combination of monitoring, visualisation, control and communication with colleagues.
Given that the development and implementation is standards-based in addition to being requirements-led, then it is not a huge leap to generalise from a community-specific VRE to, for example, an institutional VRE with customised portlets and resources for particular disciplines and research projects.
Building a VRE for the Humanities The Building a VRE for the Humanities (BVREH) Project further develops earlier work undertaken within the Humanities Division at Oxford University to survey the existing use of digital technologies within research projects and to establish a set of priorities for the development of e-infrastructure to support humanities research.
The BVREH Project, like the IB VRE Project, is firmly focussed on the user requirements of a reasonably well-defined research community.
The BVREH Project, in arising from and primarily defining the needs of the Humanities Division at Oxford, has commonalities with the IB VRE Project (led by a specific research community) and the Sakai VRE Demonstrator Project (situated within institutional structures).
Despite the Project's focus on a particular institution, the resulting scoping framework and demonstrator tools are designed to be reusable by humanities faculties and departments elsewhere.
The brief for the earlier survey undertaken within Oxford was to examine, among other things, the potential benefits of grid computing for humanities research, information retrieval from heterogeneous and distributed databases, communication technologies, data curation and reusable tools [24].
The results from the preliminary survey suggested that the overall priorities of most interviewees concerned central hosting and curation of the digital components of research projects; and potential for a VRE to facilitate communications.
The latter included the dissemination of results from projects, event notification, registers of research interests, collaboration beyond institutional boundaries, and the promotion of humanities research at Oxford more generally.
The cross-searching of distributed databases, project management tools, and directory services for hardware, software and other types of electronic resources were also noted as important requirements.
The BVREH Project therefore builds on this preliminary survey through a deeper analysis of the humanities research environment within Oxford and the mapping of existing research tools to specific components of the research life cycle.
The results from these studies will inform the development of demonstrator VRE applications and their subsequent evaluation.
Where possible the demonstrator tools will be developed or deployed as standards-compliant portlets both to gain added value from development work within other VRE projects (within and beyond Oxford) and to ensure sustainability and potential reuse beyond the project.
Developing according to standards like JSR 168 and WSRP also provides the potential for re-purposing tools from elsewhere.
However, technical development is not an aim in itself for this project and, should the technologies not prove available or satisfactory, simple Web-based walk-throughs would suffice as the means to the end: being the articulation of the priorities and benefits to be gained from deploying a VRE (in its widest sense) for the humanities research community, as well as an indication of those processes within the research life cycle which for the moment may be better served by more traditional tools and methods.
Sakai VRE Demonstrator Oxford is a partner in the Sakai VRE Demonstrator Project [25] led by Lancaster University, with other partners being the CCLRC e-Science Centre at the Daresbury Laboratories, and the University of Portsmouth.
The Sakai VRE Project is not tied to any one subject area but rather is seeking to build a demonstrator VRE using the Sakai portal framework.
Sakai, funded by the Mellon Foundation and with a large consortium of institutional partners, is intended as a virtual learning environment rather than a suite for the research community [26].
However, Sakai benefits from being developed with reference to key standards which encourage the reusability and sharing of tools developed within and without the Sakai framework.
Sakai is also intended as a collaboration environment and collaboration is, of course, common to both learning and research environments.
The Sakai VRE Project will therefore retain the generic communication tools within Sakai but plug in and evaluate a number of research-led tools and services.
The project takes advantage of the knowledge and expertise found within the partner sites.
For example, Oxford, through the RTS, has particular responsibility for integrating a more effective access management service which builds on the experience of two Shibboleth-centred middleware projects (Spie and ESP-Grid) and integrates a Sakai instance with an institutional single sign-on system.
In addition, Oxford is also investigating the integration of cross-searching tools based on Z39.50/SRW and delivered via WSRP/JSR 168 portlets.
A centrally mounted instance of Sakai is being maintained by Daresbury Laboratories which also have responsibility for developing an interface to enable access from within Sakai to user-selected Web Services.
The Daresbury Laboratories, building on the related Growl Project, are also integrating a range of tools for Grid computing including data management and simple visualisation.
The University of Portsmouth is contributing to the integration of peer-to-peer tools together with portlet components which will enable interaction with external P2P systems.
NaradaBrokering, for example, provides an overall messaging infrastructure which can support grid and Web services, P2P and video-conferencing [27].
Interaction with the NaradaBroker from within Sakai will enable access to core e-Science services.
Portsmouth is also developing an advanced portal registry service within the context of the semantic web.
Lancaster University, the lead site for the Sakai VRE Project, is contributing to the overall Sakai infrastructure with a tool to simplify the creation of project workspaces.
Lancaster also have ownership of a workpackage to provide a range of collaboration and communication tools, especially a distributed whiteboard, audio and video tools, wikis, and document management facilities.
The Sakai VRE Project neatly exposes the VRE construct as a combination of underlying framework and sharable tools.
While the project may not be addressing the needs of a well-defined research community, the project's end-users are, in some sense, the institutional partners.
If Sakai is to be seriously considered as a customisable institutional VRE, for example, then (among other things) it will have to prove itself to be not simply another Web-based portal framework but also a layer of enabling middleware with which other institutional systems can be integrated (from research costing applications to the VLE).
As Sakai moves towards a Web Services approach, and in particular a WSRP producer, this scenario becomes more realistic.
In the meantime, each of the partners in the project will implement and experiment with local instances of the Sakai framework.
In Oxford, it is hoped that Sakai might provide an additional testbed for demonstrator tools from the BVREH Project and the sharing of tools from the Integrative Biology VRE Project.
Conclusion The development of virtual research environments and the underlying e-infrastructure is mostly being driven by project funding.
Technological change, including the supporting standards is, as usual, rapid.
In parallel to the piloting, investigation and scoping of VREs there is convergence on multiple fronts whether it is the evolution to an all-encompassing e-framework, agreed portlet standards, integration between institutional portals, VLEs and emerging VREs, or more generally the gradual acceptance of open standards, open source software and open access.
However, users expectations have to be managed.
There is always a risk inherent in the development of infrastructure through projects of attempting to deliver too much, too quickly.
The complexity of both the technical development and the cultural change required has to be properly accounted for, if an early and prolonged trough of disillusionment is to be avoided.
VREs within and beyond institutional environments are dependent on core e-infrastructure.
Sustainable outcomes from projects require a strategic context and supporting policies.
This requirement is especially apparent with regard to the future of institutional repositories, a key component in institutional e-infrastructure.
Most eprint repositories, at least, have have been established within UK universities through support from projects such as SHERPA.
Retaining a project-developed repository requires on-going funding for development, maintenance and awareness-raising.
The deposit, curation, preservation and dissemination of research inputs and outputs requires institutional support: through strategy, funding and policy.
The imminent arrival of Full Economic Costing (FEC) presents institutions with a hitherto unavailable opportunity to think through the real costs of providing the research e-infrastructure and ensuring, through formulaic costing, that it is priced appropriately in bids for research funding.
The strategic direction being taken by JISC with regard to recommending a specific set of standards for its e-framework, on the one hand, and the mandating of open access to publicly-funded research on the other, have to be appropriated by institutions if they are to have any practical and long-term realisation.
Currently, it is the research councils which mandate deposit of research data and research results, often within services which lie outside the institutional structures and which themselves are dependent on the vagaries of short-term funding.
A serious data migration and preservation strategy would operate over 1,000 years not three!
[28] Google harvests and indexes the Web without attempting to preserve it using approximately 30 clusters, each housing around 2,000 PCs [29].
How many distributed clusters are dedicated to the preservation of research data in the UK alone?
Finally, institutional support for the development of sustainable e-infrastructure requires recognition across all subjects that the creation of interoperable, sharable datasets and reusable tools within the context of a VRE is an important aspect of scholarship in the 21st Century, not merely unaccountable drudgery.
The competences required within the disciplines and supporting services to support the development of a VRE along the lines described above are not common.
Given the convergence between enterprise systems for education and research there is a pressing need to ensure appropriate recruitment criteria for new staff and adequate training for existing staff.
The UK Government's Science & Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014, published in July 2004, makes it clear that HM Treasury, at least, believes that multidisciplinarity is the key to success in addressing the grand challenges of the next ten years and this includes the funding for infrastructure to support a multidisciplinary research environment.
As part of this, the Government does "work with interested funders and stakeholders to consider the national e-infrastructure (hardware, networks, communications technology) necessary to deliver an effective system.
"[30] Future funding from JISC, the research councils, the third phase of the UK's e-Science Programme and, of course, institutions, should help in addressing many of these priorities [31].
References Roadmap for a UK Virtual Research Environment: Report of the JCSR VRE Working Group (2004), http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/VRE%20roadmap%20v4.pdf See further: Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure.
2003.
Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/ ("Atkins Report").
Berman, F. and H. Brady, "Final Report: NSF SBE-CISE Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences", http://www.sdsc.edu/sbe/ (2005).
1.Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences, 2004http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm The Growl Project, funded under the JISC VRE Programme, is developing a client interface to a Grid programming environment, for example http://www.growl.org.uk/ The final report of the NSF SBE-CISE Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences includes substantial sections on how the social and behavioural scientist community can bring their expertise to both assist in the development of cyberinfrastructure and in assessing the impact.
(sections III-IV, http://vis.sdsc.edu/sbe/reports/SBE-CISE-FINAL.pdf) The AHRC recently announced its new e-science initiative http://www.ahrcict.rdg.ac.uk/activities/e_science.htm AHDS taxonomy of computational methods http://ahds.ac.uk/about/projects/pmdb-extension/index.htm ISME: Integration & Steering of Multi-site Experiments to Assemble Engineering Body Scans http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=vre_isme AHRC Methods Network, http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/methnet/ See further Lyon, Liz, "From research data to new knowledge: a lifecycle approach.
Making the strategic case for institutional repositories".
CNI-JISC-SURF Conference, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, 10-11 May 2005.
Via http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ebank-uk/dissemination/ The Shoah Foundation, for example, has 200 TB of data, including 120,000 hours of digital video and 52,000 testimonies from Holcaust Survivors and eyewitnesses in 32 languages http://www.vhf.org/ The VidGrid -Distributed video analysis with Grid technologies Project "aims to investigate the potential for Grid-enabled technologies to enhance the collaborative analysis of video" http://www.kcl.ac.uk/management/witrg/vidgrid.html Silchester Roman Town: A Virtual Research Environment for Archaeology http://www.silchester.reading.ac.uk/vre/ MEMETIC: Meeting Memory Technology Informing Collaboration, http://www.memetic-vre.net/ CSAGE: Collaborative Stereoscopic Access Grid Environment for Experimentation within the Arts & Humanities http://kato.mvc.mcc.ac.uk/sve-wiki/SAGE Research Councils UK Position Statement on Access to Research Outputs http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/ The TARDis Project at Southampton has JISC funding to adapt the eprints.org software to include a Research Assessment Exercise management interface http://tardis.eprints.org/ See further, Hey, Tony and Anne Trefethen, "The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective".
UK e-Science Core Programme, 2003.
Preprint at http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/documents/report_datadeluge.pdf See the e-Framework for Education and Research http://www.e-framework.org/ Virtual Research Environment for the History of Political Discourse 1500-1800, http://www.uea.ac.uk/his/research/projects/vre/ Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Oxford http://www.lsi.ox.ac.uk/ EVIE: Embedding a VRE in an Institutional Environment http://www.leeds.ac.uk/evie/ Virtual Research Environment Projects at Oxford University http://www.vre.ox.ac.uk/ Integrative Biology: Exploiting e-Science to combat fatal diseases http://www.integrativebiology.ox.ac.uk/publications.html Editor's note: 'in silico' : meaning 'carried out in a computer'as with the Latin expression 'in vitro' meaning 'in glass' uPortal, http://www.uportal.org/ See further, Crouchley, Rob and Adrian Fish, "Sakai Evaluation Exercise: A report to JISC" (Dec 2004) http://tyne.dl.ac.uk/Sakai/sakai_doc/ Humanities Virtual Research Environment (consultancy) http://www.e-science.ox.ac.uk/humanities/ The BVREH Project Web site is at http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/ Sakai VRE Portal Demonstrator http://www.grids.ac.uk/Sakai/ Sakai Project http://www.sakaiproject.org/ NaradaBrokering http://www.naradabrokering.org/ The 1,000 year preservation strategy is mentioned in the final report of the NSF SBE-CISE Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences http://vis.sdsc.edu/sbe/reports/SBE-CISE-FINAL.pdf p.23 Loney, Matt, "The magic that makes Google tick" ZDNet UK (1 Dec 2004) http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/servers/0,39020445,39175560,00.htm See also Barroso, Luiz Andre, Jeffrey Dean, Urs Holzle, "Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture" IEEE Micro (March 2003): 22-28 or at http://www.computer.org/micro/mi2003/m2022.pdf HM Treasury.
Science & innovation investment framework 2004-2014 (2004).
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/spending_review/spend_sr04/associated_documents/spending_sr04_science.cfm See Chapter 2, "A vision for world-class research: challenges and opportunities for the UK science base".
See Hey, Tony, "Towards an e-Infrastructure for Research and Innovation: A Progress Report on e-Science".All Hands Meeting 2004 http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/ahm2004/presentations/TonyHey.pdf and also Hey, Tony, "Funding Opportunities under the-Science Programme" What is the grid and how can it help your research?
Workshop, Sheffield, April 2005. http://www.wrgrid.org.uk/workshop2005/TonyHey.pdf Acknowledgements I would like to thank Matthew Dovey (Oxford e-Science Centre Technical Manager), Sharon Lloyd (IB Project Manager) and Ruth Kirkham (BVREH Project Manager) for commenting on sections of this article.
Author Details Michael Fraser Co-ordinator, Research Technologies Service University of Oxford Email: mike.fraser@oucs.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mikef/ Return to top Article Title: "Virtual Research Environments: Overview and Activity" Author: Michael Fraser Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/fraser/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Tracing Help With Copyright: New AHDS Case Studies on Copyright Issues Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Tracing Help With Copyright: New AHDS Case Studies on Copyright Issues Buzz data dissemination archives metadata digitisation copyright licence research Citation BibTex RIS Alastair Dunning provides an overview of case studies published by the Arts and Humanities Data Service in that persistent minefield of respecting copyright.
The Web statistics tool which measures hits on the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) Web site [1] provides some telling information.
The most common search engine keyword by which users discover the AHDS is not 'computers', 'humanities', 'research' or 'arts', but that old bugbear 'copyright'.
Although the Arts and Humanities Data Service advises on a wide range of issues, such as data capture, metadata and funding proposals, copyright is just as popular a reason for users to arrive at the Web site.
During 2004, I embarked on a small investigation into some of the particular copyright problems faced by those creating digital material of cultural or historical importance.
The outputs from this investigation aimed not to develop more sets of guidelines that projects would have to assimilate and put into practice, but instead hoped to chart the specific routes taken by completed digitisation projects; the idea being that while there is much written about copyright, there is little indication of how projects actually implement the sometimes vague copyright law.
The results of this particular research are two case studies, now published on the AHDS Web site, along with a range of other copyright resources [2].
And while the case studies ostensibly dealt with two different types of copyright problem and different projects, they demonstrate that there are overlapping approaches in how copyright clearance is tackled.
Tracing Copyright Holders and Developing Licences The first case study looks at the work of two New Opportunities Fund (NOF) supported projects [3].
The Coalfield Web Materials Project, based at the University of Swansea, was digitising an archive relating to South Wales coal-mining; the archive, including material from the nineteenth century to the present day, incorporates photographs, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, posters and audiovisual material [4].
Meanwhile, the Hantsphere Project, organised via Hampshire County Council, was creating a local studies resource on the history and heritage of Hampshire, digitising, among other objects, postcards, photographs and prints from the late eighteenth century to the present day [5].
The concern here was how these projects traced the copyright holders.
It was clear many of the objects in question were still in copyright, but how did the projects locate the rights holders of photographs where the figures are unknown, of prints where the locations are unrecognisable and other objects where the companies behind them no longer existed?
The second case study looks at a project managed by the AHDS, the Fine Art Project, which digitised and disseminated works that formed part of UK art school collections [6].
For this case study, tracing the copyright holders presented less of a problem; slightly more attention had to be paid to getting the copyright holders, often wary of digitisation, to sign the licence form to permit digital capture of their work.
Social Engagement Perhaps the most striking feature to come out of both case studies was that dealing with copyright was much more of a social than a legal concern.
Rather than spending time consulting legal texts and spending money on solicitors, the task of copyright clearance involved much more engagement with people related to the project.
Both the Swansea and Hampshire teams emphasised the importance of using local networks of knowledge, contacting retired staff, local history groups and liaising with the press in order to unearth more clues and uncover copyright holders.
It was by calling on such local sources of expertise that connections began to be made, permitting the teams to identify the relevant copyright holders.
For those working on the Fine Art Project, the personal aspect of copyright clearance was also important.
Some of the rights holders were sceptical about the digital dissemination of their work; there is a natural suspicion that work can be edited or sold on the Internet without the artist receiving any reward.
Personal discussion with artists or their representatives therefore allowed the Fine Art Project to demonstrate the pedagogic context of the project, and that it involved established educational institutions.
Thus fears about the project were allayed and this smoothed the process of getting the licences signed.
When seen in this light, inserting a copyright strand into a project becomes less of a chore and more of a feature from which to benefit.
Not only did bringing the project to a wider range of people assist in its marketing, but it aided other aspects.
Individuals or groups contacted for help with the copyright query of a particular object were often able to supply further information to the project; designers of posters and postcards could be located, previous owners of items identified, clues about other copyright holders given.
While time-consuming work Swansea, for instance, appointed a copyright officer to focus on this aspect of the project locating copyright holders had benefits for the project rather than just being a necessary burden.
Protecting Digital Property To these two case studies, an AHDS colleague, William Kilbride, has added a third [7].
This has looked at copyright from the other side a collection has been digitised and placed online, only for unauthorised copies of the digital images to appear elsewhere on the Web.
How does the curator of digital material deal with this?
Kilbride's case study looks at the problem in the context of images taken from a digitised archaeological collection related to Christ Church, Spitalfields; a problem that was exacerbated by the fact that some of the images showed human remains, where there were obvious ethical concerns.
As with the previous case studies, negotiation was important.
This allowed the hosts of the collection to discuss the matter with the party that had illegally republished the images, and to come to an agreement without the need for any serious legal battle.
Conclusion This research, and the available resources on the AHDS Web site, are far from solving all users' queries with copyright.
The investigation showed that many potential digitisers are aware of many difficulties; for example, ascertaining the copyright status of unpublished material, methods of dealing with international copyright, especially in non-western countries, and how to classify the copyright status of historic works of artistic craftsmanship such as puppets, toys and souvenirs.
For cases such as these, advice is not only lacking but there is little clear guidance from the law as to how digitisers should proceed.
However, it is hoped that the paths taken by the teams shown in the AHDS articles can indicate how others might want to approach some of the more common copyright issues in the cultural heritage sector, and that the case studies provide a model for others who are wanting to share their experiences in this area.
References The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) http://www.ahds.ac.uk/ AHDS Copyright Resources, http://ahds.ac.uk/copyright/ Dunning, A, "Tracing Copyright Holders: How two digitisation projects coped with copyright for historical material", http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/case-studies/tracing-copyright/ Coalfield Web Materials http://www.agor.org.uk/cwm/ Hantsphere, http://www.hantsphere.org.uk/ Dunning, A, "Developing Licence Agreements for Digitisation: The Fine Art Project", http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/case-studies/developing-licences/ Also The Fine Art Project, http://www.fineart.ac.uk/ Kilbride, W, "Copyright and intellectual property rights: a case study from the web face" http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/case-studies/protecting-rights/ Author Details Alastair Dunning Communications Manager AHDS King's College London Email: alastair.dunning@ahds.ac.uk Web site: http://ahds.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Tracing Help with Copyright: New AHDS Case Studies on Copyright Issues" Author: Alastair Dunning Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/dunning/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web 2.0: Building the New Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web 2.0: Building the New Library Buzz data software framework api html portal browser blog flickr uri wsrp technorati podcast interoperability foi privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Miller explores some of the recent buzz around the concept of 'Web 2.0' and asks what it means for libraries and related organisations.
'Web 2.0' is a hot story out on the blogosphere right now, with an army of advocates facing off against those who argue that it is nothing new, and their allies with painful memories of Dot Com hysteria in the 1990s.
Even respectable media outlets such as Business Week are getting excited, and an expensive conference in San Francisco at the start of October had to turn people away as it passed over 800 registrations.
So, is Web 2.0 something real?
Does it mean anything for the way in which we continue to go about our work?
Or is it yet another bubble that will burst if we simply ignore it for a few months?
Web 2.0: A State of Mind?
Writing back in July, a colleague of mine described Web 2.0 [1] as 'an attitude not a technology.'
In a recent and seminal paper on the topic [2], Tim O'Reilly attempted to define the concepts behind Web 2.0, and offered a useful diagram to illustrate some of the related ideas.
Shortly after releasing the paper, Tim posted a shorter definition of Web 2.0 on one of his company's blogs [3]: 'Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.'
There is undoubtedly a significant degree of hype around Web 2.0 at the moment, but behind the hyperbole lie some important principles, and some powerful potential.
We are seeing the emergence of Web-based services that pull data from a wide range of back-end systems to deliver value to users, when, where and in the form that they require it.
We are seeing ad hoc relationships being formed by and for these services at the point of need, rather than the costly and time-consuming human creation of contracts or service level agreements.
We are seeing disaggregation of content and services into components that are far more meaningful to the user (and potentially far more valuable to the provider), alongside disintermediation of the Gate Keepers in favour of direct access to Web-visible resources.
We are seeing previously passive recipients of content beginning to engage, and to combine and recombine that which they are given in new and interesting ways.
We are seeing the realisation of much of the Interoperability promise [4], with expensive monolithic systems increasingly likely to be replaced by a platform supporting purpose-specific components.
Figure 1 Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 'meme map' As discussion raged over this Summer around whether Web 2.0 was anything new or not, I made an attempt to extract some of the important principles as I saw them [5].
These are outlined, with some modification from the original, below.
Paul's Principles of Web 2.0 Web 2.0 presages a freeing of data, allowing it to be exposed, discovered and manipulated in a variety of ways distinct from the purpose of the application originally used to gain access.
Ian Davis' point [1] is important here, as there is no need for some new Web 2.0 technology in order for material that was previously locked away to be made public.
Some of the work at backstage.bbc.co.uk [6] is relevant here, and the BBC is to be commended for taking the brave step that it did in opening up access to a growing body of their content and Web-based back room applications.
Legislation such as that around Freedom of Information (FOI) [7] and Public Sector Information (PSI) [8] echoes this broader trend, with an increasing presumption that access is a right rather than a grudgingly granted privilege.
Is publisher hysteria around Google Print [9] not the very antithesis of this?
Web 2.0 permits the building of virtual applications, drawing data and functionality from a number of different sources as appropriate.
These applications tend to be small, they tend to be relatively rapid to deploy, and they bring power that was previously the preserve of corporations within the reach of suitably motivated individuals.
Richard Wallis' work with Google Maps [10], some of which is exposed in a proof of concept known internally as LibMap [11] is one example of the way in which data (from the Silkworm Directory [12]) and functionality (courtesy of Google Maps' API [13]) can build new applications beyond the reach of either on their own.
Web 2.0 is participative.
The traditional Web has tended to be somewhat one-sided, with a flow of content from provider to viewer.
Figures from last year suggested that 44% of Internet-using American adults had actively participated online, by blogging, sharing files, or equivalent [14].
Although unlikely to approach 100% any time soon, that percentage will rise, and participation will become a more pervasive aspect of our online lives as we share reviews of books, comment on the local Chinese restaurant, engage with our governments, or publish our own carefully crafted research into our family tree.
Web 2.0 applications have been quick to spot the value of user-generated content.
It is useful to facilitate participation in the way a messaging service might, but it is a lot more valuable to fold the output of that participation back into the application and make it available to all of the applications users.
This is a substantial part of the attraction of services such as Flickr [15] over previous photo-album applications.
Web 2.0 applications work for the user, and are able to locate and assemble content that meets our needs as users, rather than forcing us to conform to the paths laid out for us by content owners or their intermediaries.
For example, I should be able to see all sensible routings from my home to San Francisco, not just those that one airline (bmi), one airline group (Star Alliance), or one travel agent (Expedia) wish to sell me.
Web 2.0 applications are modular, with developers and users able to pick and choose from a set of interoperating components in order to build something that meets their needs.
Not only that but the Web 2.0 applications themselves become components for building yet more applications.
The units of composition are becoming more powerful and hence more valuable.
Web 2.0 is about sharing: code, content, ideas.
That does not mean there is not money to be made.
There is, but new business models need to be found whereby we collaborate on the platform(s) and make money by adding value over and above that which we and others have built together.
Web 2.0 is about communication and facilitating community.
People communicate.
The Web facilitated that to a degree, but presented a barrier that hindered the back-and-forth of true communication.
Trackbacks and the like are a shaky step towards Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web as a two-way environment which made it as easy to contribute as it did to view.
Web 2.0 is about remix.
For too long, we have jumped from one area of the Web to another, struggling with different interfaces, ignoring endless advertisements, and wading through uninteresting content on a site in order to locate the service, document, or snippet that meets our needs.
Increasingly, we can unambiguously reference and call upon the service, document or snippet that we require, incorporating it into something new that is both ours and the original contributors'.
Web 2.0 is smart.
Applications will be able to use knowledge of us, where we have been and what we are doing to deliver services that meet our needs.
Amazon's recommendation engines are only the beginning, and there is more work to be done allaying fears of intrusion and loss of privacy.
Amazon has data, libraries have data.
Everyone has data.
There is real potential to do some compelling things with it, provided that appropriate safeguards are developed and implemented.
Web 2.0 opens up the Long Tail [16], making it increasingly cost-effective to service the interests of large numbers of relatively small groups of individuals, and to enable them to benefit from key pieces of the platform while fulfilling their own needs.
Web 2.0 is built upon Trust, whether that be trust placed in individuals, in assertions, or in the uses and reuses of data.
Web 2.0 + Library = Library 2.0?
Much of the discussion around Web 2.0 centres upon California's Bay Area, upon small venture capital-backed startup companies, and upon leveraging the Web services of Amazon and others to build interesting niche applications with a sustainability model no more advanced than relying upon Google AdSense [17].
Surely this world of geeks, money and advertising offers little to the library sector?
At Talis, we disagree.
Leveraging the approaches typified by Web 2.0's principles and technology offers libraries many opportunities to serve their existing audiences better, and to reach out beyond the walls and Web sites of the institution to reach potential beneficiaries where they happen to be, and in association with the task that they happen to be undertaking.
With these approaches, we take our existing wealth of data, and we make it work much harder.
We begin to break down the internal silos of the separate systems within a single library, and we connect those components to one another, and to related components and services far beyond the building.
At a technical level, we make it possible for searchers to be presented with choices to view online, borrow locally, request from afar, buy or sell as appropriate to their needs and circumstance.
Technically, it is possible, and we are doing it with standards and specifications shared across a range of sectors, rather than inventing our own library-specific standards once again.
Can our institutional procedures, and our antiquated notions of 'membership' keep up?
Libraries were once the guardians of knowledge, and the point at which those seeking existing knowledge would engage with it.
With the rise of Google, Amazon, Wikipedia and more, there is an oft-stated fear that many users, much of the time, will bypass processes and institutions that they perceive to be slow, unresponsive, unappealing and irrelevant in favour of a more direct approach to services offered by others that just might be 'good enough' for what they need to do.
Libraries should be seizing every opportunity to challenge these perceptions, and to push their genuinely valuable content, services and expertise out to places where people might stand to benefit from them; places where a user would rarely consider drawing upon a library for support.
Conclusion Web 2.0 is a convenient label upon which to hang a range of concepts.
Our automatic reaction to hype such as that accruing to the Web 2.0 meme is often to dismiss the whole thing.
Here, though, there is much of value with which libraries should be seeking to engage.
Web 2.0 could be seen as comprising equal parts of evolution and revolution.
On the one hand it extends much of what we have been doing for years through the use of standards such as HTML, URIs and HTTP and the ubiquitous Web browser.
On the other it challenges outdated attitudes towards the rights of the user, customer choice and empowerment.
As mentioned above, Web 2.0 is participative.
That participation is often seen to be on the part of end-users such as bloggers, and this is certainly true.
For libraries and associated organisations, though, there is equal scope for participation.
We need to work together.
Libraries, library systems vendors, publishers, standards bodies, government agencies, more.
None of us can do all of this alone, and all of us stand to benefit from doing it together.
Can we take the leap?
Anyone brave enough to try, please get in touch!
Discussing this article with colleagues, Ian Davis provided a useful sound bite with which to conclude; 'Web 1.0 took people to information, Web 2.0 will take information to the people'.
Exactly.
Staying Informed, the Web 2.0 Way There are numerous blogs engaged in discussing Web 2.0, many of which offer powerful insights into this emerging space.
Talis, of course, is actively involved in understanding and shaping Web 2.0, and our various blogs offer access to our evolving thinking here [18].
Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web is another good read [19] and Lorcan Dempsey [20] is like Talis' bloggers in offering a library-oriented view onto this space.
For those who prefer to listen rather than read, we have just launched a new podcast series called Talking with Talis [21].
Our first programme [22] is a discussion on new models for managing personal identity data online, with Dick Hardt of sxip Identity in Canada.
Forthcoming programmes include conversations with Cliff Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) [23] and Chris Awre at the University of Hull [24], and a range of other topics are being prepared.
Despite the 'podcast' name, you do not need an iPod to listen, so visit the site, download or stream the audio, and listen to it wherever and however suits you best.
I do most of my listening in the car!
[25] To be thoroughly Web 2.0 in approach, you could always set up a Web feed to monitor regularly and automatically the 'web 2.0' tag at Technorati [26] or del.icio.us [27].
References Davis, I., "Talis, Web 2.0 and All That", Internet Alchemy blog, 4 July 2005 http://internetalchemy.org/2005/07/talis-web-20-and-all-that O'Reilly, T., What is Web 2.0, 30 September 2005 http://www.oreilly.com/go/web2 O'Reilly, T., "Web 2.0: Compact Definition?
", O'Reilly Radar blog, 1 October 2005 http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition.html Miller, P., "Interoperability.
What is it and Why Should I Want it?
", Ariadne 24, June 2000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/interoperability/ Miller, P., "Thinking About This Web 2.0 Thing", Thinking About the Future blog, 11 August 2005 http://paulmiller.typepad.com/thinking_about_the_future/2005/08/thinking_about_.html Backstage.bbc.co.uk http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ The UK Government's Freedom of Information Web site http://www.foi.gov.uk/ UK Government information on the re-use of Public Sector Information http://www.opsi.gov.uk/advice/psi-regulations/ Miller, P., "The publishers aren't just after Google", Thinking About the Future blog, 20 October 2005 http://paulmiller.typepad.com/thinking_about_the_future/2005/10/the_publishers_.html Google Maps http://maps.google.co.uk/ Wallis, R., "Library Map Live", Silkworm Blog blog, 23 July 2005 http://silkworm.talis.com/blog/archives/2005/07/library_map_liv.html Leavesley, J., Project Silkworm white paper, June 2005 http://silkworm.talis.com/_downloads/white_papers/silkworm_paper_13_06_2005.pdf [PDF file] Google Maps API Web site http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ Lenhart, A., Horrigan, J., & Fallows, D. Content Creation Online, Pew Internet & American Life Project research report, February 2004 http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Content_Creation_Report.pdf [PDF file] Flickr Web site http://www.flickr.com/ The Long Tail blog http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/ Google AdSense https://www.google.com/adsense/ Talis' assorted blogs http://www.talis.com/blogs/ Richard McManus' Read/Write Web blog http://www.readwriteweb.com/ Lorcan Dempsey's blog http://orweblog.oclc.org/ Talking With Talis podcasts http://talk.talis.com/ "Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0", Talking with Talis blog, October 2005 http://talk.talis.com/archives/2005/10/dick_hardt_on_i.html The Coalition for Networked Information http://www.cni.org/ Putting the Library into the Institution: Using JSR 168 and WSRP to Enable Search within Portal Frameworks, Chris Awre, Stewart Waller, Jon Allen, Matthew J Dovey, Jon Hunter and Ian Dolphin, Ariadne issue 45, October 2005, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/awre/ Miller, P., "Converted to podcasting", Thinking about the Future blog, 7 September 2005 http://paulmiller.typepad.com/thinking_about_the_future/2005/09/converted_to_po.html Technorati tag search http://www.technorati.com/tags/ Del.icio.us tag search http://del.icio.us/tag/ Author Details Dr Paul Miller Technology Evangelist Talis Email: paul.miller@talis.com Web site: http://www.talis.com/ Blog: http://paulmiller.typepad.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Web 2.0: Building the New Library" Author: Dr Paul Miller Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/miller/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The European Film Gateway Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The European Film Gateway Buzz data software framework database portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation accessibility tagging identifier vocabularies schema repositories copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 rfc aggregation ead aacr2 unicode frbr sru crm p/meta cidoc-crm interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Georg Eckes and Monika Segbert describe a Best Practice Network funded under the eContentplus Programme of the European Commission, which is building a portal for access to film archival resources in Europe.
The European Film Gateway (EFG) [1] is one in a series of projects funded by the European Commission, under the eContentplus Programme, with the aim of contributing to the development and further enhancement of Europeana the European digital library, museum and archive [2].
Officially launched on 20 November 2008, the prototype Europeana service provides access to about four million digital objects from archives, audio-visual archives, museums and libraries across Europe.
According to the European Commission's set target, by 2010 the content of Europeana will attain 10 million digital resources.
EFG started in September 2008 and during the next three years will work towards the development of an online portal offering integrated access to more than 700,000 digitised objects from Europe's film archives and cinémathèques.
The gateway will be linked to Europeana, thus considerably increasing its collections and enriching them with a popular form of cultural expression and of entertainment such as film.
It is hoped the Gateway will serve to attract a much wider audience to the service.
The EFG consortium consists of 20 partner institutions, including 14 film archives and cinémathèques, from 14 European countries.
The European Film Gateway project is supported by ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes) and the EDL Foundation and it is co-ordinated by the Deutsches Filminstitut DIF e. V. (Frankfurt).
Figure 1: Screenshot of the EFG Web site home page Why a European Film Gateway?
European digitised collections of moving images and cinema-related material are growing fast, as a result of the digitisation efforts of both individual archival institutions and of co-operative projects.
The aim is to ensure long-term preservation of these resources and to increase their accessibility.
However, many of these materials are inaccessible because they are stored on local servers or on physical storage media.
Where digitised resources are available online, they are often only accessible via special project-related Internet portals or Web sites of the digitising institutions.
This lack of cohesion prevents domain-specific search and access across the various repositories, institutions and countries.
In contrast to the European library sector, common interoperability standards have not yet spread widely in the film archival community.
While many libraries and also many non-film archives are already OAI-PMH/Z39.50/SRU-compliant, most of the film archives lack these interfaces and protocols.
Similarly, unlike libraries, most film archive institutions still work with in-house cataloguing standards.
Moreover, film archival digital resources consist of a wide variety of media, including videos, photos, sound material, text, etc.
which in most cases are described with different metadata standards.
Nowadays, a considerable number of information repositories about works of film and the persons involved in their creation (e.g.
online filmographies) are available online.
However, they are all kept separately.
A combined search across these databases is only possible via search engines such as Google which, obviously, do not provide optimal results, especially when searching specific resources from film archives or cinémathèques.
Consequently, there is a strong need in the film archive sector for a trans-institutional and international common registry of collections, items and film-specific authority files.
Copyright in the film sector is a particularly complex issue because of the fact that there is no single creator of a film, it being the result of different layers of creative work [3].
Furthermore, film archives are currently facing a number of challenges: Lack of knowledge and best practices related to IPR issues Most film archives usually do not own the rights of the works Most works are still under copyright Existing copyright agreements do not cover access via the Web There are many cases of 'orphan works' where it is frequently difficult or impossible to identify the creator(s).
Europeana depends to a great extent on the quality of the metadata contributed by its network partners.
Experience gained during the work on the Europeana prototype launched in November 2008 shows that the direct integration of individual institutions is very complex and labour-intensive.
Hence, a network of 'aggregator' projects has been put into place to solve domain-specific interoperability problems before contributing metadata to Europeana.
The rationale of these projects is systematically to involve experts from the four domains (libraries, archives, museums and audiovisual archives) to streamline the workflow of metadata integration into Europeana and, consequently, to achieve the highest possible degree of metadata quality and homogeneity.
The European Film Gateway is one such aggregator project aiming to aggregate digital objects with their description and access information for Europeana.
Figure 2: 'Aggregators' contributing to Europeana Key Issues Addressed In order to achieve its goal, the European Film Gateway will need to tackle two major issues during its three-year duration: interoperability (technical, syntactic and semantic) and copyright.
Besides being of crucial importance to film archives, these issues represent key challenges to most cultural institutions as well as to individual or collaborative initiatives seeking to provide integrated access to their digital resources.
Interoperability One of the objectives of EFG is to achieve consensus amongst the participating institutions about technical and semantic interoperability standards and developed specifications.
The EFG technical interoperability working group, set up at the start-up of the project, will develop concrete technological solutions for aggregating content from heterogeneous European audiovisual archives.
A federated approach will be pursued, meaning that the digital items will remain in their original place, while the metadata – object descriptions, access information and, where available, rights information – will be gathered in a central index.
The EFG application will be built in the Service application framework of the open source 'DRIVER Infrastructure' [4].
This has been chosen for its effective harvesting and aggregative functionalities, sustainability properties and high scalability in respect of the number of archive providers.
The DRIVER software will be customised to comply with the EFG system's requirements.
During the first year of the project, a common EFG metadata interoperability schema will be defined and adopted.
This will build on existing standards and objectmodelling frameworks such as the MPEG family, MXF, CIDOC-CRM, FRBR, DC, EAD, etc.
The intention is to use the results of the standardisation work carried out by various European film institutions (Technical Committee CEN/TC 372) during the last three years for the description of cinematographic works [5].
Because film institutions hold a varied range of materials including moving images, text, pictures, sound and books, we will need a wide spectrum of standards and specifications to implement the EFG metadata schema.
We will evaluate approaches to harvesting-based metadata interoperability (e.g.
SRU, OAI-PMH) and will select the one most suited to our requirements.
Mappings between native metadata schema and the common interoperability schema will be individually developed in close co-operation with the participating archives.
We will supply a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the archival operators for tagging archival resources with filmographic authority file identifiers.
Finally, the project will develop best practice procedures and guidelines for the inclusion of collections in the EFG portal which will help the partners and any external archive institution to join the service.
In order to make content and information available and interoperable in the EFG infrastructure, a minimum set of rules for semantic interoperability will have to be agreed by the project partners.
This includes, for instance, the character set used (preferably Unicode) and the adoption of certain standards such as ISO 3166 for names of countries, ISO 639 or RFC 3066 for names of languages, ISO 8601 for dates and ISO 15938-5 (a.k.a.
MPEG-7 MDS) for running time.
Furthermore, we will define and adopt controlled vocabularies for descriptive categories with a limited set of possible values such as credit and cast functions, version types, film genres etc.
For this task, we can exploit existing sources such as P/META and the FIAF Glossary of Filmographic Terms [6].
Last but not least, free entries of text and numbers, for example, film titles and person names, will have to obey a minimum degree of conformity retrieved from cataloguing specifications such as FIAF cataloguing rules [7] or AACR2 [8] and perhaps in the future, RDA.
This will be followed by the actual work of filmographic editing, authority record matching and archival metadata tagging.
The result will be a common filmography to serve as the basis for a comprehensive authority file of European works of film and film-related persons.
The creation of a single registry of information from different filmographies will provide an invaluable resource for searching and retrieving cinema-related content.
The project will use a number of existing film-related information repositories including the German National Filmography [9], filmarchives online [10], the Joint European Filmography (JEF) [11], filmographic databases and catalogues of the Czech National Film Archive, the Danish Film Institute [12], etc.
However, a common filmography cannot be achieved by simply pooling the metadata from these sources into one system.
The sources will be carefully analysed in order to identify double entries which will have to be consolidated.
Much of the intellectual work of matching identical persons, corporate bodies and film works will be done manually.
The diversity of languages and cataloguing traditions within Europe will make this task quite challenging: the specific skills and expertise of the EFG partners in this area and the use of smart software tools will provide the right balance to achieve this goal.
IPR Issues Providing a sustainable and legally viable framework for the long-term storage, distribution and availability of digital content from the participating institutions is a further goal of the European Film Gateway.
In particular, the EFG work in this area aims to achieve the following key objectives: to develop and implement best practices for rights clearance and the legal distribution of digital content to ensure the protection of existing individual intellectual property rights within all digital and analogue services of the EFG to promote the legal digitisation of analogue content and to maximise the digitised content accessible through the EFG service.
Within the network of EFG members, a thorough evaluation of the existing and varying copyright legislation in their respective states is currently being carried out to prepare the ground for developing best practice in the handling of IPR issues.
Drawing on the extensive experience gained by the network's participants, this evaluation should lead to the issuing of guidelines for rights clearance to be used by film archives which work with digitised content in the public domain or owned by third parties.
Since the rights to most moving images, especially feature films, are owned by third parties, EFG will also consult representatives of rights holders' associations and major commercial as well as non-commercial rights holders' organisations.
The aim of these consultations is to reach agreement on clearance procedures and to achieve mutual consent between the archives and the rights holders on Web-based access to digital content held by film archives and cinémathèques in Europe.
Special emphasis will be placed on the question of orphan works.
Orphan works are copyright-protected works, the rights owner(s) of which cannot be identified or located by someone who wants to make use of the work in a way that it requires the consent of the rights owner [13].
The orphan works issue is one of the most pressing problems for the film archival community in its efforts to make its collections accessible, usable and exploitable in a digital environment.
EFG will evaluate and discuss several possible solutions including extended collective licensing or limitation-on-remedies.
In defining whether a film work can be considered as orphan in order to make lawful use of it, EFG will observe the diligent search guidelines agreed upon between representatives of European rights holders' organisations and cultural institutions [14].
The participation of the EDL Foundation, the governing body of Europeana, as a partner in the project, will ensure that all the above actions in the areas of technical/semantic interoperability and IPR management closely reflect and are in line with Europeana's overall approach.
Steps towards the Development of the Gateway The work towards the creation of the European Film Gateway began in September 2008 and some progress has already been made.
The project has conducted a series of surveys amongst project partners who will contribute content to the EFG portal.
Feedback on cataloguing formats and rules, metadata standards, authority files, as well as on copyright legislation in the individual partners' countries has been collected and discussed during workshops.
The project has also gathered and analysed data regarding users and uses of the project partners' existing online services.
The results of these surveys will provide essential input to the concrete development of the joint gateway.
Nine of the EFG partner archives were involved in the MEDIA Plus-funded MIDAS Project (January 2006 January 2009).
The result of the MIDAS Project is the Web gateway www.filmarchives-online.eu [10] which provides free access to catalogue information from 17 European film archives.
Experience gained in setting up this union catalogue as well as the results from the surveys will provide essential input to the concrete development of the joint European Film Gateway.
A common EFG interoperability schema is currently under development.
It is due to be completed by May 2009.
This will be followed by the setting up and implementation of transformation filters for the individual participating archives, and thereafter, by the ingestion of metadata into the EFG system.
A public beta version of the EFG portal is planned for mid-2010, followed by a period of system refinement and integration of additional collections lasting until August 2011.
To date, the EFG consortium consists of 20 partner institutions, including 14 film archives and cinémathèques, from 14 European countries.
Once the interoperability schema is established and import functionalities are implemented, the network will be open to further contributing organisations.
The most important technical pre-condition here will be to provide metadata according to the EFG specifications, which will be published on the EFG site.
Conclusion: The Europeana Jigsaw In three years' time this European digital library, museum and archive will offer access to 10 million digital resources, including film material, books, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and archival resources.
This will be achieved through the efforts of EFG and a number of related EU-funded projects, which by 2010 will contribute their 'pieces' to the ever-growing Europeana jigsaw.
One of these, EuropeanaLocal is a Best Practice Network, funded under the eContentplus Programme.
Its relationship with Europeana is made quite obvious by its name which also clearly indicates the type of institutions involved: local and regional libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual archives which are working together with the final goal of including their collections in Europeana.
The project was featured in the previous issue of Ariadne [15].
ATHENA (Access To Cultural Heritage Networks Across Europe) is another new project which focuses on the museum sector.
It includes ministries, cultural institutions as well as individual libraries and museums from European member states.
Its main objectives are: to support and encourage the participation of museums and related institutions in contributing to Europeana; to identify digital content present in European museums, and; to co-ordinate standards and activities in museums across Europe.
APENET (Archives Portal of Europe on the Internet) will start shortly to develop a multi-language common gateway, providing access to the materials of European archives, supporting, at the same time, the participation of archival heritage institutions in Europeana.
ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works towards Europeana), launched in December 2008, will create an infrastructure for the management of any type of rights information, thus facilitating the actual implementation of innovative business models for both digital libraries and private digital content providers.
In addition, in line with the recommendation of the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries, it will create a European distributed registry of orphan works and access to a network of existing clearance centres for works that are out of print.
Another set of 'Europeana' successors will start in 2009 to develop further the Europeana prototype.
Amongst them, Europeanav1.0 will be of crucial importance, since it will launch the full Europeana service, implementing new functionalities and solving key operational issues related to its implementation and functioning.
The project will also market the service and ensure its sustainability.
Finally, a couple of projects related to film materials are due to start soon: EUScreen will work to make highly interoperable digitised collection of television material available on-line.
PrestoPrime will research and develop practical solutions for the long-term preservation of digital media objects and collections as well as making media archives available through Europeana.
Clearly, all these projects will have to tackle the same issues if they are to contribute their resources to Europeana.
Similarly to EFG, their work will imply making diverse resources interoperable with each other, compliant with widely acknowledged standards and protocols, and finding adequate solutions and agreements for rights clearance and access to copyrighted materials.
Without doubt close collaboration and regular information sharing amongst these projects will be one of the key ingredients to their success.
References European Film Gateway http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/ Europeana http://europeana.eu/portal/ Copyright clearances in Film, Victoria Lockley Associate, Dorsey & Whitney http://www.skillset.org/film/knowledge/article_5097_1.asp DRIVER http://www.driver-repository.eu/ The standard is available in two parts: CSH01001 – 'Film Identification – Minimum metadata set for cinematographic works', containing a minimum set of 16 data elements needed for interoperability of existing cinematographic databases; and CSH01002 – 'Film Identification – Enhancing interoperability of metadata – Element sets and structures', which provides a comprehensive standard on metadata for cataloguing and indexation of cinematographic works, as well as a comprehensive and consistent terminology.
CSH01002 has been finished lately and currently undergoes a request for comments from national European standardisation bodies.
For news about the standard, see http://www.filmstandards.org/ International Federation of Film Archives http://www.fiafnet.org/ Féderation Internationale des Archives du Film, The FIAF Cataloguing rules, Munich/London/New York/Paris, 1991 Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules http://www.aacr2.org/ filmportal http://www.filmportal.de/ filmarchives online http://www.filmarchives-online.eu/ ACE Association des Cinémathèques Européennes: JEF (Joint European Filmography) http://www.acefilm.de/56.html Danmarks Nationalfilmografi http://dnfx.dfi.dk/pls/dnf/pwt.page_setup?p_pagename=dnfhome European Audiovisual Observatory, Audiovisual Archives and the Inability to Clear Rights in Orphan Works, IRISplus Legal Observations, Issue 2007-4, p. 1.
A Memorandum of Understanding on Diligent Search Guidelines for Orphan Works has been signed on 4 June 2008: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/experts/hleg/index_en.htm Rob Davies, "Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content", Ariadne 57, October 2008 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/davies/ EuropeanaLocal http://www.europeanalocal.eu/ Author Details Georg Eckes Project manager for Deutsches Filminstitut – DFI Email: eckes@deutsches-filminstitut.de Monika Segbert Director, Eremo srl International Project Management Advice and Consultancy Email: monika@eremo.net Return to top Article Title: "European Film Gateway: A Portal for Film Archives " Author: Georg Eckes and Monika Segbert Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/eckes-segbert/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 43: When Technology Alone Is Not Enough Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 43: When Technology Alone Is Not Enough Buzz software dissemination archives metadata schema repositories eprints preservation openurl shibboleth dspace Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 43.
Niki Panteli provides us with an article which clearly indicates that, in our increasingly technology-dominated world, there are times when Trust in Global Virtual Teams cannot be taken for granted.
This is particularly true where, as is increasingly the case, projects are being obliged, indeed, actively encouraged, to operate on a distributed working model; a model where the lack of interaction between virtual teams increases the chances of loss of trust.
I would add that we should not forget that virtual teams established merely to complete a project may have no shared past or future and are consequently even more vulnerable.
Niki Panteli points out, as would many, that face-to-face (f2f) communication is by far the best form of working but that in the global virtual world we must accept that computer-mediated events in any project's lifetime are many, predominant and significant to the final outcome, even where f2f has been the basis of project strategy and kick-off meetings.
Moreover the form of communication most commonly used by distributed teams is the most unexplored text-based asynchronous form of communication e-mail and as such leaves the fate of their project wide open to serious problems.
However, I might contend that f2f meetings, where taken for granted or inadequately understood by project leaders also have the potential to fail their participants and ill repay the time they devote to them.
The absence of planning, agenda, documentation and minutes beforehand as well as uninclusive chairing, poor participant preparation, excluded voices and inadequate outcomes also have the potential to distort the goals and understanding of a virtual team as much as any asynchronous communication.
Niki Panteli also refers to the importance of 'swift trust' where a good understanding of roles and responsibilities quickly happens in a project and which clearly relies on effective communication for its success.
Niki's own study indicates that the content of formal and informal communication helps in building and maintaining trust.
In a business environment she contends, trust is not rapidly developed given 'conflict and power differentials'.
Consequently the tender flower of the one-off distributed working project needs shared goals with all partners being aware of them together with an appreciation, in the virtual environment, of the usefulness of synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC).
Such CMC has the potential to 'socialise' and stand in for real voice conversation, but, I would contend, also to distort understanding as compared with voice communication and even intrude unnecessarily; I wonder whether their use should be made subject to mutually agreed ground rules.
With regard to the imbalance of power that can quickly exist in a project where there is a hierarchical system of management, the author notes that in high-trust teams power differentials ebb and flow given the importance of any skill-set to the outcomes of the project.
This is indeed preferable in terms of the project's success to the imposition of power on the basis of standing within the partnership's various organisations where no account is taken of workers' experience and knowledge which are relevant to the project's outcomes.
However what might also prove to be of interest is the phenomenon of individuals in IT and elsewhere who regard knowledge as power and, realising that knowledge empowers the recipient, withhold it.
Niki Panteli asserts that the careful establishment of shared goals is not a one-off solution they need to be maintained in order to continue to provide the benefits they accrue.
Indeed that assumes in the first place that the establishment of shared goals will provide the 'glue' to hold a virtual team together long enough to develop that necessary trust.
Furthermore, the unavoidably iterative process of goals-sharing leads her to the inevitable conclusion that (rather like education) constant communication and the sharing of goals are ultimately nowhere near as costly to a project as ignorance.
We welcome back Daniel Chudnov and his colleagues, Richard Cameron, Jeremy Frumkin, Ross Singer and Raymond Yee who in Opening up OpenURLs with Autodiscovery demonstrate a 'gather locally, share globally' approach to OpenURLs and metadata autodiscovery in scholarly and non-scholarly environments.
In this article they focus our attention on one opportunity to bridge the gap between the new 'cool' applications like weblogging and library services by promoting the broader application of OpenURL-based metadata sharing.
The authors provide examples and their views on the potential of this solution for OpenURL implementers and invite their views.
Elsewhere in the metadata mines, Pete Johnston enquires "What Are Your Terms?"
in his article on the work of the Information Environment Metadata schema Registry and its development of a registry and associated tools and architecture for the JISC Information Environment (IE).
He covers aspects such as metadata standards and application profiles, metadata in the JISC IE and finishes by considering the challenges for the project.
Marieke Guy points out the largest single arts audience in this country is readers and in Finding Someplace to Go: Reading and the Internet provides us with an overview of how the Internet is being harnessed to promote what she describes as the 'art of reading'.
Central to her theme is the move from the emphasis on authors and their content to their readers and their experience of what they are reading and the very realistic strategy of combining the 'off-line with the online' to support not only the many blossoming reading groups but also the individual reader.
Another article in which public library staff have a role to play is National Library Goes Local.
Not that Ariadne could remotely be accused of running human interest stories, but it is fair to say that Stephanie Kenna with the aid of Sue Cook tells an interesting tale of some careful attention to the needs of public library staff in their design for the British Library training package and its virtual tour of BL's collections and services.
Persuant to my preferred strategy of tracking themes through successive issues, I welcome Marion Prudlo's discussion of E-Archiving: An Overview of Some Repository Management Software Tools in which she looks at LOCKSS, EPrints and DSpace in terms of who uses them, their cost, underlying technology, the required know-how, and functionalities.
In so doing she trusts that her comments will be of use to libraries, universities and other organisations influenced by open access and considering what software to adopt should they opt to take an active part in the scholarly publishing and preservation process themselves.
I am delighted to pick up the thread of Shibboleth from last issue's At the Event Report via Simon McLeish's description of Installing Shibboleth in a Higher Education environment.
The topic of identity management is assuming increasing importance and Simon's objective and experienced coverage of the installation procedure is a useful contribution to understanding this software and its potential, warts and all.
I am equally grateful to Leona Carpenter who addresses a favoured topic in Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions in which she describes how a JISC development programme is confronting the threat posed by inadequate provision for digital preservation, obsolescence, disruptive technologies and inadequate policy to the retention of valuable digital assets by institutions.
She points out that the management of such assets is as dependent on organisational culture, process and policy as the resolution of technical issues such as file formats.
At the same time, it is very useful to have Neil Beagrie focus upon one of the activities supported by the above JISC Programme in Digital Preservation: Best Practice and its Dissemination in which he describes the development and subsequent use of a digital preservation handbook to underpin training and professional practice.
The story of that development would seem a sound example of how to plan and execute.
As usual, we offer our usual At the Event section, as well as the helpful updates in our Regular Columns and reviews on works which include a useful overview of the global digital library scene, an introduction to metadata for the information professional, a practitioner's guide to the management of digital rights and a practical guide to building an electronic resource collection.
In addition of course we provide our expanded section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy issue 43.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Ariadne Issue 43: When Technology Alone Is Not Enough" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CRIS2006: Enabling Interaction and Quality: Beyond the Hanseatic League Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CRIS2006: Enabling Interaction and Quality: Beyond the Hanseatic League Buzz data software java framework database portal archives metadata identifier vocabularies repositories copyright oai-pmh visualisation dspace interoperability research standards cerif Citation BibTex RIS Derek Sergeant and Jessie Hey report on this 3-day conference in Bergen, Norway, 11-13 May 2006.
This conference marked the 15th anniversary of euroCRIS.
In 1991 current research information systems were housed on mainframe computers and mainly used for administrative report purposes.
CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) now supply data for research management and assessment on a local and national scale, and are at the core of optimal presentation of research information itself.
In keeping with the Hanseatic traditions of Bergen, research information traders gathered from the known world to share and improve their practice.
Day One Rune Nilsen, Professor, previous Pro Rector, University of Bergen, welcomed us.
He conveyed a passion for sharing information (especially with the Third World), feeling that knowledge and the natural landscape have a lot in common in that Norway considers them both as conducive to the public good.
He spoke of the potential threats of capital and competitive market forces, ignorance among researchers wanting to make money, and conservatism.
We all face the 10⁄90 dilemma: Rune cited the example of only 10 percent of research funds in health being spent on 90 percent of the world’s major health problems.
There are piles of publications which are not readily available, and African universities cannot afford the subscriptions.
Fortunately there are success stories the Ethiopian Journal of Health Development moved from a “closed” readership of 200 subscribers to an “Open Access” journal showing heavy citation and good index ratings.
It would be good for all researchers, vice-chancellors and practitioners in general to remember the chief goals of research : excellence, availability, academic impact, and academic relevance.
Keith Jeffery, President of euroCRIS, explained that euroCRIS holds custodianship of CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) which should be used to leverage for a one-stop portal or gateway to common CRIS.
Indeed CERIF is now the mandated format for EU interchange of research information, so all CRIS need to be made CERIF-aware.
Stefan Hornbostel, IFQ (Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance), Bonn, delivered the keynote address [1] saying that traditionally interest is on the input side (peer review) rather than the output side.
Scientific disciplines are moving towards being output-controlled, yet quantity of evaluation is rising while there are no longer sufficient peers to monitor quality rigorously.
He then outlined the inherent problems with evaluation, even post-Science Citation Index, and how research statistics varied in purpose and vocabulary.
As professors refuse to participate in evaluations, CRIS have gaps.
There will also be the same problem with repositories.
Researchers need motivation, universities need to be flexible and CRIS need networking.
Due to the number of push-and-pull demands, systems need to be able to repurpose information for playing more than one game.
Poster Preview The conference also provided space for the following posters: NARCIS, Elly Dijk, a simple portal interface in the Netherlands [2].
METIS (university research management system) acts as a data provider.
This team is investigating the use of Digital Author Identifiers to identify authors uniquely.
IST World, Brigitte Joerg, a European RTD information and service portal (Lubijana) [3] that should be ready for Framework 7.
Of course, the resultant analytics are only as good as the data.
Content comes from CORDIS, domain-specific portals, Google Scholar, Web crawling, as well as partner repositories.
CISTRANA IST, Simon Lambert, a portal of co-ordination action and research activities in IST [4].
This provides a geographical entry into the portal and presents comparability of IST funding through national programmes.
It has interesting analysis options, including collaboration intensity metrics to identify potential partners.
New Application Technologies in CRIS, Keith Harmon, these are the SAP solutions for CRIS.
While Keith is not a researcher he was involved in producing a Grants Management System.
HunCRIS, Adam Tichy-Racs, the Hungarian national research registry [5] using CERIF for a national research information system.
FRIDA, Yamuna Vallipuram, an integrated research environment populated by bibliographic data feeds from ISI and Norart [6].
Implemented in Java and Web service technology.
Actively involves institutions in quality assurance.
Paper Session 1 Elly Dijk provided details of the National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System (NARCIS).
NARCIS’ goals are to provide an overview of research in the Netherlands, in a central location and minimise administrative work for researchers and institututions.
Technically there are some METIS-NARCIS-NWO exchanges and it uses OAI-PMH.
Now the focus is on the problem of categorising the content, which is sourced by Web crawlers.
Derek Sergeant then moved to looking at research from the researcher’s perspective and strategies for supporting the research helix.
Continuing from the user side, Sergio Magalhaes explained how Rough Sets Theory could be used to find relevant CVs with probabilistic disambiguation.
Workshop: On the Way from Research Information to Research Management Systems: What Are the Needs for Universities?
This workshop in parallel with paper session 2, introduced by Wolfgang Adamczak (Kassel), remarked that CRISs should not be solely about documentation they should also be planning systems.
CRIS would not substitute for policy!
The needs of universities were raised, and the dividing line appears to be methodology rather than domain (hermeneutical versus empirical).
What would be incentives to motivate researchers to fill in forms in CRIS?
This was answered in part by automating where possible and making forms shorter and clearer.
Next Inge Wullaert and Herlinde Leemans demonstrated the Belgian Anemoon Project built on top of their SAP system.
Finally Stefan Graadman then introduced research continuum management and speculated about whether a Big Machine had a larger total cost of ownership than a federated implementation.
Day Two The Mayor of Bergen, Herman Friele, opened the day.
This was followed by a keynote from Stevan Harnad, championing self archiving, and showing graphs and charts indicating that institutional mandates were the only way of improving repository coverage.
Of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, only 9000 have a policy articulated in the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher copyright policies.
This triggered an exchange as to whether there were options other than for effective gathering of research papers.
Session 3 Neil Jacobs explored the question as to why the UK had no CRIS.
The research funding structure played an important part.
Using a scientific life cycle approach, he identified the potential benefits of using a more structured approach using the CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) standard.
The CERIF model was also picked up by Roberto Pacheco.
There was potential for collaboration between the European CERIF-based projects and the mainly Latin American ScienTI Network.
Session 4 This session saw Mark Oskam looking at a profile management system, and ways of fleshing out the profile.
The incentive for this was the generation of a euroCV for researchers.
Getting the most out of the institutional repository in a reactive university, without a traditional CRIS culture, was presented by Jessie Hey.
This talk also gave some insight into the ‘metadata quality’ issue when research assessment was beginning to play a bigger part.
Elin Stangeland and Marianne Moes’ paper reported on the real progress made in Norway in establishing institutional repository services, while only at the half-way stage of the nora Project.
The Norwegian Science Index was chosen as the standard for subject indexing.
Jing Ma described the Internet-based Scientific Information System supporting a staggering group of over 1800 institutions.
It was noted that in China national standards and processes have been developed to share information on research.
Workshop: Enriching CRISs through OA Repositories This workshop suggested that an institutional repository was a partial CRIS.
Raf Dekeyser pointed out that repositories cover publications and people.
CRIS needed a model for interoperability.
Herlinde Leemans presented thoughts on moving from an academic bibliography to a DSpace instance chosen for its Web user interface.
Peter Millington talked about enhancing a database to help administrators formulate policies (OpenDOAR).
The bX project (Frank Scholze) can be used to aggregate and analyse scholarly usage data.
Session 5 Juergen Guedler’s paper focused on the progress made in developing a CRIS as an effective management tool in the German Research Foundation (DFG).
By contrast, another German paper concentrated on bibliometric evaluation of publications in the medical sphere by integrating the Medline database.
The application-service-provider (ASP) approach had the bonus of requiring no local software installation.
Day Three Session 6 The day commenced with an overview of a portal for ‘Project Intelligence’ from Brigitte Joerg which included some interesting visualisations.
Simon Lambert framed the problem of barriers to co-ordination in Europe through the CISTRANA system.
Keith Jeffery finished with the proposal that the deposit of publications should happen at a much earlier stage within the CRIS rather than within the institutional repository.
Conclusion and Final Panel Session It was evident that there had to be guarantees that research would see a reduction in both overheads and the amount of bureaucracy.
CRIS must adapt to the disciplines that they support.
Mandating of research paper archiving was pushed very strongly, yet it was also perceived that a correlation does not necessarily exist between citation and good scientific progress.
Is there a future for ISI?
Probably not.
As to the proposal to encourage deposit of electronic publications into CRIS in the first instance, one might also argue that this may be more effective in a more regimented non-self-archiving environment than in the less structured environment of many UK universities.
Perhaps we will see a mixture of models evolving.
Certainly this community has embraced Open Access and its related OAI standards over this conference and the last.
The next international CRIS conference, in 2 years’ time, might give an opportunity to judge whether Keith Jeffery’s proposal of CRIS working closely with OAI (and encouraging deposit of publications) has taken off.
All in all, the conference was inspiring, as was the natural landscape that introduced the theme, typified by the view from Mount Fløyen over the fjords.
There were many systems in place across Europe and the globe from which we are all keen to learn.
Without doubt the meeting of the research information system community and the institutional repository/research environment community was illuminating for all concerned.
Acknowledgements We are grateful to Neil Jacobs, JISC Executive, for his comments and contributions to this report.
References Hornbostel, S., Keynote http://ct.eurocris.org/CRIS2006/upload/paper_hornbostel.doc NARCIS portal http://www.narcis.info IST World EU project http://ist-world.dfki.de CISTRANA EU project http://www.cistrana.org HunCRIS http://www.info.omikk.bme.hu/nkr1/HunCRIS_eng.htm FRIDA http://www.uio.no/english/research/frida/ Author Details Derek Sergeant EVIE Project Manager University of Leeds Email: d.m.sergeant @leeds.ac.uk Web site: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/evie Jessie Hey Institutional Repository projects Researcher/Librarian University of Southampton Email: jmnh@ecs.soton.ac.uk Web site: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/ http://preserv.eprints.org/ Return to top Article Title: “CRIS2006: Enabling Interaction and Quality: Beyond the Hanseatic League” Author: Derek Sergeant and Jessie Hey Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/cris-2006-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Googlepository and the University Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Googlepository and the University Library Buzz data database dissemination usability archives metadata tagging identifier blog repositories copyright preservation cataloguing multimedia aggregation provenance e-learning lom librarything algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim discuss the concept of Google as a repository within the wider context of resource management and provision in Further and Higher Education.
The development of an increasing array of tools for storing, organising, managing, and searching electronic resources poses some interesting questions for those in the Higher Education sector, not least of which are: what role do repositories have in this new information environment?
What effect is Google having on the information-seeking strategies of students, researchers and teachers?
Where do libraries fit within the information continuum?
And ultimately, what services should they look to provide for their users?
The concept of Google as a repository was introduced at a recent JISC conference [1].
Hitherto, it has been speculated that Google might be considered to be a digital library [2].
This viewpoint provided a catalyst for the process of considering the differences between Google and repositories.
We have evaluated this in terms of an exploration of their features and the services they provide.
This leads on to a discussion of the potential value of these services to content contributors and consumers.
In the long term, this will be expressed by users' engagement with the services and tools available to them.
In discussing repositories and Google, it may be useful to consider some of the reasons for their growing use.
Traditionally, scholarly information was disseminated in print form; libraries played a vital part in the delivery of this printed material to a mass audience.
The role of libraries is summarised in the following quotation from Mullins, "Books have always been a means of communication, a store of the history of the world passed down from generation to generation" [3].
The physicality of books and the effect they have on people remains evident even in the age of born digital material.
For example, the artist Rachel Whiteread used the theme of the library and books for her Holocaust Memorial unveiled in Vienna in 2000.
Whether this relationship with printed texts will continue into the future remains to be seen.
Set against the tradition of the use of texts, the role played by libraries in serving the needs of their users in the Higher Education sector is clearly in a phase of transition.
Libraries now have a dual role in maintaining and enhancing services for printed resources, and also in providing access to, and maintaining, services for a growing collection of digital resources.
Thus, libraries are seeing a shift in the nature of their collections (physical to virtual) and in the ownership of resources.
As Muir states, "Increasingly, information is not purchased but 'rented' through licensed access rather than physical ownership of an information artefact.
Libraries are increasingly losing physical control over their digital collections" [4].
This has repercussions for collection maintenance and the preservation of digital assets.
In addition, libraries are experiencing changes in readers' usage of resources and in attitudes towards information retrieval [5].
Librarians recognise these trends and are responding to the complex range of factors influencing their profession.
This process of transformation brings with it the requirement for new services, skills and approaches to the curatorial role libraries fulfil.
In the following table, we outline key considerations in the new knowledge-sharing environment.
Resource Factor Consequence Format paper digital storage maintenance management ownership preservation cost (production, storage, management) staff skills Physical location library building digital repository space (physical, server) maintenance management ownership preservation cost staff quotas staff skills Search and retrieval Index cards face-to-face enquirie electronic enquiries database searching Information portals search engines (Google) staff skills liaison with external organisations information literacy ease of use quality Use of Google The growing number of digital resources leads information seekers to look for easy-to-use and effective search and retrieval tools.
In turn, this has led to a proliferation of electronic tools (databases, search engines, etc) to facilitate the location and retrieval of digital versions of books, journal papers and other items.
However, users today often focus exclusively on the use of Google.
Digital resources are the preferred source of reference for many.
Evidence of this can be seen from studies into the techniques researchers employ for resource identification and location.
One recent study found that 72% of researchers' first, and sometimes only, port of call for resource discovery was Google [6].
Furthermore, their preferred format was a digital version of the item, and one that was immediately available and accessible by them [5].
The dominance of Google continues to be the cause of much debate, especially in relation to the benefits and drawbacks for student use.
University students often use Google as their primary tool for locating information for their coursework.
Some of the perceived benefits in using Google are that it is quick and easy to use and it often returns many search results.
The drawbacks include: the reliance on a single source for information; too many results may be returned especially if keywords are not carefully selected; duplication of hits; too many false drops; and inaccurate material may be presented alongside authoritative items.
Information literacy encourages the use of a range of search tools, as well as the analysis of information retrieved to ascertain its quality, accuracy, currency and provenance.
University lecturers also routinely use Google to locate information [7], and have reported using Google to search for materials to supplement their teaching [8].
In the future, deposit of teaching and learning resources into repositories may help to make a wider range of materials available to teachers for use in the creation of courseware.
No doubt these resources will be located by the individuals' preferred search method.
In other words, repositories will attract and house content that is then discovered via a Google search.
Google as Repository Google is a search engine, is it not?
Perhaps not, as many additional services are now provided under the Google banner, including Web space and analytic tools.
Therefore, we can say that Google is no longer simply a search engine, but a provider of a range of Web services.
Franklin [9] has suggested that Google is his repository.
This position is partially supported by the minimum requirements for repository services described by Heery and Anderson as, "put, get, search, access control" [10].
Some of these core components are provided by Google.
For example, content can be shared through Google Base [11], information is retrieved via Web links, and Google's search capabilities are well known.
Access control is not yet part of the Google package, but it can be provided at source if required.
A growing number of services can be viewed as repositories.
These could also be said to have a limited number of the core repository characteristics.
The content housed in these services, and in repositories, also varies.
To illustrate, some contain metadata records only, others hold items focusing on research outputs while others contain a range of resources for use in teaching and research.
There are also single subject repositories, regional repositories and those whose content is derived from a range of subjects and regions.
Repositories can be managed locally, by institutions; regionally, by a consortia of institutions; nationally, by centrally funded organisations; or they may be personal repositories created by utilising services that are freely available.
However, the concept of Google as repository presents a number of potential problems.
Google is not a managed store of resources; this means that standard metadata is not provided, items are not preserved, and they can be moved or deleted at will.
For libraries in the Higher Education sector, two issues arise with Google as repository: information literacy; and the transparency of resource provision.
Information Literacy Google, and other search engines, often return resources out of context, i.e., with no supporting information.
This makes their provenance, accuracy and currency difficult to judge.
Repositories can provide this contextual information in the metadata describing the item, as well as in any supporting information for its use.
With this data, the origin of the item and its quality becomes easier to determine.
Providing this additional information does require that repositories have procedures in place for recording, or capturing metadata, and that the quality of that metadata is good.
You could, perhaps, argue that Google generates its own metadata records dynamically on-the-fly.
These are presented to the information seeker in the form of search results.
But, the links provided may, or may not, lead to items with supporting descriptive text.
Resource Provision Students may not be aware that they only have access to an item, located through Google, because their university's library has paid for it.
Users are understandably not necessarily concerned with where a resource has come from, just that it is available to them.
However, this may be of concern to libraries as they might want to brand their subscription resources.
In addition, students might conclude that the library was not needed because information was located and retrieved through Google.
Hence, users are not aware of the resource provider, or of the cost to their institution.
Within the existing landscape, there are no clear solutions to the issues we have touched on here.
Repository services can help to provide solutions by providing contextual information alongside the link to a resource, and by branding items so that users are aware of the source.
Unique Elements to a Repository Service There are a number of elements that set repositories apart from other systems and services including: persistent identifiers facilitating reliable access to items open access making repository content available to a global audience without charge mediated deposit reducing workloads for content contributors cataloguing and metadata describing items, their creation, conditions for reuse, asserting copyright, and providing a record of modification advocacy promoting and encouraging contribution to a repository preservation thereby guaranteeing future access to resources Two of these elements, advocacy and preservation, are particularly pertinent to these discussions.
Advocacy leverages content that would otherwise remain locked in personal stores, or behind university firewalls.
Preservation activities ensure that data remains accessible in the long term.
Advocacy Early research repository managers recognised the importance of advocacy efforts in raising awareness of repositories, and in encouraging contributions to them.
Advocacy to encourage the sharing of resources for use in teaching is even more vital as it can help to overcome the reluctance to share.
These resource creators can be unwilling to make their materials available to others for a number of reasons.
Amongst those cited for this behaviour are: not realising the value of their materials to others; being uncertain that their resources are good enough to be made widely available; and not knowing of any suitable repositories in which to place their items [12].
Repository advocates can provide information and assurances to allay these fears.
A range of advocacy efforts can be employed to engage repository content contributors and content consumers.
Printed materials can be used to highlight the benefits of sharing research and teaching resources.
The steps required to make items available (selfor mediated deposit) can also be outlined.
One-to-one sessions and group events can be organised to publicise a repository.
Advocacy may not always be as effective as we would like, but some institutions have been successful in their content recruitment campaigns.
Alongside an institution's internal advocacy activities, there are national and international initiatives to introduce mandates for the deposit of research outputs into repositories.
The merits and effectiveness of mandates for research repositories are described in detail by Brody et al [13].
Mandates may be one way of driving content into repositories but they are not always popular with resource creators.
Preservation Another element in the repository mix is the preservation of digital assets.
Preservation is not an issue for Google, but it is for repositories.
At the JISC Digital Deluge Conference [1], Franklin argued that, ideally, teaching materials over five years old should be regarded as out of date, and therefore have no value in reuse.
Others would disagree with this standpoint, but in any event, preservation activities encompass a range of material categories.
This includes teaching resources, published research papers, conference papers, raw data, images and the like.
The importance of the preservation of digital material has been highlighted by the MIDESS Project.
Its participants describe the range of information required for the effective preservation of digital objects, stating that, "Simply physically storing the digital data isn't enough for long term preservation.
Details about the application used to create the digital file, rights to the digital file, ability to extract the physical attributes of the file (such as size, format, etc) and store these attributes as metadata is also important for the long term digital preservation of digital material" [14].
Repository managers need to make decisions about whether to preserve, what formats to preserve, and what preservation methods to adopt.
The cost of this activity has to be balanced against any possible future gains.
Preservation of the significant properties of an object may be viewed as a sensible route to take.
Repository policies need to take into account the preservation of digital assets and the metadata associated with an item.
Key problems to address here are detailed in the DCC Digital Curation Manual [15].
The specific issues associated with the preservation of metadata for learning objects are described by Campbell in the Instalment on Learning Object Metadata.
In this Campbell describes the IEEE LOM standard; its application and uptake; some of the issues that implementers of this standard need to be aware of; and future developments.
In addition, Campbell also points out that LOM "was not designed with long-term preservation of either resources or metadata in mind" [16].
Digital curators, and others, are currently grappling with these issues.
Decisions in this area will be supported by the ongoing work of standards organisations, JISC CETIS [17], existing and start-up repositories, and other initiatives, such as those funded by JISC.
To illustrate this, 'Retention of learning materials: a survey of institutional policies and practice' [18] looks at policies and practice in Further and Higher Education for retaining learning materials.
It also considers short-term preservation plans with a view to highlighting good practice.
Another useful example is the HATII toolkit which provides a useful audit tool for repository managers [19].
The benefits and drawbacks of the provision of good-quality metadata are also often discussed within library and repository communities.
One consideration for the future might be the loss of cataloguing skills within these communities.
As many repositories are established within the remit of the library, it is of some concern that a number of libraries are out-sourcing their cataloguing work.
By this we refer to the practice of buying in shelf-ready books.
Economies of scale take precedence where budgetary constraints are in operation, but loss of key skills may have long-term implications.
A repository could be described as a service that includes a tool for uploading resources which are then stored, organised, catalogued and preserved.
In addition, they also offer internal search functionality, presentation of metadata for search by external agents, and the retrieval of stored items.
All this is supported by unique advocacy activities.
On the other hand, the primary role of Google could be defined as that of a search tool.
Value to the Higher Education Community As the number of resources being commissioned, created and reused in the Higher Education sector grows, so the task of effective management becomes more complex.
Developers aim to provide effective systems to store, organise and present resources to users.
In their turn, resource creators and information seekers look for easy-to-use systems for sharing, locating and accessing the materials they need.
Thus, one service of value to researchers lies in the provision of a mechanism for the dissemination of information.
As Swan and Brown state, "Communicating their results to peers remains the primary reason for scholars publishing their work; in other words, they publish to have an impact on their field."
[6].
Google, repositories and libraries all have a part to play in improving dissemination, and thus research impact.
Libraries can benefit from setting up a repository because it affords them the possibility of regaining a degree of control over the digital assets created within their institution.
Preprints of published papers can be archived and preserved for the long term.
This may be useful where the publisher's version is not available and where a digital copy is required for preservation purposes.
Licensing terms and copyright issues in respect of preservation are complex, especially where the item is not held in a library's permanent collection.
This is increasingly the case with subscriptions to digital resources that are held in a publisher's database [4].
Licences terms for repositories can be created to include provision for copies to be made for preservation purposes.
In addition, copyright in the metadata associated with these items can be asserted.
With the co-operation of a number of publishers, the LOCKSS Project is currently testing the creation and storage of copies of journal papers on an institution's server [20].
These can be used as a backup when a publisher's version is not available, or when a publisher ceases operations.
Information seekers benefit from the improved findability of items as a result of the addition of good-quality metadata to describe the item and its conditions for reuse.
Morvill discusses the issue of findability and identifies some of the potential problems in this area as, "Poor information architecture.
Weak compliance with Web standards.
No metadata.
Content buried in databases that are invisible to search engines" [21].
As Morvill states, "Google loves metadata"; it is one of the three elements included in its algorithms, the other two being full text and popularity measures [21].
Community Engagement There are increasing trends towards engagement with roles that have traditionally been undertaken by professional librarians.
Many information seekers see no need to consult the services of professionals in their search for resources; they believe Google can find all the data they need.
Another task, once the preserve of librarians, is that of cataloguing.
We are all assuming this role when we tag items deposited in social software sites.
Social software tools for organising, cataloguing, tagging and sharing resources are growing in popularity.
Amongst the items being shared are texts, images, multimedia, bibliographic details, reference lists, reading lists or Web links.
Services that allow users to share their personal library catalogue with others include LibraryThing [22] and Reader2 [23].
With these services, items can be tagged, feeds can be used to pull data into other services (blogs, news readers or aggregators), and users with similar reading tastes can be discovered.
The Open Library Project [24] takes the activity of community tagging a step further.
Their aim is to create a comprehensive online catalogue comprising the details of every book published.
This will be seeded by libraries which donate their existing catalogue to the Open Library.
The metadata entry for each book will then be edited and supplemented by public contribution.
Repositories also need to engage with content contributors to ensure that a critical mass of content is reached.
Achieving this through seamless blending with existing workflows will help to make contributing to repositories more of a common-place activity.
Artists too can benefit from the greater exposure and availability of electronic resources.
To illustrate this, we can look to the Archives Hub which features a digital artist in residence.
The work of Aileen Collis was shown in June 2007 [25].
The starting point for the creation of her work during the residency was a digital image of an archive document.
One key to the reuse of materials is raising awareness of copyright issues to ensure compliance with the law.
Conclusion Libraries have long been recognised as central stores of information.
The increased availability of digital resources has provided new opportunities for both the acquisition of resources and the spread of knowledge through user communities.
System developers, service providers, funding bodies, publishers, contributors to repositories and repository users all have their own drivers for facilitating resource exposure.
Systems and services are increasingly overlapping, merging and interoperating to satisfy these diverse agendas.
Today's information seekers want to be able to locate and access materials as quickly and easily as possible.
Google is seen by many as the ideal tool to use in the quest for information.
There does not appear to be a definitive answer to the question, 'is Google a repository?'
There are some similar functions and services provided by the two and the Google brand is constantly expanding to include a variety of services and tools.
Perhaps we could view Google as a meta-repository.
Digital materials reside in repositories or on servers; these items are exposed to Google; Google matches search terms to information contained within resources; a list of possible matches is then presented to information seekers; they then use their judgement to reduce the number of hits to that which best meets their requirements.
Google is a commonly used tool for locating resources for use in research and teaching.
Can Google be used more effectively and selectively?
Yes, so long as teachers and learners are willing to participate actively in improving information literacy skills.
However, it is important to remember that Google is just one tool to help information seekers.
The role of the library is to demonstrate how best to use this tool, and to expose users to a range of other sources of information.
Libraries play a vital role in making resources accessible to a wide audience; Google and repositories serve a similar function in an online environment.
It is possible that in the long term, all information will be transferred electronically.
The tactile quality of paper copies will be lost as well as its 'affordance' [26], but much will be gained.
The quality of digital copies is as good as the source, items can be produced and transmitted speedily, searching for suitable information will be fast, and creators will have new sources of inspiration in both the digital materials themselves, and the new tools and technologies used in their creation, transmission and repurposing.
This will involve a transformative process.
What is required is a shift in both personal and technical perspectives.
Repositories, libraries and Google complement each other in helping to provide a broad range of services to information seekers.
This union begins with an effective advocacy campaign to boost repository content; here it is described, stored and managed; search engines, like Google, can then locate and present items in response to a search request.
Relying on Google to provide search and discovery of this hidden material misses out a valuable step, that of making it available in the first instance.
That is why university libraries need Google and Google needs university libraries.
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Right to preserve?
Copyright and licensing for digital preservation project.
Available online at: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2134/343/1/Final%20report.pdf Barker, P. 2007.
Digital deluge eLearning strand.
Available online at: http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/2007/06/19/digital-deluge-elearning-strand/ Beagrie, N. 2005.
Plenty of Room at the Bottom?
Personal Digital Libraries and Collections.
D-Lib Magazine, 11(6).
Available online at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june05/beagrie/06beagrie.html Costigan, A.
2007.
Google: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Presentation from the July 2007 Getting to Grips with the Google Generation workshop.
Available from ALISS Website: http://www.alissnet.org.uk Head, A.
2007.
Beyond Google: how do students conduct academic research?
First Monday, 12(8).
Available online at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/head/index.html Author Details Sue Manuel IT Support Officer University Library Loughborough University Email: s.manuel@lboro.ac.uk Charles Oppenheim Head of Department of Information Science, Loughborough University Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/people/coppenheim.html Return to top Article Title: "Googlepository and the University Library" Author: Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue53/manuel-oppenheim/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Annual Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Annual Conference Buzz data rdf framework portal archives metadata thesaurus tagging identifier vocabularies schema copyright flickr udc cataloguing marc lcsh aacr2 frbr skos librarything tgn interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Christina Claridge reports on the conference, held 3-5 September 2008, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.
Cataloguers from all over Europe travelled into Glasgow to attend the conference, subtitled “Classification and subject retrieval in the 21st century: you can’t make jelly without a mould”.
The conference provided sessions with talks on both wide-ranging and detailed aspects of cataloguing, combined together into seven sessions distributed over the three days.
All notes of the presentations are available online.
[1] Said the spider to the fly: Identity and authority in the semantic web The keynote address was given by Gordon Dunsire from the Centre for Digital Library Research [2].
He talked about many of the underlying ideas of the semantic web: the development of RDA (resource description access) that would allow machine processing, applications using the Semantic web such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) schema, and SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems).
He also spoke about new developments for subject indexing, including MELVILSEARCH, developed by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the development of tag clouds applied by users, the tension between providing high-quality or high-quantity authority records, and how these relate to the semantic web.
At the end of the address, Gordon was awarded the 2007 Alan Jeffries Award for services to cataloguing.
The Detail of Cataloguing MARC 21 Update The presentations discussing the more detailed aspects of cataloguing included the MARC 21 update, given by Corine Deliot of the British Library.
Details of the decisions are available online [3] .
Corine discussed the work of the RDA Working Group planning the introduction of RDA, including the identification of work and expression records, new content designation (336, 337, 338 fields), and the enhancement of the 502 field for dissertations.
Outlines of discussion papers relating to RDA – MARC mapping (relationship designators and the 007 field) and new authority attributes for families were also discussed.
The second half of the session concerned the proposal to render the 440 field obsolete, redefining the 490 field and tracing series through the 8XX fields.
Corine outlined the arguments for and against this change, and noted that the vote was successful.
The talk concluded with a brief outline of other papers proposing changes to MARC fields.
A question noted that system limitations make transferring legacy data into this new 490/8XX format difficult.
ANF Subject Codes for E4Libraries Project ANF (Adult Non-fiction) subject codes for the E4Libraries Project, presented by Maggie Sumner, is an attempt to increase efficiency in the (mainly public) library supply chain.
The subject codes, developed for BIC (Book Industry Communication) [4] work in addition to Dewey/LC, and are based on the trade data provided pre-publication.
The system is flexible: a detailed scheme for larger libraries can be simplified for smaller ones.
There were many questions about this talk.
Subjects included the dangers of relying on publisher-supplied information (scheme is sound, application is sometimes weak), whether the codes could be self administered (yes), direct mapping from Dewey (true for the majority), and whether this scheme is intended to replace Dewey in public libraries (no: just expand functionality of the catalogue).
The Adoption of Social Tagging in Academic Libraries: A leap of faith or a descent into the abyss?
Charlotte Smith used the examples of Flickr 5 and LibraryThing 6 to explore the utility of social tagging in her presentation.
The key point of the presentation was, in general, users apply social tags for their own benefit, rather than the more altruistic motivations behind professional cataloguing.
The negative aspects of this include the use of non-informational descriptive tags such as ‘Party’ on Flickr, and ‘Not read’ on Librarything, and the resulting large number of hits when trying to search by tag.
There were also positive aspects of the use of tags, such as the use of users’ specialist knowledge, and the retention of a controlled vocabulary.
Charlotte also looked at examples of social tagging used in various academic catalogues, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Huddersfield.
Questions after the presentation discussed motivation of taggers, and compared tagging to the early Internet, with the same division between ideas and technology and growing user expectations of interaction.
It was also noted that tag clouds at a high enough volume evolve into standard terms, and that personal tags can be useful for other users, for example through recommendations.
The problem with place: The moulds may change but the jelly remains the same Paula Williams, (National Library of Scotland) [7] highlighted the problems for subject headings related to place names, from colloquialism (‘Auld Reekie’), legislated changes (boundary changes or places ceasing to exist), and language (transliterated differently or misheard by cartographer).
The most common ‘structures’ for containing the place name jelly – LCSH, TGN (Getty) and local schemes – were then investigated, and while each has strengths, the weaknesses of each system were also discussed.
For example, the potential to conform to international standards may alienate local users of the system.
The talk concluded with the discussion of georeferencing and geoparsing, connecting items to particular coordinates, or connecting a landscape to other subjects, for example, locations in literature.
Pooling the tools: Indexing resources for a specialist subject portal in the 21st century Anne Welsh (NHS Education for Scotland) [8] gave an overview of the information resources provided for the Falls Community [9] – people who fall and the doctors who work with them in her presentation.
The members needed clear access to the information required, rather than drowning in information overload.
To do this, a portal was developed which incorporated a keywords list chosen by practitioners and mapped over to subject headings produced by the librarians.
Controlled vocabularies and formats were also mapped, providing quick access to different kinds of resources, such as policies, documentation or case studies.
The portal also included a tag cloud, seeded by practitioners to support quick access to resources and links to people, allowing keyword searches of interests.
Anne believes the success of the programme stems from good information architecture.
The Wider View of Cataloguing The rest of the presentations looked at aspects of large-scale cataloguing, ranging from the development of a faceted cataloguing system for concert programmes, through to international initiatives between national libraries.
RDA Update and Demonstration of the Online Product One of the more interesting and exciting presentations was the RDA update and demonstration of the online product, presented by Alan Danskin (British Library) [10] and Ann Chapman (UKOLN) [11].
They started with an overview of the work of developing RDA so far, from the start in 2005 through to the projected release of the interactive demonstration in September 2008, beta testing in January 2009 and implementation in 2010.
Alan then demonstrated the functionality of the demonstration model, looking at the ability to insert markers within the system and reminders of the local policy if necessary.
He also explored the search options, including Boolean terms and the ability to search vocabulary lists.
RDA will also come with workflows, task-based instructions, appendices (with examples) mapped between RDA and AACR2 rules, and the ability to create and save unique workflows.
Ann outlined the licensing and pricing of the product, which has still to be decided, and the post-release development, such as the updating of the system.
Training in the use of RDA has yet to be planned.
Questions were asked about integrating RD (resource description) vocabularies, which are due to be included in the product.
Another question was about incentives to replace MARC (described as complex and not used to its full potential).
Since RDA has been built on FRBR principles, some RDA-based changes to MARC could provide better functionality and interfaces within systems.
However, both RDA and the changes to MARC must be in place before vendors can re-design interfaces.
Multilingualism and the subject heading languages: How the MACS project is providing multilingual subject access in Europe Patrice Landry (Swiss National Library) [12] explained that this project aims to provide multilingual, concurrent subject headings using a coordinated approach between national libraries (British, French, German and Swiss) which are each autonomous, the links being established through the concept of clustering.
Patrice outlined the advances of the works from the start in 2007, through to the hiring of 6 workers by the Germans (DNB) to work on the project, to the extension of the project to Italy, which has approximately 20,000 headings.
The intention of the project is to move beyond the current four languagesSpain and Sweden both have equivalent lists to English language subject headings.
Questions covered the inclusion of non-roman alphabets the national library at St Petersburg has contacted the MACS Project; the inclusion of geographical subject headings, which are ‘next on the list’ to be included; and several questions on the translation of languages and mapping between languages.
Classifying musical performance: The application of faceted classification principles to concert programmes Deborah Lee (The Courtauld Institute) spoke about the neglected opportunities for the cataloguing and analysis of concert programmes in her presentation.
She discussed the various arrangements possible, from archives, bibliographical and separate collections, and different arrangement theories and how they could potentially divide collections of programmes and artefacts of performance.
Deborah spoke of how she used the “Event: Object: Manuscript triumvirate” to catalogue the Isolde Menges Collection, held in the Centre for Performance History, Royal College of Music [13].
Questions discussed performance recordings, art exhibition catalogues, ephemeral venues, and the difficulties of researching individual performers and groups.
Classification on the network: Machine-readable, shared, clones and hidden Aida Slavic (UDC Consortium) [14] discussed the general tendencies of current cataloguing practice, especially as applied to a faceted classification system.
She spoke about classification by concept, hierarchy and organisation by disciplines.
Aida concluded by speaking about the ‘SKOS’ification of UDC, and the focus on thesauri in the development of SKOS, which ignored problems of context and phase relationships.
A question was asked about mapping, referring to that already completed between UDC and Dewey by the Czech National Library.
Emerging approaches to subject information Terry Willan (Talis) [15] provided an overview of the developing areas of information searching.
He spoke of the move towards “single box” searching, and aspects of relevance ranking that would refine the search results.
He also spoke of methods that would refine the search if the relevance ranking was not successful: using plural words or stemming, or giving the user options to choose from, such as spelling suggestions.
Terry discussed how facets allow users to narrow results, and argued that classification can also be used as a facet, by allowing the user to find related items.
He also spoke about the positive aspects of user-contributed content: participation; value provided for other users; and negligible cost for libraries.
However, he noted that a large scale was necessary to provide quality.
Questions discussed the legal position of social networking in OPACs, suggesting filtering and a reporting process, and the differences between LibraryThing and Amazon, which displayed successful and unsuccessful tagging respectively, arguing that this was a reflection of different purposes: people visited Amazon to buy books rather than tag books.
HILT Demonstration The HILT (High Level Thesaurus) demonstration by Emma McCulloch (HILT) [16] showed how the HILT Project provides subject interoperability and allows controlled vocabularies to talk to one another.
The results come in a SKOS wrapper, and it is up to the user how the results are shown.
Emma then spoke about different aspects of mapping.
Phase 4 of HILT involved developing a pilot toolkit, also offering browsable hierarchies, which was demonstrated.
Examples were provided from Intute and BUBL.
Questions asked about the copyright issues surrounding the use of Dewey, the expansion to local schemes, and the possibility that the toolkit could be built into a library management system.
BIB Flows Project The final presentation of the conference was about the BIB Flows Project, a RINfunded study being undertaken by Ken Chad (Ken Chad Consulting) [17], looking at ways to increase efficiency by co-ordinating the import of information, where the basic information would be free, and payment would only be made for value-added information.
Ken requested the audience’s help in showing what the key aspects of bibliographic information were, and how they were used.
More information on the project and the workshop form can be found on Ken’s Web site.
Conclusion Overall, the same themes kept recurring throughout the conference: SKOS; the mapping of terms, subject headings or keywords; and tags, especially in the form of clouds.
Social Aspects of the Conference On the first night, the film The Hollywood Librarian was shown, and a collection of £30 was taken, destined for a good cause.
After the sessions of the second day, there was the CIG Annual General Meeting [18].
The conference dinner, and an excellent pre-dinner reception (sponsored by Coutts) were held at the Millennium Hotel, George Square.
The after dinner speaker was Stuart James, followed by an informal quiz, with prizes provided by Backstage Library Works.
Accommodation and excellent food were provided by the University of Strathclyde, where the beds were judged to be soft, and the most popular item at breakfast was the porridge.
After the conference, trips were offered to the Glasgow School of Art Library, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and the BBC Digital Library.
References Conference Programme and Notes http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/CIG/2008/conf-glasgow/programme/ The Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ MARC Standards http://www.loc.gov/marc/development.html BIC Book Industry Communication http://www.bic.org.uk/ Flicker http://www.flickr.com/ LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/ National Library of Scotland http://www.nls.uk/ NHS Education for Scotland http://www.nes.scot.nhs.uk British Library http://www.bl.uk/ Falls Community http://www.fallscommunity.scot.nhs.uk/ UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Swiss National Library (English) http://www.nb.admin.ch/slb/index.html?lang=en Centre for Performance History, Royal College of Music http://www.cph.rcm.ac.uk/ UDC Consortium http://www.udcc.org/ Talis http://www.talis.com/ HILT (High Level Thesaurus Project(s) http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Ken Chad Consulting http://www.kenchadconsulting.co.uk/ CIG AGM http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/CIG/2008/conf-glasgow/cig-agm-2008/ Author Details Christina Claridge Metadata Librarian University of Warwick Email: c.claridge@warwick.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Annual Conference” Author: Christina Claridge Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/cig-2008-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 42: Less Could Mean More Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 42: Less Could Mean More Buzz software wiki firefox digitisation browser blog copyright e-government foi foia research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller provides an editorial introduction to Ariadne issue 42.
Tomorrow, 31 January 2005 will be the moment of truth for those institutions among some 100,000 public authorities which received a request for information on the first operative day of the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United Kingdom.
For by tomorrow they must have responded to the request within 20 working days.
No doubt many senior administrators in HE and FE institutions up and down the country will be wondering how many requests their institution has really received, as opposed to the number that have actually been reported at least one aspect of the legislation that will not have endeared itself to them, quite understandably.
If they read Steve Bailey's thoughtful article Assessing the Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the FE and HE Sectors, then one possible scenario he describes might very well cause them to clutch their staffing budgets ever closer to their troubled bosom.
A considerable deal of heat has been generated in the short term by the repeated calls for, and the ultimate publication of, guidance on both exemptions and fees; how much light has shone is more difficult to measure.
As is clear from Steve's article, the matter of handling requests is naturally uppermost in adminstrators' minds right now, but there are other longer-term issues that require their attention also.
As is clear from his examination of the current situation, there are a number of imponderables to be addressed.
Even the private sector, for example, which doubtless cannot believe its own luck, being both exempt and yet entitled to make enquiries that may provide competitive advantage, will discover that it is not as exempt as it might have thought.
But Steve seeks to draw us away from the immediate concerns of request management and fee charging to an area which is of far greater interest to information professionals: how records and information are to be managed for the future in the light of the FOIA's provisions.
For it is this matter which will prove central to an institution's success or failure in complying with the law.
What he considers essential is a complete change in people's attitude, what he terms a change in the institutional culture with regard to the creation, management and disclosure of information.
He maintains, for example, that a properly planned system of record creation for the many operations within an institution would lead to less information of much higher quality being created, more easily managed and providing the degree of transparency that is in the spirit of the Act.
It would seem Lord Falconer does not disagree [1].
Less could mean more.
Steve has been looking into the future without the advantage of having read Freedom of Information in University College Dublin 2001-4 by Rena Lohan who has been giving us the benefit of her hard-won hindsight.
Lena has been implementing the Irish FOI legislation in her institution for the past three years.
I asked her to describe her experience of managing the demands imposed by the Irish legislation and to draw conclusions.
Her article also makes it clear that a complete re-appraisal of how information is generated and recorded is necessary, if institutions, (bearing in mind Steve's scenario), are to manage, or even better pre-empt requests for information from the public, media and others.
It is equally clear that the skills of record managers, archivists and information professionals in general, who have played such an important role in the creation of time-saving publication schemes already, are essential to future cost-effective compliance with the FOIA.
Important as these articles are from the standpoint of institutions faced with the demand for information access, I am sure you will also find it interesting to read Stephen Twigge's report Freedom of Information and the Historian which gives the view from the other side of the issue, for those seeking information, in particular our historians.
I am indebted to Michael Daw who was very helpful in his advice about tools which support collaborative activities and who has gone so far as to write us an article on Advanced Collaboration with the Access Grid with follows very neatly up on Andy Powell's contribution last issue on VRVS.
Michael gives a very objective description of the robustness of the current version of the technology together with the possible outcomes of its development in the next few years.
He draws our attention very usefully to the overwhelmingly important benefit to be had from such technologies, namely the reduction of what one of my colleagues terms our collective 'carbon footprint', as well as defending the sanity of hard-pressed professionals too frequently from home.
Conscious as I am of the slightly parochial nature of the UK's new FOI legislation, I have been keen to find articles of world-wide appeal and so it has been pleasing to obtain material on new technologies including Patrick Lauke's contribution on Mozilla Firefox for Rapid Web Development and Testing.
Patrick looks at this new browser released by the Mozilla Foundation and points out useful features and extensions for the benefit of Web developers.
They will find it interesting to read of the potential Firefox offers.
A somewhat different ball-park, but still in the realms of exploring new technology, Sebastian Rahtz is wondering whether you might be Looking for a Google Box?
in which case he describes the installation, maintenance and configuration of this serious bit of kit and describes the benefits and drawbacks involved.
This issue also offers further material on collaborative technologies with a number of views of Wikis with a report from Brian Kelly on Experiences of Using a Wiki for Note-taking at a Workshop while Robert Bristow reports on this conference with his article Beyond Email: Wikis, Blogs and Other Strange Beasts.
Still with Wikis, Emma Tonkin is to be found Making the Case for a Wiki and takes a broader view of the technology by considering realistically the issues of deployment as well as providing a details of the varying functionality across the different kinds of Wiki now available.
Readers of past issues recently will have noticed that Ariadne has been tracking the work of the OSS Watch and so it has been very gratifying to obtain an article from Randy Metcalfe on Software Choice: Decision-making in a Mixed Economy, an issue of increasing importance to institutions in their search to further the development of effective technology.
And with respect to new organisations currently emerging Sophia Ananiadou, Julia Chruszcz, John Keane, John McNaught and Paul Watry provide a comprehensive view of the aims and role of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and how it can contribute to more effective research initially in the area of bioscience and biomedecine though clearly text mining is not going to stop there.
New technology has I hope been well provided for in this issue therefore but there are also issues that abide and wax and wane but rarely disappear.
One of these is most certainly copyright and so the overview that Alastair Dunning provides of a number of new case studies in this area and I am confident that projects involved in digitisation of resources not their own will welcome Tracing Help with Copyright.
e-Government will be with us one hopes with increasing benefits both to the Knowledge Economy and the individual citizen.
Many people have become involved in this large project who might never have imagined such a possibility even 15 years ago.
In her article A Librarian's Experience of e-Government Jane Inman describes the route she has taken as a librarian through the expanding landscape of e-government and highlights the skills librarians can bring to this arena.
Those who already closely follow the debate that surrounds the open access movement may already have seen the lengthy critique of Jean-Claude Guédon's article entitled "The 'Green' and 'Gold' roads to open access: the case for mixing and matching," published recently in the Serials Review [2].
Stevan Harnad's Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold provides a succinct version of his commentary and is offered to readers as a snapshot of the ongoing debate.
Those interested further are recommended also to read Guédon's thought-provoking article, which thanks to the issue editor David Goodman is freely available from ScienceDirect for the next few months as the publisher's sample issue.
However, there may be some who are occasionally mystified by the intensity of these discussions, and wonder if such debate always brings the Open Access movement further along its proposed road.
It is possible that the OA movement as a whole may have as much to fear from the unintended disengagement of fellow travellers as it does from those who want to travel in the opposite direction.
We are able on this occasion to offer a somewhat enlarged At the Event section as well as the helpful updates in our Regular Columns and News and Reviews.
I hope you will enjoy issue 42.
References Need-to-know is now right-to-know: Freedom of Information, Lord Falconer of Thoroton BBCi News 4 January, 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4142755.stm Jean-Claude Guédon, "The 'green' and 'gold' roads to open access: the case for mixing and matching."
Serials Review, 30(4), 315-328.
Available from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00987913 Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 42: Less Could Mean More" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ERPANET Seminar on Persistent Identifiers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ERPANET Seminar on Persistent Identifiers Buzz data software framework html xml urn infrastructure archives metadata doi digitisation browser identifier namespace schema blog repositories preservation oai-pmh multimedia dns syndication e-learning purl ontologies uri ark adl lom prism openurl dcmi dspace scorm onix interoperability e-government privacy url research standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Monica Duke reports on a two-day training seminar on persistent identifiers held by ERPANET in Cork, Ireland over 17-18 June 2004.
Day One Introduction Welcome and Keynote Overview of Persistent Identifier initiatives URN OpenURL The Rough Guide Info URIs The DCMI Persistent Identifier Working Group The CENDI Report ARK PURLs Overview of the Handle System DOI Day Two Identifiers at the Coal Face EPICUR The National Digital Data Archive (NDA) NBN:URN Generator and Resolver DIVA The Publisher’s Perspective Digital Object Identifiers for Publishing and the e-Learning Communities Publication and Citation of Scientific and Primary Data Information and the Government of Canada Conclusion This event, organised by ERPANET [1], brought together around 40 key players with an interest in the topic of persistent identifiers in order to synthesize the current state of play, debate the issues and consider what lies on the horizon in this field of activity.
Participants included leaders from many of the main identifier and resolver initiatives such as DOI, openURL, infoURIs and Handles (to name a few), together with potential users of persistent identifiers from government organisations and libraries, representatives from publishing, and implementors of systems using various identifier and resolver strategies.
As the event unfolded, it became clear that the concerns of the participants were not limited simply to debating the pros and cons of various technical approaches, but rather displayed a practical awareness of the social dimension that is inherent in all of the ongoing activities.
This event was supported by University College Cork (UCC), MINERVA and the Digital Curation Centre.
University College Cork Day One Welcome and Keynote We were welcomed on a sunny June day by Peter McKinney, ERPANET Coordinator, and Carol Quinn, from the University College Cork, which hosted the meeting.
The keynote address was given by Norman Paskin, International DOI Foundation [2] who set the scene for the event by reviewing the development of persistent identifiers, and asking the audience to reflect on the meaning of ‘persistent identifiers’.
He drew attention to two landmarks in the evolution of persistent identifiers.
The first was the automation of the supply chain, in which ISBNs started to be used as unique and non-changeable identifiers, and the second was the automation of information sharing brought about by the World Wide Web.
Various ISO standards developed following the first use of ISBNs; similarly, the thinking about naming on the Web also went through a series of changes, reflected in the various interpretations of the URN acronym from Universal to Uniform to Unique.
The focus of the item being identified tends to shift according to the context.
Technology often focuses on identifying ‘bags of bits’; libraries on the other hand place importance on intellectual content.
Citations of a resource will refer to the work being cited, whereas in the context of purchasing, the manifestation may need to be specified (e.g.
the pdf or HTML version).
The speaker made a number of other observations, emphasising the scope of the identification problem, which goes beyond the HTML Web (since the Web encompasses all objects transported by http and identified by URLs), and extends to digital content outside the Web.
The discussion on standards is ongoing, and is wide-spread, extending across a number of different standards bodies and beyond.
Finally, the role of metadata to assist in defining what is being identified was highlighted.
Overview of Persistent Identifier Initiatives Following the keynote, the rest of the first day covered background information on the development of various persistent identifiers initiatives, while the following day was dedicated to sharing experiences with implementation of persistent identifier systems.
URN Katrin Schroeder of Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB) [3] gave an overview of the URN system, covering its syntax, functional requirements, URN namespace definition and registration, and resolution.
On the following day this presentation was complemented by a report from a project funded by the German department of research, which chose URN as the basic identifier of digital objects and examined their resolution based on the DNS system, (see EPICUR for details).
Developments on the URN front include an ongoing joint W3C/IETF planning group to resolve the current ‘contemporary’ view which contains confusion over the distinctions and relationships between URIs, URNs and URLs, with a draft report submitted as recently as April 2004.
To date, 40 URI schemes have been registered.
The syntax of URN, which is made up of parts, provides the flexibility to incorporate various URN-‘namespaces’, such as ISBNs, into URNs.
There are underlying assumptions in the URN-namespace registration set-up that the assignment and namespace in a URN is a managed process, although there is allowance for experimental, formal and informal namespaces.
Browsers currently do not support the resolution process for URNs resolution has to be enabled through plug-ins (or other technical solutions).
OpenURL The Rough Guide Tony Hammond,who is a member of the ANSI/NISO AX committee that is standardising the OpenURL Framework delivered an overview of OpenURLs.
OpenURLs [4] came out of the Digital Library communities.
They work with persistent identifiers to address the location of scholarly bibliographic information.
The user is seen as an active participant in the linking process and the context of the user can be taken into account in the process of resolution.
OpenURLs come in two flavours, the de facto version, implemented first in SFX (but also since implemented by other commercial vendors) and a draft standard which is evolving within the NISO process, started in 2001, and now nearing completion (predicted to be signed off within 2004).
The draft standard contains the evolved version of OpenURL, which is no longer simply a URL, but a framework with Context Objects and a Registry.
After reviewing the history of OpenURLs, the speaker gave an overview of Context Objects (which are containers of 7 entities such as referrer, requester and resolver), and Formats, for which two representations have been elaborated (Key Encoded Values, and XML).
Info URIs Whilst introducing Info URIs [5], Stu Weibel, consulting research scientist at OCLC, related them to the larger context by identifying the different layers that need to be considered when discussing identifiers: social layer, business layer, policy layer, technology layer, functionality layer.
Questions that need to be asked about identifiers could be organised around these layers.
For example, in the functional layer questions about the longevity of persistence could be asked; the policy layer addresses questions such as the right to assign identifiers, governance models and identifier management, (for example, can identifiers be recycled?)
The social model examines the issues of trust and guarantees of persistence.
Info URI is an Internet draft co-authored Herbert Van de Sompel, Tony Hammond and Eamonn Neylon.
It separates resolution from identity, which is a controversial topic.
The info URI first specifies the info namespace, followed by a namespace token, followed by anything at the discretion of the namespace managing authority.
Resolution is not inherent in the standard, but is expected to emerge; adoption and use will ultimately determine the future of info URIs.
The DCMI Persistent Identifier Working Group Robin Wilson, from The Stationery Office (TSO) reported on the activity of the DCMI WG (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Working Group) [6], which was set up to meet a perceived need, but is not intended to function as a separate isolated effort.
The focus of the working group is: Broader understanding of the functional characteristics of identifiers Explicit motivations for selection of identifiers Clearer understanding of the available choices Clearer understanding of the costs and benefits of assigning and maintaining identifiers Currently the WG is carrying out an information gathering exercise, finding out what guidance is most needed.
The collaboration of all present was invited in helping to define the priorities of the WG; for example the DCMI WG could provide a focus for gathering use cases on the use of identifiers.
The working group is aiming to have formed a plan by the next Dublin Core conference in Shanghai China [7].
The CENDI Report Larry Lannom, of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), presented the CENDI report.
CENDI is a loosely federated, but growing, interagency group of information managers from various departments in the US government federal agencies (such as the National Archives and Records Administration and NASA).
The aim of the report was to bring the issue of persistent identifiers onto the agenda of higher policy makers.
The report, which was made available to the attendees of this ERPANET event, reviews a number of persistent identifier applications (PURLs and Handles) and makes a number of recommendations, chiefly the establishment of an e-government interagency committee to study the implementation issues, analyse costs and present recommendations in the US.
ARK The California Digital Library’s efforts on the Archival Resource Key (ARK) [8] were presented by Mary Heath, Access Services Manager.
ARK is a unique actionable identifier, intended to meet a specific list of needs, namely: A simple system with a low overhead for maintenance Non-proprietary Long-tem and directly actionable identifier Policy separation between the service provider and the assigner of the identifier Creation of IDs that are unique in the world Support for attached metadata and persistence level Name assigning authorities (of which 10 are currently registered) provide the key to the persistence of ARKs.
They control the assignment of object names, which are constructed according to a set of rules.
The name assigning authority establishes the long-term association between identifiers and objects.
The third entity is a name mapping authority, which provides the resolving mechanism.
Together, the name mapping authority, name assigning authority and object name make up a URL.
Http is used as the basis to provide the actionability of ARKs.
ARKs demand and reveal an organisational requirement to persistence, and the actionability of the ARK ties to 3 things: the digital object, the metadata describing the object, and a persistence commitment statement.
The commitment statement is intended to reveal the degree of permanence of an object that is guaranteed in terms of availability and stability e.g.
content may be stated to be unchanging or dynamic, guaranteed to be available, or non-guaranteed.
ARK works with other systems and can be referenced in openURL, can contain other identifiers (e.g.
ISBN) and OAI harvesters can collect metadata from ARK repositories.
The costs of ARK implementation include any costs associated with the required metadata creation and the organisational time taken to develop a persistence policy.
PURLs Stu Weibel then took the stage again to review PURLs, (Persistent Uniform Resource Locators) [9].
PURLs are simply URLs which use no new protocols, but do make use of a set of tools that provide assistance to maintain URLs with a commitment to persistence.
PURLs use the inherent redirection facility of the http protocol and provide persistence not of the resource but of the name.
A PURL server links a symbolic URL to a network location.
OCLC maintains a free server which manages creation and redirection of PURLs.
On contacting the server with a request, (i.e.
a PURL), the client is redirected to the networked resource through the http Get request.
The software for setting up a PURL server, which performs a function similar to the OCLC one, is also free to download from the PURL Web site.
By May 2004, over 500, 000 PURLs have been registered and 86 Million plus have been resolved.
Overall, PURLs were summarised as remaining in niche usage by a small number of organisations (albeit with high usage).
Overview of the Handle System The Handle system [10] was developed within a larger project for managing digital (information) Objects.
Larry Lannom summarised its function.
The Handle system is part of resolution services that resolve a name to attributes.
The Handle system is used by a number of different organisations including the IDF, DSpace, ADLSCORM, and various digital library production and research projects.
Handles resolve to typed data; the handle itself does not have inherent semantics, there are no semantics bound to the resolution (however the handle could incorporate semantical identifiers e.g.
ISBN).
Handle queries fall into two categories: those that return all data associated with a handle those that return all data of a specific type (e.g.
type URL) The Handle resolution system has a root service as well as a number of local services distributed in layers, which can propagate, to deal with scale.
Clients first discover which handle service can resolve a handle through a global registry service.
The client then retrieves the handle data from the local site holding the information.
Proxies or plug-ins can handle the resolution for Web clients.
The handle specification is itself open; however its only known implementation is licensed.
12 million resolutions were carried out in the month of May.
There is interest in embedding the handle system in the Globus Toolkit (subject to resolving licensing issues).
DOI Norman Paskin took the stand again to give an overview of DOI [2].
The DOI aims to deliver more than a simply a label or an actionable label, but rather a complete system made up of four components: a Numbering scheme, Internet Resolution, tools for description by metadata, and policies.
The DOI syntax is an ISO standard and it is to be noted that an instance of a DOI does not necessarily encode semantics.
The resolution of DOIs adopts the Handle system, and therefore resolution can be from a DOI to a number of things: such as a location URL, metadata or services.
The level of use of DOIs can be gauged by the number of resolutions: five million per month arising from business users.
Metadata allows us to know what is being identified and the DOI uses the indecs Data Dictionary to provide interoperability, although any other metadata schemes could be used.
Costs are associated with number and metadata registration, providing the infrastructure and the governance.
Currently such costs are borne by the assigner of the DOI but other business models could be used.
Registration agencies ensure a commitment to basic standards.
The next steps for DOI will be to move the complete framework to ISO standard.
Adoption of DOI includes The Stationery Office in the UK which will use DOIs for UK government publications, the EC office of publications and the German National Library of Science (using DOIs to identify data).
Graduates mingling Day 2 Identifiers at the Coal Face The second day provided an opportunity to learn about the varied experiences from implementors of systems employing identifiers in a wide range of projects and initiatives.
EPICUR Kathrin Schroeder gave an overview of the EPICUR [11] which built on the experiences of urn management for online dissertation identification gained within the CARMEN-AP4 Project.
The DDB aims to have a corporate strategy for URNs to guarantee high technical availability of a digital object.
The strategy includes assignment, registration, administration and resolution of URNs.
URNs are assigned to items which have a perspective of long term preservation for example the objects archived by the DDB itself or those archived by certified repositories (e.g.DINI).
DDB functions as the naming authority (delegations are also possible).
URN-URL mappings must be forwarded to the DDB in order that the resolution service is updated.
URNs can be mapped to multiple URLs so that different copies of the same object can be retrieved.
The naming authority and the institution applying URNs have a contract the URN-URL relations must be registered, the URL must be kept updated.
An administration interface is available to manage the URN-URL relationships.
The system is currently used by over 60 university libraries as well as some digital library tools.
Usage statistics are available [12].
The National Digital Data Archive (NDA) of Hungary Andras Micsik from SZTAKI at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was the next to speak.
NDA is an initiative of the Hungarian government to deliver the content infrastructure for open access to cultural assets available in digital form.
It supports the digitisation of radio shows, museum objects and manuscripts, creation of metadata records, and availability via OAI-PMH.
An ontology server and metadata schema server are planned.
Persistent identifiers are needed not only for digital content objects and their metadata records but also events, persons (e.g.
famous poets) and organisations.
Locations are also candidates for being allocated an identifier since the location name (e.g.
the street name) changes over time for historical reasons.
The identifiers will need to handle high volumes, integrate with the OAI infrastructure and must be based on open standards.
The identifier solutions are being studied and a decision has not yet been made.
NBN:URN Generator and Resolver Adam Horvath from the National Szechenyi Library in Hungary introduced another URN resolver system which has been implemented for its simplicity and reliability.
It is one targeted only at Hungarians and can only be applied to HTML documents.
Owners of an HTML document requiring a URN make an http request to a server, (Adam cited an example [13]).
After some checks the server returns a URN which is incorporated into the head of the HTML document.
Resolution of URNs also relies on http requests, and the results of resolution are returned as a list of URLs encoded in an HTML page.
Digital objects which are not HTML documents need to be given an HTML cover page.
Some guidelines are issued to users for consistency copies of the same object should be assigned the same URN; different versions (e.g.
Word and HTML) should be assigned different URNs and a new URN should be assigned when the intellectual content of an object changes.
A Web interface (in Hungarian) is available to invoke the URN assignment and resolution functions.
DIVA Eva Muller, director of the Electronic Publishing Centre at the Uppsala University Library, Sweden introduced a publishing system used by 10 universities in 3 countries (mainly in Sweden, but including one in Denmark and one in Norway).
The aim of the centre is to support full text publishing, storage and ensure future access.
An automated and low-cost workflow was sought to support the long-term access strategy.
Persistent identifiers (PID) were recognised as an important part of that strategy and a non-proprietary solution was required.
The PID must be able to connect to a preservation copy because of the focus on guaranteeing long-term access.
URN:NBNs were chosen as an identification system The National Library of Sweden assigns authority and has delegated to Uppsala University.
The same PID is intended to be used for different manifestations of the same content.
An item is a single publication, with no consideration of format.
URN:NBNs are not used uniquely as identifiers in the system the metadata also incorporates use of other identifier systems such as ISSN.
PIDs are also used to identify other components in the infrastructure, for example for file format registries.
DIVA [14] hopes to interact with other file format registry initiatives in other countries in the long term as a strategy for guaranteed long-term access.
The file format registry identifier would be used as a value for the manifestation information on the content metadata.
In the future, the co-ordination of electronic academic publishing at Swedish Universities, including long-term access and preservation, will be central to activity and the resolution service will be further developed on an international level.
The Publisher’s Perspective Cliff Morgan from John Wiley and Sons offered the publisher’s take on the issue of identifiers by asking: What identifiers do publishers care about?
In a nutshell, ISBN (“obviously!” said the speaker), ISSN and DOI were singled out as the most important.
ISTC may become important in the future (though it is not well established yet), and ISWC, ISAN, V-ISAN may take on importance if multimedia becomes central.
URLs are thought of mostly as locators.
There has not been much uptake of PURL/POI (/PURL-based Object Identifier) nor is there awareness of ARK or XRI in the publishing community.
The ISBN is in revision (bringing the number up to 13 digits) due to some pressure on some number blocks and in view of harmonisation of product identifiers in 2007 [15].
Some discussions are still ongoing on e-versions, assignment to component parts and print on demand.
ISSNs are also being revised but the process is at a much earlier stage; it involves several stakeholders in the discussion of controversial issues such as what constitutes a serial: are blogs serials?
Is the ISSN a work, manifestation or expression identifier?
ISTCs (the equivalent of the music ISWC but for textual works) may become the main standard depending on the progress of its development, currently stalled considering the appointment of a registration authority.
ISTC is designed to be a work identifier and has clear application to rights issues.
DOIs have seen phenomenal take-up by publishers, with CrossRef [16] providing the impetus for this success.
The registration of DOIs with CrossRef as a main registration authority shows a rare instance of publisher collaboration happening internationally.
Citation linking is an important aspect of DOI/CrossRef in use.
The success of DOI was attributed to its well-established status with publishers, ease of implementation, reliability and ability to deliver extra or more targeted services.
ONIX and ONIX for serials were singled out as the main metadata standard of importance, with interest in Dublin Core to an extent; OAI-PMH and openURLs, PRISM, IEE/LOM/SCORM and some of the rights metadata could become important.
ONIX is overwhelmingly important because it is a trading standard, and therefore metadata sets easily mapped to ONIX are more likely to be of interest.
Moreover metadata that can be used to drive revenue, by improving reach, profile or brand would be seen as worth pursuing.
Digital Object Identifiers for Publishing and the e-Learning Communities Robin Wilson summarised an activity carried out by The Stationery Office (TSO) to produce a report for JISC to help guide and assist the development of a JISC digital identifier policy for use in the UK Higher and Further Education.
The report works around the idea of ‘Just in Time Learning’ as the future of e-learning, i.e.
creating a mix-and-match culture individualised for learners.
This implies content that can flow through: i.e.
that a learning object is a collection of references to information objects.
In the ‘just in time’ framework the persistence of identifiers is paramount along the whole life cycle.
Several communities are involved in this model of e-learning e.g.
learning technologists, content creators etc.
Resource discovery involves not only the object discovery but also the checking of rights management, syndication of content, and federation.
There are a number of scenarios where identifiers are applied: identifying a citable reference; identifying a metadata description, identifying a Web deliverable resource.
The report, which can be downloaded from the JISC [17] and the TSO site [18], reviews identifiers and systems, makes a number of recommendations to JISC and identifies a number of concerns that require further investigation: e.g.
the nature of metadata to be used alongside adopted identifiers; management of resource persistence over time, management of ID persistence over time.
Publication and Citation of Scientific and Primary Data Michael Lautenschlager introduced a two-year pilot implementation project funded by the DFG, which followed earlier activity that had produced a report for CODATA on the citation of Scientific Primary Data.
This pilot implementation has as its application area climate data, which has traditionally had data sources which are known only within a small community and are often archived without context.
A global identifier with a resolution mechanism was proposed for data archiving and context referencing.
The aim is to close the gap between the scientific literature and related data sources.
Citable data publications encourage inter-disciplinary data utilisation.
However currently there is not enough motivation for the individual scientist since extra work for data publication is not acknowledged.
The presentation covered the metadata that would be captured for primary data, including the assigning of a DOI identifier.
Persistent identifier allocation comes with added responsibilities; for example ensuring long-term availability of the data, quality assurance of the data, and the condition that data must stay unchanged, (like published articles).
A stable connection between the identifier and the data must be ensured.
Some usage scenarios for the use of identifiers with climate data were then described, including submission of data and citation.
The DOI can be resolved in three different ways, therefore citation can rely on any of the three resolution methods.
Two of the methods involve the use of actionable URLs which can be directly used in a browser, whilst the third method requires a plug-in for browsers.
A handle server [19] is made available as part of the project.
Further details can be found on the project Web page [20].
Information in the Government of Canada Cecil Somerton, Information Management Analyst with the Treasury Board of Canada gave us the perspective of the Canadian Government.
Governments are presented with a legislative context with respect to legal requirements for access to information and protection of privacy.
In Canada the Access to Information Act and Privacy Act are examples in point.
Other acts such as the Library and Archives Act contain inherent messages about the importance of persistence, although an official policy on persistent access to information has not yet been articulated by government.
For governments, the issue of persistence must address the question of access and accountability over time, authenticity and authority and trusted communications.
A report on persistent locators was presented to the Canadian government in 2002 and more recently a discussion paper on XML Namespace Management became available.
Policy must address multi-channel delivery to the public, including Internet presence.
Conclusion Participants were in agreement that, whilst having met its introductory aims, this event could be but a milestone on a journey that has scope for greater and better co-ordinated collaboration.
Ideas were mooted for follow-on activities by means of on-line discussion fora, or mailing lists.
The Digital Curation Centre was mentioned as a possible focus of activity; the DCMI Working Group [6] is also available for those wishing to participate in a collaborative activity.
In collaboration with the speakers and the participants, ERPANET will be publishing a report on the seminar.
The official report will appear on the ERPANET Web site [1] later in the year.
The ERPANET Web site also contains a good collection of links related to the topic (follow the links to products, erpatraining, persistent identifiers, background information and reading lists).
A mailing list has been set up following the workshop; interested parties can find out the instructions for this list by sending a “QUERY CORK-WORKGROUP” command to LISTSERV@JISCMAIL.AC.UK.
ERPANET also hosts a discussion forum related to the training seminar [21].
Fabio Simeoni has also written a report on this event [22].
Acknowledgements My thanks to Stu Weibel for kindly supplying some images of the conference location.
References The ERPANET Web site http://www.erpanet.org/ The International DOI Foundation http://www.doi.org/ Die Deutsche Bibliothek http://www.ddb.de/index_txt.htm Open URL http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/ Info URI http://info-uri.info The DCMI Working Group on Persistent Identifiers http://www.dublincore.org/groups/pid The DC-2004 Conference Web site http://dc2004.library.sh.cn/ ARK http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/ark/ PURL http://purl.org The Handle System http://www.handle.net EPICUR http://www.persistent-identifier.de/ Usage statistics http://www.persistent-identifier.de/?link=540 Example: URN:NBN service in the NSZL http://nbn.oszk.hu/ DIVA http://www.diva-portal.se/about.xsql Editor’s note: This subject of ISBN-13 will be addressed by Ann Chapman of UKOLN in an article in the next issue (41) of Ariadne.
Cross Ref http://www.crossref.org/ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk The Stationery Office (TSO) http://www.tso.co.uk/ Handle System Proxy Server http://doi.tib-hannover.de:8000/ Citation of Scientific Data http://www.std-doi.de/ ERPANET FORUMS Fora on Digital Preservation and Access http://www.erpanet.org/www/workgroup/Forums/ Simeoni, Fabio A report on the ERPANET Seminar on Persistent Identifiers, 17-18 June 2004, Cork, Ireland http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents/Erpanet%20Training%20Seminar%20on%20Persistent%20Identifiers.pdf Author Details Monica Duke UKOLN University of Bath, UK Email: M.Duke@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “ERPANET Seminar on Persistent Identifiers” Author: Monica Duke Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/erpanet-ids-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Creative Archive Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Creative Archive Buzz data framework archives metadata copyright video licence standards Citation BibTex RIS Paul Gerhardt describes the origins and development of the Creative Archive Project at the BBC.
Last April the BBC, together with Channel 4 Television, the British Film Institute and the Open University, launched the Creative Archive Licence.
It was a small act, but it could prove to be a momentous step in how we use moving image and audio in our public and cultural life.
Personal Media Take the example of Jim, who runs a small charity to support patients and their families with multiple sclerosis.
Television and radio programmes on health treatment and care, many of them going back decades, are known to exist.
Indeed, Jim may well have been interviewed for some of them.
But they are out of bounds for the information sharing that Jim provides for his network.
Simon is from a younger generation, and is beginning to experiment with video production.
He is keen to learn from the best documentary makers, and his many creative ideas include clever adaptations of existing programmes.
Simon knows that some of the file-sharing networks offer pirated versions of British and US TV shows, but he is nervous about using them.
And anyway, if he did so, he could not share his creative adaptations with his friends and colleagues around the UK without drawing attention to his use of copyrighted content.
Although we are all familiar with the impact of film, television and radio on our daily lives, most of us continue to experience it as a 'one-way' process from the active producer/broadcaster to the passive viewer.
These powerful media have none of the fluid, personalised interplay of words and text, where our experiences range from the purchase of authored work from bookshops, to 'free' access from the public library, right through to personal applications where we sample text, quote to friends, and use the literary world as a sourcebook for our own creativity.
Only in the world of formal education have some of these restrictions been eased for audio-visual material.
The Educational Recording Agency (ERA) scheme was an important breakthrough, allowing teachers and lecturers to copy and store recently broadcast programmes and to shape their use to the needs of the curriculum.
The ERA scheme is a response to the power of moving images on the process of learning in the classroom.
But learning, of course, is not restricted to the classroom.
There is also growing evidence that media files are the new currency of the Web.
The downloading and sharing of moving image files is driving the latest phase in the growth of the Internet, following the previous waves of text, pictures and music.
(In 2003, the downloading of video and other files grew to make up slightly more than half (51.3%) of all file sharing in OECD countries, while music downloading fell to 48.6% [1]).
The technology now exists for moving images to acquire the same intrinsic characteristics as text: for people to carry with them, to quote from, to manipulate, and to share with others.
Almost all of this activity contravenes existing copyright arrangements particularly broadcasting, which remains geared to providing one or two 'opportunities to view'.
What Is 'Creative Archive'?
The Creative Archive will offer free access to BBC content for learning, for creativity and for pleasure.
From home, the public will be able to: search for legally cleared TV and radio content from extracts to whole programmes preview and download non-broadcast quality versions modify and create their own versions share with others and with the BBC on a non-commercial basis The distinctive features of the Creative Archive are the sharing of content with the public and the provision of a safe, legal framework.
The service has the potential to change the relationship between the BBC and its audience.
By recognising user-generated work it will extend the audience experience from viewing (broadcasting) and interactivity (Web) to co-creation.
In this way, the Creative Archive [2] Licence will provide a legal framework for the integration of moving images and audio into home use: for pleasure, for creativity and for learning.
It has been inspired by the Creative Commons movement [3] which offers a 'third way' between full public domain and 'all rights reserved'.
As with Creative Commons, the Creative Archive Licence recognises and preserves copyright, but releases the opportunity to engage in non-commercial sharing and integration into personal derived work.
The Creative Archive Licence has been adapted to fit the specific requirements of broadcasters, media producers and curators of film, television and audio collections.
It allows the downloading of media to the user's hard drive 'to copy and/or Share the Work and/or create, copy and/or Share Derivative Works on any platform in any media.'
Besides the prohibition on commercial use, the user must Share Alike under the same terms, credit the owners and contributors, treat the content with respect (No Endorsement) and restrict its distribution to the UK.
At this stage the Licence is provisional and open to public discussion and refinement.
At its launch on 13 April 2005, the Licence was offered as a new industry standard with an open invitation to other content holders to adopt it.
Teachers' TV is the first organisation to accept the invitation.
In his speech at the launch, David Puttnam spoke of 'the Creative Archive (as) an idea whose time has come' and reaffirmed his belief that 'that access to ... content is a fantastic tool for creative expression and learning'.
Each organisation will apply the Licence to its own plans for downloading content.
The Open University will make up to five hours of its science content available.
Channel 4 Television will use the Licence to provide archive material and support for new, young documentary makers.
The British Film Institute has already released early British documentary material and there have been over 13,000 downloads in the last few weeks.
The BBC's Pilot For the BBC, the Licence is the means by which its rich and wide ranging archive can be made accessible at last to the public.
It is a major step for the world's largest public service broadcaster and requires a special approach in order to manage both the risks and the public expectations.
Unusually for a new BBC service, we plan to develop our Creative Archive in an open and transparent manner.
The public consultation on the Licence scheme will be followed by a pilot phase, lasting through to the autumn of 2006.
Over this period we will release up to one hundred hours of television and radio content.
This will allow us to test three significant issues: the potential size of the user audience (including how they use BBC content); the degree to which the new Licence scheme is understood and respected; and finally, the overall market impact on other commercial activities.
The content will be in the form of both extracts and whole programmes, available at MPEG1 quality (i.e.
non-broadcast).
It is likely that a simple form of one-off sign-up will be required.
The material will be released in a series of editorial 'campaigns' in association with the relevant factual and learning sites on bbc.co.uk.
For instance, nature and science content will be available through bbc.co.uk/sn/ [4] and learning content through bbc.co.uk/schools/ [5].
Factual content has been chosen for the pilot phase because the BBC wholly owns a higher percentage of the material, and there is a proven demand for the BBC's high-quality factual output.
However, it is the long-term intention of the Creative Archive to include content across all of the BBC's genres.
We can only do so with the full consent of all the stakeholders and right holders.
Market Impact It is the BBC's conviction that making non-commercial material available to the UK public will benefit all the stakeholders in the content as well as create public value itself.
By unlocking the BBC's archive we believe we can demonstrate that not only will significant minority interests be served, but that new entrepreneurial activities will be generated.
A proportion of user-derived work may well have significant commercial value, and it is central to the purpose of the Creative Archive that it will be relatively simple for these creators to 'opt out' of the scheme and put their work on a commercial basis.
After all, why should the BBC have the exclusive right to use its archive content to develop an educational package on 20th Century Physics for the classroom, or a naturalist's guide to British wildlife?
There are gifted teachers and naturalists with the technical skills to create these works for themselves.
The Creative Archive will provide new producers and entrepreneurs with the right to either share their applications freely with others or to acquire the commercial rights to publish in the marketplace.
At the launch seminar speakers from the United States confirmed the value of this business model.
Rick Prelinger, owner of the Prelinger Archive [6] pointed out that the free availability of his collection on the Internet Archive [7] had increased his business turnover as well as opening up new markets for archive film.
But many of these questions will only be anwered if we can get the material 'out there'.
The pilot phase will provide the evidence and the data to debate many of these issues in depth, including the need to educate and to understand the laws of copyright.
The holders of underlying rights in BBC archive content will need to be assured that existing commercial value is not endangered, and that wider availability will open up new opportunities for both public profile and commerce.
In many ways it is a paradigm shift in the rights culture, and it is appropriate that a major publicly funded organisation such as the BBC should take the lead and explore the risks.
Conclusion: Putting the User First Once we have proved the concept, we will need to return to the question of partnership with other organisations.
The sharing of the legal framework is a vital first step there is no other way in which a new Licence of this kind can be speedily introduced to and understood by the downloading public.
But if we are going to put the user at the core of this new service, we also need to consider a number of other issues.
For instance, can we share technical standards with other providers?
Should we develop a common approach to metadata?
Will users prefer a single search engine which can range across film, television and radio archives in the UK?
How can we collaborate on a joint venture while preserving our separate roles, identities and branding?
These are valid questions.
By keeping close to the user experience, I believe that we can answer them.
By inviting users to become partners in the development of a national Creative Archive, we can shape a service which will stimulate our media skills and enrich our national culture.
We are on the threshold of an age in which broadcasters become co-creators with their audiences.
References See http://www.oecd.org/document/ Creative Archive Licence Group http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/ Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ bbc.co.uk/sn/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/ bbc.co.uk/schools/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ Prelinger Archive http://www.prelinger.com/ The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ Author Details Paul Gerhardt Director Creative Archive BBC Email: paul.gerhardt@bbc.co.uk Web site: http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Creative Archive" Author: Paul Gerhardt Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/gerhardt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EEVL: New Hot Topic In-depth Reports Now Available Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EEVL: New Hot Topic In-depth Reports Now Available Buzz database xml preservation cataloguing graphics privacy url Citation BibTex RIS Roddy MacLeod looks at some recent developments to the EEVL service.
Hot Topics EEVL, the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing, provides access to a wide range of information on the three subjects covered through its Internet Resource Catalogue and various additional services.
Hot Topics [1], a new feature added recently, gives access to in-depth reports on topical engineering and technology issues.
The Hot Topics are freely available, and are provided through CSA [2].
CSA is an information company that specialises in publishing and distributing, in print and electronically, 100 bibliographic and full-text databases and journals in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts & humanities, and technology.
A privately held company, based in Maryland, with offices in various parts of the world including the United Kingdom, CSA has been a leader in publishing and providing quality abstracts and indexes in the information field for over thirty years.
EEVL and CSA have been working together on a number of areas over the past months, and the availability of the Hot Topics through EEVL is the first of several planned developments.
Figure 1: Screenshot of the Hot Topics Home Page Links to thirteen in-depth reports are currently available from EEVL’s Hot Topics page.
Selected for their relevance to EEVL’s users, these have been chosen from nearly 100 CSA guides covering topical issues in various subjects.
In addition, each of the Hot Topics has been catalogued by EEVL and can also be found via the Internet Resources Catalogue [3] under appropriate search terms and browse headings.
A typical entry is shown in Figure 2, below.
Title: Hydrogen Storage Alternative Title: CSA Hot Topics Series URL: http://www.csa1.co.uk/hottopics/hydrogen/overview.php Author: Becker, Laura Description: Hydrogen Storage, which is part of the CSA Hot Topics Series, considers the increasing use of hydrogen as a non-polluting energy source that can be generated from renewable resources, although there are some difficulties in storing it.
Hydrogen is stored in rechargeable nickel-metal hydride (Ni-MH) batteries, which have a higher energy capacity than environmentally toxic cadmium batteries.
The Hot Topic includes a list of relevant key citations, a collection of related Web sites, a glossary of terms used, and further details of the original source.
Keywords: CSA Hot Topics, IDS, METADEX, hydride, alloys Resources: Full Text Documents General Resource Guide/Directory Engineering Classification: * Chemical Engineering->Chemical Engineering General * Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering->Electrical Engineering->Electrical Power Sources and Motors * Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering->Electrical Engineering->Electricity, Magnetism, and Materials * Manufacturing Engineering->Product Design and Development->Materials and Energy Recycle and Reuse->Environmental Engineering->Materials and Energy Recycle and Reuse * Environmental Engineering->Renewable Energy Resources * Materials Engineering->Materials Engineering General * Mechanical Engineering and Related Industries->Fuel and Energy Technology Location: World Country of Origin: United States Language: English Comment on this record XML view of this record Figure 2: Example of Internet Resource Catalogue Record for a Hot Topic The Hot Topics cover a wide range of subjects of current interest to many students and researchers.
They have been written by CSA editors, technical editors, information analysts and experts, and include an overview of the subject, key citations and abstracts that sample the resources of CSA Illumina [4], and links to relevant and substantial Web sites.
There are links back to EEVL from the Hot Topic pages.
In the future, pre-formatted searches of the EEVL Internet Resource Catalogue will be included within the Hot Topics, so that additional Web sites related to the topic, which have already been catalogued by EEVL’s subject experts, can also be retrieved.
The Hot Topics vary in length, often including relevant diagrams and graphics.
The following Hot Topics are currently available: Columbia Shuttle Tragedy Nanomaterials: It’s a Small, Small World Rapid Manufacturing Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Technology and Cars The Space Shuttle and its Replacement Titanium Plastic Highway Bridges MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) Solid Oxide Fuel Cells Hydrogen Storage Quantum Cryptography: Privacy Through Uncertainty Lost in Cyberspace : The BBC Domesday Project and the Challenge of Digital Preservation Domestic Water Conservation: Greywater, Rainwater and Other Innovations More Hot Topics are in the pipeline, and will be added to the collection as they are released.
EEVL would like to thank CSA for their co-operation in the development of this new feature on EEVL.
About EEVL EEVL, the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing, is a UK-based not-for-profit free guide.
It was created and is run by a team of information specialists from Heriot Watt University, with input from a number of other universities in the UK, including the University of Birmingham and Cranfield University.
EEVL provides academics, researchers, students, and anyone else looking for quality-assured information in engineering, mathematics and computing, with a centralised access point on the Internet.
EEVL, which is funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), is available on the Web at: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ References EEVL Hot Topics http://www.eevl.ac.uk/hottopics.htm CSA Home Page http://www.csa.com/ EEVL Catalogue Search http://www.eevl.ac.uk/catalogue.htm CSA Illumina http://www.csa.com/csaillumina/login.php Author Details Roddy MacLeod EEVL Manager Heriot Watt University Email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html Return to top Article Title: “EEVL Column: New Hot Topic In-depth Reports Now Available” Author: Roddy MacLeod Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/eevl/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries Buzz data mobile software framework database infrastructure archives metadata accessibility tagging repositories oai-pmh passwords e-science authentication interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Barbara Kirsop, Leslie Chan and Subbiah Arunachalam consider the impact of donor access and open access to research publications on the sustainable development of science in developing countries.
The term ‘sustainable development’ was first coined by the Brundtland Commission, convened by the United Nations in 1983 [1].
It denotes ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ Although defined originally to meet the concerns relating to environmental damage, it has since been used to encompass the broader needs of society through economic, social and political sustainability.
Over the past few decades, it has been widely recognised that sustainable economic growth cannot take place without a strong science base.
In 1982, a UNESCO report stated that ‘assimilation of scientific and technological information is an essential precondition for progress in developing countries’.
Again, a few years ago, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs instituted a project known as SIST (Système d’Information Scientifique et Technique) the major goal of which is to facilitate sustainable development through support of regional research along the priorities defined by the countries themselves (health, renewable resources, agronomy, human and social sciences, Information and Communication Technology) [2].
Other authoritative organisations such as the InterAcademy Council [3], the Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, India [4] and many international individuals affirm this position [5][6].
How, then, can low-income countries strengthen their research capacity?
Research is an international activity where progress builds on the reported results of colleagues around the world.
It follows that access to published results in a refereed journal is a critical ingredient to forging a strong research environment.
But, as is now well recorded [7], the cost of access to published journals has become prohibitive for developing countries and has deteriorated in the past decade as journal subscription prices exceed general inflation figures threeor four-fold.
A number of initiatives have been set up to try to overcome this problem [8].
This article compares two broad approaches donations and free open access in terms of their sustainability and ability to build scientific research capacity.
We define Donor Access (DA) as free accessibility to published, refereed journals made possible by publishers, through targeted funding or the programmes of charitable organisations.
Open Access (OA), is defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative [9] as free accessibility to peer-reviewed literature online through: open access institutional repositories (IRs) or centralised subject repositories, that contain refereed journal papers deposited by authors, or open access journals that provide free content to readers.
There is confusion and some overlap in that: some printed toll-access (TA) publications are made freely available online, some TA publications are free only for limited periods of time (e.g.
for the first month after publication), some TA publications provide free access to only part of their publications (e.g.
research findings only, or back issues only), some TA publications are free to selected end-users only (e.g.
society members), and some journals participating in the donor programmes to increase visibility are also available through OA.
We confine our comparisons to initiatives that provide free access to entire publications (full text) either through donation projects or OA.
These two approaches are compared using selected sustainable development indicators appropriate for our purpose: Relevance Access and ease of use/search Affordability Usage Capacity building and permanence Comparison by Sustainable Development Indicators Relevance The relevance of individual articles to specific research projects depends on many factors that include discipline, timeliness and quality and is determined by the researcher’s own needs and experience.
The volume of material available directly affects the ability of researchers to access relevant material.
Donor Access: Relevance of articles to users can never be determined by the publishers of journals, although the provision of a comprehensive volume of journals could cover many requirements.
The UN programmes of HINARI/OARE/AGORA [10], supported respectively by the WHO, UNEP and the FAO, currently provide access for selected institutions to some 6000 titles across the three programmes.
Inclusion of titles depends on the willingness of publishers to make them available without charge, which in turn is dependent on sales in different countries (see Access and Affordability, below).
It should be noted that the total number of titles includes a number already made available through Open Access.
Although it is important that researchers in the developing world have access to the latest research, the relevance of articles available through the DA programmes is not necessarily appropriate to conditions they meet.
Furthermore, articles published by developing country researchers in journals published in the North will not always be those made available to their colleagues through the DA programmes.
The titles provided through the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) PERI [11] Programme and the Open Society Institute-supported eIFL [12] Programme depend on the development of consortia of institutions or the ‘bundling’ of titles made available by collaborating publishers to different end-user communities.
The Ptolomy Project [13], provides access to medical journals held in the University of Toronto’s Library to surgeons in East and Central Africa, who are affiliates of the Office of International Surgery at the University of Toronto, and carries out other infrastructure activities to strengthen the regional electronic surgical communities.
It is therefore a highly targeted initiative concerned with building capacity as well as providing access to the scientific literature.
Open Access: OA makes freely available all material published in OA journals or deposited in IRs and central OA repositories around the world and its relevance is limited only by the volume of material published or deposited by authors.
The number of OA journals registered in the Directory of OA Journals [14] in June 2007 is 2725.
The number of IRs has now reached ~ 910, though not all have been registered in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) database [15].
Total numbers of deposits in each repository are highly variable and change frequently due to new material being deposited, making it difficult to reach a reliable total figure.
However, the ROAR service shows the growth of deposits in individual repositories.
The centralised PubMedCentral repository now contains approaching 1 million records, and increasingly includes journals from developing countries.
It is mirrored in the UK, and a Canadian version is planned.
All registered repositories are compliant with the internationally accepted Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting standard (OAI-PMH) and searchable through the dedicated OAIster search program [16], as well as through Google, Google Scholar and Yahoo search services.
A further indication of the growing amount of open access material currently accessible for harvesting is therefore given by the number of compliant records searched by OAIster.
This currently stands at 12 million records, though not all are full-text research publications.
Many studies have now shown that the growth in the number of deposits reflects the recognition by authors of the greatly increased impact of their articles [17] as a result of global access.
In the same way, employers or funding organisations realise that the greatest returns on their research investments are met by the widest distribution of publications arising from their support.
Because of the inertia of researchers to deposit their papers in their IRs, as shown in studies by Swan and Brown [18], a growing number of organisations are mandating that this be done.
There are currently 23 mandates imposed by institutions, funding organisations and departments, including 5 of the 7 UK Research Councils, UK university departments and the Wellcome Trust and others in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, India, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, the USA and the European Union (see ROAR’s Material Archiving Policies database [19]).
As these mandates, and others under consideration, take root and expand to other regions, the quantity of articles available will grow, increasing the relevance of the research findings freely available.
The Free Medical Journals Programme [20] provides a useful service by listing and providing links to some 400 medical journals (listed according to the length of different publishers’ embargoes) to all with Internet access.
Access and Ease of Use/Search Donor Access: Access to DA content in the UN programmes (HINARI, AGORA, OARE) requires that the organisation requesting access be located in a country in which the GDP per capita per annum is < US$1000 (Band 1, for free access) or between US$1000-3000 (Band 2, for access following a payment of £1000 per annum).
In some cases, access by a few countries that fall into these bands is nevertheless restricted because publishers have local sales or sales agents.
The AGORA Web site currently warns that some access has been reduced recently for Band 2 users.
Free access by organisations in countries such as India is denied, even though the country falls into the GDP economic range for access.
Access is through registered organisations (generally the libraries of medical or other institutes), although employees of registered organisations may access through their personal computers if within the institute.
Access cannot be made from the office or home of individual researchers and requires the issue of passwords by registered libraries.
A study carried out by BMC Health Services research [21] found that this has caused difficulties and inconvenience for researchers.
A recent publication from Peru gives the results of a study carried out to estimate the usage of the HINARI titles [22].
It found that in April 2007, of the 150 journals with the highest impact factors on the Science Citation Index available through the scheme, the top five could no longer be accessed.
A total of 57% of all journals on offer were similarly inaccessible, although all were accessible in 2003.
In the main, the remaining 43% accessible journals were already OA or ‘free’ to low-income countries.
It is not made clear whether there had been technical problems causing access difficulties, or whether the journals had been withdrawn from the programme.
Access to DA content through the eIFL, PERI programmes depends on the inclusion of organisations in schemes to develop consortia to negotiate favourable terms for access to journals and books.
All material accessible through Free Medical Journals is free to all with access to the Internet, without the need for registration or the use of passwords.
Much full-text material from HighWire Press [23] is also free to all, though the service includes publications in which only the abstracts are available without charge.
Use of some DA projects depends on different user interfaces, and training programmes are organised to facilitate usage and searching.
Workshops for the UN programmes are undertaken by country offices or through the work of INASP, the International Network for the Availability of Scholarly Publications, and similar organisations.
Open Access: In general, all articles published in OA journals or deposited in IRs or central repositories are freely available to all with Internet access, using the familiar search mechanisms.
The exception to immediate access is where material deposited in IRs is subject to an embargo period that may be required by a minority of publishers to allow commercial benefits.
Of publishers surveyed [24], 62% allow immediate access to articles deposited in IRs.
Where the minority of publishers impose an embargo period, it is still possible for interested readers to request an emailed copy of the paper through an automated ‘request copy button’ found in abstracts and included in the free software [25].
This function mirrors the long-established practice of distributing reprints of papers on request to individual users and ensures that findings are readily available to all wishing to build on published results.
Since many authors from developing countries publish in TA journals from the North, it is important that they also deposit their articles in IRs or central repositories to ensure the widest access for their colleagues and other researchers from low-income countries.
There may be differences in permitted usage of DA and OA articles.
Whereas DA material may be subject to usage restrictions for example, UN programme users may only download a maximum of 15% of the content of an issue or book and publishers may require other end-usage restrictions usage of all OA material is defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative as ‘… .
permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself’.
The importance of data and literature reuse, and other value-added features such as data mining and social tagging, is a key advantage of OA.
Building discovery tools on top of the open content offers exciting opportunities for the future of research progress, not possible where locked PDF files make searching and reuse difficult.
With the emergence of the semantic web and e-science, the value of open access is even more keenly recognized, as stated by Keith Jeffery, in his eLPUB Conference 2007 keynote address [26].
Affordability Donor Access: The cost of both DA and OA provision is a factor affecting the value and sustainability of services.
DA programmes are financed by UN and other international agencies together with partnerships with publishers.
As mentioned above, access to the UN programmes is only free at the publishers’ discretion to registered libraries in the lowest-income countries with GNP levels below US$1000, providing there are not other publisher restrictions, such as the presence of a sales office in the country.
Band 2 users must pay US$1000 p.a.
for access to the DA journals.
As this may be difficult for some registered organisations, they have the option of choosing not to pay this fee and still retaining access to a reduced level of material.
Open Access: Access to all material available to readers through OA (both OA journals and institutional and central repositories) or through the other consortia and ‘free’ programmes described above, is free to all users with Internet access.
However, some OA publishers especially those in the developed world with established titles, or new publications may require an ‘author/institution-payment’ to meet document management costs, though this may be waived on proof of inability to pay.
These costs, while not affecting immediate access since access remains free to readers may affect the future of article provision through OA journals since it remains to be seen whether the ‘author’s institution-pays’ models are sustainable.
However, most OA journals make no charge to authors, recovering their management costs in other ways, such as providing other services, advertising, charging for print version and reprints or support from institutions or international agencies.
For these journals, both publishing in and reading articles are free of cost.
The cost of establishing IRs depends on the scope of the repository.
A campus-wide digital archive could take time and funding to establish, but the cost of an archive dedicated solely to holding an institute’s published research output is low and readily affordable by institutes in the developing world.
The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (personal communication, Francis Jayakanth), calculates that the set-up and running cost for a year is $6055, including the cost of a PC and a year’s management.
Other organisations in developing countries have said that they can use existing resources and manpower.
The SHERPA organisation in the UK states, ‘In the short term, the costs of setting up OA repositories are minimal.
Universities already have a good IT infrastructure in place and the connection cost and use of repositories is absorbed within existing overheads, so accessing the material is effectively free’ [27].
Usage The extent to which a service is used is a clear indication of its potential impact on sustainable development.
If the service is appropriate, easy to use and cost free, then benefits will follow, and in the area of research information, access to research findings presents significant opportunities.
Donor Access: Detailed evidence-based figures for usage of the UN programmes is available only to publisher partners, although a recent statement by Maurice Long, Programme Coordinator [28], reported that during the one-year period March 2005 February 2006 there were 3,040,621 PDF downloads of full-text articles by HINARI users and 195,468 PDF downloads by AGORA users.
As of May 2007, HINARI provided access to 3,700 journals from ~ 1,000 publishers and as of January 2007, AGORA provided access to ~ 1,000 journals from 40 publishers.
The distribution of the downloads was not indicated.
Elsevier, a publisher partner in the UN programmes, reported 2.5 million downloads in 2005, and a 50% increase in 2006.
This contrasts with the findings on usage from Peru [22], where the number of users had decreased from 12,144 in April 2005 to 5,655 in April 2007.
It was found that the usage of other databases had increased in the same period.
The need to pay $1000 per annum for access has also left many provincial universities in Peru without access to the HINARI journals.
A further technical problem relating to authentication is reported in a recent review of the UN programmes and Microsoft has joined the programmes as a technical partner to solve such problems.
It can be expected that usage of the UN programmes would increase if there were not the barrier to downloading more than 15% of the content from a single issue or book.
The extent of usage of the other programmes (eIFL, PERI, Free Medical Journals, HighWire) is not known.
The Ptolomy Project records high use by some surgeons, little or no use by others, but some 300 sessions were recorded in June 2005 [13].
Open Access: The usage of OA material is increasingly documented.
For example, the number of full-text downloads from ~60 journals accessed through the non-profit Bioline International site [29] that distributes OA publications generated in developing countries, reached 2.5 million in 2006 (Figure 1).
Bioline site total hits by year with breakdown Year Total Hits (adjusted) ToC Article Titles Abstract Requests Full-text Requests Journal Info Requests Search Results 2002 224137 44548 105189 26961 7682 2003 445679 116364 149211 45944 26315 2004 854467 121546 288548 157809 33895 2005 2723472 46859 86097 434935 1100615 34202 33637 2006 5749149 75537 162622 1097370 2496511 79334 66318 Figure 1: Table showing Bioline International usage, kindly provided by L.Chan, Bioline International * Statistics are also available from MedKnow Publications, Mumbai, India [30], which is the largest distributor of open access biomedical peer-reviewed journals in India.
Since converting to OA, the usage of the free material has increased steadily (Figure 2), as has the number of submissions including submissions from non-Indian authors, the Impact Factors of the OA journals and the income from the sale of printed versions of the journals (Figure 3).
Figure 2: Article downloads from the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine, kindly provided by D K Sahu, MedKnow Publications Figure 3: MedKnow sales of printed journals rising in parallel with OA usage, kindly provided by D K Sahu, MedKnow Publications A similar story is provided by the SciELO service providing open access to journals from Latin America [31], as shown for example by the usage figures of material from journals published in Chile (Figure 4).
Figure 4: SciELO Chile articles accessed from 2002-2005, kindly provided by Abel Packer, SciELO Internet distribution maps show substantial usage from the southern regions where most developing countries are located.
From these figures, it is clear that free online material is increasingly well used in low-income countries.
However, a survey carried out in Africa by INASP in 2005 [32] found poor awareness of OA in Africa, while the more recent survey carried out by BioMedCentral [21] found that in a study of four African teaching hospitals and one research institute in five African countries, 66% had used the Internet for health information in the last week.
Of the 305 postgraduate doctors surveyed, 70% reported textbooks rather than journals as their main source of information.
In two hospitals, Internet cafes were the main Internet access point.
For researchers at the externally funded research institution surveyed, electronic resources were their main source of information, and almost all had used the Internet in the last week.
It is clear from such studies that access to the Internet is improving steadily and new communications technologies (satellite, radio, hand-held computers, mobile phones, solar energy, long-life batteries, and cybercafes) form an increasingly important part of the knowledge environment.
As cyber-ability continues to grow, the availability of a comprehensive range of content becomes the more dominant need if developments are to become sustainable.
Technology Transfer/Capacity Building As increased availability of research publications necessarily strengthens the research and educational capacity of developing countries, it follows that any limitations on the selection of material available and barriers to access lead to reduced scientific progress and continuing dependence.
In general, it is the international user-driven solutions to knowledge access problems that are most likely to strengthen research capacity and, as the new procedures for exchange of research information are incorporated into researchers’ working practices, equality of access to essential information will be achieved.
Donor Access: It is encouraging that the UN programmes are recorded as being secure until 2015 [33], but it is a matter of concern that as developing country economies grow, an increasing number of low-income countries will become disenfranchised from such programmes as publishers protect their markets.
It is an anomaly that the very success of the UN programmes may lead to their reduction.
If the UN programmes should cease, users are left with limited resources, since unrestricted down-loading is not permitted and researchers are unable to develop their own ‘reference libraries’ of relevant material.
Donations may leave users dependent on the goodwill of the donors and limit their ability to build locally relevant research collections and so strengthen their institutional research capacity.
The continuation of TA journals made available through the eIFl and PERI programmes is dependent only on the continuation of the consortia arrangements and the future life of the journals themselves.
The long-term sustainability of these programmes is currently unclear.
Open Access: The future of OA journals and repositories seems secure as usage and their place in the knowledge society becomes increasingly established.
Detractors of journals adopting the user/institute-pays strategy claim the success of the new economic models is unproven, but as confidence in their quality grows and as funders become more aware of the increased return on investment from the widest possible distribution and use, they show every sign of becoming a permanent feature of the scholarly publications process.
Developing country journals distributed by MedKnow Publications, SciELO and Bioline International, for example, record an increasing number of OA journals achieving higher impact factors, as does the Public Library of Science [34].
Although the deposit of articles by authors in open access IRs is slow, a recent survey by Key Perspectives reported that between surveys of author practices carried out in 2004 and 2005, the percentage of scholars reporting self-archiving activity in some form rose from 23% to 49% [35].
This steady but under-reported progress is leading to the development of a number of repository infrastructure initiatives around the world.
For example, in Europe, the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for Europe (DRIVER) Project [36] has been set up to link and support existing IRs in the EU and encourage the establishment of others to form an EU ‘Research Area’.
In the UK, the Joint Information Systems Committee-supported DEPOT service [37] has been set up to assist authors wishing to gain maximum impact for their publications by depositing in open access interoperable IRs, when their institutes have not yet established a repository.
Articles deposited are returned to institutional repositories once they are set up.
In Australia, a Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (Online Research Collections Australia: ORCA Network) [38] has been set up.
In Brazil, the IBICT institute is developing a ‘toolkit’ for institutes wishing to set up IRs [39].
Cross-institutional co-operation in OA initiatives are also developing in countries like India, China, and South Africa.
This global interest suggests that IRs are destined to form the bedrock of the scholarly research environment in the future, providing a low cost and user-driven means to sustainable development.
Conclusion The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) [40] emphasise the urgent need to address problems such as poverty eradication, hunger and malnutrition, child mortality, maternal health, environmental sustainability and combating diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
It is very clear that without strong scientific platforms built on the widest possible access to research information, these goals will not be met.
The InterAcademy Council issued a joint statement to the UN [41] calling on strong international collaboration in developing programmes to implement the goals.
If sustainable development is dependent on a strong national science base, then permanent access to the widest possible range of publications from the international library of research is a pre-requisite.
Any restrictions in access will inevitably limit reaching independent scientific capability and adversely affect social development and economies.
Limiting access to knowledge risks missing critical research findings that may lead researchers to unnecessary duplication of experiments, adding to research costs and retarding the pace of development.
Furthermore, access barriers deprive researchers of the ability to make contacts and form partnerships with others working in the same or complimentary fields.
Exchange of research findings must be bi-directional since research information generated in emerging countries is crucial to solving global problems and inappropriate programmes based on incomplete knowledge may otherwise be established.
Fortunately, the establishment of IRs in the developing world (~150 at June 2007) and the conversion to OA of journals published in developing regions help close the south-north digital divide that is too often considered unimportant and ignored by the development communities.
During this transition period between traditional publications and the arrival of new technology for sharing and enhancing data provided by the Internet, it is evident that the world of scholarly publishing is changing and that new technology is leading to increased access and use of research findings.
As the support programmes and institutional mandates (to provide open access to publicly funded research publications) take root, the permanence and collective support for IRs will ensure a greatly increased volume of free research articles.
The present generation of users will automatically turn to free resources available from their laptops, and authors will strive for the greatest impact for their research.
Funding bodies will require the greatest returns from their investment in terms of visibility and use, and by their very openness, OA articles will become the norm.
For developing countries, the need now is to shift the focus of information provision for research to one of a global common good where the needs of society and research for solving global problems and relieving poverty are the priority.
An electronic discussion group [42] provides a forum for African, Asian and Latin American users to keep abreast of developments in both the areas of open access to scholarly literature and knowledge-based development.
While these pivotal developments in the exchange of research information evolve, the DA programmes may provide a valuable interim service, but development organisations at all levels recognise that free exchange of essential scientific knowledge combined with capacity building is the surest way to support sustainable economic growth.
As the Global Knowledge Partnership states, there is a ‘need for a user driven approach to development and application of technologies’.
The InterAcademy Panel’s statement to the UN says, ‘Sustained progress in reducing poverty and related problems require strengthened institutions for science, technology, and innovation throughout the world, including in each developing nation’.
It is of some surprise, then, that the UN organisations are strongly supporting short-term projects, some of which are now reported to be less used than previously, but seem to be unaware of the great benefits to be gained from OA material.
It must be hoped that they will join with the growing community of universities, institutes, funding organisations and individuals who are welcoming the opportunities provided by the Internet to exchange and enhance essential publicly funded research results that form the basis of a strong and sustainable global research environment.
References United Nations.
1987.
“Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development.” General Assembly Resolution 42⁄187, 11 December 1987.
Retrieved 12 April 2007 http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/42/ares42-187.htm Système d’Information Scientifique et Technique http://www.sist-sciencesdev.net InterAcademy Council http://www.interacademycouncil.net/CMS/Reports/9866/6403/6556.aspx Swaminathan Resesearch Foundation http://www.mssrf.org/ Nehru statement http://thinkexist.com/quotation/it-is-science-alone-that-can-solve-the-problems/410964.html2.
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34, page 8 http://www.inasp.info/newslet/INASPnews34.pdf Figures for costs of journals.
For example see: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/scholcomm/journalcosts.htm Kirsop, B., Chan, L., Transforming access to research literature for developing countries, Serials Review, Vol.31, No.4, 2005 https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/4416/1/Kirsop_Chan_SerialsReview.pdf Budapest Open Access Initiative http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ UN access programmes (HINARI/OARE/AGORA) http://www.who.int/hinari/en/ Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI) http://www.inasp.info/peri/index.shtml Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL) http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/home Ptolomy Project http://www.utoronto.ca/ois/pdfs/Ptolemy_MERA.pdf Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org Registry of Open Access Repositories http://roar.eprints.org OAIster search program http://www.oaister.org OA impact study, University of Southampton http://www.citebase.org/static/isi_study/ Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study.
Technical Report, External Collaborators, Key Perspectives Inc. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/ ROAR Material Archiving Policies http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ Free Medical Journals http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/ Smith, H., Bukirwa, H., Mukasa, O., Snell, P., Adeh-Nsoh, S., Mbuyita, S., Honorati, M., Orji, B. and Garner, P., BMC Health Services Research, May 17, 2007.
Access to electronic health knowledge in five countries in Africa: a descriptive study.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/7/72 Villafuerte-Galvez, J., Curioso, W.H., Gayoso, O., “Biomedical Journals and Global Poverty: Is HINARI a Step Backwards?“, PLoS Medicine, 26 June, 2007, Letter to the Editor.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1896213 HighWire Press http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl SHERPA-RoMEO database of publishers’ policies http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php Request Copy Button information https://secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk/notices/publicnotices.php?notice=902 Jeffery, K. G., eLPUB Conference 2007 Keynote: Technical Infrastructure and Policy Framework for Maximising the Benefits from Research Output http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?_id=1406_elpub2007 SHERPA costs statement http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/poc/pages/HEIguide-costs.html Long, M., “Making intellectual property work for development”, Africa Union, Geneva, 30 May 2006 http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Maurice+Long+african+Union+2006&meta= Bioline International http://www.bioline.org.br MedKnow Publications http://www.medknow.com Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) http://www.scielo.org/index.php?lang=en INASP Africa Survey http://www.inasp.info/pubs/infobrief/InfoBrief7-OA-web.pdf HINARI future plans http://www.who.int/km4ph/connections/hinari/en/index.html Public Library of Science, Impact Factor http://www.plos.org/cms/node/233 Alma Swan, Key Perspectives, American Scientists Online, Vol 95 No.3, May-June 2007 http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55131/page/3#55167 DRIVER Project http://www.driver-repository.eu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=31 DEPOT service http://depot.edina.ac.uk/ ORCA Network, Australia http://escholarship.usyd.edu.au/dpa/orca.html IBICT OA toolbox initiative http://www.cria.org.br/eventos/codata2007/apresentacao/Presentations_10-05/Session10/Panel10.3/hkuramoto.ppt UN Millenium Development Goals http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ IAP statement to UN on Millenium Development Goals http://www.interacademycouncil.net/?id=9990 Dgroups: Development through Dialogue http://c3net@dgroups.org Editor’s note to Figure 1: I am indebted to the authors for extending the data available at this point in the article.
Revision made 15 November 2007.
Author Details Barbara Kirsop Co-founder and current secretary EPT Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) Email: ept@biostrat.demon.co.uk Web site: http://www.epublishingtrust.org Subbiah Arunachalam Trustee EPT Distinguished Fellow MS Swaminathan Research Foundation Email: Subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com Web site: http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/infopoverty/biog.htm Leslie Chan Trustee EPT Associate Director Bioline International Email: chan@utsc.utoronto.ca Web site: http://www.bioline.org.br Return to top Article Title: “Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries” Author: Barbara Kirsop, Subbiah Arunachalam and Leslie Chan Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/kirsop-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Saving Energy in the Workplace Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Saving Energy in the Workplace Buzz data software wiki blog video windows solaris usb podcast research Citation BibTex RIS Eddie Young outlines some of the issues faced by a Systems Administrator when trying to save energy in the workplace.
UKOLN has recently updated its strategy to include a more environmentally sound agenda [1].
Not only does it make ethical sense to save energy it also makes long-term financial sense.
UKOLN is based at, and also receives support from, the University of Bath.
The University is taking steps to reduce its electricity and gas usage, and is taking part in a scheme called The Big Energy Challenge [2][3] which is intended to help local organisations and businesses to reduce their energy usage by at least 10% in the next 3 years.
It is appropriate then that UKOLN should try and reduce its energy usage by the same amount.
Saving electricity is just one part of an energy saving programme towards fulfilling green objectives.
We could also consider saving water, reducing waste, and an overall reduction in consumption, perhaps considering how the phrase ‘Reduce, Recycle and Reuse’ can operate within the workplace.
However, many of these issues are outside the scope of Systems Administration.
So in this article I will try to focus primarily on reducing electricity consumption.
However it may be useful to touch upon some other energy-saving measures that I have found helpful or interesting.
Consequently its scope will largely relate to an office network of desktop PCs and running a number of Web servers and services.
Obviously any new practices suggested must satisfy not only the intentions of the green agenda, but also seek to satisfy the other strategic aims of the organisation as far as possible.
The Keystone: Staff The backbone of any energy-saving initiative is the staff with whom you work.
Saving electricity is everyone’s responsibility, and can only be effective if everyone is encouraged to play their part.
There is a perception that one’s own behaviour can make little or no difference, but it is precisely individuals’ collective actions which make all the difference.
Small changes in individual behaviour do equate to significant changes in a group’s behaviour.
The worked example provided on PC power usage is a good example.
I have had nothing but positive feedback from UKOLN colleagues in this respect, but perhaps I am lucky.
However it does need to be continually revisited and kept on an organisation’s agenda.
There is no great secret to getting people on your side, it is a matter of being open about what you are doing, providing training if and where necessary, giving feedback, and making any new measures simple to carry out.
If you are open about what you are trying to achieve, provide solutions, and let people know how well they are doing in their application then you will help motivate them as well as yourself, and so maximise collective effort.
Individual staff members know their equipment and their work requirements better than you can, and they may have more ideas, experience and expertise, specifically regarding their own area of work.
A monthly review of the improvements put in place might help to keep people in touch with progress and feel involved.
Energy Saving Flowchart The first step in saving electricity is to carry out some form of audit of current use.
Once you have made a note of where power is used, then you can make recommendations, implement them and see if they make any measurable difference.
This is only common sense, since any change of organisational policy will only take place if backed up by evidence.
The audit does not need to be completely detailed since it is a constant process which should be revisited on a regular basis.
If you systematically follow the same procedure it will help to justify any changes you may wish to make, so it might be a good idea to base this on a very simple step-bystep process, such as: Audit current energy use Find areas for improvement Implement some changes Audit current energy use again Evaluate the changes Find areas of improvement (again) Implement changes (again) etc The following diagram illustrates this: Figure 1: Energy Saving Flowchart Audit Current Energy Use The walk around [3][4] is the quickest and easiest way to determine what equipment is being used, for what and by whom.
It will also give you a chance to talk with individuals so that they know (or later in the game, are reminded) that power saving is important.
You can also get a clearer picture of the organisation as a whole.
At the outset this might, in many cases, just be a matter of counting desktop PCs, screens, printers and servers, investigating which lights are used, how long they are left on and why.
Other organisations might be more complicated.
Some useful guidelines on carrying out this survey can be found at the Carbon Trust Web site [5].
If you do not have access to the electricity meter, or some equipment directly, then you may need to find other means of collecting the data for your audit.
As far as networked office equipment (PCs, switches, printers, etc) is concerned there are monitoring tools available (eg: Spiceworks [6] and OpManager [7]) which can be used to scan your local network automatically for attached devices.
The advantage of running these kinds of tools is that they offer not only a means of auditing energy consumption, but also an equipment audit tool.
Some of these programs come with other features that you may not have considered using before, which might help in other areas of your work.
Remember that scanners and network switches, some telephones and desktop lamps all draw power.
As a basic rule anything plugged into the mains that gets hot is using current.
A very useful and cheap piece of kit is a power meter plug [8] which you can plug into anything, and will tell you the power it is consuming.
It can be quite enlightening to see the amount of power certain equipment draws, both in full power and energy saving modes.
It will also tell you how efficient the energy saving mode of your equipment is (or is not!).
This can be quite motivational, and is invaluable when putting together an overall picture of the electricity consumption of your organisation.
Auditing power usage is a continuous task.
This audit will become more and more finely tuned as you complete cycles of the flowchart and get to understand your organisation.
As such you will find new areas that can be dealt with as you progress.
During your audit talk to other members of staff about what equipment they have and what they need.
You may find these do not equate to the same thing and you might find that some dramatic changes, such as a change of network/server architecture, or simplifying someone’s workflow with some training, might be in order.
Finding Areas of Improvement Saving Electricity Saving electricity comes down to a simple action: if it’s not being used then switch it off.
Switching off desktop PC’s at night is a quick win.
For those interested I provide a simple worked example of energy consumed by an average desktop PC.
It can be seen that leaving your PC on all year, at current prices would cost you in the region of £70.
Switching it off each night can reduce this cost to £26.
This represents a saving of over £40 a year, per desktop, thereby cutting costs as well as related CO2 emissions by well over a half.
Considering that most organisations run a large number of desktop PC’s (and often servers) then you can see what sort of effect a small change like this can have .
Small changes do make a difference when implemented collectively and consistently.
Rather than shutting down the PC, you might want to consider using the Hibernate option [9].
If you select Hibernate rather than Shutdown the operating system takes a snapshot of files, Web pages, and programs that you have running, so that when you boot up again they automatically restart.
You should first close any files kept on the network (rather than locally), since this does shut down your PC.
You can set up this facility within windows XP via the Control Panel, and Power Options.
You might want to encourage your colleagues to adopt this themselves, by offering a simple set of instructions.
This might be a better way to involve staff, than the Systems team effecting/forcing the change on their behalf.
I have found that my desktop restarts much quicker using this option.
In this respect it is worth asking for volunteers to be responsible for switching off equipment in their offices at the end of the day.
These people need to know that something is safe to switch off, and it might be worth printing ‘Safe to Switch Off’ labels and marking appropriate equipment as such.
This will help everybody in the organisation feel confident about switching something off if they think they should, which can be particularly important with IT equipment.
Most servers do need to be running 24⁄7 (but some, perhaps, do not) and some people run services on their desktops that they (or others) may need whilst not in the office.
Consider just because something is called a server does it really need to be on 24⁄7?
This can (and should) be applied to all electrical equipment such as printers, scanners, power supplies, office lighting and any gadgets that might be left running [10].
Reducing Paper Usage Depending upon your responsibilities some other aspects you might want to consider might be printing/paper management, the use of paper for events and conferences, etc.
Some ideas can be found at the Green Computing Web site [3], and more specifically for businesses, the Business Green Web site [11] .
Paper is the number one item used and wasted in offices [12.
Some organisations [3] recommend putting a printing policy in place to reduce the amount of printing.
This can be a thorny issue.
Do you make printing more difficult?
(eg: reduce the number of printers available) in order to force people to consider whether their print job is really worthwhile, or do you just keep reminding them not to print unless they really must.
The answer is probably somewhere in-between: Not only does an extra printer cost money to buy, maintain and keep running, it will also obviously be used for printing, and so probably increase the amount of paper your offices use.
Discuss these issues with your work colleagues to try and find a solution that works for you.
It’s worth shopping around for recycled paper.
It is worth noting that some types contain less bleach than others.
You should be able to buy something that suits your organisation.
At UKOLN we shopped around and found a weight and colour of paper that suited us the best [13].
If you can shop around, find your preferred recycled paper, stock one printer tray with it, configuring it as the default tray.
If someone does need a top-quality printout, they then have to make the extra effort to select the paper tray holding the high-quality paper.
Depending upon the layout of your offices it might make sense to have a central print room, where all print jobs go, (and are collected.)
Not only will this be easier to maintain from a Systems Administration point of view, but will almost certainly reduce the amount of paper used.
A flexible, clearly written and available printing policy covering these areas may help persuade members of staff that this is worth trying.
A lot of good quality paper gets used when giving handouts at presentations or conferences.
An alternative might be to make your presentations available on the Web, or perhaps a on a USB memory stick, giving attendees the option to print it out themselves.
Memory sticks are cheap to buy and valuable for many other things.
On evaluating the recent IWMW event (organised by UKOLN) it was generally agreed among delegates that all next year’s documentation could be provided on a memory stick, rather than paper.
Although it may be debatable as to whether memory sticks are on the whole ‘greener’ to use than paper, a change in practice like this does throw (and keep) light on the subject, and on the related issue of paperless working.
It may also be worthwhile for you to investigate installing a recycling bin for office paper in your offices.
As well as helping to reduce recyclable materials, this is a good visual reminder to people that your organisation is making efforts to be environmentally friendly.
Disposing of Waste Reducing waste is arguably as important as saving electricity, particularly as available landfill sites become scarcer, and is becoming a serious issue.
The cost of disposing of old equipment, and hazardous waste, is certainly going to rise.
There are a great many recycling projects/companies in existence that can deal with old equipment, such as PC’s and printers for you.
It is just a matter of investigating local companies, and choosing one [14].
These items are often re-built and re-sold, or given to charities.
Don’t let doubts about data security stand in the way of recycling PCs.
They are far too valuable (not to mention also hazardous waste) to simply throw away.
In the end, whether IT kit is to be thrown away or recycled, procedures should be in place to wipe data from hard drives, or destroy them.
There are a number of tools [15][16] available for reliably wiping data from hard drives.
This must be done before equipment leaves the premises.
You should bear in mind that regulations are now in place regarding disposal of many types of electrical equipment to help reduce environmental damage [17] and in the coming years are bound to get stricter.
Improve Existing Technology Embrace Better Technologies Cutting back and being thrifty is one strategy you can take.
New and more efficient technology is constantly becoming available.
For example over the years there has been a trend in providing PCs on people’s desks.
This replaced the previous model called the Thin Client Model [18].
In a nutshell this means that all the processing required was run on one central server, rather than on the desktop machines.
The desktop was simply a screen, mouse and keyboard connected to the same single powerful server as everyone else.
These days thin clients are (necessarily) much more sophisticated and powerful [19], and the trend is beginning to turn full circle back toward them.
Particularly if you consider how generally underused the power of a modern desktop PC is.
This may of course represent a major change of network architecture, and the advantages of such a system would clearly have to be weighed carefully.
Saving energy may be a small consideration, but centrally maintaining and administering simple desktops might be a very attractive option, and worth serious consideration.
Furthermore, much headway has been made in virtualising technology [20].
This is software [21][22] that allows you to run several independent computers on one machine.
In theory you can buy one large server, and then install several servers onto it, so possibly replacing many machines with one.
This kind of approach might suit an organisation with, for example, a number of concurrent development projects.
Thought needs to be given when you consider the overall power draw of the new (usually very large and powerful) machine compared to the sum total of the equivalent number of smaller machines that it is replacing.
Network speed may also be an issue since these machines are sharing network connections.
The energy-saving benefits might be disappointing when you consider redundancy, since it is often recommended to mirror (buy two of) these machines to ensure reliable 24-hour services.
However I believe that server consolidation, or virtualisation, will play a very important part in the future of server farms and computer services; provided it is sustained by a sensible, agile (and probably thrifty) server deployment policy.
Not all changes need to be dramatic: for screens under 17 inches, a flat screen can use less that half the power of a tube monitor [10], as well as taking up less desk space and being less hazardous to dispose of.
Energy-saving light bulbs are another quick win.
A 100 Watt equivalent energy-efficient bulb can draw as little as 20 watts or less and costs very little to put in place.
Needless to say, to embrace new technology effectively with a view to saving energy in the long run, and improving current working practices, it is essential to have some freedom (time) to be able to stay in touch with developments.
Carbon Offsetting Carbon offsetting is a method of reducing your carbon emission footprint indirectly by helping reduce carbon emissions elsewhere, or funding a Carbon Sink [23] to balance the impact of your own CO2 output.
Traditionally this was associated with planting trees to offset air travel but more sophisticated schemes are now available.
There is some scepticism towards carbon offsetting in that it may be too easy to balance your carbon dioxide books, whilst continuing inefficient and environmentally unfriendly practices.
In this respect it should really only be considered aftercarefully analysing current procedures, and not used as an easy resolution to absolve oneself of environmental responsibilities.
You can find details of commercial carbon offsetting projects for businesses and institutions at the Carbon Trust Web site [24].
Equipment Suppliers If you are serious about buying new kit under an Energy Saving regime, in order to reduce your organisation’s Carbon Footprint, you need to consider both the environmental impact of the equipment you buy, but also the green credentials of your supplier.
Most new IT equipment now comes with some sort of environmental impact report, summarising its chemical and heavy metal content, and the environmental impact of its manufacture.
You can request this information from your supplier before buying equipment.
Most companies now see the benefits of producing greener products and will have some details on what they are doing [25], but again quantifying this is virtually impossible.
The environmental impact of making a new desktop PC from scratch is comparable to manufacturing a new car [26][27].
It is therefore important to try and stay in touch with new advances, and which suppliers and manufacturers might reflect your environmental concerns the closest.
Energy Suppliers The choice of your organisation’s electricity supplier can quickly and relatively easily reduce your environmental impact.
Changing energy supplier in favour of a renewable source will have a great effect on staff perception of your organisation’s seriousness, as well as on the actual carbon footprint.
Although renewable electricity can sometimes be marginally more expensive, depending upon what the source is, the more it is taken up the cheaper it will become.
With government CO2 targets to reach it will certainly come down in price as market forces come into play as they did from low power refrigerators to free range eggs.
Grants and incentives are still available although changing electricity supplier at your workplace might be easier than you may think.
It may just mean asking the right person.
The more research you can do beforehand, to compare suppliers, the better position you will be to make suggestions.
Even if it is a matter of doing an initial comparison using a Web site such as uSwitch.com [28].
Further Ideas There are hosts of energy-saving options available.
Those which you will investigate and use depend upon your circumstances and the type of work your organisation does.
In the above I have tried to concentrate on a generic networked office environment, but once you have started your energy audit you will be in a better position to know what solutions will suit your organisation best.
Once you have put the simple measures in place (such as switching off lights when not needed) you are freed up to tackle some of the other areas.
Work-related travel can play a very large part in an organisation’s carbon footprint, be it to hold face-to-face meetings with clients or colleagues, give talks or demos, attend conferences, workshops or providing training.
Tackling this is far from trivial.
If someone does travel at all then it is usually an essential part of their work and there may not always be an alternative.
Having an international outreach might also play an important part in an organisation’s structure and reputation.
Video conferencing and teleconferencing can play a part in reducing the amount of travel people need to do, but are usually poor substitutes.
It is certainly cheaper (and maybe more convenient) to hold a teleconference than it is to board a plane, but could be less effective, and sometimes not even worth considering.
That said, there are other options.
Depending on what you need to do there are many different types of remote connection software available.
Some types can give you full and remote control of a desktop (or server) [29].
Some Web sites [30][31] provide shared resources for uploading and collaborating with remote colleagues over the Web.
It’s hard to say whether tools like these actually reduce the need to travel, or encourage it in the long run.
Nevertheless with more and more international collaboration they could provide helpful options.
Although video conferencing across the Web, or teleconference calls are poor substitutes for face-to-face meetings they can (and do) provide some kind of alternative.
The better the equipment you have the better the experience is likely to be and the more you can achieve, although there are limits [32][33].
This is an area to follow closely because it will certainly change over the coming years.
There is currently a lot of talk [34][35][36] about the possibilities of conferences and meetings being run online within a virtual environment such as Second Life [37], rather than in the Real World.
Whilst these applications will certainly play a role in the future (and indeed are playing a role [38] now), what with improvements such as having speech functionality, once again it is no replacement for the real thing.
There are etiquettes that need to be addressed, and certain formalities that we take for granted, that need to be re-learned in these environments in order to have a successful event.
Concepts such as the ‘unconference’ [39] try to redefine what a conference is and how it takes place.
Amongst other things, you can use Web tools like blog posts, and wikis, as well as video links and shared documents, to exchange ideas.
It may be that some events may be better conducted as streamed video, or a discussion forum or as a podcast (for example) rather than a face-to-face event.
All these things could be taken into account when considering a new event or attending one.
These tools change the way we communicate and can provide us with a number of other options.
We will probably need to change our thinking and methods, rather than trying to find the perfect reproduction of the face-to-face meeting.
Ultimately these tools will only be used if they are simpler than, and as effective as, the current practices.
So in order to make a fair comparison of these virtual conferences with the real thing you have to address what it is about a face-to-face, real life meeting that is so valuable.
What is lost when you are using the virtual environment and is it really so important?
Can it be sacrificed for the sake of saving money, and reducing the environmental impact of your travelling?
These questions are really outside the scope of this article, but I have presented some of these options above and some links for the interested reader.
Implement Changes So far we have looked at a number of energy-saving opportunities and provided some recommendations as to other options.
The next step is to discuss how to put some of these ideas in place.
The first thing to take into account is that at the moment the effort put in to drive these changes is almost certainly going to be voluntary although probably supported in principle by your organisation and most work colleagues it will only get done if someone (you) takes on extra work and motivates colleagues to try out the changes.
Most of us need to know that what we do is appreciated and makes a difference.
So providing feedback to staff needs to be a part of your system.
Each time you evaluate the changes you have made, if possible, make the results available and advertise them.
In some organisations incentives have been put in place to encourage people to switch off monitors.
Holding inter-departmental competitions to save electricity is another idea.
Try to make your process as transparent as you can, and be open to suggestions.
Many changes are fairly minor, but when added up, do make a significant difference.
You should try tackling these first.
Not only are they easier to achieve, they often represent quick wins, and will help you get a grasp of the size of the job ahead of you.
Remember that making some small changes is better than none at all, and that once you begin the process (and continue it!)
you will be putting these issues onto everyone’s agenda.
Trying to do this whilst doing your other work is difficult and it can easily fall under the radar.
It may be useful to set up a script that emails you reminders to check certain things.
If you don’t have or can’t configure a server to do this there are services that will [40].
Remember that if anything can be automated or slipped in alongside your current work commitments then it is more likely to get addressed.
Depending upon the size of your organisation, saving energy and staying on top of it may be too big a job for one person, and so you must get the support of other members of staff.
They will be the people who put the new ideas into practice after all, and who will stay motivated for as long as they receive feedback on what they have managed to achieve.
Implementing major changes will of course be more difficult.
Every organisation is different and you will have different hurdles to jump.
You will need to convince managers that these are changes for the best, for both the organisation and the environment.
It can help improve staff morale, as well as saving money, and improving efficiency.
Evaluate Changes In order to make any kind of evaluation of any changes you have made, you need to be able to compare what you had beforehand, with what you have now.
The most effective way you could do this would be to have quantitative results, but this is not always possible.
If it were a matter of taking an electricity meter reading (or looking at a bill) and comparing it with previous bills, then you can see what progress you are making.
If you are lucky then this might be an option, but even if it is you may need to be more creative in how you measure the changes you have made.
For example how can you accurately measure the effect on your organisation’s carbon footprint of replacing recycled paper in all printers?
It is not absolutely necessary to have hard figures, be they electricity bills, or CO2 calculations, in order to justify what you have done, although if you have them then they will be more convincing.
You can start quite simply if need be.
If you can’t get quantitative information like this, then consider making your energy audit, and your recommended changes as a checklist.
Tick items off as you progress.
Your implementation stage might be to check off as many of these items as you can, and then the evaluation step might be simply to see how many items have been checked off and then do better next time.
You then have your own clear ‘before-and-after’ picture.
This can be as sophisticated or as simple as your circumstances dictate.
But devising some sort of permanent record is really important.
Not only will it outline the work you have managed to achieve, but any documentation you can provide will help you with your next audit, and help justify any green claims your organisation makes.
You may get away easily with small changes in the early stages, but unless you can at least justify them, then you may find more drastic changes (such as redesigning the network, or suggesting a carbon offset scheme) are much harder to get accepted.
The major changes you might suggest will almost certainly need hard figures to receive the green light.
Don’t try tackling it all at once.
Small organised successful changes are better than attempted big changes.
You might want to give yourself a simple unambitious target to achieve over the next couple of months.
Conclusion Saving energy is about reducing the amount of electricity, and other resources that an organisation uses.
The most effective way of implementing an energy-saving programme is the emphasis on the long-term financial savings that will result in the smaller steps, and involving as many members of staff as possible.
If something is not being used then switch it off!
A well advertised green policy can improve an organisation’s public image, and staff morale, but is pointless without some evidence to back it up.
In order to be taken seriously in this matter the evidence should be as quantitative as possible.
Some simple practical measures for saving energy can be summarised as [3]: Find out how much energy the IT systems use, and monitor ongoing consumption Ensure unused equipment is switched off Educate staff on the benefits of saving energy and recycling Establish a code of practice to minimise printing Follow a responsible waste management policy Bear in mind environmental credentials of suppliers of new equipment and of the equipment itself.
These measures could be outlined in a Green Policy, describing some of the small steps we can all take.
Individuals and staff members are what make any organisation effective, and this is no exception.
Convincing those individuals to adopt your programme is probably the single most important thing you can do.
Most energy-saving programmes are run under a volunteer basis which restricts the amount of work that can be done.
In the near future, unless the larger UK CO2 emission targets are met, then we may all end up being forced to save energy, with fewer incentives, and more penalties and restrictions.
A Carbon Audit may be a reality in the not so distant future.
The earlier you can adopt an energy-saving programme, and audit, then the easier it will be for you when this happens.
References “Environmentally-friendly business processes: We are taking steps to enhance our business processes to ensure that we fulfil our collective obligation to supporting a ‘greener’ environment”.
UKOLN Strategy and Work Programme 2007-10 Department of Estates University of Bath: Our Big Energy Challenge http://www.bath.ac.uk/estates/energy/OurBigEnergyChallinks.htm Green Computing http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/specials/2162404/green-computing Assess your organisation, Carbon Trust http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/energy/assessyourorganisation/ Assessing the energy use at your industrial site fact sheet: http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/publications/publicationdetail?productid=CTL002 Spiceworks Free Network Monitoring Software for Network Management http://www.spiceworks.com/ OpManager http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/opmanager/ Energy Optimiser Ltd Energy Metering and Controls http://www.energyoptimizersdirect.co.uk/acatalog/Energy_Devices.html?
Use Hibernate and Standby to conserve batteries http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/getstarted/hibernate.mspx Gadgets threaten Energy savings, BBC News, Science/Nature http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6266082.stm BusinessGreen http://www.businessgreen.com/ The California Integrated Waste Management Board: Measuring the Success of Office Paper Reduction Efforts http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/BizWaste/OfficePaper/Measure.htm Evolve http://www.evolve-papers.com/;also waste online: Paper recycling information sheet http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/paper.htm and Conservatree: How much paper can be made from a tree?
http://www.conservatree.org/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml RecommIT: IT Disposal http://www.recommit.co.uk/ Trusted Solaris Operating System Technical FAQs http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/trustedsolaris/ts_tech_faq/faqs/purge.xml Dariks Boot and Nuke (HArd Drive Disk Wipe) http://dban.org Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR): Factsheets on Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) http://www.berr.gov.uk/sectors/sustainability/weee/Factsheets/page41148.html Thin Client: Wikipedia, accessed 6 February 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client ; FOLDOC http://foldoc.org/index.cgi?query=thin+client&action=Search Sun Software http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop&tab=3&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients Virtualisation: Wikipedia, accessed 6 February 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualisation ; also “Towards Virtualisation: A New Approach in Server Management”, Eddie Young and Matt Thrower, April 2007, Ariadne Issue 51 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/young-thrower/ VMware http://www.vmware.com/ XenSource: Open Source Virtualization http://www.citrixxenserver.com/Pages/default.aspx Carbon dioxide sink: Wikipedia, accessed 6 February 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_sink Carbon Trust: Where does offsetting fit in a robust carbon management strategy?
http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/carbon/briefing/ Apple and the Environment http://www.apple.com/environment/ UN study: Think upgrade before buying a new PC, Martyn Williams, 7 March 2004, InfoWorld http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/03/07/hnunstudy_1.html IT and Environment Initiative http://www.it-environment.org/ uSwitch.com http://www.uswitch.com/ What is VNC?
(Virtual Network Computing) http://www.cae.wisc.edu/site/public/?title=fswhatvnc 37signals: Simple small business software http://www.37signals.com/ http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html “Advanced Collaboration with the Access Grid”, Michael Daw, January 2005, Ariadne Issue 42, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/daw/ “Virtual Rooms, Real Meetings”, Andy Powell, October 2004, Ariadne Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/powell/ Reflections on Second Life and the symposium at Silversprite http://www.silversprite.com/?p=307 eFoundations: efsym2007 revisited http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2007/06/efsym2007_revis.html Paul Walk’s weblog: Eduserv Syposium 2007: Virtual Worlds, real learning http://blog.paulwalk.net/2007/05/13/eduserv-symposium-2007-virtual-worlds-real-learning/ Second Life: Your World.
Your Imagination http://secondlife.com “The Second Life of UK Academics”, John Kirriemuir, October 2007, Ariadne Issue 53 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/kirriemuir/ Unconference: Wikipedia, accessed 6 February 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference Memo to Me Internet Reminder Service http://www.memotome.com/ Author Details Eddie Young Networked Systems Officer Systems Team UKOLN Email: e.young@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Saving Energy in the Workplace” Author: Eddie Young Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/young/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 58: People Still Matter Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 58: People Still Matter Buzz data software portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility repositories preservation oai-pmh cataloguing hypertext ebook vle frbr moodle e-science e-research interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 58.
Having returned once more to the fray somewhat chastened by the experience of eye surgery, alone and without a general anaesthetic (with apologies to Rumpole and the late lamented John Mortimer [1] ), but hugely impressed by the ministrations of the NHS, I am struck once again by the enormous importance of people, both within the community that Ariadne serves as well as those domains beyond, and in which all are nonetheless increasingly, but quite naturally, dependent on technology for their success.
I think it will be quite evident from a reading of many of this issue's contributions that the technology will not succeed as well as hoped were it not for the ingenuity, determination and skill of the people who devise and operate those various technologies.
Let me mention for example the experts in the article on eResearch in the State of Victoria, Australia, who are brought together to resolve difficulties in eResearch or the staff in the local authority archives sector who are doing their best to preserve access to local heritage material within a rapidly changing landscape.
Or for that matter, the staff in a Scottish university library whose dedication and high standards of service have come to be the linch-pin in that institution's bold strategy for its Library in the 21st century.
Most significantly, at this moment, I would want to point to the value of the opinions of the people who read this publication and the fact that I am hoping they will spare me some of their ever-decreasing 'non-deliverable' time to respond to our readers survey which I have placed in a separate page to ensure no one is 'mugged' by the invitation pop-up that comes with the survey software.
I have organised it so that you can elect, or not, to help me out by clicking on the hypertext link below.
I am very conscious of the numbers of surveys we are all asked to complete, often for very good reasons, but I am not keen to force mine upon you though I would be very pleased if you could spare the five questions some of your time.
They relate to what you appreciate about Ariadne, its content and improvements you would like to see.
I suppose I shall have to admit I would never make a salesman because I find it too hard to impose the 'product' upon the 'subjects'; I can all too easily understand your position.
Nonetheless, if you do kindly elect to help, I have designed the survey to be straightforward and humane.
My thanks are on the page in which the Ariadne readers survey appears.
Returning to our content, I am particularly grateful to Derek Law for his recounting to us An Awfully Big Adventure: Strathclyde's Digital Library Plan since I feel it works very much in support of the JISC initiative on Digital Libraries of the Future [2].
While of course Strathclyde's plan is very much at the embryonic stage, there can be little doubting its grasp of the realities when planning for the future.
Faced with the consequences of the fact that 'Growth runs at over a kilometre of shelving a year' it is hardly surprising that thought was given to a solution other than building more buildings.
However, despite his quip that some might begin to ask why anyone needs a library at all with initiatives from Google and the appearance of more activity in the region of e-books than previously, readers I am sure will be in little doubt that libraries and, above all, the librarians who work in them will remain central to the support of students and researchers alike.
One need only consider the alarm that commentators have raised [3] concerning the false assumptions made about the new generation of users' ability to study using the seemingly easy-to-use new resources to realise that librarians' expertise will continue to represent a cornerstone of HEI services.
It is of particular note therefore that Derek writes 'Strathclyde has a converged management structure for Library, IT and Learning Services.
It has pioneered the use of laptops in teaching and has substantial collections of e-material, as well as its own digitisation unit.
So the Library has a lot of experience of changing user behaviour and expectations.'
Once again we come back to the importance of staff expertise and their ability to support users towards more effective practice in their employment of the new technologies.
Technology inevitably alters human behaviour, but only trained humans can show new users how to adopt best practice.
In declaring it is Time to Change Our Thinking: Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital Scholarship, Stephen G. Nichols argues that humanists need to replace the silo model of digital scholarship with collaborative ventures based on interoperability and critical comparison of content.
He describes the current situation across most digital humanities projects as one of individual initiatives operating not just independently but, rather, stand-alone, with the emphasis on the last two syllables.
Each in effect is operating within its own 'sub-disciplinary silo' as Stephen terms it.
He goes on to write that while this situation might originate in the way research projects were approached in the humanities analogue age, and would appear to have been replicated in the digital equivalent, Stephen argues that digital humanities is no longer 'at the pioneering stage' and cannot rest on its laurels.
Nonetheless, in a balanced view, the author readily acknowledges the achievements in digitisation including that born of the agreement between the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins.
By December 2009, he points out, the BnF and the digital curators at Johns Hopkins will have digitised approximately 140 manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose the most popular vernacular romance of the Middle Ages and have integrated them onto its Web site.
He describes the effect the development of digital tools has had upon teaching and scholarship with respect to the Roman de la Rose; and how the site, the largest digital manuscript library of a single work holding some 100,000 images, has had a transformative effect upon the the understanding of medieval literature and even reading habits.
He goes on to argue that it would be highly beneficial for the Rose Web site to interact with other sites devoted to late medieval authors.
With his exposition firmly in place, Stephen turns to the tendency of digital humanities projects to place digital tools ahead of what he terms 'cognition', i.e.
the thinking behind the project which recognised the value of its subject, 'the 'work of thinking' that led us to it in the first place'.
He elaborates through an analysis of the process of humanities research over time as it operated in tandem with the supporting technologies of the day, ranging from parchment via typing paper to bits and bytes, indicating the most influential changes along the way.
Principal among them, within the digital era, Stephen points to the sheer scale of what is (or he would contend I suspect, ought to be) available to humanities researchers.
He provides us a most telling description in my view of the effect that the availability to researchers of multiple versions of a work, such as the Roman de la Rose has had upon the understanding of the medieval environment in which such works were created and modified.
Stephen highlights the difficulties such emerging and large amounts of data will represent in this domain: in his view they constitute 'a sea change in humanities scholarship that gives pause to many.'
Traditionally, he maintains, humanists have neither worked with so much data nor with other practitioners as arises in other domains such as the sciences.He insists that a new mind-set is essential if the humanities are to address the changes being ushered in by data-driven research.
I am confident that many readers within and outside humanities projects will read with interest the suggestions he subsequently offers.
I am very pleased to welcome back Ann Borda to these pages.
I asked her if she would write further on eResearch in the Australian context after her report with colleagues on the 2008 eResearch Australasia Conference in Issue 57.
In her article entitled Supporting eResearch: The Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative, Ann provides a clear overview of the aims of the VeRSI Programme which works with selected research groups to develop demonstrator use cases illustrating the benefits of eResearch to researchers, primarily in the areas of life sciences and eco-sciences.
Of particular interest I noted, in the context of staff skills, that 'A skills matrix method is used for resourcing software development projects and this has proven more suitable than the conventional 'project-based' approach.
For each VeRSI project, 'skills' are coordinated so that they are incorporated as necessary during the project lifecycle.'
I further noted that 'The VeRSI mode of engagement has in part been informed by the 'collaboratories' or 'living labs' examples in the U.S. and Europe respectively'.
This model is adopted when research difficulties are encountered which appear insuperable by individuals alone and a team of skilled experts are drafted in to deal with them.
Moreover the parties concerned will be pleased to note that 'The outcomes of the ENGAGE Programme in the UK, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the National eScience Centre (NeSC) activities and NSF Cyberinfrastructure have had significant bearing on the methodologies of approach as well.'
Meanwhile others will be interested to know that 'VeRSI is also committed to work with the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) initiative in the support of data management planning from the researcher level upwards to whole institutional policies.'
After Frances' seminar here at UKOLN, it was an added bonus to to be able to persuade Frances Boyle, Alexandra Eveleigh and Heather Needham to write for Ariadne on the matter of Preserving Local Archival Heritage for Ongoing Accessibility.
The initiative described in this article focuses on the local authority archives sector and is an outcome of collaborative work from Frances, Alexandra and Heather, the Digital Preservation Coalition and The National Archives.
Central to their contribution is the survey they conducted which was designed to collect a snapshot view of the state of preparedness within the local authority archive sector in respect of digital preservation.
The article points out that 'It was clear that several services aspire to implement more managed procedures in the near future, although many also have a backlog of older material to work through.'
It is evident from this article that while the situation is mixed there is a considerable degree of aspiration in respect of better procedures and outcomes.
While difficulties in respect of 'kit' exist, I note that obtaining server storage was a problem mentioned in the suvey, but this sort of problem is more easily overcome than the reported skills shortage and ensuring effective cooperation with IT departments whose concerns are not all groundless, for example with respect to security.
The authors however take heart from the outcomes of the survey and the consultation day on which they report.
While noting that the survey returns indicated a significant number of practitioners who were yet to be come engaged in the momentum being created, they are encouraged by 'the beginnings of a 'community of the willing'.'
In The European Film Gateway Georg Eckes and Monika Segbert describe a Best Practice Network funded under the eContentplus Programme of the European Commission, which is building a portal for access to film archival resources in Europe.
In pursuit of my policy of keeping useful threads running I am delighted that this article comes as something of a follow-up to Rob Davis' contribution in Issue 57 on Europeana [4].
The European Film Gateway (EFG) consists of 20 partner institutions and over the next three years will work towards the development of an online portal offering integrated access to more than 700,000 digitised objects from Europe's film archives and cinémathèques.
In their article Georg and Monika not only provide a rationale for the EFG and the key aims of the project but also give a view of the structure contributing to Europeana overall.
Furthermore they highlight the key issues that the project will have to address and which comprise the usual suspects, interoperability and IPR (Intellectual Property Rights).
They round off by providing us with a run-down of the initiatives contributing to the European digital library, museum and archive which among them will offer access to 10 million digital resources, it is hoped, by 2012.
For readers concerned they have wandered onto some Disney promotion site, MrCute ingeniously stands for Moodle Repository, Create, Upload, Tag, and Embed and is a repository system for the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Its role is to allow content that has been uploaded to online course areas on a VLE to be shared with other users and employed in more than one location by more than one person.
In The MrCute Repository: The Next Phase Helen Brady explains that MrCute 1 offers users a means of searching for materials by keyword in addition to browsing by category.
It also enables the repository to be populated, i.e.
users could upload their own materials to share and tag them appropriately for searching and browsing.
The JISC-funded MrCute 2 Project is tasked with developing this functionality further, but also aims to make the current user interface as simple and intuitive as possible.
In her article Helen covers the Project's research and initial findings which identified that certain factors, which she lists, influence the use of repositories in terms both of MrCute 1 and wider repository system use.
She then describes how MrCute 2 should help to resolve some of the problems and how it is being designed with its users very much in mind and in close consultation with the Moodle community.
It is anticipated that such an approach will go far to overcoming the barriers to use that have so far been identified.
I am indebted to Talat Chaudhri for his article on the difficulties in Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles and his careful look at the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) structure of the Dublin Core Application Profiles.
The origin of his article lies in the problems that arise with the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set whenever one seeks to describe specific types of resources in detail, as opposed to making metadata interoperable between repositories for purposes such as OAI-PMH.
Talat also points to the fact that simple Dublin Core as a metadata model fails to permit relationships between different versions or copies of the document to be described.
In his consideration of FRBR he issues the stark reminder that FRBR was designed for library catalogues rather than repositories and that the purposes and requirements delivering resources over the Web through repositories are very different to those of library systems.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews of a new book on the topic of metadata design, implementation and evaluation in theory and practice; a guide for academic libraries on integrating geographic information systems into library services; a work which brings together perspectives on learner support from academics, librarians and student support professionals, and; a work offering simple ideas on the presentation, design and delivery of Powerpoint presentations.
In addition of course we provide our usual section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 58.
References Obituary: Sir John Mortimer, Geoffrey Robertson, Guardian Unlimited, 16 January 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jan/16/mortimer-rumpole-dies-obituary JISC: Libraries of the Future http://www.jisc.ac.uk/librariesofthefuture "The University of Google Education in the (Post) Information Age".
Review by Judy Reading, January 2008, Ariadne Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/reading-rvw/ Rob Davies, "Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content", October 2008, Ariadne Issue 57 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/davies/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 58: People Still Matter" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data mobile software rdf database xml portal archives metadata standardisation blog copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing graphics marc e-learning ontologies photoshop svg e-business vle wsrp interoperability foi foia privacy url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
PV 2005: Ensuring long-term preservation and adding value to scientific and technical data Royal Society of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 21-23 November 2005 This conference is the third of a series on long-term preservation and adding value to scientific data.
Topics covered include: 1.
Ensuring long-term data preservation State of the art of data archiving and access techniques, for example: What standardisation has to offer (in the form of feedback from experience) Adapting archiving techniques to the different categories of information handled, such as scientific data, technical data, documents, sounds and images System architecture in the context of constant technological developments 2.
Adding value to data State of the art of techniques used to add value to data (description of data and associated services) The operational use of systems (services provided for users, value added services, etc.)
3.
Lessons Learnt Examples of working systems which claim to provide digital curation services, and the lessons that can be derived from them The operational use of archives (inserts and updates, migration of media, etc.)
4.
Future Prospects What services will be needed in future to support digital curation Anticipating future users' needs A full programme of papers and social events is available.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/pv-2005/programme/ Back to headlines Online Information 2005 29 November 1 December 2005 Olympia Grand Hall, London, UK http://www.online-information.co.uk/ Online Information is a 3-day international exhibition and conference addressing online content and information management solutions.
It is a an event designed for information professionals, information management professionals and senior business decision-makers.
Programme details are obtainable at: http://www.online-information.co.uk/ol05/conferenceprogramme.html Back to headlines TASI Workshops in November and December 2005 The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) offers a wide range of practical training courses.
The following courses are being run during November and December (all in Bristol, UK): Image Capture Beginners Thursday 10 November Provides a theoretical overview of image capture combined with practical exercises in using scanners and digital cameras.
Image Capture Intermediate Friday 11 November Scanning and image optimisation techniques for those who already have some experience.
Includes calibration, techniques for capturing different types of images and ways of getting the most out of scanning and optimisation software.
Introduction to Photoshop Thursday 1 December Intended for non-technical professionals who require basic image manipulation techniques for creating printed or onscreen images.
Technical theory and explanation are supported through a range of hands-on activities.
Digital Rights Management Friday 16 December Covers copyright and other legal issues as they relate to digital images.
Offers practical approaches to securing and protecting copyright within a digital environment.
Full details on these and other TASI workshops are available on the TASI Web site Training page: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ Back to headlines The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the University Campus As part of its 2005-2006 Intellectual Property in Academia Online Workshop Series, the Center for Intellectual Property at University of Maryland University College is pleased to offer some answers to questions such as: Are students on your campus copying and transmitting music and copyrighted data on institutional networks?
Has your institution been served with cease & desist letters?
Have you had to remove content from websites as a result of such a demand?
Do you have concerns about institutional responsibilities when contacted by a content provider?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the University Campus: A Safe Harbor?
http://www.umuc.edu/cip/ipa/workshops.html#dmca November 7-November 18, 2005 This asynchronous online workshop is designed for faculty, university counsel, librarians, administrators, and instructional design and information professionals.
COURSE GOALS--Workshop participants will: Discuss the DMCA's original intentions to provide OSPs with liability protection Review DMCA history and analyze recent DMCA judicial opinions Discuss concepts of OSP and Safe Harbor Consider the universities' responsibilities as OSPs, particularly with P2P file sharing Discuss legislative developments and case studies demonstrating practical applications.
Register online at https://nighthawk.umuc.edu/CIPReg.nsf/Application?OpenForm For additional information visit http://www.umuc.edu/cip/ipa Or contact: Jack Boeve Center for Intellectual Property University of Maryland University College http://www.umuc.edu/cip Back to headlines ELPUB 2006: Digital Spectrum: Integrating Technology and Culture ELPUB 2006:the 10th International Conference on Electronic Publishing 14-16 June 2006, Bansko, Bulgaria Conference Web site: http://www.elpub.net/ Submission date for papers: 21 November 2005 ELPUB 2006 invites contributions for papers, tutorials, workshops, posters and demonstrations on the following topics: General Track: Publishing models, tools, services and roles Digital content chain / publication cycle Open Access Metadata use and interoperability Semantic web Multilingual and multimodal interfaces Digital libraries for different user communities Interactive TV Electronic publishing for impaired users Security, privacy and copyright issues Digital preservation and access Electronic publishing in eLearning applications Economic dimensions of electronic publishing Technical Track: XML applications Metadata encoding process (OAI-PMH, RDF, etc.)
Open source tools Content search, analysis and retrieval Interoperability and scalability Textual and graphical information sources (SVG) Ontologies and classification Electronic publishing for mobile services Security, preservation, quality assurance Recommendations, guidelines, standards Recommendations, guidelines, standards Please, note that the list of topics is not exhaustive.
Therefore, submissions on any topic within the overall conference theme will be considered.
Back to headlines UKeiG Meeting: FOI: How are we doing?
Implications for e-information and the information professional The John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester Wednesday, 23 November 2005, 9.45 16.30 Course Outline The first year of the Freedom of Information Act has seen the emergence of a series of new activities: new journals on freedom of information, records managers in high demand, courses on every aspect of FOI and tales of journalists aggressively testing the system to expose the cracks.
This meeting focuses on the information and how it is handled.
Firstly, case studies and examples that illustrate in a practical way the progress that has been made during 2005 will be presented, followed by two sessions dealing with the e-information itself.
How FOI affects the methods by which information and especially e-information is handled, and new opportunities for exploiting e-information will be described.
Finally, the meeting will cover the role of the information professional.
Where do information professionals, in whatever guise, fit in?
Are those not formally trained in information management now running FOI activities?
Does it matter?
Are traditional information skills such as organisation, retrieval, and handling enquiries being used or is the wheel being re-invented?
This meeting hopes to explore these issues, answer the questions and stimulate lively discussions.
Topics to be covered include: Summary of progress to date Examples of best practice E-information practice using disclosure logs E-information opportunities using FOI as a research tool The role of the information professional a lost opportunity Looking ahead new initiatives for the future Course Presenter: Steve Wood Steve Wood is a Senior lecturer in Information Management at Liverpool John Moores University.
He lectures and researches on FOI and e-business areas.
He is editor of a Freedom of Information Act Blog and founding editor of Open Government: a journal on freedom of information.
Other speakers include Tim Turner, FOI Officer, Wigan Council and Guy Daines, Policy Advisor at CILIP.
To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place by 16 November, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk.
Further details are also available via the UKeiG Web site at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Alternatively contact: Christine Baker Tel & Fax 01969 663749 Email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk Back to headlines {C}{C}{C}{C} People's Network Launches Enquire, Discover and Read England's public libraries are joining forces to provide a suite of new online services Enquire, Discover and Read.
Managed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) the new services will be available for the first time from a single national Web site for public libraries with 24-hour/7-days a week library services to help answer any question, guide users through the Web and explore books and reading online.
The Enquire service will give the public online access around the clock to library and information staff.
In an innovative move which has involved co-operation with international partners in the US and Canada, questions of any kind are answered in real time, 24/7, free of charge either via a live chat link or by email.
Discover helps people to find their way through the online world, bringing together a rich range of resources, from news items and quick links to Web sites to information about collections and objects in libraries, museums and archives.
Users can also personalise Discover to access resources that match their particular interests.
Read aims to enhance enjoyment of books and reading by giving people access to great reading resources as well as opportunities to meet other readers either face to face or online.
The new services are available at http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/ [Source: MLA News http://www.mla.gov.uk/news/] [Received: October 2005] Back to headlines Resource Description and Access: Revision of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules The Joint Steering Committee (JSC) for Revision of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules is currently working on a new standard for resource description 'RDA: Resource Description and Access'.
RDA is built on the foundations established by AACR and will provide a comprehensive set of guidelines and instructions on resource description and access covering all types of content and media.
The new standard is being developed for use primarily in libraries, but consultations are being undertaken with other major stakeholders (e.g.
system developers, metadata communities, MARC format developers, and international programmes such as the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, the ISSN International Centre, and IFLA) in an effort to attain an effective level of alignment between RDA and the metadata standards used in those communities.
RDA is due to be published in 2008.
A Prospectus has been produced to provide information about RDA.
The document is in three parts: the prospectus text a draft outline of the chapters of RDA a sample text to demonstrate the style and layout of RDA The Prospectus and more detailed information of some of the areas to be incorporated into the new standard can be found on the Joint Steering Committee Web site: http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/ The work of the JSC relies heavily on the members of the constituent organisations.
The UK's interests on the JSC are represented by CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and the British Library.
There are six JSC constituencies the other four are the American Library Association, the Australian Committee on Cataloguing, the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing and the Library of Congress joint Committee on Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules.
CILIP draws its representatives from a variety of library and cataloguing agencies.
Together with representatives from the British Library they form the CILIP/BL joint Committee on Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules.
The CILIP/BL Committee can be contacted via: the Chair and BL representative Sally Strutt sally.strutt@bl.uk or via the CILIP representative Hugh Taylor jrht3@cam.ac.uk [Received: October 2005] Back to headlines Open Access Citation Information Study In February 2005, JISC's Scholarly Communications Group (SCG) commissioned a study to look at Open Access citation information.
This study was intended to examine the present sources for citation information on open access content, consider an ideal structure for the nature of citation information on open access content and the means of its collection and distribution, and write a report making recommendations to JISC for consideration in a national and international context.
The study has now completed its final report, a condensed and extended version of which can be found on the JISC SCG home page at the URL below.
It is envisaged that the report will contribute to JISC's thinking in this area and it is currently being considered in that context.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=jcie_scg [Received: October 2005] Back to headlines Revealweb Receives a Further Award Revealweb, a Web site that brings together information about accessible resources for visually impaired people, was presented with a Getting the Message Across Award from the National Information Forum (NIF) on 19 October 2005 at the Law Society, London.
The awards acknowledge excellence and imagination in the provision of information to disabled people and others severely disadvantaged by lack of appropriate information.
The citation noted that "the selection panel were impressed by the innovatory aspect of the service, the fact that it is free and the sheer scale of the resource".
Revealweb is a free Internet database that brings together information details of over 100,000 books and information in alternative formats available from more than 200 organisations in the UK.
It offers a choice of formats, including audiocassettes, Braille, talking books, large and giant print, Moon, Braille music, tactile graphics and audio-described videos and information about new titles is continuously added.
A complementary register of suppliers gives information on services for visually impaired people.
Revealweb has already received a Commendation of Widening Access to Information in the 2005 Jodi Mattes Awards and was praised in the House of Commons Select Committee report on public libraries.
Revealweb was launched in September 2003 and is currently funded by MLA.
[Sources: MLA News http://www.mla.gov.uk/news/ Focus on UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/focus/issue16/] [Received: October 2005] Back to headlines Outstanding Library and Archive Collections Receive National Recognition The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has announced a list of 38 collections in libraries and archives across England that have been recognised as having outstanding national and international importance under the Designation Scheme.
Celebrating and safeguarding the nation's heritage held in libraries and archives, the new status will enable the 28 libraries and archives to raise the profile of the collections and attract more visitors.
The list includes an impressive variety of library and archive collections, ranging from religious and Higher Education library collections to business and company archives.
Some highlights include: Archives relating to Cornwall's hard-rock mining industry in Cornwall Record Office A comprehensive overview from the sixteenth century to the present day All holdings in the Britten-Pears library, one of the UK's most important music archives and facilities for music research.
The unrivalled Birmingham Collection, charting every aspect of Birmingham's history, at the Birmingham Central library, as well as photographic, archive, literature, music and printing collections.
The Archive of the United Africa Company held by Unilever Archive and Records Management in the North West containing papers dating from the late eighteenth century to the colonial period of African history and its aftermath.
All collections held in the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Further information: http://www.mla.gov.uk/news/press_article.asp?articleid=867 [Received: October 2005] Back to headlines CREE Project Announces Full Collection of Reports and Results Further to the release of the October issue of D-Lib containing an article describing the work of the CREE (Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment) Project, together with a companion article in this issue of Ariadne providing an overview of the technical development, the Project itself announces the availability of the full collection of reports and results from the work undertaken.
The CREE Project was funded by JISC to explore the user requirements for the presentation of Internet search tools within institutional environments (e.g, a local web environment, a VLE/course management system or an institutional portal).
Technical investigation of the JSR 168 and WSRP portlet standards was also carried out to examine their potential for enabling such presentation.
(See article in this issue.)
All reports and results are available through the project Web site at http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/, together with a range of presentations and publications describing the work.
The reports newly released are as follows: Summary Overview of the project, its work and conclusions User testing report and results spreadsheet Over 70 people across three institutions took part in a series of user testing sessions with three fully functional interactive demonstrators, based on one of the institutional environments listed above.
The results provide feedback on the use of search tools within each of these environments (generally very positive) as well as providing valuable comments on the role of searching to back up findings from earlier reports on the survey and focus groups carried out.
Screenshots of the demonstrators are also available.
Final reports on the investigation of JSR 168 and WSRP portlet standards The final reports from the technical partners in the CREE Project capture much of the experience gained from the adaptation of existing search tools for use within a portlet, as well as provide tips and leads for others wishing to explore these technologies.
Literature Review A wide-ranging literature review has informed the work of the Project throughout its lifetime.
It addresses the functional aspects of searching as well many of the technologies behind searching.
Communications and Collaboration Tools Feasibility Study To complement the investigation of the presentation of search tools within institutional environments, a survey and series of interviews were carried out to investigate user requirements for the presentation of communication and collaboration tools within the same environments and the capability of JSR 168 and WSRP to enable this, respectively.
The Final Report of the Project [Received: October 2005] Back to headlines Dramatic Rise in Number of Authors Publishing in Open Access Journals Twenty-nine percent of senior authors questioned say that they have published in an open access journal, according to a new independent survey.
This is up 18% compared to a similar question asked in a study carried out in 2004 by the same researchers, a two-and-a-half-fold increase in just twelve months.
BioMed Central has welcomed the fact that independent research is now available to confirm its own experience of the continuing growth of open access publishing.
"New Journal Publishing Models: An International Survey of Senior Researchers" was produced by CIBER, an independent publishing think tank based at City University in London.
The study, published in September 2005, is based on a survey of 5513 authors "typically principal investigators or research group leaders" who had published in an ISI-indexed journal during 2004.
It is the follow up to a previous CIBER study conducted in 2004.
Ian Rowlands and Dave Nicholas, the authors of the report, found that "the research community is now much more aware of the open access issue."
The report authors write "There has been a large rise in authors knowing quite a lot about open access (up 10 percentage points from the 2004 figure) and a big fall in authors knowing nothing at all about open access (down 25 points)."
30% of authors surveyed claimed to know "a lot" or "quite a lot" about open access journals.
This is up from 18% in the 2004 survey.
Altogether 81% of authors claim to have some awareness of open access, up from 66% in 2004.
Rowlands and Nicholas found that "Authors strongly believe that, as a result of open access, articles will become more accessible".
75% of authors surveyed agreed with the statement "High prices make it difficult to access the journals literature".
The researchers also found that "senior authors and researchers believe downloads to be a more credible measure of the usefulness of research than traditional citations."
Open access has been shown elsewhere to lead higher downloads of articles.
According to PNAS publisher Ken Fulton, "PNAS Open Access articles receive 50% more full-text accesses and PDF downloads than subscription-access articles in the first month after publication and maintain higher usage in subsequent months."
The average research article published in BioMed Central's journals in the last year has received more than 1100 accesses in the first 3 months following publication, and BioMed Central recently introduced a "Highly accessed" logo to identify those articles which have received a large number of accesses for their age.
The CIBER report was commissioned by the Publishers Association and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.
The full report is available from CIBER's Web site at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ciber/ciber_2005_survey_final.pdf Source: BioMed Central [Received: October 2005] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Supporting Creativity in Networked Environments: The COINE Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Supporting Creativity in Networked Environments: The COINE Project Buzz data database usability infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus digitisation accessibility schema copyright video preservation graphics passwords provenance youtube interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Geoff Butters, Amanda Hulme and Peter Brophy describe an approach to enabling a wide range of users to create and share their own stories, thus contributing to the development of cultural heritage at the local level.
Cultural heritage has an important role to play in today’s society.
Not only does it help us to understand our past but it also has an impact on social development, the economy and education.
Developments in Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have provided new opportunities for the manipulation of cultural heritage.
Digitisation of cultural material has widened access beyond the boundaries of traditional memory institutions and has provided scope for adding value to collections.
The involvement of non-experts in creating recordings of cultural heritage, in whatever medium, so as to capture the experience of ‘ordinary citizens’ in their own terms, could lead to richer and more illuminating collections as new insights and previously hidden information is revealed.
This democratises the creation of cultural heritage, removing it from an elitist monopoly, and provides new perspectives on local, regional, national and international events.
Advantages of this approach to building collections include greater relevance to the lives of ordinary people, while individuals gain a sense of achievement from seeing their work published.
Technology also opens up new possibilities for both creating and sharing cultural content both locally and globally.
Rather than locking up the record of our heritage in institutional collections, it becomes possible for users to identify common interests with other people all over the world.
The success of services like YouTube [1] and MySpace [2] testifies to the attractiveness of this concept.
What such services lack, however, is authority, provenance and even short-term maintenance or preservation.
The creation and sharing of content by the individual was the central objective of a European Commission-funded project, COINE (Cultural Objects In Networked Environments) which was completed in 2005 and underwent detailed evaluation in 2005-6.
The project aimed to empower ordinary citizens by providing them with the opportunity to produce and share their own cultural material.
During the project a Web-based system was developed to provide the necessary tools to allow individuals to publish their cultural material online, and subsequently to share it on a local, national and international basis.
A key theme of the project was accessibility for all and, as such, the system’s interface and functionality were simplified to allow everyone to use it, regardless of their familiarity with computers.
In doing so it provided the opportunity for many new users to become involved with ICTs and cultural heritage in a relatively easy way.
The European Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme: Heritage for All Though the term ‘cultural heritage’ is becoming familiar, it is one that lacks clear definition.
In the DigiCULT Report Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow’s Cultural Economy Mulrenin and Geser [3] define ‘culture’ as a ‘product of our everyday life’, whilst UNESCO, on the World Heritage Web site, defines ‘heritage’ as ‘our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations.’ [4].
Taken together, these perhaps provide an adequate working definition.
Cultural heritage has become an important focus of governments worldwide, largely due to its economic potential, particularly in an information-driven society.
This point is illustrated by the fact that in many advanced countries the cultural economy accounts for approximately five per cent of GDP [5].
To consider it in purely economic terms, however, would be short-sighted and indeed the importance of cultural heritage in addressing social issues is also widely acknowledged.
In addition it intersects in a variety of ways with learning, both formal and informal, as is highlighted by the DigiCULT Report, where it is suggested that ‘cultural heritage institutions are in a prime position to deliver unique learning resources that are needed at all educational levels.’ [6] This point of view is reflected in the Archives Task Force Report, Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future, which notes the potential of using archives to ‘enrich and enhance teaching and learning and contribute to raising standards in education.’ [7] Accordingly, funding and policy are directed by governments to ensure that their cultural heritage is exploited to its maximum potential.
For memory institutions libraries, museums and archives recent developments in ICTs have provided the opportunity to digitise the artefacts and documents that represent our cultural heritage, and so have opened up possibilities both for their preservation and increased accessibility.
The COINE Project One of the most important aspects of digital interactivity is the potential it creates for relating collections to personal experience.
Trant [8] considers that consumers are more concerned with how cultural objects link to their own lives rather than with the records that link to those objects.
The creation of content by the user requires a more complex level of interactivity than search, retrieval and use but it is considered an ‘integral part of connecting cultural heritage resources to people’s lives’ [9], and, as noted in the report of the Archives Task Force: ‘The growth of community archives … has in part stemmed from a desire by individuals and groups to record and share culturally diverse experiences and stories.
This grassroots movement is an expression of the often strongly felt need to celebrate, record, and rebuild the sense of community in our lives today.’ [10].
This was very much the vision of the COINE Project: to develop tools for ordinary people to create their own cultural heritage materials.
This concept is not in itself new: its popularity is demonstrated by the proliferation of local history societies, and in family history research.
In the past material produced by these groups has remained relatively isolated and inaccessible to anyone who might share an interest.
Kelly, one of the project staff, noted that: ‘None of these things [personal and local collections and societies] provide a simple systematic and efficient way of recording, searching and sharing heritage research and local “stories”’ [11] The COINE Project aimed to address this through the development of a Web-based service that allows the ordinary citizen, someone without expertise in cultural heritage or ICTs, to create, share and use cultural material.
Through COINE, people could have the opportunity to write and publish their own stories electronically, thus exploiting the potential of personal experience and history.
Images and other objects could be inserted anywhere in the text.
Because it was essential that the COINE system was usable by everyone, even by those who had little or no previous computer skills.
The system was developed with a very simple interface, hiding much of the functionality.
The COINE system was also designed to allow the cultural material being created to be shared among communities.
Kelly had highlighted a lack of consistency and difficulties in interoperability between cultural heritage projects.
In many cases such systems ‘lack coherence, structure and interoperability’ [12].
A lack of standards compliance lies behind these problems, but failure to use common terminologies also plays a big part.
COINE attempted to overcome the latter problem by using a common set of high-level subject descriptors, also called topic areas, and a shared metadata schema.
The latter enabled each user group to develop it own thesaurus, or use one available to it.
This approach was seen to be particularly appropriate for a multi-lingual partnership, since the topic areas could be translated into any language very easily while the thesauri were domain-specific essential when so much material related to local areas and events.
As a hosted service, the COINE system was designed to be attractive to small institutions without ready access to technical expertise.
However, such institutions often have high levels of professional and sometimes domain expertise (especially in areas such as local history) and utilising this gives them a significant benefit over ‘free for all’ systems (as MySpace and YouTube have become), because the authority of the institution gives credence to the objects created while mediation enables the worst excesses, such as blatant breach of copyright, to be avoided.
Interestingly, it became apparent during the project that an unmediated system would have been totally unacceptable to many groups, including teachers working with children.
A further advantage of basing services on libraries and other cultural institutions is that they are there for the long term, so that objects created should not simply disappear when the next innovation comes along.
Of course to achieve this the institution needs to be able to make arrangements for the maintenance of its own copy of the stories created by its users, not relying entirely on the hosted service provider.
Ultimately COINE intended to address limitations on access to collections and the involvement of individuals in cultural heritage and, as such, to initiate a shift in the role of memory institutions.
The system was not, however, seen as a replacement for such collections and recognised the valuable potential of having them ‘available side by side with the personal collections and histories of individuals and communities.’ [13] The COINE System COINE was based on the concept that each library or other cultural institution would be responsible for one or more ‘domains’.
A domain was in essence a virtual database, access to which was restricted to people authorised by the domain administrator through a login name and password.
An institution could choose to operate more than one domain, each with its own user group, thesaurus and access regime.
The COINE system comprised primarily a database server and a Web server.
The database server hosted the stories, the embedded objects, associated metadata, the thesaurus, etc.
for each domain, and information about its members.
The Web server hosted the Web site for each domain, passing data to and from the database server.
The two servers could have been anywhere: they could be on the same physical machine, on separate machines in the same office, or indeed anywhere in the world, connected via the Internet.
In practice, one technical partner, based in Limerick, Ireland, housed and managed the Web server, and the other technical partner, based in Sheffield, England, housed and managed the database server.
This was largely for convenience during development but also demonstrated the feasibility of running the system with multiple servers at different locations.
All of the project partners (apart from the technical developers) used a number of test sites (typically small museums or libraries or schools), each having their own ‘domain’ in the COINE system.
The administrator could operate each as a closed service allowing only authorised members to read stories, or could authorise limited access to anyone to search and read published stories.
However, contributors of stories (i.e.
those with write access) had to be registered and authorised as members by the administrator.
COINE aimed to have a simple, easy-to-use and intuitive interface which balanced clean, uncomplicated appearance, with a good level of instruction and guidance, designed to disguise sophisticated functionality.
The input of users in the design of the interface was crucial in the development, and its terminology and appearance changed considerably during the project in response to issues raised by demonstration sites.
For example, user instructions to ‘create a narrative’ and ‘choose a thesaurus term’, were changed to ‘create a story’ and ‘choose a subject term’; ‘Saved Searches’ became ‘My Ways of Finding Stories’; and ‘Personalise’ became ‘Change My Look’.
Users entered the COINE system at a registration and login page which also gave brief information about the project.
After login came a ‘My COINE’ page with a range of options including ‘Search’, ‘Change My Look’, ‘My Ways of Finding Stories’, and ‘Stories’.
The last of these enabled users to see their own previously written stories or to create a new story.
A content creation wizard aided the process of creating a story (see Figure 1).
Authors were firstly asked for a title ‘What are you going to call your story?’ then asked for a general subject area ‘What’s it about?’ to be chosen from the 20 topic areas (see Figure 2).
Next keywords could be added, then story text in a simple box (see Figure 3).
Crucially, anywhere within the story text, objects could be added by clicking a button.
Objects could be anything that existed in a digital file: picture, video, speech, music, document, anything at all.
The process of adding objects gave the opportunity to include a description and other information about the object, including usage rights (Figure 4).
Objects would then appear as clickable thumbnails in the text of the story.
It was quite possible for the story to be incidental and the objects the main focus.
For example a story could consist of a video with a text caption.
Another button allowed the addition of hyperlinks in the story without the writer having to understand how to format them, and shielding them from unintentional editing.
(It is perhaps worth noting that this proved quite challenging, since most applications display urls in a form where the unwary can easily alter them unintentionally.)
Finally administrative metadata could be added and then the full story, complete with embedded objects, saved for publication on the system.
Publication was mediated by the domain administrator who could authorise the story, or reject it with a message of explanation being sent to the author.
Figure 1: Create a story Figure 2: What’s it about?
Figure 3: What’s your story?
Figure 4: Add an object Other screens allowed authors to modify their stories, to publish them (either ‘globally’ throughout all COINE domains, or ‘locally’ on only the domain being used) or to un-publish them if needed.
Simple or advanced searching was available to registered users or non-registered casual users.
An administration interface was provided to domain administrators to monitor user registrations, mediate the publishing of stories and take care of other maintenance details.
Evaluation A study of the user experience of COINE was carried out after the end of the project using interviews and email questionnaires with project participants, analysis of the independent user testing carried out during the project (by people who were drawn into using COINE but who were not members of the consortium), and an evaluation of the usability of the system.
The last of these analyses used heuristics testing, ‘an expert evaluation method that uses a set of principles to assess if an interface is user friendly.’ [14].
To achieve this a checklist was compiled using questions based on an adaptation of the Centre for Human Computer Interface (HCI) Design’s ‘Checklist of Heuristics Evaluations’ [15].
The findings of these studies are described briefly below.
Further detail will be found in the COINE evaluation study [16] from which comments reported below are taken.
At the outset, there was a lot of enthusiasm about the COINE concept ‘both professionally and in the local community’.
Schools were keen to be involved and a local oral history society was ‘very excited about being able to digitise their resources and sharing their work’.
The independent user testers were found to be very enthusiastic, and much interest in the COINE concept was shown by delegates at a museum sector conference.
Some observers felt, however, that certain aspects of COINE would be more valuable than others, with the opportunity to create content being particularly important.
‘a lot of people would very much like to be able to take part in creating things online who haven’t got the expertise to do that because it was just too complicated and the idea of COINE was to take out that level of complex technology and provide something more simple.’ Several respondents felt that the sharing of stories, community resources and personal interests was the ‘most valuable and influential aspect’ of COINE.
This was considered important as it allowed previously unknown memories, collections and stories to be revealed to a wider community and provided better access than unstructured Web pages would allow.
Other respondents considered valuable aspects of the project to be the ability to capture and store local cultural heritage and preserve it for the long term.
Yet others felt that the challenge came from creating metadata that was descriptive of resources from all over the world but at the same time was not off-putting for the ‘non-expert’.
This emphasis on non-expert users recurred in these comments, where key advantages were: ‘To enable individuals [to] express their cultural heritage “in their own words”.
To be able to share their experiences and material in a more relaxed way than followed by a central museum or cultural centre’.
The aspect of sharing stories with others was also emphasised.
One respondent suggested that it ‘would be a really fun way to understand other people’s cultures and other people’s lives.’ The system had generally been found to be easy to use, especially by people with a reasonable level of computer literacy.
One of the primary school sites reported that children seemed to cope quite well in testing the system.
Some specific points to emerge were: COINE adhered to the principle that a ‘system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user’.
The examples cited above illustrated that the system had used ‘real-world’ rather than technical language.
It was noted that user input had greatly influenced this aspect of the design.
However, in the evaluation it was found that the attempt to be easy to understand had not always worked.
One instance of this was where the project had chosen to use the words ‘Change my look’ instead of the more usual term ‘Personalise’; most users didn’t understand what the former term meant!
Metadata creation had its problems: many users did not understand what the term ‘keywords’ meant and were unclear as to why they had to add keywords to their story.
They simply wanted to tell it!
The option of making the addition of descriptive metadata a task for the domain administrator was considered but rejected as it would make the system unattractively burdensome to the institutions.
Visual design was ‘simple’ and ‘uncluttered’.
Deliberately there were no visual images used within the user interface, apart from the first access screen which was illustrated by a photograph.
However, this was found to be a mixed blessing and it may be that the developers went too far in attempting to create a clean interface: some users felt that the interface lacked visual appeal.
COINE allowed the user some control and freedom in terms of exiting a workflow or changing their minds in the middle of the process.
However, there was no facility to save a story mid-way through its creation, and many users criticised this limitation.
Nielsen notes that it is advantageous ‘if a system is usable without “help” documentation’ [17].
Although 40 out of 72 users surveyed for part of the evaluation claimed that they did not use the help facilities, a totally intuitive user interface was not achieved and the help facilities were the only means of understanding some of the processes and terminology.
This suggests that further work might have produced a more intuitive interface.
At times the system was unstable, which, although understandable in a product under development, led to considerable frustration for users.
This was the most common negative observation by users.
Overall the evaluation concluded that COINE had been successful in proving ‘the viability and attractiveness of the concept of offering ordinary citizens the tools and opportunities to tell their own stories in a digital environment’ [18].
Conclusion As Reid [19] has pointed out, local communities have a great deal of knowledge and expertise to offer.
Individuals have a perspective on culture and on society which may be very different from that of professionals and experts, yet is equally valid.
ICTs offer the opportunity to surface and expose such stories in ways never before possible.
COINE successfully addressed this issue and provided an infrastructure which was broadly welcomed.
Recently there has been a vast increase in services which encourage publication of individuals’ stories.
However, the unfettered publication of everything and anything simply obscures the valuable among a tidal wave of the trivial.
Local cultural institutions, by providing training, monitoring content (but not censoring it) and providing a stable base have a great deal to offer their communities.
While global systems, with their enormous resources and huge size, may attract those seeking their ‘15 minutes of fame’ the long tail of localised services may yet prove to be of greater lasting value.
It is to be hoped that more experiments like COINE will enable local institutions to define a new role for themselves, focused on the creativity of ordinary people, in the networked environment.
Appendix 1: Related Projects As part of the COINE Project a number of initiatives were identified which appeared to be, or had the potential to become, ‘competitors’ to a COINE system.
Some of those from the USA, Australia and the UK were :Moving Here [20] a service from the National Archives and many other partners in England, which explored migration to England over the last 200 years and gave people the opportunity to publish their own experience of migration.
BBC’s WW2 People’s War [21] which allowed memories and stories about World War 2 to be published online and shared as part of a commemorative archive.
The Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation [22] allows users to search for immigrants who entered the USA through Ellis Island and to create Family Scrapbooks, illustrated family history stories with photographs and audio recordings.
Capture Wales Digital Storytelling [23] ‘Mini-movies’ are created by the people of Wales to tell their personal stories and to show the richness of life in Wales: they can then be accessed through the Web site.
MyFamily.com [24] allows users to create their own family album by uploading photos and entering details about them to share with friends and family.
Forever LifeStories [25] users can create their Life Story and a family tree, and add photos, home video clips or text messages, building their Forever LifeStory over time.
StoryLink [26] an online community for digital stories allowing members to store, search for, and save digital stories.
The City Stories Project [27] a city-based storytelling project with a network of city-based personal storytelling sites.
The Migration Heritage Centre [28] aims to recognise the value of cultural diversity, and provides opportunities for people to tell of their achievements, their struggles for belonging, of cultural change, traditions and adaptation.
The Montana Heritage Project [29] young people tell the story of their community its place in national and world events and its cultural heritage as expressed in traditions and celebrations, literatures and arts.
Appendix 2: The COINE Project Partners The main consortium consisted of the following organisations: 1.
Co-ordinator: The Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK.
2.
Technical partners: Fretwell-Downing Informatics Ltd (FDI), Sheffield, UK.
The National Microelectronics Applications Centre Ltd (MAC), Limerick, Ireland.
3.
Demonstration Partners The Armitt Museum, Ambleside, Cumbria, UK.
They worked with: Ambleside Oral History Group; Ambleside Primary School; Cumbria Amenity trust; Mining History Society; Ambleside Art Society; Individual volunteers.
eircom Ennis Information Age Town, ENNIS, Ireland.
Their COINE users were: Gaelscoil Mhicil Chisiog (Irish Speaking Primary School); East Clare Heritage Centre (Local History Organisation); Clare County Museum; Ennis Online Gallery (Online Photo Gallery of Ennis Through The Years).
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UoC), Barcelona, Spain.
They had test sites at: Biblioteca Pública de Tarragona; Biblioteca Antoni Pladevall i Font de Taradell; Museu d’Història de la Immigració de Catalunya.
University of Macedonia Economic and Social Sciences (UM), Thessaloniki, Greece.
COINE demonstration users were: Theatrical Organization of ‘Aktis Aeliou’; Theatrical Organization of ‘Nees Morfes’; Theatrical Organization of ‘Piramatiki Skini’; Thessaloniki Design Museum; Photography Museum of Thessaloniki (Photo Archive); Artistic House of Florina; Nikos Koronaios (Graphic Artist); Dimitris Penidis (Student); Anna Theofilaktou; Marina Polyhronidou; Athena Kesidou; The History Center of Thessaloniki; The 16th Gymnasium of Thessaloniki.
The Jagiellonian University (UJAG) Institute of Librarianship and Information Science, Krakow, Poland.
UJAG used the COINE demonstrator with:The National Museum in Krakow; National Archive in Krakow; Szkola Podstawowa Nr 114 in Krakow.
References YouTube http://www.youtube.com MySpace http://www.myspace.com Mulrenin, A. and Geser, G. (2002).
Technological landscapes for tomorrow’s cultural economy: unlocking the value of cultural heritage.
The DigiCULT report.
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities http://www.digicult.info/downloads/html/6/6.html UNESCO http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/ Throsby cited in Mulrenin and Geser (2002) p. 69.
(See reference 3.)
Mulrenin and Geser (2002) p. 8 (See reference 3.)
Archives Task Force (2004) Listening to the past, speaking to the future.
London: Museums, Libraries and Archives Council http://www.mla.gov.uk/webdav/harmonise?Page/@id=73&Document/@id=18405&Section[@stateId_eq_left_hand_root]/@id=4332 Trant cited in Mulrenin and Geser (2002).
(See reference 3.)
Mulrenin and Geser (2002) p. 204.
(See reference 3.)
Archives Task Force (2004), p. 43 (See reference 7.)
Kelly, M. (2003).
The COINE Project: sharing collections and personal histories.
Proceedings of the MDA conference, 2003. http://www.mda.org.uk/conference2003/paper04.htm Brophy, P.(2002).
Cultural Objects In Networked Environments COINE.
Cultivate Interactive.
http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/coine/ Kelly (2003).
(See reference 11.)
Centre for HCI Design, City University (2004).
Usability studies: JISC services and information environments.
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p. 61. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-Usability-Studies-Final.doc Centre for HCI Design, City University (2004), p. 135.
Hulme, A. L. (2006) The COINE Project in Use: a dissertation submitted in part-fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Library and Information Management.
Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University.
Nielsen, J.
Ten usability heuristics http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html Butters, G. (2005).
COINE final report.
Manchester: CERLIM http://www.uoc.edu/in3/coine/eng/deliverables/final_report.pdf Reid, G., (2000).
The digitisation of heritage material: arguing for an interpretative approach based on the experience of the Powys Digital History Project.
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34 (2), 143 158.
Moving Here http://www.movinghere.org.uk/ BBC’s WW2 People’s War http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/ The Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation http://www.ellisisland.org Capture Wales Digital Storytelling http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales/ MyFamily.com http://www.myfamily.com/ Forever LifeStories http://www.forevernetwork.com/lifestories/ StoryLink http://www.storylink.com/ The City Stories Project http://www.citystories.com The Migration Heritage Centre http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/ The Montana Heritage Project: What We Once Were, and What We Could Be.
Ashley Ball, May 2003. http://www.edutopia.org/php/article.php?id=Art_1048 Author Details Geoff Butters Research Associate Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) Manchester Metropolitan University Email: g.butters@mmu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/infocomms/staff-contact-details/profile.php?id=311 Amanda Hulme Former postgraduate student Department of Information and Communications Manchester Metropolitan University Email: amanda_hulme@yahoo.co.uk Peter Brophy Director Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) Manchester Metropolitan University Email: p.brophy@mmu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/infocomms/staff-contact-details/profile.php?id=190 Return to top Article Title: “Supporting Creativity in Networked Environments: the COINE Project” Author: Geoff Butters, Amanda Hulme and Peter Brophy Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/brophy-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Email Curation: Practical Approaches for Long-term Preservation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Email Curation: Practical Approaches for Long-term Preservation Buzz data framework xml infrastructure archives metadata preservation visualisation curation foia privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Dave Thompson reports on a two-day conference on Email Curation organised by the Digital Curation Centre.
This workshop organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] brought together librarians, archivists and IT specialists from academic, commercial and government sectors.
Email is a major universal communication tool.
It’s used for both assigning responsibilities and for decision making.
People using email have differing perspectives and expectations from those who manage the infrastructure.
While there are common desires for preservation no one solution fits all circumstances.
Day One: Emails as Records Seamus Ross, DCC, chaired the first session.
He began by introducing the chapter in the DCC Digital Curation Manual [2] on curating email.
Maureen Pennock of the DCC, and author of the same chapter, talked about what an email actually is, and how it can contain information or can act as the ‘envelope’ with the main message carried as an attachment.
From a management perspective an email contains much useful technical management data as the header to the message.
Yet curation is often done in an ad hoc way.
It was pointed out that the presence of back-up tapes does not constitute an archive.
The process of curation is one of active management through the information life cycle.
The benefits of the proper curation of emails include legal compliance, but also offer efficiencies in information management in the development of a trusted corpus of corporate knowledge.
A curation policy framework for the management of the life cycle of emails is essential.
It allows information content to drive policy and encourages all stakeholders to collaborate in the management process at each stage of the life cycle.
It is essential that preservation begins at the point of creation.
Yet the long-term management of emails still represents a records management problem; the principles and issues are not that different from those of records in the analogue world.
Carys Thomas and Garry Booth from Loughborough University described a project to put email management strategies into place.
The project found that both decisions and responsibilities were agreed via email.
While important emails could be printed out and filed as records, staff wanted both access to, and context for their emails.
Making staff responsible for the archiving task raises issues of responsibilities and the roles of individuals in the managment of information and how institutions support them.
Managing email can be time-consuming and efficiency varies.
Users want control over their email but also want the systems and processes to require little effort.
The cost of separating ‘important’ emails from ‘trivial’ can be high.
The buy-in of senior managers to the principles of email archiving is essential.
Technological barriers are also difficult to overcome; an academic institution can often have a complex environment with a diversity of applications and platforms used for email.
For instance how do users who work from home or with laptops synchronise and manage their emails?
The need is for user education in the importance and principles of archiving email.
This can be managed with a risk management approach balancing the cost of archiving everything against the risk of litigation, its consequences and the cost of having to retrieve emails.
Susan Graham, University of Edinburgh, presented a case study looking at the records management approach to preserving email.
People have a strong feeling about their email, wanting control over their content but don’t want to be told how to use email.
The University takes a devolved, pragmatic approach to managing email.
The plan is to manage all records in a unified way, including email.
It is essential to provide adequate resourcing to records management and this hasn’t always happened in the past.
Email is an important means of communication and decision making for the University.
The advent of the Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information Act means that emails have to be discoverable.
They also need to show evidential weight, i.e.
authenticity.
Staff also receives training in archival management and records management policies.
The support of senior managers has been crucial, as has the allocation of adequate resources.
The key lesson here is that there is no easy path to follow and significant effort may be required.
Day Two: Practical Tools and Approaches Maureen Pennock of the DCC chaired the first session of the second day.
Jacqueline Slats, National Archive of the Netherlands, noted that if the Dutch government could use email as a tool for decision-making then the time had come to take email archiving seriously.
In 2000 National Archive of the Netherlands began a project to provide for the secure and authentic storage and management of email.
The project tested three approaches to preservation and management: migration, XML and the Universal Virtual Computer (UVC).
The project chose to use XML and believes that well-structured email is well suited to preservation using XML and that XML is a sustainable solution.
XML is portable, expansible and supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Both structure layout and context can be retained in XML.
The project estimated costs for long-term management of email, including infrastructure costs such as the IT system but also personnel costs.
Some of these are ‘upfront’ costs, some are one-off.
Others, such as the cost of preservation intervention, will occur over time.
However, any management intervention after the point of creation will be both more costly and more complex.
Filip Boudrez, Stadsarchief Antwerp, talked about the eDAVID Project and gave a practical overview.
Again, the importance of email as a means of confirming or authorising action was noted.
This means that authenticity and context are essential components with regard to preservation.
The ‘casual’ use of language in an email means that without the context of the message ‘thread’ any one email can be meaningless.
The project adopted a sound records management approach, associating all records into a single location under a common ‘series’.
This approach also highlights the importance of metadata in linking individual objects into the ‘series’.
The goal of the project has been to automate processes where possible and capture essential metadata while making the process of record keeping as easy as possible for users.
Jason Baron, NARA, reiterated the importance of email as a tool for both government and commercial organisations but noted that it was not always well managed.
There are a number of commercial products available to archive email, but these may use proprietary formats.
He made the observation that in the US legislation drivers are uppermost while in the UK key drivers seem to be IT-centred.
He noted the importance of email to the Enron court case [3] and the extremely high cost of recovering poorly archived email.
While email may be an ephemeral medium, the value of the information it carried may be equally short-lived.
He talked very briefly of the Sedona guidelines for managing email [4].
The preservation period for email may not necessarily be ‘for ever’.
In some cases archiving may only require a ‘janitorial’ approach.
Jason returned to his ‘Twenty Questions’ for a further discussion on managing email in the open session time.
Jeremy John, British Library (BL), talked about curating born-digital scientific manuscripts and the BL Digital Manuscript Project.
He describes in some detail the digital scriptorium that the project uses to retrieve and recover digital manuscript material from computer media such as portable disks or hard drives.
It was emphasised that capture of data is different to preservation, though it is a pre-requisite.
While the technology is readily available, the skills required to ensure authenticity and the capture of a ‘faithful’ object are very specialised.
He suggested that one risk to born-digital material was the use of projects to create collections, projects that do not have sustainable sources of funding.
A preferred approach would be for organisations to commit to sustainable funding, demonstrated by resourcing each stage of the materials life cycle.
Reuse of Preserved Emails Dave Thompson, Wellcome Library, chaired the second session.
Susan Davies, University of Maryland, illustrated ways in which emails could be reused and presented research by Adam Perer, Ben Shneiderman and Douglas Oard.
The research illustrates the importance of email to individuals and the communities they represent.
Email can illustrate the relationships between individuals both social and organisational.
The Shneiderman email archive was examined to illustrate these relationships.
By analysis of the message headers some four thousand relationships were discovered in forty five thousand emails.
The pattern of these relationships can be shown in relation to time, the increasing use of technology and communication within organisations.
Email is well suited to this form of research, well-structured header information allows for detailed analysis.
The patterns of communication can be usefully illustrated by visualisations.
Patterns can reveal significant relationships and a greater understanding of those relationships as well as providing context to email archives.
Susan Thomas, University of Oxford, talked of the Paradigm Project and some of the barriers to re-using email over time.
The project collects and researches issues around personal political papers, especially email.
The essential nature of email makes them of value to archival collections, as evidence of social networks and personal interactions.
The project has highlighted legal, intellectual property issues in re-using email.
The use of email highlights especially defamation and privacy issues.
The donor of an email collection is not the only individual with an interest in how, under what situations and when material may be made available.
Individual emails may need to reflect these issues and access managed accordingly.
Barriers to collecting email include technical issues around the number of email systems in use, legal issues of privacy, defamation and intellectual property rights.
Not all legislation hinders the collection of email, section 33 of the Data Protection Act sets out exceptions under which personal information can be made available to research.
Conclusions to date suggest that early curation of email is a prerequisite to reuse.
Conclusion Email is used as a means of recording action or assigning responsibility; currently many organisations do not adequately manage email for recordkeeping purposes.
A common theme is that back-up tapes do not constitute an archive, since it is difficult and costly to retrieve information from them.
The risk of not managing email must be weighed against the cost of preservation and the risk of legal action.
A distinction exists between the drivers for ‘discovery’ in managing email in the US versus a technology-driven approach in the UK and mainland Europe.
The main findings may be summarised as follows: Many organisations manage their IT infrastructure but not the information it handles/contains/delivers The burden of deciding which email is a ‘record;’ and which ‘trivial’ falls on users who may be unclear of the distinction Users want to use email in their own way, and choose their own tools, but do not want additional archiving tasks placing on them The use of clear record keeping policies, backed up by user education and with support of senior management is essential to efficient longterm management Retaining proper organisational records may be a legal requirement, but relying on retrieval from backup tapes is risky, expensive and difficult XML is currently an appropriate preservation tool for well-structured material like email Long-term curation of emails requires a risk management approach between the cost and effort of preservation/management, and the legal aspects of storage and reuse References The Digital Curation Centre Web site http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ DCC Digital Curation Manual Instalments: Curating E-mails http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters/curating-e-mails/ BBC News Web site: The rise and fall of Enron http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5018176.stm The Sedona Conference http://www.thesedonaconference.org Further Reading Digitale Duurzaamheid Digital Longevity (Nationaal Archief, Netherlands) http://www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Email http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/topics/47.html Author Details Dave Thompson Web Archiving Project Officer Wellcome Library 210 Euston Road London NW1 2BE Email: d.thompson@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Email Curation: Practical Approaches for Long-term Preservation” Author: Dave Thompson Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/curating-email-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Listen Up!
Podcasting for Schools and Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Listen Up!
Podcasting for Schools and Libraries Buzz software accessibility blog copyright video graphics syndication e-learning podcast Citation BibTex RIS Elizabeth McHugh looks at how podcasting has the potential to take library services and activities to new audiences.
Linda Braun is an educational technology specialist who is an enthusiast for podcasting in all its formats and the reasons why it should and how it could be used.
The book is slanted towards education but the ideas and suggestions in it could appeal to a wider audience.
Although written primarily with American readers in mind (the specific references tend towards American Web sites) this is not to discount the relevance of the book for an international audience.
The instructions and examples presented are applicable regardless of location.
The Content Wikipedia [1] describes a podcast and podcasting as: 'a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.
The term, like "radio", can refer either to the content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also termed podcasting.
The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.'
Braun's explanation of podcasts in the first chapter of the book is shorter and simpler: '...regularly produced audio and video files that are available for subscription and that can be automatically downloaded to a computer and / or portable audio and video device.'
The explanation is part of a Sidebar entitled 'Podcast FAQ'.
The chapters of the book expand on the FAQs contained in that first sidebar and so the 'Podcast FAQ' could be said to act as a synopsis for the whole book.
At 6 chapters in 91 pages, with 3 appendices and a short glossary, the book does not set out to be an exhaustive tour of everything available in terms of podcasting.
It seeks rather to present itself as a brief guide on how to set yourself up as a podcaster, where you might find the resources that would allow you set up a podcast and ideas on how to get it noticed on the Web.
The book provides a Web site [2] to accompany the text, which lists the Web sites used in the book, covering podcasts, software and tools, articles and blogs, books and more about the author.
Short on graphics and illustrations, the book uses what it terms 'Sidebar' information in the chapters to provide examples and explanations which lie outside the normal flow of the text.
The 5-page introduction sets out the author's enthusiasm for podcasts, why the book was written, and a short description of each of the chapters.
The chapters are broken down into areas discussing the equipment needed to listen and develop a podcast and its visual twin a vidcast.
It looks at why they could be used as a method for disseminating information, the planning and marketing required to achieve this, and provides examples of them in use.
While the book talks of other 'Web 2.0' sites such as blogs and social bookmarking, it does so briefly and in the context of marketing a podcast .
The reader is left with the feeling that podcasting et al stands as separate from these communication methods, rather than a part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.
A particular strength of the book is its ability to provide advice on the preparation required before the technology is used to develop the podcast, e.g.
why the reader should consider developing podcasts, who should be involved in their development.
Braun recognises that podcasts, as with any method for disseminating information, should have a purpose to them and an intended audience and she seeks to give step-by-step reasoning to assist users in this aspect of developing their podcast ideas.
A weakness is that the book offers little in-depth advice on copyright and Accessibility.
Possible Uses When looking at purpose and intended audience, examples are provided for various audiences.
The University of Missouri's School of Information Science and Learning Technologies [3] collects and does podcasts on varied topics whether it's related to what librarians are doing in their jobs, interviews with readers and writers, discussions on human interaction behaviour.
Public libraries in the US are also making good use of Podcasts.
Kankakee Public Library in Illinois [4] not only records authors' talks, but also looks at genealogy, 'one-person shows' on lives of historical or current figures, co-operation between schools and public libraries.
If you want to listen to a show produced by children, for children, then head to Radio Willow Web, Willowdale Elementary School, Omaha, Nebraska [5], and to see how the teenagers get involved Coulee Kids Podcast [6], Longfellow Middle School, LaCrosse, Wisconsin, is a place to start.
Finally, in the mainstream media, anything goes.
Coverville [7] looks at cover music, Rocketboom [8] looks at the news in a not so serious fashion.
So from intellectual to fun productions, for young and old, technologists and the rest of us, podcasts and vidcasts are available and can be made on a variety of topics the only limit it would seem is your imagination.
The Technology The US Web sites listed are applicable regardless of location, although international examples would have been welcomed.
Where equipment brand names arise microphones, video cameras, digital voice recorders there may be more difficulty for an international audience in obtaining such specific branded equipment.
As a result the branded equipment mentioned should be taken as a guide.
The Style Covering a subject that inevitably includes technical detail, the book seeks to demystify it as much as possible.
Although technical information is spread in small amounts throughout, the chapter that deals with it specifically tries to keep information about the technology required in acceptable chunks so that the reader is not scared off.
This is the style throughout the whole book.
The book gives brief examples, but does not set out to give a complete step-by-step guide on how to use any of the technology mentioned in the book.
The reader is encouraged to obtain the technology and/or investigate the Web sites and experiment.
For confident users of technology this will not be an issue they will go and get the technology or go to the Web sites and start to experiment without concern.
Less confident users may prefer to look for a book that gives a more in-depth explanation of the technology listed and its use, once they have read this one.
The general style is intended to be encouraging and to imbue the reader with an enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by the medium.
The Sidebar content breaks up the text and provides some variety in content and style.
Conclusion For the inexperienced or those who prefer to learn how to use these technologies through a step-by-step process, this book may not be the right one for them.
At most it should be seen as a short general book on the subject.
In fairness it doesn't claim to be anything other than that.
Braun's enthusiasm for her subject cannot be doubted and the Web site examples she provides give a good introduction to her topic.
She emphasises that podcast creation should be a collaborative process, employing skills available in librarians' work environment whether such skills belong to librarians or their colleagues and gives the reader ideas to emulate.
References 'Podcast', Wikipedia.
Accessed on 26 October 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting Listen Up!
Podcasting for Schools and Libraries Web site.
Accessed 26 October 2007 http://www.leonline.com/listen_up/ LiS Radio.
Accessed on 26 October 2007 http://lisradio.missouri.edu/index.php Kankakee Public Library.
Accessed on 26 October 2007 http://www.lions-online.org/podcasts.html Radio Willow Web.
Accessed on 26 October 2007 http://www.mpsomaha.org/willow/Radio/ Coulee Kids Podcast.
Accessed on 26 October 2007 http://www.sdlax.net/longfellow/sc/ck/index.htm Coverville.
Accessed on 26 October 2007 http://coverville.com/ Rocketboom.
Accessed on 26 October 2007 http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/ Author Details Elizabeth McHugh Electronic Resources Manager UHI Millennium Institute Email: elizabeth.mchugh@uhi.ac.uk Web site: http://www.uhi.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Listen Up!
Podcasting for Schools and Libraries" Author: Elizabeth McHugh Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/mchugh-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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VIF: Version Identification Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines VIF: Version Identification Workshop Buzz data software framework database archives metadata identifier repositories eprints provenance dspace interoperability taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Molloy reports on a half-day workshop on the use of the Version Identification Framework, held in Hatton Garden, London on 22 April 2008.
The Version Identification Framework Project (VIF) [1] is a project partly funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is in partnership with the Science & Technology Facilities Council, the University of Leeds and Erasmus University, Rotterdam.
The project was undertaken in order to investigate the growing issues surrounding the identification of revised or related materials being deposited in repositories, with the aim of providing a framework for consistent identification.
Two surveys undertaken by the Project in late 2007 identified a number of problems related to version identification and the impact this might have on user perceptions of reliability; it was these issues that the VIF hoped to address.
The framework is intended as best practice guidance for the repository community, software developers and content creators.
The VIF workshop [2] held on Tuesday 22 April 2008 was an opportunity to introduce the VIF and the results of the project surveys, whilst also providing a forum for discussion and indeed encouraging discussion of the issues and the proposed solutions.
It was also hoped that the workshop would encourage acceptance of the Framework as a standard for version identification.
Session 1 Introduction to Versioning and the VIF Project Frances Shipsey, VIF Project Director based at LSE, opened the workshop on behalf of the VIF Project Partners, welcoming participants and handing over to Jenny Brace, VIF Project Manager based at LSE, to begin the first session.
Jenny gave a brief overview of the VIF Project.
She then went on to elaborate on the audience for which guidance is designed before returning to look at the definition of a version, and how such a definition might include both linear, developmental versions as well as related versions, such as a conference paper in relation to a published article.
Jenny also spent some time looking at examples of potential versions, seeking opinions from the audience as to what constitutes a version.
This highlighted different understandings of what people call versions; and how it should not be assumed that all repository users will perceive a version in the same way.
For example; minor changes to an object to correct errors might be considered versions, whilst significant changes affecting the overall status of the object might be called revisions.
She then went on to investigate the difference between a version object, perhaps the latest iteration of a report being prepared for publication, and a version relationship which might identify two distinct but related objects, perhaps a published journal article and the dataset used in the supporting research.
How would they be defined within the VIF and what distinction, if any, could or should be made?
Paul Cave, Project Officer, VIF at University of Leeds, opened his presentation by explaining the research phase of the Project, detailing how evidence had been gathered via two surveys, one designed for Information Professionals, and the other for academics, and then outlining the key outcomes.
Most significant was the response from academics regarding their own ability to identify versions of objects in an institutional repository (IR) with a statistic that only 5% found this to be easy.
But, when asked whether they were satisfied with the way in which they identified their own versions, 65% of academics stated that they were broadly happy with their own arrangements.
There was a strong indication from the survey results that academics, depending on discipline, were keen for the version held in an IR to be the final version, and not earlier drafts or iterations.
Dave Puplett, VIF Project and Communications Officer at LSE, then discussed the stages undertaken to identify possible solutions to the identified issues.
Firstly, whilst admitting that the current majority of objects held in institutional repositories are documents, Dave highlighted the need to be broad when developing a version framework since a growing number of repositories accept alternative types of media, for example; audio-visual clips and images.
Proposed versioning solutions identified the lack of a single tool that would resolve all the main issues surrounding version identification.
However, a combined approach was identified and strongly supported by respondents from both sets of survey results.
Dave highlighted that many respondents, in line with current beliefs about what is already being deposited, placed higher importance on being able to identify the final version of a digital object than any subsequent versioning that might take place.
It was also necessary to consider that there is a certain level of detachment from the issues surrounding versioning on the part of academics.
Whatever framework was to be put in place needed to be simple and constructive in order at least to maintain the status quo rather than alienate supportive academics by making unacceptable demands.
In the next part of Dave’s presentation, he began to look at the VIF in detail, pointing to 5 key pieces of information that are required either in isolation or in combination in order to identify a specific version.
These are: defined dates, identifiers, version numbering, version labels or taxonomy, and text description.
He also looked at the benefits of embedding the version information in the object itself to ensure that this is not lost if the hosting repository metadata is by-passed.
Suggested solutions presented by the VIF are that a combination of tools be used in order to identify the object and its version.
Such tools included the use of coversheets, already in use in some institutional repositories and manually added, or perhaps watermarking of the object which can be done automatically.
Simple solutions like having a uniform system for file naming and introducing ID tags and properties were also suggested.
Dave provided a brief overview of the recommendations for each repository user type in concluding this first session, providing some points of reference for what repository managers, content creators and software developers should consider doing in order to effect a change of policy more broadly in accepting the VIF.
He concluded by inviting people to access the framework itself and to read the recommendations in more detail.
Session 2 Breakout Sessions Two breakout sessions had been prepared; session 1 looking at metadata and the implications on interoperability and data mining, session 2 focussed on strategy and advocacy, investigating the importance of preparing both repository managers and academics or content creators for the need for versioning and clear, precise identification.
I chose to attend the second of these sessions, wanting to understand the practical aspects of advocating the use of the VIF, and what strategic planning might be required in advocating its use to any steering committee or group charged with managing and implementing an institutional repository.
Dave Puplett opened this session with a look at the specific recommendations laid out in the VIF.
Recommendations for repository managers entailed working on clarifying for what the repository was intended, since this could affect which level of version identification was adopted.
He also emphasised the need to investigate whether the current installation of any repository software was capable of meeting the needs of version identification, and if not, what additional functionality might reasonably be expected or requested.
Dave commented that, in some instances, it may not be possible to provide updates to current software and that this therefore had major implications for implementation at the local institutional level.
Repository managers should also take into consideration the types or formats of any digital objects that they may include in their repositories, ensuring that a strategy for what versioning identification may be required was in place, even if they do not currently accept deposit of them.
In terms of advocacy, Dave highlighted that it was important to enable and support content creators to adopt good versioning practice.
In developing a relationship with the depositor, repository managers would then be able to refer ambiguously identified versions back to them for clarification.
There was some discussion regarding the necessity and desirability of checking each deposit, particularly in a self-deposit environment, and the implications for workload on repository staff in both mediated and self-deposition was a cause for concern.
Lastly, Dave concentrated on the role of advocacy in relation to content creators, noting that there may be considerable difficulties to overcome if authors, for example, needed to be convinced of the benefits of depositing in the first place.
Dave pointed delegates to the content creators section of the Framework Web site, which offers good practice guidelines and links to version software management tools.
Peter Millington, Technical Officer, OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) [3] spoke next.
OpenDOAR is one of the SHERPA [4] services based at Nottingham University.
In its mandate, OpenDOAR is tasked with not only providing access to open access repository content via its own interface, but also advocacy and support in best practice guidance for repository management.
Peter’s presentation opened with an overview of the current OpenDOAR policy tool that enables institutions to define a policy on sharing and re-use of data for their repository.
As a result of the Version Identification Framework and the previous VERSIONS Project, additional options for including version identification in policies were being implemented.
Peter demonstrated them, which included deposited items status (for example; draft, submitted, published) and a Version Control Policy option that allows institutions to identify under what circumstances changes to versions, or additional versions, might be deposited.
The final part of the breakout session was a presentation by Peter van Huisstede, RePub, Erasmus University, Rotterdam (EUR) on the implementation of Subversion Control Software into the IR at Rotterdam.
Subversion is normally used to control versioning of software code as it is being written, but EUR have built it into the back end of their repository to enable version control of the metadata records for all objects in the repository.
In this way, each element of the metadata is a separate entity within the subversion repository, running concurrent to the main repository.
The benefit of keeping these two separate is that managing and changing version information with regard to single elements is more straightforward.
A single change can be made in the Subversion repository that will be reflected globally within the main repository.
For example; if the name of a department within a University changes, then the change can be made within the Subversion repository and, because that element of the data in the institutional repository is identified only by a unique number, this change will be reflected in each instance of that element in the IR.
In a repository with over 7000 records, this is a powerful tool.
Session 3 Software The final session of the workshop was a set of presentations looking at the potential for development in repository software to enable versioning to be implemented.
Catherine Jones, VIF Project Officer from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), presented some for software development that would facilitate the introduction of version identification to institutional repositories, and the adoption of the VIF at institutional level.
These recommendations focussed on the desirability of software versioning enablement or its introduction if not currently available and also particularly highlighted the need for a facility to identify duplicate objects, both within the institutional repository and across external repositories or co-operatives.
Support for Application Profiles within the software metadata was essential if harvesting and cross-searching was to take place, meaning that a standardised structure for metadata must be accepted.
Tim Brody, University of Southampton, representing EPrints, gave a short presentation on the potential for versioning enhancements to the EPrints software.
In the first model, separate EPrints records representing each digital object could be linked together by a version statement (perhaps through a link in each record), whilst the second model used a single EPrint record in which to display all linked objects.
Richard Green, University of Hull, representing Fedora, started by outlining the way in which Fedora software deals with objects.
He explained that Fedora is not delivered to the customer with an interface, and that objects are dealt with via their attributes, using metadata and content datastreams.
Within the content datastream, versions could be both deposited and identified.
Richard made two recommendations for Fedora users; that a single object would be most suited to developments (perhaps revisions) of the same thing, whilst different forms of content (perhaps the author’s final draft and the published version) might be better recorded as separate objects with a relationship linking them.
Jim Rutherford, HP Labs, representing DSpace, began by explaining that the current edition of DSpace is not able to include versioning information or manage versions and related objects in this context.
It is able to track changes via logging, and details the provenance of metadata.
These can be used to build up a history of an object but not to manage simultaneous versions.
Whilst the three approaches to versioning issues were different, there was consensus in the belief that it is not the role of the software to enable versioning, but rather that its role is to display the relationship information that helps end-users to identify the version that they are viewing.
The identification of versions is the responsibility of content creators and repository managers in following good practice by identifying versions through consistent methods.
The final part of the workshop was given over to a panel discussion chaired by Frances Shipsey, who was accompanied by members of the VIF project team and the software representatives.
It was stated that in the most recent installation of EPrints, by default, the most recently added version of an item was identified as the latest version, which may not always be the case if repository managers were to begin retrospective deposits of materials.
Tim Brody was asked what could be done to resolve this potential difficulty.
He stated that it depended on the way in which objects were related within the database, and that it should be possible to resolve the matter.
Balviar Notay asked whether the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) [5] could be embedded into EPrints.
Tim Brody replied that customers needed to understand better how it might work.
There was a project under way at University of Warwick [6] to try to embed SWAP.
Conclusion The workshop was drawn to a close by Jenny Brace, who concluded the workshop with a few final thoughts for delegates to consider.
Version identification was an accepted problem in the repositories community.
However, whilst there was no single solution, there were some simple procedures that could be followed: she felt that ensuring the identification system was transparent, consistent and open, regardless of the access route to material, was essential.
Moreover, deciding in advance what the repository was intended to achieve was of paramount importance.
On a personal level, I attended this workshop to gain a clearer understanding of why versioning was important, and what impact it could have both at the institutional level and across shared repository systems.
The workshop not only presented the evidence, but also offered a forum for discussion; on the principles of version identification, on its importance to the repositories community, of its importance in defining the provenance of objects.
It was also an opportunity to discuss with colleagues what procedures and developments they might expect to take back to their own institutions for discussion and implementation.
My institution is in the early stages of building its repository.
For our repository team, the main focus is on how to get the project moving, what our strategy might be for highlighting the benefits of an institutional repository to our research community, and how exposing research outputs to a wider audience can be of significant benefit for the team of researchers, and the institution alike.
Given that we are at such an early stage of development, this is an excellent time to be considering version identification.
For us, good practice in version identification should and can be built in to our own repository policies and procedures from the beginning.
References LSE Version Identification Framework Web Site http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/About/index.html LSE Version Identification Framework Workshop Web Site http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/Project/workshop.html OpenDOAR Web Site http://www.opendoar.org SHERPA Web Site http://www.sherpa.ac.uk Scholarly Works Application Profile, JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/swap.aspx Warwick Research Archive Project http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/main/research/instrep/erepositories/ Author Details Sarah Molloy Repository Administrator Queen Mary University of London Email: s.h.molloy@qmul.ac.uk Web site: http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/e-resources/oa.htm Return to top Article Title: “Which One’s Which?
Understanding Versioning in Repositories” Author: Sarah Molloy Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/vif-wrkshp-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data mobile software framework database dissemination infrastructure archives metadata repositories copyright video preservation multimedia e-learning photoshop soa curation e-science ict interoperability e-government url research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Web Tools for EU Research Projects Tuesday 7 February 2006 Cambridge, UK EU research projects share lots of information and involve joint working amongst organisations from many different countries.
There are many software tools which can support them, from shared workspaces to resource planning and reporting tools, from electronic meetings to web content management.
But which tools are effective for EU research projects?
Management tools for coordinating a construction project are rarely suitable for the more uncertain world of research.
At this seminar, project coordinators and participants in EU research projects will explain how they use these tools for a range of functions and what gave their consortia the greatest benefits.
Topics will include: Web-based project planning, monitoring and reporting Web-based project management Shared workspaces and other collaboration tools Web tools for dissemination and building research communities and ideas will be shared on Communicating between partners Finding the current version of a document Persuading partners to report on time Getting all partners to use the same document format Coping with one international meeting after another For more information: http://www.singleimage.co.uk/Workshops/schedule.html Back to headlines Code4lib 2006 Conference 15-17 February 2006 Corvallis, Oregon, USA Registration still possible Registration is still possible for Code4lib 2006.
Code4lib 2006 is a loosely structured conference for library technologists to commune, gather/create/share ideas and software, be inspired, and forge collaborations.
It is also an outgrowth of the Access HackFest, wrapped into a conference-ish format.
It is an important event for technologists building digital libraries and digital information systems, tools, and software.
More information on the conference, including the schedule, more detailed logistics information and the online registration form can be found at the conference Web site: http://code4lib.org/2006 Back to headlines Upcoming TASI Workshops Universty of Bristol February-April 2006 The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI a JISC Service) is very pleased to announce the dates and details for its workshops in early 2006. http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ *Advanced Photoshop Techniques Thursday 16th February 2006 *Building a Departmental Image Collection Friday 24th February 2006 *Introduction to Photoshop Thursday 2nd March 2006 *Improve your Photoshop Skills Friday 3rd March 2006 *Introduction to Image Metadata Friday 10th March 2006 *Image Capture Advanced Thursday 16th March 2006 *Digital Rights Management Practical Approaches to Securing and Protecting Copyright Friday 7th April 2006 *Image Capture Beginners Thursday 20th April 2006 *Image Capture Intermediate Friday 21st April 2006 *Getting the Best from a Digital Camera Thursday 27th April 2006 Full details and a booking form are available on the Training page: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ All these workshops will be held at the Universty of Bristol.
In addition to its training, TASI provides many resources on its Web site and a free helpdesk service for those within FE/HE: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/helpdesk.html Grant Young, TASI Technical Research Officer grant.young@bristol.ac.uk http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/aboutus/staff?search=cmgay Back to headlines Initiatives & Innovation: Managing Disruptive Technologies Workshop University of Warwick Friday 24 February 2006 Bookings are now open for this workshop.
This workshop, which is being organised by UKOLN, UCISA and CETIS, will seek to address the challenges being faced by institutions in the move to use of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to development which underpins the JISC development activities (as part of the JISC E-Framework), together with the exploitation of new technologies (including technologies which are sometimes referred to as Web 2.0, mobile devices, etc).
The workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to hear more about the JISC E-Framework and a case study of involvement in E-Framework development, together with a case study of how innovative technologies are being used within institutions and the challenges such approaches may place on existing approaches to service provision and support.
The workshop will seek to development a framework which will aim to ensure that potentially disruptive technologies can successfully be absorbed into production services.
Further information, including online booking, is available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/ucisa-ukoln-cetis-2006/ Back to headlines JISC Conference 2006 International Convention Centre, Birmingham Tuesday 14 March 2006 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf06_home This year's JISC Conference programme will be built on the theme of Supporting Education and Research.
We are pleased to announce that Dr Liz Beaty, Director of Learning and Teaching, HEFCE and Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information will be the conference keynote speakers.
The conference will reflect the breadth of JISC activities in providing guidance, advice and opportunities for the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in education and research.
Provisional Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf06_programme Audience This one-day event will be of interest to all those in post-16 and Higher Education and research involved in planning for and supporting the use of ICT, including: Senior managers and those responsible for developing and implementing policy and strategy Staff who play a role in supporting the use of ICT in educational organisations, including practitioners Staff with responsibility for e-resources within their institution Teachers and researchers with an interest in the use of ICT Delegates will be given opportunities to learn about the full range of JISC's work by participating in seminars, debates, workshops and demonstrations.
In the exhibition area, a range of JISC services as well as corporate companies, agencies and associations will be able to provide advice and guidance on a range of support and resources available to delegates' institutions.
Registration http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf06_home#registration For all booking enquiries, please contact Sally-Ann Rymer on 01454 413 100 or email jisc@jarviswoodhouse.com.
Back to headlines ESDS Conference: Best Practices in Sharing Data Regent's College, London Friday 17 March 2006 This one day conference is organised by Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) as part of ESRC Social Science Week.
The conference brings together a range of natural and social science research communities to discuss data sharing policies and initiatives.
Speakers from the Research Councils and successful online data access services will provide an insight into achievements and opportunities.
ESDS will be launching its range of best practice guides on key aspects of sharing and management prepared for the Medical Research Council (MRC) and for the large scale cross-council Rural Economy and Land Use Programme.
Further details including programme and booking: http://www.esds.ac.uk/news/eventdetail.asp?ID=1503 Back to headlines 1st European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine Star Hotel, Lund, Sweden 21-22 April 2006 http://www.ecspbiomed.net/ As the publishing environment encounters new challenges in the Open Access model, researchers are faced with gaining an understanding of the opportunities as well as threats offered by this novel paradigm.
The conference will gather the most authoritative opinions on these issues and offers you the opportunity to participate in lectures and educational workshops in various areas related to authors publishing.
The principal aim of the conference is to broaden researchers understanding and knowledge of the rapid changes in the scientific communication and publishing area and its possible implications on the research community.
Highlights from the programme: Dr. Eugene Garfield, Founder & Chairman Emeritus, Institute for Scientific Information / Thomson Scientific, will give a lecture on the topic "Identifying Nobel Class Scientists and the Vagaries of Research Assessment".
Dr. Stevan Harnad, Southampton University UK, will give a lecture on Extending Institutional "Publish or Perish" Policies and Incentives to "Provide Open Access to Publications".
Dr. Jean-Claude Guédon from Montreal University will give a lecture on the topic "Open access in the bio-medical fields: why it is important for researchers, practising physicians and patients".
Jan Velterop from Springer Verlag will talk about "Open Access: the Choice Is Yours".
Dr. Sara Schroter & Trish Groves, BMJ Training UK, will give a workshop on peer-review.
Practical use of the Impact Factor and Citation Analysis using ISI Web of Knowledge, will be presented by Simon M Pratt, Thomson Scientific.
Registration: http://www.ecspbiomed.net/Templates/standard.aspx?Id=6 Back to headlines The Access to Knowledge Conference Information Society Project Yale Law School, New Haven, USA 21-23 April 2006 http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/a2k.html The goal of this landmark conference is to bring together leading thinkers and activists on access to knowledge policy from North and South to generate concrete research agendas and policy solutions for the next decade.
This conference will be among the first to synthesize the multifaceted and interdisciplinary aspects of access to knowledge, ranging from textbooks and telecommunications access to software and medicines.
Back to headlines Third Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication:B eyond Declarations The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication Star Hotel, Lund, Sweden 24-25 April 2006 http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc2006/ Following up the success of the First and Second Nordic Conferences on Scholarly Communication, Lund University Libraries are proud to announce the Third Nordic Conference.
The theme of the 2004 conference was "Towards a new publishing environment".
In order to discuss, present and analyse the problems and challenges that arise within scholarly communication Lund University Libraries invite scholars, publishers, vendors, editors, librarians and other interested parties to the Third Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication 24 25 April 2006.
The conference takes place every second year and aims to be an important contribution to the discussion and to the development within the Nordic countries.
Please note that there is no call for papers for this conference.
Themes Open Access Infrastructure Future Financing of Scholarly Publishing Intellectual Property Rights Research Assessment Speakers Bo-Christer Björk, Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki, Finland Eugene Garfield, Founder & Chairman Emeritus Institute for Scientific Information now Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, USA Jean-Claude Guedon, University of Montreal, Canada Derk Haank, Springer Science+Business Media, Berlin, Germany Mathias Klang, Creative Commons, University of Göteborg, Sweden Mark McCabe, School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA Mark Patterson, Public Library of Science, PLoS, UK Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd, UK John Wilbanks, Science Commons, Cambridge, MA, USA Astrid Wissenburg, Economic and Social Research Council/Research Councils UK, UK The organisers of the CERN OAI workshops and of the Nordic Conferences on Scholarly Communication have decided to alternate the two conferences.
The workshop OAI4 is intended as a forum for technological issues associated with scholarly communication and will take place every second year in alternation with the Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication http://cern.ch/oai4 Back to headlines TAPE workshop on management of audiovisual collections Amsterdam, the Netherlands 19-25 April 2006 http://www.tape-online.net/courses.html The deadline for registration for this workshop is 10 February 2006.
The workshop is aimed at all those responsible for audiovisual collections in archives, museums, libraries.
For this introductory course, no specific technical expertise is required.
In this 5-day workshop, the characteristics of film, video and sound recordings and the different recording systems and devices will be reviewed.
Specific requirements for their handling and preservation will be related to the nature and function of different kinds of audiovisual materials.
The workshop will explore the different transfer and conversion methods, technical requirements in relation to quality, and long-term management of digital files.
Issues will be approached as management problems, and due attention will be given to aspects like needs assessment, setting priorities, planning, budgeting and outsourcing, and project management.
The speakers will present outlines of issues and practical cases, and a substantial part of the workshops will be spent on discussions and group assignments to develop participants' skills in finding their own solutions.
The workshop will be in English.
Participants are expected to have a working knowledge of English in order to participate in discussions.
Organisation: European Commission on Preservation and Access, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
The workshops are supported by the Culture 2000 Programme of the EU as part of the TAPE Project Registration fee: 600 Euros, this includes coffee, tea, lunches and a course pack with reading materials.
Participants from institutes who are TAPE partners or ECPA contributors will pay 500 Euros.
For more information: European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA) P.O.
Box 19121, NL-1000 GC Amsterdam, visiting address: c/o KNAW, Trippenhuis, Kloveniersburgwal 29, NL-1011 JV Amsterdam, The Netherlands tel.
++31 20 551 08 39 fax ++31 20 620 49 41 URL: http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/ Back to headlines Spring 2006 CNI Task Force Meeting Arlington, Virginia, USA Monday 3-Tuesday 4 April 2006 http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006a.spring The Spring 2006 CNI Task Force Meeting will be held on 3-4 April at the Hilton Crystal City Hotel in Arlington, VA.
Registration materials will be sent by the end of this month to designated Task Force representatives.
Please note that the meeting and hotel registration deadline is Friday, 24 February.
We are now accepting proposals for project briefings, one-hour breakout sessions which focus on a specific institutional project related to networked information or a discussion of a hot topic.
Proposals may be submitted via a web form available at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006a.spring/proposal.html or via an e-mail message to Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org The deadline for proposal submission is Monday, 20 February.
Diane Goldenberg-Hart Communications Coordinator Coalition for Networked Information 21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 202-296-5098 202-872-0884 (Fax) diane@cni.org Back to headlines International Association of Technological University Libraries 2006 Conference: Embedding Libraries in Learning and Research Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal 22-25 May, 2006 Conference Web site: http://www.fe.up.pt/iatul2006 IATUL and the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal, with the collaboration of the Universidade do Minho and Universitat Polytènica de Catalunya are delighted to announce the IATUL 2006 Conference in Porto on 22-25 May, 2006.
Topics related to the Conference main theme include, but are not limited to, the following: Libraries and Teaching and Learning Libraries and Research Systems Integration Travel Grants: IATUL operates an Annual Travel Grant Programme to assist first-time attendees to the IATUL Conference.
IATUL (http://www.iatul.org), founded in 1955 as a voluntary international non-governmental organisation of libraries, provides a forum for the exchange of ideas relevant to librarianship in technological universities throughout the world.
It also provides library directors and senior managers an opportunity to develop a collaborative approach to solving common problems.
Contacts: http://www.fe.up.pt/iatul2006 email iatul2006@fe.up.pt Phone: +351225081575 Fax: +351225081893 Back to headlines Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006: Quality Matters University of Bath Wednesday 14-Friday 16 June 2006 Call For Speakers And Workshop Facilitators http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2006/call/ The call for plenary speakers, workshop facilitators and briefing session presenters for the 10th Institutional Web Management Workshop is now open.
The workshop will be held at the University of Bath on Wednesday 14th Friday 16th June 2006 and the theme is "Quality Matters".
If you would like to submit a proposal for a session, please read the information on the Web site and then contact: Marieke Guy (m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk) or a member of the programme committee.
The deadline for submissions is Monday 6 March 2006.
Back to headlines The JISC/CNI Meeting Envisioning future challenges in networked information 6-7 July 2006 York Moat House, York Following the success of previous conferences held in Edinburgh and Brighton, The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are proud to announce the 6th International Meeting that will be held at the York Moat House Hotel, York on 6 and 7 July 2006.
The meeting will bring together experts from the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom.
Parallel sessions will explore and contrast major developments that are happening on both sides of the Atlantic.
It should be of interest to all senior management in information systems in the education community and those responsible for delivering digital services and resources for learning, teaching and research.
Conference keynote speakers include: Reg Carr, Director of University Library Services & Bodley's Librarian, The Bodleian Library Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC Professor Derek Law, Librarian and Head of Information Resources Directorate, University of Strathclyde Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, CNI Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, CNI David Nicholas, Centre Director, CIBER Topics for parallel sessions include: Digital Curation Centre e-theses ICT in the Humanities and Social Sciences JISC/NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom Programme Institutional repositories For further information: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jisc-cni-2006/ Back to headlines European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries ECDL 2006 "Towards the European Digital Library" University of Alicante, Spain http://www.ecdl2006.org Call for contributions The 10th ECDL will be held in Alicante (Spain) in September 2006.
Papers are invited on substantial, original and completed research, applications and development that have not previously been presented elsewhere and that make new contributions to all aspects of Digital Libraries, including, but not limited to: Concepts of Digital Libraries and digital content.
Collection building, management and integration.
System architectures, integration and interoperability.
Information organization, search and usage.
Multilingual information access and multimedia content management.
User interfaces for digital libraries.
User studies and system evaluation.
Digital archiving and preservation: methodological, technical and legal issues.
Digital Library applications in e-science, e-learning, e-government, cultural heritage, etc.
Call for papers, posters and demos Submissions (up to 12 pages) via the ECDL2005 Conference Management System must follow the guidelines for the LNCS format provided by Springer (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).
Posters and demos will undergo a simplified review process, based on the submitted papers, and will be directly accepted or rejected.
Call for proposals: Panels: proposal should address controversial subjects of interest to a large community of ECDL participants.
Tutorials: tutorials are intended to present a topic in detail over either a half-day or a full day (Sunday 17 September).
Doctoral consortium: doctoral students (based on an acceptance of a written abstract) will have the opportunity to discuss their proposal with experienced researchers on Sunday 17 September.
Important Dates 3 March Paper/Tutorial/Panel submission deadline 3 April Doctoral consortium submission deadline 22 April Acceptance notification for tutorials 15 May Acceptance notifications for papers/poster/demos/doctoral consortium 2 June Final version of papers/poster/demos/doctoral consortium 15 July End of early registration 17-22 September Conference Additional information about submissions can be found at the conference Web site http://www.ecdl2006.org Back to headlines 2nd International Digital Curation Conference: Digital data curation in practice Call for Papers http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/ The 2nd International Digital Curation Conference will be held over 21 22 November 2006 at the City Centre Hilton, Glasgow, UK.
The Digital Curation Centre welcomes contributions and participation from individuals, organisations and institutions interested in the curation of data and the management of repositories for science and scholarship.
This would include all disciplines and domains that are engaged in the creation, use, reuse and long-term management of digital data from researchers and curators, through to policy makers and funders.
All proposals will be considered for papers, workshops, demonstrations and posters with both a practical and a research focus.
The Programme Committee will be chaired by: Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre Professor Tony Hey, Vice President of the Technical Computing Initiative (TCI), Microsoft For further info on the Call for Papers, a list of the main conference topics and submission dates see: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/call-for-papers/ For further information about the venue see: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/venue/ Back to headlines Library visits in England on the up for the third year running For the third consecutive year there has been a rise in the number of people visiting public libraries in England.
Statistics released today from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy show that in 2004/05 visits to public libraries increased by over three million.
There were over 17 million more visits to libraries in 2004/05 than there were in 2001/02.
The figures, which represent the most accurate information available on public library usage, show that 42% of library services are achieving seven or more of the ten Public Library Service Standards.
At the same time they challenge libraries to improve, showing that the number of active borrowers and the number of issues continue to fall.
Commenting on the findings, Head of Library Policy at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), John Dolan said: "These figures are a welcome spotlight on library performance and their timely release means that public libraries services can start the year knowing that more people are visiting and also with a clear set of goals for the future.
"The impact of the People's Network shows that investing in a new means of accessing information and learning was a wise move.
At the same time it will always be a priority for libraries to focus on books and reading, and MLA is working with other organisations including The Reading Agency and publishers to implement best practice in this area."
Meanwhile MLA is working with a broad range of stakeholders to develop options for new models of stock procurement.
The project will consider how improvements in technology, procurement and stock management practice that have already been adopted by some, can be harnessed more widely for the benefit of all libraries.
Source: MLA [Received: January 2006] Back to headlines OpenDOAR announces primary listing of open access archives OpenDOAR, the Directory of Open Access Repositories has announced the release of its primary listing of open access archives, available from http://www.opendoar.org/ Each of the repositories listed in OpenDOAR have been visited by project staff to check the information that is gathered.
This in-depth approach gives a quality-controlled list of repository features.
In addition, while reviewing these archives, project staff are building a picture of the world-wide development of open access repositories, noting new features and directions.
This information is being analysed to create the next version of the listing, with further information and categories being noted for each repository.
OpenDOAR is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and Lund University in Sweden.
Both institutions are active in open access initiatives.
Lund operates the Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/ Nottingham leads SHERPA, and runs the SHERPA/RoMEO database which is used worldwide as a reference for publisher's copyright policies.
Staff at Lund University Libraries have created the initial OpenDOAR technical set-up and carried out repository review and classification.
OpenDOAR builds on open access work done by other researchers and projects to record and list repositories.
OpenDOAR acknowledges, among others, the Public Knowledge Project and the universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Southampton.
OpenDOAR is jointly funded by four agencies, led by the international Open Society Institute (OSI).
The UK higher education funding committee, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has provided support, along with funding from the UK-based Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) and from SPARCEurope an alliance of European research libraries, library organisations, and research institutions.
Further information: http://www.opendoar.org/documents/OpenDOAR_Press_Release_Jan06.pdf or contact either: Bill Hubbard SHERPA Manager University of Nottingham Email: bill.hubbard@opendoar.org Phone: +44 (0) 115 846 7657 Lars Bjørnshauge Director of Libraries Lund University Libraries Email: lars.bjornshauge@lub.lu.se Phone: +46 (0) 46 222 9203 [Received: January 2006] Back to headlines Partnership between MLA and the British Council for museums, libraries and archives MLA funds a part-time Museums, Libraries and Archives post within the British Council.
The post is held by Jane Weeks and she acts as the first point of contact at the British Council for the museums, libraries and archives sector, her role also raises the awareness of the museums, libraries and archives sector within the British Council.
The agreement runs until March 2006, and aims to: *Assist MLA in developing its international links *Assist BC in developing its links with regional museums, libraries and archives *Support people and institutions in the UK to develop their potential to work internationally *Support UK museums, libraries and archives in sharing skills overseas *Establish organisational links at a strategic level *Activities include: MLA advising the BC on speakers for seminars overseas, BC providing briefings for MLA on specific geographical areas, such as China, and developing the content of both websites.
For example through the MLA/BC partnership Sue Wilkinson, MLA's Director of Learning, Access, Renaissance, Regions & International Team, has just returned from Iran where she participated in the first UK-Iran museum management seminar in Tehran.
Other speakers included Michael Day, Chief Executive, Historical Royal Palaces, Xerzes Mazda, Head of Interpretation, British Museum and Sue Stronge, Curator, Asian Department, Victoria & Albert Museum.
The seminar was a joint project between the British Council in Tehran and the National Museum of Iran.
Sue gave two keynote addresses, one on learning and one on ethics and standards.
If you are interested in developing links please contact Jane Weeks, Museums, Libraries and Archives Adviser, The British Council jane.weeks@britishcouncil.org or 020 7389 3172.
Source: MLA [Received: December 2005] Back to headlines Public Libraries Stock Procurement Model Development project MLA have appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP to work with them on a Public Libraries Stock Procurement Model Development project.
The project will engage a broad range of stakeholders to develop a range of options for new models of stock procurement.
It will then refine business cases for those considered most viable, and develop a plan so that the final preferred model can be in place by 2008.
The goal is to achieve better library services through better stock procurement.
The project will consider how improvements in technology, procurement and stock management practice that have already been adopted by some libraries and in other sectors, can be harnessed more widely for the benefit of all libraries.
Key stakeholders, including local authorities, library services and users, will be involved throughout.
The steering group is chaired by Councillor Chris White, representing the Local Government Association.
Better availability and more efficient management of stock, with flexibility to meet local needs Freeing up library staff time and resource from 'back-office' work to provide additional services Creating the potential for reinvestment of efficiencies so libraries can provide the best possible service to their communities through better opening hours, stock and other services.
The project will first identify the national scope for efficiency in libraries stock procurement in order to produce a range of potential models for consideration.
All feasible options will be considered, from minor improvements to the current system to more significant change.
The intention is to achieve the greatest possible level of efficiency consistent with retaining the best of local accountability.
The project does not aim to impose a solution, but to create proposals that will make the arguments for buying-in so persuasive that they are impossible to resist.
Source: MLA [Received: December 2005] Back to headlines Coalition for Networked Information announces new program plan The CNI 2005-2006 Program Plan is now available at the CNI Web site, http://www.cni.org In a news release Clifford Lynch, Director, CNI expressed the hope that readers would find the CNI Program Plan http://www.cni.org/program/ helpful not only in understanding CNI's current priorities and programmes, but also as a vehicle for sharing information about CNI and its work with other interested colleagues.
On 5 December 2005 Clifford gave an overview of the Program Plan at the CNI Fall 2005 Task Force Meeting from which project briefings have now been made available: http://www.cni.org/tfms/2005b.fall/project.html Source: CNI [Received: December 2006] Back to headlines Major boost to career opportunities for knowledge workers The Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and Lifelong Learning UK (LLUK) have announced a strategic partnership agreement to develop a more skilled and responsive libraries and archives workforce.
Both parties have signed up to a three-year programme of collaboration which will open up greater opportunities for staff in terms of career progression and development.
At the heart of the partnership is the development of a variety of routes into working in libraries and archives, offering greater access to training and more flexibility in planning career pathways.
Other key strands of development include the collection of more robust workforce data, enhancing leadership skills and increasing diversity in the sector's workforce.
Welcoming the new partnership, David Hunter, Chief Executive of LLUK said that in a knowledge-driven economy, libraries and archives staff had a vital role to play.
MLA Chief Executive Chris Batt announced his enthusiasm for the partnership and identified the ultimate goals of improving public access to collections and resources in libraries and archives, and developing a diverse and knowledgeable workforce.
Speaking from an employer perspective David Ruse, Director of Libraries at the Westminster City Council, said that libraries and archives play a vital role in enabling communities and small businesses to access lifelong learning opportunities.
Source: MLA [Received: December 2005 ] Back to headlines JORUM user service now available The JORUM Team is pleased to announce that Further and Higher Education institutions in the UK can now register for the JORUM User Service.
JORUM User allows staff from registered institutions to search, browse, preview, download, review, reuse and repurpose resources in JORUM.
This free online repository service hosts a range of learning and teaching resources, covering a variety of subject areas and educational levels.
JISC views JORUM as a long-term venture and as the service develops, the type, breadth and subject coverage of resources available in JORUM will depend on contributions made by the community.
JORUM's success will be built on the support surrounding the service by the team, the long-term view taken by JISC and the commitment and enthusiasm of both Contributors and Users.
Institutions must register first before staff are able to gain access.
Institutions can register free for the JORUM User Service on the JISC Collections Website: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=coll_jorum .
A Site Rep and a Technical Rep must also be nominated, providing a local point of contact for staff within the institution and for the JORUM Team.
The JORUM Contributor Service, allowing institutions and projects to donate resources to JORUM, was launched in November 2005.
Since then an initial collection of resources has been submitted, from over 20 institutions which have signed up.
The current collection reflects the projects and institutions which have contributed material so far, there are a number of sizeable collections including engineering and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Language).
The newly updated JORUM Web site ( http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ ) has a comprehensive new section on JORUM User ( http://www.jorum.ac.uk/user/ ) offering support in registering and logging in, as well as a useful selection of support, training and promotional materials.
Contact: Jackie Carter support@jorum.ac.uk [Received: January 2006] Back to headlines Orphan Works Report from US Copyright Office is now available The US Copyright Office has submitted its report on orphan works.
These are works that are still under copyright but where the owner cannnot be reasonably located.
"Report on Orphan Works" was made available to the U.S.Senate on 31 January 2006 and is now available at http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/ Clifford Lynch, Director, CNI, has recently announced that those attending the Spring CNI Task force meeting in April can expect to hear of a report from the Copyright Office on this work.
Source : CNI [Received: February 2006] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Sketching Tomorrow The Social Dynamics of Information and Communication Technology Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Sketching Tomorrow The Social Dynamics of Information and Communication Technology Buzz data mobile framework flash personalisation sms twitter gnome ict research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin takes a look at an ambitious work on the relationship of modern society to information and communication technologies and observes more sins of omission than commission.
In the introduction to this 227-page work [1], editors Eugene Loos, Enid Mante-Meijer and Leslie Haddon provide a concise history of the organisation underlying the research area the social dynamics of information and communication technology, or ICT to those on first-name terms and the political stance that called it into being.
The European Commission and national governments, it seems, are of the opinion that information and communication technologies as a whole can be seen as enablers for the furtherance of democratic society.
Viewpoint of the Editors The editors see it as a social-constructivist viewpoint; the user, the citizen, every stakeholder, represents a co-constructor of an emergent society.
Technology, they note, cannot produce an ideal society.
People do that.
Technology is the enabler, or maybe the catalyst.
To study this area, interdisciplinary groups of reseachers and consultants set up a series of conferences and activities via the European COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology) intergovernmental framework, which was designed to allow the coordination of nationally funded research on a European level [2].
This book is a series of selected papers, further developed, from the 2003 COST 269 conference, which was broadly subtitled 'The Good, the Bad and the Irrelevant: The user and the future of information and communication technologies.'
Formally, the preoccupying questions underlying this book are given ([1], p.2) as: In which ways may ICTs serve as tools in the reshaping of everyday life?
What social dynamics are involved in the adoption and rejection of ICTs on personal and organisational levels?
The editors describe adoption and domestication of ICT (an oddly evocative term, the formal definition for which sadly has escaped the notice of the book's indexer) as taking technology home as a pet and making it yours [3] and a 'profoundly social phenomenon driven by the ways in which people make sense of their environment', quoting Weick's statement [4] that 'Rather than talking about adapting to an external environment, it may be more correct to argue that organizing consists of adapting to an enacted environment [ ...] constituted by the actions of interdependent human actors.
The phrase "enacted environment" preserves the crucial distinction that we wish to make, the most important being that the human creates the environment to which the system then adapts.'
To put it another way, to the extent that ICT is predictable or capable of evaluation by the user, then ICT is what you think it is and hence, what you make of it.
Designing ICTs, then, implies a good understanding of the context including social aspects of that context of use.
And as regards the prediction of social consequence: to understand how ICT will affect the ever-present evolution of society presupposes an understanding of its undercurrents and pressures, on macroclimate and local levels, and the ability to model and to predict in a manner that begins to approach one of the science-fiction author Asimov's inventions, psychohistory [5].
However, that an endeavour appears forbiddingly difficult to achieve does not mean that time spent in mapping the edges of that territory should be seen as wasted, and the time spent observing the area of the map with the caption 'Here be Dragons' has not been wasted.
Contents The papers are quite short; around sixteen pages per paper should not seem short, but with such a large canvas on which to draw, it suddenly represents a cramped space in which to introduce an area and manner of investigation, a topic, a scene, and to provide both results and conclusion.
Formally, the book is separated into five sections, within which each paper represents a chapter.
The headings are reproduced below: Part 1: Disciplinary Insights into the Social Dynamics of Innovation and Domestication 1.
Computer Anxiety in Daily Life: Old History?
2.
ICTs and the Human Body: An Empirical Study in Five Countries 3.
The Adoption of Terrestrial Digital TV: Technology Push, Political Will or Users' Choice 4.
The Flexible Room: Technology for Communication and Personalisation Part 2: The Internet as a tool to enable users to organise everyday life 5.
Users of the Family Internet Sites: A Virtual Community between Intimate Space and Public Apace 6.
Legal Self-Help and the Internet 7.
On Older People, Internet Access and Electronic Service Delivery: a Study of Sheltered Homes Part 3: ICTs in Organisational Settings: A Tool or a Curse?
8.
Resistance to Innovation: a Case Study 9.
Using ICT in Human Service Organisations: An Enabling Constraint?
Social Workers, New Technology and their Organisation 10.
The Impact of ICT Implementations on Social Interaction in Work Communities Part 4: The Future: The Boundaries Between Work and Non-Work Life 11.
There is no Business like Small Business: The Use and Meaning of ICTs for Micro-Enterprises.
12.
Teleworking Behind the Front Door: The Patterns and Meaning of Telework in the Everyday Lives of Workers Part 5: Future Developments 13: Enabling Humans to Control the Ethical Behaviour of Persuasive Agents 14.
Challenging Sensory Impairments The topics covered in the book seem to represent a random walk over a broad selection of topics from many disciplines.
Like any other random walk it spends time caught in some topics, and others appear rather as an afterthought.
Taking the core topic of 'society', we wander through the downsides of technologies, from the increasingly strict requirement to operate computers rather than interacting with humans in daily activities such as driving, commerce and consultation, to the cross-generationally present fear that makes this unpleasant for users, computer anxiety, and the resistance to this aspect of computerisation.
We consider the enabling aspects of ICT through silver surfers and legal self-help (especially useful for the more vulnerable) via the Internet.
Along the way, social interaction and virtual community are examined, and we stumble, rather dazedly by this point, into a discussion of ethics and computerised agents.
From there, the book takes us to Gladstone's poignant and fascinating final diversion into the topic of sensory impairment, retention and translation into accessible forms of data, and an unflinchingly honest evaluation: 'The narrow view of information has meant that many proposed solutions fail to address users' needs sufficiently to be technically worthwhile [ ...] technology increasingly represents a solution that is looking for a problem.
'[6] He quotes 'the elderly lady who said to an evaluator, "I am sure that all that technology is very useful but my problem is that I won't live to see my granddaughter grow up"'.
It is a sobering way to bring the star-struck reader back to earth.
Conclusion The book may meander, directed by the interests of its authors the editors' conclusion ([1], pp.
217-221) itself remarks on the diversity of the content but the conclusion given by Gladstone says it all: 'The tendency to replace human-based services by technical systems in the name of independence for the user and economy for the supplier addresses neither the real implications for the user nor the complexity of the world in which people live.
The human element in collection, presentation and delivery of ICT services is, and remains, vital.'
[6] It is said that when all you have is a hammer, everything will look like a nail.
The editors' conclusion states that the principle underlying the conference and the collection of papers into a book was 'that we benefit from looking beyond our own specialism to appreciate the contributions that different disciplines, themselves containing multiple approaches, have to make' (quotation (in [1], p.217) from Haddon [7]).
The more tools that are available for the interdisciplinary research community to wield, the better the resulting model.
When I read this book my first reaction was disappointment, not at the content of the book (which is of a generally high quality and mentions many interesting case studies) but because of the content that seemed to me to be missing.
In a world in which the Spanish could organise 2004 'flash mob' demonstrations through a form of SMS 'Chinese Whispers' [8], where the news reports in the spring of 2009 focused on the use of Twitter to organise protests in Moldova [9], where in this book is the political side of ICT to be found?
However, the fact that the book does not provide detailed discussion of all aspects of the subject could imply, as the editors state, that the topic is simply too large to give more than the briefest of overviews of subject areas in a single collection of research.
References The Social Dynamics of Information and Communication Technology.
Eds.
Eugène Loos, Enid Mante-Meijer and Leslie Hadden.
Ashgate.
ISBN 978 0 7546 7082 7 COST: European Cooperation in Science and Technology.
Retrieved 15 March, 2009 http://www.cost.esf.org/about_cost One formal definition for 'domestication' in ICT is given by Anderson [10].
The term indeed draws the analogy with 'the domestication of animals as an aid in human activities.[...]
Over time familiarisation, experience, training and (perhaps most importantly) experimentation lead to a domestication cycle.[...]
The end result is a domesticated animal whose place in peoples' lives becomes familiar to the extent that it "disappears" as a technology in everyday language..[...] This is most easily seen in the recent domestication of the mobile telephone which has become a tool of business, of safety and security, an item of fashion, of convenience and, most dramatically, of young people's fervid social communication.'
Weick, K. E. (1969).
The Social Psychology of Organizing.
(Reading: Blackwell) Asimov, I.
Foundation.
Gnome Press, 1951.
Gladstone, K. (2008).
Challenging Sensory Impairment.
In: The Social Dynamics of Information and Communication Technology.
Eds.
Loos et al., pp 207.
Haddon, L. Mante, E. A., Sapio, B., Kommonen, K.-H., Fortunati, L. and Kant, A.
(eds) (2005), Everyday Innovators: Researching the Role of Users in Shaping ICTs (Dordrecht: Springer).
Flashmobs with a Purpose:Protests in Madrid organized by SMS, chatrooms.
Posting on Boing Boing, 13 March 2004. http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/13/flashmobs-with-a-pur.html Student protests are turning into a Twitter revolution in Moldova http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/student-protests-are-turning-into-a-twitter-revolution-in-moldova/ Anderson, Ben (2003).
The domestication of information and communication technologies.
Retrieved 15 March 2009 http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/content/Pubs/wps/CWP-2002-03-Domestication-of-ICTs.pdf Author Details Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Sketching Tomorrow" Author: Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/tonkin-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Is Google Building on Shaky Foundations?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Is Google Building on Shaky Foundations?
Buzz mobile database rss archives blog copyright video aggregation technorati youtube research Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes an in-depth look at Google and its competition and wonders if things are looking slightly worrying for the search giant.
I’m sure that there must be some sort of wise old saying along the lines of ‘the loudest noise starts with the quietest whisper’.
This is something that I’m experiencing a lot at the moment as I spend time on the Internet, or teaching, or even just talking to people I’m beginning to hear a little whisper along the lines of ‘What’s up with Google these days?’ This is not a line from the experts it’s just ordinary people who are beginning to wonder if Google is… well running out of steam.
To be fair, and to abuse my own metaphor, it’s not entirely a whisper, and in fact more and more people are raising the issue with every passing day.
This really isn’t anything new, and in fact I wrote about it in Ariadne back in April 2004 [1], but what I think is slightly different is that people are less surprised these days when Google does something that doesn’t work; there is almost an expectation that when something new is released it’s going to be less than perfect, or that there are other, better resources available.
In this article I’m going to look at a few of the things that Google has released over the course of this year and see how they have been received and what, if any, other resources there are that either do a better job than Google, or from which Google should be learning.
The Google Approach to Product Development There is no doubt that Google has been quite prolific in 2006, releasing different utilities on a very regular basis.
We’ve had the news archive search function, the image labeller game, the ability to download the full text of out-of-copyright books, webmaster central, music trends, the addition of malware warnings and that is only for August and September!
Clearly Google is doing exactly what it promised; in July Marissa Mayer said ‘We believe that we should be launching more products than what will ultimately become phenomenally popular.
The way you find really successful new innovation is to release five things and hope that one or two of them really take off.’ [2] This tends to ring alarm bells for me, and I may be guilty of misreading her comments, she seems to be saying that Google is basically going to throw a lot of stuff onto the wall and see what sticks.
In fact, later in the same piece she says”We anticipate that we’re going to throw out a lot of products.
People won’t be able to remember them all, but they will remember the ones that really matter and the ones that have a lot of user potential.” This is all well and good, but again, I find it somewhat worrying.
It seems to imply that Google doesn’t really know their market they’re not sure what will work and what won’t, so they’re just trying everything.
It’s an interesting marketing strategy most companies do extensive market research before releasing something, but I suppose if a company has as much money as Google does they can afford to take a different approach.
My concern at this point is rather less with Google, and rather more with the end user.
People use products for a variety of different reasons, but generally in both the hope and expectation that the product will continue to be improved and supported.
Of course, if something is in a beta release it’s necessary to accept that things might not work as well as they should, or that it may break now and then, and that is perfectly reasonable.
However, given that Google keeps products in beta mode for a very long time they are clearly demonstrating that they have a different view and understanding of exactly what ‘beta’ means.
It is an unfortunate fact of using Google-based products that users will not always get a good service; possibly because their development teams are expending their energies running around producing new products rather than improving and developing existing ones.
It was only in August of this year that Google paradoxically moved Blogger (the weblog utility that they purchased) into beta mode as they added new features such as categories.
The worrying point here of course is that they are already way behind the times; the ability to categorise weblog posts has been around for a long time, and on a personal note it’s the reason why I finally moved my weblog from Blogger to Typepad, over a year ago.
To take one other example at this point, if you run a search for the phrase ‘Google is broken’ you’ll probably get something in the region of 10,500 hits.
If you then limit your results to the last 3 months there are 10,100 hits, for the last 6 months 10,200 hits and for the last year there are 9,980 hits.
I’m not entirely sure how you can have more results in the last 3 months than you can for the entire year, but clearly this functionality is unreliable, at best.
The ability for search syntax to work within Google also depends on the user taking into upper and lower case a search for Link:www.ariadne.ac.uk provides a very different figure to the search link:www.ariadne.ac.uk and these are absolute nuts and bolts basic errors.
The concern for the user is therefore the lack of certainty that a product will actually develop over time, and one of the concerns for Google should be that because of this uncertainty there will be less take-up of their products than they might hope for.
Although the search giant is still by far and away the most popular search engine on the Internet statistics continually show that it commands the majority of searches in the United States [3] and the UK [4] for example studies are also illustrating that for the majority of their other products they are in fact running quite far behind their major competitors.
Google Search Offerings and Other Options There is no doubt that in the area of search Google is still number 1 by a country mile that’s not in dispute at all, as the previously mentioned figures illustrate.
However, just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s always the best in its class, and Google could actually learn rather a lot from its competitors.
When I run a search I may simply need to obtain the information as a one-off, but quite commonly I want to run that search on a regular basis to see if any new Web sites are emerging in that area.
MSN Search [5] has a very nice little function hidden away at the bottom of the results page RSS.
By adding that RSS feed to my news aggregator Bloglines [6] I get an update every hour of new Web pages that the engine has found for me based on the search strategy that I’ve used.
This allows me to follow changes to the top results on an almost instant basis.
This is a powerful and effective current awareness tool and one that I use a great deal I have a lot of searches saved and they are almost constantly running in the background for me.
Now admittedly I could get something similar using Google News [7], with their news alert function, so I can keep up to date via email or RSS, but Google News is something of a blunt instrument at the best of times.
I wrote about Accoona in my last Ariadne column [8] and when it comes to targetting the news that I’m really interested in, Accoona provides me with far superior methods of doing this than I get with Google.
The Yahoo!
Mindset [9] is a research project that Yahoo!
has had ticking away in the background for over a year now.
Essentially searchers can run a search and then by using a slider bar rearrange the results to emphasise either the research or shopping angles of a subject.
Consequently a search for ‘mobile phones’ allows searchers to focus more on sites that are offering to sell them mobile phones, or sites that are looking at say, the dangers of using them.
MSN Search, with the Search builder application, allows users to re-rank search results based on freshness and popularity for example.
Exalead [10] allows us to re-rank by date.
Accoona [11] also lets users emphasise particular aspects of a search to highlight a particular search term.
With Google we have ‘Google sinkers’ where by users can repeat a search term several times to change the emphasis of a term and to affect the order of results.
Try a search for ‘football’ and then try a search for ‘football football’ and see what I mean.
I’d like to think this is a well thought-out strategy from Google, but I suspect it’s nothing more than a happy accident.
There are times when we all have to search for information on a subject that we don’t know terribly well, and as such we’re fairly limited in the terms that we can use.
I wanted to find out more about the Zoroastrian religion recently and a search for the term on Google gave me a list of pages that I could look at, but wasn’t overly helpful.
A search for ‘define:zoroastrian’ was rather more helpful, since at that point Google did suggest some other terms that were related.
However, since there were only 3 offerings, I was still fairly much in the dark.
However, moving across to Ask [12] and running the same search I was presented with a listing of 14 different searches that I could run to narrow down and focus the search.
Admittedly in this instance I didn’t get any suggestions for running a broader search, but that’s quite unusual.
If I want a quick view of a page then I’m going to turn to Exalead for their thumbnail approach, and that’s also the search engine that I’ll use if my spelling is really bad, since their option for phonetic spelling works extremely well.
Google Utilities and Other Options Google does of course provide users with many other resources, not just basic search.
However, in these areas it is also finding it quite hard to make any sort of impression.
The ability to post and to search for video footage is swiftly becoming a very popular tool; we’re now very long gone from the days when we could really only consider searching for text or images.
Google does have a video search function [13], and is promoting it very heavily the function is now linked from the home page, relegating Froogle down and into the ‘more’ menu popup.
However, when looking at the usage of the service in comparison to the competition as highlighted by Hitwise [14], Google video is lagging behind all the other major providers.
Youtube [15] is probably the most popular utility at the moment, but speaking personally I have always found that Yahoo!
Video Search [16] has always given me good solid results that are absolutely on topic.
The same can also be said of image searching in fact: although Google has a larger image database [17] than Yahoo!
[18], the search results always seem to be just that slightly bit more accurate, although this could always simply be my own perspective.
Since this article was first written Google has purchased YouTube.
After an initial popular start with Gmail when people were apparently offering to swop a car for an invite to use the system (this may or may not be true, but wouldn’t surprise me), Hotmail [19] and Yahoo!
mail [20] are still proving more popular with 52% and 23% respectively in comparison to Gmail’s 2.2% [4] Many people were concerned that their mail was being read, in order for Google to serve appropriate advertising to them and while it’s true that users do get adverts based on the content of emails, the company is not employing thousands of people to sit and read users correspondence.
The incorporation of Google Talk [21] into the system also failed to arouse a great deal of interest, only claiming a user base of 3.4 million in comparison with 204 million using MSN Messenger [22].
Over the summer Google introduced the Shakespeare collection of works [23] as part of their Book Search service.
The theory was that people could download copies of all of Shakepeare’s plays, but unfortunately this proved to be incorrect due to perceived copyright restrictions.
Ironically the UK was one of the countries that was blocked, and in most instances it was not possible to download copies of all the plays, just a small selection of them.
In comparison, the Internet Shakespeare Editions site [24] among many others provided a far superior resource and makes the Google offering look amateurish and poorly thought out.
Moreover, Clusty has produced Shakespeare Searched [25] which has been very well received by most commentators with its clear interface, flexibility and search functionality all things lacking in the Google version.
More recently the Google News Archive Search [26] has proved popular with users, though it has been pointed out that since many of the resources are only available under commercial arrangements it is not as useful as it might otherwise have been.
As Gary Price was quick to point out [27], libraries have the same type of information and have been offering it free for a very long time.
The list goes on and on, very depressingly for Google.
Their blog search option [28] has never really put their competitors such as Technorati [29] under any pressure.
The Google notebook, Google calendar and Google spreadsheet options were all launched with great fanfare, but after the initial burst of interest and curiosity they have failed to make much headway at all.
Industry pundits and observers always look at new Google releases or updates with keen interest; it would be stupid to do anything else.
However, when it comes down to practical options and choices the number of times that I, as a trainer, recommend Google is becoming more and more infrequent.
Google doesn’t appear to be overly concerned with this at the moment Marissa Meyer is prepared for a failure rate of products running at somewhere between 60%-80% [30].
As long as Google can sustain that level of failure they can continue to do pretty much whatever they please.
However, I think that the danger is that as more people are continually disappointed by Google’s performance, the more they will look at the company overall, and this will include a re-evaluation of their Internet search flagship.
A good example of exactly this can be found in Rafe Needleman’s article ‘It’s time to reconsider Google’ with his quote “Google is good, but it’s not worth unyielding devotion.”[31].
Conclusion The fact that ‘limit by date’ still hasn’t been fixed becomes less of a whispered ‘Google is broken’ and a rather louder shout of ‘Let’s go somewhere else’.
There are plenty of companies, organisations and utilities already filling the gaps.
A clear example of this is the weblog entry from Sarah Houghton-Jan entitled ‘Ten reasons librarians should use Ask.com instead of Google.’ [32].
Reasons include less advertising, better functionality and most importantly a better search experience.
If this doesn’t concern Google then nothing will.
Of course, none of this means that Google is going to disappear over night or at all, since so many people like the simple-to-use interface and approach; but, just maybe, it’s illustrating the fact that it’s not the invincible monolith some people think that it is.
References Phil Bradley.
Search Engines: the Google Backlash, April 2004, Ariadne Issue 39 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/search-engines/ Inside Google’s New-Product Process, 30 June 2006, BusinessWeek online, Technology http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2006/tc20060629_411177.htm?campaign_id=bier_tcj Google continues to be the biggest search engine in the US, 27 May 2006, Pandia Search Engine News http://www.pandia.com/sew/219-google-continues-to-be-the-biggest-search-engine-in-the-us.html Heather Hopkins.
MSN and Yahoo!
Search Tied for Second in UK, 1 June 2006, Hitwise UK http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-hopkins/2006/06/msn_and_yahoo_search_tied_for.html MSN Search http://search.msn.com/ Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com/ Google News http://news.google.com/ Phil Bradley Accoona: Super-charged Super Target Searching, April 2006, Ariadne Issue 4 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/search-engines/ Yahoo!
Mindset http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/ Exalead http://www.exalead.com/ Accoona http://www.accoona.com/ Ask http://www.ask.com/ Google video search http://video.google.com/ Bill Tancer Google Video, YouTube and MySpace Vids, 16 August 2006, Hitwise US http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/08/google_youtube_and_myspace_an.html Youtube http://www.youtube.com/ Yahoo Video Search http://video.search.yahoo.com/ Google Image Search http://images.google.com/ Yahoo!
Image Search http://search.yahoo.com/images?&ei=UTF-8&p= Hotmail http://www.hotmail.com Yahoo!
Mail http://mail.yahoo.com Google Talk http://www.google.com/talk/ Google Talk fails to find audience.
http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2006/07/google_talk_fai.html Shakespeare Collection http://books.google.com/googlebooks/shakespeare/ Internet Shakespeare Editions http://ise.uvic.ca/index.html Shakespeare Searched http://shakespeare.clusty.com/ Google News Archive Search http://news.google.com/archivesearch/ Gary Price Google launches news archive search: commentary, 6 September 2006, resourceshelf http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/09/06/google-launches-news-archive-search/#more-8126 Google Blog Search http://blogsearch.google.com/ Technorati http://www.technorati.com/ So much fanfare, so few hits, 10 July 2006, Business Week Online http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_28/b3992051.htm Rafe Needleman, It’s time to reconsider Google, 12 September 2006, CNET News.com http://news.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029694,49283482,00.htm Sarah Houghton-Jan, Ten reasons librarians should use Ask.com instead of Google.
22 September 2006 http://librarianinblack.typepad.com Author Details Phil Bradley Independent Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: “Search Engines: Is Google Building on Shaky Foundations?” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Website Optimization Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Website Optimization Buzz software rdf framework html wireless apache metadata css repositories video cache uri microformats ajax research Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff used to think 'Website Optimisation' simply meant compressing images and avoiding nested tables, but in this he book finds out how much more there is to it, even in the Age of Broadband.
Serendipity can be a wonderful thing.
It was a Tuesday, over coffee, that the esteemed editor of this publication presented me with a copy of Website Optimization and asked if I would be interested in reviewing it.
Two days later, at a regular team meeting for the Repositories Support Project 1, we discussed (rather generally) how we might boost the search ranking and usage of the RSP Web site.
Marvellous, an interesting book to review and a real life problem to which to apply to it.
In the Foreword Jim Sterne writes: “Do not read this book.
Spend a day scanning this book with a pad of yellow sticky notes at hand.” [2] Readers of my previous reviews will know that I take to heart what is said in the Foreword; so armed with the book, some page markers (which I prefer to yellow sticky notelets), a sharpened pencil and a couple of prints of the RSP Web site, I headed to the nearest café to scan, digest and mark up the pages.
The process worked in about an hour I had identified various parts of the text that I wanted to read and also chapters I could skim over, at least to start with.
This analysis of the content closely matched the book’s two parts: Part 1: Search Engine Marketing Optimization Part 2: Web Performance Optimization Part 1: includes chapters on the dark arts of improving result ranking, pay-per-click advertising and conversion rate optimisation and clearly relevant for my RSP task.
Part 2 turns to the even darker arts of increasing the performance of a Web site by manipulating HTML, HTTP requests, images, CSS, Ajax code and even tweaking the Web server.
The final (long) chapter (10), described as bridging the parts, discusses Website Optimization Metrics.
It is essential reading for anyone wishing to prove that their hard work optimising their Web site is worth it to themselves or their paymasters and to keep a handle on what is going on with their Web site i.e.
everyone.
Chapter 1 was the one that got the most page markers and covers ‘Natural Search Engine Optimization’.
As you might guess, this is about improving the positioning of a Web site within search engines and provides some useful tips in language most people familiar with the Web will understand.
What works well is that the author takes a holistic approach to the topic.
It is not just about having a well constructed site that avoids using image maps for navigation, not just about strategically placed key words or phrases, and not just about having a large number of links to the Web site from other sites.
It is about all these things working together and is also about careful monitoring over time.
The author makes it clear that: “SEO strategy requires a long-term approach with frequent postings, targeted content, and regular online promotion designed to boost inbound links in short, a combination of off-site and on-site SEO” [3] This sounds off-putting who has time for a ‘long-term approach’?
but SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) campaigns, the book suggests, take anything from 4-12 months which is certainly a lesson to learn for a project that concludes next year.
I was intrigued by and pleased to see mention of metadata, cool URIs [4] and (in a sidebar entitled “The Future of SEO: Metadata”) even microformats [5] and RDF [6].
Chapter 2 is a case study of the techniques from Chapter 1 and provides a useful framework to plan an SEO project and includes some interesting statistics not found in Chapter 1.
Chapter 3 is concerned with Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising [7] and the mysteries therein.
I foolishly ignored the warning that the chapter assumed a ‘general understanding of PPC advertising’, thinking that of course I had that understanding.
I knew it meant “see an advert on Google.
Click the ad.
Advertiser pays”.
I was, of course, being naïve.
I managed the first couple of pages before getting lost in samples, metrics and keyword groups.
That is not to say the chapter is complicated or of no use to the PPC novice, but it certainly makes a lot more sense in the light of some (albeit brief) experience of using a PPC advertising service.
Before I read the chapter a second time, I signed up to Google AdWords [8] and familiarised myself with the tools.
I did not really know what I was doing, though Google’s help was good, (if you want to try it it’ll cost you £5 one-time creation fee plus whatever you choose as your AdWords budget, which could be nothing if you have saved an AdWords voucher from a magazine).
Having got some first-hand experience of AdWords I returned to the chapter and, using the book as a guide, I had a PPC advert appearing alongside a search for “Institutional Repositories” within the hour: Fig 1.
Screenshot showing the RSP PPC advert alongside a search for “Insitutional Repositories”.
Notice how RSP does not appear in the search results.
When the excitement wore off, I continued to read and the book brings the reader down to earth by discussing what it means to use PPC and how to get the most value for money from it.
Anyone, it seems, with enough budget can get an advert alongside an appropriate result set, but does the cost of the click warrant it?
How does the cost of that click relate to any profit gained, from a sale say, when they get to the adverts linked page?
While much of this was distinctly alien what does it mean to maximise the return on investment in the context of a JISC project that does not charge for its services?
it made interesting reading and highlighted how PPC, like SEO in chapter 1, requires a lot of effort and time.
Further, investment in PPC for something like RSP (perhaps limited to .ac.uk domains as Google AdWords seems to allow) might prove a small cost for a significant benefit in usage.
Chapter 4 is a further case study, this time highlighting what application of PPC can do for a commercial site.
It didn’t warrant a page marker and I did not spend much time with it but I suspect the statistics given would make compelling reading for anyone trying to promote Website optimisation in their organisation.
Chapter 5 concludes Part 1 and deals with “Conversion Rate Optimization” which the book defines as: “the art and science of persuading your site visitors to take actions that benefit you, by making a purchase, offering a donation, or committing to some positive future action” [9] My initial reaction was to skip this chapter.
It sounded far more relevant to sites that sell books than to JISC project Web sites.
However, RSP does provide a service and any contact with us amounts to a benefit to the project, even if the user does not pay for the services.
Reading the chapter it quickly became clear that working through the “Top Ten of Factors” was something every Web site manager interested in engaging their target audience should do, for profit or not.
That concluded my research for the RSP, but there was a whole second half of the book to explore and it would be remiss of me to have ignored it for this review and so in Part 2 I moved from the alien concepts of profit, marketing and promotion back to familiar turf the things I had always considered to be Website optimisation compressing images, writing good markup and reducing HTTP requests.
I was gratified to see “Convert Table Layout to CSS Layout” as one of the tips as I had written that in some Web site creation guidelines some years ago!
Chapters 6 (Web Page Optimization), 7 (CSS Optimization) and 8 (Ajax Optimization) take the by now familiar format: introducing the topic by outlining the main problems that might occur and following up with lists of top tips essentially checklists to work through detailing solutions to these problems.
The advice includes very useful snippets of code and practical guides to using software for example using Quick Time Pro to encode a video.
Interestingly the book does not shy away from commercial software, giving instead advice on what is easy or best practice rather than what is open source.
Also important, and true throughout the book, are the very useful references to research which back up the authors’ claims about user perception of a Web site, for example, and give the book a certain authority.
Chapters 6,7 and 8 could be used in a couple of ways either as checklists before starting to inform development, or (and I think more likely) as toolkits to audit and correct problems with existing sites.
I did not try out any of the techniques, nor perform any testing on a real Web site, but from my own experience of Web site performance optimisation, the advice seems good if occasionally counter-intuitive.
For example in the Ajax chapter there is advice to compact Ajax code by removing whitespace.
This makes it hard for a human to read and debug and sounds a terrible idea to me, a software developer but is easier on the network as the size of the code is reduced in the example given by about a third.
Often the advice seems like common sense, but the thing with common sense is it only seems that way with hindsight!
Chapter 9 is entitled “Advanced Web Performance Optimization” and includes ways to tweak both Web server and client to enhance performance.
Some interesting ideas are discussed, such as delta updates (only sending what has changed), server and client-side caching and content compression, all aimed at reducing bandwidth usage.
Throughout, the reader is provided with useful samples of configuration files (mainly for the Apache httpd Web server, though popular Web servers are also mentioned).
As mentioned previously, the book concludes in Chapter 10 discussing ways of measuring how successful applying the advice in the book has been.
There are times when Website Optimization can scare its readers ‘why didn’t I think about this earlier?’, ‘why is PPC advertising so confusing?’ but those fears can only be useful as spurs to action.
The book also scares its readers by using technical terms that may not be clear.
When the advice given consists of just those phrases, for example “e.g., avoid linking to flagged sites” [10], its hard to tell what needs to be done.
There is also copious use of acronyms (CPC, KEI, PPC, ROI, [11] etc.)
and if the user is dipping into sections and may not have read previous chapters where definitions are given then it is easy to get lost.
Having access to the Web clears up the meanings quickly enough, but better would be a glossary included as part of the book especially if you are not currently online (because, say, you are in a café without free wireless).
Sometimes I also felt that the book was assuming marketing knowledge that not all readers would possess, but when discussing advertising, it is hard not to.
To conclude, I agree that the starting point is to scan the book, but then most definitely read it.
It quickly becomes apparent that there is much content that is going to require a lot of attention and time to absorb and then act on.
The times I found the book most useful were when used as a guide book, a list of places to visit on my trip to a better Web site, with that Web site right in front of me on my PC.
Of course, a certain amount of technical knowledge is required to use this book I would not advise my sister to read it to help her get her head around AdWords for her business Web site but if you think have a ‘general understanding’, are willing to be proved wrong and want to know more, you could do a lot worse than Website Optimization [12].
References The Repositories Support Project (RSP) http://www.rsp.ac.uk/ Website Optimization, Andrew B.
King, O’Reilly 2008, Foreword, pg.
xii Website Optimization, Andrew B.
King, O’Reilly 2008, pg.
5 W3C: Cool URIs for the Semantic Web http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/ Microformats http://microformats.org/ W3C: Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://www.w3.org/RDF/ Wikipedia: Pay per click (PPC) (accessed 9 November 2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click Google AdWords https://adwords.google.com/ Website Optimization, Andrew B.
King, O’Reilly 2008, pg.
111 Website Optimization, Andrew B.
King, O’Reilly 2008, pg.
12 Cost Per Click, Keyword Effectiveness Index, Pay Per Click and Return on Investment respectively For more information on website optimisation, visit the author’s companion Web site at http://www.websiteoptimizationsecrets.com/ Author Details Peter Cliff Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.d.cliff/ Return to top Article Title: “Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine and Conversion Rate Secrets” Author: Peter Cliff Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/cliff-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Thriving Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Thriving Library Buzz wiki rss blog flickr Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho takes a look at this collection of winning strategies for success in public libraries during challenging times.
This is a book about public libraries.
I might sound disappointed in saying that, in fact I was surprised.
Having spent my working life in specialist libraries, I know little about the public library sector and was slightly afraid that what I would find would be irrelevant or uninteresting.
But I soon discovered that this was to be one of the most exciting professional texts I'd read for some time.
It turns out that you can learn a lot about good practice from any successful library, irrespective of who its users are because what matters is dreams, commitment and courage.
Marylaine Block has put together the results of a survey in which she has collected examples from more than 100 libraries with impact well beyond their immediate communities.
In fact this is "In Search of Excellence" for libraries.
The author identifies eight important themes at this time of "a perfect storm", i.e.
with conditions for libraries decidedly adverse, and offers eight ways to survive and succeed.
At the end of each section she includes an interview with a professional who has particular insights into the previously discussed point.
In so far as financial pressures, new technology and social change have an impact on every library, this is a book relevant to all branches of the profession.
The author is not interested in things that every successful institution does in the same way but focuses on what really matters in local communities: creating the reading habit in the young, the library as a public space, partnerships, Library 2.0 and the role of the library in helping the community to achieve its aspirations.
The strength of this book is in the detail and in the inspirational words of those people who have ensured the success of difficult projects in the face of serious challenges.
The dreams and hopes of staff who are committed to turning their library into a place of 'enchantment and discovery', a place where teenagers can display their talents, a place where it is 'cooler to hang out than the mall'.
It might not be every library director's dream to have their institution rated as the 'Best Non-bar Pick up Spot' or to have an entry in the Guinness Book of records for the longest non-stop reading aloud event; but even if the ideas in this book lie outside your comfort zone, the inspiration will do.
One of the strongest points that come across is that libraries need to be marketed proactively and imaginatively.
You could choose a Google whack event which challenges the community to a competition with its librarians or fulfil an ambition to turn the library into the 'city's living room'; anything goes – own postal stamp, advertisements on buses, 'startling statistics', thoroughly researched return on investment figures or even a library mascot.
It is crucial to speak the language of the user and there is no denying that often 'the medium is the message'.
Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, instant messaging should all be communication options.
The library must become a place for state-of-the-art technology and this is also the key to personalised services.
If you do not use RSS feeds, texts or e-mails to recall your books and have not yet customised your Web site for small screen devices, now is the time to start worrying.
Libraries have pages on MySpace and many are citing them as "friends".
Library pictures are being posted on Flickr and Web sites are being bookmarked on del.iciou.us.
A good library has to use technology but its main goal should be to extend access and eliminate barriers, and that means eliminate barriers to all: teenage boys, alienated communities, immigrants, the elderly, the incarcerated and the homeless.
In spite of the North American focus and the scale of some of the projects which might be well beyond the dreams of public libraries in this country, this is an informative, rewarding and, above all, inspiring read which should be on the professional shelves of every library.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian BMA Email: lcoelho@bma.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "The Thriving Library: Successful Strategies for Challenging Times" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Staying Legal Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Staying Legal Buzz data database copyright ecms foi foia Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Hannabuss examines an interesting collection of essays and, with reservations, likes the second edition a lot more.
Like climbing Everest, information law is now a highly competitive field.
The first edition of this work, edited by Chris Armstrong alone, appeared from Facet in 1999.
It reflected the preoccupations of the mid-1990s, captured changing law like Internet regulation and database rights, and showed a growing understanding of information liability and the need properly to interpret contracts.
It was good to return to what is clearly an overhauled text in the form of the second edition, this time edited by Chris Armstrong and Laurence Bebbington, well-known for his legal column in the UKOLOG Newsletter.
Any study of law for information professionals will bring the pedants out of the woodwork.
A quick look at some of the rivals in the field, say, Paul Marett's Information Law in Practice (Ashgate, 2nd edition, 2002) and Paul Pedley's Essential Law for Information Professionals (Facet Publishing, 2003), let alone the ever-evolving The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information by Charles Oppenheim, the bevy of works on IT and computer law by Bainbridge and Reed and Lloyd, and three new works on copyright alone from Facet (by Sandy Norman, Tim Padfield, and Graham Cornish), confirms the faster professional pulse, probably because we all live in a much more legalistic and liability-aware world.
Information professionals, usually, cannot be their own lawyers, and most writers take care to disclaim that they are directly providing legal advice.
Armstrong & Bebbington want to raise awareness, and get all information professionals involved : legal matters are no longer things we can leave to employers, legal advisers, outsourcers it is all too risky.
'Staying legal is a constant struggle', a 'Canute-like struggle'.
The law is complex but it is important to show 'common sense'.
I would like to have seen this one teased out fully, and a start is made by McCracken in his chapter 'Agreements, User Licences and Codes of Practice'.
This is why we should all be much more aware of relevant and applicable law, especially electronic, EU and international law.
I can see where this is all coming from but I find it rather preachy and negative, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in ways that I rarely find in the generally more assertive tone in books written by legal professionals in this field.
As information professionals, I think we should, in SWOT terms, be more focused on opportunities than threats : the self-deprecation comes across as disingenuous.
What I think would also help a lot here is to get perfectly clear who exactly is involved and responsible.
Throughout the book we get terms like information professional used in many different ways without pinning down, generally speaking, who is most likely to get involved in, and be most interested in reading about, say, the implementation of data protection or FOI (Freedom of Information Act) compliance, the liability implications of confidentiality or electronic interception, and Electronic Copyright Management Systems (ECMS) protection under copyright law.
This is a rather floatingly inclusive approach which at times does take sharper focus, as in McCracken's re-write (from the first edition) of interpreting user licences, and Adams' chapter (new to the second edition) on patent registration, entitled 'Patents: Exploitation and Protection'.
So what about the overall design of the second edition?
The first started with Universal Availability of Publications (UAP) and trotted through copyright (the only form of intellectual property rights to appear) and legal deposit, data protection and criminal liability, Internet regulation, user licences, information security and database rights.
The thread was clearly focused on the information and library professional, and this thread has not been lost in the second edition, important for user segmentation when marketing the book (the target audience, by the way, is clearly libraries serving users studying information work and collections for busy professional and CPD use).
A second edition was much needed and it has got a lot right.
Putting to one side the preachy tone or the indecision about whether to talk about the law or demonstrate how it can be interpreted and applied, there is nonetheless a lot right with much of the content.
In common with the first chapter in the Pedley book, the second edition now starts with some ground rules about sources and scope of law.
It has a UK (mainly England) focus but the principle is good.
Severe critics would probably have put the whole thing into an appendix.
Powers's chapter on 'Public Access to Legal Information', (chapter two of the new edition), opens up access to the law not just by professionals but also by members of the general public, in the context of citizenship.
This is both more up to date and less abstract than what was there in the first edition on the digital divide.
I was very pleased to see a substantial expansion of intellectual property rights so as to include copyright, trade marks, and patents.
This answered my question in the first edition 'where on earth are they?'.
They are now here in two good chapters by Waelde (good on passing off and misrepresentation) and Adams (including the legal and technical status of documents, and dealing with inventors).
Bebbington has moved us a long way forward with a useful discussion of contracts (missing before, even though the generic theory can be found anywhere) and applications to outsourcing and Web sites.
McCracken has updated his user licences in the context of the EC Directive on Copyright 2001/29/EC (implemented in the UK in October 2003), making me wonder why Coleman in her discussion of copyright centred on the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) had not done the same.
Data protection moves on apace, with a new Information Commissioner with (generalising) responsibilities for freedom of information.
Bebbington's chapter on this spends time on the data protection principles, which will be useful for the reader who has missed out on them, and pleasingly changes critical gear by analysing rights, offences, codes of practice, human rights, and interception.
The editors could have had the confidence here to focus on the cutting-edge implications and interpretations, which would have made the chapter more 2004 in tone.
Charlesworth has revised his comprehensive early chapter on liability for an equally wide-ranging discussion in the second edition.
This time the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIPA) Act and cybercrime figure prominently, since things have moved on.
Even so it remains a mixed bag of a chapter in its determination to leave absolutely nothing out, and I would have liked more linkage, perhaps through the index, with liability-related issues elsewhere in the book.
So rich a pudding is this chapter that more could be done with the issues, particularly to connect up specific issues with particular types of information role or responsibility.
It is one thing to be aware of the importance of 'staying legal' and another to know just how and why.
For the specialist working with ECMSs and digital rights and Internet deliverables, there is precious little here.
This is why Bebbington & Armstrong's final chapter, called 'Staying Legal', is so useful it goes some way to doing just that, picking out areas, recommending a coherent risk management approach.
Despite its preachiness, it does provide a much-needed overall coherence to what remains a bitty book.
More, I believe, could also have been made of the wide range of issues in Rowe & Taylor's otherwise excellent (if vaguely titled) chapter on Internet law, in terms of connecting up the legal implications with the other discussions in the book.
Like Everest, then, there are many climbers on the mountain, some going up and some coming down, some with the very best equipment.
Metaphors ultimately mislead in reviews, so to the book itself in conclusion : it needed to resuscitate itself to maintain its relevance, and to a large extent it has done that.
It is not clear about its audience, it uses an awkward mixture of legal approaches (sometimes theoretical, sometimes practical), it does not always connect up the dots, it gets a bit too earnest.
But it keeps its eye on the generic information professional and some chapters really hit home.
Given the field, it has probably three years of practical life, and, like a dictionary, it is faced with a living language, in this case fast-changing law.
For me, with my collection manager's hat on, I would ask whether some fifty pounds is value for money for an essentially retrospective survey.
Author Details Dr Stuart Hannabuss Aberdeen Business School Email: s.hannabuss@rgu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Book Review: Staying Legal" Author: Stuart Hannabuss Publication Date: 30-July-2004 Publication: Ariadne Issue 40 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/hannabuss-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Presentation Zen Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Presentation Zen Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery Buzz data blog research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy gets in touch with her inner PowerPoint Zen.
Do you ever get the feeling that your slides aren't quite making the grade?
Have you ever been to an event and seen someone really good present, someone who has slides that are a bit different, slides that made you sit up and listen?
Have you wondered how you could make the transition from 'boring, run-of-the mill' presenter to 'exciting, inspiring' presenter?
These were some of the questions running through my head on the train on the way back from the last conference I attended.
I was not only fed up with my own presentations but fed up with everyone else's too!
Some had felt like a waste of everyone's time!
Yet services like Slideshare [1] have competitions for the best slideshow and there are often great entries…so how does someone like me do it?
Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen claims to offer the remedy; so I took a look.
An Approach, Not a Method Reynolds starts off by setting us straight.
Presentation Zen is not a step-by-step systematic process to good slides, it is an approach.
Reynold's touches of Zen almost make it feel like a way of life.
I must admit to a momentary feeling of disappointment.
I had hoped that there would be 5 easy steps to brilliance, but then it dawns on me that my own bad slides have been 10 years in the making and I won't solve that in a day.
In response to the old adage "death by PowerPoint" Reynolds explains that it is not PowerPoint or any other slideware that is the problem, but the way it is being used.
He makes the point that you are the presenter and that your slides should reinforce your words, not repeat them.
His points beg the question "what about those who didn't attend the talk and want something to take away?"
His answer is that we should ditch the slideument (slides + document) and create two separate documents: a slide presentation and a written document to accompany it.
Presentation Zen focuses solely on the slide presentation that should be a backdrop to our talks.
The book is divided into 5 main sections: The introduction, followed by preparation, design, delivery and the next steps.
In his introduction Reynolds familiarises us with six fundamental aptitudes originally introduced in Daniel Pink's text A Whole New Mind.
He applies these to the art of presentation: Design – Design starts at the beginning, not at the end.
Story – Story can be facts, information data but a narrative always works well.
Symphony – Time to see the relationships between relationships.
This involves using unrelated bits of information to paint a big picture.
Empathy – Empathy is emotional, it is how you relate to the audience.
Play – Humour works.
Meaning – This is your opportunity to make a small difference in the world.
He advocates that we start a new era with new thinking and open our mind to new ideas.
Preparation Preparation, preparation, preparation!
Reynold's text, like many DIY handbooks, promotes the act of preparation.
In this section he explores a number of different ways that we can stimulate our mind and find inspiration.
His most significant suggestion is that people do their planning 'analog', i.e.
away from the PC.
Holding a pen stimulates creativity and brainstorming should be done on paper.
One approach might be to create a story board.
Reynolds feels that 'alonetime' is fundamental in firing up inspiration.
One train of thought that Reynolds explores is the idea that constraints and limitations are powerful and often fundamental to creating good creative work.
This notion of restrictions as liberators is exemplified through Pecha Kulcha, where each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds providing 6 minutes 40 seconds of talk time [2].
The focus by Reynolds on preparation is not unfounded.
Spending time on the first stages of slide creation allows us to clarify the answer to the question 'what is my point?'
and helps us to 'know our story'.
It allows us to synthesise facts and give them context and perspective.
The result, Reynolds argues, will be a conversation with our audience.
Design Throughout Presentation Zen Reynolds reiterates the need for simplicity.
Simplicity equals clarity.
It is linked to elegance and naturalness.
Design is very much about subtraction.
This need for simplicity leads on to the general design principles: Reduce the signal versus noise ratio – Take out irrelevant items including, if possible, organisational logos.
Use good quality images – People remember visuals better than bullet points.
Reynolds recommends a number of different stock photo suppliers.
Empty space is good Contrast – Create dynamic differences.
Repetition – Repeat selected elements in your presentation.
Alignment – Use a grid to align objects successfully.
Proximity – Ensure that related items are grouped together These principles are illustrated by a number of high-quality visual examples.
There are often before and after images and the difference small changes can make is impressive.
Delivery Although the book focuses primarily on the creation of good slides, assuming that if you are significantly involved in their creation then delivery should be unproblematic, it does also offer advice on delivery techniques.
The main recommendation is that if you are passionate and enthusiastic about your subject and allow yourself to be truly lost in the moment you will take your audience with you.
Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is hailed as the guru of presentations and many of his methods are discussed.
Reynolds also offers advice on dealing with a hostile audience advocating that a presenter should remain natural, non-aggressive and in control at all times.
He also explains that we all make mistakes and should not be frightened of doing so; if you want to improve your art this is a necessity.
You must see yourself as permeable, not vulnerable, and allow yourself to try out new ideas.
Other suggestions include keeping the lights on, removing the lectern, using a remote mouse and giving much shorter presentations (leaving them hungry for more!).
The Next Steps Reynolds closes with some pointers on the next steps in improving your presentation skills.
He promotes extensive reading of books and online resources and offers many pointers to other experts in the field of design and creativity: Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Guy Kawasaki et al.
It would be easy to end up with a full Christmas list of 'must read' texts but probably the most useful follow up source is Reynold's own blog [3].
Other suggestions include joining the Toastmasters Association [4], exercising your right brain through creative activities and stepping out of your comfort zone.
As the old saying goes 'A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.'
Conclusion Presentation Zen is a great starting point for practitioners who are dissatisfied with their current slide creation techniques and presentation skills; but as Reynolds himself admits, it is only a first step.
Making real changes in the slides you use will require research and commitment.
For those of us working within an organisation it may quite possibly call for lobbying and culture change.
Taking the book at face value, as a source of inspiration and ideas rather than a step-by-step guide, I have only one real criticism.
There were occasions when I felt Reynolds seemed slightly out of touch with the average working environment.
Although he pointed out the benefits of constraints and limitations, he went on to make the proposition that if we put 25-30 hours into the creation of a slide presentation then we'd save other people that time too.
I'm sure most of us could put together great slides in 3 working days but to expect most people to be able to free up that amount of time does seem a little unreasonable.
Maybe he could offer a few more tips for those us who have to keep our logos on our slides, have to include sentences longer than six words and are expected to regurgitate other people's presentations at the drop of a hat!
Some of the slightly arty approaches he suggests might not go down that well in the academic world, but then again who knows…I might just give it a go.
References Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ Pecha Kucha Night http://www.pecha-kucha.org/ Presentation Zen: Garr Reynolds blog http://www.presentationzen.com/ Toastmaster Association http://www.toastmasters.org/ Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.guy/ Return to top Article Title: "Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery" Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/guy-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EuroCAMP 2005 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EuroCAMP 2005 Buzz data software portal infrastructure metadata identifier schema repositories preservation passwords shibboleth saml xacml e-research authentication interoperability privacy research ldap jstor Citation BibTex RIS Masha Garibyan and Ann Borda report on the first Campus Architecture Middleware Planning workshop in Europe hosted by the Politecnico di Torino.
The rapid expansion of the Web and Internet in recent years has brought many benefits.
It has never been easier to access scholarly information from anywhere in the world in real time.
However, this information is often held in disparate systems and is protected by a variety of access control mechanisms, such as usernames and passwords.
Many users have to struggle with increasingly complicated access control systems in order to access information they require.
This is especially the case in Higher and Further Education.
One way forward is to offer multiple services and applications within a single institution.
It is also crucial to ensure a high level of system interoperability between identity providers (e.g.
universities) and resource providers (e.g.
JSTOR).
This can be achieved with the help of middleware.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) defines middleware as 'a layer of software or 'glue' between the network and applications' [1].
It provides central services such as identification (assigning and managing digital user identities), authentication (identifying who the user is), authorisation (determining what the user is allowed to do), directories and security.
One example of a middleware application is the Shibboleth technology.
Shibboleth, developed by US Internet2, is open source software under development that can be used as part of middleware architectures for access management.
Shibboleth is about allowing individuals access to a resource based on their role (e.g.
affiliation with the home institution) rather than their identity.
Shibboleth users role-based attributes (details about the user) to determine whether or not the users should be given access to a protected resource.
The Shibboleth architecture is based on the idea of a federation.
A federation is a group of identity providers (e.g.
universities) and resource providers (e.g.
JSTOR, EBSCO), which agree on a set of common policies, such as the usage of role-based attributes.
Campus Architecture Middleware Planning (CAMP) workshops [2] have been taking place in the United States for several years, following key collaborations and community interest in the area of middleware development.
Building on the success of the US workshops and the significant work in middleware within the European research and education community, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA) [3] organised the first CAMP event in Europe which was held over 2-4 March 2005 in Turin, and hosted by the Politecnico di Torino (Technical University of Turin).
Interestingly, the building used to host EuroCAMP was the old Fiat factory, the only car factory (to our knowledge, at least) with a test track on the roof.
(Due to its unique design, the track was used to film one of the famous chases in the original Italian Job.)
Figure 1: The famous test track © John Paschoud EuroCAMP Workshop The agenda for the three-day EuroCAMP 2005 workshop [4] comprised a wide-range of session topics, including the set-up and administration of identity management, authentication and authorisation systems, and examples of best practice in security.
There were also a number of case studies and discussion forums.
Highlights of the workshop are further described below.
Abstracts and papers of all the speaker sessions are available on the TERENA Web site [5].
Day 1: Identity Management Chair: Miroslav Milinovic, CARNet, Croatia The first day of the workshop focused on identity management, looking at digital identity and its different aspects, security, trust practices and user privacy preservation.
Licia Florio of TERENA and Diego Lopez of RedIRIS (Spanish National Research and Educational Network) began the workshop with a welcome to the participants, mainly IT architects and managers of universities and research centres from Europe and the US.
Alan Robiette of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) set the scene with an overview of identity management outlining the key issues, such as the assignment of identities and the problems of ownership of data.
Alan concluded with examples of national and international developments that are leading the way toward tangible solutions.
A second strand in the day concerned directories (e.g.
use of LDAP the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and meta-directories.
Roland Hedberg of Umea University (Sweden) demonstrated an in-house solution for integrating different sources of identity into a metadata directory system, and John Paschoud of the London School of Economics spoke about the use of open standards with the Microsoft ActiveDirectory.
Under this strand, Michael Gettes (Duke University, USA) and Diego Lopez conducted a participatory discussion on the eduPerson schema.
The eduPerson schema, jointly developed by EDUCAUSE and Internet2, aims to provide for consistent descriptions and classifications of all students and staff involved in post-16 education [6].
There was a proposal for a European eduPerson schema and extensions to object classes for applications specific to European research and higher education institutions.
A third theme of the day was the topic of public key systems and infrastructures (PKIs).
David Chadwick of University of Kent began this theme by looking at the roles of directories and PKIs.
In particular, Chadwick examined ways of component matching and attribute extraction and drew examples from his work with Privilege and Role Management Infrastructure Standards Validation (PERMIS) [7].
Michael Gettes and Diego Lopez briefed participants on different approaches to overcoming the problem of hierarchy through policy management attributes (PMAs), trust repositories and federations.
The day ended with an open forum on best practice in identity management moderated by Ken Klingenstein, Project Director of the Internet2 Middleware and Security Initiatives [8] in the US who has undertaken pioneering work in Shibboleth development [9].
Day 2: Federated Access to (Web) Applications Chair: Diego Lopez, RedIRIS (Spanish National Research and Educational Network) The sessions on day two of EuroCAMP were clustered around aspects of intraand inter-organisational authentication and authorisation systems, and new technologies in widespread deployment, such as single sign-on (SSO) systems.
Ton Verschuren from the Dutch National Research and Education Network (SURFnet) outlined the functionality and benefits of authentication and authorisation (AA) systems that are currently available (e.g.
Shibboleth, PAPI, A-Select, CAS, Pubcookie, LDAP-Authentication, PERMIS).
David Orrell of Eduserv built on this introduction to provide specific examples drawn from the UK, namely the Athens AA system [10], as well as the function of webISO (web initial sign on).
Lynn McRae of Stanford University focused on the landscape of existing and developing standards such as SAML (Security Assertion Mark-Up Language) [11] and XACML (extensible Access Control Mark-Up Language) [12] and current initiatives in inter-organisational access, including work in grid communities.
A much-awaited session was Ken Klingenstein's introduction to Shibboleth.
Klingenstein gave participants a tour of Shibboleth concepts and supporting technologies, in addition to related topics of federated approach, privacy and SAML.
Two case studies illustrated the use of Shibboleth and its applications.
Firstly, a demonstration of an operational inter-organisational system in Swiss Higher Education was presented by Ueli Kienholz and Thomas Lenggenhager of the Swiss Education and Research Network (SWITCH) [13].
Secondly, Masha Garibyan of the Portal-Enabled Resources via the Shibbolized End-User Security (PERSEUS) Project [14] from the London School of Economics provided the perspective of both an end-user and librarian in the challenges of providing access to library resources and the potential requirements of an AA system to resolve these.
Ton Verschuren ended the day's sessions with a moderated forum on Identity Federation in which workshop participants discussed why federations are important and what it means to build a federation.
Figure 2: One of the presentations at EuroCAMP 2005 © John Paschoud Day 3: Federated Access to the Network Chair: Ton Verschuren, SURFnet The third day of the workshop centred on secure network access and state-of-the-art network authentication and authorisation systems.
The issue of extending identity-based networking to enable the granting of access to registered users and guest logins was a recurring theme.
Carsten Bormann, chair of the TERENA Mobility Task Force [15], opened the final day with an introduction to network access security and touched on a range of concepts and scenarios, and this was complemented by Ken Klingenstein's talk on identity network access security.
Klaas Wierenga of SURFnet spoke about federated network access with respect to EduRoam [16].
EduRoam is an academic networking roaming infrastructure initially developed in Europe, but recently expanded to Australia and soon to be trialled in the US.
Klaas' session was followed with a practical guide for joining EduRoam.
Ken Klingenstein concluded the EuroCAMP programme with a wrap-up that covered a landscape for the future in the wider middleware community.
Ken identified a number of common requirements that need to be addressed and other areas that await further development over the next five years.
These requirements encompass communication and collaboration support, the 'plumbing' of virtual organisation technologies into the local environment (e.g.
simplification of end-use tools that are consistent with needs of the user) and 'plumbing' the control plane (namely, the über-management of management aspects of virtual organisation domain tools).
Recurrent throughout was an emphasis on the need to leverage enterprise middleware developments and external trust fabrics, as well as support centres, especially in relation to virtual organisations.
These three interdependencies were seen as key considerations.
Conclusion EuroCAMP is an important event for the academic community, moving it one step closer toward an integrated and collaborative research environment.
EuroCAMP provided an excellent overview of the current access management and identity management systems.
The event brought together an impressive range of prominent speakers in the fields of identity, authentication and authorisation management.
The lectures themselves were consistently informative and provided an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with major European initiatives, as well as international developments.
The participants were given every opportunity to interact with the speakers and with each other.
The only slightly negative aspect concerned the occasional jump between overview concepts to levels of technical specificity about which a considerably smaller proportion of the audience was suitably knowledgeable.
For a first CAMP event, however, there appeared to be general satisfaction that the workshops met their aims and reached the expectations of the majority of participants.
Attendance remained notably high from day one to day three.
This is especially remarkable, considering the event happened to coincide with the Turin annual chocolate festival.
Figure 3: The Turin Chocolate Festival © John Paschoud References JISC Middleware Team http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=middleware_team EDUCAUSE, CAMP workshops http://www.educause.edu/conference/camp/ TERENA Web site http://www.terena.nl/ TERENA, Middleware EuroCAMP 2005 http://www.terena.nl/tech/eurocamp/ TERENA, EuroCAMP 2005 Programme http://www.terena.nl/tech/eurocamp/programme.html EDUCAUSE, eduPerson Schema http://www.educause.edu/eduPersonObjectClass/949 PERMIS http://sec.isi.salford.ac.uk/permis/ Internet2 Web site http://www.internet2.edu Internet2, Shibboleth http://shibboleth.internet2.edu Eduserv, Athens and Shibboleth http://www.athensams.net/shibboleth/ OASIS, SAML http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=security OASIS, XACML http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/index.php SWITCH http://www.switch.ch/ SWITCH Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure http://www.switch.ch/aai/ PERSEUS Project Web site http://www.angel.ac.uk/PERSEUS/ TERENA, Mobility Task Force http://www.terena.nl/tech/task-forces/tf-mobility/ EduRoam Web site http://www.eduroam.org Author Details Dr. Ann Borda JISC Programme Manager Core Middleware, Eresearch and Open Source JISC Email: a.borda@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk Masha Garibyan Project and Communications Officer PERSEUS Project London School of Economics and Political Science Email: M.Garibyan@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.angel.ac.uk/PERSEUS/ Return to top Article Title: "EuroCAMP 2005 " Author: Ann Borda and Masha Garibyan Publication Date: 30-April-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 43 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/eurocamp-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Manage It!
Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Manage It!
Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management Buzz software prince2 intranet Citation BibTex RIS Martin White reviews a book that sets out to provide very practical guidance on managing software projects.
After some fifteen years of managing a wide range of projects I joined Logica in 1989 to head up one of the company's largest projects.
Before I even unpacked my briefcase I was sent on a three-day project management course during which I discovered that almost everything I had done in the past was not good practice.
It was a salutary experience to sit there amongst less senior colleagues and get the answers wrong.
The course paid off some ten years later when I started a major project in Washington two days before 9/11 and managed to deliver on time and on budget.
Over the years I have built up quite a collection of project management books and was very interested to see how this new book would stand up against them.
Chapters and Subjects Covered Before looking at the book in detail I should explain that this book is primarily about the management of software projects.
Johanna Rothman [1] has a long and distinguished career in software engineering.
Not many readers will actually be managing a software development project themselves right now, but my expectation is that their daily life is being influenced by one or more such projects as I write.
In addition my guess would be that only about five per cent of this book is about techniques that are purely applicable to software development.
There are sixteen chapters that follow the life cycle of any project.
The first five chapters cover project initiation, initial project scheduling and estimating the work that will be involved.
It is when you get to Chapter Six that the author really starts to show her considerable expertise and her gift for communication.
The chapter is entitled 'Recognising and Avoiding Schedule Games' and includes observations on various approaches to managing schedules, such as the 'Bring Me a Rock' game.
This is when the sponsors tell you they want it faster but don't tell you when or why.
I'm sure that is a familiar situation, and the author comes up with five possible solutions.
Chapters Seven to Ten are all about the people-aspects of projects, including creating a great project team, steering the project, maintaining project rhythm and managing meetings.
The chapter on managing meetings is quite superb, and starts with a section entitled 'Cancel These Meetings', highlighting that any meeting that does not clearly have a defined and measurable impact on the progress of the project should be cancelled.
Chapters Eleven to Thirteen provide advice on the ongoing management of projects and monitoring progress.
Chapter Thirteen specifically covers methods for integrating testing into software projects and is the only chapter that is only tangentially valuable to other categories of project.
The final chapters cover the management of multiple projects and project completion.
Throughout the book there is a good selection of diagrams and charts and many of these are available on a Web site associated with the book.
There are a few Web citations in the footnotes but this is basically the expertise of the author laid out in a highly organised way with good contents pages and a well-constructed index that facilitates dipping in to a specific set of pages for guidance on a problem.
The writing style is heavily 'conversational' and when I read the book for the first time on a long train journey I felt that I was being talked to by the author.
Paragraphs longer than 100 words are very rare.
Conclusion If you are looking for a formal comparison of project methodologies then this is not the book for you.
If you have been told (or in a moment of madness volunteered) to be a project manager then this book will be invaluable if you accept that from time to time you will need to recognise that the advice is specifically about software projects.
However this could be an asset when you are the customer for a software project, for example the upgrade of your library management system or a new content management system.
You can then use the book to check on the project management procedures being used by the contractor and highlight those that you sense are going to cause problems along the line.
The approach is very pragmatic and comes from an author who has clearly managed a very wide range of successful projects.
Because of this pragmatic approach, reconciling the advice given with Prince2 [2] is going to be a challenge, but then all too often I find Prince2 has been adopted because it's the only methodology most managers have ever heard of!
Even after some thirty years in project management, I found much of value in this book and time after time found I was saying to myself "That's neat!".
Give this book to any one in your team that you have appointed as a project manager but do read it first, as you will find yourself being asked some difficult questions within a very short time.
References Johanna Rothman http://www.jrothman.com/ What is PRINCE2?
PRINCE2 Definition http://www.prince2.com/what-is-prince2.asp Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd 12 Allcard Close Horsham RH12 5AJ Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Manage It!
Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management" Author: Martin White Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/white-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim takes a look at this series of personal and researched historical analyses of the history of computerised information retrieval systems, and finds it makes fascinating reading if you are interested in such things.
This 420-page paperback includes the papers of a 2002 conference on the history of information retrieval systems.
It comprises 33 contributed papers (with remarkably little overlap), together with details about the contributors and an excellent index.
The papers are organised in five broad sections interdisciplinary perspectives, organising and managing information, chemical informatics, national developments and developments in international systems (such as INIS and AGRIS).
Some of the contributors are old-timers recalling how things were from their own perspectives, but most papers were accounts based on researching and interpreting the (often obscure) old literature.
The vast majority of the articles are written in a readable, accessible style two notable exceptions are Andrew Pickering's dense account of Stafford Beer's Cybernetic Informatics and Jacques Dubois on the history of the Description, Acquisition, Retrieval, and Correlation (DARC) chemical retrieval system, which was also written in an unappealing style.
The only factual mistake I found was the claim by Eunice Roe that there has been little or no research on how information services get brand names.
There has been such research, as a title search for the word 'brand' on (say) Library and Information Science Abstracts would have revealed.
This somewhat weakened the impact of this paper, because the results of her interesting research into brand names were not compared to those of other research.
Just one article did not really fit into the general themes that by Shankar on remembering and forgetting.
It was an interesting piece, but was not relevant to the history of information retrieval systems.
Among the most interesting articles were those by Peggy Kidwell on the use of models and computers by scientists and patent offices over the centuries; Jana Varlejs on the role of the technical report before World War 2; Simon Baatz on the visible human project; Bella Weinberg on predecessors in scientific indexing systems, an article which explored the rich history of indexing systems; Chuck Davis on indexing using the Chemical Abstracts Registry System; Michael Grayson on the early days of computer-supported mass spectrometry, which brought back thoughts of my own work using such techniques in the late 1960s; Richard Swanson on informatics in combinatorial chemistry; William Mitchell on the genesis of the NASA RECON online service; Dave Muddiman on J D Bernal's contribution to information retrieval; Rodney Brunt on the indexes used at Bletchley Park; Thomas Hapke's article about the international influence of Erich Pietsch; Helen Schofield's article on the patents coverage of Chemical Abstracts and Beilstein (though it was spoiled by graphs whose various lines were difficult to distinguish); and John Woolston's personal memoir on the development of AGRIS.
There were a few omissions; the most important was the lack of an ISBN on the actual book very odd.
I was surprised that Mike Lynch's fascinating ramblings into the history of chemical indexing systems failed to mention Derwent's fragmentation coding system; there was relatively little on World War II systems and the early days of computers possibly this is too well trodden ground?
There was nothing on the early days of the Internet either.
Finally, the paper on German libraries did not sufficiently cover developments in the former East Germany.
Many of the papers are complemented by fascinating old photos, some of which showed ancient computers and their operators.
There were a few typos, mainly when dealing with foreign scripts, such as umlauts on German names.
Overall, then, a fascinating trawl through how we got to where we are today, offering considerable insights into the key role a few individuals had in the development of modern professional information retrieval systems.
This sort of work will probably appeal most to academics and students, but will also attract those who are interested in how we got to where we are now; it also puts into context the problems we have with systems today in comparison with the massive problems of the past.
Author Details Charles Oppenheim Professor of Information Science Loughborough University Loughborough Leics LE11 3TU Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/people/coppenheim.html Return to top Article Title: "The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems" Author: Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/oppenheim-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Literacies for Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Literacies for Learning Buzz software e-learning research Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff reviews a work that challenges traditional notions of literacy and how suggests that new literacies need to be developed to empower both learners and teachers in the digital age.
In the changing, and increasingly digital world, learners and teachers are more and more subject to information overload and the noise this generates.
Teachers must cope with larger cohorts and more disparate communities.
Increasingly, information communication technologies are being used to address these issues and it becomes clear that new skills are required to operate effectively in the learning environment.
In Digital Literacies for Learning, editors Allan Martin and Dan Madigan set out to show in Part One how emerging (digital) learning environments require learners and teachers to develop new skills.
Starting from a generalised definition of 'literacy' Chapter One shows how a number of 'literacies' are required to ensure rich, fulfilling and effective learning in this digital world.
Subsequent chapters in Part One go on to explore the new literacies further, develop arguments that suggest institutions should start investing in developing these literacies and putting them into the context of the changing learning landscape.
Interestingly the discussion is balanced between the need to develop hard (computer) skills and soft (communication) skills.
For Information Communication Technology to succeed, it seems there is a requirement for learners and teachers to learn how to communicate effectively, without regard for the communication medium.
This is refreshing discussion and suggests that this book is not just for the technically minded it is also a social study and provides ammunition for those trying to develop e-learning skills in institutions.
Just as you are starting to share the enthusiasm for the need for new literacies, starting to enjoy the arguments and realising how they may be used as part of your day-to-day work, the book changes tack, throwing you into Part Two.
The second half of the book presents real examples of how new literacies are being developed across the globe, from Antigua to Hong Kong via Milton Keynes.
(This alone is enough to make you think about the way the learning environment and the world has changed).
A complete breakdown of the work's chapters is listed below.
A thread that runs through the latter part of the book is the potential for 'inclusion' brought through the use of information and communication technology in e-learning.
Like the World Wide Web, electronic learning environments have the potential to reach geographically diverse participants, building multi-cultural, single interest communities, and taking first class education (and the institutions that created them) not just to the four corners of the globe but to the people just down the road who never dreamt of studying before supporting and enabling life-long learning.
But, of course, to realise this potential, learners need the skills to exploit the technology, which brings the book full circle, and the reader is reminded of (and may want to explore again) Part One.
As with all 'reader' style books, while the essays included in Digital Literacies for Learning cover broadly the same ground, if you read the book cover to cover, it can feel a little disjointed.
For example, you cannot help but notice repetition in some of the chapters of Part One in the definition of literacy; or discrepancy in these definitions.
Reading the book as a coherent whole, this jars.
The writing styles vary significantly and some chapters are weaker than others.
Sometimes the jumps are refreshing, sometimes they can be disconcerting and I couldn't help thinking that the book would have benefited from an epilogue, pulling things together.
That said, the book works without it and the introductory chapters go some way to providing the necessary conceptual glue.
While only briefly mentioning the potentially significant development of what are called Web 2.0 technologies, the book does not feel out of date, which is quite remarkable for a book in this field.
I feel this is because the literacies remain more constant than the technologies.
I had one minor gripe: the citation style (and this is probably because it is not what I'm used to).
While most chapters have comprehensive references and further reading providing opportunies to explore the subjects in greater depth, or read more on the projects presented, usually through their Web sites sometimes it is hard to link the reference to the body text of the chapter.
In conclusion, Digital Literacies for Learning challenges the reader to reflect on the way in which the world is changing.
Not only is the reader asked to consider that we may well be on the edge of a pedagogical paradigm shift and what that means for the educational institutions we serve, but also how emerging technologies are creating new, geographically disparate, communities, creating challenges for learners and teachers alike.
The work shows that this provides incredible opportunities to share knowledge, anecdote and experience, creating a richer learning environment, but only if (and it is a big 'if') learners and teachers are given the skills and incentives to embrace these new learning technologies.
To be literate, it seems, requires so much more than it used to.
Appendix A: Chapter Breakdown Part I: Literacies in the digital age Literacies for the digital age: preview of Part 1 Allan Martin Learners, learning literacy and the pedagogy of e-learning Terry Mayes and Chris Fowler Real learning in the virtual environments Johannes Cronjé Digital fusion: defining the intersection of content and communications Paul Gilster Literacy and the digital knowledge revolution Claire Bélisle Understand e-literacy Maryann Kope Information literacy an overview Ola Pilerot Contemporary literacy the three Es David F. Warlick Reconceptualizing media literacy for the digital age Renee Hobbs Literacy, e-literacy and multiliteracies: meeting the challenges of teaching online Chris Sutton Graduate e-literacies and employability Denise Haywood, Jeff Haywood and Hamish MacleodPart II Enabling and supporting digital literacies Supporting and enabling digital literacy in a global environment: preview of part 2 Dan Madigan A 'dense syphony of the nation': Cymru Ar-Lein and e-citizens and e-communities in Wales Stephen Griffiths The impact of information competencies on socio-economic development in the Southern Hemisphere economies Jesús Lau Supporting students in e-learning Martin Jenkins The information commons: a student-centred environment for IT and information literacy development Hester Mountifield Socio-cultural approaches to literacy and subject knowledge development in learning management systems Neil Anderson Approaches to enabling digital literacy: successes and failures Alex Reid Professional development and graduate students: approaches to technical and information competence Catherine Cardwell Windward in an asynchronous world: the Antiguan intiative, unanticipated pleasure of the distance learning revolution Cornel J. Reinhart A tale of two courses Gill Needham and David Murphy Author Details Peter Cliff Research Officer / Software Developer (e-learning) UKOLN / University of Bath Email: p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Digital Literacies for Learning" Author: Peter Cliff Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/cliff-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IWMW 2005 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IWMW 2005 Buzz data mobile wiki rss usability metadata firefox accessibility identifier blog video shibboleth wsrp podcast authentication prince2 research Citation BibTex RIS Miles Banbery reports on the 9th Institutional Web Management Workshop held at the University of Manchester, UK, over 6-8 July 2005.
The 9th Institutional Web Management Workshop [1], a three-day event held at the Manchester Conference Centre [2], Manchester University [3], UK, 6-8 July 2005 had as its theme this year 'Whose web is it anyway?'.
How apt at a time when we are all continuing to attempt delivery of systems and services to meet users' needs and requirements within institutional demands and pressures on resource.
The format this year was six plenary sessions, two parallel workshop slots, two sessions for regional groups to discuss Content Management Systems (CMS), two panel sessions and one slot for delegates to attend an extra discussion session or look round the poster displays/vendor stalls.
The Plenaries Our Users In an excellent opening plenary entitled 'University blogging: what happens when everyone can publish?'
[4], John Dale (Head of Development at e-lab, University of Warwick) talked about Warwick Blogs [5].
His presentation was extremely interesting as it covered everything from why they released a student blogging service and allowed it be published on the Internet, to how they did it and what happened after it went live.
Especially good value were the video clips of students commenting on the service.
It also raised the issue of agile development, a subject IWMW 2006 could hopefully return to.
Stephen Emmott of LSE then followed with a fascinating presentation on 'Customers, Suppliers, and the Need for Partnerships' [6].
Using his knowledge of business and management theory, excellent materials from the Office of Government Commerce [7] and his own experience at LSE, Stephen outlined the importance of customer focus, the identification of customer chains and the re-working of processes to allow better customer-targeted service delivery.
Though initially hard-going, my bet is that this subject will be returned to by more than a few delegates over the next year or two.
Scenes from IWMW 2005, originals courtesy of Patrick Lauke, University of Salford.
Big Picture Day two opened with a characteristically confident presentation on 'Challenges at the University of Manchester arising from Project UNITY' [8] by Professor Mark Clark, Director of Information Systems.
Following the merger of UMIST with the Victoria University of Manchester to form Manchester University, Professor Clark explained that the intention was not to just merge but improve to become world-class.
To this end, one of the major factors under consideration at Manchester was being technologically smart and Mark unwrapped a complicated path of data warehousing, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and using Web services to make the Web cheaper, more dynamic and more user focussed.
Just as the delegates were picking their collective jaws up from off the floor, imagine their reaction to David Sweeney (Vice-Principal, Communications, Enterprise & Research at Royal Holloway, University of London) with his talk entitled 'Sky High or Free Fall All Aboard the Web Rollercoaster' [9].
Within only a few sides he was straight in on the attack against the host institution and showing Royal Holloway's position as 9th in the Research league table!
David went on to articulate how important information technologists and marketing experts are to each other and to the future of UK HE institutions in the 21st Century.
Institutional Case Studies Tom Franklin (Franklin Consulting) opened after tea with 'There Is No Such Thing as a Silver Bullet: CMS and Portals Will Not Solve Your Problems' [10].
Tom unravelled the possible problems and issues surrounding implementation of CMS and portals to make it clear that they are in no way a quick or simple solution.
Delegates benefited from many questions they should now be asking themselves as they prepare to introduce and maintain these services.
After lunch, 'Publish and Be Damned: Re-purposing in the Real World' [11] was the title of an excellent step-by-step demonstration talk by Jeremy Speller and Ian Bartlett of UCL.
These detailed explanations of 'how we did it at our place' are notoriously difficult to do and get away with, especially including live Internet demonstrations and this went very well indeed full marks to Jeremy and Ian!
Their talk demonstrated parallel print and Web publication in the context of Web content management systems and collaborative authorship.
The Parallel Workshops Two ninety-minute sessions were provided over the three days for a selection of sessions to run concurrently.
The first session consisted of: A1: Hey!
You!
Get Offa My Web!
Hidden Desires and Unforeseen Circumstances in Web Management [12], A2: Conducting User Needs Analysis [13], A3: How to Find a Needle in the Haystack [14], A4: Future-proofing for Collaborative Tools [15], A5: Community Building Open Source and Open Content [16], A6: Whose Work Is It Anyway?
[17], A7: Embedding Third-Party Services in Web Sites and Portals [18], A8: Managing Stakeholders with PRINCE2 [19], A9: Lies, Damn Lies, and Web Statistics [20].
The second session offered: B1: Whose Web Do You Think It Is?
Considering Web Accessibility and Usability from the Perspective of Different User Groups [21], B2: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime?
Lessons from Implementing a Corporate CMS at the University of Southampton [22], B3: Democratising the Web: The Revenge of the Non-Techie [23], B4: Folksonomies: Metadata or Mess [24], B5: Inter-institutional Authorisation Using Shibboleth: Myths, Lies and the Truth [25], B6: Avoiding the Legal Obstacles in Web Management [26], B7: WHS WEB S IT NEWY?
Including Mobile Phone Users in the Loop [27], B8: JISC Service and Vendor Presentations [28], B9: RSS: Let's Clear the Confusion and Start Using!
[29].
The Discussion Groups and Second Panel Session The discussion groups [30] were regional this year and each was asked to address the key challenges of implementing CMS across an institution.
On day one the groups each identified three key challenges and day two was spent addressing each with suggestions on how to address them.
The groups seemed to work well on the whole and many of their thoughts and two groups' presentations are available on the IWMW discussion sessions page either straight or via Wikalong [31].
The most pressing questions from the groups were then put to the second panel session on the final day [32].
The panel consisted of Mike Lowndes (Natural History Museum), Tom Franklin (Franklin Consulting) and Piero Tintori (Terminal 4).
The key points to the panel were: How to decide when CMS is the answer what are the key features?
How to get support for CMS from the information providers on one hand, but also from management and financial backers on the other?
How can we avoid institutional paralysis linked to fear of change and big projects?
How can we best find out what vendors and products there are, how much they cost and what other people use?
How would the panel tackle seamless content in multiple places without authentication problems?
How would project management or a study of methodologies help the community?
By the sounds of pins dropping, pens scribbling and keyboards tapping, the discussion proved extraordinarily good value for the delegates and thanks should go to all the panellists for this.
Key suggestions from the panellists and the resources they referred to will, it is hoped, be published on the IWMW 2005 site soon.
The Technologies in Use This year, much was made of using technologies for private and collaborative work during the workshop [31].
These had been previously advertised in advance on the IWMW2005 News page [33] and its accompanying RSS feed [34].
On day 1 Brian Kelly ran a session for early arrivals on how to set up their laptops and PDAs to take advantage of these tools [35].
RSS RSS news feeds, whilst not new, are still under-used in the sector and the Workshop feed coupled with the parallel session on RSS given by Brian will perhaps have encouraged more of us to go and implement some of these within our institutions.
Podcasting also uses RSS mechanisms and Adrian Stevenson had helpfully prepared some example podcasts for delegates to learn about the workshop and the social programme [36].
IRC Several collaborative working technologies were tried during the Workshop.
An Internet Relay Chat channel was used by some of the participants during the plenary sessions.
The chat often started off being related to the plenary, but quickly digressed in many cases.
Sometimes it was used to pull up examples of what was being discussed.
Other times it was clearly a 'boys whispering and joking at the back' activity.
Many expressed difficulty in being able to listen and IRC simultaneously though if really interested in the plenary most would have stopped 'chatting' I would have thought!
A collection of geeks by the power socket caused some amusement; while there were some expressions of annoyance at the noise of some people's keyboards!
Perhaps using laptops in public should be licensed only to those with soft keypads?
Wikis Using Wikalong [31], any user can comment on any page on the Web.
We used this on the IWMW 2005 Web site within the SE regional discussion group to collect suggestions before the event and many groups then used it to publish their thoughts on CMS after each discussion session.
Some of the pages on technologies and individual plenaries have also been commented on since.
This facility could be very useful, but once multiple users try annotating the same page oh dear!
Maybe more comments will appear on the Workshop site as time goes by, but some slightly more sophisticated client could help a lot!
Blogs, Phones and Browsers One official blogger was also present offering a commentary and interpretation of the event as it happened (as well as at least one unofficial one it transpired!)
[37].
Peer-topeer voice over IP (using Skype) was being used by one remote user to keep in touch with what was happening and a collaborative Web browsing service (using the Jybe plugin for Firefox) was suggested but went unused to my knowledge.
Social Programme and Local Organisation The social programme [38] this year consisted of the usual mix of organised events and well facilitated networking opportunities (or pubs and bars as some people still like to call them).
The first night saw the workshop dinner in the Barnes Wallis building at the University, the second involving a drinks reception and guided tour of Baby (the first 'real' computer) at the Museum of Science and Industry [39].
Excellent local restaurants, pubs, Canal Street and the late-night bar at the Conference Centre helped the workshop along nicely.
The general feeling at the workshop this year was that the local organisation was extremely smooth, in fact so smooth you could hardly tell it was happening!
Backed up by early indications from the feedback forms, it appears this year's delegates thought this was the most well organised workshop so far.
Ben Plumpton and her colleagues from the University of Manchester along with the rest of the Organising Committee from UKOLN [40] deserve a huge vote of thanks.
London, 7 July 2005 While we were settling down to the morning session on 7 July, news was coming through of the London bombings of bus and tube [41].
Some delegates caught it on the TV news, others picked up on it whilst IRC'ing in the main lecture hall.
Even though the London regional group for the discussion sessions appeared to be the most affected, it was clear that nearly everyone knew someone who might be caught up in the trouble or who could have been had matters turned out slightly differently.
Naturally we thought of those who had lost their lives or were injured, as well as their families and friends.
Conclusion IWMW Past, Present and Future A couple of sessions at this year's event sought to consider the impact of previous events and the future of the IWMW events, mailing lists and the UK HE and FE Web community, partly no doubt inspired by the handing over of the main organisational reins from Brian Kelly after nine years to his colleague at UKOLN, Marieke Guy.
Brian's presentation in the first panel session [42] highlighted how we have come to desire answers and grails to various problems which, each year, we admit to not finding!
Undoubtedly though we have a stronger community and work together better.
As we move forward, we should look at building on the success of previous IWMW events and the JISC mailing lists and look further at new technologies (finding out what students do), regional activities (local groups, national surveys), openness (QA focus) and professionalism (meeting with WOW at IWMW 2006).
Duncan Ireland (Strathclyde), who organises the successful Scottish regional group then gave a presentation on their work.
And Andrew Cox (Loughborough) gave a short presentation on the popularity and use of the web-support and website-info-mgt lists at JISCMAIL [43].
In addition, Philip Hunter (also from UKOLN) and Marieke ran two sessions on the final morning entitled 'IWMW Impact Analysis and Evaluation' [44], during which they collected comments from delegates on where the strengths and weaknesses of IWMW had been and how to improve it in the future.
As he wore his 'Ancient Monument' T-shirt on the final day (a gift from Canterbury Cathedral at IWMW 2003), he introduced a special prize for the delegate who, apart from himself, had attended the most workshops.
Kriss Fearon from York and Stephen Emmott from LSE were tied at eight out of nine with Stephen winning after a tense coin-toss.
On a more serious note, I would like to add that Brian has contributed a substantial part of his UKOLN working life to these events which have brought so much help, fun, solace and encouragement to those who have attended.
Who can forget the early workshops full of scared newly appointed Web bunnies blinded by the headlights?
Many thanks must go to Brian for his dedication and hard work on our behalf.
So how will we best collaborate, communicate and educate within our community in the years to come?
What will be the structure of our events or the contentious hot topics over the next ten years?
Best wishes to Marieke as we head into a new phase of workshops beginning with IWMW 2006 (the tenth anniversary) at the University of Bath next year [45].
I very much hope to see you all there.
References IWMW 2005 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/ Manchester Conference Centre http://www.conference.manchester.ac.uk/manchesterconferencecentre/ Manchester University http://www.manchester.ac.uk/ Dale, J., "University Blogging: What Happens When Everyone Can Publish?"
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/dale/ Warwick Blogs http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/ Emmott, S, "Customers, Suppliers, and the Need for Partnerships" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/emmott/ Office of Government Commerce http://www.ogc.gov.uk/ Clark, M., "Challenges at the University of Manchester arising from Project UNITY" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/clark/ Sweeney, D., "Sky High or Free Fall All Aboard the Web Rollercoaster" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/sweeney/ Franklin, T., "There Is No Such Thing As A Silver Bullet: CMS And Portals Will Not Solve Your Problems!"
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/franklin/ Speller, J., Bartlett, I., "Publish and Be Damned: Re-purposing in the Real World" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/speller/ A1: Hey!
You!
Get Offa My Web!
Hidden Desires and Unforeseen Circumstances in Web Management http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/middleton/ A2: Conducting User Needs Analysis: Tips On Gathering Requirements People May Have For The Systems You're Developing http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/de-la-flor/ A3: How to Find a Needle in the Haystack http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/stevenson/ A4: Future-proofing for Collaborative Tools http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/tonkin/ A5: Community Building Open Source and Open Content http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/metcalfe/ A6: Whose Work Is It Anyway?
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/savory/ A7: Embedding Third Party Services in Web Sites and Portals From Links To WSRP the Pros and Cons http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/franklin/ A8: Managing Stakeholders with PRINCE2 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/emmott/ A9: Lies, Damn Lies, and Web Statistics http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/lowndes/ B1: Whose Web Do You Think It Is?
Considering Web Accessibility And Usability From The Perspective Of Different User Groups http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/craven/ B2: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime?
Lessons from Implementing a Corporate CMS at the University of Southampton http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/work/ B3: Democratising the Web: The Revenge of The Non-Techie http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/couzin/ B4: Folksonomies: Metadata or Mess?
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/guy-tonkin/ B5: Inter-institutional Authorisation using Shibboleth: Myths, Lies and the Truth http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/dowland/ B6: Avoiding the Legal Obstacles in Web Management http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/kelly-j/ B7: WHS WEB S IT NEWY?
Including Mobile Phone Users in the Loop http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/tribe/ B8: JISC Service and Vendor Presentations http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/vendor-slot/ B9: RSS: Let's Clear The Confusion And Start Using!
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/kelly-b/ IWMW 2005 Discussion groups http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/discussion-groups/ Information On Technologies Available At IWMW 2005 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/technologies/ Lowndes, M., Franklin, T., Tintori, P., "Addressing The CMS Challenge" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/panel-2/ IWMW 2005 News page http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/news/ IWMW 2005 News RSS feed http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/news.xml Introductory Talk: Using The Technologies At IWMW 2005 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/technologies/ IWMW 2005 Podcasts http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/podcasts/ IWMW 2005 Blogs http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/workshop-blog/ IWMW 2005 Social programme http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/social/ The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester http://www.msim.org.uk/ Workshop Committee members http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/committee/ BBC News London Bombings http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2005/london_explosions/default.stm Cox, A., Ireland, D., Kelly, B., "The Web Management Community: Present and Future" http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/talks/panel-1/ JISCMAIL http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ IWMW impact analysis and evaluation http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2005/sessions/impact-analysis/ IWMW 2006, University of Bath http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2006/ Author Details Miles Banbery Web Editor University of Kent Email: M.E.C.Banbery@kent.ac.uk Web site: http://www.kent.ac.uk/cdo/web/ Return to top Article Title: "IWMW 2005: Whose Web Is It Anyway?"
Author: Miles Banbery Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/iwmw2005-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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How to Publish Data Using Overlay Journals: The OJIMS Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines How to Publish Data Using Overlay Journals: The OJIMS Project Buzz data software rdf framework wiki database dissemination xml infrastructure archives xslt metadata browser identifier schema repositories eprints copyright video flickr python preservation oai-pmh podcast research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Callaghan, Sam Pepler, Fiona Hewer, Paul Hardaker and Alan Gadian describe the implementation details that can be used to create overlay journals for data publishing in the meteorological sciences.
The previous article about the Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) Project [1] dealt with an introduction to the concept of overlay journals and their potential impact on the meteorological sciences.
It also discussed the business cases and requirements that must be met for overlay journals to become operational as data publications.
There is significant interest in data journals at this time as they could provide a framework to allow the peer-review and citation of datasets, thereby encouraging data scientists to ensure their data and metadata are complete and valid, and granting them academic credit for this work.
This would also benefit the wider community as a whole, as data publication would also ensure that expensive (and often irreproducible) data are archived and curated appropriately.
Science, as a discipline, benefits from publishing processes that facilitate the appropriate application of data and the reproduceability of experiments.
The OJIMS Project aimed to develop the mechanisms that could support both a new (overlay) Journal of Meteorological Data and an Open-Access Repository for documents related to the meteorological sciences.
Its work was conducted by a partnership between the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) and two members of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), namely the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) and the University of Leeds.
This article goes into more technical detail about the OJIMS Project, giving details of the software used to deploy a demonstration data journal and operational document repository and the form of the submission processes for each.
OJIMS Aims and Objectives Aims At the start of the OJIMS Project, there were three fundamental aims: Creation of overlay journal mechanics Creation of an open access subject-based repository for meteorology and atmospheric sciences Construction and evaluation of business models for potential overlay journals The third aim has been detailed in our previous article [1], so this contribution will concentrate on the details of the first two aims.
Objectives The specific objectives of the project were detailed as below.
Repository Set-up Set up a repository for meteorology and atmospheric sciences capable of preserving documents relating to the subject area with the following in mind: The repository should take peer-reviewed publications, 'grey' literature (which includes technical reports, images, video, podcasts etc.)
and structured metadata documents.
Create the repository's deposit and access polices.
Demonstration Overlay System Create a demonstration overlay journal system with the following aspects addressed: The system must present an online journal to the reader, and be capable of organising the workflows associated with the peer-review process.
Construct a prototype data journal (MetData) in order to evaluate its sustainability.
This will include review procedures, presentation and trial content.
Construct a prototype 'star-rated' overlay journal (MetRep) in order to evaluate its sustainability.
This will include review procedures, presentation and trial content.
Most of these objectives remained the same over the course of the project, though time spent working on the prototype 'star-rated' journal was reduced in order to spend more time on the construction of the prototype data journal.
This was decided after in-depth user surveys (as reported in [2] [3]) suggested that the meteorological and atmospheric science communities were more interested in a data journal than the provision of a 'star-rated' overlay journal (mainly due to the low levels of documents in pre-existing repositories).
It should be pointed out that the software developed to provide the overlay documents for the data journal is nonetheless equally applicable to the 'star-rated' journal.
However after examining the business models, we discovered that the creation and operation of the data and 'star-rated' journals themselves stood quite explicitly outside the project scope as such work required a long-term commitment from a journal publisher.
Methodology The main project issues were: Integration of RMetS current practice with the new overlay journals Copyright for overlay journals Copyright for documents deposited in the subject-based repository.
The copyright issues for published papers are fairly clear; however the authorship of technical reports and other 'grey' literature is often less than completely clear Dataset peer-review processes Technical implementation of overlay journals Viability of business models Figure 1 gives an overview of the components required for this project and their interactions.
It is worth noting that the software requirements for the data journal and the overlay subject repository are very similar, hence the same basic software (with minor modifications) can be used for both the data journal and overlay subject repository.
Figure 1: Schematic diagram of the project, detailing the software and procedures (blue ovals) and repositories and processes (square boxes) that are required to build an overlay MetRep subject repository and an overlay MetData data journal The OJIMS Project Web site was produced to act as a dissemination point for the results of the project, and as a collaboration tool for the project partners.
The Web site [4] will remain operational for several years after the project ends to publicise the project results.
Implementation The work of the OJIMS Project was conducted by a partnership between the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) and two members of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (the British Atmospheric Data Centre and the University of Leeds).
Building the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) Document Repository A key deliverable of the OJIMS Project was to create a discipline-based open access document repository embedded within the BADC.
There were two main requirements for the subject repository: A suitable place to lodge grey literature Mechanics for the creation of records that describe documents in other repositories (overlay documents) The overlay document requirements are considered in the data journal developments (see Creating the Infrastructure for Overlay Journals) so the subject repository development concentrated on identifying how to provide a suitable place to lodge grey literature.
The deposit policy, documentation and training process for maintenance of the repository system were all developed during the project.
The full deposit policy is available on the repository site [5].
It is broken down into separate metadata, data, content, submission and preservation policies.
Key parts of the policy are that anyone can access the metadata, full-text and other full data items stored in the repository free of charge, and that items stored in the repository will be retained indefinitely.
Implementation of the subject repository was done by installing the EPrints software (version 3) on a Xen (virtual server) platform running Red Hat Enterprise.
The basic configuration was supplemented by: Using the standard subject categories used by NORA [6] Branding and look-and-feel tweaks Adding policy information (using the OpenDOAR [7] policy tool) SNEEP [8] extensions for adding comments and tags to repository content After populating the repository with some sample content, and training BADC staff to administer the repository, the repository was launched on 30 October 2008, and advertised to BADC users.
Documents already held by the BADC and NEODC were were added to the repository.
The repository has been running operationally since launch as the Centre for Environmental Data Archival Document Repository (CEDA Docs [9]).
The repository has the standard EPrints interface with the addition of the tags and comments extensions from the SNEEP Project.
The standard repository workflows apply.
The repository currently has over 200 items mainly added by BADC staff from existing material held within the data centre.
27 users are registered with the repository.
The OJIMS Project provided the funding to run the CEDA document repository for a year, with the principal expenditure devoted to moderating the deposit of new items into the repository.
The sustainability and cost modelling of the repository were also investigated, and the costs of running the repository within the BADC in the long term were not found to be prohibitive.
Hence the repository will be maintained for the foreseeable future now that the OJIMS Project has ended.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the CEDA document repository Creating the Infrastructure for Overlay Journals The infrastructure requirements for the overlay journals are similar, regardless of whether the overlay journal is a data journal, or a 'star-rated' journal.
The project team examined current overlay infrastructure tools and technologies and chose the Open Journal Systems (OJS) because of its open source nature and the ease of adaption.
A series of interfaces and forms were generated for the publishers and authors, including a peer-review management interface and issue construction interface for publishers, and a submission interface form for authors.
Overlay Documents for the Repository and Data Journal An overlay document is a structure document that is created to annotate another resource with information on the quality of the resource.
This document can be referred to as the data description document.
However, it contains more than just a description of the data, including, for example, details of the review process context for which it is constructed.
It is for this reason that the term 'overlay document' has been coined.
The document has three basic elements: metadata about the overlay document itself; information about and from the quality process for which the document was constructed; and basic metadata from the referenced resource to aid discovery and identification.
When considering how to encode this information, project staff considered various implementation methods; as this is an annotation document, RDF seemed appropriate.
It is potentially harder to render RDF documents for human readers because of RDF's more complex data representation, but as the structure of these documents is not overly complex, it can be done.
We took inspiration from annotations of Flickr photos by Masahide Kanzaki [10].
Only openly available software was used to create the overlay document editor and the structure for the data journal.
Any modifications made to the software during the project have been made freely available in the sub-version repository on the OJIMS Web site [4].
The creation of the overlay documents used in the overlay journals required a custom-built editor system.
This was written using the Pylons Web application framework.
The editor system supported creation of documents with XML schema, Dublin Core fields for the overlay documents themselves and, for the overlaid dataset, metadata for the data centre.
The OJIMS editor is also freely available from the sub-version repository on the OJIMS site and will remain there for the foreseeable future.
Policies and Procedures for the 'Star-rated' and Data Overlay Journal This work, led by the RMetS, concentrated on producing viable business plans, as well as submission and acceptance policies for the data and 'star-rated' journal.
The main tasks for the data journal included: Work out acceptance policy for datasets Formalise interaction with the overlay journal infrastructure For the 'star-rated' overlay journal, the tasks included: Establish 'kite-marking'/'star-rating' criteria and methodologies Formalise the 'star-rating' process Both types of overlay journal required sustainability and business modelling.
Full details of the policies and procedures for data and star-rated journals can be found in the business models report [11].
For the data journal the acceptance policy for datasets depends on the subject area covered by the data journal and whether the datasets are stored in an existing data centre that satisfies standards of good practice in archiving and data management and which is registered with the data journal.
For example, for a data journal specialising in meteorological data, a dataset of rain gauge measurements stored in the BADC (or other accredited data centre) would be appropriate for publication, while a dataset on road traffic flows would not.
The contents of the data journal could be categorized in the following ways: Experimental campaigns Numerical modelling projects Operational systems (systems which are delivering a service and so have to be resilient and available, e.g.
collection of radar data for input into numerical weather models or weather forecasts) Instruments and observing facilities (as used for scientific campaigns etc., where precision may be more important than resilience) For the overlay journal and document repository, two types of ratings for the referenced documents were proposed.
The first rating advises readers on how far the material has gone through the independent peer-review process, giving four ratings as explained in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Example method of rating the contents of the repository/overlay journal according to its level of peer [11].
The second form of rating comes from the users of the overlay journal (Figure 4), where users could rate the entry out of 10.
The average rating would be displayed alongside the number of reviews and number of downloads.
Figure 4: Example form of rating from the users of the subject repository or overlay journal [11].
The Data Journal A demonstration overlay journal system used to produce a data journal has the following requirements: Tools to create the data description documents for the author Inclusion of simple metadata in the data description documents about the document and the dataset referenced Inclusion of data description documents in standard journal processes, like submit, search, view and review.
These same functions are expected of normal journal articles Unambiguous reference to datasets in long-term data centres The production of an overlay document repository can be done using an analogous process.
Figure 5 gives a schematic view of the data journal structure.
The data journal contains a database of XML documents relating to various published datasets.
These XML data description documents contain links to the datasets as they are published in various accredited data repositories.
The data journal editor edits these XML files, but does not make any changes whatsoever to the underlying datasets.
Figure 5: Schematic of MetData structure The tactic taken in the development of the demonstration system was to use as much standard online journal technologies a possible, thereby introducing all the functions of journals without engineering new solutions.
Various online journal systems considered including the Open Journal Systems (OJS), Digital Publishing System (Dpubs) and Hyperjournal.
OJS was chosen because of its open source nature and the ease of adaption.
The RIOJA [12] Project also used this software for exactly these reasons.
The approach used was to add the data description documents into the standard workflow of the journal software.
The additional elements needed were a tool to author the data description documents and a method to render the documents.
To create these documents a Web-based authoring tool was developed.
This was done using the Pylons Web application framework, which allows the rapid development of Web applications in the Python programming language.
The code for this application is available from the sub-version repository on the OJIMS Web site [13].
The editor requires input of metadata about the overlaid dataset and other information such as the author of the document.
It also adds information set and constrained by the data journal's review processes.
For example, a text description of the review process is the same for all documents and is simply inserted from the editor's configuration.
The XML documents produced by the editor were rendered into a human-readable document using a XSLT style sheet when viewing through the data journal interface (see screenshots below).
Figure 6: The front page of the journal demo.
There is a link from the front page and from the submission page to the overlay document editor Figure 7: The overlay document creation tool.
This page is where a new document can be created either online or by uploading an existing document in the same format which has been created by other means Figure 8: The document in the editing stage.
Some fields are editable, others (e.g.
format) are set by the configuration of the editor Figure 9: After submission and review, the documents are viewable in the same ways as any other online journal.
The contents of a demonstration journal issue are shown in this screenshot Figure 10: The link to the item allows the Web browser to render the document using an XSLT style sheet Outcomes of the OJIMS Project The main project achievements have included: The project has developed a business case for data journals on behalf of the academic publishing community.
The RMetS has evaluated the technologies and business cases associated with new overlay journals.
It is hoped that this will lead to the publication of a data journal in the near future.
The project has also developed some of the software technologies required to run a data journal.
The project brings data journals closer to actual realisation.
Should a data journal be developed and run, this will allow data scientists to gain academic credit for their work producing the datasets.
Further, peer review of datasets will ensure the quality of the datasets while publishing will ensure that more datasets are properly curated and archived, and are more widely available.
The document repository [9] is now fully operational and will be a resource freely available to members of the atmospheric science community and a source for documentation about the datasets stored at the BADC.
Expanding document repositories to include a wider range of citable material is of benefit and interest to the user community.
The CEDA docs repository will continue to collect material ('grey' literature) outside the scope of journal articles from numerous sources.
Impact on the Meteorological Sciences Research Community A significant part of the OJIMS project work was the survey of scientists and organisations which served to introduce the work the project was doing at the same time as capture the requirements for the data journal and document repository.
The results from these surveys are documented in the reports OJIMS Survey of Organisations [2] and OJIMS Survey of Scientists [3].
These surveys and presentations at conferences and meetings served to kick-start a community debate on what materials need archiving and which should be regarded as 'publication-quality'.
The OJIMS project has a high profile within the repository and atmospheric science community.
At the recent NERC Data Management Workshop (February 2009 [14]) the OJIMS Project was mentioned in more than one key-note speech, with special emphasis on the data journal and its potential ability to provide academic credit for those data scientists who publish their data.
Conclusions and Recommendations The OJIMS Project has demonstrated that standard online journal technologies are suitable for the development and operation of a data journal as they allow the use of all the functions of journals without the need to engineer new solutions.
OJIMS also showed that there is a significant desire in the meteorological sciences community for a data journal, as this would allow scientists to receive academic recognition (in the form of citations) for their work in ensuring the quality of datasets.
The funders of the research that produces these data also benefit from data publication as it raises the profile of the data, ensuring reuse.
Furthermore, such publication encourages the scientists involved to submit to accredited data repositories, where their data will be properly archived.
With regards to standards, the OJIMS data journal system chosen was the Open Journal Systems (OJS) and the repository software was EPrints.
Both OJS and EPrints were chosen because of their open source nature and their ease of adaption.
However they also offer standard interfaces such as OAI-PMH [15].
The overlay document schema incorporated Dublin Core metadata and used RDF to encode the needed information.
The project endeavoured to make use of pre-existing and mature software to implement the document repository and the overlay journal infrastructure, modifying it as appropriate.
This was to ensure ease of use and stability of the resulting software.
The OJIMS Project would recommend that further work be done on the implementation and operation of a data journal.
The authors are aware of one data journal currently in operation, the Earth System Science Data Journal (ESSD) [16], which has four papers in its library as of time of writing.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as the principal funder of the OJIMS Project under the JISC Capital Programme call for Projects, Strand D: 'Repository Start-up and Enhancement Projects' (4/06).
Complementary funding was provided by NCAS through the BADC core agreement, and also by the Natural Environment Research Council.
References Sarah Callaghan, Fiona Hewer, Sam Pepler, Paul Hardaker and Alan Gadian, "Overlay Journals in the Meteorological Sciences", July 2009, Ariadne, Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/callaghan-et-al/ Fiona Hewer, OJIMS Survey of Organisations, Version 2.0, March 2009 http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/FRK_RMetSOJIMS_SurveyOfOrgsV2%209Mar2009.pdf Fiona Hewer, OJIMS Survey of Scientists, Version 2.0, March 2009 http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/FRK_RMetSOJIMS_SurveyOfScientistsV2%209Mar2009.pdf Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) Trac http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims Policies: CEDA Repository http://cedadocs.badc.rl.ac.uk/policies.html NERC Open Research Archive http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/ Directory of Open Access Repositories http://www.opendoar.org/ Social Networking Extensions for EPrints http://sneep.ulcc.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page CEDA Repository http://cedadocs.badc.rl.ac.uk/ Image Annotator: The Web Kanzaki http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/sw/img-annotator.html Fiona Hewer, OJIMS Business Models Report, March 2009 http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/FRK_RMetSOJIMS_BusinessModelsV2p1.pdf Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja/ OJIMS Trac http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims/browser 2009 Workshop Programme NERC Data Management Workshop CEH Wiki http://wiki.ceh.ac.uk/display/nercworkshop/2009+Workshop+Programme The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html Earth System Science Data (ESSD) http://www.earth-system-science-data.net/ Author Details Sarah Callaghan Senior Scientific Researcher and Project Manager British Atmospheric Data Centre Email: sarah.callaghan@stfc.ac.uk Web site: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk Sam Pepler Head, Science Support Group British Atmospheric Data Centre Email: sam.pepler@stfc.ac.uk Web site: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk Fiona Hewer Environmental Consultant Fiona's Red Kite Email: fiona@fionasredkite.co.uk Web site: http://www.fionasredkite.co.uk/ Paul Hardaker Chief Executive Royal Meteorological Society Email: chiefexec@rmets.org Web site: http://www.rmets.org/ Alan Gadian Senior Research Lecturer National Centre for Atmospheric Science Email: a.gadian@see.leeds.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ncas.ac.uk/weather/ Return to top Article Title: "How to publish data using overlay journals: the OJIMS project" Author: Sarah Callaghan, Sam Pepler, Fiona Hewer, Paul Hardaker, Alan Gadian Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/callaghan-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Delivering Digital Services: A Handbook for Public Libraries and Learning Centres Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Delivering Digital Services: A Handbook for Public Libraries and Learning Centres Buzz data java framework javascript xml portal digitisation accessibility identifier copyright provenance licence ict e-government intranet Citation BibTex RIS Towards the end of the Pantomime season, Bruce Royan finds a golden egg among the goose droppings.
There is no shortage of guides to the delivery of e-services in learning centres, although often their emphasis is on academic rather than local authority institutions [1].
In the public library field, it could be argued that more than enough journal articles and monographs on the topic have already been churned out in the 8 years since the publication of New Library: the People's Network [2].
Is there really room on the shelves for one more?
Alan Poulter and David McMenemy have been particularly industrious over the past year, publishing (with Debra Hiom) a substantial companion to the Internet [3], as well as this current handbook.
In this reviewer's opinion, their labour has not been in vain: this is a useful, workmanlike introduction to the topic, with enough substance to make it worth the practitioner's while to keep it by them for further reference.
The book opens with a clear overview of the policy and legal framework: the role of the public library in the 21st century, and issues of accessibility, copyright and data protection.
It then discusses a range of front-line issues, including the importance of building on ICT skills, and the role of libraries in supporting e-government.
Finally it provides some simple recipes for content creation, covering web and intranet design, XML, portal construction and digitisation for community libraries.
Each chapter has been put together with the aid of a range of appropriate experts (Paul F Burton, Sandie King, Paul Anderson, Margaret Houston, Liz McGettigan and the delightfully named Sara O'Loan).
That all the contributors are based in Scotland does not detract from the book's relevance to every public library service in the United Kingdom.
I was at times a little uncertain about the target audience for this book.
For example, the chapter on 'The importance of building on ICT skills' contained, not the expected management-level argument on how important it was to take the ICT competencies of library staff beyond the level of the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), but a set of 22 activities to improve the competencies of the front line practitioner, from advanced search strategy to backing up data.
The book contains over 50 such exercises, and these are supported by a range of materials on the accompanying Web site [4].
These activities actually constitute a useful resource in their own right, and it is a pity that they have not been given more prominence in the preliminary pages, for easier access by the learner.
As it is, restarting the numbering of the activities at the start of each chapter does not assist easy identification, especially as Chapter 5 contains two Activity 13s (one on Java, and the other on the quite distinct Javascript).
Apart from this omission, the prelims and end-matter are helpfully constructed.
The contents pages supply a compelling overview of the argument of the whole work, while each chapter concludes with helpful and appropriate references.
The index is accurate and fairly comprehensive (though in a book with such an obviously Scottish provenance, it was surprising to encounter no entries for Am Baile, Resources for Learning in Scotland, or SCRAN).
£39.95 is a lot to pay for 184 pages, even if they are as handsomely bound and clearly presented as this book undoubtedly is.
The subtitle of the work is 'a handbook for public libraries and learning centres', and I can imagine it taking its place on the staff reference shelves, but the emphasis on practical exercises makes it read more like a student text.
I would see it as having a useful role in both undergraduate teaching and continuous professional development.
References Levy, Philippa and Roberts, Sue (eds) "Developing the New Learning Environment: the changing role of the academic librarian" Facet Publishing, October 2005; 256 pages hardback; ISBN 1-85604-530-7 New Library: the People's Network http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/newlibrary/ [accessed 20 January 2006] Poulter, Alan., Hiom, Debra and McMenemy David "The Library and Information Professional's Internet Companion" Facet Publishing, 183 pages hardback; ISBN 1-85604-509-9 "Delivering Digital Services" Web page for activities http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/deliveringdigitalservices/ [accessed 20 January 2006] Author Details Professor Bruce Royan Principal Consultant Concurrent Computing Ltd Email: bruce.royan@concurrentcomputing.com Web site: http://www.concurrentcomputing.com Return to top Article Title: "Delivering Digital Services: a handbook for public libraries and learning centres" Author: Bruce Royan Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/royan-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project Buzz data software framework database xml portal archives metadata doi schema repositories eprints copyright cataloguing openurl dspace research Citation BibTex RIS Masako Suziki and Shigeki Sugita describe Hokkaido University's efforts to populate its institutional repository with journal articles.
Hokkaido University launched its project to construct an institutional repository in early 2004.
After a year of discussion, planning and preparation, we started soliciting content in July 2005.
Within a year of that start, we had assembled a depository of approximately 9,000 documents.
It is named the Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers (HUSCAP)[1].
Eight thousand of these documents are digitised collections of faculty journal back issues that have been published over the many years of Hokkaido University's history.
Most editorial boards of academic journals at Hokkaido University have been considering different ways of publishing their journals electronically.
Consequently the proposal to provide our repository as an electronic journal platform was both readily understood and welcomed.
The HUSCAP Project scanned the back issues as PDF files.
This article will cover the remaining 1,000 documents, being the international and peer-reviewed journal articles written by researchers at Hokkaido University.
Hokkaido University is a national university with 20 faculties and 23 research centres.
It employs 2,132 researchers with 6,357 graduate students and 11,640 undergraduates on roll.
According to the Thomson Scientific database [2], researchers at Hokkaido University publish some 2,500 to 3,000 papers a year in the journals that are registered on that database.
We have always considered these papers as one of the most valuable parts of HUSCAP.
They have been central to our strategy on content recruitment.
However, collecting them has been one of the most challenging aspects of this project.
Here we describe our efforts to recruit the first 1,000 papers to the HUSCAP repository, a number, we recognise, that is nonetheless still far lower than the number of papers produced every year.
The Open Access Landscape in Japan, Lessons from Existing Projects and Our Thinking As of early 2004, the 'open access' movement and the concept of an institutional repository were little known in Japan.
It was the National Institute of Informatics (NII)[3] that played an important role in promoting the ideas of open access and the construction of institutional repositories.
The NII launched the NII Institutional Repository Portal (NII-IRP) Project [4] in June 2004, with six partner universities.
The NII and its partners conducted a trial implementation of DSpace and Eprints software and investigated how to localise them to Japan.
Under the project, promotional activities were conducted at universities in Japan.
Hokkaido University, as a project partner, has had discussions with Stevan Harnad [5] who came to Tokyo at the express invitation of the NII.
Furthermore, colleagues at Hokkaido have read many papers on the philosophical, practical and technical issues involved in the development of institutional repositories, papers which were translated into Japanese under the NII-IRP Project.
Among these, the article on DAEDALUS in Ariadne [6] and the article on Rochester University's experience in D-Lib Magazine [7] were very helpful to us in advancing the HUSCAP Project.
Our strategy on content recruitment can be summarised as: informing the community and demonstrating the usefulness of open access but without necessarily giving a full explanation or engaging in heavy marketing.
We hoped our institutional repository would play a central role in supporting the accountability of Hokkaido University to its stakeholders by providing free access to the research produced by the University.
However, it would not make much sense for us to promote this work without being able to point to any achievements.
Consequently we decided that we had to begin developing an institutional repository as a pilot project by ourselves and seek to build up a certain degree of content so as to gain the approval of the researchers we hoped to recruit.
In promoting our activities to researchers, we avoided the use of phrases like 'open access', 'institutional repository', 'self-archiving' and the like.
Instead, we described the project as another activity of library collection development in the digital age.
We asked the researchers to contribute their research papers in electronic form to increase our library collections and promised that we would process them in just the same way as traditional library materials, through acquisition, physical processing, adding them to the library catalogue and making them available to users.
Our thinking was that, even if their first submission to the institutional repository only arose as a direct result of the invitation by the Library, once their paper appeared in the repository and they learned that users from around the world were frequently downloading it, they would understand the significance of open access and the institutional repository.
Consequently they might be more willing to contribute a second and a third paper, which would lead, we hoped, to spontaneous self-archiving.
Our first step was to raise awareness of HUSCAP.
We did not expect all researchers to understand everything about it, but we did expect that this action would leave them with the impression that the library really wanted their papers in electronic form without the absolute necessity of their understanding exactly why.
Broad-brush but Conspicuous Advocacy What led us to this strategy of informing the community and demonstrating the usefulness of open access without necessarily giving a full explanation boils down to our initial experience.
At the beginning of the project, we tentatively named the repository the Hokkaido University Research Repository.
We produced a leaflet describing the 'serials crisis' and the concept of open access and sent it to all the researchers at the University.
Some researchers said that they are not familiar with the term 'repository' and what the Library understood by the word.
Others admitted they received so many leaflets that they tended to dismiss them as junk mail.
It looked as if it was going to be an uphill climb to disseminate the notion of an institutional repository by means of a single sheet of paper.
So we gave up on the one-sheet explanation, deciding instead to devote ourselves just to making the project itself far better known.
We decided to change the name of our repository to HUSCAP, after the blue honeysuckle (haskap in Japanese)[8].
This berry grows wild on Hokkaido, and the members of Hokkaido University are quite familiar with it.
We designed a logo based on the haskap and put up posters with this symbol all over the campus, keeping the text down to a few explanatory sentences.
At the same time we also prepared a 12-page pocket-size guidebook to HUSCAP for those researchers who had expressed interest in the project having seen the posters.
We made the guidebook available by leaving it near the posters.
Furthermore we produced a flyer entitled "Someone's sure to be needing a paper of yours" and handed it out to users of the Interlibrary Document Delivery Service together with the guidebook.
In the first two months of the HUSCAP Project, we held over 30 presentation sessions for researchers.
As with the poster, we did not go into too much detail, preferring only to notify them that the library was collecting e-prints.
The researchers here are so busy that we limited all presentations to 15 minutes.
We prepared a 10-page slide presentation based on the idea that this project aimed to collect research papers as a further library collection.
This presentation confined itself to a minimum explanation of the open access movement and its benefits.
For example only one slide was devoted to introducing Professor Harnad's research on the impact of open access [9].
When this slide was shown, the audience was heard to utter a collective and interested 'Hmm...!'
It was just a brief mention of the open access movement but, we believe, a telling one.
To our regret, the audiences were smaller than expected.
However, lively discussion arose every time after these 15-minute presentations, on copyright issues, the journal submission process and research life, all of which proved an invaluable opportunity for us to hear opinions on the institutional repository and scholarly communication in general.
However, ultimately, not all the researchers who supported the idea of an institutional repository actually contributed papers; but this was also the case with DAEDALUS and Rochester, as described in the Ariadne and D-Lib articles mentioned earlier [6][7].
Nonetheless, immediately following these presentations, paper submissions to HUSCAP did increase temporarily, but the increase was not maintained.
We realised all too keenly that we needed sustainable tactics that would allow us to acquire content on a continuous basis.
Not Just Any Paper, But a Specific Paper At the very outset of the project, we had asked researchers individually to submit their papers to the institutional repository.
Using the Thomson Scientific database, we listed the papers published over the last two years for each author.
We made inquiries about researchers' intentions as regards co-operating in the creation of an institutional repository.
Furthermore we contacted 60 researchers who were interested in our project providing them with a list of their papers together with a polite letter requesting them to donate their papers to the repository.
The largest number of papers listed was 27 and the smallest was 1.
The overall total came to 226 and the average number requested was 3.76.
However, only 25 papers were actually contributed, and these by 10 researchers.
As a consequence, we interviewed some of the 60 researchers contacted, and their responses can be summarised as follows: It is bothersome to look for manuscripts of past papers, which are often scattered or lost The manuscript is sometimes scrapped once the paper is published in a journal.
It was unclear which paper was wanted.
Did the repository want every paper ever written by the researcher?
Researchers who accessed our repository system expressed a variety of opinions: The metadata required are too complicated and exhaustive.
The researchers did not want to spend more than a very short time on the submission process.
The process looked troublesome at first, but turned out to be unexpectedly easy.
It took a long time to understand how to make the first submission, but after that it was easier.
In light of these comments, we revised our strategy.
The most important challenge seemed to be making the user's first-time submission easier.
Towards this goal, we decided to abandon making requests for just any paper and instead focused on their most current one.
The actual process is detailed here: Search databases every Monday to find the latest papers written by Hokkaido University researchers.
Check the RoMEO/SHERPA list [10] and select papers published in "green" journals from the database search results.
Send concise e-mails to the authors, saying "Would you be willing to contribute your manuscript '______________' as an e-mail attachment for HUSCAP's collection?
We have permission from the journal."
Load all contributed papers into the repository.
Send an e-mail thanking the author and outlining, for the first time, the benefits of open access in terms of research impact and our wish to have any other papers written by that researcher.
The results of this approach are shown in Table 1 below.
Period Request Papers requested Papers received Rate Mar.-May 2005 Papers published in the last two years 226 25 11% Jan.-Mar.
2006 Papers appearing in the database in the last week 409 201 49% Table 1: Comparison of results from initial and revised recruitment strategies We were able to obtain manuscripts from 49% of the authors.
While this figure is not high enough yet, we think it may represent a far more effective way to collect journal articles for an institutional repository than by the retrospective method.
In addition, the request from the Library to the researchers has also made them more aware of self-archiving.
Some of them therefore are starting to deposit every new article with us as it is published.
Just as encouraging is the fact that a few other researchers also made inquiries about depositing all their past works.
It was instructive for us to have contact with so many researchers.
Some of them now participate in the HUSCAP Project as early adopters.
We also met a few researchers who held negative, skeptical or contrary views.
Talking with them was stimulating and instructive, and encouraged us to reconsider our project and seek better policies.
Less Promotion, More Evidence Now we are starting to show results.
The HUSCAP Project has started to provide an e-mail service in which we notify authors of the monthly count of their articles downloaded from HUSCAP, based on the httpd access log.
The e-mail contains the download count for each of that researcher's articles, and we offer the option of receiving the download count per domain (e.g.
"xx downloads from .uk").
On 1 June 2006, the service made its debut with e-mails to 303 researchers who had contributed articles to HUSCAP enquiring whether they would like to receive the e-mail service.
40% said yes, and half of the 40% chose the version of the service giving the more detailed report.
Respondents' Preferences Researchers Ratio (a) Was sent an e-mail 303 100% (b) Prefers brief e-mail 60 20% (c) Prefers detailed e-mail 61 20% (d) Prefers either of the e-mails (b+c) 121 40% Table 2: Responses of the initial users of the e-mail service Though inevitably anecdotal, the responses from some of the users of the e-mail service are instructive: "I was surprised to hear of my paper being accessed so often."
"Please send me the results in greater detail.
I'm interested to know who's reading my papers."
"This is a good way to understand who my readership tends to be."
"As a researcher, it's a real encouragement for me to know how often my paper has been downloaded.
From now on, I'll be sending my papers to HUSCAP whenever I have something valuable to contribute."
"I felt gratified to hear someone was interested in our research and had read our paper.
I had thought the research community in my discipline must be very small in Japan."
"The download count gives us encouragement and enthusiasm.
Thank you very much."
We expect the e-mail service to serve as a distinct incentive to researchers who are thinking of contributing other papers to HUSCAP.
We do not have enough data as yet to be able to analyse the effect of the e-mail service on self-archiving; however, immediately after the first e-mails were sent, 22 papers were donated voluntarily to HUSCAP from researchers who had received them.
Wider Access During the course of the 15-minute presentations, researchers often asked whether papers contributed to HUSCAP would be accessible through the databases they tended to use, such as Pubmed, SCOPUS and Web of Science.
We generally replied that HUSCAP was crawled by Google and other Web search engines.
This answer persuaded many, but there was a significant remainder who felt this was not sufficient.
We are therefore preparing a new access path to HUSCAP in order to address this concern.
The ways of accessing institutional repositories will be multiplied, as seen in Thomson's Web Citation Index Pilot Project [11], in which 7 repositories are participating, and in Elsevier's SCIRUS [12], which includes T-Space in Toronto University and CURATOR in Chiba University as search targets.
As a new means of accessing its institutional repository, Hokkaido University has launched a collaborative research project with the Openly Informatics Division of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which has an '1CATE' link server [13].
We have developed a framework whereby users can access self-archived content in institutional repositories via link servers.
Figure 1: 1CATE/HUSCAP linking framework In order to respond to openURL requests and provide a link to the content, institutional repositories have to have rich and accurate metadata.
HUSCAP is based on DSpace 1.3.2.
The DSpace default metadata schema is based on the Library Application Profile of Dublin Core, in which citation information is edited into an element (bibliographicCitation) in free syntax without structure [14].
We modified and extended the DSpace metadata specification to allow DOI, PubMed ID, ISSN, E-ISSN, journal title, volume, issue, spage and epage all to be described as a separate metadata element.
Hokkaido University and OCLC also defined an experimental XML schema named ir.xsd [15], in accordance with which institutional repositories might reply to link servers.
In addition, Hokkaido University has developed a function for DSpace that resolves OpenURL0.1 and OpenURL1.0 requests, and responds by sending the location information of the requested paper based on ir.xsd.
The screenshot below is the 1CATE test server navigation window, with links to the published version of the paper on Elsevier's Science Direct and to the author's version on HUSCAP.
Figure 2: 1CATE's navigation window including a link to HUSCAP Navigation to the appropriate copy is an essential function of a link server.
Collaboration between link servers and institutional repositories may provide considerable benefits to the users whose institutions are unable to subscribe to electronic journals.
Moreover, our on-campus promotion and content recruitment is expected to reinforce the incentive to potential users.
We may soon be close to answering yes to the question about wider access.
Conclusion This article summarises what Hokkaido University has done in the first year since it established an institutional repository.
The lessons from the HUSCAP Project may be summarised as follows: It is more important and effective to secure fresh digital literature produced day by day before it is lost, than to focus only on compiling past works.
So that researchers might understand the aim of an institutional repository, and to recruit repeat submitters, it may be effective to notify them how much their papers in the institutional repository are read.
This will make them aware of the value of open access.
Our goal is to shift from content recruitment by database-based individual requests to voluntary deposit, by holding steadfastly to our strategy of making our aims understood.
Co-ordination between link servers and institutional repositories will underpin our arguments.
For institutional repositories it will be valuable for researchers to be aware of the benefits of self-archiving and to undertake the latter voluntarily, whether or not we mandate self-archiving.
We will continue to look for the best way to get that first research paper and to make it easier for authors to participate.
References HUSCAP http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/ Web of Science http://scientific.thomson.com/products/wos/ NII http://www.nii.ac.jp/index.shtml.en The NII-IRP Project http://www.nii.ac.jp/metadata/irp/ (in Japanese) Professor Stevan Harnad is currently Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton.
He is also an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
He is moderator of the American Scientist Open Access Forum http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Morag Mackie, "Filling Institutional Repositories: Practical strategies from the DAEDALUS Project", April 2004, Ariadne Issue 39 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/mackie/ and http://www.nii.ac.jp/metadata/irp/mackie/ (Japanese Translation) Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons, "Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories".
D-Lib Magazine, 11(1), January 2005 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html and http://www.nii.ac.jp/metadata/irp/foster/ (Japanese Translation) Lonicera caerulea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonicera_caerulea Stevan Harnad, "Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals".
D-Lib Magazine, 10(6), June 2004 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html and http://www.nii.ac.jp/metadata/irp/harnad/ (Japanese Translation) SHERPA/RoMEO publisher copyright policies and self-archiving http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php Web Citation Index http://scientific.thomson.com/press/2005/8298416/ SCIRUS http://www.scirus.com/ Openly Informatics Division, OCLC http://www.openly.com/ and its 1CATE http://www.openly.com/1cate/ DSpace's metadata http://dspace.org/technology/metadata.html XML Schema for the project(ir.xsd) http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/ir.xsd Author Details SUZUKI Masako University Library Hokkaido University Japan Email: jako@lib.hokudai.ac.jp Web site: http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/ SUGITA Shigeki University Library Hokkaido University Japan Email: sugita@lib.hokudai.ac.jp Web site: http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/ Return to top Article Title: "From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project" Author: SUZUKI Masako and SUGITA Shigeki Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/suzuki-sugita/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content Buzz data rdf framework database dissemination rss atom portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation tagging identifier repositories copyright video oai-pmh aggregation ocr ontologies owl skos licence interoperability oai-ore research Citation BibTex RIS Rob Davies describes a Best Practice Network under the eContentPlus Programme to make available locally sourced digital content to the Europeana Service.
Europeana the European digital library, museum and archive is a two-year project that began in July 2007.
It will produce a service giving users direct access initially to some two million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers, rising to a target of 10 million by 2010.
The development of the Europeana service is a flagship activity of the European Digital Libraries Initiative [1] [2], designed to increase access to digital content across four identified key domains (libraries, museums, archives and audio/visual archives) is now gaining momentum.
The first prototype service [3] will be launched by Commissioner Viviane Reding to the Council of Ministers on 19⁄20 November 2008.
This progress is paralleled in some countries by work co-ordinated at national and regional level to integrate access to cross-domain content [4].
However, there is a pressing need, not least in order to achieve Europeana’s 2010 content target also to make available the enormous amount of digital content provided by Europe’s cultural institutions at local and regional level alongside that held at national level.
By doing so, such a move will extend the institutional base of content providers to involve more extensively Europe’s network of museums and archives as well as libraries.
This process will bring together and link up heterogeneously sourced content which is complementary in terms of themes, location and time.
Moreover, it would make it possible to establish integrated services with greater richness and complexity.
Such a development will also add value for users by linking the digital content brought on stream through EuropeanaLocal with content with local and regional relevance held by national level institutions.
These are the goals of EuropeanaLocal [5].
Key Challenges A major challenge in achieving these goals is that the digital content addressed by EuropeanaLocal is very widely distributed and heterogeneous, held in a wide variety of media, maintained in many different data formats and described by a wide variety of metadata schemas.
This issue is related to the way in which users currently interact with the network of content providers and distributed collections of digital objects.
Models can range from an environment where autonomous digital libraries are federated or accessed through unified interfaces at one end of the scale, or managed approaches where metadata and/or the actual objects are aggregated in one or more portals.
Services are based on agreements between co-operating providers.
In order to address this challenge, a clear and direct route needs to be established for local institutions to enable their content to be used within Europeana.
In addition to making accessible, in the shorter term, high-value digital content held by a variety of cultural institutions (from at least one locality or region in each member state) plus Norway, EuropeanaLocal will set in place, test and promote the use of a consistent Europeana-compliant execution environment.
The latter would be achieved through technical and governance structures in such a way that the myriad cultural content generators from localities across Europe can easily ‘plug in’ their item-level content in future.
The establishment of a pan-European infrastructure of this kind will not be achieved overnight.
But it is of great importance that a start is now made so that a visible de facto standardisation of approaches can be achieved and a snowball effect created in the interests of users and public and private service providers across all member states.
A different challenge concerns the need to create the conditions for building upon the thematic richness and geographic diversity of Europe’s cultural traditions and social identities.
The expected convergence of rich digital content within Europeana will support beyond federated search mechanisms and access to individual digital collections intelligent semantic and geographic exploration and retrieval functions.
In this context, the ways in which Europeana interacts with the semantic and technical infrastructure being developed for the Semantic Web are highly relevant.
The latter applies both in terms of identifying which Semantic Web activities need to be considered in terms of standards and interoperability, and which are relevant to implementation e.g.
the Resource Description Framework RDF, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS).
The content provided through EuropeanaLocal and the user base of local/regional institutions will provide an important test bed in this respect, ensuring that approaches and standards developed to enrich semantic interoperability and improved search facilities at ‘central’ Europeana level are supported by the knowledge gained from the flow of data from local digital collections across Europe.
Likewise, EuropeanaLocal partners will be well positioned to contribute to the enrichment by means of semantic and geographic metadata (annotations), in a framework of generally agreed conceptual and spatial conventions, as they come on stream through the work of Europeana.Net Thematic Network (formerly known as EDLNet) and beyond.
Standards, Tools and Infrastructure EuropeanaLocal will ensure in general that the approaches, standards and tools developed by Europeana (e.g.
through Europeana.Net) are adopted widely, thereby supporting the interoperability of content within Europeana beyond that which is held by purely national level institutions.
The participation of The EDL Foundation as a partner in the consortium will play a valuable role in ensuring that there is the strongest possible linkage between the technical standards and infrastructural work being carried out by Europeana.Net and related activities.
For example, it will do so by making available tools such as its metadata ‘installer’ and automated metadata conversion tools for use by EuropeanaLocal partners.
This linkage will also support the development of a sustainable business plan which is hospitable to the long-term participation of a rapidly increasing number of local and regional content providers.
In general, this will involve the establishment of a harvestable network of OAI-PMH-compliant metadata repositories, aggregating content at a level which makes sense in terms of the diverse demographics and digital content holdings of Europe’s municipalities, regions and localities and which complements the existing and planned Europeana network.
A number of recommendations have begun to emerge through the initial work of Europeana.Net, providing guidance on its functional scope of the prototype to be released in November 2008, including a set of Essential Semantic Elements: In addition, a number of areas have been identified as aspects which need to be addressed in the next phase, many of which will become relevant to implementation within the proposed duration of EuropeanaLocal (2008-11).
They include: Object Modelling – and specifically the utilisation of OAI-ORE specification published on 17 October, 2008 Semantic web RSS/|ATOM, Multi-lingualism of content access Geographic and place-based discovery Social networks Collection identification Rights expression (C20 black hole) Persistent identifiers Technical and economic sustainability The Europeana Service For the Europeana interface to be fully usable and to offer an attractive range of services, the data that cultural heritage institutions currently hold in proprietary databases need to be made available for harvesting via the OAI-PMH protocol.
This will be the main line of approach of EuropeanaLocal.
To this extent, a number of the local/regional content providers participating in EuropeanaLocal have already begun to implement this model.
A number of fundamental assumptions have emerged at the strategic and political levels for Europeana and may be seen as conditions which are highly relevant to the positioning and goals of EuropeanaLocal: Europeana will be a federated digital library built on distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous resources: this fact creates specific conditions and challenges for technical, functional and semantic interoperability.
Europeana will be an access point to cultural content and not just a discovery point.
Other services will be able to reuse its content.
Archives and museums must be involved effectively and visibly in Europeana, as soon as possible.
Europeana will provide access to text, pictures, video, sound and 3D objects.
For 2008, the focus is upon open access, digital, freely available and public domain material in order to minimise copyright issues in the early stages of development.
However, all freely available content and metadata should be covered by a suitable licence clearly specifying the respective rights and use conditions.
It is clear from initial discussions that the strategic goal of Europeana is to act as a service provider rather than simply as data/object provider.
Although the principal purpose of EuropeanaLocal is to make cultural objects accessible for use (initially by exposing their metadata for harvesting) by Europeana, there is the clear proposition that Europeana will develop specific services in order to position itself as an added-value access provider.
In this context it will be important to demonstrate the unique selling points of Europeana, such as timeline based discovery which is present in the 2008 prototype.
Objectives of EuropeanaLocal The work of EuropeanaLocal will thus directly support the chief objectives of Best Practice Networks for digital libraries under eContentPlus, by contributing greatly to improving the interoperability of digital libraries held by museums, archives and other institutions in all EU Member States and by making their content accessible through the common user interface of Europeana.
Working closely with key initiatives such as Europeana.Net and successor activities to implement the proposed infrastructures and standards in the context of the provision of an enormous amount of new digital content held at local/regional level (or aggregations of this content), EuropeanaLocal will contribute powerfully to the growth of Europeana and to understanding and addressing, in practical terms, the issues relating to standards-based interoperability between digital objects and collections.
This approach will be achieved by: implementing the production standards, specifications and tools which will enable cross-domain search, retrieval and use of the digital content held by cultural institutions in all member states, involving the professional domains (libraries, museums and archives);.
establishing and promoting straightforward methods by which cultural institutions and aggregators may join Europeana and provide their content to its services.
By working so closely with Europeana, both through the involvement of its newly formed EDL Foundation as a key player in the EuropeanaLocal network consortium and through active participation in Europeana.Net, EuropeanaLocal will support the establishment of a co-operation structure which benefits cultural institutions of all types and levels in every member state.
This process will provide substantial added value to Europeana and its users by: greatly expanding and enriching the freely available and accessible content to be found by users systematically and easily through the Europeana interface itself, as new services come on stream; making available for harvesting locally relevant Europeana-branded cultural content to other service providers working in sectors such as tourism, education, family history, humanities research, the publishing/media industries and through other search engines and services on the Web.
This will serve to enhance the interoperation of Europeana with other services and assist with its intention to work with such services to improve results mutually over the longer term.
Key content types to be made available through EuropeanaLocal include items and collections of high cultural value (‘treasures’) held at local or regional level, specific local collections held by libraries, museums and archives, local sound and film archives, public records held by archives, etc.
The number of content items available from the limited sample of institutions involved in EuropeanaLocal is, at more than 20 million, already very large in the context of the targets for and content currently available to Europeana.
The potential of local/regional sources may be appreciated when these data are extrapolated to all cultural institutions in Europe and by taking into account the likelihood of a continued growth of digitisation at local and regional level in the years to come.
EuropeanaLocal will put in place an infrastructure that will continue to increase the content available to Europeana, at the same time enhancing the skills, expertise and motivation required to support local institutions throughout Europe.
Steps Towards a Successful EuropeanaLocal Over its three-year duration the project, in order to achieve its goals, will seek to: make accessible to Europeana the content specified by local/regional organisations and content aggregators which are the project partners, together with other content from these sources which becomes available during the project period, thereby boosting significantly the total content accessible through Europeana.
to this end, promote and support, through training and guidance, the establishment of a widespread operational network of OAI-PMH repositories, represented in each member state plus Norway, consistent with the requirements of Europeana to harvest content.
Metadata will be aggregated in repositories at a suitable ‘geopolitical’ or thematic level in each locality, region or country of Europe, to support Web harvesting and interoperability.
Repositories will be specified that support the recommendations of Europeana.Net in terms of protocols, technology and metadata requirements.
establish a test environment, to be operated by EDL Foundation, into which the metadata generated by EuropeanaLocal can be harvested, enabling technical enhancements and optimisation for access via the Europeana interface to be performed, before eventual integration with the main Europeana infrastructure, for public availability as a prototype service towards the end of the project; make available to the local/regional content providers in EuropeanaLocal a ‘toolkit’, including OAI ‘installer’ and metadata mapping tools developed for Europeana, automated metadata conversion tools, training and implementation support which will ease the conversion of existing local and institutional databases to OAI-PMH-compliant digital repositories and which will generate consistent metadata.
resolve the long-standing problem of the use of differing, often locally created, metadata formats, especially in the museums and archives sectors, by implementing a practical convergence of major metadata schemas and by using automated processes of mapping and ‘cross-walking’ between them.
In this context, as in others, it will be vital that EuropeanaLocal uses the architecture and standards for interoperable metadata emerging from Europeana.Net and its successor activities.
ensure that local and regional content providers represented within EDLocal comply with the list of requirements and guidelines emerging from Europeana.Net and the EDL Foundation, including the public availability of content (copyright cleared) and willingness to have their data processed according to Europeana practice.
extend to local and regionally sourced content sustainable solutions, consistent with the technologies developed within the overall framework of Europeana, for the systematic semantic and geographic annotation (metadata enrichment) of their digital content, both at the collection level and at the granular ‘item’ or ‘object’ level, such as user tagging, addition of user-provided content, GPS co-ordinates, etc.
promote, using the dissemination opportunities available to the project, the low-cost and straightforward accomplishment of additional digitisation activity (including OCR for full-text search) at regional and local level using where possible the emerging network of creation of ‘centres of competence’ which are capable of providing service support to smaller institutions in digitisation activities and of making available existing tools and services.
arrive at a position by the end of the project where it is easy for new local and regional content providers and critically its aggregators at regional, national and international level to add their content to Europeana without difficulty on a technical level and smoothly in terms of the Europeana business model e.g.
by negotiated subscription through regional, national and international initiatives (e.g.
‘portals’ and aggregations of various descriptions), as these arrangements are announced by Europeana.
EuropeanaLocal partners in each member state will act to ensure that such agreements are in place, supporting and using where appropriate agreements made by other national representative bodies.
ensure the sustainability of the repositories network in each, by negotiating and agreeing with other players in the national framework a most rational, scalable and maintainable solution to long-term aggregation of digital cultural content and its metadata.
Whilst it is early days yet in the implementation of EuropeanaLocal, progress has already been made in assessing the nature and format of content to be provided by partners, the variety of infrastructures available to support harvesting content in the participating localities and in thinking about implementation planning and training to account for the wide variety of starting points across Europe.
Meanwhile several ‘sister’ projects have been approved under eContentplus to continue the process of adding content from different cultural sectors to EuropeanaLocal including: APENet (national archives), Athena (national museums), and European Film Gateway, together with the long-standing sequence of projects managed by The European Library (TEL) which is supporting the contribution of content from National Libraries.
A further series of project inputs from projects funded under eContentplus and the forthcoming CIP programme are expected: a sign that support from the European Commission for Europeana will remain strong for the foreseeable future.
References Commission of the European Communities.
Com (2005) 465 final.
Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: I2010: digital libraries.
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/communication/en_comm_digital_libraries.pdf Europe’s Information Society Thematic Portal.
What is the Digital Libraries Initiative?
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/relaunch/index_en.htm Creating Cross-Domain Consensus for the European Digital Library http://www.blueconsultants.com/edlnet/ Europeana: connecting cultural heritage http://dev.europeana.eu/ EuropeanaLocal http://www.europeanalocal.eu Author Details Rob Davies Director, MDR and Scientific Co-ordinator of EuropeanaLocal Email: rob.davies@mdrpartners.com Web site: http://www.mdrpartners.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content” Author: Rob Davies Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/davies/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web Buzz software metadata thesaurus tagging vocabularies blog wireframe intranet taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Keith Doyle reviews the 3rd edition of the primary reference book for practising in-house staff and consultants responsible for the development of institutional information architecture.
Information architecture helps people find the information they want, whether it's a prospective student looking for a course, or staff using the intranet.
It is mostly concerned with how people browse and search the institutional Web site, and with how knowledge is shared.
People working in information architecture are likely to be responsible for institutional Web strategy; global links on the corporate template; the institutional search engine, site map and index; institutional analytics; portals and primary stakeholder home pages; content management and content management systems.
This book is an essential reference in this field of work.
The term, information architecture, was coined by the architect Wurman [1] in 1976.
He felt that information professionals could learn from the discipline of architecture.
For example, wayfinding helps people to find their way around an unfamiliar building.
Morville [2] and Rosenfeld [3] both have a library information management background and so contribute powerful metaphors, such as the thesaurus.
In this book, the context of information architecture is large-scale or enterprise Web sites which consist of multiple sub-sites and distributed authoring.
Review The book has 21 chapters in six parts: Introducing information architecture covers information architecture concepts, such as the information ecology of context, content and users, and user needs and behaviour.
Basic principles of information architecture provides the theory behind information architecture, drawing on library information management concepts.
Topics covered include taxonomy, labels, navigation, search, metadata, controlled vocabularies and thesaurus.
These theories support operational information architecture, and enabling services such as thesaurus and search.
Process and methodology explains the role of the information architecture strategist.
It lists the steps of an information architecture project up to the point of design: conducting research with the business, users, IT department and Web authors; development of an information architecture strategy, including metaphors and scenarios; design and implementation, including blueprints, wireframes, content models, inventories and style guides.
Information architecture in practice includes an invaluable list of tools and software commonly used by the information architecture community.
Information architecture in the organisation has suggestions on how to market information architecture and how to develop an in-house information architecture service.
The MSWeb case study explains how taxonomies and thesauri integrate with search and browse.
The book is almost comprehensive in describing the theory and practice of information architecture.
Because of the library background of the authors, some of the links between the terminology and systems are not always clear.
For example, the thesaurus theory in chapter 9 is comprehensive.
However, it is not until reading the MSWeb case study that it becomes evident how useful, indeed, essential a thesaurus can be to the quality of the Web presence.
After reading the book, the reader will have to work out the gaps in their own organisation's resources and develop a strategy for change.
The book suggests starting by asking the business and the users where they experience the most pain.
If you work in-house, you probably have a good idea where this is already.
But the voice of users lends credibility to the opinions of the information architect and business owners, which is why there is a strong emphasis on user needs and behaviour.
Comparison with Earlier Editions This edition is a major change and improvement from the first edition [4], which has less than 200 pages and just 10 chapters.
The second edition [5] has 461 pages in 21 chapters with identical chapter names to the third edition.
The new edition benefits from an updated list of tools and software, and of essential resources.
These alone could make it worth updating from the second edition.
Furthermore, the book includes new sections on tagging, folksonomies and diagramming.
The section on enterprise information architecture has been rewritten to reflect lessons learnt by the authors since the second edition.
Conclusion This reference covers almost everything the institutional information architect needs to consider.
For anyone practising or thinking of practising enterprise information architecture, it is an essential read.
Krug [6] is recommended for user testing.
If you are not an information architect but would like to find out more about the field, or if you are interested in applying information architecture on a smaller scale, a good reference is Wodtke [7].
References Richard Saul Wurman http://www.wurman.com/rsw/ Semantic Studios: Peter Morville's Biography http://www.semanticstudios.com/about/ Biography: Lou Rosenfeld http://louisrosenfeld.com/biography/ Rosenfeld, L & Morville, P, "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" (1998) Rosenfeld, L & Morville, P, "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd edition" (2002) Krug, S, "Don't Make Me Think, 2nd edition" (2006) Wodtke, C, "Information Architecture: Blueprints For The Web" (2003) Author Details Keith Doyle Web Content Architect University of Salford Email: k.doyle1@salford.ac.uk Blog: http://consequencing.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd edition): Designing Large-scale Web Sites" Author: Keith Doyle Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/doyle-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The SPP Alerting Portlet: Delivering Personalised Updates Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The SPP Alerting Portlet: Delivering Personalised Updates Buzz data software java framework database rss portal jena repositories cataloguing uri vle tomcat wsrp uportal research standards Citation BibTex RIS Virginia Knight describes the open-source alerting portlet which has been developed as part of the SPP Subject Portals Project (SPP) and the results of user feedback.
Background: Identifying a Need SPP phase I [1] was largely devoted to considering how five Resource Discovery Network (RDN) hubs might be turned into subject portals, but at this stage did not include the development of portlets.
During the course of phase I it became clear that many potential users of these portals would choose to access content from within their local institutional portal or a virtual learning environment (VLE).
The choice of functionality for these portlets was in part determined by the results of user testing on users of the BIOME Web site, which gathered feedback about various potential portlets and the ways in which they might deliver information [2].
Portlets were a much more important part of SPP phase II, which ran initially till 2004 (with an extension to 2006).
Two portlets were felt to be worth developing further because they were thought to be especially innovative and useful: an alerting portlet and a cross-searching portlet [3].
The idea of an alerting portlet developed out of the concept of an aggregated newsfeed searching portlet.
Its function is to notify users about new resources in their subject interest areas and to allow users to register those areas with the portlet software.
Nothing similar exists elsewhere to our knowledge and this is one of the most original outcomes of the SPP project.
During the latter stages of phase II of SPP, the project developed a close relationship with the Integrative Biology Virtual Research Environment (IBVRE) in Oxford [4].
IBVRE has been involved with the development of the portlet, producing a list of requirements (see below) validating screen designs, testing a prototype and suggesting suitable users for test cases.
The Portlet Specifications A functional specification for the alerting portlet was drawn up.
The portlet was defined as ‘an SPP facility designed to provide a means for delivering timely notification of update information of various kinds, for example: details of new bibliographic records, new records to the IRC catalogues, news items, additional services such as events, call for papers reminders, etc.’ The document also gave a definition of alert preferences (currently called ‘subscriptions’) as entities comprising ‘a unique ID, the user ID, a query string, a set of targets and a set of delivery preferences defined by the Portal User (i.e.
e-mail address, RSS news channels, alert frequency, etc.
)’ The output of the alerting portlet (the ‘alert’) should comprise ‘a unique ID, a search results list and the information prepared by additional services and the newsfeed service for the user’.
Other requirements related to what users could and could not do and defined some areas of functionality which were beyond the scope of the portlet (such as a search mechanism and a user profiling mechanism).
There were also three requirements relating to technology: the service should be an ‘open implementation’ accessible from different hardware/software platforms using standard unmodified Web and email clients.
the development of the service should allow for incremental future development.
For example, to increase the number of email formats supported.
the development of the service [was] expected to involve the use of object-oriented programming language and open-source technologies.
In addition, IBVRE independently identified its own requirements for an alerting tool, which turned out to be covered by those already drawn up in the functional specification for the SPP portlet [5].
The following additional requirements were also agreed with IBVRE: a user would be able to have multiple alerts which they could manage through the portlet interface.
an alert would consist of the following: keywords, one or more data sources (e.g BMJ), one delivery format (e.g.
email, RSS), a frequency, an active/inactive flag.
a data source could be a subset of a repository (such as a journal).
an alert would be built by running the alert’s query (with keywords joined together by AND) against the selected data sources.
the amount of text available to search would depend on the source.
(Our test portlet has used PubMed and searches titles and descriptions.)
an alert would contain items that had arisen in the data source since the last execution of the alert, up to a configurable maximum.
each item in the alert would include a synopsis and a link to the alert item source.
The alerting portlet has been designed to keep to these specifications.
The portlet is written in Java.
It has been designed in the first instance to be used within standards-based portals (such as uPortal) as it conforms to the JSR 168 portlet standard; it is also expected to conform to the WSRP portlet standard.
It uses the following libraries and frameworks: Spring 2, Hibernate 3, Jena 2.5 [6].
The quickstart is bundled with the relational database HSQLDB 1.8.0.7 and the JMS message broker ActiveMQ 4.1.1 [7].
The portlet also requires: JDK 1.5 or greater; a JSR 168-compliant portal; a JMS 1.1-compliant Message Broker; a relational database and appropriate JDBC driver; a servlet container, such as Tomcat 5.5.x [8].
Figure 1: Architecture of the SPP Alerting System The User Interface When users first open the portlet, they are asked for their name and email address and invited to create a new subscription.
The subscription options are of two kinds: Subscription details.
These are the name of the subscription, a description of it, keywords which will be applied, method of delivery, frequency of delivery and whether the subscription is active.
The name and description of each subscription are for the user’s own information.
The keywords are matched against the abstracts of articles; articles matching those keywords will be included in the alerts.
The delivery options are to receive the alert(s) as email messages or alternatively on logging into the portals (at present only the former has been implemented).
Email messages can be sent out daily, weekly or monthly.
Data sources.
All data sources are listed and the user may optionally filter by repository, then select one or more data source groups (in the test version, publications in a particular subject area), or select data sources (in the test version, individual journals) individually.
The selected data sources are listed at the bottom left of the screen.
Figure 2: Creating a subscription It is possible for a user to have multiple subscriptions.
This is likely to be desirable if the user has diverse interests or if the maximum number of resources in each alert is set at a low value by the administrator (the default is 20).
The Alerts The email message that notifies users of publications which match the keywords and data sources specified in the subscription is in the following form: a greeting by name introductory text saying which subscription the resources are from list of resources, with the following information for each: title, beginning of description (first 250 characters), date, URI.
If more than 20 resources have been found, only the first 20 are shown.
a reminder of the URI of the subscription at the end of the alert.
Test Cases In May 2007 a draft version of the alerting portlet was made available to selected users for testing.
This used a restricted data source of a selection of medical journals from PubMed Central [9], and allowed users to receive alerts as emails rather than on logging into the portal.
After a trial period of about two weeks, the users were asked about their experience of using the portlet.
A copy of the portlet was also supplied to the manager of a university portal service to test how easily it could be installed.
Case Study 1: The End-user User 1 is medical researcher working at a major U.S. university.
This user successfully set up a subscription and started receiving alerts.
User 1 did not usually use portlets, but found the alerting portlet to be a useful way of getting information about areas of interest, preferring it to redoing saved searches and to RSS.
The user described it as ‘straightforward and intuitive’ and that he expected to use it in future, but from a central source rather than a more local portal.
The presentation of results was good, and the direct links to PubMed in the alerts were especially appreciated.
User 1 suggested that there should be more online help on the portlet, perhaps as a ‘what’s this?’ link or a few words on the screen.
It would be especially useful to have help on selecting by subject for a subscription, explaining what a ‘data source group’ is and what happens if you select nothing.
Suggestions for improvement focused on the selection of journals which could be included in a subscription.
This user had research interests that crossed boundaries between subject areas and so he would like to be able to create and re-use his own customised list of the journals which he regularly uses.
Failing this, it would be good to be able to copy a subscription and edit it to create a new one.
Repeatedly compiling a list of the same journals for each subscription is laborious, especially because navigating through the list of journals is not easy.
It was suggested that some aids to navigation could be added: searching for a word/phrase, jumping to a given letter, or being able to choose the number of journals visible on screen at one time.
User 1 also suggested that alerts could be consolidated into one feed (with duplicates removed), like an RSS feed.
Some further comments came from another test user: a doctoral student at a British university, working in bioengineering and based in the computer laboratory.
This user thought the idea behind the portlet was very good and liked the interface, saying that it ‘had a nice format and easy window controls’.
This user raised one important issue, which was that it should be possible to check and/or amend one’s user details.
Online help on creating a subscription would also be useful.
Another suggestion was to be able ‘[to run] the filter on previous days to see how many hits I got’.
This would have allowed the user to see how useful different combinations of keywords (for example) would be.
Case Study 2: The Portal Administrator This user works on the portal team in the computing service at a large British university, and has written a number of portlets.
Here the brief was rather different: the user’s evaluation of the portlet also included setting it up on an instance of uPortal which mimicked the university portal in other respects and commenting on any technical issues raised by this.
The user found that the portlet installed easily, but would have welcomed more transparency about some of the configuration options, and information on how to alter them.
For example, the harvester is set to start at 35 minutes past the hour; it would be desirable to be able to change this, so that harvesting could be tested quickly during the installation, and so that if different installations of the harvester used the same resource, that resource need not come under excessive strain once an hour.
Other needs included information on how to port to other databases such as Oracle.
The installation bundle was felt to be large at 118 Mb and Maven 2 was suggested as a way of reducing this [10].
A more serious concern was that when the portlet was running, it could be heavy on CPU and bandwidth under certain circumstances, an issue currently being investigated by the development team.
This user too requested more documentation, particularly in the areas of how to configure the portlet when it is initially installed, interpretation of the log files and a general introduction to the architecture of the portlet.
It was thought highly desirable to have an alternative way of delivering alerts other than via email, where the interface to SMTP servers can cause problems.
This user also had some observations to make about the user interface.
Like the user in Case 1, it was felt that the long list of journals should be made more navigable, perhaps by including a clickable A-Z, a search box or an option to jump to a given page.
A navigation toolbar should also be included to enable the user to move between different functions such as editing contact details and editing subscription details.
From a local point of view, this would also make the portlet resemble others in use on the user’s university portal.
Some of the terminology was also thought to be potentially confusing, particularly ‘data source’ and ‘subscription’.
Development Possibilities The user testing exercise confirmed a demand for several changes which could be incorporated into the portlet if further work is done on it: for example, the option of seeing alerts on logging into the portal.
Users should to be able to access and edit their own details.
Online help, particularly in the area of managing subscriptions, would make the portlet easier to use.
The testers made further suggestions for improvement; their suggestions included making the available options more visible to the user, allowing users to test their subscriptions and providing a better way of navigating multiple data sources.
The software is being placed in open-source repositories.
It will be in the public domain and so open to further contributions of code and documentation.
Hosting the Portlet A beta version of the portlet has been placed on Sourceforge site for open-source software [11] and will be made available for download in appropriate repositories (POST has been suggested) 12] and will be promoted via email lists and publicity at relevant conferences.
Its target audience in the first instance is portal managers, developers and administrators.
Conclusion Consultation with potential users has been important in the development of the alerting portlet, from the initial decision to develop it to determining details of its final interface and functionality.
It has the potential to be a useful addition to the growing number of open-source portlets.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jasper Tredgold of ILRT for comments on an earlier draft of this article.
References SPP phase II http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/ User Testing Report http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/documents/testing/phase1/usertestingreportv3.doc More detail in de la Flor, G, Summary and Analysis of User Testing and Focus Group Sessions http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/documents/testing/phase1/user/BIOME-report-03/Summary-AnalysisV3.1.doc These correspond to 2.3.2.4 and 2.3.2.2 in the Subject Portals Project final report (phase 1) http://www.portal.ac.uk/documents/phase1/finalreport/finalreport.doc Integrative Biology Virtual Research Environment (IBVRE) http://www.vre.ox.ac.uk/ibvre/ IBVRE Third Party Tool Evaluation 7.3: Literature Alerting http://www.vre.ox.ac.uk/ibvre/index.xml.ID=literaturealerting Spring Framework http://www.springframework.org Hibernate http://www.hibernate.org Jena http://jena.sourceforge.net HSQLDB http://www.hsqldb.org/ ActiveMQ http://activemq.apache.org/ JDK http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp Tomcat http://tomcat.apache.org/ PubMed Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ Maven http://maven.apache.org/ SPP Portlets http://www.spp.opensource.ac.uk/ Portlet Open Source Trading http://portlet-opensrc.sourceforge.net/ Author Details Virginia Knight Senior Technical Researcher ILRT University of Bristol Email: virginia.knight@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/aboutus/staff/staffprofile/?search=cmvhk Return to top Article Title: “The Subject Portals Project Alerting Portlet” Author: Virginia Knight Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/knight/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Academic Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Academic Library Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Ruth Jenkins wishes this textbook had been available when she was a library school student.
This is a terrific book which does exactly what it says on the cover: 'This authoritative and wide-ranging textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the changing functions of academic libraries and the organizational cultures in which they operate.'
I would have really appreciated this book had it been available to me when I was doing my MA Librarianship course.
It would also have helped when I started my first professional post and was initially puzzled by all the acronyms and repeated references to Ranganathan.
Of course we didn't have Google back then, so I couldn't just look things up in seconds.
But even with Google, I would still have found this book useful because it picks out and summarises the key points, providing a starting point for further exploration.
I think it could also be informative for pre-job interview reading and I would strongly recommend that anyone coming to a job interview where I am going to be on the panel reads this book first!
That way, you will be able to answer my questions about the wider context.
But this is not just a book for those at the start of their careers.
Those from an administrative, IT or special collections background who are moving into a broader management role which includes responsibility for the library would also find it a succinct primer.
And I have already concluded that the book is a worthy addition to my bookshelf which gets pulled off the bookshelf and dipped into fairly frequently.
For example, I was recently invited to give a presentation about staffing structures and the summary of general trends in how staffing structures have changed (pp100-101) formed the basis for two of my slides.
So if you need a starting point before writing a policy document or presentation, this book may be able to help.
Each chapter provides an excellent summary of a particular aspect of academic libraries, with the strands of each chapter being pulled together in a 'conclusion' section.
If you want more than just a summary there is a short list of relevant 'further reading' at the end of each chapter.
I think that the book benefits from having a single author who has applied a logical structure using cross references between related material in different chapters.
Some books which have different chapters by different authors are not as coherent.
The tone here is neutral but lively and the language is accessible, with any technical terms being translated into plain English.
The acronym list at the back of the book hasn't got every single acronym we use in this profession (that would take an entire book in itself) but it contains most of the useful and heavily-used acronyms.
The first three chapters which provide a contextual overview, covering the Higher Education context, the history of HE libraries and the role of the library within the institution.
These chapters cover an amazing amount of background information in a concise way.
The impact on the sector of Dearing and Follett and other major developments are clearly explained, saving the reader from having to wade through lots of weighty reports in order to pick out the main points.
Then there are chapters on users, the impact of IT, staffing, budgetary management, collection management, buildings, systems, services, management, performance measurement, and professional issues before a final chapter on the academic library of the future.
The book has been substantially updated since the first edition, which was published four years ago.
The new chapter on performance measurement reflects the increasing importance of demonstrating the value of the library.
Given that things are changing fast it might be worth Facet Publishing creating a companion Web site for the book.
This could include links to the 'further reading' material which is available online, together with a brief 'update' page for each of the chapters.
I know that this would take some time and effort to maintain but it would help tide readers over for the next four years, or however long it is until the next edition.
Author Details Ruth Jenkins Assistant Director, Information Services University of Birmingham Email: r.jenkins@bham.ac.uk Web site: http://www.is.bham.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The Academic Library" Author: Ruth Jenkins Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/jenkins-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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dev8D: JISC Developer Happiness Days Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines dev8D: JISC Developer Happiness Days Buzz data software rss firefox blog repositories eprints video python dspace json youtube twitter screencast interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Julian Cheal reports on the 5-day JISC's Developer Happiness Days event held at Birckbeck College, London over 16 21 February 2009.
Firstly some background as to why dev8D came about.
David Flanders (JISC) and Ben O'Steen (Oxford University Library Services) over the years have attended many conferences: what they found were that the places and talks from which they benefited most were outside the programmed seminars and presentations.
It was during conversations between sessions at these events with other developers, managers, delegates that they felt learned most.
For David and Ben the real benefit of these events were derived from the backchannel, the fringe events and random conversations.
So they thought, why not set up an event for the developers like themselves in Higher Education (HE)?
However, it would be an event that resembled the collaborative effort and the coming together of ideas that they felt was often missing from a lot of other events.
Their aim was to devise an event that both addressed, and was driven by, the needs of developers like themselves.
Hence Developer Happiness Days, or dev8D for short, was born.
If you are wondering where the name dev8D comes from, the '8D' represents a smiley face.
A Free-flowing Event Considering the background of ideas that lead to dev8D it was quite a structured and yet nonetheless a free-flowing event.
The first day was for 'n00bs' ('newbies') or beginners in English.
It was designed for them to get to grips with some of the programming languages and techniques that HE developers, many would argue, should have in their armoury.
This day-long session was lead by an international panel of speakers consisting of Brian Jinwright (Wofford College), Ben O'Steen (Oxford University Library Services), Dr Peter Sefton (Information Services, University of Southern Queensland) and Dr Robert Sanderson (Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool).
The main topic covered during the day was the Python programming language.
Each speaker had his own message to convey though the session was structured such that the audience being able to interrupt to ask questions.
This was a great day which really helped everyone to see the uses and benefits of Python plus other rapid application development languages.
For anyone who missed the day the whole thing was being screen-cast live thanks to Ian Ibbotson.
There was a parallel session running on the first day lead by Tony Hirst of the Open University which was about RSS and mash-ups.
Within These Walls At the end of Day One, after checking in to the hotel and my home for the week, it was back out to the Hulu student union bar, where we had a room booked, nibbles on the tables and our own bar.
The night-time meeting began with a Jerry Springer-style Question & Answer session with an esteemed panel of experts debating various points.
Once again the audience was able to interject at any point to back up or rebuff any of the points made.
Unfortunately I cannot report what was said at this Q&A as in order to liberate people's expression of their own opinions, an embargo was universally agreed that determined that what was said in the room stayed in the room.
It is difficult to say with any certainty to what degree that régime liberated the group's candour, but there were several useful discussions and some interesting points raised.
The evening's entertainment was rounded off by the use of a big screen projector, large speakers and an Xbox 360 complete with Guitar Hero.
I was lucky enough to be in possession of a Flip Cam curtesy of David Flanders and as something of a trial run and the opportunity to capture proceedings at the epicentre of the evening's entertainment made a video [1].
Base Camp and Lightning Talks Tuesday, the second day of the event differed considerably from the previous day.
The day's activities centred on the idea of having a base camp; where people could come back to, either to relax and reflect, or to discuss and/or code up ideas with other developers and take advantage of the on-tap refreshments.
This is where everyone would meet in the morning for communal breakfast and to exchange stories of, and reactions to, the activities of the night before.
In fact Tuesday not only differed in its organisation from the first day's run of coding labs, it set the template for the rest of the week.
Delegates were offered a schedule comprising a series of lighting talks from which people could pick and choose the sessions they felt would be most relevant to them as a developer.
I started the day well by attending a talk by Mark van Harmelen.
This was a really useful talk on how to create quick and useful prototypes simply using paper, rather than cumbersome tools on the computer, which can sometimes hinder the design process.
The other lighting talks I attended were run by what the event called 'Über users'.
These users were slightly 'tech-savvy', but only to the extent that they were able to explain to us how we as developers could help them in their day-to-day lives in academia.
There was a mix of students, teachers and researchers.
It was a really useful opportunity for developers and users to meet and discuss each other's needs and requirements.
Individual Medley Wednesday was the last day of what was called the 'individual medley'.
At the beginning of the week each delegate was given five numbered poker chips.
The idea of the game was to collect as many poker chips by 10pm Wednesday night.
These could be gained in a variety of ways, from helping people get on to the event WIFI (a harder task than it sounded due to some of the limitations of the host venue's WIFI facilities), to writing some code for someone else, to a whole host of useful things that could be done for each other.
VIP King Pin Bowling Party (picture courtesy of dev8D).
Bowl Camp Wednesday night was Bowl Camp.
We were very lucky to have our own private bowling lanes complete with arcade machines, Nintendo Wii and platters of Pizza and other finger foods.
It was at this bowl camp that the collected poker chips, could either be exchanged for drinks at the bar, or entered into the individual medley, but not both.
There was chance for four people to each win a prize a Dell Mini 9.
The first person Simin Kamali had a grand total of 38; second was Matt Zumwalt with 34; Mark Van Harmelen (and team) with 33; and fourth Julian Cheal with 25 chips.
You may wonder why give out such expensive prizes at a conference?
The simple answer is the organisers knew that, being developers, the award winners were sure to use those Netbooks, as they are generally known, for work purposes.
And it would appear they were probably right, since in fact this article is being written on one of those prizes now, while the author is on a train.
code!
(picture courtesy of dev8D) Developer Decathalon Thursday was more of a day to concentrate on the Developer Decathlon.
This was a competition that enabled developers to come together face-to-face to do rapid prototyping of software ideas.
This then went towards a screencast of their group's idea which was uploaded to the Web.
Each group had a week from the Thursday to create a prototype and make a screencast.
One of these ideas is Splash URL [2] which is a service that allows a presenter in a lecture to pass in a long URL which will then be shortened using a URL shortening service and which is then displayed in large text on the screen for the delegates to copy down with ease.
In setting up the competition, the organisers of dev8D created their very own Dragon's Den [3] consisting of Rachael Bruce, Jim Downing and Mark van Harmelen.
Participating in the Dragons' Den myself, I felt they were much nicer than their television counterparts, and also much more helpful.
Everyone taking part in the decathlon to whom I spoke, including myself, found that their critiques and comments were really helpful in refining the ideas submitted.
Thursday night was the occasion JISC chose to mark its recognition of the work of developers with the dinner at the British Museum.
Having never been to the BM I must say I was impressed.
We had a wonderful three-course meal accompanied by a delightful string quartet [4].
Planning the seating for this event must have been comparable to the BAFTAs.
There were nine tables and nine people nominated for a developer award, so one could deduce that one nominee was seated at each table.
There was then a good mix of people on each table, from HE developers to commercial developers with a mingling of managers as well.
Dinner at the British Museum (picture courtesy of dev8D) Roll Your Own Friday was a 'roll-your-own' event, i.e.
you could choose what you wanted it to comprise.
I attended the repository summit event, with talks from Fedora, DSpace, EPrints and also Microsoft, who are new to the repository world, but who gave a good insight in to where they feel they fitted into the market of the open source not-for-profit landscape that covers most of the UK's repositories.
The mix of people at this day lead to some engaging discussions of what people thought institutional repositories were and what they thought they should be.
Having the main three UK repository platforms plus Microsoft in one room, lead to in-depth conversations on how they all can build in solutions into their software in order to facilitate interoperability.
Another outcome of attending the Developer Happiness days was that Chris Gutteridge of EPrints created a JSON exporter for the EPrints software.
Using JSON will make it much easier for developers to use repository data in mash-ups on third-party sites or applications.
Soon after this had been created, Marcus Ramsden started writing a plug-in for Firefox that will display information about an e-print before a user clicks on it in the repository.
Conclusion What a busy week, with some great treats, but what was it all for?
If you can attract 100+ talented people into a room and feed and water them, the ideas you may obtain in the process are much more valuable and more rapidly obtained than in reading project proposals and holding formal meetings.
One telling example of this was the Happier Pipe by Sam Easterby-Smith [5] which plots how happy the delegates were during the week.
The feedback from that alone was much more informative than an questionnaire after the event that is not always completed, let alone returned.
The happiness pipe data were used by Ben O'Steen in his blog post [6] to create graphs to show over time the overall happiness of the dev8D delegates based on Sam's application.
Some other interesting statistics that come out of the week led to a twitter account called randomdev8D which created surveys to which delegates could respond via twitter.
I hope this article will serve to bring together some of the considerable and varied content gathered by and at this event [7][8][9][10][11].
References YouTube Rocking out at dev8D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqqaEIY3l3A&feature=channel_page Splash URL.
http://splashurl.net/ BBC TV: Dragon's Den in which entrepreneurs seek investment in the Den from the Dragons, five venture capitalists willing to invest their own money in exchange for equity http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/ Electric Violinist Sarah Tuke http://www.sarahtuke.com/ Samscam Happier Pipe: A tool to measure developer-happiness http://samscam.co.uk/happier/ Ben O'Steen's Web Blog http://oxfordrepo.blogspot.com/2009/02/tracking-conferences-at-dev8d-with.html Twitter search results for dev8D http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dev8D Flicker search results for dev8D http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=dev8D&w=all dev8D video interviews http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=dev8D+interviews&aq=f dev8D | Developer Happiness Days http://dev8D.jiscinvolve.org/ JISC Developer Happiness Days, 9-13 February 2009, London http://www.dev8D.org/ Author Details Julian Cheal SUE/SIS Systems Developer UKOLN University of Bath Email: j.cheal@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "dev8D: JISC Developer Happiness Days" Author: Julian Cheal Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/jisc-dev8d-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Library Catalogue in the New Discovery Environment: Some Thoughts Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Library Catalogue in the New Discovery Environment: Some Thoughts Buzz data software database rss metadata digitisation tagging browser blog repositories cataloguing opac z39.50 marc aggregation syndication ebook frbr srw itunes librarything authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Lorcan Dempsey explores how the library catalogue will develop alongside evolving network discovery systems.
The catalogue [Note 1] has always been an important focus of library discussion; its construction and production are a central part of historical library practice and identity.
In recent months, the future of the catalogue has become a major topic of debate, prompted by several new initiatives and by a growing sense that it has to evolve to meet user needs [1][2].
Much of the discussion is about improving the catalogue user’s experience, not an unreasonable aspiration.
However, we really need to put this in the context of a more far-reaching set of issues about discovery and about the continued evolution of library systems, including the catalogue, in a changing network environment.
In this environment, users increasingly discover resources in places other than the catalogue.
This article takes a medium-term perspective and covers some issues that the further development of the catalogue, or the library discovery experience, poses.
In the longer term, I think, we will see major changes in how libraries organise themselves to provide services, but coverage of that is outside my scope, and probably my competence, here.
My purpose is to touch on some questions, not to provide any answers, as libraries continue to co-evolve with network behaviours and expectations.
It might be useful to begin with a somewhat schematic account of this change.
The main outlines of the catalogue were formed in the pre-network world.
In that world, materials were distributed to many physical locations.
The closer to a user a resource was, the more likely it was to be accessed.
Each of those locations developed a catalogue, which described parts of its collection.
In this way, the catalogued collection (what was described in the collection, acknowledging that not everything was described) broadly corresponded to the available collection (where availability was determined by being local).
In that world, information resources were relatively scarce, and consumed a considerable amount of attention: people would spend time looking in libraries, or in library catalogues, or in moving from bibliographies, abstracting and indexing services, and other finding tools back to library catalogues.
This was a necessary behaviour if you were to find things.
Today, we live in a different world.
Now, information resources are relatively abundant, and user attention is relatively scarce [3].
Users have many resources available to them, and may not spend a very long time on any one.
Many finding tools are available side by side on the network, and large consolidated resources have appeared in the form of search engines.
Even within the library, there are now several finding tools available on the network (for local repositories, A&I databases, ..).
The user is crowded with opportunity.
No single resource is the sole focus of a user’s attention.
In fact, the network is now the focus of a user’s attention, and the available ‘collection’ is a very much larger resource than the local catalogued collection.
The user wishes to ‘discover’ and use much more than is in the local catalogued collection.
Of course, this was always the case.
However, the user may be less willing to work hard to make links and connections between resources when they are on the network, and there is more incentive for the library to make the necessary linkages (to resource-sharing systems, or to search engines, for example)..
I think that this shift poses major questions for the future of the catalogue, and this shift is bound up with the difference between discovery (identifying resources of interest) and location (identifying where those resources of interest are actually available).
There may be many discovery environments, which then need to locate resources in particular collections.
While the catalogue may be a part of the latter process, its role in the former needs to be worked through.
The Catalogue, Discovery and the Network Environment In this section, I will consider several general issues arising from being in a network environment, before turning in the next section to some more specific ways in which things might change.
Matching Supply and Demand: The Long Tail One of the interesting aspects of the last couple of years is the emergence of several large consolidated information resources Amazon, iTunes, Google, etc which have strongly influenced behaviour and expectation.
Unlike these resources, the library resource is very fragmented: it is presented as a range of databases, places, and services.
In other words, libraries do not aggregate supply very well.
There are at least two factors here.
Firstly, there is no unified discovery experience, and, secondly, the transaction costs of using the system are often high (transaction costs refer to the cost in time or effort to perform the steps required to meet a goal).
There are a range of potential transaction costs, where you have to move between systems, re-key data, or pass authentication challenges: you may have to search several resources, check for locations, make ILL requests, and so on.
Compare this to popular Web resources like those mentioned a moment ago.
These provide a unified discovery experience and work hard to reduce transaction costs: they aggregate supply.
Think of demand.
And, again, think of the large Web presences: they aggregate demand by mobilising large network audiences for resources.
The fragmentation of library resources reduces the gravitational pull of any one resource on the network.
Nor do these resources tend to be projected into user environments such as the course management system or RSS aggregator.
There is limited aggregation of demand.
Better matching supply and demand closely relates to what has become known, following Chris Anderson, as the long tail argument.
(I explore this in more detail elsewhere [4]).
The long tail argument is about how a wider range of resources may be found, used or bought in network environments which better match supply and demand through aggregation at the network level.
Libraries face many interesting questions as they think about how to provide services across multiple physical service points and shared network spaces.
Think about some issues which arise from this discussion: I talked about unified discovery and low transaction costs as part of the aggregation of supply.
So, it is likely we will see the catalogue integrated with other resources in consolidated discovery environments at various levels (metasearch, regional systems, Google, etc).
It is also likely that we will see more streamlined integration of the catalogue as part of supply chains so as to reduce the transaction costs involved in discovery, location, request and delivery of materials (resolution or resource sharing, for example).
On the demand side, I talked about gravitational pull and projection into user environments.
We will see a variety of ways of connecting the catalogue to large-scale discovery environments.
And we will see greater use of Web services, RSS and other approaches to reach out into user environments.
All of these approaches are discussed in more detail below.
Discovery and Location Are Different Functions Elsewhere, I have suggested [5] that we can think about some distinct processes discover, locate, request, deliver in the chain of use of library materials.
(This chain does not include the various ways in which resources might be used.)
Increasingly we will see these sourced as part of separate systems which may be articulated in various combinations, and across material types.
A major part of the library challenge is to integrate these processes across different environments (resource sharing, metasearch, resolution, purchase options, …), or, in the terms established above, to aggregate supply.
Now, historically the discovery and location processes were tied to each other in the catalogue.
And each location required a separate inspection.
Where somebody discovered something elsewhere (a citation or in a bibliography, for example) they would then inspect the catalogue.
In this way the discovery process was tied to the location process, and indeed the catalogue is still closely tied to local inventory management.
It is typically a part of the system which manages a part of that collection.
This makes less and less sense from a ‘discovery’ point of view.
Of course, we want to be able to find out what is in the local catalogued collection, but to what extent should that be the front door to what the library makes available?
Does this give us the best available exposure for library collections?
Is it tying the discovery process to a location engine?
In some ways we have end-to-end integrated library systems where the ends are in the wrong places.
At one end, we have a catalogue interface which is unconnected to popular user discovery environments or workflows.
It is often a somewhat flat experience with low gravitational pull in the crowded network information space.
We expect people to discover the catalogue before they can discover what is in (part of) the collection.
And this points to the issue at the other end: the ‘fulfilment’ options open out onto only a part of the universe of materials which is available to the user: that local catalogued collection.
These factors mean that the catalogue currently sits awkwardly in the array of available resources.
And in fact, this appears to be realised within library vendor offerings.
A couple of things are indicative here.
First we see the emergence of new products, like Primo from Ex-Libris, which provide a discovery experience across a broader part of the library collection.
In effect they appear to be trying to make discovery of the catalogued collection a part of a broader discovery experience encompassing those parts of the collection which are in library control: local digital collections, institutional repository, catalogue.
Of course, this then needs to be articulated with the journal literature, or other resources, probably through metasearch.
And, second, in coming years we will see a new accommodation between the ILS, metasearch, resolution, electronic resource management, repositories, and other components from the ILS vendors as they try to map better this array of systems onto library requirements and user behaviours.
Resolution, for example, is now used to locate instances of discovered items, usually articles.
In the future, resolution seems likely to develop into more of a service router: given some metadata, what services are available to me on the resource referred to by the metadata (borrow it, buy it, send it to a colleague, ..), or which relate to the metadata itself (export in a particular citation format, for example).
It is a way of connecting potentially multiple discovery experiences to multiple fulfilment (request/deliver) services, or a multiplicity of other services.
So, one scenario might see the catalogued collection act as a target to a resolver, which in turn would be a resource used by various discovery services.
Of course, some of these discovery environments may be outside the library altogether.
So, what we will see is multiple discovery environments.
At the institutional level, we are seeing attempts to unify discovery in front of catalogue, resolver and other services, although this is not straightforward.
At the same time, given the pressures discussed in the last section, there is a trend to raise catalogue discovery to the network level (regional, national, ..).
Libraries Australia, Ohiolink.
Worldcat.org, and Deff provide examples here.
And for similar reasons, we are seeing growing consideration of exporting discovery to other environments, search engines included.
In one scenario, which may become more common, discovery options may connect to materials available for purchase (either by the user, or by the library on an on-demand basis).
It is interesting to compare access to the catalogue with access to the journal literature at this stage.
Historically, access to the journal literature was a two-stage process.
A user looked in one set of tools abstracting and indexing services to discover what was potentially of interest at the article level.
Then they would have journal level access to the catalogue to check whether the library held the relevant issue.
To caricature Adorno, these two steps represented the torn halves of an integral whole to which they did not add up.
Resolution services aim to make that integral whole, to connect the discovery and location experiences seamlessly.
Of course, this is done with some expense as we construct knowledge bases to support it.
The catalogue, as discussed above, allows you to locate materials in the local collection.
We are now seeing scenarios emerge which make the catalogue experience similar to the historical situation with journals where we need to connect a discovery layer (which may represent much more than is in the local collection) with the ILS to locate instances of discovered items in the local collection.
This again points to the likely realignment of services within the library systems environment.
The current catalogue will need to be blended in some way with the discovery apparatus for local digital collections, for materials available through resource-sharing systems, for materials available for purchase (either by the user, or by the library on an on-demand basis), for the journal literature, and so on.
The Network Is the Focus of Attention In a pre-network world, where information resources were relatively scarce and attention relatively abundant, users built their workflow around the library.
In a networked world, where information resources are relatively abundant, and attention is relatively scarce, we cannot expect this to happen.
Indeed, the library needs to think about ways of building its resources around the user workflow.
We cannot expect the user to come to the library any more; in fact, we cannot expect the user even to come to the library Web site any more.
A corollary of this is that there is no single destination, the world has become ‘incorrigibly plural’.
Search engines, RSS feeds, metasearch engines: these are all places where one might discover library materials.
I have described how one might experience a catalogue at institutional, regional or international levels and be guided back to an appropriate collection.
Increasingly, we need to think of the catalogue, or catalogue services and data, making connections between users and relevant resources, and think of all the places where those connections should happen.
Finally, we know that today’s network users may have different expectations of such services.
As well as expecting prompt delivery, they may expect to be able to rate and review, to persistently link, to receive feeds of new materials, and so on.
Services need to enter the fabric of their working and learning lives through those tools they use to construct their digital workflows and identities.
The emergence of social networking has also caused us to think a little differently about ‘discovery’.
The network conversations that are facilitated by these services, either directly where folks talk about things, or indirectly where one can trace affiliations through tagging, social bookmarking, and other approaches, have become important orientations for many people.
So, the catalogue emerged when patterns of distribution and use of resources, and corresponding behaviours, were very different than they are now.
The catalogue was a response to a particular configuration of resources and circumstances.
The question now is not how we improve the catalogue as such; it is how we provide effective discovery and delivery of library materials in a network environment where attention is scarce and information resources are abundant, and where discovery opportunities are being centralised into major search engines and distributed to other environments.
Multiple Discovery Experiences As we work to aggregate supply (either through consolidation of data or of services) so we must work to place these resources where they will best meet user needs.
In this process, discovery of the catalogued collection will be increasingly disembedded, or lifted out, from the ILS system, and re-embedded in a variety of other contexts – and potentially changed in the process.
And, of course, those contexts themselves are evolving in a network environment.
What are some of those other discovery contexts?
I have referred to some throughout; here is a non-exhaustive list of current examples: Local Catalogue Discovery Environments There has been a recent emphasis on the creation of an external catalogue discovery system, which takes ILS data and makes it work harder in a richer user interface.
The NCSU catalogue [6] has been much discussed and admired in this context.
Ex-Libris has announced its Primo product [7] which will import data from locally managed collections and re-present it.
Furthermore, we have just seen announcements about the eXtensible Catalog project [8] at the University of Rochester.
One of the ironies of the current situation is that just at the moment when we begin to extract more value from the historic investment in structured data in our catalogues, and these initiatives are examples of this trend, we are also looking at blending the catalogue more with other data and environments where it may be difficult to build services on top of that structured data.
Think of what happens, for example, if you combine article level data and catalogue data.
Shared Catalogue Discovery Environments We also observe a greater trend to shared catalogues, often associated with resource-sharing arrangements.
It has not been unusual to see a tiered offering, with resources at progressively broader levels (for example: local catalogue, regional/consortial, Worldcat).
The level of integration between these has been small.
However, in recent times we have seen growing interest in moving more strongly to the shared level.
This may be to strengthen resource-sharing arrangements, the better to match supply and demand of materials (the ‘long tail’ discussion [4]), and to reduce costs.
And once one moves in this direction, the question of scoping the collective resource in different ways emerges: moving from local to some larger grouping or back.
The value of OhioLink as a state-wide catalogue is an example here.
OCLC has just made Worldcat.org available, which aims to connect users to library services, brokering the many to many relations involved.
A critical driver here is the benefit of consolidation, and discussion of what level of consolidation is useful.
Increasingly, a library will have to consider where and how to disclose its resources.
Syndicated Catalogue Discovery Environments Increasingly, the library wants to project a discovery experience into other contexts.
I use ‘syndication’ to cover several ways of doing this.
Typically, one might syndicate services or data.
In the former case a machine interface is made available which can be consumed by other applications.
We are used to this model in the context of Z39.50, but additional approaches may become more common (OpenSearch, RSS feeds, ..).
How to project library resources into campus portals, or course management systems, has heightened interest here.
A service might provide a search of the collection, but other services may also be interesting, providing a list of new items for example.
The syndication of data is of growing interest also, as libraries discuss making catalogue data available to search engines and others, with links back to the library environment.
Several libraries and library organisations are exposing data in this way.
And OCLC has been very active in this area with Open WorldCat, where member data is exposed to several search engines.
The Leveraged Discovery Environment This is a clumsy expression for a phenomenon that is increasingly important, where one leverages a discovery environment which is outside your control to bring people back into your catalogue environment.
Think of Amazon or Google Scholar.
Now this may be done using fragile scraping or scripting environments, as for example with library lookup or our FRBR (Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records) bookmarklets.
Here, a browser tool may, for example, recognise an ISBN in a Web page and use that to search a library resource.
The work that Dave Pattern has done with the University of Huddersfield catalogue is an example here.
The broader ability to deploy, capture and act on structured data may make this approach more common: the potential use of CoINS (ContextObject in Span) is a specific example here.
There Are a Lot of Questions!
We are, then, looking at complex shifts in behaviour and network systems.
Many issues need to be worked through; here are some examples: Scale, Niches and Value Much of what I have said supports consolidation into general network level services.
The unified discovery experience of the search engines, Amazon, iTunes, and so on, has been a very powerful example.
And we will certainly see greater consolidation of discovery opportunities in the library space.
This will be in institutional, regional/national, and vendor contexts.
At the same time, we are seeing growing interest in specialisation for niche requirements.
How do you scoop out the resources which are of particular relevance to a specific course, for example, or do we want to build services specialised towards those working in archaeology, biodiversity, or other disciplines?
And the library will want to add more value in terms of higher-level services: what are the ‘best’ resources in a particular area, feeds for new materials, interaction with the developing apparatus for reading list and citation management, and so on.
Being able to do some of these things effectively will require further architectural, service and organisational development.
From an architectural point of view, for example, it means being much more readily able to filter, recombine and manipulate data and Web services.
From an organisational point of view it means finding ways to share or outsource routine work, and focus on where the library can make a distinctive impact.
The User Experience: Ranking, Relating and Recommending There is a general recognition that discovery environments need to do more to help the user.
Developers are looking at ranking (using well-known retrieval techniques with the bibliographic data, or probably more importantly, using holdings, usage or other data which gives an indication of popularity), relating (bringing together materials which are in the same work, about the same thing, or related in other ways), and recommending (making suggestions based on various inputs reviews or circulation data for example).
Users of Amazon and other consumer sites are becoming used to a ‘rich texture of suggestion’, and we have data to do a better job here than we have had hitherto.
This leads naturally into the mobilisation of user participation tagging, reviews to enhance the discovery experience.
PennTags is a widely noted institutional experiment in this area.
This raises interesting questions.
One is the issue of critical mass, and it may be that mechanisms emerge to share this data, or to invite it at some shared level.
It is appropriate to think here about the success of social networking sites, and about the attraction there is to converse and connect around shared interests: these are becoming important ‘discovery’ venues.
LibraryThing is an intriguing example of how such interest can be mobilised to create an increasingly rich resource.
This raises a second issue, about levels: are there particular local interests and contexts which would benefit being captured and how does that play with stuff on a more general level.
And, third, there are architectural issues around identity and citation.
Talking to the Backend Library System In the context of an ILS service layer [9], if the discovery environment is separated from the ILS, there needs to be a way for the two to communicate.
Again, this is currently done through a variety of proprietary scripting and linking approaches.
It would be useful to agree a set of appropriate functionality and some agreed ways of implementing it.
The Discovery Deficit: The Catalogued Collection Is Only a Part of the Available Collection I am thinking of two related things here.
The first which has been discussed throughout this article is that there will be a growing desire to hide boundaries between databases (A&I, catalogue, repositories, etc) especially where those boundaries are seen more to reflect the historical contingencies of library organisation or the business decisions of suppliers than the actual discovery needs of users.
We will see greater integration of the catalogue with these other resources, whether this happens at the applications level (where the catalogue sits behind the resolver, or is a metasearch target), or at the data level (where catalogue data, article level data, repository data, and so on, are consolidated in merged resources).
We will also see greater articulation of the catalogue with external resources.
This then poses a second issue, about the data itself.
Our catalogues are created in a MARC/AACR world, with established practices for controlling names, subjects and so on.
However, as the catalogue plays in a wider resource space, issues arise in meshing this data with data created in different regimes, and accordingly in leveraging the investment in controlled data.
Think about personal names for example, where authority control practices apply only to the ‘catalogued collection’.
What does it mean when that data is mixed with other data?
Does it become more difficult to build higher-level services which exploit the consistency of the data faceted browse for example?
Libraries have made a major historical investment in structured data.
We need to find good ways of releasing the value of that investment in productive use in these new services.
Routing As we separate functions discovery from location and fulfilment we need effective ways of tying them back together.
Resolution was discussed as important in this context above.
In the longer term, it also is an example of the broad interest converging on directories and registries.
In the type of environment I have sketched here, we need registries which manage the ‘intelligence’ that applications need in order to tie things together.
Registries of services (resolvers, deep opac links, Z39.50/SRW/U targets, ..), institutions (complex things!
), and so on.
One wants to be able to connect users to services they are authorised to use, or to tie institutional service points to geographic co-ordinates (so as to be able to place locations on a map), or to tie a user application to the appropriate institutional resolver (so as to be able to bring somebody from a discovered item to one that is available to them), and so on.
In each case, system-wide registries will remove local development burdens.
Indexing One of the interesting recent developments in the ‘book’ space has been the emergence of mass digitisation initiatives alongside existing aggregations of e-books.
This opens up the prospect of access to the book literature at the full-text level, and also of building higher-level services on this new corpus of material.
In effect, if they can be used appropriately, we are acquiring indexes to books scattered through many collections.
We need to work through how these index resources can be leveraged to provide deeper access to local collections.
For example, one can imagine a local application leveraging a ‘book search engine’ to find appropriate titles and then trying to locate those titles locally or against other fulfilment options.
Sourcing This is an interesting topic which is not yet widely explored in the ILS area.
The typical current model is a licensed software model where an instance of a vendor application is run locally.
The examples above show some other models: local development, collaborative sourcing, and an on-demand model where the catalogue or other functionality is provided as a network service.
Here, as in other areas of library systems work, we are likely to see a much more plural approach to sourcing system requirements in coming years.
Conclusion The catalogue discussion is often presented as just that, the catalogue discussion.
However, I have argued here that it belongs in a wider context.
We may be lifting out the catalogue discovery experience, but we are then re-embedding it in potentially multiple discovery contexts, and those discovery contexts are being changed as we re-architect systems in the network environment.
These systems include discovery systems for other collection types (the institutional repository, or digital asset repository, etc); the emergence of a general search/resolution layer within the library; external environments as different as Google and Amazon, the RSS aggregator, or the course management system.
The discovery experiences will also increasingly be part of various supply chains: resource sharing or e-commerce, for example, or local resolution services.
In summary, the catalogue question is a part of the complex set of questions we will address as we re-architect the discovery-to-delivery apparatus in ways appropriate to changing network behaviours.
Notes I have used ‘catalogue’ throughout this article with some unease, but alternative approaches were too clumsy.
The problem I faced is that while the word ‘catalogue’ currently evokes a recognisable bundle of functionality, I sometimes use the word with a different bundle of functionality in mind, as I am talking about how functionality may be reconfigured across a variety of systems.
References This short article adapts the following entry in Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog: Lifting out the catalog discovery experience, 14 May 2006, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001021.html Several of these initiatives are also discussed in: Thinking about the catalog, 12 January 2006, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000919.html There is a growing literature on attention.
The Bubble Generation blog is an interesting venue for discussion of production and use of information and other media resources in a network environment: http://www.bubblegeneration.com/ Lorcan Dempsey.
Libraries and the Long Tail: Some Thoughts about Libraries in a Network Age, D-Lib Magazine Vol.
12, No.
4, April 2006. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april06/dempsey/04dempsey.html Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog: Discover, locate, … vertical and horizontal integration, 20 November 2005, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000865.html North Carolina State University Libraries Catalog http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/ Primo: an Exclusive Peek from Ex Libris http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/webinar_1144862525.htm University of Rochester press release, 14 April 2006: Mellon Grant Funds Planning Analysis for Future Online Services http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2518 Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog: A palindromic ILS service layer, 20 January 2006, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000927.html Further Reading Related issues are discussed in these blog entries: Search, share and subscribe, 6 March 2006 http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000964.html Thinking about the catalog, 12 January 2006, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000919.html Discover, locate, … vertical and horizontal integration, 20 November 2005, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000865.html Systemwide activities and the long tail, 25 February 2006, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000955.html Systemwide discovery and delivery, 22 December 2005, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000903.html A palindromic ILS service layer, 20 January 2006, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000927.html Making data work Web 2.0 and catalogs, 4 October 2005, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000815.html Author Details Lorcan Dempsey VP Programs and Research & Chief Strategist OCLC Email: dempseyl@oclc.org Web site: http://orweblog.oclc.org Return to top Article Title: “The Library Catalogue in the New Discovery Environment: Some Thoughts” Author: Lorcan Dempsey Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/dempsey/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Looking for More Than Text?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Looking for More Than Text?
Buzz data software framework portfolio rss portal archives digitisation accessibility copyright video flickr wsrp podcast research Citation BibTex RIS Balviar Notay and Catherine Grout give an overview of developments in digitisation programmes, on-line delivery services and specialised search engines which cater for searching and locating still images and time-based media and consider the issues that surround their use, focusing particularly on JISC developments.
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that people learn better when visual and sound materials are used in a teaching context.
Researchers from a range of disciplines have also suggested that visual materials are of great value either as a core focus or to support the research process.
For example, studies looking at the effect of visual materials in education have explored how both short-term and long-term memory is associated with the different hemispheres of the brain, but also which kind of information is best retained through the use of images.
The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) [1] funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [2] has produced a paper on "The Use of Images to Support Instruction and Presentation" [3] which pulls much of this research together: 'A number of experiments carried out in the 1970s showed that not only does the brain have an extraordinary capacity to imprint and recall, but that it can do so with no loss of memory.
The capacity for recognition memory for pictures is limitless.
Pictures have a direct route to long-term memory, each image storing its own information as a coherent 'chunk' or concept (Paivio et al., 1968; Standing et al., 1970; Paivio, 1971; Standing, 1973; Paivio, 1975; Erdelyi and Stein, 1981 and references therein).
'In general, users prefer material which is illustrated (Levie and Lentz, 1982) and regard it as being of higher quality.
Levin (1989) states "pictures interact with text to produce levels of comprehension and memory that can exceed what is produced by text alone."'
While these studies are not recent, nevertheless they are still relevant to our digital online environment, an environment which is increasingly rich in non-textual materials.
However, finding appropriate visual and sound content that will add real value to our learning, teaching and research in the current landscape still remains a considerable challenge.
There are parallel challenges in introducing new users in education to the opportunities offered by digital images and other related materials, and indeed in incentivising them to begin the process of searching for this media in the first place.
A Brief Survey of Content In the UK the Higher Education digitisation revolution began in earnest in 1995 when a host of digitisation programmes, online delivery services, and specialised search engines began to emerge.
In the area of Images, the eLib [4] and the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [5] Programmes, initiated by JISC, responded to this landscape change by the funding of the Higher Education Library for Images (HELIX) [6] and later the JISC Image Digitisation Initiative (JIDI) [7] which digitised image content from 16 collections selected for their scholarly importance.
The collections were grouped into subject areas and included Art and Design, Geology and Social history and also parts of special collections, notably the Design Council Archives and the Gertrude Bell Archive.
The main aim of JIDI was to create a substantial body of digitised content which, together with other JISC-funded digital image libraries, would form the first step towards building a coherent digital image resource for Higher Education, contributing to JISC's DNER [8].
The JISC 5/99 Learning and Teaching Programme 2000 2003 [9] also digitised a number of image collections held within institutions and contextualised these resources for learning and teaching.
Artworld [10], for example, digitised the collections held at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts within the University of East Anglia [11] and collections held at the Oriental Museum at the University of Durham [12].
The Crafts Study Center Project [13] also digitised the collection of ceramics, textiles, calligraphy, and wood together with reference books, and working notes held at the Crafts Study Centre at the Surrey Institute for Art and Design, University College [14].
Until comparatively recently there were fewer digitisation initiatives in the area of Moving Pictures and Sound, though of note were Click and Go Video [15] and Lifesign projects [16], both funded as part of the JISC 5/99 Learning and Teaching Programme.
In 2003 the JISC Digitisation Programme began, creating the NewsFilm Online Project [17], a partnership between JISC, the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) [18] and the ITN which aims to digitise 3,000 hours of news film, totalling 60,000 items of footage from 1896 to date.
This will enable users to access digital resources of iconic moments from history and 'repurpose' them within their Virtual Learning and Research Environments.
Other projects such as the Spoken Word Project [19], funded through the Digital Libraries in the Classroom Programme [20], are collaborating with the BBC to digitise a large amount of material from its sound archive and make this available to teachers in the humanities and other disciplines.
In other parts of the public sector large scale initiatives like the NOF-digitise Programme [21] have digitised and created collections such as ARCive [22] which gathers together films, photographs and audio recordings of the world's species into one centralised digital library.
JISC has also made considerable investment recently in the creation and licensing of online delivery of moving picture and sound content through Education Media Online (EMOL) [23] a collection of moving image and sound, currently freely available to Higher and Further Education institutions throughout the UK.
JISC also licences two collections of images that are available to Higher and Further Education through subscription.
These are the Education Image Gallery (EIG) [24], a collection of 50,000 photographic images from the Hulton Getty Collection and Scottish Cultural Resource Access Network (SCRAN) [25], a collection over 300,000 high-quality copyright-cleared images and 5,000 video-clips and sound files.
Free image collection initiatives fostered by particular communities of interest outside the public sector, such as Stock.Xchng [26] aimed at designers, have also emerged.
Here users can browse through a gallery containing over 100,000 quality stock photos.
They can also share their photos with fellow designers and add descriptions and comments and build their own collection or portfolio.
For general use there is a site called Flickr [27] which allows users to do all of the above but also allows them to create RSS newsfeeds for their particular collections.
JISC has also fostered community-created images: for example, the Bioscience Image Bank Project [28], part of the 5/99 Learning and Teaching Programme and co-funded by the Centre for Bioscience of the Higher Education Academy [29], serves around 4,000 images, many submitted directly by teachers and researchers.
Within the commercial arena, other services such as BlinkxTV [30] have come to prominence.
Running voice recognition software over content from various broadcasting corporations such as CNN and the BBC, these services can be searched by words or phrases, returning to users video streams or podcasts containing mentions of these words or phrases.
They also offer other "intelligent" services such as Smart Folders which automatically update the files on users' computers with relevant content without users having to search for it.
As this brief content survey suggests, there is a great deal happening, but this represents only the tip of the iceberg of the new and exciting visual materials that are of potential interest to users within education.
Searching for Digital Visual Content So where do users start their search for digital visual material?
Most people's first port of call would be a Google Image search.
However, in October 2004 TASI conducted a review of such image search engines and concluded that "for those used to viewing well-indexed collections of quality images, the results of the large automated image search engines will probably disappoint.
The poor quality of their offerings is not surprising, since they reflect the randomness and unevenness of the Web... Collection-based image search engines include images selected for quality and indexed by hand.
The images they contain are seldom found within the results of general Web search engines.
Collection-based engines, then, will usually offer much better results than their search engine counterparts.
The commercial and copyright issues will also be much clearer..." [31] However, an important caveat is that finding what you are looking for is very much dependent on context and intended use.
For example, if you are teaching microbiology and you are looking for a particular image of a cell showing a radial microtubule, Google would probably be effective as much of this kind of research material is available on the Web.
However, there is of course no guarantee of visual quality.
For example, would it be of high enough resolution to project in a classroom, and moreover is it legal?
Many images returned by Google and other search engines are not necessarily accompanied by clear copyright statements.
AHDS Visual Arts [32] (the visual arts centre for the Arts and Humanities Data Service) recently conducted a survey of arts institutions in the UK entitled The Digital Picture: a future for digital images in UK arts education [33].
One of the survey's findings concluded that "...91% think that finding images should be straightforward (unsurprisingly), and in seminar discussions it was clear that many do not believe this to currently be the case.." JISC Portal Developments for Digital Visual and Sound Material JISC's Information Environment Architecture [34] was developed to help provide a conceptual framework for tackling some of these thorny resource discovery issues.
A range of JISC portal projects have also been funded to explore specific aspects of the resource discovery landscape and to develop some pilot portal services.
Specifically the JISC Portals Programme [35] has funded work to tackle the challenges of locating quality images and moving pictures and sound of educational value.
The PIXUS Image Portal Project [36] based at SCRAN, was the first of these JISC initiatives to explore the cross-searching of quality-assured images for the HE and FE sector.
It enabled users to cross-search some 700,000 images held in seven separate image collections.
The collections that formed part of the image portal demonstrator were from SCRAN, the Arts and Humanities Data Service Visual Arts, the Wellcome Trust [37], Bristol BioMed [38], The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) [39], Resources for Learning in Scotland (RLS) [40] and the British Geological Survey (BGS) [41].
In the area of time-based media, a user requirements study for a moving pictures and sound portal [42] was conducted in November 2003.
This highlighted the fact that users were interested in finding relevant resources across multiple formats and that at the same time there was little awareness of which digital collections were available for use by the FE and HE community.
The survey concluded that a portal in this area offering easier retrieval of relevant material had the potential greatly to increase the use of time-based media within education.
In September 2005 JISC funded the Visual and Sound Material (VSM) [43] Portal Scoping Study and Demonstrator Project based at EDINA [44], initially to conduct a scoping study to explore the functional, software, collection and user needs requirements of a portal to cross-search/harvest still images and time-based media from a single interface.
The project will also look at new technology and trends, for example, new standards to allow the embedding of portal services within a variety of user environments.
Embedding portal functionality could help to deliver a more seamless experience to users and also allow online portal services provided by JISC and others to be tailored to organisational priorities and goals.
For example, tools have been developed to allow standalone portal services to be accessed in an integrated way from within an institutional portal or other Web environment.
Standards to support this process have also emerged such as JSR-168 for local embedding within institutions and Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) for the use of portal services remotely.
Essentially this means that users would not have to go to another website outside their institutional portal, or other preferred environment, to search for appropriate and relevant visual and sound material.
The second phase of the project will be to build the portal demonstrator based on the scoping study requirements.
This project will conclude in February 2007.
Conclusion The primary purpose of this work is to stimulate and advance thinking in this area, to develop a firm understanding of user requirements and to use this as a basis for specifying a range of useful portal functions.
While much of the exciting new image and moving image and sound content that this article has surveyed remains under-used, there is clearly much to be done to increase the accessibility and prominence of this material in education.
Making the hidden more visible is one of the things a portal can certainly do.
A visual and sound materials portal clearly has the potential therefore to help us along the way to a point where this media takes the place it truly deserves in the future of our digital educational environment.
References Technical Advisory Service for Images http://www.tasi.ac.uk/index.html Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ The Use of Images to Support Instruction and Presentation http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/using/use.html eLib http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ DNER http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=dner_description HELIX http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/helix/ JIDIS JISC distributive Image Service http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=dner_distributed_image_service Much of this content is available for access through the Arts and Humanities Data Service AHDS Visual Arts http://vads.ahds.ac.uk 5/99 Learning and Teaching programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_learning_teaching Artworld http://artworld.uea.ac.uk/ Sainsbury Centre for the Visual and Arts http://www.scva.org.uk/ Oriental Museum at the University of Durham http://www.dur.ac.uk/oriental.museum/ Crafts Study Centre Project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_crafts Crafts Study Centre at the Surrey Institute for Art and Design, University College http://www.csc.ucreative.ac.uk/ Click and Go Video http://www.clickandgovideo.ac.uk/ Lifesign http://www.lifesign.ac.uk/ NewsFilm Online Project http://temp5.bufvc.ac.uk/newsfilmonline/public_html/index.php British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/ Spoken Word Project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_spoken_word&src=alpha Digital Libraries in the Classroom http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_dlitc NOF-digitise materials can be found through EnrichUK http://www.enrichuk.net/ ARCive http://www.arkive.org/ Education Media Online (EMOL) http://www.emol.ac.uk Education Image Gallery (EIG) http://edina.ac.uk/eig/ Scottish Cultural Resource Access Network (SCRAN) http://www.scran.ac.uk Stock.Xchng http://www.sxc.hu/ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ Bioscience Image Bank Project http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/imagebank/ Centre for Bioscience, the Higher Education Academy http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ Blinkx TV http://www.blinkx.tv TASI Review of Image Search Engines http://www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/searchengines.html AHDS Visual Arts http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/ AHDS Visual Arts The Digital Picture Survey http://www.thedigitalpicture.ac.uk/ JISC Information Environment Architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ JISC Portals Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_portals PIXUS Image Portal Project http://pixus.scran.ac.uk/ Wellcome Trust http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ Bristol Biomed http://www.brisbio.ac.uk/index.html The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) http://www.amico.org/ Resources for Learning in Scotland http://www.rls.org.uk/ British Geological Survey http://www.bgs.ac.uk/ User requirements study for a moving pictures and sound portal http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_study_picsounds Visual and Sound Material Portal Scoping Study and Demonstrator Project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_vsmportal EDINA http://edina.ac.uk/ Author Details Balviar Notay JISC Programme Manager Resource Discovery, Portals and Presentation Email: b.notay@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Catherine Grout JISC Programme Director Email: catherine.grout@kcl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Looking for More than Text?"
Author: Balviar Notay and Catherine Grout Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/notay/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008 Buzz data rdf framework wiki xml metadata standardisation accessibility tagging identifier vocabularies schema blog repositories preservation cataloguing e-learning uri adl lom dcmi scorm skos interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Currier gives an overview of current initiatives in standards for educational metadata.
In 2002 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard (IEEE LOM) [1], superseding the IMS Learning Resource Meta-data specification [2], which had been developed and used through several versions since the mid-1990s.
Over the same general period, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) had established the Dublin Core (DC) as a standard for describing all kinds of web-based resources [3].
The Dublin Core Education Working Group [4] emerged as one of several special interest groups [5] developing specific metadata elements [6] for the use of their communities.
Both of these standards have seen wide uptake since their establishment, together with a growing body of both practical implementation experience and applied research into their application.
National and international standards bodies involved in educational technology have maintained interest in supporting them, and various communities of interest and organisations have attempted to achieve some measure of interoperability through development of a number of application profiles.
For example, two national profiles of the IEEE LOM, CanCore [7] in Canada and the UK LOM Core [8], alongside the international ADL SCORM profile (Advanced Distributed Learning Sharable Content Object Reference Model)[9], were central to a flurry of activity in the development of learning object repositories and related initiatives for the creation and sharing of metadata and resources within education and training in the first half of this decade.
However, in 2004, CanCore released its most recent version, CanCore 2.0, and the UK LOM Core stalled in its development before reaching a stable version 1.0.
After this, development of the IEEE LOM and its profiles has been somewhat in abeyance, much to the frustration of many implementers, for whom wide use has inevitably revealed certain limitations.
Similarly, within Dublin Core, the acceptance of several new metadata elements relevant to education was followed by a gradual decrease in activity within the DC-Education Working Group.
Its development of a DC application profile for education slowed down as the wider DC community came to grips with the need for: an overarching abstract model; for guidelines on developing application profiles for the new Web 2.0 world; and for some kind of harmonisation between the DC and IEEE LOM models.
However, in the past year or so, perhaps due to interest in educational metadata passing some kind of threshold as the number of implementations requiring it has expanded, there has been a creative outburst of activity in the standards and profiling arena, with a number of initiatives due to bear fruit in 2008⁄9.
This article does not aim to be a critical look at such initiatives; it simply aims to give readers with an interest in educational metadata a snapshot of the current landscape, both for easy reference, and to encourage wider participation in these standards activities.
The major areas of development covered in this article are: LOM Next: plans for the next version of the IEEE LOM [10].
The Joint DCMI/IEEE LTSC (Learning Technology Standards Committee) Taskforce: bringing together the two major metadata standards used for learning resources, and providing an RDF translation for the LOM [11].
DC-Education Application Profile (DC-Ed AP): a modular application profile purely looking at educational aspects of resources, based on community requirements [12].
The United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee Learning Materials Application Profile (JISC LMAP) scoping study [13]: working alongside a number of similar projects looking at application profiles for repositories in other areas, e.g.
images.
International Standards Organisation Metadata for Learning Resources (ISO MLR): based primarily in Canada, this international standards body is devising a new international standard for educational metadata, in response to perceived limitations of the IEEE LOM [14].
The European Commission’s PROLEARN Harmonisation of Metadata project: a study into the issues and challenges of achieving harmonisation in metadata, given the heterogeneous landscape [15].
The IEEE LOM: Recent History and Future The IEEE LOM is a multi-part standard, currently consisting of a data model [16] and an XML schema [17], but with further parts currently under development as noted below.
In addition, the IMS Global Learning Consortium maintains a set of best practice guidelines that accompany the LOM [18].
The LOM’s history is intimately bound up with the history and development of the IMS e-learning interoperability specifications (e.g.
IMS Content Packaging [19]), and with the history of the ADL SCORM reference model, which profiles the LOM alongside other specifications.
It is worth noting, however, that the most recent development in the content interoperability domain within IMS, the IMS Common Cartridge specification [20], profiles Dublin Core metadata within its packages, albeit using a LOM mapping of Simple Dublin Core.
There are four areas of work for the onward development of the LOM: Re-affirmation of the data model part of the LOM standard.
Correction of errors in LOM v1.0.
A standard for expressing the LOM as DC using the Dublin Core Abstract Model.
LOM Next: deciding where to go next with the LOM in a Web 2.0 world.
LOM v1.0: Re-affirmation of the Standard In 2007, the process of re-affirming the IEEE LOM standard was initiated [10].
This five-yearly IEEE administrative process ensures that obsolete standards do not fall off the radar and remain inappropriately in the standards catalogue.
In spite of any limitations to the LOM noted by implementers in recent years, the take-up of this standard is considerable; the re-affirmation ballot was successfully completed in April 2008.
LOM v1.1: Corrigenda The first order of business with improving on the LOM has been some much-needed work on correcting minor errors that slipped through the net when the standard was first published.
An IEEE Project Authorization Request (PAR) for a corrigenda of the data model part of the standard (LOM 1484.12.1) was approved as of 27 March 2008, and will soon be released as v1.1.
An interim list of errors being corrected is available on the public wiki [21].
LOM Next: Where to for a Next-generation IEEE LOM?
In light of not only a fast-evolving Web 2.0 environment within which providers of educational resources now operate, but also the need for harmonised metadata for education, the IEEE LTSC (Learning Technology Standards Committee) is going back to first principles to decide on a way forward for the LOM [22].
Under the leadership of Erik Duval, a number of open Web conferences and email discussions are under way to establish the best approach for a next-generation educational metadata standard.
One key question under discussion is whether the IEEE LTSC should simply improve the existing LOM 1.0 standard, or whether an entirely fresh approach should prevail, perhaps taking into account such issues as attention metadata (e.g.
user reviews and recommendations, usage data) and Web 2.0 functionality such as social tagging [10].
Determining the answer to this question will involve gathering requirements from the international community of LOM implementers and users.
There is a significant cross-over between those involved in this work and those involved in the DC-Education Community working on the DC-Ed AP and the DCMI/IEEE LTSC Taskforce, as both groups strive to prevent any further ‘silo-isation’ of educational metadata, for the sake of future interoperability.
The DCMI / IEEE LTSC Taskforce: LOM, RDF and the Dublin Core Abstract Model Development of a draft RDF binding for the LOM, intended eventually to be part P1484.12.4 of the standard, was completed by Mikael Nilsson in 2002.
However, the work is now halted, although early materials are still available [23].
This RDF representation of the LOM relied heavily on the Dublin Core element set, which already had an early RDF representation available; it was also a first attempt to start thinking about harmonising the LOM and DC.
However, difficulties became apparent with the compatibility of RDF with the LOM, and work began on developing a formal DC Abstract Model (DCAM) based on the principles of RDF [24].
This led to the current DCMI/IEEE LTSC Taskforce initiative to explore harmonisation between DC and the LOM, which is proposing recommendations for expressing the LOM using the DCAM.
The resulting document is intended to be ratified by both the IEEE LTSC as a recommended practice and by the DCMI as a recommendation.
The work is nearing completion, and brings with it a de facto RDF binding for the LOM, which is technically more a translation than a binding, being somewhat lossy due to the inherent incompatibility of the models involved [25].
On 27 March 2008 the IEEE approved two Project Authorization Requests (PARs), one for the recommended practice for expressing LOM using DCAM (which will take on the 1484.12.4 designation), and one for the RDF translation of the LOM (which will become a new part of the standard: 1484.12.5).
Both the DCMI and IEEE recommendation documents will provide expressions of LOM elements and vocabularies that are reusable within DC metadata, which is good news for the DC Education Application Profile.
Dublin Core Education Application Profile: A Modular AP As mentioned above, the original incarnation of the DC Education Working Group established some Dublin Core elements specifically related to education [26], namely: conformsTo as a refinement of the Relation property.
This enables a ‘reference to an established standard to which the resource conforms’ which may include ‘educational standards, accessibility standards, or any other established standard that is relevant to the use of the resource.’ educationLevel as a refinement of Audience.
This enables a ‘general statement describing the education or training context.
Alternatively, a more specific statement of the location of the audience in terms of its progression through an education or training context.’ Mediator as a refinement of Audience.
This enables identification of a ‘class of entity that mediates access to the resource and for whom the resource is intended or useful’.
For example, ‘a teacher might be designated the Mediator for a resource intended for use by a teacher in a classroom of students of a particular level or sharing other similar characteristics.
Resources intended to be used directly by those same students would not include a Mediator.’ instructionalMethod.
This element, which may in the UK be assumed to cover pedagogy or pedagogical approach, is for describing a ‘process, used to engender knowledge, attitudes and skills, that the resource is designed to support.’ The DC-Education Working Group then turned its attention to development of a DC Education Application Profile, initially intended to be a complete application profile, covering description of all properties of an educational resource, along the lines of the successful DC Libraries AP [27].
However, this work proved slow, and a number of developments within DCMI promised solutions to some general problems that were worth waiting for, namely: closer links with the IEEE LTSC [28]; publication of the DCAM; and plans to establish DC guidelines for application profile development.
By the DC2005 Conference, the focus had moved to description solely of educational aspects and contexts of resources, in hope of creating the first AP that could be plugged into other APs: a modular AP.
There seemed little point in developing an AP which included definitions of how to express titles, authors, etc., when these could be covered by other application profiles depending on the resource (e.g.
images) or its context (e.g.
metadata for a library catalogue).
Between the Dublin Core conferences of 2006 and 2007, the DC-Education Community worked on two major aspects of the AP: recommending vocabularies for educational use of the DC Type and instructionalMethod properties, and finalising the functional requirements and domain model for the AP.
DC-Education AP Vocabularies Community members worldwide suggested vocabularies for inclusion in the AP, which were collated in a single document [29].
The reports produced by the JISC CETIS Pedagogical Vocabularies Project were invaluable, forming a comprehensive basis for the initial collation of vocabularies [30].
There was some discussion regarding the criteria for inclusion of vocabularies in the AP.
In an attempt to encourage vocabulary providers to establish and maintain interoperability and reusability for their vocabularies, the following criteria were suggested: The vocabulary is openly available.
The vocabulary includes definitions.
A standard encoding is available for the vocabulary (e.g.
SKOS, ZThes).
URIs have been assigned to the terms and/or the terms are registered.
However, feedback from the community made it clear that these criteria, while generally felt to be laudable goals, were too far ahead of existing practice.
Many felt that sticking strictly to these criteria could mean the exclusion of valuable existing vocabularies that could be of use to the wider community.
Even the LOM standard vocabularies did not meet these criteria, although the DCMI/IEEE LOM Task Force work noted above will eventually provide a solution to this.
A descriptive rather than prescriptive approach was therefore taken; the current draft AP includes all vocabularies collated for Type and instructionalMethod, with indications of which of the four criteria they meet, and to what extent.
At present, it is hoped that a similar exercise can be carried out for education-specific vocabularies for the Subject and Audience elements, although this is taking a back seat to overall development of the AP proper at the time of writing.
New metadata elements requiring vocabularies may also emerge from the current AP requirements phase.
DC-Education AP: Singapore Framework While the DC-Education Community developed some high-level use cases and requirements in 2006-2007, the DC Architecture Working Group was finalising what was to become the Singapore Framework for DC Application Profiles [31].
This framework defines a number of optional and mandatory components for a DCMI application profile.
At the DC2007 Conference in Singapore, the DC-Education Community decided to use the framework as a basis for focussing more closely on gathering a wide range of detailed use cases and building on these more specific functional requirements and a domain model.
According to the framework, these building blocks will form a solid basis for the description set profile detailing elements of the AP, and any usage guidelines for these elements.
An AP Task Group was formed with the aim of presenting a draft AP to the DC Usage Board for consideration at the DC2008 Conference.
The Task Group, under the enthusiastic hand of Lara Whitelaw of the UK’s Open University, has gathered some 30 use cases and usage scenarios from around the world, and has begun the process of analysing them in order to establish detailed functional requirements.
Serendipitously, JISC funded a Learning Materials Application Profile Scoping Study in October 2007, which has been working closely with the AP Task Group, particularly on the domain model component.
Next Steps for the UK: The JISC LMAP Scoping Study The LMAP Scoping Study: Progress The JISC Repositories Programme [32], which started in 2004, had, by its second phase, identified the need for work on national application profiles for a variety of resource types, for university and college repositories.
A number were funded, with a proposal for a scoping study on a Learning Materials Application Profile being given the green light in October 2007.
The fact that both the IEEE LOM and the Dublin Core Education Community were in a state of flux, with great things promised on the horizon but not quite having reached fruition, meant that it was deemed unwise to go ahead and develop an actual application profile, as some of the other AP projects were doing.
The LMAP Project Expert Group met on 5 March 2008, to assist with developing the study’s final report, which is likely to be released mid-2008.
The scoping study started by acknowledging that educational materials can come in any format or resource type, and can emerge from any domain.
Experts in various metadata domains were interviewed to give an overview of the advice, guidelines and metadata standards these experts would recommend to a learning materials repository manager.
One of the study’s preliminary findings was that, still, not enough was known about community needs for educational metadata to make any firm recommendations about application profiles, element sets or vocabularies.
In addition, the study produced a straw man domain model [33] for educational resources in repositories, and is continuing to work with its Expert Group and the DC-Education AP Task Group to further refine this.
Working Together: LMAP and the DC-Education AP Task Group In the meantime, the DC-Ed Group had gathered some 30 use cases as part of its requirements gathering phase.
Because these use cases were sought from on-the-ground implementers and managers of metadata, many of whom have had several years experience working with both the LOM and Dublin Core metadata in real-world implementations, they represent a significant body of evidence pointing toward functional requirements for an educational AP.
The next stage in the DC Singapore Framework model is building a domain model on these functional requirements, employing any community domain models that may be in use.
The Task Group now has some of the evidence needed by the LMAP Study, while, as noted, the Study has started work on building a domain model; both groups have agreed to continue this collaboration.
A Note About the UK LOM Core As previously noted, the UK LOM Core, which was widely lauded as a useful tool for UK Higher and Further Education, eventually stalled in its development.
However, this did not prevent its uptake, in draft form, in the UK e-learning domain.
Particularly useful were the development and recommendation of a number of UK-specific vocabularies, some developed in projects such as the RDN/LTSN collaboration which gave the RLLOMAP profile [34] of the UK LOM Core, subsequently also taken up by the Jorum national learning object repository project [35] and others.
Use of the UK LOM Core has never gone away; nor has the hope among UK e-learning metadata practitioners and implementers that some kind of formally funded support of the AP will emerge.
While the LMAP study makes no reference to the UK LOM Core, the work it is doing involves a number of key players in the UK LOM Core’s development and subsequent uptake.
It is not yet clear whether the final recommendations of the final report of the study will make mention of further development of the UK LOM Core.
However, in working closely with both LOM Next and DC-Education, the study’s authors are intent on ensuring that the UK Higher and Further Education repositories community is well supported in future with regard to educational metadata.
ISO Metadata for Learning Resources: A Third Standard?
While the above-mentioned developments have been under way, a separate group interested in improving on the LOM began work under the aegis of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) [36].
The major concerns being addressed were providing support for multilingual capability and alternate resources, e.g.
for accessibility purposes.
The standard will be in two parts: a framework, and a set of core elements.
While clearly borne out of similar frustrations as have been felt in the LOM communities around the world, this has occasioned some consternation in the rest of the e-learning standards domain, as it seems a third standard, which is not immediately interoperable with the other two, may be on the horizon [37].
Furthermore, the ISO standardisation process works through discussion and ratification by national standards bodies; so ways in which individuals and organisations can take part are unclear.
However, the ISO MLR group has come forward to collaborate with the DC-Education AP Task Group, expressing a willingness to develop cross-walks with DC and LOM metadata, taking part in the Group’s email list, contributing its own use cases to the requirements-gathering process and attending the first Web conference.
Harmonisation of Metadata: The PROLEARN Paper There will be no discussion here on the challenges and possibilities for harmonising the metadata standards discussed.
This is because Mikael Nilsson of the EC-funded PROLEARN Project, has already produced a near-perfect paper on this topic [37], in collaboration with Ambjörn Naeve, Erik Duval, Pete Johnston and David Massart, plus a broad consortium of organisations.
Conclusion As noted at the outset, this article’s modest ambition has been to introduce readers with an interest in educational metadata to recent and planned developments.
The PROLEARN document provides a critical analysis (which will be difficult to improve upon) of what needs to happen to achieve true harmonisation of current metadata standards, particularly those relevant to education.
It simply remains to me to conclude by encouraging interested parties to get involved in these initiatives.
Standards must reflect community needs and experiences, and, clearly, the time is ripe to make your presence felt.
References IEEE LTSC WG12: Learning Object Metadata http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/ IMS Global Learning Consortium, IMS Learning Resource Meta-data Specification http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/ Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Web site http://dublincore.org/ Dublin Core Education Community Web page http://dublincore.org/groups/education/ DCMI Groups Web page http://dublincore.org/groups/ DCMI Documents Web page http://dublincore.org/documents/ CanCore Web site http://www.cancore.ca/ UK LOM Core Web site http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/profiles/uklomcore ADL SCORM Web site http://www.adlnet.gov/scorm/ Hodgins, W. Moving aLOM, Off-Course On Target Blog, December 7 2007 http://waynehodgins.typepad.com/ontarget/2007/12/moving-alom.html Joint DCMI / IEEE LTSC Taskforce Wiki page http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DCMIIEEELTSCTaskforce DC-Education Application Profile Wiki page http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DC_2dEducation_20Application_20Profile Learning Materials Application Profile Scoping Study Web site http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/lmap/ ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36, Towards a Basic Set of Principles for MLR Multipart Standards Development: Incorporate Multilingual Capability and Equivalency at Architecture and Structural Levels for MLR Metadata, Working Document, July 28 2004 http://mdlet.jtc1sc36.org/doc/SC36_WG4_N0103.pdf Nilsson, M (Ed.
), Harmonization of Metadata Standards, PROLEARN Deliverable D4.7, January 21 2008 http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/lomi/images/5/52/D4.7-prolearn.pdf IEEE LTSC, IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata 1484.12.1-2002, Final Draft version available here: http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/20020612-Final-LOM-Draft.html IEEE LTSC, IEEE P1484.12.3/D8, 2005-02-22 Draft Standard for Learning Technology – Extensible Markup Language Schema Definition Language Binding for Learning Object Metadata, Draft available here: http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/files/IEEE_1484_12_03_d8_submitted.pdf IMS Global Learning Consortium, IMS Learning Resource Meta-data Best Practice and Implementation Guide, Version 1.2.1 Final Specification, 2001 http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/imsmdv1p2p1/imsmd_bestv1p2p1.html IMS Global Learning Consortium, IMS Content Packaging Specification http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/ IMS Global Learning Consortium Common Cartridge Working Group Web site http://www.imsglobal.org/commoncartridge.html Lomv1.1 wiki http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/mediawiki/index.php/Lomv1.1 New IEEE LTSC LOM Wiki http://www.ieeeltsc.org/working-groups/wg12LOM/ Nilsson, M.
(Ed.
), IEEE Learning Object Metadata RDF Binding http://kmr.nada.kth.se/static/ims/md-lomrdf.html DCMI Abstract Model http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/ Nilsson, M. Mapping LOM to the Dublin Core Abstract Model – An Alternative to the LOM RDF Binding, 2005 http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DCMIIEEELTSCTaskforce?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=2005-10-29-LOM-Orlando-LOMDCAM.pdf Hillmann, D. Using Dublin Core – Dublin Core Qualifiers, 2005 http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/qualifiers.shtml Clayphan, R. and Guenther, R., Library Application Profile, 2004 http://dublincore.org/documents/2004/09/10/library-application-profile/ DCMI/IEEE LTSC, Memorandum of Understanding Between the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee http://dublincore.org/documents/2000/12/06/dcmi-ieee-mou/ Vocabularies for the DC-Ed Application Profile Wii page http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/Vocabularies CETIS Pedagogical Vocabularies Project Web page http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elp_vocabularies.html Nilsson, M., Baker, T., Johnston, P., The Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles, http://dublincore.org/architecturewiki/SingaporeFramework/ JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres.aspx LMAP Scoping Study Domain Model Web page http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/lmap/domainModel.html Powell, A., RDN/LTSN LOM Application Profile (RLLOMAP) Version1.0 http://www.intute.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn-ap/ Jorum Web site http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 It for Education and Training WG4 Management and Delivery Web site http://mdlet.jtc1sc36.org/ Nilsson, M (Ed.
), Harmonization of Metadata Standards, PROLEARN Deliverable D4.7, January 21 2008 Author Details Sarah Currier Product Manager Intrallect Ltd Moderator Dublin Core Education Community Email: s.currier@intrallect.com Web site: http://www.intrallect.com/ DC-Ed Web site: http://dublincore.org/groups/education/ Return to top Article Title: “Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008” Author: Sarah Currier Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/currier/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Ajax in Oracle JDeveloper Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Ajax in Oracle JDeveloper Buzz software java framework api javascript database rss xml atom apache windows php ajax cd-rom Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff finds aspects of this work useful and interesting, but he also expresses some serious reservations.
Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) programming technique enables one to update parts of a Web site without reloading the entire page.
So useful is it that AJAX is turning up all over the Web, including on my own Web-based archival interfaces; so it was timely that I should be asked to review Ajax in Oracle JDeveloper.
Before diving into the book, I should say a little about Oracle's Integrated Development Environment (IDE) JDeveloper [1].
It is free to use [2], but there are some licensing restrictions if you make use of Oracle's libraries.
The book is in part about how to set up AJAX development in this IDE.
As a regular user of Eclipse, I was quite excited about trying out something new.
JDeveloper is prettier than Eclipse and quite intuitive.
Obtaining the software, however, proved a little difficult.
The download weighs in at 1Gb (with an installed footprint of 2Gb including its own copy of Java) and requires an account with Oracle.
This account proved remarkably difficult to set up (and this was not the first time I had experienced trouble with these accounts).
Having found the download location, I dutifully signed up, only to be told that my email domain (ouls.ox.ac.uk) was invalid!
'Tell that to Oxford University Library Services,' I thought, before locating a help page and sending an email.
To Oracle's credit, support responded in two days and fixed the issue, but the whole experience suggests that this book would benefit from the inclusion of a CD-ROM holding the software.
With JDeveloper installed, I dived into the book.
It takes a different approach to the learning books I have used in the past.
Instead of building an increasingly more complex application chapter-by-chapter, the author presents different AJAX frameworks (Prototype, Google Web Toolkit, Direct Web Remoting, AjaxTags, Ajax4jsf and Xajax) in order to achieve a single goal, namely to validate a Web form as users fill it in (rather than once they have submitted the entire thing), which provides benefits to the user.
Some chapters start with a summary of the technology in question, and these sections are probably the most useful in the book.
They provide quick references, including, for example, a very useful outline of methods available on the fundamentals of AJAX development, the XMLHttpRequest.
However, despite the value of these summaries, the book starts to show its weaknesses.
Yes, the broad approach usefully highlights the many possibilities and types of technology that fall under the 'AJAX umbrella', but, with each chapter following the same format, they quickly become repetitive.
Further, by being broad, but somewhat shallow, the book also leaves the reader asking for more.
More, for example, about how to extend the simple validation to something more complex; more on what is going on behind the scenes in JDeveloper; even just more about what the code is doing – as often the explanatory text is little more than pseudo-code, simply repeating what, I suspect, the target audience of this book could quickly work out from the code itself.
Most readers are likely to need only one of the chapters, to cover the technology most relevant to them – something which they can identify without working through the book – and so I thought it would be useful to be able to download certain chapters, rather than the whole book.
Checking its site, I discovered the publisher had indeed made this possible, but it worked out quite expensive at US$20 a chapter.
Neither is one comforted by the discovery that at least three of the chapters have already been published online [3][4][5] and appear only to have undergone minor alteration subsequently for the benefit of this book.
One thing I find useful when learning coding techniques from a book is to able to type the examples, usually modifying them for my own application as I go.
This enables me to see the code working, learn from fixing any bugs I have added, and to get a good feel for what is happening in the software.
At the same time I find it useful to be able to download the source code and, if I am really struggling, compare my code to the definitive version in the text.
This technique proved nigh impossible with this book.
While each chapter includes a code listing that pulls together each of the code fragments that have appeared before, the formatting of this code makes it hard to follow, let alone debug.
I was also unable to locate any downloadable content associated with the book for which I was not asked to pay extra.
(Perhaps a further argument for providing a CD-ROM?)
A glance at an example from Google books shows clearly the poor layout of the code samples [6].
Unhappily the low production values illustrated here persist to an unfortunate degree throughout the book, with several typos, and a terribly inadequate index.
However, my misgivings notwithstanding, I worked steadily through the chapters and I did uncover a number of useful pointers to tool kits that might make life easier for a Web developer.
However, the repetitive nature of the chapters (in some places repeated almost word-for-word) and the lightweight code explanations grew tiresome.
So, when I got to the PHP chapter and read that one also needed to download JDeveloper 10 because 11g did not have a supported PHP plug-in [7], I could not help feeling a little frustrated.
The words of warning also came as something of a surprise, as the synopsis on the back cover seemed to imply that JDeveloper 11g has the advantage over Eclipse by providing a PHP extension.
However, careful reading of the synopsis on the reverse suggests it is JDeveloper rather than any particular version that supports PHP development, which was a little confusing.
I could not but help note a further inconsistency in this area when this work suddenly expressed the need to explain how to install PHP and the Apache Web server on Windows.
This seemed odd, since it had previously dismissed installing an Oracle database in a single line.
Should not a book that assumes you can 'Install Oracle 10g database including the sample schemas and a database instance ORCL' without further guidance also assume that installing PHP or Apache is equally trivial?
Otherwise should it not help with the Oracle database guidance too – probably by suggesting installing the cost-free Oracle XE – and also provide pointers for other operating systems, perhaps in an appendix?
I must confess to having noticed subtle differences between the worked examples of how to setup JDeveloper 11g and JDeveloper 10, but I had merely attributed them to differences in operating system.
However, on reflection, I did wonder whether I had been reading examples from JDeveloper 10 occasionally.
Were this the case, then perhaps it would have been helpful to keep the book consistent with one version of the IDE.
If indeed there was such a mismatch between book and Web, this would appear to highlight a problem that must beset all book publishers that Web technology moves faster than the printing press.
A more concrete example can be found in the chapter on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) [8], which deals with GWT version 1.4.
A little investigating on the Web shows that GWT is at version 1.7 as I write; who knows what it will be when you have finished reading this review?
The more recent version of GWT works in different ways to the guidance given in the book.
Fortunately, it was still possible to download the older versions, so I could complete the chapter.
Nonetheless, I wondered if I would have been better off with the (free) online documentation for v.1.7.
As you might have picked up by now, there is a not too much to like about this particular book.
It is badly laid out, dated (one of the constituent chapters was published in May 2006) and does not come with electronic access to the source code.
However, it would be unfair to say I did not take away anything useful from the work.
There are a few helpful summary sections and a good introduction to the fundamentals of AJAX.
However this work represents little more than a set of chapters roughly taped together and, at £35.99, is woefully overpriced, especially as at least a third of the book is already available toll-free online.
References Oracle JDeveloper Official Home Page http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html As opposed to 'open'.
There are licensing costs involved if you use any of Oracle's built-in?
libraries; see http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/jdeveloper11gfaq.html#L0 Validating Forms with Ajax, Deepak Vohra, May 2006 http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/vohra-ajax.html Using AJAX with AjaxTags, Deepak Vohra, 28 February 2007, ITarchitect http://www.itarchitect.co.uk/articles/display.asp?id=335 Retrieving RSS/Atom Feeds with the Google AJAX Feed API: Using feeds to manage online news, Deepak Vohra, 7 September 2007, The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/07/rss_atom_feeds/ Ajax in Oracle JDeveloper Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jy_MIPpG1LEC&lpg=PR6&dq=ajax%20jdeveloper&pg=PA152#v=twopage&q=&f=false Deepak Vohra, Ajax in Oracle JDeveloper, 2008, Springer, p. 160.
ISBN 978-3-540-77595-9.
Google Web Toolkit http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ Author Details Peter Cliff Software Engineer University of Oxford Library Services Email: peter.cliff@ouls.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Ajax in Oracle JDeveloper" Author: Peter Cliff Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/cliff-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University Buzz data mobile software framework wiki html wireless usability infrastructure accessibility browser smartphone blog video cataloguing e-learning sms podcast itunes ajax facebook twitter iphone ipad android webkit junaio wikitude html5 url research Citation BibTex RIS Shailey Minocha reflects on the one-day symposium organised by Eduserv in May 2010.
The aim of the event was to discuss whether and how mobile technology will play a significant role in the delivery of UK Higher Education in the future.
The Eduserv Symposium 2010 on the mobile university brought together colleagues from academia and practice to discuss the impact of the growth in mobile technologies on Higher Education: for example, on the student experience, learning and teaching initiatives, research, libraries, role of the educators, and the computer services support.
Stephen Butcher and Andy Powell of Eduserv gave the welcome addresses.
Stephen mentioned how this symposium was the largest that Eduserv had hosted and gave a background of Eduserv’s activities.
Andy (Chair) set the context for the day: significance of the themes of mobile learning and mobile university and its implications on learning, teaching, research and support services such as the library and technical or systems support services, and, of course, on Eduserv’s activities.
The details of the event [1] and the presentations (including videos) of the event [2] are available.
The individual presentations during the event have been discussed in a number of blog posts.
In this report, I discuss the themes that emerged during the day and the challenges for educational institutions.
Themes from the Presentations In this section, I will discuss the various technological, organisational, pedagogical and social aspects that emerged from the presentations during the day.
Technological Aspects Paul Golding, in his keynote, described himself as a ‘mobilist’ and not an ‘educationalist’, and as the ‘setting the scene guy’ for the event.
He started his presentation by outlining the transition from Mobile 1.0 to Mobile 2.0, where the internet-centric phones (3G and 3.5G) have replaced the internet-capable (2G) phones of the late 1990s.
In Mobile 2.0, the focus of the users is on data-centric services by using the Internet rather than the traditional functions of calling and texting.
In the next three years, Paul envisages that there will be a 40% penetration of smart phones in the UK (currently, it is 15%).
Further, there is now a Mobile 2.0+ stage where iPad-like devices can help do ‘things’ faster and to be more productive.
Other recent innovations in the usability of mobile devices that are helping to enhance student/user experience are: larger screens and QWERTY keyboard support, either on the touch screen or a tactile keyboard.
Paul discussed how user behaviour has changed over the years and we are no longer limited to the traditional functions of calling and texting.
There is a mobile application for almost everything that one wants to do on the move: hail a taxi, share video clips, find routes or directions, check the weather, and so on.
So effectively, Paul said, ‘[you can] run your life on your mobile.’ Paul provided some interesting statistics: for example, 1.2 billion phones are sold annually worldwide and in 59 countries there are more active mobile subscriptions than people, that is, not just in mobile handsets since ‘SIM’ cards are to be found in cars and other devices.
The changing landscape in mobile IT amongst students and the students’ usage of mobile devices was highlighted by other speakers during the day, and emphasised by Nick Skelton of University of Bristol in his case study talk in the afternoon.
Paul discussed augmented reality services such as Google Goggles [3] where, just by pointing a smartphone’s camera at a location (say, a landmark, or on a book, or an artwork), the application recognises the object and automatically returns relevant information.
Other examples are Junaio [4], a next-generation mobile augmented-reality browser for camera-equipped devices, and Wikitude [5].
Gartner Research has identified augmented reality as one of the top ten most disruptive new technologies for 2008-2012 and augmented reality is expected to be used by more than 30% of the mobile workforce by 2014.
(Marieke Guy of UKOLN discusses augmented reality in a blog post [6].)
Paul discussed various key drivers that are influencing user behaviour with mobile devices: smartphone adoption, faster networks (3G+), data-friendly tariffs, increased device usability of smartphones, Web 2.0 centricity (eg growth of social software such as blogs, wikis, and creation and consumption of user-generated content), social networking (eg being able to access Facebook or Twitter via the mobile device) on the move, sensors proliferation (eg accelerometers), mobile application stores, and the apps ‘gold rush effect,’ where people are building apps and selling them.
Paul pointed out that the extension of Web 2.0 to mobile devices has opened up the platforms to developers to design and implement mobile applications.
Paul also highlighted that the Internet trends of social computing, cloud computing, and real-time ‘right-time’ Web (driven by Twitter, getting status updates from people and machines) will make the mobile phone into a ‘personalised’ computer, that is, a concatenation of a ‘person’ and a ‘right-time’ computer, which, in fact, results in a ‘new person’ or the advent of ‘augmented cognition’.
This, he said, will affect how we think since we will have access to ‘right information’ in real-time and at the ‘right time’ and at the ‘right place’.
Paul concluded his talk by highlighting an innovation challenge: ‘How can UK institutions lead in creating the ‘right-ware’ in mobile education?’ Tom Hume in his talk in the afternoon discussed how the market relating to mobile operating systems remains very fragmented.
For example, to reach 70% of UK mobile owners you need to support 375 different handsets with diverse capabilities.
This degree of diversity can be particularly challenging for educational institutions.
Organisational Aspects The presenters from academia discussed how students, when they first start at university, are now more concerned about access to the Internet than enquiring about the university support services or expecting to be provided with email accounts or hardware and software, as raised by Christine Sexton of University of Sheffield.
This changing expectation of students, to be ‘Internet-enabled’ as soon as possible and their increased use of smartphones and other Wi-Fi-enabled devices (eg iPod Touch) present new challenges for universities.
For example, Andy Ramsden, University of Bath, raised the question in his talk whether mobile adoption should involve enabling access to existing desktop applications in an institution on mobile devices, or should we be exploiting the capabilities that mobile devices can provide (eg application software or apps, location-based and real-time services)?
Other issues that were discussed during the day were: providing a robust wireless infrastructure, and developing application software (or apps) to provide services to students (eg directions to lecture rooms, or routes for wheelchair access on campus, or study timetables).
Tim Fernando, OUCS, discussed the Mobile Oxford (MOX) Project at the University of Oxford [7].
MOX provides information and access to services to guide students, staff, and the general public both in the university and in the city.
It includes a map with bus schedules, library search, podcast library (from iTunes U), news, examination results, weather, and so on.
Tim also mentioned another project called Molly [8] with which he and his colleagues are involved.
Molly is an open source framework for the rapid development of information and service portals for mobile Internet devices.
In his keynote Paul Golding mentioned the Blackboard Mobile Project [9].
Blackboard Mobile is an example of a platform that allows institutions to provide key services on students’ mobile devices.
The Blackboard Mobile Central module enables students to access a campus directory, campus maps, news, events, the library and the course catalogue.
The Blackboard Mobile Learn module allows students and educators to access teaching and learning on their mobile devices wherever and whenever they want.
Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is the first European institution to launch Blackboard Mobile Central [10].
Other initiatives that I came across while writing this article are the MIT Mobile Web [11] and the Ohio State University’s mobile site.
Ohio State University has designed a site m.osu.edu [12] for iPhone and other smartphones.
It provides access to campus news, locations of traffic hot spots on the campus, library catalogue and campus events, as well as location-based services such as the nearest dining hall, Wi-Fi hotspot, and bus stop, among others.
The arrival time of the buses at a specific stop is an example of a real-time service that this mobile site provides.
Pedagogical Aspects John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton, in his closing keynote mentioned how the mobile network and mobile education applications have helped to educate communities (particularly, in Africa) where other educational interventions may not have been possible.
He gave examples of mobile devices (eg personal digital assistants (PDAs)) being used to capture in situ observations, or data collection in field trips, or capturing artefacts on the move such as photographs, or for informal learning or training, or using mobile devices while moving around in a context-aware environment such as a museum.
John also discussed the role of mobile learning in filling the ‘dead time’, for example, when waiting in queues, or for a train.
Other applications discussed during the day were: mobile services that can help support users with special needs, for example, enabling deaf or hard of hearing users to send text messages, and using sensors for data collection which could be useful for researchers who are working in the field or in labs.
The Open University (OU) has been involved in an EU-funded project: Mobile Technologies in Lifelong Learning [13].
The OU is also working on a number of iPhone applications as well as optimising some of its Web sites for mobile delivery.
One example of an iPhone App that OU has developed is Devolve me [14].
The Mobile Innovations Group at the OU has a showcase of its educational applications [15].
Social Aspects Paul Golding gave some examples of how mobile Internet devices are being used for social networking: the social networking site, facebook.com is the second amongst the top 10 sites that are accessed on the mobile Internet and Twitter.com (for real-time interactions) featured tenth in this list.
Tom Hume, one of the afternoon’s speakers, emphasised the human-computer interaction (HCI) and usability principles of developing mobile services which emphasise the need to involve users throughout the development life cycle so as to understand their requirements and to conduct iterative evaluations with users.
Tom discussed his experiences of applying one of the HCI techniques, personas, for collecting and discussing user requirements.
The glossary on the Usability First site explains the concept of ‘persona’ [16].
Persona is a description of a specific person who is a target user of a system being designed, providing demographic information, needs, preferences, biographical information, and a photo or illustration.
Typically, multiple personas are developed in the early stages of design that represent the spectrum of the target audience.
Personas are one aspect of a scenario, the other aspect being a description of how this person would typically interact with the system being designed.
The point of developing personas is to avoid the trap of designing for the ‘average user’ who does not really exist; instead the aim is to make sure that the system will work for somebody specific, rather than no one in particular.
Challenges on the Way Ahead A wide range of difficulties and issues were highlighted during the conference in terms of what lies on the way ahead.
Here is a selection: There is a need to investigate the expectations that students have of their institutions in terms of mobile services.
Do students really want to learn on the move?
; or is it the access to mobile services related to administration such as reminders for deadlines, or maps to reach classrooms, and so on, that they value?
What are the techniques for collecting requirements from students and for eliciting their expectations?
Simon Marsden, University of Edinburgh, in his presentation, discussed a Mobile Campus project at his institution.
As a part of this project, a Mobile Services survey was carried out in March 2010 to explore the kinds of mobile devices students have, what they use them for and which potential University services (from a set of services listed in the survey such as campus maps, University directory, timetables, and so on, that the survey listed) would they like to be made available.
The results of the survey [17] are available.
However, this survey was focussed on administrative (University) services and did not enquire about students’ expectations of mobile educational applications.
How should Computing support services in academic institutions be adapting to student requirements and expectations where students are using their own hardware and software rather than institution-supplied technology?
Which models of support should be used?, asked Christine Sexton.
In another of the case study talks, Wayne Barry, Canterbury Christ Church University, discussed the iBorrow Project [18].
There are 200 netbooks in the library building that students could borrow and use within the building.
One of the significant outputs of this project is an insight into how students use learning spaces.
Should mobile Web and even provision of mobile devices be an integral part of an institution’s strategy of teaching, learning, support and perhaps also marketing?
Nick Skelton, University of Bristol, gave a message at the end of his presentation: ‘Think of mobile in every system that you are developing….build mobile in everything you do’.
What are the financial implications for educational institutions?
Is it cost-effective to outsource the creation of mobile applications?
Christine Sexton suggested that it was quicker and cheaper to out-source than to develop them in-house.
Management of students’ expectations: what are the costs involved in providing 24⁄7 support?
Will the availability or non-availability of mobile services influence students’ perception of an institution?
Will an institution’s readiness influence student recruitment?
Will students be prepared to pay for learning materials developed for mobile devices?
Security issues: confidentiality and integrity of the data can be compromised if the mobile devices are stolen or lost.
Accessibility: how can mobile services and devices be made accessible for users with special needs?
How to develop mobile education applications and services that can operate on a variety of Web-enabled mobile devices and not just iPhones?
How important is it to test our assumption that the majority of students and staff have Wi-Fi-enabled mobile devices?
What if an institution is supporting distance-education students in other countries?
Are fast networks and affordable tariffs available in the countries in which we support our international students?
What are the pedagogical advantages of developing educational applications for mobile applications as compared to mobile-optimised Web sites?
Niall Sclater discusses this very comparison in his blog post [19] while in his post, Jason Grigsby [20] illustrates the fact that even though the Mobile operating market is fragmented, the mobile Web continues to converge on HTML 5 and Webkit.
For example, The Mobile Oxford Project uses AJAX/HLML5 to provide cross-platform compatibility.
What are the pedagogical applications of augmented reality services on mobile devices (perhaps in field trips, or for learning a foreign language in a foreign land, or for learning about an exhibit in a museum, and so on) ?
Do these applications facilitate student learning through ‘immersion’ and engagement?
What are the ethical implications of using such applications?
What is the role of text messaging in education?
Can real-time interactions through text messages facilitate student engagement?
Steve Wheeler provides an an overview of text messaging [21] and also significant is the research on short message service to encourage interactivity in the classroom [22] and experimentation in using SMS to support learning new English language words [23].
Change management issues: how to convince colleagues about the advantages of mobile learning?
Also, staff training issues to induct staff in the use of mobile applications and services, and to guide them in the support of students?
Are the mobile networks, mobile services and mobile devices being developed at the same rate?
Are mobile networks and infrastructure quite behind and sometimes very expensive as compared the growth that we have seen in the development of mobile devices and mobile services?
What are the techniques for evaluating the effectiveness and student satisfaction of mobile educational applications?
What do ‘effectiveness’ and ‘student satisfaction’ imply in mobile education?
A question regarding research ethics came up in the discussion following Wayne Barry’s talk on the iBorrow Project: what are the ethics of collecting research data on students’ use of university-provided mobile hardware and applications?
Sustainability of the mobile learning initiatives: John Traxler in his closing keynote mentioned that although there have been many initiatives on mobile learning and of providing mobile services to learners, sustaining the projects has been a major challenge.
Most of the initiatives have been short-term projects and have not been scalable.
Conclusions There were four lightening talks after lunch.
Each talk was six minutes long and presented one case study of practitioners’ experiences in employing mobile technology in their institutions.
I am unsure of the brief that was given to the presenters but there was an implicit presentation format in each of the talks: motivation of the case study; funding body, if any; when it was conducted; the experiences so far; and the way ahead.
This format of short talks was very interesting and allowed one to get a glimpse of the initiatives being carried out in mobile education.
The panel discussion at the end of the four presentations gave the audience an opportunity to ask questions and helped to bring together some of the common themes in the four presentations.
All the delegates to the event were given QR (Quick Response) tag badges.
This implies that using a QR code reader, you can scan the badge of the person you spoke to at the event and then you would be emailed with their contact details, like a virtual business card.
Mike Ellis of Eduserv discusses the QR tag in his blog post [24] while another useful resource to look up on QR tags is by Marieke Guy [25].
On the whole, the event was very well-organised and well attended.
The preparations for the event are discussed by Andy Powell in his blog post [26].
The event was streamed live and, therefore, many colleagues all over the world had the opportunity to attend the event virtually and even ask questions of the speakers during the event.
Andy Powell also offers his reflections on chairing an event with a local and a virtual audience [27].
I hope that the challenges outlined in this article will help to stimulate discussion among academics and practitioners, and enable creation of a research agenda for a mobile university.
References The URLs in these references were last accessed by the author on 7 July 2010.
Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University, Event details http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/esym10/ Eduserv Symposium 2010: the Mobile University, Presentations (Slides and Videos) http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/esym10/presentations Google Goggles for Android http://tinyurl.com/yj2s7jm Junaio http://www.junaio.com/ Wikitude http://www.wikitude.org/ What’s the big fuss about Augmented Reality, a blog post by Marieke Guy, 2 November 2009 http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/whats-the-big-fuss-about-augmented-reality/ Mobile Oxford (MOX) Project http://m.ox.ac.uk/desktop/ Molly http://mollyproject.sourceforge.net/ Blackboard Mobile Project http://blackboard.com/Mobile Blackboard’s Mobile Campus Life App Debuts in Europe: Delft University of Technology Engages Students with Custom Mobile App, Amsterdam, 15 April 2010 http://www.realwire.com/release_detail.asp?ReleaseID=18332 The MIT Mobile Web http://m.mit.edu/about/ “m.osu.edu is smartphone-ready”, Ohio state University, 1 March 2010 http://www.osu.edu/features/2009/iphone/ Mobile Technologies in Lifelong Learning, Best Practices http://www.motill.eu/ Devolve Me for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/devolve-me/id336747243?mt=8 Open University: Mobile Innovations Group (MIG) http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/mobiles/projects/ Usability First Usability Glossary persona http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/persona/ IS Survey Results, Mobile Services 2010, The University of Edinburgh http://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/areas/itservices/integrated/ITS045/Other_documents/MobileSurvey2010.shtml Canterbury Christ Church University’s (CCCU) iBorrow Project http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/projects/iborrow/ Educational apps or mobile-optimised websites, a blog post by Niall Sclater http://sclater.com/blog/ Mobile operating systems and browsers are headed in opposite directions, a blog post by Jason Grisby http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/mobile-operating-systems-and-b.html Txt in Line, a blog post by Steve Wheeler, University of Plymouth http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2010/05/txt-in-line.html C. Markett, I.
A. Sanchez, S. Weber and B. Tangney.
2006.
Using short message service to encourage interactivity in the classroom, Computers & Education, vol.
46, no.
3, pp.
280-293.
N. Cavus and D. Ibrahim.
2008. m-Learning: An experiment in using SMS to support learning new English language words, British Journal of Educational Technology, vol.
40, no.
1, pp.
78-91.
QR tag demo at the Eduserv Symposium 2010, a blog post by Mike Ellis http://labs.eduserv.org.uk/blog/2010/05/qr-tag-demo-at-the-eduserv-symposium-2010/ Quick Response Time, a blog post by Marieke Guy http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/quick-response-time/ Preparing for the mobile university, a blog post by Andy Powell of Eduserv http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2010/05/preparing-for-the-mobile-university.html Audience and chairing events in a social media world, a blog post by Andy Powell (Eduserv) http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2010/05/audiences-and-chairing-events-in-a-social-media-world.html Further Reading: Full List of Associated Blog Posts A look over the Mobile Horizon, a blog post about the event by Paul Sweeney http://eduworlds.org/web-20/a-look-over-the-mobile-horizon/ Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University, a blog post by Mike Nolan on behalf of the Web Services at Edge Hill University http://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/webservices/2010/05/18/eduserv-symposium-2010-the-mobile-university/ The Mobile University, a blog post by Christine Sexton (one of the speakers on the day) http://tinyurl.com/2ue3xxn Eduserv Symposium: The Mobile University, a blog post by Marieke Guy http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/eduserv-symposium-the-mobile-university/ Eduserve’s 2010 Symposium: The Mobile University, a blog post by Chris Thomson http://www.electricchalk.com/2010/05/20/esym10/ The Mobile University, a blog post by Mike Jones http://fairlypositive.com/?p=52 Eduserv Mobile University, a blog post on the event http://mobilegeo.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/edusrv-mobile-university/ The implications of mobile… or ‘carry on up the smart phone’, a blog post by Andy Powell http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2010/05/the-implications-of-mobile.html Author Details Dr. Shailey Minocha Reader in Computing The Open University, UK Email: s.minocha@open.ac.uk Web site: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/sm577 Return to top Article Title: “Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University “ Author: Shailey Minocha Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/eduserv-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Spinning a Semantic Web for Metadata: Developments in the IEMSR Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Spinning a Semantic Web for Metadata: Developments in the IEMSR Buzz data software java rdf framework sparql api html database dissemination xml usability archives metadata thesaurus standardisation accessibility vocabularies schema jena repositories copyright graphics windows aggregation lom frbr dcmi interoperability dcap url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin and Alexey Strelnikov reflect on the experience of developing components for the Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry.
The IEMSR, a metadata schema registry, exists to support the development and use of metadata standards; in practice, what does this entail?
Metadata is not a recent invention.
It dates from at least the time of the Library of Alexandria, at which hundreds of thousands of scrolls were described using a series of indexes retaining various characteristics such as line count, subject classification, author name and biography.
However, specific metadata standards, schemas and vocabularies are created on a regular basis, falling into and out of favour as time passes and needs change.
Metadata may be described as ‘structured data which describes the characteristics of a resource’, although it is often more concisely offered as ‘data about data’.
There is a great deal of specialist vocabulary used in discussing it: standards, schemas, application profiles and vocabularies.
Going through each of them in turn: a schema is a description of a metadata record or class of records, which will provide information as to the number of elements that can be included in the record, the name of each element and the meaning of each element.
In other words, just as with a database schema, it describes the structure of the record.
The Dublin Core (DC) standard defines the schema, but does not define the encoding method that must be used (for example, HTML, XML, DC-Text, DC-XML and so forth).
A metadata vocabulary is simply a list of metadata elements (names and semantics).
The Application Profile The hardest of these concepts to understand is the application profile (AP), and to understand where the AP sprang from, it is useful to look at the development of the Dublin Core metadata standard.
DC originated at a 1995 invitational workshop held in Dublin, Ohio, with the aim of developing a simple core set of semantics for categorising Web-based resources.
These core elements, 15 descriptors in total, resulted from an ‘effort in interdisciplinary and international consensus building’ [1], and the core goals that motivated the effort were listed as: Simplicity of creation and maintenance Commonly understood semantics Conformance to existing and emerging standards International scope and applicability Extensibility Interoperability among collections and indexing systems DC required standardisation, and received it, as ISO Standard 15836 [2] and NISO standard Z39.85-2007 [3].
This successfully achieved, later workplans [4] began to reflect the question of satisfying the interests of diverse stakeholders; the problem of refining DC elements; relationship to other metadata models; and the knotty question of DC’s relationship with one technology that has enjoyed sustained hype since the late 90s RDF.
Weibel [4] notes that ‘few applications have found that the 15 elements satisfy all their needs’, adding that this ‘is unsurprising: the Dublin Core is intended to be just as its name implies – a core element set, augmented, on one hand, for local purposes by extension with added elements of local importance, and, on the other hand, by refinement through the use of qualifiers[…] refining the elements to meet such needs.’ The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) added further metadata terms [5]; by 2008, over 50 additional properties were mentioned on the DCMI Metadata Terms Web site.
Other terms were undoubtedly in use in the wild users were invited to create their own ‘elements of local importance’ and it is likely that many did so, as well as choosing to refine existing elements.
To refine an element is to restrict its scope in order to convey more accurately a given semantic; a subtitle represents a refinement of the general title element, and can be treated as a special type of title.
Exactly how many metadata terms have been created to extend DC, and how many qualified forms of terms have been created, is a difficult question.
There is no master list.
Metadata vocabularies are often created for essentially local purposes, and do not always outlive the context of their creation.
The incentive to publish is limited, unless in doing so the intention is to submit created terms as candidates for inclusion in DCMI standard vocabularies.
The application profile essentially represents a plural form of the instruction to refine or extend an element for a given purpose, and is designed to customise a set of terms for a given context of use.
As the Dublin Core Application Profile Guidelines would explain it [6], a DC Application Profile (DCAP) is ‘a declaration specifying which metadata terms an organization, information provider, or user community uses in its metadata […] A DCAP may provide additional documentation on how the terms are constrained, encoded or interpreted for application-specific purposes.’ Rather than creating a new set of terms, existing terms are customised via whichever mechanism is most appropriate; the overall set of documentation, instructions and metadata terms is collectively referred to as an AP.
One advantage of all this is that the number of new elements created is potentially controlled by the extensibility of existing elements.
A disadvantage is the weight of documentation and analysis required to encode the transformations formally.
Again, there is limited incentive to publish findings.
An additional purpose of the application profile that has recently gained in prominence is the imposition of a complex entity-relationship model embedded within the data model, an approach that is not without its critics; this will be examined later in this article.
Those interested in the recent evolution of the structures underlying Dublin Core from a simple set of shared term definitions to its present state should start with the DCMI recommendation on the subject of interoperability levels in Dublin Core metadata [7].
The IEMSR: A Metadata Registry on the Semantic Web The IEMSR began as an early adopter of various Semantic Web technologies, and was placed firmly on the bleeding edge.
Its development, however, was motivated by some very pragmatic concerns: the need to provide an easy place to find information about metadata schemas, vocabularies and application profiles; to promote use of existing metadata schema solutions; to promote interoperability between schemas as a result of reuse of component terms across applications (the ‘Holy Grail’ underlying the application profile); to reduce the amount of duplication of effort amongst metadata developers and implementers and, preferably, to provide a means to manage evolution of schemas.
Storing and curating existing knowledge was and remains a priority, that is, information about APs and metadata vocabulary, their creators, the processes (if applicable) by which they were created, and information about their development and use over time.
Application profiles are expensive joint efforts in most cases, and are time-consuming and expensive to build and test.
The schema registry can store the output in a machine-readable manner via a standard query interface.
The Role of Registries The software engineering process that underlies application profile development is a complex one and has not received a lot of attention in the literature.
A schema registry is able to become a centrepoint for this process.
Registries are potentially able to support the development of an AP.
Registries may also support APs in a deployment-time process.
A natural first step in creation of a data repository is to consider the data formats and metadata vocabularies and schemas to be used.
A registry offers a central point of call at which many APs may be found in a shared and easy-to-query format.
With this comes the general aim of developing and supporting good engineering methods for developing and testing metadata schemas, elements and application profiles.
There is significant investment by the JISC in application profiles today: the IEMSR Project sees an opportunity to improve the quality of the resulting artefacts by applying well-known engineering processes such as iterative development models and encouraging frequent engagement with users at each stage.
For this to be possible we need to develop and test appropriate means of evaluation and prototyping.
The IEMSR Project The IEMSR Project began in January 2004 and completed its second phase in September 2006.
Phase 3 ran from October 2006 and is scheduled to end in the summer of 2009.
The Registry consists of three functional components: Registry Data Server: an RDF application providing a persistent data store and APIs for uploading data (application profiles) to the data store and for querying its content Data Creation Tool: supports the creation of RDF Data Sources (application-specific profiles) for use by the Registry Data Server User Web Site Server: allows a human user to browse and query the data (terms and application profiles) that are made available by the IEMSR Registry Data Server The Registry is designed for the UK education community where both Dublin Core (DC) and IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standards are used.
IEMSR focuses on both DC and IEEE LOM application profiles, although the data creation tool in particular presently focuses on supporting Dublin Core; to build targeted support for LOM requires us to find an appropriate user group with which to work.
Phase 3 of the project concentrated on consolidation, evaluation and improvement; the present level of usability, accessibility and stability of project outputs, components and APIs were evaluated, updated requirements developed and the results fed back into further development through several iterations.
The wider registry community was contacted via the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI); the latter stages of the phase concentrated on dissemination and encouraging closer links with stakeholders and other schema registry developers.
Partly as a result of this, the project grew to concentrate more on direct interaction with intermediate developers – that is, developers primarily engaged in non-registry related tasks via provision of relevant APIs and the creation of of documentation, training sessions and exemplars.
A Registry Endpoint for the Semantic Web The IEMSR rapidly became one of a new breed of projects: a Semantic Web project.
The basic technology underlying the Semantic Web is the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which enables the encoding of arbitrary graphs (ie.
any sort of graph or network data structure involving nodes and relationships between nodes), by no means the only way of expressing graph structures, but the means preferred by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The set of technologies and design principles collected together under the name ‘Semantic Web’ are intended to provide a means of encoding information as machine-processable ‘facts’.
Hence, one might expect that encoding information about metadata standards into RDF would permit them to be available for use by both humans and software agents.
The idea of the IEMSR was conceived at approximately the same time as the idea of RDF data stores gave rise to a sudden proliferation of proposed and prototype RDF query languages; DQL, N3QL, R-DEVICE, RDFQ, RDQ, RDQL, RQL/RVL, SeRQL, Versa, to name but a few – and SPARQL, which has since emerged as a W3C Recommendation.
IEMSR’s choice of query language was related mostly to strong links between the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), technical lead on IEMSR in the earlier phases, and the SPARQL development effort.
Several years later, a core activity on Phase 3 of IEMSR has been to collect evidence regarding the appropriateness of this choice, and its implications in respect of issues such as practical long-term sustainability and portability of the IEMSR codebase.
Advantages SPARQL was one of several possible query languages; however, the use of RDF itself was essentially a given.
The files thus created were entirely standard, and so the risk of the data created during the project itself becoming obsolete was low.
The modular design resulting from use of an RDF data store and associated query language was very flexible, and offered an excellent potential for reusability of the data and of service functionality in other contexts.
The Semantic Web has been widely described as the future for data publication and reuse on the Web, so this approach also meant that the project was in line with current and expected future developments on the Web.
It additionally meant that the project would benefit from compatibility with other Semantic Web datastores that may be of relevance (for example, searching could be augmented via information gleaned from thesauri).
Disadvantages As a very new set of technologies, the adoption of SPARQL so early on was very much living on the bleeding edge of technology.
As such a lot of things could and did go wrong; software that fails to compile on new platforms, bugs, changes in protocol and a collection of other problems.
In terms of accessibility for developers, familiarity with RDF itself is far from widespread, whilst developers with prior experience of using SPARQL are exceedingly rare.
Crafting an appropriate SPARQL query can be difficult, for several reasons.
Firstly, a very good knowledge of an existing data model is required to do the job well; its flexibility can be seen as a blessing and a curse, because from the point of view of the developer, crafting a sensible question about a given dataset requires (beyond a knowledge of SPARQL syntax) a good understanding of what represents a sensible query in a given context.
Of course, the same is true of databases, but the relatively restrictive model offered by a table – or series of joined tables – tends to offer pointers to the developer about how best it should be accessed.
There is no obvious limit to the complexity of a SPARQL query – other than the time it takes to execute – and this can represent a real difficulty for those running a public SPARQL endpoint.
A badly written query can render a system unresponsive for some time, depending on system settings, even on a system that contains only a few tens of thousands of statements.
Denial of service attacks on publicly available SPARQL endpoints are easy to produce, accidentally or intentionally.
For this reason, as with conventional relational database services, there is a potential for direct access to the endpoint to be made available only via a set of login credentials, and for simple Representational State Transfer (REST) endpoints (analogous to stored queries in standard relational databases) to be made available for simple and everyday types of queries which could be added on request following testing.
Defining a Data Model Which data model to use is perhaps the most difficult question facing the DC Registry community in general, as the data model underlying DC is itself a question that has remained current for several years.
In a sense, the search to ‘do it right’ may be missing the point; rather, doing it consistently and adequately would suffice.
The present-day data model in use in the IEMSR dates back several years, and is as such out of date.
Today, this remains an issue.
Inter-registry sharing of information in particular requires availability of a standard with which both registries are compatible.
Consequently, a Dublin Core Registry Task Group is presently looking into interoperability concerns and potential solutions.
Building a Desktop Client The desktop client is designed in order to simplify the creation of new metadata vocabularies and application profiles.
The example screenshot shown in Figure 1 shows the use of the IEMSR desktop client to create a simple application profile for contain the metadata shown in Figure 2.
Figure 1: Building an application profile It is written in Java and uses the Jena Semantic Web framework and the SWT library a GUI framework developed by the Eclipse foundation.
SWT is an alternative to the Java standard GUI library – Swing – and the original choice may have related to cross-platform compatibility.
The client makes use of a standard set of Java libraries for functionality such as logging and XML parsing.
The core functionality of the desktop client is the creation of a valid RDF document, describing the application profile or metadata vocabulary that has been created.
For RDF-related activities, such as the creation of a valid RDF model, the IEMSR GUI client makes use of the Jena library, which is a well-known open source Semantic Web toolkit developed by Hewlett Packard (HP) [8].
Recently, a static code verification tool, PMD [9], has been added to the desktop tool.
This type of tool is designed to discover potential error code without executing it, just by searching for error-prone patterns.
A potential benefit there is the possible input for improving code style.
User Testing Initial user testing showed that the classical approach to distribution of Java software (essentially, a Jar archive to be executed by running a script) causes difficulties for users, especially on Windows, where .exe or installable software files are usually expected.
As a result, an executable file is now generated for the Windows platform.
Development across all major OS platforms without automated tests is quite problematic, as with the example of the operation of generation of an installable Windows executable file.
As the generation tool was only available for Windows, references to it elsewhere naturally caused the build process to stall.
Lack of automated tests also makes any re-factoring quite a headache, because it is impossible to check if changes broke code somewhere else.
There were a few comments from the testers that the client application design is not user-friendly: in some cases the current state of the application is not clearly visible, operational buttons are either hidden or obscure, if the progress some users were making through their task so far is not very well indicated.
It is necessary to take into account that the majority of IEMSR users are not very experienced in using software applications, so the need for more visual help and guidelines in the application has been recognised.
Early user testing was discouraging, in that it showed certain limitations of the original software design process; in particular, software stability was an issue, a great deal of vocabulary and imagery used was based in the assumption that the user was familiar with DC terminology, and screens that in practice required users to adhere to a specific workflow did not indicate this.
These issues and others were identified through task-based user testing and heuristic evaluation [10].
User reaction to later iterations of the software was in general very positive, showing that the software had improved significantly in both usability and functionality.
Subjects succeeded in completing tasks.
Composing application profiles from a series of existing elements proved to be an easier to understand, and represented notably less work than creating everything from scratch.
On the other hand, we discovered that even in later iterations of the software, search results were not easy to understand and use.
Creation of novel elements is not at present supported unless defining a novel vocabulary (ie.
this task cannot be completed concurrently with the creation of a new AP).
Tests of metadata element edit functionality showed that usability issues also remained in that area.
Design of a complex application should include guidance for the user; at each step of interaction, the system should indicate or hint at the type of answer or value that it would ‘like’ to receive.
Providing an initial value in interface elements such as search fields (for example, the word ‘Search’ may appear in a search box) ensures that the user recognises that the field is related to the ‘Search’ button, which may not otherwise be clear to a novice user.
Another related feature of user-friendly applications would be an introductory ‘wizard’ mode, where information about how to make use of the system is explained in a step-by-step manner.
The downside of having a great deal of visible help information is the possibility that it may become excessive; users, after some experience of the system – once they have learnt about the system and its behaviour and established a routine in their use of the software – may become annoyed by the wizard mode, so a means should be provided to reduce the verbosity of the system, and switch off all help hints.
This introduces the idea of multiple application operating modes: User is learning to use the software User is competent with system functionality The initial design did not observe all of Neilsen’s heuristics [10] for example, a great deal of recent development work concentrated on improved error-handling, relating to the heuristic, ‘Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.’ At present, the GUI client produces ‘flat’ APs, that is, application profiles without any structure.
This is not a problem as such, but means that it is appropriate for some use cases and not for others, such as application profiles like SWAP that are currently under development, and which use complex entity-relationship models.
A prototype that gives an idea of what a ‘structural’ application profile creation kit might look like is discussed later in this article.
Building a Web Site to Support Browsing of IEMSR Data The choice was made to use Java + Struts + Tiles for this work.
JSP has many advantages, as does Java itself; a plethora of libraries that can be used for dealing with almost anything in Java (JSTL is now used on the Web site), and easy XML parsing, to name two.
The Web application architecture provides an effective build and packaging system.
On the downside, the resulting code is quite difficult to use as an ‘exemplar’ that is, the use of complex libraries and toolkits tends to make the code more difficult to read and to reuse, and requires significant background knowledge about the component elements and frameworks.
It does not lead to code that is understandable at a glance.
Due to the nature of SPARQL, it is not always easy to debug errors, especially intermittent bugs.
The most common issues that came up during user testing were: Difficulty understanding the actual data model represented in the IEMSR.
Difficulty using the search function: it is not surprising that this problem exists, as the number of terms defined in the IEMSR is very small by comparison with a user’s vocabulary.
Therefore, the user is not very likely to hit on appropriate terms without help.
Missing or incomplete data.
URLs that are not persistent; sessioning IDs and session timeouts.
Errors (such as searches that provide no results) do not always give verbose results, or suggest other possible options.
Several significant issues have been identified during user testing.
Searching for keywords can be quite difficult, and the ranking is not very obvious.
One proposed remedy suggests that a thesaurus, or search suggestion, might improve search efficiency.
The system does not handle internationalisation; although data is stored from many translations of core terms, it is not visible to the user other than via the SPARQL interface.
Persistent URLs are absolutely indispensable if anything is to be built on the schema registry as a platform.
Data should be editable (or a mechanism provided for recommending improvements) at the Web site.
The Web site could also provide a ‘search query construction’ interface for the creation of custom SPARQL searches.
Users unfamiliar with SPARQL frequently find that it represents a high barrier to entry, and a custom query construction functionality could represent a useful learning tool to overcome this barrier.
Building Demonstrators for the IEMSR As part of the wider remit of user engagement, in both a human facing sense, and in its capacity as a machine-accessible service, IEMSR has a clear opportunity to become a provider of a novel series of tools; some of which have been prototyped at UKOLN and which exploit the link between schemas or elements and evidence of their actual, real-world usage in exemplar records.
For example, automated methods are able to measure some aspects of the consistency and variance of metadata record content and therefore identify elements that are error-prone or frequently confused.
They provide useful feedback to the repository manager and to the application developer.
There are many opportunities to learn from exemplar records, and also from the processes by which they are created and used.
Linking the IEMSR with the deposit process of metadata enables contextually relevant information stored within the IEMSR to be provided to the user.
In return, retrieving data of any sort (such as indicators of user activity) gathered via the user interface enables feedback to be returned to the server, and hence eventually to be reported in an aggregated form to the repository manager.
Of course, it is not possible to analyse an application profile consistently via what amounts to evaluation of a single interface or implementation; much of what is measured will be dependent on the interface by which it is accessed.
Clearly, the provision of services such as these is strongly dependent on excellent integration with other services, such as aggregators and repository instances.
Of course, a very significant problem for many services and the IEMSR is no exception to this is that of encouraging enough initial interest to secure the data necessary to render the service useful.
Interest should be actively solicited through the provision of useful services, appropriate marketing and a consistent focus on relevance and practicality.
Interest can also be generated by lowering the barrier to entry for end-users.
This might be achieved through actions such as user-centred review of the service and its documentation, attention to the accessibility and relevance of the service, and related toolsets and dissemination to the wider community.
There is reason to explore the potential of methods for partial automation of the application profile, element, and encoding development process.
Such work may also represent a valuable form of development.
Whilst we will not cover all of the demonstrators currently in place in this article, we showcase a couple here to give a quick idea of the sorts of activities that the IEMSR can support.
A detailed description of the underlying development and structure falls outside the scope of this article.
Constructing Complex Application Profiles As we discussed in the introduction to this article, the best-known application area of DC as a standard is the idea of a fairly small vocabulary of element names, such as ‘Title’, ‘Creator’ and so on, applied to objects in an extremely straightforward manner.
An image, for example, may have a title, a creator, a description, a date, and a set of rights associated with it.
Title: Kestrel Creator: E Tonkin Description: A kestrel perching on a road sign Date: 2008-10-01 Rights: Copyright E Tonkin, 2008 Identifier: http://… Fig.
2: One resource, one set of metadata associated In practice, this very simple use of metadata probably does satisfy a very large percentage of immediate user needs; it provides an option, effectively, to tag the object in a semi-formal manner and using a fairly standard syntax.
However, this represents a limitation in scenarios where simple object-level metadata are not enough to express what the information architect wants to say.
For an example of this, consider the enormous and long-standing popularity of Bram Stoker’s best-known novel, which has given us generations of derivatives and re-interpretations: Nosferatu, the Hammer Horror Dracula films, Dracula-the Musical, Dracula-the Ballet, Frances FordCoppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the film), and, closing the circle, the novelisation of Frances Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
How should these be sensibly catalogued?
One natural approach to the question is to ask whether they are all the same type of thing: after all, Mr Stoker’s original novel was a unique and fairly imaginative work, although from today’s perspective it may owe a great deal to the penny dreadful traditions, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Gothic horror Carmilla, Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood, and so on.
Still, Stoker is popularly seen as ‘patient zero’ for the modern epidemic of vampire fiction, some of it wildly different in emphasis and tone from his original work.
By comparison, adaptations of Stoker’s novel such as film(s), musicals, ballets, novelisations of the film and so on generally appear to be derivative, more or less faithful versions of the source novel.
This observation alone provides us with two separate levels of ‘thing’; a series of original creative works (Varney, Carmilla, Dracula, Interview with the Vampire…), and an adaptation of it to a particular form, audience and time (Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Graphic Novel, Hammer Horror Dracula, etc.).
Whether this specific typology sketched above is useful, the general principle of a model that portrays items and relations using multiple different types of thing, or entity, is at the basis of a large proportion of the application profile development efforts currently occurring today.
Documentation on the subject often speaks grimly of the development of an entity-relationship model – in other words, a list (often a hierarchy) describing the types of thing involved in a domain, and of the ways in which those types of item are related.
Rather than creating novel entity-relationship models, it is frequently suggested that the well-known FRBR model be applied (a discussion of this appears in Ariadne issue 58 [11]); either way, supporting users in creation of this sort of application profile is clearly a quite different sort of problem to that of supporting development of a simple ‘flat’ AP.
To support this development effort, a prototype [12] was created that is intended to permit the creation of structurally complex application profiles, a ‘structural’ application profile creation kit.
Internationalisation Concerns The IEMSR contains information about certain application profiles in several languages; for example, the DC Core Elements are currently available in no less than 15 languages [13], including English, French, Italian, Persian and Maori.
This in itself provides a useful resource for interface development; to demonstrate this we have created a prototype [14] that demonstrates a very simple process by which IEMSR can be used to provide internationalisation for a form.
Conclusion and Further Work We have reviewed the stability of the backend service itself and decided that the data collection itself is a valid process, that the data is portable and can potentially be expressed and searched using any of a number of mechanisms, and that at present the SPARQL interface fulfils the immediate need identified.
Given the limited familiarity with SPARQL we have produced a series of lightweight demonstration scripts for developers to adapt to their purposes.
We intend to continue the development effort, moving on the basis of the relatively stable and well-understood/documented setup that we now have towards a lighter, simpler service based around REST and other Web standards currently being reviewed by the JISC Information Environment.
As a result we expect to improve, simplify and encourage practical interoperability with other JISC services and developments.
As a result of experience during this phase, the IEMSR can operate as a centrepoint for collecting information, evaluating, annotating etc.
both in terms of software and development needs and in terms of user engagement, for the purposes of supporting actual engineering methods for developing schemas, elements, APs.
We look towards using IEMSR as a basis for developing other tools that are more immediately useful to the user such as fast prototyping tools, analysis of existing datasets (description rather than prescription), user interface-level innovations based on IEMSR data, etc., ie demonstrators.
To see the IEMSR as a standalone service and product is constrictive.
It is appropriate to consider a variety of use cases including but not limited to those already identified, and workflows that contain application profile or metadata descriptions as a component.
Many of these are opportunistic in that the feasibility of processes often results from novel developments, as in the case for example of the SWORD deposit mechanism.
Hence, we will emphasise close engagement with the developer community.
At the end of a three-year roller-coaster ride of alternate cheerfulness and nail-biting nervousness, one feels that something should be said about the IEMSR from the point of view of its status as one of the earliest examples of a relatively small number of JISC projects based around Semantic Web technologies.
It is not lost on us that early adopters are at risk of, metaphorically speaking, buying Betamax.
We suggest that the choice to base a project on what at the time represented early draft standards and prototype software is not one that should be taken lightly; as it happens, it seems that SPARQL has grown a modest but dedicated user community, and a number of other production SPARQL databases are now available, giving us a good and improving expectation of sustainability.
For those faced with a similar choice, there is no perfect answer beyond those typically found in any project’s risk analysis.
Will the technology gain traction or disappear?
Will the specificity of the technology and knowledge base exacerbate the difficulties inherent in recruitment?
Do the opportunities outvalue the risks?
In the latter stages of any large development process, the realisation inevitably dawns that there are no simple answers very often a project proves to be more complex in practice than it initially appeared.
However, in compensation a better understanding of the parameters of the problem is gained, which can be usefully applied in building on the existing basis of code.
Acknowledgements Thanks go to our UKOLN colleague Talat Chaudhri for his useful comments and suggestions during the writing of this article.
References Weibel, S., Kunze, J., Lagoze, C. and Wolf, M. (1998).
Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discover.
Retrieved on 20 April 2009 from http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2413.txt Information and documentation The Dublin Core metadata element set.
ISO Standard 15836 ANSI/NISO Standard Z39.85-2007 of May 2007 http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-85-2007/ Weibel, S. 1999, The State of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative: April 1999.
D-Lib magazine 5 (4) ISSN 1082-9873.
Retrieved 20 April 2009 from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/04weibel.html DCMI Usage Board, 2008.
DCMI Metadata Terms.
Retrieved on 20 April 2009 from http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ Baker, T., Dekkers, M., Fischer, T. and Heery, R. Dublin Core application profile guidelines.
Retrieved on 20 April 2009 from http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/profile-guidelines/ DCMI: Interoperability Levels for Dublin Core Metadata http://dublincore.org/documents/interoperability-levels/ HP Tools http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/tools.htm PMD.
Retrieved on 20 April 2009 from http://pmd.sourceforge.net/ Neilsen’s heuristics for user interface design http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html Talat Chaudhri, “Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles”, January 2009, Ariadne Issue 58 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/chaudhri/ UKOLN Projects IEMSR OSD Demo http://baiji.ukoln.ac.uk:8080/iemsr-beta/demos/OSD/ Translations of DCMI Documents.
Retrieved on 20 April 2009 from http://dublincore.org/resources/translations Multilingual input form http://baiji.ukoln.ac.uk:8080/iemsr-beta/demos/lang/ Author Details Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Alexey Strelnikov Research Assistant UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.strelnikov at ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Spinning a Semantic Web for Metadata: Developments in the IEMSR” Author: Emma Tonkin and Alexey Strelnikov Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/tonkin-strelnikov/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Integrating Geographic Information Systems Into Library Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Integrating Geographic Information Systems Into Library Services Buzz data software database metadata vocabularies preservation gis interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Sylvie Lafortune reviews a much needed work on offering GIS services in libraries.
No one will dispute that geographic information is an integral part of contemporary life.
Who has not looked up driving directions on MapQuest or used Google Earth to look at a city of interest on their personal computer?
And most cars manufactured in the last few years can come equipped with GPS technology.
Interestingly enough, though, most users of these tools have only a vague idea that they are based on digital geospatial data such as satellite imagery and digital elevation models (DEM).
But the reality is that most students now entering universities or technical colleges have been introduced to geographic information systems (GIS) more formally and will be expecting some level of GIS service at their institution's library.
In North America, the levels of GIS services offered in academic libraries vary a great deal.
The underlying reason for this remains, as stated in the preface to this book, a matter of resources: 'Even the most basic of GIS services requires significant investment in training programs and resources for librarians and staff'.
So it seems that the title under review is very timely and indeed unique, since a quick query in Global Books in Print reveals no other book on this topic has been published at least in the last decade.
This book is co-authored by four academic librarians working at the University of South Florida Libraries system.
It offers ten chapters, each of which is written by all or some of the authors.
The work's prefatory comments briefly provide the context in which GIS emerged, noting that it was not until the mid-1960s that, alongside print maps, 'GIS, a computer-based database for capturing, storing, analysing, and managing data and associated attributes that are spatially referenced to the earth' was introduced as a new way to look at populations, location, and natural resources.
The view is clear: GIS does not replace but augments the services of the map library.
The content loses its focus as it attempts to address too many issues at both the practical and the theoretical levels.
This becomes apparent from the preface where the authors introduce their work and hope 'the reader will be intrigued, provoked, and reflective', be they practitioners, students, educators and non-specialists.
Given the title of this book, it is more than likely that librarians will be reading it and since most of us are all too familiar with the development of the virtual library and some of the effects of the information economy, the first two chapters do not add very much to the book.
With chapters 36, the reader is introduced to key components of GIS: spatial data and databases, Web GIS services, descriptive standards for geospatial information and semantic interoperability.
Chapter 3 provides a useful overview of distributed spatial databases (mostly American ones) and spatial data infrastructures which integrate geospatial data and metadata.
Furthermore, the reader finds in this chapter a useful discussion of current issues with webGIS applications such as the interoperability of heterogeneous data among different systems and the quality of data delivery which varies with Internet bandwidth.
Although chapter 4 starts off with a set of interesting questions along the lines of 'What kind of bibliographic records or metadata will be required to meet the different uses of geospatial information and user needs?
', it ends up mostly as a detailed overview of existing descriptive standards for print maps.
Most readers may want to skip this rather long survey!
Chapter 5, however, goes to the heart of the matter: the current state of GIS data standards.
It starts with a useful definition of spatial data and a review of two better known co-ordinate systems: geographic and projected.
Moreover, there is a sound overview of existing standards.
In this chapter, readers are reminded that 'Standards promote maximum reusability, interchangeability, and mergeability'.
For anyone working with data, this has become somewhat of a mantra!
Chapter 6 deals with the fundamental question of access to geospatial information.
More specifically, the author of this section argues that while 'substantial progress has been achieved in technical interoperability, semantic interoperability remains a significant hurdle'.
Indeed, part of the complexity of GIS is that it is based on the use of technical specialised vocabulary which varies across information systems.
This state of affairs is not surprising when one considers that the use of GIS is fast increasing, mostly in private and public sector organisations where data are used and produced to meet the needs of targeted user groups.
This situation has slowed down progess in GIS use among organisations and this, in turn, has had a negative impact on research in universities.
Semantic interoperability, therefore, is not only important for data discovery but also for data exchange.
The role of the library in pushing forward possible solutions is examined.
These solutions vary from intelligent retrieval software and topic navigation maps to the creation of personal project spaces in libraries.
Chapters 7 and 8 cover familiar territory for most librarians: reference services and collection management issues with regards to geospatial information.
Chapter 7 examines many aspects of GIS reference services in a library, such as levels of services, important skill sets which librarians should have, information-seeking behaviours of GIS users and information competencies required of GIS users.
Unfortunately, this chapter is more descriptive than prescriptive, which is what this reader was expecting in a 'guide for academic libraries'.
Chapter 8 is the most solid and effective section in the book.
It covers a wide variety of collection management matters such as policies, sources of data, legal considerations, preservation and new areas in evaluation such as webware, hardware and software.
It provides in addition useful suggestions including lists of GIS software vendors, resources to assist in GIS software selection and geographic/geospatial collection building.
The last two chapters, 9 and 10, cover geographical information and library education and future trends in GIS.
Currently, very few Information Science programmes have integrated the GIS specialty area into their curricula.
Most of the learning is done on the job and through various forms of mentoring.
Younger librarians will probably navigate more easily through GIS's multi-application computing environment.
The final chapter looks at where GIS is heading and how libraries can plan effectively to deliver GIS services.
But the authors rightly argue that, for many librarians, GIS simply goes beyond their technological comfort zone!
As a first survey of a field which is still emerging this book is to be commended.
However, I had difficulty reading most chapters without skipping the first third of the content which tended to provide too much background information.
The authors attempt to write for too broad an audience and as a result, the content is scattered.
Furthermore, the book would have benefited from tougher editing in order to rid it of the excessive description as well as typographic errors.
Nonetheless, the strength of this work is that it is well researched, providing input from a variety of GIS experts.
Each chapter ends with an extensive bibliography indispensable for field professionals.
Author Details Sylvie Lafortune Government Information and Data Librarian J. N. Desmarais Library Laurentian University Sudbury, Ontario Canada Email: slafortune@laurentian.ca Return to top Article Title: "Integrating Geographic Information Systems into Library Services: A Guide for Academic Libraries" Author: Sylvie Lafortune Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/lafortune-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Ambient Findability Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Ambient Findability Buzz mobile framework wireless metadata identifier blog video python rfid git interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin reviews a book with interesting content despite a few rough edges.
Ambient Findability is to all external appearances an O'Reilly book.
It boasts the familiar line drawing of an animal, on this occasion a Verreaux's sifaka, a large and engagingly thoughtful-looking lemur.
Judging the book by its cover would suggest that it be placed on the shelf together with O'Reilly's classic line of reference books, upon which developers all over the world depend for sparsely presented, accurate information and advice.
But this book is of a different breed.
This is not nearly so much a reference book as it is a guided stream-of-consciousness tour through thought, idea and research into information search and retrieval.
Inside, the book is unusual; it's the first O'Reilly book I've read to be printed in colour on rather pleasant glossy paper.
Reading on, though, this is by no means the only detail that makes it a unique piece of work.
Introducing Ambient Findability The inevitable question that comes to one's mind at once is what the author means by ambient findability.
Rather confusingly, the book does not define this phrase as such.
Instead, it defines findability as: 'a.
The quality of being locatable or navigable b.
The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate c. The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval' (p. 4) and defines 'ambient' as: 'a.
Surrounding; encircling: eg., ambient sound.
b.
Completely enveloping.'
The author clarifies that 'Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.'
The rest of the book, on the whole, is a tour through this vision of the near future.
Structure The book is structured in such a way as to be easily readable.
Given the span and scale of its content, it is an extremely short book only 188 pages in total and as a consequence, most subjects are handled only briefly.
Research is frequently mentioned and usually referenced in a footnote.
In a book so densely packed with ideas, a bibliography would have been a useful addition.
Many mentions of sources, research and researchers are dropped into the text without a footnote, meaning that one must rely on a Web search using the information provided perhaps intentional, in a book about locating that which is not comprehensively described!
Pop.
Sci.
and Research Intertwingled Second only to the need for a bibliography is the unfortunate lack of a glossary; although there is an index, the book is packed with Wired magazine cyberpunk-era terminology that may confound the unwary or uninitiated.
From the noosphere to the memex via the brilliant future promised by ubicomp and eventual cybernetic transformation, this book is a treasury of occasionally encountered additions to the language of cyberspace.
Several acronyms, such as 'RFID', are identified only in the index.
Partially as a consequence, reading this book is not unlike reading a sequence of blog entries.
It is to be read cautiously, with an Internet-connected PC nearby, as an interactive process of information discovery and further research.
Intertwingularity is described, although no definition is provided, as fluid and non-hierarchical interrelation between different objects 'pages, documents, sites, authors, formats and topics' (p. 64).
Wikipedia helpfully explains that the term is an expression of 'the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge'.
This book itself is a remarkably good example of intertwingularity; research ideas from various domains, shorn of their context, are mingled with dissimilar domains, and thence with popular science and science fiction literature.
Therein is much to inspire thought, accord, controversy and disagreement.
Wearable Computing Under the topic 'intertwingled', ubiquitous computing (the aforementioned 'ubicomp') is introduced, followed by a discussion of the role of various existing technologies such as mobile telephones, GPS, and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification).
At the end of this chapter, wearable computing receives just three pages, which seems short indeed for a book that handles the question of findability.
As a research student in the field, I read this section with great interest.
Within that space, a few examples are held up; Steve Mann's wearable computer, Xybernaut's wearable computing platform, Motorola's wireless glasses for video display and Microsoft's MyLifeBits project, which looks into the capture of life experiences.
There, the subject is dropped, with the statement; 'we shouldn't get too hung up on wearable computing, which is really only a stepping stone on the path to cybernetic transform'.
This vision of wearable computing owes more to the satirical vision of Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash than it does to today's research in the field 'the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt' (p. 124) [1].
It is true that fashion events showcasing the fruits of today's wearable research are more likely to induce laughter than jealousy.
Prototypes, as clumsy and ridiculous as they are, represent platforms upon which ideas may be put to the test.
The essential goal of wearable computing is not hip-mounted PC104-format Pentium processors twinned with suspiciously uncool-looking head-mounted displays; it is the generation, capture and reuse of contextual information, to serve the needs of situated and pervasive or ubiquitous computing.
Wearable computing research is all about applications, not technologies, including but not limited to context sensing, augmenting reality, providing on-time services with minimal disturbance to the user's concentration, and information mediation between the user and his/her environment [2].
Ideally, the technical details of the wearable itself should pass largely unnoticed by the user who nonetheless benefits from the services that the system provides.
HCI, Evolutionary Psychology and the Pleistocene Brain Chapter 3 of the book, 'Information Interaction', introduces a number of explanations referring to the theory of evolutionary psychology (EP) that are returned to periodically throughout the rest of the book.
'More recently, research in human-computer interaction has further exposed the soft underbelly of the people problem.
A Stanford study entitled "Silicon Sycophants" showed that people respond positively to flattery from computers.[...
]In another Stanford experiment, Clifford Nass showed that people are polite to computers.
[...] But why are we so susceptible to these superficial elements?
How can such smart beings be so shallow?
The answers reside in the fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.
[...] The brain is "an ecosystem with modules simultaneously competing and relying on one another."'
[3] (p. 56) '[Y]ou can take the person out of the Stone Age, but you can't take the Stone Age out of the person.
Our neural circuits and natural instincts were designed to solve problems faced by our ancestors over millions of years of evolution.[...
]The information age has just begun.
We have transformed our environment but not ourselves.
Technology moves fast.
Evolution moves slow.'
These references are perhaps the most jarringly incongruous details in the book.
Based largely on a referenced 1998 article from Harvard Business Review, 'How Hardwired is Human Behavior?'
by Nigel Nicholson, these statements taken together do not represent scientific consensus.
Provided with neither extensive references nor appropriate discussion, these assertions are castles built on sand.
Novel application of evolutionary psychology to the field of HCI (Human Computer Interaction), whilst certainly of interest, could and ideally should be published first in a peer-reviewed journal.
To quote Buller and Hardcastle [4], 'The term "evolutionary psychology" is ambiguous in common usage.
It sometimes refers to a field of inquiry encompassing a range of work so broad that it is united only by a desire to understand the evolution of the human mind.
More frequently, however, the term is used in a more specific sense, designating only work conducted within a particular set of theoretical and methodological commitments shared by a prominent and highly influential group of researchers.[...]
In this narrower sense, "evolutionary psychology" designates a Kuhnian paradigm a shared and unquestioned framework of theory, methodology and exemplars.'
Discussion of the 'massively modular brain' suggests that the author is referring to the EP paradigm.
This is a subject debated in great detail over the last few years, sometimes in a decidedly pointed tone of prose.
No attempt will be made to discuss the subject in detail here; an introduction to the field may be found elsewhere [5].
Refer to Buller and Hardcastle [4], or Buller [6] for a critical viewpoint.
The existence of controversy surrounding the field of EP does not, of course, mean that the explanation is incorrect; in many applications of EP, the jury has not yet returned a verdict (and may never reach unanimity).
Either way, these are unnecessary details to this discussion, which may mislead the reader, and which certainly distract from the central themes of the book.
A realistic discussion of HCI research would be less controversial than this 'pick and mix' approach, and of greater immediate value to the student.
Conclusion The charm of this book is in its informality.
It is tremendously readable.
It touches on all sorts of topics that most definitely should be required reading for site designers, and showcases the strange mixture of research and popular science underlying today's Internet.
This book covers most of the concepts that make up the 'common ground' of today's Internet pundits, the conversational basics underlying discourse in the field, in a way which is both accessible and eminently readable.
That lack of formality is also the book's weakest side, which may dim its reception among researchers and lecturers in related fields.
The section referring to EP, as mentioned above, references a single 1998 article from Harvard Business Review; there is nothing wrong with the source, of course, but such a new field of scientific enquiry could be expected to move on a great deal in seven years.
A more balanced and factual approach, combined with pointers to general introductions to the various related fields of work, would have done a lot to increase the value of this book to researchers and students.
At the head of my 'wish list' for the next edition of this book would be a more rigorous approach to discussion, identification of associated research areas and specific examples of research within each topic, in that bibliography I mentioned earlier, and the invaluable glossary of terms.
I understand that a new edition has been planned, and look forward to seeing it.
Read this book for background information, quotable quotes from personalities such as Lao Tzu, Bruce Sterling and Clay Shirky, and a wealth of miscellaneous facts.
The reader will learn the background behind the Monty Python 'Spam Song' sketch, Bell curves, power laws, the Semantic Web, metadata, information overload and much else besides.
Where you arrive at the end is one thing, mostly dependent as it is on yourself, but isn't the journey half the fun?
References Stephenson, Neal, "Snow Crash", Bantam Spectra, 1992, ISBN 0553562614 Abowd, G. D. Ubiquitous computing: Research themes and open issues from an applications perspective.
Technical Report GIT-GVU 96-24, GVU Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, October 1996.
Johnson, Steven, "Mind Wide Open", Allen Lane, 2004, ISBN 0743241657 Buller, David J., and Hardcastle, Valerie Gray, Evolutionary Psychology, Meet Developmental Neurobiology: Against Promiscuous Modularity, Brain and Mind, 1 (2000): 307-325.
Buss, David, ed.
(2005) The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology.
ISBN 0471264032 David Buller, Evolutionary Psychology: The Emperor's New Paradigm , Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 277-283.
Author Details Emma L Tonkin Interoperability Focus University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Ambient Findability" Author: Emma L Tonkin Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/tonkin-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 51: Democratising Cultural Heritage Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 51: Democratising Cultural Heritage Buzz software framework html database rss portal infrastructure accessibility blog repositories copyright video passwords opera provenance e-learning uri youtube e-research authentication openid research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne 51.
Having emerged from the political arguments of the 1990s about what culture could be funded and whether it was better to fund soccer or opera, we have moved into an age where, in the UK at least, there are arguments as to what actually constitutes British culture.
Fortunately more people are deciding to do culture for themselves than remain passive witnesses to the pundits' debate.
The place where they are doing it is online and they are not waiting to see whether their offering attracts the experts' approval and sometimes, admittedly, one might argue more's the pity.
For the political class the clubroom has had to admit of a networked computer which already reaches beyond politicians' Web sites.
Concerned about the lack of interest in conventional politics among young people, they look with concern, as do the TV companies, to the enthusiasm for sites such as YouTube.
And with good grounds, if one considers the assertion during this Spring's Annual JISC Conference [1] that most of the action during last year's National Union of Students election was generated on Myspace.
There are understandable concerns about the quality or usefulness of the material on such sites and no doubt someone will come up with an analysis; the key point is that they are there and they are extremely popular.
Chief among the advantages of such interactive sites is their empowerment of users to put up their own material in much the way they would like.
But such empowerment is hardly new: in Supporting Creativity in Networked Environments: The COINE Project, Geoff Butters, Amanda Hulme and Peter Brophy describe an approach to enabling a wide range of users to create and share their own stories, so contributing to the development of cultural heritage in their own area.
I remember well the article in Cultivate Interactive on the early stages of the Project [2] at the time nearly five years ago now.
It struck me even then that to provide interested parties with the ability to put their material onto the World Wide Web without the need for great technical expertise was quite a departure.
As the authors say themselves, 'The involvement of non-experts in creating recordings of cultural heritage, in whatever medium, so as to capture the experience of 'ordinary citizens' in their own terms, could lead to richer and more illuminating collections as new insights and previously hidden information is revealed.
This democratises the creation of cultural heritage, removing it from an elitist monopoly, and provides new perspectives on local, regional, national and international events.'
Yet in the age of YouTube it is possible to claim that this project remains something of a departure for a new reason.
'As a hosted service, the COINE system was designed to be attractive to small institutions without ready access to technical expertise.
However, such institutions often have high levels of professional and sometimes domain expertise (especially in areas such as local history) and utilising this gives them a significant benefit over 'free for all' systems (as MySpace and YouTube have become), because the authority of the institution gives credence to the objects created while mediation enables the worst excesses, such as blatant breach of copyright, to be avoided.'
The authors point out that the mediated nature of the system was particularly beneficial in the view of participating institutions such as schools whose staff could rest assured that this was an environment in which their pupils could happily participate and succeed.
They also make a telling argument for the system's persistence given the long-term nature of the institutions participating.
The combination of localised expertise and quality through the mediation of material and support for contributors does mean that the localised and relatively small services may well last.
Arguably they have something different and more valuable to offer over the much larger global systems: support, authority, collective provenance, maintenance and persistence.
Many if not most journalists are unaware of the history or structure of the Internet and may at best be able to recognise the importance of a name like Tim Berners-Lee.
Relatively few will know that he heads up the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in its work to bring relative sanity to a technology that is in as much need for standards as was the technology-disrupting railway industry in its early days.
Last month I had occasion to attend a seminar given by Henry S. Thompson at UKOLN and whom those same journalists would no doubt describe as one of Mr. Berners-Lee's lieutenants.
In the seminar I was immediately struck by the passion which Henry brought to his subject and the undoubted importance of the work being undertaken by The W3C Technical Architecture Group of which he is a member.
In his article for Ariadne, Henry introduces the W3C's operations and the remit of the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and what he describes, quite rightly, as the mission of the TAG: namely its stewardship of the architecture of the Web.
Such stewardship is characterised by three major activities: "to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary; to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG'; and "to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.'
Henry goes on to provide an account of W3C's past work and the issues it is currently addressing.
They include versioning, passwords over the Internet in the clear, abbreviation for URIs, the 'self-describing Web' and the future of (X)HTML.
Henry also lists for us the coming issues for the TAG and completes an article which is indispensable reading for anyone wishing to update themselves swiflty on the issues behind the architecture of the Web from W3C's perspective.
I am indebted to Andrew Treloar and David Groenewegen for their article ARROW, DART and ARCHER: A Quiver Full of Research Repository and Related Projects in which they describe three inter-related projects to support scholarly outputs and the e-research life cycle.
The authors provide a description of each repository project's design and development and add considerable food for thought from an Antipodean perspective on what continues to be a theme of unabating interest.
I look forward to their next contribution to the Magazine.
In the current context of a new generation of students who are at ease with ICTs, much consideration is being given to how best to employ new technologies in e-learning as well as promoting digital literacy.
In her article Using Blogs for Formative Assessment and Interactive Teaching, Lisa Foggo provides us with a case-study of using a blog for formative assessment.
Grounds for its adoption were how its interactive nature engaged participants while at the same time proving beneficial to teaching staff since it permitted measurement of student expectations and their level of satisfaction with library sessions.
While reservations are expressed about how best to manage the time such use demands, there is no doubting its benefit to students and staff alike in its capacity to help students analyse and assess their work thereby providing them with a greater understanding of their learning aims.
It is something of a common expectation among researchers that they can carry out a range of research-related tasks online whether they be collaborative in nature or are related to search and retrieval.
However, much of the software which supports such operations derives from the users' local infrastructure but also via specific interfaces with relatively few links between them.
This environment can pose researchers a number of hurdles in the areas of authentication, information finding and sharing across applications.
In her article Developing a Virtual Research Environment in a Portal Framework: The EVIE Project Tracey Stanley provides an overview of the EVIE Project at the University of Leeds, funded under the JISC Virtual Research Environments Programme, and looks at how it tested the integration and deployment of key existing software components within a portal framework.
Phil Bradley has chosen in his column on search engines this issue to enquire Why Ask Me, and Does 'X' Mark the Spot?
as he takes a look at different versions of Ask to see how it is developing and investigates whether and how it is emerging from its days as an online butler.
In the field of providing support to ever hard-pressed researchers I have no doubt but that Kevin Emamy and Richard Cameron offer another topic of direct interest to them in their contribution entitled Citeulike: A Researcher's Social Bookmarking Service.
They describe a tool which assists researchers gather, collect and share papers and which may be characterised as a fusion of Web-based social bookmarking services and traditional bibliographic management tools.
As regards the former aspect, the authors point out that '[b]ecause users' collections are now stored on a Web server rather than in a proprietary bibliographic database locked away on a desktop computer, it is now possible for users of Citeulike to browse each other's collections.'
Moreover, as with COINE, this site is sufficiently specialised in the sense that it caters only for academic papers that it holds particular value for researchers.
Consequently new contributions are more readily discovered and shared between more naturally formed interest groups, formal or otherwise.
In the first of two Get Tooled Up articles for us this issue, Matt Thrower provides us with a general background and rationale for the process of employing the virtualisation of servers while Eddie Young provides an account so far of the trials and implementations carried out at UKOLN in respect of Towards Virtualisation: A New Approach in Server Management.
I look forward to seeing where next their investigations take them.
In our second article of this variety, I am indebted to Steve Hitchcock who confides that project film production turns out to be a very long way from the (relatively) safe ground of producing a paper or writing a presentation.
'[W]hen the camera points at you, [it] can challenge all sorts of sensitivities', he writes.
In his article Hold It, Hold It ... Start Again: The Perils of Project Video Production, Steve relates how he survived the ordeal to tell the story of the Preserv Project video and provides a raft of tips and wisdom gleaned from his experiences of marshalling colleagues for their appearance, directing, storyboarding, editing and much more.
There is no doubt in my mind, reading his contribution, that planning and communication come top on the needs list for such a venture, but his account points once more to the nostrum that the people involved are the single most determining success factor rather than the technology.
OpenID is a technology around which, maintain Andy Powell and David Recordon, there is increasing interest.
Recent commitments to OpenID by AOL, Microsoft, and other Web 2.0 services would appear to locate this single sign-on system in the thick of discussions about online identity and access management.
In their article OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web take a brief look at OpenID and ask what relevance it has to e-learning.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on a work offering a comprehensive discussion of e-learning and accessibility, a book for Web trainers, teachers and instructors, a work challenging traditional notions of literacy, the latest edition of a primary reference work for practitioners responsible for the development of institutional information architecture, and a practical guide for librarians on blogs and RSS.
In addition, of course, we provide our usual section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 51.
References The JISC Annual Conference 2007, Ariadne issue 51, April 2007 http://dev.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/jisc-conf-rpt/ See section entitled The Learner's Experience of e-Learning Brophy,P.
"Cultural Objects in Networked Environments COINE", Cultivate Interactive, issue 7, 11 July 2002 http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/coine/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 51: Democratising Cultural Heritage" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Planet-SOSIG Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Planet-SOSIG Buzz data mobile portal blog flash mp3 podcast research Citation BibTex RIS Flora Watson introduces a new podcasting service from Biz/ed and Angela Joyce reports on the latest developments in the Eurostudies section of SOSIG.
Biz/ed Introduces Podcasting Service Biz/ed has recently launched a podcasting service, based on its popular In the News [1] feature, a regular comment on a topical issue from a business and economics viewpoint.
Selected stories are being podcasted on a weekly basis, which students and educators will then be able to download and listen to at their leisure.
Why Podcast?
The aim of the new service is twofold.
Firstly, part of Biz/ed’s philosophy is to cater for different learning styles.
For instance, the recent additions to the site, the Cash Flow Simulation and the Interest Rate Transmission Mechanism resources, both use interactive Flash animations in order to engage the user with the concepts being explained.
The site’s new Level 2 resources engage by making use of ‘type in’ text boxes and ‘drag and drop’ exercises.
The introduction of podcasting is an extension of this approach of engaging the user.
Biz/ed recognises that some learners may process information more effectively aurally, rather than visually.
Secondly, this move is part of Biz/ed’s longer-term commitment to mobile learning.
It is the first in a series of podcasts that the site intends to offer in the coming months.
Biz/ed recognises the potential for learning through PDAs, mobile phones and iPods, and the flexibility they provide for students to make the most of their time.
For instance, students could listen to In the News while sitting on the bus or doing the dishes!
What is Podcasting?
Podcasting is a method of publishing audio broadcasts (usually MP3 files) via the Internet.
It allows users to subscribe so they automatically receive new broadcasts as they are published.
Biz/ed recognises that podcasting is a new concept for many educators.
For this reason, the site has produced some easy-to-follow help pages.
These explain what podcasting is, as well as how to subscribe to the service.
The team at Biz/ed are also on hand to answer queries from educators and students from technical issues through to the pedagogical use of the resource.
Biz/ed is very interested in feedback from educators on their experience of using the podcasts in order to refine this and future podcasting services.
Visit the Biz/ed Podcasting [2] pages to learn more.
SOSIG EuroStudies Section The EuroStudies [3] section of SOSIG was set up in 2001, to provide more focus on Internet resources covering European matters in the social sciences.
Structure of EuroStudies EuroStudies is a growing selection of over 3,000 quality European Web sites compiled by SOSIG section editors.
It can be browsed as a whole, by European Union sites only, European regions or individual countries.
It can also be searched by keyword.
The aim is to list key sites for each country with a minimum of: government Web site, statistical office, central bank, European Documentation Centre and recent treaties.
However, there is much more than this available: for example, European research projects, news services, specialist email lists and collections of academic Web resources.
The former communist countries of Eastern Europe are also well represented.
Many sites have an English version, although some are in other European languages.
Each of these Web sites can also appear in other SOSIG subject sections.
For example, the Republic of Austria site can also be found in the SOSIG Politics section.
European Union information A major focus of our activity is finding and listing European Union information [4].
With such a volume of EU online material available, and not always in user-friendly formats, we aim to find the best of the Web for users and organise it in a meaningful way.
Thus, you can view sites by resource type, eg.
data collections, government publications or organisations; or you can view an alphabetical listing.
Material ranges in scope from absolute beginners’ guides like the popular leaflet Key Facts and Figures about the European Union [5] to regular news services like EurActiv [6] or new services for researchers such as the Researcher’s Mobility Portal [7] which provides information on research vacancies throughout the EU.
We regularly add sites on EU enlargement and other EU policies.
We list major sections or pages from the European Commission site, Europa, to enable easy access to this sometimes bewildering resource.
Keeping up with EuroStudies What’s New in EuroStudies [8] is a blog-style service that is ideal for the busy lecturer, librarian or researcher who wants to keep up to date on recent developments in the European arena.
It is written by SOSIG section editors and provides analysis and useful Web addresses on topical items.
Recent features have included the German elections, Baltic region resources, e-literacy for European studies students and researching European Union information.
EuroStudies Editing SOSIG Research Officer Angela Joyce, a languages graduate, edits the section with input from other SOSIG section editors.
She is currently ‘weeding’ all sites in the section and then plans to develop it further.
She will be collaborating with the user community and other services such as the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, plus the Languages Editor of Humbul.
If you have any suggestions or comments, please contact her.
References Biz/ed In The News http://www.bized.ac.uk/dataserv/chron/ Biz/ed Podcasting http://www.bized.ac.uk/homeinfo/podcasting.htm SOSIG EuroStudies section http://www.sosig.ac.uk/eurostudies/ SOSIG EU information http://www.sosig.ac.uk/roads/subject-listing/EuroStudies-cat/euu/alphalist.html Key Facts and Figures about the European Union http://europa.eu.int/comm/publications/booklets/eu_glance/44/index_en.htm EurActiv http://www.euractiv.com/ Researcher’s Mobility Portal http://europa.eu.int/eracareers/index_en.cfm What’s New in EuroStudies http://www.sosig.ac.uk/roads/whats-new.euro.html Author Details Flora Watson Biz/ed Content Editor ILRT University of Bristol Email: flora.watson@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bized.ac.uk/ Angela Joyce SOSIG Research Officer ILRT University of Bristol Email: angela.joyce@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Planet SOSIG” Author: Flora Watson and Angela Joyce Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/planet-sosig/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Change Management in Information Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Change Management in Information Services Buzz archives digitisation cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS Ian Lovecy examines change theories and strategies, and their application to creating a change culture in an information service.
This book is, as can be seen from the extensive bibliography, a comprehensive review of the literature on change management as well as a study of how and how not!
to apply it to the running of an information service.
The basic premise, which is reiterated through the book, is that in a time of rapid technological development an information service needs to be readily adaptable, flexible, and prepared to be in constant change.
Lyndon Pugh describes the factors which have led to this need, principally the spread of digital information and the wide diversity of staff skills now incorporated within information services.
He argues that classical management theory, which bases its structures on specialisations (acquisitions, cataloguing, reader services etc), fails to make use of the potential of staff and the informal networks which exist within a diverse service.
He describes ways in which a change culture can be introduced, and also ways in which specific changes can be made acceptable to staff and users.
In both, there is great emphasis on the need for consultation, for facilitating initiatives from front-line staff, and obtaining ownership of new systems.
There is a substantial section on appropriate structures and the use of teams to ease these processes, and this is complemented by chapters on the skills of leadership and of change management.
Change Culture This book, like its predecessor, starts from the premise that change in information services is the result of the ever-increasing power of technology.
Specifically, Pugh points to the changes which have occurred as a result of digitisation and the spread of the World Wide Web, changing the relationship between librarian and user.
(It is interesting that the terms 'librarian' and 'library' are used frequently throughout the book, rather than 'information professional' and 'information service'; for all his belief in change, the author's mindset seems to have limits to its flexibility.)
There can be no doubt of the truth of this, although there may be more variety between sectors than he gives credit for: industry and commerce may well still believe that highly-paid researchers should be given pre-digested information rather than expose themselves to the vagaries of the Web, while public libraries still require a level of user education in how to use digital resources.
Much of this book seems to be geared to the academic information service.
However, even accepting the importance of technology, there is another aspect to the changes in information services.
There have been major societal changes which need to be recognised if change is to be properly managed.
The whole hierarchical structure of society is changing.
Since the 1980s there has been a tendency to discount expertise as self-interest, as when lawyers suggest that unqualified people should not write contracts, or teachers comment on how children should be taught.
Coupled with this is an acceptance that some members of the general public will benefit from more information, giving rise to patient information services in hospitals, and the 'expert patient' programmes.
Deference to people in respect of the position they hold, as opposed to their personal qualities, is (rightly) rapidly vanishing, and this in places where technology has no direct impact.
Some of the flatter management and team structures which Pugh proposes would need to happen even in a manuscript archive with a sheaf catalogue.
Pugh suggests that the modern information service should recognise that it is in a period of discontinuous change, which 'demands a distinguishable break with past practice, and requires the recognition that the former ways of doing things will not create and sustain successful organisations' (p.5).
There is a need for a 'change culture', which makes use of the theories (inter alia) of organisational development: 'OD [Organisational Development] is about changing attitudes.
It is about refocusing people's perceptions of the organisation they work in.
It is also about improving communication and interaction through new structures and through harnessing the informal patterns which underpin structures.
As this is done, the capability to innovate grows as the organisation becomes more adept at making the best of all the talents available to it.'
(p.43) We see here a hint of the dangerous concept of change for change's sake, and there are other places where this concept can be identified.
Speaking of the need to review the success of changes which are made, he comments that 'If the indications are negative, the circle of change can begin again, starting with alternatives or modification, or in extreme cases the restoration of the status quo' (p.92) If the status quo works better than any suggested changes, perhaps it should never have been altered.
That it should have been would seem to be the consequence of following Cage's principle, which Pugh quotes with approval, 'If it ain't broke, break it'.
However, there is also a paradox here, for the basic structures which Pugh suggests for the modern, flexible information service flatter management, self-managing teams would seem to be in place for the foreseeable future.
There is an assumption that once change has been introduced to thinking, it will always be there, and that there might never come a time when consolidation might be appropriate.
In this assumption he is not alone, as any review of the last fifteen years of education or health services will demonstrate.
The structures which are established, flatter and more democratic than those of existing services, may nevertheless come to be the specialisations of the future, replacing technical competences with, for example, subject competences.
Those structures may then themselves need to be superseded as technology and information requirements continue to evolve.
Change and People The book not only explains what is meant by a change culture, but also suggests ways in which this may be inculcated.
Underlying this, however, is an assumption that staff will want to change.
'There is little evidence in the literature of resistance to change in the abstract' (p74) who would write (or who would publish) an article on 'How I was an obstacle to change'?
People do resist change, even when the reasons for it are cogent and indeed unanswerable.
Change may involve what some see as de-skilling: staff who were appointed to write programs for researchers, programs which have been overtaken by packages on the market or an increase in programming skills by research staff, may feel badly used if redeployed to offer support to users of such packages let alone to assist undergraduates with word processing.
'For the individual there may be psychological implications stemming from attitudes, skills issues, location, responsibilities and roles.
Providing at best some reassurance in these areas, and at least clarity and honesty about what is likely to happen, will further reduce uncertainty and worry.'
(p.180) This is a singularly optimistic outlook; clarity and honesty and I advocate both may reduce uncertainty, but can increase worry and disaffection to a dangerous level.
Of course, one answer is that staff, if they will not change, are redundant.
However, parent organisations may have human resources policies which do not allow for mass dismissal and the re-hiring of more suitable people.
Apart from one mention of change being imposed from outside the information service, Pugh gives little consideration to external and unalterable constraints; yet these can negate the best attempts at the necessary structural changes.
Multi-skilled teams may be difficult to establish in a public library context, where certain skills AV, Computing may be necessarily concentrated in a central library; they can, I know, be impossible to effect in an academic service where a small professional staff is spread across two main buildings separated by a hill, and six satellite libraries including three at one mile, three miles and seventy miles respectively from the centre.
To adapt the Irish saying, if flexibility and teamwork is where you are going I wouldn't start from here!
Communication Pugh emphasises the importance of communication: formal communication from the senior management team to other teams (and its flow the other way), but even more importantly the informal communications networks which exist within any medium sized organisation.
His diagram on p.132 is impressive, with everyone talking to almost everyone else, and all of them (except, interestingly, the Director of Media Services, whose only external contact is the Director of Information Services) talking to people outside the group.
Again, alas, the real world may be different: perhaps Lyndon Pugh has never been reported to a trade union for 'making' a member of staff have coffee once a week with his line manager so that each could update the other on what was happening in two buildings!
There is something slightly unreal about his whole approach to finding out and making use of the networks which exist.
In a section headed 'The manager's approach to understanding and managing informal networks' (pp.130-1) he lays out a series of bullet points which sound as if they describe a sociology project: 'Understand who is talking to whom, how frequently, and about what Understand who is interacting with whom, how frequently, and in what ways Identify the focal points of the network,on the basis of the number of exchanges and interactions individuals are involved in' One cannot help but visualise the Director of Information Services standing to one side of the staff-room with a clipboard!
Interestingly, in all the discussion of networking and communication there is no mention of the major importance of having suitable places where staff can meet and talk and where middle and senior management can not only observe but be part of these networks.
Their essence is informality, for which reason attempting a formal analysis of them may prove very difficult.
Conclusion I may have given the impression that this book is of little value; that would be incorrect.
Like most management texts, it lives in an ideal world which is rarely reflected in any actual environment.
Nevertheless, the principles which it puts forward for enabling change to be accepted are sound; but it is more a description of what should be aimed at than a handbook of how to achieve it.
Pugh himself recognises this in his chapter of process and models: 'All change projects are unique.
The variables of organisational characteristics, leadership, environmental influences and skills and competencies, for example, all act to change the weighting given to the various steps in the process.
This should therefore be regarded as one of many useful possibilities rather than a prescription for managing change'.
(p81) If for much of the book he seems to lose sight of this, it doesn't invalidate the value of this 'one of many possibilities'.
Moreover, there are sections of the book on which I have not commented most notably those on leadership and the skills required for change management because they are an excellent description of what is required.
The importance of relating to users as well as to staff, the need for flexibility in management and in structure, all these are identified and a way not necessarily the way of dealing with them is proposed.
A wholly inexperienced manager attempting to implement change would find this book a little confusing in itself, and very confusing in the context of an actual service; a manager who can bring to the book his or her own experience will find ideas which are worth trying, and others which at least stimulate thought about why they might not be appropriate in a specific circumstance.
Author Details Ian Lovecy Ymghyngorydd Annibynnol / Independent Consultant Bangor Email: ian_lovecy@hotmail.com Return to top Article Title: "Change Management in Information Services" Author: Ian Lovecy Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/lovecy-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Information Tomorrow Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information Tomorrow Buzz mobile software rss blog cataloguing rfid privacy Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho is delighted by this pick-and-mix collection of reflections on the technological future of libraries.
The 16 chapters of this book focus on different aspects of the technological and societal changes that interact to shape our institutions.
Some pieces read as manifestos, some are polemical, some are technical.
But there is something for everyone who is interested in the future of libraries.
This work asserts that, in order to succeed, whilst re-inventing ourselves and our presence, we have to remain true to the basic principles of librarianship.
We have to continue to meet our users' expectations and create spaces, both physical and virtual, which appeal to them.
Technological drivers shape the medium but users shape the service.
Although the majority of contributions are from academic librarians, the perspectives offered apply to a variety of contexts.
In today's libraries the focus is often on mobile technologies where overdue notices are delivered via text messages and RSS feeds inform users of new resources and library events.
It might be a while before your library equips users entering its space with the option of automatically opening the catalogue on their smart-phones, but it is essential to know what is happening beyond 'the limits of the possible' set by your institution's IT department.
For the technologically 'savvy', there is a guide on how to leap into experimenting with new tools at little or no cost and on how free open source software is driving changes in libraries.
As the library-ness of the software we use declines and we become more dependent on solutions developed outside our communities, we need new skills and knowledge to carry this through.
For the benefit of those trying to outsmart suppliers of library management systems, there are astute general observations on the process and reflections on our new-found interest in programming, fuelled by the slow pace of LMS innovation.
The role of libraries in preserving scholarship is another point of discussion, as is the viability of new models of peer review and of individual article impact factors.
But one message is clear: libraries must become change agents in their organisations as they have powerful insights into the need to be truly service-oriented in an on-demand society.
One particularly comforting contribution dwells on what Google canot do and at what actually libraries excel – our ability to select, evaluate and decide on the authority of information.
So we should promote our ability to make up for Google's lack of depth and exploit its shortcomings.
Blended librarianship for teaching and learning can also give librarians a central role in delivering and enhancing student learning whilst supporting lecturers and teachers.
We should also learn to value our patrons' capacity to contribute to our virtual presence through blogging, content creation and generous donations of virtual properties for library expansion into Second Life.
We should not be particularly concerned about the mythical privacy threats RFID technology creates to obtain information about patrons' reading habits by driving past their homes and reading RFID tags.
There are useful hints on how to enhance positive experiences on library Web sites by engineering them to mimic our physical spaces, on how to make them 'sticky' by using personas and mapping users' journeys.
Truly embracing technological developments requires a shift in thinking and the real question this book will leave us with is: Are we ready to embrace tomorrow?
It also encourages us not to allow the setbacks to discourage us off from striving for the horizon.
What this pick-and-mix collection, full of colourful examples, teaches us is that ignorance of technology is no longer an option.
Knowledge can ensure fad-resistant solutions driven by needs; it can defeat technostress and can help us grasp that ever-changing definition of success.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian BMA Library Email: lcoelho@bma.org.uk Web site: http://www.bma.org.uk/library Return to top Article Title: "Information Tomorrow: Reflections on Technology and the Future of Public and Academic Libraries" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Preservation Planning: Principles, Examples and the Future With Planets Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Preservation Planning: Principles, Examples and the Future With Planets Buzz data software framework usability archives metadata identifier preservation jpeg e-learning research Citation BibTex RIS Frances Boyle and Jane Humphreys report on the one-day workshop on digital preservation planning jointly organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and Planets held at the British Library, on Tuesday 29 July 2008.
The aim of this one-day event was to provide an informal, interactive workshop that allowed delegates to share knowledge and experience in digital preservation planning, strategy and policy setting and of Planets [1] tools and technology.
The event was an opportunity for DPC [2] members as well as other organisations with an interest in digital preservation to learn about the approach of colleagues some way down the road with the process and to share experiences and learn about the tools and services which are being developed by Planets to support the process.
A mix of presentations, exercises and discussion faciliated the sharing of challenges and solutions.
Ahead of the event, delegates were sent a questionnaire and some pre-workshop reading.
The outcomes of the questionnaire will be used to inform both projects.
Scene Setting and Overview of the Day Frances Boyle, DPC Called upon to present at the last minute, I had not planned on delivering opening comments and chairing at the same time!
This session considered the reasons for planning to preserve digital content.
Key messages were: Planning is the cornerstone of preserving digital objects Planning should take into account the needs of an organisation, its collections and users Planning is an extension of local business strategies and priorities (IT, teaching and learning etc.)
The process of preservation planning should be driven by an organisation’s needs and priorities rather than technology The detail of the black art of preservation planning would be dealt with in the following presentations.
An Introduction to Planets Andreas Rauber, Vienna University of Technology In the opening session, Andreas Rauber explained that while Planets aims to provide a technological and architectural solution to the process of preserving digital content, at the heart of it, it takes account of the needs of a wide range of European cultural heritage institutions.
Planets is a four-year EC-funded project with the aim of assuring long-term acccess to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.
Its technology platform and suite of tools and services will help to automate and execute digital preservation processes and aid the decision-making process.
Planets will provide a framework that will help people engaged in digital preservation to answer practical questions such as: What are the organisational, users’ and content needs now and in the future?
What strategies are available and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each?
How do we test and evaluate a range of potential solutions?
Why has a decision been taken?
Planets will extend the already established and trusted decision-making tools that support archiving and access in the analogue world.
This outline which highlighted preservation planning as a process that supports decisions to meet the local needs of an organisation and its collections was a theme that resonated with the practical concerns of the audience.
Roof-top view of the British Library, photo courtesy of Clive Sherlock.
Constructing a Preservation Policy:The Case of the UK Data Archive Matthew Woollard, UK Data Archive This presentation was the first of the case studies from organisations which were actively engaged in digital preservation.
This was an insightful and measured talk which outlined the work of the UK Data Archive (UKDA) and raised some fundamental questions about preservation planning pertinent to all organisations a ‘joined-up’ organisation.
The UKDA is a mature service that has had a preservation policy in place for some time.
A recent and refreshingly probing review considered whether current policies and practice based on archival considerations and the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) framwork [3] were the most suitable.
The review recognised that change would inevitably affect other policies.
UKDA identified the OAIS framework statement that should ensure ‘that the information to be preserved is independently understandable to the designated community’ That is without the need for the experts who produced the information in the first place.
Preservation plans must be tailored to the needs and means of the communities they serve.
Matthew highlighted familiar tensions between the tenets of sound archical practice: authenticity, integrity, reliability and that other Holy Grail – usability.
He drew on the example of a 1970s social science survey stored on punched cards and how that data could be interpreted and rendered usable 30 years later.
A wide range of external influences on UKDA’s planning processes were detailed.
They included standards (BS ISO 15489), legal issues, information security (BS ISO 27001, 27002), the policies and guidelines of other agencies.
In his conclusion he pointed to the exemplars of good practice and existing tools within the community that make the development of local policies possible and to the fact that we are now at a juncture where words must be backed up with action.
The lifecycle approach taken by UKDA has resulted in changes to some of its policies.
They include monitoring of assessment, preservation of resource discovery metadata, verification of Archival Information Packages (AIPs), improved data management and edition control of implemented changes.
Going Digital: The Case of the Wellcome Library Natalie Walters, Wellcome Library Natalie offered a second glimpse at how practitioners in the real world must deal with the management of digital assets.
She also shared interesting points about the Wellcome Institute and the ambitions of the archive sector [4].
The Wellcome Library already deals with digital material, which is reflected in the Library’s digital strategy.
The changing profile of the Library’s collections has resulted in a digital curatorial post.
Its role is to adapt current archival practice to suit digital needs and provide support on technical issues to colleagues.
Other archival staff are being trained to meet these new challenges.
The ‘Digital Continuity in Action’ Project addresses issues related to the transition to the digital arena including: adapting archival practice, outreach and support work for their donor community and new digital curation pages on the Wellcome Library’s Web site.
This year, the Library issued an Invitation to Tender for a digital preservation system.
It is a process other institutions in the audience may well be contemplating.
Natalie highlighted a fundamental difference in understanding and expectations between customer and vendor, based on the disparity in terminology used and a lack both of consensus on how to approach the subject and indeed of an understanding of the needs.
The responses received suggested a fundamental choice needed to be made between either the ability to access content or to preserve it.
Negotiations continue with one prefered vendor of the five.
The audience’s interest in Natalie’s comments was reflected in their subsequent questions.
The Wellcome Library is following a pragmatic approach based on sound archival practice.
It is not waiting on a perfect solution, just working towards one that will be good enough to meet key requirements.
However, Natalie concluded with a word of warning: the digital world is far less forgiving than that of print!
Preservation Planning (Part 1): Workflow and the Plato Tool Christoph Becker, Vienna University of Technology And so to tools that may provide practical support with implementation.
Christoph Becker opened the main Planets sessions with an outline of the principles behind and an introduction to the preservation planning tool, Plato [5], and how practitioners may apply them.
Starting with thoughts about organisations’ needs Christoph outlined considerations such as: Why are we in this place?
Are there legal constraints?
What type of growth rate do we expect from this collection?
What influences should we consider?
How will users access material?
Add to this a contextual layer which examines the interests of a range of stakeholders – domain experts, content creators, IT staff, administrators whose needs must also be taken into account.
The result is a mind-map [6] not oblique doodlings as may have first been thought by the gathered throng but a decision tree whether constructed in the digital world of Plato or the analogue world of post-it notes.
He went on to review stages in the workflow: define the requirements; identify and assess possible actions; analyse results; create the plan.
Plato (short for Planning Tool) is the Planets tool that has been developed to automate the process.
To conclude the session, Christoph considered the example of Web archiving using Plato to create a decision-tree.
Preservation Planning (Part 2): Simulation and Practical Exercise Andreas Rauber & Christoph Becker, Vienna University of Technology Note to readers (and self!
): take from this a tip on event management from yours truly.
It is unwise to split a session across lunch.
Lunch-time is a long time after a demanding morning and full and frank discussions with colleagues whilst partaking of culinary delights.
This session should have been run after lunch.
It should have been longer.
And, it should have been delivered in a classroom or laborabory where software could be downloaded in advance.
And, there should have been a reprieve or some cue cards provided for the delegates prior to them getting up close and personal with the software.
Still, this session proved to delegates one of the highlights of the workshop.
After a little to-ing and fro-ing we had the opportunity to sample – if only briefly – practical tools that may make digital preservation a reality.
There were four preservation scenarios: Word document in a governmental archive Word documents in an enterprise archive Word documents in an e-Learning environment Powerpoint presentations in an e-Learning environment Delegates worked in small groups – and engaged in lively discussion – to consider the assumptions and decisions that should be made to support preservation of a particular collection and for a particular organisation.
Practical Session Roundup Christoph Becker, Vienna University of Technology This session was a demonstration of the Plato tool, which would be the next logical step after the creation of objective trees in the earlier session.
Christoph concluded the session by outlining the roadmap of steps which should be followed: Workflow-defining and creating.
Objective tree templates going through the methodical step-by-step exercise to frame the issues.
Characterisation of the collection e.g.
format identification, risk assessment, object comparisons.
Discovering applicable actions.
Building a preservation plan.
A revised version of the Plato tool is scheduled for October 2008.
Characterisation Manfred Thaller, University of Cologne Characterisation is a complex subject which Manfred reduced to one sentence.
Deciding that his plane ticket and the assembled audience merited a few more words he continued on an entertaining and illuminating journey.
What is a file format?
Why do we need to know about file formats?
Which format should we choose (with reference to the work of the Florida Center for Library Automation [7])?
How do we identify file formats?
(Through file extensions or internal characteristics.)
Plus Automating file recognition by drawing on established format registries.
Beginning with what appeared to be trivial changes to a simple jpeg image file, he highlighted the resulting damage.
He then walked through a set of scenarios to identify the most appropriate format to use to preserve content for a simple Word document with a footnote.
Outcomes conflicted, depending on whether the focus was on the rendering or the structure of the documents.
The prescient message was: characterising digital objects will never be viable if conducted manually.
It can only be realised if automated to a point where the process can be condensed from months or years to seconds.
Sensitive and confidential documents remain a challenge.
Testbed: A Walk-through Matthew Barr, HATII, University of Glasgow Matthew started the presentation with a definition of what a testbed was which was useful to the non-technical members of the audience.
‘A controlled environment for experimentation and evaluation, with metrics and benchmark content that allow comparison of tools and strategies’ Matthew provided an overview of the Planets testbed a key component in relation to identifying appropriate strategies and actions to preserve formats with particular characteristics.
Incorporating a testbed into Planets supports digital preservation decisions.
The testbed provides facts about the utility of tools and services regardless of institutional setting.
He outlined how the testbed fitted into the Planets architecture as part of the characterisation activity stream.
A key reason for adopting the testbed approach would be to avoid duplication of effort amongst partners, to share results and to ensure a common understanding amongst the players.
All of which are particularly pertinent in the area of preservation planning where there is still a requirement for a dedicated research environment to allow systematic execution of experiments by the participating partners.
Planets’ testbed was released in prototype in September 2007 and throughout Planets in March 2008.
The current iteration (v0.6-07/08) includes file format converters, migration services, simple characterisations and an image identification service.
Software can be downloaded [8].
There followed a walk-through of the testbed and the routes and decisions a user could follow.
The testbed will be open to external institutions to run experiments from April 2009.
Interactive Discussion Session Professor Kevin Shürer, UKDA And so over to the audience.
This session invited the audience to ask questions relating to the needs within their organisations.
To close the day, the delegates determined a number of issues that needed resolution: Strong messages enabling those in the front-line to convince managers within their organisations of the need to invest in preservation of digital content Continued learning in the digital realm from the archival tradition A solution to how Planets will support the challenges of legal admissibility of records A convincing sustainable business model for Planets which will extend and promote the value of the project’s work beyond its lifespan Education about, and involvement of, developers outside the project in Planets The final part of the day was an opportunity for debate and discussion between the presenters and the audience.
The session was ably led by Kevin Shürer.
After much lively debate and exchange Kevin wrapped up by asking the delegates what were the key messages they would like the Planets’ team to take away from the day.
A recurrent theme throughout the discussions was sustainability and ongoing support for Planets once the project finishes.
Conclusion Did the workshop meet its aims?
Feedback says: substantially yes.
There was a high degree of interaction.
There was consideration of policy and strategy.
There was some – if limited – experience of tools.
And a sense that solutions are begining to be developed.
But, there is also, among those closest to the problem, a keenness to understand best practice and anticipation of tools to support the process.
It will be interesting to revisit the topic in a year’s time and to gauge how far those tools have been developed, in particular with regard to some of the questions raised in the discussion session.
We hope that another event will follow in Spring 2009 – so watch this space – well, a DPC or Planets space!
Please note that all the presentations are available at the DPC Web site [9].
References Planets Web site http://www.planets-project.eu/ Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Web site http://www.dpconline.org OAIS on the ISO Web site http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=24683 Natalie Walter’s presentation on the DPC Web site http://www.dpconline.org/docs/events/080729walters.pdf Strodl, S., Becker, C., Neumayer, R., Rauber, A.
“How to Chose a Digital Preservation Strategy: Evaluating a Preservation Planning Procedure”, http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~strodl/paper/FP060-strodl.pdf Free Mind software http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Florida Digital Archive Web site http://www.fcla.edu/digitalArchive/pdfs/recFormats.pdf Testbed software http://gforge.planets-project.eu/gf/project/ptb Digital Preservation Planning: Principles, Examples and the Future with Planets, July 2008 Workshop http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/080729PlanetsBriefing.html Author Details Frances Boyle Executive Director Digital Preservation Coalition Email: fb@dpconline.org Web site: http://www.dpconline.org Jane Humphreys Planets Communication Officer The British Library Email: jane.humphreys@bl.uk Web site: http://www.planets-project.eu/ Return to top Article Title: “Digital Preservation Planning: Principles, Examples and the Future with Planets” Author: Frances Boyle and Jane Humphreys Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/dpc-planets-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Newsline Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Newsline Buzz data software framework wiki html dissemination rss xml portal usability infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility tagging identifier blog repositories eprints copyright preservation graphics windows linux visualisation e-learning photoshop personalisation ebook soa curation dspace microformats mashup e-science e-research authentication interoperability foi privacy intranet taxonomy research bibliometrics Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
TASI Workshops in November & December There are currently places available on the following Nov/Dec workshops: 14 November 2007: Image Capture Level 3, Bristol 15 November 2007: Introduction to Image Metadata, Bristol 23 November 2007: Image Optimisation Correcting and Preparing Images, Bristol 30 November 2007: Building a Departmental Image Collection, Bristol 4 December 2007: Colour Management, Bristol 13 December 2007: Photoshop Level 1, Bristol 14 December 2007: Photoshop Level 2, Bristol Full details of these and all TASI workshops are available from the Training page http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html or: You can now receive news of forthcoming TASI workshops by subscribing to the new RSS feed: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/rss.html Back to headlines JIBS Workshop: ‘Is Library 2.0 a Trivial Pursuit?’ 21 November 2007 Diskus Centre, London http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/web2.0/ This question will be addressed by a JIBS workshop to be held in London on Wednesday 21 November.
Speakers will review what Library 2.0 means and will present case studies of Library 2.0 developments in their libraries.
The day will conclude with a debate on the proposition put forward in the workshop title, in which Internet consultant Phil Bradley (a regular contributor to Ariadne on search engines) will take part.
The workshop is free to those whose institutions are members of JIBS; for others, there is a fee of £50.
For more details and a booking form, go to: http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/web2.0/ Back to headlines Joint DCC and SCRIPTed Workshop Legal Environment of Digital Curation 23 November 2007 University of Glasgow http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/legal-env-dig-cur-2007/ The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and SCRIPTed online journal have announced that they will be delivering a joint one-day workshop.
This event will take place at the University of Glasgow on Friday 23 November 2007 and will provide a useful overview of legal considerations for non-legal professionals who work with data.
The day will consist of talks by experts in the areas of: Intellectual property rights and licensing Data protection, freedom of information and privacy Data as evidence This will be followed in the afternoon by group discussion in each of the above areas.
Intended Audience: The intended audience for this event are people who: share data manage data for others need to preserve data are setting up institutional repositories for data manage collaborations depending on data Programme: To view the programme for this event, please see http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/legal-env-dig-cur-2007/Legal_Programme_2007.pdf Venue: This event will take place in Charles Wilson Building, University of Glasgow.
This is building E15 on the following map: http://www.gla.ac.uk/about/locationmapsandtravel/mapsandtravel/campusmap/ Registration: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/legal-env-dig-cur-2007/register Registration fees are £30 for DCC Associates Network members and £60 for non-members.
Membership of the DCC Associates Network is FREE!
For more information on becoming a member, see our Associates Network page at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/associates/ Back to headlines DCC/DPE/DRIVER/Nestor Joint Workshop Practices and Challenges in Preservation and Access for Scientific and Scholarly Digital Repositories 27-28 November 2007 Campus Adlershof, Humboldt University Berlin http://www.wepreserve.eu/events/dr-2007/ The Digital Curation Centre (DCC), Digital Preservation Europe (DPE), Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER), and Network of Expertise in Long-Term Storage of Digital Resources (nestor) announce they will be delivering a joint workshop on the long-term curation of scientific and scholarly digital repository content.
This event will be held over one and a half days at the Campus Adlershof, Humboldt University in Berlin on 27-28 November 2007.
This event is being organised as a follow-up to the 2005 DCC workshop on long-term curation within digital repositories which was held in Cambridge, UK.
Scientific and scholarly content such as articles and data are increasingly deposited in institutional and subject-based repositories.
These developments pose practical, conceptual and organisational challenges for accessing these contents now and in a future-proof manner.
The long-term survival, value and usability of the information stored within digital repositories depends on numerous criteria such as the formats selected for storage, the capture of associated metadata, proactive preservation measures, and the perceived trust in the repository itself.
This workshop will highlight current practices and shall provide insights into current initiatives and technical systems being developed.
Format The workshop will be delivered over six sessions and will cover the following areas: Technical Infrastructure and Social Support Frameworks Selection, Appraisal, Ingest and Description Operational Activity within the Repository Preservation Activity within the Repository Discovery and Access Quality Control, Self-audit and Certification Each session will be chaired by a leading expert on the topic.
The chair will begin the session by placing the topic in the context of digital curation and provide references to international efforts in the area.
Following this introduction, each presentations will highlight specific tools, practical approaches and emerging standards.
Each session will conclude with an open question period which will be moderated by the session chair.
Key themes include: Tools to help select, appraise and ingest information into digital repositories Description techniques that may help to ensure the long-term usability of digital information including the automation of metadata capture Overview of preservation activities being undertaken internationally and also practical applications of preservation processes Making certification of repositories meaningful and effective Back to headlines ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 13th International Conference on Technology Supported Learning and Training 28-30 November 2007 Hotel InterContinental Berlin, Budapester Str.
2, D-10787 Berlin, Germany http://www.online-educa.com This conference aims to meet the networking needs of the international e-learning and distance education industry.
It is a major event for strategists and practitioners from all over the world.
Participants of the conference are high-level decision makers from education, business and government sectors.
The conference is accompanied by an exhibition.
Further information: Organiser: ICWE GmbH Leibnizstr.
32, D-10625 Berlin Germany Tel.
: +49-30-310 18 18 0 Fax: +49-30-324 9833 Contact: Rebecca Stromeyer Email: info@online-educa.com Back to headlines 3rd International DCC Conference Registration is now open for the 3rd International Digital Curation Conference on 11-13 December 2007.
“Curating our Digital Scientific Heritage:a Global Collaborative Challenge” will focus on emerging strategy, policy implementation, leading-edge research and practitioner experience.
Keynote speakers include: Professor Carol Goble, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester Rick Luce, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at Robert Woodruff Library, Emory University Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Professor John Wood, Principal, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2007/ Back to headlines UKeiG Course: Information Law for Information Professionals What you need to know about Copyright, Data Protection, Freedom of Information and Accessibility and Disability Discrimination Laws 19 February 2008, 9.30-16.30 CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE Course Outline In particular, four key legal areas currently affect the work of many information professionals in the digital environment copyright, data protection, freedom of information, and disability discrimination and accessibility.
This one-day introductory course will chart a path through the complexities of these subjects.
Each area will be succinctly overviewed and the key aspects of the legal regime and requirements in each area will be outlined and explained.
Delegates will be taken step-by-step through the fundamentals of each area.
An understanding of each topic will be illuminated by real-life examples or scenarios explaining the application of the laws in a wide range of contexts.
The day will also highlight the inter-relationships between each of these important areas of information law.
There will be opportunities for discussion and exchanges of experience.
The day will close with a presentation on how to manage actively legal compliance in these areas in an institutional or organisational context.
The sessions will include: Copyright: everything the information professional needs to know Copyright in action: scenarios and key issues in copyright in an electronic context Data protection: overview of the data protection regime for information professionals Data protection in action: specific issues in information, publishing and library contexts Freedom of information: outline of UK freedom of information laws (including Scotland) Freedom of information in action: compliance and making it work for information professionals Accessibility and disability discrimination law: overview of the legal regime Accessibility in action: key issues in provision of digital information and services to users Managing compliance with information laws in your organisation Within each area a wide range of topics/problems will be used to shed light on the problems faced by information professionals, or how the laws can be used by them in appropriate contexts.
The course will be led by presentations but will include real-life problems and scenarios for discussion, and plenty of opportunity for questions and answers.
Course Presenter Laurence Bebbington is Law Librarian and Information Services Copyright Officer at the University of Nottingham.
Costs (including lunch and refreshments): UKeiG members £130 + VAT (£152.75); others £160 + VAT (£188.00) Contact: Christine Baker Piglet Cottage Redmire Leyburn North Yorkshire DL8 4EH .
Tel & Fax: 01969 625751 Email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk Back to headlines UKeiG Training and Seminar Programme for 2008 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ The UKeiG training and seminar programme for 2008 is designed to reflect the needs of all those involved with managing electronic information resources in the public as well as private sector.
The programme covers the general management of e-resources as well as exploring specific types of electronic information.
Bookings are open for the following meetings: March Image Management, Roger Mills, Oxford March Web 2.0, Phil Bradley, London April Business Information, Karen Blakeman, London April RSS, Blogs and Wikis: Tools for dissemination, collaboration and information gathering, Karen Blakeman, Manchester May Google and Beyond, Karen Blakeman, Liverpool Plus regular Intranet Forum meetings for UKeiG members Other meetings planned for 2008 include: Developing and managing e-book collections Metadata and taxonomy Virtual Rules OK: Developing a Policy for the Digital Collection Information literacy E-updates for subject specialists including: Engineering and Biomedicine Intranets Copyright: introductory and Advanced courses For further information please contact: Christine Baker Piglet Cottage Redmire Leyburn North Yorkshire DL8 4EH .
Tel & Fax: 01969 625751 Email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk Back to headlines Open Repositories 2008 1-4 April 2008 University of Southampton, UK http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Repositories are being deployed in a variety of settings (research, scholarship, learning, science, cultural heritage) and across a range of scales (subject, national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal).
The aim of this conference is to address the technical, managerial, practical and theoretical issues that arise from diverse applications of repositories in the increasingly pervasive information environment.
A programme of papers, panel discussions, poster presentations, workshops, tutorials and developer coding sessions will bring together all the key stakeholders in the field.
Open source software community meetings for the major platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) will also provide opportunities to advance and co-ordinate the development of repository installations across the world.
Developers, researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers describing novel experiences or developments in the construction and use of repositories.
Submissions of up to 4 pages in length are requested in PDF or HTML format.
Submissions for panel discussions are also requested.
Important dates and contact information: Submission Deadline: Friday 7th December 2007 Notification of Acceptance: Monday January 21st 2008 Submission of DSpace/EPrints/Fedora User Group Presentations: t.b.a.
Conference: April 1-4, 2008.
University of Southampton, UK.
Enquiries to: Program Committee Chair (e.lyon– ukoln.ac.uk) or General Chair (lac – ecs.soton.ac.uk) Conference Themes: The themes of the conference include the following: Transformational change in the knowledge workplace Embedding repositories in business processes and individual workflow.
Change Management Advocacy and Culture Change Policy development and policy lag.
Professionalism and practice Professional Development Workforce Capacity Skills and Training Roles and Responsibilities Sustainability Economic sustainability and new business models, Technical sustainability of a repository over time, including platform change and migration.
Technical sustainability of holdings over time.
Preservation.
Audit, certification.
Trust.
Assessment tools.
Managing sustainability failure when a repository outlives its organisation or its organisational commitment.
Legal issues Embargoes Licensing and Digital Rights Management Mandates Overcoming legislative barriers Contractual relationships facilitating and monitoring International and cross-border issues Successful interoperability Content standards discipline-specific vs general Metadata standards and application profiles Quality standards and quality control processes Achieving interchange in multi-disciplinary or multi-institutional environments Semantic web and linked data Identifier management for data and real world resources Access and authentication Models, architectures and frameworks Beyond OAIS Federations Institutional Models uberor multi-repository environments Adapting to changing e-infrastructure: SOA, services, cloud computing Scalability Value chains and scholarly communications Multi-stakeholder value: preservation, open access, research, management, admninistration Multi-agenda, multi-function, multi-purpose repositories Usefulness and usability Reference, reuse, reanalysis and repurposing of content Citation of data / learning objects Changes in scholarly practice New benchmarks for scholarly success Repository metrics Bibliometrics: usage and impact Services built on repositories OAI services User-oriented services Mashups Social networking Commentary / tagging Searching / information discovery Alerting Mining Visualisation Integration with Second life and Virtual environments Use cases for repositories E-research/E-science (e.g., data and publication; collaborative services) E-scholarship Institutional repositories Discipline-oriented repositories Scholarly Publishing Digital Library Cultural Heritage Scientific repositories / data repositories Interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral repositories Back to headlines Digital Futures: From Digitization to Delivery 7 11 April 2008 King’s College London http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/ King’s College London is pleased to announce the Digital Futures 5-day training event for 2008.
Led by experts, Digital Futures focuses on the development, delivery and preservation of digital resources from cultural and memory institutions.
Digital Futures is designed for managers and other practitioners from the library, museum, heritage and cultural sectors looking to understand the strategic and management issues of developing digital resources from digitisation to delivery.
Digital Futures will cover the following core areas: Planning and management Fund raising and sustainability Copyright and IPR Visual and image based resource development and delivery Metadata introduction and implementation Implementing digital resources Digital preservation There will be visits to 2 institutions, which have previously included the National Gallery, the National Archives and the Imperial War Museum.
The agenda: http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/digiprog.htm Digital Futures aims for no more than 25-30 delegates and every delegate will have the opportunity to also spend one-to-one time with a Digital Futures leader to discuss issues specific to them.
Digital Futures will issue a certificate of achievement to each delegate.
The Digital Futures leaders are: Simon Tanner, Director of King’s Digital Consultancy Services, King’s College London and Tom Clareson, Program Director for New Initiatives, PALINET, USA.
Other experts will be invited to speak in their areas of expertise.
Cost: £770 (VAT not charged, excludes accommodation) To register, go to: http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/digireg.htm Back to headlines ELPUB 2008 Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing 25 to 27 June 2008 Toronto, Canada http://www.elpub.net Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes.
Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance.
The ELPUB 2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences, and new dissemination channels and business models.
The conference welcomes a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications.
Topics include but are not restricted to: New Publishing models, tools, services and roles New scholarly constructs and discourse methods Innovative business models for scholarly publishing Multilingual and multimodal interfaces Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content Content search, analysis and retrieval Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery Personalisation technologies (e.g.
social tagging, folksonomies, RSS, microformats) Metadata creation, usage and interoperability Semantic web issues Data mining, text harvesting, and dynamic formatting User generated content and its relation to publisher’s content Usage and citation impact Security, privacy and copyright issues Digital preservation, content authentication Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards Key Dates: January 20th 2008: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories) February 28, 2008: Authors will be notified of the acceptance of submitted papers and workshop proposals.
April 11th, 2008: Final papers must be received.
See website for detailed author instructions.
Back to headlines {C}{C}{C}{C} New OCLC Study on Social Networking and Privacy on the Web OCLC has released the third in a series of reports that scan the information landscape to provide data, analyses and opinions about users’ behaviours and expectations in today’s networked world.
The report, entitled Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World explores social spaces online, and where the library might fit in the new social framework.
It examines four primary areas: Web user practices and preferences on their favourite social sites User attitudes about sharing and receiving information on social spaces, commercial sites and library sites Information privacy; what matters and what doesn’t U.S. librarian social networking practices and preferences; their views on privacy, policy and social networks for libraries Over 6,100 respondents, ages 14 to 84, from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, were surveyed.
The surveys were conducted in English, German, French and Japanese.
382 U.S. library directors were also surveyed.
Among the report highlights: The Internet is familiar territory.
89% of respondents have been online for four years or more and nearly a quarter have been using the Internet for more than 10 years.
The Web community has migrated from using the Internet to building it the Internet’s readers are rapidly becoming its authors.
More than a quarter of the general public respondents currently participate on some type of social media or social networking site; half of college students use social sites.
On social networking sites, 39 % have shared information about a book they have read, 57 percent have shared photos/videos and 14 % have shared self-published information.
Over half of respondents surveyed feel their personal information on the Internet is kept as private, or more private, than it was two years ago.
Online trust increases with usage.
70% of social networking users indicate they always, often or sometimes trust who they communicate with on social networking sites.
Respondents do not distinguish library Web sites as more private than other sites they are using.
13% of the public feels it is the role of the library to create a social networking site for their communities.
Cathy De Rosa, Global Vice President of Marketing, OCLC, and principal contributor to the report said she hoped the new report would spark discussion and interest in libraries and among library professionals.
Ms. De Rosa will be speaking about the study and its findings at a symposium at London Online which OCLC is hosting for the first time outside the US.
For further information see: http://www.oclc.org/info/londononline/ Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World is available for download free of charge at http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/ Print copies of the 280-page report are also available for purchase from the same site.
[Source: OCLC] [Received: October 2007] Back to headlines Workforce Skills Scheme to Boost Archive Services The successful applicants for three innovative nationwide schemes, designed to develop vital workforce skills as part of the Action for Archives Programme, have been announced by the MLA Council.
The three programmes are: The Fundraising Mentor Scheme: This scheme is running in London, the West Midlands and the South West enables participants to develop the essential skills and organisational focus to implement a sustainable fundraising strategy.
This is key in a sector which has previously been hesitant to approach external bodies for funding for new and innovative projects Strategic Planning and Influencing: This programme will provide eight places in the East of England, North East, South East and Yorkshire.
Workforce development in the field of strategic planning and the ability to influence decision-making has long been a key tool in the building of a successful organisation.
The programme will use a combined approach of mentoring, e-learning and group activities The Young Cultural Creators Programme: This programme develops the skills of archive professionals to appreciate and interpret the material in their unique collections.
Working with artists, authors and other creative practitioners on a scheme which has already resulted in a successful programme in the London region, the consultants will work in the East Midlands and North West to develop the skills and confidence required to construct and deliver sustainable learning programmes with children and their teachers.
For a full list of successful applicants, please see: http://www.mla.gov.uk/website/programmes/action_for_archives/intro/ [Source: MLA] [Received: October 2007] Back to headlines DataShare State-of-the-Art Review on Data Sharing As part of the JISC-funded DISC-UK DataShare Project in the UK, a State-of-the-Art Review has been written, marking out the current scene on data sharing at the beginning of the project.
While the report is UK-focused, it may be of wider interest, and has a very thorough bibliography.
DISC-UK is a UK consortium of data support professionals working in departments and academic libraries in universities (Data Information Specialists Committee-United Kingdom).
The project is about working with academics and institutional repository managers at the four partner institutions to provide exemplars for sharing research data within institutional repositories (based on EPrints.org, DSpace and Fedora software).
Deliverables so far: DISC-UK DataShare: State-of-the-Art Review http://www.disc-uk.org/docs/state-of-the-art-review.pdf by Harry Gibbs Data Sharing Continuum http://www.disc-uk.org/docs/data_sharing_continuum.pdf by Robin Rice Feedback on these very welcome.
More deliverables will be added as the project continues, at http://www.disc-uk.org/deliverables.html The project also maintains social bookmarks on this topic at http://faves.com/users/DataShare Background to the Project: The project’s overall aim is to contribute to new models, workflows and tools for academic data sharing within a complex and dynamic information environment which includes increased emphasis on stewardship of institutional knowledge assets of all types; new technologies to enhance e-Research; new research council policies and mandates; and the growth of the Open Access / Open Data movement.
Objectives: Build capacity of institutional repositories in UKHE to respond to the unique requirements of research datasets as a new ‘document type’ Use a range of open source software repository solutions Eprints, DSpace, Fedora to provide exemplars and add-on tools for managing datasets as institutional repository items Produce and disseminate findings in cooperation with the Repositories Support Project (RSP) and the Repositories Research Team (RRT) to inform library and repository managers about the organisational and technical issues associated with the deposit of research data Work with the RSP, Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and others to identify training needs and solutions for increasing skills of information professionals in UKHE for managing research data.
For further information see http://www.disc-uk.org/datashare.html [Source: DISC-UK DataShare Project] [Received: October 2007] Back to headlines Dioscuri: The Emulator for Digital Preservation The Koninklijke Bibliotheek national library of the Netherlands and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands have announced the world’s first modular emulator designed for digital preservation: Dioscuri.
Dioscuri is capable of emulating an Intel 8086-based computer platform with support for VGA-graphics, screen, keyboard, and storage devices like a virtual floppy drive and hard drive.
With these components Dioscuri successfully runs 16-bit operating systems like MS-DOS and applications such as WordPerfect 5.1, DrawPerfect 1.1 and Norton Commander.
Furthermore, it is capable of running many nostalgic DOS-games and a simple Linux kernel.
And when you finally open your long-forgotten WP5.1-files you can extract the text from the emulated environment into your current working environment using a simple clipboard-feature.
Designed for digital preservation: Dioscuri is built on top of a virtual layer, called a virtual machine (VM) thereby reducing dependence on the actual hardware and software it runs on.
This approach offers better portability to other platforms, which ensures longevity when a platform fails to survive over time.
Flexibility is gained by a component-based architecture.
Each component, or module, imitates the functionality of a particular hardware component (i.e.
processor, memory, hard disk, etc.).
By combining these modules any computer emulation can be created.
Configuring Dioscuri is done by a user-friendly graphical interface which stores the settings in an XML file.
Next steps are already in progress.
Since July 2007 development of Dioscuri has continued under the umbrella of the European project Planets.
Future work will consist of extending Dioscuri with more components to emulate newer x86 computers (286, 386, 486 and Pentium) which will make Dioscuri capable of running operating systems like MS Windows 95/98/2000/XP and Linux Ubuntu.
Dioscuri version 0.2.0 is now available as open source software for any institution or individual wishing to see their old digital documents again.
Download Dioscuri from: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net Mailing list and contact: If you would like to be kept up to date about new developments of Dioscuri, please register for the Dioscuri news mailing list: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dioscuri-news To get in touch with the project team, please contact: Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands Remco Verdegem, project manager Dioscuri: Email: remco.verdegem@nationaalarchief.nl Koninklijke Bibliotheek Jeffrey van der Hoeven, co-developer and tester: Email: jeffrey.vanderhoeven@kb.nl Tessella Support Service plc Bill Roberts, coordinator Development Team Email: bill.roberts@tessella.com [Source: Koninklijke Bibliotheek Netherlands National Library] [Received: October 2007] Back to headlines Digital Lives Research Project The Web pages and blog of the Digital Lives Research Project have gone live on the British Library Web site.
The Digital Lives Project is designed to provide a major pathfinding study of personal digital collections.
The project team drawn from the British Library, University College London and University of Bristol is led by Neil Beagrie of the British Library (the lead partner) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
The research for Digital Lives commenced in September 2007 and will run for 18 months to March 2009.
Outcomes from research are expected to be of significant interest within the Arts and Humanities and the libraries, archives, and information sector.
It will also be of potential interest to researchers exploring applications of digital memory in other areas such as health and ageing populations and for individuals who wish to manage their own personal digital collections for family history or other purposes.
The Web pages provide access to further information on the project, the latest project news and developments via the Blog, and publications and other research outputs from the project as they are finalised and released.
You can subscribe to feeds from the Blog to keep up to date with developments in the project and related initiatives worldwide.
If you are undertaking similar or related research we will be very pleased to hear from you and exchange information.
Further information: Digital Lives http://www.bl.uk/digital-lives/ Contact: Neil Beagrie The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB Email: neil.beagrie@bl.uk [Source: British Library] [Received: October 2007] Back to headlines Love Libraries Award Winner Get It Loud in Libraries, the groundbreaking project from Lancaster Library has won the Love Libraries Award 2007, beating off tough competition from four rivals in a public vote.
The Love Libraries Award, run by Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) celebrates the work library services do to inspire teenagers and young people under the age of 25.
Lancaster Library is breathing new life into the service, with some of the latest bands performing exclusive gigs in the library and bringing in diverse crowds.
Representatives from each of the five finalist projects attended an awards ceremony at the British Library in London on 3 October 2007, where the results of the public vote were announced by Roy Clare CBE, Chief Executive, MLA Partnership.
Lancaster Library was awarded a trophy and £2,000 towards its project.
[Source: MLA] [Received: October 2007] Back to headlines Laying the Foundations for the European Digital Library A project has begun to bring the European heritage online through a single portal.
Seventy senior managers and technical experts from museums, archives, audio-visual collections and libraries across Europe came together to plan the European Digital Library.
The meeting took place at the National Library of the Netherlands.
The initiative stems from the call by Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media to ‘make the wealth of material in Europe’s libraries, museums and archives accessible to all’.
This reflects growing user interest in major digitisation projects that are creating large-scale online heritage resources.
However, this is the first initiative to focus on providing a multilingual interface to digital artefacts, texts and media from across the European heritage.
Such collaboration between the archival, library, audio-visual and museum domains on this scale is a significant new move.
Claudia Dillmann, director of the Deutsches Filminstitut and President of the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes said ‘We recognise that researchers and people learning about European history and culture need to explore all sorts of media, including films, sounds, photos and papers.
Their expectation of the internet is that it can give them integrated access to all these things.
It’s vital that the different domains work together to collaborate on the technical solutions to enable research across different media.’ The project the European Digital Library network (EDLnet) runs for two years, and will develop a prototype that demonstrates proof of concept, bringing together content from some of Europe’s major cultural organisations.
The project will be run by The European Library together with the National Library of the Netherlands.
The project will look at the political, human, technical and semantic issues that will contribute to the creation of an interoperable system able to access fully digitised content.
It will invite feedback from different types of users in order to create a service that enriches the widest public and answers the needs of researchers, students, teachers and the creative industries.
Further information: EDLnet http://www.europeandigitallibrary.eu/edlnet/ [Source: The European Library] [Received: October 2007] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Preservation Coalition Forum on Web Archiving Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Preservation Coalition Forum on Web Archiving Buzz data software framework database infrastructure archives browser copyright preservation privacy research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Maureen Pennock and Manjula Patel report on the Digital Preservation Coalition's second Web Archiving Forum which took place at the British Library in London on 12 June 2006.
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) [1] ran its first Web archiving forum in 2002, when archiving the Web was still a relatively unexplored concept for most organisations.
This second Web-archiving forum sought to review and update on national and international activities since then and provided delegates with an excellent opportunity to exchange experiences and identify emerging areas of research and future developments in Web archiving activities.
Session 1: Technical Aspects The first session focused on technical aspects of archiving Web content.
Philip Beresford, Web archiving project manager at the British Library [2], spoke first about the British Library’s involvement with the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) [3] and the first two years of UKWAC activity.
After introducing the aims and objectives of UKWAC, which are focused on the development of collaborative approaches to Web archiving in the UK on a shared infrastructure, Philip was able to identify some of the problems and challenges they have faced in the practical development of the UKWAC archive so far.
Some of these are technical and relate to the harvesting software; others derive from more practical issues such as obtaining written permission from site owners for UKWAC to archive the site and the resource-intensive nature of the process.
Emerging tools, notably the Web-curator tool from the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) [4] and a new version of the harvesting software should help address some of these problems and enable UKWAC to develop its role and approach to collaborative Web-archiving.
Adrian Brown, Head of Digital Preservation at the UK National Archives (TNA) [5], followed with a presentation on collecting and preserving Web content.
As the nature of the Web changes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve: Web sites are no longer discrete entities that can be collected, but are experiences that arise from interaction between the Web-server and the client (i.e.
Web-browser).
These experiences can be defined as either content-driven, or Web-driven.
Archiving on the client side, also known as transactional archiving, thus captures a particular experience while archiving on the server side allows multiple future experiences by capturing the back-end databases.
Server-side archiving potentially allows the most authentic rendition of a Web site but is resource-intensive and may require support for multiple technologies.
After discussing these options in more detail, Adrian went on to cover some of the specific challenges in preserving collected Web sites.
TNA are looking at three key areas of preservation: Preserving the bits (passive preservation) Preserving the record (active preservation) Managing multiple manifestations Adrian identified a number of emerging tools that will assist in meeting the preservation challenge.
Both Web-specific tools, such as LOCKSS [6] and the IIPC toolset, and generic tools, such as the JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment (JHOVE) [7] and the National Archives’ online registry of technical information, PRONOM [8], will have a role to play.
Session 2: Collection Development and Legal Aspects After a break for coffee, John Tuck, Head of British Collections at the British Library, opened the session on collection development and legal aspects.
He introduced the legal deposit framework in the UK and the Legal Deposit Libraries Act (2003) [9], then focused on the British Library’s Collection Development Policy [10] with regards to Web archiving.
Given the huge scale and dynamic nature of the Web, it is considered neither feasible nor affordable to attempt to capture the entire UK domain.
Activities are therefore concentrated on taking a complete annual snapshot of the UK Web presence, and archiving more frequently a limited number of sites judged to be of research value both now and for the future.
Barriers to progress in achieving these activities include the permissions process identified earlier by Philip Beresford, and the speed of Web archiving tools and technologies in relation to the speed of Web site development.
The last presentation of the morning was given by Andrew Charlesworth, Director of the Centre for IT and Law (CITL) [11] at the University of Bristol, who revisited some of the legal issues identified in the DPC’s first forum in Web-archiving back in 2002.
He noted that although legislation had changed little in the past three years, people were certainly more aware of the potential value of information posted to the Internet and the detrimental effect Web archives may have upon the value of that material.
Digital works and rights-holders are becoming increasingly more proactive in pursuit of the protection of intellectual property online, hence, seeking permission to archive is certainly the safest way to approach harvesting.
Andrew spoke in detail about some of the specific legal issues and risk factors in archiving Web sites: Copyright: content owners are much more aware of copyright, but there have not yet been many instances of copyright cases on the UK Web archiving scene.
Defamation: the UK remains a favourable environment in which to bring a defamation case, largely as a result of the no-win-no-fee basis on which defamation claims can be launched.
Cases can easily be brought in from other countries as the content is available in the UK, regardless of the country of origin.
Privacy and data protection: data protection in the UK is considered less risky now than it was three years ago, as it is now more widely understood.
Content liability laws: The question of who is liable for content collected and made available in a Web archive has not been a great issue over the past three years.
The key legal change in the past three years has probably been the move towards legal deposit, although that is itself a slow process.
Session 3: Other Projects and Future Developments The afternoon session aimed to cover a select number of other projects and future developments, especially those taking place at international or European levels.
Julien Masanés, director of the European Web Archive [12] and co-ordinator of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), kicked off with an exploration of the issues surrounding preservation of the Internet.
The nature of the Web, as a grid of stable and discrete objects that are linked and both evolve and increase in number over time, means that an integrated and linked approach to preserving it is required.
The structure of the Web can facilitate this, as it is linked in a way that makes it easy for crawlers or harvesters to go from site to related site, and sites are mostly compatible with one another.
Functional collaboration is the most effective and efficient way to approach the challenge, distributing the tasks or resources between partners and sharing technical development.
Julien also introduced the European Web Archive, a non-profit foundation operating as a technical peering operation with the Internet Archive and a technology partner for cultural institutions wishing to establish Web collections.
Paul Bevan, previously the strategic manager for UKWAC at the National Library of Wales (NLW) [13] and now NLW Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) implementation manager, followed with a presentation on the NLW’s role in archiving Web sites relating to the 2005 general election.
This was a UKWAC project shared out between the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland, and the British Library.
The primary aim of the project was to develop a general archive of the 2005 general election, while simultaneously offering partners an opportunity to explore and identify some of the issues of such a collaborative project and test the capacity of the UKWAC system to manage events-based harvesting.
Each partner had a slightly different selection strategy, with different harvesting frequencies and a different approach to permission seeking.
The project highlighted how permission seeking could have a detrimental impact on the efficiency of the gathering process and how this affects the collection overall in an event-driven gathering initiative.
The final presentation was given by Catherine Lupovici of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and focused on standards and tools for domain-scale Web archiving.
She discussed some of the tools and formats being developed by the IIPC as part of their toolset, covering the whole archiving chain from acquisition through to access.
Introducing the IIPC content management approach, Catherine contended that the only true way to record the Web was to approach it from the domain-level perspective; this large-scale approach means that automatic tools and processes are essential and will allow future users to apply smart mining tools on collections.
The next phase of the IIPC will extend the consortium, building on the initial toolset to develop more sophisticated tools for acquisition and access and examine preservation issues in more detail.
Conclusions The forum concluded with a panel session chaired by Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust [14] and Richard Boulderstone of the British Library.
Speakers and delegates held a lively discussion on the issues touched upon during the day.
The preservation of Web archives was raised as a special concern, particularly with regards to obsolete tags, plug-ins and browsers, and the wide variety of source materials used to derive or contain Web-accessible content.
Audio-visual material, documents and publications, spreadsheets and slide shows, and a whole host of other file types are commonly posted on the Web and collected in Web archiving activity; these will also require preservation effort to ensure the contents remain accessible over time.
Web archiving should not therefore be perceived as an isolated activity.
Furthermore, the scale of the challenge requires development of automated tools for different aspects of the archiving process, such as quality control and preservation.
Most current tools focus only on capture.
Collaboration between different initiatives, such as the IIPC, UKWAC, and the European Web Archive, will be key to addressing and achieving these issues.
References Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) http://www.dpconline.org/ British Library http://www.bl.uk/ UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) http://netpreserve.org/ UK National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) http://www.lockss.org/ JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment (JHOVE) http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/ PRONOM http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/ Legal Deposit Libraries Act (2003) http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2003/20030028.htm British Library Collection Development Policy http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/collections.html Centre for IT and Law (CITL) at the University of Bristol http://www.law.bris.ac.uk/research/centreitlaw.html European Web Archive http://europarchive.org/ National Library of Wales (NLW) http://www.llgc.org.uk/ Wellcome Trust http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ Author Details Maureen Pennock Research Officer Digital Curation Centre UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.pennock@ukoln.ac.uk Web sites: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Manjula Patel Research Officer Digital Curation Centre UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.patel@ukoln.ac.uk Web sites: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Digital Preservation Coalition Forum on Web Archiving” Authors: Maureen Pennock and Manjula Patel Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/dpc-web-archiving-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Integration and Impact: The JISC Annual Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Integration and Impact: The JISC Annual Conference Buzz data mobile software framework database dissemination portal infrastructure archives accessibility repositories video preservation gis e-learning ejournal ebook e-business vle shibboleth curation wsrp licence e-science e-research authentication ict uportal interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy has collated reports on sessions from the JISC Annual Conference held in Birmingham.
The 2005 JISC Conference took place on 12 April at the Birmingham International Convention Centre (ICC) which this year inexplicably had a giant Ferris wheel thirty yards from the main entrance, entirely unconnected with the main event.
The annual conference [1] is a chance for JISC to showcase the breadth of its activities [2] in providing support for the use of ICT in education and research, and as usual it was a bustle of networking and learning.
However the ICC is an extremely large complex of suites and lecture rooms, and it took a number of trips to the information desk to find out where everything was happening.
This report is a series of snapshots of sessions, which Ariadne managed to catch.
Plenary Professor Sir Ron Cooke chaired the plenary session and opened the day by proclaiming that this was the largest JISC conference to date, with over 750 delegates.
His presentation centred on what JISC considers the two main themes of its current work: integration and impact.
Integration with our information environment he defined as consisting of internal, national and international integration.
The key areas for internal integration of JISC Services are accessibility, security, discoverability and interoperability.
External integration consists of JISC's work with its community of partners, such as the academy, a new elearning programme.
JISC is also keen to improve its own impact.
In the past JISC's success has been in inverse proportion to its visibility, because of Janet and Athens.
Current Janet usage continues to double every 8-12 months and the Superjanet 4's rate of growth is dramatic.
It is likely that Superjanet 5 will be completed by the end of 2005 and there are now nearly three million registered Athens users.
JISC remains invisible to many but the use of JISC resources is rising.
Press coverage has increased, for example through media coverage of popular services like the plagiarism service.
JISC realises that it needs to reach out to its practitioners: Regional Support Centres have a key role to play in this.
Professor Cook introduced the keynote speaker, Roger McClure, joint Chief Executive of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) and the Scottish Further Education Funding Council (SFEFC).
His keynote looked at the main challenges to FE and HE over next decade in the light of the distinctive Scottish experience.
The new Scottish Executive faces a number of challenges, including how to increase the Scottish national GDP, improving international competitiveness and bringing about 'full participation'.
He also remarked that Scotland had not succeeded particularly well in raising participation across a wide range of social groups.
One area which needed closer examination was the development of more responsive lifelong learning, but the curriculum to support it was not as yet in place.
He highlighted the importance of collaboration but observed that it can be difficult and time-consuming, and one often has to 'go it alone'.
He argued that it is better to commit to a variety of alliances a shared sovereignty.
Collaborative working and joint ventures, especially in ICT are of key importance.
ICT can offer research support, blended learning and distance learning/online groups.
Sessions Dr Alan Robiette talked about Next Generation Access and the problems of controlling access to resources (over 200 licensed collections) by the use of nearly 3 million usernames at 500 Higher and Further Education institutions.
He enlarged on new developments at Athens and explained that they now face novel challenges with cross-institutional working and growth in e-research.
Alan then looked at developments and initiatives in other countries, including the emergence of new standards.
He concluded that the next generation of access management must support internal applications as well as use between organisations, access to third-party resources and inter-institutional use.
It should be stable and long-term but also ad hoc and dynamic.
The Shibboleth system [3] is a new powerful, scalable, and easy-to-use solution developed by Internet2 that can be used when you want to share secured online services or access restricted digital content.
Its strengths are that it is a robust technology with international acceptance (US, Australia and some European countries).
Its weaknesses are that it lacks user-friendly management tools and has relatively unsophisticated authorisation.
What needs to be done next is to implement Shibboleth on JISC services, gain experience on campuses and build the national components.
There is now an early adopters programme at Eduserv intended to provide wide-ranging Shibboleth support [4].
Fred Friend, Director of Scholarly Communication, University College London, chaired a panel session on Opening up Access which explored issues of access to scientific and medical literature.
The three panellists each presented different perspectives on open access: from a funding agency, from the author community and from a publisher.
Robert Terry, Senior Policy Adviser from the Wellcome Trust, gave the funders' point of view and explained that subscription charges have seen a 200% increase in last 10 years and publishers still make substantial profits on average a 35% profit margin.
At the moment 90% of medical research is online, 30% is available to the public.
UK PubMed Central would like to be a worldwide pool, but the current situation doesn't allow them to be.
Robert explained that there are many advantages to depositing a copy of a research paper in an Open Archive repository, for example you can have added features such as funders' attributions and live links with other databases.
He concluded that at the end of the day dissemination costs are research costs.
Professor Peter Murray-Rust, Department of Chemistry, Cambridge University provided the author's perspective.
He argued that open access is not enough and that he would like to see work available for reuse under a Creative Commons licence.
He argued the need for a culture change on the part of funders, authors, editors, publishers as well as the need for more open data (within which he included machine-readable data).
His recommendations were that funders must promote publication and the use of Creative Commons, editors should promote publication at source and publishers should provide data licenses and encourage institutional repositories.
Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Journals Division, Oxford University Press, explained that Oxford is doing some important things to support Open Archives which included even moving towards Open Archives for some journals.
However OUP felt that further usage analysis and more research on citations and impact factor was needed to determine whether OA is more cost-effective than other models.
In a session on Tailoring Access and Enabling Discovery through Portals, Ian Dolphin, Head of e-Strategy, Hull University explored how portals and portlet functionality could help to make resource discovery a more seamless experience for the end-user.
Increasingly, functions can be assembled to deliver a more personal and targeted experience in a user-determined context.
This presentation gave an outline of JISC's portal activity and explored the implications for institutions in adopting portlet functionality to help them integrate resources.
It focused on the experience at Hull University in developing an institutional portal based on the uPortal [5] framework.
The portal at Hull aims to bring together locally held resources within the institution and external resources.
The University is also leading the JISC CREE (Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment) Project [6], which is undertaking research into user requirements of portals that will help inform JISC policy in this area.
Ian outlined the agenda for CREE and placed the portal in a national and institutional context.
He reviewed the more common and inaccurate misperceptions of portals dating from 2000 where, for example, portals were frequently seen as a universal panacea for all institutional ills.
This operated, as he put it, on the 'Field of Dreams' scenario which enshrined the premise that it was enough just to build the portal to guarantee that the users would come to use it.
Figure 1: Gartner Hype Cycle 2000 Ian described a graph, known as the Gartner Hype Cycle (see figure 1) which pointed to the peaks and troughs associated with portals created and which worked through the various phases of technology trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment and finally the realistic plateau of productivity.
The audience was presented with Hull's working definition of a portal, namely a layer which aggregates, integrates, personalises, and presents information, transactions and applications seamlessly to users, according to their role and preferences after single sign-on.
He felt that the view that a portal is more often thought of as a 'single starting point' for a user was a useful one and which merited further examination.
There was also an overview of the emerging portal landscape.
He touched upon Web Services and the benefits and drawbacks of native WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) and looked at integration with the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) mentioning commercial environments.
Concluding on the state of institutional portals, Ian said that there were around 16 to 20 in the UK based on uPortal.
He also considered their impact on institutional processes, resources and architecture.
Portals were proving flexible in tailoring online delivery and ELF Web services could be consumed by portals or desktop applications.
But of course there were still a number of challenges confronting developers.
In respect of Web services, security remained a pressing issue while performance and flexibility would be determinants in achieving portal framework maturity, just as conformance in respect of standards and specifications was both uneven and still largely untested.
Peter Ford, Professor of IT and Computing Practice, University of Nottingham and Dr Jos Boys, freelance e-learning consultant, ran a session on Can Post-16 Education Learn from e-Business?
Some years ago the Learning Lessons from eBusiness Project [7] was headed by Peter, and he was editor of a related book entitled Managing Change in Higher Education [8], the stimulus to some key work undertaken by JISC concerning its Information Strategy in the late 1990s.
Peter notified the audience that a new book was likely to be published in autumn 2005 which would be aimed at senior managers in FE and HE.
A very broad description of the project and the thinking behind this new book was presented.
Its main stimulus is the assumption that technology is changing rapidly and that it is likely to influence the way institutions operate.
He explained that the present project has sought to update the original book and ensure that it is made relevant to both FE and HE.
He saw the purpose of the session as being to get feedback from the audience, especially in terms of existing practice.
The team began by examining whether 'e-business' practices were appropriate for education.
They settled on the term 'e-business', believing that it was much more of an integrative concept than either e-learning or e-commerce.
Peter explained that all institutions were facing enormous pressure from global, corporate and private universities.
Peter explained that the team had been exploring options for moving forward, redefining the institution and embedding technologies.
Peter painted a scenario 20 years hence.
He suggested that, in HE, the first years of learning would be standardised and taught mainly through e-learning.
Secondly, courses may become more fragmented, with many students periodically working through chunks of material.
Thirdly, institutions would offer more vocational courses: it was predicted that the three-year, full-time undergraduate degree would decrease in popularity.
Finally, and an issue that was a common refrain, in 20 years corporate competitors would force universities to merge, globalise or die: the survivors would focus on high-end or on mass-produced courses.
He argued that the education market was already moving towards this scenario.
First of all there is increasing pressure to be more cost-effective.
Secondly, costs are being passed onto students with the associated changes in 'customer' expectations.
In addition, radical new opportunities were being offered by ICT through mobile technology, portals and high-speed communications.
The UK is moving closer to an American model.
Three things needed to be in place in order to apply e-business successfully, Peter suggested.
These were: Customer focus: Peter cited Amazon as a good example.
Anyone visiting the site will see a range of editorial and customer reviews, books that may be of interest to the reader, extracts of relevant books essentially data based on customer search behaviour.
Amazon is an adaptive model, focused on the customer and not a static one.
Peter explained that many college and university Web sites needed to offer a similar adaptive model when an individual learner logs on to an institutional Web site.
Organisational integration needs to be implemented CISCO was cited as an example of good practice.
Institutions should have common systems IBM was cited as an example of an organisation that stripped down its business to its basic components after an economic downturn: it is now a company reaping the benefits of this re-engineering.
Dr Rob Allan, e-Science Centre, Daresbury Laboratory, chair of the UK National Grid Service (NGS) task force gave a presentation on UK e-Research Services and Portals.
He outlined the NGS [9], the core of which consists of two computer clusters at Leeds and Oxford, and two data clusters at Manchester and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).
It is available for use by anyone in academia.
Biologists and social scientists working with large datasets are potential users.
There's also a supercomputing facility, linking high-performance computers, available only to those with a research council grant.
All the facilities available on the NGS are linked by middleware.
A major issue remains as to which particular middleware to use.
Should it be the Globus Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)[10], WS-Resource Framework (WSRF) [11] or EGEE/LCG (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE/ LHC Computing Grid)[12]?
Figure 2: The UK National Grid Service (JCSR+EPSRC) One of the main areas to be looked at is teaching users how to use the NGS.
The National e-Science Centre [13] and the National Centre for e-Social Science [14] are beginning to run courses.
Users want to know how to link their own personal devices, such as a PC, into the Grid across institutional boundaries.
Middleware needs to make it easy, for example, to breach firewalls without breaking the law while still maintaining data security and confidentiality.
Collaboratories need to facilitate people-to-people collaboration across institutions, subjects and from research to teaching.
They also need access to information in digital libraries or repositories.
Rob explained that a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) must be easy to install have a familiar interface be easy to personalise work through firewalls be available all the time be pervasive (i.e.
be securely accessible from anywhere) It bridges the gap between e-science and wider users and must have AAA (authentication, access and accountability), allow shared development of content (editing tools etc.
), and have access to grid services, data access, and allow connection to the Access Grid.
Towards the end of the day, Chris Rusbridge, the new Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), provided an overview of developments, challenges and the future opportunities of a sustainable infrastructure for e-research in the UK in his presentation on A Sustainable Infrastructure for e-Research.
This follows the recent publication of the report Science and Innovation Investment Framework, 2004-2014 [15], published by the DTI and DfES.
The presentation focused on the physical and intellectual requirements to achieve such an infrastructure, notably hardware, such as SuperJanet, and software to manage security and access such as Athens, Shibboleth and grid middleware.
The resources to be used in such an infrastructure include data centres such as MIMAS, EDINA, archives and repositories and e-science centres.
Other resources for collaboration include video conferencing, the Access Grid [16], JISCmail and VRE.
The advice, management and support services that Chris touched upon were UKERNA for the network and security, the Digital Curation Centre for data curation and preservation, the National Centre for Text Mining [17] for extracting information from text, and the NGS for access to the Grid.
He also mentioned information resources including e-journals; e-books; datasets; collections of images, videos or geospatial data for research teaching or learning.
Other examples of recent innovative use of data include Digimap Historic Map Service [18] which charts the changing landscape, and Internet Archaeology, an e-journal [19] which makes good use of the Web to link data to written papers.
The information environment and the grid can link to local services via portals and to discovery services via, for example, Google Scholar.
Chris explained that most scientific data is now kept in databases and centralised locations.
Curation of these databases is essential.
However in a study by Philip Lord and Alison Macdonald fewer than 56% of respondents said they had money set aside to maintain data after a project had finished, even if they recognised that the data would be of use in future.
Chris pointed out that data is a fundamental resource for e-infrastructure, but asked who should pay for its preservation?
Possible models he suggested include subscription; pay for use; someone who gets indirect benefit pays e.g.
through advertising, endowment; knock-for-knock (we pay for ours and you pay for yours, but we use each others' for free); and top slicing (everyone pays according to their budget).
In the question and answer session after the presentation Alan Robiette said that the MRC (Medical Research Council) wants to encourage greater use of research data, but cultural issues and difficulties in using data stand in the way.
Tony Hey said that from October, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) will make grants conditional on there being a data management system and pointed out that the International Virtual Observatory [20] for astronomy is already doing it.
Conclusions Since people were attending from locations all over the UK, and many had trains to catch, the conference attendees dispersed rapidly, without being tempted by the thrills of the big wheel at the front of the building.
The organisers of the conference had announced a free memory stick for each evaluation form handed in to the information point, so there were plenty of those piling up on the desk.
The JISC conference offered something for everyone and was a great opportunity for people to network.
Acknowledgements Ariadne would like to thank the contributors to this article: Paul Davey, JISC Philip Hunter, UKOLN Virendra Mistry, JISC Philip Pothen, JISC Judy Redfearn, JISC References JISC Conference 2005 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf_2005_intro JISC Conference 2005 Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf_2005_prog Shibboleth Project http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ Editor's note: readers may be interested in two contributions to Ariadne on Shibboleth: Installing Shibboleth, Simon McLeish, April 2005, issue 43 Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/mcleish/ Shibboleth Installation Workshop, James Sankar and Mariam Garibyan, January 2005, issue 42, Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/shibboleth-rpt/ uPortal http://www.uportal.org/ The Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment (CREE) Project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_cree&src=alpha Learning Lessons from eBusiness http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_ebusiness&src=alpha Managing Change in Higher Education, Ford P., Goodyear P., Heseltine R., Lewis R., Darby J., Graves J., Harwood, D. and King T., London: Open University Press, 1996 National Grid Service (NGS) http://www.ngs.ac.uk/ The Globus Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) http://www.globus.org/ogsa/ Globus WS-Resource Framework (WSRF) http://www.globus.org/wsrf/ The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) Project http://public.eu-egee.org/ The National e-Science Centre http://www.nesc.ac.uk/ ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science http://www.ncess.ac.uk Science and Innovation Investment Framework, 2004-2014, HM Treasury, dti, DfES, July 2004, http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/95846/spend04_sciencedoc_1_090704.pdf Advanced Collaboration with the Access Grid, Michael Daw, January 2005, issue 42, Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/daw/ The National Centre for Text Mining: Aims and Objectives, Sophia Ananiadou, Julia Chruszcz, John Keane, John McNaught and Paul Watry issue 42, January 2005, Ariadne, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/ananiadou/ Digimap Historic Map Service http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_digimap_historic.html Internet Archaeology e-journal http://intarch.ac.uk/ International Virtual Observatory Alliance http://www.ivoa.net/ Author Details Marieke Guy Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ Return to top Article Title: "Integration and Impact: The JISC Annual Conference" Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/jisc-conf-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Lives: Report of Interviews With the Creators of Personal Digital Collections Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Lives: Report of Interviews With the Creators of Personal Digital Collections Buzz software dissemination portfolio archives digitisation blog repositories copyright video preservation ict privacy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Pete Williams, Ian Rowlands, Katrina Dean and Jeremy Leighton John describe initial findings of the AHRC-funded Digital Lives Research Project studying personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories such as the British Library.
Personal collections such as those kept in the British Library have long documented diverse careers and lives, and include a wide variety of document (and artefact) types, formats and relationships.
In recent years these collections have become ever more ‘digital’.
Not surprisingly, given the inexorable march of technological innovation, individuals are capturing and storing an ever-increasing amount of digital information about or for themselves, including documents, articles, portfolios of work, digital images, and audio and video recordings [1].
People can now correspond by email, have personal Web pages, blogs, and electronic diaries.
Many issues arise from this increasingly empowered landscape of personal collection, dissemination, and digital memory, which will have major future impacts on librarianship and archival practice as our lives are increasingly recorded digitally rather than on paper.
Not only the media and formats but, as we discovered in our research into digital collections, also the contents of works created by individuals are changing in their exploitation of the possibilities afforded them by the various software applications available.
We need to understand and address these issues now if future historians, biographers and curators are to be able to make sense of life in the early twenty-first century.
There is a real danger otherwise that we will lose whole swathes of personal, family and cultural memory.
Various aspects of the subject of these personal digital archives have been studied, usually as aspects of ‘personal information management’ or PIM, such as that on the process of finding documents that have been acquired [2].
As Jones [3] says in his comprehensive literature review on the subject, ‘much of the research relating to … PIM is fragmented by application and device …’.
Important studies have focused on: Email [4] [5]; The Web or Internet [6]; Paper or electronic retrieval [7].
The research reported in this article, which forms part of a longer-term study ‘Digital Lives: research collections for the 21st century’, takes a wider look at personal digital document acquisition and creation, organisation, retrieval, disposal or archiving, considering all applications and formats.
‘Digital Lives’ is a research project focusing on personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories.
It brings together expert curators and practitioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary collections, Web archiving, history of science, and oral history from the British Library with researchers in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, and the Centre for Information Technology and Law at the University of Bristol.
Aims The Digital Lives research project aims to be a groundbreaking study addressing these major gaps in research and thinking on personal digital collections.
The full study is considering not only how collections currently being deposited are changing, but also the fate of the research collections of the future being created now and implications for collection development and practice.
We are seeking to clarify our understanding of an enormously complex and changing environment, engage with major issues, and evaluate radical new practices and tools that could assist curators in the future.
Within this broad remit, this article focuses on the first stage of the digital archive process individuals’ own digital behaviour and their build-up of a digital collection.
We wanted to find out: How and why people use computers and other ICT (Information and Communications Technologies); How this usage is creating a digital collection; Within the narrative of their use of ICT, how they learned to use various software (system and applications) and hardware, and what relevant training they have had; How they acquire, store, access and generally manage their digital archive; What the relationship is between digital and non-digital components of hybrid personal archives.
Methodology Methods We used in-depth interviews to explore the views, practices and experiences of a number of eminent individuals in the fields of politics, the arts and the sciences, plus an equal number of young or mid-career professional practitioners.
Questions covered the subjects listed above, with the first question addressing the history of the interviewee’s experience with computers and ICT.
The narration of this account often touched on topics such as training, manipulating files, backing up and transfer, collaborative work and thus offered information contextualised in more general experiences, attitudes and perceptions.
Sample For this qualitative phase of the research, a wide spectrum of respondents, in terms of ages, backgrounds, professional expertise, and type and extent of computer usage, were interviewed.
This was to elicit a diverse range of experiences and behaviours.
The 25 interviewees included respondents who were: “Established” (BL recruited), in that their works would already be of interest to institutional repositories: an architect, authors (including a Web author), a playwright, a Web designer, a molecular biologist, a geophysicist, a crystallographer, a politician, a photographer, and a knowledge management expert; “Emerging”, in that their works may develop in a way that may be of interest to such repositories: a digital artist, a theatre director, lecturers in cultural studies and education, a music publisher, and lecturers in participatory media, along with postdoctoral researchers and PhD students in the fields of English literature, human-computer interfaces, psychology, archaeology, information science and cultural studies.
Findings During the course of the research a fascinating variety of experiences, behaviours and approaches were uncovered, ranging from the digitisation of scientific records, to forwarding emails to oneself so that the subject line could be changed, to filming a theatre production and then projecting it onto the surrounding environment.
Overall, the breadth of disciplines, backgrounds, ages and experiences of the individuals interviewed gave such contrasting and varied accounts that it is almost impossible to generalise findings at this preliminary stage.
However, the narratives do provide excellent descriptions of a whole range of ‘digital’ behaviours that will be very useful in drawing up a questionnaire survey to be undertaken in the next phase of the research.
Context of Use Despite ‘home’ usually being where an individual’s use of computers first developed, later usage seems to be dominated by work.
Nearly all respondents have a collection of digital photographs, and a minority have a blog or page on a social networking Web site, but overwhelmingly documents and other ‘electronic artefacts’ produced are work-related, and the work environment was the one thought of first when answering the question.
An important point which has implications for archiving is that for some people, much work is undertaken remotely – directly from a server.
This includes blog writing (where no local copy is kept); online questionnaire construction and use (e.g.
Survey Monkey); using software applications remotely, for example for statistical analysis, where only the resulting dataset is kept; server-side email accounts.
There was a surprising enthusiasm for updating technology (although, of course, the sample was biased towards those who have a ‘digital collection’).
Only one respondent showed any reluctance – an interviewee who has been using C120 standard cassette tapes to record a diary for 40 years (he played one to us!)
and intends to continue doing so.
Equally, he said he did not wish to digitise his accumulated collection.
One unexpected finding was that, unless specifically asked to discuss ‘non-work’ digital artefacts, respondents did not readily include discussion of them in their accounts.
In fact, there was far less convergence between professional and workrelated items on the one hand, and non-work and leisure items on the other, than had been expected.
There was little evidence of a division of computers between home and work use (though there was such a division among family members – with each person generally having their own log-in and/or separate directories).
The organisation of documents seemed always to reflect the separation of work and leisure.
IT Skills, Training and Support Several key points arose.
First, the norm is to be self-taught, even where people’s jobs involve very sophisticated application of computer software.
This is mainly because of early fascination with computers or the influence of parents or older siblings; but also out of necessity.
Often a PhD topic would require the use of a particular application, which students would take upon themselves to learn for the sake of their studies.
This ranged from citation-referencing software such as Endnote to learning high-level computer programming.
Second, where respondents were not (or only partially) self-taught, training given was often informal, sporadic or ad hoc.
For example, ongoing help was provided for one of the BL interviewees by a variety of family and friends.
In another case, a digital collection was managed by one of the interviewee’s sons.
In other cases a relationship was built up between the computer user and a particular individual (such as ‘Reg, the computer man’) who was called as required, and in whom all trust was placed.
Despite many respondents working in an environment in which IT support was readily available, such support did not spring to mind when respondents spoke of their needs in this area.
When this was mentioned, comments were generally negative: ‘they don’t know anything’ or ‘[they are] generally unhelpful’.
A leading information manager called IT support workers ‘an interesting breed’, explaining that ‘they don’t understand that non-IT people have skills.
IT and librarians will always clash, because IT people are always concerned with security and librarians with information-sharing’.
However, one respondent – perhaps significantly, also an IT expert – found them ‘very good’, having worked directly with them in his job.
Finally, in the cases where informal help was provided, many misconceptions were apparent, although whether these were due to the quality of advice or teaching given is not known.
To give one example, a Web author did not realise her novel, written as a serial blog, or her emails, were stored remotely from her own computer and that without an Internet connection, therefore, she would be unable to access them.
She has never been unable to do so as her broadband Internet connection is on all the time.
She had no idea of managing email messages and did not know that these were retained after being opened.
In this respect, the current study supported the findings of Marshall and colleagues [8] whose study of how people acquire, keep, and access their digital ‘belongings’ showed ‘a scattered and contradictory understanding of computers in the abstract’.
(p.26) Filing, Storage, Transferring and Deleting Files Filing and Storage No obvious pattern has emerged so far.
The main points are, firstly, that documents are stored in folders that reflect either chronological creation, or topic, depending on appropriateness.
The variety of material and general work determined this decision.
For example, where documents are related to one theme – such as repeated experiments –they are more likely to be filed by date, or in folders by date range.
The system’s automatic allocation of ‘date modified’ was considered not to be of use in files where a date is important.
This is because often the important date is the one in which the experiment or event took place and not when the document was modified.
Many other people also tend to put the date manually as part of the file name, even though the system automatically records and displays the date when a document was last modified.
This is for four main reasons: Some interviewees do not trust the automatic date allocation provided by the system; Others tend to make tiny modifications to a document not classified in the writer’s mind as a modification.
One interviewee, for example, declared that occasionally he would read a file which had been completed and might find a small error or wish to add ‘just one word’.
This would not merit changing the date on the file name.
So although the system would record the latest but minor document change, the document was effectively ‘completed’ earlier, since the original date was deemed to make more sense in the context of the document history; Convenience – where the date is displayed as part of a file name it is not necessary to display ‘details’ in the system listing; A document in progress can be saved under the same file name several times, with only a date being modified in the name.
This is a way of saving individual drafts either to have a record of changes by date, and also as a kind of back-up, in case the working version becomes unusable for any reason.
Another broad finding was that collections appear to grow organically – instead of moving completed files and folders to a less visible position on a computer, other folders are simply created next to existing resources.
However, a minority of respondents do delete files once they are backed up elsewhere, or create folders in which they relocate folders of completed documents, so there are not too many folders at the top level.
The study also found similar results to Jones et al.
[9] in that people replicate file structures where similar filing is required for different projects.
An obvious example of this is a lecturer who has a folder for each course, within which are subfolders containing, respectively, PowerPoint slides, lecture notes, current student work, etc.
A theme that emerged with regard to email in particular was that documents and other digital artefacts accumulate unintentionally.
There were examples of email archives containing literally thousands of out of date messages, kept only because it was less effort to retain than to delete them.
According to Marshall [10] ‘most personal information in the digital world is not collected intentionally and thus does not form a coherent collection; instead heterogeneous materials accumulate invisibly over time’ (p5).
Whilst the present study’s results would not suggest that ‘most’ information is collected inadvertently, this may be true for emails and attendant attachments.
Another ‘theme’ or ‘generality’ that came out of the interviews was that a change in computer is often the motivating force and the main way in which files are removed from an ‘active’ location.
In other words, the act of transferring files from one computer to another includes that of weeding files, whereby those that are no longer active are either discarded with the old machine or, where the hardware is retained, kept in long-term storage.
Finally, there were few examples of documents not being organised into folders and directory hierarchies, but retrieved or accessed by keyword only – a finding that has echoes in the work of Jones and colleagues 9, who found that all but one of their sample of 14 professionals and academics refused to pilot a search-based system for retrieving information without organising it hierarchically.
Our research found that folder hierarchies represented ‘information in their own right’ and that ‘Folders … represented key components of a project and thus constituted an emerging understanding of the associated information items and their various relationships to one another’.
This supports the approach that has been adopted by the Digital Manuscripts Project at the British Library, for example, where the value of contextual information beyond simply the digital files has been emphasised [11].
In the present study, each folder and subfolder system formed discrete units of work themed around time periods or different tasks, such as teaching, research etc.
An aspect of folders not mentioned by Jones was that of the facility to browse.
Lecturers said that they sometimes needed material given in a particular talk for something else.
Using a traditional folder system they could browse filenames both to find specific files and for inspiration – there were occasions where, in at least one case, a file existed that the interviewee had forgotten and was only remembered on seeing the file name.
Ironically, of those who did not use folders and hierarchies, one was of a computer expert, who is adept at information retrieval, and the other of a novice.
The latter did not appear to know about folders or hierarchies, and had much help from one of his sons in indexing his files, which were integrated into a bigger collection of cassette tapes, hard copy articles and letters etc.
Transferring or Deleting Files Almost all respondents said that they deleted fewer files ‘these days’ because there were not the electronic storage problems that marked earlier computer usage, with some exceptions such as institutional file storage limits (see email below).
For many it was actually less of an effort to simply keep a file than to delete it.
However, people were aware that they were creating possible problems in the future in the form of ‘document overload’ – in other words, having too many files and directories to easily navigate to active documents.
As mentioned above, there were ways of obviating this problem.
With regard to the transferring of files, many respondents generally only remember their most recent computer transfer, or their behaviour in this respect over the last three or four years.
When asked about periods before this, they usually prefix answers with the words ‘I must have …’ and sometimes puzzle about what happened to ‘all those floppy disks’.
Many documents appear to have been lost when changing from an old to a new computer, where the former was then sold on or discarded.
There were cases, though, where old computers were kept simply for the files they contain, although subsequently retrieving the files and migrating them to newer computers was problematic, as in some cases the only way to remove a file was on a floppy disk, which in turn could not be read by a newer computer.
There were cases of this within the ‘eminent’ sample, whose collections may be deposited at the BL or similar institution, where the interviewees were told of the capacity of the BL to both extract files, and also to access corrupted or deleted material through computer forensics.
Backing-up Back-up policies appear to relate to three major factors: The value placed on a document or other digital artefact: This aspect is discussed more with regard to archiving, below; Confidence in hardware and software: Interviewees most familiar with the technology seemed to be those who were more diligent about backing-up and more mindful of the possibility of document loss.
However, almost all respondents backed up to a certain extent, even if in some cases this was only done at infrequent and irregular intervals; Knowledge about methods for backing-up: A number of interviewees simply backed up their documents by saving them in a different directory on the same computer, thus not protecting themselves against a computer ‘crash’ or theft.
Others did back up to an additional hard drive or to removable media, but these were often stored in the vicinity or same room as the computer, and so would be destroyed in the unlikely event of a fire or flood – or even house theft.
In a minority of advanced user cases, synchronous or automatic back-up is undertaken, and two interviewees have the new Mac system with its ‘Time machine’ function, enabling users to restore files and folders to their status and ‘position’ on any given date.
Nevertheless, even this method on its own is vulnerable if there is no backing up to an additional, separate, store.
Other back-up methods included storage media such as external drives, floppy disks, CDs or DVDs, and alternative computers.
However, email was also used quite extensively.
This is discussed more below.
Archiving As Jones [3] points out, ‘decisions concerning whether and how to keep … information are an essential part of personal information management’.
Although Jones was not necessarily talking about information to be kept in the long term, clearly, archiving files – and deciding whether to keep particular documents or not – is also a critical aspect of PIM.
Our study found, as with earlier work by Ravasio et al.
[12] that saving work that was completed (even if not actually using the word ‘archiving’) was an important part of working with digital documents.
The main points that emerged are that the decision to archive appears to depend on both affective and utilitarian factors.
These were: The value placed on the digital artefact professionally, academically (as with, say, a major dissertation), or emotionally (say, in the context of correspondence with someone which, though retained, is no longer read; for example, one of the interviewees reported having notes from student days which survived as obsolete WordPerfect files but which were effectively unreadable for the owner); The possibility that a document might be useful in the future; As a back-up for a hard copy archive.
The Value of a Digital Artefact Regarding the first of these points, the time and/or emotional investment in producing a document appeared to be a major factor in its retention, regardless of whether it would ever be needed again.
Marshall et al.
8 suggest that ‘value’ can be calculated using five factors: ‘demonstrated worth (e.g.
how often an asset has been replicated); creative effort (e.g.
the asset’s genre and mode of creation); labour sic; reconstituteability (…source, stability, and … cost); and emotional impact (a factor which may be influenced by with whom items have been shared)‘.
For the current project, creative time and effort appeared to be interlinked to the extent that they formed one factor.
In many cases the ‘emotional impact’ was also inextricably linked with the time and effort expended in creating the artefact, although this was also influenced by the contextual factors surrounding its creation and history.
The work and emotional effort going into a project defined it as an important statement of achievement, and thus heightened its value and guaranteed its continued existence.
Sometimes with the case of key artefacts, there would be back-up copies (for example, on CD) just to ensure survival.
Indeed, some respondents look at their archive as a reflection of their life’s work, and keep items of no further practical value.
Logically, one might assume that it would be hard copy or ‘physical’ artefacts that would be retained as such a testimony.
Much hard copy material is also kept because of the time or effort invested in its creation, or for representing important points in the creators’ lives.
However, the reluctance to dispose of electronic files indicated that they too constituted an important part of a professional or academic portfolio.
Of course, in the case of many (increasingly prevalent) digital files such as animated images, audio and video, it is not meaningful to print out a hard copy.
It has long been known from conventional (neither digital nor hybrid) archives that people retain items for their sentimental value and as biographical records or pointers to a person’s individual or family life story.
Thus while people differ in how many items are retained for this kind of reason, the importance of at least a modest degree of personal archiving is widely and strongly felt.
Etherton [13] has noted in an illuminating account of the role of archives: ‘Families very often keep personal records of people and events such as family photograph albums and baby albums which record the growth of and achievements of a child’s early years’, and argues convincingly that such things play an important role in a person’s sound psychological well-being, helping to provide individuals with a sense of belonging and a sense of place.
So much so that social work and medical professionals working with children in care and with terminally ill young mothers, ensure that life story books, memory boxes and oral history recordings are prepared in order to provide ‘fundamental information on the birth family and on the early details of the child’.
It is perhaps not surprising that this general need for personal memory is (to varying degrees) also felt by academics and professionals in respect of their careers as well as of their home life.
Moreover, such a need has begun to embrace digital objects as well as non-digital ones, as is borne out by some of the comments of interviewees.
On several occasions interviewees showed researchers either hard copy or electronic files which strongly reminded them of the contextual aspects surrounding the creation or acquisition of those files.
Examples of such contexts were working with friends, undertaking specific activities, or being constrained by the technology.
For example, a geophysicist showed us printouts of his attempts to model an ice block melting during his PhD research.
This evoked memories of limited computing power and memory (the model could not be visualised on-screen or stored locally), alongside nervous anticipation about the results of his early research efforts.
Programs had to be run overnight from departmental computers and the results retrieved from a remote printer in the morning.
Many examples were encountered where creative effort and labour lent considerable value to documents, even where they were now, to all intents and purposes, without any practical worth.
For example, Word Perfect files were not deleted even though they may have been unreadable to the creator.
It needs to be borne in mind, however, that the retention of obsolete files is not necessarily emotional or irrational.
Once a file is destroyed it is gone, but in the case of an obsolete file there remains some hope of recovery.
In science, for example, datasets and records of analyses need to be kept in order to allow colleagues the possibility of re-analysis.
A scientist who deletes a file (obsolete or not) might expose himself or herself to the criticism that he or she has actively denied other researchers the possibility of re-analysis: a gradual obsolescence might be deemed more acceptable.
With storage capacity so much larger now, it is easier to retain documents.
In fact, as mentioned above, many interviewees simply did not bother to delete documents that they no longer needed.
Thus the long-term existence of a document no longer necessarily implies that it has been invested with considerable value.
Archiving for Future Use Another reason for archiving is that documents may be required in the future.
Much of the literature on this [3] discusses acquired documents in this context.
The research reported here, however, shows that created documents are also archived for their potential later usage in different contexts.
Not surprisingly, lecturers kept Word and PowerPoint files for later reference.
They included material for courses no longer taught or current, just in case they were needed at a later stage – even to illustrate historical points (where it is the contemporary nature of the discipline that matters).
Even student essays were kept (partly) for this reason.
One interviewee said that his undergraduate essays contained ‘decent’ reviews of past literature that could be ‘plundered’ for later use.
Academic writers also found that they could ‘recycle’ parts of old articles.
For example, a conclusion to one article could be used in a section outlining the author’s own prior research in a further paper.
Of course, quite often interviewees could not specify exactly how a document would be used later but still felt that, as long as there was a possibility that it might be of use, it was worth keeping.
Email messages that were never, or no longer, ‘actionable’ were also stored.
Hard Copy Documents Hard copy is also an option for some interviewees, with the hard copies often being generated by others on their behalf (e.g.
by receiving hard copies of journal articles).
Final versions of articles are particularly likely to be printed out.
One scientist interviewed has his journal articles in electronic and hard copy form, and binds the latter every time he reaches another 30 publications.
In some cases, the hard copy is actually more extensive than the digital back-up.
For example, a playwright whom we interviewed prints his work every day, reads through and makes any changes by hand.
The next day he makes the adjustments on his computer, saving the document under the same name and thus overwriting his previous version.
He keeps and files all his printouts and thus has a comprehensive record of all stages of his work.
In addition, every 30 days or so, he does create a new electronic version (i.e.
by changing the filename).
Communication and Social Networking The exploration of the use of email proved to be one of the most fruitful and interesting areas of study.
Usage has gone far beyond the original purpose of email (e.g.
communicating with others) and is being appropriated in various innovative ways by respondents.
These include: Sending reminder messages to oneself; Using email as a file storage system, whereby individuals attach a document to a message and then send it to themselves as a form of back-up (or send it to themselves using a different account which may have a bigger storage capacity); Using email as an appointments diary (where the presence of messages in an inbox acts as a reminder); Forwarding received messages to oneself, at the same account, as a way of changing the subject line (it is not generally possible to edit this as an inbox entry without forwarding it) to reflect more accurately the message content or to highlight the content of any attachment; As a record of work or contacts.
Within the topic of email, the creation and usage of different accounts was particularly instructive: Many respondents have several accounts – being used respectively for online shopping, social mail, work, etc.
One respondent and his close colleagues had even set up Google accounts for the sole usage of their collaborative group, etc.
; Some ‘defunct’ accounts are maintained to keep in touch with people who may not know new contact details, and so are occasionally checked; Some respondents are also prepared to sacrifice the kudos that an academic address gives them for the convenience of having a better system with which to work; Some (especially younger) respondents do not like using work or university email accounts for social messages, and opened Web-mail accounts to avoid this; One respondent even prefers his Gmail account to his university one for formal use.
He begins any new formal communication with his university account, to confirm his professional credentials.
However, once people know who he is, he is happy to relinquish the ‘status’ that his university’s account accords him and switches to his Googlemail account; Saving is often a function of system limits (e.g.
maximum inbox size); and several respondents reported that free Web-mail services (Gmail, Yahoo etc.)
offered far more ‘space’ than work mail (younger respondents especially tended towards this view).
Curatorial Issues The research and the nature of the personal collections and digital behaviour described above clearly have significant implications for large institutional repositories such as the British Library.
Large, hybrid collections of contemporary papers, partly generated using computers, including eMANUSCRIPTS and eARCHIVES, have resulted in personal collections of substantial quantity and complexity in terms of version control of documents, archival appraisal and selection.
Our findings so far indicate that these issues will remain pertinent in dealing with personal hybrid and digital collections, although they may need to be tackled in different ways.
For example, more of the management, appraisal and selection of archival material from personal digital collections may need to be carried out by creators in partnership with repositories in their lifetimes, rather than retrospectively.
Moreover, repositories may need to deal with a greater variety of digital formats as part of a continuous decision-making process and workflow, rather than parcelling out different aspects of personal collections to format specialists.
From a different perspective, curators have also often dealt with intermediaries authorised by creators to control their archives (often posthumously).
However, with institutions and commercial service providers offering the creators of personal digital collections services in their lifetime such as email, social networking and file storage, the decision to pass control of potential archive material to intermediaries is sometimes taken less advisedly, and may lead to further complexities.
Digital Lives research will be examining issues concerning rights and storage services in more detail.
Finally, there is one aspect that has not been mentioned in this report but constituted part of our qualitative research among creators of personal digital collections.
It is that of attitudes to rights issues including privacy, personal control and misuse of information and copyright.
Again, these are issues traditionally encountered by repositories that have in the past balanced concerns about privacy, protection of sensitive information and intellectual property on the part of archive creators with that of access to researchers.
Our interviewees among the creators of personal digital collections seemed relaxed on the whole about these issues, or otherwise to have given them little thought.
In a context of legal compliance, it may also be appropriate to consider issues of cultural change when thinking about how rights issues are to be handled by archive creators and repositories in the future.
Again, this is a discrete area of research that is receiving more attention in the Digital Lives Project.
Conclusion Issues of acquiring, creating, manipulating, storing, archiving and managing personal digital archives are extremely complex and few patterns emerge from the interviews described.
This may be because there are many distinct styles of conducting digital lives or because the scope of what is meant by digital lives lacks adequate definition at present.
The sample was made up of people with widely differing backgrounds, and who used computers in a great variety of different ways.
There seems to be many distinct styles of conducting digital lives.
Our research found significant differences in: Methods and places of storage; Familiarity and expertise with hardware and software; Understanding of the meaning of a ‘personal digital collection’ (respondents’ own views of this concept formed part of the project, and so it was not incumbent on the researchers to provide more than a general explanation); Individual perceptions of what and especially how much is worth keeping (as is the case with conventional archives too); Relative values attached to digital and non-digital items.
While not yet yielding any general conclusions, the study has already highlighted for the researchers some of the issues relating to the deposit of personal digital collections with which, increasingly, repositories will be faced.
With further analysis and dissemination, the project findings, will greatly inform the British Library and other repositories.
One such issue, for example, is the blurring of the distinction (at least, in the interviewees’ views) between what is created or stored online and off-line, and a certain misunderstanding about this issue.
This was particularly true of email, where some respondents did not know whether their messages were stored on their own computer or remotely, and, indeed, had never given it any thought.
A certain ambiguity was also revealed, regarding ‘back-up’, ‘storage’ and ‘archive’.
In part, this was just a question of terminology, but vague areas were revealed where, for example, back-ups for active documents – often several draft versions – were retained permanently because this was easier than deleting them, even though such dormant and somewhat repetitive documents were not considered part of an archive.
Indeed, many interviewees did not regard even their long-term retained documents as an ‘archive’ of enduring value.
The interplay between digital and non-digital artefacts and individual artefacts having both digital and hard copy elements is becoming a big issue for repositories.
Our research showed that often hard copy and digital versions of works were not always the same (e.g.
in some cases a printout preceded further modifications, which remained in electronic form only), mirroring observations made by the Digital Manuscripts Project at the British Library.
There were also examples of major drafts being written only in hard copy, with later or final drafts being committed to computer.
This article – and the research to date – has elicited and highlighted some of the major issues.
In the next phase of the research, we will attempt to quantify some of the behaviours outlined here, and to explore in more depth the personal digital collection practices of various specific groups by means of a large-scale online survey.
This will help to delineate commonalities and differences, to elucidate how they came about, and to articulate implications for library and – in particular – archival professionals.
Two related aspects that we are keen to begin to explore and characterise are the questions of: what people want and expect to happen to their digital collections at the end of their lives; what motivates people to share digital files during their lives, and which types of files do individuals share (and not share but retain) and in what circumstances.
Finally, a provisional curatorial response to the tentative conclusions of this paper may include the following points: There is unlikely to be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to personal digital collections; It is important for curators and archivists to be able to deal with and advise on multiple storage media and file formats, including retrospectively; Creators may benefit from guidance regarding appraisal and selection; Recordkeeping tools may be helpful, but they need to be flexible to support individual requirements and to maintain the character of personal digital collections; Creators may benefit from advice to help determine where elements of their personal digital collections are located and who controls them and access to secure and accessible storage in order to retain control of their personal digital collections; Creators should be advised to migrate information to fresh media to avoid having their digital content marooned on obsolete media, but at the same time encouraged, nonetheless, to retain even obsolete media since, increasingly, new capture and recovery techniques are enjoying at least some success.
Acknowledgement The ‘Digital Lives’ research project is being generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant number BLRC 8669).
Special thanks are due to Neil Beagrie who conceived of the idea for the project and was its Principal Investigator until leaving the British Library on 7 December 2007.
Members of the research team who arranged and attended interviews (in addition to the authors) were: Jamie Andrews, Alison Hill, Rob Perks and Lynn Young, all from the British Library.
The authors also wish to thank the interviewees themselves for their valuable contributions to the project.
.
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3 http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_3/jones/ (accessed 3 March 2008).
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Author Details Peter Williams Research Fellow School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London Email: peter.williams@ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber/people/williams/ Katrina Dean Curator of history of science The British Library Email: Katrina.dean@bl.uk Ian Rowlands Senior lecturer School of Library, Archive and Information Studies University College London Email: i.rowlands@ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk/staff-Ian_Rowlands.html Jeremy Leighton John Principal Investigator of the Digital Lives Research Project Curator of e-manuscripts The British Library Email: Jeremy.john@bl.uk Return to top Article Title: “Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections” Author: Pete Williams, Katrina Dean, Ian Rowlands and Jeremy Leighton John Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/williams-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?
Buzz data mobile software html wireless infrastructure standardisation accessibility smartphone blog copyright cataloguing windows hypertext jpeg linux png rtf gif tiff adobe mis flash doc ebook mp3 jpg drm ogg usb mobi itunes bmp iphone aac epub ipad android flac research standards Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin investigates ebooks and takes a look at recent technological and business developments in this area.
Due in large part to the appearance since mid-2006 of increasingly affordable devices making use of e-Ink technology (a monochrome display supporting a high-resolution image despite low battery use, since the screen consumes power only during page refreshes, which in the case of ebooks generally represent page turns), the ebook has gone from a somewhat limited market into a real, although presently still niche, contender.
Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008 [1]; Sony sold 300,000 of its Reader Digital Book model between October 2006 and October 2009.
In September 2009, ebooks represented between 1% and 3% of the total US publishing market [2].
Following the JISC National eBooks Observatory Study [3] in the UK, one participant, David Nicolas, was quoted as stating that ebooks have 'reached the tipping point' [4].
Keeping in mind Bohr's statement that, 'prediction is very difficult, especially about the future', it's nonetheless safe to say that publicity about these devices is currently at a high point.
But for ebook readers, as Figure 1 shows, this is not their first time in the spotlight.
"A good book has no ending.
~R.D.
Cumming" This article marks the third time that Ariadne has discussed the subject of ebooks, namely "Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where are we now?"
[5] and "e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?"
[6].
There is something very beguiling about the idea of a book that has 'the marvelous chameleon-like quality that it can very quickly be made to substitute for a different printed work by simply loading different content' [7] a book that can play the role of a library.
As Striphas [8] points out, the concept of the electronic book, and the exploration of the interaction between the size of a container and the quantity of knowledge held, has an extraordinarily long history.
He traces the idea back to the creation of miniature manuscript books, composed of 'tiny handwriting, or micrographia', in the late 15th century, which were functional objects and could be read by means of a magnifying glass.
Striphas notes the development of microphotography techniques in the 19th century.
This was initially pioneered by John Benjamin Dancer, an optical instrument-maker who combined microscope and camera in order to create the earliest example of microphotography on record [9].
Luther reports that 'the 21 May 1853 issue of Notes and Queries carried a letter from a Dublin scholar asking "May not photography be usefully applied to the making of catalogues of large libraries?'
Microphotography led to the report in the British Photographic Journal of, 'A page of printing, from Quekett's "Treatise on the Microscope", reduced to such size that the whole of the volume of 560 pages could be contained in a space one inch long and half-an-inch broad ' [8].
Figure 1: Comparing the raw number of matches for the 'ebook' key term on Google News (1990-2010), and a manually sampled raw estimate of the number of scientific publications exploring aspects of ebook and ebook reader design, distribution, use, etc during that same period.
By the end of the 19th century, Striphas reports, it became possible to speak of 'microphotographic books'.
Robert Goldschmidt and Paul Otlet wrote about the livre microphotographique in 1907 [10]; by 1925, they described a print-on-demand library based on these technologies.
Microform, and print-on-demand services, reached practical implementation in the 1920s-1930s [11], and was formally approved by the American Library Association in their Annual Meeting of 1936 [12].
This trailed the first wartime use of microfilm by almost 60 years; microphotography of documents, in order to facilitate the use of pigeon post, first took place during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 – although it was first proposed many years earlier [9].
Microfilm libraries, both municipal and personal, are a common staple of science-fiction in the time of Heinlein and Asimov.
In The Puppet Masters (1951), Heinlein describes a library in which books are selected via a catalogue and delivered via delivery tube to a study room in the form of bookspools.
By the 1950s, Asimov [13] would write about reading-tapes and book-films.
In the novellette Profession [13], he compares books, 'reading-tapes', and vocational education.
Microform books were not commercialised outside the library environment, although it is evident from the text of patents such as 3280491, granted in 1966 to Jeshayahu Klein [14], that the potential for personal use had been recognised.
Klein wrote: The use of micro-film, particularly in the instructional and educational field has become increasingly more adopted, the obvious advantages of such film as opposed to the larger forms needing no detailing.
Currently used projectors [are] in the main too bulky to be readily portable [and] expensive to manufacture.
Much useful information and instructive material is capable of being reproduced on micro-film.
Such information [..] is reduced to an inexpensive minimum when reduced to micro-film.
It is a primary object of my invention to provide a portable viewer for micro-film.
If adapted for current technologies, Klein's argument would not seem out of place today.
However, microfilm is hard to read, as evidenced by a 1976 letter from S. A. McCoy to a journal recommending a microfilm viewer, stating that 'this truly portable viewer has transformed working from films from a drudge into something approaching a pleasant experience' [15].
McCoy adds that 'in case readers' natural cynicism has been engaged by the above, I have no connection with the firm who make it.'
The ambition was there; the technology, it seems, was not.
Returning to Striphas' history, we find ourselves in the 1980s, with cable television companies trialling teletext services adapted for ebook reading – videotex.
There were evident flaws; amongst them, expense, accessibility, and speed.
Videotex was quickly abandoned in the USA.
In France, Videotex caught on in the form of Télétel, but this was linked to a large investment from the French government.
Equally, it was used mostly for interactive and to some extent reference services [16], but although it was viciously opposed by newspaper owners, it did not take a significant role as an electronic content delivery service, and so did not closely approach the role of the ebook.
By the late 1980s, the focus had moved to the personal computer, and remained there until it was rewarded by the 1998 release of the SoftBook, a device that had been in development since 1995 [17], and the 1999 release of the NuvoMedia Rocket ebook reader.
The SoftBook reader was about the size of a sheet of letter paper, weighed 1.3kg, had a 9.5 inch greyscale touchscreen.
It cost $599.99 and contained a 33.6Kbps modem.
Downloading new books was achieved by connecting the book to a telephone line, and was restricted to the US and Canada.
The battery life was officially five hours, but reports suggest that the figure was closer to three or four.
It contained 8MB of memory and made use of the same format as the NuvoMedia, a variant on HTML 4.
If connected to the phone line overnight, it would download any periodical subscriptions for use the following day [18].
The NuvoMedia Rocket weighed 600g, had a 'postcard-size' monochrome LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) touchscreen and stylus, and claimed a battery life of 20 hours with the backlight on and 40 with it off.
Users reported a more modest battery life in practice.
It cost a more modest $199 for the basic model with 4MB of flash memory (16MB of flash for the Pro model at $269), but connectivity was limited to a serial port and cradle [19].
Following a buyout of both companies by Gemstar, linking with Powells Books in the USA, and the subsequent publication of other ebook readers, Gemstar licensed the technology to Thomson, who subsequently manufactured versions of both the Rocket ebook and the SoftBook as the REB1100 and REB1200.
Manufacturing was then taken up by Ebook Technologies.
In 2000, at the height of this hype, Stephen King released an ebook entitled Riding the Bullet.
It was plagued with technical problems.
A figure of 400,000 copies ordered in the first 24 hours was claimed [20], and servers quickly became overloaded.
As the New York Times Magazine pointed out, 'The number of actual readers was another question because the encryption caused countless computers to crash'.
[21].
The Digital Rights Management (DRM) was subsequently defeated [22].
It was the first of several ebook experiments for King, who later released part of a serialised novel, The Plant, in instalments – but stopped partway through, due to a drop in the number of paying subscribers.
Most recently, King has been involved in marketing Amazon's next-generation Kindle ebook reader, for which he wrote the novella UR, available only for that platform.
Many ebook reader products have suffered from similar problems.
It was anticipated by many commentators that two of them in particular, inadequate battery life and unsatisfactory screen readability, would be solved by a technology conceived at the MIT media lab and introduced in 1997.
The first e-Ink reader, the Sony LIBRIé, was released in Japan in March 2004.
In an interview in 2009, Russ Wilcox, joint founder of E Ink, described the launch as: Critics loved the hardware, but there were only 1,000 books available, and that does not make a successful publishing market.
And it turns out that e-books are a tough sell in Japan because there is a thriving used bookstore market.[...]
At the same time, people were getting used to standing on trains and reading on their little cell-phone displays.
[23] The present resurgence in interest is fuelled by devices such as: the Sony Reader, launched – this time in the United States in 2006; Amazon's original wireless Kindle, launched in 2007; the descendants of these devices, and the various other e-Ink devices currently on the market.
The following part of this article discusses hardware, ebook device types, and other considerations such as cost and platform integration.
In this article, a few general-purpose devices are also discussed – specifically, the iPod and Apple's new iPad.
This is due to the fact that, in the US, the iPad's marketing places it within the range of devices used as an ebook reader.
At the time of writing, Apple's iPad marketing in the UK does not yet mention this usage.
Hardware Manufacturers and Availability Since the vast majority of ebook readers presently on the market, other than general-purpose devices that contain ebook reading applications iPhones, for example – depend on very similar e-Ink screens, the amount of variation in design is limited.
Marshall [24], in describing a research prototype ebook reader called the Xlibris, explained its functionality in terms of a paper document metaphor.
In Marshall's words: The device reproduces the physical experience of working with paper: readers can hold electronic documents on their laps, moving the e-reader as appropriate to avoid glare; they can mark on the electronic documents with a variety of pens and highlighters; and they can turn from one page to the next by thumbing on the device.
In essence, Xlibris attempts to capture the materiality associated with reading physical documents.
Candidates for variation include screen size, weight and battery life.
In general, the available screen sizes are between five and ten inches, with most common devices being based around six inches diagonally across from the bottom left to the top-right corner.
The weight of ebook readers varies considerably.
The same is true of battery life.
The interaction between these characteristics is shown in the following table.
Note that the impact of the bistable e-ink screen is very noticeable in terms of lengthened battery life when the display is continuously in use; the two devices containing colour screens, the iPod and iPad, have battery life based in hours rather than days when in use as reading devices.
Steve Jobs of Apple is quoted in a recent interview [25] as stating that 'Ten hours is a long time, you're not going to read for 10 hours.'
Frequent travellers with experience of economy-class long-haul flights – or students with experience of long days at university – may see it differently.
Figure 2: Battery life, screen size and weight of several devices.
Note that reported values have been used where available.
Battery life values discount the effect of an active network connection where this information is available, as this more closely approximates reading conditions.
Other possible design choices include the following aspects: Processor Speed Processor speed, which influences the speed of indexing, document access and rendering, is particularly relevant with regard to formats such as PDF that can prove relatively processor-intensive to display.
Screen effective resolution and levels of greyscale (Some screens offer eight shades of grey, whilst others offer 16).
At present very few devices marketed specifically as ebook readers have colour screens, with the exception of the Apple iPad.
Operating System Operating system and opportunity for software installation and customisation are further aspects.
Although the popular e-Ink screen has too low a refresh rate to use comfortably with responsive applications, not all devices marketed as ebook readers are dedicated solely to that purpose.
Sony devices make use of a custom embedded operating system, whilst the iPad uses a similar operating system to the iPhone.
It therefore benefits from the compatibility with Apple's App Store, while sharing the corresponding limitations of the operating system.
The Barnes & Noble Nook makes use of the Android operating system, as a result of which it includes much wider format support than many other devices.
Many other ebook readers make use of variants of Linux.
Onboard Memory and Expansion Capability The amount of onboard memory influences the number of ebooks that can be stored.
Expansion capability determines in particular the availability of a memory card slot such as a SDHC (Secure Digital High-Capacity) or Sony memory stick.
This enables more books or other resources to be stored in the device than can be fitted into the device's onboard memory.
Audio Capabilities Audio capabilities may be added, such as onboard text-to-speech reading capabilities, or an MP3 player.
Device Input and Output The most basic devices provide only a mechanism for moving forwards and backwards in the book, turning to an index, and selecting items.
However, the ability to annotate as well as the ability to search for specific pieces of text is useful for many use cases.
For this reason, some devices provide a physical keyboard, whilst devices with a touch-screen generally make use of an onscreen keyboard instead.
This reduces the physical size of the device, since the off-screen real estate containing the keyboard is no longer required.
Ebook Availability and Transfer Mechanisms A few devices tie directly into distribution networks, such as the Amazon Kindle's link to Whispernet, enabling data to be downloaded live from most locations.
The new Barnes & Noble ebook reader ties into Wi-Fi at bricks-and-mortar bookstores across the United States.
Apple's iPad device is expected to make use of a service, imaginatively entitled iBooks, that will function in a similar manner to iTunes.
This service has not been announced outside the United States.
The iPad is not internationally marketed or intended as an ebook reader, but as a general-purpose media tablet.
The 3G-enabled iPad model is therefore likely to provide 'Kindle-like' functionality in terms of quick access to eBooks.
Most, however, depend on download via a PC and connection to the ebook reader via a USB connection.
Within these constraints, there is considerable scope for engineering, refinement, and variation.
Device Screen size (diag.)
Input Connectivity Grey-scale levels Formats accepted Memory Text-to-speech Built-in dict.
mp3 Apple iPad  (note: Ebook store available only in US) 9.7 in.
Multitouch screen   Colour Wifi, Bluetooth, 3G optional, Apple proprietary port 16GB, 32GB and 64GB model ?
Software available on App Store Software available on App store.
IRex digital reader DR1000S 10.2 in.
Touch sensor input USB 16 PDF, TXT, HTML, Mobipocket PRC, JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF and BMP.
In future: DRM PDF/EPUB 1 GB Mini SD card slot No No No iRex iliad book edition 8.1 in.
Touch sensor input USB 16 PDF , HTML  TXT, JPG  BMP, PNG  PRC, mobipocket 128MB, expandable via USB, MMC, CF No yes Yes – as user-created extension, mp3, ogg, flac, etc.
Amazon Kindle 2 International 6 in.
keyboard Whisper-net mobile connection USB 16 †  Kindle (AZW),  TXT,  unprotected MOBI, PRC 2 Gigs internal, no expansion slot Yes Yes Audible , MP3 Kindle DX (available in US only) 9.7 in.
keyboard Whisper-net mobile connection USB 16 † Kindle (AZW), PDF, TXT,  unprotected MOBI, PRC  4 GB internal Yes Yes Audible , MP3 B&N Nook 6 in.
Colour touchscreen 3G WiFi USB 16 Epub, ereader, PDF 2Gigs internal, microSD expansion No Yes MP3 Cybook Opus 5 in Touch-screen, accelerom-eter for auto-rotation of screen USB 4 ePUB/PDF  HTML, TXT, JPG, GIF, PNG, mobipocket via upgrade 1 GB internal and microSD No No No Sony PRS-300 5 in.
n/a USB 8 LRF, PDF, TXT, RTF, ePub,JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP 512MB internal No No No Sony PRS-600 6 in touchscreen USB 8 LRF, PDF, TXT, RTF, ePub,JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP 512MB internal SDHC card Sony memory stick No Yes MP3, AAC (non-DRM) BeBook mini/ Hanlin V5 5 in.
n/a USB (wifi projected to become available via extension card) 8 PDF, TXT, RTF, DOC, CHM, FB2, HTM,L, WOLF, DJVU, LIT, EPUB PPT, Mobipocket.
512MB internal, SDHC card expansion Yes exper-imental No MP3 Cool-er ereader 6" Resembles iPod style clickwheel USB 8 PDF, EPUB, FB2, RTF, TXT, HTML, PRC, JPG 1GB storage SD card expansion No No MP3 Apple iPad 9.6" Touchscreen Apple proprietary connecter, 3G (optional), Wifi Colour Various, including Apple-specific encryption/DRM on ePub format as standard No expansion ?
?
Yes Table 1: Categories of some e-book readers † Amazon provide a conversion service able to transform PDF, HTML, DOC, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP for use on the Kindle.
Note that SDHC cards are high-capacity secure digital cards, whilst SD cards are simply secure digital cards.
SDHC cards are currently available up to 32GB (the limit of the specification), whilst the specification for SD cards limits their size to 4GB.
The base price for an ebook reader is, as of late 2009, around 180-220 GBP [*].
It is expected by some industry analysts to continue to fall in price over the course of 2010 and 2011 – Gartner's vice president predicts 2010 to be the year when e-book readers really become popular consumer electronic devices, culminating in e-reader 'mania' for the 2010 holiday season [26].
Figure 3: Approximate cost distribution for ebook readers; where devices are not available directly in British pounds, an exchange rate current as of November 2009 has been used.
Where trade estimates exist of likely cost in the UK those values have been used instead.
The Amazon Kindle is now available in an 'International' edition, as is the larger-format Kindle DX reader.
They both offer wireless connectivity outside the United States, and can be used for immediate access and purchase of, mostly English-language, ebooks on the Amazon.com store.
Ebook Content Formats A mess of ebook formats, lyrically referred to as 'The Tower of eBabel' [27], has grown up across the market, some driven by device vendors and hardware manufacturers, and some promoted by software vendors such as Adobe.
The following table summarises several ebook formats.
Format Extension Governing agency DRM Platforms Plain text .txt ISO No All RTF (Rich Text Format) .rtf Microsoft No Widespread HTML (Hypertext markup language) .html World wide web consortium No Widespread PDF (Portable Document Format) .pdf Adobe, released as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008.
Yes, many standards.
Adobe Digital Editions is commonly used.
Widespread support (with the exception of DRM) Microsoft LIT .lit Microsoft Yes Windows eReader (Palm Media) .pdb   Yes – encrypted with key iPhone, PalmOS, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile Pocket PC/Smartphone, desktop Windows, and Macintosh Mobipocket, precursor to the ePub format.
.prc, .mobi Open Ebook – International Digital Publishing Forum Yes   ePub .epub OEBPS [28] International Digital Publishing Forum Yes   Broadband ebooks .lrf, .lrx Sony proprietary Yes Sony devices, and desktop Windows, Linux and MacOS via Calibre Kindle .azw Amazon proprietary (similar but not compatible with mobipocket) Yes Kindle Table 2: A partial list of ebook formats As the market continues to take shape, there are moves towards standardisation.
Barnes & Noble are currently launching the Nook ebook reader, and announced in October 2009 that the device will support ePub.
Sony moved away from its proprietary .LRF (BroadBand eBook, or BbeB) file format towards the ePub format.
As such, some describe ePub as the MP3 of the ebook world.
Like the MP3 format, the ePub format is well supported with reader software on many other platforms, including desktop operating systems, iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Maemo and Windows Mobile.
It is claimed that the Stanza reader alone has one million users.
An exception is the Amazon Kindle, which does not natively support ePub, requiring a conversion tool to be used.
At the time of writing, book retailers in the UK offered ebooks in the following formats: Retailer Supported formats Ebooks available (as of Autumn 09) WH Smith Epub, Mobipocket, Adobe PDF, Microsoft 50,000 Borders Epub and/or PDF depending on title 50,000 Waterstones Epub Over 18,000 Amazon US Kindle/Amazon proprietary format, available in the UK since 19 October 2009  (see notes).
Certain other formats usable via conversion offered by Amazon at $US 0.99 /1Mb Over 360,000 in the USA Table 3: Ebook availability Ebooks might be expected to be less expensive than their dead-tree cousins.
After all, no wood pulp is involved in their construction, storage requirements are very small and even shipping and handling becomes a relatively minor consideration.
However, the prices are scarcely attractive – Kindle International users pay around $US12 for a recent Amazon ebook (~8GBP) , although some e-books will be cheaper.
Although this is expensive by comparison to most mass-market paperbacks, it is significantly cheaper than the cost of ebooks from most other US ebook retailers – Barnes & Noble are up to 50% more expensive [29] and reflects the fact that Amazon treat their ebooks as loss-leaders put in place in order to render the Kindle more attractive and increase market share.
Amazon is said to lose $US2 for each ebook sold [30], and $US4 for each bestseller [31].
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is quoted [32] as saying that 'E-books should be cheaper than physical books.
Readers are going to demand that, and they are right because there are so many supply chain efficiencies relative to printing a paper book.'
Publishers, however, disagree.
In a recent spat with Macmillan, who asked Amazon to allow them to set prices higher than $US9.99, arguing that the rate 'was too low and putting pricing pressure on their physical books' [33], Amazon temporarily removed the ability to directly buy Macmillan books, physical or electronic, from Amazon.
Macmillan, however, prevailed; their preferred pricing model, known as the 'agency model', stipulates that books will initially be offered from $12.99 to $14.99 when initially released, with prices changing over time.
Some commentators see interviews such as this recent discussion between Apple's Steve Jobs and Mossberg [34] as a demonstration that Jobs and Bezos are simply on opposite sides of the battlefield.
Bezos described his vision of Amazon as 'the world's most consumer-centric company'; recent quotes from Jobs, on the other hand, suggest that the publisher is king.
As might be expected, it's all rather more complicated [35] [36] for further discussion about the issue.
A particularly readable description of an author's perspective may be obtained from John Scalzi [37].
In UK-based stores, prices appear almost identical to their dead-tree counterparts.
This can be seen in the following graph, which was generated by comparing the cost in each store of ten randomly selected books in physical and ebook formats (carried out in November 2009).
Note that the Amazon US values are somewhat misleading, in that certain of the books selected were on sale only within the United States.
As can be seen, the UK-based booksellers surveyed here charge somewhat more for ebooks than for paper books.
Note also that Borders UK went into administration in November 2009 and closed its doors in mid-December 2009, so these numbers are included here for interest only.
Figure 4: Comparison between physical book and ebook costs A final word regarding the cost of ebooks.
As it stands today, paper books are alone in being exempt from VAT (Value Added Tax which equates roughly to US sales tax) [38].
Within the European Union, audiobooks and ebooks are considered taxable [39].
In the UK, full VAT rates are charged on ebooks and 0% VAT on paper books, whilst in Holland, 19% tax is charged on ebooks, against a 0% rate on paper books (in France and Germany, paper books are taxed at 5.5% and 7% respectively).
Similarly, downloads of journal articles from the British Library also attract full UK VAT rates.
In February 2009, the EU voted to permit member states to reduce VAT to its minimum value on certain items, including audiobooks and ebooks [40].
Whether individual governments elect to do so is another question entirely, but the option to do so now lies in the hands of EU national governments.
Barnes & Noble in the USA state that 'eBooks follow the normal tax rules of all downloadable products.'
[41] DRM and Distribution Mechanisms DRM, or digital rights management, is generally applied to the majority of commercially published files, whether released in ePub, PDF, Amazon's own Kindle format, or other formats.
The limitations imposed by DRM vary; usually the user is permitted to make use of books on a number of registered devices; this precludes the lending of books to others in most cases.
This sort of difficulty was highlighted by Richard Stallman, in his 1997 article, The Right To Read [42].
A further problem with DRM, particularly in a commercial context, is the close link to a specific distribution network, meaning that different types of device may not be eligible for registration – bought works cannot usually be transformed between formats or applied to different types of devices, except when explicitly supported by the distribution organisation.
A second approach to distribution limitation is offered by the sort of device lockdown applied by Apple – that is, a newly bought iPod Touch or iPhone cannot run arbitrary code, but only code distributed by Apple.
This formally discourages pirating, but also limits customisation and hobbyist software development.
In response to this, large communities have grown up around the concept of jailbreaking Apple devices – getting a level of control over the device that enables individuals to instal software without having to go via Apple's official distribution network.
This was originally intended to enable individuals to use custom ringtones and wallpapers [43].
Jailbreaking is now popular enough that a company offering applications for jailbroken devices estimates that 10% of iPhone and iPod touch users have jailbroken their devices [44].
As with many means of digital rights management, most popular DRM mechanisms have been broken, including MobiPocket and, hence, at least one of the DRM approaches used for the Kindle [45], and Adobe's ADEPT DRM, as is commonly applied to ePub and PDFs [46].
The Topaz format also used on the Kindle – a PDF-like format that allows more complex display – has also been reported to have been broken [47].
This leaves most ebook platforms in much the same place as the erstwhile iTunes DRM; since a workaround is widely available and technically uncomplicated, many individuals are able to use it where it fits their needs.
One common argument against DRM is that those who will suffer most are not those who profit from the unauthorised redistribution of content – but the less technically inclined end-users who want to use their content in a manner not specifically permitted by the distributor, such as reading an ebook on a platform not covered by the distribution scheme.
For many owners of ebook readers and general-purpose mobile devices, DRM – like the choice to jailbreak their iPod, and similar closed distribution channels in general is more of an inconvenience than a showstopper.
But underneath that level of consumer confidence in grey or aftermarket solutions, there are sinister undercurrents.
If DRM mechanisms are tied to a central service, and that service goes away for whatever reason, what happens to readers who have not taken the extraordinary measure of stripping DRM from their content?
For example, with the demise of Borders, what has happened to those who bought ebooks from that source?
In mid-2009, Amazon provided a graphical demonstration; a third-party publisher submitted a number of ebooks for sale.
Amazon initially accepted them, but later removed the ebooks from sale following notification by the rights-holder.
They then removed copies of the unauthorised publication from their books and their customers' devices, notifying customers via an emailed refund statement.
In short, customers who had bought in good faith copies of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm found that the books had simply disappeared from their Kindle devices.
The media attention following this literally Orwellian episode led Amazon to state that should the situation recur, they would not remove books from customers' devices [48].
The occurrence has nonetheless caused many to ask: should customers be reassured that the policy of Amazon is now that it will not unilaterally delete books purchased in good faith, or should the consumer remain concerned about the fact that, demonstrably, Amazon – and presumably other retailers with similar distribution models – could once again resort to 'after-sales deletion'?
Text-to-speech and Authors' Rights A previous sticking point in the adoption of ebook reader platforms again arose from its interaction with the traditional publishing world.
The Kindle, like several other platforms, contains a text-to-speech mechanism.
In the case of the Kindle, it is known as Read-to-me, and an example of its use is currently available [49].
It does not appear capable of fully supporting accessibility for the visually impaired, in that the Kindle cannot read out the contents of the menu system, but only the book itself [50].
In fact, this limitation has prompted legal action relating to the decision by several universities to take part in a pilot programme testing the device, and Amazon has signalled its intention to remedy this limitation [51].
In the meantime, publishers reacted strongly to the appearance of a text-to-speech function.
Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, is quoted as saying, 'They don't have the right to read a book out loud.
That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.'
[52] As a result, Amazon has now provided publishers with the right to switch this function on or off on a per-book basis.
Business Plans Overall, these devices fit into three broad categories; general-purpose devices that can be used as ebook readers, as well as other uses, and specialised devices that attempt to emulate the experience of reading a book – which themselves fit into two broad categories, depending on whether they are designed as part of a specified ebook distribution network or not.
For example, the Sony Cybook and Cool-er devices are not specialised; although Sony owns its own ebook store, it is equally possible to make use of other stores selling ebooks in compatible formats, such as Baen Free Library [53] and Books On Board [54].
As Books On Board explains [55], it is possible to upload non-DRM-bearing book titles to the Kindle, but 'premium' (DRM-bearing) titles cannot be used on the device.
Certain devices are not simply a piece of hardware, but a multi-platform distribution and reader system.
By comparison, the Sony reader devices, along with certain others in a similar category, are not limited to a single 'premium-content' distribution system, but are relatively open and agnostic of distribution system – with the exception of a preference for certain formats, such as PDF and ePub over Mobipocket.
A single device is not usually able to support more than a subset of formats, primarily for licensing reasons; Mobipocket reputedly disallows Mobipocket DRM and Adobe DRM from co-existing in the same device [56].
Buying into certain ebook platforms is a user experience similar to that of buying a mobile phone, in that some hardware platforms are designed and sold under the assumption of significant ongoing vendor tie-in; it is important to find a distribution network, a library, that coincides with one's requirements.
An ebook reader without a commercial distribution network is primarily a gateway into the classics, open content and user-generated content, whilst an ebook reader with a single distribution network is a gateway into one vendor's world.
Clifford Lynch wrote in 2001 that ebook readers raise questions about 'the future character and operation of personal digital libraries, and their relationship to commercial and non-commercial digital libraries and digital bookstores', and about 'how these entities will be distributed across a mix of portable appliances, personal computers, personal storage on network servers, and institutionally or commercially controlled storage and services on the network.'
[7] Conclusion From the users' perspective, it seems unlikely that the sort of manoeuvrings involved in the present situation will benefit them; content is encumbered, prices are negotiated in a manner that is both unclear and involving significant grandstanding, and as the recent collapse of Borders UK has shown, buying into anything other than an open platform with open content requires a very sincere and complete risk assessment.
The collapse of previous ebook infrastructure has demonstrated that devices may last longer than the supply network.
This is mitigated by devices that make use of cross-vendor standards; those with unsupported proprietary devices will have to hope that a community is able to find a solution to their difficulties.
It is to be hoped that over time, the situation regarding digital rights management will be resolved.
In the case of music sales, it is now commonplace to buy music in the form of unencrypted MP3 content that can be played back on any platform.
Indeed, given the difficulties of retaining a large collection of files even without the additional challenge of artificially limited playback, it is to be hoped that the user be given a great deal of support.
At the price of current commercial ebook content – and given that there is generally no mechanism provided for resale of licences, and thus no mechanism to transfer the ebook to another reader an ebook collection is a very significant investment.
In the meantime, it is perhaps inevitable that many ebook owners will take advantage of the existence of solutions to remove access control on their files.
If universities are to become involved in this type of infrastructure, it would seem strongly recommended to limit exposure to the use of these devices to read compatible, open content; for this purpose, there exists a number of very appropriate devices on the market today.
Students can recoup a great deal of the original cost of their coursebooks on the resale market.
The same is not true of electronic books.
Accessibility remains an issue across the board, and therefore it is suggested that any adoption of electronic book readers be accompanied by an appropriate strategy to ensure that these concerns and needs are met.
As an owner of an e Ink device, I am optimistic about the future of these devices – especially when twinned with content stores such as the Baen Free Library.
Moreover, I regularly meet people who express a very evident delight in the idea of a book that can contain all of their favourite reads.
I am less optimistic about the idea of buying into a specific distribution network; far better, one might argue, to seek distributor-agnostic solutions – perhaps even to make use of the buying power of universities as a group, rather than to limit oneself to the constraints of any single solution.
*Editor's note: Currently 180-220 GBP equates to approx.
$US282 $US345.
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http://news.cnet.com/E-book-devices-yet-to-hit-bestsellers-list/2100-1023_3-899185.html Roush, Wade (2009).
Kindling a Revolution: E Ink's Russ Wilcox on E-Paper, Amazon, and the Future of Publishing.
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/02/26/kindling-a-revolution-e-inks-russ-wilcox-on-e-paper-amazon-and-the-future-of-publishing/?single_page=true Catherine C. Marshall, Morgan N. Price, Gene Golovchinsky, Bill N. Schilit 1999 Introducing a digital library reading appliance into a reading group Yarow, Jay (2010).
Steve Jobs Says Book Publishers Hate Amazon's Kindle.
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-publishers-are-going-to-pull-their-books-from-amazon-2010-1 Weiner, A.
(2009) E-Readers Will Take Off With Holiday Shoppers in 2010.
Gartner Industry Research.
Rothman, David H. (2006) Razing The Tower Of e-Babel, PublishersWeekly, 28 August 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6365961.html Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS), Wikipedia entry, accessed 7 February 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OEBPS Wilcox, Joe (2009) The Crook in the Nook: Barnes & Noble ebooks are overpriced compared to Amazon http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/The-Crook-in-the-Nook-Barnes-Noble-ebooks-are-overpriced-compared-to-Amazon/1256171500 Masnick, Mike (2009).
This Is What's Wrong With eBooks: Amazon Loses $2 On Every eBook Sold.Retrieved Jan 20, 2010 from http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091206/2048537223.shtml Schonfeld, Erick (2010) Why Amazon Cannot Afford To Lose The eBook Wars To Apple.
Retrieved 04-02 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020402539.html Kellogg, Carolyn (2010).
Amazon pulls Macmillan titles in first e-book skirmish.
Los Angeles Times, 30 January 2010. http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_14349035?nclick_check=1 Yarow, Jay.
2010.
Steve Jobs Says Book Publishers Hate Amazon's Kindle, Business Insider, 29 January 2010 http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-publishers-are-going-to-pull-their-books-from-amazon-2010-1 Tobias Buckell, 2010.
Why my books are no longer for sale via Amazon http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/01/31/why-my-books-are-no-longer-for-sale-via-amazon/ Charles Stross, Amazonfail round-up.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/amazonfail-round-up.html John Scalzi.
2010.
Why In Fact Publishing Will Not Go Away Anytime Soon: A Deeply Slanted Play in Three Acts.
3 February 2010 http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/03/why-in-fact-publishing-will-not-go-away-anytime-soon-a-deeply-slanted-play-in-three-acts/ Flood, 2008.
Ebooks offer VAT but not value.
guardian.co.uk, September 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/sep/25/ebook.sony.reader.vat Biba 2009.
European Union taxes e-books but not p-books.
TeleRead, 16 March 2009 http://www.teleread.org/2009/03/16/european-union-taxes-e-books-but-not-p-books/ European Parliament, 19-02-2009. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/expert/infopress_page/044-49872-047-02-08-907-20090218IPR49869-16-02-2009-2009-false/default_en.htm eBook Help FAQs Barnes & Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks/help-faqs.asp?cds2Pid=8510&linkid=1512307 Stallman, Richard (1997) The Right To Read.
Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).
February 1997.
Thomas Ricker.
2007 'iPhone Hackers: "we have owned the filesystem"', engadget, posted 10 July 2007 http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/10/iphone-hackers-we-have-owned-the-filesystem/ iPhone Savior, Cydia App Store Reports Huge Traffic Surge http://www.iphonesavior.com/2009/08/cydia-app-store-reports-huge-traffic-surge.html Ragan,Steve (2009) Kindle DRM Broken.
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200952/4992/Kindle-DRM-broken Adobe's ADEPT DRM Broken, posted by timothy, Slashdot, 9 March 2009, 07:39 http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/09/063243&from=rss Plaidophile: Interesting Topaz DRM development, 7 January 2010 http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/e/2010/01/07-interesting_topaz_drm_development.php Metz, Cade (2009).
Amazon vanishes 1984 from citizen Kindles.
The Register, 18 July 2009. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/18/amazon_removes_1984_from_kindle/ Sal Cangeloso, Kindle 2 text-to-speech demonstration, Geek.com, 9 February 2009 (4:34 pm) http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/kindle-2-text-to-speech-demonstration-2009029/ Weiss, Thomas C. (2009) The Kindle 2.0 Book Reader Facts and Accessibility.
http://www.disabled-world.com/assistivedevices/computer/kindle.php Bauer, Patricia E, 2009.
Universities decline to use Kindle amid accessibility lawsuits http://www.patriciaebauer.com/2010/01/13/universities-kindle-27127/ Kindle 2.0's 'Read to Me' Text to Speech feature under attack, Reader review, 11 February 2009 http://ireaderreview.com/2009/02/11/kindle-20s-read-to-me-text-to-speech-feature-under-attack/ Baen Free Library http://www.baen.com/library/ Books On Board http://www.booksonboard.com/ Books On Board, Loading Non-DRM .prc Files to Kindle Devices: Selections of titles that will work on the Kindle http://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?F=kindle_help_nondrm i to i blog: iRex DRM policy: Mobipocket DRM and Adobe ePub DRM status, 21 January 2010 http://i-to-i.irexnet.com/2010/01/21/irex-drm-policy-mobipocket-drm-and-adobe-epub-drm-status/ Author Details Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?"
Author: Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/tonkin/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Excuse Me...
Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Excuse Me...
Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?
Buzz data software infrastructure archives metadata browser repositories preservation graphics provenance curation gopher interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Chris Rusbridge argues with himself about some of the assumptions behind digital preservation thinking.
Excuse me… I have been asked to write an article for the tenth anniversary of Ariadne, a venture that I have enjoyed, off and on, since its inception in 1996 as part of the eLib Programme, of which I was then Programme Director.
Some years ago I wrote an article entitled “After eLib” [1] for Ariadne.
The original suggestion was for a follow-up “even more after eLib”; however, I now work for JISC, and that probably makes it hard to be objective!
In “After eLib”, I wrote this paragraph about digital preservation: “Back to the Electronic Libraries Programme, what were some of my favourite projects (I won’t say best; this is definitely a subjective list)?
The project of greatest personal satisfaction for me is CEDARS [2], the digital preservation project.
Ensuring the long-term existence of digital materials was not an element of the Follett report, and this seemed a significant gap when I started thinking about applying for the job of Programme Director.
Others were also aware of the importance of this area, most particularly FIGIT’s Chair, Lynne Brindley, now CEO of the British Library.
We still have CEDARS as an exploratory project piloting ideas (which together with its JISC/NSF-funded companion, CAMiLEON [3] has a high international profile) rather than a full-blown digital preservation service; this is another example of the difficulty of taking even widely supported ideas through research into service.
It is also true that the technical problems in this area are not yet solved, but also that the real problems are organisational and political rather than technical.
I hope that in this interim period our consciousness of the problem is raised enough that temporary expedients will be found so that little of importance will be lost.” I now work for the Digital Curation Centre, which is concerned to help improve support for digital preservation and curation.
In my first year, I have had occasion to listen to many presentations on aspects of preservation in particular, and to read many articles and other texts.
In the process, I had occasion to look for the outcomes of an eLib Project, Infobike.
The eLib Programme pages still exist [4], and the description of the project in those pages also exists [5].
However, the project Web site to which it refers to does not exist.
The UK Web Archiving Consortium, which is sponsored by JISC and includes some eLib projects, has not been able to archive the outcomes of this project.
We have to go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to find archives of the Web site for the Infobike project, dating from January 1998 to August 2003 [6].
There I was able to find a general description of the project, an architecture diagram, and a description of the system components.
Nothing fancy was needed; just access to the resource, and a current Web browser.
This re-awoke the train of thought identified at the end of the “After eLib” paragraph above: what is the use of all this grand digital preservation theory, if we lose access to the data itself?
Since then, a number of common assertions, or perhaps assumptions, about digital preservation have begun to worry me.
No one person has said all these things, but increasingly they seem to be in the background of conversations.
I will put these forward as a list of statements, but, in some respects at least, I think they are fallacies: Digital preservation is very expensive [because] File formats become obsolete very rapidly [which means that] Interventions must occur frequently, ensuring that continuing costs remain high.
Digital preservation repositories should have very long timescale aspirations, ‘Internet-age’ expectations are such that the preserved object must be easily and instantly accessible in the format de jour, and the preserved object must be faithful to the original in all respects.
These statements seem reasonable, and perhaps they are.
However, I feel we might benefit from a rather jaundiced look at them.
So that is what I thought I would attempt for this article.
Beware, the arguments presented here are not settled in my mind; indeed this is to some extent part of an argument with myself!
Digital preservation is very expensive?
Excuse me … Is digital preservation expensive?
It depends whether you compare it with print preservation!
Two thought experiments are worth doing at this point.
First, think about your nearest and dearest research library, national library, or research archive.
It will be a big building (a very big building, often rather grand), often with a comparatively small proportion of space inside for people.
Think about the number of librarians, archivists etc who look after the stock in those buildings.
Just calculate how much it must cost!
Adrian Brown of The National Archives has written: “Storing and conserving our physical stock of records (which has now grown to 176 kilometres) cost £14.3 million in 2002 […].
Retrieving a paper record for use by a reader costs about £6; delivering one over the internet cost 13p” [7].
Yes, this is access and not preservation, but in the physical world these two are strongly bound together.
The cost of the Atlas Petabyte Data Store [8] is a few million pounds; any major research library costs the odd hundred million pounds.
In the second thought experiment, imagine a digital world in which this wonderful new technology called the Basic Object for Organising Knowledge had recently been invented.
You are head of information services for a major research university (providing all those services digitally, from the access services fronting your digital repository), and have to persuade your Vice-Chancellor to invest in a new facility for these BOOKs; maybe a couple of million of them (only a fraction of the numbers of objects in your digital stores).
You can probably script the interview yourself… “You want a special building with 10 floors, with huge floor loadings and a special environment?
You want 200 staff?
You want how many million pounds?
And after all that, the users have to go into the facility to access these BOOKs?
You must be kidding me; get out of my sight!” My point is that all preservation is expensive, but we are used to it and accept it as part of the cost of a cultured and educated life… at least in the print world.
The amounts of money being spent on preservation of digital material are comparatively tiny, and in any per-unit terms, will probably remain so.
The trouble is, it is a new cost, and we have not worked out how to factor it into our budgeting and business models.
My guess is that in the long term, we will realise that print preservation is very expensive, while digital preservation is comparatively cheap!
File formats become obsolete very rapidly?
Excuse me… There’s a lot of rather panicky talk about the rapid obsolescence of file formats.
Some of this is true, some is perhaps less so.
To some extent it depends on your timescale (see 4 in the list of fallacies above).
I think we need to analyse rather carefully what we mean by file formats.
On a simple analysis, I can find the following somewhat distinct cases (there are probably more): Media formats File formats created from hardware devices (eg digital cameras, scanners etc) and telemetry File formats created by programmers for specific projects File formats from standards-based, community or open source projects (perhaps not completely distinguishable from the previous case) File formats resulting from consumer-oriented commercial software products File formats from highly configurable products (SPSS is the example I have in mind) File formats protected by Digital Rights Management systems, or other forms of encryption or proprietary encoding.
The list is long enough to appreciate that there are subtleties here.
It is clear that the first three cases do provide significant risk of early obsolescence, and the last case certainly also represents significant risk of loss.
There are significant risks in case 6 if the file is not looked after together with its attendant metadata or documentation (or if this never existed).
However, I think most people would assume that the dictum about formats becoming obsolete very rapidly applies particularly to case 5, file formats from consumer-oriented commercial products.
I used to think this, too.
But I have asked around, and I cannot find any good example of this class of file where the content is completely inaccessible today!
So with this article I am inviting anyone with details of good examples of case 5, to respond to a posting on this topic on the Digital Curation Centre Associates Network Forum [9], or to email me at the address shown at the foot of this article.
Perhaps two things are happening here: one about why this fallacy is so widely held, and one about why it is perhaps less true than it might have been.
Many of those concerned with preservation are (as it were) older people, who grew up in the pre-Internet period.
Things certainly did change rapidly then.
Managers were faced with making technology choices that did indeed appear to bind them into technological dead ends.
There were many different options for everything, and interoperability was rather weak.
Change was rapid, as company after company went out of business or was bought up.
Obsolescence was a real worry.
It seems to me that nowadays the move to a consumer market and the rise of mass access to the Internet have comparatively stabilised things.
Somehow the system has gained a significant momentum that it did not have before.
Cost of entry to markets has greatly increased, and choice and variety have decreased.
The pace of new releases of mass-market consumer products has decreased.
This may not be so true for all market segments (for example, this article was planned using one of the software products for mind mapping [10], a market segment where file format incompatibilities between products and even versions are rife), but it is increasingly true for those mass products which create most files of interest for preservation.
Note that my argument is about total loss of information content.
There are clear examples where recovery of information from old files is partial or incomplete; see the Representation and Rendering Project Report by Paul Wheatley et al, for example [11].
It is possible that, with a concerted communal effort, we can do much better with some of these file formats; for example, the wide range of graphics formats now accessible in part due to the combined efforts of many individual enthusiasts.
Part of the key here is to collect and to share information.
This is where the several efforts to gather representation information in registries are so valuable.
The first such major effort was PRONOM [12], from The National Archives in the UK; in the near future the Representation Information Registry and Repository from the Digital Curation Centre [13] is expected to come on stream, and we have recently heard that the Global Digital Format Registry Project [14] from Harvard University Libraries and others has been funded by the Mellon Foundation.
If these registries can find ways of sharing information, and of dividing up the problem space without remaining reliant on one another, we should be able to make good progress.
There may well be two flaws in my argument: genuinely disruptive technological change, and extended time.
The Internet and the consumer mass market that emerged in the early 1990s could scarcely be imagined before, and have had radical effects on the way things work.
We should expect some such change to arrive in the next 10 or 20 years, and throw any of our cosy predictions (and plans) off track.
And clearly, if enough time passes, then these problems of inaccessible formats will emerge in one form or another.
However, time is an issue for preservation repositories in many ways, and is the subject of the next section but one.
Interventions must occur frequently?
Excuse me… This fallacy follows from the last.
Simply, if file formats become obsolete and inaccessible rapidly, then digital preservation interventions to reduce loss must occur frequently.
The KB of the Netherlands [15] has suggested in its cost models that file migrations might be needed as often as every 3-5 years.
However if, as argued above, the whole system is gaining sufficient momentum to stabilise partially, then it is a reasonable bet that file formats current today, if chosen with a little care, will still be accessible in 10 to 15 years time.
This certainly seems to be the case now; although most people with access to older files (say 10 years or so) can cite cases of some difficulty in accessing the content of some of them (for example Microsoft Office version 4 file formats), these are generally not insurmountable.
Some may see this as a highly dangerous argument, encouraging complacency.
There is certainly a risk (and complacency itself would be a very high risk strategy!
), but the arguments about the continuing high cost of digital preservation are also a serious deterrent, to which the answer too often is to throw up one’s hands and say “Can’t be done!”.
Investment in digital preservation is important for cultural, scientific, government and commercial bodies.
Investments are justified by balancing cost against risk; they are about taking bets on the future.
The priorities in those bets should be: first, to make sure that important digital objects are retained with integrity, second to ensure that there is adequate metadata to know what these objects are, and how they must be accessed, and only third to undertake digital preservation interventions.
This does tie in with my final fallacy, raising the question of the extent to which the costs should be loaded onto the archive or the end user.
However, first it is worth thinking a little more about timescales.
Digital preservation repositories should have very long timescale aspirations?
Excuse me… Much of the literature on digital preservation assumes very long time scales, sometimes of hundreds or even thousands of years.
One sees comments that suggest one of the possible risks a repository must guard against is the loss of the English language, for example; so it can be suggested that part of the representation information to deal with such cases would be an English dictionary (it is amusing that they still sometimes pre-suppose an Internet and Web).
In practice, until very recently almost all digital preservation was funded on shortterm project money.
David Giaretta, Associate Director for Development of the Digital Curation Centre has wisely remarked that the primary resource needed for digital preservation is money [16] In practice, the largest risk to digital preservation is indeed money.
Who has the resources to make a hundred-year digital preservation promise?
Who can make an investment case with a hundred-year return?
The money problem has another side-effect.
The more money that needs to go into expensive infrastructure, the less is available for addressing the real risks to digital objects.
Rosenthal et al point out “Few if any institutions have an adequate budget for digital preservation; they must practice some form of economic triage.
They will preserve less content than they should, or take greater risks with it, to meet the budget constraints.
Reduced costs of acquiring and operating the system flow directly into some combination of more content being preserved or lower risk to the preserved content.”[17] So designing for very long timescales itself has the potential to cause loss.
It is true that we are beginning to see the emergence of digital preservation repositories that can properly argue they have a hundred-year timescale.
Who could doubt that the British Library, The National Archives, and other national memory institutions have long-term intentions?
But even they are not immune to the effects of disruptive technology.
Another thought experiment may be helpful here, for those of you old enough.
Cast your mind back to the early 1990s.
This was the period immediately prior to the Internet, when gopher was king, and the World Wide Web appeared no more likely to be a successful technology than WAIS (Wide Area Information System).
Who at that time could have imagined the world of today?
Who, planning a hundred-year digital preservation repository in 1992 would have made decisions we would think correct today?
What makes us think we could do any better now?
There is a strong tendency to project the current situation forward (and it might be argued I have done just that, above).
It seems to me that it makes more sense for most of us to view digital preservation as a series of holding positions, or perhaps as a relay.
Make your dispositions on the basis of the timescale you can foresee and for which you have funding.
Preserve your objects to the best of your ability, and hand them on to your successor in good order at the end of your lap of the relay.
In good order here means that the digital objects are intact, and that you have sufficient metadata and documentation to be able to demonstrate authenticity, provenance, and to give future users a good chance to access or use those digital objects.
The preserved object must be faithful to the original in all respects?
Excuse me… One of the key ideas of the CEDARS Project [2] was “significant properties”; another (from OAIS (Open Archival Information System)) is the “designated community”.
Digital objects (viewed as data structure plus mediating software), have a huge number of possible behaviours.
Think of all the capabilities of a word processor such as Microsoft Word, operating on a digital document.
During the creation phase of the document, a subset (probably not a huge subset) of those capabilities is brought into play.
Other capabilities remain unused, but as long as the file remains in an environment where it can be accessed with the same software, those capabilities can potentially be used.
Some of those capabilities, such as extracting a change history, may be important for some potential users.
Other users may only want the capability to read the document, or perhaps to cut and paste extracts into other documents (an even smaller subset of capabilities than the creator needed).
The problem here is that there is no way of precisely defining the designated community, and similarly no way of foretelling the properties that future users might deem significant.
This leads to pressure for preservation that must be faithful to the original in all respects.
Similarly, the Internet paradigm of instantly clickable, accessible results also seems to be applied as a “must have” aspect of preservation.
The combination of full capability of digital objects preserved from the past, instantly available in today’s environment, may be an ultimate goal, but is extremely expensive.
As already noted, high-cost preservation means fewer digital objects preserved.
This situation has its resonances in the print world as well.
Take a book such as Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, for example [18].
Scott was keen to publish anonymously, and so each chapter was sent to a different copyist, to disguise Scott’s hand-writing; these chapters were then sent by the copyists to the printer, typeset and assembled.
The resulting book, set in the heavy type-faces of the time, bound in leather, and full of errors, would be a daunting read for most of us, but of huge interest to the Scott scholar.
Happily for the less scholarly, modern editions are widely available; they identify Scott as the author, and aim to “correct” many of the errors in early editions.
So, the appearance, weight, pagination, authorship, publisher and text of the modern edition differ substantially from the original publication.
Despite these changes, we are content that this very different artefact represents the same “work” as the original.
For us, the story is the significant property.
For the scholar, the original is essential.
The Scott scholar and the general public are, in this case, quite separate and distinct designated communities.
In the print world, these designated communities are served over the long term by very different kinds of preservation activity.
The general public can be well served by the “preservation by diaspora” of the international library system.
Lots of copies of books, perhaps in multiple editions, do indeed keep the significant property of the work safe.
The scholar needs access to the few remaining copies of the early editions; preserved in Special Collections, in expensive controlled environments, accessed perhaps in special reading rooms supported on acid-free mounts, handled with special gloves… It is true that the modern edition in my print example required the work of the scholar on the early editions.
However, that scholar had to be prepared to do much more than the general public to access those editions, including perhaps travel to several libraries to study different copies.
In other cases that scholar might have been required to learn ancient languages, or to decipher faded documents in archaic handwriting.
Scholarship is a serious activity; it is potentially difficult.
PhDs are awarded for contributions to scholarship, 3 or more years of painstaking research.
Back in the digital world, our scholar might be desperate to retain the functionality to extract information like change history from the digital object, but our general reader might be quite content with a much smaller set of properties.
John Kunze and colleagues at the California Digital Library have suggested the idea of “desiccated” formats [19], versions of digital objects with much reduced sets of significant properties, but which are much easier to preserve.
There will be some repositories that rightfully aspire to preserve full functionality for many important digital objects.
However for many repositories this will be too expensive a proposition.
For them, as suggested above, the right approach (the right ‘bet’) may be to keep the original data files, the authentic original bit stream.
When technology moves to a point where maintaining the capability to access these files is a problem, decisions on significant properties may mean that desiccated format copes should be produced.
Bearing in mind the digital preservation mantra: “always keep the original bits”, those requiring significant properties not in the desiccated versions have the possibility of investing to extract that information by performing their own transformations on those original bits, guided by the metadata and documentation available.
In the long run, as with Special Collections and archives, it is likely that the majority of preserved objects are very little (or perhaps never) used.
Maintaining these objects in an instant readiness state is money wasted.
Given the cost pressure on digital preservation, the aim should be to minimise the ongoing cost, to make easily preservable, desiccated versions if interventions are needed, and to put the cost of wider ranges of significant properties onto the user who demands them.
Excuse me… Some of these remarks may be felt by colleagues to be almost heretical, and possibly damaging to The Cause.
Excuse me, if that is the case, but given their importance and implications, I believe these issues still need analysis (almost certainly more careful analysis than is expressed here).
So, after these ruminations, how could I re-state my original set of possible fallacies?
How about this?
Digital preservation is comparatively inexpensive, compared to preservation in the print world, File formats become obsolete rather more slowly than we thought Interventions can occur rather infrequently, ensuring that continuing costs remain containable.
Digital preservation repositories should have timescale aspirations adjusted to their funding and business case, but should be prepared for their succession, “Internet-age” expectations cannot be met by most digital repositories; and, Only desiccated versions of the preserved object need be easily and instantly accessible in the format de jour, although the original bit-stream and good preservation metadata or documentation should be available for those who wish to invest in extracting extra information or capability.
The key message that I want to get across in this article is that lack of money is perhaps the biggest obstacle to effective digital preservation.
Assumptions that make digital preservation more expensive reduce the likelihood of it happening at all.
Poor decisions on how investment is applied can have major implications on how much information can be preserved, and how effectively.
Sometimes the right choice will be “fewer and better”, as in Special Collections, for national memory institutions and major research libraries.
Sometimes the right choice will be “cheaper and more”.
Repositories do have a choice, and must consciously exercise it.
References After eLib, Chris Rusbridge, December 2000, Ariadne issue 26, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/chris/ [accessed 2006-01-31] CEDARS Project http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/ [accessed 2006-01-31] CAMiLEON Project http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ [accessed 2006-01-31] eLib: The Electronic Libraries Programme: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ [accessed 2006-01-31] The Infobike project description, eLib Web pages: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/infobike/ [accessed 2006-01-31] Wayback machine, Infobike Project Web pages: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bids.ac.uk/elib/infobike/homepage.html [accessed 2006-01-31] Digital Preservation at the National Archives, Adrian Brown, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/digitalarchive/pdf/brown.pdf [accessed 2006-01-31] Atlas Petabyte Data Store http://www.escience.clrc.ac.uk/web/projects/petabyte [accessed 2006-01-31] Digital Curation Centre Associates Network Forum posting, Jan 31, 2006, Post subject: Any truly inaccessible file formats?
http://forum.dcc.ac.uk/viewtopic.php?p=262#262 [Accessed 2006-01-31] I first came across Mind Mapping through Use Your Head, by Tony Buzan 1974, British Broadcasting Corporation.
See also http://www.buzanworld.org/mindmaps.asp [accessed 2006-01-31] Survey and assessment of sources of information on file formats and software documentation; Final Report of The Representation and Rendering Project, Paul Wheatley et al, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/FileFormatsreport.pdf [accessed 2006-01-31] The National Archives: PRONOM http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/aboutapps/pronom/default.htm [accessed2006-01-31] Digital Curation Centre Development Representation/Registry Demonstration http://dev.dcc.ac.uk/dccrrt/ [accessed 2006-01-31] Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR), Stephen Abrams and Dale Flecker, http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr/ [accessed 2006-01-31] The KB Experience, Erik Oltmans, Head Acquisitions & Processing Division, National Library of the Netherlands: presentation to the DCC Cost Models workshop, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/docs/Eric_Oltmans.ppt [accessed 2006-01-31] The Digital Curation Centre: Developing Support for digital curation, David Giaretta, slides http://www.dcc.ac.uk/docs/DCC-Development-Niees.ppt [accessed 2006-01-31] Requirements for Digital Preservation Systems: A Bottom-Up Approach, David H Rosenthal, Thomas Robertson, Tom Lipkis, Vicky Reich, Seth Morabito, D-Lib Magazine, November 2005, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/rosenthal/11rosenthal.html [accessed 2006-01-31] Kenilworth : a romance / By the author of “Waverley,” “Ivanhoe,” &c. In three volumes, Anonymous (by Sir Walter Scott), Edinburgh : Printed for Archibald Constable and Co.; and John Ballantyne, Edinburgh; and Hurst, Robinson, and Co., London., 1821 Overview of the UC Libraries Digital Preservation Repository (DPR).
Kunze et al, California Digital Library, http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/preservation/dpr/DPRoverview.pdf [accessed 2006-01-31] Author Details Chris Rusbridge Director Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh Email: C.Rusbridge@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Excuse Me… Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?” Author: Chris Rusbridge Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/rusbridge/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing Acquisitions in Library and Information Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing Acquisitions in Library and Information Services Buzz data ebook onix url Citation BibTex RIS Bruce Royan welcomes a new edition of the standard text in the acquisitions field.
Sixteen years ago, when Buying Books for Libraries [1] was first published, it rapidly became a set text in library schools.
It also found its way onto the shelves of many practitioners, and I predict a similar destiny for this fashionably re-titled and newly revised second edition.
A revised edition is timely, as much has changed in this fast-moving field, including online order systems and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the rise and rise of consortium purchasing, bewildering turnover among suppliers, the development of new value-added services, site licensing, e-books and the triumph of the Web as a means both of pre-order checking and publication supply.
So many titles of this kind turn out to be thinly disguised compilations of conference papers from different hands, with little coherence of purpose or point of view.
While Liz is at pains to acknowledge the advice and assistance of colleagues, this book is clearly and consistently the work of a single author, and of an expert in her field at that.
It is logically organised, guiding the reader from topic to topic: pre-order checking; publishers and publishing; beyond the basic book; suppliers; ordering; out-of-the-ordinary ordering; when the orders arrive; budgets and finance; and ending with a chapter on the way ahead.
At every point in this journey, Liz has provided us with clear checklists of good practice.
While clearly outlining the "why" as well as the "how" of the acquisitions process, she has grounded any theoretical explanations with illustrations and examples drawn from the real world.
As might be expected in a book like this, the critical apparatus is concise, well-structured, and generally up to date.
There is a comprehensive list of Further Reading for each chapter, and with one exception (on musical materials), none of the citations is more than 5 years old.
There is also a practical set of References (mainly the URLs of sources of information) although it is interesting to speculate why in this day and age there is no reference to Amazon [2].
The Glossary is clear and up to date, apart from the surprising lack of a definition of ONIX [3].
A brief but helpful and consistent Index concludes this business-like work.
Liz herself describes Managing Acquisitions as "an introduction for newcomers in the field", and the clarity of its structure and style fit it well for this purpose.
But its comprehensive approach and its wealth of practical advice make it as much a handbook as an introduction.
Reading it is a little like having access to the advice of a reliable and more experienced colleague by your side.
£29.95 seems a lot to pay for a slim 150 page paperback.
But to paraphrase James McNeil Whistler, it is good value for the knowledge of a lifetime.
References Chapman, Liz.
1989.
Buying Books for Libraries.
London: Library Association/Bingley Amazon UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/ The ONIX for Books Product Information Message: http://www.editeur.org/onix.html Author Details Professor Bruce Royan Principal Consultant Concurrent Computing Ltd Email: bruce.royan@concurrentcomputing.com Web site: http://www.concurrentcomputing.com Return to top Article Title: "Managing Acquisitions in Library and Information Services " Author: Bruce Royan Publication Date: 30-October-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 45 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/royan-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries (emtacl10) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries (emtacl10) Buzz data mobile software api database rss portal infrastructure browser blog repositories video cataloguing sms mashup facebook mp4 research Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Walsh reports on a new international conference on emerging technologies within academic libraries organised by the library of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and held in Trondheim, Norway in April 2010.
The emerging technologies in academic libraries (or emtac10) [1] conference was held from 26 28 April 2010 at the Rica Nidelven Hotel in Trondheim – winners of “Norges beste frokost” (Norway’s Best Breakfast) for 5 years running, as the sign proudly states outside the hotel.
They certainly fed us copious amounts of fantastic food, and had evening functions including an organ recital in the impressive cathedral, but what about the contents of the conference itself?
There was a real mix of keynotes plus a choice of strands including Practical Web 2.0, Technologies, Supporting Research, Social Networks and Mash-ups, Mobile Technologies, New Literacies, and the Semantic Web.
In this report, I outline my thoughts on the sessions I attended that stood out for me, along with my impressions of the event as a whole.
As well as presenting at the conference [2], I live-blogged the event [3] and the majority of this report is adapted from that live blog.
The references I give for each talk link to an MP4 video file of the talk, recorded and hosted by the conference organisers.
‘The network has reconfigured whole industries.
What will it do to academic libraries?’ Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC Lorcan gave us his thoughts on how libraries are going to have to change their services in the “networked” future in the first keynote presentation of the conference [4].
I can only give a flavour of the issues he raised that resonated with me; as you may expect, he gave a detailed and thought-provoking keynote that touched on a lot of issues.
He gave us examples of how the network has change other industries, such as Netflix changing the way people view films in America, the strength of its service being its powerful recommendations system.
Though Netflix is now such a powerful company, it recognises that its core competence is in recommending films and has moved much of their infrastructure to Amazon, a competitor.
Netflix wants to avoid the distraction of running a data centre, content instead to focus on its core strength.
Lorcan wanted us to recognise that this was equally applicable to academic libraries, we should focus on our core competencies and not worry about outsourcing other activities to third parties.
Once we network services, including those containing our data, with other people in shared services we benefit from massive efficiencies of scale.
It allows us to analyse data much more effectively, so we can better deliver what people want.
He reminded us that discovery now happens elsewhere, giving the example of searching Google Books to find a particular passage compared with flicking through a book.
The norm is now online, external, no longer limited to physical access and familiarity.
‘We are no longer limited to the 150 people….’ of our real life networks, we can scale up to the whole Web.
So we need to make sure our special, ‘unique’ collections are easily discoverable by people who don’t want to use our tools, but use Google, etc, instead, ie ‘Indirect discovery’.
‘Disclosing’ stuff to cloud services to allow this rather than messing about with making nice local catalogues, when in reality most discovery will happen through other tools on the Web.
He also gave us some predications for academic libraries in the future.
He thinks we will get rid of most print books except the latest, most used materials, with a move to regional stores.
80% or more of spending on materials will be licensed electronic content from a few big suppliers.
We will move a great deal of infrastructure to the cloud and as part of this complex systems will have to be simplified.
We need to realise network effects in this move, improving recommendations and benefiting from collaborative collection management.
There will be a shift from library space as necessary storage and infrastructure (holding print books and journals) to social, ad hoc rendezvous space and a showcase for particular aspects of our expertise.
Toward the end he finished with the comment with which I most strongly agree, that we need to make expertise accessible and visible.
We tend not to expose our expertise at the moment, we push to resources more than our own expertise.
If there is one quotation I’ll take away and use from his whole talk, it is, ‘If the library wants to be seen as expert, then it’s expertise has to be seen’.
New Applications Derived from Behaviour-based Recommendations Marcus Spiering and Andreas Geyer-Schulz, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie This session [5] was about BibTip [6] and how it has allowed the speakers to develop resource recommendations based on what users do, not what they say.
It seemed to be based on analysis of co-inspections (full views within the same browser session).
Slightly strangely, although this conference heard a lot of people talking about linked data, and the efficiencies in scale that Lorcan Dempsey detailed just prior to this talk, the recommendations reflected local user behaviour, not wider usage amongst collaborative libraries.
They have brought in some sharing of data, but only to populate the recommendations when there is insufficient local data for an item.
BibTip is language-independent and works on any media in the catalogue, due to its working purely on browser history.
The speakers explained that in their library they have found that 20-25% of users on any particular day click on the recommendations.
I wasn’t totally convinced by this, either by the deliberate focus on local data when broader data might be available, or by the way recommendations were produced.
My key question would be how do we know the pages people are viewing are useful?
It may be that everyone clicks on the same poor book because it comes high up in the list of search results within the catalogue.
This system would then recommend it to others, reinforcing that (possibly poor) choice as a recommended book.
This is, I should add, purely my opinion based on a short talk though; so I may be completely wrong.
Mashup of REST-ful APIs Only Using RSS Feeds to Support Research in a High-demanding Research Environment Santy Chumbe, Heriot-Watt University This interesting session [7] told us all about mash-ups using JournalTOCs API [8] to make a friendly interface for staff to use.
Santy Chumbe gave us several examples including creating alerts for a repository manager when authors from their institution have published; and how to create useful alerts about full-text material by cross-referencing RSS feeds from publishers with university subscriptions.
There seems to be lots of interesting bits and pieces you can do with this, though I feel a little uneasy about it.
They seem to be suggesting turning RSS feeds into a search for the latest materials on a topic.
I think my feeling of unease is purely because it shows that our search tools are not up to doing this job already and perhaps they should be!
‘To face or not to face’ Višnja Novosel, University of Zagreb Višnja’s talk [9] covered using Facebook (the most popular social network in Croatia) within the University of Zagreb.
She suggested that they are up to 10 years behind some other countries in some ways, so Facebook is still up and coming there while most academic libraries in Croatia lack even fairly basic Web presence.
They put news type items from the wider country and the world on their own Facebook wall, along with links to other pages.
It would appear they are using it to push useful links to people.
In the first 5 months they went from 0 to 1,100 fans (1,400 at time of writing).
It sounds as if Višnja and her colleagues really got in at the right point to surf the peak of interest in Facebook in their country.
They are disappointed that people aren’t using it as social space, just as a feed of information, though it sounds as if they’ve enjoyed a fantastic uptake.
A really interesting talk, not because of the Facebook tool itself, but because it helped me reflect upon how we are still experimenting with other social media, which have a lot of parallels with their experiences in Croatia.
Linking Education Data Chris Clarke, Talis The second day started with a keynote from Chris Clarke of Talis [10].
He used the analogy of waves (which can be disruptive) to talk about technology evolution, suggesting that every 10 years there is a wave of change in the Internet.
In the run-up to year 2000 there was lots of data placed in large silos, big databases or systems such as those developed by our Library Management Systems; but innovative thinking and development in this area is pretty much finished now.
He typified the last 10 years (Web 2.0) as investment in us, so linking people and data, all happening in the cloud.
The next ten years, where we are moving now, comes back to linked data, a real theme of this conference.
He thought linked data would make the Web data-centric, not document-centric and gave many examples of where this was already developing.
As with any wave, this means disruption.
Disruption not just in the end-products, where we are likely to ‘find, reuse, remix’ data to give us the products we want, but in changing policy and licensing laws that struggle to cope with these concepts.
Library Trailblazing Graham McCarthy and Sally Wilson, Ryerson University I was especially impressed with this session [11], not just because it is partly about librarians playing (which I like!).
Ryerson University did some great, but very cheap, work on providing mobile services to students.
One of their first new mobile services was SMS from the catalogue, allowing users to text a catalogue entry to themselves; but they also asked students what they wanted to do online.
The top six came out as ‘Check opening hours, Book study rooms, check timetable, check borrower record, check catalogue, search for articles.’ This led to their using students (with a librarian in charge) to take these most commonly requested services and develop a mobile site around them for the library.
This progressed to being asked to launch a university-wide mobile portal as well.
A fantastic example of innovative librarians introducing a trailblazing service to their university.
The Strongest Link Lisa Goddard and Gillian Byrne, Memorial University of Newfoundland This incredibly popular talk (it was standing room only) summed up for me the semantic web and open data theme running through the conference [12].
It gave practical examples and ideas as to how libraries can get involved in the semantic web and open data movement.
Alongside the practical ideas, however, was a fantastic enthusiasm and energy for the topic and a real challenge for those of us who hadn’t really thought too much about the topic previously.
Thunderstorms in Hallward Neil Smyth, University of Nottingham This session [13] focussed on some fantastic teaching technologies used by the speaker, in particular on the use of a thunderwall area in his learning commons.
This area is a series of four screens controlled by software that allows users to control the screens together or separately, annotate them as required, and move back and forth through slides providing more non-linear presentations.
This is used to create ‘open space’ presentations, where they can try and draw in people who weren’t formally attending the talk, but passing through or on the periphery.
Lots of other ideas where thrown out into the audience as well, including a great idea for using glass walls around their library’s special collections as multi-touch screens.
‘I’ve got Google, why do I need you?’ Ida Aalen, NTNU The final keynote was a student’s perspective on academic libraries.
This was a really good, perceptive talk [14], though she did start with a warning that she wasn’t a typical student (‘I think of myself as a nerd’).
That said, Ida may be at the extreme end of a group of technologically aware students, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her type of studying becomes the norm before long.
So this talk provided us some advance warning!
Ida has been a paperless student for about a year, working solely from screens, which influences a great deal of what she does.
Importantly she stressed that studying is a whole lot more than just reading.
She said she was annoyed by all the tedious tasks you have to do as a student.
‘When are the exams, what modules am I doing, can I look at previous resources for courses to allow me to decide what to do?’ She could not see why it wasn’t the library’s job to catalogue those sort of resources and make them accessible.
She was annoyed by books (does the library have a book, does the bookshop have it, do second-hand hand bookshops have it, do her friends have a copy, etc?)
and wanted to know why we as librarians couldn’t make it easier for her to find these things out.
Ida showed us plenty of tools she uses to be a paperless or digital student, from direct tools such as Evernote [15], Google Docs [16] and Quizlet [17] to tools that allow her to concentrate such as Rescue Time [18] that can block applications and help her focus on ‘productive’ work.
Really interestingly, Ida said she makes sure she obtains good material from resources (print and online) to place in her notes to which she will later refer.
I felt that this was a move back to how students used to work, but tend not to nowadays, often requiring the original book next to them when they write essays rather than their own notes from the book.
Importantly for libraries, this incredibly technologically aware student, who spends her working life online finds university databases too difficult.
She gave up and went to Google Scholar instead.
She didn’t agree with the digital native idea, concluding with a great couple of soundbites: ‘screentime does not make you competent!’ and ‘just because I can use a wooden spoon, doesn’t mean I can use all utensils made out of wood.’ [14] Ida finished with a challenge to us as well.
After telling us repeatedly that she abandons our tools and systems when they fail to meet her requirements, she asked us ‘Should I adapt or you?’ Conclusion This was a really interesting conference, with a strong, but not exclusive focus on linked data and the emerging semantic web.
There were some excellent keynote speakers, not just the classic industry experts, but an amazing keynote by a current student.
I felt challenged and enthused by the conference and hope it will be repeated in years to come.
References emtacl10: emerging technologies in academic libraries Web site http://www.emtacl.com/ Walsh, A. Blurring the boundaries between our physical and electronic libraries http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7456/ Walsh, A QR tags and mobile phones in the library http://librarymobiles.blogspot.com/search/label/emtacl10 Dempsey, L. The network has reconfigured whole industries.
What will it do to academic libraries?
http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/lorcan_dempsey.mp4 Spiering, M. & Geyer-Schulz, A.
New applications derived from behaviour based recommendations http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/marcus_spiering_andreas_geyer-schultz.mp4 BibTip http://www.bibtip.org/ Chumbe, S. Mashup of REST-ful APIs only using RSS feeds to support research in a high-demanding research environment http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/santy_chumbe.mp4 JournalTOCs API http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api/ Novosel, V. To face or not to face: faculty of humanities and social sciences library social networking http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/visnja_novosel.mp4 Clarke, C. Linking education data http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/chris_clarke.mp4 McCarthy, G. Library trailblazing: implementing a student-focused, university-wide mobile portal http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/graham_mccarthy.mp4 Goddard, L. & Byrne, G. The strongest link: libraries and the web of linked data http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/lisa_goddard_gillian_byrne.mp4 Smyth, N. Thunderstorms in Hallward: visual learning and information persistence in academic libraries http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/neil_smyth.mp4 Aalen, I. I’ve got Google, why do I need you?
A student’s expectations of academic libraries http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/media/ida_aalen.mp4 Welcome to your notable world: Evernote Corporation http://www.evernote.com/ Google Docs http://docs.google.com Quizlet http://quizlet.com/ Rescue Time http://www.rescuetime.com/ Author Details Andrew Walsh Academic Librarian University of Huddersfield Email: a.p.walsh@hud.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hud.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries (emtacl10)” Author: Andrew Walsh Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/emtacl10-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Towards an Application Profile for Images Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards an Application Profile for Images Buzz data software wiki database xml archives metadata digitisation tagging identifier vocabularies schema repositories eprints preservation cataloguing multimedia gis aggregation tiff uri frbr dcmi exif xcri vra cdwa z39.87 research standards modelling Citation BibTex RIS Mick Eadie describes the development of the Dublin Core Images Application Profile project recently funded through the JISC.
Following on from the project to develop an application profile for scholarly works (SWAP)[1], the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has recently funded through its Repositories and Preservation Programme, a series of projects to establish Application Profiles in the areas of images, time-based media, geospatial data and learning objects [2].
The work on the Images Application Profile (IAP) has been carried out for the six-month period from September 2007 to March 2008, and while the substantive project work is now complete and a draft Images Application Profile is in circulation, the ongoing job of promoting the profile to, and consulting with, the image, repository and metadata communities continues.
To this end, JISC has funded a one-year post, based with the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI), to promote the IAP and work towards community acceptance.
The first task of the IAP project was to bring together a working group with representatives from a range of backgrounds comprising image experts, repository developers and information specialists [3].
The group met for a day in late October 2007.
It has commented subsequently on various iterations of the project as it has advanced through an email discussion list and some further occasional one-to-one meetings and exchanges.
As the project nears completion, it is our intention to open the discussion on the IAP to a wider Consultation Group.
The core deliverables of the IAP project were: a set of functional requirements based on a set of defined user needs; a conceptual model; an Images Application Profile; and a set of easy-to-follow user guidelines.
At time of writing most of these deliverables, some in draft form, can be downloaded from the project's wiki page [4].
This article provides an overview of the various issues concerned with the development of the IAP to date, concentrating on the particular challenges presented by images and image metadata, the potential use of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) concept model for images, and finishes with an outline of future plans as regards community involvement and ultimately acceptance of the profile.
It also points to some areas of partial resolution that may require further research to ensure a watertight profile for images, that meets the needs of all image users and image providers across all academic domains.
The Challenge of Images Institutional Repositories have to date concentrated most of their efforts in storing and managing text-based research outputs.
Finding text-based digital data through repository and other database systems is relatively straightforward compared to finding image-based data, in that the text's content can be processed automatically by machines, to help the end-user arrive at the meaning and context of the file where human-generated descriptions are partial or lacking.
Images are not self-describing in this way and hold nothing intrinsically within them that can be extracted and used by machines to aid description other than lowlevel pixel data.
Work is ongoing in various content-based image retrieval (CBIR) software developments and related endeavours, which use this pixel data to infer similar objects, similar textures and similar colour within images, and may offer partial solutions to providing some automated description of images and their content in the long term.
However, humangenerated descriptions of images are likely to remain the primary method of describing the often complex semantics that can be associated with any given image.
This 'semantic gap' the distance between what descriptions can be extracted by machines, and what humans can provide and need is a common feature of discussions about digital images and their retrievability within software systems [5].
Of course, the problem is further compounded for the image end-user because human-generated text-based descriptions of images limited by the knowledge, culture, experience and point of view of the annotator can only ever partially capture the information, meaning and context of an image in a given setting.
As the education community moves closer to articulating an ideal of providing seamless searching across educational and cultural image collections [6], and as institutional repositories begin to move forward from storing and sharing mainly text-based objects to embrace images and other complex digital objects, this information gap is becoming increasingly evident.
Also digital images often require at least three levels of description; technical information relating to the image; the content depicted in the image; and possibly more abstract meaning and interpretation.
The technical description of the digital image itself is relatively straightforward for the IAP.
This information is generally unambiguous and can in some cases be automated using device-generated EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) or IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) tags, or, increasingly with newer file formats, XML-based embedded descriptors.
However this sort of metadata must become more complex if an institutional repository is to take seriously the long-term preservation of the digital images it holds, perhaps based upon the open archival information system (OAIS) model [7].
More detailed technical metadata, including format migration, versioning and change history information, will need to be provided if this is the case.
Descriptions of image content and abstract concepts are possibly more challenging still.
Descriptions of image content can be quite straightforward; for instance a digital image depicting the Eiffel Tower.
However, the Eiffel Tower could also reflect 'nation', or 'belonging' which are legitimate concepts to be searched on, and difficult to define in a standard way.
In addition to the complexity inherent in describing them, images also present a challenge in that they often have relationships with, or appear within, other objects.
They could be derived from slides, books, manuscripts, or photographs, or they could appear in lesson plans, course booklets, presentations and lectures.
All of which may need to be articulated in some way within the record, and all of which could be stored in or referenced by the repository.
These relationships with source and containing objects will become even more relevant to institutional repositories if they decide in future to store institutional slide collections or the outcomes of other large-scale digitisation initiatives based on local archives and other historical documents.
Similarly, some images may have relationships to other images, for example an image made up from composite layers of other images placed on top of each other, each of which could require separate description, or have various ownership and rights issues associated with them.
A further key challenge in developing an application profile for images was to take into account the wide variety of academic domains from which images form a core component, from medical and scientific disciplines to the arts and humanities.
It was necessary to identify common descriptors and terms that conveyed appropriate meaning and had applicability across a wide spectrum that incorporated all the subject areas; this involved avoiding a 'lowest common denominator' approach, and balancing the need to convey as much richness in data exchange as possible without being overly complicated.
Scope and Definition The extent to which these issues presented challenges to the development of the IAP depended much on where we drew boundaries in the project's scope, and also on how we defined the term 'image' when modelling image data.
The remit of the IAP project was to create a Dublin Core-based application profile for images that are stored in academic institutional repositories, with the aim of facilitating an exchange of image metadata between those repositories and other aggregators of data.
Thereafter, our intention was to develop a DC-based mechanism, but with image-centric add-ons that facilitated an exchange of image metadata between repositories in as meaningful a way as possible; but without it being unnecessarily complicated to use in terms of implementation by repository staff on the one hand, or burdensome to academic depositors or end-users on the other.
The scope of the project also had to consider the range of image collections that repositories hold or plan to hold in future.
Such a range could include among others: The outcomes of individual research and artistic endeavour Institutional photographic and slide collections Institutional archive and museum image collections Institutional teaching and research collections In the first instance repositories probably aim to begin storing images related to the outcomes of individual research and artistic endeavour, not least on the back of some current image and multimedia-centric repository start-up projects currently in progress [8].
However in the longer term there is likely to be an institutional requirement to manage the outcomes of all forms of image digitisation including larger archive, museum, teaching and slide collections.
We therefore took the opinion that the IAP should endeavour to keep the sharing of metadata relating to all these types of image data collections in project scope.
In terms of defining the term image for the project, we decided on a format-based approach that would include any flat two-dimensional digital image format.
This omits paintings, photographic prints, slides and anything which is three dimensional or analogue.
As such these are objects depicted within or sources for the digital image but not the image itself.
This definition suggests that what end-users will primarily be searching for through repositories is a 'digital image of something', the something being either: an object, or an event, an abstract concept, or a place.
For us this format-based approach to definition had the advantage of clearly marking the lines between digital images and their content and sources, and allowed us to make clear decisions on what were describing in our various profile entities We acknowledge that there may be some issues as regards certain file formats such as PDF, which, although technically an image format, is often treated as text.
This could also be true of any image format which has been used to capture a text with the intention of it being 'read' by an end-user as a document.
However, we feel these issues can be addressed at the local repository level and were therefore out of scope.
Also, what we were intending to model in the IAP was primarily two-dimensional Raster Images.
Vector and other three-dimensional image types may also be able to use the IAP, but this would require further research into potentially other specific metadata needs, and thus out of the scope of this project.
The Model Following on from a recommendation by the Working Group, our first task was to examine the SWAP use of the FRBR model to describe texts, and assess its applicability to image data.
Essentially FRBR is a means of modeling the structure and relationships that exist in bibliographic records [9].
It does this by providing a precise vocabulary to describe bibliographic entities, centred on what are known as Group 1 Entities, namely Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item.
Work is an abstract notion of a distinct intellectual or artistic creation, which is realised through an Expression – another abstract entity, which in turn is embodied in a physical Manifestation, which is exemplified as an Item.
To take the example of a text, the book Playback by Ronald Hayman would be modelled as follows [10]:   w¹ Playback by Ronald Hayman e¹ the authors manuscript text edited for publication m¹ the book published in 1973 by Davis-Poynter i¹ copy autographed by the Author   Subsequent editions of the same manuscript text would become new Manifestations of the same Expression, and other particular copies on library shelves would become other items.
Although an output from the bibliographic world, FRBR is intended to be capable of modelling all library holdings, including images [11].
Two initial questions emerged when applying FRBR to images: do the Group 1 entities Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item (in SWAP renamed Copy) suit images, particularly as regards the use of abstract notions for Work and Expression; and, can FRBR be used successfully to describe images, given the various challenges outlined above, regarding what is being described, and relationships with other objects?
We concluded that FRBR could be used quite successfully to model some image types, particularly those that are the product of an artistic or intellectual process.
For example, using the FRBR Group 1 Entities and their relationships as described in SWAP: Figure 1: FRBR Group 1 Entities as defined in SWAP a piece of sculpture could be described thus:   w¹ The Angel of the North e¹ Sculpture m¹ The Physical Sculpture e² Digital Still Image m¹ TIFF Format m² JPEG 2000 Format e³ Analogue Image m¹ Photographic Print m² Slide   However, after much investigation and consultation, it was decided ultimately that FRBR did not address our requirements for the IAP.
In essence what is being done by FRBR is not the modelling of the simple image and its relationships, but rather an attempt to model the artistic / intellectual process and all resultant manifestations of it.
We decided this was inappropriate for the IAP for a number of reasons.
While possible, an application profile of this complexity would require detailed explanation that could be a barrier to take-up.
Moreover, it strays from the core remit of the images IAP to facilitate a simple exchange of image data between repositories.
While the FRBR approach attempts to build relationships between objects, e.g.
slides, photographs, objects and digital surrogates, this facility already exists in, for example, the Visual Resources Association Core [12] (VRA) schema.
Our intention was not to reinvent or in any way replicate existing standards that are robust and heavyweight enough to deal with most image types.
Rather our intention was to build a lightweight layer that could sit above these standards, and work with them, facilitating a simple image search across institutional repositories.
Figure 2: Images Application Profile Conceptual Model In our model, we have renamed the FRBR Work entity as 'Image' for reasons of clarity, mainly to avoid confusion between notions of Work as described traditionally in image cataloguing in the cultural sector (i.e.
the physical thing) [13] and abstract Work as described in FRBR.
As noted above, image as defined in the IAP is a digital image, in line with our notion of end-users searching repositories for digital images of something.
Therefore our conceptual model while still using the language of FRBR and using the areas of SWAP that have applicability across the text and image domains places the digital image at its centre.
One area where we had particular concerns with FRBR for images was in the notion of an abstract Expression layer in the model.
This entity, while very useful in describing the various intellectual and artistic realisations of textual, musical and performance works, was not, it seemed to us, as useful in describing images, as defined in our project scope.
In FRBR the Expression points to 'intellectual' differences, which are not always apparent to the same extent in, for instance, a format change in an image.
To this end we have omitted this entity from the IAP model.
The IAP Model also makes use of the FRBR Group 3 Entities: Concept (an abstract notion or idea), Object (a material thing), Event (an action or occurrence) or Place (location), which will facilitate simple keyword searching of images.
We also added to the FRBR recommendations for subject a Person Entity that we felt was necessary to express either the creator of the object depicted in the image, or a person who appears in the image.
This Person information is distinct from FRBR Group 2 Entities which we have followed SWAP in consolidating as a single Agent.
In the IAP Agent is typically a funder, associated institution, or the creator of an image Manifestation.
Similarly the IAP follows SWAP in its use of Copy instead of FRBR Item.
Here a Copy is typically a network location of a particular image Manifestation.
In natural language what this model says is that each Image can have one or more Manifestations, and each Manifestation can be made available as one or more Copies.
Each Image can have one or more Subjects, Objects, Events, Places or People associated with it.
Each Image can have one or more funders and affiliated institutions and each funder and affiliated institution can be associated with one or more Image.
And each Manifestation can have one or more Creator, and each Creator can be associated with one or more Manifestations.
To use the Angel of the North example above in the IAP Model:   image¹ An image depicting The Angel of the North object¹ Sculpture object¹ The Angel of the North place¹ Gateshead person¹ Gormly, Anthony manifestation¹ image in TIFF Format   Attributes The attributes we use to describe each of our entities are summarised below.
In addition to Dublin Core and FRBR, the other metadata schema standards we looked at that have particular application for images were VRA, Catalogue Descriptions for Works of Art (CDWA) and Metadata for Images in XML (MIX / NISO Z39.87).
In the end we used a combination of MIX for technical information relating to the various manifestations, DC and the FRBR subject entities as described above.
We also looked at EXIF and IPTC standards and their recent developments, and recommend that, where possible, repositories enable automated population of the technical fields using them.
For more details on the attributes, there is a work in progress on the project's wiki page with definitions and examples [14].
As well as the standard fields derived from FRBR, DC and MIX, we introduced an 'isImageOf' property of Image which is intended, via an identifier such as a URI, to point to a fuller local record where available, that describes the image and its context in more detail.
Also, the isPartOf property of Image is intended to point to the larger image collection in which the single image belongs.
The use of these properties is intended to facilitate the inclusion of more detailed information about the images, their context, objects and relationships while keeping the Profile relatively uncomplicated.
Two further new properties that came out of our use case analysis were 'relatedCourse' property of Manifestation, designed to include information about related courses where the image manifestation appears and reproductionCost as a property of Copy, which will give the enduser a cost price for various types of publication.
We have yet to make a final decision as to whether these attributes remain in project scope.
One idea is to relate the course information property to the work going on in the XCRI project [15], but this will require some further research.
The reproductionCost attribute seems appropriate if institutions intend to generate revenue from images published in books and elsewhere.
The attributes of each Entity Type are as follows: Image Identifier entityType hasAsSubject isImageOf isFundedBy isPartOf Title Description Subject Grant Number isManifestAs Manifestation Identifier entityType isCreatedBy Format fileSize imageHeight imageWidth dateCreation colorSpace Resolution relatedCourse isAvailableAs Copy Identifier entityType accessRights rightsHolder Rights dateAvailable reproductionCost Agent entityType Name familyName givenName Homepage Subject Object entityType Object Subject Place entityType Place Subject Concept entityType Concept Subject Event entityType Event Subject Person entityType Person Community Acceptance As noted above, JISC is funding a one-year post to help take the profile out to the community and engage with relevant stakeholders.
Our remit in this development phase of the project is to put together a plan for this work, and to highlight areas that can be usefully researched further with the ultimate aim of achieving a fully implemented IAP.
The IAP development has been hampered slightly in that it has yet to be tested with institutional repository software or in a working repository setting.
Testing and further discussion with repository software developers were impossible to schedule in the short six-month period of the project, but we hope in the coming year to engage more fully in this area.
Similarly a key aim of the IAP Project has been to put a mechanism in place that would work with the Repositories Search Project [16] which intends to include image searching within its remit.
Some practical testing of image searching in this context will be imperative in the coming months.
The IAP will also need to be introduced to a wider community of image providers, across all academic and cultural domains, if it is to be truly embracing of all image types and uses.
The project team had some practical experience in providing disparate collections of images to education through our work at VADS [17], but we would recommend further detailed consultation.
We intend to put some of the formal mechanisms of this discussion in place in the next month as we invite key people and organisations to be a part of the Consultation Group.
Now that the IAP is in place we also hope to begin to engage more fully with the DCMI [18] and other organisations with interests in image metadata and application profiles.
Finally it is our hope to continue to engage closely with the other application profiles being developed as part of this Repositories strand, and exploit common areas which we can use to maximise the combined chances of all the application profiles being accepted by all of the relevant communities.
Conclusion The development of an IAP threw up issues and complexities unique to this visual format which had not been assessed fully by the repositories community thus far.
We hope that this article has outlined these comprehensively and pointed to a possible way forward in the development of a profile for images that will facilitate a rigorous enough means of searching across repositories of image data.
There remain some areas where further research may prove useful, and as the initial six-month development phase of the project ends, and the longer job of promoting the profile begins, we hope these areas will be explored in more detail.
We look forward to more debate in the coming months as engagement with the wider community begins in earnest and the profile moves closer to acceptance by repository developers, managers and the users of images.
References EPrints Application Profile Wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile The JISC's Repositories & Preservation Programme Web page http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/ Images Application Profile Working Group members on the IAP Wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Images_Application_Profile#Working_Group Images Application Profile Wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Images_Application_Profile For a good discussion of the Semantic Gap in image retrieval see Jorgensen, Corinne, "Image Access, the Semantic Gap, and Social Tagging as a Paradigm Shift", Classification Research Workshop, 2007, available from the Digital Library of Information Science & Technology Web site http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2064/ See the Defining Image Access Project Wiki at http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Defining_Image_Access and the JISC Images Working Group's "Digital Images in Education: Realising the Vision" on the JISC Collections Web site http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/images_book for recent thoughts on sharing image resources.
See article on the Open Archival Information System on the Repositories Research Team Wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/OAIS Section on multimedia & images, on the JISC's Areas of Common Interest for Start Up and Enhancement Projects Web page http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/repositories_sue/suethemes.aspx#multimedia Tillet, Barbara, "What is FRBR?
A Conceptual Model for the Bibliographic Universe", Library of Congress Cataloguing Distribution Service, February 2004 http://www.loc.gov/cds/downloads/FRBR.PDF "Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, Final Report", International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions UBCIM Publications – New Series Vol 19, 1998, p.23 http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf Ibid.
pp7-8 Visual Resources Association Web site http://www.vraweb.org See "Cataloguing Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and their Images" on the VRA Web site http://vraweb.org/ccoweb/cco/index.html Images Application Profile Wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Images_Application_Profile The XCRI: eXchange of Course-Related Information Web site http://xcri.org/Welcome.html Intute's Repository Search Web site http://www.intute.ac.uk/irs/ VADS Web site http://www.vads.ac.uk Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) http://dublincore.org/ Author Details Mick Eadie Director VADS University College for the Creative Arts at Farnham Email: mick@vads.ac.uk Web site: http://www.vads.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Towards an Application Profile for Images" Author: Mick Eadie Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/eadie/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Three Perspectives on the Evolving Infrastructure of Institutional Research Repositories in Europe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Three Perspectives on the Evolving Infrastructure of Institutional Research Repositories in Europe Buzz data software infrastructure archives metadata accessibility identifier repositories eprints copyright video oai-pmh cataloguing personalisation dspace interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Marjan Vernooy-Gerritsen, Gera Pronk and Maurits van der Graaf report on the most significant results from two surveys conducted to provide an overview of repositories with research output in the European Union.
Since 2006, the EU-sponsored DRIVER Project has aimed to build an interoperable, trusted and long-term repository infrastructure.
As part of the DRIVER Project, a survey was carried out in order to obtain an overview of repositories with research output in the European Union in 2006 [1].
This study was updated by an expanded survey in 2008, in which 178 institutional research repositories [2] from 22 European countries participated.
In this article we will present the most important results [3].
As we will argue in this article, the institutional research repositories can be seen as an important innovation to the scientific information infrastructure.
There are three kinds of stakeholder directly involved in this: authors, institutions and information users [4].
From the perspective of the authors, the institutional research repository will have an important function as an electronic archive for their own research output, for example, material published elsewhere, but also working papers, internal records and other 'grey literature', that are not (as yet) published elsewhere.
Authors might use the electronic archive for generating a publications list on their own Web site, sending out URLs of publications to colleagues and so on.
From the perspective of the institutions, the research repository might have two functions: an administration tool for the institutions in relation to annual reports, research assessment exercises, etc, and; a way of showcasing the research output of the institutions.
From the perspective of the information user, the research repositories might be a source for grey literature and an alternative route to toll-access literature.
First, we will discuss the state of the art of research repositories in Europe using the results of the survey.
Thereafter, we will discuss other eye-catching results of the survey from the viewpoint of the above-mentioned three stakeholders in research repositories.
Lastly, we will discuss the stages in innovation adoption and implementation of research repositories and propose a three-track action plan for the further development of the research repository infrastructure in Europe.
State of the Art Growing Number of Research Repositories in Europe The number of OAI-PMH-compliant institutional research repositories in the European Union including Norway, Switzerland and Croatia can be estimated on the basis of the response rate of the survey at 280 to 290 respondents.
They appear to have increased by some 25 to 30 repositories per year over the last 3 years.
This number is lower than generally is assumed on the basis of the number of repositories registered in OPEN DOAR and similar registries.
The difference lies in our definition: the term 'repository' is now used in a much broader sense than a few years ago, especially for datasets in the area of archives and heritage collections.
Therefore, the definition of which repositories to include in the 2008 survey has been refined with the phrase 'containing research output from contemporary researchers'.
The estimate of 280 to 290 research repositories in Europe means that – when compared to the number of universities in Europe of 593 according to the European University Association (full members) – nearly half of the universities have now implemented an institutional research repository.
One-third Full Text: More than 60% 'Grey' Literature Which publication types and other materials are presently covered by the research repositories in Europe?
The large majority of research repositories is focused on the full text of various publication types, while less than half also contain metadata-only records relating to publications.
But quantitatively, metadata-only records take up 51% of all records, while full-text records take up one-third (see pie chart below in Figure 1).
Only a small percentage of the records contains non-textual materials such as primary datasets, images, video and music.
A closer look at the full-text records in the repositories shows that 62% of these records are grey literature (theses, proceedings and working papers); 38% of those records contain primary literature: journal articles and books/book chapters (see pie chart below in Figure 2).The respondents also estimated the number of records of each type in their repositories.
From these data it appears that a typical research repository in Europe contained in total 8,545 items in September 2008.
Figure 1: Record types in research repositories Figure 2: Publication types of full-text records Wide Variation in Depositing Work Processes How is the material deposited in the research repository?
The results of a question in the survey about the work processes of depositing are presented in the pie chart below (see Figure 3).
Work processes vary from self-depositing by academics to independent collection of the materials by the repository staff.
Compared to the results of the 2006 survey, there is a remarkable increase in the percentage of repositories that use a combination of various workflows (28% in 2006 versus 44% in 2008).
Is that a welcome development?
We think that from the perspective of the authors, self-depositing will be the preferred working method, as they will use the repositories as an electronic archive for their materials and might not like a time-consuming procedure before they can ever be used.
From the perspective of the institutions however, comprehensiveness might be important, especially with the purpose of showcasing the research output of the institution.
In that instance, workflow C collecting materials independent from the academics might be helpful.
Figure 3: Work processes Progress in Technical Harmonisation Technical harmonisation is an important goal of the DRIVER Project and essential in order to build a common infrastructure for research repositories.
Some progress has been made over the last years (see Table 1 below).
Which software package is used for the research of repository?
2008 ARNO 1.1% CDSware 3.4% Digitool 1.1% DIVA 2.2% DSpace 30.3% Fedora 2.2% GNU Eprints 19.7% iTOR 0.6% MyCoRe 2.2% OPUS 8.4% VITAL 0.6% locally developed software package 16.9% other 11.2% Table 1: Table displaying which software package is used by research repositories.
Firstly, the software market is still fragmented, but has two clear market leaders (Dspace and GNU Eprints with 50% market share, an increase over the 43.9% in 2006).
Secondly, the DRIVER guidelines have been developed by the DRIVER project to ensure high-level interoperability and retrieval of content.
From the survey it appears that 82% of the respondents knew about the DRIVER guidelines and 54.5% make every effort to follow them.
Three Perspectives Author Perspective: Electronic Archive Function The function of a research repository as an electronic archive for the depositing author will be greatly enhanced by a persistent identifier for each deposited item and a guarantee of long-term availability for the entire archive.
Personalised services, such as the ability to generate publication lists on the personal Web site of the author, will further enhance the utility of the research repositories for academics.
The results of the survey are presented in Table 2 below.
While some form of persistent identifier has now been implemented by most research repositories, together with long-term availability in more than half, the number of research repositories with personalisation functionality is still limited to less than 30%.
Survey data related to the electronic archive function 2008 Persistent identifier 84.3% Long-term availability 52.2% Personal services 28.7% Table 2: Survey data related to the electronic archive function Another important topic for the depositing authors might be the variation in the forms of availability of full-text content supported by the repository: Open Access, Open Access with embargo period, Campus Access or No Access (archive only).
The percentages of repositories offering the various forms of availability for full text are presented in Table 3 below.
It would appear that the repositories have been offering more options in recent years.
However, from an additional analysis of the 2008 data, it appears that 47% of the research repositories still offer only one form of availability, namely the Open Access option.
For Dutch repositories, SURFfoundation recommends the Open Access option as the default option in the deposit workflow while giving authors the choice of other options.
With regard to the availability of the full text materials (articles, books, book chapters, theses etc.
): how are they available?
2008 2006 Open Access: publicly available 96.6% 94.7% Open Access with embargo: publicly available after a certain period of no access 32.6% 18.4% Campus Access: only available for users within our institution 30.3% 26.3% No Access: archived but NOT available at all 18.0% 14.0% Other 6.7% 7.9% Table 3: How full-text materials are made available Lastly, the depositing author of full text of material published elsewhere is confronted with copyright rules and in the case of journal articles the question of which version should be deposited.
From Table 4 displaying the data from both surveys, it appears that there is a clear trend from the pre-print form and/or the published form towards the post-print form.
Which statement best describes the form of journal articles in your research repository?
2008 2006 Most articles are available in pre-print form only (pre-refereeing) 10.3% 17.6% Most articles are available in postprint form (final draft post-refereeing) 46.2% 30.4% Table 4: Form of articles in research repositories Institutional Perspective: Administration Tool and Showcasing Research Output Comprehensive coverage is an important success factor for the function of showcasing research output as well as for the administration tool function for annual reports and/or research assessment exercises.
Coverage by the research repositories was estimated by the respondents of the 2008 survey to be on average 35% of the research output of their institutions.
In another estimate, respondents indicated that the percentage of academics of their institution delivering material to research repositories was on average 33%.
These estimates are similar to those made by the respondents to the 2006 survey, suggesting no real progress in this respect.
This finding leads to the next question: what is the institutions' policy with regard to depositing?
The results are presented in the Table 5 below, together with the figures from the 2006 survey.
Nearly one-third of the institutions (32%) have some sort of (partly) mandatory deposit.
This percentage has increased somewhat since 2006 (24.6%).
Just over half of the institutions have an official policy of voluntary deposit while nearly 15% have not formulated any official policy.
Which statement best describes the policy of your institution for the academics with regard to depositing material?
2008 2006 Mandatory deposit: academics are required to deposit materials 11.8% 8.8% Partly mandatory deposit: academics are required to deposit some materials (for example theses), and are free to voluntarily deposit other materials 20.2% 15.8% Voluntarily deposit with strong encouragement: academics are strongly encouraged to deposit materials 29.2% 30.7% Voluntarily deposit: academics are free to deposit materials 23.0% 20.2% There is no official policy 14.6% 21.9% Other 1.1% 2.6% Table 5: Institutional policy on deposit User Perspective: Accessibility and Retrievability Accessibility – and in particular accessibility of full text – and retrievability is the most important issue for the users of the repositories.
In Table 6 below, data from the survey on accessibility are presented.
Overall, accessibility of repository information by search engines appears to be increasing.
The large majority of the repositories are now accessible via Google (91%) and Google Scholar (72.5%).
In 2006 these proportions were much lower (respectively 64.9% and 51.8%).
However, accessibility by other specialised search engines (Scirus, Scientific Commons) is limited, while just under half of the contents of repositories are also listed in the local and/or regional library catalogue (see Table 6 below).
Retrievability of items in a repository will be enhanced by the addition of an author identifier together with keywordand subjectindexing (in the English language or in other languages).
The data from the survey (see Table 6) show that there is room for improvement in these respects and no noticeable progress since 2006.
Factors related to accessibility and retrievability Accessible via: 2008 2006 Google 91.0% 64.9% Google Scholar 72.5% 51.8% Scirus 29.8% 18.4% Scientific Commons 28.7% Library catalogue 47.8% 53.5% National or regional catalogue 44.4% 47.4% Enhanced retrieval with: 2008 2006 Author identifier 30.9% 32.5% English language keywordand subject indexing 51.7% 60.5% Keywordor subject indexing in a non-English-language 34.2% 31.6% No keyword-orsubject indexing system 14.0% 7.9% Table 6: Factors related to accessibility and retrievability Next Steps in the Further Development of European Repositories Actions at Institutional Level Institutional research repositories are a major innovation within the scientific information infrastructure.
In the box below a model for adoption and implementation of IT innovations within an organisation is described [5].
Stages in Innovation Adoption and Implementation Initiation: a match is found between innovation and its application in the organisation Adoption: a decision is reached to invest resources to accommodate the implementation effort Adaptation: the innovation is developed, installed and maintained.
Procedures are developed and maintained.
Members are trained both in the new procedures and in the innovation.
Acceptance: organisational members are induced to commit to the innovation's usage.
Routinisation: usage of the technology application is encouraged as a normal activity.
Infusion: increased organisational effectiveness is achieved through using the IT application in a more comprehensive and integrated manner to support higher-level aspects of work.
The above model implies that the first stages – initiation, adoption and adaptation – will be mainly processes on the level of a research institution or university.
This survey shows that nearly 300 institutions in Europe have already passed the adoption stage and this number is increasing annually by approximately 30 institutions.
To help the new entrants in the research repository world, DRIVER has set up a number of programmes such as the DRIVER Guidelines, the Mentor Service and the Tutorial for data providers [6].
Clearly, these kind of programmes, supported by lobbying efforts directed at decision makers within the research institutions, will be needed for some years to come in order to reach the stage whereby the overwhelming majority of research institutions will have a research repository.
Actions at the Authors' Level With regard to authors within an institution with a research repository, the stages of acceptance and routinisation will apply.
A series of studies [7][8][9][10] has been carried out in the area of self-archiving.
The results point to two gaps in the self-archiving behaviour of academic authors: Many of academics , although with large variations across academic disciplines, do not as yet self-archive.
A large percentage of those academics that do self-archive, do not use the institutional repositories for this, tending to use their personal or departmental Web pages instead.
Actions by research repositories with regard to authors should therefore focus on closing these gaps.
We emphasise the need for a user-friendly depositing procedure if we are to convince authors who still use their departmental or personal Web sites for archival purposes to change to their institutional repository instead.
We also recommend personalisation functionality to authors such as the option to generate a publication list on their personal homepage and so on.
In addition, the manifest benefits of long-term availability and persistent identifiers are compelling arguments in wooing those authors.
Research repositories should be offering services that will lower the threshold for authors who do not self-archive as yet, offering, for instance a wider variety in options of availability.
Why is there no mandatory policy in some institutions?
From the comments made by respondents it appears that two kinds of mandatory policies currently prevail: only depositing of theses is mandatory the 'depositing' of metadata pertaining to research publications is mandatory.
Only a very few responses point to a mandatory policy for all research publications produced by the institution's researchers.
One respondent commented: 'we have an institutional mandate, but: never urge an academic, you won't get anything.
Convince them'.
We concur with this and believe that a 'seduce-to-use' policy will ultimately be more successful.
Actions at the Infrastructure Level to Support Usage When the institutional research repositories are fully incorporated in the scholarly communication system, authors and institutions can only reap the benefits of this innovation when the material in the repositories is widely used by users/readers of scholarly information.
Optimal usage can be achieved through a reliable infrastructure for research repositories that enhances the accessibility and retrievability of their content.
DRIVER aims to develop such a pan-European infrastructure, offering sophisticated services and functionality for authors, institutions and information users.
Conclusion Clearly, the present state of research repositories is not yet in the final phase of innovation implementation called 'infusion', whereby the scholarly communication system as a whole will function at a higher level.
However, working on three tracks to improve the functionality of the repositories for authors, institutions and users will in our view make this final stage of innovation adoption achievable within a decade.
References Maurits van der Graaf, "DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories" 2007, Ariadne, Issue 52, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/vandergraf/ The European Repository Landscape; Maurits van der Graaf, Kwame van Eijndhoven, 2008 http://www.aup.nl/do.php?a=show_visitor_book&isbn=9789053564103 A research repository is defined by (1) containing research output from contemporary researchers and (2) OAI-PMH-compliant.
In addition, 22 thematic repositories took part in the study: their results are not reported here.
The complete results of this 2008 survey will be shortly presented in an elaborate report to be downloaded from DRIVER Support Web site http://www.driver-support.eu/ The academic publishers are another important stakeholder, not to be discussed here.
Their role will be studied extensively in the PEER Observatory see http://www.peerproject.eu/ R. B. Cooper, R.W.
Zmud, Information technology implementation research: a technological diffusion approach, Management Science archive, Volume 36 , Issue 2 (February 1990), 123 – 139.
Respectively: DRIVER Guidelines 2.0: Guidelines for content providers Exposing textual resources with OAI-PMH, November 2008 http://www.driver-support.eu/documents/DRIVER_Guidelines_v2_Final_2008-11-13.pdf About the DRIVER Project http://www.driver-support.eu/managers.html DRIVER: Mentor Service http://www.driver-support.eu/mentor.html A. Swan and S. Brown, Open access self-archiving, 2005.
Antelman K., Self-archiving practice and the influence of publisher policies in the social sciences, Learned Publishing 19, 85-89, 2006.
Loughborough University Institutional Repository: Finding open access articles using Google, Google Scholar, OAIster and OpenDOAR http://hdl.handle.net/2134/4084 Faculty attitudes and behaviors regarding scholarly communication: survey findings from the University of California, 2007.
Author Details Dr Marjan Vernooy-Gerritsen Programme Manager IT & Research SURFfoundation Utrecht The Netherlands Web site: http://www.surf.nl/ Gera Pronk Project Manager IT & Research SURFfoundation Utrecht The Netherlands Web site: http://www.surf.nl/ Maurits van der Graaf Pleiade Management and Consultancy Amsterdam The Netherlands Email: m.vdgraaf@pleiade.nl Web site: http://www.pleiade.nl/ Return to top Article Title: "Three Perspectives on the Evolving Infrastructure of Institutional Research Repositories in Europe" Author: Marjan Vernooy-Gerritsen, Gera Pronk and Maurits van der Graaf Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/vernooy-gerritsen-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Buzz database archives repositories cataloguing passwords curation research Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl reviews the first two volumes of this very substantial three-part work, covering the periods to 1640 and 1640-1850.
Cambridge University Press has, with the first two volumes of its three-volume history of libraries in Britain and Ireland, provided a wealth of fascinating information on the development of libraries and librarianship from a sterling collection of historians and scholar librarians.
The publication of an edited history results in a denser packing of detail than would be achieved by a work of single authorship, since so many specialists each have an abundance of knowledge to cram into their relatively small allocations of space.
Volume 1, which traces the history of libraries from the earliest appearance of manuscripts in these islands to the Civil War, contains 24 chapters, usually by one, but sometimes two, authors.
Volume 2 continues the history down to the passing of the Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1850, in another 31 chapters.
Fifty-nine separate authors are involved in these first two volumes, representing a magnificent feat of commissioning and editorship.
'Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past' wrote Machiavelli.
Reading these 55 chapters creates interesting correspondences for librarians today who are grappling with recorded information, the memory of mankind, in a variety of new forms undreamt of by the subjects of these volumes.
Readers of Ariadne, interested in these new forms, will be struck by the parallels as the material we manage undergoes a technology shift on the scale of that described in Volume 1.
Once printing had taken hold properly, for instance, in the 16th century, books became plentiful and dropped in price to the point at which booksellers usurped the functions of libraries, which until that point had existed to allow precious and expensive manuscripts and early printed books to be shared by a privileged few.
In a similar way today we find publishers, booksellers and even authors selling their works directly and cheaply on the Internet, on the basis that speedy acquisition by means of e-commerce is more valuable to many users than patient borrowing by means of a library.
Or again, after the invention of printing, scholars quickly realised the potential of this new technology to present reference works in a way which was superior to manuscript equivalents, with indexing and cross-referencing benefiting from the print composition process.
This led to the destruction of older manuscript compilations in the way our modern libraries have seen print reference sections almost disappear as online databases provide much faster and richer ways to find very specific information.
And in the early days of printed catalogues in the 16th century, we see an example of the way technology gradually achieved disintermediation, as the inclusion in the catalogue record of two or three words from the recto page of the second folio would identify a manuscript book uniquely, thus preventing a malicious borrower from stealing it and substituting a cheaper copy.
Librarians could thereby be released from a tedious checking task for each returned volume, and lending took a step in the direction of self-service.
Theft was clearly a big problem in medieval libraries, even when most of the borrowers were monks.
It was common for access to the book cupboards to be provided only by the use of three different locks, requiring all three key holders to be present together to unlock them, in a physical equivalent to the use of PINs, passwords and usernames to access particularly sensitive digital resources today.
Collecting entered a new dimension at the end of the Renaissance Period, when for the first time collectors began to collect more books than they needed for their own intellectual enquiry, or could ever conceivably have time to read.
These collections found their way into the early university libraries in Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin and the five Scottish universities, into Sion College theological library, into the Royal Library in London, and later into the national libraries.
The art of collecting for the needs of future scholars seeks rediscovery today as we struggle to define digital curation.
In his contribution to Volume 1, 'The libraries of the antiquaries (c. 1580-1640) and the idea of a national collection', Richard Ovenden points to the importance of antiquaries in forming 'a new vision of what collecting meant'.
That vision included the importance of the institutional role in building research collections an argument which those of us seeking to build up institutional research repositories today have made many times.
It may be some consolation that it took a considerable period of time for that role to be accepted.
We can also take some warnings from past mistakes.
Many manuscripts were discarded not just following the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the Reformation, but also because libraries needed to make space to accommodate the increasing flood of printed equivalents.
Initiatives now like the Internet Archive are predicated on a sense, or a fear, that we are taking decisions too cheaply in respect of today's jettisoned material, i.e.
early Web sites whose value as a historical record is sacrificed to the desire for relevance, in the absence of collectors.
The worldcat.org of the 16th century was Konrad Gesner's Bibliotheca Universalis, a relatively successful attempt to record everything ever written.
In perhaps the first gesture towards library consortium building, he suggested that other libraries use it as a catalogue of their own collections.
Where the British approach to librarianship was ahead of continental Europe was in mooting the idea of a national collection as early as the mid-16th century, despite the fact that it did not exist for another century and a half (though the Bodleian Library provided a de facto national collection in the interim).
But in other respects, the continental European libraries were ahead, as Catholic Europe assembled its great counter-Reformation libraries in Rome, Madrid and Milan, rich in books and manuscripts, and displaying a wealthy disregard for the use of chains to secure their books.
Chaining, however, went on well into the 18th century in the suspicious, penny-pinching gloomy British libraries dark archives in the most literal sense, in the days before artificial lighting, when the prevalence of destruction by fire meant that many of them also remained unheated.
Literacy spread, assisted by developments in printing, and in the period of the Industrial Revolution a large self-education movement was fostered by the Mechanics' Institutes, which provided libraries as well as lectures for those who could not afford a school education.
At the same time as these sober and upright improving institutions, libraries for sociability and entertainment also appeared, with the appearance of circulating libraries, prepared to lend novels which had made their appearance in the 18th century, and became massively popular, despite the fears of many of the middle-class improvers that they tended to deprave their readers.
Until the passing of the Public Libraries and Museums Act in 1850, the reading tastes of the British public were satisfied only at a cost.
Circulating libraries did not provide books free at the point of use, but in an early example of micro-payments, loaned novels out in parts typically tuppence a night for a chapter or couple of chapters of the latest novel.
With public libraries, however, the reading tastes both of those whose reading was of the self-improving variety, and those who chose entertainment, were met for free.
We might speculate on whether the same outcome is likely in our developing days of digital content.
And we should feel we can speculate, because we librarians represent strong values to those immersed in the 'republic of the learned', which was the user community claimed by the Bodleian Library.
In earliest times we would probably have been chaplains as well as librarians, celibates dedicated to the service both of learning and of God.
C.Y.
Ferdinand tells us that by the time of Thomas Bodley, in the 16th century, we would be 'learned, of good presence, temper, and manners'.
P.S.
Morrish, in his chapter on 'Library management in the pre-professional age', tells us that Thomas Carlyle, contemplating selection of the first Librarian of the London Library, described the ideal librarian as '...a wise servant, watchful, diligent, discerning what is what, incessantly endeavouring, rough-hewing all things for us; and, under the guise of a wise servant, ruling actually while he serves'.
These volumes themselves constitute a rich collection of British and Irish library history, and Cambridge University Press is to be commended on their publication.
Richard Ovenden describes how the antiquaries of the early modern period developed an understanding of the activity of historical research as a function inseparable from collecting.
This suggests that history is a founding discipline of librarianship, as relevant to digital as to print or vellum collection and curation.
These two volumes of the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland therefore make a substantial contribution to our understanding of why we do what we do, and how we should continue to do it.
Author Details John MacColl Head, Digital Library Edinburgh University Library Email: john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland" Author: John MacColl Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/maccoll-dempsey-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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An Awfully Big Adventure: Strathclyde's Digital Library Plan Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines An Awfully Big Adventure: Strathclyde's Digital Library Plan Buzz data software wiki archives digitisation blog repositories copyright cataloguing marc ejournal ebook rae research Citation BibTex RIS Derek Law describes how the University of Strathclyde is choosing to give priority to e-content and services instead of a new building.
By Scottish standards, Strathclyde is a new university, being a mere two hundred years old.
It is a large university with 20,000 students, some forty departments covering most disciplines other than medicine and a huge programme of continuing professional development (CPD).
Set up as 'a place of useful learning' it has always specialised in the applied disciplines – business, engineering, professional training (teachers, lawyers and social workers) and has set out to be quite different from its better-known competitors.
But in a world ruled by league tables, where it typically finishes fourth or fifth amongst the Scottish universities (with spikes of excellence!)
it was determined that in the current strategic plan [1] we should find ways of attempting to move all our activities into the top three.
It was made quite clear that where excellence and methods of achieving could be identified, investment would be forthcoming.
By extension, disinvestment would take place in underperforming areas.
The strategic plan also quite specifically proposed 'A revitalised and contemporary approach to the provision of library services and information resources.'
Coupled with all of this was a recognition that our estate was too large and should be reduced, one element of this being the closure of our one remote campus and its consolidation into the main city centre site.
The Library mirrors this general position.
It has a collection of over a million volumes, dating almost entirely from post-1960.
Its excellence is built on scale for there has been no great tradition of building archives or special collections.
Growth runs at over a kilometre of shelving a year and the main building is a tired 1960s conversion of a publisher's warehouse on the edge of the campus.
On most measures it comes out in fourth or fifth place in Scotland.
The one notable exception is service.
The National Student Survey [2] figures show that users place Strathclyde well above the national average on service, reflecting a real attempt by the Library to be excellent where it can.
This is further reflected in the standing of the Library within the University, where it is seen as a positive contributor to the institution and is treated sympathetically.
As part of the strategic planning process, all departments of the University were asked to reflect and report on how excellence would be identified and achieved in their area.
In the Library this meant reflecting on the external environment.
The vast majority of current journals are already available electronically; Google is digitising books by the million and has recently reached a deal with American publishers which ensures a way forward for this programme [3]; the new CIBER report [4] sees electronic books at last making headway.
Indeed we must be close to the point where a cash-strapped Vice-Chancellor will wonder why a Library is needed at all.
Paradoxically then, the proposed campus closure and the transfer of the related branch library would fill the Library to the point of unworkability, unless we undertook major building works.
The final strand in this developing story is that Strathclyde has a converged management structure for Library, IT and Learning Services.
It has pioneered the use of laptops in teaching and has substantial collections of e-material, as well as its own digitisation unit.
So the Library has a lot of experience of changing user behaviour and expectations.
Defining Excellence The first and most obvious starting point was the tired fabric of the Library.
So we looked around.
The first curiosity to strike home was that all of our major competitors had spent or planned to spend literally tens of millions on new buildings or extensions – indeed the sector as a whole in Scotland appeared to have committed some quarter of a billion pounds to library buildings, apparently as an act of faith, rather than with any obvious rationale.
It became very quickly clear that, were Strathclyde to spend say fifty million pounds on refurbishing its library, it would be no better off relatively in any league table.
While some expenditure on library fabric was unavoidable, this seemed a poor way of achieving the University's overarching goal.
It seemed a perfect time to adopt the classic approach of reframing the question.
One of the key aims of the strategic plan revolves not just around excellent teaching, something to which every university would no doubt aspire, but also to be innovative in teaching.
This implies a strong focus on technology and by extension on e-content.
Again the Library was seen as central to this.
Unique Selling Points A great deal of effort went into workshops with users and senior managers those of the students' union being notably helpful.
The innocent question from the President of the Students' Association, namely 'What's a card catalogue?
', which arose in response to a curmudgeonly defence of the past, proved a real turning point in the debate.
Prensky's well-known writings [5] both on digital natives and on legacy content were particularly influential.
Views on future needs were gathered and the question was posed as to what would justify spending millions each year on a library building, the vast majority of whose collections were – or soon would be – available at the desktop.
It was relatively easy to identify the born digital material created by the institution as a starting point.
It was seen as a primary responsibility, beginning with the institutional repository (already one of the largest in the UK) and running through a gamut of Web sites, research data, wikis, blogs and e-theses.
It should be admitted that most of this material has been identified rather than 'captured' at this stage.
Second would come the digitisation of archive and special collection material.
Much work has been done in this area by the Centre for Digital Library Research and a recently appointed University Archivist had begun the slow task of building an archive of material which did not compete with other universities from scratch.
So we focus on miscarriages of justice (asbestosis, BCCI, Paddy Meehan, etc) or modern Scottish artists, or town and country planning; we look to digitise the collections which are uniquely ours.
A few older collections such as one on alchemy would be built up and digitised in collaboration with the relevant academic departments.
In other words, our USP would be precisely those collections unique to us.
In particular, our key collection objective was to be the digital asset management of the intellectual output of the organisation.
And thirdly we would buy and subscribe to a range of materials which ensured our place in league tables based on per capita spend.
The Library Building This still left the issue of the Library Building itself, shared with academic departments, many of whom were moving to new space and adjacent to a new sports centre planned for completion in 2012.
At over 13,000 square metres the Library is large, but not large enough to squeeze in the collections from our branch library.
At the time this discussion was taking place, there was huge concern over the spiralling cost of utility bills.
As with most universities, these costs are top-sliced and there is no real understanding of the cost of heating and lighting the library for example.
Calculations by our Estates Department showed that the cost of utilities for the Library is in excess of half a million pounds a year.
Staff and Staff Skills Strathclyde's greatest strength is its staff and this is recognised by users.
However many of the academic-related staff were appointed in the 1970s and are in the final stages of their career.
Operating in a converged service has allowed the library access to different skill sets and a growing number of blended professionals have appeared within the Information Resources Directorate which oversees this converged area.
One of the key challenges will then be to identify the relevant skill sets and then the structures which will support this kind of development.
Work such as Sheila Corrall's on Infostructure [6] provides an attractive and fresh view of the classic technical services/reader services structure, but there will have to be a good deal of heart-searching and perhaps false starts before an optimal model is reached How far the Library will 'own' the information space and staff of the University is one of the interesting questions-cum-challenges.
The Proposition Taking all of these elements together, a plan quickly emerged.
It remains mercifully free of detail in many areas, but the outline is clear and has been adopted enthusiastically by the University.
It is regarded as being in keeping both with the excellence agenda and with seeking a reputation for being innovative.
Morever, the plan will help the University to address collegially some of its academic and estates issues.
A substantial capital budget of £2.5 million has been authorised for the purchase or creation of digital material and a recurrent increase of £800,000 agreed for e-journal and e-book purchase.
In return the Library has agreed to clear the equivalent of half the space on each of its six floors.
This space will be re-used principally as teaching space.
This in turn will allow consolidation of the Law, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty in a separate building and the removal of teaching space elsewhere, so reducing the size of the estate, and by extension utilities and other costs.
The library collections will be digitised where possible, consolidated into rolling stack where usage merits it and disposed of where there is no real merit in retaining back runs of journals readily available electronically.
The Library is not and never has been a library of record for commercially published material and will focus on access rather than possession.
Somewhat cautiously (there are no real benchmarks for this) we anticipate beginning this change by removing completely or to store, one quarter of the collection within three years, while no longer adding new metres of paper each and every year.
A more ambitious view is that as the grip of Google continues to bite we can probably accelerate this programme.
The pace of change will be dictated as much by the practicalities of the availability of content and the time involved in de-accessioning monographs as by philosophy or finance.
An intellectual Rubicon has been crossed.
At the same time we shall have to spend quite a few millions on upgrading the tired fabric of the Library to make it acceptable – but it will be a much smaller library.
The Investment The recurrent funding is to be spent principally on new subscriptions to e-journals.
To some extent this will be dictated by availability, but the key determinant will be supporting academic excellence.
One element of this will no doubt be the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) results of December 2008, balanced by some notion of equity between the Faculties.
As far as the £2.5 million is concerned, an entirely arbitrary distribution has been agreed between the Library, the Library Committee and the Senior Management Team of the University.
Here inequity will operate since availability of e-versions will be a much more significant factor.
The priority will be back runs of journals to replace paper collections, since this provides maximum return for minimum effort in terms of removing the paper stock.
To a lesser extent this will apply to monographs but it is not expected that there will be a significant space saving here as the number of commercially available e-books to replace 30-year old publications is limited.
Access to material on Google Books is as likely to produce good results here.
Some £1.7 million has been notionally allocated to this aspect.
A further £300,000 has been allocated for digitisation of non-copyright material and special collections, much of which is expected to be undertaken by our in-house digitisation unit.
An initial focus will be on the branch library due to move to the main campus in 2010-11, to see how far the need to move material can be reduced.
The final £500,000 is both a contingency fund and will also meet some staff and software costs associated with managing and moving the stock.
Conclusion Arguably nothing proposed for Strathclyde is new or original, except perhaps the scale of the challenge.
Nor would we claim it to be so.
However, we do feel that we have been given an opportunity to redefine what the library represents and will represent to its users.
We shall continue to place an emphasis on service as well as collections, since users clearly value this.
we shall develop the meaning of the new library mantra, whether for academics at home or students pursuing innovative learning on the move: 'Don't just go to the library – take it with you'.
We will make the Library a compelling and progressive part of an excellent and innovative university.
At least, that's the plan.
References Strategic Plan University of Strathclyde http://www.strath.ac.uk/strategicplan/ The National Student Survey http://nss.webreport.se/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fDefault.aspx Google Book Search Settlement Agreement http://books.google.com/intl/en_uk/googlebooks/agreement/ Information behaviour of the researcher of the future: a ciber briefing paper.
London: UCL, 2008. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf Prensky, Marc.
Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, On the Horizon, Vol.
9 No.
5, October 2001 Corrall, Sheila.
Developing Models of Professional Competence.
The 6th World Conference on Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning for the Library and Information Professions.
Oslo, 2005 http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla71/papers/cpdwl-Corrall.pdf Author Details Derek Law Professor University of Strathclyde Email: d.law@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.mis.strath.ac.uk/IS/staff/IRDDerek.htm Return to top Article Title: "An Awfully Big Adventure: Strathclyde's Digital Library Plan" Author: Derek Law Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/law/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing Suppliers and Partners for the Academic Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing Suppliers and Partners for the Academic Library Buzz framework cataloguing ejournal ebook Citation BibTex RIS Tony Kidd examines this study's view of the importance of partnerships in their widest context for the modern academic library.
As someone who has been involved for longer than I care to remember in various aspects of library relationships with suppliers and other partners, and knowing David Ball of Bournemouth University to be a leading practitioner and advocate in this field, I looked forward with anticipation to working my way through this volume.
Nor was I disappointed this is a fascinating guide to current practice and developments in areas such as procurement, outsourcing, and collaboration with libraries in different sectors.
The book is divided into two main sections, the first covering commercial negotiations with library suppliers of various kinds, the second detailing collaboration with academic (specifically Higher Education) library partners, particularly Further Education (FE) colleges and the UK National Health Service (NHS).
Until comparatively recently, UK academic libraries in the main did not undertake systematic evaluation of their suppliers of journals and books, despite the very large sums of money changing hands.
This has now changed completely, and almost all university libraries are members of regional consortia, which carry out regular tendering exercises involving close co-operation between procurement and library professional staff.
There is no doubt that this has greatly improved accountability and the achievement of best value for money.
David Ball was one of the pioneers in this field with the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium [1], and this book provides much background on the advantages of these developments.
Even more usefully, extensive practical guidance is provided on the mechanics of preparing specifications and evaluating tenders from potential suppliers, and the author stresses the importance of completing all steps in the procurement cycle, from identifying a need to measuring and monitoring performance.
Although current trends began with tenders for print journal and book supply (and for library management systems, which are included in this volume, but not emphasised, perhaps because their procurement is a book-length topic of its own), the provision of electronic resources is now equally or more important, and receives due prominence in this volume.
Business models are discussed, and the 'big deal' for e-journals examined with a critical eye.
But e-book models are also given attention: the author feels that this less-developed market may allow libraries to be more proactive in steering business practices in a less restrictive direction.
As with other topics, the stress is very much on UK practice international comparisons are not ignored, but are not prominent.
More generally, this book has much of interest to say on the broader theme of outsourcing, using examples from public libraries as well as Higher Education.
Ball contends that there are opportunities for academic libraries to move further in this direction, examining processes such as book selection, binding, cataloguing, and the provision of shelf-ready books.
He goes into some detail on the various factors which will influence an outsourcing decision one fundamental and non-trivial point is the need to know how much an activity is costing to perform in-house and provides a useful decision matrix to aid judgements in this area.
Moving on to the second part of the book, analysing relationships with partners as opposed to suppliers (though Ball contends that the two are related in many ways, highlighting the vital importance of communication and openness for example), two case studies are offered.
Partnerships in general are constantly increasing in importance for academic libraries, with an emphasis on access and making best use of scarce resources, and the two studies exemplify this.
A growing number of Higher Education students are based in Further Education colleges, necessitating agreements between a university library and the libraries in the FE colleges where some of that university's students are now studying.
This book draws on experience at Bournemouth as well as elsewhere, and covers strategic management, planning, funding, service provision, training and quality assurance, among other aspects.
A useful checklist supporting evaluation of the library services provided by Bournemouth University Partner Colleges is available on the publisher's Web site [2].
The second study considers relationships with the NHS, a subject of byzantine complication where a 16-page chapter cannot by any means cover all angles and possibilities.
Nevertheless, a lot of ground is gone over here, with particular emphasis on nursing, and the same headings strategic management, planning, funding etc are used to give a framework to the discussion as in the chapter on Higher Education students in FE.
The authors are optimistic that inter-relationships and resource sharing are improving here, while recognising the need for cross-sectoral procurement, something that is now beginning to take shape under the auspices of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK Higher Education funding councils and the NHS.
A final chapter looks at collaboration more generally, covering regional developments, and also what seems today to be the pervasive importance of bidding for project funding (usually involving working with a number of partners) from bodies such as JISC including a useful introductory description of the main aspects of project management.
Although there is a good deal more that could be said on quite a number of the subjects covered in this relatively short book (144 pages, plus appendix checklist, abbreviations, bibliography and index), it is an excellent introduction to the whole question of the academic library's relationships with partners of many different hues.
It offers very useful practical analysis for library staff grappling with some of the problems and opportunities inherent in providing a modern and cost-effective service in this era of inter-dependence, when no library could or should exist in isolation.
References Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium http://supc.procureweb.ac.uk/ Checklist to support evaluation of the library services provided by Bournemouth University Partner Colleges http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/ball/ Author Details Tony Kidd Head of Finance/Serials/Document Delivery Glasgow University Library Email: t.kidd@lib.gla.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Managing Suppliers and Partners for the Academic Library" Author: Tony Kidd Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/kidd-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Citeulike: A Researcher's Social Bookmarking Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Citeulike: A Researcher's Social Bookmarking Service Buzz data software database rss portal archives metadata tagging browser blog opac linux url research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Kevin Emamy and Richard Cameron describe a tool that helps researchers gather, collect and share papers.
This article describes Citeulike, a fusion of Web-based social bookmarking services and traditional bibliographic management tools.
It discusses how Citeulike turns the linear ‘gather, collect, share’ process inherent in academic research into a circular ‘gather, collect, share and network’ process, enabling the sharing and discovery of academic literature and research papers.
What is Citeulike?
Citeulike is a Web-based tool to help scientists, researchers and academics store, organise, share and discover links to academic research papers.
It has been available as a free Web service since November 2004 and like many successful software tools, it was written to solve a problem the authors were experiencing themselves: ‘Collecting material for a bibliography is something which appeared to require an amazing amount of drudgery….So, the obvious idea was that if I use a web browser to read articles, the most convenient way of storing them is by using a web browser too.
This becomes even more interesting when you consider the process of jointly authoring a paper.‘[1] The basic functionality of the tool is simple; when a researcher sees a paper on the Web that interests them, they can click a button and have a link to it added to their personal library.
Figure 1.
Citeulike front page Figure 2.
Posting page When a user posts a paper, Citeulike automatically extracts the citation details and stores a link to the paper, along with a set of user-defined tags.
The user is then returned to the original Web page, where they can continue reading.
Citeulike has a flexible filing system, based on the tags [2].
Tags provide an open, quick and user-defined classification model that can produce interesting new categorisations.
‘the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost.
At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations.
Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme.
‘Rahshmi Sinha [3] By tagging papers they post, users are building a domain-specific ‘folksonomy’ that describes the paper they are bookmarking in terms that are meaningful to themselves and usually other specialist researchers (in Citeulike’s case).
Because everyone’s library is stored on the server, it is accessible from any computer, enabling users to share their link library with others and see who else has bookmarked the same papers (their Citeulike ‘neighbours’).
They can then click through to see the rest of these other users’ libraries and in this way discover literature that is relevant to their field but of which they may have been unaware.
Tags also provide another simple mechanism whereby users can navigate the libraries and discover new papers.
RSS feeds and Watchlists allow users to track tags and users’ libraries that interest them, showing the latest additions to these chosen categories.
As well as browsing their neighbours’ tags and libraries, users can discover papers on the Citeulike front page where the latest papers that have been posted are displayed (see Figure 1. above).
Another point of discovery is the set of subject specific pages, where the latest links to papers posted are displayed according to the subject under which users have classified them.
This is currently a simple closed classification consisting of Computer Science, Biological Science, Social Science, Medicine, Engineering, Economics/Business, Arts/Humanities, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Philosophy and Earth/Environmental Science.
Within these categories, as well as display of papers by latest addition, there is a voting system whereby users can vote on a particular paper that they find interesting, resulting in that paper’s promotion up the list of latest papers.
Figure 3.
Latest papers in Computer Science The emerging dataset of papers, tags and the relations between the two offers many intriguing avenues for investigation and data mining.
Clusters of tags can be investigated for patterns, and papers with similar tags can be grouped and relations between them exposed.
There are already several independent projects under way to produce analyses from the Citeulike dataset.
It is important to note that the tagging is initially done for the individual user’s personal benefit and the community benefits arise as a consequence of this behaviour.
Having said that, it is also clear that contributing to the community, or at least to a group, is also an important part of the motivation of many users (which can create a possible dichotomy in the choice of tag words (personal vs generic)).
Gather, Collect, Share Citeulike fuses together two separate categories of software: the new ‘Web 2.0’ breed of social bookmarking services (del.icio.us [4] etc) and traditional bibliographic management software (EndNote etc).
While Web bookmarks are simple URLs, citations are a bit more complex and include metadata like journal names, authors, page numbers etc.
The gather-collect-share model found in traditional bibliographic software is a linear process.
Gathering literature is conducted by querying an OPAC database or a scientific publisher’s site using a Web browser.
Desktop software such as EndNote will then allow the user to collect the articles which he or she wishes to keep for future reference, and the collection process stores sufficient metadata for the article (the title, authors, journal name, page number) in a format which allows for its ultimate sharing with others by citing it in the author’s own publication.
When the publication appears in print, the whole gather-collect-share process starts again with a different researcher in a different institution.
Citeulike fulfils two roles: Firstly, it makes the existing model of collecting information easier for the end-user.
A Web browser is the natural tool for exploring lists of publications, and our premise was that it ought equally to be the natural tool with which to collect bibliographic records.
Social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us allow the user to store links to Web pages in an online account all at the click of a button.
On the other hand, academic users have traditionally had to switch back-and-forth between Web browser and external application as they alternate between gathering and collecting modes.
This process is time-consuming and error-prone.
Citeulike solves this problem by operating like a standard social bookmarking service (the user clicks a bookmarklet in order to post an article to his or her account), but it also extracts all the relevant metadata required to create a proper bibliographic record automatically from the publisher’s site.
Citeulike supports most of the major publishers [5], and the ‘gather’ and ‘collect’ steps of the process work seamlessly for the user without having to leave the Web browser, with none of the drudgery traditionally associated with keeping one’s personal bibliographic database up to date.
Gather, Collect, Share, Repeat The second role fulfilled by Citeulike is that it has actually changed the traditional method for discovering and sharing information.
The linear gather-collect-share process has turned into a virtuous circle.
Because users’ collections are now stored on a Web server rather than in a proprietary bibliographic database locked away on a desktop computer, it is now possible for users of Citeulike to browse each other’s collections.
Figure 4.
Browsing a user’s library Users of Citeulike can browse or search through collections of articles bookmarked by other people with similar interests.
Figure 5.
Searching a user’s library Due to its specialisation in a particular niche (only catering for academic articles), Citeulike has value to researchers beyond a service aimed at a generalised audience.
Within this niche, new papers are more easily discovered, relevant clusters of interest are naturally formed and the tags are likely to be meaningful to users.
The tagging within a niche is also more specific.
For example, a tag consisting of the term ‘evolution’ applied to the World Wide Web as a whole could correspond to many possible interpretations of the word.
Within the context of peer-reviewed articles, the scope of such a tag is likely to be much narrower, and users searching on that term will retrieve many more targeted results.
An interesting question arises: how far should this specialisation be taken?
Is there a requirement for a separate bookmarking service for each individual academic discipline or sub-discipline?
It could be argued that a single unified bookmarking system filtered by tags is the answer to this problem, but the utility of a specialist service versus a generalised one as demonstrated by Citeulike weighs against this.
Separate services would not be of benefit to cross-disciplinary fields or users, or indeed the discovery of relations between aspects of separate disciplines.
Perhaps in choosing the overall category of academic research as a specialisation Citeulike has fallen naturally into a rational balance in this regard.
As noted above, Citeulike partly addresses this issue with the user classification of papers into subject areas (primarily to enhance discovery).
At the time of writing, we believe that Citeulike is the only social bookmarking service that has attempted to combine tagging with a closed classification like this (albeit a simple one).
It is worth noting that, from users’ point of view, it is far more practical to have a single social bookmarking service to store all their research papers, from whatever source (rather than several services).
This is also true from the sharing and collaborative point of view.
For this reason, we would argue that journal publishers and database providers should link to services like Citeulike in order to provide bookmarking functionality for their subscribers.
Additionally, the natural sharing and discovery of papers amongst users on Citeulike has obvious promotional benefits for the output of publishers.
Because Citeulike is an independent service, papers posted to Citeulike are more likely to reach an audience beyond a particular publisher’s natural constituency.
Gather, Collect, Share, Network As already noted, a further consequence of the “everything in your browser” model of Citeulike is that users will inevitably discover others with similar interests.
The fact that two users read similar literature probably indicates that they will potentially have a professional interest in each other.
The bibliographic data forms a fabric binding people together.
Professional networks build up between researchers in the same field.
Rather than requiring the facility to chat to friends, researchers welcome tools which let them carry out tasks associated with their work collaboratively.
To further serve that end, Citeulike provides groups, allowing people who already have working relationships and are, say, collaborating on a publication to share their bibliographic databases.
Additionally, it allows for globally distributed researchers with a common theme to build up a shared collection of literature they find relevant.
Publisher-specific Data As well as browsing Citeulike themselves, publishers can obtain feeds from the database of tags being used by Citeulike users of their particular journals.
Figure 6.
A list of articles from the journal ‘Science’ which have been tagged ‘bioinformatics’ Publishers can encourage the sharing of papers on Citeulike by adding a post to Citeulike link at the article level on their publications.
Alongside the link, publishers could also choose to display the tags used and number of users tagging at the article level on their sites.
Architecture and Future Directions In terms of technical architecture, the software is built on PostgreSQL, Tcl and Memcached.
The database and Web servers resides on scalable, redundant, professionally hosted Linux servers and the database is backed up every 15 minutes.
The design of the Citeulike Web site is simple, clear and functional.
This should not be lost through careless addition of excessive extra functionality.
Unlike other services, Citeulike is remarkably free of spam links and the technical design decisions that have prevented spammers’ invasions will continue to be a focus of activity.
The current development schedule includes building on the existing group’s functionality, to make it easier for users to separate personal and group associated bookmarks and extending and improving on the tagging tools by introducing things like tag bundling which would give a further level of user-defined classification and enable mass tag-editing operations.
Private bookmarks are a feature request that has been resisted so far in order to keep with Citeulike’s community-orientated philosophy, however there are probably good reasons why certain researchers wish to keep their bookmarks private and this is under review.
Using open source components, it costs surprisingly little to build and run Web services today which in the past would have required millions of pounds of investment, and this is surely a trend that will continue.
Citeulike benefits from this trend; however the authors do intend to make it a self-sustaining resource.
There are a number of ways in which this could be achieved however they all depend on a continued expansion of the user base, which is where efforts are concentrated at the moment.
Citeulike has grown virally through word of mouth to its current size: 33,000 users generating 200,000 distinct visits per month, (see Current Statistics below).
The network effects that created this scale continue to accelerate.
The obvious and least intrusive way to promote its use is through library and information management professionals, as well links from publishers alluded to above.
The most intriguing area for future experimentation is mining the tag and article data that is being created.
Is it possible that large-scale datasets from bookmarking and tagging can be used to supplement traditional peer review and citation analysis?
This is a hard problem to solve, but there must be some implicit crowd knowledge in the patterns formed.
Dario Taraborelli has written a thought provoking post on this: ‘Collaborative metadata cannot offer the same guarantees as standard selection processes (insofar as they do not rely on experts’ reviews and are less immune to biases and manipulations).
However, they are an interesting solution for producing evaluative representations of scientific content on a large scale.’ [6] Conclusion Citeulike is a tool that has gained a significant audience in the academic community.
Through helping users keep track of their own bibliographies, it naturally creates an environment that facilitates sharing and consumption of academic literature.
Publishers can encourage Citeulike’s use amongst their readers, thereby benefiting from enhanced exposure for their content and greater user engagement with content.
Many are doing this by placing posting links at the article level on their content, and will soon be displaying statistics as well as popular tags from Citeulike on their sites.
Insights can be gained through analysis of the emerging dataset of tags, and given a sufficiently large dataset, supplemental forms of discovery and rating of scientific literature could emerge.
Ultimately Citeulike works because it is useful to its users.
It automates a repetitive bibliographic management task and it offers a complimentary alternative to search engines and databases of academic literature through socially mediated retrieval and discovery of papers.
Current Statistics As of 13 March 2007, Citeulike currently has 33,000 registered users and is gaining new registrations at the rate of 100 per day (up from 50 per day 6 months ago).
Of that 33,000, 45% go on to post articles to the site, many simply ‘lurk’ (i.e.
browse other users’ libraries but do not post themselves), and some disappear.
Citeulike receives in excess of 200,000 distinct visits (defined by Google Analytics as a set of page views by a unique user with a timeout after 30 minutes of inactivity) per month, with each visit generating an average of 2.77 page views.
Of that 200,000 around 40,000 are visits from unique users who have previously visited the site on multiple occasions.
There are currently 505,402 items posted in the database (counting n if n people post the same article); 1,676,130 tags (counting n if there are ‘n’ tags applied to an article); and 130,548 distinct words used as tags.
These numbers are growing exponentially.
There are over 800 user-created special interest groups.
Citeulike has an international audience and has been translated (by enthusiastic users) into 8 different languages including Japanese and Chinese (the largest single group of users by country is the USA).
References Citeulike FAQ http://www.citeulike.org/faq/all.adp Wikipedia entry on Tags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags Rashmi Sinha blog post ‘A cognitive analysis of tagging’ http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html del.icio.us, the grandfather of social bookmarking sites: http://www.del.icio.us Supported sites: AIP Scitation; Amazon; American Chem.
Soc.
Publications; American Geophysical Union; American Meteorological Society; Anthrosource; Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal; BMJ; BioMed Central; Blackwell Synergy; CSIRO Publishing; CiteSeer; Cryptology ePrint Archive; HighWire; IEEE Xplore; Ingenta; IngentaConnect; IoP Electronic Journals; JSTOR; MathSciNet; MetaPress; NASA Astrophysics Data System; Nature; PloS; PLoS Biology; Physical Review Online Archive; Project MUSE; PubMed; PubMed Central; Science; ScienceDirect; Scopus; SpringerLink; Wiley InterScience; arXiv.org e-Print archive.
Dario Taraborelli (2007).
‘Soft Peer review, social software and distributed evaluation’ http://www.academicproductivity.com/blog/2007/soft-peer-review-social-software-and-distributed-scientific-evaluation/ {C}{C}Author Details Kevin Emamy Citeulike Email: kevin@citeulike.org Web site: http://www.citeulike.org/ Richard Cameron Citeulike Email: Richard@citeulike.org Web site: http://www.citeulike.org/ Return to top Article Title: “Citeulike: A Researcher’s Social Bookmarking Service” Author: Kevin Emamy and Richard Cameron Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/emamy-cameron/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Video Streaming of Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Video Streaming of Events Buzz data software wireless usability infrastructure video preservation graphics windows multimedia linux cache streaming flash avi quicktime mp3 asf dvd ogg gpl codec theora wmv h.264 h.263 licence mpeg-2 interoperability mpeg-4 mpeg-1 algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Greg Tourte and Emma Tonkin describe the set-up and use of video streaming technology at the IWMW 2006 event.
The recent Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2006) [1] was a rare opportunity to try out a few new pieces of technology.
With events that occur at a different location each year, it is often difficult to do so, since the infrastructure at the venue may not be suitable, and it is difficult to liase effectively with technical staff at the venue before the event in order to put all the necessary technology into place.
It may also be difficult to test significantly before the event, meaning that it is unwise to publicise the expected availability of the service.
Since the IWMW took place at UKOLN's home at the University of Bath, an effort was made to look into possible technologies and take full advantage of the opportunity.
After due consideration we settled on audio and video streaming of selected speeches as a feasible (although challenging) aim.
The project was very much about establishing the answer to one question; was video streaming technology ready and waiting to be used, or does it remain (as it is often perceived) a specialist and expensive technology requiring purpose-built and dedicated hardware?
We felt that the technology had probably matured to the point that it had become accessible to technical staff even to hobbyists, and set out to test our hypothesis.
There are several technical notions that are required in order to understand video streaming, and although we will not undertake a fully fledged lecture on video theory, we will give a fair amount of background information.
Real-time video is probably one of the most resource-intensive applications one can expect to deal with due to the sheer amount of data and the speed at which this data needs to be handled.
A lot has to be done in the background before being able to send a Web-friendly video stream, in which we would include: a reasonable viewing size (typically 320×240); which can be accessed over a standard Internet connection; while still being more than a random collection of moving squares.
Firstly sending an uncompressed video via the Internet would be inconceivable; in fact there are few user-targeted applications with uncompressed video DVD and even HD-DVD / BD-DVD (Blu-ray Disc-DVD), while quite high-quality, all use compressed video.
An example of the amount of bandwidth required to receive raw video in VGA format (640×480), which is close to television quality, would be: 640×480 × 24 bits/pixel × 25 frames/s = 184,320,000 bits/second = 22 MiB/s A fairly fast broadband connection (1 Mbit/s) still only represents somewhat less than 1% of the required bandwidth.
Therefore one needs to use some sort of compression.
However the compression used is highly dependent on the target transport method.
As for audio compression [2], one needs to get the best video input possible.
Encoding Video A video can be considered as a collection of images being displayed one after the other, with the term image being defined as a rectangular shaped mosaic made of pixels representing a scene.
And indeed this is the way most video cameras will capture them.
However video is rarely stored that way as the storage requirements would be far too great, as shown above.
In order to bring the size down to a manageable level, most video devices will use some form of compression.
The first compression method used is transformation of each frame of the video from the RGB colour space to YUV.
RGB means that each pixel is composed of three values of identical size (usually 8bits), one for Red, one for Green and one for Blue (hence the name).
YUV stems from the principle that most of the details on an image are contained in the grey scale version of the image.
Colour being something that does not need to be as stored precisely, the overall size of the image is reduced.
An example of this would be that for every cluster of 2x2 pixels defined in the grey scale layer, only one will be defined in the luminance and one for the chrominance layers.
At this point, digital imaging specialists are probably alarmed on reading about YUV being used in the digital video context when this term should only really be applied to analogue video.
The correct colour space name for digital video should be referred to as YCbCr, but the principle is the same [3][4].
The colour space is not the only way to compress video, as it is by far not sufficient.
One can look at video in two different ways: the first, from the historical standpoint, the old-fashioned film method, where images are recorded one by one onto film.
Each frame contains all the information to view the actual frame.
In other words a continuous series of images displayed at fairly high speed one by one.
The other way of looking at the problem is from the animation point of view where one has to draw each image by hand.
In this approach of course very little of the image changes from one frame to the next and one can therefore keep the background from the previous frame and just redraw the bits that have changed.
This is called temporal compression and is used in nearly all digital video compression algorithms.
There are many different ways of achieving this effect and all have their advantages and drawbacks.
It has to be a compromise which usually can be summarised, for a predefined image quality, to result in a large file format and fairly primitive algorithm that is very easy to decode or a small file and extremely complex algorithm, which is consequentially highly resource-intensive to decode.
This can be expanded to any variations of the parameters, but all in all you cannot get a very small file with a perfect image quality that remains very easy to decode or encode at the same time.
Therefore, your choice of compression format is highly dependent on the final use of the file.
Muxing Video Muxing, a new item of jargon, refers to the concept that, most of the time, a video file is an envelope for the audio and video content it contains.
However the industry has not made life easy by disambiguating the term and so they frequently refer to the file format by the same name as the compression algorithm.
Starting with audio only, the main use of a container is that it will have a series of flag positions and descriptions of how to read the encoded audio stream it contains.
Most file formats will enable the user to choose to move to any part of the stream, forward or backward.
Video containers work pretty much the same way with the added complexity that it keeps detailed location of the memory pointer for two streams, the audio and the video.
For our streaming purposes, we need to choose a container that enables a player to play the file even though it does not have all of it.
By this we mean that there are basically two ways of putting audio and video data in a file: the easy way is to write one first; and the other is to do so afterwards and rely on the container data to tell the player how to synchronise the two.
This is called a non-interleaved file.
The alternative is an interleaved file where bits of the audio and the corresponding bits of alternative is an interleaved file where bits of the audio and the corresponding bits of videos are written in succession.
The former is the only way a file can be streamed.
Figure 1: File content of video containers The Technologies Used In order to ensure that the process was technically feasible, we first put together a list of our requirements and the constraints placed upon us.
Our use cases were fairly simple; we required a system for video streaming that: Was sufficiently stable for use in a conference environment, where very little time could be spared by technical staff for 'nursemaiding' the system Could be built from off-the-shelf parts, most of which were already available to us; we had a strictly limited budget for the purpose Could be reused in a variety of environments, i.e., which did not make use of dedicated hardware specific to the University, and was not dependent on University-specific software licensing or exemptions.
Requirements Bandwidth The University of Bath, being linked to JANET, the Joint Academic Network, has a great deal of bandwidth available to it especially in summer, when most students are on vacation.
However, as mentioned in the technical background section above, video streaming is potentially an extraordinarily expensive activity in terms of bandwidth.
Whilst JANET bandwidth is extremely large, with the University's own network weighing in at 100 Megabits, the major cause of concern was the viewers' Internet connections.
Moreover, we should recall that video streaming bandwidth is additive; one viewer = one unit of bandwidth, ten viewers = ten units of bandwidth.
Scalable solutions require relatively little bandwidth to be used per connection.
This is a major issue in determining the choice of codec (Coder-Decoder) to be used.
Reasonable needs in terms of bandwidth translated, in practice, into finding a video codec that performs well at low bitrates.
Measuring the performance of codecs is an ongoing research topic; it is situational, in that it depends on the content of the video stream and also on the user.
For example, those who watched the World Cup features on the BBC Web site will have noticed that certain codecs have a tendency to fragment badly when faced with camera motion and several focuses of attention on the pitch, which tends to induce nausea on the part of the viewer.
On the other hand, that same codec suffices entirely for watching a 'talking-head' announcer discussing the news of the day against a static background.
Fortunately for us, a wired network connection was available in the lecture theatre.
Had this not been the case, we would have been forced to share a wireless connection with a large number of delegates' laptops, which would have limited bandwidth in unpredictable ways, and would have very likely reduced the performance and stability of the result.
Cost As mentioned previously, this project was partly about ascertaining the cost of video streaming.
Important criteria included: Free, multiplatform viewing software must be available A free server platform must be available In this instance, 'free' could apply either to 'free as in speech', or 'free as in beer', although obviously 'free as in speech and beer' was a strong selling point.
Whilst academic licences, exemptions or demonstration versions were available for certain platforms, it seemed disingenuous to demonstrate solutions to the enthusiast that come with a hefty price tag in normal use, or cannot be applied in practice due to licensing restrictions.
Sensors, DV and Hardware Encoding Partly because of the cost issues, we preferred solutions that allowed us to use the popular combination of a DV camera and a FireWire (IEEE-1394) link.
Firewire-enabled DV cameras are now fairly commonplace we used Emma's throughout testing and a solution based around it would require no specialised hardware other than a FireWire input port or PCI Firewire card (costing around £15, this was not an expensive upgrade).
One alternative would have been the use of an MPEG encoder card taking an S-Video or composite video input, but a real-time MPEG encoder card is relatively expensive, and probably out of range for the intended audience.
It was also possible to use a webcam or similarly inexpensive video input device.
From personal experience, we knew that webcams often suffered from video quality issues.
Webcams come in two common flavours; CCD (Charged Coupled Device) sensors, or, at the low end of the market, CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor).
CMOS webcams tend to have difficulty picking up fast changes in light intensity, are rather grainy, and blur on fast motion.
CCDs operate better, but even at the upper end of the market, webcams have a limited range and quality, cannot be adjusted or focused to any degree of precision, and tend to shift inadvertently when filming.
They are inherently better suited to close-up static shots.
Since we hoped to provide an overview of the lecture theatre, and attempt some camera work when possible, the DV solution was more suited to our needs.
Patent Issues Video and graphics are profitable areas for companies, which are inclined to seek legal protection for their discoveries and implementations wherever possible.
To be a little more direct, video streaming is a patents minefield.
The 'Windows codecs', which is to say WMV (Windows Media Video) and ASF (Advanced Streaming Format), are patent-encumbered and action has previously been taken against software authors who implemented these standards in unwanted ways.
For example, the popular GPL project VirtualDub, a video editing application, was requested by Microsoft to remove support for ASF from the application.
Microsoft had patented the codec, and although the original author had reverse-engineered the file format, Microsoft felt that the code infringed upon their patent.
Similarly, various other file formats are not 'free'; indeed, very few are.
The problem is not necessarily that a single patent exists to cover a given format; rather, a large number of patents apply.
For example, MPEG-2 is covered by at least 30 patents, each of which must be licensed, although some consider it necessary to license up to 100 patents.
To simplify this process, a patent pool exists, which is managed by MPEG LA.
The MPEG-2 file format is now licensed under strict rules royalties for each decoding application are payable, at a cost of around $2.50 per instance.
The Sorenson codec was for many years a difficult subject, used frequently in the encoding of Quicktime movies.
The specification was not made public, making it difficult to view these videos without using an official Apple decoder.
It was eventually reverse-engineered, however, and is now viewable on all platforms.
However, it is clear that such issues have a significant impact on the long-term preservation of digital video, as well as on the immediate usability and cost of the result.
We were keen to establish tentative best practice in the field; this issue was therefore a significant factor in our choice of technology.
Realistic Encoding Time In keeping with the budget limitations, we did not have a particularly fast machine available for encoding.
We had borrowed one of our desktop computers which was at the time slightly over a year old.
It was a 3GHz university standard Viglen desktop PC running Linux, with a non-standard addition of an extra 512 MiB of RAM, to bring it up to a total of 1 GiB.
Fortunately, it was a dual-thread, or hyperthreaded, Intel with 2 MiB of cache in total; when putting together specifications for a good video encoding platform, cache size is an important variable.
This was entirely fortuitous, however; it had not been bought with this use in mind.
Video encoding, as mentioned above, is not necessarily a fast process; it is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy.
The codec chosen must be sufficiently fast to encode in real-time on the desktop PC pressed into service, whilst retaining sufficiently good quality of image to be watchable at a low bitrate.
Ease of Use We were not very concerned about the fact that less 'polished' server-based solutions would be fiddly for the technical staff to operate, as long as the result was stable and 'took care of itself' under most circumstances.
However, we were very concerned about the amount of work the end user would have to put in to set their computers up to view the video stream.
This was a significant issue for us because we were unable to offer any form of technical support to remote users other than a Web page.
Shortlisting Codecs As mentioned in the background section, it is important to recall the difference between container formats and codecs.
Instead of going into the details, we present several likely combinations of container and codec.
Options considered included: ASF/WMV QuickTime (regrettably impractical, as we did not own a Mac) [5] MPEG-1, MPEG-2 MPEG-4/H.264 Ogg Theora RealVideo (typically uses a variant of H.264) Flash-based videostreaming (generally uses a variant of H.263 (Sorenson) to encode video in FLV (Flash Live Video) format) Of these, few are reliably supported natively on all viewing platforms.
Flash is available on any machine with the Flash codec installed.
Many platforms have some form of MPEG-1/2 decoder.
The ASF/WMV solution is handled natively on Windows, Quicktime is handled natively on Macs.
RealVideo generally requires a download.
Ogg Theora is not native to any platform, and always requires a codec download.
Support of specific versions of each of the above is patchy, so that the details may vary depending on implementation details.
In terms of costs, the vast majority of these formats are patented and require a royalty.
Theora is open and patent-free.
FLV is a proprietary binary format.
Note that the following table contains highly subjective measures of low-bitrate performance, and cannot be generalised the measurement of performance is very dependent on situation, light level, level of motion, etc.
Codec Encoder Low-bitrate performance Native?
IP ASF/WMV Windows Media Services 9 (Server 2003) OK Windows Patented, restrictions in place QuickTime QuickTime Streaming Server (Part of OSX Server) OK Mac Various formats, some open MPEG-1/2 VLC, FFMPEG Low Various Closed, patented, royalty payable MPEG-4 H.264 VLC, FFMPEG, QuickTime streaming server Good No Contains patented elements RealVideo RealVideo server Adequate No Contains patented elements Ogg Theora Ffmpeg2theora Very Good No Open specs FLV Flash Media Server, FFMPEG Good Flash plugin Some specs available (but uses patented MP3 code) Table 1: Some codec/wrapper combinations As can be seen from Table 1, there was little likelihood of finding a one-size-fits-all solution.
The Flash-based solution came the closest to overall interoperability without requiring any downloads.
We then proceeded to take a closer look at a few 'free as in beer' software combinations.
Candidate Software Solutions We then looked around for methods of generating and streaming video, and came up with a total of three candidate solutions, each of which was capable of encoding from a digital video camera over FireWire (also known as i.Link or IEEE 1394).
VideoLan VideoLan (VLC) was capable of streaming MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.
In practice, though, encoding was slow and the resulting video stream quickly picked up lag.
FFmpeg + dvgrab, IEEE1394 or libiec61883, Outputting to ffserver.
ffserver is an encoding server capable of producing anything that the FFmpeg library can handle, including Flash-encapsulated formats.
The uplink between the machine performing FFmpeg capture and the machine running ffserver must be rock-solid and extremely fast, since the intermediate video stream is essentially uncompressed!
The major advantage of this approach was the fact that it can output one video input simultaneously in multiple formats, so that some users can watch Flash whilst others watch the same stream in MPEG-4, Real Video, Windows Media Video and Ogg Theora.This would have been our method of choice, but which local conditions and shortage of testing time precluded at that time.
Ogg Theora This solution also used dvgrab, IEEE1394 or libiec61883, but encoded entirely on the machine performing the capturing.
The encoding process itself is completed using a piece of software called ffmpeg2theora, which produces an Ogg Theora-encoded stream.
This is then forwarded (piped) directly to an icecast server using oggfwd.
Icecast is actually an 'internet radio' streaming media server, principally designed to stream audio data to listeners.
It also has video streaming support via Ogg-encapsulated video codecs (Ogg, like AVI, is an 'envelope' for data in various formats; by contrast, MP3 files contain only MP3-encoded data.)
The commonest video format found in Ogg files is Theora.
Had we been entirely confident of our infrastructure and resources, we would have used the ffmpeg solution.
However, we felt that the data transfer might be briefly interrupted from time to time, and that a better result would be achieved using a less demanding approach.
We therefore chose the Ogg Theora solution.
A disadvantage of the approach was that almost all viewers needed to download the codec specifically for this event, since it is not a commonly distributed codec.
On the other hand, the stream to the icecast server was less demanding, the image looked good at low bitrates and the encoding used very little system resources (i.e.
a much slower machine could have been used successfully for this format).
Conclusion In general, the video streaming was a popular feature.
At one point, sixteen users were watching simultaneously with no ill effects on the server.
This gives us the confidence to consider publishing a timetable in advance in future years, ensuring that the service is promoted before the event.
However, the major flaw was as follows; turning off the camera or interrupting the Ogg stream caused broken frames, which meant that remote users' connections to the icecast server were broken.
They were therefore forced to reconnect approximately once an hour.
We did not have a method of switching between DV inputs, either in software or in hardware.
Hardware solutions such as DV-capable mixing desks do exist for this sort of purpose, and would be a low-effort solution for future years although, given that such a piece of hardware costs something in the realm of a couple of thousand pounds, this takes us out of the realm of our original statement of intent.
Software-based solutions are very probably available, or certainly could be created at the cost of a couple of weeks of qualified time and the expenditure of a few thousand brain cells, but we are not aware of an appropriate application for doing this with video data as of now, although audio information is another question.
The experiment ably demonstrated the correctness of our hypothesis, however.
Video streaming is not beyond the reach of today's hardware, requiring just a few kilobytes/second upload bandwidth, a cheap FireWire digital video camera, a standard PC plus a FireWire port, a copy of Linux and something worth broadcasting!
We hope in future years to be able to repeat the experiment at future IWMWs, using a dedicated laptop.
References Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2006/ "Recording Digital Sound", UKOLN QA Focus Briefing Paper 23, 2004 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-23/ "YUV Wikipedia Article" (viewed 2006-10-27) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV "YCbCr Wikipedia Article" (viewed 2006-10-27) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YCbCr QuickTime Streaming Server 2.0: Streaming Live Audio or Video http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75002 Further Reading FFMpeg Multimedia System http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ ffmpeg2theora http://www.v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/ Ogg Theora Video streaming with Icecast2 howto http://www.oddsock.org/guides/video.php Theora Free Video Compression http://www.theora.org/ Theorur for Ogg/Theora Steaming http://theorur.tvlivre.org/ VideoLAN http://www.videolan.org/ Author Details Emma L. Tonkin Interoperability Focus UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Gregory J. L. Tourte Systems Architect UKOLN University of Bath Email: g.tourte@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Video Streaming of Events" Author: Greg Tourte and Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/tourte-tonkin/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: My Word!
Plagiarism and College Culture Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: My Word!
Plagiarism and College Culture Buzz software copyright video Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley reviews a look at this problem from an American anthropologist and finds there is more in it than just a consideration of plagiarism.
My Word!
is an attention-grabbing title for a book on plagiarism by an academic anthropologist and teacher.
Although written entirely from a North American perspective, many bells will ring here for all concerned with teaching and education.
Do not, however, expect a set of ideas or rules to prevent (!)
or reduce plagiarism.
Susan Blum suggests that the real problem of academic dishonesty, of which plagiarism is a part, arises primarily from a lack of communication between two distinct cultures within the university setting.
Lecturers (and administrators) regard plagiarism as a serious crime, an ethical transgression.
It might also be considered as a sin against an ethos of individualism and originality.
However, students revel in sharing, in multiplicity of tasks and in accomplishment at any cost.
This book is unlikely to reassure readers (probably academics, administrators maybe) who hope that alleged rates of plagiarism can be reversed with strongly worded warnings on the first day of a class.
My Word!
starts to open a dialogue between academic staff and their students that might lead to mutual understanding.
It should also provide the basis for a better alignment between teachers' expectations and students' practices.
It should be noted that My Word!
is an anthropological study and not a treatise on how to prevent plagiarism, although Blum does finally make some telling suggestions to accommodate plagiarism based on her study.
What Do We Mean by Plagiarism?
Now I was not short of time for writing this review.
Nevertheless, I did plagiarise the previous paragraph from the dust jacket of the book.
Or rather, I copied it, altered a few words and the order of some statements and added two sentences at the end, but otherwise reproduced it as written.
This practice has been termed 'patchwriting' by Rebecca Moore Howard [1] and is discussed in 'My Word!'
as the '... universally banned practices of "copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another."'
([2] p. 26).
Yet reviewers, this one included, probably find it difficult to avoid doing this, especially if space is restricted – somebody else has said it accurately and succinctly.
This is where Blum's book is fascinating since she explores the idea of plagiarism and related concepts from several points of view.
First, from that of the academic establishment in several chapters: 'A question of judgement, Plagiarism is not one thing, once and for all', 'Intertextuality, Authorship and Plagiarism; My word, your word, their word -> our word' and, Chapter 3 'Observing the performance self, multiplicity versus authenticity'.
These three chapters make interesting reading as one is forced to contemplate and reflect on one's own practice and how that might be viewed by students and indeed by observers from a non-academic standpoint.
The investigations in these chapters use interviews with students, discussions with colleagues and references to appropriate literature (fully referenced and with 11 pages of notes and bibliography).
The arguments range widely and include related aspects such as copyright, intellectual property rights (IPR), music and video downloading.
Early on ([2] p. 12), Blum makes an interesting textual distinction between 'cheating', 'inadvertent plagiarism' and 'professional infringement'.
I have adapted this as Figure 1.
It is useful as a means of mapping specific sins or crimes, morals and rules and how 'bad' each instance is that one might encounter; music downloads provide an interesting example.
Figure 1: Ternary diagram showing the relationships between three aspects of plagiarism, after Blum [2].
Personal viewpoint is important here in terms of punitive response or permissiveness as well as different types of plagiarism incorporated into the ternary scheme (Blum's Table 1, [2] p. 27).
This book forces you to look at a variety of such issues as well as 'plagiarism' as we usually understand it within academic communities and the world at large.
(Do I now hold some sort of authority for devising the visual image of Figure 1, even though using and crediting Blum's concept?
Please discuss in a group and write it up in no more than a page.)
Group and individual values are related to academe and, with the introduction of the Internet and Web-based materials, we are all bobbing around in various types of boat in seas of information.
Blum suggests that, 'students must learn that if they wish to succeed, they must grasp the concept of authority and its rules so that they can perform according to them.'
([2] p. 90).
Chapter 4, 'Growing up in the college bubble, the tasks and temptations of adolescence' is the analysis and discussion of college education for 'Generation Y' and how plagiarism is linked to it.
For those of us in Gen X, this is an interesting and perhaps even alarming tour.
Blum guides us through this with skill and makes detours into binge drinking, honour codes and 'helicopter parents'.
Her aim in this, the lengthiest chapter, is to describe the prevailing culture to ensure the reader clearly understands plagiarism in its various manifestations.
It is well worth the read as it casts light on aspects of student educational behaviour beyond that of plagiarism and other issues related to cheating.
The title of Chapter 5, 'No magic bullet, Deconstructing Plagiarism' does not tell all, but indicates that 'solutions' involving policing (such as the use of 'Turnitin' software) may represent a deterrent but are not the answer.
Once more, the anthropologist looking at academic integrity, honour, morality and legality, again by using peer-peer music file-sharing as an example, demonstrates the complexity of living in an information-rich 21st Century.
Conclusion Blum's 'Conclusion' is sub-titled 'what is to be done?'
There is of course no answer, despite what academics (and administrators) might like to think.
So Blum offers some suggestions based on her experience and investigations.
While it does not serve readers to list them, a few brief quotations will perhaps give a flavour of the sociological basis for the chapter.
'The fundamental law is that we be honest; students are excellent detectors of hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy begs for uncovering' (p. 174).
And, associated with a specific case, 'This time around I saw the academic miscreant as more of a lost soul than a hardened criminal'.
This changing viewpoint comes with the acceptance that there is a 'mismatch' between the academy's and students' expectations.
I very much enjoyed reading this book, it provided new viewpoints and ideas and suggests ways of approaching plagiarism.
The purview is largely from the US and consequently does not consider issues encountered more commonly outside the US, especially concerning students from other cultures; see for example East [3] for a discussion from an Australian point of view.
Its 180 pages of main text are thought-provoking and easy to read, the anthropological discussion is mostly to be found in the Notes section.
Your reflection is the tricky bit.
If you are involved with education then you will find it very worthwhile.
I shall finish with three suggestions from Susan Blum's analysis which universities might adopt (p. 179).
As a disciple of Douglas N. Adams ('A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did?
Don't do that.'
[4]), I find them particularly significant, although not ones I might expect to read in a book on plagiarism: Don't panic!
Really educate these young people.
Empower them.
Don't treat them as children to be disciplined "because I say so."
A revolutionary approach would be to abolish college as the major adolescent challenge: separate the intellectual from the other endeavors.
Institutionalize a two-year service obligation prior to beginning higher education.
Let students begin to grow up a little before they enter our classes.
References Howard, R.M.
"Plagiarisms, authorships, and the academic death penalty.
1995.
College English, 57 no 2, November, 788-806.
Blum, S. D. "My Word!
Plagiarism and College Culture".
2009, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
East, J.
"The problem of plagiarism in academic culture" 2006. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 2, 16-28 http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/IJEI Adams, D. N. "The Salmon of Doubt" 1992, London, Macmillan.
p. 274.
Author Details W. Brian Whalley Professor of Geomorphology School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology Queen's University of Belfast Belfast BT7 1NN Email: b.whalley@qub.ac.uk Web site: http://geognet.qub.ac.uk/people/staff/whalley/ Return to top Article Title: "My Word!
Plagiarism and College Culture" Author: W. Brian Whalley Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/whalley-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Developing the New Learning Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Developing the New Learning Environment Buzz framework repositories e-learning vle research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Town welcomes this new text on a key issue for the future of academic librarians, and suggests some broader questions for consideration.
This work promises to 'capture' and 'critically discuss' the changing support role of librarians in the current 'rapidly changing environment' where boundaries between roles are 'becoming increasingly blurred'.
There is clearly a market for such a work, given that librarians in many educational contexts are indeed faced with new forms of learning environment and a significant growth in electronic, distance and blended learning.
'Capturing' anything in a time of rapid change is difficult, and it may be that boundaries and roles are only 'blurred' where there is insufficient clarity or definition of concepts, strategy, process and thought.
However there is enough confusion and uncertainty around these issues to require a timely and helpful text for those working at all levels of library and learning activity.
Philippa Levy is a well-known academic and researcher in the Department of Information Studies at Sheffield University.
Sue Roberts is Head of Learning Services at Edge Hill CHE and relevantly is the Chair of the SCONUL Task and Finish Group on e-learning.
The editorial conjunction reflects the fact that the book is constructed of two halves.
The first presents the context and theoretical background of the new learning environments.
The second addresses the issue of librarians providing 'learner support' from a practical viewpoint.
There is evidence of a team approach throughout the work, and effort has been made to link all the contributions to the common purpose.
Peter Brophy begins the first half by critically reviewing the policy framework and points up the issues with his usual clarity.
The publication schedule clearly fell before the publication of the DFES strategy on e-learning, which is not covered [1].
Philippa Levy provides a sound introduction to pedagogy and its relevance to developments in HE teaching and learning, and the consequences for information and librarian interactions.
Dorothy Williams provides an excellent summary of recent developments and debates in information and related literacies, and links these effectively back to pedagogic conceptions.
Williams perceptively picks up broader information and knowledge issues, and rightly points out the lack of distinction between 'information skills' and 'learning' itself.
Allison Littlejohn's chapter is the first from an academic unconnected with librarianship, and this is laudable and desirable in a work that seeks a broader collaborative perspective.
I found this chapter interesting and I liked the use of models such as the Mayes cycle.
Some of the content is likely to date rapidly given recent VLE market developments, and I might disagree that the 'integration of virtual spaces will inevitably be accompanied by a merging of responsibilities and roles'.
One of the key questions on which the book might have taken a stronger position is whether we are only to see currently identifiable roles changing and collaborating more with others, or whether new converged professions will emerge.
Sue Roberts concludes the first half with a chapter on new professional identities, and also starts the second half with Mark Schofield and Ruth Wilson on new academic teams.
Roberts correctly sums up some of the role issues for academic librarians.
From my perspective I do see a future problem for librarians who are neither proactive nor academically 'connected', but I see this as a long-standing people and process issue, rather than one only arising from recent technological developments.
The second half of the work moves immediately into case studies, and perhaps unavoidably this is where some focus is lost.
Case studies will inevitably draw different reactions from readers depending on their own experience, context and stage of local institutional development.
I personally found much of interest and value in the contributions of Susannah Quinsee, from the perspective of an e-learning unit Head, and Judith Peacock, as ever, on information literacy in practice.
Philip Payne provides a thoughtful survey on library management implications.
My own response to the second half of this work is inevitably influenced by close involvement in knowledge service and e-learning development.
Many of the issues raised were therefore clear to me some time ago, and maybe some already resolved.
It might have been beneficial to have some cases from institutions or organisations with very large-scale distance or e-learning experience to draw on, and also more on the knowledge management role opportunities for librarians in relation to researchrelated developments.
In a desire to be practical the focus sometimes seems only low-level and structural.
Overall the first half of the book is good, and provides some accurate diagnosis of the problems and issues.
However the decision to impose a distinction between theoretical and background chapters seemed ultimately unsatisfactory to me.
It perhaps also meant that some relevant recent work seemed to be omitted (see for example, the INLEI Project [2]).
Consequently the second part was unable to answer completely some of the very big questions raised in the first.
Perhaps the key concepts for the book were interpreted in too narrow a way.
This may have been unavoidable in order to create a manageable text.
But if the thrust of the book is to consider 'convergence', then limiting the discussion to only the 'learner support' role of librarians might not be a broad enough basis.
In particular I believe 'learner support' for blended learning requires deeper consideration of the librarian's role in repository developments from knowledge management, technical and process perspectives.
In addition, the 'learners' in this volume seem to encompass 'researchers' only occasionally, and academic staff rarely.
Convergence seems to me to be about the positioning and boundaries of institutional library services in toto as well as for individual learner support librarians.
Some of this might have been addressed in an additional chapter providing a clearer synthesis of the contributions, as opposed to the summary and reflections chapter provided.
This is a thought-provoking book, and in this sense it fulfils its objective and was a pleasure to review.
It might have benefited from some of the more challenging visions current in e-learning (for example, see Salmon [3]) to bring out the consequences of future potential scenarios for librarians, and also a final position which could have been used to allow readers to draw more specific conclusions.
These in turn might also have generated a precise agenda for professional education in relation to these new or enhanced roles.
However this work should form a part of the essential reading for those engaging with the implications of the new learning environment for librarians.
References The e-Strategy 'Harnessing Technology: Transforming learning and children's services' http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/e-strategy/ Bricheno, P., Higgison, C. and Weedon, E. The impact of networked learning on education institutions.
(JISC INLEI Project) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_inlei Salmon, G. (2004), Reflecting the Future of e-Learning.
Scaling up e-Learning Symposium, 5 6 October 2004, Shrivenham: Cranfield University RMCS.
Author Details Stephen Town Director of Information Services, Defence College of Management & Technology, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom & Deputy University Librarian, Cranfield University UK Email: J.S.Town@cranfield.ac.uk Web site: http://diglib.shrivenham.cranfield.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Developing the New Learning Environment: the changing role of the academic librarian" Author: Stephen Town Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/town-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Video Active Consortium: Europe's Television History Online Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Video Active Consortium: Europe's Television History Online Buzz data java rdf framework sparql api database xml portal infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus digitisation standardisation vocabularies schema jena repositories video preservation oai-pmh windows hypertext multimedia streaming flash ontologies owl sesame mysql dvd itunes youtube ict interoperability rdfs research standards Citation BibTex RIS Johan Oomen and Vassilis Tzouvaras provide an insight into the background and development of the Video Active Portal which offers access to television heritage material from leading archives across Europe.
Europe's audiovisual heritage contains both a record and a representation of the past and as such it demonstrates the development of the 'audiovisual culture' we inhabit today.
In this article we hope to offer an insight into the development of the Video Active Portal [1] which provides access broadcast heritage material retained by archives across Europe.
We will explain how Video Active needed to find solutions for managing intellectual property rights, semantic and linguistic interoperability and the design of a meaningful user experience.
We will also mention the use of Semantic Web technology and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) as main components at the back-end of the Portal.
The greatest promise of the Internet as a public knowledge repository is to create seamless access for anyone, anywhere, to all knowledge and cultural products ever produced by mankind.
Mainly due to increased bandwidth availability, Web sites offering online video material have managed to mature over a short period to become extremely popular.
Web sites like YouTube [2], MySpace [3], Revver [4] and many others show how the idea of making and manipulating images (once mostly the preserve of professionals) has been embraced as a way of broadcasting who we are to anyone prepared to watch.
The most popular site to date, YouTube, was launched in early 2005 and serves over 100 million videos daily [5].
Furthermore, it is estimated that online video will be responsible for 30% of all Internet traffic by 2011 [6].
Looking at these numbers, it is evident that the potential for releasing material from audio-visual archives online is enormous.
To date, however, despite the many millions of hours of material held in these archives, only a few percent can be found online [7].
Many of the existing online services are based on user-generated content.
And if professional content is offered (i.e.
Joost [8], MSN Video [9], Miro [10], Blinkx [11]) the focus tends rather to concentrate on recent material.
Audio-visual archives need to overcome several obstacles before they can set up meaningful online services.
These include: managing intellectual property rights; technological issues concerning digitisation and metadata standardisation; and issues related to the way the sources are presented to users.
The latter is even more challenging if the aim is to present material from several countries in a structured way; indeed this is an aim and the starting point of the Video Active Project.
The main challenge facing Video Active is to remove the main barriers listed above in order to create multi-lingual access to Europe's television heritage.
Video Active achieves this by selecting a balanced collection of television archive content, which reflects the cultural and historical similarities and differences of television from across the European Union, and by complementing this archive content with well-defined contextual metadata.
The technical infrastructure facilitates the process of enrichment and asset management.
Video Active offers an enormous resource for exploring both the representation of cultural and historical events within and across nations and the development of the medium itself at a cross-cultural level.
This article firstly introduces the main challenges involved and in the second part will provide some details on the technical infrastructure that was created in the first year of this three-year project.
The Project Video Active is funded within the eContentplus Programme of the European Commission (Content Enrichment Action) and started in September 2006 for a duration of 36 months [12].
The first version of the portal will be fully operational by January 2008.
The Consortium and the Associate Members The consortium consists of major European audio-visual archives, academic partners and ICT developers.
The archives will supply their digital content; the universities are the link to end-users and play an important role in developing a strategy for selecting the content and in delivering the necessary contextual information.
The ICT developers will be responsible for supplying the required technology.
Core archive partners Associate partners British Broadcasting Corporation, UK Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DK Deutsche Welle, DE Hungarian National Audiovisual Archive, HU Istituto Luce, IT Hellenic Audiovisual Archive, GR Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, NL Österreichischer Rundfunk, AT Radio-Télévision Belge de la Communauté Française, BE Swedish Institute for Sound and Image, SE Televisio de Catalunya, ES Vlaamse Radioen Televisieomroep (BE) Moving Image Communications Ltd (UK) Table 1: Core archive and associate partners Eleven archives are represented in the core consortium.
Taken together, their collections comprise over 4.5 million hours of audio and video material from 1890 to the present day.
Figure 1: Distribution of the consortium partners As of June 2007 two new associate members have joined the project: the Vlaamse Radioen Televisieomroep (VRT) from Belgium and the footage library Moving Image Communications Ltd from the UK.
By welcoming these new partners Video Active will offer an even richer collection of television heritage to the Video Active portal.
Video Active hopes to include more associate members soon.
All organisations holding television content are welcome to join.
Amsterdam-based Noterik Multimedia specialises in online video solutions and is responsible for the development of the Video Active portal application.
The second technical partner is the National Technical University of Athens, contributing expertise in knowledge representation as well as being responsible for metadata management.
The media studies faculties of Utrecht University and Royal Holloway, University of London complement the consortium.
Users and Their Demands The demand for access to television archive content online has been growing, and this demand has been driven by a number of distinct sectors: education, the general public and the heritage sector.
Digitisation of archive content transforms cultural heritage into flexible 'learning objects' that can be easily integrated into today's teaching and learning strategies.
For the academic community the rich holdings of television archives are valuable teaching and research resources.
Up to now access has been limited since much of the archive content is stored on legacy formats and often only with a minimum set of descriptive metadata.
Although this is changing, with many of the preservation and digitisation projects now underway in large audio-visual archives across Europe, the comparative dimensions of European television content remain as yet largely unexplored.
As noted in our introduction, public demand for archive content has risen with the growth and affordability of the Internet and media publishing tools.
Cultural heritage is of interest to everyone, not just specialists and students.
The 19th century saw a huge development in museums, libraries, galleries and related heritage institutions, all with public access.
Many such institutions have very low charges (or are free) in order to render access truly public and democratic.
Audio-visual collections are by comparison much less accessible and democratic.
Broadcast archives are closed to the public, most 'public' film and video institutions charge by the hour for personal access, and many such institutions are not actually public.
Instead, they require proof of research status before allowing access to their general collections.
The digital age has also had an impact on the work of professionals in the heritage domain, such as museum curators, organisers of exhibitions, journalists, documentalists, etc.
They can conduct their activities and render services faster, better, more efficiently and sometimes at a lower cost.
In short, a so-called e-culture is emerging.
Additionally, in the digital age, the value of heritage institutions lies increasingly in their role as mediators between networks that produce culture and those which impart meaning.
To an increasing degree, they will find themselves contributing their knowledge and content within a cultural arena where a host of highly diverse players are in action, including non-cultural sector institutions, in addition to the audience or users.
This means that the added value which heritage organisations seek to provide will grow increasingly dependent on the extent to which they are able to make knowledge sharing, crossovers, and structural co-operation part of their 'core business'.
These user groups have specific expectations and profiles, and the Video Active Project has to understand and encompass them to ensure both user satisfaction and revisits.
Surveys, face-to-face interviews and desk research have been conducted in the initial stages of the project.
The resulting insight into user requirements became fundamental to defining the technical specifications and hence the technical architecture.
Further requirements testing will take place on the first release of the portal; comprehensive evaluation with key users will provide the project with input as it develops the second release, planned for the second year of the project.
Sustainability After the formal project duration within the EC framework comes to an end, a new organisation (the Video Active Association) will continue the management of the portal.
The consortium has already started to think about business models to support these activities.
Most notably, Video Active will offer high-resolution versions of the items to be found on the portal to interested professionals in the creative industry.
Once the stakeholders have agreed on the price and pre-conditions for reuse of a certain clip, the portal supports a secure file transfer using peer-to-peer technology.
Furthermore, the portal is used as a 'shop window' to display pre-produced DVD's and other products created by the archives .
Content Selection and Intellectual Property Rights By definition, the selected content on the Video Active Portal is heterogeneous in many ways, language being one.
A multi-lingual thesaurus allows multi-lingual access to the holdings.
Ten languages will be supported in the first release of the Video Active Portal.
Other challenges regarding the approach to the selection of content relate to the variety of archive material across both historical periods and genres held by content providers for the project.
Moreover, the availability of supplementary content (images, television guides etc.)
as well as metadata produced by the content providers is not equally distributed amongst the partners.
As a consequence, comparative research by academics and exploration by the general public will remain impossible.
In order to tackle these issues, Video Active has developed a content selection strategy which adopted a comparative perspective, namely seeking to explore and demonstrate both the cultural and historical similarities as well as differences in television content across Europe through various themes [13].
The thematic approach allows for the development of a rich resource that explores the history of Europe using television archive content from across a number of genres and periods.
So far 40 different themes have been selected and together with the historical coverage, a matrix for content selection has been created.
This comparative approach is also reflected in the data management and information architecture of the portal.
Not only do the existing metadata in the archive need to be syntactically aligned, they must also be semantically enriched in order to facilitate understanding and analysis of the material selected.
Several Video Active-specific fields were added to the Dublin Core element set [14], including Television Genre, European Dimension and National Relevance.
Intellectual property rights (IPR) represent a further and final major factor to influence content selection in relation to programmes.
In almost all cases, individual rights owners need to be contacted before material can be published online and agreements need to be set up.
Material cannot be made available until such agreements are in place with all relevant parties involved.
The project does not have the financial means to finance rights clearances, so needless to say, not all content selected in the first instance will find its way onto the portal.
Every country has different IPR regulations.
For example, in some instances it is not permitted to store the video files on a server physically located abroad.
As a consequence, the Video Active infrastructure was required to facilitate a distributed solution for content storage; this meant the central portal needed to link to a number of remotely distributed servers.
Encoding of the selected material is performed by the archives.
Ingest formats (notably MPEG 1-2) are transcoded to Flash and Windows Media streaming formats by what is termed the Transcoding Factory.
The Transcoding Factory is an integral part of the Contribution Application which lies at the heart of the asset management process of Video Active.
Video Active Architecture The Video Active system comprises various modules, all using Web technologies.
The whole workflow, from annotation, uploading material, transcoding material, keyframe extraction, metadata storage and searching is managed by these components.
Figure 1 shows the architecture which lies behind the portal.
Figure 2: The Video Active Architecture Video Active provides multi-lingual annotation, search and retrieval of the digital assets using the ThesauriX technology [15].
ThesauriX is a Web-based multilingual thesauri tool based on the IPTC standard [16].
The system also exploits Semantic Web technologies supporting automation, intelligent query services (i.e.
sophisticated query) and semantic interoperability with other heterogeneous digital archives.
In particular, a semantic layer has been added through the representation of its metadata in Resource Description Framework (RDF) [17].
The expressive power of RDF supports light reasoning services (use of implicit knowledge through subsumption and equivalence relations), merging/aligning metadata from heterogeneous sources and a sophisticated query facility based on SPARQL RDF query language [18].
Additionally, XML and relational database technologies have been used to speed up some processes where semantic information is not required.
Finally, the Video Active metadata are public and ready to be harvested using the OAI-MPH technology [19].
In the Video Active system each archive has the ability either to insert the metadata manually, using the Web annotation tool, or semi-automatically, using a uniform (i.e.
common to all the archives) XML schema.
The Video Active metadata schema has been based on the Dublin Core [14] metadata schema with additional elements essential in capturing the cultural heritage aspect of the resources.
The video metadata are produced automatically and are represented in a schema that is based in MPEG-7 [20].
In order to support semantic services, the metadata are transformed into RDF triples and stored in a semantic metadata repository.
The Annotation Process The annotation process can be carried out either manually or semi-automatically.
In the manual process, the archives use the Web Annotation Tool to insert the metadata.
In the semi-automatic process, the archives export their metadata (the ones that have mappings to the Dublin Core elements) using a common XML schema.
The elements that cannot be mapped to the Video Active schema (or are missing from the legacy databases, e.g.
thesauri terms) are inserted manually (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: RDF representation of the final Video Active schema The Web Annotation Tool supports the entry and management of the metadata associated with the media and also handles the preparation of the actual content, i.e.
format conversion (low/medium bit rate for streaming service, etc.).
It produces an XML file that contains metadata, based on Dublin Core, as well as content encoding and key frame extraction information.
The XML is then transformed into RDF triples (Figure 2) and stored in the semantic repository.
The use of an ontology language, such as RDF which has formal semantics, supports rich representation and reasoning services that facilitate sophisticated query, automation of processes and semantic interoperability.
Semantic interoperability permits common automatic interpretation of the meaning of the exchanged information, i.e.
the ability to process automatically the information in a machine-understandable manner.
The first step to achieving a certain level of common understanding is a representation language that exchanges the formal semantics of the information.
Thereafter, systems that understand these semantics (reasoning tools, ontology querying engines etc.)
can process the information and provide Web services such as search and retrieval, etc.
Semantic Web technologies provide the user with a formal framework for the representation and processing of different levels of semantics.
Figure 4: Architecture of Sesame data insertion system Storing and Querying The semantic metadata store that is used in Video Active is Sesame [21].
Sesame is an open source Java framework for storing, querying and reasoning with RDF.
It can be used as a database for RDF triples, or as a Java library for applications that need to work with RDF internally.
It supports storing RDF triples in several storage systems (e.g.
Sesame local repository, MySQL database).
The procedure for the insertion of the assets into the RDF Store (Sesame) is depicted in Figure 3.
In order to transform the XML documents into RDF triples, Video Active uses the Jena Semantic Web Framework [22].
Jena is a JAVA API for building semantic web applications.
It provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS [23] and OWL [24], and XML [25].
In this application, Jena is mainly used for generating the RDF documents from the XML data representation.
The query service of Video Active system has been based on the SPARQL RDF query technology.
[26] SPARQL is a W3C Candidate Recommendation towards a standard query language for the Semantic Web.
Its focus is on querying RDF triples and has been successfully used to query the Video Active metadata.
The end-user has the ability to perform simple Google type searches but the query service also allows browsing through the metadata using pre-defined filters, an approach best compared with the Apple iTunes interface.
Metadata OAI Repository All the metadata stored in Sesame, with the help of an OAI-compliant repository are exposed to external systems/archives.
The OAI-PMH [19] defines a mechanism for harvesting records containing metadata from repositories.
The OAI-PMH gives a simple technical option for data providers to make their metadata available to services, based on the open standards HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language).
The metadata harvested may be in any format that is agreed by a community (or by any discrete set of data and service providers), although unqualified Dublin Core is specified to provide a basic level of interoperability.
Conclusion: Towards a European Digital Library The European Commission's i2010 Digital Libraries initiative advocates the need for integrated access to the digital items and collections held in Europe's cultural heritage institutions via a single online access point: The European Digital Library (EDL).
Practical steps towards this goal are currently undertaken in many projects, large and small.
The EC recently launched a co-ordinative action to align these efforts, called EDLnet [27].
Video Active is an invited member of the 'European Digital Library Thematic Partner Network' within EDLnet.
This network aims to bring on board key cultural heritage stakeholders from European countries to prepare the ground for the development of an operational service for the European Digital Library, to be operational in 2008.
As this article has indicated, simply digitising and uploading archive content does not release the full potential of audio-visual content.
The added value of archives lies in their ability to place material in a context that is meaningful to different user groups, and by enriching the metadata to allow interactive exploration.
For a pan-European service, the infrastructure should meet very specific requirements, dealing with semantic and linguistic interoperability, the handling of intellectual property rights and so on.
As more archives join Video Active, a vital part of our heritage will become available online for everybody to study and enjoy.
References Video Active http://www.videoactive.eu/ YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ MySpace http://www.myspace.com/ Revver http://one.revver.com/revver/ YouTube serves up 100 million videos a day online, USA Today, 16 July 2006 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-16-youtube-views_x.htm Video Drives Net Traffic: Cisco credits the popularity of video and peer-to-peer networking with boosting net traffic 21 percent in 5 years, PCWorld, 18 August 2007 http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136069-page,1/article.html Annual Report on Preservation Issues for European Audiovisual Collections (2007) http://www.prestospace.org/project/deliverables/D22-8.pdf Joost http://www.joost.com/ MSN Video http://video.msn.com/video.aspx/?mkt=en-gb Miro http://www.getmiro.com/ Blinkx http://www.blinkx.com/ eContentplus Programme http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm Content selection strategy report http://videoactive.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/23_content_selection_strategy_report.pdf Dublin Core Metadata Initiative http://dublincore.org/ Multi-lingual Thesaurus http://www.birth-of-tv.org/birth/thesaurix.do?term=4620 International Press Telecommunications Council http://www.iptc.org/pages/index.php Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://www.w3.org/RDF/ SPARQL Query Language for RDF http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/openarchivesprotocol.htm#Introduction MPEG-7 Standard, ISO/IEC 15938-1, Multimedia Content Description Interface http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-7/mpeg-7.htm Broekstra, J., Kampman, A., Harmelen, F. (2002).
"Sesame: A Generis Architecture for Storing and Querying RDF and RDF Schema".
1st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002).
Jena A Semantic Web Framework for Java http://jena.sourceforge.net/ Dan Brickley, RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema, http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/ Bechhofer, S., van Harmelen, F., Hendler, J., Horrocks, I., McGuinness, D. L., Patel-Schneider, P. F., & eds., L. A. S. (2004).
OWL web ontology language reference.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) http://www.w3.org/XML/ Andy Seaborne, HP Labs Bristol, RDQL A Query Language for RDF, http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-RDQL-20040109/ EDLnet http://digitallibrary.eu/edlnet/ Author Details Johan Oomen Policy Advisor Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Email: joomen@beeldengeluid.nl Web site: http://www.beeldengeluid.nl Vassilis Tzouvaras Senior Researcher National Technical University of Athens Email: tzouvaras@image.ntua.gr Web site: http://www.image.ntua.gr/~tzouvaras/ Return to top Article Title: "Providing Access to European Television Heritage" Author: Johan Oomen and Vassilis Tzouvaras Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/ooman-tzouvaras/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Tasks of the AHDS: Ten Years on Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Tasks of the AHDS: Ten Years on Buzz data framework database xml infrastructure archives metadata digitisation sql repositories copyright preservation cataloguing multimedia jpeg gis tiff ontologies e-science ict interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alastair Dunning reviews 10 years in the history of the Arts and Humanities Data Service.
An article by Dan Greenstein and Jennifer Trant in an early edition (July 1996) of Ariadne introduced readers to the aims and organisation of the fledging Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) [1].
Exactly ten years on from that, as the AHDS undergoes a systematic review by its funders, it seems appropriate to take stock of how the AHDS has evolved, comparing its current position with that envisaged for it when the organisation commenced work in the 1990s.
Since Greenstein’s and Trant’s article, the AHDS has grown considerably and the service has become an established member of the digital library community.
Staff numbers have roughly doubled; the AHDS now employs around 25 core staff and 15 other project staff.
Annual funding is now just over a million pounds, doubling the original annual sum provided by Joint Information Systems Committee [2].
Significantly, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) now shares 50% of these annual costs with the JISC [3].
The AHRC, as the crucial stakeholder in the arts and humanities community, sits well next to JISC, which is already extensively embedded within the information science community.
The AHDS also now receives significant project income: in 2005⁄6 this totalled close to a million pounds.
Despite this growth, the issues that Greenstein and Trant identified in their article e.g.
data creation, awareness and education, collections, preservation remain key to the AHDS’ task; indeed the continued success of the AHDS is evident from the fact that the statement of purpose defined by Greenstein and Trant still offers a clear direction today: ‘It will collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from scholarly research in the humanities, and make its collections readily available to scholars through an on-line catalogue.’ Further evidence emphasises the AHDS’ continued focus on these issues.
The number of collections ingested in a year exceeded 100 for the first time in 2004⁄5 (166 collections deposited the previous high was 97).
Overall, the AHDS can boast over 60,000 images, 1 million archaeological records and several hundred texts, database and multimedia collections.
User hits continue to grow, as do the number of telephone and email inquiries [4].
A complete preservation service has been established.
The AHDS has run over 100 workshops, and has, on behalf of the AHRC, marked over 1800 applications for funding from the scholarly community [5][6].
Yet, and this is probably true of any team within the JISC community, or indeed of any Web-based service, running such an organisation requires constant reassessment of these issues.
One could perhaps define the AHDS’ work as a variation of the Sisyphean task.
Sisyphus, you may remember, strove to push his giant rock to the summit of a mountain, but each time he reached it, the rock fell back to the bottom [7].
The AHDS has not been so unfortunate in having to return to the foot of each mountain, but there are certain similarities.
The rapidly changing digital environment reconfigures and recontextualises the objectives of an online service; once one summit is reached, a whole host of new ones home into view and the organisation must prepare itself to push onwards to those new summits.
This article therefore reviews the AHDS by articulating how the AHDS has climbed the summits initially outlined by Greenstein and Trant and pointing to the new peaks that have appeared on the horizon.
Data Creation and Description The original Ariadne article on the AHDS [1] declared that ‘the use of common, or at least interoperable standards ensures a level of consistency across accessioned digital materials without which electronic resource management and preservation is impossible.’ It noted that the AHDS would have a key role in developing this consistency of standards.
The AHDS has committed plenty of its attention to advising the research community on the use of particular standards for data creation and description.
The service can content itself that within the arts and humanities community, the use of open standards is, where feasible, now a default position by most creators of any serious data resources (although this is not the case for smaller, more ‘personal’ resources) [8].
Uncompressed tiff and jpeg are the acknowledged formats for image creation; xml and txt for text files; and databases are generally SQL-compliant.
The AHDS has been careful, however, to ensure that additional information is wrapped around this guidance on data formats.
The focus of the AHDS as an advice service is not data capture by itself but the whole orbit of a digitisation project.
Thus AHDS advice has drawn attention to themes such as project management, metadata, workflow, copyright emphasising that the process of creating a digital resource is more than selecting the correct technical standard, but something that requires the integration of a whole range of issues.
The AHDS has pursued this task through multiple pathways.
Information papers have drawn attention to particular issues in digital resource creation [9].
Case studies have highlighted projects that have dealt successfully with these themes [10].
AHDS Digitisation Workshops have introduced over 900 delegates to digitisation, and provided a valuable meeting point for potential projects to convene and engage with one another.
Perhaps most valuably, users have been free to call AHDS staff to discuss general or specific problems.
Well over 2,000 users’ queries were made in the period from August 2005 to April 2006 alone.
Of course, the AHDS has not been alone in this work.
Within the UK, the Technical Advisory Service for Images, UKOLN, TechDIS, the New Opportunities Fund and the Minerva guidelines have all done valuable work in promoting the standards message [11].
Such a variety of services discussing standards has also been useful to promote debate on how standards are adopted, enforced or adapted for example, the recent article on pragmatism and open standards given at the WWW Conference in Edinburgh [12].
So, has the AHDS climbed the mountain named data creation?
Well, yes, the large number of projects employing common standards, and the general discourse of open standards that is associated with digital resource creation means that the AHDS has reached the summit it originally set out to climb.
But this new viewpoint confirmed that establishing data standards for digitisation should not be the final point on this journey.
Implementing standards and best practice when creating a resource for research or teaching is not simply about allowing a resource to function in a technical sense.
How a source is digitised directly impinges on how the resource will be analysed and exploited by the academic community.
Technical choices made early on can radically affect the impact of the resource on scholars in the future.
The AHDS acknowledged this upon its inception.
Its series of Guides to Good Practice provides subject-specific information relating to the development of digital resources, which introduce subject specialists to the overlap between intellectual methodologies and standards in digitisation [13].
So for example historians can discover how best to exploit spatial-temporal data [14]; archaeologists have a trusted source for using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) [15].
But after ten years it has become apparent that this issue needs to be reinvigorated when considering resource creation, the standards and methodologies used, and a resource’s place in the research agenda.
All types of questions materialise: is this methodology for digitisation the most fruitful for the exploitation of a resource?
Should a rich or a light mark-up be employed here?
Should these artefacts be captured at a high or low resolution?
Will this resource work better as a 2D or a 3D image?
How will a resource created with this methodology add to the intellectual debate?
Is digitisation even worthwhile?
Determining such questions demands both technical and intellectual input; issues about data standards and practices used in digital resource development cannot be separated from the academic reasons for digitising.
To provide the necessary environment for such discussion, the AHDS needs to continue working with other important stakeholders; indeed, in some areas it has already started to do so.
For instance the major funding programme for digital resource development, the AHRC’s Resource Enhancement Scheme, has now begun a process of seeking community engagement so that digitisation can occur in a more strategic fashion [16].
The AHDS and the ARIA (Arts and Humanities Research ICT Awareness and Training) Project [17] at De Montfort University have also combined to produce the ICT Guides [18] that inform researchers about methods, research projects and training in resource creation.
Such events and partnerships will provide the basis for more coherent discussion on the technical and intellectual contexts for digitisation.
Preservation “The problems are vast and as yet without satisfactory solutions” the original Ariadne portrait of the AHDS cited a rather gloomy 1995 preservation study.
More than a decade later, the problems are still vast.
The growing number of expert bodies is pinpointing the larger array of challenges when trying to sustain datasets, Web sites, emails, etc over changes in technological platforms and standards [19].
Nevertheless, effective methods for tackling the issues of digital preservation are now much more apparent.
‘Solutions’ is perhaps too definitive a word finding systems, processes and methods for undertaking preservation work is perhaps more apt than the conclusiveness suggested by the word ‘solution’.
The task of preservation of ensuring that digital files can function in the future whatever technical platform they run on remains an essential element of the AHDS’ raison d’être.
Greenstein and Trant’s article highlighted the range of electronic resources being developed as part of the research process text, image, database etc.
Such resources would increasingly play a fundamental role within scholarship; failing to preserve these texts, corpora, datasets and multimedia collections would be undermining the framework of evidence and record upon which researchers develop their scholarly argument.
After ten years, the AHDS has reached a point where it can look back upon its preservation achievements with a certain amount of pride.
Having established its own digital repository and an accompanying systematic workflow for the ingest of digital collections, the AHDS has an infrastructure as well as policies and procedures in place to ensure the long-term availability of the collections deposited with it.
The establishment of the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) reference model offered the AHDS a framework upon which to base its repository.
Layered upon this the AHDS has a range of Preservation Handbooks, Ingest Manuals and metadata tools to assist AHDS staff [20].
AHDS expertise in the field is well acknowledged; AHDS preservation projects include Sherpa Digital Preservation (or Sherpa DP), the E-Prints Feasibility Study (both of which investigated preservation issues for e-prints) and the Digital Images Archiving Study [21].
The Medical Research Council recently consulted with the AHDS over the creation of its own digital archive.
The presence of AHDS subject-specialist staff has been important here.
The sheer range of digital material developed in the arts and humanities demands not only wide-ranging technical knowledge but also understanding of how the resource will be used by the research community(s).
This in turn affects how the resource is described at a technical level (i.e.
in terms of preservation and collection-level metadata), and prepared for ingest within the AHDS repository.
Without this blend of skills it would be difficult for any organisation to develop a working preservation system.
Inevitably, however, other challenges present themselves as the AHDS grapples with the steep slope of preservation.
Sustaining the functionality of a digital resource, beyond its raw data, is the most pressing of these challenges.
Current strategies for preservation function well for smaller or straightforward datasets (single texts, still image collections, small to medium databases or multimedia collections).
However, when the resource demands the type of user interaction (whether it be to analyse, sort or subset) that is provided by hosting the resource online, then matters of preservation become a little more tricky.
No longer is it a case of just preserving the raw data, but also of preserving tools, scripts and functionality that allow for the data to be sifted through and interrogated.
Increasingly, such online resources also require intellectual preservation the expectation that the content of the resource itself will be updated and enhanced with new discoveries and that emails and queries relating to this content will be acknowledged and answered.
Debate is ongoing about how best to confront this new challenge.
Various options suggest themselves: the need for funding councils to take a more stringent line in dictating standards for both data creation and also in relation to the tools and scripts that analyse such data; the need to fund a network of expertise (whether as part of the AHDS or as part of a much wider network) that can undertake the sustainability of different Web sites’ functionality and content; the need to provide a common set of tools that can be applied to various different resources.
As with the data creation issues, this is not something the AHDS can tackle alone; it requires a larger infrastructure for such an environment to develop.
How the AHDS and the relative stakeholders in the digital library community respond to this challenge will be crucial in grappling with this new preservation peak.
Collecting and Locating Resources The past ten years have been a boom time for digitisation.
The JISC report on digitisation in the UK estimated that over £130 million has been spent on digitisation during the lifetime of the AHDS [22].
Naturally this has resulted in greater numbers of collections being deposited with the AHDS, especially in the past few years.
In the first six years of its life, the AHDS ingested approximately 260 collections.
In the three-year period 2002-5, the figure was a more substantial 342.
As envisaged by Greenstein and Trant in 1996, the AHDS has focussed on developing tools to allow users to locate these resources.
However, achieving this has been a long and somewhat painful task.
An important internal milestone for the AHDS was developing a metadata framework that could describe all deposited collections.
The initial scope of the AHDS perhaps gave a little too much freedom to describing collections in individual subject areas, causing subsequent problems when the initial AHDS Gateway was developed; the level of interoperability between resources from different subject areas was low.
Developing a common metadata framework that underpins the new AHDS cross-search catalogue (released in 2003) has rectified this problem [23].
Users can now easily search for and download AHDS collections via this catalogue.
There are also separate search tools for single items, such as archaeological records and visual arts images [24].
The bulk of the AHDS’ more recent collections come from projects funded by the AHRC.
AHRC grant holders are obliged to offer copies of their digital outputs a strategic decision that has been of crucial import to the AHDS, enabling a much closer relationship with AHRC award winners, and the ingest of some fascinating collections.
For instance, Designing Shakespeare illustrates 40 years of Shakespearian performance in Stratford and London [25]; the Spanish ‘Little War’ database allows historians to formulate questions on guerrilla action in the Spanish Napoleonic Wars [26]; the Sheffield Corpus of Chinese is a valuable corpus allowing analysis of different generations of Chinese language [27]; the Stone in Archaeology database catalogues the use of different geological types [28]; the Imperial War Museum: Posters of Conflict is a digitised archive of military posters from World War One to the present day [29].
While this variety is pleasing and makes for a joyful serendipity when searching the catalogue, it also highlights another key factor for the AHDS.
Back in 1996, Greenstein and Trant noted that the AHDS would only be one of many cultural organisations making material available online.
To develop a critical mass of material relevant to a scholar’s needs requires a high level of interoperability between many of these disparate content providers.
Ten years on, this is still a problem, not just for the AHDS but also the wider digital information community.
An unpublished report by Sheila Anderson, Director of AHDS, notes that ‘a major barrier to the full exploitation and use of the material is presented by the majority of this work taking place within discipline and institutional silos, thus massively reducing the ability to engage meaningfully across disparate collections of digital content, domains and discipline areas.’ [30] The whole could be, but is not yet, greater than the sum.
This is one mountain that loomed large in 1996 and continues to do so to this day.
This mountain will need to be approached from numerous angles; AHDS work with the e-Science agenda will be one of these.
Back in 2002, an Ariadne conference report entitled ‘The Information Grid’ highlighted the mutual importance of metadata and grid technologies in developing systematic interoperability [31].
Work undertaken at the recently opened Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre has been able to demonstrate this importance [32].
Briefing papers on the development of ontologies and the exploitation of Web Services indicate how greater interoperability between resources can be nurtured and then exploited [33].
The Centre is also working with AHRC-funded e-Science projects that are looking at issues related to grid-enabling disparate digital datasets [34].
Once again, it will be vital to work with others in the humanities computing community.
Developing and exploiting the grid is, by definition, not something that can be done alone.
The related AHDS E-Science Scoping Study [35] has also begun to address this issue, bringing together scholars and technologists to discuss the tools, resources and skills needed to ensure that grid-enabled resources are interoperable.
The final report from this project, due in Autumn 2006, will play an important role in developing a broader strategy for enhancing and joining-up digital collections in the arts and humanities.
Conclusion This article has highlighted some of the key issues that provide a link between the AHDS in 1996 and that of 2006.
But there are numerous other topics for the AHDS, or any publicly funded digital archive to address; the relationship between e-prints, research datasets and other academic materials; the impact of mass digitisation; programmes such as Google Print; the need to preserve personal digital materials, e.g.
notes, emails, sketches; licensing, authenticating and reusing digital resources over a distributed grid network; methods of automating metadata creation a list that could go on and provides the AHDS with a whole new range of peaks to ascend within the next few years.
References Greenstein D., Trant J., “AHDS: Arts and Humanities Data Service”, Ariadne issue 4, July 1996 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/ahds/ JISC Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Arts and Humanities Research Council Web site http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/ The JISC Monitoring Unit provides statistics on AHDS performance.
See http://www.mu.jisc.ac.uk/servicedata/ahds/.
Other statistics, relating to collections ingested, enquiries received, technical appendices marked, as well as links to notable projects, publications and resources can be found on the AHDS timeline at http://ahds.ac.uk/about/ahds-timeline.htm For details of AHDS workshops since 2003 see http://ahds.ac.uk/news/events/past-events.htm The AHDS have been marking the Technical Appendices submitted as part of applications to the AHRC since 1999⁄2000.
For more details on the relationship between the AHDS and the AHRC see http://ahds.ac.uk/ahrc/ahrc-advice.htm For more information on Sisyphus see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus By more personal resources, I mean the type of resources developed quickly and roughly for personal use, without any thought to given to re-use by others.
Numerous such databases, notes, sketches etc.
sit on academics desktops and laptops.
For the AHDS Information Papers (including those on copyright, metadata, project management) see http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/information-papers/ AHDS Case Studies http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/case-studies/ TASI http://www.tasi.ac.uk UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk; TechDIS http://www.techdis.ac.uk/ NOF Advisory Service http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/ Minerva guidelines http://www.minervaeurope.org/publications/technicalguidelines.htm Kelly, B., Dunning, A., Rahtz, S., Hollins, P and Phipps, L., “A Contextual Framework For Standards”, WWW 2006 Edinburgh, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/e-gov-workshop-2006/ A list of all AHDS Guides to Good Practice: http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/guides/ Gregory I., “A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research”, 2002, http://ahds.ac.uk/history/creating/guides/gis/.
Eiteljorg II H., Fernie K., Huggett J., Robinson D., “CAD: A Guide to Good Practice”, 2002, http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/goodguides/cad/ Details about this call for submissions are available at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/apply/research/sfi/ahrcsi/strategic_resource_enhancement_programme.asp The ARIA Project Web site is at http://aria.dmu.ac.uk/ The ICT Guides are at http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/ For example, the work of the Digital Preservation Coalition http://www.dpconline.org/ or the Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk All AHDS documents on its repository are at http://ahds.ac.uk/preservation/ Sherpa DP (Digital Preservation) http://ahds.ac.uk/about/projects/sherpa-dp/ Digital Image Archiving Study http://ahds.ac.uk/about/projects/archiving-studies/ A page for the E-Prints Feasibility Study will be ready in August 2006, viewable via http://ahds.ac.uk/projects/ Parkinson N., “Digitisation in the UK: the case for a UK Framework A report based on the Loughborough University study”, 2005, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/parkinson.html The AHDS common metadata framework and other AHDS documents on metadata can be found at http://ahds.ac.uk/metadata/ All AHDS collections can be searched via http://ahds.ac.uk/collections/ Designing Shakespeare is available at http://ahds.ac.uk/performingarts/designing-shakespeare/ The Spanish ‘Little War’, 1808-1814 database can be downloaded from http://www.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/collection.htm?uri=hist-5095-1 The Sheffield Corpus of Chinese can be downloaded from http://ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/collection.htm?uri=lll-2481-1.
Unlike the other collections cited here, the corpus was the outcome of a pilot project funded by the British Academy and is a collaborative project between the School of East Asian Studies and the Humanities Research Institute of University of Sheffield The Stone in Archaeology archive can be searched at http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/archive/stones_ahrb_2005/ Details about and access to Posters of Conflict are available at http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/IWMPC.html Anderson S., “The Arts and Humanities Data Service: future challenges, future possibilities”.
Unpublished report “The Information Grid”, Ariadne issue 32, July 2002, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/information-grid/ The Arts and Humanities E-Science Centre ( http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/ ) is a JISC-funded project hosted at King’s College London, by the AHDS and the AHRC’s Methods Network http://methodsnetwork.ac.uk/ The Briefing Papers are available from http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/BriefingPapers.html.
Besides Web Services and Ontologies, there are articles on the Access Grid, the Grid and Virtual Research Environments.
These projects are documented at http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/WorkshopsDemonstrators.html E-Science Scoping Study http://ahds.ac.uk/e-science/e-science-scoping-study.htm Author Details Alastair Dunning Communications Manager Arts and Humanities Data Service King’s College London Email: alastair.dunning@ahds.ac.uk Web site: http://ahds.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “The Tasks of the AHDS: Ten Years On” Author: Alastair Dunning Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue48/dunning/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 57:Achieving the Balance Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 57:Achieving the Balance Buzz data framework usability infrastructure archives metadata digitisation blog repositories copyright preservation cataloguing openurl soa interoperability oai-ore Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 57.
In her second Get Tooled Up article on the subject of remote working Staying Connected: Technologies Supporting Remote Workers, Marieke Guy takes a look at the many technologies that support remote working, from broadband to Web 2.0 social networking tools.
Readers may also be interested to read her blog on remote working which I am definitely finding interesting [1].
I am greatly indebted to Marieke, who as many IWMW delegates will attest, is indisputably one of Life's finishers and who, in her delivery of both this article and its predecessor 'A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working' [2] has very much practised what she recommends in her articles on remote working.
She has made expert use of the technologies placed at her disposition by UKOLN while at the same time recognising that there are moments when technology will not achieve the objective as effectively as a face-to-face meeting can.
Thus, for example, we have made free use of applications such as an electronic calendar as a planning and reminder tool, and equally of shared network locations for the placement and retrieval of revised versions.
However, Marieke has devoted at least three face-to-face meetings to scoping the two articles and discussing some of the finer points for improvement.
I would strongly suggest that newcomers do not allow themselves to be drawn into reading the contribution on technologies until they have considered the rationale offered by 'A Desk Too Far', and from which this current article flows.
I suspect neither author nor editor will complain if this description of the supporting technologies attracts as much interest as its predecessor.
'IT departments' (as they are often termed) in some organisations may groan at the prospect of such an article, and sometimes justifiably so, but Marieke's writing has been informed by technical feedback, and very often technical support groups are not credited with the 'can-do' philosophy they will adopt when the case for their assistance is clear.
Supporters of Ariadne's Get Tooled Up articles will feel spoilt this issue as we have been able to arrange for Jakob Voß to describe SeeAlso: A Simple Linkserver Protocol which combines OpenSearch and unAPI to enrich catalogues.
As Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has grown increasingly important in digital library systems, more and more core functionalities are appearing as Web-based, standardised services which can be combined dynamically to operate across a broader environment.
The SeeAlso linkserver protocol arose from a need to enrich title views in library catalogues of the German Common Library Network (GBV) with links to additional information which led to the creation of a general linkserver Web service.
Jakob not only describes the work related to this area but details the specification for SeeAlso Full and Simple.
He also covers usage and provides examples.
He concludes by mentioning the advantages of a loose coupling of link server and Web applications as a general strategy.
Ariadne is delighted to welcome a further article from award-winning [3] contributor Leo Waaijers.
In his article Copyright Angst, Lust for Prestige and Cost Control, Leo addresses the different tensions confronting academic institutions as various staff with differing roles attempt to achieve their (sometimes conflicting) objectives.
Not for the first, or last, time, the issue of how to approach copyright demands arises.
Leo points to the false hope that digitisation would cause subscription prices to fall among scholarly journals as well as the fact that the landscape is nonetheless changing.
As he addresses the differing pressures of 'copyright angst', academic prestige and the whole issue of publishing costs, Leo offers concluding recommendations together with two comparisons of institutional costs in respect of open access and subscription models.
With the increase in interest and activity in respect of digital cultural heritage I am very pleased to include Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content by Rob Davies in which he describes a Best Practice Network under the eContentplus Programme to make available locally sourced digital content to the Europeana Service.
He highlights the pressing need to make available the enormous amount of digital content provided by Europe's cultural institutions at local and regional level alongside that held at national level.
Rob describes the contribution EuropanaLocal intends to make in integrating digital content and increasing its navigability and usefulness.
Rob details for us the key challenges confronting the project and provides a review of the approaches, standards, tools and infrastructure developed by Europeana.
He describes the project objectives as well as the steps necessary to achieve a successful outcome.
It has been very welcome to receive an article in the form of a progress report from Ronald Milne and John Tuck in respect of ground made by the British Library towards compliance with the Legal Deposit Libraries Act.
As if it were not already a major task to collect the published output of the nation in print, Implementing e-Legal Deposit: A British Library Perspective reminds us that the remit will widen to that of non-print media.
Ronald and John describe the work of the Legal Deposit Advisory Panel set up to advise H.M.Government on this issue, as well as the involvement of the legal deposit libraries, with particular reference to the British Library.
They also look at collaborative work with publishers and the approaches being made towards handling the output of electronic publications as well as off-line material.
I am by no means being ironic if I say that no issue is complete without a contribution of some description on digital repositories.
Ariadne will always, I hope, reflect to a reasonable degree what is engaging the attention of its community.
In A Bug's Life?
: How Metaphors from Ecology Can Articulate the Messy Details of Repository Interactions R. John Robertson, Mahendra Mahey and Phil Barker offer up an alternative perspective on the development of repositories based on an ecologically related metaphor.
The authors invite us to reconsider traditional approaches to tackling complexity and problem solving which they consider inadequate.
By providing an example of their suggested approach, the authors hope to improve the understanding of key success factors and offer repository managers a way to model the context of the repository that does not rely on knowledge of a particular modelling tool and which can engage a variety of stakeholders.
Practitioners interested in the users' perspective in Web design will be keen to read 'What Happens If I Click on This?
': Experiences of the Archives Hub in which Jane Stevenson describes the results of usability testing for the Archives Hub Web site.
While few would disagree that the opinion of users in any development is of paramount importance, the examples of where that view is acted upon are not legion.
Jane not only describes for us the process undertaken in order for views on usability to be brought to bear, but details many of the views expressed which should give all developers pause for reflection.
I am grateful to Sally Rumsey and Ben O'Steen for their description of OAI-ORE and how it can contribute to digital preservation activities.
In OAI-ORE, PRESERV2 and Digital Preservation they describe the basic outline of the framework and how it can support the PRESERV2 project digital preservation model of provision of preservation services and interoperability for digital repositories.
They describe the role OAI-ORE has to play in the copying and movement of data between different repositories as well as interoperability.
In his latest column for Ariadne Phil Bradley considers how social media output is being indexed, sorted and made available for searching by looking at some representative samples.
In A Selection of Social Media Search Engines Phil reassures us that the commonly held view that little of social media and user-generated content is actually being indexed is not entirely correct.
Phil offers a balanced view on what value should be placed upon the content of tweets, blogs, etc, and concentrates on providing a helpful array of ways to search such content more effectively than by using conventional search engines.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on Website Optimisation, records management in the 21st century, the inadequacy of current patent arrangements, remixing data and Web services and the negative effects of popular Internet culture.
It is in respect of the last two areas of Ariadne's output that I would like to add a note of thanks to two long-standing supporters of the Magazine as they retire from this field.
Ann Apps of Mimas has written on encoding OpenURLs in Dublin Core metadata and has also reported on DC2007 and the OpenURL and OpenURL Framework.
Many readers will have seen her present on a variety of topics at conferences worldwide and benefitted from her expertise.
I would also like to thank her for the support she has given Ariadne, not only through her contributions but also advice and information in respect of the unseen and relentless activity of commissioning material.
Stuart Hannabuss of Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen has been a stalwart reviewer for this publication, principally in the field of digital rights, for over five years.
He has brought a wealth of knowledge and a deep store of wisdom to bear in his reviews of works covering the minefield of digital copyright and allied subjects.
He brings them into play one last time in his current review [4].
I would commend his work for Ariadne to all would-be reviewers, not only for its balance and attention to detail, but above all for its compassion, for he clearly understands the burden and the vulnerability of those people who go public, risk disaster and are called authors.
As he moves to another field of academic endeavour, its gain is most decidedly Ariadne's loss.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 57.
References Ramblings of a Remote Worker, Marieke Guy, http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/ Marieke Guy, A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working, July 2008, Ariadne Issue 57 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/guy/ SPARC Europe Award 2008 for Leo Waaijers, April 2008, Ariadne Issue 55 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/newsline/#news3 Stuart Hannabuss reviewed Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk, October 2008, Ariadne Issue 57 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/hannabuss-rvw/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 57:Achieving the Balance" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 55: Digital Lives, Digital Values Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 55: Digital Lives, Digital Values Buzz data software archives metadata accessibility repositories cataloguing e-learning lom frbr curation facebook e-research authentication ict interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 55.
As far back as a work reviewed in Ariadne Issue 41 [1], the notion of personal collections was not exactly novel, but as Pete Williams, Katrina Dean, Ian Rowlands and Jeremy Leighton John remark in Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections 'the inexorable march of technological innovation' has served to encourage people to amass increasingly large and diverse personal collections of information about themselves and the people and issues that matter to them [2][3].
Alive as I am to the disadvantages that have come with the development of the World Wide Web, they are greatly outweighed by the attendant benefits and in particular the democratising effect that it brings, not least in the form of enabling ordinary people to promote that which is important to them.
It should be added that such a drive is not confined to the Web alone: at a time when this country is coming to terms with the loss of yet another national treasure [4][5], it is worth noting that Guardian Unlimited in September 2005 began to publish the obituaries of 'other lives' [6] alongside those of the famous and notable [7].
This growing collection will do no harm in reminding us and social historians to come, that, by sheer weight of numbers, ordinary people benefit this society considerably more than its 'celebrities'.
The authors raise a wide range of important issues.
For example they write, 'Not only the media and formats but, as we discovered in our research into digital collections, also the contents of works created by individuals are changing in their exploitation of the possibilities afforded them by the various software applications available.
We need to understand and address these issues now if future historians, biographers and curators are to be able to make sense of life in the early twenty-first century.
There is a real danger otherwise that we will lose whole swathes of personal, family and cultural memory.'
They allude to the whole matter of curation of valuable digital assets.
Already, it occurs to me, the whole tangled issue of, for one example, email curation, must begin to have its effect upon the biographers and historians aforementioned.
While the collective correspondence between Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis [8] may not represent essential reading even to the litérateurs among us, it was recorded and retained, whereas one may justifiably fear that the correspondence of the next generation of authors, including Kingsley's son Martin, for all I know, may not be so well preserved and contextualised.
There has been work to investigate this far-reaching issue [9], but concerns of biographers and literary researchers as to the imminence of a 'personal correspondence Dark Ages' are by no means exaggerated in my view.
Neither am I convinced that matters will improve when it comes to other, newer forms of electronic communication, as encompassed in what the authors cite, 'As Jones says in his comprehensive literature review on the subject, "much of the research relating to ... PIM is fragmented by application and device ...", by which they mean email, the Web and paper or electronic retrieval'.
As has become increasingly true of the electronic age, the means by which we communicate have splintered into a mosaic of applications.
We should of course retain some perspective upon these developments.
There will still be a great deal that can be retrieved and curated.
Few, for example, complain about the black hole created by the ubiquitous spread of the personal (landline) telephone in the 1950s and 1960s, and all the communication that particular development ceased to record.
In Digital Lives, the authors focus on the first stage of the digital archive process, people's own digital behaviour, including their adoption and use of various software, and any related training.
In this context for example, they made some interesting discoveries about the interviewees' digital behaviours which will interest more readers than specialists in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction).
For example, descriptions of habits developed in the use of email will be of interest to us all.
Perhaps because, relatively speaking, email has been used for some considerable time, the purposes to which it is now put beyond the early perceived usage are notably more varied.
I found myself both 'found out' but also comforted in my discovery of all the 'unintended purposes' to which interviewees put their email application.
For example, using email for sending reminder messages to oneself, or as an appointments diary, as a record of work or contacts, to mention but a few.
The authors examine a variety of behaviours but also the values of interviewees, equally important since naturally they influence the behaviour adopted towards technology.
For example another area of wide interest will be attitudes to backing up data.
A combination of the value creators place upon a digital artefact combined with the level of their technical understanding of storage issues determines to a large degree if and how they are to set about backing that artefact up.
This article highlights a wide range of ways in which we should remember that people will ultimately use, adapt or reject the ICT applications being developed according to their personal needs, values, attitudes and understanding.
Sarah Currier in her article Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008 makes no claims to writing a critical review of the subject, but rather furnishes readers with a snapshot of the current landscape of educational metadata.
She usefully provides some background to the current situation, explaining the position with both the IEEE LOM and Dublin Core models, neither of which, she contends, have enjoyed completely smooth progress.
Sarah also points to the work begun by a group under the aegis of ISO which, while seeking to address issues relating to Accessibility and multilingual capability, has occasioned some concern in certain areas of the e-learning standards domain since it could be regarded as heading in a third direction with all the potential problems with interoperability that might involve.
Sarah's snapshot details both the difficulties and positive developments occurring in this field.
I am indebted to Margaret Henty who points to the effect that increased computing power and developments in applications is having on research.
In her article Developing the Capability and Skills to Support eResearch she indicates the clear economic benefits that increased research capability brings to a nation; but in her perspective from an Australian standpoint, she points to the gap between the potential such technological developments offer and the current degree to which they are being completely harnessed, particularly in terms of effective data stewardship and long-term sustainability.
Principal, in my view, among the issues which she raises in this important contribution, is the degree to which the technical skills and personal qualities of practitioners conducting and supporting eResearch will determine the speed at which it grows.
Margaret's analysis goes further in that she also points to the division that can also exist between people in the eResearch environment with a high level of subject expertise and their colleagues whose primary contribution is that of technical know-how.
Margaret provides interesting and often familiar examples and suggestions in an article that has implications for any organisation engaged in research and beyond.
Margaret Henty's comments on the economic benefits of eResearch resonate all the more in the context in which Martie van Deventer and Heila Pienaar write.
In their article South African Repositories: Bridging Knowledge Divides they point to the considerable contribution to be made by generators of open access such as institutional repositories in what, they suggest, is arguably still a divided society.
Moreover, they highlight the benefits such co-operation may provide for the rest of Africa.
In their article they provide us with an overview of the SARIS (South African Research Information Services) Project as well as an instance of knowledge transfer within this context.
Readers who were interested in the issues of 'digital exclusion' in the last issue of Ariadne [10] may be interested in Martie's and Heila's views on the importance of knowledge exchange in this area.
My thanks also go to Mick Eadie for providing us with an overview of the JISC-funded project Images Application Profile (IAP).
In Towards an Application Profile for Images he describes the various issues involved in the IAP's development to date and the various problems that such work has identified along the way.
They include challenges associated with images and their metadata as well as the potential of the FRBR concept model in this context.
I welcome the opportunity to update Ariadne readers on progress with Intute.
Angela Joyce, Jackie Wickham, Phil Cross and Chris Stephens follow up on contributions from Debra Hiom [11] and Caroline Williams [12] in order to describe Intute's ongoing Integration Project, which is promoting and developing integration of Intute content in the UK academic library community.
The authors explain how Intute has responded to the ways in which people now access information influenced by the changes brought about by the evolution of the Web, including Web 2.0 technologies.
In their article Intute Integration they look at the rationale behind the project, the integration methods offered, technical issues, a case study, uptake, challenges presented, and future plans.
Developments in the ways in which users access information underlie Nick Lewis' contribution on Implementing Ex Libris's PRIMO at the University of East Anglia.
Nick points out that 'The problem Primo looks to solve is the overwhelming evidence that users are preferring other search, retrieval and delivery services over the library catalogue and subscribed institutional resources.
The reasons for preferring search engines like Google include ease and speed of use, relevance-ranked results, few authentication challenges, and what can be described as the overall aesthetic experience.'
He goes on to address the debate about which strategy to adopt when seeking to provide a useful and used search interface to people so used themselves to the likes of Google and Facebook.
Nick provides a summary of Ex Libris' adopted strategy within this rolling debate and how, he contends, Primo goes beyond the provison of a library catalogue.
John MacColl also mentions the increased use of Web 2.0 and other applications in the daily round of information seeking, discovery and use by researchers.
He describes the position in which the adoption of Web applications currently places research libraries and information services.
In Research Libraries and the Power of the Co-operative he also describes how OCLC Programs and Research, formerly the Research Libraries Group, is working to benefit research libraries and their users, and how co-operation is central to providing access to reliable high-quality content in a networked manner.
Having referred to such search engines in his previous columns, Phil Bradley has kindly agreed to go into more detail for our benefit in Custom-built Search Engines.
While search engines ought readily to be described these days as 'legion' (particularly if you have been following Phil's many contributions on the topic), I find it highly instructive to realise that 'search engines can only do so much, and unfortunately that's a good deal less than we imagine.'
In presenting this rationale for custom-built engines, Phil also provides us with a number of reasons why the most heavily adopted systems do not necessarily serve their users as well as the latter might think.
In explaining the benefits of custom-built search engines, Phil also provides us with a further means of determining our own usage as well as strengthening the quality and relevance of the results we receive.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on works covering winning strategies for success in public libraries, the individual and society in the digital age, new ways to understand the emotions of users provided by the US information behaviour community, research into computerisation movements and practical guidance on managing software projects.
In addition of course we provide our expanded section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 55.
References "The Web Library: Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources", Lina Coelho, October 2004, Ariadne Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/coelho-rvw/ A good example of concerted creativity: Brophy,P.
"Cultural Objects in Networked Environments COINE", Cultivate Interactive, issue 7, 11 July 2002 http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/coine/ Also: "Supporting Creativity in Networked Environments: the COINE Project", Geoff Butters, Amanda Hulme and Peter Brophy, April 2007, Ariadne Issue 51 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/brophy-et-al/ Jazz legend Lyttelton dies at 86, BBC News, 26 April 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7367385.stm Obituary: Humphrey Lyttelton, BBC News, 25 April 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3477089.stm For example, 30 January 2006, of a dedicated senior officer in the (then) Probation Service, written by his wife.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/jan/30/obituaries.readersobituaries Published the same day, that of Philip Mishon, prominent philanthropist and businessman, written by Michael Freedland, journalist, author and TV producer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/jan/30/obituaries.mainsection The Letters of Kingsley Amis, Kingsley Amis, HarperCollins, Paperback, 1280pp, 2001, ISBN-13: 978-0006387831.
Just for one example: Digital Curation Centre: Resource Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/ "Ancient Cultures Inside Modern Universes', Edgardo Civallero, January 2008, Ariadne Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/civallero/ "Retrospective on the RDN", Debra Hiom, April 2006, Ariadne, Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/hiom/ "Intute: The New Best of the Web", Caroline Williams, July 2006, Ariadne, Issue 48 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/williams/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 55: Digital Lives, Digital Values" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 61: The Double-edged Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 61: The Double-edged Web Buzz data mobile software framework javascript xml infrastructure archives digitisation blog repositories gis provenance curation technorati ajax twitter research ldap Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 61.
Perhaps one of the current benchmarks for gauging when a Web technology has migrated from the cluttered desks of the technorati to the dining tables of the chatterati is if it becomes a topic for BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze [1].
More accustomed to discussing matters such as child-rearing or a controversial pronouncement of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the panel members who, over the years have ranged from the liberal to the harrumphing illiberal (and in one case, both at the same time), recently did battle over Twitter [2].
They were discussing its mass use recently to cause considerable discomfort to two professions that, some might still argue, benefit from a degree of unaccountability not enjoyed by lesser mortals.
It is not my place here to rehearse the excellent arguments in some cases put forward by both the programme's witnesses (brave individuals clearly unschooled in the story of Daniel and the Lion's Den) and their interviewing panel.
However, it was heartening to hear a debate about the benefits of the apparently democratising technology that Twitter arguably is, as opposed to the disservice such incidents might very well do to traditional political engagement and debate (with some mention of 'wisdom of the mob' or similar).
What I concluded will be of no interest, but the programme served to highlight the essential nature of the Web, that it is capable of producing developments that can benefit or disadvantage not just users, but people in general at one and the same time.
In the case of Twitter, I am sure there were a few bus drivers in Bath (where UKOLN produces Ariadne) who were glad of it when snowstorms beleaguered the city in February 2009 [3].
Messages were sent out asking householders to make drivers a cup of tea if they saw their bus stuck in the snow outside their home.
'bathcsc' was put to immediate good use and it is the immediacy of Twitter that makes it so powerful; its staying power may be another matter; at time of writing 'bathcsc' is no longer with us [4].
Indeed it is the immediacy of Twitter and real-time search engines that equally appeal to our expert on search engines Phil Bradley.
I am very pleased to say that The Moral Maze does not have a monopoly on philosophical musings because in Search Engines: Real-time Search Phil raises the question of what exactly is real-time search 'is the emphasis on real-time search, or is it on real-time search?
', he enquires.
Is one '...looking through material that literally is published in real time.
In other words, material where there's practically no delay between composition and publishing'?
Or is it more a matter of 'finding the right answer to your question based on what's available right now, about the subject you care about right now.
'?
I will leave you to discover where Phil stands on the matter, and promise equally that he provides in his inimitable fashion a cornucopia of sites to visit in pursuit of real-time search facilities.
However, I welcomed his preface to that list offering a few salient remarks on the nature of real-time searching that are relevant to my train of thought above.
Phil advises us to take account of 'the usual suspects such as spam and authority.'
It is the latter suspect, the concept of authority, which represents a major issue for information providers and their users, and not just in the area of real-time search engines, as will be apparent.
Phil writes, 'If the idea of authority on the Web is taxing, at least with traditional Web publishing it's possible to check a Web site, read back through a series of blog posts or see who links to a specific page.
With real-time search we're depending on the fact that someone who says that they're at the scene of a specific event actually is; it's all too easy for a malicious individual to 'report' something that's happening when it really isn't.
As we have little to go on other than brief details that person has supplied in their biography (if indeed they have), it becomes much more difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.'
I think I mention the problem of sorting wheat from chaff elsewhere but in this instance it is the provenance of the material that poses searchers considerable difficulties.
A misleading tweet, for all that it may be considerably shorter than a misleading or ill-informed article, may do just as much harm.
I was extremely pleased to receive the views of Michael Kennedy as recounted in his Cautionary Tales: Archives 2.0 and the Diplomatic Historian which describe his own brush with the two-edged nature of 2.0-ness.
Michael describes his reactions thus: 'Preparing for the CRESC Conference[[5]], I was introduced to the new world of Web 2.0 and Archives 2.0.
The central tenets of both were welcome, but at times worrying, territory.
With the definition of Archives 2.0 as a changed mindset towards archives and as the application of Web 2.0 technologies to archives, I could see why, as a researcher, Archives 2.0 would be of benefit to me.
On the other hand, as an editor and publisher of diplomatic documents, I felt the brakes of caution apply.'
And little wonder, since Michael stands diametrically opposite the tweeter shooting from the hip in an attempt to keep up with developments he is picking off with real-time searches.
'The openness of Archives 2.0, with its encouragement of direct user intervention with sources, clashes with the requirement placed upon diplomatic document editors to provide a neutral environment for the documents they are publishing with care and expertise.'
In effect we confront yet again the issue that Phil Bradley raised in his contribution albeit from a slightly different angle: authority.
Or perhaps to put it another way, trust.
In this instance we see Michael quite properly concerned for the authority of the documents he is placing online and the need for neutrality in the way in which they are presented.
Given the nature of the documents in question, it is entirely understandable that he has reservations about 'the ability Web 2.0 technology gives to archive end-users to manipulate and augment published data to their own ends, perhaps even to augment the source itself, on the hosting Web site.'
What impresses however is that even given the perceived threat to the very essence of his service, the author remains open-minded and can recognise the benefits the Web 2.0 technologies may be able to provide.
'What if DIFP allowed users limited freedom to add references to online documents to give details of, say, corresponding files or documents in other archives?
For example, if DIFP published a letter from the Eamon de Valera to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a user of the Chamberlain papers in the University of Birmingham could add in a reference to the corresponding file in the Chamberlain papers.'
He also considers other examples such as using geo-locational technologies to provide supplementary information.
Closer investigation may prove that this might not work for DIFP, but the important point, as is the case with Paul Bevan below, is to keep an open mind.
Michael's writing demonstrates a readiness to consider new approaches and technologies combined with a natural and entirely professional caution in defence of the very essence of what his work represents to society.
Ultimately, when considering the usefulness of new Web technologies, while it is increasingly apparent, given the wide range of vehicles for content now available, that it ought to be a question of horses for courses, a considered approach would have to place the primacy of the nature of the content in the driving seat of new developments.
Paola Marchionni also argues in her article Why Are Users So Useful?
: User Engagement and the Experience of the JISC Digitisation Programme that, when considering content, keeping the nature of its users in mind is equally important.
In particular she points to the significant role of user engagement in the creation of digitised scholarly resources.
She writes, 'The prospect of free and democratic access to high-quality digitised content over the World Wide Web has often resulted in institutions undertaking digitisation projects with the emphasis more on making the digitised content accessible online rather than carefully researching the needs of their target audiences.
Nor have they always considered providing them with content and functionalities that respond to their demands.
'If you build it, they will come' has been perhaps too common a mantra, underpinned by the belief that it will be enough to publish rare or unique content on the Web in order for users to flock in and for a Web site to thrive.'
Whatever else, the Web like so many other things in the 2000s, has ceased to be one single entity or considered as such.
The adoption of new technologies must be guided by considerations of content and audience every much as which envelope into which one places that content.
With all the hype and confusion that surrounds Web 2.0 it is refreshing to come across a submission that speaks in terms of an approach to the subject that are both measured and considered.
It is clear from his article Share.
Collaborate.
Innovate.
Building an Organisational Approach to Web 2.0 that Paul Bevan and his colleagues have done a great deal of homework while shaping the new Web Strategy of the National Library of Wales.
What soon becomes apparent from Paul's description is the importance of keeping an open mind when considering the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.
He discovered reactions ranged from those of organisations which were soon disenchanted by the indifference to their offering, to others which have been surprised at the degree of take-up of new Web 2.0-related services.
To listen to one persuasion to the exclusion of the other might very well prove unwise, but even more importantly, Paul points out that any success is rooted in a realistic and practical notion of what is actually achievable as opposed to the really marvellous and unworkable.
Two further points he makes are of equal importance in the approach he details: a refusal to allow the 'hot topic' of Web 2.0 to predominate to the exclusion of other important aspects of a Web strategy by firmly placing it alongside other Web technologies, exciting or otherwise; and the clear recognition that the 'advantage of an organisational approach is that rather than simply exercising the potential and passion of individuals, the potential for long-term and widespread engagement can be harnessed through a cohesive network of individuals with a shared strategic aim'.
The emergence of data journals at the moment would seem to be a welcome development.
Many would recognise the potential they provide for a framework to permit the citation, and indeed peer review, of datasets with the same force as is true of scholarly papers in general.
Such data publication is surely a positive trend where scientists will begin to see the value of spending more time on the proper curation of their data and the potential for datasets to earn them credit for their work as much, perhaps one day, as do their published papers.
I am very grateful to Sarah Callaghan, Sam Pepler, Fiona Hewer, Paul Hardaker and Alan Gadian for returning to us with a follow-up article to their contribution in Issue 60 which covered the Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) Project offering an introduction to the concept of overlay journals and their potential impact on the meteorological sciences.
In How to Publish Data Using Overlay Journals: The OJIMS Project they provide us with more technical detail about the OJIMS Project, giving details of the software used to deploy a demonstration data journal and operational document repository and the form of the submission processes for each.
Few are likely to dispute that the landscape in scholarly publications has been radically altered by the advent of the World Wide Web, nor that the disruptive technologies it brought with it have completely changed the way research is published and accessed.
The emergence of the Open Access movement in this regard remains a constantly shifting topic and I am most grateful to Arjan Hogenaar for his contribution on yet another emerging element in the form of the Enhanced Publication (EP) which Arjan feels will make a significant improvement to Society's understanding of Science.
In his article Enhancing Scientific Communication through Aggregated Publications he draws our attention to the way researchers can implement EPs in Aggregated Publications Environments and, equally significantly, points to the importance of the move away from the model of traditional scholarly publication process towards the development of scholarly communication which combines the recognised benefits of the traditional process with the new properties derived from scientific collaboratories.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that as soon as one development on the Web begins to deliver dividends to research, then it is not very long before its very usefulness attracts difficulties in its wake.
One such area arises in the matter of search and discovery of digital resources, even when hosted by institutional repositories (IRs).
In their article UK Institutional Repository Search: Innovation and Discovery Vic Lyte, Sophia Jones, Sophia Ananiadou and Linda Kerr point out that a simple search box which returns a long list of results derived from the holdings of an individual IR is quite likely to swamp the searcher and if the search system is offering federated search then the list will be considerably more daunting.
As it stands, such a blizzard of results is not only likely to detain researchers while they sort the wheat from the chaff, but to make things worse, there is a strong likelihood that in such circumstances the once clear objectives of the researcher will start to lose their focus while in the literature search stage of their work.
As the authors point out, 'How the aggregated results are re-organised presents major challenges to a federated higher-level simple search facility'.
The aim of the UK Institutional Repository Search Project, funded by the JISC and led by MIMAS in partnership with SHERPA, UKOLN and NaCTeM is to address the underlying difficulties that confront searchers across IRs with a solution in the form of a free, targeted search tool that makes searching faster and more relevant to them.
I am indebted to Peri Stracchino and Yankui Feng who describe a year's progress in building the digital library infrastructure outlined by Julie Allinson and Elizabeth Harbord in their article SHERPA to YODL-ING: Digital Mountaineering at York in our last issue.
Their article Learning to YODL: Building York's Digital Library will meet the needs of readers who were hoping to drill down a little more on the development of digital repositories for the University of York.
In this issue the authors have provided a more detailed technical description of their work on York's repository infrastructure.
Readers of Issue 60 will already know that the project had opted to adopt the now widely used Fedora Commons as the underlying repository.
More controversial perhaps was their decision to produce their user interface by the use of Muradora.
Peri and Yangkui reflect upon how they managed the implementation and development of such two elements but they also focus in particular on their development of fine-grained access control integrated with York's LDAP and the use of X Forms technology to develop a workflow structure.
In addition we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on: a work covering Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) programming technique; another offering Reflections on Technology and the Future of Public and Academic Libraries; and a collection of papers from the First International M-Libraries Conference, which examined potential library uses of mobile phones and other portable technology.
In addition of course we provide our section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 61.
References BBC Radio 4, The Moral Maze Programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qk11 Moral Maze, 04/11/2009 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nkcfk It's the calm before the (rain and snow) storm.
Bath Chronicle, Monday, February 09, 2009, 14:30 http://www.thisisbath.co.uk/news/Buses-hit-snow-crisis/article-673182-detail/article.html Bath Bus Station (bathcsc) on Twitter (discontinued) http://twitter.com/bathcsc NCeSS Event :' Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists' http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/past/item/?item=216&active=1&subactive= Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 61: The Double-edged Web" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Versioning in Repositories: Implementing Best Practice Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Versioning in Repositories: Implementing Best Practice Buzz data software framework database archives metadata doi identifier vocabularies repositories copyright preservation cataloguing multimedia uri frbr rae research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jenny Brace explains why giving time to versioning within a repository is worthwhile and outlines the best practice to implement.
The VIF Project The Version Identification Framework (VIF) [1] Project ran between July 2007 and May 2008 and was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, (JISC) under the Repositories and Preservation Programme [2] in order to help develop versioning best practice in repositories.
The project was run by partners, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) [3], the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) [4], the University of Leeds [5] and Erasmus University Rotterdam [6].
It has produced a detailed Web-based framework [7], which provides information and guidance about versioning in repositories.
The article, ‘Version Identification: A Growing Problem’ [8], published in Ariadne Issue 54 explored the issues associated with versions in institutional repositories and outlined the current research and work carried out to date.
This successor article highlights some of the best practice developed within the VIF Project, which is also available in more detail in the framework itself.
It also accompanies the event report in Ariadne Issue 55, ‘Which One’s Which?
Understanding Versioning in Repositories’ [9] which reported on VIF’s final workshop in April 2008.
Why Pay Attention to Versioning?
Versioning is so inherent to the research process that it can be easy to give the matter little thought; it is one of those facts of research life that, at a cursory glance, would not appear to be able to contend with heavier issues such as resourcing or licensing.
As such, until recently, there has not been a huge amount of time dedicated to versioning issues, but we do know it is a recognised problem.
In the survey that VIF carried out in autumn of 2007 [10], only 5% of academics and 6.5% of information professionals surveyed found it easy to identify versions of digital objects within institutional repositories.
Across multiple repositories the figures were only 1.8% of academics and 1.1% of information professionals.
Moreover, a third of information professionals who work with repositories stated that they either have no system currently in place or ‘don’t know’ how they deal with versioning at present.
However, the institutional repository movement has grown rapidly and as it is now developed well past infancy, the type of problems encountered has changed as repositories have become more established.
The bigger issues are still pressing and constantly under debate, but increasingly the devil shows itself in the detail.
The more that content is entered into repositories, the more academics are concerned about issues such as citation, and the increased potential of version relationships and even of simple version identification to cause confusion.
Not tackling the issue can compound the problems.
On further investigation, the subject of versioning proves to be a magnificent example of how dedicating some time thinking about the finer points and applying the best practice proves to be well worth the time and effort.
Working through the detail allows a repository manager to challenge and improve all aspects from strategy and policies to configuration and communication with the repository’s users.
Advanced repositories can use a review of versioning issues as an opportunity to take stock and clear up, ready for the next stage of growth.
Meanwhile fledgling repositories can take full advantage of the lessons learnt by the earlier repositories and bypass potential problems, issues and wasted resources.
Most importantly, attention paid to versioning really puts the emphasis back on the role of the end-user and helps to build trust in a repository.
When researchers search a repository and access a digital object, they need to have confidence that they have found the right item for their purposes.
People working on a repository or even an author may think that they know what the best version to store is, but research is very rarely a linear or objective process, and all researchers have their own independent needs.
For example, one researcher may need to find the published version in order to give an accurate citation, whilst another would like to view an earlier version of the same work in order to assess the development in the thought of the author or content creator.
Another person might need to know exactly what information was provided at a particular date to provide evidence, for example in a court case.
If the only version information provided on this object is ‘final version’, how can any of these researchers know that they have found the relevant, or appropriate item?
How can the end-users trust the information or indeed the repository itself?
The Confusion Caused by Versioning The first point of confusion for VIF to tackle was what we mean when we talk about versions.
Research projects are more often than not highly dynamic and complex processes, spawning vast numbers of separate entities, all of which may relate to each other in some way, but may or may not be understood as ‘versions’ of the same thing.
Part of the misunderstanding is caused by a lack of differentiation between a version relationship between two or more objects and a single object’s version status.
Sometimes researchers just need to know what is in front of them.
For example, the same questions can be asked of the same object: I want to cite the published version, is this one it?
Is this a draft version which has subsequently been added to?
Is this the presentation which was delivered in London last year or Cardiff this year after the author developed his thesis?
If the researcher wants to gain a more complex understanding of the relationships an object has with other objects, the questions might be more wide ranging: In what order were these draft versions created?
Is this working paper related to the article of the same name?
Are conference papers and posters stored in the same place as the article which refers to them?
There are two articles with the same name which appear identical; are they sequential versions of each other, or just copies in different formats?
To help clarify understanding, VIF has provided the following definitions: ‘A ‘version’ is a digital object (in whatever format) that exists in time and place and has a context that can be described by the relationship it has to one or more other objects.
‘A ‘version relationship’ is an understanding or expression of how two or more objects relate to each other.’ [11] These definitions encapsulate the notion that all objects associated with a piece of work (perhaps a concept or a research project) have a relationship with each other.
These relationships vary but may be considered by some to be versions of each other.
The VIF Project has avoided specifically defining what is and what is not a version and left it to the repository manager and the end-user to decide what they would call versions.
VIF has instead encouraged repository managers to focus on ensuring that all important information is made available to users for them to understand both the version status and any version relationship.
The other cause of confusion is the lack of common agreement about terminology despite a few recent attempts to define common vocabularies.
The NISO/ALPSP Working Group on Journal Articles [12] and the VERSIONS Project [13] focussed upon defining the position of a journal article in the publication process.
The RIVER Project [14] looked more broadly at any sort of digital object, and its lifespan in general terms, not just publication, and offers expressions to describe the relationships between digital objects.
However, across the wider community, terms are still frequently used interchangeably and the boundaries between them are often subjective.
For example, one person’s ‘revision’ might be minor changes, but represent another person’s significant changes or landmark versions (for example, peer-reviewed, published, etc.).
When do formatting or stylistic changes (for example, typesetting or font) or a change of file format (creating a digital variant) become significant?
Best Practice The Strategy A clear, documented understanding of the purpose of the repository will help navigate some of the thornier decisions.
A repository can be used as: a permanent archive; a research database; a tool for statistical analysis and reporting (for example, helping to support the Research Assessment Exercise submission); or even as a workbench on which academics develop their work.
These purposes are not mutually exclusive but acknowledgement of what is important for your institution and what type of object the repository will contain will help clarify what versioning issues may come up.
The repository may for a variety of reasons want to limit the number of drafts of the same work, provide restricted access to some types of material, or decide to remove duplicated or old material; but there should be a framework in place to guide these procedures.
Without strategy and subsequent policy setting, decision making will be at best inconsistent, and at worst incoherent, leading to confusing explanations and instructions to both contributors and users.
For example, an archive may feel that adjusting an object by adding a coversheet or watermark may alter the original integrity of the work; but a workbench repository may find these tools extremely helpful.
A scientific repository of images of cell cultures that is a permanent archive will focus more on cataloguing the individual objects; but one that is used for researchers to examine and cross reference data systematically may pay more attention to highlighting the relationships between images.
A university repository which currently contains journal articles in order to collect an institution’s intellectual output and which is considering including e-theses, might have the aim of changing the academic administrative process and move away from a print focus to electronic submission.
If the repository is a collection of the university’s academic output, should only theses completed at the university be included?
If so, how should the repository present this decision to an academic who completed her thesis elsewhere but has become interested in the repository because she is attracted by the idea of depositing all of her own work in one place?
It is also worth considering the future goals and uses of the repository.
A repository which only deals with one kind of object for one purpose, like e-theses, will find consistent application of versioning tools much simpler than those containing multiple formats related in different ways.
However, what if it is later expanded to include supporting research material in different formats, or follow-up journal articles?
Will the versioning tools implemented be able to be easily adapted?
Multimedia objects are in some ways harder to deal with than text documents because there are more variations in the sort of versions associated with them, such as formatting and compression; and frequently there are fewer obvious places to present text-based versioning information.
Once clear about the purpose of the repository, the likely content and the needs of the end-users, the appropriate software should be selected.
One software system might be more appropriate if the repository is going to be used as a workbench and requires a high degree of customisation because of the repository’s specialism.
However the same software might be too challenging for a start-up repository that is intended to store a number of text-based documents but which has little IT technical support.
Priorities for functionality should be considered and exploited.
Is automatic ingest functionality essential to save manual input time?
Is keeping every version important or will the ability to delete be vital?
Is flagging (for example, the last available version) something that would be useful?
All software available has a continuing programme of upgrading and it is worth keeping up to date with improved versions.
There are certainly some major advances anticipated from the main software providers in respect of version control due in 2008.
Once strategy is set, it is critical to document the thought processes involved and set transparent policies.
Version policies do not have to be stand-alone, but can be integrated into existing policy documents.
The OpenDOAR [15] policies tool provides a number of templates for repositories to adapt and has taken up VIF’s recommendations for including versioning policies.
Advocacy The best and most accurate version information comes directly from content creators at the time of deposit.
Identifying version status and relationships should be seen as an essential part of the ingest process.
The framework provides a few simple tips for content creators to include within an existing advocacy programme that will enhance the quality of version information.
These are: Keep a record of which versions are made publicly available and where.
Use a numbering system that denotes major revisions.
Make explicit the author, title, date last changed and version status on all versions of work.
This can be done: descriptively within the object, for example, on a title page, title slide, first frame of film and so on.
by using a clear, updated and relevant filename for every different version.
by filling in available ‘Properties’ details or ‘ID tags’ (full guidance below).
Repository staff should suggest that content creators look at the Toolkit or the Content Creation section of the Framework [16], which contains more information about how to include version information within specific object types.
The VERSIONS Project produced a freely available toolkit [17] available to download or in a printed booklet to hand out to academics, which is an extremely practical and useful information resource containing a lot of best practice and guidance for repository managers, authors and researchers.
The Essential Versioning Information Some pieces of information about an object, such as the author and the title are obvious, but more information is necessary to make a qualified assessment of what version is at hand.
Although only one piece of information may be needed to identify a particular object, the more information that the repository can make transparent, the less possibility for confusion.
VIF has identified five important pieces of information that can be used to identify a version quickly and easily (if applied in a clear and transparent manner) by either embedding them into an object or storing them in metadata: 1.
Defined dates: A date is probably the most obvious and potentially effective way of identifying a version and it may be the only information required.
However, despite the fact that a date without explanation can easily cause more confusion and ambiguity, it seems that undefined dates are very common.
VIF’s strongly recommends that any date used is clear, defined and that the most relevant is then applied consistently within the repository.
If only one date is used, it should be Date Modified (by the author, not the repository) wherever possible and should be accompanied by a description of who made the changes and why.
As the version identification it should relate to the object at hand, not to the repository, nor to an understanding of the workflow.
2.
Identifiers An identifier is a ‘name’ which uniquely identifies an object (simple or complex).
One object might have a number of different identifiers, such as a filename, author, email address, handle, DOI, URI, Repository Number or ISBN.
As many identifiers as are known should be displayed in both metadata and the object itself, although persistent identifiers should particularly be made available for citation purposes.
3.
Version Numbering Version numbering is very common amongst authors, as it works very well for individuals.
A variety of systems are used, although consistency across authors is not usual and multiple authors working together can cause problems by branching off onto different lines.
Whilst systems can be very easy and intuitive to follow, it can be difficult to impose a consistent version numbering system since a major change for one person may be regarded as a minor one by someone else.
In addition, the version number is only really meaningful if other versions are also known.
However, repository managers may consider this version information useful to include if provided by the creator at time of deposit.
4.
Version Labels / Taxonomies Taxonomies are extremely useful in positioning an object in a workflow, which is why people like the idea of them so much.
The suggested VERSIONS names for example, that have enjoyed some take-up success for journal articles are ‘Draft’, ‘Submitted Version’, ‘Accepted Version’, ‘Published Version’ and ‘Updated Version’.
However, there are a number of challenges in implementing a robust and consistent system, particularly when dealing with more than one kind of object as workflows differ enormously.
VIF’s advice is that if terminologies are used, they must be used consistently and the terms must be clear and explained to the end-user.
5.
Text Description A written description will always be the best and clearest method of communicating the object’s version status and relationships to other objects.
Complexities can be fully explained, and if it is the content creator who has written the description, then the level of trust in the information is very high.
However, statements like ‘last version’ should be avoided as they can become very rapidly out of date.
However, there are not many opportunities to add this level of detail, particularly in non-textbased objects and it is time-consuming to do.
How to Use Version Information The best way to capture information about an object within a repository is within metadata fields which can be amended by repository staff.
Richer metadata used for describing repository content will enable better export and harvesting leading to more accurate searching in repository search services and faster version identification.
The framework provides information about how to use different metadata schemas and share their metadata with others by mapping fields consistently.
However, it is also critical to make it directly available to an end-user within an object because there are ways of accessing objects which bypass associated metadata.
If the information is embedded, it cannot be lost.
Unlike metadata, which is not always available.
For example: because the object was accessed directly through an Internet search; or because it has been saved locally, breaking the connection to the repository; or because the standard format provided by a cross-repository search service has not replicated the repository’s version information.
VIF has therefore strongly recommended that repositories systematically implement at least one of the following solutions to embed versioning information into objects: 1.
ID Tags and Properties Fields This opportunity already exists in a number of object types, but content creators need to be encouraged to complete the fields or the repository staff must make the decision to add information at deposit.
2.
Cover Sheets Implementation of consistent cover sheets across all, or a group of objects in a repository to provide standardised information not only provides detailed version information, but provides an opportunity to link with other information such as copyright details.
However, without an automated system, this can prove to be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.
3.
File-naming Conventions A consistent system of file-naming can provide uniformity in an obvious place, although the amount of information that can be provided is manifestly limited.
4.
Watermarks The use of a watermark is an effective but unobtrusive way of planting certain bits of metadata into the object.
It can be an automated process and can be used on a number of different types of digital object.
Linking Objects in the Repository Implementing a consistent understanding of how to link objects is a difficult task that raises many questions with no obvious answers.
Are all outputs from one research project or wider body of work versions of each other, and if not, where is the line drawn?
How to define what constitutes a ‘project’ or what the extent of the ‘body of work’ is?
Are objects with identical content but different file format versions of each other?
When organising the repository, when, why and how should records be linked and when should one record contain more than one object?
The conceptual model of how records link in the software is important to understand, and although it is not easy to change by a repository manager, it should be considered by a repository manager when selecting the software system.
VIF has recommended that IFLA’s Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records 18 conceptual model is a useful way of understanding version relationships.
The FRBR model presents objects in a structural tree, moving from conceptual levels of the ‘work’ through different expressions and manifestations down to distinct physical or electronic copies.
VIF has supported the development and promotion of several application profiles currently available or in development (see the Sharing Standards section of the Framework [19] for details about the individual profiles).
Funded by JISC, these application profiles are a metadata specification for describing a digital object type and they have mostly been created using the Dublin Core metadata scheme as a basis for creating a FRBRised structure in which to store metadata.
The use of an application profile helps to aggregate a more consistent, richer metadata from repositories when using a cross-repository search tool and helps with version identification because they provide metadata information down to the item level.
Whether the FRBR model is taken up or not, VIF recommends that repository systems are able at least to link objects that have a version relationship, and to provide a flexible architecture that allows objects to be stored and displayed in a way that reflects their version status in a workflow.
The framework highlights the following examples: All objects have their own record, and no records are linked together or make reference to other records.
All objects have their own record, but if there is a relationship between two objects this is recorded by the repository and displayed to the user.
This relationship may not be described, but one or both repository records refer to the other.
Versions created as part of the development of a piece of work can be stored in a linear fashion, with one version being the latest, and previous versions linked to within that record.
Versions of different format, such as a Word document and a PDF of the same thing, are stored in one record.
For more complex relationships, it might be useful to consider having the records stored separately, each with its own metadata and attributes, but linked and using categories as ‘supplemental material’: A research paper that draws on a small set of survey results that are saved as a spreadsheet.
Both are submitted for inclusion in the repository.
Should the data file have its own record?
Preferably not.
It should be able to be stored in a record which represents the body of work of which both pieces are components.
Conclusion Implementing versioning best practice within a repository does not have to be difficult or too time-consuming, but it does require thought and planning, which will pay dividends over time.
There is a wide range of repositories, all with different purposes, dealing with a range of complex versioning issues and most definitely with a wide spectrum of resourcing available.
The framework has been designed not to be prescriptive, but rather to provide a whole range of guidance and advice from which all repository mangers and software developers can pick and choose.
Even a person running a repository on a part-time basis should find some useful information to help improve version identification within the repository.
Although there are some clear recommendations given within the framework, much of the guidance is balanced, for example, presenting both pros and cons of the different solutions so that a repository manager can judge what is most appropriate for the repository in question.
Repository managers should review the guidance and implement what they are able to within their repositories.
Whatever the approach taken, there are some key principles to follow to enhance end-users’ trust and confidence in repositories and in knowing that the digital objects they access are appropriate for their purposes.
All information provided in the repository should be as transparent as possible.
Any solution adopted should be implemented consistently.
Decisions made should be made explicit; policies should be recorded and user education and communication should be included in procedures.
Bearing these guiding principles in mind will help improve a repository, provide a user-led approach and enhance trust in the repository’s content.
References The Version Identification Framework http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/ JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres.aspx London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/ Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) http://www.scitech.ac.uk/ University of Leeds http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ Erasmus University Rotterdam http://www.eur.nl/english/ The Version Identification Framework (VIF) http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/ Puplett, D. “Version Identification: A Growing Problem”, January 2008, Ariadne, Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/puplett/ Molley, S. “Which One’s Which?
Understanding Versioning in Repositories”, April 2008, Ariadne, Issue 55, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/vif-wrkshp-rpt/ Cave, P. “Work package 2: Requirements exercise report of a survey of Academics and Information Professionals” 2007, p.3 http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/documents.html VIF Importance of Version Identification page http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/Problem/importance.html#what Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP Working Group on Versions of Journal Articles, 2006, http://www.niso.org/committees/Journal_versioning/Recommendations_TechnicalWG.pdf VERSIONS Project http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/versions/ Rumsey, S. et al, “Scoping Study on Repository Version Identification (RIVER) Final Report” , Rightscom, 2006 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/RIVER%20Final%20Report.pdf OpenDOAR: http://www.opendoar.org/tools/en/policies.php Content Creators section of the framework http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/Framework/ContentCreation/index.html VERSIONS Toolkit http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/versions/VERSIONS_Toolkit_v1_final.pdf IFLA FRBR Final Report http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf Sharing Standards section of the Framework http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif/Framework/SoftwareDevelopment/standards.html Acknowledgements The VIF Project team included Dave Puplett, LSE, Catherine Jones, STFC and Paul Cave, University of Leeds.
Each of the team members significantly contributed to the thought and development of the project, the framework and therefore also to this article.
Author Details Jenny Brace VIF Project Manager The London School of Economics and Political Science Email: vif@lse.ac.uk or jenny.brace@gmail.com Web site: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif Return to top Article Title: “Versioning in Repositories: Implementing Best Practice” Author: Jenny Brace Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/brace/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Repository Software Comparison: Building Digital Library Infrastructure at LSE Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Repository Software Comparison: Building Digital Library Infrastructure at LSE Buzz data mobile software api database infrastructure archives metadata digitisation identifier schema blog repositories eprints video preservation cataloguing multimedia gis aggregation uri vle shibboleth dspace xacml twitter authentication research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Ed Fay presents a comparison of repository software that was carried out at LSE in support of digital library infrastructure development.
Digital collections at LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science)[1] are significant and growing, as are the requirements of their users.
LSE Library collects materials relevant to research and teaching in the social sciences, crossing the boundaries between personal and organisational archives, rare and unique printed collections and institutional research outputs.
Digital preservation is an increasing concern alongside our commitment to continue to develop innovative digital services for researchers and students.
The Digital Library Management and Infrastructure Development Programme is a cross-library initiative to build our capacity to collect, manage, preserve and provide access to our digital collections.
The initial phase of the programme has investigated our collections, their users and best practice in the wider community and produced functional specifications for testing against the current best-of-breed open source repository software.
Following this comparison we made a recommendation for the implementation of a repository system to operate at the core of our digital library.
This article gives a summary of that comparison.
Methodology Recent studies such as those by the Repository Support Project (2009) [2], the National Library of Medicine (2009) [3] and Purdue University (forthcoming) [4] have carried out comparisons of repository software, but while these were useful in stimulating our thinking, none provided a comprehensive answer to our question: which is the best software to meet our needs?
In previous studies, two different methodologies seem to have emerged: Like-for-like comparisons of repository features (comparing for example supported metadata schemas or underlying databases); Comparisons of repository features against local functional requirements.
While like-for-like comparisons can provide the most reusable data, they also tend to flatten the most interesting differences between the platforms, making it hard to identify their relative strengths and weaknesses in different contexts.
For us, context is everything and it provided the basis for producing our own set of functional criteria for testing, placing us more towards the latter category of methodologies.
The comparison of repository software was the culmination of a 9-month phase of our infrastructure development programme that progressed through a series of inter-related workpackages: Digital collections audit (including a risk assessment [5]) Initial user requirements (these are evolving in parallel with other projects looking at specific areas of digital collections, such as born-digital archives) Investigation of best practice in the wider community (Draft) metadata specification Functional specification Repository software comparison Parallel work is underway to look at digital collections policies, including born-digital deposit agreements and digital preservation policies.
These will feed additional requirements into the implementation phase of the programme, but by early 2010 we had gathered sufficient information to understand our core functional criteria and to carry out a high-level comparison of alternative repositories.
Digital Collections Digital collections for which the Library has preservation responsibility include the outputs from digitisation projects, born-digital archives and research outputs.
Existing systems and processes are in place for their management, at varying degrees of maturity, but over time our scale of operation is anticipated to exceed our capacity for management in this heterogeneous environment.
The table below gives some details about our digital collections.
Material Type Existing Systems Functional Requirements Digitisation projects Images Multi-page text Maps (including geo-data) Presentation through institutional CMS, custom Web sites and 3rd-party provision.
Presentation through rich multi-media Web and mobile interfaces Discovery, search and browse Preservation storage of master image files Born-digital archives Any file formats and structures Storage on original physical media and server (RAID, tape backup).
Description in archives management system.
Preservation storage of born-digital archive deposits Integration with existing collection management systems Future integration with library discovery systems and multimedia presentation interfaces Research outputs Mostly PDF, office formats Increasingly video, audio Comprehensive collection management in mature EPrints repository.
‘Traditional’ IR functionality including cataloguing, ingest, discovery, presentation and harvesting to third parties Table 1: Details of LSE Library digital collections In the future, the preservation remit of the Library is likely to expand further to include additional collections and formats, some of which are nearer on the horizon than others, such as research data, learning materials (currently managed in the institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)) and Web archiving (of the institution’s Web presence and of Web-published material by archive depositors).
Digital Library Technical Aims Our digital library development is designed to produce unified infrastructure to support the management, preservation of and access to all of our digital collections.
This will involve building shared functionality where possible (generally at ‘low’ system levels such as storage, identification, bit-security and format management) and more targeted functionality where necessary (generally at ‘high’ system levels such as access interfaces for discovery and presentation).
All collections will benefit from shared approaches to digital object management (including economies of scale for the institution as collections grow over time) while retaining enough flexibility to innovate with specific collections or formats.
We realised that a modular approach to developing this functionality was preferable to a monolithic approach, and this was confirmed by our review of best practice in institutions with digital collections of similar size and diversity.
A modular architecture allows independence of functional components, a separation of digital objects from particular software installations and an iterative approach to developing capacity in different functional areas according to evolving demands and requirements, such as projects involving content creation.
A modular architecture also facilitates interfaces with existing library systems such as catalogues holding descriptive metadata and access points providing federated discovery across collections.
This also reduces our chances of producing another ‘silo’ of isolated content.
Within this ecosystem we identified specific areas to prioritise for functional development.
They turned out to be digital object storage, management and preservation in the first instance, followed by ingest and management functionality for curators and access functionality for end-users.
Having identified these high-level requirements, we thought about our architecture, outlined our priorities, and decided we could capture initial functional requirements in preparation for our comparison of repository software.
Repository Comparison In formulating our criteria we made use of previous internal work carried out during the implementation of our institutional repository, which was based on a checklist provided by the Open Society Institute (2004) [6].
This document is out of date compared with recent advances in repository software; its main use was the historical insight it provided into how our requirements have evolved.
Other sources we consulted included ‘York Digital Library Project Requirements Specification’ (2008) [7] and ‘Wellcome Library requirements for a digital object repository’ (2008) [8].
We arrived at 24 functional criteria, grouped into 7 functional areas which correspond approximately to OAIS functional classes [9].
On the basis of these criteria, we devised a series of tests to carry out against out-of-the-box installations of the latest versions of each software.
We installed the latest production release of each repository in a virtual machine with identical specifications, to allow ease of testing and ease of reset to default configurations.
The repository versions we tested were DSpace 1.6, EPrints 3.2.0 and Fedora 3.3.
Our approach to scoring a repository on a functional criterion was to give a colour rating (red, yellow, green) and explanatory text giving our reasons for the scoring.
This approach to classification was intended to give an indication of how well each repository met our needs: Green: the repository would satisfy our requirements in that area out-of-the-box, perhaps with minimal configuration of the repository software; Yellow: the repository could be made to satisfy our requirements in that area, but it would take technical development to extend the repository software; Red: the repository does not satisfy our requirements or the repository software could not practically be extended to satisfy our requirements.
We deliberately avoided a numerical comparison of repository features and a selection based on a cumulative total to allow us to compare relative strengths and weaknesses in different functional areas.
It is important to note that if a repository did not provide specific functionality out-of-the-box, but was designed to support that functionality with the addition of third-party tools or applications, it would score green rather than yellow or red.
We realised early on that our purpose was to identify whether the repository could function as a component in our digital library infrastructure, rather than provide a comprehensive solution in all functional areas.
Findings Our key finding is that repository softwares are not equal.
Competing solutions have relative strengths and weaknesses in different functional areas, which is most likely because they were designed to solve different problems.
This might make a particular repository a useful tool and the natural choice in a certain context, but less useful and a poor choice in another.
It is important to remember that our specific context will heavily skew these findings according to our functional requirements and a perceived weakness when measured against our criteria may not in fact be a weakness in another context.
DSpace and EPrints represent a different approach to digital collections management compared with Fedora.
They are both monolithic repositories that package solutions for multiple functional areas into one piece of software.
They provide functionality not only for digital object storage and management, but also for ingest workflows and access front-ends.
Both repositories are designed primarily as open access publication databases, which means they do not provide some required functionality for born-digital archives and digitised material: data model to support complex object types; repository-independent and flexible persistent identifier schema; ingest workflows with integrated object packaging tools; integrated bitstream preservation tools (although this is changing, particularly with new versions of EPrints); repository-independent storage; flexible and configurable access control; extensible front-ends for rich presentation interfaces; while some functionality that is provided is not suitable or necessary for our purposes: ingest workflows with manual metadata capture; insecure indexing engines for repository content; inflexible front-ends for simple object structures and file formats.
Selection of either of these repositories would require significant development work to extend core functionality.
We did not consider this to be a viable option, as it would: increase the risk of destabilising other, dependent functionality; increase the degree to which we are tied to the platform; increase the difficulty of performing upgrades to latest version releases.
Fedora, meanwhile, does not bundle functionality into a monolithic core, and instead provides a flexible architecture that is designed to be customised to local requirements.
In some cases this requires the use of additional software to provide a complete repository solution, which we deem to be beneficial as appropriate components can be selected independently according to requirements in specific functional areas.
This approach is advantageous as all the above risks associated with monolithic solutions are mitigated or avoided: core functionality is not modified, resulting in a stable repository core; independence of components in discrete functional areas means we are not tied to any one piece of software; upgrades of independent components can be performed as necessary.
Although this approach requires greater set-up and configuration in the short term, in the long term the costs are anticipated to be lower, and additional benefits should accrue from the ability to adapt more easily to evolving requirements for preservation and innovative access methods.
The full investigation has not been reproduced here, but the table below gives a listing of the functional areas and testing criteria, and a summary of our findings in each area.
Functional Area Testing Criteria Summary of Findings Data Model object structures collections structures external aggregations DSpace and EPrints have restrictive data models (although DSpace is currently more flexible than EPrints) which reduces their ability to hold complex, structured objects.
Both would require modification or significant customisation to support the range of digital objects in scope.
Fedora is designed explicitly to be a flexible and extensible digital object store and would support the diversity of digital objects natively, but would require configuration.
Ingest, Data Management and Administration Ingest command-line interface Web interface machine interface batch import custom workflows metadata capture Data Management bulk updates audit history Administration CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) objects All repositories provide sufficient functionality to support flexible humanand machine-ingest for a range of materials with different workflows, although configuration would be required for all.
All repositories provide sufficient functionality to support digital object management and administration operations on content stored within the repository.
Fedora’s flexibility gives it a slight advantage for customisation of ingest workflows.
Descriptive Information (Metadata) persistent identifiers human-readable, hierarchical identifiers support for standards OAI compatibility DSpace and EPrints suffer from a lack of support for identifier schemas (although EPrints is significantly worse) which tends to reduce options for making collection and object identifiers independent from the repository software and human-readable interpretations of collection hierarchies.
Fedora provides sufficient flexibility in its identifier schemas and architecture to support independent, persistent and human-readable identifiers.
All repositories support extensible metadata schemas for the implementation of descriptive and technical metadata (including format-specific and preservation metadata) and OAI compatibility.
Storage file system structures integrity checking DSpace and EPrints suffer from a lack of attention to preservation storage, both requiring the maintenance of the repository software and environment to retrieve digital objects in the event of a hardware or software failure.
Fedora supports the storage of digital objects independent of the repository, which is preferable for preservation purposes.
Access batch export Web front-end API/URI schemas indexing engine access control approach authorisation authentication DSpace and EPrints have limitations in their access functionality.
Both provide out-of-the-box front-ends which are designed for open access publications, and which would require modification to support digitised collections and born-digital archives.
Their machine interfaces to support the development of independent Web applications are also limited.
Fedora comes with no front-ends out-of-the-box, which would require the use of third-party front-ends (of which several exist for Fedora) or custom in-house development.
Fedora provides multiple machine interfaces to support the development of independent Web applications and the exposure of content to the Web of linked data.
While all repositories provide sufficient functionality to control access to content at granular levels, Fedora’s use of XACML (Extensible Access Control Markup Language) makes its access control more easily configurable.
All repositories come with support or plugins for authentication using LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), Shibboleth and CAS (Central Authentication Service).
Table 2: Repository software comparison by functional area, testing criteria and summary of findings Recommendation The infrastructure development team has recommended to our senior management that we implement Fedora at the core of our digital library.
Our senior managers have accepted this recommendation and mandated the implementation.
In line with our decision to develop a modular architecture, we will be iterating development in our prioritised functional areas over time, according to our increasing understanding of our requirements and growing collections.
Initial development will implement a Fedora repository configured for in-scope content types, along with the necessary hardware environment and fully tested redundancy and back-up regimes.
Subsequent development will then build functionality for ingest, management and access.
This implementation forms part of the wider body of work of the digital library development, which includes significant effort devoted to user engagement, advocacy within the institution and internal communication amongst collection and technical specialists and the wider library staff and community.
Resource Implications Our best practice review discovered that scales of resourcing for digital library teams vary according to the scale of operation of the host institution, but that certain roles and responsibilities are always clearly defined.
This includes strategic planners, collection specialists, digital curators, systems administrators, technical developers and management.
These roles may be combined into a single person, or distributed across a team.
From a systems development point of view, we are anticipating ‘development humps’ where demand for technical skills will be increased, along with an overall increase in the longer term in the demand for technical skills to carry out system and collection maintenance.
We observed that DSpace and EPrints can be implemented with little additional burden on systems administrators and little to no technical development for a limited set of use cases — primarily open-access publications databases.
However, once the use cases and collection types multiply, technical demands increase.
By comparison, we observed that Fedora requires significant local set-up in order to achieve any useful functionality.
This can include simple configuration, but it is also likely to involve the implementation or development of additional pieces of software as modules to provide specific functionality that does not come as standard.
In our context we observed a tipping point, where the necessary effort to extend an existing system (as in our case with EPrints) outstrips the effort to implement a new system that supports requirements more natively.
In our case, this point has been reached, as our collections have multiplied and diversified to the point where it makes more sense in the long term to expend not insignificant effort in the short term, in order to build a core system that will serve as a platform for our digital library that is extensible and scalable.
During our investigations it was observed that maintaining digital library infrastructure is comparable in terms of scale and complexity to maintaining a traditional library management system, with additional peaks of development activity required to build functionality (as might be achieved by a supplier request in the case of an LMS).
While arrangements for resourcing development work will and should vary according to the evolution of requirements, alongside projects and project funding, in the long term it is anticipated that digital collections infrastructure maintenance will require the assignment of permanent technical resource.
This is in the nature of systems management as much as it is the result of the specific and peculiar requirements of digital collections management.
LSE is not seeking to research and develop new technology; we are seeking to implement the best-of-breed solutions produced by that research in pioneering and national institutions.
The technology is available, but implementation and maintenance are activities that must be resourced at the local level according to local requirements in support of local collections.
Conclusion Repository softwares are not equal.
Competing solutions have relative strengths and weaknesses in different functional areas, which is most likely because they were designed to solve different problems.
This might make a particular repository a useful tool and the natural choice in a certain context, but less useful and a poor choice in another.
The situation at LSE is an increasing volume and heterogeneity of digital collections, requiring both the extension of current capacity and the flexibility to adapt to evolving content types and requirements.
This, coupled with existing systems carrying out aspects of collection management, pushed us naturally towards a solution of a certain kind.
Specific aspects of our context further supported our selection of repository software: The heterogeneous nature of our collections and the pattern of emerging requirements naturally disposes us to a modular architecture, where functionality in different collection and technical areas is independent; Although digital preservation is of increasingly urgent concern, we have systems already in place handling aspects of collection management, so we are not starting from scratch and attempting to develop a solution in all functional areas in one go; Despite competing demands for resources, increased in intensity by the financial situation in the sector, we do have access to members of staff to carry out technical development and maintenance.
These are important considerations beyond a purely technical analysis, and they were factors in our selection—differences in this wider context could have affected our final choice.
Over the coming months, LSE Library will be working towards the implementation of its digital library.
The progress of our infrastructure development will be described in a future issue.
Acknowledgments Members of the digital library infrastructure development team: Mike Hallas, Mike McFarlane, Simon McLeish, Peter Spring, Neil Stewart, Nick White, Nicola Wright.
References LSE Library (also known as the British Library of Political & Economic Science) http://www.library.lse.ac.uk/ Repository Software Survey, Repository Support Project, March 2009 http://www.rsp.ac.uk/software/Repository-Software-Survey-2009-03.pdf Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine, Jennifer L. Marill and Edward C. Luczak, May/June 2009, D-Lib Magazine, Volume 15 Number 5⁄6 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may09/marill/05marill.html A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Repository Software, 25 February 2010 http://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/rep/ Digital Collections Risk Assessment at LSE: Using DRAMBORA http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/keepit/2010/07/19/digital-collections-risk-assessment-at-lse-using-drambora/ A Guide to Institutional Repository Software, , Open Society Institute, August 2004, 3rd Edition http://www.soros.org/openaccess/pdf/OSI_Guide_to_IR_Software_v3.pdf Requirements Specification, University of York Digital Library Project (SAFIR), Version 1.1, March 2008 https://vle.york.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/xid-89716_3 Wellcome Library requirements for a digital object repository, 2008 http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtx055600.doc Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), CCSDS 650.0-B-1, Blue Book, January 2002 http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf Author Details Ed Fay Collection Digitisation Manager Library The London School of Economics and Political Science Email: E.Fay@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.library.lse.ac.uk/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/digitalfay Blog: http://lselibrarydigidev.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Repository Software Comparison: Building Digital Library Infrastructure at LSE” Author: Ed Fay Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/fay/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Repository Thrills and Spills Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Repository Thrills and Spills Buzz framework portal infrastructure metadata repositories eprints copyright preservation e-learning personalisation soa dspace ict interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim take a look at recent developments in the digital repositories field and present a light-hearted project narrative.
Much can be learned from looking back and reflecting on events in the repository arena over the past few years.
Repository systems, institutional managers, repository managers, advisory organisations and repository users have all come a long way in this short time.
Looking back acts as a way of grounding prior activity in the present context.
It can also provide invaluable insights into where repositories are headed.
The activity of deliberating on past events may be of value to a range of individuals engaged in repository activities.
This might include funding bodies, professional organisations, publishers, institutions with an existing repository; or those in the process of considering the deployment of one, repository managers, repository project workers, and repository contributors and content consumers.
Some possible areas for consideration are technical and non-technical factors that encompass the whole range of the repository spectrum, from development through deployment, to advocacy and use.
This article introduces this reflective process from the perspective of a repository project funded under the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Digital Repositories Programme (JISC DRP) over the period 2005-2007 [1].
The Rights and Rewards Project's [2] focus for the last two years has primarily been directed towards repositories with teaching and learning content.
Although we consider repositories from the perspective of our local focus, i.e.
an Institutional Repository, we also address issues from a wider sphere of influence.
It is also worth bearing in mind that in the development of a repository of teaching resources we have benefited from prior studies by those setting up and maintaining research repositories.
This invaluable background information has been extended to encompass a teaching perspective by the research undertaken by this and other projects.
We present a brief background to repositories, and suggest some areas where shifts in perceptions may be occurring.
This overview covers current context, the marketplace for repositories, actors and their roles, managing expectations, and service requirements.
We also offer a light-hearted metaphorical view of the Rights and Rewards Project's "repository adventure" [3].
Areas for additional research activity are also discussed.
Prior to the start of the JISC DRP in 2005, repositories were at the early stages of deployment in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
In the main, their purpose was to house and showcase the research outputs of an institution.
The overarching principle was to provide Open Access (OA) to this type of institutional asset.
During the initial DRP conference the talk was of existing formal repository systems (mainly DSpace [4] and EPrints [5]); workflow; standards for metadata, content packaging and harvesting; preservation; interoperability between systems; and models and frameworks.
There was also debate about the legal aspects to repositories, policy decisions and cultural barriers to be overcome.
The focus was very much on getting the technical aspects right, and indeed this is still one of the key areas for the development and implementation of repositories.
Current State of Play Two years on, discussions have moved on to the possibilities afforded by Web 2.0, folksonomies, service-oriented architecture (SOA), systems and services, repository ecology, communities, inclusivity, informal repositories, and so on.
That is not to suggest that some of these topics were not being discussed two years ago, or that these are the only issues currently being investigated.
There does, however, seem to be greater awareness of alternative approaches to setting up a repository, and a more relaxed view of the range of available options.
It may be worth considering the question: Are developers, institutions, repository implementers, researchers, or a combination of these leading this shift in priorities?
Are users of repository systems driving this research activity as a reaction to existing provision?
To borrow the repository as ecology metaphor from the recently released 'An ecological approach to repository and service interactions' [6], it may be a natural evolution from the pre-existing repository foundation.
To illustrate this expansion of ideas consider a current project, SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) [7].
This project aims to bring a flexible and adaptable deposit protocol to the repository landscape.
A few years ago the concept of a common deposit interface for four of the main repository platforms (EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary) may not have been envisaged by many.
And yet, we still need the formal, fixed, quality-assured, preservation-minded, standards-based repositories to ground the informal, flexible, 'drop-and-go' repository described by the TrustDR team in their draft version of: 'Managing intellectual property rights in digital learning materials: a development pack for institutional repositories' [8].
Without this background and ongoing work, it is hard to imagine that we would have arrived at the position we find ourselves in today.
Those researching informal and social repository spaces might agree with a note of caution in the repository ecology document.
This alerts us to the fact that within ecologies, there are parasitic, saprophytic, and symbiotic relationships.
Educause conducts an annual survey of its member institutions to gather information about what IT issues are at the forefront of college and IT leaders' minds.
Responses to their 2007 survey included for the first time course and learner management systems [9].
The intense efforts and singular focus required by an institution to source, implement and embed systems of this type into the working practice of teaching and support staff hints at the scale of the task facing the successful introduction of a teaching and learning repository.
In the authors' experience, academics are aware of some of the issues that come with increased reliance on electronic systems and services for teaching.
Furthermore, there is a willingness to explore new systems to support teaching, but there are also concerns that need to be addressed.
These include the need for support and training, reducing the learning curve for IT systems and services, building use of new tools into everyday practice and the rewards for doing so.
Some possible solutions are to provide a portal for easy access to all information and tools relating to teaching practice, offer a desktop tool to access teaching and learning systems, provide appropriate levels of support and encourage community support.
The ideal scenario would be for systems to interoperate; so that conflict over ownership of systems and services would be minimised, control becomes less of an issue, existing roles are secure or transformed, and an ethos of collaboration rather than competition prevails.
This ideal applies to systems, institutions and individuals.
CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards) [10] plays an important role in bringing the issues of interoperability and standards to the attention of the teaching and learning community.
Through their Special Interest Groups (SIGs), they also provide an invaluable forum for a range of practitioners to come together to share their experience, expertise and visions for the future.
In the following section we describe the Rights and Rewards Project's reflections, which, inspired by the ecology metaphor, are illustrated by using the metaphor of a developing theme park.
Repositories: A Voyage in a Metaphor-laden Landscape Approaching the gates to the theme park can leave one feeling excited, optimistic, eager, and slightly apprehensive at the thought of the scale of the park and the complexity of the rides (task ahead).
One of the first places for new visitors to look over is the JISC visitor attraction and information suite.
Here you can pick up complimentary tickets for free rides and a wealth of advice and guidance.
Then off to the CETIS tea party tent, where you can meet up, and share experiences with novice and expert park employees.
This is also a good place to load up with armfuls of practical guides.
Along the way, you will also encounter a smattering of international stands where you can learn about theme parks and rides in other countries.
As with all good theme parks, there is also a darker side, so beware as you encounter the publisher's ride.
Here you may well be asked to assign copyright before you can climb on board.
Leave them copies of reports on open access, and IPR instead.
Then begin the process of setting up a ride with colleagues, seeking advice from existing owners, enticing customers, refining the experience, adding features and collaborating with others.
This can be accompanied by a thorough exploration of the rest of the park.
For the best view of the park, head for the very top of the roller-coaster ride.
From here the whole park is laid out before you.
Do not be tempted to linger here too long though, be bold, take the brakes off, ride through the subsequent trough and prepare to tackle the next stage in your ride.
As you navigate the park, you will no doubt enjoy watching and learning from others who are setting up their rides or stands.
One experience not to be missed is the park employees' final banquet.
This is a spectacular event that is held in an elaborately decorated hall.
The meal is prepared in the 'Old Mother Hubbard' style of catering.
Yes, the cupboards are bare but the chefs always manage to find a few choice items lurking at the back of the shelves.
They skilfully assemble these ingredients into what can best be described as an eclectic mix of individual dishes.
But, you will be treated to a most interesting and unique dining experience.
If you should find that your hunger is not satisfied, fear not, for there are complimentary biscuits in every theme park hotel room.
As you approach the exit still stuffed full of theme park fare, feeling slightly dizzy, you may be having some regrets.
You may feel that you have missed out on some of the things that you think you should have experienced along the way.
No doubt you will have enjoyed the companionship of others along the way, and you will have relished the opportunity to marvel at the creations of others.
There will been plenty of highs and lows, as you would expect from a theme park.
The highs might include all those you met along the way who were full of understanding, help, advice and support.
The lows might include a particularly rough ride towards the end of your park adventure.
You know the type of ride that leaves you reeling, your head spinning, slightly giddy and with legs wobbling.
Perhaps your path can be likened to a roller-coaster ride in a spinning teacup.
This trip has seen you sitting in a teacup, spinning around, head thrown back, flung against a wall, scraped up cartoon style, re-assembled and set off again.
But, you made it to the finish line, slightly worse for wear, but buoyed up by a supportive community of theme park personnel.
So what does it all mean?
As you look back, you will be heartened to see that the park carries on, new ideas for rides are being proposed, and new visitors are entering the gates.
Some of the people who embarked on their expeditions at the same time as you did are still there, keeping things on track.
And, what do you leave for those who enter the park as you depart?
Your own personal theme park trail (metadata) of course.
Yes, a description of your journey for others to consider, to follow or to navigate away from.
It may provide a patchy description in the places where you did not always fully comprehend what was happening to you, and where you did not always understand the value of charting your path.
But where it is faint, and where appropriate, you can be sure that the experience of others will fill any gaps.
Lessons Learned Coming to the close of one set of JISC-funded DRP projects is an ideal time for projects and the JISC to reflect on the events of the past two years, to evaluate what has been achieved, what it was not possible to accomplish, and what were the key factors for success and conversely for failure.
Were any setbacks due to technical difficulties, problems with infrastructure, institutional or cultural issues, or with individuals?
What were the outcomes that were predicted?
What were their triggers?
And, ultimately, where do we go from here?
JISC's aims [11] for the period 2007-2009 suggest a pulling together of some of the factors we have discussed here.
Innovations in ICT are to be grounded in considerations of infrastructure and effective use.
Institutions will be encouraged to engage with the wider community, and ideally initiatives will align with institutional strategy to ensure sustainable outputs.
Indeed, what does this reflection mean in the repository context?
Simply that you are not alone in your efforts, although it may feel that way sometimes.
There is expert advice and support available when you need it.
What you are attempting locally sits within a wider context, and there are opportunities for collaboration and interconnectedness.
Your successes and failures will be made in a public arena, but this is what it is all about.
We are all facing the same learning curve and shared experience can ultimately advance us all.
You will probably be in awe of the achievements of others, as they will appreciate yours.
And finally, this is a work in progress, mistakes are rectified, systems begun anew, revelations made and new visions realised.
Next Steps: Future Areas for Evaluation As technology systems and services mature, perhaps the focus for future research needs to shift to repository service users.
Topics of interest to teaching and learning repositories might include usage tracking (metric evaluations), institutional and/or practitioner readiness for repositories, key training and support issues, and technological developments.
Based on the theories of information architecture, human-computer interactions, and on the work of information professionals, it is possible to study user needs, user testing and user experience.
Involvement in the use of mature repository systems by a greater number of users would provide valuable information on experience and expectations of repository systems.
Thus, the perceptions versus the reality of repository use could be explored.
Other questions that could be examined include what is the uptake of Web 2.0 features where these are offered, and do users make use of personalisation features?
The necessary skills to use (contribute to and consume) repository services effectively are complementary to those required in the production of effective e-learning.
The availability of training and support are crucial elements in the repository mix.
This gap in provision was highlighted by the Educause survey [9] mentioned earlier.
Research into the use and reuse of open access materials and the influence on teaching and learning that repositories bring would provide valuable evidence to senior managers and teachers alike of the value of this type of service.
The benefits for teachers in having greater access to resources, and the knock on effects for improvements to the student learning experience should be explored.
One notable example of positive end results can be seen in the DIDET Project [12][13].
Here, students used an informal repository environment to share and work together as part of a team-based engineering design project.
Access to completed copyright-cleared projects was via a formal repository.
This collaborative project involved lecturers, librarians, learning technologists and coaches.
The project is being embedded in the Department of Design, Manufacture and Engineering Management at the University of Strathclyde.
Another avenue for investigation is the formal / informal repository debate.
Which is best?
What are the advantages of both types to managers and users?
Should the two operate in tandem, as in the DIDET Project, or is it more appropriate to devise a tight specification of requirements?
Several factors have hampered investigations into repositories for teaching and learning.
The number in operation and the user base remain small.
Wide publication of successful examples, like the JORUM [14] and DIDET Project, can help to raise awareness of their potential.
Returning to the theme park analogy for a moment, it is easy to see how a range of options can come together to form a coherent whole.
Yes, we need the spectacular, the flashy, thrilling and show-stopping rides.
In the field of repositories, examples of these types of service are: for research, the Cream of Science [15], arXiv [16]; and for teaching, MERLOT [17] and the JORUM.
We also need the intermediate attractions, trusted and secure, instilling confidence in park managers and users alike.
This option could be covered by a recently launched Depot [18].
This can be used as a staging post, making repository systems accessible whilst providing time for further investigations, seeking funding and the setting up of an institutional repository.
Next comes the family ride, a showcase for a local group; IRs fit nicely into this category.
There is the travelling show, opportunistic, personal, flexible, adaptable, possibly short-lived.
Personal repositories and some social software systems might apply here.
All these repositories come together to provide a satisfying experience for a whole range of users.
Conclusion The JISC DRP brought together a diverse group of repository projects.
Each one aspired to achieve the aims set out in its project plan and any new objectives set out along the way.
Individual efforts were tightly focused, but opportunities for 'cross-pollination' were explored.
We aimed to pursue repositories that were essentially formal in nature.
However, conditions, expectations and the requirements of users directed some projects to consider other possibilities.
Towards the end of this two-year period, discussions on more informal social approaches to repositories and repository like-systems have surfaced.
One may be left wondering what the next transformation in this 'repository adventure' will bring.
Perhaps the recent interest in Second Life [19] might lead to its use in a virtual repositories world.
We will probably have to revisit the theme park in another two years.
One thing is certain: the theme park will have changed a lot by then.
References JISC Digital Repositories Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digital_repositories.aspx Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project http://rightsandrewards.lboro.ac.uk/ Cervone, H.F., 2004.
The repository adventure.
Library Journal, 129(10) 44-46. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA421033.html DSpace http://www.dspace.org/ EPrints http://www.eprints.org/ Robertson, R.J., Mahey, M., & Allinson, J., 2007.
An ecological approach to repository and service interactions.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Ecology Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD Casey, J., Proven, J., & Dripps, D., 2007.
Managing intellectual property rights in digital learning materials: a development pack for institutional repositories.
http://trustdr.ulster.ac.uk/outputs.php Camp, J., DeBlois, P., & Educause Current Issues Committee.
2007.
Top ten IT issues.
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0730.pdf CETIS http://www.cetis.ac.uk/ Strategic aims and key deliverables: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/strategy/strategy0709/strategy_aims.aspx DIDET http://www.didet.ac.uk/ Breslin, C. DIDET http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2007/06/caroline_breslin.ppt JORUM http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ Creame of Science http://www.creamofscience.org/en/page/language.view/keur.page arXiv http://arxiv.org/ MERLOT http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm The Depot http://depot.edina.ac.uk/ Second Life http://www.secondlife.com/ Further Reading Pothen, P., and colleagues, 2007.
The JISC Annual Conference 2007.
Ariadne, Issue 51 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/jisc-conf-rpt/ Author Details Sue Manuel Research Assistant, Loughborough University Email: s.manuel@lboro.ac.uk Charles Oppenheim Head of Department of Information Science, Loughborough University Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/people/coppenheim.html Return to top Article Title: "Repository Thrills and Spills" Author: Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/manuel-oppenheim/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Using Blogs for Formative Assessment and Interactive Teaching Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Using Blogs for Formative Assessment and Interactive Teaching Buzz framework wiki database rss archives vocabularies blog visualisation e-learning licence privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Lisa Foggo provides a case-study of using a blog for formative assessment.
Its interactivity engaged participants and permitted measurement of student expectations and satisfaction with library sessions.
This case study shows how students were taught the skills they need to find information relevant to their subject area.
As groups of students are generally seen once only, measures to assess the effectiveness of teaching are needed, i.e.
to determine the skills the students have acquired.
Blogs were used as a tool for formative assessment and were used to measure student expectations before teaching, and their level of satisfaction with the session afterwards.
The blog [1] helps the tutor to understand if learning outcomes have been achieved and whether the session has met student expectations.
It also requires students to reflect on the skills that they have acquired.
The Context The lecturer for an undergraduate module on Communications Policy Issues asked the tutor to help her students search for information on government policies and legislation, both UK and overseas, and those of organisations such as the EU all of which can be difficult.
Their assignment was to prepare an annotated bibliography on a chosen topic which would be peer-reviewed by fellow students.
Five articles or book chapters, or one book, were also to be reviewed in the presentation.
Students were expected to provide a summary of the text(s) and show how they related to the chosen topic of the presentation.
A mentor from the Brotherton Library was also available to offer advice on how to improve the session and on any pedagogic issues that arose.
The 5 areas that the students would be covering in their assignment were: Freedom of expression and free press: where to get information on UK laws that protect and restrict it.
D-Notices, libel law, human rights, new anti-terrorism laws, privacy law plus EU and UN conventions Pornography: obscenity acts in UK, and US Internet regulation Audiovisual policy EU, UK : OFCOM, ownership rules in the UK, television without frontiers in the EU Public service broadcasting: EU Treaty of Amsterdam, the BBC in the UK, issues of licence fee, content and programming, BBC World as an enterprise Information Society: UK and EU legislation These areas had already been covered in lectures, so students had some idea of what they were looking for.
There were 2 groups of 35 students, and attendance was compulsory, as the lecturer had sent a register to be signed.
This ensured a high level of participation.
Learning Outcomes for the Session: To search for sources of information on government policy and theories behind the policy.
To identify keywords and construct a search statement.
To realise that they might need to review their search strategy if necessary, and identify how to do this.
To be aware of the Harvard system.
Learning Activities Planned to Facilitate Rapport/Interaction Past experience has shown that Communications Studies students generally appreciate the opportunity for interactive learning that is self-guided.
Evaluations by Communications Studies students of workbook-based teaching have indicated that it is boring and does not offer sufficient opportunity to find out about resources.
Therefore the comment facility of an online blog was used to ask the students about keywords for their chosen topic (ahead of their attendance) and also about what they expected to achieve from the session (in a dedicated time-slot at the beginning).
Computing and information technology (C&IT) is widely used in information literacy teaching, but it can be hard to determine if the students have really understood the techniques and resources taught and that they have been able to apply them independently.
Using a blog for formative assessment allowed a more supportive approach to teaching.
This developed work done at the University of Northumbria where lecturers on a Built Environment module used formative assessment because it 'goes beyond the formulation and reporting of judgements about students' learning, and their learning experiences, and which formatively informs those who teach, about the experiences of those who learn' [2].
Previously student evaluation forms had been used, but they failed to tell the tutor what the students expected to learn.
Using formative assessment identified what they wanted to achieve, (broadly concurring with the tutor's own ideas, which was reassuring) and that their expectations were largely met.
It can also be argued that formative assessment helps concentrate the students' minds on why they are in the session while promoting the opportunity to acquire the research skills needed for independent learning -rather than learning about the Library (which they think they have mastered already).
The approach in this study most closely resembles that of Action Plan E at Northumbria, in which the lecturer at the beginning of the session asked students to note questions for which they hoped to have an answer by the end.
The students are then given regular opportunities to revise this list and delete those questions that have been answered [3].
The effectiveness of the approach will be outlined below.
Part of the motivation for this study is the tutor's interest in Web 2.0 and the developments taking place with blogs, wikis, RSS, deli.ci.ous etc.
[4] and their applications for today's students.
Brindley argues that in order to meet the needs of the millennial generation in digital information and library research, we must find a method of actively engaging with their social context [5].
She gives the example of the recent BBC Televison series Who Do You Think You Are?
and the related exhibition mounted by the British Library.
This led to people from ethnic minorities and a range of social backgrounds visiting the exhibition, people who otherwise would never have crossed the threshold of a library.
In order to teach today's student, I would argue that you need to be aware of, and use creatively, the technologies that are available.
Details of Content in Relation to Learning Outcomes Submission of keywords by the students prior to arrival allowed the tutor to write their ideas on A3 paper and distribute these around the room so that the students could be divided into groups, depending on the topic in which they were interested.
The URL of the blog for the students to use was then circulated and they were asked to submit ideas on what they wanted to achieve.
A description of which databases would be used, why students might use them, and how to search them was then distributed.
In their groups, the students then formed a search statement (based on an example given by the tutor) and searched for relevant information using the databases.
This meant that they were able to talk to their peers about their topic and to share ideas on search statements that worked and those that did not.
This helped to overcome common fears and frustrations with the research process.
As a consequence, within this environment of interactivity and discussion, a positive 'learning climate' developed.
Students also had the tutor in the room as a back-up for reassurance and help, if needed.
At the end, the students were required to go back to the blog and state whether their objectives had been achieved.
This then allowed the tutor to evaluate whether the session and the approach had been successful, as well as the tutor's own observations and those of the mentor.
The success of the students' evaluation and of the blog may be seen [6] and this was analysed after the session had taken place.
The reason for choosing this form of learning activity was that it was a recent, online technology with which many students would be acquainted.
It also allowed some work to be done by the students by way of preparation, thereby focusing their efforts.
Finally, it is accessible from anywhere and does not require any sort of login and thus is easy to access.
Students were encouraged to use databases that were relevant to searching for British and European legislation and policies.
They were able to read them on their computer screen and this provided a good opportunity to engage with primary sources.
This meant that they understood the existence of different models of, and the nature of, contemporary policy and debates.
As many students had not really handled this type of material before (but as level 2 students were used to electronic resources and evaluating information), this seemed to be pitched at the appropriate level.
Critical Review of the Session The blog worked well in that it engaged all the students in considering their objectives for the session.
However, it took up too much time and meant that it was hard to get them to re-focus on their group work.
The mentor also agreed that the session was geared to achieving the set objectives and that these were made clearer to students through use of the blog; their blog submissions showed they had understood why they were there.
He also felt that the session definitely instilled confidence and represented a satisfactory start.
However, more time was needed, probably best devoted to a follow-up session covering any queries arising from completion of the workbook and information on referencing.
It is interesting to note that Northumbria University also found they ran out of time and that this was a pressure they had not anticipated in their use of formative feedback.
However, they also felt that 'identifying needs that had not been anticipated for the module was a positive outcome' [2].
I would concur with this; although for the tutor the comments of the students represented more of a reassurance that ideas and materials about which they knew little were being covered, and at the right level.
Significance in Future Planning This session forms the basis of what could be a very effective and interactive session, wherein the students engage in formative self-assessment of what they wish to achieve.
However, more time is needed for the session if it is to be fully used and integrated with other activities.
The fact that the blog was accessible by students wherever they were was especially appealing, and made it possible to submit keywords prior to the session, requiring them to give serious consideration of their topic and of what might be expected of them in researching it.
This meant that they were more aware of their need for research techniques.
This aspect of a blog is well worth further investigation.
This experience makes it possible to think about future strategies.
An example would be to ask 1st year students to complete an online poll about Library knowledge and skills.
Many think that they already have these skills and do not see the reason for the session taught in the 1st year.
This poll would then highlight what they do not know, and would encourage them to add reflective comments to the blog on what they learn during the two sessions taught.
This would build on the idea of formative assessment and also help students to become reflective practitioners.
They could also respond to each others' comments, with ideas and advice, thus helping to build an online peer community.
This may go someway to answering the question posed by Garrison and Anderson: 'how does one establish social presence in an e-learning environment that will support a community of inquiry and the concomitant, critically reflective discourse?'
[7].
A blog is accessible to everyone and allows anonymous and therefore, one hopes, open communication (although some ground rules on etiquette will need to be established).
Group cohesion will be promoted because the class members will also know each other in real life and therefore can enter into discussion off-line as well.
However, it does need to be recognised that online discussion boards usually have limited success and that students often fail to engage with them.
Therefore other methods may need to be investigated.
Moretti's advice [8] also needs to be considered, so that objectives are not overlooked in the excitement of using new technology.
One should also be aware that not all students will have the same C&IT skills.
Although blogs are usable by all, accessible vocabulary needs to be used rather than 'technobabble' and library jargon.
Students will want to question tutors face-to-face and tutors must maintain visibility in this regard, thus aiding blended learning.
Conclusion Finally, awareness in the e-learning field should be maintained and tutors should be ever ready to respond to the changing environment and new opportunities.
Morrison outlines his visualisation of the future of e-learning as encompassing simulation ('an environment where learners can practice, fail, succeed and learn in a rich and realistic setting' [9]; mobilisation (by which he means the use of PDAs and WAP-enabled devices); and permeation (in which learning simultaneously delivers many types and forms of learning at different levels of granularity).
I would argue that we have already reached this stage, and, like Brindley [5], just need to find the appropriate method to engage the users of these devices in e-learning and react responsively to their needs.
Therefore constant vigilance and evaluation of methods is key to any future work undertaken.
References Lisa's information literacy http://www.livejournal.com/users/leedsinfolit Cowan, J.
2004.
Improving student learning through departmental student feedback self-studies: Project position paper, pg.
1.
Higher Education Academy: LTSN Subject Centre for the Built Environment (CEBE) LTSN Subject Centre for the Built Environment (CEBE).
2004.
Improving student learning through departmental student feedback self-studies: Possible action plan (E) for a participating development.
Higher Education Academy: LTSN Subject Centre for the Built Environment (CEBE) Kelly, B.
2006.
Web 2.0: Implications for Higher Education.
(Accessed 10 November 2006).
Bath: UKOLN, 2006 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/leeds-2006-03/web20.ppt Brindley, L. 2006.
A world of contrasts: information literacy in the digital world.
In: LILAC 2006, 29 March 2006, Leeds.
(Accessed 25 April 2006).
Leeds: CILIP Information Literacy Group.
http://www.cilip.org.uk/NR/rdonlyres/4B47053F-F385-4436-902C-A1AE6CFE570F/0/brindley.ppt "Students aims" in Lisa's Information Literacy http://leedsinfolit.livejournal.com/894.html Garrison, D.R and Anderson, T. 2003.
E-learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice.
London: Routledge Falmer, p. 53 Moretti, F. 2005.
"Support in the use of new media" in Melling, M. (2005) Supporting e-learning: A guide for library and information managers London: Facet Publishing, pp85-111 Morrison, D. 2003.
E-learning strategies: How to get implementation and delivery right first time Chichester: Wiley Author Details Lisa Foggo J.B. Morrell Library University of York Library & Archives Heslington York YO10 5DD Email: lf523@york.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Using Blogs for Formative Assessment and Interactive Teaching" Author: Lisa Foggo Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/foggo/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Publish and Cherish With Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Publish and Cherish With Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems Buzz data framework database dissemination infrastructure accessibility repositories copyright preservation aggregation ftp ict algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Leo Waaijers urges Open Access-mandating research funders to extend OA publishing conditions by stimulating the market.
Now that publications are increasingly being enriched with databases and audio-visual elements, the need for non-proprietary review systems – that is, peer review systems that do not require the assignment of copyright to the organiser of the peer review i.e.
the publisher is becoming ever-more pressing.
Although there is a steadily growing number of peer-reviewed Open Access journals [1] and an active Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association [2], the supply fails to keep pace with the demand.
More and more research funders require open access to the publications that result from research they have financed.
Recently the European Commission conducted a pilot initiative on open access to peer-reviewed articles in FP7 [3], its Seventh Research Framework Programme, that may result in 100,000 reviewed articles.
In so far as authors cannot all publish in Open Access journals, the EC and, for that matter, other Open Access-mandating funders impose unfair conditions on authors.
With a shift from proprietary to non-proprietary systems of peer review, initial experience has now been garnered from SCOAP [4] and the Springer experiments [5] at UKB, MPG, Göttingen University and, lately, California University [6]).
This conversion can be speeded up if disciplinary communities, universities, and research funders actively enter the market of the peer review organisers by calling for tenders and inviting publishers to submit proposals for a non-proprietary design of the peer review process.
Given the current situation – with the American legislature and the European Commission having clearly taken a stand in favour of Open Access – one can expect that such tenders will certainly produce interesting proposals.
The time is ripe!
This article examines the idea of the European Commission putting out such a tender.
Open Access in a Nutshell Open Access (OA) means access to research results that are peer-reviewed, well preserved and distributed over the Internet for free reuse under the sole condition of crediting the creator.
The idea of Open Access has emerged with the rise of the World Wide Web.
It is widely regarded as the natural successor to the classical paper-based subscription model.
For universities and research institutes OA embodies their Corporate Social Responsibility: it is showcasing their institutional talents to society, thereby enabling people and communities to participate in knowledge-based democracies.
Authors want to share their knowledge and are aware that OA generates more citations of their work thus contributing to their status and prestige; here ethical principles and self-interest may coincide.
Together institutes and researchers are aware that free and prompt access to scientific information improves the efficiency of scientific discovery and becomes practically imperative for enhanced publications that are composed of various resources like research data, algorithms, audio-visuals, etc.
Different access regimes to different parts of such publications would make these publications unworkable.
Open access contributes significantly to the transparency of the whole research process.
It eases reproduction of research which is the ultimate quality control and guarantee against scientific fraud.
At the same time it reduces unintentional duplicated research effort.
Powerful tools [7] now facilitate the detection of plagiarism from open access publications and finally, good news for publishers, copyright piracy is impossible in an Open Access environment.
You cannot steal oxygen from the atmosphere.
Not surprisingly, the academic community has expressed its strong support for OA on many occasions.
One of the early expressions was an open letter that 35,000 academics in the biomedical disciplines sent to their publishers in 2000 [8].
One should also note the recommendation of the European University Association in March 2008 to its 800 members that 'Universities should develop institutional policies and strategies that foster the availability of their quality controlled research results for the broadest possible range of users, maximizing their visibility, accessibility and scientific impact.'
At the beginning of 2007 in the space of just one month more than 20,000 people mainly from the European academic community petitioned the European Commission to 'Guarantee public access to publicly funded research results shortly after publication.'
More than 500 people signed the petition on behalf of their institution.
As the petition has remained open, more than 7,000 people have added their support subsequently [9].
Funders, ranging from an early bird like the Wellcome Trust [10] via Research Councils of Europe, in the UK [11] and in Germany [12] and recently followed by the American legislature [13], the Council of the European Union [14] and the European Commission, started to require Open Access to articles that resulted from the research they financed.
Glossary of Open Access Terminology For the remainder of this article it may be helpful to acquaint oneself with some of the jargon.
A manuscript that is submitted to a journal is called a pre-print.
The author version that is accepted for publication goes under the term post-print.
The publisher version (usually a pdf document) is often referred to as final published article.
The Open Access approach to publishing is referred to as the "Gold route" and the classical publication process is labelled "Toll Gate route".
Authors who try to tunnel out post-prints of their articles originally published in a classical journal to open access via institutional repositories are said to follow the 'Green route'.
Authors without an institutional or subject-based repository at their disposal to post their manuscript or published article are termed 'orphan authors'.
Open Access Economics In order to understand how Open Access publishing works compared to its classical variant, we might do worse than take a brief look at the publication process of scientific articles (Figure 1).
The quality control in both approaches is identical: a pre-print goes through an editorial and peer review process that, often after revision of the manuscript, may result in a post-print.
Then, before proceeding to publication of the article, publishers expect to be remunerated for their work, namely the organisation of the quality control and subsequent dissemination of the article via one of their, sometimes highly branded, journals.
At this juncture, the two approaches bifurcate.
In the classical approach publishers require exclusive, complete and irreversible assignment of copyright which gives them control over access to the article.
Subsequently, they transubstantiate this control into revenue via subscriptions, licences, copyright clearance fees and various conditions of reuse.
Conversely, Open Access publishers require a sum of money upfront, the so-called 'publication fee' or 'author fee'.
Upon its receipt, they publish the article promptly in an open access Internet journal where the sole condition of reuse is the correct attribution of the content to its author(s).
Figure 1: Overview of publishing process: The Gold Route vs the Green Route A relative cost comparison between the two approaches is quite straightforward as the only difference lies in the distribution process.
The classical approach, with its complicated licensing or subscribing and content-shielding process suffers considerably in the comparison.
Although publishers are rather secretive with their business data, various studies have estimated the costs of this distribution layer amounting to between 20% and 30% of the whole publication cycle.
Consequently, Open Access publishing can be carried out at considerably lower cost.
This, however, does not automatically mean that all institutions will benefit equally from a transfer to Open Access because the basis for pricing is different across the two approaches.
In the classical model, subscriptions or licences provide the basis for pricing whereas in the Open Access approach it is the published articles themselves.
As a result, a typical educational institution with a large collection of journals but which publishes relatively few articles of its own will pay substantially less in an Open Access world.
Conversely, a research-intensive institution generating numerous published papers may pay more.
Box 1 illustrates two examples of HE institutions in the Netherlands.
Some explanation of these examples may be useful.
Both libraries operate a different average publication fee per article: €2000 (ISS) resp.
€1300 (UU).
The Web site of BioMed Central offers a comprehensive price list [15] which may provide a basis for these estimates.
In their study John Houghton, Charles Oppenheim et al.
estimate the average cost per article at £1524 ([16] p. XV) but mention that fewer than 50% of OA journals charge author fees ([16] p. 77).
This would reduce the effective average publication fee to about £750.
In this light, some further price analysis might prove useful.
As expected, OA is very beneficial to the Institute of Social Studies, not only price-wise but also because its alumni, once back home, will keep free access to the publications of their alma mater.
The somewhat more nuanced outcome for the University of Utrecht is even more surprising.
If external research funders are prepared to include the cost of article publication fees in project funding (as more and more funders now do) then even Utrecht will be better off in an OA environment.
A more far-reaching exploration has been conducted of both the costs and benefits across the alternative publication models.
This has now been carried out on a national scale by John Houghton and his colleagues in respect of Australia (September 2006) and the UK (January 2009) [16].
Similar studies for the Netherlands and Denmark are anticipated.
The results are impressive and conclude that there exist substantial OA benefits for practically all stakeholders involved ([16] pp.
XXII – XXV).
Cost Comparison: Open Access v. Subscriptions at Utrecht University Established in 1636, today Utrecht University is an internationally renowned top research university with almost 30, 000 students and over 8, 500 staff.
Annually UU publishes 5000 articles in peer-reviewed journals; of these 1500 result from externally funded research (figures 2005).
Utrecht University is a signatory of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.
Open Access Subscriptions Publication fees UU1 €6,500,000 Subscriptions and licences €4,500,000     Document supply 3 + copyright clearance fees + collection management 4 €1,000,000   €6,500,000   €5,500,000 Publication fees research funders 2 €1,950,000     Remaining costs UU €4,550,000     1.
5000 peer-reviewed articles @ €1,300 2.
1500 peer-reviewed articles @ €1,300 3.
Includes out of pocket costs to third parties (other libraries, publishers) and in-house handling costs.
4.Includes defining the collection, acquisitions and administration, shielding access and copyright issues.
September 2008 Bas Savenije University Librarian of Utrecht University Cost Comparison: Open Access v. Subscriptions at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague Established in 1952, the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague is an international graduate school with typically 400 students per year.
Its research programme results in books, reports and about 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals annually.
An intangible open access advantage is the free access that ISS alumni, who are often based in developing countries, will have to these articles.
Open Access Subscriptions Publication fees ISS 1 €120,000 Subscriptions and licences €180,000     Document supply 3 + copyright clearance fees €65,000 Platform or aggregation costs 2 €25,000 Collection management 4 €60,000   €145,000   €305,000 1.
60 peer-reviewed articles @ €2,000.
The publication fee is an estimate based on the pricelist published by BioMedCentral.
The list refers mainly to STM journals [17].
For social sciences the fees may be lower.
2.
ISS assumes that even in a full open access world still some aggregation or platform fees will be needed.
3.
Includes out of pocket costs to third parties (other libraries, publishers) and in-house handling costs.
4.This is a rough estimate.
Includes defining the collection, acquisitions and administration, shielding access and copyright issues.
September 2008 Michel Wesseling, Head of the Office of Library and Information Technology Services Box 1: Comparison of costs with Open Access and Subscription approaches at two Dutch institutions Open Access Mandates Several research funders and also some universities require open access to the publications of the research they fund.
A typical example is the European Commission with their Open Access Pilot in the Seventh Research Framework Programme F7 [18].
FP7 is the Commisson's €50 billion research programme, running from 2007 to 2013.
The Pilot covers approximately 20% of the budget and applies to the following areas: Energy, Environment, Health, ICT, e-Infrastructures, Science in Society, Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities.
The Commission requires Open Access to all peer-reviewed articles resulting from research in these areas within six or twelve months of publication.
If we estimate that every €100,000 of research funding results in one peer-reviewed article, the FP7 pilot will provide open access to something like 100,000 articles.
All articles must be deposited into institutional or subject-based repositories.
In order to enable authors to meet these publishing requirements, the Commission reimburses the publication fee for articles published in Open Access journals.
The Commission has also tendered for the provision of a pan-European repository [19] where authors who do not have an institutional or subject-based repository at their disposal can store their article.
Currently, Open Access journals represent some 15% of the market of scientific and scholarly publishing.
Statistically, this means that 15,000 articles of the FP7 pilot meet the requirements of the Commission.
As copyright owners, their authors can deposit these articles in a repository immediately upon their publication.
The remaining 85,000 articles still have to be published in a subscription-based journal which includes assigment of copyright to the publisher.
For these articles the authors "should make their best efforts to negotiate copyright and licensing conditions that comply with the open access pilot in FP7" [20] says the Commission in its leaflet.
Authors can discover exactly what this means from the RoMeo/SHERPA Web site [21].
The site gives an overview of more than 500 classical model publishers and what they permit authors to do with their articles.
About 30% permit the depositing of both pre-prints and post-prints in a repository; 21% allow the depositing of post-prints only while 12% permit the depositing of pre-prints only.
The remaining 37% do not authorise anything.
Unfortunately this is not the whole story.
Publishers employ different embargo periods when it comes to allowing open access to these manuscripts; they vary from zero (i.e.
immediate release) to four years.
Moreover, the reuse conditions of these manuscripts differ widely.
Some may only be displayed on the author's Web site, others solely on the institutional Web site, others yet again may not be reused in any commercial setting, etc.
As some publishers apply different copyright policies to different journals, there are actually more copyright policies than there are publishers!
For authors this is a labyrinth.
Nonetheless, the Commission as well as other pro-Open Access funders – wants authors to 'make their best efforts to negotiate copyright and licensing conditions that comply with the open access pilot in FP7.'
And even if these authors succeed in such best efforts, open circulation will only apply to their manuscripts, not the final published article.
But in citation indexes like Web of Science and Scopus only citations of final published articles are ever counted.
The Open Access requirements of the EC, and of other funders for that matter, must be regarded as unfair in respect of the 85% of authors who cannot publish in an Open Access journal.
Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems Moreover such requirements are unnecessary.
One of the standard mechanisms for the EC to realise its policies is putting out tenders and calls for bids or proposals.
Indeed, the Commission has tendered the provision of a pan-European repository for orphan authors in FP7 [22].
But lacking an appropriate peer review system, the Commission sends authors off to find their way around the RoMeo/SHERPA labyrinth.
Instead, it could have tendered for bids to establish adequate non-proprietary review systems.
Such a measure would follow up the policy advice of the important Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe [23] which it published three years ago.
The wording of such an invitation to tender (ITT) might run as follows: "The European FP7 Programme (€50 billion, 2007-2013) will generate a stream of published research.
For seven areas of research the Commission requires that such published research appears as openly accessible peer-reviewed articles.
In order to have appropriate review procedures in place to process these articles, the Commission plans to tender the reviewing process under the following conditions: The reviewing process must be independent, rigorous and swift.
The reviewing may be anonymous, named or open (to be negotiated).
As a result of the reviewing process, articles will be marked 1 to 5.
For articles marked 3 to 5 adequate Open Access publication platforms must be available (e.g.
new Open Access journals).
Alternatively, authors may publish their articles in any existing OA journal.
Upon publication all articles will be deposited in a certified (institutional) repository.
In review procedures the Commission will weigh articles with marks 3, 4 and 5 as if they were published in journals with impact factors 1-3, 4-8 and 9-15 respectively.
(These figures are nominal and subject to disciplinary calibration).
A yield of at least 100,000 articles during the Programme period across the selected research areas is anticipated.
It is possible that more than one proposal will be accepted in order to cater for different disciplines.
The Commission will seek the advice of EURAB/ESF/EUA/EUROHORCS/ERC in the proposal selection process."
Box 2: Wording for a possible Invitation to Tender for Non-proprietary peer review systems The wording of the proposed ITT above requires some explanation: This imaginary ITT is geared to the EC but could easily be adapted to (consortia of) funders or universities alike which have developed distinct Open Access policies.
Condition 4 above creates an adequate Open Access solution for all authors within the mandate.
Of course, if authors insist on publishing their article in a Toll Gate journal (and undertake the complicated process of negotiating delayed open access to their post-print) they may still do so.
The announcement that in review procedures articles with marks 3 to 5 will be weighed as if they were published in journals with certain impact factors aligns this approach with the existing review systems.
The advice of prestigious European research authorities – all fervent Open Access advocates [24] authorises this important step.
This nuanced approach also disincentivises a costly iteration of rejection and re-submission of articles.
Of the total of 100,000 articles, 15,000 can already be published in Open Access journals today.
So there is a market for 85,000 open access articles e.g.
for about 120 new Open Access journals (120 journals x 7 years x 100 articles/journal-year = 84,000 articles.)
Proposals may include existing Open Access journals.
Especially for young Open Access journals, i.e.
journals that have not yet gathered a journal impact factor, this call offers the opportunity to gain accreditation by the Commission.
Classical publishers could seize the opportunity to switch Toll Gate journals to Open Access.
The expected number of articles should stimulate the Open Access market.
Conclusion Acceptance of a proposal means that the proposed publication channel (e.g.
a journal) has a non-proprietary review system in place that meets the Commission's requirements.
Although the direct aim of the tender is to create a level playing field for researchers who are involved in the Open Access Pilot in FP7, any other author may equally publish via such a channel.
Essentially, the outcome is a directory of accredited Open Access publication channels.
The action is very scalable; other funders or (consortia of) universities can easily join in or adopt similar initiatives.
Finally, there is no risk in opting for this approach.
The worst-case scenario would be that the call does not result in any accepted proposals.
If that were the case, the Commission, or any other funder for that matter, need only fall back on its current position.
References Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/ Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) http://www.oaspa.org/ Research Science and Society:The European Commission launches an open access pilot in FP7 http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/index.cfm?fuseaction=public.topic&id=1680 SCOAP3 Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics http://scoap3.org/ Library Journal: Springer and Max Planck together again; Michigan celebrates one million scans http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6528977.html Library Journal: University of California Libraries, Springer Strike Open Access Deal http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6631517.html Shambles: Plagiarism Tools http://www.shambles.net/pages/staff/ptools/ Public Library of Science (PloS): Read the Open Letter http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results http://www.ec-petition.eu/ Wellcome Trust: Position statement in support of open and unrestricted access to published research http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002766.html Research Councils UK: Access to Research Outputs: RCUK position on issue of improved access to research outputs http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/default.htm DFG-funded Project Shows How to Make Works Accessible Free of Charge on the Internet http://www.dfg.de/en/news/press_releases/2007/press_release_2007_23.html Open Access at the Max Planck Society http://open-access.net/de_en/information_on_oa_by/max_planck_society/ An open access mandate for the NIH http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-08.htm#nih Council Conclusions on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/intm/97236.pdf Comparison of BioMed Central's Article Processing Charges with those of other publishers http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apccomparison/ John Houghton, Charles Oppenheim et al., "Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits", January 2009 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/rpteconomicoapublishing.pdf BioMed Central | for authors | Article processing charge comparison http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apccomparison/ The European Commission launches an open access pilot in FP7 http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/index.cfm?fuseaction=public.topic&id=1680 Scientific Information Repository supporting FP7 ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ict/docs/e-infrastructure/20081216-infoday-morais_en.pdf Leaflet Open Access Pilot in FP7 http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/open-access-pilot_en.pdf Statistics for 579 publishers http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?stats=yes Info package FP7 http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=UserSite.FP7DetailsCallPage&call_id=190#infopack Scientific Information Repository supporting FP7, presentation Carlos Morais Pires ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ict/docs/e-infrastructure/20081216-infoday-morais_en.pdf Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf EUROHORCs – European Heads of Research Councils Recommendations on Open Access http://eurohorcs.drift.senselogic.se/download/18.770467ab119dd5c597080004322/EUROHORCs'+Recommendations+on+Open+Access+200805.pdff EURAB European Reseach Advisory Board – Final Report http://ec.europa.eu/research/eurab/pdf/eurab_scipub_report_recomm_dec06_en.pdf EUA – European University Association urges universities to develop clear strategies to advance open access http://www.eua.be/index.php?id=48&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5btt_news%5d=518&tx_ttnews%5bbackPid%5d=11 ERC – European Reseach Council Scientific Council Guidelines for Open Access http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ScC_Guidelines_Open_Access_revised_Dec07_FINAL.pdf Author Details Leo Waaijers Open Access consultant Email: leowaa@xs4all.nl Return to top Article Title: "Publish and Cherish with Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems" Author: Leo Waaijers Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/waaijers/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Cult of the Amateur Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Cult of the Amateur Buzz data wiki blog video youtube Citation BibTex RIS Stephanie Taylor tries to curb her enthusiasm for Web 2.0 by investigating the dark side of social networking.
Before I begin this review, I should declare my interests and publicly acknowledge that I not only work with social networking tools and technologies professionally, but I actually like many aspects of Web 2.0.
But I do not embrace Web 2.0 without reservations, and knowing I have a tendency occasionally to be ever so slightly blinded by my enthusiasms, I have been eager to investigate the more sceptical viewpoint and so, I hope, develop a more rounded view of the subject.
The strap line to Andrew Keen's book, How the Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy looked like the perfect antidote to my over-enthusiasm for all things Web 2.0.
And the cover convinced me it was a mustread.
Keen, it declares, is 'no Luddite but a Silicon Valley insider who pioneered several Internet startups himself.'
Like the technical gurus quoted on the cover, I was eager to have my thoughts provoked and my horizons widened.
Keen wastes no time and outlines his basic premise in the first chapter.
Basically, he feels that Web 2.0 technologies have been developed with a single, messianic message in mind that the collective wisdom of the masses is better in every way than the individual wisdom of specialists.
He thinks that the cult of Web 2.0 elevates the amateur above the professional expert as a matter of faith.
And in his opinion, this is wrong.
What is more, this new religion is spreading with evangelical zeal around the Western world and the mass converts are destroying the traditional media industries as they abandon cinemas, television, recorded music, newspapers and books in order to stampede online and grab and share free, amateur or stolen professionally produced content via blogs, wikis and file-sharing sites.
The end result is, according to Keen, cultural and economic meltdown right across Western civilisation.
Loss of revenue streams from both advertising and paid-for content resulting in job cuts and, ultimately, he claims, the destruction of the culture created by the traditional media.
And this, he concludes, is disastrous for the West because the traditional media are, for Keen, the guardians of all that is good in our culture.
It's a dramatic story.
And for the rest of the book Keen follows it through the film industry, the newspaper and book-publishing industries and finally the recorded music industry, laying out his general theory again and again, illustrated with woeful examples from each sector.
In Keen's world, the film and television industries are losing so much ground to amateur video sites such as YouTube that even a cultural icon as the Disney studio is embarking on frequent redundancy rounds.
Newspapers are under attack from bloggers, books are left mouldering on the shelves as everyone joins forces to write collaborative wikis.
For Keen, this crisis culminates in the music industry.
This industry, he claims, is now so damaged by loss of revenue from file-sharing technologies that record companies can no longer afford to nurture talent and create heavily produced albums.
The closing down of his favourite record shop (Tower Records, San Francisco) is clearly a deeply felt, personal tragedy for the author.
And that, for me, is one of the main problems of this book.
It is presented as polemic, but is nothing more or less than a personal view on cultural change.
I have never felt affection for record shops (or vinyl records) and personally, I dislike heavily produced studio-based albums.
So I don't care if record shops shut and music becomes less 'professional' on the production side.
It's a matter of taste and personal preference.
It is far too subjective an approach to warn of cultural meltdown because something the author does not like is becoming popular.
Which brings me to another problem with this work namely the lack of any historical and cultural context to Keen's theories.
Keen seems to have developed his viewpoint within the rather rarefied air of Silicon Valley in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
He seems unaware that technological changes in the past have previously revolutionised the then traditional media of the day.
The overall impression he gives is that relatively recent technologies such as recorded music, film and television have been embedded in our culture forever when they are, in reality, a very recent development in cultural terms.
As one of the main thrusts of his argument is that Web 2.0 technologies are undermining the foundations of Western culture, the weight he gives to modern mass media channels that were developed primarily in the twentieth century renders his arguments less convincing.
From the broader cultural and heritage perspective, YouTube undermining the television industry seems like one recent, technologically driven newcomer being displaced by another even more recent, technology driven one.
The questions he asks would be very interesting if his answers took into account the bigger picture.
Without this context, his theories seem less well formed and come across as the work of an enthusiastic amateur, the very thing he criticises Web 2.0 for championing.
He also fails to deal with the business and economic side of the entertainment industry.
He sees bookshops closing, but Amazon, one of the largest and most successful online retailers, started out selling books and books and music still form a large part of its business.
Yet no reference is made to this.
A lack of referenced facts and figures within the book generally left me less than entirely convinced by his conclusions.
Without this kind of data to support his case, I fear that the author may open himself to the charge of over-reliance on anecdote when presenting his ideas.
The book, overall, lacks authority in a wider context.
His take on traditional mass media, for example, is touchingly naïve.
He paints a picture of newspapers, TV studios, film studios, record companies and publishers as champions of truth, freedom and the highest cultural standards.
In Keen's world, these cultural gate-keepers are all focussed on searching for, nurturing and developing talent.
They allow only the best creative artists to thrive and thus safeguard Western culture from the untalented masses who are trying to storm this elite stronghold.
Meanwhile, Web 2.0 is not only opening the gates and inviting the un-cultured masses to ransack our culture, but is making sure they blog it and share it.
Arguably Keen has completely failed to engage with the huge elephant in the room here.
Namely that the modern mass media industries have been too effective as gate-keepers and are no longer engaging enough people in their potential audience.
Web 2.0 allows people to decide what they want to watch, listen to and read.
That is at the heart of the changes.
How new technologies change a culture and how cultures shape the way technologies are used and developed is a fascinating and complex area that Keen has not really addressed.
What I would regard as wasted opportunities in his treatment of the subject is perhaps clearly exemplified by the author's interview with the musician Paul Simon.
As a star in the conventional record company business, Simon personally does not like Web 2.0.
'I'm personally against Web 2.0 in the same way I'm against my own death.'
Simon informs Keen.
Simon then goes on to compare Web 2.0 to an uncontrollable forest fire, concluding "Maybe… a fire is what's needed for a vigorous new growth, but that's the long view."
Keen, however, does not discuss the idea of a need for Web 2.0 or take Simon's thoughts any further.
Which is a shame, because it is an issue at the very heart of the debate.
There are also genuine concerns about quality control, who pays for content and the demise of some traditional knowledge and skills.
But Keen's, to my mind, rather simplistic view of life fails either to raise or address these issues.
There are some useful pockets of information and thought in the book, and his views on search engines and the way their development has been influenced by popularity rather than knowledge are both fascinating and important.
He is clearly very knowledgeable in this area and I would like to read more of his views on this subject.
In his acknowledgements, at the end of the book, Keen confesses that this is his first book and that 'as a writer, I remain a bit of an amateur.'
I am inclined to agree.
As a cultural and economic commentator, he did not really challenge my views on Web 2.0 at all.
I still feel I would like someone to do that, thought I suspect it will not be Andrew Keen, for all his admiration of traditional media formats, I feel he would make a better blogger than he does a print author.
Ironically, both his style and content would benefit from a blog environment.
I'm not sure I would be rushing to read his views on cultural change again, but if he ever starts a blog about popular search engines I think I would be a loyal reader and post many comments.
Author Details Stephanie Taylor UKOLN and Critical Eye Communications Limited Email: s.taylor@ukoln.ac.uk Web sites: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk | http://www.criticaleyecommunications.co.uk Return to top Article Title: "The Cult of the Amateur" Author: Stephanie Taylor Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/taylor-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digital Curation and Preservation: Defining the Research Agenda for the Next Decade Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digital Curation and Preservation: Defining the Research Agenda for the Next Decade Buzz data software framework infrastructure archives metadata accessibility identifier repositories copyright preservation provenance curation interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Philip Pothen reports on this two-day conference at Warwick University over 7-8 November 2005.
Over recent years it has become clear that accessing and preserving digital data is increasingly important across a wide range of scientific, artistic and cultural activities.
There has been a growing recognition of the need to address the fragility and accessibility of the digital information collected in all aspects of our lives.
Access to digital information lies at the heart of the scientific and technical innovation vital for modern economies.
A two-day workshop took place over 7 8 November at the University of Warwick to address these issues and to map out a future research agenda for digital curation and preservation.
Sponsored by JISC, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the British Library and the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), the invitation-only event drew a wide range of national and international experts to explore the current state of play with a view to shaping future strategy.
Day One Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary of JISC, delivered the welcome address, saying at the outset that there had been a 'sea-change' in this area and that 'the debate is now very much about 'how?'
we preserve digital information rather than 'whether?''.
Policy makers had taken up this issue with the Office of Science and Technology (OST) working group on e-Infrastructure establishing 'curation and preservation' of digital information as one of six key components in the future national e-infrastructure.
The OST working group is charged with mapping out relevant developments, gaps and challenges in digital curation and preservation over the next 10 years, Dr Read said.
He looked forward to a time when 'research resources and research data will be very much more readily available than is the case at the moment.'
However, he warned, a 'culture change' was needed to achieve this vision.
The issue of making data more openly available was an important one, and the time was right to look at this question more closely, something he hoped the two-day workshop would address.
Professor John Wood, Chief Executive of the CCLRC, followed with the keynote address.
Setting the scene for the two days, Professor Wood spoke of the policy background and in particular the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's report last year which called for the development of institutional repositories to store research outputs and, echoing Dr Read's words, their linking to primary datasets.
Digital media are especially vulnerable to loss, he continued, with fewer that one in ten software packages lasting more than ten years.
These facts made the deliberations of the attendees of particular importance to the development of the national research infrastructure over the coming years, Professor Wood concluded.
Drivers, Data Life Cycle Management and Technical Issues Delegates split into three groups for the afternoon session.
One looked at the drivers policy, technical and cultural behind digital curation and preservation and the barriers to their effective implementation.
Professor Christine Borgman of UCLA spoke of the 'value chain of information' the relationships between information sources, their history, their provenance which was at the heart of scholarly communications.
Greater value, status, and indeed reward, needed to be given to the role of information management the importance of documentation, of adding full metadata to allow greater visibility of research outputs, for example within the scholarly and research community, she said.
Other barriers or disincentives to a fully open scholarly communications environment were, she said, the protectiveness of many scholars who had acquired their data often with great difficulty, and questions, and often misunderstandings, about copyright and intellectual property.
The need to mitigate or overcome these barriers, through appropriate incentives was, she said, the 'highest priority' facing policy makers in this area.
Professor Laurie Hunter of the University of Glasgow looked at the question of digital preservation from the perspective of an organisation's or community's holding of an intangible asset.
It was a characteristic of the post-industrial economy, he said, with its emphasis on services as opposed to production, and its concomitant dependence on digital media, that organisations often hold a wealth of intangible assets the value of which they needed to understand more fully.
We need to see spending decisions as investments, Professor Hunter said, with a clear view of the costs and benefits of activities through the employment of rigorous systems of metrics.
A way forward was to examine more closely the social and organisational benefits of digital curation and preservation, as well as a greater emphasis on education.
Robert Sharpe of Tessella, a commercial organisation specialising in digital preservation, spoke of the 'sticks' and 'carrots' behind organisational efforts at digital preservation and said that too many organisations were responding to the sticks rather than the carrots, whether they be legal or funding requirements.
There were a range of other reasons why preservation procedures should be adopted more rigorously by organisations and a more effective business case needed to be made for these, he concluded.
A second group looked at the question of data life cycle management, exploring the question of where delegates hoped the community would be in ten years' time.
The session began with thought-provoking presentations on the scholarly life cycle by Dr Jeremy Frey of Southampton University, on the data policies of the research councils by Mark Thorley of NERC, and on life cycle costings for digital material by Helen Shenton of the British Library.
In discussion, delegates spoke of the need for an environment in which data resources were interoperable, easily discovered and seamlessly searched, with appropriate appraisal mechanisms for the selection of resources.
There is also a need for a unified and clearly understood policy framework, as there is for trust within the management of the digital life cycle, for better understanding of the economics and costs over time and how these are influenced by and varied by different factors, with technical competence and a continued emphasis on provenance of information sources also being absolutely vital.
The question of education was a recurrent theme.
Where are the digital curators of the future?
asked one delegate, and how do we train them?
While the barriers between libraries, archivist and technical specialists are breaking down slowly, the wider question of training and education needed to be addressed, delegates agreed.
Expectations surrounding the networked world had outrun delivery, argued one delegate, which means that digital curation and preservation are being assumed both by policy makers and end-users, with inappropriate funding and status structures.
The concept of 'academic literacy' was changing, however, with greater technical skills now apparent but greater incentives were needed for researchers to curate and archive themselves.
Once again, appropriate business models were needed, delegates agreed.
With research centres, universities and national data centres all involved in digital curation and preservation, there was a need for them to work together, perhaps at different stages of the digital life cycle and to understand how such models might work in practice.
Funding, however, was perhaps the greatest priority to incentivise researchers, to deliver the appropriate infrastructure and to ensure the long-term sustainability of services.
The third group looked at technical aspects, including curation techniques and the underlying technologies and hardware.
As with the other groups, there was first a review of the current state of play, with Olaf Barring from CERN and Steve Hughes from JPL setting the scene.
The view to the 5and 10-year horizons was addressed by Bruce Wright, UK Met.
Office, and Reagan Moore from the San Diego Super Computer Centre, well known for his SRB (Storage Resource Broker) distributed storage system.
The vision was one of increasing 'virtualisation' as a way to keep the knowledge that we wish to preserve in a way that is independent of the underlying systems.
This will ensure that as those underlying systems change, as they will, the knowledge will remain accessible, and understandable.
Lou Reich, NASA/CSC, who was the editor of the OAIS Reference Model, described several of the significant challenges which remain to be addressed.
The majority of this group's time was spent in detailed discussion of the technical issues, and a report from that session [1] is available on the DCC Web site.
Day Two Speaking on the second day of the workshop, Peter Tindemans, Chair of the European Union's Task Force on Permanent Access, began by giving some of the background to the Task Force's work, and in particular the EU conference in November 2004 in The Hague at which participants agreed the need to create a European infrastructure for the long-term preservation and access (LTPA) to the records of science.
The Task Force was subsequently set up with an LTPA remit and with a focus on research and the testing and prototyping of new technologies.
Peter Tindemans spoke of the need to devise new approaches to the development of IT solutions from the perspective of the durability of information, and of the need for life cycle costings, value chain analyses and other economic models to support sustainable long-term preservation.
There are two main strands, he said, driving this agenda: cultural heritage and the needs of the scientific community in the digital age.
Addressing the first strand, he said there was a need to get stakeholders involved in issues of digital heritage at 'board level' by emphasising the economic and cultural importance of LTPA for their own strategic development.
Political attention, through organisations such as the EU and UNESCO, was also supporting this particular driver.
As for the scientific community, he said, their need was greatest.
There was a need for more focused action by a critical mass of stakeholders to create an infrastructure to support LTPA as well as the need for a consensus among communities and organisations around what was required to place these issues within the 'real life' structure of organisations.
Among the conditions which Peter outlined were: frameworks for metadata, persistent identifiers and registries; a common framework of principles and guidelines for the management of access and rights; financial mechanisms for developing and testing tools and techniques, and common certification and accreditation mechanisms.
There was, however, Peter Tindemans concluded, a consensus of sorts emerging which could be built upon, around standards, and through national and EU-funded projects, as well as public-private agreements such as those between libraries and publishers.
Finally, calling on stakeholders to continue their current efforts and their investments in this area, he said that 1 million Euros were needed to establish the European Alliance for Permanent Access to the Record of Science, an action recommended by the Task Force to meet the challenge of LTPA.
Neil Beagrie, BL/JISC Partnership Manager, gave the concluding address and summed up the background and aims of the workshop as well as the next steps that need to be taken.
Neil began by giving the background to the work of the Preservation and Curation Working Group of which he is chair.
The UK Government's 'Science and Innovation Investment Framework: 2004 2014' identifies systematic preservation of digital information as an important component of the information infrastructure.
The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) established 6 sub-groups to take forward the published framework, one of them being the Preservation and Curation Working Group.
A report from the working group will be delivered to the DTI by the end of March 2006.
The Warwick workshop would be an important input into this process, he said.
The second area of discussion in the workshop concerned developments in the European Union.
Summarising potential future initiatives including proposals for the Framework 7 programme, final projects emerging from Framework 6, and the consultation on the i2010 digital libraries initiative, Neil reported that a number of working groups, including ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG), and the KB (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) Task Force on Permanent Access to the Record of Science, were now working on shaping and influencing the EU agenda for future research and infrastructure.
Many of these working groups would be reporting at the EU Research Infrastructures conference in Nottingham in December 2005, including the Task Force which would report on plans for a European Alliance for Permanent Access to the Record of Science.
Conclusion Neil concluded by outlining the recommendations of the previous Warwick workshop held in 1999 and reviewing the progress that had been made in implementing them over the subsequent five years.
Many had been addressed with substantial success, such as the need for greater awareness of the issue of preservation and the need for cross-sectoral communication.
He cited the work of the Digital Preservation Coalition in achieving these important goals.
Guidelines and support materials too had been developed and continued to be developed and were of value to the community, while a growing network of preservation centres was, he said, becoming established.
However, areas where he felt most work was still needed were in the development of certification criteria, checklists to determine complexity and cost, and new research, particularly into emulation and dynamic data.
In discussion all were agreed that much had been done in the last five years and that important policy activity was emerging both in the UK and in Europe.
However there was still a great deal to be done and a need to continue to step up activity as part of the UK research agenda for the next decade.
References Digital Curation and Preservation: Defining the research agenda for the next decade, Warwick Workshop 7/8 November 2005 Curation Services and Technologies Session Report http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/warwick_2005/Warwick_Workshop_report.pdf Author Details Philip Pothen JISC Executive King's College London Strand Bridge House 138 142 The Strand London WC2R 1HH Email: p.pothen@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Digital Curation and Preservation: Defining the Research Agenda for the Next Decade" Author: Philip Pothen Publication Date: 08-February-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 46 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/warwick-2005-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Information Culture Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Information Culture Buzz wiki digitisation blog aggregation privacy Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Hannabuss analyses a very useful addition to the realm of information, knowledge and library studies.
This is an impressive and very useful book.
It is impressive in drawing on a wide range of relevant ideas (on history, society, culture, technology) to tease out the ways in which we can validly speak about the cultural aspects of digital information.
It is very useful because it will almost instantly join lists of recommended reading wherever information, knowledge and library studies are formally taught (it clearly derives from lectures but is all the clearer for that in this case, with none of the pedestrianism and derivativeness associated with that origin).
Luke Tredinnick is course leader for the MSc in digital information management at London Metropolitan University and this book is intended to be a companion to his earlier Digital Information Contexts [1].
The author is right to open up the wider landscape of culture and society, otherwise we have only a vague sense of context.
The first of two parts, then, discusses culture and technology, positioning insights from well-known voices like Arnold and Hoggart in the historical side of this, moving on to technological determinism and cyberspace, hinting at dislocations between representation and reality (more perhaps expected there on simulacra, but that has been done to death and anyway it jumps in later), and explaining the importance of narrative in meaning-making in organisations, among individuals, and in the digital age.
Tredinnick's point that a constructivistic approach to the ways in which digital technology has been developed and used is convincing and leads neatly to the second part of the book which deals with digital information culture itself.
This is a real elephant's trap of a subject and many books have dragged their weary way through digital information, making pretentious and unconvincing cross-references on the way.
Tredinnick does a very creditable job with it, organising his thoughts under themes like textuality and knowledge, power and identity.
The most impressive chapter by a long stretch is his discussion of authenticity, which in a very real sense lies at the centre of the book.
He picks up this sentiment at the very end, in an epilogue on culture and tradition, when he says that we situate ourselves on new and changing cultural terrains, that cultural activity has always been a dialogue with tradition and new cultural forms, and that we're in territory where any pronouncement has only the credibility it comes with.
Authenticity lies at the heart of things – not only because digital culture appears to reconfigure (and some say undermine) traditional understandings and arrangements for authority and ownership (many of these underpinned in their turn by intellectual property rights), but also because digital culture throws up a set of problems that we cannot evade.
It enables us to preserve documents from the past but we don't know how permanent digital storage is; at the same time, digital formats enable perfect reproductions, disseminate knowledge simultaneously to thousands of users, and allow for immersion and granularity and interactivity on a scale never known before.
Tredinnick debates these issues without being dogmatic.
In a well-informed way he raises one issue after another in a logical way, easy to follow for someone new to the subject, but never condescending.
There are times when his frame of reference gets more complex – as when he ponders the historiographic implications of digitisation (in a late chapter on memory) and, here in the authenticity chapter, where he (very cleverly) merges two traditions (aesthetic and the technology of cultural production) to examine whether digital technology has led to a loss of authenticity at the price of a gain in access and investigability.
In the knowledge chapter he explores the related issue of mediation, of the extent to which publishers/aggregators and the like do and can and should shape media consumption.
Much if not most of it seems driven by highly participative and collaborative consumers keen to use MySpace and wikis, mash-ups and blogs.
A principle underlying this in its turn is the paradigm shift from use value to exchange value, and this characterises both the knowledge economy and the creative industries : it is as relevant to knowledge and information as to cultural artefacts and artistic practice.
With culture in mind, Tredinnick handles the strictly cultural rather well : it can take over and it can get marginalised, and he disciplines himself to apply the cultural approach (which is partly culture in the art and literature sense and partly anthropological and sociological, as in organisational culture or demographics), making sure he targets the wider intellectual ideas on topics that genuinely relate to digital matters.
He is alert, too, to the ways in which we speak not just of behaviours (eg more people using wikis, more people believing that objective truth is unlikely, more people worried about privacy in a digital age) but also of beliefs and values – a cultural analysis should highlight values and meanings and Tredinnick does this.
Some way of joining up all the dots on this particular strand would have been good, but an intelligent reader – and one is needed for a book like this, snobbery aside – will do that for him/herself.
A topical and aptly-chosen bibliography ends the book.
Chandos have published one of their best recent books with this one.
It comes in a hardback [2] as well as a paperback format – the paperback was received for review – and for library use I would recommend the hardback : my Chandos books tend to fall apart rather too quickly.
Certainly a winner here and, unusually for such a book, one that admirably stays this side of cliché and pomposity.
References Luke Tredinnick, Digital Information Contexts, Chandos Publishing (Oxford), October 2006, 200pp, ISBN-13: 9781843341697.
Other Formats: Paperback.
Luke Tredinnick, Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age, Hardback: ISBN 978-1-84334-170-3, £57.00.
Author Details Stuart Hannabuss Gray's School of Art Aberdeen Email: ext.hannabuss@rgu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age" Author: Stuart Hannabuss Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/hannabuss-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Visualizing Data Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Visualizing Data Buzz data software java javascript html database xml graphics visualisation flash photoshop svg mysql json licence research Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff considers a new book on data visualisation and hopes one day to implement some of the interesting ideas presented in this work.
I'll be honest I am no expert in data visualisation.
I had not heard of Edward Tufte [1] before looking at this book and while I thought I had an idea about the topic, the book suggested to me I did not.
Perhaps this makes me unable to judge the value of its content; but I prefer to think this means I can come at the work as a member of the target audience: "...the book is for web designers who want to build more complex visualizations than their tools will allow.
It's also for software engineers who want to become adept at writing software that represents data...
Fundamentally this book is for people who have a data set, a curiosity to explore it, and an idea of what they want to communicate about it."
[2] As a researcher I certainly have the curiosity to explore data and regularly have the need to communicate something about it.
It is with this in mind that I began reviewing Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment.
The book certainly hits the ground running, with Chapter One outlining a seven-step programme for data visualisation: Acquire, Parse, Filter, Mine, Represent, Refine, Interact.
These steps are illustrated with a worked example and they are both useful and understandable by someone unfamiliar with the "process of visualisation".
Perhaps it helps that I'm a software developer and "The Process" is reminiscent of iterative software development however.
What is good is the way the author focuses on the solid foundations of a data visualisation before jumping in with things like "look at this snazzy reflection effect".
That is to say, this book is clearly concerned with getting the right data, in the right format, before considering the graphics.
I tend to approve of such ground-up approaches.
Be clear though, if you are looking for a book about whizzy graphics and pretty pictures, this is not the book you want.
Chapter Two introduces the Processing software [3] used throughout the rest of the book and in many ways Processing (not visualising data) is the star of this work – to the extent that one Amazon reviewer suggests reversing the Title and the Sub-title.
I tend to agree.
The Processing software describes itself as: "...an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.
It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.
It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool.
Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.
"[4] which makes it sound like a competitor to the likes of Flash, though Processing's FAQ would say otherwise.
I'm not familiar with Flash so cannot compare, but I am impressed by Processing.
Essentially Processing provides a self-contained development environment (the PDE) and Java-like programming language to create, as it states, images, animation and interactions.
It is clearly suited to data visualisation problems and has enough power to address each of the steps outlined in Chapter One from reading and parsing (Acquire) data files to handling mouse clicks on the visualisation itself (Interaction).
Perhaps one of the nicest features is the ability to export any work as a Java application and/or applet so it can be shared.
If Processing is the focus of the book, then you might now be discounting Data Visualisation in the same way you might a book on Photoshop, as being about using an expensive software package.
However, Processing is released under the GNU Public License [5], ensuring that Processing itself remains firmly open source, while any products created with it can be licensed as the user wishes (including commercial use).
Worried now it is Open Source?
Processing it seems has an active community around it and has been developed and used for seven years, which is reassuring for an Open Source software project.
Back to the book: Having very briefly familiarised the reader with Processing, the next six chapters present worked examples addressing different data types: Mapping (Chapter 3), Time Series (Chapter 4), Connections and Correlations (Chapter 5), Scatterplot Maps (Chapter 6), Trees, Hierarchies and Recursion (Chapter 7) and Networks and Graphs (Chapter 8).
Each of these chapters addresses specific problems that arise from the type of data, for example, using recursion to traverse a directory tree in Chapter 6, or choosing appropriate axis, ranges and point-styles in Chapter 4.
Further, each chapter also outlines broader data visualisation principles.
For example, Chapter 5, an exploration of the correlation between baseball team pay and team standing, illustrates a couple of methods to obtain data from the Web, including manual methods like using a spreadsheet program to obtain data from tables (useful for data that doesn't change very often).
Such techniques are useful for non-programmers who might not be capable of scripting the data acquisition step as well as illustrating the author's pragmatic bent – why script when a manual process will suffice?
The same chapter also touches on typography.
In Chapter 3 we are presented with useful functions for handling mouse input.
A nice touch is the way each heading within the chapters is linked back to the seven stages of data visualisation outlined in the first chapter by simply including the name of the stages in the headings.
The two penultimate chapters (Acquiring Data and Parsing Data, Chapters 9 and 10 respectively), to use the author's words, are "in cookbook-style" and as you might guess, designed to give Processing users the ability to discover and organise datasets from the Web as well as those created and/or stored locally.
Chapter 9 looks at reading large data files, integrating Processing with MySQL [6] databases, and, of course, collecting data from the Web.
Chapter 10 is all about parsing and briefly discusses the different formats data might arrive in and how they might be processed for use in the visualisation.
The chapter touches on screen scraping (including handily embedding Tidy into the Processing program), parsing text, HTML, XML (including SVG [7]), JSON [8], etc.
before moving on to more specialised formats like DXF (AutoCAD)[9], PDF and Shapefile [10].
It then delves into the darkness of binary formats before getting dirty pulling apart Web pages by packet sniffing to find out where the Web pages get their data from.
Discussion in these chapters is necessarily brief, but certainly provides the reader with plenty of ideas.
The book concludes with its most specialised chapter, "Integrating Processing with Java", which highlights the difference between Processing and the Java programming language (the book describes Processing as a "dialect" of Java) and how Processing might be used in a broader programming application.
While only a few of the book's readers will need this chapter, it is a welcome addition none the less, extending the power and range of the Processing environment.
It is important to note that this book ramps up the requirement for technical ability and understanding quite quickly.
The book itself admits that without a prior background in programming Chapters Five onwards will "quickly become more difficult".
That said, it seems the author makes some attempts to accommodate varying degrees of programming knowledge throughout the text.
However, these attempts sometimes lead to either frustration or confusion.
Frustration because there might be an explanation of a programming concept that seems obvious to a programmer (Objects for example), and confusion because the explanation does not seem detailed enough for the beginner.
The same can be said about the design and visualisation aspects of the text which sometimes left me, a beginner in the field, confused.
I wondered if the same explanations would perhaps seem obvious to a designer.
It's a difficult ground for an author, but I think deciding firmly on a level and audience for the text would help clarify the writing, if limit the readership.
To conclude, Visualising Data is a useful publication.
Yes, it can be quite dry at times, but good data is needed for good visualisation and good data is a dry subject.
Yes, it can be quite wordy at times, though that may be my prejudice against wordy text books.
Yes, it sometimes tries to walk a middle ground of technical experience, which will leave beginners bemused and old lags bored, but, I suspect, outside computer science and design are large numbers of people who really are in this middle ground.
Finally, do not be misled by the title.
Visualising Data focuses mainly on Processing and how to use it to visualise data.
In this it is successful, and some general principles can be picked up along the way.
But I imagine there are better books (indeed a couple are listed in the work's bibliography) that explore data visualisation in general.
So if you want an introduction to the subject, you would probably be best starting elsewhere, before returning to this book for a neat way to express your creative ideas.
References The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ Visualizing Data, Ben Fry, O'Reilly 2008, Preface, 2.1 Processing 1.0 (Beta) http://www.processing.org/ Ibid.
GNU General Public License http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html MySQL http://www.mysql.com/ Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/ JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) http://www.json.org/ AutoCAD 2000 DXF Reference http://www.autodesk.com/techpubs/autocad/acad2000/dxf/ ESRI Shapefile Technical Description http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdf Author Details Peter Cliff Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.d.cliff/ Return to top Article Title: "Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment" Author: Peter Cliff Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/cliff-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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e-Books for the Future: Here but Hiding?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines e-Books for the Future: Here but Hiding?
Buzz data mobile software wiki database wireless rss portal archives metadata thesaurus browser blog sql repositories copyright cataloguing hypertext multimedia aggregation syndication e-learning flash ejournal ebook mp3 vle widget dspace scorm podcast itunes exif youtube licence rae interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley outlines some developments in e-book technologies and links them to existing ways of presenting textbook information.
Although they were not called e-books at the time, Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg started digitising existing print on paper editions for public access in the 1970s.
Since then, the term e-book has come to have a variety of meanings and related concepts.
Here I want to explore the direction associated with my day job as a researcher and teacher within the UK Higher Education system.
My viewpoint may thus be somewhat idiosyncratic compared to Ariadne’s normal clientele but I am particularly interested in the information technologist’s role as an intermediary between academic author and student reader.
Some of the following is conjecture although it is based on what technology, both hard and software we already have.
It does not need to look too far in the future.
I believe that this is important as it could help guide the provision of computer and library facilities for educational institutions.
We have relatively simple, but substantial, edifices for print on paper; what provision should be made over the next five years?
In particular, what should the provision be for students over those years?
In turn, this has implications for what academic authors and publishers should, or might, be doing, not just to take advantage of the technology for its own sake, but to use technology to produce a better ‘educational product’.
Hardware The term ‘e-book’ includes the hardware, a suitable device to read electronic media, perhaps better called ‘e-book readers’.
Reviews, including Penny Garrod’s 2003 article [1], mention various manufacturers but with advancing technology this is now out of date.
For example, E-ink (electrophoretic) technology with iRex (Philips) iLiad ER 0100 and Sony Libre units have emerged.
Although these are relatively expensive, prices will undoubtedly fall.
These units are less weighty and bulky than many a textbook so the ‘can’t read them on the train’ factor is less significant.
Indeed, with the price of many academic books at about £25, purchasing the hardware might be a good investment, albeit for a tutor rather than a student.
Their screens are small, about A5, so while fine for a paperback novel, a larger format would not be easy to read.
As yet, they have only 16-level greyscale rather than colour.
There is evidence that students find it easier to adjust to reading on the screen than ‘maturer’ readers.
This reluctance to read (as opposed to view) on screen may stem from using small screens with poor contrast.
Yet technology is always working in our favour.
I am currently writing this on my laptop with 15” screen but plugged into a 19” TFT monitor.
On this a portrait page of A4 can be seen natural size and it is not difficult to read.
There is also screen space to spare for other tools.
Again, prices are continually falling, resolution and contrast control are improving so on-screen reading will be made much easier.
Unfortunately, TFT screens are still power-hungry and somewhat unsociable on trains.
Large, roll-up screens are still, ‘along real soon now’.
Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPC ) with wireless connectivity and Bluetooth are now available.
Samsung’s new UMPC, the Q1, has very good battery life and a touch screen with an excellent handwriting recognition package but doesn’t have e-ink capability.
With moves towards off-line, Web-based applications (such a Google’s ‘Writely’ word processor and spreadsheet) there is no need for a CD drive.
Flash memory will take over from hard disk drives for tablet or UMPC machines.
Like screens, battery life and power requirements are all benefiting from advances in technology, so really usable machines at reasonable prices are not far off.
The hardware is important as it provides what readers may need to exploit with the software available and link this to specific requirements.
We should include audio here as this needs to be taken along with visual and the integration of the two is already taking place with podcasts and vodcasts.
A teaching conjecture: an ‘e-book reader’ with audio so that a student can follow a reading of Beowulf, see the Old English and a modern translation on-screen, and highlight and make notes on either.
Perhaps this is already possible.
Books, Magazines and Scholarly Monographs We have traditional print-on-paper (p-o-p; ‘flimsy-ware’?)
taking up shelf space the world over.
Buying a book or magazine in hard copy is an everyday experience as is, for many, downloading music or audio as an MP3 file.
Evidence suggests that students visit libraries in person less and less but retrieve their information electronically from wherever they happen to be with an Internet connection.
Why buy a textbook if you can get the information on the Web?
Whether this is the ‘right’ information is a moot point.
Downloading books has been possible for some time and the Baen technology and pricing model is almost a standard.
Magazines can now be bought in Zinio format instead of the hard copy for a price which is the equivalent of the print version.
Lightweight, colour e-book readers will be a viable way of reading and storage and therefore referencing.
Further, scribbling on e-text will not be a mortal sin.
Google Books now offers the Google Library Project [2]: ‘The Library Project’s aim is simple: make it easier for people to find relevant books specifically books they wouldn’t find any other way such as those that are out of print while carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights.
Our ultimate goal is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalogue of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers.
Wikipedia has also developed a resource under ‘Wikisource.org’.
Such initiatives will be valuable to academic researchers, students and anybody investigating a topic for interest.
However, my experience suggests that a very small percentage of academics are aware of these possibilities now, let alone realise their potential.
Full text searching via suitable search engines will become increasingly sophisticated with increased coverage.
Yet all these aspects, however useful, are not exactly novel in as far as they do not present ‘new’ modes of learning and teaching.
All of these ‘flimsyware’ forms are related to what one might call formal statements, whether texts of novels, parliamentary debates, newspapers or a motorcycle magazine.
Once published, it is available.
However, in one sense they are then inviolable.
Mistakes occur, corrections need to be made and readers offer criticism, comments and additional information.
True letters to the editors of newspapers and online and blog comments will work with opinions rapidly but there is a transience associated with such comments that should not be the case with academic textbooks or monographs etc.
Let me now refer to some ideas and concepts that relate to textbooks and quality academic publishing.
Reusable Educational Objects (REOs) I recently gave a talk to Queens University of Belfast (QUB) staff as part of a workshop on ‘e-books’.
A few minutes into my PowerPoint illustrated talk, I realised that the PowerPoint presentation itself was, in effect, an e-book.
It could be viewed and listened to, synchronously and asynchronously after storage and retrieved from anywhere.
Moreover, as an entirety it could be considered as a ‘learning object’ or a single slide could be used and reused.
Reusable educational objects (REO) or reusable learning objects (I prefer the wider term) are becoming an area of interest in education, especially in Higher Education.
This stems from the ideas of reusability from ‘mass’ e-learning in the USA and from there developed the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) as well as some resources such as MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) [3].
This tends to have full resources such as a slide set or a Web page.
Lecturers should try this as there may well be all sorts of useful material available within the archive, often free.
However, the real use of REOs is yet to come.
Taking two examples of resources (often called ‘assets’) that might be used in a lecture: a digital image of a landform and a PowerPoint slide illustrating an idea.
Both are digital, both useful to me in one lecture and for others or in another form, e.g.
backup for a lab practical.
They are in appropriate files on my computer and so can be used, alone or in conjunction with other objects as needed.
Importantly, they have metadata associated with them.
Images from digital cameras already have Exif (Exchangeable image file format) metadata and, by using a tool such as ‘Informator’, this can be inspected and other data added.
Assets can thus be shared with colleagues, although copyright problems may arise and I may wish to charge commercial concerns.
Two aspects just mentioned come into play in an example which has relevance to e-books.
Recently, I walked into our cartographers office.
They prepare maps, diagrams etc for teaching and research and are paid for by my institution.
An image scanned from a textbook was being re-drawn to make it more readable for a PowerPoint presentation.
Aside from the copyright issue, why was this necessary when I have my own version already available?
My digital asset could have gone to my colleague with no extra expense of time or money and still could have been elaborated (’re-purposed’ is a commonly used word here) as required for other educational tasks.
Unfortunately, neither my cartographer nor tutor colleagues were aware of reusing digital assets.
Digital Asset Repositories and Management Systems Many HE institutions are establishing digital repositories and asset managers, sometimes referred to as a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system.
These do what they say, being sophisticated databases of images, digitised texts etc.
Protocols are necessary for this management as well as metadata for each asset.
DAM systems are complex as they require SQL for interrogation but tools for cataloguing, metadata addition as well as searching and collation and workflow tools.
They may also incorporate copyright handling and commercial management.
A commonly used open source system is ‘Dspace’, a Hewlett-Packard and MIT collaboration.
This is now frequently used by the Open Source movement for academic archiving and requesting research papers [4].
Commercially, Intrallect’s ‘intraLibrary’ is intended to bring together various assets, including the BBC’s ‘Jam’ initiative [5].
Although ‘Jam’ is intended for fiveto sixteen-year olds, such children will be able to, ‘explore, learn, create’ interactively and thus be fully aware of the capability of repositories when they reach FE and HE.
Intrallect has also been awarded the contract to work on JISC ’s JORUM initiative [6].
JORUM is a project designed to operate as an academic teaching repository for UK-based institutions [7].
It thus brings together the concepts of REOs and digital repositories which can be used by UK academics.
Having provided, ultimately, a variety of assets in repositories how might academics (and students) use them?
Before answering this, it is worthwhile mentioning another new concept which, in simple forms, is already here: Personal Learning Environments.
Personal Learning Environments If studying on-screen is to become commonplace, then a variety of software tools need to be made available.
If students cannot, or will not, visit libraries [8] then they need tools to help make electronic visits easier.
This needs to be more than a set of ‘Office’ facilities, a browser and Google.
I detect a move from Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) for certain types of teaching towards Personal Learning Environments (PLEs).
There still needs to be repositories, not least where module source material will be held.
But what about the student, with mobile, laptop computing WiFi facilities available?
What does the student require to work in a personal learning space wherever that might be; college locations, flat, hospital, etc?
A move towards personal learning environments is welcome.
Indeed, some forms are already available, one is based on the ‘Boddington’ VLE [9].
The ‘widgets’ on my Mac dashboard include: dictionary/thesaurus, BBC Radio/TV schedule, unit convertor, scientific calculator, iTunes connector and colour wheel/Hex coder.
All these, and more, would help personal study; anything that might be useful to ease the task in hand.
This might be, for example, a critique of a section of an e-book.
To this end another set of tools might be needed: search engine aggregators, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from agencies such as the BBC, mind and concept mapping tools, either as free, share or commercial ware.
The technology is keeping pace with student needs.
However, many tutors will not be guiding students in this direction because they themselves are not aware of them.
Notably, innovation is student-directed and information scientists and librarians are the best fitted to provide this knowledge of tools as much as where to get the information.
Wikipedia and ‘Portal Wikis’ Despite the criticism levelled at Wikipedia there have been comparisons showing that it works well [10].
I admit to using it considerably at times.
Although in my subject area it is rather under-developed, I find it good for acronym expansion and to get a feel for a topic.
If you consider this article has been under-referenced and that you are unaware of some of the terms used (e.g.
SCORM, Zinio, Baen) then type them into Wikipedia on your personal learning environment.
I find it works well and gives me both the information I need as well as (mostly) useful hyperlinks.
If it is not there, or not what you would expect (e.g.
try typing ‘PLE’), then a knowledgeable person can always make this addition to the Wikipedia database.
This is much more reputable, at least in my experience, than it sounds.
Students use it a great deal, staff far less so even if they have heard of it.
It is but one step to create a portal wiki, ie subject-related.
Usually, this is a form of discussion centre or way of presenting personal information.
However Scholarpedia.org [11] has recently shown a restricted editing form of encyclopedia (Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience; Dynamical Systems and Computational Intelligence).
These have curators and quality control of articles by peer review.
A recent experimental venture, forking from Wikipedia is ‘Citizendium’ (Citizendium.
org or use Wikipedia).
This project will use ‘experts’ as subject specialists to check publicly-provided information.
The qualifications of the experts will be openly stated.
For teaching, I am currently producing a geomorphology wiki for my Level 2 module in ‘Landscapes and landforms’.
This is extended with hyperlinks to provide a resource base for the module and students help in this construction.
One important aspect is that it can be used non-serially.
If a reader is unsure about a term or phrase used then it is easy to bypass the current reading and concentrate on the term not understood.
This can be done easily and makes wikis an important learning tool.
Publishers and Textbooks When preparing my talk on e-books for Queens I was also finishing a review of a textbook.
This was a conventional print offering from a well-known publisher; very good academically and student-orientated.
However, the material presented required moving between sections and chapters.
This would be mitigated by hypertext.
My major criticism was that there was nothing in colour.
This could have been solved with more expensive printing or, preferably, by an e-version.
The authors said that they laboured long over ‘Illustrator’ to produce the diagrams.
I feel their labour of love had been let down by the publishers.
Even then, the price is £25 a driver to widen the educational, let alone the digital, divide.
I then compared this to a textbook (in colour) on a related subject; still not an e-text but having a support Web site with ready-made PowerPoints!
This of course is helpful and a start towards REOs, either as individual slides or as a ready-made lecture for the hard-pressed new academic with RAE potential to fulfil.
Yet the quality of images in the PowerPoint slides was poor.
In some cases illegible text and generally a lack of contrast that would make students even in the middle rows strain their eyes and give up.
The price of this book, aimed at first year undergraduates, is over £30.
The Nature of Future Textbooks Can we now speculate about what future e-textbooks might look like?
The simplest will be monograph-like with chapters, fully searchable (and no need for an index) with any diagrams etc having their own metadata and, if necessary, copyright information.
Copyright here would include Creative Commons licence agreements.
This area continues to be contentious, not least with respect to the question of who holds copyright and IP rights in UK Higher Education institutions (HEIs).
Moreover, it also brings into focus the costs of producing diagrams or maps for books.
If my institution pays the salary for the cartographers, why do authors pass diagrams to commercial publishers apparently free of charge?
(We need not discuss further the remainder of the publishing cycle where an institution has to re-purchase books for its library from the publisher.)
The simplest arrangement is for the institution itself to publish the book and manage this through its DAM system.
PDFs can be distributed electronically for the purchaser to bind or make available on an e-book reader.
If required, limited paper print runs could be commissioned through a local bindery.
Inter-HEI agreements could keep costs low between libraries but several marketing models can be envisaged.
Such in-house publication is not new, and many university presses presumably started in this way, but procedures based on open-source models could keep prices down.
This would apply both for low print runs of specialised books as much as electronic versions.
The same process is applicable to e-journals and a good example is the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning [12].
Many textbooks, usually in science or engineering, are divided into sections and sub-sections to aid finding material.
Sections of digital text may be a more useful way of referencing than a topic/page index.
This applies to writing as well as reading and studying.
Importantly, hypertext linking of these sections from a contents page is easy but the great advantage is to link sections, or words in sections, by hypertext.
Moreover, in electronic editions it becomes easy to add new material, correct errors and even to tell subscribers that such changes have been made.
The name ‘dynabook’ comes to mind; essentially Alan Kay’s view of a laptop computer, although it was the capabilities in software that he was concerned with rather than the hardware.
On looking up ‘Dynabook’ in Wikipedia I noticed the following entry: ‘Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer gives an account of a book constructed with nanotechnology that speaks to its owner with lessons that are age-specific.‘ Now that really would be something.
Textbooks need to be written at an ‘appropriate’ level.
Too much detail or complexity or the introduction of higher-level material may well be beyond the level of the student.
This makes it difficult for the writer as much as a student.
Students however would have to go to another textbook to add further to their knowledge and understanding.
Yet this requirement could easily be achieved given the adaptability of even present-day software technology.
Perhaps there are no surprises for guessing that I am advocating a wiki-like structure.
Wiki-books The writing of such an e-textbook could be done individually or shared easily with other authors and with restrictions on who could make changes, unlike Wikipedia as normally seen.
Adding more complex material could be added as a box in the text although this may also be used to show examples or explanations of related material.
For example, in a plant morphology book there could be a box about photosynthesis.
However, some students might want an explanation or refresher about electron transfer.
This could be provided within that ‘wiki-book’ or even to a quite different wiki-book if that were available.
The whole structure could be formulated with such additions included as required.
Readability, even on a small e-book reader, might be enhanced.
But textbooks are not usually written in this way.
Hypertext provides an entirely suitable way of providing this material.
The material itself might be left as Open Source with illustrations (as educational objects) being Creative Commons, probably supplied via a DAM system or, more likely, a set of repositories at several institutions.
With the present system, material used from JORUM would necessitate restriction to the UK.
Will it work?
My learning wiki, mentioned above, currently takes a traditional dictionary entry approach to terms in my subject area.
To this I am about to add sections from a short textbook I wrote many years ago and to which I now want to add new text, illustrations and references.
Students have the ability to ask questions on the wiki (rather than add material) so I should be able to see what needs addition or clarification as the process of writing and use unfolds.
Of course, I am not the first.
From the ‘Dynabook’ Wikipedia entry I then went to the entry for ‘Neal Stephenson’ and found the following: ‘With the 2003 publication of Quicksilver, Stephenson debuted The Metaweb, a wiki (using the same software as Wikipedia) annotating the ideas and historical period explored in the novel’.
Needless to say, Wikipedia itself has arrived at the same conclusion via its ‘Wikimedia Free Textbook’ and Wikimedia-textbooks’ projects to the present ‘Wikibooks [13].
It will be interesting to see how these ideas about e-textbooks develop.
They do exploit the advantages of hypertext, immediacy of adding material and assets, and stem from the Open Source movement.
Conclusion Looking to the future can be dangerous, via the egg-on-face route, especially with technology.
However, the developments suggested here are with us now and e-texts could easily be integrated with comprehensive, although expensive, learning tools such as Tegrity’s ‘Campus’ [14].
This is an institutionally based system linking with a VLE.
However, I suspect simple personal learning environments (PLEs) will become popular as Web-based applications (spreadsheets, word processors and bibliographic tools) develop for use on Wi-Fi-connected e-book readers.
Digital, reusable assets will also become increasingly common.
Their integration into learning environments, together with some form of e-book (or wikibook), offers a better student experience than ‘chalk, talk and a textbook’.
Perhaps this integration can be best achieved by information professionals linking skills with academic authors and educational technologists; but I fear that copyright lawyers might not be too far away.
Experience does show that inexpensive, easy-to-use tools are taken on with alacrity by the public at large, and that people are prepared to share resources (e.g.
Flikr, YouTube).
Simplicity of operation may take off educationally.
Wilson has described the EBONI Project [15] and it will be interesting to see how some of the techniques she described can be used for the evaluation of wikibooks in their various guises.
References Garrod, P. Ebooks in UK libraries: Where are we now?
October 2003, Ariadne, Issue 37 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/garrod/ Google Library Project http://books.google.com/googleprint/library.html Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching http://www.merlot.org/ Dspace http://wiki.dspace.org/RequestCopy BBC curriculum gets kids to jam, 27 January 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4655292.stm Kraan, W. Intrallect wins JORUM UK national repository contract, September 2004 http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20040905163446 JORUM http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ Hyatt, S and Connaway, L.S.
Utilizing E-books to Enhance Digital Library Offerings, October 2002, Ariadne, Issue 33 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/netlibrary/ CETIS, Centre for educational technology interoperability standards http://www.cetis.ac.uk/ Giles, J.
Special Report: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, Nature 438, 15 December 2005, 900-901 Scholarpedia http://www.scholarpedia.org/ The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/ Wikibooks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibook Tegrity ‘Campus’ http://www.tegrity.com/tegrity_campus.php Wilson, R. E-books for students: EBONI, March 2001, Ariadne, Issue 27 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/e-books/ Author Details W. Brian Whalley Professor of Geomorphology School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology Queens University of Belfast Belfast BT7 1NN Email: b.whalley@qub.ac.uk Web site: http://geognet.qub.ac.uk/people/staff/whalley Return to top Article Title: “e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?” Author: Brian Whalley Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/whalley/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility With Firefox Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility With Firefox Buzz data java javascript html css firefox accessibility browser jpg wcag Citation BibTex RIS Patrick Lauke outlines how Mozilla Firefox can be used in conjunction with the Web Developer Toolbar to carry out a preliminary accessibility review.
In a previous issue of Ariadne [1], I gave a brief overview of Mozilla Firefox [2] and introduced a few of its most useful extensions.
In this article, we will use one of these extensions, Chris Pederick's Web Developer toolbar [3], to aid us in a preliminary assessment of a web site's accessibility.
Although awareness of web accessibility has steadily increased in recent years, many web developers are still uncertain about how to evaluate their sites.
The relative complexity of documents such as the W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 [4] and the wealth of sometimes contradictory advice found on sites dedicated to the subject can leave developers wondering about the practical aspects of testing.
Often developers lack time or training and simply rely on one of the many automated testing tools such as WebXACT [5], Cynthia [6] or Wave [7].
But even those mechanical checks need to be supplemented (and, to avoid false positives, counter-checked) by manual checks.
Based on some of the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints, this article aims to provide a quick outline of how Mozilla Firefox and the Web Developer toolbar can help with these manual checks.
Checkpoint 1.1: Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element Users of screen readers and text browsers (as well as those users who have disabled images for faster browsing over slow connections ... and not forgetting search engines) can't see images included in a web page.
Web authors need therefore to provide a textual alternative for the browser to use in these situations.
First, we must ensure that there are no images which are missing an ALTernate altogether: Images > Outline Images Without Alt Attribute Figure 1: Images menu with "Outline Images Without Alt Attribute" highlighted.
If images are used purely for visual embellishment or as a spacer to influence the layout, they should be marked up with an empty ALT attribute (also referred to as a "null ALT"), e.g.
<img src="sample.jpg" alt="" /> It would be better to relegate these visual stylings purely to Cascading Style Sheets (giving adequate margins and paddings rather than spacers/shims and assigning the images as a non-repeating background to the relevant markup element), but if your pages still use images for these purposes they can be identified via: Images > Outline Images With Empty Alt Attribute Figure 2: Images menu with "Outline Images With Empty Alt Attribute" highlighted.
Lastly, we replace images with their ALTernate equivalent: Images > Replace Images With Alt Attributes Figure 3: Images menu with "Replace Images With Alt Attributes" highlighted, and an example before/after shot of the effect.
Ensure that all relevant images have an adequate and equivalent text alternative.
This should be succinct, accurately represent any text present in the image and/or convey the purpose of the image.
Checkpoint 3.2: Create documents that validate to published formal grammars Web pages which use proprietary markup (special tags or style rules that only work in a particular browser such as Internet Explorer) or contain syntax errors (e.g.
wrongly nested or unclosed elements) can cause problems with cross-browser compatibility: proprietary features may not be supported, and while one browser's error-handling routines may be quite lenient and compensate for messy syntax, other browsers may fail to render a page with broken markup.
The Web Developer extension provides a quick way to submit the current page (be it a "live" page already available online, or a document being developed locally) and its related style sheets to the W3C's HTML [8] and CSS validators [9] via the Tools menu: Tools > Validate CSS, Tools > Validate HTML, Tools > Validate Local CSS, Tools > Validate Local HTML.
Figure 4: Tools menu with the most relevant CSS and HTML validation commands highlighted.
Checkpoint 3.3: Use style sheets to control layout and presentation Pages which use HTML markup to achieve a certain visual presentation (e.g.
FONT elements, TABLEs for layouts, text/link/background colours as BODY attributes) can cause problems for users who wish or need to override the way a site is displayed (consider for example a user with dyslexia who may require a specific combination of foreground and background colour or a particular typeface).
To check if a site's layout is controlled via style sheets, we simply disable all styles with Disable > Disable Styles > All styles.
Figure 5: Disable menu with "Disable Styles > All Styles" highlighted, and an example before/after shot of the effect.
If the result is a page that looks unstyled, the site is indeed using CSS.
The following three checkpoints all relate to the correct use of HTML markup.
Checkpoint 3.5: Use header elements to convey document structure and use them according to specification Checkpoint 3.6: Mark up lists and list items properly Checkpoint 3.7: Mark up quotations.
Do not use quotation markup for formatting effects such as indentation These items relate to the correct use of HTML markup.
Assistive technology, such as screen readers, can take advantage of structural information provided by these markup constructs and offer users additional functionality in order to navigate a page more easily.
Conversely, these markup constructs should not be abused for anything other than their intended purpose.
The Web Developer toolbar can give a visual overview of a page's structure without the need to delve into the actual source code.
First, we must ensure that in the extension's configuration the "Show element names when outlining elements" option (under Options > Options > General) is enabled.
Figure 6: Web Developer toolbar's Options dialogue, with "Show element names when outlining elements" option highlighted and checked.
Selecting the Outline > Block Level Elements command, we can now check that headings are indeed marked up as headings, lists are proper lists, and that elements are not being misused purely to achieve a certain presentational effect.
Figure 7: Outline menu with "Outline Block Level Elements" highlighted, and an example of the resulting visual output.
Checkpoint 4.2: Specify the expansion of each abbreviation or acronym in a document where it first occurs In a similar vein to the previous checkpoints, we can test for the presence of appropriate markup for acronyms and abbreviations (where expansions are presented visually to mouse users as a tool-tip when hovering over the element; correct abbreviation or acronym markup can be automatically expanded by screen readers when voicing a page).
As abbreviations and acronyms are not block level elements in HTML, Outline > Block Level Elements won't identify them in the current document.
However, we can specify ABBR and ACRONYM as custom elements to outline via Outline > Outline Custom Elements.
Figure 8: Outline menu with "Outline Custom Elements" highlighted, the resulting dialog box with "ABBR" and "ACRONYM" entered as custom elements, and an example of the resulting visual output.
Checkpoint 5.3: Do not use tables for layout unless the table makes sense when linearised In screen readers and text browsers, the reading order is determined primarily the be the order in which text appears in the markup (also referred to as "source order").
For tables, this has the effect of reading any cells sequentially left to right, top to bottom.
Depending on how a table-based (multi-column) layout is constructed, content that appears to make sense visually may be read completely out of order once linearised.
If your page still makes use of layout tables, linearise the page and ensure that the content is presented in the right order: Miscellaneous > Linearise Page Figure 9: Miscellaneous menu with "Linearise Page" highlighted.
Note that this checkpoint does not apply to data tables used to present tabular information (e.g.
a spreadsheet of numerical data).
Checkpoint 6.1: Organise documents so they may be read without style sheets.
For example, when an HTML document is rendered without associated style sheets, it must still be possible to read the document As with checkpoint 3.3, the quickest way to manually check that a document still makes sense without style sheets is to disable them.
Checkpoint 6.3: Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported It cannot always be guaranteed that a user viewing a site has installed a particular plugin, or that features such as javascript are available or enabled.
Therefore, pages should still remain usable in the absence of these additional technologies.
The Web Developer extension provides a handy way to turn off javascript and java support from the Disable menu: Disable > Disable Java, Disable > Disable JavaScript.
Figure 10: Disable menu with "Disable Java" and "Disable Javascript" selected.
The next two checkpoints can be approached in a similar fashion.
Checkpoint 6.4: For scripts and applets, ensure that event handlers are input device-independent Checkpoint 9.3: For scripts, specify logical event handlers rather than device-dependent event handlers These two related checkpoints can be tested by simply using both mouse (or equivalent pointing device) and keyboard-based navigation (i.e.
tabbing through all script enabled links present on a page) and ensuring that everything 'works' in both modes.
Checkpoint 9.4: Create a logical tab order through links, form controls, and objects The tab order of elements which can receive focus via the keyboard is determined by the order in which they appear in the markup.
As with the previous checkpoints, this can be tested by navigating the page via the keyboard (tabbing through links, form controls etc) and ensuring that the order is indeed correct.
Particularly complex forms with multiple inputs that were created and edited in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) application (such as Macromedia Dreamweaver's page view [10] or Microsoft VisualStudio [11]) can often look ordered on screen, but have an underlying markup that makes users navigating via the keyboard jump from one part of the form to a completely unrelated one.
As with the test for checkpoint 5.3, correct source order which determines a document's tab order can also be checked by linearising the page.
Checkpoint 9.5: Provide keyboard shortcuts to important links (including those in client-side image maps), form controls, and groups of form controls Although the subject of whether or not to provide accesskeys is a controversial one (see the articles by noted accessibility experts Derek Featherstone and John Foliot of WATS [12]), we can nonetheless make any accesskey assignments present in the current page visible via: Information > Display Accesskeys.
Figure 11: Information menu with "Display Accesskeys" highlighted, and an example of the resulting visual output.
Checkpoint 11.2: Avoid deprecated features of W3C technologies Related to checkpoints 3.2 and 3.3: even when particular markup constructs (especially in transitional doctypes) validate against the official specifications, the W3C may have flagged them as being "deprecated"; these features are included purely for backwards compatibility.
An example of a deprecated HTML element is the previously mentioned FONT tag, which should be abandoned in favour of CSS.
To identify the presence of any deprecated elements in the current page, we can use Outline > Outline deprecated elements.
Figure 12: Outline menu with "Outline deprecated elements" highlighted, and an example of the resulting visual output (in this case, a FONT element is identified).
Checkpoint 12.4: Associate labels explicitly with their controls When users with screen readers tab their way through a page containing forms, their browser's focus naturally lands on the individual form controls.
To understand what type of information or interaction the current form control is expecting, these users may have to backtrack before/after said control in order to find any possible textual labels relating to it.
However, HTML offers through the LABEL element a convenient and unequivocal way of associating the control and the label directly.
Assistive technology such as screen readers can take advantage of this element and correctly announce the correct label for the current form control.
Additionally, labels can also benefit sighted users navigating pages with a mouse, as they can be clicked in order to activate and/or place the focus on their associated controls.
In the specific case of checkboxes and radio buttons, this results in a much larger "clickable area", which can be particularly helpful for users with limited dexterity.
A very quick visual check takes advantage of this "side effect": when viewing a form, use the mouse to click on text labels.
If the related form element is being activated, or the focus is moved to the associated input, then the page is indeed using labels correctly.
For an overview of all form controls and associated labels present on the current page, you can take advantage of the Forms > View Form Information command.
Figure 13: Forms menu with "View Form Information" highlighted, and an example of the resulting overview table, loaded in a new tab.
Conclusion The Web Developer Toolbar is a powerful extension for Mozilla Firefox which can, in combination with other extensions such as Gez Lemon's Table Inspector [13] (taking care of checkpoints 5.1, 5.2, 5.5 and 5.6 relating to data tables) and a solid understanding of accessibility principles, facilitate a large number of manual checks required by WCAG 1.0.
Although it can't make all potential accessibility problems of a particular page immediately apparent to developers, it is nonetheless an effective tool which can be used to great advantage as part of an overall Web accessibility design workflow.
References Lauke, P.H., "Mozilla Firefox for Rapid Web Development and Testing", Ariadne 42, January 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/lauke/ Mozilla Firefox product page, http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar extension, http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/ W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ Watchfire WebXACT, http://webxact.watchfire.com/ HiSoftware Cynthia Says, http://www.contentquality.com/ Wave 3.0 Accessibility Tool, http://wave.webaim.org/ W3C Markup Validation Service, http://validator.w3.org/ W3C CSS Validation Service, http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ Macromedia Dreamweaver product page, http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/ Microsoft VisualStudio Developer Center, http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ Featherstone, D. and Foliot, J., WATS articles on Accesskeys, http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskey Gez Lemon's Table Inspector extension http://juicystudio.com/article/firefox-table-inspector.php Author Details Patrick H. Lauke Web Editor University of Salford Email: p.h.lauke@salford.ac.uk Web site: http://www.salford.ac.uk/ Personal Web site: http://www.splintered.co.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox" Author: Patrick H. Lauke Publication Date: 30-July-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 44 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/lauke/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Academic Liaison Librarianship: Curatorial Pedagogy or Pedagogical Curation?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Academic Liaison Librarianship: Curatorial Pedagogy or Pedagogical Curation?
Buzz data framework database infrastructure archives metadata vocabularies blog repositories cataloguing ontologies curation e-research taxonomy research managerialism Citation BibTex RIS Allan Parsons presents a strategic view of the need to develop the academic liaison librarianship role.
When reflecting on a methodological approach and set of research practices with which he was closely associated, Bruno Latour suggested that, “there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!” [1].
In a similar vein, it could be suggested that, “there are three things that do not work with academic liaison librarianship: the word academic, the word liaison and the word librarianship”.
Why so?
Whatley [2] defines academic liaison in the 1990s and early 2000s as being built around three roles: reference services (emanating from the reference desk), instructional services (e.g.
library, bibliographic and database instruction) and collection development (print and, increasingly, electronic).
Garnes and Smith [3] provide a similar description of the liaison role, with the liaison librarian being responsible for understanding an academic department’s needs for collections, information services and instruction.
These three roles characterise the liaison model.
Thull and Hansen [4], in discussing the Reference and User Services Association definition of liaison work, point out the centrality of the collection to liaison, since both reference and instructional services orient the reader/library user to the collection, as conventionally understood, i.e.
print with an emerging subscription-based electronic dimension.
However, these explicit functional roles mask a further implicit interpersonal, communicational or phatic role, harnessing a capability that, in the near future, may be of greater importance, relationship building: “Building relationships is becoming the essence of what it is to be a liaison librarian…”.
[2] Relationship building, it is argued here, will play a crucial role in the re-articulation of academic liaison librarianship, as it moves from the liaison model, with its collection-centred approach, towards what Williams [5] calls an engagement-centred model.
Among the ways in which this shift towards engagement has been expressed, at the University of Westminster and elsewhere, is to suggest that academic liaison is like teaching, on the one hand, and is like curation, on the other hand.
For example, Helen Conroy asserts that, “There is a clear need for librarians to develop teaching skills” [6]; Neal, Parsonage and Shaw [7] argue that, “although subject knowledge and familiarity with a range of relevant information resources continue to be important, there is now a much greater emphasis on proactivity and the need for excellent interpersonal, negotiation, project management and, increasingly, pedagogic skills”; while Lorcan Dempsey [8] notes that the term curation is being used increasingly in the context of libraries and points to the importance of the Digital Curation Centre [9]; David Lewis suggests that academic libraries should, “Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content” [10]; and Heidi Cool [11] devotes a blog entry to the increasing significance of digital curation in academic and other settings.
The first (teaching) metaphor proposes a greater engagement with the learner and the learning experience, becoming a partner in the delivery of the learning process rather than simply an occasional support for others who genuinely teach.
The second (curation) metaphor proposes a greater engagement with the collection, the direction of its development and its active pedagogical role.
Rather than simply being a guide to readers, library users and learners, pointing to where information is located or can be accessed, engaged professionals actively shape the collection towards particular pedagogical ends and learning experiences.
They actively select and interpret the collection, not just presenting it as a classified sequence or an alphabetical list.
In short, they make the collection and the library part of the learning experience by integrating them more explicitly into an engaging learning environment, rather than a store with tables, which may or may not be pleasurable to sit at.
Both teaching and curation are valid forms of engagement, but what is being argued here that they would benefit from informing one another dialectically around the concepts of the learner, the learning experience, the learning environment, learning practices (or styles), pedagogical practices (or styles) and research practices (styles and methods).
Moreover, it is argued that through this process of mutual engagement the librarianship dimension of academic liaison transforms into what might be called curatorial pedagogy or pedagogical curation; or, possibly more simply, learning advisers.
While these forms of engagement are promising, focusing on them solely might miss a vitally important point: such potential developments will depend on greater engagement with the organisational form of the (specific) university and the (cultural-national) institution of Higher Education.
In other words, what is at stake is not just a change of roles.
Changing those roles implies organisational change and institutional change.
The dynamic of change will be bottom-up and top-down, as well as peer-to-peer.
It is here, in this maelstrom of change, that relationship building comes into its own.
In the process of this gradually deepening engagement, through relationship building, the practices denoted currently by the label academic liaison librarianship will move away from being conceived as liaison, from being focused solely on academic learning, and from being librarianship in any easily recognisable form.
So, to answer the question posed in the first paragraph: not liaison but engagement; not (solely) academic (learning) but learning practices (more generally); and not librarianship but learning advice.
Academic Engagement The liaison model is closely tied to the academic library’s traditional role as gateway, i.e.
starting point for locating information for research, a role which Schonfeld and Housewright [12] indicate is in decline in the USA, as the academic library transforms from “an institution focused on acquiring, maintaining and providing services centred on a local print collection into a more electronic hub offering a variety of services to support campus needs for research, teaching and learning” [12].
In the UK, the decline in the academic library’s gateway role is confirmed by a report commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN) and the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL), whose data show that researchers’ visits to academic libraries declined markedly in 2001-2006, a trend that is set to continue in 2006-2011 [13].
In passing, Schonfeld and Housewright indicate that over 2003-2009 the library’s buyer role (paying for resources such as books, journals, and databases), which was always important, has become by far the most important to academic staff, with the archive role (a repository of resources which are preserved and made accessible) remaining stable, and, as noted, the gateway role in decline.
They also note that, when asked about two additional roles for the library, i.e.
teaching support (supporting and facilitating academics’ teaching activities) and research support (active support to increase the productivity of research and scholarship), academic staff indicated that they do not yet value the teaching and research support roles nearly as highly as they do the academic library’s infrastructural roles (as buyer and as archive).
As this last point should make clear, transforming the academic library and the academic liaison role to promote greater engagement will not be a simple matter of putting forward proposals and arguing rationally for their necessity.
While those currently practising academic liaison might seek to develop their roles in various new ways, they are part of a larger organisational and institutional context.
Their proposals will be met with resistance, some on the basis of sound reasoning, some on the basis of vested interests, some on the basis of (explicit or implicit) ideological stances.
This highlights an important part of an engagement model: academic liaison librarians, in order to develop into what it is that they seek to become, their strategic goal, will need to engage with the educational institutions within which they act and the organisational forms that those institutions take.
They will have to address, and to counter where necessary, the perceptions and expectations of other parts of the educational institution concerning what their role is and should be.
For example, the RIN CURL report mentioned above [13] finds that academic researchers see the future of librarians as custodians (of print-based and digitised archives and special collections), managers (of institutional repositories of digital information), administrators (dealing with the purchase and delivery of information services), subject-based information expert, teacher (of information literacy and related skills), manager (of datasets generated by e-research and grid-based projects) and technology specialist (facilitating electronic access to information resources) [13].
They do not see them, perhaps because it was not one of the options presented to them in the survey or perhaps because they do not (yet) see that it is in their interest to do so, as partners engaged in a common pursuit, for example, that of delivering an academic education.
Organisational and Institutional Engagement The engagement model, then, suggests that relationship building, not the collection and its development, provides a cornerstone in the development of liaison practices.
Furthermore, that relationship building will not only be with academic departments and their students, but with the organisation as a whole.
Broadly, then, that engagement will be of two kinds: with the educational practices of learning, teaching and research, on the one hand; and with the broader organisational practices and institutional goals of the university, on the other.
In other words, that relationship building will not only underlie learning as traditionally understood, i.e.
as an individual process within an academic horizon, but also learning as a collective process, or organisational learning, and learning as a social process, or institutional and cultural learning.
Such relationships as established will anchor resources development, i.e.
no longer a collection ‘held’ in the traditional sense, and will guide the realisation of the learning goals of those in the relationship, i.e.
professional development on the part of the library professional and learning or research objectives on the part of the client, the organisation and the institution.
As Williams [5] acknowledges, an engagement-centred approach to developing library roles calls for some kind of systems thinking, thinking that involves multiple contexts, flows and feedback loops, as well as a concern for how (strategic) purpose plays out in such systems.
Systemic thinking, as Lewis et al.
[14] reminds us, is the conceptual cornerstone, The Fifth Discipline, of Peter Senge’s [15] approach to understanding organisational learning.
Furthermore, for Senge, it is teams, not individuals, who are the fundamental learning unit in modern organisations.
If this is the case, and, as the literature readily affirms [16][17][18][19][14][20], universities are far from being learning organisations in any simple or immediate sense, the key to the development of the engagement role would be to form part of the appropriate teams for specific kinds of learning, organised around the achievement of the institution’s goals.
Dahl [21] conceives such organisational and institutional engagement as an adaptation and expansion of the liaison role as applied to academic units, which can facilitate a more systematic approach to building relationships with non-academic units, an approach which offers many advantages: “By extending the liaison model to include non-academic units [i.e.
by engaging with non-academic units at the level of the team author] the library gains both partners and an increased presence on the campus” [21].
In short, this is not just a case of marketing services, but of being engaged actively, as participants, in the practices whereby organisational and institutional learning are generated, sustained and recalled.
In the context of academic engagement, such participation calls for a true partnership between those involved in the delivery of learning experiences, a position taken by Dahl and affirmed by Garnes and Smith, one which would require an institutional change to the existing hierarchies.
By way of acknowledging this insight, Thull and Hansen argue that, turning that initial meeting with the students into a long-term educational relationship is the ultimate goal of library induction and instruction sessions, and that “successful working relationships with faculty allow librarians to be recognised as partners in the pursuit of teaching and learning, the central mission of the university.” [22] In other words, the goal is to build relationships that can sustain learning communities of practice, to use a phrase that anticipates what follows.
In the context of organisational and institutional engagement, such participation calls for, as Franklin [23] argues, an alignment of library strategy and structure with the university’s strategic objectives, both educational and societal, whether in terms of community, environment and public service or in terms of economics, finance and employment; and engagement with non-academic organisational communities, as Dahl suggests.
Value: From Functional to Systemic The central issue at stake here is the value of academic liaison librarianship, not so much the question of how do you measure its value but, more fundamentally, how do you establish that it is valuable.
This is because, as Jakubs [24] writes, “libraries must continue to prove their value to the university”.
What is being argued here is that relationship building, the central act in developing those practices known currently as academic liaison librarianship, creates and sustains value, and that that value is systemic in character.
Discussion of the academic library, and, by default, academic liaison, is dominated by financial and technological concepts ordered by a managerialist discourse, i.e.
an operational, instrumental or functional framework.
It is proposed here that these academic library-related issues would be better expressed, and therefore better addressed, by being discussed using an economic, purposive or systemic discourse, with a consequent change of vocabulary to one that enables a more fluid and dynamic conceptualisation of practices and organisations, i.e.
a strategic framework.
The purpose of this shift, which is both rhetorical and pragmatic, is to establish a common language, a technique allowing communication and translation to take place, in which the values of the practices referred to under the label of academic liaison librarianship, first, can be recognised and, second, once recognised, their educational, organisational and institutional potential can be developed.
Those practices already provide value-for-money because they are of significant educational value.
With better organisation, and possibly with better technologies, they could be made to realise more fully both their (under-used) educational value and their (under-developed) organisational and institutional value, and hence provide better value-for-money, although that is not the primary goal of developing them.
Conversely, the issue may be expressed as follows: many existing technologies and management structures provide little educational, organisational or institutional value, they block the recognition of the value of the resources already available, particularly human resources.
They also prevent the emergence of new resources and organisational and institutional forms, and may therefore be considered not only poor value for money, but also destructive of value per se.
Thus, finance, technology and management are not being ignored here, they are being re-contextualised.
Without that re-contextualisation, one will be unable to respond to the questions raised by the reconfiguration of the academic library and the university, questions which require strategic responses.
Those questions are: what are the appropriate financial, business or economic models, given the context of the several economies, as discussed below, in play in higher education?
; what are the appropriate sets of (interlinked) technologies, given the educational and organisational objectives of the university and the academic library?
; and what are the appropriate managerial models, given the context of changing and emerging organisational forms, some exhibiting self-organisation?
Discussion of the strategic educational, organisational and institutional, i.e.
systemic, values of academic liaison librarianship, it is suggested, provides a lens for discussing the questions those three quests raise, questions that might otherwise be resolved without ever having been explicitly posed.
Development of the practices currently covered by the name academic liaison librarianship is vital for the development of higher education in the 21st century, through creating, sustaining and enabling the recall of the quality of higher education institutions’ academic, organisational and institutional knowledge bases and through their contribution to their operation both as learning organisations (in as far as they qualify as such) and organisations for learning, all of which relies crucially on relationship building.
Those practices can only be developed, however, when it is recognised that, first, learning lies at the intersection of education (traditionally, individual learning, scholarship and expertise), organisation (collective, group or team learning) and institution (societal and cultural learning); and, second, that not all learning is academic (formal learning), indeed, most learning is not academic.
What is central to relationship building, in turn, is learning practices and their relationship to knowledge (what has been learnt and is remembered), on the one hand, and to purpose or intent (why that learning, as memory and as capacity for further learning, is important, its value), on the other.
In addition to relationship building (orientation to a client and/or partner), then, learning practices, and the knowledge to which they give rise (orientation to knowledge), and purpose (teleonomic orientation) are crucial for the development of the academic liaison librarianship role.
The Dialectic of Curation and Pedagogy In the Introduction, it was noted that two metaphors have been used as a way of trying to express the necessary transformation of the academic liaison role, a curatorial metaphor and a pedagogic metaphor.
In this section, an outline of the dialectical engagement of curation and teaching is presented.
The value of the curatorial metaphor raised in the introduction would seem to be this: in recent decades, museum practice and museology have moved away from a primary emphasis on collections management and curatorial expertise towards a greater emphasis on museum design, exhibition design, visitor experience and the museum’s educational role.
Similarly, libraries and librarianship would benefit from moving away from a primary concern with collections management and library classification towards a greater emphasis on the design of the library as a complex physical, digital and mixed virtual-physical learning environment and on the learning experience (and the learner’s experience).
The new museology is now old, itself a product of the 1980s [25], but thinking about museums’ design, purpose and operation in relation to the visitor experience continues, as can be witnessed in, for example, Din and Hecht [26], Hein [27], Knell [28], Message [29], Parry [30], and Witcomb [31].
The value of the pedagogical metaphor seems to be this: teaching has moved from a teacher-centred transmission model of education and learning to a student-centred model of engagement or participation in learning, with teachers becoming facilitators (guides, liberators) rather than pedagogues (leaders, controllers).
Similarly, libraries and librarianship would benefit from moving from a text/book-centred, knowledge-transmission, rationalist model of learning towards engagement with design of ‘the library’ as a complex physical-virtual learning environment, development of learning technologies and a focus on the learning experience, with a far more sophisticated grasp of learning theories applied to information literacy, as begun, for example, by Johnson [32].
One lesson that may be taken from this discussion is that academic liaison librarianship as a field of practices is like curation, teaching, archiving, research and publishing in as far as they are all are experiencing a similar displacement and need to redefine strategically and organisationally.
The most valuable lessons passing among curation, teaching and librarianship, then, would be at the level of how they are responding to similar challenges.
For example, in the context of curation, these relate to selection and acquisition of material and digital artefacts, to documentation or recording of material and digital artefacts, to the provision of metadata to accompany the catalogue records, editing and content curation, conducting research, curating exhibitions, writing publications, subject specialisation or subject expertise and the interpretation of artefacts.
In the context of pedagogy, the relevant issues concern subject specialisation, disciplinarity, interand trans-disciplinarity, the curriculum and curriculum development, pedagogical styles, techniques and methods, learning theories, learning styles and philosophy of education.
Synthesising these agendas, the emerging field of practice, whatever it comes to be called, combines concern for what different disciplinary and professional practices count as valid learning processes; how those learning process are realised in specific learning experiences in specific learning environments using specific learning resources; how those processes are considered to lead to knowledge; how that knowledge is sustained and recalled individually, organisationally, institutionally and societally; what material, media and intellectual forms that knowledge takes; how those knowledge forms operate in society by being interwoven with the dominant narratives through which organisational, institutional and societal power is enacted (e.g.
gender, political and religious ideologies); how that knowledge can be questioned legitimately, i.e.
within the bounds of what the discipline itself considers valid reasoning, and therefore how the discipline thereby extends, grows or develops itself; and how inter-, crossand trans-disciplinarity extends such disciplinary knowledge through critique and synergy.
In other words, development of the practices currently covered by the term academic liaison librarianship forms an emergent field of educational practice, within organisational, institutional, societal and cultural horizons, that relates to librarianship, curation, archiving, teaching, researching and publishing, yet, as a specific field of educational practice, it differs significantly from all.
The opportunity exists for practitioners of that set of practices to overcome the limitations of being perceived as a minor profession, as part of librarianship, or as a para-profession, subordinate to other, more senior, professions.
Organisational Economies The re-organisation of universities, like that of public services more generally, has become an unending process.
The most recent phase can be discerned in discussions of the future of the academic profession from the 1980s onwards, as the university adapts to the demands of globalisation, the ‘knowledge society’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘information society’, ‘learning society’ or perhaps even ‘lifelong learning society’.
Such discussions can be found in, for example, Jurgen Enders [33], Michael Peters [34], Phil Cohen [35] and Peter Scott [36].
Will Hutton describes the task facing those who govern universities, as well as their government paymasters, as a balancing act: “Too much emphasis on knowledge and learning for their own sake and the university becomes an ivory tower; too much emphasis on economic benefits and the idea-generator implodes.” [37] The Browne Report [38] perpetuates re-organisation, perhaps towards imbalance.
In this context, at least six sets of inter-related changes have been underway since the 1980s that are of relevance to the academic library and academic liaison librarianship: in the role of the teacher; in the role of the librarian; in the character of the student body; in the university as learning environment; in the relationship between the university, industry and government; and in the character of learning and knowledge resources.
One of the central difficulties in this context is to find an organisational model that represents the university, and the academic library within it, sufficiently well that one could use it in practice to characterise the changes underway and to reorganise service provision.
In discussing museums and libraries specifically, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) characterises organisational culture in the 21st century as being multi-directional, for example top-down, bottom-up and side-to-side [39].
A caveat is necessary here.
While this multi-dimensionality may indeed be the case, there remains a strong top-down power axis within it, inherent in an inherited and persistent managerialism.
For example, White and Weathersby [19], admittedly discussing a US context, but one which has resonance in the UK, note that, “The culture of institutions of higher education is full of examples of competitive ratings and rankings, acceptances and rejections, and authoritarian and hierarchical structures.” In this context, they continue, “Rather than operating as a community of scholars, most universities operate as bureaucracies where social learning is an espoused ideal rather than actual practice.” Furthermore, as Henkel [40] notes, citing Dill [41], “ ‘universities have long been regarded as centres of knowledge creation and application for the larger society, but not as learning organisations developing and transferring knowledge for the improvement of their own basic processes’ “.
The idea of the university as corporate enterprise, as explicitly advocated by the 1985 Jarratt Report [42], seems to have had a greater influence.
That idea assumes that the major problem confronting universities is long-term scarcity of resources, the solution to which lies in managerialism.
Other models of the university have been proposed.
For example, Askling and Kristensen [18] discuss Middlehurst’s [43] three organisational types of universities: communities of professionals; political bureaucracies; and systems perspectives (cybernetic or electronic).
The aim here is not to argue that the learning organisation is the ideal towards which universities should be moving, but that, in fact, universities are mixed organisations undergoing continuous change.
Three directions are developed from this assumption.
First, from the perspective of developing academic liaison librarianship, it is useful to treat the university as constituted by communities of professionals, each with their own learning practices.
Second, that while not seeking to establish the learning organisation as an ideal, in conditions of change, learning is an essential component of organisation, as established by Schön [44]: learning to respond; learning to adapt; learning to manage environmental change.
Third, in order to grasp the complexity of education, as an element in a field of professional learning economies, it is useful to frame education as, at one and the same time: a commodity in a financial economy (in other words, qualifications have a cost, or are priced in a market; these qualifications can be used in a market-based, money-oriented job market to gain higher wages or financial rewards; and universities are businesses which have to balance their accounts, although the concept of ‘profit’ and ‘loss’ is problematic here); a public good in a welfare or a political economy (society benefits from having qualified people with specialised skill sets; providing these services brings rewards of status and power to those skilled professionals; and universities are public institutions which are part of the institutional fabric of a society as well as producing professionals for other social institutions); and a gift in a moral or reputational economy (good educators address the moral as well as the technical capabilities of their students; those educated students add to the moral quality, the reciprocity and mutual respect of the give-and-take of everyday interaction in society; and universities are places where people partake in a generous exchange of ideas and affects as well as freely exchanging the artefacts in which knowledge about such ways of being, doing and knowing are embodied).
Thus, academic liaison as a professional, educational practice can be said to be conducted across three major economies: the (private) financial economy of buying and selling (fixed cycles of private-professional learning); the (public) welfare economy or political economy of inheriting and investing in public goods (iterated cycles of civic-professional learning); and the (inter-personal, networked, moral or reputational) gift economy of giving and taking (open-ended cyclicality of life-long learning).
In short, as implied by the above, learning practices are not uniform, in terms of their duration, in terms of their purpose and in terms of their cyclicality or cumulativity, their ‘practical economy’: lifelong learning differs from civic-professional learning differs from private-professional learning.
As noted at the end of the “Value: From Functional to Systemic” section, in each of these economies, like the other professional practices that make up the university as a set of communities of professionals, curatorial pedagogy/pedagogical curation, as the transformed academic liaison librarianship might be called, can be said to have three major axes or orientations: towards the client/partner (relationship dimension), towards knowledge (learning-resources/learning practices dimension) and towards the goals of the client, or the purposes to be achieved by the professional and the client working together in partnership, on the one hand, and the purposes to be achieved by the professional in the course of his/her professional development, on the other (teleonomic dimension).
Taxonomy of Professional Practices By way of developing a relatively simple systemic model of the fields of practice covered by the engaged practitioner, curatorial pedagogue/pedagogical curator/learning adviser, using what has been said in the foregoing as a preliminary ontology, in both the computing sense (a model or system of concepts for describing the world, consisting of a set of types, properties, and relationship types) and the philosophical sense (what exists within or for a particular world, but from the perspective of being-in-the-world, of ‘what matters’ in that world, that for which one ‘cares’), one might begin to define a taxonomy of what, in practice, such engaged professionals are (already) doing and should be doing (in the near future).
In this way, nine domains of practice and areas of development emerge from the combination of three orientations (client, knowledge, purpose) and three economies (commodity, public good and gift).
Three caveats should be heeded at this point.
First, although this is presented as a table here, it would be more appropriate to represent it dynamically as a series of flows that enter and exit one another, altering one another.
For the sake of simplicity, in what is already a complex landscape, a table is presented.
Second, no single practitioner would be expected to cover the whole field.
The limited aim of this tabulation is to suggest the terrain within which any single practitioner might orient or position himor herself.
More accurately, it might be said that the aim is to make explicit the dispositions that already exist within the field of practice of academic liaison, so that individual practitioners might make more conscious choices about their orientation, ‘economic’ effectiveness and direction of development.
Third, the model may be useful to define team roles, how they might be combined to cover the whole field of practice, and how those teams would be integrated with other teams within the organisational whole of the university.
The danger is that the emerging practitioners, having such a broad palette, from curation, teaching, researching, and editing to collecting and exhibiting, across a wide spectrum of media, will do a bit of everything but will do it all badly.
The first task is to delimit the field of practice, not as a single unified whole, but as a lattice or net of overlapping fields of engagement, as outlined in Table 1, and then establish the organisational or relational means to achieve the relevant goals within the differing fields of service offered.
Each of the specific practical-topical processes and operations derived from librarianship, curation, archiving, publishing and learning-teaching, will be re-shaped within one or more of these nine directions or orientations, to achieve goals set within them or to push boundaries within and across them.
Again, in practice, the boundaries among these fields are blurred, but the suggestion offered here is that it is useful to render them distinguishable analytically, so that one may be able to reconfigure one’s actions and develop one’s professional practice.
Financial Economy Political Economy Moral Economy Relationship dimension: relationship building: enhancing competitive, cooperative, and collaborative relationships, where appropriate Market-based, financial economic relationship building: charging for services, private services: Commercial relationships Societal-based, political economic relationship building: services provided as public goods, public services: public service relationships Inter-personal, moral economic relationship building: services provided for free, inter-personal inter-action: Reputational relationships Knowledge/Learning dimension: knowledge/learning-resources development: enhancing learning resources and learning environments, focusing on learning experiences Fee-based or subscription-based resource development providing market intelligence (for professional practice) Resource development for academic and professional practice (not simply market intelligence), funded by public finance, using the university’s infrastructure Resource development for network-based knowledge sharing, e.g.
using Web 2.0 technologies Teleonomic dimension: educational achievement: enhancing the learning-teaching and research experience; learning to learn; learning to live; lifelong learning, getting more out of life Professional-client collaboration to achieve academic and professional qualifications and to achieve gainful employment Professional-client collaboration to achieve higher professional standing, academic achievement and/or power/influence Professional-client collaboration to achieve network standing as expert, contact person for particular topics or advice Table 1: A taxonomy of professional practices Practical Implications With a focus on learning practices, on the one hand, and service provision, on the other, it is argued that the top priorities for academic liaison within the University of Westminster, which may have relevance elsewhere, are: 1.
To create, restore, manage and develop key relationships in key forums in order to forge learning communities of practice with, amongst others: permanent teaching staff, visiting lecturers, researchers, library and information technology managers, university managers, students (undergraduate, postgraduate, M.Phil and PhD), professional groups within particular domains, inside and outside the University This is crucial for organisation, for community and for learning, such communities of practice being the very ground of learning, because, as Manasse puts it succinctly, “relationships have begun to replace organizations as the primary organizing principle”.
[45] This requires creating or restoring and developing the appropriate communication channels, on the one hand, and (physical and online) forums, on the other, whereby these relationships can be consolidated, to form professional communities of learning practice.
It will also require definition of the service boundaries and the transformative passages among the three economies which affect the character of the above-mentioned relationships, i.e.
those commercial relationships for which charging is appropriate, those which are provided as institutional, public services and those which are given pro bono, as a professional gratuity.
A final requirement in this context is the establishment of an ethics of relating, i.e.
knowing how and when to compete, to co-operate and to collaborate and also how and when to shift back and forth among competition/commerce, co-operation/public service and collaboration/reciprocity, without becoming a moral relativist, immoral or amoral.
2.
To acquire, create, restore, manage and develop key learning resources and learning environments which serve performatively to sustain the academic, organisational and institutional memory for the respective learning communities of practice.
This includes virtual and physical learning environments.
This requires addressing collections as learning resources for professional and academic practice, including the historical and archival dimensions, supplementing constative metadata and providing performative metadata.
Again, this will require a definition of the boundaries among the three economies which affect the character of such learning resources, i.e.
those for which charging is necessary, those made available as part of a public service and those given freely, both in a physical environment and via the Web.
3.
To define the goals to be achieved in respect of learning and education for the respective learning communities of practice, and specifically for the curatorial pedagogue/learning adviser group.
This will require the development of a strong, non-foundational, educational agenda and curriculum, articulating 21st century skills, competences and knowledge, set within a global awareness.
Serious thought will need to be given to establishing which educational goals and values are to be achieved within each of the three economies; for example, those qualifications and skills that relate to competition and markets, those which relate to the common good and welfare and those which relate to mutual respect and reciprocity.
Conclusion The value of developing the practices currently covered by the term academic liaison librarianship is as much an issue of concern for teachers, researchers, curators and library and university managers as it is librarians.
That development becomes even more significant in a situation in which, first, permanent academic staff are under pressure to manage, administer, budget, teach, fund-raise and research simultaneously, leading to a position where, “One of the commonest refrains amongst academics is that we can never get any ‘work’ done when we go into work.
In other words we are so busy and stressed out by our ever increasing teaching and admin loads that we literally have no time or place to think let alone to do anything approximating sustained research.” [35].
Second, there are pressures on visiting teaching staff’s hours; and they are often required to focus on industry, market and employability skills, which are not strictly academic or necessarily academic at all, but do involve learning and not simply training.
Third, there is grave concern about a loss of curatorial expertise in museums, a trend that may be exacerbated by the anticipated budget cuts in the early 2010s that will make the position of curators even more perilous.
For example, in an interview in the Museums Journal Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, reasons that, “If the expertise falls away, the grant applications fall away, the frequency with which objects are collected by museums diminishes and…the central function of the museum as a place where objects are brought to life slips away as well.” [46] The point is reiterated month after month in the Museums Journal.
For example, Rebecca Atkinson, states that, “Hefty budget reductions are likely to hasten the demise of specialist curators, especially at a regional level, putting more pressure on remaining subject specialists and leaving collections at risk of neglect.” [47] Although, as should now be apparent, it is not the collection per se that is the issue, but the potential relationship building, learning practice and purposive action that it may create and sustain that is at risk.
In this environment, the need to establish and strengthen the role of sustaining the academic, organisational and institutional knowledge bases and learning capabilities, a key element in realising organisational and institutional goals, under whatever guise this role takes, academic liaison librarianship or otherwise, is becoming acute.
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Author Details Allan Parsons Academic Liaison Librarian University of Westminster, Harrow Learning Resources Centre Email: a.parsons@westminster.ac.uk Web sites: https://sites.google.com/a/staff.westminster.ac.uk/journalismweb/home https://sites.google.com/site/westminsteradm/home http://sites.google.com/site/praxisandtechne/ Blogs: http://prolepsis-ap.blogspot.com/ http://westminsteraro.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Academic Liaison Librarianship: Curatorial Pedagogy or Pedagogical Curation?” Author: Allan Parsons Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/parsons/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 48: Extended Family Net Works Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 48: Extended Family Net Works Buzz data api infrastructure archives identifier preservation cataloguing shibboleth research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne 48.
While the number of delegates at the Institutional Web Management Workshop did not quite match that of ECDL 2004 [1] when it too was hosted at the University of Bath, it would be fair to say the Workshop gave UKOLN almost as much to do.
Inevitably the bulk of the workload fell upon the Workshop's new Chair Marieke Guy and also Natasha Bishop, UKOLN Events and Marketing Manager.
There is little doubt there were many opportunities for networking within a workshop in which it was evident very many delegates were known to each other.
It was quite apparent to UKOLN colleagues attending, as it was to others present, that this event had a distinct buzz about it.
Kate Forbes-Pitt of the LSE, whose presentation aroused much interest, remarked that she knew of no other event this side of the Atlantic which evoked such a sense of common cause.
A frequent comment was that after ten years IWMW came close to a family gathering; there is undoubtedly a depth of shared history.
I will leave the report of the Workshop in the capable hands of Adrian Stephenson who has put together IWMW 2006: Quality Matters for us; but for two comments.
Firstly, UKOLN colleagues were delighted by the depth of delegates' appreciation, not only for Brian Kelly's years of unstinting effort for IWMW but also for the hard work and prodigious calm of their new Chairperson.
Secondly I would mention the heartening evidence of so many experienced practitioners who, while taking proper account of the opportunities offered by emerging collaborative technologies at the Workshop, nonetheless repeatedly reported back in the final plenary on the value their discussion groups placed on face-to-face meetings and closer contact with colleagues as at IWMW 2006.
Robin Murray and I were both beaten by the common enemy, Time, in our efforts to publish Library Systems: Synthesise, Specialise, Mobilise in the last issue, although Robin's examination of the changing landscape in which library systems operate has lost nothing of its currency.
He describes how the integrated library system is no longer as firmly anchored to its service model as it once was and examines its emerging role in relation to Web-based services.
The area from which he draws an example to illustrate his arguments is very much in the public eye [2].
The role of the library catalogue in a changing landscape has been exercising Lorcan Dempsey somewhat and he has contributed The Library Catalogue in the New Discovery Environment: Some Thoughts on the matter.
Lorcan also points to changes affecting the traditional model of catalogue usage, changes that are being driven by alterations in the pattern of users' demands, and places these developments in the wider context of the emerging network environment.
In their persistent search for new developments in the field of library systems and services, Daniel Chudnov, Peter Binkley, Jeremy Frumkin, Michael J. Giarlo, Mike Rylander, Ross Singer and Ed Summers have come up with what they term 'a tiny HTTP API for serving information objects in next-generation Web applications'.
Introducing unAPI, they point to the persistence of barriers to flexible reuse of library resources across new Web services.
While the capacity to copy and paste is a function that all IT users take for granted in their desktop applications, the authors appear to have hit upon a potentially invaluable extension of the concept to permit us to copy complex digital objects from Web applcations.
I am indebted to Caroline Williams for taking up the baton from Debra Hiom [3] and for completing the two-part series we have arranged on the development and future of the Resource Discovery Network in her article on Intute: The New Best of the Web.
Caroline also points to the changing environment in which Intute now works and the efforts made to address such change.
Whatever those changes, she makes it clear that as the Internet continues to expand, issues of quality and trust will only grow in their importance to education and research and that she sees engagement with Intute's community as central to its future practice.
I am particularly delighted to be able to offer a further addition to the material Ariadne has offered hitherto on developments in access management technology [4].
This is thanks to Martin Moyle who as Project Manager of SHERPA-LEAP at University College London has been in the van of work on Shibboleth.
In Seven Libraries and a LEAP of Faith Martin describes for us the ShibboLEAP Project which involved six University of London institutions in the implementation of Shibboleth.
Martin provides us with background to the project as well as a summary of its aims and core findings and introduces case studies of Shibboleth Identity Provider implementation.
His hope that the project's work will be of service to new adopters of this new technology is not, I think, a vain one.
Having looked rather more broadly at the search engine industry in recent issues, Phil Bradley has decided this time around to turn his attention to a specific search engine again and in Super-Charged Super Target Searching he has chosen the European version of Accoona and draws our attention to its range of search options which, for all Accoona' imperfections, do merit the attention of our readers who like to keep up with developments in this area.
It seems to be a time of marking tens of years and tenth in a series, since Alastair Dunning now describes The Tasks of the AHDS: Ten Years On.
UKOLN has collaborated with the Arts and Humanities Data Service in a number of ways over that decade and colleagues will wish to join me in congratulating AHDS on its decade of activity.
In his article Alastair reviews some of the statements made in respect of the AHDS in previous Ariadne articles and examines them in the light of current and likely developments.
In UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment: Where We Go From Here Najla Semple and Maggie Jones describe the programme of work undertaken by the Digital Preservation Coalition in the gathering of facts and figures to support informed planning for a national digital preservation infrastructure.
They point out that the UK Needs Assessment was designed however not only to provide statistics but to exercise an awareness-raising role towards an ever-expanding audience of practitioners who are discovering that digital preservation is now entering their remit.
Its report provides considerable food for thought, not least urging upon its readers that digital preservation begins not in the declining years of a resource but at its creation.
Meanwhile in the same neck of the woods Miguel Ferreira, Ana Alice Baptista and José Carlos Ramalho seek to propose A Foundation for Automatic Digital Preservation to support digital cultural heritage institutions in their preservation goals.
Central to their approach is a Service-Oriented Architecture populated with elements which would serve to support preservation operations such as identification and migration.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on practical advice for tutors and staff developers in online and blended learning; guidelines for information managers attempting to effect change within their organisation; evaluating your library; and the 2nd edition of The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide.
In addition of course we provide our section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 48.
References Ariadne also covered ECDL 2004 thanks to these contributions: Jessie Hey, ECDL 2004: A Digital Librarian's Report, October 2004, Ariadne Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/ecdl2004-rpt/ Michael Day, The 4th International Web Archiving Workshop, October 2004, Ariadne Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/ecdl-web-archiving-rpt/ NHS provider looking critical, The Register, 2 August 2006 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/24/isoft_fsa_probe/ Debra Hiom, Retrospective on the RDN, April 2006, Ariadne Iissue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/hiom/ James Sankar and Mariam Garibyan, Shibboleth Installation Workshop, January 2005, Ariadne Issue 42 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/shibboleth-rpt/ Simon McLeish, Installing Shibboleth, April 2005, Ariadne Issue 43 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/mcleish/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 48: Extended Family Net Works" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue48/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data mobile framework database dissemination rss infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility repositories copyright video preservation multimedia aggregation ocr adobe e-learning photoshop ebook curation podcast licence e-research research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
JISC Digital Media (formerly TASI) Training Schedule Four brand new courses are on offer for the 2009 season dealing with: Finding free images online Editing and managing images using Photoshop Lightroom 2 Audio Production (recording lectures, seminars, interviews and podcasts) Digitising analogue video recordings.
Courses are already filling up fast and several courses now have multiple dates to accommodate demand.
Spring 2009 Programme: 10 March 2009 Introduction to Photoshop Lightroom 2 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-photoshop-lightroom.html 19 March 2009 Copyright and Digital Images http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-copyright-1.html 25 March 2009 Colour Management http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-colour-management.html 26 March 2009 Scanning with the CLA Licence http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-scanning-cla.html 27 March 2009 Building a Departmental Image Collection http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-image-collection.html 31 March 2009 Essential Photoshop Skills http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-photoshop-1.html 3 April 2009 Audio Production: Recording Lectures, Seminars, Interviews and Podcasts http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-audio-production.html 23 April 2009 Finding Free-to-Use Images Online http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-finding-images.html 24 April 2009 Digitising Analogue Video Recordings http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-analogue-video.html 28 April 2009 Introduction to Image Metadata http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-image-metadata.html 29 April 2009 Optimising your Images using Adobe Photoshop http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-image-optimisation.html To book on a course please visit http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/bookingform.html You can also subscribe to the Forthcoming Workshops RSS Feed: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/rss.html For further information If you would like any more information about courses, including the option of on-demand and customised courses, then please contact: Dave Kilbey JISC Digital Media d.kilbey@bristol.ac.uk or by phone 0117 3314332 Back to headlines UKeiG Course: Essential Copyright for Information Professionals What You Need to Know and Preparing for Change!
CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE Tuesday, 17 March 2009, 9.30-16.15 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Course Outline: Copyright remains one of the most challenging legal issues for information professionals in all areas of the information industries.
This one-day introductory course will chart a path through the complexity of the subject.
It will cover all essential aspects of copyright and associated rights.
Delegates will be taken step-by-step through the fundamentals of copyright.
Woven into the sessions will be the latest information on forthcoming changes to UK law on copyright and how you need to understand and prepare for them now.
Understanding of each topic will be illuminated by real-life examples of copyright issues.
Examples will be drawn from a wide range of contexts.
The sessions will include: Copyright what is it, how does it arise and how long does it last?
Ownership of copyright Categories of copyright works The rights of the copyright owner Permitted acts and exceptions to copyright Database right Moral rights Licensing schemes for education, commercial and business organisations Overview of copyright in the digital environment The Gowers Review Planning for Change: a special, dedicated session on how the likely reforms to UK law currently under implementation from the Gowers Review will affect practitioners, and how they will benefit.
What do they need to be doing now?
The course will be led by presentations but will include real-life problems and scenarios for discussion, and plenty of opportunity for questions and answers.
For further information For more information or to book a place on this course, please visit http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ or email meetings@ukeig.org.uk Back to headlines DigCCurr 2009: Digital Curation Practice, Promise and Prospects Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA 1-3 April 2009 http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2009/ The draft conference programme is now available at: http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2009/schedule The School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina is pleased to announce our second digital curation curriculum symposium.
DigCCurr 2009: Digital Curation Practice, Promise and Prospects is part of the Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr) Project.
DigCCurr is a three-year (2006-2009), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded collaboration between SILS and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
The primary goals of the DigCCurr Project are to develop a graduate-level curricular framework, course modules, and experiential components to prepare students for digital curation in various environments.
DigCCurr initiatives in support of this goal are informed by representatives from the project's collaborating institutions as well as an Advisory Board of experts from Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The first symposium, DigCCurr2007: An International Symposium in Digital Curation, was held 18-20 April 2007, attracting nearly 300 attendees from ten countries.
Participants explored the definition of digital curation and what skills are necessary for digital curation professionals working in libraries, archives, museums, data centers, and other data-intensive organisations.
With speakers from more than a dozen countries, DigCCurr2009 will continue this theme, focusing on current practice and research surrounding digital curation with a look toward the future, and trends in preparing digital curation professionals.
Sessions Focus on: Digital curation synergies and collaboration: What are the challenges and opportunities for regional, national, and global cooperation and collaboration in digital curation practices and research?
How do we approach these effectively?
Where do practices and research converge and diverge across different organisational mandates and requirements?
Strategies for building and leveraging relations and cooperation among a global audience of digital curation researchers and educators for improved delivery of digital curation research and practice opportunities for emerging professionals.
Teaching and training at the international level: What are the barriers and advantages in providing quality and comparable education?
How does the profession traverse credentials and certification?
Graduate education and continuing education for practitioners; Examination of current teaching tools; Recruiting students; Perceptions on the changing professional competencies and personal attributes for employment in digital curation environments.
Digital curation in relation to archives and museums: How is the environment shaping traditional responsibilities?
How are synergies developing across libraries, archives, and museums?
What are core competencies in digital curation?
Can we develop common ground among participating disciplines and entities?
What are implications for various professions, and what issues do the professions need to addressing separately?
What is going on in real life with the curation of digital resources?
We encourage people to undertake small-scale studies in order to share data and case studies about current practices, procedures and approaches within specific organisational contexts.
What is happening in different sectors such as industry, federal government, state government, nonprofit cultural institutions?
What do we need?
Examination of scope, extent, relevance, and quality of current literature.
What is useful?
What is missing?
Infrastructures in support of digital curation.
How well is current technology meeting the needs of digital curation, and what should future technology research and development involve to better meet these needs?
How do organisations incorporate digital curation principles and procedures into their administrative and managerial operations?
How do we support sustainable infrastructure?
Registration: http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2009/registration Cancellations or substitutions must be made to Rachael Clemens rclemens@unc.edu For further information: Dr. Helen R. Tibbo School of Information and Library Science 201 Manning Hall CB#3360 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360 Tel: 919-962-8063 Fax: 919-962-8071 Email: tibbo@email.unc.edu Back to headlines OCR in Mass Digitisation: Challenges between Full Text, Imaging and Language Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands 6 7 April 2009 http://www.impact-project.eu/news/ic2009/ The IMPACT Project is organising a conference on OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in mass digitisation projects to take place in the first week of April at the National Library of the Netherlands (KB).
The conference will focus on exchanging views with other researchers and suppliers in the OCR field, as well as presenting some preliminary results from the first year of the IMPACT project.
The conference is able to accept a maximum of 150 participants.
Programme Monday 6 April 2009: Current and future challenges facing OCR technology, such as image enhancement and linguistic issues that come up when digitising historical text material.
Tuesday 7 April 2009: New advances in OCR technology, such as collaborative correction and adaptive OCR techniques, a possible way forward for future large-scale digitisation programmes.
Both days will feature key speakers from outside of the project, in addition to experts from the IMPACT consortium.
Each day's programme will last from 10.00 – 18.00, with a conference dinner on the first day.
Conference Programme: http://www.impact-project.eu/news/ic2009/conference-programme/ Registration is now open: http://www.impact-project.eu/news/ic2009/register/ Back to headlines Museums and the Web 2009 Museums and the Web 2009: The international conference for culture and heritage online Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 15-18 April 2009 http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/ MW is an international venue where people working in museums, science centres and art galleries share how they are responding to the challenges of our networked world.
At MW2009 you can connect with people who understand what you are doing, and who have dealt with the issues practitioners are now facing.
Registration: https://www2.archimuse.com/mw2009/mw2009.registrationForm.html For further information: View http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/ or Contact mw2009@archimuse.com Back to headlines The 15th INFORUM Conference on Professional Information Resources Prague, Czech Republic 2729 May 2009 http://www.inforum.cz/en/ The 15th Annual INFORUM Conference will deal with professional electronic information resources for research, development, education and business purposes.
It will will be held from 27 May to 29 May 2009 in Prague.
Conference participation is international since 2003 the original territorial focus on the Czech Republic and Slovakia has been expanded to other Central and Eastern European countries and it has become the main event in this field in the region.
The conference is particularly attended by information professionals from special and public libraries, private corporations and state agencies, IT managers, physicians, lawyers, university teachers and students.
Conference Topics Matching Content with User Intent Trends and Updates in Using Information Using and Administration of Electronic Information Resources Open Access Access to Electronic Information Resources and Their Usage in e-Learning Practical Aspects of Using e-Resources in Companies Knowledge Management Electronic Resources Electronic Age Evaluation and Electronic Information Resources Guest speakers this year will be Herbert Van De Sompel, David Bawden and Carol Tenopir.
The official conference languages are Czech and English (simultaneous translations will be provided).
For further information: Andrea Kutnarova (INFORUM co-ordinator) Albertina icome Praha s.r.o.
Stepanska 16 110 00 Praha 1 Czech Republic tel.
: +420-2-2223 1212 fax: +420-2-2223 1313 Andrea.Kutnarova@aip.cz Back to headlines Museums at Night 2009: A nationwide campaign promoting museums and galleries European-wide 15 –17 May 2009 The annual 'Museums at Night' takes place during the third weekend in May, 15-17 2009.
A national campaign for late night opening across the UK, it seeks to attract people into museums who do not usually visit, simply by staying open late or by creating special events.
It will link up with the European-wide campaign of the same name (La Nuit des Musées http://nuitdesmusees.culture.fr/ ), which takes place on Saturday 16 May 2009.
The UK equivalent, funded by the MLA and organised by Culture24 takes place over the weekend of Friday 15 May to Sunday 17 May 2009.
This year the event is simple: open up your museum or heritage site, at night, and do whatever you want to do.
Many museums have already signed up including, The National Gallery in London and The Sainsbury Centre for Art in Norwich.
Museums at Night 2009 will extend across the sector, from the big national museums to smaller, regional museums, which together will reveal the rich and vibrant nature of the UK museum sector.
For further information: To access more information and download the media toolkit, press pack and publicity materials for Museums at Night visit the relevant 24 Hour Museum page Back to headlines TrebleCLEF Summer School on Multilingual Information Access Santa Croce in Fossabanda, Pisa, Italy 15-19 June 2009 http://www.trebleclef.eu/summerschool.php The aim of the Summer School is to give participants a grounding in the core topics that constitute the multidisciplinary area of Multilingual Information Access (MLIA).
The School is intended for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students, post-doctoral researchers plus academic and industrial researchers and system developers with backgrounds in Computer Science, Information Science, Language Technologies and related areas.
The focus of the school will be on 'How to build effective multilingual information retrieval systems and how to evaluate them'.
Programme The programme of the school will cover the following areas: Multilingual Text Processing Cross-Language Information Retrieval Content and Text-based Image Retrieval, including multilingualapproaches Cross-language Speech and Video Retrieval System Architectures and Multilinguality Information Extraction in a Multilingual Context Machine Translation for Multilingual Information processing Interactive Aspects of Cross-Language Information Retrieval Evaluation for Multilingual Systems and Components.
An optional student mentoring session where students can present and discuss with lecturers their research ideas will also be organised.
Accommodation and Registration A maximum of 40 registrations will be accepted.
Tuition fees are set at 200 Euros up to 30 April and 350 Euros after this date.
Tuition fees cover all courses and lectures, course material, lunch and coffee breaks during the School, the Welcome Reception on the evening of Sunday 14 June, and the Social Dinner on Monday 15 June.
Accommodation will be on the School site at Santa Croce in Fossabanda.
Financial Support for Students A number of grants will be made available by TrebleCLEF and by the DELOS Association covering accommodation costs.
Students wishing to receive a grant must submit a brief application (maximum 1 page) explaining why attendance at the school would be important for them.
The application must be supported by a letter of reference from the student's advisor /supervisor or equivalent.
For further information: Further details including the programme of lectures and information on how to register can be found at http://www.trebleclef.eu/summerschool.php or contact Carol Peters carol.peters@isti.cnr.it Back to headlines 2nd International m-libraries Conference Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 23-24 June, 2009 http://m-libraries2009.ubc.ca/ This conference aims to explore and share work carried out in libraries around the world to deliver services and resources to users 'on the move' via a growing range of mobile and hand-held devices.
The conference will bring together researchers, technical developers and library and educational practitioners to exchange experience and expertise in this dynamic service area.
The m-libraries Conference features more than 30 international speakers and social events for an early bird rate of $375 (Canadian dollars) if registered by 15 May 2009.
Featured speakers include: Sir John Daniel President and CEO, Commonwealth of Learning Lorcan Dempsey Vice-President and Chief Strategist, OCLC Ken Banks Founder of Kiwanja.net Carie Page Educause Learning Initiative Program Coordinator 22 June is an optional pre-conference workshop day, followed on 23-24 June by a full program of keynotes, sessions, activities and social events.
A number of accommodation choices are available on the UBC campus starting at $49 per night.
For further information: Web site http://m-libraries2009.ubc.ca/ or contact Maeliosa Griffin at mlibraries.2009@ubc.ca Back to headlines Report on Preservation and Access for Scientific Data The Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD) of the National Science and Technology Council's(NSTC) Committee on Science has issued a report detailing a strategy to promote preservation of, and access to, digital scientific data.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was one of the agencies that participated in the development of this report.
Kenneth Thibodeau and Robert Chadduck of the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) Program Management Office served as NARA's representatives to this group.
The report is entitled, Harnessing the Power of Digital Data for Science and Society.
It can be accessed at: http://www.nitrd.gov/about/Harnessing_Power_Web.pdf [Received: February 2009] Back to headlines Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models JISC has recently announced the availability of a report entitled Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits by John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen and Peter Sheehan, Victoria University and Charles Oppenheim, Anne Morris, Claire Creaser, Helen Greenwood, Mark Summers and Adrian Gourlay, Loughborough University.
Using an economic modelling approach, it makes a rather strong analysis of the benefits and value rather than simply costs.
For further information: JISC Announcement http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx Brief details are also available in a Times Higher Education report.
[Received: January 2009] Back to headlines The Research Library's Role in Digital Repository Services A new report is now available from the Association of Research Libraries that looks at what we have learned about the role of research libraries in Digital Repository Services, and provides an up-to-date perspective of the area in the broader context of developments in areas such as e-research.
Entitled The Research Library's Role in Digital Repository Services this document constitutes the Final Report of the ARL Digital Repository Issues Task Force.
The report is available at: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/repository-services-report.pdf [Received: January 2009] mlibrar Back to headlines Gap Analysis of Research Data Stewardship in Canada The Research Data Strategy Working Group has completed a gap analysis of research data stewardship in Canada.
Using the data lifecycle as a framework, the report examines Canada's current state versus an 'ideal state' based on existing international best practice across 10 indicators.
The indicators include: policies, funding, roles and responsibilities, standards, data repositories, skills and training, accessibility, and preservation.
The analysis reveals significant barriers to the access and preservation of research data barriers that could have a serious impact on the future of Canadian research and innovation if not addressed.
For example, large amounts of data are being lost because of the woefully inadequate number of trusted data repositories in Canada.
Stewardship of Research Data in Canada: A Gap Analysis was prepared by Kathleen Shearer with input from the national RDS Working Group.
Available at: http://data-donnees.gc.ca/eng/about/achievements.html Further information: http://data-donnees.gc.ca/eng/news/gap_analysis.html [Received: January 2009] Back to headlines Metadata Tools Report Released by DLF Aquifer The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has announced the publication of Future Directions in Metadata Remediation for Metadata Aggregators, a report that identifies and evaluates tools that can be used to normalise and enhance metadata.
Commissioned by DLF Aquifer, the report was written by Greta de Groat, electronic media cataloguer in the Metadata Development Unit of the Stanford University Libraries, and was supported by a grant from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
The report is available for download, free of charge, from the DLF Web site in early February 2009; print-on-demand copies will be sold on Amazon.com.
The report is available at: http://www.diglib.org/pubs/dlfpubs.htm The Digital Library Federation, founded in 1995, is a partnership organisation of research libraries and related organizations that are pioneering the use of electronic-information technologies to extend their collections and services.
Through its strategic and allied members, DLF provides leadership for libraries by identifying standards and 'best practices' for digital collections and network access; coordinating research and development in the libraries' use of technology; and incubating projects and services that libraries need but cannot develop individually.
Further information: More information about DLF is available at http://www.diglib.org/ [Received: February 2009] Back to headlines SURFshare Gives Researchers Active Role Focus on users in projects for knowledge dissemination via the Web Twelve innovation projects have been approved for the SURFshare Programme and will start at the end of January 2009.
All of these projects have the same objective, namely to promote knowledge dissemination via the Internet.
In this new round of projects, the SURFshare Programme allots an active role to researchers and 'lectors' (directors of research groups and knowledge networks in Universities of Applied Science): the main thing is not the infrastructure but the user.
The grant from the SURFshare Programme comes to over € 630.000 on a total budget of € 1.220.000.
The year-long innovation projects were submitted by institutions of Higher Education (HEIs).
There was a big response to the 2008 call for tenders, with HEIs submitting a total of 19 project proposals.
One condition for receiving a grant is that a project must contribute to improving the Dutch knowledge infrastructure.
In an internationally competitive knowledge economy, it is essential for the knowledge generated to find its way to researchers, educators, business and industry, and society in general.
With this new round of projects, the SURFshare Programme is taking a further step towards making research material available online, encouraging Web-based collaboration, and knowledge dissemination among 'Universities of Applied Sciences'.
The projects will go a long way towards meeting the needs of users, i.e.
scientists, scholars, and researchers, but also lectors.
The previous call for tenders (2007) in the SURFshare Programme emphasised infrastructure.
The new projects focus primarily on the user.
The infrastructure is basically in place, and it is now up to users actually to make use of it.
Highly motivated and enthusiastic project teams will started work at the end of January 2009.
Each project will do so in its own way, leading to a wide range of activities, including developing technical aids, carrying out research, improving existing experimental services, and ultimately presenting the final results to the SURFshare community and the Higher Education sector as a whole.
The twelve projects that have been awarded grants are: Knowledge dissemination at Universities of Applied Sciences National Knowledge Forum for Care and Treatment of Addiction Automotive Knowledge Bank for Universities of Applied Sciences DIGIPUB – Digital Publication environments FUTURE – Thematised Access to Expertise, Knowledge & Research for SMEs, Students and Experts Enriched publications JALC – Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries, enriched publications in Dutch archaeology DatapluS – Repositories for Enhanced Survey Publications ESCAPE – Enhanced Scientific Communication by Aggregated Publications Environments Theses Plus – Enriched theses in the Utrecht repository Veteran Tapes – Enriched publication based on multidisciplinary re-use of qualitative research files Collaboratories Tales of the Revolt Collaboratory: Sharing, Enhancing and Disseminating Sources Hublab-2 – Toward successful implementation of the Liferay platform in historical research Virtual Knowledge Studio Collaboratory – Understanding Scholarly Collaboration in Practice More information about these projects can be found at the SURF Foundation Web site.
[Received: January 2009] Back to headlines New Guidance and Insight from the UKSG Latest chapters of The E-Resources Management Handbook The UK Serials Group has recently published new chapters of The E-Resources Management Handbook, its open access guide to the issues and challenges facing those in the information community.
Two of the new chapters follow the book's original formula by providing analyses of specific areas of e-resource management.
Louise Cole, Senior Information Advisor (Collections) at Kingston University gives up-to-date guidance for UK librarians relating to copyright in the digital age.
Her chapter covers licences, digital rights management, sharing and adapting content, multimedia and open access.
Jo Cross, Market Research Manager at Taylor & Francis, provides an introduction to impact factors that explains how they are calculated and what variables need to be considered when evaluating them.
An additional five new chapters take the form of interviews with thought leaders from the information community: Stephen Abram, Vice President, SirsiDynix Martin Marlow, Vice President, Publisher Business Development and Marketing, Ingram Digital Peter McCracken, Director of Research, Serials Solutions Jim Mouw, Assistant Director,Technical and Electronic Services, University of Chicago Alison Mudditt, Executive Vice President, Higher Education Group, SAGE The interviews are designed to summarise the current state of scholarly communications while providing a broad range of insights into what the future may hold, from professionals with differing perspectives and comprehensive experience.
They provide a milestone in the handbook's evolution, and a benchmark against which future developments in e-resource management can be measured.
The E-Resources Management Handbook now incorporates 21 chapters covering licensing, statistics, archiving, resource discovery, marketing and ERM systems among many other topics.
As a "living" e-book, chapters are reviewed periodically and updated when necessary – but they are never removed, even when superceded, so that the book is an evolving record of the state of the field.
It has been described as "essential reading for anyone involved in the management and use of electronic resources" by Charles Oppenheim, Professor of Information Science, Loughborough University.
Planned updates for 2009 include chapters on peer review, repositories, e-learning and the semantic web.
Learn more, or sign up for new chapter alerts at http://www.uksg.org/serials#handbook UKSG would like thank all its volunteer authors and interviewees for sharing their expertise.
[Received: February 2009] Back to headlines ARL Publishes First e-Only Bimonthly Report, Research Library Issues The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published its first e-only bimonthly report, Research Library Issues (RLI), which now sports a new look and title.
The e-only format permits broad distribution of the articles and the introduction of new features, such as audio excerpts from speaker presentations.
The focus of the publication continues to be on the major issues that affect the ability of research libraries to meet the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve.
The first issue of RLI, no.
262 (February 2009), features two ARL statements on the university's role in the dissemination of research and scholarship, and on the global economic crisis and an article by the University of Washington's Elisabeth Jones on 'Reinventing Science Librarianship: Themes from the ARL-CNI Forum.'
In addition, ARL's Martha Kyrillidou writes on 'Redefining Serial Counts and Remaining Relevant in the 21st Century.'
RLI is a continuation of the publication ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues from ARL, CNI, and SPARC.
RLI continues the numbering of this serial with no.
262.
Current and back issues of the publication are freely available as PDFs on the ARL Web site.
The Web site is also where you may sign up for alerts of new releases of RLI and learn about submitting ideas for articles.
Further information: Research Library Issues http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/rli/ [Received: February 2009] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Rewriting the Book: On the Move With the Library of Birmingham Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Rewriting the Book: On the Move With the Library of Birmingham Buzz mobile software framework wireless infrastructure archives metadata digitisation ebook sms itunes facebook iphone ipad ict research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Gambles presents the Library of Birmingham vision and strategy for addressing the challenge of mobile digital services.
The Library of Birmingham (LoB) will open in 2013 as a world-class centre for culture, learning and knowledge, rewriting the book for public libraries in the 21st century.
'Rewriting the Book', which is integral to the new LoB brand, recognises and embraces the present and future challenge to libraries – it accepts that established means of accessing knowledge are changing rapidly and dynamically, with a significant digital dimension, and that increasingly radical responses to this challenge are demanded from leaders in the library sector.
The LoB will seek to transform perceptions of Birmingham, redefining 'the library', with an outward focus, deeply embedded in partnership working, digitally connected to the world, and servicing both local and international audiences as a platform and cultural hub for knowledge and communal exchange.
Fundamental to this change will be the delivery of digital services both inside and outside the new library with greater support for mobile communications with customers.
Mobile is commonplace today, and opens up many opportunities to enhance customer experience both inside and external to the new library.
This article describes the continuing journey of the LoB project in assessing the challenge of mobile, its relevance and how innovation could improve the visitor experience in the future.
Mobility: An Integral Part of Living Mobile services are an integral part of our daily lives and embedded in our culture.
This is never more apparent when we do not have them close to hand – a recent survey found that 40% of mobile phone users would rather lose their wallet than their mobile device.
The choice may not be available for much longer: the mobile is very likely to become your wallet in the future!
Figure 1: Library of Birmingham Design Numerous surveys demonstrate the extent of this change – from the first mobile phone in 1982 to over 5 billion phone connections worldwide and 30 million in the UK alone with 130% penetration.
Alongside this has evolved an increasingly sophisticated functionality with the "Swiss army phone" concept and a growing range of applications addressed through the software.
The human – phone interface is evolving with growing demand for touch-based interaction.
Figure 2: Mobile Technology Growth The iPhone phenomenon shows no sign of abating, with some 250,000 applications downloaded 5 billion times generating $1 billion for Apple.
Over 3 million iPads have been sold in 3 months.
A similar experience is emerging in the cultural sector with some 300,000 downloads of the National Gallery application, Love Art, in just two months.
The Louvre Application was the seventh most downloaded application globally in 2009.
The majority of applications simply act as a new way to access content or replace the classic museum audio guide, but a new generation of augmented-reality applications offers more radical opportunities for learning and knowledge enhancement: Street Museum, by Museum of London [1], overlays the capital's street's with old pictures at given locations.
Mobility now encompasses many meanings and a vast range of device types offering multiple services.
The growth of portable, lightweight computing platforms has blurred the traditional device boundaries with multi-channel access becoming commonplace.
The growth of 'cloud'-based applications, increased collaboration and participation is driving the customer experience forward in the mobile space.
The change from simple information retrieval to an enhanced customer experience is significant, with concepts such as augmented reality [2] appearing on mobile devices.
The ability to connect anywhere, the availability and very nature of media, and the whole context of mobility is rapidly changing on a global scale.
In some developing countries a whole generation of landline-based broadband technology is being passed over as the dominance of mobile access asserts itself.
Communities are already connecting using mobile devices over the Internet to share interests and information.
It is unlikely that the pace of change will slow down and customer demand and expectations will grow – with profound meaning for libraries and archives.
The Challenge to Archives and Libraries A revolution has taken place in how we read, learn and consume knowledge in the last twenty years.
This shows no sign of halting.
The combination of mobile tools in hand, ubiquitous Internet access and a vast array of ever increasing online content represents a significant challenge.
Can libraries continue to hold appeal, or is this the end of libraries?
Far from it, if we simply see the change from physical to digital as one of form but with a vastly increased user community.
For archives the online paradigm is an unprecedented opportunity the frustration of limited physical access to collections and treasures is overcome through the digital dimension.
Of course, this may not be as rewarding as the physical experience of a Shakespeare first folio but it opens up a rich treasure trove to millions, and signposts the originals.
The LoB views this challenge as a unique opportunity but one which will require significant cultural change to embrace it.
The objective for libraries and archives in the mobile arena is to make services relevant and meaningful for the mobile user but in a way that complements and enhances both the online and physical experience.
LoB on the Move: Vision and Strategy The transformed library of the not-so-new century will be perceived and accessed in a variety of ways that reflect changing lifestyles, technologies and customer expectations.
The vision must allow for and embrace the 'digital revolution' but not lose sight of the core values which have been embedded in library and archive services for generations.
Technology will continue to evolve, sometimes slowly, but sometimes in great leaps and bounds, always challenging accepted forms and formats.
In 25 years time will all services be delivered from the 'cloud'?
Will we all be reading 'plastic newspapers'?
Will wireless be the universal form of access for all devices?
Will we see a greatly reduced physical book presence?
The approach to digital mobile services fits with the overall vision for the LoB where top down service delivery and the conventional provider-recipient relationship embedded in most public services is replaced by collaborative working, enabling customers to contribute to and share in the collective knowledge and the active memory bank of the city.
This will unify the online, virtual and digital characteristics of the LoB, integrated with and complementing the physical library and supporting engagement with new customers and communities in ways that are meaningful to citizens in the digital era.
This will challenge accepted service delivery models.
Mobility will be a critical component of this change.
The strategy must entail fundamental changes in the library operation linked to digital mobile services: A Web strategy to create an holistic library Web presence with increased collaboration and community engagement with new social networking tools like Facebook having greater relevance.
A flexible and adaptable approach to service development and delivery A programme of digitisation and metadata creation A programme of staff development with an accelerating shift from traditional library work to content creation and multi-channel online customer interaction Engagement with leading operators and innovators in the mobile space to develop longer-term commercial partnerships and solutions Engagement with locally based innovators from the digital SME sector to activate and animate entrepreneurial relationships and unlock commercial potential Technology delivered to support mobile engagement with customers supported by free wireless access and rich content A diverse and engaging retailing approach to address the economic challenge of the day.
In reality the presence of mobile access throughout society is assumed and we fully anticipate that the capability and form of mobile devices will evolve – the critical factor is in the wealth of library and archive content which represents the knowledge preserved from generation to generation.
The key challenge is facilitating the customer experience through 'killer applications' via the mobile channel.
By this approach, the library can shed its recent dependence on the robustness of the device, and focus on its strengths – content and engagement.
Change Enabled by Innovation The LoB has recognised the importance of innovation in the future delivery of library and archive services.
Throughout 2009 innovation suppliers across the country were approached the better to understand how technology could apply to the LoB – mobile technology was an integral part of this.
Innovation allows us to do things in ways we could not do before: it empowers people, supports their creativity, makes them more productive and, above all, releases potential and helps people learn things they did not think they could learn before.
This is all fundamental to reinventing the whole way the library works, creating a new image of radicalism.
Birmingham Library & Archives Services has a strong tradition of social and community engagement as a platform for LoB to build upon – digital mobile opens up new ways of engagement and sharing with social and multi-cultural groups both locally and internationally.
The rapid growth of mobile access and connectivity presents a number of critical challenges to the library and archive community.
In developing a strategy for the next decade the key characteristics of mobile which are relevant to the LoB journey: Effective use of mobile in the provision of wayshowing [3] support within the new library with different levels of support from simple floor and service information to specific information and direction finding for collections and books.
Integration with city-wide GPS-based navigation to promote cultural services.
Social networking support and interaction with the library using existing services (i.e.
Facebook) and new online services as they emerge.
Enhancement of the visitor experience through digital media, content and augmented reality type services.
Migration of existing services to the mobile platform, such as library reservations.
Use of more recently established services through the mobile channel, such as email, SMS texting and Web site information.
Development of new 'library and archive service' applications to provide specialist services.
Many of the challenges of the day were reshaped and reformulated as the research progressed: the Google book digitisation programme, the e-Book in all its shapes and sizes, electronic paper, the iTunes experience, the long-term evolution of mobile technology and mobile services.
In developing a strategy for the future, each of these challenges must be addressed in the context of a changing library service.
Amazon in the US now claim 6 e-downloads for every 10 physical book sales.
At the very least this represents a sea change in how people access the written word.
With the iPad, Apple has a potential game-changer offering illustration, animation, sound and film as well as words in full colour – much more than an e-Book and with iTunes capability built in.
The LoB is now set to move forward with a number of innovation projects which will help to shape aspects of the future business model and open up commercial opportunities in ways that would have previously been impossible.
Discussions are taking place with major IT suppliers such as Microsoft around an MS Surface proof of concept which is looking to deliver both multi-media content from the library archives and content captured in the public domain.
Partnership engagement with a number of leading digital SMEs in the Birmingham area is underway with some examples of the areas currently under investigation included below.
iPad A project which is exploring the potential for using the iPad within a library context providing a highly visual image-based application making use of the iPad's excellent display capabilities.
The application will focus on the strength of the digital images with the exploration of images facilitated through an intuitive image-browsing interface.
Digital Wayshowing A digital wayshowing [3] application which provides an interactive tour of the library, accessed through the Web, on touch screens and mobile devices.
The purpose of this application is to enrich user experience whilst in the Library, efficiently guiding users to their destinations as well as providing a platform for users to take a more interactive and explorative approach to navigating the Library.
Figure 3: Library Wayshowing Application The application will use technologies including Augmented Reality [2], QR codes [4] and GPS tracking [5] to build a bridge between the real and the virtual, offering users a new and exciting platform on which to explore space and place.
Figure 4: Library Visitor Journeys iTunes U iTunes U [6] supports the application of the iTunes store approach to delivering downloaded content from the library.
This is not a new concept, having been used effectively by universities world-wide to share content, but it is relatively new to public libraries with only a handful of sites in place.
Historically, libraries have been excellent at capturing, preserving and disseminating the intellectual output of others, but not so good at doing the same with their own expertise and knowledge.
Specialist librarians often develop substantial expertise in their subject areas which is occasionally captured in a book, newspaper article or library-oriented publication, but usually it is only ever deployed in the context of customer engagement and professional networking.
Some library experts deliver public talks on specific subjects, but these talks have rarely been captured for later use.
In the main, the vast majority of library expertise is only ever expressed in a largely ephemeral way.
Delivered freely and bespoke to the precise needs of one particular library customer, library expertise is an incredibly valuable element of the library service.
Figure 5: iTunes U at New York Public Library iTunes U provides exactly the right framework through which digitised library and archives expertise could be best delivered.
With the Apple framework as a model, staff can start imagining how expertise and knowledge might be captured and disseminated far more widely.
The design and delivery of iTunes U is ideally suited to the mobile world opening up a wide range of content to library users.
Customer Experience and Mobility Customer experience is everything!
The LoB is embarking on a series of customer journey scenarios which will include the physical, digital online and mobile to fully understand how and where future customers will interact.
We fully expect this to support multi-channel access to services from the home through to the digital spaces in the new building.
The demand for a fulfilling and engaging customer experience has never been greater.
Digital services provided by archives and libraries will need increased flexibility to support online access on the move using well designed applications which allow for the continuum between fixed and mobile locations.
The challenge is around understanding the needs of the customer in terms of transactional and experiential engagement and then shaping solutions which deliver a wide range of rich content through the mobile channel.
The LoB is far from having all the answers to this challenge but our approach of engaging with innovative thinkers across the region, combined with the strengths of major ICT suppliers and the knowledge, understanding and drive from across the services represents a formidable mix in any transformation of library services.
The LoB Projects The LoB has defined a programme of ICT-enabled change projects which will establish a sound infrastructure within and external to the building, a range of core business-led projects along with the innovation projects described above.
Figure 6: The LoB ICT Projects Pyramid What Does the Future Hold The journey for the LoB has only just started.
As the building takes shape in Centenary Square a parallel change has started only a few hundred yards away in the Central Library.
Change is ultimately about people – the technology helps make the change and often enables it to happen in new ways, but without the vision and drive of the people who deliver the services it becomes just another technology fad.
How we employ the technology into current and new services to enrich the lives of visitors to the new library – both physical and digital – is the true test of our vision.
To address this challenge the LoB has defined the 'Five Libraries' concept which establishes a clear structure for change incorporating all that is good about the library concept but also embracing the need for a transformational approach to the digital agenda of the day.
Figure 7: The Five Libraries of LoB Digital There will continue to be significant changes in technology with mobile leading the way.
For example, we have considered the potential of near field communications [7] technologies in relation to the mobile customer with major developments expected over the next three years and the almost inevitable convergence of more and more services into the mobile phone.
Our exploration has confirmed changes in the way we access technology with touch and voice – this is nowhere more convincing than in the mobile arena.
What will be as important as the technology are the social trends which mobile facilitates: the increased collaboration and participation online with self-authoring and delivery of content.
Conclusion The library of the future will be very different from today – there are fundamental social, economic and technical forces driving this change.
However, if we adapt, take advantage of the technology, build sustainable partnerships, engage with communities and continue to provide meaningful services, and learn to operate effectively in the digital space, then the future looks bright.
The theme of this article is 'on the move' which captures the dynamic approach which must characterise the library of the future, carefully and strategically positioned at the point where past and future collide, and perfectly shaped to take advantage of the resulting release of forces: rewriting the book.
References Street Museum of London http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/MuseumOfLondon/Resources/app/you-are-here-app/index.html Augmented Reality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality Library Wayshowing iPhone application: American Museum of Natural History http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3quWNKB6w8 QR Codes http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/about-qr-codes/ GPS Tracking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps iTunes U in Libraries – New York City Library http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/nypl.org (Requires iTunes.)
Near Field Communications http://www.nearfieldcommunicationsworld.com/ Author Details Brian Gambles Assistant Director Culture Birmingham City Council Email: brian.gambles@birmingham.gov.uk Web site: http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/lob Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/libraryofbirmingham Return to top Article Title: "Rewriting the Book: On the Move in the Library of Birmingham " Author: Brian Gambles Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/gambles/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition Buzz data software java html database archives metadata eprints ascii perl php csv interoperability url Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin and Greg Tourte take a look at the new edition of an O'Reilly classic.
Introduction: Needles, Haystacks and Magnets Since the early days of metadata, powerful textual search methods have been, as Wodehouse’s Wooster might have put it, ‘of the essence’.
Effective use of search engines is all about understanding the use of the rich query syntax supported by that particular software.
Examples include the use of Boolean logic (AND, OR and NOT), and wildcards, such as and ?.
Search engines such as Google naturally include their own selection of rich functionality and usage tricks, and O’Reilly has a book out to cover that, too (see Phil Bradley’s review of ‘Google Hacks’ in Ariadne [1]).
In the digital library environment, methods of free-text search have gained in importance as the availability of metadata and full-text corpora such as eprints archives has increased, along with the processing power of the average Web server.
Today, all facets of search literacy are as important to the digital library as they are to data and text mining specialists, and indeed to everybody who deals with textual information.
At the core of today’s smallto mediumscale search engines, you will find a set of routines designed to query a set of records, usually an index containing information about the objects in the database, and extract appropriate results.
The chances are fairly high that those routines will make heavy use of the subject of this book: the regular expression.
The regular expression, known to its friends as the regex or regexp, is to search and manipulation of data what a powerful electromagnet is to the famous ‘needle-in-a-haystack’ metaphor; that is, an extremely powerful shortcut through an otherwise lengthy and tedious process.
Introducing Regular Expressions The introduction to this book describes regular expressions as ‘the key to powerful, flexible and efficient text processing.
Regular expressions themselves, with a general pattern notation almost like a mini-programming language, allow you to describe and parse text.
[They] can add, remove, isolate, and generally fold, spindle, and mutilate all kinds of text and data.’ The regular expression is a canny beast, with many languageor environmentspecific adaptions.
Pretty much the only constant between the various implementations out there (a phenomenon referred to in this book as ‘linguistic diversification’) is the fact that almost all regular expressions look like accidental ASCII noise on a modem connection and of course, the fact that they are all extraordinarily useful.
It is difficult to imagine life without regular expressions; they’re just too useful.
Here is an example randomly plucked from a Perl script:   $line=~/title=“(.?
)“/;   This means: “if part of the string ‘line’ contains ‘title=”…’, and if there are a number of characters after those opening quotation marks and before the closing quotation mark (which can be anything from a number to a letter to a hyphen, underscore, semicolon, etc…), please return the set of characters between the quotation marks.” This book, unlike so many technical textbooks, is a good all-rounder.
The first chapter of the book presents a general introduction to regular expressions, explaining in an accessible manner what a regular expression is and some of the specialist terminology that is in use.
Chapter 2 provides some very readable introductory text and a set of simple yet powerful examples, followed in chapter 3 by a concise history of the concept of regular expressions and general descriptions of their use; and by the development over time of the various implementations of regex ‘engines’ in chapter 4; that is, libraries providing regular expression functionality.
This makes fascinating reading for everybody who’s ever wondered why the regex functionality of UNIX tools such as grep, awk and sed don’t always line up with Perl (or, indeed, with each other).
It also underlines one fact that explains almost everything related to the regexp; computer scientists just like to hack, to make functions just a little better and more powerful.
Chapter 5 is where the book gets technical, providing a cookbook of carefully explained regex techniques and examples, such as matching of IP addresses, matching HTML tags, validating hostnames and parsing CSV files.
The following chapter provides you with all of the reasons to be cautious with your new-found knowledge, with a particular focus on efficiency of execution, benchmarking techniques and troubleshooting techniques.
Chapters 7-10 each provide extended information about ‘flavours’ of regular expressions in various languages; Perl, Java, .Net and PHP.
Learning Regular Expressions A side-effect of all this power is a great deal of potential for confusion.
Regular expressions are a major cause of stress headaches in developers.
Learning to make use of regular expressions is a challenge there’s a painful learning curve involved in the process.
Firstly, there’s a lot to memorise.
Secondly, they’re famously cryptic; depending on the implementation and the type of the regular expression engine, the behaviour may differ in a variety of baffling and unexpected ways.
Thirdly, they’re just plain hard to read.
To a great extent, the only solution is a combination of knowledge, reference and practice.
Thankfully, this book offers all three, in an up-to-date, conveniently sized package.
Aside from the expository chapters, it offers examples, quizzes and look-up tables.
Helpful conventions are explained, such as the use of the x modifier that enables comments and spacing to be placed within a regular expression, enabling regular expressions in Perl to be written with greater legibility.
For example, from page 301: $url =~ m{ href \s* = \s* # Match the “href =“part, then the value… (?
: “([^“]*)” # a double-quoted value, or… | ‘([^‘] )’ # a single-quoted value, or… | ([^‘”<>]+) ) # an unquoted value }ix;   Compare to the equivalent but uncommented rendition given below:   $url=~m/href\s=\s(?
:([^“])“|‘([^‘]*)‘|([^‘”<>]+))/i;   There’s more to this book than an applied introduction; readers will find that sections, such as the discussion of efficiency in regexps in Chapter 6, are of value in optimisation of code.
The language-specific chapters are great as a reference to keep close to hand in everyday code development, debugging and deciphering.
Those with an interest in the topic may also wish to take a look at O’Reilly’s range of pocket references though Mastering Regular Expressions may be used as a reference, it is not designed exclusively for this purpose.
The original Regular Expressions Pocket Reference [2] dating from 2003 was a little patchy in its coverage, but would work well as a quick reference for a developer with a good knowledge of regular expressions, given the option of referring back to a larger text.
It is also notable that a new edition of the Pocket Reference (2nd Edition, July 2007) has been released, with updated coverage of a wide range of platforms and implementations.
Conclusion This book is a work that should be on the desk of every programmer who deals with text analysis, almost by default.
It’s readable, informative and full of useful detail.
The subject matter is complex and technical, but the book presents information well and those with the time to work through the first chapters steadily will find they can acquire an enviable level of knowledge.
Furthermore, the closing chapters’ coverage of real-world use of regular expressions in a range of programming languages, (from the usual suspects such as Perl and PHP to Java and .Net) makes this book an essential read.
And not only for those who do not consider regular expressions as a major feature of their programming language (or for those who think of Perl as a bad habit!)
We will keep a copy of the updated 3rd edition on our desks.
We conducted a small quantitative poll of two programmers (the authors) and found that five of the last six scripts they wrote in any language involved regular expressions.
Regular expressions are too helpful to ignore.
One final, compelling argument: once you’re comfortable with them, one regexp will save you hours of work.
But if we made one small suggestion: before we get carried away designing appropriate regular expressions for all sorts of purposes, let’s all promise to comment our code… References Bradley, P, Review of: ‘Google Hacks’, Ariadne 50, January 2007 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/bradley-rvw/ Stubblevine, T, “Regular Expression Pocket Reference: First Edition”, O’Reilly, August 2003 Author Details Emma Tonkin Interoperability Focus UKOLN Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.tonkin/ Gregory J. L. Tourte Scientific Software and Systems Support Engineer School of Geographical Sciences University of Bristol Email: g.j.l.tourte@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/staff/staff_tourte.html Return to top Article Title: “Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition” Authors: Emma Tonkin and Gregory J.L.Tourte Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/tonkin-tourte-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Hold It, Hold It ... Start Again: The Perils of Project Video Production Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hold It, Hold It ... Start Again: The Perils of Project Video Production Buzz mobile software dissemination archives repositories eprints video preservation cataloguing curation podcast itunes youtube Citation BibTex RIS It's not like writing a paper.
Film production, when the camera points at you, can challenge all sorts of sensitivities.
Steve Hitchcock survived the ordeal to tell the story of the Preserv Project video.
Does anyone remember the first popular music video (emphasis on popular)?
Now, does anyone remember the first JISC project video (emphasis on, er, project)?
That is, a video about the project rather than about the subject of the project.
If not then the Preserv video [1] produced to tell the story of the JISC Preserv Project [2] might claim the prize.
If you are stunned to learn of a project with this degree of bravado, vanity or sheer recklessness to commit to this format, then it’s probably as nothing until you have seen the video.
Given the popularity of video services such as YouTube and podcast services such as iTunes, is this an idea that will catch on with other projects?
This article describes our experience so others can begin to assess some of the practicalities should they want to do the same.
Production of the Preserv video was generously sponsored by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [3], yet it is sobering to learn that some professional video editing software can cost 100 times more than our entire budget.
That has obvious implications for the production values of the video.
No it won’t be Casino Royale; it won’t even be Honey, We’re Killing the Kids.
Resources So what do you need to produce a video on limited resources, both financial and technical?
Firstly you want people who know how to manage a video project, as well as operate the audio-visual equipment.
Most people reading this article work in institutions, some large and diverse, so probably colleagues with experience can be found somewhere.
Seek them out.
At Southampton University, in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) [4], our starting point was the School’s Marketing and Communications team, including team manager Joyce Lewis, Sarah Prendergast, and David Tarrant, a PhD student, clearly destined for greater things in the media.
A brilliant team.
They not only set up the camera, charge the battery, mind the tapes, and mike up the participants.
They produce, choose the shot locations and, not least, become mentor and advisor to enthusiastic but amateur performers.
Overall, they bring authority and experience.
Where did the idea for a project video come from?
Originally the DCC wanted to develop a curation and preservation seminar series and invited projects from the JISC 404 preservation programme [5] to pilot the series.
What caught our attention was the idea of recording the seminars.
We agreed to present a filmed seminar for DCC in Glasgow at the start of 2007, as the project came to its conclusion.
The difficulties of liaising on production issues led us to relocate filming to Southampton, but we had just moved to a new building on the University’s Highfield campus and the audio-visual studios were in the process of being fully equipped.
Instead, David suggested we think about producing a video podcast.
Preserv had a number of important partners, and we recognised immediately that with this new approach we were in a position to include a larger number of colleagues from across the participating institutions.
We could tell the story of the project through its people rather than through one or two presenters.
The School of ECS began producing news videos in 2006, presented through its ECS-TV [6] Web site.
A number of these videos emanated from the 15th International World Wide Web Conference, which the School organised in Edinburgh in May that year.
In another notable video, Professor Greg Parker was interviewed introducing his exhibition of remarkable astronomical photographs (ECS News July 2006).
ECS is the first school at Southampton to use videos as communications tools, and we believe it is the first school anywhere in the UK to do so.
Even ECS had not produced a project video until Preserv, however, so that might back up our claims to be the first JISC project video too.
At first entire programmes were filmed in one take and simply produced in the correct video format.
With the Preserv Project the production team had the opportunity to take this to a new level, filming in several locations with many people, with presenters to top-and-tail the main content once all the other content had been filmed.
Practical Tips In the expectation that project videos might represent a new wave of project dissemination, here are some tips and tricks from our experience, a few of which might help you make your own way forward in this area.
Your people are your assets You aren’t going to have great editing resources, in terms of time or money, or special effects to fall back on, so you have to make use of the one resource that all projects have, their people.
The first effect of switching from filmed seminar to video podcast was that potentially all partners in the project could be represented.
In Preserv, our team includes experts from world-renowned institutions: The British Library (BL), The National Archives (TNA) and Oxford University.
Tell a story: Storyboard We decided not to use an interview-style Question & Answer approach, but to invite participants to tell their part of the project story in their own words.
Each contribution has to be framed and co-ordinated by a prior understanding of where it fits in the development of the whole story.
This is where the storyboard comes in.
It amounted simply to a series of ‘shot cards’, written on old library-style catalogue cards, describing who would be in each shot, where it was to be taken, and what the shot was to be about.
Since shots are rarely perfect first time, the same shot may be recorded a number of times, with the producer noting each ‘take’ and its timing on the card.
A presenter might be asked to talk about his or her role in the project; if the presenter is to appear in more than one shot, the brief for each shot has to be more specific.
The order of the shot cards defines the presentation order of the edited video, and every shot has to be captured and accounted for.
As the credited writer I wrote the storyboard, not what was said by the participants.
The storyboard, as implemented here by shot cards, is the critical tool in the production process.
It informs the whole team producer, director, and presenters and without it direction and co-ordination would break down.
Storyboarding also makes the editing process easier.
Clips were captured and correctly ordered in Final Cut Studio our editing package [7], which is a professional-level editing package that costs hundreds rather than thousands of pounds, and is reported to be used in production by local television stations before being cut down to try and keep the story coherent and interesting; cue, inevitably, disputes between editor and director!
Eventually a final draft was agreed and then came the additional processes of adding transitions, music, voiceovers and name banners before, finally, the credit sequence and out-takes.
Find a good producer Filming challenges sensitivities in ways for which most projects, other than through the more fiery listservs, do not prepare us.
A good producer will get the best from a cast, understanding when to praise mostly in the case of this video and occasionally when to castigate.
So who was the recipient of the admonishment that gives this article its title?
Me of course.
All shots were to be complete within one take, so that ideally no in-shot editing is needed.
By getting tongue-tied, drying up, or blurting out the wrong word in the umpteenth take, even an edit-averse producer will try to avoid starting the shot again.
Ours calmly advised, “hold it, hold, it … pause and keep absolutely still, now carry on from where you stopped”.
That was before spotting the slightest movement on my part which meant that continuity and the take were lost; and, understandably, uttering the frustrated cry that the Ariadne editor removed from my article title on the grounds it was inappropriate for an international audience.
Participants: prepare what you want to say, but don’t script The storyboard is used to brief participants, who are further directed at the time of filming.
Between these two stages participants will prepare, to different degrees, what they want to say.
It seems counter-intuitive to advise them not to script what they plan to say.
My unfortunate experience, related above, shows why you should not script what you say.
Scripting takes away spontaneity, and this is hard to disguise by those not trained as actors.
The more exacting requirements of performing to a script means more mistakes, because you have something to deviate from, and so forcing more takes.
Plan well; if it can go wrong, it will Traffic chaos will ensue, and contractors will turn up with noisy equipment at just the moment you want to start filming.
It’s a cliché, it’s obvious, and it happened to us too!
We wanted to do some outside filming, and the BL and TNA kindly offered fine picturesque locations.
We filmed at both locations on the same day, with a carefully worked out schedule.
We left Southampton in the dark hours, and arrived just over 80 miles (130 km) away at the BL in London … 5 hours later.
It might have been quicker to go to Glasgow after all.
Panic and diversions completely overwhelmed our vehicle’s satellite navigation system.
Fortunately our participants were less fazed, and stoically endured those few extra hours in the BL coffee shop.
Get the permissions You cannot film anywhere you like, especially not at public institutions, unless you want to attract the attention of the resident security heavyweights.
Obtaining permissions can take longer than you think TNA asks for at least two weeks notice unless you have insider contacts, in which case they might even turn on the fountains for you.
At the BL we were told not to interview or interfere with the public, to which broadly we were inclined to adhere.
Although on spotting that a tour party had positioned itself behind one of our filming locations, and was intending to stay another 15 minutes, we politely persuaded them to move on purely for continuity reasons you understand after the traffic hold-ups of the morning we just didn’t have time to wait.
A wardrobe assistant can help Continuity can be a problem in visual productions.
Take, for example, the tale of Tim Brody’s segments.
We began filming Tim, towards the end of a February afternoon, in front of a window.
Before his final section could be completed, the producer noticed that, with darkness falling, we were picking up reflections from the window panes behind our subject.
Consequently Tim had to be ready to continue two days later; and, for continuity purposes, looking exactly the same as in the initial filming: no hair cut, same clothes.
Be prepared for ridicule For us this is yet to come, after the launch of the video, perhaps; so we can’t advise directly, for the moment.
No doubt novel ways will be found to manipulate such works for general hilarity.
Just don’t tell your children about it.
For those inclined towards more serious appraisal, bear in mind that we were not just novices; we didn’t even have the benefit of a screen test.
You might think that those rather passé out-takes presented alongside the closing credits are there for your amusement.
For those involved, they are considerably therapeutic.
As a colleague told us, they show you’re actually not as stuffy as you look in the film.
Give it a try You never know what you can achieve.
In retrospect is seems incredible that all our project partners signed up to the idea straight away, and didn’t question the premise that we might all be just a little bit inexperienced at this type of thing.
Neil Jefferies of Oxford University is clearly a natural.
After being placed in rather an awkward position beside a replica of an historical printing press on display at the British Library, Neil looked down, composed himself, and then simply reeled off his contribution in one take.
Helen Hockx-Yu of JISC glanced nervously at her notes during a couple of takes, then put the notes away and found it much less daunting.
Adam Farquhar of the BL didn’t need his notes; it’s more a question of where to stop than where to start with Adam.
Apparently I’m a director now.
To think, before being involved in this video I didn’t even know what a director was!
I won’t be giving up the day job just yet, but I’d like to do another video, and hopefully I’ve learned enough to do better next time.
Should you tire of listening to our video, mute the sound and you will see plenty of positive body language.
Even if you learn nothing about digital preservation and institutional repositories, you’ll recognise that we were honest, and, for the most part, having fun too.
Conclusion If, in comparison with the production of a podcast, this process sounds complex, that’s because it is; podcasts typically require considerably less work.
Off-the-shelf equipment is available to allow you to produce a simple podcast (Apple Macs come with the video editing software built-in) and you can even use your mobile phone to film the content, rather than needing a camera costing thousands of pounds, as used for the Preserv video.
Of course, the YouTube generation already knows this.
Moreover, it was only 10 years ago, or so, that we started producing project Web pages and placing our papers on the Web.
They may not have been the best examples of Web production, and production values have improved enormously since then; but those papers were noticed.
I suspect that, whatever the quality, novelty value will do the same for project videos, if only briefly.
Beyond that we will all have to develop our audio-visual skills, sharpen our wits to anticipate cultural trends, and make sure we are sufficiently de-sensitised to join in.
A Final Word My thanks of course to the entire cast of the Preserv Project video, in order of appearance: Jessie Hey Helen Hockx-Yu Les Carr Adam Farquhar Adrian Brown Tim Brody Neil Jefferies By the way, sorry, Tim.
Filming has overrun again.
Can you come back tomorrow?
And don’t forget to wash and iron those shirts again.
References The Preserv Project video: Warning!
Embedded video player plugin starts to download the video on loading this Web page http://preserv.eprints.org/video-coverpage.html JISC Preserv (Preservation Eprints Services) Project Enabling long-term open access to materials in institutional repositories http://preserv.eprints.org/ Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ JISC digital preservation and asset management strand (404 programme) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_preservation/programme_404.aspx ECS-TV http://www.zepler.tv/podcasts.php Apple Final Cut Studio http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/ Author Details Steve Hitchcock School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Hold It, Hold It … Start Again: The Perils of Project Video Production” Author: Steve Hitchcock Publication Date: 30-April-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 51 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/hitchcock/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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SHERPA to YODL-ING: Digital Mountaineering at York Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SHERPA to YODL-ING: Digital Mountaineering at York Buzz data software framework dissemination archives metadata digitisation repositories copyright preservation multimedia ead streaming vle licence authentication interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Julie Allinson and Elizabeth Harbord describe the development of digital repositories for the University of York.
The University Library & Archives' first venture into digital repositories was as part of the White Rose partnership in the original SHERPA Project [1].
Leeds, Sheffield and York universities have had a research partnership for some years and the library services became a consortial partner in SHERPA in 2002 to set up a joint e-prints repository called White Rose Research Online (WRRO) [2] .
During the project which ran from 2002-2006, advocacy about Open Access and the need for wider dissemination of research outputs got underway at York.
At the same time the University was rolling out implementation of an institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) [3] and it became clear that the University had a number of actual or potential digital resources which could not be appropriately accommodated in either WRRO or the VLE content management system.
These resources included still and moving images, sound recordings and archives which were dispersed round the University in different departments.
The case for bringing them together in a centralised service was made on the grounds that it would avoid duplication, enable reuse and provide an efficient way of managing the complex elements involved such as digitisation, copyright, storage and backup, metadata, preservation, access, authentication and cross-searching.
As a result York decided in 2006 to set up its own multimedia repository now called the York Digital Library (YODL) [4], alongside WRRO and the VLE.
Start-up funding was secured from JISC for the SAFIR Project [5] but three years of development work was funded from a special University grant.
Since 2006, York's contribution to WRRO and the development of YODL has progressed in tandem and both aspects are discussed in more detail below.
SHERPA, WRRO and e-Theses In 2002 when the opportunity to participate in the SHERPA Project arose, we had little experience of digital repositories, apart from the Archaeology Data Service [6] run within the Department of Archaeology.
A consortial approach in which the costs and expertise needed to set up a repository could be shared was therefore attractive.
Leeds offered to host and run the server and a joint project officer was appointed funded equally by all three White Rose universities.
Although there have been occasional differences in approach between the three universities, the White Rose research 'brand' is seen as valuable and adding to rather than detracting from the institutional need for each to showcase its own research.
This collaboration has proved beneficial in the longer term and the advantages of keeping the consortial approach were recognised by establishing WRRO as an ongoing service after the SHERPA Project finished.
York has continued to work with Leeds and Sheffield to develop advocacy, ingest more content and attempt to embed the deposit of research publications into the research process.
A further JISC project, IncReASe [7], has just recently been completed and has highlighted areas for further work such as: Renewed advocacy, since levels of awareness and understanding of 'open access' are still very low Interoperability between WRRO, and other institutional systems for authentication and wider research management issues, especially in relation to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) Provision of a simple interface to enable a researcher to deposit a paper only once, whether in a subject-based or institutional repository and for it to be available in other appropriate repositories e-Theses As WRRO began to grow and its value in disseminating research was recognised, the question of including theses was raised.
National developments with e-theses, culminating in the launch of EThOSnet [8] in January 2009, supported this development.
Work to enable WRRO to accept theses started in 2008, as Sheffield had changed its regulations to require e-submission from October 2008 and a separate instance of the e-prints software was set up called White Rose Etheses Online (WREO) [9].
At York a proposal to require e-submission has been going through the consultation and committee approval process during this academic year, and we expect that change to be in place for postgraduates registering from October 2009 onwards.
The response from students and staff has generally been very favourable and has provided an opportunity to reinforce good practice in the areas of copyright compliance and avoiding plagiarism.
Towards a Digital Library Service for York Work on YODL began in August 2007 and in the 18 months since then we have progressed from ideas and planning through to a functioning beta service with over 7,000 items.
Figure 1: Screenshot showing YODL BETA YODL: From Requirements to Software From the start, YODL set out to work with users to design a system which was both needed and usable.
Gathering user requirements to inform our software selection was a first step for the project and was an ideal opportunity for the new team to start meeting academics and other potential users.
As part of this process we assembled an 'Advisory Group' comprising interested members of York's academic community, and some additional representatives from related services, such as WRRO.
From meetings with those, and with their colleagues, we assembled a list of requirements for a repository system, augmented with findings from desk-research into digital libraries.
The outcome of this activity was a document with two purposes [10]: firstly, it offered a high-level model for our digital library, which took a more abstract view of purpose, scope and functions; and secondly a list of detailed requirements which became part of an Invitation to Tender (ITT), sent out to various software companies.
Of course, gathering requirements and advocating YODL to users is an ongoing process and we continue to work towards an embedded and integrated service.
YODL: Going Open Source The outcome of our software selection was to choose Fedora Commons [11], an open source repository architecture whose principal feature is flexibility.
This decision was influenced by several factors.
Although a number of commercial offerings exist for multimedia repositories, none had quite the suite of features we wanted.
In addition, as a project we had the capacity to take risks and our Steering Group took a strategic decision to commit to development here at York, rather than spend our budget on commercial software.
Such an approach is not without challenges – recruiting developers, building skillsets, fire-fighting bugs and other technical problems as well as monitoring developments in small open source communities have all demanded creative solutions and occasioned much head-scratching.
YODL: Stuff, What Stuff?
A digital library is not a digital library without content, and we have no shortage of identified collections.
Our initial pilot collection has been History of Art images.
Frustratingly, much of this content needs fine-grained access control to comply with licence restrictions, which has meant a lot of work on implementing access control mechanisms and ingesting material for a relatively small number of users.
Nonetheless, supporting students is a key mission and we are very close to a fully rolled-out access-controlled collection of over 7,000 images for use by staff and students in History of Art.
Beyond that, we have focused heavily on images so far and have reused our metadata creation and image ingestion workflows for a number of smaller collections, including images taken through the course of research by academics and research students as well as a digitised manuscript from our Borthwick Institute for Archives, with more to follow.
Going beyond YODL, the digital library service has taken responsibility for co-ordinating digitisation activities for the Library & Archives and helping colleagues to put together proposals for building content collections which YODL would host, manage and deliver.
Music is our next focus, and we have a large collection of high-quality rare recordings which are currently being digitised and will come en masse to the Digital Library this year.
This will allow us to explore new ways of delivery through York's streaming service.
YODL: Working with Users: A Case Study Our collaboration with the History of Art Department is an interesting example of working with users.
Traditionally, teaching was carried out using slides, but increasingly use is being made of scanned images stored on local PCs in the slide library, scanned by departmental staff.
The History of Art image collections were selected as our pilot collection for the SAFIR Project principally because they are so heavily used.
Initially we had planned to digitise many of their existing slides, but it quickly became apparent that licensing and quality issues would make this difficult.
Moreover, the usage of these slides was falling away in favour of images scanned under the Copyright Licensing Agency licence, along with other images taken by individual academics.
In order to support the Department following the resignation of their departmental slide assistant, the Library offered an image service, with a view to migrating digital content into YODL.
This initiative would reduce the need for a physically staffed slide library over time.
It has involved digitising images, setting up a workflow for uploading new digital images, assessing the slide collections for possible digitisation, supporting users in the Department and trying to ensure that staff are aware of copyright and licensing restrictions.
It has been a very successful collaboration.
For the Digital Library team, we have gained an unprecedented understanding of the needs of academics and students within the Department, while the Department has benefited from the support of professional Library staff.
Over the next year we will move both staff and students over to using YODL for access to images.
Although we anticipate that this process will not be universally smooth – culture change never is – we are hoping that established relationships and a continued commitment to supporting the Department will help us to make a successful transition.
YODL: Architecting the System Choosing Fedora has given us the flexibility to design a system from the ground up.
Fedora provides an architecture for storing and managing objects, and access to a growing and active community of developers.
What it does not provide, however, is a single simple way to do things, or an out-of-the box interface.
This does mean that we are free to design an interface for our users, both a blessing and a curse when trying to choose the best way to proceed from a myriad of options.
One early decision we made was to experiment with Muradora [12], a user interface and access control layer for Fedora.
Less developed than Fedora and with a smaller user base, Mura does pose difficulties and we are uncertain about its long-term future.
What it has provided us, though, is a place to start: that is, an interface to show to our users; and, with some technical development, a mechanism for controlling access to resources in quite complex and fine-grained ways.
In all of this aspect of our work, support from colleagues from Computing Service has been crucial, and a growing network of connections with technical and support staff across the University is helping with integration tasks.
Our immediate future work has been helped by a further JISC grant for a technical enhancement project called YODL-ING (YOrk Digital Library Integration for the Next Generation).
This will allow us to explore some technical ways of populating and managing YODL.
Integration and interoperability are high on the list of priorities for this project, which has, on the ingest side, a SWORD-based [13] one-stop deposit client which will allow content to be deposited simply, employing one desktop or Web-based tool with the underlying system pushing the content to the most appropriate system using the SWORD protocol.
Additionally, we are looking to provide enhanced methods of accessing content, including a means of selecting YODL content from within our VLE.
Access control will again feature in future activity as we want to work towards a more sustainable mechanism for controlled access based on specific licence requirements.
YODL and the Spoke : Working with Archives Another strand of recent activity is working with the Borthwick Institute for Archives to manage its online delivery of archival finding aids.
We are currently implementing York's own local Archives Hub spoke, which will serve up EAD documents to the national Archives Hub service [14].
We also plan to devise more accessible stylesheets for viewing and printing finding aids.
Moreover, we will investigate how to tie together the hierarchical collection descriptions of manuscript pages with digitised images held in YODL.
Conclusions and Future Plans For the Digital Library team, the last few years have been an exciting time.
In a new and developing area we have appreciated the value of collaboration, both within the University, with our White Rose colleagues and with others in the Open Source community, from whom we have learnt a great deal.
In some cases, as with WRRO, a consortial approach may be the answer; in others such as YODL, an institutional approach is appropriate.
Working with Open Source enables locally tailored development but is heavily reliant on good technical support.
We have learnt the hard way that however much advocacy you do, it is never enough unless the process of depositing content is easy and embedded in the academic process.
The Digital Library project has quickly become a service-in-development.
Offering a digitisation and slide library service to History of Art was not part of the original project plan, and has been challenging when developing systems, processes and services from scratch.
However, the opportunity to work with users has been invaluable.
Moving into work with the Borthwick Institute for Archives has added another element to our service, and looking at the Library's needs for scanning and delivering book chapters and articles has offered a much broader user base for exploring requirements.
Beyond the JISC project, in August 2010, YODL will become a permanent service.
Furthermore, by then it is hoped we will be offering truly hybrid services, providing different interfaces into a range of content, with a mixture of open access and access-controlled resources.
References Sherpa Project http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/projects/sherpa.html White Rose Research Online http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ YorkShare VLE: http://vlesupport.york.ac.uk/ York Digital Library http://dlib.york.ac.uk/yodl SAFIR http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres/sue/safir.aspx Archaeology Data Service http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ IncReASe http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/increase/ EThOS http://ethos.bl.uk White Rose eTheses Online http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/ YODL Requirements Specification https://vle.york.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/xid-89716_3 Fedora Commons http://www.fedora.info/ Muradora http://www.muradora.org/muradora SWORD http://swordapp.org/ Archives Hub http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/ Author Details Julie Allinson Digital Library Manager Library & Archives University of York Email: ja546@york.ac.uk Web site: xhttp://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ja546/ Elizabeth Harbord Head of Operations and Services Library & Archives University of York Email: eah8@york.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "SHERPA to YODL-ING: Digital Mountaineering at York" Author: Julie Allinson and Elizabeth Harbord Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/allinson-harbord/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digitising an Archive: The Factory Approach Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digitising an Archive: The Factory Approach Buzz data software database archives metadata digitisation browser copyright video preservation windows multimedia flash avi wav quicktime mp3 drm codec mpeg-2 ftp mpeg-4 mpeg-1 standards Citation BibTex RIS Duncan Burbidge describes a new approach to digitising an archive both as a future-proof substitute and for Web delivery.
The FP6 PrestoSpace Project [1] aims to develop systems that will permit quick, efficient and economically accessible preservation of analogue media [2].
Stream UK has built on the knowledge gained from three years of working on this project along with expertise from over seven years encoding within the industry to develop a complete encoding factory solution, based on the PrestoSpace project where the focus is on developing a semi-automated 'preservation factory' approach to preservation of audio-visual collections aimed at driving down the cost of digitising the archive below the 1€ per minute level.
The solution is housed in a stand-alone rack unit and includes barcode tracking of tapes through the system to allow archive owners to take an existing collection of off-line material and convert it into a high-quality archive and a Web-ready preview format including all existing metadata and maintaining an overview of the process via the barcode tracking system which produces a searchable interface that can be accessed via a LAN or Internet connection.
Each unit includes: A stand-alone encoding system built into a portable rack unit Barcode tracking of tapes The facility to import metadata Live video capture in multiple formats Deck control via a frame-accurate RS232 interface Batch processing of multiple encoded clips simultaneously Encoding to all formats MPEG1 & 2 (4:2:2 & 4:2:0 at up to 80Mbps), Windows Media, Quicktime, Real, MPEG4, WAV, AVI, Flash, MP3 Import from and export to an image sequence Email notification and FTP distribution Noise reduction, colour correction, horizontal and vertical filtering.
Figure 1: The Stream UK Encoding Factory This article looks at: Tracking the process of digitisation from tape to fully indexed archive; The encoding technology behind the system; Storage of the archive; Encoding formats that are available; and A conclusion on the whole process.
Complete Tracking of the Process During the encoding of an archive, maintaining control of the assets and an overview of the process is essential.
Stream UK has developed an interface which allows: Existing metadata to be entered; Individual tapes to be tracked via barcodes; and An overview of the status to be accessed via a normal Web browser.
Any tape that is introduced to the system goes through a five-step process: Any metadata that exists in electronic format is imported into the database.
If this includes editing points then these will be recognised by the system.
A barcode is added to the tape and scanned into the system.
The tape is inserted into the player and the appropriate encoding profiles selected.
When the tape has finished encoding (real-time) it is removed from the system.
The status of the job is recorded on the board.
The Encoding Technology The engine that powers the Stream UK Encoding Factory is based on the Digital Rapids [3] range of hardware encoders.
These encoding cards are considered by experts to be the best solution for obtaining a digital format from a non-digital source and include the facility to ingest via SDI-capture [4].
Figure 2: The Encoding Administration Area The key video features of the hardware video processors include: Key Video Processing Features Motion adaptive de-interlacing 3:2 and 2:2 film process de-interlacing 3D (temporal) noise reduction 2D (spatial) noise reduction Independent horizontal and vertical filtering Aspect ratio conversion Proc-amp controls Different cards are available to support hardware MPEG-2 or MJPEG 2K encoding for the archive, with ingest being either via an in-built player or via inputs attached to the breakout panel.
All encoding is done in real-time, with deck-control allowing hands-free operation.
The Factory will plug in directly to any robotics-based playout system.
Figure 3: Details of Individual Tapes Storage of the Archive Storage of a multimedia archive needs to be appropriate to the use that media is put to.
The increasing affordability of disk storage makes RAID5 an ideal option for both the high-quality archive and the Web-ready fomats.
According to the PrestoSpace Storage Media Quality Assurance report [5], RAID5 offers the ideal combination of access speed, price and reliability.
The Stream UK Encoding Factory comes with a standard 2 terabytes of storage included, enough for around 100 hours of archive footage encoding in both high-quality archive (MPEG-2 25Mpbps, for example) and preview formats.
Additional storage is available within the same chassis up to 1 petabyte.
Encoding Formats Stream UK will work with the archive owner to develop a complete set of appropriate profiles for the encoding formats.
Any archive owner seeking to digitise will need to select formats that are appropriate to the end-user.
Normally this means: a high-quality archive that is suitable for: future transcoding; and as a direct replacement for the original off-line copies.
A preview-quality archive that is suitable for users to see what is available in the full archive.
The Stream UK Encoding Factory supports all of the following formats, including support for Windows Media DRM.
The table below provides a summary of the comparisons between the various formats: Table 1 Comparison of Encoding Formats Format Comments Use MPEG-1 Part of the Motion Pictures Experts Group [6] set of formats, MPEG-1 has now been superceded by some of the later profiles.
It does still have advantages in terms of playability across a wide range of software clients, but it has been left behind in terms of quality any preview material needs to be encoded, stored and delivered at a comparitively high bit-rate.
MPEG-1 is good for preview encoding at bit-rates from 500Kbps to 2Mbps.
MPEG-2 Still the benchmark for hig-quality archive encoding.
Although MPEG-2 is a lossy format (meaning that some of the original information is thrown away by the encoding process), data-rates over about 20Mbps result in excellent quality.
Parameters such as GOP need to be chosen with care.
MPEG-2 is the standard for a wide range of applications across the entire A/V industry including all the transcoding software, playout over broadcast channels, editing suites etc.
Archive-quality footage can also be easily viewed on a standard PC.
MPEG-2 is good for archive encoding at bit-rates from 8Mbps to 80Mbps.
MPEG-4 This codec belongs to the next generation of encoding profiles, along with the common proprietory formats like Windows Media.
The quality is comparable and MPEG-4 is supported by a wide range of platforms.
Digital rights management and copyright issues remains outstanding.
MPEG-4 is good for preview encoding at bit-rates from 200Kbps to 2Mbps.
MJPEG 2K This is a relatively new codec and it is only in 2006 that some of the major encoding card manufacturers began to implement the scheme within hardware encoding cards.
Encoding in MJPEG 2K is lossless, which is attractive to many archives.
Playback is not yet possible on normal PCs but transcoding gives excellent results.
MJPEG 2K results in bit-rates of around 80Mbps.
Windows Media 9 Windows Media 9 is the proprietory codec with the highest market penetration, it can be viewed by around 73% of all Internet-connected computers.
This codec is also very useful for preview-quality encoding since the DRM capabilities are the most advanced and allow content owners to maintain control of assets even through open systems.
Later versions of editing software can edit this format natively.
Windows Media is good for preview encoding at bit-rates from 200Kbps to 2Mbps.
Quicktime There is no single QuickTime format, but the .mov file extension includes a range of codecs of which the Sorenson 3 video codec and the Qdesign2 audio codec are leading the way.
Quality is comparable with Windows Media and Mpeg-4 although a shade lower for most types of footage.
QuickTime is easily viewable by those with Apple OS, something that is often attractive to the creative or educational sectors.
Editing support is good from all major providers, as is transcoding support.
Suitable for both preview quality and archive quality at a range of bit-rates from 200Kbps to 30Mbps.
The QuickTime formats are well supported by the professional edit suites available.
Quality of transcoding is not as high as for MPEG-2 and MJPEG 2K.
Conclusion The conversion of an archive into digital format is one of the most important steps that the owner will ever take.
Essential to this process is the correct choice of process and equipment.
The Stream UK Encoding Factory allows archive owners to take control over the choices presented to them and to use an expert resource before and during the process.
The solution as presented is most suitable for archives that have between 50 and 500 hours of footage to digitise, although multiple units can be integrated for larger archives.
References PrestoSpace Project http://www.prestospace.org Daniel Teruggi, "Can We Save Our Audio-visual Heritage?
", April 2004, Ariadne Issue 39. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/teruggi/ Digital Rapids PCI cards http://www.digital-rapids.com/Products_PCICards.html Editor's note: SDI = Serial Digital Interface PrestoSpace Storage Media Quality Assurance report http://www.prestospace.org/project/deliverables/D12-6.pdf Motion Pictures Experts Group: http://www.mpeg.org Author Details Duncan Burbidge Director Stream UK Media Service Limited Email: duncan@streamuk.com Web site: http://www.streamuk.com Return to top Article Title: "Digitising an Archive: The Factory Approach" Author: Duncan Burbidge Publication Date: 30-April-2006  Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/burbridge/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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eResearch Australasia 2008 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eResearch Australasia 2008 Buzz data software framework database wireless restful dissemination portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation browser identifier schema repositories copyright video preservation visualisation shibboleth curation e-science e-research interoperability plone research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tobias Blanke, Ann Borda, Gaby Bright and Bridget Soulsby report on the annual eResearch Australasia Conference, held in Melbourne, Australia, 29 September 3 October, 2008.
The following overview of eResearch Australasia 2008 by Ann Borda is intended to give a sense of the diversity of the programme and key themes of the Conference at a glance.
A selection of workshops and themes are explored in more detail by fellow contributing authors in the sections below: Bridget Soulsby on the 'Data Deluge', Gaby Bright on 'Uptake of eResearch' and Tobias Blanke on 'Arts & Humanities eResearch'.
The full eResearch Australasia 08 programme and copies of the speaker presentations are now accessible on the Conference Web site [1].
In brief, this marks the second year as an annual event for eResearch Australasia.
The Conference was held in the city of Melbourne and provided another very rich programme of featured speakers, demonstrations and workshops from across the Australian and international eResearch community.
About 400 participants came together during the course of the event.
In particular, the event offered delegates a number of opportunities, namely in its role as: A catalyst for innovation and collaboration, by bringing together the architects, builders, users, and managers of eResearch infrastructures and services; A forum to support the development, enhancement, and harmonisation of national, regional, and discipline-specific eResearch infrastructures and services; A showcase for innovative science and research supported by these technologies and services.
These opportunities were equally matched by the national importance of the eResearch agenda in general as reflected in its visible support by the Australian Government through the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) [2] and the Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council (AeRIC) [3].
The recent growth of investment in eResearch activities in Australia has historically drawn inspiration (and its drivers) among developments in the US, UK and Europe.
The international keynote presentations did not disappoint in this regard.
They consistently provided a range of perspectives that had certain resonances among the audiences – and eResearch practitioners.
Speaker highlights included: Graham Cameron, Associate Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory Sayeed Choudhury, Hodson Director of the Digital Knowlege Center, Johns Hopkins University Michael Fulford, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading Kerstin Lehnert, Director of the Geoinformatics for Geochemistry Program at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science, Creative Commons There were also lively and complementary sessions, such as The AeRIC eResearch Forum, a town meeting style session which looked beyond existing initiatives for fresh ideas in innovation; and a provocative Cloud Infrastructure Services panel featuring Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of External Research, Microsoft Research [4].
This year the Conference had a notably strong data thread which underpinned many of the presentations.
For instance, keynote speaker, John Wilbanks spoke of his work with neurocommons.org [5], which seeks to make scientific work as accessible and useful as possible by employing the latest semantic Web technologies to bring together multiple databases and link their contents to a fine-grained level of detail across taxonomies.
In the words of Wilbanks, 'eResearch is a requirement imposed on us by the flood of data.'
Similarly, Graham Cameron of the European Bioinformatics Institute [6] discussed the emergence of eScience as a unifying theme bridging disciplines, sharing solutions, and legitimising the field of Bioinformatics which has evolved in its role in tackling complex information needs.
The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) [7] Workshop brought together a number of the recurring data issues for discussion.
Arising from the Workshop sessions, there was a consensus that data management plans (DMPs) were especially important and that it would be useful to develop template DMPs, along with assisting selected research projects in formulating a DMP of their own [8].
These plans then would be made available online for other projects to use and adapt.
A second thread running through the Conference focused on eResearch enablers.
For instance, two Australian state funded initiatives are showing the ways in which eResearch can facilitate better research, collaboration and resource sharing across research groups and institutions.
VeRSI (the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative) [9], funded by the Victorian government, and Intersect [10], funded in part by New South Wales, are developing exemplars in this space and leading the way for other inter-institutional and collaborative partnerships.
The need to leverage more existing infrastructure and resources became a central discussion point for participants in a workshop attended by members from Australian and New Zealand research organisations.
Exploratory activities involving eResearch collaboration across the 'Tasman' are already underway – and future support needs for education, outreach and training were among the potential partnership areas identified for follow-up discussion.
Enabling tools and associated demonstrators were represented in a few of the talks.
Ron Chernich (University of Queensland) spoke about 'A Generic Schema-Driven Metadata Editor for the eResearch Community'.
The Schema-based metadata editor (MDE) is a lightweight (Web 2.0) client which builds on ten years of previous editor experience and is available as a downloadable release [11].
Specfic collaboration tools provided as part of the ARCS [12] service and desktop modelling tools for structural geology were among the offerings.
The opportunities provided to scientists through remote access to national facilities and instruments were successfully demonstrated through the Virtual Beamline Project [13] which supports protein crystallographers working at the Australian Synchrotron.
Building infrastructure and research capability comprised several of the strands, ranging from federated identity infrastructures to gridded data delivery supporting the IMOS (Integrated Marine Observing System) Satellite Remote Sensing Facility.
High-performance computing (HPC) and the potential benefits to researchers at Monash University highlighted the institutional context.
In particular, the HPC landscape is in a state of growth in Australia with the recent launch of a A$100m Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative.
Featured speaker, Prof. Justin Zobel, presented on the initiative which promises to be one of the largest supercomputing facilities in the world dedicated to supporting life sciences research [14].
Although there remains a considerable focus on 'science' disciplines and applications, the Conference had a dedicated strand related to eResearch developments in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
This was a marked and refreshing difference to last year's event.
Prof. Michael Fulford from Reading University (UK) led the list of plenary speakers with a discourse on a virtual research environment (VRE) for archaeologists.
Fulford's presentation struck a chord across the subject domains and key themes represented at the Conference.
Also from the UK, speakers based at the National Centre for eSocial Science (NCeSS) [15] and at the Arts & Humanities eScience Support Centre (AHESSC) [16] provided valuable insights into engaging with those respective communities, as well as providing examples of nationally co-ordinated activities, methods of approach, and tools.
The profiling of Australian contributions to Humanities eResearch culminated in a full day workshop held at the end of the week-long event.
This was complemented by the recognition of the PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) project which received the inaugural VeRSI eResearch HASS (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) award [17].
'The Data Deluge' 'I am a digital girl, and I live in a digital world' is what went through my mind moving from session to session at this year's eResearch Australasia Conference held in Melbourne, Australia.
With multiple mentions of 'Moore's Law' and data being a theme of the event, the amount of information I needed to absorb and then follow up was a little overwhelming; I really did start to feel another aftershock from the 'data deluge'.
From Excavation to Publication: The integration of developing digital technologies with a long-running archaeological project Professor Michael Fulford, University of Reading Michael Fulford delivered the opening keynote for the conference.
Describing the logistics and characteristics of a long-term archaeological dig [18], Michael painted a picture for the delegates of what it is like for researchers on an extended dig, including the costs, tools, people and the working environment.
He pointed out that the difficulties for conducting research in the typical archaeological dig environment produces a level of complexity that a standard desktop or laboratory researcher would not necessarily face.
As a 'desktop' researcher I take for granted that when I sit down at my desk to work I will be able to plug my notebook into a power point, a network cable for connectivity (or wireless) and have light to enable me to see my environment.
While on an archaeological dig, Michael and his team of researchers, have to build their working environment to include all the technological luxuries that I have grown to take for granted and this is before they even get any of the 'digging' done.
Wireless antennae, power generators and 'toughened' notebooks have now become standard items in today's archaeologist's toolbox.
Professor Fulford not only described how technology is being used in providing an environment, he discussed how it is now also embedded in the way they conduct their research.
Field notes form an integral part of an archaeologist's research, historically collected by scribbling on any flat surface, including trouser legs or the inside of an arm and in writing only able to be deciphered by the scribe or by a pharmacist well practised in deciphering a medical doctor's hieroglyphics.
Sponsored by JISC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Virtual Environment for Research in Archaeology (VERA) [19] is a project, in collaboration with the School of Systems Engineering at Reading and the York Archaeological Trust, that captures data in the field via the use of digital pens.
The field notes data, following a pre-described format, are uploaded into an integrated archaeological database (IADB) that also has interoperability with other archaeological databases.
This information is then, in turn, developed into 3D models of the archaeological dig and disseminated.
Professor Fulford discussed how the use of technology was increasingly being used in the field on these digs and was providing a more effective means for translating meticulous field notes into valuable information.
The presentation was a valuable demonstration on how technology is providing researchers with tools to reveal our past.
What Is a Society to Do?
Increasing pressure for data, to be combined with other data, to be cited by other data for the good of the data… or the researcher?
New Science Communities for Cyberinfrastructure: The Example of Geochemistry Kerstin Lehnert The second plenary talk on day two of the conference was delivered by Dr Kerstin Lehnert, Director of the Geoinformatics for Geochemistry Program at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) of Columbia University.
Dr Lehnert highlighted the benefits of gaining a scientific society's support for successful open data sharing.
Kerstin also pointed out the current issues with acceptance of this practice within a scientific community including the ramifications of open data sharing and citations.
The idea of openly sharing data amongst researchers in a scientific discipline has raised concerns around the intellectual property and acknowledgement of the data source.
Kerstin discussed how it has taken 10 years to gain support from the relevant professional societies and scientific journals for developing a 'best practice' of depositing geosciences data into a database for open access.
It is a valuable message, to gain acceptance for open data sharing, the professional societies and scientific journals associated with the discipline are a powerful influence within the community.
Gaining their support is progress, addressing the issues as regards citing a researcher's contribution to a database is still a hurdle to overcome.
A copy of Kerstin's presentation can be found at the conference Web site [20].
More Data...
Throughout the conference there were many sessions and talks specifically on data, its management, curation and importance.
Memorable sessions included: Daniel Cox Daniel Cox from the Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) talked about the establishment of the ARCS National Grid and hosting the various tools for eResearch.
The speaker gave an overview of the service systems including Storage Resource Broker (SRB), the collaborative tool sakai and how the future of the service will include the national deployment of gLITE, middleware which is being used by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN.
Daniel's slides can be found at the Conference Web site [21].
Andrew Treloar The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is supported by the Australian Commonwealth Government, Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR).
Andrew Treloar from the ANDS Organizing Network presented an update of where the A$24m four-year project 'Towards the Australian Data Commons' now stands after a year and where it is heading.
Andrew provided an overview of the increasing digital data management issues and presented a roadmap of how ANDS plans to address the growing needs for 'use and reuse' of research data in Australia.
Part of the plan is to provide 'four inter-related and coordinated service delivery programs' in developing frameworks for influencing policy, providing utilities for offering technical services, seeding the commons to start an improvement in data management and building capabilities by targeting early career researchers and research support staff.
The talk was well delivered with a large amount of content covered.
The ANDS Project looks to address a number of the 'data deluge' issues and provides a hopeful outlook for researchers drowning in data.
Andrew's presentation can be found at the conference Web site [22].
Engaging with eResearch Birds of a Feather: Raising Awareness and Increasing the Uptake of eResearch Convenors: Gaby Bright and Dr Lyle Winton Birds of a Feather sessions are a welcome addition to the eResearch conference landscape in Australia, and have been adopted from similar conferences in the UK.
Gaby Bright, the eResearch Communications Manager from VeRSI, ran this BoF with Lyle Winton, a Senior Research Support Officer from eScholarship Research Centre [23], University of Melbourne.
The aim of the BoF was to explore the various perceptions and benefits of eResearch for different 'domains', and discuss how best to communicate to these domains.
The convenors defined domains as the various research discipline areas, in addition to the various administrative divisions of Higher Education institutes, which support researchers.
With this broad range of interested parties a panel was formed to provide their perspectives on the issues to be discussed.
The panel had representatives from science and humanities research, as well as IT divisions, research offices and eResearch centres.
Photo of the BoF panel with convenor Lyle Winton (far left) The panel and a very engaged audience were posed five questions, and a lively discussion ensued.
One of the major challenges identified for the successful communication of eResearch is what does eResearch actually mean.
Whilst the panel members and the audience had many perspectives to offer, the following 30-minute discussion did not elicit a definition.
There was not even a clear idea about whether eResearch is a verb or a noun.
Perhaps the only point of common agreement was that it is an area that, in Australia, is still evolving.
The discussion highlighted just how important it is to know the intended audience for any eResearch awareness message.
The convenors sensibly noted that demonstrating the particular benefits of eResearch to an audience is crucial if one is to convince them to adopt a new technology or research practice.
To this end they asked delegates what they saw as the key benefits of eResearch to themselves, or to the people they supported.
For some it was about having the right tools for the objective that they were trying to achieve; for others it was having the reliable infrastructure in place.
Most people generally agreed that for eResearch to be successful it needed champions, often the early adopters.
There had been five questions posed, but given the enthusiasm of the discussion, the one and-a-half hours allocated only allowed for coverage of three, the last of which was what it took to make eResearch a priority.
Encouragingly, one of the IT directors present stated that his drivers were the researchers, rather than the institutional hierarchy.
Undoubtedly support 'from above' is needed, but it was pleasing to hear that the details will be determined by the users' needs.
Notes were taken, and displayed, during the discussion [24] and the whole session was recorded, as well as blogged.
The convenors have said that they intend to process the information with a view to publicising the conclusions drawn from the discussion.
Participants were encouraged to leave their contact details so that they can hear about the results and benefit from being a part of a discussion in which all present expressed an interest.
Birds of a Feather: Research Skills and Training Convenors: Gaby Bright, VeRSI, and Valerie Maxville, iVEC [25] The question of who in Australia is responsible for the implementation of eResearch skill development and training was raised during the AeRIC eResearch Forum on the second day.
It seems that this is a problem that has no Federal or co-ordinated solution.
Stream 3 of talks on the final day of eResearch Australasia had a soft focus on eResearch education and support and seemed an ideal prelude to an informal lunchtime discussion.
The discussion brought together many of the people who participated in the Awareness and Outreach BoF discussion from earlier in the week.
It focused on identification of what eResearch skills are needed, who needs them, and how best to deliver them.
It was acknowledged, and agreed upon, that there is a new breed of role – neither purely academic, nor purely service delivery, nor support-based.
The challenge for research institutions, or eResearch support organisations, is how best to provide the training required as well as the career incentives and options.
The qualities that are needed in good eResearch support staff were readily identified.
Some will be technology developers, some will fulfil business analyst roles, but all will need to occupy the layer between the two traditionally disparate communities.
The impromptu but impassioned gathering gained enough momentum to establish a mailing list and collaboration space [26] to further the discussion.
The group hopes to be able to share knowledge about existing training options and provide a network from which a more formalised approach can be developed.
Arts and Humanities eResearch Arts and Humanities eResearch has never limited itself to more traditional ideas of e-Research and e-Science, which link these mostly to the application of certain advanced network technologies in supporting research.
These technologies like the Grid have their place, but they might generate the impression that the solution is already there and only needs to find the right application and those willing to provide the money.
From our experience, eResearch will fail if it deems itself as just an application of technologies.
It would then be perceived, rightly, as some kind of invasion of technology know-it-alls, who know the solution without understanding the problem.
It became obvious during eResearch Australasia that in Australia the eResearch community is not limiting itself to a particular set of tools and methodologies.
This became particularly clear in the sessions that covered non-traditional eResearch disciplines such as social sciences and arts and humanities.
Arts and Humanities research was strongly represented at eResearch Australasia 2008, not only on the main conference track, but also in a specialised workshop on the last day of the Conference.
The workshop continued and extended the discussions of the Conference, which on the first day saw a Bird of a Feather session on performance arts in eResearch [27].
Other arts and humanities presentations on the first day also introduced the new Aus-e-Lit Project, which aims to support literary scholars in Australia through a number of services being developed and deployed in the AustLit portal [28].
The portal will integrate several repositories relevant to literacy research and will offer advanced visualisation, annotation and collaboration services to researchers.
In another presentation, Margaret Birtley, the inaugural CEO of the Collections Council of Australia, outlined the scale of the challenge for arts and humanities eResearch, as the number and size of cultural heritage collections steadily increases with digitisation programmes in Australia.
Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage Workshop Convenors: John Byron, Executive Director, Australian Academy of the Humanities; Mark Hedges, Centre for eResearch, King's College London; and Tobias Blanke, Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre, London The specialised workshop on 'eResearch in the Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage' on the last day of the Conference was attended by more than 50 people, and during which researchers from Australia, the UK and Europe offered an overview of their research projects.
We cannot describe all the presentations here, as there were over 15 in the course of an intense day of discussion and analysis [29].
It was particularly interesting to see that the challenges to arts and humanities eResearch are comparable all over the world.
Dianna Hardy from James Cook University, e.g., introduced how best to support video annotation in cultural heritage communities.
The Gugu Badhun people, an Aboriginal community in North Queensland, uses a toolkit developed at James Cook to record their community life.
The toolkit reuses existing technologies (SRB and Plone integrated with Shibboleth) to set up a collaborative and data management solution for video and other files and a custom application for video upload and annotation called Mattotea [30].
Video annotation has also been a focus in the UK and European arts and humanities eResearch projects [31].
So has the integration of heterogeneous data resources.
The Heurist Project at the University of Sydney focuses on data management strategies for heterogeneous Humanities data [32].
Heurist is an extremely flexible reference manager, which handles Internet bookmarks, bibliographic references and user annotation in a seamless, browser-based social bookmarking space.
Additional types can be added without programming.
It was also interesting to see how more traditional digital humanities projects start to use eResearch tools.
The online publication framework South Seas [33] is a resource exploring James Cook's first Pacific voyage.
The resource is currently extended to become a RESTful Web publishing platform that operates in conjunction with a collection of lightweight Web services and visualisation tools using the Plone content management system.
But the workshop delivered not only interesting systems but also presentations about methodologies important to arts and humanities research.
The OAK Law Project ('Open Access to Knowledge') is an Australian research project at the Queensland University of Technology to look at open access publishing [34].
It was presented by Kylie Pappalardo.
The project has recently released the results of its 2007 nationwide survey of the attitudes and practices of Australian academic authors towards the publication and dissemination of their research, publishing agreements and open access.
Alongside these presentations from Australia, a remote presentation by Antonio Calanducci from Catania, Italy, addressed how the existing European eResearch infrastructures can be used for cultural heritage preservation.
The Catania digital archives include the works of Italian writer Federico De Roberto, made up of almost 8000 scans, and the musical archives of Giuseppe Geremia, an 8th Century musician.
A working prototype of these two digital libraries has been implemented on the gLibrary platform [35], a grid-based system to host and manage digital libraries developed by INFN Catania, on the Sicilian data research infrastructure.
In the final presentation of the day, Tobias Blanke summarised the grass-roots projects of the UK arts & humanities eScience initiative [36].
The workshop ended with a plenary chaired by John Byron on how to take an Australian arts and humanities eResearch agenda forward.
It was emphasised that such an agenda needs to be user-focused and concentrate on the specific needs of Australian arts and humanities researchers.
The arts and humanities e-Science programme in the UK is in many ways unique in the world, but the workshop again showed that its challenges like the data deluge can be found anywhere and that these challenges produce fascinating research.
Conclusion eResearch Australasia 2008 proved to be another success for the participants – not least because it provided the means for both researchers and eResearch practitioners to go beyond 'what' has been accomplished to date, and to allow discussion on the 'how' and the 'why'.
The presence of regional, national and international participants permitted a number of perspectives and experiences to be shared.
The introduction of more strands relating to non-traditional communities in eResearch, such as the arts, humanities and social sciences, gave a richer set of examples of how eResearch is crossing boundaries.
However, there are inevitable challenges which were highlighted during the course of discussions.
Researchers are not yet working well enough across disciplines, since it remains a challenge to obtain insights into other research disciplines.
Some would argue that making data more easily discoverable is one way to achieve multi-disciplinary outcomes.
But the data deluge remains a complex issue, especially when researchers do not understand the potential benefits of managing data for instance, from creation in the lab to 'publication'.
There still needs to be more exemplar projects to demonstrate the benefits of data management to obtain greater buy-in.
Similarly, eResearch should support exemplar development more visibly and promote best practice in its approach.
In terms of clear benefit for researchers in Australia is the way in which eResearch has introduced collaboration technologies that can eliminate geographical barriers and can facilitate conversation across the country and internationally.
There is a sense that technology is beginning to draw Australian researchers closer to the rest of the world and making many things possible that previously were just not an option.
Everyone attending this year's eResearch Australasia 2008 would surely agree on this latter point.
Indeed, there was a lot of evidence to show that Australia is proactively boosting its research communities and joining the global effort along the way to make research an increasingly global activity.
References eResearch Australasia 2008 http://www.eresearch.edu.au/ Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) http://www.innovation.gov.au/ Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council (AeRIC) http://www.pfc.org.au/bin/view/Main/AeRIC Microsoft Research http://research.microsoft.com/erp/ Neurocommons http://www.neurocommons.org/ European Bioinformatics Institute http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ ANDS – Australian National Data Service http://ands.org.au/about-ands.html Constructing a Research Project Data Management Plan http://www.library.uq.edu.au/escholarship/BW_dmp.pdf VeRSI http://www.versi.edu.au Intersect http://www.intersect.org.au/ Metadata editor http://www.metadata.net/ ARCS Australian Research Collaboration Service http://www.arcs.org.au/ Virtual BeamLine http://versi.edu.au/activities/vbl.html Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative http://www.vlsci.unimelb.edu.au/ National Centre for eSocial Science (NceSS) http://www.ncess.ac.uk/ Arts & Humanities eScience Support Centre (AHESSC) http://www.ahessc.ac.uk VeRSI award for the PARADISEC project http://www.versi.edu.au/eResearchAward/announcement.html ; PARADISEC Project http://paradisec.org.au/home.html Silchester Project at the University of Reading http://www.silchester.reading.ac.uk/index.html VERA http://vera.rdg.ac.uk/ Kerstin Lehnert: New Science Communities for Cyberinfrastructure The Example of Geochemistry http://www.eresearch.edu.au/lehnert2008 Daniel Cox and Paul Coddington: ARCS Systems Services and the ARCS National Grid http://www.eresearch.edu.au/cox2008 Andrew Treloar: The Australian National Data Service: one small step for Australia, one potentially giant leap for research.
http://www.eresearch.edu.au/treloar2008 eResearch Scholarship Centre http://www.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/ eResearch Awareness BoF http://www.versi.edu.au/downloads/eResearchBoFAwareness.pdf iVec http://www.ivec.org/ Education and Training in eResearch http://wiki.arcs.org.au/EREdu BoF on Performing arts http://www.ersesearch.edu.au/holledge2008 Aus-Lit Portal http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/projects/aus-e-lit/ Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritate eResearch Workshop http://www.eresearch.edu.au/ahch-workshop Mattotea software http://eresearch.jcu.edu.au/software/video-annotation-software-mattotea Arts and humanities e-Science projects http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/projects Heurist project http://heuristscholar.org/ South Seas http://southseas.nla.gov.au Brian Fitzgerald, Anne Fitzgerald, Mark Perry, Scott Kiel-Chisholm, Erin Driscoll, Dilan Thampapillai, Jessica Coates, "OAK Law Project Report No.
1 Creating a legal framework for copyright management of open access within the Australian academic and research sector ", August 2006, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00013623/01/13623_2.pdf gLibrary Project https://glibrary.ct.infn.it/glibrary/index.php Arts and Humanities eScience initiative http://www.ahrcict.rdg.ac.uk/activities/e-science/ Author Details Tobias Blanke Research Fellow Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre King's College London Email: tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ahessc.ac.uk Ann Borda Executive Director Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative Email: ann.borda@versi.edu.au Web site: http://www.versi.edu.au Gaby Bright eResearch Communications Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative Email: gabrielle.bright@versi.edu.au Web site: http://www.versi.edu.au Bridget Soulsby Business & Operations Manager Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, The University of Melbourne & Melbourne Health Email: bsoulsby@unimelb.edu.au Web site: http://www.psychiatry.unimelb.edu.au/mnc/about/staff/bsoulsby.html Return to top Article Title: "eResearch Australasia 2008" Author: Tobias Blanke, Ann Borda, Gaby Bright and Bridget Soulsby Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/eresearch-australasia-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: What's the Alternative?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: What's the Alternative?
Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho takes an enthusiastic view of the opportunities open to library and information professionals presented in this career-enhancing book.
If you have been wondering whether there are any alternative career options you could pursue whilst using your skills to full potential, do not miss this book.
It will boost your confidence, focus your mind and take you on dozens of brief career journeys with fellow professionals.
The author also builds on her personal experience of "taking the leap".
After ten years in public libraries she is now self-employed, "stitching together multiple threads to create a personal career path, outside of, yet related to libraries".
It is not only new technology, changes in society's perception of information and new curricula at library school which drive this shift towards career experimentation, it is driven by the changing nature of work itself.
Today's professionals average five different occupations in the course of their working lives.
And if you are alarmed by this, don't be; all you need is Rachel Singer's guidance and you will find your confidence and build on your transferable skills to follow where your imagination leads.
The book is well structured and offers an array of options open to information professionals.
It starts with useful suggestions on how to approach the process of change, how to adjust your attitudes, assess your values, analyse your strengths, make plans and weigh your options.
Examining your personal change drivers will help you decide whether the leap is worth taking.
Once you have decided you need to make a move, the choices are many and varied: stay close to libraries, by working for a vendor; stay close to books by working in the book trade; experiment with free-lance work; write, to review other's writing or get on the lecture circuit.
This book will help you look at all the skills which fit any particular choice you are ready to make.
And because a lot of the content is based on an online survey on alternative careers conducted by the author, you benefit from the comments of those who have taken the leap before you.
Many of the options discussed are choices you might have thought of at one time or another but the author also focuses on some unusual options – like creative writing, interpreting and translating or even being a private investigator.
For those who are interested and have specific skills in IT there are many options too – from user interface engineer to director of Web services.
And if the thought of never being a librarian again scares you, and has so far prevented you from taking the leap, the author re-assures you that there is always a way back.
The book is enriched with further advice on how to 'retool your résumé' and organise your skills and experience to appeal to a range of employers.
There is a comprehensive list of useful Web sites and as you would be very busy planning your move, you would be grateful for the facilities provided by the accompanying Web site.
This might not be a book you wish to take on your summer holiday or read cover to cover even when you return refreshed to your desk.
However, its good structure allows you to read as much or as little as you need in order to face your future career options with confidence.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian British Medical Association Email: lcoelho@bma.org.uk Web site: http://www.bma.org.uk/library Return to top Article Title: "What's the Alternative?
: Career Options for Librarians and Info Pros" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Enhancing Scientific Communication through Aggregated Publications Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Enhancing Scientific Communication through Aggregated Publications Buzz data rdf xml atom infrastructure archives metadata tagging identifier vocabularies repositories video preservation oai-pmh aggregation ontologies uri frbr foaf didl e-science e-research interoperability oai-ore url research Citation BibTex RIS Arjan Hogenaar describes changes in the publication and communication process which will mean that the role of authors will become a more prominent one.
The Internet has caused a revolution in the way scientists and scholars have access to scholarly output.
Only 15 years ago, the (university) library decided what sources should be offered to the staff and individual scientists could only hope the librarian would listen to their wishes.
In this system scientists frequently had no instantaneous access to the information they wanted.
In such instances they had to rely on the Interlibrary Loan System.
Nowadays, researchers may access scientific publications anytime and anywhere, provided that their institution has fulfilled their obligations to pay the access fees to the publisher.
Of course this system has a risk in itself: especially for universities from outside Western countries there is the problem of finding the money to pay for their researchers’ access to digital output.
One of the solutions to overcome this problem is the rise of the Open Access movement.
Its view is that the results of publicly funded research should be publicly available.
Thanks to the development of institutional repositories and of service providers like NARCIS [1], many scientific publications have become accessible to a broad public.
Furthermore, the switch from the classic business model (where the user pays) to a new Open Access business model (where the author pays) may be helpful in improving the access to scientific output.
Due to these developments, the relationships between Science and Society have become stronger.
Journalists, policy makers and the broad public are offered the opportunity to become acquainted with new scientific views at an early stage.
Thanks to new developments, researchers are offered the opportunity to strengthen these relationships in what are termed Enhanced Publications (EPs).
This article describes a way researchers can implement EPs in Aggregated Publications Environments.
From Scholarly Publication to Scholarly Communication The publication process represents but one single aspect of scientific work.
Science is flourishing thanks to communication, a much broader concept than publishing.
Long before the final book or article will be published, researchers will have had extensive discussions with their peers to share their views, ideas and opinions in order to check the validity of their claims.
The raw data on which the publication will be based may be shared as well.
Unfortunately, in recent times the improvement of scientific communication has not appeared to be a top priority for the major publishers.
Even the announcement of Elsevier’s ‘Article of the Future’ [2] does not appear to be as promising as had been expected.
Its end-product is still a publication rather than a communication object.
On the other hand, it is certainly the case that publishers have invested a lot of money in the development of excellent search and alerting tools.
A good example is the service that Scopus [3] offers scientists, providing them with the opportunity to search citations from thousands of journals and scientific Web pages.
This sort of service is of course useful, but it may still be seen by some as a form of one-way traffic: the publisher offers information to researchers.
They can subsequently re-arrange subsets of this information according to their own wishes.
There is no option, however, to use this kind of service to comment on findings or to discuss them with other researchers.
Collaboratories Apart from the traditional publication process, researchers themselves have begin to set up what are termed collaboratories in all kinds of disciplines.
The goal of such collaboratories is to enable researchers to co-operate in distributed teams and to share tools and resources (e.g.
datasets).
Naturally, the collaboratory gives the team the chance to write and discuss manuscripts as well.
A good international example is Cx-Nets, a collaboratory on complex networks [4].
This collaboratory supports co-operation among teams from the USA, Italy and France.
The information shared within a collaboratory is not necessarily available to everybody.
So a collaboratory may display all the characteristics of modern scientific communication, but is not primarily focused on the open exchange of information.
Enhanced Publications in Relation to Aggregated Publications Environments There is now a new publication and communication model which combines the properties of the traditional publications with the improvements from the collaboratories.
In this model the information object will play a central role.
It may be any kind of object: a traditional publication, a comment on that publication; a dataset; an image; an audio fragment, and so on.
Furthermore, the model – Jane Hunter has called it a ‘scientific publication package’ [5] describes the relationships between the objects.
All relevant steps in the scientific workflow that are necessary to produce a publication may be traced.
In this new publication type, termed an Enhanced Publication (EP), it will be clear to readers what for instance is the relationship between a dataset and a traditional publication built upon it.
But they will also have the opportunity to comment on or to build upon the EP.
In fact, the EP is not a static document in the way a journal article is.
The EP has a dynamic character.
Moreover, readers may have the opportunity to reuse certain parts of the EP, either to create another EP or a traditional publication.
Implementing EPs is technically rather complex.
The challenge is to suppport researchers with tools that will make it easy to aggregate objects and to describe the relationships between them.
The Aggregated Publications Environments (APEs) have been set up to make this happen.
Usage of EPs will support the interaction between Science and Society.
A policy maker will be offered the opportunity to put together an EP in which parts of the original scientific publication have been incorporated into a policy paper.
This example also shows that the components of an EP may have different authors from different fields.
OAI-ORE New techniques have had to be developed to provide the functionality required to create EPs.
In this respect, the completion of the ORE-ORE model of Herbert van de Sompel has been welcomed by the EP community [6].
Figure 1: The Representation of Resource Maps In short, OAI-ORE is a means to describe aggregations of Web resources, while identifying the boundaries of such aggregations at the same time.
Examples of aggregations are collections of images, a book with a large number of chapters, an article with related datasets.
(See also the OAI-ORE introduction given by Rumsey and O’Steen [7]).
A central distinction made by the OAI-ORE model is that among Resource Map, Aggregation and Aggregated Resources.
Figure 1, taken from Van de Sompel’s OAI-ORE primer [6], depicts an example of a Resource Map.
The OAI-ORE model can easily be translated into a model for the EP.
The overall description of the EP is provided by the Resource Map.
This Resource Map has a machine-readable representation that provides details about the Aggregation.
The aggregation sums up what information objects have been used in the EP and that aggregated resource represents an individual information object in the EP.
There even exists the option to divide traditional information objects into smaller ones.
For instance, it is perfectly possible to describe every single chapter in a book or to split a journal article into units such as Introduction, Materials & Methods, and Discussion.
In this sense, OAI-ORE will realise what Harmsze, Van der Tol and Kircz [8] have described in the late 1990s.
They proposed a model for modular versions of scientific publications.
They argued that instead of using PDF – which after all only creates an electronic counterpart of the paper version –it would be advisable to split the publications into modules.
By doing so, it would become possible to refer to a single module of a published document.
In fact, what Elsevier presents in Cell Press beta [9] is not entirely dissimilar to their idea.
It is up to the creators of an EP to decide on the degree of granularity they wish to adopt while putting the EP together.
For instance, with conference proceedings, the individual papers may best represent the information unit, but in the example of an journal article in may be useful to choose a greater degree of granularity.
ESCAPE The OAI-ORE model is now being introduced in the world of libraries and research.
In the Netherlands, SURFfoundation has launched a tender [10] for the implementation of EPs.
The goal of this tender is to demonstrate the advantages of EPs to the field of scholarly communication.
Enhanced Scientific Communication by Aggregated Publications Environments (ESCAPE) [11] is one of the projects that have received a SURFfoundation grant.
Various groups of scientists and researchers from both the University of Twente and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands are involved in this project to demonstrate the added value of the Enhanced Publication model.
They are working together in a rather unique setting with programmers, library staff and information specialists from both their own institutions as well as the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Where hyperlinks are being used to interconnect existing Web documents, a web of data can be created by interconnecting data by means of RDF-triples [12].
In fact, OAI-ORE has RDF as one of its foundations, as Van de Sompel states in his ORE Primer [6].
By using RDF, it becomes possible to identify persons and even abstract entities like ideas on the Web.
This is very important in the case of EPs, because it is possible to include background information on the authors (their activities, their affiliations, etc.).
Moreover, RDF can be used to indicate the relationships between the information objects.
The EP (Resource Map) has its own Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and so has every single information object that is part of it.
This approach is essential in order to meet the goals of OAI-ORE, i.e.
object re-use and exchange.
Researchers can incorporate a specific information object from an already existing EP in a new one.
For example, they can simply copy over to the new EP the exact same research method from the existing EP as they later adopted exactly the same procedures as described in the earlier EP.
A further example: researchers can incorporate in a new EP a whole dataset from a former EP since their writing relies on exactly the same dataset as that employed in the earlier EP.
Initiatives like ESCAPE are evolving worldwide.
Some important examples are: eSCIDoC [13]: Within the Max Planck Society, the eSCIDoc Project will implement an infrastructure for its researchers which combines different types of information objects in one scientific knowledge space.
SCOPE [14]: The Australian project SCOPE (Scientific Compound Object Publishing and Editing) has goals related to those of the ESCAPE project: offering authoring tools to researchers to enable them to create their own EP’s.
ICE-TheOREM [15] End to End Semantically Aware eResearch Infrastructure for Theses: In ICE-TheOREM the functionalities of a content management system with those of OAI-ORE are being coupled in one single system.
Aggregated Publications Environments as Part of ESCAPE Important developments in the field of Linked DATA (and the related RDF and SemWeb) are described by Bizer et al [16], but this will not represent a principal feature of this article.
Instead the focus will be on the potential producers of EPs: researchers in fields like biology or archaeology.
These researchers presumably want to obtain tools to relate information objects to one another, but without detailed knowledge of OAI-ORE and RDF.
The most important part of the Aggregated Publications Environments (APEs) therefore, is the development of tools that can enable researchers to produce their own EPs.
Obviously, these tools are being developed by programmers in close collaboration with those researchers.
The deliverables of the ESCAPE Project will be tested and embedded in the regular workflow of the researchers.
These APEs can be regarded as elements in the service layer of the OAI data/services model.
No major changes in the mode of operation of traditional repositories are needed to deliver objects as items in an aggregation with other objects.
The ESCAPE Project is based on Web architecture principles, mainly using individual resources (objects) and effecting unique identification of the resources by means of a URI (in most cases a URL).
In FRBR terminology [17] the core of description is at item [18] level.
All the individual objects may become part of a structure of related individual objects.
This structure is not fixed.
You may have a structure inspired by library principles (like FRBR) or inspired by content-based relationships between objects.
In this last example, the kind of the content relations may depend on the scientific discipline.
As the OAI-ORE model is completely compatible with Web architecture principles, in ESCAPE, OAI-ORE is being used to describe EP instead of XML-containers like DIDL (Digital Item Declaration Language).
Information specialists, library personnel and programmers from Twente University, RUG and KNAW are working together to develop APEs for the following research groups: Centre for Conflict, Risk and Safety Perception (iCRiSP) [19].
With these researchers from Twente University an APE is being developed as part of the Web site CRiSP.
Brandaris128 [20].
Within the BRANDARIS Project, the applications of an ultra high-speed camera are being studied.
The results have a major impact on society.
As part of the Web site Brandaris128, an APE will be presented with EPs that show the relationships between the original research results and derived material (like television programmes and popular scientific publications).
Centre for Public Order and Security [21].
Within this Centre, studies are being set up to measure the impact and reuse of annotations (comments on legal decisions) on local authorities.
Editing Rights in APEs EPs offer new opportunities for co-operation.
Naturally, a research group does not want everybody to be able to add or edit objects within its EP.
Therefore three levels of usage have been implemented.
The creators have all the rights to add, edit or delete objects.
They may also appoint other researchers as ‘Editors’.
These editors may add information to the EP (for instance by tagging or by commenting parts of the EP), but they do not have the right to delete or edit existing information objects.
The general public is able to view the EPs, but has no further rights.
Figure 2: User Functions in ESCAPE First Results of the ESCAPE Project To start with, a technical infrastructure has been established for the archiving of resource maps, based on the OAI-ORE data model [22] and its elaboration in DRIVER [23].
As explained earlier, the resource maps describe and give access to the objects (aggregated resources) and their mutual relationships within it.
Moreover, the objects within the resource maps (ReMs) may be edited by library personnel or scientists.
Repository of ReMs It was decided to base the repository on Fedora 3.1, especially because of its built-in RDF (triple store) support.
The repository stores the individual entities of the OAI-ORE data model and exposes them through OAI-ORE resource maps.
These resource maps are harvestable making use of the classic OAI-PMH protocol [24].
Consequently, no other harvesting protocol is required.
The resource maps may be serialized in Atom or in RDF for harvesting.
Therefore in response to a particular publication or information need, it will be possible to offer a view of a network of content-related objects displayed together with the relevant document.
In this way, the relationship between the original scientific publication and a derived information object – for instance a policy paper – will be made visible to the public.
In some cases one may want to refer to an information object in a particular setting.
A good example is the description of a particular painting as part of a specific exhibition.
This situation can be described using the proxy URI [25] as proposed by Van de Sompel.
Resource Map Editor In order to be able to establish a repository based on resource maps (ReMs), researchers had first to be in a position to put together these very same ReMs.
The project therefore devoted effort to the development of a special editor that they could use to produce and amend resource maps in a user-friendly manner.
The resource map editor is a tool for defining and describing relations between objects, by authorised professionals using standardised descriptions.
These descriptions can be viewed and edited.
Unauthorised users will also have the opportunity to add free descriptions to the ReMs.
Work is in progress to realise this option.
The Resource Map Editor and a tool for browsing and searching the aggregated resources are combined in the Aggregated Publications Environments.
Resource Map Vocabularies Researchers can indicate the existing relationships between information objects by the use of vocabularies.
Within the ESCAPE Project it was decided to rely as much as possible on already existing vocabularies like dcterms [26], FOAF [27] and SWAN [28].
This would help to make the outcomes of the project interoperable with other systems.
In the provisional example of an EP below, you can see a part of an EP with some of its information objects.
Figure 3: Part of a resource map, produced in the ESCAPE Project Every single information object may be edited by authorised users.
The vocabulary used in an information object (e.g.
name of the organisation, title of an article, and so on) is shown via a mouse roll-over functionality.
The main focus of the ESCAPE Project will be the development of functionality.
Next year, more attention will be paid to the improvement of graphical representation.
Figure 4: Part of a resource map, detail of an information object In Figure 4 an information object – in this case a journal article – is shown as part of the Enhanced Publication of Figure 3.
The creator of the EP, Michel Versluis, has decided that this article is related to a video with the name ‘On sound of snapping shrimp’.
Researchers are offered terms from a broad set of vocabularies.
Besides terms from already existing vocabularies they have the option to indicate other (free) terms to describe potential relationships.
The existing vocabularies do not offer terms to describe specific content relations; for example, when a publication is adopted by another publication, as in the case of a policy paper.
Accordingly, the ‘relationAnnotation’ object has been introduced in ESCAPE.
So using the normal dcterms:relation, researchers can indicate that there is a relationship between two objects, but by using the relation annotation object (with its own URI) they can now also make the relationship identifiable.
In the example below, the relation annotation makes it clear that the creator of the EP has incorporated the BBC animal show ‘Weird Nature’, as it is a ‘Beautiful non-specialist video of the scientific study into cavitating bubbles’.
Figure 5: Relation Annotation The ESCAPE Project will end in December 2009.
By that time, tools for composing EPs will have been delivered.
As a result, researchers will be able to produce EPs and deposit them in an institutional repository.
This development will mean that existing service providers like NARCIS will be adapted in order to present the added value of the EPs to its users.
Conclusions The emergence of the semantic Web/ linked data and OAI-ORE represents great potential.
Researchers will have the tools to identify each object with its own URI.
Moreover they will able to describe the relationships between these objects and have the opportunity to arrange these related objects in a resource map.
The boundaries of these resource maps – each with a URI of its own can be defined by researchers themselves.
However, these developments may also generate difficulties themselves.
First of all, the creation of a resource map with aggregation and aggregated resources is a more complex job than just depositing a publication in an institutional repository.
It will require extra analytical effort, because researchers must be completely informed about the objects they want to include in the resource map.
Moreover, they must know, and indicate, the relationships between the objects.
This means that authors have to keep a ‘helicopter view’.
Furthermore, the composer of an EP will be confronted by certain practical problems, such as the user-friendliness of the tools, the completeness of the vocabularies and the discovery of resource maps in which a specific object has been placed.
However, it is anticipated that such difficulties will disappear within a short time.
There are some issues though that will require special attention.
In an EP environment, researchers will need to enter an RDF statement (URI) to describe the name of the creator of an object.
But which one should they choose?
In many cases several URIs will exist describing the same author (for instance, a URI provided by the university and one provided by the cycle club of which the author is a member).
Which URI is correct will depend on the situation.
So there may be a need for an aggregation of URIs for a specific author.
As a consequence, in this respect, there could well be a role for digital author identifiers.
The last thing to deal with is the fact that is not easy to discover in what EPs an individual object (for instance an object from a traditional repository) has been described.
For science research it would be very interesting to identify who created the EPs in which a specific information object has been incorporated.
A solution to this ‘discovery’ problem could be the introduction of a PING or trackback functionality.
Every time a specific information object is being incorporated in a new EP, the URI of that EP (and the URI of the object) would be sent back to the repository where that specific item resides.
These problematic matters notwithstanding, the introduction of linked data, RDF and OAI-ORE in the world of scientific communication represents a big step forwards.
Scholars will have the opportunity to relate the items they consider important.
For the readers of their EPs, it will become clear to them on what basis a publication has been created.
In this respect these conclusions are quite similar to those drawn by Van den Sompel et al [29].
There are already some interesting use cases.
Within the project DatapluS [30] researchers are composing EPs in which traditional articles are being linked to specific subsets of survey data.
The Centre for Conflict, Risk and Safety Perception of the University of Twente [19] will use the ESCAPE Resource Map editor to allow researchers and other interested parties to share (social scientific) knowledge on public risk perception and public adaptive behaviour toward water safety.
Their goal is to stimulate interaction between researchers and policy makers.
Lawyers will have the opportunity to compose EPs based on existing legislation with all the annotations and the legal definitions, reports and case laws related to them.
It is expected the EPs will make research more transparent.
As a result, one may hope that scientific/scholarly progress will be accelerated and that as a consequence, the bond between Science and Society will be strengthened.
References Narcis: the Gateway to Dutch Scientific Information http://www.narcis.info Schemm, Y.
“Elsevier announces ‘Article of the Future”, 20 July 2009 http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_01279 Scopus overview http://info.scopus.com/overview/what/ Cx-Nets: Complex Networks Collaboratory http://cxnets.googlepages.com/ Hunter, J., “Scientific Publication Packages – A Selective Approach to the Communication and Archival of Scientific Output”, International Journal of Digital Curation 1(1), 2006. http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/viewFile/8/4 Lagoze, C., Van de Sompel, H. Ore User Guide – Primer, 17 October 2008 http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/primer Rumsey, S., O’Steen, B. , “OAI-ORE, PRESERV and Digital Preservation.
October 2008, Ariadne, Issue 57 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/rumsey-osteen/ Harmsze, F.A.P., Van der Tol, M.C., Kircz, J.G., “A Modular Structure for Electronic Scientific Articles”, Proceedings of the Conference on Information Sciences, Amsterdam, 1999 http://www.science.uva.nl/projects/commphys/papers/infwet/infwet.html Cell Press beta, “Article of the Future”, 20 July 2009 http://beta.cell.com/index.php/2009/07/article-of-the-future/ SURFfoundation.
“SURFshare Tender Project”, 2008 http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/themas/openonderzoek/surfsharetenders/pages/default.aspx ESCAPE, 2009 http://escapesurf.wordpress.com/ W3C, “RDF Primer”, 10 February 2004 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/ eSciDoc https://www.escidoc.org/ Cheung, K., Hunter, J., Lashtabeg, A., Drennan, J.
“SCOPE: a Scientific Compound Publishing and Editing System”, International Journal of Digital Curation, 3(2), 2008 http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/84 Sefton, P., Downing, J., Day, N., “ICE-TheOREM: End to End Semantically Aware eResearch Infrastructure for Theses”, paper presented at the Open Repositories conference, Atlanta, 19 May 2009. http://eprints.usq.edu.au/5248/1/ice-theorem-paper-OR09.htm Bizer, Chr., Cyganiak, R., Heath, T., “How to Publish Linked Data on the Web”.
27 July 2007 http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/ Davis, I., Newman, R., “Expression of Core FRBR Concepts in RDF”, 16 May 2009 http://vocab.org/frbr/core In this terminology a ‘work’ stands for the creation of a person, an ‘expression’ is a version, translation or realisation of that ‘work’; the manifestation is the particular form (print, electronic); and the ‘item’ stands for an exemplar of the manifestation (a specific book in a library).
iCRiSP, Centre for Conflict, Risk and Safety Perception, 2009 http://www.ibr.utwente.nl/icrisp/ Brandaris 128: Ultra High Speed Imaging http://www.brandaris128.nl Centre for Public Order and Security, (in Dutch) http://www.rug.nl/rechten/faculteit/vakgroepen/alrg/arw/centrumvooropenbareordehandhaving/index Lagoze C., Van de Sompel, H., “ORE Specification – Abstract Data Model”, 17 October 2008 http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/datamodel Verhaar, P., “Enhanced Publications: Object Models and Functionalities”, 18 February 2009 http://www.driver-repository.eu/component/option,com_jdownloads/Itemid,58/task,view.download/cid,54/ Open Archives Initiative, “The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting”, 14 June 2002 http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html Lagoze, C., Van de Sompel, H., “Proxy URis”, 17 October 2008 http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/http.html#Proxy Dcterms, 2008 http://purl.org/dc/terms/ FOAF specifications http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ W3C, “Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine (SWAN) Ontology”, 17 September 2009 http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/notes/swan/ Van de Sompel, S., Lagoze C., Nelson, M.L., “Adding eScience Assets to the Data Web”, paper presented at the Linked Data on the Web Workshop, 20 April 2009, Madrid http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2009/papers/ldow2009_paper8.pdf DatapluS http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/projecten/Pages/Dataplus.aspx Author Details Arjan Hogenaar Editor Research Information Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Email: arjan.hogenaar@bureau.knaw.nl Web site: http://www.onderzoekinformatie.nl/en/oi/ Return to top Article Title: “Enhancing Scientific Communication through Aggregated Publications Environments” Author: Arjan Hogenaar Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/hogenaar/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Reader Survey Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Reader Survey Citation BibTex RIS The editor invites readers to let Ariadne know what they think about the Magazine.
Since I most certainly do not flatter myself that everyone invariably drops into the Editorial, whether they dip into the occasional issue of Ariadne or mark out several articles for train reading every time, I am writing briefly about the survey designed for Ariadne readers, which is accessible via this link: Ariadne reader survey Moves are afoot to give Ariadne some effort towards improvements in your experience of the publication and I cannot emphasise enough the value I place on suggestions and comments from you.
I am very keen to know what readers value and dislike in Ariadne.
It goes without saying that neither your nor my wish-list is likely to be completely fulfilled, such is the nature of developmental work, but the suggestions of readers carry weight in any such exercise and this is your opportunity to give me the benefit of your perspective on the publication.
While of course much of the enquiry is drawn towards readers’ preferences from a technological standpoint, please do note that I am also keen to know what sort of material you would like to read if you could wave a magic wand, or just persuade a colleague to write up their excellent work on something.
Let us know your thoughts, whether very general like more on (whichever topic you choose) or specific with a potential contributor’s name and area of work.
I do realise how busy practitioners are these days and I have deliberately designed a questionnaire that can be completed in minutes if you can spare only a little time, though if you can tarry long enough to give us your written thoughts on some if not all aspects of the survey, that expansion is that much more helpful.
While you are free to complete the survey anonymously if you wish, I would greatly welcome a few details on your professional background in the second and last page since information on your area of work and interest does provide a much sharper perspective on your opinions.
Finally, my thanks if you do have the time to help me out; equally no hard feelings if you are once more impossibly busy right now!
Ariadne reader survey If in doubt, do please contact me.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Ariadne Reader Survey” Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/reader-survey/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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GROW: Building a High-quality Civil Engineering Learning Object Repository and Portal Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines GROW: Building a High-quality Civil Engineering Learning Object Repository and Portal Buzz data dissemination portal archives metadata accessibility vocabularies repositories video multimedia flash interoperability taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Yan Han provides a general overview of the Geotechnical, Rock and Water Digital Library (GROW), a learning object repository and peer-reviewed civil engineering Web portal.
Digital libraries are changing the way that we search for, find and use resources in traditional libraries.
In the networked information environment they allow users to access information anywhere and anytime.
They are also leading to innovative ways for teaching and learning opportunities.
For example, an instructor can develop learning objects based on traditional static text-based materials by using multimedia (images, videos, sounds, and animations) technology.
Learners can explore these digital learning objects in dynamic and interactive ways at their own pace, rather than by following textual instructions.
This article provides a general overview of the Geotechnical, Rock and Water Digital Library (GROW) [1], a part of the US National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Digital Library (NSDL) [2].
This article demonstrates GROW’s role as a learning object repository and its role as a high-quality civil engineering Web portal.
Metadata standards, related authority control, and learning objects using Flash technology are reported.
The learning objects design philosophy and the hierarchical structure of granularity (element, learning unit, module and theme) are described in detail.
Finally, achievements including awards and site statistics are reported.
GROW started in 2001 with a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) [3].
The mission of the NSDL is to “provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education” [4].
The NSDL is not a single entity, but a collection of many educational digital libraries which are connected together through a centralised portal using Open Archive Initiative (OAI) services.
The GROW digital library focuses on three areas: Civil Engineering, Rock and Water resources, with the intention to extend to other engineering fields.
At the University of Arizona the project team is comprised of faculty and staff members from Civil Engineering, Mining and Geological Engineering, Agriculture and BioSystems Engineering, the Learning Technologies Center and the University Library.
The team members have considerable experience in metadata, digital library system design and analysis, subject expertise, teaching, and instructional design.
The diverse backgrounds of the team members promise a strong combination of skills to carry out this project.
The mission of GROW is ‘to encourage and promote interest, exploration and learning in Civil Engineering through the development, collection, and dissemination of reviewed and ranked interactive learning resources continuously enhanced by new technological innovations.’[5] There are two significant factors that distinguish GROW from other Civil Engineering digital libraries.
Firstly, GROW’s resources are high-quality materials, peer-reviewed by Engineering Faculty members, catalogued with a controlled vocabulary, and ranked by users.
These resources are harvested from the Internet or recommended by users.
Secondly, GROW has a collection of over 200 interactive learning objects created by the team.
These learning objects are interactive, multimedia, and educational resources which place a strong emphasis on the active learning experience.
GROW as a Learning Object Repository A learning object is defined as ‘any digital resource that can be reused to support learning’ [6].
GROW learning objects are arranged in a hierarchical structure, containing four classes (element, learning unit, module and theme) that are in a sub-class and super-class relationship.
An element, the lowest granularity, is a base piece that may consist of an image, some text or a data file.
A learning unit, consisting of elements, is the smallest self-contained learning lesson and which provides at least one learning outcome.
Interactive multimedia technology such as Macromedia Flash has been used.
A module, consisting of learning units, has one or more learning outcomes.
The learning units can be sequenced to accomplish different learning outcomes.
These modules adopt multimedia media types, including interactive animation, video, sound, images and text.
These steps in the module bring to users virtual experiments as if they were in a real laboratory.
Finally, a theme, a collection of modules, can address a global topic.
For example, a theme called “Effects of Water on Soils” can have modules that provide a series of learning experiences in topics on the effects of water on soils for a variety of users, such as K-12 [7] and undergraduates [8].
Most of the learning objects are created using Macromedia Flash technology and require the Flash player to view them.
This sometimes creates accessibility problems for users who do not have that player.
Nonetheless these innovative, interactive learning objects actively support the aims of the library to encourage active learning and exploration on the part of its users.
The following figure is an example of learning objects which dynamically demonstrate the danger of flowing water.
Figure 1: Screen Capture of a Learning Object This learning object allows users to examine the effects of rising flowing water on three different sizes of vehicles (a pickup, a full-size car and a small car).
The three vehicles are in the centre of a flood-stream and the flowing water is just starting to rise.
The water rises gradually.
The water streams past the vehicles at about 4 mph.
As the water begins to rise around each vehicle, each one experiences a buoyancy force as it begins to displace water.
The frictional force between the tyres and the road is what keeps the vehicles from being swept away down-stream.
However when the force of the stream pushing on the cars exceeds that of the friction force, the vehicles lose contact with the road surface and are swept away.
Learning objects in GROW provide an interactive learning experience with multimedia components, to provide an alternative approach to traditional teaching and learning.
This approach emphasises active learning, allows learners to learn at their own pace, and provides immediate feedback when needed.
The collection of learning objects can meet the needs of users from K-12 students, to undergraduates, to professionals looking for continuing education.
GROW as a Civil Engineering Portal GROW is also a Civil Engineering Web portal like Yahoo Civil Engineering directory [9].
Users can suggest Web sites and Web resources for GROW’s focused subjects.
The GROW system has a built-in workflow that notifies reviewers for new resources, allows reviewers to examine these resources at their own pace, and helps them to release qualified resources which meet the required standards.
At the same time, metadata is assigned by the reviewers based on a pre-defined template and a controlled vocabulary set.
Figure 2 shows a screen capture of the GROW home page.
Figure 2: GROW home page [1] Metadata Metadata was one of the prime areas in which the GROW team reached a high level of efficiency and quality.
GROW was one of eight projects that achieved a successful metadata harvesting from NSDL on the first attempt.
GROW uses the recommended metadata elements from NSDL, basic elements from Dublin Core (DC), plus three IEEE elements recommended by the DC Education Working Group [4].The standard metadata allows GROW to contribute easily to the NSDL and to ensure its compatibility and interoperability within the NSDL.
The primary method for contributing GROW’s metadata to the NSDL is currently through OAI protocols.
GROW uses authority control, such as controlled vocabularies, to make quality metadata.
The team evaluated multiple thesauri, taxonomies and controlled vocabularies based on the nature of GROW and its intended users.
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Subject Heading List [5] was selected as the controlled vocabulary for DC element subject.
Project Achievements The success of the project is reflected in several awards, users’ responses, and encouraging site statistics.
GROW has received awards from a number of organisations, including the prestigious Macromedia 2003 MAX award in the Educational category, Emerald Abstract’s Civil Engineering Coolsite and Geotechnical Coolsite in 2003, and Best Learning Object/Instructional Module (University of Arizona Multimedia Users Group Festival 2003).
In addition, the team has received very positive responses from a variety of users such as middle school teachers, engineers, undergraduate students and faculty members.
Statistics show that there are many users from across the world.
After the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia are the top three in terms of site traffic.
The learning objects collection contributes to over 50% of the site’s hits.
With awards and many other collaborative and outreach efforts, the site has seen a 200% increase in traffic since August 2003.
Conclusion The GROW digital library not only provides its unique collection of interactive digital learning objects, but also works as a gateway to peer-reviewed high-quality civil engineering resources.
The learning objects provide an interactive learning experience for a variety of users employing multimedia types.
This new model of teaching and learning uses digital resources and multimedia technology to enhance learners’ experience and improve knowledge retention.
As the transition from traditional teaching to a hybrid traditional-digital method approaches, extensive research and evaluation will be necessary to consolidate and develop this new area of learning.
Acknowledgements GROW is funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant #DUE-0121691, and some of GROW resources were developed under NSF grant #DUE-9950906.
The help of Dr. Lee Zia, Lead Program Director for the NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program, is greatly appreciated.
References Geotechnical, Rock and Water Resources Library http://www.grow.arizona.edu/ The National Science Digital Library http://www.nsdl.org/ National Science Foundation (NSF) http://www.nsf.gov/ NSDL Metadata Primer: Metadata Overview http://metamanagement.comm.nsdlib.org/overview2.html#NSDL American Society of Civil Engineers Subject Heading List to the CEDB http://www.pubs.asce.org/subjlst.html WILEY, D.A.
2000.
Connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: A definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy.
In The Instructional Use of Learning Objects: Online Version, edited by D. A. Wiley,.
http://reusability.org/read/chapters/wiley.doc (accessed 10 June 2005) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: K-12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-12 BUDHU, Muniram.
2003.
Distance learning using a digital library: The GROW-NCERL Project.
Computers and Advanced Technology in Education, CATE 2003.
Rhodes, Greece.
Yahoo Civil Engineering directory http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Engineering/Civil_Engineering/ Author Details Yan Han Digital Library and Information Systems Team The University of Arizona Library 1510 E. University Blvd Tucson Arizona USA Email: hany@u.library.arizona.edu Web site: http://www.library.arizona.edu/ Return to top Article Title: “GROW: Building a High-quality Civil Engineering Learning Object Repository and Portal” Author: Yan Han Publication Date: 30-October-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 49 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/yan-han/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Institutional Repositories and Their 'Other' Users: Usability Beyond Authors Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Institutional Repositories and Their 'Other' Users: Usability Beyond Authors Buzz data software framework database usability infrastructure archives metadata repositories eprints copyright dspace rae research Citation BibTex RIS Dana McKay summarises the literature on the usability of institutional repositories, and points to directions for future work.
If institutional repositories (IRs) were all that their proponents could have hoped, they would be providing researchers with better access to research, improving institutional prestige, and assisting with formal research assessment [1][2][3].
The reality, though, is that IRs are less frequently implemented, harder to fill, and less visible than their advocates would hope or expect [4][5][6].
While technical platforms for IRs, such as DSpace [7] and ePrints [8] have seen an abundance of research, little is known about the users of IRs, neither how they use IR software, nor how usable it is for them.
IR users can be divided into three main groups: authors, information seekers, and data creators/maintainers; while authors are reasonably well understood, the latter groups are particularly under-studied.
Authors Authors are better studied than any other users of IRs, perhaps because the first barrier to IR use is content recruitment, and authors are vital to content recruitment, even in IRs where deposit is performed by a third party.
Several strategies to improve author involvement in IRs have been identified in the literature, and are summarised in Mark and Shearer’s excellent review [9].
The literature on authors will not be further reviewed here.
Information Seekers Information seekers are the end-users of any IR, and while there may be authors in this group (indeed, they may constitute the majority of this group), the goals and concerns of this group are very different from the goals and concerns of authors in their authorship role.
Research shows that information seekers generally want to find information quickly and with a minimum of fuss [10][11][12], (though authors are differentiated by placing high value on peer-reviewed work [13]).
It is clear that where information is freely available, information seekers are willing to use it, and trust it just as much as for-fee information [12].
Even authors are visibly willing to use ‘free’ published work; 88% report having used self-archived materials [14].
While IRs clearly have potential users, even researchers at a given institution are unlikely to know whether their institution has an IR [5][13]; hence IRs are likely to be largely unknown to researchers outside their host institutions (and must certainly be unknown to the general public, one of the purported beneficiaries of IRs [3]).
The first usability problem for IRs, then, is visibility; for IRs to be useful they must be seen, and it would appear at present that authors are quite right in perceiving them as ‘islands’ of information, set apart from the people who might be interested in them [15].
This is a problem that can be addressed by search-engine harvesting of IRs, not just by Google Scholar (which attracts some use by academics, but is not usually the first information source they consult [13]) but by Google’s main service, which is the first stop for information for academics and the public alike [11][12][13].
This is not to say that other commercial search engines should be excluded; Google is mentioned by name here simply because it is the most popular [12][13].
Reinforcing the importance of search-engine harvesting is Nicholas’ surprising conclusion that search-engine indexing of a journal is at least as important as making that journal open access in terms of improving the journal’s visitor numbers [16].
Other than this visibility problem, little is known about the usability of IRs for information seekers.
A limited number of usability studies of IRs has been conducted (more on this below), but at the time of writing there are no known reports of actual usage of any IR.
This dearth of usage data means we do not know: whether typical IR users are local or from outside the hosting institution; whether they find the IR via the institutional homepage or via search engine referrals; we do not know what kind of information they look for and use; nor how they use the functionality offered by IRs.
While studies of IR usage would also be valuable, we can certainly learn from the usability studies of IRs and from the wealth of research about information seeking in other contexts.
(In particular, this would be likely to advance our knowledge of how best to design IRs [17].)
Usability Studies of IR Software The work in this field is very limited; at the time of writing, only one complete report of a usability study of any IR with a focus on users could be found.
That report is a comparative analysis of two of the big software players in the IR field, e-Prints and DSpace [18].
In this study, Kim performed a heuristic analysis of e-Prints and DSpace for a number of tasks (most of which involved searching for a known item), and then ran a between-groups study of users performing the same tasks.
Kim predicted from the heuristic analysis that users would be faster and error rates would be lower for most tasks using DSpace (the reasons for this are analysed in depth in the paper); these predictions were proved accurate in the user studies.
Despite the consistency of Kim’s results, they are in contrast to Ottaviani’s findings, which show problems with interface terminology and context indicators in DSpace in real-world use [19].
Kim’s findings also differ from Atkinson’s experience, in which researchers found it very difficult to perform one of their common real-life tasks using DSpace [20].
The implications of this work are not software-specific; we can see that heuristic analysis can give good usability predictions, and that usability studies of specific tasks can tell us about software performance for those tasks.
However, when the results are contradicted by studies of users attempting real-world tasks, we see that understanding what users would like to do with software, and ensuring that these tasks are both possible and simple to do, should be a priority when developing IRs.
Usage Studies of Online Research Resources Despite the lack of IR usage studies, we can gain some understanding of how users are likely to use IRs for information seeking by looking to usage studies of journal databases and open access research repositories.
Recent studies of large journal databases show that users read and download an unexpectedly wide range of material in comparison with the range of papers actually cited.
Obsolescence is not nearly as pronounced in downloads as it is in citations; while there is some recency effect (particularly in the sciences), older articles are downloaded much more frequently than they are cited [21].
It is suggested that this may be a result of search engine use [21].
Equally article popularity is not so clear cut as might be expected.
In a one month study of a ‘big deal’ [22] nearly all available journals were accessed at least once, although the top half of the journals accounted for over 90% of the usage and three quarters of articles were viewed only once.
Fewer than 1% of articles were downloaded more than ten times.
Studies of what people actually do with journal databases show that the typical user visits infrequently, views articles from just a single subject area, and views only a small number of articles [22][23][24].
There is a correlation between the number of items viewed and the frequency with which users returned, suggesting that there is a small but significant minority of ‘dedicated researchers’.
The statistics also indicate a significant level of browsing, particularly of journals’ tables of contents [23].
Usage studies of open access research collections in computing confirm the pattern of infrequent visitors who view and download only a small number of articles [25][26] [27].
Moreover, users typically type in short queries (1-3 words), do not change default search options, and view only the first page of search results.
Spelling errors are not often observed, but a number of queries returning few or no results are a result of less popular local spelling variants (for example ‘optimisation’ versus ‘optimization’) [25].
While these studies do not investigate IR usage, the systems they describe are similar in purpose to IRs and we can reasonably expect information seekers to use them in similar ways.
Given that assumption, we can infer that typical IR users will visit infrequently, download only a few articles at a time, perform very simple searches, and use results from the top of the results list (though they will browse widely in other ways if offered the chance).
Conversely, as a group, IR users are likely to use a wide range of articles, not just those that are new or popular, because their searches will return a wide range of articles, not just the most recent or popular articles.
This picture of users suggests search mechanisms should be easy to use, that search defaults should produce a wide range of results, and that results should be displayed with the best possible relevance rankings.
IRs should also facilitate browsing (preferably of the whole collection, as well as search results), and provide the widest possible range of articles.
Information-seeking Behaviour When looking for information, users do more that just use a search box, particularly if it is not clear to them exactly what they are looking for.
Instead, they engage in a process that continues until they find what they want, find something close enough (otherwise known as ‘satisficing’ [10]), or just give up [28].
This process has been described in a number of models (see for example [29][30]), but the models are broadly similar and can be abstracted to six steps (though the process is often iterative).
Those six steps are: Perceiving a need for information Investigating the ways in which the information need might be met, including assessing available sources of information, and possible searching and browsing for preliminary results Clarifying the information need to a small number of specific questions, based on the available resources and personal interest Querying information sources to meet the need Browsing and assessing results Assimilating results and refining queries if the information need remains unmet.
It is important to recognise this process when designing an information system, and to support it as much as possible.
An example of an ‘information system’ that supports this process well is a library reference desk, where a librarian facilitates information seeking [31][28].
In terms of IR usability, this process suggests we should include browsing functionality (to help users with assessing the information source, and clarifying their information need), and that we should allow users to interleave searching and browsing (this reflects the iterative nature of this process, and is supported by Nicholas [32] who shows that users of a journal database do interleave searching and browsing).
Data Creators/Maintainers An IR’s data creators/maintainers (henceforth referred to as ‘data maintainers’) are those who create metadata, upload documents, and generally contribute to or oversee the IR’s document collection.
Data maintainers may be librarians; the group may also include authors at institutions where author self-deposit is used.
Very little research attention has been paid to this group, particularly in the usability field, yet they are vitally important to the creation and maintenance of any IR.
Moreover, data maintainers are engaged in an entirely new role.
This role is likely to require some combination of technical expertise, an understanding of metadata and metadata standards, copyright knowledge and the inclination to collate research publications [33].
There is no comparable role within any other information system, particularly when it comes to author self-submission (authors who deposit in subject archives such as arXiv.org are sufficiently highly motivated to ignore usability problems [34], while it is difficult to motivate authors to submit to IRs at all [4]); thus there is no other research we can draw on to bolster our limited understanding of this role.
Leadership Librarians have demonstrated leadership in the IR field [4][35][6][36], and creating IRs [37][38] and encouraging OA mandates [37] is seen as a way forward for libraries in an age of digital information.
A number of reports describe how well-suited librarians are to IR involvement [39][11][40] [41][42], and how they provide a wide range of necessary functions, including overcoming publisher and academic resistance [38], providing good metadata standards, and pushing for inclusion in external search services [41].
Not only do librarians possess the necessary skills to provide leadership in the establishment of IRs, Carver [40] posits that libraries are best placed to use these skills, being at the nexus between published work, academics, and information access.
The benefits of librarians’ involvement in IRs do not all flow one way, however; documented benefits to libraries include greater visibility within their research communities [37], opportunities to provide more tailored services for their patrons [41], and improved research collaboration with other libraries [43].
Despite all the potential benefits, it would be foolish to suggest that IR leadership never has any negative impact on libraries.
Those with experience do caution about the amount of staff time that may be absorbed by IRs [38][35]; moreover, Piroun warns of the high level of technical expertise required by some systems (expertise not readily available in all libraries) [35].
There are reports about the inertia of academics and their resistance to involving themselves in IRs [44][4][40][15][45], meaning that librarians must provide leadership, because they are the only people suited and available to do so.
Finally, despite resolute predictions that self-archiving would make research literature free for the taking [1], not one of the library publications about IRs mentions a reduction in journal subscriptions (and hence cost) as a benefit.
Usability for Data Creators and Maintainers Unfortunately, as with information seekers, there is only a limited number of reports of IR software usability for data maintainers.
Despite assertions that authors can be easily trained to submit their own work [46], usability reports about IR software are predominantly negative, both in terms of what users can do with the software and how the software appears and behaves (though it should be noted that the research to date only covers DSpace and ePrints).
The main problems for data maintainers reported in the literature are: Terminology: The terminology used in the deposit and management interfaces of DSpace and ePrints was confusing and inappropriate for both authors and librarians (though in different ways) [20][47][19].
Process: to deposit an item or to update its metadata, users were required to click through a number of screens.
Often users needed to see only one or two of these screens, but they were nonetheless forced to follow the same linear progression through the screens.
Even in early trials, users saw this as tedious and frustrating [20][47][19].
Metadata requirements: In one study, the detailed metadata input fields displayed by ePrints and DSpace in their document deposit interfaces were daunting to both academic staff and librarians.
Both groups complained that they often did not have all the metadata, and that it was not clear from either system which elements were required and which were optional [47].
It is worth noting that the requirement of detailed metadata at the time of deposit is also raised as a problem in the design stage of a image repository system [48].
Detail suppression: One group studied reported having difficulty making sections of a record private when using DSpace.
This limited what that group was able to put in its repository [19].
Formatting and authority control: Examples of formatting and authority control problems include: whether record titles were entered in title case or lower case; and whether author names were entered first name or last name first [47].
Authority control for author names in particular has also been mentioned by bloggers working in the IR field [49][50], though requiring depositors to create authority versions of names during the deposit process has been shown to be unwieldy (at least for an image repository [48]).
This issue is not only frustrating for librarians or authors who must enter details of a work, but may also cause problems for information seekers who type in the ‘wrong’ variant of a name.
(It should be noted that ePrints version 3 has an ‘auto-complete feature’ that will help automate authority control [51].
This version of ePrints was not the subject of any of the reports reviewed here.)
Research reporting: A group of librarians who wished to use DSpace for research reporting (not an uncommon task for IRs [2] [36]) found the search and browse functionalities ‘weak’, and the search results display awkward [20].
It should be noted that while DSpace is more heavily criticised than ePrints, it is also more widely tested and thus may not be any less usable for data maintainers (though in a comparative test between DSpace and ePrints, a slight preference for ePrints emerged among both librarians and author-depositors [47]).
This literature reflects serious usability issues that may engender resentment among librarians taking time out of other duties to maintain IRs, and may also discourage authors who are ambivalent about self-deposit at best.
However, at present it is impossible to calculate the real impact of these usability problems because we do not know how data creation and maintenance fits into the work practices of the authors and librarians involved (despite claims that self-archiving should take authors less than one hour per year each [46], and criticism of authors for not doing it [52]).
Libraries and librarians currently display a high level of commitment to IR data creation and maintenance; if this level of commitment is to be retained, it is necessary to pay attention to the needs and experiences of librarians.
Conversely, if the commitment of authors is to be increased, it is necessary to ensure at least that their initial experience of the process is neither frustrating nor daunting.
This means not only improving the usability of data creator and maintainer interfaces, but also understanding how the work involved in data creation and maintenance fits into the way people involved do their jobs, and make this fit in as streamlined a manner as possible.
(For an example of how work practices of users were taken into account during the design of an image repository to great benefit, see Roda [48]).
Conclusions and Future Directions In reviewing the literature about IR use and usability, we see that authors are well studied, and that there are a number of proven methods of engaging them.
However, there are two other user groups for IRs that have not attracted nearly so much attention thus far, namely information seekers (or ‘end-users’) and data creators and maintainers.
Information seekers, while they are not closely studied with respect to IRs, are well studied in general, and by understanding both the information-seeking process and the behaviour of this group in similar systems, we can make predictions about how they may use IRs.
Their visits are likely to be short, with short searches, and they are likely to view only a few articles.
They will make use of browsing features, if they are provided, and this could lead to better information seeking.
Collectively, they will use a wide range of articles spread over a long period of time.
Even academic information seekers use Google (or other commercial search engines) first; IRs that are harvested by search engines will see a higher level of use than those that are not.
All that we know about information seekers should be incorporated into our design of information seeker interfaces within IRs, but the few usability studies available suggest this has not been the case.
Data creators and maintainers have been largely ignored in the literature; despite their role being completely new, we know very little about how it fits into other job responsibilities and expectations.
The suitability of data maintenance interfaces to their users is also largely unknown, though the available literature suggests that improvements are needed in this area.
Future Directions For IRs to attract the level of use they need to revolutionise digital scholarship, they must be both useful and usable.
For IRs to be useful, they must first have information in them, and little is known about their usability for the group (data creators and maintainers) who create the information.
We know that this group is made up of librarians and authors, for the most part, but we do not know how the work of populating an IR fits into their workflow.
Thus far, usability reports have been largely negative, and we can make suggestions as to how to avoid these mistakes, but we cannot make general suggestions for good design of IRs from a data maintainer’s perspective.
Observational studies of data maintainers would provide an understanding of the tasks IRs are used for and the way they fit into data maintainers’ larger work roles, and also suggest ways of improving the fit of IR software to the tasks for which it is used.
More formal usability testing could then be used for fine-tuning the design of data maintainers’ IR interfaces.
Virtually nothing is known about IR end-users.
We do not know how many people are using IRs, whether they are academics or lay people, or how they most often find IRs, though it is reasonable to suspect they may find IRs with Google, given that this is the starting point for most information seekers.
Studies of usage logs from a well-populated IR could answer these questions, and provide avenues for further investigation into how we might improve information seekers’ IR experience.
Acknowledgements The work to prepare this review was funded by the ARROW Project (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) [53].
The ARROW Project is funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, under the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education.
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Australian Research Repositories Online to the World http://www.arrow.edu.au Author Details Dana McKay Usability Researcher Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia Email: dmckay@swin.edu.au Return to top Article Title: “Institutional Repositories and Their ‘Other’ Users: Usability Beyond Authors” Author: Dana McKay Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/mckay/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Intranet Management: Divine Comedy or Strategic Imperative?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Intranet Management: Divine Comedy or Strategic Imperative?
Buzz data mobile wiki html database dissemination rss portal usability metadata schema blog repositories passwords provenance adobe drupal licence ict foi privacy intranet taxonomy research standards sharepoint Citation BibTex RIS Martin White suggests that a failure to recognise the value of intranets is a symptom of a failure to recognise information as a strategic asset.
According to Dante in his Divine Comedy the inscription above the door to Hades reads "Abandon hope all ye who enter here".
For many this could also be the sign on the home page of their organisation's intranet as, with business-critical decisions to make, they begin the daily hunt for information that they are sure should be somewhere in the application.
It could just as easily be the sign on the door of the intranet manager of the organisation, though this door usually also carries a number of other job descriptions, all of which seem to be given more priority by the organisation than the care and development of the intranet.
Most organisations of any size will have a full-time web manager, often with a support team, but this is rarely the case with the intranet.
There are a substantial number of intranets in the UK.
Statistics from the Office for National Statistics indicate that 22% of all businesses have an intranet [1].
As the size of the business increases so does the level of penetration, and most businesses of more than 500 people will now have some form of intranet.
Given the number of businesses in the UK the author estimates that there are probably around 300,000 intranets in the commercial sector, and at a guess a further 100,000 in the public sector, charities, Higher Education institutions (HEIs) and other organisations.
Only over the last few years has any reliable statistical information become available on intranet use and development, and this is a in-depth global survey of only around 300 intranets [2].
In the UK HEI sector a major opportunity was lost in a survey commissioned in 2009 by Eduserv into the management of web content in the HEI sector as no account of intranet use of CMS applications was included in the scope of the survey [3].
A survey of SharePoint use in HEIs undertaken for Eduserv in late 2009 [4] did indicate that a number of institutions were using SharePoint for intranet applications but the survey did not look in detail at intranet implementation.
It is also only over the last few years have forums been set up in which intranet managers are able to share experiences and challenges with others.
The work of the Intranet Benchmark Forum [5] is focused on providing services to large organisations, but there are also other virtual and physical discussion forums, such as the Intranet Forum [6] run by UKeiG for its members.
It is probably reasonable to suggest that the majority of intranet managers have seen very few intranets from which to gain a sense of good practice, whereas web managers have an almost unlimited supply of sites from which to gain ideas for their own use.
This is as true in the HEI sector as in other sectors.
Given the installed base of intranets in the UK it is also surprising that there is no 'intranet conference' event even though intranet management does feature in events such as Online Information [7].
Most countries in northern Europe have an intranet conference [8], often with several hundred delegates, so why there is no equivalent in the UK is a mystery.
Intranets Are Different All too often an intranet is regarded as an internal web site.
The reality is that about the only commonality between an intranet and a web site is the use of web browser technology.
Many very successful intranets do not even use a web content management application but instead are based on Notes technology or portal applications.
Intranet content contribution is usually highly distributed, with individual members of staff publishing content direct to the intranet perhaps only a few times a year.
This means that the web content management system has to be highly intuitive, and enable Word documents to be rendered into clean HTML code to create web pages.
The teams supporting public web sites are using the systems every working day, working often in HTML and having a much more limited range of content to cope with.
Many of the problems that arise in keeping content current on an intranet are a result of staff having to use a complex Web publishing system that was specified for Web site management and not intranet management.
Another factor to be considered is that increasingly intranets are federated applications [9].
This is often the situation in HEIs where each department wants to have its own intranet, and on top of all these individual intranets there is some form of top-level 'corporate' home page and navigation.
Often there is no central coordination of these intranets, and so each adopts some or none of the visual design standards of the HEI.
As far as enterprise applications are concerned, intranets are different because they are not based on business processes or work-flow.
Finance, registry, personnel and most other applications support well-defined processes, usually within a specific department, and where the content requirements are usually specified in database terms.
Anything approaching text content is usually relegated to a single field in the database.
Intranets exist because there is a substantial amount of information in any organisation that is not based on business processes and cannot be managed within a formal database structure, such as policies, procedures, campus maps, events, staff notices and hundreds of other information formats produced by every department and location within the organisation.
As a result the intranet becomes an information dumping ground.
Under-resourced intranet managers do not have the resources to maintain content quality, and so multiple versions of documents with no visible ownership or provenance proliferate.
Employees leave or change responsibility but the intranet is based on a 'file-and-forget' principle and no effort is taken to ensure that document ownership is transferred to another member of staff.
Very quickly the information architecture of the intranet, based usually on the structure of the organisation at the time of the last WCMS (Web content management system) deployment, is not fit for purpose.
The decision is taken to implement a search engine, and only then does the scale of the problem of information decay become apparent.
It can also be an interesting exercise to search for 'Confidential' and see just how many documents are returned!
Defining Good Practice Intranets are not novel.
Arguably they date back to the launch of Lotus Notes in 1989, featured prominently in Peter's book Liberation Management [10] and were the basis for the success of Netscape in 1994/1995.
The installed base grew very rapidly in the early part of the 21st Century.
The first report on good intranet practice [11] to be published in the UK was written by a team of consultants from TFPL in 1999 and much of the good practice remains valid today.
One of the features of the intranet landscape is that the development of intranet good practice has been the result of the evangelism of a single consultant working in Sydney, Australia.
James Robertson, the Managing Director of Step Two Designs [12] has published many reports on intranet management and his web site and blog has provided a wealth of free information for intranet managers around the world.
The Nielsen Norman Group [13] has played an important role in the area of intranet usability, the Global Intranet Trends Report [2] from Jane McConnell (NetStrategy/JMC) is an invaluable resource and at Intranet Focus Ltd [14 we have concentrated on the interface between intranet strategy and information management strategy, with particular reference to enterprise search.
Look along the shelves in any large bookstore and there will be multiple titles on almost any of the most arcane web technology topics, but there will be no books on intranets.
Indeed only one book on the subject has been published this century [15] though two others are to be published later in 2010 [16][17].
At the heart of intranet good practice is user-centric design to an extent even greater than is the case with a web site.
Many corporate intranets run to millions of pages of content published by thousands of content contributors on hundreds of different topics, and links into tens of applications [18].
Very few web sites are on this scale.
Intranets are a decision-support application, not just an internal communications channel, and so a lot of attention has to be paid to gaining a balance between the information architecture, excellent landing pages, well-maintained and appropriate hyperlinks, quality search and a range of RSS feeds.
Getting the balance right has given rise to a keen interest in benchmarking.
At one end of the scale is the Intranet Review Toolkit from Step Two Designs, released under a Creative Commons Licence [19], and the Worldwide Intranet Challenge from CIBA Solutions [20] and at the other is the very comprehensive methodology from the Intranet Benchmark Forum [5] Although benchmarking can be very valuable even companies of the same size in the same industry can have very different information requirements and adopting approaches from other organisations without fully understanding the business and technology context can be counter-productive.
There are a great many excellent intranets that set high standards in usability and value to the organisation.
In general companies in the pharmaceutical, legal, finance, consulting, engineering and information technology sectors have invested significantly in their intranets.
An emerging consensus is emerging from the research undertaken by both McConnell and the Nielsen Norman Group that a ratio of one full-time intranet manager for every 5000 staff is a minimum level of investment, and ideally the ratio should be nearer 1 to 3500.
Many charities have also recognised the value of good intranets.
The situation in the public and government sectors is probably not so good, based on anecdotal evidence [21].
To give one example, a factor in the loss of the personal data of half the population by HMRC was the inability of staff to find the relevant policy on the intranet.
The Poynter report [22] commented, 'The primary dissemination method for information security policy in HMRC is via its intranet.
However, almost all interviewees contacted in my team's investigations expressed a lack of knowledge as to exactly where on the intranet the security policy is to be found.
In addition, staff have noted that the intranet search function is unhelpful in generating relevant results for search terms such as "DSSM" [Department Security Standards Manual].'
Information Management Whenever two or three intranet managers gather together the opening topic will always be around how to persuade senior management to support an intranet.
All too often the intranet manager has been asked to make a return-on-investment proposal for additional staff resources or for new content management or search technology.
The challenge is how to define what the return will be, and this is a virtually impossible challenge.
Over the last few years several surveys have indicated that there has been perhaps too strong an emphasis on knowledge management as a means of improving organisational performance and not enough on information management.
These surveys indicate that managers are making decisions without access to all the information assets of the organisation.
For example in a 2009 global survey of 2,500 Chief Information Officer (CIOs) carried out by IBM [23] just 67 percent of CIOs said data are readily available for relevant users.
Capgemini surveyed 150 managers in large UK organisations in late 2007 and found that 63% of respondents made business-critical decisions five times or more a week without the right information [24].
An intranet is the archetypical information management application, and can only function effectively within an information management strategy.
What constitutes such a strategy is beyond the scope of this paper, but over the last couple of years Intranet Focus Ltd has developed an information management charter as a means of focusing senior management attention on the need to manage information resources actively to reduce business risk.
We commit to ensuring that our employees: Can find the internal and external information they need to make effective business decisions that reduce corporate risk, enhance the achievement of strategic and operational objectives and enable them to develop their careers Can trust that information they find will be the best and most current available Know how to publish and circulate information so that it can be found by other employees both as quickly as possible and also at some time in the future Can take advantage of the expertise and experience gained by past and current employees Know that the roles and responsibilities of managers include ensuring that the information requirements of employees are addressed with an appropriate level of resource.
Our experience is that few organisations are in a position to meet these commitments, and yet each one of them is a crucial element in reducing risk and enhancing performance.
The Importance of Governance Managing an intranet is rarely a substantial technology challenge unless the IT department has taken the view that a portal application is required.
Most intranet content is Office files, Adobe PDF and HTML, and perhaps increasingly some rich media, so there are few challenges in terms of file management.
The challenges are almost all related to governance, and especially who is able to make the decisions on technology upgrades, information architecture and resource allocation.
The budget may well be divided between IT and (quite typically) internal communications, but the benefits of the intranet are at corporate and often global level even in a small organisation.
The communications budget will not easily stretch to running training courses for content publishers in the Engineering faculty.
The result is then that Engineering find money from somewhere and create their own intranet to meet specific needs.
The critical success factor for an intranet is that users trust it to deliver information on which they can rely.
Tracking page hits in the way that a web manager would regard as essential is of little value.
Arguably HITS in intranet terms is an acronym for How Idiots Track Success.
Governance is all about setting standards, guidelines and success targets, and ensuring that information quality is the highest possible.
Another critical issue, referred to below, is working out the optimum relationship between the intranet (basically a publishing application) and collaboration and social media applications that are highly interactive and contain a substantial amount of user-generated content.
An intranet strategy that enables decisions to be taken on these and many other issues has to be set within the context of the organisational information strategy.
The governance model also needs to look carefully at issues of information security, the impact of Freedom of Information legislation, data privacy and other compliance and regulatory requirements.
Blogs and other social media add an additional layer of complexity to the strategy.
In the Eduserv survey [3] respondents to the survey were evenly split between those who said that their institution did have a web strategy (44 per cent) and those who said that their institution did not (43 per cent).
Among those who did have a strategy, almost a quarter (24 per cent) said that the strategy had been implemented in 2009 while 15 per cent said the strategy had been put into effect in 2008.
In view of the importance of web marketing to attract students, especially from outside the UK, it seems almost inconceivable that so many HEIs do not have a web strategy.
A significant new factor in the governance challenge is presented by the adoption of SharePoint 2007 and imminently SharePoint 2010.
With the substantial educational discounts available from Microsoft there is a very significant technology push by IT departments to roll out SharePoint as the Swiss penknife of information management applications.
When properly governed SharePoint technology can deliver significant value to the organisation, but in general there is now a realisation that SharePoint is not a plug-and-play application.
An excellent report [4] on the use of Microsoft SharePoint in HEIs was published in early 2010.
The critical success factors identified included Identifying what customisation is required and managing those customisations Finding a way of managing the provision of new collaborative team sites Identifying a clear focus for the implementation Providing enough training and advice to enable people to make use of the system Defining the boundary between SharePoint and other systems Putting adequate governance arrangements in place: SharePoint has the capacity to sprawl and grow very quickly In fact these are all different aspects of governance, and reflect the fact that SharePoint, like all intranet applications, is organisation-wide in its operation and impact.
Yet it is usually the line responsibility of just one department which has little or no formal responsibility or resources to manage such a complex application.
Searching But Not Finding The deployment of SharePoint also brings the issue of search to the fore.
No matter how much attention is paid to user-centric information architecture the provision of good search functionality is crucial to the effective use of the information assets of the organisation.
The search functionality of SharePoint 2007 is very poor; fortunately Microsoft has recognised this and has substantially enhanced SharePoint 2010, though it will require 64-bit architecture.
Such is the quality of all the leading enterprise search applications there are going to be few technical problems that cannot be solved on deployment.
However most organisations fail to realise that getting the best from the investment requires a dedicated support team with IT, business and taxonomy skills that could easily be a team of four people [25].
The search logs are an invaluable source of information about not only what users can find but what they are looking for and cannot find.
In the latter case there may need to be changes to the information architecture or to the metadata metadata schema; they are not changes that can be made in a matter of hours or even days.
Such is the level of performance that users have come to expect from Google on the Web, any apparent failure of the intranet search application to find information that is known to exist will quickly cause a permanent breach of trust in that search application.
The Global Intranet Trends survey [2] has indicated for a number of years that search is regarded as a core application and yet the level of satisfaction is very low.
In the 2010 survey only 14% of respondents were very satisfied with their search application.
Certainly 47% were moderately satisfied, but is this not an acceptable benchmark for search.
Why are the results so poor?
Only 12% of respondents have a search strategy for implementation and evolution and in only 6% of cases are business owners involved in defining requirements.
Only 10% of organisations consult users about search and just 13% conduct usability tests.
Those figures are bad enough but worse is to come.
70% of organisations have less than one full time employee working on search support, 30% do not look at search logs at all, and a further 35% do so only when resources allow.
What seems to be happening is that the blame for poor search results is being pinned on the technology, as a third of all respondents had implemented or were in the process of implementing a new search application in the past 12 months.
This is good news for the search vendors, but not for employees in the organisations concerned.
Working Together Collaboration, team working, communities of practice, knowledge sharing, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 – there are just so many buzz words but little attention to detail.
So often the view is that people are not working together as the organisation expected, but if wiki applications are implemented and/or SharePoint is installed then all will be well.
Hansen has commented that bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration [26].
Certainly there has been a steady increase in the adoption of social media and other collaboration applications, but the direct benefits have been difficult to quantify.
Pilot projects rarely deliver immediate benefits and may well be closed down just as they start to be effective.
There is a tendency in organisations to use the word 'collaboration' in a generic sense when in fact there are at least four distinct models of collaboration.
The model set out below was developed by Cawthorne [27] Content-centric: Collaborative authoring, editing and discussion of documents or other content items, including sectional editing of large documents Conversation-centric: Not focusing on content items, but on discussions about ideas and concepts; this can be thought of as asynchronous brain-storming or idea development, and discussion forums are one example of this type of collaboration Process-centric: collaboration supporting the completion of standard business processes and tasks; for example the development of the annual business plan and budget for an HEI based on submissions from faculties and subsequent rounds of discussion and negotiation Project-centric: Collaboration around a very specific set of goals and objectives central to a specific project One of the core issues that this model illustrates is the potential divide between formal information (which may have been published in a document management system) and informal information held on a wiki.
Often there is no way for a user unfamiliar with the business process or project to know what the status is of the documentation, which in organisations subject to any compliance requirement can be a major issue.
The HEI Situation in the UK Higher Education institutions (HEIs) present some unique challenges in intranet management.
There are multiple user segments, which might typically include On-site visitors (to conferences, training courses etc) Prospective students Undergraduate Special (Continuing Professional Development (CPD), short course, etc) Postgraduate Research Taught Postgraduate UK International Academic Staff Teaching and Learning Research External researchers Affiliated institutions Corporate Other Alumni Business and commercial partners Regulators and ombudsmen The unique challenges include: Students may be on campus for only a year and in general the user population changes substantially from year to year HEIs operate on a very federated basis, with limited direct control from a central management team Budgets are under very considerable pressure Usually a multiplicity of departmental and other file servers A wide range of specialised applications, such as learning management applications Complex information security architectures Remote access requirements from student accommodation Support for mobile device access Maintaining a wide range of sensitive personal data The need to protect the integrity of institutional and third-party intellectual property The ability to provide important assessment information to students and staff promptly The combination of these challenges, multiple user groups and very substantial collections of information mean that HEI information environments are complex strategic assets.
As a result HEI intranets push the technological and governance boundaries to the limit and beyond.
No research seems to have been carried out on HEI intranets, and the list of challenges above is based on a number of projects carried out by Intranet Focus Ltd in UK universities and associated agencies, in particular a long-term intranet strategy project at the Open University which is described below.
However it is possible to visit a number of university intranets because some or all of the intranet is accessible from the web.
20 UK university intranets can be found very easily using Google and scanning through the first dozen or so pages of results.
Some of the information on these sites might well be considered either confidential or at least being subject to controlled access but either it has been decided that the benefits of total or limited public access are in the best interests of the HEI concerned, that Freedom of Information legislation required the HEI to do so, or that no one took a view on the issues.
Among the content that is accessible on these intranets are three-year corporate plans, staff policies, and departmental research projects for commercial customers.
Although in some cases sections of the intranet are password-protected, one university provides such detailed information on the formats of the passwords and user names that it would be fairly easy to hack into the intranet.
It might be expected that JISC would be in a position to provide support for intranet managers.
A search for 'intranets' on the JISC site did produce 383 results, all of which (on 11 February 2010) had the displayed date of 22 April 2009 even though the dates of the content ranged from 1999 to 2009.
There are three links on the technology section of the JISC site [28], but two of these no longer exist and the third is a very poor list by a third-party organisation that fails to list most of the major intranet resources referred to in this article.
Open University Intranet Case Study The Open University has long been a leader in using information technology to support learning, teaching and administration.
As far as intranet use was concerned, by early 2007, when the decision had been made to implement an EMC Documentum document management application essentially for course production, there were around 200+ individual intranets in use.
They had been built using a number of different platforms, including a WCMS developed by the OU IT department.
Intranet search was carried out using Ultraseek, but not all the intranets were indexed.
Intranet Focus Ltd was commissioned to develop an intranet strategy for the OU, and at the same time a full-time intranet manager was appointed to manage the development of the intranet.
A significant amount of user survey work was undertaken and the main issues identified were: The inadequacy of the search tool Out-of-date content (sites and documents), content duplication, broken links and owners of documents having left the OU Inconsistent navigation, and the different "look and feel" of sites depending on the publishing platform and on staff resources and expertise Better communication channels, e.g.
who is working on a specific project News feeds that would push information out to staff Web publishing needs to be quick, user-friendly and offer more flexibility During 2008 decisions were taken to undertake the redevelopment in a number of phases.
Phase 1 was to develop a new Intranet home page.
Phase 2 was to seek a new search application.
Phase 3 was to acquire a suitable Web publishing tool.
A new home page was developed using one of the existing CMS platforms.
Among the methods used to determine the information architecture were online and manual card-sorting exercises.
As the design progressed, a significant amount of usability testing was undertaken around specific tasks that users needed to be able to perform on the intranet.
This was soft-launched with the original home page still being available for a while.
The Exalead search application was chosen for both the intranet and public web sites, taking around ten months from writing the specification until implementation, with some significant security management issues to solve in the process.
In the middle of 2009 a decision was taken to adopt Drupal as the University's web publishing tool for new intranet (and public) sites with the plan to gradually migrate other intranet sites to this open source platform.
Work is currently being carried out on the redevelopment of the intranet sites for HR and for the OU Business School.
Alongside this has been a significant development in the ability to surface Documentum content into Drupal.
This work has been conducted by the Intranet Manager with additional resources and support (often limited) for specific tasks.
There is still much to do to reduce further the number of intranet sites and to continue to improve usability.
Creating Intranet Value Over the last ten years there has been little in the way of major technology changes that would affect intranets, even if enterprise search, web content management and portal systems have become more powerful and offer more functionality.
The good practice that was developed by early adopters in the 1990s still holds good today.
Yet, based on extensive anecdotal information about HEI intranets accumulated over the last few years, and a detailed review of those intranets in the public domain, it is clear that, for the most part, the HEI sector is not adopting good practice.
Not only is this an issue for the effective use of the information resources of the university by staff and students but students will go out into careers without experience of what a good intranet should be able to add to help an organisation achieve its objectives.
Although Robertson has played an enormously important role in developing operational good practice it is time to turn to McConnell, who is the leading thinker on intranet strategy, especially governance strategy, to enable me to provide a positive and constructive end to what otherwise would be a somewhat depressing analysis of the intranet environment.
In the NetStrategyJMC 2010 Global Intranet Trends report [2] McConnell identifies six areas where it is both possible and desirable to enhance the value of an intranet.
In summary these are: Make the intranet a front-door into the widest possible range of repositories and applications, but enable users to customise what they see to reduce information overload The intranet should be task-based, providing the information and applications needed to complete tasks on a seamless basis, rather than requiring staff to work in one application and then use the intranet to locate forms, documents, and other information needed to complete the task on an ad hoc basis The intranet should be team-oriented, enabling virtual teams to share knowledge, information and documents.
External partners need to be able to access the same information and tools as the employees.
The intranet makes it easy to find people even when you do not know their names.
People with shared interests can connect: they can share experiences and good practices directly even if they did not know each other prior to the exchanges The intranet works in real time, so that users can be informed, communicate and contact each other in real-time regardless of location.
The news section of the intranet lets people subscribe to different news topics, and their individual news pages are updated as the news is published The intranet enables teleworkers to use the same tools and see the same information as the office-based people, making effective use of mobile technology To achieve this requires vision, planning and commitment to place the intranet at the very centre of an organisational information strategy.
It can be done, as the reports from the Nielsen Norman Group and Step Two Designs illustrate, but judging from a review of the admittedly small number of publicly accessible HEI intranets the standards in this sector seem quite low.
In Conclusion Good decisions demand good information, and, given the economic crisis that the UK is currently experiencing, especially in terms of HEI funding, there will be many difficult decisions to make over the years ahead.
The story behind the potential destruction of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009 is a classic example of not being able to join up information from a number of different applications and make good decisions [29].
Stern has commented that, 'Managers need more than gut instinct and past experience to help them make good decisions.
This means that knowledge has to be seen as an asset, something to be both respected and exploited.'
[30] Too many organisations seem to take the view that if they put all possible information onto an intranet, and connect up a search engine, then the job is done.
In HEIs in particular, with rapidly changing populations of students and researchers in particular, knowledge is walking in and out of the institution all of the time, and information is being added to multiple repositories in amounts that are well into gigabytes each day.
A good intranet, properly governed and resourced, with technology that is appropriate to the requirements, will make a significant difference to the achievement of organisational and personal objectives.
In a survey of international companies conducted by Capgemini [31], over 80% of respondents stated that information exploitation was a critical driver or determinant of business performance.
However, many also felt they could make better use of their information.
The vast majority said that business performance could be improved by at least 27% if they were able to exploit their information successfully.
Until HEIs, along with the majority of both private and public sector organisations in the UK, recognise that information needs to be treated as arguably the most important asset they possess (because it remains behind even when employees leave) staff of the institutions could well make uninformed decisions, and end up initiating a divine comedy of errors.
Is that a risk worth taking when institutional reputation is so important and fragile?
Or would it be better to regard information as a strategic asset, starting with a re-evaluation of the role the intranet is, and could be, playing in the achievement of objectives in challenging and changing times.
Acknowledgements I would like to record my thanks to Jed Cawthorne, Jane McConnell, Mike Reddy (Syndicus) and James Robertson for their comments on early versions of this paper.
Nicky Waters and Ian Roddis kindly agreed to allow me to cite the Open University as a case study.
I have made a number of comments on the HEI sector in this paper, and I must emphasise that they should not be regarded as representing the views of my colleagues in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield.
References E-commerce and information and communication technology (ICT) activity, 2008.
Office for National Statistics.
2009 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/ecom1109.pdf Global Intranet Trends Report 2010 http://www.netjmc.net/intranet-trends/ Investigation into the management of website content in higher education institutions.
Eudserv.
2009 http://www.eduserv.ac.uk/research/studies/wcm2009 Investigation into the use of Microsoft SharePoint in Higher Education Institutions.
Lappin, J and McLeod, J. Eduserv, 2010 http://www.eduserv.ac.uk Intranet Benchmarking Forum http://www.ibforum.com Intranet Forum http://www.ukeig.org.uk Online Information Conference http://www.online-information.co.uk Intranet conferences 2010 http://www.intranetfocus.com/blog/entry.php?entry=74 Workplace Web 3 models http://www.netjmc.net/globally_local/2010/01/workplace-web-3-models.html Peters, T. Liberation Management.
1992 http://www.tompeters.com White, M, Howells, A, Kibby, P and Abell, A Intranet Management.
TFPL Ltd, London, 1998 Step Two Designs http://www.steptwo.com.au Nielsen Norman Group http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/ Intranet Focus Ltd http://www.intranetfocus.com Treddinick, Luke.
Why Intranets Fail (and How to Fix Them) 2004 Chandos Publishing http://www.chandospublishing.com Robertson, James.
Intranet Design + Redesign (in preparation) http://www.steptwo.com.au White, Martin.
Handbook on Intranet Governance (to be published by Facet Publishing 2010) How IBM uses an intranet to connect a global audience http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5362/is_200805/ai_n27900315/?tag=content;col1 Intranet Review Toolkit.
http://www.intranetreviewtoolkit.org/ Worldwide Intranet Chellenge (WIC) http://www.cibasolutions.com.au/ better Connected Intranets.
Socitm.
2007 http://www.socitm.gov.uk/socitm/News/Press+Releases/20070209.htm Poynter, K. Review of information security at HM Revenue and Customs.
Final report, June 1998 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/poynter_review/poynter_review_index.cfm IBM Global CIO Study United Kingdom, 2009 http://www-935.ibm.com/services/uk/cio/ciostudy/ The Information Opportunity.
CapGemini.
2008 http://www.uk.capgemini.com/news/pr/pr1605/ Arnold, S and White M, Successful Enterprise Search Management.
Galatea 2009 Hansen, M. Collaboration.
Harvard Business Press.
2009 http://hbr.org/ ECM Stuff http://ecm-stuff.blogspot.com/ JISC: Technologies: I http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/services/techwatch/aztechnologies/i.aspx#intranets Northwest Flight 253's Lessons for Leaders Rosabeth Moss Kanter Harvard Business Review blog entry, 4 January 2010 http://blogs.hbr.org/kanter/2010/01/northwest-flight-253s-lessons.html Stern, S. Financial Times, 11 January 2010, p.11.
How to Make Your Business Information Count.
CapGemini, 2009 http://www.capgemini.com Author Details Martin White, FRSC, HonFCLIP, FRSA Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd.
Visiting Professor Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Return to top Article Title: "Intranet Management: Divine Comedy or Strategic Imperative?"
Author: Martin White Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/white/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Internet Librarian International 2009 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Internet Librarian International 2009 Buzz data usability blog copyright ebook drm Citation BibTex RIS Katherine Allen reports on Internet Librarian International 2009 which took place in London on 15 and 16 October 2009.
Internet Librarian International [1] brought together librarians and information professionals from 33 countries including China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Nigeria and Australia as well as Europe and North America, to discuss and debate the latest developments under the conference theme 'value, versatility and viability'.
Conference Chair Marydee Ojala emphasised that today's challenge for libraries and librarians lies in maximising the value of the internet for users, while proving the value of services to communities, and the theme of innovation was common to many speakers.
The conference covered a wealth of diverse topics including usability, usefulness and usage data; search as platform; libraries on the move; collaboration and community and eCollections and eBooks.
There was also a vibrant networking area which featured 15 sponsoring organisations.
This report focuses on the two keynote speakers who set the tone for the conference.
Opening Keynote: Cory Doctorow Figure 1: Cory Doctorow giving the opening keynote Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, blogger and activist perhaps best known for his Guardian column [2] and as Co-Editor of the Boing Boing blog [3].
He reminded delegates that copyright is not just about controlling access to the products of the big entertainment giants.
Now that the Internet is the primary mechanism for disseminating education and providing access to freedom of speech, healthcare and government information, it's more fundamental than that.
The public has a legitimate interest in preserving access to these resources and, according to Cary, 'people whose job it is to provide information have to be international copyright experts'.
He noted that all over the world there are new rules that are meant to stop people making copies – but 'they have never worked and they never will work'.
Day 2 Keynote: Peter Murray-Rust University of Cambridge chemist Dr Peter Murray-Rust [4] avowed his great love of libraries but challenged librarians to innovate with passion, in order to 'change the world', using Ranganathan's five laws of library science [5] as their mantra for the future.
Peter set out 12 actions that in his view every library can do to keep the library as a growing organism.
They included publicly campaigning for openness, and actively participating in obtaining science grants and in the scientific publishing process.
More controversially, he suggested that libraries should ignore copyright by posting all academic content publicly, and put second-year students in charge of developing educational and technology resources.
Many delegates would have been struck by Murray-Rust's off-the-cuff comment 'if you do not destroy copyright as a force in academic scholarly publishing in the next 10 years then your profession is dead', which occasioned much discussion during the subsequent networking breaks.
In many respects, the current economic climate, while restricting library budgets, has engendered a culture of 'guerrilla innovation' in some libraries and information centres where effective projects have been developed under the radar.
Peter Murray-Rust exhorted librarians to think of the library as an addictive game and there were plenty of examples, both on the conference platform and amongst delegates, of librarians working with passion and commitment the better to serve their library community.
In a challenging year for many libraries, this was a high-energy and motivating event.
References Internet Librarian International 2009, 15 & 16 October 2009 http://www.internet-librarian.com/2009/ Guardian Online: Cory Doctorow's column on DRM http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/digitalwrongs Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/ Dr Peter Murray-Rust http://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/staff/pm.html Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr517/03-04-wt2/projects/ranganathan/contri.htm Author Details Katherine Allen Director of Business Development, Europe Information Today Email: k.allen@infotoday.com Web site: http://www.infotoday.com Return to top Article Title: "Internet Librarian International 2009" Author: Katherine Allen Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/ili-2009-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Code4lib 2006 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Code4lib 2006 Buzz software framework metadata blog repositories oai-pmh opac interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Jeremy Frumkin and Dan Chudnov report on the inaugural conference of the Code4lib community of programmers, hackers, and techies working in or with libraries and information systems.
Focused as a highly technical event, the inaugural code4lib conference resulted from the combined efforts of the code4lib community, a loosely connected set of programmers, hackers, librarians, and library technologists who pursue technologies related to libraries and information.
Over 80 attendees had the opportunity to learn what their peers were pursuing at other institutions, to share projects, hacks, code, and ideas, and to participate in breakout sessions and give lightning talks.
Everything about code4lib proceeded from the involvement of the code4lib community and the attendees of the event, from the planning of logistics to the decisions about the programme, and the on-the-fly decision making and agenda shaping.
Genesis of a Conference Code4lib 2006 [1] began as an idea that had been simmering in hallway conversations, email discussions, and chat room chatter for quite a while.
In early November, the community in the #code4lib IRC channel [2] turned the rough idea of extending the 'hackfest' component of the Access conference held annually in Canada into a three day conference targeting coders and technologists who work in or with libraries.
In essence, code4lib 2006 was created through a grassroots, open manner, with members of the code4lib community working together to plan, organise, and run the conference.
Community voting decided everything from the conference location to the accepted presentations and the design of the conference t-shirt.
Communication occurred mainly on the code4lib and code4libcon discussion lists, as well as the #code4lib IRC channel.
(Conference details and information are available via the code4lib Web site [3].
Finally, members of the community helped run many of the events during the conference, including the lightning talks and breakout sessions.
Conference Overview The code4lib conference comprised four distinct types of activity: keynote talks, proposed twenty-minute talks, five-minute lightning talks, and participatory breakout sessions.
Attendees had the opportunity to participate in all of these activities, as code4lib was a single-track event (except for the breakout sessions, which ran in parallel).
Information about presentations [4] can be found on the conference Web site and, by the time this article is published, audio recordings of the keynotes, presentations, and lightning talks should also be available.
Keynotes The opening keynote speech was by the Evergreen development team of the Georgia PINES consortium.
Evergreen is a state funded development effort to create an open source integrated library system.
Because the Evergreen team could not attend the conference, they presented their keynote virtually with a speakerphone and slides shown in the conference hall manned by a conference attendee.
This perfectly reflected the 'hacker' philosophy of the conference and also set the tone for the rest of the event, through both the breadth and technical depth of the work they presented and in how easily they overcame the technical challenges of presenting a lengthy keynote remotely.
Indeed, the presenters were even able to interact directly with the audience, easily hearing and answering numerous questions.
Thom Hickey, Chief Scientist of OCLC's Office of Research, gave the second keynote highlighting the amazing things possible in as little as 1,000 lines of software code [5].
He demonstrated a number of tools created at OCLC in recent years and how they can be composed into extremely sophisticated new applications with a minimal amount of additional new software development.
This keynote also provided the audience with a view into how inexpensive approaches to high-performance computing techniques may be implemented with commodity hardware.
To top it all off, Thom delivered most of his keynote adorned in a shirt which itself consisted of an OAI-PMH repository.
Thom Hickey in formal code4lib attire 20-minute Talks One of the aspects of code4lib much appreciated was the pace of presentations.
Each day had a set of twenty-minute talks, whose length and subject matter kept the energy at a high level.
These talks were voted in by community members from more than thirty proposals, which were solicited at short notice over several library-related email lists.
Despite the short notice, the quality of all proposals was extremely high.
The topics presented were diverse, ranging from practical solutions for current problems to forward-thinking digital library research topics: ERP Options in an OSS World (Art Rhyno) [6] Connecting Everything with unAPI and OPA (Dan Chudnov) [7] WikiD (Jeff Young) [8] Lipstick on a Pig: 7 Ways to Improve the Sex Life of Your OPAC (Jim Robertson) [9] AHAH: When Good is Better than Best (Casey Durfee) [10] Standards, Reusability, and the Mating Habits of Learning Content (Robby Robson) [11] Generating Recommendations in OPACs: Initial Results and Open Areas for Exploration (Colleen Whitney) [12] Library Text Mining (Robert Sanderson) [13] Anatomy of aDORe (Ryan Chute) [14] Teaching the Library and Information Community How to Remix Information (Raymond Yee) [15] Two Paths to Interoperable Metadata (Devon Smith) [16] The Case for Code4Lib 501c(3) (Roy Tennant) [17] Quality Metrics (Aaron Krowne) [18] Practical Aspects of Implementing Open Source in Armenia (Tigran Zargaryan) [19] What Blog Applications Can Teach Us About Library Software Architecture (Casey Bisson) [20] Proper laptop-to-attendee ratio Breakout Sessions A key part of the conference lay in encouraging all participants actually to participate.
Prior to and during the conference itself, attendees were encouraged to propose breakout sessions where specific topics, projects, or concepts could be discussed and in some cases worked on.
Instances were as follows: Building a Library IM Bot Developing unAPI and w/unAPI Developing an Interface for Federated Search Engines or for an OPAC Interface The Future of code4lib More Lipstick on a Pig: Improving OPACs Lightning Talks These five-minute presentations, wherein any attendee could speak on any topic for five strictly timed minutes, were the biggest hit of the conference.
Of the longest of three separate lightning talk sessions, one held each day of the conference, one attendee later wrote elsewhere that "the session where 22 talks were presented in rapid succession was the most intense and gratifying conference experience I have ever seen."
[21] Overall, thirty-three lightning talks were presented, by twenty-eight different presenters or almost exactly one-third of the attendees.
A complete list of the lightning talks can be obtained from the conference Web site [22].
Conclusion Code4lib 2006 proved to be an unmitigated success.
For a first-time event, having over eighty participants and speakers from the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Armenia (yes, Armenia) was impressive, and for the most part, things ran smoothly and effectively.
The participants overwhelmingly agreed that the single conference track (in the style of the Access conferences [23]) succeeded in keeping everybody on the same page, and participants also discussed ideas for possibly expanding the next conference to include preor post-conference workshops, tutorials, or code sprints.
Overall, feedback was extremely positive, and many people stated that they were already pencilling in code4lib 2007 on their calendars.
References code4lib 2006 http://www.code4lib.org/2006/ code4lib IRC channel http://www.code4lib.org/irc code4lib Web site http://code4lib.org/ Information on presentations available via http://code4lib.org/2006/schedule/ 1,000 Lines of Code, and other topics from OCLC Research http://www.code4lib.org/2006/hickey ERP Options in an OSS World http://www.code4lib.org/2006/rhyno Connecting Everything with unAPI and OPA http://www.code4lib.org/2006/chudnov WikiD http://www.code4lib.org/2006/young Lipstick on a Pig: 7 Ways to Improve the Sex Life of Your OPAC http://www.code4lib.org/2006/robertson AHAH: When Good is Better than Best http://www.code4lib.org/2006/durfee Standards, Reusability, and the Mating Habits of Learning Content http://www.code4lib.org/2006/robson Generating Recommendations in OPACs: Initial Results and Open Areas for Exploration http://www.code4lib.org/2006/whitney Library Text Mining http://www.code4lib.org/2006/sanderson Anatomy of aDORe http://www.code4lib.org/2006/liu Teaching the Library and Information Community How to Remix Information http://www.code4lib.org/2006/yee Two Paths to Interoperable Metadata http://www.code4lib.org/2006/smith The Case for Code4Lib 501c(3) http://www.code4lib.org/2006/tennant Quality Metrics http://www.code4lib.org/2006/krowne Editor's note: readers may be interested to learn that Aaron Krowne and Urvashi Gadi have contributed an article entitled QMSearch: A Quality Metrics-aware Search Framework to this issue, see http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/krowne/ Practical Aspects of Implementing Open Source in Armenia http://www.code4lib.org/2006/zargaryan What Blog Applications Can Teach Us About Library Software Architecture http://www.code4lib.org/2006/bisson Comment on 5-minute talks http://webvoy.uwindsor.ca:8087/artblog/librarycog/1140232323 code4lib Conference: lightning talks http://code4lib.org/2006/lightning 2005's hosts were Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and provided links forward and back at: http://access2005.library.ualberta.ca/ Author Details Jeremy Frumkin The Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services Oregon State University Email: jeremy.frumkin@oregonstate.edu Web site: http://digitallibrarian.org Dan Chudnov Librarian/Programmer Yale Center for Medical Informatics Email: daniel.chudnov@yale.edu Web site: http://onebiglibrary.net/ Return to top Article Title: "Code4lib 2006" Author: Jeremy Frumkin and Dan Chudnov Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/code4lib-2006-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing the Crowd Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing the Crowd Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World Buzz data software framework metadata tagging browser blog foia research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy reviews a text that could offer the blueprint for moving records management into the 21st century.
I'd like to start with a disclaimer: I am not a records manager nor have I ever been a records manager.
My only official qualification in the field of records management is that I took a module in it whilst studying for my MSc in Information Management many moons ago.
That said, this is not a book just for records managers.
The overlaps with those working in other fields such as information management, librarianship, IT services, Web management, teaching, research etc.
are many.
Neither is it just a book for those interested in Web 2.0 and the applications involved.
It primarily appealed to me because it is a book for people interested in change and how within our working environments we take on the challenges presented by our continually changing technical climate.
It is a book for both those who have made a decision to embrace change and for people who are keeping their heads down below the parapet.
In which case I think that just about covers everyone!
The premise of Steve Bailey's book is that in our world of data-deluge records management is no longer sustainable.
Records management is by its very nature a means to an end (the protection and support of one's organisation); Bailey argues that as those ends evolve, so should likewise the means.
As such records management must adopt a fundamentally different approach if it is to play a part in managing the records of this changing environment.
The Structure The book is sensibly ordered into three parts: the first of which outlines our changing world and Web 2.0, which Bailey calls the third IT paradigm (the first being the increased use of personal computers and the second the integration of the World wide Web into our culture).
The second part explains why records management as it currently stands is not fit to deal with this change.
Finally the third section offers ten defining principles for Records Management 2.0, the phrase Bailey has coined for this change in approach.
Part 1: The Nature of the Changing World In the first part of his text Bailey details the ways in which Web 2.0 and its concepts have affected the records management world.
He highlights a number of different areas; the most important for him being the increasingly blurred boundaries between domestic and business use of IT systems and the boundless growth in storage capacity, which has led to a situation where people would rather search for than manage information.
He points out that because Web 2.0 has allowed users to create, share and store information in any way they choose without the need for corporate systems the balance of power as regards information has been tilted away from organisations and towards the individual.
For example, blogs have fundamentally changed the concept of a corporate record because they raise issues about ownership and management.
Bringing these technologies in-house is no longer a feasible option, Users will now increasingly choose to store their information externally.
The final chapter in this section sees Bailey use a depiction of an office of the future to demonstrate the process by which an organisation might well end up with all corporate applications outsourced.
The scenario is not that far removed from what happens now and the progression is cleverly drawn: it is often small logical steps that take us to a new situation, rather than radical changes in direction.
One can almost feel the rug being pulled from under the records management community's feet.
Part 2: Is Records Management No Longer Fit for Purpose?
In the second part of the book Bailey seeks to demonstrate how the principles that currently underpin records management were formulated in another age and no longer operate.
Concepts like 'regardless of format', appraisal, retention and destruction are picked apart to reveal outdated approaches that have become habit rather than effective future-proofing strategies.
Bailey explains how the Data Protection Act (1998) and Freedom of Information Act (2001), two of the most significant legislative acts of recent times for records managers, have been embraced by the community yet have had no discernible impact on the outdated concepts that comprise records management.
The discussion about records vs. information in which Bailey engages was of great interest to me since I had had the same discussion not long before with a number of records managers working with me on the JISC-PoWR Project.
Within records management, records are seen as in scope while information is out of scope; this concept is something that is very dear to the heart of all records management preofessionals.
Bailey argues that this is a distinction which has now lost its relevance.
The Freedom of Information Act itself demonstrates that the distinction of an item being a record is irrelevant as every element of information can be requested; therefore all information is potentially necessary to protect and support one's organisation.
Thus for records managers the items within their scope has exploded.
While officially the percentage of data that falls under the records management remit is falling, in reality the percentage of information that may play a role in protecting an organisation's legal interests may be considerably higher.
Bailey argues that a records manager's role is not to avoid responsibility but to embrace it.
Part 3: Records Management 2.0 and the Future of Records Management In part 3 Bailey nails his colours to the mast by describing what records management 2.0 could look like and defines his 10 principles of records management 2.0 [1] Bailey suggests a future where the user community collectively describes the value and properties of a record; where records retention, description and purpose are determined in part by users within general boundaries defined by the records manager.
He feels that harnessing the wisdom of the crowd may aid current scalability problems and represent a way forward for managing records.
Bailey's defining principles advocate investment in a comprehensive, scalable system that is independent of specific hardware, software and location.
Such a system should use Web-based technologies but also be extensible (and future-proof), enjoyable to use and it should be able to be applied to all recorded information.
Bailey states that 'all information is at least worthy of initial inclusion and assessment…information should be assumed to be of value until proven worthless.'
His idea is deliberately undefined, but could follow the lines of a browser-based tagging system (similar to del.icio.us [2]) that allows users to tag records and offer feedback on whether records were useful and should be retained, based on operational need, legal requirements and historical interest.
He also advocates the need for a detailed, complex and fluid policy framework to support such a system.
Alongside technological and policy-based solutions, Bailey is also adamant that for records management 2.0 to work, it needs to be driven by the records management community, a community that must be self-critical and willing to learn from other stakeholder groups.
Although Bailey's suggestions are still rough around the edges, he does argue that, whatever it may be, records management 2.0 is better than nothing at all, the only other option on the table.
Conclusions Bailey's book will not go without criticism.
Many of his ideas are deliberately provocative.
For example, he suggests that records managers embrace folksonomies rather than classification schemes and metadata schemas as the main means of resource discovery for unstructured data.
This discussion is one that has been going on in the information management world for many years and has led to harsh words from some librarians.
Yet throughout the book he also maintains that there is no need to abandon traditional records management techniques if they work well.
For Bailey the text is only the start of a dialogue between himself and his community; to engage it he wants to stimulate discussion.
The ability to criticise ourselves (and the way we work) is a great skill and as Bailey says, 'there are no sacred cows'.
This book offers up much food for thought.
Bailey wants to wake up and shake his community.
He wants to make them see that all is not well in the records management world and that if they don't start moving with the times then they will be pushed out of the way.
He contends there is a very real possibility that records management as we know it will cease to exist; it will be outsourced.
It seems to me that the records management community should actually be pleased that they have a forward-thinking person sitting on their team.
With this book Steve Bailey is doing both the practical and sensible thing.
He is encouraging a much-needed debate on what records management 2.0 should be from within his own community of records managers.
Now that sounds like a plan!
Many of these ideas are further discussed on Steve Bailey's blog: Records management futurewatch [3].
References Steve Bailey's Blog: Records management future watch, The 10 (published) principles of Records Management 2.0, June 2008 http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/2008/06/10-published-principles-of-records.html del.icio.us http://delicious.com/ Steve Bailey's Blog: Records management future watch http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/ Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.guy/ Return to top Article Title: "Managing the Crowd: Rethinking records management for the Web 2.0 world" Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/guy-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Connecting Researchers at the University of Bath Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Connecting Researchers at the University of Bath Buzz mobile wiki database dissemination rss doi identifier blog video preservation syndication e-learning curation wordpress twitter hashtag ict microblogging research Citation BibTex RIS Jez Cope and Geraldine Jones describe a recent series of events introducing social media to research students at the University of Bath.
The Connected Researcher initiative is a response to both local and sector-wide events.
At the University of Bath groups of postgraduate research students from Chemistry and Social Sciences separately expressed an interest in finding out how to profile their own research and establish links with other researchers in their fields.
Nationally there has been a growing wave of interest in the potential offered by social media for supporting all aspects of the research cycle as exemplified by the recent Digital Researcher events sponsored by Vitae [1] and the Research Information Network (RIN) publication Social media: A guide for researchers [2].
We sought to respond to the needs and aspirations of our researchers for participation in wider research-related communities through offering opportunities to discover the potential of social media.
Social Media and Research Communities Put simply, social media are tools for social interaction using Web-based and mobile technologies (Wikipedia).
These technologies, often referred to as Web 2.0 or social software, provide services that support users in generating and publishing their own content.
The social interactions developed as a result of this activity can support engagement with communities of practice through networking and other co-operative and collaborative practices.
In short, social media can provide a new dimension to engaging with research communities.
They may be central to an individual’s area of research or more peripheral where interests intersect.
Networking skills are key to engaging with these communities and social media offer tools and practices for maintaining, navigating and expanding these networks of like-minded people.
In fact some argue that digital networking using social media or ‘network literacy’ is becoming a core professional skill [3].
Although the tools themselves (e.g.
for blogging, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, media sharing etc.)
are relatively simple to use, they make little sense when disconnected from a specific context or community.
Indeed viewing them out of context has led to criticism that social media are trivial and only useful for propagating banal comment.
The Connected Researcher: Aims and Approach The Connected Researcher (a term borrowed from colleagues at the University of Cardiff) initiative seeks to place social media firmly in the context of research, focusing on the processes and purposes of use.
The initiative’s aims broadly align with recommendations for facilitating the use of Web 2.0 tools among the research community put forward in a recent RIN publication [4] as follows: raising awareness of the range of tools and services and their relevance for different kinds of activities; publicising examples of successful use and good practice by research groups and networks across a range of disciplines; providing guidelines and training to help researchers make informed choices; helping to set standards and providing advice on curation and preservation.
However we were keen to steer away from a ‘cookbook’ approach, mindful of ‘the risk of stifling innovation by attempts to impose particular systems or concepts of how they will be used.’ [4] Through a series of seminars and workshops we wanted to communicate the participatory practices that have evolved around the use of social media and in particular how these practices can support all aspects of the research cycle.
We took a social learning approach, creating opportunities for interested but novice users to engage with researchers who already have some experience in successfully using social media.
Participants in the Connected Researcher events were also exposed to a range of digital networking techniques as well as the potential benefits and challenges.
As a result participants were able to identify personal and specific reasons for adopting social media in support of their research.
Follow-up workshops then offered a hands-on session in getting started with specific social media tools including account creation and how to access and contribute to the associated information streams generated.
Linking to the Research Cycle In order to demonstrate a range of ways in which social media can support or challenge research activity, we planned to link the Connected Researcher events to specific aspects of the research cycle as defined by Cann et al.
[2].
They see research as essentially a collaborative process, broadly following four stages: identification of knowledge; knowledge creation; quality assurance of knowledge, and; dissemination of knowledge.
Identification of Knowledge Finding relevant information can be a challenge to researchers with so much information ‘out there’.
Undertaking literature reviews using peer-reviewed sources has traditionally been regarded as a relatively solitary activity employing good search strategies.
Social media can help with both the discovery and filtering of information by using the collective knowledge of those engaged in related research.
These processes and supporting technologies were explored as part of our first event.
Knowledge Creation The potential for social media to aid in the creation of research knowledge is also wide-ranging, but possible tensions with existing publishing protocols can sometimes inhibit experimentation.
The second event provided a forum for discussing these issues and an opportunity to create and use a blog.
Quality Assurance of Knowledge In terms of quality-assured knowledge, social media offer new opportunities to gain formative feedback on ideas and share recommendations within and between research communities.
How this activity dovetails with existing and formal research practice is also a subject for debate.
This, together with a hands-on exploration of social bookmarking, provides the focus of the proposed third Connected Researcher event.
Dissemination of Knowledge Finally, social media can add to existing mechanisms of disseminating research findings.
However which mechanism to employ and when is likely to depend on the nature of the research and personal preference.
The concluding event considers the role of new media (film, audio) in the dissemination of research findings.
Events So Far Launch Event On Thursday 14 April 2011, we launched the initiative with a morning of talks and workshops for researchers and postgraduate research students.
We began with a talk from our guest speaker, Dr Tristram Hooley, Head of the International Centre for Guidance Studies (iCeGS) at the University of Derby and co-writer of Social media: A guide for researchers [1][2].
Tristram’s main point was that most (if not all) of the processes involved in research are inherently social and can therefore be supported and enhanced through the use of social media tools.
He discussed how online networking is an excellent way to build and maintain ‘weak links’.
They tend to involve large numbers of people with whom you would not usually come into contact, but who nonetheless can have a significant impact on your research through ideas generated in conversation over coffee or at a conference meal: ‘lots of people who can help you a bit is better than a few people who can help you a lot.’ He described several practical reasons for researchers to make use of social media.
Some were altruistic (‘research moves more quickly if ideas are shared’) while others were more self-centred (‘you’ll get information and references that will save you time and help you spot things that you would have missed’).
Overall, he put forward a very persuasive case in favour of trying out social media.
Twitter Following the talk and a short break for refreshments, Tristram introduced a group of students to Twitter [4][5] in the first of our two workshops.
Twitter is the most popular example of what is referred to as a ‘microblogging’ service.
In simplest terms, microblogging involves posting a series of short messages (typically limited to 140 characters) on the Web.
There is a whole new language surrounding Twitter, of retweets, @mentions and hashtags.
This is one of the factors which can discourage new users of what is, at heart, a very simple technology.
Rather than spending time trying to familiarise participants with this jargon, Tristram stuck to a short introduction, then had them all sign up to Twitter and start playing with it straight away.
The introduction focused on how Twitter is useful to researchers.
At conferences, it provides what is known as a ‘back channel’, allowing delegates to discuss and debate talks as they happen.
It has traditionally been thought of as rude to get your laptop or phone out during a talk, but it is increasingly the case that those who do are more engaged, through their online discussion, than those who do not.
There are knock-on benefits to taking discussion online.
It affords people unable to attend in person the opportunity to follow along and contribute, and enables discussion to continue seamlessly after the event.
This process of extending an event beyond its physical location and scheduled time is referred to as ‘amplification’.
Twitter is also a valuable tool for building and maintaining your face-to-face networks.
It makes it much easier to keep contacts up to date with your latest achievements, and in a way that is for some much more natural than the old round-robin newsletter or email.
It allows much more interaction as well, and that can introduce you to new people with shared interests who you might otherwise never have met, even if you were at the same conference.
The simplicity of the Twitter platform, combined with Tristram’s straightforward delivery, made it very accessible to the participants.
Since the workshop, we have heard from a number of participants who are continuing to use Twitter, primarily to receive updates from big names and major journals in their research areas.
Really Simple Syndication For the second workshop, we chose to focus on Really Simple Syndication (RSS) as a mechanism for creating custom information streams tailored to individual research interests.
RSS is a technology which allows users to aggregate content from a wide range of sources.
This makes it much easier to follow news, journal articles and blog posts in one place.
Participants were introduced to iGoogle [5][6] and Google Reader [6][7] as a place to aggregate RSS feeds and were then encouraged to track down feeds relevant to their research.
Populating their pages with newly found feeds created a ‘personal newspaper’ which is automatically updated when the feed source changes.
Thus RSS offers another means of filtering and managing information.
It can even be used to create search feeds to monitor search engines for specific keywords associated with a research area.
Unlike Twitter, RSS is not overtly social, but when used to monitor other researchers’ blogs or perhaps a collaborative project wiki, it can prompt an exchange of comments and feedback across a community.
Participants new to RSS were struck by how convenient it was to manage information with RSS but were equally disappointed when they found a useful information source that did not offer a feed.
Innovations Day Blogging Event Building on the success of the first event, we set up a second, focusing on academic blogging and coinciding with the University of Bath’s Teaching & Learning Innovations Day on Thursday 12 May 2011.
This time, we drew on local expertise and put together a panel discussion featuring four bloggers from around the university: Dr Tony James, Senior Lecturer, Department of Chemistry; Dr Declan Fleming, RSC Teacher Fellow, Department of Chemistry; James Doodson, PhD student, Department of Psychology; and Prof Bill Scott, Honorary Professor, Department of Education.
We intentionally brought together panellists with a range of experience and reasons for using blogs, and a lively, productive discussion ensued.
Tony James uses his blog as a good-looking, easy-to-edit Web site [7][8] that publicises his research group and ties together all his other outputs, both traditional and modern.
Declan Fleming blogs [8][9] to keep visitors to the Royal Society of Chemistry Web site up to date on his work as an RSC Teacher Fellow bringing exciting cutting-edge chemistry into schools.
James Doodson keeps a private blog as a journal of his developing research ideas.
Bill Scott uses his blog [10][9]as a space to air views and ideas that might not be suitable for formal publication, and to engage in debate with others in his field.
Following the panel discussion, we ran a hands-on workshop introducing participants to blogging using the free WordPress.com service [10][11].
We wanted to emphasise the benefits of blogging beyond the obvious advantages of promoting one’s own research.
Blogging is really useful as a way to get your ideas out on ‘paper’, which has a number of bonuses.
To start with, you have to get them into a coherent structure just in order to write them down, which makes it much easier to fit them all together.
Having done so, you can look at them in a more detached light and see what works, what does not and what needs to be added.
It is much easier to assess your own ideas on reviewing them.
In addition to this, getting your ideas out into the light of day gives others an opportunity to see them as well.
Feedback from others can be invaluable in the early stages of developing an idea, and a blog provides a nice informal setting in which you can air those ideas with a minimal risk.
Overall, participants were very impressed with how quickly they were able to get started and how easily they could make their new blog look and feel the way they wanted.
It will be interesting to follow up with them to find out how they are progressing.
Discussion Finding Expert Users Currently take-up is patchy and although researchers are broadly supportive of the social media in principle, the majority do not see such tools as particularly important [3][4].
It can therefore be difficult to find existing users to share their experiences with novices, especially within an institution.
However, we found online networking very useful in this respect.
Through Twitter we were able to find several social media users of various levels of experience, all of whom have been very keen to support us and contribute where they could.
Social Media Publicity An event is no use if no one knows about it.
In addition, not everyone who wants to attend in person will be able to.
In keeping with the Connected Researcher theme, we chose to use several social media channels to publicise and amplify the event.
A couple of weeks in advance of the first event, we agreed on a Twitter hashtag, #bathcr, and began talking about it online to build awareness and get suggestions on what material to include.
The university communications team picked up on the launch event, publishing an announcement on the internal home page and promoting the event on the university’s own Twitter feed (@UniofBath).
Thanks to this approach, we had participation over Twitter from people both in the room, in the rest of the University and around the country.
We even had a mention in the Times Higher Education: @timeshighered: RT @jezcope Hooley: Social media isn’t about the technology, it’s about the people #bathcr <– so true.
And hello to all @ #bathcr waves As well as informing our connections around the country what we were doing, this was picked up by a few existing Twitter users on campus, who contributed either by showing up in person or by welcoming our fledgling twitterers online.
Amplification We are very aware (popular opinion of students notwithstanding) that research students have a lot of demands on their time and many who would like to learn more about social media cannot always spare the time to attend workshops.
We are therefore ensuring that all slides and hand-outs from face-to-face sessions are also available online through our space on the University’s wiki.
We are also broadcasting highlights from each event live on Twitter (for existing Twitter users, our hashtag is #bathcr), attracting contributions both from our own researchers and researchers and support staff around the country.
Choosing the Right Service One potentially difficult issue is the choice of which service to use in a particular category.
For example, our blogging workshop focused on the free WordPress.com service.
WordPress is, however, only one of a large number of excellent blogging platforms, including Blogger (owned by Google), Posterous, Tumblr, Movable Type, LiveJournal and many more.
In addition, some of these platforms allow you to host a blog on a private Web server: the University of Bath has its own blogging platform based on WordPress.
The choice between services run by private companies (such as Twitter) and those hosted internally by researchers’ own institutions can be particularly difficult.
Any privately run service can theoretically fail or change without notice, so it is important to be aware of this risk.
Although it was tempting to focus on the University blogging platform, relying on the added level of support we can expect from our Web services team, we felt that it was more important that our researchers had the freedom to take their blog with them, if and when they move to another institution.
In the end, it was our focus on practice over technology that got us round this issue.
We emphasised the general skills involved, and indeed several participants in the blogging workshop took part successfully using other services.
Encouraging Network Building A key part of our plan to encourage adoption of social media within the University is to build up a community of practice.
However, since it is not our intention to promote the technology for its own sake, it does not make sense to build a single network in which the main common interest is use of social media.
Researchers typically network with other members of their discipline rather than other members of their university, so to have a lasting impact it is these disciplinary networks which we need to penetrate.
Future Plans We have several more workshops planned, of which the next will focus on so-called social citation tools (such as Mendeley, Zotero, citeulike and Connotea) which allow shared bibliographic databases to be built by individuals, research groups and whole communities.
We will also be further building our wiki of resources.
We are starting to build a library of ‘why-to’ videos featuring successful academics talking about their use of social media.
We may augment them with a number of short, focused video tutorials introducing specific tools and their benefits.
Finally, we will be following up with delegates to previous workshops, to find out what impact social media has had on their work.
We hope that they will be willing to share their own experience with each other, and perhaps contribute case studies to guide others in making the best use of social media.
Conclusions The social web is built around information discovery, networking and collaboration, precisely the skills required of a modern researcher.
Social media tools are not yet widely used in Higher Education, but there is already a keen minority of researchers who use them regularly and to good effect, and a clear interest in the subject from non-users.
The key to encouraging wider adoption is lowering the cost of adoption: researchers are busy people and most have neither the time nor the inclination independently to find and learn the tools which would be useful to them.
We have tackled this by bringing in researchers who use social media in their day-to-day work to demonstrate the specific benefits available to social media users.
Because they are so scarce at present, and involved in disciplinary rather than institutional networks, local ‘experts’ can be difficult to find, but they are there and, for the most part, keen to help.
We have run hands-on workshops to overcome perceived barriers to adoption by providing a safe and supportive environment in which to experiment.
These workshops have been very participant-led with little step-by-step guidance needed from workshop leaders, which emphasises the fact that most social media tools are very easy to get started with.
Throughout, we have been clear about the benefits, honest about the risks and focused on practices rather than technologies.
This approach has helped our participants to trust that social media will be of genuine use to them in their work.
We would like to encourage our readers to give social media a try if they have not already, and to contribute to events like ours at their own institutions.
It is only by building a critical mass of users across the sector that we can realise the potential of these exciting new tools.
References Digital Researcher http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/315321/Digital-Researcher.html Cann, A., Dimitriou, K., Hooley, T., “Social Media : A guide for researchers”, (February), 2011 http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/social-media-guide-researchers Pegrum, M., “‘I link therefore I am’: network literacy as a core digital literacy”, E-learning and Digital Media 7(4), 346-354 2010 doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.4.346 Research Information Network, “If you build it, will they come?
How researchers perceive and use web 2.0”, 2010 http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/use-and-relevance-web-20-researchers Twitter http://twitter.com/ iGoogle http://www.google.com/ig Google Reader http://www.google.com/reader Boronic Acid Research Team http://chemosensors.wordpress.com/ Fellowship Down http://my.rsc.org/blogs/73 Bill Scott’s blog http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/edswahs/ WordPress.com http://wordpress.com/ Author Details Jez Cope ICT Project Manager Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies University of Bath Email: j.cope@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://people.bath.ac.uk/jc619/ Jez Cope helps research students and staff in the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies to collaborate, communicate and do their research better using technology.
His main responsibility is to develop and support iSusLab, the Centre’s Virtual Research Environment.
Geraldine Jones E-learning Officer Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Bath Email: g.m.jones@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/staff/gjones.php Geraldine Jones is responsible for raising awareness of the possibilities offered by e-learning practices and tools for staff and students across the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
She is particularly interested in digital literacies and the impact of the digital environment on flexible learning and teaching.
Return to top Article Title: Connecting Researchers at the University of Bath Authors: Jez Cope, Geraldine Jones Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/cope-jones/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Approximately 97 Things Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Approximately 97 Things Buzz software licence Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff learns something new in this 'Open Source' book every time he makes the tea.
97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know.
From the title it should be pretty clear what we’re getting, but the creation of this book is a little different.
The editor goes so far as to state this is an Open Source book and likens its creation to Open Source Software development.
It contains (you guessed it) 97 short (2-page) essays (‘axioms’), each one contributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.
Each presents a single pearl of wisdom from an expert in the field of Software Architecture.
It is a little like Thought for the Day [1], albeit with a narrower field of discussion.
Assuming you’ve some familiarity with software architecture (see Wikipedia if not [2]), it is quite an easy read.
Each essay can be read in the time it takes the kettle to boil and there is nothing that is, on the face of it, complex or challenging.
Topics covered include ideas for improving productivity, ways to avoid going round in circles when designing software and how to ensure successful communication with management and developers, all good things.
That said, while reading, I felt underwhelmed by some of the topics.
Perhaps due to their short length, some of the ‘Things’ seemed underdeveloped.
The occasional ‘Thing’ even read like a platitude.
However, I also noticed as I read that I was favouring some contributors (many of whom have contributed more than one essay) over others, and even skipped those I couldn’t get on with, which led me to wonder if some of the ‘Things’ appeared less interesting than they should due to the background of this reviewer.
Would the same topics be more relevant to others?
For example, the opening topic ‘Don’t put your resume ahead of the requirements’ seemed so obvious as to be unnecessary, but maybe some people do that.
I really enjoyed ‘Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse’ because it warned against something of which I can be guilty (trying to make software general before it even works), but perhaps such principles are obvious to others.
More ‘Things’ warranted a turned page corner (apologies to those who view this as the worst of sins) including ‘Warning: Problems in the Mirror May Be Larger Than They Appear’ (though this is unfortunately reminiscent of a Meatloaf song) and ‘Business Drivers,’ whereas others I quickly skipped, such as ‘Stand Up!’.
Which essay fits which category will, as I say, depend on your background, and you are sure to find essays that give helpful insights into the work of a Software Architect a useful skill for programmers and managers as well.
The difficulty perhaps lies in working with the book.
There is little to aid the reader to navigate the essays, aside from the oft times unclear titles.
While in a more conventional book there is no more natural reaction than to press on after a brilliant chapter since that next chapter should build on the previous one, here a turn of a page flings you into another essay, and the thoughts generated by the gem you have just found are still-born.
Therefore I soon found it better to stop, wait, to dwell and cogitate.
If a ‘Thing’ struck a chord with me, it helped to spend some time exploring why and how that ‘Thing’ might be useful, even putting the book down and researching further on the Web.
It was a bold move on O’Reilly’s part to publish a book where the content is Creative Commons and available on the Web [3].
Bolder still is that they felt it could warrant the best part of £30 for a little over 200 pages.
But this book won’t really cost you that much if you shop around and its often useful content could actually save you much more in the long run.
References Wikipedia: 5 May 2010: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme: Thought for the Day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today_%28BBC_Radio_4%29#Notable_features Wikipedia: Software Architecture: 5 May 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_architecture The original site for the content of this book has already disappeared from the Web, but I eventually found it after a bit of careful searching: http://architect.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/97_Things_Every_Software_Architect_Should_Know_-_The_Book Author Details Peter Cliff Software Engineer Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford Email: peter.cliff@bodleian.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Approximately 97 Things” Author: Peter Cliff Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/cliff-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Fedora Users Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Fedora Users Conference Buzz data software rdf framework wiki api database dissemination xml infrastructure metadata accessibility identifier sql repositories preservation cataloguing aggregation soap uri php mysql soa mets dspace xacml bpel e-research rae interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre and Richard Green report from the Fedora Users Conference, a two-day meeting for users of the open source Fedora repository system held at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, over 19-20 June 2006.
The Fedora Users Conference 2006, for users of the open source Fedora repository system [1] was the second to be run under the auspices of the core Fedora development team, following an initial conference at Rutgers University in June 2005.
It is, though, one among a collection of conferences and meetings that have taken place over the past year based on using Fedora, with venues as diverse as Copenhagen, Aberystwyth, Sydney, and Hull.
There has been a great deal of activity in the past twelve months and this was reflected in the wide range of presentations in Charlottesville.
Full details of the conference, including presentations, are available via the conference Web site [2].
Descriptions are reported here in groups or as individual presentations according to themes that emerged during the conference.
Opening Plenary Session Thornton Staples, University of Virginia and co-Director of Fedora’s development Thorny Staples started the conference off with two assumptions: that attendees are in the business of dealing with information/content that is intended to persist; and that the Web is the way of working with this information/content.
Fedora meets these assumptions.
In considering the information/content we work with today there is a need to think of ‘aggregation objects’.
These have been around in traditional forms for many years, e.g., a newspaper organises an aggregation of many individual articles.
More recently, Web sites are all aggregation objects, combinations of many smaller pieces and files.
How can we deal with this level of aggregation, and potential disaggregation, of digital objects?
Standards, technical, structural and organisational, will be of huge benefit here.
Fedora for its part offers a foundation on which to build different architectures.
It allows arbitrary units of content that can be assigned behaviours and structural relationships with other units of content allowing these to be flexibly managed and re-combined as required.
There is a need to be pragmatic about breaking down digital objects into their constituent parts to support this, but an atomistic view is beneficial.
Decisions about the level and degree of aggregation/disaggregation are, he concluded, an art, not a science.
Plenary Session: Fulfilling the Fedora Vision: Taking on Complex Problems and Providing Flexible Solutions Sandy Payette, Cornell University and co-Director of Fedora’s development Sandy followed Thorny Staples’ opening plenary by also describing her vision for Fedora and how the system can meet current demands.
There is no doubt that the environment is changing: Grid and Humanities computing have produced novel and innovative ways of facilitating science and digital scholarship.
Repositories are situated at the heart of these developments and trends, including SOA, Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web: Fedora can fit in with these.
However, it is vital that we look at what people want rather than give them what we think they need.
Repositories are enablers of such a network, and are not just about storage or search and access.
How does Fedora measure up currently in its ability to deal with the multitude of digital content?
Fedora has a flexible digital object model that can accommodate many different scenarios, and can enable relationships between objects through the use of RDF.
The Fedora Services Framework allows other components to be sited alongside Fedora and integrated with it.
Fedora can also support long-term digital preservation: its use has been mapped onto the OAIS Reference Model to demonstrate how Fedora can sit within an overall preservation workflow.
Additionally, Fedora makes use of XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language [3]) to support flexible and fine-grained authorisation.
The software has been scaled to 2 million objects, amounting to over 160 million RDF triples in the associated Resource Index.
Current development priorities are a content model dissemination architecture (CMDA) [4], which will provide a mechanism for sharing content models and associating them with disseminators (a development considered extremely useful by current Fedora users), and the ongoing development of the Fedora Services Framework through the development of a message-brokering service to communicate between the different, and growing number of, components that can link into the Framework.
A VITAL Business?
| Evaluating the Role of Vendor Support for Open Source Repository Components in a Research Library Environment Carl Grant, President and COO, VTLS Inc. / Jeffrey Barnett, Yale University The means by which open source software can be provided and supported was the topic of two paired presentations early on in the conference.
Carl Grant from VTLS [5] presented his views of how a commercial company can make use of open source software to provide services that the community finds valuable.
VITAL [6] is VTLS’s repository product based on Fedora.
Jeffrey Barnett from Yale University described the use of Fedora with vendor support within Yale University Library.
For a vendor such as VTLS there is an issue about what is open and what is confidential.
Customers have an expectation of openness because of open source, but also need to respect VTLS confidentiality where it applies to VITAL-specific add-ons to Fedora: ongoing communication between the company and the customers is essential to enable this.
VTLS, for their part, recognise their dependency on Fedora development and their need to contribute back to the open source community from which they have benefited.
Support selling is becoming increasingly important for VITAL as its main model of business.
Oddly, this was not always the case as many early Fedora adopters had their own development teams and were thus not interested.
However, Fedora users have since spread to institutions where such internal support is not so prevalent.
Yale does have a development team that could support Fedora, but there was a desire not to be the first on the block with such software, and vendor support offered reassurance that the issues had been addressed previously.
The benefits for such support were considered as follows: It reduces risk You get more functionality (at least in the case of VITAL, which comes with additional supported modules) You get better support (based on previous experience) It reduces the learning curve It can lead to possible development partnerships with the company, reducing the costs of custom development Notwithstanding the attraction of supported software, the TANSTAAFL (There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) principle applies.
Significant training was required to bring library staff up to speed on metadata and XML.
The need for community input also takes time.
The tests carried out revealed a number of gaps in the required VITAL functionality.
However, the position of VTLS in supplying Fedora means that these can be addressed together.
Their experience of using VITAL has, in summary, been a positive one.
A Fedora Architecture to Support Diverse Collections | An Approach to Modelling Rich Content and Disseminators: Promoting Interoperability and Reuse of Content in the Tufts Digital Repository Ryan Scherle and Jon Dunn, Indiana University/Rob Chavez, Tufts University Indiana [7] and Tufts [8] Universities both described their use of the Fedora repository to manage a wide range of digital content that had hitherto been managed in many different ways.
This situation has led to a series of motivations at Indiana to adopt a repository as a single management tool, motivations summarised as follows: A repository allows the centralisation of access and preservation functions A repository reduces the level of staff time required to attend to the many different current systems used A repository permits easier generation of new collections A repository enables digital preservation Both Indiana and Tufts are re-engineering their digital collections around Fedora.
Notwithstanding the diverse range of media types, they have aimed to produce a small set of behaviours that can apply across these types for their easier management.
Indiana has also produced, and is producing, a range of tools to help working with Fedora, including ingest and a METS metadata navigator (available through SourceForge [9]).
One particular area of interest at Tufts is “asset actions”.
These have emerged from work undertaken within the DLF Aquifer Project [10] and represent ways of providing actionable URIs in harvestable metadata.
They are not exclusive to Fedora, but can be implemented with Fedora disseminators to provide interoperable ways of delivering access to objects.
Publishing in the NSDL: Fundamental Concepts for Creating and Reusing Content | Building a National Science Digital Library on Fedora Carol Minton Morris, NSDL Communications Team, Cornell University/Dean B. Kraft, NSDL The NSDL (National Science Digital Library) [11] is the online library for the NSF (National Science Foundation) in the US.
The NSDL has a Communications Team, based at Cornell University, which aims to promote the purpose and use of the NSDL among its target populations.
A key focus of this team is to bring people together to avoid failures of communication that can lead to technical failures.
Carol described the background to the implementation of NSDL’s On Ramp initiative, the development of user services onto the NSDL’s Fedora-based content management system (the NSDL Data Repository (NDR)) an ongoing initiative into 2007.
Terminology was a key aspect of this, to ensure a common understanding of what the NSDL was offering.
The current NSDL instance contains over 100 collections within Fedora.
The aim of NSDL 2.0 (the current version) is not unlike that of Web 2.0 to provide a system and content that is service-based and re-mixable.
It was this aim that led to the NSDL team selecting Fedora for the NSDL Data Repository that underpins NSDL 2.0.
Key features of Fedora identified included the ability to work with multiple object types and the use of RDF to express relationships between objects.
Dataset acquisition, accessibility, and annotation e-Research Technologies (DART) Project: Fedora and the New Collaborative e-Research Infrastructure | The eSciDoc Project: An Overview Andrew Treloar, Monash University/Matthias Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe Andrew Treloar described the work of the DART initiative [12], a large-scale project (A$3.23 million) running over 18 months and employing 40 staff.
DART is investigating new ways of curating e-research datasets and allowing them to be used effectively within the scholarly communication chain.
Issues being addressed include the required infrastructure, the processes of deposit, access and annotation, and IPR concerns.
The work has been inspired by the Pathways Project [13] at Cornell University and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The project is building a series of demonstrators that can be embedded within research teams and iteratively developed based on feedback.
The role of the demonstrators is to demonstrate the value of the end-to-end DART lifecycle approach.
Test subject areas are protein X-ray crystallography, climate research, and digital history.
Fedora sits at a number of junctures within the DART lifecycle.
It acts as the basis for managing data and information, it facilitates collaboration and annotation, it assists with publication, and it also acts as the main access point for discovery.
Matthias Razum described the equally ambitious eSciDoc Project [14], a US$12 million, five-year, project to build an integrated information, communication and publishing platform for Web-based scientific work in order to support these activities within the Max Planck Society.
It is not just R&D but aims to build a production and productive system.
Repositories help curate the institutional memory of an organisation and, like memory, should be open to new input and associations.
If they are then they can form the basis for the new systems to support scholarship.
The repositories need to be interdisciplinary: more, they need to be open, application-independent and flexible in such a way as to allow re-purposing of their content.
eSciDoc supports the generation of knowledge through the use of such repositories from first ideas through to publishing, including collaborative work and interactive authoring: Fedora was identified as a system that can enable these aims.
Development of the Fedora Generic Search Service | Considerations about a Peer-to-peer Service for Fedora Gert Schmeltz Pedersen, Technical University of Denmark Gert Schmeltz Pedersen gave two presentations on the separate developments to enhance searching of Fedora repositories.
The Technical University had previously developed a tool that allowed a search of Fedora using the Zebra search tool.
It was then decided to make this a more generic tool that could accommodate a search engine of choice through a plug-in model.
The new generic search service [15] has been developed as a Web application that can sit within the Fedora Service Framework to access an existing Fedora repository plus an indexing and searching engine of choice.
The generic search service does not supplant Fedora’s inbuilt search facility, which is provided as part of its management facility; rather the new service provides a search capability for the datastreams inside a Fedora object that reference its digital content.
In his second presentation, Gert described current thinking around the possibility of a peer-to-peer service based on Fedora.
The background to this thinking is the Alvis Project [16], an EU initiative to develop an open source distributed semantic-based search engine prototype.
Alvis has investigated the role of peer-to-peer as a means of supporting its search functionality and Fedora has been tested within this as a source of content for searching.
Work on the project is taking place during summer 2006, and an evaluation is planned towards the end of the year.
The RepoMMan Project: Automating Metadata and Workflow for Fedora | An Institutional Repository for the University of Hull: Supporting User Needs Richard Green, University of Hull/Chris Awre, University of Hull RepoMMan [17], a JISC-funded project within the Digital Repositories Programme, was the only UK example of Fedora usage reported at the conference, though there were also attendees from the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland.
A poster was also presented highlighting the wide range of Fedora investigation and usage that had been reported at the first meeting of the UK & Ireland Fedora Users Group in May 2006.
Richard Green gave an overview of the RepoMMan project and described in greater detail the work of the project in the areas of workflow (building a workflow engine based around BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services [18])) and automated metadata generation.
In a separate presentation Chris Awre focused on the user requirementsgathering that is taking place within the project to underpin the development of these proposed tools.
The aim is to ensure the repository meets not just the needs of end-users (researchers in the first instance), but to investigate how it can fit into their workflows and be used as a working tool rather than simply a place where content has to be put at some point in the production process.
The ARROW Project: A Fedora-based Institutional Repository Andrew Treloar, ARROW Consortium, Monash University In his second presentation, Andrew Treloar described the ARROW Project [19], a three-year initiative in Australia to develop a generalised institutional repository solution for research information management across a number of partners, co-ordinated through Monash University in Melbourne.
It has examined a number of different initiatives for managing and exposing research information, initially addressing digital surrogates of traditional “print equivalent” publications.
ARROW is making use of open standards wherever possible and aims to deliver open source software components for use by others as part of its work.
The project is also making use of open source software for a number of purposes.
It is, of course, using Fedora, as supplied by VTLS through its VITAL product.
ARROW selected Fedora because it offers a robust architecture, a flexible object-oriented data model, clear versioning, persistent identifiers at a high level of granularity, and clean Web Service interfaces.
Getting content into repositories is a major issue for ARROW as it is elsewhere.
The project has followed a mediated deposit model for now, but is slowly working to transit over to a direct deposit model as appropriate.
Don’t Keep It Under Your Hat!
Christiaan Kortekaas, University of Queensland Christiaan Kortekaas is the lead developer of the Fez client [20] onto Fedora.
He used his presentation to describe Fez and how it is being employed to support research assessment within the University of Queensland as well as nationally.
Fez is defined as, “a free, open source, flexible, highly configurable digital repository and workflow management system based on Fedora 2.” It is currently at version 1.2 (April 2006) and has been developed through grant funding as part of wider projects (e.g., APSR (Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories) and MAMS (Meta Access Management Project)).
The system is written in PHP 5.0+ and optimised for MySQL 5 and use with Fedora 2.1.1.
It can manage a wide range of digital content, both individually and in combination.
It is highly configurable to work with content models, workflow and security needs of choice through a Web GUI.
The security and workflows can also be based on meaningful roles: creator, editor, approver, viewer, etc.
Fez essentially helps manage content within Fedora.
Fez was developed as a result of an identified need to provide a clear way to manage diverse digital content.
UQ eSpace is a specific adaptation of Fez to support the research assessment exercise.
The University has carried out a dry run in preparation for the national Research Quality Framework (RDF) in 2007, a process that has been adapted directly from the UK’s RAE process.
The workflow for submission, reviewing and publishing is configurable and different parts can be role-based.
Some parts are automatic (e.g., images are automatically processed to produce thumbnails), but generally everything else is flexible.
Current content model development has been focused on requirements for the RAE process, and so exist for most standard publication types, e.g., journal articles, conference papers, patents, books, book chapters, etc.
The internal dry run has been classified a success, and has also highlighted a few lessons to be learned prior to the full RQF in 2007.
For example, the best way to bug-test a system is to throw it at users and get them to enter content.
This helps identify bugs early and helps raise data quality.
It is also important that users understand the fields they are being asked to fill, to make sure they don’t enter the wrong information.
Fez has just been awarded a further year’s grant funding in its own right for ongoing development.
Using DPubS to Publish Fedora Content David Ruddy, Cornell University David Ruddy also described a system that can work on top of Fedora.
DPubS (Digital Publishing System) [21] is an electronic publishing application that has been developed to provide an alternative for scholarly publishing and it is currently being packaged for open source distribution.
Recent activity has focused on layering DPubS on top of institutional repository software allowing content within to be published: such publication could make use of distributed content from multiple repositories as well as from a single source.
Initial investigations have focused on Fedora and DSpace to see how the DPubS Repository Service API can interface with them.
There are no hard and fast conclusions as yet, though there is clear potential for Fedora to be used to assist with versioning within publications and providing granular access to individual datastreams for specific publishing requirements.
Sakai Fedora Repository Tool Beth Kirschner, University of Michigan The development of the Sakai Fedora tool highlights a slightly different means of how user-facing systems can work with Fedora.
The development of this tool has its origins in the identified needs of the eResearch community at the University of Michigan.
Projects in this area needed a collaboration environment to facilitate interaction, for which they are using Sakai [22].
They also needed a repository in which to store and manage the outputs from experiments, for which they are using Fedora.
The Sakai Fedora tool provides a link between the two systems, enabling the user both to deposit and search datasets in Fedora from within Sakai.
It has been designed as a generic framework to support various eResearch activities within Sakai and acts as a window between the two systems.
Access is made available through the use of the generic search service described earlier.
Current activity is considering the role of disseminators in enhancing what can be done with objects from within Sakai.
IRIaB: Institutional Repository In a Box Christian Tønsberg, Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark Finally, there was a presentation about a possible way to package Fedora alongside additional tools as a complete package.
The Technical Knowledge Center has had its ORBIT (Online Research database In Technology) system in place for over six years.
This system allowed the capture and cataloguing of content using the MetaToo Web-based input management tool.
Records were then pulled out of the SQL database generated into a storage filesystem from where they could be indexed and made available for searching.
Input was role-based and records could be edited by a number of roles as part of an input workflow.
The ORBIT system was designed as a simple system to meet a clear need.
Needs over time have multiplied and become more complex, however, and ORBIT is not now considered an adequate architecture to meet current and future needs.
The Technical Knowledge Center has thus looked at incorporating Fedora into its architecture to provide a more flexible capability.
The new architecture still makes use of the MetaToo tool as this is still considered a valuable front-end to Fedora.
They are building a connector service that uses the Web Service interfaces on both MetaToo (REST (Representational State Transfer )) and Fedora (SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)) to pass catalogued records between the two.
The generic search service and API-A interfaces to Fedora can then be used to facilitate access to the content.
In order to manage this system and make it available for others they are packaging it, hence the concept of a repository in a box.
The initial version of IRIaB [23] contains the MetaToo tool, the connector and the search interface not, though, Fedora itself: a future version, IRIaB++, may well include Fedora as a .war file once this packaging of Fedora is available (which it should be shortly).
Conclusion The second Fedora Users Conference contained a wide and extensive collection of presentations, as can be seen from the descriptions above.
Additional sessions also reported on the advantages of an SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) approach in planning the implementation of a repository like Fedora, and how smaller institutions can make use of Fedora.
There was also a presentation on the work of the Preservation Services Working Group, one of three Working Groups (the others being Workflow and Search) [24] that are involving members of the community outside the core development team.
Two notable points emerged from these presentations: firstly that other than overviews offered in the plenary sessions there were no presentations from the core developers; and secondly that this was largely due to the number of presentations from elsewhere demonstrating how Fedora was being used and built upon for a wide variety of purposes.
In other words, presentations from the Fedora team were not necessary.
This was very much a ‘Users’ conference and it was both gratifying and welcome to see the extensive range of uses already in existence.
Notwithstanding this, it also became apparent through the presentations that whilst Fedora is a usable and workable system now, it is not static but is being actively developed.
Although funding for Fedora development formally expires in September 2007, the evidence from this conference suggests that it will live on long beyond then as successful open source software.
References Fedora http://www.fedora.info Fedora Users Conference website http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/fedoraconf/index.shtml XACML background information http://xml.coverpages.org/xacml.html Payette S., Shin E., Wilper C., Wayland R., “Fedora Proposal: Content Model Dissemination Architecture”, Fedora Project 2006 http://www.cs.cornell.edu/payette/fedora/designs/cmda VTLS, Inc. http://www.vtls.com/ VITAL http://www.vtls.com/Products/vital.shtml Indiana University Digital Library Infrastructure Project Wiki http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/display/INF Tufts University Digital Repository Program http://dca.tufts.edu/tdr METS Navigator tool http://sourceforge.net/projects/metsnavigator DLF Aquifer Project http://www.diglib.org/aquifer/index.htm National Science Digital Library http://nsdl.org/ DART Project http://dart.edu.au/ The Pathways Project http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/pathways/ eSciDoc http://www.escidoc-project.de/homepage.html Fedora generic search service http://defxws2006.cvt.dk/fedoragsearch/ Alvis Project http://www.alvis.info/alvis/ RepoMMan Project http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ BPEL background information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPEL ARROW Project http://arrow.edu.au/ Fez http://www.apsr.edu.au/fez.htm DPubS http://dpubs.org/ Sakai Collaboration & Learning Environment http://www.sakaiproject.org/ Institutional Repository In a Box (IRIaB) http://defxws.cvt.dk/projects/fedora-generic/dataintegration/iriab/ Fedora Working Groups http://www.fedora.info/wiki/index.php/Working_Groups Author Details Chris Awre Integration Architect e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/ Richard Green RepoMMan Project Manager e-Services Integration Group University of Hull Email: r.green@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ Return to top Article Title: “Fedora Users Conference” Author: Chris Awre and Richard Green Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/fedora-users-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Virtual Reference Desk Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Virtual Reference Desk Buzz data software database wireless video research Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho feels that digital reference has come of age and that this work is one of its adornments where reference information professionals are concerned.
Digital reference has come of age.
Starting with tentative 'Ask us a question' e-mail services, it is now available in public, academic and specialist libraries.
This dynamic area, which has already undergone major developments in the past few years, continues to grow and evolve.
Creating a Reference Future reflects the best of the contributions to the Fifth Annual Conference on the subject.
The authors of the ten chapters included here are front-line librarians from a wide variety of backgrounds eager to share their experiences with colleagues.
The first part of the book focuses on chat reference and offers advice based on experiences with teenagers in three state-wide services.
It reports of shocked and offended librarians unused to teenage chat and gives valuable insights into their online behaviour.
It is reassuring that inappropriate behaviour on the part of users is only relatively rare and that having a robust 'good-bye script' to push to rude users can resolve most problems.
Relevant psychological commentary is mixed with useful tips and suggestions on how to deal with rude and impatient users.
This is a valuable contribution to the virtual reference body of research which focuses mainly on questions of accuracy, efficiency or accounts of individual services.
Virtual reference provides a rich opportunity to move the relevant research agenda forwards because, unlike face-to-face encounters, it supplies effortless transcripts which can be analysed and mined for data.
Although it is not entirely different from the traditional reference desk encounter, it requires librarians to develop different skills and to become accustomed to changing staffing patterns.
Training programmes in virtual reference should, therefore, focus not only on software familiarisation but also on adapting communication skills to the e-medium.
The cited research findings suggest that it is feasible to offer online virtual reference training, including different learning techniques to accommodate various learning styles.
Vendor-specific training in using the software, which might still present difficulties, has to be supplemented by sessions dealing with the specifics of the virtual environment, including legal issues.
Staffing virtual reference desks presents a particular challenge and new models have to be developed which include offering a variety of online reference options including e-mail, chat and traditional services.
Depending on the context in which these are offered, there are possibilities for consortia and sharing workloads, as evidenced by the public library network experience in Denmark, where libraries take turns in participating in a consortium, as this is regarded both as a privilege and an opportunity for staff development.
This allows productivity gains through multi-tasking and achieving significant outcomes.
Such developments inevitably require that measures for success be identified and setting performance targets is the subject of a study based at Vancouver Public Library.
It looks at benchmarking, costs, transactions time and capacity.
'How many questions should we answer correctly and completely to be successful?'
is the concern of all those running virtual reference desks as they struggle to record shifting patterns of use.
The opportunity of aggregating information on digital encounters permits the accumulation of large amounts of information which provide reliable data pools for research.
The warehousing of digital reference transactions can accelerate the rate at which improvements in digital reference are delivered to clients.
The most interesting and inspiring articles for me were in the section on innovative approaches to creating a reference future.
These ranged from the experience of Biblioteksvagten, where 200 Danish libraries in the public and academic sector co-operate to provide a quality service, to the attempts at the NASA Goddard Space Library to 'download' a librarian's brain onto a knowledge database and record his (and others') tacit knowledge on a system which supports the work of junior colleagues.
The experimental developments in information service delivery at the Orange County (Florida) Library System take the form of 'roving' reference or 'point-of-need reference instruction' taking advantage of Wi-Fi, using wireless communication units, and wireless computers tablet and pocket PCs which take the reference desk to the user wherever he or she happens to be in the physical library space.
There is also use of video conferencing for the assistance of users which improves communication and does not require the user and the librarian to share the same location.
The possibility of creating a virtual 'collaboratory' which facilitates 'active experiential learning' by offering a network of bulletin boards, online chat with Web cam, integrated calendar and open source on-line journals management, publishing and conference systems is a reality in Rutgers University and proving popular with students.
This is an inspirational volume, providing exciting and stimulating reading for any reference librarian and for those who are passionate about professional knowledge sharing and taking services to their clients.
As our users become more and more experienced at surfing the Web and conduct every day more searches than they ask reference questions in a year, we have to learn to adapt and refine our offering in line with the technical opportunities offered by the constantly evolving options in cyberspace.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian The British Medical Association Email: lina.coelho@bma.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "The Virtual Reference Desk Creating a Reference Future" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-April-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 47 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The DARE Chronicle: Open Access to Research Results and Teaching Material in the Netherlands Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The DARE Chronicle: Open Access to Research Results and Teaching Material in the Netherlands Buzz data software framework html database dissemination rss xml portal infrastructure archives metadata accessibility identifier repositories copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing visualisation rtf doc lucene didl licence rae ict interoperability oai-ore intranet research standards sharepoint Citation BibTex RIS Leo Waaijers reflects on four years of progress and also looks ahead.
While Cream of Science (Keur der Wetenschap), Promise of Science and the HBO Knowledge Bank (HBO Kennisbank) are among the inspiring results of the DARE Programme for the period 2003-06, what is more important in the long run is the new infrastructure that enables Dutch Higher Education and research institutions to provide easy and reliable open access to research results and teaching material as quickly as possible.
Such open access ought to be the standard in a knowledge-driven society, certainly if the material and data have been generated with public funding.
Universities, scientists and scholars appear to agree entirely, given the success of the Open Access petition that the academic world has submitted to the European Commission.
The infrastructure achieved in the DARE Programme encompasses open source applications and protocols that are now being used across Europe, thanks to the DRIVER Project and other efforts.
The new SURFshare 2007-10 programme focuses on scientists and scholars working in 'collaboratories' and their aim of disseminating their research results by means of 'enhanced' publications, i.e.
publications that include research data, models and visualisations.
The Programme Mission Figure 1: Message of the Berlin Declaration Looking back, the mission of the DARE Programme could have been defined by the Berlin Declaration [1].
But that is only in retrospect; the elegantly worded Berlin Declaration was only issued after SURF had already approved the DARE Programme on 14 June 2002.
SURF is the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) collaboration organisation that unites the research universities, universities of applied sciences (hogescholen), the National Library (KB) and national research organisations in the Netherlands, i.e.
the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO).
Founded in 1987, SURF has three platforms: Research, Education and Organisation.
DARE (Digital Academic Repositories) was the programme pursued by the Research platform in the 2003-06 planning period.
The out-of-pocket budget for DARE came to EUR 5.9m and the participating institutions were to contribute another EUR 3m or so, in the form of staff effort.
With the exception of the universities of applied sciences, which were not yet ready to participate in 2003, all the SURF institutions took part in the DARE Programme.
A number of hogescholen did eventually join the programme in its final year (2006), and are fully involved in the successor to DARE, the SURFshare Programme.
The OAI Standard The OAI-PMH standard [2] was essential to the success of the DARE Programme.
Defined in October 1999 as the 'Santa Fé Convention' [3] by Herbert van de Sompel and his team and tested internationally over the following few years, the Open Archiving Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), version 2.0, was published on 14 June 2002.
It was a symbolic coincidence that its publication took place on precisely the same day that the DARE Programme was approved in the Netherlands.
OAI-PMH has turned out to be a very robust standard.
Some one thousand repositories worldwide now base their interoperability on this protocol, and the original version is still being used.
Figure 2: The two layers architecturally OAI-PMH divides the world of information into two layers: a data layer (content grid) and a services layer.
The idea is that every research institution has its own repository, i.e.
a digital archive based on the OAI standard.
The archive contains the research results of the relevant institution, i.e.
articles, dissertations and other publications, but also, and increasingly, data collections, models, visualisations and teaching materials.
The OAI standard makes these repositories 'interoperable'; in other words, the content can be harvested by anyone applying a fixed protocol and can be used to deliver added-value services in the field of research and education or for services of use to society as a whole.
Figure 3: The two layers businesswise The two layers are situated in two different cultures.
The data layer is an international, public-domain infrastructure.
It involves machine-to-machine interaction, with agreements on standards and protocols being crucial.
The co-operating universities and research institutes are responsible for organising the data layer and for the quality of the material on offer.
The services layer focuses on machine-human interaction.
The services are demand-driven, scalable and tailor-made.
They are provided in a competitive environment and must be exploited in one way or another.
The data layer and services layer together form a symbiotic duo.
DARE Results Figure 4: The two layers historically The first important milestone of the DARE Programme was achieved a year after it began with the launch of DAREnet [4].
On 27 January 2004, every Dutch university had its own repository based on the OAI standard, from which DAREnet harvested 17,000 open access publications.
Today that number has grown to 130,000, with an average of 100 publications being added every day.
Assuming that the growth can be attributed mainly to new publications, that means that more than half of new Dutch publications become available via open access.
Though prominent, the Dutch developments are not singular.
When the DARE Programme began in 2003, there were 30 repositories worldwide, the result of experiments using the OAI protocol (which had been published six months earlier).
Today, OAIster [5] reports that there are more than 850 OAI repositories worldwide containing 12 million records (although these are mainly bibliographical records and images).
The OpenDOAR [6] register reports 926 repositories.
Recent studies conclude that repositories are now broadly being recognized as essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital world [7] [8] [9].
Issues Arising Figure 5: The OAI data layer as infrastructural component Once the repositories had been established, scientists and scholars began to raise various questions.
One related to the problem of duplicate effort: "It's great that my institution has a repository, but now I have to enter my publication data twice: once in our Current Research Information System 'Metis', for my university's report on its activities, and then a second time in our repository.
Can't this be fixed?"
Since 2006, we've been able to give the following answer: "Yes, it's been fixed.
You now only have to enter your publication into Metis because we've created a link between Metis and the repository.
You only have to press the upload button on the new Personal Metis entry screen and your publication will automatically be sent to the repository as well."
Another question related to matters digital preservation and access: "Paper will survive for centuries, and usually the only tool you require for access is a pair of glasses.
What about our digital material in the repositories?"
On 28 November 2006, the full complement of DARE participants signed an agreement with the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) concerning the long-term storage of open access content in its repository.
More important than the basic storage it offers is the fact that the National Library can guarantee permanent accessibility.
The agreement was based on a thoroughly tested two-way connection between each repository and the National Library's e-Depot.
The connection ensures not only that material can be removed securely from the repositories, but also that it will be returned upon request.
There was also a question about the long-term storage of researchers' work: "If I change university or work for a research school based on a partnership between multiple universities, where do I store my material?"
We are still working on a solution.
It will be ready in October 2007 and will be called DAI, the Digital Author Identifier [10].
Every scholarly or scientific author in the Netherlands will be assigned a unique author number that will be appended to his or her publications.
It will then be possible to assemble all of a particular author's publications with a simple press of a key, regardless of the repository in which the material has been deposited or the name under which the author has published.
Another question related to file formats: "My dissertation or book consists of various different files.
Can it still be circulated as a complete unit?"
That was naturally always possible by publishing a table of contents with links to the various files, but this was a non-standardised solution and it depended on the format (pdf, html, doc, rtf, etc.).
Harvesters and even Google robots had trouble with this.
The DARE Programme has produced a future-proof solution to this problem: a standard xml format, known as the DIDL container [11].
It is not only capable of assembling and maintaining text files in the right order, but it can also do the same for other objects, for example visualisations, models, and so forth.
At the moment the format is used for files that are all located in the same repository, but in the future it can also be expanded to assemble objects distributed across various repositories.
A visualiser was recently developed that makes it possible to read the contents of the DIDL container.
What you see looks like an old-fashioned table of contents, but this time it is not only human readible but also machine readible as it is based on a standardised xml solution that is being used, among other things, for the future-proof storage of material in the National Library's e-Depot.
Services Figure 8: Local services emanating from the DARE Programme SURF encouraged universities in the Netherlands to develop their own services from the very beginning.
In addition to the research results offered on university Web sites, these efforts have resulted in approximately fifteen operational and active services [16].
In general, scholars and scientists are primarily interested in services related to their own field, and a number of DARE projects have keyed into that fact.
By now, some of these have developed into robust international services, for example Nereus [17] for the economists or Connecting Africa [18].
Other services have also been set up, for example signalling and annotation services.
In addition to their own publications, archaeologists now also have access to the first data collections in the repository, a solid step towards the future.
Another example is the first real commercial service based on repositories.
The purpose of SORD (Selected Organic Reactions Database) [19] is to extract the recipes for substances produced within the context of doctoral research from the relevant dissertations.
SORD makes the recipes for these chemical reactions accessible via its database.
Institutions that make dissertations available are given free access to the database; the pharmaceutical industry is required to pay for access.
Any older dissertations on paper that are relevant are scanned with the author's permission.
The digital version can then be included in the repository.
All in all, this is a good example of how repositories can help improve access to knowledge.
Obstacles Copyright law and the state of technology have prevented a genuine breakthrough with respect to open access.
Copyright Figure 9: The JISC-SURF Copyright toolbox The existing practice in the Netherlands is that it is the authors who own the copyright to their work, and not the university or institute for which they work.
As soon as the author of an article 'pays' for its publication by transferring the copyright exclusively to one publisher, it is the publisher who sets the price to be charged for access to the publication and the conditions for its reuse.
The consequences of this model are clearly enough understood, especially in libraries.
One of SURF's key activities is to promote awareness of this situation among authors and to offer them other options.
Increasingly, the publishing world is itself offering such options via other business models.
According to these models, publications will not be paid for in the form of rights, but in cash.
After it has been reviewed and accepted, the article can then be published in an 'open-access journal'.
The major commercial publishers are resisting this model since it produces lower profit margins than their traditional copyright monopoly model.
In so far as authors are still unable to publish in an open access journal, partly for that reason, we would argue in favour of a licence whereby the author gives the publisher the right to publish the article but retains all other rights, such as the right to place the article in a repository and permit access to it after a maximum embargo of six months.
This Licence to Publish [20] was drawn up by Dutch and British legal experts.
Spanish and French versions have now been produced, and versions for other European countries are currently under development.
Figure 10: Academics petition the EC for Open Access Knowledge Exchange [21], a partnership consisting of JISC (UK), DFG (Germany), SURF (Netherlands) and Deff (Denmark), will be launching a campaign this autumn to promote the use of the Licence to Publish.
Knowledge Exchange and SPARC Europe were also the drivers behind a petition asking the European Commission to follow the recommendations of a study that it had itself ordered.
The study advises the Commission to apply the principles underlying the Licence to Publish and to take steps to improve the publishing market for scientific and scholarly articles.
Within a period of just one month, some 24,000 individuals from the academic world had signed the petition, more than 500 of whom did so on behalf of an organisation [22].
It is the powerful publishers' lobby that continues to prevent the Commission from taking specific steps.
As soon as this topic is raised in the European Parliament, the petition-related activities will be resumed.
Another new development to emerge from DARE Programme was the Licence to Deposit [23].
DAREnet was, fortunately, launched without complicated copyright discussions being necessary in advance.
Now that authors have placed more than 130,000 open access articles in the repositories, it would be useful to let third parties know precisely how this material can be used.
By issuing a Licence to Deposit, authors give the repository manager official permission to circulate their publication for free, non-commercial reuse with attribution of the work to the creator.
Various support services have been developed in this area, for example an informative Web site and a summer course for the staff of the local copyright information centres scheduled to be launched at a number of Dutch universities in September 2007.
The point is to help authors to publish their material via high-quality channels without relinquishing their copyright.
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands offers a shining example.
Her annual 'Speech from the Throne' is published in all the newspapers, but she never transfers her copyright to another party.
Technology The quality of the knowledge services provided depends in part on the quality of the underlying data layer.
The relevant technology is still under development.
The DARE Programme produced a number of important applications, for example the SAHARA harvester, a fast search engine based on Lucene, and the DIDL container and visualiser mentioned previously.
These are robust open source software programs [24] that are also used internationally, specifically in the European DRIVER [25] projects.
In essence, the DRIVER Project is an expansion of DARE from fifteen repositories in the Netherlands to about fifty repositories around Europe and from one country to eight.
The project was launched on 1 June 2006 and will be completed on 1 December 2007.
In addition to effective technology, efficient interoperability demands reliable agreements on the standards and protocols to be applied.
The DARE 'Guidelines' were developed for this purpose; they will also be applied within DRIVER where they will serve as requirements for including a repository in the DRIVER network [26].
A validator will shortly be completed to check whether a repository complies with the Guidelines and report on those aspects that do not.
Ideally, any failures detected would be corrected automatically.
That is not yet possible, but developers are working on it.
Figure 11: Architecture of the DRIVER Project DRIVER goes much further than DARE on a number of points.
For example, it has a metadata store for storing all harvested metadata that have been subjected to a quality check.
Service providers therefore no longer need to harvest all repositories themselves; they can start with the metadata store.
The DRIVER consortium successfully submitted DRIVER II as a project under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme.
It is expected to begin before the end of 2007.
DRIVER II will go much further in terms of improving the infrastructure, which will be made suitable for enhanced publications (i.e.
scientific or scholarly articles published along with the related research data, visualisations and models).
The project will also demonstrate Web 2.0 services.
The number of participating countries will increase from eight to perhaps fifteen, and the number of repositories will undoubtedly exceed 200.
Recognition At the start of the DARE Programme, institutional repositories were often viewed as hobby projects for libraries.
SURF took the decision to launch the programme on 14 June 2002 in part because it wanted to give a small, motivated and ambitious team the benefit of the doubt.
Not all of SURF's participating institutions were by any means persuaded that this was the future.
Holland Consulting Group, a private firm of consultants, evaluated the programme halfway through.
By then the preconceptions had begun to crumble and approximately half of SURF's participating institutions understood the strategic importance of the new development.
The remainder were still cautious, but they soon came round to the others' way of thinking.
The final DARE evaluation demonstrated the complete conviction of the university managers.
Figure 12: Dutch academic VIPs queueing to sign the Berlin Declaration.
From left: Tony Hey (UK), Bert Speelman (Wageningen University), Wim Liebrand (SURF), Frits van Oostrom (Royal Academy), Joris van Bergen (Leiden University), Bas Savenije (Utrecht University), Sijbolt Noorda (University of Amsterdam), Peter Nijkamp (NWO).
It was also halfway through the programme, on 10 May 2005, that half the institutions signed the Berlin Declaration during the ceremony marking the launch of Cream of Science.
By the close of the DARE Programme on 25 January 2007, the remaining institutions had also signed the declaration.
In short, at the moment all the participating Dutch institutions see easy and quick access to knowledge as part of their mission.
Is that an important step?
Yes, it is; ten years ago, knowledge communication was a blind spot at the universities.
They felt responsible for generating knowledge, and therefore developed the necessary plans, attracted top researchers, set up laboratories, and so forth.
But there was little interest in the results of their policy and efforts (articles, reports and contributions to conferences).
Circulating the results was left to the individual author, despite the fact that a publication might very easily represent a value, in round terms, of EUR 100,000.
Yet only in the instance of their dissertations did the universities take on the task of quality assessment and distribution.
That attitude has changed dramatically.
The universities consider access to their scholarly and scientific research results and their reuse important, both as a means of accountability and for competition purposes [27].
They have adopted such a view both at mission statement level by signing the Berlin Declaration and at operational level by setting up repositories.
The current position paper of the European University Association in response to the European Commission's Greenpaper on the European Research Area reflects this responsibility in a broader policy context on behalf of its 800 members [28].
Figure 13: Peaks in DAREnet usage Use of DAREnet peaked around the launch of Cream of Science in May 2005 and surged once again after the opening of the Promise of Science site in September 2006.
The decline in the autumn of 2005 was the result of a technological malfunction that lasted weeks.
Use has grown steadily since then to approximately 30,000 visitors a month in the last three months of 2006; a recent report by the current manager, the Royal Academy, shows that the site became even more popular in 2007.
Scientists and scholars have now begun referring to their publications in DAREnet in their list of references.
They evidently have confidence in the future of DAREnet.
Figure 14: How to write 'Cream of Science' in Japanese?
DAREnet has also received recognition internationally.
Googling 'DAREnet' produces 2.5 million hits and the site www.darenet.nl has a Page Rank of 7, comparable with major cities and the leading Dutch online auction site.
In other words, DAREnet is the Netherlands' most important showcase for research.
Cream of Science serves as a reference for comparable projects in Britain and Germany, and has even caught the attention of Japan [29].
An international demonstrator has been developed as a follow-up to the Promise of Science dissertation site that harvests dissertations from repositories in five countries The project has been so successful [30] that it has now been decided to use it as a basis for offering dissertations from dozens of European repositories in DRIVER as a separate subsidiary collection, precisely as is done in DAREnet.
It will be completed on 1 December 2007.
Success Factors The timing of DARE could not have been better.
The programme keyed into a growing awareness at universities and research institutes that they were not only responsible for generating knowledge but also for disseminating it.
Scholars and scientists had come to much the same conclusion.
As far back as 2000, some 34,000 scholars and scientists signed an open letter to their publishers urging them to make their articles freely accessible within six months a plea that the publishers chose to ignore.
Advances in technology had also come at just the right moment.
The development of the OAI protocol and the metadata standard Dublin Core could not have been timelier.
Nevertheless, these factors do not explain precisely why DARE has been such a huge success; they are general in nature and could apply in many different countries.
More specific in the case of the Netherlands is the unusual way in which Dutch Higher Education and research institutions banded together to tackle issues in the field of ICT under the name of SURF [31].
All sixty eligible institutions take part in SURF, and every four years they decide on the organisation's future.
They do that by approving or rejecting its four-year plan.
If it is approved, the institutions bear responsibility for the basic funding for that same period.
SURF then goes in search of additional funds to finance its various programmes.
This is an attractive formula for the government because the plans thus submitted are already supported on a national scale and their implementation is in experienced hands.
The SURF formula is unique in the world, although there are organisations in the UK (JISC) and Scandinavia that bear a resemblance.
One important difference, however, is that SURF was set up from the bottom up, whereas its sister organisations (and partners of SURF) are more or less top-down in character.
SURF assembled an enthusiastic and successful community for the DARE Programme, with a lively intranet and an intensive knowledge-sharing and decision-making structure, leading to a number of joint milestones such as DAREnet (25 January 2004), Cream of Science (10 May 2005), Promise of Science (13 September 2006) and the HBO Knowledge Bank (8 November 2006).
The climax was the HonDAREduizend Project, which achieved the 100,000th open access Dutch publication in late December 2006.
Next Steps SURF's strategic plan for the period 2007-10 was adopted unanimously in April 2006.
The strategic plan provides the basis for the successor to the DARE Programme, SURFshare [32], which is being developed to reflect the research life cycle.
The research life cycle describes the various steps of a research project, from funding to implementation to results and effects and (where possible) to new funding.
It has been used to define those areas that have already been covered by the DARE Programme.
SURFshare focuses on the areas that are still undeveloped, including the pre-publication phase.
This is where the collaboratories or virtual research environments are situated, with scientists and scholars worldwide co-operating with one another on enhanced publications, regardless of time and place.
An invitation to submit projects testing existing software for the scientific publication environment was issued in July 2007.
The software packages involved are Sharepoint (business environment) and SAKAI (education environment).
These pioneering projects are intended to produce specific insights and lessons that can be used to develop functional publication environments in which it is easy to work with different versions and that are characterised by refined access control, enhanced publications and interoperability.
Figure 15: The research life cycle, basis for the DARE and SURFshare programmes The post-publication phase also falls within the remit of SURFshare, however.
Repositories will have to be designed or re-designed to deal with complex or enhanced publications, making new demands on the structure and transportability of the metadata.
SURFshare will be working closely with the OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange) initiative in the USA [33] on this aspect.
One area of focus will be the long-term storage and accessibility of research data, involving new initiatives by the Royal Academy (DANS [34] for the social sciences and humanities) and the 3-TU consortium (for technical data).
The structural relationship between the institutional repositories and the current research information systems will be improved; a strategic analysis was developed for this purpose in Knowledge Exchange and will be used as a guideline [35].
All these areas have important points in common with the new European DRIVER II Project.
The participation of the Dutch universities has been organised in a Joint Research Unit under SURF's leadership.
It is the first time that this structure which was designed for research institutes that wish to co-operate with one another internationally as a unit in a European project is being applied by a national team in a European infrastructure project, and as such it is a relatively high-profile move.
Publication initiatives will be launched or receive support without the quality assessment depending on authors' signing away their rights.
An invitation has been issued to submit project proposals, including ones that involve experiments with open review processes or structured open annotation processes.
The second phase of the SURFshare Programme will also look at the effect of publication.
The current impact factor is a one-dimensional and contested measure.
The world of high-energy physics (CERN and Los Alamos) is working hard on improved and supplementary methods.
The new approach taken in the UK's Research Assessment Exercise is also being followed closely.
Where possible, the SURFshare programme will co-operate in such initiatives or develop its own.
Finally, SURFshare encompasses a crash approach to achieve parity in knowledge dissemination as quickly as possible between Dutch universities of applied sciences and Dutch research universities.
Acknowledgement The author wishes to thank Annemiek van der Kuil, DARE's Community Manager, for her in-house reviewing of this article.
References Web site of Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, Berlin, 20 22 Oct 2003 http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html Open Archives Initiative site http://www.openarchives.org/ Herbert van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, "The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative", D-Lib Magazine, February 2000 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-oai/02vandesompel-oai.html Dutch research window DAREnet site http://www.darenet.nl/en/page/language.view/search.page Union catalogue of digital resources site http://www.oaister.org The Directory of Open Access Repositories site http://www.opendoar.org/index.html Gerard van Westrienen, Clifford A. Lynch, "Academic Institutional Repositories.
Deployment Status in 13 Nations as of Mid 2005", D-Lib Magazine, September 2005 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/westrienen/09westrienen.html Clifford A. Lynch, Joan K. Lippincott, "Institutional Repository Deployment in the United States as of Early 2005", D-Lib Magazine, September 2005 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lynch/09lynch.html Maurits van de Graaf, "DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories", Ariadne, July 2007 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/vandergraf/ DAI (Digital Author Identification) Project site http://www.rug.nl/Bibliotheek/informatie/digitaleBibliotheek/dailang Jeroen Bekaert, Patrick Hochstenbach, Herbert Van de Sompel, "Using MPEG-21 DIDL to Represent Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library", D-Lib Magazine, November 2003 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november03/bekaert/11bekaert.html Martin Feijen, Annemiek van der Kuil, "A Recipe for Cream of Science: Special Content Recruitment for Dutch Institutional Repositories", Ariadne 45, October 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/vanderkuil/ Promise of Science, doctoral e-theses in the Netherlands site http://www.darenet.nl/nl/page/language.view/promise.page Learning Objects Repository network site http://www.lorenet.nl/en/page/luzi/show?name=show&showcase=1 HBO Knowledge Base, bachelor e-theses in the Netherlands site http://www.hbo-kennisbank.nl/en/page/page.view/hbo.page DARE-based services Web site http://www.darenet.nl/nl/page/language.view/diensten.diensten Nereus access to economics resources site http://www.nereus4economics.info/about_us.html Connecting-Africa, African Studies web portal http://www.connecting-africa.net/ Selected Organic Reactions Database site http://www.sord.nl JISC-SURF copyright toolbox with, among others, publishing licences in English, Dutch, French and Spanish http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/ Knowledge Exchange site http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=1 Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results http://www.ec-petition.eu SURF's Web site with depositing licence (in Dutch only) http://www.surffoundation.nl/smartsite.dws?ch=AHO&id=12625 Open source OAI-repository tools like harvester, metadata store, indexer, drill down, search, rss etc.
http://www.cq2.nl/page/meresco.page DRIVER site http://www.driver-repository.eu/ Guidelines for DRIVER repositories (also in Spanish) http://www.driver-support.eu/en/guidelines.html Richard Poynder interviews Leo Waaijers in his series of OA interviews http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/Waaijers%20Interview.pdf EUA's response to Commission's "Green Paper" consultation on the European Research Area, September 2007 http://www.eua.be/fileadmin/user_upload/files/Policy_Positions/EUA_Response_to_ERA_Green_Paper.pdf Cream of Science in Japanese http://www.nii.ac.jp/irp/info/translation/feijen.html Drs.
M.P.J.P.
Vanderfeesten, "A portal for doctoral e-theses in Europe; Lessons learned from a demonstrator project" July 2007 http://www.surffoundation.nl/download/ETD_LessonsLearned_Annex.pdf SURF Web site http://www.surffoundation.nl/smartsite.dws?id=5289&ch=ENG "SURFshare Programme 2007-2010, Condensed version" http://www.surffoundation.nl/download/SURFshare%20programme%202007-2010%20Condensed%20version%20website.pdf Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange site http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ Data Archiving and Networked Services site http://www.dans.knaw.nl/en/ Mathias Razum, Ed Simoms.
Wolfram Horstmann, "Institutional Repositories Workshop Strand Report.
Strand title: Exchanging Research Information", February 2007 http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=164 Author Details Leo Waaijers DARE Programme Manager SURFfoundation Email: waaijers@surf.nl Return to top Article Title: "The DARE Chronicle: Open Access to Research Results and Teaching Material in the Netherlands" Author: Leo Waaijers Publication Date: 30-October-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 53 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/waaijers/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Time to Change Our Thinking: Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital Scholarship Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Time to Change Our Thinking: Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital Scholarship Buzz data database archives digitisation accessibility repositories graphics provenance curation licence interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Stephen G. Nichols argues that humanists need to replace the silo model of digital scholarship with collaborative ventures based on interoperability and critical comparison of content.
There is no longer anything exotic about digital humanities projects.
Almost every humanities faculty has at least one.
But like humanities disciplines themselves, digital projects too often exist in lonely splendour, each in its own sub-disciplinary silo.
Classicists have their project(s), Middle English scholars post Chaucer and Langland manuscripts, while French medievalists have sites for major genres or authors from the troubadours to Christine de Pizan, and beyond.
The situation is not appreciably different for digital humanities projects dealing with modern topics.
Even within disciplines, teams pursue their objectives independently more often than not.
Neither the scholars nor the sites they create interact with one another in any meaningful way.
Such attitudes survive from the early days of digital scholarship, when each group had to struggle to get its project off the ground.
Even if they are not that old, the fact remains that digital humanities are no longer at the pioneering stage.
To put it crudely, we have won the battle for access to manuscripts and documents, and for distribution over the World Wide Web.
In a major shift in thinking, museums and libraries now accept digitisation as best management practice, even though some repositories remain wary of allowing their material to be posted to scholarly Web sites.
Even here, we have made progress.
In recent years, we have seen innovative partnerships between scholars and repositories.
Take, for example, the unprecedented agreement between the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins.
By December 2009, the BnF and the digital curators at Johns Hopkins will have completed digitising some 140 manuscripts of the most popular vernacular romance of the Middle Ages (the Roman de la Rose)—and integrating them onto its Web site www.romandelarose.org [1].
Over the last decade or so, the Hopkins project has developed tools to allow intensive study of manuscripts, while also encouraging their use in teaching.
Even before all of the French manuscripts have been posted, data show that as the site has evolved over the last decade, it has radically transformed the teaching and scholarship of this work.
Because it is the largest digital manuscript library of a single work—approximately 100,000 images—the site also offers graphic testimony to the mode of existence of vernacular literature in the centuries before printing.
Because so many Rose manuscripts incorporate painted miniatures of scenes from the work on their pages, as well as fascinating images on the bottom of the page—pictures portraying subjects not obviously related to the text (including erotic images)—art historians have also profited from this trove of manuscripts.
While critical editions of the text strive to represent the romance as it might have appeared when completed around 1285 C.E.
(though without the all-important illuminations), the manuscripts on the Rose Web site offer dramatic testimony to the ever-evolving styles of book making, manuscript painting, and the demographics of readership during the 250-odd years of this work's pre-modern existence.
To study Rose manuscripts from different periods of the late Middle Ages is to understand instinctively how the work could so profoundly influence literary works composed in the following centuries... and why it would be fruitful for the Rose Web site to be able to interact with others devoted to late medieval authors.
The collaboration between Hopkins and the Bibliothèque nationale de France will soon be extended to the museum-going public.
This winter and spring will witness exhibitions at the BnF in Paris and at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore that feature displays of Rose manuscripts interspersed with computer terminals linked to the Rose Web site.
Readers will be able to look at rare manuscripts carefully preserved in display cases, but then, thanks to the interactive nature of the Web site, experience the thrill of seeing for themselves an entire manuscript instead of only the two folios typically viewable in a museum display case.
Before considering why it has been so difficult to promote a culture of interoperability, let us look at one other example of innovative collaboration: 'Parker on the Web.'
This project, linking Stanford University Library with Corpus Christi, Cambridge, has made it possible to digitise the Parker Library, one of the most significant Renaissance collections of knowledge in the world.
Matthew Parker (1504-1575) was a powerful figure in the English Reformation: chaplain to Anne Boleyn, Master of Corpus Christi, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and Archbishop of Canterbury (1559-1575).
When Henry VIII dissolved Catholic monasteries during the Reformation, Parker acquired manuscripts from monastic libraries, particularly, though far from exclusively, those of Anglo-Saxon provenance, which he hoped would provide evidence of an early English-speaking Church independent of Rome.
The Matthew Parker library contains some 600 manuscripts as well as printed books and documents ranging from the 6th to the 16th century.
Parker thus contains examples of many historical, literary, and theological works and commentaries that formed the basis for medieval intellectual life.
Not surprisingly, it has manuscripts of works, such as Boethius (c. 480-c.525 C.E.)
and Chaucer (c. 1325-1400) that influenced or were influenced by the Romance of the Rose, to name but one example.
So why not extend the collaboration between Stanford University Library and Corpus Christi a bit further to include Hopkins's Rose project?
Scholars would find it extremely rewarding while working with the Rose Web site to have access to Parker at Stanford.
To compare a late classical reference cited in the Rose with a contemporary manuscript from which the work might have been quoted could tell us much about the logic of inter-textual reference in literature of the period.
It also offers an opening for historians and literary scholars to collaborate with their colleagues in theology and philosophy who can be expected to have at least a passing interest in understanding how their authors were read and used at that time.
How it is that works written a thousand years earlier could seem so 'present', so up-to-date to 13th century thinkers?
One answer, illustrated by 'Parker-on-the-Web' is the two-fold status of late antique authors in the medieval period.
On the one hand, they had the unmistakable stamp of authority—after all, they had survived as long as the Bible—and, like the Bible, they also could seem 'modern' since they circulated in manuscripts produced relatively recently and written in Latin, which 13th century authors themselves spoke and wrote fluently.
Classical authors were thus ancient and modern at the same time: a double guarantee of status.
Putting the Cogito Back into Digital Humanities We can all agree, presumably, that Parker-on-the-Web and the Rose digital manuscript library represent a useful model of collaboration.
Neither would be nearly so impressive if indeed they could exist at all without the work of teams at Stanford and Corpus Christi, or, for the Rose, at Hopkins and at the BnF.
So they exist; but do they think, as Descartes might have said?
The problem with many digital humanities projects is that they often tend to 'put tools before cognition.'
Understandably so, because without appropriate tools, Web sites cannot function.
But tools and technical protocols are not the reason why someone originally conceived a need for the data provided by the site.
We make information available on the Web for scholarly use.
Somewhere between perceiving the need for the data and the complex task of making them available, we may lose sight of the project's 'cogito,' the 'work of thinking' that led us to it in the first place.
That is hardly surprising because digital humanities represent a very different approach to research from analogue scholarship.
The difference is as stark as that between the typewriter and the computer.
The French did not have a word for typewriter, but a descriptive phrase: machine à écrire, 'a machine for writing.'
The French expression emphasises writing, which in turn presupposes thinking, and the research that nurtures both thought and writing.
What comes out of the typewriter is what the writer mechanically enters... one letter at a time.
The typewriter is neither interactive, nor a source of information.
We often forget that the pen and typewriter shaped the phenomenology of humanities research.
It all stemmed from a dedicated individual willing to immerse himor herself in the pursuit of information: one document at a time, one archive at a time, following tenuous threads of information from one source to another, often across oceans and continents.
The individual researcher first made notes and then formulated conclusions in written arguments.
So what has changed?
Well, scale, for one thing, and, for another, the speed and accessibility of masses of data available to the scholar through the collaboration of computer and the World Wide Web.
Think of the 100,000 images of the Rose we spoke of a moment ago.
Or imagine the even larger database of books and manuscripts rescued from English monasteries in the Parker library.
These examples tell us that the Internet allows us to aggregate large amounts of data.
One person, working alone in the tradition of analogue scholarship cannot begin to sort through such masses of information.
But if the unfamiliar challenge of working with quantitative data represents a sea change for traditional humanities scholarship a prospect that gives pause to many humanists (even those who avidly embrace their computers and in theory approve increased accessibility to data) it is an evolution that goes far beyond scholarly protocols.
Scale transforms content and requires that scholars formulate new questions based on novel assumptions even when dealing with the most familiar objects.
But can we speak of objects as 'familiar' once they have been radically scaled?
Writing a treatise on optics in 1263, Roger Bacon points to the metamorphosis of objects when viewed from different perspectives.
In particular, he notes how proximity and distance alter our perception of the same object.
A mountain viewed from afar appears small, easily taken in by the eye.
From its base, however, the viewer cannot begin to perceive the mountain as such.
It cannot be measured, described, or analysed from a single position or by a single individual standing at the foot of the mountain.
What is true of a mountain viewed from far and near holds true, with the respective differences having been considered, for medieval literary works.
The modern critical edition is the equivalent of viewing a mountain at a distance.
It offers a global view of the work, in a manner that bolsters the sense of authorial identity and control—the editor's assumption is that the text represents as faithfully as possible the text composed by the poet.
Unfortunately, the modern critical edition has little to do with the reality of medieval literary practice; it is an artefact of analogue scholarship based on print technology whose only feasible option was to choose a base manuscript, transcribe its text, and make notes of interesting variants from other manuscripts.
In the print context, there was simply no way to make the manuscripts available themselves.
If truth be told, there was also little desire to do so.
Many scribes, who were often regarded as careless or even incapable of reproducing the author's text word for word, were thought to introduce errors—or even their own thoughts—into the work they were copying; thereby, so the belief went, 'corrupting' the author's intention.
The Internet has altered the equation by making possible the study of literary works in their original configurations.
We can now understand that manuscripts designed and produced by scribes and artists—often long after the death of the original poet—have a life of their own.
It was not that scribes were 'incapable' of copying texts word-for-word, but rather that this was not what their culture demanded of them.
This is but one of the reasons why the story of medieval manuscripts is both so fascinating, and so very different from the one we are accustomed to hearing.
But it requires rethinking concepts as fundamental as authorship, for example.
Confronted with over 150 versions of the work, no two quite alike, what becomes of the concept of authorial control?
And how can one assert with certainty which of the 150 or so versions is the 'correct' one, or even whether such a concept even makes sense in a pre-print culture?
If scale can change entrenched attitudes about something as fundamental as 'authorship,' it must also affect other traditional views of medieval literature, like language, for example.
For well over a century-and-a-half, received opinion has held that medieval French—on the model of Latin—had a 'standard' literary form, and a much more varied vernacular stemming from 'Vulgar Latin'—with local dialects making communication difficult from one region to another.
On this view, it was the literary language that bound medieval French culture together, creating a courtly language that could be understood throughout the realm.
In the last thirty years, classicists working on the so-called 'dark ages' from the 5th to the 10th centuries, have sharply questioned the truth of the Vulgar Latin / literary Latin dichotomy.
What was thought to be 'Vulgar Latin,' supposedly spoken by the illiterate masses, has now been shown to be simply classical Latin slowly evolving into the various Romance tongues.
What becomes of the concept of a literary language, distinct from spoken dialects, when confronted with a data mass of some 160 manuscripts of a work some 22,000 lines in length?
We have never had so extensive a body of linguistic evidence from a single work that will offer linguists, syntacticians, grammarians, and phonologists the chance to test the concept of a koiné [*] that had regional variations but was otherwise conformist.
If their research confirms the concept that has ruled medieval studies since the mid-19th century, then it will become unassailable.
One suspects, however, that their findings will lead to far more remarkable observations.
Then again, there is the challenge posed by digital datasets to traditional ways of organising scholarly units in the university.
Simply by aggregating manuscripts, one realises the geographical and chronological extent of vernacular literature, especially of a work as popular as the Rose.
That data in turn leads to the recognition of comparable artefacts elsewhere.
Since medieval French romance in general, and the Rose in particular, was translated into other European languages—Middle English, Spanish, Italian, German, Icelandic, and so on—why would scholars not want to collaborate in exploring this extended data?
In the case of the Rose project, we have involved scholars trained in medieval Spanish and Middle English.
They have extended the range of the project not simply by locating and describing examples of the Rose in Spain and England, but also by identifying its engagement with and influence on other literary works of the period in those countries.
Such examples illustrate how manuscript datasets challenge the disciplinary and national boundaries that partition scholarly inquiry in the academia [2].
All of this points to a sea change in humanities scholarship that gives pause to many.
This is not surprising since humanists typically have neither training nor experience in confronting large-scale data.
Accustomed to working with a discrete corpus, they do not have the same comfort level with data mass as scientists; nor have they typically had occasion to work collaboratively.
Indeed, humanities research protocol, based on the model of evaluating the individual researcher, has typically discouraged collaboration as somehow beneath one's dignity 'infra dig.'
While attitudes more favourable to the needs of digital humanities projects are slowly evolving, we have yet to see a general acceptance of new approaches.
Indeed, even where digital projects have been embraced, evidence suggests that attitudes from traditional or analogue scholarship continue to influence the way projects are evaluated, a practice that younger, untenured colleagues often find intimidating.
At least as far as the demands of humanities credentialing are concerned, the dominion of the typewriter has yet to give way to that of the computer, metaphorically speaking.
It is not news in 2009 that digital humanities require a wholly new mind-set.
That is what is meant by 'the cogito' of digital humanities.
We cannot continue to focus simply on digital projects while ignoring the intellectual and social context in which they take place.
We must begin by accepting the very different social, intellectual, and institutional context fostered by data-driven research.
Digital scholarship creates a potentially productive network at many levels, and it entails significant change at the level of the individual scholar, in terms of operational methods, and in the kind of intraand extra-institutional partnerships required.
The typical digital project cannot be pursued, much less completed by the proverbial 'solitary scholar' familiar to us from the analogue research model.
Because of the way data is acquired and then scaled, digital research rests on a basis of collaboration at many levels: First, as a partnership between scholars and IT professionals; Second, as a dynamic interaction between scholars of the same and different disciplines, since the data is too large to be handled by a single scholar, and too varied to be encompassed by a single discipline [3]; Third, in concert with a team of IT professionals responsible for designing the site, developing functionality as requested by the scholars, posting the data, and, not least of all, assuring access to end-users around the world.
It would be a mistake to ignore the fundamental changes to the professional relationships within institutions implied by such intensive collaboration.
Similarly, it would be naïve to imagine that they have no impact on what we might term the 'etiquette' factor of scholarship.
Traditionally etiquette was based on social conventions which were, in turn, largely predicated on hierarchical arrangements: i.e., the concept of 'a guest of honour,' alternating 'ladies' and 'gentlemen' at table, the precedence of women in social situations, but not necessarily in other real-life contexts.
Analogue scholarship had its own set of conventions, which shared with etiquette the core principle of 'decorum,' which translated to a rigid code of conventions for research practices, scholarly methods, and above all the authority of the individual scholar.
Not all of this makes sense, or is even possible, in the digital context.
Since no single individual can create the conditions or manage the data that constitute a digital environment, the Web is thoroughly democratic.
If the scholarly end-user is the one who conceives and publishes articles about the content of a Web site, such publications are not the only ones to emerge from the collaboration of scholars and IT professionals.
The latter, too, produce innovative articles about technical innovations they made in creating the site.
Indeed, it is often the case that technical staff achieve breakthroughs that end-users have neither the expertise nor, frankly, the interest to fathom.
The scholarly end-user must understand, however, that since his or her research depends upon the responsiveness of the IT professionals to the users' needs, both are enmeshed in a social network configured, if not quite as a matrix, than certainly as a flattened hierarchy.
Since the quasi-matrix model of the scholarly digital world is obvious to anyone who stops to think about it, it ought to serve as a guide to the design and use of Web sites themselves.
But there is something of a contradiction in the way Web sites and their functions are often conceived.
Frequently, they find themselves at cross-purposes with the inherent collaborative potential of the Internet by opting to use dedicated tools limited to the particular needs of the project.
Such proprietary thinking may be appropriate for commercial sites, but does it make sense in the context of the intellectual world where interoperability and co-operation can do so much more to advance knowledge, not to mention extending the range of projects?
Is it not the case that the 'cogito' of scholarly Web sites begins with making them 'smarter' by designing them to facilitate collaboration from the ground up, as it were?
One way to achieve this goal is to make projects 'tool-agnostic.'
Rather than creating tools specifically for a given set of material, one can make platforms tool-agnostic: meaning simply that the site is designed to accommodate varied content.
The capacity of a site to host multiple projects invites collaboration among scholarly groups who would otherwise each be putting up its own separate site.
This in turn will promote scholarly communication and collaboration …in short, true interoperability.
Technically such a model is not difficult to achieve; the problem lies elsewhere: in convincing scholars and IT professionals to think imaginatively and proactively by creating an 'ecumenical' platform for their original content, i.e.
one that is general in its extent and application.
This is precisely what we have done at Johns Hopkins for the Rose project.
As a result, we are ready to incorporate material from other sources—existing or planned—that will transform what is currently a single-focus site into a full-fledged Digital Library of Manuscripts and Incunabula.
Making Web sites 'ecumenical' in this way sets conditions where interoperability is feasible.
This step alone, however, cannot assure a truly collaborative environment.
If digital projects have not been able to interact more effectively, it is in large measure because they remain proprietary to a sub-discipline.
To encourage other projects and their organisers to see the advantage of collaboration, scholars should look beyond the specificity of their topic to the larger rubric under which both may be subsumed.
In short, we need to change our thinking when conceiving scholarly projects.
Simple awareness that the utility of any Web site can be enhanced by its ability to interact with related data can alter the approach to digital projects.
As with any co-operative endeavour, the same spirit should motivate each component.
In this case, it is the spirit of the scholarly method that is at issue.
If the scholars who establish a project adopt a comparative approach from the outset—foreseeing the benefits of interacting with related projects, such as Parker-on-the-Web and Rose, or medieval and Renaissance projects in general where applicable—the expectation is that, from the outset, they will conceptualize their endeavour from a comparative and a collaborative viewpoint.
To maintain the parallelism with the technical side, we can call such a comparative approach 'use-agnostic,' in the same way that the site platform is 'tool-agnostic.'
What are the implications of a use-agnostic approach to digital projects?
To begin with, it brings the scholarship in line with the digital environment by recognising the social network of collaboration between scholars, students, IT professionals, and even the general public.
It recognises that the concept of scholarly 'ownership' is an artefact of analogue protocol.
Use-agnostic projects involve scholars from other disciplines who become involved through the data which contribute to the design of the site, thereby assuring that all the expertise needed to parse the breadth and depth of the data will be brought into play.
A further benefit of the 'use-agnostic' approach is that it will inhibit sub-disciplinary prejudices from 'capturing' or unduly dominating the site, thereby decreasing its usefulness to others with a legitimate interest in the material.
Lest this proposal be misunderstood, 'use-agnostic' should not be construed as offering licence to engage in irresponsible exploitation of site materials.
It does encourage scholars, students, teachers, and interested members of the general public to use them productively.
The fact that a site is use-agnostic by no means implies that that project participants cannot derive discrete personal gain – individual publications, etc.
– from the project.
One imagines, however, that such publications will be enriched by access to the comparative data, which the site makes possible.
Similarly, a site so designed can enhance potential collaborative publications by scholars working on related data from several projects.
That is certainly a strong rationale for interoperability.
Data-level interoperability is a major area of computer science research and for scholars can and should form the basis for the most productive kinds of comparative critical study.
Conclusion No matter how compelling the rationale for making digital projects interoperable, good reasons do not in themselves produce change.
We must go further to reflect on the means of encouraging new ways of thinking.
What factors might we consider likely to support this aim?
To begin with, we must ask what motivates scholarship?
What do scholars hope to achieve?
If one can then show how the change we are talking about can help to realise those goals more effectively, then incentive can be matched to motivation.
This may sound relatively straightforward, but one should never underestimate the resistance of many colleagues, even relatively young ones, to digital practices.
For digital sceptics, what they refer to as 'technology' seems orthogonal to 'scholarship,' as they define it.
So, there is no question but that we need to educate colleagues.
And even before we begin to illustrate how collaborative digital projects can produce innovative scholarship, we will have to prove to their satisfaction that 'digital' and 'scholarship' are not contradictory concepts.
Nothing succeeds like a detailed practical demonstration: showing by doing, if you will.
This is one case where interactive workshops, a lot of them, at strategic locations cannot but advance such education.
Such workshops would require meticulous planning to assure participation by key scholars from related disciplines.
The demographics of such workshops will be crucial to their success.
The mix should include senior scholars and junior scholars who have compelling projects, and who can demonstrate their advantages persuasively.
More difficult to manage, and perhaps delicate to arrange, will be assuring the presence of a target audience of sceptical colleagues, i.e.
for whom 'technology' and scholarship represent antithetical states.
But energy should not be expended simply on 'proselytising.'
Equally urgent is the need to organise workshops to demonstrate to colleagues who already have digital projects why it might be to their advantage to join forces with other teams.
Defining and demonstrating the advantages of inter-site collaboration will help the community to understand better and think more creatively (and productively) about these issues.
Once again, it is important for workshops to include a mix of senior scholars with their younger peers and recent PhDs.
Bearing in mind the flattened nature of digital scholarship hierarchically-speaking, one can imagine the younger participants contributing as much to the education of their older colleagues as the other way around.
Finally, there is the problem of proliferating projects with little or no communication with other ventures, even those falling within the same or related domains.
It is a fact that growing numbers of sites compete for the same funding resources.
We are at or near a zero-sum game.
One might envisage solving the problem of unco-ordinated proliferation and diminishing funding by aggregating projects that fall within related spheres.
As we have seen, the advantage of tool-agnostic and use-agnostic approaches is their potential to encourage collaboration.
Few digital projects require dedicated servers or platforms to carry out their purpose.
Just as 'cloud computing' has increasingly become the choice for storing one's documents, so data curation centres specialising in related projects might be designated to consolidate projects based at a wide variety of locations.
If the Medieval Digital Library at Hopkins, for example, were to become the curation site for a number of programmes dealing with medieval manuscripts and incunabula from around the U.S. and even other countries, scholars working on these projects would have the same level of access and control over them as if they were on servers at their own institution.
But they would enjoy a further distinct advantage in avoiding the expense and logistical problems of organising and maintaining a 'back office' (i.e., all the technical aspects of their project).
They could concentrate on the scholarly enterprise itself.
Consolidation would also offer the advantage of true interoperability with or without collaboration.
Given a number of authors, manuscript types and genres preserved on the same platform, the teams of scholars responsible for the different projects could work comparatively with each others' resources.
Whole new aspects of medieval culture and intellectual life might be discovered serendipitously, even accidentally.
And what is true for medieval and Renaissance projects can also be envisioned in the case of modern digital enterprises.
One other advantage of aggregating curation centres comes to mind.
A finite number of centres would prove easier to fund aggressively at levels that would allow them to offer a menu of technical services, and even to provide custom functionality.
Current models of funding just do not allow individual projects to envisage such beneficial features.
In essence, these consolidated curation centres would operate as consortia, with a steering committee or board drawn from contributing projects or institutions.
Were one to begin to realise this concept, many more advantages would undoubtedly emerge.
Other research disciplines have reached similar conclusions.
None, perhaps, articulates the need for and benefits of cross-disciplinary research and collaborative data analysis than does an ARL report published in 2006: Long-term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering [4].
These proposals do not begin to respond comprehensively to the questions posed.
They do, however, point to problems that need to be faced sooner or later.
I would contend that we can ill afford to delay their implementation for much longer.
*Editor's note: in this context: 'koine' or 'koiné': a dialect or language of a region that has become the common or standard language of a larger area.
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
References Roman de la Rose Digital Library http://www.romandelarose.org/ In this connection, it is instructive to note the demographics of the Rose community as analysed at recent scholarly meetings in the United States in 2008.
Countries represented are: Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.
Analysis of the Rose community conducted in 2008 demonstrates that the site has attracted a broad constituency consisting of literary scholars (36%), Art historians (16%), students of medieval costume design (9%), medieval cultural historians (8%), as well as medieval re-enactors (7%).
To Stand the Test of Time Long-term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering A Report to the National Science Foundation from the ARL Workshop on New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe, 26–27 September, 2006, Arlington, VA http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/digdatarpt.pdf Author Details Stephen G. Nichols German & Romance Languages Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218-2687 USA Email: stephen.nichols@jhu.edu Web site: http://grll.jhu.edu/FacultyBio/Nichols.html Stephen G. Nichols is the James M. Beall Professor of French and Humanities in the Department of German and Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University.
He is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).
He specialises in medieval literature in its relations with history, philosophy, and history of art.
One of his books, Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography, received the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding book by an MLA author in 1984.
Another, The New Philology, was honoured by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 1991.
Author, editor, and co-editor of 24 books, Nichols conceived and is co-director of the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts and Incunabula at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of Johns Hopkins.
He has lectured and written on digital scholarship in the Humanities, e.g.
"From Parchment to Cyberspace," "Digital Scholarship, What's all the Fuss?"
"'Born Medieval:' Manuscripts in the Digital Scriptorium," "Manuscripts and Digital Surrogates: Sibling or Counterfeit?
", "There's an Elephant in the Room: Digital Scholarship and Scholarly Prejudice."
Return to top Article Title: "Time to Change Our Thinking: Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital Scholarship" Author: Stephen G. Nichols Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/nichols/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing the Capability and Skills to Support EResearch Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing the Capability and Skills to Support EResearch Buzz data software wiki database xml portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation identifier repositories copyright video preservation windows linux visualisation gis marc tiff curation e-science e-research ict privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Margaret Henty provides an Australian perspective on improving the environment in which eResearch is conducted through developing institutional capability and providing appropriate skills training.
The growing capacity of ICT to contribute to research of all kinds has excited researchers the world over as they invent new ways of conducting research and enjoy the benefits of bigger and more sophisticated computers and communications systems to support measurement, analysis, collaboration and publishing.
The expanding rate of ICT development is matched by the numbers of people wanting to join in this funfest, by growth in the amount of data being generated, and by demands for new and improved hardware, software, networks, and data storage.
Governments and research funders, too, are keen to exploit the potential for new discoveries which may bring societal benefits and a return on their financial investment.
There is some way to go to bridge the gap between the potential on offer and the realities with which we are living.
Of particular concern to this article is the need for improved levels of data stewardship to enable good data management for long-term sustainability, both at national and institutional levels.
Overall there is a need for skilled personnel to be employed in an organisational environment which enables and facilitates the research agenda.
The concern is being voiced worldwide.
In late 2006, in Australia, a report issued by the Prime Minister's Science and Engineering Innovation Council (PMSEIC) stated that: 'The Committee found that adoption of e-research methodologies in Australia is constrained by a shortage of skills in e-research methodologies, including information management and curation skills.'
[1] In the United States, the National Science Foundation's report, Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery, outlines one goal of the National Science Foundation as being 'To support the development of new skills and professions needed for full realisation of CI-enabled opportunities' [2].
In the United Kingdom, this sentiment is further echoed in a recent consultancy report by Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, which offers the restrained comment that: 'The awareness and skills levels of researchers regarding data management is variable.'
[3] Terminology It needs to be noted at this point that there are terminological differences used in various countries to describe these new methods of conducting research and the digital environment in which research is taking place.
In the UK, we see use of the term eScience, in Australia, eResearch, and in the USA, the underpinning environment is described as Cyberinfrastructure.
Background to the Study The issues of eResearch and data stewardship have become increasingly prominent in the past couple of years.
In Australia, there has been considerable investment in developments to encourage eResearch, improve infrastructure at national and institutional levels, encourage open access to both data and publications and improve the take up of institutional repositories [4].
The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) was one of the projects supported by the Australian Department of Education, Science and Training through its Strategic Infrastructure Initiative.
The APSR brief included training and outreach activities, which found a large and appreciative audience.
APSR also conducted a number of surveys which have added to our understanding of researcher practice and repository management [5].
My own background is in social science research and librarianship and I have published extensively in library research for over twenty years.
I was prompted to undertake this study by a perceived need to understand better where the gaps lay between the ideal and current practice, with the expectation that this information could be fed into planning for the new Australian National Data Service (ANDS).
My intention was to concentrate on the need for skills development and it was only as the study progressed that it became clear that skills development is only part of the answer.
I therefore took on the role of investigating the issue of skills and capabilities through the Skills for eResearch Project.
This had as its aims: to identify the range and types of skills required to undertake and support eResearch; to provide information on which to base proposals for future events, training and other means of skills development; and to provide information for institutions and government for consideration in relation to formal Higher Education and vocational training options.
Groups of Interest Four groups were identified as likely to be engaged in forwarding the eResearch agenda.
These were researchers, particularly those engaged in data-intensive research; systems developers, data scientists and other technical staff; data managers of institutional repositories, data archives and discipline-based data centres and their support staff, with those who liaise between depositors and the repository as being of particular interest; and those who are engaged in high-level policy formulation, either in government or research institutions.
The Study The study was undertaken in the latter half of 2007 and the results of four separate investigations have been combined for this report.
A further part of this study is planned for 2008, to take the form of an in-depth study of a research unit.
This will relate to the needs of researchers and those who provide technical support within the disciplinary context.
Interviews were conducted with twelve key established researchers in six Australian institutions, with a focus on academics engaged in data-intensive research.
Interviews were conducted also with the manager of a large data centre, and a repository administrator.
The institutions concerned were the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Tasmania, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney and one area of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
APSR conducted a questionnaire survey of those who attended eResearch Australasia 2007, held in June.
About 320 people attended and 76 responded to the post-conference questionnaire which asked, 'what skills would you identify as necessary in your workplace to support the more rapid uptake of eResearch'.
There was also a question asking people to identify themselves as: an academic engaged in eResearch; the manager or support staff of an institutional repository, data archive or discipline-based collection; a system developer or software technician; an administrator engaged in policy or governance issues; or some other category.
The results of this question showed that there were few who identified as only one of these, with most people ticking more than one box and the largest single response being 'other'.
Among those 'other' were 'all of the above, plus direct support, plus awareness raising', an ICT strategy manager, an 'advocate for the humanities', a librarian working with academics on e-projects, an ICT solutions/technology vendor, 'eResearch support staff, a research technology communicator', an 'education program leader' and more, indicating the broad range of people intersecting with the eResearch agenda.
Overall, this group identified 140 separate 'skills'.
In June 2007, a workshop was held in association with eResearch Australasia 2007.
'The Researcher/Librarian Nexus: The challenges of research data management in institutional repositories' brought together those with an interest in discussing the role of the librarian in the long-term management and sustainability of research data.
Some of the people attending were librarians who already have, or will have, a designated role in data stewardship in their universities.
They identified the skills which they saw as being needed as they take on a role in repository management and data stewardship.
The South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC) conducted a small survey early in 2007 targeted at South Australian-based initiatives related to the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), South Australian research groups likely to be involved in national NCRIS initiatives (i.e.
not based in South Australia) and the broad South Australian research community.
They received 27 replies.
The survey was a broad one relating to generic shared infrastructure requirements.
The Results Two themes emerged from the surveys.
One related to skills and the need for training and staff development.
The other was the identification of barriers to eResearch, which together contribute to the notion of capability and the need for cultural and organisational change.
There was wide agreement that there are three types of skills required for practitioners of eResearch, their support staff and repository staff.
Not surprisingly, there was a strong need for technical skills.
Perhaps not as obvious was the identification of a wide range of non-technical skills.
Less obvious again was mention of an assortment of personal qualities, which, while not skills in the formal sense of the term, were singled out as being important.
In terms of capability, many responses identified the need for communication between and among the different groups associated with eResearch to increase understanding of what each has to offer and what each needs to function effectively.
There were also calls for organisational and cultural change to cover policies, practices and structures.
Quotations from interviews are included in blockquotes below.
Technical Skills The surveys indicated that not everyone needs the same level of technical skills to conduct or support eResearch.
However, there do seem to be minimum requirements for all the groups identified above as being of interest, either to practise, or, as in the case of the policy maker or the administrator, to understand fully the import of what is being done.
One senior scientist described the researcher requirement in the following terms, while pointing to some of the deficiencies in support services: 'In order to get to the more useful parts of eResearch, you have to have a definite skill base to work from, and that skill base is really largely anchored in a Linux /Unix background and to some extent in Windows and less so in the Macintosh field.
[…] So you need a basic literacy level to look after your computers where you're storing your data, and then in order to access, like a remote repository, you need to know something about how to connect to that remote repository, what the format of the data should be to go in it, how to convert your data to that required format.'
The list of technical skills identified for researchers and the people supporting them was very long.
It included skills related to high-performance computing (HPC) and the access grid, data (and database) management, data curation, information engineering, information modelling, software development, remote communications, distributed processing, informatics, portal design, computational fluid dynamics, database integration, visualisation and programming of all kinds.
Some of these skills are tightly connected to specific disciplines, especially informatics.
The field of informatics deals with the storage, retrieval, sharing and use of scientific information, especially as it relates to modern computing and communication technologies.
It has had a recognised place in many disciplines for some time, but informaticians are increasingly being sought after to be part of the research team.
The SAPAC survey referred to above contained calls for more people in bio-informatics and chemo-informatics.
The need for technical skills is allied to the ability to understand end-to-end workflows, especially for repository managers and developers who need to be able to think like the researcher and to apply that understanding to developing the repository.
By workflows, I mean the many software applications, processing operations and interactions required for research tasks to be carried through to completion.
For example, the workflow of writing a paper through to publishing it online and archiving it in a repository for open access.
The group of librarians at 'The Researcher Librarian Nexus' workshop identified a need for further development of their technical skills, mentioning in particular metadata, something which did not feature among any of the other responses, other than by implication.
Non-technical Skills and Personal Qualities There was widespread agreement that computer-based technical skills cannot exist in isolation and that non-technical skills are equally critical.
These vary from skills in data analysis (including the use of statistical packages and other techniques such as data mining) through information seeking to a broader range of general skills.
Project management, business analysis, communications, negotiation, intellectual property, team building and train the trainer were mentioned specifically.
Another was generic problem solving, because, as one researcher aptly put it, the kinds of problems which arise when undertaking eResearch mean that 'There's never going to be someone who has done it before.'
On the subject of project management, one senior researcher commented: '[...] it's related to the time urgency associated in the higher education field in general.
The management of projects is now devolved back down to the researchers much more than it was a couple of decades ago, and it really depends on the management skill of those people, by definition academic staff.
I mean, I know myself, I didn't go into academia because I wanted to do management.
I went into it because I wanted to do research.
And I'm not a good manager in terms of projects.
You know, not as good as someone who has a skill base in that.
So it's an effort for me to learn that sort of thing.
And it's not so much because it's hard to learn.
It's because I don't really have that much of a desire to learn it.'
Others did not see project management as an issue only for academic staff.
The librarians involved with the Researcher/Librarian Nexus workshop also identified it as being of high priority for repository managers, along with marketing, advocacy, copyright, metadata, educational outreach and grant submission writing.
They also singled out the intriguing skill of 'researcher management' while not specifying precisely what this might entail.
A good grasp of copyright and intellectual property issues was seen as essential, with many comments to the effect that this does not currently exist.
As one person put it: 'There's pretty much a misunderstanding of copyright issues across the campus.
Not many people are aware of their ownership, their rights as a generator of intellectual property, where their rights end and the rights of the university take up'.
One repository administrator pointed out the need for all parties to have a good understanding of the broader policy environment, not just at the discipline level, but at the 'institutional level, at the national level, the funding level and at the international level which again might be disciplinary.'
There was one call for researchers to improve their skills in 'mathematics; abstraction/inductive reasoning; process-oriented introspection' on the basis that Towards 2020 Science argues that 'researchers will need to increase their abilities in the above areas'.
[6] While the various surveys conducted asked about skills, there were many responses concerning the importance of having people with the particular personal qualities.
These were listed as: open-mindedness, patience and an 'ability to cooperate and collaborate rather than compete'.
Bridging the Discipline/Technical Divide While not a skills issue as such, one aspect of the eResearch environment is the difficulty associated with bridging the divide between those with a high level of disciplinary expertise and those who have technical expertise.
This may occur within research teams, or where repository managers and developers are communicating with researchers in order to encourage deposit or to provide other technical support.
Within research groups, it can be a major issue.
For example, one researcher, in the field of finance told me of his need for programmers who have a high level of expertise in economics, econometrics, statistics, maths and programming; 'otherwise all the programming expertise doesn't really help because then they make strange assumptions in their coding that just result in nonsense output.'
For others, this is less of a problem and each side seems to be able to learn sufficient of what the other does to perform effectively as a team.
One data centre manager was firmly of the view that it is easier to overlay a disciplinary knowledge over a strong ICT background than the other way around.
One senior repository administrator was equally firm that the opposite was the case.
There does not seem to be an absolute answer here.
One solution to the need to bridge the disciplinary gap is to use graduate students to help with the technical aspects, where those students have an interest and aptitude for this kind of work.
In some cases this might be done by providing scholarships, the students then graduating with a PhD on the basis their contribution to the research project has been of sufficient originality to warrant the degree.
One example of this is the University of Queensland's project to create an 'e-atlas' as part of the Historical Atlas of Queensland Project [7] being funded through an ARC Linkage Grant.
Three PhD scholars will be involved: one with a background in IT, one with GIS and the third in cultural landscapes.
Alternately, PhD graduates might be employed to undertake postdoctoral work.
Sometimes researchers find themselves taking on all roles: 'So basically I'm the chief software architect, programmer, plus I have a research agenda'.
Developing Capability There is a range of people associated with research in the digital environment and the provision of support for appropriate data management and long-term sustainability.
At one end of the spectrum there are researchers familiar with their disciplines, and whose technical understanding varies from outstanding to basic.
At the other end of the spectrum are those responsible for technical support whose disciplinary skills vary from outstanding to basic.
There are also non-technical skill sets which need to be brought to bear: relating to ethics, privacy, intellectual property and so on.
Research institutions need to cover this range, but the value of skills can only be optimised in an organisational and cultural setting where they are visible, appreciated and available.
Many of the people surveyed and interviewed commented on frustrating institutional barriers to their capacity to conduct their work effectively.
Some of them relate directly to the availability of skilled personnel, while others are more general.
The barrier to research most often mentioned was the difficulty in assembling all the skills required to conduct a project, particularly in relation to data management and stewardship.
In some cases the gap is organisational, as happens for example when the researcher is either unaware of or unable to tap into the skills of a central IT unit.
More often the gap was in a lack of understanding of what each group needs, what each has to offer and where responsibilities lie.
Examples of this can be seen in comments like the following: 'There is a gap in the methodologies of these two groups that needs to be acknowledged and worked with.'
'For instance if you've got data in say NetCDF file formats and the repository wants it in TIFF format, well you need to know something about the technicality of getting your data from NetCDF format into TIFF format.
And that's actually a technology that's not widely known.
It's known by people like myself who deal with images but the general people in applied areas don't know that sort of information.
And even if you go to say the IT departments in the university they don't know that either, because it's just not considered part of data management per se.
The conversion of data is not seen as part of data management.
That's seen as the problem of the person that either holds the data or generated the data.'
'Few have an appreciation of the appraisal and transition process from the operational environment to the preservation and re-use environment.'
There was wide-spread agreement that everyone would benefit from well-developed and well-propagated policies and practices at the national, international, disciplinary and institutional levels.
Some researchers reported that they find it difficult to find solutions to the various issues associated with the complexities of conducting their research.
As one person put it: 'Knowing what we can do, and having clearer guidelines as to who/what/where provides the infrastructure (at the department, school, university, state, or federal level).
It all seems to be "somebody else" who will provide the ground level support.'
All research projects are unique: '... so you feel like you're starting from scratch all the time'.
The lack of good tools to integrate the scholarly communication process was also seen as a barrier: 'more seamless paths from field or library research through writing into publication and archiving', as were tools developed specifically to meet research needs rather than using those developed primarily for business needs.
Advocacy There is a need for better communications between all the different groups involved in the eResearch agenda.
This was often referred to as advocacy, and it is discussed here because it was mentioned so often by survey respondents and by those interviewed.
In this context, however, the need for advocacy means different things to different groups.
Among researchers, advocacy tends to refer to the need for attracting the engagement of academics through 'a greater understanding of the opportunities available.'
One researcher put it this way: 'For most discipline areas, the skills are generally fairly basic, relating to databases, internet, etc.
For researchers, it is not so much a matter of skills as such, but more an appreciation of what e-research can do to facilitate research in different areas.
This will be the primary driver of the uptake of e-research.'
The humanities and social sciences are notable areas where the take-up rate of eResearch has been slower than, for example, in the hard sciences, and where there have been calls for exemplars to be publicised.
Many practitioners in the humanities and social sciences find it difficult to envisage where their work might fit into the concept of eResearch.
The importance of skills development is one of the issues currently under investigation by the Australian Academy of the Humanities which is undertaking a study of 'Humanities technologies: Research methods and ICT use by humanities researchers' [8].
Researchers, data managers and repository staff recognise the need for advocacy when it comes to increasing understanding of what they do for the purposes for attracting political and funding support.
This applies within the institution as researchers try to explain the importance of this new kind of research to vice-chancellors and the like to achieve 'cultural buy-in – across the organisation and at all levels'.
Data managers and repository staff at the same time are putting their case for more resources to provide the infrastructure to support research.
Outside the institution, researchers are competing for funds from the different funding agencies, and data managers and repository staff are seeking recognition of the importance of their contribution to data sustainability and reuse.
Data centre managers and repository managers must also persuade researchers that they can contribute to the research agenda.
Few researchers are aware that there are such things as repositories, so it is important that the repository is seen as (and indeed is) 'a good repository – that it's good in the sense of its high quality but also good in that it adds value for [the researcher].'
The repository manager must also advocate for open access, of both data and publications.
The ways in which data can be reused are many: 'we have valuable data here.
And we can re-use that.
We can use it in scholarly portfolios, we can use it in government reporting, we can use it in research collaboration which is ultimately the main goal anyway.'
The difficulty here is for researchers to know what they do not know.
Many fail to develop a proper data management plan at the outset of their projects, so there is a great need for advocacy of what can and should be done.
Liz Lyon in Dealing with Data suggests that 'Advocacy messages need to be clear and consistent, and ideally will be harmonized across funding bodies.
Surveys suggest researchers particularly need advice concerning technical standards for data curation.'
[3] Solutions and Suggestions While the surveys and interviews that went into this study did not go out seeking advice about what could and should be done, it was perhaps inevitable that there were would be a lot of advice and opinions expressed as to what was needed.
These fell into several different categories: suggesting what might happen even if nothing is done or pointing out opportunities to be developed.
This section will look at some of them, and also discuss some examples of programmes already in operation.
Generational Change There were strong suggestions that the problem will take care of itself as the researcher population ages and a younger generation of digital natives takes over.
Digital natives are those who 'have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age'.
[9] '... it's a generational thing.
I tend to encourage technology uptake but I recognise that each generation that's coming through is becoming more and more comfortable with the technology.
So you can advocate, but whether the population you're advocating to has the ability to pick up the technology and run with it is really an open debate.
I think if we are advocating more connectivity, which is what eResearch is about, it's about connectivity between groups and individuals.
[...] I don't want to say age but because it involves not just an age thing but also in some ways some technologies you can't just pick up at a young age because you don't have the background for them.
You haven't learnt enough to pick them up.'
An increasing supply of digital natives will not be sufficient though if the academic curriculum does not incorporate data management.
If you look at the range of skills which are usually identified as comprising information literacy, i.e.
to 'be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information' [10], the inclusion of data management is a logical extension, for both undergraduates and graduates.
'We've talked with a few academics about data management being something you actually taught.
Even if it's just a one-off lecture.
[...] In my undergraduate days when I was doing labs, I was taught how to do error analysis, how to do measurement, how to do significant figures reporting and so on.
[...] So why not explain to people at the same time, oh, and if you want to store that image from that instrument over there, store it in this format.
Why do I store it in that format?
Oh, because it's preservable.
What do you mean by preservable?
So we can keep it it's a documented format.
That's it.
It's a one minute exercise.
But you just plant those seeds.'
'It's significant that a large take-up of high performance computing is coming out of places like physics where the training that the early career researchers is getting is really about data manipulation, and they use the Linux and Unix world, whereas those parts of the education spectrum where you've got people who are using computer technology but not developing it don't get that sort of exposure.'
On-the-job Training When asked how training could best be offered to researchers and their staff, responses varied.
'One of the great maxims is that users hate training.
Users love support' was one response, another was 'I'd love to be able to say one-on-one training'.
The list of issues relating to on-the-job training was large: when to do it, how to do it, what to include, how to cover the cost, how to provide the right trainers.
Training is most effective when given at the point of need, making timing a particular issue.
On-the-job support also means assisting with the design of research projects to influence the selection of file formats and other data management procedures.
It means trying to influence the researcher at the beginning of the project, rather than picking up the pieces (from a data management perspective) some time further into the process, or indeed at the end of it.
One possibility for example, would be to create small learning objects to support data management, along the lines of the icons which pop up in some word processing programs which interpret what is going on and offer help.
Certification One of the researchers interviewed, a senior epidemiologist, had found it very hard to locate appropriately qualified staff and asked plaintively: '...is there a Masters of Data Management?
Are there people out there that actually have an expert [qualification] – like you might find someone who's done a librarian course?
Well, is there a Masters of Data Management so that there's these people that actually know how to do all this stuff that we want to do.'
The answer to this question is no, in Australia at least.
There are some courses appearing in the USA, the Digital Library Curriculum Project [11] which builds upon a collaboration between Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Digital Information Management Certificate offered by the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science [12] to name but two.
In Australia it is possible that a formal training mechanism will be developed through the proposed Australian National Data Service (ANDS).
ANDS will take a strong role in providing advice and assistance as 'education, training and consultancy programs are required to build the capability of data creators, data stewards, and data consumers to participate in the commons'.
[13] The ORCA Model The wide-ranging list of needs outlined by survey respondents means that there will not be one delivery mechanism for skills development.
Some of these needs will be met through the formal education system, some through training offered within the institution and some by training bodies set up for the purpose.
The Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) Support Network was established to support the ORCA Collections Registry [14].
Its training programme was designed to provide some of the professional development required by researchers, technologists, and collection managers and was based on the assumption that training at a local level can best meet local needs.
The ORCA Support Network members are situated in major Australian research universities and employed within central areas responsible for repository management and development.
During 2007, they offered consultancies and advice to researchers and shared their locally developed training programmes with each other.
Local training programmes offered, subsidised by APSR, included: developing a data management plan, XML for online collections, data rescue, data exit planning for retiring researchers, cultural informatics, archival practice and the records of eResearch, and digitisation for beginners.
All training materials have been shared through the ORCA wiki.
Instruction on developing a data management plan was given a high priority among the ORCA members for two reasons.
Firstly, to improve local data management practice and secondly, because it is expected that the Australian Research Council and the National Health & Medical Research Council will require such a plan in future in research funding applications.
The Australian National University has elected to develop a course which can be offered through its Graduate Information Literacy Program, both online and in the classroom.
Conclusion If research institutions are to minimise the gap between the ideals and realities of eResearch, there is some way to go in providing both institutional capacity and appropriately qualified individuals.
While eResearch is dependent on good ICT infrastructure, this is not sufficient in itself.
The results of the survey outlined here show that capacity in information technology skills is important but must be accompanied by a range of non-technical skills in such areas as project management.
Equally important is the creation of research environments which are covered by well-propagated and understood policies, which are appropriately organised into structures with clearly delineated roles and responsibilities and which minimise the current barriers experienced by many researchers.
Acknowledgements My thanks are due to Adrian Burton and Chris Blackall of APSR, Belind Weaver, Rowan Brownlee, Gavan McCarthy and Simon Porter from the ORCA Support Network, and all those who kindly gave me their valuable time and insights into the world of eResearch.
References PMSEIC Working Group on Data for Science.
From Data to Wisdom: Pathways to Successful Data Management for Australian Science.
December 2006. page 51. http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/D15793B2-FEB9-41EE-B7E8-C6DB2E84E8C9/15103/From_Data_to_Wisdom_Pathways_data_man_forAust_scie.pdf National Science Foundation.
Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery.
Washington DC.
March 2007. page 37.
Lyon, Liz.
Dealing with Data; Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships: Consultancy Report.
UKOLN, University of Bath.
June 2007, page 54. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/reports/dealing_with_data_report-final.pdf See, for example, the Web site of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) http://www.ncris.dest.gov.au/ and that of the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/programmes_funding/general_funding/research_infrastructure/systemic_infrastructure_initiative.htm A list of these can be found at http://www.apsr.edu.au/publications/discussion.htm Towards 2020 Science, Microsoft Foundation, 2005. http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/downloads.htm Queensland Historical Atlas (QHAtlas) project http://www.uq.edu.au/qhatlas/ Howard, Sarah and John Byron.
"Humanities technologies: Research methods and ICT use by humanities researchers", Paper presented at eResearch Australasia, Brisbane, June 27, 2007. http://www.eresearch.edu.au/byron Marc Prensky, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants", On The Horizon, Vol 9, No 5, 2001.
Viewed 25 January 2008 at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/ American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report January 10, 1989, Washington, D.C http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/whitepapers/presidential.cfm Digital Library Curriculum Project http://curric.dlib.vt.edu/ University of Arizona Graduate Certificate in Digital Information Management http://sir.arizona.edu/digin/ ANDS Technical Working Group, Towards the Australian Data Commons: A proposal for an Australian National Data Service, Canberra, October 2007, p24.
http://www.pfc.org.au/twiki/pub/Main/Data/TowardstheAustralianDataCommons.pdf For further information about ORCA, see http://www.apsr.edu.au/orca/ Author Details Margaret Henty National Services Program Coordinator Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Email: margaret.henty@apsr.edu.au Web site: http://www.apsr.edu.au/ Return to top Article Title: "Developing the Capability and Skills to Support eResearch" Author: Margaret Henty Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/henty/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Repository Fringe 2010 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Repository Fringe 2010 Buzz data framework api html database dissemination rss infrastructure archives metadata doi digitisation tagging identifier blog repositories eprints video preservation hypertext visualisation gis aggregation ontologies uri csv curation dspace wordpress mashup twitter oer hashtag ipad solr kml research standards Citation BibTex RIS Martin Donnelly (and friends) report on the Repository Fringe "unconference" held at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland, over 2-3 September 2010.
2010 was the third year of Repository Fringe, and slightly more formally organised than its antecedents, with an increased number of discursive presentations and less in the way of organised chaos!
The proceedings began on Wednesday 1 September with a one-day, pre-event SHERPA/RoMEO API Workshop [1] run by the Repositories Support Project team.
2 September 2010 Opening the event proper on Thursday morning, Sheila Cannell, Director of Library Services, University of Edinburgh, used the imminent Edinburgh festival fireworks as a metaphor for the repository development endeavour.
They can be enjoyed for free at various vantage points across the city, or people can pay to gain entry to Princes Street Gardens to experience them in more comfort; but each group receives different versions of the same experience.
Openness works along similar lines: someone has to pay, but all can benefit.
Keynote Address Dr Tony Hirst (Open University) Tony Hirst's keynote address was entitled 'Open etc' and began with an overview of the scholarly communication workflow, positioning the publications repository as the institution's memory.
Time is often wasted when repository staff have to go and seek out papers published by members of the university, and there are other places and ways for storing content.
Hirst gave the example of his own blog and other online mechanisms for dissemination.
Rather than publish in traditional academic journals, he uses Slideshare as a place to expose his research, and also blogs unformed thoughts which are subsequently refined through user feedback/comments.
The blog therefore becomes a kind of notebook and a structured 'repository' / database.
The remainder of Tony's talk dealt with ways of structuring and transforming textual content so that it can be processed as data, addressing key concepts such as discovery, disaggregation, and representation.
Documents can be 'chunked' by assigning URIs to each paragraph, and services built atop WordPress's standard RSS feeds using tools like Yahoo Pipes.
Tony showed a map of usable (and free) workflows between applications, from Wikipedia to Google Maps via HTML, CSV, KML and <embed>ding; a similar process can be used to link RSS feeds and Mendeley reading lists.
Tony called this process 'content liberation': using free and simple-to-use means, he and demonstrated how the interrelation of textual content can be made clearer by the application of visualisation tools.
He ended his talk with a reminder of Ranganathan's five laws of library science [2], and a few thoughts on how they might be applied to data repositories.
Presentation: MEMENTO: Time Travel for the Web Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory / Old Dominion University) The central topic of Herbert Van de Sompel's talk was the Memento Project, a Web archiving interface which aims to make it easy to navigate Web sites from the past.
Herbert cited Tim Berners Lee on generic versus specific resources, noting that resources vary over time.
But automated Web archivers cannot harvest all content, especially pictorial/video content.
There are already Web archives which record the changes that have taken place to particular pages, but Memento is concerned with navigating archived resources.
Memento's raison d'être is that recreating/revisiting the experience of the past is more compelling than just reading a summary of changes of, for example, a Wikipedia page.
Memento codifies existing ad hoc methods which link the past to the present, and creates a linkage from the present to the past; Herbert noted that the former challenge is considerably simpler than the latter!
Memento's TimeGate front-end uses 'content negotiation in the date-time dimension', and utilises protocol settings that are built into the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Herbert ended by stressing the value of HTTP URIs, and expressing the view that Memento serves to extend their power.
Pecha Kucha: Session 1 Following lunch we staved off post-prandial fatigue with the first breakneck round of Pecha Kucha sessions.
Pecha Kucha is a Japanese presentation format in which presenters speak to 20 slides for 20 seconds each, making each presentation last precisely 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
The aim of such a rigid format is to focus presenters on getting their message across in a clear and concise way.
Open Access Repository Junction Ian Stuart, University of Edinburgh / EDINA Stuart spoke about research as a communal activity, which is often carried out by distributed teams and takes place largely over the Internet.
However, educational institutions tend to be more insular in their view of research, operating in what Stuart calls a 'vertical market'.
So there is a need for some middle ground, or a sort of 'broker' between the researchers and the institutional repository.
Repository Junction is currently working with seven repositories to provide such a service, in liaison with the EPrints and DSpace teams.
Their final report is due in May 2011.
Photo courtesy of Nicola Osborne, Social Media Officer, EDINA JorumOpen Hiten Vaghmaria, EDINA Hiten Vaghmaria's short talk was about design.
Great design tends to be universally loved, bad design widely disliked.
It is important to consider form: people respond emotionally to good design.
Jorum is the UK's national repository of learning and teaching resources, and it has recently improved its Web site design in response to user demand for more content to be accessible more quickly.
Hybrid Institutional Repository Robbie Ireland and Toby Hanning, University of Glasgow Library Robbie Ireland and Toby Hanning talked about the University of Glasgow's Enlighten as a hybrid, being both an institutional repository and a publications database.
Glasgow has successfully mandated deposit in the repository, across a wide range of content types.
The speakers suggested that there were four main factors that have contributed to this success: policy, collaboration, data, and organisation.
There has been a certain amount of staff resistance to the mandate, and advocacy and collaboration are therefore important.
There are also quality-related problems, especially with bulk data uploads, necessitating periodic checks.
Enlighten mostly holds metadata records, but the Enlighten team aims to increase the number of full-text items held over the coming months and years.
Photo courtesy of Nicola Osborne, Social Media Officer, EDINA Dataset Identity Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory Following his earlier, very accessible presentation, Herbert Van de Sompel here gave a fairly technical presentation which covered the addressing, accessing, and citing of content, together with the different requirements needed for each of these stages.
He spoke about the relative strengths and weaknesses (and requirements) of DOI and HTTP URI for each of these actions.
Citing requires identifier and credits, while fragment identifiers can be used to address segments.
It is, he stressed, possible to combine approaches.
Providing Data Support in a Repository Context Elin Stangeland, Cambridge University Library Elin Stangeland spoke about the JISC-funded Incremental and DataTrain projects, with specific regard to lessons learned on issues of tools and training.
The projects have carried out scoping studies and interviews, and among the emerging themes were a widespread ignorance on the part of researchers regarding matters such as back-up procedures and best practice generally.
It is clear that the preservation message has not yet captured researchers' hearts and minds, and that people often find it dull.
These problems are not discipline-specific, but tailored/discipline-specific guidance would be welcomed in overcoming them.
Addressing History Nicola Osborne, EDINA Addressing History is a 6-month JISC rapid innovation project.
EDINA in partnership with the National Library of Scotland are developing a scalable geo-coding tool that will combine and enhance data from digitised historical Scottish Post Office Directories (PODs) with large-scale historical maps of the same era through crowdsourcing.
In the first instance the tool will access three eras of Edinburgh mapping and PODs (1784-5; 1865; 1905-6).
The PODs contain residents' names, professions, and street addresses, information which can be valuable to those who study the past, such as genealogists, local and social historians.
Osborne ended by demonstrating various possibilities for combining this new information with existing datasets by way of mashups, and noted that the live preview would be launching soon.
Photo courtesy of Nicola Osborne, Social Media Officer, EDINA Repository Building Blocks: EPrints David Tarrant and Patrick McSweeny, University of Southampton David Tarrant and Patrick McSweeny's double act gave an entertaining overview of new features and future developments in EPrints.
EPrints 3.3 is due in the first quarter of 2011, at which point the EPrints Bazaar – a kind of 'App Store' for repository plug-ins – will also be officially launched.
The rationale for the EPrints Bazaar is that sharing success is all about the community.
Lots of plug-ins have been developed by the EPrints user base, but it can be hard to make them discoverable and achieve a decent profile.
The EPrints Bazaar presents a single place for discovery, and supports installation via a single click.
The duo also covered the 'really powerful' Digital Preservation Suite for EPrints, which has been developed in collaboration with Planets, and its accompanying one-day training course.
Tarrant demonstrated several of the plug-ins, including SNEEP (Social Network Extensions to EPrints), EdShare ToolBox, and MePrints.
They took an out-of-the-box (or 'vanilla') EPrints installation and installed (and tweaked) several plug-ins to make it much more attractive and user-friendly.
The session ended with a video demo of an iPad app (Flipboard) which makes it more pleasant to browse repository content; indeed, ease-of-use and the importance of interface design and user-friendliness emerged as one of the event's overarching themes, representing the carrot to the stick of institutional mandate!
Round Table Discussion 1: The Value of Geo-referencing Data in Repositories Ian Stuart, EDINA The broad topics for discussion were 'Why geo-tag stuff?'
'What does geo-tagging mean and what would it be used for?
', 'What is tagged: the location of the camera or the contents of the picture?'
They led to several subsequent questions: 'Where is a place?
', 'What about non-terrestrial places?
', 'What about the place as is was at <time>?'
Following much lively discussion, the group reached a consensus; what they wanted ideally was for applications to offer suggestions that users can either accept or modify.
The thinking behind this was that people would be more inclined to de-select the places that are wrong rather than write down the places that are right.
The real trick is to get positive feedback: show good uses for geo-located data and people will be encouraged to provide geo-locating information items, in the self-interested belief that this will raise their own profile(s).
Round Table Discussion 2: Collaborative Documentation The EPrints Handbook Stephanie Taylor, UKOLN This round table centred on the documentation needs of EPrints users at all levels, from technical practitioner to busy repository manager, and raised the possibility of supplementing existing documentation with community-created content.
There was a positive response to the latter suggestion, and useful discussion covering the approaches that currently work well and not so well for both EPrints documentation and peer-support communities.
There was also discussion of potential ways in which these support fora could be improved and linked together.
Stephanie Taylor will be taking forward the suggestions of this round table over the coming months.
Round Table Discussion 3: Where Does the IR Fit in the CRIS World?
Anna Clements, University of St Andrews, James Toon, University of Edinburgh This session was designed for institutions facing issues related to the sometimes muddy boundaries between the two system types: Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Current Research Information Systems (CRISs).
Anna Clements started the session by offering an overview of the 'Pure' implementation at St Andrews, including work done on the CRISPool Project in providing a CRIS-based solution for SUPA, the Scottish physics research pool, and how St Andrews are dealing with the CRIS/IR issue.
With more and more institutions reportedly turning to the CRIS based approach, the ensuing discussion considered whether or not we ought to maintain the distinction between IR and CRIS systems.
In this, the group considered the value of regional or national alternatives to local repository services.
The group also discussed whether or not more work should be done in integrating the functionality of CRIS and IR systems, and what impact the REF might have in the long term in bringing these needs together.
3 September 2010 Introducing day two of the event, Simon Bains, Head of the Digital Library at Edinburgh, announced that Toby Hanning and Robbie Ireland had won the public vote for yesterday's best Pecha Kucha session.
Presentation: Hydra Chris Awre, University of Hull In the first session of the morning, Chris Awre spoke about Hydra, a self-funded collaboration between Hull, Virginia, Stanford Universities and Fedora Commons (now DuraSpace), which is working towards a reusable framework for multi-purpose, multi-function, multi-institutional repository-enabled solutions.
Hydra is based on two fundamental assumptions: that no single institution can resource the development of a full range of digital content management solutions on its own, yet each needs the flexibility to tailor solutions to local demands and workflows; that no single system can provide the full range of repository-based solutions for a given institution's needs, and that sustainable solutions require a common repository infrastructure.
Awre gave an synopsis of Hydra's origins in the RepoMMan, REMAP and CLIF projects at Hull, followed by an overview of the consortium's working methods and organisation, and a visual depiction of the system's Open Source technical architecture – which encompasses Fedora, Blacklight, Solr, Solrizer, and the Hydra Rails plug-in – accompanied by a rationale for the selection of these technologies.
He ended with an assertion that testing is a core community principle; that we need to test our systems adequately, and furthermore we need to demonstrate that they have been tested.
Round Table Discussion 4: UK Metadata Forum Stephanie Taylor, UKOLN This was the second meeting of the Metadata Forum [3]].
The Forum aims to help build a community of practice around the use of metadata.
Anyone with an interest in metadata is encouraged to participate, but the emphasis is on practical solutions to practical problems.
The session started with a short talk by Sheila Fraser from EDINA.
Sheila is working on a JISC Scoping Study entitled, 'Aggregations of Metadata for Images and Time Based Media' [4]].
Some basic models of aggregation were provided for consideration from the group, and this sparked off an interesting discussion on the benefits of aggregation and whether a pragmatic approach is perhaps more beneficial.
The general consensus of participants was that being able to access content in the way that made sense to the user had to be the starting point.
If a model is less than perfect, but has benefits in the way users can interact with a system, then this is much more beneficial than a 'perfect' model that makes little sense to the users.
Of course, there are lots of grey areas in between, and this is where solutions are often found.
The mention of users led on naturally to a discussion about what users want, and how metadata can support their needs.
A recurring theme among UK metadata users right now is the need to find robust, workable solutions for dealing with non-text-based objects.
Still images, moving images and music were all mentioned as objects repository managers and others are starting to need to deal with on a regular basis.
In addition, the specific needs of different subject areas were highlighted.
For example, with still images, there are very different needs which depend on subject and use rather than file format.
Geolocation is essential for architectural images, but for medical images geolocation information must not be available as this could lead to identification of the patient with the image – something which would compromise data protection requirements and mean the image could not be used as a source for research purposes.
The meeting concluded that some basic guidelines on dealing with different objects would be useful, but that the key to creating something workable would be to have a flexible approach.
Such an approach would create a toolkit that took into consideration the needs of specific subjects too, as well as format.
The issues raised in the discussion will be used as the focus of later meetings of the Forum, where specific topics will be discussed and people who have already found some working solutions in these areas will give short presentations on their work.
Round Table Discussion 5: Linking Articles into Research Data Robin Rice and Philip Hunter, University of Edinburgh This session covered a wide range of questions: Should we encourage academics to curate the dataset that goes with a particular publication, rather than the whole of the data they have produced?
How do repository managers want to accept storage for OA or archiving?
How could linking datasets improve scientific practice?
For pointing to datasets, what is more important: bibliographic citation or permanent identifier?
Are DOIs preferable to handles?
What metadata is required for linking outputs to datasets, and can ontologies help?
As things stand, when related data are offered to journals, their publishers may say that they cannot support it yet.
But the group's view was that if you worry too much about doing something perfectly, you get nothing done.
People can still achieve useful results by putting in time and effort, but attempting to scale this approach is somewhat problematic.
The group also discussed a few related issues such as enhanced publications, citation alerts and other tools.
(N.B.
A much more detailed summary of this round table is being prepared by Philip Hunter.)
Round Table Discussion 6: Re-imagining Learning and Teaching Repositories Yvonne Howard and Patrick McSweeny, University of Southampton This wide-ranging discussion centred on the role of repositories in learning and teaching, opportunities for supporting the pedagogic process, and the potential for promoting the reuse – beyond simply encouraging deposit – of materials in repositories.
This was a lively session, with participants expressing strong views on the nature and problematic historical legacies of self-defined learning objects (as well as their packaging and metadata), and the most productive ways to take advantage both of materials created in the JISC Open Educational Resources (OER) Programme and of other, previously funded, digitisation initiatives.
Pecha Kucha: Session 2 After lunch we had the second round of quick-fire Pecha Kucha sessions, again with the enticing prospect of a half-bottle of malt whisky for the most popular presentation.
DSpace and the REF Robin Taylor, University of Edinburgh Robin Taylor's talk covered Research Excellence Framework (REF) requirements as they relate to publications.
Rather than asking researchers to produce and maintain a list of their publications, Edinburgh's approach is to allow each researcher to select the publications for submission from a pre-generated list.
This helps counter the difficulty in telling the difference among researchers with similar names.
RePosit Project Sarah Molloy, Queen Mary University London The JISC-funded RePosit Project comprises a fairly large project consortium, and runs for one year.
The project's goal is to make deposit easier, and hence get more users and submissions/deposits into the CRIS and IR.
Project outputs include a survey, training materials, advocacy, shared community space (RePosit Google Group), Twitter account (@JISCRePosit), and a blog.
Developing Services to Support Research Data Management and Sharing Robin Rice, University of Edinburgh/EDINA Rice gave an overview of Edinburgh's Data Library service, and the DSpace-based Edinburgh DataShare.
A data library should include support for finding, accessing, using, and teaching.
Rice and her colleagues have developed guidance and training, and have worked at influencing University policy, in an attempt to overcome traditional barriers to deposit.
Rice also gave very quick introductions to the MANTRA Project (MANagement TRAining), which will incorporate video stories from senior researchers as well as data handling exercises, and to the JISC Managing Research Data Project.
JISC CETIS Phil Barker Barker's presentation was entitled 'An open and closed case for educational resources', and made the case for increased Openness in the production of learning materials.
Open educational resources (OERs) can be found and reused for free by anyone via search engines, and can be presented either modularly or as parts of courses.
Phil's hope is that Open becomes the default approach within the HE community.
ShareGeo 12 Months on and Going Open Anne Robertson, EDINA A pertinent successor to Phil Barker's presentation, Anne Robertson gave an introduction to the ShareGeo Project, which supports the ready discovery and sharing of geospatial data, and offered a rationale for 'going Open' in order to increase deposit numbers.
SONEX: Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange Pablo de Castro, SONEX Pablo de Castro gave an overview of the SONEX think-tank, which aims to identify and analyse deposit opportunities (use cases) for the ingest of research papers (and potentially other scholarly work) into repositories.
SONEX is involved in analysis, not coding, so there are no technical outputs as such, although some development work will be undertaken by partners.
The project is related to DepositMO, which was funded under the JISC Managing Research Data call.
Presentation: Topic Models Michael Fourman, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh Michael Fourman's talk outlined some new tools to explore and browse ideas.
By carrying out an automated analysis of topics featured in Science journal between 1980-2002, Fourman was able to create an automated index of ideas.
Central to this is the conception of a document as 'a bag of words', where syntax can be ignored and word frequencies are all that matter.
What Fourman calls a topic is a frequency distribution over words.
Documents are generated from a mixture of topics, and topics (and mixtures of topics) can be inferred from textual corpora such as the historic Science journals, and various powerful analyses (Bayesian, Monte Carlo et al.)
may be carried out on the data.
Closing Presentation Kevin Ashley, Digital Curation Centre (After a quick vote during the coffee break, it emerged that Robin Taylor had won the prize for day 2's best Pecha Kucha presentation.)
Closing the event, Kevin Ashley, Director of the DCC, offered a recap of the themes that had emerged over the preceding couple of days – notably fireworks, documentation (for EPrints, coming soon!
), building blocks, the Bazaar, Open-ness, the need for collaboration if we are to travel far rather than simply fast, that everything is data (Fourman), and that the nature of data is changing (Van de Sompel).
Ashley also took the opportunity to reflect on the past: starting with the JISC Repository Preservation and Advisory Group in 2004, he showed how repository-related themes have changed over the past six years, and indulged in a little stargazing to frame 'repositories and/for/as data'.
The prevailing question must be: which data, and when?
More joined-up collaboration between stakeholders will be needed, and we need to think in terms of use cases when it comes to the larger cultural change of updating scholarly publication practice.
Conclusion Slides, images and links to streamed content – including 20,000 words of live-blogged content – can be found on the Repository Fringe Web site [5]].
Additionally, the event's Twitter hashtag was #rfringe10, and a quick search on this will return a large number of interesting opinions.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to Ian Stuart, Nicola Osborne, James Toon, Philip Hunter and Stephanie Taylor for providing summaries of the parallel breakout groups.
References For more information on the workshop, see http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/index.php?page=RoMEOAPI2010/index.php Ranganathan's Laws: Books are for use; Every reader his book; Every book its reader; Save the time of the reader; The library is a growing organism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_laws_of_library_science The Metadata Forum blog http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/themetadataforum/ Edina: Projects: Scoping Study: Aggregations of Metadata for Images and Time Based Media http://edina.ac.uk/projects/Aggregations_Scoping_summary.html Repository Fringe Web site http://www.repositoryfringe.org/ Author Details Martin Donnelly Curation Research Officer Digital Curation Centre University of Edinburgh Email: martin.donnelly@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Repository Fringe 2010" Author: Martin Donnelly Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/repos-fringe-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DataCite UK User Group Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DataCite UK User Group Meeting Buzz data framework api usability archives metadata doi accessibility identifier schema repositories preservation cataloguing curation guid research Citation BibTex RIS Alex Ball reports on the 2nd UK User Group meeting for DataCite, held at the British Library in London, in April 2011.
DataCite [1] is an international not-for-profit organisation dedicated to making research data a normal, citable part of the scientific record.
It is made up of a membership of 15 major libraries and data centres, which, along with four associate members, represent 11 different countries across four continents.
The approach taken by DataCite currently centres on assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to datasets; it is a member of the International DOI Foundation and one of a handful of DOI registration agencies.
As such, it is assembling a suite of services to allow repositories and data centres to assign DOIs to their holdings, associate metadata with those DOIs, and maintain and use those metadata.
This User Group meeting was a chance for UK users of DataCite services to share their experiences so far, to influence the future direction of the services and the underlying metadata scheme, and to try out the latest versions of the DataCite tools.
It also attracted those, like myself, who were not users at that time, but nevertheless interested in the practicalities and potential of these services.
Short Talks Following a welcome and introduction to the day from Max Wilkinson of the British Library (BL), the meeting began with a series of presentations from projects and centres which are already working with DOIs for data.
Mike Haft of the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA) outlined how his organisation is developing a repository to support easier access to its data holdings.
The work so far, carried out by the FISHNet Project [2], has focused on creating a solid repository back-end upon which a light and flexible front-end may be built.
The workflows built into the repository allow for DOIs to be assigned to datasets that have passed usability assessments.
There are still issues to be addressed, however: how DOIs should be assigned to datasets that are frequently updated; how DOIs should be assigned to aggregate data products; how to co-ordinate DOI management for jointly owned datasets; and how to handle annotated datasets formed from many small samples.
Sarah Callaghan of the Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA) gave an overview of how the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) has decided to implement dataset DOIs [3].
It has established four eligibility criteria that its datasets have to satisfy before receiving a DOI: the dataset has to be stable (i.e.
the data will not change), complete (i.e.
no more data will be added), permanent (i.e.
kept in perpetuity) and of good quality.
There is also a fifth criterion — authors’ permission — which is a greater hurdle for older datasets than for new and future ones.
Once the DOI is assigned, the associated dataset is fixed: no additions, deletions or modifications to the bits or the directory structure are allowed; any such changes would result in a new version that would need a new DOI.
Anyone resolving one of these DOIs would be taken to the catalogue record for the dataset, which provides a link to the data themselves and may also link to records for other versions.
BADC follows the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) convention of using a 32-digit hexadecimal number known as a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) for the DOI suffix (the part after the 10.xxx/).
Anusha Ranganathan, University of Oxford, explained that Oxford”s DataBank [4] is using DOIs as a complement to its internal identifier system.
The local identifiers consist of the string ‘bodleian’ followed by an accession code to represent (the latest version of) a dataset.
Particular versions are specified by appending a dot and the version number, while files within that version are specified by further appending a slash and the filename.
The local identifier for a particular version may be “promoted” to a DOI if it has public catalogue page.
Datasets with a DOI automatically receive a new one for a new version triggered by a data change, but if the version change is triggered by additional files or changed metadata, the new version only receives a DOI if the authors explicitly ask for it.
Gudmundur Thorisson, University of Leicester, introduced the Café RouGE (now Café Variome) clearinghouse for genetics data [5].
It had planned to assign DOIs to incoming data from diagnostic laboratories, using suffixes starting with the string ‘caferouge’ followed by a dot, the gene name, a hyphen and then a numeric identifier.
On the day, the wisdom of using the service name in the DOI was questioned due to (well-founded) fears it might change over time.
The greatest concerns of the Café RouGE team were how to relate DOIs to dynamic datasets, and how ORCID [6] might be used in DataCite metadata to identify dataset authors.
Michael Charno of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) reported how his organisation has used the DataCite application programming interfaces (APIs) to assign DOIs to around 400 datasets [7].
A few of these datasets have been updated subsequent to receiving a DOI; as a matter of policy, obsolete versions are removed from live access, so their DOI landing pages change to a page that refers the reader to the latest version.
In future, these redirection pages may also contain instructions for applying to ADS for a copy of the obsolete version.
The ADS also holds around 9,000 survey reports that it hopes to furnish with DOIs; before it does so it needs to establish that the contractors (e.g.
Oxford Archaeology, Wessex Archaeology) are happy for ADS to take on that responsibility.
A random number is used as the DOI suffix.
Susan Noble of MIMAS pointed out the challenges of applying DOIs to the datasets redistributed by ESDS International [8].
These datasets are provided free of charge to the UK Further and Higher Education sectors, but must otherwise be accessed for a fee from the original publishers.
This means there is a risk of a dataset receiving one DOI relevant to UK researchers and another relevant to everyone else; this highlights the need for a service providing multiple resolutions for the same DOI, similar to that provided by CrossRef.
Many of the datasets are also frequently updated.
The solution has been to mint DOIs for monthly snapshots of the data; all DOIs for the same dataset share the same landing page, and are visible on that page, but only the latest snapshot is readily available.
The DOI suffix is generated from the author, title and snapshot date for the dataset.
Matthew Brumpton of the UK Data Archive (UKDA) indicated how his organisation is adding DOIs to its collection of published datasets [9].
Each of these datasets already has a study number identifier, so this is used as the basis for the DOI suffix.
Each DOI resolves to a special metadata page that contains the DOI, the full change history of the study and a link to the current catalogue record.
High-impact changes to the data or metadata result in a new version and DOI, but low-impact changes (such as typographic corrections) do not.
The UKDA has written its own interface for managing DOIs and DataCite metadata, using the DataCite APIs to connect to the central service.
Srikanth Nagella of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) showed how DOIs are being used in ICAT, the data catalogue used by large facilities such as the Diamond Light Source and ISIS [10].
The DOI suffixes are made up of the facility code (e.g.
isis, dls), a dot, a code letter denoting either an experiment (e), a dataset (d) or a file (f), another dot, and a randomly assigned number.
The DOIs resolve to the relevant catalogue record in ICAT.
Breakout Groups Following the talks, we divided into groups to discuss some of the issues that had been raised.
As already mentioned, a case was argued for DataCite to provide a service for resolving the same DOI to multiple locations, for cases where the route has an impact on the accessibility of the data.
Another suggestion was for DataCite to provide sample contracts that could be used between a data publisher and a data redistributor.
This approach would allow the latter to forge ahead with minting DOIs until the former decided it wished to take on that responsibility itself.
Several versioning issues were highlighted for further consideration.
Of pressing concern was how to store multiple versions efficiently.
With frequently updated time-series data, is it better to create snapshots of the entire time series at regular intervals, or chunk the data into a succession of short time series?
How should the links between the different versions be exposed?
Granularity was another vexing issue: it could become a significant administrative burden to provide DOIs for subsets and supersets of data, but how can users cite specific parts of a dataset using a DOI for the whole thing?
Peter Li (University of Birmingham) from the SageCite Project [11], along with others who had built tools on top of the DataCite APIs and metadata scheme, remarked that it would have been useful to have a forum for sharing code and approaches.
Thankfully, this was a relatively simple matter to resolve: Michael Charno and Tom Pollard (BL) have now set up Google Groups for both DataCite developers 12 and users 13.
The DataCite Metadata Schema After lunch, Elizabeth Newbold (BL) took us through version 2.0 of the DataCite Metadata Scheme [14][15], explaining its genesis and the rationale behind its five mandatory and 12 optional properties.
The scheme is administered by the Metadata Supervisor at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) with assistance from the DataCite Metadata Working Group.
The mandatory properties correspond to the minimum metadata needed to construct a basic bibliographic reference, while the optional properties support fuller citations and simple data discovery applications.
Having looked in detail at the metadata scheme, we took the opportunity to give our feedback on how it might be improved.
The discussion mainly centred on the roles of various stakeholders in the data — creators, contributors, publishers, owners — and the options for identifying these stakeholders by formal identifiers instead of (or as well as) names.
We also suggested that the use cases for the scheme should be clarified, so that more explicit guidance can be provided on how to use it.
Hands-on Exercise The final session of the day, led by Ed Zukowski and Tom Pollard (BL), was an opportunity to practise using the DataCite tools to mint DOIs, toggle their activation status, and update their associated metadata.
For this exercise, we teamed up into pairs, with each pair consisting (as far as possible) of an experienced user and a complete novice.
Those of us with the code and right set-up to hand used the DataCite APIs to complete the exercise, while the others used the Web interface.
In my pair, we used the APIs to perform the tasks and the Web interface to verify our progress.
Both were easy and intuitive to use, and I found the code examples for the APIs most helpful.
Conclusion I found this workshop both enjoyable and motivating, with a good mix of theory and practice.
The representatives from DataCite were clearly keen not only to communicate their work to date but also to develop it in response to the needs of their users and the wider community.
There are still plenty of issues to solve and further systems to build before DataCite achieves its stated aims, but this is a good basis from which to proceed.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to Tom Pollard, Gudmundur Thorisson and Peter Li for helpful comments.
References The DataCite Web site http://datacite.org/ The FISHNet Web site http://www.fishnetonline.org/ The British Atmospheric Data Centre Web site http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/ The DataBank Web site http://databank.ouls.ox.ac.uk/ The Café Variome Web site http://www.cafevariome.org/ The Open Researcher and Contributer ID Initiative Web site http://www.orcid.org/ The Archaeology Data Service Archives catalogue http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/ The ESDS International Web site http://www.esds.ac.uk/international/ The UK Data Archive Web site http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ The ICAT Project Web site http://www.icatproject.org/ The SageCite Project Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/sagecite/ The DataCite developers discussion group Web page http://groups.google.com/group/datacite-developers The DataCite users discussion group Web page http://groups.google.com/group/datacite-users Starr, J., Gastl, A., “isCitedBy: A Metadata Scheme for DataCite”, D-Lib Magazine, 17(1⁄2), January/February 2011 http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/january2011-starr The latest version of the DataCite Metadata Scheme is available from the DataCite Web site http://schema.datacite.org/ Author Details Alex Ball Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.ball@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Alex Ball is a research officer with UKOLN, University of Bath, working in the area of data curation and digital preservation.
His research interests include scientific metadata, Open Data and the curation of engineering information and Web resources.
He is a member of staff at the UK’s Digital Curation Centre; his previous projects include ERIM and the KIM Grand Challenge Project, and he contributed to the development of the Data Asset Framework.
Return to top Article Title: DataCite UK User Group Meeting Author: Alex Ball Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/datacite-2011-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Live Blogging @ IWMW 2009 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Live Blogging @ IWMW 2009 Buzz data mobile software api javascript html database metadata css accessibility browser schema blog video flickr preservation e-learning streaming uri photoshop curation ajax facebook twitter wireframe interoperability privacy research netvibes Citation BibTex RIS Kirsty McGill provides a live blogger perspective on the three-day Institutional Web Managers Workshop, held by UKOLN at the University of Essex, Colchester, in July 2009.
The 12th annual Institutional Web Managers Workshop (IWMW) attracted nearly 200 delegates, making it the largest workshop in the event's history.
Whilst the popularity of the physical event has grown, so too has the remote audience.
So this year organisers Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly decided that it was time to start treating this remote audience as first class citizens.
That's where I came in.
As live blogger, my job was to amplify IWMW 2009; providing a live commentary via Twitter on the dedicated @iwmwlive account, blogging on the IWMW 2009 blog [1], uploading video interviews and co-ordinating all the online resources via a NetVibes page [2] to give the remote audience a more complete experience of attending and to create a digital footprint for the proceedings, complementing the fantastic live video streaming provided by the University of Essex.
In this report, I will give a summary of the event as a whole, together with observations about the successes and challenges of co-ordinating all the digital output from an event with experimental formats.... Day 1: 28 July 2009 Workshop Opening Chaired by Marieke Guy, UKOLN There were new features in this year's programme, which Marieke introduced in her opening to the workshop.
These included a Developers' Lounge, a quiet area for those wishing to avoid inclusion in photographs and live video streaming, and front-end/back-end strands for some of the plenaries.
Brian Kelly set the scene for the event's discussions by highlighting how student expectations, environmental issues and the social Web are all changing the way universities operate in the digital world.
IWMW provides an opportunity to get together and discuss how to move forward with these issues, but in the current economic climate, where university Web teams are likely to face cuts, it also provides an opportunity to discuss how to survive.
To capture these discussions, Brian introduced the #iwmw2009 tag, to be used in combination with short tags for each plenary session (e.g.
#p1) to help filter and organise tweets generated throughout the event.
Over half the delegates reported that they would be tweeting, so this system would provide us with a rich, searchable record of what was said.
Keith Brooke, Web and Learning Technology Manager at University of Essex, welcomed us to Colchester and to the Ivor Crew Lecture Theatre, which was to be our base throughout.
He stressed the importance his department places on the annual IWMW event and was excited to be hosting this year's event, which he and his team did impeccably.
Marieke then got things started by introducing the first plenary... Keynote Plenary: Headlights on Dark Roads Derek Law, University of Strathclyde Derek Law spoke about the uncertainty universities and libraries face as they negotiate the new economic and digital environment, questioning the relevance of the university library, as information and students are increasingly moving to the Web.
He noted that libraries are failing in a digital world due to a number of factors, including lack of underpinning philosophy about the provision and preservation of Web resources, the rise of the managerial technocrat, complacency and a failure to engage with e-resources.
In a time when large portions of universities' activities could be outsourced to Google, the issues faced by institutional Web managers providing institutional Web resources become even more important.
Derek suggested that increasingly we are moving towards a society that uses images rather than words as cultural reference points.
Recording your participation in an event – such as the London bombings of July 2005– comes in the form or a photograph snapped on your mobile, rather than a literary record.
He also suggested that we may be moving towards a society where a-literacy becomes acceptable.
A-literacy implies the skill of reading and writing text becomes an optional lifestyle choice, and may lead to the possibility of completing a PhD without being able to read or write.
Why would you need to write a methodology for your experiment, when you could just video the experiment being conducted and upload it?
Law noted that this, and text message shorthand, does not necessarily signal a dumbing down, but rather a change in the way we communicate.
Derek stressed that most institutions seem to be adopting a 'digital overlap strategy' (i.e.
cross your fingers and hope) rather than developing sound policies for the creation, maintenance and curation of digital content.
Most universities simply do not realise how much digital data they produce each year!
Devising policies that manage and preserve that data so that the university remains a relevant centre of knowledge in the digital world is the challenge we now face.
In conclusion, Law proposed that institutions need to have a clear policy to generate trust and value in their online resources, ensuring that they are institutionally defined, scholarly, cumulative and perpetual, open and interoperable.
Workshop Dinner Tuesday night saw the workshop dinner – a great barbecue together with entertainment from a caricaturist and a magician who wowed us at our tables, followed by karaoke until late (for those who could manage it!).
Figure 1: Brian Kelly (left) with his caricature Day 2: 29 July 2009 Plenary: Servicing 'Core' and 'Chore' David Harrison and Joe Nicholls, Cardiff University David Harrison introduced Joe Nicholls, who presented this talk which examined the way both students and researchers use technology as part of their working practices.
Joe's key point was the need for a holistic approach, with an iterative cycle of communication between developers and end-users to ensure that there is education about tools, enabling users to do their jobs, and an understanding of the users' requirements when developing new tools.
Joe took us through a series of diagrams demonstrating the different layers of IT interaction that researchers go through to do the different parts of their job.
This involved identifying 'core' activities and 'chore' activities.
He showed how the modern working environment for these researchers involves working across these different layers to complete tasks; an awareness of which is vital to best meet the needs of these researchers when developing new tools.
Joe also explained that we have to take into account external Web resources when considering how researchers and students are working, not just internal services.
Understanding how and why these tools are used can help Web managers consider how best to improve their own tools and educate users about best practice, so you are effectively enabling them to work in a modern IT environment.
This does not necessarily mean teaching them how to use particular tools, but rather teaching them transferable skills and literacies that enable them to move across tools and work effectively.
As technologists, we tend to focus on the tools rather than the task as a whole, but this isn't good enough in a modern IT working environment.
We need to be educating users and learning about their requirements, understanding the benefits of external tools so that we support students and researchers, creating a new, agile working environment that capitalises on all of the tools that will benefit people within the university.
Plenary: Making Your Killer Applications... Killer!
Paul Boag, Headscape This was a rally-cry to Web managers to think again about their university Web sites and online applications for prospective students.
He highlighted the course-finder feature and noted the need for the designers developing these tools to stop thinking in a page-based way and consider such tools more as desktop applications.
Paul gave some practical advice to encourage his audience to experiment with more ambitious, user-friendly Web sites, whatever the cost and political difficulties.
This included addressing concerns about accessibility standards by suggesting graded browser support and developing proof of concept designs in order to convince managers of the potential of these developments.
He also noted that use of existing APIs, Javascript libraries and third-party Web sites could help keep costs down.
Shifting mindsets from page-based to application-based thinking can also be a barrier.
Paul suggested storyboarding and taking sanity checks by asking others to test out your application to keep the focus on designing an intuitive, interactive application.
He also suggested looking outside HE at commercial Web sites for solutions that will help make the university Web site not only more useful, but also more personable.
Personableness was a big issue for Paul – emphasising the role of the university Web site as a marketing tool.
He highlighted the potential for choice paralysis, the need for user engagement beyond Facebook and Twitter, and the desperate need for a copywriter.
He did actually stamp his feet at this point!
There is a real need for a personable voice for university Web sites, citing corporate world examples, including Flickr, who were brave enough to put up a blog post saying: 'we suck'.
Paul emphasised the need to look beyond HE and to be imaginative in our approach to meeting the needs of the prospective students – thinking of them as consumers and gearing our institutional Web sites to them accordingly.
BarCamps Following the success of the BarCamps last year, three 30-minute slots after Paul's talk were dedicated to small group discussions facilitated by volunteers.
These were informal, interactive sessions where delegates could choose their own topics, exchange ideas experiences and questions.
Following the BarCamps, the programme was split into two strands: the front-end (marketing, communications and management-focussed delegates) and the back-end (for the more technically focussed).
Whilst one strand was engaged in plenary talks, the other divided into various parallel sessions.
Front-End Strand Plenary: What Is The Web?
James Currall, University of Glasgow In his unconventional plenary, James Currall abandoned what he calls 'Lecture 1.0' (lecturer stands at the front, talks for 45 minutes, answers questions for five) in favour of a more interactive, discussion-based session in which he encouraged debate around the topic: 'What is the Web?'
The audience could take part verbally or by tweeting using the #iwmwp4 tag, which allowed the relevant tweets to be projected up onto the wall via Twitterfall.
James would check the tweets throughout his talk and respond to them – sometimes conversationally ('yes Mike, I agree,') or sometimes by using the points raised to redirect his talk or provoke further debate.
He challenged us to consider what we think the Web is and how we can strip down what we do to the simple level of providing content to different types of users, when they want it, in the form they want it.
As the live blogger, I found this format challenging to report upon, as there was no clearly structured argument to follow or series of problems and solutions to report.
I ended up providing sound bites from the discussions, and a little descriptive commentary about what was happening, e.g.
'remote user @RappinRach has asked "is it about portals then?"
James wants to avoid using labels for things in this way'.
Remote participants had many access points through which to follow this talk.
Some were watching the live video-streaming and interacted via the #iwmwp4 tag.
Others could follow @iwmwlive, where I was using the established format of #iwmw2009 #p4, so that my echoing tweets did not appear on the Twitterfall and interfere with the active conversation.
This provides us not only with different ways of experiencing the event live, but also with different types of records which can be searched and referenced in different ways.
The format was good for stimulating debate and exchange of ideas, but more interesting than those ideas will be how we handle the records and the experience of the talk for the remote user separated through both space and time.
Front-End Strand Plenary: Hub Web sites for Youth Participation David Newman, Queen's University David introduced the HuWY Project, an experimental enterprise designed to engage young people in policy making for Web-related issues at EU level.
This project is based on the idea that young people, having grown up with the Web, have a unique view on issues like cyber-bullying and privacy on the Web, but demonstrate little interest or active involvement in the regulatory processes and policy making that is going on within the European Union to govern these issues.
The aim is to find ways to connect young people and policy makers, with each group understanding the other, and providing hubs to connect their ideas so their efforts can lead to actual change.
HuWY will first work with young people in eight countries across the EU, providing them with a hub site of materials to get their discussions going.
The intention is to allow the young people to go away into their own corners of the Web using whatever tools or services they prefer to discuss the issues and generate ideas.
These results will then be fed into another hub, where they will be organised, tagged and phrased in a format that policy makers will understand and can use to inform policy.
David invited us to contribute ideas about how we could encourage both our students to take part and our policy makers to listen.
Engaging the latter seemed to be the harder of the two!
He made the point that young people are politically engaged, but just not in the traditional ways; so we need to look at new ways to get young, digitally native people involved in the political process.
Back-End Strand Plenary: Agile Prototyping in Academia Dave Flanders, JISC Dave Flanders was unable to deliver his plenary talk in person, so he recorded a screen cast for us, including breaks for discussion both within the live and remote audience using the #iwmwp6 tag.
Dave himself participated using Twitter, so he was able to contribute in real time.
Dave took us through the Agile manifesto and discussed how it could be used in an academic development setting.
He promoted various user-focussed approaches to help achieve development goals, useable software and user feedback.
This included advocating paper prototyping as a quick way to generate user feedback and refine ideas, and considering how to include users all the way through developments by having the paperprototypes and wireframes up on the walls so the user is in the room with you.
This was very much a practical talk, examining the manifesto principles and translating them into practical processes that would work in the academic setting, not just the business setting for which Agile was designed.
The break in Dave's screen cast encouraged members of the audience to discuss the issues and any experience they may have had of using Agile.
He emphasised the importance of learning from each other and answered questions remotely throughout.
Back-End Strand Plenary: Lightweight Web Management Christopher Gutteridge, University of Southampton This talk was full of practical tips to manage the workload of Web services.
Chris argued that it is a waste of time and resources to have humans doing jobs that computers can do really well.
His department has written lots of scripts to perform basic tasks – particularly monitoring tasks – to help make them visibly more efficient.
Whilst monitoring his department's systems in this way has made it easier to manage theworkload – preventing them from dropping the ball on normal requests – Chris also noted that this practice was going to be especially important in the current economic climate, with uncertainty about jobs.
Monitoring was enabling them to build a stock of statistics that showed how much work they do and how efficiently they work.
He was concerned by the amount of data people in similar roles in other institutions could be throwing away and argued strongly that they should start preserving that data – even if they don't do anything analytical with it initially.
He also recommended monitoring the things beyond your control that cause your systems to become unavailable.
Throughout, Chris kept returning to the point that we are here to facilitate research and teaching.
Building the system he described could help you focus on this support for your researchers and students, rather than rushing around responding to cries for help, i.e.
continual fire-fighting.
Parallel Sessions Unfortunately, keeping the output going on the blog meant that I was unable to attend any of the parallel sessions.
However, there were plenty of choices for both strands, including sessions on using the social Web to maximise access to resources, practical blog preservation, using Amazon Web services and hands-on prototyping for metadata structures – to name but a few.
Day 3: 30 July 2009 Plenary: How the BBC Make Web Sites Michael Smethurst and Matthew Wood, BBC Michael and Matthew develop Web sites for BBC Audio and Music.
They took us through their development process for www.bbc.co.uk/programmes designed to provide a permanent home on the Web for all BBC programmes.
Their aim was to make URIs human-readable, hackable and, most importantly, persistent.
They begin their design process with the domain objects (programmes, songs, recordings, etc) and build models based on how these domain objects relate to each other.
They don't use wireframes or mockups, but do take the domain model to users to check that they are speaking the same language.
They then translate the domain model into a physical database schema that enables them to express the domain model richly in the language of the user.
Once the model is established as a database schema, they collect together all the data needed to create the resource in all of its forms, before moving on to document design.
One of their most telling points was the assertion that document design should be independent of the page layout – that's the job of the CSS.
In fact, wireframing doesn't happen until they add the layout CSS to the HTML pages and any Javascript or AJAX gets added last of all.
Michael and Matthew were very firm that they don't test photoshop mock ups or wireframes, they test working applications, which enables them to focus more on creating rich content discovery journeys through the resources that are domain-driven.
We were given a tour of bbc.co.uk/programmes to see all this in practice and the opportunity to ask Matthew and Michael about their processes in more detail.
Developers' Show-and-Tell Chaired by Mike Nolan, Edge Hill University This session featured a short talk by Mike Ellis of EduServe, in which he encouraged developers to stop being 'day-coders' and make development a life passion by getting together more: attending geek meet ups and hack days as ways of exchanging ideas, having a go at new things and making useful contacts.
Mike demonstrated how easy it can be to set up your own events – citing his own efforts in Bath where he instigated popular monthly BathCamp meetings in a local pub, and his new Geek Dads group.
This talk certainly inspired people, and within days Chris Gutteridge started publicising plans for a Southampton-based developer social event in response to Mike's arguments.
Mike Nolan showed several video clips, including 'Hug A Developer' [3], introducing the UKOLN project DevCSI, which aims to help developers raise their profile.
Mike and Mike then inflicted the live blogger's worst nightmare... a series of lightning debates, each lasting only three minutes in total.
The motions were: 'Project managers get in the way and should be sacked' – the house disagreed 'IT should be moved into the Cloud' – the house disagreed 'Web 2.0 is where it's at' – the house was split on this motion!
'External design agencies are a waste of time and money' – the house disagreed 'Content Management Systems are crap' – the house disagreed Keeping an accurate commentary certainly required a serious dose of adrenalin!
Workshop Closing Comments and Conclusions Brian Kelly, UKOLN In his summary remarks, Brian proposed building on the #iwmw tag as a way of collecting resources together, possibly using #iwmc to represent community.
Most of the slides for IWMW are on Slideshare, but such a tag could be used for gathering together all sorts of conversations and digital materials.
Brian also highlighted the interesting links between the problems faced by UK and US institutions, calling on Mike from Allegheny College, who spoke about how they use social media to sell the emotion of the college.
Finally, Brian questioned: what is the Web and what is the institutional Web?
Do we need to rethink what is in scope for IWMW?
All that remained was for Marieke to thank everyone and bring the workshop to a close.
The event blog remained active for a further two weeks to collect feedback and further comments, providing an ongoing record and resource for delegates and remote participants alike.
References The IWMW 2009 Blog http://iwmw2009.wordpress.com/ The IWMW 2009 NetVibes page http://www.netvibes.com/iwmw2009 'Hug a Developer' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lqxORnQARw Author Details Kirsty McGill Creative Director TConsult Ltd Email: kirsty.mcgill@tconsult-ltd.com Web site: http://www.tconsult-ltd.com Return to top Article Title: "Live Blogging @ IWMW 2009" Author: Kirsty McGill Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/iwmw-2009-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The CLIF Project: The Repository as Part of a Content Lifecycle Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The CLIF Project: The Repository as Part of a Content Lifecycle Buzz data software framework archives metadata repositories preservation cataloguing opac mods solr e-research url research standards sharepoint Citation BibTex RIS Richard Green, Chris Awre and Simon Waddington describe how a digital repository can become part of the technical landscape within an institution and support digital content lifecycle management across systems.
At the heart of meeting institutional requirements for managing digital content is the need to understand the different operations through which content goes, from planning and creation through to disposal or preservation.
Digital content is created using a variety of authoring tools.
Once created, the content is often stored somewhere different, made accessible in possibly more than one way, altered as required, and then moved for deletion or preservation at an appropriate point.
Different systems can be involved at different stages: one of them may be a repository.
To embed repositories in the content lifecycle, and prevent them becoming yet another content silo within the institution, they must therefore be integrated with other systems that support other parts of this lifecycle.
In this way the content can be moved between systems as required, minimising the constraints of any one system.
The JISC-funded CLIF (Content Lifecycle Integration Framework) Project, which concluded in March 2011, was a joint venture between Library and Learning Innovation (LLI) at the University of Hull and the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King’s College London.
It undertook an extensive literature review [1] and worked with creators of digital content at the two host institutions to understand how they would like to deal with the interaction of the authoring, collaboration and delivery of materials using three systems used within Higher Education institutions.
These three systems handle the management of digital content from different perspectives and for different purposes:  the Fedora Commons repository software [2], Microsoft SharePoint [3], and the virtual learning environment, Sakai [4].
Each of these systems addresses a range of lifecycle stages in the functionality provided; yet they were not designed to encompass the whole lifecycle.
Armed with this background information, the project team went on to design and produce software that would allow the transfer of digital content between the systems to meet lifecycle requirements: Fedora and SharePoint, on the one hand, Fedora and Sakai on the other.
The CLIF software has been designed to try and allow the maximum flexibility in how and when users can transfer material from one system to another, integrating the tools in such a way that they seem to be natural extensions of the basic systems.
This open source software is available for others to investigate and use.
This article draws on several of the sections of documentation produced by the project.
Background One might say that the CLIF Project was part of an ongoing journey of discovery at the University of Hull.
Ariadne has kindly allowed us to describe two previous repository-related projects at Hull, RepoMMan [5] and REMAP [6].
The first of these, RepoMMan, undertook work to embed the repository in the natural workflow of digital content creators, whilst REMAP looked at how the repository might be made proactive in its own management and development.
In developing the scope and position of the repository it became apparent that there was a risk of the repository becoming another institutional silo of digital content, potentially duplicating existing functionality in other systems rather than working in synergy with them.
The CLIF Project thus sought to discover how one might best integrate the repository with other content management systems on campus.
We were fortunate that colleagues at King’s College, London, shared this area of interest and, thus, we undertook the work together.
The involvement of two campuses gave us access to a wider range of users (academic and administrative) and use cases than either institution could have mustered on its own.
Given that a core output for the project was intended to be software that others could make use of to enable similar lifecycle management, we were anxious to adhere to appropriate standards.
Acknowledging the technical standards that could be used, a key standard for moving content between systems was how that content was structured.
This is particularly the case in the use of Fedora, where, fortunately or unfortunately, the ‘F’ stands for ‘flexible’ and readers familiar with the Fedora Commons software will be aware that there are a huge number of ways in which one might construct a digital object around any particular content, some better than others.
In parallel with the period of the CLIF Project, Hull has pursued this issue as one of the founding partners in the Hydra Project [7].
This project is an international collaboration with the University of Virginia and Stanford University to develop a framework for building flexible repository solutions over Fedora.
Work on this has provided guidelines as to how one might sensibly build Fedora digital objects in a way that others can share.The term 'Hydra-compliant' is now being applied to digital objects, and referenced in papers and presentations about Fedora repositories.
It was only logical that CLIF would take advantage of this and it is Hydra-compliant objects that the CLIF software builds.
Literature Review The first element of the project was a literature review [1]: a piece of cross-disciplinary desk research in liaison with our contributing staff colleagues for their subject and role-related input.
This resulted in a document that does not aim to produce or summarise the many different examples of lifecycle in existence, for there are many.
Instead it addresses the issues that have emerged through developing or examining such lifecycles, focusing in particular on the limited amount of literature which examines lifecycles across different systems.
In many ways, the literature review highlighted a range of different views, opinions and approaches to dealing with digital content lifecycles.
They came from different perspectives and starting points, covering both research and learning and teaching, plus others related to different content types, which seemed to emphasise that, wherever you were coming from, consideration and management of digital content lifecycles are important.
It is perhaps surprising that literature on specific system aspects of this management approach was not found, but this may be due to the flux in technology adoption and the rapid pace of change.
Nevertheless, the technology involved must be taken into account when implementing a digital content lifecycle management approach as it is core to its day-to-day running.
Consideration of the appropriateness of different systems is important to inform this, and this can be extended to consideration of appropriate systems at different stages of the lifecycle, the starting point of CLIF.
There were a number of specific points emerging from the literature that were taken into the CLIF Project and readers who are interested in this area are encouraged to read our review and, in particular, its conclusions.
One thing the literature review did not attempt was to determine where responsibility lies for overseeing or managing digital content lifecycles.
Any implied assumptions that can be read into the literature reviewed, for example about the role of a library, are coincidental.
It is acknowledged, though, that as digital content lifecycles become better understood in terms of their design and technical implementation there will be a need to place this in the context of how the lifecycles are managed organisationally and see the lifecycles put into practice.
Case Studies The next part of our work was to gather user requirements [8] from colleagues at our two institutions.
There was a recognised difference of emphasis:  colleagues at King’s College were particularly interested in the requirements for research data whilst at Hull the emphasis was more on text-based materials.
The interviewees were from a range of backgrounds, learning and teaching, research and administrative roles, and were chosen to cover a wide range of possibilities.
The interviews sought to discover how people dealt with digital content and what kinds of software were used to manage it.
Further, our colleagues were asked to speculate on how they thought a repository might be used to enhance their work around the two identified target systems, Sakai and SharePoint.
From all this information two generic use cases, one for experimental data and documentation, the other for essentially textual material, were derived for CLIF to address in terms of providing supporting functionality.
Technical Review Fedora, SharePoint and Sakai all provide a rich and complex set of functionalities; thus it was that the software design and development work was preceded by a technical review [9].
This examined the functionality offered by the three applications and considered how this might be used to support the scenarios identified in the case study work.
In particular, the team considered where in the content lifecycle interaction between the systems might usefully take place; after due consideration the team decided to take a somewhat agnostic approach to this question so as to be flexible in addressing the needs in the use cases.
A further major element of the review considered how the software integration might best be carried out.
Integrations between systems can be carried out using point-to-point techniques according to specific need.
Whilst a loosely coupled approach to point-to-point can enable wider adoption of a solution, such solutions can also be limited by the systems themselves as they change over time.
Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) are an approach to abstract out the ways that systems can communicate with each other, protecting integrations against software changes.
The project team was aware that it needed to assess the relative merits of the two approaches in the context of the two partner institutions and also in the context of possible wider adoption of its technical outputs.
In the event, whilst the potential of ESBs was clear, the practicalities of the necessary  systems integration within the system environments of the partner sites led to the conclusion that implementing an ESB for the purposes of the CLIF Project was not realistic.
That decided, a basic, and as far as possible open, point-to-point architecture for the integrations was drawn up.
Software Development Informed by the technical review, work commenced to develop code that would enable the two integrations: SharePoint with Fedora and Sakai with Fedora.
It was decided that the SharePoint work would be based at King’s and that the Sakai work should be concentrated in Hull.
This is not to say that the two parts of the project proceeded in isolation.
There was healthy dialogue between the developers and at times each contributed to the other’s code as well as serving as the first port of call for testing.
Although rather different in nature the two integrations even share a certain amount of code where that seemed to be appropriate.
The detail of the development work, the outcomes and the installation procedures are documented at length in the technical appendix to the CLIF Project’s Final Report [10].
SharePoint-Fedora Integration CLIF extends the functionality of SharePoint’s MySite.
Although MySite was used as the basis for development, the CLIF work could easily be adapted for use for document archiving in other site templates.
When a new MySite user is added by an administrator, the CLIF system automatically creates a Fedora account for the user as well as creating a Fedora object as the basis for the user’s private repository area under the MySite root object.
Within MySite, users can have access to both the existing functionality as well as the additional features provided by CLIF.
As part of the document upload process, a certain amount of general metadata is gathered, which can then be appended to the Fedora object that is deposited to the repository.
Users can 'move' a document to the associated repository: this creates a Fedora object in their private archive area of the repository and deletes the SharePoint instance of it.
The associated metadata are retained and are re-associated with the object should the file be brought back from archive.
This is effectively a shortor medium-term preservation strategy.
Two versions of depositing a copy of a document to the repository are provided (which an administrator can configure to offer users the choice of either or both).
'Publishing' a document starts a SharePoint workflow which needs to be completed in order for the content to reach the general (public-facing) repository (such a workflow may require, for instance, approval steps).
The list of locations to which a user is able to publish within the general repository can be configured at the top level by an administrator and is presented to the user in a pull-down list on a Web form.
The second option provided, 'Copy to Repository', takes the object created and places it in a specific place within the repository for further processing by others (this is effective as an accession queue containing materials to be dealt with by repository managers).
This repository location typically has restricted access.
This second process provides users with the opportunity to provide significant metadata about the content they are publishing, appropriate to objects being exposed in an institutional repository; this is MODS metadata by default but can be Dublin Core or both.
Where possible, default entries in the metadata fields are derived from the user's SharePoint environment.
Figure 1: SharePoint screen showing a pop-up menu with options for depositing item to repository Deposit of multiple documents to the repository, either copy or move, is provided by an additional feature that enables the user to select multiple documents from a document library.
This could be used for instance when the user has completed a project and wishes to archive a large number of files.
Documents that have been ‘moved’ from SharePoint to the repository can be retrieved by navigating to the Archive list and selecting the URL of the document.
This retrieves the document from the repository to the local file system.
Repository browse functionality is provided that enables users to browse their private folders in the repository as well as the public repository folders.
A text box on the MySite pages enables the user to enter search queries.
Search can be performed across metadata and text of all documents in MySite as well as the metadata of documents that have been moved to the repository (since the metadata are retained in SharePoint).
A URL is provided in the search results that retrieves the document to the local file system.
Due to time limitations, it was not possible to include free-text searching across Fedora, although this could be added using Solr indexing.
Sakai-Fedora Integration The CLIF work also integrates Fedora into the Sakai resources tool.
This is an area of Sakai in which users can store digital materials for their own use and, potentially, share them with other users of Sakai.
The system allows the creation of a tree structure to aid organisation of the materials held and provides a range of functions to manage them: upload, copy, edit, move, delete, and so on.
Figure 2: A Sakai resources screen showing the 'paste' stage of a copy into a repository A configuration setting determines a point in the repository structure below which it will be visible to Sakai users.
CLIF then makes this linked Fedora repository area appear as a resources tree with the full range of management functionality allowing movement of content between Sakai folders and repository folders.
Operations to transfer content both to and from the repository can be performed on single files or digital objects, folders or indeed trees.
By transferring materials into repository folders they are potentially shared outside the Sakai environment and may be in a better location for mediumor long-term preservation.
Unlike the SharePoint integration, the Sakai integration does not have the capability to deal with rich metadata.
A certain amount of metadata can be associated with content in Sakai and, where this is available, it is taken with that content into digital objects in the repository.
Unfortunately when digital objects are moved in the opposite direction Sakai does not currently provide functionality to insert such metadata into the application environment.
The CLIF code produced within the project assumes that a Sakai user has full read-write capablility within the area of the repository that they can navigate.
A somewhat different approach may be needed in a production system and this is discussed further in the section 'Post-CLIF' below.
One might argue that this section on Sakai-Fedora integration is rather short.
In a presentation we gave recently we showed a photograph: Figure 3: Surface serenity © 2008 Richard Green We liken what we have done to this image of swans: it is all calm and serene on the surface but you cannot appreciate what is going on underneath.
We could simply say that we have enabled ‘copy and paste’ between Sakai and Fedora.
Put like that, the functionality seems almost trivial but that simplification overlooks our use of standards wherever feasible and the implicit complexity in getting systems that manage content to work in ways they were not originally scoped to do.
To our users the CLIF work has greatly simplified what would otherwise have been a complex process and thus, we hope, it will encourage them to exploit the exchange between the two systems to capitalise on the features offered by each.
Evaluation CLIF’s use cases were identified through interviews with stakeholders.
On completion of the integration work, these use cases were re-tested with as many of the original stakeholders as could be contacted.
As noted earlier, they were broadly related to teaching, research and administration.
In the case of both SharePoint and Sakai, a number of common observations emerged from the evaluation interviews carried out: There needs to be a clear understanding and view about where the boundaries are between the different systems being used, to avoid confusion There needs to be clarity over why different systems are being used, to overcome concerns about having to work with multiple systems There is a need for better preservation and a recognition that integrating the repository could support this, but also a need to be clear about what needs preserving There is benefit in being able to access other content stores from within your current working environment in order to see what is available more broadly The evaluation highlighted that the users were open to combining systems in their working environment, but needed to be re-assured that there was good reason for this and what the different lifecycle stages being enabled through the integration of systems were.
Post-CLIF Post-project development at Hull will produce a version of the Sakai integration code where users can deposit (write) materials only into a specified part of the repository structure that Sakai exposes, and will be able to browse (read-only) solely those parts of the repository permitted by their level of authorisation.
All materials deposited into Hull’s institutional repository go through a quality assurance (QA) process and this writable area within the Sakai tree will correspond to the quality assurance 'queue' for learning and teaching materials.
Given the limited functionality with respect to metadata being passed into the repository with Sakai content, this QA stage will be a useful opportunity for repository staff to enrich the descriptive metadata ultimately available to end-users.
Conclusions The work undertaken on the CLIF Project leads us to four major conclusions.
The management of digital content lifecycles has been extensively explored in the literature, from many different perspectives and in many different subject and content domains.
The majority of these explorations focus on the processes involved in managing the different steps of the lifecycle, and whilst there is variation there is also a great deal of consensus in the descriptions of digital content lifecycles.
This project has not sought to replicate this work or add to the existing variations, but rather to focus on the implementation of the digital content lifecycle across multiple systems.
This practical aspect of how a digital content lifecycle can be implemented is far less evident in the literature.
This may be because technologies change and consistency in process is more important that focusing on specific systems; or it may be that different domains put their findings into practice using technology designed for that domain, and never identify the need to move out of that domain.
The literature suggests both.
CLIF challenges in particular this latter position by recognising that different systems used to manage digital content within a university do not have to work in isolation, but can be used together.
The technical integration work carried out has successfully demonstrated that diverse content management systems can be brought together to allow the seamless movement of content between them.
Having identified a set of use cases from interviews with local users, we were nevertheless keen to ensure that implementing these use cases did not preclude other uses for the movement of content between the systems, and implemented them in as generic a way as possible.
This has resulted in a flexible set of outputs that can be further developed and applied.
Our evaluations revealed additional functionality and use cases that could be implemented, and we anticipate further use cases emerging as we implement the project’s outputs more widely and more users become familiar with what is feasible.
The work required to carry out the integration has been extensive and detailed, and it can also be concluded that the lack of the most up-to-date standards in the interfaces for content management presented by both Sakai and SharePoint (e.g., CMIS [11]) does not make the task of getting such systems to work together any easier.
It is concluded from this experience that all content management systems should be encouraged to make it as easy to get content out as it is to get content into them in order to facilitate seamless flow and enable the digital content lifecycle across systems.
An assumption at the start of the project was that we would be agnostic about the direction in which content might flow between the systems once integrated.
Evaluation feedback clearly suggests that the repository’s archival capability is regarded as one of its strongest assets, and the area in which the other systems could not offer comparable functionality.
Hence, the primary flow of content is into the repository.
This suggests that the role of the repository within a University will be regarded very much in terms of what it can offer that the other systems cannot, rather than try and compete on all levels.
Whilst there is clear benefit in playing to one’s strengths there is a challenge to clarify better at an institutional level what functionality is offered by different content management systems, so as to more fully understand how different stages of the digital content lifecycle can be best enabled.
Code The CLIF code is available on two github sites: https://github.com/uohull/clif-sakai  [12] https://github.com/uohull/clif-sharepoint  [13] Configuration and installation instructions are to be found in the technical appendix to the CLIF final report [10].
Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge funding for the CLIF Project from the 'Repositories Enhancement' strand of the Information Environment initiative of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
We are also grateful to colleagues, academic and administrative, at both the University of Hull and King’s College London.
Their time in helping us to formulate case studies and, subsequently, to evaluate the project’s work against those starting points was much appreciated.
Finally, we acknowledge assistance from the University of the Highlands and the Islands (UHI).
Ours was not the first attempt to integrate Sakai and Fedora, colleagues at UHI tried it some years ago as part of the JISC CTREP Project.
That they were only partially successful was entirely due to restrictions of the (then) Sakai code.
Their work provided a very helpful starting point for the CLIF team and their time in helping us understand it was invaluable.
References CLIF literature review https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:2430 Fedora Commons http://fedora-commons.org Microsoft SharePoint http://sharepoint.microsoft.com Sakai http://sakaiproject.org Richard Green, Chris Awre.
"RepoMMan: Delivering Private Repository Space for Day-to-day Use".
January 2008, Ariadne Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/green-awre/ Richard Green, Chris Awre.
"The REMAP Project: Steps Towards a Repository-enabled Information Environment".
April 2009, Ariadne Issue 59 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/green-awre/ The Hydra Project http://projecthydra.org CLIF use case summary  https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:2431 CLIF technical design https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:2697 CLIF final report https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:4194 Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/cmis/ github site: uohull / clif-sakai https://github.com/uohull/clif-sakai github site: uohull / clif-sharepoint https://github.com/uohull/clif-sharepoint Author Details Richard Green Manager Hydrangea in Hull and Hydra (Hull) Projects  c/o Library and Learning Innovation Brynmor Jones Library University of Hull Hull HU6 7RX Email: r.green@hull.ac.uk Web sites: http://hydrangeainhull.wordpress.com/    http://projecthydra.org Richard Green is an independent IT consultant who has worked with the Hull repository team managing a number of projects since 2005.
At present Richard is involved with Hull’s Hydra repository implementation, work to integrate the library OPAC and repository search, and is working with the University archives to develop an approach to born-digital materials.
He is a member of the Hydra Project steering group and, as such, actively involved in the development of that international collaboration.
Richard is co-chair of the Fedora UK and Ireland User Group.
Chris Awre Head of Information Management Library and Learning Innovation Brynmor Jones Library University of Hull Hull HU6 7RX Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/lli/ Chris Awre is Head of Information Management within Library and Learning Innovation at the University of Hull.
He oversees the teams responsible for the acquisition, processing and cataloguing of all materials managed through the Library from both external and internal sources, the latter focusing on the development of the digital repository and local digital collections.
Chris has a background as a systems librarian and advocates the value of a broad approach to digital repository collection development.
Simon Waddington Software Development Manager Centre for e-Research King's College London Strand Campus 26-29 Drury Lane London WC2B 5RL Email: simon.waddington@kcl.ac.uk Simon Waddington is Research Fellow at the Centre for e-Research, King’s College London.
His manages a team of software developers working on projects in the areas of data management and preservation, and carries out research in information science and applied computing.
He is currently PI of the JISC funded UKRISS project.
Simon has a long background in research and development, including holding positions at Motorola and BBC.
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Book Review: Understanding Information and Computation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Understanding Information and Computation Buzz data intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Martin White reviews a very individual perspective on the extent to which the growth and structure of the World Wide Web is governed by the fundamental laws of physics and mathematics.
I have been a member of the information profession for almost 60 years, but then I started at a very young age.
Indeed I was a library assistant at the age of four.
My grandfather was the volunteer librarian for the small library in Clanfield, Hampshire, which opened up for a couple of afternoons each week.
My job was to stack the books up, and help him put them back on the shelves.
I felt very important.
I have no recollection of learning to read, but grew up surrounded by books, mostly Reader’s Digest condensed editions.
My grandfather was also a regular user of the Lending Library that was run by Boots the Chemists from 1899 to 1966.
The result was that by the time I went to school I could read very fluently indeed.
Mrs Edwards, my first teacher, asked the class to bring in something they were reading at home, and I turned up with the Daily Telegraph!
So from an early age perhaps I was destined to find a career in information science.
Content Every day we face the problems of how to find the information we need to meet personal, family and career objectives.
Marshall McLuhan has remarked that the one thing of which fish are totally unaware is water, as they have no anti-environment that would enable them to perceive the element in which they swim [1].
They take it for granted, and we do just the same.
Over the last few years I have become increasingly interested in what we mean by ‘information’.
Then we come to ‘content’, a convenient word when talking about enterprise content management.
Is ‘content’ the same as information, or different?
And how is it the same or different?
There is a General Definition of Information that is based upon a concept of ‘data + meaning’.
There is a good summary of GDI in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2] written by Luciano Floridi, the author of the excellent book Information – a very short introduction [3].
From Einstein to Web Science This is the subtitle of Philip Tetlow’s Understanding Information and Computation, which might also be regarded as ‘Information – a Very Long Introduction’.
It is almost impossible to categorise this book.
The author is an Enterprise IT Architect with IBM, but his book is nothing to do with IT architecture.
Among the chapter titles are ‘Hitler, Turing and Quantum Mathematics’ (Chapter 3), ‘Twists, Turns and Nature’s Preference for Curves’ (Chapter 6), ‘Why Are Conic Sections Important?’ (Chapter 9) and ‘Time to Reformulate with a Little Help from Information Retrieval Research’.
At the time I was reading this book there was a fascinating programme on BBC4 by Professor Jim Al-Kahili which traversed the period from the initial development of writing scripts to Alan Turing’s seminal work on the basic principles of computation via Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper on A Mathematical Theory of Communication.
One of the concepts introduced by Shannon was information entropy as a measure of the uncertainty in a message.
At the Enterprise Search Meetup which took place during the Enterprise Search Summit Fall in Washington in October 2012, it was interesting to hear some quite intense discussions (especially as I am a chemist by training) around the implications of entropy in enterprise search.
Next year we will be marking the 60th anniversary of the publication in Nature of the paper by Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA.
At one level the role of DNA in genetic inheritance can be seen as a chemical reaction but, at another level, the communication of information.
Although ‘informational genetics’ is not in the index of Tetlow’s work, there are 30 entries for ‘gravity’, ‘quantum mechanics’, ‘relativity’ and ‘The Universe’.
Much of the mathematics is based on geometry, but I need to emphasise that a degree in mathematics is not needed to enjoy this book.
If you are wondering where geometry and information coincide, there is no better example than the vector space model used to assess content object similarity in search applications.
Indeed the discussion in the book about vector space and information retrieval is an excellent example of the skill of the author in being able to link computation and information.
A Feynman Approach to Information Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist, was always seeking to understand everything in physics from first principles and never took anything on trust.
Tetlow follows the same path in an endeavour to discover whether it is possible to see information as a fundamental force of The Universe in the same way as we do gravity.
This may seem to be a very pretentious endeavour and I’m not sure I am entirely convinced by the arguments, but I admire the breadth of knowledge that is evident in this book.
There is a very good bibliography and reading the book is enhanced though excellent footnotes.
It is certainly not an easy book to read.
It took me a month or more to work my way gradually through it and I found it useful to read several of the early chapters again as I moved through the later sections of the book.
Having done so, I feel at last that some of the hunches I have around the concept of information and the behaviour of the Web are in fact based on fundamental laws of physics and mathematics.
This is not a student textbook and it is not going to help you deliver better customer service tomorrow, or design a better intranet architecture by the end of the month.
But if you feel that there must be more to information than shelves of books or folders of files, then this is a book for you.
References Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore.
“War and Peace in the Global Village”, 1968, Gingko Press "Semantic Conceptions of Information", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/ Luciano Floridi.
Information: a very short introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
138 p. ISBN 978-0-19-955137-8.
Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd. Horsham West Sussex Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Martin White is an information management consultant specialising in enterprise search assignments.
He established Intranet Focus Ltd in 1999 and has been a Visiting Professor at the iSchool, University of Sheffield since 2002.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Member of the Association of Computing Machinery.
His latest book, Enterprise Search, has just been published by O’Reilly Media.
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New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies Buzz data framework wiki dissemination portfolio infrastructure archives schema blog repositories visualisation e-learning personalisation vle eportfolio moodle youtube oer research Citation BibTex RIS Grainne Conole reflects on the implications of Web 2.0 for education and offers two new schemas for thinking about harnessing the potential of technologies.
In this article I want to reflect on the rhetoric of ‘Web 2.0’ and its potential versus actual impact.
I want to suggest that we need to do more than look at how social networking technologies are being used generally as an indicator of their potential impact on education, arguing instead that we need to rethink what are the fundamental characteristics of learning and then see how social networking can be harnessed to maximise these characteristics to best effect.
I will further argue that the current complexity of the digital environment requires us to develop ‘schema’ or approaches to thinking about how we can best harness the benefits these new technologies confer.
The Tension between Web 2.0 and Education So my primary interest is to focus on the educational aspects of new technologies and in particular what might be appropriate ‘schema’ for describing the ways in which technologies are being used.
There is an inherent tension between the rhetoric of Web 2.0 and current educational practices.
For example, today’s digital environment is characterised by speed and immediacy; the ability to access a vast amount of information at the click of a mouse, coupled with multiple communication channels and social networks.
This seems contradictory to traditional notions of education; the need to reflect, to build cumulatively on existing knowledge and develop individual understanding over time.
Just as there has been a backlash against ‘fast food’ with the ‘slow food’ movement, some are arguing for the need to a return to ‘slow learning’ as a counter to the speed and immediacy that digital learning appears to offer.
Similarly a key characteristic of Web 2.0 is user participation – the ‘wisdom of the crowds’, the ‘architecture of participation’ – mash-ups, remixing and co-construction are fundamental and widespread practices in Web 2.0.
In contrast, despite the general increase in group-collaboration in recent years, fundamentally educational systems revolve around individual testing – evidencing of attainment of a level of knowledge and understanding against a set of pre-defined criteria.
Even where group work is encouraged, more often than not there are strategies to ensure recognition of individual contribution to some extent.
Ever since the advent of the Internet and access to information, many have argued for a need for changes in assessment practices – ‘if information is abundantly available, surely assessment processes which focus primarily on knowledge recall are inappropriate?’ Similarly whereas in a Web 2.0 world, cut and pasting, combining different sources, and editing other peoples’ work (through wikis for example) is encouraged and is indeed fundamental to the nature of how Web 2.0 works, such practices in the current educational climate constitute plagiarism.
Even the nature of academic referencing is being challenged in the fluid way in which ideas are developed, transformed and transferred through the blogosphere.
Yes there is an inherent practice of cross-referencing sources in the blogosphere, however the speed with which ideas are taken up and transferred across blogs is such that it is almost impossible to identify ‘a source’ for many ideas.
My own use of a blog has caused me to reflect on and rethink the nature of academic discourse and the relationship between how I develop and convey my ideas through traditional media such as journal publications and conference proceedings compared with my use of blogs.
I have been surprised at how liberating and useful blogging has been, as a ‘stream of consciousness’ of the development of my ideas, through being part of an evolving collective of other thinking in the community and increasingly as my main reflective research journal and repository of ideas and resources.
The ‘wisdom of the crowds’ notion argues that user-generated content and mass participation enable new ways of co-constructing ideas.
Education is still predicated on a striated structure – crudely put with ‘teacher’ as ‘privileged expert’, this is despite the rise in pedagogies such as social constructivism, which emphasise the need for co-construction of knowledge and support a more learner-centred approach.
Traditionally education and the way in which it is taught, is divided into subject fields with knowledge on the whole static and unchanging.
This model has been increasingly challenged in the last few decades as subject domains fragment and diversify and as knowledge seems to expand exponentially.
It is no longer possible for any individual to be an expert in their field, with an understanding of the full scope of their domain.
Web 2.0 by its nature copes seamlessly with a complex and changing knowledge domain; fundamental to Web 2.0 practice is that no one individual is expert, rather they are part of a social network of others; the power of the Web enables knowledge to be co-constructed and hence continually change as needed.
Even where the pedagogy is learner-centred, current educational systems are not – administrative processes and assessment practice remain firmly bound to hierarchical, differentiated educational structures.
For those espousing more radical and innovative pedagogical approaches, Web 2.0 seems to have much to offer through equity of participation and mutual negotiation – the question is ‘will simply letting "Web 2.0" loose on education be enough to bring about such changes or is something more needed’?
Will the changes in social practice we have seen generally through adoption of Web 2.0 happen automatically or is there something fundamentally different about education?
Whichever aspects you look at there appears to be an irresolvable tension between current educational practice which is essentially individualistic and objective, and the philosophies inherent in Web 2.0 – namely social and subjective.
So there are huge tensions between the potential of Web 2.0 and our current educational systems.
Realigning New Technologies to Pedagogy I have a fear that because the technologies are so exciting and beguiling that we are seeing a technologically deterministic drive, rather than one based on sound pedagogies.
However I will also show that there has never been a closer alignment between the current practices of Web 2.0 technologies and what is put forward as good pedagogy – what we need are means to realise and harness this match.
Therefore in order to counter a primarily technological drive, where, educationally, use is shaped by the tools, rather than the other way round, I want to put forward some ideas for matching the affordances of the tools to what they offer for learning.
In particular I want to suggest two new schema/approaches, which we might adopt to make sense of this and harness the potential of new technologies.
I want to consider this from a number of perspectives.
Firstly, looking at existing learning theories and reflecting on how they align with Web 2.0 practices through use of a pedagogical framework against which to map tools.
Secondly, I want to suggest some ideas to help us to map Web 2.0 better to the kinds of pedagogical practices we want to promote, through use of a matrix mapping key learning principles to the pedagogies they promote.
These two different schema or ways of thinking are not intended to be definitive but rather are put forward as suggestions of how we can begin to think differently about how to evaluate and apply the existing affordances the new technologies offer.
To demonstrate the parallels between current technology developments and pedagogy I want to draw on some work we did a few years ago [1].
We undertook a review of learning theories focusing on how the specific characteristics of each relates to the affordances of different digital media; from theories which are more individual and cognitively focused through to those where the emphasis is on social and situative learning.
For example ‘behaviourist theories’ (such as instructivism) where the focus is on stimulus-response and observable learning outcomes maps well to technologies which enable trial and error and adaptive responses – such as e-assessment tools.
In contrast, a range of asynchronous and synchronous communication tools provide ample opportunities for dialogue, a key element to pedagogies based on socio-constructivist principles, where the emphasis is on co-construction of knowledge.
Theories Main focus Map to technologies Behaviourism Trial and error learning Learning through association and reinforcement Presentation of content, use of multiple media to convey information Feedback through e-assessment tools Peer feedback Cognitive constructivism Focus on the processes by which learners build their own mental structures when interacting with an environment Task-orientated, favour hands-on, self-directed activities orientated towards design and discovery Guided and adaptive instruction through interactive materials Access to resources and expertise offers the potential to develop more engaging and student-centred, active and authentic learning environments Social constructivism Emphasis on interpersonal relationships involving imitation and modelling and joint construction of knowledge Multiple forms of asynchronous and synchronous communication offer the potential for more diverse and richer forms of dialogue and interaction between students and tutors and amongst peers Archive materials and resources provide ample opportunity for vicarious learning Different online communication tools and learning environments and social fora offer the potential for new forms of communities of practice or facilities to support and enhance existing communities Situated learning Learning as social participation Shift from a focus on the individual and information-focused learning to an emphasis on social learning and communication/ collaboration Networking capabilities of the Web enable more diverse access to different forms of expertise and the potential for the development of different types of communities Online communication tools and learning environments offer the potential for new forms of communities of practice or can facilitate and enhance existing communities Table 1: Technology affordances mapped to different learning theories Table 1 includes an extract of some of the theories considered in that chapter, their main pedagogical focus (for example, trial-and-error learning or learning through social interactions), and a suggested list of technological affordances which might best support these characteristics.
Recent thinking in learning theory has shifted to emphasise the benefit of social and situated learning as opposed to behaviourist, outcomes-based, individual learning.
What is striking is that a mapping to the technologies shows that recent trends in the use of technologies, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 echoes this; Web 2.0 tools very much emphasise the collective and the network.
In a related chapter [2] I compared tools pre-2005 with those post-2005 against their key functionality.
These were divided into 11 types: text and data manipulation; presentation and dissemination; data analysis; information seeking and handling; storing and managing information; personal management; project management; communication; visualisation and brainstorming; guidance and support; and evaluation and assessment.
The post-2005 tools very much emphasise the fundamental shift with Web 2.0 from information to communication: It is significant that many of the post 2005 tools are available as free, online services.
What is also noticeable about these new tools is that many are multifaceted in nature.
Their use in combination has led to a new paucity in the system, information can be transmitted seamlessly between systems and functionality created in one tool can be embedded or made available in another.
For example the ‘embed’ function enables slideshare presentations or Youtube videos to be incorporated into blogs and run in situ in that environment.
This enables users to create their own personal environment and to consume information at a location and in a format they choose/control.
The emphasis on the social and collaborative characteristics of these new tools is very prominent, as is the shift from desktop tools to Web services emphasising the assumption that there is near-ubiquitous access to the Internet.
Arguably then there has never been a better alignment of current thinking in terms of good pedagogy – i.e.
emphasising the social and situated nature of learning, rather than a focus on knowledge recall with current practices in the use of technologies – i.e.
user-generated content, user-added value and aggregated network effects.
Despite this, the impact of Web 2.0 on education has been less dramatic than its impact on other spheres of society – use for social purposes, supporting niche communities, collective political action, amateur journalism and social commentary.
The same lag was evident with the impact of Web 1.0 tools: whereas businesses transformed their systems and practices through embracing the potential of technologies, educational systems did not.
This difference is due to a complex set of factors – technological, organisational and pedagogical.
Educational systems are slow to change; the practice and process of teaching and learning are embedded in these systems.
Take, for example, assessment – the primary model in place is still one based on summative, individual assessment; although formative and more collaborative assessment is possible, it is more difficult in the current educational infrastructure.
There are cultural issues as well, not least the need for a changing mindset of teachers in terms of their role.
Therefore, I want to suggest that we need new ways of thinking about how to map different pedagogies to the use of tools.
I offer two examples; one based on a framework highlighting different dimensions of learning which can be used to consider how to use different tools in specific contexts.
The second example helps to articulate particular principles for learning and then map them against four overarching features of learning.
A Pedagogical Framework for Mapping Tools in Use The first example I want to talk about follows on from the review of learning theories outlined above.
For each learning theory we distilled out what were the key characteristics that particular theory promoted [1].
We argued that the different theories fore-grounded different aspects of these characteristics and showed this by mapping the theories against the framework.
The framework has three dimensions (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Pedagogy framework for mapping ‘tools-in-use’ We argued that any particular instance of learning lies somewhere along a combination of the three dimensions shown in the figure.
The first is the dimension of learning on one’s own, individually through to learning socially.
The second dimension is learning through information versus learning through experience.
The third dimension is learning passively versus actively.
(Note that passive is not meant to be negative in this context – immersive language or music learning is a good example).
The framework can be used as a means of mapping tools in use.
For example consider two different uses of a blog; as a reflective diary or as a class-based, collective resource repository.
This emphasises that using a blog as a reflective diary is primarily individual, active and experience-based; whereas a class blog is more social, still active but now primarily information-based.
An e-portfolio used as part of a nurse-practitioner’s course as evidence of the students’ work-based experience, would be individual, active and experience-based.
Collaborative construction of a project report on a review of the literature would be active, social and probably mid-way between information and experience.
Of course any one individual using this schema would map particular instances differently, depending on their interpretation of the framework and the context of use of the tools; the point is this framework provides a useful schema to think about tools in use and how they map to different characteristics of learning.
Mapping Pedagogical Principles The second example focuses not so much on the tools and how they are being used, but on how the particular principles of a learning situation maps to characteristics of learning.
With this approach the learning principles for a particular learning situation are mapped against four key characteristics of learning [3][4], i.e that learning in any situation is some combination of learning through: thinking and reflection conversation and interaction experience and activity evidence and demonstration.
Figure 2: A framework of learning characteristics Figure 2 illustrates these learning characteristics.
This can then be used as the basis against which to benchmark pedagogical principles for any particular learning scenario.
A simple example of how this can be used is shown in Table 2.
So, for example, a learning activity that enabled learners to reflect on their experience, say for example, in a work-based learning context – would map to ‘thinking and reflection’ and ‘evidence and demonstration’.
In contrast, an activity that supported collaboration would map to the first three characteristics.
Principles Learning characteristic Thinking & reflection Conversation & interaction Experience & activity Evidence & demonstration Reflect on experience and show understanding √ √ Frequent interactive exercises and feedback √ √ √ Provides support for independent learning √ √ √ Supports collaborative activities √ √ √ Table 2: A matrix of principles against the learning characteristics they promote In the Open University, we are engaged in two large-scale e-learning initiatives that provide useful case studies against which to test this matrix concept; SocialLearn and Openlearn.
Social:Learn is a relatively new initiative attempting to apply the best of Web 2.0 principles to an educational context [5][6].
The aim is to provide an enabling learning architecture along with a series of exemplar learning applications that demonstrate how Web 2.0 principles can be applied in an educational context.
The question driving SocialLearn is ‘if we were to start a new university from scratch, harnessing the very best of new technologies – what would it look like?’ In contrast, OpenLearn began as an initiative more from a content perspective.
Funded by the Hewlitt Foundation, the OpenLearn Project is making ca.
10% of the OU’s educational resource freely available as Open Educational Resources (OERs).
The site has been built using the Moodle platform, and in addition to the OERs a range of social tools are also provided to encourage discussion and collaboration among users [7].
Tables 3 and 4 show the matrix mapped to the principles derived for SocialLearn and OpenLearn.
They provide a useful visualisation of how the principles map across the four aspects of pedagogy outlined in Figure 2.
Such matrices can be used with end-users to get them to reverse-engineer the pedagogical assumptions inherent in the design of a particular learning intervention or alternatively can also be used as the basis for developing new learning applications at the design stage.
Mapping of pedagogies to Social:Learn principles Thinking and reflection Experience and activity Conversation and interaction Evidence and demonstration Supports a range of pedagogies and styles √ √ √ √ Formalises the informal √ Informalises the formal √ Is built on relationships between people √ Harnesses the Internet (social scale, user generated content, etc.)
√ √ √ √ Aggregates learning events, resources, and opportunities √ Provides structures and scaffolds for the learning process √ √ √ √ Uses metaphors and simple approaches to impart pedagogy √ √ √ √ Encourages a range of participation √ Evidence via range of informal and formal assessment mechanisms √ Lifelong support across different learning goals √ √ Provides access to expertise √ Supports collaborative elements √ Helps surface incidental learning √ √ Wraps learning around an individual’s interests √ √ √ Enables learner control and learner responsibility √ √ Allows users to build reputation in the system √ √ Encourages legitimate peripheral participation √ Encourages learning through observation √ Supports different subject areas and styles √ √ √ √ Encourages mentorship √ Mapping of pedagogies to Social:Learn principles Thinking and reflection Experience and activity Conversation and interaction Evidence and demonstration Table 3: Application of the pedagogy framework to SocialLearn Mapping of pedagogies to OpenLearn principles Thinking & reflection Experience & activity Conversation & interaction Evidence & demonstration Search and use of a pool of quality-assured, open access content √ √ Provides support for learners adopting independent learning √ √ √ √ Opportunity for reuse and repurposing √ √ Lifelong support across different learning goals √ Provides students with access to ‘captured’ expertise in content √ Includes a variety of activities and interactivity √ √ Offers opportunities for in-built formative feedback √ √ Potential for teachers to adapt and embed in their teaching √ √ √ Provides conduit for sharing learning designs √ √ √ Supported through informal social networking tools √ Knowledge mapping and visualisation to aid understanding √ √ Opportunities for presence indicators to support different communities √ Dialogue through tailored content-focused forums √ √ √ Channel from informal to formal learning √ Opportunities for student-generated content √ √ Good pedagogical design embedded in content √ Personalisation through discrete stand-alone units of learning √ √ Aggregates learning opportunities, resources & opportunities √ √ √ √ Mapping of pedagogies to OpenLearn principles Thinking & reflection Experience & activity Conversation & interaction Evidence & demonstration Table 4: Application of the pedagogy framework to OpenLearn Feedback from SocialLearn workshops where this matrix has been used suggests that it is useful in two respects.
Firstly, revisiting the original list of pedagogical principles developed for SocialLearn in January 2008 demonstrated that they are proving to be a robust list; they are still valid and hence do capture the essence of what we are trying to do with SocialLearn.
Secondly, exposing the principles to others in the workshops helped exemplify what SocialLearn was about and importantly what it is trying to achieve pedagogically.
In addition, the participants were able to add to the list, to suggest new additions to the principles in light of current developments in the project; so the list is becoming a dynamic, evolving set of principles, which can be added to as SocialLearn develops and as the ideas become instantiated in the learning platform and associated applications.
Now that we have developed an approach that appears to be of value, this will be used as the basis for gathering users’ views on the educational aspects of SocialLearn at future events and also as a basis of thinking through new learning applications at the design stage.
Implications Having suggested some ways of thinking about how better to harness Web 2.0 in education and make sense of the complex, dynamic digital environment in which learning and teaching now takes place, I wanted to conclude by broadening the arguments and reflecting on the implications beyond the microcosm of learning and teaching practice to educational institutions.
I will argue that these changes are having, and will continue to have, profound implications for individual roles as well as for organisational structures and processes.
Blogs act as valuable barometers of change, and so to illustrate the above I want to draw on some recent discussions in the blogosphere, which to my mind exemplify some of the core issues.
It is evident that the new technologies now enable individuals to personalise the environment in which they work or learn, appropriating a range of tools to meet their interests and needs.
The term ‘Personal Learning Environments’ (PLEs) has been in circulation for a number of years now and although exact interpretations of what a PLE is vary, crudely they are offered by many as an alternative to institutionally controlled Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).
Martin Weller has written a lot about this and has blogged about what he sees as his current working environment or ‘PLE’, namely a mixture of tools to meet the different aspects of his job [8].
What is interesting with Martin’s picture is that, although the details will vary, such a personal working environment and mixture of institutional and self-selected tools are increasingly becoming the norm.
Research looking at how students are appropriating technologies points to similar changes in practice: students are mixing and matching different tools to meet their own personal needs and preferences, not just relying on institutionally provided tools and indeed in some instances shunning them in favour of their own personal tools [9].
In November 2007 Martin sparked a contentious debate in the blogosphere with his post ‘The VLE/LMS is dead!’ touching on some of the issues relating to changes in the way staff and students are using tools [10].
In it Martin argued that the plethora of freely available, and often functionally better, tools now available is challenging the notion of an institutionally developed and controlled VLE.
The discussion that ensued in the blogosphere covered the range of issues associated with the tensions inherent in this dichotomy.
So clearly there is a tension between personalised tools verses institutional tools, between having integrated institutional systems and loosely coupled systems, and the issue of what we should control and what students should control.
The implications are profound, for institutional structures and processes, for individual roles and identities, for the way in which we view learning and teaching (Figure 2).
Figure 3: The impact of new technologies on organisations, individuals and practices I have put forward some models here that provide a starting point to enable us to take a more constructive and focused approach to thinking about new tools and their implications for learning.
However we need new ways of thinking, not just to map tools to pedagogy, but to think about institutional structures and processes, to map changing roles, and to guide new thinking on strategic policies to guide the direction of change.
We are only at the start of unpacking what this will mean for the future of all aspects of education.
If we constructively embrace the potential of new technologies, I believe they have much to offer in terms of providing more engaging, personalised learning opportunities for our students; we ignore them at our peril.
References Conole, G., Dyke, M., Oliver, M. and Seale, J.
(2004).
‘Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design’, Computers and Education.Volume 43, Issues 1-2, August-September 2004, Pages 17-33.
Conole, G. (submitted).
‘Stepping over the edge: the implications of new technologies for education’, in M. Lee and C. McLoughlin (Eds), Web 2.0-Based E-Learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching’, Ideas publications.
Dyke, M., Conole, G., Ravenscroft, A. and de Freitas, S. (2007).
‘Learning theories and their application to e-learning’, in G. Conole and M. Oliver (ed), Contemporary perspectives in e-learning research: themes, methods and impact on practice’, part of the Open and Distance Learning Series, F. Lockwood, (ed), RoutledgeFalmer.
See also e4innovation http://www.e4innovation.com/ for a background to the development of these ideas.
Walton, A., Weller, M., and Conole, G. (2008).
Social:Learn – Widening participation and the sustainability of higher education, Eden Conference workshop, June 2008, Lisbon.
Social:Learn Web site: http://sociallearn.open.ac.uk/ OpenLearn Web site: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk Weller, M. (2007).
My personal work/leisure/learning environment, blog post, 6 December 2007 http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/12/my-personal-wor.html Conole, G., De Laat, M., Dillon, T. and Darby, J.
(2008).
‘Disruptive technologies’, ‘pedagogical innovation’: What’s new?
Findings from an in-depth study of students’ use and perception of technology’, Computers and Education, Volume 50, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 511-524.
Weller, M. (2007).
The VLE/LMS is dead, blog post, 8/11/07, http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/11/the-vlelms-is-d.html Author Details Gráinne Conole Professor of e-learning The Open University Email: G.C.Conole@open.ac.uk Web site: http://www.e4innovation.com/ Return to top Article Title: "New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies" Author: Gráinne Conole Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Building Trust in Digital Repositories Using the DRAMBORA Toolkit Pre-SOA Conference Workshop: Building Trust in Digital Repositories Using the DRAMBORA Toolkit 27 August 2007, 11.00-16.00 The Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/drambora-belfast-2007/ Running from 11.00am to 4.00pm, this practical tutorial will provide a contextual overview of the need for an evidence-based evaluation of digital repositories and offer an overview of the DCC pilot audits to date.
The tutorial will then move on to demonstrate how institutions can make use of the DRAMBORA toolkit to design, develop, evaluate, and refine new or existing trusted digital repository systems and workflows.
This will involve a walk-through of the toolkit sections with practical examples based on the pilot audits.
Participants were encouraged to draw upon and share their own experiences during this discussion.
Participants will receive a hard copy of the various DRAMBORA worksheets to take away with them so they could begin to assess their own repositories and workflows or start developing their own repository system.
This event is being held in cooperation with the Society of Archivists (SoA) Annual Conference.
The SoA conference entitled 'Differing Directions: Challenging Communities' tackles many of the important issues regarding the future of archives.
For more information on the conference, please see: http://www.archives.org.uk/thesociety/conference2007belfast.html Benefits of Participation This course will enable attendees to: Comprehend the concepts of trust with regards to digital repositories Recognise the need for evidence-based evaluation for building trust in digital repositories Understand how the DRAMBORA toolkit can be used to help design and develop systems and workflows that can help build trusted digital repositories Obtain skills needed to undertake a thorough assessment of digital repositories using the DRAMBORA toolkit Appreciate the range of staff and skill-sets required to implement and sustain a trusted digital repository Intended Audience The intended audience for this event is anyone involved in funding, supporting, developing, implementing, and/or managing digital repositories.
Registration Registration fees are £30 for DCC Associates Network members and £60 for non-members.
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/drambora-belfast-2007/register Instructor Andrew McHugh, Advisory Services Manager for the DCC since 2004, leads a world-class team of digital curation practitioners in offering leading-edge expertise and insight in a range of issues.
His most recent work at the DCC has involved leading its work in trusted repository Audit and Certification.
Andrew also lectures on multimedia systems and design on the MSc in Information Technology run by the Computing Science Department at the University of Glasgow Back to headlines TASI Workshop Programme for September to December 2007 TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) has just released details of its new training workshops for September to December 2007. http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ If you cannot make it to a scheduled TASI workshop, TASI now offers most of its workshops 'on demand'.
Training is available for individuals or groups at its facilities in Bristol at a time that suits you.
Find out more at: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/on-demand.html The full scheduled timetable is as follows: * Thursday 6th September 2007, Bristol Rights and Responsibilities: Copyright and Digital Images * Friday 7th September 2007, Bristol Beyond Google: Strategies for Finding Images Online * Tuesday 11th September 2007, Bristol Colour Management * Friday 21st September 2007, Bristol Scanning from Print * Wednesday 3rd October 2007, Bristol Digital Photography Level 1 * Thursday 4th October 2007, Bristol Digital Photography Level 2 * Thursday 18th October 2007, Bristol Building a Departmental Image Collection * Thursday 1st November 2007, Bristol Image Capture Level 1 * Friday 2nd November 2007, Bristol Image Capture Level 2 * Wednesday 14th November 2007, Bristol Image Capture Level 3 * Thursday 15th November 2007, Bristol Introduction to Image Metadata * Friday 23rd November 2007, Bristol Image Optimisation Correcting and Preparing Images * Friday 30th November 2007, Bristol Building a Departmental Image Collection * Tuesday 4th December 2007, Bristol Scanning from Print * Thursday 13th December 2007, Bristol Photoshop Level 1 * Friday 14th December 2007, Bristol Photoshop Level 2 Full details and the online booking form can be found on the Training page: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ In addition to its training programme, TASI provides many resources on its Web site and a free helpdesk service for those within FE/HE: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/helpdesk.html Back to headlines JISC Collections Workshop: Promoting and Embedding E-textbooks 14 September 2007 JISC Collections Office, London http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/news_and_events/coll_events/etextbooks_workshop This workshop will explore current promotional methods being utilised by librarians, publishers and aggregators to aid the embedding of monographs and e-textbooks into the learning environment of users.
It will provide an opportunity for librarians to discuss their role in promotion, to share ideas for future strategies and tools that harness Web 2.0 technologies and to identify the core issues that they would like publishers, aggregators and JISC Collections to tackle to ensure that monographs and e-textbooks are being fully embedding in their institutions.
A series of case studies will be presented in the morning, followed by break out sessions in the afternoon.
This workshop will take place at the JISC Collections office in London on Friday 14th September 2007.
Further details on this workshop can be found at http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/news_and_events/coll_events/etextbooks_workshop To book your place at this workshop, please complete the online registration form at http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/ebooks_workshop or contact Jane Anthony at j.anthony@jisc.ac.uk Back to headlines Libraries Without Walls 7 Libraries Without Walls 7:Exploring 'anytime, anywhere' delivery of library services 14-18 September 2007 Aegean Island of Lesvos, Greece http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww7/ In 2007 LWWW7 wishes to encourage the widest possible range of papers to reflect the diverse current developments in library service delivery.
It is anticipated that papers may cover: New kinds of service, especially those which open up new paradigms of 'library' perhaps the library equivalent of YouTube or MySpace?
Papers which describe the library's role within new models of scholarly publishing, including experience of developing services based on institutional or other repositories, and papers examining the responsibility of the library for digital curation.
Service delivery in challenging environments, especially where the infrastructure may be sub-optimal as in some developing countries, or where the user group represents particular challenges.
New technological solutions, provided these are presented to illustrate the impact on users of the improved services they make possible Delivery and assessment of information skills/literacies, especially where this is achieved through electronic environments.
Back to headlines 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries 16-21 September 2007 Budapest, Hungary http://www.ecdl2007.org This unique and well-established series brings together researchers, developers and practitioners working in various disciplines and related areas of digital libraries all over the world, providing a meeting point for the library, Web and DL communities.
The conference will consist of a three days technical programme, preceded by a tutorial day and followed by workshops.
The technical program will include refereed paper presentations, plenary sessions, panels and poster sessions.
ECDL 2007 will be devoted to discussions about hot issues and applications and will primarily provide a forum to reinforce the collaboration of researchers and practitioners in the following topics: Ontologies, Digital libraries and the Web, Models, Multimedia and Multilingual Digital Libraries, Grid and Peer-to-Peer, Preservation, User Interfaces, Document Linking, Information Retrieval, Personal Information Management, New DL Applications, and User Studies.
The corresponding tutorials will provide further in-depth looks at areas of current interest, including Thesauri and Ontologies, DL Education, Large Scale Digital Library Infrastructures, Sharing Content, Services and Computing Resources.
The Workshops, covering wide areas of interest, to be held in conjunction with ECDL2007, on September 20-21, are still open for contributions.
CLEF 2007 Cross language Evaluation Forum Workshop on "Foundations of Digital Libraries" DLSci 2007 Digital Library Goes e-Science LADL 2007 Cross-Media and Personalized Learning Applications on top of Digital Libraries Curriculum Development in Digital Libraries: An Exercise in Developing Lesson Plans Towards an European repository ecology: conceptualising interactionsbetween n etworks of repositories and services Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services Libraries in the Digital Age: What If?
Registration and programme details are available at: http://www.ecdl2007.org/ Back to headlines Folksonomy: A look at a hated word but a loved resource Address by Thomas Vander Wal 18 September 2007, 14.00-15.30 Room 0.01, Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK LE1 9BH Free and open to the public.
http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/vanderwal07.htm "Folksonomy" was recently voted one of the new terms most likely to make you 'wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard.'
This talk by the inventor of the term Thomas Vander Wal will offer you a chance to make your own judgment.
The talk is open to all and will not require any specialist knowledge on behalf of the audience.
A Folksonomy can be created when users of 'Web 2.0' sites such as YouTube, Flickr, LastFM and Del.icio.us add keywords ('tags') to the items they view in order to add information about these items.
As more and more users tags such items more information is created about the the items.
Unlike library catalogues which are created by experts, folksonomies are like catalogues created by everyday people.
For some, this heralds a brave new era of democratic information management, for others it heralds the death of expertise.
Thomas Vander Wal lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and this is a rare opportunity to hear him in the UK.
He coined the term 'folksonomy' in 2004 and is a popular speaker on tagging/folksonomy, social Web, and Web applications around well structured information.
He is principal, and senior consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, a social Web consulting firm.
Thomas has been working professionally on the Web since 1995 (with a professional IT background beginning in 1988) and has breadth and depth across many roles and disciplines around Web design, social Web development & research and general Web development.
He is a member of the Web Standards Project Steering Committee and helped found the Information Architecture Institute and Boxes & Arrows Web Magazine.
See his Web site to find out more: http://www.vanderwal.net/ The lecture is presented as part of the AHRC-funded research project Tags Networks Narratives, examining the interdisciplinary application of experimental social software to the study of narrative in digital contexts.
It is a unique speculative project assessing the potential for collaborative social-software techniques such as folksonomy in narrative research.
The project explores: What kinds of collaborative social network tools are available for the gathering and classification of information?
Which researchers are making online narratives the focus of study, and how are those projects categorised by discipline?
How can these researchers make effective use of social network tools to share knowledge and develop interdisciplinary collaborations?
The project is based in the Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at De Montfort University, Leicester UK and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board from October 2006-September 2007.
The project team consists of Professor Sue Thomas, Bruce Mason and Simon Mills.
The talk is organised in partnership with Production and Research in Transliteracy group http://www.transliteracy.com For more information and directions to the venue visit http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/vanderwal07.htm For enquiries contact Bruce Mason bmason01@dmu.ac.uk Back to headlines Librarian@2010 International Conference Librarian@2010 Educating for the Future 19-21 September 2007 Lisbon, Portugal http://www.apbad.pt/Librarian@2010/Librarian@2010.htm EBLIDA (European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations), EUCLID (the European Association for Library and Information Education and Research) and the BAD (the Portuguese Association of Librarians, Archivists and Documentalists) have announced their first joint conference to be held in Lisbon, Portugal (Auditorium of the Direção-Geral de Arquivos Alameda da Universidade 1649-010 Lisboa, Portugal) from the 19-21 September 2007.
Back to headlines Second International Conference on Digital Information Management (ICDIM 2007) ICDIM 2007 28-31 October 2007 INSA-Lyon, France http://icdim.insa-lyon.fr The Second International Conference on Digital Information Management ICDIM 2007 is sponsored by the Engineering Management Society of IEEE and in Cooperation with ACM SIGAPP.
The International Conference on Digital Information Management is a multidisciplinary conference on digital information management, science and technology.
The principal aim of this conference is to bring people from academia, research laboratories and industry and offer a collaborative platform to address the emerging issues and solutions in digital information science and technology.
The ICDIM will address a large number of themes and issues.
The conference invites original research and industrial papers on the theory, design and implementation of digital information systems, as well as proposals for demonstrations, tutorials, workshops and industrial presentations.
Papers are published by IEEE and fully indexed by IEEE Xplore.
The second edition of the ICDIM Conference will be hosted by the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon (INSA-Lyon) over 28-31 October 2007.
Back to headlines TEI@20 The Text Encoding Initiative Members' Meeting: 20 Years of Supporting the Digital Humanities 31 October 3 November 2007 University of Maryland, College Park Pre-conference workshops: 31 October 2007 TEI conference: 1-2 November 2007 Business meeting: 3 November 2007 http://www.lib.umd.edu/dcr/events/teiconference/ You are invited to come to the annual showcase of all things TEI.
The meeting includes: the launch of TEI P5 a full programme of invited speakers, panels, roundtable discussion special interest group sessions TEI business meeting and elections.
There will also be a day of pre-meeting training workshops (see Web site below for details).
Conference papers will be published by LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities .
The meeting will be held at the University of Maryland Libraries, University of Maryland, College Park, just outside Washington, D.C.
The event is open to all and free of charge for TEI Consortium institutional members, subscribers and invited guests.
Others will be charged $75, which entitles you to conference admission and subscriber benefits for the remainder of the calendar year.
For programme details , registration, hotel, and travel information, please visit the conference Web site: http://www.lib.umd.edu/dcr/events/teiconference/ Back to headlines Conference Announcement: Tools and Trends International Conference on Digital Preservation at the occasion of the retirement of Johan Steenbakkers 1-2 November 2007 The Hague, the Netherlands Organized by The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands http://www.kb.nl/nieuws/2007/toolstrends-en.html On 1 and 2 November 2007, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands, KB) is holding an international conference on digital preservation.
The conference is organised at the occasion of the retirement of Johan Steenbakkers, the KB's director of e-Strategy.
Tools and Trends will feature international speakers who will present newest developments of Tools for digital preservation and the latest Trends in long-term archiving.
The Programme Thursday 1 November will focus on Tools in digital preservation.
To ensure future access to our digital heritage, long-term storage is just the first step.
Acquisition, selection, appraisal, description, maintenance, retrieval and representation of digital objects are all aspects of the process of digital resource management.
Organisations that have the responsibility for the curation of digital material need tools that allow them to set up their preservation workflow.
Current projects are working on the development of these tools and procedures and will present their work at Tools and Trends.
Sessions will focus on characterization of digital objects, on preservation action (migration, emulation) and preservation planning.
Projects that will present their practical developments include PLANETS and CASPAR.
Friday 2 November will be dedicated to Trends in digital archiving.
With enormous speed, all types of communication and information have become digital.
Different digital collections require different forms of curation and may also require different preservation levels.
Tools and Trends has invited international experts to answer the question: What are the latest trends in long-term preservation of web resources, e-publications, scientific data and archival records?
And, looking forward: How can we set-up and maintain links between digital collections, what are the similarities and differences in preserving different kinds of digital materials and how do different sectors collaborate and divide responsibilities?
Everyone involved and interested in digital preservation is invited to participate in Tools and Trends.
For more information on the conference, please contact Shirley van Maren shirley.vanmaren@kb.nl and for more information on the programme, please contact Hilde van Wijngaarden, Head Digital Preservation Department of the KB hilde.vanwijngaarden@kb.nl Back to headlines 3rd Annual International Conference on the Universal Digital Library 2-4 November 2007 Carnegie Mellon University,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA http://tera-3.ul.cs.cmu.edu/icudl2007/ ICUDL 2007 is the third in a series of International Conferences on the Universal Digital Library.
The theme of this year;s conference, "Legal, policy, technical, commercial and human factor challenges to a globally owned universal digital library" continues the work of the themes and decisions of the previous ICUDLs.
The conference will add to the foundational knowledge of the Universal Digital Library (UDL) that will be a portal to foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Million Book Project (MBP) is considered a first milestone towards building this digital library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books in various languages belonging to diversified cultures and civilizations available to people worldwide over the Internet.
The annual workshop for the MBP will thus be held in conjunction with the conference.
The meeting will include a number of invited speakers, many contributed papers and presentations, some of which will be subsequently published in international journals, and an opportunity to meet digital library advocates from Australia, China, Egypt, India, and other countries.
Back to headlines UKeiG Course on Effective Business Research Practice You Want What?
Effective business research processes, principles and practices 7 November 2007, 09.45 16.30 CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE Workshop Outline Is there ever a method to the madness of researching business information?
Could the implementation of a basic research process help with your technique?
This one-day course will help new and developing information professionals answer these questions, discuss business research skills and techniques, and work through practical case study examples.
Sessions will include: The business information professional roles and skills Effective business research process techniques Opportunities to add value: is the data enough?
Practical project/case examples will be conducted covering such areas as: Negotiating with difficult people and dealing with changing circumstances What happens if it all goes wrong Time planning Source planning Searching tools and techniques Adding value to the basic request Current awareness Relationship management By the end of the course delegates will have learnt: Roles and skills for the information professional What is business research?
There's more to it than just searching databases Steps and techniques in the business research process Course Presenter Jill Fenton is the Founder and a Director of Fenton Research Ltd, a London-based research company providing high quality, tailored research and advice to help clients achieve their business goals.
Jill has over 10 years of professional business research experience.
Her career includes research management and analyst positions at Deloitte & Touche LLP, Boston Consulting Group and Mercer Oliver Wyman.
She also holds an Honours Degree in Information Management from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh.
Jill is a committee member of the City Information Group and a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals.
She has had several research related articles published and presented seminars at Online Information 2006.
Costs (including lunch and refreshments): UKeiG members £130 + VAT (£152.75); others £160 + VAT (£188.00) Registration by 1 November 2007.
For more information contact: Christine Baker Tel & Fax 01969 625751 Email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk Back to headlines Leading Archives and Museums Due to the tremendous success of Leading Archives and Museums programme last year, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is delighted to announce that further programmes will run in 2007-08.
Leading Archives and Museums has been commissioned by MLA as part of its Workforce Development Strategy, with full support from: the Museums Association; the Society of Archivists; the National Archives; the Institute of Conservation and the National Museum Directors' Conference.
It is also supported by Lifelong Learning UK and the Creative and Cultural Sector Skills Council.
The following two programmes are scheduled for 2007-08: 1.
Future Leaders Programme for aspiring leaders will take place in the Midlands on the following dates: Module 1: 4/5/6 December 2007 Module 2: 6/7 February 2008 2.
Senior Managers Programme for mid-career managers will take place in the South of England on the following dates: Module 1: 27/28 November 2007 Module 2: 29 January 2008 Module 3: 27/28 February 2008 (Please note there will be an additional Senior Managers Programme scheduled for early 2008.)
If you would like to attend either programme, please contact FPM Training on 08702 406 206 or http://www.fpmonline.co.uk/LAM.htm as soon as possible as demand for places will be very high.
Back to headlines Oxford Online Library Champion Awards 2007 Are you a library champion for online resources?
MLA and Oxford University Press are seeking nominations for the Oxford Online Library Champion Awards 2007, which will recognise public librarians' work in promoting Oxford Online resources.
Over 97% of public libraries in England are now offering 24x7 access to these prestigious resources.
Categories for nominations include: Oxford Online Library Champion of the Year Best overall strategy to promote awareness of Oxford Online resources Best Web site promotion Most effective staff training Prizes include a two-night luxury stay for two in Oxford, lunch at the Printer's House of OUP, individual tour of OUP Museum and the Bodleian Library, copy of the new edition of the leather-bound Shorter Oxford English Dictionary; and perpetual access to five Oxford Digital Reference Shelf products.
Nominate at: http://www.oup.com/online/mla/awards/ before the closing date of 30 October 2007.
[Source: MLA] [Received: August 2007] Back to headlines New Internet tutorials for Health and Life Sciences from Intute Intute has just released three new FREE Internet tutorials for the Health and Life Sciences in the Virtual Training Suite.
The tutorials teach Internet research skills for university students and are ideal for use in undergraduate courses: 1.
Internet for Dentistry and Oral Health http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/dentist By Claire McCarthy, Lecturer in Dental Hygiene & Research Hygienist, The Dental Institute, Kings College London and Laurian Williamson, Content Coordinator, Intute: Health and Life Sciences, University of Nottingham 2.
Internet Pharmacist http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/pharmacist By Robert Abbott, an information scientist based at Intute: Health and Life Sciences, University of Nottingham, building on the original tutorial by Fawz Farhan, Editorial Director, Mediapharm, consultant to HEA Health Sciences and Practice, and visiting lecturer in pharmacy practice at King's College London 3.
Internet for Allied Health http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/allied By David Brunt, Intute Service Officer for Nursing, Midwifery & Allied Health, University of Nottingham and Nicola Smart, former Service Officer, Intute Health and Life Sciences, University of Nottingham.
The tutorials offer advice on using the Internet for research for university work, offering a guide to some of the key academic websites for the subject, advice on Internet searching and on critical evaluation of information found on the Internet.
"Success Stories" in each tutorial illustrate how the Internet can be used effectively to support education and research.
All the tutorials can be accessed free on the Web as part of the JISC-funded Intute service.
Intute Virtual Training Suite: http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk [Source: Intute] [Received: July 2007] Back to headlines Blackwell Book Services collaborates with OCLC WorldCat Selection Service Blackwell Book Services is working with OCLC and its WorldCat Selection service to provide customers with a new workflow.
The WorldCat Selection service helps libraries that use several book suppliers streamline selection and ordering and delivers the corresponding WorldCat records to the library system.
Selectors can review notification slips from many suppliers in WorldCat Selection, saving them the trouble of learning to manipulate several supplier systems.
For those libraries that wish to take advantage of both WorldCat Selection and Blackwell Collection manager, a planned link from WorldCat Selection records to related titles in Collection Manager will consolidate all information needed to make informed selection decisions.
Collection Manager can augment the selection and ordering process with additional information such as tables of contents and when available, ebook previews.
OCLC and Cornell University Library staff have worked together to develop the WorldCat Selection service which is based on software known as the Integrated Tool for Selection and Ordering at Cornell University Library (ITSO CUL).
[Source: Blackwell/OCLC] [Received: July 2007] Back to headlines Cash boost to our scientific and technological past 32 grants totalling £237,000 have been awarded in the past year to help museums to acquire and conserve items of outstanding scientific or industrial importance.
Managed by The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), the PReservation of Industrial and Scientific Material (PRISM) Grant Fund awards up to £250,000 each year to museums and other heritage-based organisations in England and Wales.
The list of objects that have received funding in 2006/07 demonstrates an eclectic mix, including: * £12,735 (the largest acquisition grant) to Yorkshire Museum for the purchase of a collection of fluorite gemstones.
* £20,000 to the Lydia Eva and Mincarlo Charitable Trust for the conservation of the 'Lydia Eva', the last surviving steam herring drifter in the UK, based in Lowestoft.
* £20,000 to Beamish Open Air Museum for the conservation of a steam locomotive * £5,000 towards the purchase of a 19th century diving suit by Southampton Maritime Museum There is a new PRISM Grant Fund logo available to download from the Web site for recipients of funding to use in their promotional material.
For a full report of PRISM awards 2006/2007 please visit the PRISM section of the MLA Web site.
[Source: MLA] [Received: August 2007] Back to headlines DCC Blawg DCC Blawg, the Legal Blog of the UK's Digital Curation Centre has begun covering all manner of issues relating to digital information and the law including data sharing, intellectual property, licensing, access, copyright, data protection, freedom of information and privacy, to name but a few.
Readers with an interest in issues relating to the curation and long-term preservation of digital science and research data may also wish to view the Digital Curation Blog, also produced by the Digital Curation Centre.
DCC Blawg: http://dccblawg.blogspot.com/ Digital Curation Blog: http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/ [Source: DCC] [Received: June 2007] Back to headlines UnityUK data improvement programme to be rolled out OCLC PICA, in partnership with The Combined Regions (TCR), has completed the roll-out of phase one of a series of enhancements that improve the quality and the breadth of data available through the UnityUK national resource sharing service.
The first phase of data enhancements has been carried out by OCLC PICA in response to feedback from users and the next phase is due to begin in summer 2007.
The data enhancement programme consists of three key strands.
First, the data that was imported from the former UnityWeb service has been cleaned.
Records have been de-duplicated, in one case, a single ISBN was present no less than 40 times.
Furthermore, non-existing items were removed and (where necessary) data within each record has been moved to the appropriate MARC field.
As a result of this project, in excess of 3,300,000 records have had their data made more consistent with MARC rules.
The second development strand integrates the catalogues and holdings information from the four main locations providing resources for the visually impaired.
Inclusion of these catalogues brings a unique aspect to the UnityUK union catalogue.
Data from the catalogues of the Royal National Institute for the Blind, National Library for the Blind, CALIBRE and The Torch Trust will be loaded into UnityUK.
Pat Beech, Manager RNIB National Library Service, explains the significance of the move, "Adding collection information from Revealweb to the Unity UK service is a real step forward for blind and partially sighted people as it will make it easier for them to use mainstream libraries.
This project is an excellent example of what can be achieved when public libraries and the voluntary sector work together."
Finally, the development programme addresses the quality and depth of holdings records within the service.
Complete database loads have been carried out for around 70 UnityUK member libraries and 8 million high quality BL records, with holdings, will be loaded over the summer 2007.
For further information: OCLC PICA http://www.oclcpica.org/ UnityUK http://www.unity-uk.com/ Revealweb http://www.revealweb.org.uk/ [Source: TheAnswer Ltd/OCLC PICA] [Received: July 2007] Back to headlines MLA invites applications to 'Their Past Your Future 2' The Museums Libraries Archives (MLA) Partnership is launching an extension to the highly successful Big Lottery-funded 'Their Past Your Future' Programme.
The MLA would like museums, libraries and archives to apply for funding for projects that will form phase two of the Programme.
In this second phase lasting from 2007-10, MLA will manage an annual funding programme offering grants of between £500 £10,000 to museum, libraries and archives in England.
Organisations may use this funding to develop programmes, workshops, exhibitions and events which promote understanding of the impact of conflict.
Organisations may apply for grants focusing on two areas: work with children and young people and inter-generational learning.
The closing date for applications for the first year of the programme is 19 October 2007.
Further details of the 'Their Past Your Future 2' initiative are available from regional MLA agencies.
A series of regional seminars will be held to offer advice for staff from museums, libraries and archives who are developing applications to the funding programme.
Confirmed dates are: MLA East Midlands 13 September 2007 MLA East of England 26 September 2007 MLA London and MLA South East 25 September 2007 MLA North West 18 September 2007 MLA West Midlands 12 September 2007 Further information about the grant scheme, application guidance and forms may be downloaded from http://www.mla.gov.uk/website/aboutus/grants [Source: MLA] [Received: August 2007] Back to headlines Fedora Commons Announces $4.9m Grant Fedora Commons today announced the award of a 4-year $4.9m grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organisational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations.
Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organisation that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia.
The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.
With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form.
The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide.
With its roots in the Fedora open source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work.
The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.
Recognising the importance of multiple participants in the development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will co-operate in software development, application deployment, and community outreach for Fedora Commons.
This network of partners will be instrumental in making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit organisation that will support and incubate open source software projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation, access, collaboration, and preservation.
Fedora Commons http://www.fedora-commons.org [Source: Fedora Commons] [Received: August 2007] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Information Science in Transition Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information Science in Transition Buzz data wiki database rss metadata thesaurus vocabularies blog repositories copyright flickr ejournal youtube facebook twitter ict privacy research standards bibliometrics Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reviews an edited volume published to commemorate the founding of the Institute of Information Scientists in 1958.
Until it joined with the Library Association in 2002 to form the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), the Institute of Information Scientists was a professional organisation for those primarily working in scientific and technical information work.
The chapters in this volume were first published in 2008 as a special issue of the Journal of Information Science to commemorate the founding of the institute in 1958.
In accordance with this, many of the chapters provide a retrospective sometimes even anecdotal overview of developments in information science in the UK since the 1950s.
While the approach of the volume is thematic, a major focus is on key initiatives and individuals, the latter including such luminaries as Jason Farradane, Cyril Cleverden and Karen Spärk Jones.
Following a guest editorial by Brian Vickery, there are sixteen chapters in the book.
While each chapter stands alone, conceptually the volume moves with some exceptions from largely retrospective reviews of past progress in information science by scholars of the older generation to overviews of current trends and technologies by their younger colleagues.
Vickery’s editorial tries to place information science in its historical context, explaining how the advent of digital computers and the Internet has transformed the discipline dramatically while simultaneously making its future more uncertain.
This is also a view articulated by several of the volume contributors.
The opening chapter is an attempt by Jack Meadows to discern the main research themes in UK information science over the past 50 years.
A survey of the Journal of Information Science and other journals showed that the predominant theme was information retrieval, but that there was also important research being undertaken into information seeking, communication and bibliometrics.
The chapter also tries to delineate some of the factors affecting information science research in the UK, for example noting the negative consequences of the demise of the old British Library Research and Development Department in the 1990s [1].
He concludes, however, on a positive note, pointing out that ‘activities that were relatively marginal decades ago such as automated information retrieval are now at the heart of major growth industries’ (p. 17).
He also notes that the widening interest in information science concepts has brought in researchers from other disciplines which is probably one of the key lessons of the whole book.
In the second chapter, David Bawden (City University) again uses the Journal of Information Science as a means of exploring the development of the information science discipline itself, focusing on the underlying philosophical bases of the subject proposed by scholars like Bertie Brookes and Jason Farradane.
The third chapter is by Stella Dextre Clarke.
This is a retrospective of fifty years of knowledge organisation work in the information science domain that takes a partly anecdotal approach, attempting to illustrate ‘how it felt to work in those times’ (p. 45).
Perhaps the best aspect of this is that it enables Dextre Clarke to give the reader a feel for what information retrieval could be like in the card-based pre-computer age.
The chapter opens with a brief overview of the state of subject classification in the late 1950s, noting the continued practical predominance of enumerative schemes like the Dewey Decimal Classification while the theoreticians S. R. Ranganathan and Henry E. Bliss were still working away developing their (then) revolutionary ideas of ‘faceted classification.’ The focus then changes to the development of thesauri, noting the importance of Jean Aitchison’s pioneering work on thesaurus construction.
Dextre Clarke then provides a very brief overview of the role of controlled vocabularies in the early information retrieval tests conducted as part of the Aslib-Cranfield Research Project, a topic covered in more detail in the following chapter.
Finally, moving to the present day, Dextre Clarke notes the continued importance of controlled vocabularies in the form of taxonomies and provides some pointers for a future Semantic Web.
Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research Laboratory, Cambridge) provides the following chapter on the history of evaluation in information retrieval.
He starts out with an outline of the Cranfield experiments led by Cyril Cleverdon in the 1960s and follows this with a brief overview of US developments in computer-based retrieval as represented by Gerard Salton’s SMART Information Retrieval System and the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLARS bibliographic retrieval service.
The focus then shifts back to the UK with the attempts by Karen Spärk Jones and others to define how to plan and execute information retrieval experiments, including the development of standard test collections.
The proposal for an ‘ideal’ test collection was not taken forward at the time, but its role is now fulfilled in part by the annual Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), which has been running since 1992 [2].
Robinson provides an outline of the TREC process and methodology and its evolution into the Web era.
Chapter 5 turns to the all-important subject of user studies.
Tom Wilson starts his review with J. D. Bernal’s study of the use of scientific literature that he presented at the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference in 1948.
Follow-up research was relatively slow in getting underway, but by the 1970s, there had been detailed studies of scientists’ literature searching practices by John Martyn of the Aslib Research Group and of social scientists’ information requirements by a research group based at the University of Bath Library [3].
Wilson identifies the growth period for user studies as the 1980s, by which time ‘information use and users had become a curriculum topic in the schools of librarianship in the UK’ (p. 99).
Despite this growth, which Wilson tracks through Web of Science data, the chapter concludes with a warning about the dangers of this branch of information science becoming too removed from actual practice.
Blaise Cronin (Indiana University) then contributes a typically elegant chapter entitled ‘The sociological turn in information science.’ Partly anecdotal in nature, the chapter explores the interdisciplinary nature of information science by tracing the influence of the wider social sciences.
Cronin’s starting point is that ‘the social’ has long been part of the information science discipline, whether implicitly or explicitly.
Using the metaphor of a ‘turn’ e.g., as pioneered by the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy Cronin outlines some of the major contemporary influences on the social sciences, including the range of approaches characterised as critical theory.
He concludes that the information science discipline ‘has long been mindful of, and indeed receptive to, sociological thinking’ (p. 122).
The following two chapters focus on particular application domains.
The first is a historical introduction to the discipline now known as chemoinformatics, written by Peter Willett of the University of Sheffield.
This chapter outlines the information-rich retrieval challenges of chemistry, which has long had specific requirements, typified by the development of services like the American Chemical Society’s CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) registry or the Beilstein database.
More recently, the advent of high-throughput experimentation and combinatorial chemistry has vastly increased the size and diversity of the data that needs to be interrogated by computational tools.
Willett sees the emergence of chemoinformatics as being ‘driven in large part by the scaling-up of … techniques, which had traditionally been aimed at just a few tens of molecules, to the very large datasets that characterize modern pharmaceutical research’ (p. 155).
Chemoinformatics itself is viewed by Willett as a specialised form of data mining, ‘involving the analysis of chemical and biological information to support the discovery of new bioactive molecules’ (p. 133).
The following chapter, by Peter Bath (also of the University of Sheffield) covers health informatics.
As with chemistry, healthcare planning and clinical practice are becoming increasingly dependent on the widespread capture and availability of vast amounts of data, ‘collected, stored, analysed, transferred, and accessed on a daily basis’ (p. 170).
The chapter outlines the particular challenges of health informatics, including the significant problem of integrating legacy data and ethical issues such as security, privacy and confidentiality.
In chapter 9, Elisabeth Davenport of Napier University explores the connections between social informatics research in the USA as practised by Rob Kling and others [4] and the tradition of socio-technical studies undertaken in the UK, described as a ‘fusion of sociology and computing in ICT research’ (p. 201).
The chapter mainly focuses on work undertaken by three UK research groups, Enid Mumford and colleagues at the University of Manchester, the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh, and the ‘critical informatics’ approach of the London School of Economics.
The final chapters take a broadly thematic approach to particular information science challenges.
Peter Enser (University of Brighton) contributes a chapter on visual information retrieval, both semantic and content-based, noting how the field has been entirely transformed by greatly increased availability of images (both still and moving) on the Internet.
Elizabeth Orna and Barry Mahon then present chapters respectively on the development of information policies at national and institutional level and on professional development in the information sector.
Mahon’s chapter is described as a ‘personal view’ and is written in an informal style at variance with other parts of this volume.
That said, he does usefully define metadata as ‘a default term for what information scientists would recognize as the whole range of activities and processes designed to make information retrievable’ (p. 295).
The next three chapters cover some topics of active current interest.
First, Charles Oppenheim of Loughborough University provides an overview of electronic scholarly publishing and open access.
After a brief explanation of some of the factors affecting scholarly publishing in the scientific, technical and medical (STM) domain, Oppenheim turns to address the open access (OA) agenda in more detail.
The chapter outlines the two main forms of OA that have been adopted so far, often characterised as the ‘green’ and ‘gold’ approaches, respectively depositing copies of papers in repositories and publishing in OA journals.
The business models of both are compared.
That for the green approach is said to be ‘simply that the body maintaining the repository pays for the ingest of materials, addition of metadata and other technical and administrative requirements’ (p. 303).
The business models for gold OA journals shift the main costs of publication from subscribers to authors or in many cases their employers or research funders.
Oppenheim points out that if gold OA was ever adopted on a wide scale, HE institutions would probably have to carry a bigger proportion of costs in order to maintain the market (p. 306).
Other topics covered in this chapter include the implications of OA publishing on journal quality (including peer review), the potential increase of citation counts of OA materials, copyright, and the attitudes of publishers, HE institutions and funding bodies.
The following chapter covers the extremely topical subjects of social software and social networking tools.
In this, Wendy Warr introduces a number of Web 2.0 technologies, and indicates how some of them are used in publishing and industrial contexts.
The chapter provides very brief introductions to: wikis, blogs and RSS feeds, social networking tools (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube), social bookmarking sites (e.g., delicious, Connotea, CiteULike), and virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life).
Warr notes that the ‘world of Web 2.0 is fast changing,’ which doubtless explains why the chapter does not mention the social networking tool de nos jours: Twitter.
The chapter ends with an overview of how these tools are being used by information professionals, publishers, and the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, e.g.
for developing collaborative workspaces.
Jack Meadows’s opening chapter identified bibliometrics as one of the key topics of the past 50 years of information science.
In chapter 15, Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton provides an overview of recent developments in that field.
Thelwall dates the emergence of bibliometrics as a scientific field to the development of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) citation databases in the 1960s.
Their existence encouraged the development of both evaluative bibliometrics based (in the main) on the analysis of citations and relational bibliometrics interested in exploring the structure and nature of scientific disciplines.
Thelwall argues that the biggest recent change in bibliometrics ‘stems from the availability of new significant sources of information about scholarly communication, such as patents, web pages and digital library usage statistics’ (pp.
351-352).
The chapter then introduces how bibliometrics has been used recently to develop tools for the evaluation of individual researchers (the h-index) and for supporting national research evaluation exercises.
In the final section, Thelwall provides a brief introduction to the domain that he has done much to shape himself, i.e.
Webometrics [5].
The methods used for this include the analysis of hyperlinks e.g.
for generating Web impact factors and Web citations in journal or conference papers.
The final chapter in the volume is a short piece by Eugene Garfield jauntily entitled: ‘How I learned to love the Brits.’ This anecdotal piece focuses in part on his attendance at the Dorking Conference on Classification in 1957 and the many friendships that he had forged then and since with his UK colleagues.
Looking at the whole volume, a few key themes stand out.
Firstly, some of the authors emphasise the important balance that needs to be maintained between theory and practice.
Wilson’s comments on the potentially overly theoretical nature of user studies have already been mentioned.
In a similar vein, Robertson notes that the laboratory nature of the TREC experiments means that they are essentially an abstraction, while ‘certain aspects of the real world are highly resistant to abstraction’ (p. 86).
Secondly, it is clear that certain aspects of information science research have been completely transformed by the growing availability of vast amounts of networked information.
This applies in particular to information retrieval research, where the TREC experiments have needed to demonstrate scalability as well as precision and recall.
It is also true of more specialised areas like image retrieval or subject classification.
In some contexts, the existence of networks has led to the development of completely new areas of research, e.g.
Webometrics.
Thirdly, Cronin’s chapter, together with the chapters on chemoinformatics and health informatics, demonstrates that information science is highly interdisciplinary in nature.
Cronin has, however, noticed that citation relationships are often unidirectional.
With reference to the sociology of science, he notes that this domain’s ‘intellectual vanguard … are cited routinely in the leading information science journals,’ but that ‘regrettably, there is little citation in the reverse direction’ (p. 119).
Perhaps the most important general insight from this volume is the importance of linking information science research to its wider contexts.
Given the sociological turn in information science described in Cronin’s chapter, it would seem useful to apply some of these techniques to topics covered in other chapters.
For example, in his discussion of institutional OA policies and mandates, Oppenheim comments that ‘surveys and anecdotal evidence indicate that the real issue is not that scholars are not convinced by OA, but rather they do not have the time to convert their materials into a format suitable for an IR [institutional repository], and the matter is simply not a high enough priority for them’ (p. 314).
Perhaps this area would represent a profitable one for sociologists of science to explore in more detail.
This volume would be of interest to anyone interested in the history of information science in the UK and for those wanting to get an overview of current trends.
The volume is well produced and the layout very clear.
I noticed the occasional typographic error, chiefly in personal names, e.g.
Cramer for Cranmer (p. 98), Jacob for Jacobs (p. 321).
One minor annoyance was that Mahon’s conception of ‘Europe’ seems to conflate the geographical expression with the political entity of the European Union (and its predecessor organisations).
The main remaining question that needs to be asked is whether papers already published in an academic journal really need to be published again in book form?
After all, many potential readers may already have access to this content via their institutional subscriptions to e-journals.
The editor addresses this challenge in his preface, commenting that publishing in book form enables the content to be distributed to a wider readership.
On balance, this assessment is probably correct.
References Goulding, A.
“Searching for a research agenda for the library and information science community.” Journal of Library and Information Science 39(3), September 2007, 123-125.
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) http://trec.nist.gov/ Line, M. B.
“The information uses and needs of social scientists: an overview of INFROSS.” Aslib Proceedings 23(8), 1971, 412-434.
Van House, Nancy A.
“Science and technology studies and information studies.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 38, 2004, 3-86.
Thelwall, M., Vaughan, L., and Björneborn, L. “Webometrics.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 39, 2005, 81-135.
Author Details Michael Day Research and Development Team Leader UKOLN, University of Bath Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Information Science in Transition” Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/day-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Public Library 2.0: Culture Change?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Public Library 2.0: Culture Change?
Buzz mobile software framework wiki archives doi blog flickr opac wordpress podcast librarything youtube facebook twitter microblogging research standards netvibes Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Hammond explores UK public libraries' growing participation in social media to reach their audiences online, with a focus on blogging.
Beginning in the mid 2000s I began keeping an eye on how libraries have been getting involved with social software I started this haphazardly just out of interest but then I started to be more systematic when I needed to explore online resources for my organisation, the National Railway Museum.
When I left to pursue my MA in Librarianship at the University of Sheffield I took the opportunity to do some serious research into the subject with a focus on UK public libraries as it seemed to me that they were hugely under-represented online.
Although that research met its purpose in gaining me my degree in 2009 I was not content to leave it there; I had had such an overwhelming response to my online survey I knew that this was a topic that excited interest, both positive and negative.
In a fast-moving world where what was the 'killer app' yesterday is all but forgotten tomorrow, it can be hard for the practitioner to keep abreast of what is happening.
I intend to provide an overview of current public library activity online with a focus on blogging (as that was the focus of my research) and demonstrate some examples of success.
Initial Research In aiming to discover the level of engagement of UK public libraries with Library 2.0, I specifically concentrated on blogging in order to narrow the focus of the research to a scope that was achievable given the time constraints.
I also felt that blogs are perhaps the most versatile Web 2.0 tool at libraries' disposal, so that taking a snapshot of blog activity would give a pretty good idea of their wider engagement with Web 2.0 tools.
Consequently, I tried to find as many UK public library blogs as I could.
Further to this end, I wanted to explore the attitudes and behaviours of public librarians towards the use of Library 2.0 in their libraries which I did with an online survey.
Findings Libraries Which Blog As of August 2008 I identified 20 blogs [1] (my methodology [2] was multi-pronged: a mixture of searches and requests to the online library community, as well as an element of chance: as Clyde [3] said, 'serendipity is involved in finding blogs in general').
By September 2009, only 13 of these were still active; 6 were inactive; and 1 totally defunct (although this defunct blog was part of Newcastle's library services and they have since relaunched their online presence to much greater effect).
As of July 2010 the totals are as follows: Taking Crawford's definition [4] of an active blog being one that has been posted to in the last 90 days: Active blogs 19 Inactive blogs 13 Moved 2 Defunct – link no longer active 1 Private blogs , login needed 2 The most recently created blog, somewhat depressingly, is specifically aimed at saving branch libraries from closure in Doncaster [5].
Compare this with a concurrent study that found 161 blogs in 39 UK Higher Education institutions [6], also with the 252 public library blogs that Walt Crawford found in 2007 [7], chiefly in the USA (he updated his study in 2009 and found a lot had fallen by the wayside).
The inescapable fact is that these are not big numbers, although this study did only look at blogs.
Morris [8] adopted a wider scope in looking at uptake of social software by public library authorities; he also found a few examples of some libraries performing well with social software, most notably Manchester [9], Newcastle [10] and Gateshead [11].
A quick tour around the public library biblioblogosphere: The longest -running blog is Paige Turner – Librarian [12] for Swansea Libraries, this blog began in December 2006 and is still going strong.
Manchester Lit List is the most prolific blog with at least one post every weekday.
The Save Doncaster Libraries blog is the newest, started 15 July 2010.
Blogger and Wordpress are the most popular platforms used.
Most blogs are 'mixed,' i.e.
cover a mixture of topics from events in the library to signposting online resources.
A few are specific, e.g.
the Plymouth Library's Bookstart Bear Blog [13] which is a reader development blog for under 5s and their families.
As often happens, the original focus of a blog can change with use, e.g.
What's New at the CyberLibrary [14] started life as a blog for librarians in south-west England, but has now expanded its remit to reach library users too; but it remains primarily a filter blog, highlighting online resources chosen by librarians and deemed to be of interest and use to readers.
Harrogate's New Look, No Shush – Harrogate Library Project [15] keeps readers up to date with its ongoing library refurbishment project but also provides news of events and basic information such as opening hours.
Attitudes to Library 2.0: Why Are UK Public Libraries Not Blogging?
In order to discover attitudes to blogging in public libraries, I conducted an online survey [16]: 498 people responded and a wide range of attitudes and behaviours were discovered.
The construction of the survey followed on from the qualitative methods of Farkas [17] and Rutherford [18].
What emerged was a strong desire to blog on the part of the majority of respondents and explore the use of other Web 2.0 tools in an official capacity.
This result is not surprising considering the method of recruiting respondents, i.e.
using a Web 2.0 tool, the online questionnaire package SurveyMonkey [19] and the self-selecting nature of surveys in general.
But it did provide a microcosm of what many would see as the whole point of social software: it gives you a voice.
When it comes to reasons why public libraries aren't blogging, the trends that emerged may not come as a great surprise: technological barriers presented by IT departments barriers presented by prevailing organisational culture apathy of library staff, lack of engagement a feeling that social networking has no relevance to what a library should be doing a lack of time to devote to content creation use of other methods of communication deemed more appropriate.
This latter point referred in part to the library's Web site but there was also some feeling that more traditional methods of communication such as flyers and posters were more appropriate.
The survey responses gathered for this study did seem to fall into both extremes of this debate: that public libraries should definitely be engaging with Library 2.0, that they definitely should not, and every shade in between.
Many respondents felt that their library had something of value to be added to the Internet via a blog or any other social networking tool.
Many detected organisational resistance to blogging, from other staff and from management.
Others felt their enthusiasm met with ambivalence and apathy rather than out-and-out hostility.
Many respondents said they felt that their IT departments were resistant to librarians engaging with Library 2.0, a commonly used phrase referred to the IT department as "gatekeepers" in a derogatory sense.
This attitude tended to prevail among the US respondents.
Herring et al.
[20] posited blogs as bridging genre, removing the necessity to be so reliant on the IT department to create content.
Farkas has recommended blogging as a means of wresting control from webmasters of the information the library disseminates and of delivering it into the hands of the librarians themselves.
The UK respondents complained more about the library as an organisation blocking their online activities.
A study carried out by a UK Internet company, Huddle, found that many local government employees were keen to utilise social software for professional reasons but that their access to such sites was blocked by the IT department and the higher levels of management driving policy [21].
One respondent to this survey replied to the initial email sent out inviting participation by bemoaning the fact that their access to SurveyMonkey was blocked on work computers; luckily they were motivated enough to request an alternative way to complete it, in the end I pasted the questions into the body of an email then pasted the replies into the survey myself!
Below is a selection of excerpts from survey respondents' replies that I feel are representative of what librarians were saying in 2008, and are still saying now in 2010: 'I think I speak on behalf of most public library services when I say there is active resistance from our organisations to the concept of a blog.
X Council has a very successful Web site, and a blog – or any other social media – is seen as direct competition, rather like setting up an external microsite.
There's also an organisational lack of understanding of blogs and Web 2.0 generally.'
'There are some forward thinking individuals within the organisation but they are in a minority and constrained by existing organisational structures, structures set up to deliver a 20th as opposed to 21st century Library service.'
'The main problem we have ... is that the Council doesn't afford us the flexibility we need to have.
We should be able to try new things whenever they present themselves to us.
Instead, the same new things are blocked by the corporate web filter, or prohibited by the communications policy.
Changes are coming, though.
Doors are opening and our managers (and their managers) are becoming more receptive to new ideas, and to new uses of technology.
I think I hope my answers ... would be more positive in 18 months' time.'
'We have been quite lucky as the senior managers in the library service have fought for an independent Virtual Library, not part of the County Council site.
This has enabled us to progress well and I am keen to continue this when the new authorities are established.'
So there is some burgeoning hope amid the gloom, some authorities are seeing the value and putting their support behind engagement.
However there was a general feeling of despair at the prevailing organisational culture within authorities: 'It's the organisational culture which tends to grind people down.'
'We are reactive not proactive.'
Many respondents expressed frustration at the seemingly unending round of restructuring that left staff much reduced in numbers and in morale.
Put this feeling from 2008 with the responses to recent developments with respect to funding cuts and the possibility of the abandonment of the modernisation of public libraries by The Coalition [22], the context in which this research sits is one of disillusionment, frustration and a fear for jobs: 'We have been restructured year after year sometimes twice a year, each time losing staff and stock budget.
The service is cut further and further and said to be 'more efficient than ever'.
We are so efficient we can no longer hold the regular events because we don't have the staff and Reader's Groups are being handed over to the public to run.
Service points are left unmanned with the promise that they will bring in self service and make our lives easier.
(We know that as soon as they make it work they will sack even more staff.)
We are not a happy workforce.'
Evaluation of Libraries' Blogs: What Makes a Successful Blog?
How is Success Measured?
As can be seen above, there are barriers to Web 2.0 adoption put in place by the public library authority and/or the IT department.
In these cases it may well prove useful to be able to demonstrate the success or efficacy of a blog as a communication tool.
In conversation with several public librarians at a recent panel day held by the Oxford University Press, a recurring theme of 'bosses want numbers' was heard.
These metrics may help to put together a business case for a library starting its own blog.
In addition to this, some degree of established practice may help to provide a framework for success allowing new adopters to benefit from the experiences of early adopters.
The literature suggests public libraries are lagging behind other sectors in engagement with Library 2.0, and blogging specifically; very few peer-reviewed studies had been conducted up to 2009 but there is a move towards deriving and utilising standardised methods for blog evaluation to determine success.
Goodfellow and Graham [23] attended a conference and used a blog to communicate with their colleagues who were not in attendance.
They felt that this widened staff participation in the conference and shared the benefits with them.
Blair and Level [24] highlighted the lack of any standard metric for the evaluation of a blog and made some steps towards attempting to measure the success, or otherwise, of their academic library blog.
Combining the methods used by these two studies give the following metrics: Statistics: number of visits and hits.
Their software monitored both visits and hits, the former being number of times the home page was viewed, the latter being a count of all the blog pages being viewed Number of inlinks from other blogs and Web sites Number of subscribers in feedreaders Number of comments Survey Self-evaluation – e.g Goodfellow and Graham found that they networked with other bibliobloggers, i.e.
other librarians, and also that their technical and communication skills had improved.
It can be seen that purely rating a blog's success on the number of comments it solicits will give an incomplete picture of its impact, indeed many have written on the phenomenon of participation inequality [25] whereby far more people read online content than react to it via comments or other methods of participation; this phenomenon is referred to as "lurking" which is a rather derogatory term for "reading" in this author's opinion!
Perhaps this is something that must be borne in mind for those (such as myself) espousing social software's benefits as a participatory model for user engagement: active participation is not compulsory, "just" reading or "passive consumption" is to be welcomed too!
Moving on from this, Gosling et al.
[26] used three case studies to examine how public libraries successfully used Web 2.0 tools broadly, and blogs specifically, to provide enhanced services.
This paper is useful in outlining the development of the blogs, how they are used and how their success is being measured; it would be a good first port-of-call for anyone considering setting up a library blog.
One of these public libraries, Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation (CCLC) [27], later surveyed users to find out how their blogs are being used [28].
They found a receptive audience which was interested in the blog content, but some had not been aware of its presence, although they had been reading its content, pushed to the homepage by feeds.
An important point highlighted by this study was that links to and from the library's homepage are absolutely vital if a blog is to survive and thrive.
As well as links across a library's online presence, content feeds are vital to maintain a coherent message across whatever platforms are being used, not just blogs.
CCPL pulls content from all its blogs onto the library homepage which means that content there is always fresh and up to date and this is achieved automatically.
Figure 1: Manchester Libraries blog Manchester lit list An example of this coherence of online presence can be seen from Manchester libraries' blog (Figure 1) and Facebook page (Figure 2) where it can be seen that using HootSuite (an online brand management service that pushes content from one application into any or all of your other applications) the latest blog post is also visible on the Facebook page.
Figure 2: Manchester Libraries Facebook page Benefits of Blogging Lee and Bates [29] suggested that demonstrable professional benefits result from blogging and this was also found in some of the responses to the survey: people felt up to date with issues in the library and information science world They felt that reflective writing forced them to think more about what they did in their roles and that they could prove their worth by simply pointing to the ready-made archive.
It was also felt that they had access to the rest of the biblioblogosphere for ideas on what to do in their libraries, a sharing of ideas was valued.
Some respondents said they felt they were more in touch with other branches in their public library authority because they read their blogs.
It is clear that many of these benefits relate only to the staff.
For example, one response to the question that asked whether they considered their blog to be a success replied: 'Early days yet, main process has been to get staff enthused.'
But as McLean and Merceica [28] found, the service users are starting to read their public library's output.
One New Zealander respondent felt their blog was 'relevant and up to date and allows feedback from the public so it is a successful tool.
We can advertise and make use of our resources raising awareness when blogging.'
Another said 'We are getting an increasing number of hits.
The books reviewed are being requested heavily and events are being better patronised.
It was also a way to put our library "personality" out there because our Web site is through our council Web site and we do not have much control over it.'
Generally blogs were felt to be acquiring 'a growing following.'
The big win when it comes to blogging and indeed any Web 2.0 application is that it gives you a voice, it puts you where your users are [30] and to provide examples of where this has worked to great effect I have, I regret, to look overseas.
Christchurch City Libraries [31] in New Zealand demonstrate how lowering the threshold to participation and giving young adults their own online space engages a group traditionally regarded as non-users.
They offer them the opportunity to comment, as on most blogs, but also invite them to write a review, make suggestions and enter competitions whilst avoiding being patronising or attempting to appear 'cool'.
Figure 3: Christchurch City Libraries teen blog – the pulse / te auaha Austin Public Library's Connected Youth [32] pages show how gaming and events are central to the library's offer, this is by no means unusual in many US public libraries.
Figure 4: Austin Public Library teen blog – Connected Youth And those trailblazers, Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (PLCMC) show how their Library Loft [33] site pulls content and provides links across a whole host of Web 2.0 platforms, lowering the threshold to access about as low as it is possible to go!
This site uses embedded content so well that it is not necessary to go anywhere else, it is a comprehensive list of what's current: IM via Meebo, flickr, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, OPAC search, among others.
Figure 5: PLCMC teen blog LibraryLoft Keys to Success Important factors in producing a successful blog are outlined here, drawn from my own research and also from some of the recommended reading: Find an Advocate It seems that those libraries that have been able to successfully use social software have been greatly assisted by having advocates in their service, both enthusiastic individuals who are willing to put the time in, often their own in the first instance, and in higher levels of management who understand how their services can be enhanced and promoted more effectively.
A good example of this is Plymouth Libraries (see above).
Currency Blogs that post new content regularly seem to live longer!
Regular posting of new content shows that you care about your blog, if you fail to demonstrate this, then why should anyone else care enough to read it?
'I think online social networking sites could be very useful for libraries if they are properly maintained.
I think too often people get very keen about the new technology, but forget about the hard work needed to promote it and keep it going.
The technology is not enough, there has to be some content, resource, function which users perceive as useful and worth visiting again and again, otherwise you end up with a pathetic looking page, which is of no interest to anyone and a waste of time and resources in setting it up.'
Relevance As well as currency of course, you must pay attention to relevance, posting about things that your readers will find interesting.
Gauging this is easy if you enter into conversations with your readers, the very spirit of Web 2.0, therefore: Two-way Communication Make it easy for people to comment and reply to people who do.
Promotion A commonly heard moan is that 'we started a blog but nobody commented and nobody looked at it.'
See above regarding the reluctance to comment, but the response to this complaint should be 'how did you promote the blog?'
One of the really surprising things I discovered was how few blogs and library web pages linked to one another; this was in some cases due to the fact the blog was unofficial, but otherwise it is a cardinal sin.
See the examples above of how content is pushed and pulled across a library's online presence to create a coherent message promoting the library's blog/twitterfeed/Facebook page, etc.
Here Plymouth Libraries provide a coherent message across their Web presence, with two-way links: Figure 6: Plymouth Council Figure 7: Plymouth Library children's blog – Bookstart Bear Blog Figure 8: Plymouth Libraries on twitter In addition to this, there are more traditional promotional methods within the library, especially word of mouth; this leads to another key factor: staff buy-in.
Staff Advocates Some survey respondents felt that there were many members of staff who saw no relevance to the library's work in using Web 2.0.
If staff do not use these applications themselves then it will be hard for them to to understand their value.
Lewisham libraries glut of blogs [1] were produced when they followed the 23 Things programme (see below), originally devised by Helene Blowers of PLCMC [34].
This set of tutorials was created to 'encourage staff to experiment and learn about the new and emerging technologies that are reshaping the context of information on the Internet today' and can be a powerful tool in converting sceptics.
Don't be afraid to fail: if something just is not working, learn lessons and move on; it is alright to let a blog die, sometimes they run a natural course, especially if their focus is a specific project or an initiative run for a specific period such as a summer reading challenge.
Conclusions: Where to Now?
Aside from noting negative factors, it must be said that in the UK, and especially in the USA, there are some excellent public library blogs, widely respected within the profession but more importantly appreciated by their public (see above).
When I began this research in 2008 I did not include microblogging sites such as Twitter in my remit, I did not see much evidence of engagement at that time but now see that activity as mainstream.
It must also be mentioned that many examples of UK public libraries starting to dip their toes into the wider Library 2.0 world were found along the way to finding blogs.
Now more and more are starting to appear on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and elsewhere; I have now decided to track this activity [35] too, now I know the numbers involved are not yet too daunting.
Library 2.0 is moving beyond specific technologies, and engagement does not need to be tied to any one application as has been shown above; the more ways the library finds to reach its users, the better.
Indeed moving beyond the individual technologies can be encapsulated and governed by a general social media policy if that is what is deemed important before adoption is approved by local authorities.
A recent blog post from a (non-librarian) social media expert [36] threw out the challenge to public libraries to develop such policies in order to safeguard themselves in the digital age in a context of funding cuts.
Some authorities have started to do this and for those who have not, there is no need to start from scratch: Stephens [37] has drawn one up that can be adopted and adapted to suit.
Exciting developments: Portsmouth and Surrey library staff has produced a Libraries and Web 2.0 wiki [38] whose aims are to: Create a record of Web 2.0 ... usage by libraries around the United Kingdom Build a useful resource for librarians around the South East / country interested in Web 2.0 Provide evidence on the usefulness of Web 2.0 and set it in context Develop a more up-to-date version of '23 things' as a training tool for staff This UK-specific 23 Things [39] programme has just been trialled 'by staff from 11 library authorities, 15 HE/FE institutions, and two NHS trusts... and two intrepid librarians in Australia' and results are pending.
I intend to put myself through the 23 Things and would urge everyone to get behind this initiative.
If librarians fail to keep pace with the changing needs of existing and future patrons, then they will render themselves obsolete; these are scary times and our worth is continually being questioned.
* It is hoped that this research will prove useful in providing information for more public libraries to get involved with social software and that it goes some way to answering the query one survey respondent had: 'I would appreciate finding out how many library services maintain blogs as we have had difficulty convincing our corporate authority that this is vital in terms of reaching out to audiences.
We have explored other options such as Facebook... and received a similar response.'
Get in Touch Although my initial research is done and the MA safely completed, I shall keep going.
The blog continuesand I will add more bookmarks to the Delicious pages as and when.
I have decided to widen my remit to include all Library 2.0 engagement, so please let me know via my blog [40] whenever you find a UK public library engaged in Library 2.0 in some form: wiki, Facebook, Twitter, LibraryThing, netvibes, mobile optimised interface, podcasts, etc, and I will put them on the delicious page [35] and the Libraries and Web 2.0 wiki [38].
Alternatively please edit that wiki yourselves!
Additionally, blogs will continue to be bookmarked [1] and entered on the uklibraryblogs wiki [41].
Let us hope that very soon I am inundated and cannot keep up with all the online activity.
Indeed, it is to be hoped that very soon this research will have been rendered pointless since a public library's presence online will just be another part of its core offer.
Editor's note: We are fortunate to be able to provide an article on 23 Things in Public Libraries in this issue [42].
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Tame the Web http://tametheweb.com/2010/06/10/anytown-public-librarys-social-media-policy/ Libraries and Web 2.0 wiki http://librariesandweb2.wetpaint.com/ 23 Things http://23things.wetpaint.com/ Hammond, S.C. (2009).
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Jennie Findlay http://uklibraryblogs.pbworks.com/Institutional+Library+Blogs+-+Professional+Group+Blogs "23 Things in Public Libraries", Helen Leech, July 2010, Ariadne, Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/leech/ Author Details Sarah Hammond BSc MA Cataloguer The British Library Email: sarah@tetch.org Web site: http://schammond.wordpress.com @schammond on http://twitter.com/ http://delicious.com/Public_biblioblogosphere http://delicious.com/publiclibrary2.0 Return to top Article Title: "Public Library 2.0: Culture Change?
Author: Sarah Hammond Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/hammond/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Research Data Preservation and Access: The Views of Researchers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Research Data Preservation and Access: The Views of Researchers Buzz data framework infrastructure archives repositories preservation curation e-science e-research interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Neil Beagrie, Robert Beagrie and Ian Rowlands present findings from a UKRDS survey of researchers' views on and practices for preservation and dissemination of research data in four UK universities.
Data has always been fundamental to many areas of research but it in recent years it has become central to more disciplines and inter-disciplinary projects and grown substantially in scale and complexity.
There is increasing awareness of its strategic importance as a resource in addressing modern global challenges such as climate change, and the possibilities being unlocked by rapid technological advances and their application in research.
In the US the National Science Board has stated that: 'It is exceedingly rare that fundamentally new approaches to research and education arise.
Information technology has ushered in such a fundamental change.
Digital data collections are at the heart of this change.
They enable analysis at unprecedented levels of accuracy and sophistication and provide novel insights through innovative information integration.
Through their very size and complexity, such digital collections provide new phenomena for study.'
[1].
Similar views have been expressed internationally through the International Council for Science: 'Because of the critical importance of data and information in the global scientific enterprise, the international research community must address a series of new challenges if it is to take full advantage of the data and information resources available for research today.
Equally, if not more important than its own data and information needs, today's research community must also assume responsibility for building a robust data and information infrastructure for the future.'
[2].
In a UK context, the UK Government is a signatory to the OECD's Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding [3] and has a strong policy commitment to supporting science and innovation.
The Treasury, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) published in 2004 the Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-014, which set out the Government's ambitions for UK science and innovation over that period, in particular their contribution to economic growth and public services.
A section of the Framework addressed the need for an e-infrastructure for research.
It argued that over the next decade the growing UK research base must have ready and efficient access to digital information of all kinds such as experimental data sets, journals, theses, conference proceedings and patents.
This is the life blood of research and innovation but presents a number of major risks due to unresolved challenges in their long-term management [4].
These challenges in the management, preservation and curation of research data have been recognised over many years and different studies e.g.
Lievesley and Jones in 1998 [5], Lord and MacDonald in 2003 [6], Tessella in 2006 [7], OSI in 2006 [8], and Lyon in 2007 [9].
Although encouraging progress has been made towards fulfilling some of the recommendations of these studies, much remains to be done.
As a result, research data remain an important and strategic issue for the UK Higher Education Funding Councils and the UK Research Councils.
The UK Research Data Service Feasibility Study In April 2007 The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) requested expressions of interest in leading feasibility studies in the area of Higher Education shared services.
The Russell Group IT Directors and Research Libraries UK, with the support of the Joint Information Systems Committee, the British Library, and the Research Information Network, submitted a joint expression of interest to undertake a UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) Feasibility Study and were successful in obtaining funding.
Following an invitation to tender, Serco Consulting (in partnership with Charles Beagrie Limited and Grant Thornton) were appointed as consultants for the study.
The overall objective of the UKRDS feasibility study was to assess the feasibility and costs of developing and maintaining a national shared digital research data service for the UK Higher Education sector.
From the outset it was recognised that the scope and requirements for a UKRDS should be determined primarily by researchers themselves.
Therefore a major component of the feasibility study for UKRDS was the Survey of the Researcher Viewpoint conducted in collaboration with the Universities of Bristol, Leeds, Leicester and Oxford.
This involved researchers and staff from central services in the four universities.
Their views were sought on the potential scope and requirements and how a national shared data service could help their research, their institution, and UK research competitiveness.
The four universities represented a sample of research-intensive universities of different scales within the UK.
Survey Methodology The survey was undertaken between March and October 2008 and was conducted as an online questionnaire with a series of nine focus groups at the Universities of Bristol, Leeds and Leicester (three at each institution).
In addition the University of Oxford undertook a series of in-depth qualitative interviews and a workshop with their researchers to contribute to the survey.
The work and analysis of findings at Oxford were conducted by Luis Martinez Uribe of the University of Oxford.
The survey work at the other three case study sites by a joint team from Serco Consulting and Charles Beagrie was led by Neil Beagrie with analysis and illustration of the online questionnaire results being undertaken by Ian Rowlands and Robert Beagrie.
David Grounds and Mike Callanan from Serco Consulting, Julia Chruszcz from Charles Beagrie, and university staff at Bristol, Leeds, and Leicester made significant contributions particularly to the workshops and the definition and review of emerging findings and themes.
The online questionnaire was developed as a set of draft questions which was then piloted and refined with researchers in initial focus groups at the case study sites.
When the questions were finalised they were hosted on Survey Monkey and researchers invited by letters distributed by the case study institutions to complete the questionnaire during May 2008.
Each case study site for the online questionnaire aimed to maximise responses from researchers and respondents across their universities.
Different channels for inviting responses were available at each site.
These varied from university-wide email lists to personal letters to heads of department asking them to cascade information to relevant staff.
The number of researchers invited to participate in each case cannot therefore be calculated.
However the proportion of the known population of active researchers who responded at each university is given below.
We received 179 responses to the online questionnaire covering over 500 researchers in the universities of Bristol, Leeds, and Leicester.
Responses could be made by individual researchers or research teams as a group.
Group responses were primarily in Science, Technology and Medical (STM) subjects.
The response rates from each institution represented approximately 6-10% of the total population of active researchers at Leeds and Bristol and 17% of the active research population at Leicester.
Upon completion a second series of focus groups was then held at each site to discuss preliminary findings and responses from the Survey.
In addition, 37 one-to-one interviews with researchers were conducted in the University of Oxford by Luis Martinez-Uribe and a workshop held to discuss the initial findings from the interviews at Oxford [10].
A final series of focus groups were held at Bristol, Leeds, and Leicester and a workshop at Oxford during October to seek researcher feedback on emerging proposals for UKRDS.
The case study sites deliberately invited researchers to these focus groups who had a range of needs from different faculties including arts and humanities and social science researchers as well as biological and physical sciences.
They also deliberately included researchers who might be considered sceptics as well as supporters of a potential UKRDS from their questionnaire responses.
Scope of This Article A preliminary report from the Survey was included in the UKRDS Interim Report [11] and discussed with the UKRDS Project Board and Steering Committee.
Elements of the Survey and its findings were also incorporated in the Final Report of the UKRDS Feasibility Study submitted to HEFCE [12].
However space constraints precluded presentation of all the data and findings in full in these reports and they were mainly included in a separate unpublished appendix to the final report.
In total 27 questions were included in the online questionnaire.
This article therefore aims to publish more of this material and set it in its context (largely edited from the reports with updates from more recent published studies).
In particular it provides selections from the quantitative data from the questions and responses and qualitative data from the additional free text comments in the online questionnaire.
Results from the Online Survey Question 3: Your Department/Faculty In this section respondents selected Higher Education Statistics Agency cost centre codes.
There was a broad range of responses from different disciplines.
In general terms STM researchers' responses totalled somewhat above what would be expected as a proportion of the known population at the case study sites, whereas the arts and humanities and social sciences were slightly under-represented.
Bio-sciences, the largest single category of academic research by funding and number of publications, was particularly well represented in responses (17.3%).
Overall the sample was too small for data covering the smaller disciplines with relatively low numbers of researchers in the case study institutions.
The responses were voluntary and perhaps can be seen to some degree as a 'heat map' indicating disciplines where research data issues were of greatest concern.
Figure 1: Department or Faculty of Survey Respondent [Source data] Question 6: Your Position There was a good spread of responses across grades of staff.
17 research fellows were represented and form the majority of respondents in the 'other' category.
Figure 2: Position of Survey Respondent [Source data] Question 9: Your Data Storage Needs Researchers were asked if a national research data service were established in the UK what data storage features they thought should be included and how important would they be.
A strong need for UKRDS to focus on long-term (>5 years) and medium-term (1-5 years) data curation and preservation was indicated.
There was lower demand for short-term data storage (1-12 months).
Figure 3: Relative Importance of Different UKRDS Data Storage and Preservation Time-Scales/Services Question 12: Your Current and Future Data Storage Requirements Overall a 360% growth in data volumes is anticipated over the next three years by researchers in the survey.
There is some significant variation within and between disciplines.
Question 13: For what period after the conclusion of your project will the long-term research data remain useful for research and need to be retained either for yourself or others?
48.9% of data is seen as having a useful life of under 10 years.
Only about 27% is seen as having indefinite value and retention.
There are significant differences across disciplines in retention requirements as illustrated in the figure of perceived longerterm value of current research data holdings by discipline below.
Figure 4: Perceived Longer-term Value of Current Research Data Holdings by Discipline [Source data] Question 14: Data use and users.
During this retention period who is likely to be interested in using it?
(respondents could tick all applicable categories) The majority of the retained data is seen as useful or is used by a small number of users.
Only 24% have 20-100+ external users.
In US National Science Board data collection levels terms [1], the majority of data surveyed would be 'research data collections' with only 24% likely to be in 'community data collections' or 'reference data collections'.
Figure 5: Users of Research Data [Source data] Question 15: Are there any grant or legal requirements to retain your research data?
33% responded there is a grant requirement and 14% a legal requirement to retain their data.
A surprisingly high number of respondents believe there is no requirement (about 26%) or do not know (36%) if there is a grant or legal requirement to retain their research data.
Question 16: Location/Storage of Your Data Most research data is held locally with less than 20% of respondents using an international or national facility for data deposit.
Most data is held on individual PCs and departmental servers.
Question 17: Why do you use the storage options above [Q16] and do they meet your needs?
There were 117 free-text responses in total to this question.
They have been analysed and categorised as follows: Top Ten ranked positive factors/requirements Convenience 23 Security/Secure/Safe 23 Backed-up 21 Ease of access 21 Ease/Flexibility of use 16 Low cost (price)/free 13 Storage capacity 13 What is available 9 Data sharing 8 Self-management/Control 6 Table 1: Respondents' top ten positive factors/requirements (ranked by total number of responses) Ranked Negative Factors/improvements needed Limited storage capacity locally 7 Limited security locally 6 Limited backup locally 6 Difficult access for externals 6 Expensive local service 3 Local facilities do not meet need 3 Time needed for local backup 2 Limited publicity when local 2 Table 2: Respondents' most often cited negative factors/improvements needed (ranked by total number of responses) Question 19: What measures do you use to make your own research data available?
Most researchers share data only about 12% do not make their data available.
Informal peer exchange networks within research teams and with collaborators pre-dominate.
Only about 18% share data via a data centre.
Figure 6: Methods for Sharing Research Data [Source data] Question 25: How would you normally access the research data of other researchers?
In contrast to responses to question 19 where only 18% share via a data centre, about 43% responded that they access other researchers' data via a data centre.
Question 26: Do you access data from other sources (e.g.
Government, National Health Service) for your research?
About 41% of respondents are using data from sources such as government and the NHS in their research.
The Oxford University Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management Project The project Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management represented a cross-agency collaboration between the Office of the Director of IT, the Oxford University Computing Services, the Oxford University Library Services and the Oxford e-Research Centre.
Findings from the project form the basis for the Oxford case study work for the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) feasibility study.
The project aimed to scope requirements for services to manage and curate research data generated by Oxford researchers.
A central activity from the project was a requirements-gathering exercise to learn more about current data management practices amongst different research groups in the University and identify the researchers' top requirements for services to help them manage data more effectively.
To complement the previous exercise, as well as to raise awareness and encourage discussion, a workshop was organised in June 2008 to hear about examples of good and interesting research data management practice from the perspective of different disciplines.
A full report from the Oxford scoping study and workshop is available [10].
Findings and Top Requirements for Services at Oxford A total of 37 researchers were interviewed between May and June 2008 and 46 people attended the workshop in June.
This good response from researchers reveals the interest in research data management and it helped to document current practice and capture requirements for services across disciplines in Oxford.
The key findings were: The management of research data in the University of Oxford is exercised to variable degrees of maturity across the institution.
There are departments and individuals with extensive experience in handling the data they collect and big projects with a focus on data activities which produce, document and share data to a very high standard.
On the other hand, there are many other departments and small-scale projects in which the data management depends entirely on individual researcher's skills and this is sometimes driven by individual short-term convenience.
Overall, the vast majority of researchers interviewed thought that there are potential services that could help them to manage their data more effectively.
The top requirements from Oxford researchers for services to help them with their data management activities gathered from the interviews and the workshop are: Advice on practical issues related to managing data across their life cycle.
This help would range from assistance in producing a data management/sharing plan; advice on best formats for data creation and options for storing and sharing data securely; to guidance on publishing and preserving these research data.
A secure and user-friendly solution that supports storage of large volumes of data and their sharing in a controlled way that will permit the use of fine-grained access control mechanisms.
A sustainable infrastructure that allows publication and long-term preservation of research data for those disciplines without domain-specific archives such as the UK Data Archive, the Natural Environment Research Council Data Centres, the European Bioinformatics Institute and others.
Funding that could help address some of the departmental challenges in the management of the research data that are being produced.
The scoping study also undertook a consultation with service providers to identify gaps in service provision and piloted the Data Audit Framework methodology to document in depth the data management workflows of two research groups in Oxford.
This project is now being followed up by the JISC-funded Embedding Institutional Curation Services in Research (EIDCSR) at Oxford to address the research data management and curation requirements of two collaborating research groups.
Emerging Findings and Themes from the Survey The interim and final reports of the feasibility study produced a detailed analysis of current service provision for researchers and universities.
They also considered the research data policies of the research funders and conducted a gap analysis based on desk research of all available information, including the Survey and the workshops with the case study sites, and detailed interviews with key stakeholders.
The following conclusions were drawn: It is clear that different disciplines have different requirements and approaches to research data.
Some research funders have a significant track record of support and good practice in this area.
Many funders are now including guidance for research data outputs in terms and conditions of grants and have established policies on retention, preservation and access.
Some actively support archive and data services and require deposit with specific archives, such as the UK Data Archive and the Archaeology Data Service.
Some other funders place the responsibility for preserving data with the grant holder.
Current provision of facilities to encourage and ensure that researchers have data stores where they can deposit their valuable data for safe-keeping and for sharing, as appropriate, varies from discipline to discipline.
Those looking for facilities to perform the function of a secure archive in case of major disaster and also providing the data distribution function to interested parties often turn to specialist national or international services where they exist.
The skills provided by such centres are highly valued.
However these national or international services are usually focused on what the US National Science Board would term 'reference data collections' or 'community data collections' [1]: the 'research data collections' in these disciplines often remain at local level.
Similarly disciplinary services at national or international level remain relatively rare and data collections at the 'research', 'community', and sometimes 'reference' level remain a local responsibility in many other disciplines.
Local data management and preservation activity is very important with most data being held locally.
When researchers were asked about their data location and storage the response was that most research data are held locally with fewer than 20% of respondents using an international or national facility for data deposit.
This local storage appears, from the feedback from the case study sites, to be largely departmentand faculty-based with central services providing some capacity.
There is a growing awareness of the increase in research data being generated and the need for more storage and managed environments and, as a consequence, central provision in the case study site universities is being reviewed.
Expectations about the rate of increase in research data generated indicate not only higher data volumes but also an increase in different types of data and data generated by disciplines that have not until recently been producing volumes of digital output.
This brings with it challenges around data management and preservation that include informing and assisting researchers in best practice to facilitate data re-use and sharing.
The survey data shows higher volumes of research data associated with research teams particularly in scientific, technical and medical (STM) disciplines but also that very high and atypical volumes can be associated with particular individuals or areas of research elsewhere.
It has also documented variations in requirements for retention and access within and between different disciplines.
Significant gaps and areas of need remain to be addressed.
There is no concept of required provision and best practice existing for all research data.
There are examples of excellence and good practice but they are not available to all.
Many researchers are concerned about the capacity to retain useful research data beyond the life of a project once the funding associated with the project ceases, and local research support services are concerned about how these requirements can be met.
The Survey findings were followed up and discussed at the four final focus group sessions attended by researchers and service support professionals in each of the case study sites.
From this input the following main themes emerged: Theme 1: Advocacy: A requirement for more advice on practical issues related to managing data such as producing a data management/sharing plan, best formats on data creation, options for storing and sharing data securely, publishing and preserving them.
This sentiment was also expressed in some of the interviews conducted with the Research Councils as a need for researcher awareness and institutional support for researchers.
Theme 2: Coordination and information: Providing information about and links to established repositories, both national and international, helping to inform researcher choice and encouraging them to deposit their data.
Also providing information about and links to established national advisory services for data management (e.g.
national and regional e-science centres, the National Grid Service), digital curation and preservation (the Digital Curation Centre), and subject-specific advice (e.g.
the Medical Research Council Data Support Service).
Theme 3: Coherence: The need to focus on actions to improve linkages and collaboration at institutional and national level across dual support and all disciplines, with the aim of furthering a coherent approach to the application of standards and good practice, facilitating inter-disciplinary reuse of research data and general interoperability.
Theme 4: Data Depository: The need to address concerns about local provision and capacity, together with the problem of retaining data beyond the life of a project due to lack of funding for capacity provision to do this.
In some disciplines instrument/ observational data are valuable for reuse but the increasing volumes of such data make them difficult to retain.
Theme 5: Skills and Training: A deficit of relevant skills, training and career structures for data management and data scientists has been raised in some UKRDS focus groups and in recent reports (e.g.
Lyon, 2007 [9], Brown & Swan, 2008 [13]).
There are several different initiatives attempting to address these needs; they could be enhanced by greater coordination and sharing of outcomes.
Theme 6: Seeding the Data Commons: 'Seeding the Data Commons is seen as a priority activity in the Australian National Data Service' [14].
Within the UKRDS Case studies and surveys, researchers have drawn attention to the effort and investment needed to upgrade data collections developed for sharing between the research team and collaborators to the higher standards and documentation required to be useful for wider use.
Not all data collections have the potential to support the wider use that would justify this additional effort, so selection and prioritisation are needed.
National subject centres to undertake this selection and added-value role do not exist for all disciplines.
Theme 7: Data Security and Controlled Access: Research data originating from third parties or containing information on individuals will often only be available to researchers under strict legal or contractual conditions.
Providing access to such resources requires secure environments for data storage and controlled access as well as secure data-handling procedures.
Wider availability of these environments, combined with training of researchers and co-ordination of policies on consent and data reuse will improve availability of such data for future research.
The Survey in a UK and International Context Statistics for the UK Higher Education sector are available from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and updated annually by individual universities.
The figures for all UK universities for the Quality Research-related funding (QR) provided by the funding councils are provided in the figure below.
This provides one measure of ranking research activity in universities and correlates quite closely with figures for research projects and number of researchers provided by our case study sites.
The Survey looked at needs and views of researchers in four UK universities.
The position of each of the case study sites in this ranking is also shown below.
Figure 7: British Universities rank-ordered by total Quality Research-related funding (QR) in 2005/6 [Source data] In terms of UK ranking by Quality Related funding (2005-6) Oxford is 2nd, Leeds 9th, Bristol 13th and Leicester 27th.
We believe the universities in this group ranked from 1-27 in QR funding account for the majority of funded research projects and a large part of the potential market of UKRDS for research data services.
The online surveys, focus groups, and discussions held with the Universities of Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, and Oxford provide findings which suggest that participating in the UKRDS service could be of interest to these institutions, and comparable universities of similar scale.
This suggestion is supported by the expressions of interest from peer institutions to be involved in future phases of UKRDS.
What is currently unknown, however, is the potential level of interest in much smaller institutions, ranking between 27 and 127 in QR funding, which undertake some research and have much lower levels of research funding and numbers of research active staff and research projects.
However it seems likely that individual active researchers or research teams within such institutions would also benefit from institutional participation in the UKRDS service; over time the potential scope of the service could be all 127 Higher Education institutions across the UK undertaking research.
Modern research is of course international and our Survey unsurprisingly has many echoes in the findings and themes emerging from studies on research data in other countries.
In Australia, the government has accepted the recommendation of the proposal report Towards the Australian Data Commons: A proposal for an Australian National Data Service [14] to establish A National Australian Data Service (ANDS) and has provided funding of Au$24 million (£11.5 million) over 4 years.
In Canada, a working group comprised of a number of Canadian organisations and agencies has been established to provide recommendations and an action plan for a new national approach to the stewardship of research data in Canada and has already published a Gap Analysis of existing provision [15].
Other European countries are also keenly aware of the challenges and opportunities associated with this aspect of e-infrastructure.
In Germany the Alliance of German Science Organisations has identified research data as a major focus in its Priority Initiative on Digital Information [16] and the University of Göttingen, one of Germany's leading research universities, has published a study of the digital preservation needs of its researchers [17].
Conclusions The frequency of demands for data management support at institutional level, by researchers, is starting to increase as data volumes grow, and as more research funders (notably the UK's Research Councils) develop policies for the management of data outputs generated by grant holders.
Researchers' own expectation is often that the institutional library and/or IT service will make the necessary provision; although this has started to happen on a small scale, university managers have serious concerns about the cost, scalability and sustainability of purely local solutions, and the duplication of effort that may result.
Although some of the UK's Research Councils have data centres for their outputs, and there are some discipline-based repositories at national and international level, the large gaps in the UK's current provision means that the challenge of managing this data and ensuring its long-term sustainability and potential re-use often defaults to the individual university or even individual research group or researcher.
It is also important to understand that the data management challenge is by no means restricted to so-called 'big science', although large-scale facilities in areas such as particle physics generate huge data volumes.
More modestly funded projects in all disciplines will also bring data challenges and data formats of varying complexity.
The issue of the data deluge and increasing data complexity is not going to be restricted to Russell Group universities, although they can reasonably expect to have the largest volumes of research data to deal with.
All UK universities will be affected by these challenges and it seems likely all could benefit to some degree from a UK-wide research data service.
Clearly there are several excellent facilities currently in place which provide outstanding services on behalf of their communities for access to and storage of research data.
However, that does not imply if we take a holistic look at the situation within universities and the opportunities and guidance available to researchers for preserving and providing access to research data across all disciplines that researchers' needs are being fully met.
The UKRDS Feasibility Study and the Survey presented here can make a strong case for a national shared service in order to enhance the capacity, skills, and R&D investment needed to sustain UK research data cost-effectively.
In the complex landscape of existing provision, the devil, of course, will be in the detail of implementation.
The introduction and testing of any new provision and shared services must inevitably be pragmatic and evolutionary.
A national shared service might take a number of forms, with components provided by universities, the Research Councils, and other agencies.
The Feasibility Study reviewed and appraised the possible options and recommended in its final report a 'pathfinder approach' to establishing a UKRDS.
At the time of writing a further UKRDS project is getting under way, funded mainly by HEFCE with another contribution from JISC.
This phase, known as the UKRDS Interim Project, will move things forward in the planning, design and preparation for a UKRDS by testing proof of concept in a modest way in collaboration with the four case study universities [18].
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Retrieved 3 January 2008 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/dealing_with_data_report-final.pdf Martinez-Uribe, L., 2008, Findings of the Scoping Study and Research Data Management WorkshopMain Report, (University of Oxford).
Retrieved 1 June 2009 from http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A4e2b7e64-d941-4237-a17f-659fe8a12eb5/datastreams/ATTACHMENT02 Serco Consulting, 2008a, UKRDS Interim Report, Version v0.1a.030708 7th July 2008.
Retrieved 1 June 2009 from http://www.ukrds.ac.uk/UKRDS%20SC%2010%20July%2008%20Item%205%20(2).doc Serco Consulting, 2008b, The UK research data service feasibility study: Report and Recommendations to HEFCE, 19 December 2008.
Retrieved 1 June 2009 from http://www.ukrds.ac.uk/HEFCE%20UKRDS%20Final%20Report%20V%201.1.doc Alma Swan, A., & Brown, S., Skills, Role & Career Structure of Data Scientists & Curators: Assessment of Current Practice & Future Needs, July 2008.
Retrieved 30 July 2009 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/dataskillscareersfinalreport.aspx ANDS Technical Working Group, 2007, Towards the Australian Data Commons: A proposal for an Australian National Data Service (Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra).
Retrieved 20/5/2008 from http://www.pfc.org.au/twiki/pub/Main/Data/TowardstheAustralianDataCommons.pdf Research Data Strategy Working Group 2008 Stewardship of Research Data in Canada: Gap Analysis Retrieved 1 June 2009 from http://data-donnees.gc.ca/docs/GapAnalysis.pdf The Alliance of German Science Organisations, 2008, Priority Initiative Digital Information.
Retrieved 1 June 2009 from http://www.dfg.de/forschungsfoerderung/wissenschaftliche_infrastruktur/lis/download/allianz_initiative_digital_information_en.pdf Neuroth, H., Strathmann, S., Vlaeminck, S., 2008, 'Digital Preservation Needs of Scientific Communities: The Example of Göttingen University', in Research and advanced technology for digital libraries: 12th European conference, ECDL 2008, Aarhus, Denmark, September 14-19, 2008: proceedings (Springer 2008).
UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) http://ukrds.ac.uk Author Details Neil Beagrie Charles Beagrie Ltd. Email: neil@beagrie.com Web site: http://www.beagrie.com/ Robert Beagrie Charles Beagrie Ltd. Email: rob@beagrie.com Web site: http://www.beagrie.com/ Ian Rowlands Reader Department of Information Studies University College London Email: i.rowlands@ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Research Data Preservation and Access: The Views of Researchers" Author: Neil Beagrie, Robert Beagrie and Ian Rowlands Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/beagrie-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Libraries of the Future Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Libraries of the Future Buzz data rss infrastructure metadata digitisation accessibility blog repositories preservation aggregation e-learning ebook facebook interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Michelle Pauli reports on the National e-textbook Debate and Libraries of the Future panel sessions held by JISC in Birmingham over 14-15 April 2008.
As part of its new Libraries of the Future programme [1], JISC held three events during its annual conference in Birmingham to explore some of the questions facing libraries today: in an information world in which Google apparently offers us everything, what place is there for the traditional, and even the digital, library?
In a library environment which is increasingly moving to the delivery of online rather than print resources, what of the academic library’s traditional place at the heart of campus life?
What about the impact of repositories and open access on the delivery of library resources?
And the need to digitise and make more widely accessible key scholarly resources?
And what of the calls for libraries to play a central role in the promotion of ‘information literacy’?
National E-textbook Debate The JISC National E-textbook Debate, held the evening before the start of the conference proper, provided an opportunity to quiz a panel of experts and debate the future role of the library in the provision of electronic textbooks.
On the panel were: Tom Davy, CEO of Cengage; Dominic Knight, MD of Palgrave; Sue McKnight, Director of Libraries and Knowledge Resources at Nottingham Trent University; Mandy Phillips, Information Resources Manager at Edge Hill University.
The event was chaired by JISC’s executive secretary, Malcolm Read.
Responding to questions from the floor, the panel revealed what was perhaps a surprising amount of consensus on key issues relating to the e-textbook debate.
Three ‘e’ themes emerged from the discussion: Economics Environment: e-textbooks/e-learning/e-stuff Ease versus breadth and depth Economics The question of what kinds of business models of e-textbooks are emerging, and the balance of expenditure between students and institutions on these kinds of resources, was raised immediately in the discussion.
Dominic Knight described it as a ‘core issue’ and the response from the floor suggested that many shared his interest in this aspect of the debate.
An early question came from Rob Heath of Emerald Group Publishing, who asked how the industry was going to overcome the problem of the e-model transferring the cost of print from publishing groups to cash-strapped students.
While Knight argued that UK students actually spend little on their books in comparison with the amount they spend on entertainment, Sue McKnight suggested that it may be seen as an institutional cost, and Tom Davy agreed that universities will find that one of the best ways to attract students will be to provide a core set of value-added e-learning resources: ‘if vice-chancellors find that by improving the e-learning environment, retention rates increase and their university attracts more students who stay the course then they will be encouraged to invest’.
It then becomes a question of equity, added Sue McKnight.
The panel agreed that, whatever the economics, the transition from print to e-books would be very gradual and that the two would co-exist for a long time with e-copies supporting print copies and e-sales possibly even driving up print sales budgets.
Environment: e-textbooks/e-learning/e-stuff Tom Davy summed up the difference between ‘e-textbook and ‘e-learning’ as ‘e-learning is an all-encompassing term while an e-textbook is a subset of that (a structured body of knowledge which fits a particular course)’.
It was a definition which gained general approval although Mandy Phillips pointed to the difficulty of separating out the different elements of e-learning and Sue McKnight added that academics are often not clear in their own minds about what is a textbook as opposed to background reading, and what works best for each student in terms of pedagogy and e-learning.
She also noted that there is a difference between an e-textbook and ‘e-stuff’ (ie a list of digital reading resources from a reading list): libraries can put together excellent collections of e-stuff but the key with e-textbooks is the interactivity that can be gained with customised learning pathways.
Tom Davy supported the notion that academics need to engage more with the idea that students need some help and direction: ‘I’ve been going to conferences like this since the 80s and I feel we are approaching a tipping point where the technology is there, the will is there, the students are there – they are tech natives – and we need the faculty to embrace the digital world and yet they are rather slow to do it.‘ According to Dominic Knight, the US is probably a year or two ahead of the UK in terms of e-textbook activity.
He described the environment for e-textbooks as ‘difficult’, especially in relation to standards and in comparison to the more established market for journals and monographs.
The discussion naturally moved from there to the question of open access (OA) publishing for textbooks and while Sue McKnight came out as a strong supporter of making all scholarly material OA, and Dominic Knight expressed concerns abut the financial sustainability of the OA model, Tom Davy suggested a hybrid model: ’ There’s a place for faculty-created content and I think publishers in the future will integrate that material with their own and structure it well and provide tools for students to use it.’ Ease v breadth and depth The discussion took an unexpected turn when Alex Reid of the University of Western Australia moved it away from the benefits of e-textbooks – functionality and accessibility – and asked if such bespoke learning materials might not, in fact, make students lazy by enabling them to do the minimum they need to pass their courses.
Mandy Philips warned that the wider experience of the library and browsing around your subject area needed to be safeguarded in the age of the e-textbook, but Sue McKnight pointed to research done at a university in Australia which showed that if you made it easy for students to access the materials they needed to read and study to pass their exams then they did also read far more widely around their subject.
‘Students are more clever than we give them credit for,’ she added.
‘It is for us to create learning environments that challenge and stimulate them – e-books are just a tiny part of the learning environment’.
The panel agreed that it was the role of teachers to inspire students to tackle the breadth and depth of their subjects, and that if the core learning path is not well-laid then students are not inspired to do the rest.
The consensus was that e-textbooks that smoothe the way along that core learning path are not necessarily a bad thing.
As Tom Davy pointed out it, ‘a textbook is supposed to help them pass…if it doesn’t then it’s not a very good textbook!’ The debate ended with ideas from the panel on the next steps for JISC.
Further research, engagement with a wide range of voices from the community and economic business modelling were all suggested, along with a forthright conclusion from Sue McKnight: ‘I would encourage JISC to move from the notion of ‘e’ being electronic to ‘e’ being enhanced: the technology is just a tool – get over it!” From eLib to the Library of the Future The libraries debate continued into the main day of the JISC conference with two further sessions on the long-term changes that will lead to the library of the future.
The first of these, From eLib to the Library of the Future, featured a series of quick-fire presentations looking backwards and forwards at the academic library.
Andy Jordan, one of the directors of Duke & Jordan Ltd and co-author of an impact study of eLib [2], kicked off proceedings with a look back at the eLib Programme [3] and its impact nationally and internationally.
He highlighted the rapid change in libraries over the past 14 years by noting that, in 1992, student clusters were virtually unknown and some senior librarians refused to have anything at all to do with IT.
ELib’s greatest impact was around cultural change and its success is shown in the way in which it: promoted effective governance and management; for institutions, it caught the mood; brought libraries into synchrony; produced savvy staff (in project management, service and technology); levelled the playing field between old and new universities; repositioned libraries in the provision of learning materials.
It is a substantial legacy, said Jordan, of which JISC should be proud.
Jean Sykes, Librarian and Director of IT Services at the LSE, brought the debate back to the present with a rapid roundup of the new drivers for change in the library sector and the key issues facing libraries today.
She identified three key drivers for change: the environment, students and research.
The former is characterised by a volatile landscape of rapid change, with the ubiquitous use of the Web, the impact of Google, new publishing models and the blurring of social, personal and work activities.
Students drive change as the first digital native generation, in their role as paying customers, and in their expectation that the library will be integrated with their virtual learning environment.
Research needs, meanwhile, have evolved and now encompass access to deep Web, underlying data and the reuse of data.
The issues all these drivers raise for JISC and the libraries are wide-ranging, from better data on usage and impact, to the use of identity management to connect users to relevant content seamlessly to librarians needing to make the running on digital preservation.
Ian Dolphin, director of JISC’s Information Environment Programme [4], cast an eye to the future with a presentation that also focused on the need for more information about the preferences of the individuals and institutions using library services.
‘When we talk about service-oriented architecture we tend to pitch it in a way that emphasises that it will save money and effort.
Rather, I think the move towards it will enable the kind of flexible systems that are closer to user need and users will be able to compose systems that are closer to their needs.’ However, the speaker to cause the biggest buzz in the room was Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President and Chief Strategist of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), with his dynamic analysis of the challenges facing libraries today as they move into the future.
He argued that libraries haven’t yet really understood what it means to operate in a networked environment and highlighted two key distinctions between the environments in which libraries operated in the past, then, and now.
Then: resources were scarce and attention abundant if you wanted information you had to go to a library Now: resources are abundant and attention scarce – people have lots of things to do and library sits in the middle of a range of repositories of documents.
The ways people can find things out are multiple and may be no less good than library resources.
People value convenience and do not have strong incentives to use library resources.
Then: users built workflow around libraries Now: libraries must build services around user workflow He argued that libraries need to think more about the competitive environment and how to disclose resources to where people are: people do not start their search on a library Web site, they will start it somewhere else (Google, Facebook RSS feeds) – if discovery happens elsewhere you have to think about how you are represented elsewhere.
The diffusion of Web 2.0 has been matched by a massive concentration of activity on just a few sites, such as Google and Amazon; and in terms of proportion of traffic, those sites are central.
Controversially, he suggested that libraries’ focus on their Web sites creates expense from the management side and confusion from the user side.
This point was immediately picked up in the question-and-answer session by Sheila Corrall, from the University of Sheffield, who suggested that Lorcan Dempsey’s picture presents a tension between the need of the user for seamless access and less focus on the Web site and the need for libraries to pay some attention to their branding and profile in order to have a case for funding.
Libraries need to think about a compelling local story and that’s about how you support learning and research in various ways and align activities around that which touches people and reminds them who they are, countered Lorcan.
Spend more time on that and less time on infrastructure, he argued.
Clearly people need to have a Web site and ideally it would give easy access to resources, but in terms of the relative importance in a user’s behaviour it needs to be accompanied by attention to the other places where they do things.
Ian Dolphin added that for most students it’s all ‘stuff on the Web’ and that branding is really not very important to them, while Jean Sykes closed the session with a strong defence of libraries in their physical incarnation: ‘Many libraries are increasing their opening hours, many to 24-hour opening, and there more users are coming in so I take a more relaxed view…maybe the branding isn’t such an enormous issue after all as they do want to physically sit somewhere – they have to sit somewhere even to use wifi, they’re not going to wander about in the rain!
They need a space in which to do a whole load of things and they like sitting among a whole load of books even if they are not actually using them at that point.’ Challenges for the Digital Librarian In the third of the Libraries of the Future sessions, Peter Brophy and David Kay considered the key strategies librarians can implement to achieve long-term success in becoming a recognised presence within the workflow of their user communities.
Peter Brophy, Director of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, and David Kay, Director of Sero Consulting, have recently published the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study [5] and this formed the backdrop of their presentation.
The study is an evaluation and horizontal scan of the current library management systems and related systems landscape for UK Higher Education, and involved the participation of 100 libraries.
It includes a library survey, vendor perspectives, reference group feedback and a short, practical guide for librarians.
Based on that research, Peter Brophy identified five assets held by libraries: unique collections user clickstreams vertical ‘business’ context staff expertise – the power of the expert local study environment and these, he said, need to be leveraged to tackle the five challenges facing the digital librarian: Aggregation: Find out what content provided by others that users are interested in and slip in the library content among that.
Encouraging/enabling user-generated content: encourage users to provide their own commentary on library data and get a dialogue going within that scenario.
Embedding in other people’s services: for example the way in which the University of Huddersfield has enabled a search on Amazon to show when books searched for are available in the library.
Collaborative description.
Supporting social learning: understanding the importance of academic conversation and being part of their conversation.
Five recommendations followed: Invest in vendor systems with caution not complacency.
Review library management systems (LMS) contracts seeking increased value, looking at ways to improve services by implementing features around the core LMS.
Focus on breaking down barriers to resources, involving single sign-on, unifying workflows and liberating metadata for re-use.
Develop Service-oriented Architecture-based interoperability across institutional systems as the foundation for future services.
Look at consortia and partnership arrangements to increase critical mass.
The discussion which followed focused on this final recommendation of improved shared services and collaboration.
Sheila Corrall of the University of Sheffield argued that a lack of good exemplars stands in the way of movement in that direction while James Clay of Gloucestershire College suggested that one of the problems with sharing things is that at a certain level it doesn’t work because you have to share everything and then you start to think, ‘Why have separate colleges at all?
Why not just have one college to cover the whole country?’ Peter Burnhill, Director of Edina, noted that Digimap is a classic example of a shared service but it was a new thing which created a supply and a service and a demand based on something new.
Lorcan Dempsey suggested that there are historical factors in the UK which mean that it does not have the consortia culture of northern Europe and the US, and library management systems may be an area which is particularly difficult to change.
Other arenas may be more ripe for a new approach.
Conclusion These three stimulating events marked a positive launch for JISC’s Libraries of the Future Programme.
They placed it firmly within the context of previous work (the Electronic Libraries Programme, eLib), examined the emerging issues that face libraries today, and considered the challenges which will confront the library of the future.
There were unexpected areas of consensus Malcolm Read revealed that JISC was unable to find a librarian prepared to argue against e-textbooks in the first panel debate – but also robust discussions about how to build library services around user workflow in the new digital environment in which academic libraries operate.
A key tension which emerged is between the desire to make the user experience ‘seamless’ and to ‘slip in’ library content among other ‘stuff on the Web’ and the need for libraries to maintain some kind of profile to bolster their case for funding.
It will be interesting to see if future debate helps to resolve this tension.
References Live blogs and full audio recordings of all the sessions mentioned in this report can be accessed at the Libraries of the Future blog: http://librariesofthefuture.jiscinvolve.org/ The Libraries of the Future Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/librariesofthefuture Duke and Jordan Ltd, Impact Study of the JISC eLib (Electronic libraries) programme, October 2006 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/elibimpactstudyreport Archived eLib Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elib JISC Information Environment programme Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/information_environment Sero Consulting Ltd, Library Management Systems Horizon Scan, March 2008 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/resourcediscovery/libraryMS Author Details Michelle Pauli Writer and editor Email: info@michellepauli.co.uk Web site: http://www.michellepauli.co.uk Michelle Pauli is a writer with over 10 years’ experience as a journalist, author, editor and researcher.
She is currently editor of the Guardian’s award-winning literary Web site, guardian.co.uk/books, writes a weekly column on blogs for the paper’s Saturday Review and works in a freelance capacity for JISC as online editor for its Digitisation programme and the Strategic Content Alliance .
Return to top Article Title: “Libraries of the Future” Author: Michelle Pauli Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/jisc-debates-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Preparing Collections for Digitization Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Preparing Collections for Digitization Buzz archives metadata digitisation preservation tiff provenance interoperability algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reviews a recently published book on the selection and preparation of archive and library collections for digitisation.
Over the past 20 years a great deal of information and guidance has been published to support cultural heritage organisations interested in undertaking digitisation projects.
It is well over a decade now since the seminal Joint National Preservation Office and Research Libraries Group Preservation Conference on Guidelines for digital imaging [1] and standard introductory texts on digitisation like Anne Kenney and Oya Rieger's Moving theory into practice [2] and Stuart Lee's Digital imaging: a practical handbook [3] are of a similar age although still extremely useful.
More up-to-date guidance is also available from services like JISC Digital Media [4] and the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative [5].
Into this mix comes this new book on the preparation of collections for digitisation by Anna Bülow and Jess Ahmon, respectively Head of Preservation and Preservation Officer at The National Archives in Kew, London.
The book claims to fill a gap in the existing literature, covering the practical aspects of safeguarding collections during image capture.
It is perhaps worth noting upfront that the main focus of the book is on textual resources and documentary records, meaning that it would seem to be most useful for those working in the libraries and archives sectors.
The first chapter provides some essential context, linking digitisation initiatives to the ongoing collection management practices of archives and libraries.
It makes the general point that collection management has three main aspects: the development, use and preservation of collections.
Collection management involves making well informed decisions in order to prioritise actions and optimise the allocation of resources to maintain as much accessible value as possible.
(p. 5) Bülow and Ahmon argue that digital technologies have created new challenges for collection management, e.g.
being partly responsible for a shift in attention from the development and preservation role to the development and use role.
In practice, however, the link between the roles can be more nuanced.
For example, in some cases digitisation may benefit conservation aims by helping to reduce the physical handling of fragile materials.
In general, however, the authors feel that while the long-term sustainability challenges of digital content remain unresolved, "digitization of any book or document cannot be seen as a preservation measure for the original itself."
(p. 8).
The chapter concludes with a brief outline of the four phases of digitisation, each of which is made up of multiple steps.
Of these, this book focuses primarily on the first two stages, covering all of the tasks that need to be done prior to imaging (e.g.
selection, rights clearance, document preparation) as well as those associated with the digitisation process itself (imaging, quality assurance, transcription, metadata creation).
The remaining two stages, chiefly facilitating use and sustainability, are not dealt with in any detail by this book.
Chapter two outlines some of the things that need to be done prior to digitisation, including building project teams that provide a wide range of skills, including expert conservators.
From their archives perspective, Blow and Ahmon strongly advocate the involvement of conservation staff from the outset of digitisation projects (p. 18).
Further sections deal in more detail with the questions of outsourcing and the role of microform.
As a reasonably stable medium, microform has become the de facto standard for some preservation reformatting projects, and this can interact with digitisation projects in a number of different ways.
The general principle adhered to here seems to be a reasonable one, i.e.
that it is preferable to undertake imaging of a collection once only (p. 28), meaning that some digitisation projects will have to fit both into a single workflow.
The third chapter is an outline of digital image technology by Ross Spencer, a colleague of Blow and Ahmon at The National Archives.
This chapter provides a quick overview of key concepts like image resolution (e.g.
in pixels per inch or dimension), bit-depth/colour-depth and colour management.
Spencer also introduces the concept of developing an 'archival master' from which a variety of so-called 'service copies' can be generated (these are sometimes also known as 'access files').
Archival masters are intended to be useable over reasonably long periods of time, and so care needs to be taken over the exact choice of format and the compression algorithms used.
Following widespread practice in the cultural heritage sector, Spencer comments that image formats like TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) "have proven to be robust and have lasted over time" (p. 38).
Regardless of format, however, it is important that image quality is sufficient to support its continued use and reuse.
Image specifications should be as high as possible.
One of the benefits of digitized objects is the manipulations and techniques that might be used on them and so [...] it is important to specify a requirement for images with the highest possible and highest achievable standards for our time.
(p. 42) On compression techniques, Spencer also expresses the widely accepted view that the use of lossy compression is not best practice for archival masters (p. 41).
Other topics covered in the chapter are image post-processing (e.g.
image enhancement, cropping, de-skewing) and the need to retain metadata about the image as part of the provenance record.
It might have been useful for the chapter to have referred to a standard text like Howard Besser's Introduction to imaging [6], as this goes into far more detail on most of these topics.
The following chapter turns to look in more detail at the process for selecting collections for digitisation.
Despite the advent of large-scale digitisation initiatives in the last decade, Bülow and Ahmon consider that most cultural heritage organisations would not currently be in a position to consider digitising any more than a relatively small proportion of their content (p. 47).
Selecting collections for digitisation needs to fit with wider institutional goals, and could be based on (for example) use, format and physical condition (e.g.
as part of a conservation strategy for fragile originals), or containing content judged to have most potential for reuse in education and research.
The chapter refers to the popular decision-making selection matrix developed by Harvard University Library [7], suggesting that the main value of such tools is in providing "a checklist of questions to form the foundation of a selection policy" (p. 53).
The rest of the chapter concerns the initial assessment of the physical format and condition of collections before they can be finally selected for digitisation.
Chapter five introduces the more detailed collection surveys that need to be undertaken to help identify specific challenges that will be encountered during digitisation itself.
Bülow and Ahmon argue that such surveys are not optional extras, but essential to help inform choices on equipment and much else (p. 63).
The examples provided in the chapter (which includes some interesting illustrations) provide evidence of the extremely wide range of different physical formats that might be encountered in archives, but the techniques described would also be useful for helping libraries to identify where significant gaps might need to be filled from other collections or institutions (p. 66), or in deciding what to do with things like uncut pages, fold-outs or extra-tight bindings.
As a general principle, Bülow and Ahmon argue that the planning stage of a digitisation project must "allow time for the survey and analysis of results because the survey will provide information that can have a crucial impact on the imaging operation and hence the timescale for the whole digitization project" (p. 67).
The following chapter goes on to outline some of the issues around the equipment used for image capture.
Bülow and Ahmon concede that there is an abundance of literature on this topic (p. 91), so they focus in this book on equipment requirements as they relate to original content.
The chapter first describes risks to content from increased handling, exposure to light and heat, and disassociation, then goes on to consider the features to consider when selecting which specific equipment to use.
It concludes with a brief overview of the different types of imaging equipment, including flatbed scanners, overhead scanners and digital cameras.
Chapters seven and eight deal with the physical aspects of preparing documents for image capture as part of a digitisation workflow.
Chapter seven focuses on document formats and fastenings, using a number of practical examples from The National Archives own holdings.
Images illustrate the assortment of fastenings used in archives and the chapter provides, with short case studies, some tips for how these can best be dealt with during the imaging process.
These problems may not be as significant a problem for most libraries, however, since as Bülow and Ahmon admit printed books "can be the most trouble-free of document formats to digitize" (p. 123).
The chapter does, however, investigate the contentious issue of disbanding books for digitisation.
Chapter eight deals in more detail with the preparation of damaged documents, and how to evaluate whether specific conservation expertise would be needed and how this would potentially fit within the digitisation workflow.
Short case studies illustrate how conservation expertise has been integrated within two of The National Archives" own projects.
The final chapter describes setting up the imaging operation from the perspective of document welfare.
The principle expounded here is that the collection manager should be "involved during the planning and setting-up of the imaging operation so that they can advise on these issues" (p. 159).
Some compromises may need to be made here because the optimal environmental conditions for documents may not always coincide with those for digitisation staff.
The chapter covers workspace design, health and safety, document tracking and staffing.
The remainder of the book comprises a two-page conclusion, a very short annotated list of further reading and an index.
To conclude, Preparing Collections for Digitization is an extremely valuable addition to the literature on digitisation.
It should be of interest to all involved in the digitisation of documentary records and textual materials and would usefully inform the development of conservation strategies and digitisation workflows dealing with these content types.
The volume has been attractively produced making extensive use of short case studies and illustrations, particularly in the sections dealing with collection surveying and preparation.
I spotted the occasional inconsistency, e.g.
the use of 'principle' for 'principal' in chapter 1 (p. 1) and the confusing use of both 'phase' and 'stage' in Figure 1.2 (p. 11).
I also wondered whether it was necessary to include both Figures 1.1 and 1.3, as they are largely identical.
As the title implies, Preparing Collections for Digitization focuses almost entirely on the collection management and conservation processes that need to be undertaken prior to the imaging stage.
Naturally, it has far less to say about what comes afterwards, e.g.
text transcription, structural metadata, delivery, evaluation and sustainability.
In practice, the book would therefore need to be used in conjunction with the wide range of other digitisation guidance available in other publications and on the Web.
However, like much of that wider digitisation literature, books like this perhaps inevitably largely represent the producer interest in that they focus on the specific requirements of libraries and archives rather than those of the potential users of the resources that are being generated by digitisation projects.
There are some hints in chapter 4 that people outside the collecting institutions themselves e.g.
members of the research community or the general public might have a potential role in helping to select content for digitisation.
However, there is less awareness of how the digitisation choices of cultural heritage organisations might limit the later use of the resources they are so expensively creating.
Researchers can be very resourceful in their use of digitised resources, but it is still very important to capture potential usage scenarios at the planning stage of a digitisation project.
That said, archives and libraries planning to undertake digitisation will find this new book a useful source of guidance on the collection surveying and preparation activities that are a necessary part of any digitisation project.
References Guidelines for digital imaging: papers given at the joint National Preservation Office and Research Libraries Group preservation conference in Warwick, 28 30 September 1998 (London: National Preservation Office, 1999).
Online version retrieved 2 June 2011 http://www.bl.uk/blpac/pdf/conf1998.pdf Anne E. Kenney and Oya Y. Rieger, eds., Moving theory into practice: digital imaging for libraries and archives (Mountain View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, 2000).
Stuart D. Lee, Digital imaging: a practical handbook (London: Library Association Publishing, 2000).
JISC Digital Media.
Retrieved 2 June 2011 http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/ Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative.
Retrieved 2 June 2011 http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/ Howard Besser, Introduction to imaging, rev.
ed.
(Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 2003).
Online version retrieved 2 June 2011 http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/introimages/ Dan Hazen, Jeffrey Horrell and Jan Merill-Oldham, Selecting research collections for digitization (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998).
Online version retrieved 2 June 2011 http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub74.html Author Details Michael Day Research and Development Team Leader UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Michael Day has worked at UKOLN since 1996 on a variety of research projects relating to resource description, semantic interoperability and digital preservation.
He currently leads UKOLN's research and development team and is part of the small team at UKOLN contributing to the EU-funded IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) Project: http://www.impact-project.eu/ Return to top Article Title: Preparing Collections for Digitization (book review) Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/day-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Web 2.0 in U.S. LIS Schools: Are They Missing the Boat?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Web 2.0 in U.S. LIS Schools: Are They Missing the Boat?
Buzz data software wiki database rss archives metadata tagging blog flickr cataloguing podcast youtube facebook research Citation BibTex RIS Noa Aharony asks whether library and information science schools in the United States are underestimating the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 applications.
Library and information science (LIS) programmes prepare students for performing traditional information tasks such as indexing, retrieval and library management [1][2][3].
The increased importance and centrality of information has moved LIS schools to offer new curricula that combine traditional librarianship and archiving with technological and social aspects of information.
As the author has a considerable interest in both LIS education and in Web 2.0 applications, and because she found out that in her own country (Israel) only a limited emphasis is given to adapting Web 2.0 new technologies in LIS schools, she has decided to examine the situation in US LIS.
This article presents a preliminary report on a survey of the accredited schools of library and information science in the United States, to determine the degree of adoption of courses on Web 2.0.
Expanding the curriculum and integrating a course which focuses on Web 2.0 may improve the image of LIS, and more importantly, may enable learners to acquire a broader perspective in their attitude towards information studies, and to cope with rapid change in the information landscape.
Adding Web 2.0 studies to the curriculum may also serve to improve the position of LIS programmes when competing for student attention against other programmes of study and career options.
Changes in the Information Landscape and Information Education Aspects of information production, use, storage, and access are the main study areas in LIS programmes.
These programmes provide traditional training while trying to accommodate the rapidly changing information landscape.
Traditional roles of dealing with journals and books are becoming less prevalent in the careers open to information professionals, and new competencies, skills, and graduate-level education are becoming more sought after [4].
The traditional focus of LIS was on containers rather than on content: books, journals and so on.
Barlow compared information to fine wine, 'We thought for many years that we were in the wine business.
In fact, we were in the bottling business.
And we don't know a dammed thing about wine'.
[5] Several researchers have argued that libraries will be only one part of the information society, and not necessarily the most important one.
Librarians will become a small part of the growing body of information workers, since responding to the challenges of information management will require knowledge and skills from disciplines traditionally considered peripheral to LIS [6][7].
Furthermore, education for LIS should expand, beyond skills and technology, to include new cognitive, social and situational processes [8].
Cronin, Stiffler and Day examined the emergent market for information professionals and claimed that there was a low demand for people with a Master of Library Science degree, and a greater emphasis on subject knowledge and business ability [9].
They concluded that those LIS schools which offer other options to the traditional curricula are more successful in meeting the emergent market for information professionals.
The KALIPER Report [10] identified several trends that demonstrated active movement towards a change in the education of information professionals for libraries and other information environments.
The first trend was the change that LIS underwent at the end of the twentieth century, from a library-focused model to an information-focused paradigm.
Another trend referred to two related areas – increased user-centeredness and increased inter-disciplinarity.
The third trend related to the increased investment by LIS programmes in Information and Communication Technology and its inclusion in their curricula.
The role of information in creating power and wealth is currently receiving more attention in various programmes such as: computer science, business/management schools, communications and schools of library and information science [11].
Graduates of these programmes enter careers in diverse areas such as business, industry, libraries and educational institutions [12].
It has become apparent that LIS training no longer automatically guarantees students the first pick of all employment opportunities in the field of information work [13].
Abell and Hall in their portrayal of the 'e-information' job market [14] claim that two types of e-information role seem to offer the greatest number of work opportunities: information architecture; and content management.
While these roles are open to traditional information specialists, they are often offered to highly skilled people who do not hold formal information qualifications.
Employers would like to have the best candidates from a wide range of backgrounds and the traditional information professionals compete with other workers from a variety of domains, such as computer science, business/management schools and communications.
LIS education and indeed the profession itself are facing new competition [7] and must acquire new knowledge to cope with it successfully.
Indeed, examining various LIS school programmes during the past decade has revealed that many schools have introduced new courses into their curricula such as the social context of information technology, changes in use and user behaviour, human-machine interaction and information technology, information economics, communication skills, information policy and information brokering.
Web 2.0 People talk a lot about Web 2.0.
What is this Web 2.0?
Is it a revolutionary web?
Is it another technology 'bubble'?
Is it hype?
Many associate it with terms such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, social web, etc.
and assert that Web 2.0 is a place where everyone can add or edit information.
It is a web where digital tools allow users to create, change and publish dynamic content [15].
Tim Berners-Lee claims that Web 2.0 is not different from Web 1.0 as the goal of Web 1.0 was to connect people [16].
He adds that Web 2.0 is only jargon and nobody really knows what it means.
The term Web 2.0 was first coined and conceptualised by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty in 2004 to describe the terms and business models that survived the technology sector market crash in the 1990s [17].
The companies and services that survived were collaborative, interactive, dynamic and the line between the creation and consumption of content in these environments was blurred [18].
Web 2.0 Characteristics One of the main characteristics of Web 2.0 is individual production and user-generated content (UGC).
UGC refers to self-publishing, personal publishing and self-expression [19].
The second characteristic is its capacity for 'harnessing the power of the crowd.'
A further characteristic is that of its architecture of participation and means that a service designation can improve and facilitate user participation.
Another characteristic is network effect, an economic term used to describe the increase in value to existing users of a service, as more people start to use it [20][21].
The final characteristic is openness.
It suggests working with open standards, using open source software, making use of free data, reusing data, and working in a spirit of open innovation [22].
Miller summarises and asserts that Web 2.0 enables data to be exposed and permits the building of virtual applications [23].
It is participative and presents the value of user-generated content.
Web 2.0 is about sharing and about communication and it opens the 'long tail' which allows small groups of individuals to benefit from key pieces of the platform while fulfilling their own needs.
Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 The question which inevitably arises for us is: how does this concept of Web 2.0 relate to the library world?
Notess claims that for some the term Library 2.0 means the incorporation of blogs, wikis, instant messaging, RSS, and social networking into library services [24].
For others it suggests involving users through interactive and collaborative activities such as adding tags, contributing comments and rating different library items.
Maness asserts that Library 2.0 is a user-centered virtual community [18], and Farkas [25] says that Library 2.0 improves services to the users.
Abram portrays the image of the new librarian, Librarian 2.0 [26].
These librarians understand the power of Web 2.0 opportunities, and investigate and ultimately adopt their tools.
They use non-traditional cataloguing and classification and recognise the idea of the 'long tail'.
Librarians 2.0 connect users to experts' discussions and to communities of practice; they develop social networks and encourage users to develop content and metadata.
Librarians 2.0 understand the 'wisdom of crowds' and the new roles of the blogosphere and wikisphere.
Maness [18] adds that Librarian 2.0 acts as a facilitator.
Web 2.0 is becoming an important and central topic in our information world, and more and more libraries worldwide are using its different applications.
Some libraries use blogs which serve as excellent sources of information; a place where librarians can express their opinions on issues at hand [27].
Furthermore, libraries' blogs can market the libraries to a variety of potential users.
In addition, librarians can use wikis or YouTube for the purpose of library instruction.
They can also use wikis as a platform for book recommendations, cataloguing and tagging, all created by library users.
Even OCLC has recently created a WorldCat application in Facebook (the most popular social network) where the user can search WorldCat databases, without entering the OCLC site.
Based on what has been written so far, the present study set out to explore the extent to which courses dealing with Web 2.0 are taught in the accredited schools of library and information science in the United States.
Survey Results A survey of 59 LIS programmes was conducted in July 2007 to determine whether American LIS schools offer courses on Web 2.0.
All the programmes in this survey are accredited by the American Library Association.
The researcher examined the 59 Web sites and the curricula of these accredited programmes, and also sent emails to get further information from respondents.
In the mail the respondents were asked whether their programme offered a course on Web 2.0 and if so, they were asked to send syllabi.
Examination of 59 LIS schools Web sites indicated that only six (10%) programmes taught this subject.
Out of these six, three schools (University of Western Ontario, University of Hawaii and North Carolina Central University) offer a course whose main focus is Web 2.0 and the other three schools (University of Michigan, University of Washington and Valdosta State University) offer courses which include several issues based on Web 2.0 concepts.
Only 12 schools (20%) answered the email.
Of these, 6 programmes do not offer any course which deals with Web 2.0.
As regards the other 6 programmes, one school (Florida State University) does not offer such a course, but plans to offer it in the near future.
An examination of the other 5 programmes (University of Tennessee, University of Alberta, Louisiana State University, University of Michigan and University at Buffalo) shows that these programmes do not offer a specific course on Web 2.0 but include issues such as wikis, blogs, Flickr, collaborate favorites, social networks and instant messages in their IT courses and in other advanced technology courses.
One school (University at Buffalo) plans to offer such a Web 2.0 course in the future.
Interpreting Findings This preliminary survey indicates that LIS schools in the United States are not adequately prepared for the rapid changes in Web technology and use.
It seems that the LIS programmes have not yet internalised the importance of the new, changing and dynamic innovations that are taking place in their environment.
These programmes do not offer full courses that deal with the new concept of Web 2.0, and only a few of them include several issues which are based on Web 2.0 in their courses.
The author would like to expand the scope of this survey and point to recent research which took place in Israel [28].
This research explored whether Israeli LIS students were familiar with the newest technological innovations, and whether they made use of the different Web 2.0 applications.
The research findings show that the most popular Web 2.0 applications used by LIS students are wikis (89%), blogs (45%), followed by social networks (37%), flickr (20%), while the least popular is RSS (19%).
From these results one may conclude that Israeli LIS students should be more exposed to Web 2.0 applications and their use.
Returning to the current survey of US schools, the results are susceptible to several interpretations: The first one is that perhaps LIS progammes do not attribute a lot of attention to Web 2.0 concepts and applications as they consider them a relatively unimportant topic and regard them as 'hype'.
The second is that LIS programme planners may assume that the issue of Web 2.0 is too technical and should be taught in other departments such as computer science and not in schools of librarianship and information science.
Another interpretation is that this situation reflects the fact that LIS programme designers are not open to change and innovation.
The crucial question is whether those LIS schools are not missing an opportunity to improve their professional image and standing.
Integrating a Web 2.0 course into the curriculum would expose the students to the most updated innovations in ITC, and facilitate their encounter with the new information world.
Furthermore, if LIS students are exposed to such innovations and master the most modern technologies, their professional image will be improved.
They will be empowered and will convey this feeling to their users, who may appreciate their broad spectrum of knowledge as well as their technological skills.
There is no doubt that the students of the present who are the librarians or information professionals of the future should know, master, and apply Web 2.0 principles and applications and should be able to convey them to their users.
The best way to achieve these goals is to introduce them with the new concepts and new applications of Web 2.0.
But, this is only the first step; these students should also practise and experience the new applications in order to assimilate them into their professional life.
As the present survey indicates, Web 2.0 is only a part of a whole course, and obviously there is not enough time for students to practise, exercise and internalise the new topic.
Examination of the professional literature which focuses on Web 2.0 applications and their uses shows that other academic departments make use of Web 2.0.
Educational researchers have studied learning environments which involve wikis, blogs, social networks and their implications on the learning process [29][30][31][32][33][34].
It seems that other disciplines recognise the benefits and importance of studying and applying Web 2.0 principles.
Limitations As mentioned earlier in this text, this is only a preliminary report.
One should bear in mind that that the term Web 2.0 is very young and was coined only in 2004.
Perhaps, LIS schools need more time to learn and to be exposed to this issue in order to decide whether or not they integrate this discipline into their curriculum.
In addition to this, the findings are based on a thorough examination of the 59 Web sites of the accredited schools of library and information science in the United States, but on a limited number (20%) of responses which were received via the email.
Furthermore, data were collected only from accredited LIS schools in the United States.
Perhaps another study should not focus just on schools which are part of the accredited ALA group but include other LIS schools worldwide.
Conclusion The author recommends that the different issues and applications of Web 2.0 be thoroughly taught as a separate course in the LIS curriculum and not as partial topics in another course.
Expanding the curriculum will equip new generations of librarians with competencies and skills that fit a modern, dynamic and changing work environment.
This course should include theoretical explanation as well as practical experience of the various applications of Web 2.0 such as: blogs, wikis, RSS, flickr, collaborative favorites, tagging and Folksonomies, instant messages, social networks etc.
It is important that novice librarians and information professionals recognise these applications and be able to apply them properly in their libraries and information centres in order to show their readers and users that they are still relevant and up to date in this changing, dynamic information world.
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Author Details Dr. Noa Aharony Department of Information Science Bar-Ilan University Israel Email: aharonn1@mail.biu.ac.il Web site: http://www.is.biu.ac.il/ Return to top Article Title: "Web 2.0 in U.S. LIS Schools: Are They Missing the Boat?"
Author: Dr. Noa Aharony Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/aharony/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Making the Most of a Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Making the Most of a Conference Buzz data software rdf framework wiki api javascript database dissemination infrastructure archives zip metadata doi tagging blog repositories copyright flickr linux visualisation provenance widget twitter hashtag licence research standards Citation BibTex RIS Stephanie Taylor writes about how she made the most of a conference to promote and inform the work of a project.
I’ve been working with repositories in various ways for over five years, so I have, of course, attended the major international conference Open Repositories before.
I have never actually presented anything or represented a specific project at the event, though.
This year was different.
This year I had a mission -  to present a poster on the DataFlow Project [1] and to talk to people about the work we had been doing for the past 12 months and (I hoped) to interest them in using the Open Source (OS) systems we had developed during that period.
Open Repositories is probably the largest repository-focussed conference in the world.
It attracts delegates literally from around the globe.
Because of its position as a major conference in this field, it attracts a high standard of speakers from many countries.
Repositories themselves are still a comparatively new area in the information and research world, so this is a fast-moving and innovative area in which to work.
Attending Open Repositories 2012 [2] is very important for repository staff.
They get a chance to share their work and see what everyone has been doing.
The conference has always maintained a very practical element, with informal sessions, workshops and software-specific sessions run by the main systems developers in the field.
People do not just come to listen at OR12, they come to participate.
It is a very active conference.
Perhaps because of the still experimental nature of much of the work, the community is very strong.
Many institutions only support a few repository staff, so peer support is done online with people working in the same areas at different institutions.
This has helped to build a strong and friendly community feel that is carried over into any ‘live’ event where people get to meet face-to-face.
OR12 is no exception, and sending staff has two-fold benefits.
First, it is an excellent event at which to showcase projects and new work to exactly the audience who will want to help, participate, use what you have done and give feedback.
Second, it is the place to be to pick up on what is happening, to find those useful tools, valuable research data, latest trends and take them back to the workplace for implementation.
Finally, and in some ways most importantly, it is a great opportunity to network, meet up with old colleagues and make new contacts.
When you have staff working in a fast-moving area, the strength of the community benefits everyone.
Coffee time at OR12 Photo by Zealary via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/people/zaleary/used under CC licence Open Repositories offered a further benefit in that the Repository Fringe event [3] was running as a strand of the main conference.
The ‘Repo Fringe’ as it is affectionately known within the UK repositories community, is by way of being an institution.
It has run for the past four years in Edinburgh, alongside the initial Edinburgh Fringe events but had been moved forward this year to run alongside the bigger conference.
Obviously, with ‘Big Brother’ OR12 in town, this year was going to be a little different.
The Repo Fringe is a more casual, un-conference event quite a bit removed from the highly organised nature of a large conference, and all the more welcome for that.
I had agreed to work with the Repo Fringe team to gather thoughts from people at the conference on how they would like the Repositories Fringe event to develop for 2013.
This turned out to be a very positive experience, although to start with I did feel a little overwhelmed!
Although I undertook this work to help and support the Repo Fringe event, it was a good icebreaker with delegates.
Having met me as a ‘roving reporter’, delegates were  interested to find out about what I was working on, giving me chance to chat about DataFlow.
In addition, specifically asking people about their views on the Repo Fringe gave me a great introduction to what delegates found effective, both in event organisation and in content.
From an organisation perspective, everyone was very keen on sessions that supported active participation.
This was a valuable insight for forthcoming DataFlow events, as workshops and hand-on experience would work well for the dissemination of this project.
Collecting thoughts on what delegates saw as the ‘hot’ topics for inclusion in the programme next year was a good way of gaining insights into what would be occupying people during the next twelve months.
Throughout the conference, learning about the main trends within the repositories world was a valuable The DataFlow Project Experience The DataFlow Project is making it easier for researchers and research groups to manage, archive and publish research data files from 1Mb up to 100Gb.
DataFlow has developed a two-stage data management infrastructure using DataStage [4], a networked file store and DataBank [5], a scalable data repository.
DataBank is intended to be hosted by a university or research institute, to serve as the data-archiving and publication platform for a number of DataStage instances.
It is in routine use by the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford.
DataBank allows research groups to provide optimal visibility to their published data artefacts, whilst DataStage provides optimal support for the initial creation and local management of those data sets.
DataStage and DataBank are designed to work in concert.
However, because both use the new SWORD-2 repository submission protocol, have published APIs, employ standards (REST, BagIt and Zip), and encode metadata in RDF, they can also be integrated with other systems.
DataStage is capable of publishing to any SWORD-2-compliant repository, while DataBank is able to ingest data published by any SWORD-2 client.
The software for both DataStage and DataBank is Open Source (OS) and packaged for ease of installation on an Ubuntu Linux system; users need pay only for local or cloud hosting.
The projects are keen to see institutions download and try the software, and post their feedback to our discussion list or direct to the project manager [6].
The Open Repositories 2012 Conference (OR12) seemed like a great place to interest people in our work.
I also wanted to find out more about what everyone else was doing, and as the largest international conference about repositories, OR12 seemed perfect.
Conference Participation: Transmitting On the first day, I realised the conference had a huge number of delegates when they had almost run out of lunch options by the time I reached the front of the queue.
But lunch also provided a good chance to catch up with colleagues from the project team who were also there to help promote our work.
As we chatted, a couple of people came up and asked about the project, which seemed a good start.
We told them about the posters and headed off to the afternoon sessions.
Evening networking was a good chance to talk about the project, and I had lots of interesting chats with delegates literally from all over the world about DataFlow, Open Source development and research data management.
This was the biggest difference from previous years, having a personal agenda during the evening social events.
I usually just drift, following up on speakers or areas that interested me during the day.
I found it actually helped to have a more structured approach and a specific purpose at such a big event.
As the conference was so vast, it was impossible to speak to everyone during the day.
Instead, I spent the evenings catching up with people who were interested in DataFlow, making sure they had contact information and taking details of people who wanted more information sent out to them by our project manager, back at base.
It was hard work, but also fun, and it was a real buzz to find so much interest in our project at an international conference.
Tuesday was our ‘big day’.
In the afternoon we took part in the ‘Minute Madness’ poster pitch and the evening was the drinks reception held at the poster exhibition space.
We had had two posters accepted by the conference, one explaining DataBank and one explaining DataStage, with both having information on the linking of the systems and the overall concept of DataFlow.
Minute Madness At the Minute Madness [7], I was pitching the DataStage poster.
The idea behind the Minute Madness is to promote posters to delegates in a quick-fire session.
Each poster has exactly one minute to tell everyone else about their poster and their work, and hopefully cram enough into the incredibly short pitch to interest people in coming to take a closer look at their work.
The 60 seconds can be filled in any way teams think suitable, using images, sound, speech – anything that can get your message across quickly and effectively.
The pitches took place in the late afternoon slot, and were followed that evening by a drinks reception where all the posters would be available for viewing.
The reception would give us time to talk in detail about the project.
All we had to do was use the MinuteMadness time well enough to catch their interest and get them to remember the project later.
Of course, identifying the key points is incredibly important when you only have 60 seconds to pitch in.
After much discussion among the project team, we had decided to enter two posters to get across the idea that our project was made up of two systems that could be used together or separately, something we thought was a key part of our work.
Anusha Ranganathan doing her poster pitch in the one-minute madness Photo by Nicola Osbourne via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/people/eurovision_nicola/ used under CC licence My colleague, Anusha Ranganathan of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and one of the key developers on the project, was pitching the DataBank poster [8].
Although I am used to speaking in public, I was quite nervous of only having a minute to speak and be clear.
The session was great fun, though, with all the ‘pitchers’ sitting together in a ‘pit’ at the front of the theatre.
As we were called up, our comrades-in-arms patted our backs and we gave loud applause and thumbs up to each other.
Many of the pitches were funny, many very imaginative, all of them clear and a great advert for their projects and services.
Anusha was fantasic, and came in spot on 60 seconds.
I over-ran and fell foul of the dreaded 60-second whistle, but it can’t have been too bad as we noticed lots of people looking for the posters at the drinks reception.
The reception was a great success, with lots of interest in the project.
I was glad we had decided on two posters, as the project is complicated to explain.
Part of the work has been in creating two systems that work together but also separately, so having two posters really helped to make that clear.
Success Factors We focussed on paring the information down as much as possible, and trying not to cram too much into the minute we were allowed.
Good time keeping was important, as presentations were ruthlessly cut off in mid-flow if they over-ran.
You also needed to make sure you were not bombarding the audience with so much information that they got confused.
The key to success was saying just enough, clearly enough, so people knew what the project was about and would be able to remember you and find you at the poster reception.
Keeping it simple helped, as did keeping to time.
Anusha’s presentation worked so well because she hit the time exactly, so finished with a strong, clear statement of who would be interested in visiting us and why they would benefit.
Humour was an integral part of proceedings, given that so many people were talking in such short pitches, and some of the best pitches incorporated jokes to get points across.
This approach works well if you are comfortable with humour, but if you feel this is not your style, it is best to leave it alone.
A more casual style is appropriate, and the friendly, informal mood that quickly developed in the session meant people naturally fell into a more relaxed delivery.
As an aside, working on describing the project in 60 seconds was a very valuable exercise in itself.
It really honed down what we thought we were doing.
It also highlighted not just the project successes but the things we had achieved that other people would be interested in hearing about and using.
The time discipline made it hard work, but once you have got the slim-line version of your project pitch, it provides a really useful template from which to develop all your promotional material, because you have identified the essential message you want to give to people.
Indeed, it would be invaluable to work on a minute-long pitch about your project before any conference, even if you are not presenting in that format.
The benefits of being able to tell people clearly and concisely about your work in a very short time especially at a busy event.
Although the conference has always been international, it really felt as though it was world-wide this year.
I spoke to delegates from Japan, Korea, India, the USA and, of course, most European countries.
The Pecha Kucha sessions, which were run over three days of the conference as part of the Repo Fringe strand, rather emphasised this.
Pecha Kucha is a simple idea of 20 images with 20 seconds of ‘showing time’ per image.
Originally a Japanese idea, Pecha Kucha is a fast, informal way of exchanging experience and ideas.
These sessions are a regular and popular part of the Repo Fringe, and translated well to a bigger conference.
They have a lot in common with the Minute Madness type of sessions, although there is a little more time to talk.
They offer the same kind of benefits for promoting projects but need more of a specific focus to make them work well.
Ideally, they should ‘show’ as well as ‘tell’, meaning that the best sessions leave the audience knowing something they didn’t know before.
A good approach is to ask a question and answer that question in the session.
Given that each slide is only shown for 20 seconds, images work much better than complex, bullet-pointed slides.
Most Pecha Kuchas will have the images for each session changing automatically, changing after 20 seconds, so it really does pay to practise in advance.
That said, the sessions are fun and informal.
Everyone appreciates the challenge of the tight delivery time, and humour and goodwill are key components of any session.
For OR12, I found the Pecha Kucha sessions were a useful way of identifying new trends and projects and people to whom I wanted to talk about DataFlow.
They gave a really varied and accessible view into what is happening in repositories across the globe.
I like these ‘taster’ type sessions at large conferences as they make it easy to identify the speakers you want to follow up on later.
With such a packed programme and over 460 delegates, it just was not possible to go to every session, but the Pecha Kutchas made me feel I was not missing out on anything.
A memorable Pecha Kucha can get lots of attention at a bigger event for individual projects.
Time and other commitments meant DataFlow did not enter a session, but having seen the benefits of giving an informal summary to delegates, I would definitely make sure that I participated in future when I have a project or idea to share.
DevCSI Developer Challenge With large conferences, it pays to look at ahead at all the sessions and plan ahead.
However, it is also useful to stay flexible at the event itself so you do not miss any opportunities.
For the DataFlow Project, based as it is on software development, the Developer Challenge at OR12 was a great chance to showcase the talented developers who had worked on the systems.
The Developer Challenge [9] was run by the DevCSI Project [10] throughout the OR12 Conference, giving developers four days to work out an idea and get something coded.
It was a good opportunity to see what the developers who work with repositories can do, what they are thinking and also see useful tools as prototypes.
There was a vast number of entries, and lots of innovative ideas.
Two of the developers who worked on the DataFlow Project, Ben O’Steen and Richard Jones, submitted entries [11].
Ben developed a service to check whether it is actually possible to read articles that are flagged as published.
Based on DOIs, the service will check a DOI to see whether the article is available and readable or is, in fact, hidden behind a pay-wall [12].
Richard worked with Mark MacGillivray on SWORD IT!, a javascript widget that researchers could easily embed  in their own Web pages.
Once in place, the widget would automatically track the repository deposits of researchers, providing useful statistics and other information [13].
Ben O'Steen, Mahendra Mahey (DevCSI, UKOLN) and Richard Jones (Photo by Zealary via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/people/zaleary/ used under CC licence) Although neither of them won the challenge, they were both highly commended and will both continue to develop the ideas.
The winner was Patrick McSweeney of the University of Southampton.
Patrick’s idea involved a set of tools which turn a repository into a data management and visualisation suite with a simple provenance model [14].
The Developer Challenge created a great buzz at the conference and having two developers from the project getting so much individual interest really helped to raise the profile of the project.
It was a way to demonstrate the quality of our work, which can be very challenging when the deliverables are software systems that nobody is going to install and configure on the spot.
Demos are great for giving people a flavour of the work, but they are just that – demonstrations.
Showing the skills that went into the project via the Developer Challenge was a creative way of illustrating a different side of project work that is essential but often not visible.
Exploiting Social Media Staying flexible and continuing to look at how you can promote your project once you are actually at a conference means you can identify opportunities and respond to them.
The key to making the most of such opportunities is to be able to report on them quickly.
For DataFlow, the Developer Challenge was the unexpected opportunity that really raised our profile.
The other part of the promotion equation is, of course, making the most out of such opportunities by making sure interested people get to know about what you are doing.
Social media offers a great way to keep promoting your project with a ‘drip-drip’ approach before, during and for a period after, the conference.
For DataFlow at OR12, we used a combination of Twitter and blogging to transmit the activities of the project team at the conference.
During conferences, the combination of tweeting and blogging is very strong.
Starting with Twitter, most conferences now have an official event hashtag for Twitter use – the tag for OR12 was #OR2012.
By tagging any tweet relating to the conference with this hash tag, your tweet automatically joins the main ‘stream’ of tweets about the conference.
The stream will be followed not just by people at the conference (a valuable audience to reach) but also by many people who are unable to attend the conference but still want to follow what is happening.
By tweeting information about your own project and related areas you can let those interested know what your project is about.
Make sure  also to tweet links back to relevant sections of your main project Web site when mentioning your project, so people can click through to read more.
In addition to tweeting, blog posts allow you to expand on what is happening, sessions your project is involved with, high points of the conference and anything else ‘news-worthy’ about your project at the conference.
Just as important as writing the post is to include photographs so people start to put a face to your work and links to presentations so people can read about your work later.
Make sure people know who to contact for more information and for further discussion too.
Once you have a blog post up and published, tweet a short introduction and a link to the post.
The tweet will give people the opportunity to click through and read more and will allow events organisers to pick up on your post and link back to it from the official conference blog and/or Web site, another valuable channel for dissemination.
Social media, though, are just one part of the ‘informal’ side of a large conference.
Many face-to-face options happen throughout events.
Birds of a Feather  (BoF) sessions, where like-minded individuals meet to discuss specific topics, are often organised during the conference rather than planned ahead.
Look for any BoF sessions that could be relevant to your project and go along.
If nothing is really addressing the burning topics your project raises, start your own session and get others to sign up.
Keep it useful and relevant, though, not just a straight talk about the project but a chance to discuss the wider issues that lie within your areas of work.
Some conferences also have time and space for demo sessions or practical workshops where you can show your work to delegates.
Again, these can be available on an ad hoc, informal basis during the conference.
If you have interest from delegates for a demo or workshop, speak to the conference organisers about taking a room or part of a room for an informal session – they are usually happy to accommodate additional exchanges of information providing they have the space available.
Thinking outside the formal presentation ‘box’ can give you a lot of more creative and eye-catching opportunities to get the attention of delegates.
You can also target your audience more specifically and look to talk at greater length and in more depth to people who are really interested in your work through informal sessions.
The short sessions like the Minute Madness and the Pecha Kucha work well for more broad dissemination and are very worthwhile.
You never know exactly when someone might remember your project, maybe long after the conference, and get in touch with you.
Conference Participation: Receiving The other side of participating in a conference is to find out about the work of other people.
For a project, this is important on a number of levels.
Firstly, potential contacts can be identified by attending sessions on other projects to find out how they might fit with your own work.
For managing to get to everything of interest at a large conference, planning really is the key.
Planning which sessions to attend and sharing them among colleagues using a combination of the conference programme, the poster Minute Madness session and the Petcha Kutcha sessions means you can identify the most relevant topics and make sure someone is there.
As with your own dissemination, don’t just look to the formal papers.
Many informal sessions can be just as informative and may even be better for networking.
Reporting back to colleagues and the wider project team is important too.
It is worth considering encouraging colleagues to write blog posts on general sessions and observation.
This helps your own project team but can also be useful to share among the wider community.
Having agreed channels for different kinds of information is also useful.
For example, we have a project team email list for keeping everyone up-to-date so new information and questions can be posted and shared there.
Time is always the problem with reading up on new things, so an afternoon immersed in the latest projects is a welcome opportunity.
I attended the text mining workshop [15] which was really useful.
Text mining is an area I do not know much about, but feel I should know more.
As a novice to text mining, I was delighted that all the speakers put their work in context.
There were lots of practical examples, demos and videos to illustrate their presentations.
It was a great way to learn a lot in a short time, and of course I started to think about DataFlow and how we might adapt some of the work I had seen to enhance the systems.
It is impossible to mention everything at this event, but highlights were the Developer Challenge, the Hydra Project and developments surrounding SWORD2 .
Although I was unable to make the main Hydra [16] workshop on Tuesday morning, I soon picked up on the buzz around the project.
The Hydra vision is of one back-end body a digital repository – with many front-end heads – tailored applications designed for specific user communities.
It reflected very faithfully the main topics arising at the conference and created a lot of interest.
From the perspective of my own project I was delighted to discover another project working with a similar vision of both open source development and bespoke features for end-users.
There were many people interested in how we could link up the work of the projects, and this is something I will definitely be taking back to the DataFlow Steering Committee.
SWORD2 [17] was another interesting aspect of the conference.
DataFlow worked to integrate SWORD2 into both Databank and DataStage, so I was very keen to see what was going to happen next.
I was really pleased to learn that the team has been granted extended funding to investigate data deposit scenarios, something of great interest in the future [18].
Monitoring The other benefit of going to a large conference is picking up on what everyone is talking about and what ‘hot trends’ are being identified.
This is important to do in addition to the more formal listening and participation in specific sessions about individual projects as it gives a flavour of what might come.
The formal presentations are about what has happened and what it happening now.
The informal trends being discussed between sessions are all about what might be next, what is going to be happening in the future.
In terms of picking up a feel for whether your current work is going to stay relevant and identifying in which directions it would be most useful to develop your work during at least the next 12 months, the ‘hot gossip’ is the best indicator.
This year, there was much talk of Open Access (OA) and a general feeling that the issues were breaking out of the repositories community and were starting to be discussed on a much bigger stage.
For the UK, the Finch Report [19] is an obvious driver, but the increasing importance of OA seemed as relevant for delegates from other countries too.
Linked data and text mining, and their usefulness in the context of a repository are perennial topics of discussion, but this year things seemed to be more advanced than anticipated.
More people seemed to be actually integrating tools with repositories and assessing their usefulness from practical experience.
It was a very positive conference in that way, as I seemed to see and hear about so many things, big and small, that had actually been done rather than discussed in theory.
In fact, when talking to people about DataFlow, the most frequently asked question was ‘can I do X with it?’, which was most encouraging.
There was much speculation about what repositories actually are, whether their user interfaces are something the end users actually need to interact with or whether it would be more useful for repositories to become invisible to users and even if they were still needed.
The formal presentations and informal conversations around this topic focussed heavily on what I think was the one big theme systems integration.
This was driven in part by the surge in implementations of Research Data Management (RDM) systems and Research Information Management (RIM) systems.
Linking the databases together that hold the three strands of core information – scholarly works, research data supporting those publications and the information about funding – makes sense.
However, there was much discussion about how the integration could and should be achieved.
The idea of the ‘invisible repository’ has been around since 2011, first used by William Nixon of the University of Glasgow to describe his vision of an embedded repository [20].
The recent drive to establish RDMs and RIMs has expanded on this concept to include the repository as one of the three main systems, whether it is visible or not.
A great driver in the UK is the Research Excellence Framework (REF) [21], which will require information gathered from all three of these core areas.
One of the benefits of an international conference, though, is being able to put UK motivations within a global context and it was interesting to find that even without the REF, most countries are focussing on using the combination of scholarly works, research data and research management information.
There was much talk of budget cuts, not exactly a surprise, but useful to see that this was having a global effect, so we could pool ideas and look for possible solutions together.
De-briefing For many projects, time for meeting up face-to-face can be brief.
DataFlow is no exception, with the team based in various locations and keeping in touch via Skype conference calls, wikis and email.
Attending a conference, then, can give a project team a great chance to get together for a few days.
Although not everyone from our project attended, we had enough people to make informal meetings possible and valuable.
Being away from our usual work environments was also a useful opportunity to talk without the interruptions of the workplace.
We were quite informal in our approach, and had decided ahead of time on the people who would do the pitch for the posters and who would be with each poster at the reception.
We got together to discuss the sessions we had attended and to update each other on new contacts.
We also passed on contacts among ourselves if a contact needed more detailed information from a specific team member.
We had planned ahead of time to have someone back in the office who could field email queries and send out additional information to new contacts, and in the rush of a large conference this was invaluable and something that is well worth taking time to sort out ahead of attending a large event.
The main lesson learned in this area is that more co-ordination and planning is good.
We did some pre-planning, but the conference was such a large event, with so many delegates, that it was difficult to know if you had managed to talk to everyone and made yourself available to everyone who wanted to discuss the project.
A more organised approach to blogging and dissemination in general would be good.
Again, we had planned ahead, but there was so much to cover and to get out in a short time that a more detailed media plan would be very useful in future.
Updating members of the project team not at the conference was largely done through the project email list and via blog posts.
A daily de-briefing on a more formal basis would help another time to make sure we captured everything we wanted to report back.
I felt, for example, that my own focus was maybe too much on reporting back contacts and questions and would have benefitted from more reporting back on trends and specific sessions.
However, there is always time post-conference to digest all the information and report back at a more leisurely pace, so all is not lost.
Conclusion In fact, the reflective time after the conference is a good point at which to review the benefits of attending as a team.
The large conferences run extremely tight schedules and packed programmes.
With so many parallel sessions, it is impossible for one person to cover everything, so sending a team ensures that key sessions are attended and reported back.
The same is true of networking, whether for specific dissemination or generally making contacts.
For using the conference as a launch for dissemination of a project, a team is essential.
The cross-project skills can be represented, along with specific areas of expertise and this can open up new opportunities for more creative dissemination, such as the Developer Challenge.
In addition, sharing important jobs like tweeting and blogging means that covering the essential sessions is possible.
Dividing up the presentations and networking really does mean that your project can have far greater impact, and add up to benefits for the project both in dissemination terms and also in terms of information and contacts brought back to the project that are far greater than the sum of the parts.
From the perspective of my DataFlow effort,  I found OR2012 a very engaging conference.
I went to OR2012 with an agenda, and I came away happy to have worked through it.
I think the DataFlow Project was a good fit for the themes of the conference this year.
Two of the main themes in particular  enhancing repositories with additional tools/applications and system integration – touched directly on the work of the project.
As a result, the project team had a lot of discussions about how both DataBank and DataStage could be integrated within existing systems, and how they could be implemented and built upon.
The conference was a really good place to promote the project and tell people within the repository world what we had been doing, and why.
It was also a great place to go and listen to what everyone else was doing, and take back new ideas.
As the ultimate aim of the DataFlow Project is to deliver two working, open-source systems to the HEI community, and encourage further community development of both, seeing where our work might fit into the future is essential.
OR2012 delivered a great international conference to both show and learn.
I would encourage anyone with a related project to promote to consider going to Open Repositories to share the work and gather inspiration and knowledge for future developments.
The next conference, OR2013, will take place in Prince Edward Island, Canada in July 2013 [22].
I’d really like to be there.
The OR2012 team produced fantastic coverage of the event through their live blog, a really great resource for checking on any sessions if you could not be there or missed anything during the conference [23].
References The DataFlow Project Web site http://www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk/ Open Repositories 2012 http://or2012.ed.ac.uk/ The Repository Fringe Web site http://www.repositoryfringe.org/ About DataStage, including links for downloading the software http://www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk/index.php/datastage About DataBank, including links for downloading the software http://www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk/index.php/databank DataFlow mailing list information http://www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk/index.php/links Minute Madness details https://www.conftool.net/or2012/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=6 DataFlow posters https://www.conftool.net/or2012/index.php?page=browseSessions&search=dataflow The DevCSI Developer Challenge http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/developer-challenges/developer-challenge-or-12/ DevCSI Project http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/ Blog post on DataFlow developer entries http://criticalsteph.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/dataflow-developers-success-in-the-or12-developer-challenge/ Ben O’Steen’s ‘Is this research readable?’ pitch and proof of concept http://isthisresearchreadable.org/ Richard Jones and Mark MacGillivray idea ‘SWORDIT!’ described on video http://vimeo.com/45626757 Developer Challenge 2012 winning entry http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/2012/07/12/or2012-developer-challenge-the-winners/ The Text Mining Workshop at OR12 https://www.conftool.net/or2012/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=42 The Hydra Project Web site http://projecthydra.org/ The SWORD2 Web site http://swordapp.org/ SWORD2 presentations at OR2012, including links to papers https://www.conftool.net/or2012/index.php?page=browseSessions&search=SWORD The Finch Report, 2012, final version http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/ Nixon, W.J., ‘Embedding Exemplar’, paper given at RSP event ‘How embedded and integrated is your repository?’, Nottingham, 10 February 2011 http://rsp.ac.uk/events/embedding-and-integrating-repositories/ REF Web site http://www.ref.ac.uk/ Open Repositories 2013 announcement http://or2012.ed.ac.uk/2012/06/18/announcement-of-open-repositories-2013/ OR2012 live blog Web site http://or2012.ed.ac.uk/category/liveblog/ Author Details Stephanie Taylor Software Development Manager for the DataFlow Project, Oxford Critical Eye Communications Ltd Email: Stephanie@criticalec.com Web site: Project Web site http://www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk/ Critical Eye Communications blog http://criticalsteph.wordpress.com/ Stephanie Taylor is a library and information consultant and trainer/facilitator with a background in academic libraries and over 15 years of experience in the library and information sector.
She also worked for around five years on the ‘dark side’,  as a project manager & engineering team leader for a library software company.
She occasionally uses that experience to write documentation and wrangle developers for HEI software development projects.
Her main interests are in all things digital library, social media, digital copyright, repositories, Open Access and Open Development.
She can often be found talking about these topics along with knitting, chocolate and cocktails on Twitter as @criticalsteph Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall Meeting Buzz data software rdf sparql database infrastructure archives metadata digitisation repositories preservation provenance flash frbr soa curation dspace e-science interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Walk reports on the Sun-PASIG winter meeting held in Baltimore, USA on 18-20 November 2008.
I had managed to miss the previous two PASIG (Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group)[1] meetings, so was delighted to find myself finally able to participate by attending the Fall meeting.
Conveniently the event was arranged to follow immediately the SPARC Digital Repositories meeting [2], also held in Baltimore, and which I also attended.
PASIG is a group sponsored by and centred on Sun Microsystems (Sun) which is a prominent vendor of data storage hardware and which is building a new business around systems to support digital preservation and archiving.
The event was held in the brand-new Baltimore Hilton which made for very plush surroundings and a very comfortable stay for those of us who had booked a room in the same hotel.
There were 126 delegates listed, but I estimate that rather fewer actually made an appearance although as people came and went it was difficult to be sure about numbers.
Rather unfortunately, a day or two before this meeting Sun had announced an intention to lay off 18% of its workforce.
This was mentioned several times in conversations over coffee with other delegates who were concerned about Sun's viability as a business.
In addition to this, Sun has until recently sold a hardware/software package for a high-performance archiving solution called 'ST 5800 Honeycomb'.
At the meeting it was announced that this product was being 'end-of-lined'.
A significant proportion of the delegates had purchased Honeycomb and Sun staff felt obliged to apologise to them at the meeting.
Within this somewhat inauspicious context, Mike Keller (University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Stanford University) gave an introduction to the meeting, suggesting that we should not allow 'socio-political issues' to dominate the discussion and that 'in these troubled times we need to concentrate on the technical'.
Continuing in this vein, Ernie Ingles (Vice-Provost and Chief Librarian, University of Alberta) regretted the 'bad news about Sun', declaring that 'he wanted to support this great company', and 'that all would be well'.
Ernie emphasised that we should 'take a longer view' a reasonable position, perhaps, for a group focussed on digital preservation.
He also suggested that '400 years from now, history will look at PASIG and the wonderful work it did to to advance the state of digital preservation'.
With so much interesting material to discuss, the PASIG delegates went along with the suggestion to 'concentrate on the technical' and the wider context of the troubled economic climate was put to one side for the most part.
The format of the next two-and-a-half days was a intensive series of (mostly short) presentations from a wide variety of speakers.
It is not possible to describe all of the presentations, and I have had to be brief about those I have described.
However, most of the presentations' slides are available for further study and where this is the case I have given URLs in the references.
19 November 2008: Morning Session This session consisted of a few presentations from speakers concerned with looking at significant trends in preservation and archiving, including the following: James Simon, An Open Preservation and Archiving Architecture (claimed to support 'most if not all of the ST 5800 features and more') [3] Major Trends Overview Martha Anderson, Director of Program Management, NDIIPP, U.S. Library of Congress Martha emphasised the need to preserve 'practice' as well as data, arguing that even if tools and technology change, the thinking behind them should be preserved.
She characterised the Library of Congress's approach to preservation which considers different perspectives on preservation, looking at 'today, tomorrow and forever'.
Intriguingly, she invoked Philip K. Dicks's The Preserving Machine as required reading for people involved in digital preservation!
She presented a slide which I thought was particularly useful number 7 in her presentation [4] which details how NDIPP categorises content into domains.
Storage Technology Overview Chris Wood, Storage CTO, Sun Microsystems Chris gave a comprehensive overview of the current state of data storage technology, with some extrapolations indicating likely future trends.
If you are specifically interested in this sort of thing then Chris's presentation [5] should be a useful resource the last half-dozen slides outline some emerging technologies in storage.
Chris went on to describe some early plans for a new 'T10 object-based' storage system a system which is completely abstracted from hardware, the details of which were, unfortunately, subject to a non-disclosure arrangement at the time.
Suffice it to say that while the appeal of the recently deprecated Honeycomb system was due to the fact that it bundled dedicated hardware and software, this meant that the hardware and software were, to a degree, mutually dependent.
The appeal of the new approach is the fact that the software will be able to run over a variety of hardware.
Chris also presented some strong views about functions which he believes are not appropriate to an archiving system, asserting that 'de-duplication is not a function of archiving.
Neither is lossy compression, or transcoding'.
Much of his presentation was concerned with the pros and cons of various media in use today (disk, tape, optical, solid-state).
He predicts an increase in the use of solid-state or 'flash' storage, but also that tape and disk will remain viable for some time to come.
Tape endures as a viable storage medium for many applications as it is still relatively cheap both to manufacture and to operate (in terms of power consumption).
Blu-Ray optical storage is also a good bet for the medium term according to Chris.
He pointed out the effect of wide consumer-device adoption driving down the price of technologies, citing the example of solid-state memory in particular.
One very interesting point Chris made concerned the relative costs of procuring and running hardware.
He predicts that somewhere between 2010 and 2015, the capital outlay for equipment (servers, disk arrays etc.)
will be superseded by the running costs of keeping a typical item of such equipment both powered up and cooled down.
19 November 2008: Afternoon Session This session was predominately concerned with preservation, and we were treated to a series of short presentations reporting on projects in this area.
Most of these were short, and included the following: Sandy Payette, Fedora Commons (some interesting ideas on the 'emergence of infrastructure'.
I noted with interest that with version 3.1, Fedora has introduced support for SPARQL) [6] Mark Evans, Planets (a description of a data model to underpin a distributed system for preservation) [7] David Tarrant, Preserv2 (an interesting look at preservation as a process within a repository system)[8] Carl Grant, Ex Libris, The Digital Preservation System and the Open-Platform [9] Brad McLean, DSpace 2.0 (an overview of a new architecture which is influenced by 'ORE, JCR, FRBR, RDF and Fedora') [10] Sayeed Choudhury, Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access (an update on the progress of this group) [11] Chris Awre, REMAP and RepoMMan (an overview of two projects concerned with systematically embedding preservation into scholarly workflows in an institutional context) [12] Architectural Issues in Preservation Kenneth Thibodeau, Director, Electronic Records Archives Program, NHE, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration I thought Kenneth was particularly interesting, talking mostly about arrangements for archiving US Government records, including email messages sent to and from the White House.
He described some considerable preservation challenges, with a slide [13] illustrating remarkable growth in the quantity of records kept in the White House.
Kenneth explained how his administration was anticipating a deluge of new material with the transition of power from President Bush to President-elect Obama.
He explained the primary differences between 'documents' and 'records', offering the distinction that a document can be a stand-alone or atomic artefact, while a record is generally part of an (ordered) collection.
Kenneth also had some interesting things to say about the importance of perception in preservation explaining that, in a context of changing business requirements and technological obsolescence, expectations and perceptions can also change.
He also illustrated the difficulty of designing for the future, pointing out that, 'it is only when a bridge collapses that you actually recognise what it was you needed to know when you designed it'.
Overview of Repository Needs and Directions Tyler Walters, Georgia Institute of Technology Tyler gave a nice overview of progress under three themes: 'exchange' (harvesting & interoperability), 'infrastructure' and 'synergies'.
Under the 'exchange' theme, he was especially enthusiastic about ORE (Object Reuse and Exchange), asserting that 'metadata is important, but source content is what it's all about!'
SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) also got a mention here, notably in its role of facilitating interoperability between OJS (Open Journal System) and Fedora and DSpace.
Tyler also described an opportunity for LOCKSS to work with harvesting technologies and SWORD to provide 'distributed preservation' via private LOCKSS networks.
This would require the development of extensions to repository software to support automatic harvesting and distribution of content, with SWORD providing the mechanism for what he termed 'crash recovery' of data.
Moving on to infrastructure, Tyler briefly outlined a number of initiatives in the area of format management, before addressing issues around storage.
Describing a 'tiered storage layer', Tyler emphasised the importance of 'abstracting the storage layer from the content-organising features of the repository'.
Not for the first time at the meeting, the hot topic of 'cloud-storage' got a mention, and Tyler pointed to the eScience project CARMEN as an example of a repository using cloud-storage.
Under the theme of 'synergies', Tyler mostly concentrated on what he called 'convergence', citing the collaboration between DSpace and Fedora in particular.
He picked out examples of collaborative development in areas such as the integration of repositories with authoring tools and shared storage, showing how they are leading to a shared vision of common, low-level infrastructure supporting 'modularised functionality' [14].
The day ended with an excellent dinner at the Hilton.
The waiting staff were clearly very newly trained, and the meal was punctuated on one occasion by what sounded like a tray of dishes being dropped down an escalator, but this did not at all detract from a very pleasant conclusion to day one.
20 November 2008: Morning Session The morning of day two was devoted to digital curation, in response to feedback from delegates at previous PASIG meetings.
This session consisted of a rapid succession of briefings from a wide range of parties, including: Patrick McGrath, The UC Berkeley Mediavault Program (a Mellon-funded museum collection management system called 'Collectionspace' which is designed according to SOA (Service Oriented Architectural) principles) [15] Bob Rogers, SNIA Data Preservation and Metadata Projects (an overview of tools for classification and policy management, and an introduction to SIRF (Self Contained Information Retention Format))[16] Helen Tibbo, DigCCurr I & II: Lessons Learned from Building a Digital Curation Curriculum (an introduction to the DigCCurr project in which digital curation was characterised as being about 'maintaining context over time essential for reuse' as well as being a 'young and evolving field')[17 ] Research Data Curation Trends Lucy Nowell, Program Director, Office of CyberInfrastructure, U.S. National Science Foundation Lucy gave a brief, very high-level strategic and political view of data curation in the US.
She pointed out that the NSF has had a long-standing policy which has just not been enforced.
There is now a new resolve to enforce it.
The US Congress has made it known that it expects open access to publicly funded data.
The NSF has a CyberInfrastructure vision for 21st century discovery, which is focussed on 'community-based knowledge representations'.
Contouring Curation for Disciplinary Difference and the Needs of Small Science Carole Palmer, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign Carole talked about profiling complexities and differences both within and among disciplines in 'small science'.
She showed a slide contrasting crystallography (CIFs) with data structures/formats from geobiology [18].
Interestingly, she has also been analysing the discourse of the scientists themselves in interviews, and briefly showed some 'interview word-clouds'.
High-Level Storage and Data Management Trends Raymond Clarke, Enterprise Storage Specialist, Sun Microsystems, SNIA Technical Board Member Raymond began by explaining that backing up and archiving data was a pressing issue because the 'history of data growth is exponential'.
Amusingly, he illustrated this by contrasting the size of various pieces of important text: Pythagorus' Theorum (24 words), the Gettysburg Address (286 words), the EU regulations on the sale of cabbages (26,911 words).
Focussing on issues and challenges related to storage hardware, Raymond characterised such hardware as tending to become obsolete within 2-5 years and maintaining backwards compatibility for, remarkably, only 'n-1 years'.
He claimed that we should treat hardware migration as inevitable and, consequently, that we ought to plan for it.
Raymond offered a table (slide 7 in his presentation [19]) contrasting the characteristics of systems supporting digital archiving and data protection (or 'backup').
Finally, I found the slide on the 'Demands of a New Archive Reality' (slide 8) particularly interesting, wherein Raymond suggests that a new dimension has been added to the problem of archiving massive datasets that of how to 'search petabytes of data from the edge'.
20 November 2008: Afternoon Session Day two concluded with a series of presentations concerned with the use of Sun technologies in architectures to support repositories, preservation and archiving.
The presentations included: Reagan Moore, Building a Reference Implementation of a Preservation Environment (a description of a 'starter-kit for a preservation environment' which, among other things, introduces the notion of a 'chain of custody')[20] Infinite Archive System Keith Rajecki, Education Solutions Architect, Sun Microsystems, Inc. & Judy Leach, Storage Solutions Architect, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
The latest offering in the area of integrated storage solutions from Sun Microsystems was outlined in this clear presentation.
Describing what was called an 'intelligent tiered archive', this new product offers a hardware stack of different storage media in one 'factory-configured' system.
The attraction of this approach is that a single integrated system can offer different storage solutions to meet different requirements.
As there had been plenty of discussion at PASIG about the variable costs and efficiencies of the very many options available for data storage, such an integrated yet flexible solution seemed attractive.
Although I could not stay for an extended meeting with Sun which answered questions about this new product, I noticed that many of the delegates did, suggesting that Sun might have hit on an approach which is attractive, at least, to the PASIG delegates [21].
Scalable Architectures Gary Wright, Digital Preservation Product Manager, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Randy Stokes, Principal Engineer, FamilySearch, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Gary and Randy spoke about 'preserving the heritage of mankind'.
Specifically, they described FamilySearch the world's largest genealogy database, which was begun 87 years ago and now contains 3.5 billion images on microfilm.
They have recorded 10 billion names which they estimate is '10% of everyone who has ever lived'.
FamilySearch is an ongoing digitisation project creating a million new records every week.
They have done much to streamline this process, including 'crowd-sourcing' the transcription service: for example, a scanned image of a hand-written birth-certificate is shown to two remote volunteers if they agree on the transcription then this is entered into record, else it is shown to a third volunteer and so on until a consensus is reached.
The FamilySearch project team aspires to creating an infrastructure which allows it to scan and process a billion images every year [22].
The second day culminated in a drinks reception and meal in Baltimore's Museum of American Sport, conveniently situated next to the hotel.
As ever, the catering was excellent and we were able to wander the museum, drink in hand, attempting to make sense of what passes for sport in the United States.
21 November 2008: Morning Session The third and final day of the PASIG meeting was actually a half-day, with a few presentations culminating in a summary keynote from Clifford Lynch.
Presentations included: David Gewirtz, Considerations in Implementing a Permanent Access Solution [23] Thomas Ledoux, Implementing the SPAR architecture (a description of the Système de Préservation et d'Archivage Réparti, based on an RDF platform called Virtuoso) [24] Final Summary Keynote: How the PASIG fits into the Global Project Landscape Clifford Lynch, Executive Director CNI Clifford delivered a characteristically thoughtful summing up, noting that PASIG was focussed on technology rather than policy.
He pointed to an interesting opportunity in the area of scientific/data archiving.
Most such data are generated by apparatus, are then fed into an intervening 'mystery' system, after which they are archived.
Clifford wondered if we should get closer to the apparatus, providing short-term storage as a compromise, noting that we should be open to such compromises.
Clifford suggested that there had been more discussion about federation this year, concluding that economies of scale were attractive in the present economic climate.
He noted that cost-saving strategies were preoccupying more people, citing the evidence of facilities moving large data centres to places where electricity is cheap and plentiful.
He also pointed out that ingest is still expensive and that what he termed 'money-pits' abound.
Most interesting to me was the way in which Clifford picked up on and was critical of much of the talk about 'cloud' storage and computing, declaring that there had been a lot of 'scary hand-waving about clouds'.
He suggested that one problem with clouds is that they are opaque, leading to the sort of service level agreement (SLA) which might as well just say 'Trust us!'.
He noted that Amazon's feted S3 service has the potential for severe performance problems in data preservation scenarios, and that there has been no systematic study of error/data loss from such services.
He called for more empirical testing.
He also outlined some examples of the sort of parameters a cloud-based preservation system would need to offer, including: the number of copies to be kept and geographical constraints (positive and negative), such as how many continents to store the data on, or even which countries to avoid using.
Amusingly, he asked how one would write an SLA for such a storage service, offering as an example: 'We promise to lose no more than n bits in a year.....', with a fictitious customer response of: 'We just lost most of the history of physics, but we'll be getting free service for the next year as compensation'.
With such storage services, quantified risk management doesn't work!
Clifford sounded another note of warning, suggesting that we need to consider the provenance of data more than we have done so far.
He implied that this became progressively more difficult with the increasing complexity of the architectures being developed to support preservation.
He singled out the particular difficulty of maintaining the application of licensing to data as they moved from one system to another.
Other Meetings and Discussions It is worth noting that there was plenty of opportunity for networking, and a number of ad hoc or loosely planned meetings occurred throughout the two-and-a-half day event.
I made a number of useful contacts and enjoyed many engaging conversations.
Conclusion The hospitality arranged by Sun was very good and contributed greatly, I think, to the success of the event.
At times the event was almost overwhelming, with a very dense programme of speakers, but with copious notes and well-organised access to the presentation materials, I have been able to follow up lines of enquiry after the event.
It did occur to me at the time that, while it is reasonable and appropriate for PASIG to concentrate on the technical at the expense of, as Mike Keller put it, the 'socio-political', we could not be blind to the fact that the current period of significant, global economic upheaval will have an effect on digital preservation.
Preservation can be an expensive endeavour, and budgets are going to be tighter than ever before.
Nevertheless, from what I saw and heard, technical innovation in this area continues apace.
I, or someone from UKOLN, will certainly go to future PASIG events should they continue in this vein.
References Web site for PASIG http://sun-pasig.org/ Web site of the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ir08/ James Simon's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Simon.pdf Martha Anderson's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Anderson.pdf Chris Wood's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Wood.pdf Sandy Payette's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Payette.pdf Mark Evans' presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Evans.pdf David Tarrant's presentation http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12026/ Carl Grant's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Grant.pdf Brad McLean's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_McLean.pdf Sayeed Choudhury's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Choudhury.pdf Chris Awre's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Awre.pdf Kenneth Thibodeau's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Thibodeau.pdf Tyler Walters' presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Walters.pdf Patrick McGrath's presentation http://mvp.berkeley.edu/PASIG_2008_UCB_MVP_McGrath.pdf Bob Rogers' presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Rogers.pdf Helen Tibbo's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Tibbo.pdf Carole Palmer's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Palmer.pdf Raymond Clarke's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Clarke.pdf Reagan Moore's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Moore.pdf Keith Rajecki & Judy Leach's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Leach_Hewitt.pdf Gary Wright & Randy Stokes's presentations http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Wright_pt1.pdf http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Wright_pt2.pdf David Gewirtz's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Gewirtz.pdf Thomas Ledoux's presentation http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations/PASIG_Ledoux.pdf Author Details Paul Walk Technical Manager UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall Meeting" Author: Paul Walk Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/sun-pasig-2008-11-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Get Tooled Up: Staying Connected: Technologies Supporting Remote Workers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Get Tooled Up: Staying Connected: Technologies Supporting Remote Workers Buzz data mobile software wiki database wireless dissemination portfolio usability infrastructure archives browser smartphone blog repositories video flickr preservation windows multimedia passwords videoconferencing adobe e-learning streaming mp3 jabber eportfolio wordpress podcast youtube facebook twitter authentication microblogging research standards Citation BibTex RIS Having considered organisational issues in her previous article, Marieke Guy takes a look at the many technologies that support remote working, from broadband to Web 2.0 social networking tools.
My previous article A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working [1] explored the cultural background to remote working, reasons why people might choose to work from home and some of the challenges that face them and their host organisations.
This article will consider both the technology that facilitates remote working and the tools that can support remote workers by enabling them to carry out the tasks that they need to do.
What Do Home Workers Want?
The ideal solution for most employees who work remotely is for the set-up at home to replicate the set-up in the office.
This, if possible, means good quality equipment, timely office supplies and successful communications mechanisms.
The computer should operate as if it were connected directly to the organisation’s wide area network and allow the same access to files that on-site employees have.
Workers should feel that they are completely connected to management and colleagues, and should not be hindered by their physical location.
In practice there is some compromise when working off-site, be it from home or from another location.
However the degree to which this compromise operates is decreasing and new technologies, notably those connected to the Web 2.0 phenomena, can make remote or virtual working a successful experience.
In obtaining the ‘ideal solution’ remote workers will need to participate in a number of activities: Connecting – to one’s organisation and the Internet Communicating – with colleagues, teams and peers Collaborating – with colleagues, teams and peers Being supported – by IT services This article will consider which technologies are useful and/or appropriate in achieving these goals.
Connecting There are two key technologies that have led to the increased take-up in remote working.
The first of these is broadband Internet access.
Broadband Broadband is a fast data transmission service.
It uses a much larger bandwidth (transmission capacity of a connection or the amount of data that can fit through it) than traditional dial-up access using a modem.
What bandwidth units constitutes broadband or full-speed broadband is still a matter for debate but at this moment broadband is approximately 40 times faster than dial-up.
There are currently a number of broadband technologies available: Digital Subscriber Line This is available in most homes.
Copper loop technologies that provide digital data transmission over the copper wires of a local telephone network (often BT in the UK).
Internet Service Providers in the UK include AOL [2], BT Broadband [3] etc.
To get connected you will need to buy a high-speed modem which some ISPs will provide free.
Cable – This uses buried fibre-optic cables and is currently available to about half the homes in the UK.
Most cable connections are run by Virgin Media [4], formerly ntl:Telewest.
Mobile – Mobile phone providers will let you access 3G mobile Internet connections anywhere you go.
However, this can be very costly.
Satellite Useful for people who cannot obtain access in any other way.
A detailed explanation of these technologies is given in the Wikipedia definition [5].
Deciding on the best broadband supplier for your area can be difficult, but broadband finders such as broadband.co.uk/ [6], broadband finder [7] will allow users to search for broadband providers using their own specifications.
Many will assess what type of usage allowance you will need (light, medium or heavy) based on your Internet usage activity and the speed of access you require [8].
Limits range from 1Gb a month to 30Gb or unlimited use.
Some institutions may have policies in place to help their staff with selection of broadband suppliers.
Virtual Private Network The second key technology in enabling remote working is VPN.
A virtual private network (VPN) is defined by Wikipedia to be “a computer network in which some of the links between nodes are carried by open connections or virtual circuits in some larger network (e.g., the Internet) instead of by physical wires.
One common application is secure communications through the public Internet, but a VPN need not have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption.” [9] At the University of Bath, a Microsoft VPN server is operated using Point to Point Tunnelling Protocol (PPTP) to encrypt data to and from the campus network.
The connection is secure.
All traffic including username and password is sent across an encrypted secure channel [10].
As Bath University Computing Service support states: “Your connection becomes part of the campus network.
You will obtain an IP address in the University of Bath address range.
For the duration of the connection your PC is effectively connected directly to the campus network.
This offers all the advantages of being physically present.
You can mount drives and printers and access resources that would normally be blocked by the firewall.” Having a view of your institution’s network that replicates that of on-site workers is essential in allowing a remote worker to operate effectively alongside colleagues.
Most institutions will have comprehensive documentation on how to install VPN or may have support staff whose job it is to do this.
A useful VPN Case study is provided by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets [11].
Alongside these two key technologies there are some new trends that have changed the way we can work at home.
Wireless The transition from large monitors to the smaller liquid crystal and plasma display screens has brought about the reduction in size and cost of laptops.
The portability of devices has meant that there represents a significant increase in the uptake of wireless communication.
Wireless (in its shortened form) is the movement of information without the use of electrical wires.
This obviously has had an impact on where people are able to work.
We are moving into an age of distributed working.
In the previous article the relatively new ability to work from various locations including the local coffee shop was touched on.
Workers can now theoretically work anywhere there is an accessible wifi network.
In the future a better technology infrastructure will mean that workers will no longer need to be near wifi hotspots and will be able to carry out work on the train, at the bus stop or in the school car park.
Naturally there are support issues related to this practice but the full significance of wireless technologies is not yet fully realised.
It is worth noting that currently many wireless networks (outside the home) will not allow VPN connections for travelling workers.
However while laptops remain one of the most embedded devices in distributed business practices, the recent rise of smart phones and handheld devices that integrate personal information management and mobile phone capabilities [12] mean that this is starting to change.
The advent of these smaller devices can only mean that wireless communication will continue to grow and will become a more embedded part of our working culture.
Communication Technologies In my previous article on remote working [1] it was concluded that the ‘key to success lies in making sure that remote workers feel included and supported.’ Good communication technologies are likely to be a vital part of this goal.
Communication technologies, in the context of this article, are seen to be any tools that allow users to send messages, files, data, or documents among themselves and other people.
Their primary aim is to facilitate the sharing of information.
Various types of communication technologies have been available for years but Web 2.0 has made such software and the ideas behind this type of software much more accessible.
Web 2.0 technologies go for a ‘Martini’ type of approach – any time, any place, anywhere – and as such are the perfect tool for those on the move or working remotely because they do not require a particular set-up.
They are particularly successful in encouraging and supporting communication and any remote worker or virtual team will benefit from their use.
Metcalfe’s Law [13] states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.
In recent years this law has sparked much discussion when applied to current Web 2.0 dynamics like social networking.
The exact statistics aside, it does seem to make sense that the more people use a system the more value can be gained from it.
However, for individual users, the key issue is whether both they and the person they want to contact use the same system.
E-mail E-mail is now an accepted part of the office toolset, yet recent times have seen a backlash against email, questioning its usefulness, with lines such as “email is where information goes to die”.
In a recent blog posting, Derek Morrison stated that ‘In 2008 I’m convinced that email is an easy to use, easily abused, and increasingly dysfunctional, approach to communication; and at times a major impediment to reflection, knowledge acquisition and storage’ [14].
Avoidance of e-mail is unlikely to be possible or appropriate, but understanding and knowing about appropriate use and social norms are important in its use as an effective tool.
Some areas for consideration include what tone should be used, who gets copied in on e-mail messages, how blind copies should be used, etc.
Thoughtful use of e-mail messages can significantly influence how people within a group feel.
For example, direct e-mails may have a much better effect than those directed to a large group.
Appropriate use of e-mail is a skill that can benefit any employee, working remotely or not; but that skill may be more important for workers based outside the office because they may rely even more on email in the absence of face-to-face contact.
E-mail distribution lists may also be beneficial in making remote workers feel included.
Maznevski and Chudoba in their research on richness of technology found that the more complex the message, the richer the medium required [15].
Quite often we need to make the media richer to allow feedback or allow communication between multiple parties.
Choosing the right technology to express a clear message quickly and sensitively is an important skill.
Sometimes e-mail just is not the right tool.
Telephony A good telephone system is essential for a remote worker and for some a fax and a separate work line may also be necessary.
Workers who regularly participate in long calls may benefit from a headset fitted with a microphone which allows them to take part hands-free.
Some remote workers may find themselves participating in conference or group calls (a phone call for more than two parties).
If the employer works across a large geographical area, possibly with international partners, it may well make sense to subscribe to a teleconferencing service.
Allowing remote workers to book lines can enable meetings to happen that might not otherwise take place as quickly, or at all.
Assessing the cost of these calls against the alternative (travel costs, travel time and carbon footprint) investment in such a service makes practical sense.
Voice over Internet Protocol Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is another tool whose take-up has recently gained real momentum.
VoIP itself is a protocol that allows the transmission of voice through the Internet but it is usually used to refer to the actual act of speaking over the Internet.
It can work in a number of different ways: computer to computer, computer to phone, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to SIP, phone to phone.
It can easily be set up using a headset and, if required, a Web cam.
VoIP has a number of advantages over standard telephone use.
It works very well for conference calls, call forwarding, automatic re-dial, caller ID and other cost features for which traditional telecommunication companies normally charge extra.
It can easily be integrated with other services available over the Internet, including video and data file exchange and can significantly reduce call spend as well as possibly eliminating the need for a second phone line at a worker’s home.
Phone connections have also been found to be highly secure.
More appropriately in the business world, some VoIP technologies can also allow companies to monitor call spend through a dedicated online control panel.
Some of the better-known VoIP providers include Skype [16], VOIP [17] Vontage [18].
At the moment the main issue with VoIP is uptake.
As Amber Thomas from JISC puts it: “Skype is great.
You just need a headset and maybe a webcam, but you need colleagues to have them too.
I had a Skype cam chat to someone on a project in Scotland from 11am-3pm (apart from 30 mins for lunch!
), and it worked great.
Far better than voice only, because you communicate more with silences and you can show you’re thinking/considering things.
At JISC my team is distributed, and the different sites had different policies about Skype.
In the end we made a team decision to try it, and the policy was softening anyway, so we’ll give it a go.
We hope it will cut down on emails between us and enable more informal work chat for less office-based people like me.” Undoubtedly this problem will vanish in the next few years.
On the flip side, some users have had problems with Skype, finding the connection quality to be variable and ultimately dependent on the current amount of network traffic.
This inconsistency has meant that some IT services have found it both difficult to support and problematic to define a default set of minimal equipment required to give staff an acceptable user experience.
As Eddie Young from UKOLN IT Support explains, “When you are responsible for an IT network you have to make it as good, reliable and fast as possible for the majority of the people who will use it.
Some applications (such as wireless and Skype and peer-to-peer software) can hog bandwidth.
That means that other users suffer from slower, less reliable connections as a result of someone using them.
So you have a choice.
You deny bandwidth hoggers, or you make your network faster… Ultimately banning something like this is not going to help you out, you have to learn to accommodate it because it won’t go away and this policy will only annoy people and keeps your IT department stuck in the past.” In 2005 Info-Tech Research Group released a report entitled Five Reasons To Ban Skype [19] that listed security concerns as the main criterion.
In response several blogs came up with their own 5 reasons not to ban Skype but many institutions and businesses have still taken the decision to outlaw its use.
Virtual Meetings Video conferencing, data conferencing, videoteleconferencing, visual collaboration, having virtual meetings (call it what you will) is also becoming a significantly more important part of our working life.
These systems allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously.
Special purpose rooms will usually contain a large video projector interlinked with numerous PCs.
Such an activity can take place between just two people (see VoIP) or between many people.
Moreover, the level of interactivity can vary significantly, depending on the tools available.
A list of the type of systems available can be found on Wikipedia [20].
There are a number of commercial systems available, some of the more significant for the information sector include the Access Grid 21 and the Virtual Room Videoconferencing System (VRVS).
There has also been increased use of free video chat services like tokbox [22].
Articles have already been published within Ariadne on Access Grid [23] and VRVS [24].
Success when choosing to use such systems can be assured by a number of considerations that go hand-in-hand with the technology.
Organisers should make sure that participants have a sense of who is ‘present’ and who is talking.
Prior to the meeting the group should agree on a way to ensure that when people have something to say they have a chance to be heard.
Use of support tools may also help: for example, sharing a common whiteboard that participants can modify, allowing access to slides, etc.
Indeed, many of the suggestions in an article entitled Video Conferencing in Higher Education, written way back in 1995 by Dr. Lynne Coventry, still hold true [25].
As well as participating in virtual meetings, remote workers may also be interested in remote attendance at conferences.
This is now increasingly possible with the use of technologies like video streaming, with moves towards greater access to resources, and the recent trend to open up conferences to interested parties unable to attend.
The Institutional Web Management Workshop has had increasing success offering these sorts of services.
In 2006 it saw the first live video streaming of plenary talks.
The process of streaming the event was covered in Ariadne [26] and sixteen users were reported to have tuned in to watch talks.
At this year’s event over 100 viewers were logged.
The videostreaming was accompanied by live blogging, which provided an opportunity for remote participants (and local participants who were making use of the wifi network) to discuss the plenary talks.
It is hoped that in the future the remote delegates to the event will be able to contribute in other ways.
For event organisers, allowing remote participants is a positive step and an important way to raise an event’s profile.
In a post on his blog, Lorcan Dempsey referred to the new fashion of ‘amplified conferences’, whereby the outputs (such as plenary talks) can be amplified through use of a variety of network tools and collateral communications [27].
Online Chat Online chatting is the use of a virtual discussion platform for one-to-one chat or group-based chat to facilitate and manage real-time/synchronous text messages.
It can be the online equivalent of leaning over to someone and offering a quick comment or piece of advice, or just an easy way to have a chat.
There are several chatting services available such as AIM [28], Skype, Internet Relay Chat (IRC)[29], Windows Live Messenger [30] and Jabber [31].
This type of quick communication is of great importance to the remote worker who may feel isolated and miss the friendly conversation that goes on in the office.
Office employees are all aware of the concept of a ‘water-cooler moment’.
In the past it used to refer to the friendly banter trained on last night’s television programmes (though there are claims that digital television viewing has resulted in such chat drying up [32]).
However it could also apply to any quick conversations you might have about work.
Having a mechanism to permit such thoughts to be vocalised is of considerable importance.
One might use it as a way of ‘stirring up ideas’ or as a means of sorting the ‘wheat from the chaff’ when it comes to work suggestions.
File Transfer The transference of large files between staff is a serious problem for people working remotely, primarily due to broadband’s slow upload speeds.
Large quantities of image or video files could take a significant amount of time to upload to an organisation’s network.
Many organisations will have mechanisms in place to allow this activity to take place, quite possibly through VPN.
It is important that people can use services that are secure and take measures to protect the content of the file if it is even the slightest bit sensitive in nature.
Some externally hosted services include Dropbox [33], Rapidshare [34], megaupload [35], Yousendit [36], Depositfiles [37] and Leapfile [38] Blogs Blogs can play a very important part in keeping people connected.
One could argue that blogs serve two purposes: firstly as a publishing mechanism, i.e.
telling us what an individual or group are up to or thinking about, and secondly as tool that allows the blog author/s to participate in a conversation with the rest of the Web.
Microblogging services like Twitter [39], Jaiku [40], Rakawa [41] or the ‘status update’ facility on Facebook, that allows users to send and read other users’ updates can also be a significant working practice.
Twitter itself is still a niche communication tool but the Twitter community rave about its benefits for networking.
Collaboration Technologies While communication technologies allow people to share information, collaboration technologies allow people to use this information and work together on tasks.
Wikis Remote working means less time physically in an office collaborating with people; so the need for effective application sharing is imperative.
Wikis are a great opportunity for collaborative working primarily due to features such as version and revision control.
This means that users can access a shared document or application from their respective computers simultaneously in real time.
The result is an egalitarian approach to content creation that is invaluable when working with a virtual team.
Collective intelligence is something that is really necessary when working remotely.
Such ‘bouncing ideas around’ just does not happen when you are at home on your own; shared spaces can really help.
Today there is a host of Wiki software available to use: Mediawiki [42], Twiki [143, Confluence [44], SeedWiki [45].
Shared Applications Shared applications like Google docs [46] allow the creation of online word processing and spreadsheet documents (possibly as part of a Google Apps suite).
There are also many time management software systems such as electronic calendars that schedule events and automatically notify and remind group members of dates and times.
Moves are on the increase to make more applications available remotely.
One example of this might be an application like Windows XP remote desktop where a copy of Windows is delivered over the Internet.
Remote access allows users to work quickly and easily anywhere there is an Internet connection, although such desktops are not usually shared between colleagues.
Discussion boards, also known as Internet forums or message boards, offer a virtual discussion platform to facilitate and manage online text messages.
Project Management With the rise of remote working there has been a boom relatively recently in online project management systems.
These are systems that let you schedule, track, and chart the steps in a project as it is being completed.
One might compare them to workflow systems; both allow the collaborative management of tasks and documents within a knowledge-based business process.
One Web 2.0 example of them is IdidWork [47] which enables users to log completed tasks and then share the information with their manager.
Although such a hands-on approach might not be appreciated by all, it can be useful as a ‘shared list’ approach, and might be a useful tool on days when focus/motivation is a problem.
There are a some other tools that could loosely fall into the collaboration category.
From Electronic meeting systems (EMS), to shared calendars (such as Google Calendar), bookmarking tools such as Delicious [48] and Connotea [49].
Many collaborative tools are now available but the biggest hurdle in implementing them remains convincing people to use them.
Social Networking So while the Web 2.0 themes of communication and collaboration work well for people working remotely, some might (at first glance) see social networking as a major distraction which seriously endangers a remote worker’s focus.
Although this may be the case for some, social networking tools have much to offer the remote worker and can be the very core of a successful remote-working strategy.
Social networking technologies allow users to organise social relations through groups, their main aim being to build a community.
Many a remote worker may feel that it is the loss of a physical community that leads to the feelings of isolation discussed in my previous article.
Not only can social networking help workers feel part of a team (albeit a virtual one), they can also offer an accessible collective intelligence.
This can be a very real opportunity for those people working at a geographic distance from other colleagues.
Social Networking sites such as Facebook [50], orkut [51], xing [52], linkedin [53], netlog [54], hi5 [55] allow users to interface other social networks.
One example of this is an application like Facebook which allows users to join various groups, to sign up for events and to load up various applications.
Other social networking sites allow users to share multimedia such as videos (Youtube [56]), podcasts (Podomatic [57]) and photos (Flickr [58]) or resources such as bookmarks (Delicious [46]) and slides (Slideshare [59]).
Social networks are not only an important way to obtain support through crowd sourcing, they allow users to ‘harness collective intelligence’ and get feedback on ideas and thoughts.
Note that with some social networking applications the lines between work and play can become blurred and users may find that keeping their ‘work’ social network separate from their ‘friends and family’ social network could be difficult, which can be a limitation.
Technical Support In an article for IT support staff, Esther Schindler identified four different ways in which a remote worker can operate [60]: At a fixed location at the employee’s home At different offices At a client site As a true nomad or ‘road warrior’.
Each of these different set-ups poses additional challenges for IT services, which may mean that they are not always well equipped to deal with the sorts of problems that may arise.
Most remote workers may increasingly find that they sort out their own technical problems.
Advocates for remote working have argued that IT services will need to develop a clear and comprehensive remote support strategy defining the different levels of IT support [61].
However there are a few technologies already available and being used that may help maintain a good support relationship.
Systems support teams are making increasing use of tracking systems.
These systems track requests and log the data in some form of database.
Such a system creates an even playing field and means that remote workers are not always at the back of the support queue (because they are not located on-site close to systems support and cannot ‘poke their head round the corner and ask when their upgrade will happen’).
Some tracking systems also allow support staff to log the implementation of software upgrades and stay aware of the status of machines when it comes to security etc.
Another technology aid that may prove invaluable for the remote worker and IT support team alike is remote assistance.
Using Windows XP professional and other newer operating systems, it is possible to request assistance from other XP users.
Remote assistance allows control to be granted to a remote user.
This can be used to allow access to systems support colleagues to fix any problems.
The process can be completed in tandem using detailed instructions, the PC and over the phone.
Security Technologies As mentioned in the previous article on remote working, home and mobile networks are unlikely to be as secure as office networks.
The SonicWALL survey (May 2007) found that security was considered a very low priority, with 88% admitting that passwords were stored in ‘easy access’ locations and 56% of teleworkers used their local hard drive to store sensitive data.
Only 12% used encrypted files to store and manage their login data [62].
Recent times have seen security breaches where inadequate controls have led to the leakage of sensitive data through the theft of laptop computers or the inappropriate transport of data storage devices.
In November 2007 a government body lost two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16, and in August 2008 the loss was also reported of a memory stick containing the sensitive personal data of thousands of persistent offenders.
Brian Higton, chairman of the Telework Association recommends that organisations ‘have in place a Remote Working Policy that defines the measures that should be used to protect against the range of risks that could be encountered’.
However, Higton says that ‘in his experience, the incidence of data loss from remote working personnel working on-line was not noticeably higher than for staff working in centralised locations.
It could be argued that in some ways, a distributed workforce is less vulnerable to hackers as remote workers tend to be less visible than their office-based counterparts.’ [61].
Security has become a big issue for organisations and supporting remote worker access represents a number of security implications.
Some corporate organisations require a strong two-factor authentication, which ensures the identity of the mobile user connecting to the network or using the laptop/mobile device, as a basic requirement.
There is also a need for quality anti-virus and anti-spyware software.
Though effective security can be easily maintained through a VPN, these issues need to be considered.
Worries about sensitive data and concerns about viruses mean that remote workers need to be proactive when dealing with security.
Case Study 1: E-learning at Bath At the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008, held at the University of Aberdeen over 22-24 July, a workshop session was given on managing virtual teams using Web 2.0 technologies [63].
The main facilitator of the workshop which was entitled ‘Embracing Web 2.0 Technologies to Grease the Wheels of Team Cohesion’ was Andy Ramsden, Head of e-Learning at the University of Bath.
He based the session on his experiences with the University of Bath e-learning team.
Andy had seen a pattern emerging over time: members of the e-learning team were increasingly working out of the office on a range of different projects and staff development initiatives.
Alongside this there were signs that the Hub-Spoke Model would develop and eventually more people would be recruited to the team who worked at a local level in faculties and departments.
These employees would be located and partly managed in other departments.
This emerging model of fewer face-to-face meetings and greater diversity within the wider team had created considerable challenges, although it also offered some potential benefits.
The workshop considered a number of these challenges including: how individuals keep informed about what people are up to; how to stop people becoming isolated; and how to stop ‘information silos’ forming.
It also looked at how to harness creatively the diverse talents within a team.
The workshop demonstrated how the use of social bookmarking, individual blogs, wikis and communication tools such as Twitter and Skype has changed the way that the team interacts.
The resources from the workshop are available on Slideshare [64].
Case Study 2: JISC-PoWR The aim of the JISC-sponsored Preservation of Web Resources Project (JISC PoWR) [65] was to create a handbook and run a series of workshops which would help to gain a better understanding of the challenges institutions face in preserving Web content.
The project team consisted of staff from UKOLN, based at the University of Bath, and staff from the University of London Computing Centre.
An independent consultant from opencontentlawyer, based in Reading, was also employed on certain items of work.
Although one of the UKOLN team members is based on-site at the University of Bath, the other is a remote worker, so the end result was a fairly highly distributed team.
It was a relatively short-term project, funded from April to September 2008.
This meant that to be productive, the team would need to establish communication mechanisms fairly quickly to support the project.
After a kick-off meeting in April a number of different systems were put into place.
The team opted to use a JISC Involve Wordpress blog for dissemination and discussion on topics relating to Web resource preservation.
Within the blog there was a password-controlled team area which linked to a number of chosen communication and collaboration devices: Google groups [66] for email discussion; the Google groups repository area for storage of resources and links; Google Calendar for recording important dates; Delicious to bookmark useful documents (using the tag jisc-powr), Twiki Wiki to write the handbook and Jabber/Pidgin for chat [67].
Pidgin was chosen in preference to Skype because the University of London has disallowed use of Skype due to bandwidth issues.
As well as the team tools used, a number of other Web 2.0 tools were used for dissemination including Slideshare for distribution of Powerpoint slides, Internet Archive for distribution of MP3 audio files [68], Google Docs as an online form to record delegate information and Wetpaint Wiki [69] to collate the feedback from the workshop breakout sessions.
Alongside this, organisation of the workshops was supported by Twitter tweets, phone texts and mobile phone calls.
All the communication and collaboration tools were embraced and used fruitfully throughout the project with the exception of Pidgin, which presented a few usability issues for the UKOLN staff.
The project was a very successful venture and achieved a great deal in its short life span.
Putting It All Together Case studies are starting to appear detailing the portfolio of applications people use when working remotely or in a virtual team.
Examples include Natalie Laderas-Kilkenny who provides a case study [70] of the tools her collaborative virtual team uses (primarily Adobe Connect [71], Skype, Wiki Spaces [72] and Google Docs) and Dr. Helen Barrett’s ePortfolio [73], where she recreates her presentation portfolio with 33 different online services, software and strategies.
Which tools suit us most is as individual as our taste in food.
You may find that you ‘just don’t get Twitter’ or ‘can’t get on with Delicious’.
The rise of Web 2.0 has meant that there is a whole wealth of software out there for ‘virtual teams’ to use and most of it is free.
One travelling user recently explained to me that he mostly used dedicated desktop and mobile applications rather than browser-based Web applications, and that he could not see this changing any time soon.
Again, whatever works for you, works.
Which communication tools are most appropriate will be a case of trial and error.
However one should bear in mind that a tool’s value is vastly enhanced if the people with whom you need to communicate are using it too.
Sometimes this may mean embracing a tool that at first you ‘can’t see the point of’.
It could be possible that one day you suddenly understand why it is such a popular tool, then again you might not… Conclusions My previous article on remote working [1] concluded that communication was key.
The technologies that need to support remote working must make workers feel supported and connected.
Furthermore they must also be straightforward to use and make tasks easier to do or they cease to be useful.
‘Lack of enabling technologies’ in the work environment has been cited as one of the reasons why some people are reluctant to become remote workers [74].
In reality, enabling technologies are very much out there.
However, at the moment the choice is somewhat overwhelming and perhaps even daunting, and there can tend to be a lack of support from some IT services teams when making appropriate decisions.
On the other hand, we must remember that IT services are also in something of a predicament themselves: do they need to support all these technologies?
If so, who is going to organise and train them to meet such diverse requirements?
While it seems that if you want to work remotely you may have problems obtaining the necessary support internally, you may find that it is no longer your work colleagues or systems team that support you but a whole new group of ‘virtual’ people.
Choosing which tool to use still remains a case of matching the tool to the goal.
Whatever the choice, we need to avoid biting off more than we can chew.
In the last issue of Ariadne, Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager for San José Public Library (and the Librarian in Black) published an excellent guide to coping with information overload [75].
Sarah explains that: ‘Information flowing in from the multitude of devices, organisations, and technologies distracts, pressures, and stresses us.
And yet we continue to produce information for ourselves and for others.
Every time we send out information, information returns to us, usually two-fold.
We deal with both interruptive and non-interruptive information every day.
When constantly interrupted with that information, we never have those periods of time when you can think, plan and ponder.
As a result, our ability to push our lives and our institutions forward has been greatly compromised.’ Many of Sarah’s tips are commonsense, yet we are all guilty of ignoring them.
Taking a step back is sometimes the most appropriate action.
Much research on virtual teams has given the 90⁄10 rule, i.e.
that to work effectively they should comprise 90% people, 10% technology [76].
As a remote worker you will be expected to use technology effectively, but in order to make it work the most important tool set you can have is self-sufficiency, self-belief and the ability to motivate yourself.
Maybe it’s time for that morning coffee!
In my previous article on this topic which concentrated on the organisational and human aspects of remote working, I emphasised the need for communication in order to operate effectively.
As intimated above, the technology can only be part of an effective solution.
Consequently as Amber Thomas has remarked,’Something I’ve been meaning to do is set regular office days where I go into Bristol and London, then let colleagues know in advance so we can book chats!’making that contact is not just a technology-led thing, it is really up to remote workers.
Back in 2005 Office of the Future 2020 [77] identified six key skills professionals will need to be able to work from anywhere.
Those skills were: Analysis: Analysing information and exercising good judgment Collaboration: Establishing rapport and facilitating team building Technical aptitude: Selecting the best technical tools and using them effectively Intuition: Identifying and adapting to the needs and work styles of others Ongoing education: Engaging in continual learning Negotiation: Participating in business discussions that produce positive results Technical aptitude is only one ability in a broad spectrum necessary for an effective remote worker.
When working remotely you lack the day-to-day stimulus or ‘prodding’ that being surrounded by real colleagues and a physical workplace provides.
You will need to take a pro-active approach to work.
To close with a double cliché: as a remote worker you really need to ‘be on the ball’ and ‘make it count’.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Amber Thomas, JISC, Andy Ramsden, University of Bath and both UKOLN’s own remote workers and Software and Systems team.
Editor’s note: Marieke Guy has been with UKOLN since May 2000 and has worked remotely since April 2008.
She currently lives 15 miles from UKOLN’s offices and made the decision to work from home for family and environmental reasons.
Since taking this decision, she says she has learnt a lot about herself, communication technologies and how cold her spare bedroom is!
Marieke has also begun her own blog on remote working entitled “Ramblings of a Remote Worker” in which she hopes to cover cultural issues, organisational attitudes and useful technologies related to remote working.
See http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/ References “A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working”, Marieke Guy, July 2008, Ariadne Issue 56 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/guy/ AOL http://www.myaolbroadband.co.uk/ BT http://bt.com/getbroadband Virgin http://www.virginmedia.com/ Wikipedia – Broadband http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband broadband.co.uk http://www.broadband.co.uk/ broadbandfinder http://www.broadband-finder.co.uk/ BBC News: Ruling raps broadband definition, 13 August 2004 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3563320.stm VPN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vpn See also FOLDOC definition http://foldoc.org/?Virtual+Private+Network BUCS VPN http://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucstech/VPN Cisilion Case Study: London Borough of Tower Hamlets, November 200 http://whitepapers.silicon.com/0,39024759,60269199p,00.htm Wikipedia – Smartphone, 29 September 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone Wikipedia – Metcalfe’s Law, 29 September 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law Derek Morrison’s Blog: The Auricle, Third Life Auricle: the next generation, 3 September 2008 http://www.auricle.org/auriclewp/?p=427#more-427 Bridging Space Over Time: Global Virtual Team Dynamics and Effectiveness, Martha L. Maznevski & Katherine M. Chudoba, September–October 2000, Organization Science,Vol.
11, No.
5, pp.
473–492 http://uainfo.arizona.edu/~weisband/distwork/maznevski.pdf Skype http://www.skype.com/ VOIP http://www.voip.com/ Vontage http://www.vonage.co.uk/ Silicon.Com: Should businesses ban Skype?, 10 November 2005 http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/voip/0,3800004463,39154106,00.htm Wikipedia – Videoconferencing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing Access Grid http://www.accessgrid.org/ Tokbox http://www.tokbox.com/ Michael Daw, Advanced Collaboration with the Access Grid, January 2005, Ariadne Issue 42 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/daw/ Andy Powell, Virtual Rooms, Real Meetings, October 2004, Ariadne Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/powell/ Video Conferencing in Higher Education http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/mmedia/video3/about.htm Greg Tourte and Emma Tonkin, Video Streaming of Events, October 2006, Ariadne Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/tourte-tonkin/ Lorcan Dempsey’s Blog: The Amplified Conference, July 2007 http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001404.html AIM® 6.8 http://dashboard.aim.com/aim IRC http://www.irc.org/ Windows Live Messenger http://get.live.com/messenger/overview Jabber http://www.jabber.org/web/Main_Page Monster The Death of the Water-Cooler Moment, September 2008 http://content.monster.co.uk/13168_en-GB_p1.asp DropBox http://getdropbox.com/ Rapidshare http://www.rapidshare.de/ Megaupload http://megaupload.com/ You Send It http://www.yousendit.com/ Deposit File http://www.depositfiles.com/en/ Leapfile http://www.leapfile.com/ Twitter http://twitter.com/ Jaiku http://www.jaiku.com/ Rakawa http://www.rakawa.net/ Mediawiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki Twiki http://twiki.org/ Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ Seedwiki http://www.seedwiki.com/ Googledocs http://docs.google.com/ Ididwork http://www.ididwork.com/ Delicious http://delicious.com/ Connotea http://www.connotea.org/ Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ Orkut http://www.orkut.com/ Xing http://www.xing.com/ LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/ Netlog http://en.netlog.com/ Hi5 http://hi5.com/ YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ Podomatic http://www.podomatic.com/ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ CIO Struggling to Support Remote Workers?
It’s Only Going to Get Worse, 18 April, 2008 http://www.cio.com.au/index.php/id;1018802537;pp;2;fp;4;fpid;51247 Forrester A Clear Strategy Will Help IT Effectively Support Remote Workers, 24 August 2004 http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,35237,00.html ITPRO Remote working is the ‘chink in the network armour’, 15 April 2008 http://www.itpro.co.uk/187986/remote-working-is-the-chink-in-the-network-armour Andy Ramsden and Marieke Guy, Embracing Web 2.0 Technologies to Grease the Wheels of Team Cohesion, presentation, July 2008, Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2008/sessions/ramsden/ Embracing Web 2.0 Technologies to Grease the Wheels of Team Cohesion – Slides Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/andyramsden/iwmw2008-workshop-session-use-of-web-20-in-teams/ JISC-PoWR Project: Preservation of Web Resources http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/ JISC-PoWR Project: Preservation of Web Resources Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/jisc-powr Pidgin http://pidgin.im/ Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ JISC-PoWR Workshop Wetpaint Wiki http://jiscpowr-20080627.wetpaint.com/ Design for Learning Tech Tools for working from home, 19 August 2008 http://nkilkenny.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/tech-tools-for-working-from-home/ Adobe Acrobat Connect http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/ Wiki Spaces http://www.wikispaces.com/ Helen Barrett Creating ePortfolios with Web 2.0 Tools, September 2008 http://electronicportfolios.org/web20portfolios.html Marketing Vox Web 2.0, Remote Working are Good for Business and Environment, June 2008 http://www.marketingvox.com/remote-working-web-20-good-for-business-and-environment-030359/ Sarah Houghton-Jan, Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload, July 2008, Ariadne Issue 56 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/houghton-jan/ Virtual team training http://www.virtualteams.com/ Office of the Future 2020: http://www.officeofthefuture2020.com/portal/site/oof-us Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.guy/ Return to top Article Title: “Staying Connected: Technologies Supporting Remote Workers” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/guy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Foundation for Automatic Digital Preservation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Foundation for Automatic Digital Preservation Buzz data software java framework database dissemination xml archives metadata identifier vocabularies repositories eprints video preservation graphics ascii soap wsdl uddi drm soa dspace licence droid interoperability algorithm taxonomy research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Miguel Ferreira, Ana Alice Baptista and Jose Carlos Ramalho propose a Service-Oriented Architecture to help cultural heritage institutions to accomplish automatic digital preservation.
Efforts to archive a large amount of digital material are being developed by many cultural heritage institutions.
We have evidence of this in the numerous initiatives aiming to harvest the Web [1-5] together with the impressive burgeoning of institutional repositories [6].
However, getting the material inside the archive is just the beginning for any initiative concerned with the long-term preservation of digital materials.
Digital preservation can best be described as the activity or set of activities that enable digital information to be intelligible for long periods of time.
In general, digital information kept in an archival environment is expected to be readable and interpretable for periods of time much longer than the expected lifetime of the individual hardware and software components that comprise the repository system, as well as the formats in which the items of information are encoded [7][8].
Over the past decade, a vast number of preservation strategies have emerged from the various preservation projects developed, literally, all over the world [9-12].
Nonetheless, the most cited and applied preservation strategy continues to be migration [13][14], especially in contexts where non-interactive digital objects, such as images, databases or text documents, are the focus of preservation.
Migration can be described as a '( ) set of organized tasks designed to achieve the periodic transfer of digital materials from one hardware/software configuration to another or from one generation of computer technology to a subsequent generation.'
[15].
The major drawback in this approach is that whenever an object is converted to a new format, some of its original properties may not be adequately transferred to the target format.
This may occur due to incompatibilities between the source and target formats or because the application used to do the conversion is not capable of carrying out its tasks correctly.
Understanding Migration Every preservation intervention involves choices.
Resources are finite, often scarce.
As a result, decisions have to be taken to ensure that the best possible preservation strategy is selected from the wide range of options available.
These decisions depend upon a multiplicity of factors such as: technical expertise, users' expectations, institutional budget, existing equipment and available time [16].
In this respect migration-based strategies are no different.
In order to better understand all the steps involved in a migration process, one should consider the following sequence of activities: Selection of a Migration Strategy Two decisions have to be made prior to any object migration: which format should be used to accommodate the properties of the original object; and which application should be used to carry out that migration.
This decision-making activity constitutes the first stage of any migration process.
It is in the best interests of the preserving institution to aim for the optimal combination of target format and conversion software, i.e.
one that preserves the maximum number of properties of the original object at the minimum cost.
Cost should be regarded as a multi-dimensional variable.
Factors such as throughput, application charges, format openness or prevalence should be considered collectively during this decision-making activity.
Objective tools or frameworks especially designed to help institutions in the selection of appropriate options would greatly simplify this exceptionally complicated task.
The Conversion The conversion work consists of the reorganisation of the information elements that comprise the digital object into the logical structures as defined by a different format [17].
From the preserver's point-of-view, carrying out a conversion usually consists in setting up a conversion application and executing it against a collection of digital objects.
Some scripts may have to be developed in order to automate the whole procedure.
Evaluation of Results After the conversion process, the resultant objects should be evaluated in order to determine the amount of data loss incurred during migration.
This is accomplished by comparing the properties that comprise the source object (also known as significant properties [18][19]) with the properties of its converted counterparts.
If the evaluation results are below expectations, i.e.
the object's properties have degraded to an unacceptable level, a different migration alternative should be selected and the whole process reinitiated.
In most cases, the evaluation process still requires a considerable amount of manual labour.
Certain subjective properties such as the disposition of graphic elements in a text document or the presence of compression artifacts in an image file are generally inspected by human experts, rendering this activity both onerous and time-consuming [20].
A Service-Oriented Architecture for Automatic Migration At the University of Minho research is being undertaken to devise new pathways to carry out the three outlined activities in an automated fashion (i.e.
selection of migration options, conversion and evaluation).
Current activities are focused on the development of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) [21][22] that, by combining input from different distributed applications, enables client institutions to preserve collections of digital material automatically.
It is assumed that client institutions already possess a digital repository system capable of storing, managing and providing access to the digital objects they hold.
The repository system will act as the client application that benefits from the services provided by the SOA.
In order better to understand all the functions provided by the SOA one might consider the following scenario: The National Archives of Portugal [23] are currently engaged in the development of a digital repository system capable of preserving authentic digital objects produced by affiliated public administration institutions (Project RODA [24]).
Alongside the development of the repository software comes the creation of ingest and preservation policies that will aid producers in the preparation of their material before it is submitted to the repository.
This notwithstanding, the repository will expect to be confronted by objects in formats previously unencountered and which will need to undergo a process of normalisation before being deposited.
In the presence of an unrecognised format, the repository system could invoke a format identification service provided by the SOA in order to obtain information about the object's format, in addition to checking its integrity.
After this operation, the repository could interrogate the SOA to obtain a list of formats to which the object could be converted.
Simultaneously, the repository would inform the SOA of its preservation preferences and requirements, i.e.
a list of preservation-oriented requirements derived from the policies created by the senior management of the archive.
A few examples of such requirements are as follows: Preservation interventions should be affordable and swift; Interventions should preserve the maximum number of significant properties of the original object; The interventions should not resort to formats that are dependent on the payment of royalties.
The SOA would then address all of these criteria with information previously acquired about the behaviour and quality of all accessible conversion applications and would then produce a ranked list of optimal migration options.
The repository system could then select the most suitable one from this list and request the SOA to carry out the corresponding migration.
After the conversion process, the repository system would receive a new digital object (better yet, a new digital representation of the source digital object) and a migration report stating the amount of data lost in that migration.
This report could then be merged with the preservation metadata already maintained by the repository in order to document the preservation intervention and sustain the object's authenticity.
On a regular basis, the repository would consult with a notification service to determine if any of the formats it holds are at risk of becoming obsolete.
When a format falls into that condition, a new migration process is triggered.
A close examination of the outlined scenario enables us to identify the following services: A format identification service that also checks the integrity of digital objects; A service that produces recommendations of optimal migration options (selection of a migration option); A service to carry out format migrations (the conversion); A service to determine the amount of data loss resulting from a migration (evaluation of results); A service that provides information about the formats that are at risk of becoming obsolete.
The general architecture of the proposed SOA is depicted in Figure 1.
This design does not intend to be prescriptive or limiting in any way.
The goal is to provide a framework for discussion by pointing out the fundamental elements that should be present in such a system.
Several interesting and competing research projects are presented as promising candidates to implement some of these elements.
We recognise of course that many other initiatives and solutions might also exist outside the scope of our work or this article.
Figure 1: General architecture for a SOA capable of delivering automatic digital preservation.
The figure is divided into two major sections: the client and the server-side.
The client-side depicts a few examples of applications that may use the services provided by the SOA.
Among these are: digital repository systems like DSpace [25], Fedora [26] or Eprints [27], and custom applications developed by individual users.
It is important to point out that any application capable of invoking a Web service may make use of the proposed SOA.
On the server-side are depicted the chief components comprising this framework.
Each of these components is actually an independent application with distinctive roles and responsibilities that co-operate with each other by exchanging messages.
This approach makes it possible for each component to be governed by a different organisation and facilitates the distribution of workload.
Obsolescence Notifier The first of these components is the Obsolescence Notifier, a service responsible for raising awareness among client institutions of the file formats that are at risk of becoming obsolete.
This service should to be consulted regularly by client institutions in order to determine if the objects in their custody are close to becoming unreadable to their designated community.
Several resources are available that could be used to support such a service.
A few examples are as follows: The report 'Risk Management of Digital Information: A File Format Investigation' by Lawrence, et al [17], is a study on the impact of migration on file integrity and can provide some guidance in assessing the risk involved in keeping certain file formats.
The INFORM Methodology [28] is an approach for measuring the durability of digital formats.
The service could also be supported by a group of human experts responsible for monitoring consumer trends and emerging technologies.
Several institutions already perform this type of work, although in a more generalised fashion, e.g.
DigiCULT with its annual Technology Watch Reports [29] and the Digital Preservation Coalition with its monthly themed Technology Watch Reports [30].
Format Detector The Format Detector, as the name suggests, is a service capable of identifying the underlying encoding of a digital object.
The client institution should be able to monitor, migrate and validate the integrity of digital objects without human intervention and this service is indispensable in accomplishing that goal.
Furthermore, it enables digital formats to be identified according to the naming scheme used by other components that comprise the proposed SOA (e.g.
the Migration Broker).
The following applications are potential candidates for supporting such a service: JHOVE, jointly developed by JSTOR and the Harvard University Library, is an application specifically designed to identify and characterise digital formats.
In fact, JHOVE is more of a technical metadata extractor than a simple format identifier.
At the moment, JHOVE is capable of supporting 11 different file formats [31].
Droid, on the other hand, was developed exclusively to identify digital formats.
It was developed by the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the creators of the PRONOM format registry [32][33], and currently supports hundreds of different file formats [34].
Some institutions and initiatives have been developing services capable of carrying out format migrations [35-40].
Such initiatives rely on a common set of communication protocols to support the discovery and invocation of conversion procedures.
Any conventional application may also be used as a service if an appropriate application wrapper is developed [22], i.e.
a small piece of software that acts as the intermediary between the application and communication protocol.
In this type of approach, a client application is used to send out a digital object to a remote procedure that, after unpackaging the received message, converts the embedded object and returns the result back to the client.
Standard protocols, such as the ones that accompany Web services technology [41], may play an important role in this domain due to their open-standard and platform-independent characteristics.
A distributed approach to migration introduces some appealing properties: the use of Web services hides the complexity of the conversion software that is being used under the hood and promotes interoperability by cloaking the peculiarities of the supporting hardware and operating system; combining conversion services enables new migrations to be performed and makes this solution capable of coping with the gradual disappearance of converters [22]; the development of redundant services ensures that the migration network remains functional during situations of partial breakdown.
this approach is compatible with several variants of migration, such as normalisation [13][42-47] and migration on-request [10].
However, requiring the presence of a computer network to carry out format migrations hardly seems reasonable in a preservation context.
This type of reliance on technology is generally very undesirable.
However, digital preservation is a global problem.
A distributed approach may very well prove to be an effective way to handle the intricacies of preservation as it allows institutions worldwide to share their solutions and co-operate in the network of services.
Service Registry The Service Registry component is responsible for managing information about existing conversion services.
It stores metadata about its producer/developer (e.g.
name, description and contact), about the service itself (e.g.
name, description, the source/target formats that it is capable of handling, cost of invocation, etc.)
and information on how the service should be invoked by a client application (i.e.
its access point).
It is important that the Service Registry is populated with rich metadata.
Much of the information delivered to end-users after a conversion will be obtained from this data source.
This information can be used to document the preservation intervention as it outlines all the components that took part in the migration process and describes the outcome of the event in terms of data loss and object degradation (see Object Evaluator).
This migration report constitutes what PREMIS refers to as an Event Entity [48].
One of the major advantages of using Web services in this context is in the capacity to combine tens or hundreds of conversion services to create new migration operations.
However to accomplish this, each conversion service should respect a well-defined interface that establishes the arguments that each conversion service should be capable of handling.
Although this interface is essential to produce service compositions, it is not sufficient on its own.
Each conversion service must be described with source and target format metadata elements whose values are obtained from a controlled vocabulary.
This is fundamental to enable the computation of the migration network (i.e.
all possible migration paths between two given formats).
Several initiatives are considered suitable candidates to provide that controlled vocabulary: The PRONOM registry, an initiative from the National Archives of the UK aims at building a registry of information about every existing file format [32][33]; The Digital Formats Web site, created by the Library of Congress aims at providing information about digital content formats [49][50]; The Global Digital Format Registry intends to provide sustainable distributed services to store, discover and deliver representation information about digital formats [51][52]; Representation Information Registry/Repository is an OAIS representation information registry for digital data and is currently being developed by the Digital Curation Centre [53].
Migration Broker The Migration Broker is responsible for carrying out object migrations.
In practice, this component is responsible for making sure that composite conversions are performed atomically from the point of view of the client application and the rest of the SOA components.
Additionally, this component is responsible for recording the performance of each migration service.
The results of these measurements are stored in the Evaluations Repository, a knowledge base that supports the recommendation system (see Migration Advisor).
A prototype of the proposed SOA is currently being devised at the University of Minho and is presently capable of measuring the following process-related criteria: Availability, i.e.
the probability of a service being operational at the time of invocation.
Stability, i.e.
the capacity of a service to carry out what it purports to do.
Throughput, i.e.
the amount of work that the service is capable of doing per time unit.
The workload is determined by the size of the object to be converted.
Cost, i.e.
the amount that a client will have to pay to use the service on one occasion.
The cost of a composite migration is the sum of each individual cost.
Outcome size, i.e.
the size in bytes of the resulting object when compared with the original.
Outcome file count, i.e.
the number of files in the resulting representation.
Format Evaluator The Format Evaluator provides information about the current status of file formats.
This information enables the Migration Advisor to determine which formats are better suited to accommodate the properties of source objects by looking at the characteristics of each pair of formats.
This service is supported by a data store containing facts about formats (i.e.
Format Knowledge Base), but could also exploit external sources of information such as the PRONOM registry or Google Trends [54], to determine automatically a format's prevalence and usage.
The current prototype is capable of determining the potential gain (in terms of preservation) that one might obtain in converting an object from its original format to a new one by considering the following set of criteria: Market share, i.e.
whether the format is widely accepted or simply a niche format.
Market share is also known as 'adoption'.
Adoption refers to the degree to which the format is already used by the primary creators, disseminators, or users of information resources; Support level, i.e.
whether the creator of the format provides good technical support on the format; Is standard, i.e.
whether the format has been published by a standards organisation; Open specification, i.e.
whether specification can be independently inspected.
Supports compression, i.e.
whether the format supports any type of compression.
Lossy compression only, i.e.
whether the format only supports a lossy type of compression.
Supports transparency, i.e.
whether the format supports transparency features.
Embedded metadata, i.e.
whether the format may contain embedded metadata.
Royalty-free, i.e.
whether royalties or licence fees are payable.
Open source, i.e.
whether there are decoders whose source can be independently inspected.
Backwardly compatible, i.e.
whether revisions have support for previous versions.
Documentation level, i.e.
whether the format specification is well documented.
Competing formats available, i.e.
whether competing or similar formats exist.
DRM support, i.e.
whether DRM (Digital Rights Management), encryption or digital signatures can be used.
Update frequency, i.e.
whether revisions happen so fast that the archive cannot keep up with demand.
Supports custom extensions, i.e.
whether extensions, such as executable sections or narrowly supported features, can be added to the format.
Life time, i.e.
how many years have passed since the format has been officially released.
Transparent decoding, i.e.
the degree to which the digital representation is open to direct analysis with basic tools, including human readability using a text-only editor.
Reader single producer, i.e.
whether the reader/viewer is produced by a single entity.
Single reader, i.e.
whether the format can only be read by one piece of software.
Open source reader, i.e.
whether the source-code of the reader software can be independently inspected.
Multiplatform reader, i.e.
whether the reader software can be run on various platforms (e.g.
operating systems or hardware).
All of these criteria are being considered by the Migration Advisor to rank all the available migration options.
This component is capable of measuring the preservation gain of performing a certain transformation.
For example, if the target format is royalty-free while the source format is not, there is a preservation gain associated with that transformation.
On the other hand, if the target format only supports a lossy type of compression, while the source format is not compressed at all, there is a potential risk of losing important information in the process.
The criteria present in this evaluation taxonomy were assembled from various bibliographic sources such as [28][49][55].
Groups of format experts and digital curators may also contribute with additional criteria to enrich the evaluation taxonomy.
Object Evaluator The Object Evaluator is in charge of judging the quality of the migration outcome.
It accomplishes this by comparing objects submitted for migration with their converted counterparts.
Again, these evaluations will be performed according to a range of criteria.
These criteria, known in this context as significant properties, constitute the set of attributes of an object that should be kept intact during a preservation intervention [19].
They constitute the array of attributes that characterise an object as a unique intellectual entity, independently of the encoding used to represent it.
The Bible for example, may exist in many different formats and media, e.g.
ASCII text, Portable Document Format, written on paper or carved on stone, and still be regarded as the Holy Bible.
Considering text documents as an example, some significant properties could be: the number of characters, the order of those characters, the page size, the number of pages, the graphical layout, the font type and size.
Migration Advisor The Migration Advisor is responsible for producing suggestions of migration alternatives.
In reality this component acts as a decision support centre for client institutions and is capable of determining the best possible choice within a wide range of options.
It accomplishes this by confronting the preservation requirements outlined by client institutions with the accumulated knowledge about the behaviour of each accessible migration path.
The behaviour of each migration path is determined by taking into consideration the sets of criteria previously described: conversion performance, status of the formats involved and data loss (handled respectively by the Migration Broker, Format Evaluator and Object Evaluator).
Evaluations Repository In order to generate an appropriate recommendation, the Migration Advisor resorts to the Evaluations Repository, a database containing all the measurements taken by the Object Evaluator, the Format Evaluator and the Migration Broker.
Averaging these readings provides a general idea about the behaviour of each migration path.
Different institutions will have distinct preservation needs.
They will be able to state their individual requirements by weighting the importance of each criteria handled by the system.
This enables the system to rank all the alternatives according to their level of aptness to resolve the preservation problem of the client institution.
In order to rank all possible options, the Evaluations Repository must be populated with data.
This is generally called training and basically consists in requesting the SOA to convert a large set of digital objects in different forms and sizes using all possible migration paths.
This operation forces all the evaluators to produce reports that will be used by the Migration Advisor to compute an appropriate recommendation.
The Migration Advisor uses the same principles as the evaluation framework described by Rauch and Rauber [16][20][55-57].
The process within the SOA is orchestrated as follows: For each migration path, a standard or average behaviour is determined for all of the evaluation criteria.
This task is performed by the Migration Advisor whenever a suggestion is requested.
It is assumed that the Evaluations Repository has already been populated with data (Figure 2, step 1); The average behaviour per criterion of a given migration path is then normalised into a comparable scale of 0 to 1 (Figure 2, step 2).
The highest measurements assume the value of 1 whilst the lowest are normalised to a 0.
All other values are spread between these two figures.
It is important to point out that evaluations always produce positive preservation results, i.e.
high values correspond to a better preservation performance.
The cost criterion, for example, must be inverted before the normalisation step, as higher values of cost correspond to lower preservation performances.
The client institution is then asked to assign weights to each evaluation criteria according to its perception of importance.
These weights are then multiplied by the normalised values calculated in the previous step (Figure 2, step 3); The overall score of a migration path is obtained by summing up all the ensuing values.
The most appropriate migration option is the one that attains the highest score (Figure 2, step 4).
Figure 2: Steps involved in the ranking migration alternatives.
MP1 and MP2 represent two different migration paths to convert text documents.
Evaluation A prototype implementing the concepts described in this paper is currently being devised at the University of Minho and is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2006 [22][58].
The purpose of this prototype is to evaluate the suitability of the proposed architecture and the precision of the recommendation system.
Precision will be assessed using cross-validation techniques.
Still images are generally represented by simple structures and, for that reason, are being used to guide the development of the prototype.
More complex objects, like text documents produced by word-processing software, will be considered afterwards in order to assess their effectiveness in handling more subjective criteria, such as appearance or text layout.
The current prototype fully implements the following components: a Service Registry, being supported by an UDDI server.
a Migration Network with 91 registered converters.
a Migration Broker, fully capable of combining migration services and recording their performance; a Format Detector, being supported by Droid [34]; a Format Evaluator, capable of comparing several file formats according to the criteria outlined in the previous section; a Migration Advisor, fully capable of computing recommendations based on the information collected in the Evaluations Repository.
Adding new evaluation criteria to the prototype is as easy as updating a configuration file.
The real complexity relies on creation of new criterion evaluators.
Once developed, these evaluators can be placed in the servers file system (to be loaded during system's bootstrap) or remotely invoked.
New conversion services can be attached to the system by simply adding them to the Service Registry.
Training the Migration Advisor to recognise new conversion services is, of course, essential.
Throughout this article, Web services have been presented as a promising technology to support the proposed SOA.
However, many other protocols exist which could be used to implement these ideas.
Different technologies could even be utilised together by means of gateways or proxies.
For example, a gateway is currently being developed to enable converters provided by the TOM Conversion Service [35][59], a technology that uses a non-standard communication protocol, to be used by our prototype.
Conclusions and Future Work This article describes the set of components that are necessary to build a ServiceOriented Architecture (SOA) to enable cultural heritage institutions to carry out digital preservation with minimum human intervention.
The proposed SOA enables institutions to co-operate in the establishment of a global advisory service that, among other things, will be capable of producing recommendations of optimal migration options, perform format migrations and thoroughly document preservation interventions by generating appropriate preservation metadata.
The proposed SOA could also be used as an objective tool for comparing file formats and conversion software.
It could be used to provide an on-demand migration service, i.e.
a service capable of converting objects from their archival configurations to formats more suitable for dissemination; as well as a normalisation procedure for ingest work.
Although a prototype for this SOA is still under development, some conclusions can already be drawn.
The set of digital objects used to train the recommendation system should be as heterogeneous as possible in terms of shape and size, and should contain at least a couple of thousand objects.
Small or homogeneous object sets generate very imprecise recommendations due to overfitting in the learning process [60].
Further research could be conducted to detect patterns in the user-assigned weights.
Such patterns would represent user profiles and would enable the recommendation process to be automated one step further.
The proposed SOA could also contribute to fostering new lines of research such as the improvement, or the development, of comparison algorithms for different classes of objects, e.g.
image, text, audio, video or datasets.
Comparators such as these are necessary to develop a general purpose Object Evaluator.
Further work should also be conducted to devise a general evaluation taxonomy for several classes of digital objects.
Acknowledgments The work reported in this article has been funded by the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal) under the grant SFRH/BD/17334/2004.
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Author Details Miguel Ferreira PhD student Department of Information Systems University of Minho 4800-058 Azurém-Guimarães Portugal Email: mferreira@dsi.uminho.pt Web site: http://www.dsi.uminho.pt/~ferreira Graduated as a Systems and Informatics Engineer, has worked as a consultant at the Arquivo Distrital do Porto (Oporto's Archive) and as a researcher at the University of Minho.
Since 2003 has been publishing in field of digital archives/libraries and preservation.
Currently, is developing work as a PhD student and coordinating several research projects at the Arquivo Distrital do Porto and the Portuguese National Archives (Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais/Torre do Tombo).
Ana Alice Baptista Auxiliary professor Department of Information Systems University of Minho 4800-058 Guimarães Portugal Email: analice@dsi.uminho.pt Web site: http://www.dsi.uminho.pt/~analice Auxiliary Professor at the Department of Information Systems of University of Minho, Ana has been publishing in the areas of Knowledge Society, Scholarly Communication, Information Access & Retrieval and Semantic Web.
She is also interested in the social aspects of the Internet, primarily on its impacts on scholarly communication.
José Carlos Ramalho Auxiliary Professor Computer Science Department University of Minho 4710-057 Braga Portugal Email: jcr@di.uminho.pt Web site: http://www.di.uminho.pt/~jcr Auxiliary Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Minho, has a Masters on 'Compiler Construction' and a PhD on the subject 'Document Semantics and Processing''.
Has been managing projects and publishing in the field of Markup Languages since 1995.
Return to top Article Title: "A Foundation for Automatic Digital Preservation" Author: Miguel Ferreira, Ana Alice Baptista and José Carlos Ramalho Publication Date: 30-July-2006 Publication: Ariadne Issue 48 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/ferreira-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Survive or Thrive Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Survive or Thrive Buzz data mobile software api javascript html dissemination usability infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility tagging identifier blog repositories flickr preservation cataloguing gis aggregation e-learning personalisation widget itunes mashup twitter solr interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ed Fay reports on a two-day conference organised by UKOLN on behalf of JISC to consider growth and use of digital content on the Web, which was held in Manchester in June 2010.
Survive or Thrive [1] is the punchy title given to an event intended to stimulate serious consideration amongst digital collections practitioners about future directions in our field opportunities but also potential pitfalls.
The event, which focused on content in HE, comes at a time of financial uncertainty when proving value is of increasing importance in the sector and at a point when significant investment has already been made in the UK into content creation, set against a backdrop of increasingly available content on the open Web from a multitude of sources.
The premise of the event we must survive in this context and seek to thrive is a timely reminder of these realities, but also a motivation to explore some of the currently available digital collection technologies and models for user engagement that are out there and working successfully in this environment in order to make the most of our digital collections for our users.
Digital Libraries in a Networked World: Dan Greenstein Dan Greenstein is Vice Provost at the University of California which includes oversight of the California Digital Library.
He has been Director of the Digital Library Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Data Service and the Resource Discovery Network.
Greenstein's opening point was that we would be hearing a lot about what can be done but it would be important to focus on what should be done-and this would be different for each one of us.
Something that is likely to apply to all of us, however, is that we will be working in a time of reduced budgets.
While he is of the opinion that 10-15% cuts are absorbable, cuts of 20-30% across the sector will require fundamental changes.
Although student numbers have been rising steadily, funding per capita has been falling (as demonstrated by statistics from the UK's Department of Education and Skills, over the period 1980/1-1999/2000).
Although the period after World War II saw an explosion in printed publications, we are now seeing an explosion in new distribution models digital, mobile and print-on-demand supported by e-publishing and retrospective digitisation.
Therefore, Dan maintained, 'redundant management of print collections is insane' as is seeking to make savings on special collections: they are what make a library unique, not copies of print publications that will be increasingly available through other means.
Next generation information practice is likely to require: Retrospective digitisation Institutional repositories Curated born-digital material E-learning and information literacy ('hybrid instruction' on the basis of closer engagement with information practice and research or teaching departments) What does it take to fix this?
Changes in collection management: Secure management of digital facsimiles and editions (not everything is worth saving everything that is saved, costs) National institutional repository strategy with services implemented at the department or individual level National print repositories (necessary and sufficient redundancy, no more) Localised print-on-demand and mobile download The questions are political, not technical.
Currently, core funding is used for print acquisition and e-licensing commercial acquisition while 'funding dust' is used for information literacy and digital curation.
There is no trade-off being made, and this is unsustainable.
Everything should be funded from the same collection budget, with a realistic approach to prioritisation what ought to be done.
Discovery and delivery are orienting to the individual.
If library services do not follow suit, then users will go around us to get at content.
This is a 'massively heavy lift' can we do it quickly enough before the industry bypasses us?
(Dan advised the audience to take a look at what Apple had done to the music business with the iPod and iTunes.
He maintained it is going after the publishing industry next.)
Challenges include: Communicating the benefits First mover problem (it needs to be sector-wide) Leadership problem (it needs to be institutional, not just library scale) Scope creep (driven by the range of possibilities online there must be clear direction) Threat to local autonomy ultimately to the local academic library and librarian!
Greenstein's final point an orderly retreat is better than a disorderly one: services and access to information can be maintained.
If You Love Your Content, Set It Free: Mike Ellis, Eduserv Following the economic theory of marginal utility, Mike Ellis described how, historically, value derived from scarcity and there was benefit from keeping content closed.
In the networked age there are three phenomena which challenge this: Distribution costs are declining Piracy opportunities are increasing Our relationship to content and our information behaviours are changing Nowadays, Mike maintained, value becomes about usability rather than scarcity: This is not a blip, things will not be returning to 'normal' Value has not disappeared, it has shifted What cannot be copied?
What is unique to this institution?
Think: trust, authenticity, immediacy Content is like a teenager you may try to protect it, but it will climb out the window and go clubbing anyway If you can't reuse your digital content, the creation effort is wasted This is and always will be about content and users, not technology The future is uncertain but open content and technologies help by lowering costs for reuse and interoperability It does not matter how you do it Open and Free = Eyeballs – making content open and freely available will drive its use It is worth noting that point 8 proved highly contentious during discussion, and was subsequently modified to agree that 'how' should include notions of interoperability, openness and Web accessibility, but beyond that specific technologies matter less than these principles.
Mike has placed his presentation on Slideshare [2].
Web Scale (Content in a Web Environment): Jo Pugh, TNA The National Archives (TNA) have started to publish content to Flickr Commons [3].
The primary purpose was to use Flickr as a 'shop window' to get across the scope of the collections.
Benefits and the business case for using third-party dissemination: Large audience 'shop window' (potential to drive traffic to in-house image library) User tagging and folksonomies (ultimate intention to import back into local catalogue) Proliferation of images across the site (favourites, groups, etc.)
Annotation Source of information about users Users can embed images on their own site, and TNA can embed on theirs Potential to repurpose TNA content via mashups Users can post their own content A key driver for the adoption of Flickr was to avoid rebuilding what was there already, and the motivation to avoid the 'build it and they will come' approach in favour of going to where the users are already.
This represents a balance of benefits costs vs. control of content.
A key lesson is that Flickr is working at Web scale TNA content is not!
It is also worth noting that the ambition for mashups of TNA content was regarded as overly optimistic and has not manifested itself.
However this is not seen as a disappointment-rather TNA now better understand their users and their expectations of TNA content as a result of this foray into web-scale dissemination.
What is the aim of being on Flickr?
'We don't judge what constitutes a meaningful interaction with our content' Enhancements to the TNA catalogue Vibrant online community of activity Flickr Apps ways of using content not limited by the TNA platform 3 Sessions on Geo-Data, Linked Data, Text Mining Geo-Spatial as an Organising Principle: James Reid, Edina James Reid began with a widely held assertion: 80% of all an organisation's information has a geographic aspect, directly or indirectly referenced.
Direct referencing is an explicit assertion of the geographic information (e.g.
open Ordnance Survey maps or geo-referenced digital collections) while indirect referencing is an implicit assertion of geographic information (e.g.
textual references to place names).
Edina Unlock [4] provides services for geo-referencing and geo-parsing (text-mining for geographic references).
James has made his presentation [5] available.
Linked Data: Tom Heath, Talis Tom Heath explained linked data using the analogy of a transport network different transport types interoperate; we don't need to understand how trains or buses work in order to use them to get places.
Historical lesson: building physical networks adds value to the places which are connected-building virtual networks adds value to the things which are connected.
How is linked data best implemented?
There will be no big bang; expansion and benefits will be incremental.
First step build an infrastructure of identifiers -things we care about as an organisation.
This can be as simple as id.uni.ac.uk/thing that captures the domain model (people, departments, things, etc).
Cost?
As for any infrastructure development, there is the bootstrapping cost vs. cost savings and the value of things that would not otherwise get done.
Tom has made his slides [6] available.
Text Mining: Sophia Ananiadou, NaCTeM Sophia Ananiadou introduced applications of text mining that are being developed in various academic disciplines to support the analysis of large textual corpora.
This is an emerging research discipline in its own right that is finding traction amongst the natural and social sciences as well as in the area of digital humanities.
Text mining offers the ability to extract semantic information from unstructured textual documents through a sequence of techniques: Unstructured text (implicit knowledge) ?
Information retrieval ?
Information extraction (named entities) ?
Semantic metadata annotations (enrich the document) ?
Structured content (explicit knowledge) Existing tools can be adapted to a subject domain using annotated corpora.
Applications include document classification, metadata extraction, summarisation and information extraction.
Current NaCTeM domains are biological, medical and social sciences.
[7] JISC Resource Discovery Task Force The JISC and RLUK Resource Discovery Vision ultimate goal is for a national strategy for resource discovery supported by aggregation services for metadata.
More information is available at: Resource Discovery Taskforce [8] Resource Discovery Taskforce vision report [9] JISC [10] Digital New Zealand: Andy Neale, Digital New Zealand Digital New Zealand is a national-scale platform to support digital content, including infrastructure, metadata, and front-end search and delivery.
There are currently 99 contributing organisations within New Zealand.
4 initial projects (2008) launched with 20 contributors: Search widget Mashup Remix experience Tagging demo Search widget is an aggregator focussed on digital objects (not Web pages 'Google is for that') built on top of Solr with an HTML + Javascript front-end that can be replicated and changed for different applications.
This forms the core of their infrastructure, with a public API making DigiNZ content available to other applications.
New applications can be deployed for an institution using pre-defined custom searches in the API, which are used as the basis for building new front-ends with different skins.
Not including graphical design changes, a new instance can be launched in around 2 hours.
Additional apps from DigiNZ include a timeline app which uses open-source software from the MIT SIMILE Project [11].
Initial work focussed on building foundations for something bigger, designing an infrastructure to be extensible and building from the ground up.
Using an Agile methodology (SCRUM) they were able to build the prototypes for initial launch in 16 weeks, although lots of background work had been done on the concepts and organisational buy-in.
Issues: Unclear, scattered vision statement did not provide an inspiration for the work they were left to pull out the relevant concepts and work them up into something more relevant This was not the first national attempt in this space, so they had to be sensitive to the work of others and make their differences clear They lacked in-house development capacity, so worked with 3 suppliers who could overlap each others' work when necessary to share the workload around Time and budget constraints agile development methodology (SCRUM) alleviated their effects The reputational baggage associated with branding the central service was underestimated The effort to participate for contributing organisations was perceived to be high, so they designed for a low barrier to entry by not specifying rigid metadata schemas DigiNZ does most of the heavy lifting to normalise data for ingest.
This results in lower quality metadata, but of workable standard.
Bureaucracy hindered institutional take-up To maintain momentum and energy and avoid the 'slow death of project wind-down' DigiNZ took a conscious decision to maintain the project atmosphere (although not technically a project anymore) by rejecting the idea of 'business-as-usual' and keeping to the two-week development sprint cycle.
A current challenge is finding the balance between maintenance and development.
DigiNZ are currently looking at digitisation support services, including an advice service similar to JISC Digital Media.
They are also running a central service for digitisation nominations, on which members of the public can vote.
To date, they have had 100 nominations, the most popular of which has received 600 votes.
This is considered to be a moderate amount of activity.
DigiNZ will continue its mission to lower barriers to getting content online, which includes hosting services for institutions without the resources to maintain their own.
Future applications will include metadata enhancement such as geo-tagging, based on the principle of a game to crowdsource the required effort.
Current issues are the balance of effort between central and distributed functionality and tools.
They are more interested in distributed access where partner organisations take on much of the effort of publicity.
The scope of inclusion of content and the balance between maintenance and development are also issues.
Things that worked for DigiNZ: Clear and simple vision Small scoped projects as the basis for scaling up Clear about the differences from other projects Lower barriers to participation Brand and design looking good inspires pride Build relationships with collaborators technology is not hard with the right people Deadlines Starting small and upselling Building for extensibility from the ground up Iterating development 2 days user analysis, 8 days build in a two-week cycle Planning to maintain energy after the launch Lightweight governance and a team of experts given room to work 'Get on with it' and refactor in response to change Working the Crowd: Chris Lintott, Galaxy Zoo Crowdsourcing developed in response to the data deluge of astronomical data, but is increasingly being applied in other domains.
Some astronomical data can be processed by machine but not all-in particular the pattern matching necessary to recognise galaxy shapes is not yet sufficiently sophisticated, and even neural nets have problems.
'Citizen science' is not new, it builds on a tradition of amateur ornithologists, astronomers and palaeontologists.
However, crowdsourcing is a new kind of citizen science that inverts the normal model.
Historically, scientists were asking for people to supply the data (e.g.
observations of birds or fossils) while the scientists would do the analysis.
In the crowdsourcing model, the scientists supply the data and the people do the analysis.
Galaxy Zoo underwent an explosion in popularity after it was picked up by the BBC, which crashed the original servers.
At its peak it was hitting 70,000 classifications per hour (more than 1 PhD-student-month per hour) and by the end had racked up over 200 years FTE (Full Time Equivalent) by 300,000 volunteers.
But to put this in perspective, this is only the same attention as that given to 6 seconds of Oprah Winfrey's TV show.
Lessons learnt about volunteer recruiting: There must be no barrier to entry Tell them why Treat them as collaborators Do not waste their time It became clear that crowdsourcing could tackle different kinds of questions: Known knowns: basic classification Known unknowns: specific, narrow questions not covered by the standard classification (not designed into the experiment, they require a small cadre of volunteers to be recruited for this specific task) Unknown unknowns: something totally unexpected (they cannot be designed for in the experiment, require a free response, but also require forums and volunteers to self-moderate and filter the feedback to the professionals) The platform is now being extended into a generalised platform for crowdsourcing [12] to lower the barriers to entry for early-career researchers.
The platform will also act as an intermediary to provide guarantees to those on both sides of the relationship (researchers and volunteers) a 'fulfilment contract'.
It is not expected that there will be similar, widespread publicity in the future people are not as amazed by what the Web can do anymore.
The challenge of how to recruit and engage volunteers is seen as ongoing.
Getting Your Attention: David Kay, Sero Consulting Attention or activity data harvested from OPACs can be used as a source of information about user behaviour and hence as a basis to inform collection management or to build user recommendation systems.
There are three kinds of data: Attention: interest, searches, navigation, etc.
Activity: transactional requests, check-outs, downloads, etc.
Appeal: recommendations, e.g.
reading lists (proxy for activity data).
The University of Huddersfield demonstrated an increased borrowing range by making suggestions based on current user behaviour (average number of books borrowed per person increased from 14 to 16 over the period 2005-9).
A developer challenge based on Huddersfield data produced two applications to improve resource discovery, two to support recommended courses based on a user's behaviour, and two to support decision-making in collection management.
Problems: Over-personalisation of the information landscape runs the risk of removing personal agency, decision-making and independent thought There are data protection issues regarding the use of the data, although anonymisation mitigates them to an extent Findings of the CERLIM/MOSAIC Project are that 90% of students want to know what other people were using to get the bigger picture of what is out there and to aid with retrieval.
Recommender systems are used commercially, so the benefits and mechanisms are well understood.
It was also observed that they are not the basis for people wasting money (at least this is not a reported outcome), and so they are unlikely to be the basis for people wasting attention in OPACs and non-commercial situations.
There are two approaches to user-augmented retrieval: data analysis (of attention, activity data) and social networks (user engagement reviews recommendations etc).
It was opined that activity data are likely to be of more use for undergraduate courses, due to the volume of use and associated data, while research use exists in the long-tail of the collection, and will likely benefit from social network-type effects.
However, it was observed in the Question and Answer session that the long-tail phenomenon only exists at institutional level subject networks of researchers at national level will have their own corpora of high-use material, and analysis at that level is likely to be more productive.
Question & Answer Sessions The Q&A session focussed on addressing the elephant in the room-financing.
Despite Greenstein's admonition at the start of the day there was a striking absence of specific financial discussion through the course of the day, in favour of a somewhat isolated appreciation of technical possibilities and associated user benefits.
The basis for a cost-benefit analysis was not always clear.
The question was simple "how do we pay for this?
"-the answer, less clear.
Greenstein was adamant that core budgets can and should be realigned to give appropriate focus to digital collections, while admitting the possibility of commercial partnerships.
Commercial partnerships were considered to be optimistic by other respondents, with Pugh warning that "there is no pot of gold for all" and Ellis pointing out the significant overheads of running an in-house commercial operation such as an image library.
Neale advocated 'smuggling' technical costs into other activities that over time could build into a significant strand.
The danger being that the 'other activities' (and the funding they bring in) could dry up leaving significant, un-resourced technical commitments.
Stuart Dempster (JISC) urged us to take at look at the Ithaka case studies [13] (which are due to be refreshed in 2010) and also to pay close attention to government policy to see which way the financial winds are blowing for the sector.
One thing was clear we cannot avoid opening and preserving content.
However, while possibilities were offered and successful financial models do exist, resourcing for specific digital collections remains a challenge for the curators-much depends on the nature of the collection and its target audience.
Conclusion This two-day event offered a fast-paced look at many areas of digital collections technologies and the ways in which user behaviours are changing.
While it was interesting to hear about emerging digital technologies and models for user engagement, following the event there was something of a return to normality as the realities of implementing these innovative technologies became apparent.
As mentioned above, despite serious financial considerations in the opening session, there was a striking absence of financial discussion throughout the sessions.
It was not clear in many cases what the cost of adopting such technologies or approaches would be, nor the potential savings.
Another topic that was apparent by its absence was that of digital preservation.
The ongoing costs of maintaining digital collections are only starting to be understood, and in many institutions making the case for infrastructure to support preservation is the first step before one can consider ways to innovate.
Flipping this on its head-may it be the case that innovating with content (and thus providing the associated user benefits) will make collections so valuable that preservation becomes a de facto result of maintaining the user community by providing continued, supported access?
In which case, starting from where we are-is it better to make the case for innovation or for preservation?
(And of course the answer may be different for different communities, collections or user engagement models.)
A caveat, however-we are all familiar with the project silo which, while innovative in the years which produced it, is now languishing on the equivalent of a dusty shelf and looking its age.
As institutional digital collections multiply so do the resources required to maintain them; and multiplying technology stacks on top of content only acerbates this.
Without a closer engagement with the source of use and the source, increasingly, of the data-researchers, teachers and students-we run the risk of multiplying our commitment to technologies without an associated increase in technical resources to maintain them.
If we are not demonstrating the value in doing so, then this is going to be a hard case to make, and rightly so.
Nevertheless, despite these potential pitfalls, this event filled me with a sense of optimism, as so much is changing and so much is becoming possible.
The digital revolution is changing the way information is used, and if we understand our collections, their users and the possibilities, then there exists the chance to improve information availability and use throughout the sector.
References Survive or Thrive Conference http://www.surviveorthrive.org.uk/agenda/ Readers may also be interested in the series of videos of presentations that was produced during the event http://www.surviveorthrive.org.uk/videos/ If you love your content, set it free (v3.0).
Mike Ellis, June 2010.
Presentation http://www.slideshare.net/dmje/if-you-love-your-content-set-it-free-v3-4449122 The National Archives UK's photostream: Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/ Edina Unlock http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/ Survive or Thrive?
JISC event June 2010.
James Reid.
Presentation http://prezi.com/n8ui3umrjxfh/survive-or-thrive/ Linked Data: Avoiding "Breaks of Gauge" in your Web Content.
Tom Heath.
June 2010.
Presentation http://tomheath.com/slides/2010-06-manchester-linked-data-avoiding-breaks-of-gauge-in-your-web-content.pdf The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ Resource Discovery Taskforce http://rdtf.jiscinvolve.org/ McGregor , A (2010) One to Many; Many to One: The resource discovery taskforce vision.
Technical Report.
http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/475/ New plans to open up UK resources revealed: JISC.
9 June 2010 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/news/stories/2010/06/discovery.aspx SIMILE Widgets: Timeline http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ Zooniverse Home page http://www.zooniverse.org Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability Author Details Ed Fay Collection Digitisation Manager Library The London School of Economics and Political Science Email: E.Fay@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.library.lse.ac.uk/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/digitalfay Blog: http://lselibrarydigidev.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Survive or Thrive " Author: Ed Fay Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/survive-thrive-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Integrating Journal Back Files Into an Existing Electronic Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Integrating Journal Back Files Into an Existing Electronic Environment Buzz data database xml archives metadata browser schema repositories cataloguing z39.50 passwords marc perl openurl dspace moodle licence url sfx Citation BibTex RIS Jason Cooper describes how Loughborough University Library integrated a number of collections of journal back files into their existing electronic environment.
When we purchased two collections of journal back files for hosting locally we knew that there would be some work involved in providing them to our patrons as a usable service.
The key task we faced was to get our final solution neatly integrated into our existing electronic environment.
We did not want our patrons to have to go to a stand-alone search page when they could use our federated search engine.
We wanted our OpenURL resolver to be able to link patrons to the article whether they found it via our federated search engine or another resource that supports OpenURLs.
We also wanted people to be able to link straight to an article or a journals index so that lecturers could add specific articles to their reading lists.
Finally we knew that we needed to supply a browsable index for the whole of each collection of back files.
The Back Files to Be Integrated The initial two collections of back files that were to be integrated were the Institution of Civil Engineers Virtual Library Archive (ICE) [1] and the Royal Society of Chemistry Journals Archive (RSC) [2].
The ICE collection contains the contents from 13 journals published between 1836 and 2001 and is approximately 20Gb in size.
The RSC collection contains about 238,000 articles published between 1841 and 2004 and is approximately 143GB in size.
Both collections of back files contained the PDF copies of the articles and the metadata for each article.
The metadata was stored in individual files in an XML format; the XML Schema was different for the two collections which added to complexity of using a single system to deliver the back files.
The Existing Electronic Environment The electronic environment into which the collections of back files were to be integrated consisted of a number of different services.
Our Library Management System (Aleph [3]), Federated Search Engine (MetaLib [4]) and OpenURL Resolver (SFX [5]) are all products of the same company (Ex Libris [6]) and have a reasonable level of integration between each of them.
The Reading list system (LORLS [7][8]) supports both traditional print materials and electronic materials and will generate OpenURLs for each item on a reading list where possible.
It is also possible to add a specific URL to each item to give a direct link to the electronic resource/article.
It is also possible for lecturers to put links to resources on the University’s virtual learning environment (Moodle [9]) for students taking their modules.
The Required Results It was required that, from a patron’s point of view, there would be nothing special about the back files and they would appear to be just another resource that the patrons could search in the same way as other databases.
This would require each back file collection to be searchable from within MetaLib.
The results shown to the patron should contain a direct link to the article itself where possible.
Our OpenURL resolver would be required to link to an article provided it was supplied with enough information, and failing that, it should link to the index system for the relevant back file collection to let the patrons browse to the article in which they are interested.
The back files should have an index system that would display for each collection of back files the list of journals covered; each being a link that would bring up a list of the articles in that journal that are contained in the back file.
It was also a requirement to be able to deep-link into the index system so that each of the journals contained in a collection of back files could be catalogued separately in our Library Catalogue (which is part of Aleph).
The Chosen Method The first decision that was made was how the system would present the individual files to the patron.
It was decided that a CGI script would present the patron with a click-through licence with two links, one to accept the licence and one to reject it.
If they click on the link that states that they agree to the licence the script would return the requested file.
If they click on the other link it would redirect them to the Library’s home page.
The second decision was how to enable MetaLib to search the contents of each collection.
Our solution was to use Zebra [10] to provide a Z39.50 interface to the metadata for each collection.
We already had experience of doing this to provide a Z39.50 interface to our Institutional Repository (DSpace[11]) and many of those scripts could be reused.
These scripts gave us our common target for the format of the metadata (Dublin Core XML) as this would enable us to maintain just one set of scripts for converting to Marc and indexing with Zebra.
To enable SFX to direct patrons to the resource effectively, it would need a way to look up the URL for a specific article contained within a collection.
To do this we decided upon creating a plug-in for SFX which would create a URL using the relevant ISSN, volume, issue and start page from the OpenURL and offer this as a link for journals in the collections.
The CGI script would then work out the correct file ID for the article and redirect the browser to the click through licence CGI script with that file ID.
If the CGI script failed to find a match for the provided data then the browser would be redirected to index for that back file collection.
The final decision was how to provide the browsable index for the individual back file collections.
For this we decided to create a back-end database that would be used by a small set of CGI scripts to provide a browsable index.
It was decided that the browsable index should not contain any search functionality as that is already provided by MetaLib via the Z39.50 interface.
Creating the Click-through Licence The first task was to create the database that the script would use to look up the file to return for a specific ID.
Each back file collection would have its own database consisting of a single table.
This table consisted of two fields, the ID and the full path for the file with that ID.
Inspecting the file names provided in the two back file collections showed them to be unique within their own collection and so were adopted as a simple ID that would be contained within the metadata, thus avoiding complexities for later stages of the development.
We created a database for each collection and populated it using a Perl script that parsed the tree structure of the collection and stored the full path for each file against the ID.
Once the database for each collection was populated, a Perl CGI script was created that accepts an ID.
It then displays a licence to the patron with the accept and reject options (see Figure 1).
The option to accept the licence links to the same CGI script with the ID parameter and an extra parameter stating that they had accepted the licence.
The option to reject the licence is a link out of the system.
If the CGI script is called with the ID parameter and the parameter stating the patron has accepted the licence, then the script uses the ID to look up the path to the file in the database and it then returns that file to the patron.
The directory in which this CGI script is located on the server is password-protected; this measure limits access to the actual files down to members of the University.
Figure 1: Screenshot of lower half of click-through licence The Creation of the Z39.50 Interface As we already had scripts for converting Dublin Core XML files into Marc for easy indexing in Zebra, we only had to concentrate on the scripts to map each collection’s metadata into Dublin Core XML.
This mapping was done via a Perl script that was custom-tailored to each collection’s metadata.
The script took a path to the root of the metadata files as a parameter and then it would parse the directory tree under that and convert all the metadata into a single file in a Dublin Core XML format.
Each record in the resulting Dublin Core XML contained the following metadata if it was available.
In the case of the URL element the conversion script would generate this based upon the file name of the article (which was being used as a unique ID) and the known URL of the click-through licence CGI script.
Article title Publisher URL that would link directly to the click-through licence CGI script with the ID for that article Authors Journal title Journal Date Journal Volume Journal Issue Article Description (The first 1024 characters of the article) Our existing scripts were then used to convert the Dublin Core XML files into USMARC files which were then indexed by Zebra.
The Z39.50 interface was tested using the yaz-client tool from the yaz tool kit [12].
At this point we then had a Z39.50 interface to search our back file collections.
Integrating the Back Files with MetaLib After the Z39.50 interface was set up, the next step was to configure MetaLib to be able to use it as a resource.
As we had reused our scripts from our institutional repository set-up and we already had a Z39.50 interface to our institutional repository, we could just copy the MetaLib configuration for that.
The only changes needed were to point MetaLib at the correct Z39.50 interface and set the correct database within that to be searched, as each back files collection had its own database within Zebra.
Integrating the Back Files with SFX To successfully integrate our back files into our electronic environment we needed to make sure that SFX would be able to locate articles within it from the usual information passed in an OpenURL.
For each collection we created a database that contained for each article the file ID, journal ISSN, journal volume, journal issue and start page.
We created a CGI script that uses this database to look up the file ID based on passed details and then redirects the patron’s browser to the relevant file.
If the CGI script does not receive enough information to identify the file uniquely, then it redirects the patron’s browser to the browsable index for the relevant collection.
We then created an SFX plug-in that could be used by each of the journals in the archives.
First the plug-in checks if the OpenURL passed to it contains a direct link to the required article (such as the results from a MetaLib search would produce).
If it does, and the URL matches the pattern for our server, then it offers the patron that as one of the options.
If it does not, then the plug-in offers a link to the above CGI script which it generates using the information passed to it in the OpenURL.
This has the advantage of reducing look-ups on remote servers when SFX is processing an OpenURL.
Creating a Browsable Index To create the browsable index of the back file collections, another database was created that would store some of the metadata for each article and to which journal they relate.
It also stores the archive to which the journal belongs.
This was then populated via a Perl script from the processed metadata used by the Z39.50 server.
A set of Perl CGI scripts was created to provide the browsable index.
To make it easy to deep-link into specific parts of the index, a Representational state transfer (REST) interface was used.
In the browsable index there are three different levels available to patrons: the first is a list of the archives available which is never really used as most resources link through to one of the next two levels, but it is there for completeness; the second level is a list of all journals in the archive specified in the URL (see Figure 2) this is the level that is linked to by most resources when referencing one of our archives; the third level is a list of all articles in a journal and is linked to mainly from our Library catalogue.
Figure 2: Screen shot of the browsable index Conclusion By integrating our back files with the rest of our electronic environment, rather than developing a stand-alone system, we cut out a lot of development work that would have been required.
There was no need to develop a custom search interface to the back files as our patrons use MetaLib which has many more features than we could have developed in the time available to us.
At the same time we were able to make it easier for our patrons to access the back files, through searching them via MetaLib and through SFX being able to point patrons to the articles in the back file collections from other resources that support OpenURLs.
References JISC Collections : Institution of Civil Engineers Virtual Library Archive http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/coll_icevirtuallib.aspx JISC Collections : RSC Journals Archive http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/rsc_journals_archive.aspx Aleph Integrated Library System http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/Aleph MetaLib: Reach Out and Discover Remote Resources http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/MetaLibOverview SFX: Overview http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/SFXOverview Ex Libris http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/Home Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS) http://lorls.lboro.ac.uk/about.html Brewerton, G. and Knight, J., 2003.
From local project to open source: a brief history of the Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS).
VINE, 33(4), pp.
189-195 http://hdl.handle.net/2134/441 Moodle A Free, Open Source Course Management System for Online Learning http://moodle.org/ Zebra http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra/ dspace.org http://www.dspace.org/ YAZ http://www.indexdata.dk/yaz/ Author Details Dr. Jason Cooper Library Systems Analyst\Programmer Loughborough University Email: j.l.cooper@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library Return to top Article Title: “Integrating Journal Back Files into an Existing Electronic Environment” Author: Jason Cooper Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/cooper/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Cautionary Tales: Archives 2.0 and the Diplomatic Historian Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Cautionary Tales: Archives 2.0 and the Diplomatic Historian Buzz data framework archives metadata tagging blog research standards Citation BibTex RIS Michael Kennedy discusses the value of Archives 2.0 to the online version of Ireland's 'Documents on Irish Foreign Policy' series.
When I began writing this article, as a paper to a March 2009 conference on Archives 2.0 hosted by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester, Archives 2.0 was unknown territory to me [1].
I am a diplomatic historian, not an archivist, and though I am an end-user of archives, I had not come across the term Archives 2.0 before.
The project I head, the Royal Irish Academy's Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (DIFP) series (http://www.difp.ie and http://www.ria.ie/projects/difp) [2], has since 1998 published hard-copy edited volumes of historical Irish diplomatic documents.
DIFP is part of an international genre of diplomatic document editing projects that can trace its origins back over 150 years to 1861 and the establishment of the Foreign Relations of the United States series [3].
Diplomatic document editing and publication projects have established traditional practices.
They favour hard copy over electronic publications, though in recent years many projects have embraced the Web.
In 2007 DIFP itself moved to online as well as hard copy publication.
However DIFP's hard copy series still takes priority over the online version.
DIFP's online presence is limited to providing electronic versions of existing hard copy volumes, albeit on a purpose-built Web site with the sources entirely reformatted to suit online delivery [4].
Preparing for the CRESC Conference, I was introduced to the new world of Web 2.0 and Archives 2.0.
The central tenets of both were welcome, but at times worrying, territory.
With the definition of Archives 2.0 as a changed mindset towards archives and as the application of Web 2.0 technologies to archives, I could see why, as a researcher, Archives 2.0 would be of benefit to me.
On the other hand, as an editor and publisher of diplomatic documents, I felt the brakes of caution apply.
Despite playing a valuable role in democratising archives, the guidelines of Archives 2.0 often run contrary to precepts of publishing diplomatic documents.
Diplomatic documents regularly deal with politically sensitive affairs between states and with historical topics that remain capable of generating contemporary controversy.
The openness of Archives 2.0, with its encouragement of direct user intervention with sources, clashes with the requirement placed upon diplomatic document editors to provide a neutral environment for the documents they are publishing with care and expertise.
This is not caution at what Archives 2.0 is trying to do.
I am all for opening up sources to users in new ways.
There is a definite similarity between the goals of Archives 2.0 and those of the international projects like DIFP publishing diplomatic documents, as both wish to democratise ownership and use of information.
My caution is instead directed towards the potential application of Archives 2.0 to certain aspects of publishing diplomatic documents online.
In particular I refer to the ability Web 2.0 technology gives to archive end-users to manipulate and augment published data to their own ends, perhaps even to augment the source itself, on the hosting Web site.
This raises the potential problem of malicious users linking their views to those of the host Web site in a manner detrimental to the host Web site and to its users.
An online diplomatic document publishing project needs to create a completely secure barrier between the electronic version of the source it is making available and the end-user.
This is particularly the case if a facility is to be given to the end-users to add their perspective to the source in question.
Concerns and Nightmare Scenarios So far DIFP has placed online [2] the text of 1,345 documents from Ireland's declaration of independence in 1919 up to the election of Eamon de Valera and his Fianna Fáil party to power in 1932.
We plan for material from 1932 to 1941 to go online in the near future.
How does the DIFP Web site fare in terms of Archives 2.0 compliance?
Access is free of charge and we have no plans to charge for access.
DIFP is Web 2.0compliant to the extent that the site will remain free for users, we do not ask for user registration and the site's pages can be linked to externally.
While we want to maximise global use of the DIFP Web site, we want the site to be neutral.
Accordingly, we keep our own editorial comment to a minimum.
The documents we make available speak for themselves and stand by themselves.
Metadata created by users of the documents, as favoured by Archives 2.0, cannot be generated or stored on the site.
Such data are not allowed in case confusion should arise between the actual content of the site and user-generated content.
Sharing the data outside the DIFP Web site is no problem, but, to 'personalise … annotate, and repurpose content', as one blog put it, sounds rather worrying as it would allow users to alter and thus manipulate history and violate the neutrality of the material we are making available [5].
Any site making available primary sources dealing with a contentious topic such as Irish history must remain scrupulously neutral.
It must allow data to be viewed openly and freely, but it must above all else protect the integrity of the material it contains.
The 'walled gardens' concept of content and functionality of firstgeneration Internet sites is more appropriate to the data on the DIFP Web site than the more open sites of Web 2.0 and Archives 2.0.
What would we gain by allowing users, for example, to edit our metadata?
Would we find that the site was vandalized for political reasons?
Irish history and politics represent a contentious topic.
It would only need one hack of the Web site in this manner to find its way to a mischief-making journalist to show that the Web site could be altered to create difficulties for us and for our project partners in the National Archives of Ireland (NAI), the Royal Irish Academy and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).
I fear that the malicious attitude of a few could ruin the site for the many.
We could try to monitor the site if we allowed comments online; however would devising and implementing the appropriate policies for monitoring and moderating opinions justify the time and resources they would consume?
Set standards must apply to sites providing original material and users must know that the content of sites can be trusted.
I hope that the DIFP Web site acts as a 'Gold Standard,' where users can view material in a form that is guaranteed to be as close to the original as possible but not be able to manipulate or add to it on the site.
The electronic equivalent of a toughened glass barrier security screen is necessary to preserve the integrity of DIFP online as an electronic source.
This attitude conflicts with the Archives 2.0 conceptual framework, but for our requirements the 'read-only' Web site is essential and we could not contemplate the 'read/write' Web site of 2.0.
A Slightly More Positive Perspective Perhaps the above views are unduly negative?
What if DIFP allowed users limited freedom to add references to online documents to give details of, say, corresponding files or documents in other archives?
For example, if DIFP published a letter from the Eamon de Valera to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a user of the Chamberlain papers in the University of Birmingham could add in a reference to the corresponding file in the Chamberlain papers or a user from The National Archives (TNA – UK) could supply the reference to relevant material in the Foreign Office or Dominions Office archives.
We could easily build a massive web of metadata about Irish diplomatic documents in a very cost-effective manner.
Additionally, a letter from the Irish Legation in wartime Berlin could be 'geocoded' on Google Earth to the still vacant site on Draakenstrasse where the legation stood until destroyed in an air raid in 1943.
Or DIFP could geocode the location of the hotel where Taoiseach Eamon de Valera stayed in London whilst negotiating the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938 with his British colleagues.
By also geocoding the locations of the Dominions Office, the Irish High Commission and perhaps Downing Street we could show the geography of the negotiations leading to the 1938 Anglo-Irish agreements.
A DIFP Blog?
Having thought about a DIFP blog, I cannot see an account of our reading through twenty boxes of Paris Embassy registry files having any widespread appeal, or, for that matter the details of a trip to the printers to discuss the appropriate ink mixture ratio for a DIFP volume dustjacket.
Yet we have a form of a blog in that our project news page [6] includes previews of recently located documents of interest, special outreach events and volume launches.
The site is updated monthly; we do not have regular daily updates as we do not have the resources to do so.
If we did update the pages from day to day we would end up doing far less actual work on our volumes.
In cost-benefit terms, adopting Archives 2.0 technologies may well lead to taking on extra layers of work and providing extra layers of data that are ultimately of little value to the primary task being undertaken.
In our case it would diminish the time available to work on DIFP's primary task: the publication of volumes of diplomatic documents.
One area where we might be on safer Archives 2.0 ground for DIFP relates to the tagging of documents, the provision of tag clouds and saved searches.
I would prefer separate expert and user tags in order to minimise the risk of opening up the DIFP Web site to abuse.
Accordingly we might need to control the tag subjects to avoid abuse of our content.
Nonetheless, even with a messy 'folksonomy' of some sort we could enable the user add value to DIFP by mapping a variety of paths through the site.
This would ensure the integrity of the documents but allow users – say historians or political scientists, economists or sociologists, to tag documents and thus provide a multidimensional framework surrounding the otherwise protected documents.
We already have a collaborative filtering facility where the Web site shows other documents viewed by users who viewed a particular document and we watch site usage through Google analytics.
This seems to be the direction we should be going in.
Joy Palmer of the Archives Hub Blog pointed out in December 2007: 'What tremendous benefit to archives to not only know what items are being used in research, but also to be able to easily track and gauge how that item is being used within various research or teaching contexts.
'[7] But in one sense we have always done this; from our establishment in 1997 it has been central to the project to develop our outreach and see who was using our hard copy volumes and why.
It is critical to DIFP media, marketing and sales strategies.
Web 2.0 gives us new and more accurate ways to continue this process.
I think the best approach to Web 2.0 and Archives 2.0 tool for DIFP has been to try lots of different concepts and see which ones we identify as having lasting value.
For example it has proved of benefit for project staff to make use of social bookmarking sites for sharing our work bookmarks.
There is no use adopting packages and plug-ins simply out of peer pressure and to bow unthinkingly to the concept that 'If we don't invest in the future, it will happen to us anyway!'.
[8] This is hardly democratic.
A post on the Archives Hub Blog argued that 'Web2.0 for archives, should primarily be viewed as an attitude rather than a suite of tools or services, characterised by openness, sharing, experimentation, collaboration, integration and flexibility that enables us to meet different user needs'.
[9] I do not know if all we are doing will really fulfil all the hopes of Archives 2.0 for DIFP as a Web presence.
Though I hope in making Irish diplomatic documents available online we are embracing the supposed democratisation that is central to Archives 2.0.
Losing Contact with the Real World?
Discussion on the nature of the DIFP Web site leads on to two further points of engagement with Archives 2.0. http://www.difp.ie is part of a 'new culture [to] encourage new modes of access and use of the archive within learning, research and everyday life'.
If it does represent 'a fundamental shift in perspective', does it really represent 'a philosophy that privileges the user and promotes an ethos of sharing, collaboration, and openness'?
[10] Have we not created instead a chimera of false democracy where users think they are free but in reality are even more hemmed in?
There are huge benefits in DIFP placing volumes online, but does the effect of placing vast quantities of documents online detract from scholarship, from the transferable skills we are seeking to give students and from the academic research community?
Can a virtual archive and a virtual community of users surpass the value of getting your hands dirty in the archives?
Archives 2.0 must work alongside, but surely never replace, more traditional strands of research.
In working alongside these traditional strands it will augment them as a synergy.
But unfortunately researchers often take the easy way out and will assume that if the source they want is not available online it does not exist elsewhere.
Or, if unwittingly they get their search terms wrong for some reason, they may not try to look for the material in question again.
Historical research is about casting wide for sources and opening all possibilities.
Archives 2.0 can help here, but it can never meet all requirements.
If we place our reliance on online archives where users have control, we have to remember that they have limited control over the file of material to which they are allowed access.
Arguably this is the case in all archives, but the level of control over online archives is much greater, as is the possibility of outside interference with sites.
By placing material online and lauding the online archive to the detriment of the original, we are in danger of diluting the documents, placing them out of context, removing or altering critical physical metadata that help the researcher understand the ethos and zeitgeist of the period in which they are working.
Such metadata could be as simple as the feel of the paper – contrast the difference between the plush paper of peacetime and the harsh fibrous paper of wartime or as simple a point as styles of handwriting and typing.
I often recall more about the atmosphere of an archive and the sense of place from visits to archives than the detail of what I researched there.
My postgraduate trip to the League of Nations Archive in Geneva is a prime case in point.
Had a concept such as Archive 2.0 existed then, I could have reduced the time needed in Geneva, perhaps not gone at all and I could have taken a virtual tour of the League of Nations building and walked Geneva on Google Earth or Tripadvisor.
But in going I gained a critical understanding of how the League's system worked and walked the corridors of its dwindling power.
This helped greatly in my work.
I suspect that wonderful though many of the hopes of Archive 2.0 are, we are in danger of providing all of the information and none of the understanding of that information which a visit to an archive and, by extension, a visit to the scene of one's studies provides.
Of course there is an important trade-off here.
The financial cost of research, the availability of research funding, teaching commitments and family commitments all suggest that one would prefer to work on material online, share it, bookmark it and embrace the strengths of Archives 2.0.
Nevertheless the question remains: 'What do I gain and what do I lose by this virtual research?'
Does Archives 2.0 put me in greater control of my research?
At what point am I willing to sacrifice the integrity of the originals and the ethos of working in an archive or library in order to work from my own bedroom or office?
A Doubtful Privilege?
So is the user really privileged by what we have done online with difp.ie and its cautious adoption of some of the less intrusive aspects of Archives 2.0?
The material we have placed online is definitely the best material available in terms of explaining the evolution and execution of Irish foreign policy and it provides a superb overview for researchers.
But those researchers, if they wish to do original in-depth research, will still need to consult the hard copy archives because we cannot hope to cover all the topics covered by day-to-day diplomacy in a series of select edited documents.
What we are providing on DIFP online is a high-grade overview, but like a low-scale map, once you head off the main road there is no detail.
We can cover British-Irish relations in great detail, but the detail of important areas such as Irish relations with France or Germany between the World Wars will be left off the Web site as we can only cover the most significant components.
Is this a privilege?
Yes if the Web site allows researchers to undertake a large proportion of their work from a remote location, but not if through using the Web site they close off the awareness that other streams of data exist.
Conclusion By placing DIFP online we have established a well-designed efficiently functioning online presence and we have created a user-friendly and highly searchable resource.
I suppose we have lost the innocence of assuming that the Web is a simple technology and our initial 'chuck it up online' view has been replaced by the realisation that we have created a new complex wing of the project.
In effect we have added a second production line to DIFP rather than the expected cut-and-paste job.
It was certainly not as easy as we expected to change a hard copy volume into a Web-based resource and the time required proved far greater than we could ever have imagined.
Was it worth it?
Absolutely.
Irish foreign policy is a small niche area and we have only a small portion of our material online, but since going live in 2007 we have had almost 53,000 hits from 129 countries.
These hits are, as one might expect, largely spread across the English-speaking Irish diaspora.
The main users are from Ireland, Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, along with significant usage from Argentina, Russia, Poland and France.
If Web 2.0 and thus Archives 2.0 do have a democratising effect, then they have greatly enhanced the project's potential and allowed DIFP to maximise the impact of its volumes and to reach out to new audiences through our Web site.
We have enhanced public ownership of the often secretive foreign policy-making process.
DIFP has created a successful Web site, even though it is unlikely to be Archives 2.0-compliant.
Given the concerns I have raised above, we would simply be responding unwisely to peer pressure if we changed the site to put material online in the manner considered 'best practice' by advocates of Archives 2.0.
We should pick only those portions of Archives 2.0 and wider Web 2.0 technologies which we know we will need and use.
We will have to try out a great many packages and applications to find out what suits.
It seems that for a diplomatic documents publishing project there is a definite trade-off between new delivery methods for data and the universal need for accuracy and impartiality.
We can honestly say that DIFP online is providing as accurate as possible a reproduction of what is available in the archives, and for this to continue to be the case, it seems that the user-related freedoms of Archives 2.0 have to be held in check.
References 'Archives 2.0 – Shifting dialogues between users and archivists', CRESC, University of Manchester, 19-20 March 2009 http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/archived/archiveseries/Conference.html Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series: http://www.difp.ie/ http://www.ria.ie/projects/difp/ The Foreign Relations of the United States series http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/ Placing DIFP online was an early aspiration of the project, but with the project to be established and a presence in the academic community to be developed it was one which, due to resources, finance and opportunity, only became a reality in 2006-07.
Ireland hosted the 9th international conference of diplomatic documents in Dublin in April 2007.
The conference theme was the application of new technologies to foreign policy document editing and publication and a major portion of this was placing documents online.
The conference, plus the then flush state of the public purse, gave us motive, means and opportunity to bring DIFP online into existence.
Archives Hub Blog: Archives 2.0: Fact or Fiction?
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/2007/12/archives-20-fact-or-fiction.html DIFP News http://www.ria.ie/projects/difp/news.html Archives Hub Blog: Archives 2.0: Fact or Fiction?
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/2007/12/archives-20-fact-or-fiction.html Steve Abram quoted in 'Archives 2.0: Fact or Fiction?
', Archives Hub Blog, 7 December 2007 http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/2007/12/archives-20-fact-or-fiction.html 2 February 2009 entry, 'The Archives 2.0 Hub' http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/ From the conference synopsis and content description for 'Archives 2.0 – Shifting dialogues between users and archivists', CRESC, University of Manchester, 19-20 March 2009 on http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/past/item/?item=216&active=&subactive= Author Details Michael Kennedy Executive Editor Documents on Irish Foreign Policy Email: difp@iol.ie Web site: http://www.difp.ie/ and http://www.ria.ie/Research/DIFP.aspx Return to top Article Title: "Cautionary Tales: Archives 2.0 and the Diplomatic Historian" Author: Michael Kennedy Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/kennedy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Addendum to Issue 58: Ariadne Readers Survey Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Addendum to Issue 58: Ariadne Readers Survey Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces the Ariadne survey.
Firstly if you have over-ridden your pop-up-suppressor or elected to complete the survey later, or indeed have already completed the survey, please accept my thanks.
Having come across three requests in succession to complete a survey the other day, I am conscious of the cost in your time, though I have no doubt those surveys were all as important as Ariadne’s.
If, understandably enough, you are prevaricating, then let me point out that this survey is more the sort of rapid interview that seeks opinions rather than one that asks you to make numerical judgements across a whole swathe of aspects and elements of whatever you are being asked to assess.
This survey comprises five questions and five text boxes; you can be as expansive or taciturn as you please.
While in fact all the answers are optional, nothing is mandated, I have made it clear in the last question about your work and professional interests that there is no pressure to reply, although naturally the information is very useful to us.
The information will remain private and will not be used for marketing purposes or shared attributively outside UKOLN.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 58.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Page Title: "Ariadne Readers Survey: Ariadne Issue 58" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/survey/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Peculiarities of Digitising Materials from the Collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Peculiarities of Digitising Materials from the Collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia Buzz data software database infrastructure archives metadata digitisation schema repositories eprints preservation graphics jpeg ocr tiff adobe dvd dcmi dspace drupal algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alan Hopkinson and Tigran Zargaryan give an overview of their experience of digitising paper-based materials in the Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia including some of the obstacles encountered during image processing and optical character recognition.
Early writing which first appeared as cuneiform protocols and then emerged in manuscript form and as printed materials is currently entering a new stage in its development – in the form of electronic publications.
The Internet has drastically changed our understanding of access to library resources, to publication schemas, and has introduced brand new ways of information delivery.
And as a result, the present situation could be described as a continuous increase in the amount of material being published only in electronic form, together with wide-scale conversion of paper-based material to digital formats.
And this tendency will only intensify in the coming decades, covering more and more geographical areas, countries and language groups.
More and more librarians, image-processing specialists, and metadata creators will be involved in this process.
Information Science specialists will develop and propose new algorithms for e-resource description, information discovery and retrieval.
Background: The Fundamental Scientific Library The Fundamental Scientific Library (FSL) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is the main and largest repository of scientific publications in the Republic of Armenia in the fields of Humanities & Social Sciences, Precise & Natural Sciences, Technology, and Medicine.
The rich and diverse collections of the Library include over 3 million publications in Armenian, European, Asian, and Slavic languages.
Besides modern publications, there is high demand from scholars of different countries in respect of collections of incunabula in Armenian, Gothic and old Latin.
The first Armenian book was printed in Venice in 1512 by Yakob Meghapart (Jacob the Sinful).
Between 1512 and 1513 he printed five titles: Urbatagirk (Friday Book), Parzaytumar (A Simple Calendar), Pataragatet” (Missal), Altark (An astrological treatise and Tagharan (Song Book).
The first Armenian journal Azdarar (The Monitor Monthly) was published in 1794 in Madras.
The first Armenian map Hamatarac asxarhacoyc (Large World Map: the two hemispheres) was published in 1695 in Amsterdam.
Following this embryonic period, Armenian printing spread rapidly during the 16th-18th centuries into cities where there were significant Armenian populations such as Venice, Constantinople, Rome, Lvov, Milan, Isfahan, Livorno, Marseilles, Amsterdam, Madras, Calcutta, Smyrna, Etchmiadsin, Trieste, Petersburg, Nor Nakhijevan, Astrakhan.
Thanks to Armenian bibliographers Dr. Ninel Voskanyan, Dr. Hakob Anasyan, Dr. Arsen Ghazikian, Dr. Hayk Davtyan, Dr. Knarik Korkotyan, Revd.
Dr. Vrej Nersessian and other scholars, the early printed book collection has been catalogued to the highest standard in four sequences: Armenian rare books (time period 1512-1800); and Armenian early printed books (time periods: 1801-1850, 1851-1900 and 1901-1920).
All these collections are very fragile.
The FSL has one of the largest collections of Armenian rare and early printed books and periodicals.
In 2012 Armenia will celebrate the 500th anniversary of book printing, and with this celebration in mind, the Scientific Board of FSL decided in 2007: to establish a digitisation centre in the Fundamental Scientific Library; to implement a modern scanning and conservation centre for the care of vulnerable resources.
to create high-quality digital copies from the original materials for preservation purposes; to make the metadata and images of digitised materials (in portable document format (PDF) ) freely available via the Web to researchers, students and educators all over the world.
Preservation of Armenian Rare and Early Printed Books Bearing in mind the fact that digitisation projects require high-quality professional digital cameras, a special book-handling system with motorised column, book cradle and book shuttle, and more, in 2008 FSL applied to the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library with a grant application ‘Preservation Through Digitisation of Endangered Armenian Rare Books and Making Them Accessible on the Web’.
A grant was approved, Revd.
Dr. Vrej Nersessian was appointed as a project expert, and Alan Hopkinson of Middlesex University, UK was asked to take charge of the project’s general management.
Tigran Zargaryan was appointed as a project director.
This project, from the outset, could be characterised as unique for Armenia in its scale, the novelty of the decisions involved and the hardware deployed.
The lessons learnt during the project’s implementation and the solutions that were adopted as a result served as a sound basis for initiating other digitisation projects in FSL.
During the lifetime of the project, many technical difficulties were resolved, a lot of practical finesses were teased out of our mistakes, and we hope that this article will serve as a guide for practitioners who are initiating similar projects in their own organisations.
Three principal stages evolved during the project: photographing the originals using a high-quality digital camera; saving the images on the high-quality DVD discs (producing 2 copies for each material Preservation Copy and Access Copy), and; mounting the images with relevant metadata on the Web for public access.
Stage One: Photographing Originals The Endangered Archives Programme [1] and NARA Guidelines [2] both advise that preservation copies be saved in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF), which means that when purchasing a digital camera you must be mindful of that fact, since not all digital cameras can provide this format.
If the camera does not support the saving of images as TIFF files, an alternative is to save them as RAW [3] files and later convert them to TIFF.
Preservation copies should notbe saved as a JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) file and then to TIFF.
With this in mind, we ordered digitising equipment from Icam Archive System Ltd [4], including a PhaseOne digital camera with 7.2K x 5.4K pixel array producing a 112 MB 24-bit TIFF image.
After analysing the existing literature, and drawing upon accumulated experience [1][2][5], as well as taking into account our own tests for digitisation of Armenian rare and early printed books and periodicals, the following strategy was adopted: Preservation copies will be produced in TIFF format and burned on DVDs with gold surface.
Access copies will be produced in TIFF format and burned on DVDs with silver surface.
After preliminary image processing (cropping out unnecessary edges, reducing image size, assembling all images of one book under its title), the JPEG version of a book will be produced for mounting on the Web.
During image photographing use will also be made of a colour chart to monitor the colours being reproduced and to help ensure quality and consistency of images.
Images can not be passed through the optical character recognition (OCR) process, since for Armenian typography of the 17th to 19th centuries, no character recognition system has yet been developed.
Stage One: Lessons Learnt Unsurprisingly for such an innovative project for its participants, there was a series of obstacles encountered and solutions devised.
Camera Shutter The most vulnerable part of the camera is its shutter.
After several thousand shots (usually 70,000 – 100,000), the camera shutter must be changed, and when preparing a budget for digitisation projects it is important to consult with the hardware supplier on possible repair and maintenance costs, and include these expenses as a separate line.
Figure 1: Digitised image with colour checker chart Colour Checker The Colour Checker Chart is designed for use as a colour calibration tool for use by photographers in both traditional and digital photography.
When used along with colour management software, it allows the operator to calibrate the camera in line with the monitor and printer so as to get an even workflow with accurate colours throughout.
The Colour Checker, when displayed with the image allows the viewer to check that the colour is correct as a ‘known standard’ colour chart is viewed.
It is not necessary to include it with every image (often only with the first page), but according to the requirements of the Endangered Archives Programme, it was requested to include the colour chart with each image in order to capture the appearance of the original material as accurately as possible.
We are using the Gretag Macbeth ‘mini’ chart, as it is quite small and can be included at the side or bottom of each image.
In Figure 1 an image is displayed with embedded colour checker.
More details about understanding and modelling colour can be retrieved from the ‘JISC Digital Media’ page [6].
Documenting Dimensions To record the size and dimensions of the material being digitised we made use of horizontal and vertical rulers in the first image taken for each volume.
Figure 2: Digitised image with horizontal and vertical rulers Stage Two: Preserving Image Data The images produced during the digitisation process must be of high quality, must be preserved for the future, and must also be available to library readers.
This means that 2 copies of the same image, one for preservation and one for access, should be produced.
For the preservation copy it was agreed to use 4.7 GB gold DVD-R discs, and for the access copy to use 4.7 GB silver DVD-R discs.
For safety reasons it was decided to burn 16x certified DVD-R discs with 8x speed, and according to our measurements the whole process for the burning of 4.7 GB disc takes about 15 minutes.
Stage Two: Lessons Learnt Professional digital cameras can produce large-size high-quality images.
If the colour checker chart is embedded, then the size of images will grow drastically.
For example, the size of an image from figure 1, which was photographed using PhaseOne digital camera with 7.2K x 5.4K pixel array, is 34 MB!
If you are digitising hundreds of thousands of pages, you must be prepared for the following: Depending on the number of pages to be photographed you need to obtain DVD-R discs in large quantities.
You will need to have several terabytes of networked external memory, which will allow you to download images from the camera attached to the workstation and retain them permanently.
This will free workstation hard disks, necessary since digital cameras work very fast, and the memory on the hard disk memory will be filled within 3 or 4 days.
You need to have several DVD-burning machines, since the image burning process requires a lot of time, and this is where the image production bottleneck is.
And of course you need to have staff and extra computers, occupied for this work.
Stage Three: Mounting Images on the Web The main goal of the project was the preservation of endangered books and periodicals [7].
However, since the World Wide Web provides the opportunity of unlimited access to e-resources, we decided, as a by-product, to mount all digitised resources on the Web for public use.
Early in the project, one task was to analyse the digital repository software market.
Since FSL, as a member of the Electronic Information for Libraries Consortium (eIFL [8]), is actively involved in various projects designed to promote and advocate for a Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) philosophy; and due to the advantages of FOSS products versus proprietary ones, it was decided firstly to explore the FOSS market for possible solutions.
After analysing Greenstone, EPrints and DSpace, we decided on Greenstone.
As a metadata schema, the Dublin Core metadata [9] standard was selected.
Another team of librarians, after developing the database hierarchy, started mounting PDF versions of TIFF images in the repository.
It is worth mentioning that the size of each PDF image (after conversion from TIFF and image size reduction) is about 200-250 KB.
Stage Three: Lessons Learnt Using all FOSS software, Greenstone as a digital repository system, and Drupal as a Content Management System together with EPrints for the repository of research output, with Evergreen and Koha as integrated library systems, we confirmed our initial estimations that FOSS solutions would prove good alternatives to commercial products.
They are stable, well supported, easy for localisation, and flexible for changes with well established communities all over the world.
The library will continue advocacy for FOSS implementations in Armenian libraries and academic institutions.
Placing Armenian Scholarly Content Online The experience, knowledge and skills obtained during the digitisation of Armenian rare and early printed books enabled FSL staff to initiate another digitisation project with the aim of making the National Academy of Sciences scholarly content online.
The Armenian National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was established in 1943 [10].
NAS with its 29 research institutions today publishes 16 peer-reviewed academic journals [11].
As a first step, we built our own digitising equipment based on the Canon EOS 450D camera (see Figure 2).
Since this camera supports RAW and JPEG formats, we selected RAW as an output format, later converting RAW images to TIFF files, which does create an additional step in the imaging workflow.
Since the amount of scholarly periodicals from 1940 until the present day is estimated as being around 2 million pages, in order to speed up the digitisation process, it was decided to allocate additionally three scanners, two Xerox and one HP.
Although we had already developed and tested digitisation techniques for the digital cameras, we had no experience in respect of the scanners.
Another problem to be addressed was establishing an understanding of the basics and techniques of the optical character recognition process when working with Armenian and Cyrillic scripts.
As a starting point, we found papers from the Bibliographical Center for Research, Denver [5], Zhou Yougil [12] and UNESCO [13] useful.
Figure 3: Digitising equipment constructed by FSL Optical Character Recognition Optical character recognition, usually referred to as OCR, is the conversion of scanned photographic images of text to machine-readable text.
OCR is widely used to convert handwritten, typewritten or printed text into electronic files, and to make scanned or photographed documents searchable and editable.
TIFF images created from scanned (photographed) documents need to pass one additional step, OCR process, to become searchable and editable.
Based on the findings of Zhou Yougil [12], and following our own scanning experiments, it was concluded that: documents processed at 300 or 400 dpi (dots per inch) are sufficient for creating PDF files of good quality; documents processed with resolutions lower than 300 dpi will not possess sufficient definition to create a viable preservation copy; the incidence of OCR errors upon conversion of TIFF objects to searchable PDF files will increase; documents processed with resolutions higher than 400 dpi will produce very large files with relatively little improvement in quality in terms of OCR procedures.
It was decided: to use the ABBYY Fine Reader 10 Professional Edition product as OCR software, since articles in NAS periodicals are in Armenian, English and Russian, and ABBYY’s Fine Reader supports OCR for all three scripts.
to scan all documents, as a general rule, in TIFF format at 300 dpi resolution (and only where the quality of the target print is low to scan documents at 400 dpi resolution).
to create a PDF version of the text of those files after cropping out any extraneous material, e.g., white space, etc to run the ABBYY Fine Reader OCR process on the PDF versions of articles from the Humanities & Social Sciences subject areas.
Articles from science, technology, and medical (STM) subject areas will be saved as PDF images, without passing the OCR process.
Placing Content Online: Lessons Learnt Making Digital Content Web-friendly The ABBYY Fine Reader supports various options in respect of OCR, such as: Convert to Searchable PDF Image: which permits the conversion of image files into an Adobe PDF document in the ‘Text under the page image’ mode; Convert to Editable PDF Document: which permits the conversion of image files into an Adobe PDF document in the ‘Text over the page image’ mode; and Convert PDF/Image to Microsoft Word For the project Making Armenian Scholarly Content Online we selected ‘Searchable PDF Image with the Text under the page image’ mode, which we found to be best for Web presentation of our materials.
Optimising PDFs for Web Delivery Adobe Acrobat Professional (we are currently using version 6.0) includes a number of built-in tools for optimising PDF files to make them more compact for mounting on the Web.
This is very important, since Web documents must be of good quality and also as small as possible.
ABBYY’s Fine Reader during OCR is suggesting an option ‘Compress into black & white PDF document’.
After conducting a series of trials, we concluded that this option has little effect upon file size, and we decided to not use it.
Adobe Acrobat Professional version 6.0 has two built-in tools: ‘Reduce File Size’ (being activated from the File menu) and ‘PDF Optimizer’ (being activated from the Advanced menu).
The use of the ‘Reduce File Size’ command produced no effect on our PDF files, due to the small size of those files (none were greater than 300 KB).
In contrast to this, all our files, after OCR processes pass through the ‘PDF Optimizer’.
For our documents we are using system default settings, which for our images are appropriate for maximum efficiency.
Sometimes we also use the  ‘Audit Space Usage’ feature, accessible from the ‘PDF Optimizer’ menu.
This provides a report of the total number of bytes used for document elements, including fonts, images, bookmarks, forms, and much more.
The space audit results can give an idea of where you might be able to reduce file size.
A detailed help on how to use the ‘PDF Optimizer’ can be found from the Adobe Acrobat Professional help file available on Adobe’s Acrobat Users Community site [14].
Conclusion Techniques described in this article have been tested in the Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia during digitisation of Armenian rare and early printed books and National Academy of Sciences periodicals.
All digitised materials are accessible from the Library Web page [15][16].
If the quality of English and Russian scholarly texts after optical character recognition processes is very high, regrettably the same is not true for the Armenian texts.
Issues of quality in respect of the latter fall outside the scope of this article, but specific aspects and existing problems relating to optical character recognition of Armenian texts are described in detail in an article by Tigran Zargaryan [17].
The authors hope that approaches described in this article will be helpful for other practitioners to create optimised-quality documents on the Web.
References British Library: Endangered Archives Programme: Guidelines for copying archival material  http://eap.bl.uk/ U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files – Raster Images For the Following Record Types – Textual, Graphic Illustrations/Artwork/Originals, Maps, Plans, Oversized, Photographs, Aerial Photographs, and Objects/Artifacts June 2004 http://old.diglib.org/pubs/dlf103/dlf103.htm  (accessed 8 May 2011).
Upgraded site holds other formats: http://old.diglib.org/pubs/dlf103/ A RAW file is an image file that contains unprocessed data.
Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras and some high-end scanners allow users to capture images in a RAW or native file format that is unique to each manufacturer.
After processing or editing and before use, RAW files must be converted to an open standard format such as JPEG or TIFF.
Icam Archive Systems Ltd http://www.icamarchive.co.uk/ BCR’s CDP Digital Imaging Best Practices Working Group, “BCR’s CDP Digital Imaging Best Practices, Version 2.0”, June 2008 http://mwdl.org/public/mwdl/digital-imaging-bp_2.0.pdf JISC Digital Media (formerly known as TASI): Still Images: Colour Theory: Understanding and Modelling Colour http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/stillimages/advice/colour-theory-understanding-and-modelling-colour/ The collections are available from the library page http://www.flib.sci.am/eng/node/3  by following the links: ‘The Armenian Book in 1512-1800’, ‘The Armenian Book in 1801-1850’.
Two repositories: ‘‘The Armenian Book in 1851-1890’ and ‘The Armenian Book in 1901-1200’ are in the process of compilation.
EIFL: Enabling access to knowledge in developing and transition countries http://www.eifl.net/  (Editor’s note: Readers may be interested to note that staff of EIFL have contributed to this issue.)
DCMI Home: Dublin Core  Metadata Initiative (DCMI) http://dublincore.org/ The first academic journal published in NAS (at that time the Academy was named as the Armenian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR) was Bulletin of the Armenian branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
Date of establishment 1940.
The list of NAS academic journals, published since 1940, can be found at: http://www.flib.sci.am/eng/About%20NAS%20Journals/About%20NAS%20Journals.html Astrophysics (established 1965), Reports of the National Academy of Sciences, (1944), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – Earth Sciences series (1948), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – Mathematics series (1966), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – Mechanics series (1966), Reports of the National Academy of Sciences and the State Engineering University of Armenia – Technical Sciences series (1948), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – Physics series (1966), the Herald of Social Sciences (1966), Medical Science of Armenia (1961), Biological Journal of Armenia (1948), Chemical Journal of Armenia (1957), Historical and Philological Journal (1958), Neurochemistry (1982).
From 2003 NAS has published New Electronic Journal of Natural Sciences, and from 2008 two electronic Open Access journals: Armenian Journal of Mathematics and Armenian Journal of Physics.
See also Tigran Zargaryan, Alan Hopkinson: Scientific publishing in Armenia.
European Science Editing, Vol.
35 (2) May 2009.
Yongli Zhou.
Are Your Digital Documents Web Friendly?
: Making Scanned Documents Web Accessible.
Information technology and Libraries, Vol.
29, Number 3, September 2010. pp.
151-159 https://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/publications/ital/29/3/index.cfm Preserving our Documentary Heritage UNESCO, Paris 2005 http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en//ev.php-URL_ID=19440&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html Duff Johnson.
“Understanding Acrobat’s Optimizer”.
31 July 2009, AcrobatUsers.com http://acrobatusers.com/tutorials/understanding-acrobats-optimizer Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)  http://www.flib.sci.am/eng/node/1 Fundamental Scientific Library of the NAS: Knowledge@FSL   http://www.flib.sci.am/eng/node/3 Tigran Zargaryan.
Specific aspects of digitization of paper materials based on the experience of the works carried out in the Fundamental Scientific Library.
In the World of Science, #1, 2011,  pp.
21-27, (in Armenian).
ISSN 1829-0345.
Author Details Alan Hopkinson Technical Manager (Library Services) Middlesex University London Email: a.hopkinson@mdx.ac.uk Web site: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/ Alan Hopkinson works primarily in a consultancy role leading externally funded projects at Middlesex University Learning Resources.
He is currently managing a project to modernise library and information science teaching in Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan and leading Middlesex input in improving information literacy in the Balkans as well as modernising library IT infrastructure in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzogovina.
He is a member of IFLA’s Committee on Standards established in 2012.
Tigran Zargaryan Director National Library of Armenia Email: tigran@flib.sci.am Web site: http://www.flib.sci.am/eng/ Tigran Zargaryan received a Masters in Computer Science from Yerevan State Engineering University (Armenia) and a Ph.D. in Information Science from Moscow Historical Archives Institute.
He is currently Director of the National Library of Armenia, Scientific Adviser of the Fundamental Scientific Library of NAS, and Dean of the Library School of the International Scientific Educational Centre of NAS.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 63: Consider the Users in the Field Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 63: Consider the Users in the Field Buzz data mobile software dissemination usability archives metadata digitisation identifier blog repositories video aggregation mis podcast mashup youtube facebook ipad ukad interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 63.
For those who can either remember or are battling still to make the technology work, be it coding, integration or test, it is easy and understandable enough if the technology assumes an overwhelming profile on the horizon of one's project and daily work.
It is very understandable when they privately grumble that colleagues unburdened with the minutiae of such work display a breath-taking insouciance to the consequences of asking for a change in spec because there has been an unexpected development in the requirements of the users.
Of course, the more philosophical among them will sigh and say the latter is what they are trying to deliver, though naturally they are right to ask why the change was not raised 14 iterations ago..
The ideal is to capture them from the outset and consequently understanding the users' behaviour and needs, all of them, is a crucial time-saving approach.
The theme of the user, or more widely the stakeholder, is one that has emerged quite strongly in this issue.
Diana Massam, Andrew Priest and Caroline Williams are clearly very occupied with the needs of the users of the online Internet Detective tutorial and clearly applaud the approach JISC is taking towards community building in its Rapid Innovations projects, of which theirs is one.
They also indicate that expectations of providers concerning students' degree of use of mobile technologies in their work may be in advance of the actual usage for a variety of very understandable reasons.
In the area of Archives 2.0 Marta Nogueira demonstrates the moves among a number of high-profile institutions, with particular reference to the Iberian Peninsula, to meet users' interest in social networking sites as a means of better engagement and she points to some of the tensions and mis/perceptions that exist in that area and the increase in the involvement of enthusiastic 'non'-experts.
The contribution by Lorraine Paterson and Boon Low is of course completely focused on usability as you would expect from a description of their JISC-funded project Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries (UX2.0).
Likewise John Paschoud's contribution points to the greater complexity of granting access to libraries in the digital age than in the days when, if users were not students, then they were staff.
I am particularly indebted to Brian Whalley, Professor of Geomorphology at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queens University, Belfast, who, having already reviewed for us a work which helps library and information science staff at Higher Education institutions to support their research students but then manages to deliver a review of how the new iPad can be employed by educators literally in the field like himself to support the work of their students.
In an entirely different context, but still warm to this theme, is the landscape of stakeholder interests depicted by Monika Segbert-Elbert and David Fuegi in their article on planning the future of the National Library of Mongolia.
Perhaps most significant of all is how the integral consideration of stakeholders was not only a central issue in the project described by Jim Ridolfo, William Hart-Davidson and Michael McLeod but was also instrumental in creating a far better understanding of the community behind that project and its varying needs, an understanding which ensured that they did not design a solution based, as it were, on the wrong questions.
In Mobilising the Internet Detective, Diana Massam, Andrew Priest and Caroline Williams identify a concerted move towards mobile technologies in libraries.
The aim of the Mobile Internet Detective Project was to adapt Intute's well respected and popular online Internet Detective tutorial to develop a prototype application suitable for access on a mobile device.
Building on previous experience among their colleagues at Mimas, the project team soon identified very differing needs and behaviour demonstrated by mobile surfers and by desktop surfers.
The authors welcomed the new approach JISC was applying to its Rapid Innovations projects, with an emphasis on community building sustained by blogging with tagged posts and code sharing.
In conducting investigations into users' behaviour, they discovered through their survey that students used their mobiles for academic activity only infrequently, for want of large screens, mobile-compliant sites and free Internet access.
Furthermore, Mobile surfers expressed a preference for displays limited to 1 page.
Given that the authors point to the usefulness of audio podcasts and video files, it is not surprising that the initial response of the project was to offer a podcast version as a low-cost access option.
In considering the response to mobile users' needs, they realised that even where Web sites are well-formed, the pace of change means that the option to do nothing will not serve projects for very long.
The project's decision therefore (from a range of options) was to opt for a mobile-specific Web site, designed to re-direct users to the relevant device-specific location.
The authors provide some key tips on how to adapt sites to mobile phones.
In conclusion, when reviewing the lessons learned, the authors noted drawbacks such as the difficulty in obtaining feedback; and the tendency of the original content to become disconnected from the new mobile-specific sites, for example with respect to outbound links and the need to suppress images.
They were forced to consider that they might have done better to start from scratch but note that much was learnt from the process on how to organise online material both for mobiles and more traditional platforms.
Asking Don't You Know Who I Am?, John Paschoud takes us back to the days when granting access was a very simple face-to-face process and reveals some of the complexities that pertained even then.
He goes on to identify the problems that persist in digital authorisation.
In describing the role of digital identity management, John explains that, as with physical identification, it is the exceptions to the general rule of admitting an institution's students and staff that create the difficulties.
Given these complexities in the digital context, JISC has funded research in identity management, funding the Identity Project which identified the tools, guidance and standards that even the larger HEIs would need.
As a result the online Identity Management Toolkit was established to provide HEIs with just such support.
John highlights the Toolkit's advice for dealing with institutional delays to setting up staff or student accounts by shifting responsibility closer to the relevant administrative department, and also the role of the library in handling the people who do not readily conform to the usual access profile.
In its advice the Identity Management Toolkit has also addressed other issues such as provision of wi-fi to the entitled users who are neither students nor staff and notably that of the emerging role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), a development many HEIs may see as a necessary response to changing times in their environment.
In his conclusion John sets out how an aggregation of ID management processes could not only cut down duplication of effort but also remove the overpowering to cry, 'Don't you know who I am?'
As Lorraine Paterson and Boon Low point out at the beginning of their article Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries it is yet to be a commonplace event that usability studies and digital library development naturally go hand-in-hand.
Part of their JISC-funded project Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries (UX2.0) has involved usability inspection and research on contemporary user experience techniques.
Their article highlights the findings of the usability inspection work recently conducted and reported by UX2.0.
They offer discussion points as a general resource which may be 'useful for the JISC Community and beyond'.
The core of their inspection rests on a process of heuristic evaluation which exploits the criteria derived from the Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen and ISO Heuristics 9241.
In addition they consider such aspects as advanced search , interaction design patterns, navigation, and no doubt of considerable interest to many, the associated developments with regard to social networking.
Engaging with stakeholder communities on their Samaritan Digital Archive Project at Michigan State University soon emerged as a priority for Jim Ridolfo, William Hart-Davidson and Michael McLeod and they came to recognise that Archive 2.0 technologies would have their part to play.
Describing the beginnings of the project in their article Balancing Stakeholder Needs: Archive 2.0 as Community-centred Design, they explain how desk research led Jim Ridolfo to contact with an elder of the Samaritan community and collaboration on a digitisation project.
The authors' description of the Samaritan community and its background does much to inform readers of the complexities of establishing effective communication.
They saw the work of Archive 2.0 as more about questions of procedure, methodology, and fieldwork.
They identified two distinct groups, the cultural stakeholders and Samaritan or biblical scholars.
By engaging in detailed communication with them, they learnt important information about the cultural and religious significance of the collection to the Samaritan people.
They began to see two kinds of stakeholder emerging, cultural and scholarly stakeholders.
By paying close attention to their needs, they were able to advance work on the scope of the project which would ensure that 'the digital archive would help to promote Samaritan studies by making a geographically remote collection widely available.
For example, MSU Samaritan scholar Robert Anderson told us that increased access to the MSU collection may have the real potential to attract another generation of scholars to Samaritan studies'.
Balancing stakeholders' needs soon emerged as an important strategy in this initial work.
The project team recognised that the project fitted well into the WIDE Research Center's mission of investigating 'how digital technologies change the processes, products, and contexts for writing, particularly in organisational and collaborative composing contexts.'
Their standard use of user-centred design worked well with the way the project was heading and would allow them to tailor the archive to the needs of each stakeholder community.
It soon proved that this approach avoided some erroneous assumptions taking hold at the design stage.
Similarly, close consultation with the Archive's future users enabled them to identify the first and telling selection of content.
This issue of balance even had a role to play in the creation of metadata, developing metadata sets in line with stakeholders' needs.
To implement this and make use of the wider community, they developed the Culturally Centered Metadata Acquisition Tool (CCMAT), a tool which served the needs of that informed amateur stakeholder community.
In designing the tool, the team does not underestimate the value of their fieldwork, or face-to-face consultation.
They agree with Joy Palmer [1] that Archive 2.0 is 'less about technological change than a broader epistemological shift which concerns the very nature of the archive.'
The authors are in no doubt of the value of Archive 2.0 as a means of sharing different perspectives on handling a text.
And while they accept 'Negotiating issues of balance in collaborative Archive 2.0 projects is messy, time-consuming work,' they recognise that 'the technology of Archive 2.0 provides the opportunity to build relationships through collaboration and fieldwork'.
I am pleased to be able to welcome Dave Thompson of the Wellcome Library back to our pages; Dave has been keeping us abreast of developments at the Library in handling born-digital materials [2][3].
In this issue he describes the Wellcome Library's approach to the complex subject of the policy to adopt regarding acquisitions.
In doing so he highlights the dangers of allowing the tail of technical requirements to wag the dog of a proper archival approach to acquisitions.
His article A Pragmatic Approach to Preferred File Formats for Acquisition offers nine principles that the Library has currently adopted in its approach and which may prove of interest to other organisations faced with the competing issues of cost and acquisition value.
I am most grateful to Monika Segbert-Elbert and David Fuegi for describing the intricate task of Planning the Future of the National Library of Mongolia and the work and role that their organisation eIFL.net undertook in the venture in collaboration with a wide range of Mongolian stakeholders.
eIFL.net's approach was to work with libraries organised in national consortia and which share many goals; and needed to speak with one voice.
The catalysts for the development of the National Library of Mongolia (NLM) was the decision by the Emir of Kuwait in late 2007 to gift a new national library building to the country, together with the development of the eIFL-supported Consortium of Mongolian Libraries in Mongolia.
The Emir's generous offer surely concentrated political minds in the land while the Consortium worked to provide a forum and a voice for the nation's library professionals.
Monika and David provide a panorama of the interests represented in this project and the importance of working to engender an environment for high-level planning and co-operation.
Much of eIFL.net's contribution in the opening stages centred on appropriate planning to this particular context.
They also detail the efforts of the NLM and other stakeholders to advance the project.
Through a series of workshops the project advanced the composition of a strategic plan for the development of the NLM, engaging with stakeholders along the way.
With not inconsiderable effort the national professionals hauled together and refined the Strategic Plan to the point where it could not only be submitted to government for detailed consideration but that it could also be deemed as meeting international standards.
The authors emphasise that the Plan was very much the product of the national professionals' work.
They also provide a view of the context in which this work was undertaken and the events which surrounded it.
They identify not only the importance of establishing strong national partnerships but also that of strengthening links between the NLM and its foreign peers.
These developments have generated a number of benefits already, not least of which were a range of new training opportunities.
Another major outcome was that 'the National Library of Mongolia has established for the first time an English language Web site to help raise its profile abroad.'
Monika and David point equally to the progress that has been made in partnership building in Mongolia but also the lack of certain structures which we in the UK perhaps take for granted.
Moreover, this development work has highlighted the need for far-reaching reform of the library sector.
Another area in need of input is the inevitable modernisation of services in the digital age and consideration will be required as to how they sit with current IP laws and other legislation in Mongolia.
The chief outcome, the Strategic Plan, represents an enormous effort of consultation, decision-making and design, but now speaks with one voice for the shared goals of the library consortia in Mongolia.
Jane Stevenson and Bethan Ruddock explain that Moving towards Interoperability: Experiences of the Archives Hub is about data interoperability, 'the ability to exchange or share information and use that information,' but they point out that such a definition applies equally well to collaboration among individuals and organisations.
Indeed their Archives Hub team has been working on a JISC-funded Enhancements Project to promote interoperability through practical means for encouraging data sharing and working collaboratively with colleagues.
The authors point to the benefits of interoperability in the archives context and how they will prove very advantageous to researchers, saving them time and resources.
In terms of sharing and cross-searching data, however, the authors describe a variety of difficulties including the need to convince stakeholders to prioritise such work.
Consequently they welcome the UK Archives Discovery network (UKAD) and explain its aims.
They identify some of the problems encountered ranging from lack of resources to solve the difficulties inherent in the integration of data to a continued need for consistency and standards.
They also describe collaborative efforts with organisations such as AIM25 and how work with the latter has led to improving workflows in the handling of large volumes of records.
Co-operation over the development of an export routine has reduced duplication of effort.
From April 2009 work began on improving export from the two most used archival software systems, CALM and Adlib.
The team was determined to use real data in order to address as many idiosyncrasies that were thrown up as possible.
The aim was to make the export process as widely used as possible without significantly altering repositories' workflows.
A useful strategy was to enlist the support of volunteers to contribute a variety of descriptions.
It was agreed that the latter would be tidied up only sufficiently to permit export.
These contributed data allowed the project to identify the most common problems.
The authors mention the problem of index terms in particular.
In their response to these problems, the team members visited the contributors of these data and also communicated with the software providers.
They have provided both software providers with specifications for a revised and improved version of their specification, to be used both for the Hub and AIM25.
Equally they have used the knowledge obtained in the process of handling these data to produce guidelines on export with CALM to the Archives Hub as well as tools to aid export to the Hub.
The authors conclude that aggregation services need to 'strike a balance between solidity and flexibility, innovation and reliability,' and that 'in an environment where archive repositories are increasingly stretched and where creating archival descriptions is time-consuming,' they need to ensure the Archives Hub is an effective means of dissemination and cross-searching.
In her article Archives in Web 2.0: New Opportunities Marta Nogueira states that her aim is to describe how Web 2.0 can work as a virtual extension for archives and other cultural organisations, by identifying impacts and benefits resulting from the use of Web 2.0 applications together with some goals and strategies of such use.
She lists the benefits of increased registration to channels as well as simple visits.
They represent a means of increasing and diversifying audiences as well as raising organisational profiles.
Moreover she also points to less quantifiable benefits from usage such as improvements in service to and communication with users as well as improved internal communications.
Marta also identifies a 'domino effect' in that adoption by reputable high-profile institutions has a tendency to persuade other organisations to follow their lead.
Conversely, she indicates that while adoption among archives and libraries is growing, resistance on the part of some organisations remains, which she attributes, in part, to issues of institutions' perceptions of Web 2.0 technologies.
One aspect of the perception issue relates to whether institutions recognise Web 2.0 applications' potential role in organisational promotion.
Other objections such as risks to data protection and abuse of information are more concrete in nature.
One particular instance Marta supplies is the appearance of institutional pages on Web 2.0 sites without full organisational support.
She also identifies factors for the successful adoption of Web 2.0 applications by institutions, indicating that they are similar to those for individual users, but which are best operated under a clear institutional strategy rather than just following a 'fashion.'
Marta points out that Web 2.0 apps sit very usefully in any institutional policy on diversification.
She highlights how Web 2.0 applications can lead to archives benefiting from concerted interest by engaged and often semi-expert users.
She then goes on to provide a description of three high-profile social networking sites, Facebook, Flikr and YouTube, and how institutions in Portugal, Spain and worldwide are making use of them.
Of these, Flikr has generated considerable interest among institutions through its creation of the Commons Project whose objectives are detailed by the author.
As she states in closing, 'Each application represents an individual context of use and allows a set of specific functionalities within a new rationale of democratisation in the production of content and access.'
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on 97 things every software architect should know, information science in transition, library mashups, a work which helps library and information science staff at Higher Education Institutions to support their research students and a very welcome late addition from Brian Whalley who has therefore review ed twice for Ariadne this issue, initial impressions of the new Apple iPad in the first three weeks since its release in the USA and what it has to offer the mobile educator.
In addition of course we provide our usual section of news and events.
In addition of course we provide our usual section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 63.
References Palmer, J., "Archives 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?
", July 2009, Ariadne Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/palmer/ "Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library", Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson, January 2007, Ariadne Issue 50 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/hilton-thompson/ "Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library", Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson, October 2007, Ariadne Issue 53 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/hilton-thompson/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 63: Consider the Users in the Field" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia Buzz data api database dissemination rss usability infrastructure archives metadata digitisation tagging browser identifier copyright video flickr preservation oai-pmh marc aggregation ocr doc mysql curation lucene youtube facebook twitter ftp research Citation BibTex RIS Rose Holley describes a major development in the Australian national digital information infrastructure.
In late 2009 the National Library of Australia released version 1 of Trove [1] to the public.
Trove is a free search engine.
It searches across a large aggregation of Australian content.
The treasure is over 90 million items from over 1000 libraries, museums, archives and other organisations which can be found at the click of a button.
Finding information just got easier for many Australians.
Exploring a wealth of resources and digital content like never before, including full-text books, journals and newspaper articles, images, music, sound, video, maps, Web sites, diaries, letters, archives, people and organisations has been an exciting adventure for users and the service has been heavily used.
Finding and retrieving instantly information in context; interacting with content and social engagement are core features of the service.
This article describes Trove features, usage, content building, and its applications for contributors and users in the national context.
Opportunities for Libraries I see tremendous opportunities for libraries this year because of advances in technology.
The changes in technology mean that anyone can create, describe or recommend content, which means that many people and organisations are becoming librarians or libraries in their own way.
Librarians should not be threatened or dismayed by this but rather encouraged, since it means that society is retaining its ongoing interest in the creation, organisation and dissemination of content, and we have an integral role to play in these developments.
Libraries and librarians are relevant more than ever in this environment because we have vast amounts of data and information to share, a huge amount of information expertise, and an understanding of how technology can assist us in making information more accessible.
We need to have new ideas and re-examine our old ideas to see how technology can help us.
What things have we always wanted to do that we couldn't before, like providing a single point of access to all Australian information?
Is this still pie in the sky or can we now achieve it?
Libraries need to think big.
As Charles Leadbeater would say 'Libraries need to think they are leading a mass movement, not just serving a clientele.'
[2] Librarians are often thought of as gatekeepers with the emphasis being on closed access, but technology enables gatekeepers to open doors as well as close them and this is the opportunity I see.
However many institutions will need to change their strategic thinking from control/shut to free/open before they can make this transition, and take a large dose of courage as well.
The American author Harriet Rubin says, 'Freedom is actually a bigger game than power.
Power is about what you can control.
Freedom is about what you can unleash.'
[3] The National Library of Australia already took this step forward in 2008 with the advent of the Australian Newspapers beta service, which opened up the raw text of digitised Australian newspapers to the public for improvement, without moderation on a mass scale [4].
With a long history of collaboration across the Australian cultural heritage sector [5] with regard to digitisation, storage, and service delivery, the National Library of Australia is well placed to take the lead with innovation in access to information.
Some people may say, 'But isn't Google doing that, so why do we still need libraries?'
There is no question in my mind that libraries are fundamentally different from Google and other similar services.
Libraries are different to Google for these reasons: they commit to provide long-term preservation, curation and access to their content; they have no commercial motives in the provision of information (deemed by various library acts); they aim for universal access to everyone in society; and they are 'free for all'.
To summarise: libraries are always and forever.
Who can say that of a search engine, or of any commercial organisation, regardless of size?
The National Library of Australia reviewed its strategic directions and thinking in light of changes in technology and society.
The three strategic objectives for 2009 – 2011 [6] are now: 'We will collect and make accessible the record of Australian life…We will explore new models for creating and sharing information and for collecting materials, including supporting the creation of knowledge by our users' We will meet our users' needs for rapid and easy access to our collections and other information resources.
We will collaborate with a variety of other institutions to improve the delivery of information resources to the Australian public.
In addition the strategic directions for the Resource Sharing and Innovation Division [7] acknowledge 'The changing expectations of users that they will not be passive receivers of information, but rather contributors and participants in information services.'
The outcome is Trove.
What is Trove?
The library has redesigned its underlying infrastructure for all its discovery services, and developed a new discovery service which has many features for both data engagement and social engagement.
Trove [1] provides access not just to the Library's collections but to any Australian content or collections.
Warwick Cathro, advocate for collaboration and the strategic lead for the service states 'Collaboration requires effort, and it also requires a change of mindset.
In particular it requires a willingness to examine services from a perspective which does not place one's own institution at the centre.'
[8] At present over 1000 libraries, archives, museums, galleries and other organisations have enabled their data to be shared in the service which currently provides metadata for over 90 million items.
Trove is essentially a search engine.
It harvests metadata thus aggregating it into one place for searching.
Trove does not store the content, only the metadata, so users end up on the site which holds the source of the data.
Results are relevancy-ranked, not returned in contributor order, or biased towards any one source.
There is minimal work for organisations wishing to contribute their collections and all the extra user traffic goes direct to their own site.
The difference between Trove and other search engines is that most of the content discovered via Trove would not be found in other search engines because it is buried in the 'deep web', for example in collection databases; and Trove has an Australian focus especially on unique Australian materials.
To date most of the contributors are Australian cultural heritage organisations that hold unique Australian data (the gold in the Treasure Trove).
However, having said this, the Trove team considers it vital that the resources within Trove are more widely discoverable via tools in common public use (eg Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo).
So part of the plan is to encourage other search engines to harvest Trove; to encourage use of Trove work ID's (persistent identifiers) in other sources so that linkages are created between sources; and to develop an API so that other sites can draw out information from Trove in different ways.
After the Trove infrastructure was developed the content of the nine separate collaborative services that the National Library of Australia has been managing for several years was integrated.
These services were: Australian National Bibliographic Database (Libraries Australia), PANDORA (archived Web sites), Australian Research Online, Picture Australia, Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts, Australian Newspapers, People Australia, Music Australia, and Australia Dancing.
Added to this were other international sources of digital content such as the Open Library, Hathi Trust and OAISTER.
This immediately provided content of the order of 90 million items (books, journals, pictures, music, newspapers, sound, video, diaries, archives, and Web sites) which could be easily found in a single search.
The search results are complemented by relevant information from other Web sites.
Heavily used Web sites which have an open API and can therefore be added to Trove as a target are: Google Books, Amazon, Wikipedia, Flickr and Google Videos (includes YouTube).
These results in context are differentiated from the main results by appearing to the left of them.
The Library has employed several methods of data collection.
Although its preferred method is by using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), very little data are actually collected this way.
This is because many libraries and archives are still unable to implement OAI.
Because of this the Library now recognises that more flexibility is required with data collection.
Other methods may be using an API, crawling sitemaps, using FTP or HTTP.
The strength of cultural heritage institutions is that we have all used common data description schemas, and that we agree that data should be open and shared.
Trove is the realisation and result of many, many years of working towards common standards (such as MARC, Dublin Core and EAC (Encoded Archival Context)) in order to make information accessible and free.
Trove Development Trove was planned and under development for a number of years [9] (previously referred to in staff papers as the Single Business Discovery Project).
The Australian Newspapers beta service was actually a test of the new technical infrastructure which was based on MySQL, and a Lucene search index.
The Australian Newspaper service was also the test-bed for social and data engagement and had the library's first implementation of tagging in 2008.
Because the Australian Newspapers service was very successful and scalable, it was decided to continue with the same infrastructure for Trove.
Social and data engagement features were also to be implemented on all content the library would deliver.
Trove was released in November 2009 at an early stage of development, which was 15 months after Australian Newspapers beta had been released, with key staff working on both projects.
During the first half of 2010 there have been new releases of Trove at least once a month.
The development of Trove has largely been driven by public feedback.
This mirrored the newspaper development process.
Feedback from the public is actively encouraged and feedback is considered critical for the development of the service, so we are sure we are meeting user needs.
The sentiments of Charles Leadbeater in his essay the 'Art of With' [10] are being carried out.
Leadbeater advocates that cultural heritage institutions need to learn the art of doing things 'with' people rather than 'for' or 'to' them.
This includes the development cycle as well as the end results.
Collaboration with the users is key.
This was a lesson the library had already learnt with the Australian Newspapers.
How can we know if we are meeting the changing expectations and needs of our users if we are not in close contact with them, moving along new paths together?
Trove Features Figure 1: Trove Home Page The key features of Trove are listed below and I would encourage readers to explore Trove for themselves by focusing on a topic of their own interest: Focus on Australian content Single search (search across everything at once in a few seconds) Find and Get (get options include digital, borrowing, buying, copying) Results returned 'in context' (the context reflects the eight groupings or zones (see Table 3) which were defined by users) Restrict search to Australian items, online items, or items in your preferred locations.
Items that are online are obvious from the brief results display.
Narrow down your search results by using 'facets' e.g.
year, type, and language.
Check copyright status.
Cite the record using a persistent identifier and see different citation formats.
View main record only or all the versions that are within it (relevant for books and images).
Minimise some zones in result list.
Browse items by zone.
Registration and login are optional (required only to create a profile, search within 'my libraries', or create lists, private tags or private comments).
View related items.
'Did you mean?'
help with search terms.
High-quality relevance ranking (National Library resources are not favoured over those from other sources).
Features that have been implemented in 2009/2010 as a response to changing expectations of users can be grouped by two categories: data engagement and social engagement.
The difference between the two is that data engagement is normally for the benefit of the individual only, whereas the social engagement features encourage and nurture a virtual community to develop around the content or service.
Data engagement/creation features are as follows: Tag items.
Rate items out of 5 stars.
Add comments to items.
Create contextual links to items outside Trove by adding hyperlinks in comments.
Merge/split editions or versions of works which have not been automatically grouped correctly.
Enhance/correct newspaper text.
Create virtual lists (include items found within Trove or outside Trove, add own descriptions, annotations, context, order and make public or keep private).
Add own images and descriptions via Flickr Picture Australia Group for inclusion in Trove (focus on Australian people, places, events, flaura and fauna, etc).
View history of your data interactions in your user profile.
Be alerted to new newspaper content arriving (RSS feeds).
View recent search terms.
View items recently accessed.
Identify your preferred libraries so that 'my libraries' search option and tab is active.
Social engagement features are as follows: View all public data interactions from home page (comments, tags, lists, text corrections, merges/splits).
Other users can view your profile and your recent public tags, comments and text corrections.
Crowdsourcing – text correction for newspapers, working towards a common goal Newspaper text correction 'hall of fame' (monthly rankings of community), wall of fame (overall rankings).
Newspaper articles – view all corrections on an article and users that made them.
Comments – respond to comments.
In newspaper zone your username appears in results list beside item you have corrected or commented on.
Send persistent link for item to Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook.
User forum (add more information to your profile for others to see, eg interests, location; contact other users, arrange to work collaboratively, help other users by answering their questions).
Figure 2: Trove: Looking into the past.
Example of contribution to images of Australia Trove Usage Trove has already established a user base of 1 million people in the first 6 months, which is comparable to the initial audience of the Australian Newspapers beta.
Expected usage of Trove is for at least 10 million people (half the Australian population).
This is based on the expectation that usage should exceed annual foot traffic through library doors.
National, State and Territory Libraries of Australia (NSLA) had 7.7 million people through their doors in the year 20082009 [11].
Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that in 2006 half of the population belonged to a library [12] and sought information on a regular basis, and that in December 2009 two-thirds of Australian households [13] had fast broadband access at home.
The National Library uses an extremely limited amount of its overall budget on marketing online services.
Introducing a new service of this magnitude that is relevant and useful to a large section of the Australian population needs a targeted, well funded national marketing campaign.
In the absence of such a campaign, it is expected that general awareness and usage of Trove will not grow rapidly in the first year, instead growing slowly over 2-3 years.
Word will spread by mouth, in the online environment and through library connections initially.
Usage statistics gathered so far are as follows: Users Number Unique users: cumulative for 2010 987,147 Number of registered users 12,858 Highest number of visits per day over period 19,084 Top location of users Australia (72.8%) Table 1: Trove Usage, 1 January 2010 – 31 May 2010 Content Type Totals Tags added 424,335 Comments added 9,192 Records merged 5,740 Records split 1,521 Lines of text corrected in newspapers 15.13 million Lists created (introduced in May) 30 Images added by public via Flickr 69,131 Table 2: User-generated Content in Trove as at 31 May 2010 Trove Zone Name Work Count in zone (millions) Overall % of Trove Content Overall % of Trove usage based on searches All view 90.75 100% 16.5% Books, journals, magazines, articles 30.40 33.50% 7.4% Australian Newspapers 21.53 23.72% 63.5% Pictures and photos 4.35 4.79% 7.9% Archived Web sites 31.36 34.5% 1.3% Music sound and video 1.37 1.50% 1.0% Diaries, letters, archives 0.51 0.57% 0.8% People and organisations 0.89 0.98% 0.7% Maps 0.33 0.36% 0.5% Table 3: Trove Content and Usage by Zone for 1-31 May 2010 Feedback from thousands of users tells us that creating connections and linkages between data is important, that finding related information and showing information in context is really helpful.
Users think sharing, repurposing, mashing and adding to information is equally as important as finding it in the first place.
Consistent messages received from users are 'Give us ...' As much access to as much information as possible in one place.
Tools to do stuff with the information we find.
Freedom and choices with finding, getting and interacting with the information.
Ways to work collaboratively together to achieve new things which have never before been possible so easily.
And in return our virtual community will give back their: Enthusiasm to do stuff and help us Expert subject knowledge Time Dedication This has been clearly demonstrated by the degree of activity within the virtual community of Australian Newspaper text correctors [14].
Figure 3: Trove: Results for the search term "Northern Territories" Trove: Future Developments In 2010 there are three main areas in which it is hoped to develop Trove.
These are to encourage new contributors to provide their data to the service; to continue development of the service with key new features such as a Trove API and improved access to journal articles; and to raise awareness and usage of Trove.
On the last point libraries can help by referring to the marketing page in Trove [15].
This shows you how to use a Trove logo on your Web site, to add a Trove search box to your site, to put Trove into your browser bar as a search box.
Furthermore, some libraries are considering usage of Trove as their primary discovery service, or integrating Trove content into their own single discovery service when the Trove API becomes available later this year.
The success of Trove depends on having a large body of relevant content; the usability and functionality of the service; being able to migrate users successfully from the previous eight separate existing services to Trove; and raising awareness of the existence and usefulness of Trove in the community.
Migration strategies are being developed for services such as Picture Australia, Australian Newspapers and Music Australia.
Structured usability testing will be undertaken to address both the basic functions of Trove and difficult areas highlighted in user feedback later this year.
A 'low-cost' marketing campaign has been developed for 2010 which mainly comprises distribution of bookmarks, attendance at conferences, speaking engagements by the Trove Team and publication of articles and adverts in library journals.
Any organisation that has content in Trove is encouraged to undertake its own marketing.
Trove did receive national media coverage in April 2010, but sustained ongoing marketing is important.
Conclusions Trove would not have been possible without the long history of collaboration across cultural heritage institutions in Australia, the usage of common standards across this sector and the shared understanding that data should be open and accessible wherever possible.
The National Library has taken a leadership role in demonstrating that a shift in strategic thinking and action must take place to respond to the changing expectations of users.
Control of information is no longer the ultimate goal, but rather in giving users freedom and choices to interact with the data and each other, to create their own context within the information, and add their knowledge and content to it.
In the eyes of the users this is just as important as finding the information in the first place.
Libraries are well placed to respond to these needs having the technology, tools and information expertise, but more than that, not being driven by commercial gain.
Their honest long-term goals are simply to make finding and getting information easier, now and forever and that is what Trove is all about.
References Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au Leadbeater, Charles (2009) The Internet and Society in the 21st Century.
British Library Strategy Seminar September 23 2009, York.
http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/cms/xstandard/The%20Internet%20and%20Society%20in%20the%2021st%20Century.pdf Fast Company (1998) The Fast Pack.
Fast Company Magazine, Issue 13, January 31, 1998, page 5 http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/13/fastpack.html Holley, Rose.
(2009) Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers, National Library of Australia, ISBN 9780642276940 http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/project_details/documents/ANDP_ManyHands.pdf Cathro, Warwick.
(2009) Collaboration Strategies for Digital Collections: The Australian Experience.
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/nlasp/article/view/1433/1738 National Library of Australia Directions 2009 – 2011 http://www.nla.gov.au/library/NLA_Directions_2009-2011.pdf National Library of Australia, Resource Sharing and Innovation Strategic Plan, January 2010 – December 2011 http://www.nla.gov.au/librariesaustralia/documents/strategic-plan.pdf Cathro, Warwick (2010) Collaboration across the collecting sectors, Australian National Maritime Museum Lecture Series.
Cathro, Warwick (2008) Developing Trove: The policy and technical challenges.
ttp://www.nla.gov.au/trove/marketing/TROVE_2010_02%20VALA2010_Cathro.doc Leadbeater, Charles (2009) The Art of With.
An original essay for Cornerhouse, Manchester http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/cms/xstandard/The%20Art%20of%20With%20PDF.pdf National and State Libraries of Australasia Web site, page accessed June 20, 2010. http://www.nsla.org.au/ Australia Bureau of Stats (2006) Libraries – Library Facts and Figures http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/a3121120.nsf/home/Client%20groups%20-%20Libraries%20-%20Library%20facts%20&%20figures Australian Bureau of Statistics (2009) 8146.0 Household Use of Information Technology, Australia, 2008-09 December press release.
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mediareleasesbytitle/180CCDDCB50AFA02CA257522001A3F4B?OpenDocument Holley, Rose (2009) A success story Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program.
Online Currents, 2009, vol.
23, n. 6, pp.
283-295 http://eprints.rclis.org/17665 Marketing materials for Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au/general/marketing Author Details Rose Holley Manager Trove National Library of Australia Parkes Place Canberra ACT 260 Email: rholley@nla.gov.au Web site: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ Return to top Article Title: "Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia" Author: Rose Holley Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/holley/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Overlay Journals and Data Publishing in the Meteorological Sciences Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Overlay Journals and Data Publishing in the Meteorological Sciences Buzz data software framework wiki database infrastructure archives metadata accessibility identifier blog repositories video multimedia podcast research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Callaghan, Fiona Hewer, Sam Pepler, Paul Hardaker and Alan Gadian introduce the OJIMS Project and discuss the impact of overlay and data journals in the meteorological sciences.
Historically speaking, scientific publishing has focused on publicising the methodology that the scientist uses to analyse a dataset, and the conclusions that the scientist can draw from that analysis, as this is the information that can be easily published in text format with supporting diagrams.
Datasets do not lend themselves easily to normal hard copy publication, even if the size of the dataset were small enough to allow this, and datasets are more useful stored in digital media.
This means that the peer review process that provides both scrutiny and validation of academic work is generally only applied to the final conclusions and interpretations of a dataset.
Some research areas and some countries and organisations make the underlying datasets available, but generally they are not always tightly coupled to the publications that result from them; nor have they themselves been reviewed.
Where such conclusions from the analysis of datasets are of significant importance, either within the academic field, or because the work has legal or policy implications, this becomes a problem.
It is widely recognised that conclusions drawn from analysis of a dataset must be based on valid data in order to be sound.
Furthermore, as datasets are becoming larger and more complex, a reliable method for peer review of data is needed.
In the meteorological and climate sciences, information about weather and climate change is being scrutinised more than ever to meet the need for advice to policy-makers on greenhouse gas emissions and their consequences.
Datasets of meteorological measurements such as air temperature, pressure, rain rates, etc.
dating back centuries, are subject to increasing scrutiny and analysis in order to investigate and quantify the effects of climate change.
Overlay journals are a technology which is already being used to facilitate peer review and publication on-line.
The availability of the technology enables a wider group of organisations to become publishers (e.g.
the RIOJA Project).
However, the technology is limited, in some cases, by the accessibility and functionality of what is overlaid and business models are needed to achieve long-term sustainability of overlay journals.
Why Publish Data?
Peer-reviewing and publishing data has benefits for more than just the data scientists who create the datasets.
It also benefits the funding bodies that pay for the data to be collected as well as the wider academic community.
Benefits for the Data Scientist The data scientists who build, maintain, validate and collect the data for large databanks have to ensure that the data are of high quality and that the associated metadata and documentation are complete and understandable.
This often represents a major task, which leaves little time for the analysis of the data required to produce a paper suitable for journal publication.
Publishing a dataset in a data journal will provide academic credit to data scientists, and without diverting effort from their primary work on ensuring data quality.
Benefits for the Funding Organisation A key driver for the funding organisations is obtaining the best possible science for their money.
Running measurement campaigns is expensive, both in terms of equipment and time, so the more reuse that can be derived from a dataset, the better.
Part of the submission process for publication in a data journal is uploading the dataset to a trusted repository where it will be backed up, properly archived and curated.
As a result, the problems of data stored on obsolete media or suffering from bit-rot will be avoided, thereby minimising the need to repeat costly experiments.
Similarly, the peer-review process reassures the funder that the published dataset is of good quality and that the experiment was carried out appropriately.
Benefits for the Wider Research Community When datasets have been peer-reviewed and published, it demonstrates to the wider research community that the datasets are reliable and complete, and therefore the data can be trusted.
Publication of datasets will also be useful to researchers outside the immediate field, as going to a data journal for information about datasets will be a quick and convenient way of finding out not only what high-quality data are available, but also whom to contact about accessing them.
This will encourage inter-disciplinary collaboration, and open up the user base not only for the datasets, but also the data journal and the underlying repositories.
Moreover, the availability of published datasets will make it easier to validate conclusions through the reanalysis of those datasets.
Overlay Journals The technology required for publishing data is already available in the form of online journal systems.
In a lot of cases, the software is available for free, and can easily be downloaded and installed on a Web server.
Overlay journals sit on top of, and make use of, the content stored in other pre-existing repositories.
The overlay journal database itself consists of a number of overlay documents, which are structure documents created to annotate another resource with information on the quality of the resource.
The overlay document has three basic elements: metadata about the overlay document itself; information about and from the quality process for which the document was constructed; and basic metadata from the referenced resource to aid discovery and identification (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Information needed in an overlay document The overlay documents can then be treated as any other documents in an electronic system, and they can provide added-value information about the resource they refer to, for example, a star-rating given by readers, or a series of review comments.
So, overlay journals themselves do not actually store the datasets they reference, instead they simply store overlay documents about the datasets which contain links to the datasets.
The concept of overlay journals is not solely limited to data publication; they can be applied to other objects which can be stored in a repository, but which might not be so easy to reproduce in print, for instance, video or multimedia files.
For example, an overlay journal might look at other journal-published and unpublished papers; its overlay document might allow users of the overlay journal to award star ratings to the paper to which it refers.
The underlying technology for such an overlay journal remains the same.
The Submission and Review Process The procedure for submitting a dataset for publication to an overlay journal is analogous to that of submitting a conventional paper to a print or on-line journal (Figure 2).
A scientist wishing to submit a paper for publication first writes and prepares the paper according to the journal style and requirements.
The author then submits the paper as an electronic document (usually pdf) to the journal submission site, where it is stored and passed on to the reviewer who reviews the paper against the journal’s acceptance criteria.
Once the paper has been accepted for publication, it is released on the journal’s Web site for readers to read.
In the case of a data scientist, who wishes to publish a dataset, the first step remains the same.
The dataset has to be prepared for publication, and requires its supporting documentation and metadata.
(This is analogous to the editing that needs to be done to a paper before it is submitted.)
The dataset must be stored in a trusted data repository, and the data journal would provide guidance on which repositories it trusted.
To submit the dataset for review, the data scientist would go to the overlay journal site and fill out the data journal’s form, providing details about where the dataset is stored, and providing reviewers with access to the dataset in order to complete their review.
The overlay journal site would then create a document collating all these details in the journal format to pass on to the reviewer.
The latter then reviews this overlay document and examines the dataset stored in the repository indicated in order to determine whether it meets the journal’s acceptance criteria.
Once the dataset is accepted for publication, the overlay document is released on the overlay journal’s site for readers to access.
Figure 2: Comparison between the ‘traditional’ online journal submission process and the overlay journal process for submitting and reviewing data The OJIMS Project The Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) Project aimed to develop the mechanisms that could support both a new (overlay) Journal of Meteorological Data and an Open Access Repository for documents related to the meteorological sciences.
Its work was conducted by a partnership between the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) and two members of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) and the University of Leeds.
The OJIMS Project aimed to exploit the existing data repository at the BADC, along with the expertise of the RmetS, to develop the mechanisms which could support both a new data journal and a repository for the meteorological sciences.
This concept comprised four components: a new open access discipline-specific document repository based at the BADC; the existing BADC data repository; a new overlay journal in which ‘articles’ link peer-reviewed documents to peer-reviewed datasets (codenamed the MetData journal); and an overlay journal (codenamed MetRep) framework that would provide links to highly regarded ‘star-rated’ papers via the repository (either to the repository contents or the version of the record held by the original journal publisher).
The work built on the previous JISC-funded CLADDIER Project and took the next steps towards making these two classes of overlay journal (i.e.
a ‘data’ journal and a ‘really useful papers’ journal) possible.
During the project, the RMetS undertook work to identify what possible business models exist and to recommend a method for identification and practical implementation of a sustainable business model that would guarantee the longevity of these journals.
The analysis has been made available to other learned societies or groups considering such activities via the OJIMS Web site [1].
The software created by the project team to run the overlay journals are open source and available to all via the OJIMS Web site [1].
These two overlay journal activities address two key issues.
Firstly, the application of the peer-review process to data, which has been discussed above.
Secondly, the project addressed the issue that while it is easy to create a repository for a discipline, it is not so easy to get it populated.
While NCAS as a distributed body of (primarily) university staff needs such an entity, and is in a position to expect (even mandate) NCAS-funded staff to use it, the real success of such a repository would be if it were populated by a much wider community from the UK, Europe and even further afield.
This discipline repository would also provide the documents required to provide references to the proposed overlay journal of ‘star-rated’ papers.
The resulting journal should provide a new way of focusing community attention on papers of special merit, regardless of the original journal location.
It would also act both as a mechanism to encourage repository population, and as a mechanism to encourage publishers to accept the merits of open access.
Achieving a high ‘star-rating’ would also increase the number of citations of a given paper.
Survey of Organisations and Scientists The OJIMS Project carried out a survey of organisations and scientists to investigate the potential implications for the meteorological sciences should a data journal and an open access repository be created and operated.
Survey of Organisations The OJIMS survey of organisations report [2] describes the results of a survey of commercial and public sector organisations which was conducted to assess attitudes to the creation and operation of the proposed Journal of Meteorological Data and an Open Access Repository.
It was a small survey with 14 respondents, but representing a wide variety from across meteorology.
The respondents included international energy companies with operations in the UK, a non-UK national meteorological service, a UK government agency, a local government authority, small and medium-sized companies involved in instrument manufacture and a private sector provider of weather services.
There was a positive response to the opportunity for these organisations to use any new online facility with information about meteorological sciences from the Royal Meteorological Society; all of the respondents replied that they would make use of such a facility.
These 14 organisations identified more than 300 staff who would use the facility, and when asked which topics these staff were most likely to access, all respondents said ‘operational systems and trials’ with some also selecting experimental campaigns, numerical modelling projects, instrument and observing facilities, data structure, software, pre-prints and post-prints.
The single representative of the international meteorological service community (of which there are 190) was a very positive respondent, indicating that there were 50 staff willing to use the facilities proposed, and no obstacles to submitting articles or data.
Commercial sensitivity represents a significant obstacle that will prevent larger commercial organisations making their meteorological articles available through an open access repository.
Smaller organisations and public sector organisations saw no obstacles, or merely licensing requirements, though some did not feel they held any articles of wider interest.
The three small organisations that manufactured instruments responded that they could definitely make data available to an RMetS publication for free and unrestricted use.
Others were less sure, and were concerned about commercial sensitivities.
The OJIMS project team has identified the quality assurance offered by a peer-review process as a benefit of the Journal of Meteorological Data.
However, the value of peer review was not highly rated by these organisations.
Raising awareness of the organisation’s brand was the benefit most highly rated by those respondents.
Survey of Users As well as investigating scientists’ reactions to the proposed data journal and open access repository, the survey of users report [3] also describes reactions to supervised run-throughs of a demonstration of the Journal of Meteorological Data.
The survey and demo were conducted at the NCAS Conference in Bristol of 8-10 December 2008 [4].
The survey achieved a high rate of response from delegates at the conference.
More than a third of delegates (85) from 24 institutions responded.
Respondents were mainly university-based scientists from the fields of atmospheric composition and chemistry, atmospheric physics, dynamical meteorology and climate science; scientists from meteorological programmes, observations/remote sensing, oceanography, hydrology or other areas were not represented in significant numbers.
A high proportion of respondents were less experienced scientists with 46% having less than three years experience of research work, but 25% of respondents had more than 10 years experience.
Further insight into attitudes to the Journal of Meteorological Data came from the supervised run-throughs of a demonstrator by seven volunteers at the NCAS Conference.
Useful feedback was made to the supervisor on the benefits to data creators, the review process, branding, version control and citations.
The following summarises the key responses to the user surveys.
Overlay Journal and Open Access Repository for Documents Related to the Meteorological Sciences The concept of the Open Access Repository includes both a new subject-based repository and overlay mechanics to search and access it and other repositories, as well as producing a ‘star-rated’ overlay journal for the meteorological sciences.
The Open Access Repository idea was popular with NCAS delegates with about 70% rating at least one of its features as a great idea that they would use.
The most appealing feature of the Repository was a ‘Single Web site to search many repositories’ with 71% saying they would use it.
This is a function that is provided by overlay journal mechanics.
User rating of articles, supplementary information, e.g.
videos, discussion group open forum, and ‘user comments and tags for items’ attracted minority support (12-18% said they would use each of them).
This user rating would be a key feature of the ‘star-rated’ journal.
Use of other repositories that the new Repository system would overlay is lower than might be expected.
Only 19% use repositories as their most common method for getting the full text of articles (a further 28% use them occasionally to do so) and only 38% use institutional repositories to archive their articles.
It is concluded that the overlay ‘star-rated’ journal could not become a single, comprehensive source of information for the meteorological sciences unless it attracts unprecedented volumes of deposits in its new repository, or inspires a step-change increase in archiving to existing repositories.
Journal of Meteorological Data The concept behind the Journal of Meteorological Data is to extend the scientific discipline of peer review to data.
To summarise: It received a strong positive response in the survey.
69% agreed that they would like to access data from an RMetS Journal.
67% agreed that they were more likely to deposit their data in a data centre if they can obtain academic credit through a data journal.
Almost all respondents were users or creators of meteorological data of some kind.
Data from experimental campaigns was more commonly used and created by these NCAS delegates than data from General Circulation Models, other numerical models, operational systems, and instrument and observing facilities.
The only existing data journal in this area is aimed at all environmental sciences.
91% of respondents had never heard of it.
Atmospheric Science Letters, the RMetS online journal, is one of the best known online-only meteorological journals with 93% of respondents having heard of it.
The Business Cases for the Subject Repository and Overlay and Data Journals The business models produced as part of the OJIMS Project are described in more detail in the Business Models report [5].
A review of publishing in the meteorological sciences was carried out, along with data centres and electronic repositories.
Information about the potential usage of the subject repository and overlay journals was collected through the user and organisational surveys described above.
From these information collection exercises, the functional requirements, content, benefits and success measures for the repository and journals were identified.
In parallel, development of the software infrastructure to support the repository and journals continued, with communication between the two strands to ensure that the user requirements and technical costs were fully understood.
Discussion was carried out with stakeholders regarding the governance and management structure for the repository and journals, along with publication ethics and the review processes and procedures that would be adopted.
Finally a market analysis of this information was carried out, including a full cost-benefit analysis.
The recommendations from the business cases were as follows: In the short term, there is a technical issue and a behavioural issue that would severely limit the chances of success for an Open Access Repository for the Meteorological Sciences.
Technically, the mechanics for the overlay of other repositories are immature, and direct access from the Open Access Repository to other repositories is not feasible.
The rate of depositing information into repositories is low, and would require a step-change increase for the Open Access Repository to be able to provide comprehensive access to meteorological information.
However, it is recognised that there are needs (listed below) that can be met, in the medium to long term, by the creation of an Open Access Repository for the Meteorological Sciences.
Engagement with technology development stakeholders, learned society members and potential funding organisations is needed to overcome these issues.
Quality assurance of increasing volumes of information – without compromising peer review or the facilitation of greater information and exchange Exploitation of new ways of sharing scientific information e.g.
Web 2.0 capabilities such as Web pages wikis, blogs and podcast Enabling communication between scientists and stakeholders Reduction of environmental costs of print journals and face-to-face communication With regards to the data journal, there does seem value in either a subscription or an author-pays model for financing a Journal of Meteorological Data.
To ensure the long-term success of the Journal of Meteorological Data there needs to be engagement with the community of those involved with data collection and analysis.
Further, such a journal would not succeed without the development of strategic relationships with national data centres in several countries.
OJIMS: Conclusions and Implications The following can be concluded from the OJIMS Project work: A document repository capable of storing grey literature (Web pages, project reports, pictures, video etc.)
as well as journal papers is acknowledged to be a useful addition to an organisation.
The repository created as part of the OJIMS Project is already in use as the operational repository for the BADC/NEODC and will continue to be used as this for the foreseeable future.
Interaction with meteorological and atmospheric data scientists and organisations has shown that there is a strong need for a method for publishing data (a data journal).
Publication of data will ensure that the datasets are of good quality, having been peer-reviewed, and will provide data scientists with academic credit for having created the datasets and placing them in an accredited data repository where the data can be professionally archived and curated.
Similarly, interaction with meteorological and atmospheric data scientists and organisations has shown that there is a desire to have an overlay repository which can serve as a single point of search for numerous institutional repositories.
However, at the moment it is felt that the institutional repositories do not have a critical mass of documentation stored in them to merit the investment required to develop an overlay repository framework.
The implications of this project are considerable for data scientists in the meteorological and atmospheric sciences (and potentially data scientists in other fields).
The user surveys have shown that there is a significant desire in the user community for a data journal, which would allow scientists to receive academic recognition (in the form of citations) for their work in ensuring the quality of datasets.
The sponsors and funding bodies for the experimental campaigns that produce these data (such as NERC) would also benefit as it would encourage scientists to submit their data to accredited data repositories, where they would be archived and curated.
On the broader subject of document repositories, the project has demonstrated that an overlay repository with the capability to be a single point to search multiple repositories is a tool that would be of value to significant numbers of researchers.
However, this does rely on the repositories being searched having a sufficient amount of documents in them in the first place, which is not always the case.
Further work on user interaction with repositories and determining why they are not as widely used as they could be, may prove of interest in the future.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as the principal funder of the OJIMS Project under the JISC Capital Programme call for Projects, Strand D: ‘Repository Start-up and Enhancement Projects’ (4⁄06).
Complementary funding was provided by NCAS through the BADC core agreement, and also by the Natural Environment Research Council.
References Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims Fiona Hewer, OJIMS Survey of Organisations, March 2009 http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/FRK_RMetSOJIMS_SurveyOfOrgsV2%209Mar2009.pdf Fiona Hewer,OJIMS Survey of Scientists, March 2009 http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/FRK_RMetSOJIMS_SurveyOfScientistsV2%209Mar2009.pdf 2008 NCAS Atmospheric Science Conference, 8-10 December, Bristol http://ncasweb.leeds.ac.uk/conference2008/ Fiona Hewer, OJIMS Business Models Report, March 2009 http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/FRK_RMetSOJIMS_BusinessModelsV2p1.pdf Author Details Sarah Callaghan Senior Scientific Researcher and Project Manager British Atmospheric Data Centre Email: sarah.callaghan@stfc.ac.uk Web site: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk Fiona Hewer Environmental Consultant Fiona’s Red Kite Email: fiona@fionasredkite.co.uk Web site: http://www.fionasredkite.co.uk/ Sam Pepler Head, Science Support Group British Atmospheric Data Centre Email: sam.pepler@stfc.ac.uk Web site: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk Paul Hardaker Chief Executive Royal Meteorological Society Email: chiefexec@rmets.org Web site: http://www.rmets.org/ Alan Gadian Senior Research Lecturer National Centre for Atmospheric Science Email: a.gadian@see.leeds.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ncas.ac.uk/weather/ Return to top Article Title: “Overlay Journals and Data Publishing in the Meteorological Sciences “ Author: Sarah Callaghan, Fiona Hewer, Sam Pepler, Paul Hardaker and Alan Gadian Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/callaghan-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Patent Failure How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Patent Failure How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk Buzz data software algorithm Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Hannabuss reviews a work which debunks some key assumptions about IPR and contends that current patent arrangements are ineffective.
Arguments about intellectual property rights (IPR) never go away, particularly now that technological and market changes drive the legal agendas along very fast.
Nowhere faster probably than in software and business-methods patents, one of the more colourful aspects of a highly litigious field today.
Much of the debate centres on the USA where R&D spending is highest (particularly by big players, who incidentally have the most lucrative and best-defended patents).
Indeed a recent decision by the Senate (May 2008, the time of writing) to remove the Patent Reform Act from its calendar (among other things it would have changed the first-to-invent rule to a first-to-file rule) has been seen by commentators as further evidence of patent and policy failure.
It is not by accident, then, that Bessen (software developer and now at Boston University School of Law) and Meurer (professor of law at Boston University) call their book Patent Failure.
Predictably enough, though timely in itself, their argument is that there is plenty of evidence, historical and current, to debunk some key assumptions about IPR and patents and innovation – such as the strong protections over a robust period that patents provide, such as the incentives to innovation and creativity that patent protection offers, and such as reliance on an effective (they contend the reverse) bureaucracy made up of bodies like USPTO, the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Their approach is interesting and eclectic.
The over-arching case is that current patent arrangements are ineffective for many reasons: claims are vague and are processed slowly, the courts interpret the law in ambiguous ways, the technological complexity of many patents leads to inevitable confusion (for example about who got there first, and whether infringement really took place), and patent trolls (predatory opportunists) lurk to launch appeals.
The authors build their case upon historical as well as contemporary economic data.
They suggest that, for all the perceived innovation to arise from technological change that was at the same time protected by IPR, there is a great deal more confusion and abuse.
In other words, the costs (of establishing and maintaining the claim, of issuing effective notices, of contests at law, of bottom-line returns on investment, particularly for the small inventor) exceed the benefits.
Too much attention has been paid to the benefits and too little to the costs: the evidence, they claim, speaks for itself.
They rightly pinpoint software and business methods as especially problematic.
They could and should have ventured far more into pharmaceuticals but they decided that enough can be made of the case based on what they do include.
Patents suits are more probable in the software and business methods field than in any other in the USA (the setting for this book throughout).
They cite three examples from the present (information, videotape, and broadcasting) and several from the past (telegraphy).
Their analysis hinges, they say, on such patents, and the phenomena on which they are based, being 'abstract' (a term that varies here between lacking transparency to being intellectually complex and therefore legally demanding).
They are right in suggesting that such patents often trip up on the extent to which the intellectual material (e.g.
the algorithms and source code) translates into the functional material.
This really is the key here – as recent cases show – that exclusive rights to transactions that, say, extrapolate hedge fund trends might be sustainable but not if such transactions can be executed on any computer: understandably Microsoft and IBM, who have both the software and the hardware, insist that patents should be restricted or else there is a free-for-all.
Others argue the opposite, that the intangible rights should be enough, or else all business methods applications (like online booking systems) would be infringers.
Some characterise this as a pure and applied patent debate.
Beyond all this, of course, lie the numerous arguments for non-proprietary and collaborative systems, typified by the open source movement, and examined as being a major new source of wealth for networks by writers like Benkler.
I would have liked this book to have travelled further in that direction.
Its arguments could have been better, and less parochial, if it had absorbed more about the Internet and about cross-border patents (where a lot of corporate IPR activity lies at present, albeit some ending up in US courts, federal and state).
That said, Bessen and Meurer have recommendations on how to manage the future: as well as querying the link between innovation and patent protection, as well as admitting that the bureaucracy is over-worked and some patents are vague and notices get neglected and ignored, they are right to advocate more legal expertise in specialised patent courts.
Equally they correctly call for: more effort to sort out fuzzy boundaries (say for prior-user defences) in software and business methods patents; more exemptions for good-faith infringers; and subtler distinctions between different sectors of the marketplace (some seem worse, i.e.
more litigious and more risky, than others – software, say, more than chemicals, small inventor territory more than large corporates).
The text is supported by extensive notes, a large and helpful bibliography, and an index.
Even so, its arguments are journalistic and the central points raised by and in the book could have formed an article rather than a book.
Yet at the price who is complaining?
Author Details Stuart Hannabuss Gray's School of Art Aberdeen Return to top Article Title: "Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk" Author: Stuart Hannabuss Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/hannabuss-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Information Need A Theory Connecting Information Search to Knowledge Formation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information Need A Theory Connecting Information Search to Knowledge Formation Buzz data metadata ontologies research modelling Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley reviews a book about a new theory of ‘information need’ that builds upon the ideas of Allen and Taylor from the 1960s to provide a basis for information searching.
The front cover tells you succinctly what this book is about; 'A theory Connecting  Information Search – to – Knowledge Formation.'
Equally bluntly, I shall set out my credentials for this review.
I am not a library/informational professional but I have an interest in delivering digital and information skills to students.
I have read and reviewed this book to further my own knowledge of the subject, as well as to see what (new?)
ways there are for students to use search tools and methods as well as enhance both their digital and information literacies.
Accordingly, I shall treat the review in this manner as the book itself falls roughly into these two parts.
Generalities: Information Proliferation How people search for information depends of course upon the task in hand.
Even before WW2, J. D. Bernal [1] was pointing out the information flood held in journals and books and that: ‘The kind of organisation we wish to aim at is one in which all relevant information should be available to each research worker and in amplitude proportional to its degree of relevance.
Further, that not only should the information be available but also that it should be to a large extent put at the disposal of the research worker without his having to take any steps to get hold of it.’ In the USA at the same time, Vannevar Bush was thinking along similar lines with his ‘Memex’ as a possible solution [2].
Linked to this was Bush’s selection concept of associative indexing.
For everyday information searching people used encyclopedias or even visited libraries – as undergraduates still are exhorted to do.
To search for the required information and indeed sift through the pile was not an easy task, even in a pre-computer world.
Bush suggested an operational approach and procedure: ‘This process is simple selection: it proceeds by examining in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those which have certain specified characteristics.’ [2, p. 106].
Charles Cole added the emphases to the above quotation in his ‘Information Need’.
In this book he explores and seeks to interpret the rather dissimilar ways ‘computer science' and 'information science' deal with 'information need'.
Thus (pp.
4-5): ‘The computer science perspective conceptualises the user's information need as the input into the information system ….
which produces the answer output’; ………..  ‘Information science conceptualises the user's information need as a gap in understanding that opens the door to let in information from the textural environment – an information system, for example.’ Part one (Chapters 1-8) is mainly concerned with a definition of information need and Part 2 (Chapters 9-19) deals with the ideas developed in Part 1 and 'how it works'.
The book is very much like an extended academic paper and builds progressively on its initial ideas.
This review thus only sketches this development.
‘Definition of Information Need’ Chapter 1 provides a statement describing the importance of 'information need' and we progress rapidly to a history of information need from Bernal and Bush in the 1940s to the 1960s.
Allen's six concentric circle model [3], derived from work in large organisations, represents formal and informal channels of information flow in user searches.
This is then linked to ideas of ‘critical incident decision making’ developed at MIT.
Bush’s student, Claude Shannon, added his ideas of communication information flow and the concept of noise.
Diagrams in Chapter 2 are used to explain and link these ideas and concepts.
There is no mathematical or formal logical treatment, other than a basic mention of 'probability', really a general statement of ‘likelihood’.
In Chapter 2, Allen’s model is developed and linked to distinctions (or combinations) of ‘need’ and ‘demand’ and Taylor’s focus [4][5] on the psychological aspects of information need.
These are developed in Chapters 3, and 4, as matter of levels from Taylor’s model.
Modeling user-needs brings us back to Shannon and the introduction of ‘belief’ and Jerome Bruner’s ideas together with ‘feedback’ in Chapter 6.
So far, so general and theoretical.
Chapter 7 is concerned with ‘Adaptation, internal information flows and knowledge generation’ and uses a circle metaphor.
Starting with a bottom-up environmental stimulus of circle 1 to that of circle 5, that encompasses knowledge revision and generation.
Circle 5 is labelled ‘neurological determination’ and is linked to belief systems via Stevan Harnad’s categorical perception ideas [6] to ‘neurologically derived adaptation’ and the Neolithic era.
The notion of Neanderthals as being cognitively different from modern humankind (with a well developed 'enhanced working memory') is used as part of an argument that we need better focus in searching.
I am no expert on primate evolution, but it appears that the jury is still out on the 'differences' between humans and Neanderthals (‘Neanderthals are alive and well and living in Europe’ [7]).
These ideas follow from rapidly developing work on cognitive psychology.
However, we still have so much to learn about ‘memory’ and cognitive functionality that the ideas presented here are perhaps best kept away from definitive statements about memory.
For example, long-term memory and working memory are mentioned and (p. 132) associative memory (usually thought of in terms of neural networks although not developed along these lines here), There is nothing about declarative memory and its components, cognitive origins and brain functions aspects that may be important in linking to belief systems and rapid responses to given situations.
The first section ends with a lengthier chapter (Chapter 8) on bringing these ideas together.
These relate back to Taylor’s levels and that, ‘information need manifests itself to the user in a more specific way as the user nears completion of a search (p. 92) and the division into three stages: pre-focus, focusing and post-focus.
These are linked to Carol Kuhlthau’s stages of her Information Search Process model [8].
How It Works The second part of the book deals with the implementation of Cole’s theory.
However, it is still, in the main, theoretical.
Chapter 9 starts with the ideas that there are three types of information search based on six propositions (based upon Taylor’s ideas seen in the pre-focus, focusing and post-focus phases).
Chapters 12-15 elaborate on these phases with Chapter 16 providing ‘corroborative research’ from previously published studies.
However, if a theory is developed (in whatever area) then scientific methodology suggests it should be tested (rather than corroborated) in practice.
Unfortunately, in my view, the theory is not tested here and the chapter tells us little about how we should achieve the focus or when we know we have achieved it (and with what resolution).
Chapter 19 poses the questions of the book, ‘what is information need and how does it work’.
A subtext is the recognition of information as ‘thing’ and ‘process’ as well as (some sort of) ‘knowledge’.
These recognitions also operate in time, although Cole argues that it is the achievement of ‘focus’ that is the important aspect.
To obtain a simple fact, a basic search may be all that is required.
Yet on a page of web-derived information it is necessary to place value judgments on the quality of information searched for (as distinct from the quality of the source of the information).
This returns us to the uncertainty for the searcher (student).
The searcher cannot always know or recognise the quality of the information being searched.
The search terms themselves might be wrong.
I referred to Shannon's concept of 'noise' mentioned in Chapter 4 and this is explored a little further in Chapter 11.
It is here that I feel there is need of more exploration when it comes to implementation.
For within the concept of noise (vagueness, inexactness and imprecision [9]) also come the human failings via mistakes and errors as well as misdirection.
This is where even quasi-intelligent computer behaviour takes the place, naturally and adaptably for much knowledge formation, especially where working on subject boundaries and when terms are used in unfamiliar ways.
This leads of course to ontologies although I could find no reference to ontology in the book (certainly not in the index).
As an example of a mistake; on page 11 is a list of five energy-generating solutions to a problem.
One term given is ‘Ranking’.
I know this to be a mistake for ‘Rankine’ as it is next to ‘Brayton’ which is a correct and appropriate term in the list.
This is the sort of incorrect known (as opposed to a ‘known known’) that might send a searcher in the wrong direction unless the noise has been recognized from prior knowledge.
An example illustrating the ideas presented in Chapter 18 is that of researching and writing an undergraduate social science essay.
This essay is left to the last minute and we again meet Kuhllthau’s Information Search Process ideas involving uncertainty and mental state [8].
Chapter 18 envisions ‘The Astrolabe’; ‘an information system for stage 3 information exploration’ which is suggested as the tool for ‘breaking the back of producing an essay’.
The ‘astrolabe’ is used here as a metaphor for a navigation device and for using Google searches.
Aside from the noise and errors induced by ‘Astrolabe (an actual device used widely in medieval times by navigators and astronomers to determine latitude, longitude, and time of day’, p. 179) it is not a system I would recommend to students for doing research.
Aside from difficulties of knowing the veracity of statements and providing the focus to give a coherent whole (essay), the procedure gives no indications of time to completion.
The necessity to use planning procedures (such as Concept Maps) to plan searches from an existing knowledge base are not covered, despite being a commonly-used tool for this purpose.
Some formal logic might help in Cole’s analysis.
The addition of Bayesian methods would be of great assistance in approximating the requirements of a search and starting with ‘prior’ knowledge’.
It would show how a focus could be achieved and indeed modified, according to the level of search.
Are we any the wiser with the 'astrolabe system' presented in Chapter 18?
My view is that we are not.
Way back in Chapter 8, Cole provides a brief discussion on ‘Evolutionary adaptation and information foraging’.
Without embarking on another review and comparing the two ideas, my preference is for Pirolli’s [10] foraging theory as it does investigate human-technology interactions in an adaptive manner and has web searching as its metier.
Conclusions Should you read this book?
Of course, it depends what you are after.
If it is looking at an updating of Taylor’s and Kuhlthau’s ideas and what was then known as the 'man-machine interface', as well as developing what we would now might call 'workflows', then possibly.
If you are interested in the general problem of tackling a semantic problem, fine.
If you are involved with developing better search models for library users, then I fear it has little to offer over Kuhlthau on a practical level, and Pirolli on a theoretical.
Can we combine the two?
I sympathise with what Cole is trying to do:  (p. 194-5).
‘Only the levels perspective on information need will achieve the linkage of knowledge formation and information access in information system design that we believe necessary to overcome the information overload issues we all face in a pre-focus stage of performing an information-based task, and then information literacy issues the informationally disadvantaged in our society face because they see information, information use, critical thinking, and the information age as strange abominations that only others can use.’ In a Higher and Further Education sector, where I believe that students are poorly served by academics in delivering digital and information literacies [11][12], instructional roles tend to fall on library and information professionals.
Cole’s book is a start to help the practitioner but for me the book needs to provide more practical assistance beyond the theory.
In particular, there is a need to look towards the Semantic Web and perhaps (Ward) Cunningham’s Law, ‘The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer’ [13].
References Bernal, J.D.
The Social Function of Science, Faber and Faber, p118 Bush, V. 1945.
As we may think.
Atlantic Monthly 176, 101-108. http://engl114-pressman.commons.yale.edu/files/2008/09/vbush.pdf Allen, T.J., 1969.
Information needs and uses.
In C.A.
Cuadra (Ed) Annual Review of Science and Technology.
Taylor, R.S., 1962.
The process of asking questions.
American Documentation, 13, 391-396.
Taylor, R.S., 1968.
Question-negotiation and information seeking in libraries.
College and Research Libraries 29 (3) 178-194. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD0659468 Harnad, S. 1987.
Category induction and representation.
In S. Harnad (Ed).
Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition.
Cambridge University Press.
The Neandertal Genome, Science/AAAS, 7 May 2010 http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/neandertal/ Kuhlthau, C.C.,1993.
Seeking Meaning: A process approach to Library and Information Services.
Norwood, NJ.
Ablex.
and London: Libraries Unlimited.
ISBN 1-59158-094-3 and see: http://library.humboldt.edu/ic/general_competency/kuhlthau.html Swinburme, R.G., 1969.
Vagueness, Inexactness, and Imprecision.
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 19, 281-299.
Pirolli, P., 2007.
Information Foraging Theory.
Oxford University Press, pp.
204.
JISC, 2009/2012.
Learning Literacies in a Digital Age.
Briefing Paper.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2012/developing-digital-literacies.aspx JISC 2012, Learning in a Digital Age http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2012/learning-in-a-digital-age.aspx Ward Cunningham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham Author Details W. Brian Whalley Visiting Professor University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK Email: b.whalley@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://brianbox.net/ Brian Whalley has retired from formal education and research in HE but now spends time catching up on previous sins of omission in writing up his glaciology and geomorphology research as well as contributions to student use of computers in fieldwork.
He is a co-investigator on an Higher Education Academy-funded project on ‘Enhancing Fieldwork Learning’.
He is also involved with developing metadata for fieldwork images and data and personal learning environments focused on tablet computers.
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Mining the Archive: The Development of Electronic Journals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mining the Archive: The Development of Electronic Journals Buzz mobile database archives accessibility blog copyright ejournal ebook licence research standards jstor Citation BibTex RIS Martin White looks through the Ariadne archive to trace the development of e-journals as a particular aspect of electronic service delivery and highlights material he considers as significant.
My career has spanned 42 years in the information business.
It has encompassed 10,000-hole optical coincidence cards, online database services, videotext, laser discs, and CD-ROMs, the World Wide Web, mobile services and big data solutions.
I find the historical development of information resource management absolutely fascinating, yet feel that in general it is poorly documented from an analytical perspective even though there are some excellent archives.
These archives include the back issues of Ariadne from January 1996.
Ariadne has always been one of my must-reads as a way of keeping in touch with issues and developments in e-delivery of information.
The recently launched new Ariadne platform [1] has provided easier access to these archives.
Looking through its content has reminded me of the skills and vision of the UK information profession as it sought to meet emerging user requirements with very limited resources.
The archives have always been available on the Ariadne site but the recent update to the site and the availability of good tags on the archive content has made it much easier to mine through the archive issues.
The Ariadne team, in particular Richard Waller, has given me the opportunity to mine those archives [2] and trace some of the developments in electronic service delivery in the UK.
Indeed working through the archives is now probably too easy as in the preparation of this column I have found myself moving sideways from many of the feature articles to revel in the other columns that have been a feature of Ariadne.
This article is a personal view of some of these developments and is in no way intended to be a definitive account.
Its main purpose is to encourage others to look into the archive and learn from the experiences of the many innovators that have patiently coped with the challenges of emerging technology, resource limitations and often a distinct lack of strategy and policy at both an institutional and government level.
Figure 1: Optical coincidence card, circa 1970 e-Journal Development Arriving at the University of Southampton in 1967 my main surprise was not the standard of the laboratories but the quality and scale of the Chemistry Department library.
School does not prepare you for reading primary journals and how best to make use of Chemical Abstracts, but I quickly found that working in the library was much more fun than in a laboratory.
I obtained an excellent result in one vacation project on physical chemistry problems by reverse engineering the problems through Chemical Abstracts!
Therefore, as it turned out, I had started my career as an information scientist before I even graduated.
By 1977 I was working with The Chemical Society on the micropublishing of journals and taking part in a British Library project on the future of chemical information.
Re-reading the outcomes of that project makes me realise how difficult it is to forecast the future.
Now my past has re-asserted itself to good effect as I have both the honour and excitement of being Chair of the eContent Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Figure 2: Laser disc, circa 1980 So from my standpoint, in seeking to identify distinct themes in the development of information resource management in Ariadne, a good place to start is with the e-markup of chemical journals.
In Issue 1 Dr Henry Rzepa wrote about the potential benefits of the semantic markup of primary journals to provide chemists with access to the content of the journal article and not just to a contents page and title [4].
The immediate problem you face reading this admirable summary of the potential benefits of markup is that many of the hyperlinks have disappeared.
History has been technologically terminated.
Almost 15 years passed by before the Royal Society of Chemistry set up Project Prospect and turned semantic markup into a production process [4].
Dr Rzepa is now Professor of Computational Chemistry at Imperial College, London.
By the mid-1990s good progress had been made in e-journal production technologies and the first e-only journals were beginning to appear.
Among them was Glacial Geology and Geomorphology (GGG) which existed in a printed version only in as far as readers could print out a selection from it.
One aim of GGG is therefore to provide the benefits of electronic transfer as well as other value added products in an accepted academic, peer-reviewed system.
The author of the article describing the project [5] was Dr. Brian Whalley, who went on to become a Professor in the Geomaterials Research Group, Queens University of Belfast.
As you will discover from his author profile (another Ariadne innovation), Brian is still active though retired from formal education.
What struck me about this article was the author’s vision in January 1996 of how e-journals could be of benefit in university teaching.
Figure 3: Glacial Geology and Geomorphology You will perhaps have sensed that I want to highlight the role of individuals who have made a substantial contribution to the development of our current information environment.
I first met Dr. Fytton Rowland when he was the secretary to the British Library project on the future of chemical information around 1976.
Fytton Rowland remains one of the most insightful of analysts on the development of STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publishing and you can see the evidence for that in his defence of print journals in 1997 [6].
Figure 4: Fytton Rowland, circa January 1997 “Most of the major scholarly publishers are now offering their journals in parallel print and electronic forms.
I believe that the commercial publishers will come under intense pressure to use the new technology to reduce their prices.
The current position where the electronic version costs the same as or more than the printed is untenable, given the financial position of the libraries that are their major customers.
The large publishers, both for-profit and not-for-profit, argue that ceasing to print their journals will save only a small proportion of their total budget, and that in the intermediate period when publication is in dual form, their costs are actually raised by the need to provide both forms.
The radicals who argue for a complete reform of the system use zero-based budgeting to demonstrate that costs could be drastically lowered, if new electronic-only journals were started from scratch.
It is hard to predict where this argument will end.
However, the library budget crisis combined with the increased determination of universities to retain the intellectual property rights in their research seems likely to require some compromise from publishers.” Scholarly Journals in Transition In 1996 the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) took  a remarkable initiative to set up a UK-wide Pilot Site Licence Initiative for e-journals.
This initiative was the outcome of discussions which took place in 1994 between a small number of publishers and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) [7].
The result was a three-year experiment involving four publishers Academic Press, Blackwell Science, Blackwell Publishing and the Institute of Physics Publishing.
These publishers offered access to their entire journal collection for between 60% and 70% of the normal price.
A number of regional site licence agreements had been set up in the USA but nothing on the geographic scale of the HEFCE initiative.
The reaction from the serials community was very positive and there was a willingness on the part of serials librarians, publishers and subscription agencies to work together to resolve the many open issues.
A sense of the ethos of co-operation can be gauged from a report of a meeting of the community in mid-1997 that was recorded in Ariadne later in the year [8].
On the day of the meeting it was announced that the successor to PLSI would be managed by JISC.
Rarely has a meeting been so well timed!
Moreover, in that same November 1997 issue (12), there is a very good overview of the on-going debate at that time on the future of printed journals by Tony Kidd, Head of Serials at Glasgow University Library [9].
His article illustrates the openness of the serials community to find ways to take advantage of e-journals and still maintain access to printed versions of journals.
I was one of the team of consultants who undertook a review of the PLSI for HEFCE and visited a substantial number of UK universities as well as publishers and other stakeholders.
Although there were concerns about many of the implications of e-journals and site licensing, there was a very strong common commitment to addressing them.
The result was that the Mark II licence was seen the world over as a template for national site licensing.
Much of the credit for this must go to the UK Serials Group, whose conference was and is the forum at which these concerns were aired, debated and resolved.
Tony Kidd remains associated with the University of Glasgow as Assistant Director of the Library and has been Chairman of UKSG.
Open Access By 1998 the balance was already moving towards e-journals as the primary delivery channel.
Michael Day, by then at the UK Office for Library and Information Networking (latterly UKOLN), wrote a masterly overview of the state of play in 1999 [10].
The catalyst for this was the development of the PubMed open access service that would provide free access to papers on the biomedical sciences.
PubMed was conceived by Harold Varmus, Nobel Prize winner and director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) who in 1999 circulated a proposal for an online service that would give free access to published material in the biomedical sciences.
Michael opened his paper with a quotation from F. Wilfred Lancaster, who was born in the UK but spent most of his professional career in the USA.
In my opinion, there is no real question that completely paperless systems will emerge in science and in other fields.
The only real question is "when will it happen?"
We can reasonably expect, I feel, that a rather fully developed electronic information system ... will exist by the year 2000, although it could conceivably come earlier.
This forecast dates from 1978 and gives a measure of the vision of Wilf Lancaster.
I only met him once but his enthusiasm for moving information science forward remains with me to this day.
Meanwhile Michael has gone on to lead the team which he joined at UKOLN in 1996.
So far I notice that I have not mentioned Stevan Harnad.
More than anyone else Harnad has driven the discussion around open access publishing.
The concept of Green and Gold open access date back to the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 and the BOAI has itself just reviewed the progress that has been made over the last ten years [11] To me, Harnad wrote one of the seminal contributions in the Green/Gold debate [12] It remains essential reading, all the more so since the publication of the Finch report earlier this year [13].
Archiving Digital Content The focus so far of this review has been on the delivery of e-journals but there is another important aspect and that is how to store them for the future.
This is an especially important debate in the UK where, 10 years after the changes to the Copyright Act to accommodate electronic media, the discussions about the implementation of the Act are still underway, with some hope of resolution in 2013.
I need to go back to 1995 and the development of the JStor e-archive with support from the Mellon Foundation.
By 1998 it was clear that the approach taken by JStor had very significant merit and a UK JStor was set up at MIMAS, University of Manchester.
The background and early history of the UK JStor is recorded by Alison Murphy [14] and the development of Portico by Eileen Fenton [15].
Both these services have transformed the provision of digital resources to the research and academic communities.
Conclusion In reviewing these articles some lessons from this brief history became very evident to me.
First there is the importance of listening to people with vision, even if they seem at odds with conventional wisdom.
Wilf Lancaster, Harold Varmus and Stevan Harnard are just three of these people.
What also comes across in this brief history is the willingness of the information profession to work together to solve seemingly intractable problems.
In the development of e-journal delivery, the UK Serials Group has to take a lot of credit for bringing stakeholders together on multiple occasions.
Figure 5: United Kingdom Serials Group Finally we need to appreciate that technology itself will not deliver value unless the content is also of value.
The Pilot Site Licence Initiative was a success primarily because of the reputation of the four publishers involved and the quality of their journals.
References Richard Waller.
"Editorial: Welcome to New Ariadne".
March 2012, Ariadne Issue 68 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue68/editorial1/ Ariadne: Overview of back issues archive http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issues Henry Rzepa.
"CLIC: An Electronic Chemistry Journal".
January 1996, Ariadne Issue 1 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue1/clic/ Royal Society of Chemistry: Project Prospect http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/ProjectProspect/ Brian Whalley.
"Electronic Journals, Evolutionary Niches".
May 1996, Ariadne Issue 3 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue3/ggg/ Fytton Rowland.
"Print Journals: Fit for the Future?".
January 1997, Ariadne Issue 7 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/fytton/ Judith Edwards.
"Electronic Journals: Problem Or Panacea?".
July 1997, Ariadne Issue 10 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/journals/ Jim Huntingford.
"Consortium and Site Licensing".
November 1997, Ariadne Issue 12 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/consortium Tony Kidd.
"Are Print Journals Dinosaurs?".
November 1997, Ariadne Issue 12 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/main/ Michael Day.
"The Scholarly Journal in Transition and the PubMed Central Proposal".
September 1999, Ariadne Issue 21 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/pubmed/ Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"Budapest Open Access Initiative Launches New Recommendations for the Next 10 Years of Open Access".
Deeplinks Blog, 21 September 2012 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/09/BOAI-10th-anniversary-new-recommendations Stevan Harnad.
"Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold".
January 2005, Ariadne Issue 42 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/harnad/ "Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications", ("Finch Report").
Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, June 2012 http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf Alison Murphy.
"JSTOR Usage".
June 2000, Ariadne Issue 24 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/jstor/ Eileen Fenton.
"Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico".
April 2006, Ariadne Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/fenton/ Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd Horsham West Sussex Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetdfocus.com Martin White has been tracking developments in technology since the late 1970s, initially in electronic publishing in the days of videotext and laser discs.
He is the author of four books on content management and search technologies.
His new e-book on enterprise search has just been published by O’Reilly Media.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the iSchool, University of Sheffield, since 2002 and is Chair of the eContent Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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Book Review: Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0 Buzz tagging blog video cataloguing youtube research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Delaney considers the effects of Web 2.0 on delivering information literacy to library students and end-users.
To my mind, information literacy is all about education: teaching users of all kinds of information how to find it, understand and evaluate it, and use it effectively.
Yet it is getting harder and harder to find ways to teach these skills when so much information is available at everybody's fingertips.
As a consequence, many people think they can get all they need from the Internet for free, let alone when your end-users are busy professionals for whom reading a book is often a desirable option they rarely find time to take up.
I offered to review this book because of a personal interest in keeping my library users – staff of the Audit Commission – up to speed on the information sources available.
Part of my role is to advise on which ones to trust and use, and to help them understand how to find the right information more quickly.
We need to find ways to embed this learning in the tools that they already use so that the learning is fun, relevant, timely and almost subliminal.
A recent report by University College London (UCL) on behalf of JISC and the British Library concluded that users 'have zero tolerance for delay and their information needs must be fulfilled immediately' and that, 'they pick up computer skills by trial-and-error' [1].
This isn't just a trait of the 'Google Generation' [2].
So, is Web 2.0 – or the library implementation of Web 2.0 – the way to combat these behaviours?
I was hoping that Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 would give me the answer to that question.
Part 1: The Basics In the first chapter of the book, Peter Godwin gives a very general overview of the challenge being faced in libraries and also in library schools, regarding the new behaviours of information users, the differences between the use of Web 2.0 tools for promotional activities versus for instruction or service provision, and whether the definition of what it means to be information literate has changed.
(His conclusion: the importance of understanding where the information has come from is escalating.)
Three pages of references provide a wealth of further reading on information literacy and Web 2.0, so it is a great place to start if you are new to either topic.
In chapter 2 Brian Kelly outlines the new tools available to librarians under the heading Library 2.0.
For readers who are not quite sure what is meant by Library 2.0 or Web 2.0, this is a handy little summary.
However for those more familiar with the types of tools that are available, it is perhaps a little too basic.
It does, however, set the scene for exactly which tools are being considered in the context of this book, although it stands alone from the topic of information literacy.
Part 2: Library 2.0 and the Implications for IL Learning The second section of the book focuses on the impact of Web 2.0 tools across 3 sectors: LIS students, school libraries and public libraries.
I admit that in reading Sheila Webber's chapter I started to become a little disillusioned about whether this was the book that was going to give me ideas about how to use Web 2.0 tools to deliver information literacy training.
Her focus was very much on how to embed training about using Web 2.0 tools for LIS students: training them to become literate in Web 2.0 tools.
Judy O'Connell and Michelle McLean's chapters follow a similar theme, so if you are looking for ideas on how to train people in using Web 2.0 tools, this resource is definitely a good place to start.
I did find O'Connell's chapter quite inspiring as she considers not just how the tools are used, but how the information being fed into them is structured, an aspect which is often neglected but which is core to our role as librarian.
McLean details her travels across the USA and provides a wealth of examples of how Web 2.0 is being used within library settings.
Many of her examples are quite inspirational and prompt you to put the book down and browse the examples to which she refers.
However, the examples are nonetheless largely about promoting libraries, or teaching users and staff how to use Web 2.0 tools; they are not about teaching wider information literacy skills using those tools.
Part 3: Library 2.0 and IL in Practice This third section is where we start to look at examples of Web 2.0 use in a variety of library settings.
In each case study, a different Web 2.0 tool is highlighted, giving an opportunity to see how it can be used within the library environment.
I found it a little disappointing that most of the examples are from university settings – which granted, do the most IL training – and which therefore have the opportunity to use assignments as a way to educate and assess their students.
The special library environment could try this, but is less likely to get the take-up to make the effort of designing the course worthwhile: short self-learning tutorials are more likely to be used.
Having said this, the examples do prompt some interesting thought – Deitering's chapter on using Wikipedia to demonstrate how knowledge is created; Allen & Barnhart's chapter regarding social bookmarking shows how different resources fit together, and Hoffman & Polkinghorne's tagging of images exercise highlights the importance of keywords to both the cataloguing and retrieval of information.
All of these are specific elements of the information literacy process and the various exercises could be used as part of a wider course to draw attention to these concepts.
Most useful were the video resources highlighted by Susan Ariew.
Although, again, designed for the university student, it is easy to see how the style and concepts used in the videos created by Tampa Library could be adapted to any audience.
The beauty of YouTube and other such resources is also that once you take a look at one of the examples, you are bound to come across other examples of learning to which to point your users.
(The Common Craft Show series on short explanatory videos is excellent and can easily be used by a library [3].)
Part 4: The Future The final section takes a look at gaming as a possible means of teaching information literacy.
In particular it points to the advent of the Nintendo Wii and DS which are already used for 'softer' games such as Big Brain Academy and SmartyPants.
One useful observation is that many game players often use research skills to find out ways to get to the next level or which games are best.
Godwin concludes that Web 2.0 consists of many tools that can be used to deliver information, information literacy skills and promote library services.
We need to harness these interactive tools – and those which continue to arise and develop – to ensure that users of information understand both their strengths and weaknesses.
Conclusion On one hand, this book delivered useful examples of how Web 2.0 is being used in libraries for many different activities, and therefore prompted thought and inspiration.
For example, it has made me want to create a video and interactive slide show that I can embed in a blog.
On the other hand, the examples are largely focused on the university setting, and most often address ways to teach your students and library users how to use Web 2.0 tools.
As such, I feel this work misses a trick in how to use these tools to teach users about the more traditional – and often still valid – information resources available to them.
I wouldn't say that this is a book that I must have by my desk at all times, but it has been an interesting read.
Indeed it pointed me towards some valuable sources and examples, and widened my thinking.
Now I just have to work out how to implement some of those ideas here ... References The University College London (UCL) CIBER group, "Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future: a ciber briefing paper", January 2008, p.19 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf ibid, p.6.
The Common Craft Show http://www.youtube.com/user/leelefever Author Details Emma Delaney Library Manager Audit Commission Email: e-delaney@audit-commission.gov.uk Web site: http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk Return to top Article Title: "Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0" Author: Emma Delaney Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/delaney-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit Buzz data software java wiki api dissemination xml atom apache archives zip metadata tagging namespace blog repositories eprints preservation jpeg rfc passwords gif perl syndication php mets dspace sru facebook licence authentication osid interoperability oai-ore url standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Julie Allinson, Sebastien Francois and Stuart Lewis describe the JISC-funded SWORD Project which has produced a lightweight protocol for repository deposit.
This article offers a twofold introduction to the JISC-funded SWORD [1] Project which ran for eight months in mid-2007.
Firstly it presents an overview of the methods and madness that led us to where we currently are, including a timeline of how this work moved through an informal working group to a lightweight, distributed project.
Secondly, it offers an explanation of the outputs produced for the SWORD Project and their potential benefits for the repositories community.
SWORD, which stands for Simple Web service Offering Repository Deposit, came into being in March 2007 but was preceded by a series of discussions and activities which have contributed much to the project, known as the ‘Deposit API’.
The project itself was funded under the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme, Tools and Innovation strand [2], with the over-arching aim of scoping, defining, developing and testing a standard mechanism for depositing into repositories and other systems.
The motivation was that there was no standard way of doing this currently and increasingly scenarios were arising that might usefully leverage such a standard.
Overview of SWORD’s Output Before outlining the history and inner workings of SWORD, here’s a brief overview of what SWORD has produced (to be further expanded in the following sections): A profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol which can be used by implementers to create SWORD-compliant deposit clients or SWORD interfaces into repositories, where the client will perform the deposit and the interface will accept it.
[3] Test implementations of the SWORD interface in DSpace, EPrints, IntraLibrary and Fedora to demonstrate the efficacy of the SWORD approach.
[4] Demonstration clients which can be used to deposit into the implementations at (2) or into any other SWORD-compliant implementations.
[5] Open source code for DSpace, Fedora, EPrints and the demonstration clients.
[6] Background to SWORD : The Deposit API Discussions about the lack of a standard mechanism for deposit have surfaced in a number of places, notably: in a session on repository reference models at the JISC CETIS Conference in 2005 led by Lorna Campbell and Phil Barker [7]; in Andy Powell’s ‘A service-oriented view of the JISC Information Environment’ in which a set of discrete services that a repository should offer included ‘deposit’ [8]; in the ‘add’ service identified by the eFramework [9]; and in presentations about the new Open Archives Initiative-Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) Project where ‘register’ has been used synonymously for ‘deposit’ [10].
Drawing on these indications that a deposit standard was needed within the repositories space, the newly formed Repositories Research Team, a collaboration between UKOLN and CETIS, led by Rachel Heery, contacted a group of repository developers in late 2005 and asked firstly whether they agreed that there was an identifiable need for a standard deposit protocol and secondly whether they would be willing to join a small ‘Deposit API’ working group of repository developers to kick off discussion in this area.
Among the repository platforms represented in the discussions were ARNO, OCLC, KaiNao, Harvestroad, Intrallect, EPrints, Fedora, DSpace and aDORE.
Many of those contacted were able to attend meetings in March and July 2006 where the requirements and scenarios around ‘deposit’ were explored and the beginnings of a serialisation were laid down [11].
Rationale for a Standard Deposit Mechanism There are various scenarios which illustrate why a standard deposit mechanism would be useful.
A standard deposit interface to repositories could allow more services to be built which can offer functionality such as deposit from multiple locations, e.g.
disparate repositories, desktop drag&drop tools or from within standard office applications.
Illustrations of this are shown in figures 1 and 2.
Figure 1: Author deposits using a desktop authoring system to a mediated multiple deposit service Figure 2: Deposit of experimental data output from a laboratory machine is initiated by a ‘save as’ function It could also facilitate deposit to multiple repositories, increasingly important for depositors who wish to deposit to funder, institutional or subject repositories (see figure 3).
Other possibilities include migration of content between repositories, transfer to preservation services and many more (see figure 4).
Figure 3: Deposit to multiple repositories is achieved from a single deposit point Figure 4: A repository transfers data to another repository or preservation service SWORD: The Project SWORD was funded to take the deposit API activity into a more formally funded project, to ensure that the ideas and enthusiasm already captured could be used to produce concrete outputs.
Led by UKOLN, the project was a partnership between CASIS at Aberystwyth University, the University of Southampton and Intrallect.
The project aims were simple – to agree on a protocol or specification for deposit, to implement a deposit interface into DSpace [12], Fedora [13], EPrints [14] and IntraLibrary [15] and to produce a prototype ‘smart’ deposit client for testing the implementations.
Requirements and Parameters Before agreeing a specification for deposit, the next step was to turn our scenarios into a set of concrete requirements from which we could derive a service definition and set of parameters.
Paramount in such a short project was the need to have a set scope.
For example, we agreed that authentication and authorisation, although important, could not be mandated or settled by SWORD.
SWORD concerns itself with the point of deposit, so metadata creation, again essential, should arrive at the deposit point in an agreed standard format such as that defined by the Scholarly Work Application Profile (SWAP) [16], but is not created by the deposit interface.
Issues surrounding standard metadata, data integrity, data formats and packaging are not trivial and it is easy to see that a standard deposit mechanism could fail if the deposits cannot be read and understood by different repositories.
Nonetheless, attempting to fulfil too big a scope would have made the work of the SWORD Project unmanageable within our time frame.
A selection of the requirements which emerged from our discussions were the need: to support a wide range of heterogeneous repositories, e.g.
scholarly publications, data, learning objects, images, etc.
to accept submission of different digital object types in a consistent way.
to accept data and/or metadata in the form of complex objects or content packages to support different workflows for deposit, e.g.
user to multiple repositories via intermediate client; user to repository, repository to additional repositories; user-triggered and machine-triggered deposit.
to accept large-scale deposits, e.g.
scientific datasets.
to support collections and changes in policy and permissions.
to support non-instantaneous processes, e.g.
deposit pending mediation.
to support more complex, authenticated and mediated deposit.
Defining the Service From these requirements we moved onto discussions about what a deposit service would comprise.
Two distinct services were identified: deposit and explain.
The explain service would allow a repository to provide information about its policy, whilst the deposit service would allow remote users to put data into the repository, with an accompanying ‘receipt’ indicating success or failure.
Additionally, a layered approach was outlined, whereby basic level ‘0’ compliance could easily be reached, with an extra level ‘1’ including additional parameters necessary for some repository transactions.
An added benefit of this layered approach was that it allowed additional layers to be added in the future.
This is illustrated in figure 5.
Figure 5: Parameters and levels of compliance [alternative format] Protocol and Profile From the outset of the Deposit API work, it was acknowledged that standards and specifications already existed which might be used to provide the basis of a deposit service.
A shortlist of candidate deposit specifications was drawn up, including WebDav, the OKI OSID (Open Knowledge Initiative Open Source Interface Definitions) and SRU/W (Search and Retrieve via URL or Web Service).
These were reviewed in a project brainstorming meeting and it was the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP or ATOMPUB) [17] that captured the interest of the group.
Lightweight, relatively easy to implement, already growing in use for remote blog posts and closely tied to the widely used Atom Syndication format (ATOM) [18], APP had much in its favour.
But would this lightweight standard be sufficient to fulfil the needs of repositories?
The Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) is ‘an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources’.
It is based on the HTTP transfer of Atom-formatted representations and is designed to support the deposit (POST) of ATOM documents and datastreams such as images.
In addition, it also facilitates update and delete.
Because of its scope, SWORD has focussed on two key aspects of the protocol the deposit of files, rather than Atom documents, and the extension mechanism for specifying additional deposit parameters.
SWORD does not specify the implementation of all of the functionality of APP since it supports deposit only, yet this is not meant to constrain implementers who want to support the fullness of APP.
Such extended functionality is a potential next step for SWORD.
By adding a small number of extensions to APP, we were able to support the list of parameters identified in figure 5 above as illustrated in figure 6: Figure 6: Parameters and levels of compliance [alternative format] Technical Outputs and Proof of Concept Within the boundaries of the SWORD Project we have produced demo SWORD deposit interfaces in EPrints, Fedora, DSpace and IntraLibrary.
Prototype clients in desktop, command-line and Web form allow for testing of SWORD interfaces, and sourceforge code for all of these permit reuse and wider dissemination.
The following sub-sections provide some technical detail about the EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and reference client Java implementations.
Generic Java Server Implementation A generic Java Servlet Implementation of a SWORD server was created to allow any Web system written in Java to add a SWORD interface easily.
The SWORD Servlet works by handling the SWORD interactions with the user, but delegates the handling of authentication, service document requests and package deposits to the repository.
The repository passes messages back to the SWORD Servlet to forward to the user in an appropriate format.
Since these are standard actions a repository will perform, integrating it with the SWORD Servlet is very easy.
DSpace Implementation The DSpace SWORD implementation has been written as an ‘add-on’ to DSpace making use of the new modular build system introduced in DSpace version 1.5.
This allows the SWORD module to be installed with ease alongside a current DSpace installation.
Once installed, it uses the generic Java server implementation of SWORD, and interfaces this with DSpace.
Out-of-the-box, it supports the use of zipped METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) packages (zip files), with a METS manifest containing SWAP encoded metadata.
Due to the hierarchical community and collection structure used by DSpace, responses to service document requests are easy to collate.
Any collection that a user can deposit to within DSpace is included in the list of collections returned to the user in the service document.
As each collection within DSpace has its own licence, this is used in the SWORD collection policy of each collection.
Deposited packages are ingested into DSpace via the METS plugin, with the SWAP metadata converted (crosswalked) into DSpace’s intermediate, XML-based metadata encoding ‘DIM’ [19].
This is then ingested into DSpace, along with any files in the package.
Authentication is delegated to DSpace, which then uses its configured authentication mechanism, for example LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), or its in-built password system.
Fedora Implementation As with the DSpace implementation, Fedora made use of the generic Java SWORD implementation.
The implementation is very flexible in terms of the object types it accepts for deposit.
It can accept single image files (gif or jpeg) which it stores in a new object with a single datastream, or it can accept zip files where it stores each file contained in the zip file in a separate datastream.
Alternatively it can accept METS documents where it separates each dmdSec (descriptive metadata section) into a datastream, or a zip file with a METS manifest which it can handle in a similar manner.
Eprints 3 Implementation Installation EPrints introduced a Plugin hierarchy in version 3, allowing the system to be easily customised.
Installing SWORD on EPrints 3 is simply a matter of copying some Perl files to the EPrints directory.
SWORD can then be easily enabled or disabled by editing an Apache configuration file.
Software Implementation The SWORD protocol was implemented as a two-step mechanism: the first step deals with unwrapping the metadata (eg.
when metadata is contained within a ZIP file) while the second step performs the actual import.
As such, two new classes of plugins were created on EPrints: the Unpacker class and the Importer class.
A MIME type is associated with each Unpacker plugin, while a Namespace is associated with each Importer plugin.
For example when a user deposits EPrints XML metadata embedded in a ZIP file, EPrints will first call the ZIP Unpacker module which decompresses the XML file.
Then the system calls the XML Importer plugin to perform the actual import of metadata.
Error messages will be returned to the client (especially the HTTP/400 Bad Request message) when the plugins fail respectively to decompress or import the data.
Otherwise, the newly deposited item will appear in the target collection.
(It is also possible to import raw files without embedded metadata eg.
a ZIP file containing a number of pictures or PDF documents.)
This design allows (advanced) users to support new formats easily, according to the need of the repository, and without interfering with the SWORD implementation.
Adding a new type (either MIME or Namespace) requires writing a module which handles the format and adding a single line to the SWORD configuration file.
Collections Items in an EPrints repository belong to one of three datasets: the “user inbox” (only visible to the depositing user), the “buffer” (items awaiting for approval) and the “live archive” (items visible to the outside world).
These datasets are the target collections when using SWORD.
Depending on the policy of the repository, it is possible to disable any of these collections (eg.
users are not usually allowed to deposit directly to the live archive on institutional repositories).
Authentication Since EPrints prevents its modules from returning raw HTTP headers, the authentication is carried out by the SWORD core.
This also makes it easier to define who can deposit on behalf of other users without modifying the conceptual model of EPrints.
Authentication over HTTPS is known to work but it is the EPrints administrators who would have to set this up by themselves via Apache.
Future EPrints hopes to support the full APP stack to enable more complex operations on existing items (updating, removing items or metadata, etc) and to develop extra tools for clients such as Microsoft plugins to deposit directly from Office applications.
Clients In order to test a new service such as SWORD, example clients are required.
As part of the SWORD Project, a core client library was commissioned and created.
In addition to this, three example clients were built using the client library: A command-line client: Useful for running automated scripts for testing.
Also useful for batch deposit of items by a computer (e.g.
laboratory equipment).
A GUI (graphical user interface) interface: This is the sort of interface a human user might employ.
A Web-based client: An online alternative to the GUI client, which has the benefit of not requiring any software to be installed.
The core client library was written in Java for portability and can easily be extended to create new clients.
The library and example clients are all published with an Open Source licence and can be downloaded and extended.
The clients can all either request a service document, or deposit to a collection.
The GUI and Web-based clients both make this easy by allowing a user to select from a preconfigured list of repositories and their service document locations.
Once a service document has been retrieved, the user is presented with the list of collections, and deposit buttons to deposit to each collection easily.
Figure 7 : A screenshot of the Web-based SWORD client As well as normal functionality, the clients can inject faults into deposits to allow SWORD server implementers to test their servers.
For example the client can corrupt the MD5 checksum of the file being sent, to ensure that the server correctly identifies the fault, and reports it back to the client through the correct use of HTTP response error codes.
A Facebook SWORD client is also currently being developed, along with a PHP and CURLbased client library.
Further details will be available from the SWORD wiki [20] when it becomes available.
Conclusion SWORD has achieved what it set out to do, to facilitate deposit into repositories from remote locations in a standard way and to enable the scenarios identified earlier to become a reality.
Now is the time to encourage uptake and implementation of both SWORD and APP.
This is perhaps the most difficult part, but beginning from the foundations outlined above, with the backing and input of repository developers we hope that SWORD really can help interoperability of deposit become a reality.
Not only that, but the process that has led us to where we are now can, it is hoped, help future development activity funded by JISC.
Already SWORD is being implemented by a number of projects and repositories, including arXiv [21], ICE [22], ROAD [23] and the Curriculum Online Web Service and Tagging Tool; and with case studies detailing on-the-ground experience in implementing SWORD in repositories and deposit clients to follow, further discussion and dissemination is inevitable.
References SWORD http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres.aspx SWORD Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD_APP_Profile SWORD Implemetations http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD_access SWORD clients http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD#SWORD_demonstration_clients SWORD Sourceforge site http://sourceforge.net/projects/sword-app/ Barker, Phil and Campbell, Lorna, JISC CETIS Conference 2005 Repsoitories Theme Strand Report http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/files/novconf2005.repositories.doc Powell, Andy, A service-oriented view of the JISC Information Environment, UKOLN, November 2005 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/soa/jisc-ie-soa.pdf eFramework ‘Add’ service genre http://www.e-framework.org/Services/ServiceGenres/ServiceGenreRegistry/Add11/tabid/843/Default.aspx Object Reuse and Exchange http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ Deposit API http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Deposit_API DSpace http://www.dspace.org/ Fedora http://www.fedora-commons.org/ EPrints http://www.eprints.org/ Intrallect IntraLibrary http://www.intrallect.com/index.php/intrallect/products/ Scholarly Works Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile Gregario, J. and B. de hOra, “The Atom Publishing Protocol”, RFC 5023, October 2007. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt Nottingham, M. and R. Sayre, “The Atom Syndication Format”, RFC 4287, December 2005.
[RFC4287].
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt DSpace ‘DIM’ (DSpace Intermediate Metadata) Format http://wiki.dspace.org/DspaceIntermediateMetadata SWORD wiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD arXiv http://arxiv.org/ Integrated Content Environment (ICE) Project http://ice.usq.edu.au/ Robot-generated Open Access data (ROAD) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/tools/road.aspx Author Details Julie Allinson Digital Library Manager University of York and SWORD Project Manager for UKOLN, University of Bath) Email: j546@york.ac.uk Sebastien François EPrints Developer University of Southampton Email: sf03r@ecs.soton.ac.uk Stuart Lewis Team Leader of the Web Applications and Repository Projects Team Information Services Aberystwyth University Email: stuart.lewis@aber.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit” Author: Julie Allinson, Sebastien François and Stuart Lewis Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/allinson-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IIPC Web Archiving Toolset Performance Testing at The British Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IIPC Web Archiving Toolset Performance Testing at The British Library Buzz data software framework html archives preservation standards hadoop Citation BibTex RIS Jackson Pope and Philip Beresford pick up the threads from an initial contribution in issue 50 and report on progress at The British Library in installing and performance testing the Web Curator Tool.
The British Library is adopting the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Toolset [1] comprising the Web Curator Tool (WCT), NutchWax and the Open Source Wayback Machine (OSWM) for its evolving Web archiving operations, in anticipation of Legal Deposit legislation being introduced within the next few years.
The aim of this performance-testing stage was to evaluate what hardware would be required to run the toolset in a production environment.
This article summarises the results of that testing with recommendations for the hardware platform for a production system.
To support current UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) [2] use, it is recommended that the archive is hosted on three machines.
One will host the WCT [3] including its harvest agent, running up to five simultaneous gathers, the second will run NutchWax searching and the OSWM for viewing the archive and the third will be a Network Attached Storage server.
This second machine will also perform daily indexing of newly gathered sites, executed during the night when the user access is likely to be low.
On finishing large crawls, a bug was found in the WCT that requires fixing before the system can be accepted for operational use.
This has been reported to the WCT developers.
Testing has shown that using Network Attached Storage (NAS) with the IIPC components does not constitute a problem from a performance point of view.
For more information about the conclusions drawn see the Recommendations section at the end of this article.
Testing Hardware The testing was performed on a single machine, and only one test was performed at a time.
The machine has a single 3 GHz Intel Xeon processor (featuring Hyperthreading) with 1 Gb of RAM and a 760 Gb hard disk.
Figure 1 shows the component diagram for the testing hardware and software.
Figure 1: Component Diagram for the Testing Hardware and Software The Web Curator Tool was tested in three ways: Gathering Web sites of different sizes Gathering several Web sites at once Multiple users reviewing a Web site simultaneously For the gathering of Web sites of various sizes, the gathering, reviewing (i.e.
looking at the gathered Web site to check the quality) and submission to the archive were all monitored.
As expected the average inbound data was larger than average outbound data, but the average did not increase linearly with the size of the site, presumably because some sites might have more small pages, and hence might be limited by the politeness rules (one hit per 300 ms per server).
There were no trends in the average memory or Central Processor Unit (CPU) usage (CPU load: 0.14 0.34, memory footprint: 90 240 Mb).
Maximum memory footprint is 300 Mb for the 5 Gb crawl.
In summary, the 5 Gb Web site can be harvested comfortably on the hardware used, but performance of other tasks is affected during the end of the crawl when the archived sites are being moved on disk.
Both reviewing and submission require a large memory footprint (up to 537 Mb for submitting a 5 Gb site), but submission in particular is very quick varying from a few seconds to four minutes for the 5 Gb crawl.
Submission also loads the CPU.
Performing multiple crawls simultaneously was also performed with a set of Web sites.
The same Web sites were used throughout (i.e.
first site in tests 1-6, second site in tests 2-6, etc) to allow some analysis of how running multiple searches affects gather times.
For the multiple-gathers tests, only gathering was monitored, since multiple reviewing is covered in another test.
Again there was no clear trend in memory footprint, with a maximum of less than 100 Mb.
CPU load showed a clear trend however, with a sharp increase around five simultaneous crawls (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: CPU Load for Simultaneous Crawls This implies that limiting the system to four or five simultaneous crawls is sensible to avoid times when the system becomes unresponsive.
Six simultaneous gathers also had an impact on gather times.
Gathering up to five sites had very little effect on gather times, but adding a sixth gather delayed all six of the gathers, with gather times for the sites increasing by between 8% and 49% above the average of the previous runs.
As expected, inbound data transfer increases as the number of gathers increases; but even with six simultaneous gathers the average bandwidth is only 313 Kb/s, well below the 500 Kb/s bandwidth restriction that had been set in the WCT.
The final tests of the WCT involved persuading multiple users to review a site in the WCT simultaneously.
During reviewing there was an upward trend of data transfer; but even with five people reviewing the site it did not reach significant levels.
Throughout testing, data transfer (inbound and outbound) remained in the range 18-143 Kb/s.
Average CPU load also increased with the number of users, and, with four or five simultaneous users, it reached levels that would interfere with gathers that were also being performed on the same machine.
See Figure 3 for a graph of CPU load.
Figure 3.
CPU load for multiple reviewers.
NutchWax Results NutchWax was tested in three ways: Indexing Web sites of various sizes Searching Web sites of various sizes Multiple users searching a Web site simultaneously When indexing the sites of various sizes, three stages were monitored: preparation (deleting old files from the HADOOP [4] file system and copying in the new ones), indexing and retrieving the index from HADOOP.
The preparation had negligible effect on all the monitored metrics.
Both indexing and retrieval show an upward trend in memory, disk bandwidth and CPU load, however the trend is not a good correlation to a linear approximation.
This could be due to the complexity of a site being the driver of the metrics rather than just raw size.
Sites with many more html pages or lots of links could increase the metrics over a similarly sized simple Web site.
Both indexing and retrieval have a large memory footprint: indexing peaked at 432 Mb for the 5 Gb site, and retrieval at 382 Mb.
CPU load was higher during indexing than retrieval with peak figures for the 5 Gb crawl being 2.4 and 0.38 respectively.
It took just over 21 minutes to index the 5 Gb crawl, which implies that the testing hardware can comfortably support the current UKWAC activity.
Searching did not significantly load the server in any metric, and did not show a steady upward trend on the sizes tested.
However average search times did increase on the sizes tested.
The longest search time was around 0.1 seconds, and the average for 5 Gb was only 0.028 seconds, so the system should be able to support far larger indices than the ones we tested.
More testing is required to determine how search times are affected on an index of 2Tb of archived material, as this is the order of magnitude the live system will need to support.
However, we are currently unable to do this in a reasonable timeframe, as gathering that much data would take several months.
The same is true of searching with multiple users, with the exception of six users which performed significantly more slowly.
However, the system was under significant load during the initial rest period for that test which continues throughout testing, which could have affected the times recorded.
With five users the system was managing a search every four seconds.
This tallies well with the current average page hits of the UKWAC site, being one every 7.5 seconds on average (although peak traffic will occur during the day).
Open-Source Wayback Machine Results The OSWM was tested in two ways: Viewing Web sites of various sizes Multiple users viewing an archived Web site simultaneously Viewing Web sites resulted in fairly low load across all metrics; however average CPU load increased with both the number of users and the size of the archive.
The increase in CPU load appears to increase logarithmically, although fitting a logarithmic trend line to the data led to a poor (but better than linear) correlation, suggesting that a larger archive would not cripple performance (see Figure 4).
This requires more testing once a larger archive is available.
Figure 4: CPU Load When Viewing Archives of Varying Sizes The increase in average CPU load against number of users is more linear as more users lead to more requests and hence a higher load.
During the testing the load per user was abnormally high, since users were trying to maximise the requests they generated rather than viewing, reading and exploring the archive.
Therefore the results for a few users presented should be equivalent to a higher number of real world users.
Figure 5 shows how the average and maximum CPU load varied with increasing numbers of users.
Figure 5: CPU Load with Varying Numbers of Users Index Size The size of the index in relation to the archive is important to ensure that enough disk space is reserved for that purpose.
In Figure 6, the archive size and the index size are compared for the four different test crawl sizes.
A logarithmic scale is used to show the lower values more clearly.
Index size varied between 5% and 39% of the size of the archive.
Figure 6: Comparing Index and Archive Sizes Storage We repeated all the single user tests for different sizes of sites using Network Attached Storage (NAS) to see how using storage which has to be accessed across the network would affect the performance of the system.
NAS has several advantages: it requires fewer servers to manage large amounts of storage; is easily configured into RAID arrays for improved data resilience; and is a standard way of storing large volumes of data which is likely to fit well with a hosting provider.
The disadvantage is that all information written to disk has to be transmitted across the network (which may have a detrimental effect on performance).
It has been reported that HADOOP encounters difficulties when it is run using NAS over the Network File Protocol (NFS).
The tests we performed allowed us to test that NutchWax (using HADOOP) would function correctly and to investigate the performance of using NAS for storage.
Both the live index and archive (used in searching and viewing archived sites) were moved to the NAS, and in addition the HADOOP file system (used by NutchWax to create an index) was located on the NAS (see Figure 7).
Figure 7: Testing Hardware Configuration for NAS Tests The metrics for the NAS tests were in some cases better than local storage and in some cases worse.
There was no identifiable pattern to the differences, so we can only assume these relate to random fluctuations in usage caused by the combination of programs running at the time and other network traffic.
In general, times using the NAS storage were better, although there were a couple of exceptions when the job took slightly longer using the NAS than local storage.
We attribute the general trend towards faster execution to the NAS server having higher performance disks than the local server.
In particular the indexing (which made the heaviest use of the NAS and was potentially problematic due to HADOOP not being designed to work with NAS) was significantly faster in all but one case, and was only one second slower in the anomalous case.
Recommendations General Memory use has been high throughout testing, as several of the programs suggest reserving a large amount of memory.
It is recommended that each machine used holds at least 2 Gb of RAM; this will avoid lack of memory causing swapping and thereby significantly prolonging the processing of jobs.
All testing was performed on a single machine with a direct-attached hard disk.
In operational use we will need access to a large amount of disk storage, and that will be provided through Network Attached Storage (NAS).
Bugs A problem was found performing large crawls: a 5 Gb crawl works; a 10 Gb does not).
The crawl completes successfully, but then times out during saving and is stuck in the 'stopping' state in the WCT.
We believe we have tracked down the cause of the timeout and reported it to the WCT developers for fixing in the near future.
Gathering/Reviewing Four or five gathers simultaneously per harvest agent will avoid too many problems due to overloading.
Additional crawls will be automatically queued, so if more than five crawls are scheduled to occur simultaneously, some will be queued to be processed once others have finished.
The average size of a site in the current UKWAC archive is 189 Mb, which should gather in around 1 hour and 20 minutes on average.
Assuming five gathers simultaneously, a single machine of the same spec as the testing hardware would be able to support approximately 5 * 18 = 90 gathers per day, well above the current average of approximately 10.
It is therefore fairly safe to assume that we can continue with a single gathering machine / harvest agent for the short-term future of small-scale, permissions-based crawling, with the option to introduce another harvest agent in the future if we significantly ramp-up gathering schedules.
For the same machine to support reviewing in addition to gathering, it will be necessary to add a second processor or a dual core processor, as multiple gathering and reviewing simultaneously places a noticeable load on the processor.
Indexing We currently collect around 3.5 Gb per day.
It is estimated that we can index that in around 15 minutes on a similar specification machine to that used in the testing.
It is therefore assumed that we can use the Wayback Machine for indexing; indexing each day's new ARC files during the night when the load on NutchWax and the OSWM for display is likely to be lighter.
This arrangement is likely to continue throughout the permissions-based gathering, but will need to be reviewed when we begin performing broad crawls of the UK domain.
NutchWax is designed to be inherently scaleable, but both the technical team at the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek KB) and we have had problems getting it to work on more than one machine.
Searching We need to perform larger-scale tests on searching since the production system will have over 2 Tb of archived data indexed far greater than the 5 Gb we were able to test.
When we migrate the existing data from the PANDAS system we will get an opportunity to test searching on the system before it goes live, and hence determine a suitable hardware framework for searching.
Viewing The nature of the viewing tests (multiple people quickly hopping from link to link) means that they model a higher usage than actually used.
One person quickly testing links might be the equivalent of three, four or even more people using the archive, reading the pages in some detail and hence requesting pages less frequently.
Generally, load on all metrics was fairly low which implies we can deal with far more users than the tests measured.
It is estimated that the system could support up to 50 concurrent users with similar hardware to the test system, although this number may be lower with a larger archive.
Index We recommend that an area 20% of the size of the archive is reserved for the index.
Storage We recommend that Network Attached Storage (NAS) is used to store both the index and the archive.
Despite the overheads communicating information across the network, NAS performed better in our tests and is easily configured into a RAID array for improved data resilience.
References International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) software : toolkit http://netpreserve.org/software/toolkit.php UK Web Archiving Consortium Project Overview http://info.webarchive.org.uk/ Philip Beresford, Web Curator Tool, January 2007.
Ariadne, Issue 50. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/beresford/ Wikipedia entry on Hadoop, retrieved 29 July 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadoop Author Details Jackson Pope Technical Lead Web Archiving Programme The British Library Boston Spa Wetherby West Yorkshire LS23 7 BQ Email: jackson.pope@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk/ Philip Beresford Project Manager Web Archiving Programme The British Library Boston Spa Wetherby West Yorkshire LS23 7 BQ Email: philip.beresford@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "IIPC Web Archiving Toolset Performance Testing at The British Library" Author: Jackson Pope and Philip Beresford Publication Date: 30-July-2007 Publication: Ariadne Issue 52 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/pope-beresford/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Intute Integration Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Intute Integration Buzz data software api javascript html database rss xml metadata css firefox accessibility browser blog oai-pmh cataloguing z39.50 linux marc perl e-learning utf-8 php personalisation mysql sru facebook url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Angela Joyce, Jackie Wickham, Phil Cross and Chris Stephens describe Intute's ongoing Integration Project, which is promoting and developing integration of Intute content in the UK academic library community.
The evolution of the Web has changed the way that people access information.
Web 2.0 technologies have allowed information providers to integrate their services in people's existing online spaces, and users expect to be able to synthesise, edit and customise content for their own specific purposes.
Intute, the JISC-funded service that aims to offer the best of the Web for Higher and Further Education, has responded to these changes by developing a variety of integration services which offer flexible ways of delivering its content to users.
This article aims to give an overview of the Intute Integration project, which began in March 2006.
It looks at the rationale behind the project, the integration methods offered, technical issues, a case study, uptake, challenges presented, and future plans.
Intute is a JISC-funded service that offers a searchable and browsable database of Web resources, all of which have been selected, evaluated and described by subject specialists working within the UK's Higher and Further Education communities.
It also offers the Virtual Training Suite and Internet Detective to develop information literacy.
Intute has always offered a range of content integration services, originally referred to as 'embedding' services, and many of these tools began their development in the Hubs that made up the Resource Discovery Network, Intute's predecessor.
For example, the MyIntute service, which enables users to customise Intute content, was a direct descendent of the MyHumbul service from Humbul the Humanities hub.
Further information about the Resource Discovery Network and its transition to Intute is available [1] [2].
The Integration Project represents a more focused approach, to develop and market them as one clear service, which supports Intute's strategic objectives and business plan.
Rationale One of Intute's objectives is to demonstrate its efficiency and value to its funders, and offering integration services is one way of doing this.
Given the current trend for re-purposing, sharing and mashing up content in various formats, Intute has developed flexible ways of offering free content to its user community.
Intute is keen to extend its user base and one way of attracting users already bombarded with many online services is to offer access to Intute content in places where they already go, such as their own library portals and VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments).
Intute also offers a personalisation service (MyIntute) which could appeal to many current users and which embodies many Web 2.0 functions for mashing up and redistributing content.
Integrating can save HE and FE institutions from 're-inventing the wheel' and individually producing similar guides to the Web.
There can be cost savings for them too.
Leeds University is a partner in an Integration Project case study with Intute and has saved £22,000 on replacement costs for hardware and software.
Intute is committed to promoting this approach with universities and colleges and one of its Key Performance Indicators relates to this activity.
With the constant speed of change in the information landscape, Intute needs to keep abreast of developments in educational technology and offer progressive services.
It also needs to offer flexible options which will appeal to users.
According to the CIBER report, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future [3], users show 'clear differences in information-seeking behaviour by subject, gender, and by work role'.
The report investigated new types of online behaviour, which is of great interest to Intute.
Many people are 'skimming' resources quickly, using only a fraction of content in a service, or relying on favoured brands.
Users appear to want simplicity of use without advanced search mechanisms.
Intute follows Web 2.0 developments and ideas, and aligns its objectives with JISC strategies, even if the informative What is 2.0?
report [4] from JISC admits, 'people still can't actually agree what it means.'!
Ways of Integrating Various methods of integrating content are offered, which can be broken down into five main areas: Linking to Intute or the Virtual Training Suite Search options, eg.
Federated search, integrating the Intute search box Using Intute newsfeeds (over 100 available) Using MyIntute to customise Intute and non-Intute resources Users contributing content to Intute More information on these methods is given on the Integration page of the Intute Web site.
[5] There are some interesting examples of universities or organisations which have integrated Intute content already.
It can vary considerably.
Most UK universities (66% in our August 2007 survey) had only used the simple link facility so far.
Some had been more ambitious and put in a search box, newsfeeds and pulled in content from MyIntute.
Bookmarks of more advanced integration examples can be viewed on del.icio.us.
[6].
Technical Approaches and Issues Intute offers two different technical approaches to providing integration options for our users.
The first involves the provision of standard APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that can be used by Web application developers to incorporate searches of the Intute catalogue into their own services.
Library portals are good examples of users of this kind of service.
The second approach provides services aimed at Web site administrators, often information professionals, who are not programmers but who wish to insert content from Intute directly into their own Web pages.
Examples of this type of service might be the insertion of RSS feeds provided by Intute directly into user Web pages or the Intute Include service, which places an Intute search box into a Web site.
Intute APIs Z39.50 and SRU/W Despite its age, Z39.50 is still in demand as a programming interface to Intute's catalogue, generating just under 100,000 hits per month on average, the majority of which come from library portals such as Metalib.
We chose a convenient Z39.50 interface that could be customised to work directly with our catalogue's database and which also provided an SRU/W interface out of the box.
We had some initial problems with the unexpected demand via this link and had to restrict session times to prevent our server being overwhelmed by too many simultaneous user sessions.
The software is highly configurable and we have expanded our SRU/W output from a basic MARCXML format, to a more standards-compliant version of MARC (MARC21slim) plus Dublin Core.
XML output from SRU/W has also occasioned the usual headaches with odd character sets within the database, but all should now be output in the correct utf-8 format.
OpenSearch OpenSearch [7] is a method for sharing the output of search engines by providing a means of specifying to an application how to submit searches to a search engine via URL and standard ways of outputting the search results using XML.
Results can then be integrated into aggregating services or incorporated into the toolbar search boxes of Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2.
(There are simple instructions on how to do this [8]).
OAI-PMH This protocol for metadata harvesting has long been used by the RDN, and now Intute, for exchanging metadata with partner services and others.
In particular it is used with Google to ensure it indexes all our records, an important source of access to the catalogue.
It is also used with OAIster, which indexes those of our records that point to full text documents [9].
Integration Services For those who want Intute content within their Web site but do not have the desire or facilities to make use of our programming interfaces, we provide some applications for integrating our content.
Intute Include Perhaps our main method for making content available via our users' Web sites is Intute Include.
This is a mechanism whereby an Intute search box can be inserted into someone else's search page, with the search results formatted using that Web site's own look and feel.
This is achieved by inserting the search results from Intute into a locally created template.
This gives the impression to the site's users that they are using a service provided by the site, without navigating away to Intute.
The model used is based on a system developed at UKOLN for the RDN [10], the predecessor of Intute.
In fact, when Intute was launched, our interim solution was to copy across the RDN-Include code, and alter it to work with the new Intute search engine.
However, the RDN-Include code was by this time quite old, returning non-compliant fragments of HTML, using tables for formatting, for insertion into the Web site's template.
The code has since been rewritten using the OpenSearch standard as the basis for exporting search results (see above).
Some extra functionality was also added so that full record details can be viewed, with keywords hyperlinked for further searches.
Intute Include requires a Web administrator to install some simple software on the local Web server.
This is only available for Linux/Unix systems at present, but we will be making a .NET version available within the next few months for Microsoft Web servers.
As some technical effort is required to install Intute Include, which may deter some users, we also make available Intute-Lite, which only requires the creation of an HTML page template for results and some HTML entered into the user's Web page.
We suspect a lot of people avoid this option too, thinking that JavaScript is required, but a non-JavaScript version is also available to avoid any accessibility issues.
The main issue we still have with Intute Include is that is does not work with Web sites produced through the use of content management systems; so we will be looking at other models for embedding our search boxes into Web pages in the future.
RSS Based on RSSxpress, also code originally developed by UKOLN, Intute-Channel-Lite enables RSS feeds (including Intute's 100+ RSS feeds, of course) to be directly embedded in a Web page without any technical know-how.
This does require the use of JavaScript, however, which fetches the RSS feed via some software running at Intute that formats the feed as HTML, and inserts it in the Web page.
The HTML uses CSS classes, which allow the user to format the output to fit with their own look and feel.
MyIntute The MyIntute service is the user's own personal workspace, which allows users to save, tag and customise Intute content.
Non-Intute Web sites can also be saved, tagged and exported.
Exports can be done using JavaScript which enables dynamic updating of Intute records.
Tagged records can also be emailed to yourself or other people, and saved Intute searches can be exported as RSS feeds.
Further developments are underway, for example, allowing users to comment on and rate Intute resources, similar to the Amazon Web site.
Figure 1: Example of MyIntute screen with a tag cloud [11] http://www.intute.ac.uk/myintute/index.php The MyIntute system uses a combination of PHP, Perl, JavaScript, CSS and a MySQL database backend.
Data from the system can be exported by the user as ordinary HTML, JavaScript, plain text, or, experimentally at the moment, RSS.
The JavaScript and RSS exports give the user a pointer to a file which is saved on the MyIntute server.
In this way, these exports can be maintained by the system and changed records can be updated without users having to do anything themselves.
These updates are carried out each night when a scheduled script is run.
Users also have the option to refresh the content at any time by re-exporting.
Some of the problems confronted when building the MyIntute system included the way different browsers render the CSS, as well as some small differences in JavaScript.
The CSS in particular was designed to be as platformand browserindependent as possible, though a couple of work-arounds still had to be used to account for differences between Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.
MyIntute is currently being assessed for its accessibility, and a number of improvements have already been made.
Some of the MyIntute functions rely on the use of JavaScript in the user's browser.
Although all the major functions can now be accessed without JavaScript, there are still one or two which will not work for the non-JavaScript-enabled browser.
This issue is being addressed.
The future development of MyIntute should see much more extensive use being made of RSS as an alternative to JavaScript for dynamic exports.
It is also intended to start making use of the social networking possibilities of having registered users; for instance, by putting users with similar subject profiles in touch with one another.
Leveraging the existing social networking tools, such as Facebook, may be one way to achieve this objective and a prototype Facebook application is already in development for MyIntute.
Marketing and Publicity With the technical developments complete, the focus turned to promoting the Integration services to potential users.
The main target audience was academic librarians.
Intute consists of four subject groups (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Health and Life Sciences and Science, Engineering and Technology) and one or two representatives from each group were invited to join an Integration planning group.
A workshop was held in June 2007 to plan the first publicity campaign.
The intention was to exploit Intute's advantage of having many contacts right across their subject communities.
It was also decided to produce a series of Quick Guides, four in total, describing how to use the available services.
The first stage was an email campaign, aimed at pre-existing contacts in each Intute subject group.
A standard email was sent out to contacts, either associations or individuals, explaining the benefits of Integration and pointing users to the Quick Guides.
Then press releases were sent to key organisations or journals such as JISC, CILIP and Information World Review.
News items were also posted on the Intute blogs.
A standard Powerpoint presentation on Integration was written for Intute staff to adapt and use at publicity events.
To help users get started, we produced a DIY package of help materials in Summer 2007.
The Integration help pages were updated, four Quick Guides [12] were written and the Intute online helpdesk was made available to take any email queries.
These guides are aimed at staff with a good knowledge of editing Web pages, although they could be a taster for less technical people who are curious.
They form an introduction to Intute and the methods above, to explain more and show some pre-existing examples as screenshots, from universities who have already integrated.
The guides were written with user in mind and tested by a non-technical member of the team, who set up a Web site.
The Quick Guides were trialled on volunteers in the user community, which was a valuable exercise and provided some feedback and ideas for improvements.
The second stage of the publicity campaign is more focused, aimed at Intute's partner universities where staff work for Intute and at UK universities with the largest student populations.
Intute staff are currently meeting library staff or e-learning managers at target universities to present on Intute Integration and discuss their needs.
Staff also include Integration in other presentations on Intute and some do live demonstrations of MyIntute, to show its capabilities of exporting content in flexible ways.
The latest development is a new "Exemplar" programme.
Institutions who have systematically integrated Intute into their Web sites are eligible to become Intute Exemplars.
Further information is available [13].
Leeds Case Study In the mid-1990s, the University of Leeds adopted the Roads software to list subject databases and Web sites on its library Web pages.
This was in the pre Google era when Yahoo was a directory service and subject gateways were in their infancy.
By 2006, this was creaking at the seams: the server needed replacing, the software was no longer supported and the database indexes were full.
In addition, there were workload issues of maintenance and the Library wanted to avoid flat Web pages of links.
They therefore approached us for advice.
A pilot was set up to test the feasibility of using Intute's new integration services to populate the Subject Guides to Internet Resources.
A number of subject librarians agreed to be guinea pigs: Education, Law, Engineering, Dentistry and East Asian Studies.
The pilot focused on workload, availability of Intute records and technical issues.
It explored a number of ways of adding Intute services into the library Web pages and of including content from the Intute catalogue: Embedding the Intute Search Box RSS feeds Customising resources using MyIntute The result was a subject guide entirely populated by Intute and updated automatically: Figure 2: Leeds University Library subject guide [14] http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/subjects/ After the trial, a training session was held for all subject librarians in December 2006 and by summer 2007 Intute's integration services were in use across the Web site.
In terms of workload, the librarians found MyIntute very quick and easy to use.
For the majority of subjects, Intute had comprehensive coverage and in some cases better Web sites were found.
There were some issues of scope and language – some of the Web sites which they wanted to include fell outside the scope of Intute's Collection Policy e.g.
local NHS Trusts, while some Web sites were in languages not covered.
The solution was to develop additional functionality which allowed users to add their own records in their own MyIntute workspace.
In fact the only issue was one of Accessibility.
To present the lists, MyIntute uses JavaScript which was not permitted on the Leeds University Web site.
Local IT staff developed some PHP coding which solved the problem.
Intute is now looking at this approach and working on other options, e.g.
RSS feeds.
The project realised benefits for both organisations.
Leeds University made real savings in software and hardware as well as in staff time on link and content checking.
'MyIntute has offered us an easy and effective way of promoting quality assured websites to our students', remarked Martin Gill, Faculty Team Leader, University of Leeds Library.
At the same time, Intute received invaluable feedback on its products during the development stage and has increased access to its resources beyond the Intute Web site.
Measuring Uptake Desk research was conducted during Summer 2007 to determine a benchmark of the impact of Integration services.
The Universities UK listing was used to find university Web sites [15].
University library Web pages were browsed and searched for any examples of Intute content integration.
Incidental outdated RDN links were also noted and the relevant libraries contacted to request an update of links.
Results were recorded on an Excel spreadsheet.
Unfortunately it was impossible to find out how many institutions had integrated Intute content in direct response to our publicity email.
Some library staff may have heard of Intute from other sources or simply came across it by chance.
The most popular method of integrating was a simple link to Intute 66% of the survey population.
Only 7% had implemented the Intute search box.
18.5% still had outdated RDN links – sometimes next to Intute links.
Typically there were two categories where Intute was mentioned: Under a general heading like 'Electronic Resources' or 'Databases', along with other free and subscription services.
Certain libraries sub-divided Electronic Resources further and put Intute under 'Gateways'.
In addition, Intute was also often listed in 'Subject Guides' or 'Subject Resources'.
Clearly there is still scope for further integration of Intute.
More research is needed to find out why libraries are mainly using simple links and how they would like to use Intute content in future.
This survey will be repeated at regular intervals.
Below are some sample screenshots of integration examples: Figure 3: Intute at University of the West of England [16] http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/resources/general/gateways/ Figure 4: Economics Network use of MyIntute to import economics records [17] http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/links/general.htm Conclusion There is great potential for further integration of Intute content.
Intute needs to do more user research to find out how and why integration is being carried out (or, indeed, why not).
As Intute researcher Paul Ayres succinctly puts it in his article for ALISS Quarterly [18], 'The next part of the challenge is surfacing Intute data in truly open parts of the Web, which means engaging with and contributing to third party websites.'
Integration needs to be made even simpler if possible, to encourage more users to make use of our content.
References Retrospective on the RDN, Debra Hiom, April 2006, Ariadne, Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/hiom/ Intute: The New Best of the Web, Caroline Williams, July 2006, Ariadne, Issue 48 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/williams/ Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (CIBER) 2008 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf Anderson, Paul: What is Web 2.0?
JISC, 2007 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/twweb2.aspx Intute Web site Integration page http://www.intute.ac.uk/integration/ Del.icio.us bookmarks http://del.icio.us/angejoyce OpenSearch http://www.opensearch.org/Home OpenSearch instructions http://www.intute.ac.uk/integration/opensearch/ OAIster http://www.oaister.org/ RDN-Include: Re-branding Remote Resources: A Poster Accepted for the WWW 10 Conference http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/www10/ Example of MyIntute screen with a tag cloud http://www.intute.ac.uk/myintute/index.php Intute Quick Guides http://www.intute.ac.uk/integrationguides/ Exemplar Quick Guide http://www.intute.ac.uk/integration/exemplars/ Leeds University Library subject guide http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/subjects/ Universities UK List of University Heads http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/members/ Intute at University of the West of England http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/resources/general/gateways/ Economics Network use of MyIntute http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/links/general.htm 'Is the Web2.0 Price worth paying?
Learning from Economics',Paul Ayres, ALISS Quarterly, v. 3, no.2, (pp.
18-21), 2008.
ISSN: 1747-9258 Author Details Angela Joyce Intute Research Officer University of Bristol Email: angela.joyce@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~cmamj/ Jackie Wickham Service Manager, Intute: Health and Life Sciences University of Nottingham Email: Jacqueline.Wickham@nottingham.ac.uk Phil Cross Intute Senior Technical Researcher University of Bristol Email: phil.cross@bristol.ac.uk Chris Stephens Intute Developer University of Oxford Email: christopher.stephens@oucs.ox.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Intute Integration" Author: Angela Joyce, Jackie Wickham, Phil Cross and Chris Stephens Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/joyce-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Making Sense With Metadata Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Making Sense With Metadata Buzz infrastructure metadata namespace schema repositories dcmi interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin takes a look at an impressive new book on the topic of metadata design, implementation and evaluation in theory and practice.
The casual visitor to the area of digital library research could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the sheer mass and complexity of the world of metadata, not to mention the speed at which things move on.
It is in no sense a rare occurrence, even for those taking an active role in the field, to find that something else has changed and that one has, as they say in other walks of life, 'missed a memo'.
This book is a valuable teaching tool for people entering that environment.
It's also full of clarifications for those who have already spent some time there.
If you've ever had the feeling that you've missed a memo, take a look at this book you might find that it's been reprinted here.
There's even a companion Web site [1].
This is perhaps useful for its collections of links to relevant sources.
However, the 'quizzes and exercises' are skeletal in nature and description.
They do not make use of the potential richness in interaction offered by the Web, and are therefore perhaps more suitable as classroom exercises.
Unlike the book itself, their suitability for self-study is in some cases limited.
A "Who's Who" of the Metadata Field I found this book consistently interesting in that, for one with some exposure to 'digital library' events such as the yearly Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) conferences, it can be very helpful to fill some of the many gaps in my understanding.
There are inevitably times in which the purpose of developments and changes is not initially clear to the amateur "metadata standard-spotter", and this book often reveals a clear rationale behind these cases.
A great deal of historical information is provided, and it is clear that this is useful to publish and to own.
The book is full of illuminating definitions, mostly referenced directly to primary sources.
A certain amount of theory is provided, much of it in the form of bullet-pointed lists, which have the advantage of easy readability and clarity, but can on occasion give the impression of reading lecture notes.
Embedded Journalism There's a flip-side to the authors' extensive and knowledgeable coverage of metadata in Library and Information Services (LIS).
Whilst this book will give you all the information you're likely to need to be able to pick up and understand technical memoranda in the area, its very success in that area means that those who move in other circles might find that the book does not mesh well with an outsider's viewpoint.
Metadata as a paradigm is far from universally understood or accepted.
Those who are unfamiliar with the rationale that led to the present-day dominance of metadata as a concept within library and information science might have wished for the book to begin with a longer introduction on the topic, rather than a brief presentation of metadata as the undisputed 'invisible hand of efficient organisation' [2].
Of course, Ariadne readers are likely to be already aware of the many bitter arguments surrounding the present dominance of metadata as a concept and a toolkit in the digital library/information management landscape, and it is likely that those working towards a qualification in the area of library and information science will be introduced to that discussion during their studies.
Therefore, it is the professional or researcher in other fields who is likeliest to find the implicit coverage of the most basic (and disputed) points problematic.
Structure The book is separated into four major parts: Part I.
Fundamentals of Metadata 1.
Introduction – brief history, definitions, types and functions, principles and anatomy.
2.
Current standards – a broad overview of existing metadata standards for various purposes, use cases and resource types Part II.
Metadata building blocks 3.
Schemas – structure and semantics – Elements, element sets, value spaces, application profiles, crosswalks and best practice 4.
Schemas – Syntax – encodings and namespaces 5.
Metadata records – requirements, conceptual models, issues of granularity, sources, encodings Part III.
Metadata services 6.
Metadata services – introduction, necessary infrastructure, metadata registries, repositories, and ensuring optimal discovery 7.
Metadata quality measurement and improvement – quality, functional requirements, quality measurement with various granularities, measurement inducators, metadata evaluation methodologies and quality enhancement 8.
Achieving interoperability – at the schema, record and repository levels Part IV.
Metadata outlook in research 9.
Metadata research landscape – research overview in metadata architecture, modelling and semantics The appendices include useful sources and references on metadata standards, value encoding schemes, content standards, and so forth.
There is also an excellent bibliography provided at the end of the book, as well as the useful resources and suggested readings at the end of each chapter.
Conclusion This book is certainly a useful addition to the shelves of students and researchers in the digital library field.
It may possibly be limited in appeal outside that field, but perhaps it would have been an error for the authors to try to produce both the cogent and readable guide that has been published here, and a more general text that would have been appropriate in a less LIS-related context.
References Metadata Textbook Website Index http://www.neal-schuman.com/metadata/ Zeng, M. L. & Qin, J. Metadata, Facet Publishing, 2008, p3.
Author Details Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Making Sense with Metadata" Author: Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/tonkin-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Digitisation and e-Delivery of Theses from ePrints Soton Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Digitisation and e-Delivery of Theses from ePrints Soton Buzz data software framework api xml archives metadata digitisation repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing jpeg aggregation ocr url research jstor Citation BibTex RIS Julian Ball and Christine Fowler describe the partnership between the University of Southampton’s Library Digitisation Unit and its institutional repository for digitising and hosting theses.
The Hartley Library at the University of Southampton has in excess of 15,000 bound PhD and MPhil theses on 340 linear metres of shelving.
Consultation of the hard-copy version is now restricted to readers making a personal visit to the Library, as no further microfiche copies are being produced by the British Library and no master copies of theses are lent from the Library.
Retrieval of theses from storage for readers and their subsequent return requires effort from a large number of staff.
Second soft-bound copies of theses were once deposited by authors and were available to libraries for consultation through the inter-library loan (ILL) process.
Due to ever-tightening constraints on physical storage, these copies are now no longer deposited, and those once held have been sent for disposal, thus removing the facility of loans for external readers.
With the move towards electronic distribution of all University written materials, the University of Southampton amended its Calendar commencing with the period October 2008/09 to require as a condition of award for authors to deposit, in addition to the paper copy, an electronic copy of their thesis that the University can electronically distribute [1].
At the time of deposit consent is obtained that the University may make the thesis electronically available through the University of Southampton Research Repository subject to any approved embargo period.
Authors retain the copyright of their thesis and this remains unaffected by the Calendar amendment.
Digitisation and Authors’ Rights With the general move of the University towards electronic distribution of written materials, the University Calendar was amended in 2008, establishing that theses would be deposited electronically, to enable open access from the research repository, ePrints Soton [2].
The Library has started a retrospective mass digitisation programme generating searchable PDFs for theses prior to 2008.
Due to the copyright residing with authors and with no provision in the Calendar prior to 2008 for electronic delivery, procedures have been established to gain the consent of authors before providing access to the PDFs.
Further aspects may prevent the digitisation of theses and electronic distribution that include the presence of published papers, third-party copyright materials within the text and part of the work being submitted as a digital copy.
The digitisation methodology used by the Library is based primarily on that adopted by the EThOS electronic theses online system [3].
Comment is provided on the digitisation of unbound theses, scanning techniques, file size, watermarking and compression to ensure that theses can be delivered from ePrints Soton.
Figure 1: Study area in the Hartley Library, University of Southampton In order to facilitate access to theses by external readers author consents are being retrospectively gained.
Currently all theses are catalogued on the Library management system (SirsiDynix Symphony) and electronic deposits are catalogued in ePrints Soton.
Readers are provided with links between the two sources.
Since 1 October 2008 a number of theses have been deposited in an electronic format and made available from ePrints Soton [2], the University research repository.
Distribution is made to the world community free of charge and without any restrictions except where there are legitimate embargoes for legal reasons, such as patent technology or other required confidentiality issues.
The University of Southampton Calendars prior to 2008/09 did not include any provision for electronic deposit and distribution.
The author’s copyright remains in place for a period of 70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author dies (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 s.12 [4]).
In consequence, no digital copies of theses can be made prior to September 2008 for the purpose of open access distribution without the written permission of the author or their Estate.
Rationale for Digitisation and Electronic Delivery of Theses The programme of digitisation and electronic delivery of theses at Southampton is informed by the following points: local use studies at Southampton have shown that bound theses submitted in the last 10 years are widely consulted the University has a research repository, ePrints Soton that is being used for the delivery of theses.
In the academic year 2012/2013 from a holding of 2,166 unrestricted PDFs, there were 249,406 downloads and 200,331 abstract views theses represent a rich resource of research data and digitisation will further expose their content through web search engines potential global exposure increases their citation frequency theses are written in English and many world research workers have at least a working knowledge of English, making these materials a valuable world-wide resource current access to the paper version is restricted to readers physically present at the University of Southampton Library electronic access will reduce storage space and staff retrieval time electronic access provides researchers a stable URL that can be referenced the University of Southampton Library has a well-equipped Digitisation Unit with a range of book scanners and staff able to digitise theses Based on this rationale, the University of Southampton Library has embarked on a programme of digitisation of its theses published prior to 1 October 2008 for distribution via ePrints Soton.
Currently 3,212 theses have been digitised from the period 2001 September 2008.
Searchable PDFs generated from these theses are stored in a dark archive and uploaded into ePrints Soton when the author’s consent has been obtained.
A number of considerations have been met prior to and during the digitisation process which are outlined in the following sections.
Addressing Copyright Prior to and including session 2007/2008, the University of Southampton stipulated in the Calendar 2007/08 s31a [5] that authors only give written permission for their paper thesis to be lent, copied and distributed.
This gave no provision for the creation and distribution of digital surrogates or for publishing on a web repository or distribution through electronic means.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 c.48 s.42 [6] enables prescribed libraries, which includes university libraries, to copy any item in its permanent collection for preservation purposes.
This provision does not enable electronic free open distribution of theses.
A number of options were considered to protect the University from copyright infringement of electronically distributed theses submitted prior to September 2008 that included: a takedown policy for any thesis made available electronically if challenged by the author placing notices in national newspapers stating that the University would make theses electronically available unless an objection was made within a specified time-frame obtain the consent of authors to make their thesis electronically available The first two options were deemed inadequate by an IP specialist in the University of Southampton as they could not be relied on..
The third approach is currently being implemented, whereby the consent of each author is being obtained prior to making their thesis digitally availably to the world community from the research repository.
Obtaining the Consent of Authors To ensure that the University of Southampton has a creditable consent from authors who wish to allow their thesis to be electronically distributed, a ‘Supplementary author declaration and consent (e-thesis)’ form has been developed and is available on-line [7].
Authors are invited to sign the form and send the original to the University.
Upon receipt of the form, their thesis can be made available via ePrints Soton if there are no third-party copyright issues.
To obtain the permission of individual authors a number of approaches are being employed which include: placing a small article in the University of Southampton Alumni newsletter and asking for the completion of the ‘Supplementary Release Form’ placing the Supplementary Release Form on the Library and the Alumni Web pages letters to individual authors emails to individual authors The University is actively raising awareness through the Office of Development and Alumni Relations to gain Author consent.
In one publication of the Alumni newsletter, authors were invited to sign the ‘Supplementary Release From’ and 35 consents were obtained.
100 letters were individually sent to authors and 21 consents were obtained.
15 authors have given consent who noted the invitation on the Hartley Library Web pages.
The Office of Development and Alumni Relations supplied 166 email addresses of pre-2008 PhD alumni.
A targeted email to the alumni produced 19 responses enabling their theses to be uploaded into ePrints Soton for open access.
Digitisation from Unbound Theses Theses at Southampton have in the most part been bound by the University bindery and in a relatively uniform style.
The A4 sheets are stitched into sheaves, glued and bound into a round backed spine.
These openings are very tight with the text lying towards the binding gutter.
Digitisation of the volumes intact using book scanners can result in some of the text being lost during digitisation.
A trial to unbind theses and digitise single sheets was undertaken.
The case, front and back boards and spine were removed intact and the binding removed by guillotining.
Experience has shown that the cases from other binders may not be so easily removed.
Digitisation of single sheets opened up the possibility of using document feeders.
It was found that the digitisation and quality assurance of single sheets using either manual book scanners or form feed photocopies produced better quality images than from bound theses and was a quicker process.
The decision was therefore taken to unbind theses prior to digitisation.
Following digitisation, the sheets are returned loose to the intact case, bound with linen tape and sent off site for long term storage.
Digitisation Methodology The methodology of digitisation adopted by the JISC-funded EThOS [8] Project has been used in part by the Library Digitisation Unit for University of Southampton theses.
The remit is to produce a digital copy of the deposited hard-bound paper thesis and to make the content searchable with a file size that enables electronic transmission over current bandwidth restrictions.
This is being achieved with the following digitisation procedure: theses are digitised at a true resolution of 300dpi to maximise the optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy individual pages that contain only black text or diagrams are digitised in black and white 1-bit monochrome pages containing any grey or colour component are digitised in colour as 24bit ABBYY Recognition Server 3.0 [9] is used to provide a searchable PDF.
By applying a jpeg compression, a file size between 5-50MB per thesis can be achieved Goobi, an open source software, maintained by intranda GmbH [10], manages and tracks all digitisation jobs, queuing to ABBYY via an XML ticketing API and subsequent output Due to the variable content of the A4 pages in terms of colour depth, two methods are employed to capture these variable colour components efficiently: theses that contain no colour or a minimum number of colour pages are digitised on form-feed photocopiers as 1-bit images and colour pages are inserted subsequently.
Older theses were, typically, produced without any colour text or images theses that contain a large number of colour pages are scanned by hand on book scanners producing 24or 1-bit images depending on the bit depth of individual pages Digitisation Restrictions The re-publication of a thesis in a digital format brings a different set of copyright issues that may preclude digital publication.
Such issues include: requirement for rights clearance presentation of part of the thesis as a digital file inclusion of third-party copyright materials within the text bound inclusion of published papers Request Process for Creating e-Theses Internal and external requestors may generally download PDF images of theses as required post-2008, and for those pre-2008 that have undergone rights clearance.
However, University of Southampton bound theses remain in high use and in the 12-month period between 2010 and 2011 approximately 900 theses from Library stock were requested by readers.
Previously, second paper copies or microfiche copies were made available to external requests, but they are now no longer available.
When external readers do request a copy of a thesis, the Library: encourages the reader to visit the Library to read the hard copy will undertake to contact the author and seek signature of the ‘Supplementary Release Form’, and if successful digitise the thesis and make it available in ePrints Soton The Library will continue mass digitisation of its theses for the period 2000-2008 and store them in a dark archive until author consent has be gained to upload them into eprints Soton.
Theses prior to 2000 will only be digitised when author consent has been provided.
Consolidation of Platforms, Catalogue Entry and Master Copy Currently all bound theses within the Library are catalogued and records appended to the Library catalogue, SirsiDynix Symphony.
Theses deposited electronically and those deposited post-October 2008 are accessed via ePrints Soton which has a further catalogue entry.
Links are currently provided between the two catalogues.
The ePrints Soton metadata is being harvested by a number of aggregators and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and exposed to UKETD_DC and searchable from EThOS [11].
As previously noted, the paper and electronic version of a thesis are not always identical, there being greater scope to hold various types of media within an electronic version.
The Calendar mandates that both digital and paper versions are submitted, but currently there remains the risk of discrepancies between the two versions.
Conclusions and Remarks Thesis digitisation activities at Southampton contribute to the University’s wider visibility as well as being an obvious factor in space management and a saving in staff time.
As a Russell Group university with a major research presence, any activities which contribute to overall research impact are highly significant.
The current preparations within UK HE for the Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF) in 2014 [12] have highlighted research impact as a key measure of research excellence.
Along with other Research Councils, the Arts & Humanities research Council believes that free and open access to publicly funded research, including theses, offers significant social and economic benefits [13].The link between global exposure of research outputs and impact is well documented and it is clear that putting thesis metadata and digital objects into an institutional repository will enhance that institution’s overall impact [14].
As the requirement to deposit an electronic theses version was agreed in 2008, there are currently a number of hard-copy theses being received by the University Library as well as the regular receipts of born-digital theses into the ePrints Soton.
This mixed economy of materials illustrated that a reader-focused approach to finding this material is paramount.
Currently the thesis metadata since 2008 are captured in both ePrints Soton and the Library catalogue.
Previously to 2008, all theses metadata are present in the Library catalogue with a small number of theses prior to this date in the ePrints Soton.
The conclusion is that visibility of the metadata in both locations is more helpful to the readers than any form of cross-referral with complicated caveats between the two sources.
In time, it may be expedient to have all thesis metadata in the ePrints Soton only, but the Library will need to be guided by its users on this point.
Staff development has taken place over the past three years in terms of understanding the IPR implications of born-digital and retrospectively digitised theses.
The Library Digitisation Unit has developed a considerable amount of background knowledge about the various permutations of thesis submission and their suitability for digitisation.
The development of  a workflow to carry out this procedure has also been a product of this development curve.
There is a critical set of relationships between the teams within cataloguing, inter-library loan, digitisation and the ePrints Soton and the related workflows are key to the smooth operation of the service.
References University of Southampton Calendar 2008/9 http://www.calendar.soton.ac.uk/arch2008_9/sectionV/part4.html University of Southampton Institutional Research Repository ePrints Soton http://eprints.soton.ac.uk EThOS Electronic Theses Online System http://www.ethos.ac.uk Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Chapter 48  http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48 University of Southampton Calendar 2007/08 http://www.calendar.soton.ac.uk/arch2007_8/sectionV/part4.html Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Chapter 48, Section 42 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/42 Supplementary author declaration and consent (e-thesis) form http://www.southampton.ac.uk/library/resources/documents/thesisconsentform.pdf UK theses digitisation project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/theses.aspx Server-based Document Conversion Software ABBYY Recognition Server 3.5 Product Overview http://www.abbyy.com/recognition_server/product_overview intranda GmbH http://www.intranda.com British Library EThOS search and order theses online http://ethos.bl.uk/Home.do Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 http://www.ref.ac.uk Arts & Humanities Research Council Open access to research output http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/About-Us/Policies,-standards,-and-forms/open-access/Pages/open-access.aspx Harnad, S and Carr, L and Swan, A and Sale, AHJ and Bosc, H (2009) Open Access Repositories maximizing and measuring research impact through university and research-funder open-access self-archiving mandates.
Wissenschaftsmanagement, 4 (4).
pp.
36-41.
Author Details Julian Ball Library Digitisation Unit Hartley Library University of Southampton University Road Southampton SO17 1BJ Email: j.h.ball@soton.ac.uk Web site: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/library/ldu/ Julian Ball is manager of the University of Southampton Library Digitisation Unit and has been part of two major JISC digitisation projects, 18C parliamentary papers and the 19C political pamphlets.
The Unit specialises in the digital capture of high resolution archive resources to support research.
A seamless workflow has been developed for the digitisation of materials, through to web delivery.
This incorporates quality control steps, optical character recognition and standardised metadata.
Christine Fowler Head of Electronic Library Services Hartley Library University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ Email: mailto:c.a.fowler@soton.ac.uk Web site: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/library/ Christine Fowler is Head of E-Library Services and Faculty Librarian for Humanities and Health Sciences at the University of Southampton.
Her interests include business models for e-resource creation and content sustainability.
Christine has been associated with the Library Digitisation Unit for seven years and was part of the project team that created both the 18th Century Official Parliamentary Publications collection (available through ProQuest) and latterly the 19th Century British Pamphlets Online collection (JSTOR) as part of the JISC Digitisation Programme.
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Data Science Professionals: A Global Community of Sharing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Data Science Professionals: A Global Community of Sharing Buzz data software rdf framework xml portal infrastructure archives metadata identifier schema repositories visualisation gis ontologies microdata lod e-science algorithm research standards nesstar Citation BibTex RIS Sylvie Lafortune reports on the 37th annual conference of the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST), held over 30 May – 3 June 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The IASSIST [1] Conference is a long-standing annual event which brings together researchers, statistical analysts as well as computer and information professionals interested in all aspects of research data, from discovery to reuse.
This 37th meeting spanned five days where participants could attend workshops, IASSIST business meetings and a myriad of presentations.
This year, the event focused on the sharing of tools and techniques which ‘improves capabilities across disciplines and along the entire data life cycle’.
It was hosted jointly by the libraries of Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia in the magnificent city of Vancouver.
For those readers who seldom work with data, I am including this interesting definition provided by Katherine McNeill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), during her talk at the Pechu Kucha [2]: ‘Data are a bit like garlic.
They look like a vegetable, their taste has a bit of a kick and you need a special tool to get the most out of them.’ Pre-conference Committee Meetings and Workshops 30 31 May 2011 A number of committee meetings of organisations such as the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI [3]) and the International Federation of Data Organizations for the Social Science took place on the first day.
Nine workshops were offered on the second day, providing participants with the opportunity to learn in a hands-on setting.
Some of the sessions included basic survey design, data management planning, mapping census data with ArcGIS tools, an introduction to Nesstar tools (data publishing and online analysis system) and R, the open source statistical analysis software.
Plenaries, Presentations, Pecha Kucha and Posters 1 – 3 June 2011 The main conference took place over three days and featured three plenaries, 28 concurrent sessions with more than 110 presentations, a 45-minute Pecha Kucha and a poster session ... a considerable tour de force!
First time IASSISTers like myself had to navigate through presentations titles such as Creating a Linchpin for Financial Data: The need for a Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) or Arisddi, A Resource Instantiation System for DDI and Keeping the User out of the ditch: The Importance of Front-End Alignment and – unfortunately ?
make difficult choices.
Opening Plenary: A Look at Census Taking in Canada Ian McKinnon, Chair of the National Statistics Council Ian McKinnon, Chair of the National Statistics Council [4], opened the conference by providing his perspective on the events surrounding the cancellation of the long form census in Canada and the subsequent implementation of the voluntary National Household Survey.
McKinnon refers to this period, which led to the resignation of Chief Statistician, Munir Sheikh, in the summer of 2010, as the most ‘turbulent’ in the history of the census in Canada [5].
No one can predict to what extent the response bias (moving from a 20% sample mandatory census to a voluntary survey) will affect the quality of the data.
However, McKinnon commented on some of the socio-economic indicators which are more obviously at risk: urban aboriginals, new immigrants, young people transitioning from school to work, etc.
Furthermore, public services such as local transit, health agencies and school boards will no longer be able to rely with confidence on data from the census.
McKinnon emphasised the growing consciousness of governments around the world of concerns about the intrusiveness of the public census, and commented on the future of good quality socio-economic data collected by governments.
He indicated that countries such as Canada will have to balance change with consistent reliable data points.
Co-organisers of the 37th IASSIST Conference: Mary Luebbe, Data Services Librarian, University of British Columbia Libraries and Walter Piovesan, Director, Research Data Services, Simon Fraser University.
He concluded by stating that models of administrative data collection such as population and dwelling registers could be increasingly adopted worldwide.
How this will affect research in the Humanities and Social Sciences remains to be seriously examined.
Noteworthy Trends and Developments in Social Science Data Data Discovery Tools Researchers are increasingly demanding high-quality data and documentation which they can access themselves.
So it is not surprising that many sessions focused on data standards and discovery tools.
In fact, developments seem to be so fast-paced in these areas that three sessions were needed to cover recent developments in the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) implementation, an international standard for describing data from the social sciences.
Presentations ranged from new applications used to convert MS Word-based questionnaires to DDI, to emerging open source metadata management platforms for data repositories.
Another session covered current developments in the description of qualitative data and the use of the QuDEX schema, an XML standard for qualitative data exchange.
Still another session had presentations on less conventional data discovery tools such as a data-exposing, -sharing and -analysis tool based on Linked Open Data (Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences), and a visualisation application for spatial information that extend the traditional analysis methods used in the social sciences (Australian Data Archive).
A final session emphasised work currently done on controlled vocabularies and ontologies to enriching metadata.
Several presentations discussed the use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and text-mining algorithms such as Recommind Mindserver to automate categorisation tasks.
Data Management With the establishment of new data management regulations in many countries, a number of libraries and organisations supporting research are now in the process of creating data management services to meet the needs of their researchers.
A first session discussed current developments and pilot projects in various institutions.
Activities are generally centered on developing consulting services for researchers, building support at the institutional level and creating partnerships, promotion and infrastructure.
A second session featured a panel discussion on the National Science Foundation Data Management Plan requirement established in 2010.
Panelists emphasised the fact that, like many government-initiated data management plans, the NSF plan is broadly worded and although this is meant to encourage the development of community-driven standards, it often leads to uncertainty as to how to respond in the short term.
A third session included presentations on data management planning (DMP) approaches in countries which are leaders in this process: the UK, US and Australia.
In the UK, a data management planning Web-based tool called DMP Online was developed by the Digital Curation Centre.
In the US, the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) published a list of elements for creating a DMP following an extensive gap analysis of existing recommendations for data management plans.
In Australia, the University of Technology Sydney developed a DMP based on a user-needs approach rather than relying on a compliance-based system.
This work produced data management checklists and guidelines, guides to data archives, metadata approaches as well as protocols and tools for promotion.
Finally, a fourth session on DMP had presentations on three specific projects aiming to curate, manage and share data.
The first project involves building an open data repository for social science experimental data at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University.
The second project is called the Research Data MANTRA Project (2010-2011).
It has produced extensive online learning materials which reflect best practice in research data management in three disciplines: social science, clinical psychology and geosciences.
An important goal of this project is to train postgraduate students and early career researchers in DMP.
The third project is a case study for qualitative research data management, sharing and reuse.
This is an interesting piece of work lead by the Map & Data Library at the University of Toronto which involves original research data consisting of 30 interviews with, then, leading pioneers in Canadian Sociology, all born before 1930.
Data without Boundaries (DwB) Project Governments are important producers of highly detailed microdata, but access to them, from within a country, often involves complex procedures to protect the anonymity of respondents.
With international studies currently on the rise, how can researchers access data across boundaries in a reasonable and timely way?
A session chaired by Roxanne Silbernan of the French National Data Committee for Humanities and Social Sciences and coordinator of the DwB Project, was devoted to the EU-7th-Framework Programme which deals with ‘data across boundaries’ issues within the European context.
The DwB Project involves 27 partners from 12 European countries and the goal is to create an integrated model for accessing official data from all countries.
On a practical level, this means implementing an easy and single point of access for researchers, to be linked to the CESSDA [6] portal.
This project has enormous implications for other countries and for research in the humanities and social sciences.
Teaching Data in the Library and across the University Traditionally, data service providers have been involved in helping users with data access and analysis.
As such, many have developed very particular skills in a range of statistical methods, programs and data sources.
One session which was well attended, looked at the emerging trend of teaching data in universities.
Four presentations focused on best practice in teaching with data.
The first presentation discussed the role of the library in promoting statistical and data literacy and the experiences of embedded librarians such as the business and the data librarians at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The second presentation looked at models and opportunities such as course-specific instruction, workshops and instructional partnerships across the campus.
The third presentation looked more specifically at strategies for teaching spatial data resources and software and a final presentation discussed data and statistical skills for UK social science students and how they can be acquired through the use of data resources like the Census and the Economic and Social Data Service.
Data Citation Another interesting trend in the world of data is the push to encourage good data citation practice.
Why should datasets be cited?
To enhance access, sharing and management of research data.
One session organised by the IASSIST Special Interest Group on Data Citation (SIGDC) discussed tracking data use and reuse in the literature, building data citations for discovery as well as the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) efforts to influence the whole community of data users to make data citation common practice.
Another session focused on the work of DataCite, an international consortium which, according to their site, ‘supports researchers by helping them to find, identify, and cite research datasets with confidence’.
Second Plenary:  Research Data Infrastructure Chuck Humphrey, Data Library, University of Alberta Introduced as a ‘data warrior’, Chuck Humphrey’s reputation comes not only from his passion for data, but from the countless hours of work he has contributed to national and international committees dealing with issues of data throughout his career.
His presentation focused on the current state of research data infrastructure on a global scale and where the social sciences fit within the broader E-science landscape.
His starting point was: ‘What does infrastructure mean today?’ Through his study of one event and four initiatives [7], all of which have recently taken place or started, he has come to the conclusion that there is no consensus on defining infrastructure; research data infrastructure has become associated with e-Science and cyberinfrastructure; infrastructure can be defined within a two-dimensional framework: technological-social and local-global; and the difficult task is achieving the social change that is a vital part of infrastructure.
Humphrey’s final conclusion was that the social sciences are definitely on main street as evidenced by the many exciting initiatives happening internationally around social science research data infrastructure.
Closing Plenary: Open Data in Vancouver The closing plenary was given by Ms. Andrea Reimer, Councillor for the City of Vancouver.
An advocate of open government and open data, Reimer started by sharing her conviction that the quality of decisions made by governments are only as good as the quality of information available to the people.
She described her involvement in the Vancouver’s ‘Open City 3’ initiative, where the citizens of Vancouver are encouraged to get involved, be active and empowered.
How can this be achieved?
Councillor Reimer started by getting a motion on open data approved at City Council.
This motion included three parts: Open and accessible data; Open standards; and Open source software.
What were outcomes of open data for the city?
She has observed increasing interaction with citizens to create innovative services.
For example, apps were created by Vancouverites for locating parking spaces and getting information on waste disposal.
What could be improved?
Reimer admitted that promoting the use of data remained a challenge.
Even more difficult was getting people to move beyond a passive use of information to that of an active one.
Conclusion What have I learned from this first experience at an IASSIST conference?
IASSISTers are passionate people!
Although this was a large-scale event, there was much sharing and learning going on.
Sessions were wide-ranging in topics and levels of required technical knowledge, so there was as much content for the neophyte as for the experienced data professional.
References See the IASSIST Web site for a complete description of its membership, activities and publications http://iassistdata.org/ A Pecha Kucha is a style of presentation that involves showing 20 pictures for 20 seconds each.
The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an effort to create an international standard in XML for metadata describing social science data.
For more information on DDI, refer to the organisation’s Web site http://www.ddialliance.org/ For information on the National Statistics Council in Canada: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/dnss/docViewer.aspx?docID=193#start For more details on the cancellation of the census long form in Canada: http://www.savethecensus.ca Council of European Social Science Data Archives: http://www.cessda.org/ The event is the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting, Nov. 2010.
The four initiatives are: OECD Global Science Forum on Data and Social Science Infrastructure; Canadian Association of Research Libraries Research Data Management Infrastructure; Canadian Research Data Strategy Working Group Data Summit; Canadian International Polar Year (IPY) Data Assembly Centre Network.
Author Details Sylvie Lafortune Government Information and Data Librarian Laurentian University Sudbury Ontario Canada Email: slafortune@laurentian.ca Web site: http://www.laurentian.ca/library/ Sylvie Lafortune is an Associate Librarian at Laurentian University of Sudbury, one of the two bilingual universities in Canada.
Her main area of responsibility is Government Information, Data and GIS.
She is currently Chair of the Department of Library and Archives at her institution.
For the past few years, she has enjoyed being the faculty advisor for the World University Service of Canada Local Committee at Laurentian.
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Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade Buzz data software framework database portal infrastructure archives metadata blog repositories copyright video preservation multimedia visualisation vle curation usb licence e-research foi privacy taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Marion Tattersall, Carmen O'Dell and John Lewis report on Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade, organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in partnership with the White Rose University Consortium and held 1-3 March 2011 at the University of Sheffield.
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is staging a series of free regional data management roadshows to support institutional data management, planning and training.
These events run over three days, presenting best practice and showcasing new tools and resources.
Each day is designed for a different audience with complementary content so that participants can attend the days that best meet their needs.
Presentations from both the second roadshow in Sheffield and the first one in Bath in November 2010 are on the DCC Web site [1].
Tuesday 1 March 2011: The Research Data Landscape Getting us all up to speed with the nature, current challenges and existing good practice relating to research data, was the goal for Day 1.
The format for achieving this was a substantial morning presentation followed by an afternoon of illustrative case studies.
Evolution or Revolution?
The Changing Research Data Landscape Liz Lyon, Associate Director, Digital Curation Centre, Director, UKOLN Liz delivered a comprehensive overview which was both accessible for newcomers and thought-provoking for delegates with some familiarity with the topic.
Clearly scale and volume are key features of research data, but the audience was stunned to hear that, in the context of all global digital information, the International Data Corporation(IDC) estimates a growth rate of 58% per year to reach 35 Zettabytes by 2020 2.
Complexity is also an issue, both in terms of the data themselves and the infrastructure workflows to process them across organisational, disciplinary and national boundaries in the context of Open Science and the Panton Principles [3].
No wonder then that major funders like the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are formulating policies that make data management planning mandatory, and that institutions are beginning to respond to the challenge.
Liz highlighted some useful exemplars at institutional level, referring to progress at Edinburgh [4], the JISC-funded Incremental Project [5] and collaboration with North American partners to develop the DCC Data Management Planning (DMP) Online Tool [6].
This is all happening in the context of freedom of information, citizen science and the ensuing ethics and privacy issues as the sharing culture progresses.
So what practical issues do data management policies need to address, and where are the gaps?
The list addressed all stages of the lifecycle from storage, appraisal and selection, right through to licensing, sharing, attribution and citation.
Solutions need to be secure, resilient, provide value for money, and be sustainable; so cloud services may be part of the way forward.
Underlying the technical concerns though are two fundamental questions.
Can we incentivise data management through recognition, impact metrics or other means?
Secondly, how do we unravel the funding conundrum in relation to who owns, preserves, and benefits from the process?
Required reading before starting to tackle this would seem to be the report from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access [7], and the Keeping Research Data Safe materials [8].
Case Studies The morning raised questions relating to the what and why aspects of research data management, so we were ready for an afternoon of case studies from Yorkshire and Manchester looking at how to tackle it in practice.
Case Study 1: MaDAM Pilot Data Management Infrastructure for Biomedical Researchers at University of Manchester Meik Poschen, MeRC (Manchester eResearch Centre), University of Manchester MaDAM [9], based at the University of Manchester, is a project in the JISC Managing Research Data Programme.
They have examined the research data management requirements of selected biomedical researchers and are developing a pilot infrastructure capable of upscaling to a university-wide service embedded in the normal research lifecycle.
The researchers wanted a centralised storage system with automatic back-up that could make data searchable, retrievable and above all shareable.
Meik showed screenshots of how the interface had evolved, so that the prototype was now ready to move to a production service.
He emphasised the importance of a design that was hospitable in the future to a range of subjects and data types; for example, offering automatic thumbnails for images.
The end product will provide the facility to archive complete projects with links to their published outputs.
Case Study 2: National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) Mark Birkin, Professor of Spatial Analysis and Policy, University of Leeds NeISS [10] is a three-year project in the JISC Information Environment Programme with Leeds as the lead partner.
Mark gave a clear explanation of social simulation and its relevance to a wide range of social science areas.
Critically, the data processed are of value beyond the boundaries of academic research and into the field of policy development.
The project represents therefore a key example of integrating data from varied sources and processing them for subsequent sharing and reuse.
It also encompasses making the data and their underlying methodology accessible to and usable by non-specialists.
Mark showed a diagram of the architecture through which they envisage linking together the varied datasets and models into a collection of portal services in order tomake outputs visible and push them out to different types of user.
He illustrated this approach in more detail with a series of video clips developed to instruct users.
Work in progress includes further investigation of ‘data-crunching’ using the National Grid Service, and curation of the outputs, given their resource-intensive production process.
Case Study 3: Institutional Data Management : A Hybrid Approach Matthew Herring, Digital Library Officer, University of York York Digital Library (YODL) [11] is a multimedia repository at York, but is part of a group of related services including the local Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) together with the White Rose Research Online and White Rose eTheses Online services shared with Leeds and Sheffield.
YODL’s remit is not exclusively limited to research.
A fact reflected in the recently issued policy and guidelines which relate to ‘University produced digital content relating to teaching, learning and research’ [12],and which resonates with the growing emphasis on research-led teaching and the use of research data by students at undergraduate level.
Matthew explained that YODL had worked predominantly with Humanities departments and therefore had processed mostly audio, image and video data.
The aim in principle was to be able to handle a wide range of data, while balancing the needs of complex and simpler structures.
The repository is based on Fedora software for its flexibility, but time, effort and expertise are needed to benefit from this flexibility; hence projects have deliberately costed in dedicated developers on fixed-term contracts.
YODL was also perceived as flexible in terms of offering support at four different levels: Level 1: Basic storage support.
A passive role Level 2: Early involvement at the bid and data creation stages Level 3: Bespoke development to support specific data types Level 4: Full-blown project partnership role Case Study 4: DMTpsych: Postgraduate Training for Research Data Management in the Psychological Sciences Richard Plant, Psychology Department, University of York DMTpsych[13]is a JISC-funded Research Data Management (RDM) Training Materials project aiming to deliver a workbook and slides to support lectures for postgraduate research students.
The Psychology area spans a wide range of complex and voluminous data sources including interviews, statistics and MRI scans, and is supported by an equally wide range of funders with varying data management requirements.
Richard emphasised the need to make the training delivery engaging; the video clip of a fire complete with sound effects certainly caught the audience’s attention.
Somewhat paradoxically, it seemed the students preferred printed rather than online material to support the activities, though they also wanted more examples for cutting and pasting into data management plans (DMPs).
Richard outlined the lecture content, noting that the students liked an approach which became gradually more specific as well as the opportunity to follow up lectures in smaller work groups.
In the longer term, the project intends to increase research data awareness in the psychology community and collaborate further, for example, with the British Psychological Society.
Case Study 5: DataTrain: Developing Disciplinary Focussed Data Management Training Courses in Archaeology and Social Anthropology Stuart Jeffrey, Archaeological Data Service, University of York Though also focussed on training, the DataTrain case study [14] raised some different issues.
Cultural divergence in the attitudes of the two subject areas of Archaeology and Social Anthropology had been observed; even within Archaeology there was a need to distinguish between requirements in the academic and professional fields.
There was also some similarity with Psychology in case study 4, in that these disciplines use a very wide range of data collection techniques and have to meet diverse funder requirements.
Again the plan is to have a series of lectures in order to cover the topic adequately and demystify it effectively without the use of jargon.
As with other initiatives in information literacy, engagement from academics to get the material embedded in courses emerged as critical.
However, there was no conclusion as to whether in the long run this might extend to delivery by academics rather than by central services.
The project has now reached the pilot stage, with real students in Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridgeengaging with the material.
It would be interesting to see how their feedback influences further development.
How can we make research data management training both useful and interesting?
What the DCC Can Do for You Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre Kevin outlined the support that the DCC can offer in terms of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model [15], tools [6], guidance materials [16] and further events to share good practice.
He stressed that the approach was collaborative rather than prescriptive, and that the DCC could provide support to underpin local work such as possible cloud services, and synthesising information on cost benefits.
He also offered post-event follow-up to discuss local issues relating to the needs that participants had identified at this roadshow.
Wednesday 2 March 2011: The Research Data Challenge: Developing an Institutional Response Day 2 was aimed at those in senior management roles and looked at strategic and policy implementation objectives.
The format was a mixture of presentations from Liz Lyon plus group work exercises and discussion facilitated by her.
Marieke Guy’s write-up of Day 2 at the Bath Roadshow [17], which followed a similar pattern, complements the report below.
The DCC has also undertaken to collate the results of the group work and make them available.
Facing the Data Challenge : Requirements, Risks, Costs Liz Lyon, Associate Director, Digital Curation Centre, Director, UKOLN Liz gave an overview of the challenges, highlighting both institutional and disciplinary diversity.
She posed questions about the factors to be considered in facing them, requirements, motivations, benefits, plus risks, and lastly costs.
We then had the option of selecting one of those three factors and working on it in a small group.
Group feedback about requirements gathering noted the need for the personal touch, using interviews, finding a champion and making a structured proposal for discussion, perhaps based on the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model.
I worked in one of several groups looking at motivations, benefits and risks, and we felt that preserving academic reputation could be a key driver if we could also find a way to reduce administrative burden.
We concluded that synthesising evidence of benefits from existing reports might be a useful service that the DCC could provide.
A few brave delegates elected to consider costs and drew out the need to cost the full lifecycle and the difficulty of estimating post-grant costs.
One positive aspect was the feeling that the culture is shifting towards better costing of bids at an earlier stage.
Liz then gave us some input to enable us to take our deliberations forward later at a local level.
On requirements gathering she drew attention to the Data Asset Framework (DAF) [18] and practical findings from pilot users with some entertaining quotes.
Data loss, increased costs, legal risks including Freedom of Information issues, and loss of reputation, were noted as key issues.
She suggested that the Keeping Research Data Safe benefits taxonomy [19] was a valuable framework.
Reviewing Data Support Services: Analysis, Assessment, Priorities Liz Lyon, Associate Director, Digital Curation Centre, Director, UKOLN Following the same format, we looked at our local institutional readiness against the background of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model and attempted a SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) analysis of our own situation.
Overall, most institutions had pockets of expertise and varying advocacy networks, but our weakness was the inability to join them up to form a coherent approach.
We agreed that it was now opportune to address the topic and that technology offered potential solutions, but also felt that the economic climate, restructuring that ignored the new agenda, and the risk of divergent subject approaches posed significant threats.
Liz encouraged us by reporting progress at Edinburgh [4], the advent of possible cloud solutions, the firming up of funders’ policies, for example the Natural Environment Research Council [20], and the evolution of the DMP Online Tool [6].
Further afield, it appears that Australia has established good practice.
Building Capacity and Capability: Skills Audit Liz Lyon, Associate Director, Digital Curation Centre, Director, UKOLN We were now drilling down to specifics and tackled next the issues surrounding skills.
Liz hit us hard with a long list of skills that might be needed, and asked us to audit where we were in that respect and to prioritise what we saw as the core skills.
One group was diverted by the great metadata skills debate, but we noted that it remained unclear how far those needs might be reduced by more sophisticated resource discovery tools.
We concluded that overall there were significant pockets of expertise in libraries, IT services, records management and research offices, but again joining them up in a coherent way was going to present a challenge.
There seemed to be an absence of relevant staff training opportunities, but this was a gap the DCC could help us fill and would be covered in more detail on Day 3.
Postgraduate training was being covered by the JISC RDM Training Materials [21] and Liz drew attention to useful projects we had not covered on Day 1.
Developing a Strategic Plan: Actions and Timeframe Liz Lyon, Associate Director, Digital Curation Centre, Director, UKOLN We were now at the heart of the matter.
Liz focussed on the need to optimise organisational support, and flagged up key components such as leadership, coordination and role definitions.
She referred to the reorganisation of research support services at the Queensland University of Technology [22] and asked us to take that approach into account as we moved to conjuring up our own plans.
We were asked to identify actions and a timeframe for them ranging from 0 to over 36 months, and were challenged to answer the question ‘What will you do tomorrow?’ Our short-term plans included establishing a task force, building on research office links with our research community, getting research data into the grant application workflow and awareness training.
Starting a real fire to destroy some data was a light-hearted suggestion, but the mood was certainly there to start some metaphorical fires and get some quick wins with key high-profile datasets.
Medium-term suggestions were linked to the Research Excellence Framework, roadmap production and building a solid business case, preferably with an eye-catching exemplar at its heart.
There was less certainty however about longer-term plans, but a consensus emerged that maintaining momentum would be crucial, that an element of restructuring was likely, and that monitoring national and discipline-based services would be essential in arriving at a fully formed business plan.
Next Steps Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre The delegates felt that a lot of valuable outputs had been produced, and Kevin undertook to ensure that the group work would be collated and shared.
The SWOT analyses in particular could be usefully amalgamated for further consideration.
DCC would also follow up with each institution represented.
Thursday 2 March 2011: Digital Curation Lite: How to Manage Research Data The aim of Day 3 was to provide practical ‘nuggets’ for participants to take back to institutions so they could start doing something small but on a practical level.
There were lectures from DCC staff and some group exercises.
Data Management Support: Making the Most of Limited Resources Joy Davidson, Digital Curation Centre In this session Joy explored how existing policies, codes of practice and support can be exploited when making the case to senior managers.
Research income is a good place to start: what do the research funders now require with respect to RDM?
Non-compliance could result in a serious loss of research income in the future.
As a first step, ensure the relevant funder polices are somewhere researchers can easily find them [23].
Look up codes of research practice at your institution and bring them to the attention of your researchers.
These codes may assume that RDM is happening but is there evidence that there are policies and systems in place to support it?
If not, highlight the risk to the institution of not doing this.
Lost or leaked data could cause irreparable harm to an institution’s reputation, and drastically affect future funding as well as potential collaboration.
Find real-world examples of where it has all gone wrong to illustrate your point.
The University of Glasgow’s code of good research practice [24] expects all researchers to take responsibility themselves for data management and to observe the standards of practice of the funding bodies.
Crucially though, Glasgow has also committed to providing training and resources for this effort [25]; you may need to lobby for similar at your own institution.
Build trust with your researchers.
Talk to them in language relevant to them and find out what they want.
If you can provide evidence of need, you may be able to get support from staff development.
Exploit the channels you already have don’t set up a new group on RDM, fit in with pre-existing committees (such as research ethics).
Make use of existing courses and tie into them and add slides to existing course materials.
For more ideas see the Incremental Project [5], DCC 101 Training materials [16] and the UK Data Archive best practice guide [26].
Another approach is to make use of assessment tools such as the DAF [18].
Doing an assessment may reveal where efforts are being duplicated or resources under-utilised.
Senior managers are more likely to respond positively if you illustrate the potential for efficiency savings.
Finally, be sure to avoid using curation-related terminology and refine your message to your target audience.
Timing can be crucial; hook into new initiatives as you become aware of them.
Draw upon existing policies and mandates where you can, and augment or adapt existing materials that are freely available.
Introduction to Data Management Mandates and Policies Sarah Jones, Digital Curation Centre Data management planning is fast becoming a requirement for the majority of funding bodies and research councils.
This session explored the current landscape and future directions.
The DCC has provided a summary table of research data policies which is a useful starting point [23].
Most funders now have a requirement for data management and sharing plans which should describe What data will be created (format, types, quantity) How the data will be documented/described Ethical considerations/IP Plans for data sharing and access The strategy for long-term preservation of the data Some institutions have already been involved in projects to develop policies to support RDM.
The University of Oxford has produced a statement of commitment to RDM, developed through collaboration with the University of Melbourne [27].
Similarly, at the University of Edinburgh, they have developed policy and strategy for RDM [4] and provide a wealth of advice and guidance for researchers on their Web pages [28].
There is lots of guidance for producing a Data Management Plan (DMP) available, derived from JISC-funded projects.
DMTpsych [13] for example, used the DCC checklist as the basis for producing a guidance booklet for postgraduate students.
The Incremental Project [5] has led to the production of a short set of FAQs entitled ‘Who can help with….’.
Researchers have asked for practical examples, so the site includes case studies and video clips of researchers [25].
This type of initiative can help raise the profile of support and ensure it becomes embedded into wider courses.
At the end of March 2011, all the JISC Managing Research Data (JISCMRD) projects will be reporting back and all the material they produce will be freely available for anyone to use [29].
It is important to remember though, that access to general guidance is not enough.
Researchers need to be talking to IT and library staff to discuss initial ideas, get practical support and find the best way forward.
Group Exercise : ‘Lift Pitch’ Working in teams of between five and seven people, each group had to develop a ‘pitch’ aimed at senior management.
The pitch had to last less than two minutes and relay the relevance of data management to the overall strategic aims of the institution.
Delegates were reminded to give careful consideration to the language they used and to think about concrete evidence that could be used to support their arguments.
In the event, while everyone quite enjoyed this exercise, when it came to reporting back, most groups felt they weren’t quite actually ready to pitch, but they did have the basic structure.
So, for example, one group developed a pitch aimed at a pro-vice-chancellor pointing out an example of an RDM disaster and potential problems with current procedures, but the group also provided the first steps of how to solve them.
Data Management Planning Martin Donnelly, Digital Curation Centre Funder policies are diverse and have different requirements.
Some have different policies for different programmes and they require researchers to produce plans in different ways.
To help researchers, the DCC has produced the DMP Online, an online data management planning tool [6].
In the first version it had 51 questions/headings.
After consultation, this increased to 115 (though not everything needs to be answered by everyone).
It is an online tool and provides the headings needed depending on the research funder concerned, and the stage of the research cycle.
The DMP Online is freely available and enables users to create, store and update multiple versions of their plans; it meets funders’ specific data-related requirements and researchers can obtain instant guidance on how to write their plans.
DMP Online v.2 is now live.
The main difference is a clearer interface and a versioning feature which makes it possible to do a new version of a DMP based on an existing one.
Selection and Appraisal Joy Davidson, Digital Curation Centre This presentation concentrated on how to identify the data you want to keep.
It is important to do it throughout the life of the research project as various factors will affect what you are going to be able to do with the data later on.
When selecting data, the following points needed to be taken into consideration: Relevance to mission (of both the institution and the funder) Potential for redistribution Scientific/historical value Uniqueness/non-replicability Economic case Full documentation (to use the data in the future in a meaningful way it has to be contextualised how was it created, calibrated etc.
Without this it may not be worth keeping the data at all) Consent forms do they conflict with what you want to do?
To tackle all of the above, you need the researcher involved and to be thinking from the very beginning about what is going to need to be kept.
However there is always going to be a balance between want and need, what is permissible with the data and what the institution can actually afford to do.
You also need to discuss within your institution who is responsible for different parts of the DMP.
It will be a mix of research group expertise, central research support, library and computing services, depending on what aspect of the research practice and storage you are talking about.
Resources available include the DCC How-to Guide on selection and appraisal [30].
Data Licensing Alex Ball, Digital Curation Centre, UKOLN Alex began his presentation with a key question: why license your data?
One possible answer is that it gives clarity to the reuse possibilities of your data.
The problem is that the law is not up to speed with databases as there is the database itself, the content, input and the visualisation that can be derived from the data.
Each aspect may comply to differing degrees with current copyright laws and situations vary in different jurisdictions.
He described the four types of Creative Commons (CC) licences and their limitations in relation to research data.
For example, if you license data as ‘non-commercial’, does writing an article based on this data that is then published in a commercial journal contravene this licence?
As a rule, CC licences work well with homogeneous things such as reports; but if you have different types of data, data from different sources or different attributes for the data and for the database in which they are housed, then all becomes horrendously complicated.
Other possibilities are the Open Data Commons suite of licences or the Open Government Licence.
Whichever type of licence you choose to use, you need to attach it to the data, putting it where people are going to read it and in a format that is discoverable by harvesters.
Guidance on licensing is imperative because once you apply a licence to your data, that licence is irrevocable.
Researchers need to be clear about what they want to happen with their data and will need expert advice on which licence is appropriate.
The DCC provides a guide on How to License Research Data [31].
The day finished with very little time for groups to complete a final exercise by actually starting to write a DMP.
We discovered that it was very difficult for one person to come up with a DMP.
The first step is to identify the relevant people who can help.
The problem areas were considered to be: ensuring access; data sharing; reuse; as well as long-term storage which institutions have facilities in place?
Conclusion This roadshow presented an excellent opportunity for the exchange of ideas and experience.
It was well attended by delegates representing a wide range of roles in the RDM process: researchers, research support staff, IT staff and librarians.
Research data are the research institutions’ ‘crown jewels’ and can be considered the new ‘special collections’.
They are at great risk of loss, damage or leaking, unless correctly managed (slides of USB drives and a melted laptop made the point).
As these data increase on a massive scale year on year, the problem becomes more acute.
Senior management of many research institutions are slowly coming round to developing and implementing RDM policies and providing resources to support them.
This is to some extent driven by research funders, but research support staff and researchers will also need to make the case for RDM support.
There is now a wealth of experience and resources made available by the DCC and others.
They are willing to collaborate on developing and sharing information on RDM good practice, training materials and tools.
The roadshow succeeded in the aim of providing delegates with advice and guidance to support institutional RDM.
We have been inspired by this roadshow to encourage RDM planning and training at our institution.
We thoroughly recommend attending future roadshows to be held in South-East England and South Wales [1].
References Digital Curation Centre (DCC): Data Management Roadshows http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/data-management-roadshows Gantz, J.F.
and Reinsel, D. (2010) ‘The Digital Universe Decade Are You Ready?’ IDC report http://idcdocserv.com/925 Definition of Zettabyte, Wikipedia, 4 May 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte Panton Principles Web site http://pantonprinciples.org/ Haywood, J.
(2010) ‘Research Data: Concerns, Challenges & Necessities in a Research led University’ Presentation at Research Data Management Forum 5, Manchester, 27 October 2010 http://www.dcc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/RDMF/RDMF5/Haywood.pdf Incremental Project Web site http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/preservation/incremental/index.html Data Management Planning (DMP) Online Tool Web site http://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk/ Blue Ribbon Task Force (2010) ‘Sustainable economics for a digital planet: Ensuring long term access to digital information’, BRTF-SDPA Report http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2010/brtffinalreport.pdf Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Web site http://www.beagrie.com/krds.php MaDAM: Pilot data management infrastructure for biomedical researchers at University of Manchester.
Web site http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/projects/madam/ NeISS (National eInfrastructure for Social Simulation) project.
Web site http://drupals.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/neiss3/ York Digital Library (YODL) Web site http://www.york.ac.uk/library/electroniclibrary/yorkdigitallibraryyodl/ University of York Information Strategy (2010) http://www.york.ac.uk/about/departments/support-and-admin/information-directorate/strategy/ DMTpsych Postgraduate training for research data management in the psychological sciences Web site http://www.dmtpsych.york.ac.uk/ Data Train Project Web site http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/preservation/datatrain/ DCC Curation Lifecycle Model http://www.dcc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publications/DCCLifecycle.pdf DCC 101 Training Materials http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/train-the-trainer/dc-101-training-materials Guy, M. (8 November 2010) ‘Addressing the Research Data Challenge’, JISC Beginners Guide to Digital Preservation project blog http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-bgdp/2010/11/08/addressing-the-research-data-challenge/ Data Asset Framework Web site http://www.data-audit.eu/ Benefits Taxonomy and Benefit Case Studies.
In: Beagrie, N., Chruszcz, J. and Lavoie, B.
(2010) ‘Keeping Research data Safe 2’.
Final Report, pp 53-78 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2010/keepingresearchdatasafe2.pdf Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Data Policy http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/data/policy2011.asp Research data management training materials (RDMTrain), JISC Managing Research Data Programme strand http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd/rdmtrain.aspx Young, C.D.
& Young, J.A.
(2008) ‘A University Support Model for eResearch’.
Conference presentation at eResearch Australasia 2008, 28 Sept 3 Oct 2008, Melbourne http://eprints.qut.edu.au/28308/ DCC: Overview of Funders’ Data Policies http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/policy-and-legal/overview-funders-data-policies University of Glasgow, Code of Good Practice in Research, Version 1.1, 5 June 2007 http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_46633_en.pdf University of Glasgow: Data management support for researchers http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/datamanagement/ UK Data Archive (UKDA), Managing and Sharing Research Data: Best Practice for Researchers, May 2011, third edition http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/media/2894/managingsharing.pdf University of Oxford: Office of the Director of IT: Research Data Management http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/datamanagement/ The University of Edinburgh: Research Data Support http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/services/research-support/data-library JISC Managing Research Data programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd.aspx Whyte, A.
(2010) ‘Appraise & Select Research Data for Curation’ DCC How-to Guides http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/appraise-select-research-data Ball, A.
(2011) ‘How to License Research Data’ DCC How-to Guides http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/license-research-data Author Details Marion Tattersall Research Development Librarian The University of Sheffield Library Email: m.tattersall@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ Marion Tattersall is a Research Development Librarian at the University of Sheffield Library.
She is interested in how researchers gather their information and the ways they publish and disseminate their findings.
Her current role is to develop library services that support those activities in a way that fits in with researchers’ workflows.
Her previous roles there were in eServices development and subject liaison with a range of departments in Engineering, Science and Medicine.
Carmen O’Dell Faculty Librarian for Science The University of Sheffield Library Email: c.odell@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ Carmen O’Dell is the Faculty Librarian for Science at the University of Sheffield.
She is interested in developing close partnerships with departments to ensure resources and services closely match the needs of students and researchers.
Before coming to Sheffield Carmen worked in the CERN Library, Geneva.
John Lewis Senior Library Assistant The University of Sheffield Library Email: j.a.lewis@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ John Lewis is a senior customer services assistant at the University of Sheffield Library.
He has been drawn to study the issues surrounding research data management whilst completing a Masters degree in Information Management.
He will be involved in developing and providing research support services at the University library.
Return to top Article Title: Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade Authors: Marion Tattersall, Carmen O”Dell, John Lewis Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/dcc-2011-03-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UK Institutional Repository Search: Innovation and Discovery Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines UK Institutional Repository Search: Innovation and Discovery Buzz data framework apache infrastructure archives metadata repositories preservation visualisation aggregation personalisation lucene e-research uima algorithm taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Vic Lyte, Sophia Jones, Sophia Ananiadou and Linda Kerr describe an innovative tool to showcase UK research output through advanced discovery and retrieval facilities.
Institutional repositories are a major element of the Open Access movement.
More specifically in research and education, the main purpose is to make available as much of the research output of an institution as possible.
However, a simple search box and a long list of returned (keyword) artefacts derived from either an individual institutional repository (IR) or a federated search that would generate an even longer list, is no longer sufficient.
In the latter case, each repository-level search engine returns lists whose rankings relate to its individual default or customised settings.
How the aggregated results are re-organised presents major challenges to a federated higher-level simple search facility.
Rather than presenting the user with a very long list of aggregated articles, what would be more useful is for the search / discovery facility to have the ability to re-index the sub-corpus in terms of conceptual relevance to what the user is looking for.
This requires a technological capability whereby the machine understands the concepts implicit within a given item-level artefact and can discover, cluster, prioritise and establish relationships within the overall sub-corpus.
This idea has congruence with Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web; and technological changes and developments relating to machine-assisted search and discovery, such as the emergent concept coined Web 3.0 [1], will undoubtedly have a major impact on next-generation search and discovery functionalities relating to research and scholarly enquiries.
If such a search and discovery capability is overlaid on existing institutional and related repositories, this could then provide a discovery capability which in turn would inspire ideas and projects about useful and efficient ways of searching for academic research output.
More importantly, the effect would be to provide improved search and discovery facilities for researchers.
As a consequence, more rapid discovery of relevant knowledge and relationships between knowledge artefacts in repositories would facilitate discovery in the early part of the research cycle i.e., literature search.
This in turn means that by supporting more rapid and relevant discovery of important information at this point, the overall research and innovation-to-discovery lifecycle would speed up.
This is the underlying premise of the aims of the UK Institutional Repository Search Project [2] and has guided its initial aims and subsequent research, development and service transition modelling.
Background The need for a search service such as that delivered by Institutional Repository Search (IRS) arose from the realisation that research is confronted by problems in discovery.
Information items stored in a repository or collection of repositories are only useful if they can be found and transformed into forms and constructs that meet a user's specific needs and associated enquiry context.
Of key importance is that there are acknowledged challenges in maintaining manual overheads associated with current, future and in particular legacy data, for example the inclusion of non-bibliographical, but associated data assets.
As Green et al stated in 2007 [3], 'the creation of quality metadata is essential for the proper management and use of the public-facing repository.
It is, though, also clearly recognised that it is not viable for this metadata to be entirely human-generated'.
These problems therefore are met with a solution in the form of a free, targeted search tool that makes searching faster and more relevant to the researcher.
Institutional Repository Search is a project that was set up to develop a UK repository search service to support academic activity.
It is funded by the JISC [4] and led by MIMAS [5] in partnership with SHERPA [6], UKOLN [7] and NaCTeM [8].
Institutional Repository Search is designed to serve as a showcase for UK research and education.
The technological developments in IRS operate to reach the project's main targets.
Successfully finding an item relevant to a search implies that the item has been sufficiently well characterised, indexed and classified, such that relevance to a search query can be ascertained.
Moreover, the vast and constantly expanding range of information sources, and the growing area of uncharted supplementary data such as theses and dissertations, make searching quite problematic, because of what is often termed information overload.
Consequently, a literature search can take a very long time and is quite likely to lose focus.
At the same time, relationships between information are not always clear or easy to find, thereby potentially hindering researchers' attempts at innovation.
We offer an example of what a researcher might regard as a preferable scenario below [9]: Scenario: Discovery Phase (Susan the Researcher) Susan has submitted a proposal to her Principal Investigator (PI) to research an aspect related to proteomes.
Her proposal / dissertation (and scholarly curiosity) is basically related to the relationship of genetic markers and obesity.
As this is a new area, it has been accepted and she is conducting her initial literature review.
She initially goes to Google Scholar and focuses her preliminary search on the subject-specific terms – 'proteomes and obesity'.
She is returned a result set of 4,920 artefacts.
However, on preliminary evaluation, she becomes aware that the ranking in the list is based upon the number of contextually unrelated 'hits' and not necessarily the focus of inquiry she is initially seeking.
She lowers the granularity of her search and just types in "proteomes" as a keyword: Google Scholar now returns 3,500 results.
As this discovery exercise relates to grounding the theoretical framework of her research, she tries a recently available conceptual search facility, (http://www.intute.ac.uk/irs/demonstrator).
This is different from Google insofar that it uses subject-specific metadata where they exist at artefact level in UK Institutional Repositories to identify key documents.
It also uses a keyword to text-mine artefacts that its neural-network algorithms think might be conceptually related.
The researcher re-types in the high-level subject keyword "proteomes".
It comes up with 1,730 bibliographic articles returned from a targeted cross-search from the Open Access UK Institutional Repositories.
On the left hand-side of her screen she notices it has clustered the results in a dynamic browse list.
This (dynamic taxonomy) has been previously refined by a subject-specific information engineer to filter the dynamic browse list in relation to her professional focus.
She notices that the subject clustering algorithm has organised returns into 5 conceptual categories, one of which is unusually labelled 'back fat'.
On clicking on the latter, it refines the result set down to one.
On reading the summary of this paper, she discovers that, whilst it has interesting parallels, it clearly relates to another science domain.
Meanwhile, in the background, the system has been cross-indexing available subject-specific metadata from different science domains related to the article she is reviewing and displays a contextually subject-specific relationship by way of 'recommended reading'.
She clicks on this and it displays a narrowed result set of which two articles capture her interest, both from different application science disciplines to her own.
These are: "Comparative proteomic profiling of plasma from two divergent pig breeds for lean growth.
PMF.
LC/MS.
Biomarker discovery.
Label-free proteomics.
Porcine.
This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Veterinary Science; This artefact is an unpublished PhD thesis"; "Combining genetic mapping with text mining to identify disease-related genes.
Bioinformatics.
This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science.
The thesis sets out the results of a structured survey and unpublished PhD thesis".
Both are contextually relevant but unpublished, so she downloads the full PDFs of both articles and asks the system to provide contact details for the submitters and to set an alert if anything else is deposited in this area.
Susan, within her initial literature review, has quickly: identified a relationship (within the subject area of proteomes to obesity) to allied similar research in Veterinary Science; and also identified text-mining works which provide computational tools to carry out further extrapolation.
This has been achieved without the need to enter in additional search terms as her machine-driven background profile is also able to learn and adapt to the way she seeks information.
It is also able to generate and present to her contextually relevant clusters or taxonomies of concepts and changing relationships between them.
She flags this for tracking due to the likelihood of it being helpful.
As the system has been deployed across the institution, it is able to identify concepts or relationships to her other researchers whose information searching profiles indicate they are interested in the same subject areas.
On the right of her personalised screen she notices the system has provided a list of researchers fitting this attribute.
She notices there is a researcher working in a school outside her own faculty who is conducting work in this area and decides to drop him an email to see if they could meet up and 'join forces' in a prospective bid.
What the system layer has allowed her to do is to tap into the existing knowledge capital within the institution as well as having a heightened alerting capability to changes in the research intelligence environment.
This is not available to competing institutions whose researchers may be working in relative isolation and who do not benefit from dynamic, adaptive and automatic tracking of the internal and external environments relative to the given research domain.
Susan instructs the system to archive the aggregation of the knowledge derived from her information activity in the Institutional eResearch repository in preparation for a prospective bid submission process.
This is reviewed and approved by her PI.
Project Aims The IRS Project aims are: To explore and identify all current search and discovery technologies available to the Research & Teaching context that could support developments within the Institutional Repository landscape relating to the Higher Education Institutions (HEI) sector.
The IRS project team did this by establishing a dialogue with: • a number of open-source development communities (such as Lucene and IBM Unstructured Information Management Technology – UIMA); and • commercial knowledge and search technology stakeholders (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Autonomy Systems).
To encourage the embedding of a discovery and search facility for UK Institutional Repositories in familiar and day-to-day research desktop environments.
To identify how improved services to individuals could be further developed by including the ability to personalise information based on user profile, directed browse and dynamic navigation.
To provide richer, more meaningful conceptual and semantic search facilities using neural networking, semantic and text-mining technologies, including full-text document searching and dynamic concept linking.
To establish how the IRS service can be openly embedded in Web 2.0 technologies aiming at richer personalisation and contribute to developments within the Semantic Web.
Example User-driven Scenarios A number of user-driven scenarios were developed relating to the research and teaching and learning contexts.
These have subsequently been further refined as part of the Automatic Metadata Generation Use Cases recently developed for JISC [9].
Development Paths The project has identified and successfully carried out specific development paths – namely evolving from: simple metadata search to; conceptual search and clustering, full conceptual indexing of documents; text mining of full-text documents; automatic subject classification, clustering of results and; browsing/visualisation of the search results.
Together with our work with NaCTeM, this extends to term-based document classification and query expansion.
Institutional Repository Search currently searches over 95 UK institutional repositories that are listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) [10], and harvested using an aggregation system developed by UKOLN.
The evolution of the project involved growing from simple search at the beginning of the project to leveraging our findings with commercial and open-source technology stakeholders, to developing scalable Proof-of Concept (POC) demonstrators for more advanced conceptual search, clustering and text mining-based search facilities, which were integrated and fully operational by the end of the project.
Positive feedback data were obtained from formal evaluation with academic end-users and researchers.
The project undertook formal user group exercises where it asked end-users to test the demonstrators.
Within its advocacy work, the project also reported on its progress and presented the demonstrators at a number of national and international conferences where the feedback was always positive and in support of its innovative developments.
Interest in the project's results continues.
User group requirements have been integrated into the project's development iterations to ensure that the project adequately reflects what researchers want from a service such as Institutional Repository Search.
Further extensions of the IRS capability have recently been reviewed by formal user panels and by senior scholars from a number of disciplines with consistent positive feedback.
Much of IRS's success derives from the fact that it provides a way of discovering dynamic relationships from an otherwise static resource, something that is not available elsewhere.
The project has combined two complementary technologies.
One is a Web 3.0-orientated technology offering conceptual search, providing automated clustering and browsing, using the IDOL engine 7 provided by Autonomy [11].
The second is based on text-mining technology provided by NaCTeM.
The rationale for the final choice of these two complementary technologies arose from extensive discussion and elaboration with a range of knowledge technology stakeholders as described in the Project aims: Autonomy IDOL has UK academic origins originating from the University of Cambridge and maintained a consistent R&D dialogue with the technical team that worked on the aims of the project over the funded period of IRS.
It provides enterprise-class scalable core knowledge infrastructure capabilities which the IRS team has translated and successfully deployed into an open interface in the demonstrator; NaCTeM, based at the University of Manchester has been at the forefront of developing subject-specific text-mining applications which complement this broader capability.
Conceptual Search (IDOL) Conceptual search, more specifically involves: Benefits in the use of unstructured information search algorithms supported by metadata and full text, thus supporting automated taxonomy generation, and concept matching across related documents or artefacts.
The ability to search for a document, based on words that are related to a concept rather than a document that contains the actual search word or phrase.
The use of unstructured retrieval algorithms (Bayesian Inference and Shannon's Information Theory [12]), provided by the Autonomy IDOL 7 engine The project evaluated a range of available technologies but had particular success with the use of Autonomy IDOL.
This was due to available experience of its widespread use in key information retrieval areas in different, but contextually similar, scenarios to those of our researchers, such as information analysts in the wider Government and Media sectors.
Conceptual search then allows for a richer contextual search facility for users who want to view documents that are offered according to their relationship to their query.
Figure 1: Screenshot from the conceptual search Figure 2: Screenshot from conceptual search colourful cloud Text Mining-based Search (NaCTeM) Metadata are critical to the discovery of new knowledge.
The richer the metadata, and the more those metadata are linked into other resources of different types, the better placed a repository is to support new knowledge discovery and semantic search.
Text mining-based search tools that focus on what the document is about are both more convenient and more intuitive.
There are several attractive properties of a semantic search at the level of concepts, rather than keyword matching.
However, the prerequisite for such tools is the availability of semantic metadata, i.e.
information about what the document is about [13].
A problem with full-text search algorithms is low precision.
This is due to the fact that they match the query words indiscriminately against all words in a document, whether they reflect the topic of the document or not.
Within the IRS Project [14] we have proposed a practical way of alleviating this problem by constraining the search to those words or terms representative of the documents.
The keywords approach addresses this problem, but it depends on manually provided key words.
To be more practically useful, any approach needs to recognise document-representative words and terms automatically.
TerMine is an automatic term extraction service which identifies and ranks multiword terms (concepts) according to relevance.
TerMine is based on the C-Value method [15].
For IRS the results of TerMine have been integrated in the indexing process such that the document contents are represented by the extracted terms.
In addition to improving the quality of full-text retrieval, the extracted terms have been used to guide users on how to navigate documents sharing the same domain concepts.
Each retrieved document serves as a starting point to find implicitly related documents following the semantic links discovered by the concept terms, alleviating the problem of overlooking information.
A real-time document clustering system, Carrot2, which employs the LINGO algorithm [16][17], has been customized for our purposes to cluster the retrieved documents on the fly.
In each of the groups, the documents are related via a topic, denoted by a human-readable label.
For visualisation purposes, the Aduna cluster visualisation library has also been integrated.
The starting point of the search site is a basic search page, which provides options of searching on four fields: abstract, full text, title, author, and a combination of these four.
From the retrieved document list page, the document titles lead to a full document information page, on which various information about the document is displayed.
In addition, each document is associated with a list of similar documents and a list of terms representative of this document.
The users can search for other documents that share the terms by clicking on each term.
By repeating the search with the terms, users can potentially find numerous documents linked to a variety of subjects and topics.
Different IR packages may employ different query syntaxes.
In order to assist users who are not familiar with Lucene query syntax [18], the system provides an automatic query generator page, which can be used to generate complex queries by assigning values for a set of parameters via text fields on the page.
For example, users can set the words that must occur, may occur or must not occur, select a sorting option, give an author's name(s), repositories' names, etc.
To cater to users who may wish to adjust the queries manually, the automatically generated queries are displayed and can be edited.
This text mining-based search facility provides a useful tool for academic researchers and demonstrates the benefit of text mining techniques for advanced full-text search.
Benefits The IRS search service benefits different groups in the following manner: the research community by providing a more effective and personalised search and discovery facility, addressing the problem of information oversight.
the institutions themselves in providing a useful tool for their research output to attract a global audience.
society as a whole, in ensuring that publicly funded research is not only made easily accessible through Open Access but that it is also more clearly identifiable for the organisation or person searching for a particular study.
Conclusion Institutional repositories play a very important role in scholarly communication and there are many sources of information within the research arena where the user can search for information.
However, discovery and retrieval of information is not always easy, targeted and relevant.
This is turn can potentially hinder or restrict the researcher's chances of finding appropriate and significant material and so hinder innovation.
The UK Institutional Repository Search Project has created a free search tool that responds to these challenges.
More importantly, it has broken new ground in visualising how a new paradigm to search and discovery within the academic sector can be achieved beyond the simple search box.
There are key issues in UK research and teaching in scaling up our supportive knowledge capability to allow our end-users, researchers and scholars to optimise and even shorten the research cycle in response to new global challenges.
A key attribute is the ability ultimately to shorten the discovery time points within the research cycle from discovery to innovation.
A base scenario could be described as thus: "From a researcher's perspective, a starting point may not actually be a single entry into a Google search box or implicit skill in 'browsing' a subject-based classification taxonomy.
For example, a new researcher wishing to approach scholarly inquiry to determine the impact of global warming on penguin populations in South Antarctica doesn't walk up to a Librarian and shout 'Penguins'.
However despite advances in search systems such as Google Scholar entering this even as a subject-specific natural language query results in a list of 2,590 returns in a long sequential list".
Based upon recent feedback from researchers, what is needed is a means to organise this subject-orientated information in a way that fits in with current or even dynamic community or personal classification schemes.
More problematic is devising the means of mapping a constantly increasing range of subject or contextually related searchable digital assets, from a number of multi-format repositories within a dynamic relationship taxonomy.
Somehow, this has to relate directly to the construct framework the researcher is formatively attempting to build by way of new knowledge creation.
Using two proven and best-of-breed complementary technologies, IRS approaches this by searching over 95 UK repositories and 500,000 artefacts to create the opportunity for researchers to identify relevant information and relationships between information, in order to support them in their literature review and the production of their research output.
This has subsequently been extended to include both learning repositories and scientific and humanities-orientated historical archive repositories.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank our colleagues for their much-valued contributions: Phil Cross (University of Bristol); Monica Duke (UKOLN, University of Bath); Sophia Jones (SHERPA, University of Nottingham); Linda Kerr (Heriot Watts University); Andy Priest (Intute, University of Manchester); Paul Walk (UKOLN, University of Bath).
References The Semantic Web, Wikipedia, 1 November 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web Institutional Repository Search http://www.intute.ac.uk/irs Green R, Dolphin I, Awre C and Sherratt R (2007) The RepoMMan Project: automating workflow and metadata for an institutional repository, OCLC Systems and Services, 23 (2), 212-215 http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/downloads/oclc-23-2.pdf Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ National Data Centre, University of Manchester, UK http://www.mimas.ac.uk Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access (SHERPA) http://www.sherpa.ac.uk UKOLN, University of Bath http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ National Centre for Text Mining http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ Vic Lyte, Automatic Metadata Generation – Use Cases http://www.intrallect.com/index.php/intrallect/content/download/956/4017/file/Subject_Metadata.pdf Open Directory of Open Access Repositories http://www.opendoar.org/ Autonomy IDOL http://www.autonomy.com/content/Products/products-idol-server/index.en.html Autonomy: A Unique Combination of Technologies http://www.autonomy.com/content/Technology/autonomys-technology-unique-combination-technologies/index.en.html Nobata, C., Sasaki, Y., Okazaki, N., Rupp, C. J., Tsujii, J. and Ananiadou, S. (In Press).
Semantic Search on Digital Document Repositories based on Text Mining Results.
In: International Conferences on Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web 2009 (ICSD2009) Piao, S., Rea, B., McNaught, J. and Ananiadou, S.. (2009).
Improving Full Text Search With Text Mining Tools.
In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems http://www.nactem.ac.uk/aigaion2/index.php?/publications/show/134 Frantzi, K., Ananiadou, S. and Mima, H. (2000) Automatic recognition of multi-word terms, International Journal of Digital Libraries 3(2), 117-132. http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/sophia.ananiadou/IJODL2000.pdf Osinski, S., Stefanowski, J., Weiss, D.: Lingo: Search results clustering algorithm based on Singular Value Decomposition.
(2004).
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359–368.
Osinski, S., Weiss, D.: Conceptual clustering using lingo algorithm: evaluation on open directory project data.
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Apache Lucene Query Parser Syntax http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_3_2/queryparsersyntax.html Author Details Vic Lyte Mimas University of Manchester Email: vic.lyte@manchester.ac.uk Sophia Jones Centre for Research Communications University of Nottingham Email: sophia.jones@ nottingham.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Sophia Ananiadou School of Computer Science National Centre for Text Mining University of Manchester Email: Sophia.ananiadou@manchester.ac.uk Linda Kerr Intute Science, Engineering and Technology Heriot Watt University Library Email: L.Kerr@hw.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "UK Institutional Repository Search: Innovation and Discovery" Author: Vic Lyte, Sophia Jones, Sophia Ananiadou and Linda Kerr Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/lyte-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The 2010 Information Architecture Summit Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The 2010 Information Architecture Summit Buzz data mobile database curation rfid podcast facebook twitter ipad cookie privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Elizabeth Coburn reports on ASIS&T's 11th Annual Information Architecture Summit, held in Phoenix, Arizona over 9-11 April 2010.
The 11th Annual IA Summit [1] was held in sunny Phoenix Arizona this year.
It might have been more appropriate for a Masters student studying Data Curation to attend the Research Data and Access Summit, which was running concurrently, but in this particular case, curiosity prevailed.
Clearly, Information Architecture (IA) is a hot field, but this fact may only serve to increase anxiety as some may not have a firm grasp on what it entails.
As it turns out, Information Architecture seems to be loosely defined, if at all.
Instead it is more important to focus on what Information Architects seek to accomplish: facilitating understanding and improving the human experience in a world where the quantity of information is growing rapidly, and people are confronted by—and must interact with—more information than ever before.
An opening reception was held on the eve of the conference.
One of the hotel ballrooms served as the venue, and not long after the reception began it was full of people engaged in lively conversation.
In comparison to other conferences, this one looked to have a pretty cool crowd!
Whereas many appeared to have come with someone, or were meeting up with colleagues or friends they hadn’t seen in a while or since the last summit, for others this may have been their first time out.
Regardless, the participants at the Summit comprised a welcoming and lively group which, in looking at the credentials listed in the conference programme, was also surprisingly diverse.
And in this diversity some, perhaps those new to the field or the Summit, found reassurance.
Keynote Speaker: Richard Saul Wurman Richard Saul Wurman is an Information Architect with degrees in Architecture and Fine Art.
Wurman is a perfect example of a passionate person.
His particular passions are for information and ‘understanding,’ to borrow a keyword from his presentation.
He is a prolific author; the topics of his many books range from baseball to healthcare.
He is the founder of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference [2], and as he noted in his address, is responsible for the coining of the term ‘Information Architecture’.
Ideas for his projects derive from what he refers to as his own ignorance or lack of understanding.
On Saturday morning (10 April), as the audience trickled in to take its seats, Wurman sat in an armchair on the stage, chatting with those who had arrived early enough to nab seats in the front row.
On the side table next to the chair was a banana, his only prop.
He began his keynote by talking about the banana.
Eventually he would open it, this ‘perfect fruit,’ from the opposite end.
His explanation and the object lesson: everyone always tries to open bananas from the stem-end, which often results in frustration and a bruised, squishy banana, but open it from the opposite end, and this doesn’t happen.
Opening the banana from the other end is Wurman’s metaphor for what he calls ‘the opposite paradigm.’ When something isn’t working, start over from the beginning, and from the opposite direction.
He conceded that this can be a ‘terrifying’ proposition, but a necessary and ultimately rewarding one.
The speech that followed this demonstration was fascinating; filled with anecdotes about his adventures and accomplishments, insults (including a few pointed remarks about the recent release of Apple’s iPad in the United States), and general musings.
Wurman was both wise and charming, and he made the following points.
Information Architecture must be approached with an attitude.
A desire to make things understandable is a valuable passion, and a worthwhile pursuit.
In a world where everything is changing—including tools and modalities, expertise is boring.
Wurman’s presentation style was unexpected.
Aside from the banana there were no props or slides, instead the focus was on him and his words which were inspiring.
Wurman’s keynote as a podcast and a transcript are both freely available, and worth investigating [3].
Keynote Speaker: Dan Roam The keynote presentation given by Dan Roam also addressed this theme of ‘understanding.’ A consultant, best-selling author, and the founder of Digital Roam Inc., Roam holds degrees in Biology and Fine Art.
The topic of his talk was on solving complex problems through visual thinking—using pictures or ‘sketching’ to explain things.
Roam’s proposition to the audience: ‘whatever our problems are…we can solve them with pictures.’ Such a simple concept, which speaks to another over-arching theme from the Summit: keep it simple.
An interesting idea, when the tools and modalities for structuring and communicating information have become so complex.
Everyone likes pictures and everyone, Roam stated confidently, is capable of drawing them.
Drawing may very well be the most effective tool in solving the most complex problems—how ironic.
Roam also pointed out it is quite often the case that ‘whoever draws the best picture gets the funding.’ Sophistication and complexity aren’t necessary attributes of the ‘best picture,’ it is infinitely more important that the picture is easy to understand.
As an illustration of these points, Roam described the start of the most successful airline in history—Southwest, an idea that was hatched over cocktails and sketched on the back of a napkin.
Roam has given talks and hosted workshops at such places as Boeing and the United States Senate.
One sequence of his slides in his presentation at the Summit included hand-drawn sketches from the notebooks of United States Presidents: Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, etc.
A sketch on the back of a napkin was actually the basis for Reaganomics.
Even Barack Obama, the current United States president, draws extremely well, Roam noted.
Interestingly enough he is left-handed, as were five of the past seven American presidents—all drew avidly.
This makes sense given that left-handedness is commonly associated with a tendency for spatial-thinking.
President Obama is one of the most eloquent Presidents the United States has ever had, and seeing as he draws so well, Roam asked the United States Senate in his presentation to them, ‘Why isn’t he using pictures to explain things,’ how about healthcare?
The new healthcare reform bill that was recently signed into law in the U.S. has caused somewhat of an uproar among Americans.
In Roam’s opinion, it’s not so much that people don’t agree with the bill, they just don’t understand it.
So, why not explain it with pictures?
Roam did, with the help of a colleague.
His drawings (on napkins!)
are available via Slideshare [4].
In summary, Roam gave an inspiring talk about bringing Information Architecture back to basics.
Understanding is all-important, and drawing pictures is an effective way to explain complex problems—or convey information.
One which uses a simple tool that everyone possesses.
So, why isn’t everyone just drawing pictures?
For Roam’s explanation, and his keynote in entirety, download or listen to the podcast [5].
Nick Finck Nick Finck is an active and leading figure in the Web design community.
His presentation was entitled The commoditization & fragmentation of the Information Architecture community.
In his abstract he suggested that Information Architecture is at a crossroads, perhaps on the brink of fragmentation, that IA is a ‘profession defeating itself through the lack of clarity in its own message, a lack of value in its own offering, and through simply a lack of commitment by those within.’ The session was intended to be a light-hearted discussion among practitioners (and to aid in the levity of the atmosphere Finck had illustrated his slides with robot cartoons); in reality, it was anything but.
One of his first slides read: ‘Let’s not get into a debate about defining the damn thing.’ Here it was, out in the open, proof that some practitioners do not agree on the state of the profession.
Subsequent slides had questions like ‘Do you feel loved as an IA?’; ‘What are your challenges as an IA?’; and ‘What is the future of IA?’ The session rather resembled an IA support group meeting.
It was valuable in that it illustrated the struggles practitioners are having, but also a common desire among the ‘veterans’ to support the new generation of IAs and each other, and above all to ‘be the advocate for the information.’ Rather than be disheartened by the session, and perhaps it was the very presence of young people in the room (presumably ‘junior IAs’), there was instead a sense of hopefulness that if at a crossroads, or ‘on the brink,’ despite being this ephemeral, undefined, perhaps intangible entity, Information Architecture would come out okay.
It certainly has a solid future, though it may be impossible to achieve total clarity in its own message.
Having explored what Information Architecture was over the first sessions of the conference, and where it stands at the moment, the end of the weekend presented the opportunity to explore where IA is going, perhaps the most exciting part of any conference, i.e.
what’s new and yet to come?
Just as understanding was one of the major themes of this year’s summit and is perhaps a tenet of Information Architecture, another was certainly experience, in particular, the human experience.
It became evident, from sessions throughout the weekend on user experience, labelled UX, that one of the things information architects do is to model information, or structure it, in such a way as to optimise its use for people when they access it.
The most exciting examples of ‘experience’ were presented in a few sessions towards the end of the conference: the first on social networks, the second on ‘wayfinding,’ and a third on ‘metropolitan IA.’ Paul Adams Paul Adams, a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google gave a presentation Closing the gap between people’s online and real life social networks.
Adams asserted that peoples’ offline activities—their interactions and behaviour in real-life—influence their online activities and behaviour.
His prescriptive message, which was supported by two years of research and analysis, seemed to be that in order to understand online behaviour and create good design, Information Architects need to understand offline behaviours, and develop tools that allow for the incredibly complex social interactions of the people that use them.
Paul described social networking tools at present as ‘crude,’ since ‘[o]ur relationships in real life don’t boil down to accepting/following/ignoring and blocking others.’ And developing better tools at this point is more about understanding sociology than it is about technology.
Adams presented a series of case studies from his research on social interaction via Facebook.
An example of one of their findings: ‘friend’ is an ‘unhelpful’ word, and that instead designers and their tools must allow for multiple categories and types of relationships, as this is the way it works in the real-world.
Another significant point Adams made that reflected a common theme across the conference was the importance of privacy, and by association, trust.
The Internet is far-reaching and information on the Web is persistent.
People don’t always understand that their interactions are public, thus designers must make sure that tools are transparent—that users know what is happening and understand the possible consequences.
Transparent design is the only way to guarantee trust in a tool, so it must always represent a top priority.
This is an important point, one that is especially pertinent and often overlooked.
An apt example is Facebook and its ever-changing privacy policies (‘settings’).
As a result of these changes and the loss of transparency, many users have lost trust in it.
Facebook aside, Adams’ presentation provides a valuable lesson: simply look at what people do in real-life, and design accordingly.
Cennydd Bowles Cennydd Bowles, a User Experience Engineer for Clearleft in Brighton, England, gave a presentation called The future of wayfinding.
The abstract for his presentation stated that ‘[t]he boundaries between the abstract digital world and the real physical world are becoming blurred,’ GPS and RFID chips are enabling spimes (unique, location-aware, environment-aware, self-documenting objects), which will allow our environment to ‘tell us about itself and how we should interact with it.’ In the near future, our surroundings may be annotated.
The data cloud will, in some sense become grounded and transform into a data fog (paradoxical as that may sound).
Location-driven technology is already prevalent, the next step is in ‘shaping the chaos’—designing tools that help users better to experience and understand their surroundings, ultimately making them ‘feel at home.’ Again the issues of privacy and security are factors in making this experience secure, but another particularly interesting one is that by making this technology too important (such that it ‘inhibits exploration’) could result in negative experiences or interaction, in the event of (even temporary) failure.
Thus it would be prudent to maintain personal knowledge of one’s environment, and analogue ‘wayfinding’ techniques and skills.
Don Turnbull and John Tolva The presentation by Don Turnbull (whose entire bio in the programme read, ‘better than a sandwich, but not better than a cookie’), and John Tolva, Director of Citizenship and Technology for IBM, was entitled Metropolitan Information Architecture: The future of UX, databases and the (Information) Architecture of complex, urban environments.
Though similar to Bowles presentation, rather than a strict focus on navigation, Turnbull and Tolva explored how information and actual, physical architecture could ‘synchronize’ or integrate.
The presentation addressed a number of topics: the constraints of cities on design and how design could improve cities; how mobile communication and Web culture affect the streetscape; who has and is embracing data and networks as matters of physical design; at what point social media begin to change digital and physical social spaces in the urban network; and finally what metropolitan experiences could be like in the future.
Their main points emerged as follows: More than ever before human life revolves around cities and metropolitan areas, and these cities are immersed in data creating ‘platforms for interaction.’ By integrating these data and embedding new data (or annotating) a second city of information can be created.
Following this integration, a built environment becomes a ‘read and/or write environment.’ One of Tolva’s current projects at IBM is called City Forward.
The goal of this project is to make ‘smarter cities’ and consequently, better user experiences.
City Forward launches in June 2010, and represents perhaps a first step in the direction of ‘metropolitan IA’ [6].
Conclusion While some suggest that Information Architecture is on the brink of fragmentation, that it lacks clarity, and that its future is uncertain, the ideas put forth on Sunday 11 April provide evidence to the contrary—or evidence that such worries are irrelevant.
Rather than ‘debate over defining the damn thing’ maybe it is unnecessary either to define IA or even to seek complete clarity.
Whatever its course, its future is bright and brimming with possibility.
With any luck, these ideas for the future are what will remain with the delegates after the Summit.
The most exciting parts of this future seem to fall into the category of ‘ubiquitous computing’— information will potentially both leap off of the ‘page’ (the Web page) and out of the ‘box’ (the computer) distributing itself throughout the built environment.
Some of this is already happening now.
Information Architects will be the ones who further liberate it, and the ones who design the ‘experiences’ through which humans are able to interact and, ultimately, better understand the world around them, in all its complexity.
Information Architecture is not new.
The practice of structuring information, as Information Architects do, has arguably been around for as long as humans have been drawing pictures.
Perhaps it is the increased exposure that has made Information Architecture so provocative.
Or perhaps it is more likely a predictable outcome of our close proximity to an ever-increasing interaction with ‘information.’ Whatever the case may be, it is arguable that a great way, maybe even the best way, to learn about Information Architecture, is to attend an IA Summit.
Without over-simplifying the complexity of the work many Information Architects do, or the technical qualifications many possess, it is important to make it clear that the common denominator among Information Architects is a passion for information.
Though the mantra of the IA Summit was that ‘the best conversations happen in the hall’ (and a great deal of these conversations were ‘in the hall,’ as it were, or via Twitter feeds which were displayed on flat-screens), the best conversations, in fact, probably happened after everyone had departed.
The very best conversations are probably those happening now, and are the ones that people will continue to have in the coming months.
They will be the ones in which the most exciting ideas from this year’s summit—so many more than could be covered here—will be shared with those who were not able to attend.
With any luck these conversations will lead to more ideas, some of which will perhaps be revealed at the next Summit.
References IA Summit 2010 Web site http://2010.iasummit.org/ The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference http://www.ted.com/ IA Summit 10 Richard Saul Wurman Keynote: A Podcast from the IA Summit 2010 in Phoenix, AZ http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-10-richard Healthcare Napkins All http://www.slideshare.net/danroam/healthcare-napkins-all IA Summit 10 Dan Roam Keynote: A Podcast from the IA Summit 2010 in Phoenix, AZ http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-10-dan IBM.
City Forward.
2009 http://www.cityforward.org/ Author Details Elizabeth Coburn Master’s Candidate in Library and Information Science, specialising in Data Curation University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, GSLIS Email: coburn1@illinois.edu Web site: http://www.lis.illinois.edu/ Return to top Article Title: “The 2010 IA Summit” Author: Elizabeth Coburn Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/ia-summit-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Transformative Learning Support Models in Higher Education Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Transformative Learning Support Models in Higher Education Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Ward considers a work which brings together perspectives on learner support from academics, librarians and student support professionals.
At Sheffield Hallam University we are encouraged, and have the opportunity, to work with colleagues from other professional backgrounds.
Learning and IT Services is about to merge with Student and Academic Services to form Student and Learning Services.
This opens up exciting possibilities for cross-team working with the student experience at the centre of our remit; so I was very interested to read this book.
Overview of Content Margaret Weaver sets high expectations in her preface '...once read, there's no going back!'
(p.XVII) and she is absolutely right.
Chapters are arranged in three sections: part 1 covers strategy and structure, part 2 learning spaces, and part 3 research-informed approaches.
This works well though I felt that chapter 1 by Les Watson is a relevant introduction to all three sections and should be essential reading for anyone dipping into this book.
The clear presentation and consistent use of headings means most chapters are very readable, though a couple don't seem to fit as well in terms of writing style.
Where examples and case studies of research or change projects are included, they make the chapter more relevant and of real practical use.
Such chapters motivated me to find out more – to check out their Web pages, to visit the learning spaces described, and to read more about the topic.
I found the chapters by Weaver and Hough, and Martin particularly interesting in this regard.
It is heartening, but not surprising, to find that similar issues and concerns affect all Higher Education institutions.
The value of a book such as this is in learning from each other and sharing ideas.
Specific Themes Learning Spaces There has been an important shift in Higher Education to students as partners, with the student voice, student engagement, and student experience at the centre of most new developments.
The development of new social learning spaces gives students the opportunity to take control of their learning environment, and equally importantly it also gives them choice.
This book contains some examples of projects to transform learning spaces, and anyone interested in the topic could also explore the case studies in the JISC infokit [1].
Cohen and Harvey describe the creation of a range of informal learning spaces in existing accommodation (p.79); proof that you don't need new build or huge resources to make a difference to the student experience.
At Sheffield Hallam University two new types of learning space are being explored: social learning space in a new extension to the Adsetts Centre, and learning hubs in the Faculty of Development and Society.
Aspden [2] describes their development and underlying philosophy.
One early outcome of the learning hubs development is the positive collaboration between support staff and academics – what Martin describes as 'The emergence of multiprofessional teams' (p.153).
Student Support Several authors welcome the move away from a deficit model for student support services.
Student support staff are increasingly promoting the benefits of their services to all students, including their role in personal and academic development.
Stephenson (chapter 3) discusses the development of one such service at the University of Cumbria and gives an interesting overview of the change process, reflecting on what works well and what has still to be achieved.
Collaborative Working and Staff Development A common theme running through this book is the importance of learning from each other.
An environment in which support professionals work in collaborative partnership has benefits for the students and for the staff themselves.
Marsh describes the creation of Learner Support Services at the University of Bradford, 'We have the ability to improve services to staff and students by sharing professional expertise...' (p.64).
At the University of Cumbria the new learner facilitator role provides opportunities for staff to broaden their skill sets (Weaver and Hough, p.97).
Staff development is an important element in any change and is discussed by several authors.
Describing the evolving role of staff at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Rennie states 'The changes can be challenging for all staff…Consequently, a heavy investment has been made in staff development and training at all levels...' (p.115).
Success Factors From the evidence provided by the authors in this book, there appear to be some common success factors in initiatives seeking to transform learning support and learning spaces.
The most important is placing the student experience at the centre.
Also important are strong leadership with the vision to champion changes and anticipate barriers to collaboration, together with the professional will to work collaboratively in multi-professional teams.
Three of the chapters concerning research-informed approaches describe projects funded by CETLs (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning); so perhaps access to resources is also a success factor.
Conclusion It is very interesting to read how some institutions are developing their services to encompass new ideals of learner support and focus on the learner rather than the service.
It's also apparent that there isn't a single solution – depending on the needs of your student body, your institution, and your staff, you may want to borrow ideas from some or all of these authors.
You could dip in and read one or two chapters, but will gain more by reading several chapters or the whole book.
References Joint Information Systems Committee (2008).
Planning and designing technology-rich learning spaces.
http://jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/learning-space-design/more/case-studies/ Aspden, Liz (2008).
Learning environments: their role in the enhancement of the student experience.
Paper presented at the Higher Education Academy conference, 1 July 2008. http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/events/conference/Ann_conf_2008_Liz_Aspden Author Details Sarah Ward Information Specialist Sheffield Hallam University Email: s.f.ward@shu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Transformative Learning Support Models in Higher Education: Educating the whole student" Author: Sarah Ward Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/ward-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010 Buzz data mobile software framework html rss xml portal apache usability metadata css firefox accessibility browser smartphone blog video hypertext visualisation gis opera videoconferencing widget curation wordpress mashup xcri facebook twitter hashtag webkit rdfa wookie cocoa html5 plone taxonomy research sharepoint datamining Citation BibTex RIS Keith Doyle provides a personal perspective on a conference organised by UKOLN for those involved in the provision of institutional Web services.
This was the 13th Institutional Web Management Workshop [1] to be organised by UKOLN [2] held at the University of Sheffield from 12 to 14 July 2010.
The theme was 'The Web in Turbulent Times' [3].
As such, there was a healthy balance of glass-half-empty-doom-and-gloom, and glass-half-full-yes-we-can.
More detailed reporting, including live blogging by Kirsty McGill of T Consult Ltd [4] and blog posts by presenters, can be found at the IWMW Blog [5].
Welcome Just before the start of the conference, the level of noise seemed low, perhaps because there was a twitterwall of #iwmw10 tweets [6] being projected on the stage.
Marieke welcomed us to the conference, then Brian explored the theme of the conference.
Brian turned the clock back to show an early version of the University of Sheffield Web site using the memento Firefox plugin.
By show of hands, three delegates indicated that they had attended the first IWMW in 1997.
This was when a newly elected Tony Blair talked about 'Education, Education, Education.'
Brian said that it is now 'Cuts, Cuts, Cuts.'
What this means for the community is: it needs to be more innovative; focus on efficiency and networking instead of growth; make greater use of centralised shared services; save costs by using commercial services; come to terms with social media; rediscover the community online despite the drop in use of Jiscmail for mutual support.
Sponsors for the event were thanked [7].
These were Jadu, TERMINALFOUR, Statistics into Decisions, Eduserv, and Site Confidence.
The Web in Turbulent Times Plenary talk by Chris Sexton, Director or Corporate Information and Computing Services, University of Sheffield Chris highlighted key IT issues which institutions will need to address in the coming years.
She expects cuts to hit universities not this year but in the subsequent two years.
The issues facing institutions are: The only aspect of IT funding which is certain, is that there will be less of it.
When discussing IT projects and academics, it is better to think of them as business projects which bring value to the institution.
In order to reduce costs we should consider backend systems which are shared across a number of institutions.
New students are fee-paying digital natives who expect 24x7 support and greater mobile availability.
However, more availability risks confidentiality and integrity.
The Digital Economy Act could cause enormous problems, whether institutions have ISP-related or consumer-related responsibilities.
We need to develop room videoconferencing and server virtualisation to provide our contribution to reducing carbon emissions.
We need to focus on teaching and learning services.
The quality of other services such as outsourced email hosting, will not be as good.
Outsourced services will drive innovation and increase risk.
We need to rethink how we deliver projects so that they take place over weeks and months rather than years.
Chris Sexton, Director or Corporate Information and Computing Services, University of Sheffield Are Web Managers Still Needed When Everyone Is a Web Expert?
Plenary talk by Susan Farrell, Web Consultant, Susan Farrell Associates When Susan asked, few of the audience felt that their VC understood the role of the Web team.
We are not as valued as librarians, who have chartered status.
The main conclusion of this session was that Web teams needed to promote themselves and be seen as part of the solution, not part of the problem: We need to communicate the complexity of what we support, as the institution's reputation would suffer without Web management.
Our roles our indispensible if we put the Web at the heart of the business.
We can use PR techniques to communicate how we are helping the whole institution.
We can gain recognition through communities of interests, briefings and committees.
Susan Farrell, Web Consultant, Susan Farrell Associates Parallel Sessions 1 Delegates could choose one of ten breakout sessions I attended an excellent session by Stuart Church (left) from Pure Usability on Usability and User Experience on a Shoestring.
He discussed a user-centred philosophy and some useful low-cost tools.
Other sessions were: A Little Project Management Can Save a Lot of Fan Cleaning; FlashMash; 'Follow us on Twitter'...'Join our Facebook group'; Getting Awesome Results from Data Visualisation; Location Based Services Without the Cocoa; My Superpower is Content Curation.
What's Yours?
RDFa from theory to practice; Sheffield Made Us – using social media to engage students in the University brand; Stylesheets for mobile / Smartphones.
Social Event 1 Conference Meal The conference meal on the first day took place at The Edge, University of Sheffield.
HTML 5 (and Friends) Plenary talk by Patrick Lauke, Web Evangelist, Opera Software ASA Patrick Lauke expounds on the evolution of HTML Patrick focussed on what can be done with core HTML5, which is being developed by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group.
Unlike XHTML2, HTML5 is backwards-compatible, and works with the realities of browser functionality.
According to Ian Hickson, it is for 'extending the language to better support Web applications.'
The examples which Patrick gave were: New markup elements, which were identified following datamining by Google.
These elements include header, footer, article, and nav.
They can be used with older browsers with appropriate CSS coding, such as adding {display:block;} and document.createElement.
Browser-supported client-side form validation can be coded within the HTML, with styling through additional pseudo classes.
The Video element allows for improved keyboard accessibility and control.
Patrick suggested that when using HTML5, feature detection would be better than browser-sniffing to code with graceful degradation.
Mobile Web and Campus Assistant Plenary talk by Damian Steer, Web Researcher & Developer, ILRT, University of Bristol and Alex Dutton, Lead Developer, Oxford University Computing Services Damian Steer provides a history of mobile phone technology Damian gave a history of mobile phone technology.
He said that webkit is dominant, and that although there are other technologies, consumers are not using them.
Useful features are: CSS3 to query screen capabilities; device location detection; offline Web applications capability; orientation and gesture detection.
The Mobile Campus Assistant uses timeand location-sensitive information.
Their most popular tool is live bus information.
Their next project will be My Mobile Bristol.
Alex Dutton describes the quick-win mobile applications of Mobile Oxford Alex talked about Mobile Oxford, which developed quick-win mobile applications: street maps; contacts search; library search; universal search with regex pattern matching; real-time bus, weather and Web cam information.
Some of the data used were scraped, and pages could be rendered in different formats, so that third parties can make use of their data.
The software is called Molly, and can be downloaded from Sourceforge.
'So What Do You Do Exactly?
': In Challenging Times, Justifying the Roles of the Web Teams Plenary talk by Ranjit (SiD) Sidhu, Founder, Statistics into Decisions Ranjit (SiD) Sidhu justifies the roles of Web teams Sid concluded that the challenge for Web teams is to show value.
In order to show value, context must be included.
A Web site may be expensive, but context is needed to determine what value it brings to the institution.
As institutional Web sites are both e-commerce and informational, we can learn from both types of site.
The importance of PDF downloads was demonstrated by looking at how brochures feature on a car Web site.
PDF downloads provide more value than posted prospectuses which in turn provide more value than contacting the institution in person.
Sid then showed a demonstration dashboard page which he produced by feeding XML data into InDesign.
This is a single-page visual report which could be sent to management which shows month-on-month and year-on-year data, statistics, highlights, and recommendations.
No Money?
No Matter: Improve Your Web Site With Next to No Cash Plenary talk by Paul Boag, User Experience Consultant, Headscape Paul Boag explaining how to cut the Web site cloth according to one's pocket Paul sees cuts as an opportunity to simplify the service and approach things differently.
He suggested that the service needs simplifying because Web sites are bloated.
If there is less money, then smaller Web sites are required.
This can be done by three methods: remove content; hide content by removing from navigation and search so it no longer needs maintaining; and shrinking content.
This can be implemented by embracing supporting policies such as: the link on the home page with the fewest clicks will be replaced; un publish pages with few views; un publish un reviewed pages.
Suggested methods to approach things differently were: a more agile approach with one month sprints for projects; bringing in an outside perspective; monthly strategic meetings.
It's All Gone Horribly Wrong: Disaster Communication in a Crisis Plenary Talk by Jeremy Speller, Director of Learning & Media Services, University College London Jeremy Speller advocates the direct involvement of Web teams in disaster management Jeremy Speller drew on his experiences in 2005, when the 7/7 London bombings took place during the Institutional Web Management Workshop.
During the London bombings, the Web and phone service came down, so the only way to get news was through television.
All institutions have a major incident plan, but the Web team is not always fully involved in the team responsible for such a plan.
Jeremy recommended that they should be.
Jeremy showed a map of different forms of communication and explored the appropriateness of each.
An example was given of twitter being used to communicate with students during snowy weather last winter.
Jeremy also looked at Web services hosted on third parties, on the Janet network, or co-located at other institutions.
Different services are required depending on service availability.
If nothing is functioning, the institution should have a megaphone available.
We remembered the UCL victims of the bombing: Gladys Wundowa, Lee Harris, Miriam Hyman and Neetu Jain.
BarCamps There were two BarCamp sessions and an Online BarCamp [8].
High-tech geo-locational data for the Workshop's two BarCamps BarCamps Session 1 I attended a session by Helen Sargan from the University of Cambridge on dallying with Plone one year on.
Other sessions included: An Insight Into Website Quality Assurance and Enterprise Search; Client Update and Feedback Session; Course Finders and Beyond; Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly.
BarCamps Session 2 I ran a session called 'instant usability testing – let's do it!'.
I ran a usability test, including selection, preparation, test and review, in 25 minutes.
Other sessions included: Apache Wookie & W3C Widgets; Helping Your Users Get Satisfaction; Promoting Your Institution with Wikipedia – an insider's view; Slate My Website; Web Teams Must Blog; What Makes For a Great Online Video?
– review live examples.
Online BarCamp This session focussed on the Online Course Prospectus Parallel Sessions 2 Delegates could choose one of nine sessions on day two.
I presented a session on 'Developing Your Contingency Plan: Beat the Panic.'
In the session, we looked at ways of creating and analysing choices, creating a vision, and qualities which are useful for making change.
Other sessions were: Course Advertising and XCRI; Designing, Developing and Testing a Location-aware Learning Activity Using QR Codes; Engagement, Impact, Value: Measuring and Maximising Impact Using the Social Web; Inside the Pantheon: A Dreamweaver framework for managing dynamic content; Looking at Linked Data; Mobile Apps vs Mobile Web; Taxonomy – Creating structure across content using metadata; Wordpress beyond Blogging.
Social Event 2 Drinks reception at the Kelham Island Industrial Museum Rapper dancers at the drinks reception.
Doing the Day Job This session consisted of three shorter plenary talks and then a panel session with those who had just given talks.
Conducting their panel session are: (left to right) James Lappin, Peter Gilbert, Richard Brierton and Josef Lapka Replacement CMS: Getting It Right and Getting the Buy-In Talk by Richard Brierton, Internet Services Manager, University of Sheffield Richard's talk was informed by his experiences of upgrading a CMS to a completely new version.
Often a CMS is blamed for problems, but really any problems are the responsibility of the Web team.
He listed his department's CMS ethos as: Deliver a CMS for the 90% non-technical users; One voice use consistent terminology; Training is the most cost-effective way to improve your Web site; Content is the most expensive part of the system; Your CMS design should cater for users who will best-guess if unsure; Avoid unnecessary flexibility – remove non-essential and counter-productive features; Editor's don't care about the CMS – only about their content.
StudentNET Portal Talk by Josef Lapka, Senior Web Applications Developer, Canterbury Christ Church University Josef gave a live demo of a student portal system which is the home page for students on campus.
Once created, it is very easy for the developers to create new widgets to add new functionality.
Some content is forced on students, but mostly students can choose which widgets to display on their home page.
The system allows granular messaging to students.
It features drag-and-drop functionality, students can check their data and modules, RSS feeds can be added, there is contextual help for each application.
The Impact of SharePoint in Higher Education Talk by James Lappin, Records Management Consultant and Trainer, Thinking Records and Peter Gilbert, SharePoint Evangelist, University of the West of England 90% of Universities have SharePoint.
It is mostly being used for: staff administration using its collaborative tools; and for academic research because it is easier to allow access to third parties than for VLEs.
The advantages of SharePoint are that it is good for committees and that it can be used to develop solutions without the skills of a developer.
It can be useful for short or external courses.
However, there is a steep learning curve, and MySite is designed for people in businesses.
Forms can be created using InfoPath, and there is a workflow tool called Skelter which is simpler than SharePoint's.
Panel Session With Richard Brierton, Josef Lapka, James Lappin and Peter Gilbert The panel answered questions from the audience.
Conference Conclusion Workshop conclusions facilitated by Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, UKOLN Brian and others summarised some of the sessions.
Brian also demonstrated some fascinating mashups.
This included a Twitter buzzword bingo.
The following points were made: Christine Sexton's blog is worth seeing [9] Results of the QR code game were announced Some innovative tools: Twapperkeeper [10] Summarizr [11] IWMW synoptic [12] Brian asked everyone to write one blog post a week as a community resource which could be accessed from the IWMW Community [13] He also highlighted the press release for the event [14], and encouraged us to write our own press releases.
Brian showed us a version of the presentation videos with twitter subtitles [15] Brian talked about whether the IWMW would be held again, if the format would need to change, and the need to explore sponsorship.
Author Conclusion There was a good turnout for the conference, and I enjoyed it as much as previous conferences I have attended in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
There was a mixed mood of 'doom and gloom' at the prospect of cuts, and enthusiasm for innovations and new ways of working.
I have commented from the perspective of someone attending the conference, but there were live online activities happening too.
People not attending the conference could: watch the main sessions live on the Internet; take part in twitter discussions; take part in an online BarCamp.
From talking with conference participants, I sensed that people valued the conference for providing them with enthusiasm and motivation.
At the same time, there was realism about the changes which will need to be made in the economic climate and people were ready to return to their institutions with a clearer sense of the importance of strategy.
Health warning at opening of IWMW10 Workshop References Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010 http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/ UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ "This year's event sees the Web Management community, like others in the HE sector, facing turbulent times: we have the uncertainty of the forthcoming general election, the implications of cuts across the public sector, the concerns raised by global warming and even, more recently the effect of erupting volcanoes on northern Europe" http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/ T Consult Ltd http://tconsult-ltd.com/ IWMW 2010 Blog http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2010/ Twitterwall.me http://twitterwall.me/%23iwmw10 Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010: Sponsors http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/sponsors/ Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010: BarCamps http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/barcamp/ Christine Sexton's blog http://cicsdir.blogspot.com/ Twapper Keeper "We save tweets" #hashtag iwmw10 IWMW 2010 tweets http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/iwmw10 Summarizr http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/?hashtag=iwmw10 IWMW synoptic http://iwmw-rdf.ukoln.info/ Institutional Web Management Workshops: The IWMW Community http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/community/search IWMW 10: Community Press Release: UK Universities Web Managers Are Prepared for Cuts http://bit.ly/iwmw10pressrelease iTitle: IWMW10: The Web in Turbulent Times with Twitter Subtitles http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/ititle/v/id/13314385/ Author Details Keith Doyle User Experience Consultant Extreme Usability Email: keith.doyle@extremeusability.co.uk Web site: http://www.extremeusability.co.uk Keith Doyle worked in further and higher education for a total of 13 years.
He has been Web Content Architect at the University of Salford and Web Master at Manchester College of Arts and Technology (now The Manchester College).
Since leaving Salford in 2008, Keith has worked in the private sector, and is now self-employed.
Keith's technical interests are in user experience in particular in Web site navigation, information architecture and live usability testing.
Return to top Article Title: "Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010" Author: Keith Doyle Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/iwmw-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Back to the moon eLib and the future of the library.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Back to the moon eLib and the future of the library.
Citation BibTex RIS Martin Hamilton, Jisc's resident futurist and one time developer on the ROADS project in the 1990s, looks back at the heady days of the Follett Report, the eLib projects that appeared as a result and the services that some of them gave rise to.
He then proposes an interesting long term archiving idea that might not be as far fetched as it sounds.
19th January 1996, and founding editor John Kirriemuir is about to hit “publish” on the first edition of Ariadne magazine.
In a bunker somewhere in the East Midlands, Jon Knight waits with trepidation to see what the Ariadne editorial process will make of the first in what would prove to be a long running series of From the Trenches articles.
Little realising that twenty years later he would himself be a member of the editorial cabal... Follett FIGITs Wind the clock back a little further, to 1993, and the Follett Report.
Follett recommends what amounts to a “moonshot” for UK university libraries.
It was already clear that technological change would have a profound effect on teaching, learning and research, and that libraries were poised to play a pivotal role in this or would simply fade away into obsolescence.
Follett states that: The exploitation of IT is essential to create the effective library service of the future.
In 1995 the wonderfully acronymed Follett Implementation Group on IT (FIGIT) is established and creates the UK electronic libraries programme, or eLib for short.
eLib was chartered to pursue a programme of radical innovation that included: ...development of standards, pilot projects to demonstrate the potential of on-demand publishing and electronic document and article delivery, a feasibility project to promote the development of electronic journals in conjunction with relevant publishing interests, the development of a database and dataset strategy, investment in navigational tools, retrospective conversion of certain catalogues, and investment in the further development of library automation and management systems.
eLib ran from 1995 to 2001, and chartered around 70 digital library R&D projects truly letting “a thousand flowers bloom”.
I was lucky enough to play my own small part in the eLib programme, co-authoring the software underpinning the eLib subject gateway services.
The subject gateways provided a curated list of quality resources in the Wild West that was the (pre-Google) early web.
I described this period and my work on and around eLib in a 2011 blog post: Back to the future resource discovery, revisited.
Life after eLib Many of the themes that eLib supported which have really taken on a life of their own in the intervening years.
For example, take a look at the Open Journal and CogPrints projects from Wendy Hall, Les Carr and Steven Harnad at the University of Southampton, which neatly map out much of the open access, institutional repository and open journal space that is rapidly becoming the norm for researchers worldwide.
Like CogPrints, Thomas Krichel’s working papers in economics (WoPEc) project at the University of Surrey lives on as part of Research Papers in Economics (RePEc).
I am particularly fond of RePEc, which is built on the metadata format that we used in the long defunct eLib ROADS project.
And at Jisc we took forward a number of the eLib projects as national services like Netskills and DIGIMAP, and the subject gateways were ultimately brought together as the Resource Discovery Network, which became part of the Intute portal.
But in many ways the most significant part of eLib for librarians might actually have been the Ariadne magazine, which rapidly became the place to look for the latest ideas and advice on harnessing the potential of technology.
This issue of Ariadne, number 75, comes out on the magazine’s 20th anniversary.
Back to the moon Looking back at the eLib initiative now, it’s clear that in many cases we were years if not decades ahead of our time.
For example it is only very recently that open access journals and open research data have come to be regarded as standard operating practice for publicly funded research with the RCUK Policy on Open Access and equivalent mandates from funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
However, we also failed to anticipate the extent to which digital systems and services would come to be consolidated under the auspices of a few large players from the Stacks, as Bruce Sterling calls the major Internet firms, to a handful of conglomerates that dominate academic publishing, much like the zaibatsus of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Perhaps this tension between the Stacks (e.g.
cloud providers and publishers) and the individual or institution will come to be the defining characteristic of the next twenty years.
A new moonshot?
We don’t have a “new Follett report” perhaps the Nurse Report is the closest we get to one, and its recommendations are about efficiency and consolidation more than they are about radical innovation.
But that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about the future.
What ideas would seem radical now, but could easily be standard operating practice by 2036?
Google’s Moonshot Summit in the Summer 2016 brought educators and technology innovators together from around the world to consider the future of technology enhanced learning.
Let’s now ask ourselves what would a Moonshot for Libraries look like?
A “new Follett” for the twenty tens and beyond.
Not only are public libraries closing at a fast rate of knots, but it’s also becoming increasingly difficult to train as a librarian due to library school closures.
This seems paradoxical given that we are also told that 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last couple of years.
I believe the answer is that we actually need librarians more than ever to help us find and make sense of all that information.
And in academia there is a particular need for librarians to help open up research outputs and teaching and learning materials to ensure they are reused, revised, remixed and redistributed.
The Content Mine, from Peter Murray-Rust and his collaborators, offers us a glimpse of the transformational potential of open science.
Plan B the offsite backup It sometimes takes an outrageous or plainly ridiculous idea to spark a conversation that leads to real insights.
In that spirit I will share an idea with you today in this article right now the sum total of human knowledge is only to be found on the Earth, but the Earth is fragile and our tenancy upon it far from assured.
Do we not owe it to future human generations, or future interplanetary explorers who discover Earth’s smouldering remains, to have an offsite backup?
[NASA PhoneSat, by Steve Jurvetson.
CC-BY]   Just a few years ago this would have been completely preposterous, but consider that an offline copy of Wikipedia (I know, but we have to start somewhere!)
is a mere 12GB in size easily copied onto a thumbnail sized microSD card.
I’d like to think that Tim Peake took a copy up to the International Space Station as part of the Astro Pi project, but sadly I think that opportunity was missed.
Now if that microSD card was a nice big 128GB one, there would still be room left for 50,000 ebooks from Project Gutenberg.
Whilst an offplanet outpost holding the archive is quite appealing (if only because I am picturing “Moonbase Jisc” at this point) the truth is that we could easily send all that information out with every space probe that Earth dispatches like a latter day version of the Voyager Golden Record.
We could even bury it deep below the surface of the moon as part of the Lunar Mission One time capsule.
Of course the sum total of human knowledge is a little more than this, and some curation effort might be required to decide which of the 459 billion web pages indexed by archive.org is worth keeping a backup copy of.
And that’s before we’ve started to look at cat videos and human DNA.
The serious point here is that we tend to think of the scientific record and educational materials as big data, but they are a drop in the ocean by comparison with the ordinary person’s “digital exhaust” of photos and videos in an era of smartphones and tablets.
That offsite (off planet) backup of humanity’s key insights might not be such an impossible or implausible idea after all, and making it might teach us a lot about what is truly important.
So that’s my moonshot what’s yours?
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 56: More Light Than Heat Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 56: More Light Than Heat Buzz data software framework database rss accessibility identifier repositories multimedia visualisation research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 56.
I am greatly indebted to Gráinne Conole for a number of reasons.
It has been my intention for some time to commission something from the OU in respect of learning technologies given the wealth of expertise that resides there.
For a variety of reasons it has taken me a while, but the wait has been more than worthwhile in the light of Gráinne's contribution.
In my view her article New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies does much to exchange light for all the ambient heat that surrounds this topic, while refusing, as some are tempted, to reject the whole Web 2.0 development as 'blether'.
Instead Gráinne provides a reasoned and structured path through this topic which will give considerable food for thought to her fellow practitioners.
In this balanced article she freely acknowledges the tensions that exist 'between the rhetoric of Web 2.0 and current educational practices.'
She also describes in this context some of the chief characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies and how they can place new users at variance with current educational thinking.
She goes on to point out that the traditional educational and knowledge model has changed, while Web 2.0 in effect helps resolve the difficulty: '...
It is no longer possible for any individual to be an expert in their field, ....
Web 2.0 by its nature copes seamlessly with a complex and changing knowledge domain; fundamental to Web 2.0 practice is that no one individual is expert, rather they are part of a social network of others; the power of the Web enables knowledge to be co-constructed and hence continually change as needed.'
Yet despite these tensions and changes Gráinne points to the fact that, 'there has never been a closer alignment between the current practices of Web 2.0 technologies and what is put forward as good pedagogy ...'.
Thus, to my own considerable relief, she turns the all too frequent approach on its head and shows how the primary and educational need can shape and make use of the benefits these new technologies confer.
Before anyone 'detects' a themed issue, I should point out that not even two swallows make a summer; consequently the contributions from Marieke Guy and the LibrarianInBlack, Sarah Houghton-Jan in this Summer Issue can only form a 'tendency', namely looking at the information professional's 'lot', happy or otherwise.
In this regard, if Marieke addresses the notion of 'where' in her contribution then Sarah most decidedly delves into an increasingly important aspect of 'what'.
Sarah Houghton-Jan's article Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload addresses a major concern these days, wired or otherwise.
Indeed, she informs us that anxiety about excess of information dates back centuries.
Nonetheless, of the old tyrannical triumvirate of the telephone, photocopier and computer, it is the latter which has now subsumed the roles of its co-conspirators and bombards us with email, IMs, VoIP calls et al, ad nauseam (to invoke the Latin, appropriately enough).
While Sarah orientates this contribution towards the role of librarians and other information professionals, I suspect many other office-based workers will benefit somewhere from her ten techniques to manage the overload.
Not all are either revolutionary or essential to all.
Indeed some points are arguably centred on 'mere' good administrative practice.
Others might complain that her suggested 'traffic survey' of all 'incoming' only adds to their workload.
The latter complaint would appear a little unfair.
In order to solve any problem one has to gauge the degree to which it exists and few would claim they suffer no information overload.
Indeed SHJ offers some very pragmatic advice on dealing with floods of email and RSS feeds as well as more recent 'carriers' .
Her axe extends to print and multimedia; she advises us to be ruthless for our own sakes.
If information overload is the disease, Sarah may very well have a cure.
Moreover if such ministrations to the hard-pressed professional fail to help, there is always Lina Coelho's review of What's the Alternative?.
What particularly commends itself in Marieke Guy's article is the approach she adopts throughout.
This is neither a pitch on behalf of the workforce to stay at home and compute from the duvet, nor is it an opportunity for employers to complain about the suspicions they may have about remote working.
A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working takes an even-handed approach to the subject and is far from starry-eyed about the prospect of remote working.
Indeed Marieke's research makes it clear that remote working is neither feasible nor appropriate for everyone.
Such are the personal and organisational issues involved that we have agreed to defer discussion of the technical aspects of remote working to a further article.
Given the widely accepted view that while synchronous and asynchronous communications are all very well, but what some organisations need is more 'face-to-face', it might seem perverse to advocate remote working.
However, recent developments have not all been technical; the way in which practitioners now work has also altered considerably.
Indeed, in one respect,but an important one, it can be argued that this style of working has come to the rescue of the system of employment as it proceeds to make its life ever more difficult with the advent of shorter and shorter contracts and decreasing tenure.
It is reasonable to contend that such a trend is inevitable in the continuous attempt to make the funding cake go further.
The counter-argument goes that as this trend strengthens, an increasing proportion of say, a researcher's contract is devoted to looking for the next post.
Remote working can in these circumstances sustain both recruitment and retention, since it can provide a 'silver bullet' solution to the problems of filling a post and keeping it filled.
In the last of three contributions emanating from the JISC-funded Version Identification Framework (VIF) this year, Jenny Brace points out in Versioning in Repositories: Implementing Best Practice that, while a recognised problem, versioning has not had a great deal of time or effort devoted to it as yet.
She produces statistics from a VIF survey conducted among researchers in autumn 2007.
Yet developments in institutional repositories have only served to exacerbate the problem and Jenny seeks to provide some clarification amidst the confusion, as well as some pointers to good practice for all concerned.
In the framework she proposes, she emphasises the importance of answering the needs of individual repository managers.
The individual approach nonetheless comes underpinned by some globally applicable key principles which will serve to increase end-users' confidence in their repository.
In The Networked Library Service Layer: Sharing Data for More Effective Management and Cooperation Janifer Gatenby offers criteria for determining which data in various library systems could be more beneficially shared and managed at a network level.
Janifer provides us with the background story of the development of integrated library systems over the years, including the times when they no longer merited the term 'integrated'.
This occurred during the most significant changes in the period after 1998 with the Internet, the World Wide Web and the growth of digital publishing eliciting new systems which took us outside the single library location in terms of resources and ultimately services.
With the advent of many different types of data, Janifer contends that we need to review 'the architecture of the ILS for smoother integration into the current environment' and also proffers examples of how the new varieties of data can be of service to libraries and users alike.
While she maintains that it is important for libraries to own and control their data resources and manage their access beneficially, she is less convinced that libraries need to be similarly in control of the management software.
In his Get Tooled Up article about Integrating Journal Back Files into an Existing Electronic Environment, Jason Cooper provides a well-structured and step-by-step analysis of the approach adopted by Systems Staff at Loughborough University Library.
In his exposition, Jason provides helpful background on the existing electronic environment, what the team wanted to achieve in terms of users' experience and the method elected.
His description then takes us through the various elements of the implementation and how the team saved time and effort by integrating the back files into its existing electronic set-up.
in his column on search engines, Phil Bradley freely admits he sees Google Still Growing and even ignores his own restraining order on coverage of Google since he is quite impressed with some of its latest developments.
But only some.
He warns not to expect that everything mooted in Google's experimentation space will necessarily come to fruition, though it is possible to see what is progressing in Google Labs for example.
Where Google most decidedly draws Phil's fire is in respect of Google Librarian which, as he ponts out, had been enjoying a very lengthy summer break only to give way, in the end to a newsletter for librarians.
Phil finds it hard to mask his scepticism.
He is far more more impressed by the move by Google to index what is variously known as the dark, hidden or invisible Web, basically inaccessible databases.
If this works, it will have a significant effect on usage of the Web, though, he warns, it will not come without its problems.
Phil covers a variety of other developments, of which I was most interested by the new Google Maps features.
In Lost in the JISC Information Environment Tony Ross offers his personal view of the contribution the JISC Information Environment architecture has made to development, i.e.
from the perspective of someone working on tools for resource discovery.
In his high-level view of the design of the JISC IE, he seeks to highlight to what degree the IE, as he terms it, 'has existence'.
In his overview he points to what he perceives as a gap between what the conceptual model covers and what might be termed as feasible, and between the prescriptive and the descriptive.
I am also indebted to Emma Tonkin for her contribution on Persistent Identifiers: Considering the Options in which she looks at the current landscape of persistent identifiers, describes several current services, and examines the theoretical background behind their structure and use.
For readers coming to persistent idetifiers for the first time she offers a working notion of what they do and why they are so useful, including the factors that have driven their design.
Emma warmly acknowledges the support of John A. Kunze's feedback on these standards; I well recall John's passionate and engaging address on Supporting Persistent Citation at a UKOLN seminar in December 2006.
Of particular interest to me in Emma's article is the technical vulnerability provoked by a human tendency to impose non-technical considerations such as marketing that can defeat persistence and for what seems very trivial gains.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on the visualisation of data, the effects of Web 2.0 on delivering information literacy, blended learning and online tutoring, practical advice on Web Accessibility and, of undoubted interest to many worried practitioners, a review of Keeping Within the Law the book and the online service.
In addition of course we provide our usual news and events.
I hope you will all find much of interest in Issue 56.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 56: More Light Than Heat" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 72 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 72 Buzz data dissemination metadata digitisation repositories eprints copyright cataloguing lod research altmetrics Citation BibTex RIS The new editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne Issue 72.
Change Is the Only Constant Issue 72 is the product of a long period of almost constant change.
In the last issue, Richard Waller waved adieu as the outgoing editor, explaining the circumstances around the change in the Editorial for Issue 71 [1].
Richard has left some very large shoes to fill in terms of the quality of articles and the guidance for authors in producing readable and relevant material.
The change is apparent when we look at the context in which Ariadne is now operating: the University of Bath Library has taken the reins, well aware of the regard in which the publication is held by its readers a wide community with the unifying theme of information use, management and dissemination at its heart.
‘Change’ is also a constant theme flowing through each article in this issue, from transformations in open data; a revolution in measuring impact with altmetrics; the growth of Japan’s repository network and the development of thesis delivery online.
This issue is short but well formed, and we trust there is something to snag your interest.
In their article on Digitisation and e-Delivery of Theses from ePrints Soton, Julian Ball and Christine Fowler outline their experiences around the programme of moving theses from print to digital and the ongoing processes surrounding the delivery of e-theses.
First and foremost in discussions are authors’ rights, particularly for theses within the retrospective mass digitisation programme.
The issues in addressing copyright and obtaining the consent of authors are outlined, as are considerations of the digitisation methodology, including scanning specification, digitisation from unbound copies and restrictions on access.
As evidenced, a reader-focused approach to finding material was paramount, with work on the consolidation of platforms, catalogue entry and master copy to ensure metadata visibility to users.
All in all, this article provides an invaluable insight for institutions looking at their own conversion programmes.
In their opening remarks on LinkedUp: Linking Open Data for Education, Marieke Guy, Mathieu d’Aquin, Stefan Dietze, Hendrik Drachsler, Eelco Herder and Elisabetta Parodi warn that while OERs are the first things we think of at the mention of Open Education, there is a wider variety of issues associated, which the LinkedUp Project is examining with its partners.
The authors demonstrate how projects in the Higher Education sector have already begun to make use of linked and open data to the benefit of staff and students alike.
They explain how the LinkedUp Project is encouraging greater engagement through a series of competitions that encourage innovation in the use of Web data and give an account of the first competition or Challenge held over May to June 2013.
At the same time, the project is developing the LinkedUp Dataset Catalog to provide not only Challenge entrants but the community as a whole with easily accessible datasets.
Furthermore, the LinkedUp team provides entrants with advice on legal, exploitation and dissemination issues, as well as ensuring they are not hindered by technical difficulties.
The authors describe how LinkedUp  activity is designed to promote a diverse community that will sustain itself beyond the LinkedUp Project’s duration.
In their article on Realising the Potential of Altmetrics within Institutions, Jean Liu and Euan Adie explain that altmetrics, or alternative metrics as indicators of non-traditional forms of research impact, are growing in significance amidst current criticism of possible misuse of the Journal Impact Factor.
Having entered into the mainstream only recently, altmetrics are now being used in research assessment, faculty promotion, and even in the matter of tenure.
The authors warn against making assumptions about altmetrics at their current stage of development or about the scope of their effectiveness.
Furthermore, they remind us they are an indicator of the attention paid to published material, not its quality.
They go on to explain that while Altmetric’s data and tools were originally geared to serve scholarly publishers, institutional use began in February 2013, and which it intends to strengthen.
The authors explain how altmetrics are already saving individual researchers a lot of time by aggregating mentions and discussions of their output and building a useful picture of the interest it attracts.
Moreover, and crucially for researchers, the attention is attracted at the article level, not the journal level.
Finally, they also explain how altmetrics tools can support postgraduate training.
They describe the different research outputs as well as Altmetric’s involvement with open access institutional repositories, including Opus, the repository here at the University of Bath.
Our fourth feature article takes us to Japan, with Shared Repositories, Shared Benefits: Regional and Consortial Repositories in Japan.
We are indebted to Takeo Ozono, Daisuke Ueda and Fumiyo Ozaki for their patience with the production and publication of their interesting story of the development of shared IRs across Japan which modestly underplays the degree of resourcefulness and teamwork involved.
In their article, in which they recognise the precedents set by the UK projects White Rose Research Online and SHERPA-LEAP, they describe how Japanese institutions have managed to set up consortial repositories across 14 regions.
They explain how this project facilitated the establishment of institutional repositories among 92 different bodies, despite the fact they possessed no institutional hardware themselves.
Our event report continues the international flavour, with a report on the Open Access and Research Conference held at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia (November 2013).
To round out Issue 72 we have a comphrensive book review on Tara Brabazon’s latest offering Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectural Fitness.
Going forward, Ariadne will see some decisions made to shape the future of the publication.
In particular, we’ll be introducing an ‘Articles available ahead of publication’ section so authors don’t need to wait for the entire issue to be produced to see their work online.
We would very much value the input of our reader community, particularly to continue the work of sharing experiences and innovation on the information scene.
Please do get in touch with comments via our webform.
I trust you will enjoy Issue 72.
References Richard Waller.
Editorial: Ariadne Carries On.
Ariadne, 17 July 2013. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue71/editorial1 Author Details Kara Jones Ariadne Editor Email: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/contact/webform Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collecting Evidence in a Web 2.0 Context Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collecting Evidence in a Web 2.0 Context Buzz data software wiki database rss archives blog repositories video flickr cataloguing passwords gis vle wordpress podcast librarything mashup youtube facebook twitter research standards netvibes pageflakes Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell describe the challenge of collecting evidence for a study of how Web 2.0 is being used in the UK HE sector.
Although JISC [1] has developed a number of services, (e.g.
JORUM [2], JISCmail [3]) specifically for use by the UK Higher Education (HE) sector, people within the sector are increasingly using services developed outside the sector, either in addition to or in some cases instead of – JISC-provided services.
And as well as using such services, people are also engaging in ‘mashups’ where combinations of services and content are used to provide new services or to provide added value to data already held.
UKOLN is currently working on a JISC-funded study looking at the use of Web 2.0 tools and services in the UK HE sector [4], with the aim of finding out who is using these tools and services and the purposes to which they are being put.
We are also investigating why specific tools and services are used – is it ease of use, or the needs of multi-institutional collaboration, or is it the tool or service everyone else is using?
In order to do this, we need to collect information from a potentially large number of people working in a variety of roles.
However, the study is small-scale, so we have limited staff effort at our disposal; the study has a short timescale, so there is limited time to collect the evidence; and finally, the study has a wide focus, so it is not easy to identify the people we need to contact.
So where to start?
The traditional route would be to carry out a literature search plus some form of survey focusing on a specific group of people.
Then, having collected enough data, carry out some statistical analyses on the survey data, record the findings and come up with some recommendations.
While a literature search was feasible, it was quickly recognised that, in the short space of time available, it was not going to be possible to deploy any of the usual survey techniques.
Our answer was to use a Web 2.0 tool – a blog – [5] to collect the evidence, relying on wide-ranging advertising of the survey and trusting that those interested enough to take part would also spread the word to colleagues.
What Are Web 2.0 Tools and Services?
Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as [6]: ‘a second generation of Web development and Web design.
… It has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and Web applications.
Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.’ Web 2.0 hosted services and Web applications enable people to share information, work collaboratively, engage in discussion, keep in contact with colleagues, and reach new audiences.
An incomplete listing would include (in no particular order): GoogleDocs, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, Box.net, Snapfish, Photobucket, Bebo, Slideshare, Slideboom, GoogleMaps, GoogleEarth, WikiMapia, Furl, Sumpy, Citeulike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Digg, reddit, Newsvine, LibraryThing, Wordpress, Blogspot, Blogger and Typepad, LinkedIn, NetVibes, Pageflakes, MyYahoo, iGoogle or MicrosoftLive, Second Life – and more are being developed.
For some of the tasks, people might be using a JISC service, such as a JISCmail discussion list, the JORUM repository for teaching and learning materials [7], the Depot [8] open-access repository for e-prints, and ShareGeo [9] for sharing and re-using geo-spatial data for academic research and teaching.
However, while JISC, and also institutional services may be available, that does not mean they are always the service of choice.
The aim of this study is to find out why mainstream, non-academic services are often the service of choice.
The Literature Search Even though we were not conducting a full traditional research project, it was still necessary to carry out a literature search for the usual reason that we needed to find out what other relevant (and recent) work had been carried out (or was in progress) on the use of Web 2.0 in UK HE.
At the same time as providing background and context for our own work, scanning of other reports and work in progress has brought important issues to our attention and provided pointers for future directions (even though sometimes conflicting).
It has also put us in contact with other researchers.
An additional benefit was that several suitable candidates for case studies were identified from reviewing reports containing information about interesting HE initiatives relevant to our focus.
An initial Google search quickly brought several key reports to our attention.
We are fortunate that several UKOLN colleagues have a strong interest in Web 2.0 developments, so our initial findings were supplemented by suggestions from them, although it was reassuring that there was some overlap with those we had already identified via our searching.
Since then, we have continued to add further items, some on more specific areas of research.
These have either been identified from further searching using, for example, Google Scholar, or are the result of serendipity, during the course of our work.
A request to complete an online questionnaire has been received from one project carrying out a parallel study, although we had already identified this.
We have made our list of key findings available on the blog, which also gives people the opportunity to make further suggestions via the comments facility.
However no additional resources have been suggested so far.
Why Not Traditional Survey Methods?
Surveys can be useful but need careful preparation.
It is important to identify first the type of information that is required and the target population from which the information will be collected.
The next step is to create the questionnaire, making sure that all the data you want to collect are covered and that the form of answer required (tick boxes, rating scales, free text, etc.)
is appropriate for the purposes of the investigation.
The questionnaire then has to be mailed out to the target population, whether as hardcopy print (less likely these days), as emailed attachments, as text within email messages or print or email requests to visit a Web page.
Then you wait to see how many respond, maybe do some reminders, and finally call it a day, hoping you end up with sufficient data to produce meaningful analyses.
The traditional questionnaire, whichever route to the target population was chosen, held disadvantages for this study.
We were interested in a range of people – lecturers, researchers and students at various levels in any academic discipline; administrators, public relations and marketing departments; librarians, information professionals and IT services personnel – in any academic institution in the UK.
There was no easy way to select the people to approach, given that there were so many.
And the challenge was not to find out how many were using Web 2.0 but rather to approach only those who were doing so.
An Internet-based survey still requires the lengthy preparation of a questionnaire, together with the time needed to transform it into either a Web-accessible document or a Web form.
While the term ‘Internet-based survey’ could be applied to a PDF or Word file that is printed off or downloaded for completion and then printing, it is more accurately applied to a Web form that is completed online and where the data are recorded in a database.
It does not remove the challenge of contacting (and reminding) those you want to respond, although the data transcription element is removed.
There are even Internet services (e.g.
SurveyMonkey) that allow you to create a survey questionnaire and collect the responses.
However, whether it is a form printed from a Web site or an online form with database, this method, as with other questionnaire techniques, is more suited to collecting quantitative data than qualitative data.
There is an interesting feature of Internet surveys, especially where they are linked from an existing Web site, and all promotion of the survey is via that Web site.
In this situation, the respondents are self-selecting from the pool of anyone who happens to visit that site while the survey is running.
An observation made by someone we interviewed for another study was that some people are ‘survey junkies’ and will happily complete any survey they encounter; whereas others regard surveys as a waste of time and only real incentives will get them to take part.
Time was also against us.
Creating a questionnaire, deciding whom to send it to, sending it, reminding non-responders and analysing the data would all take time we did not have.
Whatever we were going to do needed to be a realistic proposition in terms of the amount of data collected and be time-effective.
Collecting Qualitative Data We wanted qualitative data not just figures, so we needed to go beyond the simple ‘which service are you using for images?’ question.
Yes, we were interested in whether people were using Flickr, Photobucket or Snapfish (or something else) but, more importantly, we wanted to know why they had chosen a specific service.
Perhaps someone else had recommended it to them or they had heard of it somewhere.
Or maybe they knew that sort of service was available and did some searching and played around with different ones to find the one that suited their needs the best.
They might have started with one service, found problems and moved to another service.
Alternatively, they might have chosen a service because they knew it to be frequently used by the people they were trying to reach.
We could, therefore, have tried a telephone survey.
This still requires the preparatory stages of identifying the information required and the target population, as well as constructing the questionnaire.
In this type of survey the target audience would be defined early on as a list of named individuals.
With a telephone survey, the questioning can be more informal and text-based, although based on a standard set of questions, and specific points can be investigated in greater detail as opportunity arises.
However, despite the fact that this type of survey often focuses on a smaller target population, it is in fact time-intensive as it requires initial contact to set up interview appointments, the time required for the actual interview, and further time spent on transcribing the interview.
Through past experience of this technique we realised we could hope only to interview a small number of people within the study timescale and with the person-hours available.
Our Solution Having considered the usual methods, we were clear about the information we needed to collect.
We wanted to know about people who were using Web 2.0 tools and services; why they were using them, what they saw as their advantages, and how using these tools and services supported different aspects of their work.
We were also clear about the range of people we wanted to contact – quite simply, anyone working (in any role) or studying in the UK academic sector.
That’s ‘a big ask’ as they say.
While discussing this, a colleague suggested that we try using a blog to collect evidence, noting that UKOLN had recently tried this method to collaborate in the compilation of some best practice guidelines in the Good APIs Project [10].
After some consideration, we decided that it had the potential to deliver what we needed within the constraints detailed above and that we would give it a try.
The first task was to investigate what was possible with the blog software (Wordpress) that UKOLN is using.
A three-column layout would enable us to post information about the study in the central block, and to set up the information collection using pages linked from the left-hand column, while the right-hand column would hold links to the most recent comments.
Creating the pages to collect the information was an early task.
We decided to break down the types of tasks for which people might be using Web 2.0 tools and services, and added the catch-all ‘any other task’ in case we had missed anything.
An early version of these pages was shown to UKOLN colleagues; feedback generally was in favour of our breakdown, but the text was felt to be overlong.
So with red pen in hand, the text was pruned to make it clearer and more concise.
At this point we were almost ready to make the blog public.
However, we felt that publishing the blog with no comments at all initially might be off-putting to some potential respondents, despite providing some example comment text.
We therefore asked UKOLN colleagues to add the first few comments.
Once this seeding of comments was in place, we went public.
Spreading the Word We recognised that one factor in the success or failure of this technique would be getting enough responses from the full range of people we were interested in reaching.
Simply making the blog public would not lead people to it and we therefore needed an effective advertising strategy.
Our first approach was to use the UKOLN Web site, since this is well known and frequently visited by the library and information community.
Accordingly a news item was posted, appearing on both the Web site and in our RSS news feed.
A feature piece was also written for the home page and the link to the survey blog was given prominence on the home page.
Recognising nonetheless that this was a passive approach, we also started more active advertising.
UKOLN colleagues were helpful in posting to relevant email discussion lists to which they subscribed, posting in other blogs and tweeting on Twitter; this proved useful and we saw comments being posted almost immediately.
However all of the responses were coming from the library and information community, and though pleasing to see, we needed to reach other subject communities as well as institutional administration and management.
So we decided try using other JISCmail lists.
Since there are many lists, our first step was to identify which lists were relevant and we decided to concentrate on (a) super-lists, (b) general lists within a specific subject area and © new lecturer lists.
It was hoped that this would enable us to get our request seen by a sizeable proportion of our target population.
However, putting this into practice turned out to be more difficult than anticipated.
Firstly, posting the same message directly to several lists at a time triggered the spam filtering software.
Secondly, posting the request to list owners had varying results; a few posted the message on almost immediately, while others ignored it.
Thirdly, investigation of the archives of some of the lists initially chosen revealed that they were moribund, with no posts recorded for a year or more.
And having put a lot of effort into this, there appeared to be little benefit in terms of comments being made by communities other than the library and information community.
Why were we not getting input from the other communities?
This is difficult to answer definitively, though there are some likely reasons.
We made the blog public in early June, at the end of the academic year when departments would be focusing on examinations and graduations.
Once those were finished with, and over the next couple of months, staff would be taking annual leave and perhaps working in a different way and maybe checking email less often.
We were aware of all this before deciding on the blog as an evidence collection method, but we had expected more input to result from the emails than we actually received.
So did this negative engagement indicate that many people on the lists were not big users of Web 2.0 tools and services?
That would be one interpretation, but another would be that it may indicate that those using these tools still appear to be predominantly in the early adopter category.
Our original hope was that even a small number of respondents to the email request would be enough, if they would pass on the request to friends and colleagues who were known to be similarly interested, but it became obvious that this was not happening, at least not to the extent we had hoped.
Looking for Case Studies Although the blog seemed a useful approach, we had always intended to use other methods.
One was to identify a selection of people known to be using a range of Web 2.0 tools and services and then compile case studies which would provide a more rounded picture of how Web 2.0 is being employed within working lives.
Given the time-consuming nature of this method, candidates needed to be selected carefully.
Our first case study focused on a new lecturer in library and information studies, who was known by us to be using Web 2.0 tools and services.
Initial contact was followed by email discussion as a draft document was collaborated on, using a question-and-answer interview style.
Further case studies also involved telephone discussions.
The case study approach proved useful in obtaining qualitative data as we were able to explore not only which tools and services were being used, but also the reasons why they were chosen, their limitations and advantages.
The main problem with case studies was finding whom to approach.
Ideally we would have several exemplars of each category: lecturers and researchers in different disciplines plus support services such as libraries, IT services, marketing and careers.
In practice it quickly became obvious that we would simply have to settle for a less comprehensive mix.
However, we were able to publish the first case studies in early July.
A further problem was that people who initially seemed to be likely people (e.g.
we were aware they were using a Web 2.0 tool) turned out to be unsuitable after all (either that was the only tool they used or it was being used in a very limited way).
Although a few in the library and information community were known to us or UKOLN colleagues, those in other communities were not – so again there was a need to identify suitable cases.
We used two approaches to identify further potential case studies.
Firstly, we kept a watch on comments posted on the blog, and approached a few people who appeared to fit our criteria.
Secondly, we were able to pick out a few likely cases from our final strand of evidence collection – desk-top research.
Thirdly, several candidates were identified from information gathered in the literature review.
Desk-top Research Our final method was to look at Web sites in the UK HE sector and collect relevant information.
In one sense this is an easy method, since all institutions now have Web sites, but in practice it can be frustrating and time-consuming.
Institutions vary in how their Web site is structured and how much is easily visible to the visitor, what further parts can be located following a site search and what remains password-protected.
The Web site survey followed a consistent strategy.
Since other evidence was primarily coming from the library community, the library and learning centre was reviewed first, looking in particular for blogs, podcasts, and Web 2.0 features within catalogues.
The next step was to look at the alumni section of the site, where it was expected that social networks might feature.
Then it was on to sections for prospective students, including accommodation and student life details.
Once obvious links were exhausted, the site was searched for ‘blogs’ and ‘podcasts’.
As noted earlier, there were limitations to this approach.
Evidence collected was restricted to what was available on the site at the time it was reviewed.
The site searches on ‘blogs’ revealed that it is likely that more blogs are in use than are openly visible, because it appears that they are often set up within an institution’s virtual learning environment (VLE).
And it is of course possible that institutions may be planning more use of Web 2.0, but have yet to implement it.
An additional benefit of this research strand was that, as noted above, it was useful in identifying a few further potential candidates for the case studies.
Conclusion This has been an interesting experiment and a learning experience.
The blog structure has proved to be a useful method of data collection, albeit with certain disadvantages.
Firstly, the amount of data that can be collected is dependent on either effective advertising and take-up or a small target population that is committed to providing that input.
Secondly, once the page topics were decided, it was not easily possible to add further topics once the blog was up and running.
A major issue has been getting the message out to people who are using Web 2.0 and ensuring they contribute.
Possible reasons are that we did not find the right route to attract their attention, we were unfortunate in the time of year we were carrying out the study, or we simply received few responses because Web 2.0 users are still limited in number.
The final answer is likely to be a combination of these reasons.
Was all this effort wasted?
The answer is no, for several reasons, Firstly, we did get some evidence and it was the type of information that we were trying to obtain.
Then, even negative evidence can be useful; for example, by mid-July we still had no comments on Web 2.0 tools and services being used for research purposes.
Knowing this prompted us to try some targeted approaches for input from that group.
We also gained more knowledge as to the value and usefulness of using a blog for data collection.
Finally, creating the blog has enabled us to create a Web presence for the study (a funding requirement); it is easy to maintain and update and we have been able to share our data with anyone interested throughout the lifetime of the study.
On a final note, we’d like to emphasise that the study is still current at the time of writing and we are continuing to collect evidence.
We welcome further comments on our blog until the end of August 2009.
References The JISC Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ JORUM http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ JISCmail http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ JISC SIS Landscape Study http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/ JISC SIS Landscape Study blog http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/ Web 2.0: Wikipedia entry, retrieved 30 July 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 Jorum Home http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ the Depot http://depot.edina.ac.uk/ ShareGeo Home Page http://edina.ac.uk/projects/sharegeo/ Good APIs Project http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/good-apis-jisc/ Author Details Ann Chapman Community and Outreach Team UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.chapman/ Rosemary Russell Research and Development Team UKOLN University of Bath Email: r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/r.russell/ Return to top Article Title: “Collecting Evidence in a Web 2.0 Context” Author: Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/chapman-russell/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Is a URI and Why Does It Matter?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Is a URI and Why Does It Matter?
Buzz data framework javascript html metadata xhtml browser identifier cataloguing hypertext png rfc aggregation gif uri mp3 jpg ajax cookie algorithm url Citation BibTex RIS Henry S. Thompson describes how recent developments in Web technology have affected the relationship between URI and resource representation and the related consequences.
URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier, the official name for those things you see all the time on the Web that begin 'http:' or 'mailto:', for example http://www.w3.org/, which is the URI for the home page of the World Wide Web Consortium [1].
(These things were called URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in the early days of the Web, and the change from URL to URI is either hugely significant or completely irrelevant, depending on who is talking—I have nothing to say about this issue in this article.
If you have never heard of URIs (or IRIs, the even more recent fully internationalised version), but are familiar with URLs, just think 'URL' whenever you see 'URI' below.)
Historically, URIs were mostly seen as simply the way you accessed Web pages.
These pages were hand-authored, relatively stable and simply shipped out on demand.
More and more often that is no longer the case; in at least three different ways: Web pages for reading have been complemented by pictures for viewing, videos for watching and music for listening; The Web is now more than a conduit for information, it is a means to a variety of ends; we use it to do things: purchase goods and services, contribute to forums, play games; The things we access on the Web are often not hand-authored or stable, but are automatically synthesised from 'deeper' data sources on demand.
Furthermore, that synthesis is increasingly influenced by aspects of the way we initiate the access.
It is against this background that I think it is worth exploring with some care what URIs were meant to be, and how they are being used in practice.
In particular, I want to look at what is to be gained from a better understanding of how other kinds of identifiers work.
The Official Version Insofar as there are definitive documents about all this, they all agree that URIs are, as the third initial says, identifiers, that is, names.
They identify resources, and often (although not always) allow you to access representations of those resources.
(Words in bold are used as technical terms—their ordinary language meaning is in many cases likely to be more confusing than helpful.)
'Resource' names a role in a story, not an intrinsically distinguishable subset of things, just as 'referent' does in ordinary language.
Things are resources because someone created a URI to identify them, not because they have some particular properties in and of themselves.
'Representation' names a pair: a character sequence and a media type.
The media type specifies how the character string should be interpreted.
For example JPG or HTML or MP3 would be likely media types for representations of an image of an apple, a news report about an orchard or a recording of a Beatles song, respectively.
The relationship of these three concepts (URI, resource, representation) according to the official version is illustrated in this diagram: Figure 1: The URI-resource-representation story, from The Architecture of the World Wide Web [2].
This cannot be the whole story, since nothing in Figure 1 above looks anything like a weather report.
What Web users experience in practice involves a further relationship, between a representation and what we might call a presentation: Figure 2: The representation-presentation story There is significant potential for variation in two aspects of the pictures above.
In the first aspect, different representations may be available for the same resource, in at least four ways: Different technologies, manifested as different media types, for example GIF or JPG or PNG for an image, PDF or HTML or XHTML or TXT for structured text; Different intended presentation platforms, for example desktop screen versus portable device; In the case of text, different natural languages, for example the weather report in English or Spanish; Different versions, either as a document evolves, or, more interestingly, because a resource is time-varying by nature, for example today's weather report.
In the second aspect, different presentations may be determined by the same representation, ranging from simple changes in size, scale or fonts to changes in modality (digital display, print, even audio or braille) or even non-physical presentation for non-human consumption, for example, by the Web crawlers used by search engines.
Figures 1 and 2 above illustrate the static relationship between the various constituents of the URI story.
There is also a dynamic story, which is where the Web comes in: Figure 3: The HTTP request-response story The underlying mechanism for accessing representations via the Web, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, provides for control over the first three kinds of variation.
That is, by specifying parameters in the request from client to server to access a URI, the consumer can determine which representation the server responds with.
In Figure 3 above, for example, we see the initial request includes an Accept header which specifies the XHTML media type, and that is indeed what the server sends back in the response.
The fourth kind of variation, variation of representation over time, is quite different, and leads on to some new and very interesting issues.
In the cases of the Oaxaca weather report or the home page of your favourite online newspaper, it does seem right to say there is only one resource, despite the fact that the representations you can retrieve of such resources will vary a great deal from day to day.
There is an illuminating parallel here with the class of words in ordinary language which linguists call indexical, words such as this, here and tomorrow, as well as you and I.
An indexical such as now has a single meaning but multiple interpretations.
The meaning is something like 'the time at which the utterance containing the word is made', and is the same for every use of the word.
But the interpretation is, well, whatever time it happens to be when the word is used, and this of course changes all the time.
More generally, the meaning of an indexical can be understood as a function from contexts (that is, contexts of utterance) to interpretations.
The situation with time-varying resources is just the same—indeed the gloss we gave to the examples above (yesterday's weather report, etc.)
underlines this.
Once the parallel is pointed out, it can be seen to apply to other, admittedly more specialised, URIs, such as http://localhost/... or file:///home/ht/...., which identify resources whose representations depend not (or not only) on when they are accessed, but also where.
To sum up: Although historically URIs were understood as a kind of Web-enabled file name, with a simple 'URI points to Web page' model, the move to separate conceptually the (stable) resource identified by a URI from its (potentially varied) representations was necessary to make sense of actual practice.
The resource abstraction has gone on to provide powerful new functionality, a subject we will return to below.
The Actual State of Play The phrase 'Web 2.0' means many different things, but one thing it is often used to refer to is a significant change in the way representations determine presentations.
What a user sees on the screen today as a result of accessing a resource identified by a URI often depends as much, if not more, on running Javascript programs embedded in the retrieved (X)HTML representation, and on the results of other, behind-the-scenes, resource accesses, as it does on the (X)HTML itself.
The coinage AJAX refers to this approach.
For example, the presentation of a map which a user sees when accessing Google Maps is entirely constructed from images retrieved behind the scenes by the Javascript which makes up virtually all of the original representation as retrieved from the Google Maps URI.
As the proportion of a presentation that depends directly and declaratively on the initially retrieved representation diminishes, and the proportion based on local computation and representations retrieved behind the scenes increases, there is a kind of historical regression going on, which goes back to treating URIs instrumentally, as ways of moving data.
What you can send and retrieve is all that matters, and the resource-representation distinction no longer seems to be doing useful work.
There are two things underlying this blurring of the resource-representation distinction in Web 2.0 usage: The kinds of flexibility provided by the kind of variation discussed above, in particular variation with respect to media type or natural language, are just not relevant to most behind-the-scenes Web access; The distinction between the URI as such, and the rest of the request to the server, particularly with respect to explicit parameter specifications, is much less evident from the standpoint of the Javascript programmer.
Both URI and parameters are things which have to be specified as part of a Web request, and this encourages the viewpoint that taken together they identify what is wanted.
If behind-the-scenes URI usage tends to encourage a near-equation of resource and representation, other aspects of sophisticated Web 2.0 usage tend in the opposite direction.
If the presentation experienced by a user varies independently of any user-controllable aspect of URI access, or evolves in response to user actions, the sense in which the URI visible at the top of the browser can be said still to 'identify' a representation which corresponds to that presentation has become attenuated almost to the point of vanishing.
If what you see depends on a cookie, you cannot post a pointer to it in an email message, because the recipient will not have the right cookie.
That is not necessarily a bad thing (you probably would not want to be able to send an email message which lets someone into your bank account), but does act to diminish the connection between URI, resource and representation.
If what you see depends on the IP address your request comes from or on a radio button value that does not show up as a URI parameter, then not only can you not point to it in email, but you cannot (reliably) bookmark it; nor does Google index it, because its crawlers will never see it: crawlers do not tick boxes or share your IP address.
The original value proposition of the Web was produced by the network effect: for anything you were interested in, someone else somewhere was too, and they had produced a Web site about it, and search engines could find it for you.
But the Web as information appliance has evolved: not only are large amounts of Web-delivered information not available via search engines, for the kind of reasons discussed above, even the famous pagerank algorithm which launched Google's success does not work particularly well anymore.
This is because the proportion of hand-authored pages has declined, and information access is increasingly controlled by a self-reinforcing feedback loop between Google and the big players in the information aggregation game, such as Wikipedia, Tripadvisor and MedicineNet: page ranking in Google today depends to a substantial extent on statistics over search terms and clickthroughs.
From the user perspective, a related phenomenon which threatens to erode the centrality of the URI-resource connection further is the use of the search entry field in browsers instead of the address field.
Already in December of 2008, for example, 8 of the top 15 search terms reported by one service over the last five months were in fact the core parts of domain names (non-www., non-.com), and some actual domain names, such as myspace.com, yahoo.com and hotmail.com, were in the top fifty.
Arguably the time when URIs were the primary currency of the Web is past, and they will disappear from view and consciousness for the vast majority of Web users in much the same way as the angle brackets and equal signs of raw HTML have done.
The Emerging Future As long ago as the mid-1990s, information scientists had taken the URI-resource-representation split to its logical conclusion: it was OK to create URIs for resources for which no representation existed yet (for example a planned but not-yet-drafted catalogue entry), or even for resources for which no (retrievable) representation could in principle ever exist (a particular physical book, or even its author).
By the end of the 1990s, the generalisation of the resource concept was complete, and we find, in the defining document for URIs (since superseded, but without significant change in this regard): A resource can be anything that has identity.
Familiar examples include an electronic document, an image, a service (e.g., 'today's weather report for Los Angeles'), and a collection of other resources.
Not all resources are network 'retrievable'; e.g., human beings, corporations, and bound books in a library can also be considered resources [3].
Since then the principle that a URI can be used to identify anything; that is, that there are few if any limits on what can 'be a resource', has assumed more and more importance, particularly within one community, namely the participants in what is termed the Semantic Web programme.
This move is not just a theoretical possibility: there are more and more URIs appearing 'in the wild' which do not identify images, reports, home pages or recordings, but rather people, places and even abstract relations.
But this in turn has lead to a problem.
Time was, when you tried to access a URI, you either succeeded or failed.
Success, as illustrated in Figure 3 above, and specifically signalled by the first line of the response message, HTTP/1.1 200 OK, meant a representation was coming next, and all was well.
Failure meant the infamous '404 Not Found' (whose official rendition is HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found) and no representation.
Furthermore, success meant that the presentation determined by the representation you retrieved could be counted on to pretty well reproduce the resource identified by the URI itself.
You could look at the image, or read the report, or listen to the recording, etc.
But what if we have a URI which identifies, let us say, not the Oaxaca weather report, but Oaxaca itself, that city in the Sierra Madre del Sur south-east of Mexico City?
What should happen if we try to access that URI?
If the access succeeds, the representation we get certainly will not reproduce Oaxaca very well: we will not be able to walk around in it, or smell the radishes if it happens to be 23 December.
This is the point at which the word 'representation' is a problem.
Surely we can retrieve some kind of representation of Oaxaca: a map, or a description, or a collection of aerial photographs.
These are representations in the ordinary sense of the word, but not in the technical sense it is used when discussing Web architecture.
Unfortunately, beyond pointing to the kind of easy examples we have used all along (a JPG is a good representation of an image, a HTML document can represent a report very well, an MP3 file can represent a recording pretty faithfully), it is hard to give a crisp definition of what 'representation' means in the technical sense, in order to justify the assertion that, for example, an image of Oaxaca does not 'represent' Oaxaca.
The definition implied above, namely that a representation of a resource should determine a presentation that reproduces the resource for the perceiver, begs the question of what is meant by 'reproduce'.
The Architecture of the World Wide Web [2], which is a systematic attempt to analyse the key properties on which the success of the Web depends, coined the term information resource for those resources for which a representation is possible.
It defines the term in this way: 'The distinguishing characteristic of [information] resources is that all of their essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message.'
This may seem like an academic question, one which indeed has important connections to both philosophy, particularly the philosophy of aesthetics, and to information science and the notorious question concerning 'the nature of the work of art'.
But it has real practical consequences.
There is real debate underway at the moment as to exactly what it means for a Web server to return a 200 OK response code, and about exactly what kind of response is appropriate to a request for a URI which identifies a non-information resource.
This question arises because, particularly in the context of Semantic Web applications, although no representation of the resource itself may be available, a representation of an information resource which describes that resource may be available.
So, to go back to our example, there may be a representation available for a report on a visit to Oaxaca, or for a collection of images of Oaxaca, or even a set of formally encoded propositions about Oaxaca.
Such descriptions are often called metadata.
Figure 4: The URI-resource-metadata story Conclusions URIs are at the heart of the Web: we use them both intentionally and without realising it every time we take advantage of the myriad possibilities the Web offers us.
Their use is evolving in a number of directions, not all obviously compatible with one another, or with their original conception and the basic technical framework which supported them when the Web was young.
Understanding all this is a necessary and worthwhile challenge, both from the perspective of scientific enquiry (just what are these things?)
and from the perspective of stewardship (how do we ensure that the Web will continue to work well for everyone?).
Insights into these questions may come from surprisingly distant quarters, as well as from observation of everyday use and practice.
The intention of this brief introduction has been to introduce the terminology and issues surrounding URIs and their role on the Web, and as such cannot have done justice to the complexities involved in many areas.
The next section points the way for those who want to dig in and explore the details.
Further Reading The Technical Architecture Group (TAG)[4] of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)[1] was established to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help co-ordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C (from the TAG charter [5]).
The TAG's largest piece of work to date is The Architecture of the World Wide Web by editors Jacobs and Walsh [2], sometimes referred to as 'WebArch' or just AWWW.
It contains definitions, principles, constraints and best practice, set out in a relatively informal way, with motivating examples.
Further TAG work has been published as separate 'findings', which are listed, along with other information about the TAG's work, on the TAG home page [4].
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) [6] is responsible for the formal specifications at the heart of the Web.
Recent IETF publications of particular relevance to the issues discussed here are: Berners-Lee, Fielding and Masinter 2005 RFC 3986, Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax [3] Duerst and Suignard 2005 RFC 3987, Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) [7] Fielding et al.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -HTTP/1.1, 1999 [8] References World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/ Ian Jacobs and Norman Walsh, (Eds).
"Architecture of the World Wide Web", Volume One, W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004 http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, U.C.
Irvine & L. Masinter.
Uniform Resource "Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax", 1998 RFC 2396 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2396 The Technical Architecture Group (TAG) http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ Ian Jacobs, (Ed).
"Technical Architecture Group (TAG) Charter", 27 October 2004 http://www.w3.org/2004/10/27-tag-charter.html The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) http://www.ietf.org/ M. Duerst & M. Suignard, "Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)", January 2005 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3987 R. Fielding, UC Irvine, J. Gettys, J.
Mogul, H. Frystyk, L. Masinter, P. Leach & T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -HTTP/1.1", June 1999 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 Author Details Henry S. Thompson, Ph.D. School of Informatics University of Edinburgh; Managing Director Markup Systems Email: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ Email: ht@markup.co.uk Web site: http://www.markup.co.uk/hst.html Return to top Article Title: "What Is a URI and Why Does It Matter?"
Author: Henry S. Thompson, Ph.D.
Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/thompson-hs/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Acceptance in Academic Environments Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Acceptance in Academic Environments Buzz data mobile software wiki database portal metadata ebook iphone oer ipad algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS In the light of a workshop run by the Geological Society of London and Wikimedia UK, Brian Whalley reflects on the attitudes and practice of academia in respect of present-day Wikipedia content.
Wikipedia has become internationally known as an online encyclopaedia ('The Free Encyclopedia').
Developed by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and launched in 2001 it has, to date, editions in 285 languages.
Wikipedia is but one subset of the Web-based applications known as 'wikis'.
The original wiki (as wikiwikiweb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the 1990s as the least complex way of rapidly sharing and communicating 'information'.
Wiki is Hawaiian for 'quick'; repeating the word is equivalent to adding 'very'.
The significance of a wiki is that it can be added to, and be edited by, its users.
Many specific types of 'wiki', for local or international use, have been developed within this software platform.
Wales and Sanger's contribution, developed from a fore-runner, 'Nupedia'.
However, although Nupedia had free content (that is, free cultural work), it had a complex vetting and review system for articles and Wales wanted something easier to add to and contribute to.
Wikipedia was the result.
If a word or phrase is 'googled' a searcher for information (if not wisdom) may well find that the Wikipedia entry comes high in the search engine's list.
This ranking is subject to the algorithms used rather than the accuracy of the Wikipedia entry.
Wikipedia in a Wicked World Wikipedia is clearly a much-used resource in the world at large, but its use can induce apparent contempt in some academic circles.
A sociological/anthropological study of the reasons many academics seem to despise, or ban it, from students use [1] would be interesting.
Students may be told not to use it; yet many people, students and academics, do find it useful.
Perversely perhaps, some users correct or add new entries to increase Wikpedia's range, depth, accuracy and utility (termed 'Wikipedians' in Wikimedia circles).
'Some people' here includes those who are not academics and perhaps who have no aspirations to be so, but does this mean their contributions are automatically less valuable?
In this article I shall explore what the use of Wikipedia might mean for developing information and digital literacies in the Higher and Further Education domains [2][3].
Geological Society of London Initiative Given the general academic reticence mentioned above, it was perhaps surprising that that the Geological Society of London (The 'Geol Soc' or GSL) organised a workshop in late March 2012 to encourage Fellows to write or edit Wikipedia entries [4].
Sixteen Fellows and colleagues from the Royal Society of Chemistry (across the court-yard at Burlington House in Piccadilly, London) met, together with members of Wikimedia UK to learn more about becoming a 'Wikipedian'.
First, Charles Matthews, of Wikimedia UK [5]  gave an introductory talk and led discussions about Wikipedia's 'Neutral Point of View', 'Verifiability', referencing and correcting entries.
Some of those present had experience of editing entries, perhaps making small factual corrections, others had written the odd short ('stub') article.
Most, nonetheless, had only a basic user knowledge of Wikipedia.
The workshop gave the opportunity of using a 'sandbox', or trial area, to produce entries under the helpful eyes of Wikimedia UK experts.
However, most of the time was spent in discussion of how Wikipedia (and its editors) dealt with aspects such as updating, information quality and style of writing.
I wish to explore in this article some of the implications of Wikipedia's use raised and its use by academics and academic institutions.
My approach here is from a geological point of view, but the implications are related to digital and information literacies in general and their use in Further and Higher Education (FHE).
I have also provided links to Wikipedia entries for readers who are interested.
Companion to the Earth?
Despite the statement above, it is actually not surprising that the GSL sponsored this workshop.
It is one of few 'academic' societies that covers practitioners as well as researchers; oil exploration people as well as ophiolite [6] hunters.
As such, the GSL appreciates that it is to Wikipedia that 'most' people turn for geological information – particularly it would seem, on volcanoes.
Presumably, this is not just students researching for term papers but because of a general need to provide current information on topics of geological interest.
A good topical example here is hydraulic fracturing ('fracking' [7][8]) .
One of the participants in the GSL workshop had a professional interest in this topic of oil and gas extraction and the Society has just announced a public meeting to debate the issues involved.
In the Wikipedia article on Fracking, there is the note at the head of the entry: The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the Talk page.
Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.
(March 2012).
This caution is hardly news to Ariadne readers but I strongly suspect that the majority of 'academics' are unaware of this feature, the related 'Neutral Point of View' (NPOV), the log of notes of updates and discussion of changes in the 'Talk' section.
They are aspects that are not apparent in a casual look but are worth a visit.
In particular, the Neutral Point of View requirement is displayed, not only because the 'talk' [9] discussions show the technical aspects of the subject, but because they also demonstrate the way editors and contributors strive for coverage and NPOV.
In these discussions they expose the controversial nature of the topic.
Thus, far from imposing a distorted and static 'definition', Wikipedia reveals the struggle for coverage and balance.
These are aspects that it may well be useful to show to students, rather than adopting the approach of  'don't use because it can be changed'.
Students should, I contend, be shown these features quite specifically.
To a large extent, these aspects of Wikipedia editing make it focused and academic, rather than free and easy, resource than many teachers believe it to be.
The 'fracking' Wikipedia entry displayed several changes during May and June 2012.
My OUP, print-on-paper 'Oxford Companion to the Earth' (Hancock and Skinner, 2000) [10], has one line devoted to hydro-fracturing and nothing, as far as I can see, in the 'Petroleum' entry.
A link from the Wikipedia entry goes to the 'Pages in category “Hydraulic fracturing” [11]'; with tabulated access to 12 further pages in this category.
As it happens, the publisher recently contacted me, and presumably all the other authors, about my views on the need for changes of my entry.
I shall not be inclined to make any alterations for any future print version.
The instant cross-referencing and access that electronic databases can supply, together with updating and quality control of entries together the breadth of Wikipedia coverage shows it to be a natural, information-age, encyclopaedia which replaces print-on-paper versions.
Not least, is the use of colour and animations in Wikipedia that is difficult to achieve in any print format.
My copy of the 'Oxford Companion to the Earth' was gratis, courtesy of the publishers as I wrote an entry.
It now costs £50.
I doubt if libraries would buy a new 'updated' edition for cost reasons, let alone for information content.
One Amazon reviewer indicated in 2002: 'This book is nothing short of fantastic.
As a qualified geologist, I have found few errors in this book”.
Yet it also elicited the following remarks from another Amazon reviewer, 'However, the whole work is flawed by the numerous errors which litter the text and figures.
Captions to some figures are missing or incomplete, chemical equations do not balance, chunks of text are missing'.
Perhaps no further comment is necessary in the 'accuracy' debate as well as in absolute costs in providing up-to-date, as well as 'free' information.
The fact that no original research (NOR) [12]  is allowed is neither here nor there, it can be referred to in references as would be the case for any encyclopaedia used as a starting point for further reading.
For checking veracity of Wikipedia entries, there is the famous article by Giles (2005) in Nature [13] that compared Wikipedia entries with Britannica.
For a more general set of statements see Terdiman on the subject [14].
Behind the Wikipedia Scenes One of the most informative aspects of the GSL workshop was the look 'behind the scenes' at data in Wikipedia at WikiProject Geology [15].
This pages states that, 'The scope of WikiProject Geology is all articles in the Category: Geology [16].
Our particular interests are core Geology concepts and issues related to Geology articles.'
The particular project goals are there stated as being to: Bring every Geology article as close to Featured Article [17] or Featured List [18] status as possible.
Maximize compliance with the Wikipedia manual of style [19].
Clean up tagged articles [20].
Organize categories [21] at every level of Category: Geology [16] (see the category tree [22]).
Make sure all articles are properly referenced [23].
Keep the Earth sciences portal [24] in good shape.
Keep the WikiProject Geology community active, growing, and well-supported.
Discuss the content of Geology articles on Wikipedia and the direction that WikiProject Geology should take (see talk page [25]).
The 'look behind the scenes' at data shows many entries of interest to geoscientists to be ‘stubs’; ‘an article deemed too short to provide encyclopaedic coverage of a subject’.
Figure 1 shows a table from the geology project, of geology articles assessed by quality (Stub leading to start status and categories to top-flight FA and FL classes [26].
The follow-up here would seem to be that geologists – of whatever standing – should update those areas of special interest or knowledge.
This however is no light undertaking, although it is expected that entry modifications should generally be progressive and evolve rather than produce full blown contributions from scratch.
However, the advent of several geoscientific Wikipedians would greatly enhance Wikipedia’s geological coverage, to the benefit of all.
Figure 1: Table extracted from the WikiProject Geology pages showing numbers of entries according to quality status.
A little further behind the scenes we can see the following categories: Category: All articles with unsourced statements Category: Articles with unsourced statements from August 2011 Category: Wikipedia articles needing clarification from November 2010 There are many such entries and they show a form of citation indexing where some quality control is needed.
These omissions can be rectified by Wikipedian, crowd-sourcing, responses.
This may take time but it could be argued that a traditional print encyclopaedia would find this difficult to achieve in a revised version and only an online format could make this a reasonable task to accomplish.
From an academic tutors' point of view, this would show students where they need to improve their referencing skills.
Of course, the extent this might be required depends upon specific cases yet the feature shows that Wikipedia takes quality control, as 'Verifiability', very seriously.
Such considerations bring us to the need for memory in an increasingly information-rich and complex world [27] (Bowker, 2008) as well as the use of Wolfram Alpha [28] and structured queries from anybody, not just students.
This in turn brings us to the Semantic Web [29] part of Tim Berners-Lee's vision.
The implications here are considerable for the support of student information literacy.
Unfortunately, most academics are still trying to catch up with Web2.0.
Digital and Information Literacies for Students Returning to the original contention, what is it about Wikipedia that antagonises some academics?
The ease of getting to basic data?
That students do not have to use libraries or search diligently?
Perhaps some or all of these?
Or is it because, paradoxically, students do not have to visit prescribed texts that are produced by fellow academics?
Of course, Wikipedia might be the refuge of a last-minute, 'couldn't-care-less' attitude to writing a report or essay.
I have used what I call the 'hoodoo test' to show students that even specialised dictionaries (not just Britannica) are generally inferior to Wikipedia's entry.
A hoodoo is one particular landform [30] and I have asked students to compare the entries in several dictionaries or encyclopedias.
Needless to say, and notwithstanding my additions to the online entry, Wikipedia provides the best information.
Not least because it provides images.
The Oxford Companion to the Earth only has a single line reference that begs the question of what a hoodoo actually looks like.
Bringing anti-Wikipedia approaches to students' advantage is not unknown.
Examples include Munger's (undated) 'Having Undergraduates Write for Wikipedia' [31].
She begins her paper: Most students don't like writing papers.
Honestly, how many of us like grading papers?
But to learn how to think critically they need to learn how to ask questions, find good sources using the library's abundant resources, read and understand journal articles, and write about those journal articles intelligently.
I do not think many academics would dispute this.
But what many do forget is what it is like to be a student!
Things are done at the last minute and with minimum effort.
So turning the intricacies of Wikipedia, its requirements and editing technicalities is useful for students and their knowledge of how the information world works.
Wikimedia publishes useful documents on its bookshelf [32] on Wikipedia article quality and a general 'Welcome to Wikipedia' with how to start editing material.
Getting involved is an important part of being a Wikipedian and there is no reason that students cannot contribute to the greater good.
Making use of the requirements of Tone, Balance and Misuse of primary sources is an important part of academic writing and reporting as engendered by Wikipedia editors.
Some Conclusions and Implications Perhaps other academic societies and professional bodies can contribute to an upgrading and extending Wikipedia entries.
I suggest that it is unlikely that publishers will continue to produce printed encyclopaedias even given the possibility of digital-related funding opportunities.
Not only because they become out of date and are (in print-on-paper versions) difficult and expensive to update but because of the difficulties of providing reasonable remuneration for contributors to 'locked-down' copyrighted tomes.
Open Educational Resources could be much enhanced by a Creative Commons/Wikipedia approach.
It is possible that 'academics' would be less against the Open Resource approach of Wikipedia (the 'not invented here' syndrome?)
if they were happier about the quality of entries.
Yet showing students how Wikipedia works is a good way of showing how to do research, develop independent learning and good information handling skills.
My concern is that most academics will not take this on board.
If they will not, then the need to do this falls on Library and Information staff – who are often involved in digital skills anyway – but they could work with developers to involve students with meaningful exercises, search schemas and information literacies.
There are other implications for librarians and learning developers associated with student skills, especially with regard to gaining digital and information literacy.
Pressures will come from the technology available to students in the form of tablets and 'ultrabooks'.
I have argued previously about the significance of mobile technologies [33] and the specific importance of the iPad in its first incarnation [34].
The 'retina display' of the latest iPad and iPhone makes all forms of digital interaction easier than ever before.
These mobile devices, as part of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement, clearly have implications on what applications are used to aid students' studies.
It is possible that institutions will cut down on the need for 'Open Access Areas' (also known of old as 'computer labs') as rolling replacement of fixed machines declines.
Students will have tablets as part of their Personal Learning Environments to take with them to learning spaces which are governed as much by their needs and requirements as their physical location.
It also means that classes, labs and libraries become interconnected learning spaces.
This will however put pressure on institutions to provide high-quality broadband WiFi extensively over their campuses.
Halls of residence commonly provide Ethernet access.
However, tablet users will soon be asking for WiFi access to take advantage of any good weather to sit outside to study.
The more techie-minded will no doubt think of hardware solutions although I suspect officialdom will exert control.
Extensions of networking could mean benefits for information professionals.
Help desks as such may become flexible with Skype access and the development of local apps.
An example here is the University of Exeter's Layar Augmented Reality facility [35].
Now this may seem a way from where we started, with Wikipedia.
However, the implications of students' use of Wikipedia is that they will need physical libraries less.
No need to go to the library if you can get the information online.
If Wikipedia is the first port of call, as it already seems to be, for information requirement traffic, then there is a commitment to build on Open Educational Resources (OERs) of various kinds and improve their quality.
This would be additional to going beyond Wikipedia to journals and academic e-books.
Promoting Wikimedia's 'Education project' [36] and the 'Campus Ambassadors' programme [37] would promote digital and information literacies: the things students need to know about in terms of their digital learning futures [38].
References Jaschik, S. A stand against Wikipedia.
2007 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki JISC, Developing Digital Literacies, 2012 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2012/developing-digital-literacies.aspx JISC, 2009/2012.
Learning Literacies in a Digital Age.
Briefing Paper.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2012/developing-digital-literacies.aspx Geological Society of London 2012  Something Wiki this way comes.
Geoscientist May 2012,  http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/geoscientist/atlarge/wikipedia Wikipedia: User: Charles Matthews http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Charles_Matthews Wikipedia entry: Ophiolite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite Hydraulic fracturing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking Fracking: Friends of the Earth Cymru concerns after UK government approval.
BBC News South-east Wales 17 April 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-17738184 Wikipedia: Talk: Hydraulic fracturing  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hydraulic_fracturing#WP:NPOV Hancock, P.L.
and Skinner, B.J.
2000, The Oxford Companion to the Earth.
Oxford University Press.
Category:Hydraulic fracturing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hydraulic_fracturing Wikipedia:No original research (WP: NOR) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research Jim Giles, "Internet encyclopedias go head to head", December 2005, Nature 438 (7070): 900–901.
Terdiman, D.  2005, Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html WikiProject Geology  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geology Wikipedia: Category:Geology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Geology Wikipedia:Featured articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_Article Wikipedia:Featured lists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_List Wikipedia:Manual of Style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MoS This is a cleanup listing for WikiProject Geology generated on 28 July 2012: http://toolserver.org/~svick/CleanupListing/CleanupListingByCat.php?project=Geology Wikipedia:Categorization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geology/Categories Wikipedia:Citing sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CITE Portal:Earth sciences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Earth_sciences Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Geology Wikipedia: Featured articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FA  and Wikipedia:Featured lists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_lists Bowker, G.C.
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Memory practices in the sciences.
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Wolfram Alpha answer engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_alpha Semantic Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web Hoodoo (geology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_%28geology%29 Munger, G.  Having Undergraduates write for Wikipedia.
Association for Psychological Science http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/aps-wikipedia-initiative/having-undergraduates-write-for-wikipedia Outreach Wikimedia: Bookshelf http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf/ Brian Whalley.
"Book Review: Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies".
October 2010, Ariadne Issue 65 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/whalley-rvw/ Brian Whalley.
"Product Review: The IPad and the Educator, First Impressions".
April 2010, Ariadne Issue 63 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/whalley-rvw-2/ University of Exeter: Layar 'Augmented Reality' Browsing http://www.exeter.ac.uk/students/life/layar/ Wikimedia UK Education projects http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_projects Wikipedia Ambassadors as part of the Wikipedia Education Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Resources Facer, K. 2011, Learning Futures.
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Author Details Brian Whalley Visiting Professor University of Sheffield Email: b.whalley@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://brianbox.net Brian Whalley has retired from formal education and research in HE but now spends time catching up on previous sins of omission in writing up his glaciology research and contributions to student use of computers in fieldwork.
He is a co-investigator on an HEA-funded project on 'Enhancing Fieldwork Learning' and is also involved with developing metadata for fieldwork images and data.
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Book Review: Library Mashups Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Library Mashups Buzz data api database browser repositories flickr cataloguing opac mashup Citation BibTex RIS Aldalin Lyngdoh reviews a book on the basics of mashups and how they have been used in libraries worldwide.
This book is intended for readers who have some knowledge of computers, computer programming and libraries.
Many of us may be wondering what this book is all about and some of us may not have heard of the term 'mashups'.
In very simple terms according to Engard, a mashup is a way of taking data from one source and combining them with data from another source to create a unique online tool.
To put things into context, most of us have, for example, used Google maps.
If we use it to look up libraries in an area specialising in architecture we are mashing data (maps + libraries in an area + architecture) to give us a tool to find information on the subject.
This book tries to teach us just how to do that.
The book is divided in to five sections, each teaching or talking about different experiences various librarians have had while mashing up their library data.
It starts off by introducing mashups, how they work and the general reference sources available.
For a novice the second and third chapters could be slightly daunting to go through as they cover APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and Web Service Architectures which may represent something of a challenge to readers unused to programming or without a grasp of various Web and Internet terminologies.
The next section teaches how to use mashups to improve static Web sites by incorporating interactive tools and making them more dynamic and user-friendly.
They go on to show how we can use tools like Flickr, Google maps, etc, to enhance users' experience while they are on our Web site.
The topics in this book have been compiled keeping the user in mind, not only a seasoned professional who has the computing knowledge along with a library background but also the technical novice.
I really enjoyed reading this book for it presented ideas in a clear and concise manner.
For every chapter that was technical and full of terminologies I found a chapter that just presented ideas on how to improve the library pages by adding a Browser-Side layer.
These chapters are far from technical; there are concepts that can be used to raise the profile of the Web site by using expertise and information that may already be available (for example, Yahoo Pipes!).
However if one already has experience of programming, the topics in this book are excellent as they provide ways of mashing up data from more than two sources and creating something which fits in with what we call today Web 2.0.
This book will not only help to expand your technical abilities, but also boost the rating of your organisation's Web site.
I was particularly impressed by the chapters 'Breaking into the OPAC", "Piping out Library data" and "Federated Database Search Mashups".
These chapters are all about enhancing the service of the library catalogue as and when required, rather than just adding a feature because that's what everybody is doing.
Prior to reading this book I had very little notion of what library mashups were and how they can be used to amplify the information we have in our databases.
Now, I am quite confident that the opinions and views of people about libraries will change from their just being repositories of books to something more engaging and interactive.
This work gave me an understanding of the complexities and usefulness of these technologies and services.
I am now able to form more concrete ideas about how they can be incorporated into the library Web pages.
This book has a lot to offer, and I believe everyone will find something in the pages that they may find interesting or useful.
Whether you are a mashup novice or a hard-core programmer this book will contribute to your existing knowledge.
I would recommend it to readers who would like to learn more about the topic and to go ahead and experiment by making their own mashups.
Engard has certainly justified her choice of subtitle to this book, Exploring new ways to deliver library data.
Author Details Aldalin Lyngdoh Assistant Librarian British Medical Association London Email: alyngdoh@bma.org.uk Web site: http://www.bma.org.uk/library Return to top Article Title: "Library Mashups: Exploring new ways to deliver library data" Author: Aldalin Lyngdoh Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/lyngdoh-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Implementing a Resource or Reading List Management System Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Implementing a Resource or Reading List Management System Buzz data software blog cataloguing e-learning vle shibboleth podcast authentication standards ldap mooc freemium Citation BibTex RIS Gary Brewerton takes us step by step through the various stages of implementing a Resource or Reading List Management System for your institution.
This article takes you step by step through the various stages of implementing a Resource or Reading List Management System; from writing the business case to involving stakeholders, selecting a system, implementation planning, advocacy, training and data entry.
It recognises the hard work required to embed such a system into your institution both during the implementation process and beyond.
Reading lists have long been a feature of Higher Education in the UK.
Traditionally they consisted of an annotated list of books and journal articles compiled by an academic and distributed to their students at the beginning of each term.
Today they are often made available electronically and contain links to online content as well as traditional information sources.
For this reason they are sometimes also called resource lists.
A Resource/Reading List Management System (RLMS) provides an easy way to discover, create and maintain these lists.
However, implementing such a system at your institution may not be as simple as it first appears; it requires careful planning if you want it to be a success.
The Business Case The first step in implementing an RLMS is to convince your institution of the need for one.
A key driver at most institutions is improving the student experience in order to recruit and retain sufficient students of the right calibre.
A RLMS supports this by providing clear guidance to students on which resources they need to support their learning and, at the same time, ensuring the library has an appropriate level of resources to meet this demand.
An RLMS can also be evidence of teaching excellence as it demonstrates a clear channel of communication between academics, their students and the library.
And of course this channel is not just one way.
Students can feed back on the usefulness of recommended resources on their reading lists.
At the same time, the library may be able to provide actual usage data on the resources, which will also support academics in further development of their reading lists.
An academic library also has a vested interest in a RLMS as such a system allows it to align its collection management procedures with the teaching of the institution.
This allows the library to ensure its resources represent value for money to the institution with the limited budget it has available.
There may well be other local considerations (eg presence of a VLE, authentication issues, etc) that can form part of your business case.
Key Stakeholders Implementing an RLMS is not a one person job; it requires involvement from a number of stakeholders in your institution to achieve a success.
Firstly the process would greatly benefit from the support and involvement of senior management.
A Pro Vice Chancellor, Dean or similarly influential person chairing meetings would give the project a greater official standing and aid communication with those responsible for other relevant institutional activities.
Academics as the creators of the reading lists are obviously key to the success of the project.
They are also the group that may feel the most aggrieved about any changes imposed upon them due to the implementation of the RLMS.
Involving academic staff means that you can gain a better awareness of any such concerns and best be able to address them.
These academics may also become your ‘Champions’ during the advocacy phase of the project.
Students as the consumers of reading lists are also equally important.
Their support for the project can influence others to get on board.
However, it should be noted that student involvement can be problematic as it may not be possible to retain the same student(s) throughout an extended implementation process.
The library clearly has a vested interest in reading lists as they feed into its acquisitions and collection development procedures.
The library is also likely to be best placed to assume, or at least assist, in the advocacy and training for the RLMS.
The library may also find itself heavily involved in the data entry for the system and can at least play a quality assurance role in this activity.
There is also a need for technical staff involvement, whether this is from a central IT department or elsewhere in the institution.
Their participation is needed to ensure that the RLMS is compatible with institutional technologies.
Ideally a project group comprising at least these five stakeholders (senior management, academics, student representatives, library staff and technical staff) should be convened to take forward the implementation.
There may well be other people (eg procurement advisors, teaching support, e-learning officers, sponsors, etc) that your institution would include in any such project group.
Initial Considerations There are a few basic questions that the project team needs to ask.
Answers to these questions will influence both the choice of system and how you implement it.
Who owns your institution’s reading lists?
The institution is likely to be the legal owner of the lists but may never have asserted its rights over them.
As such some academics, particularly those with the lengthier reading lists commonly found in the arts or social sciences, may feel they own the lists.
It is important to determine ownership and ideally be able to point to the relevant local policy that states such ownership.
Where ownership of reading lists is uncertain, or where academics may have been given ownership, this will require greater advocacy and prolong the implementation process.
How many reading lists does your institution have and how long are they?
This is important to know to help define the scale of the implementation project.
The number of reading lists will be a similar value to the number of modules your institution supports, but remember that not all modules will necessarily have reading lists and some modules may share lists.
There may also be reading lists that are not formally connected to a module but which it is nonetheless important to include.
The length of any reading list is most likely governed by the subject it covers; engineering lists tend to be very short whilst social science lists can run into hundreds of items.
Who will initially input the lists onto the RLMS?
Is this a job for the academics, local clerical support or library staff?
Perhaps additional staffing is available (for a price) for data entry or maybe you already hold a significant number of reading lists in an electronic format that could be imported into the RLMS.
The latter option will certainly be feasible if the team is migrating data from one RLMS to another.
Who will maintain the reading lists?
Obviously the lists will need to be reviewed and updated over time.
However, this need not be the same group which initially entered them; for example, library staff could have initially entered the reading lists into the RLMS, then academic staff would be responsible for maintaining them.
It is important that this issue is clearly decided before any advocacy or training can begin.
Who should have access to the reading lists?
Are the lists restricted to members of the institution or can anyone view them?
Making reading lists available to potential students can be a valuable marketing tool but at the same time these lists do contain the intellectual property of the institution which it may well wish to reserve for its fee-paying students.
Of course, this decision may be greatly simplified if your institution signs up to a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) project [1] where educational content (including reading lists) is made freely available to self-learners.
Specifying Requirements The project team should expand on the answers to the initial considerations to create a list of essential and desirable requirements.
For instance, the following basic features in many ways define a RLMS: Enable students to view reading lists and easily check availability of recommended resources Restrict the creation and maintenance of reading lists to appropriate staff Allow academics to structure and annotate reading lists as they choose Permit import/export of reading lists (eg to reference management software) Inform library staff of additions, changes and deletions to reading lists (in order to support collection development).
It is also advantageous if the RLMS can provide you with information on both the number of reading lists entered into the system and the number of items, so you can easily monitor the data entry during the implementation.
Other requirements may be determined by local considerations.
Do you have a VLE and if so how closely should this be integrated with the RLMS?
What authentication options are supported?
Are there any student information systems that contain data with which the RLMS could or should interact?
For example, your institution may have a system that holds course details including how many students are registered on each module.
The ability of the RLMS to interact with such systems can reduce the amount of data entry needed.
System Selection With a list of requirements in hand, the project team can now draw up a short list of potential systems [2] to evaluate.
There are currently a handful of commercial systems, usually delivering software as a service.
In the UK it is relatively easy to obtain demonstrations of these systems from their suppliers.
There are also a growing number of freemium [3] reading lists solutions out there that may meet your requirements.
These provide a free basic service to users and charge either for advanced features or use an alternate revenue stream such as taking a small referral fee when people purchase recommended items from an online bookstore.
Open source systems are also available, although live demonstrations of these systems by their developers may not be possible.
However, the developers may provide an online demonstration, be this interactive or recorded podcast(s).
Obviously one advantage of open source is that technical staff can gain first-hand experience with the system by simply downloading and installing it.
Another option is to develop your own RLMS.
This will require significant local technical resource and is not something to be entered into lightly.
An in-house system may well be the best match to your list of requirements, and this is increasingly likely to be the case if you need to integrate it with many other local (i.e.
non-standard) systems, but you do need to consider the total cost of such a development.
With a short list of possible systems drawn up and the project team having seen demonstrations of them, the next step is to visit or speak with users of the systems.
This is a great opportunity to learn more about the system and also to gain confidence that what you are seeking to accomplish has been achieved elsewhere: if they can do it, so can you.
The usual questions to ask are: What do staff and student think of the system?
What other RLMSs did they consider and why did they choose the one they implemented?
Were there any unexpected problems or limitations with the system?
How much supplier/developer support was needed and was it forthcoming?
How long did it take to implement the system?
What other systems have they integrated with the RLMS?
If you did the implementation again what would you change?
The decision on what RLMS to implement is likely to be made based upon a number of factors.
They include how well the system meets your list of requirements; what are the costs of the system (both in terms of money and resources); and your level of confidence in the supplier/developer of the system.
The latter is particularly important if there are key requirements missing from the system that you are hoping will be developed in future.
Your project team may have the authority to make the decision on which RLMS to adopt, or, more likely, recommend an RLMS for approval from a higher power.
Of course, the recommendation could even be not to proceed with an RLMS or wait until required features are developed before going any further.
However, assuming that you do decide on which RLMS to implement, then the hard work can really begin!
In-house Development If you decide to develop your own in-house RLMS, then this will impose delays in the implementation process as there is no point in promoting a service that has yet to be realised.
However, it is important that ongoing communication occurs between the project team and local developers to ensure the resultant system is what is required.
In addition, regular progress reviews will ensure the system is on track and other aspects of the implementation (eg advocacy, support, etc) will be ready when needed.
One major danger of any local development is feature creep.
This is the continuous growth of requirements beyond what was decided at the start of the development.
New requirements are not necessarily a bad thing and may be caused by factors outside the original scope of the RLMS implementation, but they must be strongly managed as so to avoid the development overrunning or the need for additional resourcing.
Implementation Planning It is probable that the timescale for the project has already been determined (eg ready for the new academic year) and therefore the two major constraints on the project will be the cost and scope.
Cost may be licensing or subscription charges, purchase of hardware and, of course, staff time.
Scope in this case means the number of other systems the RLMS needs to integrate with and number of reading lists to be entered into the system.
It is unlikely that you will be able to obtain every reading list in existence at your institution or motivate all academics to enter their lists into the RLMS.
Therefore you need to set a realistic target number or percentage of lists to enter as part of the implementation process.
An aspirational goal of 90% of the available lists may be appropriate for some institutions, whereas 60% may be more realistic for other sites.
This target will depend heavily on how much institutional buy-in the project has; the greater the buy-in the higher the target.
With your timescale and target number of reading lists determined then it is possible to plan the implementation using standard project management tools such as work breakdown structures, network diagrams and Gantt charts.
Key activities of the project plan will include advocacy, system installation, system configuration, training, data entry and support.
If you have selected a commercial system then the supplier should be able to assist you in this process having (it is hoped) implemented their system successfully at other sites.
Figure 1 below shows a simplified Gantt chart for a RLMS implementation.
Figure 1: Implementation Gantt chart If you have sufficient time, then one possibility is to run a pilot implementation.
This will allow you to practise many of the activities, in particular advocacy and training, and also allow you to evaluate better your data entry and support needs.
A pilot could be run with a single academic department but it would be better to involve academics (either whole departments or individuals) from multiple subject disciplines.
This is because the size and style of reading lists can vary greatly between subjects; using a single department is therefore likely to skew the results of the pilot.
Another advantage of using academics in different departments is that these early adopters can be used later to help promote the full roll-out of the RLMS.
Advocacy It may be that some advocacy has already been done, either as part of convincing your institution of the need for a RLMS or as part of the system selection process.
In any case, now that the implementation is actually happening, it is important that this begin in earnest.
At the very least, you can now inform people of the key features of the system and project timescales.
Subject liaison librarians are ideally suited for this advocacy role as they will have established channels of communication with academic departments.
Where this does not already apply, it is a great opportunity to forge these contacts.
It is important to know which departments respond well to persuasion and which require more formal encouragement, perhaps by a senior member of the institution or an agreed institutional policy.
If, for example, you have a teaching or e-learning policy then it may be possible to add a requirement for all courses or modules to place a reading list on the RLMS.
It may also be useful to know how academics in the department use reading lists.
How do they promote and motivate their students to use the lists?
From where do they make them available?
And who, if anyone, assists them in keeping the lists up to date?
Clearly departments do differ significantly from one another even in the same institution, and what works for one will not necessarily work for another.
In some departments, local champions (maybe your early adopters) can do more than official promotions.
If this is the case, it is important to identify and support your champions.
You may also find that there is natural competition within a department or among departments of which you can take advantage.
However, this does need to be handled with great care so as not to alienate those department(s).
If it has been decided that non-academic staff will be responsible for the initial data entry, then this certainly makes the advocacy activity easier as all you need from the academics are copies of their reading lists.
On the other hand, getting academics to actually enter their lists onto the system themselves will take a lot more persuasive effort.
Use every opportunity you can to promote the RLMS.
If an academic has bad feedback from their students relating to lack of available resources then maybe this is because of their lack of a reading list on the system.
If there is an upcoming teaching assessment, then maybe you could suggest that a department invest some time in ensuring their lists are on the system so as to demonstrate a clear chain of events from an academic recommending a resource, to the library acquiring it, and the students using it.
Finally, you may need to consider possible competition from other sources for the reading lists.
For example the local bookshop may already have an ongoing relationship with some of your academics or perhaps a freemium reading list service is asking your academics or students to upload their reading lists.
It is important that you establish the selected RLMS as the official system as far as the institution is concerned.
After all you will not want to see academics having to do the same job twice and if it is appropriate for the other source to have the reading list data then access to this can possibly be arranged.
System Installation and Configuration Installation of the RLMS will be carried out by your technical staff, the system supplier or more likely a combination of them both.
Critical tasks are integrating the RLMS with your institutional authentication systems (Shibboleth, LDAP, etc) and the library catalogue.
Further integration with your Library Management System may also be possible, as could integration with a VLE and other institutional systems.
Once the RLMS has been installed, it then needs to be configured.
This may include uploading local branding and department/course/module details to reflect the make-up of the institution.
The latter could mean extracting such data from an existing institutional system and importing into the RLMS, or entering them manually.
Training and Support It is to be hoped your selected RLMS is easy to use, but you will still need to provide training.
Before your trainers can train others they must first become familiar with the RLMS themselves.
This may involve organising training from a supplier, or reading available documentation, or simply having a good play with the system.
If your initial data entry is being undertaken by a small group of staff (library or otherwise), then training need not be an onerous task.
If your academics will be undertaking the initial data entry then your training programme will need to be more extensive.
Training could take place in central locations such as the library and also in departments.
Ideally the training should be group sessions although do not be afraid of one-to-one training, particularly in the case of your local champions.
In your training sessions you may encounter some resistance to the RLMS.
It is important to remind people of the aims of the project and benefits the system will bring.
However, it is worth recording any criticism of the system as this can be used to inform further development of the RLMS.
You might also want to consider recording one of the training sessions or specifically creating an online version of the training.
This can then be used countless times thereafter by trainees at a time that is convenient for them.
Beyond the organised training there is also a need to provide ad hoc support during the implementation process.
This may be to answer queries from those doing the data entry or to explain any changes that might have come into effect since the training, for example an update of the RLMS that introduces valuable new functionality.
As well as providing phone and email contact details, it may be worth considering establishing a blog or electronic forum to assist in supporting the implementation; either of these solutions would prove an ideal platform to host an FAQ .
Data Entry Of all the activities relating to implementing a RLMS, data entry is in many ways the most vital.
Without a sufficient critical mass of reading lists, the system may not be taken seriously when it is launched, and both it and the project potentially deemed a failure.
Therefore, it is important to monitor the progress of lists entered into the system against the agreed targets and to take remedial action if necessary.
Such action could be as simple as encouraging those already undertaking the data entry (academics, library staff, temporary staff, etc.)
in their efforts or recruiting more people to assist in the process.
Alternatively you could redefine the scope of the project, perhaps limiting data entry to reading lists for first-year students.
Regardless of who enters the reading lists into the system, there is likely to be a need to check the quality of their input.
Such checking needs to address the accuracy of the citations and overall organisation of the reading list.
Common mistakes encountered can then be fed back into the training programme and, one hopes, resolved.
If it is not possible to check all the lists, then certainly checking a sample of them could be beneficial.
Launch and Beyond With a lot of hard work and a little luck, by the time the launch date arrives, you will have successfully begun the process of embedding the RLMS into your institution’s workflows and procedures.
If you have achieved close to your target percentage of reading lists then this is good news; if you have successfully entered over 90% of your institution’s lists into the system, then this should be a cause for celebration.
However, whilst the implementation project may now be drawing to a close, the work of implementing the RLMS continues.
Without continual advocacy, training and support you may not be able to get the remaining reading lists entered onto the system or, even more importantly, maintain those lists already entered into the system.
The latter is particularly important if a different group of staff (ie the academics) did not initially enter the lists but are now responsible for keeping them up to date.
The launch also signifies a change to the advocacy.
Before the launch this will have focused on the academic staff.
As the launch approaches this will need to expand to include your students, after all they are the main beneficiaries of the RLMS.
Obviously the launch itself represents an ideal opportunity to promote the system to them, perhaps with an official launch event.
Conclusion Implementing a RLMS is a lot of work.
There are many questions that need to be considered, not least: which system to adopt and who will be responsible for inputting the reading lists.
It will require the co-operation of many people in the institution, especially the academic staff.
However, with careful planning and an effective programme of advocacy and support, you will have begun to embed the system into your institutional procedures and soon have realised the benefits.
Acknowledgements I am grateful for the support and encouragement of my colleagues, in particular Jon Knight, Jason Cooper and Ruth Stubbings.
References Pappano, Laura.
“The Year of the MOOC.”The New York News.
The New York Times Company, 4 Nov 2012.
Accessed 11 December 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html Chad, Ken.
helibtech.
SCONUL, 2012.
Accessed 11 December 2012 http://helibtech.com/Reading_Resource+lists Froberg, Peter.
Freemium 101: A brief introduction to the freemium business model.
n.p., 2012.
Accessed  11 December 2012. http://www.freemium.org/wp-content/ebook-101.pdf   Author Details Gary Brewerton Library Systems Manager Loughborough University Email: g.p.brewerton@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/    Gary Brewerton is the Library Systems Manager at Loughborough University and is interested in library automation, information and communication technology, and open source development (eg LORLS).
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Book Review: Making Digital Cultures Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Making Digital Cultures Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity Buzz archives digitisation Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho finds this study of the cultural terrain of modern institutions, where digital and analogue objects co-exist, both challenging and thought-provoking.
This book is about cultural continuity and change.
It focuses on the debates about the impact of 'new technology' and 'the digital age' on the shaping of cultural spaces, the discourses between 'producers' and 'consumers' and the changing fabric of modern institutions.
The effects of various digitisation endeavours on institutional identities and practices and on individual behaviours are analysed in order to demonstrate how digital technologies are 'enfolded into the fabric of specific institutional and broader cultural environments.'
Making Digital Cultures invites us to reflect on how digital media shape events and practices and how they are in turn shaped by cultural experiences.
Here digitisation is defined as a 'cultural problematic' in the broader sense.
Key ideas and concepts from social and cultural theory are organised around the interpretation of digital cultural production as 'narratives of promise and threat'.
These narratives are mapped at the economic, social and political level and viewed through the concepts of flow, rather than structure; network, rather than state, and horizontal information rather than hierarchical knowledge.
The theoretical dimensions of 'the plurality of understanding of digital culture' are brought together with three studies (the library, the business organisation and the archive) of how different institutions adopt these technologies.
The digital technology 'narratives of threat and promise' are examined in terms of the potential for democratisation/ de-democratisation and struggle for control.
But it is through 'examining local engagements with [the] technology that the continuous/ discontinuous characteristics of digital culture are … illuminated'.
The analysis of these three institutions brings to life the complex processes and locally enacted parameters that shape the 'enfolding' of any technical solution in specific circumstances.
The library case study provides an example of reframing access as "communicative" rather then a learning issue.
This presents evidence for the ambivalence of the discourses and the materials of digital culture.
In the second example is an illustration of the failure of digitisation to make a difference when vision and practice cannot be reconciled.
The technical side can never be seen clearly without context.
The final example, of the modern archive, raises the question of authenticity in relation to memory and culture and how this concept needs to be re-examined, re-negotiated and re-defined.
This thought-provoking work will help you evaluate and re-think the way organisations struggle to negotiate shifting corporate and personal cultural boundaries and expectations into manageable practices in a world where digital offerings sit besides analogue objects.
This is a book which is topical and challenging, brilliantly researched and original, well referenced and polemic, combining theoretical approaches and empirical analysis.
The author, Martin Hand, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Queen's University, Canada, has put substantial work in bringing together perspectives, arguments and insights.
The expectation is that the reader too will have to put in sustained intellectual effort, keep an open mind and re-appraise personal experiences.
Author Details Lina Coelho Sub-Librarian BMA Library Email: lcoelho@bma.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "Making Digital Cultures: Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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KIM Project Conference 2008 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines KIM Project Conference 2008 Buzz data software framework database xml infrastructure archives xslt identifier vocabularies repositories video rfid intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Alexander Ball provides an overview of the Knowledge and Information Management Through Life Project Conference held in April, 2008.
The KIM Project [1] is a £5.5 million research programme involving eleven UK universities and funded primarily by the EPSRC [2] and ESRC [3].
The Project’s tagline is ‘Knowledge and Information Management Through Life’, and it is primarily focussed on long-lived engineering artifacts and the companies that produce and support them.
The driver for the research is a ‘product-service paradigm’ that is emerging in several industrial sectors, whereby a supplier is contracted not only to deliver a product such as an aircraft or building, but to maintain and adapt it throughout its lifecycle.
The second KIM Project Conference was held on 2–3 April 2008 at the University of Reading.
As with the previous conference [4], the purpose of the event was to allow the Project’s researchers to present their findings so far to the rest of the Project team, and to garner feedback from industrial representatives.
Industry Session The first session of the Conference was the showcase for papers of particular relevance and interest to industry, and ranged across the various different aspects of the Project.
Alison McKay of the University of Leeds started the proceedings with a paper on integrating product, process and rationale models.
The move to product-service offers a supplier new opportunities for improving design work in the light of experience gained from the later lifecycle stages of existing products.
It also presents challenges, as it is impossible to predict at the time of design how the product (and its attendant manufacturing and in-service processes) will need to be adapted over the course of its life.
Instead of trying to future-proof designs, what is needed is a set of process and rationale models that can be linked to and superimposed on the product model, and updated as the understanding and usage of the product changes over time.
Stewart Johnstone of Loughborough University presented some early findings of research into the impact that the move to product-service is having on suppliers’ Human Resource (HR) management.
Some of the more pressing challenges are the stark divide often found between the product and service sides of the business, with the service side often receiving a low priority, and the need to align the personal goals of the staff with organisational goals.
Some of the strategies adopted include changing the organisational structure to increase integration, developing programmes of service training, and recruiting globally to find adequately skilled staff.
There are corporate benefits to allowing HR departments greater influence within the organisation and including them in decisions on strategy.
Michael Lewis of the University of Bath School of Management challenged a common belief that contracts and relationships are mutually exclusive methods that customers use to govern the business they do with suppliers.
While contracts and relationships have different dynamics and evolve differently over time, they should be seen as complementary; good governance depends on getting (and maintaining) the right balance between the two.
Yuyang Zhao of the University of Bath Innovative Design and Manufacturing Research Centre (IdMRC) presented the results of a case study looking at how information was evaluated at three different levels of management in seven different organisations.
Evaluation practices tended to vary more with functional context than managerial level, however.
In an archival context, document properties rather than full text content were used as the basis for judgement, whereas for information published to an intranet, context was key.
The research pointed to the utility of applying a profile-dependent ‘value tag’ to documents, enabling more effective searching and better information system co-ordination.
Yee Mey Goh, also of the University of Bath IdMRC, looked at three different ways in which in-service information could be captured and fed back into the system.
Many aerospace companies are equipping their products to produce real-time performance logs, but as this data is held by the customer, the suppliers cannot take advantage of the feedback it provides.
Service reports are usually semi-structured, but are hard to analyse due to the variety of ways in which free text portions are completed, and the number of locations over which they are distributed.
NASA’s Lessons Learned Information System, in contrast, is a highly managed system, where staff are trained to enter records in an objective and consistent manner, and each record is checked for compliance.
This system still has cultural barriers to overcome — unwillingness to admit mistakes, for example — but its value is being proven by the reuse of the records.
The final presentation of the session was given by James Wasiak, again of the University of Bath IdMRC, who has been conducting a case study into the use of email by one of the Project’s industrial collaborators.
Some of the key statistics were that 35% of the engineers studied spent more than two hours a day using email, and 40% felt they didn’t use it effectively.
Where systems alert them to new email, engineers read email within six seconds of it arriving; thus email was highly disruptive to their work.
Study of email content revealed that during product development, 70% of emails related to organisational aspects rather than the project or product, although the product came to dominate email correspondence later on.
Notably, 70% of emails were purely informative, and while approximately a third concerned problem solving, hardly any decisions were recorded within emails.
The session concluded with a feedback period, where the industrial delegates could discuss the papers presented.
It was encouraging to hear them reiterate and amplify many of the points raised by the speakers.
It was also a little uncanny that one of them should call for some sort of integrating framework that linked the research up in an easily digestible way, as this lead neatly into the next paper.
The EGIPT Model Work package structures are good for dividing research work into logical threads, but not so good for explaining how the threads tie together.
One of the deliverables of the Project’s administrative work package was to produce a framework that did link up all the research into a cohesive whole, and to this end the EGIPT Model was born.
Simon Austin of Loughborough University explained how the research could be thought of as involving the engineering context (Environment), people (Groups and Individuals) and things (Practices and Tools).
(As an aside, the Practices element of the model was briefly known as Techniques, but this would have yielded too amusing an acronym.)
Each of the three main work packages contribute to all five divisions of the model, although Work Package 1 — Advanced product information representation and management — is more concentrated in the Practices and Tools areas, whereas Work Package 3 — Managing the knowledge system lifecycle — is more concentrated in the Environment, Group and Individuals areas.
Work package 2 — Learning throughout the product-service cycle — is fairly evenly spread.
The remainder of the Conference was explicitly organised around the EGIPT Model.
Environment/Group/Individual-related Papers Jurong Zheng of the University of Bath School of Management kicked off the second session with a comparative case study of two PFI hospitals, looking particularly at the asymmetries in how the public and private partners learned from each other.
In both instances, the private partner seemed better equipped for learning, with more mature processes in place — meeting structures, knowledge databases — while the public partner’s approach was more ad hoc, though the asymmetry was different in the two cases.
Wisdom Kwawu of the University of Reading considered the place of incentives in contracts and business relationships, and noted the need for vigilance over the course of a contract to ensure that the incentives are working.
Incentives need to match up with well-defined performance measures, but handling these measures can be tricky as business requirements evolve over time.
Wisdom presented a case study of a 45-week project to build a £4.5m office building complex.
The project was dogged by misaligned incentive systems through the supply chain (the primary contractor did not want to pass the incentives down the chain), the performance measures were subjective, and poor communication made it hard for managers to prioritise the work.
Florian Täube of Imperial College, London looked at organisational learning in the context of a UK-based firm with subsidiaries in India and China.
The case study found few mechanisms for disseminating knowledge, and found that technological, geographical and cultural distances were still significant barriers.
Indeed, the case study highlighted the advantages of a co-located design team over a distributed team, and found that a scheme of temporarily embedding individual members of the subsidiary team into the headquarters proved to have a highly positive impact.
Kathryn Fahy of the University of Lancaster examined the role of tacit knowledge in engineering expertise.
The tacit–explicit axis is just one dimension along which knowledge can be placed; others include the individual–social axis, the axis between intellectual knowledge and acquired skill, and the axis between prescribed procedure and actual practice.
The case study found that a whole range of knowledge types were key to solving problems: written documents, knowing one’s way around the archive system, having a ‘feel’ for problems, understanding the past, and so on.
The picture painted was of bricoleurs bringing together diverse resources in order to come to an understanding of the situation.
Finally in this session, Jawwad Raja of the University of Reading presented a further case study on the theme of the impact of the move to product-service on HR management.
The study concerned two service businesses, both of which were undergoing continuous restructuring and were changing their HR structures to suit.
In moving to a ‘business partner’ model [5], HR was given a more strategic role within the business, with more personnel functions devolved to line managers, and a consequent reduction in the number of HR staff.
However, this change in role was only implemented patchily, due to strong resistance to the changing practices in some units.
Practice-related Papers The final session of the first day began with Khadidja Grebici of the University of Cambridge presenting a technique for reducing risk in the design embodiment process by explicitly recording the uncertainty and maturity of the information used.
The technique involves analysing the uncertainties associated with a piece of information (errors, imprecision, instability) and assessing the likelihood that the uncertainty is high, medium or low, according to a given set of metrics; these factors are used to generate the risk likelihood.
Similarly, the likelihood that maturity indicators (data quality, validity, sensitivity) are characteristic of high, medium, or low maturity is assessed, and the results used to generate the risk impact.
The risk likelihood and impact together determine the priority to assign to the risk, and the probability assessments indicate where greater certainty is needed in order to reduce the risk.
Carys Siemieniuch of the Loughborough University demonstrated a decision making system for product-service projects.
The system consists of agents (those making the decisions), activities, infrastructure and technology, and knowledge and information; these affect or are affected by internal variables, external variables, organisational culture and the level of decision-making.
This system is currently being used to analyse a set of incidents (nicknamed the ‘disaster database’) to discover the reasons behind the decisions that lead to the incidents.
The next stage of the research will be to derive recommendations from these findings.
Weisheng Lu of the University of Reading gave the last presentation of the day, and livened up proceedings by positioning his paper as a sequel to the Matrix trilogy of films.
His subject this time was a decision support system that uses a weighted SWOT analysis, the conclusions of which are derived using matrix mathematics.
The theoretical basis for the system is a mixture of both the rational-analytic and naturalistic schools of decision making; decision making is seen as a process of analysing the situation, generating a set of options and choosing the best option from this set.
The proposed system would constitute an artificial intelligence for generating the set of options, but would need a well-curated expert knowledge base from which to work.
Tool-related Papers Day Two of the Conference began with three papers looking at the design record and tools for creating and organising it.
Lian Ding of the University of Bath IdMRC explained how lightweight representations of 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models, coupled with ‘stand-off’ (separate) XML annotation files, can be used to reduce costs and simplify the process of curating designs and communicating them across the extended enterprise.
The annotations allow non-geometric information to be layered on top of the geometry, but being ‘stand-off’ they can be applied equally well to the original model or its lightweight derivative.
The concept is being proven using a full-weight CAD system (NX) and two lightweight formats: X3D and 3D PDF.
Alastair Conway of the University of Strathclyde demonstrated complementary methods for recording synchronous and asynchronous design work.
On the synchronous side, the Media Enhanced Minuting System (MEMS) allows one to upload in real time textual and photographic records of what happens in a meeting, along with any digital materials used in the discussion.
It is also possible to link these in with video and audio captures of the meeting.
On the asynchronous side, each activity can be represented in XML according to its inputs, outputs, controls and mechanisms.
These XML records can be linked up to provide a complete chain, and transformed via XSLT into reports.
The two modes can be reconciled into a single process chain by considering reports of asynchronous work as inputs to synchronous work, and synchronous work as setting the agenda for asynchronous work.
Yee Mey Goh of the University of Bath IdMRC returned to the podium to give a presentation on the faceted classification of in-service issue records.
The technique chosen was to transform a corpus of in-service issue records into structured XML documents, where each element represents a facet by which the record can be classified.
Fields with controlled vocabulary (such as operator, product variant) were simple to turn into facets.
For the free-text part of the record, the corpus had to be examined carefully to see which types of information came up most regularly; in this case, subjects such as function, failure mode (e.g.
corrosion, crack, wear), and type of usage proved most suitable.
It is hoped that text mining techniques can be used to generate these facets.
The advantages of using faceted classification in this context is that it makes it easier to spot systemic issues with a product, and allows one to spot recurring queries.
Practice/Tool-related Papers (1) The final two sessions of the Conference featured some procedure-related tools, alongside theoretical and philosphical papers on Project themes.
Raymond Sung of Heriot-Watt University showed how motion study techniques, such as chronocyclegraphs and therbligs, can be applied to logs of interaction with virtual reality (VR) design software in order to highlight inefficiencies and training needs.
In one case study involving cable harness design, it was found that the designers were spending 47% of their time navigating through system menus, but only 27% of their time designing; this revealed that the menu navigation needed to be simplified and improved.
Other applications of this system of analysis include finding the best way to go about a maintenance activity, and deducing the rationale behind a given design decision.
Nathan Eng of the University of Cambridge presented some early thoughts on the relative merits of graphical and narrative methods of presenting information.
Human thought is narrative in nature, while endeavours such as complex engineering work and the systems that support it are increasingly non-linear and web-like in nature.
There is an increasing trend to move away from textual reports and similar narrative structures to graphical representations such as concept maps, rationale maps and mind maps, but it is not clear what is gained and what is lost by this.
One danger could be that without an over-arching narrative to interpret the information, the significance of the collection of graphs may be lost.
As if in reply, Rob Bracewell of the University of Cambridge then presented a comparison of traditional narrative design documentation with an integrated design documentation method using DRed, an editor for design rationale maps.
The DRed maps linked in with the various informational inputs to the design process (Word documents, PDFs) as well as live spreadsheets where the calculations were done, while version control was accomplished using a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system.
While the point was made that written records could be optimised for certain oft-repeated design tasks, the new integrated method did look easy to follow and could be used for novel design tasks.
Bob Young of Loughborough University set out a new way of capturing and re-using manufacturing best practice.
The technique involves using the second edition of the Unified Modelling Language (UML2) to describe constant and conditional relationships between design part families (defined by their geometry, topology and functional requirements) and manufacturing part families (defined by how they are made).
By expressing best practice in this way, it becomes possible to automate the process of identifying the most suitable manufacturing options for a given design part.
A proof of concept is being implemented in NX, Teamcenter and E2KS.
Practice/Tool-related Papers (2) Peter Heisig of the University of Cambridge discussed research into an integrated product-process-rationale (PPR) framework, to enable organisations to ensure they collect the right information and knowledge at the different stages of the lifecycle.
The first branch of the research was literature-based and yielded seven different PPR models; among these models there was certainly no consensus over what terms should be used, nor even what the terms should mean, but some useful components were identified.
In order to prioritise these components, a second branch of the research surveyed practising engineers about their knowledge and information management concerns.
More analysis needs to be done before producing the first draft of the new model.
John Rooke of Salford University reported on meta-research concerning product-service developments in the construction industry.
Rooke argued that more attention needs to be paid to the information carried by physical artifacts and environments.
He also introduced a procurer–provider–user model of meta-relationships in product-service lifecycles, tentatively suggesting that the product-service concept should be expanded to include policy.
Rooke’s last point was a methodological plea in favour of the strong unique adequacy principle: only analysing situations in terms native to the context.
In the final paper of the Conference, Koray Pekericli of the University of Reading presented a vision of a construction industry that uses a shared data repository and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to facilitate through-life knowledge management.
RFID tags can be used not only to identify components, but also to report on environmental conditions and the performance of subsystems.
Linking the RFID data to a data repository allows components to be tracked from design to disposal, and enables one to discover systemic failures or underperformance of given components.
This workflow is equally applicable to other complex engineering contexts such as aerospace.
A proof of concept implementation has been prepared.
Closing Remarks Project Director Chris McMahon of the University of Bath IdMRC brought proceedings to a close with some words about the direction of the Project in its final year.
Researchers who have primarily focussed on describing existing scenarios and behaviours were asked to think about recommendations they could make to industry, while those developing tools were asked to think about their technology readiness level [6].
Above all, the key was to make the research accessible, relevant and useful to industry, so it can be used to improve knowledge and information management with immediate effect.
Conclusions From the perspective of a researcher on the Project, it was encouraging to see how much progress has been made in the past year.
The strands of research that seemed a bit abstract last year have now gained rather more substance, and the final stages of the Project look set to yield some exciting and relevant results.
The Conference itself was smoothly run, and maintained its tradition for rigorous time keeping (this time speakers were threatened with crocodile-infested swamp).
It was also a little emotional as it marked the retirement of the Project Manager, Garry Burt, who has done so much to ensure close collaboration between the Project and industry.
All in all, it was a valuable and positive couple of days, and the Project leaders hope to conclude the series with a third conference in spring 2009.
References The KIM Project Web site http://www.kimproject.org/ The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Web site http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/ The Economic and Social Research Council Web site http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ A Ball, ‘KIM Project Conference: Knowledge and Information Management Through Life’, Ariadne 51 (2007) http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/kim-conf-rpt/ D Ulrich, Human Resource Champions, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997.
Chapter 2.
J C Mankins, Technology Readiness Levels: A White Paper, Washington, DC: NASA, 6 April 1995 http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/trl/trl.pdf Author Details Alexander Ball Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.ball@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “KIM Project Conference 2008” Author: Alexander Ball Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/kim-conf-2008-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Addendum to Issue 60: Snapshot of the Global Economy, Summer 2009 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Addendum to Issue 60: Snapshot of the Global Economy, Summer 2009 Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller collects images and links describing economic conditions in 2009.
The snapshot taken from a high-level page from the BBC News economy pages on 31 July 2009 should give future readers a notion of the situation to which many Ariadne authors allude.
A snapshot of BBC Economy News stories as displayed on 31 July 2009 Listed here is a representative set of stories: The layman's finance crisis glossary 10:45 GMT, Friday, 15 May 2009 11:45 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7642138.stm Timeline: Credit crunch to downturn 08:07 GMT, Thursday, 11 June 2009 09:07 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7521250.stm US states face budget meltdowns 11:29 GMT, Thursday, 2 July 2009 12:29 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8130318.stm China stocks fall on bubble fears 10:17 GMT, Wednesday, 29 July 2009 11:17 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8173746.stm US goods orders suffer sharp fall 13:29 GMT, Wednesday, 29 July 2009 14:29 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8174990.stm German unemployment rises in July 12:46 GMT, Thursday, 30 July 2009 13:46 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8176603.stm Japan jobless at six-year record 06:31 GMT, Friday, 31 July 2009 07:31 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8177646.stm '$10 trillion' credit crunch cost 08:44 GMT, Friday, 31 July 2009 09:44 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8177814.stm 19,000 shops 'closed this year' 13:03 GMT, Friday, 31 July 2009 14:03 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8177502.stm Pace of US economic decline eases 15:15 GMT, Friday, 31 July 2009 16:15 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8178430.stm British Airways makes £148m loss 16:12 GMT, Friday, 31 July 2009 17:12 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8177647.stm UK savers get £21bn compensation 17:58 GMT, Friday, 31 July 2009 18:58 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8179096.stm Editor, Ariadne Return to top Article Title: "Snapshot of the Global Economy, Summer 2009" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 67: Changes Afoot Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 67: Changes Afoot Buzz data mobile software framework rss usability urn infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility tagging identifier blog repositories eprints preservation cataloguing gis ulcc curation librarything webinar twitter elluminate uima interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 67.
For readers who might have been wondering, I shall resist Mark Twain’s remark about reports of his demise being exaggerated, and reassure you that while Ariadne has been undergoing changes to the way in which it will be delivered to the Web, it has been business as usual in the matter of the content, as you will see from the paragraphs that follow.
Issue 67, while currently not looking any different, is in the process of being migrated to a new platform developed to enhance functionality and give a more user-friendly look and feel to the publication.
These developments are being approached with uninterrupted service uppermost in our mind while attending to the not inconsiderable legacy material the publication by now holds.
Our intention is to ensure the current and previous content remain available without any break in accessibility to the Ariadne site.
In their article Towards Interoperabilty of European Language Resources, Sophia Ananiadou and her colleagues explain how a recent survey identified the growing trend of the Internet to exclude European citizens who cannot understand or speak English since so many transactions and information are in English.
They provide an overview of the META-NET Network of Excellence (NoE) and its work to support European citizens through enhanced communication and co-operation across languages.
A major outcome of this NoE will be META-SHARE, ‘a searchable network of repositories that collect together resources such as language data, tools and related Web services, covering a large number of European languages.’ The authors also describe the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) Framework, which ensures interoperability of resources, and its U-Compare platform above it.
Together they are designed to support the rapid construction of natural language processing and text-mining applications without the need for extra programming.
In this way they can support automatic machine translation.
In this way, the META-SHARE system serves not only to locate language resources, but also supports rapid prototyping and testing of applications destined to use such resources.
The META-NET will therefore serve to preserve European cultural and linguistic diversity.
The authors introduce the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance (META) which comprehends a wide range of stakeholders and which will undertake a ‘technology visioning process’ to innovate in the area of language technology applications.
The META-SHARE platform will hold language data, tools and Web services for a large number of European languages.
Work has begun on the preparation of resources and the aim is to encourage a diversity of innovation by accepting both toll-free and chargeable resources.
The authors highlight the role of high-quality metadata in permitting users to locate the broad range of resources across a wide range of languages.
They stress the importance of interoperability and comparability in this venture.
They are concerned about the effect that different programming languages, formats and data types can have on compatability.
The authors describe the nature and benefits of the U-Compare platform including the GUI, workflow canvas, annotation functionality and a library of components.
The platform also offers facilities to evaluate the performance of workflows and the option to substitute more effective components to improve performance.
The authors then go on to explain the role of the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) in their system.
This UIMA framework also serves to wrap resources as its own components, thereby rendering their original programming language irrelevant.
They then proceed to describe the role of the Type System, the set of annotation types employed.
They also explain how the use of a sharable type system serves as a partial solution to fostering interoperability across working groups at least at an intermediate level of hierarchy.
The authors point to the commonality of processing approaches of these language technology applications, and the likelihood of a rapid increase in the availability of new applications without the need to write large quantities of new code.
Despite a decidedly philosophical tone to the opening of Christopher Blackwell and Amy Hackney Blackwell’s article, they assure us that Image ‘Quotation’ Using the C.I.T.E.
Architecture is concerned less with the metaphysical aspects of quotation than with the practical considerations involved.
More importantly, they are concerned with the quotation of images, a tougher undertaking if ever there were.
They provide in their introduction a useful illustration of the ease with which it is possible to quote from an established textual work, such as the Hebrew Bible, as compared with the pitfalls involved in attempting to refer to a fragment of an image.
Yet the increasing distribution of images within scholarly activity only exacerbates the failings currently encountered.
The authors not only discuss the theoretical assumptions underlying their solution to image quotation but also detail technological implementation accompanied by examples from different disciplinary domains.
The authors introduce the work of the Homer Multitext Project and the nature of the data with which it works.
In particular they point to the pre-existing high level of scholarly commentary relating to the primary sources with which the project members work.
They explain how considerable attention will have to be paid to the scaling-up of the underlying digital service operating on these materials, with equal regard given to handling the technological changes to which all such systems are subject.
What perhaps I should highlight for readers at this juncture is the ground-breaking development that the HMT and similar initiatives represent.
For the first time they offer scholars the opportunity not only to examine in depth and at leisure, manuscripts and commentaries which previously required enormous effort to access, but they place side by side sources which have never and probably never will be seen together physically.
They also explain the components of the infrastructure underlying the HMT Project, which is called CITE (Collections, Indices, Texts, and Extensions).
It becomes clear that it is important to appreciate ‘the basic mechanism for linking in this digital library architecture: citation ‘¦’ and which provides the capacity to manage objects both concisely and in a very granular fashion.
The essential point to appreciate is the use of URNs with which to express citations which, looking at the textual examples the authors supply, can be very concise and effective.
In the instance of the Iliad, it can be used to retrieve a single line without difficulty.
By defining an URN-structured citation for each scholarly object, whether primary source, commentary text, etc, the HMT can link and publish a comprehensive range of resources for users.
The authors further explain that the Indices (i.e., the ‘I’ in CITE) are the keystone of the HMT digital library infrastructure in that they list all the links between URNs or even a URN and an unformed element of textual data.
Consequently, text-to-image linking becomes straightforward.
Not only does the system have little difficulty in linking to images or fragments of images, but it does so in a manner that is independent of format or technology which makes it so flexible in the context of technological obsolescence.
Moreover, by employing percentages in the URN, it is possible to ensure that URNs expressing ‘regions-of-interest’ in an image remain valid, irrespective of how the cited image is scaled.
Just as it was apparent that the placement of Homeric texts and commentaries in the virtual domain has generated new and intensified research, the application of such technologies in the biological domain has a potential to resolve the problem of an enormous backlog in the description and analysis of historical specimens.
The fact that the number of specimens awaiting analysis far outstrips the capacity of the relevant scientific communities to attend to them is very amply demonstrated by the authors’ reference to the time it took to discover and analyse botanical specimens from Darwin’s voyage on HMS Beagle of 1831-36 some 175 years!
The principal difficulties revolve around physical access and the retrieval and management of physical artefacts.
The potential of moving to a digital solution is consequently very important.
While perhaps less mould-breaking than the potential for scientific discovery, the opportunities that such technology offers the teaching of biology are no less revolutionary.
Quite rightly the authors point to the importance of the persistence of the data contained in a CITE-URN: ‘the final result of this process is a canonical reference, abstracted from any ephemeral manifestation of files, formats, and services.
Even if the CITE architecture falls by the wayside, the information in a CITE-URN would admit mechanical reproduction into a new useful format, provided only that the images continue to exist somewhere.’ Jez Cope and Geraldine Jones point to the growing appreciation of the potential of social media to support all aspects of the research cycle as grounds for the establishment of the Connected Researcher initiative.
In Connecting Researchers at the University of Bath they assert the usefulness of social media tools in enabling researchers to network with like-minded people.
They do emphasise that the use of such social media can only be effective in ‘the specific context or community’ of the user.
The authors describe the aims of the Connected Researcher initiative in terms of awareness-raising, spreading of good practice, providing support to researchers in their decision making and in promoting standards, curation and preservation.
But in so doing, they indicate the dangers inherent in an over-prescriptive approach which can stifle innovation.
Instead, they adopted the approach of social learning, bringing more and less experienced users of social media together at their events to support the sharing of digital networking techniques.
The authors then describe how they linked the Connected Researcher events to the research cycle associated with the four stages of the cycle as described by Cann et al.
In describing the events to support the initiative’s aims, the authors highlight the guidance offered by Dr Tristram Hooley, Head of the International Centre for Guidance Studies (iCeGS) at the University of Derby and co-writer of Social Media: A Guide for Researchers.
His advice covered the value of online networking including Twitter.
Whether psychologists would agree with the authors that conference delegates who interact with the event via transmissions over Twitter are automatically ‘more engaged’ than all those who do not, assumes a universal passivity on the part of the latter that does not appear to be justified.
However, there is no doubting the usefulness of Twitter as a collaborative and supportive tool, and nowadays a common form of event amplification.
Moreover, the authors are in my view entirely correct in their assessment of Twitter as a means of creating and maintaining contacts.
The initiative’s second event concentrated on the value of RSS to researchers and the considerable power it holds to help them filter information.
The authors go on to describe their marshalling of four of the University of Bath’s bloggers to support their view of the value of blogging to researchers.
They highlight the particular value of blogging at the initial stages of one’s research where the act of writing, albeit informally, forces one to put down ideas in a coherent fashion, which not only allows for more objective review by the author, but also by peers in a less formal context.
It is interesting if not surprising to note, moreover, that the team working on the Connected Researcher initiative enjoyed far greater success in garnering support for their activity over the very social media they wished to promote than they did through more ‘traditional’ channels.
They also raise the useful point in respect of the sustainability of a blogging platform for researchers, explaining that while institutional platforms offer greater persistence, there is the problem of what to do when one moves from that institution.
They are also to be congratulated in my view by refusing to be seduced by the technology, concentrating instead on the human behaviour that determines usage.
They do well to underline the importance of disciplinary links and relationships to researchers, something forgotten at one’s peril.
In their conclusions, they describe the stage along the road of technology adoption where many researchers find themselves: aware, even interested, but adopters are still in the minority.
They identify the means of encouraging greater usage as the resolve to dismantle the barriers to adoption, principal among which is the time required to find and learn such tools.
In MyMobileBristol, Mike Jones, Simon Price, Nikki Rogers and Damian Steer describe a project with ambitious aims to support the delivery of timeand location-sensitive data in the Bristol area to mobile phones.
It benefits not only the students and staff at the institution but also operates in partnership with the municipal authority.
The authors describe MyMobileBristol in the Mobile Campus Assistant Project which had similar aims but narrower scope since it did not require access to restricted components of mobile phones.
They also highlight the importance of Semantic Web technologies in their work and their involvement in this project where they would serve to aggregate content on a more ambitious platform.
The answers they intend MyMobileBristol to offer users were highly practical ones such as bus times to halls of residence, nearest Wi-Fi hotspots, etc.
Unsurprisingly they achieved rapid take-up.
Initial stakeholder analysis of the system provided the project with a new set of use cases which would only increase its popularity.
They also describe the opportunity for collaboration the project has offered in the context of innovation in online markets.
They also point to the value of the one-day workshop co-organised with the UKOLN-based DevCSI Project in furthering the discussion of use cases, problems and solutions.
In addition to the long-standing methods of communication with its stakeholder community, the authors describe the features of the collaborative platform implemented to increase that contact.
They also describe the issue of handling the public and more private aspects of the mobile platform’s development in this co-operative context, as well as the contribution JISC Techdis has made to the development of its stakeholder engagement plan.
The authors also explain the importance of Bristol City Council to the project and how the latter can contribute to the Council’s plan to reduce its carbon footprint radically through the adoption of smart applications.
These trends are further supported by local and national authorities to provide more data to the public, and despite inevitable difficulties surrounding geo-location data, the City Council is keen to collaborate with the project.
The authors go on to describe the software with which the project is being implemented and provide an overview of the architecture developed.
They also describe the continuing consultation with stakeholders, including interviews and deployment of a usability expert.
Despite its beta status, the MyMobileBristol platform continues to extend the data it offers and to receive requests for more personalised content such as lecture timetables.
In their conclusion, the authors identify the potential difficulties handling and reusing data from various provenances may produce, but point to the considerable benefits this project will provide, including its potential value to JISC itself.
In Piloting Web Conferencing Software: Experiences and Challenges, Julian Prior and Marie Salter introduce Elluminate Live!
as a Web conferencing application which may represent an attractive option for institutions keen to make efficiency savings.
They point to the most obvious usage and how Web conferencing has emerged as a firm favourite for users eager to see and hear colleagues in a face-to-face situation, but over the Web, with attendant cost-benefits.
They then go on to the amplification of events, pointing out that Web-conferencing software can also support a comprehensive webinar process for users.
The authors describe the pilot activity begun at Bath which operated in the context of CPD (Continuing Professional Development), but which soon was looking at exploiting the Access Grid which offers robust support for live broadcasting.
They also describe the drawbacks.
The authors go on to draw comparisons across other synchronous Web-conferencing applications using standard criteria and explain their reasons for choosing Elluminate.
They then provide details of their usage across the tool’s wide functionality, including use scenarios such as interviewing, conference activities and a virtual open day (in order to satisfy the demand for information on a new teaching programme), virtual team meetings, off-site evaluation of campus-based students’ work, multi-located seminar discussions and group work.
The authors then provide a very useful insight into the difficulties encountered in the pilot stage, many of which did not emanate from the application, but the usual problems when adding hardware and software, to which they provide some useful and commonsense solutions.
In their article Retooling Special Collections Digitisation in the Age of Mass Scanning Constance Rinaldo, Judith Warnement, Tom Baione, Martin R. Kalfatovic and Susan Fraserdescribe the work of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) on the development of a cost-effective and efficient workflow for the digitisation of its special collections.
It becomes apparent in this article the value that is attached by researchers to the historical data to past biodiversity research and the importance of making them digitally accessible to researchers.
They note that the heterogeneity of special collections can impede the scaling up of mass scanning operations.
In addition to effort on the workflow aspects, the group would also seek ‘to explore ways to enhance metadata for library materials that are designated as “special collections”.’ The project relied considerably on meetings to provide comparisons not only of digitisation costs but also techniques, and it invited librarians from a range of institutions.
Its second meeting established the parameters to begin small-scale tests on same or similar items across the institutions.
In its third meeting the group was able to discuss the test results by vendor.
The authors explain the characteristics of books which render them unsuitable for mass scanning.
They explain the partners had developed a detailed set of criteria in this respect and that the rejection rate for such specialised items was higher than initially anticipated, particularly for natural history materials.
Reasons ranged from the mundane (oversize dimensions) to the worrying (items of such high value as to occasion security concerns).
In respect of the outcomes of the scanning tests, the authors indicate a very discernible gap between institutional and commercial costs of digitisation.
They offer comparisons between the cost and performance of in-library and institutional scanning and those of the ‘institutional boutique’ solutions with state-of-the-art technology but higher costs.
They also describe their investigation of the potential benefits from Web services and social networking and the involvement LibraryThing.
They determined that adding content links in Wikipedia did increase the number of referrals to the BHL site and that Wikipedia and LibraryThing were the most promising locations for user-generated feedback and tagging.
The authors then turn their attention to the current situation, where much of the biodiversity literature which could easily be scanned has now been processed.
What remains is the more difficult material which is nonetheless of equal importance to the scientific community.
They do emphasise the value of good bibliographic records in building a shared catalogue, and that enhancing metadata ‘is a better investment than packing and shipping special collections materials to off-site facilities.’ They also point to the benefits of a portable scanning unit in dealing with fragile items from their special collections.
Faced with the problem of some 1,200 non-functional links on the Institute of Education’s library catalogue, Bernard M Scaife began his work there as Technical Services Librarian by setting about solving the link rot problem.
In From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary: Creating the Digital Educational Resource Archive (DERA) he describes how tackling the affected links manually proved quite instructive, and he found a series of characteristics behind these link failures.
One particular group of failures related to missing documents of which many, it turned out, could be classified as official publications frequently untroubled by any familiarity with persistent identifiers, thus exacerbating the problem.
It soon became clear that a more structured solution was needed, and so the Library’s own research repository with EPrints software, hosted by ULCC, was pressed into service where the persistence of a citation which linked to a record in a Web archive looked more resilient.
As is so often the case, the matter of IPR soon raised its head in such a venture, and the increased threat to the longevity of government content occasioned by the Coalition Government’s announcement of public sector cuts meant that many content holders welcomed the project’s offer of assistance.
With the likelihood of a stream of documents suitable for inclusion in the Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA) assured, the author and his colleagues turned their attention to the adoption of suitable metadata, beginning with their EPrints repository fields.
While many were retained as useful, among new fields introduced was that of ‘Organisation’ since the team was extremely conscious of the possible demise of content-holding entities and all that that would involve.
Bernard describes how EPrints is capable of flexible handling and how he and his colleagues altered their approach to cataloguing documents which might no longer exist.
They developed a process involving retrospective data loading.
The first significant instance of a content-holding agency’s disappearance proved to be that of BECTA whose electronic document archive was entrusted to DERA.
By February 2011 the DERA was at a level of operation such that it could be officially launched.
In Looking for the Link between Library Usage and Student Attainment Graham Stone, Bryony Ramsden and Dave Pattern begin by giving the background to their successful bid in the JISC call through the Activity Data programme, explaining the data collected informed a co-relation between library usage and degree results.
Were Huddersfield’s findings an anomaly or the norm?
If the latter, how might they be used to increase student attainment?
Huddersfield and seven partners were awarded funding by JISC to investigate these questions.
In stating their aims and objectives, the authors maintain that library use is a cause of increased student knowledge and so attainment, but recognise that other factors have an influence.
The authors go on to describe how the Library Impact Data Project (LIDP) took a critical stance towards the hypothesis that library usage influences attainment, pointing to circumstances which indicate that library usage is not the only factor.
Degree courses differ, the availability of resources inside and outside the library likewise.
They also point out a number of other variables, including digital information literacy, as factors that must be taken into consideration.
In discussing the nature of data collection, the authors point out the value of collecting data on multiple years of library usage, since results could be obtained across the lifetime of that degree course, where behaviour, unsurprisingly, altered over time.
They are very interested to compare findings with their partners.
They describe the data acquired and explain shortcomings.
While some partners are experiencing problems in the collection of certain types of data, the project does seem confident of sufficient information to fulfil its aims.
On the other hand, one partner has extended the analysis by including PC log-in data.
The authors go on to discuss the variability of releasing their anonymised data for reuse, but recognise that there could be difficulties which might limit their ability to do so.
They emphasise the care with which all data are being anonymised, right down to excluding data from small, and so identifiable, courses.
Added to these quantative data, all partners are seeking qualitative data in focus groups of students.
While the authors note that their project’s duration inevitably limits the scope of their findings, they are confident that a number of approaches could be adopted in any subsequent activity.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews of: a timely collection of essays that highlights the values of institutional leadership and resourcefulness in academic librarianship’s engagements with Web 2.0; a recently published book on the selection and preparation of archive and library collections for digitisation; and a work which takes a hard look at academic libraries, how they are being redefined and what skills will be required of the staff who will move them forward.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 67.
Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Editorial Introduction to Issue 67: Changes Afoot” Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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iPRES 2008 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines iPRES 2008 Buzz data software framework xml infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility identifier schema blog repositories copyright video preservation aggregation ejournal frbr curation mets mods cd-rom research standards warc Citation BibTex RIS Frances Boyle and Adam Farquhar report on the two-day international conference which was the fifth in the series on digital preservation of digital objects held at the British Library, on 29 30 September 2008. iPRES 2008, the Fifth International Conference on Digital Preservation, was held at the British Library on 29-30 September, 2008.
From its beginnings five years ago, iPRES has retained its strong international flavour.
This year, it brought together over 250 participants from 33 countries.
iPRES has become a major international forum for the exchange of ideas and practice in Digital Preservation.
The theme of the conference was ‘Joined Up and Working: tools and methods for digital preservation’.
Preserving our scientific, cultural and social digital heritage draws together activity across diverse disciplines.
It transcends international boundaries and incorporates the needs of disparate communities.
By working together, there has been some real concrete progress towards solving the problems that were identified in earlier years.
This was the first year that iPRES collected and published full papers in addition to the presentations provided at the conference.
Authors’ abstracts were reviewed by at least three members of the Programme Committee for quality, innovation, and significance.
Venues are very limited in number for publishing conceptual frameworks, scientific results, and practical experience in digital preservation.
The inclusion of full papers makes an important contribution to the field by addressing this problem.
This was also the first year that iPRES had a vendor and sponsor presence during the conference.
Ex Libris, Sun and Tessella demonstrated offerings with emerging preservation components.
As digital preservation moves into the main stream, it is anticipated that this trend will continue.
The conference was blogged solidly.
Particular highlights included Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre [1], who provided a comprehensive near-real-time report and the Information Environment blog from the JISC [2].
There were two tracks in the programme.
One designed for those with an interest in practically preserving digital content within their organisation, the other designed for those with an interest in underpinning concepts and digital preservation technology.
The programme was a mix of short presentations (between 15 – 20 minutes) and longer panel discussions with audience participation.
Day One – 29 September 2008 The keynote address was given by Dame Lynne Brindley, CEO of the British Library.
Her theme was digital preservation as a component of a larger complex jigsaw.
She related some of the projects and work which is ongoing at the British Library.
She noted that there was now an awareness of the need for digital preservation even from the general public, as confirmed in the public’s response to a recent British Library (BL) project on email preservation.
Her final comments, and this was a thesis which was returned to throughout the conference, was that the term digital preservation was perhaps now not the most appropriate term for the activities involved – she suggested ‘preservation for access’.
Session 1: Modelling Organisational Goals 1.
Digital Preservation: A Subject of No Importance?
Neil Beagrie, Najla Rettberg 2.
Modelling Organisational Goals to Guide Preservation.
Angela Dappert 3.
Component Business Model for Digital Preservation.
Raymond Van Diessen, Barbara Sierman.
4.
Development of Organisational and Business Models for Long-term Preservation of Digital Objects.
Suzanne Lang, Michael Minkus.
The opening session of the conference looked at high-level mapping of digital preservation policies to wider institutional goals and strategies.
Across the four papers the recurrent message was that in order to gain resonance and ‘buy-in’ from the host organisation the approach needed to be contextualised.
It was essential to take into account the overall goals of the organisation.
The first paper reported on work funded by JISC to model a generic preservation policy the work has not been published fully, at the time of the conference or of writing, but this is something which will certainly be of interest to the wider community.
The other three speakers looked at more detailed approach to modelling at specific institutions, the KB and the Bavarian State Library.
The Planets [3] Project looked at the risk management issues associated with decisions which would need to be made at the local organisational level dependent on the approach taken.
Session 2: Disciplinary Contexts (Practitioner Track) and Digital Preservation Formats (Technical Track) Disciplinary Contexts 1.
Long-term Preservation of Electronic Literature.
Sabine Schrimpf 2.
Preservation of Art in the Digital Realm.
Tim au Yeung 3.
Dexterity: Data Exchange Tools and Standards for Social Sciences.
Louise Corti 4.
Sustaining Digital Scholarship as Cooperative Digital Preservation.
Bradley J Daigle 5.
Adapting Existing Technologies for the Digital Archiving of Personal Lives.
Jeremy Leighton John Each of these parallel tracks had five presentations concluding with a question and answer session.
The practitioner track featured presentations about diverse formats from a range of institutions and countries.
A common thread throughout the presentations was the need to couch their work in terms of the organisational needs and objectives and to ensure that ongoing work was given an institutional orientation.
We heard about a joint approach by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Deutsche Literaturarchive Marbach and nestor in their work to develop preservation strategies for electronic literature.
From the University of Calgary we heard about the issues around preserving digital art from a number of case studies.
The speaker concluded that there were no definite answers in this field and that the work was in a state of flux.
The complex problem set surrounding digital scholarship was illustrated from work at the University of Virginia.
The thrust of this paper was that to sustain digital scholarship there needs to be a collaborative approach taken at the organisation level to formulate an achievable digital preservation strategy.
The work at the UKDA on the data exchange tools for social scientists graphically illustrated the issues in working with a group of researchers who all work and produce data on a variety of proprietary software packages.
The JISC-funded work looks at open data exchange formats which will eventually produce a suite of tools to enable data to be preserved and remain exchangeable.
The final paper provided a fascinating look at the BL’s Digital Manuscripts project.
The work combined digital forensics with an evolutionary approach to the issues.
The key message pointed to a need for a flexible and diverse approach to work in this area.
Digital Preservation Formats 1.
Enduring Access to Digitised Books.
Oya Rieger 2.
Creating Virtual CD-Rom Collections.
Kam Woods 3.
Preservation of Web Resources, The JISC PoWR Project.Brian Kelly 4.
Preserving the Content and Network:An Innovative Approach to Web-archiving.
Amanda Spencer 5.
“What?
So What?”: The Next-Generation JHOVE2 Architecture for Format-Aware Characterization.Stephen Abrams The session on Digital Preservation Formats drew on concrete experience among the presenters defining formats to preserve specific types of content.
The texture and detail provided by the presenters made this one of the most enjoyable and memorable sessions at the conference.
It began with Oya Rieger’s overview of the work that she and colleagues have done at Cornell University to define formats to support their large-scale book digitisation programme.
Kam Woods from Indiana University described how they provide a virtual CD library online and highlighted many of the issues that arose in so doing.
Brian Kelly of UKOLN gave an especially entertaining presentation that highlighted archived versions of the University of Bath Web site over many years; this demonstrated how the University has changed its image of itself and interacted with its students.
It made a powerful argument to justify the need to archive, preserve, and use online material.
Amanda Spencer gave an enjoyable exposition of the work that is going on at The National Archives (TNA UK) to capture and preserve the increasing amount of Government material published on the Web.
To complete the session, Stephen Abrams provided an update and outlook for JHOVE2.
JHOVE has become one of the most widely used tools to identify and validate digital content in the preservation community.
JHOVE2 is its much anticipated successor and the audience was eager to hear about the current plans for it.
Session 3: Preservation Planning (Plenary Session) 1.Emulation: From Digital Artefact to Remotely Rendered Environments.
Dirk von Suchodoletz 2.
Data Without Meaning: Establishing the Significant Properties of Digital Research.
Gareth Knight 3.
Towards a Curation and Preservation Architecture for CAD Engineering Models.
Alexander Ball 4.Evaluating Strategies for Preservation of Console Video Games.
Mark Guttenbrunne The four speakers in this session looked at different aspects and approaches to preservation planning.
The first speaker, from the University of Freiburg, spoke about an emulation approach which has the debatable advantage of preserving the objects in their original form and experiencing them in their original environment.
The latter, of course, may have ongoing related IPR issues.
That much-vaunted term ‘significant properties’ was discussed through the work of the InSPECT Project during the second paper.
The work will produce a data dictionary of significant properties which will lead to the production of an xml schema.
We then turned to work looking at CAD engineering models from the University of Bath.
Engineering is a discipline which has requirements for retaining and preserving data over the long term.
Again in this work IRP issues were a consideration as engineering moves towards a service approach rather than merely product delivery.
Two tools have been developed, the first a preservation planning tool which uses Representational Information (as defined by OAIS) to advise on appropriate strategies to adopt for migrating CAD models to archival or exchange formats.
Their second tool provides an architecture for lite formats – LiMMA.
The final speaker from the Vienna University of Technology outlined the Planets approach to preservation for what some may have considered ephemeral material (but as the keynote speaker remarked will it always be ephemeral?)
in the form of console video games.
The Planets preservation planning approach was taken for 3 case studies adopting both emulation and migration strategies.
Again IPR was a factor that needed considering.
During the Q&A session the relevance of the OAIS [4] framework was brought into the discussion – this was particularly timely as there is a current review of the OAIS model.
Session 4: Understanding Costs and Risks (Practitioner Track) and Preservation Metadata (Technical Track) Understanding Costs and Risks 1.
LIFE2 Costing the Digital Preservation Life-cycle More Effectively.
Paul Wheatley 2.
Risk Assessment: Using a Risk-based Approach to Prioritise Handheld Digital Information.
Rory McLeod 3.
The Significance of Storage in the Cost of Risk of Digital Preservation.
Richard Wright 4. International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation.
William G. LeFurgy, Adrienne Muir.
The four speakers all shared their practical experience and outcomes from their recent projects – all addressing one of the core issues – how much will it cost and is it legal?
The experience and findings from the LIFE2 Project were discussed.
This was a project that was evidence-based and one in which the methodology had been refined from the preceding LIFE project.
Additional case studies were presented which informed the lifecycle costing models and the generic preservation model.
However it was evident that accurate forecasting of preservation costs was still some time away.
The risk assessment work at the BL was outlined.
It was clear that the success of this work was due in part to the fact that this was not a stand-alone exercise.
Rather it was an integral part of the overarching digital library and preservation work under way at the BL.
Twenty-three risks were identified (using AS/NZ 4360:2004 standard) and which were classed as either a direct or indirect risk.
The major risks found were media deterioration and for hand-held material, that of software obsolescence.
The indirect risks, not surprisingly, were related to policy.
The third speaker’s approach was an insightful look at the cost of risks, looking in particular at the storage of audiovisual material.
The thesis was that storage costs decline which have an effect on capacity as more ‘stuff’ becomes available.
This results in growing usage with a resulted increased risk risk being directly proportional to usage.
The upshot: the recognition of the need to pay attention to bit preservation, particularly for complex files which are much more fragile than simple files.
The final speakers in the session gave the audience a taster of that most popular of topics, copyright.
A review of a recent international study which looked at the impact of copyright on preservation from a number of jurisdictions was presented.
Each reported domain had exceptions in regard to digital preservation but there was wide variation between countries.
However as it stands, the current legislation is, in some areas, a barrier to effective digital preservation.
The recommendation from the report is that laws and policies should support and encourage digital preservation, not act as a barrier.
Preservation Metadata 1.Developing Preservation Metadata for Use in Grid Based Preservation Systems.
Arwen Hutt 2.
Using METS, PREMIS and MODS for Archiving EJournals.
Markus Enders 3.
Harvester Results in Digital Preservation System.
Tobias Steink 4.
The FRBR Theoretical Library: The Role of Conceptual Data Modelling in Cultural Heritage Information System DesignRonald Murray The first speaker outlined the metadata that was needed to support the distributed federated Chronopolis repository.
The second speaker discussed the approach used at the British Library to archive e-journal metadata.
No single standard covers all of the needs for e-journal metadata.
He explained how METS was used as a container and how PREMIS and MODS each played a role within it.
This is a pattern that several organisations are using, and the concrete examples and discussion of design decisions may be useful for others.
The third speaker explored and contrasted the capabilities of the METS and WARC formats for holding metadata on the results of Web harvesting.
The final speaker in the session noted that for every preservation metadata approach, there is an underlying conceptual model.
He argued that there could be benefit in looking explicitly at the literature on conceptual modelling.
Day One: Plenary: Closing Remarks The final session, as observed on the day, was a Dickensian slant on the future of the iPRES series.
Representatives from iPRES past, present and future outlined the growth of iPRES and the future plans for the series.
The delegates were encouraged to consider this and to capture their thoughts either in the feedback form or by speaking to one of the Programme Committee.
Day Two: 30 September The keynote was given by Dr Horst Forster of the Directorate General for Information and Media who gave an overview of the EU’s work in digital preservation.
He also discussed the importance of digital preservation at national and international levels, as well as a commitment to dedicate the resources needed to make progress.
An interesting ‘take-home’ was the feeling that the ‘p’ word was not the most apt and perhaps the preservation community might look to interact with other areas in the digital landscape.
Session 5: National Initiatives (Practitioner Track) and Grid Storage Architecture (Technical Track) National Initiatives 1.
JISC Funding and Digital Preservation Initiatives in the UK.
Neil Grindley 2.
Weaving a National Network of Partnerships in the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Programme.
Martha Anderson 3.
Digital Strategy and the National Library of New Zealand Steve Knight 4.
Digital Preservation Activities Across Communities – Benefits and Problems Natascha Schumann The four speakers gave an overview of the national initiatives in their particular space.
The panel session looked at areas were there might be opportunities for co-operation and collaboration internationally and a discussion of shared challenges.
Interesting debate followed about the differences between the rhetoric and the reality when it comes to collaboration.
A suggestion, which seemed to have resonance with the audience, was that collaboration would be much more forthcoming if it was directed at shared specific issues which needed solving.
The sustainability of the national DPC, nestor type bodies was also discussed – for instance would it be more effective to have a pan-European body?
Grid Storage Architecture 1.
Towards Smart Storage for Repository Preservation Infrastructure.
Steve Hitchcock 2.
Repository and Preservation Storage Architecture.
Keith Rajecki 3.
Implementing Preservation Services over the Storage Resource Broker.
Douglas Kosovic 4.
Embedding Legacy Environments into a Grid-based Infrastructure.
Claus-Peter Klas The first three talks in the Grid and Storage Architecture session demonstrated that the way that we think about storage is changing radically.
The first talk provided an architecture for ‘smart storage’ that would move many of the capabilities that are currently implemented in the repository or preservation layers down into the storage layer itself.
The second talk outlined a modular storage architecture and contrasted it with several existing repository approaches.
The third talk described work to extend the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) to support preservation services.
The final talk introduced the EU co-funded SHAMAN Project and its plans to integrate preservation services with data grid technology.
Session 6.
Establishing Trust in Service Providers (Practitioner Track) and Service Architecture for Digital Preservation (Technical Track) Enabling Trust in Service Providers 1.
Creating Trust Relationships for Digital Preservation.
Tyler Walters 2.
The Use of Quality Management Standards in Trustworthy Digital Archives.
Suzanne Dobratz 3.
The Data Audit Framework: A Toolkit to Identify Research Assets and Improve Data Management in Research-led Institutions.
Sarah Jones 4.
Data Seal Approval, Data Archiving & Network Services.
Henk Harmsen This session looked at the issues and challenges which are common to all areas of collaborative working and shared services provision.
The first speaker looked at a model for successful preservation federation looking at three different trust models.
It was evident that so-called institutional trust was initially based on individual relationships.
He went on to outline the five different stages in developing trust.
Indeed the conclusion was that trust is not only relevant to processes and procedures but it also has an equally important human perspective.
The next speaker from the Humboldt University of Berlin spoke about their work in quality management in regard to trustworthy digital archives.
The work, from the nestor programme, looked at the relevance and applicability of different standards to trusted digital networks (TDRs).
From the survey it was not evident whether a separate standard for trusted repositories was required; however work was ongoing.
An overview of the Data Audit Framework was particularly timely as it was officially launched at a separate meeting the following day.
The work, part of a JISC project, produced an audit methodology, online toolkit and registry.
Four pilot sites were used and the speaker presented many practical tips which came to light as the work progressed to produce a self-audit tool.
The final session looked at the Data Seal of Approval from the Data Archiving and Networking Services in the Hague.
There are 17 guidelines under the seal.
The speaker outlined them and how the Archives have worked to satisfy such requirements.
There was a nice aggregation of the responsibilities between the data provider and the repository which in itself was a useful pragmatic step on the trust continuum.
The next stages for the work would be its international acceptance and ongoing work to meet TRAC requirements.
During the active Q&A session an apposite comment from the floor was that building trust was easy compared to rebuilding trust once there had been a break in the relationship.
Service Architecture for Digital Preservation 1.
Updating DAITSS: Transitioning to a Web-service Architecture.
Randall Fischer 2.
Conceptual Framework for the Use of the Service Oriented Architecture Approach.
Christian Saul 3.
RODA and Crib: A Service Oriented Digital Repository.
Jose Carlos Ramalho 4.
Persistent Identifiers distributed system for Cultural Heritage digital objects.
Maurizio Lunghi The Service Architecture session was focused on how a new generation of digital repositories has begun to provide open service-oriented interfaces.
This is an essential step to enable digital preservation tools and services to work with more than one repository.
These interfaces are emerging, however, and common practice has not yet emerged.
The final paper reminded the audience that the problem of long-lived identifiers for digital objects has also not yet been fully put to rest.
Session 7: Training and Curriculum Development (Practitioner Track) and International Approaches to Web Archiving (Technical Track) Training and Curriculum Development 1.
Digital Preservation Management Workshop at the Five-Year Mark.
Nancy McGovern 2.
Digital Preservation Training Programme.
Kevin Ashley 3.
Funding Digital Preservation Research Practice and Education in the US.
Rachel Frick 4.
The Key Challenges in Training and Educating a Professional Digital Preservation Workshop.
Seamus Ross This session, brought together an international panel of experts in the field of training delivery and curriculum development.
The first speaker from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) shared experiences of the seminal work of the Digital Preservation Management Workshop.
The work has now reached a level of maturity and is looking for further development in its next phase.
Key tips which were shared included know your audience, mix the teaching styles and be clear what the course objectives are to ensure that they matched delegates’ expectations.
This segued nicely into the work of the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) which was first run in collaboration with the previous speaker.
The main thrust of the DPTP is to foster critical thinking rather than provide a prescriptive fix for all preservation issues.
The third speaker gave the perspective of a funding body – looking at what they require from proposals to fund training programmes.
Though this was a US body, the issues that were raised were pertinent to the international audiences.
The initiatives they funded included internships and elevation practice.
The pan-European collaborative approach was succinctly outlined in the final session.
WePreserve an umbrella organisation of large EU-funded preservation projects – works to reduce duplication of effort and to foster collaboration and a cohesive approach to training.
The final discussion session touched on different expectations which people have from training courses.
The clear message, from all the speakers, was that comprehensive preservation expertise was not something which could be picked up from attending a 5-day course.
Rather, what the current courses aimed to do was to raise awareness in the community of the gamut of issues involved and to empower delegates to take forward the digital preservation agenda in their own organisations.
International Approaches to Web Archiving 1.
Thorsteinn Hallgrimsson National and University Library of Iceland 2.
Birgit N. Henriksen – The Royal Library, Denmark 3.
Helen Hockx-Yu – The British Librar 4.
Gildas Illien National Library of France 5.
Colin Webb National Library of Australia The Web archiving panel provided an insight into the one of the most challenging digital preservation problems of our time.
Speakers gave unique national perspectives from Iceland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, France, and Australia.
They described the tremendous scale of the national efforts, as well as the complex legal and technical challenges.
The legal frameworks in France and Denmark have enabled them to carry out large-scale crawls with archives in the 100TB range.
The frameworks in Australia and the United Kingdom, in contrast, have required explicit permission to collect sites resulting in smaller archives.
The International Internet Preservation Coalition (IIPC) provides good examples of collaborative development and tool reuse (e.g., the Heretrix crawler, the Web Curator Toolkit).
An important development reported by Collin Webb is that the IIPC has recently established a digital preservation working group that is looking beyond bit-level preservation.
The heterogeneous Web archive collections provide an enormous opportunity for, and challenge to, the digital preservation community.
Session 8: Digital Preservation Services (Practitioner Track) and Foundations (Technical Track) Digital Preservation Services 1.
Encouraging Cyber-infrastructure Collaboration for Digital Preservation.
Chris Jordan 2.
Establishing a Community-based Approach to Electronic Journal Archiving: LOCKSS.
Adam Rusbridge 3.
The KB e-Depot as a Driving Force for Change.
Marcel Ras 4.
Building a Digital Repository: a Practical Implementation.
Filip Boudrez The Services session comprised four papers each outlining current digital preservation services.
The first looked at a range of initiatives at the supercomputing centres in the US.
They outlined some of the important recent work from a number of programmes including NDIIPP and the NSF DataNet.
The next paper outlined the LOCKSS Pilot Programme, a JISCand RLUK-funded project, to ensure the long-term accessibility to electronic journal content for the scholarly community.
Their conclusion was that community involvement was essential to take forward this work.
The pragmatic twostream approach of the e-Depot development at the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) was outlined by the third speaker.
Their cross-departmental approach and their involvement in international work such as Planets have allowed them to implement practical solutions for permanent access.
The final speaker in this session described the implementation path taken at the City of Antwerp Archives in the building of their digital repository.
Their incremental approach taken with their records management approach had paid dividends.
Foundations 1.
Bit Preservation: A Solved Problem?
David H Rosenthal 2.
Modelling Reliability for Digital Preservation Systems.
Yan Han 3.
Ways to Deal with Complexity.
Christian Keitel 4.
A Logic-based Approach to the Formal Specification of Data Formats.
Michael Hartle The Foundations session brought several papers together looking at mathematical and theoretical foundations for digital preservation.
It started with a very strong paper and presentation by David Rosenthal who challenged some of our common assumptions about bit preservation.
His analysis suggests that bit preservation is far from a solved problem and that reliability estimates for hardware and systems are hugely optimistic.
This paper could change the way that you think about holding large quantities of digital material over the long haul.
Holding a petabyte for a hundred years is not as easy as we might think!
The session moved on to a paper that applied well-known mathematical modelling techniques to look at system-level reliability for a digital archive composed of a mixture of redundant disk and tape storage.
The session concluded with a paper looking at ways to think about reducing the complexity of preservation systems and providing a more rigorous basis for file format specifications.
Conclusion The iPRES Conference concluded with some summary remarks by Steve Knight from the National Library of New Zealand.
Steve noted that the conference theme “Joined up and Working” may not yet fully characterise the state of practice in the field, but is a call to arms.
The programme committee collected feedback forms from the participants.
Ninety-five percent rated the programme as very good or excellent (4 or 5 out of 5) and ninety-one percent felt that the conference increased their knowledge of digital preservation.
Anecdotal and recorded feedback, including feedback from blogs, confirms that iPRES 2008 was a success.
As well as the blog coverage, there was also some press coverage in the Guardian [5].
The new initiatives introduced this year were well received.
It would seem that iPRES is fully established as a conference in the digital preservation world and we look forward to next year’s at the California Digital Library.
Please note that all the presentations and the conference proceedings are available online at the iPRES Web site [6][7].
References DCC blog http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/ JISC blog http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/?s=ipres Planets project http://www.planets-project.eu/ OAIS http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf In praise of … preserving digital memories, Guardian article, 30 September 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/30/internet.digitalmusic Adam Farquhar (Ed).
The Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects.
London: The British Library, 2008.
ISBN-978-0-7123-0913 iPRES 2008 http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008/ Author Details Frances Boyle Executive Director Digital Preservation Coalition Email: fb@dpconline.org Web site: http://www.dpconline.org Adam Farquhar Head of Digital Library Technology The British Library Email: adam.farquhar@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk Return to top Article Title: “iPRES 2008: ‘Joined Up and Working: Tools and Methods for Digital Preservation’.” Author: Frances Boyle and Adam Farquhar Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/ipres-2008-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Getting Started with Cloud Computing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Getting Started with Cloud Computing Buzz data mobile software ipad privacy intranet sharepoint Citation BibTex RIS Martin White reviews a collection of essays on cloud computing that attempts to clarify the technology and its applications for librarians and information professionals.
I will admit to having read very little in the way of fiction writing over the last half-century though perhaps as a chemist by training I do enjoy science fiction from authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Fred Hoyle.
All were distinguished scientists, none more so than Fred Hoyle, who was Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
On Clouds and Crystal Balls Hoyle came to fame as the author of A for Andromeda, but in my opinion his best work is The Black Cloud.
The Cloud approaches Earth as it seeks to recharge its energy supplies from the Sun before heading off back into the Universe.
The hero, Kingsley (Hoyle in disguise) is able to communicate digitally with the Cloud and learns about many of the secrets of the Universe before dying from, in effect, information overload.
In the case of cloud computing there is certainly information overload at the present time, with books, reports and conferences in profusion.
Most of them are targeted at senior IT managers in large organisations, and tend to assume a high level of technical knowledge.
However cloud services are now the way in which many small businesses operate and I have been using Microsoft Office 365 for some time now without ever thinking about the novelty of using a cloud service for a nominal monthly fee.
In the same way my Apple iPad works very happily with Apple iCloud.
By further way of introduction, I’ve spent much of my career trying to explain technologies to business executives as well as forecasting the future development of technologies, neither with much success.
Business executives are not really interested in how the technology works, but are very interested in what it can do to help them achieve their own objectives.
Forecasting technologies is a nightmare, because the pace of development is such that by the time the forecast is published it is already out of date.
So with all this experience I felt reasonably well qualified to offer to review this book.
When Is a Cloud Not a Cloud?
According to the Editors, this book is meant to help readers understand more about cloud computing in general in easy-to-understand terms and to explain cloud computing as it pertains to the library community.
That seems like a good plan, though implicit in this objective is the notion that the library community needs to be spoon-fed technology.
Then they go on to state that they are defining cloud computing as any use of remote computing power accessed through the Internet as a kind of cloud computing that will be of interest to librarians.
Now I have a problem, as that definition includes Google and Bing and many other services.
Do I see some cumulonimbus thunder clouds on the horizon?
In Chapter 2 there is the important statement that SaaS (Software as a Service), PasS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) are all components of cloud services but just because a service is delivered by one of these components does not mean that it is a cloud-based service.
The core problem with this book is that few of the authors understand that statement.
‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’ This was the first Latin sentence I learned, and this book, like Gaul, is divided into three parts.
Part 1 deals with General Concerns (you can read mine below), Part 2 with Technologies and Part 3 with Case Studies.
The first two chapters are excellent.
Rosalyn Metz and H. Frank Cervone really know what they are writing about and do so with style.
However I would have liked to have seen a diagram of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) model of cloud computing because the descriptions of it in these two chapters get a little convoluted at times.
Chapters 4 and 5 take a user perspective and are quite well written but from that point onwards the book loses the plot.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the lack of focus of the book and of the individual chapters is that eight of the twenty chapters have more than one author!
This is truly a multi-author title.
Facet Publishing has an excellent track record of publishing multi-author books [1] but this book was originally published by the Library and Information Technology Association, a division of the American Library Association.
Another problem is that Part 1 addresses General Concerns and Part 2 covers Technologies.
The overlap is quite substantial because the general concerns about cloud computing are largely technology-related, and, as already mentioned, the opening chapters are excellent surveys of cloud technology.
As a result there is a lot of duplication of content.
The Editors needed to have taken a much firmer line with the contributors, but also thought more carefully about the structure of the book.
A good example is given by Chapter 12, SharePoint Strategies for Establishing a Powerful Library Intranet.
This shows all the signs of the Editors wanting to have a chapter on SharePoint at any cost.
As a result the chapter is about SharePoint, but not from a cloud perspective, and there is little evidence that the authors have actually carried out a cloud implementation.
Part 3 appears to offer eight case studies.
One of these is an ill-fated attempt to implement a free web-conferencing solution and another is a six-page account of implementing Google Calendar.
The common problem with all these case studies is that there is no analysis of why a cloud-based solution was chosen over a locally hosted or SaaS solution.
Indeed Chapter 20 describes the use of VoiceThread which is described both as a cloud service and SaaS.
SaaS services deliver applications as a utility and in my view cloud services deliver computing as a utility.
There is a difference, and on its Web site VoiceThread makes no mention of it being a cloud service.
I am also disappointed, though not surprised, that not one of the case studies (other than one with a passing reference to New Zealand) is based outside North America.
This is very disappointing given the level of cloud activity in the UK with organisations such as Capita and Eduserv.
Another reason why a US-centric view of cloud computing is limiting is that in the EU issues of data privacy and cloud computing are very complex.
In this book there are three passing references to the Patriot Act but clearly no understanding of the challenges that cloud service providers and users face in Europe, especially if they operate 24/7 follow-the-sun services.
Conclusion Cloud computing is big business and very important business, and the potential for the library community to manage its costs and deliver innovative services is immense.
This is especially the case with mobile applications, which are all but ignored in this book outside a paper from Karen Coombs of OCLC.
I’m disappointed with the quality of many of the chapters, the amount of duplication and the lack of focus.
My main concern is that the view of the Editors and authors is that library and information professionals cannot cope with technology and need to have books like this to help them make sense of a technology and its applications.
It may be a result of the quality of LIS courses in the UK and the activities of JISC and other organisations in this sector, but the library and information professionals I know are well ahead of this book in understanding the benefits and challenges of cloud computing, and also understand that service offerings are going to change on a daily basis.
For certain they have the skills to track down, evaluate and capitalise on developments in cloud technology and its role in developing new library services.
If someone gives you this book then do read the first few chapters but I really cannot recommend it as a way of getting started in cloud computing.
References ‘….
and I’ll start this review by congratulating Facet on recognising the need to publish in the IR/search sector.
Normally my heart sinks when I begin to read a book that is a set of contributions by individual authors, but in this case the editors have welded the contributions together so well that it reads as though it was written by a single author.’   Martin White.
"Book Review: Innovations in Information Retrieval".
March 2012, Ariadne Issue 68 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue68/white-rvw/ Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetdfocus.com Martin White has been tracking developments in technology since the late 1970s, initially in electronic publishing in the days of videotext and laser discs.
He is the author of three books on content management and search technologies and is just completing a book for O’Reilly Media on enterprise search.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the iSchool, University of Sheffield, since 2002 and is Chair of the eContent Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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Book Review: The Accidental Taxonomist Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Accidental Taxonomist Buzz software thesaurus tagging vocabularies cataloguing z39.50 visualisation ontologies taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin takes a look at a book on the work of the taxonomist and notes both merits and disappointments.
Definitions TAXON”OMY, n. [Gr.
order, and law.]
Classification; a term used by a French author to denote the classification of plants.
Webster’s Revised Dictionary (1828 Edition) [1] Tax*on”omy (?
), n. [Gr.
an arrangement, order + a law.]
That division of the natural sciences which treats of the classification of animals and plants; the laws or principles of classification.
Webster’s Revised Dictionary (1913 Edition) [1] Taxonomy Classification, esp.
in relation to its general laws or principles; that department of science, or of a particular science or subject, which consists in or relates to classification; esp.
the systematic classification of living organisms.
(With a and pl.)
A classification of anything.
Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition 1989 What it means to have an involvement with taxonomy, or to study taxonomy, can be seen by how much the above definitions have changed in the last two centuries.
The Accidental Taxonomist provides a utilitarian, thoroughly modern viewpoint on the issue, and presents a grab-bag of introductory information, background knowledge, detailed information of relevance to the area – from concept creation to Z39.50, automated indexing, management software, visualisation and maintenance.
The Taxonomy of Taxonomists Hedden suggests that the term ‘taxonomy’ has undergone a significant drift in the last 20 years, and ‘is now understood to mean information organisation in general’.
For Hedden, taxonomy as a term may refer to controlled vocabularies, navigation labels, categories, and standardised terminologies.
They may appear in many different contexts of use; content management systems, Web sites, catalogues, indexes, business knowledge bases, and so on.
She acknowledges that individual contexts already have their own specialised terminology for describing this sort of work, ‘classical terms’, such as ‘authority file’, ‘controlled vocabulary’, and ‘thesaurus’.
She suggests that, despite the variations, to work in these areas, whether as an information architect, librarian, or knowledge manager, is nonetheless a function of the taxonomist.
This usage of the term, she acknowledges, provides significant overlap with knowledge organisation system, a term that is used by the NKOS (Networked Knowedge Organisation Systems Working Group) [2].
This term, however, is used sparingly, as it ‘has not caught on in the business world and is not likely to do so’.
It is true that the agent noun that she proposes, knowledge organisation system creator, is clunkier than taxonomist, and is unlikely to win any prizes for brevity.
As an introduction, this tells the reader what he or she can expect to find: a practical approach to knowledge organisation work.
But it also suggests that this book is an attempt to build a portrait of a new kind of job description: the taxonomist, a one-size-fits-all definition that transcends barriers of organisation and community discourse to draw a broad functional equivalence between an apparently wide range of roles.
As the author says (Introduction, p.xxvii), ‘This book also serves the purpose of cross-training existing taxonomists for different kinds of taxonomy projects.
If we want to carry the label of taxonomist and move from one job to another, then a broader understanding of the types of work and issues involved is needed.’ This notion – the definition of the term ‘taxonomist’ as an expert role, transcending the precise domain of application, like that of a chartered engineer or physicist – also accounts for the title of the book.
According to a survey conducted by Hedden, many people approach taxonomy development by accident, without having received relevant training such as might be offered by a library science or information science qualification.
A 2008 survey of those self-identifying as taxonomists showed that under half had MLS or MLIS degrees (p. xxiv).
The ‘accidental taxonomists’ are those who find themselves in the role.
This book, then, is intended as a lifebelt for the drowning taxonomist-to-be and a reference for the practising taxonomist.
Structure The book is laid out in twelve chapters and a series of appendices (the results of the aforementioned survey, a welcome glossary, a slightly skeletal list of recommended reading, and an index).
The chapter layout is, broadly speaking, self-explanatory.
Chapter 1: What are Taxonomies?
–briefly describes a wide series of structures, from the authority file to the ontology, offers a little history, and explores the term’s use as a Noughties buzzword.
Chapter 2: Who are Taxonomists?
is simply a directory of the roles and agencies that define the area.
In Chapter 3: Creating Terms and Chapter 4: Creating Relationships, relevant background theory and examples are provided, along with advice and best practice.
Chapter 5 moves on to discuss Software for Taxonomy Creation and Management, beginning with the results of a survey into the types of software used for the purpose of creating and managing taxonomies, that shows that nearly 20% of respondents use general-purpose software, such as Excel, for the purpose.
Again, this chapter shows the practical approach of the book, discussing the use of Excel alongside other categories of software – mind mapping, ontology development software, and so forth.
It frequently offers advice: ‘You may want to consider… you will want…’ and so forth.
The author notes that taxonomy software is a vague notion, and indeed, having accepted such a broad definition of the term, it is.
Those looking to create an ontology, for example, might want to pick up a more detailed book, such as The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.
However, the introduction provided here offers a broad overview – although some areas, notably thesaurus development, receive a disproportionately large amount of attention.
Chapter 6 discusses Taxonomies for Human Indexing: tagging, or keywording, which may not ‘necessarily imply using a taxonomy (controlled vocabulary)’.
The agent noun for this work, she suggests, is indexer – for her, there are no taggers (a term which, nonetheless, she uses on p.257).
This chapter reviews tagging, cataloguing, classification, and indexing, discusses the role of human indexers, and reviews relevant concepts, such as nonpreferred terms.
It discusses the management of taxonomies and of folksonomies.
The chapter concludes with the statement that ‘a folksonomy … is not an alternative to a taxonomy but rather is supplemental.
Each has its own place and purpose.’ Chapter 7: Taxonomies for Automated Indexing, discusses the broad area of automated indexing, presenting the approach as fast, useful over structured document types and uniform subject areas, available primarily for text content, and relevant for, ‘a corporate culture that is more comfortable with investing in externally purchased technology than in hiring, training and managing human indexers.’ This sentiment is interesting, as automated indexing is not in practice solely the domain of commercial enterprise, but it is perhaps unsurprising that this is perceived to be the case.
The chapter passes quickly over information extraction and text analytics, entity extraction, automatic categorisation, and so forth.
The detail given is on the level of broad general knowledge.
Some of the assertions presented as factual in this chapter are difficult to justify entirely, so for the technically inclined reader looking specifically for detailed information in this area, it may be preferable to look elsewhere.
Chapter 8 moves on to discuss Taxonomy Structures; the characteristics of hierarchies, such as depth and breadth, the implementation of facets, and the use of multiple vocabularies and categories.
Taxonomy Displays are discussed in the following chapter, by reference to the intended use case for the interface; for the trained taxonomist, the human indexer, the subject area researcher and the end-user searcher.
Chapter 9 discusses Taxonomy Displays, by reference to the intended use case for the interface; for the trained taxonomist, the human indexer, the subject area researcher and the end-user searcher.
Notably, the chapter explores thesaurus displays, hierarchical taxonomy displays and fielded search displays.
In Chapter 10 and 11, we move on to the final phase of the book; discussing firstly taxonomy planning, design and creation, and then taxonomy implementation and evolution.
A set of relevant standards are briefly introduced, and issues in taxonomy creation and maintenance, and multilingual use are discussed.
The final chapter returns to the theme of the introduction: Taxonomy Work and the Profession.
It reviews the findings of various studies, such as a 2009 survey of a Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies special interest group, discussing what taxonomists enjoy about their jobs.
The recurring theme is this: the taxonomist, as a role, is difficult to explain, and is not always taken seriously.
The chapter describes the likely profile of taxonomy contract work, with some skeletal descriptions of the process of a consultancy or a freelance role in the area.
The lack of dedicated education for the would-be taxonomist is lamented, and a number of LIS and IS programmes are named, along with continuing education opportunities such as webinars, independent training and conference workshops, and professional associations.
By this point in the book, however, the term taxonomist had begun to lose its charm.
It is a broad term, perhaps overly broad, and in this book is applied across domains in a manner that suggests greater familiarity with some than others.
It may well be that creation of a new professional class of generalist in the area of knowledge organisation systems proves to be a useful move, and the concerns of those working in the domain, as described through the survey results presented, certainly suggests that there is difficulty communicating the role and its worth.
However, the payload of the book does not make this argument as clearly as perhaps it would like to.
In descriptive text alone, one can achieve only so much.
The boundaries between the various structures discussed are blurred only in part for the reason identified in the introduction: that is, because they are discipline-specific efforts to achieve similar aims.
But underlying that discipline specificity is often a great deal of application-specific complexity, which receives little attention in this book.
Conclusion The Accidental Taxonomist is a reasonably-priced book $39.50 for an overview of a topic area that is readable, direct and to-the-point.
The cover blurb describes it as a ‘guide to the art and science of building information taxonomies’.
I would suggest that as a guide to the landscape, it is in most areas a success.
Viewing each area from the author’s perspective of knowledge and experience is generally a useful experience, and it is written in a readable if occasionally overly didactic and under-referenced manner.
Despite the promise of the blurb, though, it is not intended as a guide to the science, in the sense of mathematical or computational detail.
On reaching the end of the book, the reader will have gained an awareness of the basic components of each domain, and is armed with a great deal of useful information.
A book that covered the details would by necessity have to be a great deal longer and probably less readable – but might provide more insight into the question of what defines a taxonomist in each domain.
Editor’s note: In that rather flexible manner that English displays, following the logic of Eighties and Nineties, the first decade of the 21st century has been termed quite frequently as the ‘Noughties.’ References The ARTFL Project, “Taxonomy”, Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 Retrieved 10 October 2010 from http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster%27s&word=taxonomy&use1913=on&use1828=on Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/ Author Details Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.tonkin/ Return to top Article Title: “The General-purpose Taxonomist” Author: Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/tonkin-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IMPACT Final Conference 2011 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IMPACT Final Conference 2011 Buzz data software framework wiki database dissemination archives metadata digitisation tagging blog copyright preservation ocr unicode mets wordpress twitter oer solr ict interoperability research finereader tesseract Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy reports on the two-day conference looking at the results of the IMPACT Project in making digitisation and OCR better, faster and cheaper.
The IMPACT Project (Improving Access to Text) [1] was funded by the European Commission back in 2007 to look at significantly advancing access to historical text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) methods.
As the project reaches its conclusion, one of its key objectives is sharing project outputs.
The final conference was a 2-day event held over 24 25 October 2011 at the British Library in London where it demonstrated findings, showcased tools and presented related research in the field of OCR and language technology.
IMPACT Project Director Hildelies Balk-Pennington de Jongh from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) National Library of the Netherlands opened the conference.
The busy two days were then divided into a series of blocks covering different aspects of the project.
Day One kicked off with a look at the operational context.
Block 1: Operational Context Strategic Digital Overview Richard Boulderstone, Director, e-Strategy and Information Systems, British Library (BL), provided us with an overview of BL's digitisation work to date.
The Library had embarked on a huge digitisation process and now had 5 billion physical pages and 57 million objects online, although they only represented 1% of its collection.
This however, figuratively speaking, was but a drop in the European ocean.
The Conference of European National Libraries 2006 Survey estimated that the national libraries of Europe were holding over 13 billion pages for digitisation and the number was rapidly growing.
One starts to get a sense of the magnitude of the demand.
The British Library was involved in a project with brightsolid to digitise BL’s newspaper collection [2], while it had also recently signed a deal with Google to digitise 250,000 more pages.
Richard Boulderstone, British Library, provides an overview of BL’s digitisation work to date.
Richard continued his theme of numbers and moved on to the economics.
Early digitisation projects often involved rare materials and were very costly; mass digitisation was much cheaper, but still remained costly.
Richard noted the need to generate revenue and gave some examples of how BL is already doing this through chargeable content.
This approach hasn’t always been popular, he admitted, but was necessary.
When it came to measuring value, one easy approach was to compare print and digital.
There were lots of benefits to digital material: it is more durable (potentially), often has a better look and feel, could offer effective simulations, made searching easier and distribution faster.
It also made data mining, social networking and revenue all possible.
It was quite clear that digital content was a winner.
During his talk Richard praised the IMPACT Project, describing it as unique in the way it had set the benchmark in addressing a common set of problems across Europe, and seeking to resolve them through wide collaboration and the piloting of systems which would benefit libraries and the citizens of Europe for many years to come.
He noted that OCR worked very well for modern collections and that users expected and received high rates of accuracy; although Richard accepted there was still some way to go for older material.
The IMPACT Project had helped make up some ground.
IMPACT's Achievements So Far Hildelies Balk-Pennington de Jongh, KB, began her presentation by mentioning many of the OCR problems the project had faced: ink shine-through, ink smearing, no annotations, fonts, language, etc.
When IMPACT started in 2008, it originally had 26 partners, was co-ordinated by KB and co-funded by EU.
Over the last four years it had taken many steps to improve significantly the mass digitisation of text across Europe.
IMPACT Project Director Hildelies Balk-Pennington de Jongh, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB).
Hildelies explained that the approach from the start had been for everyone (content holders, researchers and industry) to work together to find solutions based on real-life problems.
The main IMPACT achievements so far had been the production of a series of open-source tools and plug-ins for OCR correction, the development of a digitisation framework, a comprehensive knowledge bank, and computer lexica for nine different languages.
Not only this, but the project has established a unique network of institutions, researchers and practitioners in the digitisation arena.
Technical Talks A series of technical talks followed.
Apostolos Antonacopoulos from the University of Salford looked at the effect of scanning parameters (such as setting colour vs bi-tonal vs dithered vs 8-bit greyscale and using different resolutions) on OCR results.
Apostolos concluded that using bi-tonal often gave poor results unless particular methods are used.
He recommended the study Going Grey?
[3] by Tracy Powell and Gordon Paynter which poses a number of questions that may need to be considered when scanning.
Claus Gravenhorst of Content Conversion Specialists GmbH (CCS) presented a case study by the KB and CCS which considered whether the new ABBYY FineReader Engine 10 [4] and Dutch Lexicon increase OCR accuracy and production efficiency.
Claus explained that various preand postprocessing steps could have an effect on accuracy as well as image quality.
He described the test material they had chosen: 17th-century Dutch newspapers where a typical page would have two colours and gothic fonts.
The test system used was docWorks which was developed during the EU FP5 project METAe [5] (in which ABBYY was involved).
The workflow covered item tracking from the shelf, scanning and back to the shelf including QA, etc.
This system was used to integrate IMPACT tools.
There was very little pre-processing as the focus was the OCR.
Zones were classified and then passed to the OCR engine.
Finally, an analysis was carried out to understand the structure of the page.
The goal was to generate statistical data for character and word accuracy over four test runs.
There was a 20.6% improvement in word accuracy when using IMPACT tools.
Block 2: Framework and Evaluation The second block looked at the IMPACT framework that has been developed.
OCR Experiences Paul Fogel, California Digital Library, University of California, presented digitisation experiences and challenges faced by CDL when dealing with OCR document text extraction.
Paul emphasised the difficulties and obstacles posed by poor OCR during the mass indexing and digitisation processes of cultural records: they included marginalia, image-text misinterpretations and fonts, as well as limited resources, the wide range of languages and low number of dictionaries.
Paul explained that US libraries had been very opportunistic in their digitisation, especially in their use of Google.
He introduced us to Solr [6], an open-source search engine technology used for distributed search.
It was worth noting that Google had recently moved from ABBYY 9 to Tesseract [7], Google’s own in-house open-source OCR engine.
Technical Talks Clemens Neudecker from the KB presented the IMPACT Interoperability Framework which brings together project tools and data.
He introduced the workflows  in the project and the various building blocks used including Taverna [8], an open source workflow management system.
Although progress had been good, Clemens pointed out, but there was still a long way to go.
Stefan Pletschacher, University of Salford, began by presenting an overview of the digitisation workflow and the issues at each stage.
These stages are usually given as scanning (whatever goes wrong at this stage was hard to recover later), image enhancement, layout analysis, OCR and post-processing.
He explained that it was sensible to evaluate at each step but also to consider the workflow as a whole.
To carry out performance evaluation, it is necessary to begin with some images that are representative of the images to be processed.
Then one will OCR the results.
There then followed an explanation of the concept of ‘ground truth’.
Interestingly enough a conversation on the nature of ground truth had already done the rounds on Twitter.
Some of the definitions discussed are given below: Ground truth is manually created text by double re-keying and segmentation correction Ground truth is the ‘transcription’ of a document or a text and more Ground truth is the data against which you evaluate your results, for OCR it is transcribed text with 99.9+% accuracy.
Stefan explained that it was not just the final text but would also include other aspects, such as images to map to, de-skewing, de-warping, border removal and binarisation.
The IMPACT ground truths have been produced using Alethia, now a fairly mature tool, which allows creation of information on page borders, print space, layout regions, text lines, words, glyphs, Unicode text, reading order, layers etc.
Stefan concluded his talk with an overview of the datasets available: 667,120 images approximately, consisting of institutional datasets from 10 libraries (602,313 images) and demonstrator sets (56,141 images).
Block 3: Tools for Improved Text Recognition ABBYY FineReader Michael Fuchs, Senior Product Marketing Manager at ABBYY Europe, began his presentation with an overview of ABBYY and ABBYY products.
ABBYY is an international company with its headquarters in Moscow and 14 subsidiaries around the world.
Michael claimed ABBYY had made a 40% improvement in OCR output since 2007 thanks to software improvements and the improved quality of images used.
Michael walked the audience through the range of improvements, including image binarisation, document layout analysis and text/character recognition.
He highlighted the need for binary images as they tend to produce the best results.
Recently ABBYY has also extended its character and text recognition system to include Eastern European languages, such as Old Slavonic.
Michael concluded that ABBYY’s decreased cost in historic fonts and its flexible rates have contributed to IMPACT’s efforts to make digitisation cheaper and OCR technology more accessible to both individuals and partnerships across Europe and the world.
Technical Talks Asaf Tzadok of IBM Haifa Research Lab introduced the IBM Adaptive OCR Engine and CONCERT Cooperative Correction.
During his talk, Asaf introduced the concept of collaborative correction – getting users to correct OCR errors.
He showed a number of crowdsourcing tools including Trove and DigitalKloot [9], and looked at where improvements could still be made.
The CONCERT tool was completely adaptive and had a lot of productivity tools, separating data entry process into several complementary tasks.
Asaf concluded that collaborative correction could be consistent and reliable and required no prior knowledge of digitisation or OCR.
Lotte Wilms from the KB joined Asaf on stage and gave the library perspective: three libraries were involved and user tests were carried out by all the libraries with full support from IBM.
Majlis Bremer-Laamanen from the Centre for Preservation and Digitisation at the National Library of Finland then talked about crowdsourcing in the DigitalKoot Project.
The Library now had 1.3 million pages digitised and its aim was to share resources and make them available for research.
At this point there was a definitive need for OCR correction.
The DigitalKoot project name came from the combination of the Finnish terms ‘digi’ = to digitise, ‘talkoot’ = people gathering together.
It was a joint project run by the National Library of Finland and Microtask.
Users could play mole hunt games to carry out OCR correction.
The project had been hugely successful and had received a lot of media coverage.
Between 8 February  – 31 March 2011 there were 31,816 visitors of whom there were 4,768 players, who engaged in 2,740 hours of game time.
Results had been positive, for example, in one check, out of 1,467 words there were 14 mistakes and 228 correct corrections.
Ulrich Reffle, University of Munich, finished off the day by talking about postcorrection (the batch correction of document-specific language and OCR error profiles) in the IMPACT Project.
Ulrich explained that many languages contain elements of foreign languages, for example Latin or French usages in the English language which occasions greater processing complexity.
Ulrich explained that OCR problems were as diverse as historical language variations and, unfortunately, there was no ‘ring to rule them all.’ OCR and the Transformation of the Humanities The opening keynote for Day Two was provided by Gregory Crane, Professor and Chair, Department of Classics, Tufts University.
Gregory began by giving three basic changes in the humanities: transformation of the scale of questions (breadth and depth); student researchers and citizen scholars, and; globalisation of cultural heritage (there are more than 20 official languages).
Crane then moved on to describing dynamic variorum editions as one of OCR’s greatest challenges.
Crane stressed that even with all possible crowd-sourcing, we still need to process data as automatically as possible.
He gave the new Variorum Shakespeare series (140 years old) as a good example of this the winning system is the most useful, not the smartest.
A classicist by origin, Crane focused on the Greco-Roman world and illustrated the problems ancient languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek pose to OCR technology.
OCR helped Tufts detect how many of the 25,000 Latin books selected were actually in Latin.
Unsurprisingly, OCR analysis revealed that many of these works were actually Greek.
It seemed OCR often tells us more than metadata can.
Crane saw the key to dealing with a cultural heritage language as residing in multiple open-source OCR engines in order to produce better results.
Block 4: Language Tools and Resources The morning focused on language tools and resources.
Katrien Depuydt from the Institute for Dutch Lexicology began with an overview of the language work being carried out.
She explained that she would stand by her use of ‘weerld’ – ‘world’  as an example since it continued to be useful there were so many instances of the word ‘world’.
Katrien touched on the IMPACT Project’s work in building lexica (checked lists of words in a language) within a corpus (collection).
She explained that it is important to have lexica set against a historical period since spelling variation problems were often time period-, language-, and content-specific.
Each of the nine  IMPACT Project languages had different departure points and special cases unique to them.
Jesse de Does, INL, went on to look at the evaluation of lexicon-supported OCR and Information Retrieval.
He considered the project’s use of ABBYY Finereader, which provides a set of options and you prune them to what you think is possible.
During the project, the team had evaluated Finereader SDK 10 with default dictionary.
They thought that using the Oxford English Dictionary would be easy.
It turned out that there were not very large spelling variations and that there were already measures in place for sorting this out.
By limiting themselves to 17th-century texts, they had made significant progress.
Steven Krauwer, CLARIN co-ordinator, University of Utrecht, then introduced the CLARIN [10] Project and explained how its work tied in with IMPACT.
The CLARIN Project is a large-scale pan-European collaborative effort to create, co-ordinate and make language resources and technology available and readily usable.
CLARIN offers scholars the tools to allow computer-aided language processing, addressing one or more of the multiple roles language plays (i.e.
carrier of cultural content and knowledge, instrument of communication, component of identity and object of study) in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
CLARIN allows for virtual collections, serves expert and non-expert users, covers both linguistic data and its content.
It is still in its preparatory phase, the main construction phase will be over 20112013.
Block 5: IMPACT Centre of Competence The last block of the day before the parallel sessions was the official launch of the IMPACT Centre of Competence.
Khalil Rouhana, Director for Digital Content and Cognitive Systems in DG Information Society and Media at the European Commission, gave an overview of the EC Digital Agenda.
Khalil explained that the IMPACT Project has been one of the biggest projects in terms of size.
Initially there were doubts that large-scale projects were the right way of supporting innovation and the FP7 team was involved in a lot of discussion on the approach to take.
However IMPACT has been a good example of why large-scale integrating projects are still valuable for the ICT agenda of the EU.
Khalil talked about the digital agenda for Europe which includes creating a sustainable financing model for Europeana, creating a legal framework for orphan and out of commerce works.
Three important aspects were highlighted: that ‘access’ is the central concept digitisation should be a moral obligation to maintain our cultural resources common platforms are central to the strategy.
The bottlenecks were funding problems and copyright.
Hildelies Balk-Pennington De Jongh and Aly Conteh, KB, then introduced the IMPACT Centre of Competence [11] which builds on IMPACT’s strength in the development of a very strong collaboration between communities.
It also provides access to the knowledge bank of guidelines and materials for institutions working on OCR and digitisation projects all over the world.
Other valuable services offered by the Centre include a ground truth dataset, as well as a helpdesk, specifically designed and created for institutions to ask questions to experts who can, in turn, give some insight into how to address issues raised.
The question of sustainability was also discussed.
The sustainability model currently works around four key points: the Web site, membership packages, partner contributions and a Centre office established to provide assistance.
The Centre also has further support from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and the Fundación Biblioteca Virtual Miguel De Cervantes, which host the centre, while the BnF and the Biblioteca Virtual will also provide a wide range of partner support, sponsorship and networks, technology transfer and dissemination, as well as the preparation and dissemination of all open-source software.
Through the round window: British Library courtyard Parallel Sessions Language The language parallel session consisted of a series of presentations and demonstrations of the IMPACT language tools and hosted by Katrien Depuydt (INL).
The first session was on Named Entity Work and presented by Frank Landsbergen.
Frank began by defining named entities (NE).
They are a word or string referring to a proper location, person or organisation (or date, time, etc).
Within IMPACT, the term is limited to location, person or organisation.
The extra focus on these words is primarily because they may be of particular interest to end-users and because they are not usually in dictionaries; so there is a greater improvement in the lexicon and ultimately the OCR.
Note that a lexicon is a list of related entities in the database that are linked eg, ‘Amsterdams’, ‘Amsteldam’, ‘Amsteldamme’ = ‘Amsterdam’.
He then spent the majority of his talk walking us through the 4-step process of building a NE Lexicon: Data collection; NE tagging: Possibilities include NE extraction software, use of the Stanford University module, statistical NE recognition (the software ‘trains’ itself) or manual tagging.
Many of these tools currently work best with contemporary data.
enrichment (POS tagging, lemmatizing, adding the person name structure, variants) database creation.
So far the majority of IMPACT’s NE work has been on creating a toolkit for lexicon building (NERT, Attestation tool) and creating NE-lexica for Dutch, English and German.
Annette Gotscharek talked about the 16th-century German printed book collection, a special case since the resources were so old, and therefore very challenging.
There were a number of special features of the period language at a word level.
The historical variants were all added to the modern lama.
The diachronic ground truth corpus was text files of what appeared on the scans.
It was collected from different resources on the Web and non-public electronic corpora.
They worked on areas including the creation of a hypothetical lexicon and manually verifying IR-lexica.
Janusz S. Bie?
talked about Polish Language Resources in IMPACT.
Janusz and his team faced a number of problems when working with Polish text.
The earlier dictionaries were rejected because although they held the relevant information, it was too difficult to extract.
They also struggled to use other later dictionaries because of copyright issues.
In the end they did manage to use a selection of dictionaries and texts including the Benedykt Chmielowski encyclopedia, which is famous for its memorable ‘definitions’: ‘Horse is as everyone can see.’ Tomaž Erjavec finished the session with a look at the Slovene Language Resources in IMPACT.
Tomaž previously worked on the AHLib Project looking at transcription correction and markup.
At the same time as their work on the IMPACT Project they also won a Google award so have been able to develop language models for historical Slovene.
Their methodology has been to develop three resources: transcribed texts, hand-annotated corpus and a lexicon of historical words.
They have also developed the annotation tool, ToTrTaLe which aids in tagging and lemmatising historical Slovene.
The main issues have been tokenisation (words were split differently in earlier forms of Slovene), variability and extinct words.
Over the course of the project they have transcribed over 10 million words, consisting of the AHLib corpus/DL, NUK GTD, Google Books and Wiki source –all of which are freely available.
Digitisation Aly Conteh from the British Library hosted the parallel Q&A session on digitisation tips.
Panel members included Astrid Verheusen, Manager of the Digital Library Programme and Head of the Innovative Projects Department, KB National Library of the Netherlands, Geneviève Cron, OCR expert, BnF, Christa Müller, Director Digital Services Department, Austrian National Library, Majlis Bremer-Laamanen, Director of the Centre for Preservation and Digitisation, National Library of Finland and Alena Kav?i?-Colic, Head of the Research and Development Unit, National and University Library of Slovenia.
The questions included: How do digital libraries exist without METS/ALTO and how do you support retrospective production of OCR?
; many libraries digitising newspaper collections clean the head titles of their documents.
Will this still happen in the future?
Why insist on cleaning head titles rather than invest in digitising more pages?
How do you measure capture quality when you lack ground truth?
What are library priorities for the next 10 years?
Research The research parallel revolved around state-of-the-art research tools for document analysis developed via the IMPACT Project.
Basilis Gatos looked at Impact Tools Developed by the National Centre of Scientific Research (DEMOKRITOS) in Athens.
Involved with IMPACT since 2008, they have collaborated in the production of nine software tools to support binarisation, border removal, page split, page curl correction, OCR result, character segment and word spotting.
Stefan Pletschacher, Univeristy of Salford, considered OCR for typewritten documents, which pose a unique challenge to OCR recognition.
Typical typewritten documents in archives are actually carbon copies with blurred type and a textured background.
Moreover, as they are often administrative documents, they are rife with names, abbreviations and numbers, all of which render typical lexicon-based recognition approaches less useful.
A system has been developed in IMPACT to tackle these particular difficulties by incorporating background knowledge of typewritten documents, and through improved segmentation and enhancement of glyph images, while ‘performing language-independent character recognition using specifically trained classifiers.’ Apostolos Antonacopoulos, University of Salford, looked at image enhancement, segmentation and experimental OCR by representing the work of PRImA (Pattern Recognition & Image Analysis) research at the University of Salford.
Apostolos demonstrated their approach to the digitisation workflow and the tools developed for Image Enhancement (border removal, page curl removal, correction of arbitrary warping) as well as segmentation (recognition-based and stand-alone).
Richard Boulderstone recommended a look at the newly refurbished St Pancras Railway Station.
Conclusions The IMPACT final conference offered an excellent bird’s eye view of the achievements that have been made through the lifecyle of the project.
These achievements range from the highly technical (through development of the project tools) to the more overarching variety (through awareness-raising and capacity-building activity in the area of OCR).
Some of the presentations were slightly esoteric and very much designed for the specialist.
However there was still enough to keep the non-specialist engaged.
It is clear that there is still much work to be done in the area of OCR scanning of historical texts, but the IMPACT Project has packed an impressive travel bag for the road ahead.
The writing of this trip report has been aided by session summaries from the IMPACT Wordpress blog [12], and my thanks go out to the team of reporters.
Presentations from the day are available from the IMPACT blog and from the IMPACT Slideshare account [13].
You can follow the IMPACT Project and the Centre of Competence on Twitter [14].
References The IMPACT Project Web site http://www.impact-project.eu "British Library and brightsolid partnership to digitise up to 40 million pages of historic newspapers", brightsolid news release, 18 May 2010 http://www.brightsolid.com/home/latest-news/recent-news/british-library-and-brightsolid-partnership-to-digitise.html Powell, T. and Paynter, G., "Going Grey?
Comparing the OCR Accuracy Levels of Bitonal and Greyscale Images", D-Lib Magazine, March/April 2009 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march09/powell/03powell.html ABBYY Finereader http://www.abbyy.com/ocr_sdk/ MetaE http://meta-e.aib.uni-linz.ac.at/ Solr http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ Tesseract http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ Taverna http://www.taverna.org.uk/ DigitalKoot http://www.digitalkoot.fi/en/splash CLARIN http://www.clarin.eu/external/ IMPACT Centre of Competence http://www.digitisation.eu/ IMPACT blog http://impactocr.wordpress.com/ IMPACT Slideshare account http://www.slideshare.net/impactproject IMPACT Twitter account http://twitter.com/#!/impactocr Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Marieke Guy is a research officer at UKOLN.
She has worked in an outreach role in the IMPACT Project creating Open Educational Resources (OER) on digitisation which are likely to be released later in 2012.
She has recently taken on a new role as an Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre, working towards raising awareness and building capacity for institutional research data management.
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Intute Reflections at the End of an Era Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Intute Reflections at the End of an Era Buzz data mobile software database dissemination metadata digitisation tagging vocabularies blog cataloguing personalisation widget curation twitter vim research Citation BibTex RIS Angela Joyce, Linda Kerr, Tim Machin, Paul Meehan and Caroline Williams look back at the history and achievements of Intute, and reflect on lessons learned as the service enters its final year.
Increasingly, library and information services are under pressure to demonstrate value for money.
Against the backdrop of search engine dominance, economic instability, and rapid technological development, Intute, a JISC-funded free national service which delivers the best of the Web for education and research, is facing reduced funding and an uncertain future.
This article will share its successes and achievements, put a spotlight on the human expertise of its contributors and partners, and reflect on lessons learnt in the context of the sustainability of library and information services.
History and Context Did you use the Internet in the early 1990s?
Do you remember the beginnings of the World Wide Web, the first search engines, and early Web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape Navigator?
Although launched in 2006, the history of Intute takes us right back to this period; to the beginnings of the first academic subject gateways, the development of early online tutorials like the Internet Detective, and the creation of the Resource Discovery Network, (which would evolve into Intute).
During the 1990s, use of the Internet grew rapidly, with increasing usage for both leisure and academic purposes, but in those early years it was difficult to find Internet-based academic content.
Search engines and Web directories such as AltaVista and Yahoo had arrived on the scene to help people navigate through this new and confusing world, but there was a need for services that would bring together academic content and provide simple access for students, librarians, researchers and academics.
The initiation of the JISC Electronic Libraries (eLib) programme in 1995 led to the creation of a suite of subject gateways, and services such as SOSIG and EEVL were conceived.
As the eLib funding cycle neared completion, JISC recognised that there was a need to coordinate the activities of the (now established) gateways, and the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) was formed in 1998 [1].
The RDN ultimately comprised eight distinct subject gateways: Altis: Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism Artifact: Arts and Creative Industries BIOME: Health and Life Sciences EEVL: Engineering, Maths and Computing GEsource: Geography and Environment Humbul: Humanities PSIgate: Physical Sciences SOSIG: Social Sciences, Business and Law The Virtual Training Suite, a series of tutorials promoting Internet research skills funded under the JISC 5⁄99 Learning and Teaching Programme, became part of the core service in 2002.
In 2005, an Executive was formed within Mimas at The University of Manchester, and took on the challenge to make the organisation more efficient and integrated.
The content of the gateways was merged into one simple interface and service, and Intute was born.
The distributed organisational model became more closely integrated, drawing on the strengths and expertise of all the partners.
The core of the service itself was a newly integrated database of hand-picked, carefully described Web sites.
The Virtual Training Suite stood alongside this catalogue delivering its subject-based Internet research skills tutorials, and during this period, the JISC-funded Informs online tutorial creation software was transferred from the University of Huddersfield to join Intute’s suite of training services.
Intute did not rest on its laurels.
Over the following years, the Web site would be redeveloped and reorganised, replacing the initial set of 4 subject groupings (arts and humanities; social sciences; science, engineering and technology; health and life sciences) with a structure based around 19 top-level subject headings.
This approach allowed users to focus their searching more keenly on a specific subject whilst retaining the ability to search Intute as a whole; response to these changes was extremely positive.
The context that Intute operates in has changed enormously since the early RDN days.
When Google arrived after the millennium, it would quickly become the weapon of choice when searching against a backdrop of exponentially increasing content on the Web.
Increasingly Google and Google Scholar offer effective search results as they index databases and reach deeper into the hidden Web, and libraries and publishers now strategically engage with them to expose their content as they cover more and more of the world’s information.
However, in education this is not without issues.
Search engine-ranking mechanisms do not guarantee quality and do not discriminate between the biased, the commercial, and the self-interested Web site.
Concerns about the student use of Internet have been explored by Tara Brabazon [2] and more recently by Andrew Whitworth in his book Information Obesity.
Whitworth describes the scholarly environment as one where there is an increasing volume and complexity of information, and suggests that, ‘finding information is no longer the problem, but being discriminating, filtering it out, and managing it is.’ [3] This is the problem that Intute has always responded to in its aim to facilitate the development of the critical evaluation skills required to assess the copious stream of content generated by the Web, and provide recommendations of Web sites from trusted sources.
Intute Achievements For us our achievements have not simply been in delivering a widely used service with an evolving range of features, but also in the way we, as an organisation, have worked together and used our distributed network of expertise.
In addition to the seven universities which formed the Intute consortium, more than 70 other partners were recognised at the time Intute launched.
These included such prestigious bodies as the Wellcome Trust, the British Library, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal College of Nursing, 12 of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centres and the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Intute was underpinned by a wealth of influential supporters and organisations.
Creating and developing Intute has required extensive technical expertise but also an increased level of distributed teamwork, an area for which Intute has subsequently become renowned.
Throughout its history, Intute partners have worked together to offer real benefits to the library and information community.
We have developed machine-to-machine interfaces and worked closely with institutions to embed services and features into learning and teaching materials via the Intute Integration Project [4].
University libraries such as Leeds have used the MyIntute personalisation interface, newsfeeds and search widgets to build online lists of resources across a range of academic subjects, and by 2009, 67% of UK universities had widely integrated Intute content into their library Web pages, VLEs or federated search systems.
Intute has continued to be technically innovative in a service environment, adding a number of Web 2.0-related enhancements, such as user comments and ratings, and the ability to filter searches in increasingly complex ways.
The service also became searchable through Linden Lab’s Second Life virtual world in 2007, one of the first academic services to appear there.
Our work was rewarded with greater visibility in the national media, with a Guardian headline [5] suggesting ‘Google, eat your heart out’, and pointing out that ‘Intute offers what search engines don’t commitment to quality’.
With a favourable review on the BBC Click [6] programme following, it was clear that the service was making huge strides.
This attention was also reflected in the Intute usage statistics.
An average month in 2008 would see more than 11 million page views, over 1 million browses and upwards of 1 million searches performed on Intute, and these figures would increase significantly in 2009.
Across the academic year for 2008⁄9, 34.5 million keyword searches alone were carried out.
The Virtual Training Suite also went from strength to strength.
Usage continued to grow apace, with almost 700,000 visitors viewing 7.6 million pages worth of tutorials in 2009.
Thousands of positive endorsements were received from tutorial users: ‘self explanatory, informative, easy to understand, straight to the point’, ‘very well organized and easy to navigate, and surprisingly interesting to follow’, ‘I like how explicit the tutorial was in examining the credibility and relevance of online sources’.
In 2007, Intute was awarded the Jason Farradane Award [7] for outstanding achievement in the information field and was described as ‘a great example of the UK library community taking a long-term pioneering role in the Internet information environment, developing a national service through collaboration, which has grown to become well respected and highly used worldwide.’ The achievements of service director Caroline Williams were particularly highlighted, with the committee noting her role in developing ‘organisational strategies and systems that enable distributed teams to run a unified and coherent service’.
Projects and Research Over the years, Intute has been involved with a range of other projects, harnessing core staff expertise, technology, and using our database as a test-bed for new services and methods.
At the same time, work on these cutting-edge pieces of research has enhanced Intute’s core services.
Intute’s research and related projects have typically built on existing services, but extended these through project funding both as demonstrators and as real enhancements to existing services.
The mobile Internet Detective [8] is one example of a well used service extended through new technology.
Still ongoing is the ViM (Value for money in automatic Metadata generation) Project, looking for ways to maximise quality whilst minimising costs of metadata creation.
Final data is not yet available, but the study has been comparing the efficiency of manual (human-edited) approaches to metadata creation, against automated tools, and looking in more detail at the kinds of metadata required by users.
Initial results are surprising, suggesting that automation does not necessarily save costs – but detailed conclusions are likely to provide a legacy applicable across a broad spectrum of future data services.
Drawing on Intute’s experience of integrating the varied databases and working practices of the former RDN hubs, the AIRDIP (Academy Intute Resource Database Integration) Project was a partnership with the Higher Education Academy (HEA).
This integrated the online resources of ten Academy subject centres into a single database, to provide tailored subsets of data for their different user groups and configured search options to meet user needs.
Against a backdrop of changing project specifications, and organisational change, this project offered a chance to learn the lesson that, according to project manager Diana Massam, ‘a focus on deliverables which can be achieved and have some benefits for partners can lead to a positive outcome!’ Other collaborations have included the PERTAINS (PERsonalised TAgging Information Services) Project (with the University of Glamorgan) which looked at ways of suggesting controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies for user tagging of information, and EASTER (Evaluating Automated Subject Tools for Enhancing Retrieval) (with UKOLN) to evaluate existing tools for automated subject metadata generation.
Intute’s knowledge of the resource landscape in particular subject areas proved a further fertile arena for developing projects.
MEDEV for Medicine, Veterinary Science and Dentistry (another collaboration with the HEA) and Organic.Edunet for agriculture (an EU-wide programme), involved building up a picture of the best and most relevant Web content in specialist fields.
This subject expertise was perhaps tested most by IJDDiP (Intute/JISC Digitisation Dissemination Project) which through an Intute-organised series of academic seminars and subject-focused Web guides, aimed to generate awareness of the new JISC digitisation projects amongst the relevant sections of the UK academic research community.
Here, the project recognised that ‘academic researchers can be a difficult group to alert to new digitised content, as the usual dissemination channels for such content (leaflets, blogs, presentations, etc) do not always penetrate the forums of academic discussion that the researchers themselves inhabit and use to exchange information’ [9].
Although Intute’s own expertise in harnessing both conventional digital and academic channels was applied, perhaps the benefits flowed mainly from the role of Intute as a mentor, facilitating best practice and offering the chance to experiment and encourage others to showcase the results.
Lessons Learned In July 2010, we find ourselves in less celebratory times.
As we enter into a one year maintenance funding phase, and begin to wind down the service in its current form, we would like to share some reflections on what went wrong for Intute.
The impact of the global economic crisis and subsequent reductions in public funding has thrust services such as ours into new and unfamiliar environments.
Since the launch of Intute, the threat of funding reduction has been a constant risk, and over the last four years the ESRC, the AHRC and now primary funder JISC have withdrawn support.
At the end of 2006 we commissioned an independent business development consultancy to explore alternative business models and provide advice.
Their frustrating, and yet unsurprising, recommendation was that grant funding was the most appropriate fit for the core mission and values of Intute.
Their market research suggested limited interest in subscription to Intute in its entirety, a point which is perhaps not surprising in the context of reducing library budgets, and proposed that sponsorship and advertising opportunities should be investigated further.
Unfortunately, the economic instability that had resulted in reduced grant funding also hampered our investigations into advertising and our attempts were unsuccessful.
Our exploration of alternative business models was affected by the lack of availability of business development expertise within Intute.
The work of Ithaka on behalf of Strategic Content Alliance [10] did illustrate imaginative ways of sustaining online resources yet we struggled to translate this experience into our context, and our two attempts to recruit a business development officer failed.
Intute was successful in reducing costs so that a 15% tapering annual funding allocation was accommodated without any degradation of service, but when the news of the 80% funding cut reached us we realised we were dealing with not just an issue of efficiency but of radical transformation or demise.
Our unique selling point of human selection and generation of descriptions of Web sites was a costly model, and seemed somewhat at odds with the current trend for Web 2.0 technologies and free contribution on the Internet.
The way forward was not clear, but developing a community-generated model seemed like the only way to go.
Does Intute Have a Future?
So, in pursuit of sustainable routes for the Intute catalogue, we now enter into discussion about volunteers and free contribution.
Clay Shirky outlines what he sees as the three different approaches to organised activity: institutional or managed action; no action (because the costs of organising outweigh the benefits of that activity); and social tools, which provide a third option: ‘action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.’[11] For Intute, if the cost of managed action outweighs the benefits, then can the third alternative way forward work for us (or indeed is it time to stop and take no action)?
The success of initiatives such as Wikipedia and suggests that there is mileage in an easily editable community-driven model.
Internally, although excited by the opportunities and full of innovative ideas, there was also scepticism.
Intute has an existing network of potential contributors from its Twitter channels, MyIntute subscribers and the comments and rating system, but moving to this model poses fundamental questions: What does it mean for our current collection development processes and for our curation expertise?
To what extent will this jeopardise trust in and value of the service?
And indeed will people contribute?
We have explored the motivation to contribute and found contrasting evidence.
Jakob Nielsen has well documented what he calls ‘Participation Inequality’ and the 90-9-1 rule [12], however the Intute user survey last summer painted a more optimistic picture for community contribution revealing that 54% of respondents (who were largely from the library community) would contribute their own favourite Web resources.
Many respondents stated that they would need to maintain their own lists of favourite resources if they did not have the Intute IRC to rely on, and could be encouraged to contribute to a collaborative resource.
The market research findings did, however, suggest that a quality-assurance process would be essential in order to maintain trust in the service and also pointed to the need for incentives to encourage contributions.
If this approach was deemed to be a way forward then we would have to explore financing of low-cost incentives for contributors of accepted resources.
Referring back to our earlier question, if people do contribute, what does this mean for our current collection development processes and for our curation expertise?
Clay Shirky offers the example of iStockphoto to illustrate how bringing together amateur and professional photographers can change social definitions that are not tied to professions [11].
But where does the librarian and the expert fit in all of this?
Are we grappling with new perceptions of trust and quality?
For this approach to work at Intute, our role as the expert would need to turn into one of mediator: a visible person in the network who would motivate contribution by issuing calls for action.
There are compelling reasons to pursue this route, however, we are still searching for an alternative business model to support this work.
In terms of future directions for the Virtual Training Suite and Informs, the picture is clearer.
Our market research indicated that development of these services to include greater customisation and enhanced support could support the introduction of a subscription model.
The 2010⁄11 academic year will see staff involved in these services venture into new commercial territory as they explore options to keep these popular services running.
Conclusion The problems that led to the creation of the RDN hubs, that is the need to find quality resources and make sense of the Internet, are still pressing issues today, and throughout its history Intute has helped students to make discerning use of the Internet through community collaboration.
However, technological developments, changing user expectations and diminishing budgets mean that services such as Intute will need to find new ways to engage with their communities, and the search for alternative business models will require new ways of thinking.
As Intute begins to wind down the service in its current form, we would like to thank all of the staff and partners that have worked together to develop the service throughout its history, and we hope that this tradition of collaboration will leave a legacy for the future development of community-driven resources.
References A full retrospective of the RDN is available at Hiom, D., “Retrospective on the RDN”, April 2006, Ariadne Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/hiom/ Brabazon, T. (2002).
“Digital Hemlock: Internet education and the poisoning of teaching.” UNSW Press.
Whitworth, A.
(2009).
“Information Obesity” Chandos Publishing The Integration project ran from 2006 to 2009, and has been described in detail at Joyce, A. et al, “Intute Integration”, April 2008, Ariadne Issue 55 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/joyce-et-al/ Hoare, S. “Google, eat your heart out.” The Guardian, December, 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2006/dec/12/elearning.technology37 BBC Click http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/default.stm Jason Farradane Award at UK eInformation Group (UKeIG) http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/jason-farradane A full description of this project is available at: Massam, D. et al, “Mobilising the Internet Detective”, April 2010, Ariadne Issue 63 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/massam-et-al/ Wilson, JAJ.
“Intute / JISC Digitisation Dissemination Project final report” http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/intutefinal.pdf Maron, NL.
et al, “Sustaining Digital Resources: an on-the-ground view of projects today: Ithaka case studies in sustainability”, July 2009 http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability/report/SCA_Ithaka_SustainingDigitalResources_Report.pdf Shirky, C. (2008), “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together.” Penguin, ISBN-13: 9781594201530, p.47.
Nielsen, J.
“Alertbox”, October 2006 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html Author Details Angela Joyce Research Officer Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1HH Email: angela.joyce@bristol.ac.uk Linda Kerr Intute Service Manager University Library Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh EH14 4AS Email: l.kerr@hw.ac.uk Tim Machin Intute Content Cataloguer (Research) Minshull House Chorlton Street Manchester M1 3FY Email: t.machin@mmu.ac.uk Paul Meehan Mimas Senior Development Officer Mimas Roscoe Building (5th Floor) The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email: paul.meehan@manchester.ac.uk Caroline Williams Executive Director of Intute and Deputy Director of Mimas Mimas Roscoe Building (5th Floor) The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email: caroline.williams@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://mimas.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Intute Reflections at the End of an Era” Author: Angela Joyce, Linda Kerr, Tim Machin, Paul Meehan and Caroline Williams Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/joyce-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Ariadne is not the only fruit.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Ariadne is not the only fruit.
Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir, editor of the first ten issues of Ariadne, reminisces about library and information science e-­journals back in the day, looks across the current landscape of online “free to read, free to write for” publications, considers a few questions for budding authors to ask, and highlights some publications to house their words.
In the beginning was the Jisc­-funded buffet   Ariadne was conceived between Lorcan Dempsey and John MacColl [n0], gestated in UKOLN and the University of Abertay in Dundee through the autumn of 1995, and was born, on a dark and stormy night [n1], in January 1996.
Richard Dawes [n2], the IT manager for the University of North London Learning Centre where the launch party and online demonstration were held, recalls the technical hiccups and the joy of launching under Windows 3.1, as well as: …someone produced a better­ than­ average buffet.
The primary purpose of Ariadne, both the print and web versions, was to publicise other Jisc­-funded Electronic Library Programme projects.
Ariadne was also a vehicle for raising awareness of digital library projects, services and issues across the education sector.
The parallel glossy print version was posted to academic libraries for the several years of its run; the web version [n3] remains open and free to access.
Ariadne, as an online, free-­to-­read vehicle for LIS news and articles, was not alone.
Other such publications emerged; sadly, many did not endure.
For example, the Katharine Sharp Review, mirrored by UKOLN [5], was: …a journal to present articles by student authors who are concerned with topics relevant to library and information science and can consist of work that has been both prepared for coursework and through independent study.
Unlike some other online LIS publications of the time, an archive of KSR content is maintained [6].
Similarly, and also originally mirrored by UKOLN, MCJournal (the Journal of Academic Media Librarianship) was produced between 1993 and 2002 with the archive also still available [7].
But others carry on.
Some, such as Chinese Librarianship [8] and JEP, the Journal of Electronic Publishing [9], came into being in the heady mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was exciting and dangerous, and cutting edge online innovations included tables, style sheets (cascading ones!)
and the blink tag.
Some still­-functioning LIS online publications are even older.
It’s worth remembering that online is not the same as the web, and there were technologies before Tim thought it would be interesting to hyperlink together some CERN documents one day.
The old librarian in the back at conferences, mumbling about Archie, Veronica, WAIS, Gopher and ‘you youngsters don’t know the hell of boolean­-searching a remote database of publications before the Telnet connection dies’, has seen it all [n4].
So, here we are.
From a time when Bill Clinton was still in his first term as President of the USA, John Major was still Prime Minister of the UK, and most people in the western world still had not used the web, to now.
Mid-January 2016, and the 75th issue and 20th birthday of Ariadne.
But today, in the prevailing climate of contracting funding for library services, sustainability is not easy.
Publications such as the Journal of Library Innovation [10] have recently ceased to produce new issues, while others such as the Journal of Creative Library Practice seek incomes [11] to remain viable.
And sustainability is even more difficult when, to get as wide a content acquisition and readership as possible, a publication chooses not to charge either the authors or the readers.
The EWOCs of Planet Librarian   In this article we focus on what could be called EWOC publications in the wider library, information science and information professional sector.
An EWOC has four characteristics: Editorial:­ there is some sort of editorial process involving people other than content authors, to filter out irrelevant, biased, poor quality, scandalous or otherwise undesirable material, for either rejection or suggested improvement by the author.
Write for free:­ there is no financial cost to the author for publishing their work through the EWOC.
Online: the publication and all of its contents, new and old, are accessible online.
Complimentary or Chargeless: there is no cost for reading the full content of any article.
Some, but not all, Open Access journals can be considered EWOCs, while many EWOCs share several attributes: As there is no mandatory income from authors or readers, EWOCs without sponsorship are usually operated by a fully volunteer effort, or by a host institution or library letting staff work on the publication during their office time.
With many LIS print­-oriented journals, the time from submission of the content to when it appears in public is often between several months and a few years.
With EWOCS this time tends to be between a few months and a few weeks, sometimes even less [n5].
Writing and editorial styles are typically more formal than with social media such as blogs, but less formal than for old school highbrow print journals.
For example, the call for submissions for code4lib [12] includes:  “Writers should aim for the middle ground between blog posts and articles in traditional refereed journals.” The positives and negatives of not charging [n6] authors to publish, or readers to read, have been thrashed around in a thousand blog posts concerning ever­-evolving online publishing and writing practice.
But if you’re happy to write in an EWOC, what then?
Some questions to ask   Have you not (yet) written for an online LIS publication?
But you have an idea, and perhaps you’ve also found an appealing online publication for your writing to appear in?
Here are ten questions to ask yourself… Have you read the publication guidelines?
A decent online publication should have, on its website, details of the target audience, types of articles, their length, some other background material and a clear contact point.
Reading the guidelines, plus as a few recent articles, should give a notion of whether it’s an ideal place for your writing.
Why are you writing this?
Seriously, why are you?
Is it to amplify results, inform the community (and which community?
), add to the sum of human knowledge, or let others know the outcome of some research or project or service?
Or to add an extra publication to your resume, or to increase your rankings or metrics on some list, or some other reason?
Or, like Rey returning Luke’s lightsaber, because it seems the right thing to do?
What are your real motivations for writing this piece?
Are you happy with the editorial process?
Some EWOCs, such as the Journal for Radical Librarianship, have detailed information on this process [13] on their website.
Can you write a good piece on this topic?
Perhaps you don’t know.
Perhaps have a frank email discussion with the editor, or see what they think of an extended abstract.
Or perhaps you think you can’t write a good piece but you actually can [n7].
Again, contact the editor to get an independent opinion.
Remember: the editor both needs and wants content.
Maybe you can provide it?
Is this publication safe?
Search around to see if there have been any unsavoury or controversial incidents of late.
Ask recent authors if the process was fine and dandy, and they are happy with how their content has been handled, edited and appears online.
Is the publication indexed, scored, ranked and so forth?
If this matters to you, then where does the publication get indexed?
Does the content within also count towards academic publishing metrics such as h­-indexes and i10­-indexes, or appear in services such as Google Scholar [14]?
Is the publication diverse enough?
Run through the list of authors for the past few issues; are you happy with the range of diversity?
Will you writing for this publication help, or hinder, this diversity?
Are the publication and yourself politically on the same page?
Before spending substantial time writing that piece extolling the virtues of neoliberal library funding, you may want to consider whether submission to The Journal of Socialist ­Marxist Librarianship is likely to result in a positive response from comrade editor, or not.
Who owns your content?
There’s own and there’s own.
Can the publication, or the owners of the publication, sell or reuse your content?
If so, do you get a cut of the profits, or the right of veto?
And can you yourself sell or reuse your content?
Seriously, have you read the guidelines?
Yes, we’ve already mentioned it, and yes, there will always be people who will ask a question answered on the publication website, or (worse) spend a lot of time writing ultimately rejected content, because they didn’t read the guidelines.
Some EWOCs to consider   Fourteen EWOCs, with their content or scope remit, are listed below.
Other EWOCs are available, as is the wider range of traditional flammable stack-filling publications, social media options such as blogging, and publications where either the content author, or the reader, has to pay.
Ariadne [16] this very publication itself.
The remit for content, as defined by the current editor, is: “Articles should be from practitioners involved with libraries, museums or archives, detailing something that they’ve actually done in one of those places that is of interest to people working in the same field elsewhere.”   Chinese Librarianship [8] this international peer­-reviewed e­-journal: “…focuses on both the practical and the theoretical aspects of Chinese librarianship.”   code{4}lib Journal [17] code4Lib is a volunteer­-driven collective of hackers, designers, architects, curators, catalogers, artists and instigators from around the world, who largely work for and with libraries, archives and museums on technology.
The mission of their journal is: “…to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.”   Communications in Information Literacy [18] this twice-annual nine year old publication is: “…devoted to advancing research, theory, and practice in the area of information literacy in higher education.”   D­-Lib [19] supported by the CNRI [20] and others, the focus of D-­Lib magazine is: “…on digital library research and development, including new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues.”   In the library with the lead pipe [22] founded seven years ago and formerly considered a peer-reviewed blog, Lead Pipe was repositioned as a professional journal in 2012.
It: “…publishes articles by authors representing diverse perspectives including educators, administrators, library support staff, technologists, and community members.”   The Journal of Creative Writing Practice [23] active since 2013, this journal: “…provides an outlet for librarians and information professionals to describe and encourage greater creativity in library and information center communications, policies, collections, instruction, and other areas of librarianship.”   The Journal of Electronic Publishing [24] founded a few months before Ariadne, JEP: “…publishes research and discussion about contemporary publishing practices, and the impact of those practices upon users.”   The Journal of eScience Librarianship [25] JESLIB, operating since 2012, is an e-journal which: “…advances the theory and practice of librarianship with a special focus on services related to data­-driven research in the physical, biological, social, and medical sciences, including public health.”   The Journal of Information Literacy [26] this is the professional journal of the CILIP (UK Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) Information Literacy Group.
The journal: “…welcomes contributions that push the boundaries of Information Literacy beyond the educational setting and examine this phenomenon as a continuum between those involved in its development and delivery and those benefiting from its provision.”   The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication [27] published by Pacific University (Oregon) libraries, the journal is particularly interested in: “…the intersection of librarianship and publishing and the resulting role of libraries in both content dissemination and content creation.”   The Journal of Radical Librarianship [28] the professional journal of the Radical Librarians Collective [29].
The scope of the journal is: “…any work that contributes to a discourse around critical library and information theory and practice.”   Libres [30] another LIS e­journal mirrored by UKOLN in the 1990s, Libres has accumulated several decades of history and content.
It is: “…devoted to research and scholarly articles in Library and Information Science.
It has a particular focus on research in emerging areas of LIS, synthesis of LIS research areas, and on novel perspectives and conceptions that advance theory and practice.”   The Political Librarian [31] a new kid on the block, this US­-oriented journal sits at the intersection of local libraries, public policy and tax policy.
The journal: “…does not limit our contributors to just those working in the field of library and information science.
We seek submissions from researchers, practitioners, community members, or others dedicated to furthering the discussion, promoting research, and helping to re-envision tax policy and public policy on the extremely local level.”   Conclusion Writing can be fun, satisfying, is useful from a career perspective, and adds to personal fortitude.
As a bonus, academic writing altruistically adds to the sum of human knowledge.
EWOCs, those online publications with editorial procedures, provide a platform where you can place your writing without having to raid your bank account or project budget (if you have actually have one).
The absence of paywalls and charges for the reader no credit card or university subscription required should provide a numerically healthy audience for your work.
On this happy birthday [n8] we wish you happy writing!
Notes [n0] Ariadne was a consortium project between the Dundee team (print version) and the UKOLN team (web version).
By team, this was to start with one person and their line manager in each place, though more staff became involved later on.
Therefore, in the early days, Ariadne was effectively a “Gang of Four”, three of whom wrote a retrospective about Ariadne in the tenth anniversary issue [35].
Alison Kilgour was the print editor and a lot of credit should always go to her for providing high quality content that went into both versions, plus dealing with the additional and considerable issues involved in print production, being a skilled roving reporter and photographer, and for being the cool head when deadlines approached.
[n1] Possibly the high point of the launch event was an email from Tim Berners­-Lee wishing Ariadne well.
Unfortunately, and to my lasting shame, like other UKOLN alumni [1] in possession of historical TBL materials, I did not keep a copy.
[n2] In an example of the small­ world syndrome that pervades the UK digital library sector, another UKOLN alumni would work in that same building and with Richard [2].
[n3] The print version was constrained by the costs of physical printing and distribution.
The web version, with the lesser constraints of just cut and pasting content as it was acquired, contained all of the content of the print version, plus additional material.
There was a slight tension in that the print version was arguably broadsheet in nature, containing e.g.
fine poetry [3], wheras the web version was arguably more of a tabloid, containing e.g.
caption competitions [4].
[n4] One of my favourite LIS conference presentation titles from back in the day was: “The truth?
You can’t handle the truth!
(about microfiche)”   [n5] The continual mode of publishing in Ariadne is for there to be no delays between when the editorial board has checked a piece as being okay for inclusion, and when it goes live (bar from the time to mark­up the piece).
Some other EWOCs, such as the Journal of Radical Librarianship, have a similar ‘publish without delay’ process.
[n6] Even if everyone volunteers their time, an EWOC still carries costs such as equipment, and content hosting.
If you recently won the Powerball or the UK National Lottery, or are a philanthropist reading this (Hi Bill and Melissa!
), or just had a great financial month, then throwing a few pounds, dollars, euros or similar in the direction of an EWOC or two could help sustain these specific wells of human knowledge.
[n7] Imposter Phenomenon or Syndrome is a much­-discussed [15] attribute in the library sector, the feeling that somehow you are not a ‘worthy’ or ‘proper’ librarian while your peers are.
Publishing a few articles in topics that interest you, especially if you aren’t contractually mandated to publish, may be one way of fighting any ‘demon of inadequacy’ in your head that holds you back.
Once you have published, you have published, whatever the demon tries to convince you afterwards.
Have a go.
Write something.
Publish and be read.
Slay the demon…   [n8] It is said that UKOLN staff [32] never missed out on the opportunity for a good party (birthday or otherwise), a good get-together, or a good buffet [33].
Acknowledgements   Thanks to Jon Knight and Becky Yoose for suggestions of candidate e-journals, e-magazines, webzines and similar, Simon Barron for his note-and-reference style which I have blatantly copied, Jeanette Winterson, George Lucas and Clare Grogan for cultural references, and above all the team at Loughborough University library and the associated editorial board for keeping Ariadne, and all of its legacy content, alive and free to read and write for.
Proposal: let’s hold the Ariadne 30th anniversary party on Moonbase Jisc [34].
References   [1] See ‘Andy Powell, Eduserv: Reflections on 10 years of the Institutional Web’ within http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/iwmw-2006-rpt   [2] Tweet by Paul Walk.
https://twitter.com/paulwalk/status/487545419514535936   [3] Poem and cartoon from Ariadne issue 1 (print and web).
https://web.archive.org/web/19980113183239/http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue1/poem/   [4] Caption Competiton from Ariadne issue 10 (web only).
https://web.archive.org/web/19980113141922/http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/caption/   [5] UKOLN mirror of Library and Information Science Journals.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980518054151/http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/   [6] Archive of The Katharine Sharp Review.
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/78128   [7] Archive of MCJournal, the Journal of Academic Media Librarianship.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/publications/mcjrnl/back.html   [8] Chinese Librarianship.
http://www.iclc.us/cliej/   [9] Reflecting on 20 Years of Electronic Publishing.
JEP: the journal of electronic publishing.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0018.401?view=text;rgn=main   [10] Journal of Library Innovation.
http://www.libraryinnovation.org/index.php/JOLI   [11] Journal of Creative Library Practice request for donations.
http://creativelibrarypractice.org/2015/12/29/please-support-the-journal   [12] code4lib call for submissions.
http://journal.code4lib.org/call-for-submissions   [13] Journal of Radical Librarianship: About this Publishing System.
https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/about/aboutThisPublishingSystem   [14] Google Scholar example of an academic researcher who has published several times in Ariadne and other LIS publications.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=tk9bOjgAAAAJ&hl=en   [15] Perceived Inadequacy: A Study of the Imposter Phenomenon among College and Research Librarians, by Clark, Vardeman and Barba.
http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2012/12/19/crl12-423.full.pdf   [16] Ariadne: Web Magazine for Information Professionals.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk   [17] code{4}lib Journal.
http://journal.code4lib.org   [18] Communications in Information Literacy.
http://www.comminfolit.org   [19] D­-Lib Magazine: The Magazine of Digital Library Research.
http://www.dlib.org   [20] CNRI: Corporation for National Research Initiatives.
https://www.cnri.reston.va.us   [21] Nobody looks at the references; here’s a bonus if you do.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jedi_librarian   [22] In the Library with the Lead Pipe.
http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org   [23] The Journal of Creative Library Practice.
http://creativelibrarypractice.org   [24] The Journal of Electronic Publishing.
http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org   [25] The Journal of eScience Librarianship.
http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib   [26] The Journal of Information Literacy.
http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL   [27] The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.
http://jlsc-pub.org   [28] The Journal of Radical Librarianship.
https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org   [29] Radical Librarians Collective.
https://rlc.radicallibrarianship.org   [30] Libres: Library and Information Science Research e­-journal.
http://libres-ejournal.info   [31] The Political Librarian.
http://everylibrary.org/political-librarian   [32] UKOLN photos on Flickr.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukoln [33] Jisc buffets have gradually grown more elaborate over the years.
A 2015 one, photographed by James Clay.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesclay/16606285339   [34] Back to the moon eLib and the future of the library.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue75/hamilton [35] Editorial Introduction to Issue 46: Ten Years of Pathfinding.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/editorial   [UKOLN staff photo from the mid-1990s, Bath Spa, England]     Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial: Passing of a Seasoned Campaigner Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial: Passing of a Seasoned Campaigner Buzz blog standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller does not introduce Ariadne Issue 60.
Understandably enough, here at UKOLN everyone's chins have been on the floor since the news of the death of Rachel Heery reached us last week.
Rachel retired as Deputy Director in 2007 and in the years that she worked as the team leader of UKOLN R&D she left an indelible mark on the field in which she worked [1] and still remained professionally active in retirement despite her illness.
Thanks to the tributes written by her friends and colleagues, I need but direct you to their descriptions of her work and way of working [2].
When I joined the organisation I soon learnt that Rachel might be absent in the geographical sense but oh so very present in cyberspace as she joined some argument proceeding on one of our internal lists well after 'end of business' (at UKOLN a term poorly understand at best) and from some hotel room in (wherever the reader may please) during one of her frequent journeys [3].
That is assuming, of course, that she had not started the argument herself which she frequently did, in pursuit, as so many have observed, of the unalloyed truth of a purpose, standard, function, deliverable or outcome.
Nor did she allow herself to be brow-beaten by blinding science which she could detect at 10,000 metres.
As a consequence, I soon worked out the reason why I might not always receive an immediate response from her over some work-related query; she would still be scaling her personal email mountain which required double crampons and an oxygen set.
Yet, mysteriously, completely unexpectedly, a response to some personal query, for example in the context of compassionate leave, would come back astonishingly quickly.
Rachel would push colleagues' concerns to the front of the queue.
Lorcan Dempsey's observation about the 'dreary paperwork, the endless proposals' [4] will doubtless strike a chord with many and Rachel waded through silos of the stuff for precisely the reasons he attributes, 'to get the job done.'
I well recall seeing her in her office at the dog-end of a Friday afternoon collating feedback from four points of the compass (and in every conceivable format) to finalise a project proposal that was due within the hour.
Though we managed to persuade her to accept some assistance, she would have battled on without complaint and her trademark imperturbability.
Of course a smart-alec management consultant would doubtless remark on the matter of leaving matters till the last moment, until someone could take him on one side and explain that it was probably the third or fourth proposal that Rachel had written that week.
Even by the time she retired in 2007 [5] I was still discovering things that Rachel would have omitted to mention to anyone and, thanks to the words of her colleagues who attended her retirement reception, one learnt of how much she had influenced new and fellow practitioners in her field and indeed the exceptional role model she unwittingly provided for young women in a male-dominated arena [6].
Asking a fellow pedestrian the way to the funeral service, I discovered, in the pouring rain, one of Rachel's neighbours and fellow parishioner.
Realising I was a colleague, she asked me what exactly Rachel, whom she seemed to know quite well, did professionally; I did my best.
Rachel's husband Mike, in his tribute during the service, fared far better, and the overwhelming majority of the congregation, I thought, was quite amazed to learn of her globe-trotting work and the importance with which it was regarded.
For our part, we, her colleagues, who had always wondered how she managed such a responsible job as well as a family, discovered she was a pillar of the community and a committed Christian who was a support to the local NCT group [7], her church's primary school, and more besides.
So even when she left us standing outside St. Bonaventure's, I realised that once more Rachel's modesty had caught me napping.
I had been dreading the service, I freely admit, but by the end that wry sense of humour and no-nonsense of hers had worked its will and I left, wondering how on earth she managed it all, and all so deftly.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 60.
References Tribute from UKOLN colleagues http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/rachel-heery-tribute/ Rachel Bruce, 31 July 2009 http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2009/07/31/rachel-heery/ Lorna M. Campbell, Lorna's JISC CETIS blog, 28 July 2009 http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/07/28/rachel-heery/ Stu Weibel, Weibel Lines, 28 July 2009 http://weibel-lines.typepad.com/weibelines/2009/07/rachel-heery-a-remembrance.html {C}{C}{C}{C}{C} Andy Powell's blip: Monday 27 July 2009:" And rest" http://www.blipfoto.com/view.php?id=337042&month=7&year=2009 Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog, 29 July 2009 http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001991.html 'Rachel Heery Retires', Focus on UKOLN Newsletter, December 2007, Issue 19 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/focus/issue19/#19.0 Sarah Currier comment on Lorna Campbell's blog entry (c.f.
2. above) http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/07/28/rachel-heery/#comments NCT (National Childbirth Trust) http://www.nctpregnancyandbabycare.com/about-us Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 60: Passing of a Seasoned Campaigner" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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e-Framework Implements New Workplan Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines e-Framework Implements New Workplan Buzz data software framework infrastructure repositories preservation e-learning soa twitter ict uportal interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ian Dolphin and Phil Nicholls describe recent and forthcoming developments from the e-Framework Partnership for Education and Research.
The e-Framework for Education and Research was founded in 2005 as a partnership between the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, and the then Department of Education Science and Technology (DEST) in Australia.
Since the foundation of the e-Framework, a major government reorganisation in Australia has replaced DEST with the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), and the initial partnership has expanded to include SURF in the Netherlands, and the New Zealand Ministry of Education/Te Tahuhu o te Matauranga.
The e-Framework built on earlier JISC-DEST partnership work in the e-Learning Framework.
It aims, through collaboration, to address the challenges involved in a service-oriented approach to software analysis and design in the broader context of learning, teaching, research and administration.
Choice of the term ‘service-oriented approach’ was, and is, deliberate.
(It is often represented by lower case soa, in contrast to the upper-case Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA).
Whilst the distinction may appear subtle; one perspective of that distinction is that it is designed essentially to encapsulate the difference between the route and the destination.
Service Oriented Approaches and Service Oriented Architecture …Service Oriented Architecture is described by Wikipedia as providing; ‘…methods for systems development and integration where systems package functionality as interoperable services.
A SOA infrastructure allows different applications to exchange data with one another.
Service-orientation aims at a loose coupling of services with operating systems, programming languages and other technologies that underlie applications.’ [1] Service-orientation builds on earlier approaches to systems architecture in presupposing smaller, more flexible and loosely coupled elements, which can be re-composed and combined to support a wider range of requirements than a traditional application.
In a general, business sense, the implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture is regarded as providing the following benefits; Acting to eliminate code redundancy, and an accompanying reduction in the costs of maintenance Reducing the costs associated with integration Increasing the reuse of assets and services Increasing flexibility and agility, and reducing risk Whilst the promise of Service Oriented Architecture is considerable, many commercial entities and educational institutions shy away from an approach that suggests that they replace their application infrastructure wholesale.
Extracting the essential characteristic of service orientation, that ‘services can be implemented once and accessed by different applications when needed’ [2] leaves other, more gradual routes to the realisation of benefits prior to establishing a complete SOA.
This is the principle reason the e-Framework chose to use the term ‘service-oriented approach’ to describe its early activities in this area.
The benefits of a service-oriented approach are often posed, rather starkly, as ‘business benefits’.
Whilst this is frequently merely an acceptable shorthand, Patrick O’Reilly, the Head of Information Services and Technology at the University of Bolton points beyond this in terms of the flexibility a service-oriented approach offers within education; ‘The problem is that Universities are not selling commodities.
If Amazon sells a kettle it can use the same set of processes as it uses to sell a book… The value Amazon adds to the commodity is in the product reputation system, the tailored recommendations, the dispatch options.
This is clever stuff, but not complex.
There is limited process variety: only commodity variety.
Universities too have standard processes: validating a course, marketing a course, recruiting, enrolling a student, collecting the fee, claiming the funding, accrediting the learning, graduating the student.
But the curriculum is too complex to be a commodity, and is characterised by huge variety: the different approaches of the academic disciplines, personalised in the delivery, varying in the assessment methods, adjusted for learning styles.’ [3] To which might be added, that ICT-enabled or -supported curriculum delivery, and perhaps more broadly still, the opportunities presented by ICT for transforming learning, teaching and research, are still highly experimental and barely defined, let alone commodified.
In this context, increasing the flexibility of ICT systems to support a range of processes, without the costs associated with constantly re-inventing such systems from scratch would appear highly beneficial.
Yet despite this promise, and continued analyst reports of the increased adoption of SOA in business, adoption across education appears markedly slower than the commercial sector.
Several factors may be affecting this, including the front-loaded costs associated with process analysis and redesign, process ownership and related governance issues within an institution, and sheer technical complexity and lack of expertise.
It is clearly important, in this context, to ensure that the early experiences of service-oriented approaches to systems design in education are shared effectively.
In part this necessitates an approach that attempts to abstract and generalise the lessons of service-oriented work from a particular domain or work area and apply those lessons in another.
This is the essence of the technical approach developed by the e-Framework Partnership an approach which is as neutral as possible, bridging the worlds of learning, teaching, research and administration, and which does this, as far as possible, across national boundaries.
A New Work Plan In the summer of 2008 the e-Framework appointed an International Director, Ian Dolphin, to lead the development of a rounded international workplan.
The new workplan substantively agreed at an International Partners meeting on November 2008 has two primary areas of focus.
The first is concerned with securing validation of the use of the service-oriented approach suggested by the e-Framework.
The second re-affirms the e-Framework as a strategic partnership of the agencies involved, and involves an open exploration of the potential for collaboration in other areas.
It is entirely appropriate that the technical approaches suggested by the e-Framework be subjected to detailed and open evaluation and validation.
An overarching technical model is in the final stages of internal review, and will be released publicly in May 2009.
This provides a coherent perspective of how the e-Framework components relate and work together; it is designed to make the technical approach more approachable.
The model is also an essential pre-requisite of review and validation of the contents of the e-Framework Service Knowledgebase.
The Knowledgebase currently contains around sixty documentary artefacts from a variety of projects and activities across the partnership.
A further sixty or so artefacts are being added in coming months, as they move through a streamlined peer review process.
This represents a considerable body of distilled experience.
The intention, then, is to work with the community to assess the value of the e-Framework service-oriented approach at both the level of the overall model, and the experience the Knowledgebase seeks to capture and share, in as wide a range of contexts and domains as possible.
A Strategic Partnership Whilst the service-oriented approach developed by the e-Framework remains a clear strategic priority, it is likely to be joined by other strands of activity as the partnership continues to develop.
These activities will be governed largely by the principle of subsidiarity; the Partnership will generally undertake activities which could not better handled at a national or local level.
There are early examples of potential joint work areas.
The partners share common strategic interests in the development and adoption of common technical specifications and standards to promote interoperability, and are establishing ways of collaborating more closely in international standards bodies.
Further joint work areas will be identified by mapping the technical and innovation activity undertaken by the partners at a strategic level.
It is already possible to determine a degree of commonality in several work areas, such as support for research collaboration, green computing, the development of repositories of research outputs, and a common interest in addressing the tangle of issues around storage and preservation of research data.
In the current economic climate, sharing strategic approaches, and identifying areas of common interest and potential collaboration makes profoundly good sense.
References Wikipedia: Service-oriented architecture, retrieved 28 April 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Oriented_Architecture e-Framework Overview: Overview of the e-Framework for Education and Research http://www.e-framework.org/Default.aspx?tabid=925 1.2 A Briefing for Directors and Heads of IT Services by Patrick O’Reilly, Head of Information Services & Technology, University of Bolton http://soa.cetis.ac.uk/soa-pack/section-1/1.2%20A%20Briefing%20for%20Directors%20and%20Heads%20of%20IT%20services Author Details Ian Dolphin International Director e-Framework Partnership for Education and Research Email: i.dolphin@e-framework.org Web site: http://www.e-framework.org/ Ian Dolphin is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Sakai Project and Foundation, and of JASIG, the parent organisation of uPortal and CAS.
He is currently seconded from his role as Head of e-Strategy at the University of Hull to the e-Framework Partnership for Education and Research as International Director.
This article is contributed in an individual capacity.
Ian can be contacted at i.dolphin at e-framework.org or as iandolphin24 via Twitter.
The e-Framework can be found at http://www.e-framework.org/ or or as eFramework via Twitter.
Phil Nicholls Technical Editor International e-Framework for Education and Research Psydev Ltd Email: editor@e-framework.org Phil Nicholls is Director of the Psydev Consultancy.
He has worked in the e-learning and digital libraries domains as a developer and consultant for approximately fifteen years.
Phil’s interests lie in testing and service oriented software.
He also works part time for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.
Return to top Article Title: “e-Framework Implements New Workplan” Author: Ian Dolphin and Phil Nicholls Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue59/dolphin/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Networked Library Service Layer: Sharing Data for More Effective Management and Cooperation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Networked Library Service Layer: Sharing Data for More Effective Management and Cooperation Buzz data software rdf framework database rss atom portal archives metadata digitisation standardisation identifier schema blog repositories copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing opac z39.50 rfc aggregation syndication uri marc21 openurl sru z39.88 mashup licence ftp authentication interoperability algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Janifer Gatenby identifies criteria for determining which data in various library systems could be more beneficially shared and managed at a network level.
Libraries’ collections fall into three parts: physical, digital and licensed.
These are managed by multiple systems, ILS (Integrated Library System), ERM (Electronic Records Management), digital management, digital repositories, resolvers, inter-library loan and reference.
At the same time libraries are increasingly co-operating in collecting and storing resources.
This article examines how to identify data that is best located at global, collective and local levels.
An example is explored, namely the benefits of moving data from different local systems to the network level to manage acquisition of the total collection as a whole and in combination with consortia members.
Also covered is how to achieve rapid development of standards to plug existing gaps that are hindering system interoperability.
Evolution of Library Management Systems The integrated library management system (ILMS or just ILS) was conceived in the 1970s when library collections were purely physical and library users visited the libraries to consult and borrow the materials.
The ILS was conceived as an ideal state where all systems within the library would share common data, centered on bibliographic metadata describing the collection.
It was the successful solution to duplication in separate cataloguing, acquisitions and circulation systems and, as bonus by-products, it made possible management statistics and the online public access catalogue (OPAC)[1].
The library’s ILS operated as an independent and isolated system even within the library’s own institution.
Interaction with external libraries and systems was limited.
Union catalogues existed for co-operative cataloguing but the records were downloaded to the library’s ILS and public discovery was mainly at the local level, supplemented by abstract and index databases (A&I).
The union catalogues were also the vehicle for inter-library loans which was usually seen as a supplementary service for privileged users.
Purchase orders were sent electronically to library suppliers.
The central importance of the ILS remained relatively unchanged until the turn of the twentieth century but the ILS evolved to interface with self-service and theft-detection systems and institutional authentication systems.
Portals came into favour with the capacity to present users with one interface to search multiple targets, typically the local library, A&I databases and the databases of other libraries.
However, most significant changes have arisen in the period roughly since 1998 with Internet, the World Wide Web and the growth of digital publishing eliciting new, more powerful portals, systems that manage electronic licences, digital repositories, physical inter-library loans, resolvers that link from citations to full-text and question-and-answer services.
Thus, somewhere in the period 1998-2008, the ILS no longer merited its capital “I”: it no longer integrated a library’s processes in one system.
Large libraries now have multiple systems, which are often better coupled with external data sources than with their peer systems.
Thus the original problem of the 1970s has re-manifested itself.
Andrew Pace [2] put it this way: “We end up with a non-integrated or disintegrating suite of services, databases, lists and content … which are a huge mess”.
Lorcan Dempsey [3] separates the library collection into three; the bought collection (managed by the ILS), the licensed collection (managed by the electronic resource management system ERM and the resolver) and the digital collection (managed sometimes by multiple systems, e.g.
one for digitised materials and one for the institution repository).
These multiple systems are increasingly expensive and the ensemble is clumsy to maintain.
Current Library Priorities As libraries respond to the challenges of a 3-part collection and a user community with expectations of national and increasingly global discovery and delivery, they are forming into larger co-operatives.
Consortia are forming making virtual shared physical collections, treating all user requests equally, allowing unmediated requests.
Examples include the PiCarta [4] service of the Dutch union catalogue, GBV [5] and Libraries Australia’s [6] copies direct.
The consortia may operate via union catalogues, such as WorldCat [7], TEL [8], Libraries Australia, GBV, Sudoc [9] or via virtual union catalogues.
Co-operative stores are also emerging and now in the U.S., 21% of library stores are for collectives [10][11].
Consortia are also sharing digital resources and rationalising digital subscriptions, though as Müller warns [12], licensing too often poses barriers to inter-library access.
Examples of digitisation co-operatives are numerous, including The European Digital Library (9 national libraries) [13], Louisiana Digital Library (19 libraries) [14], Memòria Digital de Catalunya (17 libraries)[15] and the Arizona Memory Project [16].
With physical collections, close library co-operation was geographically bound, often constrained by the limits of an internal courier service.
This is not so anymore: libraries can make alliances to share electronically with other libraries anywhere on the globe with similar or complementary collections.
Thus international co-operation has moved from the sidelines to centre stage.
This has resulted in a phenomenal growth of WorldCat [7] in 2006 and 2007 with the loading of large union catalogues from Europe, Australasia and Africa and the former RLG [17] database.
In recognition of user preferences for digital material that can be delivered immediately and remotely, libraries are now realising that they must shift their focus from the physical to the digital collection [18] by allocating more of the budget to digital collection and services.
To this end they are now increasingly collecting digital materials, buying licence access to digital materials and creating their own digital content.
Their main library management systems based on architecture conceived in the 1970s for entirely physical collections are not well adapted to the collection, management, exposure and delivery of digital material.
Matching Systems to Priorities The architecture of the ILS is a product of its time when storage was expensive, communications were slow, narrow-band and less robust, where the World-Wide Web was non-existent and terms such as social networking, mashups and syndication had totally different meanings.
The ILS was designed to ingest data (‘into the building’) but not to emit it, nor to access external data.
Yet now, from the standpoint of libraries, linking externally is imperative and the nature of the links is diverse; links to other libraries, services, search engines, social network sites, archives, discovery sites, encyclopaedias, virtual learning environments (VLEs), e-commerce systems, distant learning systems etc.
It is time to re-examine the architecture of the ILS for smoother integration into the current environment.
The Digital Library Federation [19] has taken the initiative via two groups, the ILS Discovery Interface Group and the Electronic Resource Management Initiative, both producing recommendations for interoperability of ILS and ERM systems.
These recommendations seek to make an immediate improvement in data availability and reusability.
At the same time it is also necessary to take a longer-term view by re-considering the data within all current library systems, including those that grew up alongside the ILS, as the ILS itself changes.
Optimum Data Storage One way to re-examine the architecture of the ILS and other library systems is to look at the data that are held and assess the optimum level of storage for those data.
Are the data sharable, poolable or private?
The following characteristics indicate that there are benefits in sharing or aggregating data: data needing more effective exposure in a Web-scale site (e.g.
bibliographic metadata) data, which if aggregated, are more likely to attract users and user contributions data being managed multiple times redundantly (e.g.
suppliers’ details, supplier suggestions) data, aggregated into collective knowledge, that can be used to render tasks less complicated or more accurate (e.g.
serial prediction) data, which if aggregated, make possible new knowledge via deduction or mining (e.g.
holdings count indicating rareness and popularity, supplier performance, enriched name authority records) data, which if aggregated, permit the most effective and efficient management of links and imported enriched data aggregated data permitting data collections to be compared and assessed and facilitating the management of combined collections Data that are not sharable include: Dynamic data Sensitive data Data that are difficult to integrate for technical reasons (different scripts, transliteration schemes, data requiring specific collection and management interfaces) Data that are separate for political, cultural and copyright reasons In the case of dynamic and sensitive data, summary, snapshot and anonymised data may be shared where there is a perceived benefit.
There is a clear need to define data at multiple levels: globally sharable data (e.g.
bibliographic metadata, holdings, issue level holdings, suppliers, statistics, reference query-and-answer pairs) Data that can be shared within one or more co-operatives to which the library belongs (e.g.
selection / rejection decisions, weeding reasons) Local data that are not shared (e.g.
budgets, invoice details, some user information) The following tables illustrate the various categories of library data that are managed by various local and network systems.
The columns indicate various data types and data sources.
The two rows underneath the columns represent enquiry and maintenance functions performed on the data.
Core data Mined data Other harvested data Articles Social data Links * direct members * union catalogues * QA dept * Dewey * QP history * audience level * holdings count work + levels * collections * identities * fiction finder * TOC * reviews * biographies * publisher data * circulation data * tags * reviews * lists * work clusters * external links from URIs * external links via search add online, add in background, upload / harvest, modify / enhance, download, feeds enquire online / enquire by programme Table 1: Bibliographic and Authority Data supporting Search, Present, Select, Evaluate, Annotate, Download Discovery operates increasingly at a network level.
The ILS is designed to be the first point of discovery but that is not the first choice of users.
OCLC’s report on The perceptions of libraries and information resources [20] indicates that only 2% use a library portal as the first point of call whereas 84% start in a search engine.
These statistics have been largely digested by libraries and as a result they are increasingly exposing their collections in search engines, either directly or via worlcat.org [21].
Shunning the OPAC of ILS systems, some libraries have adopted independent portals such as Encore [22], Primo [23], Endeca ProFind [24] and WorldCat Local, a localised view of worldcat.org [7].
However the path from discovery to delivery is still far from smooth for the user.
One need is to position the ILS at a secondary point in the discovery-to-delivery sequence; that is, to make locational, availability and statistical usage information available to external discovery and delivery systems.
Bibliographic Holdings data Knowledge Base * Dbase Sources * article issue links * serial patterns Library Registry * services * policies * resolvers * OPACs * addresses Copyright Registry Registry of digital masters User data * addresses * courses * privileges * preferences * payments * circulation add online, add in background, upload / harvest, modify / enhance, download, feeds enquire online / enquire by programme / access Table 2: Locate and Deliver; User circulation Most of these data files reside at the local level but are candidates for moving to the network level, particularly registry and knowledge base information.
User data and circulation are exceptions, but external access should be possible.
Circulation log information stripped of borrower identification may be loaded centrally and combined to indicate popularity of resources.
The Danish Danbib [25] and Slovenian COBISS [26] systems collect loan statistics from their nation’s local library systems and combine them with the union catalogue to provide services such as the Slovenian “best read books”.
Suppliers * addresses * contacts * contracts * performance * parameters & rules Holdings * status * usage history * issue level holdings Subscriptions * physical / online * aggregator * duration * conditions * packages Copyright Registry Registry of digital masters Orders * collection policies * selections * orders * invoices * funds & budgets add online, add in background, upload / harvest, modify / enhance, download, feeds enquire online / enquire by programme / access Table 3: Acquisitions, Collection and Resource Management Collection Acquisition and Management at the Network Level As library collections are increasingly shared, there may be significant advantages (in terms of both cost and efficiency) in moving more acquisitions and licensing data and processes to the network level where they can be shared among the ILS, ERM and repositories and with other libraries.
Moreover, libraries are finding their ILS acquisitions modules inadequate for managing the acquisition of the newer parts of whole collections.
There is already a clear need for the acquisitions of the three parts of the collection to be managed as a whole; moving data to the network, thereby enabling shared network services, is one solution.
Storage and budgetary demands are pressing libraries to collect, digitise, store and preserve collectively.
Network level data facilitate co-operative selection and collection building.
Moreover, at the network level, it is easier to enhance the data pool with more evaluative content and to provide seamless links with user discovery and requesting services, and with user reference services.
Moreover, the data available to the user are also enriched as the collection strengths of libraries in relation to other libraries become more explicit.
At first sight, the supplier file (including providers, vendors and licensors [27]) is an obvious candidate for network level data.
Typically, ILS systems have discrete files including suppliers’ names, physical and electronic addresses, contacts and other such information that are manually keyed and maintained in each instance of an ILS and ERM.
Exploring this further, there may be advantages in pooling and making available information on materials reviewed (and review comments), selected (and the budget to which the resource was attributed), rejected (and reasons), and re-located to storage (with reasons, e.g.
low recent circulation).
Selections could be linked to the reviews that inspired them or could be flagged as a user’s direct request, possibly with a link to a reference enquiry.
To assist selection, centralised metadata could be enriched by data that are mined, loaded or linked, indicating such things as in-print status, copyright status, sales and circulation statistics.
OCLC’s WorldCat Selection service [28] is a start in this direction.
It groups suggestions provided by a growing number of suppliers, then downloads consolidated selections to the library’s ILS for completion of the order process.
This circumvents each library needing either to pre-load the suggestions or to visit each supplier’s Web site individually; thus it gives some efficiencies, but more could be achieved by better ILS integration and by centralised access to non-financial and non-sensitive information.
A complementary service is OCLC’s Collection Analysis service [29] which allows the comparison of collections and as such can serve as a basic tool underlying co-operative collections.
Another area where ILS data have not been shared but could be is in the area of serials prediction.
It is necessary to predict the date of appearance of the next issue of a serial in order to know when to claim non-receipt.
Failure to claim in time results in gaps that frequently cannot be closed for serials with limited print runs.
Complex patterns are recorded for each serial, often far more complex than represented in MARC21, that are used by ILS systems to predict both the citation (enumeration and chronology) and appearance date of the next issue of a serial, including indexes, supplements, tables of contents and other special issues.
The algorithms to do this are very complicated and remain only successful up to a point.
All of which represents an obvious candidate for a Web service; one that could be much smarter if it knew the latest issues received by a large number of libraries.
If serial check-in data could be recorded at a network level, extending network holdings to the issue level, the amount of guess-work in serial claims could be significantly reduced.
It would be better still if the issue could be linked (directly or via a resolver) to a table of contents and available online article content, if applicable.
Andrew Pace [30] proposes a more radical approach to serials management.
Electronic serials do not require serials prediction, and where serials are released in both print and electronic formats, claims for late or missing physical issues can be based on the existence or absence of the electronic issue.
Thus the art of serial prediction becomes redundant for a large part of most libraries’ serial collections.
Full Text * articles * datasets * digitised collections * locations Full Text Links * union catalogue * authority files * biographies Full Text Rights Data * owners Preservation Data add online, add in background, upload / harvest, modify / enhance, download, feeds enquire online / enquire by programme / access Table 4: Digital Data The optimal place to store and maintain data could be local, regional, national or global, depending on the nature of the data and infrastructures available.
And data may be maintained at one location then stored or replicated in another, or summaries of local data may be made available to a networked environment.
At first glance, dynamic data such as physical circulation and private information, e.g.
financial, should be at the local level; though historic summaries and statistics could be made available to the network level.
In a similar vein, acquisitions information underlying the management and growth of the collective collection, with the exception of financial data, needs to be managed at a network level, possibly regional, national or thematic.
These collections may be exposed to multiple Web sites; a global stage where they are more easily discovered and accessed.
As the data are stored at various levels, systems need to adapt to address the data wherever they are located.
Need for Standardisation Moving data to the network level will help to disentangle the ILS, ERM, resolver, digital management, digital repository and reference systems and make their data accessible to all systems, where the network system bears the brunt of interoperability.
There is the potential for the data to be of higher value in a wellmanaged network environment.
Disentangling the data, however, necessitates a standards layer that does not currently exist.
NISO [31] started a Web services initiative, VIEWS [32] but this has lain dormant since 2004.
The fastest way to achieve this layer, and possibly the best way, is to encourage adoption by using existing extensible standards.
Arguably, all interoperation can be modelled as either enquiry or as maintenance (additions, updates, deletions).
Even transactions within protocols such as interlibrary loans can be divided into notifications of action taken or request for action and these can be conveyed as changed data fields.
Thus, if a data schema can be developed and agreed for each class of data to interoperate, the brunt of the standardisation will have been accomplished.
The same schemas can be used for enquiry and maintenance.
This has the potential to reduce standards efforts significantly and to achieve interoperability as a reality in a more timely way.
There are several standards offering enquiry, in particular Z39.50 [33], OpenSearch [34] and SRU [35].
In addition NCIP [36] and OpenURL [37] provide information on single records.
SRU is arguably the most suitable standard to consider, as it is easily extensible and has the best architecture capable of handling result sets and their manipulation [38].
It includes metadata about the result set including record count and result set position.
SRU extensions allow the definition of different search context sets (access points or indexes) and record schemas.
Several SRU elements needing definition can already been identified.
These include: defining extra result set data to include facets in the form of SRU URLs record schema for work-level records including embedded SRU URLs for ‘opening the cluster’ SRU record context sets for Registry enquiry Holdings Reference Knowledge base Request Record schemas for Registry enquiry Holdings (the new standard ISO 20775 [39] has been designed for this) Reference Knowledge base Request (similar to or same as Request Notification Message) For each distinct dataset a search context set and a response data schema will meet the requirements.
The process for registering and achieving consensus is considerably easier than for a full standard and can incorporate a trial use period.
Similarly for data addition and maintenance there are existing standards that can be extended to encompass new data schemas.
Such standards include OAI-PMH [23], Atom syndication format [40] and RSS [41], so-called PULL mechanisms where a database makes the data available for external systems to harvest and does not monitor the subsequent use of the data.
The widely employed FTP [42] is either a PUSH or a PULL mechanism.
SRU record update [43] and the Atom Publishing Protocol [44] are PUSH mechanisms designed for a system to update another in real time or background as if it were an online client.
SRU record update allows for the exchange of diagnostics and linking identifiers.
All these standards support multiple data schemas.
Conclusion Moving appropriate data to a network level data with basic enquiry and update Web services is a first step in re-engineering library systems.
In fact it is not only the ILS that needs re-engineering, but also the newer solutions that, like the ILS, have created silos of data, often locked inside proprietary systems and databases.
It is important for libraries to own and control their data resources; to be free to share them, provide access to them and to expose the data.
It is less important that the libraries own or run the software that manipulates and manages the data.
References OPAC: Online Public Access Catalogue.
Typically a module supplied with an ILS system.
Pace, Andrew K. Private discussion, 2008.
Dempsey, Lorcan (2007) The network reconfigures the library systems environment.
Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog, 6 July 2007. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001379.html PiCarta: Online database comprising the Dutch Union catalogue and article content http://www.oclc.org/nl/nl/picarta/ GBV: Web portal of the GBV Common Library Network of the German States Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, Thüringen and the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage http://www.gbv.de/vgm/ Libraries Australia: Public interface of the national union catalogue of Australia.
http://librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au/apps/kss/ WorldCat: Union catalogue of global dimensions managed by OCLC http://www.worldcat.org/ TEL: The European Library.
Catalogue of 44 European national libraries.
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/ Sudoc: Système universitaire de documentation (Sudoc) http://www.sudoc.abes.fr/ Payne, Lizanne, Library storage facilities and the future of print collections in North America.
2007.
Shared print collections program, OCLC Programs and Research, 2007. http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/collectivecoll/sharedprint/default.htm OCLC is a non-profit, membership, computer library service and research organisation http://www.oclc.org/about/ Müller, Harald, Rights and distribution: legal problems of document delivery by libraries.
Keynote paper IFLA ILDS Singapore, October 2007. http://www.nlbconference.com/ilds/speakers-muller.htm European Digital Library Project: A Targeted Project funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme and coordinated by the German National Library http://www.edlproject.eu/ Louisiana Digital Library http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/ Memòria Digital de Catalunya http://www.cbuc.cat/mdc/ Arizona Memory Project http://azmemory.lib.az.us/ RLG: Research Libraries Group.
Now a part of OCLC.
http://www.oclc.org/community/rlg/ National and State Libraries Australasia.
The big bang: creating the new library universe, 2007 http://www.nsla.org.au/publications/papers/2007/pdf/NSLA.Discussion-Paper-20070629-The.Big.Bang..creating.the.new.library.universe.pdf Digital Library Federation Electronic Resource Management Initiative Phase 2 White paper on interoperability between acquisitions modules of ILS and ERM systems, 2008 http://www.diglib.org/standards/ERMI_Interop_Report_20080108.pdf Also: Draft recommendations, Digital Library Federation ILS Discovery Interface Group, 2008 http://project.library.upenn.edu/confluence/download/attachments/5963787/ILS-DI-Snapshot-2008-Feb15.doc Perceptions of libraries and information resources, OCLC, 2005 http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm Accessing library material through Google and other Web sites.
Gatenby, Janifer.
Paper for ELAG (European Library Automation Group), May 2007, Barcelona, Spain.
http://elag2007.upf.edu/papers/gatenby_2.pdf Encore: Library portal system provided by Innovative Interfaces http://www.encoreforlibraries.com/ OAI-PMH: Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html Endeca Profind: Enterprise providing an Information Access Platform http://endeca.com/ Danbib: National union catalogue of Denmark http://www.dbc.dk/top/top_danbib_eng.html COBISS: National union catalogue of Slovenia http://www.cobiss.net/cobiss_platform.htm These files do not typically include publisher data which are buried within bibliographic description in a non-normalised form and thus difficult to parse and reuse.
WorldCat Selection: A centralised selection service managed by OCLC http://www.oclc.org/selection/ Collection Analysis: Service provided by OCLC to allow libraries to analyse their collections in relation to other libraries http://www.oclc.org/collectionanalysis/ Pace, Andrew K. Electronic Resource Management: Homegrown perspective 2005 http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/e-matrix/presentations.html NISO: National Information Standards Organization (USA) http://www.niso.org/ Views: Vendor Initiative for enabling web services.Hosted by NISO.
http://www.niso.org/committees/VIEWS/VIEWS-info.html Z39.50: Information retrieval protocol http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ OpenSearch: A collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation developed by A9, an Amazon subsidiary http://www.opensearch.org/Home SRU: Search and Retrieve via URL.
Search mechanism hosted by the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ NCIP: Z39.83 Circulation Interchange Protocol managed by NISO.
http://www.niso.org/standards/standard_detail.cfm?std_id=728 OpenURL: Z39.88 2004 The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services http://alcme.oclc.org/openurl/servlet/OAIHandler?verb=ListSets SRU updates Z39.50.
NCIP does not handle a result set; OpenSearch does not have standard searches and can be viewed as a subset of SRU; and OpenURL is not intended to be a search mechanism.
ISO Holdings schema ISO 20775.
Information and Documentation: Schema for Holdings Information http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=39735 Atom syndication format http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt RSS: formally “RDF Site Summary”, (known colloquially as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification FTP: File transfer protocol: IETF RFC 959 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc959 SRU record update: Update mechanism developed by the SRU community, hosted by the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/record-update/ Atom Publishing Protocol http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt Author Details Janifer Gatenby Research Integration and Standards OCLC Email: janifer.gatenby@oclc.org Web site: http://www.oclc.org/ Return to top Article Title: “The Networked Library Service Layer: Sharing Data for More Effective Management and Co-operation” Author: Janifer Gatenby Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/gatenby/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Mobilising the Internet Detective Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mobilising the Internet Detective Buzz data mobile software java wireless stylesheet css accessibility browser blog repositories video aggregation opera e-learning php mp3 sms mobi podcast facebook iphone ipad android research Citation BibTex RIS Diana Massam, Andrew Priest and Caroline Williams describe a recent project to adapt the online Internet Detective tutorial, to deliver a user-friendly mobile site which reflects their market research into user preferences for mobile content.
'The mobile phone is undoubtedly [a] strong driving force, a behaviour changer…Library users will soon be demanding that every interaction can take place via the cell phone' [1] The move towards mobile technologies in libraries and in the wider educational environment is gathering increasing momentum as we enter a new decade.
This is reflected in the huge amount of Web content, research reports and innovative projects devoted to mobile learning and mobile applications in libraries which can be found via a quick search on Google.
This article describes our own foray at Intute into the world of mobilisation, via a JISC Rapid Innovations [2] project in 2009.
The aim of the Mobile Internet Detective Project was to adapt Intute's well respected and popular online Internet Detective tutorial [3] to develop a prototype application suitable for access on a mobile device.
As well as investigating the provision of more flexible access for end-users, the project was also intended to act as a test bed to inform the potential re-development of other JISC services based at Mimas [4], (the home of Intute) and build on existing expertise in mobile technologies within the organisation.
The foundation stone for this work was a qualitative market research programme commissioned specifically for the project.
This enabled us to find out directly about the needs of students in Higher Education in the UK and their own views on the use of mobile technologies for learning.
The research provided invaluable insights and also sounded some notes of caution which informed our subsequent work on standards and content for mobile applications.
Why Mobile?
Confirming the influence of mobile technologies in an educational context, the 2010 edition of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report [5] once again highlighted mobile computing as a key emerging technology likely to become mainstream for educational institutions within the next 12 months.
This move towards mobile learning is also reflected elsewhere.
For example the report Student Reflections on Lifelong e-Learning [6] in 2009 found that: ...students demonstrated a growing maturity in their choices of technology and their use of online tools to support their learning towards the end of their courses' and 'students used their own technologies such as mobile phones and mp3 players creatively as an integral part of learning.
Within this context, our colleagues at Mimas have already demonstrated expertise in the arena of mobile learning, with the mobile version of the Hairdressing Training service [7] one of the winners of the Handheld Learning Awards 2008.
Intute's successful bid for a JISC Rapid Innovations Grant reflected a commitment to investigate extending the reach of our services to include mobile users who, as the mobile Internet has developed, have come to expect higher standards when browsing on their handsets.
Within this context, it seemed clear that the needs and behaviour of a mobile surfer differ greatly from those of a desktop surfer; so the Mobile Internet Detective Project aimed to deliver a user-friendly mobile site that was fast and inexpensive to load, providing the right content, presented in the right order and with an adapted layout.
Methodology The Mobile Internet Detective Project was one of around 40 JISC Rapid Innovations projects in the Information Environment Programme.
As the projects were headlined as Rapid Innovations, it was refreshing to see JISC adopting an innovative approach to project management and reporting, with an emphasis on building a community, sharing information and ensuring, as one of the project requirements, that code was made available as open source using a code repository for each project.
This streamlined project documentation was implemented at the outset by JISC, using Google Docs to provide information and collect participant feedback on the new approach.
A particularly pleasing aspect was the requirement for projects to maintain a blog throughout the life of the project, with the added benefit of the combined posts making up the final report, with suggested headings and tags provided.
Whether an update, reporting on user testing or design considerations, the tags enabled the aggregation of posts in one place, keeping the community updated easily and in a timely fashion [8].
Another JISC-inspired innovation was a two-day event held in Manchester for software developers and project representatives.
The event, entitled Rapid Innovation in Development [9], was arranged to bring together the innovations projects in order to demonstrate their outputs, share ideas and also to help the delegates refine their project pitches with a view to securing more funding for further development.
Overall the two days provided a series of lightning talks and 'birds of a feather' sessions on issues such as Google Android, linked data and repositories.
Delegates also heard an introduction to the DevCSI [10], a new project with the aim of establishing a recognisable sector-wide community of developers.
Market Research Engagement with users was a key aspect of the project from the start.
The original Internet Detective online tutorial is aimed at helping undergraduate students to assess the academic validity of Web sites.
Whilst there are many assumptions made about how students use the Internet and about preferences for mobile technology we wanted to hear the voices and opinions of student users themselves on these subjects.
Intute therefore commissioned consultants to undertake a market research programme.
This took place in September 2009 in Manchester and London.
In total 48 undergraduate students participated in four focus groups and four in-depth interviews.
Participants were drawn from a range of red-brick and new universities, studying a wide variety of academic disciplines.
The research had two main objectives: to provide detailed feedback on the proposed service based on student user needs; to determine user requirements and the technical specification for a prototype.
During the focus groups and in-depth interviews the students had access to the Internet Detective tutorial through laptops and were presented with a mock-up of the Mobile Internet Detective site.
The research revealed some fascinating detail about how students use the Internet for their academic work, their views about using mobile phones to access the Internet and some strong opinions about the content and design of mobile Internet Web sites.
Using the Internet for Academic Research Students regarded access to the Internet as an integral part of their academic life: (I use the Internet) for absolutely everything.
Why walk to the library if it's on the Internet.
You just flick through it.
Your university's signed up to all these journals and the journals are available to buy but you just look it up on the Internet.
You don't even bother going to the library.
(London Focus Group, female) Most students had received some sort of training in using the Internet for academic research but the quality of this training varied greatly.
For some it had been part of a Key Skills module at school, others were given the option of attending seminars run by their university library and some received more informal guidance from tutors.
The training received was often of fairly limited scope and there was a perceived skills gap in many students who were not aware of the additional support and guidance available to them as their studies continued.
Views on the Mobile Internet While ownership of mobile phones was virtually universal, the extent to which students accessed the Internet using their phones varied greatly.
Only a small number ever used their mobiles for academic work.
Cost and slow access to the Internet were identified as the main reasons for not using the mobile Internet.
The availability of free, faster access via a PC at university or at home meant that there was little need to use mobiles for anything other than social purposes such as email or Facebook.
Another factor was that very few students possessed new telephones with large screens, or had a contract with free Internet access and they also referred to the lack of compatibility of many Web sites with mobile phones.
Mine's quite bad actually ... quite poor so I don't really use it.
I would if it was better, if it actually looked like the Internet pages then I'd probably use it more but at the minute I just do it for emails I really need … but the interface on mine isn't very good.
(Manchester Group, female.)
This finding reinforced our intention to include a podcast as a project output, in addition to a mobile Web site, which can be downloaded easily and accessed at low cost on relatively low specification phones, or broadcast to users at no cost using Bluetooth.
However, mobile technology is changing fast and students were keen to trade up to the latest technology.
Despite the current difficulties, many students stated that they would use the mobile Internet for their academic work if: their phones had larger screens it was quick and easy to load and navigate Web sites it was cheaper or free (included in their contract) to access the Internet The pros would be that it's handy, it's like more convenient to be able to use it there and then but the cons would be I don't know, it's like too small to look at it on the phone and I don't know, it would be too fiddly I guess.
(in-depth Interview, London, male) A key theme which emerged was the need to summarise the content of the existing tutorial so that users would be able to load the mobile Web site quickly and navigate easily around the tutorial, with minimal time and cost.
Students were very clear about what they expected from a mobile Web site: I would consider using it if it's short and brief.
If it's long I would just skip it straightaway …(in-depth interview, London, male) It's way too big for mobile phones, too much information (London Focus Group, male) To be honest as well this is not the kind of thing I'd use on my mobile.
This is something that you do, you sit there and you learn it … Mobile Web sites are kind of like reference, a quick check … and you'd have to have a serious condensation of information there, you'd have to have one page – don't forget that, don't forget that.
That would be the only way I'd probably look at it on the mobile.
(Manchester Focus Group, female) Overall it became clear that the content of the Internet Detective is very relevant and students were able to identify some elements of new knowledge in it.
However, as we expected, the full tutorial was not the type of Web site they would use on a mobile phone.
To make it appealing to mobile users would require a radical overhaul of the content.
Mobile Standards One of the aims of the project was to deliver a mobile-optimised Web site that could reach the largest audience, regardless of their device.
In embarking on such a project, consideration of standards to assist with mobile development would be a pre-requisite.
The current standards in the mobile Web development world can be found at the W3C Mobile Web Initiative [11], whose stated goal is 'to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality'.
The W3C has produced a working draft Mobile Web Application Best Practices [12] which builds on their earlier Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 [13].
There are several options available to validate a mobile Web site.
The W3C has produced an excellent tool called the mobileOK [14] checker, which will provide hints to fix your content.
The Opera browser is good to check how your Web site will look to the majority of mobile users and then of course there are plenty of phone emulators available on the Internet like this one at dotMobi [15] (requires Java).
However, there is no substitution for testing the Web site on actual phones with real users!
Mobile Content An existing Web site, if produced with good structural mark-up, will probably render well on most mobile browsers, but sites designed for larger screens are often slow to load and hard to navigate even on zoom browsers.
In addition, as reflected in our market research, the majority of mobile users still use lower specification devices, so they will not be catered for in a 'do nothing' approach.
To create mobile-specific content, one option would be to use a transcoder to convert existing Web site content to a more mobile-friendly format, but the downside to this is that content is surrendered to third-party interpretation and this does not take advantage of the mobile environment.
Another option is to use a mobile stylesheet, but problems exist with this approach due to the fact that 'media="handheld"' is not always recognised by devices.Equally, the problem of non-specific mobile Web site content and navigation would not be resolved.
The option chosen for the Mobile Internet Detective Project was to create a mobile Web site that was specific to the device, fast-loading, context-relevant and above all usable.
Design and production considerations encountered during the project became apparent during testing and while conducting the market research.
Figure 1: View of the Web site using a mobile phone emulator Some of the specific areas include: Automatic device detection – the project used Andy Moore's lightweight PHP script [16] which is free for non-profit Web sites.
This gives the option of providing a full Web page for desktop browser users but redirects mobile users to the specific Web site.
You may want to tailor your Web site for use on the iPhone for example, in this case the script can be tweaked to redirect per device.
For full-featured mobile application development and detection you will need WURFL [17] or DeviceAtlas [18] and implemented with the programming language of choice.
Domain name – think about how you want to market your Web site.
At the time of the project JANET(UK) did not support .mobi type domains as far as the project team were aware.
If you are part of the UK education sector you could buy a .mobi domain, use a sub-domain like m.yoursite.ac.uk or create a sub-directory within your current architecture like yoursite.ac.uk/mobile.
Simple page structure and navigation – go right back to basics and simplify your information architecture, a one-column layout is probably all you need.
Remove outbound links that do not point to mobile-friendly Web sites.
Page styling – presentation effects must be defined separately from the content with CSS.
Resize images – keep the use of images down to an absolute minimum and present them after important text.
Do not try to reduce the image size on the fly, reduce them first, and store the new images on your server making sure you declare the new height and width within your mark-up.
Anchor tags and access keys – in a content-heavy page that requires a lot of vertical scrolling; consider providing anchor tags or access keys to aid navigation within the page.
Podcast – a podcast of your content is another good option for the mobile user, once downloaded to the device it will be available at no cost – if broadcast via Bluetooth, at a library induction say, there would be no download cost to the user at all.
Short codes – these are the short numbers mobile users can text to say, receive a link to your Web site or provide feedback i.e.
text the word 'like' to 12345.
Short codes were too expensive to trial with the Mobile Internet Detective Project.
Figure 2: Close-up of the Web site home page Lessons Learned Based on the findings outlined above, the project team at Intute produced a final mobile prototype which is a heavily condensed and concise version of the original tutorial.
The site is simple and easy to use with colour-coded links for easy navigation between sections.
Links to external sites have been kept to a minimum and images have been removed to speed up loading time and keep connection costs down.
Unfortunately cost limitations meant that we were unable to trial the use of SMS messages as a neat way to develop feedback mechanisms for users, but this would be something well worth pursuing in the future.
Obviously we have learned a great deal from our work on the project and would commend the light touch of the JISC programme management team which encouraged developers to connect with each other and share code and experiences rather than to get bogged down in documentation.
In some ways the simplicity and brevity demanded by mobile Internet users is difficult to reconcile with the traditional academic approach to providing learning materials.
The new Mobile Internet Detective tutorial ended up losing much of its connection to the original, due to the huge amount of text and images which were cut from it.
In retrospect it may have been easier to write a new tutorial from scratch rather than adapting existing content and attempting to reflect the character of the original, an approach which we increasingly abandoned with each re-write.
However, it is tempting to get too bogged down in the divide between mobile and non-mobile content and in fact we can translate many of the lessons learned from our experiences with mobile content to more traditional Web content.
The desire for limited amounts of text and for separate chunks of information, rather than a linear text-based approach is a valid approach to the development of most online learning materials.
It is important to be guided by hardware developments as we look at future directions for mobilising learning materials.
The recent launch of the iPad [19] indicates a demand from users for larger screens to access the Internet.
However, we should also keep in mind the limitations experienced by users who do not have access to the latest technology.
Future developments should include options for audio podcasts and video applications as well as text-based materials which are accessible to a wider range of users.
Nevertheless, as mobile hardware improves over time and as new Web site content is created which adheres to current standards, the distinction between mobile and non-mobile content will become less important and accessibility should improve across the board.
The team working on the Mobile Internet Detective found it a really rewarding project.
It provided us with some rich information about students' use of mobile technology in education and allowed us to apply that knowledge in practice.
We will be making use of the experience gained with our colleagues in Mimas and are looking forward to doing more mobile learning work across other JISC-funded Mimas services in the future.
References From a presentation delivered by Boris Zetterlund, Manager Development Strategy, Axiell Library Group, at Online Information 2009 conference, 1-3 December 2009.
Details at http://axiellarena.co.uk/ Rapid innovation strand http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/jiscri.aspx Internet Detective http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/ Mimas http://mimas.ac.uk/ The Horizon Report 2010 Edition, The New Media Consortium/The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report.pdf STROLL Final report, p.2 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/strollfinalreport.pdf Mobile Version of Hairdressing Training http://htmob.mobi/ Intute Blog: Mobile Internet Detective http://www.intute.ac.uk/blog/category/mobile-internet-detective/ UKOLN Events: Rapid Innovation in Development, September 2009 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jiscri-2009/ Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/ W3C Mobile Web Initiative http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ Mobile Web Application Best Practices, W3C Working Draft 6 October 2009 http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-mwabp-20091006/ Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0: Basic Guidelines, W3C Recommendation 29 July 2008 http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/ W3C mobileOK Checker http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ dotMobi http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php Detect Mobile Browsers Mobile User Agent Detection http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/ WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ DeviceAtlas http://deviceatlas.com/ Apple (United Kingdom) iPad http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad/ Author Details Diana Massam Intute Project Manager, Mimas The University of Manchester Email: Diana.Massam@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://mimas.ac.uk/ Andrew Priest Senior Intute Technical Officer Mimas The University of Manchester Email: Andrew.Priest@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://mimas.ac.uk/ Caroline Williams Intute Executive Director, Deputy Director of Mimas The University of Manchester Email: Caroline.Williams@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://mimas.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Mobilising the Internet Detective" Author: Diana Massam, Andrew Priest and Caroline Williams Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/massam-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Future-Proofing the Past: LAI Joint Conference 2008 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Future-Proofing the Past: LAI Joint Conference 2008 Buzz data portal archives metadata digitisation cataloguing multimedia marc aacr2 research standards Citation BibTex RIS Siobhan Fitzpatrick reports on the Annual Joint Conference of the Library Association of Ireland and Cilip IRELAND.
15 April The conference, entitled ‘Future-proofing the Past: 80 years’ commitment to access and cooperation’, was officially opened by the President of the Library Association of Ireland (LAI) who welcomed the delegates and wished them well in their deliberations at this conference which was the 40th joint conference of the LAI and Cilip IRELAND, occurring in the 80th year of the LAI.
The conference was attended by 120 delegates.
Unless otherwise stated, the sessions described below were all plenary.
Opening Session: ‘The European Library’ Louise Edwards, General Manager of the European Library Chair: Siobhán Fitzpatrick, Vice-President, LAI Louise Edwards began by inviting the audience to spread the word about The European Library [1].
In the course of her forty-minute paper she provided us with an overview of the participants in and the contents of this portal.
The European Library, based at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, in The Hague, is an initiative of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), a foundation aimed at increasing access to the national libraries of Europe.
Stretching to Azerbajian and Armenia and soon to include the national libraries of Russia and Turkey, it already provides access to the catalogues of 47 national libraries, amounting to 170 million records.
With multilingual collection descriptions, online exhibitions featuring the constituent national libraries and the innovative Europeana site which will provide access to 2 million digital objects from libraries, archives and museums by November 2008, the European Library is a wonderful example of cooperation to enable access.
A useful feature which can be applied on your own site is the mini search box which can be downloaded into your own portal.
Libraries on the Agenda Alan Hassan, President, CILIP Scotland Chair: Deirdre Ellis-King, President, LAI Alan Hassan spoke about future-proofing the past in the context of dealing with the political imperatives set by our masters.
He pointed to some of the paradoxes which coexist in society today: the fact that while society is, in general, more affluent, there is less willingness to support a panoply of services; 22% of the population aged 16+ are functionally illiterate; in order to maintain competitiveness the public sector could be cut by 25%; Google has a huge impact; library staff come at a high cost.
Government is meantime pursuing a reductionist model and a value chain analyis approach.
Assumptions are based on a 35-hour week which fails to take account of the realities of the workplace.
The centralisation of services will lead to job losses which will be treated as savings.
In the current Scottish situation emphasis is on the setting of five priorities with 15 outcomes at national and 55 at local level.
This approach drills down very deeply at local level.
For organisations, issues include resourcing, prioritising objectives, staffing, and how much influence the organisation is capable of maintaining in flatter structures.
On the positive side, there have been innovative responses to this reductionist approach: Authorities are looking at new models of structure, e.g.
setting up trusts which have financial advantages and can help offset staff losses.
Glasgow was cited as an example; Forming alliances between, for example, sports organisations and libraries, tourist boards and museums, although this could have quality implications for services; Advocacy – there are new opportunities in Scotland; Professionalism – librarians have a skill set, but lack status.
This must be addressed.
Alan concluded by confirming that libraries have been managing decline for a number of years.
We need to re-examine our mission and determine the resources required to deliver it.
The Tuesday session closed with a presentation by Ms Hayley Harris, Alexander Street Press on the product, Music Online.
16 April: Members’ Day Presidential Address: Tracing the path of professional education for public library staffs: 1928-2008 Deirdre Ellis-King, President, LAI Chair: Rhys Bebb Jone, Chair, CILIP Cymru/Wales Deirdre Ellis-King explored the various means by which public library staff acquired professional training prior to the formation of the LAI and subsequently.
She particularly emphasised the tough economic conditions which prevailed in the emergent state and the consequent difficulty of ensuring that high standards of training and education were met.
This placed demands on the association who set the standards and prioritised professional training.
The LAI was incorporated in March 1952 and distance learning activities were in place in the early 1950s.
The President emphasised the need to maintain vigorous re-training processes which would be necessitated by changes in society and the continuing need for professional postgraduate education.
Parallel Sessions I: Services for All Pat Beech, Royal National Institute for the Blind Library Niall Crowley, Chief Executive, The Equality Authority Chair: Breda Gleeson, Kildare County Librarian Pat Beech emphasised the need to listen to blind people in order to provide services which are inclusive and equitable.
She pointed out that the legislation only demands minimum requirements whereas we should aim for the maximum standards of provision.
Blind people should be able to access information, which is their right, without intermediaries.
Pat explained that 100 people begin to lose their sight every day; the corollorary of this is that their use of the public library decreases correspondingly.
Twenty per cent of blind and poor-sighted people, aged 75+, have not left their homes in a week; 46% of these have given up their hobbies.
The situation invites us to: Have policies to address the needs of blind and poor-sighted members of the community; Consult and develop community profiles; Provide a wide-range of stock in all formats; Provide access via special reading devices, accessible web facilities; Develop activities such as reading groups; Train our staffs – this helps poor-sighted people to relax in the library; Market the library’s resources for blind and poorly-sighted people; Audit our buildings.
Niall Crowley began by stating that Services for All equates to a standard for equality.
Equality should be a high standard and access should be the aim.
Equality should be part of the decision-making process.
He proceeded to speak about the implications of diversity and the barriers to equality of access which can be either physical or attitudinal.
Like Pat, he emphasised the need for consultation with individual users and local disability organisations.
He also dealt with the auditing of buildings, the design of services, the provision of assistive technology, the level of capacity among staff to deal with disability, the delivery of services and events which are inclusive.
In terms of marketing, Niall placed an emphasis on identifying channels people with disabilities use.
He also stressed the importance of quality control and data collection.
Referring to the Equal Status Acts, Niall said that compliance is the bottom line.
Services should be pro-active in terms of equality.
It is important to create an approach that is endemic rather than championed by individuals.
Staff should be well trained and action plans should engage with the reality of needs.
Organisations should engage in evidence-based, participative, decision-making.
2: Digitising our Past I: The Changing Libraries Digitisation Programme* Joan Ward, Executive Librarian, An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/The Library Council Chair: Kieran Swords, Chair, LAI/Genealogy &amp; Local Studies Section Joan Ward described the Changing Libraries Programme, the partners of which are the Department of the Environment, Heritage &amp; Local Government, library authorities and the Library Council.
The aim is to digitise local content and make it available online via the web site, Ask about Ireland [2].
The site contains documents, images, links and contacts.
Digitisation is labour intensive, but positive outcomes are: ease of access; the local library profile is raised; digitisation helps to preserve the original objects.
Other sources which are available on the site are The Irish Times Digital Archive and Historic Map Viewer (The Ordnance Survey 6” and 25” map series).
Griffith’s Valuation will shortly be available and there are plans to go live with the eighteenthand nineteenth-century statistical surveys of various Irish counties.
Apart from the positive aspects mentioned above, the web site will benefit from feedback and community memory, and has much potential for growth.
3: Digitising Our Past 2: The 1911 Census in the National Archives Caitríona Crowe, Senior Archivist, The National Archives Chair: Kieran Swords, Chair, LAI/Genealogy & Local Studies Section Caitríona Crowe took the audience on a fascinating tour of the digitised 1911 Census, a project undertaken by the National Archives (Ireland) in partnership with the Library & Archives Canada.
To date only the census for Dublin city and county is available but gradually the census for the remainder of the country will be rolled out and the 1901 Census should be completed by mid-2009.
Caitríona explained that Ireland is unique in that it is the only country which preserved the original census forms.
It is possible to reconstruct the composition of entire streets in terms of residents, how houses were divided up etc.
Added value has been added to the web site via the introduction of selections from photographic collections of the National Library of Ireland and the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, and tram timetables from the resources of the Irish Railway Record Society.
Essays have been commissioned on topics relating to Dublin at this crucial time pre the Great War.
Caitríona alluded to the potential of sites such as this as a springboard for exhibitions and a host of other co-operative activities [3].
4: EU Information Everywhere: The Europe Direct Service Maureen Kerr, Donegal County Library Chair: Mary Carleton Reynolds, Longford County Librarian and Chair, LAI/City & Co. Librarians Group Maureen Kerr began by describing the origins of the Europe Direct Service which arose in the context of a negative perception of the European Union (EU) as being bureaucratic and remote.
The rejection of the Consitutional Treaty in 2005 by the Netherlands and France, Ireland’s initial rejection of the Nice Treaty and concerns among EU citizens about the effects of enlargement and globalisation prompted the Vice-President of the European Commission, Margot Wallstrom to promote the idea of a ‘Plan D’, standing for Debate, Dialogue and Democracy.
In Ireland the EDS partners are the European Commission, the Library Council and libraries in various regions, Letterkenny Library being the centre for North-West Ireland.
The aim is to bring the EU closer to the individual citizen by providing information on opportunities offered by the Union, information about the EU and how to make your voice heard in Europe.
Services offered by ED centres include: information provision; meeting/event space; feedback forum; free phone/pc access to Brussels; a relay information service from the centre to neighbouring counties via the library service.
25 per cent of users access the service re mobility issues and a similar number seek information on EU institutions, their functions and objectives.
Maureen showed interesting graphs re issues of concern to Europeans, in which unemployment ranked highest at 36%, followed closely by the cost of living and pension issues.
Significantly, economic growth featured seventh from the bottom of the scale at 7%.
Communication priorities for 2008 are: The Lisbon Treaty; the Lisbon Strategy for growth and employment; energy and climate change; migration; EU’s role in the world; EU budget review etc.
The service is funded by the European Commission with a grant to the Library Council for maintenance of the Web site.
[4][5][6] The National Library of Ireland: Recent Strategic and Digital Developments Aongus ÓhAonghusa, Director, National Library of Ireland (NLI) and Katherine McSharry, Assistant Keeper II, NLI Chair: Fionnuala Hanrahan, Vice-President, LAI Aongus Ó hAonghusa welcomed the opportunity to speak at the conference about developments at the NLI [7], including a new Strategic Plan, 2008-10.
He began by outlining briefly the history and background of the library and referred to its statutory functions which include Irish legal deposit.
The library holds over 8 million items.
The change in status of the library in 2005, whereby it has a governing board and is an autonomous cultural institution offers new challenges and opportunities.
The library aims to be a world-class institution by 2020: the library has identified six key strategic aims and 25 objectives which are elaborated in the Strategic Plan, copies of which were circulated in the delegates’ conference packs.
Aongus stressed the potential for collaborative working (e.g.
on digital projects) between the National Library and libraries in other sectors.
He also suggested staff exchanges, exhibitions and other ideas which could be explored in the future.
Finally, the Director invited comment on the Library’s Collection Policy which will shortly be made available.
The Strategic Plan [8] is available from the NLI’s online Reports and Policy Documents.
Katherine McSharry elaborated the Library’s plans to digitise images from the collections and the ongoing digitisation of the major bibliographic resource Hayes’s Manuscript sources for the history of Irish civilisation, 11 vols + supplements (Boston, 1965-79) and Richard Hayes, ed., Sources for the history of Irish civilisation: Articles from Irish periodicals, 9 vols (Boston, 1970).
The emphasis is on access to the Library’s resources and to this end the National Library is contributing to the Europeana digital library project which is part of the European Library.
The COLICO Lecture: ‘Cross-border working makes sense, but more needs to be done’ Andy Pollak, Director, Centre for Cross-Border Studies, and Secretary, Universities Ireland Chair: Elaine Urquhart, Chairperson, COLICO (The Committee for Library Co-operation in Ireland) COLICO (Committee on Library Co-operation in Ireland) [9] is a North-South body whose function is to optimise the collective value of the combined resources of Irish libraries for their clienteles.
The committee was established in 1977 and since 1994 has been the formal advisory body on library co-operation to An Chomhairle Leabharlanna, and the Library & Information Services Council, Northern Ireland (LISC).
An Chomhairle Leabharlanna provides the Secretariat to the Committee.
COLICO hosts an annual lecture at the joint conference.
Andy Pollak spoke about the work of the Centre for Cross Border Studies (CCBS) and indicated key factors for good practice in North-South co-operation.
The CCBS is one of the most significant non-governmental North-South bodies to have emerged since the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
It is an independent, university-based centre providing research, policy development and administrative services to groups and organisations wishing to engage in cross-border co-operation.
Andy outlined the wide range of activities and research projects at all levels, which the CCBS has facilitated or managed.
These include training public and civil servants in North-South co-operation.
Andy highlighted: the commitment of the CCBS staff to their mission; the need to emphasise the mutual benefits which can accrue to those engaged in cross-border projects and longterm activities, and in particular, the need to engage the Unionist community; the need for strong leadership.
Areas which need to be strengthened or addressed are: building up solid supports at operational level in government; effective networking and active championing of cross-border cooperation; the need for institutionalisation, mainstreaming and embedding of successful activities.
Andy emphasised the need, above all, to ‘do things which make sense’ and bring real benefits to the people of both jurisdictions.
The full text of Andy’s address [10] is available.
Curators of the Carriers of Civilisation: The Role of the Rare Books Librarian in the 21st Century Marie Boran, NUI Galway and Evelyn Flanagan, UCD Chair: Mary Farrell, Westmeath County Librarian Evelyn Flanagan and Marie Boran gave a joint presentation in which they outlined the wide variety of collections handled by Special Collections librarians, the attendant activities, e.g.
conservation, training readers in handling the collections, building up the collections, digitisation, organising lectures, exhibitions, classes etc.
Examples of projects in which Special Collections librarians can be involved were cited, included the Galway 1842 Map Project.
Marie and Evelyn referred in particular to the work of the LAI/Rare Books Group, and the services which it offers to those working, however marginally, with rare books or special collections.
These include cataloguing workshops, seminars on topics such as maps, drawings, ephemera, history of science collections and so on, visits and lectures.
The group has also published seminar papers and other works of interest to librarians, historians and bibliographers.
Resource Description and Access (RDA): A New International Standard Ann Chapman, UKOLN, and Chair of CILIP/BL Committee on AACR/RDA Chair: Colette O’Flaherty, National Library of Ireland Ann Chapman described RDA [11] as a new standard for creating bibliographic metadata, drawing on AACR and taking into account the requirements of bibliographic records and the often complex relationships introduced by multimedia and a plethora of formats and activities.
Ann outlined the problems with AACR2, including issues re seriality and hierarchical relationships and the problems arising from mixing the data relating to ‘content and carrier’.
A joint steering committee consisting of the ACOC, ALA, BL, CCC, CILIP and LC is guiding the process.
The aim is to establish rules which are: easy to use and interpret; can be applied to an online, networked environment; can be compatible with other standards and may be integrated; provide effective bibliographic control for all types of media.
Ann gave examples of how the rules might be applied in practice: many of the applications are simpler and more practical than the old rules permitted.
The features are more user-centred and may be used with MARC, Dublin Core etc.
The process of refinement is ongoing and greater emphasis is being accorded to cataloguer judgement.
The end product will be capable of being customised for one’s own institutional requirements, e.g.
MyRDA.
RDA will be published as an online resource; the demo version will be shown at IFLA 2008.
It may also be issued in a loose-leaf version.
The national libraries will lead the field in implementation.
The conference featured a lively trade exhibition, a civic reception hosted by Athlone Town Council, an enjoyable conference dinner and a visit to the Athlone Library and Civic Centre with a tour of the Aidan Heavey Special Collection.
Acknowledgements The author acknowledges with thanks the notes taken by Ms Mary Conefrey, Leitrim County Library, at the presentation entitled ‘Digitising our Past I: ‘The Changing Libraries Digitisation Programme’.
References The European Library http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/index.html Ask about Ireland AAI http://www.askaboutireland.ie/ National Archives: Census of Ireland 1911 http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/ EuropeDirect.ie Home http://www.europedirect.ie/ European Commission: The EU in Ireland http://ec.europa.eu/ Europa The European Union On-Line http://europa.eu/ The National Library of Ireland http://www.nli.ie/ The National Library of Ireland: Reports and Policy Documents http://www.nli.ie/en/udlist/reports-and-policy-documents.aspx Committee on Library Co-operation in Ireland (COLICO) http://www.librarycouncil.ie/colico/ COLICO Lecture Series http://www.librarycouncil.ie/colico/lectureseries.shtml “RDA: cataloguing for the twenty-first century”, presentation by Ann Chapman to the Annual Joint Conference of the Library Association of Ireland and Cilip, April 2008 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bib-man/presentations/lai-cilip-conf-2008/ and also: “RDA: A New International Standard”, Ann Chapman, October 2006, Ariadne, Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/chapman/ Author Details Siobhán Fitzpatrick Vice-President, LAI and Librarian, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin Email: s.Fitzpatrick@ria.ie Web site: http://www.ria.ie/ Return to top Article Title: “Future-proofing the Past” Author: Siobhán Fitzpatrick Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/lai-2008-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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LinkedUp: Linking Open Data for Education Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines LinkedUp: Linking Open Data for Education Buzz data mobile rdf framework sparql dissemination xml portal usability infrastructure metadata identifier blog repositories video cataloguing hypertext visualisation uri personalisation mashup facebook twitter oer lod ict interoperability privacy research mooc Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy, Mathieu d’Aquin, Stefan Dietze, Hendrik Drachsler, Eelco Herder and Elisabetta Parodi describe the activities carried out by the LinkedUp Project looking at the promotion of open data in education.
In the past, discussions around Open Education have tended to focus on content and primarily Open Educational Resources (OER), freely accessible, openly licensed resources that are used for teaching, learning, assessment and research purposes.
However Open Education is a complex beast made up of many aspects, of which the opening up of data is one important element.
When one mentions open data in education a multitude of questions arise: from the technical (what is open data?
What is linked data?
How do I create open datasets?
), the semantic (what is the difference between Open Education data and open data in education?)
to the more philosophical (what exactly is Open Education anyway?
How can we make sure ‘open’ means ‘accessible to all’?
How can opening up data be helpful?)
All valid questions, yet not all with straight-forward answers; however exploration around what might purport to be answers to these questions is very much in scope for the LinkedUp Project.
The LinkedUp Project (Linking Web data for education) [1] is an EU FP7 Coordination and Support Action running from November 2012 to November 2014 which looks at issues around open data in education, with the aim of pushing forward the exploitation of the vast amounts of public, open data available on the Web.
It aspires to do this by facilitating developer competitions and deploying an evaluation framework, which identifies innovative success stories of robust, Web-scale information management applications.
The project comprises six pan-European consortium partners [2] led by the L3S Research Center of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover and consisting of the Open University UK, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Elsevier, the Open Universiteit Nederland and eXact learning LCMS.
The project also has a number of associated partners [3] with an interest in the project including the Commonwealth of Learning, Canada and the Department of Informatics, PUC-Rio, Brazil.
Figure 1: The LinkedUp Web site Open and Linked Web Data The LinkedUp Project focuses on open Web data and has its roots in the linked data movement.
The project recognises that while World Wide Web began as a global space in which to link primarily documents, through the development of Web standards and the inclusion of semantic content in Web pages there is now an increasing need for access to raw data that sit separately from documents.
Publishing these data in a structured way as linked data, through the use of URIs and RDF, provides an opportunity for these data to become much more useful.
As Tim Berners-Lee explains: ‘The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web.
It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data.
With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.’ [4] The Semantic Web is an overarching concept, a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across applications, and Linked data is one part of this framework.
Many use the terms semantic web synonymously with linked data.
For a lay-person the easiest way to understand both the Semantic Web and linked data is through the idea of a ‘web of data’.
So for example if you searched for lecturers at an institution you could find their name, but you could also find all the papers that they have written, where those papers were published, definitions of all the topics they cover, details of all the other universities involved, and so on.
Searching is considerably enhanced by semantics: you would know that the author with the very commonplace name John Smith you searched for was the lecturer at ‘University A’ rather than the one at ‘University B’ because all key elements have unique identifiers.
The result is a much more intelligent system than the current Web.
There are many better concrete examples out there, the Ordnance Survey linked data video [5] offers a good introduction.
So are people already creating linked data?
The book: Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space [6] reports that there are 50 billion facts published as linked data on the Web today, while the W3C notes that in September 2011 there were a billion RDF triples, interlinked by around 504 million RDF links [7].
These data cover most academic domains, cross-domain datasets (such as DBpedia, a crowd-sourced community initiative to extract structured information from Wikipedia [8]) and governmental data [9].
In addition to the more technology-centric publication of data, many initiatives have emerged recently that follow the more general principle of open data, from governments and public institutions to local and private institutions (eg the Guardian data blog [10]).
Linked data must adhere to the four principles of linked data outlined by Tim Berners-Lee in his Design Issues Linked Data note [11].
They could be summarised as: use URIs to denote things; use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to and looked up; provide useful information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced; leverage standards such as RDF, SPARQL and; include links to other related things (using their URIs).
But when they are published on the Web, open data do not necessarily have to be structured, but they have to be open.
The Open Definition [12], developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation [13], sets out principles that define ‘openness’ in relation to data and content.
It can be summed up in the statement that: ‘A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.’ The LinkedUp Project advocates use and creation of linked data and recognises the value of open data.
Open and Linked Data in UK Higher Education In the education sector, the benefits of using open and linked Web data are starting to show with several universities engaged in the deployment of linked data approaches.
In the UK this has been driven by a requirement for transparency and accountability in public institutions, directed by government.
However there is also a relatively recent acknowledgement that sharing data not only allows comparison between individual institutions and cluster groups but can also inform decision-making.
The creation of innovative tools, as supported through LinkedUp activities, can bring together different datasets and offer new perspectives.
These new perspectives are nicely illustrated in a UK project on sharing equipment data.
The UK University Facilities and Equipment Open Data project [14] was funded by a UK research council in response to a need to facilitate discussions around equipment sharing among UK universities.
It delivers a national ‘shop window’ for research equipment and supports searching across UK HE equipment datasets.
The service forms part of the data.ac.uk initiative formed by the community of UK university open data projects.
One institution that has been doing some really interesting work in this area is the University of Southampton [15].
Staff there have created an open data service and brought together datasets on many aspects of university life such as locations, course details, people and travel information.
The result is many interesting views on the data that allows you, for example, to find out what coffee shops are open on campus, what they sell and how to locate them.
Or what courses are on at what time and whether students rate them highly.
Another interesting project in this area is mEducator [16] which provides linked data on open educational resources and has led to community platforms such as LinkedEducation.org [17], an open platform which promotes the use of linked data for educational purposes.
One of the project’s aims is to identify best practice and potential links between individual resources in order to contribute to a well-connected educational Web of Data.
For those involved in the LinkedUp Project it is clear that the availability of open teaching and education-related data represents an unprecedented resource for students and teachers.
It has the potential to introduce a paradigm shift in the way educational services are provided, substantially improve educational processes and lower the costs of providing Higher Education.
Nonetheless, so far, the potential of using educational Web data has been vastly underexploited by the educational sector.
Applications and services often only make use of very limited amounts of data and distributed datasets; nor do they provide users with an appropriate level of context and filtering for the vast amounts of heterogeneous content retrieved to make it possible for such information to be adequately exploited.
The LinkedUp Project hopes to engage with communities working in this area, and also with others who have yet to see the potential of open and linked data for educational purposes.
Its aim is to encourage more activity in the open and linked data arena, in particular by educational institutions and organisations.
The LinkedUp Challenge One of the principal ways it intends to encourage engagement is through a series of open competitions designed to elicit Web data-driven applications for personalised, open and online university-level studies.
The LinkedUp Challenge [18] is a series of three consecutive competitions which seek interesting and innovative tools and applications that analyse and/or integrate open Web data for educational purposes.
The competitions are open to anyone, from researchers and students, to developers and businesses.
The second and third competitions will build upon their predecessor; leading from innovative prototypes and tools through to large-scale deployable systems.
Participants are required to solve critical issues with respect to Web-scale data and information discovery and retrieval, interoperability and matchmaking, data quality assurance and performance.
The challenge builds on a strong alliance of institutions with expertise in areas such as open Web data management, data integration and Web-based education.
The first competition (Veni) ran from to 22 May to 27 June 2013.
Extensive promotion was carried out using Twitter, blog posts and pan-European mailing lists.
By the closing date 22 valid submissions had been received from 12 different countries (four from the UK, three from France, three from Spain, three from the USA, 2 from the Netherlands and 1 each from Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and Nepal).
The abstracts are available from the LinkedUp Challenge Web site [19].
The majority of entries were from teams based at universities or from start-up companies, but there were also a few from independent consultants.
Some entries were developed by large teams, for example one had 9 people listed as authors and others had authors spread across different countries and organisations, while other entries had sole authors.
Entries and Judging The entrants to the competition had interpreted the specification ‘educational purposes’ in a variety of innovative ways.
A number of the entries had looked at Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and course data and offered cross-searching mechanisms while others had concentrated on discipline-specific data and offered new pedagogical approaches for learners to explore and understand subjects.
Two of the submissions focused on cultural heritage data and how museum data could be used in an educational context.
The remaining submissions covered other educationally related areas including use of conference publications, reading lists, mobile learning and annotation.
The submissions were judged using two different approaches.
An evaluation framework was used to assess entries and the wider public were also given the opportunity to vote on entries in the People’s Choice.
The People’s Choice was operated using Ideascale [20], a cloud-based crowdsourcing service combined with poster voting at the Open Knowledge (OKCon) festival in Geneva [21].
The online voting approaches adopted in the People’s Choice are explained in a blog post on the Remote Worker blog [22].
After entries were reviewed by the evaluation committee, led by the LinkedUp advisory board, a shortlist of eight was agreed on 16 August 2013.
The shortlist consisted of: Knownodes is a collaborative Web site that supports relating, defining and exploring connections between Web resources and ideas, making use of graph visualisations.
Knownodes scored high on educational innovation.
Mismuseos connects museum data with sources including Europeana, Dbpedia and Geonames.
With Mismuseos, learners can browse and explore the backgrounds and relations between objects from multiple Spanish museums.
ReCredible is a browsable topic map with Wikipedia-like content alongside.
The topic library showcases interesting topics varying from dog breeds and alternative medicine to nanotechnology and information systems.
DataConf is a mobile mashup that enriches conference publications.
The reviewers applauded its attractive and effective design.
DataConf is especially useful at the graduate education level.
We-Share is a social annotation application for educational ICT tools.
We-Share can help educators to find tools to support teaching at all educational levels, and received high scores on educational innovation.
YourHistory is a Facebook app that makes history tangible by showing historic and global events that are related to your own life events and your interests.
Globe-Town is a ‘fun-to-use’ tool that enables users to find out the most important trade partners, migrant populations and airline routes in their own countries.
It also provides infographics on issues regarding society, environment and economy.
Polimedia connects transcripts of the Dutch parliament with media coverage in newspapers and radio bulletins.
Polimedia employs innovative information techniques and provides an attractive front-end that invites exploration and browsing.
The shortlisted entrants were invited to the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) [21] in Geneva to take part in the LinkedUp Award Ceremony where first, second, and third prizes were awarded.
The third place was awarded to We-Share, the second place was awarded to Globe-Town and the first place was awarded to Polimedia.
The People’s Choice was awarded to We-Share.
Further details of the awards ceremony are available from the LinkedUp blog [23].
Figure 2: The Veni Competition shortlist entrants receive their awards The next competition, the Vidi competition, was launched by LinkedUp in early November 2013 and will run until 14 February 2014.
Evaluation Framework As mentioned earlier, the LinkedUp Challenge is being assessed using a well-defined evaluation framework.
During initial stages of the project, the project team carried out a thorough assessment of the technical landscape in the field of open (educational) Web data (eg linked data, data mining, learning analytics, legal and privacy aspects).
This information was fed into the initial design of the LinkedUp Challenge and helped to provide a detailed description of the requirements which had to be met by entrants.
It is intended that these requirements will ensure the large-scale reusability and exploitation of the challenge results and positive impact on the educational sector within Europe.
The evaluation framework consists of predefined evaluation procedures and benchmarking criteria for the ranking of the participating projects during the LinkedUp competitions.
The requirements include interdisciplinary coverage, integration of high-quality Web data, integration with local data, context and filtering, scalability and performance and multilingualism.
The evaluation framework consists of a transparent and distinct list of evaluation criteria that enable the review panel to measure, based on quantifiable criteria and qualitative assessment, the impact and appropriateness of large-scale Web information and data applications.
The evaluation framework also helps to identify the strengths and weaknesses of individual projects and submissions.
These ratings are being used by LinkedUp to analyse ‘gaps in knowledge’ and offer customised technology transfer workshops to support the participating projects and guarantee an effective knowledge exchange during the LinkedUp challenge.
After each stage of the Challenge, the evaluation framework is being reviewed on its validity and as to possible improvements that could be made to achieve the most sustainable and practical evaluation instrument possible by the end of the project.
It is envisaged that the LinkedUp evaluation framework will contribute to an overall evaluation framework for knowledgeand data-intensive applications in particular domains (such as education).
In order to implement the evaluation framework, an evaluation experts group has been established, composed of experts from within and outside the LinkedUp Project (consortium, associated experts, external experts).
The evaluation panel began by analysing the evaluation framework itself (evaluation criteria, benchmarks and methods) to guarantee the reliability and validity of the selected measures and participated in the evaluation of the LinkedUp Challenge submissions.
Use Cases One interesting area of work in the LinkedUp Project is the development of large-scale scenarios and use cases for the deployment, evaluation and exploitation of the challenge submissions/applications.
These use cases will provide the basis for the evaluation of the LinkedUp Challenge submissions in real-world scenarios involving a critical mass of users as well as data, where submitted applications will be deployed and evaluated according to the evaluation criteria defined in the challenge design.
Four use cases were defined for the Veni competition: Teaching going social; Educationizer; Simplify; and Supporting employees’ development via didactic guidance through learning materials [24].
These were large-scale scenarios and use cases that arose through consultation among LinkedUp Project members and associated partners.
For example: ‘How can teachers in the developing world benefit from the open resources freely available online?’ ‘How do you make research more accessible and understandable for people without an academic degree?’ ‘How can teachers put courses together benefiting from online resources from Massive Open Online Courses, social media, etc?’ The use cases present actual, real-life challenges that the related institutions are facing and addressing.
Their aim is to provide challenge participants with inspiration and examples of the kinds of problems that submissions can address.
For the second competition, Vidi, the LinkedUp team has developed slightly different use cases.
Particular institutions are coming up with ‘focused tasks’ that would resolve a particular difficulty they are confronting .
It is envisioned that solving problems for institutions, such as the BBC, will encourage participation and offer real kudos to participants.
The team looking at use cases is also preparing and implementing an exit and sustainability strategy for the long-term exploitation of the project results.
This approach hopes to ensure the persistence and long-term availability of the competition results and evaluation framework produced in LinkedUp.
The exit and sustainability strategy will in particular also cover legal and privacy aspects which are of importance when exposing and using publicly available Web data.
The strategy will define appropriate licensing schemes and the setup of joint consortia/entities to handle future business opportunities related to LinkedUp outcomes.
Data Catalogue In order to support the LinkedUp Challenge and to aid use of open and linked data in education more generally, the project is continuously selecting and cataloguing relevant datasets.
This has been done through the creation and maintenance of a catalogue and repository of data relevant and useful to education scenarios.
The goal of the LinkedUp Dataset Catalog (or Linked Education Cloud) [25] is to collect and make available, ideally in an easily usable form, all sorts of data sources of relevance to education.
The aim is not only to support participants of the LinkedUp Challenge in identifying and conjointly using Web data in their applications, but also to be a general, evolving resource for the community interested in Web data for education.
During the project lifespan the technical team will enable and encourage contentand data-providers to contribute new material to the LinkedUp Dataset Catalog through a series of hands-on workshops and the promotion of community documentation on LinkedUp tools, workflows and lessons learned.
Figure 3: Open University data in the LinkedUp catalogue The LinkedUp Dataset Catalog can be used in many ways.
It is first and foremost a registry of datasets, Datahub.io [26] is probably the most popular registry of global catalogues of datasets and forms the heart of the Linked Open Data cloud.
In the interest of integrating with other ongoing open data effort, rather than developing in isolation, the LinkedUp Dataset Catalog has been created as part of Datahub.io.
It takes the form of a community group in which any dataset can be included.
Any dataset in Datahub.io can be included in the Linked Education Cloud group (provided it is relevant), and the datasets in this group are also visible globally on the Datahub.io portal.
Every dataset is described with a set of basic metadata and assigned resources.
This makes it possible to search for datasets and employ faceted browsing of the results both globally or specifically in the Linked Education Cloud.
For example, one could search for the word ‘university’ in the Linked Education Cloud, and obtain datasets that explicitly mention ‘university’ in their metadata.
These results can be further reduced with filters, for example to include only the ones that provide an example resource in the RDF/XML format.
Alongside the data catalogue, the more technical members of the LinkedUp team have been involved in virtual development and will be organising ‘code clinics’ during the last two stages of the LinkedUp Challenge to ensure that the development and deployment of participant’s applications are not hampered by technical problems.
Support is not just technical but also more general regarding legal, exploitation and dissemination issues related to participants’ applications.
These processes will ensure that by the end of the project the results of the challenge can be taken up by educational organisations, commercial organisations or the development community with a clear legal and exploitation framework for each application.
Discussions around the technical framework of the LinkedUp Project are carried out on the Devtalk blog [27].
Open Education Network The LinkedUp Project has a defined lifespan and concludes in November 2014.
It is anticipated that the legacy of the project will be carried on through the creation of a sustainable network.
One aim of the competitions is to promote an active, diverse and well-connected community of content producers, metadata experts, technologists and others in academia, data management communities, publishing and beyond, both by strengthening existing networks and engaging new stakeholders.
Much of the initial activities include dissemination of LinkedUp results (evaluation framework, datasets, LinkedUp challenge submissions) and relevant outcomes to a wider community and the transfer of innovative results and knowledge from academic and research contexts into industrial and application scenarios.
LinkedUp has presented at events including Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) 2013, Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) 2013 and the International World Wide Web Conference, 13-17 May 2013 held in Rio de Janiero, Brazil [28].
Figure 4: Open Education Working Group logo One core activity of the project is to establish a network of open Web data and resource evangelists (in particular in the area of education) who will raise awareness of legal and technical best practice in a variety of domains, facilitate conversation and collaboration between technologists in the Open Educational resource community and engage end-users in teaching and learning.
The Open Knowledge Foundation in particular is keen to see the discussions around open data in education pulled into the wider debates on Open Education.
This is happening through the establishment of an Open Education Working Group [29].
The Open Knowledge Foundation defines the working groups it hosts as collaborations of individuals, who meet virtually and in person to focus on a particular area of open knowledge and its effect on society.
Another important aspect of working groups is the opportunity for cross-organisation collaboration through engagement with pre-existing groups.
The Open Education Working Group will have a broad remit but intends to work closely with other groups already active in this area, such as the OER community and the W3C Open Linked Education Community Group [30].
It will cover all aspects of Open Education, from Open Educational Resources (OER) and changing teaching practices, to areas such as opening up relevant educational data and changing both institutional and wider culture.
It hopes to be able to link with existing networks and bring groups together.
It intends to look at the synergies between activities, projects and people acting in Open Education.
Figure 5: Open Education Panel Session at OKCon.
From left to right: Mathieu d’Aquin, Davide Storti, Jackie Carter and Doug Belshaw The Open Education Working Group was launched at OKCon [21] at a panel session on Open Education [31] facilitated by Doug Belshaw from Mozilla.
The panelists were Jackie Carter, Senior Manager, MIMAS, Centre of Excellence, University of Manchester, Davide Storti, Programme Specialist, Communication and Information Sector (CI), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Mathieu d’Aquin, Research Fellow, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, UK.
The panel session was entitled: The facets of Open Education: resources, data and culture.
It considered questions such as: What is Open Education?
What role can open data play to make education better, more accessible and more open?
How can we ensure that Open Education really widens participation?
How can we encourage MOOC developers to open up their data?
In the forthcoming months the working group will develop its governance structure by adding an advisory board, an ensemble of experts in the Open Education field, and increasing its member numbers through the Open Education mailing list.
Initially the group will be co-ordinated by members of the LinkedUp team but it is anticipated that in the future this role will be passed on to someone active in the community who can ensure that the group remains active and relevant.
One of the first activities of the working group will be the creation of an Open Education Handbook, a collaboratively written living Web document targeting educational practitioners and the education community at large, which will contain a significant section on open data in education.
It will be a resource for both educators and Web data providers as well as adopters.
The Open Education Handbook was initiated at a booksprint held in central London [32] on 3 September 2013 and Open Education experts from many different sectors (commercial, academic, government, not-for-profit) were invited to attend.
The booksprint methodology (initiated by Adam Hyde of booksprints.net [33]) involves moving from zero to a published book in three to five days.
It was decided to take a less-pressurised and more collaborative approach to writing the Open Education Handbook.
While the handbook process has begun with a mini-one-day-booksprint to get the initial outline of the handbook, the final edited version will be written collaboratively over a longer time period of time (with a final version delivered in October 2014).
The mini-booksprint saw 17 Open Education experts come together to participate in brainstorming and discussion and write over 30 pages of outline and written text.
Figure 6: Images from the Open Education Handbook booksprint Other areas of interest for the Open Education Working Group include moving forward the debate on opening up MOOC data, building up evidence and case studies around open data use in education and collaborative activity building lists of resources and best practice.
Conclusions Open Education is a broad area of work, and activity spans sectors and continents.
While the LinkedUp Project is primarily interested in the use of open Web data in education, it also acknowledges the need to build a community whose interests go beyond the technical aspects of data creation and use.
Ultimately Open Education is about eliminating barriers and supporting learning, and open data can be a support to both.
However open data must be accurate, valid, timely, usable and complete before it becomes useful.
It must also be hugely relevant to its audience and interpreted in appropriate ways.
The LinkedUp Project recognises this and accepts that while technology is an aide, open data is really about people References LinkedUp Project Web site http://linkedup-project.eu LinkedUp Project consortium partners http://linkedup-project.eu/about/consortium-partners/ LinkedUp Project associated partners http://linkedup-project.eu/about/associated-partners/ Tim Berners-Lee, Design Issues Linked Data Note, 27 July 2006 http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html Ordnance Survey linked data introductory video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qBEkW1wmEM&feature=player_embedded Heath, T. and Bizer, C. (2011) Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space (1st edition).
Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology, 1:1, 1-136.
Morgan & Claypool.
W3C SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData http://www.w3.org/wiki/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData DBpedia http://dbpedia.org/ In the UK we have Data.gov http://data.gov.uk and http://data.legislation.gov.uk Guardian data blog http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog Tim Berners-Lee, Design Issues: Linked Data note, June 2006 http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html Open Definition http://opendefinition.org Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org University Facilities and Equipment Open Data Project: Enabling access to UK HE research equipment http://equipment.data.ac.uk/ University of Southampton Open Data Service http://data.southampton.ac.uk mEducator http://linkededucation.org/meducator Linkededucation.org http://linkededucation.wordpress.com LinkedUp Challenge http://linkedup-challenge.org LinkedUp Challenge: Veni Submissions http://linkedup-challenge.org/veni.html LinkedUp Ideascale site http://linkedup.ideascale.com OKCon http://okcon.org Online Voting: The highs and lows, Ramblings of a Remote Worker blog, 9 August 2013 http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/online-voting-the-highs-and-lows/ Details of Veni winners, 17 September 2013 http://linkedup-project.eu/2013/09/17/veni-competition-winners/ LinkedUp Use Cases http://linkedup-challenge.org/usecases.html LinkedUp Dataset Catalog (or Linked Education Cloud) http://data.linkededucation.org/linkedup/catalog/ Datahub http://datahub.io/ LinkedUp Devtalk blog,http://data.linkededucation.org/linkedup/devtalk/ LinkedUp events and presentations http://linkedup-project.eu/events/ and http://linkedup-project.eu/resources/presentations/ Open Education Working Group http://education.okfn.org W3C Open Linked Education Community Group http://www.w3.org/community/opened/ Open Education panel session, 17 September 2013 http://linkedup-project.eu/2013/09/17/open-education-panel-session/ Open Education Booksprint, 3 September 2013 http://linkedup-project.eu/2013/09/04/open-education-handbook-booksprint/ Booksprint.net http://www.booksprints.net/ Author Details Marieke Guy Project Community Coordinator LinkedUp Project Open Knowledge Foundation Email: marieke.guy@okfn.org Web site: http://okfn.org Marieke Guy is the Project Community Coordinator for the LinkedUp Project, supporting the adoption of open data by educational organisations and institutions.
She works for the Open Knowledge Organisation, a global movement which aims to open up knowledge around the world and see it used and useful.
She previously worked as an Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) helping raise awareness and building capacity for research data management at UK Higher Education Institutions.
Her great regard for all things open began during her 13 years at UKOLN, a centre of expertise in digital infrastructure and information policy based at the University of Bath.
Mathieu d’Aquin Knowledge Media Institute Open University UK Email: m.daquin@open.ac.uk Web site: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/mathieu-daquin Mathieu d’Acquin is a research fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, and his research activities focus on the Semantic Web, and especially on methods and tools to build intelligent applications exploiting online knowledge.
Mathieu has been involved in the organisation of events such as the IWOD series of workshops and the SSSW Summer School.
Stefan Dietze Research Group Leader L3S Research Center Hanover Germany Email:  dietze[@]L3S.de Web site: http://www.l3s.de/en/vcard/id/stefan-dietze/ Stefan Dietze is a Research Group Leader at the L3S Research Center, Hanover, Germany.
His research interests are in Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies and their application to Web data integration problems.
Stefan currently is coordinator of two European R&D projects (LinkedUp, DURAARK) and he has been involved in the organisation of numerous events, such as ACM Web Science 2012 or the Linked Learning workshop series.
Hendrik Drachsler Assistant Professor CELSTEC Institute Open University in the Netherlands Email: hendrik.drachsler[@]ou.nl Web site: http://patient-project.eu/?page_id=73 Hendrik Drachsler is Assistant Professor at the CELSTEC Institute of the Open University in the Netherlands.
He is focusing on the personalisation of learning with information retrieval technologies and especially recommender systems.
Therefore, he is interested in research on educational datasets, linked data, data mashups, data visualisations and learning analytics.
Eelco Herder Senior Researcher L3S Research Center Hanover Germany Email: herder@l3s.de Web site: http://www.l3s.de/~herder/ Eelco Herder is a Senior Researcher at the L3S Research Center.
His research areas include Web personalisation, user modelling, usability and HCI in general.
He organised several workshops at UMAP, ESWC and IUI.
He is Programme Chair for Hypertext 2014 and was a member of the organisation committees for UMAP 2013, 2012 and 2011, CHI 2012 and Adaptive Hypermedia 2008.
Elisabetta Parodi Lattanzio Learning S.p.A. Milan Italy Email: parodi@lattanziogroup.eu Web site: http://www.lattanziogroup.eu/en.html Elisabetta Parodi is a Research and Development Project Manager for Lattanzio Learning S.p.A.
The Lattanzio Group supports public administrations and companies towards growth and provides consulting for management, training, operational and managerial outsourcing, as well as assistance with internationalisation and communication.
In addition to working on the LinkedUp Project, Elisabetta manages the Wespot Project, envisaging the development of a tools framework supporting the development of inquiry-based skills, and the INTUITEL Project, working towards the extension of Learning Management Systems via the integration of monitoring, guidance, assistance and feedback to their users.
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Book Review: Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies Buzz data mobile software wiki openoffice blog repositories linux png e-learning ebook usb podcast youtube ict Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley looks at a student survival aid in the information age that should also be valuable for tutors.
'Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies' is an example of an ever-increasing range of 'self-help' books for students on a variety of topics relating skills, tips and education.
Such books range from 'Critical thinking skills' [1] to the quite specific, for example, 'Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and more' [2].
This offering from Gower/Ashgate comes somewhere in between.
It introduces students to the main current technologies and some of the pedagogic devices they might find in modern education.
Coverage Chapter 1 introduces and sets the basics of mobile and online technologies in perspective.
It includes 'Lifelong Learning' and a useful diagram showing inter-connections when studying with these technologies.
The well-established term Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) covers the subject matter adequately.
Chapter 2, 'Student voices', shows the book's student orientation by presenting some diverse views, experiences and usage of these technologies.
All students will need ICT in their life after Further and Higher Education but no means all will have developed from practices at school.
Chapter 3 includes ideas of learning spaces and good practice as well as some notes on 'distractions and effective learning'.
Some useful information here, although I baulk somewhat at the suggestion that USB data sticks should be used even as temporary backup devices; they are by no means reliable and easily get lost.
I have not yet heard 'the dog ate my data stick' as an excuse for non-submission of a piece of work but ...
There is a tendency to equate 'temporary' with 'all'; and not just for students.
My experience suggests that, in general, students need more ICT support and consolidation of good practice than we might think, and this chapter is a useful introduction in deciding what this support might be.
Chapter 4 deals with 'traditional' academic activities ('Listening, Reading and Sense-making') which, although short, is a good introduction.
Chapter 5 follows this with 'Listening, Reading and Sense-making: a survival guide'.
There is perhaps a tendency for a reader to read this too quickly, nod sagely and pass on.
But again, there is a great deal of wisdom available here and students need to digest it and practise it in their work.
These are useful sections and, like all the chapters, can be digested fairly easily.
What I liked throughout the book were boxes with 'Tools you might use' and 'Try this' as well as quick tips, references, Web sites and applications.
I found these chapters useful to think about from a teaching perspective too, and I am sure students will use them in an effective manner.
They help concentrate the mind for various tasks they are likely to encounter in their education – although see a warning note below.
The subsequent chapters follow a similar, paired, format, Chapter 6 is 'Communicating and Community' while Chapter 7 is ditto: 'a Survival Guide'.
Chapter 8 is 'Searching and Researching', 9 is the survival aspect with Chapter 10 on 'Writing and Presenting', These are relatively short chapters but provide the basics under the chapter headings so that are not too much to tackle at any one time.
The survival guide for 'Writing and Presenting' in Chapter 11 includes a short section on collaborative writing; but it is a pity there is no linkage to plagiarism and collusion.
Students still need clarification on crossing the, often unexplained, boundary between them and co-operation.
The book makes easy reading and is not lengthy, so it can be browsed through in an evening and read in more detail as the short chapters and their survival guides are required.
The book also has, Appendix A, 'Web links to further resources' (with an online link to a Google site [3]) and Appendix B.
'File Types and Common Web Link Codes'.
The former is useful but the file types list omits some that students might well come into contact with, e.g.
.png.
Here, as throughout the book, there is a general Microsoft-orientation with only an occasional OpenOffice and Open Source or Apple/Unix/Linux mention.
There is a reference to 'Open Source' software in the Glossary (also with an online Google site [4]) but I think this is a theme that could be extended as more businesses use Open Source software and impecunious students (or their institutions) do not have to be in thrall to Microsoft.
I suspect that many students buy books such as this on the supposition that the buying and browsing will give competence.
Competencies however are only done by participation, interaction and practice.
Students do need advice, reassurance, ideas and support in their activities.
This may be related to a single pedagogic entity at a time; 'podcasts' say.
Immediate and specific advice is required but the whole is not needed.
A print-on-paper book may not be ideal for this but the e-book version apparently is just the print-on-paper published electronically.
A wiki textbook [5] could be a more suitable format.
The online glossary [4] is just a linked version of what is in the book and I'm afraid just does not cut it.
Suitable links to Wikipedia or YouTube would be rather better, although the online glossary does ask for readers to add to it.
ICT is a rapidly moving world and an updatable repository of information would aid student understanding as and when required.
The above is not a criticism of the authors – they have done a good job and there is much valuable information here – but rather of the medium for this type of publication.
Student Perspectives on Technology The recently published report, 'Student perspectives on technology – demand, perceptions and training needs' [6] by the National Union of Students in the UK was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council of England on behalf of its 'Online Learning Task Force'.
The report observed some trends that are significant in the present context: Students prefer a choice in how they learn – ICT is seen as one of many possibilities, alongside part-time and traditional full-time learning, and face-to-face teaching.
Appropriateness of technology varies significantly from course to course – students value the incorporation of ICT into their learning experience, but the demand in terms of the degree to which this occurs varies depending on course and type of study and assessment.
This book provides some of the basic information they will need for ICT development as well as a little about some basic educational (or pedagogic) methods as reviewed above.
However, the report goes on to say: Students are concerned about the ICT competency of lecturers and academic staff– There are varying levels of ICT competence on the part of lecturers and staff and, whilst some are clearly skilled or at least able to function in an IT setting, others lack even the most rudimentary IT skills; 21% of students thought their lecturers needed additional training.
There has been considerable development of 'e-learning' or better, 'Technology Enhanced Learning' (TEL) and what this means for the 'net generation' for example, 'Rethinking learning for a digital age' [7].
Yet, if students are to use ICT effectively in their life after university, then tutors need to provide appropriate use of ICT in courses and modules.
The ICT/TEL text-book for staff has not yet been written – but perhaps this is it!
Conclusion As learners experience a technology-rich age they should be able to take their developing skills and make them applicable to a wide range of academic tasks when in education and beyond.
This book would be a useful guide at schools, not just FE and HE.
Students buying it will certainly benefit from it, at least as a start into their technological education.
It is not at the cheapest end of the spectrum but is reasonable value for money.
However, given the items listed in the NUS report, I suggest (and not with tongue in cheek) that purchasers of this book should include teaching staff.
Librarians and ICT staff might have copies available at help desks too.
References Cottrell, S. "Critical Thinking Skills: Developing Effective Analysis and Argument".
2005.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pulman, A."
Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and More".
2009.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
"Learning with online and mobile technologies", Web links to further resources, http://sites.google.com/site/learnonlinegroup/useful-links "Learning with online and mobile technologies", Glossary of Acronyms and Common Terms http://sites.google.com/site/learnonlinegroup/glossary Whalley, W.B.
E-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?
', October 2006.
Ariadne, Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/whalley/ Higher Education Funding Council of England "Understanding student perspectives of online learning" 2010.
(10 November 2010) http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2010/nus.htm Sharpe, R. Beetham, H. and de Freitas, S. "Rethinking learning for a digital age".
2010.
New York and London: Routledge.
Author Details W. Brian Whalley Emeritus Professor of Geomorphology Queen's University of Belfast Belfast BT7 1NN Email: b.whalley@qub.ac.uk Web site: http://geognet.qub.ac.uk/people/staff/whalley/ Return to top Article Title: "Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies: A Student Survival Guide" Author: W. Brian Whalley Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/whalley-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review of The Network Reshapes the Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review of The Network Reshapes the Library Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir provides a review of Lorcan Dempsey's book "The Network Reshapes the Library" which collects together some of the thoughts he has had on libraries, networked information retrieval, publishing and Irish literature.
Overview [Disclosure: As Director of UKOLN, Lorcan Dempsey hired me in 1995 to be the Information Officer and Ariadne web editor.]
This 2014 publication presents a selection of posts from the blog [1] of Lorcan Dempsey [2], the Vice-President of research at OCLC for several years.
The posts are presented largely as they were originally made public; the editor notes that: "Of course, time goes on, and some websites, services, tools, and links are undoubtedly gone.
We have made no attempt to update details or refresh the content of posts.
The items included here are largely as they appeared in the blog; we have occasionally omitted long quotes from other posts from the blog and made the occasional edit for clarity."
The book is available in two media; traditional paper [3], and more recently digital versions such as for PDF readers and the Kindle [4].
The free and downloadable PDF version is reviewed here.
The book is divided into nine themed chapters, each containing the selected posts presented in chronological order.
1.
Networked resources The book and this chapter opens with a 2005 post on Amazon, Google and eBay (which are, of course, all successful today).
Further replicated posts describe the functionality of these services in more detail, as well as their relevance to informatics and the services needed, and used, by people.
The 2010 post on Top Trends is an enjoyable romp through technologies at start of this decade, such as the Nintendo Wii and QR codes.
The chapter closes with a still-pertinent 2012 post discussing knowledge organisation (for want of a better phrase), the catalog, and network-level resources.
2.
Networked organization As the title suggests, this chapter complements the previous one, focusing on how those networked resources could, or should, or are, organized to provide what the user, reader, or enquirer needs.
As throughout his blog and this book, Dempsey discusses the terminology of information services; a 2004 post here muses on the meaning and implication of logistics as applied to library services.
Following this, a 2005 post discusses: "... recombinance ... to talk about how network flow affects structures."
Another 2005 post brings back memories of those more innocent time and alludes to a more recent xkcd cartoon [5] concerning unifying standards: "Closely related to the one-stop-shop discussion is the YAP syndrome: the yet another portal syndrome.
Put together the aspiration to meet all needs in one place, and the unlikelihood of achieving this aspiration, and you end up with several one-stop-shops.
A proliferation of portals."
3.
In the flow This chapter contains Dempsey's 2005 post of the same title, which discusses the demand-side and supply-side aspects of library services.
Other posts within reference many information-oriented services that typically lie outside of the library environment, such as Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Delicious and Scribd.
A 2009 post on digital and online identity is included, discussing the identity issues of a former colleague known as Andy Powell (in physical life), Art Fossett (in Second Life), and Andy Powell as Googled (in Wishbone Ash).
Elsewhere in this chapter, the 2010 discussion of the phrase "discovery happens elsewhere" is as relevant now as it was then.
4.
Resource discovery I approached this chapter and its historically-loaded title with some trepidation; would it be filled with discourse on centroids and IAFA templates, or how human descriptives of web resources with the arguable exceptions of The Scout Report and MetaFilter have been made figuratively and literally redundant by brute force, non-salaried, technology?
This proved not to be the case.
Discussions within included the discover-locate-request-deliver concept, a detailed 2006 analysis of the future of the catalog, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and its relevance to librarians, discovery layers and content demand issues, and the relationship between the concepts of 'discovery' and 'discoverability'.
5.
Library systems The library systems chapter opens with a 2005 post discussing how ILS's (Integrated Library Systems) are typically perhaps more fragmented than integrated.
The substantive 2007 post, 'The network reconfigures the library systems environment', discusses library interoperability and the movement of discovery to the network layer, while a 2009 post, 'Untangling the library systems environment', contains some observations on library resource management of the time.
The chapter concludes with a short 2011 post which examines three senior digital library job descriptions and notes the shifting terminologies and priorities within.
6.
Data and metadata Because of the nature of Dempsey's historical roles, and the central role of OCLC, it would have been remiss not to feature posts discussing these two inter-related topics.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, to see discussion of concepts including MARC, Dublin Core, and AACR2, but thankfully this does not become an overbearing theme.
For example, an especially interesting post from 2007, 'Four sources of metadata about things', outlines the different origins of descriptive metadata in libraries (professional, contributed, programmatically promoted and intentional), while a 2009 post, 'Name authorities, crowd-sourcing, and Máire Mhac an tSaoi' discusses the representation of Gaelic names by data services.
7.
Publishing and communication This was my favourite chapter; partially due to the themes covered, and partially because of the mention of the founding of Ariadne, the publication you are currently reading.
Of particular enjoyment was the August 2007 post, 'Communication', which discusses the concept of 'impact', the state of library literature, and the comparative impact of writing in blogs, online publications, and traditional journals where your words are invisible from all readers for a time, and non-paying readers forever.
It's interesting to note that nearly all of the issues discussed in that post, and many others within this chapter, are contemporary and contentious nearly a decade later.
Perhaps, after multiple decades of services, projects, proposals and experiments, and millions of words by thousands of commentators on the issues of research publishing, quality, impact, online verses print, readability, funding and purpose, there needs to be more of a realization and acceptance that these issues are fundamentally unresolvable.
8.
Libraries The posts here relate not just to libraries, but also museums, galleries and archives, with a theme around the purpose, and the necessity, of these institutions and services pervading the chapter.
Within, Dempsey tackles Christopher Caldwell's controversial 2011 Financial Times piece on public library funding, the Information Professional now and in 2050, the definition of the librarian (with, in Dempsey's style, reference to Irish literature), collection development, and the contemporary role of the library.
9.
Lorcan's picks These are posts which are still of interest to their author, but do not fall into any of the eight previous categories.
They begin with the first post in the blog and the rationale for its existence.
There's a heavier infusion of culture in this chapter, touching on Irish poetry and literature, the so-called 'special relationship' between the US and the UK, Starbucks, Narnia, and perhaps regrettably Mumford & Sons.
In a somewhat meta-conclusion, the book closes with a 2011 post discussing preservation and curation.
Overall The style of writing makes this compilation work an easy read, with little technical knowledge demanded of the reader and most of the selected posts being relatively short.
There are, thankfully, no long technical tracts on z39.50 or the inapplicability of MARC to the modern world.
Instead, it's a pleasant read, perhaps more suited to dipping into when travelling or stuck in an airport rather than a bedtime cover-to-cover read.
Despite the easy readability, there is much of substance in the selected posts.
In addition, putting many of the discussions in context, there is frequent reference to the posts of other commentators in the wider library and information science sector.
There are two, albeit minor, criticisms.
First, it did feel slightly off to see regularly inserted 'expert comments', extolling the virtues of Dempsey's blog.
This seemed strange, like unavoidably coming across five star Amazon reviews for a product inside the product while you are consuming it.
I am not sure why these are included, as by its nature the reader is already reading the quoted content and can make up their own mind as to whether they find it enjoyable or useful.
Second, the index is a little incomplete; Starbucks, for example, appears more frequently in the text than the index indicates.
However, these slightly irksome distractions aside, I recommend Dempsey's compendium.
There is much of interest within and it is striking to observe how many digital library issues from the 2000's remain unresolved, even though we are nuclear war and sudden climate change notwithstanding closing in on the 2020's.
If you aren't sure, then you can download the free PDF reviewed here and search, browse, or randomly read a post within.
I hope, the survival of humanity willing, there is a follow-up volume in a decade or so.
Reviewer John Kirriemuir  Independent researcher http://www.silversprite.com References [1] Blog of Lorcan Dempsey.
http://orweblog.oclc.org/ [2] Lorcan Dempsey.
http://www.oclc.org/research/people/dempsey.html [3] Book of the blog, in the ALA Store (other shops are available).
http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=10974 [4] Digital versions of the Book of the blog.
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2014/network-reshapes-library-2014-overview.html [5] xkcd observation on standards.
https://xkcd.com/927/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Ancient Cultures Inside Modern Universes Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Ancient Cultures Inside Modern Universes Buzz framework wiki database dissemination portal infrastructure archives digitisation vocabularies blog repositories flickr preservation multimedia mis ebook mp3 youtube ict taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Edgardo Civallero writes on preservation and dissemination of intangible South American indigenous heritage and updating information using Web-based tools.
Cultural Heritage Heritage can be defined as a heterogeneous ensemble of environmental and cultural elements material or otherwise that are transmitted from generation to generation, creating the foundations on which people build and orientate their identity and vision of the world.
According to the definition reached during the UNESCO Experts´ Round Table in Turin (Italy, 2001), heritage includes: ’… peoples’ learned processes along with the knowledge, skills and creativity that inform and are developed by them, the products they create, and the resources, spaces and other aspects of the social and natural context necessary to their sustainability’.
[1] There is a number of things that may be considered to play an active role in the memory of all people: landscapes, sounds, objects, tools, pieces of work and buildings that show the path trodden by communities; the different parts that hold any clue to their motivations, their hopes and their quests; any element that may reveal their failures and losses, the reasons why they came into existence and, inevitably in some cases, vanished in the mists of time.
Besides giving people a feeling of continuity in relation to previous generations, these elements are also important for their present identity and the preservation of human diversity and creativity.
A first approach to this matter allows us to make a clear difference between two main categories of heritage: natural and cultural [2].
The latter represents the most valuable product of human intellect and sensitivity, and therefore it is the most intimately linked with human nature.
According to UNESCO’s definition, cultural heritage… ’… includes the works of [humankind’s] artists, architects, musicians, writers and scientists and also the work of anonymous artists, expressions of the people’s spirituality, and the body of values which give meaning to life’.
[3] For the most part, this rich heritage -used, enjoyed, renewed, enlarged and improved on a daily basisis non-material (even if it is usually expressed through material means).
Non-palpable aspects of life such as words and languages, sounds, feelings, sensations, thoughts and beliefs are considered to form the intangible cultural heritage, a group of manifestations belonging to the very spirit of a people.
In addition to channelling a community’s interests and different pursuits, it also acts as a means and a guide to the production of the tangible heritage, i.e.
the material one.
UNESCO defines this intangible heritage as ‘all forms of traditional and popular or folk culture, i.e., collective works originated in a given community and based on tradition’ [4].
Customs, tales, music, dances, rituals, festivities, medicine, culinary arts, dressing, games, theatre and the special skills related to material aspects (e.g.
tool making or agricultural knowledge), are components of a huge mosaic that bestows all people with unique features, making them the owners of an invaluable richness.
All these traditions are usually transmitted through different channels and methods within a framework of collective recreative activity.
Moreover, besides strengthening the social bonds within a community, they also facilitate the socialisation of its individuals as well as the development of their group identity.
Image from the Ecuadorean Confederation of Indigenous Nations [58] Identity and Diversity For a good number of societies, intangible heritage represents an inexhaustible source of facts and ideas that not only support their struggle for development, but also emphasise their memory and their cultural identity, which they proudly defend day after day.
Cultural identity is the ensemble of traits and features that link a person to a group, maintaining a strong cohesion within society, harmonising customs, establishing both social rules and codes of communication.
Inside this ensemble, languages act as a form of glue, fixing various elements together and giving a sense to the cultural characteristics surrounding them.
According to UNESCO Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean [5], cultural identity is the basis for the life of peoples, stemming from the past and projecting itself into the future; never static but simultaneously historical and forward-looking, and, therefore, always improving and renewing itself.
As happens with intangible heritage, UNESCO recommends that the international community preserve and protect each people’s identity, especially that of cultural and demographic minorities [4].
This recommendation deserves careful consideration: heritages, memories and identities of such minority communities have to withstand tremendous pressure from surrounding dominant cultures and ideologies, represented by mass media, modern digital information channels, official educative systems, religious creeds and socio-economic policies, all of which are themselves widely influenced by Western thought, idioms and models.
Such considerable pressure on these fragile minority societies results in the phenomenon known as acculturation, namely the progressive abandonment of one’s own culture (or a great part of it) and the gradual adoption of increasingly dominant alien structures.
Besides the alarming loss of cultural identity, the resulting homogenisation threatens natural human diversity and leads to the eradication of valuable features that were part of our universal heritage.
Culture assumes diverse forms through different places and time.
This diversity is manifest in the plurality and originality that characterise human groupings and societies.
The planet currently plays host to very many different human communities, each presenting unique facets of our diversity, demonstrating particular elements or aspects that make them what they are.
Each community has different ways of facing the same (or very similar) problem(s), particular rhythms and sounds expressing the same feeling, specific words used to define broadly similar concepts, specific images for the same belief.
All go to produce a panorama composed of an infinite number of components, a panorama that varies in form, yet is identical in terms of its deeper content.
The first article of the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity [6] proposes that it must be ‘recognized and affirmed for the benefit of present and future generations’, for it is a continuous ‘source of exchange, innovation and creativity … as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature’.
However, and according to UNESCO’s report ‘Knowledge versus information societies’ [7], only 4% of the planet’s languages are used by 96% of its population; 50% of the world’s languages are in danger of extinction; 90% of all languages are not represented on the Internet.
Smith [8] states that ‘education dominated by commercial interests or by the English language may threaten vulnerable local languages and cultures’.
Capurro [9], quoting another UNESCO document [10] points out that ‘globalization … by highlighting the culture of economically powerful nations, has created new forms of inequality, thereby fostering cultural conflict rather than cultural pluralism’.
These excerpts brief paragraphs extracted from a plethora of detailed and related works serve to highlight an unequal and unbalanced environment: that of ‘minority’ communities.
Despite (inter)national recommendations, declarations and laws (as quoted above), those communities’ rich and diverse cultural heritage has been pushed to one side in favour of mainstream, globalised, dominant cultures.
Such minorities are usually underor mis-represented in books, journals, the Web and other media, and they are placed behind different types of socio-economic barriers, including that of the Digital Divide.
Their intangible heritage is rarely included in libraries, archives or other repositories of knowledge, they have almost no access to information and their freedom of expression is far from guaranteed, despite Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other similar international documents.
Key components of these minority indigenous populations are very important elements of human diversity and, at the same time, prime targets for socio-economic and cultural pressures, inequalities, exclusion and discrimination.
As a result of these processes, their ancient and traditional wisdom, memories, identities and cultural heritage are seriously threatened, and their mother tongues endangered.
In the developed world where information and knowledge seem to be at the fingertips of every person thanks to new ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), they have difficulty in recovering just a little part of their culture in order to remember who they are, why they exist, what they are heading for and what their struggles are… Nonetheless, some successful steps have been taken to re-balance this inequitable situation.
And, curiously enough, new technologies -Web sites, blogs and digital libraries have played a key role in this process.
Indigenous Peoples and Their Heritage Traditional Cultures in a Modern World Indigenous peoples are neither a romantic part of a past that has come to an end, nor a museum curiosity in a globalised present.
These societies are bursting with vitality, and preserve their traditional characteristics while trying to adapt them to the times in which they live.
Such indigenous communities make up a population of about 300370 million people, according to latest international estimates (World Bank United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues) [11].
According to IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) [11], they constitute over 5% of the world population, speaking more than 4000 different languages and dialects and comprising more than 5000 groups inhabiting 70 countries across the five continents.
According to the same source, they account for 15% of the poorest people on the planet, and about one-third of the 900 million extremely poor rural inhabitants in the world.
In Latin American countries, these societies comprise some 300-400 groups, amounting to something like 40-50 million people, i.e.
around 10% of the regional population [12][13][14][15].
In the case of Bolivia and Guatemala, they make up more than half the total population of each nation.
From the 16th century onwards, native peoples in South America have been decimated by disease, invasion, slavery and war, and consequently harmed on every imaginable front: political, social, religious, cultural, linguistic, educational.
Many such peoples were eradicated in their homeland, together with any living memory; some others, however, managed to survive, and developed new forms of social structure and development, ways of thinking and patterns of behaviour.
Their ancient cultures constitute a surprisingly high percentage of total global cultural diversity.
Both in South America and worldwide, the cultures of indigenous peoples represent an immense mosaic of languages, cultural features, philosophies and literatures (both oral and written), of rituals and daily custom.
Their cultural background is intimately connected with the environment they inhabited (which usually is not the one that they occupy at present).
They also represent a wide spectrum of knowledge about the world that is very different from the range of ideas presented by the dominant cultures on the planet.
In South America, many of their words and attitudes have been added to the mestizo heritage of each nation, thereby enriching their own plural identity.
Indigenous traditions, sounds and sense of time have been acknowledged around the world.
However, the Western understanding of such traditions needs to be much deeper if it is to be anywhere near complete and accurate.
Despite the relative continuity of their historical presence on the global map admittedly more important in some cases than in others and the recognition of their rights in a good number of international recommendations and treaties, most native peoples nonetheless continue today down the path to cultural and actual oblivion.
Current statistics (such as those quoted above) show a regrettable connection between indigenous communities and the highest levels of poverty, with all the problems associated: lack of human rights, poor general health, malnutrition, violence, substance addiction, unemployment, and loss of identity.
National efforts across South America have managed to do little to improve this situation; they largely comprise a range of disparate and insufficient support initiatives which fail even to guarantee a temporary level of basic welfare, let alone the development for the future that they would wish for themselves.
Largely against their will they have increasingly become pawns on a political chess board, participants in a power struggle in which they count for relatively little.
In many cases, their culture, far from being restored, promulgated and proudly lived out, has turned into a folksy postcard caricature which they can barely recognise at all.
In the worst cases these people’s culture has become a burden, an undesirable marking that only attracts discrimination and prejudice.
In fact, official oppression and/or social discrimination have forced them towards the voluntary abandonment of their traditional ways of life in an attempt to ‘integrate’ into the dominant society, in order to be accepted; something that they have yet to achieve: their physical characteristics, which they neither can nor should alter, remain the main reason for their exclusion in South America.
Yet despite the often critical situation in which they find themselves, many of these indigenous peoples keep up the struggle to survive.
Many strong socio-political and cultural indigenous movements have spread across the continent.
They acknowledge the importance of keeping a foot in their own traditional culture and, at the same time, having the other in the global, hi-tech, dominant society.
On the one hand, they work -sometimes against mainstream pressure towards the restoration and revitalisation of their language, heritage, customary laws and attitudes through education programmes and other activities.
On the other, they work with the new ICTs, in order to attain their goals and serve their own interests: disseminating their knowledge, exposing their problems, sharing their culture and exchanging ideas, experiences and opportunities in a global arena.
On the Other Side of the ‘Digital Divide’ Digital tools and Web connection have demonstrated in those areas where they are available, which are not so many below the line that separates North and South that it is possible to respond to the challenge that many underserved users represent, by recovering their memories, traditions and knowledge and spreading them worldwide with due respect for their cultural and linguistic patterns and characteristics.
Once it has been proved to be possible to do this in some cases, it should be increasingly possible to carry out such recovery work in many more.
ICT should help South American indigenous populations to recover part of their cultures, make their current socio-political situation more widely known, and spread further news of their hopes and endeavours.
Equally such technology could also support the first steps of traditional peoples towards their inclusion in the ‘global (digital) village’, creating opportunities for cross-cultural meetings and exchanges.
Indigenous populations in South America have faced such challenges with imagination and creativity, somewhat characteristic of their daily life.
Socially and demographically strong communities like Aymara in Bolivia, Quechua in Peru and Mapuche in Chile living in areas where there is access to Web technologies, have already made extensive use of them in order to inform the wider world about their social and political issues, their traditional literature, their music and their customs.
They have also used new tools, such as forums, blogs and wikis, in order to collect information on languages and culture, and share news and claims.
Other minority communities -like Wayúu in Colombia, Kuna in Panama, Guaraní in Paraguay, Tikuna in Brazil or Qom in Argentinahave started to use new ICTs in order to gather not only their intangible heritage, but also their communities’ current affairs information and updated news, and share them with the (inter)national society, while providing their own community members with valuable material for bolstering their endangered identity.
Governmental institutions, universities, private foundations and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) across the continent have also collaborated with native communities admittedly with different levels of commitment according to their capacity and engagement to create Web-based spaces where indigenous culture can be appropriately displayed under open access terms.
Good examples of these activities can be found in Chile and Colombia.
Certainly, the Web-based material created by such diverse types of authors with such different educational and training backgrounds, ethnic origin, linguistic and literacy skills, technological capacity and funding support is very variable, but all of it has one thing in common: it has been designed for sharing knowledge about its community with the global and national community, and seeks to ensure that indigenous voices (usually silenced and forgotten) are heard.
The principal characteristics of this Web-based material are as follows: All kinds of Web tools are used, from Web sites to portals and from blogs to wikis.
Free Web pages and weblogs with simple designs and usually overloaded with advertisements are the most common choices for little indigenous communities and groups, usually operating on a small budget, scarce access to technology, low digital literacy and with little chance of developing a more complex or elaborate setup.
By contrast, universities and governmental institutions display the most sophisticated designs, including elements like databases, virtual libraries, sound archives, etc.
Therefore social exclusion, lack of resources and information illiteracy, in effect the Digital Divide, may be pointed to for the reasons why such a huge distance exists between indigenous minorities on the one hand and established institutions on the other.
Contents displayed in these Web spaces include a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from socio-political claims and activity to cultural matters and traditional knowledge.
Again, free Web pages and blogs are generally used by indigenous (and non-indigenous) local or grass-root organisations in order to spread news on their current circumstances and information on their culture.
Detailed and complex Web sites are used by bigger or official organisations in order to share educative materials, ancient heritage, oral tradition, art and handicraft, books and music, etc.
Somewhere in the middle between those two ends of the spectrum, simple Web sites are used by national indigenous organisations in order to disseminate their news and information.
When one compares the various outputs, it is indigenous communities which provide the most up-to-date news and ‘fresh’ cultural information; however, it is the institutional Web presences which provide a better quality of content and presentation, more resources and a wider range of informative options.
Most of this material (whether of indigenous or non-indigenous authorship) are written mainly in Spanish or Portuguese.
Few Web pages are exclusively written in an indigenous language; and when they are, more often than not, they are the work of an official institution or group rather than an indigenous community (though some of latter’s members may be part of such an institution).
It can be concluded therefore that most of the indigenous thought is usually put into non-indigenous words.
The reasons for this phenomenon are complex: basically, among aboriginal language speakers in South America there is a low level of literacy in their mother tongue; furthermore, some of these languages do not have a written form, or it may happen that their orthographic and grammar standards have yet to be entirely developed.
With some exceptions, these circumstances make it difficult to express content using native languages.
In addition, it is intended that the information presented in those pages be understood by the whole national society where most individuals barely understand indigenous languages, much less speak them.
Thus, with the target audience in mind, Spanish and/or Portuguese are preferred.
Where content is intended to reach the native community as well as non-indigenous society, the dominant (usually national) languages nonetheless remain the most employed: indigenous people who are able to access Web tools are invariably bilingual, while the official languages are the only tongues understood by non-indigenous people.
Free Web space where digital files, text, news or messages can be shared and exchanged are the most popular among indigenous individual users (see Other Media below).
Apart from the obvious economic reason, namely that free Web space is popular with Web surfers worldwide, it should be noted that indigenous peoples have a deep sense of communal sharing; it can be argued, then, that (digital) locations where information products can be exchanged without charge and accessed openly, do in themselves fit better with their customary attitudes and habits.
The taxonomy proposed by Hernández and Calcagno [16] for indigenous and indigenous-related Web sites provides further information and might clarify some of the ideas suggested in the previous paragraphs.
There is not a single, simple assessment of South American indigenous presence on the Web.
The direct involvement of native communities in the digital universe is still very limited, due to several reasons: geographical or social isolation, exclusion, poverty, digital illiteracy, lack of reading and writing skills, language, absence of resources such as electricity, telephone or computers, etc.
Furthermore, the South American indigenous material on the Web largely derives from a small number of ethnic groups: Mapuche in Chile, Aymara in Bolivia, Quechua in Peru and, to some extent, Guaraní in Paraguay and Wayúu in Colombia.
These particular groups are numerically significant in terms of population and have developed long-term, enduring strategies to defend their rights, using Web-based material as a means of sustaining their movement.
Once participation is achieved, usually by indigenous peoples with a strong presence in their national society and living in areas where the infrastructure and ICT are reasonably available, the initial aims relate to creating free or low-cost Web space where socio-political issues, claims and activity can be exposed, as well as content in respect of their own culture and identity.
The sort of information they make public generally reflects their grievances about the violation of their rights, as well as their efforts to guarantee respect for and promote the restoration of their culture and language.
Universities, NGOs, official organisations and governmental institutions have become the main sources of accurate, scholarly knowledge on indigenous cultures, since they have the budget, the know-how, the technologies, the staff and the research resources to extend such knowledge.
Their Web sites include bibliographies, images, sound files, books, news, interviews, analysis and essays, sometimes with multilingual facilities (Spanish / Portuguese, English and indigenous languages).
They work in collaboration with indigenous persons, usually scholars, students, artists, journalists and leaders, to design them.
In the short term, it would be desirable not only to increase direct indigenous involvement in the connected world of the World Wide Web, but also to include more ethnic groups from different areas, and to create new spaces for participation and exchange.
At the same time, major organisations should provide support to indigenous communities for developing such spaces and disseminating their material in the WWW universe.
Partnership ought to be the option of choice, relying on fruitful collaboration between local and official organisations.
It should encourage native peoples to face the challenge of new technology, by which they would benefit enormously in terms of their information needs.
Such an association would also provide national societies with the opportunity to extend their own knowledge horizon through the inclusion of indigenous wisdom.
In so doing, it is expected that new developments will stem from best practice and these innovations will make it possible to live traditional cultures in a modern, digital way.
Some South American Experiences Wikipedia The most famous open access encyclopaedia has new versions in Aymara, Quechua and Guaraní languages (added to Nahuatl, Inuit, Navajo, Cherokee and Cree).
Wikipedia Aymar Aru [17] had 110 articles in November 2007.
Qhichwa Wikipidiya [18] numbered almost 5000 articles at that time, while Wikipedia Ava—e’éme [19] had just been launched.
Besides using exclusively indigenous languages, these wikis display intangible heritage, historical and geographical information and other cultural content.
Local Organisations’ Weblogs Some local indigenous associations have decided to use blogs in order to spread their own cultural expressions and news.
This is the case of Aymara organisations such as Consejo Regional Aymara de Mallkus y T’allas [20], Consejo Autónomo Aymara [21] and Consejo Nacional Aymara de Mallkus y T’allas [22] in northern Chile.
In the south of Chile, Mapuche associations like Newen Mapuche Kimn [23], Noticias Mapundial [24] and Newen Tuleimy Compuche [25] have also chosen Weblogs for introducing themselves on the Web.
Valuable examples from Colombian Wayúu people include Cabildo Wayúu Nóüna de Campamento [26], a macro-blog system lodging subsidiary blogs as NotiWayúu [27], Itinerario de víctimas Wayúu [28] and Tienda de Wayúu Nóüna [29].
The Wayúu organisation Wayúumunsurat edits the Weblog Acontecimientos de la Guajira [30] and the NGO Solidaridad Wayúu Solidarity also has another blog [31].
National Organisations’ Web Sites Major national organisations maintain interesting Web sites where they publish news and other updated cultural content on indigenous peoples.
These bodies are, roughly speaking, non-native institutions working on indigenous issues, which allow different degrees of participation on the part of aboriginal communities’ members.
In Argentina, the Web sites Comunidades Aborígenes de la República Argentina [32], Equipo Nacional de Pastoral Aborigen [33] and Equipo de Pueblos Indígenas [34] may serve as examples.
All of them belong to non-indigenous groups, mostly influenced by the Catholic Church.
They exhibit a variety of content, most of them describing contemporary indigenous societies, their geographical setting, their socio-economic situation, and their cultural traits.
In Bolivia there is a large number of indigenous organisations present on the Web.
Important ones some of them truly remarkable are Parlamento del Pueblo Aymara [35], Plataforma de Información del Pueblo Indio [36], CIDOB Confederación Indígena del Oriente, Chaco y Amazonía Boliviana [37], and APCOB Apoyo para el Campesino Indígena del Oriente Boliviano [38].
The latter has done impressive work, editing multimedia material with a great deal of material on indigenous intangible heritage.
At the same time, it has improved information literacy skills within native communities.
Official, non-aboriginal institutions working with or for native communities are CEDIB Centro de Documentación e Información Bolivia [39], CEJIS Centro de Estudios Jurídicos e Investigación Social [40] and CENDA Centro de Comunicación y Desarrollo Andino [41].
All of them support aboriginal groups by providing strategic information (e.g.
health information and human rights).
In Brazil, Fundação Nacional do Indio [42], Instituto de Desenvolvimento das Tradições Indígenas [43], Coordenação das Organizações Indígenas da Amazonia Brasileira [44], Centro de Trabalho Indigenista [45] and the Web site ‘Povos Indígenas do Brasil’ of the Instituto Socioambiental [46] are a few examples of governmental organisations working in close collaboration with indigenous communities and disseminating cultural content and news updates.
Indigenous Peoples of Brazil from the Web site of the Socio-environmental Institute [46] In Colombia, two major indigenous organisations are Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia [47] and Asociación de Cabildos del Cauca [48].
Their contents focus principally on political issues, in a country where breaches of human (especially aboriginal) rights reach dramatic proportions.
In Chile, the main governmental groups are CONADI Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena [49], Programa de Derechos Indígenas [50], Ser Indígena Portal de las culturas indígenas de Chile [51] and Pueblos Indígenas de Chile [52].
They offer extensive and detailed information on native heritage; Ser Indígena has a virtual library (see Digital Libraries and Archives) with many documents available to be downloaded.
Indigenous associations with a strong presence on the Web are Mapuche Inter-regional Council [53], Centro de Documentación Mapuche [54], LIWEN [55] and Portal mapuche [56] for Mapuche people, and Aymara Net [57] for Aymara communities.
Their chief concern is the present circumstances of indigenous peoples; however, they also include much interesting cultural content.
From Ser Indígena: Portal of the indigenous cultures of Chile [51] In Ecuador, core indigenous organisations are Confederación de nacionalidades indígenas del Ecuador [58], Ecuarunari Confederación de los pueblos de nacionalidad Kichua del Ecuador [59] and CODENPE Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y pueblos del Ecuador [60].
Examples of official institutions are FODEPI Fondo de desarrollo de los pueblos indígenas [61] and DINEIB Dirección Nacional de Educación Intercultural bilingüe del Ecuador [62].
In Peru, space for indigenous peoples is provided on the Web by Red de Información Indígena [63], Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica [64], AIDESEP Asociación Interétnica para el Desarrollo de la Amazonia Peruana [65] and the NGO Chirapaq [66].
They exhibit a considerable amount of cultural content and support local socio-political movements.
At a continental level, there are several political organisations such as Fondo Indígena Latinoamericano [67] and Minkandina Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas [68].
The III Instituto Indigenista Interamericano [69] together with OEA (Organización de Estados Americanos), UN, UNESCO and WHO, have developed a remarkable amount of material concerning aboriginal issues, similar to the efforts undertaken by other regional organisations like RUTA Desarrollo Rural Sostenible de Centroamérica [70] and Red de Información Indígena [71].
These efforts are aimed at restoring, preserving, organising and managing indigenous knowledge and information.
These organisations have also developed specific initiatives, within indigenous communities, to promote information literacy and skills for handling their own heritage in a digital context.
From the Indigenous Information Network [71] The Web sites of some national non-indigenous organisations have been created in European countries.
Good examples are Fundación Rehue [72] which originated in the Netherlands and Ñuke Mapu [73] created in Sweden, both displaying Mapuche cultural content and political material.
Educational Organisations In the Andes, PROEIB Andes [74] is a major institution supporting and encouraging bilingual education.
In Bolivia, THOA Taller de Historia Oral Andina [75] is one of the members of REDETBO, an online network of anthropological organisations and libraries.
THOA carries out extensive research on oral history.
In northern Chile, Instituto de Estudios Andinos Isluga [76], IECTA Instituto para el estudio de la cultura y tecnología andina [77] and ILCA Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara [78] are recognised institutions working for the restoration of traditional Aymara culture, while in southern Chile, a very important institution is Instituto de Estudios Indígenas at the Universidad de la Frontera [79], which has an outstanding documentation centre focusing on Mapuche culture.
In Peru, a well known centre is Centro Bartolomé de las Casas [80], with scholarly work on Andean Peruvian native culture; furthermore, organisations like CAAAP Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica [81] and IIAP Instituto de Investigación de la Amazonia Peruana [82] are involved in similar work in Peruvian Amazonia.
Front page of the Institute of Indigenous Studies [79] Language Web Sites and Blogs The Quechua language is the most prevalent across Latin-American indigenous sites.
Web sites such as Runasimi [83], created in Germany, and Yachay [84] are widely recognised for the detail and accuracy of the documents they hold.
However, platforms such as Habla quechua [85], Quechua Imperial [86], Asociación tucumana de investigadores en lengua quechua [87], Asociación de investigadores en lengua quechua [88] and Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua Regional Lima [89] also make interesting contributions.
The Aymara language is supported by really good Web sites, such as Aruskipasipxa—anakasakipunirakïspawa [90], Aymara Uta [91] and ILCA Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara [92].
The Guaraní language, for its part, is described on the German-based Web site Guaraní Ñanduti Rogue [93] and on the Ateneo de lengua y cultura guaraní [94], among others.
Other indigenous languages are represented as well, with their material published online, especially by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) [95] and by the Stanford University Department of Linguistics [96].
Digital Libraries and Archives One of the most interesting digital archives in Latin America is curiously placed at the University of Texas (USA).
AILLA Archivo de los Idiomas Indígenas de Latinoamérica [97] is an archive where sound examples of many indigenous languages can be freely accessed and downloaded alongside transcriptions and complementary information.
A good example of digital library containing indigenous documents is the Chilean Biblioteca Virtual Ser Indigena [98].
It lodges many resources on native culture, ranging from digital books to useful links and from art pictures to mp3-format music.
University libraries and other institutions throughout South America usually include in their virtual space digitised versions of early national or regional books, including those written in indigenous languages and about native peoples.
It should be noted that the digitisation of the first Aymara grammar and vocabulary, a book written by the Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio in 1603, appears on the Web site Lengua andina [99].
News Front page banner of Mapuexpress, an information and news site for the Mapuche people [100] Indigenous online newspapers as Mapuexpress Informativo mapuche [100] and Periódico Mapuche Azkintuwe [101] from the Chilean Mapuche people release updated information on political and cultural issues; a similar task is accomplished by the Ecuadorian organisation Ecuarunari bilingual electronic newspaper ‘Rikcharisun’ [102].
Independent platforms include Indymedia 103, where there is a section for native peoples [104 (again from Argentina); Red Voltaire [105], Agencia Latinoamericana de Información [106], Revista Ser Indígena [107], Redes Indígenas [108], Choike [109], Ukhamawa [110] and Minga Informativa [111] are other informative channels collecting news about the reality of native communities.
Individual Weblogs Many individuals within indigenous communities have built personal blogs in order to expose and share different aspects of their own native culture such as music, history, language, customs or art.
Examples are Aymaras de Chile [112], Encuentro Kollasuyo [113], Comunidad Ayllu [114], Aru Wayna La voz de los jóvenes [115], Crónicas Aymaras [116] and Cultura Aymara [117] related to the Chilean Aymara people; Comunidad Mbyá Guaraní [118] to the Argentinean Guaraní people; Ilamagun [119] to the Panama Kuna people, El camino de los tobas [120] and Barrio Toba de La Plata [121] relating to the Argentinean Qom people, and many others.
At the same time, there are non-indigenous authors publishing Weblogs on indigenous issues, like Cine indígena [122], Organizando la esperanza [123] or Resistencia indígena [124].
There is also a high number of photoblogs and audioblogs sharing indigenous material, edited mainly by young people.
Other Media Indigenous organisations and individuals have also made use of other Web-based tools for disseminating their intangible heritage, their opinions and their current circumstances.
Forums and listservs have been employed in exchanging ideas, news and experiences, as well as in disseminating claims and calling for initiatives.
A perfect example is the listserv Ukhamawa [125].
Popular, free platforms like Flickr (for storing images) and YouTube (videos) have been also used in order to share tourist pictures and videos, music performances, traditional celebrations and ceremonies (like the Andean Carnival), debates and other political activism, documentary films, TV interviews with indigenous leaders and many different examples of cultural expression.
Native users also profit from free shared spaces like RapidShare [126].
Online indigenous radio stations broadcast music, language courses, cultural programmes and current affairs at local and regional level, using both dominant and native languages.
Conclusions Despite the adverse repercussions of the digital divide and information illiteracy across Latin America, the adoption of new ICTs is becoming more widespread.
Even if inside the WWW universe, ‘dominant’ languages, alphabets, media and cultural traits still represent a high percentage of its content, it is also true that minority groups are finding a niche in the digital world thanks to the expansion in use of the technology that can connect them.
The increased use of Web-based tools and space as an arena for communication and dissemination will undoubtedly remain a priority for years to come.
Furthermore, these spaces and tools could also represent a means to greater intercultural exchange between different (indigenous and non-indigenous) societies.
After centuries of silence, the indigenous peoples of Latin America now have the opportunity to make their voices heard worldwide.
These their initiatives deserve international support if we are to create a better and deeper understanding among cultures and peoples and so allow humankind to develop its plural societies successfully.
Editor’s note: ‘mestizo’ is defined as ‘(in Latin America) a man (or woman) of mixed race, especially the offspring of a Spaniard and an American Indian.
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Del Popolo, F., Oyarce, A.M. (2005).
“Población indígena de América Latina: perfil sociodemográfico en el marco de la Conferencia Internacional sobre la Población y el Desarrollo y de las Metas del Milenio”.
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Los pueblos indígenas y la Sociedad de la Información en América Latina y el Caribe: un marco para la acción, http://www.iica.org.uy/REDLAT/publi021.pdf Wikipedia Aymar Aru http://ay.wikipedia.org/ Qhichwa Wikipidiya http://qu.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia Ava—e’éme http://gn.wikipedia.org/ Consejo Regional Aymara de Mallkus y T’allas http://cna-aricaparinacota.blogspot.com/ Consejo Autónomo Aymara http://consejoautonomoaymara.blogspot.com/ Consejo Nacional Aymara de Mallkus y T’allas http://cna-chile.blogspot.com/ Newen Mapuche Kimn http://newenmapuchekimn.blogspot.com/ Noticias Mapundial http://mapundial-ong.blogspot.com/ Newen Tuleimy Compuche http://juanpaillalef.blogspot.com/ Cabildo Wayúu Nóüna de Campamento http://cabildowayuunouna.blogspot.com/ NotiWayúu http://notiwayuu.blogspot.com/ Itinerario de víctimas Wayúu http://victimaswayuu.blogspot.com/ Tienda de Wayúu Nóüna http://victimaswayuu.blogspot.com/ Weblog Acontecimientos de la Guajira http://organizacionwayuumunsurat.blogspot.com/ Blog Wayúunaiki101 http://www.wayuunaiki101.blogspot.com/ Comunidades Aborígenes de la República Argentina http://www.madryn.com/pm/endepa/ Equipo Nacional de Pastoral Aborigen http://www.endepa.org.ar/ Equipo de Pueblos Indígenas http://www.pueblosindigenas.net/ Parlamento del Pueblo Aymara http://www.AymaraNet.org/parlamentoaymara1.html Plataforma de Información del Pueblo Indio http://www.puebloindio.org/ceacisa.htm CIDOB Confederación Indígena del Oriente, Chaco y Amazonía Boliviana http://www.cidob-bo.org/ APCOB Apoyo para el Campesino Indígena del Oriente Boliviano http://www.apcob.org.bo/ CEDIB Centro de Documentación e Información Bolivia http://www.cedib.org/pcedib/ CEJIS Centro de Estudios Jurídicos e Investigación Social http://www.ecoportal.net/content/view/full/14759/ CENDA Centro de Comunicación y Desarrollo Andino http://www.cenda.org/ Fundação Nacional do Indio http://www.funai.gov.br/ Instituto de Desenvolvimento das Tradições Indígenas http:///www.ideti.org.br/ Coordenação das Organizações Indígenas da Amazonia Brasileira http://www.coiab.com.br/ Centro de Trabalho Indigenista http://www.trabalhoindigenista.org.br/ ‘Povos Indígenas do Brasil’ of the Instituto Socioambiental http://www.socioambiental.org/pib/index.html Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia http://www.onic.org.co/ Asociación de Cabildos del Cauca http://www.inforcauca.org/ CONADI Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena http://www.conadi.cl/ Programa de Derechos Indígenas http://www.derechosindigenas.cl/ Ser Indígena Portal de las culturas indígenas de Chile http://www.serindigena.cl/ Pueblos Indígenas de Chile http://www.conal.cl/html/que_es_conal/pueblos_indigenas.html Mapuche Inter-regional Council http://www.members.aol.com/mapulink/ Centro de Documentación Mapuche http://www.soc.uu.se/Mapuche/ El Centro de Estudios y Documentación Mapuche Liwen http://liwen_temuko.tripod.com/liwen.html Portal mapuche http://www.lofdigital.org.ar/ Aymara Net http://www.aymaranet.org/ Confederación de nacionalidades indígenas del Ecuador http://conaie.org/ Ecuarunari Confederación de los pueblos de nacionalidad Kichua del Ecuador http://www.ecuarunari.org/ CODENPE Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y pueblos del Ecuador http://www.codenpe.gov.ec/ FODEPI Fondo de desarrollo de los pueblos indígenas http://www.codenpe.gov.ec/fodepi.htm DINEIB Dirección Nacional de Educación Intercultural bilingüe del Ecuador http://www.dineib.edu.ec/ Red de Información Indígena http://www.redindigena.net/ Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica http://www.coica.org.ec/ AIDESEP Asociación Interétnica para el Desarrollo de la Amazonia Peruana http://www.aidesep.org.pe/index.php/ Chirapaq http://www.chirapaq.org.pe/ Fondo Indígena Latinoamericano http://www.fondoindigena.org/ Minkandina Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas http://www.minkandina.org/ III Instituto Indigenista Interamericano http://www.indigenista.org/ RUTA Desarrollo Rural Sostenible de Centroamérica http://www.ruta.org/ Red de Información Indígena http://www.redindigena.net/ Fundación Rehue http://www.xs4all.nl/~rehue/index.html Ñuke Mapu http://www.mapuche.info/ PROEIB Andes http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/ESSD/indigenous.nsf/Kiosk+Links/3EDED47A26C829F1852568230080961F THOA Taller de Historia Oral Andina http://www.aymaranet.org/thoa.html Instituto de Estudios Andinos Isluga http://www.unap.cl/isluga/ IECTA Instituto para el estudio de la cultura y tecnología andina http://www.iecta.cl/ ILCA Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara http://www.ilcanet.com/ Instituto de Estudios Indígenas at the Universidad de la Frontera http://www.estudiosindigenas.cl/ Centro Bartolomé de las Casas http://www.cbc.org.pe/ CAAAP Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica http://www.caaap.org.pe/ IIAP Instituto de Investigación de la Amazonia Peruana http://www.iiap.org.pe/ Runasimi http://www.runasimi.de/ Yachay http://www.yachay.com.pe/ Habla quechua http://hablaquechua.blogspot.com/ Quechua Imperial http://noemivizcardorozas.blogspot.com/ Asociación tucumana de investigadores en lengua quechua http://usuarios.arnet.com.ar/yanasu/ Asociación de investigadores en lengua quechua http://www.adilq.com.ar/ Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua Regional Lima http://amlqrl.blogspot.com/ Aruskipasipxa—anakasakipunirakïspawa http://grove.ufl.edu/~hardman/ Aymara Uta http://www.aymara.org/ ILCA Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara http://www.ilcanet.com/ Guaraní Ñanduti Rogue http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/lustig/hisp/guarani.html Ateneo de lengua y cultura guaraní http://www.ateneoguarani.edu.py Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) http://www.sil.org/ Stanford University Department of Linguistics http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/ AILLA Archivo de los Idiomas Indígenas de Latinoamérica http://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/welcome_sp.html Biblioteca Virtual Ser Indigena http://biblioteca.serindigena.org/ Lengua andina http://www.lenguandina.org/ Mapuexpress Informativo mapuche http://www.mapuexpress.net/ Periódico Mapuche Azkintuwe http://www.nodo50.org/azkintuwe/ ‘Rikcharisun’ Newspaper http://www.ecuarunari.org/ Indymedia http://argentina.indymedia.org/ Indymedia section for First Nations http://argentina.indymedia.org/features/pueblos/ Red Voltaire http://www.voltairenet.org/es Agencia Latinoamericana de Información http://www.alainet.org/index.phtml.es/ Revista Ser Indígena http://www.revista.serindigena.org/noticias/ Redes Indígenas http://www.nativenetworks.si.edu/esp/purple/ Choike http://www.choike.org/nuevo/97/12/noticias.html Ukhamawa http://ukhamawa.blogspot.com/ Minga Informativa http://www.movimientos.org/ Aymaras de Chile http://aymarasdechile.blogspot.com/ Encuentro Kollasuyo http://encuentrokollasuyo.blogspot.com/ Comunidad Ayllu http://comunidadayllu.blogspot.com/ Aru Wayna La voz de los jóvenes http://aruwaynachile.blogspot.com/ Crónicas Aymaras http://aymarani.blogspot.com/ Cultura Aymara http://aymara.blogspot.com/ Comunidad Mbyá Guaraní http://marangatucomunidad.blogspot.com/ Ilamagun http://ilamagun.blogspot.com/ El camino de los tobas http://elcaminodelostobas.blogspot.com/ Barrio Toba de La Plata http://barriotoba-lp.blogspot.com/ Cine indígena http://cineindigena.blogspot.com/ Organizando la esperanza http://organizandolaesperanza.blogspot.com/ Resistencia indígena http://resistenciaindigena.blogspot.com/ Ukhamawa http://espanol.groups.yahoo.com/group/ukhamawa/ RapidShare http://rapidshare.com/ Author Details Edgardo Civallero Independent researcher, librarian and lecturer National University of Córdoba Córdoba Argentina Email: edgardocivallero@gmail.com Web site: http://www.thelogofalibrarian.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Ancient Cultures Inside Modern Universes” Author: Edgardo Civallero Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/civallero/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Eduserv Symposium 2009: Evolution Or Revolution: The Future of Identity and Access Management for Research Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Eduserv Symposium 2009: Evolution Or Revolution: The Future of Identity and Access Management for Research Buzz data mobile wireless blog video flickr passwords streaming shibboleth facebook twitter e-science e-research authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Shirley Williams reports on the Eduserv Foundation Symposium which took as its theme investigate the intersection between identity management, access management and scholarly research collaboration across institutional and geographic boundaries.
I was pleased to accept a place at this year’s Eduserv Symposium [1], which was held at the Royal College of Physicians, London.
The College is close to Regent’s Park and as well as discovering about the future of identity and access management, delegates were able to have a glimpse at the past of physicians from the exhibitions that abounded in the magnificent venue.
Issues of identity and access management to resources must have concerned physicians for many years; for example, 200 years ago how did physicians corresponding with each other verify the other’s identity and decide whether or not to share resources?
The programme for the day offered a variety of perspectives, both technological and socio-political, of ways in which academia can develop effective ways of allowing researchers to share resources and manage the issues of access identity.
Although the programme suggested this was UK-centric, little of what was said could be considered UK-specific, indeed much of what was presented followed the symposium’s theme of collaboration across boundaries.
Opening Remarks The day was opened by Stephen Butcher, the CEO of Eduserv.
He welcomed all the delegates, and explained the role of Eduserv was to deliver shared services.
He gave a little of the history of Eduserv and its charitable background.
He explained that as part of the transition from Eduserv Foundation to the Eduserv Research Programme, Eduserv was no longer issuing the annual call for research projects, focusing instead on developing new and existing charitable services for the community.
Andy Powell (Eduserv’s Research Programme Director) followed with general housekeeping remarks.
He had to start with an apology that Eduserv had asked for 40 user names for the wireless access, and they had all got snapped up and so now more were to be generated.
The laptop users were asked to sit to the side (where power points were available) so they didn’t distract the others.
He pointed out that the event was streaming live and that there was a back channel on Twitter using the tag esym09.
We were warned not to try and watch the streaming if we were in the event as the wireless wouldn’t cope.
Watching the Twitter stream, and the other back channel, it was obvious a number of people were following the event at a distance [2], there was a lot of praise on the day for the quality of the streaming service Eduserv provided.
Subsequently video of the event was made available and it is of very high quality [1].
The phrase that stayed with me from Andy’s opening presentation was: ‘Research happens across boundaries’.
Oh, you’re that Cameron Neylon: Why effective identity management is critical to the development of open research Cameron Neylon talked about the growing need to make research outputs more readily available, coupled with the aspects of authentication.
Leading to a couple of interesting comments: ‘Whose data do you trust?’ and ‘Most researchers aren’t very good’, though in respect of the latter comment he did qualify with the observation that it applied to most of us most of the time.
From these comments he led us through to the idea of a network of contacts that are trusted.
He showed us how Googling himself revealed his current role as Senior Scientist in Biomolecular Sciences at the ISIS Neutron Scattering Facility at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, as well as previous roles in other institutions.
He then revealed the reason for the catchy title of the presentation: there is another Cameron Neylon who has published work with a shared co-author and as such it is important that trust is based on more evidence than just an unusual name.
User-centric Research James Farnhill (eResearch Programme Manager, JISC) started with a review of the work done by JISC Innovation Group-funded projects in the area of access and identity management (AIM).
He then moved on to looking at the future of funding in the area of researchers and identity.
He foresaw a future dominated by user-centric research, with individual researchers building strong communities across the UK and beyond.
These communities would facilitate the sharing of data that previously only existed on a single PC, perhaps backed up on a CD that doubled as a coffee mat.
The communities would provide pre-publication of reviews of papers by trusted co-workers rather than going directly to anonymous reviewers.
James is obviously someone who believes in the importance of community and at one point in his talk he made the following statement, ‘at JISC we are nothing without the community’.
Experiences in Federated Access Control for UK e-Science John Watt is a Research Associate at the National e-Science Centre at the University of Glasgow; he is engaged in investigating various technologies and techniques for providing federated access control to distributed data and Grid resources.
He talked about a number of authentication projects, and used authentication and security as synonyms.
He addressed issues related to institutional identity and presented a number of the technical issues involved.
He concluded that the goal of seamless access across resources is still some way off, although there are several techniques that will serve to achieve such a goal.
Opening up User-centric Identity Nate Klingenstein is a Senior Technical Analyst at Internet2 working on Shibboleth and aspects of federations.
He started with the statement, ‘Identity is totally forked’ and the joke ‘when you come to a fork in the road, take it’.
He then went on to discuss the relative merits of Enterprise-centric Identity versus User-centric Federated Identity.
He cited studies of students who were very lax with their user names and passwords, sharing them readily with friends and lovers, and then changing them after a split up.
He reminded us that users are lazy, and so that leads to the question, is unification or lack or unification a bad thing?
Conducting at the Piazza Venezia: An IT Director’s View from the Intersection Mike Roch is Director of IT services at the University of Reading.
He started by showing a video of a traffic cop at a busy intersection, with lots of hand waving, but with the traffic moving.
He likened his role to that of the traffic cop.
He talked about the set-up at Reading and other UK universities, and highlighted the concerns that faced IT managers in these universities.
Interestingly, issues of access management weren’t high on the list of matters that caused them concern; in a recent survey it ranked number 13, with funding and sustainability sitting at the top of the list.
Mike also talked about social attitudes investigated by Project FLAME that had run at the London School of Economics (LSE) and had interviewed first year students; in return for chocolates, over 90% had divulged their LSE user name, 40% had divulged their Facebook password, and 14% their LSE password.
A large number had also parted with their credit card number.
In this careless world, IT directors, such as Mike, face considerable challenges in keeping their systems secure.
News from the New Coffeehouses David Smith is Business Innovations Manager at CABI.
Before the talk I wasn’t aware of CABI; it is a not-for-profit organisation specialising in scientific publishing related to agriculture and the environment.
David had taken the 17th century coffee house as an analogy with Internet-based communities.
He talked about the changing characteristics of the users whom CABI serves.
He presented an example of exposing data to the ‘whole world’ and how 80% of the traffic did not come from identifiable academic institutions or the like.
Belonging to a university to a large extent validates ones identity, but those people who are beyond academic boundaries still need ways of validating their identity and several potential options were discussed.
David finished with a selection of quotations from the Free Range Librarian blog post: ‘The User is Not Broken’ [3]: ‘You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user.
Meet people where they are – not where you want them to be.
We have wonderful third spaces that offer our users a place where they can think and dream and experience information.
Most of your most passionate users will never meet you face to face.
Most of your most alienated users will never meet you face to face.
The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way.’ Panel Session Anne Bell is the University Librarian at Warwick and an Eduserv trustee; she welcomed back all the speakers to the panel session she was chairing.
The questions started with a query about what is best practice for an organisation that wants users to register; answers bounced back that it depended what sort of service it was and what information was actually needed from users, and what was the trust model.
Questions from both the real and virtual audience continued ranging through telephony, mobile access, personal learning environments, risk management, reputation and trust.
Concluding Remarks In his concluding remarks, Andy Powell spoke of the breadth of issues that were covered in the day, and said that he thought the day had addressed ‘how the Web is changing us’ and the impact of this on research, scholarly pursuits, teaching and learning.
He felt the day had shown that is easier to talk about identity in relationship to teaching, rather than research, although he didn’t know why that was.
Conclusion I felt the day was really useful; while I most certainly didn’t agree with everything that was said, there was a lot of thought-provoking comments and they will influence my thinking in the future.
Indeed in the time between attending the event and writing this conclusion (some two weeks) I have had two distinct opportunities to cite things I heard at the Eduserv symposium.
I am concerned by any suggestion that a line should be drawn between issues related to teaching and research.
I do not see that there is a clear gap between identity and access issues for teaching and for research, probably because my view of the world is reflected by many people who are members of many communities.
This multi-membership means a researcher in one community may be a world authority, while in another community he or she maybe engaged in formal or informal learning, i.e.
as a learner [4].
References Links to videos and details of the event http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/esym09 Throughout the event the tag esym09 was used, and tweets related to the event can be found at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23esym09 Free Range Librarian blog post: The User is not Broken at: http://freerangelibrarian.com/2006/06/03/the-user-is-not-broken-a-meme-masquerading-as-a-manifesto/ Photos of the day on Flickr from Eduserv http://www.flickr.com/photos/eduserv/sets/72157619185537750/ Author Details Shirley Williams University Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer School of Systems Engineering University of Reading Email: shirley.williams@reading.ac.uk Web site: http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog Return to top Article Title: “Eduserv Symposium 2009: Evolution or Revolution: The Future of Identity and Access Management for Research” Author: Shirley Williams Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/eduserv-2009-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 59: The Loneliness of the Long-distance Worker Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 59: The Loneliness of the Long-distance Worker Buzz data software framework sparql infrastructure metadata schema blog repositories copyright preservation vle oer e-research ict e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 59.
I am grateful to Marieke Guy not least since she still manages to write for Ariadne when she has her own blog [1] on remote working to maintain.
Having begun her series of articles with A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working, a treatment of the organisational issues surrounding the suitability of remote working as a business case, which she followed with a wealth of information on supportive technologies entitled Staying Connected: Technologies Supporting Remote Workers, Marieke returns, not exactly full circle, but back to an organisational perspective in her third contribution A Support Framework for Remote Workers.
Benefitting from further discussion and sheer experience, Marieke proceeds to outline an evolving structure to ensure that remote-working colleagues enjoy a consistent degree of support from the host organisations.
She takes as her text the developments within UKOLN itself and how things have progressed since the initial instance of remote working in 1997.
The central thrust of this article is that like any project, improvements in remote working will not occur consistently without some form of structured process and Marieke details the iterative cycle of development which has emerged here.
She provides concrete examples of how one thing has led to another with specific and tangible gains that benefiot not only remote workers but in-house-based colleagues as well.
More strategic benefits are evolving as the increased profile of remote workers is acknowledged in organisational policy.
As readers unwise enough to read my editorials will allow, the topic of how information professionals relate to their technologies is a source of frequent fascination.
Most people in this airspace will recognise the loneliness of the long-distance worker, whether working in-house or remotely.
It is my view that pro-active thinking such as Marieke and her colleagues have generated, near and far, can only benefit practitioners as a whole.
In asking us to Publish and Cherish with Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems, Leo Waaijers points to the increasing complexity of the scholarly publishing scene, not only in terms of the more complex nature of the published content but also the change in attitudes to Open Access publishing.
With the American Congress and the European Commission (EC) inclining more favourably towards Open Access, and a growing tendency of funders to make it a condition to publish research in open access publications, the need for non-proprietary review systems grows ever-pressing.
As so often arises, the difficulty originates in the matter of copyright.
Traditionally, peer review is conducted through a system in which the expectation is to assign copyright over the reviewed item to that peer review system's owner the publisher.
Yet with so many more funding bodies mandating publication in open access journals, Leo points to an increasing imbalance between supply of non-proprietary peer review and research in need of open access publishing.
Leo proposes that the EC should considewr how it must resolve this failure of supply and in his article offers a solution for consideration.
The shifting sands of Open Access publication do not confine themselves to the European Union.
I note from their article in which Heila Pienaar and Martie van Deventer ponder whether To VRE or Not to VRE?
: Do South African Malaria Researchers Need a Virtual Research Environment?
that our colleagues in South Africa must wait while the competing demands and interests associated with Open Access are mulled and occasionally fought over by their politicians too.
However this article will be of particular interest to readers charting the progress of eReseach initiatives across the world.
It provides us with insights as to how far eResearch has begun to emerge in terms of cohesiveness through an overview of the developments nationwide, supported by the example of one particular malaria research project and its uptake of supporting ICT technologies.
The authors detail for us the relationships these technologies and the discrete components of the cycle of research activity and the degree to which these technologies have been adopted.
Readers who are particularly interested in research developments of this nature in this region may well have already seen the authors' contribution on South African Repositories.
I am also pleased to be able to offer a further contribution on the story of institutional repositories in the European context.
Marjan Vernoy-Gerritsen, Gera Pronk and Maurits van der Graaf have provided us with the most significant results from two recent and related surveys on developments in, ultimately, 178 institutional research repositories from across 22 European countries.
Three Perspectives on the Evolving Infrastructure of Institutional Research Repositories in Europe not only considers what effect these repositories are having upon the scientific information infrastructure, but also examines what effects such repostiroies have upon the institutions which develop and maintain them, the authors who contribute to them and the researchers who use their material.
The authors moreover point us towards what they see as a representative model of research repository development which comprises a series of stages in a process of innovation, adoption and implementation.
They also describe how action by different actors in this domain will serve to hasten the process they have identified.
Despite changes to the machinery of government in one half of the original Australia-UK partnership, the e-Framework Partnership for Education and Research has expanded its partnership and has embarked on a a service-oriented approach to software analysis and design in the broader context of learning, teaching, research and administration.
In their article e-Framework Implements New Workplan, Ian Dolphin and Phil Nicholls examine the benefits of a Serivce-oriented Architecture in a general business sense, particularly in terms of the potential for increased reuse of assets and services together with anticipated reductions in cost and duplication of effort.
They then compare this with the (lower-case) concept of a service-oriented approach particularly across the contrasting environments and requirements of the education and commercial sectors.
The authors point to the emerging and differing strands within the e-Framework's strategic partnership and describe their potential to sustain the initiative in the current economic climate.
In their article on Spinning a Semantic Web for Metadata: IEMSR Development Report, Emma Tonkin and Alexey Strelnikov provide a reflective contribution on the development of components for the Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) and explain the principal concepts involved such as the Application Profile (AP).
The IEMSR is considered in terms of the Semantic Web technologies it adopted in its early stages and within the general context of the role of registries and how far, among other things, they can serve to support AP development.
The authors examine the project's adoption of the Semantic Web and analyse both the pros and cons of the approach adopted, including the ultimate value of SPARQL to the project.
Emma and Alexey describe the various components of their work on IEMSR from defining a data model, building a desktop client and a Web site to browse IEMSR data.
They conclude with a summary of their reactions and where their work is likely to head next.
In The REMAP Project: Steps towards a Repository-enabled Information Environment, Richard Green and Chris Awre provide an analysis of how their project has contribute to wards a larger vision of the role a repository can play in supporting digital content management for an institution.
Many will perhaps recall their contribution on RepoMMAn which is integral to this story.
They outline for us how REMAP has taken the programme forward from 2007 and its contribution to continued and better management of repository content, in particular, but not solely, with regard to the publishing of content; the project also encompasses Records Management and Digital Preservation (RMDP).
Moreover Richard and Chris provide us with a taster of a further chapter to this story in the form of the recently established HYDRA Project, a collaboration of Hull, Standofrd and Virginia, with the active co-operation of Fedora Commons, or perhaps I should say Duraspace.
Certainly a space to watch.
I am indebted to Jill Russell for her description of EThOS: From Project to Service and the impact the service is making on the availability of UK doctoral theses.
Jill points out by way of introduction the long-standing need that EThOS now addresses by providing access through an electronic document delivery system to doctoral theses which were once very difficult to get hold of.
To date some 100 British HEIs are now participating in EThOS.
Not for the first time we discover that the principal barriers to institutional participation relate to the management of the risks associated with IPR but that the service recommends processes which seem to earn participants' confidence.
Jill provides information on the latest effort within the service as well as how it is coping with the vastly increased demand for theses.
In Encouraging More Open Educational Resources with Southampton's EdShare, Debra Morris describes EdShare, an educational learning and teaching repository has been developed within the University under the auspices of a JISC-funded institutional exemplars project.
She details its development thanks to the collaborative efforts of a range of Southampton staff and the flexibility required to move with the pace of technological change in HEIs in this decade.
Debra details for us the relationship of EdShare to the institutional VLE and the approach adopted in order to embed the EdShare resource in the operational culture of the institution.
She concludes with plans to enhance the resource to ensure it operates in a manner that explicitly meets of its principal users, the students themselves.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on: a study of the cultural terrain of modern institutions, where digital and analogue objects co-exist; managing electronic government information in libraries; a varied collection of approaches to the topic of reader development; and the social dynamics of Information and Communication Technology.
In addition of course we provide our section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 59.
References Ramblings of a Remote Worker, Marieke Guy http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 59: The Loneliness of the Long-distance Worker" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Why Are Users So Useful?
User Engagement and the Experience of the JISC Digitisation Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Why Are Users So Useful?
User Engagement and the Experience of the JISC Digitisation Programme Buzz data wiki dissemination usability archives metadata digitisation identifier blog video flickr cataloguing multimedia podcast itunes youtube facebook twitter ict research Citation BibTex RIS Paola Marchionni discusses the importance of user engagement in the creation of digitised scholarly resources with case studies from the JISC Digitisation Programme.
Do we know enough about what our users' needs are when creating online digitised scholarly resources?
What are the benefits of engaging users?
In what way can they be useful to the process?
These might sound like rhetorical questions, yet, looking back at the last decade of activity in digitisation and creation of online resources, such questions have been tackled by content providers only in part, and with various degrees of success.
Millions of pounds of public funding have been spent in digitisation so far.
However, this is still, on the whole, an activity which only pays partial attention to the users for whom the content is being digitised, and their relevant needs.
This article draws on the experience of the JISC Digitisation Programme Phase Two (2007-2009)[1] and focuses on two case studies where effective practices in user engagement have been adopted in the development of digitisation projects and consequent creation of online scholarly resources.
It attempts to identify: key areas where user engagement has been particularly useful the successes and challenges of pro-actively involving users some practical tips on working with users in an effective way Traditionally, much digitisation activity funded by public money in the UK under either the cultural heritage or formal education banner has been led more by supply rather then demand.
The prospect of free and democratic access to high-quality digitised content over the World Wide Web has often resulted in institutions undertaking digitisation projects with the emphasis more on making the digitised content accessible online rather than carefully researching the needs of their target audiences.
Nor have they always considered providing them with content and functionalities that respond to their demands.
'If you build it, they will come' has been perhaps too common a mantra, underpinned by the belief that it will be enough to publish rare or unique content on the Web in order for users to flock in and for a Web site to thrive.
However, making sure that users are embedded in the process of creation of a digitised resource is important.
As recognised by the Strategic Content Alliance's [2], study Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources, '[t]he value of a [digitisation] project is quantified by the benefits it creates for users', which has an impact on how much a resource will be used and, in turn, its chances of survival and sustainability.
A quick review of past programmes and studies reveals how researching and targeting users' needs, as well as involving users in the creation of online resources, and keeping in touch with them, was and still is a major concern faced by institutions and organisations involved in the creation of online content.
The Evaluation of the NOF digitisation programme [3, 1999-2004, the most substantial UK Government investment in digitisation to date, concluded that: 'The identification of target users by the majority of projects was not policy-led or particularly consistent with the aim [of the programme] [...] Target user groups in the majority of projects were not selected according to any particular lifelong learning criteria.'
(p. 8) Although an objective study of the long-term usage and impact of the NOF programme has not taken place, one might hazard that, with some notable exceptions (Vision of Britain, Am Baile, The Old Bailey [4] to name just a few projects), a lot of the content produced under this nonetheless pioneering programme now seems little known, used or updated [5].
If a lack of focus and depth of knowledge in identifying users and users' needs mainly within the cultural heritage sector targeting 'lifelong learning' characterised many of the NOF digitisation projects [6], the 2005 report Digitised Content in the UK Research Library and Archives Sector [7] also highlighted the lack, within the Higher Education sector, of an 'overview of user needs and demands for digitised content in the UK'.
While the two reports above emphasised the problems of targeting relevant users and knowing about their specific requirements, the 2006 report LAIRAH project: log analysis of Internet resources in the arts and humanities [8] posed the question of what happens to digital resources after completion, based on the anecdotal evidence that some of the resources became well known but others were quickly forgotten.
The LAIRAH team estimated that between 30-35% of resources created through public funding remain unused.
It is interesting to note that when one looks at the various reasons for their non-use, 'user contact' is one of the determining factors in the success of a resource: 'Few projects carried out formal user testing, thus have little idea of the needs of their user community.
Those projects which had carried out user tests were amongst the most well used in our survey.'
([8], p. 6) [...] PARIP carried out a user needs survey at the beginning of the project, and the Channel Tunnel project conducted focus groups.
These are both examples of especially good practice: their creators were aware of the needs of their users and could take design decisions accordingly from very early in the project.'
(p. 28) And finally, moving from project to institutional level, the results of the 2008 survey entitled JISC survey of Head and Senior Librarians in HE and FE [9] still revealed that only 41% of Higher Education institutions have made use of some user consultation to determine priority collections to digitise.
The JISC Digitisation Programme Phase Two (2007-2009) The JISC Digitisation Programme Phase Two, totalling an investment of £12m, started in March 2007 and came to an end in Spring 2009, when 16 new digital collections went live, spanning centuries of UK and international life, culture and history, and including resources as varied as pamphlets, newspapers, cabinet papers, poetry manuscripts, theatre ephemera, political cartoons, radio and TV programmes, maps, images of art works and thesis.
The programme built on the JISC Digitisation Programme Phase One (2004-2006), worth £10m, which delivered 6 projects, ranging from medical journals' backfiles, to parliamentary papers, newspapers, sound recordings and population data.
In line with the JISC Digitisation Strategy [10], this large-scale digitisation programme placed a strong emphasis on the creation of digital collections which would be 'Driven by learning, teaching and/or research requirements and where clear evidence of user needs has been identified' [11].
At the bidding stage, projects were asked to document audience analysis activities they had carried out, consultation with experts in the selection of relevant material and how the content selected mapped to the needs of identified courses or research priorities.
Some examples of how this work was carried out by two of the projects funded by the programme (Archival Sound Recordings and the John Johnson Collection [12]) are documented on the Strategic Content Alliance's document The Guide to Researching Audiences.
Case Studies [13].
Recognising that users are co-producers of a resource's value, to the extent that its value is determined by how much a resource is used, the best projects have approached user engagement as a lifecycle process taking place before, during and after the creation of a digital resource and informed by a strategic approach including a range of activities aimed at soliciting users' input in a two-way exchange, where users shape, at various points and in various degrees, the development and creation of a digital resource.
The level of user engagement activities carried out by the 16 projects was generally high.
What follows are examples of some of the key areas where interaction with users has been most useful that have emerged from the case studies of two digitisation projects: The British Library's Archival Sound Recording 2 (ASR2) [14] – over 25,000 recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments Oxford University's First World War Poetry Digital Archive (WW1PDA) [15]– over 7000 items of text, images, audio and video material on key First World War poets Figure 1: Screenshot of the Archival Sound Recordings home page [16]   Figure 2: Screenshot of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive home page [17] Conducting Effective User Engagement: A Starter for Ten Below I have detailed ten possible steps towards more effective engagement with the beneficiaries of a project.
1.
Recognising the Importance of User Engagement The first step for conducting effective user engagement is to recognise the importance of this activity in the development of a project and then task somebody with the responsibility of carrying it out, often as a specific work package that operates across all the other activities of project work.
The way in which this role is established within a project team might follow different models, each with their own pros and cons, such as creating an ad hoc position or absorbing the tasks within existing team members.
The need for the specific post of Engagement Officer was identified in the first phase of the ASR2 Project (this project was also funded in Phase One of the JISC Digitisation programme).
Outcomes of workshops and user panels in the first phase of the project highlighted how the academic community was still a bit baffled by audio resources, not quite knowing how to incorporate them within teaching and research.
The team therefore felt that a more targeted engagement with the user community was needed in order to encourage take-up.
The Engagement Officer worked to a very specific brief that was developed as part of the project's marketing and communication strategy, and which included a wide range of activities, such as: 'the development of an online user network, a series of case studies, a monthly newsletter to HE/FE institutions, a project blog and attendance to a large number of conferences, workshops and engagement with online interactions.
'[18] She also worked in close collaboration with the project's User Panel recruited through a one-day event at the British Library.
2.
Establishing a 'Relationship' with Users and Sustaining It Users are not a homogenous and anonymous entity, they are 'individuals' and as such need to feel appreciated.
As projects found, it is beneficial to set up a 'relationship' with user groups from the beginning of a project (and before the project, to find out about potential needs), and nurture it throughout in an iterative fashion.
For the Project Manager of the WW1PDA: 'To ensure a usable and popular resource, engagement with users was at the heart of the project.
'[19] The WW1PDA employed a typology of users to provide input into the different areas of the project.
A steering group consisting of key experts in the field of First World War Literature was recruited to advise on what should be digitised, the metadata that should be captured and system requirements.
One of the unexpected, but very useful, contributions made by specialist researchers was their request to participate in the Quality Assurance process, by viewing all the digitised manuscripts online.
By doing so, they also carried out usability testing, thus providing valuable feedback on the various functionalities offered by the Web site.
To develop the Education section, the team consulted secondary schools and Higher Education teachers of First World War literature and history through a number of Teaching WW1 Literature workshops.
The workshops proved extremely useful in finding out more about the teaching of the subject itself and teachers' needs without emphasising the technology as such (see step 4 below).
The challenge of sustaining the relationship throughout the project was met by keeping in regular contact by email, telephone or one-to-one meetings, for help on very specific tasks, such as the Quality Assurance process mentioned above, or by visiting archives with project staff to select manuscript material.
This project was also particularly skilful in exploiting Web 2.0 techniques and networks of users to maintain a relationship with users beyond the duration of the project and to promote the resource.
They created wikipedia entries about relevant WW1 poets, established a blog and Twitter feed to communicate latest news, set up Google discussion groups, built a Facebook group and fan page, a Flickr account, and produced podcasts that were posted on iTunes , iTunesU and YouTube.
Did the Web 2.0 techniques pay off?
It may still be too early to judge, but the project noticed that, for example, the bounce rate of visitors to the site had substantially decreased for those users coming from these Web 2.0 initiatives, thereby suggesting that they were users particularly interested in the resource, rather than users who had come across it through a generic Google search and realised it was not what they were looking for.
3.
Knowing What to Do with Users' Feedback Usability testing is a great way to find out how potential users react to a new digital resource, its content and functionalities.
Whether it is carried out by an external professional company or in-house, some of the challenges encountered by projects highlighted the importance of knowing how to pose the right questions to users and deciding how to interpret users' feedback, and act on it.
The ASR2 project team had identified the need for more user interaction on the Web site, and explored with its users' panel the introduction of Web 2.0 features such as adding tags, comments and ratings to audio clips.
At first, however, it met with hostility from their users' group which was disturbed by the possibility that users might undermine the authority of the 'archivist's record'.
The users' group was also concerned about the differing criteria users might adopt for rating recordings; some group members pointed out that if 'quality' of a recording was adopted as a criterium, an old audio clip might not score highly, even though its content might still be very valuable.
Such anxieties, however, were assuaged when the team proposed that users' comments would be clearly displayed as distinct from the archivist's documentation and the Web site made clear the type of comments that were being solicited (i.e.
information about the recording, rather than personal likes or dislikes).
Moreover, it was decided to substitute the audio clip 'rating' with a 'Favourite' functionality.
Usability testing was also extremely useful in impproving the presentation of the home page.
Some of the testers' comments, such as, 'It seems to be fairly limited and it doesn't give you an idea of what is here...'[20] revealed that users did not appear to read the opening paragraph on the home page describing the scope and content of the digitised collections.
A new version of the home page included a punchier, bullet-point style opening paragraph with clear information on the content of the Web site and what the different categories of users were allowed to do.
4.
Embedding Resources into Teaching and Research Getting new resources, which will be competing with existing ones, embedded into teaching and research is one of the biggest challenges highlighted by projects.
Not only is it the case that take-up within teaching courses or research activity is something that develops over time, but it is important that a resource be embedded in the academic practice of its users.
The approach adopted by the WW1PDA Project towards the organisation of the Teaching WW1 Literature workshops quite deliberately fought shy of the technology, instead asking teachers what functionality they would like to see on a Web site.
In effect, they focused on finding out 'what constituted the effective teaching and study of this area,' and examined the 'learning objectives of existing courses'.
Discussions were recorded throughout the day and revealed, perhaps in a more indirect way, how these users '...wished to both discover and visualise content for educational purposes, for instance browsing via keywords associated with the National Curriculum, hyper-linked metadata, purpose built resource packs to teach particular topics, and being able to present a selection of items with additional notes to students...' [21] The team then elaborated the findings and came up with ideas for how these needs could be best addressed by the technology available.
During the workshops, teachers were also asked to author a number of learning resources to upload on the Web site (resource packs, Powerpoint presentations or collections assembled through the Path creation tool [22]).
Figure 3: Pathway on the Western Front [23] Although various resources were created, the team realised it had been too ambitious in what it had asked teachers to contribute.
It is therefore planning to re-focus future workshops, concentrating on the creation of just one type of learning resource.
Early evidence of take-up suggests that some teachers have used this collection in the classroom as part of creating a wiki on WW1 poetry – 'students have been using the archive for research and will be linking to it' – and a number of teachers commented how 'It's very good to be able to refer students to a web site of such quality from a sound academic source'.
[24] 5.
Galvanising Users as Project Advocates Once even a small group of key users have bought into the new resource, there is a lot they can do as volunteers to advocate its value within their network of contacts.
Knowing that dealing with sound recordings constituted a challenge for potential users, as many in the education sector are still not familiar with using this format, the ASR2 project team asked members of their users panel to develop case studies and testimonials to show how they had used the recordings in a teaching, learning and research context and had these case studies ready for when the new collection was launched.
It was more difficult to approach users beyond members of the users' panel, but the project partly managed to do this by tracking down users from Web logs, identifying which institutions were accessing the resource more heavily and contacting the Librarian.
This generated a number of case studies and testimonials from lecturers, PhD students, researchers and librarians, including an FE teacher commenting on using the Art and Design interviews for a project on famous photographers: 'The realism of it [interviews with photographers] inspired students and encouraged them to source other material beyond Google searches.
It also placed the photographs in context, which you don't get from Google.'
[25] The Project Manager acknowledged the difficulty of measuring the impact that the case studies might be having whether other teachers and researchers were being inspired by them and used the collection more.
However, she felt that developing them was important for various reasons, namely: to show how sound resources could be used in teaching and research; to build up a case for the resource; as advocacy; proof of value; and as part of a strategic approach to justify the resource's value and making a case for its sustainability within the hosting institution.
6.
Getting Users to Create Content Debates on the usefulness of Web 2.0 tools and techniques when it comes to user generated content within the realm of digitised scholarly resources are still hot, with supporters hailing the potential for harnessing the wisdom of the crowd and detractors alarmed by the risk of undermining the authority and trust of a scholarly resource.
[26] However, there are plenty of examples now of how, if well organised and focused, setting up a process for users to contribute content to a scholarly Web site can return surprising results.
As part of their digitisation project, the WW1PDA set up the Great War Archive [27], a section of the Web site where the general public was asked to submit digitised items relating to the First World War in their possession.
Surpassing initial estimates, the project received more that 6,000 submissions in the span of just a few months, and subsequently had to create a Flickr group to accommodate more material coming in from the public.
Submissions included: ...diaries from Gallipoli, love letters from France, audio interviews with veterans, signals sent on Armistice, and a bullet dented tea tin that saved a soldier's life.
[28] The initiative not only provided new context to the digitised poetry manuscripts, but also experimented with a new model of public engagement in a university project involving mass amateur digitisation.
A lot of thought and effort, however, went into its organisation.
First the team had to define target groups for the Great War Archive, then build the interface for the collection, catalogue and approve of items, market the initiative, organise 'submission events' in libraries where staff would help the public to digitise and upload its material, and finally migrate all the items and metadata to the Web site's content management system.
If unprepared for the level of response received from the public, the project was able to cope by diverting internal resources, by employing extra staff to help process the non-digitised material received through the post, and by extending the initial submission deadline.
A definite lesson from the project was the need to put in place robust processes and mechanisms to cope with any unanticipated degree of success.
7.
Targeting Dissemination Activities The majority of projects certainly employed all the more traditional marketing and PR activities to publicise their resource, such as press releases, mailings, leaflets and launches.
However, what worked best in most cases were dissemination activities with a focus on reaching key audiences, either through existing networks or 'places' where these communities were already likely to be found.
The ASR2 Project, for example, found that publicising its Holocaust collection through mailings to specific subject groups, such as Higher Education History, Jewish and Theology Studies networks, was particularly successful, returning a number of articles in the press as well as online newsletters and blogs.
Figure 4: Holocaust Survivors Collection [29] While generic calls for case studies and competitions on the project's Web site failed to attract many responses, the project's Newsletter proved very popular.
In the words of the Project Manager, this demonstrated that 'people are interested in collections that may be of value to them, but are not generally willing to spend time on additional activities.'
[30] This echoes the project's experience of setting up a Facebook page, where activity soon died out after an initial spurt of subscriptions, pointing to the fact that 'busy academics (and students) are interested in using resources, but not spending time speaking about them.'
[31] The ASR2 also found that one of the main challenges was how to ensure that information about the project cascaded down to primary users (eg students) from the 'intermediaries' (librarians, teachers, etc) they had principally targeted.
The project felt that other tactics could be employed to complement those going via intermediaries, such as having posters of the collections in the library and doing road shows.
The project also recognised the benefit of bundling their new 'product' with existing ones offered by their host institution in order to increase their value proposition.
8.
Demonstrating Value and Impact ...
The degree to which users perceive the value of a resource will be reflected in its usage and the impact a resource has upon its users.
A recent report commissioned by the Strategic Content Alliance, points out how: Digital resources do not exist in a vacuum – sustaining them requires that project leaders understand the unique value that a resource provides and where it fits within the competitive landscape.
What does a resource contribute that sets it apart?
Is its content rare or unique [...]?
Does the resource provide important services or functionality that can be found nowhere else?
[32] In the case of these projects, not only is the content unique but both have included features on their Web sites that add value to the digitised content – and users have been vital in the identification of such features.
In their consultation with the steering group, the WW1PDA found out that one of the most common problems that researchers had was how to compare different versions of manuscripts of the same poem residing in different archives.
The project addressed this need by creating a functionality on the Web site that displayed manuscripts side-by-side.
In the same way, when speaking to teachers, it emerged that some of them may not have Internet access in the classroom.
Therefore, downloadable resource packs mainly comprising Powerpoint presentations were also developed alongside Web-based functionalities.
Figure 5: Manuscript comparison tool [33] It is still too early for the digitisation projects funded by JISC to determine how much impact they are having on users – although JISC has carried out a study, the Usage and Impact Study of Phase One Digitisation Projects.
[34] However, as with the choice of dissemination activities, sustaining the community of users that has been created during a project is vital as an eventual means of measuring the impact a resource has on its target audiences.
A recent JISC-funded study developed a toolkit, the Toolkit for the impact of digitised scholarly resources [35] which suggests a range of methodologies to employ to track usage and impact.
These methodologies will be much more effective if a project has easy access to its community of users, and it is worth bearing them in mind when designing a Web site.
9.
...and Making a Case for Sustainability Inevitably, especially once project funding has come to an end, an institution may be faced with having to sustain a newly created digital resource.
If it can demonstrate that it is being used and is having an impact on its community of users, this will go a long way to making a case for more investment.
This will apply as much internally, to the hosting organisation, as externally, to a potential partner or funder.
The WW1PDA has been running under different guises since 1996.
Its continued success has been determined by a number of factors.
They are: institutional support from the University of Oxford; and the commitment of a project champion within the University; but also the fact that the project has been able to: keep in regular contact with its key users; respond to their changing needs; and make a case for continuous support both to their hosting institution as well as external funders.
The project's Final Report to JISC details how the archive was first conceived and its developments over the next ten years: 'Between 1996-98, under the JISC Technology Applications Programme [...], Oxford University developed the "Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature", based around a multimedia archive holding digital collections relating to the poet Wilfred Owen.
Considered pioneering at the time this archive has been one of the major influences on the use of IT in research and teaching within the humanities, and has been regularly cited in publications [...].
It won several awards [...] and was used by several national bodies [...] as a demonstration of excellence.
[...] In consultative exercises held with users of the existing resource, at workshops, and through direct feedback, it was indicated that expansion of the collection was the primary demand.
[36] Based on strong evidence of users' needs, the University of Oxford applied for funding for what became the WW1PDA and subsequently received an additional grant to further develop interactive functionalities on the Web site.
10.
'Listen to your users, but don't be bullied by them' This is a quote I stole from Susan Whitfield, Project Manager of the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) [37] at the British Library, in her presentation on what makes a digital resource a well-used resource, at the JISC Digital Content Conference 2009, when she was asked about her top tips.
[38] Susan was referring to a couple of issues here.
First, the challenge of ever knowing what users really want, how to cope with 'unexpected uses' of a resource and the fact that the majority of user consultation is still only representative of a sample of users, and therefore partial.
Secondly, and most importantly, as a consequence, the need for a project to keep focused on its own vision and the needs of key categories of heavy primary users, as the JISC projects also found; rather than trying to satisfy the needs of too many different types of users, which inevitably runs the risk of building a resource for everybody and nobody.
Conclusions These are the main areas that have emerged as the ones where 'user engagement' can prove most useful in increasing the use and value of a digital resource.
Other projects may have identified other areas, and some of them can be considered rather 'common-sense'.
The fact is though, that, when a team is involved in a large-scale digitisation project, very often the 'digitisation' element of the project, because of its demanding technical nature, tends to absorb most of a team's attention, and the creation of the final Web site delivering the content tends to come as an after-thought.
It is hoped that these reflections will be of interest to new projects and that they can provide a starting point the better to document the experience of large-scale digitisation projects in their efforts to involve users in a pro-active manner when developing an online digitised scholarly resource.
References JISC Digitisation programme Phase Two http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/projects.aspx Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources, An Ithaka Report, Guthrie, K., Griffiths, R., and Maron, N., Strategic Content Alliance http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/content/contentalliance.aspx, 2008 http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/files/2008/06/sca_ithaka_sustainability_report-final.pdf, p.6.
The Fund's ICT Content Programmes.
Final evaluation report, Education for Change, March 2006 http://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/er_eval_ict_final_rep.pdf Vision of Britain http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/index.jsp Am Baile http://www.ambaile.org.uk/ The Old Bailey http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ See the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) Digitisation projects Web site created by Alastair Dunning for a breakdown of NOF projects and their current status http://web.me.com/xcia0069/nof.html For anecdotal evidence of the lack of knowledge or use of content created under NOF, see also the Save the NOF-Digi content!
petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/savedigi/ The Final evaluation report also highlights the difficulty of measuring impact of projects because of the lack of baseline information and that projects "had little contact with end users."
(p. 9) Digitised Content in the UK Research Library and Archives Sector, Bültmann, B., Hardy, R., Muir, A., Wictor, C., JISC and Curl, April 2005 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-Digi-in-UK-FULL-v1-final.pdf, p4 LAIRAH project: log analysis of Internet resources in the arts and humanities.
Final Report to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Warwick, C., Terras, M., Huntington, P., Pappa, N., Galina, I., University College London, September 2006 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/claire-warwick/publications/LAIRAHreport.pdf JISC survey of Head and Senior Librarians in HE and FE, JISC, 2008, p.37 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/attitudinalsurvey2008librariansreport.pdf JISC Digitisation strategy http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/jisc_digitisation_strategy_2008.doc JISC Digitisation Programme Phase Two Request for Proposals, p.3 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/funding/2006/05/digitisation_rfp_april_2006_final.pdf Archival Sound Recordings http://sounds.bl.uk/; John Johnson Collection http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing.do The Guide to Researching Audiences.
Case Studies, p.8 and p. 20 http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/files/2009/07/sca_audiences_case_studies_v1-03.pdf Archival Sound Recordings http://sounds.bl.uk/ First World War Poetry Digital Archive http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/ Archival Sound Recordings http://sounds.bl.uk/ First World War Poetry Digital Archive http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/ Archival Sound Recordings 2 Final report, p. 7 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/asr2finalreport.pdf First World War Poetry Digital Archive Final report, p.8 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/ww1finalreport.pdf Archival Sound Recordings 2 Final report, p. 31 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/asr2finalreport.pdf First World War Poetry Digital Archive Final report, p. 20 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/ww1finalreport.pdf First World War Poetry Digital Archive, Pathways http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education/pathways Pathway on The Western Front, First World War Poetry Digital Archive http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education/pathways/users/stuart/paths/jqrjbx/viewer/ Quotes from teachers obtained by the Project Manager during workshops.
Archival Sound Recordings Web site, case studies http://sounds.bl.uk/CaseStudies.aspx See the concerns expressed by the Re-Raphaelite resource project's Audience Research report, outlined on the JISC Digitisaton Blog, http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/2008/07/07/is-academia-ready-for-web-20/ The Great War Archive http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/ First World War Poetry Digital Archive Final report, p. 18 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/ww1finalreport.pdf Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Archival Sound Recordings http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0410X0030XX-0500V0.xml Archival Sound Recordings 2 Final report http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/asr2finalreport.pdf, p20 Archival Sound Recordings 2 Final report http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/asr2finalreport.pdf, p23 Maron, N., L., Smith, K., K., and Loy, M., JISC (Strategic Content Alliance), July 2009, Sustaining digital resources: An on-the-ground view of projects today, Ithaka case studies in sustainability, p.14 http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/files/2009/07/sca_ithaka_sustainingdigitalresources_report.pdf Manuscript comparison tool, First World War Poetry Digital Archive http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/db/compare.php?CISOITEM1=1&CISOITEM2=2&TOTSELECT=3 Usage and impact study of JISC-funded phase one digitisation projects, Oxford Internet Institute, JISC, 2009 http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/system/files/TIDSR_FinalReport_20July2009.pdf Toolkit for the impact of digitised scholarly resources http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/welcome First World War Poetry Digital Archive Final report, p.4 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/ww1finalreport.pdf International Dunhuang Project (IDP) http://idp.bl.uk/ See the JISC Digitisation blog post, final lines.
http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/2009/07/02/jdcc09-user-engagement-users-impact-and-metrics/#more-522 Author Details Paola Marchionni Digitisation Programme Manager JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Email: p.marchionni@jisc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation/ Return to top Article Title: "Why Are Users So Useful?
: User Engagement and the Experience of the JISC Digitisation Programme Author: Paola Marchionni Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/marchionni/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Embedding Web Preservation Strategies Within Your Institution Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Embedding Web Preservation Strategies Within Your Institution Buzz data software wiki database rss archives browser blog preservation dns aggregation personalisation mp3 ulcc curation ajax facebook twitter research Citation BibTex RIS Christopher Eddie reports on the third one-day workshop of the JISC-PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources) Project held at the University of Manchester on 12 September 2008.
The Web is where you go to find out what is happening now, it is, or should be, where the most up to date information about a topic, company or institution is to be found.
Every day more and more information is added to existing Web sites and new ones appear at a frightening pace.
Having all this information at our fingertips is undoubtedly a good thing but there is also a downside: more information means that it is increasingly difficult to find the bits that are relevant to you, and often the new information simply replaces what was there before.
It is this second point that inspired the Preservation of Web Resources Project [1] and its series of three workshops held in London, Aberdeen and Manchester, the first of which was reviewed in the previous edition of Ariadne [2] by Stephen Emmott of the LSE.
The more we use the Web as our primary publication channel for certain types of information, the more the problem of losing the last version of that information grows, and the more aware we become of the ticking timebomb of our discarded Web resources.
It is sobering to recall the early days of television before anyone took the decision to record everything for posterity; how many fascinating gems of broadcasting have been lost forever?
Will we also be mourning our lost Web sites in the future?
This third workshop has brought together opinion, feedback and research from the first two and was a chance for the delegates to get a first look at the Handbook being developed by the project team.
The theme was “embedding Web preservation strategies within your institution” and this was addressed in presentations and breakout sessions as follows: Morning (10.00 – 12.40) Presentation 1.
Introduction to JISC PoWR (Kevin Ashley, ULCC) Presentation 2.
Records Management vs.
Web Management: Beyond the Stereotypes (Marieke Guy, UKOLN) Breakout Session 1: Web Preservation in your Organisation Presentation 3.
Web Preservation in a Web 2.0 Environment (Brian Kelly, UKOLN) Afternoon (13.30 – 16.00) Presentation 4.
The JISC-PoWR Workshops Inputs and Outcomes (Marieke Guy, UKOLN) Presentation 5.
The JISC-PoWR Handbook Explaining Web Preservation (Kevin Ashley, ULCC) Presentation 6.
The JISC-PoWR Handbook Identifying Web Issues (Richard Davis, ULCC) Breakout Session 2: The Next Steps for Web Preservation in your Organisation Presentation 7.
The JISC-PoWR Handbook Recommended Approaches (Ed Pinsent, ULCC) Future possibilities and Final Thoughts Introduction to JISC PoWR Kevin Ashley began by clarifying what the project’s goals were: this series of workshops would lead to the publishing of a handbook that would help both effective decision making about Web resource preservation and how then to implement those decisions.
Where the earlier workshops helped to validate the project team’s thinking, this final workshop aimed to validate their understanding.
When outlining a decision-making process, Kevin referred to ‘MoSCoW’, which Stephen Emmott mentioned in July’s ‘At the Event’, and this neatly illustrated the symbiotic nature of the workshops and the delegates’ input.
(MoSCoW is a model of prioritisation – Must do; Should do; Could do; Won’t do).
This is an ideal starting point for anyone implementing a preservation strategy.
It may at first seem much easier just to preserve everything, but doing so could lead to future conflicts with Data Protection.
On the other hand not preserving anything can leave you open to legal liability: someone makes a decision based on information held solely on your Web site, you change this information, their decision becomes flawed, if they pursue the issue, how do you prove that the misinformation was not on your site?
A further complication is that even if there is a robust preservation process in operation it may only show what was changed, not why it was changed.
At this point I felt a flutter of despair.
Where does this end?
What next?
Preserving every tweet from Twitter?
What about your reason for tweeting in the first place?
In his conclusion, Kevin explained the outline structure of the handbook and, as a result of these workshops and feedback from the PoWR Web site, what will no longer be included, such as managing preserved content, how much and how often, and implications of change.
He closed with a further request to us for feedback as to whether the handbook is useful, how it could be improved and to supply case studies from our own institutions.
Records Management vs.
Web Management: Beyond the Stereotypes Marieke Guy had clearly had some fun exploring the stereotypical characteristics of Web Managers and Record Managers to highlight the assumption that they are opposites.
Web Managers tend to be male, technology-literate and open, questing for the new, and not bothered about preservation; whereas Records Managers are pessimistic (they deal with planning for the worst imaginable contingencies), take a sensible, risk-management approach, want to be closed (not too many cries of ‘Let’s try re-organising this archive!’ in libraries and universities throughout the land), and are very interested in preservation and its necessary flipside destruction of records.
She briefly reminded us of Alison Wildish and Lizzie Richmond’s presentation about the University of Bath from Workshop 1 [2] and then tied it all together with a succinct and positive conclusion.
Web Managers need Record Managers and Record Managers need Web Managers, so get together and begin to share knowledge and skills.
Successfully addressing Web preservation is too large and complex for it to be the sole responsibility of one person or team.
The responsibilities must first be agreed upon and then shared amongst all stakeholders.
This will inevitably require additional resources and senior management buy-in, but more of that later.
Breakout Session 1: Web Preservation in your Organisation To pre-empt seminar fatigue the focus was then turned on the delegates.
Three groups were each given a scenario: to think about a preservation audit for either our institution’s Web site, our online prospectus, or a student’s Personal Learning Environment including Web 2.0 services.
I was quite relieved to be in the group looking at the prospectus, it initially seemed quite obvious and self-contained but as soon as we began to discuss the online version we realised that this was not the case.
A printed prospectus will cover the application process and the course details but on the Web site there will be links through to departments, schools and faculties, particular academics and research projects, clubs, societies and, in Oxford’s case, the colleges.
One office may hold the responsibility for producing the prospectus and so could potentially be able to preserve it, but they are unlikely to also be responsible for the content on the departments’, academics’ or projects’ Web sites.
How will this content be preserved?
Some thought-provoking points arose in the wider discussion that followed the exercise.
There may be risks involved in having a preservation policy that states, ‘do nothing’, but having one that says, ‘do something’ simply presents other risks.
Taking a much broader view, what actually is the risk?
It may seem plausible, even responsible, to approach senior management with the (worst case) scenario that not preserving online information may lead to a future law suit, but then most of us still remember the doom-laden scenario of Y2K.
Ultimately, what is the real preservation driver?
Web Preservation in a Web 2.0 Environment Brian Kelly spoke at the 2nd Workshop in Aberdeen, part of IWMW 2008 [3], on this topic and gave a comprehensive recap here.
Where Web 1.0 was primarily concerned with content, Web 2.0 focuses on collaboration and communication.
Web 1.0 sites are housed in single locations, Web 2.0 brings together numerous third-party services, the network becomes the platform and this creates more complex IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) issues.
He posed two questions: will the use of these services lead to new preservation concerns?
And how should we respond to these new challenges?
Using 8 case studies covering topics such as migrating content from one blog to another, moving wiki content to a static Web page, and what happens to your work when a service like Slideshare vanishes, he neatly illustrated that if anyone hoped that Web 2.0 was going to make preservation easier, they were mistaken.
It will lead to new preservation concerns.
How should we respond?
In some cases, Twitter, Skype, Facebook status messages, the individual is probably happy to think of their contributions as disposable, but in others, such as blogs, the only real way to be sure that the content is preserved may be for the bloggers themselves to take responsibility and copy or export the data regularly.
The main point I took from this talk and its subsequent discussion is the matter of responsibility.
Many of these services are associated with the individual, not the institution that they work in.
It would be fair to assume that the institution should accept the responsibility for preserving the departmental Web site that an academic works in and may create content for, but if the academic also runs a blog through a service like Blogger, would the responsibility not then move to the academic (or even to Blogger)?
Students too, I believe, fall outside the institution’s responsibility.
Some universities provide these services in-house but what happens when students leave?
Is there any point today in institutions ‘reinventing the wheel’ by developing an in-house blogging tool?
Why allocate precious resources to a service that will almost certainly be done better elsewhere, be updated more frequently, is probably free to use, and, perhaps most importantly, students may already be using by the time they start at the institution?
The JISC-PoWR Workshops: Inputs and Outcomes Marieke Guy returned to give an overview of how this project had run and what resources had been created apart from the handbook: presentations on Slideshare, a wiki, mp3 recordings of the talks.
She also offered an excuse about the limit of the outputs because of the shortage or time and funds for the project.
This was unnecessary, the fact that anything at all has been done about this ever-growing concern is more than enough and I think that all the delegates were suitably appreciative.
When asked what else the project team could do if they applied for more funding there was no shortage of suggestions ranging from help with existing software and creating policy guidelines right through to JISC running a central preservation service.
The JISC-PoWR Handbook: Explaining Web Preservation Kevin Ashley also returned to give an extremely useful overview of the Web preservation landscape that I will condense into What, How and When.
What: Take a second to ask yourself this question: imagine some time from now that your institution has been preserving its Web resources for a decade, you want to find out what was on the homepage of the main Web site 5 years ago; what do you actually expect to see?
Is it just the raw content, the text and links?
Is it a faithful recreation of how the site looked, functioned and ‘felt’?
If the site utilised RSS feeds or some clever AJAX utility, would they still work?
If so, are they pulling other archived content for that particular chosen date?
Is that also preserved by your institution?
What about navigating the preserved site, internal links might work, external ones will link to what?
How: Will the preservation process happen within the authoring system or server?
Acceptable perhaps in the short term, but if done through a CMS then you are likely to create a dependency on an external provider.
If it happens through the browser then the site becomes representative, like a publication, but also ‘frozen’.
The most widely used option is harvesting, examples being the Internet Archive [4] and the British Library [5], but this is still far from perfect.
How much or how little do you capture?
Can the harvesting tool access content held on databases?
Will it even capture style sheets?
When: do you preserve daily, monthly, annually?
Who decides?
What triggers it; every change or just major changes?
Is it automatic or manually initiated?
The JISC-PoWR Handbook: Identifying Web Issues Richard Davis picked up the baton by identifying the main issues that will affect preservation.
First identify what is on your Web and then, of that list, what is only available on the Web?
It is this information that we should concentrate on and ask: Who owns it?
Where is it?
And what is it for?
He revisited many issues that had arisen over the course of all three workshops, from the basic – sheer quantity and variety of content – to the specific – problems of aggregation and personalisation.
Breakout Session 2: The Next Steps for Web Preservation in Your Organisation We were given another chance to expound our opinions through the scenario of thinking about the first steps in creating our own institution’s Web preservation strategy.
We duly listed who needed to be involved, what training and education would be necessary, how we would audit the existing information and then implement.
However this also highlighted that before any of this could be done resourcing would need to be addressed; how could a strategy be implemented without a budget or available staff?
The JISC-PoWR Handbook Recommended Approaches Ed Pinsent tied the whole series up with a concise summary that reflected the content of the handbook and managed to be both cheerily optimistic and, most importantly, realistic.
There have been times in the workshops when the already thorny issue of preservation had seemed insurmountable but Ed reassuringly stated that it was possible, just remember: not everything not every version of every resource not forever not perfect Do what it is possible to do whether it is a policy review, some quick wins or a full strategic approach.
When it actually comes to “Embedding Web Preservation Strategies within Your Institution” this may be done by: Convincing the decision makers Including Web Preservation in policy Preservation-friendly features in future procurements Resources to manage capture and curation of resources We can all begin the process by working out who we should be collaborating with inside our institution, carrying out an audit of what information we actually have, even if this is just finding out what all the registered domains are from our DNS Manager, who actually requires the resources to be preserved and what can be discarded.
The working draft of this handbook is available to download from the JISC PoWR Web site [6].
Conclusion This series of workshops has certainly been useful and the handbook deserves a place on any Web manager’s desk, but more than this it was also reassuring and, let’s be honest, a relief to meet peers facing the same problem who have also yet to grasp the nettle.
I learnt much in the workshops but the points that stand out are: To implement a Web preservation strategy effectively, buy-in has to be attained at a very high level.
Yes, it is vital to collaborate with the relevant colleagues inside the institution to agree upon and carry out the project; but without senior management’s backing it is unlikely to be successful.
In one of the discussions we surmised that most universities lack an information strategy because most senior level post-holders come from an academic background.
Business has grasped the importance of the Chief Information Officer, one day HEIs might too.
Once preservation is seen as important, it will be gradually accepted by the current workforce and so can be planned for to ensure it will always be enforced.
The perfect time to introduce staff to your institution’s preservation policy and procedures is during their induction.
If content contributors were always aware that their work would still be accessible in the future, would this raise its quality?
Books do not get published by authors, they go through a rigorous selection, editing and proofing process.
When was the last time your Web pages went through this quality assurance procedure?
There will not be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ answer, so assess each area independently.
The research work carried out in institutions may already be comprehensively preserved, and the best of it will be published and thus exist in many formats in many locations.
Concentrate on the most important areas that are not provided for elsewhere.
It is somewhat encouraging to remember that not everything is really worth keeping, although it will be time-consuming to gain agreement on what is.
What will be most interesting is seeing what has happened one year from now.
Will some proactive delegate meet the challenge, learn from the handbook and be in a position to present their experience to others?
I hope so and I hope that the JISC-PoWR team are inspired to keep the momentum going on this project so that there is still a platform in place to allow that presentation to occur.
References JISC-PoWR Project Web site http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/ Stephen Emmott, Preservation of Web Resources: Making a Start, July 2008, Ariadne, Issue 56 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/jisc-powr-rpt/ Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2008/ Internet Archive http://www.archive.org British Library http://www.bl.uk Working draft of JISC-PoWR Handbook http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/handbook/ Author Details Christopher Eddie Web Officer Public Affairs Directorate University of Oxford Email: christopher.eddie@admin.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ox.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Embedding Web Preservation Strategies Within Your Institution” Author: Christopher Eddie Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/jisc-powr-2008-09-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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MyMobileBristol Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines MyMobileBristol Buzz data mobile software java rdf framework wiki sparql api javascript html database wireless restful dissemination portfolio rss bsd xml atom portal apache usability browser smartphone jena blog sql cataloguing gis licence e-science e-research authentication research standards ldap Citation BibTex RIS Mike Jones, Simon Price, Nikki Rogers and Damian Steer describe the rationale, aims and progress of MyMobileBristol, highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities that have arisen during the project.
[toc hidden:1] The MyMobileBristol Project is managed and developed by the Web Futures group at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol [1].
The project has a number of broad and ambitious aims and objectives, including collaboration with Bristol City Council on the development or adoption of standards with regard to the exchange of timeand location-sensitive data within the Bristol region, with particular emphasis on transport, the environment and sustainability.
The project also pilots a mobile Web application within the University of Bristol that provides access to data within an 'on-the-move' context via a smartphone [2].
The pilot benefits the University by providing a beta service that provides an opportunity for stakeholder analysis with staff and students, thus helping inform the development of our mobile strategy.
This article describes the background to the inception of the project, the process and output of stakeholder engagement, outlines the software developed and highlights some of the opportunities and challenges we have faced in creating a platform that delivers content for mobile devices.
How the System Works The software being developed by the MyMobileBristol Project provides a server-side solution for delivering mobile-friendly Web applications.
The intention is not to create a mobile version of an existing Web site, but to provide information, automatically integrated together from diverse data sources, that is useful for members of the University on their smart phones that is, where appropriate, filtered by the date, time or current location.
For example, you might see a map of University buildings in relation to your location, or view a list of events that are happening on the campus today.
The Web applications are viewed by the Web browser on a mobile phone or desktop and it is not necessary to download a bespoke native application.
Figure 1: m.bristol.ac.uk viewed 'on the move' Mobile Campus Assistant MyMobileBristol builds upon the foundations of the Mobile Campus Assistant Project that was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in 2009 [3].
The University of Bristol delivers a traditional Web site, portal and other Web applications geared towards desktop browsers.
With the proliferation of mobile phones and the increasing number of smart phones on the market, the Mobile Campus Assistant Project provided an opportunity to look at the issues around the provision of timeand location-sensitive information to students.
The requirements of the original project did not need access to the camera, filesystem and other security-restricted parts of the hardware or operating systems on the phone.
We did need to access the location of the user and this was supported by a number of phones in their Web browser via JavaScript [4].
This meant we could develop a single Mobile Web solution rather than developing several native applications to support the various smartphone platforms [5].
Moreover, ILRT has a strong background in developing software that uses Semantic Web technologies such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and SPARQL query language.
RDF provides a powerful and flexible medium for modelling data and better supports the integration of heterogenous sources.
SPARQL provides a language to query RDF that has some similarities in syntax to the Structured Query Language (SQL) that is used in traditional relational databases.
The project provided an opportunity to test the appropriateness of these tools in delivering content to mobile devices.
It was important that we did not burden University content providers with the overhead of a new content management system but would use, as far as it was possible, existing content and data sources.
In effect, we needed a system that could aggregate content and Semantic Web technologies seemed a good fit for such a problem proposition.
To produce a 'just-in-time' and 'on-the-move' experience, we wanted to support a number of use cases.
For example, we anticipated that smartphone users would want fingertip answers to questions such as what events are happening on campus today?
Where is the nearest University wireless hotspot?
When is the next bus to the halls of residence?
The project achieved rapid success and was featured in JISC's toolshed publication [6].
The project brought a number of tangible benefits to the University.
First, it allowed for some initial stakeholder analysis to help develop case studies that need to be supported by a mobile solution.
Second, it identified gaps, inconsistencies and issues with data that we wanted to be delivered in a mobile context.
For example, we can currently only show the number of free PCs that are available in two of the many labs situated within the campus.
It was also clear that data need to be available in consistent and standard formats because, in some areas, it is currently necessary to scrape Web pages to obtain data.
It was also evident that transport data in Bristol was difficult to obtain, but would be particularly useful for mobile users.
Business and Community Engagement One of the key aims of the current MyMobileBristol Project is to formalise a collaboration between the University of Bristol, Bristol City Council [7] and other interested parties, both locally and nationally.
The opportunity for collaboration was made possible through funding by the JISC [8] under their Business and Community Engagement (BCE) programme [9].
MyMobileBristol forms part of a portfolio of BCE 'Open Innovation' and 'Access to Resource' projects that are designed to allow Higher Education institutions to take a leading role in generating innovation through the development of ideas in open online marketplaces.
With this remit, the project hopes to facilitate developers, data providers, policy makers and user groups to promote the development and deployment of innovative technologies.
Towards this goal, we co-organised with the DevCSI Project [10] a one-day workshop on 'Developing for the Mobile Web' which was well attended by developers from across United Kingdom Higher Education institutions and a number of local Bristol developers [11].
The workshop proved to be a useful forum for institutions to share use cases, challenges and the solutions that were being delivered.
We intend to organise a second workshop that focuses on the issues surrounding data, including ownership, licences and intellectual property.
A final transferability workshop at the end of the project will focus on disseminating the outputs of the project for those interested both inside and outside the Higher Education sector.
Collaborative Platform Initial deliverables produced by the project were a collaborative platform to underpin the relationship with stakeholders, steering group members and other interested parties.
A number of tools constitute the platform, including a wiki [12], issue tracker [13], mailing lists [14] and blog [15].
The blog provides a place for project dissemination, while the wiki provides a forum to document the software, record meetings, and note stakeholder analysis and ideas.
The issue tracking software allows us to keep track of tasks related to the project and bugs relating to the software.
We provide two mailing lists.
The first is a public mailing list which includes all members of the steering committee and other interested parties.
A second list is restricted to stakeholders and interested parties within the University of Bristol.
There is an aspiration to develop and discuss the project openly, but there are some matters that relate to University business that are more comfortably dealt with on an internal list.
Pages on the wiki and tickets in the issue tracker are open to the public, but some pages are restricted to members of the University or just the development team.
There is a tension between what can be handled in the public or private spheres and it is all too easy to default to the latter rather than thinking whether or not information should be available within the public domain.
Stakeholder Engagement Stakeholder engagement is a key aspect of the project and is carried out through a number of different activities.
JISC Techdis provided useful guidance and critical advice to the project in the preparation of a stakeholder engagement plan.
The project itself is overseen by a steering group made up of staff from the Public Relations Office, Research Enterprise and Development, Estates and IT Services from within the University; as well as representatives of the transport department at Bristol City Council.
The steering group provides guidance for the project team and guides the direction of development and the refinement of use cases, especially in relation to the deployment of a beta service.
Members of the project team have also had meetings with stakeholders and data source owners.
There has also been an opportunity to discuss the project with local small businesses which are involved in the production of mobile solutions.
The stakeholder engagement has been a valuable exercise in developing uses cases, stakeholder analysis and opportunities for dissemination.
Through talking to various user groups, other possible opportunities have arisen, such as providing a mobile Web site to support the next University Open Day and providing a virtual tour of the campus.
It was also clear that stakeholders wanted the mobile experience to be embedded into the wider context of the city with access to information on services, amenities and cultural events.
To provide access to this information, developing the relationship with Bristol City Council was important.
Bristol City Council Bristol City Council has adopted the ambitious 20:20 Plan, where the aim is to be one of the top twenty cities in Europe within the next 10 years [16].
This is based on a number of priorities such as the promotion of Bristol as a culturally vibrant and innovative city that is moving towards a low-carbon economy.
In fact, Bristol intends to reduce, by 2020, its carbon footprint by 40% compared to 2005 statistics.
Part of this strategy involves becoming a 'Smart City' whereby innovation can drive smarter solutions in power consumption and transport.
The provision of better and real-time data is important, coupled with building a community of interested parties in developing 'smart' applications that consume these data and help Bristol's citizens to make 'smart' choices in areas such as transport [17].
Both central and local governments are releasing public data to help improve the transparency on how administrations work and policies are developed.
There are now 5,400 datasets available on the data.gov.uk Web site [18].
Bristol City Council had already released some data under the B-Open scheme, including the location of libraries and bus stops, data relating to air and river quality and listings of events in the city.
The Media Sandbox, a development programme sponsored by Bristol City Council, South West Screen and The South West Regional Development Agency, has commissioned a number of projects to develop innovative applications that use the council data [19].
For example, Hills are Evil provides a map overlay that helps those with restricted mobility, cyclists, and people with push-chairs to identify appropriate routes through the city [20].
The Council is now auditing its transport data to investigate what might be made publicly available.
One issue the Council faces is the fact that most geo-location data are plotted using Ordinance Survey (OS) software, which means the data are then encumbered with an OS licence.
The Council are required to use a definitive source of geo-data, as opposed to open sources such as OpenStreetMap, in order to support legal decision making and dispute resolution in a robust manner.
Despite these issues, the Council is keen to collaborate with the University and provide data that will be useful to the project.
For example, we have received a dataset that provides the location of B-Open wireless hotspots across the city.
In addition, we will provide a useful case study on how the data should be delivered and in what format.
The data from the Council will help embed the University mobile experience within the wider context of the city.
The Software The following section gives a brief technical overview of the Mobile Campus Assistant software that has continued to be developed for the MyMobileBristolProject.
Where it is possible, harvesters retrieve remote data sources and convert them to RDF.
The software currently has harvesters for RSS, Atom, XML and HTML.
The data are then queried with SPARQL query language and displayed in an HTML format suitable for mobile Web browsers via a RESTful interface.
Where it is not possible to harvest data the software can query supported services such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
A lot of development effort has been spent making the software production-ready and organising the code so that it is modular.
The project is Java-based and uses a number of Java frameworks and libraries: Jersey an implementation of the Java API for RESTful Web Services [21] FreeMarker template engine [22] Jena Semantic Web Framework [23] H2 Database Engine [24] Figure 2: Software architecture The software, available under a BSD style open source licence, provides a lightweight solution that can be extended to support other data sources and services [25].
m.bristol.ac.uk It has already been noted that we are running a beta service within the University (also called MyMobileBristol) that uses the software that we have developed.
This provides an opportunity to develop the code to production-grade and allows for further stakeholder analysis with staff and students.
We are also planning further engagement with students through a usability expert, using short interviews to gauge their expectations of content in a mobile application and to evaluate what is provided within the demonstrator.
Figure 3: The home page of m.bristol.ac.uk We have continued to extend the functionality of the Mobile Campus Assistant software and are continuing to add further data sources.
One useful addition is the crowd-sourced geo-location data from OpenStreetMap.
It allows the provision of data relating to the local environment, such as the location of public bicycle stands, nearest post box, cash point or other local amenity.
Figure 4: Postboxes around the campus The service has not yet been widely advertised across the University due to its beta status, but despite this we have seen a reasonable amount of traffic and members of the campus are providing suggestions via a feedback form [26].
At the moment, we are only delivering open data but there are requests for more personalised data such as timetables.
Next stages of development include providing authentication through the Single Sign-On system and providing a search against the Library catalogue system.
Conclusion The MyMobileBristol Project started with a comprehensive set of aims and objectives.
We continue to engage successfully with stakeholders and interested parties to develop use cases.
We are running a beta service within the University and collecting evidence to support a mobile strategy.
The data and content produced by the University and third parties, which are then used by a mobile device, do provide a number of problems for an institutional strategy.
For example, the data might be aggregated, integrated and reused in a manner that was not initially anticipated.
The data themselves might be incomplete, of poor quality or might not be provided in 'real time' and thus prove unsuitable for mobile users 'on the move'.
Other data might need to be limited to authenticated users.
Stakeholder engagement has shown the desire to embed the mobile experience within the wider context of the city, providing access to information relating to services, amenities and the cultural life that Bristol provides.
The project is fortunate to have partnered with a forward thinking city council whose own 20:20 Plan provides a catalyst for providing useful and relevant data.
We are developing the software to meet the requirements of other organisations.
For example, we are working with JISC's communications team to enable the software to deliver news, funding calls and other information for mobile devices.We encourage other institutions to evaluate the software and provide feedback on its suitability for deployment within their own environment.
References University of Bristol | Institute for Learning & Research Technology (ILRT) http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ The demonstrator is available at http://m.bristol.ac.uk/ Mobile Campus Assistant Project Page http://mobilecampus.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ JavaScript support is via the W3C Geo-location API.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/geolocation-API/ For an introduction to the pros and cons of native application development versus the mobile Web, see Mark Power, Mobile Web Apps: A Briefing Paper, March 2011 http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/7/76/Mobile_Web_Apps.pdf University of Bristol.
Mobile Campus Assistant, Smartphones get smarter with ILRT innovation, 17 March 2010 http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2010/6895.html Bristol City Council http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Business & Community Engagement programme: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/bce.aspx DevCSI http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/about/ UKOLN | Events: Developing for the Mobile Web http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/devcsi/mobile_web/ ILRT: Dashboard Web Futures https://mmb.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ JIRA: System Dashboard Web Futures Issue Tracker https://jira.ilrt.bris.ac.uk Mailing Lists MyMobileBristol Web Futures https://mmb.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/display/mmb/Mailing+Lists MyMobileBristol http://mymobilebristol.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ The Bristol Partnership http://www.bristolpartnership.org/ On the concept of the 'Smart City' see the webcasts of the 'Smart and Connected City' event that was held in Bristol on 28 March 2011.
Chris Tuppen gives his recommendations on actions and priorities needed for Bristol to become a 'Smart City' http://www.connectingbristol.org/2011/03/28/smart-connected-city-event-webcasts/ data.gov.uk | Opening up government http://data.gov.uk/ Watershed: Media Sandbox http://www.mediasandbox.co.uk/ Hills Are Evil!
http://www.hillsareevil.com/ Java.net: Jersey http://jersey.java.net/ FreeMarker: Java Template Engine Library Overview http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/ Jena A Semantic Web Framework for Java http://openjena.org/ H2 Database Engine http://www.h2database.com ILRT/MCA GitHub https://github.com/ilrt/mca User Feedback MyMobileBristol Web Futures https://mmb.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/display/mmb/User+Feedback Author Details Mike Jones Senior Technical Researcher Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol Email: mike.a.jones@bristol.ac.uk Web site: http://fairlypositive.com/ Mike Jones is a Senior Technical Researcher at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol, and is the principal developer on the MyMobileBristol Project.
He has many years of experience in developing Web applications and is particularly interested in development for mobile devices.
Simon Price Acting Deputy Director Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol Email: simon.price@bristol.ac.uk Simon Price manages the Web Futures group at the ILRT, University of Bristol and is the project manager for the MyMobileBristol Project.
He is also a member of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory in the School of Engineering where he works on applications of machine learning to data integration, the Semantic Web and e-Research/e-Science.
Nikki Rogers Enterprise Architect University of Bristol Email: Nikki.Rogers@bristol.ac.uk Nikki Rogers is Enterprise Architect at the University and is involved in steering Bristol's Mobile Strategy by liaising across several departments and initiatives, including MyMobileBristol.
Damian Steer Senior Technical Researcher Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol Email: d.steer@bristol.ac.uk Damian Steer is a Senior Technical Researcher at the University of Bristol with many years experience developing applications on the Web.
He is a committer on Apache Jena, and has been involved with the JRuby Project for a number of years.
Return to top Article Title: MyMobileBristol Authors: Mike Jones, Simon Price, Nikki Rogers, Damian Steer Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/jones-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs Buzz data portfolio metadata accessibility blog repositories licence research altmetrics Citation BibTex RIS Theo Andrew presents new data on the cost of Gold OA publishing at the University of Edinburgh.
Research Councils UK (RCUK) have recently announced a significant amendment to their open access (OA)  policy which requires all research papers that result from research partly or wholly funded by RCUK to be made open access [1].
To comply with this policy, researchers must either; a) publish in an open access journal, termed Gold OA, which often incurs an article processing charge (APC); or, b) ensure that a copy of the post-print is deposited in an appropriate repository, also known as Green OA.
A subsequent clarification from RCUK stated that Gold OA is the preferred mechanism of choice to realise open access for outputs that they have funded and have announced the award of block grants to eligible institutions to achieve this aim [2].
Where a Gold OA option is unavailable, Green OA is also acceptable; however, RCUK have indicated that the decision will be ultimately left up to institutions as to which route to take [3].
Since RCUK are the major funder of research in the United Kingdom, this new policy will not only have a major impact on how researchers publish their work, but also huge implications for their budgets.
Many research institutions funded by RCUK are currently investigating how they will implement this policy and are looking at the costs for open access publication, and how they can support the adoption of open access within their organisation.
The ball is very much in the court of institutions to decide how to play the open access game.
One of the key factors that will affect institutions is the cost that publishers will set for their APCs.
So far RCUK have steered clear of suggesting an appropriate fee, leaving individual publishers to determine the market level of the APCs as per the current situation.
Meanwhile there seems to be a huge variability in costs.
There is a general expectation that over time APCs will settle to a reasonable rate and similarly journal subscriptions will lower to reflect the gradual change in business model from subscription fees to APCs.
Most publishers have not yet been upfront about what impact they will have on journal subscriptions, if any, and it is hard to access and assess real-life data.
RSC Publishing is one notable exception since it has introduced a system of waiving a proportion of APC fees based on institutional subscription costs.
Much of this transition period to full open access will have to be navigated through uncharted territory, where no one has a clear handle on the costs involved.
The rationale of this article is to present data on article processing charges gathered over the past five years, report on trends seen within this data, to suggest some approaches and to generally contribute to and inform the policy discussion.
The Problem To put some rough-and-ready figures on the table, the University of Edinburgh publishes in the region of 4,000-4,500 peer-reviewed journal articles per year; this figure does not include other publication types like working papers not affected by the RCUK policy.
Assuming an average Article Processing Charge (APC) of £1500 [4], the total publication costs to make all of these outputs Gold would be in the region of £6m.
It is clear that even with guaranteed funding from HEFCE, and other funders of research, large research-intensive universities will not be able to pay for all of their research to be published under Gold OA.
How to allocate funding to researchers will be a difficult choice that many institutions are currently asking themselves will it be on a first-come-first-served basis, funder-specific, or will REF-submitted material take priority?
Equally problematic are the difficulties we face in fully assessing an institution’s total spend on open access.
Whilst it is possible to find out through aggregate sources like Web of Science how many articles are published in fully open access journals.
It is virtually impossible to find out the number of open access articles published in hybrid journals as there is currently no flag in the metadata which indicates the open status of the paper.
A hybrid journal is a traditional subscription journal that offers open access to individual articles upon payment of an APC.
Of course it is possible to find hybrid open access content through EuropePMC.org; however this will only give a snapshot for the biomedical and life sciences.
With current systems and processes it is virtually impossible to gauge this spend accurately.
Cost Data Unfortunately, financial data about open access publishing is scarce.
The University of Edinburgh (UoE) has recently implemented account codes to allow the finance systems to track this spend going forwards; however, finding out costs retrospectively remains problematic.
Furthermore, institutions are not typically in the habit of publishing this data with others.
The institutions that have shared data show a degree of variability.
In 2010, the foremost initial supporter and enabler of Gold Open Access publishing in the UK, the Wellcome Trust, found that the average cost of publication under the author-pays model was $2,367 (approximately £1,500) [4].
RCUK in their recent press release on block grants for open access estimate the average APC as £1,727 plus VAT [2], whilst, based on figures in the Finch Report, the University of Nottingham paid on average £1,216 [5].
All these figures are useful as they give a ballpark figure upon which further estimates can be based.
The precise cost of individual APCs levied by publishers is generally unavailable in a form which easily enables further analysis.
Typically this information is available from publisher’s Web sites; however, aggregating the data is cumbersome as there is no consistent way to interrogate the Web sites and APCs commonly vary from title to title in the publishers’ portfolio.
There have been some commendable attempts to gather this information, for example the SHERPA RoMEO listing of Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access [7].
Here about 100 publishers have been surveyed and their APCs are listed.
A large cost variance exists for some publishers’ records as individual journals often have different APCs, and also institutional subscriptions/memberships can reduce costs in a non-uniform way.
It takes a lot of effort to gather these data and keep them it up to date.
Other approaches have tried to crowd-source this activity, for example Ross Mounce’s survey of open access publishers, publications, licences and fees.
Here approximately 130 publishers’ web sites were surveyed to find out what licences are being used on the open access content; the cost being a secondary focus of the survey.
Analysis of these data shows less than 5% of publishers claiming 'open access' are fully compliant with the Budapest Declaration on Open Access [7].
The data we present here is an attempt to enrich the data available to interested parties and make them available in a reusable format for further analysis.
It comprises articles funded by the Wellcome Trust at the University of Edinburgh between 2007 and 2012.
In total there are 260 articles published in a mixture of open access journals and traditional subscription journals with an open access option (sometimes known as hybrid).
All of the journals charged an article processing fee.
Overall, the total cost incurred was £452,713.40.
The mean article processing charge was £1,741.21, with the median value £1,644.22.
The full data can be accessed online at the Edinburgh DataShare repository [8].
APC Cost through Time As shown in Table 1 the number of articles supported by the Wellcome Trust open access grant has increased each year: Year No.of articles Total cost Mean APC 2007/08 19 £32,712.85 £1,721.73 2008/09 38 £58,648.88 £1,543.39 2009/10 49 £90,304.78 £1,842.95 2010/11 67 £124,359.79 £1,856.11 2011/12 87 £146,687.10 £1,686.06 Total 260 £452,713.40 £1,741.21 Table 1: High-level details of the Wellcome Trust open access expenditure at UoE Over the past five years the costs have been fairly stable – the yearly variation we see here is likely to be a function of the small sample size.
It is interesting to note that costs have not appreciably risen in line with inflation.
The jump in number of articles from 2009/10 onwards may be directly attributed to the hardening of the Wellcome Trust’s open access policy and the introduction of sanctions backdated to 2009.
Any non-compliant papers identified in submitted end-of-grant reports will now impose 10% of the budget to be withheld [9].
It appears that Open Access policies require rigorous compliance monitoring to be successful, and seem to be more effective when punitive sanctions are imposed.
APC and Impact Factor Next we decided to look at the relationship between APC cost and the prestige of a journal.
Bearing in mind the well known and documented limitations (for example as discussed by Kurmis [10]), we used the well-established metric journal impact factor as a proxy for prestige.
The impact factor for the host journal of each article was calculated using the 5 year average as published in the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports [11].
The five-year average value was chosen to normalise impact factors across the data census period.
The figure below shows the journal impact factor plotted against journal article processing fee.
The graph shows a positive correlation between APC and impact factor; as demonstrated by the simple linear regression line (trendline).
Figure 1: Graph showing cost of article processing fee plotted against journal impact factor At a first glance it appears that some journals with high impact factors are applying significantly higher article processing charges.
Looking specifically at the APCs over £3,000, we find the mean journal impact factor is 11.30.
To put this in context with the whole dataset, the mean APC cost and journal impact factor is £1,741.21 and 5.92 respectively.
APC and Journal Type The first point to note is that during the five-year sample period, publication in hybrid journals (n=185) was significantly more popular than publishing in full OA journals (n=75).
This may be due to the fact that there are more hybrid journals to publish in.
Secondly, Figure 1 clearly shows that there is a significant difference in price between hybrid journals (red squares) and full OA journals (green triangles).
The full OA journals plot completely under the trend line; whilst all of the APC fees over £2,000 were incurred by hybrid journals only.
We found the average APC cost for hybrid journals was £1,989.79 compared to £1,128.02 for full OA journals – a difference of £861.77.
Limitations This study has a number of limitations that should be noted; the biggest of which is the relatively small data size.
We propose and strongly encourage any other institutions which hold similar information to share their data to create a larger dataset to see if these results still hold true.
For some journals there is a large variation in cost (shown in Figure 1 by a linear vertical spread of costs for the same journal) due to unseen factors such as foreign currency conversion, or institutional membership schemes reducing costs.
This artificial noise detracts from the signal we are trying to interpret.
Discussion The average APC we have seen is higher than both the previously reported 2010 average by the Wellcome Trust and the 2010-11 figures from the University of Nottingham; however, it is broadly in line with the latest APC figures published in the Finch Report which suggests this is fairly representative.
The relationship between impact factor and cost is also interesting to note.
Researchintensive institutions are likely to be hit twice; since they publish more articles and more frequently in higher-impact journals, their share of Gold OA bills is likely to be disproportionally larger.
The causes of significantly higher APC costs for high impact factor and hybrid journals are hard to identify and the suggestions made here are purely speculative: Higher rejection rates: It is often reported anecdotally that journals with high impact factors generally have higher rates of rejection for submitted manuscripts compared to other journals.
If this is the case, then these journals will incur higher overheads in order to administer their peer-review process.
There is a fundamental lack of transparency in the cost of peer review which prevents any detailed analysis.
Do extra peer review costs for one paper merit a price increase £2,000 over and above the average APC costs seen for some other journals?
Reprints: various publishers have commented that they maximise their income streams by selling commercial reprints [12].
A fully open licence (for example Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY) would remove this as users are free to distribute and reuse without further payment.
It is precisely for this reason that Nature Publishing Group has recently imposed a premium of ~£200 on their CC-BY licences [13].
In this case, higher APCs are being used to offset revenue loss.
It may be the case that other publishers are including this factor in their costs but are not as up front about it.
Brand: Scarcity is commonly used by retailers as a mechanism to stimulate demand or prestige for their brand.
In this sense, publishers are no different.
One way of artificially creating scarcity is to increase retail costs; consequently there is a valid business case for publishers to increase APCs for their higher impact journals.
Value: Related to the issue of brand, there is a commonly held view that having high costs for publishing articles in high impact journals is justified as this is a valued service for which researchers are willing to pay a premium.
In all likelihood the cost of APCs will be influenced by all these factors and more.
Commercial publishers may seek to set the APCs at a price point which they think the market can bear.
In theory, researchers can choose exactly where to publish and are free to publish elsewhere if they don't like the prices.
Unfortunately this thinking could be seen as somewhat naïve.
It has been widely mentioned, for example by David Prosser of Research Libraries UK [14], that market forces are unlikely to force down costs so institutions will have to be very careful about how they set up and manage their central open access funds.
We share this concern that with an inelastic market researchers are unlikely to shop around and where the costs are sheltered central funds mean that researchers are not exposed directly to costs the APCs would remain high because normal market forces would not drive costs down.
We believe one very effective course of action is to be as maximally transparent with Gold APC costs as possible.
Unlike the current situation we find ourselves in, where traditional journal subscription costs are kept hidden from readers by confidentiality clauses in the contracts, all institutions, including universities and RCUK, should strive to publish a detailed analysis of their spend on Gold OA.
Conclusion Bearing in mind the study’s limitations, the data we present here suggest some important points: Hybrid journals seem to be more popular venues for Open Access  publication, and Hybrid journals generally charge more than full OA journals independent of journal impact factor, and There is a positive correlation between APC cost and impact factor for both hybrid and full OA journals.
Some more reflective points that this study raises are: It appears that Open Access policies require rigorous compliance monitoring to be successful, and seem to be more effective when punitive sanctions are imposed.
Research-intensive institutions are likely to be hit by a cost ‘double whammy’; they not only publish more articles, but they also publish them more frequently in high-impact-factor journals.
Institutions need to be more open about costs, and publish the data in a format that allows reuse.
The dataset upon which this paper is based is available to download from Edinburgh DataShare [8].
Acknowledgements Many thanks to the Wellcome Trust for allowing us to reuse and publish part of its data.
References Research Councils UK Policy on Access to Research Outputs http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUK%20_Policy_on_Access_to_Research_Outputs.pdf RCUK announces block grants for universities to aid drives to open access to research outputs http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2012news/Pages/121108.aspx RCUK Open Access Policy – When to go Green and When to go Gold http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/2012/09/28/rcuk-open-access-policy-when-to-go-green-and-when-to-go-gold/ Wellcome Trust and the author-pays model http://blog.europepmc.org/2011/02/wellcome-trust-and-author-pays-model.html Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications: Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings.
Section 7.5 http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf SHERPA RoMEO: Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PaidOA.html A survey of 'Open Access' publisher licenses https://sites.google.com/site/rossmounce/misc/a-survey-of-open-access-publisher-licenses Edinburgh DataShare http://datashare.is.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/250 Wellcome Trust Authors’ FAQs http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-access/Guides/WTD018855.htm#ten Kurmis, A.P.
Understanding the limitations of the journal impact factor.
J Bone Joint Surg Am.
December 2003; 85-A(12):2449-54 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14668520 Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/journal_citation_reports/ NPG position statement on open access publishing and subscription business models.
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/statement.html NPG expands Creative Commons Attribution license options http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cc-licenses.html David Prosser.
"Cash alone will not cure the research market".
The Impact of Social Sciences blog, 18 September 2012 http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/09/18/cash-alone-will-not-cure-the-research-market/ Author Details Theo Andrew Open Scholarship Development Officer University of Edinburgh Email: theo.andrew(at)ed.ac.uk Web site: http://about.me/theo_andrew Theo Andrew is the Open Scholarship development officer based at the Digital Library Section at the University of Edinburgh.
Professional interests include: enhancing scholarly communication using new technologies; promoting the open agenda within academia; research analytics and altmetrics; and research information/data management.
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The Potential of Learning Analytics and Big Data Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Potential of Learning Analytics and Big Data Buzz data software framework database doi browser identifier video visualisation e-learning streaming personalisation cybernetics algorithm research hadoop mooc modelling Citation BibTex RIS Patricia Charlton, Manolis Mavrikis and Demetra Katsifli discuss how the emerging trend of learning analytics and big data can support and empower learning and teaching.
‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’ Attributed to Albert Einstein In the last decade we have had access to data that opens up a new world of potential evidence ranging from indicating how children might learn their first word to the use of millions of mathematical models to predict outbreaks of flu.
We explore the potential impact of learning analytics and big data for the future of learning and teaching.
Essentially, it is in our hands to make constructive and effective use of the data around us to provide useful and significant insights into learning and teaching.
Learning Analytics and Big Data The first international conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge was held in 2011 in Alberta [1] defining Learning Analytics “as the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs” So what has changed in education?
Hasn’t learning analytics been part of teaching since teaching began?
With the digital age we have seen the exponential growth of data and with it the potential to analyse data patterns to assist in determining possible factors that may improve the learner’s success.
However, the challenge is to determine which data are of interest.
We are now in an era where gaining access to data is not the problem; the challenge lies in determining which data are significant and why.
There are many data mining tools available to help with the analysis, but in the past they were targeted on structured data.
Today we have so much data that come in an unstructured or semi-structured form that may nonetheless be of value in understanding more about our learners.
For example, Deb Roy [2] recorded the life of the development of his child’s first word.
In Figure 1 we see the amount of data captured and analysed which provides a visual narrative of learning taking place.
Figure 1: The data captured to see the birth of a word in action The opportunity to record the data visually means that a narrative of how language learning takes place in early development can be analysed.
But the scale of data  to see the development of a word (a huge step for the development of a baby or toddler and the family) is immense.
The world of technology has changed since the turn of the century as now [3]: 80 per cent of the world’s information is unstructured; Unstructured data are growing at 15 times the rate of structured information Raw computational power is growing at such an enormous rate that we almost have a supercomputer in our hands; Access to information is available to all In a BBC Radio 4 interview, Kenneth Cukier [4], when discussing Big Data stated “Let the data speak for itself”.
However, “more data does not mean more knowledge” (Dr. Tiffany Jenkins [4]).
Cukier describes an example from Google predicting the flu outbreak in the US.
He explains that a correlation experiment was run using millions of terms where they used lots of mathematical models:             ‘…what they were able to find was they were able to correlate in a very short period of time where flu outbreaks were going to be in quasi real time’.
Cukier states that because of the large scale set of variables that are used in the era of Big Data, we as humans must give up a degree of understanding how the causation and possible new insights into the data used to provide information may have been determined.
Computers can relentlessly trawl through data but the lens that is used to determine the patterns through those data are a human invention.
And as stated during the Radio 4 [4] programme by Marcus du Sautoy, mathematics is used to find patterns.
We use mathematics everyday.
However, to obtain information that is really useful to us, we need to know what we are looking for in the sea of data.
He gave the example of the Hadron Collider experiment in which huge amounts of data was created as electrons were smashed together to determine how electrons and quarks have mass, which was achieved through identifying the Higg’s Particle [5].
However, the Higg’s Particle was too unstable so researchers had to look for the existence of evidence that a Higg’s Particle might leave behind.
Searching for the evidence in a mass of data requires knowing what kind of evidence is needed.
Knowledge of the domain and understanding and interpretation of the patterns we see.
So how can we aquire an understanding of how to handle Big Data and its possible value to learning analytics?
What Is Big Data?
‘Big Data applies to information that can’t be processed or analyzed using traditional processes or tools.
Increasingly, organizations today are facing more and more Big Data challenges.
They have access to a wealth of information, but they don’t know how to get value out of it because it is sitting in its most raw form or in a semistructured or unstructured format; and as a result, they don’t even know whether it’s worth keeping (or even able to keep it for that matter).’[3, p.3] There are three characteristics that define Big Data: volume, variety and velocity.
Big data is well suited for solving information challenges that do not natively fit within a traditional relational database approach for handling the problem at hand.
The major shortcomings of the existing tools today according to the report by Emicien [6]: Search helps you discover insights you already know, yet it does not help you discover things of which you are completely unaware.
Query-based tools are time-consuming because search-based approaches require a virtually infinite number of queries.
Statistical methods are largely limited to numerical data; over 85% of data are unstructured.
Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining So How Might We Work with Big Data?
We need to use new models that do not treat data as only numerical data, that are time-efficient as the data available have a time dependency relevance and can provide a representation of means of informing us of new potential discoveries.
The idea that there are systems in place that can correlate millions of terms and use over millions of mathematical models in a meaningful time span to provide potentially relevant predictions places us centre-stage of a further dimension of Zuboff’s Smart Machine [7].
‘Knowledge and Technology are changing so fast […] What will happen to us?’ [7, p.3].
A statement with which many involved in delivering teaching and learning today may have sympathy.
There are many tools and applications available as well as online data about students’ achievements, learning experiences and the types of teaching resources available.
The analytic tools currently used to support the analysis of these data from an educational perspective are covered by two key research perspectives: educational mining data tools; and learning analytics.
While related and having similar visions, they pursue different needs and provide different but relevant insights into working with the digital context of the data about the world of education.
The Educational Data-mining Lens ‘Educational Data Mining is an emerging discipline, concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational settings, and using those methods to better understand students, and the settings which they learn in.’ [8] Working with any data does require an idea; a hypothesis and a view to know what kind of patterns you might be interested in.
For teaching and learning it is the understanding of those critical factors that influence the teaching and learning experience.
The types of tools that assist us in navigating the data are data mining tools.
As indicated, not all classic methods previously used will make sense in Big Data.
Some examples of the types of applications that can result from Educational data mining are [9]: Analysis and visualisation of data Providing feedback for supporting instructors Recommendations for students Predicting student performance Student modelling Detecting undesirable student behaviours Grouping students Social network analysis Developing concept maps Constructing courseware Planning and scheduling Both Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining communities have the goal of improving the quality of analysis of educational data, to support both basic research and practice in education.
However as indicated by Siemens and Baker [10], there are differences between the approaches as their focus and routes come potentially from different places.
The comparison between the approaches can help us better understand the potential role of learning analytics.
A brief comparison of the two fields is given in Table 1.
Learning Analytics Educational Data Mining Discovery Leveraging human judgment is key; automated discovery is a tool to accomplish this goal Automated discovery is key; leveraging human judgment is a tool to accomplish this goal Reduction & Holism Stronger emphasis on understanding systems as wholes, in their full complexity Stronger emphasis on reducing to components and analysing individual components and relationships between them Origins has stronger origins in semantic web, “intelligent curriculum,” outcome prediction, and systemic interventions has strong origins in educational software and student modelling, with a significant community in predicting course outcomes Adaptation & Personalisation Greater focus on informing and empowering instructors and learners Greater focus on automated adaptation (eg by the computer with no human in the loop) Techniques & Methods Social network analysis, sentiment analysis, influence analytics, discourse analysis, learner success prediction, concept analysis, sense-making models Classification, clustering, Bayesian modelling, relationship mining, discovery with models, visualisation Table 1: A brief comparison of the two fields (courtesy of George Siemens and Ryan Baker [10]) Learning-analytics Lens and Big Data: From Theory to Practice Below we consider some scenarios to explore the potential, approaches, impact and need for learning analytics in the education context.
Scenario 1: Assume All Students at Risk at All Times As students are at risk at all times of failing, is it still useful to predict which students will be at a higher risk level than others?
Teachers’ insight into past experiences of their students provides important understanding in identifying how to provide the right type of scaffolding at the right time.
How then could we exploit teachers’ knowledge and experience gained from teaching similar cohorts in the past?
We could automate the testing of certain thresholds / hypotheses that teachers deem important indicators of learning at key times during the year.
An example being: ‘if a student has not achieved an average of 45% or above on three assessed assignments by mid-January, the student is likely to fail the year’, or another example, ‘if in addition to not achieving a minimum of 45%, the student has not made the due fee payment, he/she is at risk of dropping out’.
The identification of such thresholds is based on patterns observed by academics when teaching similar student cohorts, albeit without using complex statistical methods.
At a very minimum, such hypotheses should be tested by way of feeding the teachers’ relevant experience into evaluating student performance at key control points.
Scenario 2: Assume Students Present Different Levels of Risk at Different Times More complex patterns of student behaviour where a multitude of factors come to bear are not easy to detect or to express as simple hypotheses.
Teachers and academic support staff will have a good sense of what factors influence student performance, for example, past academic achievements, number of visits to online course materials, number of hours per week in a paid job, hours per day spent travelling, number or pattern of free periods in student timetables, demographics, financial support and so on.
Guided by such clues, modelling experts will test the historic data looking for inter-relationships and the significance of each of the factors suspected to be influential.
Manipulating data structures by categorising or grouping data or handling missing data items is all part of the statistical analysis, with the aim of creating a predictive model that can run automatically.
Of course, it calls for expertise in multidimensional analysis and there are plenty of people working in and for education who are qualified to take this on.
Such analysis could result in seven to 10 (or more) significant factors that have influenced student success for a given cohort in the past, and these factors will form the basis of a predictive risk assessment model for the current student cohort.
The model will produce a predictive score for each student and display results in easily interpreted categories of risk:  for example, at high risk, at risk, or safe, or even red, amber, green.
In principle, this approach is the most robust as it incorporates the widest possible set of considerations when evaluating student performance and the risk of failure.
Moreover, once the model is created, it can be run daily to provide the most up-to-date outlook for each student.
Ideally, the predictive risk assessment model should also incorporate the ability to execute discrete tests of various different hypotheses at given times in the year (as described in scenario 1 above, especially where there are gaps in the associated historic data.
Scenario 3: Troubleshooting via a Single Piece of Data vs Big Data Assume that we have a robust predictive risk assessment model (with 85% to 95% accuracy), is there any point in also considering other types of observed student behaviour?
Take a scenario where the predictive model ran overnight and a student who was predicted to be ‘safe’ was seen later that day by the teacher in class with his head down on the desk for the second time that week.
It can be argued that in an ideal situation, the predictive model should run alongside an online incident management process which can manage behavioural issues that have actually been observed (as opposed to predicted risk).
Also, the number and types of incidents logged over time should be added to the pool of learning analytics and examined for their contribution to student learning.
Impact of Predictive Learning Analytics Like all other models in all walks of life, the impact of predictive analytics will be negligible if the right people are not (a) examining the results of the model on a regular basis and (b) taking action to mitigate predicted risk.
Science and technology have already come together to develop tools to exploit learning analytics and big data so as to help remove barriers to learning and to increase attainment.
There are tools that encompass the automation of all the methods outlined in the above three scenarios, i.e.
testing of specific hypotheses on student performance predictive risk assessment using multiple data points management of individual student observed behaviours Educators who work with this level of precision will have the most power to influence student learning and to shape learning and teaching methods for future students.
Policy makers may also be interested in this kind of information at large scale.
This is becoming more accessible both due to connectivity and to the potential of continuous assessment that is becoming possible either directly or indirectly through the interaction and the traces that students leave behind when interacting with educational software.
Systems Using Analytics and Data for Teaching and Learning There are many tools and platforms available for teachers to use.
We have selected some of the tools and platforms to analyse in this report that were presented and demonstrated at the London Knowledge Lab 11 Jenzabar Jenzabar’s  Retention Management [12] platform provides analytic tools that enable an all-inclusive student profile instantly informing whether a student is safe, at risk, or at high risk of dropping out or failing.
To develop the model, Jenzabar first analyses an institution’s existing information, as far as three years back, to determine trends and significant factors affecting retention and graduation rates for a specific cohort of students.
Retention factors include all aspects of a student’s profile, past and present, academic, social and financial.
Any number of ‘suspect’ factors can be tested for their impact on retention / graduation, but from experience only about 12 factors have been found to be significant for any given cohort.
Once the significant factors are mathematically identified, weight values are assigned to each in order to create the Risk Assessment model.
The analytic tools (called FinishLine and supplied by Jenzabar) are currently used at approximately 70 HE and FE institutions, mainly in the US.
As well as the predictive modelling, it also provides easy management of alerts and interventions.
Examples of cohorts managed via FinishLine are non-traditional students (with factors such as number of years away from study, hours in a job per week, number of small children, length of commute), transfer students, distance learning students, international students, first-years, second-years and final year students.
Teaching and Learning Analytics and MOOCS The MOOC (Massively Online Open Courses) model is closest to IOE (Institute of Education) models for certain kinds of CPD course – expert input plus significant peer interaction, with no individual guidance or assessment.
The general expectation is that the MOOC model could transform the nature of HE.
The Course Resource Appraisal Model (CRAM) provides the visual analysis [13] provides an insight into how to think about the teaching and learning experience impact when we move from face-to-face, blended learning and larger-scale delivery such as MOOCs.
Understanding the impact of changes on both teaching and learning when scaling up requires bringing together the pedagogical understanding with the learning experiences for the students.
Visual representations of the impact of scaling up and including other resources used in delivering teaching and learning provide teachers and learning technologists with an explicit insight into design changes.
Maths-Whizz The Maths-Whizz [14] proprietary online tutoring system is able to assess individual students’ levels continuously in the different topics in mathematics and then identifying an overall “maths age” for each student.
This is useful when used as a relative measure to compare profiles and abilities of students within a class in an easy and digestible manner.
This empowers teachers to assess areas of attention for their class as a whole as well as individual students.
This capability is currently being expanded to provide ministries of education with an ability to compare different regions or schools in terms of both maths ability and progress rate, raising the potential of evaluating the impact on the learning of mathematics via their various educational initiatives.
Over 100,000 students in multiple countries are currently being virtually tutored by Maths-Whizz providing a significant amount of data for useful analysis and value-added conclusions.
Blikbook BlikBook [15] uses analytics to understand class engagement and drive better learning outcomes.
It is a course engagement platform for lecturers and students in higher education.
It helps students find the academic content they need, whilst helping lecturers save time supporting students outside the lecture theatre.
The platform was made publicly available in September 2012 and is now in use at over a third of UK Higher Education institutions.
Students using the platform rate their lecturer 20-40% higher in answers to National Student Survey questions, and lecturers report increased academic performance, particularly among students who tend to perform below the average.
Teacher Assistance Tools in an Exploratory Learning Environment The MiGen Project [16] has developed an intelligent exploratory learning environment, the eXpresser, that aims to support 11-14 year-old students’ development of algebraic ways of thinking.
Given the open-ended nature of the tasks that students undertake in eXpresser, teachers can only be aware of what a small number of students are doing at any one time as they walk around the classroom.
The computer screens of students who are not in their immediate vicinity are typically not visible to them and these students may not be engaged in productive construction.
It is hard for teachers to know which students are making progress, who is off-task, and who is in difficulty and in need of additional support.
Even for those students whose screens are currently visible to the teacher, it may be hard for the teacher to understand the process by which a student has arrived at the current state of their construction and the recent feedback the student has received from eXpresser, and to provide appropriate guidance.
A suite of visualisation and notification tools, which are referred to as the Teacher Assistance tools, aim to assist teachers in focussing their attention across the whole class as students are working with eXpresser.
The interventions supported by the tool help students reflect on their work.
The teacher is also made aware of the interventions, provided as feedback and suggestions to students, so that the teacher can use this knowledge when setting new goals and further feedback.
Tools and Platforms Learning Analytics Perspective Educational Data Mining Perspective Teaching Analytics Perspective Jenzabar Strong analytics  overall and systemic approach using largescale data from across the organisation.
As well as learning analytics, statistical models are used to create predictive analysis Whole organisation is involved in understanding the behaviour view.
Although no explicit pedagogical framework is included, teachers and lecturers can access and input into the student model.
The tool provides visual representations to lecturers and support staff to inform which students need support and why.
CRAM (Course Resource Appraisal Model) Provides visual representation of teaching Classification system and relationships to support activities across  Teaching and Learning analysis Automated visual   models of the impact on teaching and learning.
Maths Whiz Domain-specific analysis that enables different types of insight into the students’ learning and relative learning of Maths Uses analysis clustering models of static relative learning points to determine Maths age and contextual data for relative improvement analysis Uses a visual model to provide information of the Teachers to use as part of their teaching.
BlikBook Social peer group approach for exchange and group problem solving Student modelling and profiles for community use Student feedback to the teachers and more peerled student groups MiGen Social grouping and outcome predictions of students.
Rule-based analysis and various problem-specific computational techniques analyse task progression to provide feedback to the teacher and students.
Constant visual analytics of teaching and learning for teachers to instigate immediate intervention on task progression and collaborative activities.
Table 2: Tools and their data One critical success factor of all these tools has been the engagement with teachers.
While they have all taken a view on learning needs and experience of the students, it is often the teacher that takes the lead role in determining the contextual factors that influence the students’ learning.
This is possible when the teacher or lecturer participates in the design process of the tool and contributes to how the tool will be used.
It is only in the ownership and interpretation of the ‘big data’ by those that must work with it that significant impact and value are realised.
Discussion How might we make use of learning analytics and big data?
Big data and learning analytics: Friends or foe?
How does big data and learning analytics influence education?
Decision Making for Teachers and Policy Makers The proliferation of educational technology in classrooms is both a blessing and a curse for teachers.
Among other factors, and related to the discussion here, teachers need to be able to monitor several students simultaneously and have meaningful reports about their learning.
Communicating therefore the vast quantity of traces that students leave behind when interacting with computers into meaningful and informative ‘indicators’ is an effort shared among many research and development groups [17].
Examples that are informative and beneficial to learning range from the simple analysis of common question errors to lack of resource usage to more complex patterns of students’ interactions [18].
The analysis can include recommendation about which students to group together.
Also, the analysis is useful in helping teachers to see the potential impact of resources and new ways of delivering teaching and learning [19][20].
When teachers, head teachers and policy makers are faced with many constraints, data can provide them with the information they need to make the better decisions for the learners of today and the future.
How might this be done?
In what form do these data best serve decision makers?
How might we interrogate the data to understand the key concepts that may underpin the potential rationale of teaching and learning experience for the user?
Or are we really in the realm that Cukier refers to as ‘letting the data speak for itself’?
Students, Their Own Data and Own Learning While reflection on one’s learning is critical, how do we learn to reflect and make effective decisions about improving our learning?
Personalised feedback is extremely useful but for the teacher it is time-consuming and cannot always be available in a timely manner.
Personal analytics that potentially identify one’s common errors in understanding or less-than-appropriate techniques used by the students can provide them with a context in which to reflect on their own development and to address improvements in a timely manner.
How might we best present such feedback and information to students?
There are several examples of systems and Web sites that attempt that.
The most recent hype is around the analytics provided in the Khan academy, a Web site with open resources for learning mathematics and science through a series of online video and interactive activities.
Detailed bar graphs show students’ progress, histograms presenting the problems students encountered with particular activities and a tree structure represents the knowledge.
Can the use of various feedback cases and contextual knowledge be useful in supporting such feedback?
How can teachers leverage such knowledge to provide the appropriate and effective feedback efficiently?
How can the data help students help each other in developing further understanding and help them improve their learning experience?
Data, Research Questions and the Potential of Data Researchers have various types of data that they collect and analyse to understand various developments and insights.
The research itself is formed from questions in search of understanding about the context or critical factors that affect teaching and learning.
Sometimes these questions are based on observations, or an idea of innate knowledge that we might class as a hunch, a hypothesis that draws from the knowledge and experience about the current context of teaching and learning, or impacts and changes in society.
Process and product data both from human-computer and computer-mediated human-human interactions provide unique opportunities for knowledge discovery through advanced data analysis and visualisation techniques.
For example, Porayska-Pomsta et al [21] analysed patterns of students-tutor computer-mediated dialogues to develop machine-learned rules about tutors’ inferences in relation to learners’ affective states and the actions that tutors take as a consequence.
We can harness the power of data the better to understand and assess learning in both technology-enhanced and even conventional contexts.
Big Data can be found even in small-scale approaches as the amount of data collected even from a small series of interactions can be enough to provide useful insights for further analysis.
With access and the opportunity to share data across domains, together with the variety of areas of learning, we are in a position to reflect on large-scale data and patterns that may provide further insights into correlations between what are the important factors for learning to take place and the critical indicators.
While intuitively we may be able to state what these factors are, providing the evidence is difficult.
There are so many variables that may influence the learner, the learning, the teacher and the teaching, so how might the more ubiquitous and pervasive nature of learning research data be made available to teachers?
How can a broader audience have access to the data and be provided with the right contextual lens to interpret the data?
Is there a right context?
What is the best way for researchers to share their findings with teachers and learners?
How can teachers and learners be included in the process and influence the process from research questions to analysis?
Systems Can Adapt, Automate and Inform of Change Systems and tools can adapt to the context and data by providing automated responses, for example, quiz assessments, analysis of interaction, usage or not of online resources, summaries of who is interacting more frequently than others and with whom.
This is not new since the ease of access to Internet through browsers; the lens with which we view data requires a trust of the underlying rules and algorithms that have been provided for us to access data.
For example, the browser adapts to our searches based on the knowledge it already has about our usage.
Trend analysis provides information from the past to some potential insights in the future.
For example, Intelligent Tutoring Systems may provide individualised feedback to students but we know now that it is being used both to ‘game the system’ [22] but also as a means of reflection [23] Automation of systems to adapt based on learning trends and factors is possible.
For example, currently such data is forming part of the use of and growing interest in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)[24].
When scaling up to a large student cohort what happens to both teaching and learning?
How should systems be managed?
How can we help teachers and learners get the best out of such systems?
Can knowledge profiling of critical factors help in interpreting the data presented and the automations in place?
These are all questions that concern the fields of Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics.
Conclusion Critical to considering the data is the interpretation of the data and that our instinctive perspective still holds crucial value even when articulation is challenging.
Without experience of the context, data analysis may bring little value.
In a recent seminar by Professor Diana Laurillard about the possible way of understanding the impact of scaling up for large online courses, which investigated the move towards MOOCs, she reported a discussion with one of the lecturers who had been asked to assess the impact of scaling up: ‘The lecturer intuitively felt that the change would have an impact but was struggling to articulate in what way’.
After some further investigation and working with a teaching design tool (see Course Resource Appraisal Model (CRAM) [13]) that provides a visual representation and feedback about learning and teaching, the lecturer could see there would be an impact on personalised learning (eg getting one-to-one feedback).
As the size scaled up, the one-to-one teaching opportunities diminished.
Although tools and techniques have evolved substantially in the last few years, there are still very important limitations that need to be addressed and as technology is rapidly being adopted in schools and homes around the world, the educational sector runs the risk of ‘picking the low hanging fruit’ of learning analytics — meaningless descriptive information or simple statistics that values what we can easily measure rather than measures what we value.
References 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, 27 February 1 March 2011, Banff, Alberta, Canada  https://tekri.athabascau.ca/analytics/ Learning Your First Word http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html Chris Eaton, Dirk Deroos, Tom Deutsch, George Lapis & Paul Zikopoulos, “Understanding Big Data: Analytics for Enterprise Class Hadoop and Streaming Data”, p.XV.
McGraw-Hill, 2012.
BBC Radio 4, Start the Week, Big Data and Analytics, first broadcast 11 February 2013 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qhqfv    Why do particles have mass?
http://www.lhc.ac.uk/17738.aspx The Big Data Paradigm Shift: Insight Through Automation http://www.emicien.com/ Zuboff, S. (1984).
“In the Age of the Smart Machine” New York, Basic Book.
The International Educational Data Mining Society http://www.educationaldatamining.org/ Romero, C. (2010).
Educational Data Mining: A Review of the State of the Art, In: Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, IEEE Transactions on Date of Publication: November 2010 Siemens & Baker (2012).
Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining: Towards Communication and Collaboration.
Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2012.
Available in .pdf format at http://users.wpi.edu/~rsbaker/LAKs%20reformatting%20v2.pdf      LKLi (London Knowledge Lab Innovations) https://www.lkldev.ioe.ac.uk/lklinnovation/big-data-and-learning-analytics/ Jenzabar, 2013 http://www.jenzabar.com/higher-ed-solutions/retention Laurillard, D. (2013),  CRAM, Course Resource Appraisal Model https://www.lkldev.ioe.ac.uk/lklinnovation/big-data-and-learning-analytics/ Maths-Whiz http://www.whizz.com/ Blikbook http://www.blikbook.com/ MiGen http://www.lkl.ac.uk/projects/migen/      Gutierrez-Santos, S. Geraniou, E., Pearce-Lazard, D. & Poulovassilis.
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(2012) Architectural Design of Teacher Assistance Tools in an Exploratory Learning Environment for Algebraic Generalisation.
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366-376, October 2012.
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M. Mavrikis Modelling Student Interactions in Intelligent Learning Environments: Constructing Bayesian Networks from Data.
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Charlton P., Magoulas G., Laurillard, D. (2012) Enabling Creative Learning Design through Semantic Web Technologies,  Journal of Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 21, 231-253.
Laurillard, D., (2012) “Teaching as a Design Science”, Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology, New York, NY, Routledge.
Porayska-Pomsta, K., Mavrikis, M., and Pain, H. (2008).
Diagnosing and acting on student affect: the tutor’s perspective.
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Baker, R.S., Corbett, A.T., Koedinger, K.R., Wagner, A.Z.
(2004) Off-Task Behavior in the Cognitive Tutor Classroom: When Students “Game The System”.Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004: Computer-Human Interaction, 383-390.
Shih, B. Koedinger, K. and Scheines, R. A,  Response Time Model for Bottom-Out Hints as Worked Examples in Educational Data Mining conference 2008.
See the recent ‘moocshop’ in the 2013 International Conference of Artificial Intelligence in Education https://sites.google.com/site/moocshop/ Author Details Dr Patricia Charlton Research Officer London Knowledge Lab Email: patricia.charlton@pobox.com Web site: http://tinyurl.com/TrishCharlton Patricia Charlton is a researcher on artificial intelligence, cognitive science and technology-enhanced learning.
She has recently researched and designed knowledge co-construction systems using computational reflection and meta-level inferencing techniques.
Dr Manolis Mavrikis Senior Research Fellow London Knowledge Lab Email: m.mavrikis@lkl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lkl.ac.uk/manolis Manolis Mavrikis is a Senior Research Fellow on Technology-Enhanced Learning in the London Knowledge Lab.
His research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and machine-learning and aims to design and evaluate transformative intelligent technologies for learning and teaching.
Dr Demetra Katsifli Director of Business Innovation Jenzabar Email: Demetra.Katsifli@jenzabar.com Web site: http://www.jenzabar.com/ Demetra is responsible for leading the implementation of academic technologies for universities and colleges.
Her professional career in Higher Education spans 33 years and has focused on leading enterprise services and systems to underpin the core business of education.
Demetra’s research interest is in educational technology in Higher Education.
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Book Review: University Libraries and Digital Learning Environments Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: University Libraries and Digital Learning Environments Buzz data mobile software framework database wireless archives repositories copyright preservation graphics gis e-learning curation licence interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sylvie Lafortune reviews a collection of essays that examine the transformation of academic libraries as they become part of digital learning environments.
This book examines how academic libraries are realigning themselves with the university of the 21st century, which is increasingly becoming a digital learning environment.
The expectations of the Google generation, the interdependence of teaching and research, and the changing roles of library staff  and technology all play a fundamental part in this environment–and to lead the discussions in this book, the editors have called on 18 experts and practitioners.
The result is 16 chapters that provide a range of viewpoints on how academic libraries will participate in and support digital learning environments.
In their introduction, the editors emphasise that they have chosen to use word clouds (using Wordle) for the cover of the entire book as well as for each chapter to demonstrate ‘in a very graphic way the breadth and depth of the content’.
This is one of the initial features many readers will notice about this book and, based on my reading experience, I think it is effective in helping the reader focus on patterns that have emerged during the creation of the work.
Contents In Chapter 1, ‘Here today and here tomorrow', Sue McKnight focuses on the resilience and adaptability of libraries as they become the physical and virtual heart of their campuses.
However, she argues that, to succeed, the ‘virtual library’ must be an easy-to-use space which complements the physical space.
Furthermore, libraries must remain focused on their role in a world where customers want to work, study and socialise.
In this context, librarians will more likely collaborate with academics, student support professionals and e-learning technologists who are creating and working in online learning spaces.
The greatest challenge for libraries, according to McKnight, is to ‘enable’ their users to access, consume and remix information they manage wherever and whenever they wish.
Chapter 2, provocatively entitled ’It’s All About Social Media, Stupid!’ by Peter Godwin, looks at the intersection of libraries and Web 2.0.
Much has been written about this intersection, but some of his considerations deserve to be highlighted.
On the one hand, it is important to realise that social media do not have a universal appeal!
On the other hand, the generational gap relating to technology is closing and, more importantly, research indicates a positive correlation between literacy and engagement with social media.
Godwin also asks a more fundamental question: ‘Do users actually want to communicate with librarians?’ He also provides an important discussion of social media metrics and how complex it can be to form accurate measurements simply because they are often more qualitative than quantitative.
Chapter 3, Jacqui Weetman Dacosta’s ‘Information Literacy in the Digital Environment’ addresses the impact of technology on teaching information literacy (IL) skills.
Much is being developed, from online tutorials, to teaching assessment tools such as SAILS (Standard Assessment of Information Literacy Skills), to Web guides and training modules for librarians such as Lollipop and Sir Learnalot.
Digital  initiatives are used in the hope of engaging students and also of addressing more effectively diverse learning styles.
However, Dacosta raises two important issues: as of yet, there is no evidence that IL is more effective within a virtual space, and; teaching students to formulate search strategies, develop keywords and evaluate sources remains at the heart of IL, not matter what the format of the instruction.
Sheila Corrall takes a look at the skillset needed by academic librarians in contemporary digital learning environments in Chapter 4 ‘Professional Education for a Digital World’.
Many library schools have moved from the traditional library science programme to broader information management programmes.
Do the latter really provide the multi-faceted skillset needed for the new role of ‘data liaison’?
According to Corrall’s analysis of numerous reports, there is no consensus as to what programmes best prepare professionals for the digital learning environment.
The US leads the way in terms of specialised courses in academic librarianship; but, according to many, there is still an important gap in specialist education for information literacy and data curation.
In Chapter 5, ‘The Library Chameleon: Physical Space’, Liz Waller gives us a tour of the emerging learning spaces in academic libraries.
These spaces are being transformed in ‘student centered’ environments, complete with modular furniture, ‘service pods’, roving multi-skilled staff, wireless and fixed personal computers and coffee shops.
There is a growing body of work on ‘learning space design’ and for anyone directly involved in building refurbishment, it is quite fascinating to see how it affects all areas in libraries, from service to collections to staff.
Equally fascinating is to witness how occupancy increases!
However, this leads to another important area of space planning which is evaluation.
To date, Waller notes that evaluation tends to focus on justification of expenditure and student satisfaction.
But the fundamental question is: do new learning spaces enhance learning?
The author does provide an overview of studies which identify and review tools, methods and frameworks for evaluation mechanisms.
Rachel Geeson provides an overview of virtual advice services although she focuses mainly on what is widely known as ‘chat services’.
Chapter 6, ‘Virtual Advice Services’, starts off with a brief outline of the results of a survey the author conducted in 2009.
This leads to a discussion of chat software (commercial and freeware) and service models which vary widely.
They include staffing, set-up, opening times and usage figures.
Geeson notes that staffing issues are what is common to all institutions.
However, we must consider that, from the user’s perspective, chat services are not a novelty but a significant service option.
Finally, it appears that successful chat services depend primarily on promotion and strategic entry points.
There are some pitfalls to this service, for example, that it lacks personal identity and metrics.
Looking forward, Geeson suggests that libraries need to think about delivering mobile-friendly information on the Web.
In Chapter 7, ‘The Reading E-volution’, Jill Beard and Penny Dale dig deeper into the role of the library in academic literacy and student success.
Their point of departure is asking ‘to what extent learning in a largely digital environment can be considered “reading”?’ Up until now, there has been little research on reading strategies and academic skills development in a digital environment.
Although no definite solution can be found here, the chapter does cover three areas which libraries must examine: partnerships; the role of the student and peer-assisted support, and; the overarching role of technology.
One area which can be improved is the traditional reading list.
Indeed, reading lists are the foundation of the ‘reading for a degree’ concept by which faculty staff provide core material and their students, through learning activities based on the material provided, progress through their studies until they obtain their degree.
But this method is static and is no longer effective in a digital environment.
The authors discuss emerging initiatives such as using digital tools to help open up reading lists to students.
These tactics range from embedding reading lists in virtual learning environment software with links directly to the corresponding content, to providing the ability for students to use social bookmarking and networking tools to share and comment on the resources and add their reflections.
Chapter 8, Alma Swan’s ‘Institutional Repositories – Now and Next’ covers what repositories are, what they achieve, how they have evolved in the past decade and what the current challenges are to move them forward.
Unfortunately, since digital repository initiatives are progressing rather slowly, the author could not add very much to the existing body of knowledge.
Among other issues, copyright and interoperability remain the major roadblocks and the author rightly notes that without international consensus among all stakeholders, progress may be very slow indeed.
Swan attempts to link repositories and the scholarly enquiry process by drawing attention to the significant amount of digital data that is currently being produced in all disciplines.
Undoubtedly, repositories can play an important role in data storage, curation and access but as she herself states ‘these things are under intense study and discussion’ – and nowhere near being resolved.
Chapter 9, ‘Making the Repository Count: Lessons from Successful Implementation’ by Matt Holland and Tim Denning examines why implementing – and I may add, maintaining –  a repository remains a challenge for most universities.
Two short case studies provide the background for a discussion which could have easily been integrated with the previous chapter.
Mellissa Terras, Claire Warwick and Claire Ross, in Chapter 10, ‘Building Useful Virtual Research Environments: The Need for User-led Design’ use an interesting case study (VERA Project) to describe an emerging technology.
Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are databases with customised digital tools and services designed to enhance the work of scholars.
The chapter offers one important message: the need for a user-driven design when undertaking VRE development; and the authors even provide a set of guiding principles to help potential developers of these projects.
But isn’t it now widely recognised that the success of any new digital application is directly related to user needs and feedback?
Nonetheless, the guidelines are clear and useful and could be applied to other contexts!
One last point is the argument for the involvement of libraries in VRE development which is ‘becoming more central’: the authors do caution that currently, most librarians may not be sufficiently skilled to be fully integrated into these projects.
I must admit that I struggled with the dilemma in Chapter 11, Jane Russ’s ‘The HE and FE Digital Dilemma’!
Understandably, the issues surrounding support for the often very different needs of students of Higher Education institutions and Further Education programmes are real and practical.
However, this has been the case for decades now.
What this chapter is not always clear about is the real solutions that virtual learning environments bring to this problem.
There is much ‘back and forth’ in terms of advantages and disadvantages of digital support and potential challenges from the students’ or the libraries’ perspectives.
I think what we take away from this contribution is that VLEs have had a very positive impact in providing support for students in HE/FE collaborative programmes (enhanced access to information, flexible learning opportunities, greater ownership of studies).
But there is room for improvement!
The author calls for a stronger collaboration between HE/FE institutions for better integration and delivery of learning resources.
The primary dilemma of whether the VLEs should be separate or combined remains unresolved.
In Chapter 12, ‘Online Support Offered to International Students by UK University Libraries – What are we doing, and why are we doing it?’, Frank Trew focuses not only on current initiatives being developed to support international students but also asks why such initiatives are taking place.
He admits that there are no definite answers to these questions, but does refer to strong recruitment and retention mandates of universities, in the UK and  elsewhere.
A few important points should be emphasised from Trew’s work.
Firstly, there are many digital resources and tools available for international students, but library support is patchy and rarely makes use of VLEs.
The author includes a few observations that librarians should be aware of, namely that in addition to the well documented language  and cultural problems, international students may be susceptible to ‘learning shock’, defined as differences in learning and teaching styles as well as in measures of success (p. 188).
This may justify employing ‘academic literacy’ approach, rather than an ‘information literacy’ approach when working with international students.
Furthermore, we should be careful not to fall in the ‘deficit model’ trap!
The author discusses a study which found few differences in the information seeking behaviours of international and ‘local’ American students.
However, plagiarism remains one area where local and international students differ significantly.
Trew concludes by stating that there is as yet no consensus, in terms of pedagogy, on what actual help international students need: should it be exclusive or inclusive support?
In Chapter 13, ‘Library Performance Measurement in the Digital Age’, Angela Conyers and Philip Payne offer some insight into why and how libraries are re-examining their traditional performance measures.
Undoubtedly, the evolving digital landscape is driving change in how libraries collect and analyse statistics.
They must now measure availability, use and impact of print and e-resources as well as emerging services delivered through technology.
Customer satisfaction is also driving performance measurement and so we are witnessing the use of qualitative as well as quantitative methodologies.
I had not realised how this whole field appears to be an area of innovation for libraries as the authors discuss action research methodology, use of stories or narratives, use of ‘star ratings’ through interaction with users and possibly even ROI (Return on Investment) models.
The authors end their contribution by reminding us that no matter which methodology is used, the data must be systematically analysed and reviewed before being presented.
Emma Crowley’s and Chris Spencer’s (Chapter 14) ‘Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World’ examines the impact of the digital environment on the increasingly complex activities of purchasing.
This area of activity has changed dramatically over the past two decades as the amount and range of digital content have increased exponentially.
From licence negotiation to ‘patron selection plans’, to marketing and usage analysis, to resource discovery tools and user feedback, librarians and suppliers are developing systems and services to meet the expectations of today’s users.
These transformations are not without problems.
Library staff need to adapt and develop new skills and library management systems are incapable of fully supporting the acquisition and exploitation of digital content so libraries are being creative and using a combination of local solutions, commercial software and provider applications.
Moreover, preservation of content in perpetual usable formats are a primary concern.
One last notable point is that most library environments ‘remain hybrid, due to higher costs of digital materials, small society print titles and legacy print’.
(p. 234) In Chapter 15, ‘Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning’, Sheila Corrall looks at what is now available to librarians who need continually to update their skills in the digital learning environment.
In recent years, academic libraries have seen the emergence of micro-specialties in areas such as information systems, digital content services, institutional repositories, subject-specific liaison roles and information literacy.
In addition, traditional work boundaries have become blurred giving  rise to ‘blended’ librarians.
Corrall provides a detailed list of both external and internal activities that librarians can engage in to pursue professional development, from study visits, summer courses and work shadowing to joining task forces, reading professional literature to job rotation.
Increasingly, pedagogical abilities to perform effectively in digital environments is a requirement of academic librarians.
The author concludes by highlighting that there is evidence that academic librarians are progressing towards professional doctorates in the US.
This may be an indication that there is a strong movement towards advancing university library practice.
Chapter 16, ‘Librarians as Midwives of Change in Scholarly Communication’ by David Ball is a short essay arguing that we are currently in the middle of a third information and communications technology revolution!
A valuable analysis of the transformation currently taking place in the information value chain is included as well as a brief discussion of the costs of each link in the chain with more emphasis on the cost of academic journal publishing.
Indisputably, academic publishers still hold most of the cards in digital content negotiations, but the rest of the stakeholders are slowly and surely working their way toward reclaiming all of the links in the information chain.
According to Ball, the revolution has started, but there are ‘many practical, cultural and financial impediments’.
The author predicts that librarians will act as midwives in delivering a new age of scholarly communication.
The intended metaphor is ambiguous, depending on one's perception of midwives; if one interprets the metaphor as relegating librarians to behind-the-scenes work again, it would seem to clash with how librarianship is seen to be evolving by most of the other authors in this book.
Alternatively, one may read the intent as placing librarians at the forefront of the information revolution due to their focused expertise and constant attention, which offers a more positive interpretation.
Conclusion  I do have mixed feelings about this book: on the one hand, most of the contributions provided me with an opportunity to do some benchmarking against my own experience.
For example, I now realise that most academic libraries I have visited in recent years are either at a planning or implementation stage of new services and spaces described in this work.
And this confirms that academic libraries are resilient and adaptable!
However, as Sheila Corrall indicates in her chapter on professional development, to move forward, our profession needs actively to pursue critical reflection and reflective writing.
Unfortunately, I did not see enough deep thinking and reflective writing in this collected work.
What I do take away is that in digital learning environments, librarians must update their skills in pedagogy and technology and focus on partnerships with those directly involved in teaching and research in their institutions Author Details Sylvie Lafortune Government Information and Data Librarian Laurentian University Sudbury Ontario Canada Email: slafortune@laurentian.ca Web site: http://www.laurentian.ca/library/ Sylvie Lafortune is an Associate Librarian at Laurentian University of Sudbury, one of the two bilingual universities in Canada.
Her main area of responsibility is Government Information, Data and GIS.
She is currently Chair of the Department of Library and Archives at her institution.
For the past few years, she has enjoyed being the faculty advisor for the World University Service of Canada Local Committee at Laurentian.
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23 Things in Public Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 23 Things in Public Libraries Buzz mobile software wiki database rss archives tagging blog video flickr cataloguing podcast librarything youtube facebook twitter url Citation BibTex RIS Helen Leech describes a collaborative project to increase front-line staff's understanding and use of Web 2.0 in public libraries.
Did you know that: Of the Generation Y – the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s – 96% are members of a social network There are some 200 million blogs on the World Wide Web One in eight couples who married in the USA in 2009 met over the Internet If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest by population in the world after China, the USA and India All the statistics emanate from Socialnomics [1].
They are designed to be attention-grabbers, and they will no doubt provoke ferocious debate.
However, what is unarguable is that some seismic shifts have taken place on the Internet in the past ten years, and social media and user-generated content now play a huge role in the way many people create and share information and how they communicate with each other.
These changes have crept up on public libraries.
Ten years ago, we became Internet experts when the People's Network initiative put 30,000 computers into our buildings.
We became used to the new role of teaching people how to use a mouse, what a search engine is, how to create an email account.
But when it came to content, we tended to leave that to our customers.
Friends Reunited came along, followed by Myspace, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and we were dimly aware of them as social phenomena, but we did not have much to do with them in our day-to-day work.
Changes in Public Libraries So what has changed and why do we need to know about them now?
The list below is by no means exhaustive but represents some of the main drivers behind changes emerging within public libraries in the UK.
The need to help people get online.
As I write, every public library in the UK is being asked to sign up to Race Online [2], the initiative to get 100% of the population clued up by the time the Olympics happens.
The reappointed UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox launched the Race Online 2012 campaign in March 2010.
The initiative reports that more than 600 partners have pledged to help more than 1.7 million new people to get online by the end of 2012.
Its rationale is "to build a UK of near-universal web literacy by the time of the Olympics, with access as easy and affordable as water, electricity or gas and skills considered as fundamental as literacy and numeracy: [its] ambition is to get everyone of working-age online by the end of this Parliament."
People need to know the key skills for getting around online, and a large part of these skills involves social networking.
Changes in the way people communicate.
There is a subtle shift taking place in electronic communication, moving onwards from email towards more collaborative methods: file sharing and cloud computing, social media that include information 'walls,' instant messaging and mobile apps.
There is growing evidence that Generation Y and the Millenials – the generations born after the late 1980s – are moving towards very different methods of communication.
It is important that library staff understand these technologies, since they are going to become as mainstream as email very shortly.
Communities in Control [3]: you might recognise this as the title of a recent government paper, looking at the need to pass control over political processes to local communities, and how this could be achieved.
The principle is being reinforced through the new administration's Big Society initiative [4].
New technologies are allowing people to mobilise in a way that simply has not been possible before, to create and share content, and to become involved in the running of public libraries in radical new ways.
It is also worth looking at the International Association for Public Participation's Spectrum of Public Participation [5] which gives some idea of the range of ways in which we need to work with our communities, from providing them with information all the way up to acting as facilitators so that they can manage and run services themselves.
It is also worth watching the film Us Now [6], which gives a glimpse of the way that new technologies might affect people's relationships with central government and public services.
It highlights the way that social networking applications allow huge numbers of people to collaborate to do previously unthinkable things, like run a bank.
If communities can make the day-to-day decisions necessary to run a bank or a second division football club, then it starts to become possible that they could do the same for political processes or delivery of public services.
Library staff need to understand this culture of engagement, and to understand the tools that facilitate it.
The economic environment.
The next four years, 2010-14, are going to be the hardest public services have seen, and we are going to have to make cost savings everywhere we can.
There are clear benefits in collaboration, and the tools that are available for this are improving rapidly.
Which is where 23 Things comes in.
Learning online 23 Things In 2008, I was casting around the World Wide Web looking for online courses that would allow staff to learn about the Web at their own pace, when I came across 23 Things.
It was set up in 2006 by a technology trainer called Helene Blowers for an American public library system, and was based on a very simple concept.
She set up a blog and divided it into modules.
Each module, or 'Thing', covered a separate technology.
The content was light and entertaining, with lots of emphasis on podcasts and videos, and plenty of interactivity where people could set up their own accounts on Twitter or Flickr and upload content.
To monitor their progress through the course, participants were asked to set up their own blog, and to record their experiences.
You can still see Helene's original 23 Things online [7].
I found the fact that Helene had put the course onto a publicly available blog quite astonishing.
A free course?
Surely not.
That anybody could do?
How did that work?
Surely Helene wanted to restrict it to her own staff?
What's the advantage of making it available to anybody, library staff or not, free of charge?
The concept that there could be a fully fledged course, answering a key library need, available free of charge for me or anybody else to do, was quite revolutionary, beautifully simple, and very much in the spirit of the Web.
Other people clearly felt the same.
Word spread rapidly, and people from outside Helene's service started doing the course or adapting it for their own needs.
Four years on, Helene's Delicious account lists 462 organisations which have their own versions – and those are the ones she knows about.
I started to think about using it for Surrey.
The Society of Chief Librarians (South East) held a briefing session on Web 2.0 in September 2009 which put me into contact with Patricia Garrett from Portsmouth, who was using Web 2.0 tools for many practical purposes, including The Book Case [8] and a teen reading group [9].
We started talking about how we could use Helene's 23 Things.
We ran through the course and felt that Helene's original was out of date.
Three years is an awfully long time on the Internet, and a number of the Things had become outdated, or contained dead links, or the focus had moved on.
Enough had changed to force us to rethink it.
23 Things with a UK Public Library Orientation So we went looking for UK versions.
There were several educational versions.
Two of the most well-developed were created in 2008 by Imperial College [10] and the University of Huddersfield [11][12].
However, although a lot of the aims overlapped, we felt that we wanted a public library version.
Our customers are different to a university's and create a different set of focii, and our resources are more populist.
We found two public libraries who were in the process of writing and rolling out local versions: Devon [13] and Kirklees [14].
The people writing them very kindly gave us permission to use the content they had created, and this went into the mix.
Next, we had a look at the blog format, which we found we did not like.
It forces all the content into date order, and we felt it was not intuitive to use.
We decided to use a wiki, and Wetpaint [15] was the application that we knew most about.
We sat down and created a list of the subjects we wanted staff to know about, such as blogging, photos and images, social networking, tagging, RSS feeds, etc.
We shoehorned them into 23 modules, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake, because it forced us to create modules that were not entirely justified.
This is something that we are planning to address again once we are further into the project.
Then we and our teams went away and wrote content, lifting liberally from the Kirklees and Devon versions.
Using the wiki collaboratively was a great experience, allowing the creators to work freely together and making the content available to anybody who wanted to participate.
Staff in our two authorities were able to collaborate freely, creating content and assessing and editing each other's work.
We communicated largely by email – while this is effective, it made us conscious of the disadvantages of email's one-to-one linear nature.
We experimented with Google Wave, which while vaguely promising still had all the disadvantages of the written medium (and has since been withdrawn by Google), so went back to email.
In June 2010, we finished assessing the quality of the content, and started a period of evaluation, by putting a Surveymonkey form at the bottom of each Thing.
In addition to asking library staff to test it out, we posted a message to the Web 2.0 Jiscmail list [16].
To our surprise, we had a huge response.
We ended up with evaluators from 11 public library authorities, 15 FE and HE institutions, 2 health authorities, and two intrepid independent librarians in Australia.
If you would like to see the results of the evaluation period please contact me using the details below.
Feedback from Evaluators Now (July 2010) we are entering the next phase, which is to revise the course in line with feedback from the evaluators.
One of the comments that came up a number of times was unease about the amount of time front-line staff would have to commit to doing the course.
It's getting increasingly difficult to pull staff off the front line for training, and the current economic environment means that we're looking carefully at anything which will take time.
As a result we will probably create a 'lite' version of the course, perhaps five or six Things which will be mandatory for all staff to complete, and then offer the rest of the course for those people who want to take it further.
A really exciting development is that we – Portsmouth and Surrey – are now working with Suffolk and Aberdeen, public library authorities which also see the need to enhance staff skills.
It will be a challenge: with the geographical distances involved, we are not going to be able to meet physically – but we live in digital times.
We have already had a couple of WebEx sessions which will allow us to speak to each other, share documents, and work on the wiki collaboratively.
(WebEx is seminar software to which Surrey County Council subscribes [17].)
It is not as good as face-to-face meetings, but we think we can make it work.
Conclusions The way is opening for public library authorities for all public services to collaborate in many areas.
I suspect that increasingly we will see authorities collaborating in areas such as: Benchmarking: Like most local authority services, we are dependent on organisations like CIPFA [18] which allow us to compare our performance with our peers.
However, the figures CIPFA collate are high-level, and not all authorities subscribe to CIPFA's benchmarking club.
We often resort to asking each other about performance through the various email lists.
How much better it would be if there was one social network where we could collate an FAQ and ask each other questions!
Putting together guidelines for use of Web 2.0 resources.
We are all creating Twitter accounts, and we are all writing instructions for our staff, largely about what they are and are not allowed to do with them.
The guidelines are generally all the same.
Let us think about having one template for each Web 2.0 application, deposited on a wiki somewhere, which can then be adapted by each authority to suit its own needs.
'Virtual libraries' of hyperlinks and URLs.
Go to any public library Web site and you will find a list or database of recommended Web links.
Let's work together to create some central lists, and feed them into our individual Web sites.
Delicious [19], anybody?
Cribsheets and guides for our users setting up an email account, using Ancestry.
Thanks to the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council [20], the majority of public library services are subscribing to the same list of online resources.
There are many fine training materials and guides produced by the publishers, but curiously not many e-guides.
Librarians end up creating them themselves, and using them to support in-house courses such as UK Online's MyGuide, or Computing for the Terrified.
Further staff training.
We work in difficult times.
I don't know any library authority which can easily pull staff out of the front line to attend traditional classroom training.
23 Things and Frontline [21] allow people to build skills and understanding in their own (work) time, at their own speed.
How about getting together to develop online, virtual training resources for developing frontline staff's skills around customer services, enquiry skills, understanding of new ways of working such as floorwalking?
Infiltrating book and reading forums like LibraryThing to talk about what public libraries can do.
LibraryThing and similar Web sites Goodreads, Shelfari draw people together around books, and the relationship between LibraryThing and public libraries is growing stronger and stronger, with the development of centralised catalogues and apps.
These Web sites can be seen as extensions of our services and are places where our customers gather.
Let's go and talk to them there.
Q&A forums.
One of the great side effects of Web 2.0 is that it creates places where you can throw a question into a social network, and 20 people will answer it, whether it is facile ('What shoes go with this dress?')
or life-changing ('I've got a job interview tomorrow.
Does anybody know ') Many public libraries already offer a 'chat-to-a-librarian' facility using Enquire [22], and Enquire staff also work hard on Yahoo Answers [23].
I think we should be expanding on this.
Public librarians should be haunting all the Q&A networks, from DIY to health.
Countering the bad press public libraries sometimes receive.
Most online news stories, these days, have comments areas.
Have you come across the concept of flashmobs?
One person texts all his friends, and all his friends text all their friends, and they all meet on a street corner somewhere?
We should be flashmobbing to counter negative stories!
Screenshot of a page from 23 Things I think I can speak for everybody who has been involved in our 23 Things project when I say that it has been really valuable: not only for creating staff training resources, but also for the experience of working collaboratively online, and on a personal level, it has been an opportunity to develop and understand new skills – skills which are becoming increasingly important in public libraries.
If you would like to find out more, contact me using the email address below, and, of course, you can look at our own 23 Things [24].
References Socialnomics Web site http://socialnomics.net/ Race Online 2012 http://raceonline2012.org/ Communities in control: real people, real power, H.M. Government, 2008.
ISBN: 978 0 10 174272 6 http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/communitiesincontrol Government puts Big Society at heart of public sector reform, Cabinet Office News, 18 May 2010 http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2010/100518-news-big-society-launch.aspx Cameron and Clegg set out 'big society' policy ideas, BBC News: Politics, 18 May 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8688860.stm International Association of Public Participation's Spectrum of Public Participation: http://www.iap2.org/associations/4748/files/IAP2%20Spectrum_vertical.pdf Us Now, Banyak Films, 2008 http://watch.usnowfilm.com/ 23 Things @ Devon Libraries http://23thingsdevlibs.wordpress.com/ Portsmouth's Book Case wiki http://thebookcase.wetpaint.com/ Portsmouth's Teen Reading Group wiki http://teenreadinggroup.wetpaint.com/ Learning 2.0 @ Imperial College London Library http://learning20atimperial.wordpress.com/ 25 Things @ Huddersfield http://25things2008.wordpress.com/ You can find a presentation about Imperial College's experience at http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/health/subject-groups/libraries-for-nursing/Documents/jenny-evans.pdf and about the University of Huddersfield's course at http://eprints.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/4665/1/CILIP%20Update%20article%20copy%20to%20submit%2012%20Aug%2009.doc Devon Library Service's version of 23 Things: http://23thingsdevlibs.wordpress.com/ Kirklees Library Service's 25 Things http://thereflibrary25things.wordpress.com/ Wetpaint wikis http://www.wetpaint.com/ Web 2.0 Jiscmail list https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=LIS-WEB2 WebEx:Web Conferencing, Web Meeting, Video Conference, Online Meeting Services http://www.webex.co.uk/ CIPFA Benchmarking Club http://www.ipfbenchmarking.net/ Delicious social bookmarking http://delicious.com/ Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Web site http://www.mla.gov.uk/ Frontline training is a programme available from The Reading Agency, and develops staff skills around reader development http://www.openingthebook.com/archive/branching-out/page2.asp?idno=910 Enquire (online chat with a librarian) http://www.questionpoint.org/crs/servlet/org.oclc.home.TFSRedirect?virtcategory=10836 Yahoo Answers http://answers.yahoo.com/ 23 Things Home http://23things.wetpaint.com/ Author Details Helen Leech Virtual Content Manager Surrey Library Service Email: Helen.leech@surreycc.gov.uk Web site: http://23things.wetpaint.com/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/helenleech Return to top Article Title: "23 Things in Public Libraries" Author: Helen Leech Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/leech/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Conference Review: M-Libraries 2, A Virtual Library in Everyone's Pocket Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Conference Review: M-Libraries 2, A Virtual Library in Everyone's Pocket Buzz mobile wireless smartphone flash sms iphone html5 intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Martin White reviews the proceedings of a 2009 M-Libraries conference on mobile applications in libraries.
I have no doubt at all that smart phones are going to cause a revolution in information access.
People need location-free access to information, whether they are walking down a corridor in an office, working in a laboratory or sitting in a library.
If you doubt that forecast, then just look at the speed with which around 300,000 applications have been developed for the Apple iPhone, a substantial number of which are information-centric rather than entertainment-centric.
There is also a lot of interest in providing access to enterprise applications, notably intranets, from a smart phone.
For once, libraries have been in the vanguard of mobile technology, using SMS messages for book loan reminders and for other library administrative operations.
I was struck by the article in Ariadne Issue 64 on the Library of Birmingham [1] describing the strategy that has been developed to take advantage of mobile and wireless technologies.
When I saw this book on offer for review I immediately emailed the Editor for the immensely selfish reason that I was preparing both a presentation for the CILIP Digital Information Conference on mobile technologies [2] and also a paper for Business Information Review [3].
I needed all the research I could lay my hands on.
When Is a Book Not a Book?
My initial reaction on opening the book was how many contributors there seemed to be, and I was planning to start the review by congratulating the editors on getting them all lined up to write a chapter.
Then I reached the Acknowledgements and read 'Without the Second International M-Libraries Conference this book would not exist'.
The book is in fact the conference proceedings [4], though this is not mentioned on the front cover of the book.
To be fair the situation is made plain on the back cover.
So what am I reviewing?
In one respect I am reviewing a conference I did not attend, which since it was in Vancouver was a great pity.
But since the conference programme is not included I do not immediately know whether all the papers were included (most are), and if they are, did the authors rewrite their papers to take into account the discussion that no doubt took place following the presentation?
In another respect I am reviewing a book, as the presentations are reproduced in text, not in PowerPoint slides, and there is an index.
But some of the chapters/papers are very short, in one case just over two pages in length.
The bigger issue is that the collection of authors and balance of topics needed to attract delegates to a conference is not necessarily the same as would attract a reader to buy a book.
This is most obvious at the beginning, where there is no basic introduction to the technology and to the way in which the technology has been adopted and adapted by libraries around the world.
Some Gentle Juggling What you do get is set of 27 papers covering developments around the world, technology in m-libraries, applications of m-libraries, m-libraries and learning, and building the case for m-libraries.
One of the exciting aspects of mobile technology is the way in which a range of innovative services can be delivered to developing countries where land-line telephone services are very basic and have a limited geographic reach.
So it is entirely appropriate to start with this topic, but all the papers pre-suppose a reasonable degree of familiarity with the technology and its limitations.
The sequence of the papers in the conference proceedings is different to the conference programme, and overall I think that the editors have done a good job of providing a useful re-categorisation of the papers.
What does become clear is how quickly mobile applications have transformed the information functionality of smart phones.
Commercial services using these applications from STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishers and from the business information service providers are hardly given a mention; because in early 2009, when these papers were written, such services hardly existed.
Conclusion As a set of conference proceedings this volume has value, and certainly having the proceedings in print about a year after the conference itself (June 2009) is an achievement.
The papers are all from experienced practitioners and references at the end of each paper do provide a starting point to readers new to the topics covered by the authors/presenters.
However I think that there are two things missing.
One is a more prominent announcement on the cover that this is a set of conference proceedings.
The second is an introduction that does more than provide a summary of the papers, and sets the scene for readers new to the area when there are few books or reports on the subject.
Topics such as the battle between HTML5 and Flash, and WiMax and 4G/LTE are not mentioned at all in the papers and yet will have a major impact on service delivery.
A review of the proceedings of the First M-Libraries Conference has been published in Ariadne [5] as has a report on the Second Conference [6].
References Gambles, B., "Rewriting the Book: On the Move in the Library of Birmingham", July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/gambles/ CILIP Digital Information Conference 2010, 28 October 2010, Kings Place, London http://www.cilip.org.uk/digitalinfo2010/programme/pages/default.aspx White, M., "Information anywhere, any when – the role of the smartphone".
Business Information Review.
(In press) 2nd International M-Libraries Conference, Vancouver, Canada, 23-24 June 2009 http://m-libraries2009.ubc.ca/ Speight, S., "M-Libraries: Libraries on the move to provide virtual access," October 2009, Ariadne Issue 61 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/speight-rvw/ Mills, K., "The Second International M-Libraries Conference", July 2009, Ariadne Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/m-libraries-2009-rpt/ Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com/ Return to top Article Title: "M-Libraries 2" Author: Martin White Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/white-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Programming Collective Intelligence Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Programming Collective Intelligence Buzz data api blog python ruby ajax algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff tries to remember A-level mathematics as he dives into the fascinating world of machine learning and statistics and how to apply these techniques to Web-accessible datasets.
When I was handed this book for review a colleague of mine said "rather you than me" and there is no doubt that Programming Collective Intelligence is probably not a book for everyone.
However, if phrases like 'Bayesian filtering', 'Support-vector machines', 'Collaborative filtering' and 'Methods of clustering' do not deter you or better, engage your interest, then this work is well worth a look.
One of the pleasing things to notice when picking up the book is its relatively small size and Toby Segaran has managed to condense a series of complex techniques into just eleven chapters of concise and interesting writing.
The writing is packed full of information, without wasting any words; and sometimes this can be hard (but good) going.
The author suggests at the start that 'some knowledge of trigonometry and basic statistics' will be helpful in understanding the algorithms.
However, he does a good job of explaining the techniques and even if you do not fully understand what is going on (keep at it and you will!
), you are still left with some useful, working code to add to your applications.
As regards not fully understanding: the writing style, out of necessity, can leave the reader asking 'why?'
or 'how?'
when a complex mathematical idea is presented as a solution, leaving the rationale unexplained.
However, there is enough in the text to suggest further avenues of investigation and exploring the exercises at the end of each chapter can help.
Moreover, spending some time picking apart the Python code also repays the effort.
But there perhaps we broach an issue and a word of warning.
In many cases the explanation of the algorithm is tied closely to the Python code (available from the author's blog [1]), so lack of familiarity with Python might present a problem.
That said, if the reader is familiar with other programming languages and has a good grasp of programming principles then the code samples are understandable with a little work.
There are even efforts on the Web to port the code samples to other languages [2] and I would recommend this approach to anyone who really wants to understand the algorithms presented.
I have long been dismissive of Python, but through this book even my hard heart began to soften at the facility and usefulness of the language!
The chapters build steadily in complexity: Chapter 1 introduces 'Collective Intelligence' and then we are off on a functional tour of algorithms for achieving specific goals: Making Recommendations (Chapter 2) Discovering Groups (Chapter 3) Searching and Ranking (Chapter 4) Optimization (Chapter 5) Document Filtering (Chapter 6) Modelling with Decision Trees (Chapter 7) Building Price Models (Chapter 8) Kernel Methods and SVMs (Support Vector Machines)(Chapter 9) and it should be clear from this list that this book has significant relevance to our sector.
One of the nicest things about the way the chapters progress is that they start with the theory, perhaps working on a sample dataset, and then present the reader with a real-world example.
For example, 'Making Recommendations' (Chapter 2) demonstrates use of the del.icio.us API while Chapter 8 shows how to draw data from eBay.
The penultimate two chapters of the book change tack, with Chapter 10 examining ways of discovering features in a dataset (which then form the basis of classification) and Chapter 11 taking you into the fascinating (and astonishing) world of genetic programming.
The final chapter is very useful as it summarises the algorithms discussed in the rest of the book and is designed as the starting point for any new problem the reader might encounter to which these 'Collective Intelligence' techniques can be applied.
The book closes with two useful appendices, Appendix A summarising the Python libraries used throughout the book, including simple installation instructions and certainly enough to enable the reader to make use of the code samples in the book.
Appendix B is a useful summary of the mathematical formulas used in the book but if strange mathematical symbols scare you, may best be avoided.
Programming Collective Intelligence not only delivers, but manages to deal with a dense subject in an interesting way, providing a successful mix of theory and practical application thanks to the consistent use of real-world examples.
In short, if its subject lies within your field of interest, this work is an excellent addition to your professional bookshelf and may even convince you (as it did me) to take another look at Python!
References kiwitobes blog: "Programming Collective Intelligence" code now available, 29 October 2007 http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=44 Programming Collective Intelligence RailsOnWave Ruby on Rails web 2.0 Ajax, 15 January 2008 http://www.railsonwave.com/railsonwave/2008/1/15/programming-collective-intelligence Author Details Peter Cliff Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.d.cliff/ Return to top Article Title: "Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications " Author: Peter Cliff Publication Date: 30-January-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 54 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/cliff-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Pro Web 2.0 Mashups Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Pro Web 2.0 Mashups Buzz data api javascript rss xml atom tagging openoffice blog flickr python syndication soap php microformats ajax json mashup url research Citation BibTex RIS Ralph LeVan looks at a comprehensive work on how to consume and repurpose Web services.
Raymond Yee has produced a comprehensive book on how to consume and repurpose Web services, even for Web sites that do not intentionally expose Web services.
The book is broken into four sections; understanding how to use Web content, understanding Web services, combining the data from multiple services (mashups) and detailed examples of specific mashup opportunities.
Web Services are a complicated topic and this book does an excellent job of describing how to use them.
However, their complexity is reflected in the complexity and volume of the text.
The table of contents and introduction to Pro Web 2.0 Mashups are available online [1].
It includes an excellent chapter-by-chapter summary of the book.
The code developed in the work is also available online [2].
The book is full of details about how to access specific Web services and provides URLs as examples of services and examples of uses of those services.
Unfortunately, those URLs cannot be tried out in a book and are, for the most part, impossible to retype by hand.
The electronic version of the book is available for an additional $10 fee.
This book is not an easy read.
The initial section is suitable for intermediate developers and would-be developers.
The subsequent sections are quite advanced; if you didn’t understand the first section, you don’t need to attempt the later ones.
The examples in the book use JavaScript, PHP and Python.
They are readable without a deep familiarity with those languages, but the reader must be comfortable with Web programming for them to make much sense.
Part 1: Remixing Information Without Programming This section introduces the topic of mashups and the fundamental tools of the mashup: Web services, feeds and tagging.
Chapter 1 examines Housingmaps.com, Google Maps and the LibraryLookup bookmarklet as examples of mashups.
Chapter 2 demonstrates how to control the behaviour of a Web site through a careful understanding of the site’s URLs.
Chapter 3 discusses tagging and Folksonomies as simple access mechanisms to a site’s content.
Chapter 4 describes the various types of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds as simple sources of easily consumed data.
Chapter 5 uses the moving of content into and out of blogs as an example of integration through APIs.
Part 2: Remixing a Single Web Application Using Its API This section introduces APIs as a more formal method for consuming Web services; as opposed to the informal examination of URLs and URL hacking that was used in the first section.
Chapter 6 focuses on the Flickr REST API.and the use of PHP to generate requests and process the XML responses.
Chapter 7 moves on to look at XML-RPC and SOAP and REST-ful APIs in general.
Of particular interest is the description of the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) which was designed for maintaining blogs but is finding use in a number of applications.
Chapter 8 examines JavaScript, the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX).
Part 3: Making Mashups This section uses the skills developed in the previous sections to combine information from multiple Web services into a mashup.
Chapter 9 introduces ProgrammableWeb as a source of information about Web service APIs and mashups.
It uses ProgrammableWeb to investigate mashups in several topic areas.
Chapter 10 describes the creation of a specific mashup of Flickr and Google Maps.
Chapter 11 introduces some tools, the Google Mashup Editor (GME) and Yahoo!
Pipes, to simplify the creation of the mashup.
Chapter 12 uses the experience of consuming Web content to inform the process of exposing Web content for consumption.
Part 4: Exploring Other Mashup Topics This section looks at more complex mashup opportunities.
Chapter 13 looks at a number of mapping APIs, while Chapter 14 looks at bookmarking.
Chapter 15 covers calendaring systems and Chapter 16 considers online storage systems.
Chapter 17 looks at OpenOffice and Microsoft Office as sources of XML content through APIs.
Chapter 18 covers microformats for embedding data in Web pages.
Finally, Chapter 19 examines search APIs.
Conclusion I can’t imagine a more comprehensive book on mashups.
This book would make a great textbook for a class on the topic.
If you are a developer of mashups, this book must be in your reference library.
However, if you’re looking for a gentle introduction to the topic, it may be more than you want.
References Raymond Yee, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups Remixing Data and Web Services, 2008 (.pdf format) http://apress.com/resource/bookfile/3917 Associated code (in zipped file) http://apress.com/resource/bookfile/3901 Author Details Ralph LeVan Senior Research Scientist OCLC Email: levan@oclc.org Return to top Article Title: “Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services” Author: Ralph LeVan Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/levan-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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#ukmedlibs.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines #ukmedlibs.
Citation BibTex RIS Tom Roper, Sam Burgess and Holly Case discuss the formation, use, benefits and limitations of Twitter chat sessions for forming and maintaining professional networks.
They focus on the #ukmedlibs chat aimed at UK (and European) health library professionals, which has been running since May 2015.
Introduction Twitter chats offer a new way to undertake professional development and networking online.
A Twitter chat takes place at a pre-arranged time, uses a hashtag to organise and aggregate tweets, and usually tackles an agenda of numbered questions.
Increasingly popular, a number of opportunities for clinicians to chats via Twitter now exist, for example, in the UK, those held under the #wecommunities[i] banner.
Library-related chats in Britain include #chartership[ii] chat for candidates for CILIP chartership, #radlibchat[iii] from the Radical Librarians collective and #uklibchat[iv], whose chats take place under the strapline Instant Ideas and Collaboration.
However, until recently, there was no British chat for library and information professionals working in the health sector.
The authors’ first encounter with Twitter chats was through the North American #medlibs[v] chat.
Established in 2012, this chat takes place weekly.
However chats take place on Thursdays at 18:00 PST/21:00pm EST, which is 2:00 GMT.
The potential for participation by British and other European contributors is therefore limited largely to browsing the archives of chats.
With this in mind, and after helpful advice from Nikki Detmar[vi], convenor of the #medlibs chats, the first author (TR) sent a message to the JISCMAIL lis-medical list on 6 February 2015 asking if there would be interest in a British chat; the idea was also mentioned, naturally, on Twitter.
Replies were positive, and the other authors, HC and SB volunteered to help organise the first and subsequent chats, which took place in May 2015.
To establish a routine, we agreed that chats would always take place on the third Tuesday of the month, at 8 pm.
We negotiated this arrangement with the other British-based library and information chats we could identify, as we had no wish to disrupt existing arrangements, although clashes cannot always be avoided.
It has proved challenging to find a time that maximises participation, but we felt that few would find time in the working day to dedicate an hour to Twitter.
At each chat one of the team, or a guest, acts as facilitator and steers the discussion.
Questions are set in advance and given a number.
Participants are then encouraged to use the question number, to make it clear which question their contribution relates to.
Participants also use the #ukmedlibs hashtag, thus ensuring that contributions are visible to others, can be aggregated by Twitter clients and then appear in the transcript.
At the beginning, each participant is encouraged to tweet a short personal introduction.
The topic for each chat is determined in advance by the #ukmedlibs team, and announced on Twitter, e-mail lists, print newsletters and on the #ukmedlibs blog[vii].
Topics so far have been: The Health Education England Library and Knowledge Service Development Framework.
The future of healthcare libraries Twitter journal club: a journal club conducted around Rethlefsen[viii] Health and public libraries partnerships Conferences Librarians as teachers A Twitter focus group on clinical and executive champions as advocates for library and knowledge services Festive frivolity: an exchange of bizarre articles from the biomedical literature in the style of Improbable Research[ix].
The first chat of 2016 (19 January) will be online critical appraisal training.
The Critical Appraisal Skills Project (CASP) has organised two Twitter critical appraisal sessions using the hashtag #WeCATS[x] — one of the present authors (TR) helped facilitate their first chat.
While #WeCATS chats are aimed at a nursing audience, we believe our chat will be the first time information professionals have conducted critical appraisal online, practicing the skills of critical appraisal online in a friendly atmosphere, with skilled facilitators.
We encourage participants and potential participants to put forward topics for future chats, and proposers can, if they wish, lead or facilitate the chat.
We knew that archiving would be essential to ensure that transcripts of chats were accessible after the event, and settled on Symplur, who as well as collecting and holding chat archives offer analytics services.
Transcripts are automatically collated and made available the day after the chat.
What have we learnt?
Managing Twitter chats can be challenging.
Participants and facilitators do not have the visual cues available that allow us to run face to face discussions.
Everyone talks at once.
This makes for interesting conversations and side-conversations, but may make it difficult to discern the general direction of the chat.
The format of chat transcripts necessarily means that they are not easy to read.
It may be that some of the techniques used in qualitative and mixed methods research may be useful in making them more accessible and intelligible, as might the use of curation tools such as Storify.
We decided initially to hold chats on a monthly basis.
The #medlibs chats take place weekly, and we were strongly advised that we should follow suit, but we worried about the sustainability of the workload of a weekly chat.
Our North American colleagues have greater numbers to draw on, both for chat leaders and participants.
We have been helped considerably by support from senior leaders in health library and information work.
Louise Goswami, National Programme Manager and Sue Lacey Bryant, Senior Advisor of Health Education England’s Knowledge for Healthcare programme, Imrana Ghumra, HE East of England LKS lead, and members of CILIP’s Health Libraries Group committee have all participated and promoted the chats.
Twitter may offer greater flexibility than some of the more formal structures for online education.
Both virtual learning environments and MOOCs lack the openness and ease of use of Twitter.
One professional association’s VLE was pithily and accurately described in another chat as having ‘the interface of a choose your own adventure’[xi] from the point of view of navigation.
We sense that library and information professionals are looking for easier and more flexible ways to learn and to share professional experience and exchange views with colleagues.
As CILIP continues to promote revalidation to its members, it should be noted that participation in chats can count towards revalidation.
Indeed, participation in every chat of the year would provide at least 12 hours of the 20 hours required by CILIP.
Our medium of discussion is English and the UK element of #ukmedlibs may be off-putting to would-be participants in continental Europe.
We are keen to encourage wider participation, and it may be that, when we present at EAHIL’s conference in Seville in June, others will be inspired to take part, or to start their own.
We have used guidance from #uklibchat on how to participate effectively in a chat.
Reviewing our experience, we feel that the key points are: Participants should ideally do more than lurk, should ask questions and offer thoughts, controversial or otherwise Use the hashtag and question number Stay on topic, though with the caveat that sometimes the best conversations have been peripheral to the topic  From the organisers’ perspective, we have learnt the perhaps obvious lesson that detailed planning, interesting topics and widespread publicity are key to successful chats.
Symplur’s analytics[xii] show that, as at 11 January, we had 1,193,365 impressions, 1,741 tweets and 204 participants.
Symplur also analyses the ’influencers’ of each chat, by mentions, tweets and impressions.
A paper to be presented at the 2016 EAHIL conference in Seville will assess the impact of the chats.
We acknowledge the generous help and support of Nikki Detmar and her #medlibs colleagues, of those who run other British library-related Twitter chats and, above all, those who have led and participated in our chats, in helping us get #ukmedlibs off the ground.
References   [i] We communities (2012) Available at: http://www.wecommunities.org/ (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
[ii] Chartership chat (2012) Available at: http://cilipquals.pbworks.com/w/page/52708592/Chartership%20Chat (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
[iii] Radical library chat (2015) Available at: https://rlc.radicallibrarianship.org/radical-library-chat/ (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
[iv] #uklibchat (2011) Available at: https://uklibchat.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
[v] #medlibs chat: about (2012) Available at: http://medlibschat.blogspot.co.uk/p/about.html (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
[vi] Dettmar, N. (2015) ‘Social Media: How to Hashtag Chat: Twitter Tips from #medlibs’, MLA News.
[vii] Roper, T. (2015) Ukmedlibs.
Available at: https://ukmedlibs.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
[viii] Rethlefsen, M. L., Farrell, A. M., Osterhaus Trzasko, L. C. and Brigham, T. J.
(2015) ‘Librarian co-authors correlated with higher quality reported search strategies in general internal medicine systematic reviews’, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 68(6), pp.
617–626.
doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2014.11.025   [ix] Improbable research (no date) Available at: http://www.improbable.com/ (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
[x] #WeCATS Tweet chat Hashtag (2015) Available at: http://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/wecats/ (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
[xi] @deadlylibrarian (2016) 5 January.
[xii] #ukmedlibs Tweet chat Hashtag (2016) Available at: http://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/ukmedlibs/ (Accessed: 11 January 2016).
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data mobile software database dissemination portal usability archives metadata doi standardisation repositories preservation cataloguing visualisation ejournal ebook curation itunes twitter ipad privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Engagement, Impact, Value Workshop University of Manchester Monday 24 May 2010 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/engagement-impact-value-201005/ UKOLN and Mimas will be jointly running a workshop entitled Engagement, Impact, Value which will be held at the University of Manchester on Monday 24 May.
The event will provide an opportunity to share and discuss ways in which service providers can engage with their user communities in order to enhance the impact of their work and maximise the value.
The event is designed primarily for practitioners involved in JISC-funded work.
The event will be of interest to colleagues with responsibility for demonstrating impact, promoting take-up of services, obtaining feedback from users and responding to such feedback.
For further information Further details, together with access to the online booking form is available from the UKOLN Web site.
Back to headlines CNI Conversations Web Thursday 27 May 2010 http://conversations.cni.org/ The next session of CNI Conversations will take place on Thursday 27 May 2010, 1-2pm EST and is open to individuals at member institutions.
If you are interested in participating in CNI Conversations, please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org CNI Conversations was last held on April 15; the archived audio recording of that discussion is now available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher).
The April session included a recap of the CNI Spring 2010 Membership Meeting by CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch and Associate Director Joan Lippincott.
Cliff also discussed the recent announcement by the Library of Congress to archive the Twitter database, an event on sustainable digital preservation held in Washington, DC on April 1st, and the e-journals summits convened by the National Academies, among other topics.
Questions included the state of e-books with the advent of the iPad.
For further information contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org Back to headlines First DataCite Open Meeting Hannover, Germany 7-8 June 2010 http://www.datacite.org/ DataCite, the international consortium for the citation of research data, is holding its first open meeting 7-8 June 2010 in Hannover, Germany.
Conference topics include metadata, peer-review, trustworthiness, best practice, and visualisation of data.
DataCite, a federation currently of 12 major library or data members from nine countries, was founded in December 2009 to facilitate access to research data sets over the Internet as citable objects, using the DOI System.
The scope of this meeting is to allow data centres from all over the world to exchange experience and workflows concerning the handling of research data.
The following subjects will be covered by international experts: Metadata for datasets – More than pure citation information?
Peer-review systems and the publication of data sets – Ensuring Quality Best practice and examples – What can be done and is done worldwide?
Trustworthiness of data centers – A technological, a structural and a legal discussion Visualisation of datasets – More than meets the eye Datasets and scholarly journals – A perfect combination?
Programme: http://www.tib-hannover.de/fileadmin/datacite-summer-programme.html Back to headlines The LIS Research Coalition Conference 2010 British Library Conference Centre, London Monday 28 June 2010: 10:30-16:15 http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/ The broad conference programme considers perspectives of the LIS research landscape.
It will tackle issues relating to identifying LIS research opportunities; translating research outcomes into practice; growing research capacity amongst LIS professionals; and developing the future UK LIS research agenda.
The programme will appeal to all LIS research stakeholders from funders of LIS-related research activity through to those who publish LIS research output, as well as practitioner researchers and academics.
With first-hand access to expert speakers and peers on the day, delegates will develop their knowledge of the LIS research landscape, including the work of the LIS Research Coalition, while also increasing their awareness of: The diversity of LIS research opportunities Research funding sources Potential research collaborators Means of increasing the relevance of their research efforts Avenues for publication of their research output Research development opportunities for individuals and groups Techniques for integrating research activities into everyday work practice The opening keynote speaker, Professor Andrew Dillon of the University of Texas an LIS researcher of international repute will speak on international perspectives of UK LIS research.
The closing keynote speaker, Loughborough University's Professor Charles Oppenheim also an LIS researcher of international standing (and well-known to readers of Ariadne reviews) will discuss how an examination of the evidence, value and impact of current LIS research can inform the future LIS research agenda.
Afternoon break-out sessions will be led by a number of experts with research experience in public, academic, special and corporate libraries; the health service; business; publishing; consulting; training; charities and Higher Education.
Further information: The conference venue is the British Library's state of the art Conference Centre http://www.bl.uk/conferencecentre/conference.html Located in central London, the British Library Conference Centre is within easy walking distance of three mainline railway stations St Pancras (Eurostar terminal), Euston and King's Cross and six Underground rail lines, and is thus at the heart of the UK and European transportation network.
The conference fee is £100 inclusive of VAT (£85.10 + £14.90 VAT).
Back to headlines Tipping the scales: tackling information obesity to ensure productive and sustainable information resources A joint UKeiG/BDA Knowledge Management meeting British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street , London W1G 8YS Tuesday 29 June 2010, 9.30 16.30 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/trainingevent/tipping-scales-tackling-information-obesity-ensure-productive-and-sustainable-informat Course Outline "Information obesity" describes a condition whereby available information resources are not being used in a productive and sustainable way by individuals or communities.
Like physical obesity, it is not just the result of consuming too much, but is linked to declines in the information's quality, and individuals' and communities' awareness of problems which arise through over-consumption.
Fitness and (mental) exercise also come into play.
The consequences of information obesity may be severe if left unchecked; it will lead to a decline in our ability to manage knowledge, both in our communities and our workplaces.
As a teaching strategy, information literacy (IL) can partly help to combat the condition.
However, as traditionally defined, IL does not address the ways in which the structure of organisations and our own innate cognitive biases prevent us acting as independent and self-aware evaluators of the information we find.
This course will help participants understand these biases and how, through work at the community level, they may be overcome, in order that we start using information to sustain ourselves and our communities, and not just consume it unthinkingly.
This one-day course will include time for plenty of discussion and practical activity.
Participants will be encouraged to share their experiences with others and also to build a network of practice after the event.
Sessions will include: Identifying information obesity: structural, individual and community-level explanations How information literacy helps: and how it is limited Cognitive biases, and why they matter How organisations affect the way we think The holistic approach to IL: subjective, objective and inter-subjective value Problem-based learning; studentand community-led research projects Who should attend?
Anyone working with information in formal, non-formal or informal education, who has an interest in enhancing their teaching of information studies and/or knowledge management, to students or to colleagues as part of their professional development work.
This includes: information professionals; teachers/lecturers at any level of education; managers (particularly, but not only, those with responsibilities for information and knowledge management and dissemination); other stakeholders in education.
Course Presenter Dr Andrew Whitworth is the Programme Director for the MA: Digital Technologies, Communication and Education at the University of Manchester.
He has published widely in the field of information literacy including the 2009 book with Chandos, "Information Obesity".
His "Media and Information Literacy" course at Manchester was recognised by the LLIDA (Learning Literacies for a Digital Age) project as an exemplar of learning literacies education.
To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk or visit the UKeiG website at http://www.ukeig.org.uk Back to headlines Bookings Now Open for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010 IMWMW 2010: The Web In Turbulent Times University of Sheffield 12 14 July 2010 http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/ Bookings are now open for Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010 to be held from Monday 12 to Wednesday 14 July 2010 at the University of Sheffield.
The cost is £350 for the 3-day event.
The price includes two nights ensuite accommodation, all food and materials included.
You will need to choose your parallel sessions from the workshop programme and the session abstracts when booking.
The IWMW event provides an opportunity for those involved in the provision of institutional Web services to hear about institutional case studies, national initiatives and emerging technologies and to actively participate in a number of parallel sessions.
The Institutional Web Management Workshop series is organised by UKOLN in order to support members of institutional Web management teams within the UK Higher and Further Education communities and related organisations.
Back to headlines Ticer's International Summer School "Digital Libraries à la Carte" Tilburg University, the Netherlands 26 – 30 July 2010 http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/2010/ From 26 – 30 July 2010, Ticer's international summer school "Digital Libraries à la Carte" will be held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
You can take your choice from a completely renewed 'menu' of five one-day modules.
Module 1: Strategic Developments and Library Management Module 2: The Library in the Scholar's Workflow and Research Data Module 3: Libraries Partners in Teaching and Learning Module 4: Mobile Technologies in Education and Library Module 5: Web 2.0 and Linked Data in Libraries Learn about: Supporting your institution's strategic goals Your library's return on investment The role of libraries in research assessment Digital scholarship Data management and re-use The scholar's workflow Research support services Web lectures 21st Century literacies Physical learning spaces The use of mobile devices by teens and young adults Mobile technology in teaching and learning Mobile enhanced library services eReaders in education and libraries Web 2.0 User-centred design of next-generation library services Linked data Open annotation The course is designed for library managers/directors, deputy librarians, library middle management, digital library project managers, IT/systems librarians, IT specialists, information specialists, research librarians, teaching and learning support staff, and publishers and researchers.
High-profile speakers will present their views.
Below is just a small selection: Paula T. Kaufman, Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, measures the return on investment of her academic libraries.
Carole Goble, professor at the University of Manchester, is director of the MyGrid project and knows how to get in the scholar's workflow.
Tony Hey is Corporate Vice President of External Research at Microsoft Research and an expert on data-intensive science.
Andrew Treloar is Director of Technology at the Australian National Data Service and can tell us how to get started with research data services.
Kristen Purcell, Associate Director, Research at Pew Internet & American Life Project shares research results on the use of mobile technology by teens and young adults.
As E-Adviser Teaching & Learning at JISC, Adam Blackwood explains how to enrich the student's learning experience with mobile technology.
Tito Sierra, Associate Head for Digital Library Development, NCSU Libraries, successfully concluded several mobile library projects.
Anne Christensen, responsible for the beluga system at the State and University Library Hamburg shares her expertise on usability.
This course is recommended by LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries), SURFfoundation, JISC, DEFF (Denmark's Electronic Research Library), CBU/KUB (the conference of university libraries in Switzerland), Helsinki University Library, and NFF (Norwegian Association of Special Libraries).
Further information: Further details are available from http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/2010/ The course brochure is available on our Web site at http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/ticer/2010/Ticerbrochure2010.pdf Or contact: Ms Jola Prinsen, Manager Ticer Tilburg University, Library and IT Services P.O.
Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands Tel.
+31 13 466 8310, fax +31 13 466 8383 jola.prinsen@uvt.nl http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/ticer/2010/ Back to headlines CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Conference University of Exeter 13 15 September 2010 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/CIG/2010/conf-exeter/ Every cloud has a silver lining?
Changes in cataloguing in 'interesting times'.
What are cataloguers doing to get through these days of recession and financial stringency?
Some of us are under clouds and some of us are computing in them.
The 2010 Cataloguing and Indexing Group conference will look at the pressures facing the cataloguing community and how people are working through them.
Some current developments may have come out of difficult circumstances but may signal the way of the future.
e.g.
Management initiatives (reducing cost, increasing efficiency, doing more with less, etc); cataloguing developments and changes automated metadata extraction, harvesting, re-purposing and re-use); technical developments (shared services, cloud solutions, vertical search, etc); new standards and protocols (not just RDA!
); standardisation.
Learning Aims and Objectives Aim: to refresh professional knowledge Objectives: enabling Delegates to update knowledge, share innovative solutions and best practices and develop professional networks For further information: Programme : http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/CIG/2010/conf-exeter/programme/ Back to headlines 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2010) 19 24 September 2010 Vienna, Austria http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010 The Austrian National Library and the Vienna University of Technology are pleased to host the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES2010) in Vienna in September 2010. iPRES2010 will be the seventh in the series of annual international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our digital heritage.
Digital Preservation and Curation is evolving from a niche activity to an established practice and research field that involves various disciplines and communities.
iPRES2010 will re-emphasise that preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage requires integration of activities and research across institutional and disciplinary boundaries to adequately address the challenges in digital preservation.
iPRES2010 will further strengthen the link between digital preservation research and practitioners in memory institutions and scientific data centres.
iPRES 2010 is jointly organised by: the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology the Austrian National Library (ONB) and the Austrian Computer Society (OCG).
For further information: Contact: ipres2010@ifs.tuwien.ac.at Back to headlines   Pew Report on the Fate of the Semantic Web Clifford Lynch, Director, CNI advises that the Pew Internet and American Life Project has recently issued a report that 'compiles a substantial number of well-informed views on this issue'.
The report, and ancillary materials, can be found at:http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Semantic-Web.aspx [Source: CNI] [Received: May 2010] Back to headlines Train Online!
New Planets Training Materials Available The final Digital Preservation – The Planets Way event took place in Rome in April.
Over 200 people have attended the series of five events since May 2009.
To complement the face-to-face training and introduce Planets to people who were unable to attend, a set of online training materials is now available to download from the Planets Web site.
The basic set of resources takes around five hours to complete and comprises: Seven narrated presentations provide an introduction to digital preservation, the risk management case for devising a preservation strategy and Planets tools and services.A set of technical summaries produced by Planets industry partner, IBM, providing an overview of Planets tools and services for technical support and developer staff plus an annotated initial and further reading list on the principles of digital preservation and how Planets helps to tackle preservation challenges.
To start the training, please visit: http://www.planets-project.eu/training-materials Thanks are due to the speakers and Raymond van Diessen of IBM who have contributed so much to the development of these resources.
Further information: To comment or ask a question, please e-mail us at: info@planets-project.eu Please also forward this onto colleagues who may be interested.
[Source: Planets Project] [Received: May 2010] Back to headlines CILIP Launches Guidelines on User Privacy CILIP has launched its guidelines User Privacy in Libraries.
The guidelines have been developed to help staff working in library and information services tackle complex confidentiality and privacy issues.
Such issues include data sharing, the Internet, children, CCTV and what rights police and other security agencies have to demand access to the personal information of users.
The guidelines were developed following concern that the number of interventions by police and security services seeking confidential information about library users was increasing.
CILIP ran a surveillance survey, which indicated this was not the case, but it did reveal a number of places lacking a policy covering this area and a need for advice and guidance.
Margaret Watson, who led the work on privacy and is chair of CILIP's Ethics Panel, commented on the guidelines, 'Most institutions will have policies relating to the confidentiality of personal information but that doesn't absolve the practitioner from individual responsibility.
Under CILIP's Ethical Principles each practitioner has to show "Respect for confidentiality and privacy in dealing with information users".
The guidelines will help them in this and, where there are worries about existing practice members must raise the issue in an appropriate manner'.
[Source: CILIP] [Received: March 2010] Back to headlines A Roma Journey: Europeana Supports New Web Exhibition from The European Library Europeana invites the public to uncover the Roma's rich cultural heritage through a ground breaking multilingual online exhibition http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition/roma_journey/eng/index.html The display is organised by The European Library which is channelling digitised content from Europe's national and research libraries into Europeana.
Visitors to A Roma Journey can view a unique collection of full-text books, rare manuscripts, photographs, paintings, sound recordings and videos from the world of the Roma.
Rarities on offer include the first ever dictionary written in Romani-Serbian-German in a concentration camp, traditional songs and tales, postcards and letters exploring the experiences of one Roma family in Scandinavia.
In addition to highlighting Roma culture, A Roma Journey provides a glimpse of the type of virtual exhibitions that will be available on Europeana in the future.
Europeana is working with The European Library to develop virtual exhibitions, including some with curatorial interpretation, for the Europeana.eu portal http://europeana.eu/ [Source: Europeana] [Received: March 2010] Back to headlines Scientists Seeking NSF Funding Will Soon Be Required to Submit Data Management Plans NSF has issued a press release addressing the discussions at last week's National Science Board meeting regarding upcoming requirements for data management plans.
See http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116928&org=NSF&from=news [Source: CNI] [Received: May 2010] Back to headlines French Records Further Enrich WorldCat as Global Resource There are now more than 16.3 million French records in WorldCat, following completion of batchloading projects from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Système Universitaire de documentation (Sudoc) and the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (BM Lyon).
In 2009, the BnF and ABES, the agency that manages the Sudoc database for French universities, signed an agreement with OCLC to load their records and holdings information into WorldCat.
OCLC then processed more than 8.8 million records for BnF and over 7.9 million records for ABES.
The Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, the second largest public library in France, contributed more than 1.3 million records to WorldCat.
With these projects complete, there are now more than 16.3 million French-language records in WorldCat.
Just as the total number of WorldCat records has grown substantially in recent years to 175 million, the percentage of French-language records has also increased from 6.2 percent in 2007 to 9.6 percent in 2010.
"By agreeing to join WorldCat through Sudoc, French academic libraries show that national choices are compatible with an international strategy," said Raymond Bérard, Director of ABES.
"We gain visibility through WorldCat while working on a national cataloguing platform based on CBS (metadata management system).
ABES is confident that working more closely with other libraries inside the OCLC cooperative will benefit the French library community as well as other libraries in Europe and beyond."
In addition to the more academically focused content of the Sudoc libraries, the BnF and BM Lyon have contributed an extensive quantity of French content to WorldCat of a more diverse, general, cultural and historical nature.
As keeper of five centuries of cultural heritage, the Bibliothèque nationale de France collects, catalogues, preserves and enriches this national heritage via legal deposit and acquisitions.
The Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon offers extensive collections for wide audiences.
A dynamic public library, it was founded by the City of Lyon in the 16th century as the library of its renowned Collège de la Trinité and became widely open to the public in 1765, 24 years before the French Revolution, when it was transformed into a repository for all local collections.
It therefore encompasses 15 centuries of knowledge starting with the Merovingian times.
Its printed heritage is worthy of the city's role as a major centre of printing in the Renaissance.
"We think that it is a major asset for our public library to be visible in WorldCat," said Patrick Bazin, Library Director at the BM Lyon.
"Not just for the more common types of materials, but especially because more than half of our 3 million documents are rare materials, either books or visual and special collections."
Further information: OCLC http://www.oclc.org/ WorldCat http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/ [Source: OCLC] [Received: April 2010] Back to headlines   Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working Buzz data mobile wiki rss infrastructure blog video e-learning e-business research standards Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy examines both the benefits and the pitfalls of working remotely from the standpoint of both employees and their organisation.
Introduction: A New Way of Working In the 21st Century work has changed.
Remote working or teleworking [1] is an employment arrangement in which employees can complete their work from a location other than their office base, be it their home, a sub-office or even the local coffee shop.
As Woody Leonhard puts it in the Underground Guide to Telecommuting, “Work is becoming something you do, not a place you go to.” [2] Modern employment law now offers more flexibility of working hours.
From April 2003, all employees with children under 6 years old, or children under 18 with disabilities, have a legal right to ask to work flexibly.
In April 2007 this legislation was extended to employees with responsibility for caring for spouses and partners; while in November 2007 the Prime Minister announced plans to extend these provisions to those parents with older children.
Further details are available from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform [3].
Remote working is not a new concept but various factors including technological advancements, the change in legislation mentioned above and the needs and wants of organisations and their employees have prompted a growth in more flexible ways of working.
A Scottish Enterprise document [4] on remote working claims that 80% of UK workers are now ‘information workers’ i.e.
people who work with data and use a networked PC and telephone as their main tools.
Information workers need no longer be tied to a traditional office nor traditional working hours [5].
Remote-working solutions once implemented by an organisation can support a broad range of operations, such as employees largely operating on-site but moving about, or even workers using a different set-up from the standard one; not just employees working from home.
Such solutions have the potential to change significantly the way people work, and for the better; but there is a need for explicit guidance and planned support for those colleagues involved.
This article will explore the reasons why people choose to work from home and some of the difficulties that face them and their host organisations.
It will then offer possible solutions to these challenges.
If the Cap Fits So who exactly can work from home or remotely?
Obviously not all jobs are suited to remote working: some tasks lend themselves better than others, requiring long periods of uninterrupted work and use of just a PC; while others necessitate staff being on-site and available during working hours.
It may be possible to come to an arrangement whereby some workers may be able to spend part of their week working from home and part in the office.
Although many organisations will have flexible working policies in place, currently it is largely up to the employee to make a convincing case.
However some organisations in the public sector are actively promoting remote working and have introduced dedicated teleworking technologies.
For example, the Natural History Museum, which is situated at multiple sites, felt that remote working was a priority for staff and took this into account when implementing a new IP communications network [6].
The percentage of staff working remotely within an organisation depends very much on organisational policy and to some degree the attitude of management towards such a setup.
Legally, remote working can be relatively straightforward to arrange.
The process usually requires a formal application to change one’s working status under the terms of an organisation’s Flexible Working Policy.
Contracts can then be changed and the employees’ remote-working environment established.
Such a policy usually offers the ‘right to request’ but does not mean that an employer is bound to consent to the request.
Benefits to Organisation and Employee Remote working offers flexibility and cost benefit to both the worker and the organisation.
Some of the key advantages are: Work-Life Balance People have busier and more complicated lives than ever before, and remote working offers a way for people to achieve a better work-life balance.
Not having to travel from home means that parents and carers have fewer childcare worries and can spend more time together as a family.
The UK is one of the least regulated labour markets in the industrialised world having opted out of the European Union’s working time directive, a legislative act which imposes a 48-hour maximum working week on all member states.
Workers in the UK work some of the longest hours in Europe.
Achieving a balance between work commitments and family life has never been more difficult.
Initiatives like Changing Times [7], under the aegis of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the national trade union umbrella organisation in the UK, and Work Wise [8], established by the IT Forum Foundation, offer employers and unions practical guidance to achieving a better work-life balance in the workplace.
The 2007 Work Wise Week was a series of events demonstrating flexible working practices and culminated in a ‘work from home day’.
Productivity “The brain is a wonderful organ.
It starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get into the office.” Robert Frost It is repeatedly reported that remote workers have a higher productivity [9].
This may be for a number of different reasons.
On the whole remote workers tend to be less stressed.
Many avoid the daily commute to work (often cited by workers as the most stressful part of the day) and, as mentioned earlier, many achieve a better work-life balance.
Having happier staff is in an organisation’s interests since it strengthens staff loyalty; the resultant drop in staff turnover reduces interruptions to projects and lateness of deliverables, not to mention the time and money lost to recruitment.
It is also true that there are actually fewer distractions at home than at work, aiding concentration.
Those who work alone from home are likely to be in a quieter environment with no colleagues around to chat with, no company coffee breaks and no ‘unnecessary’ meetings.
That is, unless they have young children; in which case, reliable, consistent childcare arrangements are indispensable.
It might also be the case that those who are sanctioned to work remotely by management are only the employees with an appropriate skill set such as punctuality and good time management and organisational skills.
Moreover, because remote workers are not actually physically in the workplace, and therefore ‘seen to be at work’, they often feel the need to prove that they are effective workers by their outputs.
This may in time lead to an acute enthusiasm when replying to emails, answering the phone etc.
that results in less breathers and shorter lunch breaks.
How others perceive remote workers is discussed further in the section on challenges; but some might argue that remote workers are the hardest taskmasters.
In terms of staffing strategy in particular, remote working represents a major bonus to employers.
Organisations can benefit as a whole by dint of who else can be employed thanks to the option of remote working.
Using remote workers gives organisations access to skilled workers whom they might not so easily employ, people with mobility problems and staff who live out of commuting range and would be reluctant or unable to relocate.
Equally, it might also allow the retention of skilled and experienced staff whose circumstances change and who may otherwise have had to resign.
The saving in recruitment and training costs alone could be substantial, especially in niche industries.
Flexibility Remote working allows more flexibility.
Work can fit around individuals’ timetables and irregular hours are more easily worked where one’s workspace is not limited to the traditional 9-5 office.
For example, a remote worker might find it easier to finish a piece of work that needs to be completed by a deadline.
Organisations have also found that it cuts down on absenteeism [10].
Flexibility also applies to the ability to be in different places yet ‘seem’ as if you are in the office.
The Natural History Museum remote system mentioned earlier allows staff ‘to move locations quickly and without disruption, increasing their availability and enabling them to work from any of the museum’s multiple sites, at home or while they are travelling.’ [11] Hot-desking or using one desk shared between several people [12], is becoming an increasingly adopted solution in working space issues.
Environmental Concerns It is increasingly clear that current commuting trends are unsustainable and any traffic reduction is sure to be beneficial to the environment through lower CO2 emissions.
Government environmental targets have also encouraged public sector organisations to consider implementing remote access systems, thereby allowing staff to work more flexibly.
As a result local authorities or other public sector bodies are more likely to meet their own targets.
In June 2007 the Transport Studies Unit, part of the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, carried out a study on The Costs of Transport on the Environment – The Role of Teleworking in Reducing Carbon Emissions.
The study concluded that “The importance of teleworking to reduce energy use in transport for both the workand business-related journeys is becoming more important.” [13] Other possible environmental improvements, such as saving energy, reducing paper use and better waste disposal, are discussed in the recent Ariadne article Saving Energy in the Workplace [14] and can be applied to some extent to home working.
Reduction of Overhead Costs Many employers are finding it more and more appealing to have remote workers as they significantly reduce overheads.
An organisation can save on space, heating and electricity costs.
Some organisations, for example, universities, have a growing number of people on-site: departments within want to expand but do not have the space; they can substantially benefit from people working off-site.
Savings in this area can be channelled into improvements to other facilities.
There are also now instances of people ‘co-working’, remote workers who get together and share office space.
Challenges to Organisation and Employee Naturally any different way of working brings with it some challenges.
Loss of Face-to-face Contact “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” Henry Ford Remote workers often suffer feelings of isolation.
Some feel that they miss out on informal organisational discussion and have a poorer understanding of office politics.
Some even feel that they are less valued than their on-site colleagues and more at risk from redundancy.
Remote workers do have to be able to motivate themselves to work independently and with less supervision.
Some employees find this difficult and miss the direction and management they may have previously received from face-to-face contact.
Perceptions of Remote Workers Despite outputs demonstrating to the contrary, there are still preconceptions that remote working is ‘easier’ and remote workers tend to ‘skive off’.
A recent survey in Computer Weekly reported that “when their remote employees do not immediately answer their home or mobile phones, managers show some lapse of faith.
Nearly a quarter think their employees are running household errands or shuttling the kids around, and 9% believe they are being deliberately ignored.” [15] Perceptions of remote workers are changing and it is to be hoped a more objective attitude will prevail but currently this view does little to help boost remote worker’s confidence.
In response some remote workers can find that they become slightly paranoid and end up overworking.
In their own cocoon with no colleagues to pull them out or a virtual ‘end of work bell’ to tell them when to stop, some workers remain at their desk for hours on end without a break.
What has not yet been researched or determined is how many managers worry about their subordinates working remotely till late in the evening.
One might hazard a guess at “not many”.
Morale “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work”.
Aristotle (384 BC 322 BC) In a staff development magazine released back in 1995 a remote worker explained: “The typical remote worker starts out almost euphoric…You get to go home!
But what researchers have found is that, over time, remote workers tend to bottom out.
With the fridge always close at hand, weight gains are commonplace.” [16] Some organisations have reported a burnout stage [17] at around a year at which time a significant proportion decide that working remotely is not for them.
A fair number will return to the office and some actually leave their job looking for an on-site post elsewhere.
Workers who carry on working remotely after this period tend to find it difficult to go back to an ordinary office environment.
Organisational and Technical Issues There are also many challenges for organisations which increasingly employ remote workers.
One of the most significant is a loss of corporate identity.. Workers who are distributed may no longer feel part of a team or even part of an organisation.
This loss of cohesion can have a significant effect on employees and managers alike.
Managers may even have to learn to manage differently.
Research carried out by Henley Management College found that the increase in flexible working practices has meant that to be effective, managers now need to trust their staff more and move away from the traditional controlling style of management [18].
There are also many specific technical requirements when supporting remote workers.
Some are explored in the JISCInfoNet ‘Anytime, anywhere computing’ [19] publication which offers solutions to the difficulties in delivering such a service at Higher Education institutions.
Setting up a remote worker is relatively straightforward.
Broadband is now cheaper than ever and connections can be made through an Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) or cable.
With countless providers online, and a number of broadband provider comparison sites available, there should be a package to suit all individual needs.
However, which broadband provider workers should use may present an issue.
Some organisations may have a preferred provider and may be paying, but home broadband is rarely going to be used solely for business purposes.
Most organisations would use broadband with Web Virtual Private Network (VPN) to provide a secure connection between two or more locations via the Internet.
Web VPN is a remote access security platform, which provides relatively simple and secure access to applications and information they require.
Despite the use of VPN the major technical issue for organisations using remote workers is security.
Although remote workers may be no less vigilant than on-site colleagues, because their computer may be used for many more activities than just work, they are more exposed to unsafe applications and may end up being infected by viruses.
Organisations need to make sure that their current security policy covers remote working.
JANET, the UK’s education and research network, provides useful information about remote working security [20] .
The lack of an on-hand IT support team may also mean that machines are not maintained to the same standard as those in the office, unless the support team has included remote working workstations in its programme of support.
The technologies involved in enabling remote working, such as VPN, will be explored in a further article in Ariadne.
Education Sector Remote Working has particular relevance to the education sector from two different angles.
Firstly the technologies involved are interesting on a research level.
But secondly, and more importantly for this article, flexible working and remote access is about removing barriers, something that universities endeavour to do.
Allowing more people to access universities and university outputs, partly through e-learning and shared virtual learning environments (VLEs) for example, is a key part of JISC’s work.
Recently a number of JISC projects have been funded that look at issues relating to remote working.
The Location Independent Working (LIW) [21] project lead by Coventry University is looking at the cultural change, technological development and good working practice required to support academic staff carrying out their work from locations other than their base campus.
Using remote working effectively is a particular challenge to the education and public sector.
Meeting the Challenges Inclusion and Support Although there is no universal panacea for the challenges discussed above, those who have experience of remote working often feel that the key to success lies in making sure that remote workers feel included and supported.
This can be done in many ways.
For example, in the establishment of a remote workers’ support group with regular communications via synchronous media such as instant messaging or phone/video conferencing.
Synchronous technologies (as opposed to asynchronous ones such as email) allow for more feedback and aid understanding.
Web 2.0 social networking tools have been particularly successful in enabling virtual teams to communicate and collaborate.
Using the technologies out there to enable communication is an important skill and so a good relationship between IT support and remote workers is crucial.
These technologies will be explored in a further article.
Organisations would also benefit from ensuring remote workers are included in organisational procedures such as awards and rewards, thus demonstrating to them and others that they remain valued.
Remote workers should also be invited to on-site events whenever possible.
In her article on Trust in Global Virtual Teams [22] Niki Panteli advocates that any virtual team include a social and fun element in its interactions, which will help in creating a stronger shared social context.
In November 2007, in an effort to support colleagues who work away from its University of Bath base, UKOLN held a one-day workshop for all remote workers [23] .
The workshop was facilitated by Sylvia Vacher of Objectives Training and Development.
Workshop members spent the majority of the day discussing and developing strategies for improving personal and collaborative working practices in their particular distributed environment.
It should be pointed out that within some organisations people can feel like remote workers without even working remotely.
Good communication is always essential for a contented team.
Organisations may find that they benefit across the board from procedures and policies produced to address the needs of remote workers.
Shared Goals As well as involving remote workers, it is also imperative that organisations keep them well informed and provide clear, well-documented work goals.
Whatever the make-up of the team, these goals should be collective ones.
Niki Panteli asserts that “Shared goals are and should be a key characteristic of virtual teams.” She explains that the “construction of these goals is likely to be time-consuming and complex but that the collaborative creation of goals is crucial to a successful virtual team.
Working towards these goals will ultimately result in a level of trust.” [22].
As Charles Handy puts it, "virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology on its own is not enough."
[24] Policies and Procedures In order to formalise such practices, organisations which increasingly allow staff to work flexibly should make sure that they have good working policies and procedures in place.
A policy might cover how remote working can be applied for, health and safety, data protection, security issues, financial issues such as when expenses can be claimed, legal and contractual issues, work hours etc.
Such a policy should also provide useful guidance.
As an article in Business Zone explains, “The key to unlocking the benefits of flexible working is to ensure that when a boardroom policy is being created it always keeps practical implementation front of mind.” [25] In addition to a policy on remote working it might be useful for the relevant staff to be provided with other more specific documentation.
This could include a checklist of technical requirements, information on broadband providers etc.
It could well be beneficial for a new remote worker to be put into contact with other remote workers in the organisation.
Chatting to people who know what you are attempting is likely to be very useful.
However, within any organisation, the matrix of different organisational experience and previous knowledge of the available technologies will mean that the reactions and experiences of each person to remote working could be very different.
For example, someone who has worked for an organisation for a long while and then chooses to work remotely will have different needs from someone who is new to the organisation yet has worked remotely before.
Groups like the Telework Association [26] can provide support to organisations and individuals new to remote working.
The Telework Association is a membership organisation providing information, advice and support to enable individuals, whether employed or self-employed, to make a success of mobile, home-based and flexible ways of working.
As part of their work they produce the Teleworking Handbook.
Time Management “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.” Brian Tracy As mentioned earlier, working remotely requires good time management skills.
Time for everyone is limited but the two pivotal skills are prioritising work and working more efficiently.
There are many ways in which we can work more efficiently.
Maintaining good communication with other workers, exploiting synergies and basing work on best practice avoids duplication of work and ‘reinventing the wheel’.
Remote workers also have a wealth of technology at their fingertips that they can use to save time rather than add to their workload.
A good skill to learn is effective use of email.
Some ideas on how to avoid email overload and use other communication tools were written way back in 2005 by Brian Kelly [27].
Brian suggested the use of Instant Messaging, RSS, blogs, wikis, VOIP as other options in communications technologies.
The best approach is to use the appropriate tool at the appropriate time.
Why type out a long email message when a 1-minute phone conversation will clear things up and save time?
A Successful Remote Worker Although what makes a successful remote worker is likely to be different for each individual, there is a consensus that working away from the office requires discipline.
This discipline can often be easier to achieve when a division is maintained between work and home.
Some remote workers like to demarcate the day by a daily activity such as walking round the garden or putting on formal work clothes and sitting at a desk.
A clearly defined workspace, such as dedicated room or garden office, also helps.
Working on your own initiative without the opportunity to bounce ideas off others can make tasks seem boring and stale, so maintaining a consistent work schedule with regular breaks helps keep the mind fresh.
People work well in different ways and at different times, so it may be important for remote workers to focus on what they are producing rather that the length of time they are sat in front of a computer.
That said, remote working does require employees to offer their full attention to work.
Having children at home, rather than at nursery or with a child minder, will not work.
Alongside an effective working environment the success of remote working also relies on transparency of roles.
As mentioned above, clear policies are imperative and so is clarity over responsibilities and the financial aspects of the working arrangement.
Host organisations have a duty to specify who will pay for what and remote workers have a duty to keep all receipts for broadband, stationery, telephone calls etc.
Conclusion: The Office of the Future This article has covered some of the challenges that face employers and employees who embrace remote working.
It makes no apology for not having dealt with the technical aspects in any great detail, believing changes in working practice always centre first and foremost on cultural change.
The technical aspects will be covered in a further article.
At the beginning of the article it was stated that in the 21st Century work has changed.
This change brings with it responsibilities.
Remote working offers great potential for employer and employee alike but to make it work both parties need to ‘do their bit’.
Within the public sector, which strives to be seen to be more mobile and flexible with initiatives like the government’s Project Nomad [28], there is a duty to embrace flexible and remote working.
Interestingly, the research for this article has shown that it is the large commercial companies which have the infrastructure to support remote working, and recognise the benefits it can offer.
It is they which are leading the field in implementation of remote working.
Currently many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) do not have the scale of staffing or IT infrastructure to support newer working practices.
However it is obvious that remote working will remain on the increase for sometime.
What has been observed when investigating remote working further is that quite often problems that have already been observed in the office, such as feelings of isolation and low morale, can be amplified when employees work remotely.
Organisations which truly address these issues by engaging with their staff, whether they work remotely or not, will find that the benefits are significant.
Maybe it matters little where the office of the future will be, more whether the office of the future connects.
Acknowledgements Thanks to the UKOLN remote workers for their words of wisdom.
Editor’s Note: Marieke Guy has been with UKOLN since May 2000 and has worked remotely since April 2008.
She currently lives 15 miles from UKOLN’s offices and made the decision to work from home for family and environmental reasons.
Since taking this decision, she says, she has learnt a lot about herself, communication technologies and how cold her spare bedroom is!
[2008-10-20] Marieke has since begun her own blog on remote working entitled “Ramblings of a Remote Worker” in which she hopes to cover cultural issues, organisational attitudes and useful technologies related to remote working.
See http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/ References Teleworking from Home, Nicola Harrison, Ariadne, Issue 17 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue17/teleworking/ “The Underground Guide to Telecommuting”, Leonhard, Woody, 1995, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-48343-2.
Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform: Flexible working: the right to request and the duty to consider http://www.berr.gov.uk/employment/employment-legislation/employment-guidance/page35662.html eBusiness Fact Sheet: Remote Working http://www.scottish-enterprise.com/publications/remote_working-2.pdf M. Blake (1999) Teleworking for Library and Information Professionals, Aslib.
Natural History Museum introduces remote working http://www.eogroup.com/virtual-offices/article.asp?item=17132909 TUC: Work-Life Balance http://www.tuc.org.uk/work_life/ WorkWise http://www.workwiseuk.org/ Remote Working Healthcare trust reaches out to its customers and staff http://www.btplc.com/Health/AboutBTHealth/Casestudies/Case4/ Survey: Flexible working Round the clock, Human Resources, http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=fulldetails&newsUID=c1015265-15b3-4504-abdd-2356e19f80d8 Museum rolls out remote working http://www.museumnews.net/link.asp?ID=84736&Title=Museum%20rolls%20out%20remote%20working Wikipedia: Hot desking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_desking The Costs of Transport on the Environment – The Role of Teleworking in Reducing Carbon Emissions, David Banister, Carey Newson and Matthew Ledbury, Working Paper N° 1024, June 2007 http://www.tsu.ox.ac.uk/research/pubs/1024-banister-etal.pdf Saving Energy in the Workplace.
Eddie Young, Ariadne, Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/young/ Survey: remote working is motivational for workers http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/09/13/226762/survey-remote-working-is-motivational-for-workers.htm Remote working: marvelous, perilous, or both?
http://www.ucar.edu/communications/staffnotes/9704/telecommuting.html Place of work and working conditions http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/ewco/studies/tn0701029s/tn0701029s_8.htm Remote working ‘will be the death of the middle manager’ http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39199946,00.htm The Think Tank: Anytime, anywhere computing http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/publications/aac-pdf JANET UK http://www.ja.net/ Coventry University JISC LIW Project http://e-learning.coventry.ac.uk/LIW/ Trust in Global Virtual Teams, Niki Panteli, Ariadne, Issue 43 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/panteli/ UKOLN Workshop for Remote Workers http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/focus/issue19/#19.26.5 Handy C. (1995), “Trust and the Virtual Organization”, Harvard Business Review, May-June, 40-50, p.44 The case for remote working http://www.businesszone.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=169356&d=1095&h=1097&f=1096&dateformat=%25o-%25B-%25Y Telework Association http://www.telework.org.uk/ Web Focus: Must Email Die?
Brian Kelly, Ariadne, Issue 45 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/web-focus/ ProjectNomad http://www.projectnomad.org.uk/ Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.guy/ Return to top Article Title: “A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/guy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: User Studies for Digital Library Development Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: User Studies for Digital Library Development Buzz data mobile framework usability archives metadata accessibility multimedia e-learning research Citation BibTex RIS Selenay Aytac reviews a collection of essays on user studies and digital library development that provides a concise overview of a variety of digital library projects and examines major research trends relating to digital libraries.
User Studies for Digital Library Development provides a concise overview of a variety of digital library projects and examines major research trends relating to digital libraries.
While there are many books on user studies and digital library development, this work operates at the junction of these two domains and stands out for its insights, balance, and quality of its case-based investigations.
The book brings together points of view from different professional communities, including practitioners as well as researchers.
It incorporates an overview of usability tools and techniques, takes a look at the latest research on designing for a positive user experience, and provides many tips on accessibility and usability of online digital resources.
This is a well-written, broad-reaching work that is structured and organised in a manner that goes beyond many user studies for digital library development.
The contributors aim to combine two approaches; each chapter not only elaborates a relevant case study but also discusses and analyses the broader significance of the methods.
In this way the case studies move beyond merely presenting discrete examples and instead offer the reader something more compelling.
Although this book mainly focuses on information professionals who want to develop user-centered digital libraries, it is also appropriate for students as well as instructors.
For students, the list of acronyms, glossary, and bibliography will be appreciated.
This is a good book for library and information science instructors and deserves use in many courses on research methods, digital library design, and user studies.
Individual chapters are also valuable for introductory courses, such as knowledge organisation and information society.
This book provides the ideal opportunity to gather insights and ideas to ignite the imagination and spark innovation in the field of user studies.
This stirring and stimulating volume is edited by Milena Dobreva of University of Malta, Andy O’Dwyer of the BBC, and Pierluigi Feliciati of the University of Macerata with an excellent preface by T.D.Wilson.
It consists of a very detailed glossary, a brief introduction, and 24 chapters relating to digital library design and evaluation.
The 24 chapters are independent of each other and can be read out of sequence, but they flow well in the order presented.
Many of the chapter authors are prominent scholars known for their numerous articles and books in the area of user studies and digital libraries.
The book is divided into five parts.
Four chapters in Part 1: “Setting the Scene” present a general overview of the digital library context.
Elaine G. Toms, the Chair of Information Science at the Information School, University of Sheffield, UK, reviews the types of models that have emerged in information science and how existing models from different disciplines contributed to inform the design of digital libraries.
The author of chapter 2, Sudatta Chowdhury, faculty member at the University of Technology Sydney, presents four important case studies to illustrate some major issues and research on user and usability in the digital library domain.
The “Europeana” case study (Case Study 3.4: Europeana p.37-38) is a great example of challenging multicultural usability.
In the following chapter, Petar Mihaylov examines the visual design challenges of digital libraries and concludes with some recommendations on how to improve user experience in a typical digital library development project.
The last chapter of Part 1, Giannis Tsakonas, librarian at the University of Patras, Library & Information Center Patras, Greece, investigates users within the evaluation of digital libraries.
The emergence of the digital world, the Internet revolution, and changing user needs have a significant impact on digital library development.
This first part of the book provides a compelling and convincing evidence-based argument in favour of user studies for digital libraries.
User studies are essential as they are practical ways to assess, design, and improve the digital libraries for maximum user-friendliness.
The five chapters in Part 2: “Methods Explained and Illustrated” deal with specific research and data collection techniques for user studies.
The chapters’ combined strength is a clear, concise investigation of user studies in real-world digital library settings that are illustrated by case studies.
The case study is an exploratory research craft and has been used successfully in various fields, especially in business education, to generate an in-depth understanding of a complex issue.
A typical case study presents critical portions of the problem objectively and discusses the key steps involved in each unit of analysis.
This pedagogical teaching tool is used in each section of Part 2.
In the first chapter, Jillian Griffiths of Manchester Metropolitan University examines the most popular research methods, such as survey questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups.
An investigation of expert evaluation techniques is presented by Claus-Peter Klas of FernUniversität in Hagen.
Another powerful and relatively new technique, deep log analysis, is discussed by David Nicholas and David Clark of CIBER Research Ltd in the following chapter.
Eye-tracking studies, a new and controversial approach to digital library evaluations, is addressed by Panos Balatsoukas of the University of Strathclyde.
The use of personas in digital library evaluations is reviewed by Katja Guldbaek Rasmussen and Gitte Petersen of the Royal Library of Denmark.
These outstanding chapters in Part 2 teach us how to diagnose and get a better grasp of usability problems by examining current digital library projects.
The term “digital library” now signifies almost any type of digital collection.
The seven chapters in Part 3: “User Studies in the Digital Library Universe: What Else Needs to be Considered?” seek to explore complex issues which digital library designers face, and present examples from a variety of digital library domains towards a sustainable future.
In the first chapter, Paul Clough of the University of Sheffield, UK, discusses the challenges regarding multilingual access to multimedia collections.
The value of bringing children into the design and evaluation process of digital libraries is studied by Ian Ruthven and Andreas Lingnau of the University of Strathclyde, UK, and Monica Landoni of the University of Lugano in Switzerland.
Jeffery K. Guin examines user engagement and the significance of social media and Web 2.0 in the context of five digital libraries, including case studies on the Library of Congress, Miami University Library, The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), The National Library of Australia’s Trove Initiative [1], and the University of Houston Library.
These case studies are all of a superior quality, and I would recommend them warmly to those willing to delve into them.
Similarly, the case study method is used here to provide a deeper understanding of evidence-based digital library design practice.
In the following chapters, Kathleen Menzies and Duncan Birrell discuss user studies and digital preservation, and Lina Petrakieva of Glasgow Caledonian University, UK, addresses the challenges of using mobile devices for accessing and manipulating data available from digital libraries.
She underlines the importance of mobile devices as the key to enhancing user experience and igniting innovation, as they are capable of facilitating constant interaction between the user and digital content.
Traditional libraries have been at the centre of providing access to educational resources for centuries.
However, the boundaries of library services have been progressively expanded as the knowledge universe has experienced the advent of technology and particularly the World Wide Web.
Digital libraries are playing a significant role at the centre of this new and demanding scholarly communication context.
Zsuzsanna Varga of the University of Oxford examines the importance of using digital libraries in tertiary education by giving examples from the collections containing digitised East European travel writing.
Nicola Osborne of the University of Edinburgh also discusses digital libraries in the developing educational or e-learning context.
Part 4: “User Studies Across the Cultural Heritage Sector” has six chapters that present user studies in different contexts.
Derek Law examines user studies in libraries; while Wendy M. Duff of the University of Toronto presents user studies in archives, and Susan Hazan of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem discusses user studies in museum settings.
The importance of context in facilitating user-centred design is illustrated in these different settings.
Within a more specific domain, Leo Konstantelos of the University of Glasgow offers a compelling investigation on the perspectives of users regarding digital art online.
In the same vein, Andy O’Dwyer of the BBC examines user-related issues regarding audiovisual collections within digital library development.
Open access or public access to information has become more important and constitutes a major trend, particularly for digital cultural heritage resources.
In the last chapter of Part 4, Harry Verwayen  of Europeana and Martijn Arnoldus of Creative Commons Netherlands offer a business model perspective on the benefits of open sharing and open distribution of cultural heritage  resources.
This is an important chapter for those readers interested in open access and open distribution of digital library content.
The concluding chapter in Part 5: “Putting it All Together” is written by the editors and offers a cross-sectional look at user studies in digital library settings by touching upon all the nuances mentioned by the chapter contributors.
In particular, the editors provide guidelines shaped by their real-world digital library design experience that can foster better and more powerful research designs practice.
Furthermore, table 24.1 (p. 250-251) is an excellent outline for research design for anyone who is planning to conduct a user study.
From methodological, theoretical, and empirical perspectives, it serves as a superb model for researchers in user-centred frameworks.
Digital libraries work at multiple layers and the user is the most important component of the overall design process at all levels.
In this book, the 17 case studies are the obvious strong points linking theory with practice.
These case studies acknowledge real-life challenges in designing usable digital libraries and provide readers with specific examples to analyse.
To sum up: I commend this book strongly, particularly to those readers who want to improve their understanding of user studies and digital library development from a real-world perspective.
This is a significant contribution to the field.
List of Chapters Chapter 1 Introduction: user studies for digital library development PART 1: SETTING THE SCENE Chapter 2 Models that inform digital library design Chapter 3 User-centric studies Chapter 4 Design issues and user needs Chapter 5 Users within the evaluation of digital libraries PART 2: METHODS EXPLAINED AND ILLUSTRATED Chapter 6 Questionnaires, interviews and focus groups as means for user engagement with evaluation of digital libraries Chapter 7 Expert evaluation methods Chapter 8 Evidence of user behaviour: deep log analysis Chapter 9 An eye-tracking approach to the evaluation of digital libraries Chapter 10 Personas PART 3: USER STUDIES IN THE DIGITAL LIBRARY UNIVERSE: WHAT ELSE NEEDS TO BE CONSIDERED?
Chapter 11 User-related issues in multilingual access to multimedia collections Chapter 12 Children and digital libraries Chapter 13 User engagement and social media Chapter 14 Significant others: user studies and digital preservation Chapter 15 The shift to mobile devices Chapter 16 Resource discovery for research and course design Chapter 17 Support for users within an educational or e-learning context PART 4: USER STUDIES ACROSS THE CULTURAL HERITAGE SECTOR Chapter 18 User studies in libraries Chapter 19 User studies in archives Chapter 20 User studies in museums: holding the museum in the palm of your hand Chapter 21 Digital art online: perspectives on user needs, access, documentation and retrieval Chapter 22 User studies for digital libraries’ development: audiovisual collections Chapter 23 A business-model perspective on end-users and open metadata PART 5: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER Chapter 24 And now … to the brave real world References 1.
Rose Holley.
"Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia".
July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/holley/ Author Details Dr Selenay Aytac Associate Professor Library Faculty Long Island University NY USA Email: selenay.aytac@liu.edu Dr. Selenay Aytac is an associate professor at Long Island University, NY.
She is also an adjunct professor for the Knowledge Organization courses at Pratt Institute, NY and Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain.
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Implementing Ex Libris's PRIMO at the University of East Anglia Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Implementing Ex Libris's PRIMO at the University of East Anglia Buzz data mobile software javascript database rss xml portal metadata tagging browser repositories cataloguing linux marc solaris ejournal frbr shibboleth ajax facebook authentication interoperability refworks algorithm url standards sfx ldap Citation BibTex RIS Nick Lewis outlines the University of East Anglia's experience of implementing Ex Libris's Primo, a new search and retrieval interface for presenting the library catalogue and institutional databases and e-resources.
At the University of East Anglia (UEA), we have been taking part in the Primo Charter Programme in which various libraries in the Europe and the US have been able to work with Ex Libris on version 1 of their Primo product.
We have learned a great deal from the process and there is interest throughout the library sector in the potential benefits of separating or decoupling the search and retrieval interface layer from the database layer when presenting library resources.
The problem Primo looks to solve is the overwhelming evidence that users are preferring other search, retrieval and delivery services over the library catalogue and subscribed institutional resources.
The reasons for preferring search engines like Google include ease and speed of use, relevance-ranked results, few authentication challenges, and what can be described as the overall aesthetic experience.
There are several papers on these issues, but one of the most influential has been OCLC’s 2005 report ‘Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources’ [1] which has helped to corroborate Ex Libris’s strategy.
In theory there is little argument that our local services should be developing more in line with the wider network of services such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, but there is still considerable debate as to how it should be done.
Many people argue that a more up-to-date kind of search interface is long overdue in Library catalogues and that Library Management System (LMS) suppliers ought to have provided such functionality as standard as their OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) have developed.
The counter-argument contends that merely updating the library catalogue is investing a great deal of effort in old technology.
To do this well, it is worth investing in a new and flexible search layer that can include resources and databases beyond the library catalogue and which is free from the constraints of the backroom aspects of the Library Management System.
There is another aspect to this debate: there is the argument that since the vast majority of users are now using sites like Google and Facebook, there is little point trying to develop our own local interfaces to resources.
Instead we ought to concentrate our efforts on making our resources visible within the wider network of search engines, union catalogues and open repositories.
The idea is to concentrate on making the library’s local records more visible in the wider network and then to funnel users back to the local resources.
Ex Libris takes such concerns into account but firmly places itself in the ideological camp that claims local is best.
Whilst Google and Facebook may have the upper hand in terms of attracting users, they are nonetheless different services.
A suitable strategy would be to examine what makes them successful and apply some of their features to our more local interfaces.
In so doing we are more likely to encourage people to use our interfaces and as a consequence obtain the highest-quality resources they need to support their teaching and learning.
That is where libraries have the upper hand: if content is king, then libraries win hands down due to the quality of the content they have to offer in comparison with Google.
The problem lies in the fact that not all our users know this; even if they do, the presentation of those resources via different databases and interfaces often seems less attractive and engaging than what can be found on the Web.
This is where Primo steps in.
Primo is about finding, not just searching, and delivering resources no matter where they originate.
In this respect, Primo is more than just a glorified replacement for the library catalogue.
Front of House The key benefit of Primo is that it represents a one-stop shop for access to local institutions’ library catalogue, institutional repository and remote databases.
The relevancy ranking algorithm is sophisticated, leading to results by relevance not just year of publication; it works more like the search engines our users are familiar with on the Web.
The visibility of book covers (from Amazon [2]) and icons, rather than text, to distinguish between different types of records, contribute to an enhanced and enriched aesthetic experience.
Figure 1: The PRIMO user interface As well as the main search box, Primo gives users pre-search options in the form of drop-down boxes which allow them to opt to search by material type and collection for example.
Post-search, there is an abundance of choice for limiting the search.
The faceted navigation [3] functionality offers options to display just ‘online resources’ or just those that are currently ‘available’ (i.e.
not checked out).
Other options include refining by creator, topic or resource type.
The number of likely results is given in parentheses next to each choice.
The topic facets, based on subject headings from the library catalogue, can also be used as a starting point for completely new searches if required.
If a work is available in more than one library or in different collections, they can also be displayed as facets to choose from.
Other facets are also possible depending on the fields originating from the MARC records in the catalogue, such as date of publication, language, classification, etc.
Figure 2: The PRIMO user interface: brief results with faceted navigation options to refine results In order to provide a less cluttered approach to finding books, Primo includes functionality to group-related records under a single record.
This so-called ‘FRBRisation’ [4] works well, particularly for textbooks where different editions are held under the one record.
There is also a de-duplication option to bring together duplicate bibliographic records and merge them together which could be helpful for consortia set-ups.
From the brief results page users immediately receive an indication of whether copies or online versions are available.
In version 1 of Primo the availability information is not real-time, being based on an availability pipe that runs at intervals throughout the day.
Therefore in theory it is possible that if there is just one copy of a particular book, the holdings information could be out of date at that point.
However, the ‘Get it’ link to the right of each record can be made to provide a quick link to what we have renamed ‘Live holdings’, which is the holdings information on our live library catalogue (Aleph) at UEA.
The ‘Get it’ function can also offer the user other appropriate copies or services.
The ‘Other services’ tab uses your institution’s link resolver service (e.g.
SFX) to show links to other library catalogues, search engines or Google Scholar for example.
If users prefer, they can choose to expand a brief record to display the full record.
This gives additional bibliographic information and also links to other services such as the table of contents from Amazon or an abstract from Syndetics Solutions [5] or the record in WorldCat [6].
This additional post-search enrichment of records, which supplements data from the original MARC records, is included as part of Primo, subject to any agreements needed with those third-party providers.
As you would expect from a major database, there are options to save, email and print results – with e-shelf (marked list) functionality to select records.
Currently there are options to save to third-party applications such as del.icio.us [7], Connotea [8] and Refworks [9], with other export options anticipated in future versions.
Other Web 2.0 and social networking features such as tagging and reviews (for logged-in users) are not particularly ground-breaking but nonetheless are what users now expect.
If logged in, users can also save previous queries and set up alerts or RSS feeds for specific searches which can be configured only to update when new content becomes available.
The search functionality is more forgiving than a traditional library catalogue.
There is ‘Did you mean?’ option which recognises common misspellings and offers options (e.g.
if you type ‘mangment’ it will ask you if you meant ‘management’.)
There is also a ‘still haven’t found what you are looking for?’ section which provides users additional guidance on what to do next if their initial search has been unsuccessful.
At UEA we have set up our default local search ‘scope’ to include our local library catalogues: the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich Hospitals Library catalogues.
We have also included a search of our local institutional repository (Ex Libris’s DigiTool).
This is beneficial in terms of making our repository articles more visible as we look to promote the repository more widely.
For ease of use, we also allow the option of searching the repository on its own by clicking on a separate tab which shows a new view just restricting the search and results to records in the repository.
The third tab is the remote search view, used for searching the library’s external databases and e-journals.
The remote search option uses the federated search functionality from Ex Libris’s MetaLib.
The user can search pre-selected groups of databases, or ‘quicksets’ as they are called, based on their subject matter or type of database.
The databases are pre-selected by librarians and so the user does not know in advance what databases they are searching, just that the sets include databases relevant to their subject.
There is a short delay whilst MetaLib pulls in and converts the records from these databases into its standard display format.
If users get tired of waiting, there is a ‘show me what you have so far’ option.
The users are then presented with a relevance-ranked, merged set of results from those databases.
In this version of Primo, it is not possible to include the remote search functionality within the same tabs as the local collections.
There is a good reason for this because this remote searching relies on federated searching which is unlikely to return results as quickly as local databases.
Therefore to combine local and remote searches might lead to unacceptable delays.
The remote search functionality works particularly well with bibliographic databases that index journal articles and book chapters.
From the brief results, whose records look identical in format to the results from local searches, the user can quickly see whether or not the full text is available and, if it is, simply click the ‘Get it’ link.
Primo then uses linkage software functionality (in our case SFX) to deliver the full text immediately to the user either within a frame of Primo, or, if the user prefers, in a new browser window.
If no full text is available from UEA, then the ‘Online resource’ tab is replaced by an ‘Additional Services’ tab which is available to offer other services such as a table of contents, Google or another library search.
Primo also enables the user to choose to return more results from each database, thereby partially overcoming one of the main limitations of federated searching: the fact that only the first few records from each database are pulled in after an initial search.
Behind the Scenes This section offers an overview of what it has been like to implement Primo from a project management perspective and the workload required to maintain it.
Ex Libris provides a customer profile for Primo which outlines the various strands for setting up Primo.
In basic terms these are: system administration and authentication, data management configuration, user interface configuration, and interoperability, i.e.
integration with other systems.
In our case those other systems are the SFX link resolver, MetaLib for federated searching and our digital repository, Digitool.
We are also planning to embed Primo search within our institutional portal.
We realised from the outset that we would need a multi-skilled team for this project, drawn from across the Library and IT departments.
For ease of use, the majority of the configuration for Primo can be done through a Web-based interface called the Back Office.
The configuration process for the user interface is fairly straightforward using these tools and Ex Libris provides guidance in both the customer profile and Primo documentation.
The only downside of the Web-based approach is that administrators do not get to see the underlying directory structure.
This means it can be hard to assess how one aspect of the setup relates to another.
The approach is good for those who like to start with the detail and work from there; others might prefer the overview first.
Figure 3: The PRIMO Back Office interface At the heart of the Back Office are the tools for managing the Primo Publishing Platform which is where records from different sources are brought together.
Although there are pre-existing pipes (transformations) for loading data, from your catalogue and repository, for example, it can be a complex process.
Whilst the pipes work ‘out of the box’, the default settings are inevitably for a standard library with a standard setup.
Most libraries have at least some local non-standard practices.
Add to that the question of multiple branches or multi-site libraries, each with slightly different cataloguing practices, and some interesting obstacles arise.
Having said that, Primo is designed to cope with consortium setups and has the flexibility to set up different views based on the user’s context.
This works well for libraries on completely different sites.
However, challenges may remain for dealing with sub-libraries or branches if they share IP ranges or parts of your existing catalogue records.
So how do you refine the ‘out-of-the-box’ configurations?
In order to display data from your catalogue, repository or other local databases, records need to be published into XML format and then each XML record needs to be ‘normalised’ to show in Primo.
Normalisation creates an enhanced version of the XML record from each harvested source record.
This enhanced record is called the PNX record (Primo Normalised XML).
For this process you need someone who really understands the history of your library and its cataloguing quirks and foibles.
In effect, you need to choose the person you would rely on if you were planning a library management system migration.
Figure 4: The PNX record viewer which shows the differences between a source XML record and a Primo PNX record To make adjustments to a normalised PNX (Primo Normalised XML) record, you need to make changes to each standard pipe.
You need to look at what fields are displaying in the Primo user interface, and how they are displaying, and make adjustments to their configuration accordingly.
Since the Primo Publishing Platform has its own indexes, any changes are only reflected by completing a re-indexing process, called renormalisation, and this takes at least an hour to run depending on the size of your database.
If you make changes to the data in your library catalogue to fit better with Primo, then you will need to reload, as well as re-index.
To save time, you can set up a range of test records which means you do not have to wait for renormalisation to see the effects of any changes you make.
Some adjustments were straightforward, others have required the creation of rules to display the original data in different ways in the user interface, depending on the context.
In some situations we also needed to change our current cataloguing practices in our library system so that the data worked well in both our existing catalogue and Primo.
For example, we had to edit notes on our 856 records (our e-resource URLs) so they made sense in both systems.
As well as including data from the original MARC or XML record, the PNX record also has additional functional fields to enrich each Primo record with Web 2.0 and other value-added functionality such as facets and thumbnails.
By working systematically through the data configuration we found we made good progress.
This is because once a configuration issue is fixed, it is in theory fixed for ever (unless you change your cataloguing practices or library management system of course).
For the institutional repository integration into Primo, the preferred method of publishing is to turn on OAI (Open Access Initiative) publishing in your repository, in our case DigiTool.
The DigiTool records are pulled using one of Primo’s standard pipes for OAI harvesting and the records are then displayed in the consistent Primo format.
As with the library catalogue, the standard pipe works well for this and adjustments can be made to the PNX records depending on the metadata format (MARC or Dublin Core) you have chosen in DigiTool.
Depending on what is stored in your repository, Primo can present images and other digital objects as well as links to digitised documents.
The actual delivery of the objects, such as full text journal articles, is done by whatever system hosts that digital object.
All the local indexes on Primo need to be updated with new material on a regular basis, for example once a day.
This process can be automated just to pull the new and changed records from each of the source databases.
Configuring the remote search functionality involves creating some additional Quicksets in MetaLib and then switching on various options in the PRIMO Back Office interface.
The implementation of Ex Libris’s proprietary Patron Directory Services (PDS) authentication (now available across all its products) is important for the remote search because this will determine access rights for the sets of databases to be searched.
Depending on users’ location or whether they have logged in or not, an indication of access rights will be shown to them for each of the quicksets prior to carrying out a search.
PDS also enables single sign-on between all Ex Libris products and can link to external institutional authentication services using LDAP or Shibboleth for example.
Primo is not just a standalone product.
It is interoperable with other library management products and software, not just Ex Libris products.
In terms of where Primo appears in your institutional landscape of interfaces and services, it can easily be embedded in or deep-linked to.
Initially we will be looking to make the search box available within our institutional portal and course management systems and at a later stage we will explore the potential of other Web services it provides.
In terms of system hardware, sizing obviously depends on the number of concurrent users and records.
UEA is sized for 200 users and up to 5 million records.
From May 2008, UEA will be running PRIMO version 2 on several HP BL460C Blade Servers each with 2 x 3GHz Quad-Core Xeon E5450 Processors.
We are choosing to run on Linux rather than Solaris.
In terms of the total cost of ownership, Primo is a very flexible product and, as a result, it initially needs a high level of resource to maximise its potential.
We expect this to reduce as Primo comes of age.
Future difficulties may not lie so much in the maintenance of Primo itself as in its connections with the underlying source databases as they change and develop.
The Future There are a number of other next-generation library search and retrieval products available, Encore [10] and Aquabrowser [11] being the most similar to Primo.
Like Primo, they all aim to work with a variety of library management systems and federated and linkage services.
One of the key challenges yet to be met by any of these products is the true integration of local and remote resources.
Encore and Aquabrowser apparently show results on the same page as the local results but in a different frame; Primo shows the results in a different tab.
We expect that, in future versions, users could choose to combine records from both local and remote searches, though perhaps at a later stage in their search, once more of the remote records have become available.
In the longer term, the aim must be to obtain permission to harvest the actual journal data from third-party suppliers, such as Science Direct, which would speed up the search process and allow more accurate relevance ranking based on all the records.
The barriers to this may be more political than technical.
Primo version 2 is due for release in the 2nd quarter of 2008.
Looking at competing products, we hope to see more functionality such as an option for showing books by popularity, support for more material types, and more tools for integration and embedding Primo in other products, such as an alternative search screen for mobile devices.
For smaller libraries, maybe a remotely hosted Primo could be offered for institutions that cannot afford the overhead of their own servers.
We also expect to see other technologies like AJAX [12] being used, perhaps to cut down on the amount of data that needs to be loaded initially or to provide more real-time availability.
We hope to see additional support for dealing with local practices, so that some of the more subtle inter-relationships between records can be retained; for example if your library has analytic or hierarchical records.
This may be particularly relevant to those who want to use Primo with less standard databases or with databases for which there are, as yet, no pipes available.
In its current version, whilst Primo aims to replace the search and retrieval interfaces of your local or remote databases, it does not claim to replace other functionality, such as the ability to place reservations.
Should that be one of its longer-term aims?
Conclusion Searching on Primo is closer to the experience of searching interfaces like Amazon than a standard library catalogue.
Local and remote records appear in a consistent format which offers a continuity to the product as a whole which users may well prefer.
The relevance ranking combined with an abundance of Web 2.0 options will be applauded by those who enjoy browsing as well as searching.
It also provides valuable resource discovery benefits.
Primo scores very highly in its scope, not only providing an alternative library catalogue, but also integrating e-resources, local articles and external resources.
The quality of the source products such as SFX, MetaLib and DigiTool clearly helps to give Primo an edge, especially for existing Ex Libris customers.
In terms of other sites in the UK, at the time of writing, the University of Strathclyde and the British Library are the two other UK customers.
However there are already pilot installations at several institutions internationally [13] and, to date, approximately 75 libraries and universities are signed up worldwide.
Ex Libris is clearly investing heavily in Primo and the architecture is likely to be used in the development of its next-generation library management system.
We anticipate rapid development of Primo over the next few years.
It is hard work being an early adopter but harder still would be confronting the likelihood that, without products such as Primo, our systems and services may be perceived as increasingly irrelevant.
References OCLC.
(2005) Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources.
Retrieved from http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm For example, use of Amazon Web Services http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=3435361 is free but requires a prominent link back to Amazon from your site.
For more information about Faceted Classification, see: Murray, P. (2007) Faceted Classification of Information.
Retrieved from http://www.kmconnection.com/DOC100100.htm For more information about FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) see: UKOLN.
(2005) Bibliographic Management Factfile: FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records).
Retrieved from http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bib-man/factfile/cataloguing-rules/frbr/ Danskin, A.
& Chapman, A.
(2003) Bibliographic records in the computer age.
Library & Information Update, 2(9), 42-43.
Retrieved from http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine/archive/archive2003/september/update0309d.htm Riva, P. (2007) Introducing the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and Related IFLA Developments.
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 33(6), 7-11.
Retrieved from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Aug-07/Riva.pdf Syndetic Solutions http://www.syndetics.com WorldCat http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/default.htm deli.icio.us http://del.icio.us Connotea http://www.connotea.org RefWorks http://www.refworks.com Encore http://www.iii.com/encore/ For a sample implementation see Glasgow University http://encore.lib.gla.ac.uk/iii/encore/app For in depth review, see Breeding, M. (2007) Encore.
Library Technology Reports, 43(4), 23-27.
Aquabrowser: http://www.aquabrowser.com/ For a sample implementation see Columbus Metropolitan Library: http://catalog.columbuslibrary.org For in depth review, see Breeding, M. (2007) AquaBrowser.
Library Technology Reports, 43(4), 15-18.
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
Vanderbilt University http://discoverlibrary.vanderbilt.edu; the Royal Library of Denmark http://primo-7.kb.dk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=KGL; the University of Minnesota http://prime2.oit.umn.edu:1701/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=TWINCITIES; the University of Iowa http://smartsearch.uiowa.edu/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=uiowa Author Details Nicholas Lewis Library Director Information Services Directorate University of East Anglia Email: nicholas.lewis@uea.ac.uk Web site: http://www.uea.ac.uk/is Return to top Article Title: “Implementing Ex Libris’s Primo at the University of East Anglia “ Author: Nicholas Lewis Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/lewis/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Evidence, Value and Impact: The LIS Research Landscape in 2010 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Evidence, Value and Impact: The LIS Research Landscape in 2010 Buzz data framework wiki usability archives blog video e-learning twitter iphone research Citation BibTex RIS Stephanie Kenna reports on the Library and Information Science Research Coalition conference, held at the British Library on 28 June 2010.
Having been involved in developing the concept of a coalition for research in Library and Information Science (LIS) since 2006, it was with both pride and excitement that I took my place in the British Library's auditorium on Monday 28 June.
There was a buzz of anticipation.
We were not disappointed.
The Coalition was established by a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the five founder members in March 2009 [1].
In August 2009 the Coalition Board was in a position to appoint Hazel Hall as Executive Secretary and to start work.
In the past year a great deal has been achieved, including the organisation of this conference [2].
The aim of the conference was to consider perspectives on the library and information science research landscape with reference to: identifying LIS research opportunities; translating research outcomes into practice; growing research capacity amongst LIS professionals; and developing the future UK LIS research agenda.
The day's programme was designed to appeal all LIS research stakeholders, ranging from the funders of LIS-related research activity through to those who publish LIS research output, as well as practitioner researchers and academics.
Details of the day, including links to summaries of the six main sessions and associated PowerPoint presentations and videos are available as well as the live blog [3].
The LIS Research Coalition and Its Support of LIS Research Dr Michael Jubb, Research Information Network and Chair of the Board of Directors of the LIS Research Coalition Michael Jubb [4] set the scene by explaining the background to the Coalition and then introduced the key messages and themes for the day.
He began by outlining the history of LIS research in the UK from the 1960s which saw the setting up of new library and information schools in universities such as Sheffield, Loughborough and Strathclyde, to join the longer-established school at University College London, the launch of a number of scholarly journals in the field and the shift from work place-based, practitioner-led studies to a more academic, scientific approach to LIS research.
However, by the mid 1980s a report commissioned by the then University Grants Committee was critical of the state of library and information research and there were tensions between different groups of researchers allied to LIS: information scientists; computer scientists; researchers in the academic community; and practitioners.
The Research and Development Department at the British Library brought LIS researchers together and provided the main support for library and information research in the UK until the 1990s.
Director Brian Perry played a key role in this and his death in January 2006 was the catalyst for discussions around the broad proposal of founding a new body or structure to look at some of the issues that had arisen both during his tenure, and since the move of responsibilities for LIS research from the BL to other bodies.
During these discussions, the tensions highlighted above became more pronounced, together with other concerns, including issues related to: the quality of LIS research; weak relationships between people in LIS and other research communities; and poor links between research and practice.
The result of the discussions was a consensus that there was a need for some kind of structure to build a more co-ordinated approach to LIS research in the UK and the birth of the Coalition which continues to have a clear role for the future.
However, because of the diversity of the landscape and the porous nature of the boundaries, it would not be appropriate for the Coalition to try to set a rigid research agenda for LIS research in the UK.
Both the LIS research and practitioner communities should grasp the nettle and play their part in shaping that research agenda [5].
Michael went on to describe the Coalition's activities currently in place [2] and to outline some of the specific plans for the next year which include a proposed workshop for prospective authors with journal editors, the development of a practitioner researcher starter kit, and plans for creating interactive space on the Coalition Web site.
Finally, he addressed the key research challenge for the LIS community: that the value and the impact of LIS research, and of library and information services themselves, will, in 'difficult times' become increasingly important in order to justify funding for the community.
While there has been a lot of advocacy work, the priority now is for really hard-headed studies of impact and value a tough challenge.
In conclusion he stressed three key issues for the LIS research community and the broader LIS community: the issue of research quality the issue of impact and value of research the issue of engagement To tackle either or both of the first two issues, there is a need for better engagement between researchers and practitioners.
The Coalition can work to improve this situation, but needs, he reiterated, the engagement of the wider community.
Michael Jubb's presentation is available [6].
Opening Keynote: Perspectives on the Evidence, Value and Impact of LIS Research: Conceptual Challenges Professor Andrew Dillon, University of Texas Andrew Dillon [7] outlined the major background shifts in the ecology of information.
He emphasised the need to separate two types of research: looking at the technology of organising and presenting, and; studying the ways that humans deal with information.
In doing so it is more likely that we shape technology so it serves people better.
He noted the historically acknowledged importance of keeping and managing information by referring to Newton.
Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, but he was only able to do so because those giants left a carefully curated record from which he could work.
This inevitably shaped his thinking and what he was able to achieve.
However, only now are we able to judge the impact and value of those records: at the time it would have been impossible to predict their potential impact and value accurately.
In analysing the shifts that are taking place in the information space, Andrew observed that there is no discussion of IT design to reflect the changing demographics of the population.
He took us through some of the statistics about Internet usage and discussed how the population is learning to access, use and interpret information delivered via the Internet.
In particular, he noted that 99.99% of all new data are created digitally, and that of the 40 million US Internet users who claim that this is their primary source of scientific information, 80% check the veracity of information accessed.
In order to do this, they must have learnt a new set of information-related skills.
Having used IT as an example, Andrew went on to emphasise that the problem is not owned by the computer science discipline, or by any other discipline.
Disciplines do not live forever but questions and issues have a much greater longevity.
Professions shift according to cultural and social forces.
As the sub-disciplines of information shift, problems with communication between these sub-disciplines arise and there is boundary confusion.
He identified the boundaries between LIS, Social Informatics, Information Science/Studies/Technology, Instructional/Educational Technology and Information Architecture/Policy/Management, noting that the boundaries themselves present questions about credentials and jurisdiction.
Andrew then moved on to highlight a success story for LIS research: information retrieval.
LIS research informed computer scientists that information retrieval is not just a technical issue, but also a human issue.
It is connected with how humans search for and use information, and this has helped to inform the design of digital information retrieval systems.
However, he pointed out that our obsession with information retrieval places too little emphasis on longitudinal outcomes.
Usability studies tend only to look at the instant response, not at how the information is then used and interpreted, or how the human interacting with the new technology adapts to it over time.
He also noted that how people share information is again under-appreciated, and is very difficult to study.
Andrew's current concerns include the emergence of a new literacy that emphasises search over comprehension, and leads to a loss of 'deep' reading skills.
One implication is that we still need to design systems that make it possible for people to be able to learn, and that the development of those systems must take human behaviour into account.
Andrew highlighted studies that show people want information to be comprehensible, believable and timely, adding that when asked about what they require and value in the information that they need to use, people never mention the technology that delivers that information.
In conclusion, Andrew said that LIS research should be looking at how to build information systems that reflect the way people think and use information.
Demonstrating impact and value is about identifying the human rules, remembering that technology is simply an enabler.
He remarked that data are stored; information is experienced.
Finally he turned to the problem of using hard data to demonstrate the value of LIS.
For example, he expressed surprise that many people in this field can't produce hard data that demonstrate that reading matters.
He cited a study that achieves this.
It showed that the single strongest factor in predicting a child's success at college is whether or not the child grows up in a house with books.
He challenged us to think of other studies we could point to as evidence of our value.
Andrew acknowledged that a lot of what we do is qualitative work, so it is hard to meta-analyse to judge impact, but we are not alone in that.
He ended by describing ours as a discovery discipline, which is art and science, politics and economics, research and teaching.
It is a social contract with our future.
Andrew Dillon's presentation is available [8].
One Minute Madness Chaired by Hazel Hall, LIS Research Coalition What is one minute madness?
The chance for conference participants to present their ideas to their peers in an informal and fun way – in exactly one minute while the audience counts down.
It also proved to be a great ice-breaker, chaired by Hazel Hall [9], and an imaginative way of presenting a snapshot of the UK LIS research landscape in 2010.
The session covered practitioner writing, use of twitter wikis and blogs, access to personal data, community engagement in public libraries, the book of life, generic social outcomes, video on-demand and many more topics.
All presentations were formulated as a response to the question 'Evidence, value and impact: what's on your mind?'
This could be a verbal sketch of a research project recently completed, in progress, being planned, or for which funding, collaborators and/or participants were sought.
Equally, delegates might choose to voice particular opinions and/or concerns about the LIS research landscape.
They were free to decide how to address the question: they could be humourous, serious, informative and/or entertaining – or even all of them at once.
With a single PowerPoint slide displayed for each presenter giving their names and affiliations and the titles of their presentations, their e-mail addresses and Twitter name (for those who had one), participants, both presenters and audience, joined in with great enthusiasm – and with only the occasional use of Hazel Hall's iPhone vuvuzula to mark that a speaker's 60 seconds were up.
Full details, including a video of the presentations, are available [10].
Breakout Sessions The conversations generated by the one minute madness continued in the breakout sessions after lunch.
These were designed to generate debate around issues related to evidence, impact and value in the context of LIS research.
Delegates were divided into four groups.
Each group attended two sessions, both of which were led by a facilitator supported by a PhD student rapporteur.
In the first, each group identified a series of challenges on either: evidence; or impact and value.
They reformulated these challenges into questions to be debated by one of the other breakout groups in the second session.
After the breakout session debates concluded, the rapporteurs relayed the main points to Charles Oppenheim who incorporated the strongest messages into his closing keynote address.
The main challenges identified for discussion, and possible future action are detailed below.
Questions Related to Research Design What kind of evidence will we need in the future?
How can we identify variables and keep pace with them?
How do we value judgements (and other variables) that change over time?
How do we balance expectations with what we value as important measures?
How do we choose 'good' research methods?
How do we convince people we are using good research methods?
Questions Related to Communicating Our Research Activities and Output To whom are we communicating our impact and values?
How do we identify the different audiences for our research output, and communicate value and impact accordingly?
How can we use our measures of impact and value for different audiences?
How can we make it possible/acceptable to disseminate news of less positive research outcomes so that we can build up knowledge of 'lessons learned'?
Broad Research Questions to Address What is the wider and longer term impact of individual library initiatives?
What is the overall benefit of LIS research?
What does the library do?
(What should the library do?)
Question on the Status of LIS Research per se To what extent is LIS research 'nice to do'?
Suggestions or comments on – or even fully fledged solutions to – any of these challenges are welcomed [11].
Closing Keynote: From Perspectives to Policy: How an Examination of Evidence, Value and Impact Can Inform the LIS Research Agenda Professor Charles Oppenheim, Loughborough University Charles Oppenheim [12] had the unenviable task of summarising the proceedings of the day in his closing address – starting out with a blank piece of paper.
Charles started by asking 'Why do LIS research?'
The responses he offered highlighted intellectual interest, greater engagement or empowerment at work – especially for practitioners, and a desire to influence policy and decision-makers.
He then went on to outline his perceptions of the landscape in which this research is conducted.
He referred to scattered effort, low levels of funding, poor appreciation of the full range of available research methods, and a lack of recognition of completed work.
LIS research is supported by a plethora of unco-ordinated funding bodies, which – understandably – leads to degree of confusion amongst a researcher community that struggles to follow all the different agendas and requirements.
However, echoing Michael Jubb, he noted that the current economic context places pressure on LIS researchers and practitioners to produce research that justifies their existence.
It also means less money is available to fund that research.
Turning to the key concepts that emerged during the day, Charles highlighted the terms 'impact' and 'human angle'.
He reminded the audience that 'impact' is currently a buzz word, particularly for those who work in Higher Education and are preparing for the next assessment of research in the form of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
In the guidelines available to date, the presentation of case studies with a strong narrative is recommended as a means of demonstrating impact.
As far as the 'human angle' is concerned, LIS research focuses on how humans create, store, disseminate and use information.
We can only be successful if we understand the ways humans interact with information, so we should not be concerned simply about information retrieval systems as technologies, but also about how humans wish to interact with the systems, reflecting Andrew Dillon's opening keynote.
Charles re-stated that we need to understand enduring behaviours so we can help library and information services users meet their goals.
Thus most LIS research necessarily involves overlap with psychology and sociology, as well as an understanding of history.
This is especially important since experience shows that what is apparently articulated as information need by end-users, for example in survey responses, is often not what is seems.
Charles continued by highlighting future important research areas, derived from listening to conversations throughout the day.
Included was the theme of information overload and the stress that it induces.
The challenge here is to make it possible for end-users to access valuable information as relevant to a particular task from the vast quantity that faces them in their daily lives.
So, how can the LIS Research Coalition continue to support the LIS research community?
Charles suggested it could take a role in disseminating anonymised 'lessons learned' from projects that did not deliver as expected; it should also continue to lobby and promote the value of LIS research as key in an information/knowledge economy, while ensuring that research ideas, researchers and research funding are connected together to best effect.
Charles Oppenheim's presentation is available [13].
Conclusion So, what did the conference achieve?
It identified the challenges that currently face the LIS research community together with the opportunities that are there for the taking.
It highlighted the need for the research and practitioner communities to shape the future agenda together.
Delegates came from across the broader LIS community and from all stages of careers in LIS research but, sadly, very few from the public library sector.
Those public librarians who did attend were however enthusiastic: in his review of the conference Michael Stead urged the public library community to recognise the value of LIS research, and recommended the involvement of the Society of Chief Librarians in the work of the LIS Research Coalition [14].
A key priority for the Coalition over the coming months will be stronger engagement with this sector.
Delegates valued the day, particularly for making contact with other LIS researchers, learning about on-going projects, and inspiring individuals' commitment to pursuing their own research objectives.
For the LIS Research Coalition, the event provided a great opportunity to bring together information about LIS research in the UK and encourage dialogue across the members of the LIS research community.
Discussions during the day have helped identify priority areas for investment of Coalition resources in the coming months.
It also put the LIS Research Coalition firmly on the map.
References The British Library (BL), Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the Research Information Network (RIN).
In March 2010 the Strategic Health Authority Library Leads (SHALL) joined as an associate member followed by the Committee on Library Co-operation in Ireland (COLICO) in June 2010.
In March 2010 the LIS Research Coalition published a report to review the activities of its implementation from August 2009 to the end of February 2010 http://lisresearchcoalition.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/2009_10_year_1_-report.pdf For details of more recent activities, visit the Coalition's Web site http://www.lisresearch.org/ Conference 2010: LIS Research Coalition http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/ Dr Michael Jubb, Director, Research Information Network (RIN) http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/speakers-facilitators-and-chairs/#MichaelJ Further details of the work that went into the establishment of the Coalition between 2006 and 2009 can be found at http://lisresearch.org/about/history/ Review of the work of the LIS Research Coalition – presentation at LISRC10 by Michael Jubb, April 2010 http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/review-of-the-work-of-the-lis-research-coalition-presentation-at-lisrc10-by-michael-jubb/ Professor Andrew Dillon, Dean and Louis T. Yule Regents Professor of Information at the School of Information, University of Texas http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/speakers-facilitators-and-chairs/#Andrew Perspectives on the evidence, value and impact of LIS research: conceptual challenges, presentation by Andrew Dillon, April 2010 http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/perspectives-on-the-evidence-value-and-impact-of-lis-research-conceptual-challenges-presented-by-andrew-dillon/ Dr Hazel Hall, Director, Centre for Social Informatics, School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/speakers-facilitators-and-chairs/#Hazel One minute madness: LIS Research Coalition http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/one-minute-madness/ Breakout sessions at LISRC10: LIS Research Coalition http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/Breakout-sessions-at-lisrc10/ Professor Charles Oppenheim, Emeritus Professor and former Head of the Department of Information Science, Loughborough University http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/speakers-facilitators-and-chairs/#Charles From perspectives to policy: how an examination of evidence, value and impact can inform the LIS research agenda, presentation by Charles Oppenheim, April 2010 http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/from-perspectives-to-policy-how-an-examination-of-evidence-value-and-impact-can-inform-the-lis-research-agenda-by-charles-oppenheim/ LIS Research Coalition Conference 2010: not really a writeup, more a springboard for rambling | Optimus Librarian http://michaelstead.org/2010/07/05/lis-research-coalition-conference-ftw-not-really-a-writeup-more-a-springboard-for-rambling/ Author Details Stephanie Kenna LIS Research Coalition Email: stephanie.kenna@lisresearch.org Web site: http://www.lisresearch.org/ Twitter: @LISResearch Return to top Article Title: "Evidence, Value and Impact: The LIS Research Landscape in 2010" Author: Stephanie Kenna Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/lisrc10-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing a Prototype Library WebApp for Mobile Devices Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing a Prototype Library WebApp for Mobile Devices Buzz data mobile java framework api javascript html restful rss xml apache metadata css xhtml browser vocabularies blog cataloguing passwords cache perl adobe widget itunes ajax json iphone ipad android html5 authentication cookie url standards jquery Citation BibTex RIS Jason Cooper and Gary Brewerton describe the development of a prototype WebApp to improve access to Library systems at Loughborough University for mobile devices.
Reviewing Loughborough University Library’s Web site statistics over a 12-month period (October 2011 – September 2012) showed a monthly average of 1,200 visits via mobile devices (eg smart phones and tablet computers).
These visits account for 4% of the total monthly average visits; but plotting the percentage of visits per month from such mobile devices demonstrated over the period a steady increase, rising from 2% to 8%.
These figures were supported by comparison with statistics from the Library’s blog, where, over the same period, there was also a steady increase in the percentage of visits from mobile devices.
This increase was on a smaller scale than the Web site, rising from 0.5% up to 4%.
Having identified this increase in the usage of mobile devices, it was decided to investigate ways to support mobile access more effectively.
As part of this investigation, the Library's Systems Team undertook the development of a prototype mobile app.
Deciding the Prototype's Features The first task undertaken was to produce a list of functionality that could be included in the Library WebApp.
The list was based upon current Library services and consisted of the following: Support library catalogue searching Display opening hours (pulled from the Library Web site so data can be maintained in one location) Display current item loans, requests and holds Indicate overdue items Indicate recalled items Offer option to renew loaned items Offer option to cancel requests for items Reading lists Ensure module list displays all modules for which the user is registered Should handle multiple levels of reading lists Include thumbnails Include library holding information Display current room/PC bookings Display list of bookings including resource name, start time and end time for each booking.
Offer option to cancel a room/PC booking Offer option to make a room/PC booking Display upcoming library events (pulled from the Library Web site) Include both upcoming workshops and events Display library news (taken as a feed from our Library blog) Offer feedback option After reviewing this list, it was decided to leave out the searching of the Library Catalogue feature as the Library's discovery tool (Ex Libris’s Primo [1]) was scheduled for a number of updates that would improve the support of mobile devices.
Therefore it was decided to wait and see how the improved mobile interface performed before deciding how to integrate it into the mobile app.
Additionally it was decided not to implement a number of the other features, those that would either require new APIs to be created for other systems or those that would alter the information stored in the other systems.
These features would be carried forward for implementation in a future version of the mobile app.
Consequently features excluded from the pilot version were: library catalogue searching the option to renew loaned items and cancel requested items the option to make or cancel a room/PC booking WebApp versus Native Apps An important early decision was whether to create the Mobile App as a WebApp or as a number of native apps?
A native app is one that is developed in the native language for the platform (Objective-C for iPhone/iPad devices, Java for Android devices, etc) and usually delivered via an app-store (iTunes for Apple, Google Play for Android, etc).
A WebApp is developed in HTML5 and JavaScript, being delivered to the mobile device via the World Wide Web.
There are pros and cons to developing a mobile app as a native app or as a WebApp.
Native apps have full access to a mobile device's resources but need to be developed as a separate app for each platform on which they are to be made available.
Conversely developing a mobile app as a WebApp restricts the resources that can be accessed to those available to the device's Web browser, although a single developed WebApp can work on multiple platforms.
There are also pros and cons with the different publishing methods of native apps and WebApps.
To be available to the majority of devices using a specific platform, native apps need to be made available through that platform’s app-store.
The process to get an app included in an app-store varies from app-store to app-store.
It usually involves an additional delay, during which the app must be checked to ensure it does not infringe the app-store's terms and conditions.
However, one advantage of publishing through a platform's app-store is that it is the first place a user will look to see if an app is available.
WebApps are a lot easier to publish as they are simply hosted on a Web server which users just access via their browser and then add a link to the WebApp on their home screen/desktop.
As there is no app-store submission procedure to navigate, there is no additional delay between finishing a version of the WebApp and releasing it.
More complex arrangements are required to advertise a WebApp, otherwise potential users may fail to realise that it has actually become available.
There is a third hybrid path available which involves the use of Adobe PhoneGap [2]/Apache Cordova [3] to convert a WebApp into a native app.
This method gives you a lot of the advantages of WebApp development (eg one set of WebApp files that will be available on multiple platforms) while also allowing you to access more of the device's resources than a pure WebApp would.
The resulting native apps produced via PhoneGap/Cordova can usually be made available by the relevant platform app-stores.
It was decided to develop the Library mobile app as a WebApp as there was no need to access any of the device's resources other than those available in the Web browser.
Moreover, developing a single WebApp would require less time and fewer resources.
Technologies The Library mobile app was developed in HTML5 [4] and makes use of the jQuery Mobile framework [5] to provide the majority of the user interface.
A mobile app using the jQuery Mobile framework consists of one or more pages.
Each page can have its own content including a header and/or footer.
A page may also have a number of pop-up container types attached to it.
These are hidden till they are triggered, at which point they pop-up and present their content to the user.
Pop-ups can be positioned either over specific pieces of content or in the centre of the window.
Both pages and pop-ups can be populated with standard HTML content, jQuery Mobile widgets or a combination of the two.
The jQuery Mobile widget types are styled to give a consistent feel to the WebApp; these styles can be overridden by either attaching specific attributes to the widget or through customising the CSS.
The widgets used by the mobile app are list views, collapsible content blocks and buttons.
The list view widget produces a list in a format that is more suitable for use on a mobile device than traditional HTML lists.
Collapsible content blocks provide a header bar with an attached container for other content.
When the user clicks/taps the block's title bar, the attached container will be collapsed or expanded, depending on its current state.
This state can also be pre-defined as expanded or collapsed when creating the widget.
jQuery Mobile automatically converts anchor elements in the content of a page to its button widget.
These are a lot easier for mobile device users to select than a traditional HTML link and again can be styled through either customising CSS or by defining a number of attributes on the source anchor element.
jQuery Mobile is built on top of the jQuery framework [6] and as such this is also required by the mobile app.
Due to it already being present and its AJAX [7] functionality being very powerful, it was decided to use jQuery for communicating with the mobile app's back-end APIs.
Back-end APIs The active functionality for the mobile app is provided through a set of back-end APIs.
These APIs are Perl CGI scripts hosted on a standard Web server and accessed via a RESTful interface.
Their output is returned in XML [8], JSON [9] or JSONP [10] format, depending on the information being returned.
Most of the back-end APIs call APIs for other Library systems and then process and filter the results before returning them to the mobile app.
The server used to host the APIs is an existing Web server that already hosts a number of other small Library projects.
Almost all the APIs require a valid security hash that identifies and authenticates the user.
As the security hash has to be passed in most API calls, all the APIs are accessed over HTTPS connections to secure them.
Each security hash is only valid for a period of time that is specified on the server.
The Pilot Mobile App As most features of the mobile app are personalised, the first APIs required by the mobile app were those to log users in and to obtain their details.
If the mobile app does not hold a current security hash, it presents users with a login form requesting their username and password.
These details are then passed to the login API for authentication.
The login API authenticates the users’ credentials against the University's Active Directory and, if they are valid, returns a security hash.
Once the mobile app has a valid security hash it is used to call the getUserDetails API which returns the following information about the user: name email address department school modules on which they are registered In addition, it also generates a new security hash and returns that to the mobile app.
As the security hash is refreshed every time the mobile app is started, users will only have to log in again if they do not use the app before their current security hash expires.
Having obtained users’ details, the mobile app presents users with its starting page, which consists of a menu with the following options: opening hours my loans my reading lists my bookings my librarian events library news Beneath this menu there is also a feedback button which allows users to send feedback to the Library.
Figure 1: Main menu page Selecting the Opening Hours option presents the user with a number of collapsible tables.
Each table contains the opening hours for one week, starting with the current week.
By default, only the first table is expanded, and the rest remain collapsed; this makes it obvious to the users which week is the current one.
The opening hours are loaded dynamically from a file on the server which is regularly generated from opening hours data contained in the content management system hosting the Library's Web site.
The opening hours data are processed and converted into JSON format then saved into a file on the mobile app's Web server.
The resulting file is ideally suited to being loaded dynamically by the mobile app.
Figure 2: Opening hours page My Loans, the next option on the main menu displays three collapsible tables (Loans, Holds and Requests).
They are populated with data retrieved from the getLoans API.
The getLoans API accesses the user's current loans, holds and requests details directly from the Library Management System (LMS), which in this case is Aleph [11] from ExLibris.
The requests to the LMS are made via its X-Server protocol.
The getLoans API returns the following details for each loan currently held by the user: title authors due date and time if it has been recalled if it is overdue The getLoans API returns just the title and authors for items being held or that have been requested, since they have no due date, recall status or overdue status.
As well as populating these tables the mobile app also populates a counter in the title bar of each collapsible table showing the number of entries contained.
These counters allow the mobile app to collapse the holds and requests tables by default, but still warn the user when there is content in there.
Figure 3: My Loans page The third option in the main menu, My Reading Lists, uses the module information for the user that was retrieved when the mobile app was started.
The module information is used to retrieve the reading lists attached to those modules from the University's reading list management system (RLMS) via its APIs.
The University uses the Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS) [12] as its RLMS which, since its redevelopment in version 6 [13], makes a very strong set of APIs available.
The mobile app presents users with a list of their reading lists along with module codes and names of tutors.
If there is no reading list available for a module the module code is annotated with the message 'No reading list for module'.
When the user selects an available reading list, the content of that list is loaded from the RLMS and displayed.
Each entry in the reading list is shown in a similar format to that used by the standard RLMS Web interface, so that the user sees the information in a consistent way.
In a reading list any entry the user can select will either be a link to another reading list or an actual item.
If it is a link to another reading list, the mobile app will repeat the process to load and display the new reading list.
If it is an item then a new page is shown with more details about the item, including metadata, library holdings and a cover image, provided one is available from Google Books [14].
Figure 4: Reading list item page When the user selects the My Bookings option from the main menu a table lists their current and upcoming bookings of library resources (Rooms, PC, etc.).
Each booking entry shows the resource booked along with the start and end dates and times of the booking.
The booking information is retrieved from the Library's resource booking system (WUBS) [15] using an API that had been developed previously for extracting a specific user's future bookings.
The last personalised feature is the My Librarian feature, where the user is presented with the details for the Library contact responsible for their school/department.
The mobile app obtains a list of Library contacts from an existing system that is used to provide Library contact information to a number of online systems.
Each entry in the list returned contains the contacts’ name, job title, email address, URL of an image and, if relevant, the school for which they are responsible.
The mobile app uses this information to select the Academic Librarian who is responsible for that user’s school or department and present his or her details at the top of the page.
If there is no Academic Librarian so designated, then a predefined fall-back option is used, currently the Library's Customer Services Manager.
Underneath the main contact's details is a collapsed list of all other Library contacts which users can expand to look through if they are looking for a specific Academic Librarian to contact.
The Events and Library News options in the main menu operate in the same way with the information of these being obtained from RSS feeds [16].
The Events information is taken from an RSS feed on the Library Web site and the Library news from an RSS feed on the Library's blog.
As RSS feeds are in a consistent XML format the mobile app just needs one function to process them and populate a collapsible list with their content.
If the RSS entry has a link attached, then the entry in the list will link through to that in case the user wishes to find out more details.
When the feedback option is selected by the user it presents a form in a pop-up.
The form contains two text fields for the user to complete, subject and message.
There is also a button that, when selected, will pass the subject and message along with the user's name and email address to the feedback API.
The feedback API uses this information to create and send an email to a predefined email address.
With the exception of the main menu of the mobile app, all pages have a back button located in the left-hand side of the header bar.
This provides the user with a consistent means of returning to the previous page.
Benefits of HTML5 Two key features of HTML5 for WebApp development are caching and local storage.
Local storage allows the mobile app to store data locally in the browser in key/value pairs which can only be accessed by the Web site that created it.
Local storage is similar in many ways to HTTP cookies except they can store larger quantities of data and are not sent to the server with the HTTP requests.
They can also only store primitive JavaScript data types and arrays.
To store more complex objects in local storage, the mobile app has first to convert them into a JSON string, and, when retrieving them, it has to parse that JSON string to recreate the object.
Every time the mobile app retrieves and processes data from an API, a copy of the resulting value/object is stored in local storage.
If a call to an API fails, then the mobile app checks to see if there is a suitable entry in the local storage and, if so, it retrieves the value/object from local storage and uses that.
This provides users with access to the majority of their data even when they do not have an Internet connection.
The caching aspect of HTML lets the mobile app specify which resources should be cached locally by the browser and which URLs should never be cached.
When a browser loads a WebApp which specifies a cache manifest file, the browser will download it and compare it to the previous version it has cached.
If the contents of the two files differ, then the browser will use the latest version and reload its cache by downloading all the listed cacheable resources.
From then on, when the browser is asked to retrieve a resource, it will check to see if it has a cached version and, if so, will use that.
During the development it was discovered that trying to cache too much data would cause problems for some browsers and devices due to upper limits of the quantity of data they can cache.
Caching HTML, JavaScript, Style Sheets and icon files worked well, but trying to cache larger images quickly filled up the cache.
Development Timescale The time taken actually to produce the pilot version of the mobile app was approximately two weeks and the development was undertaken by a single developer, working around his usual tasks.
The quick development time was mainly thanks to the initial choices made in the project.
Developing a single WebApp instead of multiple native apps significantly reduced the time and breadth of knowledge required.
Moreover, the decision to limit the initial content for the mobile app to that which was easily available via existing APIs removed the need to develop APIs for other systems.
The developer was already skilled in Web development and had a very good understanding of the programming languages involved.
Using jQuery Mobile allowed him to concentrate on the content of the mobile app and still feel confident that the final look and feel would be suitable for a mobile app.
Furthermore, the use of jQuery Mobile allowed local branding to be easily applied through the mobile app's style sheet.
Piloting the Mobile App and Future Enhancements Given the plethora of mobile devices available, it was impractical to test the mobile app on a majority of devices.
Instead, testing took place on a small number of devices covering the supported platforms (Android and Apple IOS).
This testing showed the mobile app to work in the standard browsers used on the Android and Apple platforms.
Thereafter, the mobile app was made available to users in a pilot phase to discover any device-specific bugs.
The pilot version of the mobile app was made available to members of the University during November 2012.
Over the next few weeks, 65 people made use of the app and a number of feedback emails were received from users.
The main content of these emails were requests for additional functionality rather than bug reports.
The lack of device-specific bugs has been attributed to the use of the jQuery and jQuery Mobile frameworks, as they already take a lot of device-specific discrepancies into account.
After reviewing the new feature requests a list of functionality for future releases of the mobile app was drawn up.
The features in development for the next version of the mobile app are: Renewing loans Cancelling loan requests Booking resources Cancelling booked resources There are already APIs available for renewing loans and cancelling loan requests in the local LMS which should allow easy addition of those functions to the mobile app.
On the other hand, the making and cancelling bookings functions will require more in-depth development as there are currently no APIs for these operations in the local resource-booking system.
Conclusion The jQuery Mobile framework with the jQuery framework is a very powerful and effective tool for developing WebApps and, provided suitable APIs are available, can be used to produce a usable mobile app in a very short period of time.
Also by using existing resources, the development of a mobile app can be achieved with very little financial outlay.
References Ex Libris: Primo http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/PrimoOverview PhoneGap http://phonegap.com/ Brian Leroux.
PhoneGap Blog: PhoneGap, Cordova, and what’s in a name?
http://phonegap.com/2012/03/19/phonegap-cordova-and-what%E2%80%99s-in-a-name/ W3C.
HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ jQuery Mobile http://jquerymobile.com/ jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library http://jquery.com/ Powers, S., 2007.
Adding Ajax: Making Existing Sites More Interactive.
O’Reilly Media.
W3C.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) http://www.w3.org/XML/ JSON: Introducing JSON http://www.json.org/ JSON-P: Safer cross-domain Ajax with JSON-P/JSONP http://json-p.org/ Ex Libris Aleph Integrated Library System http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/Aleph LORLS: Loughborough Online Reading List System http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/lorls Jon Knight, Jason Cooper, Gary Brewerton.
"Redeveloping the Loughborough Online Reading List System".
July 2012, Ariadne, Issue 69 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue69/knight-et-al Google Books http://books.google.com/ Web User Booking System (WUBS) http://sourceforge.net/projects/wubs/ RSS Advisory Board.
RSS 2.0 Specification http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Author Details Dr Jason Cooper Library Systems Analyst/Programmer Loughborough University Email: j.l.cooper@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/ Dr Jason Cooper has been a member of the Library Systems at Loughborough University for eight years.
He develops and maintains a number of key systems for the Library.
Gary Brewerton Library Systems Manager Loughborough University Email: g.p.brewerton@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/ Gary Brewerton is the Library Systems Manager at Loughborough University and is interested in library automation, information and communication technology, and open source development (eg LORLS).
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Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) Project Launch Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) Project Launch Conference Buzz data framework dissemination metadata blog repositories cookie taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Ray Harper reports on a one-day conference which launched the DREaM Project, held by the Library and Information Science Research Coalition in London on 19 July 2011.
The DREaM (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) Conference [1] was held at the British Library Conference Centre in London in July 2011.
The conference was attended by 86 delegates, and consisted of an overview of the DREaM Project, two keynote papers, a one-minute madness session, and four parallel breakout sessions.
I had the opportunity to attend as a sponsored delegate, thanks to Glen Recruitment, Sue Hill Recruitment and TFPL.
Welcome Address Professor Hazel Hall, Edinburgh Napier University The welcome address was given by Professor Hazel Hall.
The Library and Information Science (LIS) Research Coalition aims to develop research capacity and capability, build sustainable foundations for long-term collaborations, and to engage practitioners with research activity.
A key theme she highlighted was the importance of collaboration across sectors within the library and information profession, as well as communication across disciplines outside library and information science.
Professor Hall highlighted the concept of a ‘cadre’ of individuals working as a group, and how collaborative working can act as a backbone to support change.
As a strand of LIS Research Coalition activity, the DREaM Project is focused on developing research methods, and building up practitioners’ knowledge of different approaches to research.
The DREaM Project will involve two conferences (this one and a concluding event in July 2012), and three workshops in between those conferences specifically to cover research methods not traditionally conducted in LIS research.
Potential participants are encouraged to attend all three workshops for continuity, and to engage with the DREaM Project via online communities like Spruz [2].
At the concluding event in July 2012, there will be a Practitioner Research Excellence Award of £500 to recognise excellence in a practitioner research project.
The British Library.
Photo by Emily Barney.
(Usage.)
Opening Keynote: “… And into the zone of quasi-rationality” Professor Blaise Cronin, Indiana University, USA The opening keynote from Professor Blaise Cronin gave a lucid and detailed overview of the current library and information research landscape.
He began by discussing Pierce Butler’s An Introduction to Library Science (1933) to show the roots of librarianship and information science in scientific knowledge and sociological principles.
He illustrated a later shift towards a more humanistic approach in Butler’s thinking (and in the wider development of library science) with examples of direct action, lobbying and public debate over the connection between libraries and democracy.
These examples were particularly relevant to recent campaigns to save public libraries from closure or cut-backs (notably the Wirral in the UK).
Professor Cronin went on to discuss limitations of current library and information research, drawing on Bradford’s law of scatter to present a field that sometimes contains research which is too marginal and trivial.
One reason for this (particularly in the USA) is that librarians have to publish articles in order to gain tenure in academic libraries.
He suggested that a major limitation of library and information research is that it talks to itself a great deal, but sometimes fails fully to communicate and connect with other research disciplines.
A good example of this is the failure to engage with significant theoretical frameworks developed by French post-modernists like Foucault and Derrida; a situation which Cronin described as ‘critical chill’.
Cronin also drew on evidence indicating that most of the research on information behaviour in library and information research is ignored by other disciplines [3].
He then outlined the key criticisms of library and information research, particularly weak experimental design and a lack of meta-analysis.
He drew attention to the ‘theoretical bricolage’* in library and information science, with its failure fully to accumulate a corpus of research evidence and theories, in a way which other disciplines like Chemistry have managed.
An example he offered was the prevalence of ‘cookie cutter’ research studies, which carry out research in a formulaic way to investigate topics whose basic parameters never change; he gave the example of studies on the ‘Information needs of_____’.
The focus on the lack of cumulation in library and information research reminded me of Dr Ross Todd’s keynote address at EBLIP (Evidence Based Library and Information Practice) 6 , where he criticised the creation of a vast array of models of information literacy without fully consolidating the findings for practical use.
Professor Cronin provided some background to this, citing a 1986 study by Harris [4] on the field, and drew on a recent observation by Professor Charles Oppenheim, Loughborough University, to the effect that library and information science research is ‘poorly funded, poorly conducted and poorly recognised’.
In this light, he looked back to a so-called ‘golden era’ between 1965-1990, when significant funding was directed towards research and practitioner bodies like Aslib (Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureau), CRUS (Centre for Research on User Studies), PCRC (Primary Communications Research Centre)  and CCR (Centre for Communications Research).
As a relatively young professional, I found it interesting to hear more about bodies and research centres which existed before CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), because it gives some context to the history and direction of our profession.
Cronin then went on to discuss key areas where the field has the strength and potential to improve, directing our attention to the development of evidence-based librarianship, which attempts to integrate a strong scientific element back into library ‘science’.
He pointed out that research can be useful in demonstrating the value of library and information services, referring to a paper on the ‘economic value of elephants’.
He then referred to various studies around the issue of ‘value’.
These included Professor Don King’s research in the 1970s, current research at the University of Colorado [5], and research showing that the British Library generates 4.4 times the value of the investment it receives [6].
In terms of the ‘value’ and ‘impact’ of LIS research itself, Cronin highlighted evidence indicating that LIS research is being increasingly cited outside the area, in disciplines as varied as computer science, business management and health research.
There was evidence for this in a study by Martyn and Cronin (1983) [7].
An added dimension is that PhD students in LIS are increasingly being supervised by academics whose PhD is from outside LIS [8].
In this light, he drew attention to the i-Schools concept, taken up by many LIS schools in the USA, and increasingly in Britain, with one notable example, the University of Sheffield’s i-School [9].
This can be seen as an opportunity for greater collaboration among disciplines, but could equally be perceived as a threat to library and information science.
He explained that Indiana University is deliberately recruiting academics from outside LIS to ensure an interdisciplinary focus, and called for more library and information schools in the UK to take more risks in recruiting researchers from outside the LIS area.
He gave the example of Professor Susan Herring (Indiana University) [10], who is an expert on discourse analysis, has a PhD in Linguistics and is a Professor in Information Science.
The call for interdisciplinary working is supported by evidence that research papers and publications are increasingly being written by multiple authors, with single authors becoming less common.
This was shown in a 2010 study by Vincent Larivière, which found that highly cited research is often collaborative and co-authored.
Cronin explored the issue of collaborative research in his study on Rob Kling’s work, finding that physical location can be a key factor in determining with whom researchers collaborate [11].
Professor Cronin concluded with a useful positioning matrix, which gave some indications of decisions over where and how to develop LIS research.
This showed for example, that if there was low opportunity and low capability, then researchers should exit the field.
In contrast, if there was high opportunity and high capability, greater investment should be made into that particular research area.
This perceptive analysis was pertinent to the aim of DREaM to capitalise on opportunities for research, and develop capacity in the area.
One-minute Madness Chaired by Stephanie Kenna (LIS Research Coalition) A ‘one-minute madness’ session gave delegates the opportunity to talk for one minute about a topic of their choice this could be a research project, activity or personal reflections.
This took place at the 2010 LIS Research Coalition Conference [12] (of which a report appears in Ariadne Issue 64 [13]), and at the recent EBLIP6 conference in Salford [14].
Neatly tying in with the theme of demonstrating ‘value’, Adam Steventon presented his PhD research into the impact of information management, which is developing progress markers and indicators to measure impact [15].
Ella Taylor-Smith (Edinburgh Napier University) presented a summary of the ‘Online Ambition’ Project which is helping job seekers to use the Internet to locate employment [16].
The notion of assisting job seekers through an online environment has some similarities with the CPD23 blog [17].
Raising Your Research Dissemination Ambitions Dr Philip Hills, Editor, International Journal of Information Management The afternoon consisted of four breakout sessions followed by the closing keynote.
I attended the session on ‘Raising your research dissemination ambitions’, a really useful and practical session on writing up research, submitting to peer-reviewed journals and considering other dissemination routes.
In small groups, we listed the variety of possible ways in which research could be disseminated.
They included: journal papers, conference papers, mainstream media (newspapers and radio), social networks, departmental seminars in universities, submissions to government, institutional repositories, email lists, internal briefing papers, private circulation to experts, reports for funding bodies, blogs, Slideshare, poster sessions, public lectures and toolkits.
When we considered how research had been disseminated in the past, the list was far shorter; demonstrating that LIS researchers should be more open to different means of sharing research.
A key issue raised was that researchers in the UK feel pressured towards publishing in peer-reviewed journals, as other dissemination routes (such as Open Access journals) do not carry as much weight in research assessment (eg, the Research Excellence Framework).
We then discussed various problems experienced in submitting papers to peer-reviewed journals.
An issue which was mentioned by a few delegates was the perception that the submission process could be rather mechanical, with automated emails confirming submission, and minimal contact from the editor whilst a paper was being considered.
One delegate felt that the submission process was a ‘black hole’, referring to an instance where he had waited two years for a paper to be reviewed in a particular journal!
A general operational issue was in having to change the format of references for each journal, which some delegates found frustrating and time-consuming (given that most journals have a different referencing style).
A problem which some researchers had encountered was the conflicting feedback comments that they had received from different reviewers, which made it difficult to effect appropriate amendments to a research paper.
The discussion also revealed that some researchers felt that the publishing process involved a certain amount of bias towards well-established researchers, or even suspicion of less experienced researchers.
The session was concluded with a debate over how communication of research in journal papers could be improved.
Dr Hills made the useful suggestion of contacting a journal editor two months after submitting a paper to see what stage of review the paper had reached.
He added that writers should ensure that the abstract, title and references are clear and distinctive, because these are elements which editors initially use to judge a paper.
A useful suggestion in the discussion was to ensure effective metadata and keywords are associated with a paper, so that the research could be easily located in a Web search.
In addition, it was suggested that researchers could share an early version of their paper with peers via a social network site, and consider sharing detailed statistics via a web site.
Professor Cronin suggested the option of self-publishing (through presses like Bloomington Press), which allows researchers to share their research even if it may involve personal expense.
Other Breakout Sessions The main points and outcomes of the other breakout sessions were usefully summarised for the benefit of the whole conference by rapporteurs.
Research Techniques A session on ‘Extending your research methods repertoire’ was facilitated by Professor Julie McLeod and Elizabeth Lomas, Northumbria University.
This explored a range of different research techniques, including the Delphi method, cooperative inquiry and community engagement.
The Delphi technique is a relatively new method, which uses a panel of experts to answer various questions on a topic, and can be used as a ‘forecasting tool’ for research data.
The advantage of this method is that it is an iterative process, developing its data and findings incrementally.
Delegates highlighted disadvantages of this approach, including difficulty over how ‘experts’ are defined, and the way that the researchers can choose which key messages are communicated.
Co-operative Inquiry Co-operative inquiry is a method derived from action research, and focuses on research as an activity which involves study participants as ‘co-researchers’.
The benefits of this approach are that it embraces a diverse range of perspectives, and is a transparent way of investigating a topic.
However, there are practical issues associated with participants’ commitment, and how far confidentiality and ethical standards can be maintained.
This method seemed particularly interesting in the light of Professor Cronin’s commentary on collaborative research, and on the wider aim of the DREaM Project to involve practitioners in research.
Community Engagement Community engagement and consultation was the final method discussed in this breakout session.
The focus of this type of approach is to engage with a local ‘community’ group, who could be library patrons, library user groups or colleagues across an organisation.
This approach is interesting in the light of ongoing UK government policy around the area of empowering local communities, particularly the Total Place and Big Society initiatives.
The method’s key feature is the vast quantity and depth of data which it can produce, which are simultaneously its major weakness and strength.
Inter-disciplinary Collaboration On the theme of inter-disciplinary collaboration, Professor Sara Rankin, Imperial College London and Gina Czarnecki, artist, facilitated a session on ‘Stepping out of the comfort zone by collaborating across disciplines’.
This drew on the example of their joint work on stem cells in teeth to highlight the opportunities for inter-disciplinary collaborative research [18].
It also made us aware that there are now incentives from research councils for carrying out inter-disciplinary research.
Inter-disciplinary research can support greater creativity, and can be a beneficial learning experience for both parties.
A practical way of engaging with other disciplines is to attend conferences and workshops outside the ‘comfort zone’ of your own subject area.
There is now an opportunity to ‘stitch’ together research taking place across different disciplines, and provide some kind of ‘meta-analysis’ which could help to consolidate the mass of research findings which constantly emerge in different subjects.
The biggest challenge of this type of collaborative approach is that it requires trust among researchers, and requires them to relinquish total control over their work.
Cultivating Networks The final breakout was on the topic of ‘Cultivating networks’ and was led by Professor Gunilla Widén, Åbo Akademi School of Business and Economics, Finland.
This identified a gap between research and practice, with a perception that academia and ‘practice’ are two entirely different career paths.
This situation means there is a need for active professional networks (like the LIS Research Coalition) to provide a network and forum for discussion and information sharing.
It is also important that there is strong leadership in the area of library and information research, because this can support the cultivation of active and valuable networks.
Closing Keynote Dr Dylan Evans, University College Cork, Republic of Ireland The closing keynote by Dr Dylan Evans, Lecturer in Behavioural Science [19] presented a fascinating overview of the speaker’s shift across a variety of research disciplines.
Dr Evans had originally studied for a degree in Linguistics and Spanish, before gaining a Masters in Psycho-analysis, then going on to study for a PhD in Philosophy.
In keeping with this unusual career trajectory, he has recently worked in the area of robotics engineering, and currently works as an academic in a medical department!
The presentation suggested that most academic researchers tend to stick with their own discipline, and look down on researchers who go across disciplines.
In fact, there is a lot to be gained from inter-disciplinary working, particularly as this kind of collaboration can support a positive cross-fertilisation of ideas and produce original research.
Dr Evans argued that most disciplines have not yet reached the ‘mature’ stage in their development, to use Thomas Kuhn’s terminology.
Increasing specialisation in certain research areas means that academic disciplines can become territorial and anti-competitive, which is a barrier to collaborative and inter-disciplinary research.
He illustrated the drawbacks of highly specialised research fields through the example of a medical professional who is unable to treat an illness, responding with the mantra ‘it’s not my organ’.
In contrast to this niche approach to research, Dr Evans gave the example of a collaborative project between robotics engineering and cardiovascular research, with ‘rapid proto-typing’ capable of creating bespoke 3D models of a human heart [20].
He also gave the example of his collaboration with a digital artist [21].
He did mention that there was a risk of moving between disciplines too much, but argued that sometimes it is worth taking risks to progress in a research career.
When asked if he had considered collaborative research with the LIS research area, he highlighted his interest in investigating ‘information silos’ in the mind, and in creating a model of mental structure.
This was a very thought-provoking talk, particularly as it made me consider whether the traditional boundaries between research areas can represent a barrier to useful and worthwhile research.
Conclusion This was a really valuable and thought-provoking conference, and I am glad that I had the opportunity to attend.
The mix of theoretical overview (in Professor Cronin’s paper) and practical advice (in the session on research dissemination) made the event highly relevant to the LIS research community.
There are clearly challenges attendant on engaging with disciplines outside LIS, and on attempting to consolidate the vast array of research findings in the field.
There are also issues surrounding the reform of how we disseminate research, and how to ensure that it reaches practitioners in a relevant form.
The key message I took away was the importance of collaboration, both within the LIS area and with other disciplines, to support practical improvements in the quality and sharing of research.
*Editor's note: bricolage: 1.
(in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things.
2. something created in this way (origin from  French).
The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th edition.
References Library and Information Science Research Coalition DREaM launch event http://lisresearch.org/dream-project/dream-event-1-launch-conference-tuesday-19-july-2011/ Library and Information Science Research Coalition on LIS New Professionals Network Spruz http://www.lisnpn.spruz.com/profile/LISResearch/ Fisher, K., Julien, H., "Information Behavior."
In: Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, Cronin, B (ed.)
Medford, NJ: Information Today.
2009, 43, pp.317-358.
Harris, M. H., The Dialectic of Defeat: Antimonies in Research in Library and Information Science.
Library Trends, Winter 1986, pp.515-531.
Wiersma, G., Fong, Y., "Towards Demonstrating Value: Measuring the Contributions of Library Collections to University Research and Teaching Goals Denise Pan".
2011 (ALA event) http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/national/2011/papers/towards_demonstratin.pdf Pung, C., Elwes, T., Marks, P., "Measuring the Economic Impact of the British Library".
Paper at the conference ‘Demonstrating Impact’ at the British Library on 21 June 2004 http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/increasingvalue/publicvalue/confpres/pungelwesmarks.pdf Martyn, J., Cronin, B., “Assessing the impact and benefits of information and library research”.
Journal of Documentation, 1983, 39(3), pp.171 – 191.
Cronin, B., Meho, L I., "The shifting balance of intellectual trade in information studies".
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2008, 59(4), pp.551-564.
University of Sheffield i-School http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/is Professor Susan Herring, Indiana University http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/herring/cv.html Cronin, B., Shaw, D., “Peers and Spheres of Influence: Situating Rob Kling”.
The Information Society, July 2007, 23(4), pp.221-233,.
LIS Research Coalition Conference 2010 Archive http://lisresearch.org/conference-2010/ Stephanie Kenna.
"Evidence, Value and Impact: The LIS Research Landscape in 2010".
July 2010, Ariadne, Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/lisrc10-rpt/ Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP) 6 http://www.eblip6.salford.ac.uk/ Adam Steventon PhD topic http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/research/PhDstudents/Steventon.html Online Ambition Project (Edinburgh Napier University) http://itc.napier.ac.uk/huwy/onlineambition.pdf CPD23: 23 Things for Professional Development http://cpd23.blogspot.com/2011/05/all-about-23-things.html Editor’s note: readers may be interested in Ariadne coverage in this area: Helen Leech.
"23 Things in Public Libraries".
July 2010, Ariadne, Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/leech/ BBC report on collaborative research project: James Gallagher, ‘Stem cell project needs 12,000 baby teeth’.
BBC News, Health, 31 March 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12906968 Dr Dylan Evans http://www.dylan.org.uk/ 'Rapid prototyping' project summary http://www.dylan.org.uk/leverhulme.PDF Dr Dylan Evans’ collaborative project with a digital artist http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/Cyber-Doll/Cyber-Doll.htm Author Details Ray Harper Planning Assistant University of Sheffield Email: r.harper@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.shef.ac.uk/pgs Ray Harper works as Planning Assistant at the University of Sheffield in Planning and Governance Services.
In this role, he is involved in the submission of statutory returns to funding bodies, internal reporting of student numbers, and the provision of management information across the University.
In particular he supports the Faculty of Medicine with business planning, competitor analysis and target setting.
His previous posts include a graduate traineeship at Emmanuel College Library (University of Cambridge), a knowledge management role in a research consultancy (CUREE) and a role in taxonomy development in the NHS.
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Book Review: The Expert Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Expert Library Buzz data archives metadata preservation cataloguing visualisation gis curation e-science research Citation BibTex RIS Sylvie Lafortune reviews a book taking a hard look at academic libraries, how they are being redefined and what skills will be required of the staff who will move them forward.
E-Science, creative disorder, innovators wanted, core competencies and hybridisation of library personnel are some of the concepts you will find in the titles of the 13 chapters which make up this collected work.
The editors, both library administrators at two large universities in the US, introduce the book by asking: in view of the major changes that are taking place in academic libraries, who should we be hiring to provide services in areas of 'critical campus concern' such as undergraduate research, data curation, intellectual property management and e-science?
Indeed, this question is not taken lightly, and some of the answers offered by the authors are the result of extensive, ongoing discussion and reflection on how best to build capacity in libraries to deal with emerging resources and services.
Content of the Book The first four chapters focus more broadly on academic library staffing and fundamental questions are raised and examined (all 13 chapter headings are listed below under Information on Reviewed Book).
How are job responsibilities evolving as the boundaries of libraries expand in areas such as publishing, teaching and learning and entrepreneurial initiatives, to name just a few?
Are the traditional core competencies (obtained via a Master of Library Science(MLS) degree) still relevant?
Some authors suggest that libraries are increasingly turning towards non-MLS professionals with diplomas in instructional design, informatics and new media.
Certainly, there is a consensus on the need for new personnel selection processes which go beyond recruitment for specific skill sets.
Within the new library environment, defined by fluidity in terms of job content as well as boundaries within the organisation, 'soft skills' are equally, if not more, important than core competencies.
Flexibility, adaptability and commitment to continuous learning are the 'soft skills' most often referred to, although the author of the third chapter emphasises the importance of communication, political and technical skills in libraries.
He also reminds us that it is increasingly important to work in teams because all the required competencies for the 'expert library of the 21st century' cannot possibly be carried by an individual.
It is worth noting here that the fourth chapter provides a comprehensive review and analysis of what has been done in terms of 'competency planning'.
Chapters 5 through 12 provide an overview of either the transformation of traditional roles such as reference/subject librarians or cataloguers, or of emerging trends in disciplines or services which have a direct impact on staffing in academic libraries.
Chapters 5, 6 and 12 look at the strategic role of liaison librarians.
There is tremendous pressure on this category of staff in academic libraries because they represent the public faces of their organisations.
As such, they need to demonstrate the 'added value' that the library brings to the teaching and research mandate of their university.
They are called upon to develop new 'collaborative skills' as they contribute to teaching and learning teams.
They must also thrive in an environment marked by ambiguity and constantly changing user needs.
Chapter 10 provides an excellent overview of the future of cataloguing in academic libraries: new tasks, new work areas, new competencies.
Staff in this area will need to balance the orderly (traditional cataloguing) and the disorderly (user-generated metadata and distributed, reusable Web content (p. 271)).
Chapter 9 examines how e-science challenges the library to rethink how it can support research based on cyberinfrastructure (simulation, high-performance computing, visualisation and capacity to store massive amounts of data).
The author focuses on two emerging areas of concern for the academic library: data curation and preservation and inter-disciplinary research and virtual organisation.
The last chapter deals with the 'how to' of organisational change or, more specifically, how academic libraries can plan and implement the changes they need to make to stay relevant to their parent institutions.
The authors review a management approach called 'Organization Development' (OD) which focuses on the human side of organisations and which has been widely adopted in libraries.
OD draws on an assortment of powerful tools to help organisations 'sail smoothly' through the unsettling process of change.
However, the authors remind us that organisational change requires commitment and patience as it does not happen overnight.
Conclusion This book is highly recommended: it provides a wealth of up-to-date information on the current situation of academic libraries and what will be required to move them forward.
It draws from the research and expertise of 18 professional staff who work in academic libraries all over the US.
Therefore, to get the most out of this work, readers will need to have some background knowledge of the academic library environment.
Summary of Chapters The Expert Library: Sustaining, Staffing and Advancing the Academic Library in the 21st Century.
Edited by Scott Walter and Karen Williams, Association of College & Research Libraries, 2010, ISBN 978-083898551-9 Foreword v The Hybridization of Library Personnel Resources: New Responsibilities Demand Staff Diversity James G. Neal Introduction ix Scott Walter and Karen Williams Chapter 1: p.1 Academic Library Staffing A Decade From Now David W. Lewis Chapter 2: p.30 New Challenges in Academic Library Personnel Selection John Lehner Chapter 3: p.52 Innovators Wanted: No Experience Necessary?
R. David Lankes Chapter 4: p.76 Put the Pieces Together and You Get the Perfect Academic Librarian or Do You?
: What Competency Standards Tell Us About Academic Librarianship in the 21st Century Heather Gendron Chapter 5: p.93 The New Liaison Librarian: Competencies for the 21st Century Academic Library Craig Gibson and Jamie Wright Coniglio Chapter 6: p.127 Preparing Our Librarians for the Future: Identifying and Assessing Core Competencies at the University of Minnesota Libraries Stephanie H. Crowe and Janice M. Jaguszewski Chapter 7: p.158 Ph.D. Holders in the Academic Library: The CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program Marta L. Brunner Chapter 8: p.190 The Publisher in the Library Michael J. Furlough Chapter 9: p.234 E-Science, Cyberinfrastructure, and the Changing Face of Scholarship: Organizing for New Models of Research Support at the Purdue University Libraries Jake R. Carlson and Jeremy R. Garritano Chapter 10: p.270 Creative Disorder: The Work of Metadata Librarians in the 21st Century Kevin Clair Chapter 11: p.292 Listen Up, Librarians: It's All About the Message Eric Bartheld Chapter 12: p.314 Teaching the Teachers: Developing a Teaching Improvement Program for Academic Librarians Beth S. Woodard and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe Chapter 13: p.337 Creating Smooth Sailing: The Benefits of Organization Development for the Expert Library Elaine Z. Jennerich and M. Sue Baughman About the authors: p.365 About the Editors Scott Walter is Associate University Librarian for Services and Associate Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Karen Williams is Associate University Librarian for Academic Programs at the University of Minnesota.
Author Details Sylvie Lafortune Government Information and Data Librarian Laurentian University Sudbury Ontario Canada Email: slafortune@laurentian.ca Web site: http://www.laurentian.ca/library/ Sylvie Lafortune is an Associate Librarian at Laurentian University of Sudbury, one of the two bilingual universities in Canada.
Her main area of responsibility is Government Information, Data and GIS.
She is currently Chair of the Department of Library and Archives at her institution.
For the past few years, she has enjoyed being the faculty advisor for the World University Service of Canada Local Committee at Laurentian.
Return to top Article Title: The Expert Library: Sustaining, Staffing and Advancing the Academic Library in the 21st Century (book review) Author: Sylvie Lafortune Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/lafortune-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Realising the Potential of Altmetrics within Institutions Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Realising the Potential of Altmetrics within Institutions Buzz data metadata doi digitisation identifier blog repositories passwords aggregation adobe twitter url research altmetrics Citation BibTex RIS Jean Liu and Euan Adie of Altmetric take a look at the growing presence of altmetrics in universities, and consider some of the potential applications.
The concept of alternative metrics as indicators of non-traditional forms of research impact – better known as ‘altmetrics’ – has been gaining significant attention and support from both the scholarly publishing and academic communities.
After being adopted by many publishing platforms and institutional repositories within the past year, altmetrics have entered into the scholarly mainstream, emerging as a relevant topic for academic consideration amidst mounting opposition to misuse of the Journal Impact Factor.
The future of altmetrics has mostly been discussed in the context of highlighting research impact.
Although the metrics themselves still require much refinement, qualitative highlights from these data are valuable and have already begun to appear in the digital CVs of researchers.
It is likely that qualitative altmetrics data will be increasingly used to inform research assessment, such as in funding applications, as well as faculty promotion and tenure.
However, the development of altmetrics is still in its early stages.
Moreover, much of the data collected at the moment indicates the attention paid to rather than the quality of different scholarly works, and it is important to bear this in mind and to distinguish between the different kinds of impact that a piece of research can have [1].
Altmetrics are very good at finding evidence of some kinds of impact and not so much others.
They complement rather than replace existing methods.
The Altmetric Service Our service, Altmetric [2], is an aggregator of online attention surrounding scholarly content, primarily journal articles and datasets [3].
Mentions of scholarly content on social media posts, news coverage, blog posts, and other sources are picked up as online attention, and are displayed in “article details pages”, which allow users to see who has mentioned specific articles, and what has actually been said (Figure 1).
The article details pages were principally designed with publishers and their authors in mind, and include both quantitative measures (raw metrics, along with an aggregate estimate of attention known as the Altmetric score [4]) and qualitative content (the mentions themselves).
In the context of research assessment, it is important to bear in mind that the Altmetric score merely estimates the amount of attention paid to the article, and does not in any way judge the quality of a scholarly work.
The score’s primary use is for article discovery, as readers are able to filter quickly through an immense collection of articles by the amount of social attention, therefore potentially uncovering new and interesting articles to read.
Figure 1:  Screenshot of an Altmetric article details page Although Altmetric’s data and tools have thus far been geared towards scholarly publishers, we have recently begun to work with institutions.
Our institutional experience formally began in February 2013, when we started providing services and tools free to academic librarians and institutional repositories [5].
The feedback that we have received from librarians and repository managers has been very positive, although the fact that Altmetric’s products are publisher-oriented means that there is still much to be done to achieve greater value for institutional use.
In this article, we will explore the potential for altmetrics to be used effectively within the institutional environment.
We will also examine some of the possible applications of altmetrics from the perspectives of the different end-users and of the university as a research institution.
Enriching Altmetrics for Researchers Many of the online discussions taking place about research are initiated by academics, who are increasingly using social media platforms [6], blogs [7], and Web-based peer review platforms for scholarly discourse.
Qualitative altmetrics data are potentially useful to researchers on a personal level.
Altmetrics tools aggregate online attention rapidly, and within days of an article’s publication, researchers are often able to see the online conversations about and mentions of their work that would otherwise have been difficult and time-consuming to find.
Many researchers are pleasantly surprised by the amount of press coverage and social media attention accorded their articles, and are also appreciative of how the metrics are calculated at the article (not journal) level.
One neuroscientist who had published in a newer open-access journal wrote to us, saying that Altmetric ‘… allow[s] research articles like mine, that were largely ignored by the major journals, to have a chance at making an impact and contributing to my career.’ [8] The immediacy of altmetrics is a great advantage to researchers, especially when describing the impacts of their work.
Altmetrics are rapid proxies for attention and article uptake [9].
Moreover, qualitative altmetrics data can occasionally provide evidence that an article has made an impact within society, separate from an article’s academic impact (as indicated by the number of citations) [2].
For instance, healthcare practitioners may be less likely to publish and cite works in the medical literature, but might only have time to blog or tweet about new interventions that they have read about and applied in the clinic.
Scholarly Publishers’ Use of Altmetrics Although researchers have much to gain from consuming altmetrics data, the available filtering applications and data analysis tools have so far been more focused on the needs of publishers.
We have seen that publishers are motivated to adopt altmetrics into journal platforms for two main reasons: to help their editors understand the reader engagement with their articles [10]; and to provide valuable data that can potentially incentivise researchers to submit papers to the publication.
At Altmetric, we have collected attention data for approximately 1.7m articles (as of 13 November 2013).
For our publisher-oriented application, the Altmetric Explorer, we developed various filters to help users find articles of interest and navigate quickly through the huge amount of scholarly content.
The filters include time frame, journal titles (and ISSN), article identifiers (eg DOI, PubMed ID, handle, etc.
), publisher, PubMed query, and others, but filtering by people or institutions is still in active development.
We also provide contextual information to help users make sense of the attention scores, but the comparisons are at the journal, rather than discipline, level.
As toolmakers who are also interested in exploring the potential of altmetrics in institutions, we think that it is important to address some key areas for improvement.
Clustering Altmetrics Data by People and by Institutions We envision a smarter way to organise altmetrics data, which not only connects researchers more efficiently with the attention surrounding their work, but also provides a more logical way to link up the many articles that comprise distinct research projects.
Institutions should be able to track the online impacts of their faculty members’ intellectual outputs, and individual researchers should be able to see where their own contributions lie.
Moreover, further granularity that reflects the organisation of universities should be implemented.
Any attention that surrounds the output of whole research groups, comprised of labs in the same department or even inter-disciplinary, inter-departmental teams, should be more efficiently aggregated and presented by an institutional altmetrics tool.
However, rather than simply creating ‘researcher-level metrics’ (as opposed to article-level and journal-level metrics), it will remain necessary to emphasise the qualitative attention data above the quantitative.
Discipline-specific Context for Metrics of Attention Interestingly, our data show that 30-40% of recent biomedical papers will have attention tracked by Altmetric, but that this is only the case for less than 10% of articles in the social sciences.
Overall, altmetrics data are typically available for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, whereas disciplines in the humanities are currently poorly represented.
What accounts for these discrepancies in online attention across disciplines?
One explanation could lie in the inherent biases that are present in methods of data collection used by altmetrics tools.
For items such as social media posts and blog posts, altmetrics tools can only pick up mentions and conversations if hyperlinks to scholarly content are included [11].
Amongst academics and communicators in STEM, there seems to be awareness of good ‘linking behaviour’, which makes it easier for mentions to be collected.
(Furthermore, altmetrics tend to be publicised more for STEM fields, and therefore there could be a greater awareness of altmetrics in general.)
Bloggers and social media users in STEM fields are diligent in including URLs to scholarly content, and sites such as Research Blogging [12] have gone further by developing more standardised ways for citing scholarly articles in blogs.
Another explanation relates to the different formats of research outputs that are produced by the various fields.
Books, for instance, are frequently cited scholarly works in the humanities, and yet are not tracked by most altmetrics tools.
Academics in the humanities could be blogging more frequently about books, not papers, but this attention would therefore not be captured.
A general observation is that bloggers in humanities fields tend to make reference to older works, and article URLs, which altmetrics tools require, are less frequently included.
Presently, the uptake and usage of social media tools are by no means consistent amongst academics across disciplines, and in certain fields there may even be a tendency to use particular services over others.
Additionally, in the mainstream news, there is a marked bias in reporting towards health and life sciences topics.
Finally, it is already known that older articles will tend to have higher metrics and attention scores simply because they have had more time to accumulate mentions.
Regardless of the reasons which divide STEM fields and the humanities, it is clear that without suitable discipline-specific contextual information for available attention data, users have no way to determine what amount of attention is typical for a particular field or sub-field.
For instance, what is a ‘normal’ amount of attention that an article about Renaissance art would be expected to receive?
How much attention would be expected for an article in high-energy particle physics?
The need to establish discipline-specific context and benchmarks has grown out of a reliance on the metrics, although having some way to establish the ‘norm of the field’ for qualitative data would also be useful.
While Altmetric does emphasise the stories behind the numbers, we do provide raw metrics and a quantitative estimate score of attention (the Altmetric score).
For the latter, we provide journal-specific contextual information.
Although not as finely tuned as discipline-specific benchmarks would be, journal-specific benchmarks are still useful.
Taken in isolation, the numeric value of the scale-less Altmetric score would give users little sense of how much attention this article received in comparison to others.
On Altmetric article details pages, we provide a tab labelled ‘Score’ (Figure 2), which displays the results of various automatic calculations for context, including different kinds of comparisons with other articles by journal and by date of publication.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the Score tab in an Altmetric article details page Being able to construct discipline-specific benchmarks would be useful, but unfortunately, establishing discipline-specific context in attention metrics is technically challenging.
Journal article metadata do not typically include the discipline of the article; rather, the overarching disciplines that the journal itself covers tend to be used.
However, this becomes particularly problematic for articles in multidisciplinary journals such as PLOS ONE, Nature, Science, and PNAS.
For these types of journals, precise topics that pertain to individual articles will need to be analysed from the full text, perhaps through text-mining or manual input.
New Uses for Altmetrics Altmetrics data are collected rapidly and in great quantities.
On a daily basis, Altmetric picks up 15,000 mentions of scholarly content; over a week, Altmetric sees mentions of 22,000 unique articles (as of 13 November 2013).
In order to interpret all these data, it is important to know what questions need to be answered; these questions can be different depending on the user.
While journal editors and researchers tend to be the main consumers of altmetrics data right now, other users can potentially benefit as well.
In the following section, we speculate on some possible institutional users who might gain insights from altmetrics.
Informing University Communications In order to attract talented students and faculty, bolster community relations, and promote a positive image of the university, institutions must be able to raise awareness of their achievements and intellectual outputs successfully.
To reach the broader public, the achievements of the institution might be communicated in a variety of ways, including press releases, external reports, blogs, print newsletters, media campaigns, and more.
Altmetrics data can potentially aid communications and press officers’ strategies in two important ways:  the identification of actionable trends in attention; and  the measurement of the success of media campaigns.
Since researchers do not always notify university communications teams about their new publications, media and press officers may not be aware of the institution’s newest research.
Continuously monitoring altmetrics data associated with researchers or departments from the university may provide a solution.
Spikes in attention for specific articles or topics can be useful early signals of public interest.
A recent article submitted to the pre-print server arXiv serves as an interesting example.
In early September 2013, an article entitled “Automated Password Extraction Attack on Modern Password Managers” was submitted to arXiv by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University [13].
A day or two after the article first appeared on arXiv, 6 people tweeted about it [14].
There was a period of silence, until early November 2013, when there was a second wave of uptake, and the article was tweeted by a further 25 users.
What was responsible for the second wave?
Perhaps there was a topical reason; it is possible that the spike in interest was related to recent events, which heightened awareness of Web security issues amongst the general public.
Such events include a security breach at Adobe in the autumn of 2013, during which millions of users’ passwords were leaked.
From a communications perspective, the second wave of Twitter attention and the connection with recent events could be a good signal of public interest.
As such, the university’s press office could consider increasing awareness of these researchers’ article, perhaps by distributing a press release or posting a highlight piece on the institution’s blog.
In this way, altmetrics could provide a way of gauging potential areas of public interest, allowing communications experts to focus their outreach activities to maximise exposure.
Altmetrics may also be helpful in determining which online communication formats and styles are effective for conveying messages about the university’s research and achievements.
For example, it might be noted from qualitative altmetrics data that the inclusion of research-related images leads to greater uptake of press releases; it might also be observed that a specific journalist’s blog coverage of the story has been particularly popular, and so the university could reach out to the journalist again in the future.
Qualitative altmetrics are portals into the online world of research communications.
As such, we believe that altmetrics, aggregated at the institutional or departmental level, have potential to help university communications teams to interact effectively with the press and understand how to best to utilise online self-publishing platforms.
Enriching Undergraduate Education and Postgraduate Training Altmetrics tools are valuable for filtering and discovering new scholarly content.
In terms of education, altmetrics tools have some applications in training for both postgraduate and undergraduate students.
Researchers, including postgraduate students, can clearly benefit from altmetrics in the most direct way, as attention surrounding many different research outputs can be tracked.
These outputs include journal articles, theses, dissertations, presentation slides, datasets, and other documents, and are commonly deposited into institutional repositories.
Since early 2013, Altmetric has supported a number of open access institutional repositories in the UK and abroad, including IU Scholarworks (Indiana University, USA) [15], Opus (University of Bath) [16], LSE Research Online (London School of Economics) [17], and Enlighten (University of Glasgow) [18].
The monitoring of online attention surrounding a variety of research outputs may be helpful for postgraduate students to gauge both academic feedback and public interest in their work.
Undergraduate students are usually introduced to scholarly articles in the classroom, during the preparation of assignments, essays, and presentations.
Altmetrics data, which can tell meaningful stories about societal uptake, and perhaps impact of recent research, could help to foster students’ interest in course topics.
For instance, lecturers could provide students with ‘socially curated’ or ‘trending article’ reading lists, supplemented with qualitative altmetrics data to direct further exploration of a particular topic and its associated online communities.
The Altmetric Explorer application is useful for compiling such reading lists, as it allows for custom filtering of articles by various parameters, including Altmetric score, publication date, and subject.
Moreover, some publishers include trending articles lists on their Web sites, which may also be of interest to lecturers and their students.
Conclusion No longer considered purely ‘alternative’, altmetrics are the necessary byproducts of the digitisation of scholarly content.
In the near future, there will likely be increased uptake of altmetrics tools in the institutional environment, perhaps leading to greater pressure to use the data in research assessment.
As altmetrics toolmakers, we should strive to build institution-oriented tools, and incorporate features to help users interpret the data appropriately and suit the needs of different institutional users.
References Liu J., Adie E., “New perspectives on article-level metrics: developing ways to assess research uptake and impact online”, Insights: the UKSG journal 26, 153-158, July 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/2048-7754.79 Altmetric http://www.altmetric.com Adie, E., Roe, W., “Altmetric: enriching scholarly content with article-level discussion and metrics”, Learned Publishing, 26, 11-17, January 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20130103 Altmetric: How we measure attention http://www.altmetric.com/whatwedo.php#score Adie, E., “Altmetrics in libraries and institutional repositories”, Altmetric Blog, January 2013 http://www.altmetric.com/blog/altmetrics-in-academic-libraries-and-institutional-repositories Darling, E. S., Shiffman, D., C?té, I. M., Drew, J.
A., “The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication”, Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 6, 32-43, October 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.4033/iee.2013.6.6.f Shema H., Bar-Ilan, J., Thelwall, M., “Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information”, PLOS ONE 7, e35869, May 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0035869 Personal communication Thelwall, M., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., Sugimoto, C. R., “Do Altmetrics Work?
Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services”, PLOS ONE 8, e64841, May 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064841 Gibson, D., Baier, A., Chamberlain, S., “Uptake of Journal of Ecology papers in 2012: A comparison of metrics (UPDATED)”, Journal of Ecology Blog, January 2013 http://jecologyblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/uptake-of-journal-of-ecology-papers-in-2012-a-comparison-of-metrics Liu, J., Adie E., “Five challenges in altmetrics: A toolmaker's perspective”, Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 39, 31-34, April/May 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bult.2013.1720390410 Research Blogging http://researchblogging.com Gonzalez, R., Chen, E. Y., Jackson, C., “Automated Password Extraction Attack on Modern Password Managers”, arXiv:1309.1416, September 2013 http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1416 Altmetric article details page for “Automated Password Extraction Attack on Modern Password Managers” http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?citation_id=1734330 IUScholarWorks – Indiana University https://scholarworks.iu.edu Opus: Online Publications Store – University of Bath http://opus.bath.ac.uk LSE Research Online – London School of Economics http://eprints.lse.ac.uk Enlighten – University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Author Details Jean Liu Product Development Manager Altmetric LLP Email: jean@altmetric.com Web site: http://www.altmetric.com Jean Liu is the product development manager and data curator for Altmetric.com.
Previously, she was a researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she obtained an MSc in Pharmacology/Neuroscience.
Euan Adie Founder Altmetric LLP Email: euan@altmetric.com Web site: http://www.altmetric.com Euan Adie is the founder of Altmetric.com, which tracks the conversations around scholarly articles online.
He was previously a senior product manager at Nature Publishing Group where he worked on projects like Connotea and Nature.com Blogs.
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Institutional Repositories for Creative and Applied Arts Research: The Kultur Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Institutional Repositories for Creative and Applied Arts Research: The Kultur Project Buzz data software framework dissemination usability archives metadata digitisation schema blog repositories eprints copyright video preservation windows multimedia jpeg tiff provenance streaming flash avi wav quicktime photoshop mp3 rae ftp url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Gray discusses institutional repositories and the creative and applied arts specifically in relation to the JISC-funded Kultur Project.
Those involved in Higher Education (HE) may have started to sense the approach of Institutional Repositories (IRs).
Leaving aside the unfortunate nomenclature, IRs are becoming a fact of life in many educational institutions.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has invested £14million in the Repositories and Preservation Programme [1] and the recent Repositories and Preservation Programme Meeting in Birmingham [2] celebrated the end of over 40 individual repository projects under the Start Up and Enhancement [3] strand.
However this does not signify the end but really only the beginning for many institutions in managing their own IR.
In 2006 Sally Rumsey clearly pointed out the advantages and the purpose of IRs for HE [4].
One of the main drivers for any HE institution is the promise of a system that can manage and promote the research activity of their academics.
Anyone who has experienced the recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and trembles in anticipation of its replacement Research Evaluation Framework (REF) will concur with Harnard et al when in 2003 they stated: 'The RAE costs a great deal of time and energy to prepare and assess, for both universities and assessors (time and energy that could be better used to actually do research, rather than preparing and assessing RAE returns).'
[5] Yet any examination of this burgeoning IR landscape will not fail to identify the meagre showing of the arts and humanities disciplines.
There are very few IRs for the arts but Daisy Abbott and Sheila Anderson [6] state that digital content for the arts and humanities is proportionally higher than its share of the education market.
Daisy Abbott does go on to suggest that: 'the arts and humanities, whilst slow to grasp the e-prints open access agenda, instead prefer to embrace the digitisation and dissemination of primary sources, most particularly image collections and textual sources.'
[7] It is this conflict that the JISC Kultur Project has grappled with in creating a transferable model of an IR for the creative and applied arts.
The Partners Kultur was a two-year project that finished in March 2009 and brought together the expertise and experience of University of Southampton (UoS), University for the Creative Arts (UCA), University for the Arts London (UAL) and the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).
UoS had not only supplied considerable experience of IRs but is responsible for the Eprints software we used and developed on the project; and in Winchester School of Art we had a research community that could contribute to the project.
Further art communities were supplied by UCA and UAL.
UCA has 5 five constituent art colleges situated at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester.
UAL is comprised of Camberwell College of Arts, Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London College of Communication, London College of Fashion and Wimbledon College of Arts.
Between them they cover all areas of art, design and the applied arts.
In fact if it is not studied at these colleges 'it ain't art!'.
VADS is an online visual resource for the art community and has numerous digitised collections.
It was an obvious choice in the formation of a partnership since it could supply a great deal of expertise and advice in many areas including metadata and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
Such a collaborative project raised obvious but vital issues.
The main issue was communication; each project officer was located at a different site with the project manager and Eprints developer again at a different location.
Regular meetings were scheduled and full use was made of email, Google docs and belatedly Skype.
Good working relationships were built up and served to illustrate the advantages of collaborating with staff from similar and different institutions.
The Process Our first goal was to scope our individual institutions and produce an environmental assessment.
We examined the academic and research structures of our institutions and tried to ascertain what research was produced.
Part of this assessment was to discover what research was already available digitally and online.
This was done by combing through our institutions' Web sites and staff profiles and looking for links to work or actual works that are already accessible over the Web.
This allowed us to identify who to contact in order to collect work for the demonstrator repository that we had set up.
The assessment also highlighted the fact that there was a large number of part-time staff that was also research-active.
The research practices of this group would also need to be addressed as part of the project.
We decided to use an online survey [8] to help in the development of the demonstrator and the project.
The address for this was distributed via staff email, posted on institutions' intranets and included in the weekly email newsletter.
We were aware of the low number of responses such online surveys typically attracted.
Add to that the fact that a lot of part-time research staff either did not have university email accounts or did not regularly check them, and we also resolved to post paper copies (with the online survey address) in staff pigeon holes and in the library.
The response was still low but we felt we had enough responses to work with [9].
Using those responses, we asked certain researchers if we could conduct one-to-one interviews with them.
In total we interviewed 15 researchers across all 3 institutions, making sure that we covered as many of the disciplines as we could [10].
All our findings fed back into the development of the demonstrator repository.
The survey and interviews also doubled up as modes of advocacy for the project.
Advocacy was also undertaken in various ways.
We spoke formally and informally with a number of staff.
Presentations were given to research centres, research offices, library staff and various management teams.
Lots of coffee was consumed as we tried to identify members of staff who would be interested in the project and persuaded them to provide us with work for the demonstrator.
Presentations were given at the Arlis (Art Libraries Society) Conference and OR08 (Open Repositories Conference).
Various 'events' around the institutions were also attended such as private views, book launches and talks, which offered the advantages of having researchers present and more relaxed opportunities to find out about them and promote the repository.
Once we had a more developed demonstrator repository we conducted some usability tests which again fed back into adding new features, removing old ones or tweaking others.
Approximately four months before the end of the project, the demonstrator repository split and UAL and UCA each hosted their own repository.
While we all still worked together on major issues such as copyright and IPR, we were also involved in embedding the repositories within our own institutions and tackling such matters as IT, institutional policies and branding.
What's the Problem?
The majority of IRs have handled and dealt with the traditional research output of articles which have often been in the standard pdf format.
Art research also has a considerable amount of articles but the Kultur Project focused on multimedia and how to depict this in a coherent and valuable way.
There is also considerable debate within art academia around the whole notion of art and research.
Art research is often practice-based and it has been felt by certain sections of the community that the methods employed to measure its success as research, e.g.
the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), are really only suitable for more scientific disciplines [11][12].
Although the skills of the Kultur Project team were considerable, we did not seek to solve this debate, but rather, used it to understand and navigate our way through certain barriers to the project.
The best way to illustrate how we have tried to address and cater to the needs of our researchers is to examine our repository and explain how we reached such conclusions and why.
Originally all 3 institutions shared a demonstrator repository which we populated with various pieces of work and pulled apart and put back together again in various guises with varying degrees of success.
Since January 2009 UAL and UCA were given their own repositories and the work that was in the demonstrator was moved according to its provenance.
Access to the demonstrator repository is no longer available so I will, in the main, be using images from, and referring to, UAL's repository UAL Research Online.
However, I will also be using UCA's repository (currently unnamed).
Work from Winchester School of Art has been returned to the University of Southampton repository, where they are in the process of implementing the enhancements developed as part of the project.
Does My 'Art' Look Good in This?
Bad pun aside, the visual aspect of the repository loomed large in all our minds during the project, especially in the early stages.
We are dealing with an arts community which by definition has a highly 'tuned' sense of the visual aesthetic.
Concerns about the design of the site were voiced in our survey and how such a design would reflect upon their actual work: "Really worried that the interface (from a 'customer' perspective, NOT super-user) would poorly reflect the work within."
Survey respondent 1 "... to be somehow more visual.
Work to be represented by thumbnails" Survey respondent 2 If you compare Figure 1 with Figure 2 you can see that there is a considerable difference between the original version and that with which the project finished.
Figure 1: Original Kultur Demonstrator Home Page Figure 2: UAL Research Online Home Page The most striking difference is the use of images throughout the site.
In many ways it resembles more a 'Web site' than a typical 'institutional repository'.
The idea was to promote the range of work from the institution and this was best served by having a series of random images pulled from records and then displayed on the front page.
The strip below the main image is the other images that will be displayed while on this page, with each image changing every 10 seconds and the whole series of images changing every 15 minutes.
This visual aspect is continued in the right-hand column where we have thumbnails representing the 'latest items'.
In the actual record of the work the visual aspect is emphasised above other information including the metadata (what we have called 'details').
What became very clear from our survey and interviews, as well as our own personal knowledge, was that records for arts research would often have multiple items.
Documentation of a particular piece of arts research could often involve digital images, audio or video, posters, articles or text.
All would relate directly to the piece of research and illustrate a different aspect.
Documentation of such research becomes extremely important, particularly where the work may be temporary, such as an exhibition.
In Figure 3 we have a record for a conference which held a number of different items.
Figure 3: Item Record With Tabs The item record presents a maximum of 4 tabs with the 'images' tab as lead.
This is then followed by the tabs 'video/audio', 'documents' and finally 'details'.
There are in fact 19 'images' in this record which does involve scrolling down to view them all.
The size and number of images to be displayed on a line was a source of continual debate once we discovered that particular research outputs could have over 100 images associated with them.
Our ideal when having a large number of images was to have a maximum of five on a line, but of a size that would still be meaningful.
When using the site, one of our interviewees stated that scrolling was preferable to viewing tiny images.
At UAL this 'debate' was curtailed by the UAL Web site template which would only allow a maximum of three before the images became too small to view.
Another issue that this particular record raised was that of copyright.
It arose in respect of the conference jointly held by UAL, Monash University of Art & Design and The British School at Rome.
The delegates and contributors were all from these institutions.
Before the conference actually began, I got in touch with the organisers at UAL and asked them to gain clearance from each of the contributors to include their images, presentations and articles, as well as obtaining their permission to use their 'likeness' online.
This was achieved in the majority of cases.
However, I was contacted by the organisers after they had sent me video of the conference to ask me not to include it since they were concerned that there might be footage of a sensitive nature or permissions that they had not cleared, and that they would need to edit it first.
For the project this pointed out that the repository would need to be involved or at least provide consistent and clear advice at the outset of such a conference.
We had been lucky to speak to them beforehand, but a lot of the work that we handled over the development period of the project had obviously been completed retrospectively and there had been little or no notion of rights clearance.
In our survey, 48% of respondents had rated their knowledge of copyright as moderate to high; more respondents had rated their knowledge as very high than those who had rated it as low.
Though this may correspond more closely with another result of our survey: copyright and how their work could be appropriated proved to be the chief concern of respondents regarding the placement of their work online.
It is hard to draw a definite conclusion from this, but arguably researchers are very aware of their own copyright when they themselves have produced the work, but become increasingly unsure and uneasy once others are involved or have collaborated with them.
Not only does collaborative work figure highly in the majority of our researchers' practice but also other accreditation needs to be taken into account.
A researcher may often employ the skills of others in the documentation of their work.
We found that a certain amount of work provided to us would often contain images taken by a photographer not the specific researcher.
So, while not strictly a collaboration, there is a need at the least to credit such photographers in this example and, where necessary, clear the rights to use their photos.
Again our survey indicated that respondents who already had their work online tended to possess a better knowledge of copyright than those who did not.
This was often borne out by our initial populating of the demonstrator repository where we looked for staff who had their own Web sites in order to identify work for the demonstrator.
Staff who had maintained their own site for a while would be precise in crediting all who had been involved in their work.
To depict and represent a possible situation of multiple rights holders or even multiple accreditations, the demonstrator allowed us to place information regarding each image or item alongside that item (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Record displaying different photographer accreditation Video/Audio: Moving image and audio is a widely used medium within the arts community.
It may be used simply as documentation of a specific event such as a conference or a performance, or it may be the actual research practice itself, such as a video work.
Each has its own, though not mutually exclusive, requirements.
As discussed earlier, film of events such as conferences will need the permission of those involved; this can also be the case with film of theatre performances which may well involve multiple rights holders.
This can range from the author of the work performed, to the music used, to each of the actors in the performance.
There also arises within such documentation the 'unsatisfactoriness of reproduction' where the video or film cannot truly convey what happened in a 'live' performance.
However documentation is still needed, and some researchers overcome this by providing extra pieces of documentary evidence to create a more 'rounded' picture of the work.
Another issue for practitioners working with video or sound art relates to the viewing context how and where the work is experienced as remarked upon with 'performance' work.
'...
I am sometimes uncomfortable about the fact that the resultant work may only be heard on lower-resolution PC speakers and about the fact that to listen to/engage with work on a PC that is also used for a whole host of other activities may rob that work of a certain specialness.'
Respondent 3 (Kultur Survey) Such reservations also apply where the work was originally part of a multi-screen installation or relies on physical size to produce the intended effect.
We are also faced with the reality of work that is being produced that is at a much higher resolution, for researchers now working with HD (High Definition) film.
Researchers may then be reluctant to provide us with their actual video work.
One researcher from UCA decided to provide us with only a sample of the work in a smaller resolution, but enough to give a flavour of that work.
This alongside textual information or documentation could help to overcome this reticence.
File Formats File formats and file size was a concern throughout the project and one that we opted to leave to the individual institutions since it fell to them to define the limits of what they could accept.
As a project we wanted to encourage as much work into our demonstrator as we could, and also subsequently discover what limits and stresses applied to the Eprints software.
The actual range of formats provided was not enormous and tended to correspond with our expectations.
We dealt with such common formats as mov, jpeg, tiff, ping, photoshop, quicktime, avi, flash, windows media, mp3, wav.
We were eventually able to deal with and represent them all.
In order to stream videos, we converted to flash for our video player (Figure 5).
However the actual format itself is preserved, so if the researcher permits, the original format can be downloaded.
As to file size, there were some problems with uploading large video files to the demonstrator, though this difficulty was resolved with a larger server.
One request from a group of researchers was to have the ability to use FTP to upload large files; unfortunately we did not have enough time to explore this in depth as part of the project, although at UAL it is an issue that will be investigated.
Figure 5: Streaming video player The quality of the images and video which we were permitted to 'grab' from researchers sites was variable.
Much depended on researchers' attitudes towards protecting their 'copyright'.
While all researchers wanted to promote their own research and raise their own profile, they were also anxious that the repository did not interfere with any commercial opportunities that could arise from their own practice.
This was particularly evident from photographers and video artists.
One researcher had sold his video work and part of the agreement was that the work would not be available elsewhere.
There were also concerns that if high-quality files were available for download, then they could be used to print out high-quality prints of the work.
On the other hand, researchers were encouraged by the fact that high-quality images could be stored in the repository and yet be restricted to those whom the researcher elected.
This type of control is allowed in the repository through the Eprints 'request a copy' button (Figure 6).
This option was an advantage for researchers when promoting work to galleries since it allowed galleries in different cities to access high-quality images and thus could help in gaining exhibition opportunities.
This practical approach was appreciated by a research team which welcomed the access to its own high-quality images when working away from its base, while secure in the knowledge that access was not extended to others outside the team.
Figure 6: Request a copy button Metadata One of the significant differences between art research, as remarked earlier, is that of multiple items, multiple rights and multimedia.
As we worked through the project the metadata were reworked on numerous occasions.
Trying to produce a deposit form that was consistent, clear and which took into account the varying disciplines proved quite a task.
After much to-ing and fro-ing we decided on the set of 'item types' which determined which metadata fields were presented (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Item types The two specific additions to the item types we produced were 'exhibitions' and 'performance', alongside 'art/design item' (Figure 7).
This allowed us to identify 'exhibitions' and 'performances' as mediums of research dissemination.
The whole process of tackling the metadata was to try and adapt them to the arts.
This not only involved adding or removing certain metadata fields, but also adapting the language used for metadata fields as well as for the help text.
For example, 'abstract' was changed to 'description' since 'abstract' referred specifically to text.
Originally 'art/design item' was 'artefact' and this particular change was influenced not only by our own opinions but also by our interviews and usability studies; it was apparent that the majority of researchers not only did not use 'artefact' but were sometimes unsure as to what it actually referred, especially since they would only be depositing the digital representation itself and not the actual 'artefact' itself.
The key differences between the metadata schema for item types are obviously between those that are text-based and those that are not, i.e.
art/design, show/exhibition and performance.
Our schema reflected the many instances of collaborative work and where there had been contributors to that work.
It was necessary to have fields where you could list the venues of a particular exhibition and if a specific piece of work had been part of other exhibitions, e.g.
group exhibition, solo exhibition.
We also included fields to allow description via the media of the object itself.
For example, we may have digital photos of a piece of hand-built glazed earthenware:it is the earthenware that we want to describe in the 'material' field (Figure 8), Figure 8: Material metadata field but the digital photo format will also be detailed in the image description (Figure 9).
Figure 9: Image format The further details section allows more information about the work or the researcher to be included.
The field for 'additional URLs', provides us with the opportunity to link to the Web sites of the researcher or gallery.
This helps to align the repository to researchers' desire to promote themselves and their own research.
The linking of different records was a specific issue when dealing with researchers who produced different but related research outputs.
One researcher produced and installed a different sound installation in a number of cities; each time the installation was different and had different documentation, but it was all part of the same project.
To enable this linking we added a 'project' field to the metadata.
This field was 'hotlinked' so that clicking on the project title would draw up all the related records within the repository (Figure 10).
Figure 10: Records by 'project' While this is an effective way of showing what has been done within the project, it still relies on the depositor entering the information.
This also presupposes previous knowledge of earlier work by the researcher on this project.
If researchers are depositing it themselves this would not really be a problem, since they would have such fore-knowledge; when it is mediated deposit and if more than one person is depositing work over a period of time, such linking could break down.
One possible solution would be to request such detailed information from researchers when they supply work to be deposited.
Support What is clear from the project, and from the embedding of the institutional repositories within our institutions, is the need of specific and clear support together with guidelines for our researchers and people working with the repository.
The gathering of material and eliciting of information about that material is of prime importance.
To do this, we need to also allay fears, misconceptions and ignorance in respect of copyright and IPR.
Because of the complexity surrounding copyright and IPR in the creative arts, VADS produced a series of guidelines and 'scenarios' for us to use as part of the promotion of our individual repositories.
At UAL the repository has revealed a great demand for information about copyright and IPR from our staff in order to gather work for the repository and to protect and educate staff about their rights and relationships with other rights holders.
A Future While institutional repositories have been around for a while it is still a young concept.
Institutional repositories for the creative arts are even younger and there will be constant development needed to integrate such a system fully within arts research.
There were a few areas of development that we had hoped to work upon in the project timescale but time worked against us.
One area was the development of research profiles.
This was an area that continually arose in our meetings with researchers and in the course of our interviews.
Researchers used research profiles as a means of promotion; when passing us their work, they would often also attach their research profile as a means of highlighting their practice and to provide contextual background to their research.
Another area that we were not really able to solve in any meaningful way was critical commentary on particular pieces of research.
Reviews of exhibitions in magazines and blogs are important in judging the influence and impact of certain areas of research.
Our problem was that we could only supply a link to a piece online with no guarantee that it would be there in a year's time.
The issues of copyright loomed large over this.
We found that staff would often scan newspapers or magazines that had commented, or conducted interviews, on their work and as such we could not put them into the repository.
The actual way that art research is valued is often outside the traditional academic structure and these sites of critical exploration can often be transitory.
One need that became apparent, as we advocated the repository and sought material for our demonstrator, was a digitisation service.
Many times I contacted research centres, introduced myself and the Kultur Project and asked if they would be documenting a conference or research project, only to be told that they would be very happy for me to come along and video/record their 'conference' 'project'.
A lot of research activity is happening across the university but with no systematic digital documentation.
If as an institution we were able to offer this in some form, we would be offering a definite service and would gain not only material for the repository but also 'friends' within the research community.
In a community that is as so diverse as the arts, with its varying disciplines, cultures and outputs, a real advantage was to bring the evidence of their research together.
For many of the researchers to whom we spoke and demonstrated the repository, it was of great interest that the work we held was from a number of different institutions.
The fact that you could see work from Winchester School of Art alongside work from Maidstone College of Art as well as Chelsea School of Art was a impressive.
Therefore some surprise and notes of regret were expressed that, at the end of the project, the three institutions involved would be gaining separate repositories.
Maybe there is scope for future development that would link up different arts repositories and increase the availability of arts research to all, and so encourage even more collaboration.
Conclusion The Kultur Project tried to address a neglected area within institutional repositories.
The arts community is as diverse as it is similar, yet there is a growing and pressing need to gather, sustain and promote the research within this valuable discipline.
A repository is also a way to add value to such research by demonstrating that it is research.
There are still significant developments to pursue, and there are art practices to convince that such a system as IRs can help provide an arena for dissemination.
The success of the project will partly depend on the success of each institution's use of its IR and how its researchers engage with it.
References JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres.aspx JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme Meeting http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres/reppresprogconf.aspx JISC Repositories Start-up and Enhancement projects http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres/sue Rumsey, Sally (2006).
The purpose of institutional repositories in UK higher education : a repository manager's view.
International journal of information management, 26 (3).
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181-186.
ISSN 0268-4012 http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000800 Stevan Harnad, Les Carr, Tim Brody, Charles Oppenheim, "Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives", April 2003, Ariadne, Issue 35 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ Daisy Abbott, Sheila Anderson, Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory: Conclusions and Recommendations, April 2009 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/draireport_concl_final.pdf Daisy Abbott, JISC Final Report – Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory Project, July 2008 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/drai-end-project-report.doc Questionnaire: Putting Creative Arts Material Online: Your Views http://kultur.eprints.org/docs/Questionnaire%20WEB%20VERSION.pdf Victoria Sheppard, Kultur Project User Survey Report, August 2008 http://kultur.eprints.org/docs/Survey%20report%20final%20Aug%2008.pdf Victoria Sheppard, Andrew Gray, Dominic Persad, Kultur Project User Analysis: Interviews Report, November 2008 http://kultur.eprints.org/docs/Interview%20analysis%20final%20Nov%2008.pdf Dally, K. et al (2004) Assessing the exhibition and the exegesis in visual arts higher degrees: perspectives of examiners.
Working Papers in Art and Design 3.
ISSN 1466-4917.
Retrieved 15 April 2009 from http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/research/papers/wpades/vol3/kdfull.html Marshall, T. & S. Newton (2000) Scholarly design as a paradigm for practice-based research.
Working Papers in Art and Design 1, ISSN 1466-4917 Retrieved 31 July 2009 from http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/research/papers/wpades/vol1/marshall2.html Author Details Andrew Gray Kultur Project Officer (University of the Arts London) University of the Arts London Email: a.gray@arts.ac.uk Web site: http://www.arts.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Institutional Repositories for Creative and Applied Arts Research: The Kultur Project" Author: Andrew Gray Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/gray/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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5th International Digital Curation Conference – Moving to Multi-Scale Science: Managing Complexity and Diversity Millennium Gloucester Hotel, Kensington, London 2-4 December 2009 http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/ The International Digital Curation Conference is an established annual event reaching out to individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains involved in curating data for e-science and e-research.
The Digital Curation Centre, which is responsible for organising the Conference, will be hosting a full day of workshops on 2 December including Disciplinary Dimensions of Digital Curation: New Perspectives on Research Data; Digital Curation 101 Lite Training; Citability of Research Data; and Repository Preservation Infrastructure (REPRISE).
The workshops will be followed by a Pre-Conference Drinks Reception at the Natural History Museum.
The main conference will open on 3 December with a keynote speech from Professor Douglas Kell, Chief Executive of the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
This will be followed by perspectives on scale from US viewpoints, particularly the two large NSF-funded DataNet projects, and from the UK with reports linked to neurosciences and social simulation.
The first day of the conference will also incorporate the ever-popular ‘minute madness’, an interactive afternoon for posters and demos and a symposium entitled “Citizen Science: Data Challenges” led by Richard Cable, BBC Lab UK.
Clifford Lynch, CEO of the Coalition for Networked Information will sum up the first day.
The second day will start with an award for the best peer-reveiwed paper and will be followed by a keynote from Professor Ed Seidal, National Science Foundation.
The rest of the day will be made up of peer-reviewed papers in themed sessions covering Disciplinary and Institutional Challenges, Practitioner Experience, Metadata, Software Preservation & Managing Risk.
Timo Hannay from Nature Publishing Group will close the conference.
For further information: Full programme details are available online: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/programme/ Registration will close on 20 November 2009.
Places are limited so please register now at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/ Back to headlines ‘Doing More With Less?’: Forum on preservation skills development British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB Monday 30 November 2009 http://www.bl.uk/npo/forum.html Caring for library and archive collections today demands new knowledge and new skills responding to climate change and environmental impact, ensuring the survival of modern materials, incorporating information technology into our professional talent base.
The first annual forum of the British Library Preservation Advisory Centre showcases recent research and latest developments in preservation learning and provides an opportunity to hear how different methods of learning have been successfully applied to preservation training.
Discussion sessions will inform the future skills development programme of the Preservation Advisory Centre.
The event is designed for people from all types of organisation, institution or collection who have responsibility for the care of library and archive materials.
Programme 09.30 Registration 10.00 Welcome and introduction Caroline Peach, Head, British Library Preservation Advisory Centre 10.15 Strategic challenges for preservation in libraries and archives Helen Shenton, Head of Collection Care, British Library 10.45 Preservation training needs in Research Libraries UKand higher education libraries Jane Arthur, Preservation Training Coordinator, British Library Preservation Advisory Centre 11.05 Break 11.25 The benefits of partnerships in preservation projects Sheila Hingley, Head of Heritage Collections, Durham University Library 11.45 Action Conservation: engaging volunteers hands-on Vicki Marsland, National Trust Conservator South 12.05 Panel discussion 12.30 Lunch 13.30 Distance learning at Northumbria University Jean Brown, Programme Leader, Preventive Conservation, Northumbria University 13.50 Work-based learning opportunities at the British Library Catherine Atkinson, Head of Conservation Learning and Development, British Library 14.10 Digital preservation what do I need to know?
William Kilbride, Executive Director, Digital Preservation Coalition 14.30 Break 14.50 Preserving sound Sound Archive, British Library 15.10 Modern materials: new problems, new skills?
Cordelia Rogerson, Acting Head of Conservation, British Library 15.30 Preservation Advisory Centre’s skills development programme Caroline Peach, Head, British Library Preservation Advisory Centre 15.50 Panel discussion 16.20 Close Registration fee £80.50 (GBP); (Students £46.00 (GBP)) For further information: To register, please visit http://www.bl.uk/npo/forum.html Email: blpac@bl.uk Back to headlines Managing and sharing research data: focus on consent, confidentiality and disclosure Rosebery Hall, London School of Economics Wednesday 2 December 2009 http://www.esds.ac.uk/news/eventdetail.asp?id=2293 On 2 December 2009, as part of the 5th International Digital Curation Conference, the UK Data Archive is holding a workshop at the LSE Rosebery Hall on managing and sharing research data.
Guidance is based on advice and support provided to ESRC award holders as part of their contractual obligations to share data, and on data management planning as implemented by the cross-Research Council Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) Programme.
This workshop will cover key issues on data management and sharing as applied to socio-economic research involving people as participants (interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, observation and so on).
It will provide both theoretical information and practical exercises and discussions focusing on: dealing with confidential research information and personal data developing agreements for obtaining informed consent from participants appropriate anonymisation techniques to enable reuse and sharing of research data.
Guidance will also help researchers when planning data management strategies for research projects, or when considering data sharing and archiving as part of ethical review procedures.
Participants are encouraged to contribute materials in advance of the workshop to ensure an interactive and topical approach.
Such materials will depend on current research activities, but might include: descriptions of current research projects; sample consent forms used; data management plans; current or intending procedures for anonymising data; institutional ethical review guidelines on data sharing.
There is a cost of £65 for this workshop.
Places are limited so booking is essential.
Priority will be given to researchers actively collecting data or to Research Ethics Committee members.
For further information: Further details: http://www.esds.ac.uk/news/eventdetail.asp?id=2293 Programme: http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/news/eventsdocs/consentdec09.asp Lorna Balkan Outreach and Promotion Officer UK Data Archive a service provider for the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester CO4 3SQ UK Tel: +44 (0)1206 872007 Email: balka@essex.ac.uk http://www.esds.ac.uk/ http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ Back to headlines Online Educa Berlin 2009: 15th International Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning and Training Berlin, Germany 2 4 December 2009 http://www.online-educa.com/ The largest global e-learning conference for corporate, education and public service sectors takes place from 2 – 4 December at the Hotel InterContinental Berlin.
2,200 e-learning experts from more than 90 countries are expected to attend.
The focus of this year’s conference is effective e-learning in the workplace.
Global companies such as BP, Deloitte and SAP will present their strategies for more productive learning in the wake of the financial crisis.
Martin Dougiamas, the founder of Moodle, an open source platform with 735,000 users and 1,000 new registrations each day, will present solutions for companies.
In addition, a multitude of presentations will be dedicated to learning technologies in schools and universities.
There will be a demonstration for example, of how medical students can analyse x-rays with iPhones.
In virtual football stadiums, secondary school pupils find out about jobs requiring vocational training and English students receive feedback from teachers via video.
Parallel to the conference, leading international e-learning suppliers will present the latest products and services in the exhibition area.
For further information: Further information of the annual conference can be found here: http://www.online-educa.com/ Location: Hotel InterContinental Berlin, Budapester Str.
2, 10787 Berlin, Germany Organiser: ICWE GmbH, Leibnizstr.
32, 10625 Berlin, Germany E-Mail: info@online-educa.com Back to headlines METS Workshop: The Basics and Beyond ALA Hotel TBD and 90 Mt.
Auburn, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA 18-22 January 2010 http://www.arl.org/stats/statsevents/METS-workshop.shtml The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Statistics and Measurement Program is offering a five day workshop entitled METS: The Basics and Beyond to be held in partnership with Nancy J. Hoebelheinrich and Rick Beaubien of the METS Editorial Board.
This workshop is aimed at people who work in digital and physical libraries and would like to gain knowledge and skills to organise the many and disparate component parts of individual digital resources.
The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a data encoding and transmission specification, expressed in XML, that provides a means for conveying the structural, descriptive, and administrative metadata necessary for both the management of digital objects within a repository and the exchange of such objects between repositories (or between repositories and their users).
This common digital object format was designed to facilitate both the exchange of digital materials among institutions and vendors, and the shared development of supporting tools.
METS is currently used by libraries and cultural heritage institutions worldwide including the Library of Congress, the British Library, the German National Library, the Ministry of Culture Spain, the National Diet Library Japan, the National Library of Finland, the National Library of Portugal, the National Library of Wales and numerous research libraries across the globe.
Although continuous, this hands-on workshop consists of three modules, any of which may be taken independently.
Module 1: An Overview of METS – offers a thorough introduction to METS including an overview of all of its high level features.
(Duration: one day).
Module 2: Strategies for encoding various content types – delves deeply into the heart of METS: the flexible mechanisms it provides for encoding, organizing and representing digital content of various kinds and for different purposes.
(Duration: two days).
Module 3: Strategies for implementing METS in a production environment – explores strategies for implementing METS in a production environment, and reviews existing tools that can facilitate implementation.
(Duration: two days).
For further information: For further details, including expanded module descriptions, instructor bios, and information on lodging, please go to: http://www.arl.org/stats/statsevents/METS-workshop.shtml Instructors: Nancy J. Hoebelheinrich – Metadata Specialist / Digital Library Consultant Rick Beaubien – Software Engineer/Digital Library Consultant Event Details: Date: Monday, January 18 to Friday, January 22, 2010 Time: 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. each day Location: Monday: ALA hotel TBD; Tuesday-Friday: 90 Mt.
Auburn, Harvard University Fee: Please see http://www.arl.org/stats/statsevents/METS-workshop.shtml Register: http://www.formspring.com/forms/?718274-lHXuYlPAxR Back to headlines Subject Repositories: European collaboration in the international context The British Library Conference Centre, London 28-29 January 2010 http://www.neeoconference.eu/ This conference, which is the first of its kind, will explore the development of subject repositories worldwide and will see the launch of Economists Online, the key output of an EC-funded subject repository project managed by the Nereus consortium of top European economics libraries.
Nereus members will showcase this subject repository in both plenary and parallel sessions, sharing lessons learned and engaging delegates in discussions of the main issues such as content recruitment, search and retrieval services, usage statistics and data sets.
The two-day programme will also put Economists Online into the wider context and will allow delegates to hear about repository trends across three continents.
Among the speakers are Chuck Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, Cathrine Harboe-Ree, University Librarian at Monash University, Australia, who led the ARROW Project and is involved in leading the ANDS Project, and Christian Zimmerman, Economics professor at the University of Connecticut.
Professor Nick Barr of the London School of Economics will launch the Economists Online portal.
The delegate fee is £155 (approximately €175 or US$250) and includes attendance at plenary and parallel sessions, refreshments during breaks, two lunches and VAT.
For further information: For further information about how to book, speakers, travel information and hotels, please visit: http://www.neeoconference.eu/ The programme can be found at http://www.neeoconference.eu/programme.html Back to headlines emtacl10 — emerging technologies in academic libraries Library of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway 26–28 April 2010 http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/ Emerging technologies and evolving user behaviour change the rules of the game for academic libraries.
Emerging technologies include new ways of using existing technologies and totally new, disruptive technologies.
Examples include: social networks (micro)blogging news services and aggregation cloud computing sharing and mashups mobile Web location awareness This is a new international conference for academic librarians, information professionals, academic staff, students, library system developers and suppliers, among others.
The conference aims to provide answers to the following questions: What can academic libraries do to address change?
How can we adapt?
Which technologies can/should/must we use/create?
Keynote speakers will include: Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC; Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix; Conor Galvin, University College Dublin; Chris Clarke, Talis; Martin Malmsten, LIBRIS; and Ida Aalen, NTNU.
Topics likely to emerge in the course of the Conference will be: Semantic web library New (information) literacies Supporting research in a changing age Organizational change within the library Analysis of user behaviour and using statistics in Library 2.0 New services/old services in new clothes Best practices for the adaptive academic library Other relevant perspectives on emerging technologies The conference is hosted by the Library of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.
For further information: For additional information, please visit the conference Web site: http://www.emtacl.com or email us at emtacl@ub.ntnu.no Karen Johanne Buset (organizing committee chair) Ole Husby (programme committee chair) Back to headlines ECA 2010: 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving Geneva, Switzerland 28-30 April 2010 http://www.bar.admin.ch/eca2010/ http://www.bar.admin.ch/eca2010/index.html?lang=en The 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving will be held in Geneva over 28-30 April 2010.
It will follow in the footsteps of the European Conferences on Archives of recent decades.
However, this conference aims to take a new approach by emphasising digital elements and archiving as a function instead of the archive as an institution.
The future will be digital, but we want to preserve the analogue tradition: the archive of the future must be a safe place for the analogue and digital evidence of the past.
Programme: http://www.bar.admin.ch/eca2010/00732/index.html?lang=en The conference aims not only to debate the current challenges during the event but also to present specific solutions – large-scale and small, both successful and not so successful as we can learn the most from concrete projects.
In addition, the involvement of a number of generations of specialists in various professions will provide for an inter-professional and inter-generational dialogue that should give rise to many suggestions for further solutions.
Further information is available at: http://www.bar.admin.ch/eca2010/ http://www.bar.admin.ch/eca2010/index.html?lang=en Conference Location: International Conference Centre Geneva (CICG) http://www.bar.admin.ch/eca2010/00737/00809/index.html?lang=en Organising Committee: Andreas Kellerhals, Chairman Back to headlines Open Science at Web-Scale A new report on Open Science has just appeared as part of JISC’s ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’ activity which launches at the end of November.
The report, entitled Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential was written by written by Dr. Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre, trails key research trends that could have far-reaching implications for science, universities and UK society.
In this consultative report, Dr. Lyon identifies open-ness, predictive science based on massive data volumes, and citizen involvement as being important features of tomorrow’s research practice.
Further information: Press release: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/press/2009-11-11/ Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/opensciencerpt.aspx [Source: UKOLN] [Received: November 2009] Back to headlines JISC Inform Goes Interactive The latest JISC Inform (Inform 26: Autumn 2009) is previewed now with an online version, Inform Plus, showcasing extra content, an interactive timeline, podcasts and videos as well as the usual spread of news from across JISC’s work in universities and colleges.
This autumn edition looks at how digital technologies are helping colleges and universities reach out locally as well as internationally.
The topics of research, open access and collaboration are all featured in this edition with a podcast interview with Professor Robert Darnton from the University of Harvard talking about the university’s journey to transition to open access policies.
The interview previews some of the themes of JISC’s ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’ activity, demonstrating how JISC adds value to researchers as they manage data, collaborate and publish.
Further information: JISC Inform goes interactive http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/11/inform.aspx [Source: JISC] [Received: November 2009] Back to headlines MLA and British Pathé Initiative Thousands of hours of rare archive footage from the 20th Century, covering every aspect of news and social history in Britain between 1896 and the 1970, is now available to local museums, public libraries and archives, thanks to a new cost-saving subscription agreement.
The agreement between British Pathé and the MLA will allow access to the entire British Pathé film archive in broadcast quality, for use in exhibitions, displays and public events.
British Pathé has had hundreds of requests from museums in Britain which want to feature historic newsreel to enhance their displays.
However, until now, access to this prestigious material could be prohibitively expensive.
Now these organisations will have unlimited and instant online access to the entire British Pathé film archive, to download in broadcast quality, for use in all their public exhibitions, through a simple and affordable monthly subscription fee of £60.
Further information: British Pathé and museums, libraries and archives http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press/releases/2009/British_Pathe [Source: MLA] [Received: November 2009] Back to headlines JISC-funded Study Identifies Barriers to Research A JISC funded study is making recommendations to help people find university research outputs through better integration of library catalogues, research repositories and other university systems.
The JISC-funded Online catalogue and repository interoperability study carried out by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde suggests that although there is overlap between the types of information resources recorded in library catalogues and repositories, these overlaps are rarely apparent to the information seeker.
This is because both types of system need to be searched separately as there is no interlinking.
Barriers between systems arise not only for technical reasons but also because they are often based in different departments of the university.
Further information: Recommendations for systems join-up could make finding research easier: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/11/catalogue.aspx [Source: JISC] [Received: November 2009] Back to headlines Life Scientists’ Information Use: One size does not fit all A report on research patterns in life sciences reveals that researcher practices diverge from policies promoted by funders and information service providers A report by the British Library and the Research Information Network (RIN) launched on 2 November 2009 provides a unique insight into how information is used by researchers across life sciences.
Undertaken by the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services, the report concludes that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and data sharing policies are not achieving scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences.
The report, Patterns of Information Use and Exchange: Case Studies of Researchers in Life Sciences was developed using an innovative approach to capture the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams across a wide range of disciplines, from botany to clinical neuroscience.
The study, undertaken over 11 months and involving 56 participants, found that there is a significant gap between how researchers behave and the policies and strategies of funders and service providers.
This suggests that the attempts to implement such strategies have had only a limited impact.
Key findings from the report include: Researchers use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources and resources The use of social networking tools for scientific research purposes is far more limited than expected Data and information sharing activities are mainly driven by needs and benefits perceived as most important by life scientists rather than ‘top-down’ policies and strategies There are marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange between research groups active in different areas of the life sciences, reinforcing the need to avoid standardised policy approaches The study used ground-breaking research methods to map information use in research teams from across the life sciences.
This included specially designed ‘information lab books’ to chart and monitor individual researchers’ day-to-day information practices.
The report sets out a number of recommendations to funders, universities and information service providers on how policy and services can be more aligned with research practice and help UK life scientists sustain their position at the forefront of world-class research.
Further information: Research Information Network: Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/disciplinary-case-studies-life-sciences [Source: British Library] [Received: November 2009] Back to headlines UKOLN Research Officer Wins Remote Worker Award 2009 UKOLN Research Officer Marieke Guy, who works entirely from home, was surprised to discover that she has won the Remote Worker Award organised by Remote Employment in association with BT Business.
Marieke had already been named on the short list to win but was facing some very strong competition.
Hundreds of entries had been received for the awards and the judges selected the winners based on the individuals or companies that demonstrated how remote working had created the greatest positive impact on their work life.
Mick Hegarty, strategy and commercial director, BT Business said, “These awards highlight some of the best examples of how remote workers are helping the environment, increasing business productivity and improving quality of life.” Marieke received the award for Remote Worker, the category for employees currently working remotely, out of office, or who are fieldor mobile-based.
After the ceremony at the prestigious Cliveden House, Marieke, who as part of her work is also Chair of the long-standing annual UKOLN Institutional Web Management Workshop said, “It is incredible to have people appreciate the work I do in this way.
I really hope what I’ve done is useful to others in the same boat, working from home is not always easy.
I want to thank my employers UKOLN and the University of Bath who have endorsed the work I do and encouraged me throughout.” With typical modesty Marieke only informed colleagues of her award obliquely by pointing them to the address of her popular blog on remote working Ramblings of a Remote Worker which operates at the core of her work in this area.
Dr.Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, who had encouraged Marieke to follow her path to remote working was asked for her reaction.
“I think I speak for all my colleagues when I say how delighted I am to see Marieke receive this award as a fitting tribute to all her hard work in this area.
Both before and since her appointment as Remote Worker Champion at UKOLN in 2008, Marieke has worked tirelessly to refine our remote working systems as well as represent her colleagues who also work entirely online to us.
Moreover, as Marieke has pointed out herself, this award also recognises the efforts of colleagues, for example in Software & Systems, and elsewhere in UKOLN, who have played their part to further a new approach to working from which we all benefit.” Marieke has also written a number of contributions to Ariadne on the topic of remote working.
Further information: Marieke Guy, UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.guy/ Marieke’s blog Ramblings of a Remote Worker http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/ Marieke’s contributions to Ariadne on remote working: Article Title: “A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30 July 2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/guy/ Article Title: “Staying Connected: Technologies Supporting Remote Workers” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30 October 2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/guy/ Article Title: “A Support Framework for Remote Workers” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30 April 2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/guy/ [Source: UKOLN] [Received: September 2009] Back to headlines Erasmus Prize for Europeana Europeana.eu has been awarded the Erasmus Award for Networking Europe at the Erasmus EuroMedia Awards 2009 ceremony at the City Hall in Vienna.
There were some 230 applications, resulting in 62 nominations, from which the jury selected 3 Erasmus awards.
The award is given by the European Society for Education and Communication, and selected by an international jury from the world of learning and research.
Jury member Joan Hemels, Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Communication, University of Amsterdam made the award, saying, “One year after the official launch of Europeana, the most critical users are already impressed by the achievement of this virtual online library and museum.
An open mind for the national cultural sources in Europe can be crucial for the development of a common European consciousness and for the sharing of different social and cultural values among the inhabitants of the participating countries.
The route to an integrated cultural space of Europe has been shortened by realizing Europeana an outstanding achievement in bridging European cultures.” Further information: Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ EuroMedia Awards: The European Society for Education and Communication http://www.univie.ac.at/esec/php/wordpress/?page_id=5 Article Title: “Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content” Author: Rob Davies Publication Date: 30 October 2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/davies/ The European Commission has released a comunication about the next steps for Europeana and digitisation in Europe: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/itemlongdetail.cfm?item_id=5181 It sets the target for items in Europeana at 10 million for 2010, and also addresses the low level of digitisation in Europe and the disparities in copyright legislation across the Member States.
[Source: Europeana] [Received: October 2009] Back to headlines MLA Guidance on the Importance of Library Services As the pressure on public sector finances mounts, and with the Wirral inquiry in the pipeline, the MLA has published guidance designed to help library services meet wider local priorities and maintain a comprehensive and efficient service.
The MLA is writing to all local authority chief executives in England emphasising how public libraries make a difference by supporting people and communities in learning, acquiring new skills and jobs, accessing the Internet and reading books.
The MLA Web site guidance highlights case studies from Leicester, Lincolnshire, Newcastle, Staffordshire, Suffolk and Wigan illustrating how these library services have improved their services by redefining strategic priorities, restructuring the workforce, community consultation and co-location with other services.
MLA Chief Executive Roy Clare said, “The MLA is looking forward to continuing to support the cause of better library services for people and communities everywhere.
We don’t have a mandate to intervene, but the MLA field teams can respond quickly and effectively when local authorities seek guidance and help, plus there is a wealth of case studies, research and evidence available on our Web site.” President of the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL), Fiona Williams, said, “These library support pages were developed following consultations that MLA had with SCL and the library sector.
They will be a very useful resource for those delivering a library service that works for every community.
SCL believes that local authorities should use all such resources to identify and implement good practice.” Further information: MLA: Improving a library service http://www.mla.gov.uk/librarysupport [Source: MLA] [Received: October 2009] Back to headlines Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom A recent 93-page US report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the US Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses.
The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile.
Further information: Reference Notes Blog http://ref-notes.blogspot.com/2009/08/study-finds-that-online-education-beats_19.html [Source: Reference Notes blog] [Received: August 2009] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Copyright Compliance Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Copyright Compliance Buzz data software database archives blog copyright ebook licence foi privacy intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Hannabuss argues that the book's online big sister, Keeping Within the Law (KWtL), launched at the same time, is really the place to go and the source to buy.
Books are not mushrooms and do not grow in the dark: we tend to know they're there and we know the frame within which they work.
Copyright Compliance is one in a useful line of books about information law from Paul Pedley and others, published by Facet Publishing (which is owned by CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, formerly The Library Association).
This in turn is part of a wider interest and trend in legally orientated books for library and information practitioners, one that is very large indeed if we factor in studies of law and ethics in fields like software, patents, Internet, e-commerce, and telecoms.
So, seeing announcements of the new title, readers, who are likely to be professionals in training and in practice (and a constellation of others working with data and databases, freedom of information and privacy, information and electronic management, Internet matters and the like), will recall and compare earlier works like Essential Law for Information Professionals (second edition, Facet, 2006 [1]) and Digital Copyright (second edition, Facet, 2007 [2]).
Such readers, too, will know how useful it is to know what the law says, how it can and should be interpreted and implemented, why it matters, and where specific legal advice is really needed.
Paul Pedley (Head of Research at the Intelligence Unit of The Economist, a newspaper, and a well-known writer and trainer in the field) has a clear, practical approach, keeps on top of his brief, and successfully bridges two professional areas that have, in recent years, converged – information and law.
The book Copyright Compliance appears simultaneously with an online subscription service – edited by Pedley and published by Facet – called Keeping Within the Law (KWtL).
It is the current flagship item on the Facet Web site.
This event is exciting but means that a review at this time must accommodate both items.
This one tries to achieve that.
For starters, my position is that two overriding factors are in play that give the online option the advantage : first updatability – the law is fast-changing daily, and books, however cutting edge, date rapidly; second, flexible access – information practitioners come at and to the law in an infinite number of ways (practical, theoretical, legalistic); information practitioners are of so many kinds, that a resource needs to anticipate all these factors at the same time.
Other features – search facilities, e-newsletters, blog functions, Q&A, current legislation (UK, USA, EU, international), links (often deep ones) to Web sites, opportunities to e-mail the editor – are things we come to expect.
As a result, the Pedley-Facet offer is a Good Thing overall, a logical development of Pedley's and Facet's legal publishing theme in the last ten years, and at last, with KWtL, a service of that kind can claim to offer competitive value to the wide constituency of information professionals (not just librarians, of course) that CILIP claims to address.
On its fringes of course (areas like competition law, e-commerce, human rights, contract law, liability and tort) it goes head-to-head with LexisNexis, Westlaw and the big boys.
Consequently, it must know its boundaries if it is to succeed.
Given that many different groups may want to use it, too exclusive a demand-led evolution of this Web site might turn it into a hybrid of use to nobody.
The flip side of this, of course, is that what we have here is a functionally useful book in Copyright Compliance overshadowed by its big sister the Web site KWtL.
The difference in price is obvious – the subscription rates are between £175 and £326 a year [3], and subscriptions depend on how long and robust the project is (we read that Pedley has a team around him) – but for my money what you see is what you get and you get a great deal more, formatted in ways you really want, in the subscription service.
The book itself is an awkward mixture of stuff.
I read it three times with different hats on: as a practical librarian, picking out advice on fair dealing and the guidance for risk management and copyright policy (chapters 4, 8, 10 and 12), and was reminded of books by Sandy Norman and Graham Cornish [4][5]; as a legal eagle, scrutinising a competent analysis of changing law and database law early on, nice arguments about remedies and damages, a set of useful cases in the middle, and reminders of Creative Commons options and clearance later on; as a law teacher, where I would draw on it for students (Pedley's books are always useful here) – perhaps the mediation of disputes, or re-use or Crown-waivered material, or liability under licence.
Persistently there were nagging feelings of inadequacy, even where it interpreted the law (more as a lawyer-helping-a-lay-client than ever before).
Yet three problems at least reared their heads – first, the bit-of-this-bit-of-that structure of the book, turning this way and that, without any of the flexibility offered online now it was practical things like sample forms, now it was international cases, now it was a hint of confidentiality, now it was online piracy.
The second problem for me was the inability of the book properly to follow up on, and link up, themes that kept coming to the surface, above all reutilization/retransmission/redissemination, how and if there are challenges in common for libraries and Internet service providers and electronic rights managers and FOI specialists, and the extent to which different readers (say librarians, say intranet managers, say software specialists) might and would need the material (the cases in chapter 5 are interesting but to whom and why?
fair use, the US version of fair dealing, is interesting but the book is heavily UK-centric).
The third problem was its extensive use of information from sources like the IPO (the Intellectual Property Office) and OPSI (the Office of Public Sector Information) and the Gower report on intellectual property (2006) [6].
Large chunks – all relevant, all topical, but all so much more attractive as links.
This trio of problems is not helped by an index that really is a disgrace, above all for a CILIP-related business arm – gaps, odd concepts, inconsistencies.
The index would not otherwise stand out as poor were it not for the wider implications of how suitable it now is for companies like Facet to publish works like this in online (rather than in paper-based) formats.
The index looked scrambled together.
The Keeping Within the Law service itself is the initiative waiting to happen and is the natural summation of Pedley's engagement with the area.
It is user-friendly and well designed, with numerous ways into useful material – side-bars of click-lists like legislation, legal cases, factsheets, and in-depth articles.
Nonand potential subscribers can get a clear idea what is there and samples are on offer.
A search facility allows one, say, to pin down material on e-commerce (mine came up with Internet regulation, current regulations, identity theft, and data protection, predictable but quick and relevant).
An e-newsletter and a blog are part of the package.
The design of the service is clear and logical and, if it can be sustained at this promising level, it will almost certainly supplant any more books for this hybrid information-law readership, including books like Copyright Compliance itself.
Conceptually – from both legal and an information profession viewpoints – the core range of material here is good (copyright law, digital rights, European Directives, online music, records management, intranets and so forth).
By allowing users to come in at any point, it avoids the structural awkwardness of the book.
How well it really does address the questions practitioners have, and how well its editorial team can keep it up to date and competitively value-added, remains to be seen.
Facet is 'grown up' now it has this subscription service, even though we can only guess that its business plan has included enough marketing to assure it that libraries can afford the service (and these, particularly special libraries, may well end up being the main subscribers).
Some specialist groups in the information field, too, like FOI officers, have their own networks.
A break-even may come for the project – as indeed for CILIP itself – in whether it can succeed in convincing enough of the information community (which is after all too diverse for any one service, or professional body, to claim hegemony) that it has what they want.
The books will trickle on to their traditional audience, and e-books even less so (one of Pedley's appeared in that format): where law is concerned in this field, online is the way ahead.
Felicitously, CILIP thinks so too with respect to ethics, with its 'information ethics' facility [7].
References "Essential Law for Information Professionals", Stuart Hannabuss, October 2006, Ariadne, Issue 49, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/hannabuss-rvw/ "Digital Copyright", Dr Stuart Hannabuss, January 2008, Ariadne, Issue 54, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/hannabuss-rvw/ Subscription rates for the Keeping Within the Law service at time of writing (10 June 2008 – Ed.)
are as follows: non-commercial annual price for 1 subscriber £225, for 2-5 subscribers £200, and for 6-10 subscribers £175; and commercial annual price for 1 subscriber £326, for 2-5 subscribers £290, and for 6-10 subscribers £254.
Further information may be obtained by e-mailing Facet at info@facetpublishing.co.uk Sandy Norman, Practical Copyright for Information Professionals : the CILIP Handbook, Facet Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1 85604 490 4 Graham Cornish, Copyright : Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, (now in its revised 4th edition), Facet Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1 856-4 508 0 Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, December 2006, HMSO http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/other/0118404830/0118404830.pdf Information Ethics is a joint initiative between InfoResponse Associates and Oxford Business Intelligence, in collaboration with CILIP.
You can find it at http://www.infoethics.org.uk.
It includes case studies 'covering a wide range of issues in academic and public libraries, the not-for-profit sector and others', as well as material on topics like the ethical dimensions of the information society and competitive intelligence ethics.
Author Details Dr Stuart Hannabuss Research Associate Gray's School of Art Aberdeen and Freelance Writer and Editor Email: ext.hannabuss@rgu.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Copyright Compliance : Practical Steps to Stay Within the Law + Keeping Within the Law (KWtL)" Author: Dr Stuart Hannabuss Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/hannabuss-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The REMAP Project: Steps Towards a Repository-enabled Information Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The REMAP Project: Steps Towards a Repository-enabled Information Environment Buzz data software framework rss archives metadata browser schema repositories preservation tiff doc mods droid url standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Green and Chris Awre investigate what role a repository can play in enabling and supporting the management and preservation of its own digital content.
This article describes the recently completed REMAP Project undertaken at the University of Hull, which has been a key step toward realising a larger vision of the role a repository can play in supporting digital content management for an institution.
The first step was the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded RepoMMan Project that the team undertook between 2005 and 2007 [1].
RepoMMan was described at length in Ariadne Issue 54 (January 2008) [2] and will only be dealt with in summary here.
The second step has been the REMAP Project itself; JISC-funded again, this second two-year project further developed the work that RepoMMan had started.
The third step, more of a leap maybe, is a three-year venture (2008-11), the Hydra Project, being undertaken in partnership with colleagues at Stanford University, the University of Virginia and Fedora Commons: Hull uses the Fedora repository software, its development is undertaken by the not-for-profit organisation Fedora Commons [3].
Hull will also be working with King’s College London on the CLIF project to December 2010, work that will run in parallel with and complement Hydra.
In the Ariadne article describing the work of RepoMMan we wrote: “The vision at Hull was, and is, of a repository placed at the heart of a Web Services architecture: a key component of a university’s information management.
In this vision the institutional repository provides not only a showcase for finished digital output, but also a workspace in which members of the University can, if they wish, develop those same materials.” [2] This remains the case but with REMAP we added in notions of records management and digital preservation (RMDP) once the materials were placed in the repository.
Thus the repository can play a key part throughout the lifetime of the content.
It turns out that others share this vision of repository-enabled management over the full lifecycle of born-digital materials, a concept that some are calling the ‘scholar’s workbench’.
(Others are calling it the ‘scholars’ workbench’: the community has not yet decided quite where the apostrophe belongs!)
RepoMMan: A Short Review The RepoMMan Project developed a browser-based interface that allowed users to interact with a private repository space (‘My repository’) where they could safely store and manage digital works-in-progress of any kind.
Users have the ability to treat the workspace as a digital vault, accessible from anywhere that they have access to the Internet, but one that natively supports versioning of the materials that they develop.
Thus, at any stage in the process, it is possible to revert to an earlier iteration of their work.
It was always the intention that the RepoMMan tool would eventually allow users to publish appropriate material from this private space into the University’s public-facing repository, and to that end, the project investigated a range of options for automatically providing various items of metadata with which to describe it.
The project stopped short of actually implementing the publishing process.
REMAP: The Publishing Process The REMAP Project (2007-2009) took over where RepoMMan left off, but it was not simply an exercise in enhancing the RepoMMan tool with a ‘publish’ function.
Whilst working on RepoMMan, we had realised that the process of publishing an author’s material to the public-facing repository was actually an opportunity to embed within it triggers that would help repository staff to manage the material over time and, potentially, assist in its long-term preservation.
Thus the repository has an active role to play throughout the lifetime of the materials.
When authors decide that an item in their private repository space should be submitted for publication, they select the item and click on a button labelled ‘publish’.
This starts a set of processes that will take a copy of their file, whatever it may be, lead them through the process of adding metadata to describe the material and will finally create a new digital object which goes into the accessioning queue for the repository proper to await approval.
From the authors’ standpoint, clicking the ‘publish’ button starts what we might call a ‘publish wizard’.
The purpose of the wizard is largely to take the authors through the process of gathering metadata with which to describe their work.
As things stand at present with Hull’s repository, this will generally become a Dublin Core (DC) metadata record within the repository’s digital object (a move to the richer MODS metadata schema is likely soon) with the exception that our theses use UKETD_DC [4].
It will be helpful if we take a concrete example, so let us assume that one of us wishes to place a version of this article in Hull’s repository and that it exists in a private repository as a Word (.doc) file.
The authors are first asked to describe the material that they are publishing by choosing from a dropdown menu.
Our article is clearly ‘text’ and from the sub-categories available we would choose ‘article’.
The next wizard screen asks us for the author, the subject of the article and an abstract.
However it does not appear with three blank text boxes; we might reasonably hope that all three are filled in through automated means.
When the author clicked ‘publish’ a set of processes (technically, Web Services) was invoked which retrieved a copy of the Word file and, in the background, ran it through a metadata extraction tool [5].
Amongst other things, the tool attempts to identify these three items (author, subject and abstract) from the file; in our experience it is quite effective.
Thus authors see pre-filled text boxes which they can alter if they feel that the content is wrong.
The process proceeds with pages pre-populated as much as possible.
When authors finish with the wizard, a further set of processes is invoked to take a copy of their file and the metadata that they have provided and to build from it a new digital object which will go into the repository accession queue.
This object will conform to a standard ‘content model’ for articles.
In other words, as an aid to long-term management, it will have exactly the same internal structure as all other digital objects holding articles in the repository.
So what will this structure be?
An object in a Fedora repository contains a number of so-called ‘datastreams’.
Some of them are required by the repository, others are defined by the user.
Thus our object here must have datastreams that deal with the minimal Dublin Core metadata required by Fedora and the object’s relationships to other objects in the repository (the formal expression of the content model is itself a repository object).
In addition, all Hull’s simple text objects will have a delivery datastream for the text and for any archive version of it: Figure 1: A simplified structural view of a text object in Hull’s repository Hull’s preferred format for text in the repository is pdf; thus a background process will be run that converts the Word file.
The original goes into the object as the archive datastream whilst the pdf becomes the delivery datastream and the metadata enhance the DC datastream.
Essentially this is all that is needed for the object to become part of the institutional repository’s content.
The object can now go for checking and approval and should appear in due course.
The ‘creation to publish’ cycle envisaged at the start of the RepoMMan Project has been completed – but REMAP goes further.
Before moving on to describe the Records Management and Digital Preservation (RMDP) aspects of REMAP, there are a few further comments that should be made about the publishing wizard and the process more generally.
We have tried to adopt an intelligent approach to the gathering of metadata from the author and the subsequent creation of digital objects.
Hull’s use of Web Services to underpin the tools means that we can run quite complex, non-linear processes behind the scenes.
The metadata wizard is sensitive to the type of content being submitted; had we declared our text to be a ‘thesis or dissertation’, for instance, we would have seen a quite different sequence of screens because they use a different metadata schema (UKETD_DC).
Had we submitted an image of some sort, whilst DC would again have been used, additional requests for information would have been made notably for filesize and image dimensions.
However, they would have been pre-filled by calling another Web Service (in this case one invoking a locally installed copy of the JHOVE tool from Harvard [6]).
The process of creating an image object would have resulted in a number of datastreams containing ‘derived’ images in a range of sizes from ‘full-size’ to ‘thumbnail’ and the transfer of the original file to an archive datastream (it may have been that this original was not in a browser-compatible format, perhaps a TIFF file).
All of this process operates with the author largely unaware that anything terribly complex is occurring.
REMAP: The RMDP Work At the beginning of the previous section we talked about embedding ‘triggers’ in the digital objects that the REMAP technology creates.
This formed a significant part of the REMAP work, taking the team into new territory.
As we noted in our introduction, the vision for an institutional repository at Hull was one that saw the repository at the heart of the University’s information architecture; the storehouse for much of its digital material of whatever type.
Thus it was that we could envisage in the future a repository holding hundreds of thousands, even millions, of objects of widely varying file type.
Such a vision could easily become a nightmare for repository managers.
How would we manage so many disparate objects effectively?
The idea behind the REMAP work was to investigate how, in a sense, the repository could contribute to its own management.
The work started with a user needs analysis during which we interviewed a variety of key University staff in order to understand the lifecycle of the materials that they handled and how that might translate into repository terms.
In addition we spent time with our partners in the REMAP Project, the Spoken Word Services team at Glasgow Caledonian University [7] who were investigating the potential for a repository of audio materials which envisaged a particularly complex lifecycle.
Thus informed, we identified in our user needs report [8] a range of triggers that might usefully be built into a repository object.
It may help to explain the process through a concrete example.
Consider a Departmental Secretary who each year submits to the repository a departmental prospectus for potential students.
The students might retrieve it directly from the repository or via a link from the departmental Web site.
The prospectus needs to go through the normal repository checks before being exposed and, once available, has a lifetime of just a year before it needs to be replaced.
Triggers might usefully be placed in the object to drive two processes.
In the first, a trigger is placed in the object to say that on or immediately after the date of publication the Secretary should be emailed that publication has successfully taken place and giving the URL of the prospectus.
In a year’s time, the repository should email the Secretary that the prospectus is now out of date and will be hidden from public view unless action is taken to prevent it.
In this last example we see the repository becoming proactive in its own management.
We have used email in the examples but the process could equally well adopt RSS feeds or some other information tool.
How is this functionality achieved?
When the new object is constructed for the repository from the author’s original, an additional datastream is created within it.
This holds information about the triggers in a format commonly used with personal calendars and scheduling software.
From there the information is copied to a ‘calendar server’ which is actually employed to deal with it.
In fact, the information goes onto the calendar server as ‘to-do’ jobs and the system is periodically polled for outstanding jobs to be executed.
Once each task is complete that fact is recorded against the trigger entry in the object so that an audit trail is built up.
Consider a second example involving information that needs to be preserved in the long term.
The minutes of key University committees need to be stored ‘for ever’.
When these minutes go into the repository they would be processed, again via Web Services, through a locally installed copy of the DROID tool from The National Archives (TNA) in the UK [9].
This analyses the file containing the minutes and attempts to identify the exact format, producing a DROID file signature.
The information from the DROID tool is stored in the digital object.
The unique file signature is then transmitted to TNA’s PRONOM service which returns information about the format and any risks associated with it.
Whilst we would not expect it at the moment, in the future the PRONOM response might recommend a format migration or other preservation work to ensure that the content can be successfully accessed for a further period.
Whatever the PRONOM response, it is stored.
Driven by embedded triggers in our object, the PRONOM service will be re-queried periodically so that any changes can be noted and necessary actions taken.
Seen in overview, the complete RepoMMan and REMAP structure looks something like this: Figure 2: An overview of the RepoMMan and REMAP processes The work undertaken with triggers has taken the REMAP team into new territory and, as so often working with relatively new standards and emerging software, the route has not been an easy one.
As a consequence, at the end of the project, our RMDP work is not as well-developed as we should have liked.
That said, all the processes described above have been demonstrated in practice and will be taken forward in due course.
Enter the Hydra Project.
Hydra The work of RepoMMan and subsequently REMAP was presented at a number of conferences in the UK and the US.
Following a presentation at Open Repositories 2008, the REMAP team was approached on behalf of the University of Virginia (UVa).
UVa needed a specifically targeted repository but wanted to build it incorporating ideas from our two projects.
It was agreed that we should hold a meeting in the early autumn and thus it was that September 2008 saw us at UVa talking with staff there.
Also represented was Stanford University, which had identified a similar need, and Fedora Commons staff who were interested in the potential of the meeting for the development of the Fedora repository software.
At this meeting the three universities agreed, with the active co-operation of Fedora Commons, to work together ‘to develop an end-to-end, flexible, extensible, workflow-driven, Fedora application kit’ [10].
What this means in practice is a search-and-discovery tool for the Fedora repository software integrated with RepoMMan-like functionality to support authors and creators and REMAP-like functionality to support records management and preservation activities.
However, this work will be done in such a way that what emerges is a toolkit from which other potential users can construct workflows around their needs using a ‘Lego set’ of (re-)configurable components.
This work is well under way and the partner universities hope to have the search-and-discovery interface, the core of the system, with some useful workflows, in place for the start of the academic year 2009⁄10.
After that, the work will be broadened to enable other workflows and the RMDP work.
The software will be open-source and will be released in stages to the repository community after appropriate production testing.
The Content Lifecycle Integration Framework Project The work of the projects thus far, and their continuation through Hydra, is placing the repository at the heart of the information environment within an institution.
Making this environment flexible and user-friendly to use is vital, as Hydra has identified.
We have also recognised that the repository within an institution is but one place where digital content management takes place, and that such management activities have taken place for some years without repositories.
The Content Lifecycle Integration Framework (CLIF) Project [11], a collaboration between Hull and King’s College London, will undertake work complementary to Hydra to identify how the lifecycle of digital content influences its management across systems within an institution, and the related integrations between the repository and other systems that are required.
Conclusion Thus it is that we anticipate the work of RepoMMan and REMAP, and the original vision, being taken forward albeit in a rather unexpected way.
Little did we think, four years ago when we started out on this work, that the future held such exciting, international opportunities.
Acknowledgements Many people, from the UK, continental Europe, Australia and the US, have contributed directly and indirectly to our work over the last four years.
It would be impossible to name them all but they have our thanks.
Two groups in particular, though, should be singled out: We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of the Joint Information Systems Committee (the JISC) in funding the RepoMMan and REMAP Projects, and in contributing towards travel costs associated with getting the Hydra Project under way.
We acknowledge too the significant contributions made to REMAP and the thinking around it by our good friends in Spoken Word Services at Glasgow Caledonian University (David Donald, Caroline Noakes, Iain Wallace and, for the first year, Graeme West).
We are delighted that they have agreed to become consultants to Hydra.
References The RepoMMan Project http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ Richard Green and Chris Awre, “RepoMMan: Delivering Private Repository Space for Day-to-day Use”, January 2008, Ariadne Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/green-awre/ Fedora Commons http://fedora-commons.org/ UKETD-DC http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=47 The iVia metadata tool, part of the Data Fountains Project http://datafountains.ucr.edu/ JHOVE http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/ Spoken Word Services http://www.spokenword.ac.uk/ Green R, Awre C, Burg J, Mays V, and Wallace Ian (2007) REMAP Project: Records Management and Preservation Requirements http://edocs.hull.ac.uk/splash.jsp?parentId=hull:798%26pid=hull:97 PRONOM and DROID http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/Default.aspx The Hydra Project https://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project The Content Lifecycle Integration Framework (CLIF) Project: http://www.hull.ac.uk/clif Author Details Richard Green Manager CLIF and Hydra (Hull) Projects c/o Academic Services Brynmor Jones Library University of Hull Hull HU6 7RX Email: r.green@hull.ac.uk Web sites: http://www.hull.ac.uk/clif https://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project Richard Green is an independent consultant working with the IT Systems Group in Academic Services.
Chris Awre Head of Information Management Academic Services Brynmor Jones Library University of Hull Hull HU6 7RX Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web sites:http://www.hull.ac.uk/clif https://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project Return to top Article Title: “The REMAP Project: Steps towards a Repository-enabled Information Environment” Author: Richard Green and Chris Awre Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/green-awre/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Librarian's Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) 2008 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Librarian's Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) 2008 Buzz data software rss portal infrastructure metadata blog video vle moodle research standards Citation BibTex RIS Keir Hopwood reports on three-day conference about current and future trends in the practice of information literacy teaching in Higher Education and beyond.
The LILAC 2008 has already received plenty of Web coverage, notably in Sheila Webber’s IL blog [1], where lots of other weblog posts on the event have been collected.
I also produced an official blog [2] myself, as part of the conditions of my student award conference bursary.
As a newcomer to the information and library profession, and a postgraduate masters student, I hope to offer a different perspective on this event, focussing on the highlights and my personal impressions.
In my submission for the LILAC student award panel I had noted some of the aspects of this discipline which struck a raw graduate like myself: that information literacy itself is a contested concept and so often has to be justified or at least explained; that it has emerged in isolated pockets but is now becoming a cross-sector activity; and that it’s an international issue.
The terms of the conference award meant I had to create a weblog report of the event – this also allowed me to combine two major professional interests, “Web 2.0” and information literacy.
I had obviously come to the right place!
Keynote Speakers There were five keynote sessions this year, one up on 2006.
The speakers represented a very diverse range of perspectives, considering both their professional involvements and their approaches to the subject of information literacy.
We heard from researching librarians, a social anthropologist, a media studies professor, a science library director and an IL dignitary from the USA.
The resulting mixture seemed to fit the bill given the controversial conference themes (including the “net generation”, information ethics and social justice), and made for a heady and slightly explosive brew of ideas which certainly kept me upright in my seat as much as the obligatory coffee and muffins.
Anja Timm In her presentation “The library?
Why would I go there?”, Anja Timm used a short documentary video filmed in India to introduce her research, giving us a very personalised anthropological introduction to the expectations of university level study and the scholarly writing process of international students from three countries (or continents) of origin.
I found this a very apt and striking way to present her findings, which are directly relevant to how students use libraries (and in fact, how they experience university as a whole) but could so easily vanish in the anonymity of official reports and academic routine.
When I sat next to an Indian student on the train home from the conference, and she recounted her friend’s experience of being hauled up before a plagiarism tribunal for an unwittingly unattributed quotation, I saw first-hand that this is a live issue!
Patricia Senn-Breivik Dr. Breivik’s view seemed to be a totally integrated one: information literacy as a means to universal education, and librarians as activists.
She had practical suggestions as to how to overcome the obstacles to getting it on the agenda at the highest levels.
These were her three ‘P’s of information literacy: partnerships, planning and public relations.
In these ways, librarians were to “go beyond the walls” of libraries and even academic institutions; so, for example, academic librarians should become advocates for school librarians.
The esteemed educational administrator Ernest Boyer [3] was cited as saying that students should spend equal time in the library and the classroom; the library educator Patricia Knapp was invoked as an advocate of active learning.
Every conference delegate received a copy of Dr. Breivik’s book Higher Education in the Internet Age: Libraries Creating a Strategic Edge [4].
Frances Norton The head of the Wellcome Library also used the documentary film idiom in this case a vox pop session on peoples’ views of ‘science’.
This rather ‘unscientific’ (as she put it!)
dip into popular opinion introduced a visual exploration of scientific communication.
Frances led us through an eclectic selection of materials, from computer-generated geographic statistical representations, to a copy of an original sketch of DNA by Francis Crick.
I was impressed by her definition of scientific literacy as a multifaceted sense for logic, risk, probability and numeracy.
Her mention of a ‘strain in British culture of pushing science to one side’ resonated with my experience of studying Physics as an undergraduate, and seeing the contrast between the outlook of teachers like Richard Feynmann and the general impressions available in the mass media.
She compared the importance of the discovery of DNA and the Human Genome Project to that of the invention of the Internet.
If this is true, then I believe there is a long way to go in public understanding of science, given that the Internet is still so misunderstood.
Christine Irving and John Crawford A refreshingly different approach was provided by the Scottish Information Literacy Project’s Information Literacy in the Workplace [5] research report.
I attended the smaller workshop on this topic as well as the keynote speech, and I was happy to have done so, because this was the practical evidence-based review of IL in multiple sectors I had been eagerly anticipating.
The research was qualitative and interview-based, and aimed at creating new theory to suggest further research questions.
Several points seemed familiar from my background reading and experience: that there is a ‘complete disjunction’ between the library and information science and pedagogic theory literatures, and that in many cases, special libraries tend to be dissolved – and then re-constructed under another guise!
The review’s conclusions seemed quite biased towards an academic interpretation, and maybe would suggest (at least to me) some sort of shift closer towards theories of knowledge management.
Tara Brabazon The final keynote was also long-awaited: the presentation and one-woman theatrical performance by Professor Brabazon from the University of Brighton.
She used music, the good old overhead projector, and a whole raft of popular culture references to develop a vision of the librarian as the real hub of information and knowledge exchange in the incumbent ‘conceptual age’.
Mirroring Tim O’Reilly’s now ubiquitous Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 mapping [6], she portrayed the unique skills and qualities of information professionals as the next step in a natural progression, exemplified by the mappings ‘search engine > information professional’, and ‘infrastructure > social structure’.
Despite some one-sided press responses, she did not unilaterally malign Google and Wikipedia (‘how can you argue with a platform?’) but did press for a more subtle approach to their application, taking into account the moral and social context of today’s information user.
Workshops The sheer pace of the schedule at LILAC surprised me.
One needs a certain amount of information literacy just to keep track of the session locations, and the location changes during the three days; to say nothing of the sheer amounts of knowledge and information flowing freely.
Wikipedia: A Resource for Teaching and Learning?
Angela Newton and Katy Sidwell My first workshop was fully booked, but as the official blog reporter I was able to secure a place.
Angela Newton and Katy Sidwell aptly presented their experience of using Wikipedia for university teaching in the context of an interactive workshop.
We were led through the interesting social structures that underlie Wikipedia and the more credential-focussed alternative, Citizendium, and looked at ways to understand and challenge students’ and academics’ perceptions of both, making the interactive encyclopaedia come alive.
Out-genning the Net Generation: Second Life as a Learning Environment Sheila Webber, Vicki Cormie & Lyn Parker Another interactive class, this time on the (to me) frankly bizarre but obviously hugely successful Second Life virtual world.
They pulled off the impressive feat of getting a roomful of librarians, some of whom (like me!)
were rather sceptical of the whole concept, signed up and romping round the University of Sheffield “island”.
If that was all we achieved, it was no mean feat.
The Academic Librarian as a Supervisor: Intervening in the Student’s Research Process Maria-Carme Torras i Calvo Dr. Torras i Calvo put forward her theories of librarians’ interventions in the research process in this workshop, by which point, I must confess, I was somewhat conference-weary!
The ideas that managed to penetrate my somnolent mind were impressively new: there is value in seeing learning as a continuous process involving the whole social context of the student.
This situates the students in a triadic network of peers, academics and librarians.
It entails new practices, such as an ‘apprenticeship’ in research and group supervisions.
These ideas all tend towards ‘making the graduate curriculum explicit’ [7] so they are not totally new, but involving librarians to this extent certainly is.
A pilot study is underway and should be eagerly awaited.
Moodle at LSE Library: Bringing Information Literacy to the Students’ Desktop Rowena Macrae-Gibson & Maria Bell The London School of Economics’ (LSE) training portal uses RSS feeds [8] to draw together details of workshops and short courses from across the University, in all skill areas from library induction, through academic writing to IT and standard software packages.
The courses are administered the various training providers and then fed into the RSS system through various filters to put the data into standardised metadata fields.
The feed is then directed into Moodle, the LSE’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) [9] and displayed on plasma screens around the campus.
This initiative has had interesting results – for example, a widespread perception that the courses are only IT-related.
The link with information literacy is that this activity fits into JISC’s i-Skills agenda [10], under the heading of communication.
Power to the People: Exploring the Development of the Informs Software Tool through Community Engagement Diana Massam & Lisa Charnock I wasn’t able to follow much of the Informs session, except to find out that the very existence of this excellent website user tutorial creation platform was recently saved by the advocacy of its online user community [11] – surely a case in point of information literacy promoters putting our own tools to good use.
Academic Liaison Saves the World?
Alice Crawford Having newly entered the library profession, I was immediately inundated with professional literature signalling the profession’s impending snark-like vanishment.
This workshop presented the experience of two academic liaison librarians, a particularly unimaginable sub-species of this genus, and their Herculean struggles to reintroduce liaison librarianship into the institutional ecology of the University of St. Andrews.
Despite their key skills in teaching, communication and influencing, and their academic library knowledge, they are pitted against a laundry list job specification, approximately 10-15 liaison subject responsibilities, and the fact that the organisation appears to have forgotten where they fit in (and closed the gap).
In their final slide, they raised (for me) the essential question: What’s our role now that ‘we are all librarians now’?
Conclusion While I may not have attended all the sessions I meant to, and perhaps could well have paid more complete attention at the sessions I did attend [12] I learned an awful lot and was left with some useful questions for my own dissertation, which hopefully will focus on information literacy in an academic context.
I feel that a career in academic libraries could be a real possibility for me, now that I’ve met some of the people who, until last month, were mere journal citations for me.
Given that LILAC has only been running since 2005, although IL has been a current term for longer, I feel there is still a long way to go towards uniting all these disparate strands of theory and practice.
Some delegates and speakers espoused an apparently common view that ‘it’s practice that counts’ but I am still holding out for a Grand Unified Theory of Information Literacy!
Especially if the conference themes are taken seriously: Information Literacy is such a key component of everyone’s rights to education, there seems to be a desperate need for some way to articulate this at the academic, political and plain language levels.
Maybe someone could work on this idea for next year’s LILAC.
References Information Literacy Weblog http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/ Official LILAC 2008 Weblog http://lilac2008.wordpress.com/ Altbach, P. (1996), “Ernest Boyer: An Appreciation”, http://bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/News04/text4.html Brown, W. (2006), “Higher Education in the Internet Age: Libraries Creating a Strategic Edge”.
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm06413.pdf Information Literacy in the Workplace project website: http://www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/workplace.html O’Reilly, T. (2005) “What is Web 2.0?” http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html Sullivan, T. (1991)Making the Graduate Curriculum Explicit, Teaching Sociology, Vol.
19, No.
3, Graduate Education (Jul., 1991), pp.
408-413 http://training.lse.ac.uk/docs/ http://moodle.lse.ac.uk/ http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_sissdocs/pub_sissdocs_investing.aspx http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/informs-users.html A variation on Bilbo’s “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”?
Tolkien, J.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Chapter 1).
Available from: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/hm051/88195987.html Author Details Keir Hopwood Postgraduate Student University of the West of England Bristol Email: keir.hopwood@live.uwe.ac.uk Web site: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “The Librarian’s Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) 2008” Author: Keir Hopwood Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/lilac-2008-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Against the Machine Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Against the Machine Buzz metadata blog repositories video youtube facebook research Citation BibTex RIS Mahendra Mahey reviews a book which examines popular Internet culture and how it may be having negative effects on many of us.
As I spend a large part of my day (as I have for the last 12 years) in front of a computer screen connected to the Internet, I wondered what I was going to learn about a book that examines the effect that this technology has had on our culture, our minds and the way we socialise.
Lee Siegel is introduced as a cultural commentator and art critic who has written several books on these subjects as well as popular culture.
He was also a writer and reviewer for The Nation [1], Slate [2], Harper’s [3] and LA Times Book Review [4].
He lives in New Jersey in the US with his wife and son.
Content of the Work Against the Machine comes in three parts plus an introduction and epilogue.
The introduction outlines the motivation for Siegel writing this book.
First of all, he does not claim everything the Internet has achieved is bad.
Siegel believes that there are many books that have been written praising the benefits and uses of the Internet (some of which he mentions); but he claims that few have been written questioning seriously, in a critical, detached way the effect the Internet is having on the way we live our lives.
Siegel believes that there are many negative forces that are driving the Internet in recent times: the cult and craving of popularity, a crowd mentality where individuals are continually looking to the masses for approval, originality being stifled by constant imitation, democratic principles being subverted, while many of the people driving development are being lead by commercialism and self-interest.
By way of a metaphor he recalls the development of the car and how it too represented unstoppable progress, a kind of ‘cool’, that once we had it we could never go back to what existed before.
If you tried to criticise cars in the early days, it was almost as if you were criticising democracy and freedom!
However, in 1965, Ralph Nader wrote a book called Unsafe at any Speed [5] which was an exposé of the motor industry and car safety.
The book criticised the industry for failing to make the changes to cars earlier which could have made them a lot safer to drive, preventing thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Subsequently, as a result of this devastating critique, pressure grew on manufacturers to improve car design with safety in mind.
Many people no longer saw cars through the rose-tinted spectacles they once wore.
The author argues that even though the Internet also represents a kind of ‘unstoppable, non-reversible progress’, we need to examine the negative aspects on humanity carefully, and not blindly accept all its effects as beneficial.
Siegel contends that technology is merely a reflection of the people using it and therefore only serves to amplify existing human strengths and weaknesses; moreover that our personal values and sense of morality are what define technology as good or bad, not the technology itself.
The Internet magnifies pathological behaviour but it does not create it.
Another possible motivation for writing this book derives from a ‘misadventure’ which befell Siegel when writing a cultural blog for the political journal The New Republic.
Siegel had received some very hateful comments from anonymous posters and after complaints to his editors requesting they remove them fell on deaf ears, he decided (in frustration) to exact a somewhat childish revenge (which he admits in subsequent interviews).
In response to ‘thuggish anonymity’ as he described it, he too created an ‘anonymous’ persona called ‘sprezzatura’ (meaning someone who makes difficult things appear easy) who then attacked the ‘anonymous thugs’ with their own tools.
Unfortunately, Lee’s pride prevented him from disguising his writing style and he was quickly discovered but not before he had enraged many in the blogosphere, ironically being pilloried for representing the worst of ‘thuggish anonymity’ and on the way, coining a new word ‘blogofacism’.
The ‘incident’ is described in more detail in an interview by Deborah Solomon for the New York Times Magazine [6] and subsequently in the Guardian newspaper (also available on online [7]).
Siegel’s central argument is that we or at least those of us with access should not allow the Internet to tarnish our lives now that it has become a permanent feature.
Part one (in three chapters) sets the context for Siegel’s main arguments of why we should be thinking critically about the impact of Internet culture on our humanity.
He argues that we have not been given a choice, it has been foisted upon us, and we need to question its impact on us as a society.
Siegel examines the kind of world we have created where we sit at our screens and buy, chat, become someone else, etc.
It appears that we are shaping a vast illusion.
We seem to be spending more and more time alone and living in our minds, Siegel laments.
Our primary reason for using the Web seems to be for immediate gratification.
This has become particularly important with the collapse of families and more people living alone.
For some the only reality that exists is the internal one.
He argues that the main message of the Internet is the ‘ego’ which is allowed to run riot.
Society is becoming a ‘look-at-me culture’ where social networks are actually a contradiction; how is it really possible to have hundreds of ‘friends’?
What does this mean for real friendship and relationships?
Siegel believes that this is having an erosive effect on the very fabric of society.
The Internet is teaching us to package ourselves and perform as if in front of a camera.
The best formula for success, i.e.
to be loved and recognised, appears to be imitation.
In fact, to be successful, you must sound more like everyone else than anyone else can.
The author points to a myth of ‘selfexpression’ on the Internet, as in reality we are far too preoccupied with being liked and accepted to dare to express anything that would attract derision.
Page rank, viewing figures, and ‘friends’ (who are in reality just ‘connections’) represent the new currency.
Many who use this currency, he contends, appear isolated, asocial individuals who are not fully formed adults, more ‘pre-adults’, especially in the language they use.
Siegel believes that the Internet provides the first social environment to serve these people’s needs.
Yet other voices, the quiet ones, are being drowned out.
Siegel warns us of the ‘Internet boosters’, people who use the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, choice and access to justify the Internet; but in fact they conceal their greed and blind self-interest and what they are really promoting: either themselves or some money-making opportunity.
Siegel introduces the term ‘transvaluation’, i.e.
where a word or concept is taken out of its original context to mean new things, where words are distorted and manipulated.
He argues that the language of many Internet evangelists or Internet boosters is littered with such transvaluations.
For example, they ‘transvalue’ words like ‘revolution’ and ‘rebellion’ to describe the effect of the Internet on our lives and where ‘self-expression’ equals ‘creativity’.
The ability to write what you want, create video, etc, does not always mean it is ‘creative’, indeed most is imitation.
Siegel argues that in reality the Internet is a marvel of convenience and a technical innovation but should not be seen in ‘revolutionary terms’.
Much of what motivates Internet boosters is commercial.
There always seems to be the bottom line; seemingly innocent ventures eventually reveal themselves as commercial in essence when someone asks where is the business model to continue to support them.
The Internet is the most deliberate, purposeful environment ever created according to Siegel.
Part two, again with three chapters, focuses much more specifically on the cult, exaltation and indiscriminate hunger for popularity on the Internet by many of its regular users and contributors.
The author argues that many on the Web will do anything for popularity and approval even suppressing their own originality.
Many Internet boosters had predicted that demassification, more choice and access would result because of the Internet.
However, Siegel suggests that was is in fact happening is a ‘homogenization’ largely because of the cult of popularity, fear of disapproval and possibly the way the technology is ranking content.
Siegel argues that to a large extent Internet culture is about finding a clique or group and striving to reproduce its style with the possibility of adding some adorable non-threatening superficial twist.
It resembles schoolchildren wanting to be with the ‘in-crowd’ or even any ‘in-crowd’.
As a result, a new mob is emerging, the mob motivated by popularity.
Siegel again talks about concepts taken from the business world such as the ‘tipping point’ where ‘trends’, ‘styles’, ‘tip’ into craze because of popularity and illustrates how such ideas shape the development of the Internet.
Siegel argues that we need to wake up to the highly purposeful way vested interests are imposed upon us.
Siegel bemoans the decrease in leisure time as more of us spend more time online, for example trying to sell ourselves with carefully crafted profiles, blogs etc.
The separation between work and play grows fuzzier.
We send e-mails, check eBay, keep up to date with latest news gossip, and read Facebook updates.
Siegel writes entertainingly about the popular TV programme American Idol, a singing contest where the most successful performers are those who can imitate previously popular singers.
He believes that such imitative features are being aped in many ways on the Internet.
Part 3 (three chapters) is a really scathing attack on Web 2.0.
Lee Siegel invites us to imagine a world where we could write what we want, to millions of people, with impunity.
He argues that is exactly what blogging allows us to do.
Yet strong opinions need little research or fact checking, yet the blog has quickly gained influence and popularity, especially in the news media.
He fears this trend will reduce what the truth is to whoever shouts the loudest.
Who is going to listen if your considered insights are obscured and buried deep in the Google’s search rankings under a mountain of unchecked facts and opinions?
Siegel emphasises that not everyone has the skill to be a writer.
He decries the elevated status accorded badly written or ill-chosen content that is without merit.
He wants to value skill and expertise and the fact that not anyone can be a journalist for example; we would never accept ‘citizen heart surgeons’, yet we seem to accept ‘citizen journalists’ readily enough.
Siegel admits that old print-based media are terrified of new technology and many journalists and media companies are now embracing blogging.
In fact many professional journalists have managed to edge out other bloggers in terms of popularity with their own respected blogs in similar subject domains.
He also warns that many journalists have become sheepish and ingratiating when online.
Another Web 2.0 feature in Siegel’s sights is Wikipedia.
He strongly criticises the fact that anyone can add entries and he highlights the issues where false entries are added and not checked for accuracy.
He argues that Wikipedia could be one of the first encyclopaedias to include gossip.
Traditional publishing models may be flawed but they retain more checks, balances and accountability.
There are many lessons to be learned from old news media, which is where Siegel originates from professionally.
Siegel goes on to say that most of Wikipedia is ‘information’ masquerading as ‘knowledge’.
He points to the distinction between the huge amount of ‘information’ which is not in a context and ‘knowledge’ which is essentially about real understanding understanding the causes, consequences, history, development and context.
He makes the strong case that you can be armed with a lot of ‘information’, yet have very little understanding.
Real knowledge is being buried while many of us crave irrelevant information from random multiple divergent sources (guilty as charged!).
Siegel contends that the only way to be free of all these negative influences is to practise critical detachment and seek knowledge and understanding.
This is the only way we can guarantee a free society with personal autonomy.
In conclusion, Siegel points out that Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom.
In the epilogue, Siegel predicts a new species ‘homo interneticus’, which may already describe many of us.
He predicts that we will lose our freedom to live apart from other people’s uses for us.
The world will shrink to ourselves.
We we will become very impatient (which is already happening), especially when our basic desires are not being met.
We will surround ourselves with goods and services, and we will be more distracted and appear busier, even though we have actually become more isolated.
We will measure people by their capacity to please or gratify us, and eventually the only face we will be able to face is our own.
Personal Reactions to This Work The book was published in early 2008 (originally in hardback) and if you would like to see and listen to interviews / presentations that Siegel has given since publication, there are several: in February 2008 on The Daily Show with American satirist John Stewart 8, a presentation and discussion at ‘Authors@Google’ he gave in April 2008 9 and an interview with BBC Click (a computer technology magazine) 10 in July 2008.
I must admit they helped a lot in understanding Siegel’s arguments.
It is important to note that the book is written from an American perspective.
One minor point is that a bibliography would have been helpful as I was not aware of some of the works Siegel mentions.
Beyond that, it is certainly written in an entertaining and controversial way.
It is not a balanced piece of writing, and deliberately so.
From the beginning he takes a combative stance and possibly exaggerates some of the negative aspects in an entertaining yet serious way.
Siegel calls for serious reflection on the effect the Internet is having on our culture.
I feel that Siegel believes that he is trying to take on the Web’s show-offs and bullies.
It does seem that many more people are choosing to interact with various Web 2.0 technologies; yet that does not necessarily mean that such a take-up is having a positive effect on human relationships.
A fair amount of repetition in the book leads me to wonder how the book was created, i.e.
to speculate whether it is a collection of essays put together at different times?
Throughout, the ‘Internet’ is almost characterised as a person or single entity perhaps a literary device to bolster Siegel’s standpoint.
I am sure Siegel realises that in reality cyberspace is more than one person and not everyone is driven by the negative forces he mentions.
There are plenty of examples of genuine humanity out there.
Because of this I think Siegel’s microscope is on the popular aspects of the Internet, there is no examination of scholarly work for example possibly because there are too many communities on the Web to be able to focus on all.
Siegel’s call to remove anonymity from the Web is unrealistic, in my view, at least for the foreseeable future.
To choose anonymity may be childish, it may be cunning and cowardly, but it can also be beneficial on occasions, e.g.
whistle blowing (e.g.
Anonymous (group) [11]).
One could argue that the Internet provides a voice for shy people too who would not normally feel brave enough to say something in a social situation.
Is this necessarily a bad thing?
Siegel provides no space to discuss this and I am not sure whether this is deliberate or not.
Siegel should acknowledge that many people will only chat to others they know, and they are part of the Web also.
I agree with Siegel that just because people can go online and contribute to the Web, especially using Web 2.0-type technologies, does not guarantee an increase in intelligent, competent, knowledgeable contributions to discussions and debates.
Expertise, skill, knowledge and wisdom do need to be respected and valued more than either popularity or de-contextualised unchecked information on the Web.
Siegel does not really provide any answers on how this may be done in his book, but has done so in subsequent interviews, such as creating an ‘anti-google’ that does not page rank and is based on contextualised knowledge.
There have been many initiatives that have tried to quality-check information on the Internet and provide rich metadata, for example Intute 12, Tim Berners-Lee’s recently established World Wide Web Foundation [13], FactCheck.Org which (according to its Web site) has been trying to check facts in the Obama / McCain 2008 presidential campaign [14] to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.
How technology or media can be harnessed to spread lies, conspiracy theories or fake history is nothing new and is well described in Counterknowledge by Damian Thompson [15].
Siegel’s point about a lot of content on the Web becoming ‘homogenous’ definitely holds water, as do his warnings about the cult of popularity, the ‘ego’ running wild and imitation.
The distinction he makes between knowledge and information also holds true.
Knowledge requires considerable effort, time, reflection, consideration and understanding.
Knowledge is drowning under the weight of ‘information overload’.
Information which is easy to obtain, requires little analysis and therefore provides immediate gratification.
This information may consist of opinions, trivia and unchecked facts.
As a result untruths are being perpetuated and accepted as fact to a greater extent than ever before, because of the ubiquitous nature of the technology propagating them.
However the phenomenon of our increasing insularity and and a society driven by personal demands has been a topic for debate by philosophers, sociologists, social scientists for many years before the advent of the Web, at least since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Although Siegel quotes some work into cyberscepticism [17] [18] he could have used both sources more effectively throughout the book to back up his arguments.
I agree that there are many things from traditional media such as editorial standards that should not be lost even though they are also flawed.
But surely they have to be better than the lack of editorial control in various places on the Web.
I feel that the editorial process is all about trust, respect and a little humility as not everyone can be a great writer.
When you know the public eye will be on you it is good to go through that process, as will this article text.
I agree with Siegel that people do change when the camera is on them and that cannot be good for society especially when people are performing and packaging themselves for other people all the time.
Again, nothing new, the Web is just another means, and therefore raises all sorts of questions about our sincerity in social situations.
Siegel makes many relevant points about blogging and I do feel that although the original purpose for blogs was for individuals to set up and express their opinions, I think I have to agree that their value has been artificially inflated.
It must be said that there are bloggers whose opinions, knowledge and judgement are well respected and they can be useful places to visit for particular types of information e.g.
a personal view on a conference, event, news item.
Some of the more popular blogs do appear to be a clique or ‘in-crowd’.
Perhaps their current elevated status should be reconsidered when we realise they are often ranked higher than more scholarly sources of information.
I must admit many of the social networking sites feel like a popularity contest.
My teenage son was appalled by a well-known social networking site because it obliged him to rank his friends in order of popularity.
He was horrified when he realised that they were able to see where they stood in the ‘pecking order’.
To his credit he decided that was all wrong, and withdrew from the site in disgust.
Conclusion I would say that this was not an easy book to read as it required a fair bit of research.
However, it is certainly an entertaining, controversial and thought-provoking work.
I am sure it will evince strong opinions among many who read it.
Siegel’s fundamental question is: are we changing for the worse and has the Web contributed to this decline?
I am not certain (though some of us are), but I probably agree.
Editor’s note: Readers may be interested in a potential travelling companion of Lee Siegel in the form of Andrew Keen, whose book The Cult of the Amateur was reviewed in Ariadne in the Autumn 2007 issue.
References The Nation http://www.thenation.com/ Slate Magazine http://www.slate.com/ Harper’s Magazine http://harpers.org/ Book Reviews and News Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/books/ Nader, R. “Unsafe At Any Speed’, Knightsbridge Pub Co Mass, 1965 Bye-Bye Blogger New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17wwln_q4.html The critic bites back: How the US writer Lee Siegel went undercover to confront an army of bloggers http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/may/27/art.culture Lee Siegel, The Daily Show, Comedy Central http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=156816&title=lee-siegel YouTube Authors@Google: Lee Siegel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNMUtau8D30 Experts’ warnings of Web’s future http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/7466085.stm#2 Anonymous (group) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) Intute the best Web resources for education and research http://www.intute.ac.uk/ World Wide Web Foundation http://www.webfoundation.org/ FactCheck.Org http://www.factcheck.org/ Thompson, D. Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History, Atlantic Books, 2008 Author Details Mahendra Mahey Repositories Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath.
Email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Against the Machine – Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” Author: Mahendra Mahey Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/mahey-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Lost Words, Lost Worlds.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Lost Words, Lost Worlds.
Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin discusses how the words we use, and where we use them, change over time, and how this can cause issues for digital preservation.
'Now let's take this parsnip in.'
'Parsnip?'
'Parsnip, coffee.
Perrin, Wellbourne.
What does it matter what we call things?'
– David Nobbs, The Fall And Rise of Reginald Perrin Introduction What does it matter what we call things?
David Nobbs' fictional character Reggie Perrin suggests in the quote above that it doesn't matter at all.
Yet we should keep in mind that Reggie tells us this after almost three hundred pages of tragicomic confusion brought on by his habit of arbitrarily replacing nouns with others such as 'parsnip' or 'earwig' ('When I say earwig, I mean your wife') and his serial adoption of half-a-dozen new identities.
Reggie's linguistic delinquencies are part of a struggle to escape, both literally and nominally, from a choked, stultifying suburban identity.
Pragmatically, this sort of thing can get in the way of communication.
If you want a coffee, after all, why ask for a parsnip?
On the other hand, to have been invited for coffee in 1774 would have been an invitation to a light meal which, admittedly, involved drinking coffee (Crystal, 2014), so Perrin's lesson to us – that you cannot trust the term 'coffee', but you can usually rely on caffeine if you need to stay awake long enough to finish reading that paper – survives intact.
Which, by a circuitous route, brings us to semantic change, observation of change in the way that terminology is used.
It's always a fascinating topic, even if it isn't necessarily a very productive direction under the majority of circumstances because it is also, frankly, rather a subtle phenomenon, with (in general) rather subtle effects.
It's interesting to library, archive, museum and cultural heritage collections in general.
This is partly because much of the information held in such collections has been around for a very long time and occasionally throws up pragmatic engineering problems as a result, and partly because the languages of the past are innately interesting, whether there is a practical purpose to it or not.
Words certainly do change their meaning and their connotations, sometimes rather suddenly.
Any parent of the approximately 0.02% of American infant girls whose parents went for the chart-topping entry in 2013's list of Top Ten mythological girls' names will be sharply aware of that: #3 is Persephone, #2 Thalia, and at the top of the pops in 2013, we find Isis (Khazan, 2014).
The Egyptian goddess of health, marriage and wisdom has abruptly found herself unwillingly defending her namespace against a thoroughly unpleasant competitor.
This type of current-event-driven change is exceptionally high-profile.
Usually the factors that drive semantic change are not so widely broadcast, nor do they develop as rapidly.
Semantic change often plods on for decades, sometimes even generations, before the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary reach for the red pen.
Semantic change in digital preservation Semantic change is understood to be an issue of great relevance to digital preservation, in an understated sort of way.
Semantic change in formal systems, such as controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies, has received ongoing interest from theoreticians and practitioners alike (Tennis 2007; Wang et al, 2011; Baker et al, 2013).
The concept of semantic change has been mathematically formalised on a number of occasions: Wang et al (2011) reviewed past work in the Semantic Web domain on the subject, then formalised the idea of concept drift (a change in the meaning that underlies a term) for a knowledge organisation context.
The formal definitions involved are a little opaque: for example, Wang et al remarked that: The meaning CT of a concept C at some moment in time t is a triple (labelt(C), intt(C),extt(C)), where labelt(C) is a String, intt(C) a set of properties (the intension of C) and extt(C) a subset of the universe (the extension of C).
In other words, a concept connects label (a word or words) with a set of properties and a set of things.
For example, the concept cat connects the word cat with the 'intension' – the properties of being fluffy, four-legged, having a tail, making plaintive meowing noises and insisting on napping on the keyboard – and with the 'extension', i.e.
your cat, your neighbour's cat, the feral cat down the road who breaks open trash bags and forages for meat, and so forth.
Any of the elements of this set-up can change.
Change in pronunciation of the English language might eventually cause us to come up with a more representative variant spelling of cat.
We may develop a new word for feral cat and transfer all of the relevant cats from cat over to the new concept instead, splitting the cat namespace into cats-that-eat-garbage and cats-that-nap-on-keyboards.
This sort of thing can happen, eventually, if there are enough of each to make it worth finding a shortcut way to reference the distinction.
From a practical point of view, it seems clear that the effects of semantic change are far less dramatic in the short-to-medium term accessibility of a digital object than the sorts of technical change with which digital preservation usually concerns itself.
The unavailability of any software capable of interpreting a complex binary file format is a very fundamental accessibility problem, readily and often identified as an issue (see discussion, Graf et al 2013).
Such an issue is significant enough to warrant immediate and direct mitigation, perhaps through conversion of the digital object into an alternative and more accessible file format, or through software emulation or virtualisation of the environment required to make use of legacy software (Van der Hoeven et al, 2008; Giaretta, 2008).
What happens if incompatibilities develop between the original interpretation of a set of terms and the way that they are understood today?
The answer must depend on the details.
We cannot lightly speak of semantic change as though terminology switches suddenly, uniformly, from one meaning to another, as if by common consensus society simply edits its common dictionary.
There is, according to mathematical studies (Niyogi, 2006), a sort of threshold effect beyond which change is generally adopted – the 's-shaped curve' of language change, where change pushes forward slowly, peaks, and then tails off (Blythe & Croft, 2012).
The fact that a new convention dominates does not mean that use of unfamiliar conventions becomes entirely incomprehensible: if it did, Yoda's grammar would require helpful subtitles.
In general it takes a long time for terminology to drift so far from the original meaning that observers (human observers, at least: machines are not generally as flexible with language) cannot dredge the intended meaning from memory or infer it from contextual data.
Foscarini et al (2010), commenting on Lee's (2010) contextual framework for digital collections, lay out the importance of situational context to the interpretation of digital objects.
The authors identify information about original contexts of creation and use as important for users trying to 'make sense and meaningful use of artefacts at moments of “reactivation” in the future.'
Olde Worlde Words Consider the following text drawn from a set of 16th century art auction catalogues, made available by Julie Allinson of the University of York, who developed the dataset as part of the OpenArt project (Allinson et al, 2012).
A Cataloge of the Names off the Most Famous painters hath lived in Europe these Many Years bygon -off whose hands tharr is A Great parcell off Most Curious rare picturs To be sold.
The majority of our difficulty with this text does not result from semantic change, but from simple orthographic inconsistency: for example, we like to spell 'parcel' and 'of' with a more consistent and parsimonious number of consonants.
We are also generally a little more cautious in our use of capitalisation, although we, too, often make exceptions to this rule, especially when laying out titles in academic texts.
Semantic change is represented in this text, however.
The term 'curious' is most probably used here to mean 'unusually', rather than, as it is read, 'strangely'.
We read that the parcel of pictures is 'great', meaning, as in the sense of 'Great Britain', not that it is excellent but simply – according to Geoffrey of Monmouth  (Hay, 1955)– that it is the larger landmass, Britain, by comparison to the smaller, Brittany.
For a human being, decoding this sort of thing generally demands an unwelcome effort: wading through variant spellings and obsolete terminology can take more time and cognitive resources than we would like to spend.
That historical records contain spellings that would be more familiar today to the Dutch ('an original landskip by a good hand') is a pleasant curiosity in passing and an irritant in quantity.
More problematically, without an appropriately trained indexing function capable of identifying variant spellings, our catalogue becomes almost opaque to searches based on keyword indexing.
This is only exacerbated by functionality that is in ordinary terms a useful second-generation catalogue feature, such as automatic spelling corrections performed on search input: these are more helpful if they are normalised against the same conventions that govern the index itself.
On the other hand, the challenge itself of reading historical texts in their original form can be a positive benefit to some.
There is a persistent, if specialist, interest in reading unedited editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, despite the fact that learning Chaucer's Middle English involves almost all of the steps involved in learning a foreign language.
That is partially due perhaps to the enduring appeal and timeless themes of the Tales themselves, but as Josephine Livingstone (2013) put it, 'learning a medieval language […] connects you to a body of literature which is at once intensely familiar and delightfully strange.
It is an uncannily lovely experience to read lines written many, many hundreds of years ago about bits of the world that you could have laid eyes on yourself'.
Subtler problems can easily ambush us, too.
Absolute problems with comprehension are not always the principal factor driving revision of a text.
Sometimes terminology develops connotations that may be viewed as distracting or aggressive.
The language of the relatively recent past, like the language of Chaucer, is a window into another world.
Texts from the 1800s, however, are not as strange to our eyes as Chaucer or Shakespeare.
Such texts are often familiar enough to resonate with contemporary politics, sometimes in unpleasant ways.
The same could be said of the language spoken in unfamiliar contexts, whether physical or online.
In his 1953 novel The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley wrote that 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.'
If that's the case, then online communities could be anywhere: if learning a medieval language is a form of time machine, then studying distant communities is a form of space travel.
Groups of people on the Web speak as it pleases them, share as it pleases them and write according to the norms of their own communities.
Hill et al (2003) famously described social interactions such as the sharing of gossip as a form of 'social grooming': one of the means by which the human ape establishes and retains social bonds.
Donath (2007) considered the impact of social networking services – platforms that allow for rapid large-scale social grooming activities.
Rather than spending hours picking lice from another ape's hair, we have not only dispensed with the effort of any physical grooming activity by developing language and finding another means to 'maintain ties and manage trust' (ibid), but we have also managed to figure out how to broadcast it to hundreds of other people at once with minimal effort to us.
For the purpose we make use of what to anthropologists and linguists is known as phatic expression (Malinowski, 1923), and to everybody else as small talk.
Ape 1: 'Morning'       Ape 2: 'Hey, how's it going?'
Ape 1: 'How're you doing?'
Ape 2: 'Turned out nice again' and so forth.
Phatic expressions aren't designed to inform the listener about the weather.
They're 'grooming talk'.
Online networks are an excellent medium for the transmission of such signals.
Within our groups, we develop social conventions and signals: differentiating our use of language from that of others' is just one dimension of the many, many things that the social ape can do to mediate membership in a community.
As much fun as this type of theorising is, pragmatically, it does not really matter all that much from a data management or preservation perspective why such specialisations occur.
The 'why' of variant orthography is neither here nor there from a practical perspective: the important point is that it happens.
If social webs are islands, then they are volcanic Back in 2007, Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) published a map of the social web, drawing each online social web site as a landmass, representing the user member count by the surface area of each land on the map (Munroe, 2007).
He published an updated version the map in 2010 (Munroe, 2010).
Many of the locations on the original map no longer exist.
Orkut, for example, was closed in 2014 after ten years in operation.
Other sites, though still in existence, have lost much of their popularity: MySpace peaked in 2007 and has seen a significant decline in usage since.
Munroe's map necessarily displays only a tiny proportion of the many social websites online at the time of his design: most of them would not have been visible on the scale of the graphic, anyway.
Back in 2012, a colleague named Adam Chen and I completed a study into the social web, which identified and tracked the popularity of several hundred social websites over a period of five years.
All sorts of sites were included, including German-language Facebook clones, Chinese-language social networking services, a Digg (social news) clone used for news relating to a single political party, and a plethora of social bookmarking sites designed for specific language communities.
The database included some 75 sites in the social bookmarking category, twelve of which were already closed in 2012, and over a hundred social news sites, of which a quarter were already closed.
Returning to that list of sites today, of the 308 that were still functional in 2012, 45 no longer exist even as repurposed domain names.
A further 18 simply respond with HTTP web protocol errors in the 400 range: 403 Forbidden; 404 Not Found and the ever-plaintive 410:       HTTP 410 Gone, The resource is not available and will not be available again.
A complementary metaphor to Munroe's island itself might characterise each social networking site as an exotic species of island fauna.
If a site is granted a stable niche, it can survive comfortably, unless and until a larger, hungrier or altogether angrier species decides to muscle in on its territory.
Of course, this metaphor is somewhat spoiled by the fact that people can and often do belong to several social networks simultaneously; we do not have to live full-time on Facebook Island.
We can have breakfast on Facebook Island with our school friends and then pop out to researchgate.net to share our morning cuppa with the other five people in the world who share our interest in our personal choice of specialist research.
We are unlikely to communicate with each group in an identical tone of voice (or, sometimes, the same language).
This brings us to the 'lost worlds' of the title.
Some of the lost sites that we identified were never in common use.
Some contained more spam than coherent content.
A few, however, were the 'eight-hundred pound gorilla' of their genre and in their time, and of those, a surprisingly large proportion are now no longer in use.
Some have been archived in whole or in part by the site owners or by interested third parties,  most are simply gone.
Dependency on a specialist network has its advantages.
As Jeffrey (2012) puts it, however, a dependency on external services increases the risk of a 'digital dark age'.
Jeffrey referred to the use of social network services in the field of archaeology: the same could be said of librarianship.
We do not know whether the people sitting under a notionally tranquil palm tree on a soon-to-be-sunken social media island were simply performing the online equivalent of picking lice from another ape's hair or sharing insights about their close reading of Geoffrey Chaucer in Middle English.
It does not matter: the island is gone and that material is in all probability lost.
It may be that issues that hide as deeply in the long grass as semantic change genuinely don't deserve a great deal of time, with rare exceptions.
One such exception might involve the development of specialist user interfaces designed to handle material spanning particularly long periods of time.
Another might be consideration of the issues related to long-term sustainability of knowledge structures such as vocabularies, taxonomies or ontologies.
We may find that as the scale of collections continues to grow – 2015 was, after all, hailed by Oracle as 'the year of Big Data' (Preimesberger, 2014) – the subtle trickery of natural language may pave our way to new views of the data that we hold and the places and times it illustrates.
Conclusion Semantic inconsistencies are, depending on one's perspective, either a fascinating resource for productive study or an irritating rake in the face for the busy engineer.
The phenomenon is slow, compared to other forms of change.
It has received interest in a variety of knowledge-management contexts, and the modelling, characterisation and mitigation of its implications to various engineering problems has been studied.
Given the many advances in the area of provision and aggregation of open data, perhaps the extent (and limit) of variance within very large datasets will become more evident as further uses of such large datasets are reported.
Since datasets are presently often experienced within a subject-or organisation-specific silo, it may be that the extent of such changes is hidden from view unless organisations make a point of comparing search terms to track potential differences between the semantics used within the index and those selected by users.
References Allinson, J.
(2012).
Openart: Open metadata for art research at the Tate.
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 38(3), 43-48.
Baker, T., Vandenbussche, P. Y., & Vatant, B.
(2013).
Requirements for vocabulary preservation and governance.
Library Hi Tech, 31(4), 657-668.
Blythe, R. A., & Croft, W. (2012).
S-curves and the mechanisms of propagation in language change.
Language, 88(2), 269-304.
Crystal, D. (2014).
Words in time and place: exploring language through the historical thesaurus of the Oxford English dictionary.
Oxford University Press.
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(2007).
Signals in social supernets.
Journal of Computer?Mediated Communication, 13(1), 231-251.
Foscarini, F., Kim, Y., Lee, C. A., Mehler, A., Oliver, G., & Ross, S. (2010).
On the notion of genre in digital preservation.
In Proceedings of the Dagstuhl seminar 10291 on Automation in Digital Preservation, pp.
18-23.
Giaretta, D. (2008).
The CASPAR approach to digital preservation.
International Journal of Digital Curation, 2(1), 112-121.
Graf, R., & Gordea, S. (2013, September).
A risk analysis of file formats for preservation planning.
In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPres2013) (pp.
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Hill, R. A., & Dunbar, R. I.
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Collaborative web tools, social media and long-term preservation.
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The Atlantic (2014).
at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/isis-girls-name-popular/380532 Lee, C. (2010).
A framework for contextual information in digital collections.
Journal of Documentation, 67(1).
Livingstone, Josephine (2013).
Why you should learn a dead language.
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http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/16/why-learn-a-dead-language Malinowski, B.
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"The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages”, in: Charles K. Ogden / Ian A. Richards (eds.
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Munro, Randall (2007).
Online Communities.
http://xkcd.com/256 Munro, Randall (2010).
Online Communities 2. http://xkcd.com/802  Niyogi, P. (2006).
The computational nature of language learning and evolution.
Cambridge: MIT press.
Preimersberger, Chris (2014).
Why 2015 will be 'The Year of Big Data': Oracle's Seven Predictions.
Retrieved 2015-12-27 from http://www.eweek.com/database/why-2015-will-be-year-of-big-data-oracles-seven-predictions.html Tennis, J. T. (2007).
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Cataloging & classification quarterly, 43(3-4), 85-104.
Van der Hoeven, J., Lohman, B., & Verdegem, R. (2008).
Emulation for digital preservation in practice: The results.
International journal of digital curation, 2(2), 123-132.
Wang, S., Schlobach, S., & Klein, M. (2011).
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Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 9(3), 247-265.
Wijaya, D. T., & Yeniterzi, R. (2011, October).
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Book Review: The Embedded Librarian Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Embedded Librarian Buzz data framework database blog cataloguing research standards Citation BibTex RIS John Azzolini reviews a comprehensive overview of embedded librarianship, a new model of library service that promises to enhance the strategic value of contemporary knowledge work.
Librarianship as a profession is confronting a growing demand to prove its worth.
Library patrons expect utility.
The organisations that fund them pre-suppose a contribution to their bottom lines.
The calls for this proof come from librarians themselves as much as from their employers.
And the tone of the questioning is persistent if not redundant.
It can be distilled to a fundamental query: Can the library sustain its basic mission of effectively and efficiently fulfilling its users' information needs given the technological, social, and economic developments that are transforming how people interact with data, documents, and each other?
Librarianship: In Search of the Value Proposition These transformations have been occurring for some time, in different areas of living and working.
Though not flowing from a single source, for librarians the impacts from these changes have seemingly converged on their profession as if they were collusive forces.
A global financial crisis and its lingering downturns have resulted in deeper budget cuts for many departments in every type of institution, public and private.
A rising trend toward direct information consumption has caused many everyday users as well as executives to believe that removing librarians from the knowledge cycle is the next logical step.
Caught within the sights of cost-conscious decision makers, libraries and information centres have become vulnerable to downsizing.
Students enter universities even secondary schools wedded unconsciously to their handhelds, always connected, assuming unmitigated and near-immediate digital satisfaction for their knowledge wants.
Most of them were born into this socio-technical life-world as if it were a natural order.
They know and expect nothing else.
In such an environment, librarians orchestrate access but need not be confronted.
They maintain crucial databases and finding aids, but can do so unseen and disembodied.
They can be relegated to infrastructural innards.
For-profit organisations, the home of law firm and business librarians, are looking upon the outsourcing of support staff with increasing favour.
And while library positions have not yet been handed over wholesale to third-party providers, there is industry trepidation that it could move in that direction.
The threat is vague but distinctly present.
Many have taken to the outlets of library opinion and prediction, warning of impending disintermediation and possible obsolescence if the field fails to embrace drastic changes in how it carries out its service mission.
Blogs, journals, and conferences are animated with calls to re-conceptualise philosophies and re-direct core methods.
Some commentators merely emit distress signals on behalf of the library community.
They are invocations of crisis without even a stab at real solutions.
Others, however, are serious attempts to map out alternative pathways to a more stable occupational future.
These need to be reckoned with.
A common path taken by the more constructive endeavours is demonstrating how librarianship can re-establish its value in a rapidly changing environment.
This value is understood to be the knowledge-creating and disseminating efficacies that libraries bring to their users more ably and with less cost than other institutions.
Since libraries are housed and financially supported by parent organisations of some kind, the value is usually construed as a combination of business and mission-relevant attributes.
The emphasis on mission may be more pronounced in academic and public libraries, while corporate and firm libraries stress the financial aspects, but it is ultimately about how management assesses the library's contributions to the organisation's long-term integrity.
Granted, the value has a large practical component for a library's patrons; the direct benefits are the answers, leads, and guidance they obtain when visiting the reference desk or searching the collections.
However, the final criterion for most libraries will be the value proposition attributed to them by upper-level decision makers.
User satisfaction is a valuable standard, but in the end it is often translated into a determination of whether the library produces distinct results in light of the resources devoted to maintaining it.
A concrete attempt to re-assert the business and service value of librarians has been the adoption of the practice model known as embedded librarianship.
Although it has been applied in libraries in one form or another for a few decades without necessarily using the word ‘embedded’ only in the past several years has it risen to widespread notability.
Judging by the upsurge in professional discussions and published cases devoted to this approach, librarians of many types are expressing keen interest in the value-enhancing potential of embedding themselves.
Its contemporary significance is fully examined by David Shumaker in The Embedded Librarian: Innovative Strategies for Taking Knowledge Where It's Needed.
The author, an associate professor at The Catholic University of America's School of Library and Information Science in Washington, D.C., is a well-known chronicler of embedded practices.
This book is the field's first attempt at a comprehensive review of embedded librarianship's shared features, variable manifestations, and elements for success among major types of libraries.
Contents Shumaker divides his work into two parts.
The first (‘Embedded Librarianship: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow’) covering chapters one through six, presents an introduction to the core characteristics of the model.
It touches upon the relationships and ambitions that distinguish embedded librarians from their more traditional counterparts and why these properties represent clear advantages for those seeking a more robust librarianship.
Inexorable changes in work practices, user expectations, and technological diffusion have made embeddedness both a necessity and an opportunity.
One chapter is given to a distinct type of library or libraries, where the status, structure, and potential of the embedded model for each one are discussed.
The book’s second half (‘Your Path to Success’) addresses those readers interested in commencing their own embedded projects and looking for an empirically minded guiding hand.
With questionnaires, suggestive scenarios, and the extracted wisdom of practitioners who have embedded successfully, Shumaker attends to issues of readiness, organisationally specific strategies for starting up, sustaining a project once it is running, and frameworks for evaluation.
Although embedded librarianship is gaining prominence, not every librarian has read accounts of it, let alone experimented with a programme of their own.
Some might be able to discern ‘embeddedness’ when catching a glimpse of it in action, but a formulation of its attributes and an offering of real-world examples are compulsory for a preliminary understanding.
In Chapter 1, ‘Defining Embedded Librarianship,’ Shumaker does not give an explicit definition; he clarifies the dispositions toward professional communication, knowledge, and work product that mark off embedded librarians as particularly value-producing.
To embed oneself is to establish and maintain a strong project-oriented partnership with a specific user group, building a highly collaborative, trust-based relationship with it in order to provide customised information expertise.
Embeddedness signifies a social and task-based integration between librarians and their targeted groups so closely woven that the latter’s knowledge needs can be habitually anticipated and satisfied by the former.
Librarianship at this level pre-supposes deeper, ongoing face-to-face interactions.
In some situations, a physical work space is shared by the group and its librarian so that the customisation, collaboration, and anticipatory information solutions that define the embedded relationship can best be realised.
The chapter contains five illustrations (a culinary arts department in a private university; a design consulting firm; the Performing Arts Centre of a private college; the biology curriculum of a public university; and a marketing unit of a large public corporation) that show the variety and potential for professional fulfilment of embedded arrangements.
The author contrasts the embedded approach with the so-called traditional way of librarianship.
This is seen by him as hampered by an overly transaction-based practice method.
Users contact the reference desk with standardised, one-on-one queries.
Librarian responsiveness is diffused across individuals with separate knowledge needs.
Consequently, it can be reactive or even disaggregated piecemeal into a bureaucratic product.
In Shumaker’s eyes, not only is ‘traditional’ librarianship lacking in much-needed flexibility and creative energy, but even its most vaunted features unflagging service  and responsiveness to users are considered to be a level below the anticipatory, partnering stance of the embedded model.
This blanket judgment of librarianship of the non-embedded type as outmoded and worthy of replacement informs much of the book.
I find it problematic and will return to it in this review's conclusion.
Chapter 2, ‘Push and Pull: The Forces Driving Embedded Librarianship,’ argues that contemporary librarianship is still mostly stuck in a traditional passive reference mode, and it is faced with societal trends as disquieting as they are auspicious.
The 'push' refers to dramatic changes in information use as a result of ubiquitous media and content sources.
Massive amounts of Web-based material are accessible at almost any time of the day.
When there's widespread perception that such quantities are available for easy direct consumption, the library’s reputation as a librarian-enabled knowledge site could depreciate to the point where it is mainly sought out as a social meeting space or a technology hub.
‘Pull’ is the demand for creativity, innovation, cognitive diversity, and measurable knowledge work in an increasingly competitive world economy.
These organisational and business forces open up fertile possibilities for librarians because they place a premium value on competencies and outlooks that most librarians already possess, though perhaps have not fully actualised.
The book makes a strong case that the push impresses upon librarianship the spectre of obsolescence, which must be met and overcome by exploiting the opportunities carried forward by the currents of pull.
The next four chapters focus on specific types of libraries, exploring how embeddedness has been typically expressed in each.
Chapter 3 (‘Embedded Librarians in Higher Education’) and Chapter 4 (‘Embedded Librarians in the Health Sciences’) are the stronger of the four, if only because the embedded model has been more fully developed and analysed in those institutional settings.
Shumaker delves into the origins of embeddedness in academic and medical libraries, discusses best practices, and touches upon possible future directions for both.
This pair of chapters is an absorbing read, rich in references and skilful at relating how each library type uniquely addresses stakeholder relationships, librarian training, organisational culture, and self-evaluation.
Chapter 5, ‘Embedded Librarians in Corporations, Nonprofits, and Government,’ covers the model in libraries that have strikingly less experience with it than the health and education fields have.
The author sketches an incipient notion of embeddedness in corporate settings in the early 1990s, when downsizing, special library closures and a rapid switch to digital information germinated the idea of the library as a service, with a responsibility for cost-effectively supporting the strategic goals of the parent organisation.
The functions and tasks found in corporate embedded programmes also differ from their medical and university counterparts.
Where the academic librarian’s emphasis would be on information literacy and curriculum development, and the clinical librarian would concentrate on a sophisticated grasp of the domain literature, the corporate librarian would be more likely to perform competitive intelligence, current awareness, and document delivery.
The evaluative stance toward embedded practice is also different in this kind of library.
The feedback from library managers and the heads of target groups receiving embedded services tend to be rather informal and qualitative when compared to the more metric-conscious academic and medical embedded projects.
The term ‘embedded’ is hardly ever used among school and public librarians.
Indeed, one might be hard-pressed to find evidence of credible embedded practices in such settings, whether they are labelled as such or not.
However, in Chapter 6, ‘Embedded Librarians in Schools and Public Libraries’, a case is made that valid examples of embeddedness are to be found among them.
Despite certain obstacles attributable to their organisational structures and librarian-patron interactions, Shumaker recognises an occupational readiness and a growing advocacy for the model among public as well as elementary and secondary school librarians.
However, I found this position to be less than convincing, as many of the given instances of embeddedness seem more like a heightened level of collaboration between teachers and librarians, or a not-so-extraordinary community involvement by public librarians, than the purposeful embedded librarianship explicated in this work.
The four chapters of the book’s second half grapple with the practical issues of readiness, initiation, perpetuation, and measurement and accountability.
Chapter 7, ‘Assessing Your Readiness,’ encourages readers to appraise their potential for embarking on an embedded programme.
It provides an ‘Embedded Librarianship Maturity Questionnaire’ that allows one to judge how much one possesses ‘indicators of embeddedness.’ These include various dimensions of target group interaction, collaboration, communication, and performance feedback.
The Questionnaire, based on questions and themes from an earlier Special Libraries Association (SLA) research project [1], allows one to obtain a score and corresponding placement along a continuum of maturity, from not embedded to highly embedded.
Shumaker usefully distinguishes between librarian readiness and organisational readiness and the elements of each, and includes worksheets for both readiness dimensions.
To show how these elements might influence readiness in applied settings, he sets out fictional scenarios of different types of libraries (medical, law firm, university and government agency) and gives them varying levels of organisational and librarian readiness.
Chapter 8, ‘Getting Started With Embedded Librarianship,’ opens with a note on the importance of assessing the many facets of your organisational structure in order to lay a more resilient foundation for your newly forming embedded model.
An important option to consider is whether the centralised library will be separated from, combined with, or replaced by one’s embedded librarians.
Continuing with the four readiness scenarios from the previous chapter, Shumaker proffers an action plan for each combination of organisational-librarian readiness.
When knowing the mix of environmental, motivational, and cultural conditions, a viable plan can be tailored.
Also relying on the SLA’s Models of Embedded Librarianship: Final Report, Chapter 9, ‘Sustaining Your Embedded Role,’ expounds the ‘habits of successful embedded librarians.’ Based on one of the more comprehensive studies of the embedded model, these empirically minded recommendations are welcomed.
The habits are marketing and promotion of one’s capabilities and successes; provision of high-level, value-added work product; commitment to self-evaluation; and engagement with and cultivation of support from both library and user group management.
Naturally, maintaining a programme means being cognizant of regular problem areas so as to avoid them or at least prepare and mitigate.
Among the more common ones are excessive or inappropriate work demands, social and professional isolation of the embedded librarian from the central library, and a lack of preparedness for succession planning when established librarians leave the organisation.
In the face of these potential pitfalls, the author stresses the significance of responsible and effective library managers, who are frequently liaisons between embedded librarians and user group managers.
Chapter 10, ‘Evaluating Your Success,’ elaborates on the success-facilitating habit of evaluating one’s embedded programme and then persuasively communicating the results to those who have the power to authorise, enrich, or terminate your programme.
It discusses the strengths and shortcomings of several metrics: output and activity, outcome, and impact.
The author contends that successful embedded librarians apply a combination of these measures.
One’s organisational culture and managerial preferences will determine how much of one or the other is applied, and at what level.
To challenge the reader’s grasp of the chapter’s concepts, Shumaker proposes an ‘Evaluation and Sustainability Exercise.’ In this activity there are four fictional scenarios of different libraries facing a specific challenge.
The reader is invited to come up with an action that would overcome the challenge and thereby sustain the embedded programme.
The author then provides his own detailed solutions to these challenges, underscoring the importance of local institutional conditions in crafting an evaluative framework for one’s embedded endeavours.
Conclusion The Embedded Librarian’s goal is not simply to explore and affirm the positives of embedded practice, but to advocate its necessity (and superiority) in a transformed society.
To bring out the dynamism and effectiveness of such an argument, it is understandable that certain narrative liberties will be taken.
Contrasts are more dramatic when applied with very broad brush strokes.
However, I find some of the pronouncements by embedded advocates regarding both their new calling and librarianship in general to be overstated.
Embedded librarianship as an emerging practice model is truly exciting, but it also has some aspects of being ‘the next best thing.’ Librarians are not immune to the wholesale, almost giddy appropriation of promising new methodologies, especially ones promulgated as a cure for the disintermediation blues, a malady that seems to grow progressively worse as digital information tools and sources expand.
I have several lingering questions for which the standard answers leave me unconvinced: Are most instances of officially designated embedded librarianship truly examples of a ‘new model of library and information work’ or are they just more targeted types of librarianship, enhanced versions of the consultant-specialist?
How susceptible is ‘embedded librarianship’ to being conflated with simply an acute involvement in specific users’ projects?
Shumaker distinguishes the embedded model from the consulting librarian and other types (p.14-17), but to what extent is ‘embeddedness’ only a new name for pretty much the same old stuff, only slightly intensified, re-labelled, and boasting substantial trending potential?
It’s difficult to argue with respected studies and a field leader, but I still have my doubts.
Is ‘traditional librarianship’ really as stagnant and enervated as embedded enthusiasts claim?
And if so, is it possible or desirable to supplant it with the embedded model?
Shumaker favours the anticipatory over the responsive and partnership over service.
Even if embedded librarianship is as anticipatory and partnership-based as its advocates assert, aren’t these qualities nonetheless standing on the shoulders of traditional library responsiveness and service?
Can any approach to librarianship still be called ‘librarianship’ in the absence of these two pillars?
Can embedded librarianship be accepted en masse by every type of library?
Considering this book’s chapter on public and school libraries, which portrays a set of occupational and physical environments somewhat incompatible with the embedded model, I am sceptical.
I also see an inextricable problem for some kinds of special libraries, particularly those serving professional service firms.
The embedded paradigm expounds full membership of the librarian in the user group, and shared responsibility for outcomes.
This is doubtful given the ingrained status differences and rigid boundary-making in some professions.
In these settings, an embrace of librarians as equals by user groups is implausible.
And once this core element of embeddedness is removed, the model cannot be initiated, let alone sustained.
Despite the reservations above, I consider this to be an important book in several ways.
For those who see embedded practice as a viable option for their own libraries, it provides a preliminary blueprint for assessing their capability and, if ready, for priming their starting positions with proven methods.
For practitioners already engaged in embeddedness in one form or another, this work serves as a guiding source, for some of its distilled insights have likely not been fully applied by them.
Perhaps most relevantly, The Embedded Librarian is a fine example of how librarians of all kinds can creatively adapt their venerable yet recently self-doubting mission to an unstable environment.
It ambitiously re-conceptualises librarianship’s abiding strengths into a more value-creating and professionally sustainable embodiment.
The author’s continuing dedication to this practice model can be found at his blog, The Embedded Librarian [2].
References 1.
Shumaker, D. and Talley, M. (2009).
Models of Embedded Librarianship: Final Report.
Alexandria, VA: Special Libraries Association, in .pdf format http://www.sla.org/pdfs/EmbeddedLibrarianshipFinalRptRev.pdf 2.
The Embedded Librarian blog http://embeddedlibrarian.com/ Author Details John Azzolini Reference Librarian Clifford Chance US LLP New York Email: john.azzolini@cliffordchance.com John Azzolini has been working in private law firm libraries in New York City for over ten years.
He began in technical services and cataloguing but later realised that the challenges of reference were too tempting to pass up.
John is always interested in discovering new legal research content and methods as well as in the continuing possibilities of digital libraries.
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Making Citation Work: A British Library DataCite Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Making Citation Work: A British Library DataCite Workshop Buzz data framework api infrastructure archives metadata doi identifier vocabularies schema blog repositories video preservation cataloguing url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alex Ball reports on a workshop on practical data citation issues for institutions, held at the British Library, London, on 8 March 2013.
On Friday, 8 March 2013, I attended the fifth in the series of DataCite workshops run by the British Library [1].
The British Library Conference Centre was the venue for this workshop on the theme 'Making Citation Work: Practical Issues for Institutions'.
I counted myself lucky to get a place: the organisers had had so much interest they had started a reserve list for the event.
I could believe it as it was standing room only at one point, though an awkwardly placed pillar may have contributed to that.
Following the words of welcome from Caroline Wilkinson, the day consisted of three presentations and an extended discussion session.
Working with DataCite: A Practical Guide Elizabeth Newbold and Caroline Wilkinson, British Library For the benefit of anyone new to DataCite, Elizabeth Newbold gave an introduction to the organisation, its motivations and objectives.
DataCite was formed to provide a robust identifier scheme for datasets, and to achieve this it opted to become a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agency.
Its members are mostly national and large academic libraries.
Each member acts as the DOI Allocating Agent for its own country or, in the case of Germany and the US, a sector within a country.
DataCite members such as the British Library (BL) do not work directly with researchers but with data centres and institutional data repositories.
This is because DOIs are meant to signify a long-term commitment to preserving data and making them available, something that can only be provided at an organisational level.
The BL negotiates a contract with each of its client organisations.
While these contracts are bespoke they have some common features:  a three-year term, and commitments from the client to provide data landing pages containing the mandatory DataCite metadata [2], to ensure DOIs continue to point to the right landing pages, and to provide persistent access to data as appropriate.
Clients can demonstrate these commitments through preservation plans, data management policies, service level agreements, mission statements, or similar.
Caroline Wilkinson explained how client organisations mint and manage their DOIs using the DataCite Metadata Store.
The Metadata Store has both a Web interface and an application programming interface (API); the latter is useful for batch operations and for integrating DOI management into local systems.
On the day of the workshop, a new video had just been released which demonstrated how to use the Metadata Store [3].
A key point to note was that a dataset cannot be given a DOI without the client supplying at least the mandatory DataCite metadata.
Preparing the Repository for DOIs (or Building One from Scratch) Tom Parsons, University of Nottingham The ADMIRe Project at the University of Nottingham has been gathering requirements for the institution's forthcoming data repository [4].
Some requirements come directly from the IT policies in place at Nottingham, but as Tom Parsons explained, the project has focused on understanding the needs of research staff.
It therefore conducted a survey and a series of interviews and focus groups.
The survey revealed some considerable difficulties, not least that 60–77% of the data assets known to respondents had no associated metadata.
There was also a low compliance rate with funder requirements to share data.
Digging deeper, the focus groups revealed that researchers were most concerned about file storage, metadata, data identifiers, and standard vocabularies.
The architecture of the data repository will be based on the micro-services approach promoted by the California Digital Library [5].
Tom picked out two of particular interest: the 'Tag' service and the 'ID' service.
The minimal metadata to be demanded by the Tag service closely mirror those demanded by DataCite: creator, title, publisher (i.e.
the university), publication year, identifier (assigned), subject, research grant code, location, associated research paper.
The ID service will run two schemes in parallel, one internal and one external.
DOIs were selected for the external scheme, as they explicitly satisfy EPSRC's fifth Expectation [6] and are familiar to researchers through their scholarly journal publications.
DOIs will only be registered on request; some of the University's data assets have sensitive metadata, and thus cannot be registered with DataCite.
Now that the requirements for the data repository are understood – each micro-service is scoped by around 10–15 requirements – development work was scheduled to begin on 27 March 2013.
Engaging with Researchers at Exeter Gareth Cole, University of Exeter The Open Exeter Project is developing policies and a technical infrastructure for research data management [7].
As Gareth Cole was keen to stress, a cornerstone of the project was how it has engaged with multiple stakeholders: senior management, academic staff, post-graduate researchers, central and embedded IT support staff, library staff, administrators and so on.
This engagement was performed both through dedicated channels, such as a policy task-and-finish group and a DAF (Data Asset Framework) survey, and through existing channels such as departmental seminar series, staff meetings and college workshops.
The project team is confident this programme of engagement has given them an accurate picture of current practice and of stakeholder requirements for both the policy and infrastructure strands of its work.
It is also giving researchers a sense of ownership over the project deliverables, making it more likely they will abide by the policies and use the infrastructure in future.
Language proved to be a problem.
Disciplines at the Arts and Humanities end of the spectrum  tended not to think of their 'digital objects' as data.
Some researchers only recognised data sharing in the context of active data, not the archival context.
The University of Exeter has now approved the Open Access Research and Research Data Management Policy for PGR Students developed by the project [8].
The policy specifies that data must be securely preserved and registered with the University's data repository, but does not specify a persistent identifier scheme.
Questions and Answers The discussion section of the workshop was chaired by Caroline Wilkinson and lead by a panel consisting of Michael Charno, Archaeology Data Service (ADS) at the University of York, David Boyd, University of Bristol, and Sarah Callaghan, British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) at STFC.
The ADS has registered the most DOIs of any UK repository, while the University of Bristol was the first UK Higher Education institution to mint a DOI.
Sarah said BADC had chosen DOIs as an identifier scheme because of the reputation they had among researchers as a stamp of authority, and because they were seen as more trustworthy than BADC's existing catalogue page URLs.
David said that for the University of Bristol, using DOIs was a sign of its commitment to maintain the infrastructure set up by the Data.Bris project; it also helped that DOIs, more so than other identifiers, were well known and understood among researchers.
Michael explained that the closure of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) served as a warning to ADS about the vulnerability of domain names, and DOIs seemed like a good way to introduce a layer of indirection.
As archaeology is a field with a culture of reuse, it is easy to make the case to researchers for data citation as a way of promoting datasets.
There was some discussion about the relative merits of DOIs and plain Handles (DOIs are a special type of Handle identifier).
It was emphasised that DOIs have greater mind share and recognition among researchers and publishers, and an additional layer of governance in the form of the International DOI Foundation.
DOIs have a different 'implicit contract': they imply a static version of reference, while Handles can happily be used for more dynamic or ephemeral entities.
DOIs also have additional services associated with them, such as DataCite's Metadata Store for data discovery, made possible through the enforcement of a metadata standard.
On the old chestnut of institutional versus subject-based repositories, there was a general consensus that the two can co-exist, with the institutions supporting subjects that do not have their own repositories.
Michael noted that the ADS is happy to prepare and package submitted data and send them back to institutions to archive.
Where a dataset has two (or more) possible homes, the consensus was that the metadata should be held in each place but only one repository should hold the actual data (with this location recorded by the others).
It is the repository that holds the data that should manage the DOI registrations.
A variation on this was introduced into the conversation by Robin Rice, University of Edinburgh: what about data that was being hosted in a custom, dedicated repository by a university department?
Could the institutional repository register DOIs on behalf of the departmental repository?
Should it ingest copies of the data and register those as the version of record, despite the departmental repository providing a better user experience?
The ensuing discussion threw up some interesting points.
The contract would be between the BL and the university, not the institutional repository, so the university could have separate prefixes for each of its repositories.
If the departmental repository had to close because the researcher running it had moved on, the DOIs could follow the researcher to a new institution, or the institutional repository could ingest the data at that point and take over control of the DOIs.
After further probing, it began to look like DOIs may not be the best solution for the use case Robin had in mind.
Several participants were concerned about the business case for institutions subscribing to DataCite.
David reassured them that the annual cost was reasonable, not too dissimilar to that of a journal subscription, and there had been no problems making the case for it at Bristol.
Sarah added that the subscription fee was dwarfed by the staff costs associated with ingesting data into a repository.
The panel members were asked if they had policies on which sorts of object could receive DOIs.
At ADS, the matter was decided by the types of object for which its catalogue system could generate landing pages.
At Bristol, the current policy is that DOIs are given to the data underlying published papers.
If a dataset is given a DOI but later needs to be changed in the light of a peer reviewer's comments, a new version has to be registered with a new DOI.
At BADC, DOIs are used to mark frozen datasets that have high-quality metadata.
Sarah explained that, in terms of granularity, the key thing is that datasets marked with a DOI form a scientifically meaningful, complete entity.
This might mean everything from a project is kept together as a single object, or the outputs might be separated out into distinct but related objects.
While it would be possible to mint DOIs at several different levels of granularity – one for a dataset and one each for several subsets, say – Sarah warned this might dilute the apparent impact of the dataset by diverting some of its citation count to its subsets or supersets.
A few additional matters were raised and dealt with fairly quickly.
One participant's concerns about use of the DataCite API at scale were allayed.
It was clarified that dataset landing pages need to contain a statement about accessing the data, but need not provide a link for direct download.
Michael explained how the DOI resolver supports content negotiation for DataCite DOIs: in other words, it can be coaxed into telling you, say, the MIME type of a dataset instead of redirecting you to the landing page.
It was also pointed out that if a repository has to maintain several snapshots of a dynamic dataset, each with a different DOI, this does not mean data have to be duplicated across all the snapshots: the snapshots could be assembled on demand from a single master corpus or sequence.
Conclusion One of the organisers confessed to me they were unsure the format of the workshop would work: it is rare to have so much time devoted to free discussion.
In this case I think it paid off.
As the reader will gather from the above (incomplete) summary, it gave participants the chance to air a wide variety of concerns and solicit advice on some knotty real-world problems.
Even so, I suspect that the most valuable thing to come out of this workshop, at least for institutional data repositories, is the information that was given about those all-important DOI registration accounts and associated contracts.
I can see why such information has been slow to enter the public arena, but I cannot help feeling that this has kept potential clients away.
If nothing else, I hope this workshop has provided reassurance to institutions who wanted to know about being able to mint DOIs, but were too afraid to ask.
References British Library DataCite workshops http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/datasets/dataciteworkshops/ DataCite Metadata Schema for the Publication and Citation of Research Data, Version 2.2, July 2011 http://dx.doi.org/10.5438/0005 British Library, DataCite: Information for Potential Clients http://bit.ly/DataCiteFAQ ADMIRe Project blog http://admire.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ Abrams, S., Kunze, J., Loy, D., “An Emergent Micro-Services Approach to Digital Curation Infrastructure”, International Journal of Digital Curation 5(1): 172-186, 2010 http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v5i1.151 EPSRC, Expectations http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/standards/researchdata/Pages/expectations.aspx Open Exeter Project blog http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/openexeterrdm/ University of Exeter, Open Access Research and Research Data Management Policy for PGR Students http://hdl.handle.net/10036/4279 Author Details Alex Ball Institutional Support Officer/Research Officer DCC/UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.ball@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~ab318/ Alex Ball is a Research Officer working in the field of digital curation and research data management, and an Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre.
His interests include Engineering research data, Web technologies and preservation, scientific metadata, data citation and the intellectual property aspects of research data.
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Turning on the Lights for the User: NISO Discovery to Delivery Forum Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Turning on the Lights for the User: NISO Discovery to Delivery Forum Buzz data software framework api database rss xml atom archives metadata digitisation standardisation tagging identifier schema video oai-pmh cataloguing visualisation marc aggregation ebook openurl drm shibboleth onix authentication interoperability research standards sfx jstor Citation BibTex RIS Laura Akerman and Kim Durante report on Discovery to Delivery, Creating a First-Class User Experience, a NISO Forum on today's information seekers and current standards developments held in March 2010 at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center.
A crisp spring day in Atlanta saw a gathering of 50 participants coming from libraries, including many from the GALILEO consortium, from vendors, including sponsors Ex Libris and Innovative Interfaces, Inc., and from content providers such as JSTOR, for a series of presentations at the well-equipped and comfortable Georgia Tech Global Learning Center, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
The agenda [1] was an interesting mix of perspectives on a theme switching focus from information resource users, particularly students, and how studying and interacting with them can inform our discovery and delivery systems, to details of ‘behind the scenes’ of these systems, technologies and standards such as OpenURL and SSO (Single Sign-on), and improvements needed to deliver more seamlessly what users want, as well as the development of new services such as bX recommender and BookServer.
Many of these behind-the-scenes issues centred on metadata quality and interoperability.
Welcome Todd Carpenter NISO Managing Director Todd Carpenter introduced the talks and the theme.
The Education Committee wanted a programme that got back to the basics: technology should ‘get out of the way and give the users what they want’.
He used a light switch analogy for the kind of seamlessness today’s users are expecting.
Keynote: Connecting with Today’s Users Joan Lippincott, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information.
Joan Lippincott’s overview of college students as information users their behaviour, attitudes and changes over the years, was grounded in her background as both provider she was formerly head of Public Services at Cornell and more recently, as a consumer (researcher) of information services.
However, it drew from a lot of research data and reports in reaching its conclusions and recommendations.
They documented trends amongst the ‘Net Gen’ (born 1982-1991) students, such as the rise in use of cell phones and laptops, increasing participative and collaborative learning, and the importance of social networking.
Student attitudes support the need to ‘make search simpler’: 80% think they are good searchers, and while they use databases in addition to Google, students usually stick with a small number of databases with which they’re familiar.
Embedding trusted resources and services ‘where the users are’, with seamless navigation and simple, easy-to-follow instructions is essential to reach these users.
Developers have to get out of their silos and listen to both librarians and users.
Her recommendations were as follows: provide combined access to both purchased and freely available resources on the Web, such as other institutions’ digitised special collections; offer more lively and interactive displays of information; provide more methods of discovery beyond indexes and catalogues, such as exhibits and visualisations; consider new technologies such as QR codes; provide more external links and social engagement, for example through tagging; and promote your institution’s digital publications with links in socially developed resources like Wikipedia.
Discussion after the presentation ranged from the technical barriers to connecting library applications with some learning management software (e.g.
Blackboard), to Web site navigation links (Joan remarked, ‘We’ve lost the right side students think it’s for ads!’).
Maintaining the OpenURL Registry Phil Norman, Director of Reference and Resource Sharing Development, OCLC Phil Norman manages the OpenURL Maintenance Agency at OCLC.
He used his presentation to explain some of the key concepts of the OpenURL Registry with the goal of enabling institutions better to use the registry in order to optimise search and discovery services for their users.
Information contained in the OpenURL Registry can be used as a reference and implementation guide for developers.
For service providers, it can function as a catalogue of what is already available, as well as a tool to create new applications.
The registry uses the OpenURL 1.0 protocol to create OpenURL framework applications [2].
Norman explained the importance of citation metadata in OpenURL ContextObjects and cited this data mark-up as the method by which link resolvers parse information to serve out the appropriate copy of a requested resource.
Norman explained the core components of ContextObjects and talked about the relevant encoding schemes required for contained elements.
Additionally, he discussed the four currently existing community application profiles.
Included among them is the RTM (Request Transfer Message) profile approved last year [3].
This profile will be used for directing loan, copy, access to look-up, or item digitisation requests to Resource Delivery Systems and / or Electronic Resolver Systems.
Norman outlined the 3-step lightweight process of creating a registry entry and suggested that members start with an idea or an existing application in need of standardisation.
He advised interested parties to solicit advice from members of the informational and technological communities.
Seamless Access to Resources Adam Chandler, Database Management and E-Resources Librarian, Cornell University Library Adam Chandler followed Norman’s discussion of the OpenURL registry by elaborating on some specific findings of the OpenURL Quality Metrics project at NISO.
Working closely with the recommendations put forth by phase I of the KBART (Knowledge Base and Related Tools) project [4], group members are working to optimise the linking capability of OpenURLs by informing all stakeholders with a set of best practice guidelines.
Chandler gave a demonstration of the reporting software which was used to analyse the content of nearly 4.5 million OpenURLs [5].
The process compares the link-to metadata supplied by content providers against that of an institutional knowledge base.
The resulting metrics indicate the frequency of certain core elements appearing in OpenURLs generated from a wide range of providers.
By examining the most granular aspects of OpenURL metadata, it is possible to determine what missing or incorrectly formatted elements are causing links to break.
Conducting such a detailed analysis on core element frequencies will guide the project team in developing recommendations for standardising metadata used in OpenURL knowledge bases.
Chandler later remarked that focusing more on correcting or enhancing OpenURL metadata in the initial stages of implementation will result in a more seamless discovery process.
After two years, the Quality Metrics project will undergo evaluation and then a decision will be made as to whether the group will continue its work.
In conjunction with the KBART recommendations, the group seeks to increase communication between content providers and their consumers and to co-ordinate a systematic method for metadata standardisation and updates.
They are open to contributions from others, especially those who may have useful data.
The Student Advisory Board at Georgia Tech Library: Collaborating to Improve the User Experience Ameet Doshi, User Engagement & Assessment Coordinator, Georgia Tech Library Bob Fox, Associate Director for Public and Administrative Services, Georgia Tech Library Dottie Hunt, Information Associate II, User Experience Department, Georgia Tech Library Ameet Doshi thanked the organisers for the excellent lunch, and introduced Bob Fox who started off a lively and informative presentation by giving some history of why Georgia Tech Library’s Student Advisory Board was formed and how it has evolved.
After-the-fact comments from students on how a library renovation could have been done better prompted formation of the Board in 2005.
Student membership eventually expanded from 8 to 17, to allow for unavoidable absences from the monthly meetings and so maintain momentum.
The Board had some independence and students were to nominate their successors, but this proved problematic and the successors are now chosen from nominees furnished by the Library with suggestions from a scholarship committee, allowing for vetting and diversity of representation across a number of factors.
They try to choose talkative contributors and leaders, then turn them loose but organise things to keep them involved: ‘If you have food, a compelling agenda, and then follow through on ideas, they will come.’ Email communication is important to keep students who may miss a meeting in the loop and to furnish quick response from the Library on student suggestions.
Dottie Hunt described the design charrette [6] used by students to mock up their suggestions for space redesign for two renovation projects.
She also shared videos of Board meeting participation and of Board members video-interviewing other students to capture how they used the Library’s Web site and resources, using flip cameras that are made available to them.
Ameet Doshi concluded with some observations and points of best practice.
Keeping a ‘cohort’ of students together on the Board for 2-4 years fostered commitment and ultimately, advocacy for the Library.
When Board members heard that 24-hour service might be curtailed due to budget shortfalls, they took the initiative to start gathering student signatures on petitions to keep it open.
Doshi said there is also a faculty advisory board; they tried combining the boards and found they have higher student involvement when the student board is separate.
As regards return on investment, the library believes the Board’s activity contributed to positive perceptions by students that the Library is actively listening, as shown in a recent LibQual survey.
bX™ Recommender Service Nettie Lagace, Product Director, Ex Libris, Inc. Lagace of ExLibris gave an overview of the recommender service and explained the rationale behind the aggregated harvesting of usage data for scholarly articles.
Recommender services in commercial Web sites have proven to be of great assistance to consumers when suggesting similar items based on what past consumers have searched for and ultimately, purchased.
This type of service is now extended to scholarly researchers by pointing them to specific articles of likely interest based upon their search parameters.
bX™ recommender is a product of the research done at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Johan Bollen and Herbert Von de Sompel [7] based on the mining and structural analysis of aggregated usage data.
Linking servers, such as SFX, contain histories of digital scholarship across a multitude of databases.
This usage data can be harvested through OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and analysed as click-through data indicative of relationships between scholarly resources.
Over time, these patterns become representative of the research activities of scholars working within specific research domains and they are employed to present the user with similar items based on their search path.
bX™ services can be incorporated into any library’s user environment whether or not they are using SFX.
And although it is not required, institutions can also contribute their local usage statistics from their own SFX logs, the idea being that the higher the number of contributors, the higher the quality of the recommendations.
bX™ currently benefits from over 200 implementations worldwide.
Besides receiving specific article recommendations, users of bX™ may be able to discover new search terms or explore new fields of interest based upon their initial query.
Additionally, bX™ is offered as an on-demand service, so it does not have to be installed or maintained locally.
However, once installed, it displays from within the menu of services offered by the library’s link resolver, or it can be accessed through an API to other services such as ATOM and RSS.
Lagace demonstrated the integration of bX™ into the interfaces of several discovery environments such as Xerxes, Primo, and Google Scholar.
Improving Single Sign-on: Perfecting a Seamless, Item-level Linking through SSO Harry Kaplanian, Director, Product Management, Serials Solutions Aggregated discovery usually means that there are several different network platforms that a user must sign on to in order to access resources on the Web.
NISO’s Single Sign-on (SSO) Authentication Working group is developing a set of recommended practices to improve single sign-on functionality in hopes of creating seamless access across all service providers [8].
The Working Group’s goal is to provide SSO functionality across licensed resources and authenticated portals.
A set of deliverables has been defined in order to achieve this goal.
Terminology will be analysed from across Web authentication processes and login procedures will be classified.
The group hopes to develop a set of best practice recommendations for the relationships between users and service providers.
Another issue related to authentication across domains is the lack of a user interface allowing for a more seamless user experience.
Existing SSO technologies like Shibboleth make it possible for the user to maintain one identity across all systems.
Such technologies work reliably when sites are compliant and authentication is somewhat automatic.
Yet, there are many factors to consider.
Users should have the ability to establish a home site, preferred service provider and automatic login as well as an automatic trigger to aid the discovery process.
The group is focusing on implementation of SSO in federated search systems because of the array of challenges associated with points of access.
They are creating use cases that will detail how a user arrives at a service and what login process is required to access the information.
The group will promote its set of best practices for SSO access by eventually developing a promotional plan but Kaplanian cited some problems.
Standardising terminology across different domains has been difficult.
Varying levels of technical or business knowledge associated with parts of the process have highlighted the need to communicate across a network of campus administrators and IT stakeholders.
BookServer Peter Brantley, Director, BookServer Project, Internet Archive Peter Brantley described BookServer, a community-driven project, which is sponsored by the Internet Archive.
The project aims to provide an open architecture for discovery and delivery of e-books, including purchase, borrowing or delivery of free content, from any source, to any device.
Brantley gave a little history of how and why the idea developed, spurred by reaction to Amazon, the Google Books settlement and the development of the e-book marketplace.
It’s no surprise that users are confused and frustrated over all the differing formats, publishers, devices, discovery pathways, modes of acquisition and DRM (Digital Rights Management) methods.
The community is drafting the Open Publication Distribution system (OPDS) XML standard [9], a very simple implementation built on the Atom format, using Dublin Core descriptive elements in preference to the more complex and publisher-centric ONIX.
Using an existing schema is allowing them to get the ‘Catalogue,’ or manifest, component off the ground quickly.
They are working on tools for transforming ONIX, MARC, and spreadsheet data to this format.
‘Catalogue’ feeds could be assembled and pushed out in a number of ways, indexed using Open Search, sorted and faceted, potentially tying in reviews, recommendations, fan fiction… there are many possibilities.
Some of the same challenges surface here as in other projects described in this forum: metadata need to be ‘cleaned up’ and standardised; matching titles (for works) is not easy; identifiers are key.
Other obstacles needing consideration are: publishing is segmented by geography and language; DRMs are messy; standardising vending and lending workflow is difficult.
There are many potential applications and benefits to the standardisation envisioned in this project.
Some publishers and institutions such as the Library of Congress are taking an interest, and the group is open to more participants.
The question/answer session showed listeners’ interest in independent ebook reader software and in how OPDS could be used for any kind of content (even library catalogues), as well as in services which could include print-on-demand or centralised search of aggregated databases.
Conclusion This was a stimulating and informative forum that maintained a dual focus on information users and on the essential (and mostly voluntary) work that goes on behind the scenes to develop and promulgate standards that will provide new and improved ‘seamless’ discovery and delivery services.
References NISO, D2D Forum Agenda http://www.niso.org/news/events/2010/d2d/agenda with links to most of the presentation slides.
OCLC OpenURL Resolver Registry http://www.oclc.org/productworks/urlresolver.htm NISO OpenURL Quality Metrics Work Group http://www.niso.org/workrooms/openurlquality KBART Working Group http://www.uksg.org/kbart Demo at the NISO OpenURL Quality Metrics Report site http://www.openurlquality.org/ Wikipedia: 5 May 2010: ‘charrette’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_charrette Bollen, J., & Van de Sompel, H. An architecture for the aggregation and analysis of scholarly usage data, 2006.
In Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL2006) (pp.
298–307).
Chapel Hill, NC .
Preprint: http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/papers/jcdl06_accepted_version.pdf SSO Authentication National Information Standards Organization: NISO Single Sign-On Work Group http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sso Open Publication Distribution System Google Code site http://code.google.com/p/openpub/wiki/OPDS Author Details Laura Akerman Technology and Metadata Librarian Emory University Libraries Email: liblna@emory.edu Web site: http://web.library.emory.edu/ Kim Durante Metadata Librarian Emory University Libraries Email: kaduran@emory.edu Web site: http://web.library.emory.edu/ Return to top Article Title: “Turning on the Lights for the User: NISO Discovery to Delivery Forum” Author: Laura Akerman and Kim Durante Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/niso-d2d-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing Infrastructure for Research Data Management at the University of Oxford Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing Infrastructure for Research Data Management at the University of Oxford Buzz data software framework database xml portal infrastructure archives metadata browser identifier schema repositories preservation multimedia jpeg visualisation gis provenance flash curation j2ee qt e-research ict interoperability algorithm research standards sharepoint Citation BibTex RIS James A. J. Wilson, Michael A. Fraser, Luis Martinez-Uribe, Paul Jeffreys, Meriel Patrick, Asif Akram and Tahir Mansoori describe the approaches taken, findings, and issues encountered while developing research data management services and infrastructure at the University of Oxford.
The University of Oxford began to consider research data management infrastructure in earnest in 2008, with the ‘Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data’ Project [1].
Two further JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)-funded pilot projects followed this initial study, and the approaches taken by these projects, and their findings, form the bulk of this article.
Oxford’s decision to do something about its data management infrastructure was timely.
A subject that had previously attracted relatively little interest amongst senior decision makers within the UK university sector, let alone amongst the public at large, was about to acquire a new-found prominence.
In November 2009, the email archives of researchers within the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were compromised and leaked to the Web by climate change sceptics, alongside commentary casting doubt upon the scientific integrity of the researchers involved.
The story was seized upon by the national press and entered the public consciousness [2].
Although subsequent enquiries have exonerated the researchers from scientific malpractice, criticism has been levelled at their data management practices.
The report of Lord Oxburgh’s scientific assessment panel in April 2010 observed that the researchers: ‘should have devoted more attention in the past to archiving data and algorithms and recording exactly what they did.
At the time the work was done, they had no idea that these data would assume the importance they have today.‘ The report adds that ‘pressing ahead with new work has been at the expense of what was regarded as non-essential record keeping’ [3].
The case brings home the importance of managing one’s research data well.
The sympathy many researchers undoubtedly felt for their colleagues at the Climate Research Unit is unlikely to stretch indefinitely into the future, especially if, as seems likely, funding bodies start to insist, rather than simply recommend, that research paid for by public money is open and accountable.
But to what extent should researchers be expected to redirect their time from research to data management?
Clearly there is a cost involved, and one which explains the reluctance to devote resources to what might look like ‘non-essential record keeping’.
The value of researchers to their institutions is measured in publications, not orderly filing cabinets.
In practice, good data management requires the input of the data creators, as they are usually the only ones in a position to accurately document their methods and outputs.
The researchers’ university can, however, play its part in ensuring that this is as easy as possible and that documentation is of an appropriate standard.
At present, few universities do.
At the very least, infrastructure needs to be available to enable researchers to meet the requirements laid down by funding bodies.
In some academic disciplines cross-institutional data repositories and standards have already been established.
It is already common practice for data to be shared between groups working in astronomy or crystallography, for instance, despite the competitive pressures that exist between institutions [4].
In other fields, funding bodies have established subject repositories with data curation responsibilities beyond institutional boundaries.
The UK Data Archive at the University of Essex is one example, whilst the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) supports a network of data centres across its disciplinary areas [5].
But if researchers and funders can set up their own infrastructures for managing data, why should universities take on this responsibility?
Firstly, especially in the UK since the demise of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), there are questions about the long-term sustainability of such services.
Universities have diverse funding sources and have a good track record of long-term information preservation (over 800 years in the case of Oxford), whereas discipline-specific data centres are less protected from the whims and politics of funding agencies and governments, or so the argument goes.
Secondly, there are legal issues to consider.
Universities such as Oxford take ownership of the data produced by their researchers (up to a point), and therefore have responsibilities for it.
The exact nature of any given university’s intellectual property rights regarding research data varies, but at a purely practical level it is likely to prove embarrassing for a university if the data produced by its researchers cannot withstand reasonable scrutiny.
Thirdly, there are issues relating to the research life-cycle.
Researchers need to start considering data management questions from the inception of any new project, before even making a funding bid.
Service providers within the university are arguably better placed to give advice and support at this very early stage than data centres, whose primary concern has traditionally been with curating and disseminating the data that they ingest later in the cycle.
Before going further, it is perhaps worth indicating what is meant here by ‘data management’.
Data management means different things to different people.
Data repositories tend to think of it primarily in terms of preservation and curation, but researchers are more likely to associate the term with structuring data in a database, or the organisation of files and folder.
At its broadest, research data management involves all the processes that information from research inputs undergoes as it is manipulated and analysed en route to becoming a research output.
Research inputs may include everything from journal articles, through 15th-century manuscripts, to images generated by electron microscopes.
Research notes, whether hand-written or electronic, are also an essential part of this research process.
It is this broadest definition of research data management that informs our approach to data management infrastructure.
The data filing system on the desktop or in the Web 2.0 ‘cloud’ should be regarded a continuation of the data filing system on the desk, the study floor, or occasionally the cabinet.
Part of the aim of instilling good practice in data management is to expose the connections between heterogeneous data sources that more often than not exist only in the mind of the researcher.
To this end, research data management has much in common with the management of private archives, only we would hope that management takes place at the beginning of the research career, rather than towards the end (or indeed post-mortem).
Institutional Strategy The overall approach taken by the University of Oxford to the development of infrastructure, policy, and business planning to support research data management is one that is consistent with the University’s adherence to the principle of subsidiarity: that decisions should be taken at the lowest appropriate level, which, in the context of research, would tend to be by the researcher, research group or academic department, rather than being imposed by central service providers or decision-making bodies.
Given that Oxford has a highly federated organisational structure, however, it is recognised that an element of central coordination is essential to the development of institutional strategy.
Within Oxford the lead has been taken by the Computing Services (including the Office of the Director of IT).
At other institutions, it may be the library or research administration services.
All are likely to bring their own emphases (libraries focusing on preservation and open access; IT services caring about infrastructure to support day-to-day working; research services instinctively supporting funding body compliance).
The centrally-coordinated activities at Oxford have recognised these different priorities by trying to ensure that support for research data management is a distributed, ‘multi-agency’ activity, including, of course, researchers and research groups.
Indeed, each project has encompassed a significant element of end-user requirements gathering, either working with specific research groups, an academic division, or across many disciplines.
The overall activity is embedded within the IT governance structure, reporting to the ICT Subcommittee of the Policy and Resources Allocation Committee (PRAC ICT or ‘PICT’) and the Research Information Management Sub-Committee of the University’s Research Committee.
Both sub-committees are chaired by pro-vice chancellors.
In 2009 PICT approved a statement of institutional commitment to developing services for the management of research data: ‘The University of Oxford is committed to supporting researchers in appropriate curation and preservation of their research data, and where applicable in accordance with the research funders’ requirements.
It recognises that this must be achieved through the deployment of a federated institutional data repository.
This repository has to be supported by a suitable business model, and where possible funded through full economic cost recovery, so that the University can guarantee that the data deposited there will be managed over the long term.
The data repository will be a cross-agency activity developed and supported by a number of departments within the University and will build, as far as possible, on existing services, including the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA).
It will be overseen by a Steering Group which reports to the University Research Committee.
The management and curation of research data will be addressed in cooperation with specialist agencies, research funders and other institutions in the UK and internationally.
Oxford is committed to playing a significant role within the foreseen UK Research Data Service Pathfinder activities’ [6] JISC funding has played an important role in assisting Oxford in making concrete the above vision, and it will also help ensure that the outputs of the projects, including software, training materials, and knowledge generated, will be shared with other institutions.
The development of research infrastructure takes time, and it will still be several years (funding permitting) before the University is able to claim an integrated suite of services to support research data management.
This article describes the approach taken so far, the progress made, and the lessons learned.
Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management The University of Oxford’s initial ‘Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data’ Project was an intra-institutional collaboration between members of the Office of the Director of IT, Computing Services, Library Services and the Oxford e-Research Centre.
Throughout 2008 the study embarked on a range of activities to scope the requirements for services to manage and curate research data generated in Oxford.
Thirty-eight interviews were conducted, covering a cross-section of departments and researcher roles, and exploring data management practices and researchers’ needs at Oxford.
In addition to the interviews, a data management workshop was staged to further explore and confirm requirements.
The interviews and the workshop revealed a wide variety of data management practices, ranging from the consistent and proficient to rather more ad hoc activities conducted by researchers with little support and few resources [7].
The extraordinarily good response from researchers suggested that the issues were of great interest to many scholars.
These initial requirements-gathering exercises demonstrated that whilst aspects of data management are common across academic divisions, there are also requirements specific to particular research domains.
Researchers in the life sciences, for instance, can generate large amounts of digital data from instruments, which in many cases have a short lifespan.
Humanities data, on the other hand, can be of a very different nature, typically having a much longer lifespan but without the sheer size issues.
Requirements for institutional data services can likewise differ: many humanities researchers require access to sustainable database provisioning systems to create, analyse, and share their data; life sciences researchers placed more emphasis on secure storage for large volumes of data and the capacity to transport the data quickly and reliably for analysis, visualisation, and sharing.
Obviously not all research activities within those broad disciplinary areas fit these characterisations; there are a plethora of rich details in every research activity data practice.
Of the data management requirements that were common across disciplines, the most evident was the need for support in the form or advice and training.
A similar exercise was undertaken with service providers in Oxford.
First, a group of these central and divisional level agencies within the University were consulted to validate the researchers’ requirements and to determine the services on offer.
A workshop was then organised that brought together Oxford services and data service providers from other institutions to discuss institutional roles in supporting data management.
The data management and curation services framework shown below was devised to engage service units in the discussions, understand services on offer, and start drawing the division of responsibilities amongst them.
Data management sharing plans Legal & ethical Best formats & best practice Secure storage Metadata Access & discovery Computation analysis & visualization Restricted sharing Data cleaning Publication Assess value Preservation Add value Support Infrastructure and tools Policy Business model Data management and curation services framework Many service units participated in this consultation including the Library Services, Computing Services, Research Services, the e-Research Centre and post-doctoral training centres [8].
All had complementary expertise in many of the areas of the above framework.
However, the exercise also revealed that data management support is generally provided on an ad hoc basis, and many of the services in the framework are not offered fully or at all.
Many of the service units pointed out the importance of developing institutional policy to promote research integrity and having business models to outline the economic and sustainability aspects of research data services.
These elements were perceived to be key components required to build the data management infrastructure required at Oxford.
These requirements also formed the basis of the Oxford input for the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) feasibility study [9] to investigate the demand for, and feasibility of, a UK-wide data management service.
Moreover, the study also served to test the Data Audit Framework (DAF) methodology [10] through participation in the DISC-UK DataShare Project [11].
The scoping study helped to raise awareness, identify high-level priorities (including gaps in existing provision), and gain senior management support across service units.
Furthermore, it helped identify and engage with a number of researchers who use and generate data, many of whom were willing to participate in further activities where their particular issues could be addressed.
Embedding Institutional Curation Services in Research Taking the priorities identified by the initial scoping study, a project proposal was developed that combined embedding infrastructure services in research with policy and sustainability development.
The proposal was submitted as a preservation exemplar project, with the exemplar components being: recognising that research data management belongs to no single part of the institution but rather involves a partnership of researchers, their departments, IT, library, and research support services; bringing together bottom-up and top-down approaches through embedding joined-up infrastructure services within the research process, on the one hand, and the development of institutional policy and costing models on the other; developing software, training and other supporting services with longer-term production and sustainability in mind.
As a result of the proposal, in Autumn 2008, research groups from the medical and life sciences (which had participated in the initial study), together with the service units, brought their complementary areas of expertise to the service of a new data curation activity at Oxford.
The resulting project, Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research (EIDCSR) [12], was funded by the JISC under the Information Environment Programme.
Research Groups’ Workflows and Requirements This new data activity began with a requirements analysis phase [13].
This involved interviewing researchers (using the DAF methodology [14]) to learn about their specific data practices and workflows.
The results of this exercise would feed into the development of policy and cost-price models as well as the implementation of data management tools.
The three research groups participating in EIDCSR (the Computational Biology Group, the Cardio Mechano-Electric Feedback Group, and the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine) were collaborating on an existing project informally entitled the ‘3D Heart Project’.
The objective of this project was to create three-dimensional computer models of hearts upon which in-silico experiments could be conducted.
In order to create these models, the researchers involved need to combine a variety of techniques ranging from histology, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), image processing, and computer simulation [15].
The 3D Heart Project was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), whose policy requires the researchers to preserve their data and ensure it remains available and accessible for ten years after the completion of the project.
The research process begins with image acquisition within the laboratory, where histology data and two types of MRIs are generated.
The histology data for each subject represents a stack of high-resolution images, each stack being up to 1.6 terabytes in size.
The MRIs are not as large, and they complement the histology data, providing more detailed structural information.
These images are processed to generate 3D volumes, which then go through a process of segmentation and mesh generation that will finally allow running simulations of cardiac activity.
This specific data management workflow involves: generating a variety of data in the laboratory from a range of instruments; using a set of tools for manipulating and visualising the data; processing the laboratory data to generate three-dimensional models of the heart; storing the data in different locations including project servers, desktops and DVDs with various back-up strategies; sharing the data in different ways amongst the groups and other collaborators; publishing research papers based on results obtained from the data and making the data available.
The data management requirements from these research groups include: the capacity to move large quantities of data across the network for analysis and sharing; having access to secure storage with back-up and off-site copies; and provision of tools and support to record provenance information such as laboratory protocols, parameters and methodologies.
Data Archiving and Rediscovery Given that the EIDCSR Project is attempting both to meet the needs of the particular research groups with whom we are working, and to establish infrastructure intended to be more broadly useful for future researchers working on projects as yet unknown, a flexible metadata schema that could accommodate the varying needs of different research groups and domains was deemed essential.
It also became apparent during the early stages of the project that the metadata would need to be able to evolve during the lifespan of the archived objects if it was to remain accurate.
The data archiving and discovery side of the EIDCSR Project has two distinct software components: one that enables the project team to archive data (and any annotations added to that data); and another that allows the querying of the metadata.
The EIDCSR archiving client consists of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) via which researchers can archive datasets from their networked storage to the Computing Service’s IBM Tivoli Hierarchical File System (HFS).
The GUI is a C/C++ application, using C for the business logic and Qt for the user interface.
The EIDCSR client works by parsing the research project’s computer folders for data files and corresponding metadata information, recorded as ‘readme’ files.
The metadata, if available, is then stored independently in a repository supported by Oxford University Library Services, whilst the datasets themselves are archived to the HFS.
The essential task of the EIDCSR client is to assign a unique identifier to individual image datasets and the corresponding metadata so that the two remain linked.
It can also be used to create and add metadata relating to the project and other types of research data.
If the readme file for any given set of images is missing, or lacks core information, the client alerts the archiver and displays a metadata editing form so that the missing fields can be completed.
A small minimum set of metadata needs to be added before the data can be archived.
It is possible to archive the data without completing many of the metadata fields but this is likely to impact on future discoverability and therefore limit reuse.
Projects that have already archived their data to HFS can also use the EIDCSR client to add or edit existing metadata.
The second software component of EIDCSR is an online search interface for querying the metadata repository to discover archived data.
This will enable searching by various fields, such as project description, team members, experimental details, or even publications arising from the data (assuming the relevant metadata has been included).
Once a relevant project or dataset has been located, the searcher may then send a request to that project’s principal investigator or data manager to retrieve the archived data.
Provided that the request is approved and there are no embargoes or other access restrictions on the data, it may then be uploaded from the HFS to an appropriate accessible location via the EIDCSR or standard HFS client.
EIDCSR is at present working with researchers and library staff to develop a ‘core’ set of metadata fields that is likely to be common across many research projects, whilst also catering for the addition of custom metadata fields that can store information particularly relevant to individual research projects.
This will take the form of an extensible XML schema.
Visualisation and Annotation Tools for Large Image Datasets Whilst the EIDSCR archiving and metadata-editing tools address some of the identified researcher requirements, the sheer size of some image data poses other problems.
In the 3D Heart Project, the MRI and histology images are generated by different research groups in different locations.
The images they produce then need to be sent to the researchers at the Computational Biology Group, who must rapidly evaluate their feasibility for computational processing and give any feedback for improving image quality.
It is difficult for research collaborators to immediately access full or partial image datasets without downloading terabytes of data, which takes significant time and bandwidth.
Furthermore, all three groups need to look at multiple datasets to identify areas of interest and particular physiological features.
To address this issue, the EIDCSR Project has been developing visualisation software that enables users to quickly browse raw image datasets via a Web-based system.
The system allows users to: upload 2D and 3D image datasets which are converted to a hierarchical quad-tree pyramid for fast access over the Internet; visualise large 2D and 3D datasets; adjust various image visualisation parameters to enhance contrast, brightness, colour channels and perform simple colour thresholding to identify areas of physiological importance; measure various physiological features present in the image; access datasets through authenticated sessions.
An administrator can specify the access level for each user.
The initial testing of the system was conducted using the datasets generated from the 3D Heart Project.
The largest dataset, which consists of 4GB of 3D MRI (26.4 x 26.4 x 24.4 um spacing with 1024 x 1024 x 2048 voxels) and a corresponding 1.6 TB of histology (1.1 x 1.1 x 10 um spacing with 35000 x 20000 x 1850 voxels) obtained from a rabbit heart, was used as a test case.
The datasets, when uploaded through a browser, are partitioned and stored as quad-tree pyramids.
For quad-tree pyramid generation, each high-resolution image is recursively divided into four regions until a tile size of 256 x 256 is obtained.
At each step the full image is reduced further by a factor of two in each dimension to obtain the next level of the quad-tree.
This process is repeated for each image until the whole pyramid is generated.
A 50% lossy JPEG compressed pyramid consumes only 4% storage space compared to the uncompressed raw image volume, whilst keeping the visual quality of the compressed dataset indistinguishable from its original.
The compressed dataset provides an efficient representation for displaying large images over the Internet, significantly reducing the bandwidth requirements for visualisation.
For the particular test dataset, the quad-tree consists of 16 million nodes representing the whole 3D heart.
This partitioned dataset is available through a Flash-enabled browser using a zoomable interface similar to Google Maps for visualisation of 2D data.
The visualisation of 3D data is provided through a multi-axis view showing axial, coronal and sagittal planes.
Measurement, image analysis, and administration tools are integrated in to the Web application.
Policy and Cost-price Models Development A significant component of the EIDCSR Project was to develop and implement institutional policy on data management as part of a wider programme to promote research integrity [16].
This policy would also look to ensure compliance with funders’ requirements.
The University of Melbourne began developing a similar policy in 2005, so Oxford sought to learn from their experiences, seconding Dr. Paul Taylor to assist with creating the draft.
This work included interviews with academics and administrative staff, an assessment of current policy and guidance in the UK, and a second workshop attracting national participation.
Outputs included the planned draft policy document and supporting recommendations, one of which was for the Research Services Office to develop a Web portal to assist academics with discovering existing services (local and national) [17] and policy for managing research data.
The draft policy document is currently undergoing a consultation process.
Participation in another JISC-funded project, Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) [18], provided the opportunity to look into the economics of data management.
Detailed cost information was gathered about the creation and local management of data by the 3D Heart Project, as well as the curatorial activities undertaken by EIDCSR.
In this case study, the results showed that the cost of creating the actual research datasets, including staff time as well as the use and acquisition of lab equipment, was proportionally high, representing 73% of the total cost [19].
The costs of the admittedly limited local data management activities undertaken by the researchers on the other hand were modest, representing only 1% of the total.
The curatorial activities undertaken as part of the EIDCSR Project constituted 24%.
A large proportion of these curatorial costs were however derived from ‘start up’ costs: the general analysis work to capture requirements, metadata management research, the technical implementation of tools, and the policy development work, which would not be significant in future research data management activities.
The remaining 2% was devoted to the already existing back-up and long-term file store service provided by Oxford University Computing Services.
The costs of established curatorial services are low per dataset, and therefore it is anticipated that the cost of curation services will decrease over time and with economies of scale.
Supporting Data Management Infrastructure for the Humanities The second JISC-funded project to arise from Oxford’s drive to develop its data management infrastructure is entitled ‘Supporting Data Management Infrastructure for the Humanities’ (SUDAMIH) [20].
SUDAMIH is complementary to EIDCSR and uses the same framework, namely: scoping the project involving multiple institutional service providers working in partnership with an academic community; defining the academic community’s priorities to better enable research data management whilst maintaining a longer-term focus on services and infrastructure that will scale and broaden to encompass other types of research activity; ensuring that infrastructure and service development is symbiotic with the development of policy and sustainability.
Whilst the EIDCSR Project works within a fairly narrow disciplinary area, SUDAMIH has a broader focus, considering the needs of the entire Humanities Division.
The pre-proposal phase of requirements gathering identified two significant areas for development: the provision of training in the management of research data, and the development of an infrastructure service to support the creation and management of database applications in the humanities [21].
Work on the training strand involves piloting a range of materials (modules, introductory presentations, online support) with researchers at Oxford, in collaboration with the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and related initiatives.
The other strand involves the development of a ‘Database as a Service’ (DaaS) infrastructure, which will enable researchers to quickly and intuitively construct Web-based relational databases.
As an online service, the DaaS will support collaboration and sharing, both within research groups and with a wider public.
Whilst initially developed for humanities scholars, the aim is ultimately to develop infrastructure that can be expanded to meet the needs of other academic divisions.
Humanities Researchers’ Data and Requirements There are over 1,500 researchers based in the Humanities Division at Oxford, working on a huge number of different projects [22].
Although there is at present a trend towards more collaborative working in the humanities, there are still many ‘lone researchers’, each working on their own areas of personal interest.
It was therefore imperative for SUDAMIH to speak to a broad cross-section of the community to understand existing practices and requirements.
The project conducted thirty-two interviews in total, twenty-nine of which were with active researchers [23].
The researchers fell into two broad camps those who clearly worked with structured data and recognised it as such, and those who did not consider themselves to be working with ‘data’ at all.
Whilst all humanities researchers faced issues about structuring and storing their information in such a way as to ensure that it was at their fingertips when needed, many did not conceptualise this as working with data.
From this it became apparent that the project would need to couch training in terms that would be familiar and attractive emphasising the day-to-day problems that researchers encounter when dealing with their material, rather than talking about data management in generic terms.
Despite the huge variety of research being conducted in the humanities at Oxford, the interviews did identify a number of characteristics of humanities research data that would need to be considered when providing support.
Principal among these was the fact that much humanities data has a very long life-span and that its value does not depreciate over time: a database of Roman cities will potentially be of as much use to researchers in fifty years time as it is today, provided it is not rendered obsolete through technological change.
Humanities scholarship often aggregates to a ‘life’s work’ body of research, with any given researcher often wishing to go back to old datasets in order to find new information.
It is therefore important that infrastructure for humanities data can guarantee preservation and curation potentially indefinitely.
This of course places a huge sustainability burden on any centrally-provided infrastructure, although an infrastructure than can bear this responsibility offers a great improvement on the often ad hoc, local, and short-term preservation of data that is currently the norm.
Certain characteristics of humanities data make its re-use particularly difficult.
The data is often messy and incomplete, being derived from diverse sources that were never intended to provide information in a regular or comparable format.
Information is typically compiled from assorted primary texts, by diverse hands and covering different topics, with differing degrees of reliability, so a degree of interpretation is usually required in order to structure it in a format that allows analysis.
Whilst the original compiler is aware of the procedure they used to do this, anyone else coming to the data later requires a significant degree of explanation or documentation to ensure they do not misinterpret it.
Cleaning and documenting data is time-consuming, so any infrastructure that enables re-use must make these processes as easy and natural as possible.
The requirements gathering exercise did identify several issues that were commonly encountered by humanities researchers where training and other aspects of infrastructural support could potentially make a difference.
These included: Most researchers misplaced information from time to time, which slowed their work.
Time spent hunting for the right quotation or reference interrupted the research process.
Some researchers occasionally ‘lost’ chunks of electronic data due to poor backing up or storage processes.
Data stored electronically can become obsolete due to technological change, causing problems when researchers wanted to refer back to it.
Information can be (or become) disconnected from associated or contextual material this can make tasks such as searching for images, or tracking information back to its source, difficult.
Researchers were often simply unaware of the existence of technologies that might help them to structure and analyse their information, or did not understand how such tools might be able to assist them.
In addition to these challenges, some researchers were keen to learn how to structure their information and data better as they felt it might have a positive effect on their ability to conceptualise their work.
One philosophy lecturer commented that, ‘I do believe that our research could be enhanced by having better ways of storing information, because the way I store my thoughts makes a difference to how I use them when progressing in my thinking.
I can see that improving the way I store them might help the actual thinking – apart from saving time, it might be a bit more substantial than that: having a clear view of what I’ve already done, or how my different projects interconnect, might just be heuristic in a sense.’ Data Management Training Besides the interviews with researchers at Oxford, SUDAMIH arranged a workshop with contributions from national bodies such as the DCC and Research Information Network in order to get a wider perspective on data management training for the Humanities [24].
The majority of the interviewees and workshop delegates agreed that there was a need for data management training within the humanities and also upon various areas where current practices could be improved.
The need for training was regarded as common to researchers at all levels, although it was felt to be particularly beneficial for graduate students.
Although the 2002 Roberts’ Report [25] resulted in a substantial increase in the training offered to graduates, data management has not yet received as much attention as other areas.
The interviews indicated that the desired training fell into two broad categories: general data management issues, which include the organisation and storage of paper and electronic research materials for efficient access and re-use, and training in the use of specific data management tools, such as database packages and bibliographic software.
The latter is to some extent already covered by the wide range of courses offered by Oxford’s IT Learning Programme, although there is room for expansion into some more specialised aspects (such as, for example, designing databases which can deal with complex data such as vague dates, variant spellings, and fragmentary texts).
There is also substantial interest in the overlap between the general and more specific areas: many researchers would like to know more about the range of data management tools available to them, and how to select the appropriate tool(s) for a given project.
However, the interviews also revealed a significant barrier to improving data management practices: that of persuading academics to take time out of what are invariably very busy schedules for training.
Data management tends to be regarded as a lower priority than more immediately beneficial skills, being important, but not necessarily urgent.
In order to overcome this, advice about data management might usefully be embedded in compulsory research methods training for graduate students.
It is also essential to highlight the benefits to the researcher of good data management, rather than simply presenting it as something imposed by funding bodies or university policy: efficient organisation and use of appropriate tools means less time spent hunting for information, which in turn means more time available for analysis and original thought.
Database as a Service The DaaS system provides on-demand institutionally-hosted databases and a generic Web portal to access them.
The Web portal essentially mirrors the underlying database structures, using Data Definition Language (tables, columns), and enabling data population and querying.
An important rationale behind the DaaS is to allow researchers to concentrate on their own research interests rather than IT infrastructure.
Managing geospatial data and multimedia content in a database can be a complicated process, and SUDAMIH shields users from such underlying complexities.
The DaaS caters for two basic routes to creating a database: Migration and porting: for researchers who have already developed a local, standalone database in one form or another and want to open it up to a wider audience.
Design and creation: for researchers starting a new project who wish to straightforwardly design, implement and share a database.
Microsoft Access databases are particularly popular in the arts and humanities, due primarily to their ease of use, straightforward user interface, and the software’s ready availability on university computers.
An Access database is arguably not the optimal solution for collaborative multi-user database environments, however, nor for serving a large number of simultaneous users.
As research projects evolve, the limitations of Access tend to become apparent.
This led to a strong requirement from users for SUDAMIH to support the migration of Access databases to other standards.
The database management aspect of the DaaS supports the migration of Access databases into Postgresql, which enables additional functionality and brings advantages even outside the scope of the SUDAMIH Project.
The DaaS infrastructure consists of following three main components: SUDAMIH Web Portal (Administration): for registering projects and project teams, enabling a principal investigator (who could be a lone researcher) to design a relational databases via a simple Web interface, or to upload a database schema and populate it via a data dump (migration).
Database Management (Business Logic): for implementing and populating databases as well as managing access based on user roles, facilitating collaboration with simultaneous multiple users.
Project Web Portal (Public Interface): for providing a Web interface to each active database hosted on the DaaS.
Each registered project can have multiple databases (e.g.
separate research, development, and/or production databases) but at any given time only one database can be active.
SUDAMIH automatically creates a generic Web Portal for each project using latest J2EE standards.
The Project Web Portal allows data population and querying of the active database, with support for reasonably complex queries.
It is the intention of SUDAMIH to develop the functionality of the Web Portal so that users can view geospatial data within the browser, and to support annotated multimedia content.
Conclusions Partnerships The University of Oxford’s institutional approach to research data management was built upon two principles: researchers being at the core of development; and the need for intra-institutional collaboration amongst service providers.
It is perhaps obvious that understanding the requirements of researchers, and retaining their engagement, is critical to the longer-term success and sustainability of any institutional initiatives to better support the management for research data (especially given that if it does not meet their requirements, researchers are free to a large degree to simply ignore central infrastructure and go their own way).
It may be less obvious, at least until the research process is fully understood, that the management of research data (though its notional lifecycle) requires a coordinated approach amongst service providers.
It matters less which part of the organisation is taking a lead on these activities than whether the relevant providers are engaged in the undertaking and have a reasonably clear sense of not only their current service provision and strengths but also their gaps and weaknesses.
Lessons Learnt Throughout this article we have, with few qualifications, spoken of research ‘data’.
However, is it clear both that this means different things to researchers in different fields, and that datasets can take very different forms.
Understanding this is essential for engaging with research communities.
The language used must be theirs, not that of the information or technology communities.
Requirements for research data management infrastructure can be specific to particular projects: some might focus on large storage resources for datasets in the range of terabytes, others might be concerned with keeping their confidential data secure, and still others with sharing their data with fellow researchers or the public at large.
The experience of Oxford also shows, however, that in spite of the diversity of infrastructure requirements across different fields of research, there are aspects of data management infrastructure required by almost all.
The need for data documentation (metadata), training and support, secure storage, and linking data to publications are common across disciplines.
At the institutional level, it is fundamental to have policies in place, to understand the role of the different service providers, and to arrive at a clear understanding of the costs and benefits associated with managing and curating data.
Next Steps The EIDCSR Project is scheduled to end in December 2010, SUDAMIH in March 2011.
By that point we hope to have developed: institutional infrastructure for storing large volumes of data (based upon the existing backing-up and archiving system); a basic yet extensible metadata schema to capture essential information about data stored there; a visualisation platform that will enable researchers to access, share, and annotate very large visual images; a system that will enable researchers to create their own centrally-hosted databases (with contextual metadata); and a set of training materials to improve data management practices.
The University’s Research Services Office will also have produced a draft institutional policy for the management of data together with a data portal to provide guidance and point to existing data services in Oxford and elsewhere.
The priority for the institution will be to make ‘production-ready’ those deliverables from the projects for which there is an ongoing demonstrable requirement and for which there is a business plan.
The IT infrastructure outputs, for example, have been developed with production in mind, embedding the software development within the relevant service teams.
The development of the DaaS will also contribute to the overall plan to improve the Web delivery platform for individuals, groups and departments.
Throughout these projects Oxford has also contributed to the UKRDS planning, both the feasibility study and the subsequent ‘pathfinder’ phase [26].
Whilst funding for the UKRDS remains, at the time of writing, unclear, the contribution that Oxford has made has helped further define the institutional strategic priorities for the ongoing support of research data management activities.
In particular, it has emphasised the importance of institutional leadership (comparable to pro vice-chancellor level) to ensure the full engagement of both senior management and influencers within the academic divisions.
It has supported the need to implement aspects of institutional IT infrastructure, especially a federated, lightweight, extensible filestore offered and coordinated on a cost-recovery basis and interoperable with other research-support services such as SharePoint and the Digital Asset Management System.
And finally, it has confirmed the need to build upon the work of SUDAMIH by extending research data management training to other divisions, especially through existing training facilitators.
There are various internal activities in progress to pursue each of these priorities so that, indeed, the University might fulfil its commitment to ‘to supporting researchers in appropriate curation and preservation of their research data’.
References Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/digitalrepository/ See for instance The Guardian’s “Hacked Climate Science Emails” feature: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/hacked-climate-science-emails Lord Oxburgh et al., “Report of the International Panel Set Up by the University of East Anglia to Examine the Research of the Climatic Research Unit”, April 2010, p. 3 http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP See for instance the European Virtual Observatory http://www.euro-vo.org/pub/ and the related AstroGrid applications http://www.astrogrid.org/, the eCrystals repository at the University of Southampton http://ecrystals.chem.soton.ac.uk/ and standards established by the International Union of Crystallography http://www.iucr.org/resources/cif/spec RCUK, “Delivering the UK’s E-infrastructure for Research and Innovation”, July 2010.
Research data management within the University of Oxford http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/datamanagement Martinez-Uribe, L., “Findings of the Scoping Study and Research Data Management Workshop”, July 2008 http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A4e2b7e64-d941-4237-a17f-659fe8a12eb5 Martinez-Uribe, L., “Research Data Management Services: Findings of the Consultation with Service Providers”, October 2008 http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A0bcc3d57-8d20-42dd-82ac-55eab5cd682b Serco Consulting, “UK Research Data Service: Report and Recommendations to HEFCE”, December 2008 http://www.ukrds.ac.uk/resources/download/id/16 Martinez-Uribe, L. “Using the Data Audit Framework: an Oxford Case Study”, March 2009 http://www.disc-uk.org/docs/DAF-Oxford.pdf DISC-UK DataShare http://www.disc-uk.org/datashare.html Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research http://eidcsr.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ Martinez-Uribe, L. “EIDCSR Audit and Requirements Analysis Findings”, December 2009 http://eidcsr.oucs.ox.ac.uk/docs/EIDCSR_AnalysisFindings_v3.1.pdf The Data Audit Framework http://www.data-audit.eu/ Bishop, M. J., Plank, G., Burton, R. A.
B., Schneider, J. E., Gavaghan, D. J., Grau, V., Kohl P., “Development of an Anatomically Detailed MRI-Derived Rabbit Ventricular Model and Assessment of its Impact on Simulations of Electrophysiological Function” Am.
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Heart Circ.
Physiol., February 1, 2010 298:H699-H718 http://ajpheart.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/298/2/H699 Dally, K., “Policy Preparations at Oxford”, March 2010, presentation at workshop Institutional Policy and Guidance for Research Data http://eidcsr.oucs.ox.ac.uk/policy_workshop.xml University of Oxford Research Data Management Portal http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm/ Keeping Research Data Safe 2 http://www.beagrie.com/jisc.php Beagrie, N., Lavoie, B., Woollard, M., “Keeping Research Data Safe 2”, April 2010 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2010/keepingresearchdatasafe2.aspx#downloads SUDAMIH Project http://sudamih.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ see SUDAMIH Project Plan for more details: http://sudamih.oucs.ox.ac.uk/docs/sudamih_JISC_Data_Management_Oxford_dissemination.pdf As of 30th September, 2009.
Figure combines faculty staff, other academic and research staff, and postgraduate students on research courses.
Provided by University of Oxford Humanities Division.
Wilson, J.
A. J., Patrick, M., “Sudamih Researcher Requirements Report”, July 2010 http://sudamih.oucs.ox.ac.uk/docs/Sudamih%20Researcher%20Requirements%20Report.pdf Presentations from the SUDAMIH Data Management Training For the Humanities workshop are available from the workshop Web page: http://sudamih.oucs.ox.ac.uk/training_workshop.xml Vitae Web page on the Roberts’ Report: http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/1685/Roberts-recommendations.html UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) http://www.ukrds.ac.uk/ Author Details James A. J. Wilson EIDCSR and SUDAMIH Project Manager Oxford University Computing Services Email: james.wilson@oucs.ox.ac.uk Michael A. Fraser Head of Infrastructure Systems and Services Group Oxford University Computing Services Email: mike.fraser@oucs.ox.ac.uk Luis Martinez-Uribe Data Management and Curation Consultant Oxford University Computing Services and Instituto Juan March Email: luis.martinez-uribe@oucs.ox.ac.uk Paul Jeffreys Director of IT Office of the Director of IT, University of Oxford Email: paul.jeffreys@odit.ox.ac.uk Meriel Patrick SUDAMIH Analyst Oxford University Computing Services Email: meriel.patrick@oucs.ox.ac.uk Asif Akram EIDCSR and SUDAMIH Software Developer Oxford University Computing Services Email: asif.akram@oucs.ox.ac.uk Tahir Mansoori EIDCSR Visualization Developer Oxford University Computing Laboratory Email: tahir.mansoori@wolfson.ox.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Developing Infrastructure for Research Data Management at the University of Oxford” Author: James A. J. Wilson, Michael A. Fraser, Luis Martinez-Uribe, Meriel Patrick, Asif Akram and Tahir Mansoori Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/wilson-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Open Educational Resources Hack Day Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Educational Resources Hack Day Buzz data mobile software wiki api rss portal infrastructure metadata doi accessibility browser identifier openoffice blog repositories video oai-pmh cataloguing visualisation aggregation provenance vle widget wordpress moodle youtube facebook oer drupal wookie licence authentication interoperability ukoer url storify Citation BibTex RIS Kirsty Pitkin reports on a two-day practical hack event focusing on Open Educational Resources (OER), held by DevCSI and JISC CETIS in Manchester on 31 March 1 April 2011.
The Open Educational Resources Hack Day event was designed to bring together those interested in rapidly developing tools and prototypes to solve problems related to OER.
Whilst there is a growing interest in the potential for learning resources created and shared openly by academics and teachers, a number of technical challenges still exist, including resource retrieval, evaluation and reuse.
This event aimed to explore some of these problem areas by partnering developers with the creators and users of OER to identify needs and potential solutions.
Participants came from a variety of backgrounds and levels of technical expertise, and included academics, learning technologists, repository managers, developers and librarians from UK institutions such as East Riding College, Harper Adams, Nottingham, the Open University, Oxford, and other organisations such as Creative Commons, the Learning Registry, Open Michigan, and TechDis.
To open the event, John Robertson from CETIS provided a brief overview of the discussions in the lead-up to the event, including blog postings by Nick Sheppard [1], Amber Thomas [2] and Dan Rehak [3].
Robertson also outlined some of the ideas shared prior to the event in both the email list discussion and the event wiki [4] which included an OER playlist picker and tools created using W3C widgets.
Mahendra Mahey (UKOLN), DevCSI Project Manager, provided a summary of the event aims for participants: to meet other experts in the field and start interesting conversations, to develop interesting new ideas, form mixed teams and develop prototypes (paper or electronic) or working code.
Lightning Talks The event kicked off with a series of lightning talks from participants who wanted to share their project perspectives, interests and challenges for the group.
JORUM, Aggregated OAI-PMH, Open APIs, and Discoverable JORUM OERs Nick Sheppard, Leeds Metropolitan University Sheppard described his journey through various JISC-supported projects working with OER to identify areas for collaboration through the event.
In describing his experiences, he discussed the recurring issue of getting content into JORUM, given the lack of OAI-PMH support, and his experience using SWORD to deposit resources differentially into multiple repositories and retrieve those resources from a central portal.
In particular, Sheppard described a desktop tool which allows academics to drag-and-drop resources straight into their local repository.
However, he highlighted the current lack of metadata associated with the deposited resource under this system.
As a non-developer, Sheppard was keen to document an extension to this tool which could solve this problem and identify potential collaborators to help bring this about.
Open Fields Roger Greenhalgh, Harper Adams University College Greenhalgh took us on a whirlwind tour of some of the ideas he has been exploring in relation to the new Harper Adams’ repository OpenFields [5], aimed at the “dirty -nailed practitioners” as he termed them in agriculture and land-based subjects.
This includes not only formal papers, but also grey materials and other learning resources, which they wanted to make very findable to the public.
Greenhalgh discussed their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) activities and their emphasis on creating short technical briefing papers with bullet points and pictures to explain practical issues, which can be easily found and used to lead people to the more academic resources, if appropriate.
This team created its own short url inspired by the DOI system — the OFI (Open Fields Identifier) and a plug-in within their VLE which allows you to search the repository and pull the resources out in order to use them.
This brought to light problems identifying the attribution of photographs, so at Dev8D they created a prototype service to add a banner automatically along the bottom of any image displaying selected metadata.
This prototype won first prize in the Picture This!
competition.
Figure 1: Roger Greenhalgh (left) receiving the Picture This!
prize at Dev8D Greenhalgh discussed some of the new ideas that this work had triggered, which could be explored during the event.
They included mechanisms to extract images and other data from PowerPoint resources, and ways to keep branding information separate from video content to avoid costly work when institutions re-brand.
OERca: A New Publishing Platform for Open Michigan Ali Asad Lotia, University of Michigan Medical School Lotia introduced several elements of his work from the Open.Michigan Project, including OERca, which was developed to help automate the due diligence process assessing whether OER materials are fully cleared.
He explained how the OERca document import/export tool works with OpenOffice.org to extract materials, suggesting that participants may want to look into developing enhancements to this tool to allow users to process a wider variety of file types for use in OER.
He went on to discuss OERbit, their recently released Drupal-based OER publishing platform, which is available open source.
He issued a challenge to write an installation script to help automate the install process for OERbit, making it easier for people to try.
“With many teams, their ambition outstrips their resourcing, so we are hoping to get other people interested in some of our ideas and to work with us’¦ as fresh perspectives usually make software better.” [6] The Learning Registry Daniel Rehak, Learning Registry Rehak introduced the Learning Registry, which he described in a blog posting prior to the event as “social networking for metadata”.
Rehak discussed some of the difficulties and deficiencies associated with conventional metadata, and the advantages of looking at other types of data when searching and evaluating resources.
He provided examples such as paradata (usage data), analytical data, linked data and context, drawing parallels with the ways in which Google and Facebook work.
“We have a legacy problem of hundreds of different metadata formats and it really doesn’t work for finding resources… if you look at the way that Google and Facebook work, they base their data not on conventional catalogues but on very informal things [such as] the usage of data and how things are related … so we are trying to see if we can capture similar information about learning resources.
We believe that by doing this, that ‘second-class’� metadata can be used to build discovery systems and feedback loops.” [7] Rehak outlined the flow from a resource being made available in the Learning Registry, which then creates a common metadata timeline, effectively re-aggregating metadata to show how the resource is used.
This data can then be used a social way.
They currently have around 180,000 paradata records, which can be quite small, such as “I like this data” or “I use this data”.
Rehak explained that the Learning Registry is an “open everything” push network which provides a set of APIs enabling developers to build interesting stuff on top.
He emphasised that they were keen to see what participants could contribute to or build upon this during the event.
“We see Learning Registry as an international activity and we’re just at the point where we are starting to deploy, so this is a good opportunity for us to connect to people, see what people are doing in the UK and to see how we can leverage and build upon what we have already built.” [7] Wookie W3C Widgets Mark Johnson, University of Bolton Johnson provided a brief overview of the Wookie Project, which aims to increase accessibility by creating external W3C widgets for tools and resources, which can then be brought into a wide variety of learning environments via a plug-in as and when the functionality is required.
He provided an introduction to the system in which a widget file is stored on the Wookie server, which then talks to a plug-in within your browser or web application.
The plugin creates a space within that environment into which the server can inject the configured widget.
Users are authenticated by the container web application, allowing the widget to remain simple and integrated.
Johnson concluded by demonstrating how easily he could create a JORUM widget, accessible to anyone engaging with the Wookie server within their environment, and showed how this would appear within Moodle, as a practical example.
Provenance, Attribution, Licensing and Teaching Resources Amber Thomas, JISC Thomas advocated a person-centered approach to OER, considering the incentives for sharing including reward and recognition.
She emphasised that feedback reflecting how others are using and valuing their OER is really important for those creating resources.
This is also vital at management level, as identified by JISC-funded work examining activity data, which has shown this information to be really useful business data.
Thomas highlighted some of the current technical issues associated with attribution and licensing, noting that whilst Creative Commons licenses are useful, resources often only contain the Creative Commons logo for the chosen licence.
Without a name or link to the licence, they fail to provide enough information for users to follow that licence appropriately.
She emphasised the need for greater use of machine-readable licences to improve this situation.
In discussing provenance of OER, Thomas observed that we often assume we do not know very much about the identity of people online.
However, she believes this is going to change, particularly as authentication across devices and OpenAuth grows.
Knowing a tiny bit about who people are will help us know what they are doing, and will help make sharing resources on the web more sustainable.
Thomas advised participants to assume that we are working towards this position when developing OER tools.
Thomas concluded that the end-game should be to make OER person-centric, as this may be a key way in which people will navigate through resources.
Let The Hacking Begin… Following the lightning talks, participants were encouraged to discuss ideas and add them to the ideas wall, where they were collected together into natural groupings.
Once these groups were established, those with an interest in a particular area gathered to discuss the practical work they proposed to undertake.
Figure 2: The OER hack ideas wall The following groups emerged: WordPress Widgets Group This group brainstormed a wide variety of ideas relating to ways WordPress could be used to store, organise or expose OER, including its potential role as a repository, playlist picker and recommendation tool, connecting OER to people more directly.
PORSCHE Group A group formed of representatives from the ‘Pathways for Open Resource Sharing through Convergence in Healthcare Education’� (PORSCHE) Project gathered to explore the user and technical requirements of bookmarking tools for learning objects, which could be used to help people submit feedback about resources, using customised Django apps.
Course Catalogue Group This group looked at linking OER to specific courses, so the resources are connected with courses and institutions as a way of aiding discoverability and use.
Their initial work involved taking a step back from OER to create a Google custom search to act as a complete course catalogue from all UK HE institutions, required as a backbone to their project.
They then examined ways to connect OER to this and to design a user interface that would encourage students to use it to both discover courses and preview the materials used on that course.
OERbit Group This group was interested in developing an automated installation for the University of Michigan’s open source OERbit code.
The developers identified a number of problems with installing it on different systems, so spent time overnight working to remedy them.
OeRBITAL Group This group was formed by Terry MacAndrew, who has been working on the UK Centre for Bioscience’s OeRBITAL Project to develop a MediaWiki populated with curated collections from existing OERs on subject areas within the biosciences, as assembled by academic discipline consultants.
This has produced a wiki containing fairly loosely structured data, including useful paradata about the materials.
The group combined representatives from the OeRBITAL Project and the Learning Registry to examine how best to extract paradata from the MediaWiki and into the Learning Registry, and how this data could be used to improve the project as a whole.
Visualisations Group Several people from different backgrounds and perspectives joined in conversation with Tony Hirst, who has been producing visualisations with different datasets using the visualisation tool Gephi.
There was interest in the potential for this type of interpretation of paradata, and for examining the relationships between tagged resources.
One of the potential use cases cited involved #ukoer tagged objects, which not only includes OER resources, but also the conversations around resources, such as blog posts and tweets using the tag.
Figure 3: The WordPress hack team working together Group Insight Whilst these groups were forming, I listened in on what became the WordPress group, who were discussing different use cases for WordPress within an OER context.
They engaged in a heated debate about the how appropriate it is to focus on one tool, compared to a more service-orientated architectural approach, whereby users are not restricted to one environment in order to access valuable tools.
The counter-argument was that WordPress is widely used within academia, so is already a popular and familiar tool for a large number of users.
They compared empowering someone by giving them a Swiss Army knife or empowering someone by giving them a sharper knife i.e.
making interoperable tools versus making an existing tool more powerful.
The group agreed that there was a trade-off either way between long-term efficiency and a quick win.
Outcomes After 24 hours of work, the groups presented the results of their efforts: The Course Detective The Course Catalogue group produced a Google Custom search engine to search over the undergraduate prospectus pages for all UK universities.
They presented a conceptual design (Figure 4) and the live search interface [8] which includes filters for just courses or resources, or both.
There will also be a tab to search over the YouTube channels available.
Figure 4: The Course Detective conceptual design by James Roscoe and Joel Reed The group argued that a lot of OERs have been created in connection with a specific course, and can be a great marketing tool to help give a flavour of the course content.
However, they are rarely linked to the course prospectus, so are rarely found by prospective students.
The premise of the Course Detective is to create a rich search experience for prospective students that capitalises on OERs.
WordPress and OER: A List of Tools, Workflows and Hacks Figure 5: Brainstorming The WordPress group carried out a range of work to evaluate existing plugins and build up a range of resources to help make use of the WordPress platform in a practical way.
Its work included: Creating a new OER bookmarker and bookmarklet plugin: “FavOERite” which is platform-independent and mobile-compatible; Reviewing how to populate WordPress with feeds from the University of Oxford’s OpenSpires system; Feeding WordPress using FeedWordPress and Custom Post Types, to be displayed using Featured Post type; Creating a plugin to search against Xpert, RSS and APIs; Reviewing plugins for OER Creative Commons work.
The group also discussed ways in which WordPress could potentially integrate with the Learning Registry, including pulling information in through RSS and using the Salmon protocol [9] to flow comments back to the source.
Both groups agreed that this could be a very interesting solution to create a reciprocal relationship between WordPress content and the Learning Registry.
Generating Paradata from MediaWiki The OeRBITAL Group examined how to contribute paradata back into the Learning Registry by building a simple data pump that mines MediaWiki and transforms it into a paradata envelope for the Learning Registry.
Currently this includes recommendation data, but the group noted the need for their antithesis, a “thumbs-down” option, together with more semantic information to contribute more valuable paradata about the resources in the future.
Sacreligious The PORSCHE group demonstrated a proof of concept for a tool they named “Sacreligious” an OER version of Delicious, built on Django.
This automatically picks up licence-, authorand publisher-related data, where available, and includes a bookmarklet to help users add resources and personal descriptions as they browse.
Xpert — Learning Registry Connection John Poyau from the Learning Registry worked with the Xpert search API to parse it and push it into the Learning Registry.
He identified some of the difficulties involved and made connections with representatives from Xpert at the event who could help take this work further.
Perspectives I carried out a number of short video interviews with participants to find out why they had come and what they found valuable about the event.
Here are just some of their responses… Greg DeKoenigsberg, ISKME: “The things to be hacked upon are sort of second interest to me.
[Its about] meeting people who would bother to show up to an OER hack fest and the follow on opportunities after that…Code is secondary to knowing the people behind the code.” [10] Lorna Campbell, CETIS: “I think it has been a great opportunity to get developers together, because although there is a lot of interesting work going on, it can be quite scattered on the technical side.
I’ve also been interested in the area of paradata, because that’s something we have been grappling with for sometime: how do we describe learning resources and how to do harness and capture the information that accrues around resources once they are out there on the Web?” [11] Terry MacAndrew, OeRBITAL: “The most valuable thing is the bandwidth you can get from personal conversation with experts in the field because you can discover what the emphasis on certain areas needs to be.” [12] I also curated a social summary of the event using Storify [13] to capture the comments and reactions of participants at the event.
This includes tweets, pictures, blog posts and even haiku reflecting on the event [14].
Figure 6: OER Hack Day Storify Summary Conclusion There were a number of common interests that had emerged from the two days, including the concept of paradata, OER-specific bookmarking tools and an ongoing OER hack community to pursue some of these ideas.
All of the participants I spoke to emphasised the value of the connections this event allowed them to make, which will form the basis of such a community, and the organisers also expressed a keen interest in providing support to facilitate ongoing discussions.
It is probably too early to say what the most valuable outcome of this event will be, but the ideas and practical solutions which evolved throughout the two days demonstrate the huge potential for some really interesting innovation in this area.
References Sheppard, N., ‘Musings On The Developing OER Infrastructure’�, March 2011 http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/musings-on-the-developing-oer-infrastructure/ Thomas, A., ‘OER and the Aggregation Question’�, March 2011 http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/03/29/oeragg/ Rehak, D., ‘The Learning Registry: Social Networking for Metadata’�, March 2011 http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/othervoices/2011/03/22/thelearningregistry/ CETIS OER Hack Day Wiki http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/OER_Hack_Days OpenFields http://www.openfields.org.uk/ Lotia, A.A., in interview with K. Pitkin, April 2011 http://vimeo.com/22118746 Rehak, D., in interview with K. Pitkin, April 2011 http://vimeo.com/22119778 Course Detective Live Search http://www.coursedetective.co.uk/ Salmon Protocol http://www.salmon-protocol.org/ DeKoenigsberg, G., in interview with K. Pitkin, April 2011 http://vimeo.com/22124131 Campbell, L., in interview with K. Pitkin, April 2011 http://vimeo.com/22229819 MacAndrew, T., in interview with K. Pitkin, April 2011 http://vimeo.com/22125297 Storify http://storify.com/ Pitkin, K., ‘DevCSI OER Hack Day’�, April 2011 http://storify.com/eventamplifier/devcsi-oer-hack-day Author Details Kirsty Pitkin Event Amplifier TConsult Ltd Email: kirsty.pitkin@tconsult-ltd.com Web site: http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com Kirsty Pitkin is a professional event amplifier who works closely with conference organisers to help extend the impact of their events using online media.
She received an MA in Creative Writing and New Media from DeMontfort University, which stimulated her ongoing interest in communicating stories across a variety of social media and digital platforms.
Return to top Article Title: Open Educational Resources Hack Day Author: Kirsty Pitkin Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/oer-hackday-2011-03-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Real-time Search Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Real-time Search Buzz data html database rss archives blog video flickr windows youtube facebook twitter ustream hashtag microblogging url avatar Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley looks at the concept of real-time search and points to some of the functionality that users can and should expect to find when exploring these engines.
There’s a lot of talk going around at the moment on the subject of ‘real-time search’, so I thought it might be useful to look at the concept in a little more detail, and to explore some of the search engines that say they offer it.
This is by no means an attempt at a comprehensive listing, as new search engines are appearing if not daily, then certainly every week.
Rather, it’s an attempt to define the area, using examples, and to point to some of the functionality that users can and should expect to find when exploring these engines themselves.
What is ‘Real-time Search’?
Firstly, what is meant by ‘real-time search’, and what does it encompass?
A ‘real-time search’ could mean that it’s possible to find something on the Web that was made available in the last few seconds, irrespective of what that item might be.
It could be a blog post that took the author 5 hours to write, and which he or she has just published.
In one sense, that’s real-time searching since you can get access to that post within seconds of its going online.
However, one could also argue that it’s not ‘real time’ at all, given the amount of time that it took to write!
Immediately we’re faced with the ambiguity of the concept; is the emphasis on real-time search, or is it on real-time search?
Opinions differ here Danny Sullivan in his article What is real-time search?
defines the concept as ‘…looking through material that literally is published in real time.
In other words, material where there’s practically no delay between composition and publishing.’ [1] This would therefore exclude the idea of the 5-hour blog post, even if the searcher found it seconds after it was published.
On the other hand, Kimbal Musk, from the OneRiot [2] search engine defines real-time search as ‘finding the right answer to your question based on what’s available right now, about the subject you care about right now.
Realtime search is finding the “Right Answer, Right Now”’.
[3] My personal definition is more akin to Danny’s – when I want to know what’s happening in the world right now, I’m interested in gaining access to data that’s been created (written, on video or in photographs) in the last few seconds, not data that has simply been made available in the last few seconds.
It’s a subtle, but important distinction, and at the moment I don’t feel that there’s a clear-cut definition, so if you hold to a different view, that’s fine as well – as long as we all recognise that when discussing the subject we might actually be discussing different things.
Is it important?
I think it is, as I’ll be using a range of search engines that use microblogging services such as Twitter, rather than news resources such as Google News.
However, there are further issues to take into account with real-time search before we can start to look at the search engines themselves.
They are the usual suspects such as spam and authority.
Once any subject becomes a hot topic some individuals will try to piggyback to get across their sad marketing message; for example, ‘Interesting news about <hot topic of the moment>, but come and visit my get-rich-quick website’ are tweets that I’m sure we’ve all seen before.
If the idea of authority on the Web is taxing, at least with traditional Web publishing it’s possible to check a Web site, read back through a series of blog posts or see who links to a specific page.
With real-time search we’re depending on the fact that someone who says that they’re at the scene of a specific event actually is; it’s all too easy for a malicious individual to ‘report’ something that’s happening when it really isn’t.
As we have little to go on other than brief details that person has supplied in their biography (if indeed they have), it becomes much more difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.
A third issue is the sheer amount of information that’s being produced.
If searchers are obtaining information on a newly breaking story, they will have to deal with new tweets or posts appearing in their hundreds every couple of minutes.
In comparison the idea of a static 5,000 results returned by a traditional search engine, through which you can wade through at your leisure, sounds almost idyllic!
Twitter Of course, when looking at real-time search, we need to find the content to search, and where better than Twitter?
Twitter [4] has its own search engine, and if you’ve done much real-time searching yourself, it’s a reasonable assumption that this is the one you’ve used.
A major problem with this search engine is that Twitter as a resource isn’t as careful with content as one may assume; in fact it seems to lose data on a regular basis, so don’t rely on a search being fully comprehensive because it won’t be.
Having said that, the search engine has some interesting features along with the basic functionality.
A visit to the Advanced Search page at http://search.twitter.com/advanced (which, annoyingly, remains unlinked to from the Twitter home page thus decreasing the likelihood of it being used) shows that it’s possible to do a location-based search within a specific radius.
This can be done by the use of a date option (although as previously mentioned, this isn’t as helpful as it could be), a search for something with a positive or negative bias towards it (based on the two emoticons ?
and ?
), and finally with a question in the tweet by using the ?
symbol as a limiting factor.
How real-time is the Twitter search engine?
I updated my status at 11.50 am using the term “asd123poi456” and it was returned in a search within 25 seconds.
Other Real-time Search Engines Sency [5] is a new search engine, just out of beta, which provides a simple interface, with two columns below the search box offering links to current trends and recent trends.
My assumption, based on running searches, is that it is limited to Twitter’s database, since it found my strange search term in a timely fashion.
However, a lack of search functionality – it couldn’t complete my location search using Twitter search terms – limits its value, and it was disappointing that there were no links to a search or FAQ page.
One useful option provided by Sency however was the ability to create an HTML-based feed for a particular term or phrase which could then be incorporated onto a Web site or into a blog.
Collecta [6]] is a search engine that takes a rather broader remit than simply searching Twitter content.
It pulls content from blogs, blog comments, Twitter [4], Jaikua [7], Identi.ca, [8], Flickr [9], TwitPic [10], yFrog [11] and video from YouTube [12] and Ustream [13].
Collecta has a three-column approach; left-hand for search, hot now topics, options and the like, centre column for results and the right-hand column to expand the result.
There are options to filter and limit a search based on five different criteria: Stories, Comments, Updates, News, Video, based on various options within each criteria; so limiting to Updates would simply pull in content from Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca) and searches can be shared across a broad range of social media sites such as Facebook [14] and Delicious [15].
What particularly impressed me about Collecta was that it was able to find my search and date-stamp it at exactly 11.49.25.
Searches are saved while you’re on the site, allowing searchers to go back easily and check to see if new material has been added since the search was originally run.
The centre column displays a small icon next to each result to indicate source, and in the right-hand pane each result can be viewed in more detail, with a link to the original source (such as a blog posting) if it’s too large to be displayed in its entirety by Collecta.
The downsides to Collecta, however, are a lack of RSS feeds, very limited help functionality and no listing of possible search syntax.
OneRiot [2] also claims to search ‘the realtime web’.
They say of themselves ‘OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds.
The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web.’ [16] It has two search options, Web and Video, and below the search box are a number of trending topics.
Disappointingly however, OneRiot did not find my recent tweet even though (at 45 minutes) it was by then quite elderly.
The reason for this however quickly becomes clear when looking at the results of searches that are returned, since OneRiot is interested in links to resources, rather than more general content.
Consequently, searching on a trending topic ‘optical illusions’ provides access to the original resource being discussed, the number of times that it has been linked to, and when.
The engine draws a distinction between two types of data – ‘real-time’ and ‘pulse’.
They explain the difference thus: ‘When you sort your search results by “Realtime” (our default sorting system), you’ll find search results that reflect the most recently shared content on the Web as related to your query.
When you sort by “Pulse,” you’ll find the most socially valued content on the Web as related to your query a ranking that takes into account stuff like number of shares, rate of share and so on’.
Scoopler [17] is another engine that takes a fairly broad remit of the resources that it uses, indexing Twitter, Flickr, Digg [18], Delicious and others].
It takes a similar approach to that of OneRiot, as it has a two-column display of results, ‘popular shares’ and ‘real-time’ results.
The popular shares automatically include images and videos, although they can be disabled if required.
Live posts certainly seemed to be real-time – the searches that I ran covering popular news items were returning results of posts that had been published in the last minute, and it found my odd search term without any problem at all, date-stamped, with a link to my avatar and Twitter home page.
Scoopler also offers a ‘hot topics’ option, links to ‘My searches’ and posts in key subject areas such as Technology, World Business, Sports and so on.
CrowdEye [19] is another beta Twitter search engine, but it does provide a wealth of information from that one resource.
Results are split into different sections – a time span and filter option with a graph to show the tweet volume of a particular term; useful when you need to see if and when a term has peaked, a tag cloud to further narrow results down, a search filter column to limit to your own search terms, and hashtag-related queries.
That”s just column one!
CrowdEye then goes onto provide access to the most popular links, such as blogs and news sites, and tweets which are sorted by relevance or time.
An interesting display here is an indication of the influence of the person tweeting, based on some “cool math”.
Stephen Fry has an influence of 86, the Daily Telegraph newspaper is rated at 50, with the Daily Mail on 46.
CrowdEye provides access to hot searches and the current top 20 Web sites.
This search engine is powerful, neatly laid out and easy to use.
If it indexed content from more sites it would put itself in an almost invincible position.
The rather strangely named Stinky Teddy [20] has positioned itself as a realtime meta search engine, pulling in content from Bing [21], Yahoo [22], Videosurf [23], Twitter and Collecta.
It provides details on how many tweets, Web results, video and image results it can find, and a buzz-o-meter telling users how many tweets there are per minute on Twitter for the subject being searched.
Results are collated according to source and can be limited to news, Tweets, video and so on.
It’s still early days for the search engine – it told me that there was one result for my strange search term, but then flatly contradicted itself and told me there were no results to view.
There are various other search engines that are currently developing in this area, such as Twazzup] [24] with suggestions of Twitter users to follow, headline news, real-time tweets, news, top links, related photographs and links to key contributors.
Twingly [25] has fairly basic results from Twitter and several other key resources such as Jaiku and Identi.ca, and it does have an RSS option.
Topsy [26] is ‘a search engine powered by tweets’, and lists the usual trending topics and popular pages.
It’s major strength is listing links to sites that people are tweeting about, breakdowns of terms/time periods and top authors.
Traditional Search Engines Given the rise in this new breed of search engines, one shouldn’t forget the old warhorses; how are they managing to integrate real-time content?
Google is certainly indexing tweets, and found my sample tweet with no problem at all.
Using the site search option of site:twitter.com provides 332,000,000 results and these can then be reduced with other search terms, or the ‘Show options’ ‘Recent results’ can also be employed.
Since I began this piece there have been developments with two of the major players – Google obviously being one, and also Bing.
The latter recently announced an agreement [27] with Twitter to take their ‘firehose’ of tweets.
If you’re keen to try this out the first point to make is that you need to use either the US version or make sure you’re in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Arabia, South Africa, rather than any other country version.
I am at a loss to explain why Microsoft appear unable to roll out working functionality across the site, but that’s the way that they have decided to do it.
The site itself is http://www.bing.com/twitter [28].
First thing that we see is a tag cloud of hot topics on Twitter.
This is not the same as the trending topics you see in Twitter there are differences.
So clearly Bing is already doing different things to the data that they’re getting.
Trying a Windows 7 search, as that’s a hot topic of the moment, returned tweets that were 2 minutes old, yet a search directly at Twitter was providing content that was less than 30 seconds old.
One might think that it’s uncharitable to quibble over 90 seconds, but the cumulative effect is worrying; in the time that it took me to run the searches, compare results and write a commentary, Twitter added another 376 new tweets, but even though Bing has a ‘Pause’ button (which I hadn’t used), the results were exactly the same other than the fact that Bing was telling me that the results were now 7 minutes old.
Bing has an option to see ‘top links shared in tweets’ which is helpful, and indeed Bing is taking this a stage further by filtering results and ranking results based on various criteria such as the age of a link, how many people are retweeting links and the authority of people who are doing the retweeting.
Bing is still very much in beta phase with this resource, but nonetheless I do have concerns – it is supposed to break open all shortened URLs, such as those from bit.ly and other similar services, but I quickly found an example where this hadn’t happened and which took me to a spam site, and others (such as Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand [29]) have reported the same thing.
This is apparently a ‘glitch’ but it doesn’t lead to much confidence in the service.
While there are good things about Bing’s offering, I don’t currently see enough of a benefit to it to make me change from other options.
I’m also not alone in this feeling – Karen Blakeman summed up her review of the service by saying, ‘Bing have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.’ [30] However, they’re still a good step ahead of Google who are able to make nothing more than the announcement of their Twitter agreement [31] and don’t even have a test site to share at the moment.
Icerocket [32] however, has been busily repositioning itself as a real-time search engine and did perform rather better.
Not only did it find my sample tweet, it was pulling up results that had been published on Twitter in the last minute.
Icerocket also has a ‘big buzz’ option which pulls in content from blogs, Twitter, video, news and images.
It also offers auto-refresh and save search options.
Conclusion Real-time search is still in its infancy, and there’s very little yet by way of ‘musthave’ functionality.
Clearly any search engine that limits itself to Twitter is of limited value, and users may well decide to use the native search engine in most instances, unless there’s a compelling reason not to.
CrowdEye certainly provides users with extra functionality and is one to keep a watch on.
Traditional search engines are going to have to up their game in order to integrate content and, as yet, with one or two exceptions, have not really started to do this.
Finally, there are many engines that are busy in this area; it would have been easy to have listed another dozen engines without any difficulty so it’s an area worth keeping an eye on.
References Danny Sullivan (2009).
What Is Real Time Search?
Definitions & Players, 9 July 2009, Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/what-is-real-time-search-definitions-players-22172 OneRiot.com – Realtime Search for the Realtime Web http://www.oneriot.com/ RE: What Is Real Time Search?
Definitions & Players 7/09/09 Posted by Kimbal Musk under ‘Industry.’ This is a response to Danny Sullivan’s recent post on SearchEngineLand http://blog.oneriot.com/content/2009/07/re-what-is-real-time-search-definitions-players/ Twitter http://twitter.com/ Sency What’s Going On?
http://sency.com/ Collecta http://collecta.com/ Jaiku Your Conversation http://www.jaiku.com/ Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ TwitPic : Share Photos on Twitter http://twitpic.com/ yFrog Share your images/videos on Twitter!
http://www.yfrog.com/ YouTube –Broadcast Yourself http://www.youtube.com/ Ustream http://www.ustream.tv/ Welcome to Facebook!
http://www.facebook.com/ Delicious http://delicious.com/ OneRiot.com About Us http://www.oneriot.com/company/about Scoopler: Real-time Search http://www.scoopler.com/ Digg The Latest News Headlines, Videos and Images http://digg.com/ CrowdEye http://www.crowdeye.com/ Stinky Teddy http://stinkyteddy.com/ Bing http://www.bing.com/ Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com/ Videosurf Video Search Engine http://www.videosurf.com/ Twazzup http://www.twazzup.com/ Twingly Microblog Search http://www.twingly.com/microblogsearch Topsy http://topsy.com/ Bing is Bringing Twitter Search to You 21 October 2009, 10.24 AM http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/10/21/bing-is-bringing-twitter-search-to-you.aspx Bing Twitter http://www.bing.com/twitter Danny Sullivan , Up Close With Bing’s Twitter Search Engine, 21 October 2009, 2.40pm ET http://searchengineland.com/live-today-bings-twitter-search-engine-28224 Karen Blakeman’s Blog: Blog Archive and Twitter search in Bing and Google, 23 October 2009 http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/23/twitter-search-in-bing-and-google/ RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!
Official Google Blog, 21 October2009, 02:09 PM http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html Icerocket http://www.icerocket.com/ Author Details Phil Bradley Independent Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Search Engines: Real-time Search” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Historic Hospitals Admission Records Project Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Historic Hospitals Admission Records Project Buzz data database archives metadata digitisation standardisation accessibility tagging research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sue Hawkins and Andrea Tanner describe a ground-breaking Web site using children's hospital admission registers.
The Historic Hospitals Admission Records Project (HHARP) is a digitisation and indexing project that covers the Victorian and Edwardian admission registers for the London children's hospitals Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), the Evelina Children's Hospital in Southwark and the Alexandra Hip Hospital in Bloomsbury, together with Yorkhill Children's Hospital in Glasgow.
It represents a collaboration between archivists, academics and volunteers that has resulted in a product that we hope will be of use to all those interested in the records of Victorian and Edwardian child health from whichever academic discipline or none [1].
It was conceived during a Wellcome-funded project Mortality in the Metropolis, (based at the Centre for Metropolitan History at the Institute of Historical Research) when the richness of the Great Ormond Street archive collection first became obvious to the researchers.
The original grant from the Wellcome-funded Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme enabled the registers from 1852 1903 to be microfilmed and copied.
Further funding from the Wellcome Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Friends of the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital allowed the project to be extended to 1914, the inclusion of admissions to the hospital's convalescent home, Cromwell House, the digitisation of one set of surviving case notes, and the creation of a Web site to make the resulting data widely available.
Figure 1: Image of GOSH 1875 The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street (GOSH) is Britain's oldest children's hospital.
It was founded by Dr Charles West, a physician who had trained in London, France and Germany, and who was associated with the Children's Dispensary in Waterloo Road.
After several failed attempts, Charles West finally succeeded in gaining support for his institution, and the Hospital for Sick Children was opened in February 1852.
Its aims were to provide medical and surgical treatment for poor children, improve knowledge of childhood diseases and to train nurses to care for sick children.
By the end of the century the hospital had almost 200 beds, plus another 50 at the convalescent home.
The initial objective of the project was to create a database of patients admitted to the hospital from its admissions registers for the period 1852 to the end of 1914, and from the registers of the convalescent home, and to link the two together to reconstruct the patient experience, albeit in a limited form.
In order to complete the project, it was necessary to join with an academic institution, and use the skills of volunteers to (at the very least) undertake the in-putting of data.
Accordingly, the Centre for Local History Studies at Kingston University became the project's home.
Staff already had experience of the processes involved in database creation from their work on the Kingston Local History Project (a large database of over 200,000 records of individuals residing in Kingston in the 19th century); moreover, they had a pool of keen volunteers and the experience to manage them.
The database management methods and volunteer management experience were adapted for the GOSH project.
Figure 2: Image of Admission Register The registers contain data on patients' names, age and place of residence, dates of admission and discharge, disease, names of doctors and governors, and the outcome of treatment, that is, whether the child was cured, relieved, not relieved or died.
Data Input The original registers were filmed, and A3-sized photocopies were produced.
Copies were then organised into batches of around 400 records.
These records were allocated to volunteer data inputters who were issued with information packs about the hospital and the registers, and detailed instructions on interpretation.
A specially created Microsoft Access input program was issued to each volunteer.
They were instructed to enter data exactly as shown in the original, including any obvious mistakes, and not to make any individual interpretation.
A Comments field was included where inputters could enter any information which could not be recorded within the structure of the database, or any comments they wished to make.
Inputters were instructed to replace letters or words they could not decipher with three asterisks, rather than attempt a guess.
When completed, each batch was returned to the Centre and added to the master database.
A checking printout was produced for teams of two volunteers, who made corrections where necessary.
Intractable interpretation difficulties were referred to the hospital archivist, who supervised the final check against the original register.
Only then were final corrections entered onto the master.
Figure 3: Volunteers in the CLHS at Kingston University Validation and Standardisation The process so far involved co-operation between three different groups, including a body of volunteers who became more proficient and confident as the project went on.
At this point, a number of validation and enhancement procedures were undertaken.
Dates, age, sex and forenames were checked for inconsistencies.
The data was visually checked for erroneous entries such as letters in a numbers field, etc.
Finally, the comments fields were checked for information which would affect any of the other fields in the entry.
By this stage, it was clear that we had to find the money and develop the expertise to create a searchable Web site.
To this end, extra fields were added.
For example, the length of stay was calculated from the admissions and discharge dates; and forenames, wards, doctors' names, diseases and places discharged to were standardised.
Standardisation of address information was of great importance, and two approaches were taken to facilitate a search or analysis of addresses: 30% of admissions were of children from outside the metropolis, although many of these were from places surrounding London which would now be considered part of greater London.
These addresses were assigned a standard county.
Addresses within London were dealt with in more detail, being assigned to registration districts and sub-districts.
London, in this project, was the Metropolitan London area as defined in the Act for the Better Management of the Metropolis, 1855, and the registration districts used were those which fell into this definition.
A registration and sub-registration district reference table was constructed using the data from the 1881 census.
It is not entirely accurate, but when applied to address information in the database, admissions became searchable by discrete location within London.
By using the same definition of London and its districts throughout the project, like-for-like comparisons can be made across time.
Figure 4: Table showing Disease Codes Standardising disease information was also important, as there were so many different terms for individual diseases and a significant proportion of children had more than one disease or symptom recorded.
A protocol for assigning a standard disease name was defined, based on symptoms and anatomical locations.
For instance, the diagnosis in the Register may be written as 'knee disease' or 'abdominal abscess' or 'tumour of femur' etc.
We first identified the symptom (e.g.
'Abscess' or 'Tumour' or 'Disease'), and added to that the body part affected.
Certain exceptions would be for well-recognised disease entities such as Scarlet Fever, or Whooping Cough.
These conditions were often referred to by several synonyms and one was selected as the standard for this database [2].
In addition, the diseases were classified using a system devised by the project team which was intended to reflect medical knowledge in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
It categorises diseases according to the body system affected, such as Circulatory System, Joints, Bones and Muscles, etc.
Two major exceptions to this system are groupings for Tubercular Diseases and Infectious Fevers, which bring all incidence of these diseases into their respective categories, regardless of the body system affected.
For the benefit of modern-day epidemiologists, the International Classification of Diseases, or ICD10, compiled by the World Health Organisation and used by health administrators and epidemiologists around the world, has been applied to the data by an experienced GOSH Medical Coder [3].
Given the limited diagnostic information available, these codes have been applied as accurately as possible.
The admissions registers for the hospital's convalescent home were also entered onto a database, following the same process.
These registers contain additional information on a patient's history of infantile diseases and vaccination.
The Cromwell House admissions were linked to the GOSH admissions, enabling the user to locate patients at Cromwell House related to a GOSH admission, thus beginning to reconstruct the patient experience.
Figure 5: Case notes The Great Ormond Street Hospital archive also contains a large number of volumes of case notes contemporary with these registers, and one set, belonging to Dr Charles West, covering the period 1854 to 1874, was selected to be digitised and linked to the relevant children in the registers.
Almost 8,000 pages of scanned images of case notes were produced, and linked to 1,339 relevant admissions in the GOSH registers database .
Figure 6: Screenshot of Project Web site home page The final result of this work was a database containing almost 95,000 records, based on GOSH admissions, with their related admissions to (and from) the convalescent home, plus case notes.
The data are now available via the project's Web site, "Small and Special" [4].
The database can be used to examine questions online about the children who were admitted, and illustrates how such sources can shed light not only on medical practice at the time, but on some of the social issues prevalent in Victorian and Edwardian London.
We can use the database to pose 'typical' historians' questions: such as, who were the patients, how did the patient profile change over time, and what events might have influenced those changes?
Figure 7: Origins of GOSH patients Let us consider the residence of the children who found themselves in the hospital .
We can determine this by using the standardised information on home address which all patients provided on being admitted to the Hospital.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a large number of children came from areas immediately adjacent to the Hospital itself, as the illustration shows: Holborn (where the Hospital was situated), St. Pancras and Islington providing one third of all admissions.
Another third came from areas 'outside London', although most lived in districts that would now be considered as metropolitan [5].
To give an idea of what this means, both Tottenham and Walthamstow were considered to be 'Outside London'.
Having said that, children did come from further away: from the south west, as far as Devon, as far north as Durham, a number from Wales and a handful from Scotland.
These are average figures across the period of the database, but comparing the mid19th century with the early 20th century we can see the averages hide a distinctive shift in patient profile: Figure 8: Origins of GOSH Children II This illustration compares the leading districts in 1852-1870 with those in 1902-1914.
Still using the same definition of 'Outside London', in the early years, only 10% of patients gave addresses outside London.
The leading districts of Holborn, St. Pancras and Islington contributed 45% of all admissions.
By the beginning of the 20th century this picture had completely reversed: only 24% of patients came from these inner London districts, while 45% came from outside London.
This huge shift is partly explained by the geographic growth of London itself, as more of the population moved to the once rural outer edges of the city.
However, a further element of this growth comes from the hospital's increasing reputation across the country, resulting in a growing number of children being sent from the provinces.
And in this respect GOSH was competing with other children's hospitals.
The foundation of very successful children's hospitals in Manchester in 1856 and Liverpool in 1859 might explain the lack of patients from Lancashire; but other hospitals such as those at Birmingham and Bristol did not prevent children being sent to GOSH from Wiltshire and Devon.
Within the central London areas we can also see a shift in the pattern of admissions: in the early period a significant number of children came from central districts such as St Giles (area 4 on the map).
By the beginning of the 20th century this district sent very few children to the hospital, and perhaps this illustrates an effect of the late Victorian slum clearance programmes?
Instead, we see an influx from the East End areas of Shoreditch and Whitechapel.
The Expansion of the Project Having launched the Web site, it was clear that users medical historians, in particular – would require other datasets to allow comparative studies.
But there were none.
So we decided to create them.
In addition, the volunteers had developed an expertise that it would have been shameful to allow to lie fallow, and they themselves were keen to get on with the next project.
Working with volunteers is hugely demanding, but the rewards are ample and enduring.
One person at the Centre was responsible for keeping in touch with them, sending out e-newsletters, updates, advice and assistance.
The social interaction is extremely important for volunteers, many of whom are retired, and who thrive on regular contact with their colleagues.
Tea and biscuits for the office-based volunteers are as important as a working database, and social events help to keep up the momentum of any project [6].
As a result of the initial success, we gained further funding from the Wellcome Trust to expand the GOSH project to cover other children's hospitals nationwide.
The Trust paid for Dr Sue Hawkins to scour the country, looking for suitable hospital admission registers.
It was during this process that relationships with hospital and county archivists were begun and nurtured.
As a result of her summer of travel, we identified six hospitals that had records suited to the same process.
Of these, we have worked on, or are working on, the Alexandra Hip Hospital, the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children, and The Royal Glasgow Sick Children's Hospital (Yorkhill).
Figure 9: Yorkhill & Evelina hospitals The approach in respect of Yorkhill demonstrates the development of techniques, and a greater involvement on the part of the archivist than was possible with the other two London hospitals.
Most importantly, when it was discovered that a Yorkhill register was missing, we worked closely with archivist Alma Topen to recreate (in effect) the missing register from a variety of other sources in her care.
We found local volunteers to work on the material, and the archivist has been delighted that local awareness of her collection has been raised to a great extent.
It is hoped that the relationship the hospital archive enjoys with local volunteers will be expanded and enduring, to cover projects that she herself wishes to launch.
Figure 10: Status Quo of HHARP, 2009 Conclusion If we were to be transported back in time to 1999, when the project was in its embryonic form, there are many things that we would do differently.
As the Irish say, if you want to get somewhere, don't start from here.
At the dawn of the Millennium, Web sites were rather exotic, and we had no plans to create one.
We expected that our users would be those accustomed to sending queries into archive offices, and that Kingston and the hospital archivist would conduct most of the database searches on behalf of the searchers.
We also expected to create discs for academic researchers and epidemiologists, with specialised interests.
Today, users demand access to the data for themselves, with links to relevant sites, and large amounts of extra contextual information.
There are several prosopographical Web sites now available, although most have been created by academics for their peers, and none has used volunteers to the same extent as the HHARP project [7].
Nowadays, it is not enough to create a Web site.
One must create one's resource, and make it available on a Web site that enables user feedback, user contributions and corrections, and, moreover, that will engage and inspire them.
We have not ended the project, and we wonder sometimes if we ever shall.
The more we make available, the greater the feedback, and the greater the demand.
Users have sent in the results of their own researches, adding to the fund of knowledge on hospital patients and staff to be included on the Web site.
Technological developments in intelligent scanning, tagging and metadata embedding mean that it is possible to consider expanding the methodology to cover more records, and different types of material.
The Heritage at Home movement means that more volunteers can be used, who can be based anywhere in the world, and their efforts combined to create resources of unimaginable size and accessibility.
We are now researching parental occupations for inclusion on the site, and we are trying to find the funds to expand the digital casenotes collection to give greater insight into the hospital experience of more patients.
The project has expanded to cover other children's hospitals in the UK, and we are now considering extending further to include general hospitals, workhouse infirmaries, and other medical institutions.
We recognise that it is no longer enough to create a Web site containing the data you have accumulated during the time a project has been funded; it is now necessary to look at value-added technological advances in order to attract funding.
To this end, we are looking at ways of involving academic institutions, of widening departmental involvement, and of creating tools that can be applied by archives of all types to their own holdings, in order to open them out to users of all persuasions.
One of the first examples of multi-disciplinary spin-off projects is a joint venture between the Centre for Local History Studies (CHLHS), the School of Education at Kingston University and the London Grid for Learning.
This project, codenamed HeLP, is currently in production and will result in an online teaching and learning resource for use in primary schools in History Key Stages I and II.
Whatever happens, we are committed to involving archivists, volunteers and archive users to the maximum, and to fostering co-operation across the archival – and non-archival – communities.
References Several articles have come from the project.
See Tanner, Andrea.
'Choice and the children's hospital : Great Ormond Street Hospital patients and their families 1855–1900' "Medicine, charity and mutual aid : the consumption of health and welfare in Britain, c.1550-1950.
In Borsay, Anne; Shapely, Peter (ed.
), Medicine, charity and mutual aid : the consumption of health and welfare in Britain, c.1550-1950 (Historical urban studies series) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 135-62.
ISBN 9780754651482; 0754651487. http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/wwwopac.exe?DATABASE=dcatalo&LANGUAGE=0&OPAC_URL=&SUCCESS=false&rf=200706261 For example, Whooping Cough was chosen as the standard term for a disease also frequently referred to as Pertussis, or spelt 'Hooping Cough'.
For a detailed explanation of ICD 10, see WHO: International Classification of Diseases (ICD) http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/ Small and Special http://www.smallandspecial.org/ For maps of the London conurbation in the Victorian and modern-day periods, see http://www.londonancestor.com/maps/maps.htm http://archivemaps.com/mapco/london.htm and http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/.../maps/london_map.htm Volunteers are an integral part of community archive work, and there is a strong volunteer tradition in oral history projects, but they have rarely been used by universities until now.
The most well-known prosopographical databases include: the Clergy of the Church of England http://www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/index.html Old Bailey Online http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ The Prosopography of the Byzantine World http://www.pbw.kcl.ac.uk/pbw/apps/ and the Prosopography of Anglo Saxon England http://www.pase.ac.uk/ Author Details Sue Hawkins HHARP Project Manager Kingston University Email: S.E.Hawkins@kingston.ac.uk Web site: http://www.kingston.ac.uk/ Andrea Tanner Research Fellow Kingston University Archive assistant Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust Email: tannea@gosh.nhs.uk Web site: http://www.gosh.org Return to top Article Title: "The Historic Hospitals Admission Records Project" Author: Sue Hawkins and Andrea Tanner Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/hawkins-tanner/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Implementing E-Legal Deposit: A British Library Perspective Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Implementing E-Legal Deposit: A British Library Perspective Buzz data framework infrastructure archives metadata copyright preservation cataloguing ejournal taxonomy research ldap Citation BibTex RIS Ronald Milne and John Tuck summarise progress towards implementation of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 which extended provision to non-print materials.
Particular reference is made to the British Library.
‘The purpose of legal deposit is to ensure that the nation’s published output (and thereby its intellectual record and future published heritage) is collected systematically and as comprehensively as possible, both in order to make it available to current researchers within the libraries of the legal deposit system and to preserve the material for the use of future generations of researchers’ [1].
In his Alexandria article of 2004, Dr Clive Field, Director of Scholarship and Collections at the British Library (2001-2006), provided a detailed account of the Legal Deposit Libraries Bill and its progress through Parliament to the statute book.
To quote directly from the article: ‘The Act [Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 [2]] was brought into force on 1 February 2004 … From this point legal deposit of printed works has operated under the new Act rather than under the now repealed Section 15 of the Copyright Act 1911.
Extension to non-print media requires secondary legislation through Regulations.
Government has determined that this process cannot commence until an Advisory Panel, independent of Government, is in place, to advise the Secretary of State on the Act’s implementation.’ [3] It is the intention in this short article to provide an account of progress since 2004 from the enabling legislation provided by the Act towards secondary legislation.
It is only through secondary legislation that deposit of electronic and other non-print material under the Act can commence.
We focus on the work of the independent Legal Deposit Advisory Panel, set up following the Act, the six legal deposit libraries in the British Isles and the publishers.
Some particular examples of working practice will be drawn from the experience of the British Library.
Legal Deposit Advisory Panel The Legal Deposit Advisory Panel (LDAP [4]) came into being as an Advisory Non-Departmental Public Body in September 2005 and comprises fifteen members: five librarians, five publishers, and five independent members, one of whom is Dr Ann Limb, the Chair, who has spent her career in public service, including leadership of substantial educational institutions and working with government ministers and officials.
In summary, LDAP’s remit, revised in March 2007 [5], is to advise the Secretary of State for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on the deposit of print material, and on regulatory and non-regulatory options for the deposit of non-print material.
The primary focus of LDAP during its first years has been on analysing types of non-print material and, in particular, on evaluating options for the deposit of three categories: off-line, by which is meant hand-held items such as CDs and DVDs (excluding sound and moving image which are not covered by the Act]; free UK online publications, by which is meant free publicly available UK Web sites where there is no barrier to access through commerce or subscription; and scholarly e-journals.
Other key elements of the Panel’s work have been arriving at a definition of the UK in a digital environment (the question of ‘territoriality’) and scoping publications which comprise the e-universe.
Legal Deposit Libraries The move towards e-legal deposit in practice has had a significant impact on all the legal deposit libraries.
As a result, following the passing of the Act, the six libraries (the British Library; the National Library of Scotland; the National Library of Wales; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Cambridge University Library, and the Library of Trinity College Dublin) set about reviewing their own co-ordinating structures relating to legal deposit.
Through the Legal Deposit Librarians Committee, which comprises the Principals of all six libraries, a Legal Deposit Librarians Committee Implementation Group (LDLC IG) was set up, chaired by Andrew Green, Librarian of the National Library of Wales.
It has representation from all six libraries and is tasked collectively and collaboratively to address the wide range of library issues necessary to facilitate the implementation of e-legal deposit.
These include technical infrastructure, access, metadata, shared cataloguing, preservation, legal issues such as data protection, as well as gathering the necessary library costings and evidence from pilot and voluntary schemes set up under the auspices of LDAP.
To facilitate this consolidated approach, the post of Legal Deposit Libraries Project Officer, funded by and working for all six libraries, was established in March 2007.
It is the role of the Project Officer, Richard Gibby, to ensure join-up across the institutions, to gather data and evidence, and to act as the conduit to LDAP through a close working relationship with the LDAP Policy, Project and Research Officer and with the publishers and their representative bodies.
The British Library The British Library was established by statute in 1972 and under the terms of the British Library Act was established as the national library of the UK, ‘consisting of a comprehensive collection of books, manuscripts, periodicals, films and other recorded material printed or otherwise’ [6].
The British Library, recognising the fundamental importance of legal deposit in underpinning its content development strategy, accorded a legal deposit matrix role to a senior member of staff in 2006 to ensure that work on all the various strands of e-legal deposit activity were co-ordinated and directed towards the priorities agreed by the LDLC IG.
This matrix role was located within British Collections as a component of the post of Head of British Collections who set up formal and informal structures and channels of communication within the Library to ensure join-up and to monitor progress.
Particular responsibilities for the matrix role holder were to ensure that British Library strategy and policy across a wide range of areas, for instance digital preservation, e-journals management, licensing and technical developments, Web archiving, and the Library’s overall newspaper strategy were synchronised with legal deposit priorities and policies.
This was particularly important as the British Library was lead partner for the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC see below); had moreover managed an e-journals pilot for legal deposit in 2005⁄06; and subsequently, within the current e-journals voluntary scheme, was playing the lead technical role in testing file formats for legal deposit.
It was also embarking on a major newspaper strategy.
The matrix role holder was also responsible for ensuring strong communication between the British Library and the other legal deposit libraries as well as with other stakeholders, for example, the newspaper industry.
Working with Publishers The legal deposit libraries have worked co-operatively with publishers over many years, for instance through the Joint Committee on Voluntary Deposit and in connection with the Voluntary Scheme for Offline Materials, set up in 1999 [7].
After the passage of the Act, this body became the Joint Committee on Legal Deposit (JCLD) which continues to meet regularly, under joint library/publisher chairmanship, and comprises representatives of the legal deposit libraries and publisher trade associations.
It has proved to be a very useful mechanism, both to discuss issues of common concern, e.g.
territoriality, and to prepare reports and documentation for LDAP.
For instance, with reference to e-journals, a joint LDAP/JCLD committee has been set up to oversee progress on the current voluntary scheme.
Identifying and Scoping the Universe The process required by government to achieve Regulation can be summarised as one of options appraisal and, as indicated above, this is being applied category by category.
A main driver of this approach has been a report, commissioned by LDAP and carried out by David Powell (then EPS, now Outsell), to consider the universe of e-publications as it would apply to e-legal deposit.
The report [8], which forms the basis for LDAP’s planning framework, outlines a new taxonomy based not on the traditional print-world formats such as books, journals, newspapers, maps, etc but rather on categories such as online/off-line; content delivered to/collected by users; freely available content/content protected behind a barrier.
The work of LDAP has also progressed against the background of the government’s Better Regulation initiative, which seeks to minimise administrative burdens for business.
It has therefore been necessary for LDAP to consider the costs, benefits, risks, and disadvantages of a number of options in respect of each category.
Consequently, LDAP has set up sub-committees, which include co-opted members with relevant expertise, for Web, off-line and e-journals.
Web In the case of free UK online publications, three options have been assessed and costed: permissions-based harvesting and archiving (this is where explicit permission has to be gained from a Web site owner before a Web site can be harvested and it is the model used by UKWAC) [9]; regulation-based harvesting and archiving; and archiving left to the market.
After full analysis and costings, these options were put to LDAP in May 2008, together with a recommendation for the full Regulation option.
The full Regulation option would allow the legal deposit libraries in the UK to harvest, preserve and make accessible this category of material without the need for permissions but within certain restrictions laid down by the Act, for instance, access to the content on legal deposit library premises only.
At the same time the Act affords publishers and libraries protection on copyright infringement and defamation.
It is estimated that this Regulation-based approach, not requiring permissions, would be much more cost effective than the UKWAC permissions approach.
In comparison with the approximately 3,000 sites so far collected by UKWAC, it would enable whole UK domain harvesting and would secure an estimated 80% of the domain for the national published archive after 10 years at a current annual cost of £215 per terabyte.
LDAP accepted this recommendation, subject to clarification of one or two points.
The next step is for the recommendation to go to DCMS whose officers will prepare the next stages of the process, which are: approval of the recommendation by the Secretary of State; an economic impact assessment; a public consultation; and then affirmation by both Houses of Parliament.
The earliest time by which Regulation could be implemented would seem to be late 2009 or early 2010.
Off-line A similar process was followed for off-line materials and a recommendation brought to the May 2008 meeting of LDAP.
In this case, based on the evidence provided through a relaunched voluntary scheme which ran from February 2007 to January 2008, the recommendation, approved by LDAP, was for a self-regulated voluntary scheme.
One strong argument for this is linked to the Better Regulation agenda for the good reason that publishing in an off-line format is declining in favour of online and it would seem inappropriate for the whole regulatory process, therefore, to be applied.
The next step is the submission of this recommendation to DCMS and then consideration of how and when the self-regulatory scheme can be implemented.
In the meantime, the legal deposit libraries will continue to apply the practices and procedures which underpinned the relaunched voluntary scheme.
e-Journals A voluntary scheme is currently under way for scholarly e-journals.
This is focussing on testing file formats from particular publishers.
In parallel, a scoping study of the e-universe of UK e-journals has been commissioned, the results of which are due later in 2008.
The outcomes of the scoping study and the voluntary scheme, which is subject to an annual review, will provide evidence for LDAP’s work on assessing options for any recommendation for this category of material.
It would seem likely that it will be two or three years before a full options appraisal can be undertaken and a recommendation made.
Next Steps Later in 2008, LDAP will consider next steps for the remaining categories in the context of this new taxonomy and will assess the feasibility of proceeding with recommendations for other categories, not one by one but more collectively.
Conclusion The electronic environment brings with it a whole range of challenges and opportunities.
They apply to and have a significant impact upon the practices of the legal deposit libraries and the publishers.
Of course, they apply beyond the UK and other national libraries are grappling with the same issues.
LDAP and LDLC IG are keeping abreast of these international developments.
LDLC IG has also put in place a Technical Infrastructure Committee which is planning and preparing the shared technical infrastructure for the legal deposit libraries.
In accordance with the provisions of the Act, this will receive, preserve and make accessible the e-content collected under legal deposit.
A more detailed article on the subject of progress towards e-legal deposit is being prepared by Andrew Green and Richard Gibby and will appear soon in the New Review of Academic Librarianship.
References British Library, Code of practice for the voluntary deposit of non-print publications, section 2 http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/legaldep/voluntarydeposit/ Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030028_en_1 Clive Field, ‘Securing digital legal deposit in the UK: the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003’, Alexandria, 16.2 (2004), 87-111.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport http://www.culture.gov.uk/working_with_us/public_appointments/3409.aspx Department for Culture, Media and Sport: Legal Deposit Advisory Panel Terms of Reference http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/LDAPToRMarch2007.pdf British Library Act 1972 and as amended http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/governance/blact/ British Library, Code of practice for the voluntary deposit of non-print publications, http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/legaldep/voluntarydeposit/ David Powell.
Refining the map of the universe of electronic publications potentially eligible for legal deposit (2006) http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/EPS_Report_to_LDAP_Nov_2006.pdf UK Web Archiving Consortium http://www.webarchive.org.uk Author Details Ronald Milne Director of Scholarship and Collections The British Library Email: ronald.milne@bl.uk John Tuck Director of Library Services Royal Holloway, University of London (formerly Head of British Collections, the British Library) Email: john.tuck@rhul.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Implementing e-Legal Deposit: A British Library Perspective” Author: Ronald Milne and John Tuck Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/milne-tuck/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Support Framework for Remote Workers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Support Framework for Remote Workers Buzz data software framework dissemination blog video multimedia twitter ict intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy follows up on her two previous articles for Ariadne with an overview of an evolving structure to provide consistent support to UKOLN colleagues who work remotely.
In my previous articles on remote working [1] [2] I have written about the positive and negative aspects of working from home and the technologies that can support one to do so.
This article aims to discuss how we, here at UKOLN, have put this theory into practice by creating a support framework for remote workers.
It is a case study of what can be done with enthusiastic staff, support from managers and faith in an iterative process.
It is also a reality check.
Remote working continues to be an aspiration for so many yet the reality is not always plain sailing.
However what remote working does offer, if it can be realised, is choice and flexibility; two increasingly required job characteristics that let the best employees work to the best of their ability.
UKOLN Remote Workers UKOLN has employed remote workers since 1997.
The first remote worker was Rosemary Russell who changed from an on-site worker to a remote worker after two years.
Rosemary began her off-campus time working in an office at University of London Computer Centre, and later moved to Charlton House (owned by Greenwich Council).
Rosemary’s move to being a remote worker was initiated by discussions with Lorcan Dempsey, then Director of UKOLN.
In 2002 she began to work from home with the approval of Dr. Liz Lyon, UKOLN’s current Director.
This arrangement, including a further relocation, continues to date.
Since Rosemary’s establishment as a remote worker, UKOLN has developed a flexible working policy and has been prepared to discuss with staff where and how they would like to work.
The UKOLN approach has been that it is important to get the right person for the job and at times this means allowing someone to work from a different location to the campus.
Over the years there have been several remote workers, some who came, worked on a project and left, possibly without ever feeling integrated into the UKOLN culture.
In 2007 it became increasingly clear that remote workers had some needs which differed from those of their colleagues working on campus.
It was recognised that in order for our remote workers to reach their full potential and increase the likelihood of their wishing to remain with UKOLN, they would need further, discrete support.
An Iterative Cycle of Development Given the diffuse nature of the UKOLN remote workers’ schedules and locations, there was a need to establish a process through which remote worker support could be improved.
Although the process was not defined at the very outset as such, it has shown itself to be highly iterative.
Iterative design is a well-known design methodology based on a cyclical process of prototyping, testing, analysing, and refining a work in progress.
Its key benefit is that the solution is designed incrementally and that the major enhancements arise from not only the development of but also the use of the system itself.
Such a process makes reasonable sense when creating a support structure for remote workers.
The structure will always be a work in progress because times change and as an organisation we continue to learn.
The establishment of a process and the implementation of changes in the support structure was also likely to take time.
Remote workers do not form a department in themselves, they have their deliverable priorities like everyone else and so these processes are by their nature slow to evolve and mature.
The Cycle works through the following stages: The initiation of the process and discussion (through face-to-face meetings) Creation of a development plan informed by above discussions Prioritisation and tactics for implementation of solutions Communication and discussion of solutions Implementation Review Next face-to-face meeting and discussion The Cycle in Action Remote Worker Day November 2007 After recognition that UKOLN was not supporting its remote workers as well as it might, the idea was floated of having a staff development day purely for remote workers.
At the end of November 2007 a one-day workshop was organised by Bridget Robinson and the UKOLN Resources and Administration Team and was facilitated by Sylvia Vacher of Objectives Training and Development [3].
The workshop focused on developing strategies for improving personal and collaborative working practices in a distributed environment.
It threw up a lot of questions (why do we have to miss out on important communication that goes on?
What could we do about staff development sessions?)
and also initiated a lot of ideas (what about Skype-based and other virtual meetings, a representative for remote workers?)
The day was deemed to be a success and so began the creation of a support framework.
A Plan of Action The feedback from the remote worker staff development day was passed back to UKOLN’s Senior Management Team and resulted in an informal development plan.
In early 2008 the role of a Remote Worker Champion was envisaged.
This ‘champion’ would operate as a catalyst in the approach to remote worker support and as the initiator of support activities.
Remote working was also added as a regular agenda item to the UKOLN Operations Group (OG), a group where all UKOLN teams are represented by at least one colleague with the remit of discussing the implementation of UKOLN policy and strategy.
The OG is an internal task group which seeks to provide an opportunity for staff participation in agenda-setting and decision-making.
Its aim is to move, where appropriate, some operational decision-making away from the Senior Management Team to those colleagues most involved or affected.
Its main focus is on capacitybuilding activities that will enable the organisation and its staff to adapt to the changing needs of the environment within which it operates and to be ready to engage effectively with future challenges.
The remote worker champion was co-opted as an Operations Group member.
The Operations Group provided a good structure in which to get constructive feedback on possible solutions to remote workers’ problems.
This forum, alongside general discussion among the UKOLN remote workers, allowed a number of approaches to solutions to surface.
A number of those solutions have been recently implemented, as described next.
Videoing Staff Seminars UKOLN is fortunate to have a good number of excellent speakers who come to visit the University every year and give presentations on their work.
In the past staff had physically to attend a session to hear the talk, and for most remote workers this would mean a long trip for an hour-long seminar.
Recently the UKOLN Software and Systems Team invested in a High Definition HDD camcorder which allows it to video and share the talks after the event, subject, of course, to the presenters’ consent.
The camcorder is a Canon HG20, chosen by the Systems Team, but a great deal can be achieved without such a high-specification camera.
During the initial trial, footage was recorded at very high quality, which could not easily be converted to Web quality for sharing.
This issue has now been resolved but there will be other technical issues to be addressed, but once set up, it just requires turning on.
Usually someone is available to manipulate and move the camera during the seminar, but even where this is not the case, a reasonable quality of recording can be achieved by just leaving it to run.
The video footage is released as soon as possible after the seminar along with the slides and any other multimedia employed.
All seminars are available indefinitely for staff use and stored on the UKOLN Staff Intranet.
They are not currently available externally but this is something that may happen in the future.
Making seminars available in this way is of considerable benefit to all UKOLN staff, not just remote workers, as colleagues are often absent on UKOLN business or otherwise unable to attend.
Support for Phoning in to Meetings UKOLN has also recently purchased a new conference phone, a Polycom SoundStation VTX1000, which provides a much clearer audio transmission than our previous model.
The extra microphones remove the necessity of constant ‘phone shifting’ that used to take place during staff meetings; it also means that people who are phoning in can hear questions and comments more clearly.
All UKOLN remote workers have Skype accounts and an appointed person usually connects to staff phoning in to the meeting to monitor any problems with the sound, questions etc.
There is also guidance available for the chair of meetings.
It covers: Collation of Resources ensuring that prior to the meeting all resources that will be required are deposited in a specified intranet location of which UKOLN remote workers are notified in advance of the meeting.
Online Contact ensuring that an allocated person is in touch with remote workers using Skype (or other application) so that any comments they make can be fed in and any problems they have (e.g.
loss of sound) can be dealt with.
Introductions – ensuring, if there is time, to allow staff to introduce themselves at the start of the meeting.
Encouraging staff to use the microphone and offer their name before they ask questions or offer comment.
Interjection – ensuring remote workers are given opportunities to ask questions and interject.
This could be managed by the online contact.
Meeting length – ensuring, where possible, that meetings do not exceed 1 hour 30 minutes (preferably less) as maintaining attention without any visual stimulus grows increasingly difficult.
Anyone presenting at a meeting makes every effort to ensure their presentation slides are available in good time so remote workers can access them.
One proposal for possible implementation in a future cycle is the creation of a remote worker deposit area that acts as an online storage facility for each meeting.
Remote Workers’ Email List Last year an internal remote workers email list was established.
This allows other UKOLN staff to address all the remote workers directly as a group (for example for administration tasks, for example with respect to travel to UKOLN) and also for the remote workers to share ideas, discuss issues, etc.
This list is being regularly used, the remote workers all have a common issue (dealing with working out of the office) so have much to discuss and the list has been useful without being overwhelming.
Quite a few of the remote workers also now have Twitter accounts, which has been another useful way to stay in touch.
Remote Worker Policies UKOLN’s remote worker policy has recently been updated and now covers: Recruitment Induction Existing staff moving to Remote Working Integration of Remote Workers into the workplace Homeworking environment, office furniture and ICT equipment Internet connections and phone lines Travel expenses Links to related documents (such as the University of Bath policies and documentation on secure data) It is also linked to a number of useful checklists.
It is anticipated that more resources aimed specifically at remote workers will be available in the future.
Review As mentioned above, the Operations Group has proven to be a good forum for discussion of possible support techniques.
Many of the ideas mentioned above have only recently been implemented (such as videoing staff seminars) and are still being refined (where should the presenter be filmed from?
Can we reduce the time it takes to get it online?).
Constructive feedback from all UKOLN staff is vital in making the techniques work as effectively as possible.
The main success so far is the improvement in the (virtual) working environment of remote workers and the recognition that their support is being taken seriously.
Remote Worker Day March 2009 In March 2009 the discussion and review continued at the second UKOLN remote worker workshop.
This was an all-day workshop run by the same external trainer who ran the first staff development day, Sylvia Vacher from Objectives Training.
Again the day was for UKOLN internal remote workers only.
The day went really well and was a good opportunity for introspection and contemplation about what being a remote worker requires.
Sylvia offers a solutions-based approach, so all UKOLN participants left with very practical, personal advice to take away and apply.
It was suggested that prior to the session Sylvia be fully briefed on UKOLN’s areas of work so she had an effective understanding of the challenges and demands the organisation faces, some of which are particular to UKOLN.
For example, UKOLN staff work on a wide range of projects with very diverse remits; to a degree it is not uncommon for some colleagues, some of the time, either to be unaware or fail to understand completely what some colleagues are currently doing.
Moreover, working within Higher Education research, some staff have relatively broad job descriptions and have to initiate a lot of their own work and/or respond to emerging trends that are not explicitly outlined by their remit, etc.
As this was Sylvia’s second session with the UKOLN staff, she demonstrated a really clear understanding of the UKOLN culture.
UKOLN Remote Workers [4]: (standing, left to right) Marieke Guy, Stephanie Taylor, Monica Duke, Adrian Stevenson; (seated) Rosemary Russell .
The main themes for the day were time management and motivation.
These were the two problem areas the UKOLN remote workers had identified as being the most significant to them.
Creativity was also covered because much of the work at UKOLN involves innovation and ideas.
The specification outline included: Time management How can we use our time more effectively?
How can we change ingrained patterns of behaviour?
How can we stop ourselves procrastinating?
What can be done to avoid distractions both online and off-line?
How can we improve our concentration?
Can different systems of time management apply to different personalities?
Motivation What motivates us as individuals?
How can we encourage motivation when, at times, we are not getting this from the work we are carrying out?
How can we set our own goals where it is not always easy to specify work requirements?
How can we stimulate creative thinking when alone?
Communication How can we increase interaction with colleagues (be they UKOLN or external)?
How can we maintain momentum in this communication?
Some of the key concepts participants took away from the day included: The need for a positive mental attitude and the importance of feedback The isolation of remote working means that, theoretically, off-site workers need feedback much more than an on-site worker.
If they aren’t getting this feedback they will need to ask for it.
This feedback could take the form of peer support, a coach, mentor, etc.
There were also lots of ideas that could potentially become part of the support framework.
Some remote workers who live close to each other in north-west England intend to have scheduled meet-ups in Manchester where they can both exchange ideas as well as just work on their own projects but in a more collectively supportive way.
This might even take the form of mentoring.
A shared list of wifi hot spots could assist with these type of meetings.
Sylvia Vacher of Objectives Training and Development (right) led the second of our remote worker development days in Spring 2009.
Again, probably the most positive aspect of the day was that the UKOLN remote workers demonstrated that they are really ‘gelling’ as a group.
Although they work on different areas, there do share a lot of common ground.
Remote Worker Champion In July 2008 I was offered the role of remote worker champion.
This role is not my main job, but rather an extra responsibility I have taken on but which I have found has become an increasingly interesting part of my work.
When I agreed to take on the remote worker champion role, I could see that for it to have any purpose I would need to take a proactive approach.
At the time I was relatively new to remote working so every discovery was useful and exciting and it made sense to share these with my remote working colleagues.
I personally feel that it is an exciting time to be a remote worker as technological developments as well as economic and environmental concerns are leading us further down this route.
Changes to the law, such as the government’s extension of the right to request flexible working, have also given arise to more opportunities for people to work remotely.
It seems inevitable that remote working will become increasingly accepted and remote workers will find that they have more ‘clout’ within their organisation.
As the remote worker champion, my main task is to represent UKOLN remote workers whenever they require collective representation: at meetings, when working with colleagues implementing policy, when dealing with systems support.
I also support them through dissemination of information (I send out an email newsletter with a round-up of current activities), initiation of support techniques and other developments.
The main dissemination mechanism for my thoughts as the remote worker champion is currently my blog: Ramblings of a Remote Worker [5].
I’ve found that writing my blog has helped to inform me about remote working issues and technologies because I now have a reason to find out about them.
It is something of a ‘chicken-and-egg’ situation.
I find out about activities and technologies and include them on the blog, readers send in comments, as a consequence I learn more about these activities and technologies so I end up writing more about them.
The blog serves a much wider community than the UKOLN remote workers.
I’ve had emails from people about remote working (for example I received one on VPNs and management from a reader in Canada [6]).
Writing the blog has allowed me to network with other remote workers and I have published two guest blog posts so far.
One was by Monica Duke [7] who also works at UKOLN while the other was by Paul Boag [8], who works for a commercial company.
I have more people lined up for guest blog posts in the future.
Events Writing the blog has also allowed me to get a name for myself as a remote worker ‘expert’.
I’ve participated in two Webinars (for RSC Eastern) and have another lined up for RSC South West in June 2009.
I will also be talking at a number of events this summer on remote working including the Flexible Working event, 23 June 2009, Birmingham and the UCISA Symposium, 7-8 July 2009, Aston Business School [9].
Conclusion The UKOLN support framework for remote workers is not set in stone.
It continues to be a work in progress and not all the activities initiated are successful.
There is still much work to done and a recent blog post looking at middle management attitudes to remote working reflects this [10].
The post discusses an idea from another blog post [11] of an organisation’s work place as being very like a pond in which communication takes the form of ripples.
These ripples sometimes fail to reach those on the outside: remote workers.
As one of the comments, from a UKOLN remote worker states: “I certainly feel myself the danger of missing out on the “unintentional, tweaked, quiet information that is transferred throughout the Pond and doesn’t leave the Pond”, and I do feel it happens not infrequently.” As my previous Ariadne articles [1] [2] have concluded, successful remote working is not something that can be achieved solely through the use of good tools or technical support.
It is about communication, engagement and support.
Here at UKOLN we feel that our support framework is very much a step in the right direction.
References Marieke Guy, “A Desk Too Far?
: The Case for Remote Working”, July 2008, Ariadne Issue 56 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/guy/ Marieke Guy, “Staying Connected: Technologies Supporting Remote Workers”, October 2008, Ariadne, Issue 57 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/guy/ “UKOLN Workshop for Remote Workers”, Focus on UKOLN, UKOLN Newsletter 19 December 2007 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/focus/issue19/#19.26.5 UKOLN Staff http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/ Ramblings of a Remote Worker http://remoteworker.wordpress.com Virtual Personal Networks (VPNs), Management and Emails from Canada http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/vpns-management-and-emails-from-canada/ Brie and Bakeries: A postcard from the North http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/brie-and-bakeries-a-postcard-from-the-north/ The Reality of Home Working http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/the-reality-of-home-working/ Advisory and Support Staff Symposium 2009, 7 July 2009 8 July 2009, Aston Business School Conference Centre, Birmingham.
Programme: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/ssg/sdg/Events/2009/SDG2009/Programme.aspx Life in the Pond: Moaning Middle Managers http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/life-in-the-pond-moaning-middle-managers/ Life in the Pond: Moaning Middle Managers – Reference to another post http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/04/15/the_pond.html Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.guy/ Return to top Article Title: “A Support Framework for Remote Workers” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/guy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Organising your first conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Organising your first conference Citation BibTex RIS Gary Brewerton has organised a number of library related conferences, mostly notably the Meeting the Reading List Challenge series.
In this article he shares some hints and tips for people considering putting on a library conference or workshop, but who are not sure where to start.
The two main objectives of a conference are: i) to promote developments in a particular area and/or ii) to gather opinion on the state of play.
In my case I’d been involved with a great project [1] and wanted the opportunity to brag talk about it.
As there didn’t seem to be any appropriate event to attend,  I ended up volunteering to organise one.
Of course there are many better reasons why you might want to do this; it may be to support your colleagues or a professional body in their endeavours, it’s (now) part of your duties, or because you need to boost your CV.
Whatever the reason, organising a conference isn’t something to take on lightly.
Assuming there are other people who can assist you, then forming an organising committee is a great, first, idea as responsibilities for various aspects of the conference (e.g.
programme, venue, registration, hosting) can be split among the committee members.
Of course it’s also important to determine what budget you have available, before proceeding too far with your plans.
If you haven’t already got a name for the conference then you’ll need to decide on one.
It may also be that you’re uncomfortable using the term “conference” particularly if this is your first event, in which case you may prefer to use seminar, symposium, showcase or workshop, especially it if includes an interactive element.
Whatever you call it, it’s worth thinking about an acronym or shortened title to use as a hashtag for the event.
Developing the draft programme Before you can develop an initial programme you need to be clear about what you’re trying to trying to achieve.
In other words, what is the purpose of the conference and what will the attendees get out of it?
The answer to this will hopefully start to inform you about what elements to include in the programme.
It may also suggest the approximate size and (more importantly for your programme) the likely duration of the event.
Clearly presentations are likely to form a significant proportion of the overall programme.
It might be you already have a few people in mind to approach, but otherwise sending out a “call for speakers” is a common starting point especially if the conference has been run previously.
Traditional email lists remain the best method of reaching prospective speakers, although nowadays twitter [2] comes a close second and can potentially reach a wider audience.
You’ll need to provide some basic details of the conference, for example the overall subject, probable date(s) and venue before people will be willing to commit to the conference.
Budget will have as part to play here, as speakers usually attend for free and may expect expenses such as travel and accommodation, to also be paid for.
[Figure 1.
Sample call for speakers] It’s possible your call might result in an abundance of speakers in which case you will need to carefully select which to include and which to reject.
This selection should be based upon providing the best overall programme for the conference (although of course what is best is a very subjective thing).
Rejecting speakers is never easy so you might consider holding “lightning talks”, a series of short (often time-limited) presentations or a panel session, which brings together multiple speakers on a single platform.
Other than presentations there are a variety of sessions that you could include for your conference.
Chief among these are group discussions which can be a great way to elicit feedback from attendees as well as a break up the tedium of presentation after presentation.
Group discussions are also an ideal means for attendees to make new acquaintances and network with people with similar interests, which is why I tend to schedule them just before the lunch break.
Poster sessions and exhibitions are also worth consideration, the latter especially so if commercial vendors will be invited to attend.
If the conference will be taking place over two or more days then you may also need to include some social activities for attendees in the evening(s) such as a conference meal, quiz night or disco.
Finding a venue Unless you already have a venue in mind then keeping close to home for your first conference is probably a good idea.
It may that your institution has some suitable space to host the conference which would be ideal, and hopefully keep the costs down.
Staying local will allow you to easily scope out the venue and if during the conference you encounter any issues, then you’ll have access to all your usual resources (e.g.
equipment, personnel, etc.)
to hopefully resolve them.
However, there are plenty of other options, including hotels, halls and a growing number of dedicated conference hosting venues.
The intended size of the conference will play a significant factor in the choice of venue as will its suitability for the intended programme, for example you may well require a number of private rooms or break out areas in a larger space, to facilitate group discussions.
Of course it may be that budget or other factors will mean selecting a venue that negatively impacts on the programme and requires it to change to accommodate limits such as the number of possible attendees, or type of sessions run.
Other factors including the availability and quality of food/drink, projection equipment, access to lockers or a locked room for storage (both for you and attendees), wifi access, transport links, accommodation and cost will also need to be considered.
Transport and accommodation are particularly significant as they may impact on the start and end times for the event.
It’s often a good idea to check the timetable of the local train station (and airport) to see when a majority of attendees might be arriving and want to depart.
This again may impact on the event’s programme.
Obviously before you can book the venue you will also need to confirm when the conference will take place.
This could be influenced by the availability of speakers or the venue, or it may be that the nature of the conference itself will determine the date.
Registration With the programme, venue and date agreed you are now almost ready to proceed with attracting attendees.
The final step to undertake before doing so is to decide on the price for attendance.
Typically this needs to be sufficient to cover the cost of the venue and extras such as presenter’s expenses and any administrative costs that are likely to be accrued.
This may be offset by income generated by sponsorship, or by charging commercial vendors extra to display their wares at the event.
When it comes to publicising the event you should start by using the same channel(s) as the call for speakers.
In addition to these you could consider advertising via blogs, journals and other sources of interest to your potential attendees.
You might to also want to encourage your presenters to announce their participation and if you have any vendors attending you might consider asking them to promote the conference to their customers.
Obviously you’ll need to get attendees to register for the event, this is to ensure that numbers don’t exceed your venue’s limit, catering is sufficient and that there are enough people interested in attending, to make the event worth holding.
Ideally your need to know the names of who wants to attend, what organisation they represent and if they have any special dietary or other requirements.
You could ask potential attendees to contact you with this information although, ideally, this is better handled by a simple web form or online ticketing service such as Eventbrite [3].
Such systems can typically handle payment of conference fees (for a cost) which can take a considerable burden off you.
[Figure 2.
Screenshot of eventbrite] At some point you may hit your limit for attendees, in which case you’ll need to put out a message stating that there are no places remaining and possibly stop the registration process.
However, it is worth considering having a waiting list of potential attendees, in case you get some cancellations.
Of course it may be that the venue you’ve chosen may be willing to handle the registration and charging for the event.
A month to go With a month to go before your conference, it’s a good idea to confirm with both speakers and attendees that they are still coming.
Hopefully this will give them sufficient time to organise travel and accommodation (if they haven’t already done so) and also for you to find replacements attendees or speakers if necessary.
Finding a replacement speaker may be difficult and attendees are usually happy to forego one presentation, if it means having longer breaks or leaving slightly earlier.
However, if you can it’s a good idea to have one presentation (usually from a colleague or even yourself) in reserve just in case the need arises.
You might also want to prompt your speakers to send through their presentations before the conference starts so you can get them uploaded beforehand.
Typically most presentations are still in PowerPoint although cloud-based presentation software such as Prezi [4] is not uncommon.
At this point you should be able to finalise the programme for the conference.
If there are any major changes from the draft programme, then the attendees should be alerted to this.
As you’re already contacting all the attendees it would also be a good idea to inform them of the hashtag for the event.
This will hopefully start to generate some enthusiasm and interest for the conference even before it starts.
A few days before Before the conference starts you’ll need to print off copies of the final version of the programme and an attendees list to hand out.
You might also want to produce badges for attendees to wear during the conference.
If you have group discussions on the programme, then you might want to consider pre-sorting people into groups to reduce administration on the day (the group could be indicated on the attendees list or perhaps even on their badge).
If you want to be able to evaluate the success of the conference then producing a simple feedback form is advisable.
Finally you’ll need to check you have sufficient stationery supplies (e.g.
pens, flip charts, blu-tack) for the event and it’s also useful if you can get hold of some power extensions and laptop/phone chargers.
Hosting the conference On the day of the conference there are two important tasks to complete before you can begin.
The first is to put out some signage to confirm to attendees that they are at the right venue.
The second is to set up a registration desk to welcome the attendees, record their arrival and give out any handouts (such as badges, programmes, attendees lists and perhaps even goodie bags if the event has been sponsored).
It’s not uncommon for people to arrive at the reception desk who haven’t registered for the event.
Sometime this is acceptable, for example if they are in place of a colleague who isn’t now able to attend, but other times it can be more problematic.
You will need to decide, usually on a case-by-case basis, what to do on these occasions.
It’s important to note that one person can’t do everything and you definitely need additional support.
At the very least you’ll need someone to staff the reception desk and another to run errands and chase up anything you are unable to deal with.
Having someone to take photographs or live tweet the event is also very useful.
You might also choose to outsource the hosting duties to another person rather than doing it yourself.
Being host for the conference means helping it run smoothly, which might mean adjusting the programme, for example swapping the order of speakers if the first one hasn’t arrived yet.
It also means opening the event by ushering the attendees to their seats and welcoming them.
It’s important to highlight any health and safety issues (e.g.
what to do if the fire alarm sounds) and indicate where facilities such as toilets, breakout rooms and drinks are located.
You might also want to point out the wifi password and remind attendees of the hashtag for the event, before outlining the programme for the day and introducing the speakers.
Throughout the conference you will need to keep an eye on the time and if necessary step in to keep it on track.
This might mean cutting a session short if it’s overrunning, or filling in time if it’s underrunning (on one occasion I gave a live demo of some new functionality we’d recently introduced not something I’d usually recommend doing).
However, it’s important to recognise that some things will simply be out of your control.
To help cover any minor emergencies it’s useful to have a laptop, tablet or phone handy to lookup the number of local taxi firm, locate the nearest pharmacy or find out departure times for the trains.
As the conference comes to a close it’s important to thank both the presenters and attendees for coming and deal with any remaining administrative tasks, such as getting people to complete feedback forms.
All over (until next time) With the conference over and the attendees all gone, it’s time to give yourself a huge pat on the back.
But before you can relax and take a well deserved drink, you might want to help tidy up the venue (especially if you want to use it again in the future).
You might also be tempted to review some of the feedback from attendees (although this can probably wait until later).
Hopefully the feedback will be positive, or least constructive.
It might also be useful to note down your own thoughts of the event, in particular what worked and what didn’t.
So if you do organise another conference you’ll know what to do differently.
If there is an event website then you should upload the presentations, and possibly any images from the event, so these are available to the attendees.
You might also be able to get one of the attendees to write an event report [5], for submission to an appropriate journal [6].
Final thoughts As you can hopefully see organising a conference is a lot of effort.
But it is also an incredibly valuable and rewarding experience and certainly something that everyone should have a go at once at least, and it does get easier the more you do it.
Acknowledgements I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the many people who have helped me organise the Meeting the Reading List Challenge [7] conference over the last six years.
Special thanks go to Ann, Sue, Jon, Jason, Mel, Linda, Karen, Dawn, Chris, Garry and Emma.
References KNIGHT, Jon, COOPER, Jason and BREWERTON, Gary (2012) Redeveloping the Loughborough Online Reading List System, Ariadne, 69, ISSN: 1361-3200.  http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue69/knight-et-al Twitter.
http://twitter.com Eventbrite.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk Prezi.
https://prezi.com WILLIAMS, Laura (2016) Meeting the Reading List Challenge Event Report, Ariadne, 76, ISSN: 1361-3200. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/76/williams Ariadne.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk Meeting the Reading List Challenge.
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Open Access and Research Conference 2013: Discovery, Impact and Innovation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Access and Research Conference 2013: Discovery, Impact and Innovation Buzz data software framework dissemination portfolio infrastructure archives metadata doi repositories eprints copyright video aggregation curation licence e-research rae research altmetrics Citation BibTex RIS Paula Callan, Stephanie Bradbury, Sarah Brown, Philippa Broadley, Emma Nelms and Christopher Hart report on Open Access and Research 2013 which focused on recent developments and the strategic advantages they bring to the research sector.
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia was the host location for the second Open Access and Research 2013 conference [1].
The conference was held at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Gardens Point campus over 31 October – 1 November 2013.
QUT has over 45,000 students and has a wide range of specialist research areas.
There are two research institutes: The Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI) which is a collaborative institute devoted to improving the health of individuals; and the Institute for Future Environments (IFE) which is a multidisciplinary institute focusing on our natural, built and virtual environments, and how to find ways to make them more sustainable, secure and resilient.
QUT’s Gardens Point Precinct includes the new Science and Engineering Centre, a hub for exploration in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
The Centre is home to The Cube [2], one of the world’s largest digital interactive learning and display spaces for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research.
In 2013, QUT celebrated 10 years of QUT ePrints [3].
Launched in 2003, QUT ePrints was backed by the world's first university-wide deposit policy.
It now contains over 24,000 open access documents.
The cumulative figure for total downloads now exceeds 12 million; 97% from external IP addresses.
75% of recently published works (2012-2013) have full-text versions available.
QUT ePrints continues to help researchers maximise their impact and engagement in the community.
The Open Access and Research Conference celebrated 10 years of QUT ePrints by bringing together experts to discuss a broad spectrum of research policy and practice issues, including advocacy, open innovation, open data and alternative metrics.
The conference featured many excellent speakers representing institutions and organisations from across the globe, to discuss open access issues specific to their region and internationally.
All presentations at the conference were filmed and the video recordings are available for Day One [4] and Day Two [5].
The Australian Open Access Support Group site provides a useful summary of the full conference [6].
This article presents selected presentations from the conference, focusing on the Australian developments.
Figure 1: Professor Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Technology, Information and Learning Support), Queensland University of Technology, OAR 2013 Welcome Reception Welcome and Opening Address Professor Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Technology, Information and Learning Support), Queensland University of Technology In his welcoming address, Professor Cochrane, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the host institution, QUT, said that the conference would be a round-up of progress, successes and challenges in relation to open access and research.
The rising cost of scholarly publishing plus a desire to ramp up its research intensity prompted QUT to innovate.
Professor Cochrane said that, after monitoring the debates in the 1990s about how scholarly communication might change, he fully expected great changes to emanate from the centres of scholarship and publishing in North America and Europe.
When this did not happen, he took an open access policy through the research committees at QUT until it was endorsed by the University Academic Board in 2003.
What resulted was the first university-wide open access mandate in the world.
Professor Cochrane said that clever implementation of the policy by the University Library, including providing detailed feedback to authors on who uses their open access works, has been instrumental in the institutional repository becoming embedded in the expectation of academic life at QUT.
QUT is a strong supporter of ‘green’ open access.
Researchers are encouraged to publish in quality journals and use the institution’s repository, QUT ePrints.
In addition, the University has made provision to support researchers, particularly in the biomedical sciences, publishing in gold open access journals of repute.
Professor Cochrane commented that the term ‘publishing’ covers a range of activities and that, while there is some tension between institutions and some of the larger journal publishers in relation to ‘green’ open access, there is a lot more that academia could be doing in terms of working collaboratively with the long tail of small publishers.
QUT has also become involved in other open access initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched (KU), Creative Commons (CC), Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) and the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG).
Professor Aidan Byrne, CEO, Australian Research Council Opening Remarks Professor Byrne of the Australian Research Council (ARC) [4], said that the guiding principles as to why the Higher Education sector should pursue open access were the benefits that would accrue for society, research and individual researchers from an open access regime which disseminates results earlier and in a more effective manner.
Professor Byrne suggested that the ‘closed’ subscription-based scholarly publishing system, where research outputs go from institutions to publishers and then back to institutions, was no longer stable or sustainable due to the vast increase in the volume of publications and costs which were going up beyond what institutions could bear.
Furthermore, it does not offer the benefits of an open access system.
In the new publishing model that will evolve, the outputs will go out beyond the institutions, in a range of media.
One of the biggest challenges, according to Professor Byrne, will be finding a sustainable business model to do all the things that need to be done, and to achieve what is needed from a system that can be controlled.
The ARC is being careful not to endorse any particular publishing model.
The new scholarly publishing ecosystem is likely to involve a mixture of different publishing models, including a ‘gold’ dimension which will probably be dominated by high profile publishers which can justify charging article-processing fees because of the value they add.
However, Professor Byrne said that he was of the opinion that the dominant structure would be ‘green’ and that there will be an added dimension of a model which involves researchers putting their work online for others to look at and comment on.
While acknowledging that there are indictors that can highlight material of value, he added that there is also a lot of rubbish online which adds ‘noise’ to the system.
It also poses a challenge to agencies which are interested in maintaining quality in the scholarly communication system.
The ARC’s objective with its open access policy [7], which was introduced at the beginning of 2013, was to get the whole research sector in Australia into an open access regime.
There is now an expectation that any publications arising from ARC funding grants are available via open access within 12 months.
The lesson the ARC learned from the UK (eg "Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings – the Finch Group")was to specify the outcome required and avoid being prescriptive on how it should be achieved.
He made no apologies for not having all the details worked out in advance, as the landscape is still changing and it is not possible to pick what will be the ‘winning’ solution at this stage.
Open Access Developments in Australia Dr Danny Kingsley, Executive Officer, Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) Dr Danny Kingsley is the Executive Officer of the AOASG [8], an advocacy group for open access.
Dr Kingsley gave an overview of open access developments in Australia.
Australia currently has over 200,000 records in institutional repositories; 30,000 are for digital theses.
The Australian and UK scenes map quite closely.
In Australia, one quarter of all Higher Education institutions have implemented an open access mandate and many of the other institutions are considering implementing at least a policy on open access.
Open access to government data is a new focus.
The Australian Government Open Access Licensing (AusGOAL) [9] Framework provides government workers with the range of options for licensing government information.
Research Data Australia [10], a metadata repository that facilitates access to research datasets, now has over 88,000 records.
However, the volume of government data in the open space in Australia is only 10% that of UK and only 1% that of USA.
Open access journal publishing in Australia has also increased significantly in recent years, with many journals now running on Open Journal Systems software (OJS).
The Open Journal Project [11], which is based in Melbourne, is an initiative of ‘Engineers without Borders’ (EWB).
This project is providing open access copies of plain-language and translated versions of journal articles (on engineering topics) so that non-English speakers and readers without scientific backgrounds will be able to understand the information.
Another interesting recent development is the news that, from 2014, Elsevier will be publishing the Journal of Physiotherapy [12], on behalf of the Australian Physiotherapy Association, as an open access journal which will be free to readers and authors.
The Association has found a business model that enables it to fund the publishing costs.
All research articles will be open access via ScienceDirect (Elsevier) but additional (professional) content and print copies will only be available to subscribers.
A number of university presses in Australia have moved into publishing open access monographs and have found that the usage statistics for these open access books are higher than the sales figures for comparable print monographs.
In Australia, the academic reward system includes block funding based on productivity (number of publications) plus additional funding based on metrics gathered as part of the periodic research assessment exercise, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).
In the first round of ERA 2010, the metrics included the distribution of articles published in journals ranked from A* to C in an ERA Journal List.
Unfortunately, although the journal ranking list was dropped from subsequent rounds of ERA, it is still driving the publishing behaviour of many Australian academics, often with perverse results.
However, there are still some unknowns.
It is not known how much open access content is available from many repositories (as many repositories do not allow search results to be limited to just those with open access full text).
It is not known how much grant money is spent on gold open access article processing charges.
What is known is that recent policy decisions in the UK have affected Australia, with many publishers introducing embargoes on ‘green’ open access and others lengthening existing embargo periods.
Advocacy and Advantage: Academic Panel Session Associate Professor Marcus Foth, QUT; Associate Professor Alex Holcombe, University of Sydney; Dr Matthew Todd, University of Sydney; Professor Barry Watson, QUT A panel of four academics from various institutions in Australia provided insight into the researchers’ view of open access and how it has affected their disciplines and the wider context of research.
Figure 2: (Left to right): Associate Professor Marcus Foth, QUT; Associate Professor Alex Holcombe, University of Sydney; Dr Matthew Todd, University of Sydney; Professor Barry Watson, QUT Associate Professor Marcus Foth, of QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty, highlighted the positive impact that QUT ePrints has had on the visibility of his publications and academic profile, and argued that institutional support for depositing scholarly publications in open access repositories is beneficial to all researchers in the long run.
Associate Professor Alex Holcombe, of University of Sydney, outlined an innovative new journal article format, the Registered Replication Report [13].
It will take existing published psychological studies, and replicate the research by applying an open science and open data approach which involves the original authors and new researchers.
This new format promises to uncover new insights.
Dr Matthew Todd, University of Sydney, demonstrated open source science at work in the Web site The Synaptic Leap [14], which provides a network of online research communities that connect and support open source biomedical research.
Currently engaged in an open source project focused on drug discovery for malaria, Open Source Malaria [15], he predicted that, ‘in ten years, everyone will be doing this’.
All data and ideas relating to Open Source Malaria are provided online.
Anyone around the world can take part and all discussion regarding the project is highly valued and made publicly available online.
Using a public electronic lab book, all data and processes are revealed every day.
Professor Barry Watson, Director, Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety (CARRS-Q) at QUT, affirmed the importance of open access repositories in providing access to research to developing countries.
QUT ePrints has enabled CARRS-Q research to reach a much wider range of stakeholders than would have been possible through traditional publishing dissemination.
Barry asserted that QUT ePrints balances the need to be publishing in the scholarly literature with the ability to reach the practitioners and policy makers.
Developing nations which have a high road crash rates have benefitted greatly by being able to access all of CARRS-Q research papers.
To date, Prof Watson has approximately 230 papers with 90,000 downloads in QUT ePrints.
Altmetrics as Indicators of Public Impact Pat Loria, Manager Information & Liaison Services, Charles Sturt University Pat Loria gave an excellent talk on altmetrics.
There is criticism, he said, that altmetrics are not real citations and are not really part of the scientific ecosystem.
But with over 3 billion members of the public now using social media, no one denies its potential for impact.
A social media campaign contributed to the re-election of President Obama.
Altmetrics aggregate the online activity generated by Web native scholarship.
Most altmetrics aggregators have adopted an open source business model.
They can be embedded into profiles, repositories and other systems.
They accrue much sooner than traditional metrics.
They can include non-traditional outputs and can facilitate the qualitative exploration of sources of impact and research evaluation.
Altmetrics provide evidence of public engagement with scholarly outputs.
Push factors for using altmetrics include the quantification of public impact for grant applications and funding agency reports.
Pull factors include researchers and research managers who are interested in monitoring public interest for individual and programme evaluation.
The future of altmetrics is one of growth.
National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is developing standards [16]; however a systems approach is required.
For example, governments may be able to generate capacity, instead of competition, by including altmetrics and other impact indicators in open national profiling systems.
This would increase the visibility of the nation’s research strengths better than is currently being achieved by research evaluation exercises.
Researchers should develop a research impact strategy.
Altmetricians might like to develop an indicator for measuring the openness of a researcher.
University marketing departments need to pick up on altmetrics too [*].
Open Data Professor John Houghton, Professorial Fellow, Victoria University Measuring the Value and Impact of Research Data Curation and Sharing Professor Houghton spoke of recent studies exploring the impact and value of three UK research data centres – the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) – now part of the UK Data Service [17], the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) [18], and the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) [19].
The aim of the studies was to assess the costs, benefits, value and impacts of the data centres, and to test a range of economic methods in order to ascertain which methods might work across three very different fields.
The studies reveal that data sharing through these centres shows a positive return on investment, with the main dimensions of benefit being the additional use facilitated by data sharing (reuse), and the impact of the data centres on the work efficiency of their user communities.
John suggested that a study is needed on what factors encourage reuse.
Dr Ross Wilkinson, Executive Director, Australian National Data Service (ANDS) Better Value from Institutional Datasets Dr Wilkinson reported that the research cycle is changing; increasingly, people are starting research by collecting data and then applying for grants, rather than applying for grants and then collecting data.
Per annum, Australia spends A$30 billion on research and development and A$8 billion on Higher Education [20].
If we say that 15% of this amount is spent on data collection, then it is imperative that Australia gets maximum value from this expenditure by investing in open data infrastructure.
It should be noted that some disciplines may require more funding, for example, Marine Science may spend up to 40% while others spend far less (eg Mathematics, which rarely spends money on data collection).
Comparatively, A$1.5 billion is spent on the Hubble Telescope each year and A$1 million per annum on the archive that stores all the data collected from the telescope.
An open access policy mandates what can be stored in this archive, and that the data are shared.
The A$1 million per annum spent on data with the addition of an open access mandate has resulted in double the research publications produced by Hubble discoveries.
Dr Wilkinson posed the question: “If an institution spent A$10 million on data, what would be the return?
The answer is: more publications; an increased citation count; more grants; greater profile; and more collaboration.
There are benefits of increased spending on data to both individuals and institutions."
Access policies and infrastructure are crucial to increasing benefits.
Institutional benefits include better reputation and better partnerships.
Two Australian research institutions that have developed policy and infrastructure to support large datasets were provided as exemplars: James Cook University (JCU) and the Australian Antarctic Division.
Both have achieved research excellence in their fields and have highly cited datasets.
To establish an internationally significant open data collection, institutions need: an institutional strategy; senior endorsement; established custodianship (library/librarians most suitable); data services – local, regional, national and international; and tracked and supported data citation procedures.
The characteristics of an internationally significant collection include: richly described metadata; connected, open, data, published with a DOI; visible and usable rich metadata; and rich data services.
Australia is well positioned in terms of infrastructure to support data collection and storage: High-end computation of data, eg NCI, Australia’s national research computing service.
Storage services for data, eg Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RSDI) Data tools and services, eg National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) Project Improved data management and sharing, eg Australian National Data Services (ANDS) The overall messages were that isolated data are of no value; and that valuable data are managed, collected, findable and reusable.
Australia has 50% of the top 10 positions in the world in research data infrastructure.
But, more can be done in terms of taking advantage of international partnerships.
Dr Wilkinson encouraged institutions to invest in the infrastructure, set the right policy and exploit the current large data investment with an international data collection.
Marco Fahmi, Project Manager of the Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory, Griffith University Just the Facts Ma'am Making data massively reusable is difficult; it requires a social and attitudinal shift of how data are used and data should not be treated the same as publications, in terms of open access.
Currently, there are many questions that need answers: If data are open will they come?
Can anyone do it when open is the only option?
What qualifications do we need?
Can use be anonymous?
When do data graduate into being research findings?
How do you make your data reusable?
Researchers seem to accept inconsistent attitudes between data and articles.
Data owners may be ‘free traders’ on weekends and protectionists on weekdays.
There is a big informational gap between data publishing and article publishing; can we peerreview data?
Overall, the expense and resources needed for data curation activities are undervalued.
Although, researchers may deposit data because a journal requires it, PLoS suggests that, on the whole, journal publishers do not want the data.
However, Fahmi argued that the distinction between publications and data needs to go away.
He concluded by adding that, where data are not sharable, researchers should always make their existence known.
Open Innovation Professor Adam Jaffe, Director and Senior Fellow, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, New Zealand The Economics of Open Innovation The Open Innovation session focused on the complex issues surrounding patents.
Professor Jaffe explained that while copyright protects expression, patents protect actual functionality.
Increasingly, innovations are based on complex systems of granular discoveries and creativity, and this is one reason why patent systems seem to be failing innovation.
Furthermore, for innovation to occur within complex systems, the need for transparency increases.
Innovative products often depend on multiple complementary inventions — a whole portfolio of patent rights.
A timely example is the recent legal feuds between Apple and Samsung [21].
The difficulty of assembling patent rights could actually inhibit innovation, even if all the components of the final products are functional.
Professor Jaffe noted that this has been described as the ‘tragedy of anti-commons’.
The transaction costs of assembling patents are real.
If the identity of patent owners and boundaries are unknown, there is opaqueness and there is an increase in transaction costs.
There is little benefit in opaqueness around patent ownership and scope.
It is currently possible for individual patent holders to retain some degree of anonymity and distance in order to cause disruption and wait until the later stages of a product innovation, when money has been invested, to demand their share of the royalties.
In Professor Jaffe’s view, this increases the level of risk within product innovation and risk is the enemy of investment and innovation.
Actual and potential litigation are inhibiting investment.
Maximising transparency would be a good place to start to ensure that the patent system works to foster innovation.
If companies and individuals seek the government protection of a patent, Professor Jaffe suggested that the price is transparency.
Professor Richard Jefferson, CEO, Cambia Solving the Problem of Problem Solving Professor Richard Jefferson, Chief Executive Officer of Cambia, used the metaphor of cartography to introduce Cambia’s new Lens service [22], identifying the early modern Portuguese empire as successful and powerful because they had the best cartographers.
Trade and commerce drove the development of civilisations by building economies.
Richard touted the map as the best tool invented.
It continues to limit risk and present many choices.
The sharing of Dutch maps led to the opening-up of trade monopolies.
In turn ‘innovation cartography’, using the demographics of open access, will provide contextual decision support for people who want to make things.
Continuing the maps metaphor, an area of innovation is essentially a point of call and Richard urged us to learn globally and act locally.
Cambia’s Lens provides a patent citation index to track citations of patents.
Richard gave a demonstration of The Lens which provides access to almost 90 million patent documents as open, annotatable digital public goods from all regions of the world.
Records are integrated with scholarly and technical literature along with regulatory and business data.
Knowledge Unlatched Dr Lucy Montgomery, Deputy Director, Knowledge Unlatched Dr Lucy Montgomery introduced the Knowledge Unlatched model for open access scholarly book publishing [23].
Dr Montgomery addressed the failing health of the scholarly monograph market, noting that prices have increased beyond inflation and authors are having difficulty in getting scholarly monographs published.
Presenting a practical solution to the scholarly monograph ‘problem’, Knowledge Unlatched provides libraries with an opportunity to share the cost of producing a scholarly monograph and making that publication available under a Creative Commons licence.
Each potential publication has a set title fee and libraries pledge to support a particular monograph and share in paying the set title fee; the greater the number of libraries that support the work, the less each library is required to contribute to that title fee.
The benefit of this model for libraries is apparent in the potential collection development savings.
Authors and publishers will also greatly benefit from this system.
When libraries pledge towards a title fee, publishers can be assured in recouping production costs for those works, eliminating the risk characteristic in traditional scholarly monograph publishing.
A confident publisher will be more open to solicitations for new works, thereby creating opportunities for humanities and social science academics to communicate their research via the traditional scholarly monograph.
Knowledge Unlatched provides a ‘next step’ in open access, providing support for production and access of high-quality open scholarly monographs.
Over 2013-2014 it is piloting its first collection which includes 28 new open access books from 13 different publishers.
* Editor’s note: Readers interested in altmetrics may wish to read an article in this issue from contributors at Altmetric.
References Open Access and Research Conference http://www.oar2013.qut.edu.au/ The Cube http://www.thecube.qut.edu.au/ QUT ePrints http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Reflections on the Open Access and Research Conference 2013 Day One Videos http://aoasg.org.au/2013/12/09/reflections-on-the-open-access-and-research-conference-2013/#One Reflections on the Open Access and Research Conference 2013 Day Two Videos http://aoasg.org.au/2013/12/09/reflections-on-the-open-access-and-research-conference-2013/#Two Reflections on the Open Access and Research Conference http://aoasg.org.au/2013/12/09/reflections-on-the-open-access-and-research-conference-2013/ ARC Open Access Policy Australian Research Council (ARC) http://www.arc.gov.au/applicants/open_access.htm Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) http://aoasg.org.au/ AusGOAL http://www.ausgoal.gov.au/ Research Data Australia http://researchdata.ands.org.au/ Open Journal Project http://www.openjournalproject.org/ Journal of Physiotherapy http://www.physiotherapy.asn.au/JOP/Home/Open_Access.aspx Registered Replication Report http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/replication The Synaptic Leap http://www.thesynapticleap.org/ Open Source Malaria http://opensourcemalaria.org/ NISO to Develop Standards and Recommended Practices for Altmetrics http://www.niso.org/news/pr/view?item_key=72efc1097d4caf7b7b5bdf9c54a165818399ec86 UK Data Service http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/ The Archaeology Data service http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/ The British Atmospheric Data Centre http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/home/index.html ABS 8104.0 Research and Experimental Development , Businesses, Australia, 2010-11 http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/8104.0Appendix12010-11 Apple and Samsung back in court over patent damages, BBC Technology News, 12 November 2013 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24855829 The Lens http://www.lens.org/lens/ Knowledge Unlatched http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/ Author Details All authors work in Queensland University of Technology Library.
Web site: http://www.library.qut.edu.au/ Paula Callan Scholarly Communications Librarian Queensland University of Technology Email: p.callan@qut.edu.au Web site: https://www.library.qut.edu.au/about/contact/p_callan.jsp Paula Callan is the Scholarly Communications Librarian at Queensland University of Technology.
She has been involved in open access advocacy locally and internationally for over ten years, and established QUT ePrints, QUT's very successful open access publications repository in 2003.
She is a member of the Australian Open Access Support Group which was established in 2012.
Stephanie Bradbury Research Support Coordinator Queensland University of Technology Email: s.bradbury@qut.edu.au Web site: http://www.library.qut.edu.au/about/contact/s_bradbury.jsp Stephanie Bradbury is the Research Support Coordinator at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library where she coordinates the Research Support Seminar Series and a range of services and activities to support the university’s research community.
Sarah Brown University Copyright and Repositories Officer Queensland University of Technology Email: qut.copyright@qut.edu.au Web site: http://www.library.qut.edu.au/about/contact/s_brown.jsp Sarah Brown is Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) University Copyright and Repositories Officer where she provides copyright advice to researchers and teaching staff and coordinates the development of new open access digital collections for the library.
She has previously worked as QUT’s Repository Resource Librarian, managing operational workflows for the institutional repository and promoting open access to QUT research.
Philippa Broadley Research Data Librarian Queensland University of Technology Email: p.broadley@qut.edu.au Web site: http://www.library.qut.edu.au/about/contact/p_broadley.jsp Philippa Broadley is a Research Data Librarian at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library where she is responsible for the provision of the research data management service, as well as providing researchers with access to purchased and external research data sets.
Philippa is also service manager for QUT’s research data registry, Research Data Finder.
Emma Nelms Liaison Librarian (QUT Business School) Queensland University of Technology Email: e.nelms@qut.edu.au Web site: http://www.library.qut.edu.au/about/contact/e_nelms.jsp Emma Nelms, MPhil MInfMgt is the Liaison Librarian to the QUT Business School.
She works with the School of Economics and Finance to select and maintain an extensive collection of financial datasets as well as providing research support and information literacy services.
Christopher Hart Liaison Librarian (Science and Engineering Faculty) Queensland University of Technology Email: c4.hart@qut.edu.au Web site: http://www.library.qut.edu.au/about/contact/c_hart.jsp Christopher Hart, MIT (LibInfSc) is the Library Adviser to the QUT Business School and works closely with students and staff to provide learning and research support.
He has previously worked as Liaison Librarian to the Science and Engineering Faculty.
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Open Repositories 2010 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Repositories 2010 Buzz data software framework database metadata tagging identifier blog repositories eprints curation dspace facebook solr equella research standards Citation BibTex RIS Philip Hunter and Robin Taylor report on the Open Repositories Conference held in Madrid between 6 -9 July 2010 at the Palacio de Congresos.
The air temperature in Madrid was around 37ºC when the Edinburgh contingent arrived in mid-afternoon on 5 July.
The excellent air-conditioned Metro took us all the way into town about 14km for only 2 Euros.
We were told later that the temperature during the preceding week had been about 21ºC, but by the end of the conference week we were enjoying 39ºC.
The conference venue turned out to be opposite the Santiago Bernabeu stadium (home of Real Madrid), in Paseo de la Castellana.
Because of the World Cup and Spain's steady progress through the upper reaches of the tournament, football was never far away.
This event report looks briefly at a small cross-section of presentations which gave clues about likely future repository development.
Because there were two main streams in the conference it was not possible to attend all sessions.
This is a selective review with apologies for omissions.
Overall there was a change in emphasis this year, with a focus on research management rather than open access.
Indeed there were numerous presentations dealing with research management solutions.
Organisations have not given up on open access, but considering the populating of repositories as a spin-off from a more complete research management solution is seen as a more fruitful approach.
One of the principal sponsors of the event was Microsoft Research.
Three years ago at the Open Repositories 2007 conference in San Antonio, Texas, Tony Hey talked about the potential for a contribution to the repository world from Microsoft.
It has taken a little time, but now things are starting to move, and it seems likely that Microsoft will be a significant player in providing technical solutions where they are possible.
As well as the three stalwarts of Dspace, ePrints and Fedora, there were several newish players represented, e.g., Equella, and Pubman.
The conference programme was as follows: 6-7 July 2010: The general sessions.
8-9 July 2010: Specfific user group sessions for Dspace, ePrints, and Fedora.
Spanish weather forecasting: A tough job, but someone has to do it.
Pre-prints and the Origin of the Web One of the most interesting of the presentations at the event was given on Tuesday 6 July by Salvatore Mele of CERN: 'INSPIRE: A new information system for High-Energy Physics'.
He told us that analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP (High-Energy Physics) scientists seldom read journals, instead preferring pre-prints.
He pointed out that HEP has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.
He used an intriguing photograph of the CERN library taken shortly before the inception of the Web, which showed shelves full of pre-print papers.
One of the original motivations for creating the Web was to support the circulation of information about these papers, and eventually to make the papers themselves available.
HEP is therefore uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: The present services offered by INSPIRE, include: citation analysis, author disambiguation, harvesting of Open Access content, strategic partnerships with other information providers and leading publishers in the field.
INSPIRE is now designing and implementing new services, including tagging, automatic key-wording, crowd-sourcing of curation, automatic author disambiguation, widening of the scope of the collections, semantic analysis of the content, etc.
IRs and Research Information Registries Sally Rumsey, University of Oxford, in her paper 'Blurring the boundaries between an institutional repository and a research information registry: where's the join?'
articulated the view that increasingly institutional repositories (IRs) are being considered as tools for research management as part of pan-institutional systems.
This might be driven by the need for statutory reporting such as that required for the forthcoming UK REF (Research Excellence Framework).
Such functionality generally requires integration with other management systems within Higher Education institutions.
It is common to find that each research management system has been selected to serve a specific need within an organisational department.
As a result, data are held in silos, are duplicated and can even be 'locked in' to those systems.
Some institutions are addressing this problem by considering CRISs (Current Research Information Systems) or business intelligence systems.
The solution at Oxford is the development of a registry and tools to support research information management.
Many of the motivations behind the repository are common with those for research information management.
There is considerable overlap of design, data, services, and stakeholder requirements.
By considering these two areas together with other related digital repository services, new opportunities and efficiencies can be revealed to the benefit of all stakeholders.
Open Repositories Conference 2010, Palacio de Congresos, Madrid Deposit (Modus Operandi) David Tarrant, University of Southampton, outlined the new DepositMO Project, which aims to develop an effective culture change mechanism that will embed a deposit culture into the everyday work of researchers and lecturers.
The project intends to extend the capabilities of repositories to exploit the familiar desktop and authoring environments of its users.
The objective is to turn the repository into an invaluable extension to the researcher's desktop in which the deposit of research outputs becomes an everyday activity.
The target desktop software suite is Microsoft Office, which is widely used across many disciplines, to maximise impact and benefit.
Targeting both EPrints and DSpace, leveraging SWORD (Simple Web Oriented Repository Deposit) and ORE protocols, DepositMO outputs will support a large number of organisations.> The ultimate goal is to change the Modus Operandi of researchers so that repository deposit becomes standard practice across a large number of disciplines using familiar desktop tools.
Partners for this project include the University of Southampton, Microsoft Corporation, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, the Higher Education Academy, LLAS (the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies at Southampton), and the University of Edinburgh.
Author Disambiguation: Open Researcher and Contributor ID Author disambiguation was a significant issue for this conference, and was discussed in several presentations, but there was nothing really new.
It is likely that it will be some time before a good solution is found to this problem.
Simeon Warner, Cornell University, gave an interesting presentation on the ORCID Project, which represents a collaborative effort of institutions and publishers to achieve a solution.to the names question.
The Open Researcher and Contributor ID Project [1] is an effort to create an open, independent registry of researcher and contributor identifiers.
The mission is to resolve systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and with the additional goal of improving the efficiency of funding and collaboration.
Importantly the founding parties include not only the leading commercial players (Thomson Reuters, Elsevier, Nature, etc.)
but also open repository projects such as INSPIRE, SSRN (The Social Science Research Network), arXiv, etc.
This is an unprecedented opportunity to address the name disambiguation problem in scholarly communication and to provide an effective substitute for many author identity-based services.
The effort can only achieve its full potential if the academic community, primarily disciplinary and institutional repositories, is an active partner.
Search Solutions There were several presentations for different repository software all demonstrating search solutions using Solr [2] as a separate indexing and search solution.
For Dspace this is being developed by @Mire and will be implemented in Dspace 1.7.
While in part this is a behind-the-scenes improvement, it will provide faceted searching for the first time.
Repository Statistics There were two presentations for Dspace, one on using Google Analytics (by Graham Triggs of OpenRepository) and one on the @Mire statistics modules.
There may have been a bit of behind-the-scenes competition going on here.
Graham was able to demonstrate that the same stats could be produced using the free Google Analytics data.
It might however be unwise to rush to judgement without further investigation.
Poster Sessions Pecha Kucha This was pretty well organised this year with a full screen countdown.
People have got the hang of this now, and hardly anybody ran over the statutory minute.
Some people in the community can turn in an excellent summary in the time available, so the need for drama might be answered in future by a shorter slot.
Conference Dinner at La Casa de Mónico Conference Dinner, La Casa de Mónico This location is a favourite for weddings and other functions, located just a few kilometres outside Madrid.
The evening of 7 July was the same evening as the World Cup semi-final between Spain and Germany the organisers of the event caved in to the inevitable, and provided two large plasma screens on the presentation stage, which showed the match during the early part of the meal.
We found ourselves at a table which was not at all interested in football, and we discussed other things.
Future Development of DSpace DSpace and Fedora UG sessions were packaged together as a Duraspace stream with some shared sessions.
It seemed as though most of the Duraspace organisation (the result of the DSpace/Fedora organisational merger) was present at OR 2010.
There was a special presentation where the future development of DSpace was outlined in some detail.
Essentially future development of the DSpace platform will be focussed on including Fedora 'inside'.
Meaning that the current storage-related code in Dspace will be replaced with Fedora.
In this way, the perceived advantages of Fedora – a simple flexible database for which easily customisable interfaces can be developed – will be available to DSpace developers.
DSpace 1.7 is scheduled for release in December 2010.
Developer Challenge This ran in the 'Developer Lounge' (and an attached bar terrace) throughout the event.
The task was to create a functioning repository user interface, presenting a single metadata record which includes as many automatically created, useful links to related external content as possible (the task resembles an earlier Repository Fringe challenge).
For the purpose of the challenge, the definitions of the highlighted terms above were defined as follows: "functioning" in this sense means that mockups/screenshots are not sufficient – however a working prototype is OK "related" in this sense means that the external content is related to this particular metadata record in some way.
"as many useful links" means that marks will be awarded for useful links, so an interface with fifty meaningless links does not beat one with three genuinely useful links!
*links must be related to content, not just a system.
So, for example, a link to the page at http://www.wikipedia.org is not legitimate, but a link to a specific page in Wikipedia could be.
Only one link of each 'type' counts: i.e.
having four links to URLs which reference 'topics' in a given system is fine but will count as one link for the challenge.
Richard Davis and Rory McNicholl from the University of London Computer Centre won the Challenge [3].
Sword Workshop This was held on the final afternoon of the event.
It was well attended, not just by developers, but by a significant number of managers.
In our case, we already understood what it did, but not much about how it did it.
So it was interesting to get detail of the history of SWORD development, and the underlying Atompub protocol.
The uses of SWORD were demonstrated in a number of ways, including repository submission by email, and via Facebook.
The SWORD tool is amazingly versatile, and the workshop was one of the highlights of the conference.
Microsoft Research Lee Dirks, Alex Wade and Oscar Naim of Microsoft Research also held a workshop on Friday 9 July – 'Tools for Repositories: Microsoft Research & the Scholarly Information Ecosystem' which was designed to ' provide a deep dive into several freely available tools from Microsoft External Research', and to demonstrate 'how these can help supplement and enhance current repository offerings.'
El Prado Museum, Madrid Summary Some among us might have been expecting OR conferences to run out of steam after a few years but instead they are developing.
Where in previous years the presentations were often "this is our repository with our user interface customisations", this year they were more focussed on how to add value to the repository and how to integrate it with other software.
All presentations will be available from the Open Repositories web site in due course [4].
References ORCID http://orcid.securesites.net/ Solr http://wiki.apache.org/solr/FAQ Details of the Developer Challenge can be found on the DevCSI blog http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2010/07/13/we-have-a-winner-developer-challenge-at-open-repositories-2010-madrid/ Open Repositories 2010 http://or2010.fecyt.es/publico/Home/index.aspx Author Details Philip Hunter Research Publications Service Manager Digital Library Section Edinburgh University Library Email: philip.hunter@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.is.ed.ac.uk Robin Taylor Systems Developer Digital Library Section Edinburgh University Library Email: robin.taylor@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.is.ed.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Open Repositories 2010" Author: Philip Hunter and Robin Taylor Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/or-10-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: M-Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: M-Libraries Buzz mobile framework ebook mp3 iphone Citation BibTex RIS Simon Speight reviews a collection of papers from the First International M-Libraries Conference, which examined potential library uses of mobile phones and other portable technology.
It may not yet be a truth universally accepted, but the battle against the mobile phone, the MP3 player and other portable devices has been lost.
Their ubiquitous presence in society makes it virtually impossible to continue ignoring or banning them from libraries.
Indeed, would this be desirable?
Library customers want the freedom to choose how, when and where they access their information, and whilst mobile technology may pose a threat to traditional library activities, it also offers an opportunity.
Rather than seeing mobile devices as 'the enemy', libraries should embrace this increasingly powerful technology.
It offers an opportunity to push information and library services to an increasingly diverse customer base, demonstrating the continued relevance of libraries.
This is where this timely collection of papers from the 2007 First International M-Libraries Conference [1] comes in.
It surveys the key concepts behind mobile learning and libraries (m-libraries) and provides practical examples of how they have been implemented.
This broad focus means it can act as a valuable guide for newcomers, yet contain enough of interest for anyone already involved in m-library projects.
Content The book comprises 24 chapters, divided into four parts [2].
Part one looks at the social context of mobile technology and the changing attitudes to information and learning, and provides contextual background information which establishes a framework for the remaining chapters.
Part two considers the use of mobile technology to reach remote users in very large or developing countries, particularly focusing on developments on the African continent (a useful reminder that we should not purely focus our attention on European or North American libraries).
Finally, parts three and four outline specific m-library projects and initiatives.
This highly structured format gives the reader great flexibility when deciding how to read the book.
Readers new to this area and wanting to find out more can work through it in its entirety.
I certainly found it a highly useful overview of some of the opportunities, challenges and limitations of m-learning.
Alternatively, it is equally informative for readers who just wish to refer to specific chapters or investigate particular ideas.
Whilst all the chapters are of interest, it is parts three and four which are likely to be of most immediate relevance to many Ariadne readers.
It is here that the practical issues behind developing and supporting m-library services are considered.
The wide range of projects featured shows just how much m-learning can offer libraries and their customers, when properly implemented.
It is also pleasing to note the willingness of contributors to highlight things which did not go quite so well or which would, with hindsight, have been done differently.
It is always helpful to be aware of potential pitfalls before undertaking your own projects, and the authors should be applauded for their willingness to share both their positive and negative experiences.
The book is helpfully laid out, with liberal use of sub-headings within chapters.
This makes it easy to read in small chunks, giving plenty of places to break off when you are interrupted – almost a certainty in today's busy libraries!
It does not assume a high level of technical knowledge or rely heavily on IT jargon.
Whilst some understanding of general IT issues is required, the reader does not need to be an expert.
There are highly useful chapters, for example, on the technological capabilities of individual mobile devices (chapters 10 and 15) or the architecture needed to support m-library services (chapter 14) which are accessible to any reasonably IT literate lay-person [3].
This is a book for those interested in service delivery, not technology.
All of the contributions prove highly informative and, whilst there is a common theme running through them, m-libraries are considered in their widest possible context.
One of my fears was that the focus would be primarily on academic libraries.
In fact, considerable attention is given to other sectors, with chapters on the use of mobile technology in public, health and other specialist libraries.
(chapters 11, 12 and 18, inter alia).
More importantly, whichever sector is under consideration, the authors are careful to place these developments in the wider social context, which means that the lessons learned can readily be adapted for another sector.
Some of the contributions do betray their origins as conference papers, sounding as though they were designed for verbal, rather than written communication.
This is not a criticism, but rather a strength.
This slightly more informal style is to be welcomed, making the book accessible to a wider audience than might otherwise have been the case.
Just occasionally chapters felt a little superficial – perfect for a 45-minute conference slot – lacking the level of detail appropriate to a written paper.
There were times when I wanted to probe a little deeper into some of the findings or question the author on some of the points.
This, of course, is an opportunity which delegates at the original conference would presumably have had but is not available to the reader, and may be a source of mild frustration.
The one significant omission relates to resourcing issues.
To some extent, this is understandable: the cost of technology is rarely stable; new and better equipment is coming out all the time and prices would be out of date before publication.
However, a key concern for many libraries is how staff-intensive such activities are.
Given the otherwise thorough treatment, it would have been helpful to have some idea of how long these projects took from planning to implementation; how many staff were assigned to them; whether there were dedicated project teams or whether existing library staff took on additional duties.
Whilst a couple of the chapters touch on this aspect, it is not given any systematic consideration.
In a period where library budgets are coming under increasing pressure, this would have been highly useful for planners and decision-makers.
Conclusion The explosion of interest in 'Web 2.0' technologies and this work's wide-ranging coverage means that it should find an equally wide-ranging audience.
Although most obviously designed for librarians, it will also be of interest to academics or anyone researching the shifting context of service delivery.
Whilst it might be of greatest use to people at the start of the m-library journey, anyone with an interest in this rapidly developing area will find food for thought.
Most libraries are starting to consider the challenges which new mobile devices pose to traditional models of service delivery and how to respond and adapt.
M-Libraries provides timely and helpful advice on some of the key issues.
The excellent blend of contextual background information together with practical examples and advice makes it a useful addition to any collection.
Having recommended this book, I shall end with a slightly tongue-in-cheek observation.
In the age of the iPhone, the Sony E-book reader and Amazon Kindle, it is somewhat ironic that a book concerned with mobile learning remains stubbornly welded to a traditional print format and as far as I can tell is not available in electronic format.
Whilst the book highlights the many, exciting advances in the field of mobile learning, it also, perhaps, demonstrates just how much further we still have to go.
References The First International m-libraries Conference http://library.open.ac.uk/mLibraries/2007/ Gill Needham and Mohamed Ally (Eds.).
(2008).
M-Libraries: Libraries on the move to provide virtual access.
September 2008; 352pp; hardback; 978-1-85604-648-0.
Facet Publishing.
Gill Needham and Mohamed Ally (Eds.).
(2008).
M-Libraries: Libraries on the move to provide virtual access.
Table of contents http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/downloads/file/sample_chapters/Needham&Ally-M-libs-00.pdf Author Details Simon Speight Head of Academic Support Durham University Library Email: s.g.speight@durham.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dur.ac.uk/library/ Return to top Article Title: "M-Libraries: Libraries on the move to provide virtual access" Author: Simon Speight Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/speight-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Informatics Transform: Re-engineering Libraries for the Data Decade Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Informatics Transform: Re-engineering Libraries for the Data Decade Buzz data software framework dissemination portfolio infrastructure archives metadata identifier vocabularies schema blog repositories video preservation ontologies curation oer licence e-science foi research Citation BibTex RIS Liz Lyon proposes that libraries re-position, re-profile and ramp up their engagement with research data management, scholarly communications and citizen science.
Research libraries have traditionally supported the scholarly research and communication process, largely through supporting access to and preservation of its published outputs.
The library cornerstones have been positioned around a long-established publication process tailored to deliver the peer-reviewed scholarly article or monograph; but now the research landscape is dramatically changing.
The application of computational science and growth of data-intensive research, combined with a veritable explosion of social media tools and Web technologies, are reshaping research practice.
Data in diverse formats are at the heart of the research process, but there are significant gaps in infrastructure to effectively share, manage, curate, preserve and potentially reuse the rapidly growing volumes of data generated by text corpora, video collections, 'big science' endeavours and by the expanding long-tail of ‘small science’.
The Informatics Transform Proposition This infrastructure encompasses hardware and software components for data integration, manipulation, recombination and storage, but also includes the essential human infrastructure required at an institutional level to advise, guide, train, co-ordinate and lead the stewardship effort to develop data management capacity and capability.
Academic libraries have performed a similar stewardship role in the past; now is the time to critically examine their structure, function and service portfolio, to ensure that they are fit for purpose to support the data-intensive research of today effectively.
The ‘deconstruction’ process described in this article, draws on the principle underpinning the mathematical analysis known as the Fourier Transform [1].
Research in the Data Decade Data scale and complexity has attracted many metaphors: described in 2003 by Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen as the ‘data deluge’ [2], as 'big data' [3], ‘surfing the tsunami’ [4] and by the data-intensive scientific discovery in the Fourth Paradigm [5].
In this collection of essays, the late Jim Gray described the emerging evolution of complementary arms of a discipline: Comp(utational)-X and X-Info(rmatics).
The latter encapsulates the collection and coding of data and information which are required to facilitate the effective scaling of data-intensive research programmes.
Implications for research stakeholders including institutions, were described in the Dealing with Data Report [6] and were presented as a set of roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships.
We will revisit them below.
In parallel, an increasingly open scholarly communications agenda which promotes the enhanced sharing of research data outputs, has emerged [7], fuelled by the adoption of Web tools and applications which accelerate the ‘publication’ process, and by economic drivers for greater accountability and transparency, to show the impact of public investments in science.
Research infrastructure in institutions and academic libraries was explored in the Open Science at Web Scale Report [8], data issues were raised but there appeared to be little appetite for change .
Then in April 2011, the EPSRC published its Policy Framework on Research Data, joining all UK research councils (and other global research funding bodies e.g.
US National Science Foundation), in setting clear guidelines and expectations for Higher Education institutions and grant holders for proactive research data management planning and good practice.
This policy steer has in a sense, provided validation for the Informatics Transform, which seeks to reshape libraries in a data-centric world.
Implementing the Informatics Transform: Some Assertions So how should research libraries, library staff, librarianship (and information science), re-position, re-profile and re-structure to be fit for purpose in a data-centric research landscape?
Here are five assertions as potential pathways to change.
Data Informatics and the University Library: A Catalyst for Institutional Research Data Management?
The research data landscape can be deconstructed in several ways, each of which produces a valuable perspective.
Firstly we will examine the institutional research data lifecycle.
The University of Bath has recently been awarded JISC funding to implement the Research360 Project (R360 [9]), to embed good research data management practice within the institution.
R360 develops the concept of an end-to-end 360-degree institutional research lifecycle which covers research conception, provision of good practice advocacy, supports the production of data management plans and associated training, the role of doctoral training centres (DTCs), storage of research proposals in a Research Information Management (RIM) or Current Research Information System (CRIS), to generating or collecting primary data in  research workflows, structured data curation and deposit in an institutional data repository or file-store, through to development of institutional policy, data publication and reuse, with associated credit and attribution (see Figure 1 below).
In this scenario, the Director of Information Services (or Chief Information Officer or University Librarian), is positioned to contribute authoritative informatics leadership and co-ordination working in partnership with the PVC Research, to assure clarity of vision supported by an understanding of the research data landscape.
In particular, changing policy requirements and their implications for HEIs should inform the development of institutional research data management policy.
But how do we ensure that this informatics leadership is in place?
One answer is for professional organisations (SCONUL, Research Libraries UK and CILIP), to accept a collective responsibility to ensure that Library 'leaders-in-waiting' are given the appropriate leadership training to equip them to operate in this data-centric world.
It is perhaps worth noting a rather controversial point here, that there is a potential benefit for those leaders to have been practising researchers at some point during their career, whether in physical sciences, social sciences or the arts and humanities.
The domain is not critical; the key requirement is a first-hand understanding of the research process and its associated data informatics requirements.
In Figure 1, REF is the UK Research Excellence Framework, a system for assessing the quality of research; RCUK is the strategic partnership of the seven UK Research Councils.
Figure 1: The Research360 Institutional Lifecycle Research Concept We can further deconstruct data informatics by unpacking library support services for research data management (RDM).
These might include: RDM Requirements: supporting departments to carry out research data requirements surveys (which might address both legacy and future data needs), using data audit and assessment tools such as the Data Audit Framework (DAF) and CARDIO from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [10].
RDM Planning: working with staff in faculty Doctoral Training Centres to deliver advocacy and guidance to post-graduates, research staff and PIs, on effective data management planning, using tools such as the UK Digital Curation Centre DMPOnline tool or the DMPTool from the California Digital Library.
There is also an opportunity to contribute to institutional annual planning rounds, through probing questions which explore future data infrastructure demands, storage requirements, security and sensitivity issues, and access.
RDM Informatics: providing technical expertise for structured data description, including use of metadata standards and schema, data formats, ontologies appropriate to particular disciplines and domains.
This is an opportunity to promote disciplinary norms and to work towards consensus.
RDM Citation: supplying guidance and links to third-party services such as DataCite, to enable the assignment of persistent identifiers to datasets to support discovery, citation and reuse.
RDM Training: collaborating with faculty Doctoral Training Centres to deliver data management training programmes and modules to postgraduates, research staff and PIs.
The DCC has developed data training materials (DCC 101 Lite) and there are a growing number of resources from JISC projects (MANTRA, CAIRO, DATUM, DataTrain, DMTpsych) that can be re-purposed.
RDM Licensing: pointing to expert guidance (eg DCC Guide How to License Research Data), to assist with queries about data licensing.
This expert guidance may also cover legal and ethical issues associated with datasets.
Engagement with university research ethics committees can be a valuable channel for communication and dissemination.
RDM Appraisal: providing guidance to assist with queries about which data to keep.
The DCC has produced a helpful guide on How to Appraise and Select Research Data.
RDM Storage: collaborating with IT Services to ensure clarity and relevance of local data storage guidelines and infrastructure provision.
There also needs to be a proactive approach to collaborating with disciplinary, national and international data centres and an awareness of funder-policy requirements (e.g.
ESRC) for data deposit in such archives.
RDM Access: informing the development of pragmatic data release policies  and embargoes, which support open science agendas and FOI, but also respect the intellectual property of the researcher, the institution and any  collaborating industrial partners (the Research360 project has a particular focus in this area).
Ensuring appropriate links from underlying and supplementary data to articles in institutional repositories.
RDM Impact: linking with Research Support Offices to collect impact evidence directly relating to research datasets and their reuse, for inclusion in RIM/CRIS systems.
There are a number of emerging-impact tracking services such as total.impact.org, which facilitate the monitoring of collections of research objects including datasets.
Libraries can promote their use and help researchers to maximise their ‘network impact’ on the Web.
Of course, delivery of these new data informatics services may require a review of library and information services organisational structure and resource reallocation.
It is worth making an obvious point that each HEI is different with a unique local service permutation, and what works for one, will not work for all, but there are some common principles for success: Adopt a partnership approach which is open and inclusive e.g.
follow a consultative track to RDM policy development with faculty and service staff.
Build co-ordination and coherence in RDM planning across departments and services, e.g.
ensure a common understanding of the external drivers, using shared templates and planning tools.
Facilitate service integration across internal suppliers e.g.
between the data management planning activity and the data storage provider.
In this context, service integration does not mean converging services or continuing to run converged services or de-converging services; rather it implies implementing integrated services across multiple institutional stakeholders with joint planning and shared service development.
Ensure shared learning across the institution and beyond e.g.
provision of infrastructure to share RDM plans, RDM training modules as open educational resources.
We can also deconstruct research data management in terms of the institutional roles and responsibilities.
Table 1 builds on the framework in the earlier Dealing with Data Report, but focuses on the Library and its key stakeholder relationships, within a research-led, Higher Education institution.
Role Responsibilities Requirements Relationships Director Information Services / CIO University Librarian To lead and co-ordinate data informatics support Appropriate LIS structure in place     Library staff with data informatics & research data management skills Institutional repository with content links to underlying research data PVC Research, Deans, Associate Deans, Faculty/School Directors of Research, IT Director, Director Research Support Other key institutional stakeholders Open Access Publishers Data librarian / Data scientist / Liaison /Subject / Faculty Librarian To deliver expert data informatics advice and guidance to research staff To facilitate access to datasets for PIs, research staff, postgraduate and undergraduate students Knowledge of data management planning and data audit and assessment tools Knowledge of selection and appraisal, metadata standards and schema, data formats, domain ontologies, identifiers, data citation,  data licensing Knowledge of appropriate disciplinary data centres, Doctoral training centres (DTCs), post-grads, PIs   DCC DataCite   Data centre staff Repository managers To ensure research papers have persistent links to underlying research data Knowledge of persistent identification mechanisms and publisher requirements Data librarians / Data scientists / Liaison /Subject / Faculty Librarians IT / Computing Services To provide data storage infrastructure and guidance Knowledge of data storage options including cloud-based services EduServ data centre.
Cloud service providers National data centres Research & Development Support Office / Research & Innovation Services To provide RIM/CRIS capability for research outputs Provision for non-textual outputs such as datasets, software and program code, gene sequences, models Research funding bodies Data scientists / Liaison /Subject / Faculty Librarians Faculty Doctoral Training Centres To supply training to new-entrant researchers and PIs Knowledge of data management planning and data audit and assessment tools Training programmes and modules Deans & Associate Deans, PIs Data librarian / Data scientist / Liaison / Subject / Faculty Librarians PVC Research To develop institutional research policy and code of practice Understanding of data management compliance implications, risks including legal and ethical issues, and sustainability challenges Deans & Associate Deans Key service directors Research & Development Support Office / Research & Innovation Services Table 1: Research data management, the Library and institutional stakeholders Mainstreaming Data Librarians and Data Scientists?
The RDM services described will require specific informatics skills and knowledge associated with particular disciplines and domains.
These might include a working knowledge of the research practices and workflows, an understanding of the specific technical standards, metadata schema and vocabularies routinely used in practice, an awareness of the national and international data centres where research data in that domain are deposited, and a good grasp of the data publication requirements of the leading scholarly journals.
Who provides this support today?
Only a few UK university libraries have a designated data librarian e.g.
Edinburgh.
The University of Bath has recently appointed an institutional data scientist as part of the Research360 Project, to help to promote good research data management practice across the institution.
In contrast, most university libraries have a staff team (variously called liaison librarians, subject librarians or faculty librarians), whose primary role is to engage and support research and teaching staff and students in academic departments.
Sometimes the liaison librarian is qualified in that particular discipline; interestingly, for information scientists in pharmaceutical companies, this may be an essential attribute.
So can this library support team adapt to augment the data informatics roles embraced by data librarians and data scientists?
Strong informatics skills are key to delivering RDM services, and individuals with these skills will be in increasing demand.
In a recent article about genomics and the torrent of DNA data [11], it was noted that bioinformaticists are in short supply everywhere and computational biologist Chris Ponting, University of Oxford, said ‘I worry that there won’t be enough people around to do the analysis’.
Is there a similar shortage of librarians and information scientists equipped with data informatics skills?
How can Library and Information Science (LIS) schools meet this capacity and capability shortfall?
Next we shall consider LIS curriculum and career incentives.
Data Informatics Embedded in the LIS and iSchool Curriculum?
In recent years, iSchools in the United States have launched a flurry of new Masters courses with a major data curation component e.g.
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, at Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Michigan.
The first UK iSchool, located at the University of Sheffield, is planning to offer a new undergraduate BSc in Informatics as well as domain-based informatics courses.
More recently, the International Curation Education (ICE) Forum [12] in London during June 2011 provided an opportunity for discussion and development of the digital curation training curriculum.
The British Association for Information and Library Education and Research (BAILER) currently has 20 members providing LIS education in the UK.
How well do curricula reflect the requirements of a data-intensive research landscape, with elements of data informatics, research data management and data curation?
The Research Information Network (RIN) Working Group on Information Information Handling [13], a coalition of partners addressing the information literacy of researchers and their supervisors, is also tackling the acquisition of data management skills.
Library representative bodies are in this group, but the audience is not librarians.
Domain knowledge acquired through a first degree in a science, technology or engineering field, is likely to be advantageous in working in data informatics and this has implications for the entry requirements and selection of students to LIS courses.
So are there barriers to recruiting to informatics?
The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) employs many informaticians and there are professional groups like the International Society for Biocuration [14], which promote the key role played by informatics experts.
However recognition for these individuals is limited, and this has significant implications on career progression.
If there is little credit, recognition or reward for informatics experts, then there is little incentive to follow this career path.
All of this is in stark contrast to the view that there is a critical shortage of data informatics skills.
Three potential ‘jump-start’ actions are proposed below: Deconstruct and define the core components of data informatics and research data management for the curriculum of UK Library and Information Science.
Analyse the entry qualifications and subject expertise of students applying for LIS school places, with a view to increasing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) entrants.
Set up an international Data Informatics Working Group to explore how informatics methods, publications and expertise, can be promoted, recognised and rewarded as first-class outputs within the research community.
Library as a Five-star Scholarly Communications Advocate Scholarly communication is undergoing a slow but relentless revolution.
The scholarly knowledge cycle described in 2003 [15] which featured open access repositories linking research outputs with learning and teaching resources, is growing in credibility.
There is now increasing momentum behind sharing research data, software and program code, gene sequences, models, simulations and methods, all driving towards ‘reproducible research’ [16].
Recent workshops e.g.
Beyond the PDF [17], and a Schloss DagStuhl workshop [18], led to the creation of the Force 11 Community [19], and have tried to crystallise ideas around publishing data-intensive research outputs, their description, discovery, citation and reuse, and to use light-weight Web-based tools to produce exemplars which demonstrate the capability of these new publishing platforms.
One approach proposed by David Shotton, University of Oxford, describes the Five Stars of Online Journal Articles [20] as a benchmark for enhancing and enriching the scholarly publication process (see Figure 2 below).
Figure 2: The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles The five stars in detail are: ?
Peer review:   Ensure your article is peer reviewed, to provide assurance of its scholarly value, quality and integrity.
?
Open Access:  Ensure others have cost-free open access both to read and to reuse your published article, to ensure its greatest possible readership and usefulness.
?
Enriched content:  Use the full potential of Web technologies and Web standards to provide interactivity and semantic enrichment to the content of your online article.
?
Available datasets:  Ensure that all the data supporting the results you report are published under an open licence, with sufficient metadata to support their re-interpretation and reuse.
?
Machine-readable metadata:  Publish machine-readable metadata describing both your article and your cited references, so that these descriptions can be discovered and reused automatically.
These five (deconstructed) points make highly compelling advocacy statements for the Library to promote and promulgate, to help embed more open scholarly communication practice amongst the academic community.
Libraries are already active in promoting open access to publications through institutional repositories; the dissemination of strong advocacy statements of this sort together with potential new roles within libraries focusing primarily on scholarly communications, help to transform behaviours and facilitate cultural change.
These elements are also components of the Community Capability Model (CCM) Framework [21], which aims to capture the requirements for successful data-intensive research with a view to building capacity and capability within the sector.
The CCM is being developed by UKOLN and Microsoft Research Connections.
Library as a Citizen Science Hub?
In 2009, the author spoke at a conference organised by the Local Government Association and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), which explored Modernising the Public Library Service.
The presentation Serving digital citizens: public libraries in the 21stC [22] included a proposal that public libraries should become citizen science hubs, and act as an information and engagement point for the public to participate in citizen science activities.
Since then, initiatives such as Galaxy Zoo and BBC LabUK have demonstrated real value in harnessing the effort, intelligence and contributions of the wider public.
In addition, Research Councils UK (RCUK) have continued to demonstrate the importance of public engagement, through targeted funding calls [23].
UKOLN worked with the British Library and the Association of Medical Research Charities on the JISC-funded Patients Participate!
Project [24].
This examined the value of the lay summary, as a mechanism to bridge the gap between information access and public understanding of health-related information.
The project explored the feasibility of creating crowd-sourced lay summaries for peer-reviewed articles in UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), and focused on stem cell research.
The findings showed strong support for a lay summary to be published with every UKPMC article (PLoS Medicine already includes a lay summary with every article) and that guidelines and templates would be valuable in the creation of lay summaries.
UKOLN and researchers from the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Bath, developed guidelines for researchers to assist the production of lay-summaries.
This study suggests that libraries have an exciting opportunity to support public engagement with science in various ways: Act as a hub or one-stop shop and collate links and information about diverse citizen science activities Support the researcher in the production of lay summaries by advocating the use of guidelines and templates Provide training for new postgraduates through Doctoral Training Centres Mediate public access to research datasets in institutional, disciplinary or national repositories and datacentres Support members of the public who wish to contribute and participate in science and research projects.
Looking Forward This article is very much a personal perspective on the future of the library and focuses primarily on supporting research.
Research data informatics has been 'deconstructed' in different contexts including within the institutional research lifecycle, the delivery of new library services and understanding institutional roles and responsibilities.
It is encouraging to note that there is pioneering work already underway in the US, Australia and the UK.
Many practical examples e.g.
providing Web pages to support data management planning, are described in more depth, in an important new book [25].
We should collectively view the ‘Informatics Transform’ as an important opportunity for libraries: a chance to engage new audiences, deliver innovative services and adopt new roles.
Author’s note: An earlier version of this article was submitted to the Royal Society Roundtable on the Future of Libraries in October 2011, which was a component of the major study Science as a Public Enterprise [26], to examine the use of scientific information as it affects science, businesses and society.
The project had a particular focus on the benefits from greater sharing of scientific information.
Acknowledgements UKOLN is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils as well as by project funding from the JISC, the European Union and Microsoft Research Connections.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
References In 1822, the French mathematician and physicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier published his observations on heat propagation, making a number of mathematical assertions.
This original work subsequently informed the derivation of a key mathematical analysis which has become known as Fourier Analysis.
In simple terms, this is the decomposition of a function into its constituent parts; the Fourier Transform describes the deconstruction process.
Tony Hey & Anne Trefethen (2003).
The data deluge: an eScience perspective.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7648/1/The_Data_Deluge.pdf Nature Big Data issue 4 September 2008. http://www.nature.com/news/specials/bigdata/index.html Science Careers: Surfing the Tsunami.
Science, 11 February 2011 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2011_02_11/caredit.a1100013 The Fourth Paradigm (2009) Eds.
Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, Kristin Tolle.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/ Lyon, Liz (2007) Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships.
Consultancy Report.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/publications.html#2007-06-19 Borgman, Christine L. (2011, submitted).
The conundrum of sharing research data.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1869155 Lyon, Liz (2009) Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential Consultative Report.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/publications.html#november-2009 Research360 blog http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/research360/ Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Pennisi, Elizabeth, Will Computers crash genomics?
Science (2011) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/666.short International Curation Education Forum http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/iceforum RIN Working Group on Information Handling http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/researcher-development-and-skills/information-handling-training-researchers/working-group-i International Society for Biocuration.
http://biocurator.org/ Liz Lyon.
"eBank UK: Building the Links Between Research Data, Scholarly Communication and Learning".
July 2003, Ariadne Issue 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/lyon/ Peng, R.D.
Reproducible research in computational science.
(2011) Science Vol 334, 2 December, 1226-1227. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6060/1226.full Beyond the PDF Workshop (2011) http://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/ Future of Research Communication, Schloss Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop (2011) http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=11331 Force 11 Community http://www.force11.org/ Shotton, D. (2011) Five Stars of online journal articles.
Blog post http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/the-five-stars-of-online-journal-articles-3/ Community Capability Model for Data-Intensive Research http://communitymodel.sharepoint.com/Pages/default.aspx Lyon, Liz.
(2009) Presentation: Serving Digital Citizens: Public Libraries in the 21stC?
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/presentations.html#2009-12-14-LGA-london RCUK Public Engagement with Research: Catalysts Call for Proposals http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/per/pages/catalysts.aspx Patients Participate!
Project http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/patientsparticipate/ Corrall, S.  (2012) ‘Roles and responsibilities: libraries, librarians and data’, in Pryor, G.
(ed.)
Managing Research Data, pp.
105-133.
London: Facet.
Royal Society, Science as a Public Enterprise http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/science-public-enterprise/ Author Details Dr Liz Lyon Director UKOLN University of Bath; Associate Director Digital Curation Centre Email: e.j.lyon@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/ Dr Liz Lyon is Director, UKOLN, University of Bath, and leads work to enable transformational change in digital libraries, data informatics and open science which supports the JISC Innovation Programme.
She is Associate Director, Digital Curation Centre and leads the UKOLN Informatics Research Group which initiated innovative and influential JISC-funded data management and scholarly communications projects.
Dr. Lyon serves on a number of strategic boards and panels including for the UK Economic and Social Science Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the US National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyber Infrastructure and the DataONE International Advisory Board (co-Chair).
Although she has previously worked in various university libraries in the UK, her background was originally in Biological Sciences and she has a doctorate in Cellular Biochemistry.
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Editorial: Open Access, organising workshops and different perspectives.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial: Open Access, organising workshops and different perspectives.
Citation BibTex RIS In Issue 76 we have articles looking at how Open Access could be used by large funding bodies to make academics' lives easier, experience driven ideas for organising library workshops and conferences, and a different perspective on library customer services from New Zealand.
Plus our usual event and book reviews, and some sad news from Bath.
In this issue of Ariadne, we have article covering a range of topics.
Lidu Gong starts us off with a description of the "heart centred" approach to customer service in a Māori oriented academic library service in New Zealand.
To help deal with cultural differences between Māori users and traditional "Western" library services, the library staff at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa college adopt an approach based on knowledge of the Māori people, their customs, beliefs and standards of interaction.
It demonstrates how an institution can alter its approach based on the cultural norms of its users to the benefit of both the users and the institution.
Over in the USA, Joshua Pearce is based in a scientific research lab at Michigan Technological University.
His article suggests a potential way that Open Access journals could be used by large scale funding bodies such as the US National Science Foundation to reduce some of the workload of researchers like him.. His idea is to restructure part of the grant application process to make the proposals more like the introduction and methods sections of a paper, which could be subsequently used as the basis for future papers.
Then, if a grant is given, reporting on progress would be via articles in an OA journal funded by the grant giving organisation.
Bouncing back to the UK, Gary Brewerton has been involved with organising many library related conferences.
He has collected together his experiences and some handy hints and tips in an article on how to go about organising a conference or workshop.
Whilst the experiences here are from academic libraries, the processes and suggestions are generally applicable to more or less any type of conference or workshop.
Hopefully this will be useful to people who suddenly find themselves tasked with such organisation for the first time!
One of the workshops Gary organised was the Meeting the Reading List Challenge in April 2016 at Loughborough University library.
We have a report on that event provided by one of the attendees, Laura Williams.
We also have a report by John Kirriemuir on a British Library/University of Nottingham event held in February asking people to suggest novel ways of using or manipulating the BL's extensive digital data collections.
John also kindly reviewed Lorcan Dempsey's book, "The Network Reshapes the Library".
This is collection of selected postings from Lorcan's blog covering many of the issues in digital libraries from the last 10-15 years.
As John rightly points out, many of the points raised in the book are still hot topics as we approach the second decade of the 21st century.
Stella Thebridge has contributed a book review of "The innovative school librarian" edited by Sharon Markless and published by Facet.
The book is aimed at school librarians and library managers, and Stella uses her experience in that field to question whether this book is providing the right information in the right format for those library workers.
Our final book review of this issue is by Elizabeth Gadd.
She has read "Altmetrics: a practical guide for librarians, researchers and academics" edited by Andy Tattersall and again published by Facet.
Altmetrics is an ongoing "hot topic" in Universities and funding bodies who both have a desire to work out the relative impact and importance of different researchers, where simple publication numbers might not give the whole story.
Lastly, some sad news has arrived from the University of Bath as I write this editorial.
Philip Bryant, best known in the Library world as the founding Director of UKOLN, passed away peacefully at home on the 15th November at the age of 84.
Philip was instrumental in the establishment of UKOLN in 1992, as well as some of the library related centres that went before it at Bath.
It was within the nuturing home of UKOLN that this journal was born 20 years ago, so we owe Philip a debt of gratitude.
After he stepped down as director of UKOLN two years after its formation, he went on to perform work of international importance on the need for, and implication of, catalogue conversions as a result of recommendations in the Follet Report.
Philip eventually retired in 1997, but continued to help conserve the antiquarian collection of the Royal Bath and West of England Society.
Four years ago Philip received an Honorary Fellowship from the Senate of University of Bath in recognition of his contribution to both the University and the wider library world.
Phlip will be much missed by the many people who knew him.
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Book Review: Digital Information Order Or Anarchy?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Information Order Or Anarchy?
Buzz archives digitisation copyright personalisation ebook facebook research Citation BibTex RIS Muhammad Rafiq offers us a review of a work which examines the future of digital information and emerging patterns of scholarly communication.
Digital Information offers an overview of the digital landscape based on the heterogeneous perspectives of multiple stakeholders contributed by the experts from Higher Education, publishers' community, information professionals, and legal experts.
This overview presents seven well written chapters by an international team of experts who have contributed well to the debate of digital information in the context of order or anarchy.
The book seems to answer the million-dollar question of today's information world: 'Will the present relatively orderly system of scholarly communication survive into the future or will the possibilities that technology affords, create disruption and anarchy?
And [will] what is being done today help an orderly transfer to the future?'
Coverage In the first chapter, Introduction: digital information, an overview of the landscape, the editors Lorraine Estelle and Hazel Woodward provide the setting for the book and discuss the current and future scenario of digital information landscape in terms of academic library, public library, national library, librarians, book shop, and publishing industry.
The editors raise a number of questions about the current and future landscape that is emerging with swift changes largely stimulated by social, political and technological changes, and not least the influence of Google on developments.
Rick Anderson in Chapter 2, Scholarly communication: the view from the library, focuses on searching and finding information, library collections, and pricing.
The viewpoint is from a library's perspective.
Anderson considers various future scenarios of scholarly communication and calls for significant mission changes in academic and research libraries.
The author emphasizes the community-driven acquisition and stresses the need to enhance the skills of librarians.
In Chapter 3, Scholarly communication: the publisher's view, Ian Russell discusses a wide spectrum of scholarly communication with a publisher's lens.
Russell's discussion covers: drivers for change; information overload; the formal publication process in scholarly communication; stewardship challenges; costs; copyright; and current business models.
Russell considers that future digital information will present an order instead of anarchy, and offers four scenarios in the event of dominance by Open Access (OA): subsistence; subvention; substitution; and subversion.
In Chapter 4, E-books and scholarly communication futures, Colin Steele considers that the development of the e-book is affected largely by the digital revolution, the superficial reading behaviour of readers and changes in publishing settings.
Nevertheless, it is true that present-day book publishers may be using digital means for production but still reflect the methods of 'the pre-Internet era' in how they go about distribution.
Steele further advises the publishing industry to learn from the music industry.
He considers that the book publishing industry is still searching for a viable solution but it needs to think beyond the traditional print book publishing model.
Alastair Dunning, in Chapter 5, Digitizing the past: next steps for public sector digitization, emphasises the role of libraries as information producers.
Dunning describes some publicly funded digitisation projects, for example Darwin Online which provides Darwin's published and unpublished writings; Old Bailey Online which provides searchable court proceedings from 1674 to 1912; the Great War Archive, presents 6,500 items contributed by general public about the experience of World War I. Dunning emphasises the power of user-generated content, but also raises the question of long-term sustainability.
In Chapter 6, Resources Discovery, Graham Stone addresses resource discovery, user needs and information seeking.
He considers that the digital marketplace occasions chaos and presents challenges to libraries.
He also discusses the structuring limitations of library OPACs.
He further stresses the need to visualise Amazon's personalisation approach as well as Facebook's system in order to understand the users' information seeking behaviour; an approach that may serve to sustain libraries' existence in the digital paradigm.
Wilma Mossink and Lorraine Estelle in Chapter 7, Who owns the content in the digital environment?
discuss intellectual property rights and reveal the current lack of clarity on ownership of digital content.
The authors raise questions about the current law which seldom addresses the issues of digital information and mass digitisation projects.
The authors further emphasise the balance between the rights of users and those of publishers in this digital world.
Conclusions The overall coverage of the contents in this book is comprehensive and represents a worthwhile purchase for information professionals including librarians, publishers, journalists, and archivists.
The work comprehensively presents academic perspectives on the issue in hand.
The chapters are well written and I would say it is essential reading for anyone interested in assessing the current and perceived landscape of digital information.
Author Details Muhammad Rafiq PhD Scholar, Dept.
of Library & Information Science, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan Senior Librarian GC University, Lahore, Pakistan Email: rafiqfsd@hotmail.com Return to top Article Title: "Digital Information: Order or anarchy?"
Author: Muhammad Rafiq Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/rafiq-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Piloting Web Conferencing Software: Experiences and Challenges Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Piloting Web Conferencing Software: Experiences and Challenges Buzz data mobile software java portfolio firefox safari browser blog video windows multimedia adobe e-learning streaming vle usb moodle webinar oer elluminate licence Citation BibTex RIS Julian Prior and Marie Salter report on their experiences piloting Elluminate Live!
at the University of Bath.
In the current fiscal climate faced by educational institutions in the UK, elearning tools and technologies that promise efficiency savings as well as enhancing the quality and quantity of course offerings are gaining popularity.
One such technology is Web conferencing where lectures, seminars, meetings or presentations take place online and allow for remote participation and collaboration via audio, video, instant chat and a virtual ‘whiteboard.’[1].
Web conferencing also has the potential to provide a sustainable and economic alternative to face-to-face professional development conferences [2].
In this article we discuss the piloting of one such Web-conferencing solution (Elluminate Live!)
in a number of areas at the University of Bath.
Web Conferencing in Higher Education With its roots as a communication tool in the business world in the 1970s, the last decade has seen the widespread adoption of Web conferencing in Higher Education.
The University of Exeter Pathfinder Project (2007-2008) piloted video-conferencing technologies for teaching and learning in a number of distinct areas across its provision (small group teaching, staff development workshops and large group, cross-campus teaching).
Its findings, while broadly positive, highlighted some of the technological issues involved in implementing video conferencing institution-wide, and strongly recommended embedding it with other tools as part of a broader blended-learning strategy [3].
Institutions like Athabasca University in Canada and the Open University in the UK have been at the forefront of integrating Web conferencing into their distanceeducation delivery methods.
The Open University in particular has made extensive use of an unlimited licence for Elluminateintroduced in April 2008 to enhance teaching and learning with over 200,000 distance learners [4].
At the University of Hertfordshire, Elluminatesoftware has been used to deliver an international blended learning conference [5] as well as supervision for postgraduate students and staff meetings.
Aston University has made the use of Web conferencing a focal point for its sustainable teaching and learning strategy [6], while the University of Winchester’s Business School uses Wimba Pronto and Wimba Voice for staff to operate virtual office hours.
A more recent application of Web conferencing has been as a tool for amplifying events [7].
While video streaming services such as Qik and Bambuser can be used to broadcast and record live video of an event from a mobile device or laptop, Web conferencing software such as Elluminateor Adobe Connect has the added advantage of being able to facilitate a full ‘webinar’ experience including chat and interactive tools such as polls and quizzes.
An example of this is the talk we gave on piloting Elluminate software at a recent UKOLN seminar [8].
Background to the Pilot Back in the spring of 2010 the south-west regional spoke of the national Higher Education Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (HE STEM) network 9 approached us seeking advice on a video-conferencing solution for to bring together partner colleges and local employers.
These organisations were looking for novel ways of delivering Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics continuing professional development (CPD) synchronously with the aim of increasing employer engagement and widening participation.
Initially discussion focused on the possibility of piggy-backing on the Access Grid Network (AGN) [10] of which the University of Bath has three ‘nodes’ essentially rooms equipped with multimedia hardware (such as video cameras and echo-cancelling microphones) and software that supports real-time collaboration between groups across distance, using audio and video over a high-speed network.
One of the advantages of AGNs is that they have high bandwidth and excellent video quality, hence they are ideal for broadcasting live experiments, for example.
On the other hand we found a number of disadvantages with the AGN solution, including prohibitive costs, the lack of portability and the low use of existing rooms.
AGNs are excellent for large group-to-group collaboration in fixed locations over a high-speed network, but lack flexibility where a person-to-person or person-to-group solution is sought.
As a result we decided to explore other synchronous Web conferencing solutions that could also be used to provide a supportive online environment to complement the Division for Lifelong Learning’s growing portfolio of distance-learning courses delivered via the Moodle virtual learning environment.
Drawing upon the regularly updated comparison of Web conferencing tools on Wikipedia [11] we chose three solutions to evaluate using criteria such as cost, support and functionality (see table below).
Criteria Wimba Elluminate MegaMeeting Max.
number of video streams 2 6 2 Integration with Moodle Yes (integrated solution) Yes (integrated solution) Possible but not an integrated solution Cross-browser and OS compatibility Yes Yes Yes Desktop Sharing Yes Yes No Recording of Sessions Yes Yes No Cost of licence for unlimited rooms for 1 year (approx.)
GBP 9,950 GBP 10, 260 GBP 8,850 Table 1: Evaluating Web-conferencing solutions (Please note we believe these features to be accurate as of June 2010.
Due to the rapidly changing feature sets of Web-conferencing software, this table should be used for illustrative purposes only.
For example, as of April 2011, MegaMeeting supports up to 16 live video streams.
The features of Wimba and Elluminate are due to be merged into the new Blackboard Collaboration Suite in the coming year [12].)
Although Elluminate emerged as the most expensive solution, we decided that its superior video functionality, comprehensive support materials and its widespread adoption in the HE sector along with its use in organisations such as JISC and ALT-C gave it the edge over its rivals.
Therefore, we purchased a one-year Elluminate Live!
open access licence in July 2010 in order to run the pilot.
Experiences at the University of Bath Elluminate is extremely well-specified Web-conferencing software; if anything, there are too many enhancements that may make the interface seem a little over-complicated.
During the informal pilot that has been running at the University of Bath, the full functionality of the tool has by no means yet been fully explored and tested.
The following are some examples of the uses to which it has been put so far.
Interview By accident rather than by design, an early use of Elluminate at Bath was to facilitate a remote interview where a candidate was hospitalised and unable to attend her specified slot.
As she was advised not to travel, it was decided to use Elluminate to enable the interview to go ahead in a timely fashion.
Before this decision was reached, checks were made to ensure that the candidate was comfortable using the technology and that she was able to respond to questions, complete the interview task planned, and demonstrate skills just as she would have been able to do in a face-to-face situation.
This proved to be a very successful use of the technology, fulfilling a real need and enabling both the remote candidate and the interview panel of three in Bath to interact comfortably, as if they had met in a room on the University of Bath campus.
Regional Web Conference A group of lecturers and learning technologists also chose to trial Elluminate when holding a regional conference at which a number of presentations were given.
Ironically, the conference theme was lecture capture!
The presenters involved were proficient in using technology and were able to make use of the audio and video capabilities as well as the desk-sharing and file-sharing options.
Virtual Open Day Staff developing a new doctorate programme in Clinical Psychology were unable to satisfy demand from prospective students interested in finding out more at a talk introducing the programme space was simply not available to accommodate all those wishing to attend the session.
They decided therefore to investigate the use of Elluminate to repeat the session they had offered face-to-face to an online audience drawn from across the globe.
The team was able to deliver the same presentation to the online audience as had been given at the campus-based session then, using both the text chat and audio facilities, the audience was able to ask questions freely.
The staff commended the flexibility offered by the system, particularly as it allowed them to sign in late-comers during the session.
They are keen to hold similar events, again using Elluminate.
Regional Meetings In deciding to fund the Elluminate licence over the last year, the HE STEM team recognised the benefits in terms of virtual meetings with colleagues from across the region without leaving the office, thereby saving on time, travel and expense.
A number of meetings have been held to date and further meetings are scheduled.
Attendees are sent a Web link for the meeting, brief instructions on how to get into the session and how to set up their audio equipment.
The functionality of Elluminate for these meetings is not tested to the full at all as the tools of interest have primarily been the audio and video capabilities.
Case Study Presentations Students within the Department of Chemistry used Elluminate to remotely present case studies for assessment to a tutor who was also remote from the campus.
Effective use of the audio and messaging tools ensured effective free-flowing discussion throughout the session.
MSc Project Presentation The Department for Health at the University of Bath has long experience of delivering distance-learning programmes to medical professionals.
The use of Elluminate enabled a student based in Hong Kong to deliver his project proposal to tutors based in Bath and New Zealand.
The student delivered a presentation of his project via a Powerpoint presentation.
The tutors were then able to question him on his presentation and provide feedback and guidance.
Weekly Postgraduate Seminar A Masters level course in Wellbeing and Human Development is currently offered as CPD remotely to students working in organisations linked to poverty reduction and policymaking in the field of international development.
There are currently seven students enrolled on the course from countries as widely distributed as Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Palestine, Syria and the UK.
Previously the course tutor used Web-conferencing software MegaMeeting to facilitate the remote learning on the course.
However, due to the varying degrees of internet robustness in the different geographical locations it was rare that all seven students were able to participate in the online seminar at the same time.
We found that using Elluminate, which is optimised for low bandwidth situations, enabled all the students to participate using video, audio and text chat as well as discuss documents shared via the virtual whiteboard.
An added advantage was that the sessions were recorded enabling students who missed the online seminars to catch up later.
Group Work The Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology deliver a number of advanced-level continuing professional development programmes to experienced health care professionals.
These programmes are delivered online through the University of Bath Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and are supported by face-to-face conferences.
Staff on the programme arranged for an expert speaker to deliver a virtual session prior to submission of the first assessed piece of work, which specifically tackled some of the questions raised in the assessment.
Incentivising the use of Elluminate in this way worked well as a first step towards the stage where students would adopt the software in order to support their own case study group work.
This was because the majority of students tuned in to the session live and contributed to the discussion.
The students were also offered the opportunity to use the synchronous audio and video facilities of Elluminate in addition to the asynchronous discussion boards of the VLE as they completed their case study group work.
Discussion boards tended to be used to arrange meeting times and then the students would meet, on average, once a week via Elluminate, often recording their meetings for those colleagues who were unable to attend.
The groups who have used Elluminate to date have each had their own, very different drivers for choosing to experiment with the software but results for all have been largely positive.
Some of the more challenging issues encountered are detailed below.
Challenges Faced and Some Recommendations As part of the evaluation of the pilot we carried out short informal interviews with participants and used a Google Form to gather semi-structured survey data.
In common with other pilots of Web-conferencing software in HE, our data reveal a number of cultural and technical support issues that need to be addressed in order to move on from the pilot stage.
Preliminary findings (the evaluation is ongoing) reveal the following issues.
Audio Quality Most negative comments made by participants in the pilot related to problems with audio quality.
Some of them were due to problems with setting up hardware and were unrelated to Elluminatesoftware.
For example, a number of participants had difficulties connecting headphones and microphones to the soundcards on Windows PCs.
Others experienced significant audio feedback when using an open microphone rather than a headset with a built-in microphone.
Most of these difficulties were resolved by using the audio set-up wizard (and tweaking other audio settings) within Elluminate, or by making sure that microphones were turned off when not talking to eliminate feedback.
Software Issues To launch Elluminate, a JNLP (Java Network Launching Protocol) file is downloaded and run using a Web browser.
This presented some challenges based on the different Web browsers, operating systems and access to security settings available to participants.
For example, in Firefox and Safari, a dialogue box appears asking the user to open or download the file, while in Internet Explorer the download is blocked by default and has to be enabled.
On some PCs in general teaching areas at the University, we found that security settings blocked the download altogether and Elluminate could not be launched.
This can be a particularly relevant issue in institutions such as Further Education colleges where firewalls are set up in a way as to block the download of Java web-start applications.
Our advice in such circumstances would be to ensure good lines of communication with IT technical support departments and provide plenty of support materials including screen-shots covering different browsers and operating systems.
Another software problem relates to Elluminate’s rather complex interface, certainly for the beginner.
There is a lot of functionality built in to the software, much of it relatively hidden, and a number of participants reported that there was a steep learning curve at that initial stage.
One participant suggested the software could have both a ‘simple’ and ‘advanced’ set of menus and windows to allow for this.
Other participants echoed this criticism, arguing that Elluminate is probably overkill if one is only seeking quick video, audio or text chat.
Recommendations With these and other issues in mind we have made a number of recommendations for others looking to use Elluminate as a Web conferencing solution.
These are (in no particular order): Use headsets with built-in microphones wherever possible to eliminate the possibility of audio feedback.
On the whole we found USB headsets were easier to set up with the software than headsets with older mini-jack connectors.
If an open microphone is a must (eg a small group of people gathered around a table using one computer) use an omni-directional microphone such as the Samson UB1, and make sure the ‘mute speakers when “talk” is pressed to prevent feedback’ tick box is checked in audio settings (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The ‘mute speakers’ setting in Elluminate Make sure participants always complete the audio set-up wizard and adjust their connection settings when they enter an Elluminate room.
Ideally, participants should also check whether their set-up meets the system requirements by visiting Elluminate Technical Support [13] and testing their set-up in the configuration room.
Provide plenty of support materials for users in the form of ‘how-tos’, screencasts, FAQs etc.
There are some excellent support materials available on the Elluminate Web site but there is no harm in adapting them to account for institutional variations.
Make sure that the support materials are accessible and not overly technical.
Use a number of moderators with large groups of participants in order to take the pressure away from speaker(s).
This way the moderators can focus on facilitating questions and any technical issues arising from the session, while the speaker(s) can focus solely on the presentation.
If time and resources permit, run a test session in Elluminate prior to any mission-critical Web conferences in order to anticipate any issues that might arise in the ‘live’ event.
Conclusion As we approach the end of the pilot we are in the enviable position of reporting overwhelmingly positive feedback from participants who have been involved in a number of different usage scenarios.
Despite some issues and barriers that need to be overcome, the pilot has indicated a clear need for a stable, feature-rich and institution-wide Web conferencing solution to meet a wide range of teaching and learning needs.
We hope to continue the pilot next year and formalise the findings into a business case for university-wide adoption.
That said, we are mindful of the fast-moving nature of technological developments in the field of Web conferencing and, with the recent acquisition of Elluminate by Blackboard Inc., will have to keep an eye out for other solutions emerging in what is fast becoming a crowded marketplace [14].
References Wikipedia entry on Web conferencing, 10:14, 29 March 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_conferencing Terry Anderson and Lyn Anderson (2009) ‘Online Professional Development Conferences: An effective, economical and eco-friendly option.’ Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology vol.
35 (2), Spring http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/viewArticle/521/254 Video conferencing for teaching and learning, academic year 20072008, University of Exeter http://as.exeter.ac.uk/support/educationenhancementprojects/videoconferencing/ Case Study : The Open University :: Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com/Resources/Case_Studies/Detail/7/?id=218 Blended Learning Conference 2011 University of Hertfordshire http://www.herts.ac.uk/about-us/learning-and-teaching/learning-teaching-institute/conferences/conference-2011/home.cfm Sustainability Teaching and Learning at Aston http://www1.aston.ac.uk/about/environment/teaching/ Marieke Guy, “10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event”, January 2011, Ariadne, Issue 66 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/guy/ UK Web Focus: UKOLN Seminar on Elluminate Open to All, Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus), 28 January 2011 http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/ukoln-seminar-on-elluminate-open-to-all/ Higher Education Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (HE STEM): About SW Spoke http://www.hestem-sw.org.uk/about/sw-spoke/ For information on Access Grid Nodes, see http://www.accessgrid.org/faq and http://www.ja.net/services/video/agsc/AGSCHome/ as well as the article by Andy Powell, “Virtual Rooms, Real Meetings”, October 2004, Ariadne, Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/powell/ Comparison of web conferencing software, Wikipedia, 18:19, 11 May 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software Blackboard Collaborate http://www.blackboard.com/sites/collaborate/ Elluminate Technical Support http://www.elluminate.com/support One such alternative garnering a lot of attention in HE is the open source Web conferencing solution Big Blue Button http://www.bigbluebutton.org/ For some interesting reflections on this alternative from colleagues at the University of Bath see the following blog posts: http://colligo.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/focusing-on-bigbluebutton/ http://erambler.co.uk/2011/01/24/simple-video-conferencing-with-bigbluebutton/ and http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/big-blue-button/ Author Details Julian Prior e-Learning Development Officer Division for Lifelong Learning University of Bath Email: j.prior2@bath.ac.uk Julian Prior is e-Developments Officer in the Division for Lifelong Learning.
He is also part of the University’s central e-learning team and is currently completing his final year of an MSc.
in Education, Technology and Society at the University of Bristol where his dissertation will focus on a collaborative design model for the creation of Open Educational Resources.
Marie Salter e-Developments Manager Division for Lifelong Learning University of Bath Email: m.salter@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/lifelong-learning/ Marie Salter is e-Developments Manager in the Division for Lifelong where she works with staff both internally and across the University’s Partner institutions to develop ways of effectively using and integrating technology into short courses and programmes to meet particular support, delivery and assessment needs.
Return to top Article Title: Piloting Web Conferencing Software: Experiences and Challenges Authors: Julian Prior, Marie Salter Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/prior-salter/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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ECLAP 2013: Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines ECLAP 2013: Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment Buzz data software rdf framework usability archives metadata digitisation accessibility vocabularies schema blog repositories copyright video preservation multimedia streaming ontologies owl ebook dvd foaf lod epub ict interoperability research standards haptics Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy reports on the second international conference held by ECLAP, the e-library for performing arts.
The beautiful city of Porto was the host location for ECLAP 2013 [1], the 2nd International Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment.
Porto is the second largest city in Portugal after Lisbon and home of the Instituto Politécnico do Porto (IPP), the largest polytechnic in the country, with over 18,500 students.
IPP has 7 different faculties, the School of Music and Arts Escola Superior de Música, Artes e Espectáculo (ESMAE) [2] is one of the two original schools established when IPP was founded in 1985.
The Teatro Helena Sá e Costa, ESMAE’s main theatre, provided a fitting location for a conference looking at IT innovation within the cultural heritage area, and the performing arts in particular.
As an outsider to the ECLAP scene and a relative newcomer to the area of IT and performing arts I was unsure of what to expect from the conference but keen to learn more about the opportunities and challenges facing those working in this area.
The overview of the ECLAP Project, given by Paolo Nesi, Professor of Computer Science Department at the University of Florence, gave some useful insights into project work so far.
ECLAP [3] was co-funded by the European Union ICT Policy Support Programme, as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions across Europe.
It has done this by establishing an e-library for performing arts and a best practice network of experts and services working in performing arts institutions in Europe.
The e-library currently contains more than 100,000 content objects (images, videos, documents, audio files, ebooks, ePub documents, animations, slides, playlists, collections, 3D objects, Braille music, annotations, etc) from more than 30 European institutions.
It is powered by a large semantic model which collects content from over 35 providers and manages metadata in 13 different languages.
The structure of this model was covered in more detail by Pierfrancesco Bellini, University of Florence, later on in the day during his talk on a linked open data service for performing arts.
Bellini explained that they have been using RDF standards and making vocabularies available as linked open data whenever possible.
The main vocabularies they have been working with are Dublin Core (DC), Friend of a Friend (FOAF), Creative Commons (CC) and basic geo vocabularies.
They have found that providing linked open data improves the user experience by adding contextual information and allows the data to be seen in a more visual way.
A specific vocabulary has been designed for the project and is available for reuse [4].
The ECLAP Project has also developed a number of tools to aggregate and enrich accepted content, such as MyStory player, an audiovisual annotation tool [5], which is also one of the tools that comprises Europeana Professional [6].
The eventual aim is to deliver over 400,000 objects that cover the ‘richness and value of the European performing arts heritage’ to Europeana [7], the European Digital Library.
The 2013 conference was primarily an attempt to pull together those with knowledge of ECLAP activities and performing arts research practitioners into one space.
The focus was on how technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts but also on new innovations developed specifically for the performing arts.
At times the 3-day event felt more like an ECLAP Project meeting than an international conference, there were relatively few participants and many of the delegates had obviously been working together recently.
The informality of the event sometimes left me a little confused, the programme itself, which had only been shared online the week before, was fairly random, with talks within the same tracks ranging from highly technical to general.
There were also some very long days and the event could have benefited from tighter scheduling and stricter chairing – we seemed to be permanently running 30 minutes late.
However once I had accepted that this appeared to be customary, I really enjoyed the conference.
There were some inspiring talks and the days were spiced up with amazing live performances from the ESMAE students and some really friendly, productive discussion.
Some of the key themes that I drew from the event relate to: Tensions between archiving old work and creating new work (that employs new ICT approaches).
Much discussion in this area was around ‘where should the money go?’ Is it just about optimising what we already have or research for the future?
How do we digitally preserve the visual arts is just about reproducibility or is it about much more?
How can we capture audience interaction?
etc Issues around terminology – do we fully understand what is meant by performance art, performing arts, dance, movement?
How can we use IT the better to describe the performing arts world?
Can we use better metadata, more detailed ontologies, can we improve dance notation?
Cross-discipline work – what can the performing arts learn from other disciplines?
What innovation in this area can be applied to other areas?
Here are overviews of my choice presentations.
Culture and Creativity in the Digital Realm: A Boost from the Past The opening plenary was delivered by Luis Ferrão from the Creativity Unit, a relatively new unit formed in July 2012 by the European Commission, DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology.
Ferrão explained that the EU has competence in the area of culture and it has made a commitment (through documents like the Lisbon Treaty) to ‘support, co-ordinate or complement’ cultural heritage work.
However what exactly is meant by culture is often a matter for discussion.
Ferrão chose to define it using the well-known T.S.
Eliot quote: ‘Culture…that which makes life worth living’.
While cultural heritage has consistently been on the EC’s agenda, it has now become apparent that the move to a digital realm has been a game changer, with emphasis moving to interaction and social communities and away from traditional approaches.
The new vision holds that: ‘culture and creation is an incremental, mutually enriching process’.
The forthcoming strategy for Europe, Horizon 2020, sees digitisation as key, but also has an open data element.
The main obstacles to this are (in no particular order): lack of investment (especially in the area of research and development); problems surrounding digital literacy; fragmented digital markets; interoperability issues; and cyber-criminality.
Despite these issues it is clear that digital access to cultural heritage breathes new life into material from the past and turns it in to a formidable asset: the digital economy is a virtuous circle.
The core service behind current efforts is Europeana – launched in 2008 – into which ECLAP feeds.
Ferrão went on to highlight some other EC work being carried out in this area such as the 2011 New Renaissance report and the more recent report on orphan works.
A new project called ARROW [8] is looking specifically at improving the obstacle of rights clearance to digital material.
After his talk, Ferrão answered some questions around how institutions can get access to more R&D funding in the area of performing arts.
He explained that Horizon 2020 is offering around €80 billion (though this figure is likely to be slightly reduced) for ICT innovation.
The best successes will come from pooling resources and using the instruments already there.
Figure 1: Bertha Bermudez, researcher, performer and project manager, education at ICK Amsterdam Multimodal Glossaries: A New Entrance to Artistic Insights of Dance Praxis Bertha Bermudez, researcher, performer and project manager at ICK Amsterdam, gave a really inspiring talk on multimodal representations of dance, ie ways to record the dance process.
She asked us to consider the crossroad between dance and digital tools, and how we can move forward with developing these tools.
Bermudez explained that there is interest from artist and soci-cultural institutions around the relations between experience, embodiment and technology.
This interest also expands to the relationship between dance and cognitive science, technology and other more established scientific disciplines.
Dance is an expert field on human movement, yet in the past dancers haven’t revealed their methods or their tacit knowledge.
It is almost like the body was a container of knowledge with copyright.
More recently artists have begun to want to share their knowledge and there has also been a shift in paradigm around how artists go about it.
These ideas were explored further by a look at some recent projects.
For example SynchronousObjects [9] examines the organisational structures found in William Forsythe's dance One Flat Thing.
It does this by translating and transforming the dance into new objects, visualising dance using techniques from a variety of disciplines.
The project asks: ‘what does physical thinking look like?’ Motion Bank [10] is another Forsythe-related project that looks into choreographic practice through the creation of online digital scores in collaboration with guest choreographers.
Bermudez also mentioned the Whatever dance toolbox [11], a set of software tools designed for the analysis and development of dance and movement.
Bermudez finished by explaining that digital technologies offer the opportunity to explore new modes of representation.
All layers of kinetics, oral transmission and experience can be shared.
Dance has changed to become a body which can be enhanced through new media while the body itself can be a script from which other people can read.
Feature Matching of Simultaneous Signals for Multimodal Synchronisation  Dr Kia Ng from the School of Computing and the School of Music at the University of Leeds continued the exploration of how you can capture dance.
At Leeds they are looking at capturing sensory data using multimodal analysis and gestural interfaces.
One good example here is in the area of sport where the use of music can create a steady rhythm, improved mood and reduced fatigue.
Ng has worked on a number of European and international projects such as iMaestro [12], which developed interactive multimedia environments for technology-enhanced music education.
Some of the novel solutions for music training use tools like 3D augmented mirrors, kinect devices for hand gestures and the ability to ‘practise with yourself’ using interactive composition.
Digital Preservation for the Performing Arts David Giaretta, Director of the Alliance for Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe Network and former co-director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) took me back to familiar ground by looking at ways that we can apply digital preservation methods to the performing arts.
Giaretta admitted to having a science background, not an arts background, but explained that digital preservation has much to offer all disciplines.
He stated, albeit with tongue in cheek, that digital preservation itself is easy as long as you can provide money forever, and that it was always possible to test claims about repositories as long as you live a long time.
A more pragmatic approach would be to carry out the preparation now so that, in five to ten years, decisions can be made about what to keep.
This was important because ‘things change’; for example, hardware and software change, the environment we work in changes (it is difficult to know what the dependencies are on the Internet) and tacit knowledge changes (people leave).
The result is that things become unfamiliar.
Unfortunately politicians are not keen to spend money on future generations (preservation included) because young people don’t vote or pay taxes!
In the past claiming ‘this is being preserved’ was untestable.
Giaretta then gave an overview of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model.
The model had originally been developed as a way of ‘testing’ preservation to ensure digitally encoded information was understandable and usable over the long term.
OAIS introduces some fundamental concepts and ways of talking about digital preservation and suggests that you can test for preservation by ‘being able to do something’ with whatever you have preserved.
At a basic level you can make sure you preserve the bits, but real preservation is about future use.
Giaretta noted that we can’t command people to use particular formats, we have to be able to survive all types of encodings.
Through work on the CASPAR Project [13] a better understanding has been achieved around the digital rights to preserved data.
The project also found that digital preservation concerns arose across disciplines; there were common threats.
Part of the project work was looking at services that could benefit different disciplines.
In the performing arts there is a need for preservation, usability and re-performability (often another artist has to be able to recreate the performance).
Many of the preservation tests had used re-performability as a marker, though discussions around this in the Q&A suggest that it isn’t always an appropriate indicator.
For example, how do you preserve the performers’ interaction with the audience?
Figure 2: Panel: From left to right: Paolo Nesi (ECLAP coordinator, Firenze University), Carlos Ramos (Vice President of the Porto's Polytechnic Institute), Francisco Beja (President of ESMAE Superior School of Music and Performing Arts Porto) The Challenge of the Inter in the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Possibly my favourite presentation of the conference was presented by Sarah Whatley, Professor of Dance at Coventry University.
Whatley continued the discussion stimulated by David Giaretta’s talk on ‘what can we preserve?’ and explained how many artists are creating work that defy digital modes of preservation, work that is hugely difficult to archive.
In the past the physical dance has rarely survived beyond the moment, yet the event can be captured in ephemera such as flyers, invitations, posters, etc, and some of them may have been available for scholarly analysis.
However at the end of the last century people began to worry about loss of dance and the politics of dance preservation and reconstruction.
Recently there has been more interest in re-enactment and returning to old works.
This has been described by André Lepecki in the journal article “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances” [14] as the ‘current will to archive’.
Over the last decades dance has been engaging with the digital environment, but performance events have often evaded capture in traditional ways, primarily because people are unsure of how exactly they can be archived.
These events are always in a state of ‘becoming’, the artist is largely invisible and they offer many difficulties for archivists.
The Gateway to Archives of Media Art (GAMA) [15] has embraced some of these challenges.
They have felt that using film as a means of capturing work may be a poor representation and that technology is more than just a tool for humans.
The archive attempts to interact with work.
Some believe that for a dance work to exist it should be performable and not just one moment in time – that is, you need to capture how the dance is done; it needs to be repeatable.
This means that the conditions need to be recorded too, yet the audience is an active part of the work, this can’t be recorded.
Whatley explained that it is not just archivists who are looking at this area, performers are too.
She gave some examples of performing artists who are responding to new IT, for example using Mocap (motion capture).
Whatley concluded by noting that technical advancements haven’t fully grappled with problems of how we capture dance, yet some documentation is better than none.
However it is important to see that artists can help with this process.
She ended with a quote from Christopher Salter: ‘Performances do things to the world, conjuring forth environments that emerge simultaneously with the individuation of the technical or living being.’ The TKB Project: Creative Technologies for Performance Composition, Analysis and Documentation  Carla Fernandes from the University of Lisbon gave a presentation on linguistic annotation and the relationships between gestures and language.
Fernandes has been working on the TKB Project [16], an extensive and trans-disciplinary project aiming at the design and construction of an open-ended multimodal knowledge-base to document, annotate and support the creation of contemporary dance pieces.
The project is looking at the interstices between linguistics and performing arts studies by considering three different moments of analysis: pre-rehearsal, the rehearsal period (oral transmission, interaction between performers) and the première of a piece.
At each of these stages multi-modal activity takes place: body movement, language, visuals, multimedia resources, sound and haptics (non-verbal communication involving touch).
Dance in the World of Data and Objects Also considering the art of dance, Katerina El Raheb from the University of Athens asked the question how can we make data on dance searchable?
Her work has involved looking at various digital information systems used for indexing and analysing, and at available ontologies.
Much current practice involves the building upon Labanotation (LN) or Kinetography Laban, a notation system for recording and analysing human movement.
However ‘meaning is more than words and deeper than concepts’ and so El Raheb is exploring other approaches.
She has found that the W3C OWL-2 [17] ontology, although it is not a dance analysis model or a new notation system, could work well as DanceOwl.
Its main advantages surround reasoning and expression of rules; it is also extensible, searchable, uses understandable terms and considers temporal modelling and human body representation.
However, as El Raheb explained, a score is only a script and remains open to different interpretations, it is just one part of the documentation.
There is a difference between motion capture (capturing a moment in time) and dance script (creating a script so someone can carry out the dance).
El Raheb’s work considers questions like ‘What is a dance?
What is movement?
What characterises it?
How can this be segmented into moves and steps?’ One interesting area of work is where she has tried to apply cultural heritage models to dance, for example work > expression > manifestation > item (whereby a work might be Hamlet, an expression might be a Portugese version, a manifestation might be a particular version and an item might be the DVD copy).
To conclude, El Raheb explained that dance is not an object, nor a concept.
We can annotate objects related to it and we can use concepts related to dance analysis to prescribe and describe its movement.
These approaches could allow dance knowledge to become more accessible to many more.
There followed some really honest discussion on the point of research and whether researchers complete their work decide that it is ‘useless’ (note this discussion wasn’t directly related to El Raheb’s research).
The discussion brought home the need to avoid technology for technologies case and for researchers to bear in mind who they are addressing with their research and what they are providing for the performers.
MultiStage: Acting across Distance Fei Su of the University of Tromsø, Norway gave a presentation on creating multistages.
He and his team have been looking at ways of enabling actors in different locations to act and interact together and so appear as if on one stage.
Supporting acting across distance can make for interesting new performances but it can also make it possible for actors to rehearse together when not physically in the same place.
However multistage acting is not straight-forward: it requires hardware and software systems, radio and wired networks, sensors to capture the actors, and computers to receive and analyse the data.
The main hardware used are kinect motion sensing input devices designed by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 console.
The separate stages must then be ‘bound together’.
The main challenges are dealing with delays (distance always causes some delay in video streaming) and issues with causality (an event must happen before it can be observed and reacted to – so more delays).
There are times when synchronisation is critical, for example if actors are dancing together, and times when it isn’t so critical.
The research team are working on masking the effects of the delays using the idea of a ‘remote handshake’ as a test.
The process is helping them ascertain how much delay is acceptable.
The Space Project: Update and Initial Findings The final keynote on Day Three was from Amanda Rigali, Director of Combined Arts and Touring at the Arts Council England, on the digital arts service The Space [18].
Rigali began by explaining that Arts Council England currently fund 680 arts organisations.
Their current digital capacity has been recently described as follows: 54% primarily use digital to market, 38% have embraced digital media in their daily work – so have interactive events, etc, 8% see digital media as their core creative purpose.
Recently there have been real efforts to increase digital use and embed it more within arts organisations driven by the Arts Council England belief that digital material drives people to the live experience.
The Space was originally set up as part of the Cultural Olympiad, it was not an academic project and no academics have been involved in the service so far.
The pilot service was Arts Council-managed and BBC staff were seconded to the project to help with technical aspects.
It was developed by a limited number of staff run from a box room at BBC TV studios.
There was a core technical and editorial team of five people, supported by other BBC staff.
Arts Council England is the legal owner of the platform, which has caused a number of legal issues.
From the start, the Space was envisaged not just as an archive service but as being about new digital work.
The team wanted to show full performances across the breadth of arts.
There was a need to offer new perspectives, rich content, a wide theatrical range, light curated and moderated feel, and to see it to work on as many different browsers as possible.
Work from established and emerging companies contributed to the effort.
Agreement for the project was secured in November 2011 and then an open application lottery programme was launched to find new artists to create work for the space.
There were 730 expressions of interest and 116 were invited to submit full applications.
Rigali explained that one of the deciding factors here was that the ideas had to be achievable.
53 projects eventually received funding of which 51 successfully delivered work, a very high achievement rate.
A further 15 commissions from other arts funding bodies along with additional work and archive material (from the Arts Council, BBC, and the British Film Institute) have since been added.
The Space was launched on 1 May 2013 and is accessible from several platforms including TVs, phones and tablets.
Rigali showed some really inspiring instances of work.
For example the Place des Anges was a pop-up event which took place in Piccadilly Circus.
A circus was set up for just one day, the event wasn’t publicised, it was just for anyone who happened to be there.
Some works were incredibly impressive: the Globe received one commission for 37 full-length Shakespeare plays in different languages.
It was important that all work was to be delivered for a new and global audience.
This naturally resulted in translation issues and BBC linguists had to get involved.
The biggest challenge for the project has been resourcing: time and people.
There was only one curator for the site and the 5-person-team had a very tight timescale in which to turn around content.
As the project has an Arts Council and BBC stamp, this has always meant high user expectations too.
There have also been some technical challenges, for example offering technical support to non-standard projects and keeping to accessibility guidelines.
Alongside these issues has been the ongoing problem of rights clearance.
Rigali pointed out that it was interesting that artists are often concerned about rights to their own work, yet frequently fail to consider the rights to the work of others that they reuse.
The site has had over 1.3 million visits, an average of 40,000 visits per week, 43% of which are visits from outside the UK.
One particularly successful area has been the John Peel record collection which provides ways to view his collection of around 25,000 vinyl albums.
The Q&A time gave Rigali  an opportunity to talk about the other work in this area, such as the Routledge Performance Archive and Digital Theatre Plus.
Part of her initial work had been to justify state funding by market failure; the Space, by being a free resource, is different from everything else out there.
Conclusion There were many other interesting sessions at ECLAP that I haven’t mentioned here including a best practice session on trust and quality in cultural heritage digital libraries.
These talks looked at ways to preserve authenticity, apply metadata and assess metadata quality.
There was also a best practice session on educational services for the performing arts covering some excellent resources like the Cuban Theatre Digital Archive and a general discussion on how to deal with IPR issues for performing arts content.
During the breaks there was a poster exhibition and we were also entertained with several short films filmed and directed by ESMAE students.
At one point, a conga of oboe players came into the theatre playing their ‘practice tunes’.
The inclusion of performance art gave a freshness and energy to the event and also made the point well that there is nothing quite like live performance.
Capturing, archiving, sharing, managing and interacting with this energy using IT is a big challenge.
All the talks at ECLAP were captured by Camtasia and should be available from the ECLAP site soon along with PDF versions of the slides and papers from the talks.
References ECLAP 2013: the 2nd International Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment http://www.eclap.eu/drupal/?q=node/113965 Escola Superior de Música, Artes e Espectáculo (ESMAE) http://www.esmae-ipp.pt/ ECLAP http://www.eclap.eu/ ECLAP schema http://www.eclap.eu/schema/ MyStory Player http://www.mystoryplayer.org Europeana Professional http://pro.europeana.eu Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/ ARROW http://www.arrow-net.eu/ SynchronousObjects http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu Motion Bank http://motionbank.org/en/ Whatever dance toolbox http://badco.hr/works/whatever-toolbox/ iMaestro http://www.i-maestro.org CASPAR Project http://www.casparpreserves.eu/ Lepecki, A.
(2010) The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances, Dance Research Journal, Volume 42, Issue 02, December 2010, pp 28-48. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8512105 Gateway to Archives of Media Art (GAMA) http://www.gama-gateway.eu/ Transmedia Knowledge Base for Performing Arts (TKB) http://tkb.fcsh.unl.pt W3C OWL-2 ontology http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/ The Space http://thespace.org Author Details Marieke Guy Institutional Support Officer Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dcc.ac.uk Marieke Guy is an Institutional Support Officer at the Digital Curation Centre.
She is working with 5 HEIs to raise awareness and building capacity for institutional research data management.
Marieke works for UKOLN, a research organisation that aims to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of: digital libraries, information systems, bibliographic management, and Web technologies.
Marieke has worked from home since April 2008 and is the remote worker champion at UKOLN.
In this role she has worked on a number of initiatives designed specifically for remote workers.
She has written articles on remote working, event amplification and related technologies and maintains a blog entitled Ramblings of a Remote Worker.
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Moving Researchers across the EResearch Chasm Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Moving Researchers across the EResearch Chasm Buzz data software rdf framework database infrastructure archives metadata accessibility identifier namespace repositories preservation oai-pmh visualisation ontologies owl foaf skos licence e-science e-research rae research standards Citation BibTex RIS Malcolm Wolski and Joanna Richardson outline an Australian initiative to address technology challenges within current research paradigms.
In 1999 Sir John Taylor [1], then Director General of the UK Research Councils, talked about e-Science, i.e.
global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will support it.
It encompasses computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments or that uses immense datasets that require grid computing.
In the US the term cyberinfrastructure has been used to describe the new research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualisation and other computing and information processing services over the Internet.
In Australia—and other countries—the term eResearch extends e-Science and cyberinfrastructure to other disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences, and denotes the use of information technology to support existing and new forms of research.
It is within this rapidly evolving context that the researcher of the 21st century now operates.
However not all researchers are responding to changes in this new environment.
In this article we will examine the current research paradigm, the main drivers for researchers to engage with this paradigm, reasons for lack of engagement, and a project undertaken at an Australian university—as part of a national initiative—to start to address the problem of making data from research activity, past and current, more discoverable and accessible.
Trends in the Evolution of Research Paradigms Gray [2] discusses the evolution of research paradigms which has led to the increasingly important role that information technology now plays in supporting research.
For thousands of years there was experimental / empirical science followed in the last few hundred years by theoretical science.
The third research paradigm, which evolved in the last few decades, was characterised by increasingly complex research challenges based principally on large-scale computational simulation.
This led to the concept of holistic systems of systems; the evolution from wet labs (hands-on scientific research and experimentation) to virtual labs; and an emphasis on modelling, simulation, projection and prediction.
E-Science / cyberinfrastructure / eResearch are short-hand terms for a new fourth paradigm which is characterised by data-intensive science.
The focus is on data analysis and mining; patterns discovery; and the evolution of large databases and data archives.
One by-product is the so-called 'data deluge', which has led to enormous challenges in research data management.
The fourth paradigm is changing the longstanding model of scholarly communication as, in the words of Clifford Lynch [2], 'the paper becomes a window for a scientist to not only actively understand a scientific result, but also reproduce it or extend it'.
This latest paradigm is also characterised by the collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of the research being undertaken at both national and international levels.
National and International Drivers for Change Governments worldwide are investing in national research information infrastructures to drive national innovation.
Because universities clearly have a central role in the generation of knowledge and innovation, they are major stakeholders in national innovation strategies.
A university's research impact—the extent to which its research informs further research and practice—is a significant component of the university league table measures [3].
In May 2004 the Australian Government announced that it would establish Quality and Accessibility Frameworks for Publicly Funded Research as part of the Backing Australia's Ability – Building our Future through Science and Innovation.
The principal objective of the Research Quality Framework (RQF) initiative was to develop the basis for an improved assessment of the quality and impact of publicly funded research as well as an effective process to achieve this [4].
The proposed Australian model, not unsurprisingly, had strong parallels with its British counterpart.
However, as it happened, feedback and submissions from the sector in response to various issues took place prior to the announcement in March 2006 that the UK government was going to change its Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) model.
Ultimately both countries adopted amended research evaluation models which, however, retained the original principal objectives.
The UK now has its Research Excellence Framework (REF) [5] while Australia has just initiated its Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) [6].
At the same time New Zealand has introduced the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) [7].
In Australia ERA will be used to measure the quality of Australian universities' research against international benchmarks as well as to inform funding decisions.
Another driver is the fact that good research requires good management.
In recognition of this principle, many major research funders worldwide either currently have or are implementing policies that require grant holders to submit data management plans for formal approval and to manage their data in accordance with those plans.
The National Science Foundation, for example, has mandated that data management plans will be subject to peer review [8].
Moore's Chasm In terms of the actual practice of eResearch, stellar examples in Australia include supercomputing (e.g.
climate modelling), human physiome project, bioinformatics, Australian Synchrotron [9], and preservation of languages and cultures.
However these are but 'islands of excellence in oceans of ignorance' [10].
Australia is not unique is this regard.
Why therefore—despite all the clear indications of how research is evolving—is there such a low uptake of eResearch?
The answer can be found in a model developed to explain the lifecycle for the adoption of technology.
The technology adoption lifecycle is a sociological model developed by Joe M. Bohlen, George M. Beal and Everett M. Rogers at Iowa State University, building on earlier research conducted there by Neal C. Gross and Bryce Ryan [11].
Subsequently in his book, Crossing the chasm, Geoffrey Moore [12] proposes a variation of the original lifecycle.
He suggests that for 'discontinuous or disruptive innovations', there is a gap or chasm between the first two adopter groups (innovators / early adopters), and the early majority.
Figure 1: Technology Adoption Lifecycle Moore's technology adoption lifecycle graph [13] describes how technology enthusiasts and visionaries are the first to embrace a new technology, followed by a frustrating period of time before the pragmatists (early majority) start to utilise the technology, followed by conservatives (late majority) and finally sceptics (laggards).
Using Moore's model for the adoption of technology, we are at that point on the chart where eResearch needs to move across the 'chasm' which separates early adopters from the early majority.
Deterrents to Crossing the Chasm With increased opportunity comes increased complexity.
Across all disciplines researchers are expressing concern about: duplication of effort loss or difficulty in recovering data for use in future research projects security of confidential data data organisation data backups and archiving data for long-term preservation data sharing or publishing data ethics data synchronisation Undoubtedly one of the largest deterrents is the effort required of researchers not only to locate their data, but also to format it for sharing.
This highlights the lack of implementation of clearly defined data standards, e.g.
formats and metadata [14].
Compounding the problem is that even if researchers are prepared to allocate resources to data sharing, it is unquestionably a lot of work and in many cases there are no mechanisms in place to facilitate the process.
The latter is particularly true of the newer data types.
Researchers are caught in the tension between being pushed to adopt eResearch practices and resistance to change because of perceived obstacles.
Addressing the Challenge In developing and supporting research infrastructure, it is clear that the content—and content is used here to encompass all research output—will not achieve critical mass by virtue of individual voluntary effort.
It is a huge task which should not be left to non-profit organisations and individual universities, writes James Boyle, a Duke University law professor and founding board member of Creative Commons [14].
Instead the energy must shift to a coordinated effort between institutions, particularly universities, and the national government.
This need for high-level collaboration has been echoed in a recent report to the European Commission [15].
In addition, as O'Brien [16] observes, individuals are important to the outcome.
The infrastructure must build 'a bridge between researchers, university and national priorities'.
Such an infrastructure will—by its very nature—help bridge the eResearch chasm.
Australian National Agenda As part of the Australian government's NCRIS (National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy) initiative, the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) was formed to support the 'Platforms for Collaboration' capability.
The service is underpinned by two fundamental concepts: with the evolution of new means of data capture and storage, data has become an increasingly important component of the research endeavour, and research collaboration is fundamental to the resolution of the major challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century [17].
With a view to increasing the visibility / discoverability of Australian research data collections, ANDS is building the Research Data Australia (RDA) service [18].
It consists of Web pages describing data collections produced by or relevant to Australian researchers.
RDA publishes only the descriptive metadata; it is at the discretion of the custodian whether access, i.e.
links, will be provided to the corresponding data.
Behind RDA lies the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) [19] which is a combination of the set of shareable Australian research collections, the descriptions of those collections including the information required to support their reuse, the relationships between the various elements involved (the data, the researchers who produced it, the instruments that collected it and the institutions where they work), and the infrastructure needed to enable, populate and support the Commons.
Griffith University: Creating a Framework for eResearch Griffith University has received NCRIS grant funding for research data identification and discovery.
Griffith's Seeding the Data Commons project has captured data about the University's research datasets, has assessed each dataset and determined appropriate access, and has then published 1,100+ records to Research Data Australia.
In addition Griffith University is the lead partner with the Queensland University of Technology in an ANDS-EIF (Education Investment Fund) project to develop a middleware software solution which will aggregate data sources from within the University for uploading to Research Data Australia.
In a university with an active, broad research programme, it is to be expected that research data collections will reside in a range of different repositories, e.g.
specialised discipline-specific repositories for stem cell research, historical data, and environmental data.
In order to participate in Australia's collaborative research infrastructure, universities will need to generate and collate a consistent metadata feed in order to populate Research Data Australia (RDA).
The Research Activity (Metadata Exchange) Hub is a joint Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) project, funded by ANDS, for the purpose of developing a master collection of research data within the respective institutions, along with an automated update (feed) to Research Data Australia.
The hub collects appropriate metadata from research collections (at the content metadata level where possible) within the University through customised feeds from the various university content management systems.
Also where authoritative source metadata is held in University corporate systems, feeds extract data directly from those databases.
This hub then acts as a central university repository to feed information in a standard format to Research Data Australia as well as university library discovery tools and other research federations where appropriate.
The overall project objectives are: to develop a sustainable solution to automate the collection of new research data held within the University and to populate RDA; and to provide exemplars / good practice for Australian universities which want to be part of the national collaborative research infrastructure.
The following diagram depicts the role that the metadata hub plays in aggregating data and identifying the relationships between key data elements.
In addition two other external interfaces are required to complete the metadata picture.
They are required to utilise persistent identifiers from ANDS and the National Library Australia People Australia [20] service.
The end result is that this service not only integrates and aggregates data within the institution, but it also provides a key link into national systems.
Figure 2: Metadata Exchange Hub Given that the architecture that defines the hub must be open source, the decision was taken to implement a loosely coupled solution based on the Vitro software [21] developed at Cornell University, which is an open source Integrated Ontology Editor and Semantic Web Application.
The project is using this solution to support a research-focused ontology and to establish relationships between researchers and organisations, research collections, research activities (e.g.
projects) and services.
The project uses several other open source components, e.g.
Persistent ID generator, OAI-PMH provider and data integrator.
This approach has enabled maximum use of existing software and best use of programming time.
The following diagram is a simple illustration of the Metadata Exchange Hub components.
Vitro is referred to on the following diagrams as 'VIVO', which is based on Cornell's implementation of Vitro, which has been implemented without changes to the underlying software architecture.
Figure 3: Metadata Exchange Hub Architecture Research activity metadata is uploaded to Research Data Australia (RDA) using the Registry Interchange Format Collections and Services (RIF-CS).
This data interchange format is based on ISO 2146:2010 Information and documentation -Registry services for libraries and related organizations [22].
In addition an important part of the project has involved the development of a national research-focused ontology, based on the core Vitro ontology, which has been successfully deployed in the first version of the tool [23].
This ontology employs components of a number of established ontology standards and describes the relationships between them.
Collectively they provide a coherent framework for mapping the bulk of institutional research activity in Australia.
The table below lists all ontologies that are included in this customised version of Vitro.
Ontology Namespace ANDSHarvest (includes RIF-CS) http://ands.org.au/guides/persistent-identifiers-working.html Bibontology http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/ Dublin Core elements http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ Dublin Core terms (includes RIF-CS) http://purl.org/dc/terms/ Event Ontology (includes RIF-CS) http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl# FOAF (includes RIF-CS) http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ FOR 2008 Ontology http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/allprimarymainfeatures/5D99AEA1DD8AA8E0CA2574180005421C geopolitical.owl http://aims.fao.org/aos/geopolitical.owl# ns http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns# SEO 2008 Ontology http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/allprimarymainfeatures/5D99AEA1DD8AA8E0CA2574180005421C SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) (includes RIF-CS) http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# time http://www.w3.org/2006/time# Vitro public constructs http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/ VIVO core 1.0 (includes RIF-CS) http://vivoweb.org/ontology/core# vivo-vitro.rdf Internal vitro/vivo ontology Griffith University Profile Extensions Internal vitro/vivo ontology Table 1: Vitro-ANDS Ontology The architecture of the Hub has been designed to allow for automatic machine-to-machine communication for the ingest of university research activity data.
In the first step (Figure 4) previously identified relevant metadata is harvested from university repositories, data stores and corporate systems in its native form.
Figure 4: Metadata Harvested from University Systems The next step (Figure 5) is to check if persistent identifiers exist for any people or projects in national systems.
Key national systems are operated by the National Library of Australia (Trove [24], People Australia), Australian Research Council (ARC), and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).
In the case of Trove [24] and ANDS, if none exist, requests are made (machine to machine) to create an ID, i.e.
new researcher person ID.
Figure 5: Obtain Persistent Identifiers The final step (Figure 6) is to upload the file to the RDA for publication.
This is done by making the RIF-CS formatted metadata available for harvest via an OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface using the OAI-CAT component [25].
Research Data Australia periodically harvests the new and updated institutional data via this interface.
Figure 6: Upload to Research Data Australia The connectivity between research data and researchers is important, especially for purposes of reuse and in cross-disciplinary research.
Identifying relationships between people, projects and institutions, for example, enhances opportunities for collaboration and new research [26] [27].
An important part of Griffith University's Metadata Exchange Hub is to expose the relationships –using RIF-CS—among researchers, their projects and their research outputs, as illustrated in Figure 7 Figure 7: RIF-CS Relationships A more detailed analysis of the technical aspects of the implementation was presented at the 2010 VIVO conference [28].
Implications for Researchers Researchers are already providing feedback to Research Data Services (Division of Information Services) on corrections to metadata.
In addition, exposing their research in RDA has made many of them more aware of Griffith's own institutional repository.
They have been contacting the Division, requesting assistance in getting more of their publications (metadata and full-text files) into the Institutional Repository.
It has been heartening to see the engagement from researchers.
A support page for Research Data Australia on the Griffith Library Web site provides information for other interested researchers.
In addition researchers are seeing the potential for building a rich personal profile based on the relationships as shown above in Figure 7.
Research Centre directors are seeing opportunities to take this one step further by using these relationships to develop research centre profiles.
Griffith University in turn is building an institutional research profile.
An increase in the collection of research data should increase opportunities for identifying collaborators for new research and identifying existing data for reuse.
As a consequence of researchers publishing this data, ideally more attention will be paid to research data management including preservation.
This initiative should also help to prepare researchers for new scholarly publishing paradigms, especially integration of data with publications [2].
All of this work ideally will lead to improvements in research quality [29] as well as an increase in the rate at which new discoveries are made and put to use [2].
Conclusion In Moore's model the key to crossing the chasm—for marketing and sales—requires the following steps: target a specific market niche as the 'point of attack' and then focus all the resources on achieving the dominant leadership position in that segment.
In Australia, the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) has focused on research collaboration and has taken a leadership role in building a national collaborative research infrastructure.
This strategy is designed to facilitate better engagement with eResearch by Australian researchers and to integrate with other international initiatives.
It was suggested at the beginning of this paper that coordinated efforts should be initiated at a national level between the government and institutions, particularly universities.
Within this context, initiatives such as those undertaken at Griffith University start to build the next layer of infrastructure which connects individual researchers, universities and the national research community.
At an institutional level the Griffith Metadata Exchange Hub is a first step in building local infrastructure which helps address some of the deterrents for researchers to 'cross the chasm' by removing key technology barriers.
It encourages researchers to see beyond the 'project' to the importance of making data from research activity, past and current, more discoverable and accessible.
Acknowledgement The authors would like to acknowledge a speech presented at Griffith University in 2010 by Rob Cooke, CEO, Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, which inspired them to contextualise this discussion in terms of Moore's chasm.
They would also like to acknowledge the work of the Research Collection Metadata Exchange Hub Project Team a joint effort among Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology and the Australian National Data Service for the technical aspects of this paper.
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"Research collaboration and research output: A longitudinal study of 65 biomedical scientists in a New Zealand university", Research Policy 38(2):306-317 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2008.11.011 Author Details Malcolm Wolski Acting Director, Information Services (Scholarly Information and Research) Griffith University Email: m.wolski@griffith.edu.au Web site: http://www.griffith.edu.au/ Joanna Richardson Team Leader, Research Content (Scholarly Information and Research) Griffith University Email: j.richardson@griffith.edu.au Web site: http://www.griffith.edu.au/ Return to top Article Title: "Moving Researchers across the eResearch Chasm" Author: Malcolm Wolski and Joanna Richardson Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/wolski-richardson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Research Libraries and the Power of the Co-operative Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Research Libraries and the Power of the Co-operative Buzz data software framework database infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation identifier vocabularies blog repositories copyright flickr preservation oai-pmh cataloguing graphics multimedia marc aggregation ead ejournal ebook dspace youtube facebook interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS John MacColl considers the 'co-operative imperative' upon research libraries, and describes the work which the former Research Libraries Group is undertaking as part of OCLC.
RLG Programs became part of OCLC in the summer of 2006.
In November of last year, RLG Programs announced the appointment of a European Director, John MacColl.
This article explains the rationale behind the combination of RLG with the OCLC Office of Research, and describes the work programme of the new Programs and Research Group.
It argues for co-operation as the necessary response to the challenges presented to research libraries as the Web changes the way researchers work, and it lays out a new programme dedicated to research outputs, which will have significant European Partner involvement.
What Game Are We In?
Ranganathan's Fourth Law of Library Science [1] 'Save the time of the user', has never been more urgent a mandate upon research libraries and information services than it is at this point in the development of the Web.
Research libraries have in many ways been left behind by the Web.
It is a commonplace for research library directors to admit that researchers have deserted the physical premises of their libraries in droves, though they continue to make use of the e-journals which are licensed for them by libraries.
But for much of their information seeking, discovery and use, they now make use of the tools of the Web – Google, Google Scholar, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and a host of services – such as CiteSeer for computer scientists which they have built for themselves without library input.
Libraries in research institutions have sought to re-establish their priority within the working lives of researchers by building new infrastructure – institutional repositories, federated search services, and virtual research environments – but the evidence of take-up is generally not convincing.
Two decades ago, academic libraries still saw themselves as set on a course towards UBC, Universal Bibliographic Control.
One of the core programmes of IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations), the UBC programme office closed in 2003.
The closure was not the result of UBC having been achieved.
The Web had happened.
And whereas the early days of automation in libraries had led to the belief that computer-assisted bibliographic services (witness MARC) would be the instrument which would finally make UBC a reality for a profession which had spent over a century refining and improving its controls over research information, in fact what happened with the Web was that automation evolved into something much more than an instrument of bureaucratic efficiency, and became a universal medium for human interchange and communication.
The currency of research information was widened way beyond the digital analogues of the print paradigm, to include preprints of research papers, conference presentations, image banks, datasets, graphical representations produced from them, and a variety of community conversation venues which reflected the heterogeneity of research cultures.
Libraries were sent reeling.
The notion of Universal Bibliographic Control became difficult even to imagine in this widened environment of shared research inputs and outputs.
Universal loss of control is what followed.
Their responses to the Web revolution were nonetheless generally correct.
The Web is changing scholarly publishing, and so the motivations behind institutional repository development are on target.
And we do need to provide for discovery which allows for the resources in our care to be found by those who seek them in the new medium.
The Web provided the information age with a vast, functional, networked environment which suited it very well but in doing so it accelerated the information age paradigm of scarce attention and abundant resources [2], fully reversing the paradigm to which libraries had adapted well but which was already disappearing in the late 20th century, of abundant attention and scarce resources.
And so, indeed, we had to find new and effective ways to save the time of the user.
But in our efforts to do so, we have tended too quickly to set up and fix in place other new services, in ways which are too influenced by the paradigms of our pre-Web professional existence, and without due attention to the behaviour of our users (whose well-understood ways of working in the print world we thought we knew and so had stopped checking on).
Researchers have deserted our services not because the answers to all of their information discovery, access, fufilment and persistence needs are met by the Web's big services, and those built by their own communities, but because we cannot meet these needs either.
We cannot provide them with high-quality, authoritative, reliable and comprehensive services across the research domains they inhabit.
By contrast, services like Google Scholar and CiteSeer do indeed save the time of the user, and if the content they provide is compromised or limited in certain ways, then the answer perhaps ought to be to address the provision of the content, rather than seeking to create new tools.
Research Information at Web Scale In the summer of 2006 the Research Libraries Group, a membership organisation representing a powerful sample of some of the world's top research libraries drawn from the academic and national library sectors, museum libraries, and archives, became part of OCLC, the world's largest library co-operative.
Since its foundation in 1967, OCLC has been involved in building a co-operative database for the sharing of catalogue records – WorldCat – which is now the largest bibliographic database in the world, with around 100 million separate records, and over a billion holdings attached to them from member libraries across the globe.
The 'marriage' of RLG and OCLC was a timely one.
Despite their difficulties in meeting the challenges of the Web in recent years, research libraries are pioneers in the creation of new territory for information and memory organisations in this digital age, which is a much happier medium for the information age than was the multimedia analogue age which preceded it.
The digital age has itself resolved into the world of the Web, which is a habitat so natural for people that we have seen it produce a set of hub services with high gravitational pull, now used daily by millions of people across the world, and which are setting the standards for the way services on the Web behave.
When we use the Web to pursue information-based goals now, we expect interfaces which allow access, search, fulfilment and contribution within a paradigm which is becoming as clear as the printed codex did in its day for the more limited purposes which it could serve.
In short, the Web now allows the information age the freedom it needs, and for researchers of all kinds, that means that they require information services which play in the environments which have high gravitational pull (so that they can be found there and are convenient), which behave in expected ways within those environments, and which have 'Web-scale' comprehensiveness.
To be 'Web scale' means to benefit from the power of aggregation of both supply and demand which is so well exemplified among the major hubs by amazon.com.
In the world of information and memory organisations, OCLC's WorldCat has Web scale.
It represents an aggregation of supply – through user-contributed content in the form of catalogue records (now extending to the article level, as well as books and journal titles) and of demand, from users requiring copies of records for their own databases.
Indeed, it took on a role of serving the 'long tail' of libraries and their users – for inter-lending as well as for copy cataloguing – long before the term was coined by Chris Anderson [3].
But that core model has ramified in various ways as the information age has become the age of the Web.
The users who contribute content are now publishers as well as libraries.
They are library consortia, contributing entire national union catalogues.
On this sort of scale, WorldCat becomes more than just a massive set of records for copy cataloguing.
It is a vast pool of authoritative, standardised data, and therefore capable of supporting data-mining to deliver some fascinating new Web-scale services.
WorldCat Identities [4], for example, creates a page for every name in WorldCat, algorithmically drawing together variant forms of personal name, in multiple languages and scripts, together with cover art from the bibliographic objects, around a graphical bibliographic profile which shows publications by and publications about the subject in a timeline graphic.
OCLC WorldMap [5] shows the bibliographic profiles of entire countries, as represented in WorldCat, and allows up to four at a time to be compared.
Much of the potential of WorldCat to go beyond the support of cataloguing is only now beginning to be explored.
With the incorporation of RLG into OCLC, that exploration has been accelerated and focused, because the RLG team of Program Officers, experienced in the needs of the research information and memory organisation sector across universities, national libraries, museums and archives, has now joined forces with the former OCLC Office of Research, which consists of research scientists and software engineers who organise and mine WorldCat on behalf of OCLC members, and who prototype and build new tools which allow it to meet the needs of these member libraries.
The bringing together of RLG and OCLC therefore gave Web-scale capability to research libraries, so that they can now build services of value to researchers who themselves operate at Web scale, and can assist institutions in exploiting Web-scale effects in order to make their service offerings system-wide more efficient and progressive.
At the same time, it gave OCLC the opportunity to put the research information world's needs firmly at the forefront of its agenda.
OCLC of course represents libraries of all kinds, but the research information sector arguably stands to gain more from global pooling of bibliographic data at the present time because its users – researchers, learners and visitors to cultural memory services on the Web – are living out much of their professional lives and their cultural engagement on the Web.
These are the needs which require Web-scale services to be delivered, and OCLC has the Web-scale from which these new services can be specified, prototyped, tested, built, evaluated and released.
That work is done within OCLC Programs and Research.
The Group divides into two teams, OCLC Research and RLG Programs, which work closely with each other.
They plan and deliver their work via two synergistic agendas.
The Research group is currently working on the areas of content management, collection and user analysis, interoperability, knowledge organisation, and systems and service architecture.
Research scientists are addressing a swathe of issues facing the information profession through the lens of data analysis and experimentation.
In the other half of the partnership, RLG Programs has a related Work Agenda which is likewise structured into themes, programmes and projects, but which grapples with issues through the environment of libraries, museums and archives 'on the ground', using its Partners as test populations and sources of user information.
It surveys its Partner libraries, engages them in conversations, works with them to facilitate problem-solving, and seeks sectoral consensus to sectoral problems wherever possible.
The idea of 'Web-scale' services permeates the entire work agenda of RLG Programs as it does OCLC Research.
Web-scale solutions are sought to system-wide problems, and these solutions only arrive through collaborative discussion and analysis, from which fully scoped many-dimensioned problems emerge, and can be tackled.
Priority Areas The RLG Programs Work Agenda consists of six themes, which are shown here: Figure 1.
The RLG Programs Work Agenda Supporting New Modes of Research, Teaching, and Learning This theme contains programmes devoted to 'scholarship in text aggregations', 'personal research collections' and (recently added) 'research outputs in reputation management', which is described more fully below.
Managing the Collective Collection Activity within this theme covers 'shared print collections' and 'harmonisation of digitisation'.
The feasibility of mass digitisation of special collections, the terms and conditions libraries should set when dealing with digitisation partners like Google and Microsoft, and the identification of unique holdings as priority targets for digitisation and preservation, are all topics which are currently featured under the 'collective collection' theme.
WorldCat can also be mined for data on last copies and on collection overlaps in support of collection management across the digital corpus.
This work is complemented by OCLC Research under its 'content management' theme, where data mining is being used to analyse the 'system-wide print book collection' to establish the size and characteristics of aggregate print book holdings, with an emphasis on implications for digitisation and preservation decision-making.
A member of the Research team is also working on the economic justification of digital preservation.
Economic issues associated with preserving digital resources over the long term are a critical research area for the digital preservation community.
The work includes the development of forecasting strategies and sustainable business and economic models.
A separate project on the 'anatomy of aggregate collections' analyses the digitised corpus provided via the Google Book Search programme.
Here, the Programs and Research synergy is very powerful, since 18 of the 29 libraries around the world which are currently working with Google on book digitisation from their collections are also RLG Programs Partners.
A 'last copy' project identifies rare or unique materials in individual library collections.
Comparative collection assessment work within Research is looking at collection development, assessment, and resource sharing for print and e-book collections.
A prototype publisher name server resolves ISBN prefixes to publisher names, resolves variant publisher names to a preferred form, and captures and makes available various publisher attributes (such as location, language, genre and dominant subject domain of the publisher's output).
Renovating Descriptive and Organising Practices Under this theme, we examine ways in which collecting institutions can introduce efficiencies into their metadata creation operations, including cross-domain leverages, work on persistent identifiers, and the interoperability of vocabularies to assist discovery.
In the archives field, RLG Programs continues the work developed by RLG on EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and on the EAC (Encoded Archival Context) standard.
Modelling New Service Infrastructures This theme is concerned with ways to 'lift' library functionality to the network level.
Much of the work done by RLG Programs seeks to achieve and promote new areas of consensus, and here we are exploring ways of developing integrated library system functionality within a shared context on the network.
Registries have been described by Lorcan Dempsey as the 'intelligence in the network' [6], and are obvious levers of efficiency.
RLG Programs staff are working with OCLC Research colleagues to develop, test and promulgate new registries, such as a Registry of Copyright Evidence, which will save the time of those seeking to digitise works in establishing their copyright status quickly and easily.
And in work which crosses the boundary between new service infrastructures and renovating descriptive practices, we are developing tools for aggregating and syndicating third-party data and user-generated content to enhance metadata and help form the recommendation of and foundation for additional services.
Architecture & Standards; Measurements & Behaviours Underlying all of this work are the ever-present efforts to measure and analyse user behaviours, and to advance standardisation work.
RLG Programs engages Partners in hypothesis formulation and testing of their users' preferences for discovering, gathering, organising, and sharing information, and Programs and Research staff participate and often lead in both formal and informal standards efforts in representing library, archive, and museum interests.
Research Outputs in Reputation Management We are conscious of a strong European interest in the area of research outputs publication and management.
Open Access publication of research outputs in conjunction with their publication in peer-reviewed journals has become an issue not merely of efficiency in research lifecycle management, but also of political and economic import in a system in which research is financed largely from public monies.
The accountability of public expenditure on research has become a high-profile matter, and public frameworks for the assessment of HE research have emerged.
The latter rely, among other measures, on some evaluation of the quality of published output.
Mainly due to the high cost of sustaining these frameworks on the basis of peer review of significant samples of research outputs produced by large numbers of institutions, there is discussion about moving parts of this evaluation from a peer-review process to one based on metrics, including, but not limited to, the well-tested approach of citation analysis.
These frameworks for assessment necessitate new modes of interaction between university research administration and information management services offered by libraries.
In the context of institutional management of reputation based on research performance profile and its associated financial reward, this is an area of library practice which has assumed a very high priority for research libraries.
Good practice has not yet emerged, however, and the models for confronting these challenges are diverse due to the novelty of practice involved in libraries working on systems design with research administration units.
Nor is there yet any common agreement on an optimal set of metrics for the assessment of research such that individual researchers as well as their institutions can be easily profiled nationally and internationally.
OCLC work to date in the Open Access area has been mainly through the DSpace harvesting project, in which OCLC Research periodically harvests OAI-compliant metadata from the institutional repositories of interested DSpace users.
This metadata is harvested into a format suitable for re-harvesting by non-OAI services and popular search engines.
With our new 'research outputs in reputation management' programme, Program Officers will also work with Partner libraries in this problem space, where some early state-of-the-art work could have useful impact, and should suggest further lines of work.
Furthermore, it is an area where a comparative perspective would be interesting, given emerging national research assessment frameworks.
One project within the programme will consider expertise profiling.
Many universities have expertise databases, which are available to the media or others.
At the same time, some institutions are experimenting with academic staff 'home pages' in institutional repositories.
University managements are interested in these services as ways of showcasing research profiles and strengths, and demonstrating knowledge transfer capability and practice.
This information is useful to universities in their relationships with the media, funding agencies, their own governance bodies, and other organisations.
What are the ways in which universities are disclosing academic staff expertise and productivity?
Do they intersect with existing library services?
In some institutions, some of these services are provided by third parties.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach?
Another project will look at workflow within research output administration.
What types of workflow are emerging to support research administration?
Typically, libraries running research repositories are providing data which is amalgamated with financial data (on research grant income) and headcount data (on numbers of research staff and students) to compose discipline-specific profiles at varying degrees of granularity.
Are models for efficient data-merging yet in evidence?
Are third-party system vendors responding to this need?
Can best practice approaches be identified and promulgated?
What models have emerged or are emerging in the relationship between institutional repositories and the managed publications lists that are required to drive assessment inputs?
Is there any evidence of best practice?
With both expertise profiling and research output administration, we anticipate an initial survey phase which identifies the state of the art against a defined set of activities.
A Working Group will be convened to set and direct the survey.
It will include experts in research repository developments from several different territorial and disciplinary cultures, together with academic staff and university research administration representatives.
This Group will meet at the conclusion of the survey phase to consider existing best practice, required standards, and recommended new functionality.
Their conclusions will lead to a report which will be promoted widely within the research library, publication and assessment communities.
This may then lead to more targeted pieces of work based on the intersection of Partner interests and our findings.
Finally, we will also focus upon 'search engine optimisation of research outputs'.
In an environment of rankings, and where Web visibility can enhance reputation, individual academic staff, institutions, departments and research groups are interested in good practice.
Some now have guidelines for how they should be named and credited in academic publications, so that they can be represented as fully and consistently as possible in citation analyses.
Research outputs held by institutional repositories generally conform to well-supported bibliographic networked data standards (e.g.
Dublin Core, OAI-PMH) but not to the degree of standardisation which is required in a non-distributed bibliographic system (e.g.
on terminology use and authority files).
What steps are institutions taking to promote the discoverability of their research outputs on the Web?
In the context of providing content which is tuned to optimise discovery by third-party search engines, what is the minimum platform investment which research libraries need to make?
Models have been proposed to encourage quality thresholds for metadata in institutional repositories to be achieved via co-operative metadata approaches.
What is the value of a more highly regulated co-operative approach as opposed to the lesser regulated approach of producing more variable metadata and trusting to third-party search engines such as Google to perform effectively?
How closely related are enhanced metadata quality standards and search engine optimisation in the field of research outputs?
This project is likely to take the form of an international conference of designers, developers and managers of bibliographic databases and digital repositories, together with information scientists.
An agenda will be set to allow presentations of the state of the art in research assessment policy regimes, and in database and repository functionality, leading on to an attempt to record consensus and extrapolate common requirements for database and repository design.
Strategic Guidance for the Sector Programs and Research is working for the research information system as a whole.
The focus of its staff across both the Programs and Research teams is on system-wide efficiencies, delivered from a deep understanding of the Web environment which now provides the medium for the conduct of research, and the discovery, delivery and preservation of its outputs.
We work primarily with our individual Partner libraries from many of the top universities, national institutions, museums and archives around the world – many of which are in the UK.
In addition, we recognise the strong roles of national funding agencies and library and research consortia within many European countries, and across Europe as a whole.
We are keen to work strategically with these groups in order to pursue common agendas which will improve the research library sector performance for the good of researchers and research information users throughout the world.
The research library community does not have the financial muscle of Google or Microsoft – not even if its financial resources are pooled.
But it does have a Web-scale bibliographic resource in WorldCat.
For libraries whose records are fully represented in it, there are opportunities to exploit that scale and benefit from network effects which will ensure that their resources are discovered and used not only by their own constituents, but by the vast numbers of hidden users across the world whose own research can benefit from access to resources which were previously unavailable to them.
And as it grows ever larger, so its capacity to improve the quality of metadata-based research services in general is increased.
The Programs and Research Team is acutely conscious of the need to make the data in this massive, co-operatively created Web-scale resource work ever harder for its builders and their users.
Research libraries have indicated their commitment to co-operation for decades, and they have realised the benefits of it from interlending and shared cataloguing.
But the challenges presented by the Web environment mean that co-operation which extends only to interlending and shared cataloguing is not enough.
Being awake in a Web world requires a much deeper commitment to the power of co-operation.
References Ranganathan, S.R.
(1931) The five laws of library science, Madras Library Association Haque, Umair (Tuesday November 5, 2005) 'The attention economy' Bubblegeneration blog http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2005/11/attention-economy-across-consumer.cfm Anderson, Chris (2004) 'The long tail' Wired 12 (10)) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html WorldCat Identities http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/ OCLC WorldMap http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/worldmap/default.htm "The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After", Lorcan Dempsey, February 2006, Ariadne, Issue 46 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/ Author Details John MacColl European Director RLG Programs OCLC Programs & Research Email: maccollj@oclc.org Web site: http://www.oclc.org/programsandresearch/ Return to top Article Title: "Research Libraries and the Power of the Co-operative" Author: John MacColl Publication Date: 30-April-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 55 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/maccoll/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Handshake Session at International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Handshake Session at International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam Buzz data wiki api infrastructure metadata identifier schema repositories oai-pmh visualisation interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Adrian Stevenson highlights the Handshake Session which formed part of the International Repositories InfrastructureWorkshop, at the Radisson SAS Hotel, Amsterdam, held over 16-17 March 2009.
I was a participant in the repository handshake group discussions at the JISC-, SURFand DRIVER-funded International Repositories Workshop in Amsterdam in March 2009 [1].
Motivation for deposit was widely discussed at the start of the day.
It also became apparent after a few hours that the premise of the discussions, i.e.
'repository handshake', was not a universally clear concept.
Some felt the term referred to technical protocols, and some to business processes.
There was a general feeling that the term might be too broad to be helpful.
On the second day the group discussed and refined some previously provided use cases.
A number of new use cases were then developed, and there was an attempt made to prioritise the resultant set.
The group felt that the development of certain demonstrators would be helpful, and that this should ideally happen in the next six to twelve months.
It was generally felt that any significant international infrastructural solutions would require funding and facilitation.
Session Objectives I attended this event with my colleagues Paul Walk and Michael Day of UKOLN.
The purpose and objectives of the workshop were stated as follows: 'The focus of this two day workshop is limited to repositories of open access research papers in order to progress the most mature aspects of developing repository networks.
However, it will be necessary to highlight links with other data/resource types and to reflect trends in research practice including international, collaborative, data-driven science.
The objectives of the workshop are: to review and accept the description of the current position as described in the briefing materials (see below) to come to a shared vision of an international repositories infrastructure or, at least, the infrastructure components that might best be developed internationally to identify the essential components of an international repositories infrastructure to review the approaches to sustainability, scalability and interoperability being taken by these components, bearing in mind the wider research infrastructure to agree ways to resolve any issues identified in (3) above, including areas where practical international collaboration would help to identify critical success factors in achieving the progress identified in (4) above, bearing in mind the current position to consider ways in which the progress might be coordinated and reviewed over time We hope that we will be able to agree action plans that can be taken forward internationally.'
Linking concepts 16 March 2009 The first thing to note was that the title of all the groups had changed between the pre-meeting wiki discussions and the event itself.
The group I was interested in had changed from 'Deposit Workflows and Environments' to the more opaque-sounding, but roughly analogous 'Repository Handshake' group.
I think it's fair to say that the premise of this session was confused from the outset and providing a report is bound to be subject to some retrospective rationalisation and reductionism.
Discussions on Definitions Peter Burnhill from EDINA was facilitating the session and he began with an overview of some typical deposit scenarios.
The session started with a general discussion around motivations for deposit.
A well received point was made that the means by which repositories fit into everyday workflow processes for people (depositors) in their place of work is important over and above any repository-specific issues.
It eventually became clear after several hours that there was little clarity or common understanding about was meant by the term 'repository handshake'.
Requirements were felt to be essential in to clarifying the debate.
Simeon Warner of Cornell University suggested that motivation for deposit should be ruled out of scope given that plenty of examples existed already.
A key issue appeared to be whether we were talking about handshake protocols or policies, and there were different views on this as to which should be the subject of the session.
There was considerable disagreement about 'what the problem is' – some thought protocols, others metadata, and some again thought it was policies, and the discussion became seriously fragmented at this point for some time.
Paul Walk of UKOLN suggested there should be a distinction between handshakes for internal purposes within institutions and their wider usage, an approach that would help in deriving use cases.
There was some consensus that the scope of our discussions should only cover obtaining resources from 'outside' the system, despite some members of the group wanting to focus on moving resources between repositories.
In the second session Peter suggested that we need to work out 'what is to be done' as Lenin would have put it [2].
Simeon amplified the point that the term'repository handshake' was not a clear one.
I felt this helped to move the debate along, as I think many in the room had not been altogether clear in their minds as to the basis for the discussions taking place.
For some, the term was very much about the protocol, for others more about the business processes, i.e.
who does what and how in the handshake.
As I think Simeon rightly pointed out, the discussion was so general at this stage that we were making no real progress.
He noted that repository handshakes have properties that are widely subject-specific, one example being in Physics, where academics do not cite page numbers.
17 March 2009 The second day started more promisingly with an attempt to get to work refining the four pre-prepared use cases [3].
In the first use case 'wishes' was changed to 'obliged to'.
The use case of depositing a link as opposed to the item itself was seen as being a key issue.
This was puzzling to me, as Jorum has been doing this for many years.
The title of the second use case was changed from 'multiple deposit' to 'deposit', with multiple deposit deemed as too wide-ranging.
Simeon felt it was important that users need not have to retype entries or have to go anywhere near the 'horrible repository'.
Issues surrounding the need for repositories to cater for academic recognition, and the difficulties occasioned by the lack of motivation to deposit, were widely discussed.
The third use case covered journal deposit.
Tara Packer from the Nature Publishing Group suggested that publishers would want to get involved in this area, to make a significant contribution to the process and provide a service that made the publishers look good.
In the session break I had an interesting chat with Clifford Lynch.
He said he was quite puzzled by the European focus on Open Access and funding mandates as the drivers for deposit, and the general desire for institutions to have their own IRs.
He said that in the US the driver was essentially data management provided at a national level, with repositories being subject-based and operated in a relatively cost-effective manner.
I also had an amusing conversation with Peter where the idea of a new repository verb 'BEG' was minted.
Emerging Use Cases In the final session we turned to a few new use cases.
Handshake 5 – Institution-assisted deposit by users of research project Handshake 6 – CV-driven bibliographies with links to papers Handshake 7 External sources that assist in the deposit process Handshake 8 Assisting researcher/author with publisher – discipline-specific Peter then attempted to get us to vote on the eight handshakes and met with some hesitancy from the group.
It was felt that the development of some kind of 'product' or demonstrator was required within the next six to twelve months.
Paul Walk suggested that some organisational facilitation would be needed to ensure things happen in terms of generating international solutions, such as providing international funding.
Simeon suggested it would be very difficult to get funding from the US and that it's probably best to persuade existing funding bodies to put cash in the pot.
In the closing session all groups came back together.
Peter Burnhill summarised the handshake session.
He suggested that our use cases could be nicknamed 'deposit opportunities'.
The focus should be on: more deposits; making it easier to deposit; and making deposit more rewarding for the depositor.
These were the key words for deposit – 'more', 'easier' and 'rewarding'.
While I doubt anyone would disagree with anything in Peter's summary, I was not sure it could reflect the entirety of discussions across the group.
Peter suggested a four-phase plan.
We may be able to achieve national leverage, but for truly international solutions we needed to get funders to engage with each other to manage this.
He went on to say that the group had outlined eight deposit opportunities with the suggestion that we focus on three of them in a six-month period, and that three or four exemplars should be highlighted in order to put some flesh on the bones.
A twoto three-year horizon seemed more realistic for the wider opportunities to bear fruit.
The two main use cases that came out of the two days of discussion were: Multiple author deposit – institutionally motivated.
Journal deposit from publisher as a service to their authors.
Input from Other Groups There were then summaries from the other groups.
Andrew Treloar spoke for the interoperable identification infrastructure group.
Some issues outlined were identifiers at the repository level, rules, approval mechanisms, temporal issues, issues around self-populating and depopulating repositories.
Authorship was mentioned, and how we might want multiple personae for work and home use.
Les Carr summarised for the citation services session.
The group looked at addressing issues surrounding global open access literature.
He walked us through a citation model the group had developed.
Les talked about repositories being able to hand on accurate references to other services.
This would be achieved by: establishing a testbed of repositories; creating APIs for reference list extraction; developing a reference extractor plug-in; and an OAI-PMH schema for reference lists.
There would need to be liaison with Crossref, university publishers, and so on.
There was mention of the creation of reference processors, reference services and other exemplar 'whizzy' reference services, for example for network visualisation and trackback.
Finally, the international repositories organisation group's deliberations were summarised.
There was talk of an activity plan, and that bottom-up funding for an organisation is required.
Furthermore, a concept should be formed around stakeholder needs.
Closing Keynote Clifford Lynch provided the closing note speech.
He addressed what he saw as the cross-cutting themes and implicit assumptions that had appeared during the two days of the workshop.
His first observation was that, given the workshop was about repositories and infrastructure, we had asked how we join up international repositories to get international infrastructure, but hadn't asked the question 'to what end?'
We had been wrestling with how repositories interacted with a whole set of other services, many of which were quite distinct.
We also had identity management issues related to identification of the individual and the organisation to address.
We also touched upon the complexities of coupling repositories with other services and their identity systems.
The important question was: do these places live within the same access management spheres?
If not, we had a problem.
Clifford felt there was a fascinating set of issues around the relationships between name management and name authority.
We needed to think about how personal name authority fitted with identity management in the repository space.
There were some registries in place, but they only represented the beginnings.
We needed to codify policy in a more sophisticated way.
We also had to include the needs of the deposit mandates of funders, for example, who funded the work, and who was the employer of creator.
He noted there was some discussion about the interfaces we expected repositories to make available.
It wasclear that we needed a lot more than just OAI-PMH.
We needed guidance on what range of interfaces repositories should provide.
The ability to be able to cross-deposit in an automated way was seen as very important, such as the idea of being able to upgrade materials or data in one repository with materials or data from another system, as might be the case if a publisher held better metadata.
We might want to be able to do a mass extraction or export from a repository.
These mass moves were quite likely to trigger performance issues.
We needed to be careful not to abuse the systems/networks in any syncing/matching exercises efficiency was key here.
Clifford was concerned about the idea/wish for auto-replication of materials from other repositories, and suggested that we needed to think about duplication problems from the outset, otherwise we were in danger of replicating some of the classic mistakes of computing history.
He mentioned that he and others at the event were frequently very frustrated by the restriction of the debate to traditional scholarly materials.
He noted that workflow was discussed at length, and he was confused about the lack of clarity around this concept.
Scholarly workflow might be clear, but generally workflow was not.
Where repositories were used in a more general context there were considerable likelihood of confusion over workflow notions.
The final issues covered were the need to change user behaviour in terms of authorial practices, and the role of the publisher.
Clifford noted that it was very difficult to alter scholarly behaviour.
The benefit of doing so had to be very clear to scholars if we were to have any hope of achieving this.
Clifford then mentioned the wish for structured references that supplement standard references with links and DOIs.
Could we do this with repositories?
If so, how costeffective would it be and of what quality?
Repositories and overlays, with the need to absorb some traditional publisher tasks into the repository space, might replace the traditional reference approach.
Repositories would exist alongside traditional publication methods.
We needed to make our assumptions explicit to get our priorities clear.
There was an ambiguity about the possible futures, and different people placed very different priorities on the range of possible services.
Clifford thought repositories were coming of age, and we needed to move our thinking about repository infrastructure out of its closed space and into a wider context.
The implication of this was that we had to situate the repository as just one of an overall set of services.
Peter Burnhill asked about possible timescales and the priorities.
Clifford replied we needed to get the identifiers solution right first, else we would encounter major problems down the line.
The capacity to cross-deposit lended itself to prototypes, which also required careful examination very soon.
Conclusion Generally speaking the workshop managed to go some way to achieving its objectives, and it does appear that the handshake group was one of the more difficult sessions from which to obtain clear and focused outputs.
Much of the first day was spent orientating ourselves and trying to get a grip on the scope of the discussions.
The second day did provide some refinement on existing use cases and some new ones that should be useful in informing the debate.
Clifford Lynch, as usual, provided some astute comments and much-needed perspective to help place the discussions in a wider context.
A wiki supporting the event's ongoing activities [4] has now been made public, and I look forward to seeing some activity in terms of the development of some demonstrators, especially as my own SWORD Project [5] is mentioned in phase 1 of the activities [6].
References UKOLN Events: International Repositories Workshop, March 2009: Home Page http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ir-workshop-2009/ In imitation of the widely circulated pamphlet by Lenin of the same name published in March 1902 as part of his attempt to galvanise the Bolshevik Party into practical and pragmatic action.
Repository Handshake use cases (Slideshare) http://www.slideshare.net/Earthowned/repository-handshake-use-cases International Repositories Infrastructure wiki http://repinf.pbwiki.com/ SWORD Project http://www.swordapp.org/ Repository Handshake – Extending An Open Hand http://repinf.pbwiki.com/Repository-handshake Author Details Adrian Stevenson SWORD Project Manager UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.stevenson@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.swordapp.org/ and http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Handshake Session at International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam" Author: Adrian Stevenson Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/handshake-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Archives in Web 2.0: New Opportunities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Archives in Web 2.0: New Opportunities Buzz data database rss portal archives tagging blog repositories video flickr gis ontologies youtube facebook twitter e-government privacy Citation BibTex RIS Marta Nogueira describes how three Web 2.0 applications (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) can work as a virtual extension for archives and other cultural organisations, by identifying benefits obtained from the use of Web 2.0 applications.
Archives are using Web 2.0 applications in a context that allows for new types of interaction, new opportunities regarding institutional promotion, new ways of providing their services and making their heritage known to the community.
Applications such as Facebook (online social network), Flickr (online image-sharing community) and YouTube (online video sharing community) are already used by cultural organisations that interact in the informal context of Web 2.0.
In this article I aim to describe how Web 2.0 can work as a virtual extension for archives and other cultural organisations, by identifying impacts and benefits resulting from the use of Web 2.0 applications together with some goals and strategies of such use.
Web 2.0: Impacts and Benefits The use of Web 2.0 applications [1] by archives and libraries is having several effects on the way their services and products are made available to the public, as well as on the way they operate (Archive 2.0 and Library 2.0).
Such impacts vary and depend on the type of applications, their characteristics and functionalities, and the way they are used and kept.
One of the immediate effects of the use of these applications is the growing number of public they reach (visitors, potential users or actual users) [2].
As an example, the collections on display on the Library of Congress Channel on YouTube had 1,044 registered users and 24,162 viewers in May 2009, a number that grew to 4,655 enrolled users and 96,685 viewers by December 2009.
On Flickr, a photograph of the Library of Congress [3] had been seen 6,433 times by 14 May 2009, with 15 comments and 5 notes while 25 people had added it to their Favourites; by 17 December 2009 the same image had been viewed 9,373 times, with 17 comments and 7 notes while 67 people had added it to their Favourites.
On Facebook, Patrimonigencat (Spain) had 655 friends in May 2009, a number that grew to 1,266 by December 2009.
The growing number of visitors to the page (Facebook), photostream (Flickr) or channel (YouTube) represents an extremely significant quantitative element to cultural organisations seeking to enlarge and diversify their users and to raise their public recognition far beyond their current number of users.
Apart from the increase in the number of users reached, there are other less immediate but nonetheless beneficial effects from the use of Web 2.0 applications.
In an article on the use of these applications, the Chinese library and information professional Dongmei Cao [4] listed eight benefits: increased importance of the library to the user; improvement in the library's image; potential of new interactive services to raise the level and quality of the service provided; increased involvement of users and improved communication of the library with such users; improvement in communication among librarians; greater ability to find quick solutions to meet the needs of users; improvement in shared knowledge and collaboration.
All these advantages, while being specifically applied to libraries and librarians, can be extended to archives.
And the benefits of the use of these applications while listed specifically to archives are also extended to libraries; in 2008 King listed benefits that Web 2.0 tools can confer on archives: 'increased awareness of its collections; varied access of its collections; diversification of users; improved relationships & links in the sector; additional information about collections; new dynamic ways to engage.'
[5].
In addition to the benefits mentioned by Dongmei Cao and Kiara King, others can be identified arising from the use of Web 2.0 applications such as: the use of such applications (at the moment) is free of charge; the increased visibility and presence on the Internet, and consequently around the globe (content search and tagging); the contribution to improved information literacy of users and the general public [6]; the recognition of users as a valid source of information.
Also the opportunity to enthuse users with the type of contact established and better communication through contact that is simultaneously institutional and informal, professional and personal.
Beside all the benefits of the use of Web 2.0 applications, there is also the impact of the use of these applications among institutions, as the use of these applications by high-profile organisations seems to be a factor in encouraging other institutions to join and use such tools.
For example, the presence of the Library of Congress on Flickr [7] and its role in the launching of the Commons Project [8] have definitely influenced other archives, libraries and museums to gain access to the project, independently of its reputation and pioneering characteristics.
The institutional standing of the Library of Congress seemed to encourage and thus multiply the use of this application by other organisations.
Web 2.0: Resistance to Use and Disadvantages Adoption of Web 2.0 applications by archives and libraries and other organisations operating in the cultural sphere is growing, as part of a general increasing trend in the use of such applications.
However, there nonetheless exists a degree of reluctance to the use of these applications by some archives and libraries.
Archives and libraries choose either to reject or postpone their adoption of such applications due to their lack of knowledge of them, or their reluctance to recognise these applications as 'official' or valid.
The informal nature of Web 2.0 seems to cause unease among institutions which might be said to operate within a formal sphere; such institutions do not consider them to offer sufficient added value to justify the necessary allocation of resources and effort to implement them, and point to the pressing nature of other priorities.
Other organisations mainly associate Web 2.0 applications with personal leisure.
However, leisure is one aspect of Web 2.0 that assumes little significance when compared to other factors.
Access, indexing and folksonomy [9], information recovery in new contexts, the attraction of different audiences and the raising of these institutions' profile are all issues directly related to archives and libraries and are well represented in Web 2.0 applications, creating new challenges for these institutions.
It is also quite likely that some of these institutions are observing the use and presence of archives and libraries already present on Web 2.0 and are considering their own involvement, deciding on how they can and should place themselves.
To some archives the process of adoption of Web 2.0 applications can also prove more onerous when approval is dependent on a hierarchy that may not always recognise the value of the organisation's presence on Web 2.0.
The use of such applications is free of charge and immediate, but their adoption still requires time and additional work from existing resources.
But the issue seems to revolve around the positioning of the organisation, on its own framing or the framing defined or allowed by its management.
However, some authors believe that this should not be regarded as a serious option, and that it should form part of libraries' marketing strategy: 'Many librarians focus their marketing energy and time around promotional activities including advertising, special events, publicity, and brand awareness.
But in today's world, marketing managers need to have Web 2.0 strategies and techniques as part of their library marketing plans.'
[10].
Apart from the resistance arising from the lack of knowledge or non-recognition of Web 2.0, the use of these applications also has a negative side.
Data protection of social network users may not always be guaranteed, there is also the danger of giving access to data to third parties with commercial motives, and the fact that some of these applications, which are now free of charge, may not be toll-free in the future (for instance, whither Facebook, now that it has 350 million users?
[11].
Such questions are not yet totally clarified, nor can they be easily answered, neither by individual users nor institutional users [12].
There are also other issues, such as the possibility of anonymous users interacting in an abusive fashion with these institutions, as well as unwelcome associations with certain religious and / or political groups or symbols.
The fact that these applications are time-consuming and that they may be used under the name of an organisation are also relevant issues.
For instance, the registration on Facebook of an archive or library by an individual user without mentioning that it is not the official page of the institution, that is, without the authorisation of the organisation supposedly registered.
Such instances have occurred in the past and continue to arise on Facebook; for example, the page of Archivo General de Simancas was created by an archive user without the sanction of the Archive, and which registers very little activity [13].
An identical situation may also have occurred with the Facebook page of the Directorate-General of Portuguese Archives (DGARQ).
In the beginning of April 2010, the page was deleted leaving doubts as to whether it was the official page or if the page was created informally, without the organisation's recognition.
This situation has been rectified and DGARQ has now a new page at Facebook [14].
The success or failure in the use of Web 2.0 applications is dependent on a number of factors; namely, the capacity of organisations to maintain active use of these applications and to take the initiative in such use (i.e.
to be the first to use them before enthusiastic individual users do so in their place and thereby obviate such irregular situations).
On Facebook, regular interaction with a group of friends may be decisive for contact with visitors, real users or potential users.
On Flickr, the regular display of images keeps users engaged and encourages them to visit and explore an organisation's image database more frequently.
The same happens on YouTube.
Web 2.0 Applications: Strategies and Objectives The use of Web 2.0 applications by archives and libraries is best undertaken with defined strategies and objectives.
However their adoption may derive from the fact that other institutions are using them or even simply because of 'fashion'.
While objectives are often more easily identified, the strategies of use that generate them are defined in a more or a less clear manner, depending on institutions' global vision of their engagement with Web 2.0.
One approach is that of deliberately diversified use of applications, as a means of enlarging the presence of the archive or library on the Internet, creating a wider range of points of access to the public.
An example of this is Patrimonigencat, which has a blog [15], uses Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, Panoramio, RSS, among others.
Figure 1: The portal Patrimoni Gencat [24] Another example is the Library of Congress (which operates a blog, uses Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, RSS, among others [16]).
'Maintaining a continuous unlimited presence or concentrating on the maintenance of short-term availability of contents' (Library of Congress) [17] both represent an extension to that approach.
The establishment of an institutional global vision and consequent strategy for engagement with Web 2.0 increases the potential of benefits that each application may bring, raising the game considerably above that of what simply the application may or may not allow.
There are other factors that have a bearing upon outcomes, such as the context in which an institution's applications operate.
For example, the degree of variety among their users will determine whether those applications represent a challenge or added value.
For instance, on Flickr a community of professional and amateur photographers may access, comment and add to their favourites images and photography collections from archives, libraries and museums, access to which was previously restricted to a limited geographical space, or electronically mainly to one point of access (the portal or Web page of the hosting institution).
Apart from the exponential increase in the potential benefits of disclosing these archives together with the attendant and supplementary information on their collections, there is also the possible opportunity to gather additional information (comments and tags) on them from quite unexpected but well-informed sources among the public.
I have selected three applications (among many of the available Web 2.0 applications) in order to demonstrate how Web 2.0 applications may be applied: Facebook (social network) [18], Flickr (image sharing community) [19] and YouTube (video sharing community) [20].
Facebook Facebook, founded in February 2004, is owned by Facebook, Inc.
It is a social network that allows people to communicate and share information within a context of social interaction [18].
'Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.'
[18].
Some archives opted to emphasise the Facebook utilities to communicate with the public.
As an example, the Spanish archive Ceu Archivo General, has its information profile embedded in its invitation to users to connect via chat or to send a message to the organisation through Facebook's message box [21]).
In Facebook each individual or group user has a page on which to display information and keeps a group of contacts, while also making combined use of other applications (e.g.
images, music, games, etc.).
Users can also personalise their page.
Several functions are available to support, for example: real-time interaction with a group of 'friends' (pokes, chats, posts and comments to posts); interaction among each other by visiting profiles; making friends; establishing contacts; posting comments; sending messages, and; suggesting friends to other friends.
Some archives already use Facebook: Arhivele Nationale ale Romaniei; Arxíu de Constantí; Ceu Archivo General; The National Archives (UK); National Archives of Australia; Patrimoni.gencat; US National Archives, among others, as well as libraries and museums (Biblioteca Nacional de Espa—a, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Library of Congress, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art), among others).
These organisations have groups of friends that include individual and group users; among these groups we find other archives and libraries, as well as projects [22], associations and bodies from all walks of life and from around the world.
They have differing aims in their adoption of Facebook: they attach differing degrees of importance to the various facets of Facebook such as: the number of its users (350 million) [23] and what that represents to them as institutions (Patrimoni.gencat) [24]; its 'immediacy' factor as well as the exchange of opinions (Patrimoni.gencat) [24]; the opportunity to create new means of communication with the public and receiving feedback from same (National Archives of Australia) [25]; exposure of the Archive's news releases (Arxiu de Constantí) [26] and the generation of new audiences (National Archives of Australia) [27]; the option of permanent contact with the public and the opportunity of serving that public on the Internet, in real time, by inviting users to connect via chat or send a message to the institution through Facebook's message box (Ceu Archivo General) [21].
Figure 2: Facebook page of Biblioteca Nacional de Espa—a To archives and libraries, the adoption of Facebook may generate a new type of relationship with real users and increase awareness of the archive among potential users or visitors.
Engagement is closer, with more of an interaction with many users rather than a simple contact.
The communication established may not necessarily be based on the rendering of a service, but on the contact itself.
Flickr Flickr, founded in 2004, is now the property of Yahoo Inc.
It is a photograph(and other image formats-) and video-hosting site, as well as a Web service suite.
It is also an online community of professional and amateur photographers for users who wish to publish and share their images and videos on the Web.
Its use is free of charge, but there is also the option of subscription offering an account with additional functionality.
Flickr allows users to store, edit, organise, share, geo-reference, generate products with images, define forms of access to images, take part in discussion forums and maintain contact within an online photography community.
In January 2008, Flickr launched the Commons Project [8] in partnership with the Library of Congress; this project includes archives, libraries and museums from around the world [8].
The main objectives of the project are: to increase access to publicly held photography collections (or collections held by institutions that waive their property rights), and; to provide a means for the general public to contribute information and knowledge that enriches these holdings.
Archives, libraries and museums can display their heritage content as users of Flickr.
Currently the Commons Project has attracted the participation of archives, libraries and museums in Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
Their objectives in adopting Flickr also vary: they may be availing themselves of the opportunity to 'open' the archives and photography collections to the general public by making them available to comments and information from that same public (Library of Congress) [28]; the opportunity to share collections with a wider public and improve the information available on the collections through tags [29] and annotations on photos (Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands) [30]; to give users the opportunity to add extra information to images and available collections (tags, comments and notes) as well as the opportunity to share some of the most popular photos with a photography community (Library of Congress) [28]; to share images, through a new channel, with an archive's researchers, potential researchers and the general public; to provide access over the Web to primary sources; to make collections available to the widest possible audience (Library and Archives of Florida) [31]; and to broaden its public and provide a new means of access.
The library wants to be where its actual and potential users are now found (Biblioteca de Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian) [32].
The importance accorded to the Flickr community can also have a positive impact on the use of this application (National Archives) [33].
The Portuguese library Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian [34], the only Portuguese organisation participating in the Commons Project [8], concluded that Flickr and the library participating in the project generated a significant increase in awareness, and use, of its photograph collections as well as attracting new audiences [35].
The Portuguese library is making photograph collections available on a regular basis ('Horácio Novais Photographic Studio'; 'Portuguese Landscape Architecture'; 'Gothic Architecture in Portugal'; 'Amadeo de Souza Cardoso – COMMONS'; 'Mário Novais Photographic Studio'; 'Portuguese woodcarving'; 'Portuguese Tiles').
Figure 3: Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Flickr Photostream [34].
The use of Flickr may allow archives and libraries to generate new means of access to and interaction with their patrons, as well as broaden the knowledge of such heritage to a larger and more diverse audience (namely the photographic community).
The Commons Project is an opportunity for these institutions to extend their presence on the Web and expose their archives and photography collections (and other image formats) to the world.
Such 'broadcasting' is done within a platform that brings together several cultural organisations and a diverse public, with the opportunity of extending the knowledge of their users, their own standing, rationale and institutional profile.
YouTube YouTube [20], founded in February 2005, is now owned by Google Inc.
It is a free video-sharing community that offers access to and the sharing of videos, films, video clips and amateur material that, in turn, can be disseminated through blogs and other Web locations.
At present YouTube receives 20 hours of video every minute, uploaded by individuals and bodies from all over the world [36].
Videos can be uploaded in any format or through the YouTube site; this contributes to making more material more easily available.
The absence of any control or filter on the material submitted also contributes to the speed at which it becomes available.
Some of the archives and libraries already present on YouTube are the Library of Congress (USA), The US National Archives, The National Archives (UK), Nationaal Archief (Netherlands), University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Archivo de Arganda del Rey (Spain), Biblioteca Nacional de Espa—a (Spain), Patrimonigencat (Spain), among others.
Figure 4: The portal Patrimoni Gencat on YouTube [32] Their motives for using YouTube are not dissimilar to those for adopting Flickr.
The Library of Congress has already mentioned that, due to its size and importance, its collection of audiovisual material could be expected to be made available on YouTube [17].
Other reasons for these institutions to use YouTube are the broadcasting of popular films that are held in their archives, informing the public of events that will take place, bringing the National Archives to the people (US National Archives) [37], making contents freely available and bringing cultural organisations into the daily life of people (Biblioteca Nacional de Espa—a) [38].
Figure 5: YouTube channel of National Library of Spain The use of YouTube by archives and libraries can represent a new type of exposure with a worldwide impact, at little cost and with wide access; it is also a powerful tool for raising the institutional profile worldwide and a promising channel when exploited in the marketing operations of such institutions.
Conclusion In common with the trend in general use of Web 2.0 applications, their use by archives and libraries is also on the increase.
This growing engagement has been having an influence on the way services and products are made available (loosely termed Archives 2.0 and Libraries 2.0).
The possible effects arising from the use of these applications are significant and have implications in areas crucial to these institutions.
The increase in and diversification of users is one of the impacts that is most often referred to; however, it is simply one of the potential impacts and not always the most significant.
The adoption by archives and libraries of Web 2.0 applications are a signal recognition of their potential: the 'immediacy' factor; the support of exchange of views and the creation of new means of communication with the public; the opportunity afforded users to add extra information to content (text, images, audio and video); access to primary sources over the Web; the broadening of their audience; the potential of new ways of providing access, and; raising the institutional profile within the user community.
The possible negative aspects arising from the use of these applications do not seem to outweigh their potential advantages.
Some bodies already have a global vision of their presence on Web 2.0, as well as a defined strategy for its use.
Each application represents an individual context of use and allows a set of specific functionalities within a new rationale of democratisation in the production of content and access thereto, through interactive and collaborative platforms where anyone can be an author, publish and access content freely.
References Barnatt, Christopher (2008) Explaining Web 2.0 [Video].
YouTube.
1 video online (7:11 min.
): colour., sound.
30 March 2008 [Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7BAXvFdMBWw&feature=fvst See as an example, the case of the Library of Congress in Flickr: Matt Raymond Flickr Followup.
Library of Congress Blog (18 January, 2008).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2008/01/flickr-followup/ Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room (Photo).
Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
C. & N.W.
R.R., Clinton, Iowa (LOC).
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Sets: Women Striving Forward 1910-1940; 1930-1940 (In colour).
8 January 2008.
[Accessed 14 May 2009] http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2178452567/ Cao, Dongmei (2009) Chinese Library 2.0: status and development In Chinese Librarianship: an International Electronic Journal (27.2009).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.iclc.us/cliej/cl27cao.htm King, Kiara (2008) An introduction to use Web 2.0 in the Archives.
Society of Archivists Conference, York (28 August 2008).
SlideShare.
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.slideshare.net/araik/archives-20-presentation The use of these applications can contribute to the development of different skills related to search and information retrieval.
Cf.
Godwin, Peter; Jo Parker – Information literacy meets Library 2.0.
London: Facet Publishing, 2008.
ISBN 978-1-85604-637-4 Cf.
The Library of Congress' photostream.
Yahoo Inc. – Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ See the project The Commons.
Yahoo Inc. – Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.flickr.com/commons?GXHC_gx_session_id_=6afecb2055a3c52c About information retrieval in Web and the folksonomy see: Peters, Isabella Folksonomies.
Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009 (Knowledge and Information / Studies in Information Science).
ISBN 978-3-598-25179-5 Fichter, Darlene (2007) Seven Strategies for Marketing in a Web 2.0 World.
Marketing libraries services Vol.
21 No.
2 (Mar.
/Apr.
2007).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.infotoday.com/mls/mar07/Fichter.shtml See Press room.
About Facebook.
Yahoo Inc. – Facebook (social networking Web site).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics See Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Facebook needs to improve privacy practices, investigation finds.
OTTAWA (16 July 2009).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.priv.gc.ca/media/nr-c/2009/nr-c_090716_e.cfm Archivo General de Simancas [Page].
Facebook (social networking Web site).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
Available at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Archivo-General-de-Simancas/45210038482 DGARQ [Page].
Facebook (social networking website).
[Accessed 9 May 2010].
Available at: http://www.facebook.com/search/?post_form_id=939031295c9acb32a1ac304cc91e7ead&q=DGARQ&init=quick&ref=search_preload#!/group.php?gid=116999324986325&ref=search&sid=1479761648.2284572755..1 Generalitat de Catalunya.
Patrimoni.gencat [Blog].
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://blocs.gencat.cat/blocs/AppPHP/gencat/?lang=en and the portal http://www20.gencat.cat/portal/site/Patrimoni About the use that Library of Congress make of Web 2.0 applications see: Lisa Braziel Social Media Marketing Example #12: Library of Congress.
Ignite Social media: the original social media agency (17 April 2009) http://libraryofcongress.maveninsight.com/ [Accessed 29 December 2009]; SPRINGER, Michelle, e outros – For the common good: the Library of Congress Flickr pilot project: [Online].
2008.
[Accessed 29 April 2010] http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf Raymond, Matt (2009) YouTube, and Now We Do Too (7 April 2009).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2009/04/youtube-and-now-we-do-too/ Yahoo Inc. – Facebook (social networking website) [Accessed 21 April 2010] Available at: http://www.facebook.com/ Yahoo Inc. – Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
[Accessed 21 April 2010] http://www.flickr.com/ Google Inc YouTube (online video sharing community) [Accessed 21 April 2010] http://www.YouTube.com Ceu Archivo General [Page].
Yahoo Inc. – Facebook (social networking website).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1479761648#/profile.php?id=100000466877244&ref=search&sid=1479761648.1673431337..1 See some projects and groups in Facebook about Archives and Libraries: Archivists on Facebook, Portuguese-Canadian History Project, Bibliotecarios en el mundo, Librarian in the world, Library 2.0 Interest Group, among others.
Facebook (social networking website).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.facebook.com Press room – Statistics.
Yahoo Inc. – Facebook (social networking website).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics See Generalitat de Catalunya.
Patrimoni.gencat [Portal].
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://patrimoni.gencat.cat The National Archives Social Media and Web 2.0 at the National Archives.
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.archives.gov/social-media/ Post in Facebook (18 January 2010): "This is great.
Archives are using Web 2.0 applications.
I would like to know what goals you have or what intentions or strategy for using facebook and/or other Web 2.0 applications.
thank you".
Answer (25 January 2010): 'La verdad és que de momento utilizamos el facebook como medio para la divulgación de noticias y poco más, aunque desde luego en el futuro deberá tener una aplicación algo más versátil.
Todo llegará...' (resposta à questão).
Translation: 'The fact is that at the moment we are using Facebook as a means of disseminating news and little else, though of course in the future there ought to be a somewhat more versatile application.
All in good time'.
(reply to query).
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.facebook.com/search/?init=srp&sfxp&o=2048&q=Archivo&s=0#!/arxiudeconstanti?ref=search&sid=1479761648.4039041087..1 Post in Facebook (18 January 2010): 'This is great.
Archives are using Web 2.0 applications.
I would like to know what goals you have or what intentions or strategy for using facebook and/or other web 2.0 applications.
thank you'.
Answer (1 February 2010): 'Like most other national institutions, we are forging our way with Web 2.0 applications.We aim to attract new audiences by doing so'.
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
http://www.facebook.com/search/?init=srp&sfxp&o=2048&q=Archivo&s=0#!/pages/Canberra-Australia/National-Archives-of-Australia/40641767696?ref=search&sid=1479761648.1554169566..1 About the recognition of users as a valid source of information see: Victorian State Government E-Government Resource Center For the Common Good: The Library of Congress Flickr Pilot Project.
[Accessed 29 December 2009] http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/topics-a-z/l/libraries-topics-a-z/for-the-common-good-the-library-of-congress-flickr-pilot-project-in-pdf-format-1333kb-.html A tag is a word or phrase that you use to describe content in the Web.
About tags and folksonomy see Rania Sabrah Enhancing information retrieval in folksonomies using ontology of place constructed from Gazetteer information.
Münster: Institute for Geoinformatics.
University of Muenster, March 2009.
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.
Available at RUN (Institutional repository of New University of Lisbon) at: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/2548 and Peters, Isabella Folksonomies.
Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009 (Knowledge and Information / Studies in Information Science).
ISBN 978-3-598-25179-5.
Cf.
Nationaal Archief's photostream.
Yahoo Inc. – Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief About State Library and Archives of Florida / Florida Memory.
Yahoo Inc. – Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
Available at: http://www.flickr.com/people/floridamemory/ See Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Perfil.
Yahoo Inc. – Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
Available at: http://www.flickr.com/people/biblarte/ See National Archives FAQS (Frequently Asked Questions).
Yahoo Inc. – Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
Available at: http://www.archives.gov/social-media/flickr-faqs.html#1 Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian's photostream Yahoo Inc. – Flickr (photo management and sharing application).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/biblarte/ See Leitão, Paulo Jorge O.
(2010) – Uma Biblioteca nas Redes Sociais: o caso da Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian no FLICKR.
Actas do 10º Congresso Nacional BAD, 7, 8 e 9 Abril 2010.
Guimarães.
See Resumo do YouTube.
Tráfego e estatísticas.
Google Inc – YouTube (online video sharing community).
[Accessed 30 May 2009] http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet National Archives Launches YouTube Channel (June 18, 2009).
[Accessed 29 December 2009].
Available at: http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2009/nr09-95.html Biblioteca Nacional de Espa—a [Page].
YouTube (online video sharing community).
[Accessed 9 May 2010] http://www.youtube.com/user/bibliotecaBNE Author Details Marta Nogueira Libraries Department / Institutional Repository Working Group University of Lisbon Portugal Email: mnogueira@reitoria.ul.pt Web site: http://repositorio.ul.pt/ Return to top Article Title: "Archives in Web 2.0: New Opportunities" Author: Marta Nogueira Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/nogueira/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data rdf framework api dissemination xml atom infrastructure archives metadata digitisation tagging identifier vocabularies repositories copyright video preservation multimedia aggregation syndication adobe uri photoshop frbr curation wordpress rdfa licence e-science lams ict interoperability oai-ore research Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
TASI Courses for Remainder of 2008 TASI (the JISC Advisory Service for still images, moving images and sound) has a few places left on its autumn/winter training programme.
http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html 14 November 2008 Optimising your Images using Adobe Photoshop 21 November 2008 Introduction to Image Metadata 27 November 2008 Essential Techniques in Digital Image Capture 28 November 2008 Advanced Techniques in Digital Image Capture 03 December 2008 Digital Photography Taking Control of your SLR 11 December 2008 Scanning with the CLA Licence 12 December 2008 Copyright and Digital Images The following newly released course has just been added to the programme: 17 December 2008 Essential Photoshop Skills TBC Digital Photography Getting started with your SLR (To register your interest for this course please contact Dave Kilbey) To view the course timetable and link to course descriptions please visit http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html To book a place please visit http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/bookingform.html For further information please feel free to contact: Dave Kilbey, TASI Training Officer and Co-ordinator TASI A JISC Advisory Service Email: d.kilbey@bristol.ac.uk Tel:+44 (0)117 331 4332 Fax:+44 (0)117 331 4396 In early 2009 TASI will re-brand to JISC Digital Media Still image, moving image and sound advice Free Helpdesk for UK Further and Higher Education: info@tasi.ac.uk Online advice documents: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/ Hands-on training: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html Back to headlines CILIP Executive Briefing Engaging the Disengaged CILIP Executive Briefing Engaging the Disengaged CILIP, 7 Ridgmount St, London WC1E 7AE Tuesday 18 November 2008 http://www.cilip.org.uk/interests/execbriefings/neets/ Libraries and information services are ideally positioned to play a key role in helping young people who are Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEETs) become engaged and secure their participation in public services.
To provide a forum for discussion of this increasingly important issue, CILIP: The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is organising an Executive Briefing with the theme Engaging the disengaged: repositioning LIS services in the NEETs agenda.
It will take place at its London offices on Tuesday 18 November 2008.
Speakers have been secured from across the NEETs community from: The Department for Children Schools and Families; The Learning and Skills Council; The Adult Institute of Adult Continuing Education; The Reading Agency; and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.
Two county councils and two London borough councils will also present case studies.
The aim is to help clarify the thinking of Government Departments and agencies to NEETs and explain the implications for public funding.
The speakers will debate the issues with delegates and help develop recommendations for LIS in supporting NEETs to answer the question 'What role can alternative providers play in engaging NEET young people?'
The Briefing is supported by CILIP's Update magazine, and will be restricted to 50 delegates to encourage discussion.
Further information is available on the CILIP Web site at http://www.cilip.org.uk/interests/execbriefings/neets/ For further information: Mark Taylor Head of Corporate Marketing & Media Relations Tel: 020 7255 0654 Email: mark.taylor@cilip.org.uk Back to headlines 4th International Digital Curation Conference: Pre-conference Workshops 4th International Digital Curation Conference: Pre-conference Workshops Edinburgh 1 December 2008 http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2008/programme/ The DCC has announced an innovative programme of pre-conference workshops to be held in Edinburgh on Monday 1 December 2008.
These half-day workshops will cover a range of tools and services including the DCC Data Curation Lifecycle model, the Data Audit Framework Toolkit, the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) Interactive toolkit and a demonstration of recently developed DCC Curation Tools.
There will also be a Repository Curation Service Environments (RECURSE) Workshop, jointly supported by OGF-Europe and DReSNET.
The workshop programme will be followed by a pre-conference drinks reception at Our Dynamic Earth.
Register for one or more of our workshops at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2008/programme/ Back to headlines SUETr Interoperability Workshop Library of London School of Economics and Political Science, 10 Portugal Street, London, WC2A 2HD 9 December 2008 Institutional Repositories should not exist in isolation.
They are not closed silos, dusty graveyards of data but rather vibrant information resources designed to facilitate scholarly communication and research innovation.
In this JISC-funded SUETr workshop we hope to shed some light on some of the technologies you could use to achieve interoperability and consider some of the issues that might arise.
For further information contact: Peter Cliff p.d.cliff@ukoln.ac.uk Back to headlines DPC/RSP/DCC/JISC Workshop on Practical Steps for Repository Managers DPC/RSP/DCC/JISC Workshop: Tackling the Preservation Challenge: Practical Steps for Repository Managers Novotel Hotel, Euston Road, London 12 December 2008 http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/081212RepMngrsWkshp.html The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), the Repositories Support Project (RSP), the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the JISC are organising a joint workshop on 12 December at the Novotel Hotel, Euston, London.
The intention is to bring together key stakeholders, the repository managers and preservation experts, at a practical focussed event to talk together and share perspectives, requirements, problems and solutions.
It is hoped that the workshop will lead to collective recommendations for what the next moves for repository managers and preservation specialists should be to provide practical focussed support, services and tools.
The workshop should in addition further repository managers' understanding of how to implement preservation strategies and processes.
As well as the formal presentations there will also be a marketplace when there will be an opportunity to view posters, and engage with project teams and see demonstrations of the latest tools.
The day will close with a participative discussion session.
Prior to the event the organisers will gather concerns and requirements from repository managers and preservation experts/services and synthesise them into 'Top 5 Concerns', 'Top 5 Wishes' and 'Top 5 Solutions' (for practical implementation).
They will then be collated to form the basis for the panel discussion.
Who should attend?
Repository managers, librarians, archivists, digital preservation experts, information management specialists, service providers.
Benefits of attendance An opportunity to share preservations issues, (concerns, wishes, solutions) with peers and experts.
To gain insight from repository managers on how they are approaching preservation on different platforms.
To get up to speed with the outcomes from existing services and projects working in this important area.
To gain some tips from fellow practitioners on what works for them.
To share digital preservation expertise with the repository community.
For further information, please visit: http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/081212RepMngrsWkshp.html Back to headlines Digital Futures Academy 2009: London and Sydney King's College London has announced the Digital Futures 5-day training event "Digital Futures Academy: from digitization to delivery" London, UK: 27 April 1 May 2009 Sydney, Australia: 2 6 February 2009 http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/ For 2009 we have 2 instances of Digital Futures, one in Sydney, Australia and another in London, UK.
Led by experts of international renown, Digital Futures focuses on the creation, delivery and preservation of digital resources from cultural and memory institutions.
Digital Futures is designed for managers and other practitioners from the library, museum, heritage and cultural sectors looking to understand the strategic and management issues of developing digital resources from digitisation to delivery.
Digital Futures will cover the following core areas: Planning and management Fund raising Understanding the audience Metadata introduction and implementation Copyright and intellectual property Sustainability Financial issues Visual and image based resource creation and delivery Implementing digital resources Digital preservation There will be visits to two institutions to see behind the scenes and receive expert presentations.
For Digital Futures London this will be the National Gallery and the National Archives.
Digital Futures aims for no more than 25-30 delegates and every delegate will have the opportunity to also spend one-to-one time with a Digital Futures leader to discuss issues specific to them.
Digital Futures will issue a certificate of achievement to each delegate.
The Digital Futures leaders are: Simon Tanner Director of King's Digital Consultancy Services, King's College London Tom Clareson Director for New Initiatives, PALINET The leaders have over 30 years of experience in the digital realm between them.
Other experts will be invited to speak in their areas of expertise.
Digital Futures London Cost: £840 (VAT not charged, excludes accommodation) Venue: King's College London Dates: 27 April 1 May 2009 Register: http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/digireg.htm Digital Futures Australasia Cost: Early bird registration: AU$ 2,250 Full registration: AU$ 2,500 (VAT not charged, excludes accommodation) Venue: University of Technology, Sydney Dates: 2 6 February 2009 Register: http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/digiregaus.htm Digital Futures is run by King's Digital Consultancy Services and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London working in co-operation with PALINET, USA.
Digital Futures Australasia is made possible by the co-operation of the Library at the University of Technology Sydney.
Back to headlines Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Austin, Texas 15-19 June 2009 http://www.jcdl2009.org/ Since 2001, the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries has served as a major international forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues.
JCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term 'digital libraries' including (but not limited to) new forms of information institutions; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organising, and distributing digital content; and theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing.
Digital libraries may be viewed as a new form of information institution or as an extension of the services libraries currently provide.
Representatives from academe, government, industry, and others are invited to participate in this annual conference.
The conference draws from a broad array of disciplines including computer science, information science, librarianship, archival science and practice, museum studies and practice, technology, medicine, social sciences, and humanities.
JCDL 2009 will be held in Austin, Texas.
JCDL 2009 is hosted by the School of Information at the University of Texas, and is organised by an international committee of scholars and leaders in the Digital Libraries field.
Four hundred delegates are expected for the five days of events including a day of cutting-edge tutorials; 3 days of papers, panels, and keynotes; and a day of research workshops.
For further information: http://www.jcdl2009.org/ Back to headlines ISKO UK: Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources Biennial Conference of the British Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK) University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT 22-23 June 2009 http://www.iskouk.org/conf2009/ The ISKO UK 2009 conference "Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources" will address issues in the organization and integration of text, images, data and voice multimedia and multilingual.
Among the highlights will be keynote addresses from Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and Professor David Crystal, the renowned author, linguist and broadcaster.
A wide spectrum of contributors from across the knowledge organisation sector will follow, ensuring ample cross-fertilisation of ideas.
Networking will be central, in more than one way.
Over the past year ISKO UK has attracted large and lively audiences of content and information architects, website developers, knowledge engineers, information managers and many others to its afternoon meeting series.
The conference aims to extend this wide audience to ensure that all aspects of knowledge organisation are represented.
Themes of the 2009 Conference include: semantic interoperability across networked resources metadata models and architecture retrieval of still and/or moving images audio retrieval user enhancement (via tagging, feedback, etc.)
of content multilingual access to mixed resources integrated combinations of media and/or content type innovative applications for semantic analysis Conference Submissions: To read more about the conference and to submit an abstract, go to the conference Web site http://www.iskouk.org/conf2009/ Important Dates: Submission of Abstracts: 1 December 2008 Notification of acceptance: 1 February 2009 Submission of full papers: 1 May 2009 For further information: ISKO UK http://www.iskouk.org/ ISKO UK Events http://www.iskouk.org/events.htm Contact: conference2009@iskouk.org About the organiser: ISKO UK is a not-for-profit scientific/professional association with the objective of promoting research and communication in the domain of knowledge organisation, within the broad field of information science and related disciplines.
The conference organizing team is closely supported by leading thinkers and practitioners in the knowledge organisation arena.
Back to headlines 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2009) 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2009) Corfu, Greece 27 September 2 October, 2009 http://www.ecdl2009.eu/ The Call for Contributions for ECDL2009 can be found at: http://www.ionio.gr/conferences/ecdl2009/call.php Important Dates: Submission deadline for Full Papers, Short Papers, Posters and Demonstrations: 21 March, 2009 Submission deadline for Doctoral Consortium Papers: 1 June, 2009 Submission deadline for Workshops, Tutorials and Panels: 27 February, 2009 You can also find the poster and the leaflet of the conference at: http://www.ionio.gr/conferences/ecdl2009/content/poster_A4.pdf http://www.ionio.gr/conferences/ecdl2009/content/poster_A3.pdf http://www.ionio.gr/conferences/ecdl2009/content/ECDL_leaflet_2ndEdition.pdf Back to headlines Preservation of Web Resources Handbook Available Version 1.0 of the PoWR Handbook is now available.
The Handbook is the main deliverable of the JISC Preservation of Web Resources Project and offers valuable advice for practitioners embarking on a Web resource preservation strategy or interested in issues related to improving long-term access to Web resources.
The handbook includes case studies, scenarios and a glossary.
It is available in PDF and from Web 2.0 services issuu and Scribd.
Further information: PoWR Handbook http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/handbook/ [Source: JISC-PoWR Project] [Received: October 2008] Back to headlines Latest Issue of Code4Lib Journal Available The fourth issue of The Code4Lib Journal is now available at http://journal.code4lib.org/ The Code4Lib Journal exists to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.
Editorial Introduction -Issue 4 Ken Varnum http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/363 Auto-Populating an ILL form with the Serial Solutions Link Resolver API Daniel Talsky http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/363 Mining Data from ISI Web of Science Reports Alfred Kraemer http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/110 Unveiling Jangle: Untangling Library Resources and Exposing them through the Atom Publishing Protocol Ross Singer and James Farrugia http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/109 LibraryH3lp: A New Flexible Chat Reference System Pam Sessoms and Eric Sessoms http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/107 OpenBook WordPress Plugin: Open Source Access to Bibliographic Data John Miedema http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/105 The Library Search Engine: A Smart Solution for Integrating Resources Beyond Library Holdings Karin Herm and Sibylle Volz http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/142 Book Review: Two Books about FRBR, Compared Christine Schwartz http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/138 [Source: The Code4Lib Journal] [Received: September 2008] Back to headlines DRIVER and eIFL.net Sign Memorandum of Understanding DRIVER and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries) have identified demand for co-operation in order to progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories.
DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, to establish a flexible, robust, and scalable infrastructure for all European and world-wide digital repositories, managing scientific information in an Open Access model increasingly demanded by researchers, funding organisations and other stakeholders.
DRIVER's mission is to expand its content base, supporting the global research community with high-quality research output, including textual research papers and complex forms of scholarly electronic publication.
Rima Kupryte, Director of eIFL.net, said, 'eIFL.net and DRIVER share the vision that research institutions should contribute actively and co-operatively to a global, interoperable, trusted and long-term data and service infrastructure based on Open Access digital repositories.
This agreement includes joint approaches to consolidation of national communities for the European repository network and active joint dissemination of best practice of Open Access scholarly communication in countries and regions without such formal policy.'
Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of DRIVER and Director of the Goettingen State and University Library commented, 'DRIVER can only be successful through collaborating with all relevant stakeholders and by including all countries.
eIfL has an excellent track record in supporting developing countries.
Co-operation with eIFL will contribute to the joint vision through an established communication network and enthusiastic pioneers in many countries.'
Further information: Rima Kupryte, Director Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net) c/o ADN Kronos, Piazza Mastai 9 00153 Rome, Italy Tel: +(39)(06)5807216/17 E-mail: info@eifl.net Web site: http://www.eifl.net/ [Source: eIFL.net] [Received: September 2008] Back to headlines Free Access to Online Journal Archives Makes Over 800,000 Journal Articles Available Over 800,000 journal articles are to be made freely available to universities, research councils and colleges in the UK.
Following an open procurement process, JISC Collections is making four journal archives freely available, to all colleges, universities and research councils in the UK.
These archives from the American Chemical Society, Brill Academic Publishers, ProQuest, and Taylor & Francis include 230 peer-reviewed journals with some of the most important articles in the arts, built environment, humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and the social sciences.
JISC Collections' purchase of these archives means that researchers, teaching staff and students can now have free access to more than 150 years of content and over 800,000 fully searchable articles.
Researchers will now be able to search these articles at a time and place of their own convenience rather than locate print versions which may only be available in a select number of libraries that were able to afford to subscribe to them.
Further information: http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk [Source: JISC] [Received: October 2008] Back to headlines Beyond the Silos of the LAMs A report on library, archive and museum collaboration commissioned from Diane Zorich and OCLC Program Officers Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway is now available on the RLG Programs Web site.
"Beyond the Silos of the LAMs Collaboration among Libraries, Archives, and Museums" (.pdf: 334K/59 pp.)
highlights lessons learned from five LAM workshops held at RLG Partner institutions in the US and the UK.
It contains information about inspiring collaborative projects in campus environments.
The bulk of the report, however, is dedicated to the catalysts which allow collaboration to thrive.
These insights should be helpful to anyone who is trying to foster deeper working relationships.
The report is available from: http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports.htm [Source: Clifford Lynch, CNI] [Received: October 2008] Back to headlines 3,000 Hours of Historic News Footage Available to FEI/HEIs Over 3,000 hours of historic news footage from ITN's archive division, ITN Source, has been made available to Further and Higher Education institutions in the UK, giving educators and students cost-free access to a century of video material.
The NewsFilm Online service, http://www.nfo.ac.uk/, featuring ITN and Reuters content, forms part of a multi-million digitisation programme, funded by JISC to promote the innovative use of ICT in education and research.
All disciplines across Further and Higher Education will have access to the archive for research, teaching and learning.
One of the unique elements of the archive licence agreement is that users from subscribing educational institutions who access the material can download clips and edit them to create their own user content for projects a first for this type of material.
For further information: http://www.nfo.ac.uk/ http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation_home.html [Source: JISC] [Received: October 2008] Back to headlines New TASI Online Tutorial on Image Searching "Internet for Image Searching" http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/imagesearching/ is a new, free-to-use online tutorial to assist staff and students within the education sphere in locating images for use in both teaching and learning.
The emphasis of the tutorial is on finding copyright cleared images which are available free; facilitating quick, hassle-free access to a vast range of online photographs and other visual resources.
This tutorial has been created by TASI the JISC Advisory Service for digital media and Intute as part of the Intute: Virtual Training Suite.
The tutorial was funded and supported by the Higher Education Academy / JISC Collaboration Initiative.
For further information: Please contact Dave Kilbey d.kilbey@bristol.ac.uk [Source: TASI] [Received: October 2008] Back to headlines OAI ORE 1.0 Published Over the past two years the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, Web, library, repository, and eScience communities to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of Web resources.
These standards provide the foundation for applications and services that can visualise, preserve, transfer, summarise, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction: including multiple page Web documents, multiple format documents in institutional repositories, scholarly datasets, and online photo and music collections.
The OAI-ORE standards leverage the core Web architecture and concepts emerging from related efforts including the semantic web, linked data, and Atom syndication.
As a result, they integrate both with the emerging machine-readable Web, Web 2.0, and the future evolution of networked information.
The production versions of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents are now available to the public, with a table of contents page at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc.
This public release is the culmination of several months of testing and review of initial alpha and beta releases.
The participation and feedback from the wider OAI-ORE community, especially the OAI-ORE technical committee, was instrumental to the process leading up to this production release.
The documents in the release describe a data model to introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the Web.
They also detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in the popular Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML, and RDFa.
The documents included in the release are: ORE User Guide Documents Primer http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/primer.html Resource Map Implementation in Atom http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/atom.html Resource Map Implementation in RDF/XML http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/rdfxml.html Resource Map Implementation in RDFa http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/rdfa.html HTTP Implementation http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/http.html Resource Map Discovery http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/discovery.html ORE Specification Documents Abstract Data Model http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/datamodel.html Vocabulary http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/vocabulary.html Tools and Additional Resources http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/tools.html Further information Full press release: http://www.openarchives.org/documents/ore-production-press-release.pdf [Source: Carl Lagoze, Cornell University; Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory] [Received: October 2008] Back to headlines Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Altmetrics: a practical guide for librarians, researchers and academics Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Altmetrics: a practical guide for librarians, researchers and academics Citation BibTex RIS Elizabeth Gadd reviews a book that aims to provide librarians, researchers and academics with practical information on the expanding field of altmetrics, but which she feels may have missed its mark.
I was excited to see that Facet had brought out a “practical guide” to altmetrics.
As far as I can see, there is only one other textbook on the market released in 2015, and in this fast-growing area I would say there is definitely room for another.
However, as I ploughed further and further through it, I must confess to feeling a bit confused.
Firstly, while the title suggests the book is a practical guide for librarians, researchers and academics, it was almost exclusively aimed at librarians (as you might expect from a book from Facet) and equally as theoretical as practical.
But it was more than this.
I came to the book expecting an edited work containing contributions from some key players in the field, on practical topics relating to the development, meaning, and implementation of altmetrics maybe some case studies and certainly some in-depth discussion on what these numbers mean and how we can apply them sensibly.
But it wasn’t quite that.
Now there were certainly some contributions from key players: excellent chapters from Euan Adie (founder of Altmetric.com), Ben Showers (formerly Head of Scholarly & Library Futures at Jisc), and William Gunn (Head of Academic Outreach at Mendeley).
However these were the only three chapters (out of 12) not written by members of the School of Health & Related Research (ScHARR) at the University of Sheffield.
Seven were written by Andy Tattersall himself and two others written by colleagues, Andrew Booth and Clare Beecroft.
This is not necessarily a bad thing if the authors were experts in the field of altmetrics, but whist undeniably experts in their respective fields, I’m not sure from their biographies whether those fields stretch to the practical implementation of altmetrics.
Indeed I felt some of their contributions on citation metrics; considerations on implementing new technologies; and mobile apps, whist interesting, were stretching the remit of the book a bit.
Particularly as there were other key topics that I felt were missing (see below).
I guess my biggest disappointment was the chapter on resources and tools.
This should be the heart of any practical guide on altmetrics.
What are these tools and how can we use them?
What are their advantages and limitations?
Who is using them and how?
The chapter lists 41 tools in total, however most were social media services, leaving just seven altmetric tools.
Now that’s OK I certainly learned of the existence of some altmetric tools I’d not heard of before.
The disappointing thing was the lack of thorough analysis.
Some resources were given a paragraph of explanation and a quick guide to how they could be used; others received just a paragraph; and still others just a single line of text.
Some were repeated (Mendeley and Impact Story).
A further seven tools were listed under the heading “Other notable academic tools” without a single line of explanation.
Snowball metrics were listed as a resource, but there was no discussion of which altmetrics are ‘Snowball-compliant’ (and how it’s only actually currently possible to generate Snowball-compliant metrics using Elsevier products…).
What this chapter sorely lacked and indeed what the rest of the book could have really benefitted from was some case studies.
We’re all at an early stage of engaging with altmetrics and having some short stories from librarians, academics and research offices about how they are using the various tools would have been invaluable.
The other key omission for me and something that is big news in the world of metrics at the moment is the validity of altmetrics and how they should be used responsibly.
What are they actually measuring?
Can they be normalised?
Should they be standardised?
Who should doing the standardising?
Is it possible to compare the value of a blog mention, a tweet mention, a wikipedia mention, and a policy mention?
In the heavily metricised world of academia, these are big issues for the information professional, researcher and academic alike.
I’m aware this review is coming over as almost completely negative and I don’t mean to be.
I definitely learned some stuff it just wasn’t exclusively in the area of altmetrics.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the book is just wrongly labelled.
If it had been called “New technologies: from web 2.0 to open peer review and everything in between” I think I would be writing a much more positive review!
So my verdict is: read it if you want a 200-page romp through some of the key scholarly communication developments of the last 30 years.
However, if they get round to a second edition, it would be good to see the focus narrowed, the author list broadened, and the inclusion of some helpful case studies.
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Being Wired Or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope With Information Overload Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Being Wired Or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope With Information Overload Buzz data mobile software rss archives blog video cataloguing multimedia mp3 podcast itunes facebook twitter research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Houghton-Jan explores different strategies for managing and coping with various types of informational overload.
What is information overload?
27 instant messages.
4 text messages.
17 phone calls.
98 work emails.
52 personal emails.
76 email listserv messages.
14 social network messages.
127 social network status updates.
825 RSS feed updates.
30 pages from a book.
5 letters.
11 pieces of junk mail.
1 periodical issue.
3 hours of radio.
1 hour of television.
That, my friends, is information overload.
It is also my daily average amount of information received, sampled over a two-week period.
That's right—that much in every category every day.
I suppose that is why I was called upon to write an article about coping with information overload (IO).
I am still here, I am still alive, and my brain has yet to explode, so somehow I must be finding a way to make it work.
At least, that is what other people tell me.
The History of Information Overload Information overload is not a new concept, believe it or not.
As far back as the sixteenth century people were complaining about the wide range of information they had to consume in order to contribute to society.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an intellectual revolution occurred as books and written information became more widely produced and disseminated, while innovations and new relationships in economics and the sciences emerged.
It is thought that this first revolution of the mind triggered, in kind, the first phase of systemic societal information overload [1].
In 1685 Adrien Baillet lamented, 'We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.'
[2] During this time, scholars perceived an overabundance of printed material and responded by moving to new ways of processing this material, instead of regular 'cover to cover' reading.
For example, scholars of this time turned to browsing, skimming, purchasing, collecting, annotating, dog-earing, cutting, and pasting.
These methods are still useful today, and as Blair points out, these methods of encountering and interacting with text are always important but even more so when readers find themselves inundated and overwhelmed with more content than they can process with the regular method [2].
Ted Tjaden offers up another list of the ways people have been dealing with information overload since the invention of the book, many of which we continue to use, including navigational tools like tables of contents, the 'bookwheel' (an early mechanical book search engine invented in 1588 by Agostino Ramelli), 'commonplace books' (topic-based quotation books), encyclopaedias, taxonomies, and shared marginalia in publicly used books for the benefit of each subsequent group of scholars (which today would result in a head-shake and revocation of one's library card by the attending librarian) [3].
In the latter part of the twentieth century the concept of information overload reared its head again with the digital revolution.
With the advent of digital information, more information found its way into more hands.
Personal computers allowed individuals to generate an incredible amount of data.
The connectivity of the Internet allowed those individuals to share that information with each other, with virtually no limitations.
Mobile telephones, those magical devices that gradually became meshed with portable computing into the new smart phones, allowed users to connect with each other anywhere, anytime, via voice, texting, or IM.
Now, with enhanced smart phones with Web browsing and GPS, the hyperlinked world of personal computing has intermeshed with the world of portable devices.
And as a result, the amount of information flowing into our lives has increased exponentially.
The Effects of Information Overload Most of us know, at least anecdotally, that there is far more information flowing into our lives than we could possibly ever process.
The following quote from the Basex publication Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us summarises the issue nicely: 'We have become far more proficient in generating information than we are in managing it, and we have also built technology that easily allows us to create new information without human intervention.'
[4] Information flowing in from the multitude of devices, organisations, and technologies distracts, pressures, and stresses us.
And yet we continue to produce information for ourselves and for others.
Every time we send out information, information returns to us, usually two-fold.
We deal with both interruptive and non-interruptive information every day.
When constantly interrupted with that information, we never have those periods of time when you can think, plan and ponder.
As a result, our ability to push our lives and our institutions forward has been greatly compromised.
A sustained negative neurological effect of information overload has been identified by psychiatrist E.M. Hallowell.
He has called this effect Attention Deficit Trait, or ADT.
'It isn't an illness; it's purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live....When a manager is desperately trying to deal with more input than he possibly can, the brain and body get locked into a reverberating circuit while the brain's frontal lobes lose their sophistication, as if vinegar were added to wine.
The result is black-and-white thinking; perspective and shades of gray disappear.
People with ADT have difficulty staying organised, setting priorities, and managing time, and they feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.'
[5] ADT extends to people working in knowledge environments, which in today's service industry-based economy, is a large portion of the workforce.
A 2005 Basex survey showed that 28% (2.1 hours) of a knowledge worker's day is consumed by interruptions.
In the United States alone, this translates to 28 billion lost working hours and $588 million in lost profits every year [4].
Other studies have also shown negative consequences as a result of information overload, such as ignoring anything past the first few options, making mistakes, having difficulty relating the details to the overall issue, wasting time, and needing more time to reach decisions [3].
University of London researcher Glenn Wilson showed in a 2005 study that people taking an IQ test while being interrupted by emails and phone calls performed an average of 10 points lower than the baseline group without those interruptions.
A frightening footnote to this study is that another test group had been tested after smoking marijuana, and they only performed an average of 4 points lower than the baseline group – from which one might reasonably conclude that persistent interruptions have a two-and-a-half times more detrimental effect on the brain than smoking marijuana [4].
How can workers expect to be efficient in an environment unwittingly set up to see them fail?
The Role of Librarians and Other Information Professionals There is a unique relationship between librarians and the concept of information overload.
Processing information appropriately is key to the success of our profession and key to the success of each of us as professionals.
People look to us to help them process information, to pick what information on which to concentrate, and to discard irrelevant information.
Librarians are trained to evaluate information, and to choose the best of the best.
One would think, therefore, that we would be more adept in dealing with the problem of information overload.
We have the skills necessary for evaluating, organising, and collecting information in ways that allow for efficient processing and retrieval.
Those skills are central to the success of many of our colleagues, librarians or not.
John D. Halamka describes how, at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, they have replaced libraries with information commons and renamed the librarians 'information specialists' and the libraries themselves were renamed as the 'Department of Knowledge Services.'
[6] The renaming itself was most certainly a superficial symptom of the reorganisation and reprioritisation in the institution's libraries (pardon me, the Department of Knowledge Services).
The key was the new emphasis on the importance of information—the focus on the content.
As more and more information floods into businesses and other organisations, we information professionals, or whatever we are called, will be indispensable in helping our co-workers and users to process their data, thereby helping the institution overall.
So, how do we combat information overload, also known as ADT?
Hallowell recommends face-to-face interactions every few hours (what he calls a 'a human moment'), exercise, enough sleep, a good diet, keeping one's workspace tidy, breaking large tasks down into smaller ones, and setting aside part of your day as 'appointment and email free.'
But what really works?
What do the people working in the field do to help themselves?
Ten Techniques to Manage the Overload Below are ten techniques for managing information overload, each in a distinct area of information input.
Not everything will apply to you, your life, your job, or the types of information with which you deal.
Use those that make the most sense in your own life.
Start with one change, and move forward from there.
The overall idea is to take control of the information instead of letting it control you.
1.
General Organisational Techniques Most people have never stopped and thought about all of the information flowing into their lives.
Much like a medieval castle, the initial structure was built many years ago, and bits and pieces were built later, added on to the original structure, resulting in a massive entity with a lack of central planning.
Florence Fass wrote that 'The first step to organising the information flow is to identify its sources and methods of delivery, and then select the source and method best suited to your practice.'
[7] Let's start there.
Make an Inventory of Information Received Make a list of every item you receive, broken into a work category and a personal category.
Note two details for each item on the list: the subject or type of data and the method of transmission.
Use this inventory to think about what you receive, how it reaches you, and whether or not each one is working as well as it could for you.
If it is not, think about other ways you could receive the same information that would work better for you, and make that change.
Make an Inventory of Your Devices Not only do we need to consider the data, and the mechanism for their input, but the devices we use to access that data.
I have a choice about accessing my work email; I can use any of three different computers or my smart phone.
I have a choice about what device I use to talk to my parents; do I use my home phone or my smart phone?
Consider all of the devices you use, and add a third detail for each of the items listed in your inventory: what device do you use, and whether or not you should use a different one.
Read Up There are many books about information overload and dealing with information generally.
Here are some of my recommendations: Information Anxiety [8] and Information Anxiety 2 [9] by Richard Saul Wurman, Take Back Your Life!
: Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organised and Stay Organised by Sally McGhee [10], Techno Stress: The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution by Craig Brod [11], and TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @ Work @ Home @ Play [12].
Think Before Sending Before using RSS, IM, email or any other tool to deliver information to someone else, think about whether or not it would be better or easier to talk in person or via the phone.
Think not only about what would work better for the other person as an input, but what would work better for you when you receive a reply.
Schedule Yourself Use your calendar not only to schedule yourself for meetings and appointments.
Schedule your workday to include time set aside to check your email, to take some time to reflect, check your RSS feeds, and more.
Stick to the time you have allotted yourself.
Schedule Unscheduled Work We all have work we have to do, but which does not have to be done today.
How do we organise this effectively?
Some productivity software offers task lists, but often those lists are kept separate from the email or calendar system and thereby often get ignored.
Instead, fold your to-do list into your calendar by scheduling yourself to work on these projects.
Add these to-do items to your calendar at the end of the day, with each item having its own slot.
Be sure to schedule these items after work hours so people do not think your workday time is blocked out.
If you have huge projects, break them into smaller tasks, with each one having its own slot.
That way you can cross one off your list, even though you still have three pieces of that project left to do.
If you do not finish an item one day, simply forward it to the next.
Use Your 'Down Time' to Your Benefit If you have down time while you are commuting, waiting for appointments, or any other time, use that time in a way that works to your benefit.
Plan ahead and bring your favorite magazine with you to the doctor's surgery instead of just reading what they have there.
Stay Tidy and on Top Keep your workspace tidy by filing paper items into to-do folders or archive them appropriately.
Keep archived items out of sight in cabinets or on shelves, not in piles on your workspace.
Keep a Waiting List Cory Doctorow recommends keeping a file dedicated to keeping track of things he is waiting for: calls, packages, payments, etc.
This one file serves as his daily reminder of the things on which he possibly needs to follow up [13].
2.
Filtering Information Received Simple logic dictates that if you have a lot of information coming in, you will have to process it in some way.
If you can reduce your input in even small ways, your information overload factor will be reduced.
Here are some general ways that you can filter or weed your input.
Weed, Baby, Weed!
Think about whether or not you actually need all of the inputs you are currently using.
Perhaps you decide that while Twitter updates from your friends are interesting, its return on investment is small when you consider the interruptions on your computer screen while you are working.
Maybe you decide to unsubscribe from some listservs or weed out your Facebook friend list.
If you get your news through both RSS feeds from Reuters and a news show on the radio, you will most likely get a lot of overlap.
Pick which one gives you the most and reject the other one.
Only keep those things that enrich your life, both professionally and personally.
Teach Others Have a communication etiquette class for your co-workers where people agree not to use email or the phone to socialise, not to send frivolous messages, one-line replies like 'thank you', or huge file attachments that do not add to the information content of the message.
Agree upon standards for when certain types of communication are most appropriate.
Schedule Unplugged Times Set aside certain weekday nights, weekend days, or hours within the workday, where you will eliminate all means of receiving incoming traffic: no phone, no computer, no PDA, nothing.
These brief respites from information inwards will give you time to concentrate on important issues and projects.
Unplug at Will Unplug completely (again, no phone, computer, or PDA) when you need to concentrate on a major project, or when you are feeling particularly anxious or distracted.
3.
RSS Overload Techniques The advent of RSS has had a huge impact on information received from those who have chosen to use it.
It has made the delivery and absorption of certain types of information much easier, but by its very nature has increased the number of points of data for many RSS users.
In other words, because it is easier to get the data, why not get more of it to fill up that time that you just freed up?
There are ways to use RSS smartly, to use the tool to combat information overload instead of increasing it.
Use RSS When Applicable You can use RSS not only to get feeds from Web sites, blogs, and other sites, but to obtain information of value to you every day: weather alerts, airport delays, traffic updates, new music on iTunes, new computer threats, sports information, and more.
Remind Yourself There are ways to use RSS to set up personal reminders to notify you at a specified time.
Limit the Number of Feeds A microcosm of information overload, a person's collection of RSS feeds grows organically and in an unorganised fashion.
Set aside half an hour or more to weed through your RSS feeds, deciding which ones are essential to your work or personal life, and which ones you can delete.
The latter tend to be the ones that you simply click through, do not read, feel guilty about, and tell yourself that you will read someday.
There is no someday.
Start deleting.
Organise Feeds Organise your RSS feeds into subject-based folders.
Set aside a primary folder, right at the top of your list, that includes all of your priority RSS feeds the ones you read first.
Look at those first each day, and only at the others when you need information on a particular subject or have the time to read them.
4.
Interruptive Technology Overload Techniques Some of the most interruptive technologies in our lives are those that get delivered to us instantly, whether we want them to or not, with no acceptance of the input on our part.
The information just shows up.
Today, the most-used interruptive technologies are instant messaging, text messaging, paging, and most recently the micro-blogging technology of Twitter.
Why is the interruptive technology a problem?
Interruptions make us less effective.
But they can also interfere with our attention spans.
A Basex survey showed that over 50% of knowledge workers surveyed write emails or IM messages during conference calls [4].
We are participating in these conversations all the time, regardless of other things competing for our primary attention.
Controlling our use of these technologies is one of the keys to dealing with information overload.
Use Interruptive Technology When Appropriate IM, pages, and text messages are useful for short and immediate-need conversations, not for lengthy interactions or those with key emotional content.
Moreover, do not use interruptive technology when you do not want a potential permanent record of your conversation.
Check When You Want to Do not feel pressured to check your messages constantly.
Set aside certain times of the day when you will check your messages.
Post these times as events on your calendar, with a reminder, if that will help you stick to the schedule.
Do Not Interrupt Yourself Do not interrupt one type of information inwards (like a meeting, conference call, or phone call) with one of these interruptive technologies.
Give your attention to the task at hand and deal with other interactions later.
Importance of the Status Message Keep your status message up to date so others know where you are and what your availability is.
Pay attention to the status of others, as well, and if someone says they are busy or in a meeting, choose to wait to interrupt them until later.
Lobby for IM in Your Workplace If you are lucky, your institution uses Instant Messaging for staff-to-staff communications.
More institutions need to use IM as a communication mechanism – this would cut down on email considerably and speed up response times to urgent issues.
While it switches one format of input to another, it redirects quick and urgent messages to a technology that allows us to deal with those types of messages appropriately.
5.
Phone Overload Techniques Some think that the telephone is outmoded, that people now communicate via the other digital methods available.
But let's test that assumption.
Do you see less or more people talking on the phone in public?
Do you spend less time on the phone than you did five years ago, or more?
Do you talk to more or less people on the phone?
Yes, it is true that the use of email, texting, IMing, and other communication methods have skyrocketed.
But they have not replaced phone communications, only supplemented them.
Use the Phone When Appropriate Use the phone only when a more personal touch is necessary, and when the inflection behind the words is as important as the words themselves.
If your issue can wait, instead choose to send a message that the recipient can deal with when he or she wants to.
Turn Your Mobile Phone Off If you have ever been in a large meeting when someone's phone has gone off, usually with a grating ring tone, you will appreciate the need sometimes to turn our phones off.
Once again, if you already have one mode of informational input (in this case, a meeting) do not set yourself up for distraction by leaving other information mechanisms on, making yourself look available when you really are not.
If really necessary, keep the phone on but put it on vibrate so you cannot interrupt others.
Keep Your Number Private Guard your mobile phone number carefully.
The more people that have access to that number, the more phone calls you will receive.
Only give your number to people who need to (and whom you want to) contact you anytime, anywhere.
Let It Ring Contrary to popular belief, just because the phone rings does not mean you have to pick it up.
The alert system of the telephone, the loud persistent ringing, is created to get us to answer it immediately.
However, the choice is ultimately yours.
If you can see who the caller is and do not want to deal with the issue at that moment, simply silence the ringer and check your messages later.
If you are concentrating on a project and do not want to deal with a minor issue, then don't.
Let it ring.
Work = Work; Home = Home Do not check your work phone messages while not at work.
If you are on your way home, at home, or on vacation, you are not working.
All of your work contact should therefore be cut off.
There are very few exceptions to this: the directors and CEOs are always on.
For the rest of us, we should take advantage of every moment we have to ourselves.
6.
Email Overload Techniques This entire article could have been about email overload.
In truth, it is the topic that attracts most attention.
The reason for this is probably that it is the most prominent method of communication today, and the one that is the most misused.
Below are some tips on dealing with this behemoth of information.
Some of them, I hope, may help you.
Stop 'Doing Email' Think carefully about how much time you spend 'doing email' (whatever the heck that is).
Do you find yourself answering the quick and easy (but lower priority) messages instead of focusing on the big issues, the priority problem messages?
Of course you do – that's how email is set up to work.
You get a great sense of satisfaction from deleting messages, so doing 4 quick ones instead of 1 long one carries with it much more of a reward.
Stop the generic treatment of email and instead try implementing the methods below.
Schedule Email Scanning Times Set aside a time every morning and evening to scan your email – to file away items that need filing, to annotate items that need your immediate attention, and to reply to questions needing immediate answers.
Those quick-answer replies are the only replies that should happen during this time period, though.
All others should wait.
You can even set up your email provider only to deliver messages to you at specific times during the day by turning off the setting that delivers messages to your account right away.
Deal with Email by Subject During the day you will address different projects, different priorities.
When you do that, go back into your email only to look for messages relevant to that project.
Those messages are part of the larger project, and if they are folded in with the rest of the data points about that project (print materials, phone messages), your efficiency in completing your work will be positively affected and the general scourge of 'doing email' will be no more.
Use Email When Appropriate If you send more email, you will receive more email.
Think about what you are sending before doing so.
Use email when the issue is important enough that it needs to be recorded, when it involves many people needing to see what is written, or when you anticipate very little back-and-forth.
A good rule is that if more than four messages are sent on an issue, a phone call or in-person meeting might work better.
Keep Your Inbox Empty Think of your inbox as a staging area, the first stop on an informational path.
Once you have addressed an email, delete it or file it.
Do not treat your inbox like a to-do list, keeping messages you need to save or possibly address someday in that one place.
If you need to save an attachment from a message, save it to your hard drive and delete the message, unless the message contains additional contextual information, in which case you can file the whole message in the right folder.
Filter Your Messages Add rules or filters for the mail you receive, redirecting messages into separate folders.
Cory Doctorow encourages using colour-coding as a way to distinguish messages from known senders from those coming in from others.
He recommends 'a soothing green.'
[13] File Your Messages File messages into the right folders once they have been addressed.
Create separate folders for committees, groups, projects, or even folders for messages from particular individuals.
Pick whatever organisational system works for you.
Darlene Fichter recommends using a naming convention for your folders that allows for sub-groups: such as TechCommittee.Agendas, TechCommittee.ProjectRequests, etc.
[14] Darlene Fichter also recommends using a naming convention for your folders so the most-often used folders always appear at the top of the list.
To achieve this, she simply adds a zero (0) to the beginning of popular folders [14].
Limit Listservs Listservs and group email lists are a large portion of unread email in most people's accounts.
Review the listservs you subscribe to and cancel subscriptions to those you rarely read.
If you find you cannot remove yourself from lists you want to leave, you can usually add the sender to your spam detector.
Cory Doctorow recommends writing a mail rule that will put all listserv messages into a special folder, except for any messages including your name, which are still funnelled into your inbox.
To do this, create a rule as follows: If subject line includes {name of list} and body does not include {your name}, then the message goes into the listserv folder [13].
Follow Good Email Etiquette There are some general email etiquette rules that, when followed by individuals throughout the organisation, can lead to better intra-institutional communications.
Some general tips to follow include addressing only one topic per email, using 'Reply to All' only when absolutely necessary, using attachments only when necessary, adding no reply is necessary notes when it applies, and limiting work email to work topics.
Delete and Archive Your email provider, especially at work, may have a limited amount of disk space for each account.
As such, you may be forced to delete messages periodically.
Even if this is not the case, you should remember to go through the content in your Sent, Deleted, and Saved folders periodically to discard what is no longer needed.
Instead of permanently deleting any message, I recommend archiving your messages off-server instead.
Some systems provide for automatic archiving, but if your system does not, you can copy months' worth of deleted or sent messages into a folder on your hard drive, naming the folders with a convention like Deleted08.01-08.03 or Sent 08.01-08.03 so you can easily access the right content if needed.
7.
Print Media Overload Techniques While digital media is a more immediate form of information overload, most people still have to deal with an influx of printed material as well.
If you're like me, you have a couple of piles at home.
A 3-foot pile of books, magazines, and newspapers next to the bed for reading eventually.
A stack of mail, catalogues, and bills on the kitchen table waiting for weeding and attention.
How do we reduce the piles?
Just Because You Can Touch It Does Not Mean You Have to Keep It Dealing with physical objects is usually more difficult for people—probably because you have a visual reminder that you have things to do and words to read.
It's harder to discard something when it requires a physical action.
Treat physical data the same way you would treat digital data: if you do not absolutely need it, throw it out.
Cancel, Cancel, Cancel Cancel subscriptions to periodicals you rarely read.
If you do not get to read the Sunday paper until the following Saturday, that is a clear sign that you need less information.
Cancel subscriptions to catalogues that you do not want on the Web site CatalogChoice.org [15].
Not only is it good for you, it is good for the environment.
Weed What You Have If you have persistent piles, weed through them twice a year to throw out what, realistically, you will never read or in which you have lost interest.
Donate your discarded books and periodicals to the library.
Let someone else add them to their information overload.
8.
Multimedia Overload Techniques Do you have a favourite television show that you have to watch every week?
A collection of checked-out or borrowed DVDs waiting to be watched?
Do you listen to news radio on your morning commute?
A stack of CDs or a collection of podcasts waiting for listening?
Other video and audio informational material?
We rarely think of audio and video entertainment as information input, but it does take up time, mental power, and brain space.
If you find yourself with a lot of material in this area, consider the following techniques for lessening its impact.
Choose Entertainment Carefully Keep a list of movies you want to watch, and stick to that list instead of letting random browsing place other, less desirable ones higher up the list than those you made a conscious decision to watch.
The same method can be applied to music.
Limit Television Viewing We all know that television is the great brain drain.
While watching a Law and Order re-run can often help your brain de-tox after a stressful workday, watching four in a row probably has diminishing returns.
Limit your viewing to those programmes that you really want to watch, and never, ever watch something you have already seen.
Use Your Commute to Your Benefit If you have down time while you are commuting, use that time in a way that works to your benefit.
If you have podcasts that you listen to, download them to an MP3 player and plug it in to your car's audio port.
Or, if podcasts are not your style, choose to have some silent time instead of listening to meaningless radio chatter.
That silence will help recharge your mental batteries so you arrive at your destination ready for anything.
9.
Social Network Overload Techniques For individuals who have dived headlong into social networks and virtual worlds, the very real information overload and time-drain from these mini-worlds has significantly influenced the overall flow of information.
In some cases, applications within social networks (such as in-network instant messaging, in-network email messaging) have replaced other information sources.
However, in many cases these new streams from the social networks have simply added to the overall flow of information.
Here are some tips for dealing with that influx.
Schedule Time on Your Networks Allot yourself a set amount of time to deal with your social networks.
Logging in at the beginning of the day can be very dangerous – the friend requests, messages, photo and wall comments, new status updates, blog posts, and fun applications can suck hours out of every day if you let them.
Stick to whatever time you allotted yourself.
Pick a Primary Network Many people have profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, and other networks.
The logic is to be available everywhere, all the time.
To reduce your daily input, pick one network as your primary method of connecting with other people—whichever one gives you the most benefit.
Keep your profiles on the other sites, but only check them weekly.
If necessary, inform people who contact you via the other networks that the primary network you have selected is now your preference.
Limit Your IM If you have IM set up through another network, turn off that functionality in the social network.
People who contact you in that way will quite likely have regular IM accounts as well, so you will lose nothing, but rather consolidate the IM you receive into one place.
10.
Time and Stress Management Two big parts of managing information overload are good time management and stress management.
Dr. Larry D. Rosen, research psychologist at CSU, describes the problem succinctly: 'All these forms of communication are now staring at you and saying "Deal with me first."
You walk by your computer and it says "Check your mail!
"or it dings at you.
It's designed to draw you in.
You can't stop.'
[16] If the incoming information causes you to manage your time badly or causes you stress, then examining your day-to-day activities can be very beneficial.
If you know that you have problems managing your time in general, or that you have problems managing stress on and off the job, then taking some time to address those problems separately will aid you in managing the information influx.
There are books aplenty on both topics, but here are some general tips: Use Your Calendar Keep one central calendar to manage both your professional and personal commitments.
Keeping an online calendar?
Make sure you keep a weekly printed back-up copy in case the server or online access goes down.
Using a printed calendar?
Think twice.
If you lose that one piece of paper, you will lose all of your organisation in one shot.
Try using Google Calendar if you do not have a pre-set system at work.
Take Breaks Take scheduled and unscheduled breaks throughout the day and do something fun or relaxing to let your mind ease off from the anxiety it is exposed to during the workday.
Be sure to do something physical as well, such as stretching your wrists or your lower back.
Eliminate Stressful Interruptions If you find yourself jumping at audio signals like IM notifications or phones ringing, then silence them.
If you feel a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you look at your email, then do not look at it as often.
Think about those stressors and do what you can to reduce them.
Look for Software Help A lot of time management software is out there for good reason.
There are programs to remind you to take breaks, to offer audio signals to remind you of appointments, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
My favourite is a Zen meditation site that offers software that will remind you to take a meditation break at certain times during the day.
Balance Your Life and Work If you find yourself tapping at a keyboard next to your partner on the sofa while you are watching a movie, instead of sidling up next to him or her, you may have a work/life balance problem.
Think long and hard about whether or not you have your priorities in the right place.
If you know you do not, then you should seek help to re-balance your time.
Conclusion Dealing with information overload has become a task for each and every one of us, and yet very few of us have actually stopped to think about the best way to do this.
We know that we are interrupted.
We know that such interruptions affect our work and capacity to think in an adverse manner.
And yet, because of the very problem itself — the constant flow of information and tasks demanding our every moment—we do not stop mid-flow to assess and organise.
Examining each information input in our lives, including the content, delivery method, and access device, will help us to realistically assess what it is we're doing with our time.
Consciously thinking about the effectiveness and desirability of each stream of information, and of ways to improve them, will help to get the best information to you in the best way.
I believe that, as information professionals, we are best equipped to recognise information overload and deal with its effects.
We know information; it is our business.
We are better positioned than anyone to deal with our own information load and to share those skills and techniques with those we serve.
Make the topic of information overload a subject at a staff meeting, the topic of a customer training, and a topic of research for your organisation's training or technology teams.
Together we can help people in general to deal with this deluge of information.
But first, we have to deal with our own flood.
Happy sailing!
References Early Modern Information Overload.
D. Rosenberg, (Ed.)
2003.
Journal of the History of Ideas.
64:1-10.
Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload.
A. Blair.
2003.
Journal of the History of Ideas.
64:11-28.
Combating Information Overload.
Ted Tjaden.
26 June, 2007. http://www.slaw.ca/2007/06/26/combating-information-overload/ Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.
Jonathan B. Spira et.
al.
Basex, Inc. March 2007.
Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform.
E.M. Hallowell.
Harvard Business Review.
January 2005: 55: 55-56.
Navigating Info Overload.
John D. Halamka.
January 28, 2008.
Computerworld.
p 26.
Handling Information Overload.
Florence M. Fass.
New Jersey Law Journal.
January 28, 2008.
Information Anxiety, Richard S. Wurman, Publisher Pan Books (January, 1991), ISBN-13: 978-0330310970 Information Anxiety 2, Richard S. Wurman, Publisher Que; 2nd edition (December, 2000), ISBN-13: 978-0789724106 Take Back Your Life!
: Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized, Sally McGhee, Publisher Microsoft Press (June, 2007), ISBN-13: 978-0735623439.
Techno Stress: The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution, Craig Brod, Publisher Addison-Wesley (February 1984) ISBN-13: 978-0201112115 Technostress, Michelle M. Weil & Larry D. Rosen, Publisher John Wiley & Sons; 1st edition (September 1997), ISBN-13: 978-0471177098 How to Stop Your Inbox Exploding.
Cory Doctorow.
29 April 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/29/email.filter "9 Ways to Tame Your Inbox."
Darlene Fichter.
April 29, 2008. http://library2.usask.ca/~fichter/blog_on_the_side/2008/04/9-ways-to-tame-your-inbox.html Web site: Catalog Choice Eliminate unwanted catalogs you receive in the mail (US) http://www.catalogchoice.org/ Too Much Information!
Rachele Kanigel.
December 2004.
Organic Style.
http://online.sfsu.edu/~kanigel/clipstoomuchinformation.html Author Details Sarah Houghton-Jan Digital Futures Manager San José Public Library California USA Email: librarianinblack@gmail.com Web site: http://www.librarianinblack.net Return to top Article Title: "Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload" Author: Sarah Houghton-Jan Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/houghton-jan/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Being an Information Innovator Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Being an Information Innovator Buzz archives youtube research Citation BibTex RIS John Paschoud reviews a book which formalises the processes of being what many of us would like to be within our information-based organisations innovators and entrepreneurs of the Information Age.
For Learners… and Practitioners?
Superficially at least, this book seems to be very clearly designed for students on a structured course at first degree or masters level for would-be information management professionals.
In terms of structure I’m sure it’s ideally suited to that audience, with each of five chapters including learning objectives, review questions to test understanding, and group discussion topics.
However the main author, Jennifer Rowley of Manchester Metropolitan University, makes quite clear in her introduction that she intends the book to cater equally for experienced and practising information professionals, claiming also that it is the ‘first to seek to discuss and apply the rhetoric and theories of innovation and entrepreneurship in information organisations’.
Far too many professionals in libraries, even those fresh from some of the best postgraduate courses, seem to be far too tightly bound by the established ways of managing things.
The stated and admirable aim of this book is to encourage people in these situations to become information innovators.
Does it do the job?
Refreshingly Concise The first chapter provides a thorough grounding in the language used, defining what the authors mean by ‘innovation’, ‘entrepreneurship’ and structured creative processes, and a helpful brief outline of what is covered in the other four more detailed chapters.
My own view is that the book is too modest in scoping the types of ‘information organisations’ to which this advice might apply.
It gives expected examples of libraries, publishers and broadcasters but scant mention of a much wider potential realm of organisations and enterprises, in government and private sectors, whose activities depend critically on the competent management of information, even though their publicly visible objectives might be to empty dustbins, keep roads or railways running, or collect taxes.
Professor Rowley acknowledges that much innovation is likely to be based on changes in or opportunities provided by information processing technologies; but also that the processes discussed are fundamentally not technological but organisational and personal.
This is a lesson too often forgotten or misunderstood by some of my fellow technologists, that ‘not all technical innovations involve technology’.
Appropriately therefore, mentions of particular technologies involved are passing and without diversion into any detail of how they work (although I did think that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were slightly more worthy of note as entrepreneurial founders of Google [1] than for their association with YouTube as the book states!).
How Change Happens, Who Does It, What Impedes It Later chapters dissect and classify the objectives of innovation in organisations and the possible models for how change can be either allowed to happen, or kept under control.
The concept of entrepreneurial behaviour by staff or management at any level is still alien to many organisations in the public sector (i.e.
most libraries to some extent), and the chapter covering entrepreneurship tackles this issue head on, recognising the barriers and challenges that will be familiar to many of us of bureaucracy and politics (that’s ‘politics’, and ‘Politics’).
It deals specifically with issues of corporate entrepreneurship (or ‘intrapreneurship’) in the public sector, eerily foreshadowing the pronouncement by David Cameron in January 2011 that he ‘wanted to release a hidden army of public sector entrepreneurs in Whitehall.’[2].
Also highly relevant to those of us working mainly in public sector and not-for-profit organisations, this chapter discusses in some detail the concepts of ‘social entrepreneurship’ and the non-financial consequences, risks and benefits that can come with innovation.
The chapter on ‘Organising for innovation’ covers in detail the issues around building teams and applying appropriate leadership styles, and fostering the sorts of creative talents and methods of working that may be stifled in the more routine jobs that the same individuals may have to do.
I found the final chapter, ‘Innovation in practice’, to be where I spent most time and found most of interest.
The rather brief coverage of ‘Implementation’, including project management (outlined in one paragraph and a total of eleven bullet points!)
was rather disappointing, despite the author’s admission that this is ‘the stage of the innovation process that involves the most significant commitment of resources’.
There are plenty of other books and resources covering those areas and I can see why the author may have chosen not to get bogged down in too much detail here.
But there is the potential to mislead a reader with less practical experience both into using this book as guidance for a real project, and into thinking that these elements of the task require a correspondingly small proportion of attention and effort.
The structure of all chapters of the book includes a set of ‘review questions’, which look suspiciously like ready-made examination questions (such as ‘Explain why it is difficult to define social entrepreneurship.
Discuss possible ways towards resolving this difficulty.’).
Of course these may be extremely handy to anyone in the position of either setting or sitting an examination paper covering this field.
Of more direct use to practising individuals and teams might be the ‘challenges’ (‘Finding and choosing the “right” customers and getting their commitment to contribute to your innovation.’) and ‘group discussion topics’ (‘How did you assess the viability of the potential new service, process or product?’).
The book is also well supported by references to further reading throughout.
Conclusion If we accept a wider interpretation of what may be an ‘information organisation’, I’m not so convinced of the ‘first’ claim of the author for this book.
Many of the same lessons and principles are included in publications that predate it, by authors such as Charles Leadbeater [3] and many more.
But that doesn’t necessarily detract from the usefulness of this book, its refreshing conciseness and its well-structured teaching style.
The weakness of this review may be that it has been written with the benefit of far too much hindsight: in that the author (of this review) has certainly been an ‘information innovator’ (and sometimes far too innovative for his own good!)
but has had the benefit of formal education in merely engineering the technologies used in information management and has learned the lessons that this book seeks to teach more often by trial and error.
Not being able to turn back the clock of my own career, I  nonetheless found a considerable amount of advice in Being an Information Innovator that I believe will be of future use to me.
References Larry Page and Sergey Brin, TED profile http://www.ted.com/speakers/sergey_brin_and_larry_page.html Andrew Cahn, Michael Clemence, “The Whitehall Entrepreneur: Oxymoron or hidden army?”, Institute for Government, March 2011 http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publications/whitehall-entrepreneur Charles Leadbeater, Archive: Innovation and Entrepreneurship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Leadbeater Author Details John Paschoud Academic Associate, Information Systems & Innovation Group, Department of Management, London School of Economics.
Managing Consultant, Local Knowledge Email: John@Local-Knowledge.net John Paschoud is a consultant information engineer currently working mainly on projects to do with personal identity management and access to online resources.
He is professionally qualified in information systems engineering and project management and has spent over 30 years managing a large number of innovation and applied research projects, and the teams delivering them, in academic institutions and other public sector and commercial organisations.
He also dabbles in Politics and some sorts of heavier engineering that can sometimes be painful.
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Shared Repositories, Shared Benefits: Regional and Consortial Repositories in Japan Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Shared Repositories, Shared Benefits: Regional and Consortial Repositories in Japan Buzz data software framework database portal infrastructure archives digitisation repositories eprints dspace research Citation BibTex RIS Takeo Ozono, Daisuke Ueda and Fumiyo Ozaki describe the work of the ShaRe Project and its influence upon the development of consortial repositories and the benefits they have brought to Japanese institutions.
The ShaRe Project (Shared Repository Project 2008-2009), which aimed to promote the concept of consortial repositories and facilitate their implementation, has made a significant contribution to the rapid growth of institutional repositories (IRs) in Japan.
Following precedents including White Rose Research Online (UK) and SHERPA-LEAP (UK), 14 regional consortial repositories have been set up on a prefectoral basis across Japan*.
Their success is demonstrated by the fact that as many as 92 bodies have set up IRs despite having no institutional hardware of their own.
In this article we discuss the role and effectiveness of consortial repositories in Japan.
Consortial repositories make it possible for each institution to reduce its economic and system management overheads, especially in the case of small and medium-sized universities.
Consequently, repository managers can focus their efforts on other important activities, such as content recruitment.
Furthermore, consortial repositories have played a significant role in the development of community co-operation among participating organisations, which has contributed greatly to the expansion of the Open Access movement in Japan.
Repository Development across Multiple Institutions As of 2012, there are over 300 academic institutional repositories operated in Japan, and the amount of content, including full-text material, reached over a million items.
In this emerging landscape, we have seen the development of a project to build institutional repositories with the establishment of the “Next-generation Academic Information Infrastructure -NII Institutional Repositories Program” (from here on referred to as the “CSI Commission Project”) [1] that the National Institute of Informatics (NII) has been supporting since 2005.
Additionally, we have also witnessed the promotion of Open Access principles into “The 4th Science and Technology Basic Plan” [2] as well as “Infrastructure Development for Strengthening the Capacity of International Scholarly Communication” [3], both of which are making good progress.
Meanwhile, in July 2010 the report of the Science Technology / Science Council Environmental Underpinning Commission Section Meeting, proposed that, ‘In the future, for institutions experiencing difficulty in constructing or operating their own repository, we need a shared repository system which is commonly available for each institution.’ [4] Following the above statement, the National Institute of Informatics launched its official service in April 2012, establishing the shared repository JAIRO Cloud (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online Cloud) [5].
As of November 2012, the NII provides more than 70 institutions with a repository environment.
Prior to these developments, dating from 2007, a number of systems deploying shared hardware and repository software were set up by several institutions which had been struggling to build their own systems due to local budgetary difficulties and shortage of local technical know-how in their respective regions.
In United Kingdom, White Rose Research Online [6] and SHERPA-LEAP [7] were known to have shared repository facilities [8], and so in in Japan, it was decided to promote the construction of similar systems for each prefecture.
This model of sharing repository systems across multiple institutions reduces the financial and operational burdens of each participating institution, thereby making it relatively easy for smaller institutions to gain a first foothold on the territory of IR development and operation.
Following the work of the CSI Commission Project, the Shared Repository Project (ShaRe), led by Hiroshima University, worked over 2008-9 in order to familiarise researchers with the aims of regional shared repositories [9].
Based on the substance of the March 2010 ShaRe Report [10] and later findings, this article will analyse the working of the community shared repositories and consider the operational model of institutional repositories in Japan as well as the development of the JAIRO Cloud.
Figure 1: Regional shared repositories in Japan (2012) (further details in the Appendix).
The Growth of Institutional Repositories and Regional Shared Repositories A full listing of the repository consortia categorised by prefectoral location is available in the Appendix but this section will describe the organisation and growth of Japan’s repositories in broad terms.
As previously explained, as of 2012, the number of community shared repositories in Japan stands at 14, which means that about one third of Japan’s 47 prefectures now have repositories.
Moreover, in addition to these 14 community-based repositories, 92 institutions have constructed their own institutional repository (IR).
As of November 2012, based on the number of institutions registered on the IRDB (Institutional Repositories DataBase) contents analysis system [11] run by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), we observed a rise in the proportion of regional shared repositories as compared to the total of institutional repositories in Japan.
Institution Institutions constructing single IR Institutions joining in development of shared IR Constructing institutions using JAIRO Cloud Total number of institutions constructing IRs National university 76 0 0 76 Public university 12 12(1) 1 25 Private university 45 46(4) 6 97 Junior college 0 18(3) 0 18 Technical college 0 8(1) 0 8 Other 6 8(0) 1 15 Total 139 92(9) 8 239 Table 1: The figures for institutional repositories in Japan categorised by class [12] * IRDB Contents Analysis System (National Institute of Informatics) NB: figures in ( ) denote the number of community shared IRs using JAIRO Cloud.
Table 1 shows the number of IRs categorised by each institution, with single IRs, Community-shared IRs and those operating in JAIRO Cloud identified separately.
Figure 2: Proportions of institutions involved in developing IRs categorised by type Figure 2 provides a graph illustrating the proportions of different kinds of repositories.
The reason for the relative predomination of IRs developed by national universities is explained by the fact that in the first year of the operation of the CSI Commission Project (2005), 17 of the 19 universities were national, and national universities had a greater capacity to share and construct repositories at a relatively early stage.
As one examines the different categories of individual institutional repositories and community shared repositories, national universities are seen mainly to operate IRs (ie as ‘host institutions’).
However, it is worthy of note that there was no national university which collaborated in the development of a repository in other words operating in the role of partner or participating institution.
Therefore, this table fails to account for the number of national universities acting as partners or participating institutions contributing (rather than leading) to the development of a community shared IR.
Meanwhile, in terms of public universities, 12 of 25 institutions, and as regards private universities, 46 of 97 institutions achieved completion of their repository through participation in community shared repositories.
Meanwhile, as regards junior colleges and technical colleges, all institutions engaged upon IR development are involved in regional shared repositories, just as 8 of 15 other institutions and institutional laboratories are also participating in the scheme.
In fact, regional shared repositories are the largest contributor to IR development in universities and Higher Education institutions other than national universities.
Additionally, as far as development of IRs with JAIRO Cloud is concerned, the number of registrations on the IRDB stands at just eight institutions at the time of writing.
However, since some institutions are releasing papers without registering on the IRDB, while over 70 institutions are now constructing institutional repositories, the proportion of regional shared repositories is set to rise in the not too distant future.
Figure 3: Annual growth of IRs in Japan 2005-2012, categorised by type of development Next, Figure 3 illustrates the annual figures separately for single IRs and community shared IRs since 2005.
In 2009, for the first time, the number of institutions launching IRs through participation in community shared repositories schemes surpassed the number of single IRs developed.
Moreover, since 2012 when the JAIRO Cloud service was launched, the number of community shared repositories or JAIRO Cloud repositories rose appreciably, whereas the proportion of single IRs decreased to approximately 20%.
This trend is likely to continue in the future.
Operation of Regional Shared Repositories   In this section we propose to classify and analyse the operating methods identified through a survey in December 2012 conducted among 14 representatives of community shared repositories now in operation.
Operational Leads and Eligibility to Participate The management of regional shared repositories falls mainly into the categories of either ‘regional consortia’ or ‘host institutions’ (ie national universities).
In the case of the management of regional consortia, there is the advantage of using the existing framework, but eligibility to participate is limited to member institutions.
On the other hand, in the case of host institutions they enjoy the advantage of managerial flexibility and the opportunity to seek partners from a wider variety of backgrounds.
In any case, operation of regional shared repositories calls for a deal of co-operation and collaboration with regional consortia and a variety of institutions.
The Rationale of Repository Development The reasons for opting to develop a repository are mainly as follows: Regional development: support for prefectoral institutions experiencing difficulty in implementing their own IR single-handedly through provision of an appropriate repository environment.
Information centre: Storage and access to the academic findings of the prefecture, as well as promotion of principles of Open Access.
Community Development: Enhancement of co-operation within the prefecture through the implementation of a collaborative project.
Support of construction of portal sites providing public access to regional information.
The Okinawa regional academic repository, which has a plan to harvest data on Okinawa from other prefectoral institutions, is being developed as an information centre of the regional academy.
Operating Costs Operating costs include those for server system maintenance, content creation and advocacy; however, according to research on expenditure incurred during 2011, most of the costs are met through funding by host institutions or from other bodies.
Currently, only Hiroshima and Kagoshima collect these costs from the participating institutions.
Hiroshima collects the costs of system maintenance (outsourced) and server updating from the participating institutions and the Hiroshima Association of University Libraries.
The annual participation fee was 30,000 yen for each institution.
In Hiroshima, it has been five years since system development was initiated and therefore these costs will be used for system replacement.
Moreover, in Nagano, there will be no cost for using JAIRO Cloud for the moment, and therefore there are currently no running costs.
While one of the perceived benefits of developing shared repositories is their low cost, nonetheless concern has been expressed by some of the participating institutions that they may be obliged to shoulder operational expenditure in the future.
Currently partners may look to the CSI Commission Project to meet costs raised by other parties.
However, since this project ended in March 2013, we need to consider how we go about securing stable and sustainable operational funding for the future.
Methods of Operation Whereas the routine operation of shared repositories tends to be performed by host institutions and participating institutions separately, generally speaking the central role of host institutions is system management.
This is because, with the exception of the Nagano service, all servers are installed and managed at the host institutions.
The assignment of other tasks generally depends on the region, and the types of tasks assigned are mainly classified into ‘Concentrated Type’ and ‘Diversified Type’.
‘Concentrated Type’ is the remit of host institutions which conduct the ingest and digitisation of content deriving from participating institutions, whereas the participating partner institutions engage solely in content collection.
The Yamagata region is a typical example.
The advantage of this type of workflow model is that short-staffed institutions can nonetheless participate because of the reduced burden on staff that this model affords.
On the other hand, the host institutions are somewhat disadvantaged by the larger burden they are compelled to assume, with the added difficulty that they have less opportunity to improve the knowledge and experience of the participating institutions.
By contrast, the ‘Diversified Type’ of operations is where participating institutions conduct each operation as a leader of the project, while host institutions carry out only system management and support for the partner institutions.
The Hiroshima region is a typical example.
Nagano region is a typical example of a host institution enjoying a reduction in operational workload characterised by the ‘Diversified Type’.
This is because the National Institute of Informatics assumes the system management of JAIRO Cloud.
With the ‘Diversified Type’, the principal advantages for participating institutions are that they can accumulate knowledge and experience while awarenessraising efforts will also improve.
Meanwhile, by comparison, the ‘Concentrated Type’ of working can represent a considerable operational burden for participating institutions in which those already experiencing budgetary or staffing shortages will find no advantage whatsoever.
System Environment Repository systems currently operated in Japan are divided, as mentioned above, into the ‘Shared Type Model’ and the ‘Independent Type Model’.
This section seeks to provide further detail and a description of advantages and disadvantages of the two types.
Shared Type Model Figure 4: Shared Type Model In this model, one repository system is shared by several partner institutions, and this model is used in 10 of the 14 Japanese regions involved.
They share one set of hardware and one type of repository system software (the latter is generally DSpace [13] or XooNips [14]).
They do require a variety of functionality which therefore does differentiate each partner despite its usage of the same system.
Required Functionality The institutional repository must be regarded as the showcase for the academic findings provided by each partner institution.
Given that every IR has a role to play in the publicity of its institution’s research effort, even in the instance of community shared repositories, each partner should have display capacity for its exclusive use.
In addition to this, in order to support the capacity of searchers to search across the content of each individual partner institution, each institution must be able to make its own arrangements for indexing and harvesting of its content.
Specifically, each institute will individually set its own baseURL or ‘set’.
Moreover, to operate the ‘Diversified Type’ model among participating institutions, it is also necessary to separate the access logs so that content management authorities can be separately identified and so each institution can manage its own log data.
This means that each partner institution in community shared repositories customises its own access logs.
Advantages and Disadvantages Since regardless of the (even large) number of participating institutions, there is only one system, most of the partner bodies experience a relatively light burden in terms of the management of their repository system and can as a result concentrate on their principal role of content collection.
Moreover, their financial burden also tends to be reduced.
A further advantage is that sharing the same system with other institutions has a very beneficial effect on inter-institutional co-operation.
Moreover, it is often worthwhile developing a portal site to display the fruits of regional co-operation where there are considerable benefits to be gained, for example with system installation.
Meanwhile, as to disadvantages, as described under ‘Required Functionality’, the customisation of functionality across the system means that there is little that can be shared with each institute.
Therefore, it is difficult to deal with individual requests from the partner institutions where there is no common cross-environment system.
Independent Type Model Figure 5: Independent Type Model (operated on a single OS) In this model, all hardware is shared while the participating institutions each possess their own repository software.
Of the 14 regions, four use this model of operation.
In Yamaguchi and Kagawa, multiple repository software Earmas [15] is operated on one operating system (OS).
Figure 6: Independent Type Model (separate server on the OS level) In Okayama, EPrints [16] and a Vmware server are used to separate servers virtually at the OS level.
Nagano operates JAIRO Cloud and uses this model; the software deployed is called WEKO [17].
Advantages and Disadvantages The greatest advantage of the independent type model is that there are no limitations placed on the system through the operation of sharing whereas the shared type model does suffer from this disadvantage.
Therefore each participating institution can operate the system with considerable flexibility.
Moreover, it is relatively easy not only to add a new partner institution but also restore the hardware whenever a technical difficulty arises.
The principal disadvantage of this model is where some institutions find it difficult to meet the demands of managing the system.
Nagano uses JAIRO Cloud and has developed portal pages.
It also plans cross-searching functionality to enhance the demonstration of its portal.
Problems with Regional Shared Repositories and IR Operating Models Finally, we describe a problem with continuing community shared repositories and IR operation models.
Role of Host Institutions As described above, in the 14 regional shared repositories currently being operated, it is the national university of each region which is operating as the host or lead institution.
The conduct of each host institution’s repository work will inevitably involve system  management and maintenance, the provision of appropriate technology and technical  know-how to support those repository operations, content ingest duties, organisational effort both in respect of the participating institutions and towards community building.
The size of each repository will depend on the size and the degree of activity pertaining to each region, which will naturally determine the scale upon which each host institution will be obliged to operate.
Consequently if the regional shared repositories are to be accounted a success, it is vital that the host institutions have the leadership and resources with which to accomplish the essential tasks noted above.
There can be no denying that the operational burden placed upon the host institutions is a very large one.
They play an essential role in promoting and supporting regional efforts in achieving the aims of partner institutions in addition to the latters’ work towards library co-operation and of course the development and operation of the shared repository.
However, in order to maintain the host institutions as a driving force in these partnerships it is important to address the difficulties they experience in terms of human resources.
Repository Operation It is important to build both a robust and flexible system of operation if we are to maintain the viability of the community shared repositories.
While clear leadership by the host institutions is a key ingredient to such success, the importance of the efforts by the partner institutions in shared repository development should not be underestimated.
The ideal that we should seek to achieve is where all members of a shared repository system are involved in its work irrespective of their rank or role of their employing institution.
In the end it is closely knit co-operation among its members that will assure the success of every consortium.
Independence from Regional Shared Repositories Where partner institutions in a shared repository system begin to find that they can no longer deal with the demands made upon them through membership of a regional shared repository, and they are able to acquire the necessary technical know-how to operate their own independent IR, then any application they make to launch an independent IR should be carefully considered.
As of 2012 there has as yet been no such an occurrence although some harvesting operations have been conducted.
Any institutions considering such a move will need to take particular care over the necessary adjustments they will have to make in order to migrate from a shared to an independent repository.
Development in the JAIRO Cloud Shinshu Shared Repository in Nagano has been developed as a JAIRO Cloud of the National Institute of Informatics.
Essentially, although each institution applies individually to be part of the JAIRO Cloud that is, a single independent IR can become part of the Cloud, the JAIRO Cloud is nonetheless regarded as community shared repositories.
Considering the problems described above, this aspect represents quite a significant development.
First of all, the partner institutions can maintain their independence which is generally regarded as a distinct advantage of the independent model, while at the same time host institutions can support the participating institutions while bearing a considerably lighter burden in terms of system management.
Second, they can also retain their regional information hub and maintain their community co-operation activity.
There is less chance for the participating institutions to become independent, and operation as an academic portal site is realised in each region by approaches such as cross-searching with institutions in their prefecture that have already developed a portal themselves.
Thus, the regional shared repositories can begin to entertain the prospect of a new type of operation.
Conclusion The shared repository operating model has clearly worked well in reducing the operational burden of participating institutions such that Japan has seen a tangible increase in the number of its institutional repositories as a result.
A further and distinct characteristic of this process has been the fact that not only Higher Education institutions such as universities and technical colleges but also smaller research and local public bodies as well as academic associations have become actively engaged in the development of IRs.
If it is possible for Open Access to apply to all academic output in national university repositories, then we need to consider the application of Open Access to all such material deposited in the regional shared repositories as well.
It would be true to assert that the development of such a large number of  regional shared repositories in Japan has, as far as we can tell, no real equal anywhere else in the world and that this approach to repository operation is unique to this country.
At the local level, institutional repository community action, as represented in particular by the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) [18] is a significant factor, thanks to the high level of co-operation among most institutions, not only in the continuing development of community shared repositories themselves, but also in the process of raising awareness of the value of repositories among researchers and other members of the academic community [19][20].
*Editor’s note: Japan consists of 47 prefectures, each overseen by an elected governor, legislature and administrative bureaucracy.
Each prefecture is further divided into cities, towns and villages.
(Wikipedia, citing McCargo, Duncan (2000).
Contemporary Japan.
Macmillan.
pp. 84–85.
ISBN 0333710002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan ) ** Editor’s note: In July 2011 the sum of 30,000 yen roughly equated to £230.
(x-rates.com historic look-up.)
References NII Institutional Repositories Program http://www.nii.ac.jp/irp/en/ The 4th Science and Technology Basic Plan (FY2011-FY2015) (Point) http://www.mext.go.jp/component/english/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/02/22/1316511_01.pdf Infrastructure Development for Strengthening the Capacity of International Scholarly Communication, July 2012 http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/10/25/1323890_4_2.pdf Ideal approach to maintenance of university library and academic information distribution (Summary of discussion): Technology / science research council academic subcommittee research environment infrastructure section http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/gijyutu/gijyutu4/toushin/1282987.htm JAIRO Cloud https://community.repo.nii.ac.jp/ White Rose Research Online http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ SHERPA-LEAP http://www.sherpa-leap.ac.uk/ Moyle, M. and Proudfoot, R. Consortial routes to effective repositories.
(RSP Briefing Papers).
Repositories Support Project: UK.
April 2009 http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/18775/ “Joint repository: construction and diffusion of model” (National Institute of Informatics Academic institutional repository construction cooperation support project 2008 2009 consignment service area project 2) http://opac.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/portal/share/share.html ShaRe Report, March 2010 http://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/00035322 NII Institutional Repositories DataBase Contents Analysis http://irdb.nii.ac.jp/analysis/index_e.php 2009 MEXT statistics directory http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/other/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2009/08/05/1282869_9.xls DSpace http://www.dspace.org/ XooNips http://xoonips.sourceforge.jp/ Earmas http://www.enut.jp/html/software_earmas.html EPrints http://www.eprints.org/ WEKO http://weko.at.nii.ac.jp/ Digital Repository Federation http://drf.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/ This paper is based upon but also updates information from “Repository made by everybody: Local corporative repository”.
March 2011, Junior College Library Research, no.30 http://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/00031272 Ikuko Tsuchide, Yui Nishizono, Masako Suzuki, Shigeki Sugita,  Kazuo Yamamoto, Hideki Uchijima.
“Hita-Hita: Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Japan Ten Years On”.
July 2013, Ariadne Issue 71 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue71/tsuchide-et-al Author Details Takeo Ozono Librarian Central Library Kagawa University Japan Email: repo@jim.ao.kagawa-u.ac.jp Web site: http://www.lib.kagawa-u.ac.jp/www/index.html Takeo Ozono is a librarian, working at Kagawa University Library, Japan.
His current main role is library system and repository manager of Kagawa University.
He is also a member of the Planning and Co-ordinating Working Group of the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) and was involved in Shared Repository Project (ShaRe).
Daisuke Ueda Librarian Central Library Hiroshima University Japan Email: dueda@hiroshima-u.ac.jp Web site: http://www.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/index_e.html Daisuke Ueda is a librarian, working at Hiroshima University Library, Japan.
His current main role is guidance, academic information user support, multi-subject training course.
He was involved in Shared Repository Project (ShaRe).
Fumiyo Ozaki Librarian Central Library Hiroshima University Japan Email: fozaki@hiroshima-u.ac.jp Web site: http://www.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/index_e.html Fumiyo Ozaki is a librarian, working at Hiroshima University Library, Japan.
Her current main role is general planning and coordination of Hiroshima University Library.
She is also a member of the Planning and Coordinating Working Group of the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) and was involved in Shared Repository Project (ShaRe).
Appendix Here is the full list of regional shared repositories in Japan as of 2012.
In 2012, regional shared repositories in Japan are as follows: a. Hirosaki Regional Repository (Aomori) http://hrr.ul.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/ Academic Town Hirosaki managed by the Higher Education Establishment Consortium (Hirosaki).
(Launched in 2011.)
b.
YOU Campus Repository (Yamagata) http://repo.lib.yamagata-u.ac.jp/ managed by the University Consortium of Yamagata (YOU Campus).
(Launched in 2007, first such repository in Japan.)
c. AKAGI : Academic Knowledge Archives of Gunma Institutes (Gunma) https://gair.media.gunma-u.ac.jp/  Shared Project between Gunma University, other universities and libraries in this prefecture (Launched in 2012.)
d. SUCRA: Saitama United Cyber Repository of Academic Resources (Saitama) http://sucra.saitama-u.ac.jp/modules/xoonips/ Library council of universities and junior colleges in Saitama prefecture manage this repository with Saitama University as host institution.
(Launched in 2008.)
e. NIRR: Niigata Regional Repository (Niigata) http://nirr.lib.niigata-u.ac.jp/ managed by Niigata University.
(Launched in 2009.)
f. CRFukui: Community Repository of Fukui (Fukui) http://crf.flib.u-fukui.ac.jp/dspace/  managed by Fukui University.
(Launched in 2009.)
g. Repository of Shinshu (Nagano) https://shinshu.repo.nii.ac.jp/  Shared Repository Project with JAIRO Cloud managed by Shinshu University as lead institution.
(Launched in 2012.)
h. O-AIR: Okayama Academic Information Repository (Okayama) http://www.lib.okayama-u.ac.jp/o-air/  managed by Okayama University.
(Launched in 2009.)
i. HARP: Hiroshima Associated Repository Portal (Hiroshima) http://harp.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp   managed by Hiroshima Association of University Libraries.
(Launched in 2008.)
j. ISHIN: Yamaguchi prefecture area Scholarly Hoop of Integrated Navigator (Yamaguchi) http://ypir.lib.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/CrossSearch/  managed by Yamaguchi Library Council of Universities.
(Launched in 2009.)
k. Kagawa Shared Repository (Kagawa) http://shark.lib.kagawa-u.ac.jp/ managed by Kagawa University.
(To be launched in October  2013) l. IYOKAN: Institutional Repository, EHIME area (Ehime) http://iyokan.lib.ehime-u.ac.jp/dspace/  managed by Ehime University.
(Launched in 2011.)
m. KARN: Kagoshima Academic Repository Network (Kagoshima) http://karn.lib.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/  managed by Kagoshima Regional University Consortium.
(Launched in 2012.)
n. ORION: Okinawa Repository Integrated Open-access Network (Okinawa) http://okinawa-repo.lib.u-ryukyu.ac.jp/  managed by the University of the Ryukyus.
(Launched in 2010.)
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Learning to YODL: Building York's Digital Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Learning to YODL: Building York's Digital Library Buzz data software java api database xml usability infrastructure archives metadata accessibility repositories copyright multimedia jpeg png gif tiff solaris avi wav mp3 dvd jpg tomcat mods xacml vra bmp authentication algorithm url research ldap Citation BibTex RIS Peri Stracchino and Yankui Feng describe a year's progress in building the digital library infrastructure outlined by Julie Allinson and Elizabeth Harbord in their article last issue.
An overview of the first phase of developing a digital repository for multimedia resources at York University has recently been outlined by Elizabeth Harbord and Julie Allinson in Ariadne [1].
This article aims to provide a technical companion piece reflecting on a year’s progress in the technical development of the repository infrastructure.
As Allinson and Harbord’s earlier article explained, it was decided to build the architecture using Fedora Commons [2] as the underlying repository, with the user interface being provided by Muradora [3].
Fedora Commons is a widely used and stable open source repository architecture with active user and developer communities, whilst Muradora has a much smaller user and developer base, and benefits from less stable project funding.
As a result, whilst it offered us a rich set of functionality that helped us to get our initial project up and running, the Muradora architecture was less developed and tested than that of Fedora Commons.
This meant that there was always some risk involved in coupling any bespoke development too tightly to Muradora, whilst at the same time, quite a lot of in-house development was required in order to adapt Muradora to our needs.
In fact, funding for the Muradora Project remains uncertain.
The first section of this article will reflect in part on how we have managed our implementation and development in light of this, whilst the second and third sections will focus on two particular development areas: those of developing fine-grained access control integrated with York’s LDAP; and of using the X Forms technology to develop a workflow structure.
Our Setup We are currently running Fedora 2.2.4 against the external Tomcat 6 which comes packaged with the Muradora 1.3.3 all-in-one installation package, on Java 5 and Solaris Unix.
Our Fedora installation runs against a separately hosted Oracle database rather than the bundled McKoi database.
Reflections on Mura Fedora Commons comes with a rich set of APIs but with no user interface of its own.
This is in some ways a strength, making it very adaptable and easily integrated into a wide range of other architectures.
On the other hand, it means that it cannot be used as an “out-of-the-box and ready-for-use” fully fledged digital library architecture – it needs to be integrated with some sort of user interface to sit on top of it.
In our particular case we also needed to implement very fine-grained access control as many of the materials we intend to store carry complex and varied copyright requirements.
Muradora does go some way towards providing this, although we found a lot of further bespoke development was required in order to fully meet our access control needs – this will be expanded on in section two.
As we needed to get a working system up and running quickly, we felt that Muradora provided an acceptable shot-term solution despite the risks of working with a comparatively unstable project.
However we attempted to minimise these risks wherever possible by avoiding coupling our in-house development too tightly to Muradora, in case we needed to move away from it at a later date.
Thus, while our workflow forms use the same X Forms technology as Muradora and the same Orbeon Forms X Form Engine [4] they are not tied to Muradora and can be used independently within other interfaces.
In practice we have still ended up investing a lot of time and development effort into our Muradora installation.
This is partly because as a less developed architecture, we have found it to be a little ‘buggy’ and unfinished in parts.
We found, for example, during the course of user testing, that apparently identical search types (‘simple’ ‘advanced’) used in different parts of the interface employ different algorithms.
This was very confusing to users who could not understand why the same search used from different screens would return different results.
So we had to spend some time looking under the bonnet and making them consistent.
On the plus side, we found the Muradora developers to be very helpful during those periods when they had project time available, a lot of thanks is due to them.
Customising Muradora In addition to work required to iron out bugs and inconsistencies, we have done quite a lot of interface customisation for cosmetic and usability purposes.
Inevitably this work is not easily transferable between interfaces and will have to be revisited if we move away from Muradora, equally so if we upgrade our Muradora version.
Changes requested ranged from simple logo and colour changes required to meet University branding requirements, to labelling changes (our test users found many of the default labels unintuitive as they were designed for text e-print resources rather than multimedia).
Other changes requested were layout changes and for the provision of more extensive Help pages, as well as for even more complex changes.
An example of the latter would be the request to break down very large search result lists not only into simple initial letter alphabetical divisions, i.e.
A, B, C (provided in Muradora) but also second letter subdivisions i.e.
Aa, Ab, Ac.
User Testing Process Many of the interface customisation changes came about as a direct result of feedback from our user testing process.
We have used a fairly agile development process and gave a test group of volunteers from our pilot user group access as soon as we had a usable interface up and running.
In addition, we took inspiration from an accessibility seminar which some of us attended.
One of the methods discussed was the “thinking aloud” method where a small group of users are given a set of tasks to work through using the software to be tested, and are observed whilst they perform these tasks, talking through their thought processes in a “stream of consciousness” manner as they do so.
We found a small group of volunteers and set up such a session, which we found extremely useful.
We found that with a 1:1 observer:volunteer ratio we were able to pick up on things which were obviously confusing our users and which might not have made it on to a remote testing feedback report.
Stability While we have found Fedora Commons to be a fairly stable application, our Muradora installation has been less so.
In particular we have found that if the application is shut down by any means other than a clean Tomcat shutdown (for example a system crash) the Berkeley DB XML database which it used to store XACML policies is prone to corruption.
There have also been possible memory leak problems which we have so far been unable to pin down.
Because the Muradora architecture is quite complex, it can be difficult to locate the origin of problems and we have sometimes resorted to a full rebuild of the indexes and databases in order to restore the system to its normal state.
Keeping Pace with Fedora One drawback of working with a comparatively small project such as Muradora in combination with a big project like Fedora Commons has been that it has limited us when it comes to keeping pace with the latest changes to Fedora.
The smaller project has had fewer resources to maintain continued compatibility with the latest Fedora versions.
Thus we began with Muradora 1.3.1 and Fedora Commons 2.2.2, upgrading to Muradora 1.3.3.
Although we managed to tweak our Muradora 1.3.3 installation to work with Fedora upgrades up to 2.2.4, Muradora 1.3.3 was not compatible with further Fedora upgrades and although a beta Fedora 3-compatible version of Muradora has been produced in beta, it is not a stable release.
With Fedora 2.2.4 now approaching the end of its support lifecycle, this leaves us considering our options for moving to Fedora 3, which is a priority.
Access Control Use Cases Muradora uses eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) to describe access control policies, and also provides a graphical user interface from which to set access restrictions on individual resources, from Collection level down to individual images, clips or audio files.
However because of the complex copyright requirements relating to our stored material, the out-ofthe-box access control was not sufficiently fine-grained to meet our needs, and we have had to do further bespoke development.
In particular, we needed to be able to restrict access on the basis of user role (public, member of staff, undergraduate student, teacher, administrator, taught postgraduate student) and of membership of specific course modules.
As a student or teacher is likely to be a member of multiple course modules, this also implies that it must be possible for a single user to have multiple roles – for example a single Art History student might be enrolled on courses covering Baroque Art, Anglo-Saxon Art, and the Bauhaus.
In addition, we needed to be able to place different levels of restriction on different types of stored material belonging to the same resource.
For example, in one use case a single stored image may have several ‘datastreams’ as they are known in Fedora Commons, consisting of XML metadata, a small thumbnail version of the image, a larger ‘preview’ image, and an archival quality image.
In a typical use case we might want to exclude members of the general public from access to any of the datastreams, allow a university student to access the metadata and view the thumbnail, permit a student on the particular course module to which the image is linked to have access to the preview, but only allow an administrator or teacher to download the archival quality image.
LDAP Integration The access control mechanism of YODL has been implemented by a set of filters [5].
During the authentication phrase, two Fedora servlet security filters are configured to access Fedora local users and student credentials from the University LDAP server.
If a matched user is found either from the local user definition XML file (fedora-users.xml) or from LDAP server, the access request will be passed through the authentication filter and will be checked by Authorization filter thereafter.
The bespoke Authorization filter interacts with the University LDAP and data warehouse (data source for information about student modules) in order to access student credentials, their matriculation information and their membership of current and past course modules.
The appropriate roles are assigned to authenticated users by combining the modules in which they enrolled and their personal information, e.g.
which department the student belongs to, what is the role of this user (undergraduate student, postgraduate taught student, or research student, etc.).
On the other hand, role-based access control policies need to be created by editing the permissions for each course collection in order to give access to specified role(s) in the adapted Muradora user interface.
Indexing New Relationship Assertions We found that the unmodified Muradora interface would not allow us place the sort of restrictions we needed on individual datastreams, such as the thumbnail version of a stored image rather than its archival quality version.
In Muradora, restrictions can only be placed on objects indexed in the RIsearch engine.
This does not by default include datastream labels, although it does include MIME types.
We found a temporary work-round by listing incorrect MIME types as a means of distinguishing between different image versions; however this was clearly unsatisfactory.
As a longterm solution we worked in partnership with a team of external developers, Steve Bayliss and Martin Dow at Acuity Unlimited [6], to implement new functionality developed by them which enables custom assertions to be made about individual datastreams and indexed by RIsearch, thus allowing us to make the assertion that datastream X has label Y and subsequently place access restrictions on those datastreams for which this assertion is true.
The functionality involves creating a new XML datastream – named RELS-INT for each resource to list such assertions, and some minor modifications are then made to the Muradora and Melcoe-PDP (Melcoe PDP is the Web service which accesses the XACML policies in Muradora) configuration files in order to make these assertions available as criteria in the user interface.
The patch developed by the Acuity developers in order to do this has since been incorporated into the latest version of Fedora Commons.
[7][8] Developing this solution however generated a new problem: retrospectively modifying the stored data in order to correct the fudged MIME types and add the appropriate XML assertion datastreams.
With over 7000 individual resources already stored in our repository, making each amendment individually was out of the question.
Fedora does offer an out-of-the-box batch modification facility capable of modifying data on the fly, but this requires the creation of an additional modification directives file specifying each individual change to be made to each individual resource – a gargantuan task if it has to be done manually.
However it has proved possible to use RIsearch to create lists of resources requiring specific changes, and pass these as parameters to Unix shell scripts to create the required modification directives files dynamically, thereby permitting successful bulk data modification on the fly.
Submission Workflows Muradora has a submission wizard to facilitate the process of creating new digital objects.
Users with appropriate permissions can submit a new object by three steps, e.g.
selecting parent collection and object content model, uploading/specifying resources, and entering metadata.
However, the drawbacks of Muradora’s submission workflow prevent it being used in a production environment.
In the current deposit workflow, the depositor has to wait while files upload as uploading constitutes the step prior to entering metadata.
Therefore, the current workflow is not efficient especially when uploading large files.
As a result, two separate asynchronous processes for uploading/processing resources and submitting metadata would be a better choice in terms of efficiency and performance.
Bespoke workflow is another requirement for specific user groups.
For example, some depositors have agreed to a smaller ‘Preview’ image being made public whilst restricting the full-sized image to University users.
Therefore, a preview image should be generated from the original image when an image is submitted, something which is not implemented in Muradora’s workflow.
In summary, the new workflow should be able to deposit in a more efficient way and should be able to deposit any type of file, which can be divided into three categories as shown below: Fully supported files (e.g.
TIFF/JPEG images, WAV audio files, and ISO CD/DVD images): the corresponding processing for each type of file will be defined individually in the workflow.
For example, a TIFF image file will be transformed to a full-size JPEG file, to a preview JPEG file, and to a thumbnail JPEG file.
The original TIFF image and all three generated image files will be ingested into Fedora as datastreams.
Partly supported files (e.g.
BMP/PNG images): for these files, a generic processing will be defined for a generic type.
For example, GenericImage for any declared partly supported images, GenericAudio for any declared partly supported audio files.
Unsupported files (e.g.
AVI file for now): for these files, a more generic (‘Generic of generic’) process is defined.
For example, when an AVI file is selected, the file will be ingested into Fedora as a datastream under a pre-defined fixed name and a pre-defined thumbnail image will be used for any unsupported file.
Figure 1: YODL submission workflow As shown in Figure 1, to support the asynchronous deposit process, an ingest server can be used by University-wide users as temporary storage for resources to be ingested into YODL.
Depositors can specify resources via various ways, e.g.
select resources from a mapped drive of the ingest server on their own PC, or upload resources from their local drive, or point to a URL either as ‘redirect’ or ‘external’ links.
All resources will be mapped to a URL and will be ready for ingestion.
Based on the content model and editor selected by the depositor, the appropriate Xform [10] will be launched to enter metadata.
Currently, a VRA [11] XForm editor has been developed for images, and a customized MODS editor is under development for audios.
After submitting an XForm, metadata will be saved into Fedora directly.
At the same time, an asynchronous process is used to process pre-prepared resources.
A message containing resource details will be sent to YODL server, where a program is running to process all resources, e.g.
following an appropriate workflow for a specific resource, and ingest these resources into the Fedora server as datastreams.
As YODL is expected to support more and more file types in specific ways, it is desirable that the workflow is reusable when the support of a new file format is required.
The ideal development scenario when the workflow is asked to deal with a new file format (MIME type) will be: Add new code to deal with the new file format Modify related configuration file(s) No need to modify any existing code Figure 2: Design of file processors in the workflow As shown in Figure 2, factory design patterns [9, pp.87] is used to maximize the reusability of existing workflow.
A matched factory will be used to process each file type.
Basically, these factories implement the processing logic for each file type.
For example, TIFFileProcessingFactory defines the processing logic for TIFF images, e.g.
transform TIFF image to JPEG image, and generate preview and thumbnail images.
Currently, only a few file types have their specific factories, e.g.
JPG, TIFF, ISO, and WAV.
It is impossible to have a specific factory for each file type.
Therefore, some generic factories are designed to process a general category of files, e.g.
GenericImageFileProcessingFactory for generic images including BMP, PNG, and GIF, and GenericAudioFileProcessingFactory for generic audios such as MP3.
In addition, a more generic factory namely GenericFileProcessingFacotry is used to process all other file types.
Conclusions and Future Work Our decision to use Muradora as our initial interface provided us with a very rich set of functionality despite the drawbacks discussed earlier.
Without it, it is unlikely we would have been able to develop our own interface with an equivalent set of functions within the short time frame planned.
However our caution about Muradora’s suitability as a long-term solution is still in question.
Since Muradora is Open Source, our possible options include continuing to work with and develop the existing code base, attempting to iron out the bugs, and make it fully compatible with the latest Fedora version.
Alternatively, we can either look for another existing interface which can be hooked into Fedora, or develop our own interface from scratch, accepting that we will need to continue to work with the older Fedora version in the meantime.
Areas for future development include further work on the access control architecture.
It is often the case that a flat list of modules and manual role-by-role application of policies is not scalable.
There is a need to apply access control to roles in a more managed and sustainable way.
A hierarchical representation of roles would be a clearer and efficient way to display roles.
In addition, a flexible search interface is needed to query appropriate role-based or collection/object-based policies.
Time-limited policies are also needed to manage short-term policies, e.g.
policies crossing academic year(s).
Other development is planned through our JISC-funded YODL-ING Project [12] which proposed to develop a suite of technical enhancements to the Digital Library.
References Allinson, J, Harbord, E, “SHERPA to YODL-ING:Digital Mountaineering at York”, July 2009, Ariadne, Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/allinson-harbord/ Fedora Commons http://www.fedora.info/ Muradora http://www.muradora.org/ Orbeon Forms X Forms Engine http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/index Sun servlet filter: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/Filters.html Acuity Unlimited email: stephen.bayliss@acuityunlimited.co.uk, martin.dow@acuityunlimited.co.uk Fedora tracker item for RELS-INT: http://www.fedora-commons.org/jira/browse/FCREPO-441 Fedora relationship documentation, now including RELS-INT http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCR30/Digital+Object+Relationships Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., Vlissides, J.
“Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” (2001), Addison-Wesley, ISBN: 0-201-63361-2.
XForms http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/ VRA core 4.0 http://www.vraweb.org/projects/vracore4/ YODL-ING http://www.york.ac.uk/library/electroniclibrary/yorkdigitallibraryyodl/#yodl-ing Author Details Peri Stracchino Digital Library Systems Administrator Library and archives University of York Email: ps552@york.ac.uk Yankui Feng Digital Library Developer Library and archives University of York Email: yf508@ york.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Learning to YODL: Building York’s Digital Library” Author: Peri Stracchino and Yankui Feng Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/stracchino-feng/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UK Reading Experience Database Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines UK Reading Experience Database Buzz data software sparql database dissemination apache archives blog sql copyright video flickr cataloguing linux provenance copac php twitter research Citation BibTex RIS Bethan Ruddock reports from the launch event for the UK Reading Experience Database, held at the Betty Boothroyd Library, the Open University, Milton Keynes, on 24 February 2011.
I was invited down to the Open University (OU) Betty Boothroyd Library in Milton Keynes for the launch of the UK Reading Experience Database (UK RED) [1].
I had been asked to attend to talk about the LOCAH Project and Linked Data, but I was also looking forward to learning about the RED Project.
This was the first of two launch days, and was designed for librarians, archivists, and information managers.
A second launch day for teachers in Higher Education was to be held in London the next day.
What Is UK RED?
The tagline for UK RED is ‘the experience of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945’, and the database brings together reading experiences, making them both searchable and browsable.
What is a reading experience?
It is evidence of anyone alive between the mid-15th and 20thcenturies having read and interacted with a book or other piece of writing, such as magazines, newspapers, letters even playbills and advertisements.
Ownership alone is not enough; there must be something to show that the person in question actually read the work or at least part of it.
This information can be found in a number of places a printed book review would be an obvious example.
The RED team also find many entries in diaries.
Such entries can range from simple lists of books that someone has read over the course of a year, to detailed descriptions of when and where they read a particular book, and how they felt about it.
Often diary entries are not actually about the book; it is mentioned in passing and in the context of a number of other activities.
While the owner’s name on the flyleaf is not itself enough to justify a ‘reading experience’, annotations to the text are, as they show that the person has actually interacted with the text.
Of course, you then have to consider whether the person whose name is on the flyleaf is the same as the person doing the annotating!
RED is much more than a list of ‘people who have read books’.
The database aims to bring out as much information as possible about the reading experience.
The interface to submit a new entry allows you to specify where the reading was taking place, all the way down to a particular room in a particular house.
It also aims to identify if the reading was silent or aloud, alone or with other people; whether the book was owned by the reader, a library book, borrowed, or even stolen.
All these data are then used to build up a rich database of information on who was reading what (and how!)
in Britain.
UK RED is not just concerned with reading experiences within Britain: team members also look at the reading experiences of citizens abroad.
Edmund King, Research Associate, Reading Experience Database, OU, told us that, as a consequence, there are fascinating examples of what captured British soldiers were reading in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps as well as examples of what they were not allowed to read.
Books in Welsh and Pakistani were banned, as well as atlases and anything about the Russian revolution.
I do not know if there are corresponding records for what prisoners in UK POW camps were forbidden to read, but it would be very interesting to find out.
The Relaunch Bob Owens, Director of the RED Project, gave us some background.
RED started in 1996 as an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project.
It surpassed all AHRC targets, and gained funding to hold an international conference on the history of reading, as well as to update the software and make it available to international partners.
As a result, there are (or soon will be) databases focusing on reading experiences in Australia [2], Canada [3], the Netherlands [4] and New Zealand [5].
Rosalind Crone, OU, talked about the technical aspects of RED.
It started out as an access database, then moved to SQL to enable searching on any of the 160 fields.
The new version (version 3) has a PHP front-end backed up by a relational SQL database, running on Linux and Apache.
The RED team wanted to ensure that all of the software it used was open source, and would be available to regional RED teams.
v.3 of the RED database has some new database fields, including paths to allow for the future inclusion of video and audio content.
Figure 1: Rosalind Crone demonstrates the new UK RED Web site.
Copyright Shaf Towheed.
The new version also allows for regional differences, as each version of RED will be slightly different, to cater to local demands.
There is little point, for instance, in coverage in the Australian database going back to 1400; while the Canadians are looking to include material that goes past the current cut-off date of 1945, and are pioneering how to handle the data protection issues surrounding more recent data (the current arrangement for UK RED means that contributors are unable to supply information about their own post-1945 reading experiences).
The Canadian database will also accommodate entries in English and French.
Where Do They Find Evidence?
Archives are one of the most common sources for evidence of reading experiences but that does not mean it is easy to find!
Authors and literary figures may be expected to record their reading, but what of ordinary people?
Their reading experience may be mentioned half-way through a source such as a handwritten diary without reading that entire source, how is anyone to know it is there?
Edmund King talked about some of the challenges involved in finding this information.
While a lot of it can be found in archival material, he made the point that, traditionally, archivists have not recorded the presence of this reading experience information in their finding aids.
This means that RED researchers have to extrapolate and guess at what might be valuable sources.
Books themselves are another valuable source of information: while librarians shudder to see their books being written on, flyleaf inscriptions and marginalia can provide evidence of a person’s interaction with the book.
You do have to evaluate the depth of interaction with the book: Edmund gave an example where a reader’s younger brother had written his name all over a book.
Does that count as having a reading experience?
Once the information is found, it might not always be easy to handle, for any number of reasons.
Readers may have been vague in their recording; diaries might note that the reader had enjoyed ‘a book about birds’; or they might contain very rich information, but in a shorthand or notation of the reader’s own creation.
There may also be intellectual property issues.
Edmund reported that he found a lot of World War One (WWI) reading experience information in the Australian National War Memorial archives in Canberra; however, under Australian law, all manuscript material is in perpetual copyright until it is published.
Evidence can be in the most obvious, yet obscure, places.
Take, for example, ‘a Transcription in Elizabeth Lyttelton’s hand of John Donne, A Hymne to God the Father’ [6].
Does transcription imply reading?
If the transcriber is literate, then of course it does.
But it is unlikely to be the first port of call when you think of places to look for evidence of reading.
Adding Data to RED After lunch we were given the chance to try adding data to the RED database ourselves, led by Non Scantlebury and Nicola Dowson, OU.
Anyone can contribute to UK RED, and volunteers are especially important in populating the database.
These volunteers are often postgraduate students who are researching a particular author, and who enter information into RED in the course of their research.
Author societies are another big source of volunteers the Robert Louis Stevenson Society was cited as a major contributor.
The online form for submitting evidence of a reading experience to the database contains 19 questions over 3 sections; however, only the first three questions are compulsory, meaning you can contribute by providing only your contact details and basic evidence of the reading experience and source.
If you want (and are able!)
to provide further information, there is an opportunity to state the exact date of the reading experience; the socio-economic group and religion of the reader; the time and place of the reading experience; and the provenance of the text.
We were given some example experiences to enter, and I was pleased to see that the first one came from the diaries of Gertrude Bell.
Bell was a late nineteenth-century traveller and archaeologist, who has been described as ‘the female Lawrence of Arabia’, and the description of her papers represents one of our favourite records for the purposes of demonstrating the Archives Hub.
Figure 2: The hands-on session.
Copyright Shaf Towheed Many of Bell’s diary entries have been made available online by Newcastle University Library [7] , and we were asked to look at the entry for 8 August 1895, and record the reading experience mentioned in it.
The mandatory fields could be filled in from that diary entry alone, but to add the supplementary information we needed to do a bit more research.
This involved looking at previous diary entries to see where Bell was and finding sources for biographical information.
While the information required a little investigation, using the submission form itself was straightforward, and I could see myself submitting reading experiences for real in the future!
At the moment the reward for contributing is the knowledge of a job well done and your name in the list of contributors.
However, the RED team is looking at ways to make the acknowledgements more publicly accessible and available for linking in order to encourage dissemination.
It is hoped this will in turn increase the visibility of the project, and so encourage others to contribute.
RED and Linked Data While I really enjoyed hearing about the RED database, and having the chance to do some hands-on work with it, I was really there to talk about bibliographic Linked Data.
I am working on LOCAH (Linked Open Copac and Archives Hub) a JISC-funded project to expose Copac and Archives Hub data as Linked Data [8].
Also funded under the ‘jiscEXPO’ stream is the LUCERO Project [9], and Owen Stephens and Mathieu D’Aquin from LUCERO were there to talk about bibliographic Linked Data and the RED Project, and how this can be used to support innovative enquiry in the digital humanities.
Linked Data offers a number of approaches to joining up disparate information sources, and enabling researchers to uncover new links and relationships.
I spoke about the potential for links between RED and the Archives Hub/Copac data.
One of the RED reading experiences is that of Thomas Kitching who read Peril at End House by Agatha Christie while imprisoned in the infamous Changi POW Camp [10].
As RED stands now, you can look at the full record and click links to find other instances of Christie as author, and of Kitching as reader, in the RED database.
If this were linked to other data sets, you might be able to click links to see a description of Agatha Christie’s papers from the Archives Hub, and copies of Peril at End House on Copac.
I know that the Archives Hub has a description of the Papers of Agatha Christie, so I was able to make that connection, and go and look them up Linked Data could link researchers to the description of the archive even without their needing to know that the archive existed.
With Linked Data you could look at the Archives Hub to see whether Changi is mentioned (it is, there are several collections whose originators were also imprisoned in Changi).
You now have links between these people, which you did not know about before.
Looking at these records on the Hub shows us that Brigadier George Wort wrote 1st Battalion, The Malay Regiment while in Changi, 1942-1945.
Might this include an account of Kitching, and his fondness for books?
We have a very specific date for this entry for Thomas Kitching: ‘24 Dec 1943’.
Using SPARQL (the query language for Linked Data), you could send a query out to all the other Linked Data sets to which you were connected, to find out if anything else happened on that day.
As one of the data sets is Dbpedia 11, you can see that lots of things happened births, deaths, even the release of a film called Midnight in Vermont.
If you were then linked in to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) [12] you could look up Midnight in Vermont, and find out that audiences in the US were watching Gloria Jean and Ray Malone while Kitching was reading Christie.
In another RED entry, Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith (1864-1945), mentions re-reading her own diaries, and finding them ‘not only full of Cabinet secrets but jerky, disjointed and dangerously frank’ [13].
Linked Data could take you to a description of her papers on the Archives Hub, where you find that her diaries are held by the Bodleian, along with her correspondence perhaps even the letter to Henry James from which this quotation originates.
You could then go along and read the diaries, to find out if your reading experience matches Margot’s.
Mathieu gave us a preview demonstration of how the LUCERO team is using Linked Data to enhance the RED experience.
The team has a demonstrator which pulls together information about a person from the RED database with information about that person from DBpedia.
This can bring out some really interesting links.
I was particularly interested in one of Mathieu’s examples Virginia Woolf, who appears in RED as both author and reader.
One of the categories in DBpedia under which Woolf appears is ‘bisexual writers’, and the demonstrator allows you to see who else in the RED database falls into that category.
One of the named people in it is Colette.
This especially interested me as the ‘on this day’ tweet that had gone out from the @TheUKRED channel earlier that day was ‘On this day in 1937: Virginia Woolf reading Colette & Molière’.
This was just a small example of the serendipitous links to be found when you open up data.
Mathieu’s blog from the day includes a link to the demonstrator [14].
Some delegates did express a reluctance to use data from DBpedia, as they see data from Wikipedia as untrustworthy and likely to be inaccurate.
Mathieu and Owen had one answer for them: if you find an error, go into Wikipedia and fix it!
Education and Volunteers Shaf Towheed, OU, spoke on how UK RED is being used in learning and teaching at the OU.
They aim to embed use of the database into postgraduate teaching, and have essays and tutorials available [15].
The History of Reading module is designed so that students can either just read the essays, or can start to explore the RED database themselves, in a very guided manner.
Shaf pointed out how useful it is for students to gain an appreciation of writers as readers themselves, as well as seeing first-hand contemporary responses to the writers they are studying.
Postgraduate students who have been introduced to RED during their studies might go on to become RED volunteers.
Volunteers are a vital part of the RED workflows the RED team have had funding for researchers, but the sheer volume of information means that the more people involved in adding data to RED, the better.
Volunteers also act as advocates and champions: Shaf showed us a video of an interview with Sophie Bankes, who speaks about her experiences of being a RED volunteer [16].
Sophie talks convincingly about the value she gains from being part of the RED project.
More volunteers are always needed, and the RED team have a ‘wish list’ of authors that they would like people to start work on [17].
The team know that the closed, historical nature of RED can put some people off from volunteering, and consequently they are using social media spaces such as Flickr, Twitter and cloudspace to encourage public engagement and collaboration with new user communities.
Conclusion The day finished with a glass of wine or two to celebrate the launch of UK RED.
Unfortunately, I had booked an early train home, so could not stay to toast the launch.
I wish I could have stayed; I had enjoyed an informative day learning about a really interesting resource from a passionate group of people.
I will certainly be using RED in any reading/writing related research I do in the future, and will keep my eye out for evidence of reading experiences I can add to the database.
It’s a fantastic resource, and deserves the support of the community.
I’ll end here with a repeat of the appeal from one of my final tweets of the day: ‘Librarians!
Archivists!
Look out for evidence of reading experiences while you’re #cataloguing, and let @theukred know :)’ References The UK Reading Experience Database home page http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/index.php The Australian RED Project home page http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages-criminology/centre-cultural-research/research/australian-reading-experience-database The Canada RED home page http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/ The Netherlands RED home page http://www.red-nl.huygens.knaw.nl/ The New Zealand RED home page http://www.victoria.ac.nz/wtapress/NZ-RED/ RED entry for ‘Transcription in Elizabeth Lyttelton’s hand of John Donne, ‘A Hymne to God the Father’‘ http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=22903 Gertrude Bell Archive Newcastle University Library http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/ LOCAH Project blog http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/locah/ LUCERO Project home page http://lucero-project.info/lb/ RED entry for Thomas Kitching reading Peril at End House, Record Number:25599 http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=25599 DBpedia home page http://dbpedia.org/About The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) http://www.imdb.com/ RED entry for Margot Asquith’s Diaries http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=7724 LUCERO blog about the RED Project http://lucero-project.info/lb/2011/03/connecting-the-reading-experience-database-to-the-web-of-data/ Open University History of Reading module http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=401089 UK RED ‘becoming a volunteer’ Web page http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/explore_contributing.php#recentvolunteer UK Red suggestions for future research http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/future_research.php Author Details Bethan Ruddock Content Development Officer Library and Archival Services Mimas University of Manchester Email: bethan.ruddock@manchester.ac.uk Web: http://bethaninfoprof.wordpress.com/ Bethan Ruddock works as Content Development Officer for Copac and the Archives Hub, at Mimas.
She is also a member of the Voices for the Library team, the SLA Europe Board, and the LIS New Professionals Network.
Bethan’s interests cover social media for personal and professional development, library advocacy, user engagement, and supporting new professionals.
She is editing a LIS New Professionals’ toolkit, to be published by Facet in 2012.
Bethan is working on the JISC-funded LOCAH (Linked Open Copac and Archives Hub) Project with colleagues from Mimas, UKOLN, EduServ and Talis.
The LOCAH Project blog is http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/locah/ .
Bethan blogs at http://bethaninfoprof.wordpress.com/ and can be found on Twitter as @bethanar.
Return to top Article Title: UK Reading Experience Database Author: Bethan Ruddock Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/reading-exp-db-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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E-Curator: A 3D Web-based Archive for Conservators and Curators Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines E-Curator: A 3D Web-based Archive for Conservators and Curators Buzz data software database dissemination infrastructure archives metadata digitisation identifier namespace preservation cataloguing graphics multimedia visualisation provenance curation gpl licence e-science rdbms research standards Citation BibTex RIS Mona Hess, Graeme Were, Ian Brown, Sally MacDonald, Stuart Robson and Francesca Simon Millar describe a project which combines 3D colour laser scanning and e-Science technologies for capturing and sharing very large 3D scans and datasets about museum artefacts in a secure computing environment.
Introduction: The Evolving Field of Artefact Documentation Digital heritage technologies promise a greater understanding of cultural objects cared for by museums.
Recent technological advances in digital photography and image processing not only offer a high level of documentation, they also provide powerful analytical tools for conservation monitoring of cultural objects.
Museums are increasingly turning to digital documentation and relational databases to administer their collections for a variety of tasks: detailed description, intervention planning, loan.
Online collection databases support the remote browsing of collections [1].
Such imaging technologies open up radically new ways of knowing and engaging with collections, something which we are only really beginning to understand as of now.
From remote accessing of objects to 3D displays and documentation, digital heritage technologies offer the potential to transform the very nature of the museum experience both from a professional viewpoint, and from the perspective of the visitor.
The E-Curator Project [2] was set up in 2007 precisely to explore some of these issues, using state-of-the-art imaging facilities at University College London (UCL).
A collaborative project involving anthropologists, curators, and engineers, the principal aim of the project was to develop a new tool for museum and heritage conservation documentation.
The use of an Arius3D laser scanner, housed in the UCL Geomatic Engineering Department, has enabled us to experiment with 3D documentation and the collaborative sharing of virtual 3D images of museum artefacts.
We are evaluating 3D laser scanning for cultural heritage with methods from engineering metrology, bridging the gaps between conservation, curation and metric survey.
Our premise was that archives containing interactive three-dimensional artefacts should complement and support the existing databases and image archives of museum collections.
Aims of the E-Curator Project The E-Curator Project ‘3D colour scans for remote object identification and assessment’, based with UCL Museums and Collections [2], was an interdisciplinary collaboration drawing on UCL’s expertise both in curatorship and in e-Science.
The one-year project, which ended in October 2008, aimed to: develop a traceable methodology for recording the surface detail and colour quality of a range of object types and materials.
explore the potential for producing validated datasets that would allow closer and more scientific examination of groups of objects, the processes involved in their manufacture, and issues of wear and deterioration.
examine how the resulting datasets could be transmitted, shared and compared between disparate locations and institutions.
begin to build expertise in the use and transmission of 3D scan data as a curatorial tool.
Figure 1: Visitors to the Petrie Museums of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL Museums and Collections.
Photograph: Gary Black The project is one of seven projects, all part of the e-science initiative of the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC) [3].
The project was jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
Museum Practice Translated into a Virtual World The E-Curator Project was an opportunity to exploit and test e-science technologies and to explore some of the opportunities they offer museum practice in a virtual world.
The research looked at the way curators and conservators examine and document objects for object identification, comparison and condition reporting.
The project also focused on the extent to which 3D colour laser scans of artefacts might enhance our understanding of physical objects.
We asked whether highly accurate 3D scans allowed us to extend beyond the limitations of the 2D photograph and catalogue entry or condition report.
We were interested to explore whether such deployment would enable curators and conservators to compare high resolution 3D colour records collected at different institutions stored remotely, or collected over a period of time under different conditions, in order to assess and monitor change.
The project also provided an opportunity to test close-range scanning methods and critically assess their capability for heritage recording and documentation.
Our research also addressed the impact that digital heritage technologies have on the museum space as they attempt to recreate a digital facsimile of objects, museum spaces and displays in the digital realm.
We aimed to understand the way different groups of stakeholders engage, form attachments and mediate material knowledge with the digital image [4].
Figure 2: E-Curator Workshop: object handling session discussing a painting by Walter Westley Russell “Beach Scene” from UCL Art Collection.
Photograph: Ian Brown Method and Technology Overview UCL’s varied collections [5] allowed us to select a range of diverse objects to form the basic study.
Each object had curatorial or conservation-related questions embedded in its form; 3D colour digitisation combined with a digital curatorial process might seek to capture and present these to the museum user.
Each of these objects was scanned using a state of the art Arius 3D scanner, which is the highest resolution and most geometrically accurate 3D colour laser scanning system currently in the UK [6].
The 3D object scans and relevant catalogue information are stored on an e-Science storage system, Storage Resource Broker (SRB) [7].
Curators and conservators can remotely access the 3D object scans and catalogue information via the E-Curator Web site [8].
Figure 3: Entry page of Museums and Collections, showing the great variety of collections at University College London [5].
Digital Heritage Documentation Museum specialists have traditionally used a combination of photography, text and drawings to document museum artefacts.
These two-dimensional record formats suffer the limitations of being selective and insufficient to record nuanced information about the complete shape, colour and texture of an object.
Today some of the limitations of conventional documentation techniques can be addressed not only by using 3D colour scanning, which has the ability to record the whole object in the round, but also by disseminating the data with a shared Web-based database platform.
These methods could in future become an accessible tool for heritage and museum specialists, laying a foundation for ‘Virtual Heritage’ [9].
The engineering sector has developed an understanding of these sensing technologies combined with precise measurement tools and guidelines to best practice, providing an established body of knowledge that can be directly exploited by the heritage sector to foster the rapid adoption of digital recording techniques [10][11].
3D Colour Laser Scanning The ‘Arius3D Foundation Model 150’ scanner [6] offers a detailed non-contact and non-destructive documentation and examination method which makes it particularly suitable for conservation recording.
Figure 4: An object from UCL Art Collections (Portrait of Mrs Flaxman) under the Arius3D scanner.
Photograph: Mona Hess Figure 5: First results of 3D scan of Mrs Flaxman.
Photograph: Wynn Abbott Surface scanning is carried out by a scanner head which emits three laser beams of different wavelengths, red ®, green (G) and blue (B), in a focused white laser beam.
The scan head simultaneously measures colour reflectance and geometry by triangulation between the laser and a camera, recording the laser reflection at each location illuminated by the lasers.
Every point therefore has an XYZ coordinate location and an RGB colour value.
A calibrated ‘white cube’ is used to supply data to enable any variations in background illumination and laser output power to be corrected on a scan line by scan line basis as part of an off-line colour calibration process.
The Arius3D scanner head is mounted to a motion control system (Coordinate Measuring Machine), which moves it over the object.
The single point accuracy of the scanning head in use at UCL is better than 25 microns in depth with the scan head and motion control system delivering a minimum spatial sampling interval of 100 microns.
This sampling interval is commensurate with the laser spot diameter used to sample the surface within the field of view of the scanning head.
To ensure consistent dimensional capability the unit is installed in an air-conditioned room that maintains temperature at 20 degrees and can control relative humidity to suit the objects being recorded.
The scan product is a high-fidelity coloured three-dimensional point cloud with a point spacing of 100 µm (see Figure 10).
Our objective for the digital documentation of museum objects was to document the artefacts very precisely in geometry, scale and colour to produce a virtual three dimensional archival document that widens our knowledge of the object.
Impact of 3D Documentation on Conservation and Curatorship The direct encounter with the material object will always have value for conservators and curators and includes an important learning process.
Viewing and handling of the real object provides an essential comparison against which to assess the value of real time user interaction with the 3D digital colour model by museum specialists working within the E-Curator user interface.
We are currently investigating how conservators can use the capabilities of the 3D documentation process to manage, understand and conserve the real object.
By these comparative means the digital image can be explored as a conservation analysis tool as it, for example, allows the eye to read the surface of an object, navigating inscriptions, paint strokes and the topology of the object by means of artificial raking light or the production of profiles.
Further interpretations are made possible through the 3D record of an object: virtual reconstructions, animations and films for multimedia and education.
Digital documentation can also draw on the dimensional and colour fidelity of a temporal succession of such digital records to allow reliable comparison and monitoring of the object over time.
Once scanning capture and data processing best practice are established, the method could provide an invaluable tool to test authenticity, to confirm authorship and to assess any change of damage or decay following a loan or exhibition by comparison of 3D data surface information.
E-Curator Prototype: A User Designed Interface A particular strength of the E-Curator project lay in the participation of all stakeholders in all stages of the design and development process.
During the project, a number of internal and external formative workshops were held to offer curators, conservators and other museum specialists at UCL the opportunity to look in more detail at the proposed project and produce a more detailed specification and review criteria.
The goal of the workshops was to find out what capabilities the users would like to have within the E-Curator application and to seek an optimal design for the Web-based interface by consulting and involving cultural heritage specialists.
These workshops also allowed the team to refine the user interface of the E-Curator application, and to understand curatorial requirements for labelling and linking to external data sources.
Figure 6: Building up a hierarchy of requirements after the E-Curator brainstorming session.
Photograph: Mona Hess A participatory approach to user-designed systems was used during the workshop.
It began with a ‘Condition Report and Catalogue Entry’ session (see Figure 2), in which curators and conservators demonstrated the preparation of condition report and catalogue entry using objects from UCL Museums and Collections.
A brainstorming session was then carried out to tease out common requirements from the broad range of specialisms represented by those attending.
Participants were requested to write a list of the features they would think as being most useful within the software.
These features were then brought together and ranked.
For example the brainstorming at the first workshop at UCL in March 2008 produced the following list of requirements: tactile and multi-sensory feature, visual requirements, comparative and consultant feature, machine sensing features, condition and conservation.
During the second half of the project single users were asked to browse their objects on a prototype of the E-Curator application and the direct one-to-one feedback further influence the software design.
Evaluation sessions with curators and conservators and a summative workshop completed the software development phase.
Sharing 3D Colour Scans in a Secure Computing Environment The use of digital technologies within the museum environment has led to the development of various software applications, which are used to manage the text and image records of museum artefacts.
Most of the images administered by these museum applications are 2D images.
In the E-Curator project, a Web application was developed to manage 3D images and relevant metadata [8].
For 3D colour scans to be of practical use, robust means of sharing and validating the data obtained need to be established.
High resolution colour scans of one object can require hundreds of megabytes of storage space, and can only realistically be shared using the distributed file systems such as Storage Resource Broker (SRB) being widely deployed in the e-Science environment.
Figure 7: The E-Curator prototype architecture.
Current implementation (top left) and future planned development (top right).
Diagram: Yean-Hoon Ong SRB is a data grid middleware software system produced by the San Diego Supercomputer Centre (SDSC) [7].
The system implements logical namespaces (distinct from physical file names) and maintains metadata on data-objects (files), users, groups, resources, collections, and other items in an SRB Metadata Catalogue (MCAT) stored in a relational database management system.
System and user-defined metadata can be queried to locate files based on attributes as well as name.
The SRB system is middleware in the sense that it is built on top of other major software packages (various storage systems, real-time data sources, a relational database management system etc) and it has callable library functions that can be utilised by higher level software.
However, it is more complete than many middleware software systems as it implements a comprehensive distributed data management environment, including various end-user client applications.
It has features to support object management and collaborative (and controlled) sharing, publication, replication, transfer, and preservation of distributed data collections.
3D scans in Arius3D Pointstream format are loaded into SRB server using the SRB client software inQ [12].
These images are organised as a collection hierarchy.
Images from different museums, for example, can be stored in separate sub-collections.
Figfure 8: Entry site of the E-Curator prototype with objects from UCL Museums and Collections [8].
We created a Web-based interface for users to access the 3D scan collection (see Figure 8).
The interface provides both browsing support for examining the collection hierarchy, and analysis tools for manipulating both 2D and 3D coloured point clouds (see Figure 9).
The Web interface also allows users to display multiple 3D images at the same time and thus facilitates the visual comparison of collections of museums artefacts.
A hierarchy for these records has been established including the aligned ‘registered’ version of the point cloud without colour or point processing, a ‘processed’ version with cleaned colours and geometry, and a ‘presentation’ file with optimised colours and filled data voids.
For the use of conservators and curators the second model will be the most relevant since it encompasses the complete object in one data set but has undergone the least data alteration and processing.
Thus the Web site and its SRB supporting system is designed to function as an essential interface for object identification and assessment.
With an appropriate storage infrastructure, data sets may also be interrogated more widely by researchers around the world.
The utilisation of Grid technology through SRB and an allied Web based interface is expected to prove extremely useful in providing a scalable solution for the dissemination of information from the E-Curator project to a multitude of users (figure 8).
Currently the user group is limited to a museums and collections community who are involved with project assessment and the development of further E-Curator capabilities, but the system will be made available to external users on both real and virtual visits to UCL Museums and Collections sites in the near future.
Object Metadata 3D representations of heritage objects and museum artefacts need to contain a clear ‘provenance’ of object history and ownership, but also a set of data describing the genesis of the 3D files.
User access to metadata within the E-Curator application allows further study of the history, exhibition and conservation information of each of the objects (see Figure 9).
Figure 9: Russell painting from UCL Art Collections ready to browse in the E-Curator prototype, object metadata underneath the 3D object The metadata used to describe the 3D images generated within E-Curator is based on SPECTRUM, the UK Museum Documentation Standard, for catalogue entries [13].
These metadata provide information about the object ID, physical description, location, historical facts, condition, exhibition and conservation .
We developed a specific metadata set for the E-Curator application that includes UCL Museums and Collections catalogue entries, images and photographs, even microscopic images.
Every three-dimensional record is also annotated with metadata concerning capture, import and colour calibration filters, and any particular scan process and post processing information.
This dataset provides the user with clear information about the production and the authorship of the 3D image.
The development of the scan metadata set has largely followed the recommendations of English Heritage for Scandata [14] and the ‘Big Data’ project’ for Arts and Humanities data [15].
The current version of the London Charter [11] is directed towards some of the problems and possibilities that arise from 3D colour scanning as a documentation tool in heritage documentation and thus to the E-Curator research project, but it does not yet embrace established engineering metrology approaches which could provide a common basis for 3D data comparison.
A common file format for archiving 3D scans in the museum sector is yet to be agreed on, let alone formalised [16].
Users’ Impressions A key feature of the E-Curator Project was the participation of potential application users in the design and development process.
The Web site functions as an essential interface for object assessment which in the future can be built upon to include a wider selection of objects and a richer tool repertoire.
Users’ overall impression of the interface, expressed in surveys and interviews, can be summarised as ‘user-friendly and intuitive’.
Users felt that 3D colour scans provided significant new information, but they raised questions about the authenticity of images.
They felt that clear protocols were needed for processing data and the final results must integrate fully with existing museum digital collections records.
Users opted for higher resolution images (only ‘light’ reduced resolution versions of 3D images had been uploaded on the prototype) together with a better representation of colour and texture in the model.
The E-Curator application source code has been made freely available under an open source GPL licence in Sourceforge [17].
It is thus open to further community development so long as new modifications are made freely available under the same GPL licence.
Figure 10: From physical to virtual object: Imhotep bronze statuette (UC8321) of the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology.
Left: Photograph of the object, middle: single scans aligned in false colour mode, right: aligned 3D colour scan.
Conclusion E-Curator brought e-science and 3D colour recording technologies together to develop a Web-based system for 3D colour digital records of museum and cultural objects.
The processes and procedures adopted follow and further develop best practice in disciplines ranging from museum curatorship, engineering metrology, computer science and cultural object handling to deliver a state of the art e-science application which is being tested by experts in all three fields.
Digital heritage technologies are radically changing the way we engage with material culture and are negotiating new ways of knowing and understanding the object.
The digital objects and tools offer a reconfiguration of practice and suggest different means of virtual engagement with objects.
In this realm of Virtual Heritage, examination of the surface materiality and object topology is possible through detailed 3D documentation.
E-Curator could be further developed to incorporate haptic technology and microscopic images into the 3D structure.
The developed system, a novel cultural heritage application, accessed through its supporting Web site, has the capability to provide an interface and storage infrastructure capable of supporting the dissemination of both existing museum records and a hierarchy of 3D colour models to a global audience.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank the AHeSSC for its support, and all the participants of our workshops from UCL, MAA Cambridge and English Heritage York.
Many thanks to Manjula Patel and Richard Waller of UKOLN who invited Mona to beautiful Bath in March 2009 to give a talk at UKOLN, which triggered the writing of this article.
References UCL Museums and Collections Online Databases, Art Collection http://art.catalogues.museum.ucl.ac.uk/ and Grant Museum of Zoology http://gmz.catalogues.museum.ucl.ac.uk/ E-Curator Project Web site http://www.museums.ucl.ac.uk/research/ecurator The Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC) exists to support, co-ordinate and promote e-Science in all arts and humanities disciplines.
http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/initiative-projects Ongoing PhD project by Francesca Simon Millar http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/Francesca-Simon-Millar University College London, Museums and Collections http://www.museums.ucl.ac.uk UCL Business Partnership: Collaborative Partnership with Arius3D http://uclb.com/content/bizpartnerships/arius/ ; Arius 3D Inc., Ontario, Canada, http://www.arius3d.com Storage Resource Broker (SRB) is a data grid middleware software system produced by the San Diego Supercomputer Centre (SDSC).
http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/index.php/Main_Page E-Curator Prototype for sharing 3D point clouds of museum artefacts.
Please use Internet Explorer to view the database.
http://data02.geospatial.ucl.ac.uk:8080/eCurator05/pages/main.jsp Roussou, M.: The components of Engagement in Virtual Heritage Environments in New Heritage.
New Media and Cultural Heritage.
Kalay, Y. E., Kvan, T., Afflek, J.
(editors), New York, 2008.
Baribeau, R; Godin, G; Cournoyer, L and Rioux, M: Colour Three-Dimensional Modelling of Museum Objects.
In Higgins, T et al (editors), Imaging the Past.
Electronic Imaging and Computer Graphics in Museums and Archaeology.
British Museum, Occasional Paper, Number 114.
1996.
The London Charter Interest Group: The London Charter.
For the use of 3-dimensional visualisation in the research and communication of cultural heritage.
Draft 1.1 14 June 2006 http://www.londoncharter.org InQ http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/index.php/InQ SPECTRUM, the UK Museum Documentation Standard http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum English Heritage: An Addendum to the Metric Survey Specifications for English Heritage.
Addendum 2: A standard specification for the collection of point cloud data by terrestrial laser scanning or other methods.
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/upload/pdf/metric_extraction_scanning_addendum_2.pdf Austin, T and Mitcham, J; Archaeology Data Service and English Heritage:  Preservation and Management Strategies for Exceptionally Large Data Formats: ‘Big Data’ (EH Project No.
3948), Final Version 1.03, 28.
September 2007. http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/bigdata/ Beraldin, J.-A., National Research Council Canada: Digital 3D Imaging and Modelling: A Metrological Approach.
2008 in Time Compression Technologies Magazine, January/February 2008, pp.35-35, NRC 49887 E-Curator on Sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=e-curator Author Details Mona Hess UCL Museums and Collections (now UCL Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering) University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT United Kingdom Email: m.hess@ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=MHESS91 E-Curator project website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/petrie/research/research-projects/3dpetrie/3d_projects/3d-projects-past/e-curator Graeme Were University of Queensland, Australia Email: g.were@uq.edu.au Web site: http://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/2505 Ian Brown Oxford Internet Institute, United Kingdom Web site: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/brown/ Sally MacDonald (now Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester) UCL Museums and Collections University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT United Kingdom   Stuart Robson UCL Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT United Kingdom Email: s.robson@ucl.ac.uk Francesca Simon Millar UCL Museums and Collections University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT United Kingdom   Article Title: “E-Curator: A 3D Web-based Archive for Conservators and Curators” Author: Mona Hess, Graeme Were, Ian Brown, Sally MacDonald, Stuart Robson and Francesca Simon Millar Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/hess-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Beyond the PDF Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Beyond the PDF Buzz data software framework wiki html archives metadata identifier blog repositories copyright video visualisation provenance streaming wordpress youtube git twitter epub html5 opm dexy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jodi Schneider reports on a three-day workshop about the future of scientific communication, held in San Diego CA, USA, in January 2011.
'Beyond the PDF' brought together around 80 people to the University of California San Diego to discuss scholarly communication, primarily in the sciences.
The main topic: How can we apply emergent technologies to improve measurably the way that scholarship is conveyed and comprehended?
The group included domain scientists, researchers and software developers, librarians, funders, publishers, journal editors a mix which organiser Phil Bourne described as 'visionaries, developers, consumers, and conveyors' of scholarship.
The workshop's vision was to identify key issues that must be overcome in order to satisfy consumers, create a plan (including responsible parties, a timeline, and deliverables), and to find a way to keep momentum.
Workshop Structure The schedule was divided into two equal parts: presentations and working sessions.
Momentum started building in advance of the gathering, with an active email discussion list.
Based on these discussions, and publicly submitted abstracts, the organisers arranged the presentations into sessions on six key topics: Annotation Data Provenance New models Writing Reviewing and impact Presentation sessions began with 4-6 short talks, followed by 30 minutes of discussion.
I was amazed by the depth of these presentations, despite a tight timeframe of 10 minutes plus 5 minutes for questions for each talk.
I was also impressed by the organisers' adeptness in responding to pressing topics and the group discussion by fitting in additional presentations, based on the group discussion and demos.
In the second part of the workshop, participants divided themselves into breakout sessions.
These groups met twice, and were allocated the bulk of the second day-and-a-half of the workshop.
This worked towards the group's goal of producing deliverables, rather than a white paper.
Discussions, Backchannel, and Archives Throughout the workshop, discussions proceeded during talks and in the dedicated discussion session through a Twitter backchannel (#beyondthepdf), which added to and also diverged from the voiced discussion.
Because of reliable streaming and the use of a backchannel, offsite participation was feasible, and Jason Priem was a very active participant without travelling from the University of North Carolina.
Much workshop material is available at or via the workshop Web site [1], including video archives [2].
Figure 1: Even in January, lunch outside is a good option in San Diego!
Courtesy of Phil Bourne Day 1: 19 January 2011 Introductory Talks from Session Moderators The workshop opened with an orientation from Phil Bourne and introductions to each topic from the session moderators.
Annotation: Ed Hovy, ISI Ed Hovy discussed the open issues in annotation, which he sees as central to the future of scholarly communication, for extracting and systematic organising information: The paper of the future lives within a cocoon of data, annotations by various people, a social network of authors, another social network of relevant papers.
He hoped that publishers could be paid to manage and systemise this, rather than 'to sit on top of our PDF with copyright'.
Data: Gully Burns, ISI Gully Burns gave an example of blatant misuse of PDF as place for dumping supplemental data.
He showed a screen capture of a page from a 40-page PDF of gene expression data.
The font was so small that the images were only readable under x1200 magnification.
To move data 'beyond the PDF,' he said we needed effective standards for interchanging data and terminology, better integration and coupling between data and the publication process, and automation for data processing and sharing.
Provenance: Paul Groth, VU University of Amsterdam Paul Groth asked how far we want to get to full reproducibility of publications, raising questions about integrating experiments with publications through workflows and computable papers and drawing attention to the difference between reproducibility and reusability.
Currently, he says, we have workflow systems to capture provenance (such as Wings and dexy), models for representing provenance (such as SWAN and OPM), and systems that integrate data into papers (such as GenePattern).
Yet to enable computable papers and reproducible papers, we still need to determine best practices for connecting both the captured data and its provenance to papers.
He also drew attention to the recent W3C report on provenance [3] as a driver of future work for data provenance in the sciences.
New Models: Anita de Waard, Elsevier Anita de Waard gave a historical perspective on new models in publishing, looking back 10 years to 2001 and 20 years to 1991, as shown in Figure 2.
Despite the changes in the past 20 years, there's still a lot to be done.
Figure 2: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Courtesy of Anita de Waard Writing: Phil Bourne, UCSD Phil asked three questions about writing: How should we write to be reproducible?
What structure should the documents we write have?
What tools should we write with in the future?
Reviewing and Impact: Cameron Neylon, Science and Technology Facilities Council Cameron gave a provocative talk showing the irony in our widespread belief that 'science works because of peer review' even though we know of many flaws in the peer-review process.
He condemned artificial scarcity, gave counter-examples which demonstrated that peer review does not guarantee technical quality and does not assess the importance or impact of work.
Nor, Cameron reminded us, does it support discovery.
In place of traditional, pre-publication peer review, Cameron argued for post-publication peer review.
Sessions Annotation, Data, and Provenance were the topics for Day 1.
In the annotation session, I was most struck by Maryann Martone's talk on Intelligent Handling of Resources for Human and Machines, about the practical issues of integration and metasearch, drawing from her work at the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF).
Even having followed developments in scholarly communication closely over the past 3-4 years, I ran into many exciting projects that were new to me; so I was perversely pleased that professional curators are struggling with the overflow, too.
Maryann said that even after four years of intensive searching, the NIF curators were still finding large caches of tools of which they were unaware.
Figure 3: Barend Mons' depiction of 'hairball' of genes In the Data session, Barend Mons asked, 'Is the (enriched) paper computer-reasonable?'
For his work, there are too many papers to read: 90 papers on each of 200 genes with a 'hairball' graph of all genes that might be involved.
Rather than this 'bignorance-driven research', he wants a semantic wiki where concepts have Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs).
These concepts are envisioned as nanopublications with subject-predicate-object.
Each nanopublication has been stated thousands of times on the Web.
They simplify this multiplicity with a single UUID identifying the nanopublication, and calculate the 'Evidence Factor' with the evidence for and against the concept.
John Kunze spoke about 'baby steps to data publication', envisioning a new standardised format of a 'data paper' as a cover sheet (with title, data, authors, abstract, and persistent identifier) with a set of links to archived artefacts.
This would expose datasets to existing indexing engines and Google Scholar, facilitate citation of the data, and instill confidence in the data identifiers (since they are backed up by metadata).
With incremental additional work, peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed overlay journals could publish data papers to publicise data that is scattered in distributed repositories.
In the Provenance session, Juliana Freire argued for provenance-rich, executable papers, which she said would lead to higher-quality publications that present more of the discovery process while supporting reviewers and would-be reproducers.
She showed an example of an arXiv paper with 'deep captions' where results link to the experiment details in the VisTrails workflow-based visualisation tool.
Yolanda Gil talked about enhancing reproducibility with semantic workflows and provenance of the software pipeline.
Even with the data made available, and even when someone is willing to invest months of effort into reproducing a paper, it may be impossible.
Nick Encina, who had attracted interest in the demo session, presented Wingu, a cloud-based startup application that allows display of science workflows and collaborative online editing of papers.
Day 2: 20 January 2011 Sessions New models, Writing, and Reviewing and Impact were the topics for day 2.
New models was one of my favourite sessions.
It included a great demo from David Argue of their prototype [4] of a next-generation paper format, which uses the idea of the view of the Model-View-Controller model, and a fun trailer 'Beyond the PDF-The Horror Movie' from Utopia's Steve Pettifer.
There were also talks on Knowledge Engineering from Experimental Design (KEfED), an unmissable talk from the highly regarded Peter Murray-Rust, and a talk on 'Open access in developing countries'.
However, I was especially struck by Michael Kurtz' presentation on the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), which focused on what has changed in the past 30 years, and how astronomy communicates.
The costs involved in the various services were particularly fascinating, as was the history of ADS, which provides free universal access to the relevant literature.
I wish that more disciplines would work together with publishers and funders to adopt this sensible approach!
In the Writing session, Martin Fenner and Cameron Neylon advocated HTML in their talk 'Blogging beyond the PDF or Copy by Reference', arguing that the best tool is one that is widely used.
WordPress and its plugin architecture, and the new possibilities of HTML5, were particularly highlighted.
Michael Reich described the challenges in reproducing one's own work, which motivated the creation of their reproducible researcher environment, GenePattern.
GenePattern workflows can be now be embedded into Microsoft Word documents, to create a reproducible research document, allowing readers to reload and re-run a GenePattern analysis from within a document.
In the Reviewing and Impact session, Anita de Waard gave a very cogent talk about how, through hedging, claims become treated as facts.
Hedging expresses uncertainty, with phrases such as 'suggest that' or 'imply that', yet citations remove this uncertainty, interpreting and solidifying these claims into generally accepted facts which 'enter the canon of knowledge'.
She suggests that we develop systems that enforce 'legal lifting' to ensure that the experimental context and parameters are cited along with the claim.
Paul Groth suggested aggregating alternative metrics-such as downloads, slide reuse, data citation, and Youtube views to show impact.
He showed Jason Priem's mockup of what such a filtering system could look like, while noting that obtaining metrics from the ever-growing array of social media services is currently difficult.
A Lunchtime Treat NASA executives were visiting the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CallT2) building, and we were invited to sit in on a video demo.
With impressive network bandwidth and incredible video technology, they can broadcast in enough detail for this near-sighted viewer to pick out individual faces in a milling crowd from the back of a large lecture hall.
Breakout Sessions I After lunch, breakout sessions were formed.
We decided on four main areas: research objects of the future, writing and reading, business rights and intellectual property rights (IPR), and attribution, evaluation, & archiving.
A draft final report of the workshop [5], linked from the workshop home page, summarises the work of each group.
Day 3: 21 January 2011 The last day of the workshop was devoted to the breakout topics.
We began the day with a summary of the previous day's breakout sessions.
Participants were invited to change sessions for the second day, or even be 'butterflies' moving between several groups.
Breakout Sessions 2 Three of the four groups left with specific deliverables.
I can speak mainly about the writing and reading group, which discussed a system for collecting up and processing research data and files.
The group plans to stitch together various storage utilities (e.g.
Dropbox, Git) can draw in part from the work of Peter Sefton's group on the 'Fascinator'.
Prototype testers are being sought, and the group hoped such a system could help keep to retain organisational knowledge often lost through transitions such as students graduating or post-docs leaving a group.
Figure 4: The pool was closed, but what a view!
Photo courtesy of Monica Duke Outcomes and Future Planning The workshop succeeded in gathering a diverse international group of participants and raised awareness and energy around scholarly communication.
Vivid conversations are continuing on the email list and various social media sites.
Smaller groups are collaborating more closely based on the face-to-face discussions during the event.
Even with the partial and incomplete view I have of what's going on, I can see that the workshop produced a major impact.
The group is coming to a consensus on the 'La Jolla Manifesto'.
An international Hackfest on Scholarly HTML, following from the 'reading and writing' breakout, is being planned for March.
Beyond the PDF participants are maintaining a calendar of interesting conferences and events and collecting resources and tools lists [6].
EPUB is getting wider discussion as a format for scholarship.
Martin Fenner has convened an email list about WordPress for scientists.
The W3C Health Care Life Sciences group has taken up the Research Object of the Future discussion.
Many people are focusing attention on Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA); opening the literature has been one area of discussion, and even before Maryann Martone started her sabbatical at the SMA Foundation, there were concrete suggestions for an impact dashboard for started her sabbatical at the SMA Foundation, there were concrete suggestions for an impact dashboard for SMA, and an international team is developing a prototype system to help the SMA Foundation access scientific and medical knowledge better and faster via text mining and claim detection on the literature.
There has also been some engagement from the standards community; on the last day one discussion comment was that a new standard, PDF/E, is being developed for PDFs for the engineering and scientific community.
Conclusion 'Beyond the PDF' was an energising gathering for taking the next steps towards changing the way we convey and communicate science.
I was delighted to put faces to names for many people I had been following online.
This workshop was filled with interesting (and concise!)
talks; I highly recommend dipping into the entire YouTube playlist!
References Beyond the PDF Web site http://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/ Beyond the PDF Video Proceedings at YouTube Web site http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=BE627F48A0DB94FD W3C Incubator Group, Provenance XG Final Report, 8 December 2010 http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/XGR-prov-20101214/ David Argue, Next-generation-paper demo http://www.zfishbook.org/NGP/ Phil Bourne, 'Beyond the PDF' Draft Report, 30 January 2011 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZPkFvUxC94o4ekLvJwTIpingYm-7mBjnfoh89q-2vSI/edit?hl=en&authkey=CKGC5JML Resources and tools http://neurolex.org/wiki/Category:Beyond_the_pdf Author Details Jodi Schneider Ph.D. Student Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) National University of Ireland Email: jschneider@pobox.com Web site: http://jodischneider.com/jodi.html Jodi Schneider is a second-year Ph.D. student at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), NUI Galway, Ireland.
She holds an M.A.
in mathematics, an M.S.
in Library and Information Science.
Her research interests are in argumentation, scientific and scholarly communication, and the Social Semantic Web.
Before joining DERI, Jodi founded an open access journal for library technologists (Code4Lib Journal), was community liaison for the research summary wiki AcaWiki, and worked in academic libraries.
At DERI, her current research is on argumentation on the Social Semantic Web, and she serves on W3C groups on Scientific Discourse in biosciences and Library Linked Data.
At Beyond the PDF, she spoke on 'Supporting Reading'.
Return to top Article Title: "Beyond the PDF" Author: Jodi Schneider Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/beyond-pdf-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial: Ariadne Carries On Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial: Ariadne Carries On Buzz rss repositories twitter Citation BibTex RIS The editor writes of the next coils in Ariadne's thread, and bids farewell.
Readers who have been conversant with the recent travails of UKOLN [1] will have been aware that Ariadne has been, to put it mildly, living in interesting times.
The closure of the Jisc Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN at the end of July 2013 had signalled the demise of the publication with the total number of issues reaching 71, after a period of reduced numbers of issues per year.
Whatever the facts of the matter, I would have found it very hard not to feel I had personally failed in the mission of maintaining what must figure as a significant publication to this community of professionals and as a repository of their considerable enthusiasm, expertise and experience.
I am delighted therefore to be able to inform readers and authors that my colleagues at the University of Bath Library (where Ariadne is produced) will be taking over the running of the publication with effect from 1 August 2013.
I wish to thank those colleagues in the University Library and UKOLN who have worked to bring about this most welcome transfer.
Even more importantly, I would like to call upon the many supporters of Ariadne, readers and authors, to give my Library colleagues their whole-hearted support through suggestions for material and above all, of course, proposals for articles or, even better, drafts of articles you are thinking of publishing.
While I recognise, and have seen for myself, the increasing pressure under which contributors now work and  the increased difficulty these days in finding time to write articles, I would like to ask that you give thought to how you may be able to contribute.
Any editors worth their salt will avow that of all the processes involved in the publication of an issue,  obtaining content, the right content, remains at the top of their list of priorities.
It is of course the aspect over which they have least control, and I have always retained a great regard for the many contributors who have offered me unsolicited material as the expression goes, and to whom I am ever grateful.
So, if you have ever been pleased by the appearance of your writing in Ariadne, valued information gleaned from colleagues’ articles or found the publication a useful source of reference, I ask that you seriously consider  getting in touch with a proposal or just to discuss what you would like to write.
If, when you have contributed an article, I have perhaps done you a favour or gone the extra mile, I would like to cash in that favour in favour of my University of Bath Library colleagues whom you can contact via the Ariadne Web form.
(Equally, if you felt I made a hash of it, then you will be impressed by the new operator!)
While my email account will terminate at the end of this month, do please remember that the contact Web form will continue to function.
Moreover, in order to keep up to date with developments, do not forget the Twitter channel operated by Ariadne or the fact that it also operates RSS feeds for forthcoming as well as newly published articles.
Inevitably, my sense of relief is mixed with sadness that I will not be working with the many contributors who have in my view made the publication the source of information and opinion it has become over its 18 years.
In the 10 years of my watch, I have enjoyed working with so many different professionals who invariably were all united in the desire to communicate, explain and even enthuse; while on the rare occasions anyone ever tried to use the word ‘exciting’ I might repress it, there was no doubt in my mind of the commitment all those authors have to their material and their practice.
It is my hope that they will continue to contribute together with many new authors and that readers and writers alike will continue to pass and write the word about and for Ariadne as she soldiers on.
References Chris Parr.
“UKOLN hit by job losses as Jisc removes funding”.
Times Higher Education, 9 May 2013  http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/ukoln-hit-by-job-losses-as-jisc-removes-funding/2003712.article Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/contact/webform Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Don't You Know Who I Am?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Don't You Know Who I Am?
Buzz data wiki infrastructure archives cataloguing graphics passwords shibboleth rfid foi research Citation BibTex RIS John Paschoud looks into identity and access management in the pre-digital and digital age, and describes how the JISC Identity Management Toolkit can help us manage identities better.
Way back in prehistory, when libraries were buildings with books in, identity management was a pretty simple challenge for them.
A library was either truly 'public', in which case you did not care who came in (the more people, the more popular you were, which was 'a good thing').
Otherwise, you had to be a member, and the security officer on the door knew your face, or you could show him (it was usually a 'him', then) a card or something to prove you were a member.
For a library to trust you to take some of its books away with you (without hiding them under your coat), you usually did have to be a member, and becoming a member entailed some sort of registration process in which you might have to prove who you were with some official-looking document.
The details of each member could be recorded in some sort of register, and a card issued.
Effectively taking someone's membership away again, for whatever reason, was a bit more difficult unless there was an opportunity to wrest the precious library card from them physically!
Admissions Rules A few years ago now our Projects Team at the London School of Economics (LSE) Library [1] was involved in documenting and analysing the admissions rules of academic libraries in London.
This was before our own library agreed to provide full access to 'the general public' (in return for Heritage Lottery grants towards a £20m building project), but I was intrigued to find that our own admissions rules included all sorts of bipartite agreements with institutions such as Kings College London (proximity, I guess) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (a lot of common-interest post-colonial subject material in each of our collections).
The most interesting 'right of access' I found in our admissions rules was 'accredited diplomatic staff of a recognised foreign country, attached to an embassy, consulate or diplomatic mission in London'.
I never actually observed anyone trying to exercise this particular right (I am excused counter duties at the library because I do not know enough about books), but I was aware that my colleagues who did serve on the Admissions Desk rota were a wonderfully diverse lot; with collectively far more knowledge of international and political affairs than this duty required.
I imagined the possible scene of an intending visitor from some small state (in some dispute with the United Nations, perhaps) being rebuffed by one of our Library Assistants because he was not accredited by a recognised foreign country.
I am sure all our LAs are much too diplomatic themselves for anything like that to actually happen now; but it did get me thinking.
What we also discovered in the course of the same investigation was the great number of other academic libraries to which I was allowed admission, on the strength of my status as a staff member at LSE.
We decided to test this out with a small 'mystery shopper' exercise.
Having retrieved a copy of the access rules for South Bank University Library (with, listed somewhere on page 2, the clause allowing LSE staff members reciprocal access) I duly set off on the 171 bus, armed with the plastic card that identified me as such (with the usual un-fetching photo and the magnetic strip that magically opened the turnstile at the LSE Library when I came into the office every morning).
There were two serious flaws in this plan.
The first was due to the fact that single-sided photocopying was clearly the norm at South Bank, and the otherwise very polite security officer at the Perry Library was only in possession of page 1 of their admissions rules, and so he couldn't see a reason to let me in.
I would like to believe that the second flaw was a result of my personal fame in the library world; but it was really because quite a lot of librarians tend to circulate around jobs in London universities, and a former LSE Library colleague was currently managing the counters there, recognised me and told the officer to let me in.
The project team decided that I would need some serious disguises before being allowed out to do any more mystery shopping!
Identity Management Partly as a result of the recognition we helped to generate that reciprocal library access was a valuable resource for students and researchers but that administration of such rules was difficult, a number of schemes have been established that make it simpler.
One such is SCONUL Access [2], a collaboration between 159 United Kingdom and Ireland university and college libraries.
Several mutual schemes are based on geography such as the M25 Consortium [3], which also provides access to staff and researchers based at non-university member institutions like museums.
The InforM25 'Visit a Library' tool [4] helps to identify rights of access and is linked with a facility to cross-search the online catalogues of most member libraries.
However, with the switch to e-resources, with more complex licensed access conditions than books, there is still considerable pressure on a library or the institution of which it is a part to identify each one of its individual users.
If a library needs to do this, and keep records of each identified user (probably with other personal information about the user attached) then it is taking on the responsibilities of Identity Management.
Most academic libraries have an 'obvious' membership constituency of the staff and students affiliated with the institution of which they are a part, and for these people their membership of the university or college will normally be handled by their human resources or academic registrar departments.
However many academic libraries, including the Library at LSE (or the British Library of Political & Economic Science as it is properly named) have formal remits to provide services to (and register members from) many other groups too.
Many of the identity management headaches in academic institutions stem from the rights of access of these 'miscellaneous' (i.e.
not just staff or students) individuals.
Moreover, the Library is an important first point of contact for many of these individuals with our institution and its identity management processes.
JISC Activity Identity management has been recognised as an important issue by (amongst others) university and college IT directors in Britain via their association UCISA (Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association [5]), which highlighted identity and personal data management as one of the top ten key issues for member organisations.
One outcome of this concern was a call for research from the JISC [6] e-infrastructure programme [7] in 2006 which funded two projects: ES-LoA [8] which investigated security levels of assurance, and The Identity Project [9].
The latter conducted a national survey of Further & Higher Education institutions to establish the broad state of play, and highly detailed audits of identity management policies and practices in ten particular institutions that were involved in the project.
A strong recommendation from the concluding reports of The Identity Project was that UK academic institutions (even larger universities with relatively large staff establishments to manage IT infrastructure) were in need of tools, guidance and standards on what they needed to do.
The Identity Management Toolkit The response to this recommendation was a further call in 2008 for the production of an institutional toolkit to provide such comprehensive support.
From this, JISC funded a partnership between LSE, University of Bristol, Cardiff University and Kidderminster College (all with considerable previous experience in this field) to put together what was ordered.
The project to produce the Identity Management Toolkit [10] has involved UCISA, RUGIT (IT heads of 'Russell Group' universities [11]), ISAF (the UK Information Security Awareness Forum [12]) and other national bodies in governance and oversight, and has 'road-tested' draft materials in live institutional projects to implement identity management systems and practices.
The project used a collaborative process of writing and editing on a wiki (TWiki being the chosen platform), with fine-grain access control (federated access using Shibboleth naturally!)
supporting published pages or topics of the Toolkit, with embedded graphics and attached template document files sitting alongside pre-publication material and other non-public pages used for management of the project and the institutional trials.
They could be read or edited as required by members of the project team and the governance board from all partner institutions with little or no administrative overhead, because all partners had well-established identity-provider services registered with the UK Access Management Federation [13].
The wiki platform for the published Toolkit, launched at the 2010 annual conferences of both UCISA [5] and JISC [6], made it very easy for the team to produce a set of highly linked documents for online use, with the option for users to generate a monolithic PDF document comprising all 138 pages of the content or just PDF documents of any of the main sections or appendices.
Realigning Responsibility within Institutions In most universities and colleges much of the concern surrounding identity management policy and practice and the responsibility to improve them currently rest with the managers and maintainers of the IT network infrastructure.
However, the Toolkit advice on formulating and governing organisational policy urges an organisation to shift these responsibilities wherever possible, and as fully as possible, onto the administrative departments that actually own the business processes involved.
The situation of an enrolled student or a newly-recruited staff member having to wait days for the activation of their network and email accounts is all too common; and all too commonly blamed on 'the IT service' when in fact the people (or automated systems) in IT are merely following procedure by refusing to create a network account until they can 'see' a valid personnel or registry record for the user.
In the case of individuals whose principal or main relationship with a university or college is via the library, as one of the 'odd' categories of library user, it should be the library that takes this responsibility for registration and future maintenance of a new identity-managed individual.
If this function of the library is forgotten when institutional procedures are reviewed or designed, and the simple assumption is made that 'everyone is a staff member or a student' (and, probably, that nobody has both these roles at the same time), then things are likely to stay messy.
The Identity Management Toolkit includes comprehensive guides on the drafting and review of governance and policies (which have so often evolved over time, but not been written down or clearly owned by an identified individual or committee), the technology, processes and jargon (see Figure 1 below), and the functionalities and standards to look for when assessing the increasing number of 'solutions' from IT vendors (which may cause more problems than they solve, if both supplier and customer do not really understand the existing requirements of the institution properly in the first place).
It also contains the methodology and templates compiled by The Identity Project for carrying out a complete institutional audit to discover where, by whom and how identity management (often duplicated or worse) is happening in an institution already; and it covers the 'social factors' of user education on network security with a methodology for measuring this amongst students (or: how much chocolate will buy their personal passwords?).
Figure 1: Core Identity Management components Wi-fi Access One facility that visitors to an academic library (or any other sort of library) have come to expect these days is omnipresent wi-fi access.
Ignoring for the moment the additional challenges posed by the newly minted Digital Economy Act 2010 [14] mainly because that deserves extensive discussion of its own this poses some specific problems for academic libraries that depend on JANET for Internet access, but which admit non-academic visitors.
The Toolkit contains a specific section of guidance on what access a library can allow, to what types of visitor, and options for how this can be regulated and managed by an institution.
The Role of the CIO A minority of UK universities (based on a quick straw-poll I took at a conference of appropriate senior academic IT people recently) have so far established the post of Chief Information Officer (CIO).
In an academic institution (and certainly, in the larger number of US academic institutions that have a CIO) this is likely to mean something rather different from the same title in a commercial enterprise of a similar scale.
But then, universities and academic libraries are enterprises that deal largely in information.
In some, the role of CIO has been built upon that of 'Director of Library and Information Services' or a similar post.
The Toolkit (and many of the sources from which the Toolkit has drawn) recommend that primary institutional ownership of the policies that govern identity management should rest clearly with a single senior post, and that this should be the CIO or equivalent.
As 'public bodies' (as most academic institutions have declared themselves for the purposes of Freedom of Information), and with news media keen to pounce on stories of personal data losses or misuse, particularly in the public sector, this brings additional pressure to any person in such a role, to 'get identity management right'.
Federated Access for Libraries Over the past three years, since the establishment of the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research [13] in November 2006, we have seen major advances in the technical capability of the UK academic community to offer federated access to an increasing variety of online resources.
So that, for example, the manager of a resource held by Columbia University in New York can allow access by students of a particular course based at LSE in London, identifying themselves with the network credentials issued by LSE (this was in fact one of the earliest examples of international and inter-institutional use of the Shibboleth protocol, implemented in January 2005 [15].
Less exotic or newsworthy examples of similar exploitations of the technology of federated access management are likely to be springing up apace, largely undocumented.
Where a current member of one university is admitted as a 'guest' to another academic library, this is on the basis that they are already 'identity-managed' by their home institution (i.e.
their 'identity-provider').
But such guest access often requires that the user must undergo a further, redundant process of registration with either the host library or perhaps with the consortium organisation (such as InforM25) that has been established to facilitate the reciprocal arrangement.
In effect, the host library is also taking on the burden of identity-managing the same individual.
There are additional technical challenges to extending federated access (as it now works in the purely online domain) to the physical barriers that typically protect the physical contents and physical space of a library; and many of the systems that control access to library gates or turnstiles, using magnetic strip or RFID tokens to identify users, are proprietary and not well integrated in standards-compliant ways with other networked resources (if they are networked at all).
Conclusion Physical library spaces and printed resources for learning and research seem set to be with us for some time yet, and so the possibilities for providing access to them on a par with e-resources and eliminating all that duplicated administration for users and library staff are attractive.
Would it not be better when I can use my LSE staff ID card to pass effortlessly through the turnstiles of King's College Library or University College London (they both have much better collections of books on 'hard' IT subjects)?
– and without a challenge from the security officer and that suppressed desire to exclaim, 'Don't you know who I am?'?
References London School of Economics Library (also known as the British Library of Political & Economic Science) http://library.lse.ac.uk SCONUL Access http://www.access.sconul.ac.uk/ The M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/ InforM25 'Visit a Library' http://www.inform25.ac.uk/AET/ Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/ JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ JISC e-Infrastructure Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/einfrastructure e-Infrastructure Security Levels of Assurance (ES-LoA) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/einfrastructure/esloa JISC: The identity project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/einfrastructure/identity The JISC Identity Management Toolkit Project http://www.identity-project.org The Russell Universities Group of IT Directors (RUGIT) http://www.rugit.ac.uk/ Information Security Awareness Forum (ISAF) http://www.theisaf.org/kzscripts/default.asp UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/ Digital Economy Act 2010 http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2010/ukpga_20100024_en_1 "Institutions collaborate to allow secure access across continents", London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), News Archive, 2005 http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2005/Shibboleh_LibraryPR.aspx Author Details John Paschoud Information Systems Engineer LSE Library Email: j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.angel.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Don't You Know Who I Am?"
Author: John Paschoud Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/paschoud/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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From Cultural Heritage to Digital Knowledge: Building Infrastructures for a Global Knowledge Society Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From Cultural Heritage to Digital Knowledge: Building Infrastructures for a Global Knowledge Society Buzz data mobile software portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation repositories cataloguing aggregation e-learning moodle ict research Citation BibTex RIS Astrid Recker reports on the 3rd IFLA Presidential Meeting, held by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) in Berlin over 19-20 February 2009.
The IFLA Presidential Meeting ‘Access to Knowledge: Networking Libraries’ [1], was the third and last event in a series of conferences held during the IFLA presidency of Claudia Lux between 2007 and 2009.
Intended as international platforms for exchange about the topic of ‘free access to information’, the motto shared by all three meetings, each of the conferences focused on a different cultural/geographical region: Central and Eastern Europe in 2007, Asia in 2008, and Arab and Islamic countries in 2009.
Thus, this year’s meeting aimed to inspire a dialogue about libraries and their role in preserving and giving access to the cultural heritage of the Arab world.
While speakers addressed a wide array of issues, recurring themes of the talks were the relationship between digital knowledge and cultural heritage (in particular, digitisation as a means to simultaneously preserving cultural heritage and making it widely accessible), the importance and potential of building networks and alliances on local, regional, and global levels, as well as the establishment of technical, social, political, and educational infrastructures for an inclusive, global knowledge society.
The conference was organised by the German IFLA National Committee in co-operation with the Federal Foreign Office, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Goethe-Institut, and the Federal Union of German Library and Information Associations, Bibliothek & Information Deutschland (BID).
Keynote Addresses In their keynote addresses, Khaled al Dhaheri, Ellen Tise, the designated IFLA president 2009-2011, and current IFLA president Claudia Lux, set the stage for the two-day event by raising a series of issues and questions ranging from the promotion of literacy to establishing digital library collections and networks that would be repeatedly addressed by the other contributors, each of whom added his or her own culture’s perspective, thus giving multi-faceted and varied insights into the shared, but also differing, concerns of their respective countries.
Dr Khaled al Dhaheri, ADACH and National Library of the United Arab Emirates Arguing for ‘The Development of the Information Society as a National Obligation’, Dr Khaled al Dhaheri asserted that in a time when the exchange of knowledge and information has considerably accelerated – in the Arab world as much as in Western countries – libraries, in order not to become ‘relics of the past’, have to keep pace with these developments.
In his talk, Al Dhaheri pointed to the urgent need to build up ICT infrastructures and to develop the necessary skills both in library staff and in the general population, a point that would be frequently reiterated during the conference.
He then continued by outlining the ADACH’s concept of a decentralised national library of Arabic and Islamic culture, with satellite branches in different regions which function as local centres of cultural heritage catering to the specific needs of each region.
Ellen Tise, Library and Information Services, Stellenbosch University, South Africa The necessity of building regional knowledges was also asserted by Ellen Tise in her address ‘Libraries for Access to Knowledge: Information Services and Information Literacy Today’.
Focusing on libraries’ role in achieving the UN millennium goals for developing countries, Tise pointed to the different challenges faced by libraries in information-abundant societies, and in societies where information is scarce.
She stressed the importance of having public libraries which enable their users to become active participants in change by helping to establish an ‘inclusive knowledge society’ based on the principles of equity, co-operation, and sharing.
Among the tasks of such libraries, according to Tise, was the ‘repackaging’ of information globally available and merging it with indigenous knowledge in order to make it useful and valuable for local communities.
While on the one hand Tise thus stressed the important role libraries play in providing access to information, knowledge, and expertise, she also pointed to their obligation to record and preserve indigenous knowledge, as without such local knowledge, other, ‘global’ information would be useless.
Dr Claudia Lux, Central and Regional Library Berlin, Germany After giving a short overview of the development of digital libraries and the challenges they currently face (cost, legal, and technical barriers), Claudia Lux’s address, ‘The Digital Library as Social Challenge’ [2], focused on the importance of digital libraries in developing a global knowledge society.
Thus, Lux argued, by giving all libraries and hence the people they serve free access to open, digital content, the gap between information-rich and information-poor societies and people can be diminished.
Highlighting IFLA’s efforts in creating an awareness of the importance of free access to information (e.g.
in the work of the IFLA Committee on Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression, FAIFE [3]), Lux urged the participants of the conference – in tune with the motto of her IFLA presidency – to put ‘libraries on the agenda’ and to enter into constructive dialogues with policyand decision-makers in order to create a strong and lasting basis for future co-operation.
Session I: Building Infrastructures in a Global Knowledge Society The speakers of the first session dealt with questions of co-operation on the one hand, and considered digitisation projects and their role in giving access to (cultural heritage in the form of) digital knowledge on the other.
Dr Irina Sens, German National Library of Science and Technology, Germany Ms Barbara Schneider-Kempf, Berlin State Library, Germany In their talks, Irina Sens and Barbara Schneider-Kempf gave a German perspective on the issues of co-operation and digitisation.
Speaking about ‘Excellence Through Co-Operation’, Dr Sens presented Goportis [4], a portal providing access to the entire collections of the German National Libraries of Science and Technology, Medicine, and Economics (Zentrale Fachbibliotheken).
Barbara Schneider-Kempf gave an overview of the work of the ‘Orientabteilung’ [5], the Oriental Collections Department of the Berlin State Library, with a particular focus on the digitisation, transcription, and cataloguing projects carried out in co-operation with a number of German and international partners.
Dr Sohair F. Wastawy, Library of Alexandria, Egypt Dr Sohair Wastawy’s talk, entitled ‘Synergy of Cooperation: Examples from Arabic Countries’, set out by explaining that one of Egypt’s major challenges resided in its comparatively low number of publications and readers.
Claiming that ‘a nation that doesn’t read is a nation at risk’, Wastawy repeatedly emphasised the importance of facilitating access to knowledge by removing political, technological, social, and economic barriers [6].
Urging the Arab world to tackle ICT infrastructure issues, to increase computer and information literacy among all citizens, and to address the need for a balanced IPR legislation, Wastawy addressed the need of increasing Arabic content on the Internet and gave an overview of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s efforts to provide access to cultural heritage and other knowledge/information in digital form.
Among many other projects [7], the Digital Assets Repository and the Arabic Digital Library it houses [8], stand out as exemplary attempts to make cultural heritage publicly available in digital form.
Thus, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has come to an agreement with 42 publishers in the Arab world to include their material in the Arabic Digital Library.
So far, 100,000 books have been digitised and are now available either openly through the Internet or, where the material in question is not yet in the public domain, via computers within the library.
Dr Saad Azzahri, Ministry of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia In his presentation, ‘Providing Access to Knowledge in the Arab World: The Role of AFLI as a Professional Society’, Dr Saad Azzahri, former president of the Arab Federation for Libraries and Information (AFLI), revisited the four barriers inhibiting the access to knowledge introduced by Sohair Wastawy (political, technological, social, and economic).
Focusing in particular on existing language barriers, not only did Dr Azzahri reiterate the fact that the Arabic content on the Internet failed by far adequately to represent the vast amount of Arabic knowledge in existence, but he also emphasised how much attempts to employ new (digital) technologies for libraries were being hampered by difficulties in making relevant software available in the Arabic language as much as by the fact that many librarians do not speak English very well.
In the light of such challenges, Azzahri regarded it as crucial to establish and expand professional training for librarians, a task that has been addressed by AFLI.
Thus, for several years now, AFLI has been offering professional training for librarians in a considerable variety of fields, ranging from cataloguing to IT and marketing.
As feedback to the workshops and training courses shows, there continues to be a great demand for such programmes.
Just as important as professional training was the sharing of expertise and resources, and hence Azzahri strongly emphasised the need for networks and collaboration between libraries in the Arab world and beyond, pointing to the AFLI conferences as excellent forums for exchange and networking.
Session II: Young Academics and Information Literacy The presentations in the second session focused on information literacy and Higher Education issues on various levels, ranging from attempts to implement information literacy education in the university curriculum (Lebanon) to establishing ICT infrastructure and distance learning programmes (Indonesia) or reading promotion (Malaysia).
Ms Gladys Saade-Azar, Lebanese University, Lebanon Dr Zainal H. Hasibuan, University of Indonesia, Indonesia While Gladys Saade-Azar spoke about the difficulties university libraries in Lebanon are experiencing in convincing both professors and students of the necessity to implement information literacy education in the curricula, Dr Zainal Hasibuan’s presentation focused on building up ICT infrastructure in Indonesia (a challenging task in a nation comprising thousands of islands) and, more particularly, the (technical) infrastructure for distance learning programmes and resource sharing between libraries i.e.
infrastructures prerequisite to reducing existing digital, information, and knowledge divides.
Thus, Higher Education institutions in Indonesia have been addressing the following tasks: the building up of ‘one-stop systems’ providing access to both local content and content hosted at other institutions; creating digital library applications and e-learning platforms with online course materials.
Among the results of these efforts is the LONTAR (Library Automation and Digital Archive) Digital Library System developed at the University of Indonesia, allowing libraries to manage their local collections at the same time that it facilitates metadata sharing between institutions by acting both as a service and a data provider [9].
At the University of Indonesia, the LONTAR search functionality is integrated in SCELE (Student Centered Learning Environment) [10], a Moodle-based e-learning platform providing access to distance learning courses.
In addition, SPEKTRA, a network of digital libraries in Indonesia provides a union catalogue and a management system for digital library content, thus further enhancing the potential for resource sharing among institutions [11].
Ms Shukriah Haji Yon, Penang Public Library Corporation (PPLC), Malaysia In her talk ‘Information Literacy in a Multicultural Environment’, Ms Shukriah Haji Yon gave an inspiring overview of the PPLC’s efforts to provide library services to all citizens of Malaysia, regardless of their ethnicity or place of residence.
Thus the PPLC has developed a closely-knit network of libraries, both in urban and rural areas.
These comprise ‘village cyber-libraries’ (with Internet access computers), mobile libraries, a children’s library, and branches in shopping malls.
All of these libraries are connected to the Internet and hence give their users access to both local and global, traditional and digital resources, while at the same time functioning as community centres and meeting places.
An example of the PPLC’s efforts to reach the entire population of Malaysia is the ‘Every Baby a Book’ Programme [12], launched in 2007 in co-operation with the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development.
Entailing the distribution of a non-toxic, colourful cloth-book with local content in Malay and English, the programme seeks to make parents and carers aware of the learning processes of their children and instructs them on how to stimulate learning with the help of suitable reading material.
Session III: Digital Knowledge and Cultural Heritage – An International Approach to Repositories and Metadata Mr Driss Khrouz, National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco With the contribution of Mr Driss Khrouz, director of the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco (BNRM) [13], the conference returned to the topic of ‘Cultural Heritage and Digitisation’.
Khrouz presented a large-scale digitisation project currently being carried out by the National Library with the objectives both of preserving and making accessible Moroccan cultural heritage.
On the one hand, Khrouz pointed to the usefulness of digitisation in undermining the illegal trading of rare manuscripts; on the other hand, for the BNRM, digitisation is a means of putting material back into the National Library which is no longer there in physical form, thus making these valuable pieces of cultural heritage available to the general public.
Arguing that ‘the digital material of today is the cultural heritage of tomorrow’, Khrouz urged all participants to be ‘future-minded’ in their approaches to digital material, highlighting at the same time the importance – especially for Arab countries – of facilitating access to ICT infrastructure and digital materials for the entire population (including women and young adults) in order to prevent knowledge divides from opening up or widening.
Dr Elisabeth Niggemann, German National Library In her talk, ‘Library Concepts of Digitization in Europe and Worldwide’, Dr Elisabeth Niggemann, director of the German National Library and Chair of the European Digital Library Foundation, presented the concept and basic infrastructure of Europeana [14].
The digital library portal (currently available in a beta version) is meant to provide access to ‘the cultural collections of Europe’ and will contain metadata of digital objects from museums and galleries, archives, libraries, and audio-visual collections; it will in particular make use of the metadata contributed by 48 national libraries to The European Library [15].
Niggemann continued to explain how Europeana, rather than being a repository storing the digital objects themselves, works with content providers and various aggregators (e.g.
the German Digital Library and other national portals) who make available and bundle the relevant metadata.
In order to make the content of Europeana visible and accessible on a global scale, co-operation and partnership with the World Digital Library [16] is envisioned in the future.
Dr Mohamed Ahmed Al-Sanabani, Sanaa University Libraries, Yemen In the final talk of the meeting, ‘Chances and Challenges in Worldwide Digital Cooperation’, Dr Al-Sanabani returned to the question of removing barriers and fostering co-operation on the local, regional, national, and international level.
In order to meet the challenges confronting libraries in Yemen and other Arab countries – in particular, according to Al-Sanabani, a lack of IT specialists, bibliographic tools, standardisation, and technical infrastructure – according to Al-Sanabani, a pan-Arabic co-operative initiative, based on cultural agreements and facilitating the sharing of resources and the exchange of information, is of utmost importance.
In this context, he asserted the importance of AFLI’s role as previously outlined by Dr Azzahri.
At the same time he voiced an urgent need for Arab countries to overcome the international language barrier, thus enabling global access to the cultural heritage of the Arab world as well as giving Arab countries access to global (digital) knowledge.
Conclusion In the final panel discussion, representatives from Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Germany addressed, among other questions, the relationship between libraries and politics/the government in their countries.
On this occasion both the differences and the similarities between the challenges libraries are currently facing around the globe became once more apparent.
Thus, nearly all contributors with Arabic and Islamic backgrounds identified illiteracy and a lack of (sometimes even most basic) ICT infrastructure as among the most serious problems in their countries, while libraries in information-rich countries were currently more concerned with reducing the complexity of the wealth of available material by bundling and filtering information.
Yet, among the most important outcomes, not only of the panel discussion but of the entire conference, was certainly the realisation that, despite differences in language and culture, in all of the countries represented at the conference, libraries were currently pre-occupied with solving problems largely of a very similar nature.
For example, everywhere libraries and their partners are struggling to put ‘libraries on the agenda’, that is, to work together with policyand decision-makers in order to find ways of removing cost, technological, and legislative barriers barriers that exist in Western countries as much as in the Arab world.
Even though there were a few conspicuous absences among the issues discussed (particularly questions of gender inequality and censorship were hardly addressed), at all times the atmosphere was one of openness.
The organisers succeeded in inspiring a dialogue among all cultures and nations represented about establishing co-operation on local and global levels co-operation, it should be said, of a decidedly ‘democratic’ nature, among equal partners mutually benefitting from exchange and collaboration.
Only by means of such co-operation will it be possible to preserve the cultural heritage of the Arab world in digital form, and to make this invaluable material accessible both locally and globally in a manner that overcomes barriers of language and culture.
The author attended the conference as part of a group of German Library and Information Science students whose visit to Berlin was sponsored by the BID and the ADACH.
I would like to thank both organisations for making it possible for me to participate in the conference.
References IFLA in Germany.
3rd IFLA Presidential Meeting 2009 http://www.ifla-deutschland.de/de/ifla_praesidentschaft/2009_3pm_en.html Lux, Claudia.
“Die digitale Bibliothek als gesellschaftliche Herausforderung” http://www.ifla-deutschland.de/de/downloads/keynote_claudia_lux.pdf IFLA Committee on Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE http://www.ifla.org/faife/index.htm GOPORTIS http://www.goportis.de/ Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Orientabteilung http://orient.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Access to Knowledge (A2K) http://www.bibalex.org/a2k/ Bibliotheca Alexandrina http://www.bibalex.org Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Digital Assets Repository http://dar.bibalex.org/ See also http://www.bibalex.org/isis/ Aji, R. F., Kurniawan, H., Hasibuan, Z.
A., “Adaptive System for Libraries Integration Case Study: University of Indonesia’s Libraries”, iiWAS2006, 4-6 December 2006, Yogyakarta http://repository.gunadarma.ac.id:8000/983/ SCELE http://scele.cs.ui.ac.id/ SPEKTRA http://svl.petra.ac.id/ IFLA Libraries for Children and Young Adults Section.
Best Practices http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s10/BP/s10_Best-practice_Penang_MY.pdf Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc (BNRM) http://www.bnrm.ma/ Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ Editor’s note: Readers may wish to refer to "Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content", Rob Davies, October 2008, Ariadne, Issue 57 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/davies/ The European Library http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ World Digital Library http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org/ Author Details Astrid Recker Graduate Research Assistant Cologne University of Applied Sciences / Fachhochschule Köln Institute of Information Science / Institut für Informationswissenschaft Email: Astrid.Recker@fh-koeln.de Web site: http://www.fbi.fh-koeln.de Return to top Article Title: “From Cultural Heritage to Digital Knowledge: Building Infrastructures for a Global Knowledge Society” Author: Astrid Recker Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/ifla-3p-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A DRY CRIG Event for the IE Demonstrator Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A DRY CRIG Event for the IE Demonstrator Buzz data software java api database restful infrastructure metadata identifier vocabularies blog repositories python preservation gis lcsh soap skos licence interoperability oai-ore privacy url research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Walk reports on an 'unconference' for developers working in and around the JISC Information Environment and institutional systems, hosted by UKOLN at the University of Bath in June 2008.
In June this year UKOLN hosted an ‘unconference’[1] which was given the title ‘DRY/CRIG’.
Jointly funded through the IE Demonstrator Project [2] and the Common Repositories Interfaces Group (CRIG) [3], this event was intended to allow technical representatives of (mainly) JISC-funded ‘Shared-Infrastructure-Services [4] to meet software developers from UK Higher Education institutions (HEIs).
The ‘DRY’ part of the name is an acronym standing for ‘Don’t Repeat Yourself’, a general principle in software engineering, which was deemed appropriate for an event mostly concerned with reusable shared services.
It also incorporated a slight pun, as the CRIG DRY events have tended to be held in bars!
For the first part of the day, the service representatives had been briefed to deliver a five-minute ‘elevator pitch’ for their service.
Because their audience had a high degree of technical knowledge and experience, the speakers were encouraged to deliver this pitch in more technical terms than they might have normally.
The idea was for the speakers to try to persuade the HEI developers to engage with their service at a technical level.
The second half of the day was devoted to the sort of prototyping activity which has come to characterise CRIG events.
The event was jointly organised by David Flanders (representing CRIG) and myself.
We had previously agreed to organise a CRIG event in Bath; as the academic year had finished, I found that the Parade Bar [5] on the University of Bath’s campus was available to use as a venue for the 20-30 people we invited.
This turned out to be an excellent venue with plenty of space, free WIFI provided by the University, food and drink available all day at the convenience of the delegates, comfortable sofas and even a pool table!
Following introductions by David and myself we jumped straight into the ‘elevator pitches’ session.
STAR Project Ceri Binding, University of Glamorgan Ceri Binding of the STAR Project [6] gave an excellent overview of the outputs to date of this effort to develop services around semantic technologies, initially within the subject domain of archaeology.
Ceri explained how the STAR Project has already done some of the ‘heavy lifting’ to prepare vocabularies for use in semantic applications, such as presenting Library of Congress Subject Headings [7] as SKOS [8].
With the provision of some publicly available Web services, this work could then be exploited by institutional developers.
The particular use case which Ceri ‘pitched’ to the audience was that of a service providing functionality to support the expansion of searches being conducted by someone using an institutional system such as a repository.
GeoCrossWalk James Reid, EDINA, Edinburgh University GeoCrossWalk [9] offers a ‘spatially aware’ database, together with a Web service-based API and a ‘geo-parser’.
Together, these elements make up a package which allows information to be parsed for geo-spatial terms.
Such information can then be given a new, coherent geographical context.
With the widespread use of Google Earth [10], it is apparent that such services are attractive to users.
The potential application to repositories and other institutional systems is interesting, and James’s pitch generated a number of questions from the assembled developers.
The chief concern for many is the restriction placed on the use of this service because of issues around IPR: the source data used for the main service is licensed from the Ordnance Survey (OS) [11] and so cannot be made openly available.
EDINA are negotiating a new licence with the OS, due to come into effect in the Summer of 2009, which will give access to the data to organisations in the UK academic domain.
The audience were, however, not convinced that even this would be open enough.
While the current dataset underpinning the GeoCrossWalk service is contemporary in nature, an understanding has been reached with a supplier to provide data similar in type but historic in scope.
Names Project Daniel Needham, MIMAS, Manchester University Daniel introduced the Names Project which is developing a names authority service for academic authors and organisations.
Using the approach of mining a wide set of data sources and then de-duplicating and disambiguating the results, the intention is to provide a centralised, authoritative database of uniquely identified individuals and organisations.
Eventually, each unique name will be given a persistent identifier, possibly using the Handle system [12].
Daniel presented possible applications for this in an institutional context, such as in the workflow around the deposit of a scholarly work into an institutional repository, where the ‘author’ field in the new item’s metadata record could be validated against an authoritative source.
Although Daniel could not demonstrate any running software, the intention is to have a prototype ready for testing in September 2008.
When Daniel revealed that the service was being developed in Java with a SOAP [13] interface, the audience of developers was unanimous in its plea for a simpler, URL-based or ‘RESTful’ [14] interface.
Among the issues which were discussed were privacy, security and long-term preservation.
Features which may need to be developed and offered include ‘self-management’ – where the subjects of the name authority entries are given the means to manage their own record, and some sort of ‘dispute resolution’ mechanism.
HILT Project Anu Joseph, Centre for Digital Library Research, University of Strathclyde Anu introduced the HILT system which is intended to improve interoperability in cross-searching and browsing of structured information.
Essentially, it is used to map between controlled vocabularies.
In the context of an institutional repository, it could provide services to the deposit workflow – allowing the selection of alternative terms to be entered into metadata records.
At the ‘other end’ of the repository, HILT could assist in providing a richer search interface by offering query expansion services.
Like the STAR Project, HILT is actively developing SKOS-based interfaces.
Anu’s pitch was followed by questions from the developers, mainly about how useful SKOS can be in satisfying machine-machine requests for information.
Deposit Plait Project Stuart Lewis, Aberystwyth University Stuart introduced Deposit Plait [15] – a recent JISC-funded interoperability demonstrator project.
This is concerned with investigating, and possibly (but not necessarily) prototyping a ‘deposit engine’, designed to reduce the amount of metadata which is required to be input, manually, into repositories.
Initially, the project will attempt to establish a ‘base set’ of metadata, before exploring solutions for aiding the creation of this metadata through the exploitation of remote services as well as the processing of the resource being described by the metadata.
Foresight Project Rob Sanderson and Richard Jones (HP Labs) Rob Sanderson briefly described their work with the OAI-ORE [16] specification as part of their Foresight Project [17].
Rob gave a useful ‘high-level’ description of ORE, before joining Richard in describing the software libraries they have developed in both the Java and Python programming languages.
They invited the developers before them to download these libraries with a view to examining and testing them.
This invitation met with a positive response.
CRIG Prototyping Session Following the succession of five-minute pitches we held a general discussion before breaking for lunch.
With a good range of hot bar food available lunch was, by all accounts, a success – proving more popular than the traditional sandwich buffet.
After lunch we moved into the CRIG session, where smaller groups were formed around particular ideas and a period of prototyping ensued.
I joined one group discussing ideas around the use of GeoCrossWalk to provide a service supporting the ‘faceted’ browsing of information based on geo-spatial classification.
We explored the fascinating notion of providing such services in a ‘just-in-time’ fashion, rather than applying such metadata to huge quantities of information in anticipation of a use for it.
As evening approached, the majority of delegates left, leaving a smaller group of developers to enjoy a drink and a more free-flowing conversation.
Later that evening, when I overheard one or two terrible jokes involving HTTP response codes, I concluded that the useful part of the day had ended and that it was time for me to go home!
Conclusion In conclusion, and judging by the feedback I have received, the event was a success.
The use of a bar worked very well, except where it got a little noisy towards lunch-time, while the menu of hot food was widely appreciated.
The objective of getting technical service providers together with institutional developers was met, and the discussions which flowed from this were characterised by mutual learning.
In many respects, while having a clear purpose, this workshop was also an experiment in event organisation.
The use of a bar meant that delegates could order refreshments at their own convenience, rather than waiting for the tea and coffee to be delivered as is usually the case.
Moreover, the cost of the event was modest: allowing delegates to select from a varied menu of hot bar food was marginally more expensive than providing them with a basic lunch of sandwiches, but the deal we struck with the bar management meant that this was the only direct cost.
Although I had reserved a more traditional teaching room in the University just in case the bar became too noisy, the gamble of using what was, essentially, a public space, paid off.
Having tried this approach, I would be happy to run an event in this way again.
Several people have commented publicly (and positively) about the event [18][19][20].
As one of the organisers, I would like to extend my gratitude to all the people who turned up, participated, and helped to make the event a stimulating one.
We intend to organise at least a further two similar events as part of the IE Demonstrator Project – if you think that you might be interested in participating, keep an eye on the IE Demonstrator blog [2] where an announcement will be made.
I would especially like to thank David Flanders and Mark Dewey (UKOLN) who helped organise and run the event.
Acknowledgements: I would like to express my thanks to Andrew McGregor of the JISC Information Environment Team whose notes have proved an invaluable asset in the writing of this article.
References Definition of an unconference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference IE Demonstrator Project http://www.iedemonstrator.org/ CRIG http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG JISC SIS http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/shared_services.aspx Parade Bar, University of Bath http://www.bath.ac.uk/hospitality/parade/ STAR Project http://hypermedia.research.glam.ac.uk/kos/STAR/ LCSH http://hypermedia.research.glam.ac.uk/kos/STAR/ SKOS http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/ GeoCrossWalk http://www.geoxwalk.ac.uk/ Google Earth http://earth.google.com/ Ordnance Survey http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/ Handle system http://www.handle.net/ SOAP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP REST http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST Deposit Plait http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/interoperabilitydemos/depositplait.aspx OAI-ORE http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ Foresight Project http://foresite.cheshire3.org/ OUseful blog http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/014735.html IE Demonstrator blog http://blog.iedemonstrator.org/2008/06/07/crig-dry-workshop/ Ian Ibbotson’s workblog http://k-int.blogspot.com/2008/06/jisc-crig-iedemonstrator-barcamp.html Author Details Paul Walk Technical Manager UKOLN, University of Bath Email: p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk Blog: http://blog.paulwalk.net Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “A DRY CRIG Event for the IE Demonstrator” Author: Paul Walk Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/ie-testbed-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge Buzz data software rdf wiki api database dissemination xml infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation blog repositories eprints flickr preservation oai-pmh marc curation dspace mods drupal interoperability cookie algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Dorothea Salo examines how library systems and procedures need to change to accommodate research data.
Eager to prove their relevance among scholars leaving print behind, libraries have participated vocally in the last half-decade's conversation about digital research data.
On the surface, libraries would seem to have much human and technological infrastructure ready-constructed to repurpose for data: digital library platforms and institutional repositories may appear fit for purpose.
However, unless libraries understand the salient characteristics of research data, and how they do and do not fit with library processes and infrastructure, they run the risk of embarrassing missteps as they come to grips with the data challenge.
Whether managing research data is 'the new special collections,'[1] a new form of regular academic-library collection development, or a brand-new library specialty, the possibilities have excited a great deal of talk, planning, and educational opportunity in a profession seeking to expand its boundaries.
Faced with shrinking budgets and staffs, library administrators may well be tempted to repurpose existing technology infrastructure and staff to address the data curation challenge.
Existing digital libraries and institutional repositories seem on the surface to be a natural fit for housing digital research data.
Unfortunately, significant mismatches exist between research data and library digital warehouses, as well as the processes and procedures librarians typically use to fill those warehouses.
Repurposing warehouses and staff for research data is therefore neither straightforward nor simple; in some cases, it may even prove impossible.
Characteristics of Research Data What do we know about research data?
What are its salient characteristics with respect to stewardship?
Size and Scope Perhaps the commonest mental image of research data is terabytes of information pouring out of the merest twitch of the Large Hadron Collider Project.
So-called 'Big Data' both captures the imagination of and creates sheer terror in the practical librarian or technologist.
'Small data,' however, may prove to be the bigger problem: data emerging from individual researchers and labs, especially those with little or no access to grants, or a hyperlocal research focus.
Though each small-data producer produces only a trickle of data compared to the like of the Large Hadron Collider Project, the tens of thousands of small-data producers in aggregate may well produce as much data (or more, measured in bytes) as their Big Data counterparts [2].
Securely and reliably storing and auditing this amount of data is a serious challenge.
The burgeoning 'small data' store means that institutions without local Big Data projects are by no means exempt from large-scale storage considerations.
Small data also represents a serious challenge in terms of human resources.
Best practices instituted in a Big Data project reach all affected scientists quickly and completely; conversely, a small amount of expert intervention in such a project pays immense dividends.
Because of the great numbers of individual scientists and labs producing small data, however, immensely more consultations and consultants are necessary to bring practices and the resulting data to an acceptable standard.
Variability Digital research data comes in every imaginable shape and form.
Even narrowing the universe of research data to 'image' yields everything from scans of historical glass negative photographs to digital microscope images of unicellular organisms taken hundreds at a time at varying depths of field so that the organism can be examined in three dimensions.
The tools that researchers use naturally shape the resulting data.
When the tool is proprietary, unfortunately, so may be the file format that it produced.
When that tool does not include long-term data viability as a development goal, the data it produces are often neither interoperable nor preservable.
A major consequence of the diversity of forms and formats of digital research data is a concomitant diversity in desired interactions.
The biologist with a 3-D stack of microscope images interacts very differently with those images than does a manuscript scholar trying to extract the underlying half-erased text from a palimpsest.
These varying affordances must be respected by dissemination platforms if research data are to enjoy continued use.
One important set of interactions involves actual changes to data.
Many sorts of research data are considerably less usable in their raw state than after they have had filters or algorithms or other processing performed on them.
Others welcome correction, or are refined by comparison with other datasets.
Two corollaries emerge: first, that planning and acting for data stewardship must take place throughout the research process, rather than being an add-on at the end; and second, that digital preservation systems designed to steward only final, unchanging materials can only fail faced with real-world datasets and data-use practices.
Finally, early experience with data-sharing has shown that it is all but impossible to forecast every conceivable use for a given dataset in advance.
Systems that force end-users into unduly limited interactions with the data reduce the usefulness of those data.
Backlog Libraries are not starting with a clean slate with research data, any more than they are with their own bibliographic data.
Research practices have been partly or wholly digital long enough to have produced a substantial amount of data already.
These data, particularly 'small data,' tend to be disorganised, poorly described if described at all, and in formats poorly suited to long-term reuse.
Even more unfortunately, researchers have become accustomed to the processes that produce these sloppy data, which makes them liable to resist changing those processes to improve data viability.
To make matters yet worse, much research data that could benefit from being digital is still analogue, the laboratory notebook being the paradigm example.
Digitising these resources is not straightforward; straight image scans might as well be analogue for all their digital reuse value, while re-keying is an unjustifiably enormous expense for materials that have a relatively low signal-to-noise ratio.
Project Orientation Particularly as science is ever more driven by grant cycles in the waning days of sustained funding, research data are managed by the project.
The lack of continuity in this system vitiates incentives toward good data practices; why save data if the next project will be on a different theme with different collaborators?
Institutional memory and tacit knowledge about good data practices tend not to accumulate, as collaborators scatter and procedures are worked up from scratch for each new project.
Tools, too, are chosen based on extremely short-term project considerations, magnifying the chance of poor choices from a longer-term stewardship perspective.
Sustainability of tool output easily takes a back seat to whiz-bang features.
Once projects are finished, usually marked by the publication of articles or reports, intermediate work products such as research data are either deleted altogether or swept unorganised and undescribed into dusty digital closets.
Non-standard Data and Data Formats The early days of almost any new venture are marked by tremendous experimentation and frequent blind alleys.
Though necessary for progress, this phenomenon is terrible if the goal is any sort of standard result.
The diversity of research data necessarily implies that complete standardisation is impossible; that more variation exists than is strictly necessary, however, is undeniable.
A few disciplines have created data standards, usually because of a strong centralised data repository that imposes those standards on researchers wishing to contribute data.
The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research [3], with its extensive data-standard documentation and strict standards, is a fine example.
Standardisation may also be an emergent quality of collaboration, as evidenced by the standards promulgated by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance [4].
In most disciplines, however, and certainly those where research is individualised or hyperlocal, incentives to create, much less follow, data standards are minimal or non-existent.
The resulting sloppy Tower of Babel* vitiates both reuse and long-term stewardship.
Characteristics of Digital Libraries What do we know about digital libraries?
How well do their technical and organisational infrastructures map to research data stewardship?
Curated Because digitisation to library standards is expensive, materials in digital libraries are chosen and handled with enormous care.
High standards prevail in digitisation quality, in associated metadata, and in presentation.
Only materials deemed important enough to warrant such care are digitised at all.
These mindsets and processes are much too labour-intensive to transfer to the enormous backlog of existing research data.
They are also at sea faced with the sloppiness of researchers' data practices; not a few librarians will simply assume that data cannot be worth curating if researchers themselves take so little care of them!
Digital librarians also rebel at the idea of researchers' sloppy digital data existing alongside their own beautifully curated materials.
If existing digital library processes and procedures cannot hold up under the deluge, libraries will have to choose the datasets they lavish effort on, much as they chose materials to digitise.
Are they prepared to alienate researchers whose datasets are not chosen?
Will they truly become estimators of data quality across the breadth of data-producing disciplines in the institution?
If not, will they rely solely on technical criteria such as file format, regardless of data quality or importance?
Whatever criteria are chosen, will those criteria conflict with institution-wide mandates such as the preservation of theses and dissertations with their accompanying materials?
[5] Taylorist Production Processes Because digitisation is expensive, most established digital libraries digitise as efficiently and cost-effectively as they can manage.
Where this does not mean outsourcing (which it often does), it means exactly the sort of rote, minimum-effort, minimum-judgment workflows known as 'Taylorist' after American manufacturing efficiency expert Frederick Taylor [6].
The variability of research data defeats Taylorist processes utterly.
Such processes simply cannot keep up with the professional judgment and technical skill required when most new projects involve new file formats and metadata standards and require individual massaging for ingest and preservation.
Libraries employing Taylorist processes tend to specialise in certain content types and digitisation processes; this maximises return on investment in a given workflow.
A library with deep scanning expertise probably does not have equivalent expertise in text encoding.
Digital library platforms specialise alongside, for clear and obvious reasons.
Both specialised processes and specialised platforms fail when faced with highly heterogeneous, not to say sloppy, research data.
Some, though not all, data can be shoehorned into a digital library not optimised for them, but only at the cost of the affordances surrounding them [7].
Consider data over which a complex Web-based interaction environment has been built.
The data can be removed from the environment for preservation, but only at the cost of loss of the specialised interactions that make the data valuable to begin with.
If the dataset can be browsed via the Web interface, a static Web snapshot becomes possible, but it too will lack sophisticated interaction.
If the digital library takes on the not inconsiderable job of recreating the entire environment, it is committing to rewriting interaction code over and over again indefinitely as computing environments change.
Taylorist digital library processes presume a near-total control over the data creation environment, which is impossible to accomplish for research data.
Such processes also presume well-established content and metadata standards, which often do not exist.
Finally, Taylorist workflows determine an organisational structure where library professionals are the supervisors and project managers.
They plan and oversee, but do not carry out projects.
The actual digitisation and metadata work is done by para-professionals.
The resulting bifurcation in technical skill and related knowledge leaves too little practical knowledge at the top of the organization to ensure that the library professionals are automatically capable of working effectively with either researchers and their data.
Ad hoc Production Processes Not all digital libraries manage to establish Taylorist platforms and workflows.
Smaller libraries, when they digitise materials at all, do so on a project-centered, ad hoc basis.
This shares all the data pitfalls of project-based research processes.
These libraries often depend on consortial or vendor-supplied technology platforms, sharply limiting the amount of digital expertise built within the library organisation.
Unitary Organisations Digital libraries tend to be self-contained organisational units, silos in both library and institutional contexts.
Their public service staffing is minimal, limited to soliciting projects and perhaps marketing to end-users of digitised content.
Many such units rarely interact directly with research faculty, though a few do solicit projects from them.
Such an organisational model cannot scale up to interacting with an entire campus full of researchers.
It is also focused on being solely the endpoint for data; given the growing consensus that data curation must be addressed throughout the data lifecycle [8], this staffing model can have only a limited impact on solving the data stewardship problem.
Characteristics of Institutional Repositories Unlike digital libraries, institutional repositories were nominally created to accept all kinds of digital content or data.
In practice, however, they were clearly optimised for standard research publications; data with different affordances and intended use fit only poorly and with difficulty.
Other technical and organisational problems impede collection of research data by institutional repositories as well.
Institutionally Bounded The word 'institutional' in 'institutional repository' is no accident; it derives from the practice of certain journal publishers forbidding deposit of any version of a published article into disciplinary repositories such as arXiv or the Social Science Research Network, but permitting deposit into institutional repositories [9].
The catch, of course, is that any repository venturing beyond its own institution's borders risks losing its safe harbour.
Unfortunately, this sharp boundary limits how effectively institutional repositories can address research data problems.
One classic backlog problem turns up when researchers leave an institution, leaving their Web presence and research data behind them.
Since they are no longer affiliated with the institution, can the institutional repository intervene?
Cross-institutional collaborations present similar difficulty; their data are liable to fall through the cracks because no institution's repository can comfortably take responsibility for them.
Now that research no longer stops at institutional borders, institution-focused solutions will often prove inadequate.
Optimised for Articles Some institutional repositories say that they open their doors wide for any sort of useful digital material.
The promise is partial at best; most repository software can only accept final, immutable materials.
Again, this is an (arguably premature) optimisation for the favoured use case of a finished, final scholarly article or book chapter.
For data, permitting only the immutable is unacceptable, as explained above; much of the value of data is precisely its mutability in the face of new evidence or new processes.
Deposit processes in many institutional repositories assume a limited number of files to deposit, such that they can be described and uploaded one at a time by a human being.
Applying this manual process to datasets is like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper.
The SWORD protocol holds potential to ameliorate this problem, but the protocol has not yet made its way into researcher or even library tools or processes.
Most repositories rely on Dublin Core metadata, largely because the OAI-PMH metadata exchange standard asserts unqualified Dublin Core as a minimum interoperability layer.
Few repositories venture beyond qualified Dublin Core.
Those who do, or wish to, find that much repository software can only manage key-value pairs.
Now that many, if not most, metadata and exchange standards for research data use XML or RDF as a base, this limitation seriously vitiates repositories' ability to manage datasets.
Cookie-cutter Look and Feel Institutional repositories have been designed, insofar as they were designed at all, as institutional showcases for research publications.
Their visual appearance tends to be university-corporate and sterile, if not library-amateurish owing to difficulty of customisation.
Unfortunately, their likeliest userbase, those academic staff who already enjoy online services and social interactions, are exposed to much more polished storage and service offerings from the likes of Flickr, SlideShare, and Google Docs.
These tools also tend to be well-tailored to the content they seek, a much more difficult proposition for an institutional repository claiming to be all things to all types of data.
In accepting everything, institutional repositories offer appropriate affordances—image lightboxes, page-turners, manipulation and remix tools—for almost nothing.
Worse still, most institutional repositories are self-contained silos, offering next to no way to access items programmatically via APIs, much less a modor plugin-friendly architecture.
Not only do content-specific or discipline-specific tools not exist inside institutional repositories, such tools cannot even be built atop or alongside them!
Inadequate Staffing Few institutional repositories are fully embedded within their libraries, much less their institutions.
Still distressingly common is the 'maverick manager' staffing model [10] based on the misconception that academic staff would willingly and en masse provide effort in the form of self-archiving.
If one staff member cannot capture the institution's intellectual output, how can one staff member expand the repository's mission to capture research data, given the many and vexing difficulties caused by their variability and the tremendous amount of hand-holding and reformatting necessary to massage those data into acceptable form for sharing and archival?
Even those repositories with a somewhat larger staff will find research data a daunting challenge; most repository staff members, not themselves librarians, do Taylorist search, capture, and description of published work.
Insofar as working with research data is anything but Taylorist, their skills will not transfer well.
Ways Forward Many of the mismatches between library technical infrastructures and the needs of researchers and their data can be resolved, given sufficient drive and resources.
Flexible Storage and Metadata Architectures End-to-end, soup-to-nuts silos, as many digital library and repository software packages are, cannot possibly meet the data challenge appropriately.
Some low-level functionality is the same for all digital materials, to be sure; no more than one checksum/audit solution should be needed for any datastore, no matter how heterogeneous its content above the bits-and-bytes level.
Still, most higher-level technologies need to be flexible in order to encompass the broadest possible variety of data and interactions.
Universities relying on vendor-hosted solutions such as Ex Libris's DigiTool or BePress face a special problem: they do not control the technology underlying their repository, and as the history of the integrated library system demonstrates, asking vendors (especially vendors who sense that their clients are locked into their platform) to bestir themselves to create new functionality is often a losing battle.
De-coupling Ingest, Storage and Use Ingest, storage, and end-user interfaces should be as loosely coupled as possible.
Ideally, the same storage pool should be available to as many ingest mechanisms as researchers and their technology staff can dream up, and the items within should be usable within as many reuse, remix, and re-evaluation environments as the Web can produce.
Of the three main open-source institutional repository platforms, only Fedora Commons comes close to fulfilling this requirement.
DSpace is a classic silo, and EPrints requires multiple software instances to accommodate differing interface needs.
The trade-off, of course, is that Fedora Commons by itself does not offer end-to-end solutions, though projects such as Hydra [11] and Islandora [12] are beginning to fill the gaps.
The key is that a Fedora repository running Islandora need not accept and disseminate materials only through Islandora's connection to a Drupal content-management system; any number of other linkages can be arranged behind the scenes.
Another fruitful approach is the 'curation microservices' stack at the California Digital Library [13].
Taking its cue from the UNIX philosophy of chaining small, discrete tools to manage complex processes, this system builds and deploys small, discrete, interoperable tools to manage separable segments of the data-curation problem.
As individual tools 'wear out' or become obsolete, they can be redeveloped or replaced without breaking the rest of the system.
APIs, Plugins, Mods What makes flexibility technologically feasible, given that the small programmer complement in most libraries does not allow custom programming for every imaginable dataset or interaction, is the ease with which a data repository can be made to interact with the outside technology world.
This means application programming interfaces (APIs) as well as pluginand modification-friendly architectures.
Once again, Fedora Commons is the clear leader in open-source repository packages, boasting clearly documented and comprehensive APIs.
DSpace users should be pleased that the platform is moving onto a Fedora base; the move should allow them to keep their existing workflows while vastly increasing their flexibility to build new ones.
Versioning and De-accessioning The ideal data repository leverages researcher inertia.
The earlier in the research process data professionals and proper data management systems appear, the more likely it is that data emerge from research in appropriate form for sharing, reuse, and long-term preservation.
Therefore, versioning, change tracking, and rollback are vital elements of a good data repository.
This is trickier than it sounds; change tracking is easy on a wiki, difficult in an XML file, perhaps impossible in a system based on proprietary instruments.
Without this capacity, however, repositories are reduced to begging researchers for final versions once more, and researchers will have to exert themselves to comply.
Inertia suggests that a flexible storage repository intended for research data will be put to other uses, research-related and non-research-related.
Over time, a great deal of junk is liable to build up, interfering with discovery and consuming storage space unnecessarily.
Policies and technology infrastructure must permit the de-accessioning and removal of obvious cruft every so often; datasets should also be evaluated periodically for obsolescence both technological and intellectual.
Standards and Interoperability Data and metadata standards do not exist to meet many research data needs.
Although interoperability-conscious approaches may reduce the cost of data interchange in a highly heterogeneous technology environment, additional standardisation is welcome and will reduce costs further.
Would-be data curators need to remain aware of standards activities, both inside and outside large national and international standards bodies.
Whenever possible, librarians should lend their metadata and digital preservation expertise to scientific standardisation activities.
Linked data deserves special mention here, not so much for its technical details as for the mindset of building data and metadata with the express intent of easy sharing and remixing.
Libraries can no longer cling desperately to decrepit, arcane, inward-focused standards such as MARC, not if the ultimate goal is to be part of a great global sea of data.
Instead, all descriptive efforts must have easy humanand machine-comprehensibility as a first-level goal, even when actual standardisation is out of reach due to data homogeneity or lack of appropriate standards.
Code Sharing The danger of flexibility, especially in the absence of standards, is recreating the Tower of Babel, mentioned above.
Ten different clever ways of representing a page-scanned book are not nearly as valuable as one clever way applied by ten different book-scanning projects.
Historically, libraries have had a great deal of trouble sharing software code and communicating about technology-related solutions [14].
In the data realm, this is not acceptable, if indeed it ever was.
Even collectively libraries barely have the technology and human resources to meet the research data challenge; how can it be done if libraries waste effort redundantly solving problems in parallel?
Moreover, libraries poor in technological capacity will be left behind entirely if libraries that build solutions do not share them.
This possibility is especially frightening for small science, many of whose practitioners do not work at major research institutions.
Staffing and Funding Models Although it is early days yet, patterns can be discerned in the experiences of libraries taking the plunge into research-data work.
They generally begin by surveying local academic staff about their data and data-management practices.
Having decided (inevitably) that help with data management is a genuine campus need, libraries then approach campus academic leaders for buy-in.
They then launch pilot projects in one or more of several forms: building a repository for a specific kind of data, a discipline-agnostic consulting service (often intended to sustain itself via grant earmarks), or targeted involvement in specific research projects.
Any staffing and funding approach will face trade-offs in scalability, sustainability, and breadth of disciplinary coverage.
Targeted interventions stress overburdened library staff less, but leave serious gaps in campus coverage.
Grant-funded services may well be financially sustainable, but they threaten to leave unfunded disciplines without aid.
Consulting services may be able to provide a base level of service to the entire campus, but that base level may be very low indeed (especially if disciplinary expertise elsewhere in the libraries is not available to the consultants), and financial sustainability is a serious concern.
Another likely outcome, particularly in wealthy Big Data projects, will be the embedded librarian, either hired specifically to help with data management or with data management one of several duties.
Libraries hoping to fund a data curation programme with grant earmarks should take special note of this possibility, as it may drastically cut the number and wealth of grantees available to work with the library.
Institutional repositories boasting significant involvement by subject liaisons or bibliographers are best situated to take on data-related responsibilities.
The potent combination of a technically adept repository manager with a discipline-savvy liaison can make headway on a substantial range of data problems.
Maverick managers, however, will likely have to be satisfied doing the best consulting job they can, given their abject poverty of resource.
Conclusion None of the challenges presented herein should discourage librarians from engaging with the research data challenge.
Our unique expertise in metadata, digital preservation, public service, and technology translation will serve researchers well, as will our sturdy common sense and the domain expertise of our subject librarians.
However, unless we proceed with clear understanding of researchers and their data, as well as our own systems and habits, we will simply trip over ourselves.
Research data are too important, and our role in curating them at present too insecure, to allow that to happen.
*Editor's note: "Tower of Babel."
Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
29 July 2010 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/47421/Tower-of-Babel References Attributed to Sayeed Choudhury by Palmer et al.
"Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship" 2007 http://groups.lis.illinois.edu/guest_lectures/showcase10/palmer.ppt , last accessed 7 July 2010.
Heidorn, P. Bryan.
Shedding light on the dark data in the long tail of science.
Library Trends 57:2, Fall 2008, pp.
280-299.
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/ International Virtual Observatory Alliance http://www.ivoa.net/ A collections or preservation policy that disallows Web sites would not be able to collect Web-based theses, e.g.
http://exploringthehyper.net/ or http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/32316 "Taylorism."
Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
29 July 2010 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1387100/Taylorism Ben O'Steen discusses this problem with regard to databases in a post entitled "Handling tabular data" on his "Less Talk, More Code" weblog http://oxfordrepo.blogspot.com/2009/02/handling-tabular-data.html See the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model http://www.dcc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publications/DCCLifecycle.pdf See, for example, Springer Verlag's policy http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php?id=74 Salo, Dorothea.
"Innkeeper at the Roach Motel."
Library Trends 57:2, Fall 2008, pp.
98-123.
Hydra https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project Islandora http://islandora.ca/ Abrams, Stephen, John Kunze, and David Loy.
"An Emergent Micro-Services Approach to Digital Curation Infrastructure."
International Journal of Digital Curation 5:1, 2010, pp.
172-185.
Askey, Dale.
"We Love Open Source Software.
No, You Can't Have Our Code."
code4lib journal 5, 2008. http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/527 Author Details Dorothea Salo Research Services Librarian University of Wisconsin-Madison Email: dsalo@library.wisc.edu Return to top Article Title: "Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge" Author: Dorothea Salo Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/salo/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Bug's Life?
: How Metaphors from Ecology Can Articulate the Messy Details of Repository Interactions Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Bug's Life?
: How Metaphors from Ecology Can Articulate the Messy Details of Repository Interactions Buzz software dissemination archives metadata identifier blog repositories eprints flickr preservation oai-pmh e-learning uml dspace bpmn research Citation BibTex RIS R. John Robertson, Mahendra Mahey and Phil Barker introduce work investigating an alternative model of repository and service interaction.
Visions In ‘Lost in the IE’, published in the last issue of Ariadne and in subsequent discussion on various blogs [1], [2] there has some thoughtful reflection on the vision of the JISC Information Environment (IE), its architecture and standards, the role of the IE and the role of ‘that diagram’ [3].
It is clear that the development of work on repositories and services in the UK has benefitted from the IE Architecture diagram but it is also clear that such a model does not (and was not intended to) reflect the reality of the ‘messiness’ that inevitably surrounds connecting actual repositories and services [4].
The development, implementation, and support of real services challenges how we have traditionally articulated, represented, and tried to communicate the context of those services.
We need abstract visions of an information environment, recommended standards, and models of software architectures (or component software functions) that can inform how we begin to develop local repositories and services.
However, we, as a community of managers, librarians, researchers, and developers of technology, also need approaches that help us engage with the complex details of local contexts that shape how and why particular repository implementations succeed or fail.
This article, based on work carried out by the Repositories Research Team (RRT) [5], proposes an ecologically inspired approach to tackle that challenge.
This article will discuss the type of approach we think is missing, and, based on our investigation of ecology as a metaphor, present an overview of an ecologically influenced approach, and discuss an example of its use.
A Complex Context Setting up a repository to manage appropriate copies of, or metadata about, journal articles is perhaps the most understood and established purpose for a repository.
Repository software (for example: ePrints, DSpace, Fedora, Intralibrary, Digitool, and Bepress) is designed to accommodate this functional requirement.
Standards, such as OAI-PMH and SWORD, have developed with the dissemination of scholarly communication as a crucial use case.
Business cases for Open Access have been thoughtfully put forward and numerous suggestions about advocacy to encourage faculty deposit have been explored.
Numerous institutions have deployed repositories to support this particular purpose.
There is however, no simple, off-the-shelf, recipe to establish a repository for scholarly communications.
Selecting and installing repository software is a relatively minor part of the challenge.
The growth of institutional repositories for scholarly communications depends on finding the right combination of people, tools, standards, support, networking, and advocacy.
Even a cursory review of the stories of successful and unsuccessful repositories highlight many different contextual issues such as: the key role of a particular departmental champion, the importance of good relations with university system managers [6], the role of funding body mandates to deposit [7], the benefits of automatically generated publication lists for faculty Web pages [8], the impact of an Open Access copy on paper citation [9] and the advocacy value of usage statistics.
No one of these factors, or any other for that matter, will ensure the creation of a successful repository for every institution, and to discover which intricate combination might work requires not only trial and error, but also a thorough understanding of the particular complex context of the repository or service.
An essential part of gaining such an understanding of a repository or service in its context is finding a way to articulate and consequently discuss the key dependencies and interactions that shape the repository.
This articulation of a complex situation has to be done in a way that can cross skill sets and quickly convey the most important systems, relationships, and other influences that need to be considered for all the stakeholders.
However, when we approach such an articulation, we often pick an analytical modelling tool, such as UML (Unified Modelling Language) [10] or BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) [11], to represent the situation with that tool, and use that as the basis of our presentation and analysis.
As useful as this can be, it is –if used on its own – also an inadequate and potentially flawed approach.
This is not as a result of an inherent difficulty with the tools but rather because we are not adequately addressing the true nature of a complex situation.
Defining Complexity Ritchey (2002), drawing on Ackoff (1974) and Pidd (1996), summarises a view that there are three types of complex situations in what he terms a socio-technical system; these are: messes, problems, and puzzles.
A mess is “a complex issue that is not well formulated or defined”.
A problem is “a well formulated/ defined issue but with no single solution”.
A puzzle is “a well defined problem with a single solution that can be worked out”.
[12] Ritchey captures implications of the above distinction between ‘mess’, ‘problem’, and ‘puzzle’ in the following quotation from Pidd, One of the greatest mistakes that can be made when dealing with a mess is to carve off part of the mess, treat it as a problem and then solve it as a puzzle – ignoring its links with other aspects of the mess.
[13] Repositories and services often exist in this sort of mess.
Not as a result of any failing or sloppiness on the part of the managers or developers, but because as organisational, technical and cultural entities like many other services and systems repositories exist in the midst of an extremely complex set of interactions and influences (only a small percentage of which are technical).
As a community we run the risk of reducing this complexity to whichever form of transaction that fits with our chosen problem-solving tool.
If we do this, we sidestep some of the complexity of the mess, view only one dimension of the problem, and then treat it as a puzzle.
As a result, the proposed solutions may neglect the context they are intended for and consequently struggle to succeed because the scope of the tools was too narrow, and critical factors were overlooked.
We need approaches to support discussing the ‘mess’, and that help us to draw out the problems that need to be considered.
To this end, the Repositories Research Team (RRT) has examined the possible benefits of using ecology as a metaphor to shape how we, as a community, articulate complex situations.
Ecology as a Metaphor for the Complex Ecology – ‘the branch of biology dealing with the relations and interactions between organisms and their environment, including other organisms’ – examines highly complex processes and interactions as they affect a particular organism being studied [14].
Although a branch of biology, the interactions it considers are not restricted to the biological; other types of interaction, such as chemical, physical, meteorological, geological, may play a part.
For example, the survival of a herd of deer in a particular area will depend on multitude of factors including the availability of food, the presence of predators, the climate, hunting restrictions, and building developments.
Investigating the details of such an ecosystem and assessing its sustainability could be a detailed and lengthy process, but a basic understanding of it is also possible without specialist knowledge.
If we consider the allotments pictured below as an example of an ecosystem, we intuitively know that the success or failure of one of the plots, such as one on the middle right, will depend on a complex set of interactions.
The interactions between the gardener, the location of the plot, the chosen crops, weeds, the neighbouring gardeners and any wildlife, form a small ecosystem.
The whole ecosystem is affected by differing environmental factors ranged from the weather and the location of the plot relative to the shed, to how often the gardener can visit the plot, local byelaws and regulations.
Figure 1: Allotments & estuary [15] Perhaps because, at least on some levels, people seem to have an intuitive understanding of ecology, it is often used as a metaphor for complex situations.
It has been used before in the field of library and information science, by Nardi and O’Day [16], and by Davenport [17], and in connection to digital libraries and repositories by Blinco and Maclean [18].
Our investigation explored the relevance of the metaphor for repositories, services, and their interactions, to see what concepts and approaches might be of use in helping articulate specifics of complex dependencies and supplement existing analytical tools and skills.
An ecological approach to repository and service interactions [19], the introductory report, we produced on this topic, goes into more detail about how these related concepts might be applied, the following section briefly presents some ideas that may be of use.
What to Model: Key Ideas We suggest that the metaphor of an ecosystem provides the following useful concepts that can help articulate complex situations: The particular matters – there is a need to consider and present the entities participating in an ecosystem as specific and unique.
The more generic a model, the less it captures of the context and complexity of the systems or entities within it.
A specific model will, however, have to be selective in what it chooses to present.
For example: a model of an institutional repository may decide to model its interactions with selected academic staff from one or two representative faculties.
Entities in an ecosystem and the interactions occurring between them will be affected by ‘environmental factors’ – constraints, pressures, and incentives that influence large parts of an ecosystem but are not directly part of it.
For example: a funding council mandating its grant holders to provide Open Access copies of their work or a change in the way the research performance of an institution is measured will have a significant effect on the ecosystem of an institutional repository.
Factors like this are not often modelled or communicated when considering a repository service.
Interactions and environmental factors are not restricted to one type.
For example: technical interactions may depend on human interactions and departmental culture may depend on contractual commitments.
Thinking about the Model: Key Ideas An ecological metaphor also provides us with some useful concepts that can inform how we approach modelling and how to assess the interactions being represented.
These are concepts that provide an easily grasped way to present and analyse a set of complex interactions: Habitat mapping: This approach takes a person or system as a focal point and considers and presents its surrounding context, i.e.
the other entities they interact with and the environmental factors influencing all of them.
Food chain: This approach takes a view of how a person or system produces and consumes information and digital assets.
This type of view highlights the importance of all the entities in an ecosystem and their interdependence.
Nutrient tracking: This approach examines how a particular resource moves through an ecosystem and how it interacts and is transformed by other entities or environmental factors though that process.
Implications of an Ecological Metaphor for Modelling The ‘living’ nature of an ecosystem serves as a reminder that change is a constant and any expression of a context is only going to capture a moment.
This is true of any model but the metaphors implicit in many other approaches, such as an architectural one, tend to be perceived as static.
Specific entities participating in a system will have their own behaviours but they can also be considered as part of a wider species.
What we know of the traits or behaviour of a type of entity can inform how we think about a particular entity.
The idea of an ecosystem carries with it the notion of a ‘niche’ – a particular part of a habitat or set of interactions which create an ideal context for a particular entity.
The idea of an ecosystem also carries with it the notion of ‘competition’.
there are other systems, services and processes competing for the available resources whether they are immediately present in the ecosystem or influence it indirectly.
Models using ecology as a metaphor are not as restricted as traditional problem-solving tools and allow the key parts of a complex situation to be expressed.
The intuitive nature of the ecological metaphor may be more accessible to a larger group of people.
The development and availability of such a model facilitates discussion and allows non-specialists to grasp the key features of a setting.
This may lead to shaping a complex mess into discrete problems that can be tackled with other tools.
Presentation Example We recently presented a poster at DC2008 about an academic’s dissemination of a presentation, specifically looking at what happened to his presentations and associated metadata [20].
A brief examination of a couple of its key features can illustrate one outcome of this type of ecological modelling.
The poster presented the ecosystem of a researcher ‘Phil Robertson’ trying to disseminate a presentation.
Phil created a workshop presentation based on a recently published paper.
After the workshop he sought to make the presentation more widely available.
The repository at his institution had accepted a preprint of the paper, but it was not interested in the presentation.
He uploaded a copy of the presentation onto SlideShare and blogged about both the paper and presentation.
The presentation was then discovered by a number of researchers.
The entities included: Phil, the institutional repository and its manager, SlideShare, flickr, the CETIS blog, two researchers, the journal publishing process, and the abstracting and indexing process.
Some of the interactions were: manage account or profile, cite, deposit, and discover.
Key environmental factors were: the collection policies and rights policies associated with the different tools, the network of the academic discipline, and social networks around Web2.0 tools.
The poster primarily took a resource-tracking approach to study and asked questions about the metadata associated with the various forms of the work and their different points of access.
Figure 2: An ecosystem of presentation dissemination Two key issues emerged from being able to have an overview of this ecosystem that could articulate technical, cultural, and human context of this researcher’s efforts to disseminate his work.
These were the differences between the author identities and the challenge of preservation.
Differences between the Author’s Identities The different tools that academics use to disseminate their work all have different ways of creating and maintaining that author’s identity.
In this instance, the identity associated with the paper carries a different organisational affiliation to that of the identity associated with the dissemination of the presentation and the blog.
The paper carries an institutional affiliation requested from the author as part of the paper; while the repository carries a departmental affiliation created as part of a profile (with the institution implied).
On the other hand, the blog, hosted by an organisation Phil belongs to, carries organisational branding and affiliation; whereas the academic’s identity on SlideShare carries no affiliation or other identification beyond what he added to his profile when it was last updated.
The Challenge of Preservation If we consider questions about the access to the presentation in the longer term, it is clear that, outside any personal archiving, long-term access to Phil Robertson’s presentation is dependent on the existence of SlideShare, and its continuation of a business model supporting free access to the content it stores.
Discovery of the presentation in the longer term may also be a challenge.
If the link between the blog and SlideShare were broken, SlideShare only supports very basic metadata (a title, tags, and an association with an optional author profile).
Practitioners seeking to preserve presentations as part of their work will encounter considerable difficulty unless they actually know the author’s SlideShare identity.
We found that this ecological model provided an easy way to identify, highlight, and discuss key issues about managing presentations.
It could also be used to assess quickly the impact of a desktop deposit tool on the current dissemination workflows, and to identify the technical, practical and administrative issues such a change would raise.
Conclusion In this article we have highlighted the need for approaches to supplement the current use of tools and models within the digital library, repository and service community.
We then introduced our exploration of ecology as a possible alternative metaphor for work that has been carried out in connection with it.
We introduced an example of a developed ecology and illustrated its usefulness through a few of the issues it had raised.
The next stage of development of our investigation of repository ecology is the release of the final version of the introductory report and the completion of three more case studies of using this approach.
It will, we hope, be clear that the ecologically influenced perspective we are suggesting is intended to support discussion and reflection on how we implement and use systems.
In providing a way to articulate the context of a service more fully, we hope that this will lead to richer discussion about why repositories succeed or fail.
We hope it offers repository managers a way to model the context of the repository that does not rely on knowledge of a particular modelling tool and which can engage a variety of stakeholders (whether librarians, developers, academics, or administrators).
References Walk, P. (2008) All models are wrong, but some are useful http://blog.paulwalk.net/2008/08/20/all-models-are-wrong-but-some-are-useful/ Powell, A.
(2008) Lost in the JISC Information Environment http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2008/08/lost.html Powell, A.
(2006) Information Environment Architecture Diagram http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/jisc-ie-arch-big.gif Powell, A.
(2007).
You sharin’?
You askin’?
http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2007/07/you-sharin-you-.html Repositories Research Team http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Repositories_Research Salo, D. ‘Innkeeper at the Roach Motel’ Library Trends 57:2 (Fall 2008), pre-print available: http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088 Sherpa Juliet http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/ lists the growing number of funding bodies mandating Open Access to research outputs.
Fried Foster, N. and Gibbons, S. (2005) ‘Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories’ D-Lib Magazine Vol 11, No.
1 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html OpCit Project (2008) The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html Object Management Group (2008) UML Resource Page http://www.uml.org/ Object Management Group (2008) Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) Information http://www.bpmn.org/ Ritchey, T. “Modelling Complex Socio-Technical Systems using Morphological Analysis” : Adapted from an address to the Swedish Parliamentary IT Commission, Stockholm, December 2002; available: http://www.swemorph.com/it-art.html .
The quote is Ritchey’s summary of R. Ackoff (1974) Redesigning the Future and M. Pidd (1996) Tools for thinking Pidd, M. (1996) Tools for thinking quoted in Ritchey.
ecology.
(n.d.).
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1).
Retrieved 8 June, 2007, from Dictionary.com Web site: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ecology MGSpiller (2006), Allotments & Estuary http://www.flickr.com/photos/mgspiller/318023291/ work is licensed Creative Commons: Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB Nardi, B.A.
and V. L O’Day (1999), ‘Information ecologies: using technology with heart.
Chapter Four: Information ecologies.’ First Monday Vol.
4, No 5 http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_5/nardi_chapter4.html Davenport, T. H (1997).
Information ecology, OUP Blinco K. and & N. McLean, “A ‘Cosmic’ View of the Repositories Space (Wheel of Fortune)”, 2004 http://www.rubric.edu.au/extrafiles/wheel/main.swf Robertson, R.J., M. Mahey, and Allinson, J (2008) An ecological approach to repository and service interactions http://purl.oclc.org/NET/RepositoryEcology/IntroductoryReport Robertson, R.J., P. Barker, and M. Mahey (2008) Metadata in an Ecosystem of Presentation Dissemination, Poster presented at International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 22-26 September, Berlin.
http://dc2008.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/05_robertson__poster.pdf Author Details R. John Robertson Research Fellow University of Strathclyde Email: robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/ Mahendra Mahey Repositories Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Phil Barker Learning Technology Adviser Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot Watt University Email: philb@icbl.hw.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “A Bug’s Life?
: How Metaphors from Ecology Can Articulate the Messy Details of Repository Interactions” Author: R. John Robertson, Mahendra Mahey and Phil Barker Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/robertson-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Dieting From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Dieting From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness Buzz software framework blog multimedia youtube facebook ict research managerialism neoliberalism Citation BibTex RIS Kevin Sanders examines Tara Brabazon’s latest analytical work which investigates the proliferation of low-quality information in the digital realm and the issues of excessive reliance on social tools for learning.
Following a body of work that includes The University of Google: Education in the (post) Information Age (2007) [1] and Digital Hemlock: Internet Education and the Poisoning of Teaching (2002), Brabazon has developed a central position within the debate surrounding technology and pedagogy, although there is very little that is centrist about Brabazon's writing.
Developing Contextual Themes With Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness (2013) Brabazon’s primary research interests in media, information and digital literacies are extended even further into the core issues binding contemporary Higher Education (HE) and learning in a world surrounded by an excess of online information, and the political framework that surrounds it.
By way of introduction Brabazon writes: In April 2010, and for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors than Google.
Increasingly there is a desire to share rather than search.
But what is the impact of such a change on higher education?
How do teachers maintain expectations, motivations and standards in an environment of information obesity?
[2] Brabazon’s critique of managerialist approaches to the production of results in HE remains defiant, defending pedagogically sound, firmly evidenced and research-based practices throughout, while at the same time tempering her passion with some humour.
However, Brabazon extends her polemic, sounding a call to arms for substantive change: namely, a movement away from the default position of appropriating technology from outside the learning domain in order to satisfy managerial vanity in wishing to appear at the leading edge of technological deployment.
This work is a conscious rejection of technological determinism and which debunks consumerist attitudes to scholarly information.
The author's narrative builds throughout the monograph to form a deep, multilateral attack on contemporary academic administration.
With such a thrust, there are parallels to be drawn with the work of scholars such as Budd (2009), reflecting assertions such as ‘[e]thical action and discourse disappear in a wasteful chasm, defined by […] popularity, and false measures of satisfaction’ [3] in contemporary HE.
Operational Manual Digital Dieting is, however, more than an important contribution to the critical literature of neoliberalism within academia [4][5].
It is also a working model of practice which provides a comprehensive evaluation of existing work from a broad range of disciplines.
It offers insights into various ways of working with students and information.
Brabazon offers highly refined operational strategies; not provided as diktats, but rather as guidance towards diversification and experimentation.
In her usual informal and accessible style, Brabazon observes and records the behaviours evident in the emails and social media messages of international students.
Such observations combined with selections of literature ranging from contemporary sonic art practitioners like Francisco Lopez, critical pedagogy specialists like Henry Giroux and pioneering technologists and futurologists like Alvin Toffler, help to form a comprehensive picture.
Brabazon’s principal arguments focus upon: the need to teach research skills effectively if we are to fulfil the needs of researchers; the centrality of information in the process; as well as the evaluation of information based on the needs of the user and the quality of the source, its applicability and suitability.
I suspect many librarians in HE might find common cause with Brabazon’s views.
This is extended to show that the rationale for contemporary academic life is a complex one, be it for students, researchers or tutors.
The many and various pressures that abound in modern monetised university management systems now dominate academic practice [6].
They have gone so far as to generate worrying connections between academia and pop culture media corporations, and damage the academic independence of students and faculties alike.
Despite the inferences that some may draw from the book’s title, Digital Dieting is not a Luddite’s call for a return to old ways, it is a fierce call for a revolution within Higher Education: ‘I demand more of our students.
Our students should demand more of themselves [...] Online or offline, it is the dialogue, debate and dance between learners and teachers that provides the way out of the dark days of a credit crunched, collapsing university sector.’[2] Brabazon’s convictions are accompanied by a cohesive guide on how to change the emphasis on praxis, and to improve the relationships between information, technology and teaching in a way that benefits all partners.
Existing Cultural Problems The author furnishes numerous examples across the globe of students falling foul of academic practice which has been affected by modern trends in management.
But Brabazon also offers a detailed analysis of modern Higher Education political economy.
Brabazon analyses how some institutions demonstrate an inability to differentiate between learning and leisure in their practice and describes how some institutions fail in their central responsibility to promote: critical thinking in their students; or an effective means of evaluating the information they find; or, for that matter, an ethical approach to the use of the sources they choose to adopt.
Brabazon's suspicions about the motives of modern HE managements in their approach to ITC in teaching are evident in her analysis of the use of technology in Higher Education institutions.
It is not that Brabazon prefers or even promotes the use of more ‘traditional’ methods; the importance of selecting and carefully developing the use of digital technologies and multimedia in teaching and appraising work, and in deploying researched-based practices is highlighted throughout.
Having studied teaching and applied strategies comprehensively when delivering audio-visual materials, from cassette tapes to YouTube videos, Brabazon talks of continually learning and experimenting, evaluating and planning ahead all to enhance the teaching and learning experience that is delivered.
Ultimately, this is to provide the all-so-important 'student experience'; but for very different reasons to the neoliberal ends to which many in present-day HE now have to work.
Brabazon talks of this critical approach to digital strategies as an improved approach towards digital dieting.
The excess of digital approaches in HE stems from our cultural inability to differentiate between leisure and work, and as such, the tools and methods to apply in a given context.
There has been an overly simplistic rationale from those in senior institutional positions that the technologies they consider to be familiar to students, for example, Facebook, YouTube, Google, PowerPoint and word-processing software must automatically offer greater value and efficiency within education, despite pedagogical analyses pointing to the contrary, the associated higher implementation and maintenance costs, as well as other cultural problems.
Citing evidence both from personal accounts and from wider research across scores of fields, the picture Brabazon creates is clear, and it does not support this de facto position.
In fact, it contradicts it.
Reclaiming Core Values By contrast, Brabazon lays great emphasis on the social nature of learning.
The introduction of Vygotzky’s model of the Zones of Proximal Development [7] is an important part of the social learning structure.
The relationship between teaching staff and students should encourage the latter towards the interrogation of intellectual concepts, not only through interesting teaching but also their own personal research and study.
Brabazon also places importance upon the need for time and space in which to learn in this process, something which Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Higher Education, it is proposed, does not always deliver.
The ready adoption of ICT in undergraduate lectures and even seminars has been rapid.
However, Brabazon wonders how carefully have the supposed benefits of ICT in the teaching of undergraduates been evaluated.
For example, it is argued that the frequent posting of Powerpoint presentations of lectures for students present and absent alike could actually be detrimental.
Their ready availability could diminish the importance of physically attending lectures and taking one's own notes.
Thus the actual effect of what is often considered a 'safety net' has been, in Brabazon's view, a means of encouraging students towards relying on the less effective resource of Powerpoint slides deposited in (sometimes dated and inefficient) Virtual Learning Environments, in the mistaken belief they are a reliable alternative to the live lecture.
Thus in some students' minds, a supposedly supportive practice, ie the routine posting of slides, has called into question the value of lectures and seminars to their learning.
Brabazon sees lectures as opportunities for active engagement rather than passive attendance, let alone no attendance at all.
However, Brabazon does not point to such instances in order to demonise the use of technology in Higher Education teaching, nor indeed to claim that it destroys traditional teaching strategies; far from it.
However, such instances do serve in the author's analysis of how the short-sighted misuse of technology does represent a cultural problem both for the teaching institution and its students.
Thus the ready availability of, and access to digital resources can be seen as depriving students of the opportunity to engage with learning material first-hand; that is, in lectures and seminars.
Brabazon, therefore, calls upon academics to reclaim the task of teaching and seize the opportunity it affords to develop their students' critical faculties, rather than bowing to the commercial demand to turn out only industry-ready employees.
Such commercially oriented pressures form part of the simplistic and reductive strategies pedalled at government level down through the hierarchy of budget holders.
The notion that students should be prepared to work for IBM, Apple, ICI, Coca-Cola, Ikea or Virgin as a result of their graduation from a course is part of the neoliberal dogma that conflates academic excellence with corporate success.
They are by no means mutually exclusive, neither should they be an automatic outcome.
Library and Information Science is showing an increasing interest in critical information literacy [8] in order to increase the political acuity of students, as much for the benefit of their citizenship as their scholarship.
In this context, Brabazon’s assertions seem even more imperative.
As Higher Education is increasingly employed to enhance job opportunities in the labour market and to give graduates value-added CVs both important benefits the danger in the misdirection from HE's primary academic focus and the social benefits that it brings should not be underestimated [9].
Successes and Opportunities Brabazon’s detailed investigation in Digital Dieting is delivered in a very engaging style.
Where appropriate there is clarification, but at the same time there is always the invitation to debate.
Brabazon’s analysis of pop culture and media theory through her explanation of Baudrillard’s post-modern conception of media re-representations serves as a good example of her ability to de-mystify.
There are current issues which Brabazon does not examine, most notably Research Discovery Services (RDS).
What effect do they have upon the 'information-obese'?
Such information discovery systems suffer from the same technological determinism of research discovery as do other algorithmic options (i.e.
Google), although the Directory of Open Access Journals is positively referenced throughout.
Is the deployment of RDS the result of pressures to save time, simplify the learning process, and so forth, when in fact it would be better for students to understand the nature of analytical research approaches, even if they take more time in doing so?
Given Brabazon's desire to revolutionise contemporary HE teaching methods, the absence of any comment on such a current aspect of technology is a little surprising.
Conclusion The bold examples cited throughout this book could be misinterpreted as driving an ideologically partisan narrative.
Not so: the discursive nature of the research displayed, combined with its engaging, passionate synthesis, the extensive footnotes and the inclusion of various forms of information and methodologies, provide an earnest stability that is welcome within scholarly monographs, particularly those that are challenging entrenched attitudes and systemic failings.
The clarity of Brabazon’s text, given its theoretical and practical underpinning, presents a refreshingly passionate vitriol in the quest for truths and justice in contemporary Higher Education.
References Judy Reading.
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January 2008, Ariadne Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/reading-rvw/ Brabazon, T. (2013).
Digital dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness.
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Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization.
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Stevenson, N. (2010).
Education, neoliberalism and cultural citizenship: Living in ‘X factor’ Britain.
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Larner, W. & Le Heron, R. (2005).
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Kozulin, A., Kindis, B. Ageyev, V. & Miller, S. (2003).
Vygotsky's educational theory in context.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, L. (2013).
‘Towards a model of critical information literacy instruction for the development of political agency’.
The journal of information literacy.
7(2): 15-32.
Bourg, C. (2014) ‘The neoliberal library: Resistance is not futile’.
Feral Librarian blog, 16 January 2014 http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/the-neoliberal-library-resistance-is-not-futile/ Author Details Kevin Sanders Information Librarian (E-Resources) University of Bath Email: k.j.sanders@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/ Kevin has worked in academic libraries since 2008.
In this time he has operated in a range of roles across five academic institutions, including as a library assistant and subject librarian.
He now works with e-resources at the University of Bath.
Kevin has a broad range of interests, but is particularly interested in scholarly communications, the politics of information and the efficacy of neoliberalism.
Kevin is a moderator at theinformed.org.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A quantum jump from information to transformation mātauranga Māori based library services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A quantum jump from information to transformation mātauranga Māori based library services Citation BibTex RIS Lidu Gong gives us an over view of how the Mātauranga Māori view of knowledge and culture are applied in the library service of a tertiary level college in New Zealand.
This cultural foundation is fundamentally different to that found in most Western cultures, and demonstrates how an academic library can cater to the specific needs of their local population.
Background: TWoA (Te Wānanga o Aotearoa) is a Māori institution, the second largest tertiary institution in New Zealand.
The vision, mission and goal of TWoA are based on mātauranga Māori embedded in TWoA values and practice.
The vision is ‘to provide holistic education opportunities of the highest quality’, and ‘to encourage all learners to learn and achieve to their fullest potential’.
The mission is ‘whānau¹ transformation through education’.
The values are Te Aroha (love), Te Whakapono (beliefs), Ngā Ture (rules), and Kotahitanga (unity) (twoa, 2016).
The goal is to become the greatest indigenous development organisation on this planet’ (Winiata, 2016).
Mātauranga Māori based library service is transformative through heart service which has double-edged functions: inspiring the heart as well as informing the mind, knowing values as well as knowing facts, knowing self as well as knowing the world.
The transition of library service from being informative to being transformative is a quantum jump².
The transformative nature of mātauranga Māori based library service is explored through answering these questions: What is mātauranga Māori?
Why is mātauranga Māori based library service transformative?
How is mātauranga Māori based library service implemented?
Qualitative research is used in forms of interviews informed by literature reviews and my lived experience as a librarian in TWoA library.
What is mātauranga Māori?
Mātauranga Māori as Māori knowledge system that ‘encompasses all branches of Māori knowledge’ with spirituality as its most important feature: ‘The tapu aspect of Māori ties it firmly into the system of beliefs and values of the Māori people’ (Mead, 2003, pp.
305-6).
This is confirmed by all Māori and indigenous scholars in my literature reviews.
Browne calls indigenous knowledge ‘organic intellectual’ experiences and ‘flax-root’ theory’ ‘which makes room for transformative learning’ (Browne, 2005, p. 6 & 15).
Holmes brands it ‘heart knowledge’ and ‘blood memory’ (Holmes, 2000, p. 40).
Meyer claims that ‘knowledge that endures is a spiritual act that animates and educates’, and ‘spirituality is at the core of what knowledge is’ (Meyer, 2014, pp.
154-5).
The spiritual aspect of mātauranga Māori makes it ontologically and epistemologically different from ‘knowledge’ in the western paradigm where religion and sociology has long been separated, and people take it for granted that academic work has nothing to do with spirituality.
For Māori, spirituality runs through everything they do in form of mauri (life force).
That is why they pray every morning before work, meals and other events.
That is why they believe that ‘everything has a wairua (spirituality)’ and “There is a ‘divine spark’ in everything” (Patterson, 1992, p. 77).
Findings: The following differences between mātauranga Māori and ‘knowledge’ as commonly used in mainstream education dominated by western ideology are identified: Knowledge is individual property and an independent ‘object’ while mātauranga Māori is a collective asset and subjectively-tuned.
Knowledge is externally acquired mind products transmitted from outside in while mātauranga Māori is internally brewed ‘heart knowledge’ activated from inside out.
Knowledge occurs at cognitive level, and therefore analytical, logical and rational while mātauranga Māori involves affective aspect of knowing, and therefore vibrational, soul-stirring and permeates the whole person.
Knowledge results in skills while mātauranga Māori surfaces as passion and confidence with ‘fire in your belly’ (Diamond, 2003, p. title).
Knowledge is noun-based and concept-centred, and therefore informative while mātauranga Māori is verb-based, action-geared, relationship-directed, and therefore performative and transformative.
Knowledge is statically-accumulated, and extends horizontally while mātauranga Māori is organically-processed and spirit-driven, and therefore motivates and enlightens.
Knowledge is consciously learning products, and concerns with what things are while mātauranga Māori is subconsciously-fermented, and concerns with what things do.
Knowledge is descriptive, objective, inanimate, and therefore experiment-tested, achievement-measured and certificate-rewarded while mātauranga Māori is metaphorical, vibrational, personalized, and therefore experience-tempered, self-realization-oriented and character-building.
Knowledge is people-independent, value-free, and used for developing IQ that helps us survive the competitive society while mātauranga Māori is relational, value-laden, and develops SQ (Spiritual Quotient) that transcends us to a higher level of being, knowing and living undivided life in the divided society (Palmer, 2008).
Knowledge acquisition is a painstaking work while mātauranga Māori is a joyful ‘peak experience’ (Maslow).
Knowledge aims to differentiate and divide us, and ends up with class division and social inequality while mātauranga Māori is oriented towards synchronising and uniting us.
‘Knowledge is power’ while mātauranga Māori empowers.
Knowledge trains professionals while mātauranga Māori shapes better persons.
Summary: Knowledge is one-dimensional unfinished mātauranga Māori while mātauranga Māori is multi-dimensional finished knowledge.
That is why Māori people always start speeches with prayers, chants and songs to apply mātauranga Māori in its full force engaging the whole person, cognitive and affective, intellectual and behavioural, rational and emotional, corporal and spiritual, and knowing and being.
Mātauranga Māori is not so much as something I am to define as something I am defined by; it is not so much as something I study on as something I am being oriented towards, drawn into, and identified with; it is not so much as something to be observed objectively as what engages me as a participant and co-constructor; it is not so much what I know about it as how I feel about it; it makes more sense to act with it than to talk about it; it is more relevant to ask what I am than to enquire what it is.
‘Ideas are only as important as what you can do with them’ (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. Foreword).
Mātauranga Māori is a new world to me, not merely the world as I see it, but the world as I am seen through it; it is not so much as a product I eventually possess as a process that ends up possessing me – being transformed.
In short, knowledge informs and mātauranga Māori transforms.
Why is mātauranga Māori based library service transformative?
The transformative mechanism of mātauranga Māori based library service lies in the interrelationship between spiritual worldview, relational epistemology, and heart pedagogy.
The spiritual aspect of mātauranga Māori is embodied in relationships.
‘An indigenous paradigm comes from the foundational belief that knowledge is relational’; and ‘these relationships … include interpersonal, intrapersonal, environmental and spiritual relationships, and relationships with ideas’ (Wilson S. , 2008, p. 74).
‘We are, therefore I am’ (Mbiti, n.d.).
This popular saying in TWoA synchronises with the most frequently quoted Māori proverb: ‘What’s the most important thing in the world?
It’s people, it’s people, it’s people’.
‘Knowledge (in the sense of mātauranga Māori) is given through relationships and for the purpose of furthering relationships.
It surpasses the intellectual realm, and lodged in the emotional realm’ (Holmes, 2000, p. 41).
‘Knowing something is bound by how we develop a relationship with it’ (Meyer, 2014, p. 154).
One linguistic evidence of taking relationship as the ultimate reality’ (Wilson S. , 2008, p. 73) is the lack of equivalent word in English for whakawhanaungatanga (establishing relationship).
Heart pedagogy distinguishes Māori way of teaching and learning from that of mind-based mainstream education.
‘There is a common centre from which all mauri emanates and from which everything draws’ (Pohatu T. , 2012).
This centre is the heart as the motor of learning.
That’s why Marsden calls for the double-edged education that inspires the heart as well as informing the mind: ‘By meditation in the heart … Knowledge is transformed into wisdom.
This is essentially a spiritual experience’.
‘Knowledge is a thing of the head’ while ‘the heart is often wiser than the mind’ (Marsden, 2003, p. 59 & 28).
This double-edged education finds its echo in many indigenous scholars’ works: ‘Knowing must touch your heart’ (Fred, 2009, cited in Akhter, 2015) as ‘the heart has wisdom and love that must be used in building one’s knowledge’ (Akhter, 2015, p. 47).
‘The Heart is the school where love and enlightenment grow’ (Royal, 2008, p. 13).
Spiritual worldview and heart pedagogy are also gaining weight in western world in recent decades with the advent of postmodernism: ‘The postmodern world celebrated the importance of the spiritual dimension of existence (Graham, Coholic & Coates, 2006, cited in Akhter) (Akhter, 2015, p. 47).
Heart-based learning is also advocated by some western scholars.
Healthytarian Movement claims: ‘The Healthytarian lifestyle combines mindful and heart-centered living’ (Ochel, 2016).
The book The Methodology of the Heart states that ‘education without ethics, without sentiments, without heart, is simply soulless’ (Pelias, 2004, p. 1).
‘I am a teacher at heart’, and ‘human heart that is the source of good teaching’ (Palmer, 2007, p. 1 & 4).
There are also scientific supports based on experiments: ‘The heart is also an information processing centre … and can have profound influences on our brain.
“Positive feelings of love, care, appreciation and other uplifting emotional qualities long-associated with ‘heart’”.
(Childre, D., Martin, H., Rozman, D. & McCraty, R., 2016, p. 6 & 8 ).
A life story is more convincing about how the heart functions as the information centre: One young girl began having nightmares of murder after her heart transplant.
Her dreams were so vivid that they led to the capture of the murderer who killed her donor (Bruce, 2004, p. 161).
TWoA library as a dynamic learning centre undertakes the mission of its organisation – transformation through education through heart service.
Findings: Heart service model is justified by the feedbacks from the interviewees³: For Māoris, God is not an entity existing somewhere far away from us, it’s omnipresent in every living thing, and embodied in everything we do.
This accounts for all the protocols practiced on all important occasions as reminders to constantly connect us to the Divine.
This is mātauranga Māori.
Knowledge is not a purely human product.
It’s God-given taonga (gift) through human efforts and transmitted through whakapapa (ancestral line).
Therefore, mātauranga Māori has a strong spiritual aspect.
Mātauranga Māori is embodied in Ako Framework: Learning is to activate mauri, from mauri moe (sleeping state) to mauri oho (awaken state), and further to mauri ora (well-being state).
Asking a kaumātua⁴ about mātauranga Māori is like asking a fish what water is.
To know mātauranga Māori, one has to plunge himself into Māori world and ‘swim’ in it.
Mātauranga Māori has multi-layers.
Mātauranga Māori is not about what to do, but about how to do.
In talking about mātauranga Māori, we must settle ourselves – who we are, where we are from, and where we are going.
It is not as objective as western worldview holds.
Asked about library services, the interviewees think that our library should: Cultivate and promote whole person development, and produce a sense of learning, feeling and being.
Therefore, librarians should send out passion and let us experience ako moments.
‘Seize the moment’ to facilitate critical thinking and evaluate information with indigenous pedagogy.
Provide space to collectively meet and function as a learning centre and achieve whakawhanaungatanga.
Not only open its gate, but also open the eyes, the mind and the heart.
Give sense of purpose to everything to be done in it.
Make its patrons realise that knowledge is not from books, but from people’ mind and heart, and get people out of the trap from books which distance them from their centre by bringing other dimensions to their being.
Be as good as its institution.
To humanise the world, humanise the library.
Reconnects what is being lost, neglected, forgotten and alienated as a part of transformation of the heart.
Summary: The name of TWoA library says it all – Te Pātaka Māramatanga (The House of Enlightenment).
The name embodies Māori expectation of their library and their way of dealing with information: Our libraries are more than information repositories, but rather people-centred Wānanga where people get enlightened and transformed.
Using an interviewee’s words, ‘for Māori the power to name is an important transformative act and … opens the possibility of applying Māori thinking, values and practice, as we humanise our world and realities’ (Pohatu H., 2007).
In short, mātauranga Māori based libraries are learning centres that feed the centre of our being.
How is mātauranga Māori based library service implemented?
The journey from information to transformation from head service to heart service reveals itself through a series of transitions in practice: Shifting from ‘well’ toward ‘spring’.
TWoA library is under the ministration of ‘Te Puna Manaaki’ (the Spring of Help) department.
‘Spring’ metaphor symbolises the transition of service mode from reactive toward proactive by reaching out our hands to offer services rather than waiting to serve: sending resource lists to tutors, embedding library services into classroom teaching, delivering inductions to new classes, circulating regular newsletters updating service information, and displaying new book reviews.
Shifting from ‘fish’ toward ‘fishing’.
‘Fishing’ metaphor embodies our delivery transition from information per se toward information skills.
Librarians’ main job is helping patrons self-search to build up their independent searching skills.
Shifting from responsive (‘What do you need?’) toward facilitative (‘What do you need this for?’) to elicit interactions to identify patrons’ real needs.
Librarians have to ‘ask enough questions to make certain the user’s question is understood in dimensions of what is or what is not required’ (Katz, 2002, p. 129).
Shifting from instructive (‘Go to that shelf, and follow this call number’) towards performative by giving patrons hand-on practice opportunities, and staircasing them until they can operate comfortably.
Performative service aims to involve patrons in searching as learning.
Shifting from resource-focused toward user-focused: ‘Every communication has content and relationship aspects’ (Radford, 1999, p. 27).
Heart service is people-centred services addressing patrons’ affective needs prior to their information needs.
How we make our patrons feel is more important than what information we provide.
People-centred services make libraries the ‘Third Space’?.
Shifting from authoritative and decisive (‘This is what you need’) toward consultative and cooperative (‘We have several options available.
Let’s discuss which is best’).
Shifting from dismissive (‘Here you are.
Goodbye!’) toward recursive seeking step-stones for deeper communications (‘If you tell me more about your purpose, I may find more relevant resources for you’).
Shifting from ‘out-of-sight-out-of-mind’ one-off transaction (‘Here it is.
Have a nice day!’) toward ‘monitored referral’ follow-ups with ‘service-has-ended-but-serving-mood-remains’ mentality (‘If you leave your contact details, we’ll keep you informed when more resources are available’).
Shifting from relieved post-service mood (‘Thank God, he/she’s gone!’) toward reflective (‘How could I have done better?’).
Shifting from apathetic one-size-fits-all greeting formality’ toward empathetic personalized communication strategies to accommodate the patrons of different personalities and learning styles.
Shifting the role of librarians from information professionals toward library user educators.
Having patrons informed and inspired rather than simply providing information.
Serving is teaching rather than giving.
Summary: The transition from information to transformation is surrendering mind-based service to heart-based one, from duty-bound to passion-driven, and from how-we-serve mentality to how-they-should-be-served as default service mood.
There is no such a thing as a good service, there are only good servers.
We don’t deliver information; rather we deliver who we are through dealing with information.
Who we serve is more important than the service provided.
We don’t need to worry too much about customer service strategies.
A good heart does it all.
What is in our heart serves better than what is in the library.
The relational aspect of information and the affective side of our patrons always come first.
Heart service motto is: open the heart before opening the mouth.
Once the heart is activated, every inquiry is an entry point to deeper level communications; every encounter is an opportunity to establishing a lifelong relationship; every transaction is an occasion to make a difference to the patron’s life; every word from us is a medium to create a ripple effect with lifelong impact; every smile is a message to express our passion and inner values; every interaction is an ako moment; and every action is a boomerang that comes back to feed us to become better servers.
Heart service is self-service.
Conclusion Mātauranga Māori based transformative heart service pedagogy is rooted in TWoA values and indigenous worldview, but its application is not confined to indigenous institutions.
Human nature is inherently good; and human potential for growth is unlimited.
Individuals are free and autonomous and are capable of making personal choices.
Library service transition from informative to transformative is not a change of recipe, but reprogramming librarians’ inner blueprint.
We ‘are conditioned, but not determined’ (Freire, 1998, p. 12).
We are all products of our genetic, social, cultural, and educational environments, all of which forming a ‘maze’ for us to run our lives inside like the mouse chasing cheese, but ‘the problem is not that the mouse is in the maze, but that the maze is in the mouse’ (Malhotra, 2013, p. 66).
We librarians have to make a quantum jump from one dimensional being, living and working to another dimension – from mind-based to heart-based ones.
Only the enlightened can enlighten; only the transformed can transform; and only the heart can activate the heart.
Librarians’ quality is the library patrons’ quality.
‘If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself…the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.’ (Holthaus, 2013, p. 44).
Notes 1.
‘Whānau can be multi-layered, flexible and dynamic’ (Walker, 2014).
Here ‘whānau’ in this context refers to group (family, community, and can be extended further) development.
2.
Quantum Jumping is an advanced visualization technique where you visualize yourself jumping into alternate universes, and communicating with alternate versions of yourself.
The term “quantum jump” is commonly referred to as ‘atomic electron transition’.
I use it here as an analogy to describe a radical shift from information-based (resourced-centred) to transformation-based (people-centred) library service Kaiako is usually translated as teacher in English in everyday communication.
3.
All the interviews were sound recorded and transcribed here by the researcher with the interviewees’ names concealed.
4.
Kaumātua refers to the knowledgeable elders in Māori world and function as transmitters of traditional knowledge and are responsible for making important decision in Māori communities.
5.
The first space is home; the second is work; and the library as the third preferred place with humanized home-coming social environment.
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The biology of belief unleashing the power of consciouness, matter & miracles.
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A fire in your belly: Māori leaders speak.
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Pedagogy of freedom – ethics, democracy and civil courage.
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Heart knowledge, Blood memory and the Voice of the Land: Implications of Research among Hawaiin Elders.
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The RSP Goes 'Back to School' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The RSP Goes 'Back to School' Buzz data framework database infrastructure archives metadata digitisation tagging schema repositories copyright preservation cataloguing avi ejournal rae interoperability research cerif Citation BibTex RIS Stephanie Taylor reports on the three-day residential school for repository managers run by the Repositories Support Project (RSP), held on 14-16 September 2009 in Northumberland.
I recently attended the Back to School event [1] run by the Repositories Support Project (RSP)[2] at Matfen Hall [3], Northumberland, where I gave a workshop on metadata and also attended the second and third days of the event as a delegate.
I was sorry not to be able to attend the sessions on the first day, but arrived in time for dinner so was able to meet the delegates and other presenters.
I regretted not seeing the Minute Madness session, where delegates had a minute to talk about their repositories, particularly when I found out the winner, Rachel Henderson of the University of East Anglia, had done a repository rap!
[4] Dominic Tate of RSP had got together a great programme, designed around the feedback and suggestions of repository staff who had attended previous events so absolutely up-to-date with what was needed.
In addition, the venue was just right, with good food and pleasant surroundings making for some relaxed networking opportunities, always an important part of any face-to-face event.
I ran my metadata workshop on the second day, getting people to describe objects using various flavours of metadata and then describing the same objects using free-style, collaborative tagging.
The final exercise combined the two types of description in one record.
The idea was to try and get people to think about what they are doing when they describe things, and also to think a bit more widely than just adopting one particular fixed approach and making objects fit!
The delegates were an enthusiastic and welcoming audience and put a lot of effort and energy into the tasks.
The exercises also generated lively discussions among the groups.
People were talking about metadata and laughing at the same time, I think it must've gone OK!
IPR and Repositories Karen Ghai, British Broadcasting Corporation Karen is a copyright lawyer.
She worked for the British Library on the sound archives digitisation project and now works for the BBC, clearing copyright/IPR and moral rights on sound and moving images that the BBC wants to digitise and make available over the Web.
She is currently on the team working with the Open University to allow wider access to the BBC/OU teaching programmes from the 1970s onwards.
She gave a general guide to the main ways of getting permission for digitisation of sound, image and moving image content and summarised the general issues surrounding the copyright, IPR and moral rights of digitisation and making resources available online.
Matfen Hall, Northumberland Photo courtesy of Dominic Tate©, SHERPA/RSP, University of Nottingham.
What's the Story, Repository?
Dealing with the Legal Issues Jason Miles-Campbell, JISC Legal Jason Miles-Campbell of JISC Legal [5] is an amusing and engaging speaker who appeared wearing a kilt and announced he had a sporran full of digital media that were high-risk, copyright-wise.
We didn't actually get to see any of these high-risk objects, but he made an interesting point that JISC Legal gets as many calls and emails from academic researchers who are nervous about the implications of having work in the IR as they do from IR managers with copyright queries on deposits.
His top 5 issues for IR managers were very useful.
Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland (ERIS) James Toon, University of Edinburgh The project ERIS [6] is, for me, one to watch.
Scotland is looking to work collaboratively in the area of institutional repositories and I think is a perfect size – big enough to have impact, small enough to be manageable when acting as a consortium.
In addition, Scotland has also been working towards collaborative purchasing for academic libraries, and James is looking to link ERIS in with the group/project responsible for purchasing e-journals to take a combined approach to IR content and e-journal subscriptions.
This could produce some interesting reactions from publishers.
James blogged his own experience of this event [7].
Electronic Research Administration: Digital Institutional Repositories from a Research Management and Administration perspective Simon Kerridge, University of Sunderland/ARMA speaking on Research Management Photo courtesy of Dominic Tate©, SHERPA/RSP, University of Nottingham.
Simon Kerridge Simon is a Research Administrator for the University of Sunderland/ Association of Research Managers and Administrators UK (ARMA)[8] and his interest in IRs is as someone who helps his university apply for grants, secure funding and show the outcome of previous funded projects.
He seems to be an IR fan, seeing a lot of potential in being able to link to outputs as well as the more obvious Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) support and the potential of the IR within the context of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
It was interesting to hear the views of a different type of IR user.
Simon widened our horizons beyond the interests of academic researchers and library staff.
I'd like to see more input from users who are not the 'usual suspects' at IR events in the future.
Repository Integration: Possibilities and Pitfalls Bill Hubbard, Repositories Support Project Bill led a workshop where delegates worked in groups to identify the broader components (databases, systems, interfaces) within institutions that related to repositories, and to consider how they could be better integrated.
This covered things like research information systems, the library catalogue, payroll, HR database, subscription databases (full-text and metadata only), media directories, personal Web sites, etc.
It was an interesting exercise, and there was a wide variety of responses from a totally integrated system at one extreme to letting Google take the strain at the other!
Repositories and Digital Preservation Michael Day, UKOLN, University of Bath Michael Day of UKOLN [9] gave a talk on the basics of digital preservation for repository managers.
There was a lot of interest among the delegates in this area.
The role of the IR seems to be evolving as it becomes bedded down in an institution, and there is a blurring of the boundaries between digital archives and repositories.
Michael's introduction to digital preservation was a useful starting point for delegates needing to consider preservation issues.
One person told me that he/she [please choose!]
had recently been told to digitise and archive papers for preservation in the IR and now had a much clearer idea of how to plan out this work.
I think the presentation will be quite heavily accessed by IR managers in the same situation now it's up on the RSP site [10].
Current Research Information Systems Daniel Hook, Symplectic The last presentation of the day was by Daniel Hook of Symplectic [11].
Daniel is also an academic physicist, and gave an entertaining talk on integrating repositories within institutional cultures and practice.
He had a realistic view of how things like deposit mandates just won't work unless there is substantial assistance available to academic staff to support things like deposit or metadata creation.
He also noted the very small percentage of content deposited, even in institutions that have mandates.
It was very, very useful to get the view of a potential depositor.
I was left feeling that Daniel had raised questions rather than supplied answers; in my view, that is the way we need to start to tackle the issue of lack of content in many IRs.
The MERIT Project Hugh Look, JISC Collections MERIT (Making Excellent Research Influential & Transferable)[12] is a JISC Collections project and was inspired by the Cream of Science Project in the Netherlands.
It aims to showcase the best of UK research and make it available, free, online, to anyone, anywhere.
At the moment, content is thin on the ground as publishers are not keen to co-operate with the project.
MERIT is looking for alternative sources of content and are exploring repositories as a possible content provider.
The idea received a mixed reception from the IR managers present.
Many are struggling to populate their own repositories and were not convinced that MERIT would attract researchers to deposit or send links to content for inclusion.
Some people thought it might succeed, if it was well publicised and branded with care to show the researchers that this was a prestigious location at which to be seen.
I wish the project well, but I do have reservations about the reception it will receive from academic researchers.
It will be another project I'll be watching with interest.
Breakout Session Photo courtesy of Dominic Tate©, SHERPA/RSP, University of Nottingham.
How Can Repositories Help Us Get Ready for REF?
Stephen Grace, Readiness for REF, King's College London This was the possibly the most anticipated presentation of the three days as many IR managers have been involved in RAE.
Many more are feeling the weight of expectations that the repository will hold all the answers to dealing with the Research Excellence Framweork (REF) within an institution.
Stephen is the project manager of the "R4R: Readiness for REF" Project [13].
This project aims both to investigate how to streamline the gathering of REF data and to build and try out interoperable infrastructures (including IRs) to capture and manage research output.
They will be using CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) and also SWAP (Scholarly Works Application Profile).
I am most interested in the practical approach this project will be employing further down the line as it plans to make demonstrator systems and do some interoperability testing.
Stephen was a good speaker and very keen to make links with anyone who has an interest in any aspect of the project.
I suspect he may be swamped with interest!
Support Structures in the UK Repositories Support Project (RSP), United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR), Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland (ERIS), Welsh Repository Network (WRN) Various Presenters This session gave a roundup of the different projects and groups in the UK working on the support and development of repositories.
RSP has a brief to support the development of repositories in HEIs and is planning an interesting programme of events and campaigns on various issues and topics of interest.
If this event was anything to go by, they will be both inspiring and useful.
UKCoRR [14] is a group organised by repository managers themselves and, as it has no funding affiliations, is not only able to provide a support network but is also free to lobby publishers on behalf of IR managers.
ERIS was well represented by James Toon's presentation on the second day, and is, as I've said, aproject to watch.
Finally, the WRN [15] focuses on supporting Welsh IRs but is also planning to make the output of the project available to everyone.
Building on its previous work, where the project team succeeded in establishing a repository in every Welsh HEI, this project will, I'm sure, produce some interesting and practical resources.
JISC Recruitment Toolkit Andy McGregor, JISC Executive This workshop was designed to showcase the new JISC Recruitment Toolkit [16].
The toolkit is designed to help anyone needing to recruit project staff and although it doesn't have any magic solutions, it does offer some useful checklists, plans and tips.
This is especially useful for project managers who do not recruit regularly, as it gives a quick way into the skills needed to be successful.
Andy McGregor led a workshop where delegates worked in groups to plan out different parts of the recruitment process.
Andy explained how many projects start late due to problems with recruitment, or are affected by staff leaving part-way through the project so that fast recruitment is needed to keep the project on track.
The toolkit seemed comprehensive and certainly gave my group a good introduction to our task of creating an overall recruitment plan.
Printed out, it was a rather large volume; but reading it online, with hyperlinks in place, it offers lots of useful resources and shortcuts.
Conclusion Dominic Tate closed the event by issuing us all with a task of writing down the three most important action points we would take away from the sessions we had attended.
Not being a working repository manager, my list may be slightly different to others.
My first action was to share the information on use of SWAP with colleagues back at UKOLN who would be interested in this.
Finding out more about the Common European Research Information Format (CERIF), the metadata schema that Stephen Grace is going to be using in the R4R Project was my second action, and my final action was to read the books on Cultural Anthropology mentioned by James Toon.
This selection summed up the success of this event to me – something to take back and share, something practical to help me in my own work, and something new and interesting to follow up.
Conference Dinner Photo courtesy of Dominic Tate©, SHERPA/RSP, University of Nottingham The venue and the organisation of the event supported the strong programme, and the hard work of all the organisers and Dominic Tate in particular really paid off in creating a relaxed yet focused environment for delegates.
This is the kind of event that makes face-to-face participation not only a pleasure, but a necessity for staff working in fast-developing areas.
References RSP Event RSP "Goes back to School", 14-16 Sep 2009, Matfen Hall, Northumberland http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/index.php?page=backtoschool2009-09-14/index.php The Repositories Support Project (RSP) http://www.rsp.ac.uk/ Matfen Hall Hotel, Golf and Spa http://www.primahotels.co.uk/matfen Some of the Minute Madness presentations are available as AVI files on the RSP Web site http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/index.php?page=backtoschool2009-09-14/index.php JISC Legal http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/eris.aspx RSP Summer School ERIS http://eriscotland.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/rsp-summer-school/ Association of Research Managers and Administrators UK http://www.arma.ac.uk UKOLN A centre of excellence in digital information management http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Michael Day: Presentation: Repositories and Digital Preservation (slides from Conference Programme page) http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/index.php?page=backtoschool2009-09-14/ Symplectic Limited http://www.symplectic.co.uk/ JISC Collections | About Merit http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/projects_and_reports/merit/about R4R http://r4r.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/ United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) http://www.ukcorr.org/ Welsh Repository Network (WRN) http://welshrepositorynetwork.blogspot.com/ Recruitment toolkit for JISC digital repository projects: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment/recruitment.aspx Author Details Stephanie Taylor Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: s.taylor@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "The RSP Goes "Back To School"" Author: Stephanie Taylor Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/strsp-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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23rd International CODATA Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 23rd International CODATA Conference Buzz data mobile software java framework wiki api database restful dissemination portfolio xml infrastructure archives metadata doi digitisation standardisation accessibility tagging identifier vocabularies smartphone blog repositories video preservation cataloguing linux visualisation gis provenance e-learning ontologies dvd widget curation usb moodle crm facebook oer lod licence interoperability privacy algorithm research standards sharepoint xmpp Citation BibTex RIS Alex Ball reports on a conference on ‘Open Data and Information for a Changing Planet’ held by the International Council for Science’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan on 28–31 October 2012.
CODATA was formed by the International Council for Science (ICSU) in 1966 to co-ordinate and harmonise the use of data in science and technology.
One of its very earliest decisions was to hold a conference every two years at which new developments could be reported.
The first conference was held in Germany in 1968, and over the following years it would be held in  15 different countries across 4 continents.
My colleague Monica Duke and I attended the most recent conference in Taipei both to represent the Digital Curation Centre – CODATA's national member for the UK – and to participate in a track of talks on data publication and citation.
Before the Conference The CODATA Conference is always busy with satellite meetings and this year’s was no exception.
On the afternoon of Sunday 28 October, effectively day zero of the conference, I popped my head around the door of the World Data System Members Forum; I couldn't actually get in as the room was packed.
I wanted to catch the demonstration of GeoMapApp [1].
This is a Java-based data visualisation tool developed by the Marine Geoscience Data System, which allows users to overlay datasets on a selection of different base maps and grids.
The tool has a good set of options for changing how the data are presented, and includes atmospheric and geophysical data as well as the oceanographic data one would expect.
A little later the conference hosts held a welcoming ceremony and reception.
Among the speakers was San-cheng Chang, a minister without portfolio within the Taiwanese Executive Yuan.
He was pleased to report that the government had launched an official open data activity as of the previous week, starting with real estate information.
Unfortunately, it had only provided a database end-user interface, not direct access to the data themselves, so the site crashed within an hour of launch due to estate agents harvesting the data through screen scraping.
San-cheng is working on getting these and other data opened up fully, so Taiwan despite its slow start might catch up with the countries leading the open data movement.
Another notable feature of the welcoming ceremony was a half-hour performance by the Chai Found Music Workshop.
We were treated to a sextet of traditional Sizhu instruments playing a  selection of Taiwanese pieces and, bizarrely, Loch Lomond.
Opening Plenary Session The conference proper began first thing Monday morning with addresses from Ray Harris, Yuan-Tseh Lee, Huadong Guo and Der-Tsai Lee, respectively the Chair of the conference’s Scientific Program Committee, the Presidents of ICSU and CODATA, and the Chair of the conference’s Local Organization Committee.
These were followed by three keynote presentations.
Sálvano Briceño, Chair of the Scientific Committee of Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) There is no such thing as a natural disaster.
This was the starting point of Sálvano Briceño’s explanation of how data can be used to mitigate the effects of earthquakes, hurricanes and other such hazards.
The number of natural disasters recorded has risen steadily from about 400 in 1980 to about 1000 in 2010, but this is more to do with people building (poorly) in hazardous areas than any decrease in the hospitality of the natural world.
The underlying issues that need to be tackled are social vulnerability and unsustainable development.
There are in fact three activities currently addressing these issues, all due to deliver policy decisions in 2015: the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction [2], the UN Millennium Development Goals [3] and ongoing international climate change negotiations.
A common theme in all three is the need to base their decisions on sound scientific evidence, derived from data on natural hazards, disaster losses and vulnerability.
There are copious data on the first of these, a fair amount on the second (though not always accurate) but very little on the third.
The IRDR has therefore set up a series of Working Groups to improve both the quality and quantity of such data.
The Disaster Loss Data Working Group has been working closely with CODATA, and a CODATA Task Group on Linked Open Data for Global Disaster Risk Research would be proposed at this year's General Assembly.
Chai Found Music Workshop Der-Tsai Lee, President of National Chung Hsing University, Taichung Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America are well-known efforts to provide access to cultural heritage artefacts via digitisation but, as Der-Tsai Lee was pleased to point out, pre-dating them both was the Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program (TELDAP) [4].
Work began in TELDAP in 2002, and since then it has built a collection not only from libraries, museums, universities, theatres across Taiwan but also from 116 institutions across 20 countries and through direct engagement with the public.
Around 6000 Moodle courses have been compiled from TELDAP holdings, as well as some manga and anime educational resources.
The Program has developed extensive experience in digitisation and related techniques, such as optical character recognition for Chinese glyphs, repairing video frames using adjacent ones, colour palette extraction, and so on.
TELDAP is starting to make its data available as linked open data, and has already placed much of its material into the public domain.
Hesheng Chen, Director of Beijing Electron Positron Collider National Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences Hesheng Chen drew on his experience in Particle Physics to illustrate a talk on the challenges of big data.
Spiralling data volumes are outstripping advances in storage and computational power, to the extent that in some cases there is not enough storage capacity for the incoming data stream, let alone the legacy data.
Data-intensive research has gone through a couple of changes already to cope with the increasing volume, complexity, rate of acquisition and variability in format of data: moving first to local clusters and then to the Grid.
The Grid provides scientists with an easy medium for sharing data, but scheduling jobs efficiently remains a hard task, and it is hampered by a diversity of service models and legacy programs.
In High Energy Physics, the community is looking at using Cloud technologies to overcome these issues.
In order to cope with the data from the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's AliEn Grid framework is using Cloud technologies, and using the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) as a coordination mechanism.
Similarly, the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences is using a Cloud system to handle the data from Beijing Spectrometer II (BESII), and in 2010 started using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) to distribute computational tasks among volunteers, under the project name CAS@Home [5].
After a break, the conference split into two tracks, one on data sharing and the other on environmental and disaster data; I went to the former.
Best Practices and Future Directions in Data Sharing Puneet Kishor, Creative Commons Puneet Kishor gave an overview of the forthcoming version 4 of the suite of Creative Commons (CC) licences [6].
The aim for the new version is to broaden the range of jurisdictions and applications for which the licences can be used, to make them more interoperable with other licences, and to make them fit for the next ten years, all without alienating existing users.
The licences will include provision for sui generis database rights, so they will be suitable for use with data in Europe, for example.
There will be greater clarity on the point that rights rather than works are being licensed.
The way the attribution requirement is worded in version 3 licences makes combining a large number of CC-licensed works unwieldy, so the new licences will explicitly permit a scalable form of attribution (the current draft wording specifies a hyperlinked credits page).
Licensors will be able to add terms that assure users the work satisfies certain quality standards, something that will be very useful in the data context.
Lastly, the version 4 licences will include a mechanism for users to remedy a situation in which they forfeit their rights due to a breach of licence terms.
Outstanding issues include how to handle text and data mining, and whether or not the licences should be ported to particular jurisdictions.
The version 4 CC licences are expected to launch towards the end of 2012 or early in 2013.
Charlotte Lee, University of Washington Charlotte Lee reported on two sociological studies of scientific collaboration, performed in the context of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, a branch of Human–Computer Interaction studies.
The first study looked at the sustainability of cyberinfrastructure middleware in the face of changing funding profiles.
It found that the tools with greatest longevity were the ones that could be ported to many different domains and use cases, as this meant developers could find new funding streams when their existing ones dried up.
The second looked at how cancer epidemiologists understood how to use variables from trusted legacy datasets.
There was broad acceptance that full documentation is too time-consuming to write, and that researchers would normally have to ask the original team to determine, for example, whether ‘1 month’ means ‘up to 1 month’ or ‘at least 1 month but less than 2’.
Both studies showed that there is no clear division between social and technical issues.
John Broome, Natural Resources Canada John Broome reported on the Canadian Research Data Summit held in September 2011 by the (Canadian government's) Research Data Strategy Working Group [7].
The purpose of the summit was both to develop a national approach for managing Canada’s research data and to develop a business case for this activity that could be communicated to decision makers.
The summit recommended the creation of a body (tentatively called ‘Research Data Canada’) to coordinate research data management nationally and liaise internationally, steered by an Advisory Council made up of government, academic and industry leaders.
The summit also drafted a national strategy that tackled issues of building skill sets and capacity in the community, securing sustained funding and improving research data infrastructure.
On the latter point, the Working Group is already piloting a set of tools using data from the International Polar Year as a test bed.
Ruoh-rong Yu, Center for Survey Research, Academia Sinica The Survey Research Data Archive (SRDA) at Academia Sinica is the largest survey archive in Taiwan and one of the largest in Asia [8].
Ruoh-rong Yu took us through the lifecycle of a data holding, from acquisition, through cleaning and anonymisation, to access.
One of three levels of access is used, depending on the sensitivity of the data: public, members only and restricted (i.e.
on-site or VPN access only).
Various improvements are planned for the online interface: better search and browse facilities, built-in statistical analysis and data merge tools, better information security management, and an English-language version.
The archive is also provides training on how to reuse data.
Following lunch were three blocks of five parallel sessions.
Seven of the sessions continued the theme of environmental and disaster data in various ways, but there were also sessions on health data, materials data, open knowledge environments, microbiological research, access to data in developing countries, and a miscellany of topics presented by early career scientists.
With so much choice it was difficult to know which sessions to pick; in the end I plumped for materials data and open knowledge environments.
Artwork on the campus of Academia Sinica Exchangeable Material Data for Uses in Industry, Government and Universities Yibin Xu, National Institute for Materials Science, Japan Yibin Xu gave an overview of AtomWork, an inorganic materials database developed by the (Japanese) National Institute for Materials Science.
It contains phase diagrams, crystal structures, diffraction patterns and property data for over 80,000 inorganic materials, harvested from published literature.
It is possible to view the data not only at the level of materials, but also of substances, compounds and chemical systems, and it has some good visualisation capabilities.
While the database contains a useful quantity of data it is by no means comprehensive.
Yibin identified several things currently lacking that would make data collection easier: a standard data format for materials data, a scientifically-based identifier system and incentives for researchers to share data.
Laura Bartolo, Kent State University In June 2011, President Obama launched the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) in the United States with the ambitious goal of halving the time and finance required to develop advanced materials [9].
It plans to do this by developing a Materials Innovation Infrastructure (i.e.
integrated computational, experimental and data informatics tools), encouraging scientists to concentrate on a few key areas relevant for national goals (national security, health and welfare, clean energy systems) and training.
Laura Bartolo gave an overview of progress so far and flagged up some important issues being faced by the MGI.
NIST is building three repositories: one for files relating to first principles calculations, one for data used with the CALPHAD (Calculation of Phase Diagrams) method for predicting thermodynamic properties, and one hosting contextual information supporting the other two.
Already it is clear that for data to be integrated reliably, universal identifiers and standard ontologies, data models and formats will be needed.
John Rumble, R&R Data Services John Rumble explained that while people have been trying to develop exchange standards for materials data since the mid-1980s, none have gained traction because the task is so complicated.
There are the microstructure, macrostructure and macroscopic behaviour to consider, the fact that slight changes to manufacturing methods can alter all of these things, and that complex materials can have a variety of structures and behaviours all at once.
There are, however, established standards for testing materials and presenting the results.
In 2009–2010, The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) ran a workshop (i.e.
project) to create a data format based on one of these standards [10] and is now running a follow-on workshop to extend this format to other testing standards [11].
This latter workshop is also testing whether the format works as an exchange standard using existing systems and processes.
Jane Hunter, University of Queensland The Asia Pacific climate is not very kind to paintings.
Jane Hunter described a collaboration between the University of Queensland and the Asia Pacific Twentieth Century Conservation Art Research Network to develop a decision support tool for art conservators [12].
Semi-automated techniques are used to harvest information from paint conservation literature and convert it to linked open data.
The resulting knowledge base uses the CIDOC CRM [13], the in-house Ontology of Paintings and PReservation of Art (OPPRA) and materials ontologies.
A Web interface has been written that supports the capture, storage, and discovery of empirical and characterisation data, in a manner comparable with electronic laboratory notebooks or laboratory management systems.
Young-Mok Rhyim, Korea Institute of Materials Science In the mid-2000s, the Korean government adopted a policy to promote the Korean materials industry, and one result of this was the launch of the Materials Bank Project in 2007 [14].
As Young-Mok Rhyim explained, the idea was to create the world's leading materials databank, primarily in support of domestic industry.
The Materials Bank is divided into three parts: Ceramics Bank, Chemicals Materials Bank and Metals Bank, the latter of which was the focus of this presentation.
It contains information on various metal samples, their chemistry and manufacturing provenance, and their microstructure, macroscopic properties and so on.
While a good deal of the information comes from scanning published literature, more and more of it is being collected specifically for inclusion in Metals Bank.
Currently 326 companies are cooperating in the project.
Open Knowledge Environments: Concepts, Applications and Potential Benefits Paul Uhlir, National Academy of Sciences Paul Uhlir began his introduction to Open Knowledge Environments (OKEs) by setting them in the context of scholarly communications on the Web, and arguing that openness rather than restriction should be the default culture.
OKEs are open platforms for scholarly communications hosted by universities or other non-commercial bodies, typically hosting content such as open access journals, grey literature, data, open educational resources and open source software.
They also typically provide interactive functions such as wikis, blogs, forums and post-publication reviews that enhance and build on the hosted content.
Examples include microBEnet [15] and CAMERA [16].
OKEs are not easy or cheap to set up.
They represent a significant cultural shift away from print publication, and require long-term financial commitments on the part of the hosts.
Among the challenges are how to protect privacy, confidentiality, and genuine commercial advantage, and how to accommodate alternative models of openness such as members-only content and embargoes.
Bill Anderson, University of Texas at Austin Bill Anderson outlined the technical requirements for an OKE, which he saw as similar to those for an Open Archival Information System [17].
Functions include input, process, output, system management, resources and strategic vision.
Managing datasets requires more resources than managing documents as one needs more contextual information to get the sense of a dataset.
More specifically, there are several facilities that an OKE should provide: some form of open review system, both preand post-publication, or perhaps some less formal discussion mechanisms; visualisation tools for data; a recommendation service for guiding users to relevant content; data-to-day curation of content; and long-term preservation.
Curation is particularly important if wikis are used, as they can become unmanageable and messy without it.
Anderson also proposed some formal methods for measuring the openness of an OKE.
In conclusion, Anderson looked at some off-the-shelf software solutions that might be used to build an OKE, suggesting on the one hand the various offerings from the Public Knowledge Project (Open Journal Systems, Open Conference Systems, Open Monograph Press, etc.)
[18] and the University of Prince Edward Island's Islandora system [19].
Robert Lancashire, University of the West Indies Robert Lancashire gave the first in a series of four presentations on contexts in which OKEs are having an impact.
The Caribbean region was for a long time isolated from the global network, but now fibre optic cables have been installed and there should be widespread Internet access by 2013.
Since 2007 the Caribbean Knowledge and Learning Network has been building C@ribNET, an academic network similar to the UK’s Joint Academic Network (JANET) linking research and educational institutions across 20 Caribbean nations.
It is opening up all sorts of exciting possibilities: virtual classrooms allowing students to be taught by a wider variety of lecturers, eLearning facilities, more efficient university administration and, of course, OKEs.
Liping Di, George Mason University Liping Di introduced us to GeoBrain, the first operational geospatial Web service system, which launched in 2005 [20].
It is a collection of portals for capturing, discovering, preserving and disseminating NASA’s earth observation satellite data and information.
The thinking behind it is that most users do not need access to the raw data (e.g.
daily precipitation levels), but rather the high-level knowledge derived from it (e.g.
whether a region is suffering from drought), but deriving this knowledge requires extensive processing and expert attention.
GeoBrain is an OKE that automates the derivation process using peer-reviewed and validated data processing models/workflows that are deployed on demand.
One of the pleasing aspects of the system is that a certain element of expertise can be encoded once and reused many times with different data, meaning each contribution represents a significant improvement to the system.
Chuang Liu, Institute of Geography and Natural Resources, Chinese Academy of Science The Digital Lin Chao Geomuseum [21] is a joint venture of CODATA, the International Geographical Union and the Geographical Society of China.
It was established in 2011 as an OKE for geography, particularly emphasising how geographical discoveries and events have impacted on culture and the arts.
Chuang Liu demonstrated this by exhibiting some of the holdings collected since May 2012 on the exploration of Tibet and the Himalayas.
These mainly consisted of stamps and postcards from around the world, all of which have been digitised and made available online.
Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica Tyng-Ruey Chuang looked at three Taiwanese projects that might be considered OKEs.
Ezgo is a computing environment aimed at schools, based on the Kubuntu Linux-based operating system and provided as a bootable DVD or USB stick [22].
PeoPo (People Post) is a citizen journalism site hosted by Taiwan Public Television Service; all content is made available through a Creative Commons licence [23].
OpenFoundry is a source code repository similar to SourceForge and GitHub, but it also organises workshops that promote and build capabilities for open source software development, publishes news and provides guidance on licensing and other legal matters relevant to software development [24].
All three have a philosophy of openness, and they each produce and disseminate knowledge and encourage public participation, so seem to fit the OKE definition.
None of them, however, have a particularly sound financial footing.
Awards Ceremony The first day concluded with a plenary session consisting of three substantive items.
The first was the presentation of the CODATA Prize for outstanding achievement in the world of scientific and technical data.
This went to Michael F. Goodchild for his work in Geographic Information Science.
He wasn’t able to be there in person, but he joined us on Skype and the hosts played back a presentation he'd recorded for us earlier.
The thrust of the talk was that the central challenge of Geographic Information Science is reducing rather complicated data to a simple two-dimensional visualisation.
He demonstrated this in various ways.
He showed how Geospatial Information Systems frequently exhibit a mismatch of accuracy and precision, for example by reporting the distance between two capital cities to the nearest micron.
He pointed out that putting a scale on a national or international map is highly misleading due to the distortions introduced by the flattening process.
Lastly, he noted how geographical names and political boundaries are, of course, social constructs and vary according to the intended audience.
The second item was the presentation of the Sangster Prize for the best contribution to CODATA from a Canadian student or recent graduate.
This went to Daniel Ricard of Dalhousie University.
His acceptance speech was notable for the extraordinary claim that, if one works to become the local expert on metadata vocabularies, one might seem boring at first but will end up being considered the sexiest person in the office.
He also argued, cogently enough, that CODATA should fund another, similar prize open to students outside Canada.
The final item of business was the official launch of the book CODATA @ 40 Years: The Story of the ICSU Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) from 1966 to 2010 by David R. Lide and Gordon H. Wood.
One of the authors, I forgot to note which, told us about the motivation for the book, the process of researching it, and how the book was structured.
When the day’s proceedings drew to a close after an exhausting 11¼ hours, we were all rewarded with a free copy of the book and a surprise second reception.
The following day kicked off with another set of five parallel tracks, continuing with themes of disaster data and microbiology and adding topics related to big data and national policy.
I, however, attended the first of three sessions on data publication and citation.
Research Data Enters Scholarly Communication Michael Diepenbroek, PANGAEA, University of Bremen Michael Diepenbroek gave the introductory overview for the track, taking as his theme the vital role of research data in scholarly publishing.
He started by arguing that without the underlying data, journal articles no longer fulfil the roles they are supposed to play as the record and evidence base of empirical science.
He went on to enumerate the various requirements for data publication (e.g.
quality assurance procedures, standards for interoperability, citability, identification, persistent access), sets of principles that have been defined (e.g.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access, Bermuda Principles), and some major players in this space (e.g.
the ICSU World Data System, DataCite, ORCID, Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index).
Diepenbroek concluded by emphasising the importance of archiving, of archives being trustworthy, and of archives working closely with publishers and libraries so that data archiving becomes a natural component of the scholarly publication workflow.
David Carlson, UNAVCO David Carlson gave his perspective as editor of Earth System Science Data (ESSD), a data journal that has its roots in the International Polar Year 2007/8 [25].
ESSD publishes papers that describe datasets and the way in which they were collected, but do not draw scientific conclusions from them.
The quality assurance process is as follows.
Each submission is assigned to a topical editor, who decides if the paper is in scope and resolves any issues with how it is written.
If the paper is suitable it is published in ESSD Discussions and undergoes simultaneous review by allocated referees and the scientific community at large.
The authors respond to the comments and submit a revised paper, which may undergo a further round of peer review before being published in ESSD or rejected.
Papers are judged on the accessibility of the data (they should be lodged with a data centre and assigned their own DOI), the quality of both the data and the paper, and the significance (uniqueness, usefulness, completeness) of the data.
ESSD occasionally publishes themed issues or joint issues.
With the latter, ESSD teams up with a regular journal, so that every science paper in the regular journal has a parallel data paper in ESSD.
Joint issues are particularly slow to produce, and there are sometimes conflicts where the science paper is good but the data paper is poor or vice versa.
Carlson is pleased with the popularity of the journal, and understands researchers are now including publication in ESSD as part of their data management plans.
IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Elsevier IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg talked about Elsevier’s Article of the Future project, which aims to provide a richer online publication medium for journal papers [26].
In particular, it seeks to integrate summary and full data into the article text.
In his demonstration, Aalbersberg showed an article in which the text was presented in a fairly traditional manner in a central column.
The left sidebar contained a table of contents which included previews of the tables and figures.
The contents of the right sidebar could be varied between options such as the article metadata, a detailed view of a selected reference, a second copy of a figure or table from the main text, or interactive visualisations and information about a dataset, structure or protein mentioned in the text.
Some of the figures were dynamic, with phylogenetic trees that could be zoomed, geospatial data presented using Google Maps, or graphs that revealed the underlying data when the points were clicked.
Such articles can be linked at the article level to holdings in data repositories.
Elsevier also invites data repositories to provide widgets that display a visualisation of an archived dataset and, perhaps, show related datasets from their holdings.
Fiona Murphy, Wiley Fiona Murphy gave a broader publisher perspective, recounting how scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers have worked since 2007 on improving the handling of data in their publications.
Examples included participation in projects such as PARSE.Insight, APARSEN, and ODE, a joint statement with DataCite, forming an STM Research Data Group and joining the board of the Dryad data repository.
Wiley-Blackwell worked with the Royal Meteorological Society in the UK to launch the Geoscience Data Journal (GDJ), following the involvement of the latter organisation in the JISC-funded OJIMS (Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences) project [27].
As with ESSD mentioned above, it is a data journal that aims to give academics credit for publishing data, while ensuring data are archived and reviewed for quality.
In GDJ papers, the associated dataset appears both in the reference list and in a prominent position at the start of the main text.
Finally, Murphy discussed her involvement with the PREPARDE (Peer REview for Publication and Accreditation of Research data in the Earth sciences) Project [28], which is using the GDJ as a test bed for developing workflows, policies and procedures for the whole data publication life cycle.
Wim Hugo, South African Environmental Observation Network The final talk in this session was given by Wim Hugo, who gave the data centre perspective.
To be effective, datasets have to be discoverable, understandable (even at scale), preserved and usable by both humans and automated systems.
The main challenges for data centres are securing long-term funding, handling low quality data submissions, integrating seamlessly with the mainstream publishing industry and building skills and enthusiasm among potential data providers.
Hugo offered some possible solutions.
Research grants could and should allocate funds specifically for preservation.
Around US$600bn is spent annually on research; allocating 3% of this to preservation would raise around US$18 bn, which is only slightly less than the size of the academic publishing industry.
Furthermore, research proposals should be judged (partly) on the strength of their data management plans and the data publication record of the applicants.
Published data should be recognised in scholarly rankings, and honours-level degrees should include training on data management and informatics.
Mandating the publication of publicly funded data would certainly help to create a more complete scientific record, but would initially entail a flood of low-quality submissions, and would also introduce disruptive competition between data centres (competing for preservation funding) and publishers (competing for data to publish).
Some outstanding questions need to be answered.
When should access to datasets be withdrawn or altered?
How different do derived works need to be in order to be considered unique?
How can licensed data be properly embargoed?
How can potential users of a dataset determine if it will be useful without downloading it in full?
How can traditional metadata records for datasets be enhanced with useful citation and quality metadata?
Midway Plenary Session Geoffrey Boulton, University of Edinburgh and the Royal Society In his keynote, Geoffrey Boulton argued that open data matter and suggested how they might be made a reality.
The purpose of the scientific journal, as envisioned by Henry Oldenburg, founding editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was to publicise discoveries as they happened, in an easily understood fashion, so others could scrutinise and build on them.
Until relatively recently, datasets were of a scale that print publications could cope with them; Boulton himself remembers writing papers based on 12 data points.
This is certainly no longer the case, and it is precipitating a loss of confidence in scientific research – scepticism over climate change evidence is a case in point.
The antidote is open data, as they discourage fraud, satisfy citizens’ demands for evidence and open up possibilities for new ways of working, such as citizen science.
Routine sharing of data would help eliminate the suppression of negative (but nevertheless useful) results, and allow us to identify unexpected patterns.
But simply putting raw data on the Web is not enough: the data have to be ‘intelligently open’: they have to be accessible, intelligible, assessable and reusable.
There are legitimate reasons for keeping data closed – commercial interests, personal privacy, public safety and security – but one should never assume these reasons automatically ‘win’: they always need to balanced against the potential benefits of openness.
There is some way to go before this vision of openness can be achieved.
There needs to be a cultural shift away from seeing publicly funded research as a private preserve.
Data management needs to be embedded in the business of doing science, data must be intelligently published in parallel with papers, and so on.
Publishers should open up their data holdings for data mining, governments should seek to improve the efficiency of science, and professional societies should be working to enact change in their communities.
Ovid J. L. Tzeng, Academia Sinica Ovid Tzeng shared some insights from the world of psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience.
Human language is far more advanced than the communication systems of other animals, and interconnects us in a way little else can.
Tzeng has shown cave paintings from 20,000 years ago to children all over the world, and they all interpret them in the same way.
Chinese writing, being based on concepts more than sounds, has changed very slowly over time, to the extent that Tzeng found he could read 60-70% of a Taiwanese document written 3,000 years ago.
The brain adapts to make common tasks easier, so reading and writing has a noticeable neurological effect.
Scans of children who are learning to read show how their brain activity moves from the right hemisphere to the left.
Furthermore, being exposed to vast amounts of information and therefore having to organise it and practise problem-solving techniques seems to affect intelligence.
The Flynn effect, whereby the average IQ of a population increases over time, seems to have arrested in developed countries, while in countries that are just becoming exposed to substantial quantities of information thanks to the Internet, IQ is rising by about 3 points per year.
There is a surprisingly strong correlation between levels of literacy (and cognitive ability generally) in a population and life expectancy, perhaps because a literate society is better able to propagate good medical and hygiene practices.
It can therefore be argued that the digital divide is not just a concern from the perspective of personal enrichment but has a real effect on people’s lifespans.
The spread of Internet coverage is not only bringing education to remote areas – Tzeng gave an example of remote mountain villages where the residents are now gaining valuable skills after schools and Internet access were installed – but also enabling real political change too.
The Internet means people can express themselves even when harsh winter weather would suppress physical rallies.
But governments have been fighting back by threatening to revoke Internet access, performing deep packet inspection or even waging electronic wars.
It is just as important now to protect freedom of expression as it was when the United States first amended its constitution.
Poster madness The plenary ended with a poster madness session, where authors were given one minute each to convince delegates to come and read their poster.
There were 23 posters in all, though I did notice one of them was a short article that had been printed out on A4 landscape pages, and stuck hopefully on the wall in a poster-sized rectangle.
After a short break, the conference split into two parallel debate sessions, one on data ethics and the other on open access.
What Do We Mean by Open Access to Data?
The open access debate was chaired by Ray Harris, University College London, and lead by a panel consisting of Geoffrey Boulton, University of Edinburgh, Robert Chen, CIESIN, Columbia University, and David Mao, Library of Congress.
The session began with the chair and each of the panellists giving a short summary of the main issues from their perspectives.
Harris enumerated the various statements and declarations that have been made on open access to data, information and knowledge, but gave several examples where openness might be harmful: the locations of nesting sites should be hidden from poachers, for example, and locations of ships at sea from pirates.
Boulton reiterated the points he had made in his keynote speech.
Chen talked about the GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Data Sharing Principles adopted in February 2005 [29], which led to the creation of the GEOSS Data-CORE – an unrestricted, distributed pool of documented datasets – in 2010.
He noted the difference between applying restrictions and attaching conditions, and advised communities to be clear about the rights and expectations associated with reusing data.
Mao spoke from the perspective of a law librarian; governments have an obligation to ensure their citizens understand the law, which implies they need to provide permanent public access to legal information in open formats.
This degree of openness can cause conflicts: in the US, legal reports routinely disclose sensitive personal information (e.g.
social security numbers), while the EU is rather more careful about respecting personal privacy in such documents.
For the remainder of the session, the chair collected a handful of questions at a time from the audience and then asked the panel to comment on one or more of them.
While I can see that this was done for the sake of efficiency, it did make the discussion a little disjointed.
Concerns were raised over the unevenness of openness around the world and between publicly and privately funded institutions.
It was suggested that CODATA should work to achieve greater consistency through an advocacy programme (it did have a hand in the GEOSS principles).
There were also some discussions about the different meanings of ‘free’ (gratis, or ‘free from cost’, versus libre, or ‘free from restriction’) and parallel issues with openness (‘open for access’ versus ‘open to participation’).
What is wrong with charging a nominal fee for data, in order to keep the machinery turning?
And shouldn't the whole legal process be made open and transparent, and not just the final reports?
Chan provided a good example of economic drivers for collaboration.
One of the motivations behind the Group on Earth Observation (GEO) came from government auditors asking, ‘Other countries are sending up satellites, so do we really need to send up our own?’ If the satellites were duplicating effort that would be a searching question, but by co-ordinating them, GEO could give each satellite a unique role that justified its budget.
These and many other discussions brought us to lunchtime, after which it was time for two more blocks of five parallel tracks.
Three of the sessions in the first block had a disciplinary focus, and one was on computational infrastructure.
I, however, rejoined the data publication and citation track.
Linking Data and Documents: Deepening the Scholarly Record Alex Ball, DCC/UKOLN, University of Bath I kicked off the session by laying out some of the most pressing challenges facing researchers as they cite datasets, and suggested solutions drawn from the guide How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications, published by the Digital Curation Centre [30].
In particular, I looked at citation metadata, microattribution approaches, citing data at the right granularity, where to put data citations/references within a paper, and how to cite dynamic datasets.
Daniel Cohen, Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI), The National Academies I was followed by Daniel Cohen, who examined the functions that data citations need to perform, and compared and contrasted them with the functions performed by citations of textual works.
Among the functions he discussed were giving the location of the dataset, properly identifying it, eliminating confusion over which data were used, establishing equivalence between datasets cited in different works, providing assurances about the provenance and integrity of data, specifying the relationships between data and other objects, making data discoverable, ensuring data are reliable and trustworthy, fairly attributing credit for data to the right actors, respecting intellectual property, and providing an audit trail within research.
IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Elsevier IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg's second presentation in this track tackled the thorny issue of supplemental data, that is, material additional to a journal article that does not form part of the version of record, but which is hosted online by the publisher to support the article.
This facility is an aid to scientific integrity, as without the constraints of the print medium there is no temptation to simplify tables or tweak figures, for example, the better to convey their meaning on the page.
On the other hand, the supplemental data area can be something of a dumping ground: the relative significance of the files is not explicit, the files are not easily discoverable and neither are they properly curated.
Editors are generally in favour of supplemental files but publishers are increasingly hostile.
Cell put a limit on the number of files that could be submitted, while the Journal of Neuroscience banned them altogether.
Various groups have looked at the issue over the years, with one of the most recent being the NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Project [31].
This project is producing a Recommended Practices document in two parts: one on business practices, roles and responsibilities, and one on technical matters such as metadata provision, identifiers and preservation.
Natalia Manola, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens The EU-funded Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe (OpenAIRE) Project ran for 3 years from December 2009, with the aim of providing a helpdesk and national Open Access Liaison Offices to support researchers depositing publications, establishing a pan-European e-print repository network, and explore how datasets might be archived in parallel with publication [32].
Natalia Manola reported on its sister project, OpenAIREplus, which started in 2011 with the aim of providing a cross-linking service between scholarly publications and research datasets.
Metadata about publications and datasets are being added to a Current Research Information System (CRIS) and surfaced through the OpenAIRE Hub.
The project is active in the Research Data Alliance [33] via the International Collaboration on Research Data Infrastructure (iCORDI) [34].
Giri Palanisamy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) hosts four major data archives and several smaller ones, in cooperation with the US Department of Energy and NASA.
The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) and Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) for Biogeochemical Dynamics both assign one DOI per collection and never delete data.
Sample data citations are provided.
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Data Archive holds data from a mix of permanent monitoring stations, mobile sites and aircraft.
Some of its holdings are on a terabyte scale; users tend not to download these, but rather get the archive to run the analysis so all the users have to download are the results.
This if nothing else is a good argument for DOIs to point to landing pages rather than the datasets directly.
ORNL is now turning its attention to impact metrics, and is hoping to work with publishers to get evidence of datasets being cited in the literature.
The final block for the day included sessions on topics such a biological science collections, data preservation and dissemination.
I started off in a session discussing data journals in the age of data-intensive research, but then decided to switch to a session on mass collaboration.
Mass Collaboration Data Projects and Policies Mikel Maron, GroundTruth Initiative OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a initiative to create an free and unrestricted global map through the efforts of volunteers [35].
The data primarily come from GPS devices tracking the routes taken by volunteers, and manual traces of satellite images.
Mikel Maron gave several examples where OSM has outdone official and commercial maps: Kibera is a Kenyan slum that had not been mapped before OSM, and when an earthquake hit Port-au-Prince in 2010, OSM rapidly created a highly detailed map of the affected area that was heavily used by the relief effort.
OSM uses a wiki methodology of iterative improvement, version control, and post-hoc quality control rather than moderation.
It has a philosophy that low quality data is better than no data at all, because the low quality data will be improved if people care about it enough.
One of its strengths is that it has kept things simple: a straightforward, restful API; a single database instead of many collections; a clear project scope; a simple XML format; and folksonomic tagging instead of restrictive schemas.
As a community effort, most decisions are made through collective discussion.
Kerstin Lehnert, Columbia University Kerstin Lehnert argued that, ideally, physical samples and specimens should be available on the Internet just like digital data, so they can be discovered, identified, accessed and cited in a reliable way.
The obvious way to achieve this would be to agree a standard form of catalogue record that could act as the digital surrogate, but there is no universally accepted metadata profile for this.
The System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR) is seeking to change all this [36].
It operates the registry for the International Geo Sample Number (IGSN), an identifier scheme for Earth Science samples.
The metadata collected include descriptions of the sample, where and how it was collected, where it is held and if applicable how it relates to other samples.
These records are available through the Handle system, so they can be referenced in publications, included in a dataset’s DataCite record, and so on.
SESAR is now working on broadening participation and moving to a scalable, distributed architecture.
Te-En Lin, Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute It may not sound the most engaging of topics, but Te-En Lin defied expectations with a fascinating and entertaining talk on monitoring roadkill in Taiwan.
Taiwan is relatively small but has many cars, and between 1995 and 2006 around 13,000 incidents of roadkill were reported in Yangmingshan National Park alone.
The Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute wanted to collect more data about the animals being killed and in 2009 decided to try a citizen science model.
As digital cameras and smartphones are ubiquitous, the Institute trained and encouraged volunteers to send in photos of roadkill, but maintaining a connection with the volunteers was difficult and the initiative didn’t take off.
The next idea was to set up a Facebook page, as over half the population use it (though it was blocked from the Institute’s computers).
People are asked to post a picture of the roadkill along with when and where the photo was taken; the location can be given as GPS coordinates, a postal address, a utility pole serial number, a road/mileage sign, or by pinning the location on Google Maps.
Since the page was set up in August 2011, 984 people have contributed, and there have been 2078 photos of reptiles alone.
While the species can be identified from just the photo in most cases, in some it can’t so people are now asked to send in the specimens, which they can do for free through the post or at a convenience store.
Most of these specimens have been preserved in alcohol, but some need to be kept dry and flat and have therefore been laminated.
While successful, this method is far from perfect.
A lot of time is wasted on transferring data out of Facebook into a local database, and on chasing up incomplete submissions.
Further, it is tough work supporting so many positioning methods.
Therefore, as a more automated alternative there is now a smartphone application for submitting observations.
The data may be viewed on the Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network Web site [37].
Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Mike Linksvayer took a look at the characteristics and policy options of mass collaboration projects.
On the matter of permissions and restriction, such projects work best when they are as open as possible and use common licensing terms.
Privacy, security, integrity, transparency, replicability and modifiability are all important factors.
Linksvayer argued that public domain dedications and copyleft licences are good for different purposes, but methods relating to intellectual property are a poor substitute for less legalistic forms of regulation.
He also noted the compatibility issues with copyleft licences and the rather restrictive nature of non-commercial and no-derivatives licences.
The session concluded with the speakers forming a panel and taking questions.
Puneet Kishor of Creative Commons pointed out that scientists only seem to start caring about their rights over data when someone suggests they give them up.
Tracey Lauriault of Carleton University, in reply to Linksvayer’s presentation, noted that intellectual property legislation is actually one of the tools being used to protect Inuit people and their lands being exploited by oil and diamond prospectors.
With that, the second day concluded, and we had about an hour to freshen up before being bussed into the beating heart of Taipei for the conference dinner.
The food was served in a long succession of modest courses, and was accompanied by a long succession of modest speeches, which I suppose was appropriate.
For reasons involving an air conditioning unit and some ear plugs I awoke later than planned the following morning.
I therefore missed David Carlson’s keynote speech on the International Polar Year 2007/2008, and instead went to one of the five parallel sessions on offer.
Topics included solar power, astronomy, earth and environment, and knowledge management, but I decided to go to the last session in the data citation track.
Roundtable on Data Citation and Practices This session was dedicated to the forthcoming white paper being written by CODATA’s Data Citation Standards and Practices Task Group.
The authors took it in turns to give a brief summary of the chapter they were writing and invite comments and questions from the delegates.
The report deals with the importance of data citation, current practice, emerging principles, standards, tools and infrastructure, social challenges and research questions.
The topic that excited the most discussion was without doubt the emerging principles.
A particularly vexing issue concerned the appropriate level at which to identify and reference datasets.
While it seems perfectly reasonable to be guided by the nature of the data and pick logically complete datasets, there is an argument for keeping a strong link between referencing and attribution by identifying sets of data with uniform authorship.
There was general disapproval of manufacturing different citations for different queries made on large, multidimensional datasets; we were reminded that the fine detail about which data have been used would more usefully be included in the in-text citation than the bibliographic reference.
The next block of sessions was dominated by environmental themes, but to get an idea of the broad range of CODATA activities I attended the session on Task Groups.
CODATA Task Groups The CODATA Task Groups, it seems, are responsible for many of the tangible outcomes and achievements of the organisation.
This year, nine Task Groups were applying for renewal and there were five proposals for new Task Groups.
The existing groups were asked to give an update on what they had achieved in the past two years, and their plans for the next.
Data at Risk: This group is concerned with rescuing non-digital data (e.g.
old ships’ log books) and digitising them so they may be added to longitudinal datasets, for example.
People can report at-risk data online [38], and the group is forming an international collaboration with UNESCO and OECD.
One of the big challenges is getting greater involvement from developing countries.
Data Citation Standards and Practices: This group held a major symposium in 2011 and, as mentioned above, is writing a white paper due for publication in March 2013.
Exchangeable Materials Data Representation to Support Scientific Research and Education: This group had been revived in 2010 partly in response to the Materials Genome Initiative in the US.
A workshop had been held in China, and the group planned to set up an online registry of materials databases and agree an international standard metadata profile.
Fundamental Physical Constants: This group has maintained the official list of fundamental constants and conversions since 1969.
The table is updated every four years, with the next due in 2013, and this time a significant change is on the cards.
There is a proposal to  fix the value of certain fundamental constants, meaning that the existing definitions of SI units would be discarded in favour of relationships to these constants.
One delegate later joked that fixing the value of empirical constants for all time proved that CODATA was the most powerful organisation in the universe.
Global Information Commons for Science Initiative: This group was active in COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, and plans to get involved with the second Global Thematic Conference on the Knowledge Commons in January 2014.
Preservation of and Access to Scientific and Technical Data in Developing Countries: This group works with developing countries to promote a deeper understanding of data issues and advance the adoption of standards.
It has held workshops with the Science Council of Asia, the Chinese Association for Science and Technology and the Asian Pacific Network, and helped with the foundation of China’s Geomuseum.
Earth and Space Science Data Interoperability: This group has been particularly active in the Commonwealth of Independent States in promoting the collection of multidisciplinary GIS data, setting up a geomagnetic data centre and translating the World Atlas of Earth’s Magnetic Field for 1500-2010 into Russian.
More data products, Web resources and improvements are planned.
Proposed Groups Following on from these presentations, the proposed groups had to demonstrate that they had useful and achievable goals and could attract enough members to be viable.
Advancing Informatics for Microbiology: This group would promote the access and use of microbial data through standards, a microbial resource information system, training courses, conferences, and a cloud-based collaboration platform.
Dealing with Data of Complexity, Uncertainty and Bias in Paradigm Shifting Areas: This group would look at ways of improving predictive models and algorithms using health and disaster data.
Knowledge Transformation in Biomedical Sciences (KnoTS): This group would identify key issues and stakeholder needs in Biomedical Sciences, and provide recommendations for technical solutions and policy with a focus on existing standards, knowledge sharing and protection.
Linked Open Data for Global Disaster Risk Research: This group would develop an integrated historical disaster data service for archivists and researchers.
The data would come from earth observation, hydrology, meteorology, government reports and financial statistics.
Octopus: Mining Space and Terrestrial Data for Improved Weather, Climate and Agriculture Predictions: The subtitle of this group tells you all you need to know, really.
The group expects to deliver data products, a framework for deriving these products, and of course peer-reviewed publications.
After lunch, the final block of parallel sessions dealt with access to data in developing countries, earth observation systems, disaster databases and a strategic vision for CODATA.
I thought I'd catch the second half of the data mining track.
Data Mining Kassim Mwitondi, Sheffield Hallam University Sunspot activity follows an approximate 11-year cycle.
The intensity of each cycle is different, but it is possible to partition the cycles into high and low intensity groups.
Kassim Mwitondi described how data mining techniques were used to detect patterns in the intensity curves of the 23 cycles on record, and in particular determine whether one could predict the whole of the intensity curve from just the first few months.
The team found that patterns from the first three years of a cycle could indeed be used to predict the peak intensity of the cycle.
The general approach could, Mwitondi believes, be adapted to many other domains and domain partitioning methods.
Hsuan-Chih Wang, Science & Technology Policy Research and Information Center, National Applied Research Laboratories, Taiwan Hsuan-Chih Wang told how a new knowledge management system was designed for and implemented at the Science & Technology Policy Research and Information Center in Taiwan.
The final system used Sharepoint as a collaboration platform, on top of which were built knowledge management tools and resources (e.g.
custom file management tools, a set of frequently asked questions, personal and corporate portals), a project management tool supporting Gantt charts and checkpoints, and a document annotation tool.
There were supposed to be three other talks in this session, but neither of the two speakers involved could make it.
I was just about to pack up and find another session when the chair, John Helliwell of the International Union of Crystallographers, invited me up to participate in a panel.
We had a free-ranging discussion on the challenges of data mining, which slowly morphed into a discussion on the poor but improving state of research data management worldwide.
The Importance of Data for Future Earth The penultimate plenary session was a panel chaired by Robert Chen, CIESIN, Columbia University.
Before handing over to the panellists, Chen reflected on how Hurricane Sandy, which was wreaking havoc along the USA’s east coast at the time, was also bringing home the importance of climate change issues.
Jane Hunter, University of Queensland Jane Hunter listed several global issues in which scientific data play an important role: climate change, clean energy, disaster risk reduction, global pandemics and food security.
In each case a cycle is formed: the data are used to generate models, through which we come to an understanding of the phenomena involved.
This understanding leads to decisions which influence policies and public funding; the outcomes of these changes generate further data.
As an example, the eReefs Project is looking at the negative impacts of agriculture on coral reefs in Queensland [39].
The effect of management actions on various indicators of environmental quality have been measured and modelled.
The models have been turned into a Web application that lets members of the public run their own simulations and see the effect of certain actions on, for example, maps of water quality.
Hunter saw the following as major challenges: global open access to politically sensitive data, good visualisations of data quality, improved data correlation services, opening online models to non-experts, real-time analysis and monitoring, multidimensional visualisations, fully exploiting the power of linked open data, ensuring citations of large-scale, collaborative, dynamic databases provide fair attribution, and providing multilingual search and presentation interfaces.
David Carlson, UNAVCO David Carlson argued that free and open access to data is key to progress.
The fundamental limiting factor on the usefulness of data will always be the amount of human effort that can be allocated to managing and curating it.
He reiterated the point that researchers have to build in good data curation right from the start, and encouraged them to practise it in demonstrator projects before embarking on anything large-scale: they need to know how it will work at the point they write their proposal.
Discussion There were, as ever, interesting points raised in the subsequent discussion.
A delegate from Germany suggested that ‘citizen sensor’ was a more accurate term to use than ‘citizen science’; Carlson came back with ‘community monitoring’ but others pointed out that citizen science was broader than this: Galaxy Zoo, for example, used volunteer effort to categorise (rather than collect) images.
There was a reminder of the wealth of born-analogue data that might be useful: old holiday videos might contain interesting biodiversity data, but the challenge is discovering and extracting such information.
Another delegate expressed frustration that if we have trouble convincing top politicians of scientifically proven conclusions, what hope is there of reaching everyone else?
The answer came back that shouting louder doesn't work: scientists have to overcome people’s fears when communicating their results.
This implies a conversation rather than a broadcast model.
It would also help to get people while they’re young, and teach science in a practical and data-driven way in schools.
Closing Ceremony The conference ended with the usual rounds of thanks to those who worked so hard to make it a success.
Presentations were made to outgoing Secretary-General Robert Chen, and to the winner of the best poster award, Anatoly Soloviev.
Honourable mentions from the poster judges went to Li-Chin Lee, Punit Kaur and Akiyo Yatagai.
Conclusion This was my first time at a CODATA conference, and I cannot but admire the stamina of the delegates who come back year after year.
They pack a lot into three days, which makes the experience fascinating and stimulating, but also exhausting and frustrating – with five sessions running at once most of the time, you can’t help but miss most of it.
The thing that really struck me was the palpable sense of community that had built up around this conference, and the obvious warmth of friendship, never mind professional respect, that exists between the regulars.
Before I attended the conference, I must admit to being a bit hazy about what CODATA actually does, and now that I know, I am rather impressed both by its accomplishments and its ambitions for the future.
The conference programme has been given its own Web site, containing abstracts, some full papers and presentations, and more information about authors and speakers [40].
The next CODATA conference will be held in 2014 in India.
References GeoMapApp Web site http://www.geomapapp.org/ United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, “What is the International Strategy?” http://www.unisdr.org/who-we-are/international-strategy-for-disaster-reduction United Nations Millennium Development Goals Web site http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ Digital Taiwan Web site http://culture.teldap.tw/culture/ CAS@Home Web site http://casathome.ihep.ac.cn/ Creative Commons, “4.0” http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0 Canadian Government, “The 2011 Canadian Research Data Summit” http://rds-sdr.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/events/data_summit_2011/ Survey Research Data Archive Web site https://srda.sinica.edu.tw/ White House, “Materials Genome Initiative” http://www.whitehouse.gov/mgi European Committee for Standardization, “CEN Workshop on Economics and Logistics of Standards compliant Schemas and ontologies for Interoperability – Engineering Material Data (WS/ELSSI-EMD)” http://www.cen.eu/cen/Sectors/Sectors/ISSS/Activity/Pages/WS-ELSSI.aspx European Committee for Standardization, “SERES – Standards for Electronic Reporting in the Engineering Sector” http://www.cen.eu/cen/Sectors/Sectors/ISSS/Activity/Pages/SERES.aspx Twentieth Century in Paint Project Web site http://www.20thcpaint.org/ CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Web site http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ Materials Bank Web site http://www.matbank.org/engMain.do Microbiology of the Built Environment Network (microBEnet) Web site http://www.microbe.net/ Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) Web site http://camera.calit2.net/ Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), issue 2, Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), Magenta Book CCSDS 650.0-M-2, June 2012 http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0m2.pdf Public Knowledge Project Web site http://pkp.sfu.ca/ Islandora Web site http://islandora.ca/ GeoBrain Web site http://geobrain.laits.gmu.edu/ Digital Lin Chao Geomuseum Web site http://www.geomuseum.cn/ Ezgo Web site http://ezgo.westart.tw/ PeoPo (People Post) Web site http://www.peopo.org/ OpenFoundry Web site http://www.openfoundry.org/ Earth System Science Data Web site http://www.earth-system-science-data.net/ Article of the Future Web site http://www.articleofthefuture.com/ Geoscience Data Journal Web site http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2049-6060 PREPARDE (Peer REview for Publication and Accreditation of Research data in the Earth sciences) Project Web site http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/preparde Group on Earth Observation, “GEO Data Sharing Principles Implementation” http://www.earthobservations.org/geoss_dsp.shtml Alex Ball and Monica Duke.
How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications.
Digital Curation Centre: 2011. http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/cite-datasets NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Project Web site http://www.niso.org/workrooms/supplemental Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe (OpenAIRE) Project Web site http://www.openaire.eu/ Research Data Alliance Web site http://rd-alliance.org/ International Collaboration on Research Data Infrastructure (iCORDI) Web site http://www.icordi.eu/ OpenStreetMap Web site http://www.openstreetmap.org/ System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR) Web site http://www.geosamples.org/ Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network Web site http://roadkilled.biota.biodiv.tw/ CODATA Data at Risk Task Group, “Submit a dataset description” http://ibiblio.org/data-at-risk/contribution Great Barrier Reef Foundation, “eReefs” http://www.barrierreef.org/OurProjects/eReefs.aspx Program of the 23rd International CODATA Conference http://codata2012.tw/ Author Details Alex Ball Institutional Support Officer/Research Officer DCC/UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.ball@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~ab318/ Alex Ball is a Research Officer working in the field of digital curation and research data management, and an Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre.
His interests include Engineering research data, Web technologies and preservation, scientific metadata, data citation and the intellectual property aspects of research data.
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Adapting VuFind as a Front-end to a Commercial Discovery System Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Adapting VuFind as a Front-end to a Commercial Discovery System Buzz data software wiki api database restful usability archives metadata identifier repositories oai-pmh cataloguing opac marc ejournal php mysql openurl lucene ruby ajax solr authentication standards sfx vufind Citation BibTex RIS Graham Seaman describes the adaptation of an open source discovery tool, VuFind, to local needs, discusses the decisions which needed to be made in the process, and considers the implications of this process for future library discovery systems.
VuFind is an open source discovery system originally created by Villanova University near Philadelphia [1] and now supported by Villanova with the participation in development of libraries around the world.
It was one of the first next-generation library discovery systems in the world, made possible by the open source Solr/Lucene text indexing and search system which lies at the heart of VuFind (Solr also underlies several of the current commercial offerings, including Serials Solutions' Summon and ExLibris' Primo).
The first wave of adopters of VuFind (the National Library of Australia, Minnesota State Colleges [2], Western Michigan [3] and Villanova itself in 2008) were therefore among the first users of next-generation discovery systems anywhere.
For library patrons the prominent features were the modern interface, contrasted with the older proprietary OPAC interfaces that had often tended to stagnate; the use of faceted search to apply post-filtering to a large number of results ranked by relevancy, in comparison with the pre-filtered exact matches of the OPAC [4][5] and consequently a general privileging of exploratory search over lookup search [6] and the access to data from multiple sources merged within the VuFind index.
Between 2008 and early 2012, the use of next-generation discovery systems became more commonplace.
Proprietary offerings such as Summon, Primo, EBSCO Discovery, and Worldcat Local all have broadly similar interfaces (and in fact the Summon development team includes the original primary developer of VuFind).
VuFind has been joined by Blacklight as a second open-source system providing similar features but based on different technology (Ruby and Rails, instead of PHP).
VuFind is therefore no longer distinguished by its interface or by its ability to pool data from multiple sources, and many users are already familiar with such features.
In addition the proprietary systems may have access to data beyond that under library control, allowing them to add metadata from journal suppliers to their pool of indexed data and so obviate the need for federated search.
VuFind and Blacklight, however, are still distinguished by the ease of adaptation to local needs which separates free software from proprietary software.
The primary aspect of this is the ability to control what is indexed and how.
But it also includes the ability to act as front end for a range of services and so provide a single interface for users which is otherwise only possible if all software is purchased from a single supplier.
These services may even include the new proprietary discovery systems: VuFind has provided a Summon interface from the start.
As time has gone by the typical contributions to VuFind from developers in other libraries later to include Royal Holloway, University of London have been interfaces to new services.
It was this secondary aspect of VuFind that drove the interest of Royal Holloway Library in its potential use.
Royal Holloway Library Software In 2009 Royal Holloway had installed the open source application Xerxes as a front end to the ExLibris Metalib federated search tool.
This had been a success, giving the Library an improved user interface, the flexibility to easily add extra pages and minor functions, and above all positive user feedback.
The Metalib API provided by Ex-Libris was stable and the system needed virtually no maintenance.
Xerxes was upgraded from one minor version to the next with minimal effort [7].
However, by early April of 2010 the decision had been taken to move away from federated search and to combine catalogue and electronic resource discovery using a single proprietary discovery service.
Summon from Serials Solutions was adopted, with the decision made from the start to upload local catalogue data into Summon.
Shortly afterwards Summon also began to harvest both the Royal Holloway Institutional Repository and the Archives catalogue using OAI-PMH.
At the start of the 2010 Academic year Summon was launched on the library front page as the main discovery service for both catalogue, repository and archive items, and journal articles.
In spite of problems with linking to search results from some suppliers, the article discovery itself worked well enough to end use of Metalib by the following summer on the assumption that the linking problems would eventually be resolved.
However, article discovery was not the whole story.
Rather than reducing the number of interfaces library users had to learn which was part of the intention in aggregating the data into a single discovery tool we had actually increased them.
Firstly, Summon had replaced the Metalib search function, but not the resource details and subject lists previously maintained in Xerxes/Metalib.
A quick solution to this problem was to set up a template-based wiki (using Semantic Mediawiki) which would allow the automatic import of resource and subject lists from Metalib while they were still available.
The wiki has performed well and has been reasonably straightforward to maintain, but has a noticeably different interface from the other Library applications.
Secondly, Summon had not replaced all the functions of the Library OPAC (Aleph, from ExLibris).
Summon does not include patron management features such as loans renewal or hold requests.
For these, users still had to log in to the Library Catalogue.
Summon is also not configurable enough to provide all the searches available in the OPAC: browse by Dewey number, or search by content type for CDs, for example.
Thirdly, there was still a strong dependence on SFX for openUrl resolution.
Many results in Summon would lead not directly to the item, but to SFX.
SFX was also the only Library tool for alphabetic listing of journals or search by journal title combined with subscription dates and embargoes for each source.
And finally, we had some problems entirely of our own making.
Initially, for example, we had our exam papers entered in the catalogue but stored in the Institutional Repository.
A search in Summon for an exam paper would return a link to the catalogue.
This would in turn present a link to SFX, and from SFX the user would arrive at the Repository where the fact that they were not previously logged in would cause their search details to be lost, and they would be left unceremoniously at the Repository front page.
The obvious answer to problems of this kind was to change the catalogue data: but the work involved and the long lead time in uploading changes to Summon made it urgent for us to find other quick, if temporary, ways round such problems.
We had previously considered using VuFind as a modern front-end to catalogue, repository and archive, importing data into a Solr index and using VuFind for patron management through the Aleph API.
Now we began to wonder if we could use it instead as a front-end to Summon.
That would allow us to make our own local changes to functions, as well as potentially providing a single point for users to access all our applications.
Work began on this approach in February 2011.
Requirements When Royal Holloway began its work with VuFind, we identified a list of areas on which we would need to concentrate: The ILS Driver VuFind includes drivers for a range of Library Management Systems, including Aleph.
However, the drivers did not at that time support some of the patron management features we needed, including holds, and the Aleph driver did not support either ExLibris PDS authentication for users or the recent ExLibris RESTful API.
The Summon Interface The most common use of VuFind with Summon is to use the Solr index for local catalogue material and the Summon interface for e-resource discovery.
In the Villanova instance of VuFind, the local search results are referred to as "Books and More", and the Summon-based search results as “Articles and More”; the two searches can be run in parallel, but the results cannot be merged.
We had almost no need for the Solr interface at all, and needed to convert the Summon interface from an optional secondary search to the default search.
This meant that local records returned by Summon had to be linked back their original sources in our catalogue, archive, or repository.
No Integration with SFX The lack of integration with our OpenURL resolver, SFX, was another area for attention.
Summon results would typically return a link to SFX which would need to be followed before the user could select a source for an article.
In some cases, where electronic resources had been entered in our catalogue, Summon would provide a link to the catalogue, which would in turn provide a link to SFX.
The number of steps was excessive.
A-Z Journal Listing The lack of any built-in integration with the SFX journal listing service represented another aspect for consideration.
SFX does allow its journal A to Z list to be incorporated into other products as a frame (as had previously been done with Xerxes), but without the ability to alter its appearance or functionality in any way.
No Integration with e-Resources Listing Wiki The lack of any integration with the new E-resources listing wiki, the local replacement for the E-resource listings from Metalib, also required attention.
Additional Search Options We also needed to compensate for the loss of the search options provided by our OPAC which were missing in Summon.
Searches for DVDs or Audio materials, for example, had been replaced by a material-type search in Summon, whereas the browse by Dewey subject classification had no effective replacement.
Branding Finally,  we also needed  to bring the branding of the discovery system in line with general University and Library web branding.
Figure 1: Data sources to be integrated in Vufind Addressing the Requirements Some of these requirements were much easier to satisfy than others.
VuFind provides a selection of ‘themes’ which determine its appearance and which can be easily overridden and extended in part or whole to match local needs.
The branding requirement could therefore be easily met by the stock VuFind implementation.
Some of the requirements needed changes to the core functions of VuFind, while others required adding extra but self-contained functionality.
To minimise future support problems, we needed to make sure that where we made additions these could be fed back into the main VuFind development path, and thus become supported by the whole pool of VuFind developers.
Like many other open source projects, VuFind is available in three forms.
Development work is done through a version control system, and the current main-line development version of the application (commonly known as the ’trunk’) can be downloaded and used directly, though this often implies that the users are planning to be involved with development work themselves.
Efforts are made to ensure that the trunk is always fully functional, but this may not be guaranteed.
At specific times usually after important new functions have been added to the trunk further additions to the trunk are suspended, and after testing a copy of the trunk is packaged as a formal numbered ’release’.
VuFind was at release 1.0 when we began and is now nearing release 1.3.
This is the closest to the proprietary model of distribution, and most users will start by installing a numbered release, and periodically updating their software as each release becomes available.
The biggest difference here is that there is no pressure applied on users to update as there is with proprietary software, so the temptation is to let updates slide until the point is reached where an update becomes a major piece of work.
Finally, many projects have a second version controlled strand which includes experimental work on the next major version VuFind 2.0 in this case.
This version is unlikely to be fully functional, especially in the early stages.
However, it may be possible to include the flexibility to deal with locally required features more easily in an experimental branch than in the main trunk.
In fact, one of the main goals of VuFind 2.0 is to make it easier to maintain local variations across future minor releases.
As we needed to make changes to the core VuFind system using a fixed release was not an option in our case.
We had a deadline of four months to have our new system ready for testing, making it impractical to work on a completely new, speculative, major version of the system.
The remaining choice was to work with the live trunk.
Some other libraries which have done this have simply diverged from the standard VuFind, treating it purely as a starting point for their own systems (most notably MnPals+ [2]).
Following this approach depends on either being willing to freeze the system after initial development without adding new features, or on having a pool of developers to continue work.
Freezing the system implies that the locally developed version will fall behind standard VuFind, which is being steadily improved.
This may not be a problem if the software is being used purely to fill a short term gap.
In the case of Royal Holloway, the only developer available to support VuFind was on a fixed-term contract.
The ideal situation would therefore be to feed local developments back into the main development trunk, where they could be supported and improved on by the entire VuFind team, and at the end of the process move back to a stable release which incorporated the local changes but did not need further local development work.
This was what was attempted, with varying degrees of success, as documented below.
The Creation of LibrarySearch VuFind is a relatively modular system, so in many cases changes can be contained in small areas, whether by extending single classes or by adding self-contained new modules.
Our problems arose where we needed changes which were not self-contained and which conflicted with the requirements of other VuFind users.
We have branded our local instance of VuFind as ‘LibrarySearch’, and in what follows that name is used to distinguish our local instance from the generic VuFind.
The LMS Driver VuFind communicates with Library Management Systems through drivers.
There is a different driver for each LMS, implementing a common interface; each driver is typically one class, in a single file.
We started to work with VuFind before holds and recalls were fully supported by the system, and so although there was already an Aleph driver it did not have all the features we needed.
It also communicated with Ex Libris’s older ‘X-server’ API rather than the newer RESTful interface.
We added the features we needed, later rewriting them to match the standard VuFind interface for holds and recalls as those were defined.
The original driver class was converted into a utility class with two child classes: one for the X-Server API, and one for the RESTful interface (which not all Aleph customers have access to).
Unfortunately this work was done in parallel with development of another Aleph driver at a Czech library which took a completely different approach, loading Aleph configuration files to allow more flexible configuration.
The differing gaps in coverage meant that neither version was an obvious automatic replacement for the original driver, while neither library had the time available to fully merge the two.
The unfortunate result was that the original version remains the default one.
However, as the driver is quite self-contained this is not a maintenance problem for us, though it implies extra work for future potential VuFind/Aleph users.
Figure 2: Circulation data from the LMS Driver The end result of the driver work is that our patrons can log in to LibrarySearch using the ExLibris PDS system, and once logged in can use VuFind to see their loans, request holds on items out on loan, and book short loans.
Logged in users also have the standard VuFind functionality of viewing their saved items and searches.
OpenURLs Search results which returned an openURL would originally lead the user back to our openURL resolver, SFX.
In addition to the two extra steps needed to reach a resource (opening SFX and then selecting a link from SFX) this meant that users were also presented with an additional interface with a very different appearance in the middle of their search.
We overcame this by using AJAX to bring the SFX results into VuFind itself, creating a 'resolver driver' modelled on the LMS drivers.
As we had access to 360Link for evaluation we added a 360Link driver to test our ability to swap between resolver drivers.
The process was very straightforward and the code submitted back to VuFind.
It is now part of the standard distribution, and yet another driver has since been added by a German library.
The process worked well, removing the need for us to maintain this particular part of the code.
Figure 3: In-place expansion of SFX link E-journals, Recent Acquisitions and E-resources One feature missing from both Summon and VuFind was indices of E-Resources and E-journals, for which we had previously used ExLibris’ Metalib (now replaced by our Eresources wiki) and SFX respectively.
SFX does allow its A-Z listing to be pulled into external applications, but as a frame with no control over look-and-feel.
We decided to replicate the SFX function within VuFind, but using data taken directly from SFX.
A task was set up to copy the relevant journal data from SFX and e-resource data from the wiki into the LibrarySearch mysql database nightly.
An additional request was for LibrarySearch to display recent library acquisitions.
Rather than pulling this information live from Aleph using the LMS driver, we decided to import this data into the local database in the same way.
The internal structure of VuFind allows new self-contained modules to be added in a very straightforward way.
We added three such modules, one for the E-journal index, one for recent acquisitions, and one for the E-resources index.
These were not fed back to the VuFind team as they were felt to be of local interest only and raised no maintenance problems.
Search results from the E-journal index return an OpenURL.
This meant that the AJAX resolver driver we had already created could be used to expand the result via SFX and so provide a direct link to the journal.
Search results from the recent acquisitions module return an author name and catalogue number; these are used to generate a Summon author name search or a search for the exact item.
In both these cases the user stays within LibrarySearch until accessing the item itself.
The E-resources index was more complex: the results of the search could not be a direct link to the resource, as part of the function of the wiki was to provide information on login conditions for each resource and to manipulate the login address in various ways.
Search results therefore provided a link to the relevant wiki page, which in turn linked to actual resource.
The Library Liaison team felt that the additional step required negated any advantages from having the search incorporated within LibrarySearch, and the module was removed to be replaced by a simple link to the wiki.
Catalogue Browsing VuFind includes a ‘browse’ module which allows users to browse the catalogue using catalogue data fields (loaded into Solr) as facets: we experimented with Author, Title, Topic, Classmark, Location and Period, but on the whole found this to be one of the less successful parts of LibrarySearch.
The first problem was with the derivation of the facet values from the catalogue Marc data.
In testing, students commented on the absurdity and overlapping nature of both location and period subdivisions.
These were dropped.
The second problem was in connecting the catalogue-derived browse data in VuFind with the corresponding items found by a Summon search.
Where there were few items in a category, the connection was at first made by requesting a set of items from Summon using the boolean ‘OR’ of a series of catalogue IDs.
Shortly before the launch of LibrarySearch in June 2011 the ability to logically OR IDs disappeared from the Summon API, and thereafter this method could only be used for single items.
Instead, the search was repeated using the corresponding terms in Summon.
This gave a generally reasonable result, though the number of results returned could be quite different.
The one option for which this approach failed was (Dewey) classmark.
Broad classes such as 500 would work well; narrow subdivisions such as 500.2094021 would (correctly) return few items, which Summon would then attempt to bulk out by adding items with similar contents.
Sorting the resulting list would often give a result page without a single item with the correct classification.
With some regret, we removed the option to browse by classmark.
The browse options which remained, however, were almost completely standard VuFind functions and raised no issues of maintenance.
Summon as Primary Search By far the biggest changes needed were to persuade VuFind to work with Summon as its primary search engine.
The VuFind 1.x series was built around Solr as its default engine, and when we started to work with it the Summon section was simply a separate module.
Continuing with this approach for us would have meant duplicating many of the features in the Solr-based code: we wanted to treat records derived from Summon in the same way as the mainstream system treated records derived from Solr, and preferred reusing existing code to writing our own from scratch.
Luckily shortly after we had started with this approach the VuFind trunk began to include ‘RecordDrivers’ tailored to records from different sources: the idea being that the system could treat Records from all sources in the same way, as long as it knew the correct RecordDriver to use to handle the particular idiosyncracies of each source of Records.
Figure 4: Summon Search results displayed in Vufind While a good match in theory, the RecordDriver approach was too new to have been fully worked out.
In practice, we found that assumptions that related only to Solr had been built in almost universally to the code, and that instead of being able to make changes in one self contained area of the code, or to override code using inheritance methods, we were making minor changes almost everywhere in the system.
As the project proceeded, it was subject to changes occurring in the data it was using.
In June 2011 modifications were made to the format of Summon record identifiers which we had mistakenly assumed were stable.
We wrote a quick series of patches to allow for the change.
In November 2011 Summon began to replace openURLs with encrypted ’direct links’, with links to all items (including our own catalogue records) routed back through a Serials Solutions’ computer.
This threatened to stop our customised link handling for local resources from working, as well as blocking our openURL module.
Again, we incorporated a quick workaround for this in our Summon driver.
The end result was that we had a system with scattered code changes (some developed in a reactive mode without forward planning) which could not easily be reintegrated with mainstream VuFind.
This is not a fatal problem, but does make it harder than it would otherwise be to incorporate desirable new features as they are added to the VuFind trunk.
Since development was not done in isolation, other VuFind developers have been well aware of the problems, as well as perceiving a need to allow VuFind to work with a range of discovery back-ends other than Solr and Summon.
The forthcoming VuFind 2.0 will allow for this.
Testing and Launch Intensive testing was done with a small group of undergraduate and postgraduate library users, walking through a defined set of tasks and commenting on aspects they found straightforward, difficult, or confusing.
All were positive about the overall application; all had suggestions for improvement.
This testing approach meant that the suggestions for improvement were concrete enough to be implemented before or shortly after launch.
LibrarySearch was launched as our new discovery tool, replacing the native Summon front-end on our library front page, at the beginning of the quiet period at the end of the Summer term.
The next month was used to make minor corrections, and when the new cohort of students arrived for the next academic year, LibrarySearch was already established.
Results and Conclusions As with any project of this size, the results have been mixed.
On the positive side, after only a few months work we have created a system which successfully integrates several applications, looks good, and works well.
We have been able to integrate improvements over the standard Summon interface which would not have been possible for us to make using Summon alone (though in some cases Summon has now caught up with these!).
LibrarySearch is used by large numbers of students without problems.
Changes we have needed to make since launch have mainly been minor and all have been made without any disruption to the service.
Reactions from outside the university both from Serials Solutions staff and from other libraries have been highly positive; reactions from inside the university have been more muted.
We hope to carry out further user testing later, and already have a list of additional features we could add without great difficulty.
The largest problem we have been aware of has had nothing to do with LibrarySearch itself, being caused by difficulties resolving links coming from Summon, especially those referring to newspaper articles.
Serials Solutions have been working to ameliorate these linking problems.
On the negative side the major issue has been and continues to be the tension caused by the rate of change in the Summon interface, given the absence of permanent developer support to cope with adapting VuFind.
In practice, this has not so far resulted in great difficulties, but it is clearly an ongoing source of risk.
Some of the changes resulting from the general direction of travel of Summon have not meshed well with the general approach behind our own VuFind adaptations, and as this direction seems set to continue more difficulties can be expected to arise: the way in which `direct linking' and FRBRisation are being tackled seem likely to be two such future problem areas.
Two general lessons could be drawn from these results, one regarding adoption of open-source applications, the other regarding uncritical adoption of `next generation' discovery.
Evaluating Open-source Applications When creating a local instance of Xerxes using the Metalib API we laid out a set of nine practical criteria for evaluating open source applications [7].
One outcome of our work with VuFind would be to add a tenth criterion: if the software depends on an API, ensure that the API is both well-documented and guaranteed to be stable.
The Summon API is well documented, and in fact Serials Solutions themselves provide the core PHP code used by the VuFind Summon driver.
However, Summon’s adoption in mid-2011 of a more rapid fortnightly update cycle may create complications for some in the external use of an API.
This kind of speed is not easily compatible with external use of an API.
An API is not only a set of procedures that can be called externally, but also the data that are returned by those calls, and both are important.
Even if the procedure calls stay unchanged, altering the structure and semantics of the data that is returned is a major source of instability for external users.
Next-generation Is Not a Single Thing `Next-generation' discovery has never been clearly defined; it is a general direction of travel, rather than a specification (the initial definition was made I believe by Eric Lease Morgan in 2006; an elaborated version can be found in Next Generation Library Catalogs in Fifteen Minutes [8]).
That direction may be inflected differently by different parties.
`Web-scale management', `central provisioning', and `transaction transparency' are part of a widespread trend that began with the move to be `more like Google'.
They can be seen as part of a logical progression from that starting point, which starts with an emphasis on discovery and exploration and a downgrading of `known item' search.
From system suppliers' point of view they are also steps in a process which removes part of the burden of serving the library patron from the library and shoulders it externally.
This is in the immediate interest of libraries inasmuch as it reduces costs (principally in cataloguing) and solves common patron problems (principally link resolution) that libraries have been unable to solve completely themselves.
Conversely, it is against the immediate interest of libraries insofar as it removes their control in cases where the supplier may not get things quite right, or where common use cases which do not fit the next-generation pattern continue to be important.
On the other hand, if the library retains control over (say) links, the external supplier loses its ability to keep full track of all usage of the items linked to, which might affect its ability to provide detailed usage statistics.
These differences have manifested themselves in our VuFind adaptation by making it more difficult to help library users find local print copies of items;  making it harder to manage local links differently from remote ones; and providing a poorer representation of items on shelves than is available from the OPAC.
In the overall picture they are minor points, and for now they can be bridged in part by open-source applications which restore some of that element of local control but the tension is clearly growing.
References John Houser, "The VuFind implementation at Villanova University", Library HiTech, 27(1):93-105, 2008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07378830910942955 Todd Digby and Stephen Elfstrand, "Open Source Discovery: Using VuFind to create MnPALS Plus", Computers in Libraries, March 2011. http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/ Birong Ho, Keith Kelley, and Scott Garrison, "Implementing VuFind as an alternative to Voyager’s WebVoyage interface", Library Hi Tech, 27(1):82-92, 2009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07378830910942946.
William Denton and Sarah J. Coysh, "Usability testing of VuFind at an academic library", Library Hi Tech, 29(2):301-319, 2011 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07378831111138189.
Jennifer Emanuel, “Usability of the VuFind Next-Generation Online Catalog”, Information Technology and Libraries, 30(1), March 2011, ISSN 0730-9295, http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/publications/ital/30/1/index.cfm.
Gary Marchionini, "Exploratory search: from finding to understanding", Communications of the ACM, 49:41-46, April 2006, ISSN 0001-0782 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1121949.1121979 Anna Grigson, Peter Kiely, Graham Seaman, and Tim Wales, "Xerxes at Royal Holloway, University of London", January 2010, Ariadne Issue 62 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/grigson-et-al/ Eric Lease Morgan, Next Generation Library Catalogs in Fifteen Minutes, November 2007 http://infomotions.com/musings/ngc-in-fifteen-minutes/ Author Details Graham Seaman Library Systems Officer Royal Holloway, University of London Email: graham.seaman@rhul.ac.uk Web site: http://grahamseaman.info/ Graham Seaman is a freelance developer who works under direct contract or through his company, Libretech Ltd. His primary experience is with free and open source software, which he combines with a particular interest in library systems.
Graham is now working on a federated search system for the M25 Library Consortium.
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A Double-edged Sword: What Are the Implications of Freedom of Information for the HE Sector?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Double-edged Sword: What Are the Implications of Freedom of Information for the HE Sector?
Buzz data framework dissemination infrastructure archives blog copyright foi foia privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Amy Gibbons reports on the second in a series of workshops organised by the Research Information Network to explore the impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the Higher Education sector, held at University College London on 1 April 2011.
Since 2008 the Research Information Network (RIN) has organised a series of workshops dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge about the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) 2000.
In previous years these workshops have centred on how the legislation could be used as a research tool [1].
In response to a growing media focus on the Higher Education (HE) sector, this year’s workshops (held at Manchester, UCL and Strathclyde universities respectively) sought not only to continue to raise awareness but also to address the potential impact of the legislation on universities in their capacity as ‘public bodies’.
This aspect was covered in this journal by Steve Bailey when the Act was first implemented in 2005 [2] but it has subsequently received little media coverage, until recently.
In November 2009, weeks before the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference, the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) came under scrutiny over a series of hacked e-mails which were obtained and published by the press.
In what then became dubbed the ‘Climategate’ affair scientists were accused of manipulating data to support their research claims.
UEA subsequently set up two inquiries, the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review (ICCER) headed by Sir Muir Russell, and an independent Scientific Appraisal Panel (SAP), headed by Lord Oxburgh.
These culminated in a Home Affairs Select Committee Investigation [3] to review these inquiries.
One of the outcomes of the Muir Russell report [4] encouraged the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to review the US Congressional amendment to Public Law 105-277, otherwise known as the Shelby Amendment, which defines research data as: ‘the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings, but not any of the following: preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer reviews, or communications with colleagues.’ Concurrent to this investigation, representatives from the HE sector and the ICO convened a roundtable in September 2010 to discuss the implications of the legislation for the sector.
In particular they focused on three cases of concern; the first was UEA, the second was a request for tree ring data at Queen’s University Belfast [5][6] and finally a request for course materials on a Homeopathy course at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) [7].
The Shelby Amendment was discussed in the meeting but was regarded as too complex to integrate into the UK FoIA given its degree of entanglement in the ‘complex federal legislative environment in the US’ and the perception that ‘any change along these lines would require a change to the primary legislation.’ The roundtable agreed to establish a working group to represent the HE sector and work with the ICO in ‘developing sector-led and sector-specific guidelines around the issues of research data, teaching materials and IPR’ [8].
This group met for the first time earlier this year and agreed to create a research sub-panel and clearer guidance for scientific material by the start of the new academic year.
A remit for the broader sector, which was latterly used for the RIN workshops, was defined in this panel: ‘The ICO wants to know what the HE sector feels the risks are, which data is of most concern which datasets are suitable for publication and which need to be withheld, with a view to finding out what the ICO needs to cover in subsequent guidance.’ [9] Introducing the day’s events was Professor Robert Hazell, Director of the Constitution Unit at UCL who gave a précis of his long history of researching Freedom of Information in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, more recently, the UK.
He spent several years as a senior civil servant prior to joining the Unit and has since acted as an advisor to the Department of Constitutional Affairs on FoI.
His research has included how the FoIA has affected local government, Parliament and Whitehall; the latter resulting in a co-authored text ‘The Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on Central Government in the UK: Does FOI Work?’ [10].
FoI and Research: Setting the Scene Dr Michael Jubb, Director of the Research Information Network and Dr Matthew Dovey, Programme Director, Digital Infrastructure JISC Dr Jubb started the proceedings by clarifying that universities fall under the FoIA 2000 as ‘public authorities’ (PAs) due to the funding they receive under the Further and Higher Education Act (FHEA) 1992.
Unlike other PAs however, universities are also charities with obligations under the Charities Act 2006 [11] and the flow of public funding that they receive is gradually diminishing.
Further, universities operate in a global marketplace competing for research funding, students and accreditation.
FoI poses concerns relating to intellectual property rights and commercial confidentiality.
He discussed the progress being made by the HE/ICO roundtable and hoped that these workshops would provide some salient points which could be fed into this process.
He concluded by referring to a useful FAQ site on FoI in HE compiled by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [12].
Dr Matthew Dovey then spoke briefly about the digital infrastructure underpinning the compliance of requests.
Part of JISC’s remit is to provide IT infrastructure for the UK research network: this is known by most universities as Eduroam.
There is a push in the sector to adopt a more transparent outlook in line with current government policy and as such, more universities and councils are adopting more open access to research, depositing theses online and disseminating working papers and collaborating through social networks.
Dr Dovey questioned what impact FoI would have on this historically open sector and its way of working.
For example, would it affect contributions to the HEFCE Research Excellence Framework (REF)?
What will happen if traditional forms of access are closed off to researchers due to the rigidity of access agreements?
In short, to what extent will the legislation affect researchers’ ability to do their jobs?
Freedom of Information: A Brief Guide David Evans, Information Commissioner’s Office The overall message imparted in this presentation was that the ICO regulates on a case-by-case basis, i.e.
‘what’s in front of us’.
The ICO has no say in the drafting of the legislation, however Mr Evans expressed hope that through participation in these events, they would have a clearer picture of the sector and so understand some of the concerns that may affect HE institutions’ decision-making processes.
He discussed examples of historical information that could have been more beneficial to the public were they released in their time.
These included details of the compensation offered to victims of the Thalidomide drug and the report, buried for 30 years, into the fire at a nuclear reactor at Windscale (Sellafield, Cumbria, UK).
He argued that some material had been released in other cases due to requesters using international FoI laws to access copies of material held outside the UK, for example US copies of safety information relating to the UK Trident nuclear missile.
Mr Evans cited the request to view materials on UCLAN’s Homeopathy BSc course as ‘good practice’, where the FoIA had been ‘properly used’.
The requester had asked for copies of the material distributed to the undergraduate students on the course including notes, PowerPoint slides and any reading recommendations.
This raised discussion about the commercial interests of universities.
Interestingly the ICO decision notice in this case states that the requester, a UCL professor, argued that the institution was confusing commercial interests, s43 (2), with financial interests [7].
Mr Evans noted however that, at the time of the request, the Homeopathy course was no longer running and that there is no case law to indicate how a live course would be treated under the Act.
In the second half of his presentation, Mr Evans ran through the key areas of the law for both requesters and compliance officers.
He covered issues ranging from how to recognise a ‘valid’ enquiry (for example, the use of pseudonyms by requesters invalidates their request) to the application of exemptions, refusing a request and what constitutes a ‘vexatious’ requester.
He pointed out that the legislation is simply an access regime: if there are requesters who are seeking to use it for monetary gain then the institution is well within its rights to issue a bill for any reuse, as recompense.
This strategy has been adopted by the Environment Agency for requests submitted by commercial organisations.
Challenges for FoI Researchers Dr Ben Worthy and Gabrielle Bourke, the Constitution Unit, University College London The purpose of this presentation was to report initial findings from research conducted into the sector.
After exploring the case law mentioned above and comparative international studies, Dr Worthy and Ms Bourke determined that the key challenges to researchers appeared to be the time devoted to processing FoI requests and the implications for copyright and intellectual property rights of the institutions.
Further, the applicant blind nature of the legislation prevents the institution knowing the rationale behind a request and how the information will be portrayed in the public domain.
To illustrate this point they invoked the case of Dr Wakefield, a lecturer who was conducting controversial research into potential correlations between MMR vaccinations and autism.
He was the subject of a FoI request which not only asked for his research but his personal details including salary.
Web sites also exist to encourage the submission of requests, the most prominent being WhatDoTheyKnow.com [13].
The presenters found a low level yet continuous interest in universities on the site.
They also discussed Academic FoI.com [14], a Web site dedicated to publishing details through FoI of HEIs’ activities often by means of blanket requesting.
All of this creates a culture whereby institutions will be very careful about acting in a particular way in order to avoid being publicly admonished through such sites.
There are also concerns that it will restrict research activity, partly due to the uncertainty of what could be picked up as the next big story by the media.
The collation of research takes several forms across the science and social science disciplines; datasets might be de-contextualised and published online but what about research papers or interview data?
The early publication of papers would have severe consequences for the competitiveness of universities.
Moreover, publishing papers on the Web would almost certainly lead journals to reject submissions as they are conditional on sole publication rights.
Publication schedules raised further concern; articles can often take months if not years to go through the peer-review process.
The same is true of patent applications, where patents are granted based on the first to file.
s22 of the FoIA exempts information from release if it is due to be published within a reasonable length of time.
Whilst there is no precedent in case law for how long this would be, we were assured during the workshop that months or years were unlikely to be considered favourably by the ICO.
The Freedom of Information Act as a Tool for Research Dr Michael Kandiah, King’s College London The FoIA is tailored to openness but is it tailored to historians?
There were already mechanisms in place for historians to review documents and the framing of the legislation runs contrary to the natural process of sifting through historical documents in their entirety.
Dr Kandiah discussed how the introduction of FoI might be detrimental to the historical discipline and research.
Despite information being released sooner than it might otherwise be it is fragmented, revealing only snapshots of de-contextualised history at any one time.
Prior to the advent of the FoIA it was difficult to write history if it did not fall within the 30-year rule (recently dropped to 20 years following the Dacre Review [15]).
Knowledge about the FoIA is increasing from the ‘bottom up’, with students teaching their supervisors about this new access route.
The focus then becomes ‘what can I get out of an archive?’ or ‘what information is likely to be present?’ as opposed to searching through documents and finding a narrative.
If information is released piecemeal then researchers are likely to have further questions and as such further requests based on the information they have received.
This risks not only elongating the process for researchers but also increasing the possibility that they become identified, by FoI request processers, as vexatious.
To avoid such an eventuality it is helpful to co-operate with the institution and students are starting to conduct interviews, with archivists and other gatekeepers to information, in an attempt to better assess what information could be made available to them.
This raises an interesting referencing question; how should material received in the post be cited?
Researchers need to factor all these considerations into their timescales and plan for any bottlenecks in the system; any information requiring a public interest test, for example, may take longer to process.
Dr Kandiah closed by touching on the problematic future scenario of having ‘open access [but] empty archives’ [16], a situation that has already been observed in Sweden (the first country to enact FoI law in 1766).
If information is not written down it does not exist to be requested under FoI and as such, a bit more history is lost.
Their experience could act as a barometer for the political reality of the future of FoI in the UK.
Discussion The afternoon discussion sessions offered an opportunity to elaborate and debate these issues.
The room was split into three groups to allow audience members to participate in deeper discussion over the impact of the legislation on the HE sector and share their own experiences of using or complying with the Act.
The groups then reconvened to discuss the themes that arose.
The questions below are an amalgamation of the talking points throughout the day: What types of information would institutions be comfortable releasing?
Sensitive material was seen as particularly problematic.
Despite personal information provisions in the Act, other aspects of empirical research aimed at contextualisation such as environment, body language and other observations could also have an impact on how the research was interpreted externally.
How would public/private partnerships be affected by the knowledge that any information produced during such collaborative activity could be subject to access legislation?
If FoI related clauses were embedded in contracts would they hinder collaboration or damage working relations?
Should there be training to further knowledge about the legislation’s impact on the HE sector and what form should this take?
To what extent could the Scottish research exemption, 27(2), assist in considering issues in HE and would it offer relief if adopted into the UK law?
Margaret Keyse, Head of Enforcement at the Scottish Information Commissioner’s Office, informed delegates at the Strathclyde workshop that there was no existing case law in this area to use as a precedent when discussing how HE sector cases may be treated more generally.
What is a reasonable expectation of a future intention to publish?
How would the legislation affect relations with other universities and international partners?
On a wider economic scale, it is also of concern whether it is in Britain’s interest to jeopardise the competitive nature of universities.
David Evans commented that if information is held, then it must be considered under the Act.
If for example, a UK institution is working on an EU project but has a copy of the information, then they are required under the law to assess it.
The cold nature of requesting under the Act is antithetical to the open nature of research and researchers alike.
One academic relayed that a colleague had been subject to a FoI request.
He had said it was not the request for information about his research that was problematic; indeed he would have been pleased to discuss his research with the individual requester.
However, such a request under the provisions of FoI law closed off any opportunity for discussion or for contextualisation and gave the impression, moreover, that any other route was not to be trusted.
What would be a reasonable expectation of confidentiality and what could therefore be considered an actionable breach?
The law offers a retrospective assessment of information so if research councils have requested information be kept, or even if records management skills are not particularly deft, then all this is open to access.
What if a researcher cannot recall what happened at a particular event, or is unable to provide details to contextualise their research?
Whilst a solution to this scenario remained unclear, it was suggested that research does not need to be analysed as this would be doing work for the requester; but the information could be supplemented by explanatory guidelines.
Conclusion Despite the implementation of the FoIA over 5 years ago, the impression garnered from this workshop was one of ambiguity and apprehension.
Approximately 40 people from across the sector participated in the day, evidence of a growing interest in the topic.
The overall message was undoubtedly one of clarification and the need to train academics about the use of FoI and their obligations if sent a request.
Several participants voiced their desire for these points to be fed into ongoing discussions at a policy level about the applicability of FoI to the HE sector.
This workshop represented a first step to achieving this end and accomplished the RIN’s aim to draw out some of the challenges the legislation poses to the HE sector.
Presentation slides from the day can be found on RIN’s Web site, along with a summary of the salient points from the three workshops [17].
References RIN Web site ‘Researchers use of freedom of information a workshop’, September 2008 http://www.rin.ac.uk/news/events/researchers-use-freedom-information-workshop Bailey, S., “Assessing the Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the FE and HE Sectors”, January 2005, Ariadne Issue 42 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/bailey/ “House of Commons Science and Technology Committee ‘The Reviews into the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit’s E-mails’, First Report of Session 2010 11”, October 2010 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmsctech/444/444.pdf Russell, M. ‘The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review’, July 2010 http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf Keenan, D.J.
‘Tree Ring Data at Queen’s University Belfast’ blog entry, 26 November 2011 http://www.informath.org/apprise/a3900.htm ICO Decision Notice FS50163282 Queen’s University Belfast, March 2010 http://www.ico.gov.uk/~/media/documents/decisionnotices/2010/FS_50163282.ashx ICO Decision Notice FS50140374, University of Central Lancashire, March 2009 http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/decisionnotices/2009/fs_50140374.pdf ‘Roundtable meeting between Information Commissioner’s Office and Higher Education Sector to discuss the implications of Freedom of Information for the Sector’, September 2010 http://www.ico.gov.uk/~/media/documents/library/Freedom_of_Information/Research_and_reports/Roundtable_meeting_ICO_and_HE_Sector_on_FOI_29092010.ashx First meeting of the ICO Higher Education sector panel on FoI and DP, January 2011 http://www.ico.gov.uk/~/media/documents/library/Freedom_of_Information/R... Hazell, R., Worthy, B., Glover, M. (2010) “The Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on Central Government in the UK: Does FOI Work?” Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke HEFCE, Regulating higher education institutions as charities’ http://www.hefce.ac.uk/finance/charities/ The JISC “Freedom of Information and research data: Questions and answers” Web site, December 2010 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2010/foiresearchdata.aspx WhatDoTheyKnow.com Web site http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/ Academic FoI Web site http://www.academicfoi.com/ The Government Response to the 30-Year Rule Review Web site, February 2010 http://www.justice.gov.uk/about/docs/government-response-30-year-rule-review.pdf Flinn, A., Jones, H. (2009) “Open Access, Empty Archives?” Routledge: London The RIN “Freedom of Information and HE researchers second in a series of regional workshops” Web site http://www.rin.ac.uk/news/events/freedom-information-and-he-researchers-second-series-regional-workshops Author Details Amy Gibbons Doctoral Researcher Department of Organisation, Work & Technology Lancaster University Email: a.gibbons1@lancaster.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/phd/profiles/amy-gibbons/ Amy Gibbons is a doctoral researcher at Lancaster University, where she is studying how information is classified and legitimated under the Freedom of Information Act.
In 2009 she spent three months on internship in The National Archives’ FoI team, where she researched ‘privileged access arrangements’ for academic researchers in government departments.
She has presented at conferences held by The National Archives, the Research Information Network and the Surveillance Studies Network.
Her wider research interests include data protection, information management and mechanisms of surveillance and privacy.
Return to top Article Title: A Double-edged Sword: What Are the Implications of Freedom of Information for the HE Sector?
Author: Amy Gibbons Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/rin-foi-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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FRBR in Practice Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines FRBR in Practice Buzz data xml copyright cataloguing opac frbr marc21 licence standards Citation BibTex RIS Wendy Taylor and Kathy Teague describe what they learnt about how FRBR is used at the Celia Library for the Visually Impaired in Helsinki, during their Ulverscroft/IFLA-funded visit.
The Royal National Institute of Blind People National Library Service (RNIB NLS) was formed in 2007 as a result of a merger between the National Library for the Blind (NLB) and the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s Library and Information Service.
It is the largest specialist library for readers with sight loss in the UK.
RNIB holds the largest collection of books in accessible formats in the UK and provides a postal service to over 44,000 readers.
RNIB produces its own books in braille, giant print and audio format for loan and sale.
It is our role to ensure that all our stock is catalogued and classified so that RNIB staff and our blind and partially sighted readers are able to find and obtain what they need through the RNIB accessible online catalogue [1].
We have been working with two library management systems (LMS) since the merger and are now in the process of tendering for a new LMS to integrate our bibliographic data.
We are anticipating the launch of the new LMS to our readers in the fourth quarter of 2011.
We feel that it is an opportune moment to review our cataloguing practice and investigate the possibility of cataloguing the accessible format, e.g.
braille at the manifestation level rather than as a holding attached to the bibliographic record describing the print book, like all other libraries for the Blind around the world.
The disadvantage of this cataloguing method is the proliferation of records for each title.
But we think that the negative effect could be corrected by Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [2].
In order to test this theory we needed to have a better understanding of FRBR and how it actually works.
We applied for and were awarded the Ulverscroft/IFLA Best Practice Award to fund our trip to the Celia Library.
Ulverscroft/IFLA Best Practice Award ‘The Ulverscroft Foundation was established in 1973 by Dr Frederick Thorpe, OBE, the founder of Ulverscroft Large Print Books Limited (ULPB), which he formed in 1964.
ULPB is the major supplier of large print books to libraries in the UK and has expanded to become a major commercial supplier of a range of alternative format books in the UK and around the world.
Having established a successful organisation for the supply of alternative format reading material Dr Thorpe was keen to address the other challenges faced by visually impaired people around the world by ploughing back the profits from his successful business enterprises.
Consequently, the Ulverscroft Foundation has funded many hundreds of medical, social and library schemes/projects designed to serve the needs of visually impaired people world-wide.
The IFLA: Libraries Serving Persons with Print Disabilities Section (LPD) is the international body which seeks to promote national and international co-operation to improve access to information and reading materials for blind and other print handicapped people.
Established in 1983 it has 86 member organisations across the world ‘ [3].
The two organisations co-operated to set up the Best Practice Awards to support libraries and individual library staff members to carry out projects that are beneficial to blind and partially sighted library users.
Our application proposed a visit to Celia Library, the first library in Europe to have adopted FRBR.
We wanted to understand FRBR better and improve our understanding of how it works.
The aims of our visit were to: discuss the pros and cons of the FRBR model with other professionals in the field see how FRBR works has been implemented in practice and have an opportunity to catalogue real records using FRBR principles exchange ideas on cataloguing issues and solutions develop relations with staff at Celia Library.
We anticipated that our new knowledge about the FRBR model gained from the visit would enable us to: assess the effectiveness of the FRBR Gain practical knowledge and experience of FRBR which could be cascaded to other members of staff evaluate the impact on our workload if we changed the way we catalogued determine the system implications and cost to RNIB assess the benefit it would represent to our customers Overall it would help us to make an informed decision, prior to the data migration to the new LMS.
We are both actively involved in the implementation of the new LMS and were able to report back to the Project Team.
Celia Library for the Visually Impaired, Helsinki Celia Library in Helsinki is the special Finnish national library for the visually impaired and print disabled.
Celia was founded in 1890 by Cely Mechelin.
It has been state-owned since 1978 and was renamed Celia after its founder in 2001.
The Library has 15,000 customers and issues 950,000 loans per year 98% of which are audio books.
All items are produced on demand and do not need to be returned to the library.
Celia Library serves all print disabilities (for example, dyslexia), but is mainly used by users who are over 60 years of age with a visual impairment.
How do Celia and RNIB NLS Compare?
The obvious difference between the two libraries is that RNIB NLS is a charity.
Our service is limited to what we receive in donations and to the income that we generate.
We are unable to provide all services to all people free of charge.
The Celia Library is state-funded.
The numbers of readers also varied greatly: RNIB NLS has a much larger reader base.
Unlike Celia Library, we are not yet a 100-per-cent print-on-demand service.
We still have a large of collection of braille and giant print books that require housing in Stockport, Lancashire.
Our audio books are print on demand but due to copyright restrictions we require our readers to return the books when they have finished with them.
The majority of titles in our collection are in English.
We have a limited collection of Welsh and some Asian language books.
Celia Library has a large amount of Swedish language materials.
In addition, Celia Library is able to make use of the Swedish Library for the Blind’s collection, a step in the direction of The Global Library Project.
Working within the constraint of the UK Copyright Licence Agreement means that our service is restricted to blind and partially sighted people.
It is an unfortunate limitation because most of our accessible format materials can benefit people with other print disabilities.
We are also unable to take advantage of electronic file sharing, as can the Celia Library, without first applying for copyright permission from the copyright owners.
What is FRBR?
In 1990 IFLA established a Study Group to define the purpose of bibliographic records and how they could be changed to be more effective in an increasingly networked environment.
The group defined how bibliographic records should help users to perform the following functions search and find materials the user searches to find Hamlet from the search results identify the key object of their interest from the result the user can identify the play Hamlet select a version of the object which matches the users needs the user can select which Arden edition of Hamlet they require acquire access to the item either in a physical or virtual form a loan copy of Hamlet is available in the format and edition required by the user which the user can acquire From these functions an entity-relationship model was developed which includes three groups of entities.
Group 1 attributes which describe the products of the artistic or intellectual creation works, expressions, manifestations, items Work (defined in FRBR as a distinct intellectual or artistic creation) Expression (the intellectual or artistic realisation of a work) Manifestation (the physical embodiment of an expression of a work) Item (a single example of a manifestation) Group 2 the persons or bodies responsible for producing the Group 1 entities Group 3 usually subjects which describe concept, object, event, or place The report defines the data elements (or attributes) for each entity and the relationships between the entities, for example, a manifestation may be a reproduction of another manifestation, works may be successors to other works, or an adaptation of another work, and items may be bound with other items [4].
Accessible materials for blind and partially sighted people are usually reproductions of print works making them ideal for FRBR description.
What are Accessible Materials?
RNIB produces the majority of its titles in more than one format.
A standard print work is scanned to create a master XML file which is used to produce accessible copies in braille, audio or giant print: Braille is a system of raised dots, which enables blind people to read with the tips of their fingers.
Contracted braille (formerly known as grade two) is where each character or cell, can represent a single print character; a whole word (such as ‘the’ ) or a short form (such as ‘ing’ or ‘today’ ).
Uncontracted braille (formerly known as grade one) represents one braille cell per print character, number or symbol (such as punctuation).
RNIB Talking Books are in DAISY format.
DAISY is an acronym for Digital Accessible Information System and is now recognised worldwide as a standard for audio books.
The DAISY format is a digital reading format that can combine audio, text and graphical information in one production, making it accessible to a wide range of people with print disabilities.
The majority of RNIB DAISY Talking Books are in audio only.
The audio files are structured into chapters, sections, etc.
which help the readers navigate through the book easily.
Books with a font size of over 18pt are defined as ‘giant print’.
RNIB NLS has books of 24pt in its collection which are either produced by RNIB or bought from another external supplier.
Most books found in bookshops or mainstream libraries are 8pt and public libraries lend large print books which are 16pt.
Cataloguing Accessible Materials Accessible materials can and should be catalogued using existing standards, but it is important when describing accessible items to include additional information to aid users in choosing an item that is suitable for their needs.
For example, the type of braille, the level of navigation on the DAISY file, the size and type of font, the length of a recording and the gender of a narrator.
As such the physical attributes of the item can be as complex to describe as the bibliographic elements.
RNIB’s accessible formats might be available for loan or for sale and therefore require different information.
For example, sale items require a price and an order number, whereas loan copies will require a barcode.
There might also be different restrictions such as copyright.
FRBR and the Cataloguing of Accessible Material FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) allows relationships to be assigned between different accessible formats of the same work.
This enables the linking and grouping of bibliographic catalogue records to simplify their display.
It should enhance the searching and retrieval experience of library catalogue users.
Celia Library’s PallasPro (Axiell) library system describes bibliographic material according to the FRBR Group 1 entities (work, expression, manifestation and item).
The FRBR hierarchy is not currently visible through the Library’s OPAC [5] but Celia plans to take advantage of the structure in future developments.
Celia Library offers many of its titles in both Swedish and Finnish and staff have found FRBR to be very effective in describing the same work with different translations at the expression level.
Not all of Celia’s stock requires the depth of the FRBR hierarchy so its catalogue has been designed to accommodate both FRBR and non-FRBR records.
During our visit we were given the opportunity to catalogue on the Celia system using FRBR.
Celia staff use FinMARC which is similar to MARC21.
First the Work is catalogued with basic information such as author and title; next the Expression level contains translation and subject descriptions; the Manifestation level describes the physical information and product information; finally, the Item level contains information about the actual book that will be received by readers.
On the other hand, RNIB catalogue records are currently based on a simple work/manifestation structure.
The print book is catalogued with the accessible versions attached.
All information relating to the accessible versions are contained at the holdings level.
RNIB may hold different editions of the same work in the same format.
For example, we have various editions of Hamlet in braille which are produced from different original print works.
The user will want to be able to identify that a braille version of Hamlet is available, but may be happy to read the play irrespective of the edition or they may want to select a specific edition for academic study.
Figure 1: Example of RNIB catalogue record based on a simple work / manifestation structure.
Under FRBR level 1 entities, as used by Celia, the structure would be as follows: Figure 2: The Celia Library structure in line with FRBR level 1 entities This approach would improve the search results for users as it follows the functions of Find, Identify.
Select and Acquire.
It would also simplify the cataloguing process because we would only need to catalogue the work once.
This will reduce inconsistencies and errors in the catalogue.
Shared information about sale and loan items will be recorded at the manifestation and work level, but unique information, such as price or barcode, can be recorded at the item level.
Visit Conclusions and Recommendations for RNIB The visit provided us with a unique opportunity where we were able to gain practical experience of cataloguing records using FRBR.
We have heard a lot about FRBR but seeing it in practice is entirely different.
It works as we have speculated but it helps a great deal to have our conjecture confirmed.
The knowledge gained during our visit fills in the gaps of our understanding of FRBR.
It confirms our theory that FRBR would help simplify the display of search results for our readers.
We feel surer that we can change our cataloguing practice from cataloguing the print book with alternative format holdings to cataloguing the alternative format at the manifestation level without detrimental effect on our readers.
We feel that cataloguing the alternative format at the manifestation level is beneficial to our readers in terms of searching, display of search results and creating and maintaining personal bookshelves/reading lists.
Each alternative format having its own bibliographic record will allow for easier extraction of data from the LMS, something we do frequently at RNIB NLS, in order to create reading lists to help our readers choose what they want to read.
With the added benefits to our readers and staff in mind, we will therefore recommend that RNIB adopt the FRBR model.
References RNIB Library Catalogue http://librarycatalogue.rnib.org.uk/ Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records by IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records Ulverscroft/IFLA Best Practice Awards Web site http://www.foundation.ulverscroft.com/award809.htm UKOLN Bibliographic Management Factfile: FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bib-man/factfile/cataloguing-rules/frbr/ Celia – Equal access to literature and information for print disabled persons (English version) http://www.celia.fi/web/guest/english Author Details Wendy Taylor Librarian (Bibliographic Services) RNIB National Library Service Email: wendy.taylor@rnib.org.uk Web site: http://www.rnib.org.uk/library Kathy Teague Librarian (Cataloguing & Technical Support) RNIB National Library Service Email: Kathy.teague@rnib.org.uk Web site: http://www.rnib.org.uk/library Return to top Article Title: “FRBR in Practice” Author: Wendy Taylor and Kathy Teague Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/taylor-teague/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources Buzz data software rdf framework api database xml infrastructure archives metadata digitisation browser identifier vocabularies multimedia ontologies uri wordpress lod e-research algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Jane Stevenson gives a personal view of the recent UK conference organised by the International Society of Knowledge Organization.
I recently attended the first biennial Conference of the British Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK) [1] entitled ‘Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources’.
It was organized in co-operation with the Department of Information Studies, University College London.
If the intention was to focus on the diversity of resources out there, I also felt that the audience was very diverse in terms of levels of expertise and perspectives.
This can provide a useful opportunity for broadening horizons, and I felt that the conference did this reasonably successfully, although I’m not sure that I really understood quite what the ISKO is and what it stands for (except in a literal sense!).
Maybe that is somewhat inevitable with a remit as broad as the organisation of knowledge.
This report focuses on some of the plenary sessions, and reflects my own interest in semantics and the Semantic Web, as well as the talks that might be described as thought-pieces, those which tend to raise all sorts of ideas that you mull over on the train journey back home!
It’s All Just Semantics!
The conference kicked off with a plenary session on linguistic semantics.
Semantics began as a branch of linguistics, so this seemed like a good starting point.
Professor David Crystal, a leading linguist and founder of Crystal Reference Systems (now an ad pepper media company) [2], told us that the term was first used in its modern sense in the 1890s by Michel Bréal, a French philologist, who referred to ‘the science of meaning in language’.
Semantics was seen as a level of linguistic organisation, alongside phonetics and grammar.
However, the abstract nature of the concept of meaning meant that semantics remained a neglected branch of linguistics.
Crystal took us through some of the history of semantics as a concept, indicating just why the term is so difficult to grasp.
He brought us up to date with the concept of the Semantic Web, which gives us one of the widest meanings of semantics.
Crystal said that there can be no broader definition of semantics than the one we encounter in the Semantic Web, and furthermore, it has taken us significantly away from the original idea of semantics the linguistic definition of the term.
He warned that if someone talks about providing a ‘semantic solution’ this should be viewed with caution, as it is open to widely differing interpretations, and is therefore somewhat meaningless without further qualification.
Crystal came back to his area of expertise, linguistic semantics, to give an entertaining talk about his recent work relating to the placing of online advertisements, an increasingly important area of advertising.
We have over a million words in English, and over 70% of them are technical terms, which tend to have quite a clear meaning.
If you take a typical abridged dictionary (around 100,000-150,000 words), the average number of senses per word is 2.4, and this number is rising (the word ‘take’ for example, has 25 meanings).
He told us about woefully misplaced online advertisements, in particular an advertisement selling knives placed next to an article on the rise of incidence of stabbing in New York, and even more disastrously, a page in a German publication where an article about Auschwitz was matched with an ad selling cheap gas.
The Importance of Context Crystal has been working on solutions to problems of irrelevance and insensitivity in the placement of advertisements.
Primitive algorithms are the source of the difficulty, where, for example, the keyword ‘knife’ is the linked concept, but the outcome is not as intended, because such algorithms cannot take account of ambiguities in language.
One solution is to put words into context.
‘Knife’ in an article about crime will be accompanied by words like murder, blood and police; ‘knife’ in a cutlery advertisement will be accompanied by words like fork and spoon (if it is that kind of knife!).
So, the theory is that, if these words are taken into account, it is possible to disambiguate successfully.
This process, known as contextual semantics, is one solution that continues to be used, but Crystal argued that this will only capture a small part of content.
A news item on stabbing may also be about street safety, policing methods, citizen protection, etc.
Most Web pages are multi-thematic, and it is often misleading to think that the title and first few lines will essentially define the content, as other themes inevitably emerge when you read down the page.
So, there is a need to analyse the entire content of page, something Crystal referred to as ‘semantic targeting’.
Semantic Targeting This process lexically analyses pages and categorises by themes [3].
If users are interested in weather and type the word ‘depression’ into a search engine, they will get millions of hits and the first page is likely to refer to the mental health meaning of depression.
How can this be improved so that users get the type of depression they are seeking?
One way is to increase the search terms, but this can bring about even more diverse results, especially if it is quite an abstract enquiry.
A word like depression is a problem because of its polysemic character; it can relate to a mental state, bad weather, a poor economy, or a dip in the ground.
If a semantic filter can be devised, the problem is solved: the user types the term depression and a menu prompts her to clarify which type.
If she selects meteorology she only gets those hits.
But how can we provide the semantic content for a filter?
If enquirers only want weather pages, then we need to predict which words related to weather will turn up on the page.
But how many items are there in a language available to users to talk about weather?
Can we predict what all of them are?
One place where all lexical items are gathered is a dictionary.
By working through all content-specific items in a dictionary and assigning each sense of each item to a semantic category, all terms will have been covered.
In addition, brand names and place names need to be included, so other sources need to be used to cover them.
This was the work that Crystal’s team of lexicographers undertook, and it took them 3 years to complete it, although, of course, the work is never really finished, as new terms are constantly introduced and meanings and associations change all the time.
Identifying Sentiment Crystal went on to describe his work on an encyclopaedia database of knowledge categories, originally for Cambridge University Press, but now used commercially, to ensure advertisements are appropriately placed.
He concluded that there are more challenges ahead, as advertisers increasingly want more targeted placement of advertisements, which requires identifying the sentiment of a Web page, so that a positive page on a subject can be distinguished from a negative one.
This necessitates another lexical trawl to identify words that express positive and negative attitudes.
In English there are about 3,000 negative words and about 1,500 positive words (negative always outweigh positive), but over and above that, there are problems such as reverse sense, not to mention the use of irony and sarcasm.
Challenges of Image Retrieval The next plenary session was on image retrieval.
Ian Davis from Dow Jones talked about how hard it is to classify images and find them on the Web.
He talked about three approaches to image retrieval: free-text descriptions, controlled vocabulary, and content-based image retrieval (CBIR).
Using free text works well to a degree, and controlled vocabulary allows you to focus on the image attributes, depicted concepts and abstract concepts (what is in them, what they are about).
CBIR is dependent on pixels, and algorithms can be created to analyse textures, colours and simple shapes.
Davis’ talk gave us plenty of visual stimuli, in particular a whole series of images depicting goats and rocks seems to stick in my mind!
His aim was to convey just how difficult it is to decide how to describe images and ensure you meet customers’ needs: a customer asks for a picture of a goat, or goats, or goats with rocks; would a scenic landscape with goats in the distance suffice?
Is that really a picture of goats?
What if they are barely visible?
What if customers search for ‘rocks’ and receive a picture of a goat with rocks?
Is that going to satisfy them?
He gave plenty of other examples of difficulties with classification, such as the apparently simple notion of indoors and outdoors; not so simple when you are trying to classify images.
Is the presence of a roof sufficient to signify indoors?
Would a bus shelter be classified as indoors or outdoors?
Also, how do you classify an abstract picture, such as swirls of light?
Davis talked about customers often wanting to be surprised and inspired.
It is difficult to describe images to meet this kind of need.
How about related content?
If, to extend the previous example, goats and rocks are your thing, are you therefore interested in other animals in rocky landscapes?
Controlled vocabulary can help with providing this type of service.
Davis concluded that people are often very critical when it comes to image retrieval if they don’t get what they want.
Whilst free-text descriptions are extremely useful, and really the best way to provide a useful image retrieval service, they are nonetheless very time-consuming.
Controlled vocabulary is always important, as it helps with precision and accuracy, but again it is time-consuming and invariably complex.
CBIR is objective and not so labour-intensive, but at present it is still quite a basic method to identify images.
Davis did feel that folksonomies can play a part in enriching classification, but did not elaborate, and this is something that it would have been interesting to hear more about.
He felt that the semantic gap is really a semantic gulf.
Text is by far the best way to retrieve complex concepts, but a combined approach with a degree of semi-automation is currently the best option.
Ontology-based Image Retrieval Dr Chris Town, from the University of Cambridge, following Ian Davis’ talk, concentrated on ontology-based image retrieval.
Most of the multimedia information on the Web is not properly tagged, but less than 25% of the content available is actually text.
How should we represent the content of the image?
How can we represent and match queries?
Town gave a summary of CBIR, from basic retrieval through to focusing on the composition and parts of the image via segmentation, and then he took us up to current methods – the application of ontologies, machine-learning techniques and statistical methods.
He also went through developments that have enhanced the level of sophistication of how users can search.
He referred to Blobworld at Berkeley [4] which is an initiative for finding coherent image regions which roughly correspond to objects, segmenting images into regions (‘blobs’) with associated colour and texture descriptors.
The query-by-example paradigm can work quite well, but when trying to find images of a certain type, you have to provide others of that type to initiate the search, and there is the issue of salience – what makes it relevant?
A look at Google’s Similar Images search [5] shows that the technology is not always effective in human terms.
Chris’s company, Imense [6] has been doing work in this area and is using Ontological Query Language, which takes the user query, enhances it in terms of syntax and context, and relates it on a conceptual level to whatever features the system has available to translate it into something useful.
Imense combines a metadata search with content classification, using the ontology that it has developed.
For example, it associates football with people, grass, outdoors, and other entities, such as shapes and colours.
e-Research and New Challenges in Knowledge Structuring On 23 June, Clifford Lynch, from the Coalition for Networked Information, opened with a stimulating keynote address on ‘e-Research and New Challenges in Knowledge Structuring’.
He talked about the database becoming an integral research tool, and changing the way that research is carried out.
He referred to ‘synthetic astronomy’, where astronomers make predictions and run them against a database.
Consequently, the data that have been gathered for one purpose, and entered into a database, become a valuable, integral part of the scientific process for many different research projects.
Scientists can now reproduce an experiment with the data or re-analyse them in different ways, whereas previously the data collected in the course of research might never really be used again.
This idea of reuse is key here; reuse advancing scientific discovery, bringing the value of databases to the fore, enabling diverse evidence to be marshalled for the advancement of research.
This principle also extends to reuse of sources outside the scientific domain, such as historical diaries on botanical discoveries or tide tables from the 18th century.
However, this does generate difficult decisions about what to keep, how long to keep it for and what is going to be most valuable for reuse.
When is it better to keep data because they are expensive to reproduce?
When are the data too inextricably tied to the experiment, rendering them of minimal value over time?
Lynch posited that in 50 years time we may not be able to understand the data currently generated by the accelerator at CERN; an interesting thought.
Citizen Science Lynch moved on to suggest that we are seeing the rebirth of ‘citizen science’; a notion that goes back the idea of the leisure pursuits of gentlemen in Renaissance Europe.
The first line of biodiversity observation is a good example of citizen science, as is astronomy, where first observations are often by amateur astronomers with a humble domestic telescope and their own computer.
The same thing seems to be happening in the humanities – maybe we are seeing the emergence of ‘citizen humanities’?
If we think about large-scale digitisation of images, it is often left to the audience to describe them and share information relating to them.
In fact, people will often be inspired by photographs they find on the Web to describe people, events and experiences that are well beyond the scope of the picture.
People en masse may have a huge amount of knowledge that they will share (one has only to think of railway enthusiasts!).
Data and traditional authored works are starting to integrate and relate to each other in complex ways.
There is an increasing sense of contributing to the collective knowledge base, to the corpus of knowledge.
Individual voices may become more muted as a result.
Writing for Machines We have now crossed the boundary where scholarly literature is not just read by humans but by machines which compute it.
The literature has two different audiences, human and machine.
Do we set about adapting literature and making it more suitable for computational work?
This brings us back to the whole subject of meaning, and the complexities of semantics.
e-Research and New Challenges in Knowledge Structuring Tom Scott, from the BBC, followed with a talk about making bbc.co.uk more human-literate.
He started by referring to Stephen Fry’s recent comment that the drive to make people computer-literate should be reframed as a drive to make computers more human-literate.
His talk was about working towards this goal.
The BBC produces huge volumes of content over a great breadth of subjects.
It is too difficult to structure it all from the outset, so the way that the BBC has worked up to now is to build micro sites, which are internally perfectly coherent, but which do not have the breadth of BBC content.
For example, you can’t find out everything about what the scientist and presenter Brian Cox has done because you can’t search across all the information.
You can’t browse by meaning, even though this is often what people want.
If a page is of interest, people often want similar content, but on the current site they cannot follow a semantic thread.
Linked Data The BBC is now trying to tackle the problem differently, starting to think about the data and how to structure it more appropriately for people.
In order to do this, it is thinking primarily about real-world entities (i.e.
programmes and subjects) rather than pages or documents.
The principle is to give things (concepts) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and expose the data associated with those URIs.
One can then put this into an XML format of RDF (Resource Description Framework) and end up with a page for every concept, with each URI reflecting that one concept.
Linked Data has helped with this process.
Scott explained that Linked Data is a very integral component of the Semantic Web, and the concept reflects Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the World Wide Web.
Linked Data presents a Web of things with unique identifiers (URIs), not a Web of documents.
Scott made 3 key points about how this works: Use http URIs to give globally unique names to things – anyone can de-reference them in this way When de-referenced, you can get useful information back as RDF Include links to other URIs to let people discover related information – this is what the Web should be – a compendium of links Scott did emphasise that there are challenges here.
Legacy content is huge and not easily ignored.
But the Semantic Web enables us to start to think more in terms of things that matter to people – Paul Weller, lions, steam trains, symphony orchestras, rather than documents.
Linked Data frees information from data silos.
Whilst a proprietary application programming interface (API) is good, it is still in essence only a door into the silo.
The ‘Linking Open Data’ cloud (LOD) [7] is all about connections between datasets.
DBpedia [8] is a structured version of Wikipedia that is increasingly becoming a central hub within the LOD cloud, because it constitutes a huge knowledge base of information, providing identifiers for millions of things.
DBpedia has become core to the new BBC Web pages, so for those who have doubts about using Wikipedia, the use of DBpedia is, in fact, now further consolidating the place of this user-generated resource.
The BBC is now going to Wikipedia pages to edit content for its own purposes.
The BBC has started with a page per programme, so one URI for each programme broadcast.
They also have a Web page for every music artist, which sources Music Brainz [9], the database of music metadata, which provides structured data available in RDF.
Scott also argued that the Web is increasingly not about the browser, as there are more and more ways to access the Web now.
We need to recognise that a page is in reality made up of multiple resources, with separate URIs for each resource.
If we can make everything addressable then we can start to mesh things up across the Web.
We can take a resource and include it in another page.
We can have multiple representations for things, as one URI can have many representations, and the appropriate document can then be returned for the device being used.
Data in the Cloud The final plenary was on the potential of new technologies.
Dr Paul Miller from The Cloud of Data [10] talked to us about Data in the Cloud.
He described the huge move to shift data centres to the Cloud; to a third-party provider.
There has been some reluctance, especially in the corporate sector, to trust third-party providers, despite arguments for reduced cost and other advantages.
Miller refuted arguments that data is not safe in the Cloud.
Whilst there is always a risk, these centres are likely to have substantially more expertise in data security than individual corporations or institutions.
We can begin to see interesting things happening once the data are out there and capable of being joined together.
Miller talked about Tim Berners-Lee’s admonishment to us all to ‘stop hugging your data’ [11].
We need to let go, to be less defensive, to allow others to use our data rather than recreate it.
Gordon Brown has said Tim Berners-Lee is going to ‘fix government data’!
(The press tended to pick up on the other announcement, the one about Alan Sugar as the saviour of business).
UK Government information is largely in silos, but the principles of Linked Data will bring it to the Web, so machines can come along and find it and use it to drive applications.
Miller split the idea of the Cloud into infrastructure, platform and application.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides big cost savings, as it is possible to draw on any number of machines on demand.
This elasticity reflects the reality of demand going up and down, and it is far more costeffective to pay for it as and when it is needed.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides the opportunity for developers to focus on their own specialized area of development, without the need to worry about the underlying components that support this.
Software as a Service (SaaS) refers to things like Google apps, Zoho, WordPress, etc.
These are all lightweight applications delivered over the Web.
Most are fairly low-end disruptors, not in competition with Oracle or Microsoft, but becoming increasingly capable, and we may get to the interesting stage where Microsoft Office or similar software applications become largely redundant.
Linked Data is really beginning to make the concept of The Cloud interesting.
Datasets are beginning to link up and to take material from each other, and this is the Web done right according to Tim Berners-Lee.
Conclusion I came away from the ISKO Conference thinking that the Semantic Web has now arrived.
As an archivist working in an online environment, I have been involved in organising events for archivists around the digital environment.
Five years ago I organised a session on the Semantic Web as part of the Society of Archivists’ Conference.
We had an overview talk and a couple of projects were represented, the Vicodi Project [12] and the Magpie Semantic Filter [13].
It all sounded intriguing, but very ambitious, and I think we all felt that this was a vision that would never be realised.
I remember puzzling over how to create the massive-scale ontologies that would be needed to make everything meaningful.
We all went away and largely forgot about it all!
Now it seems that the tools are available and being widely employed in a way that is set to make a real difference to the Web.
Exciting times ahead!
References The International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK http://www.iskouk.org/ Crystal Reference Systems (part of ad pepper media) http://www.adpepper.com/ Semantic Targeting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_targeting Blobworld at Berkelely http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1999/5567.html Google Similar Images search http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/ Imense http://www.imense.com/ Linked Open Data diagram http://linkeddata.org/ DBpedia http://www.dbpedia.org/ Music Brainz http://musicbrainz.org/ The Cloud of Data http://cloudofdata.com/ Tim Berners-Lee talk at the TED2009 conference http://www.ted.com/ Vicodi Project http://www.vicodi.org/innovation.htm Magpie, the Semantic Filter http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/magpie/main.html Author Details Jane Stevenson Archives Hub Co-ordinator Mimas University of Manchester Email: jane.stevenson@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources” Author: Jane Stevenson Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/isko-2009-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries Buzz software framework usability standardisation accessibility cataloguing personalisation ajax facebook twitter e-science ict interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Lorraine Paterson and Boon Low highlight findings from the usability inspection report conducted for the UX2.0 research project.
Demands for improved usability and developments in user experience (UX) have become pertinent due to the increasing complexities of digital libraries (DLs) and user expectations associated with the advances in Web technologies.
In particular, usability research and testing are becoming necessary means to assess the current and future breeds of information environments such that they can be better understood, well-formed and validated.
Usability studies and digital library development are not often intertwined due to the existing cultural model in system development.
Usability issues are likely to be addressed post-hoc or as a priori assumptions [1].
Recent initiatives [2] have advanced usability studies in terms of information environment development.
However, significant work is still required to address the usability of new services arising from the trends in social networking and Web 2.0.
The JISC-funded project, Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries (UX2.0) [3], contributes to this general body of work by enhancing a digital library through a development and evaluation framework centred on usability and contemporary user experience.
Part of the project involves usability inspection and research on contemporary user experience techniques.
This article highlights the findings of the usability inspection work recently conducted and reported by UX2.0 [4].
The report provided a general impression of digital library usability; notwithstanding, it revealed a range of issues, each of which merits a systematic and vigorous study.
The discussion points outlined here provide a resource generally useful for the JISC Community and beyond.
Objective and Aims The objective of the usability inspection of UX2.0 was to elicit thinking and applications of usability studies for digital library development.
The aims are: To gauge the overall usability standard of established DLs To identify positive examples of good usability To recognise the unique aspects of each DL and evaluate to what extent they enhance the user experience Test Subjects It is important to note that the findings discussed are limited to the selected test subjects and the method used to evaluate each DL.
The test subjects chosen were lent from the WorldCat usability testing report [5].
From tests conducted on WorldCat, researchers identified that academic users favour searching local, national and worldwide collections together as opposed to public library patrons who are interested in resources which are geographically close.
Using this finding as a basis for choosing test subjects, a range of digital libraries was chosen that fitted the following criteria: Public digital libraries (DLs) instead of commercial publisher sites such as ACM and Web of Science; Resources that fitted into one of 5 geographic categories; worldwide, European, nationwide (UK), regional (Scotland) and local (Edinburgh); DLs that presented the contents of a traditional library as well as those that presented a group of items which existed across many different traditional libraries.
Using these criteria the digital libraries that were selected are identified in Table 1.
Attribute Digital Library Web address Worldwide World Digital Library (WDL) http://www.wdl.org/en/ European wide Europeana http://www.europeana.eu Nationwide (UK) British Library (BL) http://www.bl.uk Regional (Scotland) Scran http://www.Scran.ac.uk/ Local (Edinburgh) University of Edinburgh (UoE) Aquabrowser http://aquabrowser.lib.ed.ac.uk/ Table 1: Digital library test subjects What is an Heuristic Evaluation?
An heuristic evaluation is a discount method [6] used to help identify usability problems with a user interface design.
Typically it is carried out by a number of evaluators who examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognised usability heuristics.
Heuristic evaluation was chosen as a robust method of uncovering usability issues.
It provided a checklist of sorts which could aid the evaluator in systematically deconstructing the usability of each DL in the absence of testing with real users.
However, there are several limitations to this method which should be noted.
Ideally heuristic evaluations should be carried out by more than one professional.
Doing so ensures cross-validations and that the maximum number of usability issues is uncovered.
As a more detailed evaluation will be carried out on the digital library currently being developed in UX2.0, the inspection report is mainly exploratory and seeks to highlight existing usability issues instead of providing an exhaustive usability study involving all test subjects.
The digital libraries were inspected using two separate sets of established usability heuristics: Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen The first is a list of 10 heuristic principles created by Jakob Nielsen in 1994 [7].
Nielsen’s heuristics have been extensively used for the purpose of usability inspections and are well respected amongst usability professionals: Visibility of system status Match between system and real world User control and freedom Consistency and standards Error prevention Recognition rather than recall Flexibility and efficiency of use Aesthetic and minimalist design Help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors Help and documentation ISO Heuristics 9241 The second set is a list of heuristic standards laid out by the International Organisation for Standardization.
The heuristics are outlined in BS EN-ISO 9241-110: Ergonomics of human system interaction Part 110: Dialogue Principles.
This part of ISO 9241 presents a set of usability heuristics that applies to the interaction of people and information systems (the heuristics are based on an earlier German standard).
The standard refers to this interaction as a “dialogue” and describes seven “dialogue principles” [8].
The ISO Dialogue Principles provide an alternative to Nielsen’s heuristics and are based on widespread research: Is the dialogue suitable for the user’s tasks and skill level?
(Suitability for the task) Does the dialogue make it clear what the user should do next?
(Self-descriptiveness) Is the dialogue consistent?
(Conformity with user expectations) Does the dialogue support learning?
(Suitability for learning) Can the user control the pace and sequence of the interaction?
(Controllability) Is the dialogue forgiving?
(Error tolerance) Can the dialogue be customised to suit the user?
(Suitability for individualisation) Together these sets provide an exhaustive list of contrasting and complementary principles with which to carry out the evaluation.
The aim of using these heuristics is to uncover usability issues effectively as well as identify positive design features.
The Advanced Search Debate The usefulness of advanced search is often a contentious issue.
Given the advent of simple and alternative search tools, users often eschew advanced search.
Therefore advanced search is often an underused feature, which should be ‘gotten rid of’ [9].
For example, WDL and UoE’s Aquabrowser do not provide advanced search forms, preferring to provide alternative ways for users to search.
The lack of advanced search may be challenged by the usability heuristics that state accelerators should be provided to speed up interaction for the expert user (Nielsen’s Heuristic 7).
Providing choice for users ensures that every type of user is catered for.
Certainly, omitting an advanced search has the potential to do more harm than not including it.
However, there is another argument that places less value on the inclusion of the advanced search than on how easy it is to use.
For example allowing inexperienced users to undertake advance search without imposing a steep learning curve could encourage usage and improve search experience.
All advanced search forms examined in the inspection had multiple blank fields, each associated with a drop-down menu, uncommon labels and very little instruction on how to complete the form.
Other usability issues encountered during the inspection are more generic.
For example, the use of small and indistinguishable links as action buttons in the middle of the search form, cf.
Fitts Law (User Interface selection dependency based on size and distance) [10].
One approach to address usability of advanced search has been more fundamental.
Instead of search fields in self-contained forms, the approach is based on the design of alternative tools that embed advanced search to provide more intuitive user experience.
Most of the digital libraries inspected, for example, provide Faceted Searching which essentially facilitates reconstituted and iterative Boolean search operations.
One social media (Twitter) search engine, Tweetzi, provides a good example of how alternative tools can act as a substitute advanced search form (Figure 1).
Tweetzi has designed icons which reveal a description of their purpose when a user hovers over it.
Providing these tools simplifies the search process and encourages user learning as recommended in ISO Heuristic 4.
For example, searching for an exact phrase is automatically generated by wrapping inverted commas around the string at the push of a button (short-cut of multiple user interactions).
Users can also search for links, hash tags (Twitter search vernacular for user-generated keywords), questions and positive or negative statements using similar buttons.
These advanced features are basic but still powerful because they are not promoted as advanced features, making them more accessible.
As a result, more users are likely to utilise them and learn about constructing complex searches in the process.
This approach may not replace the traditional advanced search form but has potential to bridge the gap for less experienced users.
Figure 1: Tweetzi search tools Emerging Interaction Design Patterns During the course of the inspection, new interaction design patterns and ways of facilitating resource discovery have been identified.
Some of these techniques are not necessary new per se.
Many have been prevalent among existing Web sites especially under the guise of Web 2.0.
However, their application in digital libraries is both novel and increasingly widespread.
An objective of UX2.0 is to delineate interaction design patterns of common usability challenges and evaluation aspects.
In addition to Faceted Searching as described above, the DLs inspected in our study are piloting systems based on emerging interaction design patterns such as Dynamic Queries, Carousels, Tag Clouds, Spatial Navigation and Intriguing Branches [4].
For example, WDL provides a timeline and interactive (map) browsing User Interface (UI) which is based on a composite use of design patterns aforementioned.
Users can manipulate the timeline (slider) to change the scope (query) dynamically of all items available on display via expandable image carousels in the interactive map.
Most of these interaction patterns rely on advanced (AJAX) UI techniques and a high degree of user manipulation.
This inevitably gives rise to usability and accessibility problems, some of which have been identified in UX2.0’s inspection, e.g.
inconsistent behaviour of WDL interactive map (links) and carousels controls (usability).
Despite the usability problems, these design patterns and their composite usages are useful especially for those who do not know exactly what they are looking for.
For example, faceted searching/navigation services (Figure 2) of WDL, Europeana and UoE Aquabrowser integrate searching and browsing to let users begin with a simple keyword search, but then help users frame their choices by allowing them to reduce the number of possible matches to their search [11].
Figure 2: Section of World Digital Library’s Faceted Navigation Indeed a general finding from the inspection indicates a trend in which searching and browsing experiences are becoming increasingly integrated.
In particular, faceted searching provides a ‘navigational metaphor’ for Boolean search operations, which are typical of advanced search.
Early user studies have suggested a propensity of faceted searching to result in greater user satisfaction and serendipitous discovery [12].
These systems have the potential to facilitate better ways of searching: fast drill-down of results; enhanced search context; and to speed up searching and create a feeling of effortless control by concentrating the user’s task [13].
It seems that the primary target users of such systems are inexperienced users as well as those who do not know exactly what they are searching for.
However, emerging evidence [12] already indicates potential benefits for expert users also.
The usefulness of the systems is less clear and something which requires rigorous user studies to validate.
Navigation Faceted navigation (search) was found to be one of the most commonly used methods implemented for resource discovery in DLs.
This is supported by a report on the assessment of the NCSU Endeca catalogue [14] which states that progressive refinement through facets account for 45% of keyword searches.
The inspection also showed that faceted navigation can also enhance the user experience by providing greater control over a search and speed up browsing of results as recommended in Nielsen’s Heuristic 3.
This is supported by usability testing comparing the Endeca catalogue to the traditional catalogue which showed significant improvements in task completion times, task success rates and perceived ease of use [14].
Additionally, the research by Olson [12] shows that faceted search can facilitate the discovery of new items previously undiscovered through traditional search methods.
However, the inspection showed that considerations need to be made when implementing faceted navigation.
Allowing users to select multiple categories is an emerging and advanced feature of faceted navigation.
It should also be clear to users what results are being provided.
Selecting two facets could create different impressions for different users.
Does the action mean all items (OR Boolean operation) or common results (AND Boolean operation) from multiple categories?
The inspection showed that Europeana had difficulty clarifying these issues.
Visual feedback should be provided to clarify the scope of search to the users.
Doing so will allow them to feel in control of their search and to manipulate it effectively to meet their needs (Nielsen’s Heuristic 3).
Faceted navigation should also present categories in a manner that makes sense to users and meets their expectations.
The report found that in some cases the default order of presenting categories is questionable.
Currently, the most popular and default presentation is facets in a descending order based on the total number of matches.
This default setting assumes a preference for large result sets.
Such bias is arguably caused by the system limitation (screen estate) of faceted navigation (in presenting all facets).
This assumption ought to be challenged through usability testing, and other forms of facet ordering should be experimented with.
For example, date or period type facets can be presented chronologically (with the option to change the order by number of results) and subject headings, alphabetically.
Such presentations at least enable users to scan and select facets in ways which reflect their mental models, as demonstrated by the efficacy of the publication date facet of AquaBrowser.
Nevertheless, this attempt is not prevalent as witnessed during the inspection, e.g.
the confusing time facets of WDL (see Figure 2).
Social Networking Development There was evidence from the inspection report to suggest that DLs are incorporating social media tools to enhance the user experience.
The inspection revealed two different strategies in providing a social outlet for their users: rudimentary integration with established communities or creating a custom community local to the library.
BL adopted the first approach with sharing services which redirect users to a variety of external social networks.
Scran and Europeana have adopted the latter solution.
However, Europeana’s social network is still under construction.
The rise in popular social networks such as Facebook can often act as a suitable and acceptable outlet for users.
As an established network, it has the benefit of being familiar to users, of reducing reliance on the latter to learn to use a new interface (ISO 1).
Additionally, existing software such as the built-in social networking module provided by Aquabrowser (My Discoveries) removes the need to build a social network from scratch and cultivate a community of regular users.
Aquabrowser can connect to users from other Aquabrowser libraries (although UoE currently does not have this service), allowing DLs to grow a successful community much faster.
However users have finite ‘social currency’; most have a legacy of existing communities with which they are already interacting.
It is a real challenge for DLs to devise ingenious ways that integrate seamlessly with users’ workflow and existing communities.
The social networking features of the test DLs are either shallow integrations or preliminary and untested prototypes (probably an indication of the challenging and resource-intensive aspects of building a social network).
Currently, both are unlikely to realise the full potential of social networking.
It remains to be seen if these and other DLs will find the means to devise a ‘third way’ a local community which is also fully interoperable with existing social networks.
Conclusion The findings from the inspection report revealed several trends in DLs that suggest more choice is being provided to users when searching for information.
The traditional approach to searching is being complemented by other systems which not only provide variety for users but also help to increase the sophistication of search making it quicker and easier for users to find what they are looking for.
In addition, new interaction patterns are being introduced and coincide with the increasing use of dynamic user interface of the Web 2.0 trend.
However, the inspection uncovered usability issues and showed that improvements are required to ensure the systems are easy to use.
Web 2.0 sites are directly influencing DLs by encouraging more personalisation and social interaction.
Many of the DLs inspected provide a personal section where users can save items and share them with others within a gated online community or through established external social networks.
The rise in popularity of social networking has generated a new online culture where users expect social services to be provided.
The increasing prevalence of such services in DLs is a positive trend which will, we hope, continue to develop.
Acknowledgements This work has been funded by the JISC Information Environment Programme 2009-11 15.
References Blandford, A., Connell, I., & Edwards, H., Analytical Usability Evaluation for Digital Libraries: A Case Study, I, 2004 Glosiene, A., & Manzuch, Z., Usability of ICT-Based Systems, State-of-the-Art Review, Calimera Project Deliverable 9, 2004 JISC Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries project http://bit.ly/jiscux2 Paterson, L. & Low, B., Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries – Full Report http://bit.ly/ux2inspectionreport WorldCat, Some Findings from WorldCat Local Usability Tests, Prepared for ALA Annual, July 2009 Nielsen, J., Heuristic Evaluation http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/ Nielsen, J., Heuristic Evaluation, Nielsen, J., & Mack, R.L (Eds.
), Usability Inspection Methods, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, 2004 BS EN-ISO 9241-110: Ergonomics of human system interaction Part 110: Dialogue principles http://www.userfocus.co.uk/resources/iso9241/part110.html Nodder, C., Application Usability workshop, Usability Week, 2009, Berlin Scott Mackenzie, I., Fitts’ law as a research and design tool in human-computer interaction.
Human-Computer Interaction, volume 7, 1992, pp.
91–139., 1992 Morville, P. & Callender, J., Search Patterns, O-Reilly Media, California, 2010 Olson, T.A., Utility of a faceted catalogue for scholarly research, Library Hi Tech, 2007, 25(4), p. 550-561 Scott, B.
& Neil, T., Designing Web Interfaces, O’Reilly, California, 2009 Antelman, K., Lynema, E., & Pace, A.K, Toward a twenty-first century library catalogue, Information technology and libraries, American Library Association, 2006, 25 (3), p. 128-138 JISC Information Environment Programme 2009-11 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11.aspx Author Details Lorraine Paterson UX2.0 Usability Analyst UK National e-Science Centre University of Edinburgh Email: l.paterson@nesc.ac.uk Web site: http://ux2.nesc.ed.ac.uk Boon Low UX2.0 Developer, Manager UK National e-Science Centre University of Edinburgh Email: boon.low@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://ux2.nesc.ed.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries” Author: Lorraine Paterson and Boon Low Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/paterson-low/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IMPACT Conference: Optical Character Recognition in Mass Digitisation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IMPACT Conference: Optical Character Recognition in Mass Digitisation Buzz data software framework database xml infrastructure archives digitisation vocabularies copyright preservation ocr interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Lieke Ploeger, Yola Park, Jeanna Nikolov-Ramirez Gaviria, Clemens Neudecker, Fedor Bochow and Michael Day report from the first IMPACT Conference, held in The Hague, Netherlands on 6-7 April, 2009.
The first conference of the IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) Project was held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands (KB) in The Hague on 6 and 7 April 2009.
A total of 136 participants from over 30 countries attended.
The main focus of the event was on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies and their use in supporting the large-scale digitisation of historical text resources.
It was also an opportunity to introduce the IMPACT Project to a wider audience and to describe some of its initial results.
IMPACT is a European project that aims to speed up the process of and enhance the quality of mass text digitisation in Europe.
The IMPACT research programme aims to improve significantly digital access to historical printed text through the development and use of innovative Optical Character Recognition software and linguistic technologies.
IMPACT will also help to build capacity in mass digitisation across Europe.
This first conference, focused on current and future challenges for OCR technology in mass digitisation projects, was intended as a means of exchanging views with other researchers and commercial providers in the OCR field, as well as presenting some preliminary results from the first year of the IMPACT Project.
A more detailed report from this conference together with links to presentation slides will be made available from the IMPACT Web site [1].
Monday, 6 April 2009 The conference was formally opened by Hans Jansen, Director of e-Strategy at the KB and chair of the IMPACT General Assembly.
After welcoming all participants he expressed his appreciation of the KB being able to host a valuable opportunity for experts from all over the world representing libraries, research institutes, software suppliers and service providers to meet and discuss the challenges of mass digitisation and their possible solutions.
IMPACT Contexts Patricia Manson, head of the European Commission’s Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning Unit (part of the Information Society and Media Directorate General), gave the opening presentation entitled Digitisation of Cultural Resources: European Actions and the Context of IMPACT.
In this, Manson located the IMPACT Project within the general context of European policies and strategies in the digitisation domain.
She mentioned that the digitisation research that IMPACT was undertaking represented just one part of an integrated set of activities focused on implementing the European Commission’s i2010 Digital Libraries Initiative [2], which plans to transform Europe’s printed heritage into digitally available resources.
The challenges involved in this initiative, however, are numerous.
Apart from the key issues of copyright and intellectual property rights, there remains the need to improve the cost-effectiveness of digitisation through the development of improved technologies and tools, and to expand competence in digitisation across Europe’s cultural institutions.
Manson argued that there was a call for (virtual) centres of competence that would aim to exploit the results of research and to leverage national and other initiatives.
It was envisaged that IMPACT would become a centre of competence for the digitisation of printed textual material.
Hildelies Balk, head of the European Projects section within the KB’s Department of Research and Development and IMPACT project manager, then provided a short introduction to the IMPACT Project.
The presentation began by describing the project’s background: the technical and strategic challenges that are still holding back the mass digitisation of historical printed text.
She commented that the current state-of-the-art in Optical Character Recognition does not produce satisfactory results for historical documents, while there is also a lack of institutional knowledge and expertise, causing inefficiency and duplication of effort.
The libraries, universities, research centres and industry partners that make up the IMPACT consortium hope to contribute to solving this by: innovating OCR software and language technology; sharing expertise and building capacity across Europe; and ensuring that tools and services will be sustained after the end of the project.
All IMPACT tools and services are focused on reducing effort and enhancing the speed and output of mass digitisation programmes, and are firmly grounded in the needs of the libraries.
After a short overview of these IMPACT tools, Dr Balk concluded with the vision that, from 2012 onwards, the project would form a sustainable centre of competence for the mass digitisation of historical text in Europe.
She commented that this centre would exist for as long as it is necessary to fulfil the ultimate aim: “All of Europe’s historical text digitised in a form that is accessible, on a par with born digital documents.” She noted that a parallel session on the second day of the conference would focus in more detail on the nature of the centre of competence concept.
Library Challenges for Mass Digitisation Astrid Verheusen, head of the Digitisation Department at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, gave an overview of mass digitisation challenges from a library perspective.
After a short description of past digitisation efforts at the KB, which were primarily small-scale projects focused on the production of visually attractive images, Verheusen argued that the mass digitisation of textual content requires a different approach.
The large-scale nature of mass digitisation means that libraries have to deal with significant challenges, e.g.
costs, heavy demands on technical and organisational infrastructure, and problems with the insufficient quality of OCR results.
Library initiatives are part of a wider framework of digitisation programmes (including Google Book Search or the Internet Archive), but it was argued that libraries have an important role to play with regard to issues like quality, completeness, long-term preservation, free availability and copyright.
She maintained, therefore, that the main challenges libraries will need to overcome include making the digitisation process more efficient (e.g., through automated processes) and improving the quality of mass digitisation in which the IMPACT Project promises to play an important role.
Finally, Verheusen described some possible solutions currently being implemented at the KB in its development of its digital library.
These include: a focus on digitising complete collections rather than selected resources; the use of the JPEG2000 format to save storage space [3]; the development of automated quality assurance tools; and increased cooperation between the different digitisation projects at the KB to prevent the duplication of effort.
Verheusen commented that the KB hopes that IMPACT will provide tools to improve the quality of mass digitisation of historical text and that the project will also help libraries and other cultural heritage institutions to share knowledge through such means as guidelines and training, a helpdesk and Web site.
IMPACT Tools (Part 1) This afternoon session started with three short presentations on the improvement of OCR, based on results from the first year of the IMPACT Project.
First, Asaf Tzadok of IBM Haifa Research Laboratory introduced the concept of Adaptive OCR.
He noted that the current generation of commercial OCR engines focus primarily on the recognition of diverse materials using modern fonts, while collections of historical texts usually involve relatively large bodies of homogenous material using older font types.
The principle underlying Adaptive OCR is that it may be possible to improve OCR capabilities by creating an OCR engine that would ‘tune’ itself to each work being processed.
The IMPACT Adaptive OCR engine works on large bodies of homogenous material, and adapts itself to the specific font, dictionaries and words in a given body of text.
In addition, a ‘Collaborative Correction’ module groups together ‘suspicious’ characters and words that users are able to correct through an online web-based application.
The Adaptive OCR engine will then receive the results of this manual correction and use them in order to improve the recognition rates even further.
Basilis Gatos, a researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos” in Athens, then gave a brief overview of the IMPACT enhancement and segmentation platform.
This helps the user to evaluate current state-of-the-art techniques for enhancement and segmentation, as well as integrating several new IMPACT toolkits first versions of the toolkits designed for dewarping, border removal and character segmentation.
The user can select a methodology for each enhancement / segmentation stage and produce not only the result of either enhancement or segmentation but also results from the intermediate stages.
In the future this platform will also be used to test the portability of the new IMPACT toolkits.
Dr Gatos concluded with a short demonstration of the platform.
Klaus Schulz, technical director of the Centrum für Informationsund Sprachverarbeitung (CIS) of the University of Munich, gave the final short presentation on Language Technology for Improving OCR on Historical Texts.
Professor Schulz discussed how language technology can help to improve or correct OCR results on historical texts.
He commented that traditional techniques for OCR correction were not suitable for historical text, because they use dictionaries that do not contain the large amount of spelling variants present in such texts.
Professor Schulz then demonstrated how the use of special historical language dictionaries in OCR engines affects OCR quality.
For example, combining a modern and a virtual dictionary could reduce the word error rate for 18th century texts by 42%.
Another option for improving OCR results would be to use knowledge on document and OCR behaviour.
When “profiling” the OCR output in a fully automated way, the intended profiles can try to detect the base language, special vocabulary, typical spelling variants of the underlying text as well as typical OCR errors found in the output.
Profiles like this could then be used for post correction or for improving OCR output on a second run.
For example, knowledge of typical historical spelling variants in a document could lead to a better selection of dictionaries.
Although this method is quite ambitious, Professor Schulz argued that profiling OCR output in terms of vocabulary, language variants and OCR errors seems a good basis for further improving OCR results.
OCR Accuracy in a Newspaper Archive Simon Tanner, Director of King’s Digital Consultancy Services (KDCS) in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King’s College London, gave a presentation on Measuring the OCR Accuracy across The British Library Two Million Page Newspaper Archive.
This presentation focused on the methodology developed by KDCS and Digital Divide Data (DDD) for evaluating OCR accuracy, based on the actual XML output in relation to the original images.
Since character accuracy rates cannot be used to say anything about word accuracy with too much certainty, this method also takes word accuracy and significant word accuracy into consideration.
In this way it will also become possible to assess the functionality that the OCR output will support, such as search accuracy and the ability to structure searches and results.
Tanner demonstrated this method with examples from the OCR accuracy study of the British Library’s 19th Century Newspaper Project.
The study selected pages from the newspaper archive, and two sections of each page were double re-keyed.
This text was then compared to the XML text generated by OCR, and the results analysed with the metrics created by KDCS.
Two-thirds of the newspaper content turned out to have a character accuracy of over 80%.
However, only half of the titles had such a figure for word accuracy, and only a quarter of the titles had over 80% significant word accuracy.
In response to a question about the acceptable word accuracy rate, Tanner replied that, as a rule of thumb, a word accuracy rate above 80% would be considered acceptable.
At that level, most ‘fuzzy’ search engines would be able to fill in the gaps sufficiently (or find related words), meaning that a high search accuracy (>95-98%) would still be possible.
By comparing the number of repeated significant words and then measuring the accuracy against the OCR results, it would thus be practicable to assess the search accuracy effectively.
Tanner argued that this method could be utilised for assessing OCR performance and thus as a means of making better OCR decisions.
Panel Discussion on OCR Challenges The final session of the day was a panel discussion on OCR Challenges, moderated by Günter Mühlberger, Head of the Department for Digitisation and Digital Preservation at Innsbruck University Library.
Panellists included all of the speakers in the previous afternoon sessions (Tzadok, Gatos, Schulz, Tanner), but they were also joined by Astrid Verheusen, Claus Gravenhorst of CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH., and Jupp Stoepetie of ABBYY.
The discussion was very lively and wide-ranging and included topics such as: the question of outsourcing or digitising in-house; the problem of ‘legacy’ content; benchmarks for OCR accuracy; lessons from the digitisation of non-European character sets; the role of greyscale scanning; and the need for digitisation tools like those being developed by IMPACT to be interoperable.
A fuller transcription of the discussion will be available in the conference proceedings.
Tuesday, 7 April 2009 The second day of the conference started with a short summary of the conference so far by Aly Conteh of the British Library.
The morning sessions were based on two talks from external experts.
Collaborative OCR Text Enhancement at the National Library of Australia The opening presentation was given by Rose Holley, manager of the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program at the National Library of Australia (NLA).
Her presentation, entitled Many Hands Make Light Work: Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers, focused on the collaborative Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program.
This intends to create a service that will provide free online access to Australian newspapers, from the first newspaper published in Australia in 1803 through to the end of 1954, including full text searchability [4].
In July 2008, 360,000 pages were made available to the public in a beta version of an interface that permits collaborative OCR correction.
After a short demonstration, Holley described the initial outcomes of the online correction system.
She noted that without almost any publicity, a large user-base had already formed.
It appeared, therefore, that end-users are potentially very interested in correcting text, whether for helping to improve the record of Australian history or to support genealogical research.
While there has been no moderation (so far) by programme staff, no vandalism of text had yet been observed.
Holley observed that giving users a high-level of trust has resulted in commitment and loyalty.
For example, accidental mistakes are often quickly corrected by other users.
A study of user feedback showed that the high level of trust invested in users was one of the main motivation factors, along with the user’s own short and long term goals (for example family history), and the focus on the outcome of improving the record of Australian history.
Holley noted that the collaborative OCR text correction system has shifted some of the power and control over data which is traditionally held by libraries or other cultural heritage organisations back to the community, and that this had turned out surprisingly well.
The challenge the National Library of Australia now faces is to sustain this virtual community in the future.
Technical OCR Challenges The second presentation was an assessment of future OCR challenges given by Claus Gravenhorst, Director Strategic Initiatives at CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH.
The presentation started with a short description of the history of OCR technology from the Kurzweil age onwards.
He commented that despite the amount of research already undertaken and the fact that 21st century OCR has reached quite a high level of character recognition, there is still a considerable lag behind human performance; for example, in the familiar and problematic areas of image quality (e.g., because of unsatisfactory scanning methods or poor print quality), difficult layouts, the use of historic fonts, etc.
He argued that an interesting approach to solving these problems might be to look at complete documents, instead of single pages, and to analyse structural information for improving OCR results.
Such structural information could also help to recognise logical entities automatically such as headings, captions, etc.
Since some of these entities tend to be more important for retrieval than running text, OCR correction could then focus principal attention on these elements.
In the era of mass digitisation, a ‘next-level OCR’ such as this is urgently needed to increase digitisation speeds and help to lower hardware costs.
IMPACT Tools (Part 2) The final afternoon of the conference began with three short talks on selected achievements of IMPACT from the first year of the project.
The first presentation, by Apostolos Antonacopoulos of the Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRImA) research group at the University of Salford, introduced IMPACT work undertaken on Digital Restoration and Layout Analysis.
The presentation outlined methods explored by IMPACT for solving problems like geometric correction, border removal and binarisation.
He showed practical examples of these problems from scans of historical text and suggested possibilities for improvement.
In addition, one of the aims of IMPACT is to create and maintain a common baseline for evaluating different approaches to mass digitisation.
For this, IMPACT will create a common dataset, with ground truth at various levels, that is both representative of the library collections and of mass digitisation challenges.
It will also define evaluation metrics and scenarios with the appropriate tools to implement them.
Katrien Depuydt, head of the language database department at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (INL) in Leiden, gave the next presentation on Historical Lexicon Building and How it Improves Access to Text.
She outlined IMPACT work on overcoming historical language barriers by building historical lexica.
These lexica are intended to supplement the basic OCR word lookup for specific use with historical texts.
IMPACT will deliver a set of tools for the efficient production of such lexica with guidelines.
After some discussion of linguistic issues in building computational lexica of historical language, Depuydt provided some insight into the lexicon building process by showing the IMPACT attestation tool, which is used to verify attestations in historical dictionaries.
Finally, she outlined how computational lexica of historical language can overcome the historical language barrier in retrieval.
Finally, Neil Fitzgerald, IMPACT Delivery Manager at The British Library, gave a short overview of the first iteration of the IMPACT decision support tools, a collection of documents providing digitisation workflow support and guidance.
They are based on the real-world experience of project partners.
The decision support tools are intended to help direct project learning through a variety of means to the wider community.
Fitzgerald argued that it was IMPACT’s vision to focus on support for practical implementation, both for the in-house and contracted-out elements of digitisation.
This is why the decision support tools contain case studies from the various project partners which deal with common issues such as complex layouts and gothic fonts, as well as links to appropriate external resources.
In later iterations, feedback from the wider cultural heritage communities will also be included.
Parallel Sessions The afternoon concluded with three parallel sessions.
The first was an open discussion of IMPACT as a centre of competence.
Hildelies Balk gave a general presentation and Aly Conteh moderated a wide-ranging discussion that demonstrated that there was a great deal of interest in such a concept.
The second parallel session focused on technical matters, with Apostolos Antonacopoulos and Stefan Pletschacher of the University of Salford moderating a discussion on Challenges and Opportunities in Mass Digitisation: How Technology Can Meet Libraries’ Needs.
The final option was a guided tour of digitisation activities at the KB led by Edwin Klijn.
More detailed reports from the two discussion sessions will also be made available from the IMPACT Project Web site.
Conclusions Aly Conteh and Hildelies Balk concluded the day with a final summary, giving thanks to certain key people involved in its organisation.
The conference was a great opportunity for the IMPACT Project to engage with stakeholders from cultural heritage organisations, commercial digitisation providers, and the research community.
The mix of presentations and discussion was a useful way for project participants to share with interested parties the current state of the art and to discover what IMPACT was doing.
It was also a useful opportunity to remind delegates of the existing digitisation challenges that remain to be solved.
References IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) http://www.impact-project.eu i2010 Digital Libraries Initiative http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/index_en.htm Robèrt Gillesse, Judith Rog, Astrid Verheusen, Alternative File Formats for Storing Master Images of Digitisation Projects, v. 2.0.
Den Haag: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, March 2008. http://www.kb.nl/hrd/dd/dd_links_en_publicaties/links_en_publicaties_intro.html Rose Holley, “How Good Can It Get?
Analysing and Improving OCR Accuracy in Large Scale Historic Newspaper Digitisation Programs.” D-Lib Magazine, Vol.
15, no.
3⁄4, March/April 2009. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march09/holley/03holley.html Author Details Lieke Ploeger Research and Development Department Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) The Hague Netherlands Email: Lieke.Ploeger@KB.nl Web site: http://www.kb.nl/ Yola Park Research and Development Department Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) The Hague Netherlands Email: Yola.Park@KB.nl Web site: http://www.kb.nl/ Jeanna Nikolov-Ramírez Gaviria Abteilung für Forschung und Entwicklung Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library) Vienna Austria Email: jeanna.nikolov@onb.ac.at Web site: http://www.onb.ac.at/ Clemens Neudecker Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum (MDZ) Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library) Munich Germany Email: neudecker@bsb-muenchen.de Web site: http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/ Fedor Bochow Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum (MDZ) Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library) Munich Germany Email: Fedor.Bochow@bsb-muenchen.de Web site: http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/ Michael Day UKOLN, University of Bath United Kingdom Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “IMPACT Conference: Optical Character Recognition in Mass Digitisation” Authors: Lieke Ploeger, Yola Park, Jeanna Nikolov-Ramirez Gaviria, Clemens Neudecker, Fedor Bochow and Michael Day Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/impact-2009-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Visualising Building Access Data Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Visualising Building Access Data Buzz data mobile api javascript html database xhtml browser vocabularies blog perl ajax json html5 jquery Citation BibTex RIS Gary Brewerton and Jason Cooper describe how the imposition of visitor access control for safety purposes was developed into a useful management tool to measure library building usage.
1980 the Pilkington Library (the Library) was opened to support the current and future information needs of students, researchers and staff at Loughborough University.
The building had four floors, the lower three forming the Library Service and the top floor hosting the Department of Library and Information Studies.
Entry to the building was via the third floor (having been built against a hill) and there was a turnstile gate to count the number of visitors.
The entrance of the building was revamped in 2000 and the turnstile replaced with a people counter that used an infra-red beam.
Whilst both the turnstile and people counter provided a figure on how many people used the building, they failed to differentiate between people using the Library and visitors to the Department of Library and Information Studies.
This meant the Library was unable to rely upon these figures to gauge its footfall and usage demographics.
In 2012, the Department of Information Science (formerly the Department of Library and Information Studies) was relocated from the building and the space released to the Library.
What started as the refurbishment of the top floor of the building was extended to include the introduction of rolling stacks on the first floor, an upgrade of enquiry desks throughout, and remodelling of the public area on the third floor [1].
Prior to the work commencing, a consultancy company was employed to undertake a health and safety survey of the building; its findings recommended a maximum occupancy figure and implementation of access control at the entry and exit to enforce this.
This meant that for the first time users would have to identify themselves before entering or leaving the Library.
This in turn raised the distinct possibility that the Library would be able to get accurate figures on not just how many people were using it, but also which departments and categories of users they were, when they used it and for how long.
Teething Troubles The Library re-opened in October 2013 with new access control gates after a thirteen week closure for the refurbishment.
It soon became apparent that there were a few problems with the gates.
Two entry gates had been installed but there was only a single exit gate despite there being room for another gate, creating significant queues for users trying to leave the building during busy periods.
Moreover, the embedded card readers in the gates, used to identify users, proved difficult to locate, and would, on occasions, take a while to read the cards successfully.
Figure 1: Recently installed access control gates Solutions to these two problems were soon found.
New card readers were installed on the gates in a more prominent location that detected and read the cards more quickly.
In addition, an order was placed for a second exit gate.
Whilst library management staff awaited the fitting of the second gate, their thoughts turned to what statistics the access control system could now provide.
Answers to enquiries directed to the Facilities Management (FM) Department, which administers the access control systems throughout the institution, did not sound altogether promising.
While FM was able to supply details of an individual’s trail through the system upon request, it was not able to provide the general statistics required.
This lack of statistics disappointed Library management and senior management of the University who had hoped for evidence to demonstrate that their investment in the Library refurbishment had been worthwhile.
Further enquiries were made and it was determined that the access control system did generate log files that might provide at least some of the required data which could be made available to the Library and senior management.
Scoping Our Needs Examination of the log files revealed that they held the user’s number, first and last name, which reader had processed the card, whether the access was successful or not, and the time of the transaction.
After confirming that the logs contained enough data from which to produce usable statistics, it was important to decide exactly what questions needed answering.
Following discussions with various Library staff, in particular the Customer Services Manager and Facilities Manager, the following set of six questions was drawn up: What is the total number of people who have visited the Library in a given period?
Which academic departments use the Library building the most?
What categories of users (e.g.
undergraduates, researchers, visitors, etc.)
use the Library building the most?
What is the maximum number of people in the Library at any time?
How long do people spend in the Library?
What are the peak times for people entering and leaving the Library?
It was obvious that answers to the first question and the last three were all readily available from the log data.
The second and third question would require the log data to be enriched with additional details from the institution’s personnel system, student records system or, more easily, the Library Management System (LMS).
It was further decided that these answers would best be presented to management through the use of a dashboard style graphical interface, since Library staff had already experienced notable success using this method with its online reading lists system [2].
Developing the Dashboard The first parts of the system that needed to be developed were the underlying database and the scripts that would populate it from the log files.
The core table would be called events which would store each transaction from the log.
To reduce the size of the table common recurring bits of information were stored in separate tables, e.g.
details of locations, actions, users and their categories (undergraduate, postgraduate, staff, researcher, etc).
Figure 2: Database structure The evacuations table stores the time of any evacuations of the building took place, as during these times the entries in the log would be unreliable, due to the gates being fixed open to allow everyone to leave the building quickly.
The config table is used by the system to store useful bits of information that might take a while to calculate (eg earliest event in the system).
The logic of the import script is quite simple:             for each entry in the log file {                        extract data fields                        lookup the relevant user ID, location ID, action ID and user type ID                        enrich the event data with some of the current users details                                  (part-time/full-time status, distance learner status and finalist status)                        if the log entry does not already exist in the events table {                                   insert log entry into the events table                        }             }             update the earliest and latest timestamps of events in the config table   After testing, it turned out that rather than looking up details from the database at the point they are needed, it was faster for the script to start by extracting all the user, location, actions and user type details from the database in one go and store them in memory in their own data structures.
Using these data structures removed the need for a number of database queries for each line in the log file (ie those in the lookup stage and the enrichment stage).
The check to see if the log entry already exists in the events table is required as the log file being imported each day contains the last few days of log entries, therefore without this check there would be duplicate entries in the event table which would skew any stats produced.
After the import script, the next decision to be made was how to structure the code base.
The two options were to have everything processed at the server side in a traditional Web site style, or to have an AJAX style interface [3] with the back-end providing data to the browser where they are then processed and rendered using JavaScript.
The AJAX style was chosen, as the development team had used the AJAX style interface effectively in a number of other projects [4][5], and whereby in recognition of the benefit it derived from offloading some of the data processing to the client’s browser.
Developing the Back-end Due to the system using an AJAX style interface, the back-end simply consists of 8 Perl CGI scripts [6].
All of the CGI scripts return their results in either plain JSON [7] format or, if the callback parameter has been specified, in a JSONP [8] format.
The first CGI script retrieves a set of useful information required by the front-end to build its interface.
This information consists of the current range of data in the systems, a list of possible user types and a list of departments.
The other 7 CGI scripts are used by the front-end to access the data required for its reports and all accept the same 5 parameters: startDate – the start of the date range to assess (required) endDate – the end of the date range to assess (required) departmentCodes – a comma-separated list of department codes by which to limit the analysis (optional) userTypes – a comma separated list of the user categories to limit the analysis by (optional) restrictions – a comma-separated list of user attributes by which to limit the analysis (optional) callback – a function name to be used when passing results back in JSONP format (optional) Developing the Front-end The front-end is a HTML5 Web page [9] and makes use jQuery [10], jQuery UI [11] and Flot [12] the jQuery graph plug-in.
When the page first loads it calls a CGI script to obtain the information it needs to build the options part of its interface.
Normally the options are hidden with only a tab at the top of the screen being displayed; but if the user clicks on the tab then the options interface is displayed (see Figure 3).
Users can change the date range being reported and narrow down the results based upon department, user category and/or user attributes.
Figure 3: Options The dashboard (see Figure 4) itself consists of a summary followed by eight reports.
The summary lists the options selected and the number of people who used the building and how many visits they actually made.
Each report has a data link that, when clicked, will show a table of the underlying data used to plot the graphs.
Figure 4: Screenshot of access control dashboard The eight reports mentioned are as follows: The first two reports are displayed as pie charts and show a breakdown of visits by the category of visitor in the first report and a breakdown of visits by department of visitor in the second The third report shows the percentage of users from each department who have used the library in the period being reported on The fourth report shows the total number of people to use the building each day in the reporting period The fifth report shows the occupancy of the building over the time being reported on (see figure 5), as well as the option to show a summary table of the underlying data for the graph.
This report also allows the user to find out how many people were in the building at a specific point in time.
The sixth report shows the length of time that people stay in the building for, while the seventh report shows the average number of people to use the building per day of the week The last report on the dashboard shows the hourly averages of people entering and leaving the building (see Figure 6).
Figure 5: Occupancy report Tackling Missing Data Due to the gates' teething troubles causing queues for users trying to exit during busy periods, at times Library staff had to lock the gates open till the queues had cleared.
While this resolved the immediate inconvenience of the queue, it caused problems for the reporting system as there were no log entries for those users leaving the Library.
This problem of data loss, to a lesser degree, also arises when users tailgate others when entering or leaving the building and their transactions are consequently never completely logged.
Figure 6: Hourly averages report The issue of a small number of missing entrance and exit events did not represent much of a problem in most of the reports, as users of the system understand that the figures returned are an approximation; but for the occupancy graph (Figure 5), minor inaccuracies would accumulate.
This resulted in it showing a steady increase in the use of the building which was misleading.
To tackle this anomaly, the occupancy report makes a few assumptions: It only counts exits that have a matching entrance for the user If it has seen that a user has entered the Library but does not detect a matching exit event within 48 hours, it assumes the user has left If it does not register any entrance or exit events for two hours, it assumes the Library has closed and assumes everyone has left.
The last assumption had to be made since a consistent closing time could not be assumed, as the Library’s opening hours varied and even include periods of 24/7 when it never closes.
Using the Dashboard Since its development the dashboard has been used by the Library to gain a valuable insight into its user population.
For the first time Library management knows which departments make most use of the building and so has been able to confirm anecdotal evidence on which categories of users visit, when, and for how long.
The Library can now say, with some authority, that three quarters of all those entering are undergraduate students.
This information has not only been useful to Library management but also of interest to others in the institution, such as FM and senior management.
Moreover, it has helped provide answers to some external information requests such as the annual SCONUL return [13].
The dashboard is also an essential tool in reviewing occupancy levels and identifying periods of high demand.
This information will prove critical in predicting the levels of demand for the Library building, allowing it to address this issue through changing opening hours, staffing and restricting access for some users.
Finally, the dashboard has provided a wealth of information for use in advocacy and marketing activities.
A poster [14] was produced for the official opening of the refurbished Library which highlighted its popularity with students and staff alike.
Information from the dashboard has also been used in blog posts, case studies and when liaison librarians are speaking to departments.
Conclusion The purpose of introducing access control to the Pilkington Library was to enforce safe occupancy levels, but it has provided a variety of further benefits.
The log data from the access control system has made it possible to answer many outstanding questions about those entering and leaving the Library.
Development of a dashboard interface seemed an ideal approach to exposing this information to Library management and this has proven to be the case.
It is hoped that the dashboard will complement the Library’s existing business intelligence and allow it to manage and market its resources better.
Being able to clearly identify and respond to patterns of Library usage represents a significant advantage, but combining this with other collated information could offer further benefits.
For example, a future study comparing physical use of the Library against use of its virtual resources may well make interesting reading.
References Graham Walton.
"Prize winners for completing Library refurb survey", 11 June 2014.
Loughborough University Library Ad-Lib blog http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/blog/category/library/building-work Cooper, J., Knight, J. and Brewerton, G. (2013) Providing Information about Reading Lists via a Dashboard Interface, Code4Lib, 19.http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/7745 Powers, S. (2007).Adding Ajax: Making Existing Sites More Interactive.
O’Reilly Media.
Jon Knight, Jason Cooper, Gary Brewerton.
“Redeveloping the Loughborough Online Reading List System”.
July 2012, Ariadne Issue 69 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue69/knight-et-al Jason Cooper, Gary Brewerton.
“Developing a Prototype Library WebApp for Mobile Devices”.
July 2013, Ariadne Issue 71. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue71/cooper-brewerton Guelich, S. Gundavaram, S. Birznieks G. (2000).
CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd Edition.
June 2000.
O’Reilly Media.
JSON: Introducing JSON http://www.json.org/ Defining Safer JSON-P http://json-p.org/ W3C.
HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML.
W3C Last Call Working Draft 17 June 2014 http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library http://jquery.com/ jQuery User Interface http://jqueryui.com/ Flot: Attractive JavaScript plotting for jQuery http://www.flotcharts.org/ SCONUL http://www.sconul.ac.uk/ How is the transformed Library being used?
May 2014.
Loughborough University Library Ad-Lib blog http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/middleware/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/acPoster.pdf Author Details Gary Brewerton Middleware and Library Systems IT Services Loughborough University Email: g.p.brewerton@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/it/ Gary is currently Manager of the Middleware and Library Systems Team in IT Services, Loughborough University.
He has over 20 years’ experience in both Higher Education and libraries.
Dr Jason Cooper Middleware and Library Systems IT Services Loughborough University Email: j.l.cooper@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/it/ Jason is a member of the Middleware and Library Systems Team at Loughborough University.
Dr Cooper maintains a number of key Library systems as well as developing middleware solutions for the University.
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Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008: The Great Debate Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008: The Great Debate Buzz data mobile software framework wiki api javascript rss xml portal usability archives css accessibility browser schema blog repositories video flickr preservation flash php personalisation wordpress microformats mashup xcri youtube facebook twitter xcri-cap research Citation BibTex RIS Adrian Tribe reports on a three-day conference designed for professionals involved in the provision of institutional Web services, organised by UKOLN and held at King's College, University of Aberdeen in July 2008.
'Aberdeen??!!
Make sure you take some woolly jumpers and a sou'wester then.'
Friends are always keen to give helpful advice, bless 'em, but as it turned out, it was a good job that I ignored it, as it was t-shirts every day for the 180 or so who had the privilege of attending the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) in the Granite City this year.
Three days of glorious sunshine, mixed with stimulating talks, thought-provoking parallel sessions, lively BarCamps, good food and interesting company made for a combination that's hard to beat, despite the allocated (Hillhead) accommodation crying out for an urgent and intimate encounter with a wrecking ball * and the seagulls being on a mission to wake me up by 4.30am.
The theme of the event this year was "The Great Debate", a reference to questions surrounding all things Web 2.0 and the place of such technologies and services within the institutional context (not, as some wags might think, an invitation to discuss whether Brian Kelly's job actually entails doing any real work!).
The Workshop presentations are generally available either from the event Web site [1] or from Slideshare [2].
King's College, University of Aberdeen The Workshop – Day One Opening Session: A Vision for the Future Following a welcome from Marieke Guy, now firmly established as a very able and worthy successor to Brian Kelly as the main IWMW organiser and conference chair, we enjoyed a brief introduction to the University and the city from Mike McConnell, the University of Aberdeen's Web Manager, who in turn introduced his colleague Derrick McClure, who gave us a fascinating insight into Doric, the dialect spoken in Aberdeen.
By the end of this we all knew that we had no hope of understanding the locals, but it was still going to be fun trying!
What a welcome change this proved to be from the rather dry introductory address from the VC or some other senior staff member who is usually wheeled out at such conferences and we can only hope that this approach is repeated at all future Workshops.
Plenary 1: Science in the YouTube Age: How Web-based Tools Are Enabling Open Research Practice Cameron Neylon, University of Southampton In the opening plenary, Cameron Neylon extolled the virtues of the open approach to research planning, execution and publication that Web 2.0 tools and services can enable, contrasted with the 'old' and rather closed methodologies that many researchers (and their universities) still seem to favour.
Cameron admitted that a culture change would have to take place if we are to see more openness, but a number of good examples were quoted where research labs or individuals are making use of various Web 2.0 tools in their work.
These included: Nasa's Phoenix Mars Lander giving updates and answering people's questions using the Twitter microblog service [3]; The Redfield Lab's use of blogs to give day-to-day accounts of their research [4]; the OpenWetWare wiki, promoting 'the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology and biological engineering' [3]; and an interesting example of a research proposal suggested, collaboratively compiled, and submitted in less than a week via the use of a blog, Google Docs and other e-collaboration tools [6].
I'm sure that few in the audience would have argued against Cameron's zealous support for more openness in research and the helpful role that the latest Web tools can play within this environment.
Plenary 2a: Web 2.0 and Brand: Theory and Practice James Souttar and Dean Russell, Precedent Communications The second plenary was due to be given by Helen Aspell from the University of Southampton but due to illness was given instead by James Souttar and Dean Russell from Precedent Communications, the company that has recently worked with Southampton on their rebranding and on the development of iSoton [7].
I confess that having heard from these speakers before, about brand intimacy, brand engagement and the like, I wasn't necessarily paying full attention, but please don't take that as a comment on the quality of their content!
One of the main things that Dean shared with us was the 'SAFE Matrix', which was developed as a way of assessing the impact of different communication tools and techniques within the institutional e-communication context.
The acronym represents the quadrants on a graph plotting brand engagement against brand intimacy and stands for Sensory (low intimacy, high engagement), Awareness (low intimacy, low engagement), Functional (high intimacy, low engagement) and Educational (high intimacy, high engagement).
An example of an activity was given for each quadrant: a Second Life presence falling under 'Sensory'; a banner advert under 'Awareness'; email under 'Functional' and 'online learning' under 'Educational'.
Dean then attempted to explain the use of a 'Critical Success Factors' assessment tool to help in assigning scores to different technologies and features, thus enabling a quantitative comparison that can be used to help guide decision making and to determine priorities in the development of particular Web site features.
Each time I've heard this talk I've struggled at this point, as it all seems rather arbitrary to me, but perhaps that's just because I'm a bit slow and my brain doesn't work in the same way as theirs!
Dean told us how the University of Southampton had set up a public blog at the time the new branding was released, but of more interest to me was an interruption from James at this point with the observation that Southampton chose after a while to 'bury' the blog much further down within the Web site and that universities may not actually be able to 'do' blogging properly at the moment because the culture of open and public engagement that is required is just too alien.
A very fair point, although I think James was preaching to the converted in Aberdeen.
Plenary 2b: The 2008 Web landscape in the Museum Sector Mike Ellis, Eduserv I'm sure I wasn't alone in feeling that Mike should have been given a much longer slot, although I admit to being a bit biased due to my background in archaeology and museums.
In the Web 2.0 world, we're now in an era where anyone can be a curator, with the public very much involved in the production of heritage material and the sharing of experiences etc.
An interesting example of an organisation making photo archives available via Flickr Commons was given (the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney) [8].
We were shown a museum that asks visitors to blog about their experiences and links to them from the museum Web site [9].
And we were encouraged to abandon the rest of the conference to play Launchball, a fun and educational Flash game on the Science Museum Web site where visitors can create and share their own levels with friends [10].
Launchball on the Science Museum Web site Plenary 2c: Use of Ning at the University of Bradford Claire Gibbons, University of Bradford Claire spoke to us about the use that they are making of the Ning social networking site as part of their 'Develop Me!'
initiative [11].
This student retention project aims to provide an online environment in which prospective and new students can access resources and interact with each other and with staff to help develop their confidence and skills, and one aspect of this is the provision of a social networking space on Ning [12].
The fact that the Ning site has just 60 members after two months in operation possibly suggests that this won't be heavily used, but time will tell and Claire was clear about the fact that the site may only have a short life span, with students linking up on Facebook and on other spaces after that.
We also learnt about "The Hub" – a place where student services are being brought together, both physically and online [13].
Discussion Groups This year's Workshop had just one slot set aside for a discussion time, in which we were split into smaller groups to consider the future of the IWMW event itself.
My group were very firmly of the opinion that the great value of the event is in its physical, face-to-face nature, and that a move to a more virtual gathering would be a negative thing.
By all means continue to provide a live video feed and give opportunities for remote participants to get involved, but on no account must the physical gathering be curtailed, as this is where the greatest strength and value of the event lies.
It gives busy Web people a chance to get away from their usual work environment and to share with and learn from colleagues from a variety of related but different institutions.
It would be a very great shame if this event could not continue as a real gathering of Web professionals (and yes, I would even be willing to stay in grotty student halls if that's the price to pay to keep it real rather than virtual!).
Parallel Session 1 Following the afternoon coffee break we had the first of the two slots allocated to parallel sessions.
I found myself in Mike Nolan's very interesting group where he told us all about 'Stuff What We're doing at Edge Hill University'.
One of Mike's slides appeared to betray a somewhat irrational phobia of Web content management systems (perhaps arising from a traumatic encounter with Vignette?
), an issue that resurfaced during the lively and helpful discussions that accompanied Mike's slides.
We played Buzzword Bingo to make us pay attention (which, incidentally, I won, but for which I received no prize except the rather empty sounding promise of a drink next year!).
We learnt about Edge Hill's 'Hi' site [14], specifically aimed at bridging the gap for traditional undergraduate students between application through UCAS and arrival at the University.
The site contains a forum for people to ask questions and several existing students are paid to blog on it.
Our discussions also touched on student and staff portals, including Edge Hill's 'Go' student portal site, promoted as the next step for users of the 'Hi' site once their relationship with the University has moved from betrothal to marriage (figuratively speaking of course) [15].
On the technical side, Mike told us about Edge Hill's use of multi-user WordPress (blogging software), bbPress (forum software), Symfony (a PHP Web application framework used extensively in Web developments at Edge Hill), and XCRI-CAP (an XML schema for describing course-related information [16].
Rather than using a CMS, the Web team focus on developing specific functional systems (news, search, etc), and support Faculty content maintainers who are using Contribute, while editing centrally using Dreamweaver.
Mike finished with a short list of suggestions that we could all consider and apply to improve our own sites, including: adding microformats, RSS feeds, and local search auto-discovery for insertion into a visitor's browser; improving download times by compressing JavaScript and CSS, enabling gzip compression and optimizing page load times using YSlow [17]; adding hint text to search boxes; making full use of Google's many free tools (Google Analytics, Google Alerts, Google AdWords, Google Webmaster Tools, etc); and customised error pages.
Social Event 1 The conference dinner took place on the first evening and was a very enjoyable affair in Elphinstone Hall.
The wine, food and conversation were good, and the attempt at dancing the Gay Gordons at the ceilidh afterwards very amusing.
My wife and children are right – I can't dance!
Walking back to the halls just before midnight with some glimmers of light still in the western sky across Seaton Park was the icing on the cake of the first day.
Wonderful.
Sunset over Seaton Park Day Two Wednesday morning started badly, with the dreaded seagulls squawking at dawn and the conference blurb getting the breakfast times wrong, but the pleasant walk down to the University for the start of Day Two soon erased those memories.
Morning Session 1: Let's Get Real Plenary 3: Web 2.0 – Whatever Happened to Web 1.0 David Hyett, British Antarctic Survey I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what David was saying about some of the dangers of adopting Web 2.0 features without careful thought as to their applicability, relevance, usability and accessibility.
Despite David's claim to be something of a sceptic/critic when it comes to Web 2.0, in the end he was actually quite positive about the use of these tools and technologies where they add genuine value to a site and don't distract users from achieving their goals, a view that I think struck a chord with quite a few in the audience.
An example of an acceptable Web 2.0 feature (in David's book) is the 'Penguin of the Day' area on the British Antarctic Survey site, with its voting facility and RSS feed.
Penguin of the Day on http://www.antarctic.ac.uk/ Plenary 4: Look Who's Talking Now ... Alison Wildish, University of Bath Alison Wildish, back by popular demand following a very good talk last year about her work at Edge Hill, gave the next plenary about her new role in the rather different environment of the University of Bath where she is now Head of Web Services.
Alison compared and contrasted the situations at Bath and Edge Hill and sought to address some of the criticisms/comments muttered last year that 'stuff what she was doing at Edge Hill' just wouldn't work at a traditional university.
In her very able, engaging and beautifully illustrated style Alison acknowledged the differences in culture, management and priorities between the two institutions but gave us an insight into some of things that she is doing to get this traditional university to take its Web marketing activities more seriously, to develop an online identity, to make better use of existing information and to interact with their Web site users in a more engaging way.
We heard about the brain-storming and mind-mapping sessions that Alison ran with her team to clarify their vision for the Web at Bath.
A communications strategy was developed to tell the rest of the University about their work and plans and to offer information and training events.
A plan for change was presented to the Web Management Board and the VC Group and top-level support was duly secured.
The Web team has been reshaped to enable more of a focus on development and marketing/communications activities rather than providing ongoing support for Web applications.
One idea that appealed to many people present was the 'Get Creative' week that Alison has planned during August to give her team an opportunity to break away from their usual work and to do something, er, creative, that hasn't necessarily been asked for but that will benefit the University in some way.
It is hoped that this will provide an environment in which the team can work together in a new way and that it will help to enthuse and refresh them for the work that lies ahead.
While I don't think Alison said anything particularly new or radical, it's certainly good to hear such a well-articulated presentation of a number of the key issues involved in managing a traditional university's Web presence.
Alison and friends enjoying the sun Morning Session 2: Getting Technical Plenary 5: Institutional Responses to Emergent Technologies Rob Bristow, JISC Rob, a Programme Manager at JISC, provided an overview of JISC-funded projects that touch on ways in which universities are using and/or responding to Web 2.0 technologies, user-owned devices, user-contributed data, personalisation and self-service applications and systems.
I found it a shame that Rob didn't spend longer talking about just one or two specific projects in greater depth, but it was good to know what JISC is funding in this area, and more details, as ever, are available on the JISC Web site [18].
I was interested to hear of the work of the Kuali Foundation, a body that is co-ordinating the development of open source administrative software for the Higher Education sector [19].
Considering the eye-watering costs of many of the commercial offerings in this area, this could well be one to watch for the future.
Plenary 6: The Tangled Web Is But a Fleeting Dream ...But Then Again...
The final plenary of the morning was given by James Currall from the University of Glasgow, with the tantalising title 'The Tangled Web is but a Fleeting Dream ...but then again...', which you will of course have realised was about the preservation and archiving of Web-based resources.
James gets at least three prizes for his talk.
One for finding a very relevant passage about the importance of archives in Ezra chapters 5 and 6.
Another for being the most mobile speaker, pacing up and down the aisles while delivering his talk.
And a third for making the first use of the voting facility in the auditorium whereby each person could press a button to indicate a 'No', 'Yes' or 'Abstain' vote when invited.
We were challenged to consider that far more important than 'How?'
and 'Who?'
when considering Web archiving is the question 'Why?
', which in turn should help us to answer the questions 'What?'
and 'When?'
(how often).
Only then can we address the 'Where?'
and 'Who?'
questions, followed by 'How?'
This talk raised some excellent issues which helped to show that Web archiving is not necessarily as straightforward a thing as you might think, especially in the Web 2.0 world.
One comment right near the end struck me as being the most important point of the whole talk: 'Don't let management try to turn a policy question into a technology problem'.
I suspect that many Web Managers are concerned about the issue of archiving, but their institutions aren't necessarily ready (or willing) to discuss the wider policy issues that ought to be established before the practicalities are addressed.
James also had the (dubious?)
honour of being filmed by Brian Kelly on his new toy – a Flip Ultra video camera designed to simplify the creation and uploading of Web-quality videos to video sharing sites such as YouTube.
The results in this instance can be found on Google Video [20].
Plenary 7: Institutional Repositories... publish and be damned?
Stephanie Taylor, UKOLN After lunch Stephanie's plenary was a valiant attempt to convince us all that an Institutional Repository (IR) can have a legitimate place among an institution's electronic and Web publication activities.
Personally I think it's hard to get away from the fact that many regard an IR at best as a confusing distraction from an institution's existing Web sites and systems or at worst as a dead duck of a system that becomes an embarrassment to the institution by virtue of its cavernous emptiness.
While I wouldn't argue against Stephanie's conclusion that an IR can have a role to play, it seems to me that the most important issues are that the institution properly considers the purpose and place of an IR, communicates this to the intended contributors, openly commits to its development and ongoing support, and firmly encourages the full and widespread contribution of resources to it.
As in James' talk about Web archiving, the fundamental points are not technical at all, but relate to matters of policy and management.
BarCamps Before our afternoon tea break we were invited to participate in not one, but two BarCamp sessions of our choosing, each lasting just 20 minutes.
The idea here was that at the start of the Workshop any participant who had something they wanted to share or discuss could write a title against a room number on a board in the King's College entrance hall.
Those of us who didn't feel inclined to run a group could then just turn up to whichever group we thought sounded interesting.
I chose to attend one session about the qualifications required to be a Web Manager, which was reasonably interesting but way too short to allow for thorough discussion and participation, which was a great shame.
As that group overran, I chose not to attend a second session except to sit briefly and listen in on the group that had the best venue – under a tree outside Elphinstone Hall – as they discussed issues surrounding the selling of an institution's soul to Microsoft.
Sorry, I mean the implementation of Microsoft's 'Live@edu' hosted email service (which I'm sure is fine and dandy, etc etc).
The Live@edu BarCamp Parallel Session 2 Following a much needed tea break it was time for the second parallel session.
Stephen Emmott, Director of Web Services, LSE, gave a presentation entitled 'Tactics to Strategy, and Back Again' which proved to be a very interesting and helpful opportunity to clarify some of the jargon that surrounds Web management activities.
He invited us to consider the categorisation of the issues and topics represented by this jargon into 'means' and 'ends', and to explore a slightly different way of looking at Web management issues by using state transition diagrams.
The latter involves thinking about subjects (e.g.
a Web page) that have states (e.g.
draft, published or archived) and the transitions (actions) that take you from one state to another (e.g.
edit, publish, archive).
Basically this is a way of breaking down potentially complex issues into a series of small steps, and as such is something with which all Web managers are familiar, albeit without necessarily thinking about it consciously in this way.
What was interesting was the way in which Stephen then brought some of these ideas together and grouped them, with task (means) and goals, objectives and risks (ends) being seen as falling under project management, tactics (means) and strategies (ends) coming together under operational management, and procedures (means) and policies (ends) categorised as governance.
I found this session to be really thought-provoking, and I hope to spend more time soon mulling over Stephen's approach with reference to my own situation at Birkbeck.
Social Event 2 On the Wednesday evening we set off on a coach into town, to a drinks reception at the Aberdeen Art Gallery.
It was a shame that we weren't able to look round anything other than the main entrance hall, but it was enough to provoke some good-natured debate about modern abstract art and the emperor's new clothes.
We then scurried off in smaller groups to various pubs and restaurants in the city centre to enjoy the local cuisine.
My fellow Birkbeckian and I had a very good time with the friendly bunch from the University of Kent and a few others at the Old Blackfriars.
The Chieftain Haggis was very tasty, as was the cheesecake for desert!
Those with more stamina than I headed off to another pub later, while I returned to Hillhead, via Seaton Park.
The end of another full and interesting day.
Good company at the Old Blackfriars Day Three Morning Session: Community Session After the hustle and bustle of checking out of our Hillhead accommodation on the final morning and lugging our cases down to King's College (well, OK, a coach did all the hard work), we enjoyed a quite leisurely morning session being shown all the entries into this year's Innovation Competition [21].
Not surprisingly some were (much) better than others, and some couldn't really be described as innovative, but as this wasn't exactly a formal or deeply serious competition with rigorously applied rules, no one really minded.
The winning entry was one of the non-innovative examples, although it was certainly creative.
It was an IWMW version of the famous song 'The lion sleeps tonight' (a.k.a 'Whimaway', 'In the jungle' etc), sung by Debbie Nicholson, Claire Gibbons, Miles Banbery, Keith Brooke and David Williams, poking fun, among other things, at Brian Kelly's twittering habits [22].
Of the more serious entries, among the ones that caught my eye (and got my vote) were David Mackland's Google Maps mashup tool that enables departments within the University of Abertay to create and maintain Google Maps containing links to points of interest without needing any coding/Web development skills at all [23]; and Dawn Petherick's live train departures information tool, developed at the University of Birmingham to help students and staff to see this information within the institutional portal environment rather than having to visit an external Web site.
This system uses the Association of Train Operating Companies' live departure boards API to pull the relevant data into a portal channel [24].
Train departure information within the University of Birmingham portal [25] Plenary 8: Unleashing the Tribe Ewan McIntosh, Learning and Teaching Scotland This final plenary was widely regarded as the best of the whole event.
His talk addressed the issue of young people's use of social networks such as MySpace or Bebo and other 'spaces', the importance of the experiences and collaborations that such networks and technologies allow, and the ways in which educators should respond to these developments that are intrinsic to the lives of the 'Bebo Boomers' who are heading our way.
In terms of our use of the Web in teaching and learning, Ewan left us with three questions: what (simple) tools help learning to be remarkable?
; how can we create a shared awareness?
and; what changes would we make to get small passionate groups creating themselves?
I'm really glad that Ewan was invited to give this final plenary, which was so inspiring, informative and entertaining (especially the YouTube video of the frozen Grand Central Station event [26]).
Conclusions Obviously there are many things that I have left out, but I hope this has given a fair flavour of the event.
By my reckoning the Workshop this year was a great success, giving us much to think about, many ideas to explore and apply, some really productive networking opportunities and the chance to enjoy that apparently rare phenomenon of three continuous days of sunshine and >20°C temperatures in Aberdeen.
A big thank you to the organisers for putting together such a good event and to God for the fantastic weather.
And long may the Institutional Web Management Workshop continue to be a real, physical 'space' for face-to-face interaction.
The King Street Bridge over the River Don, a short stroll from Hillhead *Editor's note: I gather a common finding, but it seems that, when the catastrophe befell them, neither Aberdeen nor UKOLN Events had any other option at such a late stage in the proceedings.
References IWMW 2008 Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2008/ IWMW 2008 presentations on Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/tag/iwmw2008 Mars Phoenix Twitter service http://twitter.com/marsphoenix The Redfield Lab blogs http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~redfield/doing.html The OpenWetWare Wiki http://www.openwetware.org/ Science in the open: research network proposal for open science http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/category/research-network-proposal-for-open-science/ iSoton http://www.southampton.ac.uk/isoton/ The Powerhouse Museum http://flickr.com/photos/powerhouse_museum/ The Brooklyn Museum http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/ Launchball http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/launchpad/launchball/ University of Bradford: Develop Me!
http://www.brad.ac.uk/developme/ University of Bradford: Develop Me!
Ning http://developme.ning.com/ University of Bradford: The Hub http://www.brad.ac.uk/hub/ Edge Hill University: Hi http://hi.edgehill.ac.uk/ Edge Hill University: GO http://go.edgehill.ac.uk/ XCRI-CAP http://www.xcri.org/Welcome.html YSlow, a plug-in for Firebug http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ JISC: Users & Innovation programme: Personalising technologies http://www.jisc.ac.uk/usersinnovation The Kuali Foundation http://www.kuali.org/ James Currall's plenary talk at IWMW 2008 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2435556721461270472 For a full list of the Innovation Competition entries see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2008/competition/submissions/ A video of the song performance as well as the lyrics can be seen at http://www.vcasmo.com/video/ukwebfocus/2993 Google Maps Mashup Tool http://googlemaps.abertay.ac.uk/ Train departure information on the University of Birmingham portal http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2008/competition/submissions/#submission-8 Train Channels http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2008/competition/submissions/TrainChannels23.JPG YouTube Frozen Grand Central http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo Author Details Adrian Tribe Web Manager Birkbeck, University of London Email: a.tribe@bbk.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008: The Great Debate " Author: Adrian Tribe Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/iwmw-2008-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 71 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 71 Buzz data mobile software framework api html database portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation accessibility tagging blog repositories video preservation cataloguing ebook widget curation mets twitter solr html5 diigo authentication wcag url research standards jquery bs8878 sushi Citation BibTex RIS The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne Issue 71.
As I depart this chair after the preparation of what I thought would be the last issue of Ariadne [1], I make no apology for the fact that I did my best to include as much material  to her ‘swan song’ as possible.
With the instruction to produce only one more issue this year, I felt it was important to publish as much of the content in the pipeline as I could.
This will make for a long summary of main articles; I can only console you with the thought that the first version was considerably longer… Nonetheless, as you will see, there is a wide range of contributions, technical, theoretical, practical, maybe even heretical for some.
I trust you will, as I have always tried to ensure over the last ten years, find something that will inform and engage.
In his tooled up article Implementing a Resource or Reading List Management System, Gary Brewerton takes us step by step through the various stages from writing the business case to training and data entry.
He warns that while a Reading List Management System (RLMS) provides users with an easy and useful facility, implementing it is not as straight-forward as it may first appear.
Gary’s section on the business case for an RLMS points to the core of institutional priorities, namely student retention.
He demonstrates how an RLMS supports a library’s management of its collection in line with the teaching needs of the university while providing lecturers with important feedback.
He highlights the need to plan with regard to scale, complexity, data entry (or migration effort), maintenance and access.
Close examination of these initial issues serves as a means of fleshing out system requirements.
He examines the advantages of acquiring proprietary and open source systems.
He then considers the third option which is development of one’s own RLMS, though he begins by warning us of the significant amount of development effort involved.
Once the scope and in particular the number of reading lists intended has been established, standard project management tools ought to make the process altogether manageable.
But, failure to achieve a critical mass of lists can be fatal and Gary provides remedies for project leaders.
Gary provides an overview of the main considerations concerning training and support where each institution and its RLMS will form different requirements, for example, whether libraries alone or academics are involved.
In addition to underlining their importance, Gary emphasises that stakeholders involved will assume different significance as adoption and implementation move on to RLMS launch and (no doubt) maturity.
In their article on The Potential of Learning Analytics and Big Data, Patricia Charlton, Manolis Mavrikis and  Demetra Katsifli discuss how the emerging trend of learning analytics and big data can  support and empower learning and teaching.
They begin by providing a definition of learning analytics based on that definition, the authors examine how learning analytics differs from the analytical process that has always accompanied teaching.
They point out that in the age of Big Data, the difficulty lies in determining which data are truly significant.
They explain that the amount of data now involved in investigations is enormous and time-consuming.
They also describe how the world of technology has changed since the turn of the 21st century and the consequences that have arisen.
They explain Kenneth Cukier’s approach to Big Data and how we are obliged to relinquish to a degree our understanding of how insights into mass data have been determined.
They make the point that in order to employ Big Data in operating learning analytics, practitioners must know what to look for in large volumes of data and know how to handle them.
The authors turn our attention to the two key research perspectives covering current data analysis tools.
They explain that educational data mining is an emerging discipline and that working with any form of data analysis calls for an initial notion of the kinds of patterns anticipated – in teaching and learning they are the critical factors that influence outcomes.
They then proceed to describe a series of scenarios containing a wide range of factors which can be analysed to determine the degree of risk of failure to which a cohort of students might be subject.
They describe the key tools that automate the learning analytics models.
In their discussion section, the authors look at the value of data to teachers and policy makers as well as their value to students in reflection upon the value of the effectiveness of their learning.
In their conclusion, the authors warn of the danger of misuse of learning analytics if one becomes enticed unduly by the notion of measurability.
Jason Cooper and Gary Brewerton describe the development of a prototype WebApp to improve access to Library systems at Loughborough University for mobile devices in Developing a Prototype Library WebApp for Mobile Devices.
The authors describe how a review of the statistics for access to LUL’s Web site and blog over mobile devices prompted staff to improve such access through the development of a prototype mobile app.
They explain the basis upon which they selected or rejected a range of functionalities, the determinant criteria being the avoiding the duplication of planned improvements, the creation of new APIs, or the alteration of data in related systems.
The authors then explain the importance of deciding whether to achieve a Web app approach to developing a mobile app, or to opt for a number of native apps.
They describe the various options of page or pop-up, and the availability of standard HTML content, or JQuery mobile widgets, to developers, or both.
JQuery, they felt, worked well in a mobile device context.
They describe the services with which users are presented following successful log-in and how they are displayed for optimal clarity on mobile devices.
They explain how data on users’ personalised reading lists are derived from the Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS) which they have described in detail in Issue 69 [2].
The authors move us on to the benefits they have identified in the use of HTML5 to develop their Web app.
They point out that the early decisions to limit the scope of development effort, that is, choice of Web approach and limited initial functionality, did make it possible to limit developer effort on an initial prototype.
They also indicate where their next release will take their development work.
They feel that financial and time demands can be kept to practical limits.
In his article The Effect of a Performance-based Funding Model on Research Dtatabases in Sweden and Norway, Leif Eriksson describes how the introduction of Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS) has created new forms of research databases in Sweden and Norway.
The Performance-based Research Funding System (PRFS) has proven one of the most significant changes in HE funding systems, moving the sector towards greater market-styled incentives.
A major benefit of the PRFS model is that it avoids the allocation of funding for (often historical) reasons which are no longer valid.
However the adoption of publications as an indicator of research quality in PRFS-based models has not been without controversy.
Nonetheless, publication outputs do figure significantly in first-order indicators of the PRFS models in Scandinavia and elsewhere.
The author also points to the use of indexes as a means of overcoming methodological difficulties associated with citation analysis.
Where assessors do not choose to rely on peer review, there are difficulties in the use of databases in humanities and social sciences.
In his article, Leif undertakes to examine and compare two different PRFS-oriented systems as employed in Norway and Sweden.
He describes the national system for research documentation set up to support the Norwegian model.
He also describes how in 2011 the new CRIStin system has not only assumed but extended the functionality of its predecessor, offering information on more informal publication as well as researcher and project data.
Leif in his description of the Swedish model SwePub points out that it relies on only two indicators, and that its publication indicator, by relying on Web of Science, has attracted criticism from some quarters.
He explains that new technology and publishing practices have increased the use of publication databases, but that in Swedish fields, such as humanities and social sciences, publications may only be accessible from local databases.
He provides a detailed breakdown of publications and publication types in Sweden between 2004 and 2011.
His next analysis is of language distribution in relation to ISI coverage across the various domains, commenting on particular situations in respect of Sweden.
Leif reminds us that SwePub has evolved as a result of local HEIs initiatives and discussion of the portal as a data source for the Swedish PRFS model is ongoing.
Its database, in his view, will require improvements and stricter quality control and data validation to make this feasible.
A leaf may well be taken from Norway’s book.
In their article entitled KAPTUR the Highlights:  Exploring Research Data Management in the Visual Arts, Leigh Garrett, Marie-Therese Gramstadt, Carlos Silva and Anne Spalding describe the exploration of the importance and nature of research data in the visual arts and requirements for their appropriate curation and preservation.
In their introduction, the authors explain that the KAPTUR Project at its onset did not benefit from any significant research data management practice within the visual arts.
Part of the project’s aims was to redress this situation.
They summarise the aims of the article in its description of the Project and the work of its four partners towards developing a ‘sectoral model of best practice in the management of research data in the [visual] arts.’ They describe the increasing pressures to improve transparency and more systematic management of research data for a variety of improved benefits.
The authors explain some of the complexity that attends research in the visual arts and in particular that the initial ‘data holders’ of research are physical artefacts such as sketch-books and journals.
They add that the field generates more than its share of technical difficulties as regards standards, formats and other matters.
They go on to explore the tangible nature of some outputs as opposed to the tacit knowledge accompanying artistic practice that must nonetheless be captured in some way.
While practice-based research on the visual arts is relatively recent and may derive in part from social sciences and other disciplines, visual arts data can be as, if not more, complex than in longer-established fields of research.
They lay emphasis on the far greater variety of ‘formats’ of data that visual arts researchers may produce.
The authors then explain how work was undertaken after the publication of the Project’s environmental assessment report.
They describe technical solutions to meet researchers’ requirements in the partner institutions and the basis on which two parallel pilots of those solutions were arranged as part of the user and technical analysis.
They explain the barriers that existed to effective policy formation, and how it became possible to develop successful high-level research data management policies.
In their article on The Wellcome Library, Digital, Christy Henshaw and Robert Kiley describe how the Wellcome Library has transformed its information systems to enable mass digitisation of historic collections.
They recognise that the balance between physical libraries and their virtual counterparts are changing and that the Wellcome Library has developed a transformation strategy as a consequence.
Its strategy comprises both the mass digitisation of unique collections together with the creation of an online experience that transcends the generic offerings of mass distribution.
They describe how much progress the Library has made in these key aims, explaining that such development is driven by the need to create a framework that integrates new and existing systems, provides scope for growth and meets requirements of policy surrounding both licensing and access.
In considering the Wellcome Library’s “Principles for Technical Change”, the authors examine where it can be difficult to achieve convergence with existing functionality.
They identified three main areas: searching, viewing and archiving.
They report that much has been achieved in addressing issues of convergence.
They describe the feasibility study carried out in 2010 in respect of database modification, standards and workflow requirements.
This work led to the formal development of the business requirements of the Library’s digital delivery system (DDS).
The authors provide some thoughts on the advantages and pitfalls of agile development agreed with its developers.
They then move us on to the metadata standards that have been employed by Wellcome Library DDS.
They explain the technology supporting the DDS player where, ironically, delivery of video material proved less demanding than that of image-based content.
They go on to explain the various and complex forms of access (governed by a range of licences and restrictions).
They also explain how the high level of granularity employed by authentication and access system in the DDS ensures that an optimal number of items can be made accessible while efficiently restricting the few items that cannot be made available to all.
In their article eMargin: A Collaborative Textual Annotation Tool,  Andrew Kehoe and Matt Gee describe their Jisc-funded eMargin collaborative textual annotation tool, showing how it has widened its focus through integration with Virtual Learning Environments at the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) at Birmingham City University (BCU).
They explain that while they were involved in developing automated compilation and analysis tools, such as WebCorps, their eMargin tool represented a departure since it is a manual annotation and analysis tool.
They explain the project’s genesis in 2007 during analysis work on English literature.
Ironically, eMargin grew out of the resistance on the part of some literary scholars to the highly automated top-down approach they applied which was inimical to the conventional approach of the discipline.
In discussions with staff and students at the School of English at BCU, they soon discovered the limitations of the analogue approach to close reading annotation – frankly, a mess.
Further research on their part revealed that annotation software had done little to keep pace and largely failed to meet requirements of close reading analysis and online sharing.
Armed with a clearer set of requirements, the team developed a prototype Web-based annotation system which supported (and distributed to all users) close annotation right down to single-word level.
This approach permitted immediate display and response, solving the problem of online sharing.
Their description of the eMargin tool includes the design of basic annotation and the flexibility accorded to users, tagging of sub-sections of text or even single words, the various methods and formats of uploading the primary or ‘target’ text, the management of different user groups, look-up or reference functionality, search and retrieval of primary or annotated text, and various output formats.
The authors then provide us with the architecture of their solution.
They go on to recount the technical difficulties they met in their initial design in respect of the granularity of the eMargin tool.
Their solution was both pragmatic and practical!
They also describe different and also mobile-friendly methods of text selection.
The authors are pleased to report that eMargin is attracting considerable interest and is trialling across disciplines from law and fine art to specialist healthcare.
Brian Kelly, Jonathan Hassell, David Sloan, Dominik Lukeš, E.A.
Draffan and Sarah Lewthwaite advise Bring Your Own Policy: Why Accessibility Standards Need to Be Contextually Sensitive and argue that, rather than having a universal standard for Web accessibility, Web accessibility practices and policies need to be sufficiently flexible to cater for the local context.
The authors explain that despite the increased pressures on conformance with Web accessibility guidelines, large-scale surveys have shown that they have had relatively little impact.
Having reviewed previous critiques, they examine the code of practice BS 8878.
They argue for a wider application than just to Web content, and that an alternative strategy could be adopted which would employ measures that are more context-sensitive.
The authors point out that little attention has been paid to the principles underlying Global Accessibility Standards and that in non-Western environments may even prove to be counter-productive.
They highlight the alternative of more evidence-based standards and examine their disadvantages.
Having used the example of simple language to illustrate the difficulties, the authors offer another example in the provision of accessibility support to publicly available video material.
They argue that standardisation of the deployment of Web products is more important that the conformance of the products themselves.
The authors summarise the aims of BS 8878.
They explain the scope of the framework that it adds to WCAG 2.0 and how it encourages Web site designers to think more strategically about all accessibility decisions surrounding their product.
They conclude that globalisation is not limited to users: owners of sites do not wish to be constrained in their choice of international suppliers and products, but the latter are by no means standardised globally – but the benefits of an international standard are enormous.
In his tooled up article Improving Evaluation of Resources through Injected Feedback Surveys, Terry Reese suggests a novel approach for providing intercept survey functionality for librarians looking to simplify the gathering of user feedback for library-provided materials.
He begins by explaining the difficulties librarians face in obtaining a truly representative assessment  of use of their electronic resources, and describes the drawbacks in current evaluations such as usage statistics etc.
While pointing to the improvements in the analysis of raw usage data provided by tools like COUNTER and SUSHI [3], Terry accepts that they cannot be so successful in capturing the impact of resources used on the research of students and staff.
He emphasises that usage and impact arise from different sets of information, the latter coming best from users directly and ‘at the point of need.’ An injection survey, that is, a survey that seeks to obtain users’ opinions as they are working with the library’s resource, is regarded as one of the most appropriate means of obtaining impact data, but is far from easy to implement.
This article explains the approach adopted in conjunction with a proxy server.
Terry’s institution, Oregon State University Libraries  (OSUL), was able to determine the optimal location to place an injection survey.
In order to meet the institutional need of a fully fledged survey framework in the online delivery process, OSUL adapted a novel approach to determining how to route traffic in the context of potential survey injections.
The new approach took a fraction of the time compared to when manual re-writes of URLs represented the best solution.
The re-design of OSUL’s proxy workflow meant that a more user-directed assessment programme became possible, with all the benefits to be derived from injection surveys.
Another aspect of considerable interest to OSUL staff is whether it will be possible to share surveyed impact data with, for example, institutions with which they share collections.
In conclusion, the author sees the collection of these targeted impact data as a means not only of understanding how libraries’ resources affect the work of users, but also of improving their services as well.
In DataFinder: A Research Data Catalogue for Oxford, Sally Rumsey and Neil Jefferies explain the context and the decisions guiding the development of DataFinder, a data catalogue for the University of Oxford.
The authors begin by describing their institution’s policy on research data and record management.
The emerging infrastructure is developing across four areas: RDM planning, managing live data, discovery and location and access, reuse and curation.
It is anticipated that the catalogue, DataFinder, will provide the ‘glue’ across the four services mentioned.
The authors go on to explain that DataFinder was designed to use metadata that support discovery and standard citation.
They describe the anticipated applications as forming a data chain, linked to one another as a series of services, relevant to the different stages of the research data lifecycle.
They explain that metadata created to describe datasets may begin the cycle in quite a minimal form.
However, they may be extended as the lifecycle proceeds.
A core minimum metadata set has been defined while contextual metadata, for example, commensurate with funders’ policies, can be inserted where relevant.
The application of controlled vocabularies and auto-completion to the manual creation process is seen as both user-friendly and as a means of ensuring consistency.
The authors explain that the selection of a unique subject classification scheme has been rejected because of too many conflicting interests, but they explain why the FAST scheme has been favoured.
The authors then move on to explain how the inherent architecture in their solution has the necessary characteristics to handle the increase in volume.
DataReporter will be able to employ both usage and content statistics in the preparation of reports to comply with a number of types of funder mandate as well as for purposes such as capacity planning, budgeting and the REF.
They then pass on to the approach taken in the development of DataFinder’s user interface and the reuse of Solr index and search.
They explain how the generation of a UUID for each object assures robust uniqueness which permits export without danger of duplication.
They also reveal their method of handling duplicate records and mismatches in this context which obviate the need for a highly complex process of programmatic record reconciliation.
In their conclusions, they summarise how design decisions have been inevitably influenced by finder requirements but that central to the design has been the means of simplifying the deposit process for the primary users, researchers.
In Augmented Reality in Education: The SCARLET+ Experience, Laura Skilton, Matt Ramirez, Guyda Armstrong, Rose Lock, Jean Vacher and Marie-Therese Gramstadt describe augmented reality in education case studies from the University of Sussex and the University for the Creative Arts.
While the use of Augmented Reality (AR) has been largely concentrated in advertising and high-profile events, the SCARLET and SCARLET+ projects provide a better understanding of its use not only in learning and teaching but also with regard to special collections materials and objects.
The subsequent project, SCARLET+, benefited from the experience garnered by the initial project.
The work at the University of Sussex has been with the Mass Observation collection which older readers will know dates back to the 1930s, World War II and more recently.
The SCARLET+ application at Sussex created a structure which greatly benefited users by concentrating upon the interpretation of archival material.
Such a structure could be applied to any discipline or collection.
Initial investigation of AR applications indicated that they seemed to divide into two categories: very user-friendly but limited in scope; or very flexible but technically difficult.
This paradoxical impasse was resolved by the intervention of the project team.
The authors give an example of the problems encountered in the development process and how they were solved.
The authors explain how the project addressed the somewhat different environment of the University for the Creative Arts (UCA).
Together with UCA staff it was agreed to raise students’ awareness and exploitation of AR to the benefit of their learning.
Working with UCA has allowed the project to develop approaches to AR development that support handling of artefacts.
When AR works well, it can be very impressive.
Getting it to work well depends on the technology and infrastructure working properly while training is essential for effective AR development.
In their article Engaging Researchers with Social Media Tools: 25 Research Things@Huddersfield, Graham Stone and Ellen Collins investigate whether 25 Research Things, an innovative online learning programme, could help researchers understand the value of Web 2.0 tools.
25 Research Things, an online learning course developed at the University of Huddersfield, is a pilot which seeks to do for researchers what 23 Things did for public librarians [4].
In their article they investigate to what degree this innovation has benefited researchers.
The programme was offered to both postgraduates and staff.
As with 23 Things, 25 Research Things encouraged participants to experiment with new technologies and record and share their reactions with other pilot members.
The authors review the development of Web 2.0 usage and point to research on the culture of digital natives and how it is wise not to presume that all researchers will conform to the stereotype.
The authors point to a study by Ian Rowlands and colleagues which indicates that researchers are beginning to employ social media at all stages of the research cycle, yet it may not be possible to claim that adoption among researchers is anywhere near universal.
But acceptance and experimentation is definitely growing.
They suggest an overall picture of decided interest in social media on the part of researchers, but little clarity as yet on how best to exploit Web 2.0 technologies.
The authors describe how the two runs of the course were operated and the ways in which participation was encouraged together with the role of the project authors in each cohort’s activity.
They then describe their methodology, explaining the two forms of data collection for their evaluation process.
The authors explore the themes that arose in the participants’ reflective blog posts in order to discover to what degree the online course succeeded in its aims.
The reactions to Google Docs, Mendeley, Diigo, Prezi, Slideshare, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Commoncraft were of interest, not just in terms of supporting research, but even on occasions in teaching and learning.
They also point to the value that was laid upon the importance and occasionally absence of project team support.
In their discussion section, the authors mention the tools which seemed to attract participants in terms of supporting their research activity, one of which was not included in the course!
Once again, they also mention how Web 2.0 tools were seen as a support to postgraduates’ teaching work.
Furthermore, the value of social media to  participants in terms of staying up to date in areas beyond their immediate research activity was also appreciated.
In their conclusions on this small pilot project, the authors do see connectiuons between the level of drop-outs and the amount of material and time to cover the course, the degree of project support and other factors.
Encouraging above all, to my mind, is the decision to include in future iterations of 25 Research Things for Researchers a face-to-face element for participants all together, with the project team.
Wise move.
In their article Hita-Hita: Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Japan Ten Years On, Ikuko Tsuchide, Yui Nishizono, Masako Suzuki, Shigeki Sugita, Kazuo Yamamoto and Hideki Uchijima introduce a number of ideas and projects that have enhanced the progress of the Open Access movement and institutional repositories in Japan over the last ten years.
The term ‘hita-hita’ means to be ‘tenacious, persevering and to work step by step without giving up.’ To the authors this term bespeaks the attitude of repository managers in their promotion of repository development and support for the Open Access movement in the country.
One of the groups that contributes a great deal to that sense of determination is the Digital Repository Federation (DRF), a community of repository managers from 145 universities and research institutions across Japan which the authors mention in their article.
They also describe the environment and ethos of Japanese library professionals and in particular explain the effect of the 3-year tours of duty they carry out in different departments or institutions throughout their career and how this affects the accumulation of repository management experience and expertise.
A major part of this contribution concentrates on the methodology of Japanese librarians in advocating the adoption of Open Access and the awareness-raising activities they undertake to encourage researchers to deposit.
One of the aspects which I found so striking was the very effective low-tech components of their grass-roots activities which derive, I suspect, as much from Japanese culture as conscious policy, namely the face-to-face contact that is a central part of their various promotional campaigns.
I suspect there are some worthwhile lessons to be drawn from this article, and readers interested in this subject will be pleased to learn that a follow-up article on consortial repositories in Japan will appear in Issue 72.
In his latest contribution, Mining the Archive: eBooks, Martin White opts to track the development of ebooks through the articles and reviews on the topic since 2001.
While he would maintain there are pleasures particular to the printed book, and that it can render up information more quickly than using an electronic search, Martin cannot deny that an ebook reader is clearly a practical alternative when one is in cramped conditions.
In considering a contribution by Sarah Ormes in 2001, Martin reminds us of work funded by Jisc investigating the needs of UK academics and students.
Martin’s analysis shows that 2000 – 2004 was a period of heightened interest in ebooks with the arrival of the first ebook standard and the advent of new ebook readers.
He also highlights the importance of OCLC’s acquisition of netLibrary together with the emphasis, possibly influenced by Ariadne’s readership, on electronic textbooks.
He also points to the value placed on the emerging technology by Penny Garrod of UKOLN who had examined its importance within public library provision by late 2003, and recognised the need to see ebooks integrated with existing collections.
Martin then moves on to 2006-2010, which he sees as a further and distinct period in ebook development.
He warmly recommends the article by Brian Whalley which describes the situation just before the Amazon Kindle reached the market, and analyses how it might work with other learning applications.
In his conclusions, Martin, writing as an ebook author himself, comments on the value of the format and the value placed by many on the higher currency it achieves over its printed equivalent.
As usual, there are also event reports and reviews in this issue.
I trust you will enjoy Issue 71.
Goodbye.
References Richard Waller.
"Ariadne Carries On".
July 2013, Ariadne Issue 71 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue71/editorial1 Jon Knight, Jason Cooper, Gary Brewerton.
"Redeveloping the Loughborough Online Reading List System".
July 2012, Ariadne Issue 69 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue69/knight-et-al Paul Meehan, Paul Needham, Ross MacIntyre.
"SUSHI: Delivering Major Benefits to JUSP".
November 2012, Ariadne Issue 70 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/meehan-et-al Helen Leech.
"23 Things in Public Libraries".
July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/leech/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/contact/webform Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Subject Repositories: European Collaboration in the International Context Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Subject Repositories: European Collaboration in the International Context Buzz data software framework database portal usability infrastructure metadata digitisation repositories video preservation e-research interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Dave Puplett reports on the conference Subject Repositories: European Collaboration in the International Context held at the British Library in January 2010.
The conference launched Economists Online (EO), an innovative economics subject repository.
Institutional repositories are now common in Higher Education, but successful examples of subject repositories, which cater to an entire discipline, are much rarer.
The Subject Repositories conference taught some key lessons about the role of transnational collaboration in setting up a subject repository.
The conference drew on the expertise of renowned specialists in the field and the two and a half-year-long development process of Economists Online [1].
Economists Online was created by the Network of European Economists Online (NEEO) [2], which consists of 24 European and international partners (disclosure: the author was a work package leader for this project and one of the conference organisers).
The project was funded by the European Commission out of the eContentplus [3] funding stream.
Various speakers at the conference shared their views on subject repositories, and their experience from the development of Economists Online more specifically.
This article summarises the proceeding of the conference and presents the most important lessons learned.
28 January 2010 Economists Online in the Changing Landscape of Online Repositories Jean Sykes, chair of Nereus [4] and Chief Information Officer at the London School of Economics opened the conference by welcoming all speakers and participants.
Hans Geleijnse, Director of the NEEO Project, then described the project's primary aim in his keynote address: to improve the usability, global visibility and management of European economics research.
To achieve this goal, the project had to provide open access to high-quality multi-lingual academic output of leading economics institutes and their researchers, delivered through a sustainable, multi-lingual portal with aggregated and enhanced metadata.
This portal is Economists Online.
Geleijnse revealed the many targets for content acquisition that guided its development process.
Drawing its content from the institutional repositories of the 16 founding members of NEEO, as well as six new partners, all but one target had been successfully met, and in many cases surpassed.
The portal now contains over 73,000 metadata records and more than 20,000 full-text items.
The only aim that the project fell short of was the targeted 160 datasets.
While Economists Online contains at present 100 datasets (with each linked to an associated publication), it demonstrated that academics were far more reluctant to share their data freely than they were with other types of research output.
Geleijnse differentiated subject repositories from other repositories by borrowing a definition from a 2008 SIRIS Report: 'A collection of research outputs with a common link to a particular subject discipline.
Subject repositories are likely to cover one broad-based discipline, with contributors from many different institutions supported by a variety of funders' [5].
In the context of the changing landscape of existing repositories in Europe, Geleijnse emphasised that there should be no conflict between subject repositories and institutional repositories.
This belief found broad agreement among conference participants.
In fact, the Economists Online model attests to their symbiotic relationship.
Several small and highly specialized repositories, such as the Central and Eastern European Marine Repository [6], as well as larger ones, such as TechXtra [7], provided a number of lessons: sustainability is often a major issue; critical mass of current content is essential; visibility is key to success; subject repositories provide better and more tailored services than institutional repositories.
Economists Online, however, brings a different type of service to the world of economics as compared to existing online economics resources, such as Econstor [8], the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)[9], and Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) [10].
Its added value is: the inclusion of a wider range of materials, such as datasets and enriched metadata; a strong open access agenda; and a robust funding and support structure.
Importantly, the co-operation with existing services, such as RePEc, is essential, and further collaboration would be explored in the future.
Finally, Geleijnse emphasised the importance of ensuring the sustainability of Economists Online and saw no obstacles for the Economists Online model to be applied successfully to other disciplines.
He afforded an important role to libraries in this process, given their ability to serve as 'catalysts for change'.
Economists' Needs: Launch of Economists Online Professor Nick Barr from the London School of Economics began by recalling how experienced economists in the 1950s could justifiably claim to know the entirety of their subject.
The overwhelming volume of journals, working papers, presentations and data would make such a claim absurd today, as information is becoming increasingly unmanageable.
Economists Online is part of the solution to such information overload and, moreover, allows economists to keep up with new research.
Professor Barr praised the variety of materials available in the portal, especially the amount of full-text resources, and drew attention to the need to keep the content up to date.
He described ease of use as a key to its success, noting that 'a smart product should aim to make the product useful for people who aren't smart themselves.'
He recommended improving user-friendliness by making software learn users' search habits and suggest 'articles that interest [them].'
Finally, Professor Barr described himself as an 'enthusiast' and launched a short video presentation, showcasing some of the features of Economists Online, which formally marked its launch.
Professor Barr launching Economists Online The EU's Perspective Javier Hernández-Ros, Head of Unit Access to Information in the DG Information Society and Media at the European Commission (EC), stressed recent developments in the growth of Open Access.
Progress in developing Open Access repositories had been steady in recent years and Open Access is now firmly on the European policy agenda.
In this context, institutional repositories are now a 'must' for any serious research institution.
The role of the European Commission is manifold in this process: as a policy maker, a research funder and as an infrastructure builder.
It is in this third capacity that the EC has funded the NEEO Project.
An exchange of views with the audience followed.
Christian Zimmerman, representing RePEc at the conference and Professor at the University of Connecticut, praised Europe's work on Open Access in comparison with North America.
Hernández-Ros was surprised, as he felt that US initiatives, such as PubMed Central [11], had yet to be achieved on the same scale in Europe.
Danny Kingsley from the Australian National Library cautioned that Open Access policy should not seek to be a one-size-fits-all solution.
Instead, diverse and even disparate needs of different disciplines required equally distinct solutions.
Collaboration of Repositories Dr. Neil Jacobs, Programme Manager for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and Dale Heenan, the Web Project Manager for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), explored avenues for collaboration for funders and institutional repositories.
Dr. Jacobs felt that repositories sat at the intersection between open access and research information management, which entailed both challenges and opportunities.
Dr. Jacobs clarified the relationships between researchers, funders, institutional and subject repositories, which ranged from sharing grant information, to mandates and reporting obligations, to discipline-based communities and the various related networks.
JISC has funded a variety of projects to support both repository staff and researchers in managing these relationships.
Example of such activities are SWORD [12], a tool to streamline the deposit process for researchers, and IncReASe [13], which focused upon using automation to increase the volume of repository content.
Dale Heenan presented details of the ESRC's policies towards Open Access and repositories.
The ESRC has its own repository, in which ESRC-funded research is deposited.
In this sense, the ESRC perceived itself as having an important role as the 'long-term guardians of the information' created by their funding.
The Australian Repository Experience Jean Sykes delivered a presentation prepared by Cathrine Harboe-Ree, Librarian at Monash University.
The presentation showcased projects designed to build Australia's repository infrastructure which included the Australasian Digital Theses Program (ADT), the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR), the Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW), the Australian Scheme for Higher Education Repositories (ASHER) and the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC).
Of particular interest was the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), which will develop national data frameworks and improve the capabilities of institutions.
More specifically, the project aims to improve data use and reuse through better metadata capture and management.
A lesson to be drawn from the Monash experience, according to Harboe-Ree, is that, to facilitate good data management, staff can be trained to give advice to researchers in order to exploit the skills and networks of contact librarians.
Once trained, the more senior staff can then become 'buddies' to newer staff members, passing on their expertise.
Finally, the development of Australian repositories was presented as a response to both governmental and institutional needs.
National resource discovery layers are thus essential for the future of these services, and the need for data management is emerging as a major driver for repository development.
US Developments in Online Repositories Patricia Renfro, Deputy University Librarian at Columbia and Associate Vice President for Digital Programs and Technology Services, gave an insight into the wide range of activities and initiatives taking place in the United States around repository development.
Renfro introduced five major US-based subject repositories: ArXiv, CiteSeer, RePEc, SSRN and PubMed Central.
Key to their success are certain shared characteristics: they link tightly to disciplinary practice and culture, and; they are set up for disciplines that have an established practice of sharing preprints among the community.
They represent crucial lessons, given that researchers in disciplines with successful subject repositories appear to identify more strongly with their discipline than their academic institution.
US repositories are supported by a variety of funding models to ensure their sustainability.
While PubMed Central is sustained by government funding, SSRN is a commercial venture, and the previously free service ArXiv is now developing a community-based funding model.
Funder mandates can be a driver of Open Access policies, since, for example, the National Institute of Health Public Access Policy has greatly increased the amount of content available at PubMed Central.
The success and size of US institutional repositories vary and are dependent on resource allocation; however, it emerges that US repositories contain a higher proportion of full-text content than their European counterparts.
Another important factor for content levels in institutional repositories are Open Access mandates.
Harvard's lead in establishing such a mandate has been followed by an increasing number of institutions.
The success of these repositories however depended on their commitment to Open Access, and some repositories refocused their efforts from Open Access onto other functions, such as the publishing of papers or adding Web features for author support and collaboration.
Another interesting recent development with respect to data is that some US publishers increasingly ask, where appropriate, for data to accompany all research.
Renfro closed by showing a screengrab of Mendeley [14], a new system that uses a social networking model for a research repository.
Given Mendeley's impressive growth statistics, the question arises as to its potential role in the future of repositories.
The Future of Repositories Dr. Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), discussed the role of repositories in the future of scholarly communication.
Although sustainability is a concern for both institutional and subject repositories, Dr. Lynch raised the question of whether institutional repositories are financially more sustainable than subject repositories.
Moreover, institutional repositories may find quality management easier due to the role their affiliated institution plays in monitoring the quality of its outputs.
On the other hand, he suggested that subject repositories were better positioned to manage research data within disciplinary structures rather than institutional ones.
Dr. Lynch expressed optimism about the prospects for subject repositories given their 'natural role' as an integral part of the e-research infrastructure, in addition to institutional repositories.
Lastly, a discussion ensued over the future of the existing peer-review system as Dr. Lynch suggested that a new approach to peer review was needed.
29 January 2010 The RePEc Experience Professor Christian Zimmerman, University of Connecticut, presented the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) electronic economics bibliography.
Zimmerman described the landscape of publishing in economics, which entails delays of up to five years between the completion of a research paper and its publication.
As a result, common practice in economics entails a culture of pre-print sharing.
RePEc, a service entirely supported by volunteers (including Zimmerman himself), is an index of economics pre-prints and articles that was founded by Thomas Krichel.
It contains over 840,000 entries.
A variety of other services, such as Google Scholar, Econlit and now Economists Online, make use of the RePEc database.
The main challenge for RePEc was the creation of a critical mass, which was achieved by giving incentives, such as rankings and citation analysis, to authors.
Over 23,000 economists have now registered accounts with RePEc.
A View from a European Partner Institution Francois Cavalier, Library Director of Sciences Po, Paris, presented the perspective of one of the NEEO project partners on the development of the Economists Online portal.
After describing the complexities of the French research landscape, he detailed the technical challenges Sciences Po faced to comply with the Economists Online system.
He underlined the need to take the role of national research cultures into consideration and the obstacles they faced to increasing European and international co-operation.
Cavalier explained his institution's commitment to an Open Access policy and introduced Sciences Po's institutional repository, Spire [15].
In his opinion, NEEO and the Economists Online project had been a 'wonderful opportunity', that allowed his institution to 'share with and learn from many colleagues and take part in a very dynamic network'.
Economists Online Presentation Wietske Sijtsma, NEEO Project Manager and Controller, Library and IT Services, Tilburg University, gave a live demonstration of some of the key features of Economists Online.
She also described the challenges faced and lessons learned in the development of the portal.
Key to its development was the relationship between project staff as well as both content contributors and future users.
Both groups were consulted for their views regularly throughout the project, and Sijtsma highlighted the importance of incorporating this feedback into the development of the portal.
The portal rests on three main cornerstones: personnel, hardware and software.
This requires finding a sustainable model for the future of the service and close co-operation between library and IT staff.
Once again, the importance of getting a critical mass of content was regarded as an essential target.
Content acquisition was therefore the most difficult challenge in the project.
Sijtsma presented preliminary results from a user survey conducted, which demonstrated that the quality of content was considered high and over 80 per cent of participants would recommend Economists Online to a colleague.
Parallel Workshops The conference audience then split into six workshop streams, each representing a different aspect of the work that was undertaken during the NEEO Project.
The workshops dealt with Content Recruitment, Infrastructure and Interoperability, Intellectual Property Rights, Multi-lingual tools, Datasets and finally Usage Statistics.
This approach offered experts in each area the opportunity to concentrate more closely on their field of expertise.
Future Options and Strategies for Repositories Dr Paul Ayris, Director of University College London (UCL) Library Services, summarised the discussions and conclusions of the conference.
He discussed some key points concerning the future of repositories and Economists Online, including content, funding and services offered.
Nereus, according to Ayris, should consider revising its inclusion criteria, as not all excellent economics research is published in highly rated institutions in Europe.
Mass digitisation would be another interesting, but complex and expensive, way of increasing content.
Institutional and subject repositories could also have an advocacy role in promoting Open Access — upon which Economists Online is built — and deposit mandates.
Dr. Ayris acknowledged the efforts that Nereus and NEEO had already made with respect to sustainability, noting that the Digital Preservation agreement with the Royal Library (KB) in The Hague was one of the first agreements of its kind.
Dr. Ayris also raised the question of who is best placed to assist the management of research data, and explored ways to overcome researchers' reluctance to share their own data.
He suggested that funding agencies and publishers could both have a role in this.
Expanding on Cliff Lynch's definition of Economists Online as a second-generation subject repository, Dr Ayris asked what a third-generation repository would look like and what developments would aid the transition to the next stage.
Open Access, though essential to this process, will not take off unless it is embedded in institutional strategies.
In this vein, strategic partnerships would be very important to future co-operation.
He suggested, in particular, for Economists Online to consider a partnership with DART-Europe and research consortia, such as the League of European Research Universities (LERU).
Another potential route for repositories to take would be to develop e-Press functions.
The conference was concluded with congratulations to those involved in Economists Online for the 'birth of a healthy baby,' and by Hans Geleijnse thanking the speakers, organising committee and the audience.
Conclusions The conference covered a great deal of territory in two intense half-day sessions.
The programme included showcases of existing repository practice in Europe, Australia and America, and gave the audience the opportunity to benefit from the development experience and expertise of a major new subject repository: Economists Online.
Among the many aspects of scholarly communication in economics discussed, data sharing perhaps featured most prominently.
While all — from funding agencies to librarians and publishers to academics — agree that greater access to research data is highly desirable, no systematic means of data sharing has been found (certainly not for Economics).
Disagreement persists as to who should lead on sharing research datasets.
Is it a role for publishers, as Christian Zimmerman suggested?
Or should this role be accorded to institutional and subject repositories?
Whichever approach one chooses to take, reassuring academics about IPR issues and creating the necessary infrastructure for sharing and storage remain essential pre-conditions.
Collaboration emerged as a key factor in the success of new infrastructure to deal with electronic research, in its various forms.
Time will tell if the model for Economists Online as a superstructure on top of institutional repositories is a sustainable one.
However, the delegates of this conference were left in no doubt about the degree of planning, strategic thought and hard work that has gone into the development of this new portal.
References Economists Online http://www.economistsonline.org/ NEEO Web site http://www.neeoproject.eu/ eContentplus http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/projects/funded_projects/index_en.htm Nereus http://www.nereus4economics.info/ SIRIS http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/259/1/siris-report-nov-2008.pdf CEEMAR http://www.ceemar.org/ Techxtra http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/ EconStor http://www.econstor.eu/ SSRN http://www.ssrn.com/ RePEc http://repec.org/ PubMed Central http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ SWORD http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres/tools/sword.aspx IncReASe http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres/sue/increase Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/ Spire http://spire.sciences-po.fr/ Author Details Dave Puplett Assistant Librarian, E-Services London School of Economics and Political Science Email: d.puplett@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.twitter.com/puplett Return to top Article Title: "Subject Repositories: European Collaboration in the International Context" Author: Dave Puplett Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/bl-subject-repos-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Making Software What Really Works, and Why We Believe It Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Making Software What Really Works, and Why We Believe It Buzz data software framework api repositories aggregation algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS While acknowledging the genuine usefulness of much of its content, Emma Tonkin provides helpful pointers towards a second edition.
Published by O'Reilly, as part of the Theory In Practice series, this book is essentially academic in focus.
It takes the form of thirty chapters.
The first eight of these aim to provide an introduction to the area of software engineering, or more specifically, the collection and use of supporting evidence to support software engineering practices.
These initial chapters are satisfyingly broad in scope, covering topics from human factors and personality to complexity metrics and the process of authoring a systematic review.
Evidence-based Software Engineering Software engineering is a relatively young domain, and an affluent one; IT is big business, as are the various sub-domains that surround it.
For some, IT management, development processes, the development (and marketing) of technology and business frameworks intended to support the process or improve its results are areas that represent research opportunities; for others, the potential is more effectively captured in a business plan.
Furthermore, software development is a complex process: difficult, expensive, context-sensitive and fragile.
There is no shortage of available advice, and a wealth of (often mutually contradictory) suggestions to sort through.
But that advice is seldom backed up with clear and directly applicable evidence.
As a consequence, commentators in this work proposed 'evidence-based software engineering …'  to '… provide the means by which current best evidence from research can be integrated with practical experience and human values in the decision making process regarding the development and maintenance of software' [1].
This would provide: A common goal for individual researchers and research groups to ensure that their research is directed to the requirements of industry and other stakeholder groups.
A means by which industry practitioners can make rational decisions about technology adoption.
A means to improve the dependability of software intensive systems, as a result of better choice of development technologies.
A means to increase the acceptability of softwareintensive systems that interface with individual citizens.
An input to certification processes.
Part 1: General Principles of Searching for and Using Evidence The first part of the book begins with two chapters on the theme of evidence about software engineering.
“The Quest for Convincing Evidence” discusses the collection and aggregation of evidence about software engineering.
The second chapter, “Credibility, or Why Should I Insist on Being Convinced?” discusses what makes evidence convincing, and sketches out factors that make some people harder to convince than others.
This second chapter sets the scene for much of the book, arguing that the problem of convincing an audience is context-specific: the evidence presented should be tuned to the interests and needs of the audience.
Less theory is required, say Menzies and Shull [2]; instead, a call for more repositories of evidence, observations and laws.
Chapter Three discusses the process and practice of completing a systematic review (systematic literature review).
The systematic literature review is likely to be more familiar to researchers than the majority of topics in this book, but the process is clearly explained and its strengths and weaknesses identified.
This chapter does not appear to represent a core topic for Part 1 of the book.
Chapter Four is an introduction to the use of qualitative methods in software engineering, useful background for the reader.
On reaching Chapter Five, the title alone suggests that the reader is likely to find it harder going, as it contains no less than two acronyms that are explained only part way through the body of the piece: “Learning Through Application: The Maturing of the QIP in the SEL'.
The QIP is a 'Quality Improvement Paradigm', described in the text as 'a version of the scientific method' (characterise your project; figure out what you want to know/accomplish; figure out what process might work; do it, and see what happens; analyse the data you collected, and store what you learned during the process).
The SEL is NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory.
This chapter, again, could as easily be placed in Part 2 of the book.
Chapter Six, “Personality, Intelligence and Expertise: Impacts on Software Development” returns to the goal of providing a good theoretical grounding to the reader.
This time, it's all about the personalities; how to recognise a good programmer, and establishing the role of personality and intelligence, amongst other factors.
“Why Is It So Hard to Learn to Program?”, Chapter Seven, presents available evidence about the challenges faced in learning to program, possible strategies, such as visual programming, that facilitate the process, and the circumstances in which such strategies are most likely to improve matters.
The final chapter of Part 1, “Beyond Lines of Code: Do We Need More Complexity Metrics?” serves as a (detailed) introduction to complexity metrics, their purpose and application, concluding that lines of code correlate closely with the more complex metrics available – but that alternatives to the old metrics can improve the situation further.
Part 2: Specific Topics in Software Engineering In the introduction to the second, longer section of the book, the editors explain the structure as follows: it is intended to 'apply the ideas in the previous part to several pressing topics in the field of programming and software developments' (p.143).
Controversial topics in software development and engineering are to be held to the light, allowing the reader to explore evidence and the extent to which traditional ideas may be trusted.
A bewildering diversity of topics are covered during this part of the book twenty-two chapters.
These vary in length between four and over twenty pages.
Some chapters are written in the style of scientific papers, presenting complex arguments and evidence in a manner that does little to make the information accessible to the novice reader.
Other authors have approached the challenge differently, using accessible structure and familiar examples.
If there is ever a chance to develop a second edition, it would be well worth performing a few readability tests, chapter-by-chapter, and revising the more tedious examples of the researcher's art into a more engaging form.
This was not intended to be a textbook, but it's a shame that it isn't, because the information is all here – one simply needs to get past the academic structure to find it.
The second section of the book could benefit from a clearer structure.
The chapters do not seem to be placed in any particular order.
A more cohesive grouping of topics might make it easier for the serial readers who prefer to make their way linearly through the book.
The readers find themselves drifting between topics as they progress through the book, from automated validation methodologies to the question of upfront architecture versus iterative development, and then on to human factors, from which they find themselves reading about the comparison between implementations of a given software specification in various programming languages, and so forth.
Yet as the reader works through the chapters, they will see the emergence of several topic areas; human factors and the workplace environment, evidence supporting software engineering best practices, benchmarking programmer performance, and so forth.
Topics in This Work The origins of software flaws are explored Chapter 25 entitled “Where Do Most Software Flaws Come From?”.
Other chapters, which paradoxically appear earlier in the book, explore systems intended to pick out likely locations for faults: “An Automated Fault Prediction System”, and “Evidence-Based Failure Prediction”.
Some topics are deeply tangential to the primary subject matter of the book; one such is the chapter by Whitecraft and Williams (p.221), entitled, “Why Aren't More Women in Computer Science?” It is an intriguing question, but nonetheless remains an unusual discussion to feature in a book on software engineering methods.
More obviously relevant are “Code Talkers”, Chapter 16, a study of communication between programmers, and “A Communal Workshop or Doors That Close”, discussing the ideal office layout for developers, working either alone or in a team.
Chapter 20, “Identifying and Managing Dependencies in Global Software Development”, discusses the problems inherent in 'Global Software Development', apparently a variation on the familiar terms 'outsourcing' or 'offshoring'.
Several chapters involve direct discussion of software development methodologies, such as Chapter 10, “Architecting: How Much and When?”, Chapter 17, “Pair Programming”, Chapter 18, “Modern Code Review”, Chapter 21, “How Effective Is Modularization?”, Chapter 22, “The Evidence for Design Patterns” and Chapter 12, “How Effective Is Test-Driven Development?” Chapter 15, “Quality Wars: Open Source Versus Proprietary Software”, seeks differences in quality between open source and proprietary software, but finds very little.
Chapter 14, “Two Comparisons of Programming Languages”, performs a similar task by comparing implementations of given algorithms.
There are also chapters on “The Art of Collecting Bug Reports” (Chapter 24), the strengths and weaknesses of novice programmers, “Novice Professionals: Recent Graduates in a First Software Engineering Job”, and data mining “Mining Your Own Evidence”, Chapter 27.
Chapter 28 is a discussion of “Copy-Paste as a Principled Engineering Tool”.
Chapter 29,  “How Usable Are Your APIs?” asks how, and to what extent, APIs themselves may sometimes be an obstacle to programmers, whilst the shortest and final chapter, Chapter 30, is a discussion of “Measuring Variations in Programmer Productivity”.
Conclusion This is a genuinely good book, despite the inconsistency of tone and audience focus.
Given the sum of its parts, however, it is not an easy book.
It is not an easy linear read, due to the variation in chapter styles, content and difficulty, so it works more effectively as a sourcebook to be dipped into when the need or interest arises.
No matter how smoothly written the chapters are, the subjects themselves are often challenging and complex, not least because the chapters are intended to challenge the reader's assumptions.
If you have ever wondered about questions like the following: Which is better: strongly typed languages or weakly typed languages?
Is it worth keeping superstar programmers?
Are developers who demand individual offices simply working on their reputation as prima donnas, or do they have a good reason to do so?
Why are some APIs easier to grasp than others?
Is ctrl-C ctrl-V a serious offence?
then this book may be of interest to you.
Not every developer myth comes under attack– the reader is spared the vi versus emacs versus eclipse debate, for example – but most developers, or people who work with them, will find that some of the points covered in this book will be of relevance to them.
Be warned, however: the book contains more observations than answers.
On the above subjects and many others, it provides enough information to seed a very fruitful discussion.
Nevertheless, the conclusion of the vast majority of chapters repeat very similar observations: not enough is known; there is much work to be done; the results are contextually bound and dependent on the audience, development subject, and context of use; and so forth.
To return to an observation made in the very earliest chapters of the book: 'convincing evidence motivates change[...].
Generating truly convincing bodies of evidence would […] require a shift in the way results are disseminated.
It may well be that scientific publications are not the only technology required to convey evidence'.
As detailed as this book is, it could not hope to contain evidence enough to help all readers to answer their questions.
It is a starting point, and a valuable one.
The book provides the reader with information such as concepts, resources, and dramatis personae, offering an entry point to the theoretical and practical world of software engineering in its broadest sense.
References Barbara A. Kitchenham, Tore Dybå, Magne Jørgensen: Evidence-Based Software Engineering.
ICSE 2004: pp.
273-281 Andy Oram and Greg Wilson (2010).
Making software: What really works, and why we believe it.
p. 11.
Author Details Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Managing Electronic Government Information in Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing Electronic Government Information in Libraries Buzz data dissemination archives preservation gis dvd cd-rom e-government Citation BibTex RIS Sylvie Lafortune reviews a book which addresses the following question: From e-government to t-government.
How will libraries keep up?
Today, most governments in developing countries provide essential services and information to their citizens exclusively via the World Wide Web.
The benefit of this new means of dissemination is that information is current, available 24⁄7 and for the most part, downloadable.
The downside of this model is that government Web pages are unstable and not always well designed, often making information difficult to locate.
This new ‘digital government information environment’ poses a myriad of challenges which this book addresses.
By now, some of you may be wondering ‘what is a t-government?’ It is a government which offers ‘sophisticated interactive and transactional capacities across a broad range of services.’ [1] Overview and Content Andrea Morrison has compiled 16 insightful texts written by 18 government information experts who have all been involved with the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT), an active section of the American Library Association.
The book is an in-depth examination of the emergence of e-government primarily in the U.S. but also in other countries and within international organisations.
There is valuable practical guidance for implementing and improving digital government collections and services.
In her preface, Morrison states that the major theme in this work is the ‘future role of libraries in managing digital government information’.
This is done first by considering the major issues and then by having a look at current practices.
Some of the Issues Addressed One of the most pressing issues that libraries face when dealing with digital government information is preservation.
As online resources disappear or are rapidly updated, it is currently impossible to guarantee access to them in the future.
Fortunately, two chapters are devoted to this topic and they describe major collaborative projects such as LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), the CyberCemetary and the Web-at-Risk which deal with the problem of e-government information.
Another equally important issue for libraries is providing access to e-government information to diverse and underserved populations.
These include populations with either low income, low-level literacy skills or limited language skills, all of which drive the disparity of computer use.
Other issues examined are variable government information policies (or the absence thereof) which are now irrevocably driven by technology and the increasing use of electronic government spatial information, presently distributed as maps in PDF format or as geospatial data on CD-ROM, DVD or from government Web sites.
According to the author of this chapter, in the U.S. alone, ‘32 government agencies, produce some sort of spatial information, either maps or data.’ (p. 37) Needless to say, spatial information adds to the complexity of service requirements.
Some Innovative Practices The second part of the book provides an interesting analysis of how libraries are currently adapting to the new digital government information environment.
This ranges from collection development to processing – for optimal resource discovery and retrieval – to reference and instruction services.
For most libraries, the change in distribution has meant a change in providing reference and instruction.
There is a definite trend towards integration of government information services within general information services.
Separate chapters deal with various levels of government such as local, regional, foreign countries and international government organisations.
In this second part, the reader will find numerous case studies, lists of recommended resources and Web sites and lists of criteria or steps to consider when planning or reorganising e-government information services.
Conclusion This book is a ‘must-have’ for all libraries.
It provides a comprehensive description of current trends in government information dissemination.
It gives references to most, if not all, reputable government and non-government collaborative initiatives involved in producing, distributing and archiving e-government information worldwide.
The chapters are cross-referenced and contain detailed notes and up-to-date references as well as a useful list of abbreviations which abound in this area.
Although this work focuses on the American landscape, this reflects the fact that the U.S. government remains the largest publisher in the world.
References Accenture.
2005.
Leadership in Customer Service: New Expectations, New Experiences.
http://www.accenture.com/NR/rdonlyres/F45CE4C8-9330-4450-BB4A-AF4E265C88D4/0/leadership_cust.pdf Author Details Sylvie Lafortune Government Information and Data Librarian J. N. Desmarais Library Laurentian University Sudbury, Ontario Canada Email: slafortune@laurentian.ca Return to top Article Title: “Managing Electronic Government Information in Libraries: Issues and Practices” Author: Sylvie Lafortune Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/lafortune-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Upskilling Liaison Librarians for Research Data Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Upskilling Liaison Librarians for Research Data Management Buzz data software framework infrastructure archives metadata repositories copyright preservation cataloguing curation licence e-science e-research research bibliometrics Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Cox, Eddy Verbaan and Barbara Sen explore the design of a curriculum to train academic librarians in the competencies to support Research Data Management.
For many UK HEIs, especially research-intensive institutions, Research Data Management (RDM) is rising rapidly up the agenda.
Working closely with other professional services, and with researchers themselves, libraries will probably have a key role to play in supporting RDM.
This role might include signposting institutional expertise in RDM; inclusion of the topic in information literacy sessions for PhD students and other researchers; advocacy for open data sharing; or contributing to the management of an institutional data repository.
It seems that there are choices for each librarian to make, largely shaped by their existing role.
For some, RDM may rapidly become a core part of their job.
For others it may be something of which they simply need a greater awareness.
New graduates entering the profession require a grounding in RDM-related knowledge and skills, but there is also a need for established professionals to update their competencies too.
In this context, JISC have funded the White Rose consortium of academic libraries at Leeds, Sheffield and York, working closely with the Sheffield Information School, in the RDMRose Project, to develop learning materials that will help librarians grasp the opportunity that RDM offers.
The learning materials will be used in the Information School’s Masters courses, and are also to be made available to other information sector training providers on a share-alike licence.
A version will also be made available (from January 2013) as an Open Educational Resource for use by information professionals who want to update their competencies as part of their continuing professional development (CPD).
The learning materials are being developed specifically for liaison librarians, to upskill existing professionals and to expand the knowledge base for new entrants to librarianship.
It is hoped to accommodate the perspectives of any information professional, but the scope is not intended to encompass a syllabus for a data management specialist role (following the distinction made by Corrall [1]).
This article summarises current thinking developed within the project about the scope and level of such learning materials.
This thinking is based on a number of sources:  the literature and existing curricula and also the project vision and data collected during the project in focus groups with staff at the participating libraries.
Existing Literature According to the literature, librarians are well positioned to play an important role in RDM [1][2][3][4][5].
They have good networks within institutions built through liaison activities.
Other professional services tend not to have such far-reaching connections.
They have an understanding of generic information management principles that can potentially be applied to data management.
Research data management can be seen as an aspect of Information Literacy.
Also, existing roles in promoting open access are linked to the open data agenda in RDM.
As a well-networked profession, librarians are quick and generous in sharing knowledge, and so can play an important role in rapidly replicating good practice across the whole sector.
Nevertheless there are many challenges, such as the following: Existing roles are demanding; to support RDM must mean down-rating other priorities.
Librarians often lack direct personal experience of research and so may lack a depth of insight into the motives and practices of researchers.
Understanding the diversity of ‘research data’ itself, within the context of different disciplinary and sub-disciplinary cultures and varying data practices is an important aspect of the context that needs to be understood.
Librarians need to understand the perspective of researchers in relation to RDM.
Best practice can be best promoted in a way sensitive to the pressures on researchers and a realistic assessment of the diverse drivers and barriers.
Librarians may lack domain-specific knowledge.
Translating current library expertise and practices, such as in metadata creation to research data contexts is not straightforward.
There are problems engaging users, especially researchers, with LIS services, especially because their focus in the last few years has often been on supporting teaching.
Further problems relate to the scale, complexity and indeterminacy of the challenge: The marked disciplinary differences in information and data practices mean that a lot of adaptation of generic advice and support will be required.
The complexity and scale of RDM issues in institutions is challenging.
Resources, infrastructure, policy and governance structures are still in flux.
The role of LIS in supporting research has to be seen in the wider context of work with other professional services, particularly the Research Office, Computing Services, University Archives, Staff Development services, as well as researchers and research administrators in departments.
As with a number of previous suggestions about how librarians’ roles will expand (e.g.
into Knowledge Management) there is a risk that a role in RDM will be more written about than be realised in practice.
After all, librarians are already busy.
Liaison librarians, for example, have a range of existing roles, such as in collection development, information literacy training, enquiry handling, marketing, committee work, informal networking and management roles.
Different individuals have quite different task sets, linked to seniority and background.
These different task sets will determine to what extent individuals feel RDM sits naturally in their remit.
The rather common approach of just listing sets of skills that professionals should have is limited by failing to recognise that librarians have to be able to make sense of their role as a whole, both for themselves and also in order to present a coherent image to others.
So in thinking about potential roles in RDM, we have to think about how they relate to what librarians currently do, whether it is a natural expansion of existing competencies or a major change of professional identity.
Lewis [6] as updated by Corrall [1] identifies a number of potential roles for librarians in RDM (as do also Gabridge [3] and Lyon [5]).
Focussing specifically on local institutional roles, and on those for liaison librarians in particular, the table below lists the main roles that have been proposed, and points to links in existing library practices [7][8] that may explain why the roles are appropriate both to practitioners themselves and to their users/customers.
Role Alignment with existing roles Competencies required Policy and advocacy     Lead on institutional data policy Advocacy role e.g.
in the area of open access Strategic understanding and influencing skills Support and training     Bring data into undergraduate research-based learning, promoting data information literacy Information literacy training Understanding of RDM best practices as they apply to relevant disciplines; pedagogic skills Teach data literacy to postgraduate students Develop researcher data awareness Provide an advice service to researchers (and research administrators) Eg on writing Data Management plans or advice on RDM within a project.
Advice on licensing data.
Advice on data citation.
Perhaps measurement of impact of data sharing.
Reference and enquiry roles; producing print and Web-based guides; copyright advice.
Reference interview, knowledge of RDM principles Provide advice as above through a Web portal Library Web site Knowledge of institutional and extra-institutional resources Signpost who in the institution should be consulted in relation to a particular question Role of library as point of enquiry and the reference interview Knowledge of institution Promote data reuse by making known what is available internally and externally; explaining data citation Marketing of library resources Knowledge of researchers’ needs, knowledge of available material Auditing and repository management     Audit to identify data sets for archiving, create a catalogue of materials or to identify RDM needs Metadata skills   Develop and manage access to data collections Collection development, digital library management and metadata management Audit interviews, knowledge of RDM principles, metadata, licensing Develop local data curation capacity Open access role.
Preservation role.
Knowledge of RDM principles, relevant technologies and processes, metadata Table 1: Librarians’ roles in RDM and required competencies mapped to existing roles As the table above suggests, the different roles in RDM imply different types of knowledge, but many align with existing roles and the corresponding professional knowledge base.
Any one individual may take on a number of these roles or none.
Within LIS teams, one person might see RDM as about IL another as about metadata.
Another person might play an expert-type role, keeping others abreast of wider developments.
While all RDM activities align in some way to existing roles, some do not do so in a simple way.
Effort may be needed to sell services based on such roles.
It should be noted that in addition to these various roles in RDM, Auckland [8] identifies a number of other activities related to support of research in general [7][9]: offering advice on funding sources embedded or support roles conducting literature reviews or current awareness alerts for research projects or groups bibliometrics and impact measurement support to REF bibliographic software training advocacy for open access and/or institutional repository data analysis advice advice on copyright issues and advice on archiving of research records (eg correspondence) Some of these activities are quite familiar, others are new.
This illustrates that taking up the challenge posed by RDM is inter-related with a wider set of challenges in supporting research, as well as the continuing challenge to meet longstanding liaison responsibilities.
Liaison librarians are already over-taxed with many functions.
There is a sense of change in many areas and therefore a need to make difficult decisions about priorities among different roles.
Support for RDM is often perceived to be ‘daunting’; the area ‘undefined’.
In some sense this will be worked out in different ways by different librarians.
The support they develop may indeed be offered in a variety of ways: through liaison teams, workshops, one-to-one training or even embedded roles.
So it is not simply about changing roles, but it can also be about organisational change in LIS.
Increasing emphasis on research, and RDM in particular, demands that we rethink the relation between library teams.
Thus RDM is an organisational as well as a personal challenge.
A number of exemplars of library support of RDM already exist in UK institutions.
A survey of library roles in supporting RDM undertaken by the Information School was prompted by a desire to identify best practice as well as to capture a snapshot of which of the roles identified in the table above are being most actively developed.
Results of this should be published early in 2013.
Existing Curricula Existing curricula in RDM and digital curation typically target either students of LIS, practitioners/librarians, or researchers.
Comprehensive overviews can be found in previous studies [1][10][11][12][13][14][15].
Training in digital curation at UK LIS schools is sparse but a number of US institutions offer whole programmes in Data Management.
Corrall [1] identified three key issues in the teaching provision in LIS schools in the UK and US: The importance of using the digital lifecycle as a basis for the curriculum.
Subsequently, simplified models are now available (e.g.
as developed by the Incremental project).
The importance of technologies for digital curation, although most teaching provision focuses on learning skills rather than technical skills.
Practical field experience as an essential part of the curriculum.
Tendencies in current curricula are a focus on the nature of data and the nature of the research process, and the importance of data management plans as part of the curriculum [16][17][18].
Because of the varying nature of the research process and the data produced, a number of Open Education Resources with disciplinespecific RDM training have been developed with funding [19].
Other teaching materials are being provided by data centres (e.g.
UK Data Archive [20]).
However, given their focus on the researcher perspective, it is not necessarily simple to adapt them for librarians.
A Dutch curriculum that trains practitioners/librarians in data curation [21] not only aims to increase insight into data and the research process, but also ‘to increase the ability to advise researchers effectively’.
They use a Stages of Change model to determine the kind of intervention that is needed by the data librarian, and cover arguments and conversation techniques that can be used to overcome researchers’ resistance.
The RDMRose Project Vision In initial project planning meetings for RDMRose and in the later focus group sessions with staff at the participating libraries, it was recognised that the area of RDM is rather forbidding for many information professionals as a set of new ideas, unfamiliar organisations and novel concepts and jargon.
The learning materials were therefore to be designed to overcome LIS professionals’ fears and give them confidence to operate effectively in a challenging and changing environment.
This implies the need: to establish understanding of core issues such as the policy context, the diverse and complex nature of research data and theoretical concepts such as the DCC lifecycle to have practical understanding of core methods and tools, such as aspects of writing data management plans or auditing and to develop an understanding of how to keep one’s knowledge up to date, in a fast-moving field It is important to understand the role of supporting RDM in the wider context of evolving library service provision and organisation in a context of changing institutional and cross-sector policy.
To some degree using the learning materials RDMRose is developing could be a medium through which participants could discuss change as it happens; discussion will inevitably be open-ended.
In the focus group sessions with staff at the participating libraries, there was also felt to be a need to move beyond abstract discussion of potential roles to gaining hands-on experience.
Few focus group participants had actually ever looked at a Data Management Plan.
Some participants in the project focus groups were a little frustrated by having been to many meetings to discuss possible roles in RDM; they felt the time had come to start providing real services.
The learning materials will be based on principles of active learning, both through hands-on experience of using DCC tools, for example, and in seeking to support participants in reflecting on how what they are learning about RDM can be applied in their own personal role.
Lastly, the project team felt that the learning materials should have a strong element of inquiry-based and problem-based learning.
This recognises, in a context of complexity and change, the value of encouraging participants to learn through active investigation of real-world experiences and examples and the exploration of complex and open-ended case study material.
Consistent with this we also recognised that we would have to take a highly reflective approach.
Participants need to be offered a space in which to reflect on changes around them and to think about the implications for themselves, those they work with and the organisation – rather than simplistically propounding “best practice” to researchers.
Participants also need to be prompted to engage with existing institutional activity, such as identifying contacts in other support projects and local projects.
Conclusion There are potentially important roles for liaison librarians in contributing to RDM as well as in supporting research more generally.
Although the role and competencies required align with existing liaison librarians’ roles, there are some major gaps in current knowledge and areas where the direction of development is unclear.
The theories, technical jargon and key players in RDM are unfamiliar.
It is important for librarians to increase their understanding of what research data means for researchers and to understand the viewpoint of researchers towards RDM from the inside.
Practical skill development (e.g.
in relation to understanding relevant systems or the technicalities of metadata) must be balanced with strategic perspectives (in relation to advocacy).
Because the context of policy is dynamic, much of the learning must be exploratory, discursive and reflective, providing a space in which librarians can explore developments as they relate to their individual/team role.
Equally, hands-on practical activities with documents and tools in real or realistic scenarios are important.
The need to work closely with other support services, especially research offices and computing services and in a context offered by university research governance, should also be discussed within the module.
The learning needs analysis process concluded that the learning outcomes of the proposed learning materials will be for learners to develop the ability to: explain the diverse nature of research across academic disciplines and specialities and discuss different conceptions of research data analyse the context in which research data management has become an issue discuss the role of a range of professional services, including libraries, in RDM reflect for themselves as individuals and for information professionals in general on the role and priority of supporting research data management explain and apply the key concepts of research data management and data curation to real world case studies and professional practice and understand how to keep knowledge acquired on the module up-to-date Appendix 1 lists the content for the course, as planned in eight four-hour long sessions.
Flexibility about which aspects to emphasise in any particular delivery of the material will allow the learning to be customised to local needs, both at Sheffield and for other information sector learning providers.
Versions to enable full-time learners to catch up will also suit delivery to self-supported CPD.
For the CPD version, in addition to the option to move through the material session by session, pathways through the material based on each library role as identified in the table above will be created in the form of an index.
This will allow professionals to update their skills selectively, as required.
Version 1 of the learning materials will be released in late January 2013.
The second phase of the project will be working with librarians at Leeds and York to refine and improve the learning resources further.
A workshop for Information sector learning providers, such as Information Studies departments, will be held during the summer of 2013.
The authors invite readers to comment on the current plans summarised here and, after the material is released, to use (and reuse) it.
Further information is available from the RDMRose Project Web site [22].
References Corrall, S. Roles and responsibilities: libraries, librarians and data.
Managing Research Data.
Ed.
G. Pryor.
London: Facet, 2012, pp.
105-133.
Alvaro, E., Brooks, H., Ham, M., Poegel, S. and Rosencrans, S. E-science librarianship: Field undefined, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 2011, Summer No.
66 http://www.istl.org/11-summer/ Gabridge, T. The last mile: Liaison roles in curating science and engineering research data.
Research Library Issues, August 2009, 265, pp.15-21.
Henty, M. Dreaming of data: The library’s role in supporting e-research and data management, Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference, Alice Springs, 2008 http://apsr.anu.edu.au/presentations/henty_alia_08.pdf Lyon, L. The informatics transform: Re-engineering libraries of the data decade, The International Journal of Digital Curation, 2012, 7 (1) pp.126-138.
http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/210 Lewis, M. Libraries and the management of research data, in Mcknight, S. (ed), Envisioning future academic library services: Initiatives, ideas and challenges.
London: Facet, 2010, 145-168.
Brewerton, A.
‘... and any other duties deemed necessary:’ an analysis of subject librarian job descriptions.
Sconul Focus, 2011, 51, pp.60-67.
Auckland, M. Re-Skilling for Research: An Investigation into the Role and Skills of Subject and Liaison Librarians Required to Effectively Support the Evolving Information Needs of Researchers.
London: Research Libraries UK, 2012 http://www.rluk.ac.uk/content/re-skilling-research/    Garritano, J.R. and Carlson, J.R. A subject librarian’s guide to collaborating on e-Science projects, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 2009, Spring No.
57 http://www.istl.org/09-spring/refereed2.html Digital Curation Centre.
Data management courses and training, 2012 http://www.dcc.ac.uk/node/8975 DigiCurV  Training Opportunities, 2010   http://www.digcur-education.org/eng/Training-opportunities Digital Curation Exchange.
University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill, 2012 http://digitalcurationexchange.org/ Keralis, S. Data curation education: a snapshot.
L. Jahnke, A. Asher & S.D.C.
Keralis.
The Problem of Data.
CLIR Publication 154.
Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012 http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub154/ Bailey Jr, C.W.
Digital Curation Resource Guide.
Digital Scholarship, 2012 http://digital-scholarship.org/dcrg/dcrg.htm Pryor, G. & Donnelly, M. Skilling up to do data: whose role, whose responsibility, whose career?
International Journal of Digital Curation, 2009, 4 (2), pp.
158-170. http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/126 Borgman, C. Why data matters to librarians – and how to educate the next generation.
The Changing Role of Libraries in Support of Research Data Activities: A Public Symposium, 2010   http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/brdi/PGA_056901 Borgman, C. IS289 Data, Data Practices, and Data Curation.
Los Angeles: Department of Information Studies, University of California, 2012 http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/cborgman/Chriss_Site/Courses.html McLeod, J. DATUM for Health.
Research Data Management Training for Health Studies.
Northumbria University, 2011 http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/ceispdf/report.pdf JISC Research data management training materials (RDMTrain), 2010 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd/rdmtrain.aspx UK Data Archive, Create & Manage Data: Training Resources.
University of Essex, 2012    http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/training-resources UT3.
Datacentrum, Data Intelligence 4 Librarians, 2012 http://dataintelligence.3tu.nl/en/home/ RDMRose Project http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/research/projects/rdmrose Author Details Andrew Cox Lecturer Information School University of Sheffield Email: a.m.cox@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/is/staff/cox Andrew Cox is a lecturer at the Information School, University of Sheffield and leads the RDMRose Project.
His research interests include virtual community, social media and library responses to technology.
He is the School's Director of Learning and Teaching.
He co-ordinates Sheffield's MSc in Digital Library Management.
Eddy Verbaan Research Associate Information School University of Sheffield Email: e.verbaan@sheffield.ac.uk Eddy Verbaan is the Research Associate on the RDMRose Project.
His main interests are digital library management, research practices in past and present, and didactics.
He has published on early modern geography and urban history writing, pedagogy, and on the history of Dutch Studies in the UK.
Previously, Eddy worked as a university teacher in Dutch Studies at the Universities of Leiden (NL), Paris-IV Sorbonne, Nottingham and Sheffield.
He has a PhD in history.
Barbara Sen Lecturer Information School University of Sheffield Email: b.a.sen@sheffield.ac.uk Barbara Sen is a Lecturer at the Information School, the University of Sheffield and on the RDMRose Project Board.
Her main areas of interest are strategic management of information services, and continuing professional development including the use of reflective practice to support learning.
Prior to coming into HE, Barbara worked in a number of sectors including health, special libraries, and the academic sector.
Appendix 1 Session 1: Introductions, RDM, and the role of LIS The first session will introduce the module, discuss RDM basics, and explore the role of LIS professionals in RDM.
A module overview and learning outcomes RDM basics RDM and the role of LIS An introduction to reflection Session 2: The nature of research and the need for RDM The second session is planned to focus on the nature of research, and the place of data in the research cycle.
It then discusses the need for RDM, including funders’ mandates and university policies.
Finally, research data audits and interviews are discussed, and the module’s overarching activity is introduced: preparing an interview with a researcher.
The nature of research and the need for RDM Research, information practices and data The RDM agenda, including Funders’ mandates and university policies Research data audits and interviews, and investigating a researcher Session 3: The DCC curation lifecycle model In the third session the DCC’s curation lifecycle model will be introduced, followed by an exploration of Data Management Plans, and an activity to reflect on advocating data management planning to researchers and supporting them.
Exploring the DCC lifecycle Data Management Plans Advocacy of data management planning Session 4: Key institutions and projects in RDM The fourth session will be devoted to the different ways of keeping up to date on research data management.
This includes an introduction to the DCC, the DCC Web site, and an activity to design Library Web pages with RDM support for researchers, based on an exploration of similar Web sites at other institutions.
Keeping up to date Introducing the DCC and mapping the DCC Web site Designing Library Web pages with RDM support for researchers Investigating a researcher 2: preparatory desk research and interview schedules Session 5: What is data?
The topic of the fifth session will be data: the findings of the preparatory desk investigation of a researcher are to be discussed with emphasis on data and data management issues.
Also, a framework will be presented that outlines different ways of looking at data, and a number of research data case studies are discussed.
Researchers and their data Investigating a researcher Presenting the findings of the preparatory desk research Looking at data Reflecting on research and research data Session 6: Managing data The sixth session will be devoted to the management of research data.
This includes practical data management guidelines for researchers (such as file naming conventions and backing up files), issues around finding, depositing and managing data in repositories, general metadata issues, and data citation.
Practical data management guidelines Subject and institutional repositories Metadata issues Data citation Session 7: Case study: Research Projects Session 7 introduces a number of case studies that taken together follow the processes of research and handling research data through the whole research and data curation lifecycles: from project proposal, initial data management plan and the application for ethical approval, via the reuse of existing datasets, to publishing research outputs and depositing relevant data.
Session 8: Case study: Institutional Context, and Conclusions Session 8 is to explore the viewpoints of the different RDM stakeholders within HE institutions, such as the library, research office, computing services, and staff development unit, by analysing a set of institutional case studies using strategic methodologies such as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), gap or stakeholder analysis.
The session and the module are concluded with an activity that focuses on planning for the future, as well as reflecting on the implications of RDM for one’s own role.
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OAI-ORE, PRESERV2 and Digital Preservation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines OAI-ORE, PRESERV2 and Digital Preservation Buzz data software rdf framework dissemination xml infrastructure archives metadata identifier vocabularies repositories eprints video preservation oai-pmh aggregation provenance ontologies uri dcmi curation dspace droid interoperability oai-ore url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sally Rumsey and Ben O'Steen describe OAI-ORE and how it can contribute to digital preservation activities.
The new framework for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources, OAI-ORE, had its European release in April 2008 [1].
Amongst its practical uses, OAI-ORE has a role to play in digital preservation and continued access to files.
This article describes the basic outline of the framework and how it can support the PRESERV2 project digital preservation model of provision of preservation services and interoperability for digital repositories.
The PRESERV approach recognises that effective preservation is founded on three fundamental actions on data: copy, move and monitor.
This includes the copying and movement of data between different repositories which is where OAI-ORE has a role to play.
OAI-ORE also plays a part in interoperability to ensure that repositories and other tools and services can communicate and share information and data.
In this way the project is creating and testing a flexible framework for an emerging range of services and tools, to ensure support for long-term access to the data deposited in repositories.
CRIG Repository Developers' Challenge The Open Repositories conference in April 2008 (OR08) [2] saw developers in competition for the prestigious Repository Developers' Challenge award (supported by the JISC CRIG (Common Repository Interface Group) [3].
The focus of the contest was to 'get rapid cross-platform international development' by developers working in small groups 'to demonstrate how to achieve real-life, user-relevant scenarios and services' [4].
There was just one rule for entrants: the prototype created had to utilise two different repository platforms.
Figure 1: CRIG diagram Knowing that the emerging OAI-ORE framework [5] is likely to form a key component of repository development, the ORA (Oxford institutional repository, Oxford University Research Archive) [6] software engineer, Ben O'Steen had implemented OAI-ORE resource maps (a fundamental part of the framework) into ORA some time before OR08.
Then at the conference, close collaboration in the developer's lounge between Ben, Dave Tarrant and Tim Brody, colleagues from the JISC-funded PRESERV2 project team [7] resulted in a live demonstration of interoperability between two separate live repositories built on different platforms.
Bluntly, they took an entire ePrints repository and deposited it, metadata, content and all, into Fedora.
They then took a Fedora repository and deposited it in ePrints.
The results were there for all to see and demonstrated that digital objects can be moved easily between repositories running different software platforms.
Most importantly, the objects were useable, for example for search, display and access in their new homes with the functionality and interface of the opposite repository.
This turned out to be the winning entry in the JISC-CRIG challenge [8].
The JISC PRESERV2 project team had demonstrated one of the first implementations and actual usage of the OAI-ORE standard in two live production repositories at the OR08 conference.
Ben, Dave and Tim had titled their challenge entry 'Data Mining with ORE,' [9] and it was a particularly timely and groundbreaking demonstration because it took place the day before the European release of ORE at the same conference.
But why would anyone want to do this, especially when OAI-PMH is working well and allows for metadata sharing?
Transferring a collection in this way using OAI-ORE is a satisfying technical accomplishment, but there are real-life benefits for repositories of this new framework.
OAI-ORE, as the underlying method to achieve this transfer, provides digital content managers with a new tool for repository data management, for making their content more transportable and therefore more useable and reusable.
Importantly, OAI-ORE provides a mechanism to assist with digital preservation and continued access to digital content.
Figure 2: Copying content from one repository to another A Brief Description of OAI-ORE Very simply, OAI-ORE permits easier dissemination of digital content.
It is a completely separate standard to OAI-PMH and 'neither extends nor replaces it.'
OAI-PMH has as its basic tenet 'a mechanism for harvesting records containing metadata' from one repository for reuse elsewhere [10].
This has so far been adequate and supported the openness of repositories.
However, an extension of both the uses of repositories and of types of content now requires more comprehensive methods for sharing content, with more capability in terms of what is harvested and how it is reused.
Also, there are problems of interoperability with OAI-PMH which the ORE specification aims to address [11].
Instead of focusing on the constraining concept of bulk collections comprising single files held in repositories with only the metadata available for harvesting (you can have the recipe but not the ingredients), OAI-ORE targets the resources themselves, with Web servers acting as data locators wherever that location happens to be.
In short, where OAI-PMH focuses on metadata, OAI-ORE focuses on content (you can have the recipe, the ingredients and the cake).
The ORE specification provides a model with which we can describe curated digital content, and details a number of ways to express this description.
One common way is to describe it using RDF (Resource Description Framework).
The ORE specification provides a vocabulary (an 'ontology' in RDF nomenclature) with which this can be done in a way that external agents can understand.
Digital objects range from an elementary item comprising no more than a small text file with its accompanying metadata, to something much more complex consisting of multiple components.
These latter object types can be described as complex or compound objects.
In ORE terminology, the elements that make up a compound object are grouped into an aggregation.
The aggregation does not have a defined structure: it is a theoretical concept and can be described as a 'bag' of resources.
The elements that make up the aggregation (aggregated resources) can be treated as separate entities if required.
An element can be a 'thing' (such as a text file or 'http://ox.ac.uk/people/jsmith08') or a 'string' (such as 'John Smith' which is just a string of characters).
Every 'thing' has a name (or URI – Uniform Resource Identifier) which can point to its location and if appropriate, for example if it is a URL, can resolve.
Figure 3: Aggregated resources There are endless examples of what might comprise an aggregation, for example, one resource available in multiple formats, a resource plus its supplementary material such as data, different versions of one resource, a book comprising a collection of separate images of its pages [12] or a number of articles that form an issue of a journal.
However, an aggregated resource need not be as complex as this: it might comprise a single text file plus some identifiers and other basic data.
Aggregations are generally used for binding together portions of content that are repository common currency (such as publications, images etc).
RDF is particularly useful for binding together content that might describe the context of the item and which are not in themselves digital objects.
They might include objects (or more correctly representations) such as a person, a research group or a funding agency [13].
An OAI-ORE resource map describes an aggregated resource.
The fact that OAI-ORE makes aggregations machine-readable opens up a number of possible applications and possibilities for automation.
Lagoze and van der Sompel et al [14] suggest that this will permit applications such as those enabling Web browsers to offer advanced navigation using the aggregation information, to 'provide the foundation for advanced scholarly communication systems that allow the flexible re-use and refactoring of rich scholarly artifacts and their components,' and also to assist in preservation (see below).
A resource map can only describe a single aggregation.
However, one element within an aggregated resource can be grouped 'within more than one aggregation, each described by a resource map [15].'
The resource map might offer information about the types of resources and define the relationships between them.
The resource map might use RDF in XML.
The relationships between the separate elements within the aggregation can be described within the resource map using terms such as 'isVersionOf' or 'isReferencedBy' or 'isPartOf' [16].
Such relationships (or predicates) incorporate the RDF 'triple' method and describe interrelationships semantically.
This fits with the Semantic Web.
Figure 4: RDF Triple Using the ORE specification provides a means of packaging up these related objects, including the semantic description of the relationships, using a common agreed method.
The package and its content are not necessarily fixed as prescribed by some other methods of packaging or wrappers – the content can be reused in other aggregations.
As stated above, the aggregation is only a concept, so although the boundaries describing an aggregation can be set, aggregations allow different digital items to be grouped together in such a way that each individual component can be regrouped, discovered and reused in its own right.
Figure 5: Resource Map Using the OAI-ORE specification means that it is possible to copy these descriptions (resource maps) easily to another location.
The copy will include the relationships between the elements and the element names/locations by way of the URIs (for example, URLs).
If the new location wishes to obtain the actual content (for example, the text file) it can, via the locator (perhaps a URL) given in the resource map.
Repository software can be extended so that it understands ORE resource maps and can therefore recreate the digital object, retaining all relationships in its new location, even though the second repository might have different architecture (cf.
'Data Mining with ORE' at the OR08 Repository Challenge).
There are a number of different repository software platforms in use (such as EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) which until now have been incompatible in terms of architecture.
OAI-ORE means that there can now be lossless transfer of objects between different platforms, thereby making them interoperable.
What Does OAI-ORE Mean for Digital Preservation?
The PRESERV2 Project is exploring how OAI-ORE can be used for digital preservation activities.
The PRESERV2 model works on the principle of using modular preservation services.
Each service might cover a different aspect of the preservation process and can be the responsibility of shared or distributed parties.
The PRESERV2 model takes as its starting point The National Archives' (TNA) 'seamless flow' approach of the three stages of preservation: format identification and characterisation (i.e.
which format?)
preservation planning and technology watch (format risk and implications) preservation action, migration etc.
(i.e.
what to do with the format) The PRESERV2 premise is that eventually preservation services will be employed for all of these stages.
The project will produce an exemplar characterisation service using the PRONOM [17] technical registry and DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) services from TNA [18].
A first principle for PRESERV2 was to be able to replicate an entire repository, regardless of the platform it uses.
The copy could be in a large-scale open storage service or use Web storage.
Preservation services might then be implemented at this new location.
The ORE specification allows for incremental updates and for changes and updates to digital content to be recognised by a secondary repository location.
OAI-ORE enables complete lossless archive replication and therefore provides the means to replicate the digital objects, including all their metadata, their complex relationships and their history.
Inclusion of such object history data is an important part of digital preservation as it records the provenance of the item.
Any record of preservation actions held in the metadata can, using OAI-ORE, be retained with the compound document.
For example, a document could be updated and the modified version added to the repository along with the date that the modifications were made.
The new file can be included in the aggregation with its semantic description showing that it is a new version, together with additional data about the file.
The resource map will include all this detail together with the location of the new and old files.
It is important to remember that the RDF description of the content, including the OAI-ORE resource map, is machine-readable.
This assists preservation because an automated system is able to understand the structure of any items, including compound documents.
As a result, providing policies and actions have been determined and set, a machine can ascertain the optimal procedure for taking preservation actions on that document, even if it is complex.
The chosen actions should be defined by repository policy.
For repository managers this helps to manage the activities required to preserve their digital content in a way that is achievable.
Not only does it mean that decisions can generally have been made in advance and in agreement with relevant parties, they can then be acted on automatically as specified in the policy.
The automated nature of the process means that it is scaleable.
When considering the potential size of repositories and the wide-ranging mix of file formats that are likely to be held (and the volatility of some of those formats), automation is key for many aspects of repository management including digital preservation and curation.
When laying the PRESERV2 model on this scenario, repository services can be automatically activated as desired in compliance with policy, whatever the complexity of the digital object and whatever the size of the repository.
Use of OAI-ORE means that it is relatively easy to place copies of items in alternative locations.
Put simply, working on the LOCKSS [19] principle, this means that there is more likelihood of the item surviving over time because more copies are in existence.
Each location of the item may have its own preservation actions acting on the content.
Such actions may be undertaken by services as described in the PRESERV2 model.
Within a single repository or institution use of OAI-ORE means that copies of items can be easily stored as archival copies in distributed physical locations for preservation purposes.
Not only is the file containing the content stored in different locations, but all the metadata that accompanies it can be retained with the item, meaning that the description, history, rights, technical details and other important information is linked to the content, making preservation, curation and future access much more straightforward.
The richer picture of how digital objects relate to each other can also be retained and preserved.
Providing that the policy and technical set-up are properly implemented, RDF using vocabulary provided by OAI-ORE enables the selected content in say a subject (or other) repository to be copied without loss to an institutional repository, and also work with the second repository's functionality.
Equally importantly, it allows content in the institutional repository to be copied into the subject repository.
Admittedly, this is a somewhat simplistic view.
There are factors that need resolving including version control, use of identifiers, moving compound items from a complex to a simpler system and so on.
But in principle, this scenario offers vast potential for using, reusing and re-grouping material in different ways as well as acting as a safety net for continued access to items.
Conclusion Enhancement of repository services has been furthered by the adoption of RDF together with the OAI-ORE specification and its manifestation by the PRESERV2 team's activities that won them success in the OR08 Developer's Challenge.
In the ORE world, the focus moves away from metadata and on to content, especially when dealing with the complexities of digital objects, resulting in better services for users.
In addition to its other benefits, implementing OAI-ORE provides one tool in the repository managers' toolkit to help tackle the monumental problem of digital preservation, curation and continued access.
The PRESERV2 model of preservation services provides one option for preservation activities to be undertaken in a way that is realistic and removes the prospect of a single gargantuan task to be undertaken at source.
Coupled with OAI-ORE, such services can be applied to repository content of mixed complexity where details such as provenance and relationships are retained.
Being able to invoke automated actions on digital objects in a way that is manageable and scaleable, and by enhancing object mobility so that more copies of those digital items can be stored in distributed locations, offers the increased likelihood that the objects will not only survive, but will remain accessible and by extension, usable.
Once these preservation services and actions are realised, the focus then moves to policy.
References Open Archives Initiative Announces U.K. Public Meeting on April 4, 2008 for European Release of Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/EUKickoffPressrelease.pdf and Open repositories 2008: OAI-ORE European Rollout Meeting http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ore.html Open Repositories 2008 (OR08) http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Common Repository Interface Group, set up to examine the boundaries between repositories and other systems http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG OR08: Developer Activities — The Repository Challenge http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/developers.html Open Archives Initiative Protocol Object Exchange and Reuse http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/ Preserv: Inspiration and Provision of Preservation Services for Digital Repositories http://preserv.eprints.org/ RepoChallenge – for details and videos of entries see: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG_Repository_Challenge_at_OR08 Mining for ORE, Dave Tarrant, Ben O'Steen and Tim Brody.
Video http://blip.tv/file/866653 Johnston, P., et al (2008).
Open Archives Initiative object re-use and Exchange.
ORE User Guide – Primer.
11 July 2008.
Beta release available at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.9/primer.html Lagoze, C., Van der Sompel, H., Nelson, M.L., et al, (2008).
Object re-use and exchange: a resource-centric approach http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.2273.pdf See for example MS Oxford St John's College 17 Available at http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3Acf31eb38-06b3-426f-843c-32108c18bf5d A concept which forms the basis of the JISC-funded Building the Research Information Infrastructure (BRII) Project at the University of Oxford Open Archives Initiative object re-use and Exchange, (2008).
ORE Specification and User Guide http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.9/toc Lagoze, C., Van der Sompel, H., Nelson, M.L., et al, (2008).
Object re-use and exchange: a resource-centric approach.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.2273.pdf See for example, DCMI terms at http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/index.shtml PRONOM http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/ The National Archives of the United Kingdom http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home Author Details Sally Rumsey Oxford University Research Archive Service & Development Manager University of Oxford Email: sally.rumsey@ouls.ox.ac.uk Ben O'Steen Oxford University Research Archive Software Developer University of Oxford Email: benjamin.osteen@sers.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.oxfordrepo.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: "OAI-ORE, PRESERV2 and Digital Preservation " Author: Sally Rumsey and Ben O'Steen Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/rumsey-osteen/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Reading Van Gogh Online?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Reading Van Gogh Online?
Buzz data portal usability archives firefox safari browser blog graphics windows visualisation cache research Citation BibTex RIS Peter Boot shows how log analysis can be employed to assess a site's usability, usage, and users, using the Van Gogh letter edition as an example.
Large amounts of money are spent building scholarly resources on the web.
Unlike online retailers, large publishers and banks, scholarly institutions tend not to monitor very closely the way visitors use their web sites.
In this article I would like to show that a look at the traces users leave behind in the Web servers’ log files can teach us much about our sites’ usability and about the way visitors use them.
In 2009 the Huygens Institute [1], together with the Van Gogh Museum [2], published a new edition of the letters of Vincent van Gogh.
The complete edition was published online [3], and is accessible for free; there is also a six-volume book edition [4].
The online edition was reviewed in a number of publications [5][6][7].
I will use the server logs of the Van Gogh edition as an example of what we can learn about our visitors.
I will focus not on the simple quantities, but try to assess the visitors’ access patterns.
When we created the edition, our assumption was that researchers would use the web site, while people who wanted to read the letters would favour the book.
The desire to test that assumption was one of the reasons for embarking on this investigation.
When users view, or read, editions online, busy traffic is going on between their browser (e.g.
Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari), and the web server where the edition is located.
Web servers keep logs of this traffic, and inspecting the logs gives us an opportunity to see how people are actually using the editions that we create.
When people buy a book, this shows their intention to use it, in some sense.
When people go to a web site, the server registers their visit, including, depending on the design of the site, every page they read and every search they do.
Most of the work on log analysis in scholarly environments has been done in the context of libraries researching use of electronic journals [8].
The financial interest in accurate knowledge about usage patterns in that context is obviously important.
The LAIRAH (Log Analysis of Digital Resources in the Arts and Humanities) study [9] used log analysis on portal sites in order to assess usage of digital resources in the arts and humanities.
I believe the present article is the first reported study on actual usage data of a scholarly digital edition.
First I will discuss why these log data deserve investigation.
I then will show what the data that we collect looks like and discuss both their potential and their limitations.
I will give a brief overview of the edition site, as the log data can only be understood in the context of the site’s structure and navigational facilities.
Then I’ll show a number of the things that can be done on the basis of the log files.
Analysing Log Data There are four reasons why one would want to know about user behaviour.
Three of them are very practical: to identify usability problems with the site; to check the popularity of the site’s components – usage may help decide on which features to include in new editions, or perhaps which features need more work; and to be able to customise the site to the user, displaying more prominently the data that a specific user might be interested in.
A more theoretical reason would be the desire to learn about the sorts of visitors attracted to the site, the reasons for their visit and the extent to which the site satisfies that interest.
There are several ways of collecting this information.
One would be having a number of test users execute a number of prepared tasks and observing them during that exercise; another would be a questionnaire.
The advantages of log data are that they can show what real people actually do.
In surveys people tell about what they have done or will do, or ought to do; test users are observed in a very artificial situation.
Log data are more real and more complete; on the other hand, of course, it is difficult, if not impossible, to infer motives, reasons and satisfaction levels from data about file requests.
And even at lower levels the interpretation of the data has its own hazards.
Possibilities and Limitations Let us look at a single line of a typical log file, to see what it can help us do: 82.69.23.44 [04/Apr/2010:18:21:26 +0200] “GET /vg/letters/let805/letter.html HTTP/1.1” 200 13028 “http://vangoghletters.org/vg/by_period.html" “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; (…).NET CLR 3.5.30729; SiteKiosk 7.1 Build 267)” What this shows is, among other things: An IP address: the address assigned to the computer by the ISP (Internet Service Provider).
Usually it is fixed on broadband connections; it is variable when dialling in.
Unless you are the police, it is impossible to find out the actual user from the IP address.
Large organisations often use a single IP address to connect to the outside world.
In that case, a whole university may use one and the same address.
Timestamp of the page request The page requested, with some technical information; here we see a request for letter 805 Response code, 200 indicating that the page was delivered as requested Referrer: the page from which the request originated, here a table of contents of the letters by period User agent string: helps determine the computer operating system (here Windows XP), the browser (Internet Explorer), and several other properties.
When using this form of server log analysis, there are a number of things to keep in mind: The server records the request for every object, and a regular web page can consist of tens of components: pictures, image files for icons on the page, files that define the page style and layout, scripts to be run, etc.
The log files can easily grow very big.
The file for the week in April 2010 that I have been studying is 170 MB in size.
As a consequence it is all but impossible to do anything useful with it without some sort of tool.
Conversely, the server records only what the browser asks for.
If a user presses the back button, for instance, the page is probably still in the browser cache, its temporary storage area, and there will be no need to go back to the server.
Similarly, every user request that a script in the browser can service without asking the server, will not be recorded in the log.
Nor can we see when users leave the site (or, when they decided to take a break, were interrupted by a phone call, etc.).
There is no concept here of a user session.
The best we can do is to combine IP address and user agent and consider sequential requests from the same combination to be a session.
Lots of the traffic recorded in the logs does not come from humans.
Search engines such as Google crawl the site to index the pages, and there are many other programs visiting the site, for good or evil purposes.
Some of these limitations may be circumvented by different logging parameters, or by modifying the web pages to change its interaction with the server.
The Site In order to make sense of the data under discussion, it is worthwhile forming a better picture of the Web site [10].
Figure 1: Vincent van Gogh – The Letters: Letter 607.
Its main element of course is the letters.
There are about 900 of them, mostly to Van Gogh’s brother Theo, but also letters exchanged with other family members and artist friends.
A letter page may look as in figure 1, with translation and thumbnails of the artworks discussed in the letter side by side.
Using the tabs (A), the reader can choose to see instead the original text, a facsimile, or notes.
The user can choose to view a picture discussed in the letter or can zoom in on a facsimile.
Therefore, viewing a letter is not a single event.
The body of letters is framed by a series of pages designed to help readers find their way around in the site and inform them of the backgrounds.
This menu is available on all of the site’s pages.
First there are tables of contents (B), of all the letters, by several criteria such as correspondent, period or place, and a list of all letters with sketches.
Then there are search facilities (C); a simple search, where one can enter a word or phrase (or a letter number); and an advanced search, where people can search by multiple criteria, such as correspondent, date, work of art, etc.
Searches for things like works of art and persons can also be done by clicking on hyperlinks included in the letter pages or from an index.
Next we have essays (D), texts that explain Van Gogh’s letters, their publication history and the present edition; and pages that I have called lists (E): a chronology of Van Gogh’s life and various overviews, including a concordance, maps of the relevant places, the indices and the bibliography.
Finally, there are some pages that I have grouped under the label ‘border’ (F), because they are mostly referred to at the border of the page: help, updates, credits, copyrights, a reference to the book edition, etc.
Findings To conduct this analysis I started with logs from one week in April 2010.
Still on the list of things to do is to repeat this exercise with data from a number of months.
The analysis proceeds in a number of steps: cleaning the log data (removing server housekeeping, bots, requests for irrelevant files, and extra IP addresses); analyse the log and arrange it into a logical representation of the steps taken by the user (in spreadsheet format); sort by session; derive data for overviews, counts and graphics.
Aggregate Data: Types of Pages Accessed We will begin by looking at aggregate data.
What sorts of pages do people visit?
As can be seen from Figure 2, a large majority of the visits is to the letter pages, as one would expect.
The various lists account for only a marginal fraction of the visits, for the rest all page types have decent visitor numbers.
Figure 2: Visits by page type If we look at the specific sub-page types within the letters (Figure 3), there is a preference for the translated text.
It does not seem very strong, but that is because initially, the system always fetches both the translated and original text.
The notes are also popular, but are also fetched by default.
Facsimile and artwork tabs are also used, people ask for the illustrations, they do zoom in on the facsimile.
Conversely, the options they use least are looking at the version that shows the original line-endings and especially the print version.
It would not have surprised me if more people had used the print version.
Figure 3: Letter page sub-type Let us look at two more: search (Figure 4) and tables of contents (Figure 5).
The overview of search pages confirms the conventional wisdom of site designers: people do not like advanced search.
They prefer simple search, they also use the ‘reference’ search (those are searches embedded in hyperlinks in the text, where clicking for instance the name of a person brings up a list of occurrences of that person in the site), but they hardly use the advanced search.
From the overview of tables of contents it appears all of them are used regularly.
The list of letters with sketches is also frequently accessed.
Figure 4: Search page types Figure 5: Table of content pages types If we want to understand why it is that one page is more popular than another, the next step is to look at how people navigate between pages.
Let us start at the home page (Figure 6).
At the left we see most people arrive at the home page from outside, and at the right we see where people go from the home page.
Many ask for information about the book edition (we like that), but more start by searching.
Figure 6: Previous and next page for home page visitors   Figure 7: Previous and next page for list of sketches Another graphic shows the same data for the list of letters with sketches (Figure 7).
We notice that many people click on the first letter with sketches (letter 24), somewhat fewer click on the second (32), and thereafter the numbers quickly decrease further.
Aggregate Data: Favourite Letters A plot of favourite letters (Figure 8) shows which letters are the most popular.
There are too many letters to show that in detail, but it gives an impression.
Most people start at the first letter.
The peak at the end is the last letter, presumably read because of the dramatic circumstances of Van Gogh’s suicide.
The peaks at the beginning are the letters with sketches, which as we just saw are very popular.
Other peaks correspond with letters exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, which was hosting a large exhibition at the time.
Figure 8: Views by letter For these letters again we can check where visitors came from and where they went afterwards.
Here is the information for letter 902, the last one (Figure 9).
Unlike most other letters, the majority of viewers of letter 902 deliberately selects the letter from one of the tables of contents, rather than entering it from the previous letter.
Figure 9: Next and previous pages for letter 902 Top Searches From a usability perspective, a look at the searches that people perform on the site is very instructive.
These are the top 15 searches using the simple search facility (Table 1): Search term Sessions keyword or number(s) 52 jo introduction 10 sunflowers 9 ?
6 theo 4 last letter 4 portrait 4 starry night 4 death 4 potato eaters 4 self portrait 4 paris 4 van gogh 3 sunflower 3 anna 3 Table 1: Top simple searches We report the number of sessions rather than the number of searches because quite a number of people seem to repeat the same query over and over.
The first entry points at what is apparently a usability problem with the site: ‘keyword or number(s)’ is the default content of the search box, and people search without entering a search term.
The next one indicates another problem: someone who seems to try to search for Jo, Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, in the site’s introduction (which unfortunately cannot be searched at present).
There are some other usability issues that appear from inspecting the search terms used (not shown in the table).
Sometimes people search for a date, perhaps not knowing that there is a full table of content of all the letters.
Many people do not understand that they can search for phrases by putting them between double quotes.
What is certainly a usability issue is the apparent need for a spell checker.
Table 2 shows searches for sunflowers.
Sometimes one can see people correcting themselves, but often they give up.
Perhaps Google has made us lazy.
suflower, suflower painting, suflowers, suflowr, sulowe, sumflowr, sun flouwers, sun flower, SUN FLOWER , sun flowers, SUN FLOWERS, sun flowers by Van Gough, sun flowrs, sun fower, SUN OWER, sunflouers, sunflower , sunflower painting, sunflowers, Sunflowers, SUNFLOWERS, sunflowers , sunflowes, sunfower, sunfowers, SUNFOWERS, sunfowers , sunfowes, sunlowers Table 2: Searching for sunflowers Table 3 shows searches for works of art (these are searches for the indexed references to works of art, not plain-text searches): Search total Search reference Search advanced Search index Work of art 37 36 1 0 The bedroom (F 482 / JH 1608) 18 17 1 0 The bedroom (F 484 / JH 1771) 9 8 1 0 The bedroom (F 483 / JH 1793) 5 2 3 0 The potato eaters (F 82 / JH 764) 4 0 4 0 Shoes (F 332 / JH 1234) 4 4 0 0 Paul Gauguin Madame Ginoux 4 1 3 0 Sunflowers in a vase (F 453 / JH 1559) 3 0 1 2 Nude woman on a bed (F 330 / JH 1214) 3 1 0 2 Nude woman, reclining (F 1404 / JH 1213) 3 2 1 0 Reclining female nude (F 330 / JH 1214) 3 3 0 0 The night café (F 463 / JH 1575) 3 0 3 0 Shoes(F 461 / JH 1569) 2 2 0 0 Portrait of a woman (F 328 / JH 1212) 2 2 0 0 De Nittis Victoria Embankment in London 2 2 0 0 Rembrandt van Rijn The archangel Raphael Table 3: Searches for works of art.
(Works are Van Gogh’s unless noted otherwise.)
As it appears, the Bedroom is by far the most popular Van Gogh painting, its three versions occupying the top places.
This is no doubt the effect of the restoration of the painting going on at the time, which was being reported in a popular weblog.
It is interesting to note that most of these searches were not started by typing a query (the Search advanced column), but by clicking on a ready-made link to the search results (Search reference).
These searches, by the way, can only work because we tagged all references to the works of art in the text.
That was a decision which generated some discussion at the time.
It was expensive, but nonetheless seems to have been money well spent.
Individual Sessions Moving from the aggregate level to the level of the individual visitor: it is possible to track movement of individual visitors (without knowing who they are, of course), but without the support of tools there is no sensible way of doing it.
After initial analysis a fragment of the spreadsheet detailing the movements on the site may look like table 4.
The way to read this is: to the left is date and time, to the right is the page one comes from, in the middle is the page one goes to.
The visit starts at an external page, visits the home page, does a simple search, selects a letter, goes back to the search results and selects another letter; later on we see this user take a break and come back the next day.
Timestamp To page From page 5-apr-10 15:01:38 entry   extern 5-apr-10 15:04:27 search “wezen dat de familie en vrienden” entry 5-apr-10 15:04:28 letter let574 search simple 5-apr-10 15:08:30 toc period search simple 5-apr-10 15:08:50 letter let588 toc period 5-apr-10 15:09:16 letter let589 toc period 5-apr-10 15:09:29 letter let751 toc period 5-apr-10 15:16:38 letter let683 extern 5-apr-10 15:16:40 border guide letter top let683 5-apr-10 15:16:41 letter notes let683 letter top let683 5-apr-10 16:02:52 toc complete letter top let751 5-apr-10 16:15:50 entry   extern 5-apr-10 16:16:18 essay about 1 entry 6-apr-10 12:04:46 entry   extern 6-apr-10 12:12:52 essay correspondents 1 entry 6-apr-10 12:12:54 toc correspondent essay correspondents 1 Table 4: Sample lines of spreadsheet showing navigation through the site Even though this is a very condensed representation of the log’s contents, it is still very laborious reading.
Taking into account that from the single week in April 2010 there are 60,000 lines like this, there is no way we can find interesting patterns without the capability for automated analysis.
An example of the representation of visits that I have been working with (inspired by two papers [11][12]) appears in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Visit visualisation What we see is the types of pages that have been visited (Y-axis), against time (X-axis): in black the home page, then in red the 900 or so letters, then, colour-coded, the other page types: zooms, illustrations, searches, tables of contents, etc.
Above, the time spent on these pages.
The figure shows someone who arrives on Monday, returns over the next three days, and uses almost all of the site’s facilities.
It is the sort of visitor that we like to see.
Of course a graphic like this only makes sense in conjunction with the log that shows the details of the pages the user has visited and what he or she was searching for.
Another one that I like (Figure 11) shows someone who Friday evening late was told to leave the computer, and then on Saturday after the weekly shop went back to look at our site.
Figure 12 shows the visitors at the exhibition being held in the Royal Academy, obviously very active.
Figure 11: Return the next day   Figure 12: Visitors at the Royal Academy   Figure 13: Reading sequentially Figure 13, finally, shows someone returning on six consecutive days and continuing his or her reading at the next letter.
Upon inspection of the logs, we found that this person did indeed work his or her way through letters 1 to 74, with an occasional sidestep, over the days of that week.
So this is someone who should have bought the book!
That at least, as I mentioned in the Introduction, was our idea when we created the edition: the researchers would use the Web site, the readers would use the book.
More research is needed to prove this conclusively, but many of the site’s visitors show a pattern similar to the one exhibited in Figure 13, and in fact the large majority of letter accesses are sequential.
This is not to say that no directed access is going on.
There are also many visitors who perform one search, look at the result and then leave.
But many visitors do read online, passing from one letter to the next.
Probably not many will read all 902 letters that way, but then, presumably, neither will most of the book owners read every single letter.
Conclusion and Next Steps From the above examples, it would seem that log analysis is obviously useful.
It has helped detect a number of flaws in the site’s design, and especially talking this over with one of the site’s editors proved to be a very fruitful way of thinking up possible improvements to the site.
To give an example: if we had thought about it, it would not have surprised us that people click only on the first few items in the list of letters with sketches.
Those are not the letters with the interesting sketches, but how are the visitors to know which ones are interesting?
Being confronted with the fact that people click the items at the beginning of the list, we realised that what we should have there is a list of thumbnails, or at least a preview option, rather than a text-only list.
Log analysis also helps understanding how our users use the site.
It appears the conventional wisdom that people do not like advanced search might indeed be true.
We might think of that when we are building the next edition.
On the other hand, people do like the navigational searches: the searches embedded in hyperlinks.
This confirms another conventional wisdom: people use the principle of least effort in their information-seeking behaviour.
Not confirmed, however, was our expectation that the main access to the letters would be through search and tables of contents rather than sequentially.
There are also some lessons for the application developer, the main one being ‘ask the server for the data that you need rather than doing data filtering in the user’s browser.’ Another lesson: many products exist that do log analysis.
At least to some extent however, the interesting work begins when analysing the records in terms of a specific site structure.
Grouping relevant items together and removing irrelevant junk will require some form of programming or scripting.
There are clear limitations in what log analysis can do, but much more is possible than what we have seen here.
I hope to explore more both of the technical possibilities and of the ways this can help us in doing higher-level characterisation of our users.
Marcia Bates’ well known information search model divides information seekers in four groups, on the two dimensions of activity and directedness [13].
It would be interesting to assess that model’s validity for this site.
References Huygens Instituut KNAW http://www.huygensinstituut.knaw.nl/ van Gogh Museum http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/ Vincent van Gogh The Letters http://vangoghletters.org/vg/ Jansen, L., H. Luijten, and N. Bakker, eds.
Vincent van Gogh – The Letters.
The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition.
2009, Mercatorfonds, Thames & Hudson, Amsterdam University Press, Actes Sud: Brussels, London, Amsterdam, Arles.
Ciula, A., The New Edition of the Letters of Vincent van Gogh on the Web.
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2010.
4(2).
Ten Doesschate-Chu, P., [review] Vincent van Gogh, The Letters.
The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition.
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2010.
9(2): p. 2010.
Welger-Barboza, C. Van Gogh The Letters – L’à propos de l’édition numérique.
L’observatoire critique 2010 (cited 21 January 2011) http://observatoire-critique.hypotheses.org/281 Nicholas, D., et al., The information seeking behaviour of the users of digital scholarly journals.
Information Processing & Management, 2006.
42(5): p. 1345-1365.
Warwick, C., et al., The LAIRAH Project: Log Analysis of Digital Resources in the Arts and Humanities.
Final Report to the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
2006, School of Library, Archive and Information Studies.
University College London: London http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/claire-warwick/publications/LAIRAHreport.pdf More background information about the edition http://vangoghletters.org/vg/about_1.html Hochheiser, H. and B. Shneiderman, Using interactive visualizations of WWW log data to characterize access patterns and inform site design.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2001.
52(4): p. 331-343.
Chen, R., A.
Rose, and B.B.
Bederson.
How people read books online: mining and visualizing web logs for use information.
in 13th European conference on Research and advanced technology for digital libraries.
2009: Springer-Verlag.
Bates, M.J., Toward an integrated model of information seeking and searching.
The New Review of Information Behaviour Research, 2002.
3: p. 1-15.
Author Details Peter Boot Senior researcher Huygens – Institute of Netherlands History Email: pboot@xs4all.nl Web site: http://www.huygensinstituut.knaw.nl/ Return to top Article Title: “Reading Van Gogh Online?” Author: Peter Boot Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/boot/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Fun and games with digital content and data Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Fun and games with digital content and data Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir reports on a British Library Labs and University of Nottingham event in the National Videogame Arcade on 3rd February.
Introduction   British Library [bl] Labs [bll] are currently running an initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [awmf], where they look for new or novels ways of manipulating, enhancing or presenting their considerable digital collection and data holdings.The Labs are holding a Spring 2016 roadshow [roadshow].
One stop was in Nottingham, where the Labs organised a joint workshop with the Digital Humanities and Arts Praxis project [praxis] from the University of Nottingham.
The location enticed me to attend...
Location   The event was held at the National Videogame Arcade [nva].
This large city centre building functions as a museum of digital and video games, and as a centre for gaming, programming and technology events and courses, such as learning about Arduino or developing with Unreal Engine or within Minecraft.
The event was held in the lounge of the arcade.
Attendance meant having to walk past playable games, such Zelda: Ocarina of Time [zelda] running on a Nintendo 64.
Attendees also arrived to an excellent buffet lunch of varied sandwiches, a salad tray, hummus and pita bread.
The lunch gave us an opportunity to refuel, ‘network’, and have a brief UKOLN alumni meetup.
Then, it was down to business...   Art Maps   Laura Carletti, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham, was the first presenter.
She spoke about ArtMaps [artmaps], a platform which encourages members of the public to add data to digital objects held by the Tate.
Events were planned around existing metadata and additional acquisition, such as encouraging people to visit the physical locations where photographs were taken.
Wander Anywhere   Ben Bedwell, also a research fellow at the University of Nottingham, spoke next.
He described the Wander Anywhere [wander] app, which geolocates Wordpress content onto a Google Map.
He detailed some previous uses of this initiative, such as ‘Anywhere Somewhere Everywhere’ in 2008.
Here, a person roamed the streets following instructions on their mobile phone, not realising they were being fed live data for example, “look out for the red car that’s passing you” by a project member following them at a discrete distance.
This project was supposed to incite the negative emotions that arguably come from intense surveillance systems, such as fear and paranoia, but it unexpectedly found that users enjoyed the experience.
Watching the presentation of the Wander Anywhere project   British Library Labs: Experiment with our digital collections   Mahendra Mahey was the first speaker from the British Library.
The BL holds around 180 million items (the exact figure is not known), of which around 2% are either ‘born digital’ or digitised copies of tangible things.
He introduced some of the work and collections that the Labs department deals with.
A core component of this work involves figuring out who is using the content and why, how they can be supported, and experimenting with the content and associated data through various media such as digital games.
Getting to the motive of the event, Mahendra outlined the BLL 2016 competition [competition].
With an entry deadline of 11th April, two selected finalists will work with the BLL team, getting support so they can build systems that demonstrate or provide new means of visualising, or enhacing, the British Library’s digital collections.
For example, one of last year’s winners, ‘Crowdsourcing Objects’ [co] used a classic video arcade cabinet as a mechanism for ‘players’ to add metadata (in the form of simple tags) to the British Library’s Flickr image collection [blflickr].
The BLL 2016 awards [awards] were also described.
These also focus on projects, tools and other work which make use of the British Library’s digital collections and data.
With an entry deadline of 5th September, prizes are categorised for research, commercial, artistic, and teaching and learning projects.
A recent award runner-up was Nix [nix], a Virtual Reality game made for the Oculus Rift where players reconstruct Fonthill Abbey [fonthill].
Farces and Failures   Ben O’Steen, also from British Library Labs, then spoke about BL Lab projects and collections from a data management perspective; this was my personal highlight of the day.
‘Farces and Failures’ [ben] described some of the more common misunderstandings in the library world, including the (multiple) meanings of the words collection, access, content, metadata (“one person’s data is another person’s metadata”) and crowdsourcing.
Ben O'Steen explaining how Open Data projects can be made easier   Ben described a range of British Library collection or data-oriented initiative, such as the Microsoft Books project which digitised some 49k works between 2007 and 2009.
He outlined some of the problems with data, metadata, incomplete collection development, and the accessibility of digitised materials.
In more detail, the British Library Flickr [blflickr] collection was interesting, containing over a million items, and so far notching up around a third of a billion ‘hits’ and half a million tags added by the public.
There was further mention of the video game arcade cabinet and the recent British Library Labs Crowdsourcing Game Jam [jam].
A few of the games created for that event, such as Art Treachery and Tag Attack, were described.
The prototype of one, Trustbear [trustbear], is playable in a web browser; in this simple left/right game, the player quickly decides whether an image from a British Library digital collection contains a face or not.
British Library data: a look and some ideas   The motivation for this roadshow of events is to entice people into dreaming up ideas for the aforementioned competitions and rewards, and hopefully nudging them into carrying them out.
Therefore the last hour of the event was a meta-game, with teams being enthusiastically cajoled by Mahendra to think up a feasible system which would use British Library collections of digital data.
The Labs people had brought a server containing some of these collections for quick local access and examination, as well as a small mountain of paperwork describing file content, quality and the associated metadata.
Our team devised a game, ‘Playbill Pokemon’, based around volumes of digitised theatre playbills.
The aim was to capture, collect and ‘own’ these collections by entering more substantial, and correct, metadata than their current ‘owners’.
Though a half-baked and literally 30 minute project between two strangers, Dominic produced a splendid screen mockup.
But, possibly as we ignored the large hint about OCR quality in the collection, or probably as I started rambling about metadata granularity and quickly lost the (non-librarian) crowd, our team failed to win.
Instead, the more worthy winner outlined a neat project where Victorian era digital content would be enhanced through karaoke-like system.
The winner generously handed out his prize of a bag of goodies from the British Library shop to all, pleasantries were exchanged, people departed and I spent a final few minutes playing Zelda.
Zelda at the National Video Games Archive Conclusion   This was an enjoyable event.
Ben O'Steen's presentation was a highlight, and is pertinent to anyone grappling with how to access, manipulate, make sense or process collections of large amounts of digitised content.
I am an unashamed fan of Flickr partially as, unlike digital ephemera systems such as Instagram it provides the ability to curate metadata.
Therefore, the parts of Ben’s talk describing the British Library image collections and the issues surrounding data and access enhancement were particularly interesting.
The mini game jam was entertaining.
If you’re thinking of entering either the competition or the award, it’s well worth attending one of the roadshow events so you can get a closer look at some of the collections and their associated metadata.
Finally, the National Videogame Arcade is a splendid and game-filled venue right in the centre of Nottingham.
It’s open to the public Friday through Sunday, and on school holidays.
If you are one of the many who’ve spent several decades playing video games, there’s likely to be a slice of nostalgia [games] there that will appeal to you.
References    [bl] British Library.
http://bl.uk   [bll] British Library Labs.
http://labs.bl.uk   [awmf] Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
http://mellon.org   [roadshow] British Library Labs Spring 2016 roadshow.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2016/01/the-bl-labs-roadshow-2016.html   [praxis] About the Praxis project.
http://dhapraxis.wp.horizon.ac.uk/about   [nva] National Videogame Arcade.
http://gamecity.org   [zelda] The introduction to Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CtMllWsML5M   [artmaps] Art Maps at the Tate.
http://tate.org.uk/about/projects/art-maps   [wander] Wander Anywhere app.
http://nottingham.ac.uk/art-history/research/projects/wander-anywhere.aspx   [competition] British Library Labs Competition 2016. http://labs.bl.uk/British+Library+Labs+Competition   [co] ‘Crowdsourcing Objects’ project.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2015/06/bl-labs-competition-winners-for-2015.html   [blflickr] British Library image collection on Flickr.
http://flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/albums   [awards] British Library Labs awards.
http://labs.bl.uk/British+Library+Labs+Awards   [nix] Nix.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2015/12/bl-labs-creativeartistic-award-2015-runner-up-project-nix.html   [fonthill] Fonthill Abbey (wikipedia).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonthill_Abbey   [ben] Farces and Failures.
http://slideshare.net/benosteen/citylis-talk-feb-1st-2016   [jam] British Library Labs Crowdsourcing Game Jam.
http://itch.io/jam/britishlibrary   [trustbear] Trustbear game prototype (web browser version).
http://acrymble.itch.io/trustbear   [games] Playable games, as of February 2016, at the National Videogame Arcade.
http://flickr.com/photos/silversprite/24796911815/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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International UPA 2010 Conference User Experience Design for the World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines International UPA 2010 Conference User Experience Design for the World Buzz data mobile usability smartphone video e-science research avatar Citation BibTex RIS Liza Zamboglou and Lorraine Paterson report on the Usability Professionals' Association's International Conference held in Munich, Germany in May 2010.
We were fortunate enough to attend the UPA 2010 International Conference [2] which was recently held in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich, a beautiful hotel which has accommodated numerous famous guests in the past ranging from Paris Hilton to the Dalai Lama.
The conferences main focus this year was on how UX professionals can create great user experiences across different cultures.
Over 700 people who work in the user experience field attended, with a more international crowd than ever, mainly due to the fact that it was the first UPA conference held outside North America.
As members of the JISC-funded AquaBrowser User Experience (AquaBrowserUX) Project [3][4], we were very interested in discussions which centred on user research methodologies in particular.
A key methodology used in the AquaBrowserUX Project is user research which involves a field study undertaking contextual inquiry, a form of user-centered design.
It is related to ethnographic study of users in their natural habitats, involving real-use scenarios.
This field study involves gathering data from Edinburgh University Main Library users in situ, with the aim of understanding the background of visitors, their exposure to AquaBrowser (a leading library resource discovery product with faceted search User Interface) and their information-seeking behaviour.
The method provides broader understanding of how systems fit into working environments and uncovers common user behaviours and patterns of use.
Moreover, it complements other qualitative methods which are also being employed in the project including surveys and interviews, which are all part of the data-gathering process for persona development [5].
This article summarises the presentations which we attended over the course of three days in Munich and were most relevant to the AquaBrowserUX area of work.
These included sessions on Thursday which focused around ethnography (a term loosely applied to any qualitative research project where the purpose is to provide a detailed, in-depth description of everyday life and practice), persona development (development of archetypal users that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals, behaviour and attitudes), and effective design.
Figure 1: Conference registration morning in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel, Munich [1] Wednesday 26 May 2010 Designing for Happiness, Sleeping Demons and Guardian Angels Pieter Desmet, Delft University of Technology Dr Pieter Desmet took the last session held on Wednesday afternoon where he discussed the role of product design in emotional experiences.
This presentation was expected to be interesting as it dealt with a subject that is difficult to measure or quantify.
Pieter described how elusive emotional design is, and that often designers must trust their instincts.
He said that although they are not easy to design for, all products develop emotions, making them too important an issue to ignore.
Emotions can make products successful or make them fail, therefore emotion must be part of the design process.
Statistics show that 60% of returned products are returned not because they don't work, but because they just don't feel right!
The ability to design products with a positive emotional impact is of great importance to the design research community and of practical relevance to the discipline of design.
Emotion is a central quality of human existence, and most of our behaviour, motivation and thought is enriched with, and influenced by, our emotions.
A product, or using a product, can elicit disappointment, attraction, shame, pride, disgust, contempt, admiration, satisfaction, fear, anger, and any other emotion a person may experience in response to events, people, or the actions of people.
Ignoring the emotional side of product experience would therefore be like denying that these products are designed, bought and used by humans.
During the talk, Pieter discussed the role of product design in emotional experiences, and proposed some opportunities to develop design strategies to conceptualise products that contribute to the happiness of their users.
He referred to 'sleeping demons' as concerns inherent within users which designers do not want to wake.
Often designers spend too long concentrating on solving problems or removing negative emotions from a design.
This bias in appraisal theory means the focus is often unduly narrowed.
New theories are being developed which focus more on positive emotions.
Broaden and Build Theory deals with thought action patterns which broaden the design focus to discover and build on personal resources to help people flourish and be happy.
Figure 2: A scale used to measure emotion in the Designing for Happiness presentation [6] The 40% theory states that happiness originates from three areas: 50% temperament or genes with which we are born; 10% depends on personal circumstances; and 40% originates from conscious thought.
This suggests that learning to be happier is learning how to think differently (e.g.
positive thinking).
This leaves the question of where emotion fits into design.
Pieter succinctly answered this question using a metaphor: 'you cannot make a sail trip without a sailboat'.
Products affect our happiness as sources, as resources to be used in obtaining goals and as sources of meaning: design for rich experiences (to savour), design for engagement (to find or identify and attain goals) or impact of positive emotions on human product interactions (fascination).
This reiterates his point on the importance of designing for happiness as much as designing to solve problems and remove negative emotions.
Pieter also pointed out that it is possible to enjoy things which incite fear, for example, horror films, dangerous sports, rollercoasters, etc.
We can enjoy negative emotions as long as conditions such as barriers are placed between the user and the 'danger'.
This should therefore also be taken into consideration in designing for happiness.
Overall, this session provided a lot of focus on the psychological side of design and generated some useful discussion at the end of a very engaging day.
Using Stories Effectively in User Experience Design Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brookes, Motorola This session focused on how we can use stories to collect, analyse and share qualitative information from user research to help create usable products.
This was a great presentation to kick off the conference as Whitney and Kevin were very engaging and talked passionately about the subject.
They were also buoyed by the level of contribution from the audience.
It was quite a fun session as we got to try some listening exercises where we were given a minute to speak to the person sitting next to us whilst they listened.
The aim was to work in pairs with the speaker talking for 1 minute about something relatively comfortable while the listener just listened (without talking, interrupting or filling any silences).
I found myself having to resist the urge to speak during the exercise, but we learned that if we allow speakers to proceed to the next idea without interrupting them, they tend to dig a little deeper to fill any potential silences, giving you even more information up-front.
Whitney and Kevin taught us that learning to listen and when to speak are important when seeking information from someone that is difficult to obtain.
Often those small throw-away comments are not noticed by the storyteller, but if we know how to identify a fragment that can grow into a story, we often uncover information which illuminates the data we have collected.
This sort of 'juicy' information often surprises us and contradicts common beliefs; it is invariably clear, simple and most of all, compelling.
The session went on to examine what constitutes a story.
A story is shared by everyone who hears it.
First the storyteller shapes the story and as the audience listen, they weave the story together.
The storyteller and the audience each affects the other and shapes the story they create.
A story is shared by everyone who hears it, but is heard by each person in his or her own way.
We have to be sure that what they are hearing is the same story.
The relationships around a story are called the Story Triangle and relationships shift as you move from audience to the storyteller (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The Story Triangle for a written story.
Each person in the audience has his or her own connection to the story [7] When people have a bad experience, they often tell you the story of what their experience is.
Telling stories is a natural way for people to communicate.
When carrying out user research, in order to collect stories we should try to incorporate it as part of what we are already doing; for example, if we are doing ethnography, why not just add this task to what we are already doing?
A good tip here is to structure the discussion to encourage stories.
Whitney went on to give an example of a time when she had been interviewing a lady for an hour.
The lady had answered all the questions on the survey, and once she felt that her duty was done, only then did she really open up in a more relaxed conversational manner and share some of her real experiences.
In effect, the subject gave the interviewer valuable insights which she probably believed were not relevant during the earlier structured interview.
This example proves the point that sometimes a more conversational and relaxed approach works better in gaining insights into what people really think and do.
The talk then progressed onto how we can use stories to add to personas the richness which is often lacking.
By using stories we can put a bit of the richness back.
For example, when communicating a persona's needs and goals, we can create a story around the data to give them a more realistic feel.
Stories in personas can provide perspective, generate imagery to suggest emotional connections, and give the persona a voice through the language used.
However, one ethical issue to consider carefully is how we re-use the words our subjects have used; for example, deciding whether to use their exact words or not, and how to use language in a way that communicates who they really are.
Stories can also be used to create scenarios for usability testing.
Often tasks force the participant to do something they might not ordinarily do.
If we can create a scenario and ask the participants to 'finish the story', it's often easier for them to imagine themselves in the situation and realistically attempt the task.
A good example came from an audience member who stated the problems she had had when asking women to try to record a football game using a prototype user interface (the prototype did not allow for any other task).
The women would be very unlikely to record such a thing in normal circumstances and so struggled to attempt the task.
When the facilitator changed the scenario by adding a story, the women were much happier to attempt the task: 'Your boyfriend is out and has asked you to record the football for him, can you do this?'
Stories can also be collected during usability tests.
The opening interview is often an opportunity to collect stories and use them to set up a task.
Doing so allows us to evaluate the tasks and check that they match participants' stories while also allowing us to generate a new task from the story.
In keeping with the cultural theme of this year's conference, Whitney and Kevin discussed the cultural differences in storytelling.
Asian cultures tend to tell stories in a spiral way; to whom we are connected through our environment, family, colleagues, etc.
This changes the structure of how they tell the story compared to Westerners.
It is also important to think about who is telling the story and how this changes, based on whom they are telling it to.
For example, if talking to teenagers, it might be better to interview them in pairs as they might talk between themselves more readily than talk to someone older to whom they cannot relate so easily.
There was so much to learn during the presentation; ideas on things which might seem obvious but are very often overlooked.
The overriding message from this presentation was the importance of listening; asking a question such as 'tell me about that', and then just listening!
Overall we found this to be a very enjoyable session with lots of useful discussions and exercises relevant to the work currently being undertaken in the AquaBrowserUX Project.
Thursday 27 May 2010 Ethnography 101: Usability on Plein Air Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation Paul Bryan spoke about how studying users in their natural environment is key to designing innovative, break-through Web sites rather than incrementally improving existing designs.
As our AquaBrowserUX Project is currently employing this method, this presentation seemed essential in order better to understand all that's involved.
Paul provided a very interesting insight into running such studies, explaining when to use ethnography and outlining a typical project structure.
In response to my question over the right number of participants required for a study, Paul replied with, 'it's a bit like love, you just know'.
I have never before heard such a commonly asked user research question answered so eloquently.
Ethnography clearly takes a lot of time and people-power to conduct a thorough study.
It seems that as a result, only large companies (or possibly academic institutes) get the chance to do it which is a shame because it is such an informative method.
For example, all video footage recorded must be examined minute by minute and transcribed.
When it comes to analysing the data collected, Paul suggested a few useful techniques.
Using the transcribed footage, go through and develop themes (typically 5-10).
In the example of a clothes shopping study this may be fit, value, appeal, style, appropriateness, etc.
Creating a table of quotes and mapping them to coded themes helps to validate the theme.
He also recommended that we focus on behaviour in ethnography, capture cases at opposite ends of the user spectrum, and always look for unseen behaviours.
Paul also mentioned how Ethnography has gone mainstream, referring to the film Avatar as a perfect example.
He also made reference to 'Webnography' (digital ethnography), which at its simplest is merely the application of new technologies to the process of ethnography.
At the end of the session we took part in a research exercise where we had to plan an ethnographic study to support the design of a hypothetical mobile e-commerce application.
The session generated lots of questions and feedback from the audience and was very informative and enjoyable, one of the most engaging and interesting of the conference.
Creating Richer Personas: Making Them Mobile, International, and Forward Thinking Michele Snyder and Anthony Sampanes, Oracle Corporation This short presentation provided lots of information relevant to the project as it is something which we are currently undertaking.
Michele Snyder and Anthony Sampanes gave an engaging talk on how personas are a great way to get development teams in sync with a new space and their users.
Traditionally personas are limited to desktop users.
However, this is changing as doing things on the move is now possible with the aid of smartphones and other mobile devices.
The revelation from the presenters that they had found little literature on cross-cultural or mobile personas provided a strong argument for more research to take place in this area.
Michele remarked that when you get into the mobile area, you start seeing some multicultural differences.
Mobile users are different, they differ greatly both in the way they accomplish tasks and in their operating environments, so we have to consider mobile users as a very heterogenous group of users.
As part of an in-house project, they captured key tasks which mobile users were interested in completing and carried out interviews with people they recruited in addition to ad hoc testing in which they approached people in the streets.
The aim of the interviews was to get as much information about the context of use as possible.
They also persuaded users to create a photo diary, taking pictures of the things they were doing at particular times of the day.
The photo diary approach was an especially useful method, when gathering data on user behaviour, as it goes much further than regular testing methods.
Anthony explained how the project team collated all the information gathered and ported it into personas, making sure that the set of persona represented all of the different cultures on which they wanted to portray information, making them 'forward-thinking personas' since technology in the mobile space is advancing rapidly, much more so than in other environments.
The final personas included a variety of information and importantly, images from the diary study as well.
Sections included 'About Me', 'Work', 'Mobile Life' and 'My Day'.
They also wanted to be able to provide enough information about the personas so that they acquired longevity and did not become outdated.
To do this, they encouraged the participants to 'think outside the box' about things they would like to do in the future.
To incorporate a forward-thinking section called 'Mobile Future', researchers asked participants what they would want their phone to be able to do in the future that it could not currently do.
This provided an opportunity for the personas to grow and not become outdated too quickly.
The resulting personas were reportedly a huge success and were widely used across various product teams.
The danger of outdated or dead personas represents a continual battle for design teams; so much so, that it was the topic of discussion at one of the lunch events the previous day.
It was great to see how one organisation has tried to address this issue.
Conclusion At the end of a captivating three days, it is fair to say that we both returned from the conference inspired by the variety of topics and range of speakers involved.
The conference organisers did a great job of providing delegates with a whole programme of events and activities to help people meet others with the same interest.
Activities included the lunch gatherings which focused on getting groups of people together in designated restaurants around Munich at lunchtime with the aim of discussing different flavours of Usability.
This was especially helpful for networking with like-minded people who provided inspiration and ideas for new ways of working.
Figure 4: Conference Dinner [8] The highlight of the social events was Thursday night's elaborate conference dinner which provided delegates with a true Bavarian feast including traditional German music.
This dinner not only provided the opportunity to reconnect with delegates we met during the course of the conference, but also one last opportunity to meet new people.
There was also an award ceremony which recognised the work of those in the industry and all the people that work behind the scenes to make the conference happen each year.
Overall, the conference proved of value to the work currently being undertaken on the AquaBrowserUX Project.
Who knows, maybe next summer we might even get a chance to share our research with everyone in Atlanta 2011.
References Figure 1: Registration morning in Bayerischer Hof Hotel http://www.flickr.com/photos/50646585@N07/4652439727/in/set-72157624035162609/ Embracing Cultural Diversity UPA International Conference, May 2010 https://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/conference/2010/ AquaBrowserUX Project Team http://lorrainepaterson.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/AquaBrowserux-project-plan-5-project-team-and-end-user-engagement/ User Study of AquaBrowser and UX2.0 http://boonious.typepad.com/ux2/2010/04/AquaBrowserux.html AquaBrowserUX Digital Library Personas https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/UX2/Digital+Library+Personas Figure 2: Designing for happiness slide http://www.flickr.com/photos/50646585@N07/4652589523/in/set-72157624035162609/ Figure 3: Story Triangle image http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/4459979698/ Conference Dinner http://www.flickr.com/photos/50646585@N07/4653317044/in/set-72157624035162609/ Author Details Liza Zamboglou Senior Service Manager, Information Services University of Edinburgh Email: Liza.Zamboglou@ed.ac.uk Web site: https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/UX2/AquaBrowserUX Lorraine Paterson UX2.0 Usability Analyst UK National e-Science Centre University of Edinburgh Email: l.paterson@nesc.ac.uk Web site: http://ux2.nesc.ed.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "International UPA 2010 Conference: User Experience Design for the World" Author: Liza Zamboglou and Lorraine Paterson Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/upa-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Retooling Special Collections Digitisation in the Age of Mass Scanning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Retooling Special Collections Digitisation in the Age of Mass Scanning Buzz data framework wiki database infrastructure archives metadata digitisation tagging repositories video cataloguing opac z39.50 csv librarything url research Citation BibTex RIS Constance Rinaldo, Judith Warnement, Tom Baione, Martin R. Kalfatovic and Susan Fraser describe results from a study to identify and develop a cost-effective and efficient large-scale digitisation workflow for special collections library materials.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) [1] is a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries that co-operate to digitise and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global ‘biodiversity commons.’ [2] The participating libraries hold more than two million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years to support the work of scientists, researchers and students in their home institutions and throughout the world.
BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) [3].
Much has been achieved through conventional mass scanning technologies and practices, but a significant portion of early biodiversity literature is quite rare and valuable, sometimes fragile.
For example, often the book is too large for most scanning machines, or has folded maps or illustrations that need special handling.
In 2008 BHL partners successfully applied for a $40,000 planning grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) [4] to identify and develop a cost-effective and efficient large-scale digitisation workflow and to explore ways to enhance metadata for library materials that are designated as ‘special collections.’ A recent review of special collections digitisation notes that because of the heterogeneity of these collections, it may be difficult to scale up to rapid mass scanning, unless workflow can be streamlined by assembling materials with relatively uniform characteristics [5].
The lead applicants were the Harvard University Botany Libraries and the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, MA).
The partner institution libraries included the American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY), the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, MO), The New York Botanical Garden (Bronx, NY), and the Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia, PA), while the scanning partner was the Internet Archive (San Francisco, CA) — all participants in the BHL.
The group actively consulted with other librarians and technology specialists across the country and invited several experts to its meetings to address the goals of the planning grant.
Infrastructure and Baseline Data The group developed a timeline, a tentative schedule for meetings, and reviewed the budget to keep all tasks on track.
A private wiki was established to serve as a repository for all of the documents, notes, links, and other information compiled and contributed by the partners.
Two bibliographies were compiled and posted that included papers on special collections digitisation projects and also social tagging applications to facilitate the discussion.
Definition of Special Collections The meaning of the term ‘special collections’ varies in different organisations, but it generally refers to rare books, photographs, moving images, fine arts, archives and manuscripts, memorabilia and realia in libraries.
Rare books [6] may be fragile, have unique characteristics such as autographs or handwritten notes made by well-known users, were printed before 1850, be represented by few copies, known to be of high monetary value, are smaller or larger than an average book, or are valuable because they are associated with an institution or individual.
Methods Meetings and Tests The partners met three times between November 2008 and October 2009 and each agenda centred on the specific goals of the grant for that period.
The first meeting was hosted by Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ).
Invited guests included librarians from the Harvard College Library (HCL) Imaging Services, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL), and the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (MBL/WHOI), the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), and representatives from Digital Transitions and Kirtas Technologies.
Each participant was asked to present a summary of their digital projects including details on staff, workflows, technologies and all other issues and costs associated with scanning oversized, fragile, and other categories of special collections.
As the partners and invited specialists shared their data, it became apparent that terminology varied and that each institution calculated costs in very different ways.
The group agreed to compile a glossary of terms and create a checklist of attributes used to determine what is ‘rare,’ thus requiring special handling.
The group also agreed to develop a spreadsheet to allow for more consistent cost comparisons (see Table 1).
Table 1: Parameters for comparing digitisation costs The second meeting was held at the Academy of Natural Sciences (ANS) in Philadelphia in April 2009.
The focus of the meeting was to determine parameters for some small-scale tests.
It was agreed that the same or similar items would be digitised via various workflows (e.g.
institutional facility, commercial facility, in-library facility) to produce reasonable comparisons of methods and associated costs.
Vendors were identified to participate in the tests, with one vendor reporting that the company could not actually provide the service.
Partners recorded all of the associated costs, recorded workflows, and monitored results for comparison.
It became apparent at the second meeting that the partners needed to calculate the number of volumes in the collections that needed special treatment.
The American Museum of Natural History Library and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries provided collection profiles based on size derived from OPAC reports and the Internet Archive colleagues provided details from some of their scanning sites associated with rejection rates that included size and condition included as factors.
The group also discussed the need to train library staff and scanning technicians to handle special collections material properly.
The Internet Archive contributed a ‘handling training video’ developed with the California Digital Library (CDL).
The partners also agreed on a strategy to test the utility of social networking tools by populating a Library Thing site for BHL and Wikipedia pages that could benefit from links to BHL to extend access to digital collections.
The third meeting was hosted by the Internet Archive at their San Francisco headquarters in October 2009.
The partners reviewed all of the test results by vendor and associated costs and studied the percentages of items rejected in a mass scanning process.
There was a discussion on how other workflows might improve success rates based on experiences at Harvard, Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Results Book Scanning Decision Factors There are several elements considered during the evaluation process to determine if a volume is suitable for scanning at a high-volume centre or if it must be handled in a different workflow [7][8].
These factors include the general condition as determined by the fragility, size, and value of a book.
Mass scanning facilities usually have minimum (under 4” or 10.16 cm) and maximum (over 18” or 45.72 cm) sizes.
Book bindings that are broken or have rot or water damage or other peculiarities (latches, for example) render the book unsuitable for mass scanning.
A tight binding, faint text, transparent paper, and other characteristics that may cause data loss, are often rejected by mass scanning facilities.
Other causes of rejection include uncut pages, foldouts that exceed scanning capabilities.
The partners developed a detailed key to decision factors that are used as filters to identify books that can be sent for mass scanning.
Rejection Rates Early in the discussions, the Internet Archive reported that at least 22% of the volumes pre-selected for scanning were rejected from the routine scanning process.
However, the University of Toronto scanning centre’s detailed statistics indicated that the rate was much higher.
Their study revealed that nearly half of the materials in the scanning queue were rejected because the margins were either too tight or too narrow — generally the result of rebinding.
Other common rejection factors included fragile bindings, brittle paper, and uncut pages.
Overall in the natural history libraries, the items libraries initially selected for scanning might be rejected because of the condition of the binding or text block, size, the inability to deal with foldouts or loose pages, and/or security concerns for rare or unique items (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Rejection rates for general collections at point of scanning (post-filtering) The rejection rate for special collections materials, and particularly for natural history materials, was expected to be higher because these materials consist of a higher proportion of commercially valuable books as well as books with foldouts and with other characteristics of rejected items.
The Smithsonian Libraries and the American Museum of Natural History Library assessed the presence of oversize volumes in general and special collections that had not yet been filtered for scanning suitability.
The result was that 3.86% of the items in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ scanning lists selected from the general collections were oversize whereas 11.49% of the items in the American Museum of Natural History Library’s special collections were oversize.
These results support the expectation that a higher proportion of special collections materials are likely to be rejected from a routine scanning process.
Scanning Tests There are many equipment configurations that can be used to produce high-quality images.
The challenge for the partners was to identify equipment, strategies, and workflows to facilitate the successful scanning of special collections materials at an affordable cost in a secure environment.
Needless to say, it was difficult to find a commercial vendor who met all these criteria.
The test results indicate that there is no inexpensive way to scan special collections material, but the hybrid solution achieves a high rate of success at a moderate cost.
Harvard librarians were fortunate to observe local tests of two scanning robots.
The outcomes indicated that the technology was not appropriate for scanning most special collections materials.
Human intervention was still critical to minimise damage and ensure accurate page-turning.
Several technologies were compared for scanning oversize or unusual items.
The Internet Archive model accommodated up to 30”w x 20”h (76.2 cm x 50.8 cm)(for foldouts and resulted in about a 70% success rate and averaged $0.20 per page (with a $2.00 charge per foldout).
Commercial scanning centres achieved good results at a much higher cost.
Institutional partners provided cost estimates for Financial Year (FY) 2008-2009 based on an average 300-page book and reported costs ranged from a low cost of $30 to a high cost of $52 per book.
Commercial vendors, working with some oversize items showed a low cost of $51 per book and a high cost of $120 per book.
Their costs for digitising oversize materials ranged from a low cost of $123 to a high cost of $7,000 per volume.
The really high cost was for an item for which each page required individual handling using a digital camera since a scanning bed had proved inadequate.
The same title was scanned by different vendors so partners could compare the costs and quality of the product.
A volume of The Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College was scanned at an institutional boutique facility, an Internet Archive scanning facility, and a commercial vendor.
A ‘hybrid solution’ was achieved by sending digital images of oversize foldouts scanned in an institutional facility to the Internet Archive to be ‘stitched’ into the text scanned by the Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive solution cost $0.11 per page, the hybrid solution was $0.60 per page, the institutional boutique solution $0.80 per page.
The commercial vendor determined that their facility could not produce a cost-effective scan, but another partner reported that a similar volume was scanned by a commercial vendor for more than $9.00 per page.
It should be noted that costs will vary based on the number of foldouts or other pages requiring special handling.
For a volume with many foldouts that are too large to be scanned within the Internet Archive parameters, the hybrid solution may be significantly more cost-effective.
In-library and institutional scanning centres produce good results at intermediate (in-library) to high (institutional) cost, have a much lower rejection rate, and eliminate the cost of moving materials off-site.
There are affordable in-library equipment configurations that achieve excellent results.
In-library facilities offered four equipment configurations: copy stands with cameras; fixed, face-up, overhead book scanners; flatbed scanners; robot scanners.
Lighted copy stands were fitted with a variety of cameras, including a Cambo camera at Missouri Botanical Garden, and Konica, Minolta, and Jenoptik cameras at The New York Botanical Garden.
The Natural History Museum, London, used a hybrid approach, using a Grazer Book Cradle and a large-format digital camera.
The Smithsonian Institution Libraries used a Phase One DT camera and a P65 digital scanning back.
Overhead book scanners deployed included Indus Planetary scanners, an ImageWare Bookeye Repro A2 and a KIC II scanning system.
Flatbed scanners ranged from large-format flatbeds to smaller sheet feed scanners.
Reports were provided on tests of the Treventus and Scanbot robot scanners, though they were not specifically tested as part of this grant.
The institutional boutique solution offered state-of-the-art technology and experienced technicians.
It was very expensive, but achieved excellent results.
In-library solutions also provided very good results at a lower overall cost.
The least expensive solution turned out to be the hybrid solution.
Foldouts were scanned with high-end equipment, either in-house or by a vendor, and then ‘stitched in’ to the text through the routine Internet Archive workflow.
However, the hybrid solution required more handling of the volume, thus increasing the likelihood of damage.
When pages are inserted to an existing file the associated metadata may be distorted and must be corrected by hand.
Thus, there were potential added costs for quality review and metadata correction.
The partners made the general observation that while costs varied widely they have come down in recent years.
Web Services and Social Networking Web services offer intriguing opportunities to link detailed information to specific notable books.
Crowd-sourced social tagging may be a cost-effective way to enhance metadata, particularly when librarian curators manage the tagging [9][10].
The bibliography on the Biodiversity Heritage Library IMLS Wiki facilitated the group’s discussion of how to exploit social media.
Most agreed that there is value added when experts are involved, but reaction was mixed with regard to generalist tagging.
A profile for BHL was established at LibraryThing [11].
One partner worked with a LibraryThing developer to import records for books without ISBN numbers.
The solution was still tedious and time-consuming and required extensive human intervention to correct the metadata.
The process required manual data entry of all of the imported tags for each title to a .csv file, and the typing in of all of the URLs.
Since BHL content generally predates the establishment of ISBNs and is represented predominately by serial records, the partners agreed that batch loads of BHL records would be impractical and costly, thus reducing the value of a LibraryThing profile.
Partners identified biographical profiles of important scientists in Wikipedia and linked BHL digital content to the cited references for approximately 85 titles.
Partners also used Wikipedia entries devoted to important books to determine if the public tagging of these titles would offer some added value by leading the reader to the complete work.
An example is available from Wikipedia [12].
These links did not generate tagging activity during the study, but they did increase referrals from Wikipedia to the BHL site (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Increasing referrals from Wikipedia to BHL after content links added BHL content on Open Library [13] was reviewed for analysis but there was no activity to report during the grant period.
Wikipedia and LibraryThing seem to be the most promising places to gather user-generated feedback and tagging.
Portable Scanning Unit BHL partners have been scanning the biodiversity literature for more than four years and report that the inventory of easily scanned volumes (known as the low-hanging fruit), is nearly exhausted.
However, thousands of volumes remain in the library stacks that should be made available to the scientific community.
The partners understand that there are a variety of digital processes that can be employed to scan special collections materials successfully, that in-house scanning achieves a much higher rate of success, but the costs are higher than conventional scanning workflows.
Therefore, it is important to minimise duplication of materials and effort.
BHL partners envision a co-ordinated scanning project that will provide temporary on-site scanning of pre-selected special collections materials by deploying a portable scanning unit and trained technician to partners’ libraries for a limited period.
The on-site service allows for a potentially cost-effective solution for scanning fragile, unique or valuable items that do not lend themselves to over-handling and shipping.
Creating the BHL collection has demonstrated that good bibliographic records are essential in building a shared catalogue.
All project partners must ensure that all records are reviewed and improved as necessary.
Partners agree that enhancing metadata is a better investment than packing and shipping special collections materials to off-site facilities [14].
As part of the planning grant, the Internet Archive designed a reusable shipping container for a proposed Portable Scanning Unit (PSU) service.
The Internet Archive offered detailed specifications for costs associated with delivery of one Scribe and the electrical, space and technical needs to support a single PSU.
Internet Archive network requirements include an open IP address, not blocked by a firewall, for a gateway connection box to a Scribe, Z39.50 access to catalogue records (or metadata can be created preor post-scanning to be added to the item being scanned but this is less efficient) and 1.5 megabits 24⁄7 of bandwidth.
This solution has yet to be tested although Harvard will receive a temporary Scribe this summer.
Conclusions One unique aspect of biodiversity research is that historical data are as valuable and essential as current literature.
Improving the digitisation of the literature in libraries’ special collections makes this relatively rare information readily accessible.
The focus of the project has been to identify cost-effective ways to expand the types of biodiversity literature delivered virtually and to make them easier to ‘discover’ by scientists, curators, taxonomists, conservationists, and ecologists from all over the world.
The results are readily applicable to other disciplines that rely on special collections materials.
The digital collections produced can be integrated with other major scientific and bibliographic databases and collections using contemporary informatics solutions.
Policies and relationships must be established to ensure the content remains freely accessible.
The scanned content created by BHL is used, and will continue to be used, in a variety of projects.
BHL content is part of the Digging Into Data challenge [15].
BHL looks forward to working with the planned Digital Public Library of America [16].
Enhanced access and distribution of special collections content and the associated metadata are essential, not only to biodiversity research, but also to other disciplines in other branches of science and the humanities where they have broad applications.
The partners agreed that the planning grant provided valuable information that can be applied to future projects, and enhanced working relationships among the partners and consultants.
Acknowledgements Funding for this study was received from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant number LG-50-08-0058-08; Principal Investigator: James Hanken).
We would also like to acknowledge the help of all of our partner colleagues and specialists from other organisations: Danianne Mizzy and Eileen Mathias of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, staff of the New York Botanical Garden, Doug Holland of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Robert Miller of the Internet Archive, staff of the American Museum of Natural History, Danielle Castronovo of the California Academy of Sciences, Aaron Chaletzky of the Library of Congress, Bill Comstock of Harvard University, colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution, Maura Marx of the Open Knowledge Commons, Diane Rielinger of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Library and Jane Smith of the Natural History Museum, London.
We would also like to thank the vendors who shared workflows and ideas with all of us: Linda Andelman of Parrot Digigraphic, Lofti Belkhir of Kirtas Technologies, Rudiger Klepsch of Image Ware, David Sempberger of Boston Photo Imaging, and Peter Siegel of Digital Transitions, Inc. References Biodiversity Heritage Library http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ Gwinn, Nancy E.and Constance A. Rinaldo.
2009.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Sharing biodiversity with the world.
IFLA Journal 35(1): 25-34.
Encyclopedia of Life http://www.eol.org/ Institute of Museum and Library Services http://www.imls.gov/ Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries Task Force on Digitization in Special Collections.
Erway, Ricky.
2011.
Rapid Capture: Faster Throughput in Digitization of Special Collections.
Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/2011-04.pdf Norman, Jeremy.
2004.What is a Rare Book?
The Six Criteria of Rarity in Antiquarian Books http://www.historyofscience.com/traditions/rare-book.php ABC for Book Collectors.
http://www.ilab.org/services/abcforbookcollectors.php Glaister, G.A.
Encyclopedia of the book.
New Castle, Del.
: Oak Knoll Press, etc., 1996.
Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Early Experiments and Ongoing Research http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2594/ Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2595/ BioDivLibrary: LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/profile/BioDivLibrary Systema Naturae Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, accessed 5 June 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systema_Naturae Open Library http://openlibrary.org/ Pilsk, S. C., M.A.
Person, J.M.
deVeer, J.F.
Furfey and M. R. Kalfatovic.
2010.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Advancing Metadata Practices in a Collaborative Digital Library.
Journal of Library Metadata 10: 136-155.
Digging into Data Challenge http://www.diggingintodata.org/ Digital Public Library of America http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/dpla Author Details Constance Rinaldo Ernst Mayr Library Museum of Comparative Zoology Harvard University, 26 Oxford St. Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Email: crinaldo@oeb.harvard.edu Web site: http://library.mcz.harvard.edu/ Constance Rinaldo has been the Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University since 1999 and in addition to her MLS, has an MS in Zoology.
Currently she also serves as the Executive Secretary of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Prior to her work at Harvard, she was the Head of Collections at the Biomedical Libraries at Dartmouth College.
Connie is passionate about natural history and making library collections open and accessible.
Judith Warnement Botany Libraries Harvard University 22 Divinity Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Email: warnemen@oeb.harvard.edu Web site: http://www.huh.harvard.edu/libraries/ Judith Warnement has served as the Librarian of the Harvard University Herbaria’s Botany Libraries since 1989 and is interested bibliographic description, conservation, and digitisation of botanical literature.
She serves on the Institutional Council of the Biodiversity Heritage Library and is an active member of the Council on Botanical and Horticulture Libraries and an associate member of the European Botanical and Horticulture Libraries Group.
Judy holds earned a Masters in Library and Information Science from Case Western Reserve University.
Tom Baione Department of Library Services American Museum of Natural History 79th Street and Central Park West New York, NY 10024-5192 USA Email: tbaione@amnh.org Web site: http://library.amnh.org/ Tom Baione is the Boeschenstein Director of Library Services at New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
Tom’s work in the Museum’s Library began in 1995, when he started in the Library’s Special Collections Unit; most recently he was in charge of the Library’s Research Services and was appointed director in 2010.
Martin R. Kalfatovic Smithsonian Institution Libraries Washington, DC USA Email: kalfatovicm@si.edu Web site: http://www.sil.si.edu/ Martin R. Kalfatovic is the Assistant Director, Digital Services Division at Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
The Digital Services Division oversees the Libraries digitisation efforts which include digital editions and collections, online exhibitions, and other Web site content.
Current projects include work on metadata, standards and intellectual property issues.
As the Smithsonian’s co-ordinator and Deputy Director for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), he oversees the Smithsonian’s contributions.
Susan Fraser The LuEsther T. Mertz Library, The New York Botanical Garden Bronx, New York 10458 USA Email: sfraser@nybg.org Web site: http://library.nybg.org/ Susan Fraser is the Director of The LuEsther T. Mertz Library at The New York Botanical Garden where she oversees an exceptional staff and an outstanding collection of print and non-print resources.
She also plays a pivotal role in the exhibition programme in the William D. Rondina and Giovanni Foroni LoFaro Gallery.
Susan received her MLS from Columbia University and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists.
She is an active member of the Council of Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL), having served on the Board from 2005-2008.
She is currently involved in several committees and has been the CBHL Archivist since 2000.
Return to top Article Title: Retooling Special Collections Digitisation in the Age of Mass Scanning Authors: Constance Rinaldo, Judith Warnement, Tom Baione, Martin R. Kalfatovic, Susan Fraser Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/rinaldo-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC Digital Content Conference 2009 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC Digital Content Conference 2009 Buzz data mobile wiki infrastructure archives digitisation blog copyright video preservation multimedia ejournal facebook twitter oer licence interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Michelle Pauli reports on a two-day conference on digital content held by JISC in South Cerney over 30 June 1 July 2009.
In the bucolic setting of the Cotswolds, on one of the hottest weeks of the summer, 200 delegates gathered to discuss the future of online content and to examine why UK universities need a sustainable digital content strategy to deliver successfully accessible learning and research materials for the future.
Over two days, the delegates heard from a series of keynote speakers in plenary sessions and attended breakout ‘strand sessions’ on five different themes: Managing Content; Content Development Strategies; Content in Education; User Engagement; and Looking into the Future.
The conference took place within the context of the end of the second phase of JISC’s multi-million pound digitisation programme, and the funded projects showcased their work in the reception areas with posters and video showreels.
The presence of a large number of digitisation practitioners, as well as policy-makers and funders, made for an extremely vigorous and informed debate, both during and between sessions.
The conference was fully amplified and included a blog with session reports and comments [1], video and audio [2] and a lively Twitter feed [3].
Plenary Sessions The JISC vision for digital content: achievements and challenges for the future Catherine Grout, Programme Director, e-content, JISC Catherine Grout opened the conference with a rapid overview of JISC’s digital content projects and achievements, a look at the benefits for education and research, and a warning of the challenges that lie ahead.
JISC is providing a rich, varied and fascinating set of content through its £22 million digitisation programme [4].
It encompasses more than 6.5 million items that span centuries and disciplines and includes a diverse range of media, from sound, film, images and journals to newspapers, maps, pamphlets, theses and cartoons.
This flood of online content will have a huge impact on the research of the future, Catherine argued.
Most students find online material more engaging than printed material and people with access to this material will use it in ways that those who put it online can’t even imagine.
There are, of course, challenges, especially around inconsistency of provision, intellectual property rights issues, and making high-quality content noticeable in all the noise of the Web.
She forecast rough seas ahead, especially in terms of funding.
However, Catherine noted, momentum for digitisation is growing.
Gains in efficiency have been immense, gains in quality should follow and there’s a genuine desire for collaboration between institutions and funders.
It’s a good time for investment so long as those running the projects become even better at demonstrating the impact of their work in user-friendly ways, and prove it’s worth doing.
Catherine Grout’s presentation is available on video [5].
A Modest Proposal: A California Digital Library Robert Miller, Director of Books, Internet Archive Robert Miller picked up on Catherine’s point that ‘it’s grim out there’ with some context on the difficult times we are in, and then gave a whistlestop tour of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive [6].
It’s a non-profit organisation, with funding of around $10m from foundations, grants, government and libraries who pay for services.
Areas of work include a TV archive; 400,000 items of audio on the site distributed over 100 collections; a ‘wayback machine’ (a service that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites); and 1.4 million books online, some donated, some digitised (around 1,000 plus books per day).
Projects include working with NASA Images (the Internet Archive hosts and shares all of the video images and digital files in the public domain), the Asami collection (examples of early movable type from Korea), and a collaboration with the Mormons on the world’s largest genealogy collection (the Internet Archive has donated equipment, and Mormon volunteers are digitising the material).
The Internet Archive has worked with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, but only Google is still there in the field of books.
Robert pointed out that libraries generally take a view of 100 years, but that’s probably not the case for commercial organisations.
This means that new models of sustainability need to be explored Robert mentioned endowments, grants, sponsors and partners, but with the recession hitting, new collaborations (for example with the Mormon volunteers) may be the way forward.
Another option might be a ‘stimulus package’, as has happened in China and Japan.
In answer to a question about the pros and cons of Google, Robert noted that the pros include wonderful tools and services but the cons include trying to take public knowledge and privatise it.
Robert thought that Google was near the end of what it is going to digitise, but made the point that there’s a whole lot more available in public libraries.
Robert concluded with a summary of the three elements that make a good library: resource (base), technical (instrument) and service (goal).
Robert Miller’s presentation is available on video [7].
Digital Britain or digital landfill: the challenges to heritage and higher education institutions Nick Poole, Chief Executive, Collections Trust In an energetic presentation which caused something of a stir in the Twitterverse, Nick Poole laid down a challenge to the public sector in the face of Digital Britain: there are two options either take a decade’s worth of investment in e-content and use it to create something consumer-facing and market-competitive to show how we’re contributing to Digital Britain; or argue among ourselves, spend a lot of time talking about standards and interoperability, and let digital content turn into digital landfill.
He then set out the problems the public sector shares: Money: it’s tight Politicians: attitudes change depending on the administration Trust: either trust the crowd, or don’t there are no half-measures.
Where will the limits be?
Projects: staff enthusiasm ebbs and flows Managers: we don’t have a business case; we don’t know how the models will work; we don’t know if something is a good idea or bad idea Copyright: we need to get away from the fear of copyright and think about taking risks, and remember there is no long tradition of case law here Users: are different, of all ages and technological backgrounds Strategy: this is not an area you can strategise in.
Marshalling effort is difficult, but you can set an ambition and then galvanise people towards that Digital: it means many different things, from the use of computers to manage collections to driving economic value through the Web to broadband access Marketing: the Internet is a competitive ecology and if we don’t tell people it’s there, they won’t see it Nick finished with the rousing call to action: ‘we have the chance to work towards a very exciting vision, and if we don’t, we’ll regret it for the next 10 years.’ Nick Poole’s presentation is available on video [8].
The Urge and Surge of International Collaborations Michael Popham, Susan Whitfield, Saskia de Vries In a global academic culture of sharing resources and expertise, collaboration is an essential part of many Higher Education projects and this plenary session, moderated by JISC’s head of innovation, Sarah Porter, brought together three experts in the field with a wealth of experience between them.
Michael Popham of the University of Oxford explained that his project, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive [9], involved creating a virtual collection of early Shakespeare texts and was a collaborative effort with a US partner plus Octavo and the British Library.
Susan Whitfield from the British Library is working with 8 full-time partners and 20 collaborating institutions on the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) [10].
International collaboration was always essential to the project, which is digitising the 40,000 manuscripts found in Dunhuang, a Buddhist cave temple site in western China.
A crucial aspect of the project is that it is based on collaboration and not colonisation, explained Susan.
The project must always adapt to local conditions, and there must always be a native language speaker as a key element of the project is about passing on skills and sharing knowledge.
Full members host their Web site locally, and this creates a sense of shared ownership and responsibility.
Saskia de Vries of Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) [11], which provides open access publishing for academic books in humanities and social sciences, argued that funders of research should pay for the publication of research.
Looking forward, Saskia saw a hybrid model of online and print, where online texts would be free, and print would be sold.
Despite the diversity of the projects under discussion, three common threads for successful international collaboration emerged: The importance of clear and frequent communication A need for mutual respect and trust in all parties Fair distribution of resources and responsibilities These presentations are available on video [12].
Fostering Knowledge: The JISC’s Contribution to the UK e-Infrastructure Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation, JISC Sarah focused on JISC’s contribution to the UK e-infrastructure and its work in progress, making the point that JISC’s work needs to be seen in a global context.
Global issues are now affecting the way people learn, teach and run their lives.
Content is not restricted to the UK; it comes from everywhere (whether digitised, commercial or user-generated) and everything is distributed.
Moreover, people are searching on that content from all over the world.
JISC has an enabling role, through infrastructure, policy and strategy, and practice; it intends to tackle the open agenda, sustainability, efficiency and innovation to support user needs.
Key elements of JISC’s vision, which can only be achieved through active, focused collaboration are: crowd-sourced, user-selected content accessible, engaging content more value derived from the wonderful resources available in the UK Sarah Porter’s presentation is available on video [13].
University of Oxford: Content is king but we are in a republic Stuart Lee, Director, Computing Systems and Services Stuart’s session was a rallying call for a move towards community digitisation.
He argued that we need to move away from the traditional view of digitisation (concentrating on rare/unique content from major collections) because we’re looking at the same thing again and again we’re broke it’s not sustainable Content will always be king, he argued, and there has always been and always will be lots of content.
The important question now is how can it be accessed?
We should exploit mass amateur digitisation, release new material and engage the public.
Stuart closed by saying that we shouldn’t underestimate the community, and called for JISC to set up a mass observation service/community collection service.
Stuart Lee’s presentation is available on video [14].
Strands Managing Content Sam Jordison Sessions: Value for money and the economic challenges Institutional approaches to content management and the digitisation life cycle Safeguarding Investment and Maintaining Access: The Role of Digital Preservation These sessions are available as audio [15].
This was a positive strand in that there was widespread recognition that digitisation is an important process, that there is great demand for it and that its uses are clear and obvious.
Delegates remain enthused about the way it opens up huge possibilities in research, especially making archives easier to search and providing academics easier access to resources without the need to travel.
It is also, several noted, wonderfully helpful in opening up academy to a broader public.
Delegates and speakers were full of praise for the work that JISC does in supporting digital projects.
It also helps them to: consider good structures for digitising content; to ensure that their work is sustainable and transferable, and that it fits within the wider structure of their institutions.
However, these questions of sustainability and coherence were of great concern to delegates, especially given the current economic climate and funding issues that are likely to arise.
They are faced with opposing needs: they must digitise as much as possible and as effectively as possible, and they must ensure that a structure is in place to protect that digitised archive in the long term, but they also have to trim their costs, and justify all their work anew.
At the moment there seems to be a feeling that too many projects are run on an ad hoc one-off basis and that far more work needs to be done in terms of thinking about how individual projects fit into the broader remit of their institutions.
Thought must also be given to how they serve the public and the needs of the future.
Solutions were put forward regarding deep infrastructure changes and potentially mutually beneficial partnerships with private publishers.
The final talk of the session also highlighted the external help that is available for institutions thinking about their digitisation processes and provided some very helpful workflow models.
Here too though, there was a sting in the tail with the stark warning that public-private partnerships can become very problematic and archives can even be lost should the commercial partners go out of business.
It is clearly an area that is going to need a lot of hard thought and tough decision-making in the future.
Content Development Strategies Carrie Dunn Sessions: Content Procurement in an uncertain environment: what impact is the economic crisis having on library purchasing of online content?
The Gorilla in the room (not Google!)
Copyright and Licencing.
Seizing the initiative through supportive tools and methodologies: an international comparison Digging into the data: text and data mining These sessions are available as audio [15].
The financial restrictions faced by libraries and librarians were high on the agenda in this strand.
The discussions began with stakeholders giving their own perspectives on the issues during a time of economic crisis librarians, publishers and researchers discussed what action needs to be taken, suggesting e-only journals, a reduction in content and staff cuts, among other ideas.
Striking a balance between the cost-effectiveness of e-journals and users’ wishes on the one hand and the requirement of a hard copy of content on the other may prove difficult, particularly in sectors such as art and design.
Licensing and rights issues were the key ideas at the start of day two (1 July 2009).
Thoughts about best practice were shared, and there was a consensus that people within institutions often have misperceptions about copyright and licensing; if they wish to use an ‘orphan work’ they might discard it entirely because of the risk involved, or they might use it without seeking to clear rights, thus incurring potential liability for their institution.
They may also believe that because something is available under a Creative Commons licence, it can be used freely and without restriction.
The strand concluded with discussion about how data can be mined and used, looking at projects gathering and applying data in innovative ways.
It was suggested that content should be paramount, even for those working in technology.
Content in Education Sessions: Supporting academic practice: embedding content in teaching, learning and research New media content in education Open Educational Resources These sessions are available as audio [15].
There was a clear message underpinning this strand: it is not enough simply to produce exciting digital material – it is also vital to engage users and support them in their use of these resources in academic practice.
Embedding content in learning, teaching and research is crucial but the question of how to ‘hook’ users into the content in the first place sparked off a debate that split the delegates into two camps.
Traditionally, the content of a resource has been highlighted as the key to attracting users.
A more radical approach is to look at pedagogy instead, and the argument was made that a focus on what the resource will be used for, rather than what the resource contains, is a more effective way to help teachers see that the material can be relevant and useful to their courses.
Sharing content between institutions and repurposing it should be simple but the thorny question of copyright, and the confusion many people feel towards IPR, came up as an aspect which encouraged teachers to share content.
Another aspect was the quite high level skills needed to repurpose content.
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are learning materials that are specifically designed to be shared.
That there is a demand for them was demonstrated in the inspiring example of the Open University’s OpenLearn Programme.
For the students of the future, multimedia will be their way of working and this is a pivotal moment for film and sound in education.
Delegates were introduced to the work of the JISC Film and Sound Think Tank which aims to widen formal and informal participation in digital media, accelerate the use of media, improve the quality of teaching and learning and distribute the benefits of cutting-edge research.
User Engagement Rach Colling Sessions: Making Web sites glamorous: Adding value to digitised content What makes an online resource a well-used resource?
Users, impact and metrics Beyond the Library Walls: Business and Community Engagement These sessions are available as audio [15].
Web 2.0 and social media was a major theme of the User Engagement strand.
Whether it was discussing how institutions can engage better with business and the community, or looking at how we can add value to digitised content, the speakers’ presentations (and the animated discussion amongst delegates) confirmed that Web 2.0 was now a serious part of the institutional landscape.
However, this raises interesting issues regarding sustainability.
It was suggested that rather than developing innovative new technologies for showcasing and adding value to content, institutions may be better off using third-party providers (particularly for social networking) with the aim of building a global community of users.
Social media was also cited as a good way of reaching out to the wider community, and looking beyond institutional walls to work in partnership with community groups – delegates heard how Manchester Metropolitan University is using this to great effect.
Concerns were raised, however, that focusing heavily on Web 2.0 technology use (without ensuring the resources and skills to use it are present) could exacerbate the digital divide, and that it should not be pursued at the expense of more traditional, face-to-face methods.
The point was also forcibly made that the use of social media needed to be relevant to what projects or institutions were trying to achieve – and what users wanted.
Delegates raised the issue of information overload, and called for more training to raise awareness of the appropriateness of different tools for different jobs.
What users did indeed want and use was the focus of several discussions, with much delegate interest in the benefits of audience research and metrics, particularly in how it can help with bids for funding, and the transition from project to service.
This was felt to be especially relevant in an era of content consolidation and reductions in funding.
Looking into the Future Milly Shaw Sessions: What is the impact of user-generated content on research and scholarship?
Libraries of the future New technologies for delivering and accessing digital content These sessions are available as audio [15].
If there was one take-home message of the Looking into the Future strand of the conference, it was that we cannot control change but we can adapt to it, learn from it and influence it.
The future is, by its very definition, infinite and unknown.
But in hearing examples of how some Higher Education practitioners have used new technologies, delegates could build up a picture of how the future might affect them, and how to identify and grasp emerging opportunities.
The sessions covered a diverse range of topics, from the physical appearance of libraries of the future to the emergence of ‘citizen science’.
But within the diversity of topics there emerged some common issues that are likely to affect many aspects of the future of Higher Education: Things are moving fast.
We need to keep up with technology, and we need to keep up with students who adapt to technology faster than institutions.
In fact we should be going further – rather than trying to keep up with advances, we should be looking ahead to anticipate trends and developments.
We shouldn’t be afraid of mistakes.
Not every technology development will be useful, and we have to accept that by abandoning those which are not suitable, we are learning, not failing.
We shouldn’t fall in love.
We can experiment with using Facebook, Twitter, mobile technology, wikis, virtual worlds or any of the other hundreds of tools at our disposal, but we mustn’t fall in love with the technology at the cost of the project aim.
Technology is an enabler, a means to an end.
It is the people behind the technology who create the success of a project.
Boundaries are shifting, and we shouldn’t fear the evolution of roles and relationships.
The public can be collaborators in academic projects.
Librarians can be online as well as off-line research facilitators.
Academics facilitate their own learning as well as that of their students.
Conclusion Hold a digital content conference in the context of the current economic climate, and questions of sustainability are inevitably going to be at the forefront of delegates’ minds.
However, while there was certainly a consistent undercurrent of warnings of the financial rough seas ahead at JDCC09, the conference maintained an overwhelmingly positive outlook.
The success of the JISC Digitisation Programme and its value for teaching, learning and research is in no doubt and, while there can be no question that some tough decisions are going to have to be made, the enthusiasm of the conference made it clear that, on the ground, the momentum for digitisation is now unstoppable.
Acknowledgements My thanks to the team of bloggers – Sam Jordison, Milly Shaw, Carrie Dunn and Rach Colling – who helped to document the conference so effectively on http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/ and for providing the strand session summaries.
Editor’s note: In an attempt to future-proof this report, I have created a snapshot of the global economy for the benefit of readers unacquainted with the summer months of 2009.
References JISC Digital Content Conference blog with videos and slides online http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/?cat=498 JISC Digital Content Conference – video and audio http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/06/digitalcontent/programme Twitter (search under the tag #jdcc09) http://twitter.com The JISC Digitisation Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation JISC Digital Content Conference – video and audio: video: Catherine Grout, Plenary 1: The JISC Vision for Digital Content http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/06/digitalcontent/programme/catherinegrout The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org JISC Digital Content Conference – video and audio: video: Robert Miller, Plenary 2: A Modest Proposal A California Digital Library http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/06/digitalcontent/programme/robertmiller JISC Digital Content Conference Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/06/digitalcontent Shakespeare Quartos Archive http://mith.info/quartos International Dunhuang Project http://idp.bl.uk Open Access Publishing in European Networks http://www.oapen.org JISC Digital Content Conference – video and audio: video: Sarah Porter: The urge and surge of international collaborations http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/2009/07/01/jdcc09-sarah-porter-international-collaborations/#more-521 JISC Digital Content Conference – video and audio: video: Sarah Porter: Fostering knowledge: the JISC’s contribution to the UK e-Infrastructure http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/2009/07/02/jdcc09-sarah-porter-fostering-knowledge/#more-527 JISC Digital Content Conference Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/06/digitalcontent JISC Digital Content Conference http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/06/digitalcontent/programme Author Details Michelle Pauli Freelance writer, editor and Web specialist Email: info@michellepauli.co.uk Web site: http://www.michellepauli.co.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “JISC Digital Content Conference 2009” Author: Michelle Pauli Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/jisc-digi-content-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Volcanic Eruptions Fail to Thwart Digital Preservation the Planets Way Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Volcanic Eruptions Fail to Thwart Digital Preservation the Planets Way Buzz data software java framework database xml archives zip metadata digitisation browser identifier repositories preservation cataloguing graphics visualisation usb youtube interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Matthew Barr, Amir Bernstein, Clive Billenness and Manfred Thaller report on the final Planets training event Digital Preservation The Planets Way held in Rome over 19 21 April 2010.
In far more dramatic circumstances than expected, the Planets Project [1] held its 3-day training event Digital Preservation – The Planets Way in Rome over 19 21 April 2010.
This article reports its proceedings.
The venue chosen for this Planets training event, the last of a series of five held over the past 12 months around Europe, was the prestigious Pontifica Universitata Gregoriana – the first Jesuit University, founded over 450 years ago in the heart of Rome and only a few minutes’ walk from the Trevi Fountain.
There the Planets training team had been looking forward to welcoming delegates from all over Europe.
When, therefore, a few days before the start, the ash cloud from the eruptions of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull progressively closed increasing volumes of airspace across Europe, it also cast an increasing shadow over the entire event.
However, because approximately half the delegates confirmed their determination to attend, and all but one presenter successfully made alternative travel arrangements, the decision was taken that the event should proceed as planned, with those unable to travel being offered complimentary places at the Planets Open All-Staff Conference in Berlin on 19 May 2010.
Day 1: 19 April 2010 And so it was that delegates and presenters, having travelled from Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK by car and train, gathered on 19 April to hear the welcome address by Reverend Father Martin M Morales SJ, Director of the University’s Archive.
Father Morales welcomed the work of the Planets Project in providing practical tools and solutions for long-term digital preservation.
He told the Conference that preservation has always been one of the tasks of cultural heritage institutions owing to the fragility of historic printed material which, over time, would make it increasingly difficult to provide access to scholars.
Digitisation and digital preservation were simply new techniques in the continuing process of preservation.
He stressed, however, the need to create structured metadata for digitised material to ensure that the problems which were now being encountered with paper material would not be encountered in the future when dealing with digitised versions.
Planets Trainers and Delegates gather in Rome Clive Billenness, Planets Programme Manager, British Library, then proposed a view of Digital Preservation in which it is treated as simply another response to Business Risk, to be addressed within an organisation’s normal corporate governance arrangements.
He demonstrated how the Planets Approach provides tools and services to support each stage of the Risk Management Cycle defined in a number of Standards and Guidance documents, running from Risk Identification, through Assessment, Evaluation, Planning and Execution to Review.
He also demonstrated how this approach conforms to the OAIS model.
He invited delegates to return to their own organisation and examine their corporate Risk Register to see whether they could find references to risks to digital holdings within that document; and if not, to encourage their corporate risk managers to consider this as an emerging area of Risk.
Following this theme, Mark Guttenbrunner, Vienna University of Technology, one of the team developing the Planets PLATO Preservation Planning tool, then showed how the preservation of individual digital objects related to the wider policies and procedures of an organisation.
He also emphasised that effective preservation planning is a cornerstone of creating a ‘trusted’ repository, citing work in this area by NESTOR, Drambora and TRAC.
Mark showed a workflow from Preservation Planning to Preservation Action.
He also quoted the results of a User Survey performed by Planets in 2009 which demonstrated a clear link between the availability of budget within organisations to manage digital preservation and the existence of a digital preservation policy.
After coffee, Dr Ross King, Austrian Institute of Technology, presented some thought-provoking figures about the current size and projected growth-rate of the digital universe, translating the quite abstract measure of Exabytes of data created each year into the more pictorial visualisation of a stack of CD’s which could reach to Mars and half-way back again.
Ross then considered both the challenges and incentives related to digital preservation.
He noted that over the millennia, while the density at which successive civilisations have been able to store data on different media has increased (from hieroglyphics on the pyramids to the modern USB memory device), the permanence and robustness of the media used has reduced in almost direct proportion.
So, while the Rosetta Stone, dating back to the second century BC, provided an effective and durable storage media to enable three languages to be compared, at 760kg it lacked portability, although it required only a human eye to read its contents.
In comparison, although a modern PC could store the same content within a few milligrams of silicon, it required a range of hardware and software to render the content readable by a human.
He contrasted the issues of format and media obsolescence and reflected on the pros and cons of the two main approaches to digital preservation: migration and emulation, pointing out that Planets accommodates both of these approaches.
Finally, returning to the theme of risk in digital preservation, Ross reflected on the possible contradiction which exists between normal business planning, which is based on the principle of a rapid Return on Investment, and Digital Preservation.
The latter, if not driven by legislation, is likely to be undertaken with a view on very long-term returns which might not be immediately measurable financially.
He therefore agreed that a risk management-based approach might be easier to use to create a business case justifying the investment required.
Sara van Bussel, National Library of the Netherlands, then introduced delegates to the types of action which might be taken to undertake digital preservation.
She compared the two main approaches to digital preservation – migration of material from one format to another and the presentation of digital material in its original format within an emulation of its original technical environment.
Migration denotes that digital objects are regularly converted from one bytestream representation, following a specific format, used by the software available at one point of time, into the representations needed by later generations of software.
Emulation describes an approach which leaves the bytestreams unchanged, but instead tries to preserve the older generation of software by allowing it to run unchanged on more modern hardware.
She explained the strengths and risks associated with each approach and also considered whether format migration was best performed at ingest or access.
Sara then summarised the findings of the Planets survey of preservation tool provision for the most commonly used file formats in memory institutions.
This confirmed that tools were available for the 10 most commonly used formats within the 57 migration tools known to and/or used by Planets Project partners.
She then explained to the delegates the different approaches to emulation available within Planets, and finished her presentation by demonstrating the relationship between the Planets Core Registry and the other Planets components, and explaining the potential uses for the data it stores about file formats, media and preservation tools.
To close the morning session, Professor Manfred Thaller, University at Cologne, then introduced the delegates to some of the complications arising from attempting to understand digital objects – the process of characterisation.
He also demonstrated, using a simple graphical object and a commonly used graphics application, how the appearance of a file can be substantially altered despite an apparently successful migration from one format to another.
He then detailed the various characterisation services available within Planets to Identify, Validate, Extract and Compare the properties of different digital objects.
Manfred considered different options for the comparison of objects, and introduced the conference to Planets’ eXtensible Characterisation Extraction Language (XCEL), which describes the formats of digital objects created in different applications, and the eXtensible Characterisation Definition Language (XCDL) which is used to create application-independent XML files describing the contents of individual digital objects and so enable comparison of objects created by different applications.
He also demonstrated the need to apply automated techniques to the large-scale comparison of collections of objects owing to the time which would be required to perform human comparisons.
Having stated clearly the extent of the problems to be resolved in characterisation, Manfred then showed how Planets could assist with these problems by the use of XCEL, XCDL, the Planets Collection Profiling Tool (to inventory the different formats in use within a given collection) and the Planets Comparator to assist in the quality assurance of format migration.
After lunch, the focus on the application of Planets tools and services continued.
Edith Michaeler, Austrian National Library, provided an overview of the Planets Testbed as a service to assist with the selection and benchmarking of digital preservation tools using its own ‘corpora’ of over 4,500 digital objects in multiple formats, and also to support Preservation Planning.
In preparation for the practical training sessions which would follow on Days 2 and 3 of the course, Edith outlined the process by which experiments are conducted in the Testbed and invited the delegates to register to use the Testbed, which was recently made publicly available [2], and it is also possible to email for a user account [3].
An important aspect of the Testbed approach is the sharing of experiment results, including input and output files.
As a heritage institution or other content holder, this is valuable because experiment data can provide an insight into other institutions’ experiences with preservation tools and, in turn, encourage a community of digital preservation expertise.
Tool developers, too, can further their understanding of the community’s needs and benchmark their products against those of other providers.
Mark Guttenbrunner then returned with his colleague from the Vienna University of Technology, Hannes Kulovits, to introduce delegates to the Planets Preservation Planning Framework and the Planets online Tool (Plato).
Hannes emphasised the need for preservation planning for individual objects to be contained within a framework encompassing organisational objectives and wider preservation policies.
He illustrated the variety of different potential stakeholders within an organisation with a potential interest in any preservation plan adopted.
He then demonstrated how their views might be taken into consideration within a planning assessment framework.
This can then be described in an objective-based decision tree, developed either directly in the browser-based Plato tool or using the Freemind mind-mapping tool and then imported into the Plato.
A structured assessment process then takes place, considering different possible preservation strategies and evaluating each against scored criteria derived from the objective tree.
From this evaluation, a fully documented preservation plan can be identified and adopted for execution in the Planets Interoperability Framework.
The purpose of the session was to introduce delegates to the functionality of Plato and prepare them for practical sessions using the tool on the following two days, and so focused primarily on principles rather than hands-on use.
The delegates, were however, now well prepared for the exercises on Days 2 and 3 of the event.
After a break, Ross King explained the structure of the overall Planets Framework within the context of the OAIS Repository Model.
Ross demonstrated how workflows are created within the Planets Interoperability Framework using a series of templates which can either be used ‘as is’ or modified to meet the particular requirements of the activity envisaged.
Ross then demonstrated how this framework was applied within a ‘real’ digital preservation project at the British Library – a project to migrate existing digitised 18th Century Newspapers.
The delegates were treated to a preview of a 5-minute documentary about this project now available to view online at YouTube [4] after which Ross explained how the Planets Framework had been connected to the BL’s repository services to complete this application of the Planets toolset successfully.
One positive comment which delegates have made about every Planets training course has been that they were pleased to see the inclusion of case studies about the application of Planets tools and services by partners.
The Rome event was no exception as Barbara Sierman, National Library of the Netherlands, explained how it was envisaged that Planets tools would be integrated within their forthcoming project to replace their existing digital repository system (e-Depot).
She also demonstrated how the Functional Model which underpins Planets is compatible with the OAIS model.
Closing the first day, Clive Billenness, British Library, gave a short presentation on plans to sustain the outputs from the Planets Project.
He gave details of the newly formed not-for-profit organisation The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) [5].
He explained how the individual organisations would be able to benefit from existing Planets outputs and continuing development undertaken by the OPF either as subscribing members of the OPF or simply as part of the wider Digital Preservation Community.
Day 2: 20 April 2010 On the following day, delegates returned to participate in more practical work with the Planets tools and services.
The day started, however, with a joint presentation by Giovanni Bergamin of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze and Rossella Caffo of the Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries and for Bibliographic Information.
Giovanni gave a background to the Magazzini Digitale (Digital Stacks) Project and the vision of how it would from a development project into an actual service.
He emphasised that this was not so much a technical IT project as a series of management activities addressing financial, curatorial and legal issues.
He emphasised the similarity in the issues to be addressed in both digital and physical assets.
This project focuses heavily on non-proprietary software and operating systems in order to reduce the problems with future hardware and software compatibility.
For the same reasons, it uses low-cost and commonly available storage technologies relying on replication across multiple sites in preference to more complex disk mirroring.
Giovanni also explained that the project was being conducted in an environmentally conscious way, taking into account power consumption and cooling requirements in the design of solutions.
Finally he contrasted the ‘River’ and ‘Lake’ approaches to metadata management proposed by Eric Hellman and Lorcan Dempsey.
The ‘Lake’ assumes relatively few metadata schemas in use within the repository model with a limited number of sources feeding them.
In the preferred ‘River’ model, there is an assumption that, over a long period of time, schemas may change and stores of metadata may be fed by a large number of tributary sources.
Giovanni explained why the Magazzini Digitale, with its wide and undefined potential future community of practice would be adopting the ‘River’ model.
Rossella Caffo then introduced the latest digital preservation projects in Italy.
She explained how The Institute of the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries (MiBAC) promotes preservation of and access to digital cultural heritage across Europe.
Within the ATHENA Project (Access to Cultural Heritage Networks across Europe) Italy fosters the integration of museums in digitising programmes.
A further joint-programming initiative chaired by the Italian ministry of culture co-ordinates research in the field of cultural heritage, both tangible and digital.
These strategic framework programmes will raise awareness of digital preservation and help define a common European agenda for digital preservation research.
The Conference now moved into a series of more practical sessions.
Firstly, continuing his presentation from Day 1, Manfred Thaller gave a practical presentation on the issues relating to characterising digital objects.
He demonstrated how fragile digital file formats can be, and how this fragility and susceptibility to corruption through media storage or transcription error can influence the choice of file format for long-term preservation.
He also raised the important question of what is authentic when considering preservation, where rendering and layout influence the meaning conveyed.
He posed this question in the context of a document transmitted in A4 page size and received in Letter page size, leading to differences in page break points and changes in the meaning conveyed by the content.
Sara van Bussel then gave a practical demonstration of two of the emulation tools available within Planets: Dioscuri: – a Java-based modular emulator which provides a virtual PC based on Intel 8086 technology with a variety of input/output and storage devices which can be hosted on a wide range of contemporary hardware platforms.
GRATE (Global Remote Access to Emulation): which enables emulation services to be provided from a remote server using a simple Web browser interface Sara also provided a more detailed explanation of the Planets Core Registry, explaining how it had evolved from The UK National Archives’ Pronom registry and how it can be accessed and exploited by other Planets components and also how users might make use of its services either from within Planets or as a direct data source accessible via a Web browser or via another Web service.
Next, Mark Guttenbrunner and Hannes Kulovits introduced an extended practical session working with the Planets Preservation Planning Tool, Plato.
Working in syndicates, delegates were given a sample collection of archived images containing both text and graphics and were invited to use the Freemind tool to create mindmaps for different aspects of the digital preservation issues to be considered in creating an planning assessment framework.
These mindmaps can be imported into Plato to form a preservation decision tree.
Typically, the decision tree considers preservation issues under 4 main areas: Characteristics of the preserved object – e.g.
Colour information, filename, legibility, aspect ratio Preservation process characteristics – e.g.
Duration, batch processing capability, error handling, logging Technical characteristics – e.g.
Output file size, error correction, compliance with open standards, preservation of transparency layer Cost considerations – e.g.
Hardware costs, software costs, person hours to install and maintain, development and integration costs, reliance on external skills These issues are expressed as measurable results, either as a Boolean Yes/No or as an ordinal value or score.
At the end of the session, the delegates brought together their proposals for different aspects of the decision tree and discussed each others’ work.
This exercise led to a great deal of interesting discussion while varying requirements arose from different delegates’ perceptions of the needs from their collection.
The exercise highlighted that preservation planning cannot be done quickly, nor without a considerable amount of consultation.
The Plato team confirmed, however, that template preservation plans would be provided to accelerate the process of generating a plan, and also to present a series of commonly arising considerations for different types of object.
Finally, to close the day, Edith Michaeler was joined by Matthew Barr of HATII at the University of Glasgow for a practical demonstration of the Planets Testbed in preparation for its use by delegates on Day 3.
Experiments on the Testbed follow a defined cycle, and during this session, Edith and Matthew took delegates through the entire cycle from design and definition to execution and assessment of the results.
Day 3: 21 April 2010 The final day maintained its focus on the practical aspects of the Planets Tools and Services.
The day began, however, with an introduction by Amir Bernstein of the Swiss Federal Archives to their database archiving tool SIARD (Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases).
Amir began by considering the logical structure of relational databases and some of the difficulty in the long-term preservation of their contents.
The SIARD system extracts all the data tables and records from a variety of proprietary databases and stores it in XML format in a series of folders all within an uncompressed ZIP64 file.
The database is supplemented with metadata generated during the extraction process and the final file is capable of both being read in its extracted form as well as re-imported back into another database for processing.
Amir then connected live to a database server in Switzerland and demonstrated the tool operating with a remote database, extracting all the data into a new .ZIP file stored on his local computer.
The tool drew many positive comments from the delegates, who were very interested to lean about future plans to expand the range of databases to which it can be connected.
The greater part of the rest of the day was filled with two further practical sessions facilitated by the course leaders.
The first one was to complete the sample PLATO plan based on the work of the previous day by testing a number of preservation options and assessing their outcomes.
This provided the opportunity to explore how different decisions taken earlier within the decision tree affected the scores and recommendations emerging from the plans.
Delegates were also shown how to investigate in detail the outputs from a planning exercise to determine what were the critical factors which led some options to be either rejected entirely or otherwise to be marked lower than others.
The second session was to enable delegates to conduct individual experiments within the Planets Testbed using a number of different scenarios provided for them.
Not all of them were designed to end successfully, and, again, delegates were encouraged to investigate the diagnostic information to understand better why an experiment had ‘failed’.
The final session of the conference was conducted by Clive Billenness, who provided a technical explanation of the installation options for the Planets software as well as a more detailed description of the components provided within the installation suite, which includes a suite of management and configuration tools to enable Planets to be installed, set up and used by an IT-literate user without excessive difficulty.
Clive finished his presentation with a warning, however, that the Planets tools are still part of a project and are therefore likely to undergo final updates and reconfigurations before the project finishes.
For this reason, he encouraged delegates to use the online versions at the Project Web site first before experimenting with their own installations.
Conclusion And so the fifth and final Planets training event closed, and delegates and trainers set off home, this time with the airways re-opened and the roads less congested.
Those delegates who were unable to attend this course because of the travel disruption have been offered places free of charge at the final Planets event – an open All-Staff Conference in Berlin on 20 May 2010.
During the past 12 months, more than 200 people have attended the Planets training events in Copenhagen, Sofia, Bern, London, and Rome.
Feedback has been consistently positive about the format and content of the courses, and the training material has been continuously modified in responses to comments received.
A number of delegates have indicated that they would like the Planets team to come to their country and provide a repeat course for colleagues.
While this cannot be undertaken within the Planets Project, it is anticipated that its successor, the Open Planets Foundation, will provide regular training courses around the World on a regular basis.
The material presented during the course has been placed online to provide a free training resource for the future and the training team hope that delegates will continue to benefit from it for a long time to come.
As Programme Manager for this project, I would like to take the opportunity publicly to thank here the many people who worked tirelessly and, in some cases, in the midst of all kinds of crises, to ensure that all the events ran smoothly.
As always, making an event appear effortless inevitably requires a great deal of effort behind the scenes.
I would also like to thank all those who attended the courses and who contributed so actively to the various sessions.
My final thanks I offer to the European Commission, who provided us with the finance not only to run these courses at a cost which made them accessible to both private researchers as well as employer-sponsored delegates, but also enabled us to make grants to delegates from certain countries to cover the full costs of their attendance.
Additional Resources The slides used over the 3 days are now available for download [6].
In addition, a series of audio-visual presentations based on the material used on Day 1 of the Training Course are also available to view or download [7].
They provide a complete set of study material which introduces the concepts of digital preservation and gives a first outline of the Planets tools and services without requiring any deep prior knowledge about the topic.
References Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) http://www.planets-project.eu/ Planets Testbed http://testbed.planets-project.eu/testbed helpdesktb@planets-project.eu Preserving the British Library’s C19 Newspaper Collection with Planets: a short film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6NnFcSpAh8 The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) http://openplanetsfoundation.org/ Zip file http://www.planets-project.eu/events/rome-2010/presentations/planets_all.zip Planets Publications http://www.planets-project.eu/events/audio-visual/index.htm Author Details Matthew Barr Planets Project Testbed Team HATII at University of Glasgow Email: m.barr@hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk Web site : http://www.gla.ac.uk/hatii/ Amir Bernstein SIARD Team Swiss Federal Archive Email: amir.bernstein@postmail.ch Web site: http://www.bar.admin.ch/ Clive Billenness Planets Project Programme Manager The British Library Email: clive.billenness@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk/ Manfred Thaller Professor of Computer Science for the Humanities University at Cologne Email: manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de Web site: http://www.hki.uni-koeln.de/ Return to top Article Title: “Volcanic Eruptions Fail to Thwart Digital Preservation: The Planets Way Author: Matthew Barr, Amir Bernstein, Clive Billenness and Manfred Thaller Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/planets-2010-rome-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Preservation of Web Resources: Making a Start Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Preservation of Web Resources: Making a Start Buzz data software wiki database archives repositories copyright preservation cataloguing graphics e-learning ulcc facebook foia research Citation BibTex RIS Stephen Emmott reports on a one-day workshop aimed at all those interested in issues relating to institutional Web resource preservation.
The event was held by the JISC-PoWR team at the University of London in June 2008.
A university’s Web site is typically an honest reflection of the university, which is often an uncomfortable state of affairs for its managers.
I was reminded of this as I negotiated my way from Senate House’s cycle bays to the Dr Seng Tee Room at the University of London.
Having arrived in time, Reception – one person behind wood and glass – thought I was looking for Dr Seng Tee.
A 404 [1].
When freed to my own wits I soon found myself in the Library and entering what appeared to be a private study.
Expecting a 403 [2], I was rescued by the murmur of a crowd in an adjacent antechamber and arrived just in time to pour a cup of tea and secure my place – reserved through consensus – at the centre of the front row.
Senate House is grand but it’s seen better days.
Not intuitive to use so intuition is required, and familiarity leads to a quirky fondness.
Had the organisers’ deliberately chosen the venue as a metaphor of the modern university Web site?
I found myself in the right state of mind to ponder Web preservation as the workshop’s Chair – Marieke Guy of UKOLN – captured our attention.
The JISC-PoWR Preservation of Web Resources project [3] began on 28 April 2008 and will run until the end of September 2008.
It is being undertaken jointly by UKOLN at University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives Department.
Its aim is to “organise workshops and produce a handbook that specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”.
Preservation of Web Resources: Making a Start [4] was the first of three workshops being run on the 27 June (London), 23 July (Aberdeen) and 12 September (Manchester).
As its title suggests, this was the start of engagement with the practitioners it seeks to support.
Using presentations and discussion groups, Web preservation as a concept was addressed, its importance considered, and its technological, institutional and legal challenges explored.
The programme – which differed slightly from that which was advertised – was as follows: Morning (10:00 to 13:00): Preservation of Web Resources Part I by Kevin Ashley (ULCC) Challenges for Web Resource Preservation by Marieke Guy (UKOLN) Bath University Case Study by Alison Wildish and Lizzie Richmond (University of Bath) Afternoon (14:00 to 16:00): Legal issues by Jordan Hatcher (opencontentlawyer) Preservation of Web Resources Part II by Ed Pinsent (ULCC) ReStore: A sustainable Web resources repository by Arshad Khan (National Centre for Research Methods) In addition to the presentations, two breakout sessions – one in the morning and one in the afternoon – distributed the 35 or so delegates into two groups to discuss ‘What are the Barriers to Web Resource Preservation?’ and ‘Preservation Scenarios’.
It was clear from Marieke’s introduction that we were the initial participants in a process that would lead to a practitioner’s handbook.
Was this another metaphor or will September reveal the sort of tangible desktop companion I am now less ashamed to admit that I miss?
Preservation of Web Resources Part 1 Kevin Ashley’s genuine interest and extensive knowledge enabled him to deliver an information-packed and thought-provoking talk.
The first in a series of workshops is as much about thinking as dialogue, and Kevin’s talk certainly delivered on the former.
He acknowledged that practitioners are faced with a variety of barriers – real or perceived – such as a lack of policies and procedures, or lack of resources.
Web preservation is complex and there’s no obvious model to follow.
Practitioners need guidance and support.
By ‘Practitioners’ he included a range of professionals, and not just Web managers: records managers and archivists being two of the most obvious.
Recognising the differences between professionals, the handbook will include a quick guide to Web management for records managers and a quick guide to records management for Web managers.
The core theme of Kevin’s presentation was the importance of policy, and working within existing policies e.g.
retention policy.
Such policies are typically generic – for instance, talking in terms of ‘information’ – and therefore need to be translated, or adapted, to address the preservation of Web resources.
This entails all Web resources and must stand the test of time without the need for endless revision.
Prioritisation is fundamental to successful preservation – keeping everything is rarely possible.
Kevin referred to what we must, could or should not preserve.
This reminded me of the MoSCoW model of prioritisation: Must do; Should do; Could do; Won’t do.
Without policies, practitioners have little to guide their decisions about what must, should, could and won’t be preserved, let alone how.
We were shown some complex conceptual graphs of Web sites sourced from Martin Dodge’s Cyber Geography Research Web site at the University of Manchester [5].
I’m doubtful of the value of sitemaps for large Web sites and I wasn’t quite sure about Kevin’s suggestion that our selective archiving of Web sites should include an archive of its sitemap.
My doubt stems from the lack of standards when it comes to sitemaps, especially large sitemaps whose merits are usually artistic rather than practical.
Oddly enough, the Cyber Geography Research pages are themselves ‘preserved’ updates are no longer being made.
But Kevin’s underlying point is valid: we do need – in some way to capture an accurate summary of a Web site as a whole.
Finally, Kevin outlined the structure of the handbook which in addition to guides for records managers and Web managers, includes: assessing the institution’s technical capacity and ability to implement; understanding who wants what preserved and why; the tools available; how to manage preserved resources; and implications of change.
Questions focused on which media the handbook should be provided in e.g.
wiki, print, etc; how we recreate the ‘Web experience’ of the time; ensuring the handbook remains pragmatic; and whether or not a central preservation service would be a better approach.
Challenges for Web Resource Preservation Marieke Guy summarised a long list of barriers that reminded me why Web preservation is ‘over there in a dark corner’: plenty of nettles to be grasped.
She pointed out the tacit assumption that digital media are intrinsically preserved by the very nature of the medium.
After all, the bits and bytes themselves don’t decay even if the computing hardware is replaced.
Moreover Web managers operate under pressure and are busy with the here and now.
The long term is overshadowed by the short term as the urgency to publish dominates the day.
Web sites are pervasive and touch all parts of an organisation.
Responsibilities are unclear.
Who should make the decision as to what gets preserved and who should do it?
The publisher?
The author?
The copyright holder?
Who decides?
The Web is complex, transient and dynamic, and its getting bigger with the forthcoming introduction of new TLDs by ICANN.
Technology is constantly changing and Web pages are composed of complex parts – images, movies, text, etc.
There’s the need for understanding between the relevant practitioners with different nomenclatures, let alone regulations and procedures.
Marieke referred to the cardinality of Web pages – one version of a page (on a server) but thousands of versions on users’ PCs and therefore prone to subtle variations due to the different browsers, screen settings etc.
Should the source be archived or the end-user’s experience of that source?
What is a Web site?
What is a Web page?
Marieke quoted Clay Shirky: “Are we preserving the bits or the essence?”.
[6] To what extent does preservation of Web resources require preservation of the underlying hardware and software?
Software emulation was suggested as a possible solution to this.
Two significant categories of barriers are legal issues (e.g.
IPR) and Web 2.0 (which will be looked at in more detail in the second workshop).
In summary, Marieke stressed the need for ownership, and called for recognition of Web preservation as ‘our problem’ – practitioners need to grasp the nettles and this requires an interdisciplinary approach.
Bath University Case Study Alison Wildish and Lizzie Richmond (University of Bath) offered a frank insight into the relationship between the archivist (Lizzie) and the Web manager (Alison).
No doubt the situation is common to many organisations where such roles exist: if the relationship exists at all, it’s probably no more than acquaintance.
Their presentation was delivered in the form of a smooth double act which was admirably compelling given the topic.
By acknowledging their differences, the benefit of establishing a professional working relationship between disparate professionals was on show.
This delivered a positive exemplar for delegates to try and recreate locally.
Lizzie stressed her lack of IT knowledge and skills, and her resistance to it.
Her primary focus is the archive.
Alison stressed the user experience and meeting the needs of users – the Web as a medium of communication.
From what I could gather, their relationship existed because they’d been asked to deliver the presentation, but it was obviously working well.
The value of archives was illustrated by Lizzie through a series of scanned images of the front cover of the University of Bath’s undergraduate prospectus over the last 10 years.
Seen in rapid succession, the wider context or ‘spirit of the times’ was revealed through variations in graphic design.
This was like watching a succession of images transform into a single moving image – almost a time-lapse film.
Through the dual speaker format, some of the barriers mentioned by Marieke were revealed, but in context, which worked well to reinforce an understanding of Web preservation for those willing to tackle it.
In closing, Alison emphasised that the distinction between the publication and the record is blurred and that a realistic and pragmatic approach is required.
Significant additional resources are unlikely to be available so re-using what practitioners have available is key to successful strategies locally.
Legal Issues Jordan Hatcher (opencontentlawyer) stressed that he was a lawyer but licensed to practise in the US rather than the UK, and a ‘techy’ amongst lawyers but not amongst techies.
His contribution was a calm and effortless guided tour of the legal landscape.
As well as applying to published (or live) content, UK law of course applies to archived content.
Some of the areas relevant to Web preservation were highlighted: the Data Protection Act, particularly the fifth principle concerning the retention of personal data; potentially libellous content, especially with respect to Web 2.0 content; adult content and/or obscene content; Public Order Act; Terrorism Act; Freedom of Information Act; intellectual property rights, including patents, trademarks, patents and copyright; and third-party Web sites, especially for hosting services.
During his run through these legal areas, Jordan emphasised the importance of licences in the context of copyright, and introduced the Creative Commons [7] as an model to follow.
He also discussed third-party Web sites which, he warned, are typically commercial enterprises whose primary focus is maximising profit and minimising liability.
He encouraged practitioners to refer to terms of service, a point illustrated with reference to FaceBook, which permits copying content for personal non-commercial use, but not redistribution to others.
The implication for those first posting original work in FaceBook is obvious.
While the legal aspects may appear daunting, Jordan’s message was simple: ‘Don’t Panic’.
He advocated a risk management – rather than risk averse – approach ie avoid, reduce, accept and transfer risks.
Questions focused on removing content from archives for legal reasons; legal constraints on a centralised archiving services; directories; and permitting and/or agreeing to Web sites being archived.
Preservation of Web Resources Part II Ed Pinsent’s provided us with a succinct presentation containing a great deal of valuable content.
He advocated a labour-saving and pragmatic approach.
Ed ran through the types of Web resources that would be candidates for preservation, from prospectuses through to the content of e-learning systems.
He also emphasised the need to exclude certain types of content, echoing the MoSCoW model.
Top of Ed’s list were the sorts of resources that were already well managed e.g.
institutional repositories and digital libraries (including image catalogues).
He then ran through some of the drivers for Web preservation: Uniqueness of resources Audit requirements Authenticity Financial value of resources Heritage Again, the message that Web preservation requires teams of practitioners was communicated, and Ed warned against practitioners ‘going it alone’.
He suggested the following strategies: Protect your Web site in the short to medium term.
If there are digital asset initiatives in-house, try to factor the Web site into them, either in terms of its production/provision, or in terms of archiving.
Manage your Web site with particular attention to retention and disposal.
Preserve your Web site either in whole or part.
In summary, Ed advocated: identifying the resources to be preserved i.e.
what is in scope; don’t go it alone; choose the approach that is appropriate to constraints, particularly with regard to resources.
ReStore: A Sustainable Web Resources Repository Arshad Khan of the National Centre for Research Methods raced through a description of ReStore which seeks to preserve Web resources from the hardware up.
ReStore stems from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)’s suggestion to provide a platform that would allow Web resources resulting from ESRC-funded projects to be preserved beyond the end of the project’s lifetime.
Importantly, ReStore is currently a prototype with a view to a sustainable service to which Web resources can be migrated.
Currently, ReStore is using case studies to develop the proof of concept.
From them the standards constraining the way Web sites are produced and provided can be developed.
This is important because ReStore is recreating the technical environment to provide a new home for Web resources, dynamic or otherwise.
Arshad revealed what appeared to be a resource-intensive approach which required analysis followed by migration.
This approach takes preservation close to the extreme of recreating a Web resource’s technical environment in order to provide the resource in a sustainable manner.
The details of operating systems, databases, scripting languages, and a whole host of technical matters are investigated in detail as part of the process for accepting a resource for preservation.
The basic premise is that this costly, resource-intensive approach is justified in the case of specific resources that are of sufficient value.
Conclusion This – the first of three workshops – emphasised the importance of the archive to effective Web management.
Although it may not be apparent, the absence of Web resources from the archive is having a detrimental impact on the here and now, and it can only get worse.
We can be confident that the archive is the responsibility of the archivist; the Web site the responsibility of the Web manager.
However, Web resources which should be in the archive, and under archivists’ control, are not.
This creates a significant additional burden for Web managers with an ever expanding Web presence to manage, and a dilemma for the archivists in that a significant proportion of the archive is no longer under their control.
For the organisation, and especially the records manager, this introduces a variety of risks, such as the persistence of personal data without good reason.
Once published, a Web resource will be retained – i.e.
kept in use – until it is either deleted or archived.
The default position of retention is not tenable.
Existing policies – such as an organisation’s retention policy – need to be translated or adapted to guide the management of these processes.
Moreover, this requires a virtual team of practitioners – especially the archivist, records manager, IT manager, and Web manager – to develop and implement them.
Web preservation should be part of operational work and not a project in and of itself.
Rather, the project is to embed Web preservation into operational work.
The challenges are significant, especially in terms of how to preserve Web resources.
No doubt the institutional repository will play a role.
Arguably, the absence of a solution to the preservation of Web resources leads to either retention or deletion, both of which carry risks.
The workshop’s core message to practitioners was therefore to start building an internal network amongst relevant practitioners as advice and guidance emerge.
My thinking about this matter was certainly stimulated and I look forward to the next two workshops, and the handbook that will result.
Web preservation is an issue which was always important but now grows increasingly urgent.
References 404 is the error code generated by Web servers when a page cannot be found.
403 is the error code generated by Web servers when access to a page is forbidden.
JISC-PoWR http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/ JISC PoWR Workshop 1: 27 June 2008 http://www.archive.org/details/JiscPowrWorkshop127June2008/ Cyber Geography Research http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/ Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet http://www.shirky.com/ Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ Author Details Stephen Emmott Head of Web Services London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Email: stephen.emmott@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lse.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Preservation of Web Resources: Making a Start” Author: Stephen Emmott Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/jisc-powr-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Information 2.0 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information 2.0 Buzz data mobile wiki archives digitisation blog video podcast research Citation BibTex RIS Milena Dobreva reviews the newly published book of Martin de Saulles which looks at the new models of information production, distribution and consumption.
Writing about information and the changes in the models of its production, distribution and consumption is no simple task.
Besides the long-standing debate on what information and knowledge really mean, the world of current technologies is changing at a pace which inevitably influences all spheres of human activity.
But the first of those spheres to tackle is perhaps that of information – how we create, disseminate, and use it.
This book looks into the core of the changes in the last years, and is very much about the interplay of new technologies and how we humans deal with information in this changing technological world.
Content A book on this topic could be expected to concentrate on the manifestations of change: what is special about Martin de Saulles’ offering is that it convincingly draws a picture of the changes, but also manages to go deeper in clarifying how the changing environment actually influences the very nature of the spectrum of our relationships with information.
It looks at changes which are evolutionary, for example, moving to a new environment something which already existed in the analogue world, such as podcasting as a digital analogue of radio production, or blogging as an alternative to writing in a print newspaper.
But de Saulles also looks at revolutionary changes where the digital world comes at us with a new form without any form of predecessor in the analogue world, for example the Google search engine.
This definitely helps the reader not only to see what are the new information vehicles and tools, but also to ‘place’ them in the more general picture of working with information.
The book is surprisingly compact for the broad topic it addresses, and this reflects the succinct and clear style of the author.
It has a very clear structure starting with an introductory chapter which sets the major themes developed in more detail further in the book.
The introduction contextualises topics such as what is information: what are the foundations of the information society?
What makes the Internet such a driver of change?
What new challenges are generated by big data?
How do all these changes influence information providers?
What new ways of creating information are emerging, and where are we going to put all this information?
This neatly introduces the following four chapters, which look in depth into new models in four domains: information production (chapter 2), information storage (chapter 3), information distribution (chapter 4) and information consumption (chapter 5).
Chapter 2, ‘New Models of Information Production’, looks in further detail into blogs as a modern phenomenon – and at the ways publishers have to adjust to this challenge.
Starting with a negative perception of blogs, the chapter shows how current publishers use blogs to engage closer with their readers.
The chapter goes on to explore wikis and collaborative publishing, search engines and podcasting as well as the democratisation of the media.
The informative case studies in this chapter feature The Huffington Post (p. 19) and GigaOm (p. 22) as examples of a very successful blogs (in the latter case also an example of a blog which implemented a revenue generation model offering in addition to the freely accessible blog a specialised premium service on a subscription basis).
A case study on podcasting features The TWiT Network of audio and video programmes.
A particular strength of this chapter is that it looks at the challenges a new medium presents to traditional industries and related potential commercial conflicts.
The examples of integrating the new media in traditional information production are actually quite inspirational since they demonstrate how the strengths of old and new models can be combined, quite at variance with the stereotypical perception that new models must automatically be rivals.
One conclusion the reader is entitled to draw is that modern times require the flexibility of being able to see how traditional and supposedly disruptive approaches can be combined to produce a better service to users – and to the benefit of those in the information production sector.
Chapter 3, ‘New Models of Information Storage’, covers issues such as preserving the digital content on the Internet; challenges to storage of information in an organisational context;  legal requirements; data mining; collection digitisation; personal information storage; digital footprints, and the future of storage (including a brief section on cloud storage).
Again a highly informative set of topics around the changing landscape of storage, and the legal implications on both the personal and organisational level.
Case studies in this chapter include analyses of the University of Southhampton e-Prints institutional repository and the sales in the giant American retailer Walmart.
Chapter 4, ‘New models of Information Distribution’, delves into the architecture of the Internet, the appearance of new intermediaries, online video, open government, and threats to the open Web.
Case studies presenting StockTwits and The Khan Academy illustrate new distribution channels used respectively in financial services and education.
Chapter 5, ‘New models of Information Consumption’, presents the issues surrounding information consumption devices, information ecosystems, renting and buying models, and implications for information professionals.
The case study selected for this chapter is addresses the new model of information consumption established by Amazon.
Who therefore might have to reconsider their current role in the light of all these changes?
de Saulles contends that the publishing and broadcasting industries are going to need to accommodate the new models of information production.
He also thinks that information intermediaries will need to adapt to a new environment just as information professionals will also have to adjust to the changing environment.
In his concluding chapter, de Saulles summarises the implications for information professionals, publishers and society as a whole.
The tone of this chapter is very reassuring: with information professionals currently confronted by so many changes, one might anticipate some light lamenting of the ‘good old days’; but this work most definitely concentrates on all the new opportunities emerging across the entire spectrum of  information.
What Makes This Book Different?
What I found particularly helpful were the ‘Questions to think about’ listed at the end of each chapter.
These questions help the reader to go beyond the understanding of the facts presented in the book and to ponder more deeply on the essence of the information lifecycle, and the technological environment which helps to organise and use it.
Indeed some of these questions could be developed into further books.
Just to take one example, ‘How real is the threat of disintermediation of library and information professionals by the Internet?’ (p. 83).
Another special feature of this book is that it provides numerous real-life examples and case studies without making for too laborious reading.
It is pleasing to be allowed to follow the logic without being diverted by verbose descriptions of examples.
It requires a certain mastery to write clearly and coherently and yet provide concise evidence of what happens in a domain diverse as this.
Yet another helpful feature to mention is the clear presentation of value chains of historical and new models of production, distribution and consumption of information.
The diagrams of value chains capture the activities, actors, costs and revenue sources and help the reader to analyse similarities and differences across models, old and new.
The book also benefits from a well prepared index.
Whom Would This Book Benefit?
As a lecturer in Library, Information and Archive Sciences, I will definitely put this book on the reading list of my students.
The new generation of information professionals will have to develop the ability to look out for the cross-fertilisation of old and new models, and we badly need texts which identify how this is likely to happen in the context of information production, storage, distribution and consumption.
The book will also be very informative for managers across the information sector with the clear presentation of value chains and how old and new models are orchestrated to work for specific organisational goals.
Last, but not least, de Saulles’ book will be a very informative read for anyone who is just curious about information, technology, or both.
The Author Martin de Saulles, a Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton, has extensive experience of working on the interface of information and technology sectors.
His most recent work includes topics such as mobile technologies and the information sector and the related implications of social media, as well as the generational changes in how users create and search for information.
Martin de Saulles Conclusion This work by de Saulles is informative, thought-provoking and well-written.
Of course one could always add more examples and phenomena to such a vast topic as the change in the models of dealing with information – for example digital preservation could have been addressed in more depth – but the idea behind such a book is not to document all instances on the border of old and new models, but to capture the spirit of the general process of change in the information sector.
de Saulles achieves this in a very elegant and coherent manner.
Author Details Milena Dobreva Senior Lecturer University of Malta Email: milena.dobreva@um.edu.mt Web site: http://www.um.edu.mt/maks/las/staff/dr_milena_dobreva Dr. Milena Dobreva is a Senior Lecturer in the Library, Information and Archive Sciences Department of the Media and Knowledge Sciences Faculty at the University of Malta.
She was the Principal Investigator of EC-, JISCand UNESCO-funded projects in the areas of user experience, digitisation and digital preservation and is a regular project evaluator for the EC.
In 2013, she will be co-chairing with Giannis Tsakonas the biggest European research event in Digital Libraries, the 17th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2013).
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Funding Universal Open Access via Academic Efficiency Gains from Government Funder Sponsored Open Access Journals Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Funding Universal Open Access via Academic Efficiency Gains from Government Funder Sponsored Open Access Journals Citation BibTex RIS Joshua M. Pearce presents a concept for using Open Access (OA) journals supported by large scale funding bodies to not only make research more widely and freely available, but also potentially cut down on the administrative overheads that many academic researchers face.
A great deal has been written about the benefits of open access and it should be intuitively obvious to all librarians (and really anyone) that universal free open access will be the optimum for the benefit of information availability for humankind.
Thus, the EU is moving to open access all papers they fund by 2020.
How this will occur is still being determined.
The problem with open access has always been how to fund the publishing of academic journals appropriately.
This article propose a new method of funding universal open access to all academic fields using efficiency gains available to academics.
Better still all of these efficiency gains are currently accessible to science funders and is in line with their missions.
Everyone's time is valuable, but science funders should pay particular attention to how academic researchers spend their time on funded projects.
With the average IQ of a PhD in the top 5% of the population and the time to earn a PhD averaging 8 years society has made an enormous investment in their education.
For this investment science funders should seek to have the highest return based on efficient use of their research time to generate new knowledge.
Unfortunately, the current practices of funding, reporting, and disseminating scientific research suffers from three core inefficiencies that squander a shocking fraction of academic research time.
Fortunately, there is a straight forward solution to significantly reduce wasted academic time from all of these losses: Science funders could support peer-reviewed open-access (OA) journals for their sub-disciplines.
Remarkably these gains in academic efficiency come with the side benefit of providing universal open access to all future scientific literature.
The Problem: First, in order to fund research, scientists must invest enormous quantities of their research time in grant writing.
This is analogous to the waste associated with incumbent politicians fund-raising and campaigning rather than governing.
Only a small fraction of this grant-writing time results in a successful funded project (e.g.
NIH funding rates are about 21%, but even this value does not include the number of proposals that are disqualified for arbitrary reasons (e.g.
formatting) that drops the real total funding rate for science to single digits in the U.S.).
If we conservatively estimate that an academic must invest 2 weeks of research time to write a competitive proposal and wins only one per year, 10 weeks of productive research are lost per year, or about a fifth of her research time (19.2%).
This is a huge loss for the average academic, which provides no new knowledge for society.
Second, once successfully funded, the faculty member has become under increased scrutiny for budget projections, spending rates, individual expense audits, compliance and reporting.
In general, universities interpret oversight requests from funders, as mandates to hire internal auditors, which is partially responsible for adminstrative bloat and the concomitant overhead rate increases.
This inefficiency is difficult to quantify as it varies by institution, but with overhead rates averaging over 53%, it is safe to assume that these direct losses from grant income for administration reduce productive research expenditures from funders like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).
Worse than this direct loss, faculty must spend precious research time responding to demands from compliance administrators for justifications for research expenditures.
If we conservatively assume only one research day a year is wasted on this correspondence, another 0.4% of research time is lost internally.
This loss, is trivial compared to external auditing and reporting.
Older faculty can recall when reporting was done on a “per project” or an annual basis.
Now quarterly reports are the norm and some government programs have moved to monthly reporting requirements.
These reports are generally only read by a single project manager, who may not even be technically trained.
If we assume a day per month is invested in reporting, another 4.6% of faculty research time is lost.
Lastly, the academic is expected to publish research in the peer-reviewed literature, which has enormous value for sharing science all over the world.
It is clear that progress and the goals of science are best served by free and open access to the literature for all academics.
Sadly, even this virtuous work is tainted by the increasing costs for access to the literature (e.g.
Elsevier, the largest publisher, charges ~$900,000 annually for their holdings).
With few institutions able to afford 1-click universal access to the whole of the peer-reviewed literature, research velocity is significantly hampered everywhere as all able minds are not working on the problems.
In general, academics working without literature access are cursed to the digital equivalent of the post-card requests of yesteryear to peers for pre-prints.
This trend again wastes academic research time everywhere servicing these requests.
Academics who voluntarily post pre-prints on sites like arxiv.org and academia.edu can help reduce personal requests, but a reasonably active research group will lose at least another 16 hours (2 research days) per year making their work available (0.8% of faculty research time).
All together, these three inefficiencies cost average academics approximately 25% of their research time.
Worse, these inefficiencies are increasing with time.
A Solution: Let us consider the NSF, which could utilize their existing organization structure based around directorates and divisions to create a well-ordered offering of open access journals.
The Division of Physics, would, for example, offer the NSF Journal of Physics, which could be further divided by sub-division/sub-discipline.
To fully take advantage of the efficiencies possible by this process two new requirements will need to be implemented by funders.
First, proposals would be formatted in the form of the Introduction and Methods section of a journal article.
In this way, the literature review and transparent methodology sections of an academic article would be accomplished at the proposal stage and simply have the results, discussion and conclusions sections filled in after the research was accomplished in the final article.
This would eliminate redundant effort needed in the standard process.
Special sections for individual funders (e.g.
Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts for the NSF) could be included and then used as sub-sections in the Discussion of the final article.
Complicated grants would be sub-divided into several papers.
Funding decisions would be based on the same process that is used currently for each funder and thus research quality would not be adversely effected.
Similarly, all financial and compliance issues would occur as they do now without the necessity for any changes.
Second, to go beyond the NIH OA mandate, in place of reporting funded scientist would be required to publish their findings in the public domain in these free OA Journals.
Then the reporting would only be minimized to collecting and reporting results and discussing their meaning for the entire world rather a single project manager.
The effort and expense needed by the funding organization would be nearly identical between journal publishing and report publishing.
To protect academic freedom and ensure that a government was not overly influencing knowledge dispersal the operation of the journals (e.g.
editorial decisions) would be governed by academics and authors would still have the right to additionally publish elsewhere.
In addition, these journals would be open for submissions from any authors including those not funded by the specific organization operating the journal.
The articles would undergo the same peer-review they do now in any conventional journal.
The editors would similarly be drawn from the scientific community and the journal could be managed by existing project managers during time released from eliminating reporting requirements.
The OA Journals would only be published digitally using the existing free Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal System, which already supports over 10,000 journals.
The costs of type setting could be eliminated using either Libre Office or LaTeX templates.
The final remaining cost associated with journal publishing is copy editing, which can be comfortably accomplished for less than a tenth of standard open access fees at major publishers.
This approach was targeted specifically at the U.S., but should work equally well in any country that has government funding of research in any discipline.
In fact, the more countries that participate the faster the benefits of open access to a greater percentage of the literature accrue to the entire scientific community.
For narrowly defined disciplines researchers would publish in the open access journal sponsored by their funders.
However, as shared funding models and interdisciplinary work becomes more important in some areas of research rules would allow authors to publish in the most appropriate OA journals for the specific aspects of their research.
After a few years of all the top government-funded researchers publishing in sponsored OA journals, their impact factors would rise both from the volume and because of the open access effect (academics tend to cite articles more often if they can read them and unfortunately must of the literature is inaccessible to many academics).
This proposal would be for totally “free to submit to” and “free to read” journals.
In addition, these journals would have the seal of approval from the government funding agencies to avoid the challenges of independent OA journals, who often have their reputations attacked by traditional publishers and their surrogates.
Establishing such free OA journals would attract and encourage academics funded elsewhere to submit their papers to these high-quality open access journals for free (e.g.
no article processing charge or APC).
It should be noted, that APCs represent a loss of scientific funding.
This would result in the vast majority of the literature being available without subscriptions or fees, which in turn would accelerate science in every field.
As academics would be using their time more efficiently there would be more available research time allocated to do research, while the time overall spent on administrative tasks for academics would decrease.
This will increase the rate of scientific discovery and the number of articles would increase.
Thus academics would spend more time reviewing, but their overall administrative time would still be reduced.
Elimination of the need for journal subscriptions in turn would lower overhead rates at universities, releasing more funds for actual research and improving funding rates rather than subsidizing stock holders of for-profit academic publishers.
Everyone else including funders, researchers, the general public and mother science all winbig!
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Welsh Libraries and Social Media: A Survey Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Welsh Libraries and Social Media: A Survey Buzz wiki rss archives tagging blog repositories video flickr multimedia aggregation ebook moodle youtube facebook twitter foi netvibes pageflakes Citation BibTex RIS Alyson Tyler outlines the results of a survey of Welsh libraries, their access to, and use of, social media, and offers a sample business case.
Librarians are, in general, often quick to pick up and experiment with new technologies, integrating them into their work to improve the library service.
Social media are no exception.
This article seeks to show how the adoption of social media by different library sectors in Wales is helping to deliver and promote their library services.
In Wales, the benefits of a small population (some three million people), good cross-library sector links, and the fact that libraries are a devolved issue (ie, the Welsh Government can create its own library policy), mean that it is possible to do things on an all-Wales scale.
Welsh library strategies have been in place since 2005, and one feature has been a national marketing strategy for libraries.
Led by 1.5 full-time equivalent project officers based at Wrexham County Borough Council, the marketing strategy seeks not only to improve the marketing skills and techniques of library staff in Wales but also to promote libraries and their benefits to the general public, and change people’s perceptions of libraries.
Conscious of the increasing interest in social media, the marketing project officers were keen to explore how they could be used by librarians and library services.
But they did not wish to embark on campaigns which use social media if library staff and users are unable to access them.
Anecdotal evidence suggested that many librarians were prevented from accessing social media tools in a work setting, and that access varied across the different library sectors.
Therefore more objective and reliable evidence was needed to determine whether these indications were true.
As programme manager for the library strategy, I worked with the marketing project officers to design a bilingual survey for the library services in Wales and to analyse the results and produce a report [1].
The Survey Findings The electronic survey was issued in May 2010 to heads of services and had an excellent response rate from the three main library sectors: Further Education (FE) 50%; Higher Education (HE) 75%; public libraries 60%.
Some special libraries also replied (health, national and government).
The first, and key question, was to establish if there were barriers in accessing social media, either for librarians or for users.
The social media categories used were: Social networking sites e.g.
Facebook, MySpace Blogs and/or Twitter Multimedia file sharing sites e.g.
YouTube, Flickr RSS feed aggregators e.g.
Netvibes, Pageflakes Tagging and social bookmarking sites e.g.
Delicious, Digg Instant messaging sites e.g.
meebo Collaboration sites e.g.
wikis I shall not discuss the problems of generic blocking of access, as it has been done comprehensively elsewhere [2].
The results revealed a mixed picture, but, on analysing by library type, it was noted that whilst university libraries had no barriers, special, Further Education and public libraries all had barriers in place.
This pattern of different access across the sector was repeated for all the other questions: it seems that university librarians have more freedom to experiment with social media.
So in Wales this has meant several of the early adopters of blogs, etc were in the HE sector.
Analysis of the free-text comments provided further interesting evidence.
Many confirmed that access was blocked for both staff and students.
Others said that staff were restricted but the public were able to access most of these sorts of sites (blocks being connected to content not interactivity); whereas FE colleges sometimes had access for staff but restrictions for students.
In addition, there were sometimes restrictions for certain hours during the day (e.g.
access only during lunch hours, both for staff and students) or a quota of time allowed (e.g.
1 hour) and also restrictions (filtering for content) for children, with restrictions applying at ages 12 and below, alternatively at 14, or 15.
Other comments revealed that requests for access could be made: [Blocked] for all users at specific times, eg between 9.00 & 1.00 and from 2.00 4.00pm.
(FE library)   Facebook is blocked for staff and students 9am 12pm and 12.45pm 3pm.
(FE library)   Public access PC's are blocked by age range so most Social network sites are open from age 12 upwards and blocked for anyone below this age range.
All administration PC's are blocked from using such sites with the exception of staff that have responsibilities for creating contents for Twitter, Facebook and blogger.
(Public library)   Sites blocked automatically though it is possible to request that blocks be removed if access required for a specific reason e.g.
training purposes.
(Health library) The vast majority of responses indicated that the block was the organisation’s decision and some people specifically said it was the IT department’s decision, although sometimes the library made its own policies regarding access to social media Web sites.
The  main reason for restrictions was listed as security followed by organisation’s policy.
There were also references to the safety of children when online, bandwidth, misuse/abuse of work computers during work hours, concerns of inappropriate content (e.g.
in blogs written by staff) and distractions from academic work for students.
Librarians were asked whether their library currently used Web 2.0 tools or if they were planning to use them, and to give examples.
Almost three quarters of the respondents to the survey said their library either used, or was planning to use, Web 2.0 technologies Of those who are already using these technologies people cited Twitter (29 mentions) then social networking sites (25 mentions, mainly Facebook), and then blogs (23 mentions) the most frequently.
Some of the comments of what people are doing are below.
We currently use twitter for updating on events, new resources and other goings on.
We also run a pageflake which supports our HE students and acts as a repository for interesting articles, web links, videos and more.
We're working on creating a blog and creating a Facebook group for the student association.
(FE library)   The library already has its own blog, we have started some reading groups on-line through Moodle and we also use Delicious for tagging on-line resources (such as e-books).
The college also has a youtube channel and twitter accounts which the library can use.
(FE library)   Delicious; RSS feeds; flickr; YouTube; textwall     (FE library)   Yes Twitter (for promotion), blogs (for promotion), wikis (sharing information), Facebook  (FE)   Our subject teams have blogs.
The systems librarian is trying to set up RSS feeds for new books.
Our Health team use delicious tags to make web sites available to students.
There is a Facebook page about 24 hour access to the library set up by the students union which library staff have put comments on though the students seem to have got tired of it after an initial flurry of messages.
(HE library)   Blogs various ones used for subject support and news.
RSS used on main website.
Delicious trialled by some subject librarians.
Video sharing sites used by one or two librarians, various teaching purposes.
Twitter have a library/IS feed, also used by a number of librarians for news and professional contact.
(HE library)   Last year we used a blog to promote the Orange Prize for Fiction and will be doing that again this year.
(Public library)   We are currently establishing Facebook pages for our teenage libraries.
We currently only have one of these for our e-teens section.
Others are planned.
(Public library)   Yes currently use Facebook, Blogger and Twitter.
Most of them are used in a promotional capacity and/or to advertise events.
(Public library) These quotations show the typical scope of what librarians were doing a year ago – they are probably experimenting with even more tools by now.
Respondents also indicated what sort of things they wanted to do with social media, and there is certainly a lot of enthusiasm among library staff to use these tools, particularly in marketing, communications and service-delivery capacities.
Given the importance of libraries' use of social media technologies in their work, do library staff have the necessary skills to exploit them?
Predictably enough, the majority of respondents said that 'some staff' have the necessary skills.
Frequently those who used social media in a personal capacity were early adopters in work as well.
Certainly training and awareness about social media is an important staff development issue that needs to be addressed.
Staff who have an interest in the technologies are usually very keen to exploit them.
Forcing staff who are less confident or lack interest to make use of them is unlikely to be beneficial.
If staff are not keen the end product (e.g.
blog) may be of poor quality and could be counter productive, creating a negative image of the library service Several respondents link being able to operate in a social media environment to the overall image and reputation of a library service, with obvious negative connotations if there isn’t a presence.
However, that presence must be relevant and up to date, or is conceivably worse than no presence at all.
Having good quality content is essential.
There is no point having a blog just for the sake of it; it must have a purpose and an audience.
We will get left behind and been seen as old fashioned and out of touch if we don't make use of the available technology.
An Update to the Report In summer 2011, the Society of Chief Librarians (Wales) decided to conduct their own internal survey of access to social media in public libraries in order to update the findings from the cross-sector report of the previous year.
They achieved a 100% response rate and I am grateful to them for sharing with me a copy of the results.
It appears that in the last 12 months slightly more local authorities now allow public library staff to have access to social media Web sites, and all but two allow users social media access.
However there are still many examples of restrictions preventing library staff from accessing social media Web sites, even though their use is work-related.
Implications for Libraries For staff in all library sectors, it is important that even if they do not wish to engage with social media in their personal life, or in a professional sphere, they still need to know what they are, why they might be useful for their work and their readers, and be able to answer questions about them from users where appropriate.
(Just as library staff may dislike Westerns, they still need to know enough to advise patrons who want to read Westerns.)
The online training course 23 Things could be a good place to start to familiarise oneself with the multitude of new tools [3].
For Further Education and public libraries, the results show that other libraries in their sector are able to integrate social media applications into their professional world without either the IT system being hacked or the organisation being brought into disrepute (security and fear of what might be said being two of the main reasons given for preventing access).
Librarians in these sectors who do face access problems could therefore put together a business case for being allowed access (see below).
Responses to the survey indicate that there is considerable amount of experience and enthusiasm among Welsh library staff to engage with social media in order to deliver their library service in different ways, or reach different audiences, or try new communication methods.
The report intentionally did not try to list all the social media library examples in Wales or to produce a list of 'all the Welsh library blogs' as any list would be out of date within in a week.
If readers would like to see some examples of what different Welsh libraries are doing, please contact me and I can email some links.
If librarians are thinking of creating an online presence for their library service, then looking at what others in their field are doing is very useful.
A Business Case for Content Creators Reflecting what the survey’s findings mean for Welsh libraries and librarians has led to several outcomes.
The marketing project officers are planning training for library staff in Wales on how to develop and enhance social media tools for libraries.
Furthermore, I have created a sample business case that librarians can edit for their own use to request access to have a social media presence in their organisation.
With regards to seeking a social media presence, the first thing librarians can do is check if their organisation has a social media/networking policy.
If it does, it is useful to investigate if there is a method for seeking approval for having a social networking presence.
After being inspired by various speakers during a string of conferences to try blogging and micro-blogging, I put together the business case that my workplace required.
Permission was sought and given for a blog and for a Twitter account.
Because I know many librarians and library service staff are frustrated by being unable to become content creators on social media Web sites, I adapted my personal business case into a generic template that can be edited by librarians in any sector for their own workplace.
It is available on my Slideshare account [4] but because I know some librarians cannot access Slideshare in work, please email me for a copy.
If you are seeking approval for a social media presence, some of the important things to consider are: The aim(s) of your presence (be it a blog, a social networking site like Facebook, sharing photos, etc) How the site/tool will enable you to achieve those aims What audience you will be targeting How you will evaluate the presence once it is established Resource implications: although social media can be low-cost, there are nonetheless time and skill requirements Managing potential risks How it fits into your library service/larger organisation’s general communications and marketing plans.
Thinking about these issues beforehand is important before you jump in and start blogging or tweeting.
With blogging, for example, you may want to write up a few blog posts beforehand, so that you have several ready when you launch the blog to give plenty for followers to read at the start.
Thinking about your content in advance is important.
As one respondent in the survey said: Having good quality content is essential.
There is no point having a blog just for the sake of it; it must have a purpose and an audience.
Different social media tools do different things, and appeal to different people.
If you want to engage with teenagers, you need to decide which is the most appropriate medium (where are they hanging out online?).
Internet expert Phil Bradley has written three blog posts reflecting on different social networks and which ones are useful for librarians, depending on what you like or want you want to do [5].
Further Considerations In Wales an additional consideration is the Welsh language and several public library services in Wales have bilingual Facebook pages [6][7][8].
For myself, I started my blog about Welsh libraries as two separate Web sites (one English, one Welsh) and maintained these for almost six months.
However, because I am still a Welsh learner (although a relatively competent one) the resource implications of duplicating my posts became too much.
I found that I was only writing short posts because I was conscious I would need to translate, edit and have them checked by a kind colleague, and then add all the links and photos again.
It led to my only blogging about once a fortnight.
But blogging is generally seen as a relatively spontaneous activity that one does fairly regularly; I had anticipated I would write blog posts every week or more often as the occasion arose.
After taking the decision to continue just in English, I wrote several blog posts in one week as I had quite a bit to say!
I have decided to keep the Welsh blog live for the time being, and will write posts which are on Welsh-language library issues and so not seek to make the two blogs replicate one another.
There are also legal issues to consider before starting a social media presence, for example, Freedom of Information requests can come by Twitter and you should make sure you are aware of your organisation’s policy on handing FOI requests so that you can deal with them appropriately.
As it is also a written medium, the content creator should always abide by the law and not write anything defamatory.
Librarians are generally very aware of these issues and as long as they observe their usual code of ethics, they should not encounter major difficulties.
The Welsh report does not go into these topics and those interested in learning more about social media in the library world could look at the UKOLN Cultural Heritage guides on this topic [9].
You may also like to look at a recent publication on museums and social media produced by Sound Delivery which is very informative [10].
Conclusion Despite all the whizzy technologies, social media Web sites are ultimately just communication channels.
My Twitter account (@libalyson) was called 'chatter for anoraks' by a very senior colleague in his regular staff bulletin.
(He reassured me this was a compliment.)
You may not see your online audience as anoraks, but these tools are just different ways for you to talk to your users.
And nobody, I hope, wants to ban talking.
To end, possibly the most nonsensical example of where corporate policies have not been thought out and create laughable situations: It [the council] advertises some things on Facebook, but these can't be accessed in the library.
[Public library] References Purdie, J., Tyler, A. Williams, N. "Welsh libraries and Web 2.0: a survey of access and views in 2010" http://wales.gov.uk/topics/cultureandsport/museumsarchiveslibraries/cymal/researchandevidence/librariesandweb2/?lang=en Bradley, P. "25 barriers to using Web 2.0 technologies and how to overcome them" http://www.philb.com/articles/barrierstoweb2.htm Helen Leech.
"23 Things in Public Libraries".
July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/leech/ Slideshare – Alyson Tyler profile http://www.slideshare.net/alysontyler Bradley, P. "Which social network should I use as a librarian?"
http://www.philb.com/articles/whichsocialnetwork.htm Llyfrgell canolog Caerdydd (Cardiff Central Library) http://www.facebook.com/llyfrgellganologcaerdydd Llyfrgelloedd Sir Gâr Carmarthenshire Libraries http://www.facebook.com/CarmsLibraries Llyfrgelloedd Gwynedd Libraries http://www.facebook.com/LlyfrgellGwyneddLibrary).
UKOLN Cultural Heritage guides http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/documents/ Sound Delivery, "Social media guide" http://www.sounddelivery.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/sounddelivery-socialmediaguide-museums-v2.pdf Author Details Dr Alyson Tyler Libraries Development Adviser CyMAL: Museums Archives and Libraries Wales (Welsh Government) Email: alyson.tyler@wales.gsi.gov.uk Web site: http://www.wales.gov.uk/cymal and http://libalyson.wordpress.com  Twitter: @libalyson Alyson Tyler is the Libraries Development Adviser for CyMAL: Museums Archives and Libraries Wales, a division of the Welsh Government.
Her role includes providing advice and support to librarians and libraries in Wales, overseeing the library grant programme, ministerial work and programme manager for the library strategy, among other things.
She has an interest in all things library.
And yoga.
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A Selection of Social Media Search Engines Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Selection of Social Media Search Engines Buzz data mobile rss blog video flickr youtube facebook twitter iphone diigo microblogging research pageflakes Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley takes a look at how social media output is being indexed, sorted and made available for searching by looking at some representative samples.
If we are to believe everything that we read about social media and user-created content, it’s reasonable to assume that there’s a lot of it out there.
People are busy twittering away, creating bookmarked content, creating their own pagecasts in Pageflakes – to say nothing of writing about anything and everything in their weblogs.
Yet at first glance it might appear to the casual observer that very little of this is being indexed, sorted and made available for searching.
As it happens, there are several different social media search engines that can be used to track down this useful (and sometimes not so useful) content.
One may be forgiven a certain amount of skepticism with regards to this content, but it can easily be argued that there isn’t a great deal of difference between content produced for a weblog, tweet or a social networking post, and that produced for a Web site.
I can just as easily write an article and place it onto my Web site as I can put it into a weblog posting – the location of the content really isn’t that important in that respect.
However, it may be worth pointing out that searching for content in user-created resources is going to provide more up-to-the-minute content much more quickly and effectively than using a traditional search engine storing traditional (and often not very current) Web pages.
Moreover, the conversations that are taking place in weblogs, on Twitter and the like are increasingly creating the message.
Long gone are the days when a press or publicity department could cunningly craft a well thought-through report or press release and place it onto the company Web site for visitors to marvel at.
Nowadays people will share content, repackage it, point to it from various different places on the Internet and encourage their friends and colleagues to share their own thoughts.
It still amazes me to hear librarians and other information professionals tell me that blogs are banned in their organizations; or that they are not allowed to view social networking sites and the like, as if by ignoring the existence of the medium their companies can also ignore the message.
If a company doesn’t know what is being said about them, that doesn’t stop it being said; it just means that they are not in a position to contribute to or influence that discussion.
Surely it becomes more, not less necessary to be aware of and to search this content just to keep up to date, if nothing else.
This article will look at some of the ways in which social media and user-generated content can be searched.
Twitter Search Twitter [1] is an application that people either take to quickly and find extremely useful, or it leaves them confused and puzzled.
The concept is simple – users can post short posts of up to 140 characters about whatever they wish.
This includes the banal – details of what someone had for breakfast, or their journey to work or where they are having their lunch – but also breaking news, links to weblog postings or Web sites, developments on products, or brief reports on conferences they are attending.
Such posts can be sent directly from the Web site, or just as commonly (if not more so) via mobile devices or third party applications designed to repackage content (such as a blog posting or Facebook status) and post a snippet and pointer in a ‘tweet’.
Individuals can subscribe to others (the terminology is ‘follow’) in order to see all of their posts (or tweets) but anyone can also search for references to any subject that interests them.
The search engine is oddly well hidden on the home page, placed down at the bottom almost as a footnote, but it’s also available at http://search.twitter.com/ [2].
The search interface is very basic and follows the trend of looking as much like Google as possible, although there is an advanced search function which allows users to limit in a number of ways.
While all of the usual search functions are in evidence, the search engine has a few stranger elements that users will probably not have come across before.
It’s possible to search content written by an individual, to an individual in a reply to something they themselves have said, or that refers to a specific person.
Another search option allows searchers to look for content near a specific location, within a certain number of miles or kilometres – useful if you need to do some research on a news hotspot for example.
Content can be searched from a specific date or to a specific date, which allows someone to follow the chronology of a news event perhaps.
Finally there is an interesting ‘attitudes’ option with a positive or negative attitude (as shown by using the appropriate emoticon) or by asking a question.
Results are arranged chronologically, with details of the person who posted the specific tweet, a link to the full posting, a link to a conversation if appropriate, and an option to respond to it.
There is the option of taking an RSS feed for the search or to Twitter the results themselves.
Finally there is an option to view trending subjects (current hot topics), such as the iPhone, Colin Powell or Halloween for example.
All told, this search engine is easy to use with some clever functionality that puts more established resources to shame.
Even if you have no interest in actively taking part in the Twitter community, if you need current data (and by current I mean content posted a few moments ago), and are prepared to work your way through a certain amount of chaff, it is without doubt a search engine that is worth using.
As with any successful Web 2.0-based application there are a great many other spinoff search-based applications – searching based on the American Presidential election, various mash-ups and so on; the list is almost endless.
However, if you are tempted to explore and use Twitter as a search tool.
it’s worth starting at over 150 Twitter Applications [3] or Twitter Apps [4] which currently lists almost 400 different applications.
Social Mention The Social Mention search engine [5] calls itself a ‘social media search engine’ and consequently searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
It has a simple interface with a tabbed approach, allowing users to focus a search on blogs, microblogs (by which they mean Twitter), bookmarking services such as Delicious, [6], Clipmarks [7] and Diigo [8].
Other options are to search comment sites such as FriendFeed [9], events, images from Picasaweb [10] Photobucket [11], news resources at diig [12] and reddit [13], and video from YouTube [14] and Daily Motion [15].
Alternatively there’s an option to run a multisearch across all tabs and resources.
The results obviously differ according to the type of data being searched, but the results are always clearly displayed with the option of ranking by source or date.
It’s also possible to reduce the number of results by limiting to time periods such as the last hour, 12 or 24 hours or the last week.
Social Mention also supports RSS feeds and an e-mail alert function.
Although this search engine is relatively new it’s certainly moving in the right direction.
It doesn’t take itself too seriously either – while it is collecting and collating content during a search the user is kept amused by various status messages such as ‘Adjusting interweb constant’ and ‘Jumping to hyperspace’.
tuSavvy tuSavvy is another social search engine [16] and it’s another multi/meta search engine.
This one pulls content from entirely different sites however, such as Slideshare [17] where people post their PowerPoint presentations, Pageflakes [18] which is a home/start application that allows users to create their own pages (or Pagecasts), Zimbio [19] which is another page creation resource, Rollyo [20] which is a custom search engine creator, weblogs, Web pages and so on.
Unfortunately tuSavvy doesn’t appear to provide a complete listing of the resources that they use, so it’s a slightly hit-and-miss affair; but it’s equally fair to say that it does find a lot of material that is difficult to find elsewhere.
Users can also bookmark the content that they find, or add it to ‘MyBox’, although in order to do that it’s necessary to register to use the search engine.
Delver Delver is a social search engine [21] with a difference; not least because the creators don’t like the term – they prefer ‘socially connected search engine’, and having looked at the engine I think that’s a reasonable position to take.
Before you can use the search engine, it’s necessary to create a profile of yourself for it to work with.
This is as simple as typing in your name and identifying who ‘you’ are from a listing of people with the same name in various social networking services; if you’re not currently involved with any of them, this search engine will not work for you, since ‘your friends know best’.
That’s really the crux of this engine – once it has identified who you are, it’s able to identify your friends or contacts and see what they bookmark or add to their collections of data.
Delver currently indexes content from the Web and specific resources such as Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogger and so on.
It then uses that material to find content based on what you are searching for.
Once you have identified who you are, or have claimed your identity, Delver will map out a community for you based on you and your links, and will use this as a search universe.
So, for example, if you locate your Flickr account and then search for ‘roses’, Delver will look at your friends’ content, and your friends’ friends content to find appropriate matches for you.
Delver is a rather more serendipitous search engine than the others that I’ve looked at and it succeeds or fails on the community concept that it creates.
Many of the social networking systems that individuals join find it difficult to differentiate between personal and professional aspects of one’s life, so the content returned may be a confusing mish-mash of both.
To be fair however, if a profile is carefully created initially, it can return interesting and useful content.
It’s also worth making the point that Delver can only search on public material; but equally if people are careless while setting their profiles to any sort of private mode, they may be making more information available than they realise.
Other Social Search Engines There are of course many other social search engines – almost as many as there are social search networks, as each seems to have a search option.
Moreover, they are increasing in prominence – if asked the question ‘What’s the second most popular search engine?’ most people would probably suggest Yahoo, or perhaps MSN.
However, according to reports [22], it’s actually YouTube.
In August 2008, 2.6 billion queries were run, while Yahoo managed 2.4 billion (though both are of course well short of Google’s 7.6 billion queries).
Various other applications have search engines that solely focus in that particular universe with their own particular functions, so we have LJSeek [23] which is a search engine that allows searchers to look for information contained in the public postings of Live Journal writers.
Consequently it’s often very personal information, thoughts and opinions rather than hard factual details, but users sometimes link to specific sites or news items.
Some of the groups at Live Journal do contain very knowledgeable individuals with a useful collective intelligence and they keep up to date in their specialised areas of interest; so it can sometimes be valuable to locate a group and perhaps post a question.
In a more visual format the search engine at Flickr [24] allows searchers to identify photographs of almost anything.
Photographs are also often posted to specific groups and these groups in turn often have lively discussion forums that could contain useful data or, once again, could be a place to ask a question.
Any focus on user-generated content should include weblogs, and there are indeed many weblog search engines available; last mentioned in this column back in July 2003 [25].
They do however deserve more than a passing mention and so will be featured in detail in a forthcoming issue.
In conclusion, the growth in social search is reflected in an increasing number of focused search engines and searchers should always bear them in mind when considering what, and where to search.
References Twitter http://twitter.com/ Twitter Search http://search.twitter.com/ i-Stuff … Interesting Stuff that Matters http://i-stuff.blogspot.com/2008/04/twitter-applications-part-i.html Twitter Apps http://twitterapps.co.uk/ Social Mention search engine http://www.socialmention.com/ Delicious http://www.delicious.com/ Clipmarks http://clipmarks.com/ Diigo http://www.diigo.com/ FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/ Picasaweb http://picasaweb.google.com/ Photobucket http://photobucket.com/ diig http://digg.com/ reddit http://www.reddit.com/ YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ Daily Motion http://www.dailymotion.com/us tuSavvy http://www.tusavvy.com/ Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/ Zimbio http://www.zimbio.com/ Rollyo http://www.rollyo.com/ Delver http://www.delver.com/ Matt Buchanan, Internet on Verge of Exploding: YouTube Now World’s No.
2 Search Engine, Gizmodo, 17 October 2008 http://gizmodo.com/5065027/internet-on-verge-of-exploding-youtube-now-worlds-no-2-search-engine LJSeek http://www.ljseek.com/ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ Phil Bradley, Search Engines: Weblog search engines, July 2003, Ariadne Issue 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/search-engines/ Author Details Phil Bradley Independent Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: “Search Engines: A Selection of Social Media Search Engines” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Librarians' Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) 2009 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Librarians' Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) 2009 Buzz framework database blog video multimedia marc e-learning flash vle podcast itunes youtube twitter aac refworks research Citation BibTex RIS Rosie Jones reports on a three-day conference about Information Literacy held by CILIP CSG Information Literacy Group at Cardiff University over 30 March 1 April 2009.
LILAC celebrated its fifth birthday in style in what proved to be a fantastic venue, Cardiff University.
This occasion was commemorated with tour t-shirts available for all the delegates.
The conference proved more popular than ever with a record number of presentations submitted and over 240 delegates from across the UK and worldwide.
There were also seven funded places for Library students to attend, a fantastic investment in the profession for the future.
30 March 2009 With an extremely full conference timetable, the event began with pre-conference sessions covering diverse topics.
In the first hour, there was a demonstration of RefWorks tools and services, the University of Plymouth's project to explore barriers to student use of online information retrieval and a workshop by the University of the West of England on iSkillZone [1], a resource to aid students and academics in their use of the library.
The next sessions covered Imperial College London's Medicine and Information Literacy Group set up to support librarians teaching Information Literacy (IL) and my colleagues from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) who talked about a University-wide project the Library has been involved with called Aid4Assessment, which aims to evaluate the use of voting devices in assessment within Higher Education (HE).
The pre-conference workshops proved to be almost as popular as the main parallels with many people arriving early in order to attend them.
The main conference began with an introduction from Cardiff University's Vice Chancellor Dr David Grant who, after welcoming us in Welsh, told us about the history and demographics of Cardiff University.
He talked about the need for tackling the 'University of Google' head on.
His positive attitude towards the Library and librarians was evident and this was reflected in the investment Cardiff University is making in a new state-of-the-art library.
University of Cardiff, venue for LILAC 2009 Keynote: Melissa Highton: Managing Your Flamingo The opening keynote was by Melissa Highton who is the Head of Learning Technologies Group (LTG) at the University of Oxford.
The session was intriguingly titled 'Managing Your Flamingo', an analogy from Alice in Wonderland, where Alice is trying to play croquet and every time she goes to hit the hedgehog either the flamingo's head pops up or the hedgehog rolls away; this was used to represent the need for all components to work together to achieve their goal.
Melissa spoke about different types of literacy, (digital, media and information) and questioned whether they were all comparable concepts or subsets of each other, and how far IL should integrate itself into these other literacies.
This was clearly a hot topic for the University of Oxford as they were due to hold a conference on digital literacy the day after LILAC finished.
Melissa felt that librarians should contribute to a digital literacy framework and encouraged us to edit and contribute to the digital literacy page on Wikipedia.
The skills of graduates and employees were questioned, with Melissa stating that many staff are developed for jobs that they already have, taught to use technology they already know, and to solve problems they largely understand.
The importance of teaching IL to international staff in HE was also raised.
All graduates, not just computing, needed modelling literacy and Oxford is currently working on a Modelling4all project [2].
Melissa predicted that Youtube U (an educational YouTube) was just around the corner, in much the same way as the University of Oxford has had a presence on iTunes U since October 2008.
30 March: Parallel Sessions Enhancing Student Engagement with Knowledge and Research through Evidence – based Information Literacy Training Angela Newton & Amanda Harrison, Leeds University This was the third year that Angela and Amanda had presented at LILAC on this topic.
Previous sessions covered the importance and reliability of IL assessment tools to provide evidence-based IL training and the relationship between IL skills and academic performance.
The 2009 session covered the IL assessment tool that Leeds has developed for its undergraduates which was created in response to the University IL strategy.
This tool has 26 multiple-choice questions based on six of the seven SCONUL IL pillars.
A 2-year University-wide assessment project was funded testing students in years 1-3 across nine schools.
This aimed to provide the schools with evidence about students' IL abilities and about the appropriateness and effectiveness of current IL provision.
The results from the schools were then presented and the future of the project discussed.
Networking Evening After a full opening day to LILAC the first social occasion was held in Caerphilly Castle.
This was a beautiful venue, with fabulous food and plentiful wine.
The chatter and buzz in the hall was evident and the evening certainly allowed for ample networking opportunities.
Members of the original LILAC committee also cut a fifth birthday cake.
31 March 2009 Keynote: Patricia Iannuzzi: Transforming for Next-generation Learners Patricia Iannuzzi is Dean of Libraries at the University of Nevada, and she also chaired the multi-association task force that composed the Information Literacy Competency Standards for HE.
She served on the American Library Association (ALA) President's Special Committee on IL Community Partnerships and on the ALA Task Force for 21st Century Literacies.
Patricia talked about the current IL situation in America where there is a particular focus on HE, and where politicians, parents, students and employers are all asking the same question 'what are they getting for their money out of HE?'.
She talked about a number of key papers and books that refer to IL or the principles of IL.
This included the Spellings Commission that asked two basic questions; firstly 'how can we ensure that college is affordable and accessible?'
and secondly 'how well are HE institutions preparing our students to compete in the new global economy?'
The 1998 Boyer Report talked about a shift to research-based learning.
Patricia mentioned Derek Bok's book Our Underachieving Colleges (2006) which discusses failures in US education.
She pointed out that Bok talks a lot about skills and abilities and that his writings are not dissimilar to IL statements but use different terminology.
Patricia referred to the Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) initiative (the work of the AAC&U) which showed that employers wanted students with better IL skills and so focused on the kinds of learning that will help students to succeed in this area.
Patricia stressed that a consensus about learning outcomes is emerging across HE where our common goal is student learning and that the foundation for this is student engagement.
She talked about the work of Marc Prensky and in particular his article 'Engage Me or Enrage Me', which is an area she highlighted as worthy of more investigation.
She then played a video of people who are engaged with gaming environments such as Half-Life and World of Warcraft and examined what motivates them in this setting.
Words such as community, immersive, customisation and problem solving were all used and Patricia questioned whether we could create similar environments to engage our students.
She then discussed consumer literature about engagement and the gaming industry in Las Vegas which use all these motivating elements to appeal to their audiences.
Patricia concluded with what this means for libraries and summed up that we should move away from the library being the centre of the campus and towards being the centre of student learning.
Keynote: Leslie Burger: From Information Literacy to Digital Citizenship Leslie is the director of Princeton Public Library and also runs a consultancy called Library Development Solutions.
She discussed public libraries delivering IL everyday to one person at a time, day in day out, year after year.
She emphasised that information really is power and very much a currency of our democracy.
There was recognition that the Web has changed the way we do business, as information has become a commodity and that good information relies on good research.
However, she acknowledged that there is too much information to ever use it all.
She found the Google Book Settlement a source of concern, because it would appear that they have the potential to sell libraries back their own information.
Leslie used the phrase 'librarians on steroids', asserting that the Web has made us even better and that we are skilled information managers who can save people time and money.
She encouraged us to see each interaction with our user groups as an opportunity to change someone's life and referred to a particularly interesting paper from the ALA called 'A library advocate's guide to building information literate communities'.
She recommended that we need to be monitoring trends continuously, market ourselves as much as possible and make information-seeking fun to solve real-life problems.
She encouraged us to invest in technology, reach out to those who need you the most, lead the way, go for the unexpected and, most importantly, never give up.
30 March: Parallel Sessions Help Viola: Using an Alternate Reality Game for Student Induction Rosie Jones, Emily Shields and Bob Glass, Manchester Metropolitan University On day two I presented my own session with fellow MMU colleagues on the ARGOSI Project.
Sheila Webber was in the session and has written a blog post about it [3].
Information Obesity: Critical Theory and Information Literacy Andrew Whitworth, Manchester University This session talked about the term 'information obesity', which is caused by passively consuming information and not using it to produce knowledge.
Andrew claims that information obesity has arisen due to increased quantities of information, a lack of technological awareness, increased dynamism and pace of change, economic pressures on us to consume and a lack of management of information resources.
In the ideal world information is a resource available to all, with each of us taking as much as we need and no more.
More information may be located at the Information Obesity Web site [4].
Forget about the 3Rs, Our Students Need the 3Cs: Citation, Connectors and Critical Thinking!
Jacqui Weetman DaCosta, The College of New Jersey (USA) Having heard Jacqui's fantastic introduction to Lesley Burger's keynote I was compelled to attend her session and I was not disappointed.
The session detailed IDS 102, an IL online course [5] at the College of New Jersey which is mandatory for all new students and has been running since 2004.
It consists of six modules which are assessed using the VLE.
Students need to pass the course in order to graduate.
There were initial concerns from the Library as this online course replaced induction for the students and face-to-face contact was still seen as key.
Only 50% of the participants actually go through the tutorial, the rest go straight to assessment, so in an attempt to encourage students to work through the module before trying the assessment, the number of attempts has been reduced from unlimited to three.
Students have a preand post-course assessment that identifies whether the course has improved their IL knowledge.
Questions include identifying a journal title in a citation, combining search terms and choosing the appropriate database.
The SMILE Project: A Blended Learning Approach to Information Literacy Katy Wrathall, University of Worcester The Study Methods and Information Literacy Examplars (SMILE) project [6] is an online course created to support learners.
It was funded by JISC and is a joint venture with Imperial College London, Loughborough University and the University of Worcester.
We were shown the similarities among IL, Digital Literacy and Media Literacy definitions, a theme that emerged very clearly in Melissa Highton's keynote.
SMILE is composed of re-purposed content from Olivia (Imperial College London) and InfoTrail@Lboro (University of Loughborough) together with new content from the University of Worcester, including videos, podcasts and quizzes.
Delivery is achieved via a blended learning approach including face-to-face sessions, practical tasks, discussions and tutorials.
In the future the University of Worcester aims to make subject specific versions, and SMILE@Work for non-HE employers and employees.
The SMILE learning objects are available to download and re-purpose via JORUM and the Information Literacy Group Web site.
Conference dinner After yet another full day there was a quick turnaround to the conference dinner that was held at the National Museum of Cardiff.
The evening started with the galleries being opened up for delegates to wander round with their glasses of wine.
It provided a great opportunity for discussion and networking.
After a fabulous dinner, the IL Award was presented to Ronan O'Beirne for his development of PoP-I [7] an online learning programme for IL designed for public libraries.
Then it was on to a live band who kept everyone dancing until the early hours.
1 April: Parallel Sessions The ISSAC Project – Integrating Study Skills into the Architecture Curriculum Stephen Walker & Denise Harrison, The University of Sheffield The ISSAC Project set out to develop a package of learning resources to support students within the School of Architecture.
This package was designed for all levels of students from new undergraduates up to PhD post-graduates.
It also aims to encompass a variety of disciplines that are associated with Architecture such as Philosophy, the Arts and Social Sciences.
There appears to be no real mapping of what IL skills are needed in architecture and benchmarks do not give further guidance.
However, some disciplines such as Town and Country Planning include more specific statements around the IL definition theme.
The South Bank Information Skills Benchmarking Project's [8] approach has been adopted and modified to provide a framework for applying the SCONUL Information Literacy Framework 'Seven Pillars' to architecture.
The pillars have been mapped onto five levels defining what a student should be able to do by the end of a particular level in the course.
The audit also identified three anchors (opportunities) where connections could be made to relevant IL skills.
The aim is a consistent strategy for supporting the School of Architecture's core learning and teaching activities and the design, development and implementation of a coherent suite of study skills resources available to all students at the University, relevant at every level and for every module of their courses.
Are We Sharing Our Toys in the Sandpit?
A discussion on issues surrounding the reuse and re-purposing of electronic information literacy learning objects in the UK Nancy Graham, University of Birmingham, Rebecca Mogg, Cardiff University & Nicola Siminson JORUM The session started with a short presentation outlining what was already available and highlighted resources such as Birmingham Re-Usable Materials (BRUM), the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) and Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT).
The presentation began by looking at the excellent Information Literacy Resource Bank [9] created by Cardiff University.
This resource contains a wealth of learning objects in manageable bite-size chunks, including engaging flash animations and podcasts.
Cardiff is happy for the objects to be reused providing staff are contacted and told how this will be done.
The presenters also discussed the RLO-CETL [10] a five-year project between London Metropolitan University, University of Nottingham and University of Cambridge, creating 150 high-quality learning objects on a variety of subjects including study skills.
The BRUM [11] Project created 15 RLOs to support the development of information skills, which were again a mixture of quizzes, podcasts and captivate demonstrations.
MERLOT [12] is a searchable collection of peer-reviewed online learning materials, which includes IL.
A Community of Practice model based in Ireland called iSCoP (Information Skills Community of Practice) [13] was highlighted.
It encourages users to share learning resources and information, and facilitates regular meetings.
The question was put to the group whether we should set up a CoP ourselves?
Finally, JORUM was discussed, including a current development it is working on called Community Bay [14]; it sounds as if might facilitate a similar environment to that of iSCoP.
Then it was over to the participants for what proved to be a lively debate based on a series of prompted questions discussing areas such as barriers/enablers to reuse, whether there should be a community of practice, quality control and updating of learning objects.
Keynote: Conor Galvin: Technologising the HE Learning Space: Red Pill or Blue?
Conor Galvin is a lecturer and researcher at UCD Dublin where he holds the President's Award for Teaching Excellence.
This highly entertaining session was perfect for the final LILAC keynote and apparently had been adapted in the early hours after the conference dinner.
Conor talked about the multiple identities a person presents which are fluid in today's society.
He talked about the 'millenials', i.e.
the students who have grown up over the turn of the 21st Century and whose lives are truly 'technologised'; they have been brought up with technology and are used to using it.
He drew attention to the fact that our usual strategy is to use the university Virtual learning Environment (VLE) to engage with this type of learner; however the VLE tends to be rather bland and their reaction to it is often negative.
The look and feel of the VLE is usually quite the opposite to sites like Bebo, YouTube and Scrapblog.
Conor questioned if we were doing enough to engage our learners.
Conclusion LILAC's fifth year proved to be yet another busy but enjoyable event.
Both the conference sessions and the social side of LILAC were a great success.
A special mention must be made of the lovely Cardiff University dragon that all participants received in their delegate bags.
In my opinion, LILAC just seems to get better every year and I cannot wait till next year's conference.
Other people obviously share this view as they have been actively blogging [15] and twittering [16] about the event.
References iSkillZone Web site http://iskillzone.uwe.ac.uk Modelling4all project Web site http://modelling4all.nsms.ox.ac.uk/index.html LILAC conference – ARGOSI blog post http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/search/label/lilac09 Information Obesity: the Web site http://www.informationobesity.com LINKS tutorial Web site http://www.tcnj.edu/~liblinks/ Information Literacy Support Material Web site http://www.lilacconference.com/sirlearnalot/ PoP-I Web site http://www.bradlibs.com/intranet/POPi_testOneRO/ProjectWelcomePage.htm The South Bank Information Skills Benchmarking Project Web site http://www.lisa.lsbu.ac.uk/006_services/staff/benchmarking.htm Information Literacy Resource Bank Web site https://ilrb.cf.ac.uk RLO-CETL Web site http://www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk The BRUM project Web site http://brumproject.blogspot.com/ MERLOT Library and Information Sciences Web site http://libraryandinformationservices.merlot.org/ iSCoP Web site http://www.ndlr.ie/iscop Jorum Community Web site http://community.jorum.ac.uk/ Social Software, libraries & e-learning blog http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/2009/04/lilac-blog-round-up/ Twitter #LILAC09 http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23lilac09 Author Details Rosie Jones Deputy Library Services Manager Manchester Metropolitan University Email: r.j.h.jones@mmu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.library.mmu.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The Librarians' Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) 2009" Author: Rosie Jones Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/lilac-2009-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developing Adaptable, Efficient Mobile Library Services: Librarians as Enablers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developing Adaptable, Efficient Mobile Library Services: Librarians as Enablers Buzz data mobile framework database wireless portal usability archives doi smartphone video cataloguing e-learning lbs ebook wordpress podcast webinar twitter ipad android research modelling Citation BibTex RIS Lizzie Caperon describes how library resources can be targeted towards effective mobile services as mobile devices become increasingly prevalent in Higher Education.
Mobile devices such as smartphones, iPads and tablet computers are rapidly proliferating in society and changing the way information is organised, received and disseminated.
Consequently the library world must adopt mobile services which maximise and adapt to these significant technological changes.
What do library users want from mobile services?
How can libraries adopt new, innovative mobile initiatives?
How can libraries use their advantage of being technological intelligence centres to forge and create attractive new mobile services that meet the needs of users effectively, since many such users are now armed with smartphones when commencing their academic experience?
These questions are all addressed in the following article which investigates users' desires in respect of mobile services at Leeds University Library.
Users' needs in a mobile library service at Leeds University Library were assessed through a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods and analysis in the form of focus groups and online questionnaires.
As a result of this analysis, a mobile services toolkit was created for the University of Leeds.
It is potentially transferable, if adapted, to other library contexts.
Results revealed the potential of libraries to support users’ seamless and rapid retrieval of information by mobile means.
Assessing the Demand for Mobile Services Libraries are facing a considerable and never-ending challenge: how to keep pace with the rapidly changing technological landscape and ensure the services they provide tap into the new technologies which are infiltrating society.
Statistics from 2013 indicate that, 51% of UK adults now own a smartphone and ownership of tablet devices also increased significantly in 2013; tablet ownership more than doubled in the past year, and half of owners say they now could not live without their tablet [1].
Libraries are innovating to try to meet the evolving technological challenge they face.
Innovations in mobile services include mobile apps to administer library records, text message services reminding users of book return dates, instant chat services and live lab initiatives involving the rental of mobile devices to users.
There is no doubt that the potential range of mobile services a library could offer its users is considerable.
Is it possible for libraries, so often weighed down by heavily bureaucratic structures, to create and deliver cutting-edge and quench the users’ thirst for efficient new mobile services?
The purpose of this case study was to evaluate mobile services in academic libraries, specifically focusing on Leeds University Library, one of the 10 largest university libraries in the UK.
The study directly investigates user need, and subsequently constructs mechanisms which can be implemented by librarians, allowing them to act as enablers to develop and enhance mobile service provision accordingly.
Data from two online questionnaires is complemented by more qualitative data from focus groups with library users at Leeds to establish trends, patterns and themes which inform the direction suggested for developing a future mobile service at Leeds University Library which will allow it to develop its library services in a dynamic and future-proof manner.
Literature Review Mobile Phones in Society The proliferation of mobile technologies in society is creating a cultural paradigm shift in the way information is disseminated and knowledge is consumed.
There are over 5.9 billion global mobile subscribers [2].
Research into estimates suggest that over 1 billion smartphones will be sold in 2014 [3] and there will be an estimated 10 billion mobile Internet devices by 2016 [4].
This trend is filtering into universities and in April 2013, Leeds University reported a 300% increase in unique users of wireless devices since 2009 [5].
The implications of these changes are wide-ranging and multi-faceted, as this research explores.
Mobile Technology in Higher Education Within the Higher Education setting, it has been found in research that students in 2013 want to use their technological devices to access information quickly and efficiently; as Connaway states ‘convenience is king’ and users want instant access to resources 24/7 [6][7].
Small-scale research projects by Forsans [8], Davies [9] and Morris [10] at the University of Leeds have identified the benefits of mobile learning for students.
These studies are corroborated by a thorough and insightful conference presentation at UKSG Conference 2013 by Harding (2013) [11], a medical student at the University of Warwick, advocating the ‘paperless student’ of the future which Harding felt academic libraries should facilitate.
Though Harding [11] failed to understand how large institutions such as universities often have to adopt new innovations slowly (often due to bureaucracy), Harding’s [11] insights act as a wake-up call to libraries to adapt mobile services quickly in order to meet users' expectations.
At the University of Leeds, capacity in lecture theatres has been enhanced to support up to 240 wireless devices per lecture theatre, and steps are being taken to ensure better wireless provision in other teaching spaces across campus [5].
As this trend continues, the Library must keep pace.
Text, Instant Messaging and QR Code Mobile Services There is a clear need for library services to adapt quickly and flexibly to mobile culture [12].
Smartphones are valuable tools that enable library users to tap into library services, as advocated by Starkweather and Stowers [13], Little [14] and Jensen [15].
Moreover, initiatives such as Text-a-Librarian have proven an effective means of meeting users' needs quickly.
However, the viability of such a service could depend on financial factors, such as whether users would have to pay for it.
Lombardo et al.
[16] have conducted robust research into the advantageous use of QR codes for communicating key messages to library users while Cummings [17] has created successful QR code treasure hunts for users.
Additionally, as the technology develops, other augmented realities (AR) have been trialled for libraries [18][19] while technologies such as Microsoft Kinect, Google Glasses, and Raspberry Pi are making AR a more realisable option [20][21].
Innovation and Mobile Device Use in Libraries Several pro-active, innovative trials have been conducted to meet users' demands for mobile services in libraries, Saults [22] for example, conducted research into the successful trial of lending kindles to users at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUIM) and similar research projects were undertaken at Sheffield and Manchester [23][24].
In addition to providing a service for lending devices, a small but significant body of research has been conducted into staff use of mobile devices when roving.
This has unveiled a valuable insight into the possible staff uses of devices to engage users [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32].
Though the concept of staff roving was seen as innovative by the authors of the research, no research was done into any negative outputs of staff roving, such as users becoming more daunted by having to approach a roving staff member carrying a mobile device if they were unsure of its purpose.
This research delves into this area further, exploring whether the use of mobile tablets by roving staff is a productive use of the resource.
Mobile Apps and Responsive Web Design in Meeting Users' Needs Much research has been conducted into the success of applications for mobile devices made   to enhance or streamline the user’s library experience [33][34].
Libraries are joining business in cashing into this method of engaging customers and apps have been developed at university libraries across the UK.
This can be seen in practice by ‘map apps’ used at University of Warwick Library and others [35][36].
‘Map apps’ are intuitive and seemingly popular mobile apps which provide an interactive map of the library providing the location of key services and holdings.
Mobile apps and responsive Web design have been shown to present a variety of strengths and weaknesses for the library user.
Recent literature has found that in some generic contexts, apps are growing more popular than mobile Web systems [37].
As Gedye [38] has found, apps are stand-alone and good for viewing some journals on mobile devices; however, at the same time, their drawbacks have been identified as: the hassle of having to download the app; only partial compatibility with some devices, and; the fact that they are usually designed for browsing not searching, while; many apps work effectively with single sites, but not between search engine results or desired articles.
There has been recent research into cutting-edge technologies such as Location Based Services (LBS) and Near Field Communication (NFC) enabling a mobile device to register close proximity locations [39][40].
Currently GPS technology suffers from limitations on its reliability when working in micro-scale navigation [41].
However, creative solutions such as wi-fi fingerprinting as advocated in some recent research [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49] suggest the potential of these technologies to fulfil the demand to locate users in relation to items within the library buildings.
A review of the literature has therefore shown that mobile device use is rapidly increasing among library users, and initiatives are being explored to develop mobile service provision in many different areas.
Methodology Online Questionnaire Two online questionnaires were conducted for the study one year apart, allowing for the tracking of trends and patterns.
The first questionnaire was open between 5 November 2012  and 12 December 2012 and was advertised on the University’s Portal Web site.
The majority of respondents (77%) were undergraduates (UG) and response was high, with a total of 1,363 respondents.
The four questions were chosen to support key research objectives: Question 1: Establish ownership of mobile devices Question 2: Establish the regularity of mobile device use in regards to specified activities Question 3: Establish the likelihood of using mobile device to access current library services Question 4: Establish the likelihood of using potential new mobile services in the library The second online questionnaire was open between 3 December 2013 and 12 January 2014, approximately a year after the first.
It generated fewer responses, with a total of 604; however it reflected a similar demographic make-up, with 84% of responses from undergraduates (see Figure 1).
The results from the two questionnaires were carefully compared, the questions asked being identical to those of the 2012 exercise to ensure consistency.
They were based on the Likert scale format, requiring respondents to answer questions by ranking services by how likely they would be to use them.
Figure 1: Demographics of Questionnaire Respondents Focus Groups The first questionnaire highlighted some key issues to investigate further in a qualitative form of data collection through focus groups.
Subsequently, in February 2013, two focus group exercises were conducted, comprising a mixture of undergraduate students, both home and international, with informed consent obtained from all participants.
The exercises were structured around no more than four main topic areas and four sub-topic areas to ensure ample discussion took place.
Coding was used throughout and recordings from the focus groups were openly coded to map patterns in discussions and then presented with supportive illustrative quotes and concept maps to develop key themes and outcomes.
Areas the focus groups' discussions covered included: Evaluation of institutional mobile app Evaluation of potential text message services QR codes Other potential library services we could offer Findings Online Questionnaires In the first online questionnaire, results showed the rapidity of smartphone proliferation with 86% of respondents currently owning a smartphone and nearly 80% having acquired one in the past two years.
Only 5% responded that they neither owned a smartphone nor planned to do so in the next few years.
Almost 60% of respondents did not own a desktop computer nor intended to, while in contrast, 97% of respondents owned a laptop computer.
These findings were subsequently mirrored in the questionnaire conducted one year later (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Ownership of mobile devices between November 2012 and December 2013 Use of a Likert scale in this question was highly beneficial in allowing for analysis.
The likelihood of respondents using current library services on mobile devices was high; 93% of respondents in 2012 stated that they would be likely, or very likely, to use a mobile ‘renew books’ service while 70% of respondents stated that they are likely, or very likely, to read online articles or books on a mobile device (see Figure 3).
Responses for all of the possible services showed a steady level of demand following the 2013 questionnaire.
Figure 3: Likelihood of using potential library services between January 2012 and January 2013 Year on year, mobile use is increasing for a range of regular functional activities.
The questionnaires found that it was increasing most for using a search engine (and searching generally) as well as sending email, conducting personal business and watching videos.
Use was lowest for doing research for coursework and for reading ebooks.
This principle should form a core element of theoretical development about the library user; their need being for fast, relevant information delivered to their mobile devices as advocated by Harding [11] and research by and others [6][7].
Responses rated ‘use library research guides or tutorials’ the least important of the offered services with 31% stating that they would not be likely to access these on a mobile device and a further 22% being unsure.
This shows a lack of desire to access more complex information such as research guides on a mobile device.
Emerging theory would therefore suggest that a mobile device’s capacity for allowing long-term reading functions may be limited.
This would corroborate studies by others such as Forsans [8].
Overall, the second online questionnaire results from December  2013 – January 2014 demonstrated a clear correlation with the results collected a year previously, confirming the user’s priorities towards mobile services had not significantly changed.
Codifying the Questionnaire Data In line with grounded theory, preliminary open coding of the quantitative data from the questionnaires was followed by linking the categories created from the process of simultaneous data collection and analysis to sub-categories.
As Pickard [50] highlights, at this stage it is important to identify the conditions that give rise to a particular phenomenon and the context in which it occurs.
Axial coding from the questionnaire therefore identified certain theoretical concepts.
Codification from the data surrounding device ownership found that users will be increasingly armed with their own mobile devices when they enter the library or use the library’s services, and mobile services must be developed to meet this need.
The focus groups were to build on this foundation to investigate further exactly what users’ needs are.
Data about library services also suggested that respondents showed a preference for information to their mobile devices to be delivered quickly and efficiently, for example, library opening hours.
Exactly how this principle can be best incorporated in library services was an element for further investigation in the focus groups.
Finally, axial coding suggested that users would like to gain access to mobile tools such as apps and text services in order to find what they need, as Connaway states ‘convenience is king’ and users want instant access to resources 24/7 [6][7].
The librarian can be seen as a potential barrier in this process, for instance when used as a ‘middleman’ answering online enquiries through an Instant Messaging (IM) service.
Users want specific information relating to their needs sent directly to their mobile devices.
In this way, the concept of the ‘intermediary’ from Wilson’s behaviour models [51][52][53][54] should be carefully interpreted and tailored in the mobile services context to the user’s needs.
The role of the intermediary could be more beneficial if it is a tool rather than a librarian, virtual or physical.
These emerging theory concepts provided solid recommendations for the formation and execution of the next research technique, namely qualitative focus groups, which aimed to delve deeper into specific user preferences.
Focus Groups Institutional Mobile App The focus groups (FGs) involved a thorough evaluation of the University’s institutional app in which many participants who had not used it stated they would in the future; illustrating the app provides a useful mobile service to users and should be maintained and developed.
The UniLeeds app is personalised to the student or academic.
It offers users the chance to check their timetable, computer cluster information, staff information and find out a large amount of information about the library.
For example, users can check their library record using the app, they can renew items and reserve them, search the library catalogue, pay fines, check opening hours and their reading lists.
Though the mobile app offers a comprehensive coverage of library related information, we decided to explore what other elements the user might want from the app by exploring some suggested improvements.
Figure 4 shows a breakdown of suggested improvements for the institutional app from the FG participants.
The main services advocated were scanning the ISBN/barcode of a book to find out if it is present in the library and the use of maps on the library catalogue record to search and find books or locations.
Least popular was the option to read articles or books in mobile format, corroborating the arguments that users do not necessarily want to read large amounts of information on mobile devices, but would rather use them to access and retrieve short snippets of useful information quickly.
This trend developed when looking at other mobile services (below).
Figure 4: Focus group responses to suggested improvements for the institutional app These findings corroborate emerging research into the benefits of apps within Universities and elements of apps which users would like, [55][56][57][58][59] including the iLancaster app at neighbouring Lancaster University [60].
There was general agreement among the FGs that the inclusion of maps of the library would be useful in the UniLeeds app, or as a separate mobile app: ‘I would find a library map useful for searching for a book and finding the shelf it’s on.’ [1st Year, Philosophy] Other Mobile Services When considering the user’s desire to read academic material on their devices, as highlighted for an area of exploration from the questionnaire analysis, FG participants stated a disinclination to read articles or ebooks on a mobile device.
As one user stated: Mobile apps are geared more toward use of ‘instant’ purposes, if I required access to the different journals archive, I’d be on my laptop.’ [3rd Year, Law] The FG findings strongly supported the theory that the majority of users prefer services which provide quick access to information which will take a short amount of time to read on their mobile devices.
When asked whether they would like the library to provide text services, many participants showed a clear preference for this information to be confined only to urgent messages such as notifications of impending (next-day) fines or of books ready for collection.
There was some disagreement about how useful QR codes would be for accessing subject pages, asking librarians questions either through email or direct messaging via an instant messaging service, accessing twitter pages, databases or tutorials.
The largest negative response in the exercise related to QR codes used to engage in direct chat with the librarian, with 14 participants stating they would not want this service.
This could also be a reflection on how the users perceived the usefulness of the service; that is, a direct chat with a librarian, as much as the QR method to deliver it.
Again, this fuels the theory that contacting a librarian via mobile means can be seen as a barrier to accessing relevant information; the intermediary in the user behaviour process [51][52][53][54] needing to be a mobile services tool rather than direct contact with a librarian.
The focus groups provided a significant insight into the users' needs; and from the open coding and simultaneous data analysis and collection, as advocated by grounded theory, several themes emerged as displayed in Figure 5.
These themes informed decision making about how best to focus the limited resources, including services upon which to focus and which to stop.
Figure 5: Concept map showing open coding of focus group data at Leeds University Library Conclusions From the combination of the online questionnaire data and the focus group analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn about mobile service provision at Leeds: Users want mobile services to provide them with quick access to short, sharp bite-size chunks of highly relevant information.
This can be in the form of personalised areas, such as on the Library Web site which notifies them about overdue and held items.
There is also a need for live, instantly up-to-date information, for example live statuses about the available computers and books in the library.
Such needs appear to be a reflection of how library users are growing increasingly accustomed to instantaneous, live and direct information on mobile and technological platforms, as literature has found [61][62][63][64] There is a need for new mobile services to be marketed, explained and disseminated to users effectively and efficiently; this has been advocated by others [65][66][67] Library users do not want barriers to finding the information they need.
Roving, instant messaging services and QR codes (when not appropriately directed) have been found by the research to act as barriers to users.
In the mobile services context the ‘intermediary’ in the user behaviour process, should not be as Wilson [51][ 52][ 53][ 54] advocates, a librarian, but rather, a mobile service tool which, unlike a physical intermediary, acts rather as an enabler.
Figure 6 shows a proposed adaptation to Wilson’s concept of the intermediary in user behaviour, suggesting that while the librarian can act as a barrier in the role of intermediary, mobile services can act as an enabler in the same role.
It is important to stress that this is not always the case, and often a librarian’s role is crucial in the retrieval of information resources.
However, in the arena of mobile services, it is apparent that often mobile tools created and provided by the librarian are more beneficial to the user than direct engagement with the librarian.
Mobile services should enable, rather than delay, quick instant access to information.
Librarians can work most effectively by developing these mobile services to be as effective as possible by being context-specific and directly meeting users' needs.
Library users want to be empowered by the library with apps, tools or services which allow them to access information autonomously.
For example, in the case of an app, users can access it to answer their enquiries or find items in the library themselves, rather than asking a librarian or going through other channels to access that information.
This is corroborated by literature which has found the user believes that ‘convenience is king’ [6][7] Libraries must develop flexible service models (such as a mobile services toolkit) which include a range of mobile service tools that can adapt to rapidly developing mobile technologies.
As Figure 6 illustrates, the role of the intermediary in allowing the user access to information can be seen as a barrier in some cases.
Librarians should be aware of this risk, and ensure that when developing mobile services, they are not unnecessarily putting themselves between the user and the information they want to access quickly and efficiently.
Figure 6: The role of the Intermediary in allowing the user to access information resources (adapted from Wilson’s model) In our fast-changing technological environment, it is clear that academic libraries have a great opportunity to become innovators in mobile service provision.
As the context in England changes, with undergraduate tuition fees increasing to up to £9,000 per year (depending on the institution), there is increasing pressure on academic services, including the library, to innovate to meet greater user expectations, particularly in providing new cutting edge technological facilities such as mobile services.
Such evolving contexts should be seen as opportunities rather than hindrances.
Consequently, this research led to the creation of a library mobile services toolkit at the University of Leeds, to include the services seen in Figure 6, tailored to users’ needs, which will be adaptable enough to change with our fast-paced technological world.
Limitations The nature of the research’s subject matter has presented a challenge in ensuring the contextual information used regarding mobile services is current and up to date.
New mobile services are being constantly developed and consumed.
Throughout the 11-month timespan of this research it was challenging but important to keep up with changes in mobile services and subsequent evolving research outputs in the area.
The specific findings relating to Leeds University Library from this research will, like other research on mobile technologies, become outdated quickly.
However, it is hoped that the research provides a useful insight which can be built upon in further investigations into this area.
Furthermore, a vital conclusion reached is the importance of developing an adaptable service model which will change with new mobile technologies.
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doi:10.1080/19322909.2012.672069 Author Details Lizzie Caperon eLearning Officer and Subject Librarian University of Leeds Email: e.l.v.caperon@leeds.ac.uk Web site: http://library.leeds.ac.uk/people/Lizzie-Caperon Lizzie Caperon is the eLearning Officer at Leeds University Library, UK.
She is also the Subject Librarian for the School of Medicine.
Lizzie wrote her Master’s dissertation on the use of mobile technologies in academic libraries and surveyed Leeds’ students to establish their needs from a mobile library service.
From this work she constructed suggestions for improving provision at Leeds.
Lizzie has been involved in organisational initiatives and projects which focus on moving towards a flipped classroom and blended learning approach.
As a subject librarian, Lizzie has directly implemented such pedagogical approaches and sees their impact when teaching in the School of Medicine.
Lizzie is greatly interested in the potential of new technologies and the best ways to embed them within learning to improve students' educational experience.
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The Performance-based Funding Model: Creating New Research Databases in Sweden and Norway Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Performance-based Funding Model: Creating New Research Databases in Sweden and Norway Buzz data database dissemination portal doi repositories cataloguing visualisation aggregation ssh rae research Citation BibTex RIS Leif Eriksson describes how the introduction of Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS) has created new forms of research databases in Sweden and Norway.
The introduction of Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS) models has helped to set the focus on scientific publishing since this is one of the major indicators for measuring research output.
As a secondary result, it has also forced the countries that have introduced a model that is not solely based on citations to create a new form of research database; the national portal for scientific literature.
Even in countries that have not adapted a PRFS model, these forms of portals are common.
In Sweden, the national database has been the result of local universities’ and Higher Education institutions’ efforts towards a mutual search interface to the different local repositories that have emerged.
The repositories are sometimes created to support a local funding model, but the most common reason is simply to disseminate scientific publishing.
The contribution of publications that cannot be found in the international citation indexes are substantial even for peer-reviewed publications especially for literature in the Humanities and the Social Sciences but also in Natural Sciences by adding a lot of conference papers that would otherwise not be recognised.
This can be seen as a side-effect of the discussions on the introduction of PRFS models.
Even if not all publications meet the criteria to be recognised as scientific, a significant number of them are still added to the base of publications that can be analysed from a PRFS perspective.
The incentive to disseminate search results is the other driving force for the national catalogues and, in this case, the portals are playing an important role since many of the publications mainly written in domestic languages are otherwise seldom visible to other researchers and the public.
Background The change in the Higher Education landscape has been significant over the last decades.
One of the major changes has been the introduction of performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) starting with the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the United Kingdom in 1986 [1].
The incentive offered by a PRFS model is that it overturns the allocation of funding often based on historical grounds which are no longer valid.
It can also be considered as a part of an orientation towards more effective management of the public sector, based on principles derived from the private sector.
The central idea in this transformation is the drive to increase productivity without adding resources to the system, while replacing traditional command-and-control systems with market-style incentives [2].
Publications are playing a more and more important role in the process of evaluating research and also as an indicator in the performance-based research funding systems (PRFS).
Of 14 countries which were identified as having PRFSs, at least 10 have publication output as an indicator of research quality [3].
The reason why publications are used as a PRFS indicator is that the latter measures the output of research both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Moreover, those publication data are easily found in bibliographic databases.
However, the introduction of an indicator for publications has not been without controversy in the countries that have adopted PRFS.
The resulting discussions have generally focused on two main issues: Should publications be used as a first-order or a second-order indicator?
Which data source would best reflect the research output in a particular country?
OECD launched a report on various PRFS models in 2010 including a systematic exposition of the different indicators being used [1].
Publications are often found among the first-order indicators which are aimed directly at measuring research performance.
This can be done by simply counting publications in relation to the number of research staff of a certain institution but the common practice is to add a qualitative element, either by ranking of publication channels as occurs in Denmark and Norway, or by citation analysis as operates in Belgium, that is, in the Flemish community, and Sweden.
Second-order indicators are based on indexes instead of direct measurements.
These indexes are often created as a reaction to the methodological difficulties when dealing with citation analysis.
The best known indexes are Journal Impact Factor (JIF) which measures a journal’s impact through the number of citations its articles receive, and H-index which is often used on an individual level when comparing the citation history of different authors.
However, both indicators are simplifications of more complex structures and have been criticised when being used for research assessment purposes [4].
The second question has created even more controversy in those countries which have adopted a PRFS model.
When deciding on which database would best support the publication indicator, the issue as to which type of publications should be counted immediately comes to the fore.
The main issue is whether the alternative forms of publishing that are often found in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (including books, anthologies, etc) should be included in the PRFS model, or if it should rely exclusively on peer-reviewed articles.
If the first approach is adopted, as in Denmark and Norway, the existing public or commercial databases are often found to be insufficient since a lot of the literature from the Humanities and Social Sciences is missing from these databases.
This means that national databases supporting the PRFS model have to be implemented [5].
On the other hand, if you decide not to include other publishing forms, and rely on citation databases such as Web of Science, adjustments have to be made in the form of weighting publications from different research areas differently (as in Sweden) or using second-order indicators like JIF to balance the different sectors (Flemish Community, Belgium) [6].
Traditionally the main purpose of bibliographic databases has been to disseminate research results.
The databases can be multi-disciplinary and cover research publications from all over the world (eg Web of Science, Scopus, WorldCat, etc).
Furthermore, there are also subject-specific databases that cover larger areas (eg Inspec, PubMed).
Another form of bibliographic database is the library catalogue, which is often national in scope and based on holdings from different scientific libraries.
The PRFS models including SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) literature have however introduced a new form of bibliographic database in the countries where the model has been adopted (Denmark, Finland, the Flemish community in Belgium, and Norway).
It is a national bibliographic database of scientific publishing which has as its main purpose the support of the PRFS model but which also serves as a conventional bibliographic database, providing access to contemporary research.
Moreover, Sweden has adopted such a national database, but with the difference that it is primarily a bibliographic research tool and not part, at this juncture, of the PRFS model.
Systems Employed in Norway and Sweden In this article I shall examine two examples of national databases either used for or proposed for PRFS purposes, the Frida/CRIStin in Norway and SwePub in Sweden.
These are databases or portals that were created from different perspectives.
The Norwegian system was designed directly to support the publication indicator in the PRFS model, while the Swedish system started out with a conventional bibliographic rationale.
Since the Norwegian system has been object of many studies [7][8], I shall focus in this study on the Swedish system, SwePub.
I shall see if the different approaches to creating a national portal for scientific literature in Sweden have any implications for the way in which literature is included in the database, as compared to its Norwegian counterpart.
Furthermore, I shall also try to analyse the content of the Swedish national portal to see if it has the potential to provide structured and validated data for a PRFS model, especially in respect of concerns relating to SSH literature.
Finally we will also study the role each database plays in disseminating scientific literature in the two countries and how the localisation of their portals helps to achieve this effectively.
Norway: Frida/CRISTin Norway implemented a performance-based funding system for research in 2002.
Publications form one of the two output indicators, the other is the number of PhD graduates.
Both indicators are worth 30% each of the total model.
There are also two input indicators, external funding from Norwegian Research Council and external funding from the EU, each worth 20% [1].
The publication indicator is based on a model which includes books (ISBN-titles), contributions in anthologies (papers in ISBN-titles) and articles from peer-reviewed journals (papers in ISSN-titles).
Some conference papers are also included in the model.
The criteria for a publication to be regarded as scientific is that it provides a new insight and appears in such a form that makes its results examinable.
Furthermore, it should be written in a language and distributed in a way that it makes it accessible to the research community.
Finally it should also be peer-reviewed [9].
For each publication type, there is an evaluation of the different publication channels, eg publishers for books and anthologies and journals for articles.
The publication channels are divided into two levels, level 1 which gives a lower score and the more prestigious level 2 which gives a higher score.
Not more than 20% of the total number of publications can appear on level 2.
These channels are continuously evaluated by field-specific research committees.
To support the model, a national system for research documentation has been implemented by the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions (UHR).
The system includes a central function (felles tjeneste vid Norsk samfunnvitenskaplige datatjeneste, NSD ) which delivers bibliographic data about scientific publishing and supplies an authority index to support the Higher Education institutions’ own systems (Frida/Forskdok).
The bibliographic data comes from Web of Science, the national library system Bibsys and Norart, which is a portal for Norwegian and other Nordic articles.
The data are collected in a common database, ITAR, from which researchers can import records into their own local system and verify their own publications [10].
It is also possible to register records manually into the local system.
The records are controlled by special administrators, ‘superbrukare’ on different levels in an institution such as department, faculty, etc.
A statistical report is then sent from  Frida/Forskdok to Database for statistikk om høgre utdanning (DBH) which then calculates the publication points which becomes the data upon which the budget is based.
Figure 1: Norwegian CRIStin Web site In 2011, a new system called CRIStin was implemented to replace Frida/Forskdok.
In addition to the previous system it also includes publications that are not defined as scientific in the criteria mentioned above, reports, for example, popular science, lectures, etc.
Furthermore, patents and products deriving from Norwegian research are also registered there.
The part of the system which contains documented results from research activity is called Norsk vitenskapsindeks (NVI).
The CRIStin system also contains researcher profiles, information about research projects and research units.
The system involves about 160 institutions as providers of information.
All information in the portal is open to public search.
Sweden: SwePub If the Norwegian system was created from a top-down perspective, its Swedish counterpart has evolved from exactly the opposite direction.
Sweden did not adapt a PRFS model until 2009 and decided to focus on two indicators only, external funding and publications, both indicators sharing equal weight in the funding [11].
With regard to the publication indicator, Sweden decided to use Web of Science as the data source in spite of the fact that uneven coverage between research areas as well as a bias towards literature written in English is well known [12][13].
The bibliometric indicator itself is rather complex, trying to estimate the productivity of Swedish researchers in different research areas combined with field-normalised citations [14].
In order to compensate for the uneven distribution between research areas in Web of Science, the Ministry of Education introduced different weighting for different disciplinary domains, offering the highest weight to humanities and social sciences.
The model has met with criticism from both researchers [15] and the Swedish Research Council and the Ministry has decided that the potential of using peer review should be investigated as a possible means, at least partly, of replacing the present PRFS model [11].
In spite of the relatively late interest shown in using publications as a measurement of research output on a national level, there has been an ongoing trend to include publications in different activities at local universities in Sweden.
Uppsala University was first to have a research assessment exercise as early as 1999 (Bastu) followed by further exercises in 2007 (KoF 07) and 2011 (KoF 11).
These assessments combined conventional peer review with bibliometric indicators and in order to guarantee that all publications were part of the basic data, a local publication database was created.
Later this was merged with the digital publishing system, DiVA, which now is in use in some 30 universities and other Higher Education institutions.
Other universities have undertaken similar exercises which together with the aim of collecting publication data for other evaluation purposes, including local PRFS models, have helped to support the call to create local systems for publishing data.
Another trend that has been visible during the last decade is the desire to disseminate research results as much as possible.
New technology and new publishing trends, including open access publishing has made it possible to simplify the publishing process and has helped to create the “digital revolution” in scientific publishing [16][17].
This has also increased the usage of publication databases both in the sense that they often are imbedded in a local repository together with a digital publishing tool like the example of DiVA at Uppsala University.
In certain fields, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, these publications can often only be found in the local publication database.
Figure 2: SwePub Web site SwePub is an aggregation of these local publication databases starting in 2007.
It includes records from most of the Higher Education institutions in Sweden, although some big universities are still missing, such as the Karolinska Institute and the Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences.
Moreover, coverage from the different universities has also been uneven, but in 2010 75% of the universities stated that the coverage was sufficient [15].
75% of the universities also reported that they operated some kind of quality control including control of affiliations.
Due to the different approaches to quality control adopted by Sweden’s HEIs, together with their uneven provision of extra information like subject indexing, SwePub can only be partially analysed.
Results First we will examine the coverage in SwePub both across publication types and all fields in comparison with existing data indexes and in the humanities and social sciences in more detail.
Publication type     Content   Total Peer-reviewed Other academic Popular science, debate etc.
Journal article 157,608 (48%) 133,382 (85%) 13,582 (9%) 10,669 (7%) Conference paper 63,350 (19%) 42,354 (67%)   19,673 (31%) 1,349 (2%) Book chapter 33,347 (10%) 1,298 (4%)   28,416 (85%)  3,651 (11%) Doctoral thesis* 20,156 (6%)       Report 15,003 (5%)       6 (0%)   13,940 (93%)      1,079 (7%) Other publications 10,606 (3%)   2,602 (25%)    2,947 (28%)  5,058 (48%) Review  6,844 (2%)     66 (1%)    4,855 (71%)  1,924 (28%) Book  6,164 (2%)     100 (2%)    5,127 (83%)   941 (15%) Licentiate thesis* 5,033 (2%)       Research review 3,868 (1%)   2,266 (59%)   1,285 (33%) 217 (6%) Editorial collection 3,817 (1%)       8 (0%)   3,457 (91%) 353 (9%) Editorial proceeding 665 (0%) 106 (16%) 478 (72%) 81 (12%) Artistic work 457 (0%) 7 (2%) 338 (74%) 112 (25%) Patent* 361 (0%)       Sum 326,937 182,195 (56%) 94,098 (29%) 25,434 (8%) Table 1: Total number of publications and distribution over publication types for Swedish publications 2004-2011 (whole counts)                * not applicable The distribution of publication types in table 1 shows that journal articles represent the most frequent category amounting to nearly 50% of the total records in SwePub.
They also mainly come from peer-reviewed journals (85%) and are by far the most common way to disseminate scientific work.
More striking is the fact that conference papers are the next largest group with about 20%.
Also here, peer-reviewed papers are the most numerous category but we can also find a rather large category under ‘other academic’ which suggests that this is material which can prove hard to find in other databases.
Also books and book chapters are a large group (12%) and since by definition (with a few exceptions) they are classed as ‘other academic’ or as belonging to the category ‘non-academic’, one may suppose that they are also rarely found on common databases.
Table 2 confirms this picture when one examines the distribution of languages.
More than half of the books, and nearly half of the book chapters are written in Swedish.
This means that they are rarely found elsewhere, except in library catalogues and on a few specialist subject databases.
Publication type   Language   Total International Domestic Journal article 157,664 138,965 (88%) 18,699 (12%) Conference paper 63,412 58,965 (93%) 4,447 (7%) Book chapter 33,390 18,038 (54%) 15,352 (46%) Doctoral thesis 20,156 17,765 (88%)   2,391 (12%) Report 15,037  7,394 (49%)   7,643 (51%) Other publications 10,616  7,883 (74%)   2,733 (26%) Review 6,843 2,536 (37%)   4,307 (63%) Book 6,170  2,401 (39%)   3,769 (61%) Sum              327,492         265,137 (81%) 62,355 (19%) Table 2: Total number of publications and distribution across publication type and language for Swedish publications 2004-2011 (whole counts) When analysing the differences between subject areas, both in terms of language distribution and coverage in the ISI databases, we are confronted by the problem that only parts of the records in SwePub are indexed with subject categories.
Therefore, only records from Uppsala University have been analysed, since subject indexing, at least from 2007 onwards, has been almost entirely compulsory.
In Table 3 we can clearly see differences in language distribution and ISI coverage with a high percentage of publishing internationally in Natural Sciences, Health Sciences and Engineering, while the Social Sciences, including Humanities, have a large proportion written in Swedish.
This also corresponds with the ISI coverage, with high representation in Natural Sciences and Health Sciences (75-80%) and low representation in Social Sciences and Humanities (20% and 5% respectively).
Engineering is the only subject with a high degree of international publishing that still has rather low ISI coverage (ca.
50%).
This might have something to do with the fact that conference papers represent a quite frequent publication type in Engineering which is still somewhat under-represented in Web of Science.
Main field Language Coverage   International Domestic ISI Non-ISI Natural Sciences 6,717 (99%)   64 (1%) 5,069 (75%) 1,712 (25%) Social Sciences 2,238 (67%) 1,118 (67%)   662 (20%) 2,694 (80%) Health Sciences 6,679 (97%)  242 (3%) 5,627 (81%) 1,294 (19%) Engineering 1,459 (99%)   12 (1%)    802 (55%)    669 (45%) Agriculture     61 (91%)    6 (9%)      41 (61%)      26 (39%) Sum 18,533 (86 %) 3,004 (14%) 12,350 (57%) 9,187 (43%) Table 3: Language distribution and coverage in the ISI citation index for publications from Uppsala University 2007-2011 These figures correspond well with the results from other studies.
In Norway, the coverage in existing citation indexes is low for SSH literature; only 11-20 % can be found in ISI.
The figures for Natural Science and Health Science come out at about 80 % while Engineering Science here also assumes a middle ranking with 60 % [8].
Furthermore, the Flemish database for SSH literature shows the same proportion for Humanities (15 %), while the figure for the Social Sciences is higher (53 %).
This may have something to do with the fact that the Social Sciences represent an increasing share of the publications written in English [18].
Finally, the total coverage of the publications from Uppsala University 2007-2011 in the ISI databases is 57 %.
This figure is higher than in the Norwegian study where 49 % of the publications were found in Web of Science [8].
Although this figure may not be representative of the whole country, it is nonetheless interesting to note that it also signifies an increase in ISI coverage for Uppsala University, as compared with the period 2002-2006 [19].
For the SSH sector there is an increase in the Social Sciences from 15% to 20%, but for the Humanities the figures still are very low, about 5%.
The higher coverage grade for the Social Sciences can be ascribed to the fact that, as with the Flemish community, there is an increasing trend towards publishing in English in this area.
Development of SwePub As mentioned, SwePub has been the result of the efforts by local universities in Sweden rather than a result of governmental initiative.
However, the discussion of using the portal as a data source in the Swedish PRFS model has been ongoing since the database was introduced and was also mentioned in the latest Governmental Bill in 2012 [20].
The database has to go through several improvements before it can serve as a tool in the PRFS model.
First of all, all data have to be validated in terms of author addresses, duplicates have to be identified and, if need be, merged, and so forth.
This also calls for a far stricter degree of quality control at the local university level and a system like the Norwegian ‘superbrukare’ ought to be considered.
Furthermore, subject indexing has to be completed at least for the included journals and perhaps also for individual records, depending on which PRFS model is preferred.
However, the most important task is to encourage the universities still currently missing to participate in the project, for example the Karolinska Institute and the Swedish University of Agriculture Studies.
In the Governmental Bill 2012 there were additional resources set aside for the development of SwePub with the aim of supporting bibliometric analyses and a general quality assurance of the database [20].
The location of the portal is also of crucial importance in how well the visualisation of the literature is carried out.
SwePub is managed by the Royal Library.
From the beginning it has been integrated with the national library portal, Libris, as an additional search tool.
This means that SwePub has the potential to reach the users of the national library catalogue like researchers, students and the public.
However, the statistics show a declining usage from around 22,500 searches per month on average in 2010 to 18,000 in 2012.
There are ongoing discussions about the full integration of the search function with Libris.
A possible scenario in the future will be that SwePub will divide into a bibliometric tool for analysing and maybe also act as a PRFS database, while the search function will be integrated with the national library catalogue which also will enhance its visibility.
In Norway, the Frida/Forskdok database mainly had the function of being data provider to the Database for statistikk om høgre utdanning (DBH) although the database also included publication categories other than those who were identified with the PRFS model.
Frida/Forskdok has never been a part of the national library catalogue in Norway; instead it has been working as a parallel system within the universities and other research institutions.
The introduction of the CRIStin database which has a somewhat different profile and content may however increase the usage and enhance the dissemination of scientific literature.
Since no statistics on its usage are currently available, this has still to be proven.
Discussion and Conclusion Although the national catalogue in Sweden has developed from different perspectives and needs, it has similar content and distribution between publication types, subject areas and languages as its Norwegian counterpart.
Even if peer-reviewed articles are the most common publication type (ca.
50 %) there are a lot of publications from other categories, such as books, book chapters and conference papers, which cannot be found in other databases.
Even if we are unable to estimate the coverage in Web of Science for the whole database, we can compare the figures with the repository for Uppsala University, DiVA and it confirms the picture from other countries like Norway and the Flemish region, ranging from a high coverage of ISI papers in Health Sciences and Natural Sciences, to lower coverage in Engineering, and to very low coverage in Social Sciences and Humanities, although we can see a changing pattern of more international publications in the Social Sciences.
The differentiation in publishing between subjects is also clear when we examine the language distribution.
Almost everything in the Natural Sciences and Engineering are directed to an international audience as well as in Health Sciences.
In the SSH sector nearly 50 % of all publications are published in the domestic language, both in Norway and Sweden.
Between 2007 and 2011, only some 400 publications written in Swedish were indexed in Web of Science and, of these, the majority are book reviews (75%).
The conclusion is that SwePub, as well as the other national portals for scientific literature, plays an important role in disseminating literature that is published in publication channels other than international journals.
The national portal supports visibility of important contributions in primarily the Humanities and the Social Sciences, but also in Engineering and in some parts of the Natural Sciences.
If the coming PRFS model in Sweden includes non-ISI publications, SwePub will prove an essential tool for providing publication data.
However, the database is not ready at this point to use for evaluation purposes, while data cleaning in the form of correction of addresses, completion of subject categories, etc, remains a task to be completed.
Therefore it can be argued that the national catalogues and portals have an important role to play in the new scientific landscape in both broadening the base for analysing scientific publishing as well as disseminating research.
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Proposition 2012/13:30   Forskning och innovation.
Stockholm: Utblidningsdepartementet.
Author Details Leif M Eriksson Planning Division Uppsala University Sweden Email: Leif.M.Eriksson@uadm.uu.se Web site: http://www.uu.se/en/ Leif Eriksson is a librarian currently working as an analyst at the Planning Division of Uppsala University, mainly with research performance issues.
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The Second International M-Libraries Conference Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Second International M-Libraries Conference Buzz mobile software javascript tagging browser blog cataloguing multimedia ejournal ebook mp3 sms podcast twitter url research Citation BibTex RIS Keren Mills reports on a two-day conference exploring and sharing delivery of services and resources to users 'on the move,' via mobile and hand-held devices.
Jointly hosted by the University of British Columbia (UBC), Athabasca University, the UK Open University (OU) and Thomson Rivers University, the conference [1] was held on UBC's beautiful campus in Vancouver and covered a broad range of topics, from SMS reference to using QR codes.
The conference aims were to explore and share work carried out in libraries around the world to deliver services and resources to users 'on the move', via a growing plethora of mobile and hand-held devices, as well as to bring together researchers, technical developers, managers and library practitioners to exchange experience and expertise and generate ideas for future developments.
Preconference Workshops The four preconference workshops, run by staff from Athabasca University and the UK Open University were well attended and well received.
They offered delegates the opportunity to try creating a mobile learning object, to learn about designing interactive multimedia for mobiles, reflect on technical development for m-libraries or consider research methods for developing and evaluating m-libraries.
Keynote: Concentration, Connection, Diffusion: Mobilizing Library Services Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President and Chief Strategist, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Lorcan gave an excellent overview of the types of interaction with information that can be leveraged through mobile devices, citing their use in the 2008 Obama presidential campaign as one example.
He also highlighted the fact that there is now greater investment and innovation in the consumer/retail space than in education.
For example, applications such as Snaptell [2] might previously have come from education initially.
Lorcan pointed out that, as many of us are now using multiple devices with multiple network points, moving towards cloud computing is a natural progression.
Rose garden on the campus of the University of British Columbia This means that an exclusive focus on the institutional Web site as the primary delivery mechanism and the browser as the primary consumption environment is no longer practical.
Similarly the demand for private spaces is shifting to a demand for social, networked spaces.
He also encouraged us to take the "BBC view of the world", saying that content should be syndicated, allowing the audience to collect it and consume it in a variety of environments.
Libraries are traditionally an articulation of space, collections, expertise (to organise and help access the collections) and systems and services.
These aspects are now moving apart in a networked environment and the types of expertise required of librarians is changing.
Libraries can still provide access to scarce resources, but those resources are now people, equipment, specialist advice, exhibition space and space for ad hoc rendezvous.
Making the Case for Innovation Both Carie Page of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and Joan Lippincott, Coalition for Networked Information, gave delegates an overview of the evidence in favour of developing mobile services in order to help them persuade their senior managers of the value of such innovation.
Carie spoke about reaching the 'always-on' generation through mobility, summarising the results of the Speak Up project [3].
She concluded that young students do want to work in their own spaces, but also want support from their educators.
Joan similarly highlighted reports and research which provided evidence for changing user requirements that can be supported by services to mobile devices.
For instance, as of 2008, 86% of people in the UK and 75% of people in the USA owned a mobile phone or PDA.
Yet the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) reports that 66% of students own an Internet-capable phone but most do not use it because of the expense [4].
Joan emphasised the importance of understanding your own user population before developing new services.
Several delegates in sessions I attended asked the presenters how they had persuaded their library managers to fund their mobile work and they similarly responded that they had used research reports to demonstrate the potential value of the new services.
Having recently undertaken a short project to ascertain user requirements for mobile information provision at both the University of Cambridge and the Open University, I can attest to the value of researching the needs of your own user population – the requirements at a campus-based university are very different to those at a distancelearning institution such as the OU, and can be affected by a variety of different environmental, cultural and economic factors [5].
Using the Humble SMS Ken Banks of kiwanja.net [6] gave an inspiring presentation on the role of mobile phones in the developing world and how open source tools such as FrontlineSMS [7], which he developed, can enable not-for-profit organisations to reach geographically dispersed communities.
Ken commented he was inspired to develop FrontlineSMS because he was frustrated by the failure of NGOs to report on the tools they had used to do valuable innovative work, thereby making it difficult for other organisations to imitate or build on their work.
Perhaps this observation is just as valuable as knowing that this software is available for libraries to use for delivering information to their users.
In these difficult economic times* sharing practice and collaborating on development of tools and services can save time and money.
SMS reference services are also taking off – two papers reported on pilot services at universities in the USA which were taking very different approaches.
UCLA and Yale worked together to experiment with providing SMS reference through a vendor platform, Text a Librarian [8], allowing integration with their reference desk rota, whereas NYU simply bought a Blackberry and gave students the phone number, with staff taking it in turns to respond to queries that came in by SMS.
The Text a Librarian platform allowed staff to receive and respond to enquiries through Microsoft Outlook as well as through a mobile phone.
Both projects found that their expectations about the types of enquiries they received were challenged and that library users did not expect an immediate response and were willing to engage in a reference interview by SMS.
They also found that Library staff required support and training to be able to respond to enquiries within the 160 character limit of an SMS and to become accustomed to using common 'Txt Spk' abbreviations to do so.
In common with findings of libraries evaluating their Web chat services, transcript analysis showed that some SMS enquiries were coming from within the library building.
Mobile Information Delivery There were several papers on the topic of mobile information delivery, from different parts of the world.
Jose Luis Andrade of Swets North America spoke about the role of subscription agents in delivering e-journal and e-book content to mobile devices that support javascript or Web browsing.
Representatives from Athabasca University described the development of their Digital Reading Room, which allows library users to access both internally and externally produced content through their mobile devices using Auto Detect and Reformat technology.
Another method of delivering content to mobile devices is podcasting, as demonstrated by UBC's Science and Engineering Library, whose staff reported on their use of podcasting as an outreach tool.
Many mobile phones, as well as dedicated MP3 players and handheld game consoles, are capable of playing podcasts.
A delegate taking a moment to reflect on the Conference in the rose garden Linking the Physical to the Virtual One of the most popular talks on the first afternoon was the presentation by Kate Robinson of the University of Bath (UK) on QR codes and their applications for libraries.
'QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can contain any alphanumeric text and that often feature URLs that direct users to sites where they can learn about an object or place (a practice known as "mobile tagging")' [9].
Kate's presentation was based on a survey undertaken at the University of Bath to ascertain whether students are aware of QR codes [10].
It was found that currently12-15% are aware of them, but only 2% use them, although this could be influenced by the limited number of camera phones capable of reading QR codes.
Ideas for using them in the library included linking floorplans to podcasts, linking Subject Librarians' offices/business cards to Web pages, and sending catalogue records/class numbers to users' phones.
However, the paper concluded that students are not sufficiently aware of QR codes to make use of them without encouragement and support.
A collaborative project between the University of Limerick (Republic of Ireland) and the University of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) is also working to link the library catalogue to an interactive map of the library using wifi and Bluetooth [11].
Their system architecture is too complex to detail here, but is likely to allow them to provide extensive mobile services within the library.
Libraries Leading Mobile Development A noticeable theme was that several speakers found that the libraries are ahead of their institutions in investigating, developing or implementing mobile services.
Will Reid and Vicky Owen of Liverpool John Moores University reported on a project which began as an investigation of ways the library could support Mobile Learning within the institution.
They eventually found that they had to expand the project to include development of best practice guidelines for the University.
Similarly the majority of mobile development undertaken so far at Athabasca and the OU has been led by their libraries.
Conclusion This was a fascinating and valuable conference which provided an excellent opportunity to meet fellow innovators from around the world and to learn more about the ways m-library services have been implemented.
At least two of the projects presented at this conference were reported by the speakers to have been inspired by attendance at the first m-libraries conference in 2007, so I hope delegates will once again take inspiration from the conference for useful developments to their library services.
For anyone interested in following these topics further, many of the presentations are available on the conference Web site [1].
There was an active Twitter backchannel [12] during the conference and several delegates have blogged their impressions [13].
* Editor's note: In an attempt to future-proof this report, I have created a snapshot of the global economy for the benefit of readers unacquainted with the summer months of 2009.
References The M-Libraries Conference Web site http://m-libraries2009.ubc.ca/ SnapTell http://www.snaptell.com/ Speak Up, Project Tomorrow http://www.tomorrow.org/ Salaway, G., Caruso, J.
B., Nelson, M. R., "The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008", (Research Study, Vol.
8).
Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008 http://www.educause.edu/ECAR/TheECARStudyofUndergraduateStu/163283 Mills, K., "M-Libraries: Information on the Move", Arcadia Programme, April 2009 http://arcadiaproject.lib.cam.ac.uk/docs/M-Libraries_report.pdf kiwanja.net http://kiwanja.net/ FrontlineSMS http://www.frontlinesms.com/ Text a Librarian http://www.textalibrarian.com/ 7 Things You Should Know About QR Codes http://www.educause.edu/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutQRCod/163728 Ramsden, A., Jordan, L., 2009.
"Are students ready for QR codes?
Findings from a student survey at the University of Bath."
Working Paper.
University of Bath.
http://opus.bath.ac.uk/12782/ Meere, D., Ganchev, I., O'Droma, M., "Evolution of Modern Library Services: The Progression into the Mobile Domain" M-Libraries conference, June 2009 http://ocs.sfu.ca/m-libraries/index.php/mlib/mlib2009/paper/view/31 Twitter #mlib09 http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mlib09 Owen, V., "Vicki Owen's Topically Technological Library Blog" http://vickiowensm-learningblog.blogspot.com/search/label/mlibraries Author Details Keren Mills Innovations Officer Library & Learning Resources Centre The Open University Email: k.mills@open.ac.uk Web site: http://library.open.ac.uk and http://pengalibrarian.wordpress.com/ Return to top Article Title: "The Second International m-Libraries Conference" Author: Keren Mills Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/m-libraries-2009-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary: Creating the Digital Educational Resource Archive (DERA) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary: Creating the Digital Educational Resource Archive (DERA) Buzz data software html xml infrastructure archives metadata thesaurus digitisation identifier schema repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh cataloguing multimedia lcsh provenance ulcc dspace licence interoperability url research Citation BibTex RIS Bernard M Scaife describes how an innovative use of the EPrints repository software is helping to preserve official documents from the Web.
When I started as Technical Services Librarian at the Institute of Education (IOE) in September 2009, one of the first tasks I was given was to do something about all the broken links in the catalogue.
Link rot [1] is the bane of the Systems Librarian’s life and I was well aware that you had to run fast to stand still.
It is characterised by the decay of a static URL which has, for example, been placed in a library catalogue to reference a relevant Web site resource which has subsequently been moved to a different server or else removed altogether.
I ran a report and identified that we had about 16,000 links to external resources in bibliographic records within our SirsiDynix Symphony library system.
Of those, the in-built link checker was reporting about 1,200 as non-functional (7.5%).
However, we knew that the situation was actually worse than that.
The link checker was doing its job to the best of its ability but was unable to report on sites which were using a genuine HTML redirect page to alert the user that the document could not be found, because that page was, in itself, a valid document.
Having listed the 1200 known broken links by URL and catalogue record identifier, we decided to attack them wholesale and try to fix them manually as a first step.
This exercise turned out to be very fruitful as it identified some interesting trends.
First, there were blocks of URLs relating to a single organisation’s Web site which had obviously broken all at once.
In some cases, swapping the base part of the URL with the new one rectified it.
However, more commonly we were finding that, perhaps as the result of a migration to or between content management systems, the original file names had been changed, or worse still, removed, making their amendment far more time-consuming; or in the worst instances, impossible.
We were also able to take a snapshot view which told us how many of the broken links referred to documents that were no longer available [2].
Searching via Google would sometimes bring up an alternative candidate (if the file happened to have been mounted elsewhere on the web), but in general, it was evident that about 10% of the links referred to documents which no longer existed.
In many of the cases, these were documents which were from what we would classify as Official Publications [3] for the purpose of our specialist education collection.
Official Publications are those from Government departments (e.g.
Department for Education); organisations involved in the inspection of education (eg Ofsted) and a range of other quasi-governmental bodies.
The documents are largely but not exclusively Word documents or pdf format but we anticipate that the formats will expand to include multimedia in the future.
The works include the results of research and monitoring exercises which inform the educational policy changes.
The take-up of persistent identifiers in the field of Official Publications appeared to be low which was further compounding the problem.
In the past, our method of last resort has been to retrieve a printed version of the resource which was being generated as part of our cataloguing workflow.
That would be placed in store and only accessible by users on request.
How Could We Do This Differently?
From this point, it became clear that we needed a better solution to this problem.
We had been using an in-house research repository running the EPrints software [4] since about 2009.
EPrints was originally developed by the University of Southampton to build open access repositories which are compliant with the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
It is widely used in the Higher Education community.
Our instance is hosted by the University of London Computing Centre (ULCC).
The arrangement works well, providing us with an administrative interface which allows us to tailor our instance to local requirements, backed up by a robust infrastructure, support and technical expertise from ULCC itself.
It occurred to us that this software could enable us to eradicate our link rot problem, whilst building in a core level of digital preservation and increasing the discoverability of these documents.
We were convinced that a citation which linked to a record in a Web archive was far more likely to survive than one which did not [5].
We needed a quick solution to the problem of link rot.
Whilst we were aware that other systems such as DSpace and Fedora were contenders, we were keen to work with ULCC and build on local EPrints expertise which we had developed at the IOE.
A number of issues needed to be clarified.
First, the copyright implications.
Although all these documents were in the public domain, linking to the original location versus harvesting it into a local repository generates some concerns which we wanted to eradicate from the beginning by negotiating with the organisations holding the original documents.
IPR Issues Simultaneously, the election of the Coalition Government and its planned cuts [6] meant that we were embarking on this project at a very auspicious moment in which the risk of content loss from government departments was rising.
We initially considered using a suitable version of Creative Commons licence, but discovered that most organisations’ publications were covered by a PSI (Public Sector Information) click-through licence which was in many respects similar.
We had no wish to exploit the content commercially and therefore decided to contact organisations directly which did not offer their content for use under PSI.
We felt that this would be likely to quell any fears with the bodies we approached and decided we would try to position ourselves as offering ‘free preservation’, using the Institute’s reputation as a reason for us being able to all-but -guarantee longevity.
In most cases, our approach was welcomed with open arms.
Later in the year, this task was made even easier when the copyright situation was clarified by the introduction of the Open Government Licence.
[7] Configuring the Metadata The next stage was to decide which metadata we wanted to capture.
We were aware of the National Archives Electronic Records Online Pilot [8] Project which has some similarities to our own.
For this reason we were doubly sure that the metadata associated with the documents needed to be of high quality in keeping with the Library’s mission and give added simplicity of discoverability and comprehensive coverage to the end-user.
It was at about this time that we realised that we were actually in the process of creating a new virtual collection of official publications in the arena of education.
Potential names started to be bandied about for the resource and the Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA) [9] was born.
Rather than creating metadata fields from scratch, we used our existing EPrints repository [10] as a starting point, as many of the fields there remained appropriate in this context.
For example, the ability to choose different licence types.
We also tried to build-in flexibility in the schema, for example by leaving the ability to restrict access to full text should future donors decide they wished to proceed on the basis of that access model instead.
The new fields which we introduced were: Type: We decided to call this “Document from Web” Collection: to allow granularity on: Subjects: There was some debate about the appropriateness of using our in-house subject schema London Education Thesaurus (LET) [11], a more generic one based on Library of Congress Subject Headings ( LCSH) or none at all.
In the end, building on research from the University of Southampton [12] which stated that subject schemas had little impact in the realm of repositories, we decided not to use one at all.
We are still considering in future developments whether we may try to mine terms from the full text using LET and add it to the discovery layer which the IOE is considering implementing.
Organisation: This was felt to be critical in order to be able to filter on the provenance of organisations, some of which would soon no longer exist.
For example, if it is decided to close an organisation, a notice is often put on its Web site.
Without intervention, there would be no guarantee that the electronic assets would survive beyond the closure date.
We become aware of these things via our network of educational contacts and are now able to offer a solution.
Typically, we would ask the organisation to supply the files on a Pen Drive with a spreadsheet of related metadata to allow us to upload it in bulk.
In doing so, it would all be linked to the organisation’s name as it existed at the time of closure.
A worked example of how this actually happened in practice is given later on.
Getting Used to EPrints One challenge presented by EPrints is getting to grips, for example, with adding fields and changing the layout of screens.
It was not so much the process itself that was difficult, but rather the lack of documentation describing how to.
Not having admin access at server level meant I had to rely more on ULCC colleagues than I might otherwise have wished.
Our pre-repository workflow was that potential documents for cataloguing were recorded by a Collection Development Librarian in a spreadsheet who visited each relevant website at certain intervals.
These were then added to the library catalogue by Technical Services as time permitted.
Of course, this meant in some cases that the document no longer existed at the time of cataloguing.
At the very least, we were aware that the link to the resource we were cataloguing might have little longevity so a printed copy of the document was made at the same time, attached to the catalogue record and sent to store.
This was as far as our preservation could go.
When we moved to using EPrints, we wanted to be able to retrieve the document at the time it was found (before link rot had time to set in) and, if necessary, add the extra metadata later.
EPrints is very flexible in this respect and we will shortly add a new brief format workflow which allows this to happen quickly and for preservation to begin at the point of discovery.
Retrospective Data Loading At the end of 2010, configuration was largely complete and we had added several hundred documents to the system.
We were able to soft-launch it whilst we concentrated on building up the repository to include a critical mass of content.
Taking a spreadsheet of 900 references which had not been catalogued in the interim period, this was transformed into EPrints XML format and imported in bulk, the original URL being placed in a hidden notes field to give some extra provenance.
Editors then started working through to link the documents and enhance the metadata to meet our standards.
Coincidentally, we were approached by staff at the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) in the Autumn of 2010, one of the casualties of the government cuts.
They were looking for a safe long-term home for their electronic document archive.
We were able to satisfy them that DERA was the appropriate place for them to be placed and they supplied us with a spreadsheet containing the metadata and a bunch of files on pen-drive.
Again, the metadata was loaded via XML and we attached the 400 documents supplied.
By February, the repository was a viable and useful resource and we launched it officially on 28 February 2011.
Lessons Learnt and Future Plans We now find ourselves in the position of having opened a sluice gate into which a backlog of content will need to be poured and refined.
This extra workload would possibly have benefitted from some earlier project planning, but it is a much better place to find ourselves in than one in which there was no interest at all.
Another point is that we have had to accept all common file formats at present.
It would, for preservations purposes, be preferable to convert and ingest in PDF/A format.
However our view was that the small overhead of batch migrating to that format at a later stage means it would be better to spend time upfront now on metadata rather than file conversion.
Conclusion We now find ourselves in the position of having opened a sluice gate into which a backlog of content will need to be poured and refined.
This extra workload would possibly have benefitted from some earlier project planning, but it is a much better place to find ourselves in than one in which there was no interest at all.
Another point is that we have had to accept all common file formats at present.
In practice, the majority are pdf, some MS Word and a few Excel files.
It would, for preservation purposes, be preferable to convert and ingest in PDF/A format, at least for the textual formats.
However our view was that the small overhead of batch migrating to that format at a later stage means it would be better to spend time upfront now on metadata rather than file conversion.
We felt that this was a pragmatic response which meant that we would be working within the spirit of digital preservation best practice.
We are also aware that data-based formats such as Excel cannot be meaningfully integrated into a full-text search and that these objects would benefit from better representations in which the data themselves can be interrogated.
We do not think that EPrints is the right vehicle for this, and will be investigating how we might use models or services such as those used by the UK Data Archive [13] for this type of data.
The main things we have learnt from the project are that: Placing files in a repository gives digital preservation to key documents in the subject field and eradicates the link rot problem.
Adding high-quality metadata enhances the resource and allows it to hold its head high and become an integral part of a library’s collection.
A specialist library can play an important role in preserving domain-specific government content as part of its long-term strategy and ensure high-quality resources remain available.
Provided you are prepared to get to grips with its complexity, the EPrints software is well suited to the task and provides good interoperability with other legacy systems for importing metadata The added value of being able to search the full text provides a potentially very rich resource for data mining whether by current or future researchers of educational history.
Future plans are to build up content levels to a critical mass.
We will also be listening very carefully to what users say about the service.
We intend to keep an eye on developments in this rapidly changing field to ensure that the service remains relevant and continues to fill the gap in content provision which we have identified.
We also need to ensure that we can properly integrate this resource with our other more traditional library content, which makes the ability to cross-search our resources a greater imperative than ever.
References Ailsa Parker, Link Rot: How the Inaccessibility of Electronic Citations Affects the Quality of New Zealand Scholarly Literature.
Library Journal Articles, 2007 http://www.coda.ac.nz/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=whitireia_library_jo National Library of Australia Staff Papers, 2009 -, The National Library of Australia’s Digital Preservation Agenda http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/nlasp/article/viewArticle/1319 Official Publications Collection http://www.ioe.ac.uk/services/545.html Open Access and Institutional Repositories with EPrints http://www.eprints.org/ Richard M. Davis, Moving Targets: Web Preservation and Reference Management.
January 2010, Ariadne, Issue 62 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/davis/ George Osborne outlines detail of £6.2bn spending cuts.
BBC News Monday, 24 May 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8699522.stm Open Government Licence The National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/ Electronic Records Online The National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ero/ Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA) http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/ IOE Eprints http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/ Foskett, D. J., The London Education Classification : a thesaurus-classification of British educational terms.
London 1974 Leslie Carr, Use of Navigational Tools in a Repository [email from JISC-REPOSITORIES Archives] https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=JISC-REPOSITORIES;66dc4da9.0603 UK Data Archive http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ Author Details Bernard M. Scaife Technical Services Librarian Institute of Education University of London Email: b.scaife@ioe.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/staff/31238.html Bernard Scaife is Technical Services Librarian at the Institute of Education.
His background is in library management systems and he is responsible for the cataloguing and acquisitions functions including the development of systems across the Library and Archives.
Bernard is also involved in digitisation activities, migration of legacy metadata on the Web and in lowering the barriers to accessing high-quality education resources.
Return to top Article Title: From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary: Creating the Digital Educational Resource Archive (DERA) Author: Bernard M. Scaife Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/scaife/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Never Waste a Good Crisis: Innovation and Technology in Institutions Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Never Waste a Good Crisis: Innovation and Technology in Institutions Buzz data mobile rdf framework wiki sparql metadata standardisation identifier blog windows passwords e-learning uri mashup facebook oer lod rdfa archimate ict research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tore Hoel reports on the CETIS 2010 Conference, 15 16 November 2010 at the National College for Leadership of Schools and Childrens' Services Conference Centre, Nottingham.
'I get a feeling that we are on a...' [The hands make a gesture to show the stern of a sinking ship].
The Monty Phytonesque images on my inner eye from the title of the CETIS 2010 Conference fade and the jolly music of the ship's band starts chiming in my inner ear as I see them move towards the forward half of the boat deck.
The CETIS conference is always an upbeat event, even when the prospects for higher education in UK at the moment are not that bright.
For an observer from Norway, EduChaos (another sticky concept from #cetis10) is in the range of 0.2% reduction of research funding.
However, the numbers mentioned by British colleagues range from 30% to 80% (reduction in research funding vs. funding of teaching).
The consequences are hard to imagine for a visitor, even if the smell of burnt tyres are added.
One point I do get, though: It's time for Education to innovate, and not only in Britain.
This year's CETIS conference was organised to show some possible directions.
For me chaos is a positive term, even if in its original meaning it points to an 'abyss that gapes wide open, is vast and empty' [1].
Yes, it means utter confusion and bewilderment.
But it also means the start of something new and better structured.
The design of the conference programme gave some ideas on how (a new) order should be achieved.
The dynamic force in a conference is the discussion that takes place among colleagues.
Most of the time between the opening and closing keynotes was dedicated to discussions in parallel sessions.
The keynote speakers made two different bids on framing the discussion and closing the gap: Students have little opportunity to create their own educational future without relying on the old and established institutions of Higher Education.
That was the message of Anya Kamenetz, the author of the book on the Do It Yourself University (DIY U) [2].
If we make use of what we have learnt from research on how people learn and work together across institutions and work towards large interdisciplinary design science of learning (termed Design Science Research (DSR)), we may transform Higher Education.
That was the message of Mike Sharples of University of Nottingham.
Before we delve into the CETIS 2010 discussions let us explore how far we get by considering DIY U vs. DSR U.
Do It Yourself University: The Three Benefits of Higher Education Anya Kamenetz is a 30-year old journalist who last year wrote a column called "How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education" [3].
She obviously hit the nail on the head for the publishers, because since then she has written a book on the same theme, done a TeDx show [4], got herself a manager to keep track of all her tours discussing the demise of old style universities, and even been asked by the customs when entering UK for her opinion on the students protest against higher tuition fees.
Ana Kamenetz, giving the keynote speech at CETIS 2010, photo courtesy of Mark Power Kamenetz has done her research of the University, "the Cathedral of Rationality" (a title from one of her slides), which has gone through constant development for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
In the last century, however, the universities had to adjust to the need for mass education.
Kamenetz used the California system, established by Clark Kerr [5] as an example, with its three-tier structure having a handful of University of California research campuses at the top for the elite, and State Universities and Community Colleges catering for the masses.
However, Kamenetz concluded: It was America's best loved welfare program to share the fruits of knowledge.
However, the master plan is dead.
I've done a lot of interviews with university leaders all over the US, and the conclusion is unambiguous: The model ran out of capacity.
The current university model does not scale.
Anya Kamenetz illustrated the global demand for Higher Education: 53 million in 2000, 120 million in 2010, 250 million in 2025.
In India alone, you would need to build a campus for 2,400 people every second week to cover the demand, which is simply physically impossible.
The cost of education and the tuition fees are rising, and it is difficult to cut out the cello in the string quartet or ask the band to play faster.
Having established that the universities were economically in trouble, Kamenetz went on to show that they are also struggling to deliver.
'Your drop-out rate from university is lower than ours in the US.
But is it good enough?
What are you getting for your investment?'
she asked and answered herself by this quote from a student: 'I Facebook through most of my classes'.
With this description of the sad state of affairs Kamenetz had got her equation where she needed to start the reconstruction of the university as a DIY U: cost + access + quality = the case for radical innovation.
There are many ways to build a case why we need 'revolutionary transformation' of education (which are the even stronger words Obama uses in his National Education Technology Plan [6]).
The challenge is to get the pieces right when we start constructing the new solution.
Here I think Kamenetz got it right, as a starting point to moving away from Educhaos.
She had identified the three benefits of Higher Education to be Content + Socialisation + Accreditation.
And all three have to change.
For Kamenetz, the solution is to put the word 'Open' in front of all three pillars of Higher Education.
The two first are well known; and we have made some progress, as we have been discussing Open Educational Resources, and Open Social on the Net for quite a while.
However, the Socialisation pillar might be trickier than the Content one, as it is about pedagogy and what should go on inside or outside the classroom.
The essence of learning is found neither inside nor outside the classroom, neither online nor offline.
It's in the flow from lived experience and practice, to listening, researching, and sharing the fruits of your work with a community and back out to the world again.
Now that so much high-quality information is available for free -like the 1,900 courses on MIT Open Courseware -and platforms to allow people to exchange words, images and sound online are exploding in use, many of us are excited about the possibilities of self-organized education that is pared down to this essence, thus affordable, efficient and accessible.
[2] What is radical in Kamenetz' proposal is the call for Open Accreditation.
Institutions may specialise in assessment, helping students to create learning plans, portfolios, etc, and thus breaking the universities' monopoly on accreditation.
When HE institutions begin to lose their power to sort and sift people in society, the professional networks could start to play an important role again.
And they can bypass the need for diplomas and offer an alternative route to the workplace.
Kamenetz scored with the techies in the conference when she referred to Github [7] as one tool to keep track of your competency revisions.
The bottom line for this American journalist and writer came down to: The world is more complicated now, which means there is more room for people and new ways to do things.
After all, the purpose of the Reformation was not have to submit to one cathedral.
Cathedral Us will remain, but you could choose the DIY Us instead.
Designing Learning Mike Sharples' answer to the big challenges of climate change, energy shortage, pandemics, terrorism, cultural tension -and education for an inter-connected world, is not do-it-yourself, but a large-scale and multi-disciplinary design science approach.
Sharples started his keynote by expressing optimism and focussing on the big opportunities.
He pointed to President Obama's plan [6] as one example of a good approach that tried to address the R&D challenges at the intersection of learning science, technology and education.
The way we learn is now well established, according to Mike Sharples, photo: Tore Hoel Learning is certainly faced with a new complexity, with new interactions (mediated by technology and between learners, institutions and commercial providers), and with new connections (over distance and between formal and informal settings).
But this complexity offers new opportunities for trans-national learning, massively social learning, mobile and contextual learning and life-long and life-wide learning.
Sharples seemed to be of the opinion that we now have consensus on how we learn.
As 'evidence' he points to a Science article from 2009 that draws on psychology, neuroscience, machine learning and education as foundations for a New Science of Learning.
He quotes Meltzoff et al.
that 'insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practice' [8].
What we need now is to put this new science into action by taking part in design-based research.
Design-based research will improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation.
It is based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in a real-world setting.
And it leads to contextually sensitive design principles and theories [9].
Sharples underlined that this is no longer one community's attempt to design TEL tools.
To work, this approach has to be scalable, interdisciplinary and global.
So far, so good.
However, when Sharples had tightened the canvas and pulled out his crayons it was as if the air had slipped out of the balloon.
For all he showed was two examples of tools with a definite pre-social software look & feel, a group scribble and a personal inquiry learning toolkit.
These were two examples of scalable design based on research within Secondary Education that were also being extended to Higher Education.
For me, however, it was not at all clear how this approach could bridge the Educhaos abyss.
Sharples' conclusion is that this approach to design science has a transformational vision as it is based on open sharing and scaling of best practice and large-scale embedding and evaluation.
From the futuristic Learning Sciences Research Institute of University of Nottingham, at the other end of the pond from where the CETIS 2010 Conference took place, more co-ordinated international research work could make a difference.
I have to admit I was not at all convinced.
And neither was the person who commented from the floor, saying that while the former director of CETIS, Oleg Liber, had predicted that universities would not be around in 2030, everyone had imagined that would be caused by new and disruptive technology, and not that it might be occasioned by a cost-cutting government.
View from the conference venue to the Learning Sciences Research Institute of the University of Nottingham, photo: Tore Hoel …and Making Sense in between After the concluding keynote I was struck by the sense of uncertainty about our grasp of what is really happening in Higher Education.
Even if we know our technology and have a firm foundation in new learning sciences, the political and economical aspects of universities are still a puzzle to the CETIS conference constituency.
The response to these kinds of challenges in the CETIS conferences of the last few years has been to look into enterprise architectures and tools for modelling (e.g.
Archi [10]).
This year's themes for the parallel sessions showed an opening to unmapped territory by focussing on open innovations; relationship management; and how to create cheaper, more flexible and effective institutions (a session that continued the discussion of the DIY U [11]), while also looking at more traditional themes like next-generation content and linked enterprise data in F/HE organisations.
The problem with parallel sessions is obvious: You cannot have it all, and you need a little luck to sample the highlights.
So it is like learning in general, you get out of it what you are willing to put in.
As for myself, I was attracted to the session on Open Innovation as this promised to develop ideas on open innovation strategies for taking advantage of open content, open standards, open data and open source, and for developing more effective partnerships to implement them.
Open Innovation If the maxim for academics is 'publish or perish', the corresponding 'truth' for Higher Education institutions must be something like 'innovate or be eaten'.
So how to make innovation happen?
The introductory diagram by Scott Wilson (below) seems to suggest that the solution is to put 'open' in front of every word, as in open content, open source, open standards and open data.
Then the problem becomes how to get return on investment in innovation.
Because, 'we are not hippies!
Well, not all of us, anyway…', as it was stated on one of the slides.
Diagram on Open Innovation by Scott Wilson, CETIS Revisiting the Open Innovation diagram, it is clear that the difficult issues are not related to the innovative power of openness, but the inhibiting constraints of drawing too narrow a circle around the business unit within which we work.
It is very easy to come up with a number of cases about openness and how the way we share source code, data and content reduces costs.
It is harder to describe the generation of income, especially for HEIs.
Open Source is one solution towards open innovation according to Scott Wilson, photo: Tore Hoel One exercise was to break into groups and come up with a business model for each corner in the diagram.
How to make the four quadrants meet in Open Innovation?
Again the new and more competitive climate in the UK was noticed by the oversea observer.
'I've started to hate this there is no talk about the greater good any more.
I used to love the sector I'm working for… this is changed now.'
It is much easier to argue that Open Innovation will serve the society as a whole, than the individual institution, which may recently have employed its own IPR lawyer.
Even to academics, it is hard to argue that using the Creative Commons NonCommercial is not very useful if you never plan to earn money on your work.
If you do use CC-NC, you are also preventing others from innovating and potentially earning money, which arguably is not for the greater good… The session ended up with an action plan, one item being the explicit identification of areas where institutions are competing or are able to collaborate; and another to identify how Open Innovation may fit with the institutional Business and Community Engagement (BCE) strategy [12].
Linked Data: A Glimpse into the Promised Land I have to admit, after the first day I had had enough of acronyms starting with B for business, and decided to go for a more technical track, safe from concerns about sinking ships.
I thought Linked Data would offer optimism and soft jokes like 'I never saw a linked data presentation on a Windows computer before… '.
I got the jokes ('I will show you how to do triples in Windows'), but the B word was still with us, now packaged as a 'common (business) information layer within the institution' [13].
Why should we do linked data in the enterprise?
asked Wilbert Kraan of CETIS, who already in his session introduction had noticed that increasingly mature linked data tools could enable dynamic and very diverse data sources from across an organisation to be queried and analysed.
The promise is to reconcile local concerns with cross-institutional overview, let the systems be what they are, and do the best we can locally, and then, by linking them, release the power of a reconciled picture to management.
The data syntax is pretty much solved, according to Kraan.
It is merely a matter of transport.
The real problem is not technical, but has to do with pragmatics.
We need now to focus on the semantics, e.g., what is a student?
What counts as a student in different contexts?
Introducing linked data to an organisation brings new kinds of discussions and new colleagues to the table.
What are the drivers for this development?
Most of the pressures are felt from finance & costing, followed by student data, information management and performance measurement.
However, other interests, like staff data, benchmarking, strategic planning, marketing, research data, BCE and estates are all something to gain by looking into linked data and semantic technologies for the enterprise.
After Wilbert Kraan had given his hobby horses a canter round the park, I sensed that the participants were at last beginning to feel some optimism.
Views were expressed that we should harness existing systems, discuss real issues (at least give them a URI as identifier), find answers both to local needs and the Senate floor.
No doubt, the enterprise would be strengthened!
Dave Flanders, programme manager at JISC, brought me back to reality.
We are in a recession now and need to make some money.
Managing a university is much worse than herding cats; it is like running a company where everyone thinks they are the CEO and are all trying to take the company in their own separate direction.
Therefore, Flanders was of the opinion that we need a clear business case for introducing a linked data approach.
Disambiguation is one clear result of the pragmatic activities Kraan advocated.
'How does disambiguation make me money?'
was Flanders' question.
He answered by giving three cases.
First, clearly knowing that the thing you are calling a duck is a duck is invaluable.
Second, lists, lists and more lists.
Never underestimate the value of structured lists that you can enable other people to reuse.
The third case made Flanders explain the subject-predicate-object characteristics of a triple, and we were able to lose ourselves in technicalities for a while.
When the RDF roundtrip was done, we were ready for the conclusion about disambiguation.
As is so often the case, it is not a technology problem, but a people problem, and the value lies in taking the opportunity to start sorting out issues that need sorting out.
It comes to this: It is a question of speed to market.
If your institution is the first with information on your courses… Well, then you are first!
Flanders set the tone for the rest of the presentations that showed that semantic technologies are now mature enough to start gathering at the enterprise data waterholes of the institutions.
If you also put the data in the open, you even get them cleaned up, which is a business case in its own right.
Wilbert Kraan had gathered a good group of experts that were able to explain the subtleties of RDF, RDFa, SPARQL and the rest of it, and to demonstrate how semantic technologies could be used in university enterprise settings.
Damian Steer spoke about the Research Revealed Project [14] at the University of Bristol.
Its purpose is to examine how institutions and researchers can work with the web of research data.
Who holds data, e.g., partner institutions, finance, publishers, funding councils, central systems, personal Web sites, etc.?
And how could that information be brought together to form a bigger picture?
Paul Miller, from The Cloud of Data [15], warned against getting over-enthusiastic about specific technologies.
Each has its place.
We will run into problems if we try to make linked data the answer to every prayer.
He pointed to interesting services being built out there without using big words about semantic technologies, but nevertheless using them, like tripit.com, siri.com, and a number of search engines.
They all make an effort with the mess people have already created.
Linked data may help people clean up their data because they become more exposed to what they have created themselves.
But the main thing is to make something useful of what we have got.
Hugh Davis and Yvonne Howard demonstrated how the University of Southampton has used the semantic web to build efficient services to search people, projects, publications, teaching and much more.
Going to Hug Davis' official university page [16] generates on the fly the list of people he works with, Yvonne Howard being one of them.
If you want to have that relationship explained, the RKBExplorer will show that they have 20 relations (one might be special, and 14 co-authored papers).
The clue is to give everything a unique id: groups, projects, themes, seminars, presentations, people, roles, publications, interest, locations, edges, courts, modules, semesters, sessions, and much more.
The rest is simple.
So simple, that converting data to RDF could easily be done in the pub, which seemed to be the preferred place to do mashups in Southampton.
Sean O'Riain of the National University of Ireland [17] gave a tour d'horizon of Enterprise Linked Data, pointing to a number of both useful architectures and tools.
(Links are in his presentation you find at the CETIS 2010 wiki which as usual is a good post-conference resource [18].)
O'Riain identified two barriers against the community buying in to linked data: cost and policies.
Who is going to publish?
And will the management allow you to do it?
However, open data are your own data.
If you want to publish them, is your choice.
Much of the linked data that are out there, exist behind passwords and firewalls.
They are still linked data.
It might be even more powerful if some of them were exposed to the outside world, but the choice lies with the organisation.
Sean O'Riain explaining the potential of Social Semantic Enterprise, photo: Tore Hoel The linked data model makes it easier to let an enterprise eco-system develop over time.
Most important is to start, and to start at the right entry point for your organisation.
Tim Berners-Lee [19] has suggested a 5-star deployment scheme for Linked Open Data, and O'Riain gave a link to the Web that offers good examples of how this scheme should be understood [20].
And if senior management needs further convincing, O'Riain threw in a last argument with reference to his fellow countryman's way to run an airline: Linked data make it your own problem getting aboard the plane on time, printing your boarding pass, etc.
You could distribute the innovation throughout your organisation.
And, it is to be hoped, beyond.
The Benefits of CETIS 2010 In the current economic climate everything has to be justified, even attending CETIS conferences.
Some years ago another overseas participant, Jim Farmer, commented that the CETIS conferences are 'producing benefits that are recognised and will be worth much more than the costs', e.g., facilitating the transformation of Higher Education [21].
This year's conference might be the last one.
At least, that was the feeling that spread through the session rooms and was hinted at in opening and closing speeches by the organisers.
My hope is that JISC CETIS will continue to bring together the world-leading community in educational technologies in future CETIS conferences.
As the Linked Data session clearly showed, it is not about technology any more, but about people and pragmatics.
In which case people should meet and extend their links in the open and friendly manner of the CETIS Conference.
References chaos.
(n.d.).
Online Etymology Dictionary.
Retrieved December 05, 2010, from Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chaos Kamenetz, A.
(2010) DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education Kamenetz, A.
(September 2009).
"How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education".
Fast Company, accessed 6 December 2010 http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html Anya Kamenetz TEDx talk in Atlanta, 24 June 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6MLLkmXee0 Wikipedia on Clark Kerr, accessed 26 January 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Kerr US Department of Education (2010) National Education Technology Plan 2010 http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010 GitHub, accessed 26 January 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub A.N.
Meltzoff, P. K. Kuhl, J. Movellan, & T. J. Sejnowski (2009).
Foundations for a New Science of Learning, Science 325 (5938), 284.
Wang, F., & Hannafin, M. J.
(2005).
Design-based research and technology-enhanced learning environments.
Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(4), 5-23.
ARCHI archimate modelling a free, open source, cross-platform tool http://archi.cetis.ac.uk/ Cheaper, flexible, effective institutions: technology, politics and economics.
Part of the CETIS Conference 2010 Programme.
Facilitated by: Li Yuan, Simon Grant and John Robertson.
Discussions from DIY U group http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Cheaper%2C_flexible%2C_effective_institutions:_technology%2C_politics_and_economics Open Innovation.
Part of the JISC CETIS 2010 conference.
Facilitated by: Scott Wilson, Sander Van der Waal and Paul Walk http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Open_Innovation Linked Enterprise Data in F/HE organisations.
Facilitated by: Wilbert Kraan http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Linked_Enterprise_Data_in_F/HE_organisations Research Revealed Project blog http://researchrevealed.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Paul Miller's blog The Cloud of data http://cloudofdata.com/ Hough C. Davis' home page at University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/hcd Sean O'Rian's home page http://www.deri.ie/about/team/member/sean_o'riain/ CETIS 2010 conference wiki, session on Linked Enterprise Data http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Linked_Enterprise_Data_in_F/HE_organisations Gov 2.0 Expo 2010: Tim Berners-Lee, "Open, Linked Data for a Global Community" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga1aSJXCFe0 Linked Open Data star scheme by example http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/ Holyfield, S. & Smart, C. (2007).
The community sets priorities for the e-Framework http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/edinburgh_conf Author Details Tore Hoel Oslo University College Norway Email: tore.hoel@hio.no Web site: http://hoel.nu/ For the last decade Tore Hoel has been working on standardisation of learning technologies in Norway, Europe and worldwide.
He is now engaged on European TEL projects and is acting as the vice-chair of the CEN Workshop on Learning Technologies.
Hoel is co-editor on the new part of the upcoming ISO standard on metadata for learning resources.
His field of interest has been standards governance and the role of standards in the development of learning technologies.
Hoel has a background in journalism, publishing (founder of a number of professional journals), ICT consultancy, public relations and information management, as well as in ICT and learning.
Return to top Article Title: "Never Waste a Good Crisis: Innovation and Technology in Institutions" Author: Tore Hoel Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/cetis-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Innovations in Information Retrieval Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Innovations in Information Retrieval Buzz data tagging video intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Martin White reviews a collection of essays on a wide range of current topics and challenges in information retrieval.
Information Retrieval and Enterprise Search For much of 2011 I worked on a project commissioned by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Joint Research Centre, European Commission, on a techno-economic study of enterprise search in Europe.
There is no dispute that the volume of information inside organisations is growing very rapidly, though much of this growth is the result of never discarding any digital information.
The scale of the problem is well documented by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) in its report on ‘Big Data’ [1].
In this report, MGI suggest that the majority of companies in the USA with 1000 or more employees have over 200 terabytes of digital information and in some sectors (such as manufacturing) this was approaching 1 petabyte.
There is no reason to suggest that the situation is much different in Europe.
Research conducted by MarkLogic [2] indicates that, although managers regard information as a core business asset, few are taking any action to ensure that their employees are able to find the information they need to make good decisions that will benefit their organisations and their own careers.
In Europe it is likely that only one company in ten has a good enterprise search application.
Many more may have a search application for an intranet, or for a document management application, but they represent only a small proportion of the unstructured (ie, text, image, video) assets of the company.
Among the reasons for this are a low awareness by IT managers of the technology, availability and value of enterprise search, and a significant problem in finding staff with skills in enterprise search and information retrieval.
The paradox in Europe is that there is a very active information retrieval community, yet the connections between information retrieval and enterprise search are virtually non-existent.
One result is that there is virtually no research carried out on enterprise search issues by the IR community.
More importantly HEIs with IR research groups very rarely teach at undergraduate level; and even when they do, the focus is on the information science of IR and not the practical applications.
Where is the next generation of enterprise search professionals going to learn its trade?
Theory and Practice I was therefore delighted to receive this book for review, as it promised to bridge the gap (more accurately ‘gulf’) between theory and practice.
This book is one of two from Facet Publishing this year [3], and I’ll start this review by congratulating Facet on recognising the need to publish in the IR/search sector.
Normally my heart sinks when I begin to read a book that is a set of contributions by individual authors, but in this case the editors have welded the contributions together so well that it reads as though it was written by a single author.
David Bawden starts the book off with a fascinating synthesis of work on browsing.
A feature of the book is that all the authors have significant experience in the topics on which they are writing, but are also able to stand back and see the strengths of the work carried out by others.
Bawden is an excellent example, as he strolls effortlessly through the work of Bates, Marchionini and others to illustrate both the complexity and value of browsing.
Aida Slavic then reviews work on the role of classification schemes in information retrieval, including the now ubiquitous use of facets.
Slavic provides a masterly piece of analysis which I found very stimulating to read.
The next topic is fiction retrieval research, addressed by Anat Vernitski and Pauline Rafferty.
I’ll admit that the requirements of fiction retrieval had totally passed me by but now I realise that the need to search fiction both for the purposes of reading for pleasure and for scholarly research presents some interesting challenges.
Similar issues arise in music information retrieval research, which is the subject covered by Charlie Inskip in Chapter 4.
As a musician and an information scientist, I found this of especial interest.
Next in line comes Isabella Peters with a comprehensive review of folksonomies, social tagging and information retrieval.
This is a very topical subject, and the book is worth buying just for this chapter alone.
The penultimate chapter is by Richard Kopak, Luanne Fruend and Heather L. O’Brien on digital information interaction as semantic navigation.
Although the key papers on this very broad topic are listed, I felt this chapter wandered about a bit even though all the authors work at the same institution and I was left with a feeling of ‘so what?’ at the end.
In contrast, the focus of the final chapter, on a webometric approach to assessing Web search engines by Mike Thelwall, is excellent and thought-provoking.
Conclusion This book is one of the best examples I have come across of publisher, editors and authors working in total unison.
The speed of publication is also noteworthy, as there are many references to work published in 2010.
This is important in a field moving as rapidly as information retrieval.
Although the book is targeted at the IR community, there is much that would be of interest to managers of enterprise search applications, because they need to be aware of just how difficult search is, and the amount of excellent research that is being undertaken to ease the burden on the search user.
It should be an invaluable starting point for undergraduate and graduate information science students looking for ideas for essay and research topics, and also as an illustration of how to write good literature reviews.
There must be around 500 or more papers cited in total, and anyone in the IR community and many in enterprise search would benefit from the insights provided by the authors.
Definitely a five-star rating.
References McKinsey Global Institute.
Big Data; The Next Frontier for Innovation, Productivity and Competition.
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/ MarkLogic Survey Reveals Unstructured Information is Growing Rapidly, Will Soon Surpass Relational Data.
MarkLogic Press Release, 6 June 2011.
Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval.
Edited by Ian Ruthven and Diane Kelly, Facet Publishing, 2011, 978-1-85604-707-4.
Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com/ Martin White has been involved in the science and business of search since 1974, and has written two books on the subject of enterprise search.
He was Chair of the Enterprise Search Europe Conference, which took place in October 2011, the first ever conference on the subject in Europe.
He is a Visiting Professor at the iSchool, University of Sheffield.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education: A JISC CETIS Event Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education: A JISC CETIS Event Buzz data wiki rss atom apache usability archives metadata standardisation identifier blog repositories oai-pmh e-learning adl e-business dcmi sru scorm xcri twitter hashtag interoperability url standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Currier reports on an international working meeting involving a range of educational interoperability standards bodies and communities, organised by JISC CETIS.
The stated intention of this working meeting organised by JISC CETIS, and held at the University of Bolton, UK, on 12 January 2010 was to: '[...] bring together participants in a range of standards organisations and communities to look at the future for interoperability standards in the education sector.
The key topic for consideration is the relationship between specifications developed in informal communities and formal standards organisations and industry consortia.
The meeting will also seek to explore the role of informal specification communities in rapidly developing, implementing and testing specifications in an open process before submission to more formal, possibly closed, standards bodies.'
[1] Participation was by invitation, and delegates were requested to submit position papers prior to the meeting.
By the day of the event, 17 papers had been submitted; there are now 20 available on the meeting wiki, as well as several post-event blog summaries and reflections [2].
Joining the 40 or so in-person participants were a number of interested parties who followed the meeting via Twitter, some adding commentary and questions (using the Twitter hashtag cetisfis).
Meeting Organisers The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (JISC CETIS) [3] has been, since the late 1990s, the organisation central to the development, uptake and implementation of interoperability standards for educational technology in the UK.
With JISC CETIS staff having served at various points on most of the international standards bodies operating in this domain, they were well-placed to bring together an experienced group for a working meeting to discuss the future of interoperability in this area.
Rationale In his opening address, JISC CETIS Director Adam Cooper emphasised that the impetus behind this meeting was a sense of growing dissatisfaction amongst many involved in standards development and implementation within education.
Where the original intentions of more-or-less formal bodies such as the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Learning Technology Standards Committee (IEEE LTSC) [4], the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) [5] and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) [6] were laudable, there has been an increasing feeling that the resource put into supporting these standards has not always borne the hoped-for fruit.
Meanwhile a few locally driven interoperability efforts such as Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) [7] and eXchanging Course Related Information (XCRI) [8] have appeared to work fairly well, and implementation of light-weight, non-education-specific specifications such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [9], Search/Retrieval via URL (SRU) [10], Atom and RSS have shown signs of affording some real benefits.
Developments in the Web environment have also changed the landscape, with cultural expectations of greater openness, grass-roots community involvement, and agile development methodologies becoming common-place.
Moreover, after years of being confined to the realm of exciting-but-far-in-the-future, real potential is starting to emerge in such areas as linked data and the Semantic Web, and open standards for identity, rights and identifiers.
More recently, the current economic climate and attendant concerns about funding cuts prompt the question, as a remote participant asked via Twitter: '[w]hen budgets are cut, is standardisation a luxury or a necessity?'
[11] So, it was deemed time for a fresh look to find the best way forward in ensuring effective interoperability.
While many angles and aspects of interoperability standards could have been tackled, for a one-day event, it was decided to focus on systemic issues around the formal / informal axis of standards development.
The Delegates The meeting was wisely co-located with the 40th meeting of the European Committee for Standardization Workshop for Learning Technologies (CEN WS-LT) [12] on 11 January [13], which ensured a large attendance for both meetings, even with transport problems predicted due to heavy snowfall.
Originally expecting a turn-out of around 20 from the list of invitees, the JISC CETIS organisers were surprised and delighted that nearly 40 people ended up attending, from a number of countries and standards bodies.
While this made for a cramped meeting room, it also made for a rich discussion.
A University of Bolton meeting room full of standards enthusiasts.
Photo courtesy of Tore Hoel * International communities around standards development and implementation were well represented, including participants from: the Dublin Core Education Community [14] and other Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) groups [15]; several IEEE LTSC Working Groups [4]; various ISO groups looking at educational technology interoperability [6]; ICOPER [16]; the IMS Global Learning Consortium and various IMS specifications groups [5]; the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) [17]; Open Web Foundation [18]; Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) [19], an American organisation which works with an international community of developers and vendors using Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)[20]; and of course, the CEN WS-LT [12].
About a quarter of participants came from outside the UK, including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Norway and the USA.
UK-based interoperability standards development organisations and communities in attendance included BSI [21]; UKOLN [22]; the SWORD and XCRI development communities; and Becta [23].
The Position Papers: Common Ground and Tensions Many delegates were heard to say during breaks that the position papers submitted are such a rich resource in themselves that just collecting them would have made the event worthwhile.
While there is not space here to summarise the complexities of positions put forward, it is safe to say that they represented broad agreement with the impetus behind this meeting.
There was also a large degree of commonality across the papers in terms of barriers to useful standardisation for interoperability, and possible solutions.
There was little that could be deemed contentious; perhaps only opinions about the best business models for funding what is a very expensive process, a process that one participant noted could be seen as a waste of many talented people's time.
The role of public projects, open source developments, and commercial vendors within standards efforts has long been an interesting, and sometimes controversial topic within the educational technology domain.
For instance, one paper stated that only open markets can stir the innovation needed to create really good educational technology [24], while others spoke from a paradigm of public funding.
Later discussions at the meeting touched on how interoperability standards in education have sometimes been seen as a way to stop commercial vendors taking control of what some feel is inherently a public good.
In contrast, someone made the point that innovation rarely comes out of Higher Education, and that the best teaching and learning standards emerge from industries and disciplines with a high stake in their students' successful learning, such as aviation and medicine.
However, these issues represented but a small proportion of the papers and discussion.
Perhaps more destructive to the forward movement of effective standards development is the number of paradoxes which remain difficult to resolve.
Some of the tensions that emerged at this stage included: Standards development vs.
Innovation (i.e.
are they mutually exclusive?
Do (should?)
standards drive, support, hinder innovation?
); Open community development (seen in some communities and cultures as the most desirable) vs.
Formal standardisation (required by some large vendors and governments, e.g.
some Asian countries); Open processes vs. Closed processes (e.g.
documents and discussions members-only, or behind walls; standards for purchase); Developing for future, innovative possibilities vs. Standardising current practice; Open, collaborative Web 2.0 paradigms vs.
Traditional educational technology (e.g.
that which mimics classroom teaching; locked away behind walls); Conceptual models representing common thinking across diverse communities (which can be plastic and responsive) vs. Standard information models required by formal standards bodies (which can be much more stable than that which they represent); Achieving perfect abstract standards vs.
Achieving easy, immediately implementable standards for developers.
Knowing that discussion of these issues can suck up days of meeting time, the organising team at JISC CETIS decided that the group was going to need to focus on agreement on the most potentially effective solutions proposed.
Plenary Session JISC CETIS Assistant Director Lorna Campbell ably facilitated the entire day's proceedings, starting with an open plenary discussion.
Delegates were asked what they felt were the most important issues to go on the table, given the limited time available, with a focus on what they would like to improve about the process of developing interoperability standards for education.
JISC CETIS Assistant Director Lorna Campbell joins the group in laughing at some standards-related humour.
Photo courtesy of Tore Hoel * The need for less fragmentation of effort and more effective use of the available resources for standardisation underlay most of this discussion.
Initial broad ideas included improving quality by increasing transparency and inclusiveness relating to review of standards throughout their lifecycle.
Or, as JISC CETIS Director Adam Cooper said, 'motherhood and apple pie'.
What about more specific points raised?
Beginning at the Beginning Some delegates raised discussion points about the initial stages of specification and standards development, including: 'Visioning' needs to be done correctly from the start.
Better specification of requirements should happen early in the development cycle.
The need for diverse communities with an interest in a particular area of standardisation first finding agreement on a shared conceptual map of their domain.
The idea is to separate out the ideas of a conceptual map and the eventual information model agreed upon within a specification.
Avoiding duplication of effort by better connections with other areas where relevant standards may be under development or already exist, such as e-business development.
In other words, making sure that when we focus on education-specific standards, they really have an education-specific component or requirement.
There was one call for a complete stop on formal standardisation within educational technology, due to the sector not being mature enough.
Whether or not people agreed with this, there was general agreement that focussing on the informal specification part of the standards development cycle was vital.
Specification Development Issues The need to balance effort between abstract and long-term formal standards development and concrete, implementation-ready specifications work was key to the entire day.
Rather than asking what is the best standards development process?, the question should be what are different standards processes good for?
Ideas about specification development included: Transparency/inclusiveness is important, but should be de-coupled from the idea of community size; sometimes a small development group at the start is best, with openness of process so others can feedback and test as robustness improves over time.
Specification development should be agile: short-term and fail-fast principles apply.
Failing well and failing fast is important because of the issue of not being able to replace standards once they are 'done'; this can prevent innovation.
Fail criteria as well as success criteria are needed (failure and success; slow-burner specifications; recognising negative benefits (what a standard may prevent as much as what it achieves).
Specifications and standards need to be written for implementation; usability of specification documents must be improved.
Availability of reference implementations and tool support is crucial.
Standardisation Issues Acknowledging that there are times when formal standardisation is appropriate, most participants agreed that actually teasing out the details of how and when (and if) that process should happen is important further work.
Some other ideas raised included: IP and licensing of the standards themselves must be clarified and eased.
Better connections between standards, or families of standards would be helpful: some kind of integration 'middleware' should be looked at.
More join up of industry and academia.
Take small steps – don't wait to build the whole thing (e.g.
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)[25] model).
Trusted governance is important, including openness of process and written documentation.
Written records of all processes are necessary wherever more than one language group is expected to be involved (e.g.
in any international standards effort); while this slows things down it ensures involvement of those who don't speak the standards body's primary language.
Adoption Issues Achieving interoperability, and quality of standards, is intimately connected with adoption issues.
If specifications and standards aren't adopted, feedback cannot be included in the development cycle.
And if appropriate support for adoption is not given, there will not be wide uptake.
We need better connections between standards bodies and policy makers, including focus on ensuring decision-makers understand what different standards are for, and where specifications that aren't formal standards may be useful.
Continuous development and support for standards after they are ratified is important both for uptake and for future development of the standard.
This includes documentation and support materials written for different stakeholder groups (e.g.
implementers, librarians, educators, managers), and training.
Better understanding of adoption dynamics is needed, including 'worse is better', e.g.
the necessity for many stakeholders of accepting 'good enough' standards.
Breakout Groups and Discussion In the afternoon, the meeting broke into discussion groups, each of which had the task of discussing and feeding back on the following questions: How can the relationship between formal and informal standards bodies address the issues identified in the plenary discussion?
What are the potential benefits of involving informal standards development initiatives in the system?
Can you identify ways forward from the position papers?
Groups were then required to identify ideas under the following headings and produce a single statement of agreement under each of them: Opportunities for improvement Barriers that have to be overcome Potential solutions The final output required was a concise statement to which the whole group subscribed.
When the groups reported back to the meeting, Lorna Campbell facilitated a session where the groups' responses were collated, and their points analysed to see if agreement could be reached on a final group statement.
If any individual point was rejected by anyone in the room, that point was removed from the group statement.
The rejected statements were left on the board however, and are still available alongside the agreed points on the meeting wiki [26].
The final group statements under each heading were as follows: 1.
Opportunities for Improvement Learn from the culture and lightweight processes from the informal specification community Improve the diversity of participation in standards communities Rapid, iterative development of specifications and pre-standardisation work Improve quality through early implementation and evaluation Increased adoption through involvement of more stakeholders Build shared understanding of concepts between stakeholders Recognise, understand and work with bodies which differ across a range of dimensions e.g.
legal status, respect, trust, openness, business models Identify criteria for discontinuing work 2.
Barriers That Have to Be Overcome Lack of inclusiveness in specification processes Public procurement policy that does not recognise standards & specifications from a variety of sources (e.g.
only accepts standards from certain formal bodies) Lack of early implementation of specifications Conflicting understanding of the scope and purposes of standards The ability to create derivative works is an essential issue.
There are cases when divergence is damaging but also when derivation is prevented.
How to resolve this paradox?
3.
Potential Solutions Learn from incubation models moving/supporting community efforts to a state where they might engage with full-blown standards ratification.
For example the Apache incubator [27].
Identify criteria for candidacy for incubation and moving from one to the other Match agility level to the goal/stage of the specification process Support adoption, community engagement & advocacy throughout the whole lifecycle from incubation to adoption and beyond Ensure resources/funding are available throughout the whole lifecycle of standards, not just up until ratification/publication Document success and failure stories to identify success and failure criteria Raise awareness, and be transparent, about the way we want to move through this multi-dimensional space Increase effective co-ordination between the different bodies Improve policymakers' understanding of the diversity of standards and specifications Manage the expectations of policymakers Identify solutions for the patent and ownership issues with specifications Many bodies should more effectively disseminate within their existing 'rules' Conclusion The organisers of this meeting tried not to bite off more than they could chew.
They created a fairly tightly defined remit for discussion, and kept the afternoon meeting firmly to an agenda of summarising only those points on which consensus could be reached.
Even so, there were many people around the table, and not much time for coming to a deeply considered consensus.
The issues raised have been bubbling around for a number of years in a number of forums, and there are no easy answers.
The richness of experience and knowledgeable opinion contained within the position papers and the plenary discussion notes is perhaps best not summarised too early by a few bullet-points.
However, JISC CETIS Assistant Director Scott Wilson has made a brave attempt on the meeting wiki and is welcoming feedback [28].
So, thinking together has begun, and for those who have responsibilities in the technical standards development domain, there is an opportunity now to join the discussion.
Author's note: N.B.
: JISC CETIS asks that if you blog or otherwise publish on this issue, that you use the tag cetis-fis and if you Tweet about it, use the hashtag cetisfis.
Acknowledgements * I would like to thank Tore Hoel of the ICOPER Best Practice Network, for providing all the photographs in this report.
Tore can be contacted via: Email: tore.hoel@hio.no Web site: http://hoel.nu/wordpress/ or http://www.icoper.org/ References JISC CETIS Event: The Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education, 12 January 2010, Bolton, UK http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/events/register.php?id=215 JISC CETIS Future of Interoperability Standards Meeting 2010, position papers and post-event reflections http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Future_of_Interoperability_Standards_Meeting_2010 JISC CETIS http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/ IEEE LTSC http://www.ieeeltsc.org IMS Global Learning Consortium http://www.imsglobal.org/ ISO http://www.iso.org/ SWORD http://www.swordapp.org/ XCRI http://www.xcri.org/ OAI-PMH http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html SRU http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ Thomas, Amber.
Tweet tagged #cetisfis http://twitter.com/ambrouk/status/7673130429 European Committee for Standardization Workshop for Learning Technologies CEN WS LT http://www.cen-isss-wslt.din.de/ CEN WS-LT 40th Meeting, 11 January 2010, Bolton, UK http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/CEN_WS-LT_2009-01-11 DCMI Education Community http://dublincore.org/groups/education/ DCMI http://dublincore.org/ ICOPER http://www.icoper.org/ ETSI http://www.etsi.org/ Open Web Foundation http://openwebfoundation.org/ ADL http://www.adlnet.gov/ The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) http://www.adlnet.gov/Technologies/scorm/ BSI http://www.bsigroup.com/ UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Becta http://www.becta.org.uk/ Weston, Crispin and Barr, Avron.
Position paper for JISC CETIS Conference.
7 January 2010. http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/c/c6/Saltisletsi.pdf The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) http://www.ietf.org/ JISC CETIS Future of Interoperability Standards Meeting 2010, plenary notes and summary of group feedback session http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Future_of_Interoperability_Standards_Meeting_2010 Apache Incubator http://incubator.apache.org/ Wilson, Scott.
Draft Summary of CETIS-FIS.
http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Draft_summary_of_cetisfis Author Details Sarah Currier Sarah Currier Consultancy Email: sarah.currier@gmail.com Web site: http://www.sarahcurrier.com/ Return to top Article Title: "The Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education: A JISC CETIS Event" Author: Sarah Currier Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/cetis-stds-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Data Services for the Sciences: A Needs Assessment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Data Services for the Sciences: A Needs Assessment Buzz data framework database usability infrastructure archives metadata repositories visualisation gis provenance mysql csv curation drupal e-science e-research authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Westra describes a data services needs assessment for science research staff at the University of Oregon.
Computational science and raw and derivative scientific data are increasingly important to the research enterprise of higher education institutions.
Academic libraries are beginning to examine what the expansion of data-intensive e-science means to scholarly communication and information services, and some are reshaping their own programmes to support the digital curation needs of research staff.
These changes in libraries may involve repurposing or leveraging existing services, and the development or acquisition of new skills, roles, and organisational structures [1].
Scientific research data management is a fluid and evolving endeavour, reflective of the high rate of change in the information technology landscape, increasing levels of multi-disciplinary research, complex data structures and linkages, advances in data visualisation and analysis, and new tools capable of generating or capturing massive amounts of data.
These factors can create a complex and challenging environment for managing data, and one in which libraries can have a significant positive role supporting e-science.
A needs assessment can help to characterise scientists' research methods and data management practices, highlighting gaps and barriers [2], and thereby improve the odds for libraries to plan appropriately and effectively implement services in the local setting [3].
Methods An initiative to conduct a science data services needs assessment was developed and approved in early 2009 at the University of Oregon.
The initiative coincided with the hiring of a science data services librarian, and served as an initial project for the position.
A researcher-centric approach to the development of services was a primary factor in using an assessment to shape services [4].
The goals of the project were to: define the information services needs of science research staff; inform the Libraries and other stakeholders of gaps in the current service structures; and identify research groups or staff who would be willing to participate in, and whose datasets would be good subjects for, pilot data curation projects.
The library took the lead role on the assessment, consulting with other stakeholders in its development and implementation.
Campus Information Services provided input on questions regarding campus information technology infrastructure, and to avoid unnecessary overlap with other IT service activities focused on research staff.
The Vice President for Research and other organisational units were advised of the project and were asked for referrals to potential project participants.
These units provided valuable input in the selection of staff contacts.
Librarian subject specialists also suggested staff who might be working with data and interested in participating.
Librarians responsible for digital collections, records management, scholarly communications, and the institutional repository were involved in the development of the assessment questions and project plan.
The questions used in the assessment were developed through an iterative process.
A literature and Web review located several useful resources and examples.
These included the University of Minnesota Libraries' study of scientists' research behaviours [3], and a study by Henty, et al.
on the data management practices of Australian researchers [5].
The Data Audit Framework (DAF now called the Data Asset Framework) methodology was considered to provide the most comprehensive set of questions with a field-tested methodology and guidelines [6][7][8][9][10][11].
The stages outlined in the DAF methodology were also instructive, although we elected not to execute a process for identifying and classifying assets (DAF Stage 2), since the organisational structure of our departments and institutes are not conducive to that level of investigation.
From the beginning it was recognised that recruitment of scientists was based as much on their willingness to participate as their responsibility for any specific class or type of research-generated data.
A first draft set of questions was based largely on the DAF, with input from the University's Campus Information Services, and the Electronic Records Archivist who had recently conducted interviews with social scientists in an investigation of their records-management practices [12].
The question set was further refined based on a suggested set of data interview questions from the Purdue University Libraries [13].
The Data Curation Profiles project by Purdue University Libraries and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [14], was in process at that time, and materials shared by those investigators also influenced the final set of interview questions.
The final set of questions is included in the Appendix.
One of the recommendations of the DAF methodology is to create a business case to formalise the justification for and benefits, costs, and risks of the assessment [6].
The methodology materials included a useful model for the structure and content of this document.
Familiarity with the risks and benefits in the local context was helpful for outreach to deans, chairs, and individual staff.
Establishing common definitions for the topics and issues at hand improved the outreach process, and established realistic expectations for the outcomes of the assessment prior to the interviews.
We originally considered using an online survey in parallel with interviews.
However, initial interviews quickly established that there would be an ongoing need for contextualising the questions.
The conversational format of an interview enabled the author to define terminology and frame and clarify questions within the context of a particular scientist's research area, thereby providing a process that would yield more complete and accurate information.
The DAF group had developed an online tool which they were kind enough to share with the author.
The structure of the tool was a useful starting point for the development of forms for data gathering.
Because our assessment workflow was not as extensive as the DAF, we chose to create a set of Drupal-based forms for recording information into a MySQL database.
Drupal provided a quick development environment for the forms and enabled us to tie data entry to a basic authentication scheme.
During the course of the interview, the interviewer recorded the information under the scientist's account.
This allowed the scientist to log in and review and add records about their data assets as a follow-up to the interviews.
Interviews were conducted throughout the 2009-2010 academic year, but most of them were completed between September and December 2009.
Once interviews were done, the material was exported as a .csv file and then imported into Microsoft Excel for analysis and reporting via pivot tables and graphs.
To keep the project to a manageable scope, the assessment was limited to the natural sciences, which are within the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon.
Research staff and staff from the following departments and groups were invited to participate: Biology, Chemistry, Computer and Information Science, Geological Sciences, Human Physiology, Physics, Psychology, the Center for Advanced Materials Characterization at Oregon (CAMCOR), the Institute for a Sustainable Environment, and the Museum of Natural and Cultural History.
The Maps Librarian also provided information on Geographic Information System (GIS) datasets.
Presentations to the chairs of research centres and institutes and at an orientation for new staff seemed to be the most productive approach for recruiting participants.
Library subject specialists also helped with outreach to interested staff, and each of the subject specialists accompanied the data librarian for an interview with one of the staff whose department they served.
Results A total of 25 scientists were interviewed.
The interviews generally took between 40 minutes and an hour, and were limited in most cases by the amount of time that could be scheduled with a scientist.
In some cases the interview covered all the types of datasets that a lab or individual produced.
In other instances we elected to focus on only one or two of several types of research-generated data because of time limitations.
Despite invitations to use the online form to follow up and add other dataset information, only one scientist added another dataset description.
Three logged in to review and update their post-interview records.
Numbers of participants, by group, are listed in the table below.
Organisational Unit Participants Biology 5 Center for Advanced Materials Characterization at Oregon 2 Chemistry 2 Computer & Information Science 1 Geological Sciences 5 Human Physiology 4 Institute for a Sustainable Environment 1 Museum of Natural and Cultural History 1 Physics 2 Psychology 2 Table 1: Participants by University of Oregon grouping Participation included one or more staff in all of the targeted groups, and provided a broad enough cross-section of research and data management practices to meet our goals.
In several cases scientists expressed the belief that most data management needs and problems were confined to 'big science' and massive datasets.
However, during the course of the interviews, these scientists frequently noted datasets of relatively small scale that were critical to their research.
As Heidorn has noted, much scholarly work is captured in smaller datasets that comprise the 'long tail' of scientific data [15].
Barriers and gaps in recording computational workflow and provenance were common features, even in datasets that initially seemed to have relatively simple origins.
Most of the staff noted the absence of domain repositories for their data and cursory checks indicated such data centres did not exist.
Repositories in which scientists did participate included NSF-mandated deposits into the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping for Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data [16]; the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology consortium sponsored by the NSF for seismic data [17]; and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's National Solar Radiation Database for solar energy data [18].
Some scholars expressed concern about publisher requirements with regard to data.
In some cases, the journal requires that data must accompany the article, but it is published in a difficult-to-access format (i.e., as a table in a .pdf document rather than in a linked, tab-delimited file).
Another comment was that 'even if it's published, the actual full data set will need to be made available some other way, since publishers don't have the space for the full data set.'
An immediate outcome of the interview and awareness of repository options for one scientist was that they deposited the data into the Libraries' institutional repository to accompany an article at publication.
The final question of the interview provided scientists with a chance to select up to three top data management priorities from a list or create their own items.
The top issues are shown in the graph below.
Figure 1: Data Management issues most frequently identified by survey respondents (this graph in alternative format ) Based on the selections and related comments in the interviews, the highest-ranking issues and gaps can be summarised as follows: Infrastructure Infrastructure (storage, backup).
This situation is not substantially different from that found by Marcus, et al.
[3] and Jones, et al.
[7] A range of sub-optimal methods were used for data storage, ranging from desktop computers, to external hard drives, laptops, and optical drives, but frequently without secondary backup storage.
Synchronisation of distributed files and version control were also noted as issues of significant concern.
Storage is a baseline requirement for other curation activities, and a variety of stakeholders at the University are now developing more centralised and redundant options for researchers.
Despite the gaps in infrastructure and lack of domain repositories at this time, most researchers believed that their data should be preserved indefinitely (30 of 34 data assets).
Data Management Tools Need for baseline and advanced data management tools and services in the research setting (annotation/metadata, access and discovery, version control, workflow, provenance).
Scientists were most interested in services that could help them manage data at or very near the beginning of the data life cycle.
Research staff clearly desire help with managing data as close to the point of capture/generation as possible.
For instance, these comments elaborated selections in the priorities list: 'General organization of the data and keeping things coherent across the lab.'
'Transferring data from a variety of instruments (some quite old) into one central database.'
'How to store data in an organized manner for other students in the lab to access (and add to).'
'Individual students may develop their own processes for analyzing data sets, and the issue is that if they use different methods, how should the data be backed up and the method(s) recorded.'
'Capturing metadata: sample description, project name, etc.... system to capture and store... and make it discoverable for later retrieval.'
This was one of the most notable things we observed, and it reinforced the role that libraries can play in data curation.
By engaging in services and projects that target data acquisition and link it to fundamental curation practices, libraries can improve the usability and longevity of important data assets.
In their role as research managers and primary investigators, scientists also want their teams to acquire the necessary skills to manage data.
Jones, et al.
noted this in their report as well [7].
The Libraries plan to offer workshops and online resources specifically directed toward graduate students and other researchers in the natural sciences in the coming year.
Formalised data policies and best practices documentation or guidance was largely absent across the interview group.
Follow-up conversations indicated that the interviews did prompt some staff to institute basic record-keeping and file management best practices in their research labs.
Materials such as the UK Data Archive's best practices guide [19] are helpful, and like other libraries we will continue to expand online resources, training, and support services.
These recommendations will be more useful and uniformly implemented if they are accompanied by tools, infrastructure, and support mechanisms that enable, facilitate, and reinforce policies and best practices.
Therefore, it is the author's opinion that libraries must play a role in instigating or developing these related facets of data management.
Publication of Datasets Staff expressed some interest/needs related to publishing datasets and deposit in repositories, but in most cases this was subsumed by the issues associated with managing the influx of data from current research.
Discussion One of the challenges in recruiting participants was to communicate the need for investigating new services at a time when the library is facing budget cutbacks and limitations.
In one case, a scientist voiced concerns over the erosion in serials subscriptions juxtaposed against the investment of resources in a new role in data curation.
This sentiment was rare, but does highlight the need for greater transparency on issues around scholarly communications and library budgets.
More common issues in the assessment itself were that of conveying definitions for terminology (i.e., metadata, curation), and establishing realistic expectations for what services the library might be able to provide in the near and long term.
The process of meeting with staff, collecting information, and acting as a sounding board will, it is hoped, facilitate relationships and trust that are critical to developing services and collaboration.
Other benefits have been realised from the assessment: increased awareness of data management issues among research staff and stakeholders in the campus organisation a number of requests for training for graduate students and lab personnel increased communication between research staff and the Libraries about data management issues and data curation Information technology support for e-science and cyberinfrastructure at the University is highly dependent on grant support and varies by lab, research institute, and department.
A decentralised information technology structure is an issue that was frequently commented on by scientists.
Appropriating the necessary resources and expertise for infrastructure enhancements will be challenging.
Despite budgetary and technology resource constraints, partnerships and collaborations based on trusted relationships can begin to address some of these gaps.
Exemplars of coordination within academic institutions, such as the E-Science Institute at the University of Washington [20] and those outlined by Soehner, et al [21] are gaining support among staff.
With the exceptions noted above regarding mandated data deposit, scientists were not working under strict data management plans.
The prospect of granting agencies implementing data management requirements, and the competitive advantages of such plans in proposals were noted by staff as incentives for improved data curation.
Although not a subject of this assessment, tenure-related incentives would in all likelihood also improve data curation practices by domain scientists [15].
Researcher concerns about data sharing are summarised by Martinez-Uribe and Macdonald [22], and the Libraries are not attempting to take a lead role in promoting open access science.
However, as is being seen in the nanoHUB site [23], structuring technology to facilitate discovery, usage, and citation can be a powerful factor in rewarding those who want to publish digital materials via pathways not traditionally associated with scholarly communication.
The final goal of the assessment was to identify researchers as partners for pilot data curation projects.
Two projects have been initiated with research staff.
Both of these collaborations are with service centres which generate analytical datasets for multiple labs in the biology and chemistry departments.
The objectives of the pilot projects are a direct response to issues defined by the assessment.
One of the most significant challenges will be to incorporate 'curation-friendly' functionality wherever possible in the outcomes of the projects.
The library literature generally refers to curation as '... active management and appraisal of digital information over its entire life cycle' [24] and stresses involvement early in the data life cycle [22].
To date, however, relatively few library-sponsored projects and tools seem to be directed toward data management at the point of data generation/collection.
The relative lack of exemplars that support curation in this part of the data life cycle may be a significant challenge.
Conclusion The needs assessment has proven to be a useful tool for investigating and characterising the data curation issues of research scientists.
The tested methods of the DAF and other assessment tools were critical to our ability to implement an assessment in a timely and successful manner.
The assessment generated actionable information, and the activities also set a foundation for scientists, librarians, and other stakeholders for ongoing conversations and collaboration.
The Libraries are looking forward to the next steps in support of data curation, and we hope that the development of data management guidelines, methods, tools, and training will provide templates for services by the Libraries that can be extended to other science research groups on campus.
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December 2007 http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_research/81/ Witt M, Carlson J, Brandt DS, Cragin MH.
Constructing Data Curation Profiles.
International Journal of Digital Curation.
2009 Dec 7 (cited 27 July 2010);4(3):93-103 http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/viewFile/137/165 Heidorn PB.
Shedding Light on the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science.
Library Trends.
2008 (cited 2 August 2010);57(2):280-299 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lib/summary/v057/57.2.heidorn.html The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM).
The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM).
(cited 2 August 2010) http://www.ncalm.org/home.html IRIS Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology.
(cited 2 August 2010) http://www.iris.edu/hq/ NREL: Solar Research Home Page.
(cited 2 August 2010) http://www.nrel.gov/solar/ Van den Eynden V, Corti L, Woollard M, Bishop L. Managing and Sharing Data: A Best Practice Guide for Researchers.
University of Essex; 2009. http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/media/2894/managingsharing.pdf University of Washington eScience Institute.
(cited 3 August 2010) http://escience.washington.edu/ Soehner C, Steeves C, Ward J. e-Science and data support services: a survey of ARL members.
In: International Association of Scientific and Technological University Libraries, 31st Annual Conference.
Purdue, IN: Purdue University Libraries; 2010 (cited 3 August 2010) ttp://docs.lib.purdue.edu/iatul2010/conf/day3/1 Martinez-Uribe L, Macdonald S. User Engagement in Research Data Curation.
In: Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries.
2009 (cited 3 August 2010).
p. 309-314 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04346-8_30 Haley B, Klimeck G, Luisier M, Vasileska D, Paul A, Shivarajapura S, et al.
Computational nanoelectronics research and education at nanoHUB.org.
Journal of Computational Electronics.
1 June 2009 (cited 3 August 2010);8(2):124-131. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10825-009-0273-3 Pennock M. Digital curation: a life-cycle approach to managing and preserving usable digital information.
Library and Archives Journal.
2007;1. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.pennock/publications/docs/lib-arch_curation.pdf Appendix – Interview Questions These questions were adapted with permission from the following sources: Data Audit Framework Methodology [6], Conducting a Data Interview [13], and Constructing Data Curation Profiles [14].
The report, Investigating Data Management Practices in Australian Universities [5] also provided some helpful ideas.
I.
General background A.
Who "owns" the data (is responsible for the intellectual content of the asset)?
B.
IT manager/person responsible for the asset: C. Department(s) where this data is generated/collected (drop-down list): D. Institute/centre(s) where this data is generated/collected (drop-down list) II.
Research Context A.
Subject and purpose of the data being collected: B.
Methods of data collection/generation: III.
Data form & format A.
File format(s), including transformation from raw to processed/final use data, if applicable.
B.
What form or structure is the data in?
: C. Is there metadata or other descriptive information for the asset?
: D. How large is the dataset?
(approximate file size and number of records): E. What is its rate of growth or update frequency?
: IV.
Data storage A.
Current Location: B.
How is the data backed up?
C. Are there related data repositories?
D. What is the expected lifespan of the dataset?
E. Are there grant requirements for data archiving, access, etc?
V. Access and Knowledge Transfer A.
Does the dataset contain any sensitive information (e.g., human subjects)?
B.
How could the data be used, reused, and repurposed?
C. If shared with others, how should the data be made accessible (and under what conditions)?
VI.
More Details Top Issues & Questions In this section of three identical questions, staff chose the top, second, and third priority issues for the above data asset, selecting from the following drop-down list.
They are also asked to provide comments to describe each issue more fully.
Choose the top (second, third) data management issue from the following list: None Connecting data acquisition to data storage (network and/or workflows) Connecting data storage to data analysis (network and/or workflows) Data storage and backup Data analysis/manipulation Finding and accessing related data from others Insuring data is secure/trustworthy Linking this data to publications or other assets Making this data findable by others Allowing or controlling access to this data by others Documenting and tracking updates to the asset Metadata No issues need to be addressed Other (describe below) Details / comments: Author Details Brian Westra Lorry I. Lokey Science Data Services Librarian University of Oregon Email: bwestra@uoregon.edu Web site: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/ Return to top Article Title: "Data Services for the Sciences: A Needs Assessment" Author: Brian Westra Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/westra/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review of The innovative school librarian Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review of The innovative school librarian Citation BibTex RIS Stella Thebridge reviews the second edition of a collaborative text offering a strategic approach to the leadership of school libraries.
The format of this second edition is apparently similar to that of the first (2009), with the regular use of short scenarios or ‘vignettes’.
The first of these heads the preface, and others are then used frequently within each chapter to illustrate new subjects.
This approach is designed to increase the readability of the text (in which it succeeds) while aiming to offer examples of ‘real-life’ everyday situations for those managing libraries in secondary schools.
The contributors note that the vignettes are drawn from comments and queries on the popular School Librarian Network, and this gives them a ring of authenticity.
That the opening vignette is actually the same as that used in the preface to the first edition, is noted by the writers as evidencing the lack of real change in the sector in terms of the school library manager’s role.
While circumstances have changed in librarianship, in education and politically and socially, the authors note that there is still a focus for many school librarians on the resources and day-to-day management of the library rather than the broader contribution of the librarian to teaching and learning in the school, and that this can be exacerbated by the views of others as to the library role in school.
This means that the librarian’s contribution to school life, in terms both of pupils’ development and achievement and support for teaching, instead of receiving the recognition due, can be seen as irrelevant or becomes subsumed into the work of departments.
This book tries to offer ways to support those librarians, most of whom are working solo, and, even where there might be a colleague working as an assistant, there is unlikely to be another at the same professional level except in the largest state schools / academies or in parts of the independent sector.
The book has three main sections, each further subdivided into three chapters.
The contents list shows each of these subdivisions with their own six to eight subject headings.
The three main sections are as follows: Who is the librarian?
Your community: from perceptions to practice Moving forward.
The first examines the professionalism of school librarians today and their self-perceptions, the way others might view the role, and ways of bridging the gap between the two.
In terms of the view looking in on the librarian, there is mention of the students themselves and school staff, of course, and also parents and governors.
There is brief discussion (p30) of external bodies with a wider remit, not just national and local government or those who might make inspections in school, but some of the national bodies like The Reading Agency and the National Literacy Trust, who might make pronouncements which affect the view of libraries in schools.
Any of these bodies might, whether involuntarily or not, undermine the role or status of libraries either by perpetuating a view that is not borne out by research or simply by omitting to mention them at all.
This potential problem is not emphasised here, and while this is addressed to a certain extent in Part 3 of the book, it is important that professional librarians in any sector understand that they have to keep abreast of reports and research findings and promote or challenge them both within school and with professional colleagues.
This leads to another concern that does not appear to be fully addressed in this book, which is, as the audience is predominantly solo workers, that these understand the need for and power of networking with colleagues not only in their immediate area but more widely and across sectors too.
Linked to this is the apparent lack of any mention of Schools’ Library Services (SLSs) except in a brief reference to a SLS newsletter in Appendix 4 (p162) (I searched thoroughly for this).
I must declare an interest, of course, but it seems a shame that this network does not appear to merit a few sentences.
SLSs have been lending books and other resources in bulk to schools for many years, and nowadays usually operate as traded (subscription) services within public library or education departments, or, increasingly with museum and heritage services where these offer similar resource loans.
While there are some authorities where there is no longer a SLS, many do still exist, and these often trade with schools in surrounding local authorities if these no longer offer such a service.
So, many secondary school librarians have this service available to them, which not only offers the facility for loans to be made directly into the school library, but SLS staff also offer advice, maintenance and makeover work, CPD programmes and regular network meetings for the school librarians in their area (whether or not they are signed up to the loan services of the SLS).
This network is crucial to the participants and complements others in existence, for example through the wider regions of the School Library Association and CILIP-SLG.
Again, a vignette in the “Inspiration” section of Moving forward (Part 3) quotes a school librarian getting together with a couple of neighbouring schools to run a book award (p113).
Many SLSs already run these and can take away the burden of organising as well as sorting the reading of the books to choose the shortlist.
Many more schools can be involved in an authority-wide award, and thereby SLSs create economies of scale and a much bigger final celebration and consequent greater buzz for the students.
A mention of these and those run in some authorities by public library services, or wider “City Reads” initiatives, for example, would have been helpful.
While it could be said that the first two parts of the book set the scene and the final part gives ideas for moving forward, the use of the vignettes means that in most cases the discussion and ideas run through the whole book.
It does mean that the reader benefits from reading the whole text rather than dipping in and out, and the index is not comprehensive for the latter.
That the book should be read through in this way is also intention of the authors as stated on p xi.
There are seven appendices which vary in length and maybe also usefulness.
I struggled with the meaning of Appendix 1 and could not find reference to it back in the text as to why it was included.
Appendix 7 is a lengthy extract from a work about change management, which basically lists three steps: initiation, implementation and incorporation.
It did not appear to give much fresh insight to the process of change or innovation.
The book speaks at the end of innovation being at the heart of what librarians must do in school (as indicated in the book’s title), yet other parts of the book make it clear that, while there have already been innovative, imaginative, enterprising librarians, supported in their schools with Head of Department or even Assistant Head status, contributing meaningfully to teaching and learning, and respected for their power to change young people’s lives, as a whole we are no nearer dispelling the physical stereotypes of librarians (p34), just as in libraries generally there is still the tiresome myth that they are places of enforced quiet where librarians always say ‘Shush’.
It is not clear how widely this will be read by school librarians for several reasons: firstly, the book is expensive for individuals, even with a CILIP member’s discount, and most purchases would be for single use in schools where budgets are already low.
How many school librarians will be able to catch sight of it?
Secondly, while there are some helpful ideas, more experienced librarians will know much of the background already.
They may also find some of the stories in the vignettes too good to be true.
When faced with their own situation and experience it just will not be possible for them to break past a key manager in school who has no interest in the library, and reading some of these scenarios which show ‘quick fixes’ or ‘easy wins’ may just add to their sense of helplessness.
Thirdly, there is a sense that this book is trying to promote the professionalism of school librarians in terms of librarianship graduate or post-graduate degrees as the benchmark for success in the role.
While professionalism is not an unreasonable goal, this emphasis is practically not helpful for those who are managing school libraries well, though on pay-scales that do not reflect the professionalism of their work, or, conversely, where they are achieving good results and working well in school, yet with graduate or post-graduate qualifications in disciplines other than librarianship or information science.
This particular section of the library community might feel better served by other publications, e.g.
from the School Library Association, who produce a range of very practical guides to specific areas of day-to-day school library management.
If the format used here, with the vignettes, were divided up similarly, with less of the background information and more of the practical examples, this might represent better value than the present text as it is presented and priced.
The work that relates specifically to innovation could then stand out and be used by those who really need this boost to their work.
Most of the background as it currently stands will either be known by readers or can be gained elsewhere, especially through the existing informal networks (online and face to face).
The ‘nitty-gritty’ might be more usefully distilled into a leaner and more practical handbook.
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Book Review: Reader Development in Practice Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Reader Development in Practice Buzz cataloguing ebook Citation BibTex RIS Abigail Luthmann examines a varied collection of approaches to the topic of reader development.
This book spans a wide-ranging approach to reader development, including contributions from an author, a poet, a bookseller, academics, librarians, literature development workers and a not-otherwise-affiliated reading group member.
It certainly provides a decent overview of the very different ways individuals engage with literature, some very relevant to public library practice (my field), others of more abstract interest, and some perhaps less relevant.
The book is formed in five themed sections and I shall examine each of them in turn.
The Author as Reader The introductory chapter takes us direct to the source with an account from published crime author Ann Cleeves of the process of writing, from inspiration to publication.
This is a very accessible narration; Ann positions herself clearly as a reader first, author second, and she explains the influences and images that feed into her novels.
Ann is a big fan of public libraries and the new readers they can provide for her books.
She describes the increasing number of (particularly crime) authors who group together and tour libraries and bookshops promoting their wares and providing an evening's entertainment.
From experience Ann enjoys the new readers attracted by events in libraries, promoted by passionate and knowledgeable staff to their individual readers and networks of reading groups keen to try new authors.
Promotions and Partnerships The most directly relevant chapter to public librarians, this section details practical examples of reader development work, the importance of social inclusion and changing attitudes of library staff to a pro-active reader-friendly approach.
Jane Mathieson, Regional Co-ordinator of 'Time to Read', details the growth and accomplishments of this pioneering regional reader development network in North-West England.
This is an inspiring example of what committed regional co-operation can achieve; a broad range of successful promotions from poetry to local writing, and including the Big Gay Read, titles and materials which were sold nationwide via their supplier partner, Bertrams.
The importance of a socially inclusive approach to reader development is the subject of Linda Corrigan's chapter, in which she considers the spectrum of the traditionally excluded: travellers, BME (Black and Minority Ethnic), LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) and disabled people, and focuses on people with visual impairment.
The chapter is an excellent summary of the challenges facing the latter group of readers, the different ways printed text can be accessed, and the changes that can be made in library practice greatly to improve their experience of access, selection and reading.
Anne Sherman's chapter charts her experiences in Cheshire of reader development becoming a central part of their remit rather than an add-on.
It is the usual stuff; reading groups, author events, workshops and music.
The changing attitude of staff, from that of hostile to the more welcoming which she illustrates, is probably a common experience.
Moreover, there is still room for improvement, as the recent Opening the Book publication, The Reader Friendly Library Service suggests [1], with a similar approach to Sherman (negative quotation from staff rebutted with evidence of success of new approach).
This section concludes with a personal favourite, an account of the 'Get Into Reading' (GIR) Project, initiated in Liverpool by Jane Davis.
Much has been written about the fantastic work the GIR reading groups do, breaking the traditionally middle-class reading group mould wide open and enabling people from a wide variety of backgrounds and abilities to engage directly with the words of authors and poets in supportive and inclusive group environments.
To hear the genesis of the project, and Davis' own journey, and those of some of the reading group members is both moving and powerful.
Davis' interviewees range from a carer, a pair living in a homeless shelter, to several mental health service users all powerful advocates for the impact that reading together and supportively, has had on their lives.
This is an important project, now spreading throughout the country, and one with which local authorities need to be engaging now.
Works of Imagination This section explores a wide range of new, and older, ways of engaging with literature.
Calum Kerr gives an introduction to the world of hypertexts.
He provides a multiplicity of means of navigation through a text using hyperlinks, rather than being confined to a single route imposed by the author from beginning to end.
A product of Kerr's recent PhD, the chapter is rather theory-heavy for an otherwise relatively practical book; however it does provide an interesting diversion.
Kay Sampbell discusses the increasing prevalence of novels for teens and young adults exploring dystopian themes.
These themes require young readers to face often bleak interpretations of the nature of humanity, sometimes tempered with a traditionally redemptive ending, sometimes not.
Kerr claims that recent novels by authors such as Garth Nix and Melvin Burgess mix narrative styles and elements of popular culture in order to create a complex, multi-layered reading experience that appeals particularly to young men, challenging the prevalent narrative of crisis and illiteracy that often surrounds accounts of contemporary youth.
A month in the life of practising poet, librarian and publisher forms the concluding chapter of this section.
Mike Garry is based in North-West England and through his poems and others' he works with a variety of groups, particularly young people, to engage them with words and reading.
Outputs include his own work, and publishing the creative efforts of those with whom he works; his enthusiasm and dedication are clear in his chosen diary format.
Future Directions A really mixed barrel in this final group: we are offered one long, and one shorter discussion of e-books as the main future direction for the printed word; a bit of a moan from an academic bookseller; and then an account of professional education in reader development.
Clare Warwick provides a thorough exploration of the history and current status of e-books.
Not the paradigm-shifting technology they were initially heralded as, but quite useful in particular fields.
Seemingly a result of the technological difficulties of recreating the emotional and physical experience fiction readers in particular have with the physical bound book, e-books and their accompanying hardware are not likely to take over the plastic-jacketed paperback from the library shelves anytime soon.
Those retailers, and the occasional library authority which had bravely poked its wallet over the parapet, have receded (Essex being the notable exception [2]).
However, for academic libraries and technical readers where a single chapter is often all that is required, the e-book format has clear advantages for both the reader and the library service over a limited number of paper copies.
The e-book is addressed again in a jointly authored chapter by Bob Glass, Ann Barlow and Andrew Glass questioning whether the era of Caxton is ended.
The rise of e-books is discussed more briefly, without the helpful distinctions of Warwick's chapter, and suggesting a greater impact on traditional publishing and bookselling operations.
For libraries the increase in electronic access is evidenced, as is the falling footfall, suggesting that access to books as well as information electronically from the public library is the way forward.
However this is a partial view and the chapter does not go into sufficient depth to air the many factors at play thoroughly.
Mike Mizrahi provides an account of the survival strategies with which he engages in order to survive as an academic bookseller.
They include the cultivation of a reader base, promotional opportunities and a few digs at the academics providing his bread and butter.
Considering reader development is predominantly a concern of public librarians, this seemed the most irrelevant chapter of the collection, as an account of the strategies employed by a general bookseller attracting fiction readers would seem to be a more obvious choice.
The final chapter of this section elucidates the reasoning behind the collection: a reader development module run at Manchester Metropolitan University for library and information students.
The majority of contributors also appears to have had a slot on the module programme, which provides a whistle-stop tour through key issues in the field, from the development of children's literature to literacy initiatives, storytelling, electronic resources and managing collections.
A good advert for the innovative teaching at the university, this module clearly aims to provide a good grounding in the diversity of approaches to engaging reader with book.
The Reader as Author The collection closes with a personally revealing chapter of a reader's experiences with several book groups, suggesting that as Ranganathan had 'every book its reader' [3], then also every reader his or her book group.
The author, Francine Sagar, reports attending two groups, one public library-based, one private, before finding one that fitted with her social and intellectual requirements of a reading group.
Conclusion This is a rather mixed selection of practical examples, arguments and opinions around the topic of reader development.
Having been given the full list of topics from the original module, I might have chosen contributors a little differently, and would certainly have liked to see more on reading development for children.
As a collection to be dipped into by a variety of practitioners, academics and students, it is a valuable tool however, and a good introduction to a range of issues and projects, as well as a source of inspiration for professional practice.
References Fowler, Van Riel and Downes, The Reader Friendly Library Service.
2008, London: Society of Chief Librarians.
Essex County Digital Catalogue http://essex.bookaisle.com/D059BBB6-850D-49DB-A6D7-B08F1F60B8AF/10/233/en/ Ranganathan, S.R., Five laws of library science.
1931, London: Edward Goldston.
Author Details Abigail Luthmann Librarian West Sussex County Council Email: abigail.luthmann@westsussex.gov.uk Web site: http://outofthestacks.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Reader Development in Practice: Bringing literature development to readers" Author: Abigail Luthmann Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/luthmann-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 73 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 73 Buzz data mobile infrastructure archives metadata digitisation cataloguing research Citation BibTex RIS The Editor introduces Issue 73 and provides an update on the future of Ariadne.
The requirement to make a business case to maintain or establish a service or a project is a familiar process for many of us working in Libraries.
Many libraries are asked to justify their very existence on a regular basis.
Some succeed, others unfortunately do not.
We all seem to be doing more with less, and 'lean' is how we normally describe our staffing level.
14 months ago we made a case to top level University administration for an initiative around citations improvement, seeking funds for investment in a service to improve publication performance and citations analysis.
This aligned perfectly with University strategy on league table movement and research assessment.
It was exceptionally well-received and is proving a popular and valued service.
Conversely our case for resource to support an internationally reknowned magazine specialising in innovative and yet practical information management was not successful.
Advancing our case outside the University was not successful either.
So as some of our readers will be aware, this is the final issue of Ariadne to be produced by the University of Bath Library.
Pressures on time and resources have resulted in a long wait between issues and the sensible option is to step back from production.
That said, Issue 73 of Ariadne continues to report on practical experiences, innovative methods and horizon scanning to forecast how future information services can be delivered.
Henshaw, Thompson and Baleia build on their earlier article [1] discussing work on the UK-MHL project to digitise medical history texts using high levels of automation to the acquisition and processing of content.
They outline the principal systems used for each workflow task, from the Internet Archive digitisation process, to de-duplication of material, to the creation of a Medical Heritage Library Mirror at the Wellcome Library.
Running with the collections theme, Celia Jenkins of EDINA looks at SUNCAT (Serials UNion CATalogue) as the service has developed and matured over the last ten years.
In addition to looking back at the launch and growth of the service, Jenkins takes us through some of the plans and challenges facing SUNCAT, including mobile-friendly interface, geolocation of contributing libraries, and linkage to other services such as JUSP and the Keepers Registry.
Martin White takes us on a retrospective through Ariadne’s archives looking at the development of metadata over the last 20 or so years.
In doing so, he highlights the contribution made by UKOLN to this field in both developing, implementing and fine-tuning metadata schemas.
In no small way, this work has been responsible for bringing some semblance of order to the Internet and the names will be familiar to anyone that has worked on information management.
Measuring Library building usage is crucial to many organisations today, providing data and testimony to demonstrate footfall into Library space.
Gary Brewerton and Jason Cooper report on Visualising Building Access Data, giving their experience with the introduction of access controls for purposes of safe occupancy levels, and how the resulting log data has offered many more clues to the patterns of use and users entering and leaving the building.
Those of you planning to optimise your Library space, or responding to pressures over buildings and infrastructure will find this article invaluable as it reflects on sources of evidence for such a purpose.
Looking at user uptake of mobile devices and key requirements for Higher Education libraries is the focus of Lizzie Caperon's article Developing Adaptable, Efficient Mobile Library Services: Librarians as Enablers which is based on a questionnaire from Leeds University Library.
Reducing barriers, empowering users to access information autonomously, and building in forward-compatible flexibility for the interfaces we use are shown to be key when considering the delivery of information and services to our current users.
Aiofe Lawton and Eimear Flynn use the results from two recent surveys to explore how open access publishing may add value to a number of health and social care professionals and their work in the Irish health system.
As they note in their article The Value of Open Access Publishing to Health and Social Care Professionals in Ireland, the value of Open Access to readers, authors, teachers, students, libraries, funders of research, governments and citizens has been well documented.
But what about patients and health professionals?
Zoe Hurley and Garth Bradshaw share their views on the venue, content and takeaway messages from the Internet Librarian International Conference, held in London in October 2014.
Also keeping you up to date, Fiona MacLellan reviews Peggy Johnson’s text on the Fundamentals of Library Collection Development and recommends readers will find the text useful as a reference, dipping into relevant sections as necessary.
As noted in the introduction, this is the final issue to be produced by the University of Bath Library.
That is not to say this is necessarily the final issue completely should the resources and effort to continue production be available elsewhere (please do get in touch) then you'll see her again.
Ariadne has a very passionate and active community who would be happy to see her re-awakened from her rest.
References Christy Henshaw, Robert Kiley.
"The Wellcome Library, Digital".
July 2013, Ariadne Issue 71 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue71/henshaw-kiley Author Details Kara Jones Ariadne Editor Email: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/contact/webform Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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RDA: Resource Description and Access Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines RDA: Resource Description and Access Buzz data schema video cataloguing marc aacr2 frbr marc21 onix webinar frad research standards Citation BibTex RIS Wendy Taylor and Helen Williams report on CILIP's Executive Briefings on RDA : Resource Description and Access held at CILIP on 23 March 2010 and repeated at the Bloomsbury Hotel on 30 March 2010.
In June 2010 Anglo American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), [1] the cataloguing standard in use for the last thirty years, will be replaced by Resource Description and Access (RDA) [2].
As the biggest change in bibliographic standards since the adoption of MARC21 ten years ago, the new rules have inspired much discussion in the cataloguing community and beyond.
This briefing, organised by CILIP, aimed to provide an overview of the new standard as well as addressing the impact on librarians and libraries.
Anne Welsh, Lecturer in Library and Information Studies at University College London, chaired the day.
The Why, What, How and When of RDA: The Current State of Play Ann Chapman, Research Officer UKOLN and Chair of the CILIP-BL Committee on RDA Ann took us through an overview of AACR from its beginnings in 1967 up to 2005 when the decision was made to develop RDA due to the negative feedback received on the initial draft of AACR3.
In recent years AACR has become increasingly complex to use due to the explosion of new formats and content being held in libraries.
Its Anglo-centric viewpoint has often been cited as a barrier in the growing international environment and as a standard written prior to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [3] it does not take account of many of the principles on which we now base information retrieval.
Much of AACR has of course been very successful and Ann noted that many of the key principles would still be valid in RDA, while other rules would still be appropriate but would need re-wording.
RDA itself will be more easily applicable to an online networked environment and will provide effective bibliographic control for all types of media, including future formats.
As it is compatible with other similar standards, it will be useful to communities beyond the library and will be structured on internationally agreed principles.
A particular focus will be the recording of relationships: between works, expressions, manifestations and items; between persons, families and corporate bodies; and between concepts, objects, events and places.
RDA will be launched as an online product with text linking and functionality supporting the creation of bookmarking and workflows, both institutional and personal.
So what does it all mean for cataloguing managers?
Overall RDA should enable cataloguers to put better data into OPACS which will then result in better search and display options for users.
Therefore, Ann concluded, RDA presented us with multiple opportunities to be embraced.
Introduction to Resource Description and Access: Cataloguing and Classification in the Digital Era Exclusive video presentation by Shawne D Miksa, Associate Professor, Department of Library and Information Sciences, University of North Texas Shawne discussed the relationship of RDA to the fundamental principles of bibliographic control.
Information must be organised to support access and retrieval.
In the digital age, when users expect to find information through Internet search engines, what is the role of libraries and their catalogues?
Cataloguers must do more than simply describe an item, they must become in Shawne’s words ‘the translators, or interpreters’.
In the past, librarians have helped users to interpret search results; but now users frequently search the catalogue alone, often remotely, and so the catalogue record is often the only connection between the user and a librarian.
Cataloguers must understand how the structure of the catalogue records they create enable users to accomplish certain tasks.
FRBR and FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) define entity relationships and user tasks and these concepts form the foundation of RDA.
It is not a change in the rules of cataloguing but uses the principles of cataloguing to broaden the scope of what we can catalogue and enrich the connection between users and resources.
Transition to RDA: A BL Perspective Alan Danskin, Manager of Data Quality, The British Library Alan began by considering why we need a new set of cataloguing rules.
When Antonio Panizzi, Chief Librarian of the British Museum, laid down his cataloguing rules in 1841 he was dealing with an entirely print environment, where access points had to be limited to reduce expense, and where material was being catalogued for an audience who would be highly educated.
Those rules laid the foundations for AACR, yet today library catalogues are accessed by a far more diverse community, with different expectations, and without the technological constraints of Panizzi’s day.
RDA will be more extensible with principles-based instructions encouraging the cataloguer to make judgements rather than legislating for every possible case.
The clearly defined element set of RDA will allow improved granularity and improved mapping to other schema such as Dublin Core while the greater emphasis on relationships will allow better navigation and displays making catalogues more user-focused.
RDA will be published in June 2010 and access will be free from publication until the end of August 2010.
The US already has a big testing exercise underway [4] but the UK, Canada and Australia will not be carrying out such a formalised process.
Instead National Libraries will be testing and feeding back to the rest of the community.
Alan highlighted that one thing the BL would be looking at during testing would be workflows.
Having established an efficient workflow using AACR, this is something the Library will not want to put at risk; so careful consideration about whether to implement RDA would be needed if it cannot be used as efficiently as AACR2 (though obviously it will take time for cataloguers to adjust).
UK prices for RDA have not yet been announced, though US prices are available and it is likely that UK prices will be based on them (taking into account exchange rates and different tax regimes).
The concept of RDA as a free product has been considered, but this was rejected by the publishers who have paid for the development process and who will need income to sustain the standard.
Pricing for the UK will be available from the email address rdatoolkit@ala.org in due course.
It is the publishers, rather than the Joint Steering Committee (JSC), who will decide on the pricing structure.
In terms of local system configuration there will be changes to make: to indexing, value lists, templates, validation, macros and to import/export profiles.
RDA records will be able to co-habit in the same system as older records but will be identified by an RDA flag in 040 $e and by a code in the Leader field.
Changes have been made to MARC21 to enable it to work more effectively with RDA.
[5] Few changes will be necessary to legacy data, though there are a few exceptions to this.
General material designations (which can be broken into carrier types by a global change), the recording of Biblical headings and the elimination of abbreviations (which are likely to be corrected in a NACO file and redistributed by the Library of Congress (LC)).
Obviously the more updates we make to existing data, the greater the benefits to users; but on the whole, these advantages will be seen as systems evolve and as records are enriched over time.
The BL plans to start testing RDA when the online product is published.
This will include implementation with Aleph, MARC21 changes, workflow testing, scenario evaluation (such as how to proceed if the Library of Congress does not implement RDA), creation of, and exchange of test data.
This will then be used to inform training requirements for the UK, which will be rolled out through the BL, CILIP and the Cataloguing and Indexing Group of CILIP.
Live Demonstration of RDA Alan Danskin, Manager of Data Quality, The British Library After hearing all about the benefits of RDA, we were given the opportunity to see the RDA Toolkit for ourselves.
For those unable to attend the session, a webinar demonstration of the Toolkit is available [6].
The Toolkit has been developed to support access to the content of RDA by the Co-Publishers for RDA (the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and Facet Publishing, the publishing arm of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals).
Whereas AACR2 was published in a hard copy book, RDA will be made available via an interactive online product through an annual subscription.
Users will have a login account and any annotations or bookmarks they make can be transferred with them if they change organisation.
RDA instructions are searchable and browsable.
A table of contents is available for the user to browse the content, whilst the search facility enables the user to perform simple text searches or limit for more advanced searches.
RDA online contains the content of AACR2 and it is possible to search via AACR rule numbers.
Searches can be saved to your profile and search results are ranked according to relevancy.
The Toolkit contains several resources to aid the understanding of RDA, for example a glossary and examples within the text.
It also includes mappings to MARC21, information on RDA elements and FRBR/FRAD entities all of which would be useful in training cataloguers.
Organisations (and individuals) will also be able to develop their own workflows and instructions.
RDA and the Future Cataloguing Community Anne Welsh, Lecturer in Library and Information Studies, University College London Just before lunch Anne gave us a very thought-provoking session suggesting that, rather than being completely new, FRBR actually has the same aims and goals as Cutter and Ranganathan’s user-centric approach and that in producing RDA the JSC has dug to the foundations of cataloguing principles.
Re-engineering the cataloguing code to make it stronger has taken longer than expected and this has made it hard for practitioners to determine what steps they should take and when.
A decision to move to RDA will in part depend on how risk averse both you and your organisation are.
To try and determine the kind of changes RDA might bring about in our cataloguing practices, Anne reported on a practical exercise she had carried out with her students: she asked them to look at the examples given in Appendix M of RDA and to assess whether the changes from an AACR2 record of the same title were big, small or no change at all.
They found that most of the changes were small.
Anne suggested that examining these examples was a useful exercise within our own institutions to determine what kind of changes might occur to our records and procedures and to begin thinking how we might deal with them.
For example, the elimination of abbreviations means p. becomes pages which could be corrected in one global edit, and then any resulting fields containing the data ‘1 pages’ go through another global edit to become 1 page.
Finally Anne considered what RDA means for the next generation of cataloguers.
General cataloguing principles are usually taught using the main cataloguing code of the day but while we are almost between standards this is slightly complex.
A library school teaches theory, but practical experience is also needed.
Picking up on Alan’s point that principles-based instructions encourage the cataloguer to make judgements rather than legislating for every possible case, Anne voiced an initial concern she had considered that with the Options and Alternatives allowed in RDA we could end up with a Babel-like situation making it harder to teach new students.
The aim therefore is to teach them principles and international standards which can then be easily overwritten with local practices once students are in professional posts.
Spinning Straw into Gold: How to Manage Change without Losing Your Sanity Heather Jardine, Bibliographical Access Manager, City of London Libraries Heather provided a voice of caution to delegates considering adopting RDA without consideration and planning.
Any change bears a degree of cost and so it is important to weigh up the benefits.
What will RDA be able to do which is not currently possible?
What are the true costs of implementation?
There is not just the subscription rate to consider but also costs in terms of staff training, additional staff time spent cataloguing whilst they get used to new processes, retrospective conversion and system adaptations.
RDA places a greater emphasis on authority records and access points but maintaining them takes time which is in itself a cost.
If the user can already find the items they require why invest in additional information?
If more descriptive records do make a difference then be clear what these benefits are and sell the rewards to management, whose priority in the current economic climate is to reduce, not increase, costs.
As well as convincing management of the benefits, staff will need to be involved in the change to make it successful.
If staff understand the reasons for changes to work practices and feel engaged in the change process, they will be more enthusiastic about the change.
Heather suggested that project managers should be approachable and enthusiastic if they are to get staff engaged.
RDA is an online tool and so the project manager should be someone who is used to the digital non-linear environment.
Staff should be given a good understanding of the cataloguing principles and terminology on which RDA is based.
Many involved in cataloguing are para-professionals and may not be familiar with FRBR or even the reasoning behind the AACR2 rules.
The project manager should take the time to explain these concepts to staff rather than simply implementing a new procedure.
Heather suggested organisations should soon begin to introduce staff to RDA and FRBR terminology, so that the concepts and reasoning behind the changes are understood when change is implemented later.
With careful planning and implementation the change process need not be difficult.
As Heather herself summed up, ‘Enjoy the journey as well as the destination.’ From MARC21 to RDA: A Suppliers Perspective on the Transition Gwyneth Morgan, Senior Manager, Editorial Systems, Nielsen Book (23 March only) After much discussion from the cataloguing perspective, it was very useful to listen to a supplier perspective.
Gwyneth talked about the BookData information services that are just one strand of Nielsen Book’s work.
As suppliers of aggregated data to a range of customers they have to think carefully about whether RDA is something customers want before they adopt a new standard.
However Gwyneth was equally aware that as an industry book leader, if they do not adopt RDA, others may not be encouraged to do so, thereby leaving Nielsen Book in a slightly ‘see-saw’ position.
The challenge for a supply company is that both input and output data will be affected.
With a number of customers still using UKMARC, it is to be expected that not all customers will move to RDA, and Nielsen Book has to be ready to meet customer needs on both sides of the equation for both library and non-library customers.
Changes cannot be made to data if they will be damaging to customers in the publishing sector for example.
As well as challenges, however, there will be opportunities for suppliers who adopt RDA.
The ability to record more data than AACR currently allows will mean that libraries receive data of equal quality to that received by publishers through ONIX.
There is also the potential for RDA to be a springboard for the development of better products.
From MARC21 to RDA: An Alternative View Keith Tricky, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University (30 March only) Keith began by outlining some of the challenges to the adoption of RDA.
He identified a low level of awareness of the link between MARC and AACR2.
Awareness increased with the move to MARC21 and the need to apply punctuation as defined by AACR2, but UKMARC is still widely used in the UK.
Digital media presents a new challenge for descriptive cataloguing.
In the past items have been, Keith argues, broadly self-describing (e.g.
a book contains a title page, ISBN, number of pages etc.)
and the cataloguer simply has to record that information using a set of rules.
Digital resources do not always contain this information in an easily identifiable form and this can lead to a lack of consistency in description.
In the past there was a limited number of resources and so the links and relationships between those items were important.
In the modern age of the Internet there are so many resources that to create too many links adds to the complexity.
The changes which have occurred in MARC21 as a response to RDA were outlined.
The most signicant changes have occurred in the 3XX physical description fields.
There are new fields for content (336), media (337) and carrier (338) following the replacement of GMD.
There is also greater complexity for authority records, including the option to record information relating to gender for name authority headings.
Keith suggested to delegates that they consider carefully how many of these fields they will actually need.
How many cataloguers create authority headings?
How many records are produced in-house and how many are imported?
And finally, which is more important to you: MARC21 or AACR2?
Roundtable Discussion: What Now for RDA?
A number of interesting points were raised during the Roundtable discussions and during the question-and-answer periods throughout the day.
Those of particular interest are covered below.
It was noted that there were no talks by LMS representatives and that without them it was hard to think through the practicalities of implementation.
Anne mentioned that two vendors had been invited but had declined to attend based on the grounds they did not yet have enough information from the American Library Association (ALA).
Another question related to how the success of RDA could be demonstrated to managers given the likely expense of implementation.
Discussion was around the use of a feedback button on the library catalogue, a catalogue use survey, and deep log analysis.
It was voiced by several delegates that a subscription charge would be difficult for smaller organisations to justify, especially in the current economic climate.
UK subscription rates for the RDA Toolkit have not yet been announced but it is expected that they will be comparable to the US prices available [2].
Free access will be available following publication in June until the end of August 2010 as part of the testing phase and it was recommended to all that they make the most of this opportunity to evaluate the resource.
A matter of concern for many was the implication of the Library of Congress not adopting RDA.
Alan speculated that if this does become the case then the BL would have to consider the future carefully as it is heavily dependent on LC records.
Germany and Scandinavia, however are keen to translate and implement RDA and so it is not inconceivable that RDA would have a future without the LC.
The results of their testing are expected to be made available in March 2011.
In terms of training materials, the British Library has received copies of the LC national testing documents and will be investigating, with the Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG), what training will be needed for a UK audience.
Conclusion Both CILIP Executive Briefing sessions were well attended, with a total of over 170 delegates over the two separate days.
There was a great deal of discussion about the cost and benefits of RDA and only time will tell if it will be fully implemented.
For now though, the sessions provided the cataloguing community with the information needed to begin its crucial discussions with management, system suppliers and staff.
References Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) http://www.aacr2.org/ RDA: Resource Description and Access Toolkit http://www.rdaonline.org/ Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records by IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records Testing Resource Description and Access (RDA) http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/ RDA in MARC January 2010: MARC Standards (Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress) http://www.loc.gov/marc/RDAinMARC29.html Webinar demonstration of the RDA Toolkit http://www.rdatoolkit.org/training/guidedtour Author Details Wendy Taylor Bibliographic Services Librarian RNIB National Library Service Email: Wendy.Taylor@rnib.org.uk Web site: http://www.rnib.org.uk/library Helen Williams Assistant Librarian, Bibliographic Services London School of Economics and Political Science Email: h.k.williams@lse.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library Return to top Article Title: “RDA: Resource Description and Access” Author: Wendy Taylor and Helen Williams Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/rda-briefing-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 70 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 70 Buzz data mobile software framework wiki database xml portal archives metadata digitisation standardisation accessibility identifier schema repositories preservation aggregation perl ejournal licence wcag privacy research standards bs8878 raptor sushi jstor Citation BibTex RIS The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne Issue 70.
Welcome to Issue 70 of Ariadne which is full to the brim with feature articles and a wide range of event reports and book reviews.
In Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs Theo Andrew explains the significance of the recent RCUK amendment to their Open Access policy requirements of researchers and the importance assumed by the cost of publishing the Gold Open Access route.
Unsurprisingly, there is currently a great variability in such costs to research institutions, while, with few exceptions, publishers are as yet slow to impart what effect the move to charging for article processing will have on current institutional subscription costs.
It is Theo’s aim in his article to cast what light he can on the matter by presenting data on article processing charges (APCs) gathered over the last five years.
He begins by stating ‘The Problem’ which simply enough calculates the publication costs to an institution’s research departments if they attempted to follow RCUK’s preferred Gold OA route.
Immediately it is clear that the sums involved will require rationing on their part.
Theo demonstrates that what information is available on article processing charges (APCs), estimations of unit cost vary, nor, as he explains, have there not been valiant attempts to gain a view of the likely costs – but the picture gained from the data available from over 100 publishers is a patchy and inconsistent area.
Theo therefore goes on to supply data on articles published by Edinburgh where an APC was applied.
He supplies an analysis of the comparison of APC costs with the prestige of the journals in which articles to those charges were published, and provides a calculation of the mean APC costs and related impact factor.
They draw our attention towards how little is known about the cost of peer review – or the practices of offsetting unavoidable costs.
While emphasising, quite rightly, the limited size of the data available, Theo does direct us to some interesting conclusions about the types of journal involved, and the fees for article processing charged.
While it is important to recognise the constraints described by the author, the findings and questions he raises in his Discussion section are not without interest.
In their article Upskilling Liaison Librarians for Research Data Management, Andrew Cox, Eddy Verbaan and Barbara Sen explore the design of a curriculum to train academic librarians in the competencies to support Research Data Management.
They begin by considering new roles HE libraries are likely to adopt in meeting new demands from researchers in connection with the expansion in research data management (RDM).
To address these demands, JISC has funded the White Rose Consortium  to produce learning materials in particular for liaison librarians.
This article seeks to summarise the project’s approach to the scope and standard of such learning materials.
The authors maintain that libraries are already widely recognised as being well-positioned within HEIs to adopt a major role in RDM because of their existing skills in advocacy and communication.
Nonetheless, they will encounter problems.
Not least will be how to accommodate their new roles amongst all the others.
In addition, librarians will have to contend with the complexity, large-scale and transitory nature of current data practices.
Organising new roles related to RDM within liaison librarians’ existing activities is not automatically straight-forward and could require a radical change in some practitioners’ professional outlook.
The authors provide an overview of likely librarian roles and their associated competences in RDM and how they map to existing librarian roles.
They also highlight a further raft of roles which operate in support of research effort.
The authors consider existing curricula in RDM and digital curation, and the three key issues in UK and US LIS schools.
The RDMRose Project’s planning took account of the daunting challenge confronting some librarians and made suitable provison.
In addition to producing material on concepts and policy, the project also addressed how to give ‘students’ a practical understanding of core methods and tools, including hands-on experience and the opportunity to discuss them.
The authors’ conclusions on sound approaches to developing learning materials that will provide the desired learning outcomes are succinctly expressed and are supported by an appendix detailing the course content.
In The LIPARM Project: A New Approach to Parliamentary Metadata, Richard Gartner explains that the study of United Kingdom parliamentary proceedings has been facilitated by the fact that it is possible to consult them in digital form.
However, since they do not appear in one homogenous collection, it is not yet possible to search the material over one single system.
Richard provides an effective illustration of how something as seemingly straightforward as a politician’s name can present searchers with considerable difficulties.
He goes on to explain how JISC was instrumental in promoting the realisation of a long-sought integrated approach to parliamentary metadata.
The development of a more integrated approach to parliamentary metadata would make it possible for researchers to track individual careers and parliamentary careers and voting patterns.
At the other end of the spectrum of granularity, it would allow the identification of themes and topics across all the parliamentary proceedings of the nation.
He explains how the JISC-funded project employs XML to link the essential elements of the parliamentary record within a unified metadata scheme together with the use of its own Parliamentary Metadata Language (PML) and controlled vocabularies.
The author explains the key components of the PML XML schema which  defines seven concepts, deliberately defined in generic terms to ensure that they can be applied to more than one legislature.
He goes on to demonstrate how the schema is able to accommodate information on the activities of parliamentarians through the employment of generic elements.
He explains that the schema PML schema is able to accommodate often quite complex data relating to the voting behaviour of any UK parliamentarian.
The LIPARM architecture is currently being trialled on two collections of parliamentary proceedings in order to test its viability.
While much has been made, and rightly, of the digitisation of parliamentary proceedings as a valuable source of reference for the ordinary citizen, it should also be recognised that the diligence applied by LIPARM in the construction of a sound metadata structure will serve to expose far more helpfully the digitised data and those that will surely follow.
In “Does He Take Sugar?”: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language, Brian Kelly, Dominik Lukeš and Alistair McNaught highlight the risks of  attempting to standardise easy-to-read language for online resources for the benefit of readers with disabilities.
In so doing, they address a long-standing issue in respect of Web content and writing for the Web, i.e.
standardisation of language.
They explain how in the wake of the failure of Esperanto and similar artificial tongues, the latest hopes have been pinned on plain English, and ultimately standardised English, to improve accessibility to Web content.
Their article seeks to demonstrate the risks inherent in attempts to standardise language on the Web in the light of the W3C/WAI Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) hosting of an online symposium on the topic.
They describe the aids suggested by the RDWG such as readability assessment tools, as well as the beneficiaries of the group’s aims, such as people with cognitive, hearing and speech impairments as well as with readers with low language skills, including readers not fluent in the target language.
To provide readers further context, they go on to describe earlier work which, if enshrined in WCAG Guidelines would have had significant implications for content providers seeking to comply with WCAG 2.0 AAA.
They interpret what is understood in terms of ‘the majority of users’ and the context in which content is being written for the Web.
They contend that the context in which transactional language should be made as accessible to everyone as possible differs greatly from that of education, where it may be essential to employ the technical language of a particular subject, as well as figurative language, and even on occasions, cultural references outside the ordinary.
They argue that attempts to render language easier to understand, by imposing limitations upon its complexity, will inevitably lose sight of the nuances that form part of language acquisition.
In effect  they supply a long list of reasons why the use and comprehension of language is considerably more complex than many would imagine.
However, the authors do not by any means reject out of hand the attempt to make communication more accessible.
But they do highlight the significance of context.
They introduce the characteristics that might be termed key to Accessibility 2.0 which concentrate on contextualising the use of content as opposed to creating a global solution, instead laying emphasis on the needs of the user.
They proceed to detail the BS 8878 Code of Practice 16-step plan on Web accessibility and indicate where it overlaps with the WCAG guidelines.
Having provided readers with an alternative path through the BS 8878 approach, they go on to suggest further research in areas which have received less attention from the WCAG guidelines approach.
They touch upon the effect of lengthy text, figurative language, and register, among others, upon the capacity of some readers to understand Web content.
The authors’ conclusions return to an interesting observation on the effect of plain English which might not have been anticipated – but is nonetheless welcome.
In their ‘tooled up’ article Motivations for the Development of a Web Resource Synchronisation Framework, Stuart Lewis, Richard Jones, and Simeon Warner explain some of the motivations behind the development of the framework.
They point to the wide range types and scenarios where it is necessary to synchronise resources between Web sites, including preservation services and aggregators and the care that must be applied in consideration of the protocols and standards that exist to underpin such operations.
The core of their article resides in the range of use cases they supply together with the concrete examples  and discussion of related issues they also provide.
In his article entitled The ARK Project: Analysing Raptor at Kent, Leo Lyons confidently predicts that the advent of many more mobile devices will only serve to increase the trend to use electronic resources.
He reminds us too that electronic resources are no longer confined to journals or databases, but a host of other services including local and real-time on which library users increasingly rely.
With usage of these resources ever on the increase, the ability of libraries to predict and realise ready access to them is being increasingly tested.
Librarians therefore come under increasing pressure to ensure the usage they predict is correct.
Leo highlights the importance of log files in any process of electronic resource usage audit, while admitting they are not easy to interpret by non-technical staff and no less simple to compile into a cohesive overview of resource usage.
Leo explains the purpose of Raptor in its interrogation of log files generated by access to e-resources and why the Kent team as early adopters, decided to continue work on its potential use.
He goes on to explain the team’s aims which went beyond the assessment of Raptor direct outputs and extended in the direction of use of the database by other reporting systems.
Leo explains how the Analysing Raptor at Kent team is currently examining the uses to which they can put the Microsoft Reporting Services in order to provide library managers with usable analysis and presentation tools without lengthy training.
Leo goes on to identify a raft of uses for Raptor which go deeper than direct identification of e-resource downloads  such as a diagnostic tool for learning problems, subject to proper provisions in terms of user privacy.
In their article entitled SUSHI: Delivering Major Benefits to JUSP, Paul Meehan, Paul Needham and Ross MacIntyre begin by highlighting the benefits to UK HE and publishers afforded by the automated data harvesting of the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) employing the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol.
They maintain that SUSHI provides enormous savings in both cost and time to the centralised JUSP service.
They point to the effect on efficient statistics gathering of the introduction of the COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) Code of Practice which has contributed to more effective decision making in purchasing.
A report commissioned by JISC identified a distinct demand for usage statistics which resulted ultimately in a prototype service but its reach was hardly nationwide.
The advent of SUSHI in 2009 vastly improved the machine-to-machine transfer of COUNTER-compliant data.
The authors explain the other benefits that SUSHI confers.
Such was the scale of expansion that the development of SUSHI became central to JUSP’s capacity to handle data from other 100 institutions.
However, the lack of any standard client software, or, in the case of some major publishers, support for SUSHI, also presented a headache at the outset.
Therefore a major aim was to develop a single piece of software to interact with any SUSHI repository, not a trivial undertaking.
Nonetheless, its work on the Oxford Journals server proved successful in implementing the retrieval of reports with a SUSHI client in PERL.
This work on the Oxford Journals server provided JUSP with a springboard into work to meet the needs not only of publishers deploying usage statistics platforms such as MetaPress but also those without any SUSHI service at all.
The authors report general satisfaction among libraries where not only has the manual work of reporting been drastically reduced but where there is now the reassurance that machine-to-machine operations via SUSHI are compliant with COUNTER guidelines.
The increased scale of these operations is evident when one notes that over 100 million data entries had been collected by September 2012.
The authors provide a run-down of a typical monthly data collection – and the savings in effort are significant, to put it mildly.
Even when one adds up the manual operations, few though they are, involved in a typical month’s data checking, they represent less than one per cent of the manual effort required were such an operation executed without the use of SUSHI.
They also provide a review of their findings and present the timings on automated SUSHI operations.
The authors also describe JUSP’s plans to handle the next release of the COUNTER Code of Practice at the end of 2013.
Moreover the automated nature of the SUSHI-driven process also means that should one of JUSP’s publishers be obliged to re-state its usage data on a large scale, JUSP is able to replace such data in short order, despite the lack of notice for such a large-scale revision.
The authors, convinced of the efficacy of SUSHI-driven automated harvesting of usage statistics, have been working on a stand-alone instance of the SUSHI code to enable institutions to establish a Web-based client for themselves.
Stepping down from his pivotal role as CEO at ALT in May 2012, Seb Schmoller may not have expected to be pursued by the media for his thoughts on his career, but such was the impression that he made upon some of his audience that I was prompted to ask him to respond to a few questions from Ariadne.
In Seb Schmoller Replies, he talks about online learning which, it will come as a great surprise to some, began to develop before the Web and what he has gleaned along the way in his own career.
Seb also supplies some of his philiosophy and his thoughts about the people whom he considers to have had a telling impact on the development of learning, the Web and more.
In 21st-century Scholarship and Wikipedia, Amber Thomas states that as the fifth-most used site on the Web, Wikipedia is evidence of the growing credibility of online resources and points to instances of discourse about how academics relate to Wikipedia.
But she does highlight Wikipedia’s statement that its entries should not be cited as primary sources in academic work.
Nevertheless, Amber contends that scholarship is in the process of changing and intends to describe four key trends linking scholarship and Wikipedia.
She begins by examining ways in which researchers work, which while not mainstream, are nonetheless of interest to information professionals.
Two trends she sees as important in emerging scholarly practice are the notion of continual iteration, ‘Perpetual Beta’, and typified by a high degree of collaboration and feedback, the ‘Wiki Way’.
Another development that she highlights is occurring within scholarly methodology whereby it is becoming more common to work in the open as one develops one’s thesis, inviting feedback with a view to increasing the impact of one’s work.
As such, this placing of research work more in the public eye adds a new dimension to the process of peer review.
Amber admits that this call to extended participation in the judgement of research is not without controversy.
In addressing the third trend, Amber points to the manner in which digital presentation of scholarly information has moved us beyond the tradiotional style of Dewey classification.
Without wishing to dispense with formal classification, she does contend that the public has already moved into the period of ‘post-Dewey’.
Given this new state of affairs, she recognises the need for new forms of digital literacy and points to work done by JISC in this regard.
Addressing the fourth trend, Amber describes how Wikipedia so amply illustrates the richly linked multidimensional landscape that has evolved.
She looks more closely at her own citation practice these days and how much it is influenced by ’the inherent linkiness of the Web’.
She also reminds us that Higher Education has also begun to benefit from Wikipedia since it has now become a very large source of referrals to academic work in its own right.
Moreover, its inherent features of openness in which editing history and chat on topics serve as a ’visible collective construction of knowledge itself’.
In his article entitled Case Studies in Web Sustainability, Scott Turner highlights the fact that Web resources that have been built with public money may be wasted unless thought is given to their future sustainability in the event of their hosts being closed down.
He draws attention to JISC-funded work in this area.
Scott provides readers with some general priciples behind the notion of Web site sustainability before moving us on to  consideration of two different case studies.
As part of the approach to possible solutions, a number of Web-hosting options were investigated and Scott indicates their relative advantages.
Scott then shares with us his findings with respect to those Web-hosting options, and details the advantages and drawbacks of using Google Sites, DropBox and Amazon Web Service.
The key issue in this case study was the amount of existing material on the original site which was to influence choices.
The second study concerned a smaller Web site and the aim was to achieve cost-free sustainability together with ease of management and transfer.
He then goes on to explain his choice of software in each case.
In considering the general priciples surrounding Web site sustainability, Scott takes us further than that which relates to the tax-payers’ money, important though that is.
In his article entitled Mining the Archive: The Development of Electronic Journals, Martin White declares at the outset a fascination with the history of the development of information resource management.
He finds that Ariadne is able to expose her archives far more usefully through her new platform, and as a result, he has found it far easier to mine the Journal’s content in his analysis for this article.
In his investigation of the descriptions of how information professionals have striven to ‘meet emerging user requirements with very limited resources’, Martin admits that the new-found ease with which he can access archive material using Ariadne’s tags [1] has led him down interesting by-ways as well as the highways.
Martin begins his exploration of the Ariadne archive by looking at the electronic mark-up of chemical journals and then moves to the appearance of e-only journals in the mid-1990s.
He also admits that his investigations of the archive dovetail well with his wish to highlight those practitioners who have made ‘a substantial contribution to our current information environment.’  Martin then turns his attention to the ground-breaking HEFCE initiative to create a Pilot Site Licence Initiative for e-journals nationwide, citing an article from July 1997 looking at journals in transition.
Martin goes on to identify material from an Ariadne at-the-event report which provides a notion of the reactions of information professionals to these developments, including the open stance of the serials community to the situation.
Martin moves us on from the debate which opened with the advent of e-journals, ie the fate of the print journals, to the even longer debate that surrounds Open Access.
In tracing the development of electronic journal delivery, Ariadne, as Martin seeks to emphasise, does not overlook the issue of preservation and access.
He calls upon articles on JSTOR and Portico to support this point.
Martin’s conclusions in looking back over the development of e-journals resonate very clearly in this editorial office when he asserts the importance of vision, of professional co-operation, and of the value of content.
In addition, Issue 70 offers an interesting range of event reports for which I am most grateful to their contributors while the scope of book reviews is equally worthy of your attention.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 70.
References  Overview of keywords.
Ariadne: Web Magazine for Information Professionals http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/keywords/tags Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Missing Links: The Enduring Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Missing Links: The Enduring Web Buzz data mobile software framework archives metadata accessibility blog repositories preservation streaming mashup twitter research standards warc Citation BibTex RIS Alexandra Eveleigh reports on a workshop on Web archiving, organised by the DPC, JISC and UKWAC at the British Library on 21 July 2009.
This workshop, jointly sponsored by the DPC [1], JISC [2] and UKWAC [3], aimed to bring together content creators and tool developers with key stakeholders from the library and archives domains, in the quest for a technically feasible, socially and historically acceptable, legacy for the World Wide Web.
Setting the Scene Adrian Brown, Assistant Clerk of the Records at the Parliamentary Archives [4], set out the framework for ‘securing an enduring Web’ around the key elements of selection, capture, storage, access and preservation.
He identified new selection challenges arising from today’s dynamic, personalised Web sites, and issues of ‘temporal cohesion’, where capture cannot keep pace with the rapid rate of content change.
Capture tools therefore needed to evolve in line with the changing nature of the Web itself, and we needed to find technical solutions for the longer-term accessibility and maintenance of very large quantities of interlinked, complex data.
Hanno Lecher from Leiden University [5], highlighted a more immediate concern, that of keeping reliable access to Web resources cited in academic publications.
Whilst advocating the use of citation repositories to maintain copies of Web-published content, he noted that this approach is very labour-intensive, and suggested the use of applications such as SnagIt [6] or Zotero [7], or the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s [8] WebCite service [9], as other options.
Adrian Brown gives the opening address Eric Meyer of the Oxford Internet Institute [10] spoke about the World Wide Web of Humanities Project [11], which aimed to enable researchers to extract thematic collections from the Internet Archive [12], and to provide enhanced access to the associated metadata.
Meyer also touched upon an identified need to move away from collecting snapshots of the Web towards more continuous data, in order to facilitate temporal studies on Web archives, such as the growth of news networks or the development of the climate change debate.
Creation, Capture and Collection Helen Hockx-Yu, Web Archiving Programme Manager at the British Library [13], gave an overview of the software tools available to support and manage the Web archiving process, also noting gaps in current provision.
Overall, she painted a picture of a Web archiving community always having to play catch-up with the inherent creativity of the Web itself.
In terms of preservation of Web content, there is still little consensus over strategy, practices or the use of specific tools, although international collaboration in the field has led to some convergence on certain crawlers and the development of the new WARC file format as an international standard ISO 28500: 2009, by the IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium) [8].
Cathy Smith, Collections Strategy Manager at The National Archives [14], gave an overview of a recent research study, looking at what audiences Web archives can anticipate and what the Web might look like as a historical source.
Should Web archivists aim at building a holistic, but shallow view of the whole UK Web domain, or harvest specific sites in depth, along thematic lines?
Preliminary findings suggest that users would prefer to use a national Web archive, although this does not necessarily imply a single repository.
Existing institutions could continue to provide access to local Web collections, but there should be coordination to eliminate potential overlaps arising from differing thematic, legal and geographical collecting remits.
Amanda Spencer and Tom Storrar, also from The National Archives, spoke about TNA’s Web Continuity Project [15], which combines comprehensive capture of UK central government Web sites with the deployment of redirection software to ensure persistent access from live sites to archived Web resources.
The team has also been working to influence policy makers and content creators to promote best practice in Web site construction, leading to more successful harvesting of site content.
Panel shot of (left to right): Cathy Smith, Tom Storar, Amanda Spencer and Helen Hockx-Yu [British Library] Issues and Approaches to Long-term Preservation of Web Archives Richard Davis, Project Manager, gave an introduction to the ArchivePress blog-archiving project [16] being undertaken by the University of London Computer Centre [17] and the British Library Digital Preservation Department.
Describing the complex (and expensive) Web harvesting tools currently available as ‘using a hammer to crack a nut,’ when it comes to blogs, the ArchivePress team will seek to exploit a universal feature of blogs – newsfeeds – as the key to gathering blog content for preservation.
The approach could possibly be later adapted to harvest from Twitter.
Maureen Pennock, Web Archive Preservation Project Manager at the British Library, explained some of the issues involved in the longer-term preservation of Web content, beyond capture.
Initiatives instigated by the British Library to protect the contents of the UK Web Archive [3] from obsolescence include a technology watch blog [18], a regular risk review of file formats held within the archive, coupled with migration to the container WARC format, and the creation of a Web preservation test-bed.
Maureen also outlined some challenges for the future, such as the growth of closed online communities and of personalised Web worlds.
Finally, she made the important point that ‘preservation is best if it begins at source’, emphasising the need to produce Web content which is optimised for harvesting.
Thomas Risse introduced the Living Web Archive (LiWA) Project [19], which seeks to develop the ‘next generation of Web content capture, preservation, analysis, and enrichment services’.
The new approach will go beyond harvesting static snapshots of the Web and enable the capture of streaming media, link extraction from dynamic pages, and include methods for filtering out Web spam.
Jeffrey van der Hoeven spoke about work on the emulation of old Web browsers in Global Remote Access to Emulation-Services (GRATE) as part of the Planets Project [20], and within the framework of KEEP (Keep Emulation Environments Portable) [21].
He pointed out that the current generation of crawlers assume a PC-based view of the Web.
With ever-increasing capabilities of mobile presentation devices, he suggested that in future the focus will need to change towards capturing content, with emulation used to recreate different views of the same content.
What We Want with Web Archives: Will We Win?
The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion, following Kevin Ashley’s glimpse into the future of the Web’s past.
He argued that future researchers will not just want to browse individual Web pages, but will want to exploit the inherent properties of Web content in aggregate – introducing the concept of ‘mashups in the past’.
This assumes access to archived Web data in bulk, permitting machine-to-machine interaction with different sources of historical Web content.
Questions centred on how best to engage Web users in selecting and appraising Web content for preservation, obtaining permission for harvesting, and the potential impact of enhanced legal deposit legislation in the UK.
Suggestions included the idea that popular Google searches might be used as one method of selecting content for capture, and a proposal to archive the UK domain name registry.
Slides of all the day’s presentations are available on the DPC Web site [22].
References Digital Preservation Coalition Web site http://www.dpconline.org Joint Information Systems Committee Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk UK Web Archive http://www.webarchive.org.uk Parliamentary Archives http://www.parliament.uk/publications/archives.cfm The Digital Archive for Chinese Studies, Lieden Division http://leiden.dachs-archive.org/ SnagIt Screen Capture Software http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp Zotero http://www.zotero.org/ International Internet Preservation Consortium Web site http://netpreserve.org WebCite® http://www.webcitation.org/ Oxford Internet Institute Web site http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ World Wide Web of Humanities http://wwwoh-access.archive.org/wwwoh/ Internet Archive http://www.archive.org British Library Web Archiving Programme http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/webarch/index.html The National Archives Web site http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk The National Archives Web Continuity Project http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webcontinuity/ ArchivePress Project Web site http://archivepress.ulcc.ac.uk/ University of London Computer Centre http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/ UK Web Archive Technology Watch http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/ukwebarchive_techwatch/ Living Web Archives http://www.liwa-project.eu/ Planets Project Web site http://www.planets-project.eu/ Keep Emulation Environments Portable http://www.keep-project.eu Digital Preservation Coalition: JISC, the DPC and the UK Web Archiving Consortium Workshop: missing links: the enduring web http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/090721MissingLinks.html Author Details Alexandra Eveleigh Collections Manager West Yorkshire Archive Service Email: aeveleigh@wyjs.org.uk Web site: http://www.archives.wyjs.org.uk Return to top Article Title: “Missing Links: The Enduring Web” Author: Alexandra Eveleigh Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/missing-links-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data software framework wiki database rss portal apache infrastructure archives metadata css repositories copyright preservation e-learning photoshop dspace saml podcast licence e-science ict interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
Minding the Skills Gap: A Workshop for Key Training Providers Leeds University Business School 3 September 2008 Over the last few years, researchers have enthusiastically embraced new technologies and services that allow them to discover, locate, gain access to and create information resources on their desktops.
Yet there is evidence to suggest that their research information skills and competencies have not kept up with the rapid pace of change.
The focus of this free one day workshop is on a recent study undertaken on behalf of the Research Information Network by the AIMTech Research Group at Leeds University Business School and Information Management Associates (IMA).
The published report from the study, Mind the skills gap: Information-handling training for researchers July 2008) identifies a number of significant gaps and areas for development and makes some key recommendations.
The workshop will look at the key findings from the report, explore the changing role of key providers of training to postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers (including academic staff in their research role) in relation to research information methodologies and tools and look at the potential for libraries to support researchers by developing direct support in accessing and evaluating research information.
Key speakers Dr Iain Cameron – Head, Research Careers and Diversity Unit, Research Councils UK Brian Clifford – Chair, Research Libraries UK Task Force on Research Support Dr Michael Jubb – Director, Research Information Network Who should attend?
Senior managers and IT staff in higher education with responsibility for strategy, research and training of researchers Senior librarians responsible for delivering information skills training to researchers Training coordinators, staff developers and trainers working with researchers Researchers with an interest in information skills training good practice Booking For more information and to book your place, please contact: Gaynor Dodsworth, AIMTech Research and Consultancy Group, Leeds University Business School, email G.L.Dodsworth@lubs.leeds.ac.uk or telephone 0113 3437818.
Places on the workshop are free, but space is limited, so please book early.
If you are interested but cannot attend this workshop, the Research Information Network will be holding a larger conference this Autumn with the aim of drawing up a framework to address the issues raised in the Mind the skills gap report, email sarah.gentleman@rin.ac.uk for more information.
Back to headlines Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) Autumn Programme – September 2008 TASI, the JISC Advisory Service for still images, moving images and sound resources, has announced details of its forthcoming workshop programme for September to December 2008.
A few more dates will be announced in the coming weeks.
3 September 2008 Image Capture Level 1 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-image-capture-1.html 4 September 2008 Image Capture Level 2 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-image-capture-2.html 9 October 2008 Photoshop Level 1 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-photoshop-1.html 10 October 2008 Photoshop Level 2 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-photoshop-2.html 6 November 2008 Digital Photography Level 1 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-digital-photography-1.html 7 November 2008 Building a Departmental Image Collection http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-image-collection.html 14 November 2008 Image Optimisation Correcting and Preparing Images http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-image-optimisation.html 21 November 2008 Introduction to Image Metadata http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-image-metadata.html 11 December 2008 Scanning with the CLA Licence http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-scanning-cla.html 12 December 2008 Rights and Responsibilities: Copyright and Digital Images http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-copyright-1.html To book please visit http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/bookingform.html For a full list of workshops, please visit http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ or for more information please e-mail info@tasi.ac.uk You can also subscribe to our Forthcoming Workshops RSS Feed: http://www.tasi.ac.uk/rss.html Back to headlines Netskills Autumn 2008 Programme September 2008 Netskills are pleased to announce that the early bird discount offer has been extended on the following workshops running in September, book before end of Friday 22nd August 2008 and pay only £123 per workshop.
Edinburgh University: Podcasting: A Practical Guide: 3 September Newcastle University: CSS: A Complete Web Style Toolkit: 18 September Newcastle University: Detecting and Deterring Plagiarism: 25 September Oxford University Computing Services: Web Quests, Treasure Hunts, Hotlists & Subject Samplers: 25 September Netskills is also offering a new workshop, 'Work Related Learning' which will explore a variety of resources and investigate their value in the fields of work-based and related learning.
It is designed for lecturers, learning technologists and educational developers interested in the use of technology to enhance learning, teaching and assessment.
The course will take place at Oxford University Computing Services on 24 September and Newcastle University on 1 October; this workshop is free to those working in the Further & Higher Education sector.
Further details of these workshops and of all Netskills events are available from: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/products/ Back to headlines JISC-PoWR Workshop 3: Embedding Web Preservation Strategies Within Your Institution The Flexible Learning Space, University of Manchester Friday 12th September 2008, 10.30am 4pm http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/workshops/workshop-3/ The JISC-sponsored Preservation of Web Resources Project (JISC-PoWR) will be running its third and final workshop in Manchester.
The series of workshops is designed for the UK HE/FE records management and Web management communities.
The aim of the workshop is to gain and share feedback from institutional Web, information and records managers on the proposed JISC-PoWR handbook, to address ways of embedding the proposed recommendations into institutional working practices and to solicit ideas for further work which may be needed.
The workshop is free to attend and open to all members of HE/FE institutions and related HE and FE agencies.
The booking deadline is Friday 5th September 2008 and places are limited.
http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/workshops/workshop-3/ Back to headlines Third Workshop on Digital Library Foundations Aarhus, Denmark 14-19 September 2008 http://www.delos.info/DLFoundations2008 The preliminary programme of the Third Workshop on Digital Library Foundations is now available: http://www.delos.info/DLFoundations2008 The workshop is organised in conjunction with ECDL2008, which will be held in Aarhus, Denmark, over 14-19 September.
http://www.ecdl2008.org If you haven't already done so, please register immediately for the Conference and the Workshop.
Back to headlines Reinventing Science Librarianship, an ARL/CNI Forum Arlington, Virginia, USA 16-17 October 2008 http://www.arl.org/events/fallforum/forum08/oct08schedule.shtml The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are cosponsoring a forum on "Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future," to be held Thursday and Friday, October 16 and 17, 2008, following the 153rd ARL Membership Meeting, at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City, in Arlington, Virginia.
Programme The forum organisers hope to broaden the understanding of trends in scientific research as well as support leadership in applying these trends in the development of new library roles.
The programme will highlight a few case studies of different scales to illustrate new, emerging models of library support.
Audience The forum is designed for the leadership of libraries and enterprise-wide IT services.
The intended audience includes directors or assistant directors of research libraries, campus IT services, science libraries, and health science libraries.
Institutional teams comprised of people in these roles are encouraged, but not required, to attend the forum together.
Schedule The forum will begin on Thursday, 16 October at 3:30 p.m. with an opening programme session on "E-Science Trends," followed by poster sessions and a reception on Thursday evening.
The forum programmes continue all day on Friday, 17 October, concluding by 4:30 p.m. For more details, see the forum Web site http://www.arl.org/events/fallforum/forum08/oct08schedule.shtml Note: The registration fee for ARL/CNI members is $275; the non-member price is $325.
Register by 30 September 2008 at http://www.arl.org/events/fallforum/forum08/oct08reg.shtml.
Reserve hotel accommodation by 12 September 2008.
For more information, contact: Sarah Segura Association of Research Libraries 202-296-2296 sarah@arl.org Diane Goldenberg-Hart Coalition for Networked Information 202-296-5098 diane@cni.org Back to headlines 36th Annual Museum Computer Network Conference Says "LET'S DO I.T.
RIGHT" Washington, DC 12-15 November 2008-08-17 http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/ The MCN invites practitioners to four days of targeted programming emphasising the how and why of Information Technology for Museums.
The venue will be in downtown Washington, DC at the Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel for a full range of programmes addressing a wide array of topics.
Conference Topics Issues of National Concern for Museums Social Networking, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 Superior Content, Superior Delivery Digital Readiness Museum Information Standards Leadership, Sustainability, Accountability Details of the preliminary conference programme and hotel & travel information are available: http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/ About the Museum Computer Network Founded in 1967, MCN is a nonprofit organisation with members representing a wide range of information professionals from hundreds of museums and cultural heritage institutions in the United States and around the world.
MCN provides continuing opportunities to explore, implement, and disseminate new technologies and best practice in the field.
With an annual conference, special interest groups, and a listserv, MCN is here to help museum information professionals and people interested in technology in the museum setting to seek out and share ideas and information.
Back to headlines 9th International Bielefeld Conference: Upgrading the eLibrary Enhanced Information Services Driven by Technology and Economics Bielefeld, Germany, Bielefeld Convention Center 3 5 February 2009 http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de Three decades of databases, two decades of electronic articles and one decade of open access have resulted in an avalanche of digital scholarly information services.
At the moment we observe a metamorphosis from the electronic library to an enhanced library.
meeting the emerging demands of eScience and eLearning.
Progress in technology, new concepts of knowledge networking, but also economic issues are the driving forces for upgrading the eLibrary, all of them opening up both a world of new opportunities and of new constraints for progressing enhanced scholarly information services.
The Bielefeld Conference 2009, arranged by Bielefeld University Library, provides insights into the future of eLibraries, based on the threefold interdependency of service, technology and economics.
Please see the conference Web site for the programme and further details http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de For more information please feel free to contact: Bielefeld University Library Tel.
: + 49 521 106 4050, Fax: + 49 521 106 4052 e-mail: conference.ub@uni-bielefeld.de Back to headlines OAI6: The 6th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication Geneva, Switzerland 17 19 June 2009 http://www.unige.ch/workshop/oai6/ The next OAI workshop: OAI6, the 6th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication, which will be held in Geneva, Switzerland.
The workshop will follow the successful format of previous workshops mixing practical tutorials, presentations from cutting-edge projects and research, discussion groups, posters, and an intense social programme to maximise interaction and communication.
It will be possible to register for a part or all of the programme.
The workshop is designed for those involved in the development of open access (OA) repositories and who can influence the direction of developments either within their institution, their country or at an international level that includes technical developers of OA bibliographic databases and connected services, research information policy developers at university or library level, funding bodies concerned with access to the results of their research, OA publishers, and influential researchers keen to lead OA developments in their own field.
Previous workshops have built a strong community spirit and the event is an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas and contact details with the wide range of people connected to the OA movement.
The OAI series of workshops is one of the biggest international meetings in this field and takes place roughly every two years.
Event Web site: http://www.unige.ch/workshop/oai6/ Further information will be added to this Web site, including programme details, a registration form, a call for posters, and accommodation and travel advice.
The 2009 workshop will be held at one of the larger venues belonging to the University of Geneva (UniGe) which we welcome as co-organiser of this event.
Future announcements may be made directly from the UniGe organisers.
Some slides of the new venue can be seen here: http://www.unige.ch/workshop/oai6/diaporama-mail.php The committee looks forward to welcoming you to Geneva next year for another successful event.
Joanne Yeomans On behalf of the OAI6 Organising Committee Web site: http://www.unige.ch/workshop/oai6/ Email: oaiworkshop-organisation@unige.ch Back to headlines DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Form Working Collaboration The DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons, two of the largest providers of open source software for managing and providing access to digital content, have recently announced plans to combine strengths to work on joint initiatives that will more closely align their aims and better serve both open source repository communities in the future.
The collaboration is expected to benefit over 500 organisations worldwide which are currently using open source software from either DSpace (examples include MIT, Rice University, Texas Digital Library and University of Toronto) or Fedora (examples include the National Library of France, New York Public Library, Encyclopedia of Chicago and eSciDoc).
Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) remarked, "Repositories are a key part of the infrastructure for supporting scholarly work, and they need to integrate more effectively with a range of other evolving components.
I think there are great opportunities for DSpace and Fedora to work together not only on repository interoperability but on common approaches to repository roles in the scholarly and scientific workflows."
The decision to collaborate came out of meetings held this spring where members of DSpace and Fedora Commons communities discussed cooperation between the two organisations.
Ideas included leveraging the power and reach of open source knowledge communities by using the same services and standards in the future.
The organisations will also explore opportunities to provide new capabilities for accessing and preserving digital content, developing common Web services, and enabling interoperability across repositories.
Further information: Dspace press release [Source: DSpace] [Received: July 2008] Back to headlines Report by NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning Now Available The release has recently been announced of an important report entitled Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge.
This report was the outcome of the work by a task force set up jointly by US National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources.
Professor Christine L. Borgman of UCLA was invited to chair this group which contained a wide-ranging set of participants.
The task force was requested to look at issues involving the use of cyberinfrastructure to advance teaching and learning, complementing much of the earlier discussion of cyberinfrastructure which has focused on research.
The resulting report provides considerable food for thought, covering as it does a wide range of issues, some of which will be considered at the closing plenary of the Fall CNI meeting taking place in December 2008 in Washington, DC.
The report is now available at: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08204 [Source: CNI] [Received: August 2008] Back to headlines New Director of the Office of CyberInfrastructure (OCI) at the National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected astrophysicist Professor Edward Seidel of Louisiana State University as Director of the Office of CyberInfrastructure (OCI) at the National Science Foundation.
OCI awards grants to researchers who demonstrate cutting-edge information technology that can lead to breakthroughs in science, engineering and other academic disciplines.
Prof. Seidel, who is Floating Point Systems Professor in the Louisiana State University (LSU) Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Computer Science and also is director of the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, takes up the directorship from 1 September, 2008.
For more information, see: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111689&org=NSF&from=news [Source: NSF/DCC] [Received: July 2008] Back to headlines HEFCE Announces New Chair of JISC Professor Sir Timothy O'Shea, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, has been appointed to succeed Professor Sir Ron Cooke as the new chair of JISC from 1 January 2009.
The appointment was recently announced by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), on behalf of the UK funding bodies.
Professor O'Shea is a graduate of the Universities of Sussex and Leeds.
He has worked in the United States and for the Open University (OU).
At the OU he founded the Computer Assisted Learning Research Group and worked on a range of educational technology research and development projects.
There he also held a personal chair in Information Technology and Education and, in 1993, was appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor.
In 1997 he was elected Master of Birkbeck College and subsequently appointed Provost of Gresham College and Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of London.
He was appointed Principal of the University of Edinburgh in 2002, having previously worked as a research fellow in the University's Department of Artificial Intelligence during the 1970s.
[Source: JISC] [Received: August 2008] Back to headlines D-NET v. 1.0: DRIVER Infrastucture Software Release Now Available DRIVER, the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research is proud to announce the software release D-NET v. 1.0.
The first of its kind, this open source software offers a tool-box for deploying a customisable distributed system featuring tools for harvesting and aggregating heterogeneous data sources.
A variety of end-user functionalities are applied over this integration, ranging from search, recommendation, collections, profiling to innovative tools for repository manager users.
A running instance of the software, namely the "European Information Space", maintained by the DRIVER Consortium to aggregate Open Access publications from European Institutional Repositories, can be accessed online at: http://www.driver-repository.eu/DRIVER-News-Events/PR_D-NET_1_0.html DRIVER Consortium's mission is to expand its content base with high-quality Open Access research output, as well as provide support for repository managers and state-of-the art services for the end-user.
By building a robust network of content providers, enhanced with the set of services DRIVER offers, the software's openness of the DRIVER infrastructure has encouraged service providers to develop new applications on top of the basic services.
Prototypes of such applications, built to replicate DART Europe DEEP (UK) and RECOLECTA (Spain) portals over the European Information Space, can be accessed at http://search.dart.driver.research-infrastructures.eu/ and http://search.recolecta.driver.research-infrastructures.eu respectively.
This threefold interaction between many European stakeholders, including research institutions, centres for IT research and strategic partners from the repository community, positions DRIVER as a leading European portal for scholarly research.
The European Information Space offers support to three groups of users: The researcher, reader, public.
From the DRIVER portal, apart from advanced searching and browsing options, the user can register with the system in order to activate his/her user profile and get alerts, register to collections, subscribe to communities and more services to come.
The repository manager.
Guidelines to repository development are offered to those who wish to set up a repository.
In a Web-based registration process that uses an automated validation tool, the repository manager gets feedback on the status of his repository, and suggestions on quality improvements via a personalised support service at the DRIVER helpdesk.
Web and wiki-tools update the national status of repository development, providing a network of country representatives and repository managers who interact with European colleagues through the driver website and national contacts.
The service provider.
National consortia, subject-based projects and individual repository developers can act as service providers on top of the basic DRIVER infrastructure, by enriching and/or deploying D-NET v. 1.0 software.
The software: The DRIVER D-NET v. 1.0 software is released under the Open Source Apache license with accompanying documentation, and with (limited to capacity) technical support by the DRIVER Consortium technical partners.
The infrastructure software is designed to be "open", which means that new service typologies, exposing functionalities not currently available in DRIVER, can be easily integrated with existing services.
DRIVER Consortium policies require that all new DRIVER service software, produced by DRIVER Consortium partners or third-party service providers, should be released under the same Open Source Apache license and included in the DRIVER software package.
The D-NET v. 1.0 software release is also made available to any organisation willing to run independent installations of the DRIVER infrastructure.
In this case the interested organisation would be responsible of the maintenance of such a system.
For more information, and to download the software see: http://www.driver-repository.eu/D-NET_release_v-1-0 [Source: DRIVER/DCC] [Received: Month Year] Back to headlines MLA: Future of Museum Accreditation Takes Shape As part of the MLA's restructure, a fresh emphasis is being given to 'best practice', excellence, improvement and innovation.
Among the latest steps, a positive way forward for the flagship Accreditation scheme has been recently announced.
The MLA will continue to manage the standard throughout the UK.
This will be done as an integral part of the MLA's new Quality and Standards team located in Birmingham.
In England, Renaissance hubs will be increasingly involved with the Accreditation process, advising and supporting museums before their applications are submitted, and after they have been considered.
The assessment of applications, prior to them being put before the Accreditation Panel for decision, will be undertaken by independent expert consultants in England contracted by the MLA.
The Accreditation Panel will continue to make the final decisions on behalf of the MLA Board.
MLA Chief Executive Roy Clare said: "It is fundamental that museums should be supported in, and recognised for, attaining the highest national standards.
The Accreditation scheme has become firmly established and highly respected as one of our leading programmes.
As we map a stronger future for the MLA, 'best practice' is at the core.
The future success of the Accreditation Scheme remains of central importance.
I am extremely grateful to all those in the sector, especially including the Accreditation Panel, who give their time and resources to ensuring that the scheme works effectively and efficiently."
The MLA has appointed a new manager, Samuel Rowlands.
Samuel has extensive experience of the scheme having previously worked as the Regional Officer – Museums and Standards for MLA East of England.
Emmeline Leary, the current Accreditation Manager leaves MLA in the Autumn.
Roy Clare added: "I want to pay tribute to Emmeline who, in her 20 years of managing Accreditation and Registration has ensured the integrity and development of the standard."
The newly formed Quality & Standards team, which covers Accreditation, Designation and Security Advice, is headed up by Isabel Wilson, Project Manager, Quality and Standards.
The team's immediate priority is to maintain consistency for the sector during the period of transition.
The responsibilities of the regional MLAs are being integrated within the MLA by April 2009.
[Source: MLA] [Received: August 2008] Back to headlines Education and Research Sectors Prepare for Access Management Transition Nearly 500 institutions and organisations are completing the transition to a new open standard SAML-compliant access management system and the UK Access Management Federation.
The federation will be providing access to approximately 8 million users across the UK.
In the past three months, membership of the Access Management Federation has risen dramatically as educational institutions and service providers move to take advantage of the numerous benefits of joining.
These include improved services to users, easier compliance with regulatory requirements, reduced support requirements and improved data security.
Over 90% of HE institutions and more than half of further education providers have joined the Federation.
The Federation is operated by JANET (UK) on behalf of JISC and Becta and brings the entire UK education and research sector a step closer to achieving single sign-on to network and online resources.
The Federation now has over 150 Service Provider platforms registered with over 100 educational publishers such as the BBC, Elsevier, ProQuest, Thomson Scientific, Institute of Physics and a range of smaller publishers, such as Rock's Backpages.
The access management transition programme, which has supported the first major change in access management for the education and research sectors in ten years, has seen nearly 500 organisations become members of the Federation with over 150 resources made available.
During the last two years the programme fostered a now well-established community of practice to share knowledge and take the sector forward, established a centre of expertise at EDINA and has placed the UK at the forefront of international developments in this field.
Essential elements in successful embedding of access management expertise have been the provision by JISC of 120 free training places at Netskills, outputs from early adopter projects, the deployment of access management solutions for 12 publishers and service providers, the deployment of software for 40 smaller colleges and the detailed review of over 200 resource lists from institutions.
In the future JANET UK and Netskills will continue to develop training courses with Netskills delivering ones focused on Service Provider requirements this September.
Further information: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/07/accessmanagement.aspx [Source: JISC] [Received: July 2008] Back to headlines JISC: Greener Technology Workshops Looking at ways to save money and help Further and Higher Education institutions enable their technology to work greener is the aim of a series of workshops being run by the JISC-funded SusteIT Project over the coming months.
The first in the series of five workshops, held at Cardiff University last month discussed the latest solutions in minimising the environmental impact of servers and high-performance computing.
Delegates at the one-day event explored the issues of energy-efficient configuration, cooling and power supply in data centres.
With pressure from the government on the whole public sector to reduce its carbon emissions, the event was designed to investigate how institutions can make their data centres more efficient.
The workshop looked in detail at a number of approaches to efficent energy use and cooling in the data centre.
Delegates were able to see first-hand the solutions adopted by Cardiff University.
One of the themes of the workshop was that green ICT issues need to be addressed at an institutional level.
In particular, collaboration between the IT and Estate departments, along with their suppliers, is crucial, if sustainable solutions are to be possible.
Dr Hugh Beedie, Chief Technology Officer at Cardiff University explained that the event was particularly successful as, "the site tour enabled a first hand experience of good practice of the sustainable solutions that are currently in use at the university."
Further Workshop: 2 September 2008, Sheffield: The Sustainable Desktop: This workshop will highlight examples of good practice in how further and higher education institutions can reduce their desktop computing energy consumption and carbon footprint by: powering down PCs when not is use harvesting idle CPUs through grid computing techniques purchasing devices with low power consumption substituting thin client devices for PCs Further information: The Sustainable Desktop http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2008/09/sustainableit.aspx Further workshops are planned for the Autumn 2008 and early next year on Intelligent Buildings, Virtualisation and Shared Services as well as on issues affecting the Further Education sector.
Further information: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/08/greenictworkshops.aspx [Source: JISC] [Received: August 2008] Back to headlines Museums, Libraries and Archives Greet Olympic Handover Over 100 museums, libraries and archives have signed up to host events to celebrate the Olympic Handover and the start of the Cultural Olympiad, marking the start of the UK's Olympic journey.
The activities – part of MLA's Setting the Pace programme – are timed to coincide with the Handover from the Beijing Games on 24 August 2008 and the start of the Cultural Olympiad on the weekend of the 26 28 September 2008.
Setting the Pace is the programme to support museums, libraries and archives vital contribution to the UK's four-year Cultural Olympiad.
Andrew Motion, MLA Chair said: "Our museum, library and archive collections are a wonderfully rich reflection of the world's complex cultural identities.
It's absolutely right that they should play this crucial role in allowing people throughout the country to take part in the Cultural Olympiad, and to celebrate the Games."
Phase one of Setting the Pace has two elements The People's Record, which for the first time in Olympic history will capture people's experience of living in an Olympic host nation; and Literature and Stories, which will use collections as creative inspiration for young poets, and as a source for story telling and performance events.
Setting the Pace will complement Stories of the World – one of the ten major projects of the Cultural Olympiad, led by MLA in partnership with the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG).
Stories of the World will showcase reinterpreted collections through a network of exhibitions.
Further details will be announced during the launch of the Cultural Olympiad.
Further information: LOCOG http://www.london-2012.co.uk/LOCOG/ Cultural Olympiad http://www.london2012.com/get-involved/cultural-olympiad/ [Source: MLA] [Received: July 2008] Back to headlines Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching Buzz framework research Citation BibTex RIS Wajeehah Aayeshah reviews a comprehensive book on educational games that highlights the attributes of effective games usage but which also identifies the potential problems when using them in a pedagogical context.
Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching: A Beginner’s Guide is exactly what the title maintains: a beginner’s guide.
The editors and primary authors, Nicola Whitton and Alex Moseley, have provided an extensive overview of using games as a pedagogical resource.
While this title highlights the benefits of effective games usage, it nonetheless also identifies the potential problems when employing games in a pedagogical context.
Content The book is divided into three major sections together with an introduction and a conclusion.
Part one introduces the field of educational games and provides a background to the effective role of games in learning.
Whitton has suggested four main theories that provide a rationale for the use of games in education.
A strong supporter of the constructivist perspective, she also considers experiential learning, collaborative learning and inquiry-based learning pertinent to this field.
She also advocates benefits of using games in pedagogy.
They include playfulness, practice, engagement, scaffolding, feedback, and digital literacy.
Part two discusses how different game elements can be adapted for educational needs.
Elements like challenge, game narrative, scaffolding, and game aesthetics are discussed by different authors who make practical suggestions for their effective use in an educational context.
In Chapter 4, communal gaming and ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ are examined through analysis of case studies.
Skills like collective intelligence, critical thinking, leadership skills, peer mentoring, persistence and development of scientific habits of mind are outlined as the major benefits of communal games for educational purpose.
Hoyle and Moseley explain the gist of their thesis on collaborative work in the gaming community in these words: ... we take aspects of group learning activities emerging in these games – activities that involve voluntarily writing, reading, and thinking critically – and channel them into productive, student-led learning, where students go beyond their immediate group to crowdsource additional ideas to incorporate into their joint knowledge” (p.36).
Additionally a 10-point guideline has been provided to ‘harness the power of game communities’ within an educational context (pp.41 43).
Chapter 6 proved to be a  very interesting discussion on the subject of competition, examining the pros and cons of competition in the existing educational landscape.
The chapter goes on to examine  how to harness it and turn it into a positive experience for students.
Similarly the succeeding Chapter 7 provides a worthwhile analysis of the use and importance of multiple media.
Parts III and IV could have been treated as one part since they both explore the creation and development of games for learning.
Detailed lists of things to do to make games more useful and effective are provided together with different case studies which serve as examples.
The book has a special focus on Alternate Reality Games and how they can be used as a pedagogical resource.
Both Whitton and Moseley have worked earlier on Alternate Reality Games and published in academic journals and conference proceedings.
Therefore, it is no surprise that this game genre has been suggested as an effective educational tool.
An important game genre is that of the virtual environment for learning which is also briefly discussed.
In Part V, the conclusion, the authors concede that: ... games can be an effective tool to support and enhance learning and teaching in a variety of educational sectors and contexts.
However, their use is not without its drawbacks, and there are a number of major challenges that we see in the field that need to be overcome before the use of games for learning can reach its potential (p.197).
These challenges include the current standing of game-based learning and its gradual acceptance, a behaviourist   model of learning and at the same time a lack of research-based evidence to provide evidence of its virtue and benefits.
Whilst currently this is certainly the case, new research results are being published which argue for the effectiveness of games in pedagogy.
However, they are still yet to be widely adopted and still some way to becoming incorporated in the mainstream teaching and learning.
Expert Opinion In the introduction the authors preface their arguments with the information that they have interviewed experts in the field in preparation for this book.
Quotations from these different experts are included throughout the book, identified clearly as their quotations.
The authors have done an excellent job of relating these experts’ quotations to the discussion without breaking the flow, at the same time as working in support, of the various arguments.
The only thing missing is the affiliations of these experts; whilst readers can go to the start of the book and find out this information, it does involve them in more work.
Practical Guidelines Perhaps the strongest part of this book is its practical suggestion for incorporation of game elements within an educational environment.
Whether it is for compiling a game narrative or developing a virtual reality, different suggestions and possible options are offered throughout the book.
The authors’ personal experience of the use of games in an educational context as well as coverage of the relevant literature combine to provide a strong basis for this book to function as a guide.
Not only beginners but experienced practitioners experimenting with games as a pedagogical resource can find this very useful.
Topics like assessment development and alignment of the objectives of a game with that of curriculum design are examined in detail.
Case studies provide a few strategies for the use of challenges/tasks/ activities to map out specific learning outcomes.
Even so, not all of the attributes described can or should be used to make the ‘perfect’ educational game.
The deployment of each game will depend on the nature of the educational setting and its target audience.
Some participants would prefer a highly competitive, point-based game, while others would prefer learning individually at their own pace, while indeed others again would favour elements of both.
Despite this, there will be learners who still might not benefit from this approach.
Whereas games may represent a good educational resource, the authors specifically state that they cannot replace the existing teaching modules that work well.
Conclusion This work is a well written and easily readable guide for academics and young researchers interested in using games for an educational purpose.
It provides a useful overview of the key beneficial attributes of games and also discusses ways and techniques that would enhance the pedagogical effectiveness of their use.
Moreover it provides some very interesting discussion on the use of the Alternate Reality Game in a pedagogical context.
It is perhaps the one game genre which stand outs the most here.
In publishing this work the authors have very astutely filled a gap in the existing field of books on this topic, and have done so in a very detailed and comprehensive manner.
A thoroughly practical discussion set in a theoretical framework, this book hones the experiences gained from earlier research to compile the characteristics of games that can be incorporated in an educational environment.
It is quite an interesting compilation and a highly recommended piece of work.
Author Details Wajeehah Aayeshah PhD candidate/ Tutor Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne Australia Email: wajeehah@gmail.com Web site: http://www.swinburne.edu.au/ Wajeehah Aayeshah is a researcher in Media and Communication.
She is currently examining the use of games in journalism education as a part of her PhD.
Her research interests include: Media and Journalism Education, Alternate Reality Games, Education Technology and Social Development.
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Book Review: iPad The Missing Manual Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: iPad The Missing Manual Buzz mobile safari browser video linux ebook itunes youtube iphone ipad Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley reviews a manual to help support your use of an iPad 'the book that should have been in the box'.
The Missing Manual Series, originally written and published by David Pogue has expanded and is now published by O'Reilly, who deal mainly with computer books.
Like many other publishers, they have jumped on the 'ibandwagon'.
A quick count on Amazon Books gave a dozen similar offerings (excluding developers' guides).
This is a review therefore of just one of these paperbacks, and is not a comparative review – with one exception which I shall come to below.
Comments For writing this review I settled down with the IPad on my knee, Bluetooth keyboard below that and glass of chenin blanc at my right hand – but wondered where to place the volume under review.
As yet, nobody has produced a 'skyhook' to hold one or the other.
IPad: The Missing Manual (MM) is a little smaller than the iPad itself, about as thick and uses glossy paper with colour illustrations on most pages.
In general, each page has a new topic and is organised by basic chapters.
Get to know your iPad, Interact with your iPad, etc.
They are logical and you can easily flick between them to find the section you need.
Not that, with an iPad, you really need to find much.
Just plug in applications (apps) and play to find your own way around.
This, of course, is typical for Macs of whatever kind.
With the iPad however, there is less freedom to find new ways of doing things than with the usual Linux-based Mac OS.
The main difficulty is to link up with a computer; fire up iTunes and use this to get started.
The basic leaflet that comes with the iPad will tell you all this.
Even if you have not used a Mac before, it is fairly intuitive.
If you are unsure about the basic operations and included apps, the Apple Web site [1] gives some short, but informative videos.
The Missing Manual elaborates on them.
If you have not used an iPhone, or perhaps an IPod before, then the MM helps a bit.
If you want to do something, for example, move around the icons of apps on the screen and you don't know what to do, then a brief incursion to the MM is undoubtedly helpful.
There is a substantial index to help matters but you may well have picked up the basics from Apple's video tours.
At this stage I wanted a 'top up' and went into the kitchen, but I also did an experiment.
The weight of iPad on the kitchen scales was 856g; weight of the MM was 427g, ratio, almost exactly 2:1.
By a volumetric comparison this is approximately 1: 0.8.
The MM is by no means small, so what about information content per volume or mass?
Here is another experiment if you have just bought an iPad.
First, download the app iCabMobile [2], this is another browser that can be used instead of, and is rather better than, the bundled Safari.
Now download the app GoodReader [3] and then into the browser type: manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/iPad_User_Guide.pdf [4].
Lo and behold you have the 'true' missing manual from Apple.
Now, in the browser, insert the letter g before http:// of the target URL of the pdf and press 'return'.
This downloads the iPad_User_Guide pdf into GoodReader.
It is 19MB but should come down easily.
You can then browse Apple's free manual in GoodReader as an e-book.
Steve Jobs boasts that there are 8,500 apps for the iPad [5] but which ones are necessary for your Personal Learning Environment?
Well, this review (via MacUser [6], thank you) suggests two very good ones.
GoodReader is excellent, you can leaf through the pdf as a book, search it, and so on, so put all your downloaded pdfs there.
If you do not use Mobile Me [7] and if you want to get hold of a pdf (or other) file from your office machine, then use Dropbox [8] for your office machine and iPad.
Upload it in the office and download it to your iPad at leisure.
Some apps are mentioned at various places in the MM, but of course more are added all the time so a print-on-paper book is not a good venue for them.
By this time, it is probably fairly evident that the Apple User Guide is better value than the O'Reilly version; at £12.34 from Amazon, retail £18.99.
You can buy a fair number of apps for that and I have already suggested two important ones.
If you want the Apple equivalents of MS Office then Pages, Numbers and Keynote will cost another £5.99 each.
These are covered, albeit briefly, in the MM (Chapter 10) but again, you get a good video guide from the Apple website.
There, for example, you will find that if you use the screen keyboard and type 'cant' then the Notes application (and Pages) offers 'can't' as you type, which avoids shifting to a new keyboard screen.
This useful feature is not available if you use the Bluetooth keyboard when you have to know where to place apostrophes.
There are lots of useful apps and ways to do things beyond the strict confines of the iPad platform.
The best way to locate them is to keep an eye on magazines or hints from colleagues.
Conclusion Although there may be better and cheaper offerings, you will not find iPad: The Missing Manual unhelpful, especially if you have never used an iPhone.
But if you are happy to experiment with the iPad then you might prefer to rely on instinct, Apple's videos and its pdf manual.
Furthermore, there are plenty of video 'how to..' offerings on YouTube.
References Ipad support http://www.apple.com/support/ipad/ and Apple-iPad-Guides Tours http://www.apple.com/ipad/guided-tours/ iCabMobile bit.ly/icabipad GoodReader bit.ly/goodreaderipad iPad Manual http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/iPad_User_Guide.pdf Jobs to developers: Stick with the winning team http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20007010-260.html MacUser http://www.mac.user.magazine.co.uk Mobile Me http://www.apple.com/mobileme/ DropBox http://www.dropbox.com Author Details Brian Whalley Professor of Geomorphology School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology Queens University Belfast BT7 1NN Email: b.whalley@qub.ac.uk Web site: http://web.gg.qub.ac.uk/people/staff/whalley/ Return to top Article Title: "iPad: The Missing Manual" Author: Brian Whalley Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/whalley-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Meeting the Reading List Challenge – Event Report Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Meeting the Reading List Challenge – Event Report Citation BibTex RIS Laura Williams reviews the two-day workshop "Meeting the Reading List Challenge" held at Loughborough University Library on 5th & 6th April 2016.
The Event Meeting the Reading List Challenge was held for the 6th year running at Loughborough University, as a two day conference on April 5th-6th 2016.
Meeting the Reading List Challenge brings together librarians, developers and suppliers to discuss the current issues relating to reading lists; this year the event focused on the challenges of implementation, engagement and best practice.
This conference report is structured thematically, exploring some of the key ideas from the event, alongside my own personal reflections.
The programme featured a mix of presentations and workshops, from both university library staff and reading list systems suppliers.
I particularly enjoyed the inclusion on the programme of suppliers as speakers rather than just exhibitors with a stand, as it allowed opportunity to learn more about the functionality of the different systems currently available.
Presentations from the event are available online.i A Storify of tweets from the event has been created by David Melkevik from Cardiff University, which offers an overview of the commentary and discussions from attendees on Twitter over the two days.ii Key Themes Implementation Journeys Several speakers on the programme talked about their own organisations implementation journey for reading list management systems.
The challenges of implementing a reading list system alongside other major organisational change were discussed by several speakers.
It is clear that adopting a reading list system is a big organisational change in itself, and might not work if your organisation is also undergoing a restructure or implementing other new systems.
A lot can be learned about reading list management systems from the implementation journeys of different organisations, even for those of us with already established systems.
I have not been part of the implementation process for a new system in a university library so it was interesting to hear about the experience of those who have.
Andrew MacDonald talked about the impact of organisational change on implementing a reading list system at De Montfort University, sharing ideas for ways to overcome the challenges of resistance to change and technical issues.
Capturing the support of students was one successful strategy for De Montfort University to address these issues.
Sarah Rayner and Olivia Walsby from the University of Manchester shared their story of unsuccessful reading list system implementation and the lessons learned for going forwards.
Organisational change and technological readiness were large contributing factors.
A strategy informed by research will be a key focus for the University of Manchester going forward with reading lists to ensure the system meets the needs of the organisation.
Monica Crump from the National University of Ireland, in Galway, also focused on the importance of organisational culture when implementing a reading list system.
Monica suggested that it is crucial that the entire organisation is on board with the change.
Making a new system attractive to academics was crucial and streamlining processes was key to success.
For Monica, organisational restructure was also an issue but it was used as an opportunity to create a team to support reading lists within the library.
Cathy Murr and Lyn Porteous from Kingston University talked about working with a supplier as a development partner when implementing Leganto as their reading list system.
They talked about the process of implementing a system, as a development partner, from the initial discussions to rolling out the product.
At Kingston, a main challenge was managing the expectations of staff and students, using a system still under development, which is still an unfinished product.
Staff and Student Engagement Engagement with reading list systems appears to be a hot topic for university libraries at the moment.
Almost everyone at the event spoke of user engagement challenges for their reading list system, both staff engagement and student engagement, and several presentations focused on the issues of engagement.
Strategies to get academic staff more engaged in using reading list systems was a big issue for attendees at the event.
Ideas shared about different types of training sessions, online support materials, and examples of best practice.
My presentation, delivered jointly with Alison Sharman, focused on the importance of refreshing marketing and engagement initiatives for reading list systems once reading lists have become business as usual in order to keep the momentum going.
We shared ideas from our staff engagement plan for MyReading and also our Business School reading list project which involves my role as a dedicated reading list librarian for the school.
Student engagement was discussed by Rachel Fell and Nicola Ward from Manchester Metropolitan University, with a talk about a campaign to encourage students to read and make use of reading lists.
They employed a wide variety of strategies from roving librarians, promotional events, posters, and videos to raise awareness amongst students of reading lists.
Social media played a key role as part of the campaign.
Manchester Metropolitan University also conducted a student survey to build a better picture of what students wanted from their reading lists.
Melissa Bradley and Andy Prue from the University of Kent discussed strategies for staff engagement, focusing on their idea to use student satisfaction as a hook to get staff interested in the system.
It also was important to engage wide range of stakeholders, not just academic staff, recognising the role played by other staff across the university in creating reading lists.
They have demonstrated the correlation between high quality reading lists and student satisfaction by pulling together reading list data and student satisfaction data as evidence and conducting reading list case studies.
Policy and Processes Policy and processes for reading list management was another theme which featured in most talks over the two day event, with everything from training plans, library workflows and reading list policies being discussed.
A particular hot topic issue was establishing responsibility for updating and managing reading lists; is it the responsibility of the academic or a service provided by the library?
Claudio Svaluto from the University of Essex highlighted the challenges of establishing processes for reading lists, in particular establishing whether academics or the library should take responsibility for creating and updating reading lists.
Sarah Rayner and Olivia Walsby discussed the difficulties in implementing policy and processes for reading lists.
They shared findings of research conducted with academic staff which highlighted concerns about increasing regulation, additional administration work, more box ticking and a push towards conformity within academia.
Sara Hafeez from the University of Westminster also discussed reading list processes, focusing on the training, communication and documentation.
Sara is the reading list co-ordinator for the university alongside her role as an academic liaison librarian.
Sara shared a plan for delivering training, support, advocacy and communications about reading lists, across different library teams at Westminster.
Sara’s presentation highlighted the importance of flexibility in reading list training and processes when supporting diverse subject areas.
Clear and well documented library workflows were also highlighted as important.
Sarah Hall from Staffordshire University talked about keeping the momentum going once a system is in place, and looked at how they are going to achieve their aims for reading lists going forwards.
Better policy and processes were a key part of this; for example they plan to rework ordering processes, develop a collection management policy which includes reading lists, and establish the roles and responsibilities for updating and managing reading lists.
Reading List Best Practice Reading list best practice was discussed throughout the two days, with ideas being shared about how we can make best use of our reading list systems and encourage academics to use them to their full potential.
Jo Dobson and Deborah Taylor from Sheffield Hallam delivered a workshop about creating engaging reading lists.
In groups we were given big pieces of paper, pens and lots of items to go on a reading list, and asked to design a reading list which would be engaging to students.
Each group took a different approach to structuring and annotating their reading list which highlights the many possibilities our academics are faced with when setting up a reading list.
Ideas were discussed about ways the library could help facilitate training to ensure academics are equipped with skills and knowledge to create, better and more engaging reading lists.
The conversations about reading list best practice continued into lunch and breaks with delegates sharing thoughts about the increasing need to address pedagogical issues within reading list training, rather than just basic instructional training.
Winners of the group activity to design a new reading list   System Developments New developments in reading list systems were highlighted in the presentations delivered by representatives of Talis (Talis Aspire), ExLibris (Leganto) and PTFS Europe (Rebus List).
These presentations proved to be an enlightening opportunity to learn more about the other commercial options available on the market.
The University of Huddersfield uses an in-house system MyReading so it always interesting to find out more about the systems other organisations are using.
My career background is archives, not academic libraries, so my knowledge of other reading lists systems is limited meaning the opportunity to learn more was highly valued.
Open Data Martin Hamilton from JISC discussed open data for reading lists which led into a group workshop about the potential of open reading list data for libraries, academic faculties and institutions.
Martin introduced the concept of open data in higher education, and the possibilities for reading lists.
Examples of projects utilising open data included BookMart which is a project about using open data to help students source the books they need in the most cost effective wayiii.
In groups we then discussed the possible uses of open reading list data in addition to supporting students, and of course the potential barriers for having open reading list data.
One of the main concerns raised relating to open reading list data was the issue of intellectual property; are reading lists the intellectual property of academics or institutions?
; are reading lists an asset with competitive value which institutions would not be willing to share?
One of the two group activity breakout sessions   Conclusion Before attending Meeting the Reading List Challenge, I wasn’t sure how much there was to say about reading lists, to keep a two day event fresh and interesting.
It turns out there is a lot to talk about when it comes to reading lists.
Conversations continued over dinner, breakfast and on the train home confirming that reading list management remains a complex and challenging issue for libraries.
Meeting the Reading List Challenge provided an excellent forum for sharing ideas, solving problems and reassuring ourselves that we are not alone in the challenges we face.
i http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/mtrlc/2016-conference ii https://storify.com/cardiffunilibBA/meeting-the-reading-list-challenge iii https://elevator.jisc.ac.uk/e/open-data-mashup-challenge/idea/bookmart   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Turning Off Tap Into Bath Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Turning Off Tap Into Bath Buzz data software database archives metadata digitisation schema preservation cataloguing passwords lcsh mysql dvd rslp url research Citation BibTex RIS Ann Chapman describes the lifecycle of a demonstrator database and the development of a preservation policy for its content and software.
Earlier this year UKOLN received an email informing us that the server hosting the Tap into Bath collection description database was due to be decommissioned towards the end of 2010.
Although there had been some previous discussion over the future of the database, the email was the trigger for a formal review of the project.
This article describes the preservation strategy that was developed and the steps that were taken to preserve information about the database and the software.
The Inspiration for Tap into Bath Tap into Bath was a demonstrator project created as part of the Collection Description Focus [1] work programme carried out at UKOLN between 2000 and 2004 with funding from the British Library, JISC and MLA (under its previous name Resource).
The aim of the Focus was to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions, domains and sectors.
The Focus also provided support for collection description projects in several ways which included the CLD (Collection-Level Description) Online Tutorial, created as both an aid to Implementers and as a tool for training [2].
The Focus also promoted the use of the RSLP Collection Description Schema [3] and worked with the Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group on the development of a DC-based schema for collection-level description [4], using the collection description attributes of the RSLP CD Schema as a starting point.
Collection description metadata and searchable online databases of collection information were developed in response to several factors.
Large-scale digitisation (principally of texts and images) was often not matched by resources to catalogue the newly created items, surveys revealed that quantities of materials (often older and rarer items) in traditional collections still had no records in online public access catalogues and there was an increasing need to improve the effectiveness of resource discovery techniques for digital materials across archive, library and museum collections.
Describing materials at collection level provided a new route for discovery.
The RSLP collection description metadata schema led to the independent creation of a number of collection description databases as part of specific funded projects; however, none of these databases were available for reuse with different content and it was clear that there would be little or no funding to create further such databases in the future.
In the winter of 2003, a group of Bath libraries asked for advice on taking forward their idea of a jointly owned text-based Web page about their collections.
UKOLN advised against this approach, suggesting using structured data instead and offering to work with them to develop a demonstrator collection description database that would be available for free reuse – an offer which was accepted.
What Tap into Bath Offered The Tap into Bath resource was a searchable database of information about archival, library and museum collections in the city of Bath.
The entry for each collection contained a brief description of the collection plus details of its size, the types of material held, and information about the original collectors and notable people connected with the collection.
The database was searchable by personal and institutional name and by subject as well as collection title.
Tap into Bath was a place you could find the answers to questions such as: Which buildings in Bath did the architect James McKean Brydon design?
Which collection has the 1838 Inventory of Stage Props from the Theatre Royal, Bath?
Which father and son, of the same name, were consecutively the Town Clerk for Bath?
Where can you find the Bellot Cup?
Are there any collections that contain shells?
Who founded the American Museum in Britain?
(The answers to these questions may be obtained by reading the Postscript.)
The anticipated audience for the database ranged from people living in Bath and attending Bath schools to students, researchers and professionals both local and from further afield.
It also included the many tourists from all over the world who visit Bath every year.
The Tourist Office in Bath, although not involved as a partner, valued Tap into Bath as a useful resource they could use in their work.
There were two components to Tap into Bath: the demonstrator database for collections in Bath and a downloadable open source resource that others could reuse to create their own collections database.
The MySQL database and the search and data entry interfaces were designated as open source and the un-populated database and accompanying software offered for reuse with acknowledgement.
The downloadable resource was a blank version of the database used for Tap into Bath plus the associated search and results display interface software.
The look and feel of the database search and results display pages could be customised to reflect the new resource.
Additionally the labels for the data elements could also be altered to display a different preferred term.
For example, the metadata schema used the term ‘object’ but for display the term ‘star object’ was used.
All the resources were accessed via the Tap into Bath Web site, which also contained information about the project.
Working on Tap into Bath The lead partners were UKOLN and University of Bath Library.
In addition to the original group of Bath-based libraries, all local museums and archives were also invited to participate.
This resulted in 25 contributing partners from archive, library and museum collections in both public and private sectors in the City of Bath.
The project began on 12 January 2004.
The database was created by a member of the University of Bath library staff using the RSLP Metadata Schema for collection description and a MySQL database.
A programmer was hired to create the search and display interfaces; it was part of the contract that the project would be making this available as open source software.
Partner organisations submitted collection entries as Word documents and the data was entered into the database by University library staff.
The completed database and the project Web pages were held on a University of Bath server.
The Tap into Bath database was formally launched at the Guildhall in Bath on 8 December 2004 [5].
Work on the project has previously been documented in Ariadne by Alison Baud and Ann Chapman [6] together with a report on her involvement in the project by Stephanie Round [7], Local Studies Librarian at Bath & North East Somerset Libraries.
Tap into Bath successfully demonstrated the value of a database of collection descriptions with a common focus – in this case the focus was geographic location.
It provided a staff development opportunity for the partner organisations and it was another place in which to promote their collections.
Bath & North East Somerset Libraries reported that the data collection exercise was valuable in its own right for recording its many (often small) sub-collections of the local history collection, full details of which had not previously been recorded.
Indeed, in order to complete their entries staff had needed to contact ex-members of staff for information on some of the local history collections.
Conscious that some of the original data might become inaccurate over time (e.g.
changes in opening hours, or contact details), project partners were re-contacted in 2007.
They were asked to review their entries and supply any additional or amended data, and the database was updated.
Changes that needed to be made in the 2007 update included changes of collection and institution title, opening hours, telephone numbers, email addresses and Web site URLs.
They also included updates to collection details and, in one case, recording the death in 2005 of the donor of one of the collections.
An internal review by UKOLN in 2008 concluded that further data updates would be needed over time, and that it would be useful to create new interfaces, including a password-protected data entry interface so that project partners could amend their own entries as needed.
If such an interface were available, partner institutions would be able to edit their own entries as and when changes were needed.
This would ensure that the database was updated continuously, rather than the current position where certain details might be incorrect for a lengthy period before correction.
However, staffing and funding constraints precluded this work being taken forward at that time though it remained on the wish list for improvements.
Developing a Preservation Strategy When UKOLN received notification that the University of Bath server hosting Tap into Bath would be de-commissioned later in 2010 it was an ideal opportunity to take another look at the status of the project.
The review focused on what were the original aims for the project, whether the database was still a viable service, and whether UKOLN or any of the other partners could take this on in the long term.
UKOLN is a centre of excellence in digital information management and the preservation of digital resources is an essential aspect of this work.
The situation that arose with the server decommission also provided an opportunity to develop and record a preservation strategy for the project and to then use this as a case study in preservation.
Alternative Hosting Options The 2010 internal review identified that UKOLN did not have the resources to continue to host and maintain the database on a long-term basis.
It was thought unlikely that project partners would wish to take this on, but they needed to be consulted.
A letter was sent to project partners thanking them for their past participation, outlining the current issues and inviting offers to take over the database.
No offers were received; as expected organisational budgets were already fully committed.
Decision: Providing inaccurate data was not an option so the live database would be taken down.
A Reusable Open Source Resource In addition to creating the database and populating it with content, the database structure and its associated software was created with the intention of making it available for reuse by others, with appropriate acknowledgement.
Once the resource was made available, several enquiries were received about reuse.
Some of them did not proceed (typically because funding was unavailable for data collection and data entry tasks) but two resources were created.
They were the Southern Cross Resource Finder for collections useful for the study of Australia and/or New Zealand [8] and Milton Keynes Inspire which promoted access to archives, libraries, galleries and museums in Milton Keynes [9].
A further potential reuse of the database is currently under discussion.
Between 1994 and 1999 UKOLN worked on establishing the scale of continuing need for retrospective cataloguing and conversion to provide machine readable records for all library and archive records and proposed a national strategy in Full Disclosure.
Since then some work has been funded, either through the Research Support Libraries Programme or by grant applications and occasional budget allocations.
This means that the situation has changed to some extent although it would require another survey to establish the current situation.
The Full Disclosure report [10] proposed a National Register of materials requiring retrospective cataloguing or catalogue conversion but this was never set up.
In November 2010 conversations between UKOLN and Research Libraries UK (RLUK) explored the potential for using the Tap into Bath database for just such a National Register and RLUK is actively considering this option.
Decision: Since there was still value in offering the resource for reuse, the relevant files would be hosted on the UKOLN Web site.
A Project Web Site In addition to being the access point to the live database, the Tap into Bath Web site also provided information about the project.
Taking down the Web site entirely would therefore remove information that was still useful but simply putting a complete copy on the UKOLN Web site would include inaccurate information.
The solution was to make an updated version available.
All the pages would carry a statement that the project had closed and the content of each page was reviewed and edited as required.
Decision: Provide a revised version of the Web site as part of the UKOLN Web presence.
Database Content Although the database content would become increasingly inaccurate over time, it provided a snapshot of the resources available in Bath at the time of the last update in 2007 and it also provided an example of the types of data required for collection descriptions.
While it would be counter-productive to retain the content as a live database it was also important to preserve the information collected as an example of how each organisation used the various data elements.
Decision: Make an archive copy of the populated database.
Implementation Having identified the issues and made the decisions, a detailed preservation strategy was drawn up and put in place over the next few months.
The Populated Database The archive version was made by copying the populated database onto a DVD.
Before the original database was taken down, a series of screenshots were taken of the database in use, showing example searches and results displays.
Tap into Bath Home Page Coins search Roman Baths Numismatics collection information page The Open Source Resource An archive copy on DVD was made of the blank database and the associated software and installation documentation.
The decision was to continue to offer the database and software as a free download.
In its active phase, requests to reuse the software were handled via email contact.
This method was used as it provided a way of building a relationship with reusers and getting feedback on their experience of installation and customisation.
With the move to an unsupported archival Web site, a zipped file was made directly available from the Software page, along with a note that it was unsupported.
A number of documents were added for download: the high-level design outline, installation guide, a list of RSLP Collection Description Metadata Schema elements, a list of Tap into Bath fields with definitions and example content, the data collection form template and the list of LCSH terms used for physical characteristics.
The Project Web Pages The Web pages held on the University of Bath Library server would no longer be available once the server was decommissioned so an archival Web site [10] was created on the UKOLN server.
The original pages were copied over, the text was revised and an ‘Archive’ watermark added to each page.
A brief statement about the status of the project was added to each page, as shown in the following two examples: ‘The Tap into Bath demonstrator collection description database project has now ended and the database is no longer available.
The Web site pages have been left in place as an illustration of the user view.
The database and associated search and display interface software, together with installation documents, is open source and available for download and re-use with accreditation from this site.’ and ‘The Tap into Bath demonstrator collection description database project has now ended and the database, created in 2004, is no longer available.
This page has been retained to illustrate the ‘look and feel’ of the original Web site but the search function no longer operates.’ Each page was also assessed and revised as needed.
An additional section was added to the Background page about the closure and archiving decisions.
On the Partners page, two of the links were out of date and since there would be no effort available to monitor and update links, all links to partner Web sites were removed.
The Software page was updated to note that while the database and associated software could still be downloaded, it was not supported.
The Tap into Bath Web site included an email contact address.
Support and advice on using the database and software is no longer provided, so this was changed to an email address for assistance only for problems with downloading the database and associated software.
Other Tasks We were aware that there would be a number of links to the original Web site; some of these were known (e.g.
project partners) but others were unknown.
Partners were contacted and asked to remove any links on their Web sites to the old Tap into Bath Web site.
We also contacted Southern Cross and Milton Keynes Inspire and notified them of the change of URL for the Web site so they could update the acknowledgement link on their Web pages.
Last but not least it was decided to record all of the above activity for UKOLN resource management purposes.
While it would have been possible to do this just internally, it was decided it would be more useful if our experience was shared among the community.
A short case study was written for the JISC Beginners Guide to Preservation [11] and it was decided to write this article for Ariadne.
Conclusion Tap into Bath was a successful experiment in producing a local resource using standards and best practice and providing a staff development opportunity.
We were pleased that there were instances of reuse as we had deliberately created it as open source.
As a demonstrator resource it was always recognised that at some point it might be taken down, although the exact circumstances that would initiate this were not identified during the project lifetime.
So what have we learnt from the preservation process?
Firstly, a thorough review was required to identify all the component parts of the resource; the database, its associated software for search and results display, supporting documentation and the Web pages.
Only then could we assess the various components of the resource and take appropriate decisions on each – and then carry out the actions resulting from those decisions.
It was felt to be equally important that we record our actions and make this information available to the information community.
References The Collection Description Focus Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/ CLD Online Tutorial http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/cdfocus-tutorial/ RSLP Collection Description Metadata Schema http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/cdfocus-tutorial/schemas/rslp/ Dublin Core Collections Application Profile http://dublincore.org/groups/collections/collection-application-profile/ “Tap into Bath Turned On”, Focus on UKOLN Newsletter, ISSN 0963-7354, March 2005, Issue 15 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/focus/issue15/#15.16 Baud, A. and Chapman, A.
“Tap into Bath”, Ariadne 40, July 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/baud-chapman/ Round, S. “Tap into Bath Takes Off”, Ariadne 42, January 2005 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tapintobath-rpt/ Southern Cross Resource Finder http://www.scrf.org.uk/ Milton Keynes Inspire http://www.mkinspire.org.uk/ Full Disclosure http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/fulldisclosure/ Tap into Bath Web site http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/tapintobath/ JISC Beginners Guide to Preservation.
Case Study: Tap into Bath http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-bgdp/2010/09/08/case-study-tap-into-bath/ Postscript – Back to Those Questions The questions mentioned earlier in this article were those used in the promotional quiz which was part of the launch.
There were two sets of questions, one for adults and one for children, with prizes of free admission to a couple of the museums charging for entry.
Just in case you want to know the answers, here they are.
Adult Quiz Question 1.
Which buildings in Bath did the architect James McKean Brydon design?
Answer: The Victoria Art Gallery and the The Guildhall, Bath Found by typing ‘James McKean Brydon’ in either Basic search or Advanced Search on Names Question 2.
Which collection contains the 1838 Inventory of Stage Props from the Theatre Royal, Bath?
Answer: Theatre Royal Collection, Bath & North East Somerset Libraries Found by typing ‘Stage props’ in Basic search or Advanced search on Star item Question 3.
Which father and son, of the same name, were consecutively the Town Clerk for Bath?
Answer: Philip George and Philip George [Town Clerk’s Papers, Bath City Council, Bath Record Office] Found by typing ‘Town clerk’ in Basic search and Advanced search on Description Children’s Quiz Question 1.
Where can you find the Bellot cup?
Answer: Bath Abbey Heritage Vaults Found by typing ‘Bellot cup’ in Basic search or Advanced search on Star item Question 2.
Which collection contains shells?
Answer: Natural History collection, Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution Found by typing ‘Shells’ in Basic search or Advanced search on Subject Question 3. Who founded the American Museum in Britain?
Answer: Dallas Pratt and John Judkyn Found by typing ‘American Museum in Britain’ in Basic search or Advanced search on Title.
The required information is in the Description.
Author Details Ann Chapman Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.chapman/ Return to top Article Title: “Turning off Tap into Bath” Author: Ann Chapman Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/chapman/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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What Happens If I Click on This?
': Experiences of the Archives Hub Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines What Happens If I Click on This?
': Experiences of the Archives Hub Buzz data database usability archives repositories preservation cataloguing hypertext algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jane Stevenson describes the results of usability testing for the Archives Hub Web site.
For online services, the importance of developing user-friendly and accessible Web sites is of paramount importance.
This article is about user testing recently carried out by the Archives Hub [1], an online service run by Mimas [2], which is a national data centre that provides access to a whole range of online services for research, learning and teaching.
The Archives Hub is a JISC-funded service that provides a gateway to search descriptions of archives for education and research, enabling researchers to discover unique archival sources held in repositories across the country.
One of our challenges is to create a site that primarily meets the needs of academic researchers but also works well for a whole range of users, from experienced researchers to family historians who may not be so familiar with using online services.
But describing archive collections in an online environment in a way that is both immediate and informative presents substantial challenges.
An archive usually consists of a whole range of records, accumulated over the course of an individual’s lifetime or during the day-to-day running of a business or organisation [3].
Records are often interrelated in complex ways, forming hierarchies that reflect the creation and use of records over time.
But there can be a tendency to assume that archival structure and hierarchy are self-evident.
Conveying this structure to a user, especially one who is not an experienced user of archives, is not easy to do.
It is therefore important to understand how users react to the presentation of information on the Archives Hub, and whether the layout, design and terminology help to clarify to users what they are seeing.
In addition, it is all too easy to design a Web site and build in functionality based upon perceived ideas about users, rather than engaging users directly.
This usability testing was carried out prior to a planned redesign of the Archives Hub Web site, and therefore we wanted to get valuable feedback that would help to inform any changes that we might make.
It was intended to be fairly small-scale and low-budget, and focused on our core academic users.
Rather than engage external consultants, we particularly wanted to have direct contact with users, or potential users, in order to gain a better understanding of their perspective and how they viewed the Archives Hub.
We could bring to the process our detailed knowledge of the service and experiences that we have had with users over time, and we could also carefully control the focus of the sessions.
Creating a Questionnaire We decided to create a questionnaire that we would use to interview each participant.
This would bring some level of consistency and help to provide focus.
At the same time, we intended to ask fairly open-ended questions to encourage participants to give us their own thoughts in their own words.
We felt that this would yield reasonably structured data, but that it would essentially be qualitative than quantitative.
At several points during the sessions, we asked participants about their impressions of the page display, and we tended to ask follow-up questions designed to allow them a free and discursive response.
We also asked a number of more specific questions, particularly about terminology used and the layout and content of the actual descriptions.
A questionnaire does introduce a certain level of artificiality, not least because we asked all participants to look at the same descriptions, which we deliberately picked as being fairly typical of the average Hub description.
This meant they would not be using the service in a way that reflected their research interests and therefore it might make the service seem less relevant to them.
However, if we asked them to enter a search term randomly they may come to atypical descriptions which might lead off into unforeseen tangents and it might be difficult to stick to the questions that we wanted to ask.
The Sessions We had ten participants involved in the user testing sessions.
Five were academics from various disciplines, one was a research associate, one was a first-year student, one had just completed her degree and two were PhD students.
This article provides the text of some of their answers pretty much verbatim, though with some editing for the sake of clarity.
The first question that we asked participants was about their understanding of the term ‘archives’.
This is the sort of question that may easily be overlooked, but it is clearly central to the use of the Hub and it yielded some interesting responses.
The Archives Hub Web site essentially assumes that people understand this term: our tag line describes the site as providing ‘a national gateway to descriptions of archives’.
Question: What do you understand by the term ‘archives’?
‘Records produced in the course of somebody’s business or occupation.
Also family archives maybe more related to land.’ ‘A collection of material traditionally quite old stuff.
It’s quite a loose term can be quite broad types of stuff.’ ‘Historical stuff – things that have happened in the past.
Archives are broad – maybe documents, photos, etc.’ ‘Things like census records, marriage records, birth certificates, marriage certificates, chapel records…information in its original format.
I’m not sure whether journal articles are included.’ ‘A collection of information relating to a particular institution or set of institutions.
I’d group in anything to do with the life or workings of that institution.’ ‘An archive might be something that is referred to in one of the indexes of one of the books that I’m studying.’ ‘A repository of documents and materials not always accessible to the researcher!
Also, it can mean the physical building.’ ‘Using original reference materials, journal articles, things like that.
Original work or research that was done in the past.’ ‘Stores of information.’ ‘I would assume that an archive is a collection of published books, papers or literature from previous years.
A database of old stuff.’ There was a general feeling that archives are usually old or historical stuff, and reference was also made to an archive as a store or repository.
Some responses were determined by individual experiences: the participant who was involved in family history research talked about census records and marriage records, and the participant who had been working on an oral history project relating to people living in institutions referred to the life and workings of institutions.
Overall, there was a general understanding that archives may consist of a broad range of types of sources and that they are usually historical rather than current.
But it was clear that some participants did not entirely appreciate the distinction between published and unpublished sources, between archives, monographs and articles.
The term ‘archive’ is increasingly being used in diverse ways, not least with the rise of digital information and issues surrounding the long-term access and preservation of a whole range of digital materials.
An e-prints repository will often be described as a repository of archives, so it is little wonder that people are increasingly thinking of journal articles as archives.
Therefore, the onus must be on us to clarify what archives are in the context of the Archives Hub service.
When we asked about using archives for their research, some participants continued to group published sources together with archive sources.
Seven of the participants did use a range of primary source materials to varying degrees: one had a particularly detailed knowledge of older archive sources, having worked with Anglo-Saxon charters, one had experience of using archives in Russia, and another participant was familiar with family history sources.
There was not a great deal of common ground in the way that people search for archive sources, and it very much depends upon their experience, general knowledge of archives and type of research.
A number of our participants referred to making direct contact with relevant people or organisations as a preferred option and two of our participants referred to phoning round appropriate bodies; for example, contacting theatre companies (for performance history research).
One participant referred to building up bookmarked favourites through following Web links, references in journal articles and generally serendipitous searching.
For one researcher, whose work focuses on local history, the main approach is to contact the appropriate local record office.
Some participants did refer to online sources: the participant with an interest in family history talked about Web sites such as ancestry.com, and a participant working on the literature and history of the 1640s and 1650s referred to The National Archives [4] and British Library Catalogue [5] as well as various dictionaries and guides.
We did ask whether participants were confident using online services generally: five were positively confident, three were fairly confident and two were not really confident.
Not surprisingly, those who were most confident had used the greatest variety of online resources.
Most participants did not mention any kind of cross-searching networks only one mentioned the Archives Hub as a service that they had previously used.
First Impressions One of our key aims was to get immediate reactions to the Archives Hub home page.
Whilst it is true that people increasingly access services like the Hub from different locations, the home page is still ‘the most desirable real estate’ [6] of the site.
It should clearly convey the identity and mission of the site as well as what it has to offer, where to start and what the search options are.
It should also create a good impression visually, so that it engages people’s attention.
There is a difficult balance to strike here.
The site needs to sell itself well enough to entice visitors into trying out a search, but too much content can clutter the page and people will not read, and may be put off by, substantial amounts of text.
The Hub includes a ‘Collections of the Month’ feature, highlighting collections by featuring a new subject each month.
The two subjects covered during the time our sessions took place were Stanley Kubrick, the film director, and British Women’s Emigration.
Figure 1: Screenshot of the Archives Hub homepage (October 2008) Question: How would you describe what this site is, and what it is for, from looking at the home page?
‘Initially I can’t see what it is for, but I can see a search box so this makes me want to look at what I can search for.
‘Gateway to descriptions of archives’?…I think that it is going to give resources from universities and colleges in the UK.
I’m not quite sure what kind of resources, so I would just start clicking on the links on the left to see what’s there.’ ‘Is this a Manchester University Web site?…No, it looks like it’s UK-wide.
The front page doesn’t say much [in terms of defining the content].
[The participant did read the tag line, but only after we prompted her to think about what the site was for, and it did then seem clear to her, but this text did not jump out initially].’ ‘You can search the sorts of archives held at various universities and colleges in the UK.’ ‘A database…I think the bit about Stanley Kubrick implies that it is more like an encyclopaedia.
Looking at the indexes [search options] suggests that it’s a database for information, but from this it could be an encyclopaedia as well.
It says “revolutionising access to the archives” but it’s a bit vague as to what exactly this means.’ ‘It looks like it’s an umbrella site to give access to archives within UK HEI’s.
The one term I would find slightly problematic would be ‘descriptions’.
Whether it’s a service that lets me know that archives are in UK institutions, or whether it’s a service that describes the holdings of those archives…?’ ‘Nice uncomplicated site.
What might I be searching for?
Why would I access this site?
I wouldn’t use it unless I knew exactly what I was looking for.
Emigration is very interesting for me, but British women’s emigration is too specific for me.’ [The participant thought that the feature on the home page represented the content of the site, i.e.
that the site was about British women’s emigration.]
‘Descriptions of archives held in universities and colleges in the UK [the participant immediately looked at the tag line and felt that this was a real help as it spelt out what the site is, which she felt that some sites do not do].
I want to know how to get to things quickly so prompts are really useful common terms are used search, browse I think I can get to what I want quite quickly.
It is very general in terms of content I might need to use it in order to get a feeling for what it has.’ ‘I suppose we’ve got a subject finder there, which tells me it’s for any sort of subject.
If I had a dissertation title or essay title then I would type it into here and use it to find primary reference sources.
I don’t know…I suppose it’s a sort of general reference database where you can find out a bit more about your dissertation subject, so you get a different perspective.
I’m not entirely sure to be honest.’ ‘It seems self-explanatory – the tag line gives a clear description that it is a site to search for archive sources in HE and FE.’ [Higher and Further Education] ‘A general site for loads of sources that have been archived, mainly for students.
I get the impression that I can search for a broad range of topics.
Maybe it’s difficult if you are looking for something specific you might want more information on the home page about types of sources you might find.’ The answers given to this question were quite diverse: a good illustration of how people look at the same Web site in different ways.
Half of the participants did seem clear about what the site is for, although there was some feeling that understanding of what the site is can only really come from trying out some searches.
Two of the participants were misled by the ‘Collections of the Month’ feature, which illustrates the natural tendency people have to scan a page quickly and make assumptions.
It was interesting that several participants did not read the tag line; ‘Providing access to archives in UK universities and colleges’, even when specifically asked what the site is for (whilst a couple of participants seemed suspicious of what they thought was such an obvious question!).
We were left wondering how we can effectively convey what the site is for when people so often do not read the text, not even one short line that defines the content.
We went on to ask participants ‘what do you think you will find if you carry out a search?’ There was a general feeling that there would be a broad range of material, although a few participants still focused on the Collections of the Month feature.
Two participants seemed to be thinking in terms of typical University administration records (minutes of meetings, conference records, staff records), whilst another was not confident that universities and colleges would actually hold archives.
On the whole, participants were uncertain what they would find, but there was no indication that this deterred them from using the site.
The impression was that they would simply try a search and find out.
The Archives Hub is primarily for the education and research community, but at the same time, we want to attract a broad range of users, and we wanted to find out from the participants whether they thought that the site was of general interest or whether it looked quite specialised.
Question: Do you have any thoughts about who you think the site is aimed at?
‘University students, post-sixth form, or adults – quite a wide audience.
Aimed at academic researchers and maybe their partners in research work.
Mostly researchers.
It doesn’t seem like a general public thing.
Maybe students but not so likely to be undergraduates.’ ‘Historians and education professionals, teachers, administrators, people doing research into the education system.’ ‘Specifically at academics and researchers, but also an amateur audience, a non-specialised audience and a professional audience, so archivists and librarians.
Historian colleagues, schools, projects etc.’ ‘It’s not a fancy design.
You’re not likely to linger on the home page unless you do think you are likely to find something relevant in a university archive.
Probably you’d go to it with a bit of knowledge [of archives].’ ‘I’m pretty fuzzy about what archives are, so really not sure how to answer this, but as you have a browse and a subject finder, I suppose pretty much anyone.
But from a scientific perspective, if you were doing a dissertation…we need stuff that has been published like journals etc., so I see this more for maybe arts students, language, women’s studies, social science maybe?’ ‘A broad type of user – some universities hold family records, some on education or other subjects.’ [Participant also said they may hold materials people might not expect.]
‘History students?
Maybe academic staff.’ Four participants thought the site is aimed at academics/researchers.
Most did refer to academics, students and then possibly broader users as well.
The answers given generally do reflect our intention that the site has a general appeal, but with an academic and researcher bias.
We ended this general section by asking them if they had any further thoughts about the site.
Question: Can you tell me anything more about your initial impressions of the site?
‘Initially, I think it’s quite a small home page; there isn’t a lot of information about what the site is about…you could have a section detailing what types of things are in the site.
Someone coming from my background wouldn’t know what to search for so I would have to think of something random to search for and see what came up.
It isn’t really clear to me to what a gateway is it says ‘a national gateway to descriptions’ I’m not really sure what this would be.’ ‘It doesn’t jump out [visually] and is not that exciting.
The colour is quite muted.
Maybe it’s not that obvious what it is.’ ‘It might be useful to be more explicit on what the site does’ [although the participant found it clear herself].
‘Nothing that I particularly dislike, on first impressions.
The layout seems pretty self-explanatory that is without using it, though some sites can look pretty neat and then you use it and… The way the menu is laid out, it looks pretty logical and straightforward.’ ‘It looks like a working Web site, it’s not a particular flashy interface, not a great deal going on, there is an image but it’s quite small, muted colours.
This is about getting information rather than presentation.
Not that I’m saying it’s presented in a particularly bad way but that’s not the first thing that hits you.’ ‘It’s quite spare compared with some sites.
It’s quite nice that it is fairly straightforward.
The font is nice and clear and blue on white is good visually.’ ‘The screen is a bit crowded – the footer takes up quite a lot of room – maybe too many links to external sites.’ ‘Definitely I would use it if came across it.
But if I found it in a search I may not use it I wouldn’t know exactly what I would find.’ These reactions suggest that the Archives Hub home page needs to be more explicit about what people will find when they search, and they also show that reaction to design is always a very individual thing we had a few participants who praised the simplicity and the colours used on the Web site and a few who wanted more complexity and a more vibrant design.
Summary of Findings I do not have the space here to provide a detailed analysis of the whole questionnaire [7], so instead I will sum-up by listing a number of observations and recommendations that we took from the study.
Provide a Site that Meets Expectations When we asked participants about the search options available, including the advanced search, there was a strong consensus that the options were what they expected: ‘A good list of options here.
It’s the kind of thing we’re used to’.
The sessions certainly confirmed our assumption that a prominent and simple quick search box is an essential feature of the home page.
Seven out of the ten participants said that the first thing they would do would be to use the quick search, two thought they might use the browse option and one did actually say that he would use the ‘About the Hub’ option to find out more about the service.
The collection description also generally met expectations, or participants said that they did not really have any expectations against which to measure it.
Overall, there were a number of references to things on the site being as they would expect, and therefore being reasonably familiar and intuitive to use.
Clarify the Content We asked several questions about the content available via the Archives Hub, and each question drew different responses, clearly showing a degree of uncertainty.
When we asked what would be displayed when participants ran a search, the answers given showed that people did not really know what to expect.
Maybe asking a question like this is a little artificial in that people do not typically think that carefully about what they will see beforehand, but the fact that participants referred to articles, pictures, newspapers, museum archives, exhibitions and William Wilberforce (the search was for anti-slavery) does suggest that the Hub needs to be more explicit about the type of content users will find.
Clarify What is Excluded as Well as What Is Included When looking at the hit list for a search, one participant questioned how comprehensive the list was: ‘Is this everything to do with this subject?’ A couple of other participants assumed the list was a comprehensive list of archive sources.
This, of course, is always a difficult issue because we want to promote the Hub as an effective service for locating archive sources, particularly those held in university and college archives, but that does not mean that we describe all of the archives on a particular subject.
The challenge is to find a way to describe the content accurately, and ensure that users are aware that there may be other valuable sources relating to their research area.
Use Clear Terminology We were very keen to focus on terminology in this study, as we were aware that some terms are archival, with headings often taken from the International Standard for Archive Repositories, ISAD(G) [8], which provides guidance on standard elements of description, although it does not recommend headings to use for user interfaces.
Amongst those terms questioned were ‘unpublished handlist’, ‘access points’, ‘related units of description’, ‘item-level’, ‘level of description’ and ‘fonds’.
‘Item-level’ is a very commonly used term to distinguish individual items within a collection, as opposed to a whole collection or a series of items within a collection.
Five participants said it did not mean anything to them, two said it was to do with searching for something specific, one said it was to do with only matching a keyword as opposed to every word in text and one thought it would provide some kind of fuller explanation.
The participant who had used the Hub before did understand the term in the archival sense.
It is not surprising that there was a lack of understanding, although how to refer to items within an archival hierarchy in a way that the majority of people can understand is certainly a challenge.
A term that was almost universally unknown was ‘fonds’, which is archival terminology for a collection of material accumulated by one individual, family or organisation.
In a user study by Duff and Stoyanova [9], several respondents thought that ‘fonds’ was part of the name of the record creator, as the collection they were assessing was labelled ‘Margaret Laurence Fonds’.
Archivists have tended to carry the term from the professional sphere, where it is useful, into the public sphere, where it simply causes confusion.
The term ‘access points’ also caused some confusion: ‘ What do the access points lead to…maybe to another source or to separate items or general searches?’, ‘ I’m not sure about the meaning of Access Points – are they links to other subjects?’ Figure 2: Screenshots showing the top of a search results page, the top of a collection description and the Access Points at the end of the description.
Access Points are, in fact, index terms such as names and subjects that become hypertext links within descriptions, and they lead to a browsing list where users can find other descriptions that use the same index terms.
There was a general impression that Access Points would lead to more resources of some kind relating to these subjects: some participants felt that the links might go to external Web sites, others thought that they might relate to the current collection.
Whilst it does seem worth rethinking this terminology, when asked whether they would click on the links, all participants said that they would.
So the impression was that as long as it was clear that they were links to other related resources of some kind, people would be happy just to click and see what they got.
In fact, whilst it would certainly be preferable to simplify some terminology, we did find that participants tended to accept that there was some language that was not clear to them and as long as it didn’t impede searching then they simply ignored it, or assumed its meaning from the context.
The only problem with this is that they might therefore make false assumptions that would lead them to misinterpret what they were seeing.
You Cannot Please All of the People All of the Time Inevitably, there were differences of opinion during the sessions, in particular about the design of the site, which some people praised and others criticised.
Participants disagreed on some of the content of the descriptions, such as how useful the biographical information was and whether it would be better to have it further down the order, with the scope and content nearer the top.
Two participants were happy that the description was not too long, so that it was reasonably easy to scan through, one thought that maybe there was too much information all at once, whilst one wanted as much information as possible.
In general, the feeling seemed to be that the description was about right in terms of length and content.
This particular description was about average in terms of what is on the Hub many of the descriptions are much longer.
People Are Not the Same: Except over the Back Button Running this questionnaire gave us a chance to find out, at least as far as you can with a small sample of people, how people commonly use the ‘Back’ button to navigate through Web sites such as the Hub.
Breaking the Back button was one of Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 Web design mistakes back in 1999 [10].
In fact, all participants without exception said that they would use the Back button when asked how they would return to their results set, so the rule certainly still held for our sample of users.
Are Features a Help or Hindrance?
This particular point is illustrated by the use of relevance ranking to order the results lists on the Hub.
We found that participants focused on this when they were looking at the results of a subject search for railways, and were generally puzzled by it: ‘I’m not sure about the relevance…why are some more relevant?
Railway engineering is only 2% relevant, so the percentages don’t seem right…’ ‘How does relevance work?
I’m not sure why many of them are at 4%.’ ‘It’s what I expected – a list results based on how similar they are to your search.
It’s rated them on relevance.
I quite like it although the ratings are a bit weird.’ ‘Relevancy is useful but how is it worked out?
Yes, I like the ranking idea… I suppose the higher relevance would be more important?’ Figure 3: Screenshot of a subject search on the Archives Hub, showing relevance ranking Clearly, the relevance rankings confused several of the participants; yet at the same time, many of them liked the idea of ranking results in order of importance.
The algorithm responsible for ranking results on the Hub looks at the frequency that a word occurs in different descriptions and then looks at other subject terms within that description.
Whilst this may produce accurate relevancy rankings in a strictly technical way, it doesn’t necessarily reflect human perceptions of relevance between subjects.
Users Learn by Using the Site Rather Than Reading the Text Our findings reinforced this generally accepted user characteristic.
Participants often paused when looking at a new page, questioned some aspects of it, and then quite quickly worked many things out for themselves.
They asked questions about what this or that is for, or what this term or that term means, but often they answered their own questions after a short pause for reflection: ‘I’m still no closer to knowing whether if you go to this archive you will find these papers, or whether there is more information about it, or even what this search entails.
Oh, I see there is more stuff on the right.
I see…it’s going to point me in the direction of a set of papers, rather than give me any information in any depth on those papers.’ ‘I’m a bit confused about the ‘chosen records appear’…oh I see – I click on the record and it will appear here…can I click on it?’ ‘First of all, this underlined thing [Reference and contact details] I don’t know what it means can I click on it?
Oh ok, this must be where the archive is held and this is the code number.
What happens when I click on Back?
Oh right – it’s still there – I thought it would be wiped out.
That’s quite handy.’ The browse list probably caused the most confusion, particularly linking to it from the access points: ‘ I’m not sure why some stuff is there it doesn’t seem relevant to anti-slavery as a subject.’; ‘I was expecting to be taken to another Web site…so I think these are keywords?
I’m not sure to be honest…’.
Clearly some of the participants expected the display to be related to the subject that they had clicked on (anti-slavery) and were thrown by the other terms that were being listed.
However, even when their expectations were not met, participants seemed to re-orientate themselves quickly to what they were seeing, and accepted the list to be some kind of keyword or category list for material about different subjects.
After looking at a collection description, we asked participants about a longer and more complex description that included a table of contents.
The impression was that even in the short time they had been looking at the site they felt more confident about what they were looking at, and were more inclined to analyse the description, offering suggestions for improvement: ‘It seems to have all the relevant information that you might need.’ ‘OK, so it’s just files of letters.
It is clear and useful.’ ‘The descriptions are quite clear and give a lot of information about how it was sourced and the background of the letters.’ ‘You could make it available as an electronic document, that might be good.’ ‘Should Custodial History come before Scope and Content?
Saying that there are no finding aids is not that useful [i.e.
the Finding Aids section simply says ‘None’] – maybe it should specify this means finding aids elsewhere.
It’s quite a long bibliography – you could have a link instead.’ The overall impression was that participants were gradually orientating themselves and working out what they could see in front of them.
They were thinking aloud and adjusting their view of what they were seeing as they absorbed the information.
It may be that academic users are more likely to exhibit this behaviour, although a study by Wendy Schier also noted a similar finding with novice users of archive Web sites, who, she noted, tend to go through a fairly rapid process of self-education; once they understand the structure the process becomes fairly straightforward [11].
Last Impressions The last section of the questionnaire asked participants to sum up what they felt about the site, and here some participants explicitly stated that even if some aspects of the site were not clear, this would not be a barrier to use, and it is fine for there to be some level of learning process involved.
Question: Having looked at the site, what is your overall impression of it?
‘It’s a really useful site.
It might be helpful to have some experience of archives beforehand maybe.
But if you’re used to using Web sites it wouldn’t take too long to work it out.
Even if you don’t understand some things it wouldn’t stop you from using it.’ ‘It does what it says on the tin, a good starting point.
It tells you where the stuff is that you might be looking for so it’s good if you don’t know where to start.
It follows the standard logic of most electronic resources.
Even if some terminology is not immediately familiar it doesn’t take long to work it out it makes sense if you think about it.’ ‘It seems pretty simple and easy to navigate.
The way search results come up could be improved.’ ‘I like it.
It does vary there are different levels of detail, but this is what you might expect.
Until you are more familiar with it you might think that it will show you the actual archive material many sites do do this, which raises expectations.
You have to realise that this is not going to be the case with the Hub.
But it is useful to know where things are it used to be so difficult to find archives across the country.’ ‘It is a good Web site on the whole.
I like the subject finder.
I’m pleasantly surprised by it.’ ‘It’s very interesting and useful.’ ‘I like it, apart from some terms I didn’t understand.
It’s a nice resource for someone like me to use if there are some general areas that I need to look up.
I wouldn’t be too sure how specific things were, so I would be tempted to use other Web sites as well.’ We asked whether anything could be added to the site to encourage participants to use it, and four of them said that they would be happy to use it as it is.
One referred to links to things like the Dictionary of National Biography, one referred to the ability to save searches and one summed up the difficulties of not being aware of the content coverage: ‘Make it clearer what kind of topics or collections are available and in how much detail I wouldn’t have thought I could look for so many different topics on the same Web site.
I would like to know [the breadth of content] because if I did a search and got something but not something else I would like to know why I would like to know what it covers, or what it doesn’t cover.’ Only one person, in response to this question, referred to links to digital resources (digital surrogates of archives).
When we asked whether participants would have expected links to digital content, five of them said that they wouldn’t expect this, which is an interesting result because we do tend to always assume that users expect instant access to digital content.
The impression we got from talking to the participants of this study was that researchers, particularly the more experienced researchers, understand that this is not easy to achieve.
However, one participant did come up with a compromise: ‘I would expect this maybe an example just one picture of the sort of thing you are going to find.
It helps you to imagine what the collection is.’ This is, in fact, something we are planning to introduce into the Hub over the next year.
Conclusions Whilst numerous studies point to the fact that users will give up on Web sites if they do not find what they are looking for relatively quickly, our study rather emphasised the self-learning behaviour of the participants, and many of them suggested that they would be keen to browse around the site and just see what they could find.
It may be that when seeking primary source material to support research, users are prepared to spend longer, as the search is part of the research process and researchers will want to ensure that they locate as many relevant sources as possible.
It may also be the case that a user may spend 20 minutes happily browsing through the Hub’s collections even though they have not found what they were looking for, and often users will be performing open-ended searches anyway, where they do not have a specific aim in mind.
Certainly, people have very different perspectives and it is not easy to accurately predict what people are going to think and how they are going to behave; but we found a real tendency for people to want to just click and find out what they got, without thinking much about it beforehand.
We found that our participants wanted to learn about the site through exploration rather than reading text.
They were happy to explore and learn as they went along, as long as they found the content worth exploring.
References Archives Hub http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/ Mimas National Data Centre http://www.mimas.ac.uk Wikipedia: Archives (accessed September 2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive The National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk The British Library Integrated Catalogue, http://catalogue.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=login-bl-list Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug, Macmillan Computer, August 2005, ISBN-13: 9780321344755 The full text can be requested by emailing me: jane.stevenson@manchester.ac.uk International Council on Archives, International Standard Archival Description (General) http://www.ica.org/en/node/30000 W. Duff and P. Stoyanova, Transforming the Crazy Quilt: Archival Displays from the Users’ Point of View, Archivaria 45.
Jakob Nielsen, The Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 1999, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, 30 May, 1999 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html Wendy Schier, Report on a Qualitative Exploratory Study of Novice User Experience with Online Finding Aids, Journal of Archival Organization, 2005, 3⁄4.
Author Details Jane Stevenson Archives Hub Co-ordinator Mimas University of Manchester Email: jane.stevenson@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “‘What Happens If I Click on This?’: Experiences of the Archives Hub” Author: Jane Stevenson Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/stevenson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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KAPTUR the Highlights: Exploring Research Data Management in the Visual Arts Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines KAPTUR the Highlights: Exploring Research Data Management in the Visual Arts Buzz data software framework infrastructure archives metadata digitisation blog repositories eprints video preservation cataloguing curation oer research Citation BibTex RIS Leigh Garrett, Marie-Therese Gramstadt, Carlos Silva and Anne Spalding describe the exploration of the importance and nature of research data in the visual arts and requirements for their appropriate curation and preservation.
KAPTUR (2011-13) [1], funded by Jisc and led by the Visual Arts Data Service, was a collaborative project involving four institutional partners: the Glasgow School of Arts; Goldsmiths, University of London; University for the Creative Arts; and the University of the Arts London.
Research data have in recent years become regarded as a valuable institutional resource and their appropriate collection, curation, publication and preservation as essential.
This has been driven by a number of internal and external forces, and all UK Research Councils now require it as a condition of funding [2].
As a result, a network of data repositories has emerged [3], some funded by research councils and others by institutions themselves.
However, at the outset of the project, research data management practice within the visual arts appeared to operate rather ad hoc with none of the specialist arts institutions within the UK having either implemented research data management policies [4] or established research data management systems.
KAPTUR sought to: investigate the nature of visual arts research data; make recommendations for its effective management; develop a model of best practice applicable to both specialist institutions and arts departments within multidisciplinary institutions; and apply, test and refine the model of best practice across the four institutional partner institutions.
This paper outlines the background and context of the project; explores the nature of visual arts research data; details the outcomes of the user and technical review; and describes the work which underwent within the partner institutions around policy formation and staff engagement.
Led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), in collaboration with the Glasgow School of Art, Goldsmiths College, University of the Arts London and University for the Creative Arts, and funded by Jisc, KAPTUR [1] sought to ‘...discover, create and pilot a sectoral model of best practice in the management of research data in the [visual] arts.’ [5].
Recent years have witnessed an increasing recognition across the Higher Education sector that research data are a valuable resource and therefore its appropriate curation and preservation are essential.
In addition, wider societal and political forces meant that research councils, teams and researchers were coming under increasing pressure to make publicly funded data freely available.
As such the publication of research data was increasingly becoming a requirement of funding, for example the Arts and Humanities Research Council [6] and Medical Research Council [7].
Equally important was the need for increased data transparency, and to enable researchers to access existing datasets to test the validity and reliability of the data and associated research methods; to reinterpret the data; and to preserve the data for future scrutiny.
In response, many universities, for example the University of Edinburgh, had established institutional research data management systems to support the deposit and preservation of research data, whilst others were in the process of piloting services, for example the University of Leicester, and establishing policies and procedures which actively support researchers to manage their data effectively, such as Canterbury Christ Church University and Northumbria University.
In addition, many of the research councils themselves had established repositories, for example the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex, which curates research data in the social sciences and humanities, and the Natural Environment Research Council, which supports a network of data centres across its disciplinary areas.
However, given the emerging landscape, at the outset of the project it was clear that very little was known about the collection, curation and usage of research data in the visual arts: none of the specialist arts institutions had research data management policies or infrastructure in place and evidence collected at the time indicated that practice was at best, ad hoc, left to individual researchers and teams with limited support or guidance.
Little work had been undertaken to understand the distinctive and varied nature of research data in the visual arts, and even less to understand how these data could be collected, curated, preserved and exploited, or their potential impact assessed.
By its very nature, research in the visual arts is highly complex and varied, often comprising a wide variety of outputs and formats which present researchers, repository managers and institutions with many discipline-specific difficulties.
The methods and processes which generate this research are just as varied and complex.
Research endeavour in the visual arts relies heavily on the physical artefact: sketchbooks, logbooks, journals, and workbooks.
Alongside these data, a wide range of related project documentation and protocols are also created.
While technology may offer considerable potential to support the safe storage and preservation of research and related data, and to enhance access, the highly distinctive nature of the visual arts and its research methods also present enormous technical problems with regard to formats, standards, roles and responsibilities, and policies.
Why Is Research Data Important in the Visual Arts?
With two powerful opposing forces at work: external pressures and enormous technical challenges, the first step was to articulate clearly why the collection, curation, publication and preservation of research data in the visual arts were so important.
The following factors were identified: they satisfy funders’ requirements and demands for open access; they would help to demystify research methods and outputs, and the arts themselves; they are extremely time-consuming and therefore costly, and their lack of discoverability or loss are inefficient; they may have a significant application and value far beyond the cost of their collection with outcomes which could have gone unrecognised in the initial investigation; they would enable other researchers to test the reliability and validity of the data and method; open access to research data would support their reuse and facilitate new interpretations, thereby adding value to, and enhancing the impact of, the original data; the publication of data would enable their impact to be tracked more accurately; they would enable researchers and semantic web tools to make new links more easily between isolated and previously undiscoverable datasets; they would extend collaborative opportunities to create new research opportunities between researchers and teams working on similar and related datasets; they would enable researchers, departments and institutions to maximise the value of limited public funding in research, and to showcase and maximise the impact of the arts in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF).
On this basis the appropriate curation and management of research data in the visual arts is therefore not only desirable but essential.
KAPTUR became reality.
What Are Research Data in the Visual Arts?
The first task was to explore the nature and scope of research data in the visual arts.
The variety and complexity of research outputs in the visual arts is well documented through work undertaken by the Jisc-funded KULTUR (2007-09); KULTIVATE (2010-11) and eNova (2011) projects.
As such, at the time of writing the KAPTUR proposal, the team hypothesised that the complexity of research data in the visual arts mirrored that found in the resulting outputs, and a cursory exploration revealed they take many forms both physical and virtual.
However, on reflection, this was an innocent trivialisation of the issues requiring much greater exploration.
The project team spent a considerable amount of time exploring the question: What are research data in the visual arts?
The environmental analysis was quick to identify the initial problem, terminology.
The term ‘research data’ is not understood by visual researchers or their institutions.
This was overcome to a certain extent by describing what visual arts research data are, by using examples.
Further on, the team did attempt a definition, however discussions were ongoing throughout the lifetime of the project.
Looking in greater depth, the environmental analysis revealed that the nature of visual arts research data can be: tangible and intangible; digital and physical; heterogeneous and infinite; and complex and complicated [8].
Figure 1: Denise Wren, 21 small tiles used to demonstrate different saltglaze tests on stoneware, 1960s.
© Rosemary Wren/Crafts Study Centre 2004.
Photo: David Westwood [further details][9] Tangible and intangible, signifies that research data can be perceived by touch in the form of physical objects.
For example, a sketchbook could be considered tangible research data; however the tacit knowledge which informed its creation may remain intangible.
Tacit knowledge is particularly relevant to artistic practice and practice-led teaching, as one interviewee states ‘[artistic practice as research] probably involves a lot more gut instinct and intuition than would be permissible in a scientific experiment’.
Depending on the research methodology, tacit knowledge may become explicit as part of the research output or it may need to be recorded through the research data; for example, through annotations, blog posts, or correspondence.
Figure 2: Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, pages 20 and 21 of notes on biscuit glazes from notebook, 1930s.
Craft Study Centre.
[further details][9] Research data in the visual arts are considered as heterogeneous and infinite.
Although other subject disciplines such as engineering have reported a wide variety of research data types and file formats [10], visual arts data are equally, if not more complex and diverse due to the nature of artistic research.
Artistic research is relatively new compared to other disciplines, arising from the introduction of practice-based research degrees in the 1990s.
As a result, research methodologies are borrowed or adapted from other disciplines, such as the social sciences, and often new and innovative research methods are developed.
Gray and Delday describe the process of artistic research as, ‘...never a smooth and homogenous process but fluid, “wet” and folded, if not at times messy, fuzzy and tumultuous.’ (cited Mey 2010) [11].
Therefore the nature of visual arts research data is potentially infinite, never-ending.
This is particularly the case with artistic research that is based on ‘the self’, as Gemmell and Giddens describe, ‘We are always in a state of becoming, always unfinished.’ (cited in Griffiths, 2010) [12].
One of the interviewees described their research process as much more of a continuum, without necessarily distinct or distinguished stages, but with ‘organisational moments’; at these points research data might be actualised as a natural part of the research process such as writing or ‘trials in the studio’.
‘Organisational moments’ might include: compiling materials for an exhibition; externally imposed information required for the institution or funders; making a grant application, writing a paper; institutional duties such as lectures, tutorials, or other learning and teaching events; or filing information.
What became evident during the course of the environmental analysis was the enormous value visual arts researchers placed on their data and the requirement they had to share these data.
Figure 3: Lucie Rie, Sketches in pencil, ink, and watercolour, 1910s.
Lucie Rie Archive, Craft Study Centre [further details][9] Complex and complicated, visual arts research data present many problems for the data curator, for example in terms of classifying materials, promoting discoverability and supporting access.
One interviewee reported, ‘[my practice is] complex and complicated.
[For my PhD] I thought I was doing sculpture, I ended up doing book design and photography and now I'm involved in performance practice more than anything else [...]’.
This confirmed the findings of the Kultivate (2011) Project [13]; Gray describes a workflow tested in conjunction with the researcher which was ‘designed to support the archiving of live artwork’.
This resulted in the creation of a ‘granular catalogue record (or ‘score’)’ which included, ‘videos of the performance, video interviews with the artist, scans of related promotional material, [and] digital photographs of objects involved’ [14].
Figure 4: Lucie Rie, Loose sheet with sketches of pots in blue biro.
Lucie Rie Archive, Craft Study Centre [further details][9] Digital and physical, visual arts research data can take the form of digital files or physical objects.
One of the nine EPSRC Expectations (2011) [15] mentions physical research data, ‘Publicly-funded research data that is not generated in digital format will be stored in a manner to facilitate it being shared in the event of a valid request for access to the data being received…’.
The implication is either that a programme of digitisation is required for future research data, or that at least metadata records will be required for physical research data which include access information.
A useful point to consider is that the research data of today may well be the special collections of the future (cited in Murtagh, 2011 [16]).
Taking the example of the Stanley Kubrick Archive which is housed in the University Archives and Special Collections Centre, University of the Arts London, ‘...a staggering collection of some 800 large boxes containing scripts, stills, props, posters, costumes, documents, equipment and a vast library of books…’ [17].
This was evidence from the project team, where one interviewee noted: ‘...I’m just like anyone else I’ve got boxes of stuff, I’ve got a garden shed and then I’ve got files, I’ve got electronic files and I’ve got physical files, I’ve got ring binders full of clippings, full of photographs, and I’ve got documents of exhibitions that I’ve been in, I’ve got catalogues of exhibitions I’ve been to…’.
Figure 5: Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, Small vase, used as a sample for an ash glaze, stoneware, box ash glaze, 1930s.
Craft Study Centre [further details] [9] As previously indicated, the definition of research data in the visual arts, cropped up informally several times throughout the lifetime of the project, and at its conclusion it was defined as: “Evidence which is used or created to generate new knowledge and interpretations.
‘Evidence’ may be intersubjective or subjective; physical or emotional; persistent or ephemeral; personal or public; explicit or tacit; and is consciously referenced by the researcher at some point during the course of their research.
As part of the research process, research data may be collated in a structured way to create a dataset to substantiate a particular interpretation, analysis or argument.
A dataset may or may not lead to a research output, which regardless of method of presentation, is a planned public statement of new knowledge or interpretation.”[18].
The nature of research data presents a unique series of challenges to researchers, curators and institutions seeking to collect, manage, use and preserve research data in the visual arts, many aspects of which the project team when on to explore further.
Figure 6: Rhodes, Zandra (1981).
The Renaissance/Gold Collection [Jacket] © Zandra Rhodes 2012 User and Technical Analysis Following the publication of the environmental assessment report, the Technical Project Manager embarked on a series of interviews with the four Project Officers and information technology staff at each partner institution, with the purpose of creating a user requirement for the curation and preservation of research data in the visual arts.
Based on the user requirement, the team identified seventeen potential systems which could be relevant to the curation and preservation of visual arts research data.
Using a basic scoring mechanism, based on one point per requirement, five of these systems were identified as potential solutions and selected for further detailed analysis.
Further analysis was undertaken by means of an online questionnaire whereby the Project Officers were asked to prioritise each of the requirements using a scoring method in order to calculate a more accurate score for each of the five potential solutions.
As a result EPrints, figshare and DataStage were selected as the preferred best options for partners to consider when selecting their system for curating visual arts research data.
However, none of the three systems provided a single solution which could fulfil all the requirements of researchers, research teams, and their host institutions.
Therefore, to appreciate and understand fully how best to meet the research data management requirements of researchers and their institutions, it was recommended that two pilots were undertaken in parallel: an integration of figshare with EPrints; and DataFlow's DataStage with EPrints.
In addition to the planned user and technical review, the project team was asked by the Steering Group to develop an IT costing model.
This was circulated and used by the partners to estimate the infrastructure costs associated with research data management over the short to long term.
The model was also disseminated more widely and generated considerable interest from the wider sector.
Following ratification of the technical analysis by the partners, the team set up two pilot services.
The first was an instance of DataStage to EPrints and a second, an instance of figshare with EPrints.
The partners undertook an evaluation of both these instances and it was agreed that neither was a viable option within the visual arts.
Therefore it was agreed, at a late stage in the project, following the adopted methodology, to pilot an instance of CKAN with EPrints.
The team discovered that the combination of CKAN and EPrints was the most likely infrastructure solution for the visual arts because: of its sustainability model; being open-source; while its licensing model was more flexible than the previous options which had been considered.
However, ultimately, when trying to move beyond the pilot, the team was confounded by a series of technical integration challenges and finally by the deadline of the project itself, leaving project partners better informed and to continue to explore the issue of infrastructure.
Institutional Embedding Sustainability was a core element of the project; the partners adopted an embedded approach with Project Officers from each of the four institutions being seconded from existing posts.
This ensured  that emerging knowledge, skills and practice were embedded and sustained within each institution.
In addition, the project benefited from the appointment of senior representatives at each partner institution to provide strategic leadership and governance at a high level across their respective institution.
Policy Formation This was a highly complex process for each partner, partly due to terminology and lack of clarity over the nature of research data in the visual arts but also due to lack of awareness of the requirements of funders, and the costs involved.
Policy formation was highly dependent upon existing institutional regulations, contractual obligations, practices, policies and procedures, which in some instances required consideration and review beforehand.
This was compounded by staff changes and other demands and priorities which faced institutions.
However, directed by emerging funder requirements, the project team reviewed the emerging policy landscape  across the sector and with the support of the Project Sponsors, all four partner institutions were successful in developing high-level research data management policies, three of which were approved by their respective institutions by the conclusion of the project, whilst the final policy was working its way through the approval system.
Skills Development The team developed two session outlines, each one hour in duration.
The first looked at the basic principles of research data management in the visual arts and the second focused on the creation of a research data management plan.
This was developed by each partner into a pilot course using appropriate content and resources from their respective institutions bearing in mind their particular organisational practices, process and disciplinary areas.
Each partner worked with different groups, so across the project, participants included early-career researchers, research students, established researchers and professional support colleagues from a range of departmental perspectives.
Feedback from the participants was favourable, and evaluation demonstrated that their understanding of research data management had improved or improved considerably.
Facilitators also noted that participants appreciated the importance of communication between departments and the need for a cohesive institutional approach.
The materials and feedback were then shared and reviewed by the project team and a series of online resources collated to form three digital toolkits to be hosted online and shared with the wider Higher Education community.
Figure 7: Rie, Lucie (1950s).
Set of jug and two cups and saucers [Ceramics] © Mrs. Yvonne Mayer/Crafts Study Centre 2012 Conclusion The project has successfully accomplished its stated outcomes: we have a much better understanding of research data in the visual arts, and the challenges it presents for its collection, curation, use and preservation; the partners have developed and adopted research data management policies; the team has undertaken an extensive review of user requirements and possible technical solutions; and a series of workshop and training materials have been developed and piloted to inform, support and guide practice.
Of equal importance was the unexpected benefits accrued throughout the project.
First, the partners have benefited from the development of strong relationships between departments, and knowledge, skills and practice have been informed, developed and embedded both at an operational and strategic level.
Second, the collaborative nature of the project has provided a sound basis on which to explore and share common issues and problems, with all of those involved reporting that the collaboration has been highly effective and useful.
One senior manager reported: I have benefited by learning about the techniques other institutions have used to encourage their artists to collect research data and the progress that they have made in establishing data repositories specific to the needs of creative practice researchers.
Figure 8: Degas, Edgar (1878-1879).
Jockeys before the race [Painting] ©The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham Third, the project has forged greater links with visual arts researchers and engaged them in considering and reflecting upon their practice.
However, conversely, partners reported that the project had been extremely helpful in understanding the nature of research data, seeking the experience of visual arts researchers and in seeing examples of practice.
One noted that, ‘It was good to see the examples of actual projects and activities and hear what the artists involved considered to be their “data”.
I feel that I would now be able to talk to visual artists about managing their research data without feeling like quite such an ignorant fool.’  Fourth, the project sponsors and high level institutional support was a requirement of the project, and this proved to be essential to both the project success and also embedding and sustainability within the partner institutions.
In practical terms considerable progress was made in terms of policy formation and skills development, and they provided awareness and direction to the issue of research data management both within their respective institutions but also more widely across the sector.
However, significant challenges remain.
Most immediate is the lack of a comprehensive technical solution, which addresses the needs and behaviour of visual arts researchers and research teams, and meets the requirements of curators, institutions, funders and the wider community.
Following on, the most important challenge is to embed effective research data management skills within practice.
A small step has been made in this direction already.
Working with the University for the Creative Arts, the Glasgow School of Art and Falmouth University, the team has been successful in securing funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to create a skills development package to support postgraduate and early careers researchers within the visual arts to manage their research data effectively.
But further work will undoubtedly be needed on an ongoing basis as knowledge and practice emerges while the knowledge and skills of librarians, curators, information managers and senior managers will also need to be addressed.
References KAPTUR (2011-13) Project Web site http://www.vads.ac.uk/kaptur/index.html (retrieved 18 June 2013) RCUK (2012).
RCUK Proposed Policy on Access to Research Outputs.
Online at: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/outputs.aspx (retrieved 3 June 2013) DataCite (2012) Repositories http://datacite.org/repolist (retrieved 4 June 2013) DCC (2011) UK Institutional data policies http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/policy-and-legal/institutional-data-policies/uk-institutional-data-policies  (retrieved 4 June 2013) Garrett, L. (2011) KAPTUR Project Proposal http://www.vads.ac.uk/kaptur/  (retrieved 4 June 2013) AHRC (2012) Research Funding Guide http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Research-Funding-Guide.pdf  (retrieved 5 June 2013) MRC (2011) MRC Guidance on Data Management Plans.
http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Ourresearch/Ethicsresearchguidance/datasharing/DMPs/index.htm  (retrieved 19 June 2013) Garrett, L., Gramstadt, M-T, Burgess, R., Murtagh, J., Spalding, A. and Nadim, T. (2012) Jisc-funded KAPTUR project environmental assessment report.
Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts http://www.research.ucreative.ac.uk/1054/  (retrieved 3 June 2013) Visual Arts Data Service:  Crafts Study Centre Collections  http://vads.ac.uk/collections/CSC.html   (retrieved 14 June 2013)   Howard, T., Darlington, M., Ball, A., Culley, S. and McMahon, C. (2010) Understanding and Characterizing Engineering Research Data for its Better Management.
University of Bath http://opus.bath.ac.uk/20896/1/erim2rep100420mjd10.pdf  (retrieved 3 June 2013) Mey, K. (2010) Creativity, Imagination, Values why we need artistic research.
In: Textures, the 6th European meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, Riga, Latvia, 15-19 June 2010 (Unpublished) Griffiths, M. (2010) Research and the Self.
In: Biggs, M. and Karlsson, H. eds.
The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts.
Abingdon: Routledge, 167-185.
KULTIVATE (2011) KULTIVATE Project Outputs http://www.vads.ucreative.ac.uk/kultur2group/downloads/  (retrieved 18 June 2013) Gray, S. (2011) Documenting Performance Art for the Archive.
Online at: http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/casestudies/Bristol2011.pdf  (retrieved 4 June 2013) EPSRC (2011) EPSRC Policy Framework on Research Data.
Online at: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/standards/researchdata/Pages/policyframework.aspx  (retrieved 3 June 2013) Murtagh, J.
(2011) An arts perspective: day two and three the sixth DCC Roadshow on data management  http://www.dcc.ac.uk/news/artsperspective-dcc-roadshow    (retrieved 4 April 2012) Kemp, P. (2006) The Kubrick Legacy.
In: Alumni Magazine, University of the Arts London, Issue 5 Spring/Summer 2006, pp.
8-17.
Garrett, L. (2013) Defining Research Data in the Visual Arts http://kaptur.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/what-is-visual-arts-research-data-revisited/  (retrieved 18 June 2013) Author Details Leigh Garrett Director, Visual Arts Data Service University for the Creative Arts Email: lgarrett@ucreative.ac.uk Web site: http://www.research.ucreative.ac.uk/profile/684 As Director of the Visual Arts Data Service, a Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts, Leigh’s research interests lie in the collection, management, discoverability, engagement, preservation and sustainability of digital assets, particularly where they support and enhance learning, teaching and research in the visual arts.
As such, Leigh has been Project Director and Principal Investigator for a number of external and internal research projects including: Look Here!
(2010 2011), Kultivate (2010 2011), UCARIS (2010 2014), eNova (2011), the Collections Review (2011 2012), Spot the Difference!
(2011 2012), KAPTUR (2011 2013), iTrace (2012) and VADS4R (2013-14).
He has also supported a number of other projects across the sector including: the Jisc-funded KeepIT Project (2009 2010), Higher Education Academy's Open Educational Resources Project (2010), AHRC Digital Dance Archive (2010 2011) and the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Archive (2011 2013).
Marie-Therese Gramstadt Research Associate Visual Arts Data Service University for the Creative Arts Email:mgramstadt@ucreative.ac.uk Web site: http://www.research.ucreative.ac.uk/profile/60 Marie-Therese Gramstadt is currently managing the KAPTUR Project (Jisc, 2011-13) working with Goldsmiths, University of London; The Glasgow School of Art; University of the Arts London; and University for the Creative Arts, to improve the management of arts research data.
She is also a Researcher and Digital Cataloguer for the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Archive (Jisc, 2011-13), making use of her MA in the History of Dress (Courtauld Institute of Art).
Marie-Therese has recently re-joined the Crafts Study Centre to work on the SCARLET+ Project using augmented reality with the Muriel Rose Archive (Jisc, 2012-13).
Previous projects include: Kultivate (Jisc, 2010-11), eNova (JISC, 2011) and three Learning and Teaching Research grants (2010, 2010-11, 2011-12).
Carlos Silva Programme Manager (Digital Infrastructure) Visual Arts Data Service University for the Creative Arts Email: csilva@ucreative.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ucreative.ac.uk Carlos Silva’s research interests focus on the areas of research information systems, cloud technologies, institutional repositories and software development, specifically their application to practice within visual arts.
As such, Carlos has undertaken a range of user and technical research projects, including: Enhancing VADS (2008-2009), Look Here!
(2010-2011), Kultivate (2010-2011), UCARIS (2010-2014), eNova (2011), KAPTUR (2011-2013) and the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection Project (2012-2013).
He also sits on the HEFCE Data Collection Steering Group representing the University and GuildHE.
Anne Spalding Repository Manager Visual Arts Data Service University for the Creative Arts Email: maspalding@ucreative.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ucreative.ac.uk Anne Spalding is currently managing UCA Research Online and working on the development of this resource in liaison with the University's research community and other stakeholders.
Anne has recently worked on the Jisc-funded KAPTUR Project (Jisc, 2011-13), as institutional Project Officer for the University for the Creative Arts, and previous projects including Kultivate (JISC, 2010-11), eNova (Jisc, 2011).
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Review of "Copyright and E-learning: a guide for practitioners" 2nd Edition Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review of "Copyright and E-learning: a guide for practitioners" 2nd Edition Citation BibTex RIS Adrienne Muir reviews the Facet publication, "Copyright and E-learning: a guide for practitioners", 2nd edition by Jane Secker with Chris Morrison.
This is a second, revised and updated, edition of Jane Secker’s 2009 book.
For this edition Chris Morrison is a contributor.
Both authors are prominent copyright experts working in higher education in the UK.
They are also advocates of copyright education for professionals working in the sector.
The second edition takes into account changes to UK copyright law in 2014 and developments in the field.
The book has seven chapters, including the conclusions.
There is also an introduction setting out the scope and target audience and defining key terms.
The six main chapters provide background and context for e-learning and copyright; digitisation; digital media; copyright issues specific to born digital content; copyright and networked applications and services, including social media and peer-to-peer sharing; and copyright education and training.
The book also contains seven case studies, which are placed in each of the chapters of the book.
Six of these illustrate various aspects of copyright and e-learning and digital resources in higher education institutions in the UK, New Zealand and Switzerland.
The last case study is a card game designed to facilitate copyright education and training.
The book incorporates background and context, relevant legal provisions and advice in a very readable (and enjoyable) way.
The legal aspects are introduced as and when they are relevant rather than all together at the beginning of the book.
This works really well and will helpful to practitioners.
The tables that neatly summarise key points are also very useful.
The advice is authoritative, practical and clearly based on both in-depth knowledge and experience.
The authors include the issue of risk management in the conclusions, which is important, as learning more about copyright issues may result in increased anxiety in information professionals and make them risk averse.
Understandably the focus is on UK law.
The book is up-to-date on UK copyright law and explains the nature and impact of changes.
There are some minor issues, however.
The comment “Performances qualify for protection for 50 years” (p. 90) doesn’t take into account that the term for protection of performances in sound recordings was increased to 70 years in 2013.
In the glossary it is stated that moral rights must be asserted.
In fact this only applies to the right to be identified as the author.
On p. 16 the authors say moral rights may remain after copyright expires.
It is not clear why as this would contradict s. 86 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
In chapter 1 (p. 38), the authors state “As a content creator, a teacher can attach a Creative Commons licence to their work”.
It might have been useful to mention that under UK law, the employer would be the rights holder for content created by employees as part of their normal duties.
The policy and practice in an institution would determine whether teachers may take such decisions, although practice is moving in the direction of open licences, at least in higher education.
The book has a list of acronyms, glossary and index.
There are some omissions, for example HERON is not included in the acronyms and I couldn’t find moral rights in the index.
As a former employee of the institution, I feel obliged to point out that on page 231 the authors refer to the University of Loughborough rather than Loughborough University.
This is repeated in the index.
Overall, this is an excellent book.
I would certainly recommend it to anyone in higher education as both an introduction to copyright issues in e-learning, libraries and digital humanities, and as an authoritative source of advice.
I hope that Facet will continue to publish updated editions.
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Looking for the Link Between Library Usage and Student Attainment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Looking for the Link Between Library Usage and Student Attainment Buzz data software wiki identifier blog repositories opac ebook openurl shibboleth twitter hashtag licence authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Graham Stone, Bryony Ramsden and Dave Pattern introduce the JISC-funded Library Impact Data Project (LIDP).
In 2010, the University of Huddersfield shared results from its analysis of anonymised library usage data [1].
Data was analysed for over 700 courses over four years 2005⁄6 — 2008⁄9; this included the number of e-resources accessed, the number of book loans and the number of accesses to the University Library.
This investigation suggested a strong correlation between library usage and degree results, and also significant underuse of expensive library resources at both School and course level.
At the time, it was highlighted that the correlation between library usage and grade had not yet been significance-tested and that it was not known whether the Huddersfield findings were an anomaly or the norm [2].
As a result, a number of universities approached Huddersfield in order to benchmark against the data.
In the light of the recent Comprehensive Public Spending Review and the Lord Browne”s Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance [3], it was thought that, if the Huddersfield experience was found to be of statistical significance across a broad range of universities, there was potential for the results to be used as a factor to enhance student attainment.
In parallel, there is a continuing focus on the student experience and a desire that all students should achieve their full potential whilst studying at university.
Results could also be used by libraries to target their resources more effectively where budgets are shrinking.
In September 2010, the JISC released a call through the Activity Data programme [4] and in February 2011 the University of Huddersfield along with 7 partners: University of Bradford, De Montfort University, University of Exeter, University of Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores University, University of Salford and Teesside University were awarded JISC funding to prove the hypothesis that: “There is a statistically significant correlation across a number of universities between library activity data and student attainment” JISC Activity Data Programme Part of the wider Information Environment Programme 2009-11 [5], the Activity Data strand aims to experiment with the data stored by universities with the stated aim of improving the user experience or administration of university services.
The JISC has funded 8 projects that will run for 6 months, all reporting at the end of July 2011.
For the purposes of the programme, activity data has been defined as follows: User activity data: a record of a user”s actions on a Web site or software system or other relevant institutional service Attention data: the record of what a user has viewed on a Web site or software system or other relevant institutional service The projects were asked to propose a hypothesis and to record and propose solutions to common challenges surrounding data activity by identifying tools and techniques that prove beneficial to university services.
In addition, the JISC has funded a Synthesis Project [6], which will work alongside the other projects to assist in the way data are exploited and presented.
There is potential for the JISC to fund further development of some of the areas investigated in order to assist other Higher Education (HE) institutions to benefit from the findings.
Aims and Objectives The overall goal of the Library Impact Data Project (LIDP) is to encourage greater use of library resources thus leading to an increase in students” knowledge and understanding of their subject areas, and ultimately to ensure that student attainment is improved in areas of non/low use.
However, the project is keen to acknowledge that the relationship between the two variables is not a causal relationship and there will be other factors, which influence student attainment.
The project hopes that by proving the hypothesis there will also be tangible benefits to the wider HE community.
A successful conclusion to the project will help to create a greater understanding of the link between library activity data and student attainment.
To this effect, the project will publish its methodology to allow other HE institutions to benchmark their data.
The proof of the hypothesis will also be fed back into the original work from studies on non/low use in order to target improvement in these areas [7], including techniques such as course profiling, targeted promotion of information resources, raising tutor awareness of the link between use of resources and attainment, and improved targeting of resources allocation.
Project Plan As part of the planning process, the project has been separated into four work packages.
Project Reports and Outputs (Months 1-6) In guidance issued from Andy McGregor [8], the programme manager for the Activity Data strand, all projects are required to create a number of blog posts throughout the project: Post 1 The Project Plan Post 2 Hypothesis Post 3 Users Post 4 Benefits Post 5 Technical and Standards Post 6 Licensing & reuse of software and data Post 7 Wins and fails (lessons along the way) Post 8 Final post The Library Impact Data Project has chosen to do this in a series of tagged blog posts from the project blog [9]; this will then be combined to create the final report.
An early blog post looked at the hypothesis critically, emphasising that there are other factors that impact on student attainment, and that library usage alone is not an indicator of how well students will score in their assignments, and this will be reflected in our conclusions.
There are also a number of other elements we will need to consider when we progress through analysis of our results.
Due to the nature of some courses, students may only need a small amount of material to achieve high grades and thereforeborrowing and resource access may not necessarily have any viable link with student attainment.
Recreational use of facilities, and the nature of some subject area materials being freely available outside library subscriptions (for example primary sources necessary for history assignments), may lead to increased or reduced borrowing respectively.
Some courses have information skills heavily embedded into teaching, which could result in increased access to electronic resources, but may not reflect the skills of students accessing them.
Distance learners and placement students may also skew results, and we may wish to consider their use in terms of electronic access rather than book borrowing.
In terms of entry data, socialising and non-library facilities will need to be factored into the analysis.
The project will be presenting its findings at a number of conferences in Europe during the summer of 2011, including the 40th LIBER Conference in Barcelona, the SCONUL Conference in Cardiff and the 9th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services in York; further information on other seminars and conferences will be provided on the project blog.
In addition, the partners will seek to raise awareness of the project within their respective intuitions, e.g.
at Huddersfield the team will submit a poster to the annual Poster Prom for academic staff and researchers.
The project is working closely with the Synthesis Project and has already contributed to a series of recipes, which will enable other universities to collect and analyse their own data in order to benchmark themselves against the findings of the project.
Data Collection (Months 1-4) The approach the project will take is to extract anonymised activity data from partners” systems and analyse the findings.
Potential partners were asked to provide activity data which would span at least one entire academic year (e.g.
2009⁄10), or ideally for multiple years if historic data were available as this would add robustness to the data.
Multiple years of data would represent for LIDP the ideal option since it would be possible to analyse library usage by students in each year of their course.
Data from the original study at Huddersfield suggests that library usage changes as a student progresses.
This is in addition to evidence, which pointed to differences in library usage behaviour between departments; it would be interesting to know if both were replicated across other institutions.
This builds on research from Kramer, which suggests certain disciplines have less need for books [10], extending this for the first time into the need for electronic resources.
For each student who graduated in a given year, the following data were required: Final grade achieved Number of books borrowed Number of times e-resources were accessed Number of times each student entered the library, e.g.
via a turnstile system that requires identity card access School/Faculty It should be noted that the number of times a student accessed e-resources through authentication services such as Athens, Shibboleth, EZProzy or MetaLib is a crude but common measure of actual e-resource usage.
At the bidding stage it was anticipated that there may be problems in getting enough data to make the project viable, especially given the short six-month timeframe with which the project has had to work.
To this end, potential partners were asked to confirm that they could provide at least two of the three measures of usage in addition to the student grades.
Huddersfield has provided definitions on the data required and the form the data can be accepted in.
At the time of writing, data are now being successfully received from the partners and will be quality-checked, collated and significance-tested at Huddersfield.
However, at this early stage of the project, some partners have already run into some problems with data collection, but it is felt that there is still enough information to prove the hypothesis one way or the other.
Therefore the project will be seen to have succeeded if the following measurable targets are achieved: Sufficient data are successfully captured from all partners Statistical significance is shown for the data The hypothesis that “there is a statistically significant correlation across a number of universities between library activity data and student attainment” is either wholly or partly proved for each data type and partner One of the partners has additionally submitted PC login data too; this is also being looked at by Huddersfield to see if there is a correlation between attainment and PC logins, or anticipating a lack of correlation between attainment and library entry, library entry and PC logins.
The project also hopes to make all anonymised data available for reuse under an Open Data Commons Licence [11], building on the recommendations of the MOSAIC Project [12].
The MOSAIC Project, cited as a primary influence on the Activity Data call, was a ground-breaking project that investigated the potential surrounding the exploitation of library data and in doing so, gathered intelligence about the possible use of open data for individual universities and national services.
Unanimous approval will have to be sought from partners about whether individual data will be released; otherwise the data will be further anonymised into one dataset, thereby protecting the identity of each institution.
This would probably have to be the case if the hypothesis were proved for all partners as a group, but not for an individual partner.
It is thought that this could be construed as potentially damaging to that university, despite the fact that the link between usage and student attainment is not a causal relationship.
Ideally, if all partners show a statistically significant correlation then the data sample from each will be large enough for the data to be released by each university, thereby giving a snapshot of different types of university as well as the type of use.
One of the major difficulties for the project so far has been to ensure that legal regulations and restrictions are being adhered to.
The data we intend to use for our hypothesis is sensitive on a number of levels, and while we were already making efforts to assure anonymisation, we have liaised with JISC Legal and both the University of Huddersfield”s Legal Officer and Records Manager.
We need to use identifiers to ensure we match the correct usage data to the degree result, but once the data are combined the identifier will be removed, and we are excluding data from small courses to ensure there is no traceable data back to student level.
Student notification of data use is publicised via a revised version of a statement designed by the Using OpenURL Activity Data Project at EDINA [13] for its collaborators; it is intended to include the statement in the fair processing notice for future research use.
Analysis of Data (Months 1-6) All partners have agreed to hold a number of focus groups in order to collect qualitative data from students on library usage.
The initial project meeting agreed a set of questions that each partner would use in addition to guidelines for holding focus groups in the absence of any individual university guidelines on ethics.
It is hoped that the data collected from the focus groups will complement the quantitative data and provide a more holistic picture of how students engage with library resources; this may form the basis for future project work.
As part of the project, Huddersfield recruited a research assistant to analyse the data using appropriate statistical methods, to collate the issues arising in the focus groups and identify the themes that evolve.
In the original project bid it was hoped to analyse National Student Survey data at course level, with a view to finding a correlation between satisfaction levels, library activity data and student attainment.
However, as each University has a different Faculty/School set-up, it may not be possible to release this information as part of the final report.
Evaluation and Exit Strategy (Month 6) The Library Impact Data Project has a finite scope and goal, that of proving or disproving the hypothesis.
With this in mind, some of the potential outcomes from analysing the data that does not specifically relate to the hypothesis may have to be left for future projects to investigate.
One of the outcomes of the project, to release the data on an Open Data Commons Licence will allow others to exploit the data further.
However, the hypothesis if proved or partly proved may have potentially far-reaching implications and could be taken forward in a number of ways, which will be further explored in the final report: Liaison with other projects in the strand with a view to sharing data in the future, such as the STAR-Trak Project at Leeds Metropolitan University [14], which is looking to develop a student-tracking and retention system Liaison with publishers about linking the results of the project with their usage data Use of the results of the hypotheses testing to develop generic and subjectspecific information skills sessions to increase library use over time in areas of non/low use and target promotion of resources at the point of need Use of the methodology and experience from partners to develop a generic toolkit based on proven results To investigate the impact on Learning and Teaching strategy Conclusion The Library Impact Data Project is now at the halfway point; all indications show the project will have enough data to be able to prove that: “There is a statistically significant correlation across a number of universities between library activity data and student attainment” for at least some of the elements and that data collected from the partners are similar to that already collected at Huddersfield.
Further information on the project will be available in the final report at the end of July, with the project blog and Twitter (using the #lidp hashtag) being used to post regular developments and lessons learned.
Details of all members of the project team can be found on the Library Impact Data Project blog.
References White, S. and Stone, G. Maximising use of library resources at the University of Huddersfield.
In: UKSG 33rd Annual Conference and Exhibition, 12-14 April 2010, Edinburgh International Conference Centre http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7248/ White, S. and Stone, G. Maximising use of library resources at the University of Huddersfield.
Serials, 2010, 23 (2).
pp.
83-90 http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7811/ Lord Browne”s Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance http://hereview.independent.gov.uk/hereview/ Activity data: JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/activitydata.aspx JISC Information Environment Programme 2009-11 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11.aspx JISC Activity Data Synthesis Project Blog http://blog.activitydata.org/ Goodall, D. and Pattern, D. Academic library non/low use and undergraduate student achievement: a preliminary report of research in progress.
Library Management, 2011, 32 (3) http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7940/ Evernote shared notebook http://www.evernote.com/pub/andrewmcgregor/jiscad# Library Impact Data Project Blog http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/ Kramer, L. and Kramer, M. The College Library and the Drop-Out, College and Research Libraries, 1968, 29 (4), pp.310-312 Open Data Commons http://www.opendatacommons.org/ Kay, D., Harrop, H.,Chad, K., van Harmelen, M., Miller, P., and Pattern, D. Making Our Scholarly Activity Information Count (MOSAIC).
Project Report.
(Unpublished) http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/466/ Using OpenURL Activity Data http://edina.ac.uk/projects/Using_OpenURL_Activity_data_summary.html Leeds Met STAR-Trak Project http://leedsmetstartrak.wordpress.com/ Author Details Graham Stone Electronic Resources Manager University of Huddersfield Email: g.stone@hud.ac.uk Having worked in e-resources for the last 17 years, Graham is Library Electronic Resources Manager at Huddersfield and is responsible for the management of the Electronic Resources Team and University Repository.
He has participated in a number of JISC-funded projects and is currently project manager for the Library Impact Data Project and Huddersfield Open Access Publishing Project.
A member of the UKSG Committee since 2001, Graham is UKSG Secretary and a member of the Serials, Journal of Electronic Resource Librarianship and University of Huddersfield University Press editorial boards.
He is editor-in-chief of E-Resources Management Handbook, an OA e-book, and co-author of the University”s 25 Research Things Web 2.0 course.
Bryony Ramsden Research Associate University of Huddersfield Email: b.j.ramsden@hud.ac.uk Bryony is Assistant Librarian in the Human and Health Sciences subject team at the University of Huddersfield.
Bryony has worked at the University Library for almost 10 years in various guises, including as a research assistant on an internally funded library project investigating learning space use, and is currently working on a PhD based on the results of the data.
Dave Pattern Library Systems Manager University of Huddersfield Email: d.c.pattern@hud.ac.uk Dave Pattern is the Library Systems Manager at the University of Huddersfield, with responsibility for the continuing development of the Web services and facilities provided by the library.
A Web developer with over 15 years of experience, he previously worked for a major UK library book supplier before joining Huddersfield as the lead developer on the JISC-funded INHALE and INFORMS projects.
In 2004 he was appointed to his current role and has been responsible for incorporating a variety of 2.0 enhancements into the OPAC and developing in-house services, as well as setting up weblogs and wikis for the library.
He is a committed ‘2.0’Â� advocate and was thrilled to be named as one of the ‘2009 Movers and Shakers’Â� by the Library Journal and is the current Information World Review “Information Professional of the Year”.
Return to top Article Title: Looking for the Link between Library Usage and Student Attainment Author: Graham Stone, Bryony Ramsden, Dave Pattern Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/stone-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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EMTACL12 (Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries) Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines EMTACL12 (Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries) Buzz data mobile software framework api dissemination infrastructure archives cataloguing windows e-learning uri ebook lod ipad algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Rayner and Olivia Walsby report on a three-day conference on Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries, hosted by NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Trondheim, Norway over 1 3 October 2012.
The three-day conference consisted of eight keynote presentations by invited speakers and a number of parallel sessions.
The main themes set out for this year’s conference were supporting research, organisational change within the library, linked open data and other semantic web applications in the library, new literacies, and new services/old services in new clothes, along with other relevant perspectives on emerging technologies.
We attended the conference to gain an overview of organisational changes happening across the sector in relation to technological developments and to gather opinion on the relevance of the academic library within a digital society.
We also wanted to explore how the future exploitation of new technologies within libraries might have a positive impact on the quality of teaching and learning together with the student experience.
This article will summarise a selection of keynote and parallel sessions from across the three days that addressed these issues.
1 October 2012: Keynotes Paint-Yourself-in-the-Corner Infrastructure Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA The opening keynote presented by Herbert Van de Sompel from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA raised the issues brought about by changes to scholarly communication.
Herbert spoke about an increase in dynamic scholarly records that are continually in flux, interdependent, and Web-based, and with which our current infrastructures are unable to cope.
With the publication of interdependent and executable papers, research is now a native Web activity; supporting the re-execution of algorithms and the ability to add data at any time (i.e.
PLoS Topic Pages [1] PeerJ [2]).
Herbert pointed out that, as a consequence, we now need to be able to view the state of a scholarly record at certain moments in time; to track back in time to see where findings have come from, and to trace the workflow, and therein lies a challenge for academic libraries.
Herbert explained that at present the archive infrastructure is only able to deal with static, non-fluxing research output, that, when using URIs, you will always come to the current version, not prior versions, and that Web archives are not integrated into the Web.
As Herbert went on to point out, the key problem is that the Web was created without motion of time; existing in the ‘perpetual now’.
Herbert believes that the challenges we face in this new environment are two-fold: archival approaches need to be changed to use a different infrastructure; and we need to reassess how we reference scholarly assets.
We have CMS records, Web archives, and caches, but it would be better to trace the history or timeline of a URI.
Therefore, Herbert offered some potential tools and solutions; Memento [3] (started in 2009) allows you to track back to a past version of an item in the Internet archive, bridging current URIs to old URIs from the Internet archive, using a time gate.
SiteStory [4] is a tool which allows your Web server to take an active part in its own archiving; every request from a user is pushed back to an archive and stored.
Therefore, every time material is accessed, it is archived, thereby providing a true history of an object in the archive.
Herbert Van de Sompel (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)
In conclusion, Herbert suggested that archiving needs to be an ongoing activity, tracing every interaction, including archiving links at the time of publication to ensure that the context and history of an evolving piece of research will never be lost.
Think Different Karen Coyle, Berkeley, CA, USA Karen Coyle (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)
Karen opened by raising a challenge to the way in which libraries are still holding on to outdated practices, such as the librarian’s obsession with alphabetical order, describing it as essentially only ‘an accident of language’ and questioning its continuing relevance given the now pervasive ability to cross-search.
Karen continued on this theme citing bibliographic hierarchies such as Dewey as ‘knowledge prevention systems’ which only serve to lock our users into a set view of what's out there.
Karen’s introduction led nicely on to the main themes of her presentation: the current role of the library, the need to move away from the view that getting the book into the user’s hand is the end game, and the need to change our attitudes to bibliographic control and linear order.
In effect, ‘the library should no longer be about volume and ownership!’.
Karen talked about how we should instead focus on how resources are used and what resources should be used together, to inform how we approach provision in the future.
Karen believes that the library must become connected to information on the Web, providing more context for our users and thus allowing greater information discovery.
Karen argued that the library’s role is no longer simply to gather items into an inventory but to seek to organise information that until now has been inconveniently packaged.
She suggested that we need to change our view, to focus on the information and its context, not the objects or books themselves.
Karen noted in particular that currently we present nothing within the context of time, reiterating the theme of time travel covered in Herbert’s presentation.
So, how can we do this?
Karen proposed that we should be able to interrogate catalogues to provide items with context.
She gave examples such as WorldCat [5], where you can view timelines on people, what they have published and what has been published about them, giving a relative image of their importance.
Karen argued that although linked data could prove to be an answer, or could certainly help, we must nonetheless seek to find a range of solutions and technologies.
She warned that the pitfall of having an answer is that it stops you asking questions!
Karen talked about how libraries must now recognise that bibliographic data are available everywhere, and that what libraries have that is essential and unique are the details on holdings.
She proposed that on searching the Web, part of the rich snippet should include information about what the library holds and whether it's available.
The Web should be used to direct readers to their library holdings, as well as making use of data such as location information, already being sourced by search engines.
Karen’s concluding remarks were that libraries need to look to this new approach (using tools such as Schema.org [6]) or they will lose visitors, and that if we want to remain visible and relevant, we need to be where our users are on the Web.
1 October 2012: Parallel Sessions The Winner Takes it All?
: APIs and Linked Data Battle It Out Adrian Stevenson and Jane Stevenson, MIMAS, The University of Manchester, UK The Winner Takes it All?
(Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)
Jane and Adrian from the MIMAS National Data Centre at The University of Manchester debated the use of linked data versus APIs in aggregating data for reuse in projects such as LinkingLives [7], which again looks to set information within the context of time, connecting people and events, as well as World War 1 Discovery [8].
They compared and contrasted the outcomes and experiences from these two projects, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach, and in the end came to the conclusion that each had its strengths (and weaknesses) and that therefore both had their place on such projects!
This supported the argument Karen made; that we needed to find a range of solutions and to challenge them continually.
2 October 2012: Keynotes Innovation Management in and for Libraries   Rudolf Mumenthaler, University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur, Switzerland In the first keynote of the day, Rudolph Mumenthaler gave a very engaging talk on the importance of innovation management in libraries.
His starting point was to suggest that libraries are currently in the ‘eye of the hurricane’ in relation to technological developments over which they (largely) have no control and to which they can only react.
In other words, development happens in sectors outside of the library and then our users bring them into the library whether we like it or not.
These technologies have a massive influence on the ways that our users want to engage with the library services, resources and physical spaces.
Rudolph inferred that if (as he believes) we can’t influence the development of new technologies, what we can do is foster a culture of innovation within our institutions, in order to exploit these technologies to our best advantage.
Profit companies have always done this, but to libraries it is unknown territory.
In order to develop a spirit of innovation, Rudolph claimed that it is essential to establish some form of innovation management structure within the library.
This involved creating an organisational framework to support the innovation process, defining the workflow from idea to product and introducing some form of ideas management.
He believed that it was imperative to involve people too.
Staff from across departments could get involved through an innovation circle or team where they could discuss ideas that would then be fed back to leadership teams.
In order to broaden the scope for ideas, we also needed to involve our customers via initiatives such as innovation challenges using Web 2.0 technologies and feedback tools.
Most importantly of all, we had to establish a culture where it was OK to fail.
Innovation management could not replace the spirit of ideas but it could provide the framework for it to grow and live.
Rudolph summed up the whole ethos behind creating innovation in libraries by saying that good innovation management came down to giving your staff time to try things out – that was it.
Forecast for the Academic Library of 2025: Cloudy with a Chance of User Participation and Content Lock-in Eirik Newth, Astrophysicist, writer of popular science for children, and media personality, Norway Erik Newth (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)
Eirik Newth delivered an absorbing talk on futurism.
He made an interesting prediction related to the current trend of body modification and future internalisation of personal computing – suggesting that as people are already comfortable with tattooing and piercing themselves it’s not such a radical step to imagine future relationships with devices and services becoming very personal– being literally attached to our bodies.
Or as he put it, ‘computing going personal in a physical sense’!
He also talked about cloud computing and the impact it will have on how we store and access data.
We will be able to centralise all our data and access it from anywhere with any device.
However, any models for open content using this technology are faced with the problem that companies are trying to lock people down to their content.
Eirik suggested that the future may see a move back to Windows as he believes Window 8 is looking to bridge the gap between different devices.
2 October 2012: Parallel Sessions Mubil: A Digital Laboratory Alexandra Angeletaki, NTNU University Library, Norway & Marcello Carrozzino and Chiara Evangelista, PERCRO Scuola Superiore, Italy Mubil: A Digital Laboratory (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)
The MUBIL Project [9] is an international interdisciplinary collaboration designed to disseminate the content of old books from the Gunnerus Library, NTNU.
Alexandra and Marcello introduced us to the fascinating work they have been doing using 3D technology to enhance social engagement and knowledge dissemination for new groups of library users.
Alexandra talked in particular about how they planned to use the project to gather data on how young people interact with such 3D software and virtual objects in a library setting, through the use of storytelling and gaming.
Making Connections: Enhancing Teaching and Learning at The University of Manchester Olivia Walsby, The University of Manchester Library, UK Olivia delivered a very informative break-out talk speculating on the future of the academic librarian.
The main theme of the talk highlighted the importance of the emergent role of the ‘academic engagement’ librarian in linking together new technologies, libraries, academics and developers to provide an outstanding learning experience for our students.
She charted her own personal journey through involvement in the use of mobile technologies for learning at The University of Manchester.
She outlined several ventures including e-reader projects established to improve access to undergraduate texts in humanities through Project Scarlet [10] which used Augmented Reality to unlock special collections material, to the many iPad projects that are currently running in several schools across campus.
One of the main themes running through the conference was change and the continued relevance of academic libraries.
Olivia picked up on this by describing how The University of Manchester Library is attempting to do just that, by setting her talk within the context of the recent restructure of their Research and Learning Services.
The new structure sees the Library making a radical departure from the traditional subject team approach to a functional model which will enable it to be more responsive to the needs of its user community, and better placed to keep pace with the speed with which technology is developing.
The Triadic Model: A Holistic View of How Digital and Information Literacy Must Support Each Other Andrew Whitworth, The University of Manchester, UK Andrew Whitworth’s session concentrated on the need to develop information literacy skills to allow sustainable learning within a society where information is now largely digital in its ‘provision, organisation and dissemination’.
Andrew suggested that digital literacy, information literacy and media literacy were essentially the same or at least overlapped; each was concerned with choices, and the need to review them continually.
He talked about learners making personal choices in their learning, such as preferences for particular types of technology and resources including whether or not to use the Library.
He suggested that personal choices like this were often made, or certainly influenced by, external factors such as proximity, peer pressure and routine, raising the question as to who were making these choices and whether those choices received adequate and careful consideration.
Andrew went on to say that he believed there was a need for learners to be able to read the environment around them and make selections, without falling into routine, including the ability to write back into the community.
Andrew quoted Wenger, White and Smith’s description of the need for ‘stewards’ of the ‘digital habitat’ [11], emphasising the importance of processing information rather than its mere consumption.
He suggested that all too often we, as ‘stewards’, fail to complete the learning cycle; not supporting users in the key skill of writing up their learning effectively.
Andrew explained that the responsibility for the delivery and support of such skills should be shared across the University.
However, he cited issues of silos within academic institutions forming a barrier to their effective support, often relying on external bodies and funding to provide the glue which would bring this type of collaborative work together.
The Possibilities of Social Media to Promote International Collaboration Mark Puterbaugh, Eastern University, Pennsylvania & Hua San, Shandong University of Arts, People's Republic of China (PRC) Joining us from China via Skype, Mark and Hua gave a unique presentation which demonstrated the way in which social media could be used to encourage international collaboration.
Mark, from Pennsylvania, USA, talked about his own experiences of using Skype, amongst other methods of communication, to collaborate with Hua San, in Shandong Province in the PRC, to create a subject guide of Chinese history and culture.
Paul detailed the problems involved in forming international partnerships, such as physical distance, technological variations, culture and language, and discussed the role that social media can play in overcoming these obstacles.
He explained, in particular, how social media supported both synchronous and asynchronous communication.
Paul concluded that academic libraries could now ‘tap expertise in other cultures to improve and extend their services without the huge financial cost once attributed to international collaboration’.
3 October 2012: Keynotes Connecting People and Information: How Open Access Supports Research in High Energy Physics Jens Vigen, CERN Scientific Information Service, Switzerland Jens Vigen (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)
Jens Vigen delivered a very interesting case for open access in his talk entitled "Connecting People and Information: How Open Access Supports Research in High Energy Physics.
Since 50 years!".
He referred to the fact that the CERN convention of 1953 already effectively contained an Open Access Manifesto "...the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available..."  He also talked about SCOAP3 [12] (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), the purpose of which is to introduce a funding model where libraries, library consortia, research institutions and funding agencies use their subscription budget to pay open access fees.
In other words, we should pay publishers for peer review and not for content.
What Next for Libraries?
Making Sense of the Future Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath, UK In the closing keynote presentation of the conference, Brian Kelly delivered a very entertaining talk using the past to examine the future!
He began by drawing our attention to the major difference between the ’classroom’ of 1969 and 2012, which is that now most students have several mobile devices.
He further demonstrated this point by asking us to hold up our own mobile devices most delegates had at least two!
Brian made humorous reference to certain predictions of the future from our youth which failed to live up to our expectations, such as the monorail, lunar bases and the jetpack.
What child of the 1950s or 1960s can honestly say they didn’t imagine that in the future they would be flying to work on some kind of jet-propelled device and holidaying on the moon?
He used this analogy to emphasise the fact that our expectations of the impact of new technologies and inventions are often limited to them merely automating existing practices rather than transforming them.
Continuing the theme of innovation, Brain stated that in tough economic times we still need innovation but we need to focus it.
He referred to the work done by the JISC Observatory [13] on systemising the processes for responding to predictions of future trends.
The work involved ‘evidence-gathering processes’ which can help to identify early trends as well as moves away from well-established technologies and ‘sense-making’, where the evidence gathered is interpreted.
However, Brian also pointed out that even if we do all this there will always be an element of ‘unknown unknowns’ that we will never be able to plan for.
Brian Kelly compares expectations with emerging reality 3 October 2012: Parallel Sessions Designing Tools for the 21st Century Workflow of Research and How It Changes What Libraries Must Do Sharon Favaro and Christopher Hoadley, Seton Hall University, NJ, USA Sharon discussed the issues faced by researchers in using the many tools now available to them, and highlighted the ‘profound disconnects between library-oriented resources and tools, and the other tools scholars use to do their work’.
She suggested that libraries need to seek to provide tools which will support the whole researcher life cycle, not just information retrieval.
With this comes a need to integrate the software that researchers are using, from Google Docs to bibliographic referencing software and archives.
She explained how she saw it as the Library’s role to provide a safe working environment for researchers, and she and her colleagues were seeking to create a platform that could provide a smooth transition between searching and the following processes of the researcher life cycle.
In line with other speakers at the conference, Sharon talked about the need for the library to be in our users’ spaces rather than expecting them to come to the library.
She suggested that by supporting the researcher life cycle from beginning to end in an online environment we could begin to do this.
Publication Profiles: Presenting Research in a New Way Urban Andersson and Stina Johansson, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden This breakout session provided an example of how the library could use the extensive and well-structured data contained within the institutional repository to promote the research output of its university.
Urban began by explaining the work they have been doing at Chalmers University of Technology, collating data to create an open access platform of publication profiles.
He went on to explain that from the profiles they could then begin to build further services to promote open access publishing and collaboration, such as adding in citation information, providing publication profile mapping, and also integrating social network services, such as LinkedIn.
Stina Johansson then presented the work they had undertaken so far using the data to look at co-authorship, and mapping research partners geographically.
Stina explained how they had cleaned the data and then used GPS to plot the location of researchers using Google Maps.
Conclusion To summarise, the main themes that struck us from across the three days were: Time travel: Within the context of a digital, Web-based society, the need now for libraries both to track ever-evolving research processes across time, and to set information within the context of time for our users.
This will change our approach to archiving and using a variety of different software and solutions.
Working in our users’ space: Libraries now need to ensure, in order to remain visible and relevant, that they are reaching into their users’ spaces, rather than expecting them to come to us.
Libraries need to ensure that they are on the Web and that they are connecting and integrating library resources and services to all those used in the learner/researcher life cycle.
They need to ensure that this process is supported from beginning to end, from information discovery to academic output.
Innovative use of technology: The time for developing innovative technologies within libraries has passed, our future approach should be to look outside the sector for new technologies and decide which are appropriate for our use and how we might contextualise their use in an innovative way, ie gaming, social media, etc.
We need to ensure that we manage this process effectively, encouraging new ideas from both staff and our user community.
We should also develop a culture of experimentation (where failing is OK), and share experiences of both successes and failures with our peers, working collaboratively across the sector.
References PLoS Topic Pages http://topicpages.ploscompbiol.org/wiki/Topic_Pages PeerJ https://peerj.com/ Memento http://mementoweb.org/ SiteStory http://mementoweb.github.com/SiteStory/ WorldCat http://www.worldcat.org/ Schema.org http://schema.org/ LinkingLives http://archiveshub.ac.uk/linkinglives/ World War 1 Discovery http://ww1.discovery.ac.uk/ MUBIL http://folk.ntnu.no/angeleta/mubil/index.htm Project Scarlet http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/ Wenger.
E, White.
N and Smith.
John D., Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities, Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009.
SCOAP3 http://scoap3.org/ JISC Observatory http://blog.observatory.jisc.ac.uk/ Author Details Sarah Rayner Teaching and Learning Manager University of Manchester Library Email: sarah.rayner@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library Sarah Rayner has worked in libraries since 1998 and completed an MA in Library and Information Management at the Manchester Metropolitan University in 2003.
She has recently taken on the newly created role of Teaching and Learning Manager at The University of Manchester Library.
Sarah’s current professional interests include thinking strategically about the library’s contribution to teaching and learning at The University of Manchester, with a particular focus on innovation, new technologies and improving the student experience.
Olivia Walsby Academic Engagement Librarian University of Manchester Library Email: Olivia.walsby@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library Olivia Walsby currently works as an Academic Engagement Librarian at The University of Manchester Library, having spent the past 12 years within the academic libraries sector.
Her experience includes Research & Learning Support, E-Learning and Electronic Resources Delivery.
Olivia’s professional interests include the developing liaison and marketing role of the academic librarian, and the use of new technologies to support teaching and learning, and to enhance the student experience.
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Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles Buzz data software rdf framework database xml usability archives metadata identifier vocabularies schema blog repositories eprints gis uri frbr dcmi dspace ruby interoperability dcap oai-ore e-government research standards cerif Citation BibTex RIS Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Richard Jones, Mahendra Mahey and Emma Tonkin propose a user-driven methodology for the iterative development, testing and implementation of Dublin Core Application Profiles in diverse repository software environments.
The development of the Dublin Core Application Profiles (DCAPs) has been closely focussed on the construction of metadata standards targeted at specific resource types, on the implicit assumption that such a metadata solution would be immediately and usefully implementable in software environments that deal with such resources.
The success of an application profile would thus be an inevitable consequence of correctly describing the generalised characteristics of those resources.
Yet despite the earlier success of application profiles, more recent growth in usage of the DCAPs funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been slow by comparison [1].
It has become quite clear that even the JISC DCAP with the best established user community, the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP), has not so far enjoyed the expected level of implementation [2].
The term ‘application profile’ within Dublin Core was described in 2001 as follows “A set of metadata elements, policies, and guidelines defined for a particular application.
The elements may be from one or more element sets, thus allowing a given application to meet its functional requirements by using metadata from several element sets including locally defined sets.
For example, a given application might choose a subset of the Dublin Core that meets its needs, or may include elements from the Dublin Core, another element set, and several locally defined elements, all combined in a single schema.
An Application profile is not complete without documentation that defines the policies and best practices appropriate to the application.” [3] There exist a good many application profiles designed for areas as diverse as agriculture [4], government documents [5] and folklore [6].
As many of them are application profiles of Dublin Core, the term DCAP would appear to be an appropriate designation.
However, the definition of the term has more recently been extended by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) to require that such an application profile be based on the Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM) and include a Description Set Profile (DSP) [7].
Dublin Core Application Profiles are intended to be based upon an application model [8], which can be extremely simple.
This article concentrates on the recent set of JISC-funded application profiles, which make use of application models based on variants of FRBR [9], and which follow the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles [10].
While application profiles are by no means limited to repositories and can for instance be implemented in such wide-ranging software environments as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and eAdmin, this paper focusses in the first instance on digital repositories [11].
However, these wider areas are within the broader scope of this study and it is intended that future work will address them more specifically.
However successful such an approach may be for developing high-quality metadata standards, it has become increasingly clear that implementation in repositories is not guaranteed without a far more sophisticated understanding of what such systems can practically achieve, and by what means.
There is no single answer to this question, as the aims and working practices of every repository can differ markedly from its contemporaries in other institutions.
It is broadly a matter of diverse institutional policies and management, being grounded in individual circumstances and an institutional context.
However, in some cases, those practices may derive historically from valid but arbitrary decisions that have been taken since the inception of the repository.
In either case, this article sets out a methodology by which to assess the effects of this diversity on the particular metadata requirements of individual repositories and to examine and facilitate practical local solutions.
Before any given application profile can be adopted in a particular situation, a strong case needs to be made to justify its suitability.
It is the contention of this article that application profiles, in order to be workable, living standards, need to be re-examined in their constituent parts in far greater detail than before, and that a range of implementation methods need to be practically tested against the functional and user requirements of different software systems.
This can only be achieved through a process of engagement with users, service providers (such as repository managers), technical support staff and developers.
While the ideal target audience are the end-users of the repository service, it is in practice difficult to engage them in the abstract with unfamiliar, possibly complex, metadata schemas.
So much of the process must inevitably be mediated through the repository managers’ invaluable everyday experience in dealing directly with users – at least until the stage in the process when test interfaces, test repositories or live services can be demonstrated.
In order to engage developers in the process of building and testing possible implementation methods, it is absolutely crucial to collect and present tangible evidence of user requirements.
It is highly likely that practical implementation in repositories will vary greatly between individual services based on different software platforms.
However, it may well be that there are other more significant factors in individual cases.
Repository Environments The assertion is often made that repository software environments in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector, and indeed in institutions globally, consists of the ‘Big Three’ open source repositories: EPrints [12], DSpace [13], and Fedora [14].
Statistics for usage of these items of software in the UK from ROAR [15] and OpenDOAR [16] suggest that EPrints is most widespread with between 70-80 registered instances, while DSpace has approximately 35, but surprisingly Fedora only has 3 registered live instances.
It is often overlooked that a number of universities have deployed Digital Commons, the main commercial competitor from BEPress [17], while others have DigiTool, the offering from Ex Libris [18].
Many additionally use home-grown or less well known systems, both open source and commercial.
So while it is reasonably possible to implement and demonstrate methods within the major open source platforms, it is much harder, if not impossible, to implement and demonstrate outside that scope.
Increasing numbers of universities are also seeking to deploy Current Research Information Systems (CRISs), whose remit overlaps both those of repositories and Virtual Research Environments (VREs).
As of yet there are no open source CRISs or VREs available, and their practical engagement with application profiles must remain an area for future research and development.
There are both significant differences and remarkable similarities in the way that the ‘Big Three’ model their content, which affect their capacity to represent the JISC DCAPs.
At this stage it is worth summarising the data models of these three applications, and examining their strengths and weaknesses with regard to both each other and to their capacity to support the complex data models of DCAPs.
Some of the observations below are derived from the work at Symplectic in integrating their commercial CRIS with a variety of repository systems [19].
Fedora models ‘objects’ as its primary archival unit, and each object contains a Dublin Core metadata file, an RDF document describing the relationships relevant to the object, and an arbitrary number of ‘datastreams’, which represent any form of content [20].
It is the most enabled in that it is capable of supporting entity-relationship (E-R) models, with some caveats.
Relationships from one Fedora object to some other entity (identified by its URI) or some object literal are permitted.
This means the internal relationships between the object as a whole and its parts are supported, and relationships between the object as a whole and other external entities are likewise supported.
Problems arise when attempting to create fine structure inside a single Fedora object, such as datastream-to-datastream relationships.
This can be worked around by including home-grown solutions to the requirements, but they are not then regarded as special by the overall Fedora framework.
Fedora objects are also exclusive with regards to their owned content, in that a datastream can only ‘belong’ to a single object in a sense that Fedora natively understands.
Any such extensions require programmatic intervention on the part of the adopter.
DSpace calls its primary archival units ‘items’, and each contains some metadata in a flat schema, and a number of ‘bundles’ which equate approximately to FRBR ‘manifestations’.
These bundles then contain ‘bitstreams’, which are the content elements of the item [21].
DSpace is a little more flexible in terms of the shared internal structure of the items in the archive, but less flexible in terms of formal support for E-R models.
Bitstreams can belong to more than one bundle, and bundles to more than one item, although the native UI tools for describing these relationships are somewhat lacking.
Relationships to other entities are produced ad hoc using URIs embedded in a flat qualified Dublin Core style metadata record, and these relationships are not trivially machine-readable.
There is also no built-in concept of versioning, so while it can be applied using Dublin Core fields such as ‘replaces’ and ‘isReplacedBy’, such fields do not have any impact on the behaviour of the rest of the application – it will not offer the user navigable version chains, or index only the most recent version of the content.
EPrints has a data model perhaps unremarkably similar to that of DSpace; they both grew from similar use cases: attempting to fill the Open Access and Institutional Repository space; they even share a common original software developer.
EPrints archival units are called ‘eprints’, and they contain metadata in a hierarchical schema.
Each eprint can contain an arbitrary number of ‘documents’ which again are similar to the FRBR ‘manifestation’, such that each document may contain a number of files [22].
The key difference from DSpace is that documents can only be associated with a single eprint the same limitation from which Fedora also suffers.
Again, entity relationships of most kinds are done ad hoc using URIs embedded in the hierarchical metadata record.
There is only one special kind of identifier in the standard EPrints application, which is the one which supports versioning (although it should be noted that the identifier is not a URI).
The version metadata are still just metadata, but the user interface is capable of presenting a navigable version chain, and only the most recent version of the item is returned in search results.
There is ongoing work on each of these repositories, responding to user requirements, and to contributions from their communities.
It is possible, for example, that DSpace 2.0 [23] and EPrints 3.2 [24] will provide much of the more sophisticated E-R features which are required for the DCAPs.
Meanwhile, EPrints has an implementation of SWAP as an export plug-in [25].
This alternative approach effectively treats SWAP as an exchange format rather than an integrated metadata set and structural model, and could be seen as relatively agnostic towards the future community acceptance of the application profile.
At present, this is a reasonable compromise position, and is one that DSpace could reasonably follow, given the similarities of the two systems.
However, it may be too simplistic merely to argue that these architectural differences alone account for the lack of spontaneous interest on the part of repositories in implementing the DCAPs.
It is not clear that the mismatch between internal data model and exposed, serialised logical model actually presents a significant barrier to implementation, a matter that deserves further investigation as part of the process outlined in this article.
Although no working demonstrator has been tested, it is difficult to see any insurmountable technical barrier to this in theory.
There are, after all, repository systems largely in mainland Europe that implement the Common European Research Information Format (CERIF), which has a far more complex data model than FRBR.
It seems likely that the benefits that might be derived from the DCAPs for working repositories have not been sufficiently demonstrated in order to justify the effort involved in overcoming these technical difficulties.
If this were the case, then drivers from the user communities themselves would compel the implementation.
If the benefits are less clearly obvious to the repository communities, it may be the case that simultaneous implementation should be funded and coordinated in a similar way to the SWORD standard, which enjoys widespread adoption and implementation across all major repository platforms.
In practical implementation within a repository context, it is evidently possible to use the metadata elements from these DCAPs even where the data model of the repository does not support FRBR, which would lead to some level of semantic interoperability despite the structural incompatibilities.
Of course, the suitability of such elements in pre-existing DCAPs should properly be a matter for thorough usability testing.Yet the use of metadata elements from the DCAPs without the structural components has only to date been explored in the WRAP repository in Warwick, at the time based on EPrints 3.0, whose SWAP implementation was reported as one of the less successful aspects of the repository [26].
As its funding by the JISC was partially dedicated to demonstrating SWAP, it provides no independent evidence that the repository community feels either anxious or able to implement the application profile for the benefits it might offer them.
This impasse has become a barrier to progress with the recently developed set of DCAPs.
The case has not been made for the practical benefits of implementing them, nor is there any clear demonstration of how individual repositories could do so either at the data-model or interface levels.
In repositories whose digital objects are at present incompatible with a structured data model based on a complex entity-relationship model, it would either be necessary to provide backwards compatibility with existing records or else to develop a method for batch processing records to the new format, a process that has not been explored in most cases.
In any event, both a motivation and a means need to be provided for this to happen.
Proposed Methodology In response to this situation, UKOLN has initiated a collaborative programme of user engagement and practical testing.
The initiative contributes to several JISC projects, including the Application Profiles Support Project, the Information Environment Metadata Registry (IEMSR), and the Start-up and Enhancement (SuE) and Shared Information Services (SIS) projects.
Discussions are under way with both the JISC and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) about this proposed approach.
The principal researchers at UKOLN are Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Mahendra Mahey, Emma Tonkin, and Paul Walk.
It is recognised that the resource types described by the various JISC DCAPs are far from homogeneous in nature and scope, and that solutions that may be appropriate for one may not apply to another.
Whereas scholarly publications comprise a relatively narrowly defined resource type (described by SWAP), it is arguable that some resources may be far wider in scope, e.g.
time-based media (TBMAP), images (IAP), teaching and learning materials (LMAP) and scientific data (SDAP) [27].
In domains with such wide variation of resource types, it is possible that a single application profile may not cover the whole domain effectively, a matter that deserves further deconstruction as part of the development of any targeted solution.
The scoping studies for LMAP [28] and SDAP [29] have raised this as a possible concern.
Another exceptional case is geospatial information (GAP), which can be attached to resources of almost any type, supporting the use of that application profile as a modular extension to other DCAPs.
It is therefore essential to work together with domain experts in order to test implementation methods to assess their practical benefit to users.
Application profiles usually comprise a number of discrete layers that can be examined and tested separately.
Of these, perhaps the two most significant structural components are: (1) the metadata elements as a vocabulary for describing a resource, or a series of resource or entity types; and (2) the structure that describes the relationships between different parts of that metadata, both within a resource and between multiple digital objects.
The latter also encompasses how elements are distributed between different metadata entities, since this may affect how resources can be described as complex digital objects.
UKOLN is currently developing a methodology for paper prototyping in both of these areas, in addition to usability testing via rapidly developed software prototypes.
This is intended as an iterative process of engagement with the community, with repository managers and, wherever appropriate, with end-users.
This will provide specific evidence for user requirements, required by developers as a basis for effective implementation.
There are two main, related areas of study: (1) testing established, documented application profiles to determine whether they meet the requirements that these methods establish; (2) testing the requirements for resource types at the outset of the development of prototype application profiles, in order to establish a sound methodology for the future development of similar application profiles.
It is not sufficient merely to promote standards that cannot be shown to provide useful services to end-users, an approach that rarely leads to real usage.
From a technical perspective, there is a need for considerably more collaboration with developers from across the community, particularly with those of the major repository platforms in the first instance.
It is likely that success will depend upon integration into ongoing software releases of the most popular software upon which live services are based.
Paper Prototyping Common approaches to user-centred design in information architecture include contextual enquiry, ethnographic methods, and card sorting [30].
We also make use of a fourth approach developed in-house that combines elements of several approaches to explore data structures (entity-relationship models).
Conceiving information architecture in general as a user-centered process is complicated by the fact that designers must balance a number of issues, enumerated by Sinha and Boutelle [30] as: the need to develop an understanding of user conceptual structures; the need to incorporate understanding of business goals and concerns, and the need to ensure that the design is neither quickly rendered obsolete, nor designed in too inflexible a manner to incorporate future additions of content and functionality.
A simple conceptual model describes user perceptions of how an object or system operates.
As abstract generalisations, conceptual models are generally difficult to explain and to understand.
This is alleviated through provision of examples and scenarios, which ground the conceptual model in a practical context and enable exploration of the model through concrete examples.
The perception that a single conceptual model is shared by the designers, the developers and the users is very likely to be inaccurate.
Many seemingly simple interfaces conceal a complex data model; the fact that the complexity is hidden is simply an artefact of good design practices.
Paper prototyping, then, supports the exploration of the user’s existing, accessible conceptual model of the area; if it can be captured, it is possible to compare and contrast it with alternative models.
This area of research enables designers to establish whether the views on the resource or resource set with which the user is most comfortable, can be appropriately supported by the candidate model.
It also enables them to establish the manner in which the complex model must be ‘folded’, or simplified, to present only that subset of characteristics that satisfy the user’s data modelling needs.
In short, this area of research explores cheap, simple means to elicit information from the user relating to the way in which the user would describe the resource(s) in the context of a given set of tasks; information that can feed directly into the development of candidate interfaces for software testing.
Software Testing In addition, practical implementation of these major metadata components introduces further areas that also require considerable usability testing: Interface Design If metadata entities are simply presented as multiple input forms, the demands upon users for manual metadata entry are likely to be high: a factor which is often perceived to be a major disincentive to self-archiving, at least in the case of scholarly publications.
Whether or not this is in fact the case deserves further study as part of the usability testing process, and may well depend on the users and specific resource type in question.
For example, it is likely that more detailed metadata would need to be supplied by the depositor in the case of technical images.
It may be possible to generate automatically or programmatically deduce some of the structural metadata in order to alleviate these problems, and to develop simpler input forms to distribute the metadata into the appropriate places in the underlying metadata model without the need for the user to explore the full complexity of a given structure directly.
For example, as discussed above, the more common resource types and configurations to be archived may be presented to users in the form of a greatly simplified model that closely resembles their own perception of the resource.
This facilitates the task by building on users’ own understanding of the domain area.
The general approach of building upon a simplified description, often based on an ‘interface metaphor’, is a classic tactic in human-computer interaction [31].
In order to design such an interface, it is necessary to assess which metadata are of significance to the largest number of users, and which metadata satisfy relatively minor use cases.
To achieve this, it is also necessary to establish the most common uses for the system, and to elicit information from the user community regarding commonplace models of resource, task and system function.
Once this is established it becomes possible to reduce the problem to one of optimising an existing interface for use by the defined user groups: reducing the number of key strokes required to complete a deposit process; improving the learnability and the overall usability of the interface; further improving the interface through user evaluations of each prototype.
These may then feed back into the optimisation process.
It is our contention that the interface design cannot be relegated entirely to a post-hoc engineering process, and that this in fact forms a valuable part of the process of evaluating the application profile itself.
The process allows evidence from user evaluation of views of the data structure (essentially special-case simplifications of the general model) to be fed back into the development of the DCAP, providing a useful first glimpse of the way in which the DCAP may be applied in practical contexts.
Issues ranging from the most basic, such as time taken to fill out the fields manually, to the more technical, such as evaluation of the cognitive load involved in the process of grasping the metadata model as shown to the user, are all potentially significant in evaluating the system”s chances of acceptance in a real-world context of use.
Methodologies used in exploring interface design can vary widely, from methods based on efficiency evaluation such as GOMS (Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules) and its derivatives to lightweight methods such as heuristic evaluation and Wizard-of-Oz walkthroughs [32] of paper prototypes.
Cost can vary depending on the level of implementation required to support the evaluation, from a minimal cost of a pure paper prototype to a modest cost for fast prototyping of a sample interface in a framework capable of supporting rapid development, such as Ruby on Rails.
Technical Standards and Schemas The scope and purpose of various serialisation formats and their schemas, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML), Open Archives Initiative Object Re-use and Exchange (OAI-ORE) and Description Set Profile (DSP), must be addressed from the perspective of delivering practical functionality to users.
The Singapore Framework for DCAPs requires the provision of a DSP, based on the Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM) [33].
To date, however, the functional benefits of the standard have not been sufficiently examined, not least because it has not been implemented in a functioning repository.
The particular technologies, serialisations and schemas that will be used to implement the JISC DCAPs may well vary between different software packages, and even between individual local deployments of that software.
It is therefore sensible to seek to maximise the possible implementation methods available, so that the best method for any given software scenario can be arrived at through testing.
Data Models In recognition of the simple ‘flat’ data model currently in use in many repositories, notably all instances of DSpace including the current version 1.5.2 and all instances of EPrints up to 3.0, it is apparent that there exists a considerable need to consider the practical demands of backwards compatibility with such records; or else to consider how they could be batch-processed to fit a hypothetical future complex data model based on an E-R model.
EPrints 3.1 does allow for relationships between digital objects, but not at present for an E-R model as complex as FRBR, on which the JISC DCAPs are based.
Given that the future data models of DSpace and Eprints are speculative, and considering that the bulk of repositories in the UK HE sector are based on one of these two platforms, it seems wise to take the practical position that backwards compatibility will have to be enabled.
To resolve this, work has been undertaken at UKOLN to develop a possible means to emulate the complex data models based on FRBR that have been adopted by these DCAPs, by re-mapping the FRBR Group 1 entities.
By removing the inheritance pattern from parent entities, it would become necessary to unify the Group 1 entities and thus duplicate metadata in related digital objects that would otherwise have been shared by related child entities.
This would essentially be the approach that was recommended by Rachel Heery in her Digital Repositories Roadmap Review, by which FRBR is essentially removed from the data model [34].
However, it is possible to re-factor the Group 1 entities as ordinary ‘sideways’ relationships between entities at the same level in related digital objects.
This method would allow for backwards compatibility with records in the majority of existing repositories, but also allow for the relationships implied by FRBR to be preserved.
It has been acknowledged in the predecessor to this article that opinions about the appropriateness of FRBR in the repository environment differ widely, and that one of the present authors doubts that its usefulness as a model is as universal as it has often been assumed [2].
The appropriateness of any E-R model and the relationships that it implies may be closely tied to the particular requirements of users within a particular application, and this may change as that application develops over time.
It must be admitted, in all fairness, that neither view has yet been demonstrated, and that both views require testing.
The E-R models that the original framers of the JISC DCAPs chose represent the status quo in the meantime.
Moreover, a strength of this modular approach is that multiple entity models could potentially be supported, even concurrently – or easily replaced.
It seems best to take the view that usability and suitability testing, evaluated within the real-world repository landscape, may be the best final arbiter.
In addition to providing a potential means to support FRBR-based DCAPs in existing repository architecture and working towards the gradual improvement of these records over time to comply with such complex data models, the proposed method allows the metadata elements and the entity-relationship structure to be treated as modular elements of a toolkit.
It would be possible to allow for a basic level of implementation restricted to just the metadata elements, while allowing for a later upgrade to use the full structural model.
Such an approach is not dissimilar to that described in the Dublin Core Interoperability Levels document, adding a level that could be described as ‘structural interoperability’ [35].
There is, however, an exchange to be made for this neat modular arrangement.
The reduction in the complexity of the data model may also create unsynchronised duplication of metadata between related digital objects, whereas the inheritance model of the E-R model creates no duplication.
The problem might be likely to arise in repositories that use traditional database design, e.g.
EPrints and DSpace, rather than RDF triple stores, e.g.
Fedora, where relationships are bidirectional and would be synchronised automatically.
Even in the former hypothesis, the situation would be no worse than that in which most EPrints and DSpace repositories currently find themselves, where relationships between digital objects are often expressed purely as a URI in the dc:relation field, or in one of its qualified elements.
Moreover, it would be possible to develop software that could check such relationships against a list of elements that should agree with each other, if such an entity is thus emulated, and to alert the repository manager in order to correct any errors that might have arisen.
The means to upgrade to an eventual data model that natively supports entity-relationship structures would seem to be supported by such a mapping, creating the possibility of batch-processing of old records once newer releases of the software supported it.
It must be stressed that the emulation method is offered purely as one possible tool to implement the JISC DCAPs in certain repositories that cannot support E-R models.
In order to assess whether this and other methods work in practice, UKOLN aims to arrange for these implementation methods to be demonstrated in live repository instances, either in test repositories or live services as may be appropriate, preferably across the range of repository software platforms in common use.
This should be considered best practice, as technical repository staff, where available, can rarely justify the development time without prior evidence of practical benefits and are required to avoid disruption to live services.
By providing demonstrations compatible with those services, it is hoped that the possible benefits of implementing an appropriate DCAP in a repository environment would be substantially easier to realise than is presently the case.
Community Engagement and Outreach It cannot be stressed enough that implementation of metadata standards should be upon the basis of their demonstrated usefulness to a community of professionals, such as repository managers, who have the responsibility for offering and maintaining live services to their institution and to the general public.
Theoretical models will be of no use to such a community unless they can be given not only the means to implement them, but also the clear benefits of doing so.
If the testing process is to be successful, it must engage in an ongoing dialogue with service providers, and ideally users, and proceed on the basis of the evidence gathered from any usability testing to which they contribute.
This means that no standard should be immune to radical review and re-engineering should user requirements demand it.
Furthermore, the interests of users in the process needs to be considered at all times, including their immediate purposes for attending events as well as their longer-term benefit from the eventual outcomes.
The process needs to draw upon the hard-won experience of a wide variety of individuals in outreach projects within the community, and to serve the educational needs of service providers such as repository managers in terms of their professional experience with metadata and software issues.
It is difficult to see how else they will be able to justify contributing to a programme of usability testing, if it does not offer jam today as well as tomorrow.
Conclusion The aim of the iterative testing, development and user engagement effort that has been outlined here is to complement the plan for the development of DCAPs that was advanced in the Singapore Framework.
The functional requirements, domain model and DSP were advanced as mandatory elements of a DCAP.
It is proposed here that functional requirements are a fundamental pre-condition for the other two, and consequently they require considerable, ongoing analysis and usability testing.
It is also suggested in the Singapore Framework that usage guidelines and encoding syntax guidelines should be offered as optional elements.
Ideally, of course, they should be provided wherever possible.
However, this is made more complex by the variety of the circumstances in which different repositories may need to implement any particular DCAP, if it should prove its benefit to the service offered by that institution.
Sufficient user documentation should however remain a core aim, and should be focussed on practical, implementable guidelines.
The lack of thoroughgoing evaluation within an interface engineering context and the lack of implementation to date should not necessarily be seen as a criticism of the current DCAPs.
The effort to develop these standards was pioneering, and it was not yet fully understood that substantial time for such hands-on testing and community engagement needed to be allocated.
The present initiative draws upon the experience of that work, and aims to uncover the practical benefits to software services, notably repositories, that can be derived from it.
Acknowledgements The authors would particularly like to acknowledge the ongoing contributions and collaboration of Paul Walk, Technical Manager, UKOLN.
The hard work done by the framers of the various DCAPs has made this effort possible, particularly in the case of SWAP, which has served as a precedent for the others to follow.
References These are: Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP); Images Application Profile (IAP); Time-Based Media Application Profile (TBMAP); Geospatial Application Profile; scoping study, Learning Materials Application Profile (LMAP), scoping study, Scientific Data Application Profile (SDAP) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ap/ Chaudhri, T., “Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles”, January 2009, Ariadne Issue 58 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/chaudhri/ Woodley, M.S., Clement, G., Winn, P., The Dublin Core Metadata Glossary, 2001 http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/04/12/usageguide/glossary.shtml#A Onyancha, I.; Keizer, J.; Katz, S., “A Dublin Core Application Profile in the Agricultural Domain”, Proc.
Int’l.
Conf.
On Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, 2001, pp.185-192 http://dcpapers.dublincore.org/ojs/pubs/article/viewPDFInterstitial/657/653 e-Government Unit, Cabinet Office, “e-GMS v3.0 Application Profile and Binding”, December 2004 http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/egms-ap-xml-schemas.pdf Lourdi, I., Papatheodorou, C., “A Metadata Application Profile for Collection-Level Description of Digital Folklore Resources”, Proceedings of the Database and Expert Systems Applications, 15th International Workshop, 2000, pp.
90-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/DEXA.2004.13 Coyle, K., Baker, T., Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles, 2005 http://dublincore.org/documents/profile-guidelines/ Allinson, J., Johnston, P., Powell, A., “A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works”, January 2007, Ariadne Issue 50 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/allinson-et-al/ Johnston, P., “The JISC DC Application Profiles: Some thoughts on requirements and scope”, 2008 http://www.slideshare.net/eduservfoundation/the-jisc-dc-application-profiles-some-thoughts-on-requirements-and-scope Nilsson, M., Johnston, P., Baker, T., “The Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles”, 2008 http://dublincore.org/documents/singapore-framework/ Heery, R., Powell, A., “Digital Repositories Roadmap”, JISC, 2006 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/rep-roadmap-v15.doc EPrints http://www.eprints.org/ DSpace http://www.dspace.org/ Fedora http://www.fedora-commons.org/ Registry of Open Access Repositories http://roar.eprints.org/ OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/ Digital Commons, BEPress http://digitalcommons.bepress.com/ DigiTool, Ex Libris http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/DigiToolOverview Symplectic Repository Tools http://www.symplectic.co.uk/products/repository-tools.html Fedora Data Model http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCR30/Fedora+Digital+Object+Model DSpace Data Model http://www.dspace.org/1_5_2Documentation/ch02.html EPrints Data Model http://www.eprints.org/software/training/programming/api_core.pdf Bosman, B., @mire NV, “DSpace 2.0 Demonstration : DSpace Technical Overview, Continued”, 2009 http://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/28078 New Features in EPrints 3.2 http://wiki.eprints.org/w/New_Features_Proposed_for_EPrints_3.2 Brody, T., “Eprints Application Profile Export Plugin” (for EPrints 3), GNU EPrints, 2007-8 http://files.eprints.org/325/ Delasalle, J., “SWAP and E–prints structures don’t match”, WRAP repository blog, October 2008 http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/entry/swap_and_e-prints/ Note that LMAP and SDAP are only scoping studies published on behalf of JISC.
Barker, P., “Learning Material Application Profile Scoping Study – final report”, JISC CETIS, 2008 http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/lmap/lmapreport.d3.pdf Ball, A., “Scientific Data Application Profile Scoping Study”, forthcoming http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/sdapss/ Sinha, R., Boutelle, J., “Rapid information architecture prototyping”, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems 2004, pp.
349-52 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1013115.1013177 Carroll, J. K., Mack, R. L. & Kellogg, W. A., “Interface Metaphors and User Interface Design”, in M. Helander (ed.
), Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, 1988, pp.67-85.
Wizard of Oz experiment, Wikipedia entry, retrieved 21 July 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment The Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles http://dublincore.org/documents/singapore-framework/ Heery, R., Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: towards a vision for research and learning in 2013, JISC Report, May 2009 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment/reproadmaprev.aspx Nilsson, M., Baker, T., Johnston, P., “Interoperability Levels for Dublin Core Metadata”, 2009 http://dublincore.org/documents/2009/05/01/interoperability-levels/ Author Details Talat Chaudhri Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: t.chaudhri@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.chaudhri/ Julian Cheal Systems Developer UKOLN University of Bath Email: j.cheal@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/j.cheal/ Richard Jones Head of Repository Systems Symplectic Limited UK Email: richard@symplectic.co.uk Web site: http://www.symplectic.co.uk/ Mahendra Mahey Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.mahey/ Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.tonkin/ Return to top Article Title: “Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles” Author: Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Richard Jones, Mahendra Mahey and Emma Tonkin Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/chaudhri-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC Digital Media Course: Introduction to Image Metadata ILRT, 8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol, BS8 1HH Wednesday 9 December 2009 Full-day course: 10.00 16.30 http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/training/courses/introduction-to-image-metadata/ Aim This course is designed specifically to help you consider how to effectively incorporate metadata into the fabric of your image collection, through explanation, discussion and practical activities.
Audience Anyone new to describing and cataloguing images.
Some previous knowledge of metadata will be useful but not essential.
Content Importance of metadata for image collections Choosing appropriate standards for your collection Metadata for different communities (e.g.
museums, libraries, archives) Metadata for different purposes (e.g.
retrieval, administration, preservation) Different types of metadata (e.g.
categories, controlled vocabularies, subject classifications) Introduction to storing image metadata (e.g.
databases, image tagging, XML) Introduction to some alternative approaches (e.g.
content-based retrieval, user-created metadata, the Semantic Web) Critical review of real world examples The full calendar and booking form are available here: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/training/ For more information on any of these courses, or for other training enquiries regarding one-to-one training or in-house training please contact: Dave Kilbey, Training Officer and Co-ordinator JISC Digital Media A JISC Advisory Service Still images, moving images and sound advice Free Helpdesk for UK Further and Higher Education: info@jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk Online advice documents: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/ Hands-on training: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/training/ Tel: 0117 3314332 Back to headlines UkeiG Course: Licences and their Negotiation The City Suite, Thistle City Hotel, Barbican, London, EC1V 8DS 24 September 2009, 9.30-16.30 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Course Outline This practical one day training event is designed to provide Information Professionals with an introduction to the licensing of electronic resources such as e books, e journals and abstracting and indexing services.
This course has been designed to introduce the major components of such licences and why they are important, what are the issues that are likely to cause the greatest difficulty, and will introduce issues related to the fine art of negotiating.
The sessions will include What is a licence and why are they used?
The main features of a licence Clauses that are likely to cause problems Negotiating styles Negotiating skills The session will include practical exercises to assess participants' negotiation style, and small group discussion of a sample licence Who should attend?
This workshop will be of benefit to Information Professionals in any type of organisation that have to negotiate licences with suppliers of electronic information Course Presenter Charles Oppenheim is Emeritus Professor and former Head of the Department of Information Science, Loughborough University.
Previous posts in academia and the electronic publishing industry include working for The City University, International Thomson, Pergamon and Reuters.
Charles is the author of "The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information" and is a well-known authority on copyright having written many articles on the subject.
He has been a member of JISC and served on some of its committees since 1992.
He is currently a member of the JISC Scholarly Publishing Working Group and of the HEFCE/UUK Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights.
He is a member of the Legal Advisory Board of the European Commission.
To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk.
Further details are also available via the UKeiG website at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Back to headlines ALPSP Seminar: Plagiarism: detection and management Royal College of Pathologists, 2 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1 Wednesday 30 September (10:00 16:40) http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=69340 Chair: Harvey Marcovitch, Past Chair of COPE Plagiarism has long been a problem for authors, readers and publishers and in an increasingly digital world, it has become far easier to find and appropriate the content of others.
However, the same technology also makes it easier to spot cases of plagiarism by rapidly comparing sequences of text against large databases of existing published material.
This seminar will explore the technologies available for detecting potential cases of plagiarism and their practical application to the publishing workflow.
It will also cover the crucial issue of how cases are handled and what sort of action can be taken, both from the publisher's perspective and that of the university or research organisation.
As well as text plagiarism, the seminar will also look at the related area of image falsification and its detection.
Who should attend: This seminar will be of interest primarily to Editorial and Production staff in both books and journals operations.
Programme 0930 Registration, Tea and coffee 1000 Introduction from the chair Harvey Marcovitch, Past chair of COPE 1015 The implications of plagiarism for the integrity of science and its outputs David MacNamee, The Lancet 1055 Problems encountered in using manipulation software Virginia Barbour, PLoS Medicine 1135 Tea/coffee 1200 Copy and Paste: Why do non-native users of English do it?
Speaker to be confirmed 1240 Lunch 1340 Incorporating plagiarism detection software into copy flow systems Richard Delahunty, Taylor and Francis 1420 How editors should handle plagiarism using COPE Flowcharts Randell Stephenson, School of Geosciences, Aberdeen University 1500 Tea/coffee 1520 How universities should handle plagiarism Professor Bob Allison, University of Sussex 1600 Legal aspects Joss Saunders, Blake Lapthorn 1640 Closing remarks followed by a networking reception with wine and nibbles For further information: http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=69340 Or contact Diane French: info@alpsp.org or call +44 (0)1827 709188 Back to headlines JISC Digital Media Course: Using Digital Media in VLEs ILRT, 8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol, BS8 1HH Wednesday 4 November 2009 Full-day course: 10.00 16.30 http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/training/courses/using-digital-media-in-vles/ Aim This one day workshop focuses on the effective use of digital media in presentations and online usage including the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
During the workshop attendees will discover how to improve the design of their presentation resources, know when and how digital media can be used to enhance learning materials and be able to successfully embed material in the VLE.
Audience Anybody wanting to discover ways to improve the design of online materials and include multimedia resources within a VLE.
Content Use of digital media for teaching and learning Designing better presentations using software such as PowerPoint Designing for interaction Effective use of audio and video resources for teaching and learning Embedding media in your VLE or online environment IPR issues Back to headlines ALPSP Seminar: Sustainable Publishing Royal College of Pathologists, 2 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1 Wednesday 4 November 2009, London http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=44492 Chair: Ashley Lodge, Corporate Responsibility & Publishing Consultant There are many ways in which you can improve your sustainable publishing practices, from your office environment to printing and distributing the finished products and hosting them online.
How do you make the change to 'green' publishing?
Is it worth your while?
How do you ensure that your costs do not escalate as a result?
This seminar will look at the different aspects of sustainable publishing and will be an opportunity to exchange ideas with experts and colleagues on how to make the most of this important business decision and help to save the planet.
The seminar follows our very successful session on Green Publishing at the 2008 ALPSP Conference and the aim is to offer publishers and societies information and practical advice on what is involved in implementing a sustainable publishing policy.
The day will comprise a series of short, informative presentations with ample time for questions, concluding with a break out session when groups will be challenged to create their own environmental check list based on what has been discussed during the day.
Who should attend: publishers, managers, editors, managing editors, production managers, society officers and anyone involved in publishing with a concern for the environment.
Programme 0900-0930 Registration 0930-0945 Introduction and setting the scene Ashley Lodge, Corporate Responsibility & Publishing Consultant 0945-1015 Sustainable publishing.
Why do it?
Where to start?
The operational impact Edward Milford, Chairman, Earthscan 1015-1045 How to do a green audit Toby Sawday, Business Development & Sustainability Alistair Sawday Publishing 1045-1115 Coffee 1115-1145 The Supply Chain.
Case study Genny Early, Head of Purchasing and Distribution, Oxford Journals 1145-1215 How do you know if it is green?
Sophie Greenhalgh, Envirowise Regional Manager, London 1215-1230 Review and questions 1230-1330 Lunch 1330-1400 Journal Publishing print vs digital Mark Gough, Environment and Health & Safety Coordinator, Reed Elsevier 1400-1430 Integrating 'greenness' into your business and getting your staff engaged Ashley Lodge, Corporate Responsibility & Publishing Consultant 1430-1445 Short break 1445-1530 Your Environmental Tick List (break out groups) 1530 Close and networking reception For further information: http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=44492 or please contact Lesley Ogg events@alpsp.org +44(0)1245 260571 Back to headlines A UKeiG Course: Making 'Search' Work The City Suite, Thistle City Hotel, Barbican, London, EC1V 8DS 10 November 2009, 9.30-16.30 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Course Outline Many organisations are finding that the search application on their Web site and intranet, or even a more comprehensive enterprise search, is not providing the expected benefits.
Finding a solution to the problem is not easy as there are so many variables.
Is the search engine unsuitable for the task, are expectations too high, or is the way that the search engine has been implemented not best practice?
The objective of this workshop is to help delegates analyse the nature of the problem that they are facing, and then to provide a range of solutions for consideration.
The main sections of the workshop will be Diagnosing search problems Understanding why and how people search The impact of content quality on search performance Google and SharePoint as search solutions Overview of commercial and open-source search engines Upgrade or replace – the options and issues Staffing the search team Developing a strategic plan for search Who should attend?
Intranet and Web managers who already have implemented search, even at a basic level, and wish to gain an appreciation of how to either get more from the investment, or what is involved in upgrading or replacing the current application.
Course Presenter The course will be presented by Martin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd, who is the author of 'Making Search Work' and co-author of 'Successful Enterprise Search Management'.
To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk.
Further details are also available via the UKeiG website at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Back to headlines Rachel Heery Dies after Long Illness It is with great sadness that we report that Rachel Heery, former Deputy Director of UKOLN, died on Friday 24 July, after a long-term illness.
Rachel joined UKOLN in 1995, and led the R&D Team and later became Deputy Director until her retirement in 2007.
A Tribute from Her UKOLN Colleagues: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/rachel-heery-tribute/ [Source: UKOLN] [Received: July 2009] Back to headlines Keynote Speakers Challenge Librarians at Internet Librarian International 2009 Librarians are on the front line of today's struggles with privacy and intellectual property, while technology, politics and social issues intersect at the library.
This year's keynote speakers at Internet Librarian International have some provocative views on where libraries – and librarians – are headed.
Cory Doctorow, technology activist, journalist, and science fiction author, and Cambridge academic Peter Murray-Rust look set to challenge the audience with their hard-hitting, iconclastic views.
In addition to being an award-winning science-fiction writer and Guardian columnist, Cory Doctorow is well known as a campaigner on liberty, privacy rights and access; he talks and writes frequently on the future of copyright and the media.
Doctorow doesn't predict much of a future for either: 'I see annihilation ahead for copyright and the entertainment industry in their present form,' he says.
But on the positive side, he does predict that they will reform into 'something smaller and nimbler.'
Doctorow encourages librarians to get involved with online activism: "the ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom and IFLA have been kicking ass and taking names for years now, especially at the World Intellectual Property Organization; they need active support from librarians".
For library patrons, Doctorow thinks that the top issues are "net-nannies that spy on their clickstreams and DRM that spy on their reading."
Dr Peter Murray-Rust is a Cambridge professor of chemistry, a proponent of Open Source and a library observer.
He is concerned that libraries – and particularly academic libraries used for scientific research – will soon become obsolete as researchers bypass both library collections and libraries in favour of the Internet.
'There is a need for purchasing which should be done nationally by specialists,' says Murray-Rust, 'but most of the rest will be web-based.'
On the other hand, he sees 'limitless' opportunity in the development of the semantic web, where innovations to watch include Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool which is 'interactive, pervasive, communal, universal and Open' and 'computational knowledge engine' Wolfram Alpha: 'a dark horse that goes beyond OWL-based reasoning.'
Both keynotes promise to be hard-hitting, challenging, radical and thought-provoking, and essential listening for information professionals as the libraries of the future emerge from the libraries of today.
Internet Librarian International takes place at Novotel London West in London on 15 & 16 October 2009 with pre-conference workshops on 14 October.
Further information: Novotel London West, London 15 16 October 2009 – pre-conference workshops 14 October http://www.internet-librarian.com/ The full conference programme can be viewed at: http://www.internet-librarian.com/2009/programme.php and details of 40% discounts for colleagues are available at http://www.internet-librarian.com/2009/registration.php or contact the organisers: Information Today Email: info@internet-librarian.com Tel: +44 (0)1865 327813 [Source: Information Today] [Received: July 2009] Back to headlines Koninklijke Bibliotheek Completes National Bibliography Prestigious Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN) Project completed after 27 years.
The largest and longest-running project in the history of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek is virtually complete.
The 'Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands' (STCN), which was completed in July 2009, gives an overview of all books printed in the Netherlands between 1540 and 1801 and of those published abroad in Dutch.
This milestone marks the completion of the National Bibliography from the beginning of the printing age up to the present day.
The STCN was compiled from the collections of almost 25 libraries and archives in the Netherlands and abroad.
Among these were the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) and the university libraries of Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, the Free University, Groningen and Nijmegen, as well as the British Library, the provincial libraries of Friesland and Zeeland, the municipal libraries of Haarlem, Rotterdam and Deventer and the collections of the Netherlands Music Institute and the Meermanno Museum.
In addition to numerous scientific publications, the bibliography comprises many books for 'the man in the street', such as travel stories, political pamphlets and almanacs.
Four different bibliographies had already been compiled for the periods before 1540 and after 1800, but the publications from the period 1540-1800 have now been brought together in one database for the first time.
More than 200,000 different titles came onto the market during this flourishing period of Dutch books.
Around 500,000 copies are listed in the STCN.
The five different bibliographies will be accessible via one portal within two years.
The STCN is pre-eminently suitable as a scholarly research instrument.
The database provides several more search functions than an ordinary library catalogue.
The user can search for author's names and title words as well as year, place of publication, language, printer, publisher, key words, and even illustrations, musical notation and typeface.
Moreover, the STCN will be the starting point for large-scale digitisation projects of the KB and other libraries.
http://www.kb.nl/stcn/index-en.html [Source: Koninklijke Bibliotheek] [Received: July 2009] Back to headlines JumpBox Delivers 2-minute Install of the DSpace Open Source Repository Software JumpBox, publisher of virtual appliances that provide the means to trial, develop, and deploy Open Source applications, recently announced the availability of the JumpBox for DSpace.
This addition marks the fiftieth JumpBox in its growing catalogue of time-saving virtual appliances for Open Source software.
DSpace is an open source application that enables organisations to manage, share and preserve their research output.
The software is primarily used by academia and cultural heritage institutions that want to share their research output and ensure the content persists over time.
The DSpace application was created through a collaboration between MIT and HP Labs, and is now used by over 500 organisations around the world.
DSpace supports all forms of digital media including, images, audio, movies, text and other rich media.
'We know of many organizations that would like to get started with DSpace but do not have the technical support or know how', says Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation.
'JumpBox allows them to deploy DSpace in a self-contained fashion in minutes minimizing the effort necessary to get up and running.
This translates to a simplified evaluation process for schools and reduced installation cost and headache.'
'Consistent with our goal of helping people be more productive with Open Source software, we're thrilled to be able to make this JumpBox available as a free resource for the DSpace community and to support the DSpace project and its principles.'
says Kimbro Staken, CEO of JumpBox Inc.
The JumpBox for DSpace runs under virtualisation on every major operating system and is available for immediate download via the DSpace Web site: http://www.dspace.org/index.php/News-Archive/JumpBox-Install-of-DSpace.html http://www.jumpbox.com http://twitter.com/duraspace [Source: JumpBox/DSpace] [Received: June 2009] Back to headlines Final Digital Britain Report Now Available The final Digital Britain Report was published on 16 June 2009 and the text and other information about the Report can be found on: http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/5631.aspx Victoria Coker, Senior Policy Advisor on the Digital Britain Report at the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform expressed her gratitude to all stakeholders for the input they provided on Digital Britain issues which had helped to shape the final Report.
[Source: Dept.
for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform] [Received: June 2009] Back to headlines Understanding the Next-Gen User An archived version of the Library Journal webcast "Understanding the Next-Gen User" is now available.
The event was held on 4 June 2009 and featured Joan Lippincott, CNI Associate Executive Director, as a speaker: Webcast: Returning the Researcher to the Library: Understanding the Next Gen user http://www.libraryjournal.com/webcastsDetail/2140374033.html?q=Understanding+the+Next-Gen+User+lippincott [Source: Coalition for Networked Information] [Received: June 2009] Back to headlines Clifford Lynch: Revisiting Institutional Repositories A video of Clifford Lynch's breakout session "Revisiting Institutional Repositories," from the CNI 2009 Spring Task Force Meeting in April, is now available for streaming or downloading: http://vimeo.com/5498937 CNI expects to provide videos of selected presentations from future meetings and would welcome your comments and feedback on their usefulness to you and your institution.
[Source: Coalition for Networked Information] [Received: July 2009] Back to headlines   Return to top Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Introducing RDA Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Introducing RDA Buzz data wiki archives metadata video cataloguing marc aacr2 isbd frbr marc21 frad standards Citation BibTex RIS Katrina Clifford reviews a work covering the long-heralded change in the cataloguing rule set RDA (Resource Description and Access).
The world of information description and retrieval is one of constant change and RDA (Resource Description and Access) is often touted as being one of the most radical changes on the horizon.
Early discussions were often couched very much in terms of the principles behind the move from AACR2 (Anglo American Cataloguing Rules) and the principles of a FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records)-based system.
We gradually move closer to the Library of Congress’ decision on whether to adopt RDA or not, raising questions of what adoption will mean in terms not just of day-to-day cataloguing but the wider retrieval world.
Therefore, it is not just cataloguers who may feel they need to gain an understanding of exactly what RDA is and what moving to it will involve.
The title of Chris Oliver’s book, Introducing RDA: A Guide to the Basics, will, as a result, catch the eye of people from many spheres of information work.
Content of the Book Although this book is just over 100 pages long, I would say it is not necessary to start at the beginning and work your way through the book to get the most out of it.
If you’re looking for something that places RDA squarely within the historical context of information retrieval and the rationale behind its development then the first two chapters give a comprehensive overview in relatively few pages.
Chapter 1, ‘What is RDA?’ introduces the idea of RDA being designed as a result of an increasingly varied range of resources in need of description, especially those that are digital in nature.
Additionally there is the need to search multiple datasets at once, including those beyond libraries, in allied institutions such as museums and archives.
Chapter 2, ‘RDA and the international context’, as implied by the title explores the relationship of RDA to international documentation standards such as ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description) and how it copes in terms of handling language issues of catalogue records.
It is just a brief overview however, all the ideas are discussed in one or two paragraphs each.
Together, these two initial chapters would easily fill in the background for an uninitiated professional, such as a library school student and indeed they show that RDA is built upon many of the key concepts touched upon in library school courses, such as Cutter’s Rules for a dictionary catalog.
Chapter 3 furthers this introduction by describing FRBR and FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) and how they relate to RDA.
In all the more recent discussions surrounding practical aspects of the uptake of RDA, the theoretical principles underlying it are often forgotten and revisiting them can be an interesting exercise.
After an overview of how FRBR and FRAD are constructed, it moves on to why they are important.
One figure lays out a MARC record and labels the fields with the appropriate FRBR entities which is helpful in understanding them in context.
The remainder of the chapter shows how the RDA terms have been incorporated into the layout of the sections of RDA and the wording of the rules themselves.
The chapter shows why RDA is laid out in a very different way to AACR2, grouping rules by the attribute described rather than by item format.
This chapter is perhaps the most difficult to work through, but I feel this is due to the nature of the content, rather than any failing on the part of the author.
Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Continuity with AACR2’ and while this may indicate it will describe how catalogues may appear different, the start of the chapter focuses more on continuity in terms of governance and principles rather than on the nuts and bolts of the records themselves.
It does move to describing how AACR2 has been reworked into RDA, rather than RDA being written from scratch and illustrates this with a couple of rules and wordings from both products to compare the differences and similarities.
It then moves back to what is essentially an historical account of the ‘deconstruction’ of AACR2, which is interesting in itself; but it would have been better placed near the start of the chapter to distinguish better between the historical description and the examples from RDA which follow.
For Those Who Already Know the Basics Practitioners such as cataloguers, who already have a basic understanding of the need for RDA and who do not need to explore the theoretical principles underlying FRBR and FRAD, may wish to start at Chapter 5, as some of the historical background to RDA is repeated when required.
The chapter does cover some areas of mismatch between RDA and AACR2, such as the recording of carrier type and the recording of multiple authors.
Changes from AACR2 are embedded in textual description, rather than clearly highlighted, which means this chapter cannot be skim-read for a summary of what’s different to AACR2.
There is a lot to take in, and the chapter is rather dense at times.
Although there are section headings, this chapter in particular may have benefited from clearer signposts, such as heading numbering, to make it fully clear which points were related.
Chapter 6, entitled ‘Implementing RDA,’ starts by highlighting further areas where RDA will impose changes, but in terms of the MARC21 coding changes that will need to be adopted.
It also shows how the national libraries are working to address areas where they have dealt differently with rule interpretations in the past.
The chapter then moves to a description of the RDA Toolkit.
For those who are unaware, the RDA Toolkit is the online resource that contains the full text of RDA alongside related resources.
It goes beyond just an electronic version of the text however, incorporating features such as the ability to create online workflows for different item types.
Oliver does accept that trying to convey the layout of the Toolkit textually is difficult.
Many of the figures are closely cropped.
Indeed an overall screenshot of the initial RDA Toolkit screen might have helped those who were not able to see the Toolkit during the free trial of 2010 to understand how the tabs relate to each other.
Being able to view the RDA Toolkit while reading this chapter is not essential but it is more difficult, especially when the appendices are mentioned, to fully understand what is being described.
The chapter does, however, highlight the useful features of the Toolkit such as the ability to include notes to mark local practice or the ability to search by AACR2 rule number to find the RDA equivalent.
Although it appears a little repetitive in places, this does not detract significantly from the range of material covered.
Moreover, it raises issues where there may be a degree of ‘relearning’ required from practitioners familiar with AACR2.
Chapter 7, ‘Advantages, present and future’ almost stands alone in terms of readability and while briefly acknowledging the historical factors that have led to the requirement of a new cataloguing standard, the focus in this chapter is on the benefits, both immediate and long-term, of moving to RDA.
It is written in a very non-technical manner and would be perfect for a cataloguing or service manager faced with having to explain and justify RDA adoption to senior management who may not have ever catalogued an item or even been through a traditional library school.
Layout and Extra Features The overall layout is fairly plain, but the wide margins on the outside of the page could be useful for note-taking.
Cataloguing, like much of librarianship, is a world of acronyms the book therefore comes with a handy list of abbreviations at the front.
The list of references at the end of each chapter are brief, but they are supplemented by further resources at the end of the work, grouped not by chapter heading but by overall area such as ‘RDA and other metadata communities’ and ‘Resources for training and implementation’.
They go beyond just articles and the technical documentation from the major library agencies and include webcasts and video tutorials, alongside wikis and online sites, covering a wide range of information service fields.
Conclusion Overall, to misquote the wording of a certain DIY product advert, Introducing RDA: A Guide to the Basics ‘does exactly what it says on the cover’.
It is not a ‘how-to’ manual and cannot be used as a day-to-day reference work.
However it never pretends to be as such; rather, as noted on the back cover, it is a ‘guide to the changes ahead’.
It covers the history, theoretical principles and some of the benefits that services should expect if they choose to adopt RDA.
With the exception of Chapter 7, you will need a certain degree of basic cataloguing knowledge but not extensively so.
It’s not what I would call an engaging read, but it does deal with the material in a comprehensive yet succinct manner.
I can’t say if I’ve learnt anything new as I’ve tried to keep up to date with developments in RDA, but it has served as a useful refresher.
It would definitely be of use to service managers to supplement their employees’ own knowledge of RDA; and to get everyone up to a similar point in the understanding a development that will, if widely adopted, undoubtedly have long-running implications in many areas of information description and retrieval work for decades to come.
Author Details Katrina Clifford Senior Information Advisor (Bibliographic and Metadata) Information Services Kingston University Kingston upon Thames Surrey UK Email: k.clifford@kingston.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Introducing RDA: A Guide to the Basics” Author: Katrina Clifford Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/clifford-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Automating Harvest and Ingest of the Medical Heritage Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Automating Harvest and Ingest of the Medical Heritage Library Buzz data api javascript database dissemination xml stylesheet xslt metadata digitisation browser identifier preservation cataloguing jpeg z39.50 marc ocr csv mets json html5 research standards Citation BibTex RIS Christy Henshaw, Dave Thompson and João Baleia describe an automated process to harvest medical books and pamphlets from the Internet Archive into the Wellcome Library’s Digital Services environment.
Overview of the UK Medical Heritage Library Project The aim of the UK Medical Heritage Library (UK-MHL) Project is to provide free access to a wealth of medical history and related books from UK research libraries.
There are already over 50,000 books and journal issues in the Medical Heritage Library drawn from North American research libraries.
The UK-MHL Project will expand this collection considerably by digitising a further 15 million pages for inclusion in the collection.
The Wellcome Library is incorporating these books into its own digital library, making further strides towards becoming a global online resource for the history of medicine and health.
The UK-MHL Project is funded by Jisc [1], a registered charity providing digital solutions for UK education and research, and the Wellcome Trust [2].
Content for digitisation is selected from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Royal College of Physicians of London, Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Wellcome Library, and six university libraries: King’s College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University College London (UCL), University of Bristol, University of Leeds and University of Glasgow.
All digitisation is carried out by the Internet Archive, one of the largest digital libraries in the world, and a widely used digitisation bureau [3].
The digitisation centre is located at the Wellcome Library in London, hosting 12 digitisation units and 14 members of staff.
The Internet Archive upload both metadata and digitised images to their Web site for quality control and creation of a range of image and text-based dissemination formats, making all content freely available to users at no extra cost to the content providers.
Overview of the Wellcome Digital Library Systems The Wellcome Library’s systems are described in detail in a previous Ariadne article [4].
Table 1 shows a summary of the key systems involved.
System Description and purpose Preservica Digital asset management system (formerly known as Safety Deposit Box) managing long term preservation of digitised and born digital content Goobi “Intranda version” – a workflow system that manages content harvest from the Internet Archive site, image validation and conversion, metadata mapping, encoding access conditions, ingest, creation of METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) files, and more Sierra Library catalogue/bibliographic database Encore Library discovery interface for all physical and digital content Digital Delivery System (DDS) Handles the retrieval of digital content from Preservica using METS files, creates JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) files to instruct the player, authenticates content, caches JPEG tiles, creates PDFs, and more IIPImage Server Image server that delivers JPEG tiles created on-the-fly from JPEG 2000 image files Wellcome Library “the player” Media viewer based on OpenSeadragon and HTML 5 that is the user interface to digital content on the Wellcome Library Web site Table 1: Wellcome digital library systems Placing Content on the Internet Archive Site Selection Books and pamphlets earmarked for digitisation as part of the UK-MHL Project are selected by all the contributing partners from their medical history and related collections within a date range of 1780 1914.
The aim is to create a broad-based resource that reflects the interests and knowledge of those involved in medicine and healing in the 19th century, so the subject areas are varied, including both core medical subjects such as anatomy, surgery or neurology, and broader health or body-related topics including physical exercise, cookery, and phrenology.
Figure 1: Artistic Anatomy, by Mathias Duval, 1884, page 18[5] De-duplication Once the selection has been made, all partners export their catalogue records and send them to the Wellcome Library where they are compared to titles that are already available on the Internet Archive, or are already on the list to be digitised.
Rates of duplication are generally between about 20% and 40% depending on the collection.
An item is considered a duplicate if there is a copy of the same edition available on the Internet Archive site that also has an available MARC record online.
In order to do this comparison, we downloaded all the available MARC records for the Internet Archive’s 19th-century monographs and created a “master list” of existing digital content, which grows each time more unique titles are discovered and earmarked for digitisation.
We can also root out any duplicates within collections – although in some cases, there is good reason to digitise duplicates; where there are interesting annotations, for example.
Before the comparison is possible it is necessary to convert all descriptive metadata delivered as separate MARC21 records into a single CSV (comma-separated values) file.
This is done using a XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) document that selects only material types considered in scope and concatenates part of the author name, part of the main title and the date of publication in one string.
It also adds, in a separate column, the unique system or institutional identifier for that record (normally in 001 Marc field).
The resulting document is then compared to the “master file” using a VlookUp function which matches on the concatenated strings because there is no reliable universal unique identifier for this material.
For each record to be ingested in Preservica a “stub Marc record” is then created, containing the unique system identifier, and loaded in our bibliographic database.
These stub records are used as a match point so our bibliographic database only loads the full records of works we want to digitise or harvest from the Internet Archive.
Identifying Previously Digitised Medical Books This process also allows us to identify those we can immediately harvest from the Internet Archive into our own digital library.
Although all the monographs and pamphlets currently part of the Medical Heritage Library collection will be harvested, we are now finding relevant titles that have never been included in that collection.
Comparing medical history collections from all the partners allows us to identify these titles in the larger corpus of the Internet Archive’s 19th-century collections.
Digitising Books Once de-duplication is complete for a collection, the catalogue records are loaded into Sierra where they are assigned unique identifiers that will be used throughout the digitisation process.
When the books are delivered for digitisation, they are accompanied by electronic “scan lists” that provide the unique IDs of all books in a shipment, allowing the Internet Archive to harvest records from the Sierra database using z39.50.
Internet Archive can then digitise the items and create all the dissemination formats.
Once this is complete, anyone can access the content either by using the Internet Archive browser interface, or by downloading content using an open API.
Creating a Medical Heritage Library Mirror at the Wellcome Library All of the Medical Heritage Library content will be harvested and ingested into the Wellcome Library’s digital library system.
Two new harvesting workflows were developed in Goobi to achieve this.
Items newly digitised via the UK-MHL Project are assigned a ‘collection identifier’ on the Internet Archive site, and our workflow tracking system, Goobi, has been developed to poll the Internet Archive site for records that display this identifier.
Records with this identifier are automatically harvested once they are discovered, although we have enforced a 25-day automatic waiting period from date of upload.
This is to ensure that the Internet Archive can complete its quality-control process and creation of dissemination files.
The unique Sierra ID number (known as a .b number), allocated at the point of digitisation, allows all the content to be linked together in the Wellcome’s systems.
The second workflow harvests items that are already in the Internet Archive but not digitised as part of the UK-MHL Project.
As the items were not digitised as part of the UK-MHL Project, the Internet Archive records do not contain the unique Sierra .b number, and therefore cannot be automatically harvested using a collection identifier as there would be no way to link them to the metadata already held in Sierra.
So, in this case, the records downloaded to create the ‘master list’ for de-duplication are loaded into Goobi first, containing both a Sierra .b number and the Internet Archive’s pre-existing identifier providing a match point.
Goobi can then use the Internet Archive identifier to harvest the content, and match content to metadata using the associated Sierra .b number.
Goobi acts as a gateway to the internal network, where the content is ultimately stored.
At this point, the two workflows converge and follow the same series of steps.
Figure 2: Medical Evidence in Railway Accidents by John Charles Hall, 1868 [6] Once the content has been harvested, Goobi imports the structural metadata from the Internet Archive “scandata.xml” file into its database.
This includes pagination information and logical structures such as covers, table of contents, title pages, and similar divisions, as identified and marked up by the Internet Archive.
The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) file, downloaded as a raw Abbyy.gz file, is used by Intranda to create Analyzed Layout and Text Object (ALTO) XML files, the basis of our full-text database in the player (for ‘search within’ functionality), and Encore (for full-text search across all items, including snippet display in the results list).
Goobi runs a JPEG 2000 validation program called jpylyzer to ensure all the image files are valid .jp2 files (Part 1) before triggering automated ingest into Preservica.
Once Preservica has ingested and characterised the files, it returns administrative metadata to Goobi including unique IDs for each image file.
This is merged into the Goobi database.
Once all the steps have been completed to bring together the information required by the digital delivery system, Goobi exports a METS file that contains the administrative data (image sequence, pagination, logical structure, filenames, file IDs, references to ALTO files, etc.)
The METS is exported to the Digital Delivery System (DDS) and stored alongside the ALTO files.
The METS files are not considered preservation objects in themselves and so are not stored in Preservica.
Task Principal systems UK-MHL (new digitisation) workflow Internet Archive (existing content) workflow Generate or import catalogue records Manual process Sierra Import externally sourced MARC records to Sierra Import all MHL records harvested from the Internet Archive De-duplicate Manual process Sierra Excel De-duplicate Metadata processing Manual process Sierra Flag unique records as “to be digitised” or “to harvest” Import Internet Archive records into Goobi from Sierra Identify and request downloads from Internet Archive Goobi Poll Internet Archive for any new UK-MHL content and download content Search Internet Archive for specific IDs and download content Transfer content to Wellcome network Goobi Download relevant content to Goobi, transfer to internal network   Image validation Jpylyzer Goobi Validate images with Jpylyzer validation script   Add structural metadata Goobi Map structural metadata to Goobi database   Create ALTO files Intranda (external service) Goobi Create ALTO files from raw OCR, and export to digital delivery system   Ingest images to Preservica Preservica Goobi Ingest images and descriptive metadata to Preservica   Add administrative metadata Preservica Goobi Export administrative metadata from Preservica, and map to Goobi database   Create and export METS Goobi Create and export METS files via Goobi to digital delivery system   Delete unnecessary files Goobi Delete image and OCR files originally harvested from the IA Web site and no longer required on the Goobi servers   Table 2: Tasks and responsibilities Conclusion Aside from the aim of creating a UK Medical Heritage Library the key principle behind this project has been to apply high levels of automation to the acquisition and processing of content.
The purpose being to create both a scalable and sustainable activity.
The project was built by extending and developing existing tools and systems.
Having created automated processes for this project, we are now in a position to apply the work to future projects.
The task of automation was made simpler by the metadata that the Internet Archive created.
The structural and raw OCR files that are available from the Internet Archive Web site could be processed to create METS and ALTO files automatically.
Although automation of many of the basic tasks was achieved there was still human resource required for some of the processes such as the metadata harvest and import and setting up the de-duplication process.
References Jisc http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Wellcome Trust: Looking for a grant?
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/?gclid=CJLoj87I-cACFSXKtAodyiIA2A Scanning Services: Digitizing Print Collections with the Internet Archive https://archive.org/scanning Christy Henshaw, Robert Kiley.
“The Wellcome Library, Digital”.
July 2013, Ariadne Issue 71 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue71/henshaw-kiley Mathias Duval, 1884.
Artistic Anatomy, page 18 http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b20418449#?asi=0&ai=33&z=-1.0072%2C0%2C3.0143%2C1.5272 John Charles Hall, 1868.
Medical Evidence in Railway Accidents http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b20400640 Author Details Christy Henshaw Digitisation Programme Manager Wellcome Library Email: c.henshaw@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://wellcomelibrary.org/ Christy Henshaw has managed the Wellcome Library’s digitisation programme since 2007.
Dave Thompson Digital Curator Wellcome Library Email: d.thompson@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://wellcomelibrary.org/ Dave Thompson manages the systems; Goobi and Preservica, associated with digitisation on a day-to-day basis.
João Baleia Library Systems Support Officer Wellcome Library Email: j.baleia@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://wellcomelibrary.org/ João Baleia supports public-facing library systems and resolves metadata-related problems.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial: Digital billboards, folksonomies and lightweight catalogue interfaces Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial: Digital billboards, folksonomies and lightweight catalogue interfaces Citation BibTex RIS In issue 77 of Ariadne, we have articles covering a range of topics: Prince Jacon Igwe discusses the role of a Social Media Librarian in academic libraries, and presents an innovative use of digital billboards to promote the library’s and institution’s work whilst increasing engagement with students, academics and the public.
Social media is being increasingly used by academics to demonstrate their “impact” to funders and management.
Having the library engage social media users to help spread the word about relevant University research and resources can therefore also be a demonstrable benefit the library is bringing to their academics.
Ana Margarida Dias da Silva has provided an article on Folksonomies in Archives.
It looks at how archives in France have made use of modern web technologies to bring user input and controlled social collaboration into metadata creation for their large numbers of records.
These “folksonomies” aim to change users from passive consumers of archive information to active participants in the creaste and maintenance of archive data sets.
Jason Cooper describes how a lightweight temporary library catalogue system was constructed when Loughborough University opened their second campus in London.
This version of the catalogue was viewed as a temporary measure for what was effectively a new branch library attached to a previously single site based catalogue.
As the University’s main library system was to be replaced within a few years, support for multiple sites would be added at that point and so this option reduced configuration and recataloguing requirements in the meantime.
We also have some book reviews: Tanya Butchers reviews, “Library Management in Disruptive Times: Skills and knowledge for an uncertain future” edited by Steve O’Connor, Helen Young reviews, “Dynamic research support for academic libraries” edited by Starr Hoffman, and Adrienne Muir reviews, “Copyright and E-learning: a guide for practitioners”, by Jane Secker with Chris Morrison.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Fourth DCC-RIN Research Data Management Forum Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Fourth DCC-RIN Research Data Management Forum Buzz data framework infrastructure archives metadata repositories preservation ulcc curation licence foi algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Martin Donnelly and Graham Pryor report on the fourth Research Data Management Forum event, on the theme "Dealing with Sensitive Data: Managing Ethics, Security and Trust," organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and Research Information Network (RIN) in Manchester, England, over 10 11 March, 2010.
The fourth meeting of the Research Data Management Forum was held in Manchester on 10 and 11 March 2010, co-sponsored by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] and the Research Information Network (RIN) [2].
The event took Dealing with Sensitive Data: Managing Ethics, Security and Trust as its theme [3].
Day 1: 10 March 2010 DCC Associate Director Liz Lyon and RIN Head of Programmes Stéphane Goldstein welcomed the 45 delegates to the event, and began by introducing the keynote speaker, Iain Buchan, Professor of Public Health Informatics and Director of the Northwest Institute for Bio-Health Informatics (NIBHI), University of Manchester.
Iain's talk was entitled Opening Bio-Health Data and Models Securely and Effectively for Public Benefit, and addressed three main questions: Where does the public's health need digital innovation?
How can research curators promote this innovation (and what are the implications for Ethics, Security and Trust)?
Is a framework required (covering the Social Contract and a digital and operational infrastructure)?
A major theme in contemporary healthcare is that of prevention, and the need for proactive 'citizen buy-in' in order to avert NHS bankruptcy, a need supported by the use of 'persuasive technologies.'
There is, however, a disconnect between the proactive public health model, and the reactive clinical model, and between expectations and available resource.
'Digital bridges', composed of new information technologies, are used to close the gaps between primary and secondary care, and to link disease-specific pathways.
Iain touched on the impact that the data deluge is having on healthcare, reflecting that knowledge can no longer be managed solely by reading scholarly papers: the datasets and structures now extend far beyond any single study's observations.
It is now necessary to build data-centred models, and to interrogate them for clusters via dedicated algorithms.
However, there are holes in the datasets – for example, clinical trials exclude women of childbearing age and subjects undergoing certain treatments – hence electronic health records must be mined in order to fill these gaps, but this can be problematised by a lack of useful metadata, leading to 'healthcare data tombs,' repositories of health records lacking the contextual information to make them useful.
Such data resources may be worse than useless: they may be misinformation.
Comprehensible social networks with user-friendly interfaces can be used to improve the quality of metadata, based on the principle that more frequent use leads to better quality information.
These networks can also bridge the Balkanisation that can occur when different groups tackle the same issue from varying standpoints (e.g.
examining obesity from dietaryand exercise-based perspectives, but not sharing data across these boundaries.)
The vision is for a joint, open, unifying and interdisciplinary framework and understanding wherein resources and expertise are shared.
Of course, crossing these divides is accompanied by a raft of trust and security issues, and Iain described the various measures that are implemented to cope with them.
Iain discussed the ethical issues surrounding wider use of health record information across the NHS, including consent (opt-in versus opt-out), the right (or lack thereof) of an investigator to go to a patient directly, and – perhaps most controversially – whether it was actually unethical to allow a health dataset to go under-exploited.
If this is indeed the case, it follows that there is a real need to audit the demonstrable good that is derived from datasets.
Day 2: 11 March 2010 The morning's session began with a presentation from Nicky Tarry, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), who spoke on Data Handling: doing the right thing and doing it in the right way.
Nicky began by outlining the data held by the DWP: benefits data (including sickness and disability records), drug abuse/criminal history, personal (including ethnicity and family make-up), plus data from surveys and other government departments, including employment, tax and other financial information.
He then covered the legacy security measures that were used to protect data (sampling and partial anonymisation), and the changes put in place to improve them in the wake of recent data loss scandals (full anonymisation, senior sign-off).
He outlined SARA (Survey and Risk Assessment), a risk-based system that was introduced following a recent Cabinet Office review that was triggered by a number of high-profile data leaks.
He also spoke of the new Data Labs which are being prepared to process data that meet certain criteria, and which will allow flexibility while still meeting security requirements.
Nicky also mentioned the DWP Data Access Ethics Committee, established in 2004 and comprising a mixed membership from a variety of backgrounds.
The next session was entitled Providing a Service, and was split into two parts.
The first presentation was from Kevin Ashley, speaking in his role as former head of the Digital Archives Group at the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), and covered Managing Issues of Confidentiality, Ethics and Trust.
Established in 1997, the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) is a branch of the National Archives (TNA) dedicated to the preservation of, and access to, digital datasets, metadata and related documents from UK central government departments.
NDAD is hosted and managed by ULCC on a sub-contract basis, while TNA identifies the datasets and documents to be deposited.
The focus of Kevin's talk was the process by which users can access sometimes-sensitive information, and records that are deliberately preserved in their original (imperfect) states, hence contextual information is important to explain the imperfections!
NDAD always checks with the government department that a record is safe to be released, and records are signed off by both NDAD and that department prior to release as an additional safety mechanism.
Redaction (censorship) of data may be achieved by restricting access (for example via embargo), by excising sensitive data, or via redaction of metadata that describes the sensitive data.
The manual redaction process can be time-consuming and therefore expensive.
NDAD's rule-based model defines precisely who is allowed to see what, and under which circumstances, and records of past restrictions are also stored and preserved.
Finally, in terms of managing trust, different stakeholders have different concerns: data owners need to be assured that their instructions are being followed, and that they are kept informed about developments; TNA guidelines must be followed and auditable records kept of all requests and accessed; and the general public may wish to ask questions which NDAD is obliged to answer.
Following Kevin, Reza Afkhami of the UK Data Archive (UKDA) spoke about Secure Approaches to Data Management, specifically the UKDA's new Secure Data Service (SDS).
Based at the University of Colchester, the UKDA is a TNA-designated Place of Deposit, and houses the UK's largest collection of digital humanities and social science data.
The SDS mission is to promote researcher access to sensitive micro data (maximising data access and utility), while simultaneously protecting confidentiality and minimising the risk of disclosure of sensitive information.
Identifying a threshold of maximum tolerable risk involves a trade-off between data utility and disclosure risk, and the SDS threshold for released data sits slightly below this maximum.
SDS users are required to register with the service, and access criteria are set based on purpose, users, research output (which is screened), location (this can be restricted to specific IP addresses if appropriate), and data licensing (which involves contracts with users and data owners.)
The data security model incorporates a series of checks, including the validity of the statistical purpose, trusted researchers, anonymisation of data where necessary, technical controls (e.g.
over encryption and import/export of data), and scrutiny of the research outputs in order to prevent inappropriate disclosure.
Reza also outlined the legal and regulatory framework within which SDS operates, comprising UK law, duties of care, and rules imposed by the data suppliers, as well as the penalties that can be imposed upon researchers who break the rules.
Next up was Reza's colleague Veerle Van Den Eynden from UKDA's Research Data Management Support Services, who gave another side of the story in her presentation entitled Sharing and Managing Sensitive Data in Research with People.
Veerle's presentation addressed two core questions against a backdrop of research with people as participants and/or as subjects for study: What can researchers do to enable sharing of sensitive data?
How can data archives help researchers?
In response to the first question, the recommendation is that issues relating to data sensitivity and sharing should be considered from the early planning stage, and that pre-existing methodologies should then be adapted to fit the circumstances of the research.
It is necessary to include data sharing with an ethical review process, to manage consent in an informed way, and to consider data management once the research is over (and the funding is no longer there.)
Veerle quoted a couple of definitions for 'personal' and 'sensitive' data from the Data Protection Act (1998, and the Data Sharing Review of 2008), and outlined other pieces of legislation which combined to form the pertaining ethical and legal framework, including the Statistics and Registration Services Act (2007) and the Human Rights Act (1998).
With regard to the role of data archives in the research process, the UKDA position is to provide guidance and training for researchers (covering informed consent, anonymisation, data security, and access regulations), guidance for ethics committees (at the institutional, faculty, school or departmental level), and the execution of disclosure checks and data anonymisation during the data archiving process.
The final presentation of the morning came from Andrew Charlesworth, Director of the Centre for IT and Law (CITL) at the University of Bristol, and was entitled Thinking Outside the Tick Box: complying with the spirit, and not just the letter, of the law.
Beginning with a reference to the recent 'Climategate' scandal [4], Andrew noted the scale of interest that third parties (from the public to the press, and beyond) might have in research data, the fact that Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation may apply to it, and the risks that accompany failure to comply with FOI requests.
Researchers, therefore, need to be kept aware of potential problems.
Andrew identified potential issues which may arise from a disconnect between regulation and practice.
Citing the example of a Faculty Ethics Committee which had issued a blanket ruling that all research data must be kept for a prescribed period, the question of who exactly would take responsibility for the data's safekeeping did not appear to have occurred to the committee, nor did the appropriateness or feasibility of holding onto every last dataset.
Past experience shows that leaving responsibility to the researchers themselves is problematic: they move institution, retire, replace and lose equipment – and furthermore this approach exposes the institution to risk in the shape of not being able to locate particular data within the FOI notice period.
And, echoing Reza's point from earlier in the morning's session, Andrew ended with a couple of notes of caution, the first being: beware lack of sanctions.
If there is no sanction for bad data practice, no one takes responsibility for ensuring good practice.
The second was: beware the tick box.
Experience indicates that policies underpinned by standardised forms breed a complacent 'box-ticking' culture, which generally fails to engender a true engagement with the spirit of the policy, and compromises effective risk assessment and risk management.
Breakout Groups and Subsequent Discussion After lunch, the delegates divided into three breakout groups: Identifying a good practice checklist for an HEI dealing with sensitive data Assessing optimal technical approaches for data curation systems and services Scoping training requirements for UK HE data managers Once the delegates had reconvened, the last formal item of the event was a summary of the points raised and next steps, which was provided by DCC Associate Director Graham Pryor.
Considering the morning's presentations, he identified the human infrastructure as a key strand running through each of the situations that had been explored.
From here he saw the potential for a significant redefinition of institutional repositories, which should be perceived less as a locale or physical entity and instead promoted as a bundle of services, covering an advisory role (data policy and compliance, the benefits and techniques of preservation/ curation), undertaking and supporting data audits, and training.
A pre-requisite to success would be for repository/data management staff to engage more actively in a direct relationship with the research project lifecycle and its protagonists.
The issue of applying appropriate and achievable sanctions to non-compliance with measures for dealing with sensitive data raised the prospect of a number of tricky scenarios that would have to be balanced against the more open-handed approach necessary for buy-in to effective data management.
It was suggested that the DCC training programme may contribute here by including courses for researchers on data ethics and managing sensitive data.
There were also some messages for the DCC coming from the three breakout groups.
Looking at the needs of a good practice checklist, the DCC should be expected to lend its authority by providing advocacy at a high level within institutions, by explaining best practice models, and through targeted training.
The concept of a pilot programme was mooted, and this will be explored in the context of the new DCC data management roadshows.
With respect to optimal technical approaches, it was evident that the capability of practitioners would be a first principle, and this again brought everyone's attention back to the DCC training programme.
It would also be essential to have a framework of policies for data handling – and buy-in to those policies!
– which returns us to the old chestnut of appropriate and effective advocacy, another primary objective of the new roadshows.
The third breakout group, having covered a theme that is core to the DCC's recently commenced Phase 3, produced fresh demands in the shape of a national standard 'driving licence' for data management.
However, calls for data management to be embedded in the broader researcher development were thought to be met by the DCC's existing programme of 'Train the Trainer' events.
Nonetheless, the DCC mission to increase both capability and capacity was given further definition in the ensuing debate where, for instance, it was acknowledged that university ethics committees as well as IT managers need to gain a broader perspective on the research lifecycle than their offices currently permit.
Moreover, it was felt that the need for training in data management should be clearly identified in the data management plans being developed as part of research funding submissions.
Conclusion and Next Meeting Closing the event, DCC Director-Designate Kevin Ashley introduced himself as having quickly to occupy the 'big shoes' left behind by his predecessor, Chris Rusbridge, but explained that from an early age he had been required to grow into his clothes, and so was up for the challenge!
Referring to the DCC having recently entered its third phase, but with a reduced budget and staff, he complimented the RDMF as a means of engaging with a diverse community of stakeholders.
This latest event had tackled some very challenging issues, offering serious food for thought as the DCC reflected on its next three-year programme of work.
The Forum's fifth meeting is expected to be held in October or November 2010, again in Manchester.
Full details will be released via the JISC Research Data Management mailing list [5] nearer the time, so subscribe to this if you would like to be kept in the loop.
References Digital Curation Centre (DCC) http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Research Information Network (RIN) http://www.rin.ac.uk/ All presentation slides are available via the RDMF4 event page on the DCC Web site http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/research-data-management-forum/research-data-management-forum-dealing-sensitive-data See, for example, "Hackers target leading climate research unit".
BBC News: Science and Environment: 20 November 2009, 14:13 GMT http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8370282.stm JISCMail RESEARCH-DATAMAN List at JISCMAIL.AC.UK http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/RESEARCH-DATAMAN.html Author Details Martin Donnelly Curation Research Officer Digital Curation Centre University of Edinburgh Email: martin.donnelly@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Graham Pryor Associate Director Digital Curation Centre University of Edinburgh Email: graham.pryor@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "The Fourth DCC-RIN Research Data Management Forum" Author: Martin Donnelly and Graham Pryor Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/rdmf4-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Moving Ariadne: Migrating and Enriching Content with Drupal Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Moving Ariadne: Migrating and Enriching Content with Drupal Buzz data software rdf framework api html database rss xml apache usability archives metadata css identifier repositories video python preservation graphics linux visualisation perl php mysql json drupal licence taxonomy research standards jquery sqlite Citation BibTex RIS Thom Bunting explains some of the technology behind the migration of Ariadne (including more than 1600 articles from its back issues archive) onto a Drupal content management platform.
Tools and strategies for content management are a perennial topic in Ariadne.
With more than one hundred articles touching on content management system (CMS) technologies or techniques since this online magazine commenced publication in 1996, Ariadne attests to continuing interest in this topic.
Authors have discussed this topic within various contexts, from intranets to repositories and Web 2.0,  with some notable surges in references to 'content management' between 2000 and 2005 (see Figure 1 below).
Although levels of discussion are by no means trending, over recent years it is clear that Ariadne authors have taken note of and written about content management tools and techniques on a regular basis.
In the light of this long-established interest, it is noteworthy that Ariadne itself migrated into a content management system only recently.
Although the formatting of its articles did change a few times since 1996, Ariadne remained 'hand-coded' for more than fifteen years.
None of its articles had been migrated into a database-driven content management system until March 2012, when issue 68 was published.
As mentioned in the editorial introduction to that first issue, launching the new content management arrangements, and as discussed in some more detail below (see 'Technical challenges in content migration'), the considerable size of Ariadne's archive of back issues was daunting.
With more than 1600 articles in hand-coded 'flat'-html formats, the process of migration itself required careful planning to result in a seamless, graceful transition into an entirely new content management arrangement.
Over time, the sheer size of the Ariadne corpus had made it both increasingly rich in content and increasingly more challenging to convert retrospectively into a database-driven CMS as the total number of articles published within this online magazine steadily expanded.
In looking back over the recent process of migrating Ariadne onto a CMS platform, this article discusses some tools and techniques used to prepare content for transfer, testing, and then re-launch.
After explaining some of the background to and objectives of this work, this article focuses on key features of content management supported by Drupal.
Figure 1: Ariadne timeline of references to content management Requirements Analysis: Planning the Way Forward Based on surveys of readers and authors conducted in late 2010, the Ariadne management team analysed the range of feedback, drew up sets of re-development requirements, and then considered the options available.
The following table provides an overview of key findings regarding the range of enhanced functionality and features considered: Overview of findings derived from survey responses enhanced functionality or feature interest recorded in surveys browsing by keywords 73.4% of respondents updated look and feel 62.3% of respondents browsing by title 50.0% of respondents enhanced use of search engine 48.0% of respondents improved display for portable devices 34.0% of respondents more summative information on articles 32.1% of respondents improved navigability from article level 32.1% of respondents improved social media options 29.5% of respondents browsing by author 28.0% of respondents improved RSS feeds 27.0% of respondents In addition to these findings derived from surveys, the management team also recognised the need for some other functionalities to support monitoring of Ariadne's on-going engagement with various domains and institutions across the UK and beyond.
Additional features to support monitoring of engagement identification of author domains (higher education, further education, research, commercial, etc) to support analysis of Ariadne connections and reach across various sectors identification of authors by organisation to support analysis of Ariadne connections and reach in UK and worldwide Taking into account the key findings derived from survey questions as well as the additional functionality identified as useful in monitoring UK and worldwide engagement, the Ariadne management team drew up sets of re-development requirements and considered how to proceed.
Migration into a content management system represented the obvious way forward, as it became clear that Ariadne's previous tradition of 'hand-coded' production (dating from the early days of the Web) had little chance of coping gracefully with the new sets of requirements.
In a review of CMS options available, it also became clear that  Drupal [1] was well positioned as a content management system (or, emphasising its highly modular and extensible design, content management framework  [2] ) to supply required functionality and features.
Rationale for Drupal's Content Management Framework Since its beginnings as open source CMS project in 2001 (with a strong boost in momentum around 2005), Drupal has been well known as for its adaptable, modular architecture for content management.
Drupal has drawn attention from many quarters including global corporate, government, and academic institutions attracted by the benefits of using open source code base across a wide range of use cases.
In an extensive series of 15 in-depth articles published on the IBM developerWorks Web site from 2006 to 2007 [3], for example, senior engineers at IBM favourably reviewed the strengths of its programming model (including clean 'separation of content from presentation' [4] and robust 'extensibility' [5]).
Though much has changed since the IBM developerWorks articles explained the benefits of Drupal, the fundamental conclusions remain as true now as then:   Drupal has held up well.
When we needed new functions, we could usually find an existing module within the contributions.
If not, we were able to quickly build our own custom module to extend the functions of our system.
This extensibility, found in many open source CMSs, is critical for addressing new problems as they arise.
Perhaps the most important factor in deciding to use Drupal is the very active and large community of developers engaged with its technical development, on-going testing, and collaborative support.
As the overall architecture of Drupal open source is highly extensible,  developers produce a wide range of modules that provide new functions as required.
Over time, large development houses and major projects [6] as well as many dedicated community programmers [7] contribute to the Drupal so many useful (and sometimes increasingly small or abstracted) building blocks of functionality that it is very rarely necessary for anyone to build 'custom' modules.
Drupal's very active community of developers provides and manages 'core' as well as 'contrib' modules in a way that minimises the need for extra programming effort.
Although it is true that Drupal offers developers (as well as technically capable users) many options for customising features and functionality through code, most use cases are easily accommodated without need for touching code.
As explained on Wikipedia [8], Drupal is amenable both to developers and to ordinary users: "Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration".
Particularly important for everyone using Drupal to manage content, the collaborative, methodically managed code base provided by the active development community can be managed administratively.
For developers and ordinary users alike, code management arrangements coordinated via the official Drupal site can be managed easily and reliably.
Whereas technical users have many powerful options to manage module installations, configurations, and updates very efficiently via the command-line (using 'drush'), non-technical users can use Web-based interfaces to manage receive module configurations and update notifications.
Over the years, the scope of engagement with Drupal across many sectors has increased.
As the official drupal.org site explains, a broad range of groups 'from local businesses to global organizations' use Drupal to manage content.
In addition to the examples of major publishers, universities, and corporates using Drupal, it is noteworthy that a range of government-funded initiatives for public engagement (such as www.whitehouse.gov) and data-sharing (data.gov and data.gov.uk ) as well as very large publishing sites (such as economist.com ) are using Drupal to run remarkably high-performance, data-rich Web sites.
[9] As reliable access to Ariadne content remains the highest priority, the fact that Drupal has been used for years by major publishers contributed to the decision to consider it as a suitable platform.
Although it is unlikely that Ariadne will become as popular as some of the Internet's busiest publishing sites, it is reassuring to know that 'a single mid range server' running Drupal can with reasonable tuning scale up to very high loads of 3.4 million page views per day [10].
Technical Challenges in Content Migration For consistency and coherence, the Ariadne management team decided that all articles originally published in the previous issues were to be migrated onto the new Drupal-based platform.
In planning the migration of content into a more modern 'look and feel', with enhanced functionality, the decision was taken to keep intact the substance of articles 'as is'.
[11] The focus in this process has been on maintaining the historical integrity of more than 1600 articles in the Ariadne back issues archive, as these previous articles represent a substantial body of work reflecting developments in thinking and working since the commencement of publication in the relatively early days of the Web.
As the previous articles had been all 'hand-coded', with some variations of HTML related to both evolutions in standards and (occasionally) human inconsistencies, one of the first challenges was to retrieve from the 'flat-HTML' corpus the core content of articles that were to be migrated into the Drupal database structure.
To accomplish this, a Perl script was created to scan all previous articles and extract the key elements required: article titles, authors, article summaries (used as preview / lead-in text), and the main article content.
In this extraction process, it was necessary to transform programatically some aspects of the HTML into required formats (for example, by changing relative paths to absolute paths for site-wide consistency) and downloading images into consistently structured directories so that all Ariadne images could be managed in a consistent way.
Once this key content from the previous articles had been extracted from the 'flat-HTML' corpus, the next challenge was to import this content into the MySQL database to be used by Drupal.
[12] To achieve this we used the Feeds module, which proved very useful in mapping specific elements of content to the relevant database tables and fields.
After setting up and testing the required mappings via the Feeds Importers interface), it was possible to import all the previous articles from the Ariadne archive into the Drupal database within a few minutes.
[13] To check that all content had imported correctly and was displaying as expected in the new Drupal format, the Ariadne production team scanned through migrated content.
To make this scanning process efficient, administrative views were set up to produce all-in-one overviews of all articles published in each issue so that it was easier to spot and correct any inconsistencies remaining from automated parsing of hand-coded articles.
As part of this post-migration review process, it was relatively easy to make a range of improvements in areas such as tweaking placement of images and strengthening editorial consistency in titles across more than 1600 articles.
Even though scanning by human beings was, of course, much slower than the programmatic execution of content migration that had preceded it, achievement of more thorough consistency across the entire Ariadne back issue archive has prepared the way for opening up this Web magazine's full range of content.
[14] Extensible Toolkit: Using Drupal 'contrib' Options Once the previous articles from the Ariadne back issue archive had been imported, some key Drupal 'contrib' modules were essential to meeting the set of requirements gathered in the early planning stage of re-development work.
Those familiar with Drupal will not be surprised that Views, Taxonomy, and Content Construction Kit (CCK) [15] modules proved useful in providing essential functionality, as these modules are very widely used in many Drupal sites.
Below is an overview of how Drupal module and theme options usefully supported required functionalities and features.
Usage of Drupal 'core' and 'contrib' functionality or feature core module contrib modules browsing by keywords Taxonomy Views updated look and feel   0 Point Theme, CCK browsing by title Taxonomy Views enhanced use of search engine Search Search 404 improved display for portable devices   0 Point Theme more summative information on articles   CCK improved navigability from article level Taxonomy Views improved social media options   ShareThis browsing by author Taxonomy Views improved RSS feeds   Views, Feed Path Publisher identification of author domains Taxonomy Views identification of authors by organisation Taxonomy Views As content migrated into the new platform, several other Drupal 'contrib' modules also proved immediately useful in providing features and functionality related to points raised by surveys during the preliminary requirements-gathering process.
Below is an overview of some of these further modules.
Further usage of Drupal 'contrib' functionality or feature contrib modules auto-generated article table of contents  Table of Contents bibliographic citation examples for articles Views, CCK automated management of images Views, ImageField, ImageCache printer-friendly versions of articles Print auto-generated markers for external links External Link managed feedback from readers Webform calls for authors, forthcoming updates Views, CCK By using the 'contrib' modules listed above (in combination with some 'core' as well as other utility modules), the new Ariadne easily supported a range of enhancements such as the following: including table of contents at start of each article, so that readers can easily scan main sections providing comprehensive bibliographic citations as well as guidance on content licences and 'How to cite this article' explanations included at end of each article improving the visual display of content supporting a range of usability improvements enhancing reviews to feature book images and bibliographic information for books reviewed expanding the flow of on-going communication with readers, prospective / commissioned authors Some further enhancements of the new Ariadne platform were supported by another key 'contrib' module: Data.
In conjunction with the Views module, this 'contrib' Data module supported the requirement for monitoring data about author backgrounds and it provided a basis for extending considerably the range of metadata that can be managed and presented regarding author activities and other factors related to publications.
It is worth noting how  this relatively new 'contrib' Data module significantly extends Drupal's traditionally strong support for running data-rich Web sites.
[16]  Whilst it is by design geared for technically adept users (as it assumes understanding of database table structures, database queries, and data modelling generally), the Data module provides many options for managing directly within Drupal key sets of data that are relevant to a Web site.
In view of the growing trends in using Drupal as front-end to data-rich Web sites, it is likely that the Data module is well positioned to help extend this further.
Complementary Tools: Other Technologies and Drupal The process of migrating Ariadne confirmed that Drupal also integrates flexibly with a range of other technologies.
Given that the Drupal project has its origins in mainstream LAMP developments [17], it quite naturally lends itself to working compatibly with many other technologies that share its open source development philosophy.
In addition to open source, however, Drupal can also integrate with other technologies.
[18]  The process of working on the migration of Ariadne content demonstrated that 'contrib' modules can seamlessly facilitate integration with a range of data interchange standards (JSON, XML, RDF) and programming libraries (JQuery, GD graphics, etc).
Although this integration with other technologies is by no means unique to it, Drupal does have a fundamentally adaptable and extensible approach to integrating other technologies into its content management framework.
[19]  In addition, Ariadne re-development also demonstrated how Drupal lends itself to visualisation of data sets.
As the Drupal community is actively interested in visualisation of data using recently developed libraries (such as TileMill mapping and Highcharts graphing libraries), quite a bit of work in this area is in progress.
[20]  Given that Drupal could manage rich data sets related to usage of keywords in articles published over the more than 15 years of publication, after the Ariadne content migration it proved relatively easy to produce via the recently developed Highcharts libraries relevant sets of visualisations showing timelines, bar charts, scatter plots, etc.
Of course Drupal as a web-based application is also amenable to testing and tuning procedures using a range of commonly available tools.
In preparing for re-launch, the new Drupal platform for Ariadne was tested repeatedly with a range of both open source (shell scripts using wget) and proprietary (ProxySniffer) [21] load-testing tools after carefully tuning the Drupal application and its platform using best-practice Drupal and LAMP-standard procedures.
[22]  Methodical tuning, testing, and final optimisation was facilitated by many freely available technologies relevant to checking the performance of a Drupal content management platform.
Conclusion Based on the experience of transferring, testing, and re-launching on a new Drupal content management platform more than 1600 articles from the Ariadne back issue archive, it is fair to say that Drupal technology has proven more than equal to the challenging tasks involved.
In discussing some of the planning and technical work related to this migration process, this article has attempted to provide information that may be of some usefulness and relevance to two types of readers: 1) those interested in Drupal as a content management system; 2) those interested in Ariadne as compendium of content about the Web technologies.
Now that you as a reader have made it this far along in this article, it's likely that you are in either one of these two groups.
If by this point you find yourself a bit more firmly situated in both these camps, then this article may well have served its purpose.
References Wikipedia provides a useful overview of Drupal as 'free and open-source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General PUblic License. '
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal The notion of 'content management framework' puts emphasis on the reusability of components.
As indicated by the Wikipedia article on Drupal, the focus of most Drupal 'core' modules (and, increasingly, many 'contrib' modules) is on providing reusable bits of functionality that can be extended or altered in a highly adaptable way suiting the requirements of particular use cases.
Discussions around work in progress on Drupal 8 (currently scheduled for release summer 2013) make it clear that Drupal core is tending to become content management framework (rather than attempting to produce a finished product); for more information, see http://drupal.org/node/908022 IBM DeveloperWorks in 2006 and 2007 published a series of articles focusing on Drupal (and its relationships with other technologies).
For an overview of these articles, see:  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/implement.html 'Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site, Part 5: Getting started with Drupal' http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource5/ 'Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site, Part 15: Lessons learned' http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource15/ Some notable examples of commercial development houses and major projects contributing module code freely to the Drupal community include: Development Seed release of 'Feeds' module; Cyrve release of powerful enhancements to 'Migrate' module; and www.whitehouse.gov on-going releases of modular functionality such as 'NodeEmbed' module etc.
It is also important to appreciate that much Drupal code has been contributed by a broad community of dedicated developers who produce key modules without the resources provided by major development house resources or substantial funding.
Typical of a globally distributed open source programming model, Drupal has been developed by a combination of both highly experienced and highly creative contributers working collaboratively.
For example, a very young programmer created the 'Drush make' module, which automates many tedious tasks of site construction, and this after immediately being well received as 'absolute game changer' (see http://boldium.com/blog/drush-make-comes-to-installation-profiles ) has been further developed by some of Drupal's most senior programmers and integrated directly into the 'drush' (as the fundamental Drupal site management system).
See the Wikipedia article on Drupal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal ) for an overview of both basic features and functionalities, some critiques, and noteworthy examples of Drupal implementations on websites across publishing, education, and many other domains.
Further noteworthy examples of sites using Drupal can be found in the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal ) and on the official Drupal site (http://drupal.org/about ) as well as on many 'showcases' such as this site belonging to Drupal's original creator Dries Buytaert: http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites/ .
See Khalid Baheyeldin, "How we did it: 3.4 million page views per day, 92 M per month, one server!
", DrupalCon Chicago 2011,  http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/how-we-did-it-3-4-million-page-views-day-92-m-month-one-server As noted in the editorial introduction to Issue 68 (see http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue68/editorial1 ), this decision to keep the main content of each article 'as is' following migration to a new platform helps to protect historically interesting online resources.
Even though each article is presented with a more user-friendly and consistent look and feel, and each article is connected far more deeply and richly with other articles in Ariadne related by keyword themes, the preservation of each article's main content remained a key objective of the migration work.
Consequently, word-for-word each article in the new format is comparable with its corresponding version in the previous format; only the surrounding navigational links are different.
Although most Drupal sites typically use MySQL databases, Drupal does provide a database abstraction layer and it (depending upon version and configuration) can support a broad range of databases including: MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, MondoDB.
In addition to migrations of content managed via the Feeds module (see http://drupal.org/project/feeds/ ),  even more powerful options are available for migrating content via the Migrate module ( http://drupal.org/project/migrate/ ).
Whereas the Feeds module proved sufficient and highly effective in moving all Ariadne content into the new Drupal platform, in cases where content to be migrated is highly dynamic or huge, then the Migrate module could be a more suitable solution as this module includes sophisticated features such as database-to-database mappings, incremental migrations, and roll-backs (with operations executable via 'drush' command-line).
As cited in the editorial introduction to Issue 68, former Ariadne editor John Kirriemir particularly welcomes the fact that after migration to the new platform "the magazine has one universal style throughout".
Whereas the previous 'hand-coded' production style of Ariadne meant that it would have been very challenging to effect a universal change in presentation style, adjustments in 'look and feel' were trivial once the content had migrated into Drupal: simply by changing theme templates (easily done via the standard Drupal configuration options) or by tweaking CSS files, the display of all content can be transformed.
It's noteworthy that parts of 'contrib' module Content Construction Kit (CCK) have been moved into 'core' as of Drupal version 7.
In practice, this addition of some CCK functionality to 'core' Drupal code is a sign that CCK functionality has been accepted as essential to every site: by enabling site administrators to extend the range of Drupal database fields,  CCK does further extend the flexibility of Drupal in accommodating a vast range of content management requirements.
It is also worth noting, however, that only some parts of CCK have moved into 'core' as of Drupal 7: there is still a strong 'small core' movement within the Drupal community, which in principle is trying to reduce the size of 'core' modules as much as possible and (conversely) to increase the range of 'contrib' modules that can build on a very basic, abstracted functionality provided by a 'small core' set of code.
As noted above, Drupal has often been used as front-end to data-rich sites such as data.gov and data.gov.uk yet recently there seems to be an emerging trend in combining Drupal with large, sometimes highly dynamic data sets and code that produces interactive visualisations.
For many examples of interesting work in this area, see http://developmentseed.org/projects.
For an overview of LAMP stack (Linux Apache, MySQL, Perl / PHP / Python) development stack see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle) .
Whereas the P in the LAMP acronym originally stood for Perl, it is now often interpreted as standing for PHP or (less frequently) Python as all of these scripting languages can be applied in similar ways depending upon a developer's personal coding preference.
From the relatively early case studies of Drupal published by IBM developerWorks, to the most recent work undertaken to make Drupal 7 compatible with Microsoft SQL Server, it is clear that Drupal's architecture makes it amenable to a broad range of applications buth open source and proprietary.
The relatively new Libraries API module (http://drupal.org/project/libraries/ ), for instance, positions itself as "common denominator for all Drupal modules/profiles/themes that integrate with external libraries".
As such, this module provides a mechanism for bringing into Drupal various libraries (such as JQuery) in a uniform way, so that  libraries can be easily upgraded without complications and all modules can reliably use a specified library without creating unexpected conflicts (due to multiple, incompatible versions being installed, etc).
For overviews of development work on 'Creating Beautiful Maps for Drupal with TileMill' see: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/mar/08/creating-beautiful-maps-drupal-tilemill/.
For more information on the Drupal 'contrib' module in alpha stages of development for direct integration of Highcharts, see:  http://drupal.org/project/highcharts .
For an overview of ProxySniffer 'Professional Web Load and Stress testing Tool' see: http://www.proxy-sniffer.com/ For an in-depth explanation of best-practice procedures for Drupal performance optimisation and server tuning, see the 1.5 hour video recording of conference workshop presentation by Nate Haug: http://drupalize.me/videos/overview-performance-scalability Author Details Dr. Thom Bunting Observatory and Innovation Zone Project Manager / Web Manager Innovation Support Centre UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: t.bunting@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.bunting/ Return to top Article Title: "Moving Ariadne: Migrating and Enriching Content with Drupal" Author: Thom Bunting Publication Date: 30-July-2012 Publication: Ariadne Issue 69 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue69/bunting/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Encouraging More Open Educational Resources With Southampton's EdShare Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Encouraging More Open Educational Resources With Southampton's EdShare Buzz software framework wiki portal usability infrastructure metadata accessibility tagging repositories eprints copyright flickr e-learning vle curation youtube facebook oer webct url research bibliometrics Citation BibTex RIS Debra Morris describes the EdSpace Institutional Exemplar Project and the early development of EdShare for sharing learning and teaching materials within and beyond the institution.
The University of Southampton has around 22,000 students across six campuses: five in the city of Southampton and one in Winchester.
It is a broad-based, research-intensive institution, a member of the Russell Group of UK Universities.
The University comprises three Faculties: Faculty of Engineering, Science and Maths; Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences, and the Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences.
Within the three Faculties, there are currently 21 academic Schools which are responsible for the delivery of education.
University academic services, including the University Library, iSolutions (IT infrastructure group), the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (LATEU), Student Administration and Registry (SARD) and the Student Services Department (SSD) work in partnership with the Schools to deliver the curriculum, to support students in their learning as well as staff in teaching.
Within the University, decision-making, resourcing and staffing is largely devolved to the individual academic Schools.
EdShare [1], an educational learning and teaching repository has been developed within the University under the auspices of a JISC-funded institutional exemplars project, over the period October 2007-March 2009.
Built on the proven, open source, EPrints software, this application has both drawn on and consolidated development work across the institution over recent years.
In particular, the Project team, including two past and current members of University Library staff, has built on past success of partnership working with academic groups.
For example, within the University during the 1990s (as in many other similar institutions), the Library developed and presented a popular Reserve Collection (Short Loan teaching-focused) for tutors to be able to provide key texts and resources specifically for undergraduates.
This collection included lecturers’ handwritten or typed notes, reading lists, worked examples, case studies, photocopied journal articles, photocopied book chapters as well as a range of other relevant material.
There were practices and policies for use of the Short Loan Collection and service varying according to courses, tutors, programmes, disciplines, departments and faculties.
The prime determinant at that time was the preference of the individual tutor or academic team, rather than any articulated “student-centredness” philosophy.
The University Library had a core role in supporting the learning and teaching agenda – assistant librarians worked in partnership with academics to identify, procure, reproduce, curate, and present the selected materials.
All of these resources, presented in a building called ‘the Library’, were visible to the whole academic community.
The increase in sheer quantity of material over time was enormous.
The pressures on Library space were significant and the task for students in locating, prioritising and accessing materials represented a substantial challenge.
Library staff were concerned to provide equitable access to the full range of students – part-time, mature, placement learners – which required specific borrowing privileges to ensure this equity.
As electronic services began to emerge, there was an increased emphasis on the benefit that this mode of access afforded in terms of access, availability, convenience and appropriateness for the learner.
The building labelled “the Library” in the University of Southampton, whilst still significant has also acted as a base from which professional staff members have worked at developing and re-positioning the contribution of Library professionals to the academic process within the institution.
The Local Environment One of the most innovative recent developments at the University of Southampton has been the UK Department of Health-funded ‘New Generation Project’ – later to become ‘Inter-Professional Learning’.
This educational programme, begun in 1999, aimed ‘to introduce opportunities for undergraduate students from different health and social care professions to learn together in order to enhance professional collaboration and teamwork skills and so improve the quality of care provided for patients and clients.’[2] The University Librarian, Dr. Mark Brown, and the strategic lead for Inter-Professional Learning (IPL), Dr. Debra Humphris, in discussion about appropriate support from the Library for this work – originating in a conversation about book budgets had agreed on modelling precisely the kind of approach that inter-professional learning sought to foster in its participants and identified the inter-professional team to support the design and implementation for IPL – academics, librarians, IT specialists, Web developers and administrative specialists.
From the inception of the Project, the University Library was involved in the development work.
A range of Staff contributed to support for curriculum development, understanding the evidence base which informed the educational innovation, and working as embedded members of each of the three Unit Teams, responsible for the development of the curriculum itself.
The learning resources to be developed and delivered for IPL were to be founded on a baseline provision for all students independently of their University affiliation or uni-professional programme award.
Where possible, access would be electronic – in order to maximise accessibility, anytime and anywhere and throughout the period of the programme on which the student was registered.
The mechanism for delivery was to be the customised www.commonlearning.net Web site; neutral as between University and practice, between each of the Universities involved and as among staff within the University and those based in practice locations, supporting the students’ learning.
In the absence of a content management system, the capacity of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) was increased to store as well as to deliver the learning resources for all of the learning units.
As the librarian who led the work with the New Generation Project/Inter-Professional Learning Units at the University of Southampton, I was also designated the ELearning Lead for the University Library from 2004.
This new designation came as positive, deliberate recognition of the increasing significance of electronic delivery of Library content and services.
The Library as a whole was making a greater contribution to the shaping of institutional strategy, policy and practice for developing and delivering learning resources in a tailored and targetted way, linked to the curriculum itself.
Other factors reflecting this change were leadership from the Library with respect to the information literacy agenda, the emergence of the academic liaison librarian roles to mirror the re-structured University’s faculties and Schools, and librarians’ membership of University strategy committees such as the Education Committee, the Learning Resources Committee, the ELearning Strategy Committee and the ELearning Implementation Group.
So, by the early 2000s, within the University changes in various academic teams had emerged to support development in the collaborative creation of learning resources as well as sharing them across and beyond the institution [3].
Meanwhile, there were corresponding developments in provision of electronic delivery from the central University IT service.
The VLE at the University of Southampton is based primarily on Blackboard.
The Blackboard Learning System is a Web-based learning platform.
A pilot version of the service began in July 2000, and in January 2001 the full service was launched.
In fact, a different VLE service had initially been implemented at the University of Southampton: WebCT was introduced as a pilot service in Autumn 1997, and the service closed February 2003, when the University standardised on the Blackboard platform.
The current declared policy of the University is that the VLE should be used ‘to enhance the student learning experience at the University of Southampton’.
Blackboard is actually part of a Managed Learning Environment (MLE), integrated with other systems such as the University Portal and Banner Student Record System.
In reality, resources to support student learning and the delivery of the curriculum have also been deposited within Blackboard.
Guidance is provided to teachers within the University to make these resources accessible by all who need access to the materials for the period that they require them.
In addition, the intent is that academic staff should be free to concentrate on the pedagogic development of ELearning.
Since its implementation, there has been a move away from the initial view in which the VLE is an ‘enhancement’ of the student experience to its becoming a core, infrastructual service.
This de facto shift, however, is not yet specifically articulated in the written policies of the University.
In practice, what the VLE does is to support course management, deliver documentation and the associated curriculum resources.
Staff deposit their resources in Blackboard and if they happen to leave the University, in principle, the academic team/institution, still has access to the resources created which support the delivery of the curriculum.
For the majority of Schools, Blackboard has become the main support for course management and delivery.
In a few cases, however, specific Schools and academic disciplines have developed their own intranets, managed learning environments and/or Web sites which support their specialist requirements.
In the School of Medicine, a specialist staff group has specifically developed their own learning support Web-based infrastructure within the MEDIS Portal.
In the School of Electronics and Computer Science, ECS Course Resources provides access to a whole range of materials including course syllabi, course notes, wikis, timetables etc.
; and in the School of Psychology, PsyWeb provides integrated access to core School services, resources and applications for specific programmes and across student cohorts.
VLEs have proved to be useful tools in facilitating staff work on organising educational resources and activities in a hierarchical way to represent the structure of programmes and modules.
While VLEs are excellent vehicles for delivering materials, however, they are not in themselves ideal applications for managing and curating materials.
Within the University of Southampton, it was recognised that a repository was required for educational materials that could, in turn, be used as a means to link to the appropriate VLE.
The University took the strategic decision to develop a repository for educational materials using its own well-established EPrints research repository software.
The reason we chose this route was that we recognised that excellent technical specifications alone would be unlikely to promote the cultural change necessary to embed such a service within the institution.
We believed that the co-design process (technical staff working collaboratively with academic and educational delivery staff) of specifying and implementing the precise design and functional requirements of the system would be most helpful in ensuring community commitment and uptake.
The New Work The EdShare resource was conceived as a central part of the educational infrastructure as envisaged in the recently implemented University ELearning Strategy.
The Strategy focuses on enabling student-centred learning in a research-intensive institution, which also emphasised inclusivity and usability.
The EdShare repository was envisaged as a social site allowing staff and students to share resources across the rich breadth of disciplines.
It would provide for metadata, tagging, and semantic mark-up of stored items.
A range of local and external tools would access the repository using service interfaces.
In order to be able to achieve this vision, the University constructed a bid in response to the UK JISC 01/07 Strand G Call of 2007.
Drs.
Hugh Davis and Les Carr, both of the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, led a cross-institutional, multi-professional team bid which stated that both the University of Southampton and the wider JISC community would benefit from extending the EPrints software into the educational domain, as well as from the case study of the institutional change and integration.
The bid was successful and the EdSpace Project at the University of Southampton began on 1 October 2007.
I worked as the embedded Project Manager within the Project Team.
This work was essentially a further extension of the role I had developed as Library lead within IPL (2000-2007) as described above.
Within the EdSpace Project, we have worked with early adopters and champions identified across a range of roles within the University.
This group of “critical friends” has been enthusiastic in contributing to the early design and development stages for EdShare.
In addition, these change leaders have contributed early resources to EdShare, sharing their own resources right across the University, and sometimes beyond.
Developing pilot versions of the service and now, in April 2009, working with version 1.3 of EdShare on EPrints 3.1, the front page looks like this: Figure 1: Home page of EdShare We have identified the repository content as the core aspect of our work; we are concerned to support educators and learners in sharing their resources and in making materials visible on the Web.
Our developers have provided attractive preview tools to deliver our commitment to put content to the fore.
Figure 2: A range of content in EdShare [4] In addition, we have a range of permission levels, selectable at the point of adding content to the repository which enable our communities to develop their own confidence and comfort in making their materials visible, retrievable and downloadable (or not) to the whole World.
The metadata (descriptive details) of the resources are retrievable via Google searches and the material described may or may not be downloadable depending on the permission levels assigned to it by the person who has added the content.
Figure 3: Eye-catching previews support ‘content to the fore’ Focusing on the advocacy experience of two team members as well as the respected and trusted status of University Library staff, during the 18 months of the JISC-funded EdSpace Project work we have also been able to extend our work with identified partner academic groups across the whole institution.
Our motivation in taking this approach has been the co-design philosophy we have been interested to implement right from the outset and which we believe to be an indispensable and crucial element of any successful implementation associated with such significant pedagogical, technical, and cultural change for the organisation.
The benefits can be described as follows: Content providers would be able simply and speedily to deposit any kind of file (or collection of files) and describe them to their chosen level of detail using metadata or free-form text; Content providers would be able to control the access levels to their files (typically ‘institution-only’ or ‘open access’); EdShare would allocate a unique and permanent URL which could be referenced by other systems, such as the institutional VLE; The free-form text and metadata descriptions of all files lodged in the repository would be found and indexed by search engines; Users would be able to browse all items in the repository and download those lodged for open access without the need to be a registered user of the repository; Users browsing the repository would see Web 2.0-like tagging and annotation features.
Indeed, the decision to make content metadata searchable and visible to the world has proven to be highly significant in developing awareness and supportive conditions for content creators and providers to be able to increase the openness of their resources.
When presented with requests for access to their materials from students and other educators across the world, we have been able to encourage academic and educator colleagues to consider ways of simply making their materials available to the world.
Some colleagues have found this an easy and comfortable move, others have contemplated their options and, although happy to consider this as a longer term proposition, have preferred to maintain a relatively closed and sheltered profile for their resources in EdShare [5].
The Edspace Project has been interested in working with wider aspects of the success of Web 2.0 sharing sites such as: YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook.
It occupies a neutral location within the institution – not associated with any specific academic School or discipline – linked to the core educational mission of the institution as well as the role of the Library in supporting this work.
The Project has been interested in supporting embedding good academic practice across the University, enabling academic change and making visible resources to support this process across the whole institution rather than making these resources visible only to those individuals, enrolled on a specific Unit for the length of time they are registered and for that time only.
We have been interested in a range of resources including Inter-Professional Learning materials, resources which support the development of effective research skills for both postgraduate taught and postgraduate research students.
We are also investigating ways of reaching beyond the boundaries of the University to local 14-19 year olds (and their teachers), who may be considering applying to University in the future and want to explore ways to extend their own educational achievements and understanding.
Similarly, EdShare provides a secure and persistent storage place for resources from which people can derive a unique URL.
There are system functions under development which enable people to collect, aggregate, tag and organise their and others’ materials in order to be able gain easy access and associate resources in ways which make sense to the individual rather than in a institutional, programme-centred way as provided by the VLE.
Finally, there are communities of practice emerging around educational change within the University as well as specific subject/concept areas which are beginning to emerge within educational practice in the University.
As Project Manager I am interested in facilitating these emergent communities, connecting with the University’s Learning & Teaching Enhancement Unit work as well as other change agent roles within the learning and teaching domain.
Future Work We will be working on building on the role of the Library in sharing resources across the institution, presenting resources which are relevant to students, where students can make judgments based on their own understanding rather than on the basis of which resources are required for a specific Unit – genuine student-centredness.
In addition, this work has enabled Library professionals to draw on traditional skills such as: selection, description, presentation, curation and management of materials to support the academic process, and present them within an innovative context while increasing recognition of the changing contribution librarians have to bring to the academic process and how that role is appropriate not only within a building named ‘the Library’, but also well beyond the walls of such a building [6].
Conclusion In a newly-funded JISC bid, effective from 1 April 2009, a multi-professional team with some of the same members as the EdSpace Team, will be concentrating on some specific service developments to further the development of learning and teaching repository functions here at Southampton.
The personal, author profile page in EdShare is to be augmented and enhanced as a means of developing individual discipline career profiles, disseminating subject expertise and linking between research and learning/teaching activities within the context of both learning and teaching, and research repositories.
Work will also be undertaken to develop a closer, integrated deposit mechanism such that with a single deposit ‘click’, resources will be made visible within the institutional learning and teaching repository, the VLE and other repositories such as the UK national resource, JORUM.
We will be extending our advocacy work with the University academic community to support the emerging confidence of creators and presenters.
We are aiming to support the transition of the University to become an influential member of the UK academic community contributing to the Open Educational Resources movement and we cannot overestimate the extent to which this represents a significant change for the University.
Furthermore, this change process has implications for the way in which copyright and intellectual property are regarded, presented and discussed within the institution.
We are interested in supporting work for use by academics to ensure that their own resources respect copyright requirements, that third-party issues are well understood and that the range of Creative Commons licences with which we would like to work are themselves understood within the University.
We are keen to work across the institution to agree and present clear policies and procedures and to generate accessible and widely disseminated guidance for all staff.
We are aware that in the digital environment this is an increasingly significant area of concern and potential risk.
Finally, within the University, we have also been interested in exploring the contribution that EdShare has to make to the reward and recognition of the institution’s teaching-related promotion route.
With the role of bibliometrics being explored and developed within the context of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) over the next few years, how might the metrics from EdShare relating to deposits, downloads, links, and comments contribute to the gathering of evidence considered permissible and appropriate to inform judgments on the performance of a University teacher?
We will report on developments in the literature over the course of the next year or two and welcome contact from other services and universities interested in the same areas.
References EdShare University of Southampton http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/ O’Halloran Cath, Hean Sarah, Humphris Debra and McLeod-Clark, Jill, Developing Common Learning: The New Generation Project UndergraduateCurriculum Model, Journal of Inter-professional Care Vol.
20 No.1, 2006 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13561820500471854 Davis, Hugh C. and Fill, Karen, Embedding blended learning in a university’s teaching culture: Experiences and reflections, British Journal of Educational Technology Vol.
38 No.
5, 2007 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/117984237/PDFSTART Source of image in Figure 2 http://www.cd-adapco.com/press_room/dynamics/25/tourdefrance.html Davis, Hugh C., Carr, Leslie, Hey, Jessie, Howard,Yvonne, Millard, David, Morris, Debra and White, Su, Bootstrapping a culture of sharing to facilitate Open Educational Resources, forthcoming IEEE Transactions on learning technologies McGill, Lou, Currier, Sarah, Duncan, Charles.
and Douglas, Peter, Improving the Evidence Base in Support of Sharing Learning Materials (2008).
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/publications/documents/evidencebaselearningmaterialsreport.aspx Author Details Debra Morris Research Fellow, School of Electronics & Computer Science Liaison librarian, Hartley Library University of Southampton Email: D.Morris@soton.ac.uk Debra Morris works as Project Manager for EdShare at the University of Southampton, she is ELearning Lead for the University Library as well as Liaison Librarian within the University Library.
Debra has worked as a Research Fellow within the Learning Societies Lab, School of Electronics and Computer Science since 2007.
She is a member of the University E-Learning Strategy Group, University E-Learning Implementation Group and the University Learning Spaces Strategy Group.
In 2005, she was awarded a University of Southampton Vice Chancellor’s Award for Learning and Teaching.
Ms. Morris is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
Return to top Article Title: “Encouraging More Open Educational Resources with Southampton’s EdShare” Author: Debra Morris Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/morris/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Get Tooled Up: SeeAlso: A Simple Linkserver Protocol Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Get Tooled Up: SeeAlso: A Simple Linkserver Protocol Buzz data software rdf framework wiki sparql api javascript html database xml atom archives xslt metadata firefox browser identifier namespace blog sql oai-pmh cataloguing opac hypertext rfc perl syndication uri openurl csv soa sru microformats json librarything lod licence url standards Citation BibTex RIS Jakob Voss combines OpenSearch and unAPI to enrich catalogues.
In recent years the principle of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has grown increasingly important in digital library systems.
More and more core functionalities are becoming available in the form of Web-based, standardised services which can be combined dynamically to operate across a broader environment [1].
Standard APIs for searching (SRU [2] [3], OpenSearch [4]), harvesting and syndication (OAI-OMH [5], ATOM [6]), copying (unAPI [7] [8]), publishing, editing (AtomPub [9], Jangle [10], SRU Update [11]), and more basic library operations, either already exist or are being developed.
The creation of the SeeAlso linkserver protocol was occasioned by the need to enrich title views in library catalogues of the German Common Library Network (GBV) with links to additional information.
However, instead of integrating those links into title records and tailoring the presentation to our specific OPAC software, we decided to create a general linkserver Web service.
Related Work Early hypertext architectures like the Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP) included links as first class objects stored in specific link server databases [12].
Later the World Wide Web replaced most hypertext systems although its links are untyped, point in only one direction and can easily break [13].
Meanwhile these limitations are overcome starting with backlinks in wikis, Trackback and Pingback between blogs, as well as typed links with Microformats in HTML, together with published sets of links within the Linking Open Data Project [14].
However, the concept of a link server remains relatively unknown.
SPARQL [15] can be used to query any RDF data, including links, but it is far too powerful and complex for simple applications.
OpenURL [16] is more useful for resolving links rather than querying them.
The most promising APIs turned out to be unAPI [8] and OpenSearch Suggestions [17]; it was decided to combine them to form the SeeAlso linkserver protocol.
Figure 1: OpenSearch Suggestions in Firefox [18] SeeAlso Specification The design of SeeAlso was informed by two principles: first, it should be easy to use and implement and second, it should build on existing standards.
Fortunately an existing and appropriate standard was soon identified in the form of OpenSearch Suggestions.
The core of the SeeAlso specification – SeeAlso Simple [19] – reuses this self same standard.
The rest of SeeAlso – SeeAlso Full [20] – goes on to add elements of OpenSearch and unAPI.
Both specifications have been defined and implemented.
The current state of development was recently presented at ECDL 2008 [21].
The current draft of SeeAlso Simple is awaiting final comments with a view to publishing it as version 1.0.
SeeAlso Full still needs some work and further feedback before it can be considered as definitively finished.
Figure 2: Example of query and response in SeeAlso SeeAlso Simple with OpenSearch Suggestions OpenSearch Suggestions is an extension of the OpenSearch standard to return a set of search term completion suggestions for a given search term prefix [17].
Firefox has supported this extension since its version 2 and shows search results in its Search Bar (Table 1).
A suggestion is returned by a search engine in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) [22] as an array of four values.
SeeAlso Simple uses the same format.
A SeeAlso Simple service is queried via HTTP GET with a query parameter “id” and and optional callback parameter “callback”.
In addition to search suggestions (as defined by OpenSearch Suggestions), the response includes the element “Identifier”, the value of which echoes the query parameter.
The value can be normalised by the service.
For instance ISBNs in different forms can be returned as canonical URIs.
The elements “Descriptions” and “URIs” are mandatory.
“URIs” can contain any URIs including URLs, and the response body can be wrapped by a callback method.
For this reason the MIME type of the response can be “text/javascript” instead of “application/x-suggestions+json”.
Figure 2 shows an example of query and response.
Element OpenSearch Suggestions name Description Identifier Query String search term as string, can be normalised Labels Completions array of strings with link labels Descriptions Descriptions array of strings with additional information URIs Query URLs array of strings with link URIs Table 1: The four elements of a SeeAlso response SeeAlso Full with unAPI and OpenSearch Description The integration of services into other applications requires not only standardised APIs for access but also standardised descriptions of particular services [1].
For this reason SeeAlso Full completes SeeAlso Simple with support of an OpenSearch description document [23].
The connection between a simple SeeAlso service and its description is established via unAPI.
In short, a full SeeAlso service is an unAPI server that provides at least two formats, “seealso” and “opensearchdescription”: <formats> <format name=“seealso” type=“text/javascript” /> <format name=“opensearchdescription” type=“application/opensearchdescription+xml” docs=“http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1/Draft_3#OpenSearch _description_document” /> </formats> If you select format=seealso, a simple SeeAlso response in JSON format is returned (see Figure 2).
If you select format=opensearchdescription, an OpenSearch description document is returned.
The following description is returned for the SeeAlso server at http://ws.gbv.de/seealso/isbn2gbv:   <OpenSearchDescription xmlns=“http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"> <ShortName>ISBN-to-GBV</ShortName> <Description>Checks whether a given ISBN is available in the GBV union catalog </Description> <Query role=“example” searchTerms=“3-447-03706-7” /> <Query role=“example” searchTerms=“1-4013-0237-8” /> <Url type="text/javascript" template="http://ws.gbv.de/seealso/isbn2gbv?id= {searchTerms}&amp;format=seealso&amp;callback={callback}" /> </OpenSearchDescription> This simple trick avoids the limitations of unAPI, that does not define a standard method to retrieve information about a service like verb=identify in OAI-PMH or operation=explain (the other main limitations of unAPI are a missing XML namespace and returning non-200 HTTP status codes).
The combination of unAPI and OpenSearch description allows it to provide automatically an additional HTML interface to any full SeeAlso service with XSLT (Figure 3).
Figure 3: HTML interface to a SeeAlso service Usage and Examples SeeAlso is used in the Common Library Network (GBV) to enrich catalogues with central services without having to change existing ILS and OPAC software [24].
The most popular service delivers links to German Wikipedia articles that cite a given book by ISBN.
In general SeeAlso can be used to include any list of labels and/or links dynamically.
Current GBV services include look-up of links to publications of a given author (identified by PND authority file number), links to the social cataloguing services LibraryThing and BibSonomy, and links to other libraries that hold a given work.
More services are planned with availability information, cover images, reviews, tables of contents and other information that is not stored in the bibliographic records.
Easy Access with JavaScript A general barrier to innovation in (digital) libraries is the lack of technical skills.
After all, standards and APIs are not much help if they impose difficult additional programming.
Accordingly, a SeeAlso JavaScript client library is provided to help to lower this barrier [25].
This library contains methods to query SeeAlso services and display the result in different views (comma seperated, ordered list, tag cloud, etc.).
The following script queries the SeeAlso server at http://ws.gbv.de/seealso/isbn2gbv/ and displays the result as a comma-seperated list (SeeAlsoCSV) at a given HTML-div element: <div id=“gbvlink”/> <script type=“text/javascript”> isbn = “1-4013-0237-8”; // query id service = new SeeAlsoService(“http://ws.gbv.de/seealso/isbn2gbv/"); service.queryDisplay( isbn, “gbvlink”, new SeeAlsoCSV() ); </script>   The library also contains methods for replacing HTML tags automatically.
Libraries in the GBV library network just include the JavaScript library and put tags with predefined class attributes in the HTML code of their Web interface.
The following code is used to show links to German Wikipedia articles that cite a book by ISBN:   <div class=“seealso-container” style=“display:none;”> In Wikipedia: <span title=“3-7643-5826-2” class=“isbn2wikipedia seealso-csv”></span> </div>   Web services that use APIs other than SeeAlso (for instance Google Booksearch) can be wrapped and used in the same way.
Providing SeeAlso Services To provide a SeeAlso Web service you must at least implement OpenSearch Suggestions or rather return JSON as a response to the HTTP parameter “id” (SeeAlso Simple, Figure 2).
However, it is also strongly recommended to implement unAPI and the OpenSearch description document according to the SeeAlso Full specification.
An open source reference implementation in Perl is available at CPAN [26].
A new SeeAlso service is created by defining a query method and optionally describing it: #!/usr/bin/perl sub query { my $id = shift; return unless $id->valid(); my $response = SeeAlso::Response-&gt;new( $id ); # ...determine label, description, uri ... $response->add( $label, $description, $uri ); $response->add( $label, $description, $uri ); return $response; } my $source = SeeAlso::Source->new( &amp;query ); $source->description( “ShortName” => “MySimpleServer”, “Description” => “…” ); print SeeAlso::Server->new()->query( $source ); Further development of the server will focus on improvements in performance and on adding wrappers and examples to create SeeAlso services on top of any data source that supports SQL or SPARQL.
Conclusion SeeAlso combines OpenSearch and unAPI to provide a simple linkserver protocol that can be used to enrich applications dynamically with additional links and similar listed items.
Content delivered by a SeeAlso link server can be integrated either on the Web server or in the client browser.
For the latter, a JavaScript library is provided that limits the effort to a few lines of JavaScript and/or HTML.
The Catalog Enrichment Initiative [27] lists different possible elements for enhancing library catalogues and points out that all must support item identifiers and information about the data provider.
SeeAlso fulfils these requirements with the search term parameter “id” and an OpenSearch description document for each SeeAlso service.
The actual use of SeeAlso is up to the individual institution: you can add links to other libraries, Wikipedia, and social cataloguing applications; you can include information about current availability, reviews, search completion suggestions, etc.
The loose coupling of link server and Web application is part of a general strategy to focus on service-oriented architecture in digital libraries.
The seperation of content services and display makes it possible to integrate several Web 2.0 features in library catalogues without need to change core elements of existing software.
References van Veen, T., “Serving Services in Web 2.0”, April 2006, Ariadne Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/vanveen/ Lease Morgan, E., “An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU)”, July 2004, Ariadne Issue 40 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/morgan/ SRU: Search/Retrieve via URL http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ OpenSearch http://www.opensearch.org/Home Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html Nottingham, M., Sayre, R., “The Atom Syndication Format”, RFC 4287, December 2005 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt Chudnov, D. et al., “Introducing unAPI”, July 2006, Ariadne Issue 47, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/chudnov-et-al/ Chudnov, D. et al., “unAPI specification version 1”, June 2006 http://unapi.info/specs/ Gregario, J. and B. de hOra, “The Atom Publishing Protocol”, RFC 5023, October 2007 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt Singer, R., Farrugia, J., “Unveiling Jangle: Untangling Library Resources and Exposing them through the Atom Publishing Protocol”, Code4Lib 4, September 2008 http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/109 SRU Record update http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/record-update/ Michaelides, D.T., Millard, D.E., Weal, M.J., Roure, D.D., “Auld Leaky: A Contextual Open Hypermedia Link Server” 12th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, LNCS 2266, 2001, p. 59–70 Ayers, D., “Evolving the Link”, IEEE Internet Computing 11(3), 2007, p. 94-96 http://dannyayers.com/docs/ieee/w3 Linking Open Data project http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData Prud’hommeaux, E., Seaborne, A., “SPARQL Query Language for RDF”, W3C, January 2008 http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ Van de Sompel, H., Beit-Arie, O., “Open Linking in the Scholarly Information Environment Using the OpenURL Framework”, D-Lib Magazine, 7 March 2001 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/vandesompel/03vandesompel.html Clintin, D., “OpenSearch Suggestions 1.0”, Public draft 1.0 http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/Extensions/Suggestions Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Creating_OpenSearch_plugins_for_Firefox SeeAlso Simple Specification http://www.gbv.de/wikis/cls/SeeAlso_Simple_Specification SeeAlso Full Specification http://www.gbv.de/wikis/cls/SeeAlso_Full_Specification (in progress) Voß, J.
“Dynamic Catalogue Enrichment with SeeAlso Link Servers”, ECDL 2008, Aarhus http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00014639/ Crockford, D., “JavaScript Object Notation”, RFC 4627, July 2006 http://www.json.org/ Tesler, J. et al., “OpenSearch description document”, 2005 http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1 SeeAlso Web services at GBV http://ws.gbv.de/seealso/ SeeAlso JavaScript library http://ws.gbv.de/seealso/seealso.js Voß, J., “SeeAlso::Server”, CPAN http://search.cpan.org/dist/SeeAlso-Server/ Draft File Content Element List of the Catalog Enrichment Initiative http://www.loc.gov/standards/catenrich/catenrich-elements.html Author Details Jakob Voß Digital Library Developer Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) Germany Email: jakob.voss@gbv.de Blog: http://jakoblog.de Licence: This article is available under the Creative Commons Attributions-Share Alike 2.5 Generic licence (by-sa): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ Return to top Article Title: “SeeAlso: A Simple Linkserver Protocol” Author: Jakob Voß Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/voss/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Delete The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Delete The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age Buzz data software privacy Citation BibTex RIS Pete Cliff hopes he'll not forget this marvellous book, even when the author seems to suggest it might be better if he did!
In the past the storage and recall of information (the act of remembering) was limited.
If people wanted to keep a record, it had to be written down (at great expense in the days before printing) or they had to rely on (notoriously error-prone) human memory.
As time moved on, more and more could be recorded, but recall in the analogue world remained difficult the raison d’être of information science.
However, with the proliferation of digital recording and the advent of cheap and vast storage, the balance has shifted.
In a world deluged with data including our personal collections of digital photos, email inboxes and the like it has become easier to record everything than attempt any kind of manual pruning deleting bad photographs, irrelevant emails, etc.
At the same time recall methods have advanced, so that I can (should I want) look up an email I sent more than five years ago or see what a colleague blogged last year.
This shift from people forgetting to machines remembering is the central theme of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s book Delete, published by Princeton University Press.
And a fascinating, frightening, well-argued and accessible read it is!
The work opens with the now familiar horror stories of digital remembering a newly qualified teacher failing to get a job on account of the picture of her on a social networking site, the psychotherapist refused entry to the USA because of a (presumably open access) journal article, published several years before, in which he mentions having taken LSD in the 1960s.
Examples of how society is now able to discover (to remember) facts about your life that you have forgotten yourself.
This opening chapter neatly sets the scene and highlights just how much Mayer-Schönberger has read around the problem of ‘perfect memory’.
In the next two chapters, the reader is taken on a ride through the psychology, sociology and history of forgetting and humankind’s battle against it.
They culminate in the rise of the technologies that now leave us with a society capable of seemingly perfect memory (though not everything is remembered digitally and we’d do well to remember that!)
while individuals are now capable of looking up their past in ways hitherto unimagined.
Though the author’s arguments are compelling, they are on occasion overstated or based on false premise is it really all that easy to mine the vast data resources we have at our command yet?
However, the book does get the reader thinking and the author himself states that part of his reason for writing it was to stimulate debate.
Chapter IV, Of Power and Time Consequences of the Demise of Forgetting, is probably my favourite perhaps because I love a good tale of doom!
It examines the consequences of total recall and boils the issue down to two fundamentals.
Firstly there is the loss of power, as information about us is duplicated and reused (often out of context) with or without our permission; and secondly the negation of time.
Among the issues are two terrifying possibilities: that perfect memory threatens reason, abstract thought and the ability to make decisions in the present, and; that the reasons for retaining data now may seem sensible, but what if (as with the chilling example given) it should fall into the wrong hands in the future?
Having clearly and concisely built a picture of the problem, from the early days of human history to the present, Mayer-Schönberger then turns to some potential solutions.
Chapter V outlines six potential responses, drawing on information privacy issues as well as other areas.
Curious here is the way he suggests one response would be for information sources (us) to use digital rights management techniques to ensure our data are safe, effectively turning the tables on the music industry or search engines.
It is an interesting idea, though one the author later dismisses.
The final chapter before his conclusions, entitled Reintroducing Forgetting, goes on to give Mayer-Schönberger’s own solution to the problem data with a shelf life.
That is to say, every piece of information from files on your hard drive, through your emails and even your search terms and online purchase history is given an ‘expiration date’ (by the end of this chapter, try not to scream at the number of times those two words appear!).
It is here that I find my only real criticism of the book.
Up to this point we’ve been taken in, we are willing to overlook the odd overstatement (information retrieval is easy for example, or that you really would forget a falling out you had with an old acquaintance only to rediscover the event in an email long forgotten).
However, Mayer-Schönberger’s suggested response leaves a lot to be desired.
Perhaps this is deliberate on his part, perhaps you will disagree with me, but it seems this chapter is not as well researched or carefully considered as the rest of the book.
It seems unlikely that an end-user would specify a data expiry date no matter how simple the interface and the solution would not be as easy to implement as is suggested.
The example of a camera that reads its subjects’ data wirelessly and adds an expiry date to the photo feels entirely unworkable!
But do not let these final thoughts put you off this book!
On the contrary, I hope they provoke you to go and read it for yourself, because Delete is a fascinating read and one I would recommend to every information scientist I know.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is right: there never has been a more pressing need to question total recall.
Author Details Peter Cliff Software Engineer Bodleian Library University of Oxford Email: peter.cliff@ouls.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” Author: Peter Cliff Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/cliff-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Myths of Innovation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Myths of Innovation Buzz video research Citation BibTex RIS Lina Coelho takes a look at Scott Berkun's challenging view of what innovation and creativity really mean.
The clue is in the title.
This book sets out to dispel the myths about creativity and innovation which you have cherished so dearly.
It tells you what 'not to do and what not to think' so that you can free yourself from common misguided notions on the subject.
As a special bonus, this new paperback edition includes four new chapters which provide the practical tips you would need to help your ideas take off.
It also carries the added reassurance that the author had corrected more than 40 issues compared to the hardback version through offering better evidence and examples and providing more accessible references.
Scott Berkun's insights can be trusted not only because he has already written three bestselling books and made regular contributions to a range of publications, but also because of his background in teaching creative thinking at the University of Washington and his experience of working at Microsoft on Internet Explorer.
Having come to the conclusion that the 'the i-word is thrown around so frequently it no longer means anything', the author sets out to demolish the 10 most pervasive and misleading myths about it.
In each chapter, he addresses one of the myths and using examples, comments and facts, puts forward ideas which might, at first glance, seem iconoclastic.
First to come under attack is the myth of epiphany – the notion that innovation comes from nowhere, or at least from some hidden and magical place – namely, being in the right place at the right time.
Not so, says Berkun, the truth is far less glamorous – hard work, personal risk and sacrifice are all it takes.
And although many of the myths around innovation have persisted because of their entertainment value – from Newton and his apple to Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, the journey of de-bunking the myths is even more entertaining.
The moral for inventors-to-be is to keep working whilst waiting for the breakthrough.
The second chapter deals with the misconception that we understand the history of innovation and that the significance of everything is evident at the time of creation.
Having long believed that the Rosetta Stone helped decipher hieroglyphics, I had to re-adjust my thinking in order to accept the view that, at the time of its creation, it was nothing more than pharaoh propaganda.
It is indeed difficult to imagine, from where we are standing today, that progress does not happen in a straight line.
Berkun's next target is the idea that there is an 'innovation method'.
The truth is that the journey only starts with finding an idea, the hard work comes later in developing a solution, finding the money, creating a cheap enough product, reaching potential customers, beating competitors and staying the course in difficult times.
It is tempting to believe that everybody loves a new idea; in fact Berkun cites many examples to prove exactly the opposite – leaps of the imagination frighten us and prevent us from taking leaps of faith.
Enthusiasm for an idea only grows once it has been proven successful.
Potential innovators need not worry about others stealing their ideas, they will have to 'ram them down people's throats'.
The reasons for rejection can be many and varied: personal, political or economic.
The innovator's dilemma as dramatised in the face-off between Western Union and Alexander Bell – as the captains of an ageing innovation protect their work from the threat of an emerging idea.
The paradigm shift which is necessary in order to open up the way for an invention can be so profound that ensuring adoption might be much harder than coming up with an innovative idea.
This inevitably leads to the painfully slow diffusion of innovation that depends on the relative advantage of the new idea, the complexity of the switch from old to new, the risk of taking the leap, and the ease of demonstrating advantage.
Chapter Five sees the myth of the lone inventor exploded through many historical examples, so Karl Benz takes the place of Henry Ford in the history of the automobile and Davy and Swan displace Edison as the inventor of the light bulb.
But the truth is even more complex than that, as no inventor stands alone, he or she just follows in a line of incremental discoveries with only the names of those who had the best publicity machines or were in the right place at the right time remaining on the record.
Often it is only shorthand that we equate Google with the invention of the search engine, Nintendo with the video game and Apple with the GUI.
According to Einstein 'imagination is more important than knowledge'.
It is harder to overcome the fear of inconsistencies, the departures from convention and the rigidity of adult certainties in order to grasp a new idea.
New ideas require new perspectives and new perspectives need flexibility.
The best way to have a good idea is to have many bad ideas – 40:1 if we are to take the example which gives the name of this product, WD-40, the trademark of a water-displacing solvent which took 40 attempts to create.
Being accepting of others' as well as of your own ideas is the best way to innovate.
Management and innovation have an uneasy relationship.
Professional management embodies the desire to optimise and control, not to pursue experimentation and new, often seemingly unproductive, paths.
This is one reason why established companies which are too big and risk-averse, set up spin-offs, small agile outfits which hot-house innovation.
Another big misconception, which feeds on our idealistic beliefs, is that the best ideas win'.
Chapter eight addresses this myth with examples of how history helps us remember the good and forget the bad.
If it is a mystery to you why we use the qwerty keyboard, consider the prosaic explanation that long after the necessity for it has been removed, as the mechanics of the typewriter are well behind us, it still persists on our computer keyboards.
Culture, dominant design, inheritance and tradition, the politics of power, economics and short-term thinking often force the path of successful innovation.
Full consideration of the effects and consequences of an invention can be rather limiting, as being able to look into the future will put any invention into the straight jacket of ensuring use for 'good' and minimising use for 'evil'.
A piece of useful advice for future innovators comes in chapter 9 which suggests that time used for defining the problem is well spent as it helps find the right solution.
Focusing on a gap, on a need, on an issue ensures that the solution suggested has a chance, in a crowded scene of solutions, in tipping the odds in its favour.
The final four chapters contain advice for those who want to put what they have learned from this book into practice.
There is a plan of action, a condensed creativity course, a list of creative thinking hacks and advice on how to pitch an idea successfully.
If you are an ideas person, but not an excellent communicator or insightful planner, make sure you work with others who are.
When it comes to staying motivated, use everything you've got: anger, necessity, pride, discipline or a crazy friend, Berkun shows you how.
A couple of things made this book special for me.
Firstly, the meticulously presented research and recommendations including a ranked bibliography which notes the influence of a number of authors and works on Berkun.
And secondly, the special praise for our profession as 'the elves who make interlibrary loans possible'.
The author finally appeals to all readers to work for the popularity of this book.
As I am unlikely to influence Oprah in choosing it for her book club or Jon Stewart in inviting the author to his programme, I am doing my bit by writing this review.
Author Details Lina Coelho BMA Library Email: lcoelho@bma.org.uk Return to top Article Title: "The Myths of Innovation" Author: Lina Coelho Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/coelho-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Open Repositories 2008 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Repositories 2008 Buzz data software framework api xml atom archives metadata identifier blog repositories eprints copyright video flickr preservation graphics aggregation syndication drm mets dspace ruby mashup facebook icalendar interoperability oai-ore plone research standards Citation BibTex RIS Mahendra Mahey reports on the third international Open Repositories 2008 Conference, held at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton in April 2008.
This was the third international Open Repositories Conference, the previous two being held in 2007, San Antonio, Texas [1] and in 2006, Sydney [2], so Europe was the third continent to host the event.
Southampton was gloriously sunny for the five days of the conference (1-4 April), so there was no need to use the disposable plastic macs that were provided in the delegate bags.
The event tends to attract people who have either already set up digital repositories in their institutions, are thinking about it or are interested in various aspects of repositories.
Typically these repositories allow open access to their research outputs and/or teaching or learning materials.
Delegates included developers, administrators, librarians, managers or even policy makers.
The main theme of the conference this year was practice and innovation, and there was plenty of evidence that this was reflected in the main conference programme [3].
The conference continued in the same format of previous conferences, that of having general conference plenary sessions followed by parallel Technical Open User Group meetings for DSpace [4], Fedora [5], and Eprints [6], the popular institutional repository software platforms.
New to the event was the very first 'Repository Challenge' organised by the JISC CRIG (Common Repository Interface Group) [7] where software developers worked together in small teams in a very informal way (barcamp style) to create real-life software demonstrators and services quickly, building on previous CRIG work (started in March 2007) which had produced real-life, user-relevant scenarios and services for digital repositories.
A first prize of $5000 was awarded to the winner, more of which later.
As part of this packed programme there were also Birds of a Feather Sessions, meetings of the UK Council of Research Repository Managers, the EurOpenScholar group of European Universities Senior Managers and the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) European Rollout the third alpha release of the OAI-ORE specifications.
Facts and Figures This year the event was heavily over-subscribed, there were over 450 delegates from 34 countries.
There were 234 submissions in total to the conference.
After peer review, 31 submissions were accepted for the main conference (some sessions were parallel sessions), 51 submissions were accepted as posters and 45 were accepted for the user group sessions, giving an acceptance rate of 54%.
Figure 1: Some of the delegates at OR08 in the main conference room.
Flickr image courtesy of adamnfield For the first time, all the presentations and papers are available from a real repository, the OR08 conference repository [8].
Figure 2: The OR08 conference repository Use of CrowdVine for Conference Networking The organisers of the conference used the CrowdVine Web-based system to facilitate networking between delegates at the conference.
Although the software has similarities with Facebook (which I have used), this was the first time I had experienced such software.
Delegates were encouraged to join up and use the technology for social networking throughout the conference and there were some people who joined who didn't actually attend the conference, mentioning no names.
The software had some interesting features, such as showing your network of friends (alas I never win in the popularity stakes), who you were a fan of, and those you wanted to meet and those who want to meet you.
I would recommend this software to anyone organising an event, it is easy and free to set up for a conference, especially for quite large meetings, say 100+.
It was clear that most people were using CrowdVine during the conference, though I think it is a good idea to give access to it well before and after a conference, which the organisers had done.
Figure 3: Open Repositories 2008 Home (CrowdVine) [9] on 29 April 2008 More information about setting up Crowdvine for your event for free is available [10].
The Main Conference As with many conferences of this type, it was physically impossible to attend all the sessions, so what follows are my personal highlights of the week, apologies for any sessions I may have missed out.
Remember that the conference repository contains presentations and documents of all the sessions, in case there is something of interest to you that I have omitted [8].
Highlights from Day One Opening Keynote Repositories for Scientific Data: Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge Peter Murray-Rust delivered the opening keynote.
I think the main aim for Peter was to highlight the 'elephant in the room' as far as digital repositories are concerned, i.e.
where do we put data from research within educational institutions, especially that which is generated from the 'long tail of science'?
Most of the work to date in institutional digital repositories has tended to focus on making research publications freely available through the principles of the Open Access movement.
Although there were a few technical difficulties during the presentation (on which Peter has subsequently blogged [11]).
He focused on the fact that although there is no one size-fits-all solution for data repositories for science, there are some general principles that could be adopted for those interested in setting them up.
For example, data repositories should be a natural and invisible part of the workflow of a scientist and should support directly the scientific process, where the people running them are physically present in or around the laboratory.
Peter was also at pains to stress that solutions to data repositories need not be complicated; the typical scientific informatics toolset could consist of nothing more than word processing and spreadsheet software, free-text indexing tools, reliable storage and a HTTP/REST interface to access the data.
He offered an insight into how all of this is being approached in the chemistry / crystallography domain.
Peter's presentation is available from the conference repository [8].
Session 2b: Sustainability Issues (a) Collaboration in building a sustainable repository environment: a national library's role.
Warwick Cathro: National Library of Australia Warwick highlighted what can be achieved when a national library and the university community work together.
The Australian National Library and the university community in Australia are developing a number of sustainable services e.g.
national discovery and metadata aggregation services, collection registry services based on a prototype registry service called Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) [12] which is built on the ISO 2146 (Registry Services for Libraries and Relate Organisations) standard [13], the PILIN Project [14] which is likely to lead to a National Persistent Identifier Service (based on the handle system [15], Automated Obsolescence Notification System (AONS) [16] a very useful tool which alerts repository managers to potential obsolescence of file formats in their repository and finally the development of an Australian Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) metadata profile [17].
Session 3: Interoperability SWORD: Julie Allinson, University of York, UK My former UKOLN colleague Julie Allinson spoke about SWORD (Simple Web service Offering Repository Deposit) [18], work which she presented to the Open Repositories Conference in San Antonio (2007) on the Deposit API work [19].
Julie gave some background as to how a deposit specification / protocol for use across repository platforms came into place and how JISC came to the rescue with funding to ensure that the protocols and demonstrators were developed.
There really seemed a genuine buzz and interest about the work, not just in the presentation but throughout the conference.
Poster Sessions: Minute Madness Figure 4: Julie Allinson, University of York, presenting her poster Picture courtesy of 'Ares' Picassa Web Albums In traditional 'minute madness' fashion, there were slightly chaotic scenes of people trying to organise the poster presenters (there were in fact 51 posters, although I do not think all of them were actually presented).
I have a few vivid memories.
Firstly, the huge queue of people waiting to talk.
Secondly, all presenters had exactly one minute to present their poster and convince people to come to their stand in the informal poster session / wine reception afterwards.
Memorable presenters included: Leonie Hayes, who gave as the chief reason for people to come to her stand the fact that she had travelled the most time zones to get to the conference, from New Zealand [20].
Peter Sefton, who presented and then admitted that his poster had yet to be created, but would be ready in the next hour or so for people when they came to his stand [21].
Pero Å ipka, who told a story about a 'marriage' between SCIndeks and a national journals repository, the other partner in this 'marriage' was actually Pero's wife Biljana Kasanovic, which he only revealed at the end of the sixty seconds [22].
Highlights from Day Two Session 4a: National and International Perspectives What can we learn from Europe in our quest for populating our repositories?
Vanessa Proudman, Tilburg University, Netherlands Vanessa was presenting an analysis of six case studies conducted at various European institutions on how they managed to populate their repositories.
Interestingly, all the institutions in the study already had a mandate for deposit in place for their staff.
Vanessa then identified six areas that influence the successful population of a repository, namely; policy, organisation, influential factors for populating repositories, advocacy, services and legal aspects.
Vanessa then gave her top six critical success factors for populating a repository from a list of seventeen, at this point there were many delegates who were scribbling down furiously.
Some of the factors included; having a strong communications plan, showcasing your efforts and achievements, using your local, regional, national and international networks for the development of policy, services and personnel, providing sound Intellectual Property Rights information and support.
A full list of the factors is available [23].
Session 5a: Legal Repositories and Digital Rights: An Overview of the landscape and an action plan Grace Agnew, Rutgers University Libraries, US Grace gave an excellent, very thorough and entertaining overview of copyright, digital rights and repositories over a time span of nearly forty years.
Topics included the Digital Rights (DR) agenda for repositories, examining a data model for DR in repositories, a review of the current legal and technical landscape of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the importance of repositories in this area.
It was clear that Grace was very knowledgeable about her subject, every slide was packed with so much information that there was much more than twenty minutes worth.
Session 6b: Models, Architecture and Frameworks The aDORe Federation Architecture Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Research Library, US Much of the work in the repository space focuses on institutions with relatively small collections, but numbering thousands of digital objects; what happens to repository architectures if they have to deal with tens of millions of objects?
The answer to this question from Herbert Van de Sompel from LANL was clear in his opening remarks, 'scale changes everything'!
Herbert gave an overview of how the LANL team needed to develop a new repository architecture to supersede the existing structure so that it could deal with the enormous scale and the severe deficiencies that existed in the previous information discovery environment developed for the LANL Research Library.
Some of the deficiencies include; metadata-centric records, tens of millions of digital assets stored as separate files, content being tied to a collection and its discovery, preventing other applications from utilising the content.
The LANL team had explored existing open source repository solutions and decided they were not sufficient to deal with the specific problems at LANL.
The solution came about by developing a three-tier distributed, component-based approach to meet their specific challenges of scale.
The metadata-centric approach was replaced by a compound object approach, where digital assets were bundled into storage containers that reduce the number of files in a file system.
It was also necessary to separate storage repository from applications using a 'surrogate' repository system, and by providing a simple HTTP protocol machine interface to allow access to the stored assets.
Herbert also pointed out that the resultant software, the aDORe Archive Installer, is freely available [24].
Session 7: Usage MESUR: Implications of usage-based evaluations of scholarly status for open repositories Johan Bollen, Los Alamos National Laboratory, US Johan's presentation was my personal favourite of the whole conference.
Even though it was at the end of the day, the so-called 'graveyard shift', I can honestly say that the audience were on the edge of their seats and were thoroughly entertained.
From the opening slide, a picture of Britney Spears [25] and Big Star [26] (a relatively unknown band from the early 1970s judging by the lack of hands going up when the audience was asked), it was clear that this was going to be an engaging presentation.
Johan's main argument was that current metrics which measure the impact of research using measures of popularity are an inadequate measure of the actual influence and impact on research; other factors need to be taken in account.
He supported his assertion with the judgement that although Britney Spears has sold 83 million records whereas Big Star had only sold 50,000, it was Big Star that has had the greatest influence on popular music.
Johan argued that a much more complicated model is required to explain the impact of research.
LANL's research was based on an enormous amount of usage, citation and bibliographic data obtained form a variety of publishers (his team had to sign confidentiality agreements with them), aggregators and institutions.
Johan argued that scholarly evaluation largely based on the supposedly valued citation data has several shortcomings, e.g.
publication delays mean that citation data lag scholarly developments by significant periods, and therefore more emphasis should be placed on services that could actually shorten the scholarly life cycle.
Johan also pointed out that citation data ignores the growing body of grey literature or non-textual scholarly objects that exist outside the scholarly journals in which authors regularly publish and has an impact on research.
Johan concluded that research on aggregated usage data over a range of scholarly sources is a significant adjunct to traditional citation data.
The Repository Challenge Figure 5: The graphic for Common Repositories Interface Group (CRIG) [27].
Many software developers attend the Open Repositories conference, so this year it was decided by JISC-funded CRIG that it would be a good idea to organise a week-long developer's activity to produce new demos of novel repository capability the Repository Challenge!
19 teams registered for the challenge and they had some real-life, user-relevant scenarios and services to inspire them from previous CRIG activities (e.g.
scenario development, expert telconferences, Unconferencing and a Barcamp).
The Repository Challenge seemed a natural 'follow-on' from CRIG work and much praise must go to David Flanders, chair of the Repository Challenge, who has also been organising much of the work of the CRIG.
Figure 6: Some example 'ideas' for developers to work on I really feel that this activity generated an excitement around the conference, especially during the break sessions.
The challenge was run in a very informal way, coders were developing over copious cups of coffee or meeting up over drinks and pizza in true Barcamp style over the week.
The challenge culminated at the conference dinner, where five of the entrants were short-listed (after being judged by a panel of expert judges) and a video of each was presented to the delegates, who then had to vote for their favourite.
The winning entry attracted a US$5,000 prize, with the cash prizes for second and third places plus gifts for honourable mentions.
Figure 7: General Chair of the Organisation Committee Les Carr, at the conference dinner Flickr image courtesy of 'adamnfield' The order of merit is shown below: 1st Place: Mining For ORE by Dave Tarrant, Ben O'Steen and Tim Brody 2nd Place: Zero Click Ingest by Leo Momus, Peter Sefton, Scott Yedon and Christaan Kortekaas 3rd Place: BibApp 1.0 by Tim Donohue Shortlisted: FileBlast by Scott Wilson and Kris Popat Shortlisted: Visualiser by Patrick McSweeney Figure 8: Congratulations to the winners of 'The Repository Challenge', Dave Tarrant and Tim Brody (University of Southampton) and Ben O'Steen (University of Oxford), for their entry 'Mining with ORE' [28] More details about each of the entries are available, including some videos of the presentations [29].
Repository User Group Sessions and Other Meetings Below are brief highlights from the Repository User Group sessions: DSpace DSpace 1.5 was launched, a major and fundamental upgrade to DSpace to allow modularisation; a strategy and roadmap for the development of DSpace in 2008/2009 were also presented.
There were also demonstrations of how DSpace 1.5 can be customised using overlays; how the submission process can be configured; and how repositories can be personalised.
A demonstration of a Virtual Olympic Museum, technical metadata and issues with content packaging together with three case studies formed the rest of the DSpace session.
Fedora Commons A technical update to Fedora Commons was given as well as strategies for long-term digital preservation with repositories.
Several demonstrations were given: mashups, Muradora, Plone front end to Fedora, Fedora integration with Honeycomb, a batch metadata editing tool, records management and digital preservation using Fedora and icalendar, Fedora and datasets, a toolkit for implementing ingest and preservation workflows, XForms 3 and Fedora, Fedora+Atom, Fedora and Ruby on Rails, search and Fedora, Using VUE and content based image retrieval.
Three Fedora case studies were also presented.
Eprints There were presentations on the launch of EPrints 3.1 beta and the future of Eprints as well as on improving the support for the editorial review process for Eprints, extending Eprints and repository analytics.
In addition there were three case studies focusing on the UK Research Assessment experience.
OAI-ORE European Rollout Meeting The meeting was intended for information managers, strategists, and implementers of networked information systems.
It was led by the two coordinators of OAI-ORE [30], Carl Lagoze of Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Delegates learnt more about the ORE data model and about the translation of this data model to the XML-based ATOM syndication format.
They also learned about initial experiments with the specifications that have been carried out and there was opportunity for delegates to ask questions and discuss the specifications.
EurOpenScholar Meeting Theme: The University's Mission, Management and Mandate in the Open Access Era Figure 9: Dr Alma Swan, Dr John Smith and Prof Bernard Rentier speaking at the EurOpenScholar (EOS) [31] meeting Picture courtesy of heystax77 from flickr EOS is the European movement for Open Access to scientific and scholarly publications whose goals are to inform the European university communities about the opportunities available to researchers today for providing open access, and to establish institutional repositories in the universities and research centres of Europe in order to deliver a range of benefits.
Conclusion This was a very busy event, clearly over-subscribed, but very well organised with lots of interesting speakers and sessions, especially 'The Repository Challenge'.
Several people have blogged about their experiences: Neil Grindley [32], Pete Johnston [33] and Maureen Pennock [34].
Open Repositories 2009 OR2009 [35], will be in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, over 18-21 May 2009; see you there.
References 'What Is an Open Repository?
', Julie Allinson, Jessie Hey, Chris Awre and Mahendra Mahey, April 2007, Ariadne Issue 51 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/open-repos-rpt/ APSR http://www.apsr.edu.au/Open_Repositories_2006/ Open Repositories 2008 http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/conference.html dspace.org – Home http://www.dspace.org/ Fedora Commons http://www.fedora.info/ EPrints for Digital Repositories http://www.eprints.org/ CRIG DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG Welcome to OR08 Publications OR08 Publications http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Open Repositories 2008 Home (CrowdVine) http://or08.crowdvine.com/ CrowdVine: Create your own social network http://www.crowdvine.com/ Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge petermr's blog; Blog Archive >> OR08 "Repositories and Scientific Data" the challenge of complexity http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1019 Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) http://www.library.uq.edu.au/escholarship/orca.html ISO 2146 Project http://www.nla.gov.au/wgroups/ISO2146/ PILIN https://www.pilin.net.au/ HANDLE.NET The Handle System http://www.handle.net/ SourceForge.net: AONS http://sourceforge.net/projects/aons The Australian METS Profile A Journey about Metadata http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/pearce/03pearce.html SWORD DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD Repository Deposit Service Description; Presentation to OR 2007 : the 2nd International Conference on Open Repositories, San Antonio, Texas, USA, 23-26 Jan 2007.
Presenter: Julie Allinson, UKOLN, University of Bath; Co-authors: Rachel Heery (UKOLN), Martin Morrey (Intrallect), Christopher Gutteridge (Southampton), and Jim Downing (Cambridge) (application/pdf Object) http://www.openrepositories.org/2007/program/files/5/heery.pdf RESEARCHSPACE@AUCKLAND : DISASTER RECOVERY (DR) OR08 Publications http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/67/ Swimming upstream.
From the repository to the source, in search of better content OR08 Publications http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/74/ The national citation index as a platform to achieve interoperability of a national journals repository OR08 Publications http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/60/ Seventeen guidelines for stimulating the population of repositories (application/pdf Object) http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=69760 Tutorial http://african.lanl.gov/aDORe/projects/adoreArchive/docs/tutorial.html Britney Spears Official Site http://www.britneyspears.com/ BIG STAR * IN SPACE http://bigstarband.com/index.html CRIG DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG To see their winning presentation visit http://blip.tv/file/866653 CRIG Repository Challenge at OR08 – DigiRepWiki http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG_Repository_Challenge_at_OR08 Open Archives Initiative Protocol Object Exchange and Reuse http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ Bernard Rentier, Recteur » EurOpenScholar http://recteur.blogs.ulg.ac.be/?p=151 Open Repositories 2008 : Information Environment Team http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/04/18/open-repositories-2008-2/ eFoundations: Open Repositories 2008 http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2008/04/open-repositori.html Digital Curation Blog: Open Repositories 2008 http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-repositories-2008.html Open Repositories Conference 2009 http://or09.library.gatech.edu/ Author Details Mahendra Mahey Repositories Research Officer UKOLN Email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/ Return to top Article Title: "Open Repositories 2008" Author: Mahendra Mahey Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/or-08-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review of "Dynamic research support for academic libraries" Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review of "Dynamic research support for academic libraries" Citation BibTex RIS Helen Young reviews the Facet publication, "Dynamic research support for academic libraries" edited by Starr Hoffman Starr Hoffman sets out some clear aims in her preface to ‘Dynamic research support for academic libraries’.
The book intends to: Inspire “you to think creatively about new services” Spark “ideas of potential collaborations within and outside the library…” Provide “specific examples of new services…” Provide “a broad array of examples across different types of institutions…” Shift you “from a mindset of … separate initiatives towards a broad view of ‘research support’ “p.
ix The book aims to achieve this by having a helpful, practical overarching introduction and then division into three separate parts, each with its own introduction; two by Hoffman and one by Jackie Carter.
The parts cover ‘Training and infrastructure’, ‘Data services and data literacy’ and ‘Research as a conversation’, thus playing to Hoffman’s strengths.
The chapters provided by authors from a wide range of institutions in the USA, Mexico and Europe are short, clear and precise.
The topics covered are wide-ranging, including library space, staff skills, data services, digital humanities, open access, information literacy for students and metadata; some of which would not be expected in a traditional ‘research support’ book.
Part 1 Training and infrastructure Part 1 examines three different aspects of library infrastructure, upon which successful research support has to be founded: space, systems and staff.
Alberto Santiago Martinez’s chapter on the renovation and expansion of the Colmex library in Mexico City reminds us of the challenges librarians face when working with university administrations which have differing views about what a library could or should be; as well as the importance of balancing digital and traditional print resource needs, and collaborative and independent study space.
It also highlights the need for new skills within the workforce to meet the research needs of its users.
Fatima Diez-Platas’ chapter discusses the collaborative project that developed the Biblioteca Digital Ovidiana in Spain, which opened up a variety of historical, illustrated works of Ovid to an international audience through its digital platform and rich metadata.
Richard Freeman’s chapter follows the theme of digital scholarship with a description of the University of Florida Smathers Libraries’ Digital Humanities Library Group’s Librarian Project which aimed to establish a community of practice and ensure that the librarians were viewed as, and felt themselves to be, partners to faculty in this area.
The group developed and gained funding for its own digitization project to enable those involved to develop relevant skills for curating a digital collection of the Brothers Grimm, notably the two deliverables of enhancing ‘German Popular Stories’ and creating an online exhibit of the Brothers Grimm Tales.
Freeman shares the group’s experiences, providing a helpful summary of what worked well and what they would do differently next time.
Part 2 Data services and data literacy Jackie Carter introduces the section on data with reflections on the situation in the UK and developments at the University of Manchester, particularly in relation to the undergraduate population, which is a refreshing view, as the need for support for the research of this group is often overlooked when discussing ‘research support’.
Heather Coates’ chapter continues the discussion with a helpfully detailed examination of how she and her colleagues developed data literacy instruction classes at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) for graduate students.
Whilst challenges regarding attendance remain, the systematic way that the classes were developed provide strong foundations for the future.
Ashley Jester maps data services on to the research lifecycle (planning-collecting-analysing-sharing) through her case study of the Columbia University Libraries, in particular the Digital Social Science Center with its necessarily broad definition of data and support for researchers at all levels within the institution.
The breadth and depth of support offered by the team is enviable for institutions with a smaller staff base, including support for statistical analysis, data collection, sharing and improving visibility.
Karen Munro’s chapter keeps us within the context of the USA with an exploration of how the University of Oregan’s architecture library staff support geographical information systems (GIS) to meet the needs of its users, with her literature review indicating how GIS is relevant to a wide-range of subject areas beyond traditional geographical ones and the chapter considering why academic libraries should develop at least a basic level of support for these tools.
Part 3 Research as a conversation Hoffman introduces the final part of the book with reference to Burke’s description of research as a conversation as a way to link chapters on open access, MOOC and metadata together.
Dominic Tate examines the rapid evolution of open access in the UK through his case study of the University of Edinburgh and how that institution has implemented and communicated funding body and college policy changes, with a firm emphasis on a positive message.
Mariann Lokse and colleagues from UiT The Arctic University of Norway move the focus back to the early years of researchers with their chapter discussing an information literacy MOOC for students beginning their studies at university.
It is a very helpful consideration of how best to develop an effective online learning tutorial, acknowledging the challenges including time, skills and need for honest user evaluation which needs to be acted upon.
Hannah Tarver and Mark Phillips from the University of North Texas finish the book with a chapter on the often overlooked, but increasingly important, area of name authority control and how they are taking responsibility for this at a local level.
Summary Hoffman has edited a useful collection of short case studies from a variety of countries and types of institutions which does indeed inspire and encourage different ways of supporting research.
The collection appreciates that one size does not fit all and Hoffman sets the scene very effectively for the book and two of the parts, as does Carter for her section.
It is unfortunate that despite a strong introduction and the wide variety of chapters, the book seems to fizzle out at the end: there is no conclusion to round it all off and link the chapters back together.
The book also makes bold claims about its authors being from across the world; they are, but it would have been a stronger claim if there had also been chapters from Asia and Australasia, where so much dynamic research support also takes place.
However, these are quibbles with publicity rather than the content.
So, does the book achieve the objectives it sets out in the preface?
On the whole, yes, it does this as effectively as it can in 147 pages.
There are inevitably aspects of research support that are not covered, and the chapter on MOOCs, whilst informative, does slightly stretch the definition of research support, perhaps needing to be linked back to the bigger picture more carefully, but on the other hand the inclusion of this and other references to undergraduates does make you appreciate how broad the definition of library research support can be.
Hoffman’s collection does indeed indicate the need of dynamic research support in academic libraries.
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The Wellcome Library, Digital Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Wellcome Library, Digital Buzz data mobile framework api javascript html database portal usability infrastructure archives metadata digitisation blog repositories copyright video preservation cataloguing jpeg passwords cache flash mets json facebook twitter html5 licence authentication algorithm url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Christy Henshaw and Robert Kiley describe how the Wellcome Library has transformed its information systems to support mass digitisation of historic collections.
Online access is now the norm for many spheres of discovery and learning.
What benefits bricks-and-mortar libraries have to offer in this digital age is a subject of much debate and concern, and will continue to be so as learning resources and environments shift ever more from the physical to the virtual.
In order to maintain a place in this dual environment, most research libraries strive to replicate their traditional offerings in the digital world.
Over the past three years the Wellcome Library has followed a transformation strategy to make the Library digital [1].
The ambition was not to create an online shop window, but instead permanently break the bonds imposed by a physical library and provide full access to our collections in new and innovative ways.
We aimed to create an entirely new digital presence based on the Wellcome Library’s historic foundations and modern personality.
At the heart of this transformation strategy are two key elements: mass digitisation of unique collections and the creation of an online experience that transcends the generic offerings of mass distribution and offers a unique value.
Although this work is still in progress, thus far we have successfully integrated the digital content into the Library’s existing discovery mechanisms and created new discovery routes via interpretive content and tools such as tailored subject browse, full-text search within items, and an engaging timeline application.
Plans to incorporate full-text search across digitised collections, and the creation of an engaging online environment promoting exploration of the collections designed for the ‘curious public’, will go still further.
The overarching aims of the technological development of the digital library were to create a modular framework that integrated existing and new systems, provide a foundation for future growth and sustainability, and accommodate policy decisions around licensing and access.
This article describes how we set about engineering this transformation; how we tackled technological and policy barriers and paved the way for future development and growth, and describes some of the key lessons learnt so far.
Strategy The digitisation strategy [2] at the Wellcome Library has been through multiple iterations over the years*.
In 2010 the Wellcome Trust Board of Governors approved a multimillion pound digitisation programme that set the stage for an ongoing programme of mass digitisation.
The content for the first ‘pilot’ phase was largely focused on the theme of genetics, ‘Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics,’ [3] which included our own collections complemented by archive holdings held by other institutions.
Mindful of the need to respond to emerging partnership opportunities, additional projects were added to the mix, including a project with  ProQuest to digitise books for the Early European Books [4] initiative and a project part-funded by Jisc to digitise the Medical Officer of Health reports for Greater London [5].
Although the main focus of the Wellcome Library’s collection is on the history of medicine and providing access to researchers in this field, the Library’s resources also provide value to many other historical and social scientific fields.
These were the key audiences for the digital library.
However, the Library also aims to increase its potential to improve public understanding of medicine and science.
The long-term goal is to work with the Wellcome Collection [6] in bringing digital resources to the wider ‘curious public’ in conjunction with exhibitions both physical and online.
The digital library infrastructure can provide a technological framework for this.
A key element of the pilot programme was to build a sustainable and expandable mechanism for creating, storing and delivering data – the basis for a new digital library.
In developing this infrastructure however, the Library was highly conscious of the fact that it already had some key systems in place – a Library management system (Sierra), a discovery application (Encore), and a digital asset management system (Safety Deposit Box) – which would need to be integrated into the digital library infrastructure.
Furthermore, it was agreed that the digital content had to be fully discoverable alongside the Library’s physical holdings.
This required a single search and discovery experience that would allow users to find all relevant content, irrespective of whether it had been digitised or not.
Principles for Technological Change The Wellcome Library has been digitising image-based content for many years, and making this available through an image library the Wellcome Images portal [7].
However, although an image library is useful for finding individual images, it is not the right tool for providing users with the ability to browse, read and download entire texts or archive collections.
It lacks a number of features that are required for conducting research on Library materials and does not have the necessary technological framework in place to expand beyond single-image, fixed-resolution access.
Consequently, when the Library embarked upon its mass digitisation programme, it was self-evident that we would need to build a new framework through which this content could be accessed in innovative and engaging ways.
However, the digital library was never intended to be a stand-alone system.
There was a desire to ensure that effort was not duplicated, and that system administration did not become overly complicated.
Therefore, although the system was to be modular – to ensure that individual elements could be independently upgraded or replaced as required – there was to be little to no duplication of pre-existing functionality.
There are three main areas where convergence is not always achieved in the standard digital library due to policy decisions or simple technological complexity: Searching: often, digital libraries have their own catalogue database and search interface.
This separates the digital from the non-digital, removing it from the larger context and preventing users from discovering what they need in a single session.
This is particularly problematic when only a small proportion of a Library’s collections are available in digital form, which is nearly always the case.
Viewing: it is difficult to find examples of digital content platforms that can provide a single user interface consistent in look and feel and usability for all types of digital content, and provide in a single package all the code required to render whatever content the user might be requesting from the repository.
Archiving: in terms of digital preservation, born digital and digitised collections are usually managed in silos, with different systems and even different administrators to manage them.
This unnecessarily duplicates effort.
Although there is much debate on the preservation merits of certain digitisation file formats, this emphasis is not always equalled when it comes to preservation systems for the products of digitisation.
However, no one wants to lose their digitised data, and preservation is a key part of ensuring sustainability of the digital resource in the long term.
Consolidating systems allows a more unified preservation approach that is better able to ensure that preservation actions – carried out on both digitised and born digital content – are consistently applied providing for more predictable outcomes which can only benefit the durability of the data.
The Wellcome Library has demonstrated that such convergence is not only desirable, but entirely possible; even if there are still areas that need further work.
It is early days in terms of receiving significant user feedback on our results, but from a technical point of view, much has been achieved in this area.
Prototyping and Procuring the Digital Delivery System The feasibility of the Wellcome Library’s  digital delivery plans were tested through a series of studies carried out in 2010 [8].
This feasibility phase included: proof-of-concept work that informed essential modifications in SDB (Safety Deposit Box) to support management of content produced by digitisation activities, research on the use of METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) as the digital object metadata standard of choice, research on the use of JPEG2000 for Web delivery including investigating the possibility of on-the-fly image conversion to Web-friendly formats, definition of requirements for a workflow system for administering digital content creation and ingest.
The feasibility phase was the first step to developing an integrated piece of work on a series of system components, the crux of which was a new application which became known as the Digital Delivery System (DDS) that would interoperate with SDB and the Library catalogue, and incorporate an entirely new digital content ‘Player’.
In summer 2011, the DDS project formally began with establishing the business requirements.
The key requirements were to: develop a system that would provide access to the Library’s digital content in a rich, engaging and intuitive manner integrate with Safety Deposit Box (SDB), the Library’s digital asset management system where all digital content is stored [9]; integrate with Encore, the Library’s discovery system an off-the-shelf system, developed by Innovative Interfaces Inc. to provide a single platform for finding content irrespective of whether it has been digitised [10]; integrate with Sierra the existing library management system, an off-the shelf system also developed by Innovative Interfaces Inc., to provide a single authentication system for any content which, for data protection reasons, is behind an authentication layer [11]; be capable of using JPEG 2000 images, the image format which the Wellcome Library has adopted as its preservation standard, including on-the-fly conversion to JPEG for Web [12]; work with METS files, the technical and descriptive metadata encoding standard the Library has adopted for its digital content [13].
Faced with this somewhat daunting set of pre-conditions, the Wellcome Library issued an Invitation to Tender (ITT) to develop a technical specification for the DDS.
The output from this work would be a written report laying out the specifications for a DDS not any working code.
After assessing the responses, two suppliers were awarded the contract to develop this specification.
Although this approach did incur additional costs – as the Library was ultimately only going to contract with one supplier to actually build the DDS – it did provide an opportunity to truly assess the capabilities of two suppliers (especially in terms of demonstrating how their proposed solution would integrate with the Library’s existing systems) before contracting with them to build the DDS solution.
Digirati, a digital agency that provides digital strategy, design, integration and engineering consultancy [14], was subsequently awarded the contract to build the DDS and the Player.
They also implemented a migration of the entire Library Web site to a new Web site content management system (CMS), SDL Alterian Content Manager.
In order to facilitate a creative, iterative approach, the Library followed an informal, agile project management methodology.
In practice, this entailed working according to 2-week ‘sprints’ – or work-packages – where each work-package constituted a separate contract with the supplier.
This approach reduced the risk inherent in creating inflexible specifications at the start of a project that cannot easily adapt to changing requirements or influences.
This approach however increased the risk of scope-creep, and made it difficult to forecast what the total spend would be.
To mitigate these risks, an overall development timescale (with major milestones) and budget envelope was developed and fixed.
This, coupled with fortnightly meetings to review the deliverables of each work-package and assess priorities for the next one, helped to keep the project on time and to budget.
Overall, this approach has proved highly effective in allowing the Wellcome Library to achieve its original goals, and to incorporate new ideas in a well-defined and resourced manner as the project took shape.
Alongside procurement of a development partner, the Wellcome Library also commissioned a Web site design company to analyse and redesign the information architecture for the whole Wellcome Library Web site, and to design a new ‘Codebreakers’ microsite to showcase to researchers the online resource of the genetics-related content created by the Library’s digitisation projects.
This procurement followed a more traditional pattern with a call for proposals and presentations by a number of relevant companies.
The Library appointed Clearleft [15], a user-experience-based design company which worked on the project from first principles, such as defining audiences and interviewing actual users through to creating much of the HTML code that could be used by Digirati as its staff built the new Web site.
The design brief Clearleft worked to also changed and grew as the project progressed and the Library became more experienced with and aware of how deeply user experience informs the creation of an online resource.
Metadata and METS The functionality of the Library’s DDS is predicated on metadata.
Metadata are often classed as ‘descriptive’ or ‘administrative.’ However, the boundaries between them are not always clear to anyone other than a metadata expert, so here they are described according to what the metadata achieves.
Metadata type Stored in Used by Used for Bibliographic, item descriptions Library catalogues Player, via API Populates ‘More info’ panel [16] Access level (open, restricted, etc.)
METS Player Informs access restrictions where required and prompts a login box where appropriate [17] Usage rights (CC-BY-NC, private use only, etc.
stored as a code “A”, “B” etc.)
METS Player configuration file Player Displays correct message found in configuration file according to code included in the METS [18] Logical description (pagination, detail of sections such as “cover” or “table of contents”) METS Player Allows navigation by page number; builds index in ‘Contents’ pane etc.
[19] File information (image format and size, filename, file type, unique ID of file, list of ALTO file IDs, etc.)
METS Image server Player To retrieve digital content from SDB or the cache and display it correctly; find ALTO files for search term highlighting in images [20] Table 1: Metadata used by the Digital Delivery System (DDS) It will be noted that much of the metadata necessary for the Player to render content on the Web is stored in METS files [13].
METS is an XML schema that contains information about digital objects, and, in the Wellcome Library’s case, is used to contain information to inform the delivery of digital content.
METS can also be used to contain preservation metadata, but in this case all preservation metadata is contained in SDB.
Figure 1: The Player, with the 'More Information' and 'Index' panes expanded METS files as used here are subject to change (for example, if an access level changes) and therefore are not static representations of objects in the Library’s collections and are not archived.
METS files are created by the Library’s workflow system, Goobi, which automates the ingest of content into SDB and aggregates data from the Library catalogues, SDB and user-generated data into METS [21].
The DDS transforms the METS metadata to JSON so that the Player can read it and render content appropriately.
Metadata such as pagination is added to each item manually, whilst access levels and licence codes are assigned by default according to specific projects, and then adjusted manually by exception, or manually assigned to specific sections within an item (see below for further details of authentication functionality).
Figure 2: Conditions of Use message Content is held together with a persistent unique ID based on the system number allocated by Sierra, the library management system used by the Wellcome Library.
Each catalogue record contains this system number and it is carried into SDB and stored in the METS files.
As the system ID is already present in the catalogue record, it facilitates automated link-creation by Encore (URL path + system ID), the Wellcome Library’s discovery platform.
The connecting ‘cycle’ from clicking a link to a digital item, to opening the Player, to retrieving the content, to linking back to the catalogue record, rests on the passing forward of this unique ID.
Figure 3: Highlighting of search terms and search-term navigation for text-based content SDB assigns its own ID to each object and to each file.
For example, a book of 100 pages will have 101 unique SDB IDs.
These are all stored in the METS file so the Player can retrieve individual files from SDB when that book is requested by a user.
The Player and JPEG 2000 The Wellcome Library Player enables a variety of content to be viewed via Web browsers on desktop or mobile platforms.
The Player draws on various technologies to achieve this, specifically: Seadragon Javascript library for image-based content, HTML5 or Flash for video, and HTML5 for audio.
The Player was custom built by Digirati based on designs user-tested and wireframed by Clearleft, and aims to provide all the basic functionality that today’s users expect from an online viewing experience.
Basic functionality for audio-visual material including play, stop, pause, fast-forward, volume control and transcript download is common to all online players, and was not particularly difficult to define (in future, as our requirements for A/V content becomes more complex, this may change) [22].
Image-based content, however, was more complicated due to the different types of content being represented – from grey literature to oil paintings.
Particularly difficult was incorporating printed-book-style functionality such as page navigation with an elegant, smooth and zoomable image viewer.
After months of research and development, the end result brought together the elegant image navigation of Seadragon [23] and the Library’s own user research-based navigation and page design ideas to provide a seamless, engaging and useful all-in-one Player [24].
The Library’s archival image format is JPEG 2000 (namely because of its intelligent compression algorithm that reduces storage costs by up to 80%) [25].
JPEG 2000 files cannot be displayed in Web browsers, so any JPEG 2000 solution needs to convert images to JPEG (or another Web-friendly format) for display.
The DDS incorporates an image server application called IIPImage [26].
IIPImage can quickly and efficiently convert JPEG 2000 files on-the-fly to JPEG.
It does this tile by tile, so as you zoom and pan across an image it can serve up JPEG tiles according to tile requests made by the Player.
When an item is opened for the first time in the Player, the DDS will ensure that the JP2 file for any visible page is copied from SDB to the DDS’ local cache, so that the IIPImage image server can begin to generate tiles in response to requests from the Player.
A JP2 file will only be scavenged from the cache if it is not being used, meaning that over time the cache will hold the most popular content.
The generated tiles are also cached, but for shorter periods, and depending on access conditions.
The Player is a ‘client’ of the DDS and therefore acts as an API to the DDS (and the digital content).
This API allows the Player to be embedded into any Web site or blog, and it will look (almost) and act exactly the same as it does on the Wellcome Library Web site (the user can define the size of the Player, although at any size there is a full screen option).
Access and Licensing Policy Developments In addition to creating content and building a digital repository, the Wellcome Library had to reframe policies around sensitivity assessment, copyright clearance and licensing of content for online use [27].
The implications of these policies had a significant impact on the development of the technical solution.
Access levels for digital content include: Open: published works, archives and manuscripts over 100 years old (unless by exception), and non-clinical videos and visual materials such as artworks, photographs, posters, etc.
Registration Required: unmoderated online registration for archives less than 100 years old with conditions of registration prohibiting users from misusing any private or sensitive data they may find Clinical: special permission required by application to access images or video of a clinical nature Restricted: no permission to view online but can be consulted in person at the library where archives are considered too sensitive, or where copyright holders have refused permission to publish online (this may be applied to entire items or parts of items) Closed: no access allowed to archives at all due to data protection restrictions (but may be digitised for preservation reasons) and born digital content that has not yet been appraised and catalogued or opened to the public End-user licences had to be developed to include a variety of conditions of use.
For out-of-copyright content or orphan works that are openly available, a Creative Commons licence is used (usually CC-BY-NC) [28].
Depending on permissions granted by copyright holders, licences will vary and may include a restriction on download options, particularly downloading entire books as a PDF or high-resolution versions of individual images.
Archival content such as personal or organisational papers is typically made available under an attribution non-commercial licence with the additional condition that sensitive or personal data not be misused.
Conditions of Use statements are displayed at point of use in the ‘More info’ tab of the Player.
Developing Authentication Functionality The fact that sensitive items are included in our digital repository meant that appropriate security measures for the digital content (and metadata related to it) had to be factored in when building the digital library.
The development of authentication functionality to allow or restrict access to certain classes of material meant that an authentication check had to apply to all media types (including all image tiles), and administrative metadata  all without affecting performance.
Figure 4: Library online registration forms In keeping with the approach to use existing systems wherever possible, the Player uses the Sierra authentication system the same one Library members use when checking their loans or requesting items from the closed stacks.
In order to do this the Player calls the Sierra authentication API to check whether the entered username and password is valid.
If a user does not have a Library card (or does not wish to join the Library) they can still log in using a social media account (Twitter, Facebook etc.).
The first time they do this for a ‘Registration required’ item, the system will present the user with the Library’s Terms and Conditions, which they will simply need to agree to before content can be viewed; or, for a ‘Clinical’ item they will request permission from the Wellcome Library, and thereafter can log in and view clinical items.
Figure 5: View of archival content by unauthorised user In addition to this relatively simple authentication layer, the Player has been developed to restrict specific images within a multi-image object, such as a file of letters.
This image-level approach to authentication has allowed the Library to maximise the amount of content it can make available online.
Under this model if an object of, say, 100 images, includes 5 images that are highly sensitive, the Player can still make the other 95 images available.
If the Library had simply taken an object-based approach for authentication then, in this example, all 100 images would have been restricted or closed (and not available online).
In order for the Player to do this, it must refer to the Access information contained in the JSON file for each item, and for each file within that item.
Once this has been done, the Player can match that code against the user account details and present the appropriate display (allow the user to view the content, ask the user to register, or prevent the user from accessing content that would never be permissible to view online).
Figure 6: Player log-in screen Other security measures are in place to prevent access to data held in the METS files that may pertain to sensitive images, prevent re-engineering URLs or image requests, and more.
This enables the Library to manage and preserve even highly sensitive archives in SDB.
Seven Simple Steps of DDS Operation Step 1: The user discovers a link to the digital content in the Library catalogue or anywhere else on the Web.
Step 2.
Clicking this link passes a command to the Player to open and to find a METS file with the filename corresponding to the system ID in the URL.
Step 3.
The Player opens the METS file, transforms the metadata to JSON.
Step 4.
The Player reads the SDB file IDs in the JSON file and requests individual files as appropriate from SDB.
Step 5.
For JPEG 2000 files, IIP Image server caches the JPEG 2000 files retrieved from SDB and creates and caches JPEG tile derivatives .
Step 6.
The Player checks the authentication status of the user against the access level of the item and its individual files.
Step 7.
The Player displays the content, or displays the appropriate login box/message.
Figure 7: Simplified view of the Digital Delivery System (DDS) Conclusion The information architecture implemented by the Wellcome Library is a cornerstone of functionality to come.
Changing user requirements, new funding opportunities, innovation, and the size and variability of the resources digitised will continue to shape the online spaces the Library provides.
Transformation is a continual process, but establishing a technical framework based on sound principles is an essential first step.
By the end of 2013, the Library expects to have all the key technical components in place to deliver its goals for greatly expanded access, engagement and reuse of the digital collection.
*Editor’s note:  readers may be interested in earlier articles from colleagues at Wellcome: Chris Hilton, Dave Thompson.
"Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library".
January 2007, Ariadne Issue 50 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/hilton-thompson/ Chris Hilton, Dave Thompson.
"Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library".
October 2007, Ariadne Issue 53 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/hilton-thompson/ Dave Thompson.
"A Pragmatic Approach to Preferred File Formats for Acquisition".
April 2010, Ariadne Issue 63 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/thompson/ References Transforming the Wellcome Library 2009 – 2014 http://wellcomelibrary.org/about-us/library-strategy-and-policy/transforming-the-wellcome-library/ Digitisation at the Wellcome Library http://wellcomelibrary.org/about-us/projects/digitisation/ Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics http://wellcomelibrary.org/using-the-library/subject-guides/genetics/makers-of-modern-genetics/ Early European Books http://eeb.chadwyck.com/home.do London Medical Officer of Health project http://wellcomelibrary.org/about-us/projects/digitisation/london-medical-officer-of-health-project/ Wellcome Collection http://www.wellcomecollection.org/ Wellcome Images http://wellcomeimages.org/ Henshaw, C, Savage-Jones, M and Thompson, D. “A Digital Library Feasibility Study” LIBER Quarterly , Vol.
20, no.1 (2010) http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/7975 Safety Deposit Box http://www.digital-preservation.com/solution/safety-deposit-box/ Encore discovery system http://encoreforlibraries.com/ Sierra Services Platform http://sierra.iii.com/ JPEG 2000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000 METS http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ Digirati Digital Business Solutions http://www.digirati.co.uk/ Clearleft http://clearleft.com/ Wellcome Library player: Click on the ‘More information’ prompt to the right of the main window http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b1803469x Wellcome Library player: Crick papers, requiring registration and login http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b18167214 Wellcome Library player: Click on the ‘More information’ prompt to the right and click on ‘View conditions of use’ http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b1803469x Wellcome Library player: Click on the Index prompt to the left http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b1803469x Wellcome Library player: Enter a keyword search in the search box at the bottom http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b1803469x Goobi Intranda version http://www.digiverso.com/en/products/goobi Digitised video The Five (1970) http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b16672422 Seadragon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seadragon_Software The Player: a new way of viewing digital collections http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2012/11/the-player-a-new-way-of-viewing-digital-collections/ JPEG 2000 at the Wellcome Library blog, an account of the Library’s JPEG 2000 journey http://jpeg2000wellcomelibrary.blogspot.co.uk/ IIPImage http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/ Access to Archives policy http://wellcomelibrary.org/content/documents/access-to-archives.pdf Copyright clearance and takedown http://wellcomelibrary.org/about-this-site/copyright-clearance-and-takedown/ Author Details Christy Henshaw Digitisation Programme Manager Wellcome Library Email: c.henshaw@wellcome.ac.uk Christy Henshaw has managed the Wellcome Library’s digitisation programme since 2007.
Robert Kiley Head of Digital Services Wellcome Library Email: r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk Robert Kiley is Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Library.
In this role he is responsible for developing and implementing a strategy to deliver electronic services to the Library’s users – both in person and remotely.
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Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS Buzz data software framework database infrastructure archives metadata identifier blog repositories eprints copyright preservation oai-pmh dspace guid rae interoperability research standards cerif ldap Citation BibTex RIS Nick Sheppard reports on the event examining integrated, systemic approaches to research information management organised by the Welsh Repository Network and supported by JISC and ARMA at Leeds Metropolitan University, in May 2010.
More than 60 delegates convened at the Rose Bowl in Leeds on 7 May 2010 for this event to explore the developing relationship and overlap between Open Access research repositories and so called 'CRISs' – Current Research Information Systems – that are increasingly being implemented at universities.
The Welsh Repository Network (WRN) [1], a collaborative venture between the Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in Wales, funded by JISC, had clearly hit upon an engaging topic du jour.
The event, jointly supported by JISC [2] and ARMA (Association of Research Managers and Administrators)[3], was fully booked within just five days of being announced.
In the main, delegates were either research managers and administrators, or repository managers, and one of the themes that came up throughout the day was the need for greater communication between research offices and libraries (where repository services are often managed.)
As well as JISC and ARMA, euroCRIS [4], a not-forprofit organisation that aims to be an internationally recognised point of reference for CRISs, was represented at the event.
Delegates could also visit the software exhibition and speak with representatives of Atira, Symplectic Ltd and Thomson Reuters, among others.
Overview of CRIS and Repository Overlaps and Position Statements Why a CRIS: Andy McGregor, JISC As a JISC programme manager who has overseen more than 60 repository projects in the last 3 years, Andy is uniquely qualified to describe the repository landscape in the UK and asserted for us just how common repositories have become both in this country and internationally [5].
He also reminded us, however, that repositories are 'lonely and isolated'; still very much under-used and not sufficiently linked to other university systems.
They are often under-resourced with low levels of full-text deposit and require continuous advocacy to academics and research staff, the end-users who would benefit most.
Andy went on to suggest that the ideal partner for a repository is, in fact, a Current Research Information System, or CRIS for short.
Ostensibly they manage the same data for analogous purposes and for similar end-users; they have shared interests including reducing duplication, collating data for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and feeding other institutional systems.
Moreover, they must both integrate appropriately with the research lifecycle, recording bibliographic data and documenting grant-related information, for example, in the case of a CRIS, and archiving an appropriate full-text version of a research paper in the case of a repository.
This last comparison emphasises Andy's next point, that there are enough differences in the respective requirements that neither system can fully supplant the other and it makes sense to keep them separate.
CRISs, for example, are more focused on monitoring rather than maximising impact, the latter being the goal of repositories which, in turn, tend to be more focused on preservation of full-text material rather than just bibliographic data.
There are also likely to be significant differences between the administrative workflow and the research workflow itself that can be managed more appropriately by systems tailored to the specific requirements of each; it is also important to remember that institutions are different and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Andy finished his presentation by highlighting JISC-funded work in this area including Research Revealed [6], and Readiness 4 REF [7].
Institutional Repositories: Just a Bit of CRIS?
: Simon Kerridge, ARMA Simon [8] was representing ARMA, the professional association for research managers and administrators in the UK, and works in the central research support office at the University of Sunderland.
He has designed and overseen the various stages of electronic research administration (ERA) systems at the University for the past 15 years and is currently working with the University Library Service to implement an Open Access repository and integrate it with the research office systems.
Simon emphasised the multi-skilled role of research managers as an interface with the academic community.
They are in a position to give advice on the practicalities of submitting a research proposal, for example, and all the associated paraphernalia (costing, pricing, contracts, ethics) as well as contributing to governance, planning and other strategic objectives.
So what exactly is a CRIS?
Like repositories, perhaps, it is not easy to offer a simple and definitive definition, however, they are 'loosely defined' by Rodman and Stanford [9] 'as improving [research] administrative processes through the application of technology, particularly computer technology'.
CRISs go under a variety of names including the straightforwardly descriptive Research Management and Administration System (RMAS) or Sunderland's own Electronic Research Administration system (ERA) and are essentially tools for managing research information in several main areas: Staff (research) Publications (bibliographic data) Projects and proposals (funding information) Post-graduate research Impact Ethics Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Such a system can be used for a range of management requirements including strategic planning and providing data to funders; notably HEFCE in the form of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and its replacement, the upcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Internally they need to interact with a number of other university systems and processes including Human Resources and Finance, Library and Faculty systems and student databases; while externally they should be inter-operable with specialised funder systems including those for large-scale assessment exercises like the RAE and REF.
Moreover, the exchange of research data is becoming increasingly important with Web-enabled systems and this has led to the development of the CERIF data-model [10] which is explored by the JISC-funded EXRI-UK (Exchanging Research Information in the UK) Project [11] and was discussed in more detail in the case study presented by Anna Clements (see below.)
All of which brought Simon back to his original question: Is an institutional repository (IR) a subset of a CRIS?
A show of hands indicated that audience opinion was split, which was appropriate as Simon's answer was an equivocal 'Yes...and No…' Like Andy, he observed that, generally, they are not managed by the same service and emphasised that research managers and administrators need to work closely with their counterparts in 'the library'.
Events such as this, he concluded, are certainly a step in the right direction.
Case Studies: The Ideal CRIS?
: Anna Clements, University of St. Andrews representing euroCRIS Anna is a data architect at the University of St. Andrews where she is responsible for establishing and leading a programme of information management improvement across the institution; she also represents euroCRIS and perhaps took a broader view of 'Who needs it and why?'
than Simon [12].
While echoing many of his institutional-level drivers, she also emphasised 'political decision-makers', 'entrepreneurs and innovators' and 'media and general public,' citing researcher CVs, research bibliographies and commercial output reports as just some of the potential outputs from a CRIS.
Anna began with a broad definition of a CRIS as 'any information tool dedicated to provide access to and disseminate research information,' going on to describe the CERIF data model before providing an overview of the CERIF-CRIS that has been implemented at her home institution of St Andrews, based on Pure software from Atira.
In order to emphasise its constituent elements, Anna deconstructed the acronym favoured by euroCRIS before putting it back together in the historical context of the organisation: Current means timeliness and vitality (includes ongoing relevance not merely being contemporaneous) Also implicit is the dynamic nature of relationships, as staff move between institutions, or work on different funded projects for example.
Research information comprises the various entity attributes required for comprehensive research evaluation (people, organisations, funding programmes, etc) System is the tools and, crucially, the data model to manage heterogeneous (meta)data from disparate systems CERIF and euroCRIS have their antecedents in the mid-1980s when the need was identified to share information better about what research was being undertaken in institutions across Europe, in order to target funding more effectively, for example, and to facilitate collaboration.
It was developed in two major phases between 1987-1990 and 1997-1999.
The first iteration was relatively limited, based primarily on project information, but has become increasingly sophisticated with each release.
In 2002 the European Commission authorised euroCRIS to maintain and develop CERIF and its usage [10] and the standard has become a European Union recommendation to member states.
CERIF 2008 recommends a 'core' of entities, attributes and relationships and allows entities to be separated from the semantic layer for greater flexibility when sharing local data with another institution as well as supporting multiple languages.
The diagrams below are taken from Anna's slides and represent the different types of entities in different colours: Core entities (green) Result entities (orange) 2nd-level entities (blue) Link entities (purple) The coloured loops indicate that there is recursive logic within the entities themselves with hierarchical relationships between people or within an organisational unit: Figure 1: CERIF 2nd Level Entities (Image © euroCRIS 2010) Link entities record the precise, time-bound relationships between and within entities, so a person might be a member of both a project and an organisational unit, for different periods of time.
Such relationships can become extremely complex, and the strength of CERIF is that it is able to capture such web-like complexity with a data model that is essentially very simple.
Figure 2: CERIF example Link Entities (Image © euroCRIS 2010) Anna gave some examples of the types of questions that can be answered when research data are captured within such a sophisticated data model, pertaining, for example, to individual authors (how many articles author X published in 2007 as a first author; whether author X publishes with institutionally external authors) and/or specific projects (how many publications have resulted from project Y; how many women have been involved in FP6 projects).
CERIF is currently most widely used in Northern Europe, in both institutional and national systems in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Norway, but uptake has not been so great in the UK.
After the difficulties encountered collating data for the RAE in 2008, however, it is increasingly on the agenda as universities aim to ensure the process is easier for the REF in 2012.
This was the impetus behind the JISC funded EXRI-UK Project [11] which aimed to explore 'current and future scenarios for the exchange of research information in the UK' with the specific objective 'to appraise the options and, specifically, whether any particular format for exchanging research information (eg CERIF) would be suitable' though 'linked data' and 'known Semantic Web approaches to modelling the research domain' were also considered.
The RAE, in fact, was the driver for St. Andrew's in-house (non-CERIF) research information system implemented in 2002 and linked to its DSpace repository; Anna emphasised, as had Andy and Simon, the value of working together as well as the importance of good data management and re-using data that had already been gathered.
This approach naturally led to a model with the research information management system at the centre of the process fed by data from other systems: Figure 3: Schematic representation of the research management infrastructure at the University of St Andrews implemented in 2002 (Image © euroCRIS 2010) After the RAE in 2008, the issue of a highly functional CRIS was climbing up the agenda at St. Andrews; the functionality of the in-house system was relatively basic and though it provided a system to aggregate the various data, it did not adequately facilitate processing and retrieval of those data.
Moreover, as a small institution, there were not the resources available to invest in ongoing development.
It had become increasingly apparent that the requirements were similar across the sector and research into available systems and links with the University of Aberdeen ultimately resulted in a joint project to tender and implement a CERIF-CRIS to serve the two institutions.
The system that has now been implemented is Pure, a commercial CRIS from Atira which is also linked to the Institutional Repository; Pure itself does not preserve full-text research outputs but is able to use the CERIF data model to link to external systems like the IR which, in turn, provides the technology to preserve full text and ensure metadata are harvested by OAI-PMH.
In addition, full-text deposit to the repository is mediated through the Pure interface itself giving an integrated system for the user.
Anna's concluding message was that the repository at St. Andrews is not being subsumed but rather put into context within the broader electronic research management infrastructure.
The expertise and work already invested in repository development at universities are still essential.
Moreover, there is an ongoing need for Open Access advocacy, but ultimately a repository linked to a CRIS is greater than the sum of its parts and will make the job of both repository managers and research administrators easier.
An Enlighten-ed View of Repository and Research System Integration: William Nixon & Valerie McCutchean, University of Glasgow The next case study once again illustrated the importance of appropriate liaison between research management and repository development.
William is the service manager for Enlighten, the IR at the University of Glasgow; he was the project manager for the recently completed JISC-funded project Enrich [13] and works closely with Valerie, operations manager in the Department of Research and Enterprise at the University.
The broad aims of the Enrich Project were to establish Enlighten as a comprehensive, University-wide repository and central publications database, and to improve staff profiles by linking data from core institutional systems.
In addition, it sought to ensure compliance with funders' open access policies and reporting requirements as well as improving publicity for research activity and outputs.
Valerie began by giving an overview of the systems underpinning research management infrastructure at the University of Glasgow which has had a 'data-rich' research system since 1994 with links to the Human Resources, Finance and Student systems; part of Enrich has been to also link to the repository.
She illustrated how the various systems interact throughout the research lifecycle to facilitate an integrated process encompassing pre-award through to post-award and project completion, whereupon an automatic email will request full text for the repository, for example: Figure 4: The Research Lifecycle (Image © University of Glasgow 2010) The system, though based on relatively 'old' technology, broadly fulfils the requirements of research administration at the University and enables the Department of Research and Enterprise to collate and coordinate a large amount of data centrally, including staff and student information (from the HR system), funder details, internal and external collaborations, costings, ethics and awards.
Ongoing development is overseen by the Research Systems User Group which enables the different stakeholder groups to communicate effectively what is required from the interoperable systems and, after Enrich, now includes members from the library as well as from faculties, HR and Finance.
Staff are also trained across the different systems so that repository staff can administer the research system and vice versa.
After Valerie's introduction, William took over and spoke in more detail about their EPrints repository – branded as Enlighten and the Enrich Project.
Glasgow's Publications Policy is a formal mandate which requires that, where copyright allows, staff deposit a copy of peer-reviewed, published journal articles and conference proceedings into Enlighten as soon as possible after publication.
In addition, it also attempts to capture bibliographic metadata for all published outputs.
One of the crucial elements of Enrich has been to integrate Enlighten with the University LDAP system using a Glasgow unique identifier (GUID), meaning not only that users do not need to register a separate account to begin depositing their outputs, but also that those outputs are tied to the same unique identifier in all systemic components of the institutional research infrastructure.
This makes it easier to pull together all publications for a given author and to share and reuse the data across different systems.
The technique also makes it easier to feed repository data to other areas of the University Web site, so that dynamic publication lists can be added to departmental or individual academics' Web pages, for example.
An additional benefit is the way that an author view can be constructed when author records are disambiguated in this way.
Many repositories (and other research systems) lack a 'name authority file' which leads to several problems.
When originally entered into a system, names are likely to be keyed in different ways by different users and common names may be duplicated within an institution.
Academics may also change their name, due to marriage, for example.
Until this development, author listings in Enlighten (as in many other repositories) were based on the author name in the metadata record, giving an ungainly mix of 'Jim Smith,' 'J.
Smith,' 'Smith, James,' etc, which were all listed separately.
However, users may now browse for all of their publications under their official University designation, irrespective of how their name is entered in individual records and also including an honorific (eg 'Smith, Dr James').
Another important development is that funder information can now be extracted from the research system, incorporated into individual repository records and facilitating 'Browse by Research Funder name'.
The link is bi-directional, allowing browse by funder code in the research system, so that the Department of Research and Enterprise can more easily discover publications attached to a specific project.
Valerie stressed that one of the main reasons for linking awards to outputs in this way is due to the rising profile of the impact and output agenda across both the institution and the HE sector; they are keen to integrate effort across the University to identify users of research outputs and to gain feedback to illustrate impact.
Work is also ongoing to ensure that Enlighten can manage other types of research outputs (exhibitions, broadcasts, artwork, etc) as well as, from an OA perspective, an ongoing focus on increasing full-text content in the repository.
The take-home message from William, Valerie and Enlighten was encapsulated in the 'three Ps': People: good working relationships across stakeholder groups are essential to developing an integrated research management system Processes: developing synergies between the different workflows of the research system and the repository Policies: developing a coherent institutional publications policy and working with funders' policies (eg Wellcome Trust mandate) Where Did It All Go Wrong?
: Confessions of how not to do it and lessons learnt: Jackie Knowles, Project Manager, Welsh Repository Network The final session of the morning was composed from anonymous 'confessions' from the community.
By providing evidence from real-life situations, the aim was to address the issue of 'how not to do it/ pitfalls to avoid' when developing a repository, research management system or CRIS.
An overarching theme was 'they just don't get it', but it was far from clear precisely who and what this referred to; Jackie suggested 'they' and 'it' had, in fact, become less vague throughout the morning sessions with the overall emphasis on the different stakeholder groups and the importance of communication.
The value of training researchers and managers to understand the research lifecycle better, for example, was highlighted; one should not assume that people are already aware of the issues.
Other 'top tips' were to pursue simplicity – avoid reinventing the wheel but also recognise that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the disparate requirements of research management and associated workflows.
It is valuable to map them in some detail and to elucidate where the respective elements fit into the 'bigger picture'.
Detailed user scenarios were cited as a useful way of specifying functionality; what does a user actually require from the system?
The power of statistics as an advocacy tool was emphasised and the importance of advocacy in general.
It was better to launch early rather than trying to perfect the system first, and to spread the word and address non-engagement.
'Lessons learned' again emphasised the importance of communication: one story described how, during the tendering process for a CRIS, repository staff had not been involved and the repository had therefore not been sufficiently prioritised.
As a result, it took 2 years' work subsequently to tailor the systems to work together.
Another interesting point was to avoid making assumptions about other stakeholders' knowledge and perspectives; not everyone will automatically and unreservedly think Open Access is a good thing, for example.
Moreover, there may well be specific barriers associated with the institutional context; an OA mandate, for instance, is powerless without the means to enforce it.
By way of conclusion, Jackie offered generalised personality types that she had encountered in her own work with repositories and that may well have a bearing on developing effective relationships.
These included 'the obstinate preservationists' who manage their own data and see no need to work differently; 'the endless debaters' who like to attend events and engage in discussion around the philosophy of the approach but without actually changing their working practices, and 'the non-communicators' who may be working on similar systems without engaging with related projects already underway elsewhere in the institution or even in the same department.
Café Society Discussions After lunch, four topics were explored in café society discussions with delegates moving between sessions throughout the afternoon; session aims are summarised below and individual facilitators have posted full reports on the WRN blog [14] Topic 1: Drivers: Facilitator: Andy McGregor The session [15] was designed to explore the issues that are driving the development of research management systems, processes and policies in universities.
The range of drivers was examined as well as the ways in which institutions were choosing to address the various issues.
These approaches were used to develop a rough-and-ready action plan for institutions wishing to look at research management.
Topic 2: DIY vs Commercial Solutions: Facilitator: Anna Clements The session [16] explored the pros and cons of either developing a system in-house or implementing a commercial system (or systems).
It also examined the implications of moving from one to the other.
Topic 3: Stakeholder Engagement Facilitator: William Nixon This session [17] asked the question 'Who are the main stakeholders and how do we engage them?'
The focus was on researchers, research office and repository staff – many other stakeholders were also identified including funding bodies, university management, JISC and HEFC.
Topic 4: Data Quality Facilitator: Simon Kerridge This session [18] framed the issue of Data Quality as 'How do we ensure data quality in our systems?
What are the best methods for getting data out of legacy systems?'
Panel Q&A and Concluding Discussions At the end of the afternoon, facilitators fed back from their respective discussions and delegates had an opportunity to raise any final questions.
The session was filmed and along with all presentations from the day can be viewed online [19].
Conclusion Institutions are all different and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
A Russell Group university, for example, will have very different requirements to a Million+ institution, and it is important to focus on precisely what is required from a research management system in your particular context.
Institutions should also, perhaps, take a broader view of their requirements and be circumspect about focusing too closely on one particular driver.
With many institutions, for example, concentrating on the REF, there is a danger of developing systems that are too narrowly focused on the specific requirements of that one exercise.
The availability of human and other resources, in-house expertise and (as illustrated by the contrasting case studies at Glasgow and St Andrews) the existing infrastructure of an institution will all have a huge impact on the most appropriate course of action.
That course of action may include whether existing systems should be developed in-house or tenders submitted for entirely new systems.
If starting with a blank slate, it probably makes sense for a CRIS to be the central system with the repository as a linked peripheral component; but, of course, very few are actually starting from this point and different models can be just as effective.
The over-riding conclusion that was reinforced throughout the day was the need for effective communication channels between research administrators and repository managers in particular, but also among the full range of stakeholders at a given institution.
By working together, the disparate systems of institutional research management infrastructure can become more effectively integrated.
References Welsh Repository Network http://www.wrn.aber.ac.uk/ JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ ARMA http://www.arma.ac.uk/ euroCRIS http://www.eurocris.org/ Why a CRIS?
http://www.wrn.aber.ac.uk/events/cris/presentations/andy_mcgregor.ppt Research Revealed http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/sue2/researchrevealed.aspx Readiness for Ref http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/sue2/r4r.aspx Institutional Repositories, just a bit of a CRIS?
http://www.wrn.aber.ac.uk/events/cris/presentations/simon_kerridge.pptx Electronic Research Administration (ERA) : Commencement, Practice, and Future, John A. Rodman and Brad Stanford, in "Research administration and management" Elliott C. Kulakowski, Lynne U. Chronister (2006), Chapter 30, p. 297.
CERIF http://www.eurocris.org/cerif/introduction/ EXRI-UK http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/448/ The ideal CRIS?
http://coursecast.aber.ac.uk/CourseCast/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=9a976666-5734-4211-997f-e16d016d3b17 Enrich http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/sue2/enrich WRN blog http://welshrepositorynetwork.blogspot.com/ CRIS Event Cafe Society Write up Group 1: Drivers http://welshrepositorynetwork.blogspot.com/2010/05/cris-event-cafe-society-write-up-group.html CRIS Event Cafe Society Write up Group 2: DIY v. Commercial Solutions http://welshrepositorynetwork.blogspot.com/2010/05/cris-event-cafe-society-write-up-group_17.html CRIS Event Cafe Society Write up Group 3: Stakeholder Engagement http://welshrepositorynetwork.blogspot.com/2010/05/cris-event-cafe-society-write-up-group_7100.html CRIS Event Cafe Society Write up Group 4: Data Quality http://welshrepositorynetwork.blogspot.com/2010/05/cris-event-cafe-society-write-up-group_9742.html Presentations and videos http://www.wrn.aber.ac.uk/events/cris/presentations.html Author Details Nick Sheppard Repository Development Officer Leeds Metropolitan University Email: n.e.sheppard@leedsmet.ac.uk Web site: http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/ Return to top Article Title: "Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS" Author: Nick Sheppard Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/wrn-repos-2010-05-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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euroCRIS Membership Meeting, Madrid Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines euroCRIS Membership Meeting, Madrid Buzz data software rdf framework database xml portal infrastructure identifier vocabularies blog repositories preservation visualisation aggregation adobe ontologies lod interoperability research standards cerif bibliometrics Citation BibTex RIS Rosemary Russell and Brigitte Jörg report on the bi-annual euroCRIS membership and Task Groups meetings which took place in Madrid on 5-6 November 2012. euroCRIS membership meetings [1] are held twice a year, providing members and invited participants with updates on strategic and Task Group progress and plans, as well as the opportunity to share experience of Current Research Information System (CRIS)-related developments and seek feedback.
A CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) tutorial is usually included on the first morning for those new to the standard, and the host country reports on local CRIS initiatives in the ‘national’ session.
Members are invited to contribute presentations in the ‘Jostein Hauge’ session (named after the founder of euroCRIS).
For this meeting, there was also a focus on the topic of identifiers, inspired by the ongoing developments surrounding the ORCID initiative and its launch on 17 October 2012. euroCRIS now aims to collocate Task Group meetings with membership meetings, so the second day in Madrid consisted of parallel Task Group sessions, which were open to all interested in the topic.
euroCRIS ‘Business’ Reports This was the last membership meeting to be chaired by Keith Jeffery, stepping down as euroCRIS President after 10 years.
A new board was elected in October 2012, with four new members (two of whom are now UK-based).
Ed Simons will be the new President, with effect from January 2013.
11 different countries are represented on the Board 10 members are European and one is Canadian.
This is therefore likely to be a time of change for euroCRIS.
Fundraising is recognised as a task for the new treasurer, in order to support further activities.
One planned task that can be supported now is a test database to check CERIF compatibility.
Overall euroCRIS membership is growing at an encouraging 15% per year, which was reflected in the Madrid meeting attendance figures: there were 80 registered participants this time, the largest meeting to date.
There are now members in 43 countries, a significant distribution.
Residencia de Estudiantes, historic cultural centre, and location of the euroCRIS meeting CERIF Promotion Strategies: UK ‘an example to follow’ The promotion of CERIF is clearly the most important strategic issue for euroCRIS, in order to increase take-up internationally.
It was particularly interesting that Anne Asserson, outgoing Board member for Strategy/External Relations, highlighted the take-up of CERIF in the UK as a ‘breakthrough’ for the standard.
Its widespread UK implementation is therefore of key strategic importance for euroCRIS.
The key role played by JISC in kick-starting and supporting implementation was cited as an example to follow internationally.
JISC’s funding of lots of small projects is recognised as one of the important factors contributing to the overall big impact.
At euroCRIS meetings other countries have regularly expressed a degree of envy at the support for the innovative CERIF CRIS work that has been available in the UK via the JISC Research Information Management (RIM) programme.
Reflecting the large number of CERIF CRIS UK implementations, the UK has by far the largest number of members in euroCRIS: 25 institutional members (Germany is next with 13).
As a result of the large body of interest, CERIF/CRIS events organised in the UK by the Innovation Support Centre (ISC), UKOLN [2], and the JISC CERIF in Action Project [3] during 2012 have been oversubscribed.
There is a large, active and growing community of users which requires ongoing co-ordination, support and development to capitalise on the significant achievements already realised.
Initiatives and Alliances euroCRIS involvement in three current EU projects (EuroRIs-Net+, OpenAIREPlus and ENGAGE) is a major achievement and very important for recognition of the standard, in addition to the funding aspect.
Conversely, the lack of EU funding for euroCRIS infrastructure is seen as something of a disappointment (comparison was drawn with significant US funding for the VIVO infrastructure).
Keith Jeffery, President of euroCRIS and Alicia Lopez Medina, Executive Director of COAR sign the Memorandum of Understanding Strategic partnerships are also continuing to grow in number: in addition to recent new partners VIVO and the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH), an agreement with COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) was signed during the meeting on 6 November 2012.
This recognised the importance of the join-up between CRIS and repositories.
Joint work is planned between the euroCRIS CRIS-IR Task Group and COAR’s working group on interoperability.
With interest in CERIF CRIS growing at many levels, euroCRIS events are attracting increasing numbers of delegates: CRIS 2012 in Prague this year was the largest conference to date and the annual seminar series in Brussels continues to be successful.
Task Groups Full Task Group reports are available via euroCRIS.
This section presents some highlights only.
Indicators Task Group Launch The new Indicators Task Group was introduced by Keith Jeffery.
The group will take forward a programme of research and generation of best practice (linked with the Best Practice/DRIS TG) in the use of indicators (scientometrics, bibliometrics) for evaluating research.
A likely output is CERIF-compliant software services.
Funding proposals to the EU and other agencies are expected.
Task Group meetings in progress Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS) An application to support a Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS) has been developed by the Best Practice/DRIS Task Group.
It incorporates bits of CERIF behind the scenes.
This is intended as a first ‘basic’ version, which will be extended in future, for example as a Linked Open Data registry.
An automated interface to support easier updating was also suggested.
The DRIS could in future be the basis for a portal to heterogeneous CRIS.
The forms to capture structured information to populate the Directory were demonstrated.
euroCRIS members are being asked to input their own CRIS details as test cases, before it goes live to the wider community.
The Directory will provide a view of the CRIS landscape, and potentially facilitate interoperability.
CERIF Task Group The formal CERIF 1.5 files have been available since July 2012; additional specification and example documents are added continuously.
Those currently in preparation include the new federated identifiers feature (more below), multiple structured person names, and an extensive vocabulary (including contributions from RMAS (UK), CIA (UK), CASRAI (CA), MERIL (EU), VIVO (US)).
Looking towards CERIF 2.0, Task Group work is very likely to extend the description of research data and corresponding vocabularies, as well as vocabularies for research infrastructure.
In parallel, items are continuously discussed with respect to model ‘cleaning’ towards CERIF 2.0.
These include what to do about Dublin Core within the CERIF model and whether the Semantic Layer would be a better location for language, country and currency descriptions.
Another aim is to use a consistent CERIF mapping format (syntax) – see next section.
Meanwhile there are mapping exercises with REF, ROS and Research Fish (GtR) in the UK, ENGAGE EuroRIs-Net+, CASRAI and VIVO.
Linked Open Data The recently established Linked Open Data (LOD) Task Group has initiated a joint euroCRIS / VIVO paper with a first mapping of VIVO and CERIF at the CERIF model level.
In a joint meeting of the CERIF and LOD TGs in Madrid (with the participation of VIVO), a further step was taken towards more formal mapping.
CERIF-LOD are an RDF expression of CERIF.
The more formal mapping is working towards automated transformation scripts between different models, that is, for example, CERIF relational to the VIVO ontology.
The work will be published shortly in the euroCRIS domain.
A first draft of a CERIF expression in RDF has been developed within the EU-funded VOA3R Project.
CERIF Tutorial The recently released CERIF 1.5 was presented in the tutorial.
In a break from tradition, Jan Dvo?ák, CERIF Task Group Deputy Lead replaced Brigitte Jörg, Task Group Leader, who had just flown in from presenting CERIF / euroCRIS at the CODATA conference in Taipei.
Jan covered the CERIF model structure with its different entity types, the Semantic Layer, plus more recent features such as measures and indicators (based on work carried out by the JISC MICE [4] and CERIFy [5] projects, and incorporated into CERIF) and federated identifiers to permit, for example, linkage with other CRIS and non-CRIS systems.
The final slide addressed  ‘what makes CERIF shine’ (examples included: reference rather than copy, versatile semantic layer, time-based relationships).
The 53 slides available from the tutorial reflect Jan’s assertion that the model is ‘not complex but it is large…’ Spanish National Session Pablo de Castro, local organiser of the meeting, firstly presented an overview of the state of the art of CRIS implementation and integration with open access repositories in Spain.
No systems in Spain are currently CERIF-compliant.
Institutions use a wide range of CRIS solutions (mainly developed within Spain).
Much of the activity has been concentrated in Catalonia.
This contrasts with the situation in the Netherlands (where just one system – METIS – is used) and the UK (where most institutions use one of three systems – Pure, CONVERIS or Symplectic Elements); co-ordination is therefore more difficult.
However Pablo and others at the meeting have already initiated discussions on CRIS/IR integration, which are ongoing.
As an illustration, Consol García from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya reported on the successful integration of their CRIS with the institutional repository, with a range of benefits for both the research community (eg visibility, preservation) and the library (increased deposit of documents, new services).
SICA is a centralised CRIS for the region of Andalucia, providing CV services for a large research community, as well as information for research administrators.
SICA also links to Reposit-AN, the Andalucian regional open access repository.
The Andalucia region is a member of COAR.
The CVN (Normalised Curriculum Vitae) Project [6] provided a focus for several of the presentations as well as ensuing discussions on working towards CERIF adoption in Spain.
CVN is managed by FECYT, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (which also supports digital repositories infrastructure).
CVN provides a format to capture standardised CV information in order to exchange data across different research information systems.
Some issues related to the aggregation of data are still being addressed – all items within a CV need a unique identifier.
Work is being carried out on which person identifier to use.
Miguel-Angel Sicilia from the University of Alcalá and Task Group Leader for Linked Open Data presented CVN to CERIF [7].
This is a prototype tool which extracts data from CVN-XML files and stores it in a CERIF-compliant database.
The first prototype has mapped a limited data set to CERIF entities, including person, organisation and project data.
A further facility has also been developed to allow the data to be exposed as Linked Open Data.
The SIGMA Consortium which develops the ARGOS CRIS also presented their approach to moving towards CERIF, via the national CVN standard.
Some initial SIGMA work to compare ARGOS and CVN with the CERIF data model has revealed that mapping to the majority of CERIF entities is possible.
However it was pointed out that one-to-one matches between CVN and CERIF are not possible.
SIGMA also highlighted the fact that only 22% of researchers are currently represented in CVN, although a forthcoming research funding requirement means that there should in theory be 100% coverage in future.
Netherlands Research Landscape Visualisations Some very striking visualisations of the Dutch research landscape were presented by Elly Dijk from DANS (see below).
NARCIS [8] is a national portal providing access to information about researchers and their work, including ‘enhanced publications’.
The aim of the project was to visualise the data in NARCIS in order to provide a useful overview of the contents.
Resources used to develop the visualisations included NARCIS data (researchers, institutions, classification trees), the Science of Science (Sci2) tool for data analysis and layout, Gephi for node and edge rendering and Adobe Illustrator for the final design.
Central visualisation: Network of 8,156 professors in 14 universities by co-affiliation New RIM Initiatives in Germany In Germany a Research Information Systems working group (AG FIS) has just been set up within DINI, the German Initiative for Network Information [9].
It will work in co-operation with euroCRIS.
Barbara Ebert (Leuphana University and euroCRIS board member) is co-speaker for the group.
It resulted from a DINI workshop held in November 2011 which has kick-started a number of research information management initiatives in Germany.
These initiatives recognised the need to support the increasing numbers of CRIS and CRIS-like implementations and to liaise with European activities to standardise and exchange data (euroCRIS, OpenAIRE, etc).
The group’s aims therefore include making recommendations and promoting best practice for CRIS systems in universities and research institutions.
UK RIM activities were presented to the DINI working group during their foundation meeting and also at the workshop in November 2011.
The first workshop to be organised by the group will address standards and exchange formats for research information and will be held in January 2013 in Bielefeld [10].
In response to these combined initiatives, it is notable that between March and November 2012 the number of German institutions with membership of euroCRIS jumped from 10 to 15.
CINECA and CERIF in Italy Three Italian research organisations have recently been merged into CINECA [11].
Planning to implement CERIF using open source software is already underway in the new organisation.
It is envisaged that this will bring 100 Italian research institutions into euroCRIS.
Identifiers Session CERIF Federated Identifier A special topic session on identifiers was held on the first day, a subject which continues to challenge many communities.
Brigitte Jörg explained how the CERIF 1.5 model supports the incorporation and maintenance of persistent identifiers.
The latest release includes a new ‘federated identifier’ entity, which allows linkage to external records or systems.
In fact this enables the opening up of CRIS systems, that is, the formal interconnection of a CRIS record with an outside record.
For example, in a CRIS system, a person can maintain multiple IDs (eg an ORCID, DAI, ResearcherID, Staff-ID, etc) [12].
These identifier types are managed through the CERIF vocabulary (where UUIDs are recommended) and are provided with defined vocabulary terms.
The Dialnet portal to Spanish journals is not CERIF-compliant, but offers author disambiguation and claims to be ‘the largest and more exhaustive Spanish researchers database identified by a persistent id’.
ORCID Launched and In Use As a member of the ORCID [13] Outreach Working Group, Consol García presented the ORCID service in the light of its recent launch in October.
ORCID provides a ‘registry of persistent unique identifiers for researchers and scholars and automating linkages to research objects such as publications, grants, and patents’.
A key aim is to support researcher disambiguation (probably by next year), although the first priority is to build the community.
Anyone can create an ORCID record free of charge, link the ID to other identifier schemes and enhance it with information on research activities.
Institutions can opt to pay a fee and join as members, which allows them to create ORCIDs on behalf of employees, although the ID does not become public until it is endorsed by the researcher.
Two weeks after the launch there were 8,395 registered users; at the time of writing one month post-launch, over 20,000 ORCID IDs have been issued.
AVEDAS, Elsevier and Symplectic all participated in the Launch Partners programme; only one university was a partner (Boston) although other universities have been involved, as well as the JISC Names Project [14].
Pablo de Castro suggested that institutions with a CRIS are in a better position to implement ORCID, especially if it is CERIF-based.
Institutional repositories could be an alternative for ORCID implementation if there is no CRIS.
Snowball Metrics: Recipe Book Launched Snowball Metrics [15] originated in a JISC-funded research information management study carried out by Imperial College and Elsevier.
Key drivers included frustration with the available tools and lack of standard metrics.
There was clear recognition of need for an agreed set of metrics across all research organisations that was suitable for institutions and not imposed.
Eight UK universities worked with Elsevier to reach consensus on a set of metrics.
Elsevier played a supporting role, including feasibility testing; the metrics are owned by the institutions and the framework can be adopted by any other organisation.
Hard copies of the new ‘Recipe Book’ (also available online) were distributed at the meeting.
Development of CERIF compliance is underway; an accompanying set of vocabularies will also need to be developed.
Other standards could also be incorporated; the longer-term vision is for Snowball Metrics to be global.
It is acknowledged that sensitivity of data is a big issue.
Feedback on any aspect of the metrics is currently being sought.
CERIF Support Project: New Blog The CERIF Support blog [16] has been set up to support CERIF activities in the UK and beyond.
The aim is to have short, regular posts that contribute to the understanding of CERIF, providing a variety of perspectives.
They can then be used for guidance and as a form of reference, and will, it is hoped, contribute to consistency with implementation.
There will also be invited guest posts to extend the reach of the blog a little further, so stay tuned.
Conclusion The Madrid meeting saw the launch of several new initiatives, adding to the already numerous activities and further broadening the CERIF CRIS community.
The influence of the UK JISC RIM projects on raising the CERIF CRIS profile and increasing interest and uptake beyond the UK was highlighted several times during the meeting.
This momentum should be harnessed and supported.
The number of new euroCRIS strategic and working partnerships being set up within Europe and beyond is encouraging.
euroCRIS and CERIF have grown hugely in the last ten years and look set to continue.
The next membership meeting will be held on 13-14 May 2013 at Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in Bonn, Germany.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank Dr Barbara Ebert of Leuphana Universität Lüneburg for her kind permission to reuse some of her photos of the event.
References euroCRIS membership meetings http://www.eurocris.org/Index.php?page=members_meetings&t=1 Rosemary Russell.
"JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop".
July 2012, Ariadne Issue 69 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue69/jisc-rim-cerif-rpt CIA London workshop, 19 October 2012 http://cerifinaction.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/cia-london-workshop-take-home-messages/ MICE: Measuring Impact under CERIF http://mice.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/ CERIFy http://cerify.ukoln.ac.uk/ CVN Project https://cvn.fecyt.es/ CVN to CERIF https://github.com/ieru/cvn2cerif NARCIS http://www.narcis.nl/ Research Information Systems Working Group (AG FIS)  http://www.dini.de/ag/fis/ Standards und Harmonisierungsansätze für die Forschungsberichterstattung, Bielefeld, 2123 January 2013 http://www.dini.de/veranstaltungen/workshops/fisberichte/programm/ CINECA http://www.cineca.it/ B. Jörg, T. Höllrigl, M.A.
Sicilia, “Entities and Identities in Research Information Systems” In Proceedings: CRIS 2012  http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/17176       ORCID http://about.orcid.org/ JISC Names Project http://names.mimas.ac.uk/ Snowball Metrics http://www.snowballmetrics.com/ The CERIF Support blog http://www.cerifsupport.org Author Details Rosemary Russell Research Officer Innovation Support Centre UKOLN University of Bath Email: r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/ Rosemary Russell is a Research Officer within the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN.
Her current work focuses on Research Information Management (RIM) and the provision of support, advice, synthesis and evaluation for the JISC RIM programme.
Rosemary participates in euroCRIS activities and is a member of the Best Practice Task Group.
She also has an interest in institutional repository management and the integration of repositories and CRIS.
Brigitte Jörg CERIF Support Project National Co-ordinator Innovation Support Centre UKOLN University of Bath Email: b.joerg@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/work/csp Brigitte Jörg fulfils the role of CERIF National Co-ordinator with the JISC Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN.
Her current work focuses on co-ordination and support of ongoing Research Information Management (RIM) activity.
Since 2005, Brigitte has been a member of the euroCRIS Board and leads the CERIF task group.
She is interested in developing international relationships and joint initiatives.
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Book Review: The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping Buzz framework wiki dissemination archives metadata digitisation vocabularies blog flickr preservation cataloguing provenance personalisation youtube facebook twitter research semiotic Citation BibTex RIS John Azzolini reviews an anthology of perceptive essays on the challenges presented to archival thought and practice by Web 2.0, postmodern perspectives, and cross-disciplinary interchanges.
Librarians, archivists, and records managers do not share identical challenges or controversies in their practical endeavours or theoretical queries.
However, a common issue for all the information professions and a dominating topic of discussion in their literature is the fundamental change in the structure and distribution of knowledge caused by mass digitisation.
The proliferation of daily digital content, in quantity, reach, and manifestation, is confronting them all with a disquieting role ambiguity.
The expanding tools and expectations of Web 2.0 have made this self-questioning a recurrent one, but they have also stimulated invigorating debate on the purpose and direction of these fields.
The perception is one of extraordinary change initiated by emerging technologies, unprecedented knowledge production and dissemination, and a new centralised role for the information user.
In these galvanising changes leading library and archives practitioners are sensing opportunities for confirming the professions’ relevance, in the estimation of other scholarly disciplines and of society at large, but, perhaps most of all, in their own eyes as well.
The diverse ramifications of Web-based communications for the archival perspective are a pivotal narrative underlying most of the essays in The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping: A Reader.
But, as this compilation’s contributors make clear, the archives profession is coming to terms with several transformations, only one of which is technological.
The book is divided into four thematic sections, each of which highlights a change-driven contention in which the discipline is engaged.
In addition to the Web 2.0 juggernaut, the chapters explore the elemental provocations of: post-modern thought; the spreading interest in archives and archival thinking among other disciplines and by the public; and the archival profession’s critical exchanges with other fields, such as history, literary theory, and knowledge management.
Together, they offer a glimpse into the field’s critical self-assessment of its conceptual and political presumptions, its societal role, and its future potential as a domain of viable knowledge.
Contents Chapter 1, 'Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we going?
Situating the Archive and Archivists', by Victoria Lane and the book’s editor, Jennie Hill, calls attention to several of the profession’s vexing issues by setting Hilary Jenkinson’s highly influential perspective as a theoretical baseline.
The authors see Jenkinson’s canonical work, A Manual of Archive Administration, as establishing a positivistic ideal, which fixes the genuine archivist as 'unobtrusive, passive, invisible, disinterested, neutral, tacit, objective and innocent' (p. 4).
Lane and Hill broach the social trends and evolving disciplinary thinking that cast powerful doubts on the notion of the archivist as impartial custodian.
These include the post-modern scepticism toward fixed meaning and singular truths, the role of the archivist as active creator of archival artefacts, the records continuum model, and the impact of cyberspace on the notion of context.
However, in acknowledging the perseverance of Jenkinson’s approach in the writings of thought leaders such as Luciana Duranti (a contributor to this book), Lane and Hill fairly portray an archival field alive with healthy dissension and debate.
In Chapter 2, 'Encounters with the Self: Archives and Research', Sue Breakell discusses the increasing popularity of the idea of the archive in mainstream culture together with the move of the everyday user into prominence as both creator and researcher.
This focus on the needs and desires of 'the people' reflects the recent growth of public interest in history and genealogy as well as the Internet environment’s expectation of personalised user-driven content.
Breakell nicely conveys the very real effects of the shifting interpretations of archival objects through intertextuality with other cultural objects and the engagement of subjective understanding, whether this comes from the archivist, the researcher, or the casual visitor.
She makes a solid argument for the profession’s recognition of and creative responsiveness to this personalisation of the archival experience.
The cross-disciplinary use of archival perspectives is the topic of Chapter 3, Alexandrina Buchanan’s 'Strangely Unfamiliar: Ideas of the Archive from Outside the Discipline'.
The author looks specifically at the interdisciplinary attempts by history, art, and literary studies.
She considers the various narratives and anecdotes these other fields have critically borrowed from archival thought, arguing how these 'turns' have revealed both the theoretical weaknesses and possibilities of archival paradigms.
Buchanan’s conclusion is to reaffirm the profession’s disciplinary self-direction while remaining generous and open to other knowledge fields: 'Far from being a storehouse, plundered by other disciplines, the archive is, or could be, the shared territory in which scholars make encounters, across which bridges can be built to mutual benefit' (p. 55).
Appraisal, the central practice of determining value for the sake of archival inclusion and retention, is understood by Luciana Duranti to necessitate a scientific analysis, one that accords a vital place to rigorous empirical methodology.
In Chapter 4, 'Structural and Formal Analysis: The Contribution of Diplomatics to Archival Appraisal in the Digital Environment', she affirms the functional and organic nature of records.
Records exist in a definite structural context, usually an administrative hierarchy which grounds the formal relationships embedded in it.
Duranti introduces the reader to diplomatics, 'a science for the purpose of determining the authenticity of records of unproven origin' (p. 71).
She sets out to demonstrate the applicability of diplomatics to the study of the digital record and the design of resilient recordkeeping systems.
In a rather dry prose, she surveys the formal requirements of digital records per se as well as the manifestations of a record’s authenticity and integrity.
Despite its unadorned textbook descriptions of such concepts as stored and manifested records, static and dynamic entities, and identity and integrity metadata, this chapter stands out as a strong defence of adopting a systematic context-based approach to description and appraisal.
Duranti underscores the empirical necessity of ascertaining common provenance and therefore archival value.
As such, she submits a worthy counterpoint to most of the other contributors in this book, who decidedly embrace the fundamental doubts and potential for ground-shifting re-conceptualisation ushered in by post-modern perspectives.
In Chapter 5, 'Archivistics: Science or Art?'
Eric Ketelaar devotes a short piece to the field’s image of its status as a separate scientific branch of study in possession of its own body of functional methods and logical classification schemes.
He discusses the early yet continuing influence of the writings of Hilary Jenkinson, T.R.
Schellenberg, and of the Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, published by the Dutch Society of Archivists in 1898.
While this chapter might be of interest mainly to archivists with a keen eye on their profession’s historical self-perception, it reasonably stresses the need for the simultaneous and mutually beneficial workings of cross-disciplinary inventiveness and traditional theory-driven frameworks if the archival field is to avoid obsolescence in a rapidly changing world.
The inescapable presence of political motivations and relations of power in the archive’s creation and content-building is the subject of Chapter 6, 'Archons, Aliens and Angels: Power and Politics in the Archive', by Verne Harris.
This contribution is the book’s most dramatic example of the field’s advocacy of post-modern notions of truth and meaning.
As such, it evinces both the strengths and drawbacks of such a leaning.
On the one hand, it rightfully draws attention to the often neglected or wilfully ignored realities of politically contested interpretations of cultural objects.
Especially consequential is the privileged power of those who control information and the classification systems used to implement it.
On the other hand, the post-modern view can exaggerate, almost giddily, the instantiations of political power.
If all social interaction and cultural production are manifestations of this power, then simply declaring a situation a product of unequal power relations does not really explain anything.
Harris does an excellent job of reminding us that the archive is a natural site of contestable meaning, that 'The call is to dirty one’s hands in the mess of the political, reaching always for a politics which is just' (p. 112).
However, he also tends to veer into theoretical overstatement, as in ‘.. “the archive” is to be found whenever and wherever information is marked, or recorded, on a substrate through human agency..' (p. 105) and metaphorical indulgence, as for example, in his assertion that the archive '…sounds at every level of our being, speaks to and of every persona and every identity we adopt…We play in it and with it' (p 118).
Perhaps these heady assertions should come as no surprise issuing from someone who ‘work[s] within an unashamedly deconstructive framework' (p. 121) and who is heavily involved in the South African archival field, a country where past disparities carry incomparably heavy layers of power implications for the future.
Particularly thought-provoking is Harris’s observations on six 'sites of recordmaking' – the government correspondence file, the state-sponsored truth commission, the oral record of a small collectivity, the family archive, the marking of ‘private parts’, and the psychotherapist’s consulting room (p. 112-117).
Here, the author accentuates the inherently political nature of these public and private domains by posing several questions to each regarding very basic decisions of inclusion, content, policy, and access.
Each of these questions, outwardly simple and of an everyday nature, nevertheless, 'suggests, invites, or demands, the adjective “political”.
Each question provokes a play of what is right, what is possible, and what is supported, or supportable' (p. 117).
The impact of Web 2.0 on archival practice and attitudes is given full treatment in Chapter 7, 'Interactivity, Flexibility and Transparency: Social Media and Archives 2.0.'
Kate Theimer begins with a description of the technical and interactional hallmarks of an Internet understood to be so different from earlier versions in its functionality that it was given a next-level designation.
She then covers several of the productive uses of 2.0 social networking tools, as individuals and institutions have successfully used programs such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and wikis for the mass dissemination of archival content.
Theimer believes this move towards user-centred interactivity, flexibility, and transparency is a positive trend, indicative of a more democratic, collaborative relationship with the public.
Allowing significantly more user input expands archival collections and broadens contextual comprehension.
As a result, '…the archives can create a public with greater understanding and emotional connection to the archival mission' (p. 141).
As the author of the blog, ArchivesNext [1], and the Archives 2.0 wiki [2], Theimer writes convincingly from an optimistic, practice-informed stance on the potential of social networking instruments.
The implications of local, non-professional collections for the established archival field are addressed in Chapter 8, Andrew Flinn’s 'The Impact of Independent and Community Archives on Professional Archival Thinking and Practice'.
As the straightforward title indicates, the increase in the quantity and perceived legitimacy of community-based archives has prompted debate among archivists as to the legitimate boundaries of their profession.
Examining the definitions, scope, and history of independent archives leads Flinn to such probing questions as: What is an archive, Where is an archive kept, and Who looks after the archive.
He concludes that: A document or object has archival status whenever someone (be it an individual, a community or an employee of a national archives) gives it that status on the basis of whatever value (evidential, informational, legal, cultural, personal) that individual, group or institution deems significant or valid' (p. 164).
This fine chapter reaffirms the call for a more transparent and beneficent relationship between the professional archive and its community counterpart, whether this be a local history group, an ethnic heritage library, or a regional working-class documentation project.
It stakes out a more dedicated place for creator-based control and the assignment of significance in the advancement of archival thought and practice.
In Chapter 9, Adrian Cunningham scrutinises the idea of 'The Postcustodial Archive.'
He takes as his departure point an address given 30 years ago by F. Gerald Ham, then the State Archivist of Wisconsin.
Ham referred to the need for the profession to mobilise for a 'postcustodial era' on both the theoretical and practical fronts.
He urged a necessary recognition of the growing complexity and decentralisation of 'the archive', which entails moving beyond an archive identified chiefly as a place of physical deposit.
Cunningham surveys the field’s evolving constructions of archival custody, particularly in light of ever-increasing electronic records and expectations of 24/7 virtual access by all types of users.
He declares that the post-custodial approach is now the normal state of affairs and not simply a choice of method.
Among its beneficial yields are an authentic and persistent linkage of records to their societal contexts in preference to an unthinking adherence to original order, a strong valuation placed on the distributed custodial programmes of community and grassroots archives, and the admission that archivists are proactive records makers rather than merely handlers.
In 'Information Management, Records Management, Knowledge Management: The Place of Archives in a Digital Age' (Chapter 10), Nicole Convery looks at the substantial transformations brought by digital culture on information consumption and preservation.
Although this section’s themes closely track those of preceding chapters, the author contributes a distinct vantage by comparing and contrasting the digital challenges faced by archives with those of related information professions.
All these professionals are wrestling with across-the-board user engagement, the spreading power of social media, and the inflation of contextualised information.
However, Convery focuses on the varied challenges they face in their organisational environments.
Business goals (i.e., profit-making) and corporate governance imperatives (such as risk management) frequently result in very different determinations of the value of these professions to their employers.
Archivists in particular have to be aware of how they are perceived; for their commonly held image as lacking in quantitative benefits can ultimately have negative consequences for the preservation of social memory, not to mention the devaluation of their profession by those who control powerful resources.
The author speaks incisively to the information professions (if not to business managers) when she articulates the need for their specialist borders to be opened for the sake of a more unified field.
There must be an acknowledgment of the 'information management continuum', a fruitful recognition that 'Records and knowledge managers as well as archivists and librarians all essentially manage information in its various guises based on very similar methodologies' (p. 207).
Richard Cox situates appraisal, 'the central and most important archival function' (p. 213) in the context of the digital technologies that are transforming so much of his profession.
In Chapter 11, ‘Appraisal and the Future of Archives in the Digital Era,’ he sees generational and status issues as interacting with the new information technologies to create a precarious state of affairs, above all, a detrimental hesitation on the part of older practitioners to adapt to digitisation’s emerging roles and  expectations.
Appraisal, the determination of long-term research value that warrants inclusion in the archive, will have to be thought and done much differently in this 'digital documentary universe.'
One major difference is the acceptance of appraisal as a continuous process that incorporates iterative re-appraisal and a sincere respect for accountability by the appraisers.
It is also crucial for archivists to disabuse themselves of the belief that everything in this digital age can be preserved.
Cox is in firm agreement with this book’s other contributors when he admits that the new generation of archivists (digital natives, all) 'will be more documentary shapers than documentary custodians, more digital forensic experts than documentary describers, and more archival activists than passive reference gatekeepers' (p. 231).
Interestingly, he feels the emergence of the Information School (I-School) model among library studies programmes offers distinct opportunities for broad, innovative learning for next-generation archivists to meet the challenges ahead.
Conclusion As its subtitle makes clear, The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping is intended as a reader; one for postgraduate archival students specifically, as the editors state in the introduction.
However, the editors also point to its interest level being apparent for anyone seeking a grasp of the profession’s thematic debates and pressing issues.
With that opinion I wholeheartedly concur.
This compilation is an outstanding introduction to contemporary archival controversies.
Clearly written yet far from an oversimplified presentation of ideas, this book spurred me to read further by tracking down several of its cited references for further engagement as well as googling phrases such as 'archival theory' in the title segment of Web pages.
While not written as a guide, it provides a good deal of guiding insights into the current positions of meaningful vocabularies, abiding oppositions, and underlying principles.
As a librarian who previously had no interest in the theoretical anxieties and practical struggles of archivists, I found myself pleasantly surprised to discover that many of the challenges of archival work are shared by librarianship.
They include the centralisation of the Web 2.0 user in the creation and manipulation of digital information and the attendant need to consider such users’ increasing expectations and expertise in shaping the discipline’s prospects.
In both fields these trends implicate a reconfiguration of professional identity and purpose.
And like many learned examples by librarians, The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping furnishes an optimistic standpoint on the future, backed by well-grounded theory and discerning observations from day-to-day practice.
It foregrounds much unsettling change while also taking a reasoned grasp of it.
For a librarian, one striking characteristic of the archival encounter with knowledge formation is its earnest contemplation of post-modern perspectives on the effects of power, subjectivity, and political identity on official and unofficial interpretations.
Whether the individual approach is labelled as deconstructionism, post-structuralism, or semiotics, many leading archivists take the contingent nature of truth claims and the fluid mediation of socio-political contexts to heart.
Perhaps this reflects the high stakes inherent in the notion of 'the archive', an idea and a place representing such ideologically and emotionally loaded conceptions as national heritage, cultural identity, and family history.
Other information professions, like librarianship and knowledge management, appear comparatively free to carry on organising and indexing without these politically fraught parameters.
I cannot speak for practising archivists, but I strongly recommend The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping as an enriching read for librarians of all types.
It sheds much light on the common goals and dilemmas faced by all information professions while also introducing non-archivists to issues of knowledge and culture that are too important not to be conscientiously analysed.
References ArchivesNext: well, what will come next?
http://www.archivesnext.com/ Archives 2.0 http://archives2point0.wetpaint.com/ Author Details John Azzolini Reference Librarian Clifford Chance US LLP New York Email: john.azzolini@cliffordchance.com John Azzolini has been working in private law firm libraries in New York City for over ten years.
He began in technical services and cataloguing but later realised that the challenges of reference were too tempting to pass up.
John is always interested in discovering new legal research content and methods as well as in the continuing possibilities of digital libraries.
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Open Repositories 2009 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Open Repositories 2009 Buzz data software rdf api html dissemination xml atom archives zip metadata digitisation standardisation blog repositories eprints copyright flickr oai-pmh jpeg aggregation adobe ontologies mets dspace facebook twitter interoperability oai-ore url research Citation BibTex RIS Adrian Stevenson reports on the four-day annual Open Repositories conference held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA, USA over 18 21 May 2009.
I recently attended the annual Open Repositories 2009 Conference [1] in Atlanta, Georgia which hosted 326 delegates from 23 countries.
For myself, as the SWORD [2] Project Manager, the event proved to be very worthwhile.
My colleague Julie Allinson and I were both able to give a plenary presentation on the first day and a half-day workshop on the final day.
Much of the conference addressed developments surrounding the Fedora, DSpace and EPrints systems that have occurred over the last year.
There was also a number of presentations and discussions in respect of the new strategic partnership between the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons, including much mention of the new DuraSpace Project [3], a joint endeavour to provide a Web-based service for storing digital content in the cloud.
Microsoft was much in evidence at the event as well, launching its new Zentity repository system as well as demonstrating and presenting its range of scholarly tools [4].
The Cutting Edge of SWORD Adrian Stevenson, UKOLN and Julie Allinson, University of York Julie began by giving some background to the SWORD2 Project; she explained that SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) is concerned with lowering the barriers to deposit and that before SWORD, there was no accepted, standardised means to deposit into repositories.
The project team decided that the development of a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol [5] was the best fit to meet the use cases and requirements.
SWORD facilitates remote deposit of items into a repository.
This could be from a user's desktop, for instance from word-processing applications.
It can also facilitate multiple deposit, for example to a funder's repository, a national subject-based repository or an institutional repository, in one click.
The SWORD profile provides extensions and constraints to the Atom Publishing Protocol to meet the needs of the repository community, in particular addressing requirements such as package deposit and mediated deposit, i.e.
deposit on behalf of another.
The project has developed and provided demonstrator repository installations of Fedora, DSpace, EPrints and Intralibrary which any user can access to test SWORD deposit.
The project has also provided a number of demonstrator deposit clients that can be used with the demo repositories or any other SWORD-enabled repositories to test SWORD implementations.
I then gave a live demonstration of a number of deposit clients that the SWORD2 Project has developed including a Web page-based client and a Facebook client.
The presentation was well received judging by the number of questions, feedback direct to us after the talk and via some positive comments over Twitter [6].
Georgia Tech campus Connecting Authors and Repositories through SWORD Pablo Fernicola, Microsoft Scholarly Communications We were followed by Pablo Fernicola from Microsoft.
Pablo talked about and demonstrated the 'Authoring Add-in for Word 2007' [7] that Microsoft has developed which incorporates SWORD and which means it's now possible for authors to deposit articles directly from Word.
The SWORD-related information is incorporated into template files, so all the author has to do is click a button.
Moreover, through the add-in, author metadata can be gathered in a largely automated fashion, reducing duplication in data entry and author irritation.
I think it's fair to say that SWORD was a very popular topic throughout the conference, getting numerous name checks in presentations.
Pablo as well as Alex Wade and Lee Dirks, also of Microsoft, have been doing a great job of marketing SWORD in their presentations about the Word Authoring Add-in and the new SWORD-enabled Zentity repository system [8] that was officially launched at the event.
Strategies for Innovation and Sustainability: Insights from Leaders of Open Source Repository Organisations DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Michele Kimpton, DSpace Foundation and Sandy Payette, Fedora Commons Sandy and Michele talked about the new Duraspace initiative and how it is relevant to the broader issue of sustainability.
There was talk about how Duraspace can add value to the general strategy of being mission driven.
A key goal of Duraspace is to support the two communities and seek synergies to achieve a critical mass for innovation.
The benefits of this approach are efficiency and widening access to funding opportunities, partly by reducing the amount of competition.
There was acknowledgement that there is some degree of risk of over-committing given the limited resources available.
Eprints Les Carr, University of Southampton Les began with a fairly detailed history of Eprints [9] in order to provide some historical context to the issue of sustainability.
According to Les, the bottom line was that sustainability came down to funding in the case of Eprints.
Resources were needed for innovation, and were typically being provided by funding bodies such as JISC [10] as well as some commercial customers.
The main resources doing the innovation in this instance were the existing Eprints team.
Les saw the benefit of the Eprints approach as one of achieving coherent developments with effective innovation, whilst striking a good balance of providing many free as well as some paying services.
Some disadvantages were low commitment from platform adopters, little inter-adopter contact and reduced visibility in the wider community.
The Microsoft Business Model Lee Dirks, Microsoft Research Lee explained some of the thinking behind the current Microsoft business model.
The idea centred on the transformation of scholarly communication, with the salient points being that interoperability was essential, and that using community standards such as SWORD was 'a must'.
He also drew attention to the launch of the new Microsoft Research-Outputs Repository system, Zentity v1.0.
Lee stated that the Microsoft Scholarly Research Group is not actually a new product group, rather one that is now taking an 'open-edge' approach, with Zentity representing one component of wider efforts to participate in the scholarly lifecycle.
Keynote Address: Locks and Gears: Digital Repositories and the Digital Commons John Wilbank, Vice-President of Science at Creative Commons John Wilbanks was next up, repeating the frequently cited idea that mandates are necessary to solve the deposit motivation problem.
In time there would be need for fewer sticks such as these, as the benefits of repositories become more evident.
He highlighted issues such as one mentioned in the 'Caveat Lector' blog [11], that it took an hour to change a link in DSPace.
Clearly this is a problem.
He also mentioned that there has still not been enough digitisation of materials.
Talking about the Web, he noted that it gives us the ability to move knowledge around, and that the existing scenario of articles and citations by contrast are a 'tin can' network, by which he meant by it is a relatively poor and inefficient system for information sharing in comparison..
He highlighted the OAI-ORE specification [12] as something that promises to take us from the tin can to the Internet.
A key aspect of the take-up of the Web related to the ability to make and pass round copies of resources.
The old way was to make Web pages by copying the HTML and then editing the content.
The content of the these web pages was out of copyright of course, but this was the way information was shared.
John went on to say that as useful as the Web has been for sharing data, it needed an upgrade.
This upgrade to the Web is the Semantic Web [13] that allows computers to be able to understand things.
We also have to teach the Web how different words can mean the same thing using ontologies.
He mentioned that you can the use same method of copying code and changing a few details to apply to other subject areas, a bit like the old days of HTML.
John made a stand against the creation of further standards.
The 5% potential advantage they might represent was just not worth the effort in the long run.
We should collaborate, not compete, and he cited Duraspace as a good example of such an approach.
Naming, Branding and Promoting the Institutional Repository: A Social Marketing Approach from the Canadian Perspective Wayne Johnston, University of Guelph Library Wayne explained how social marketing uses a commercial marketing approach that is customer-oriented, insight-driven, and theory and exchange-based.
He outlined the 'four Ps': the product; the price; the place, i.e.
the how and where, or the convenience factor, and; the promotion, i.e.
what to say and which channel to use.
An example given was a naming contest as a possible way to develop a brand name.
It is a way to engage the target audience, although the resulting name may not be suitable, and it can be very time consuming.
There is also the think-tank approach with people who have a vested interest.
Any name needs to be tested to check what comes to mind and whether it is memorable.
He mentioned that some naming firms charged as much as $75,000 for a name which indicated how important it was considered to be.
Wayne then went on to talk about branding.
A brand was important as it captured and carried a complex message in simple form and could assume a life of its own.
Secrets of Success: Identifying Success Factors in Institutional Repositories Elizabeth Yakel, University of Michigan Elizabeth outlined some case studies which illustrated that institutional repositories tended to be successful when they achieved broad and voluntary participation.
It was important for sustainability that the repository be absorbed into the larger institutional planning although in reality this very rarely happened.
We needed to take a longer view to assess impact as institutional repositories were still quite new.
The case studies were developed by holding on-site interviews.
The impact areas considered were the content and the technology such as building technical competence and experience with new and different technologies.
The role of the library was considered, given that institutional repositories had brought the role of the library into focus.
The importance of the longer-term view was stressed along with the proposition that we will look back in five years and be surprised at the impact.
Adding OAI-ORE Support to Repository Platforms Alexey Maslov, Texas Digital Library Alexey reported on the Texas Digital Library's experiences of adding harvesting support to their DSpace repository using both OAI-PMH [14] and the OAI-ORE specification.
He commented that, although OAI-PMH was useful, it had no dissemination facility.
A possible solution was to use packaging formats to disseminate over OAI-PMH and then unpack, but this approach was subject to erroneous interpretation and ambiguities at the PMH layer.
OAI-ORE however was both specialised for the purpose and simple.
There were three aspects to mapping DSpace to ORE: aggregations, resources and resource maps (ReMs) [15].
These three aspects were mapped onto the DSpace software model, thereby establishing a mapping between the ORE data model and their own data model.
They used DSpace 'bundles' for storage and went with the Atom XML for the ORE serialisation [16].
Crosswalks were implemented from ORE ReMs to DSpace items and the harvester was implemented at DSpace collection level.
The implementation allowed harvesting of the metadata and the file bitstreams if the harvester supported ORE, or it was possible to harvest just the metadata.
The result was that harvesting had been achieved using both OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE.
Promoting Your Research with Citeline: An Advanced Bibliographic Citation Publishing Service Sean Thomas, MIT Sean initially described the problematic aspects of promoting research.
Currently there was no centralised citation process.
It was disorganised and bitty, and lacked standardisation.
For example, dates varied, and widely differing citation styles were used.
This made things difficult for users.
Neither were page headers and HTML used consistently.
In addition, there were multiple exposure channels with publication lists sprinkled amongst many sites.
Many were not timely or persistent and had out of date pages and broken links.
There were many inefficiencies and consequently the resources could not be described as very useful.
Citeline [17] aimed to provide a centralised service for citation data publishing.
It removed technical barriers and provided an out-of-the-box presentation.
Citeline offered rich features and simple workflows, supporting once-only updating, and with the information then being re-purposed onto any number of different Web sites.
Citeline also allowed data export to other systems employing semantic Web technologies, such as RDF/XML, by using the SIMILE toolkit [18].
Sean then demoed the Citeline.
It looked impressive and seemed quick as well.
SWORD Futures Workshop SWORD Futures Workshop Julie Allinson, University of York and Adrian Stevenson, UKOLN On the final day Julie Allinson and I led the half-day SWORD Futures workshop.
We were delighted to see a packed house for the show-and-tell section.
Pablo Fernicola from Microsoft talked about their use of SWORD.
Authors could deposit through Office with a simple one-click interaction with repositories from software that was, for many disciplines, the main authoring tool.
Currently, all of the SWORD demonstration repositories [19] work with the Word Authoring plug-in.
Simeon Warner from arXiv talked about their SWORD implementation into arXiv by Thorsten Schwander [20].
In particular Simeon talked through their workflow for 'replace', which has extended SWORD in a purely ATOMPUB way by using PUT to the edit url specified in the ATOM response document.
Julian Cheal of UKOLN demonstrated a prototype desktop repository uploader tool built using Adobe Air [21].
The tool used the Sherpa Romeo API [22] for journal/publisher information and drew upon data from the JISC-funded NAMES Project [23] for author names.
It worked in a similar way to the Flickr uploader tool and had the potential to be used as a batch uploader tool for repository managers and administrators.
Glen Robson from the National Library of Wales then talked through the SWORD Fedora 3 plug-in.
It worked using a configuration file and a set of file handlers that were passed the content type and mime type.
Currently there were four file handlers, for jpeg images (ties to in-built Fedora disseminators), for zip files (unpacks and stores as separate datastreams), METS (retrieves contents) and anything else (simple stores).
The second part of the workshop went into the finer detail of SWORD implementation including discussions on some ongoing issues concerning matters such as packaging and HTTP headers.
It was certainly a useful session for the SWORD Project, not only to note further requirements but also to get to meet a number of SWORD implementers face to face.
Poster Session The poster session 'minute madness' was entertaining with all the speakers explaining their poster to a time-bomb animation backdrop.
Mahendra Mahey of UKOLN and John Robertson from CETIS hosted the poster for the UKOLN/CETIS Repositories Research Team contribution.
I wasn't involved directly, but it was clear they had a fair bit of interest.
I noticed that both the Duraspace and Fedora Twitter feeds gave the poster a mention.
Repo Challenge The RepoChallenge event sponsored by JISC and Microsoft also attracted a lot of interest.
The winner was MentionIt by Tim Donohue of the University of Illinois, with a notable runner-up of FedoraFS by Rebecca Koesar of Emory [24].
The announcement and prize-giving was held at the end of the conference dinner at the Georgia Aquarium.
Conclusion This was my first Open Repositories and I found it a really useful event in a number of ways.
My work on the SWORD Project is clearly heavily focused on the repository community, so it was extremely useful to get a chance to put the message across to such a focused and receptive audience.
It was also gratifying and very useful to see how well SWORD has already been adopted and how much of a talking point it appeared to be in this community at the moment.
As John Robertson noted on his blog post [25], SWORD really was everywhere this year.
The event was also an efficient opportunity to meet many members of the repository community face to face, whether they had a specific interest in SWORD or not.
It was clear from many of the talks that there's still a way to go on the repositories road, and recent global events may even have played in part in hindering this progress.
There does appear to be very real movement towards the overall goal however, and I hope to see further progress at next year's event, and in the coming years.
References Open Repositories 2009 Conference https://or09.library.gatech.edu/ The SWORD Project http://www.swordapp.org/ Duraspace http://www.duraspace.org/ Microsoft Scholarly Communications http://www.microsoft.com/scholarlycomm Atom Publishing Protocol http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt SWORD Project twitter feed http://www.twitter.com/swordapp Microsoft Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/authoring/ Microsoft Zentity 1.0 Research-Output Repository Platform http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/48e60ac1-a95a-4163-a23d-28a914007743/ Eprints http://www.eprints.org/ Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk Caveat Lector Blog http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/ Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ Semantic Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html OAI-ORE Resource Map http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/datamodel#Resource_Map OAI-ORE Resource Map Implementation in Atom http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/atom.html Citeline http://citeline.mit.edu/ Simile Project http://simile.mit.edu/ SWORD clients and demonstrators http://www.swordapp.org/sword/demonstrators arXiv.org SWORD/APP Deposit API http://arxiv.org/help/submit_sword IE Demonstrator Blog http://blog.iedemonstrator.org/ Sherpa Romeo API http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/api.html NAMES Project http://namesproject.wordpress.com/ RepoChallenge Winners http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/2009/05/20/repochallenge-winners/ John's JISCCETIS Blog http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/2009/06/05/open-repositories-2009/ Author Details Adrian Stevenson SWORD Project Manager UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.stevenson@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.swordapp.org/ and http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Open Repositories 2009" Author: Adrian Stevenson Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/or-09-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Balancing Stakeholder Needs: Archive 2.0 As Community-centred Design Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Balancing Stakeholder Needs: Archive 2.0 As Community-centred Design Buzz software framework database portal usability archives metadata digitisation tagging cataloguing php mysql facebook research Citation BibTex RIS Jim Ridolfo, William Hart-Davidson and Michael McLeod present a case example on building a digital archive with cultural and scholarly stakeholder groups to provide a model for balancing stakeholder needs.
Archive 2.0 is relatively new concept for us, one that we have only worked with since 2007 and the beginning of our Samaritan Digital Archive Project at Michigan State University (MSU).
Our project started with the intention of building a digital archive; the Archive 2.0 nature of the project surfaced when we realised that in order to build a useful archive, we would need to engage multiple stakeholder communities.
In our project this meant working with the cultural stakeholders, the Samaritans, as well as academic stakeholders, including Samaritan and Biblical scholars.
Initially we thought that applying Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, image tagging, etc, to a digital archive would be our most important contribution to the project.
As the project unfolded and we identified stakeholder needs more precisely however, we realised that our role was as much about balancing stakeholders’ representational needs as much as it was about the application of Web 2.0 technologies.
The project began in December of 2007 when Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center [1] Research Assistant Jim Ridolfo was browsing the digital MSU Special Collections catalogue, and discovered the library index for the MSU Chamberlain-Warren collection of Samaritan texts.
While investigating the history of the collection, Ridolfo learnt that in 2003 a Samaritan elder had travelled to MSU and had spoken to the Board of Trustees.
The elder, Binyamim Tsedaka, had ‘encouraged the university to utilise the collection to promote Samaritan studies.’ [2] On learning of Tsedaka’s speech, Ridolfo e-mailed Tsedaka and enquired about the community’s possible interest in collaborating on a digitisation project.
Tsedaka responded with his full blessing and an offer of collaboration [3].
Who Are the Samaritans?
The Samaritans have existed as a community for thousands of years.
They are an ancient biblical people living primarily in Holon, Israel and Mt.
Gerizim, West Bank.
Their Torah is similar in content to that of Jewish people, but with several major theological differences.
For example, the Samaritan Torah maintains that Mt.
Gerizim rather than Jerusalem is holy.
The Samaritan Pentateuch also contains thousands of textual differences from the Masoretic Hebrew text; consequently, their theological interpretations and practices differ from common Jewish interpretations and traditions.
In addition, the script of the Samaritan Torah is written in Samaritan Hebrew, which includes a unique script, pronunciation scheme, and grammar.
Starting at a very early age, all Samaritan children learn to read, write, and chant in Samaritan Hebrew.
The Samaritan community includes 712 members, with approximately half the population living in Holon, Israel, and the other half living in the Mt.
Gerizim village of Kiryat Luza.
The community in Holon speaks Modern Hebrew as a first language, while the community in Kiryat Luza speaks Palestinian Arabic as a first language.
The Samaritans living in Kiryat Luza maintain a delicate relationship with the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.
Being few in number and vulnerable to larger political trends, they seek a peaceful relationship with both authorities.
For example, the residents of Kiryat Luza possess both Palestinian Authority and Israeli passports, vote in both elections, and work, travel, and study on both sides of the Green Line.
Since the Samaritans of Holon and Kiryat Luza commemorate all festivals, holidays, and life cycle celebrations together on Mt.
Gerizim, they are very keen to maintain contact between both communities [4][5].
Stumbling into Archive 2.0 While Web 2.0 technology helps mitigate stakeholder needs, we see the work of Archive 2.0 as more about questions of procedure, methodology, and field work.
In the first phase of the project (pre-funding), we conducted interviews with the US representative of the AB Samaritan Institute, e-mailed back and forth with Benyamim Tsedaka, and observed how Samaritan and biblical scholars conduct textual scholarship.
What we began to see was how the digital archive would (and could) serve different functions for these two distinct groups: the cultural stakeholders and Samaritan/biblical scholars.
In the first stage of the project (January March 2008) Jim Ridolfo and WIDE Co-Director William Hart-Davidson reached out to the university community.
This phase of the project included conversations with the Director of Special Collections Peter Berg, MSU University Archivist Cynthia Ghering, and MSU Samaritan scholar Robert Anderson.
In addition, Ridolfo regularly met with Sharon Dufour, the US Representative for the AB Samaritan Institute.
From e-mails with Tsedaka and meetings with Dufour, we learnt important information about the cultural and religious significance of the collection for the Samaritan people [6].
We began to apply the term stakeholder to describe the stakes and interests different people had in the MSU collection.
From our initial conversations we identified two primary groups with a stated interest in the collection: cultural and scholarly stakeholders.
We wanted to know with a great deal of certainty that the archive would be beneficial to the Samaritan people.
This concern, the question of who has the authority to represent another people, is a cultural stakeholder concern we take very seriously.
In addition to ongoing talks with Benyamim Tsedaka and Sharon Dufour, Dr. Jim Ridolfo and WIDE Software Developer Michael McLeod travelled to the West Bank and met the late High Priest Elazar ben Tsedaka.
High Priest Elazar ben Tsedaka enthusiastically gave the project his blessing and explained clearly that the archive would give the community access to the historical information embedded in these texts while raising awareness of the community to the rest of the world.
From our early discussions with Samaritan and biblical scholars, we also learnt that the digital archive would help to promote Samaritan studies by making a geographically remote collection widely available.
For example, MSU Samaritan scholar Robert Anderson told us that increased access to the MSU collection may have the real potential to attract another generation of scholars to Samaritan studies.
The two stakeholder groups had complementary interests in the digital archive; but as we will discuss later, the digital archive would be used for different values and purposes by each group of stakeholders.
After these initial conversations, we realised that while Web 2.0 technologies offered us databaseand interaction-driven methods for engaging with stakeholders, fieldwork direct interaction with the cultural stakeholders would be crucial to developing an archive that was not only useful for them but also demonstrated respect for them and their culture.
In this sense, the project’s first Archive 2.0 moment did not have to do with technology, but rather with questions of ethical research and the balancing of stakeholder needs.
Figure 1: Screenshot of an early metadata interface One aspect of the project that attracted us from the beginning was an anticipated need to tailor the digital archive to multiple stakeholder groups; the project fitted well into the WIDE Research Center’s mission of investigating ‘how digital technologies change the processes, products, and contexts for writing, particularly in organisational and collaborative composing contexts.’ The guiding framework for our fieldwork and interviews is user-centred design, an approach that employs techniques of prototyping, testing, and iterative design in order to ensure that users can have a meaningful impact upon the design process [7].
For our work, we saw the user-centred design process as a way to tailor the archive to the needs of each particular stakeholder community.
This approach helped our team gather information from members of the two user communities in order to develop a design prototype that would best meet their needs.
We engaged with Samaritan community members and biblical/textual scholars as informants, tapping their expertise to help us design better (i.e., more useful and usable) interfaces for the digital Samaritan archive.
In keeping with the best practice of user-centred design, we followed an iterative design pattern, meaning that after each round of mock-ups and prototypes we went back to our user communities for feedback.
This feedback was crucial not only in fine-tuning interfaces the various stakeholders would find useful, but also in helping us identify specific areas where our observations about the user community and their needs were incorrect or inaccurate.
For example, as designers, we had assumed prior to our fieldwork that designing a Web portal for the community in the Samaritan script would be useful and desirable.
However, from our discussions with the community we learnt that this is not of any utility.
The Samaritans have no use at this time for digital interfaces in Samaritan, and we were instructed to localise the Web site in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.
These interactions with stakeholders are moments of Archive 2.0 discovery, in other words, and not merely moments where we as designers confirm our assumptions.
In another example, we learnt that the Greek word Pentateuch has little meaning for the Samaritans (see Figure 1).
We were advised by the Samaritans to localise the interface with the word Torah.
While this example may seem trivial, without the benefit of user-centred design we could have potentially deployed the archive with an entirely incorrect name for one particular stakeholder community.
Archive 2.0 and Balancing Stakeholder Needs What emerged from our project meetings was the conclusion that the digital archive can function in very different ways for multiple stakeholder groups.
If, for example, we had pursued the development of the digital archive without the Samaritans’ input, we would have ended up with a very different interface and information design; the same also held true for Samaritan and biblical scholars.
Before we even applied for our first round of funding, Director of MSU Special Collections Dr. Peter Berg had generously agreed to digitise the first 20 pages of a Samaritan Pentateuch as cost share.
This presented our project team with an opportunity and a question: which Pentateuch and which 20 pages did we digitise first?
On 6 October 2008 members of the WIDE team met at MSU Special Collections with Peter Berg, scholar Robert Anderson, Sharon Dufour from the AB Samaritan Institute, while Benyamim Tsedaka from Holon, Israel joined us on the phone.
Tsedaka and Professor Anderson both agreed that the most culturally and scholarly significant item to digitise first was a selection from the Book of Exodus.
From our field research with the community we later learnt that the Samaritans have no pressing ritual need for the texts in the MSU archive: there is no shortage of Pentateuchs in Mt.
Gerizim or Holon.
For Tsedaka, the selection was significant because the book of Exodus contains an acrostic called a tashkil, a message ‘formed by dividing the text into two columns, and bringing out the letters required for the acrostic into the vacant space between them.’ [8] The tashkil tells the story of the scribe, the scribe’s family, and other historical details.
From our field research we learnt that, for the Samaritans, digital access to Pentateuchs with acrostics is culturally important.
When we interviewed young Samaritans on Mt.
Gerizim about their interest in a digital archive, this was overwhelmingly emphasised as an important need.
For textual scholars such as Professor Anderson, the selection may also hold important historical information about the scribe and community.
In addition to consensus about what to digitise, we also became conscious of balancing how we described what we were to digitise (metadata), and we focused on how the issue of balance could play out in terms of metadata.
While we want scholars to annotate the images collaboratively as they see fit, we equally want the Samaritans to be able to annotate the Pentateuch images as they see fit.
To balance these needs we are developing a metadata system by which the Samaritans could opt to keep their notations private to working groups, and the Scholars too could also opt to keep their notations private.
For the general archive portal, if one or several members of a stakeholder group want to make annotations public, no set of annotations will be the default metadata for any one interface.
Rather, users may select from different sets of public metadata descriptions.
We planned to connect metadata from both the community and scholars.
The question arose of how to handle two potentially divergent sets of metadata.
Rather than think of multiple sets as a problem, we saw this problem of balance as a particular strength of Archive 2.0.
For the cultural stakeholders, we developed a MySQL/PHP-driven prototype tool to collect metadata from Samaritan volunteers.
We call this tool the Culturally Centered Metadata Acquisition Tool (CCMAT).
Our CCMAT is a rather cumbersome acronym for what we think is an otherwise useful idea in terms of Archive 2.0 and balance: create a place where community stakeholders might contribute to categorising and describing digital content in ways that ultimately support ‘views’ of the information that the community, rather than traditional scholars, need.
This could include information about a tashkil as it relates to living relatives today, discussion relating to the weekly Torah portion, or other matters relating to religious practice.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the Samaritan metadata acquisition tool For our first use of the CCMAT, members of the Samaritan community in Holon and Mt.
Gerizim helped us to identify each page remotely.
We provided a Hebrew and English menu system so the Samaritans could assign a weekly Torah portion value to each page.
Additionally, they provided Hebrew, English, and Arabic comments on each page, including translations of passages from Samaritan to Hebrew, religious commentary, and relevant cultural information.
Our first run of the CCMAT was effective, but we do not think that we could have designed an effective CCMAT without fieldwork.
In this sense, Archive 2.0 for us is not strictly about Web 2.0 technology, but also about the increased need for fieldwork in relationship to digital projects.
We are in agreement with Palmer when she argues that Archive 2.0 is ‘less about technological change than a broader epistemological shift which concerns the very nature of the archive’ [9].
For our project, Archive 2.0 is not simply about Web 2.0 technology; but Web 2.0 technology is able to help us tailor the use of the archive for the needs of specific stakeholder groups.
For example, when we travelled to the West Bank we learnt that a significant number of Samaritans use social networking technology (such as Facebook) to communicate with each other.
When we returned to the USA and made the first 20 Pentateuch scans available on the Web, we observed that community members copied and shared the scans onto social networking groups, pages, and profiles.
What emerged from this fieldwork was the idea that we should tailor the use of the archive to different stakeholder platforms those places where they were already sharing information.
This could include creating a Facebook applet that displays the links to archive images relating to the weekly Torah portion, as well as aggregate comments from the community through Facebook.
In other words, Archive 2.0 as a database-driven entity means that we no longer have to think about the archive as one physical space, box, or catalogue; we can develop and tailor multiple interfaces to different stakeholder needs.
For example, the Samaritans can have a Facebook portal to the archive, scholars can have a Web portal to the archive, and each can be tailored, in terms of metadata and interface, to the needs of each stakeholder group.
Conclusion We think that the most promising aspect of Archive 2.0 and of digital technologies in libraries and archives, generally, is that a plurality of organisations’ schemes can co-exist with others, allowing multiple stakeholder communities to move through the text in ways they find useful and familiar, but also in ways with which other stakeholder communities may not be familiar.
We envision that different stakeholder communities can learn from one another by browsing each other’s public metadata.
In this sense, Archive 2.0 opens up the possibility for some digital archives to become a place where stakeholders interact, share, and compare ways of seeing texts; while, at the same time, they are able, in the best case, simultaneously to preserve and help to present unique, culturally specific and scholarly ways of viewing a text.
Negotiating issues of balance in collaborative Archive 2.0 projects is messy, time-consuming work.
For us, the technology of Archive 2.0 provides the opportunity to build relationships through collaboration and fieldwork.
Echoing Kennedy, we do not think that Archive 2.0 will look similar in all instances, nor do we think that the question of balance will be the foremost concern for each Archive 2.0 project [10].
However, we do think that Archive 2.0, particularly when one is working with the texts of a historically marginalised group, will increasingly challenge digital archivists to think up new methodological approaches to address issues of balance.
References Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center http://www.wide.msu.edu/ “Meeting Minutes for November 13.” Board of Trustees.
13 November 2003.
Michigan State University.
12 December 2007 http://trustees.msu.edu/meetings/pdfs/031114.pdf Ridolfo, Jim.
“Re: Hello and Question From a Researcher At Michigan State University.” Email to the author.
5 January 2008.
Dana Rosenblatt, “Amid conflict, Samaritans keep unique identity”.
CNN.com, 14 October 2002. http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/10/08/samaritans/ Sean Ireton, “The Samaritans A Jewish Sect in Israel: Strategies for Survival of an Ethno-religious Minority in the Twenty First Century”.
2003. http://www.anthrobase.com/Txt/I/Ireton_S_01.htm For more information please see our 2009 National Endowment for the Humanities report http://wide.msu.edu/content/archive/ See: What is User-Centered Design: About Usability: Usability Professionals’ Association Resources http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/about_usability/what_is_ucd.html Cowley, Arthur E. “Description of Four Samaritan Manuscripts Belonging to The Palestine Exploration Fund.” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1904): 67-78.
Print.
Palmer, J., “Archives 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?“, July 2009, Ariadne Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/palmer/ Kennedy, M., “Cautionary Tales: Archives 2.0 and the Diplomatic Historian”, October 2009, Ariadne Issue 61 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/kennedy/ Author Details Jim Ridolfo, PhD Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric University of Cincinnati Email: ridolfo@gmail.com Web site: http://rid.olfo.org William Hart-Davidson, PhD Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures Co-Director, Writing in Digital Environments Research Center Michigan State University Email: hartdav2@msu.edu Web site: http://wide.msu.edu Michael McLeod, MA Lead Software Developer Writing in Digital Environments Research Center Adjunct Faculty in Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures Michigan State University Email: mcleodm3@msu.edu Web site: http://wide.msu.edu Return to top Article Title: “Balancing Stakeholder Needs: Archive 2.0 as Community-centred Design” Author: Jim Ridolfo, William Hart-Davidson and Michael McLeod Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/ridolfo-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Blended Learning and Online Tutoring: Planning Learner Support and Activity Design Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Blended Learning and Online Tutoring: Planning Learner Support and Activity Design Buzz framework wiki tagging blog flickr e-learning facebook privacy Citation BibTex RIS Lyn Parker does not consider that the second edition has changed considerably from the first edition despite the publishers' blurb to the contrary.
Nonetheless, she feels there is much of value.
When asked to review the second edition of this book, I willingly accepted as I considered the first edition to be "easy to read, full of practical advice, whilst challenging me to reflect on my own practice".
[1] In addition, the interest in blended learning in HEIs shows no sign of abating with several textbooks [2] [3] [4] appearing since 2006 and the Blended Learning Unit, a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) with an annual conference, being established at the University of Hertfordshire[5] [6].
The promotional material provided by Gower Publishing promises that the second edition incorporates many new examples of Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and wikis, and 'many new exemplars of learning activity design' to support 'the development of critical, independent learners'.
[7] As I am involved with various projects to develop information literacy and student engagement through the use of Web 2.0 at the University of Sheffield, I was keen to see how Janet MacDonald had incorporated the use of new technologies into her original text.
She defines blended learning as a mix of e-learning with face-to-face contact but recognises/d that it can also be applied to the mix of synchronous and asynchronous technologies used.
She maintains her view that we should concentrate on supporting networked learners effectively rather than focusing too much on a particular technology or blend, a view that I share especially given the pace of change in the technologies.
Content The second edition retains the same overall structure as the first with 3 parts: Part I concentrates on current practice in blended learning with particular reference to the Open University, the SOLACE (Supporting Open Learners in A Changing Environment) Project (from 2004) and various case studies taken from Europe and Australasia.
However, despite it still being labelled current, I could only find minor amendments to this section.
The words blogs and wikis have been added when listing types of asynchronous communication and one additional case study from the University of Strathclyde has been included.
[8] Part II covers online tutoring and details various practical tools and methods, updated in the second edition to cover Web 2.0 technologies.
Chapter 6 is now entitled Supporting Students using Asynchronous tools: Forums, Wikis and Blogs with a couple of examples of each but the emphasis is still on choosing the most appropriate tool for the academic purpose and the size of the group.
Techniques for moderating blogs and wikis respectively have been added to Chapter 7 Handy Techniques for Moderators – Online Asynchronous Groups.
Chapters 8 and 9 on synchronous tools have not altered but the first edition already included examples of using chat and instant messaging services.
Part III is entitled Developing Independent Learners: Activity Design.
It includes an overview on blended learning design and the experience of blended learning from the learners' perspective with chapters on Developing E-Investigators, E-Writers and E-Communicators.
Again only a few changes have been made in the second edition; a case study on using a wiki for collaborative writing from the OU and some more recent references now being included.
As MacDonald states: "There is really nothing new here: these ideas are based on a wealth of knowledge and understanding built up over years of experience in student learning with and without learning technologies" (p.133).
Given the pace of change in the technologies keeping a book up to date will always be an issue.
Indeed some new books on Web 2.0 use blogs and wikis to supplement their original text [9] [10].
Conclusion Overall, therefore, I do not agree that the second edition contains many new examples of good practice and many new exemplars of learning activity design and if you already have a copy of the first edition there is no need to rush out to get a copy of the second.
However, I did still find the book easy to read, and worth reading again.
The practical advice given in the case studies and bright ideas is relevant and applicable to various new technologies, not just blogs and wikis, and the few additional examples are useful.
Personally I would be interested in more case studies of students setting up their own tools to support group activities, both formally as part of the course, but also informally as part of their social learning; the inclusion of the student voice reflecting on this use and their particular concerns; and the addition of other Web 2.0 technologies; particularly networking tools such as Facebook [11] and Ning [12],bookmarking tools such as Digg [13] and StumbleUpon [14], and tagging as used with del.icio.us [15], Furl [16] and flickr [17].
I consider that it is this social nature of the tools, enabling collaboration and sharing of information, which is crucial to their use in an educational setting and raises a number of issues for discussion such as security, privacy, ethical use and the merger of social and academic space online.
It is my experience that it is these issues which are concerning academics as they introduce them to their courses [18].
References Parker, L (2006) "Blended Learning and Online Tutoring: a Good Practice Guide" Ariadne Issue 48. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/parker-rvw/ Allan, B.
(2007) Blended Learning: tools for teaching and training, London, Facet Publishing.
Littlejohn, A. and Pegler, C. (2007) Preparing for Blended E-learning, London, Routledge.
Randy Garrison, D. (2008) Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles and Guidelines.
San Francisco, Wiley University of Hertfordshire.
Blended Learning Unit.
(2008) Home page.
Available from http://perseus.herts.ac.uk/uhinfo/info/blu/blu/blu_home.cfm University of Hertfordshire.
(2008) Blended Learning conference 2008. http://perseus.herts.ac.uk/BLU-conference-2008/home.html http://www.gowerpub.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=10611&edition_id=11260 Baxter, J (2007) A case study of online collaborative work in a large first year Psychology class.
REAP International Online Conference on Assessment Design for Learner Responsibility 29-31 May.
http://www.reap.ac.uk/reap07/Welcome/tabid/72/Default.html Bradley, P. (2007) How to use Web 2.0 in your library.
London, Facet Publishing.
Godwin, P. & Parker, J. eds (2008) Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0.
London, Facet Publishing Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ Ning.
Create your own social network for anything http://www.ning.com/ Digg All News, Videos, & Images http://digg.com/ StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/ Delicious http://del.icio.us/ Furl http://www.furl.net/ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ Parker, L. & Webber, S. (2008).
What does your Facebook say about you?
University of Sheffield workshop http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/what-does-your-facebook-say-about-you Author Details Lyn Parker Quality and Development Team Manager Academic Services Group, University Library University of Sheffield Western Bank Sheffield Email: l.a.parker@sheffield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/ Return to top Article Title: "Blended Learning and Online Tutoring: Planning Learner Support and Activity Design."
Author: Lyn Parker Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/parker-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Copyright Angst, Lust for Prestige and Cost Control: What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open Access Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Copyright Angst, Lust for Prestige and Cost Control: What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open Access Buzz software database dissemination archives metadata digitisation accessibility repositories copyright passwords aggregation licence algorithm research standards sfx Citation BibTex RIS Leo Waaijers writes about copyright, prestige and cost control in the world of open access while in two appendices Bas Savenije and Michel Wesseling compare the costs of open access publishing and subscriptions/licences for their respective institutions.
The view that the results of publicly financed research should also be publicly accessible enjoys broad support in the academic community.
Where their own articles are concerned, however, many authors hesitate to circulate them openly, for example by publishing them in Open Access journals or placing them in their institution’s repository.
They ask themselves whether that will not be at odds with the copyright rules and whether they will gain – or perhaps even lose – prestige.
For their part, institutional managers wonder whether switching to Open Access will not make things more expensive than sticking with the traditional system of publication.
This article analyses the current situation regarding these three issues.
The only possible conclusion is that the academic community finds itself in the course of a transition – from paper to digital – as regards the dissemination of knowledge, a transition that urgently requires an active and directive approach on the part of universities and research institutions.
This conclusion is in line with a recent recommendation [1] by the European University Association, with the primary conclusion being that ‘Universities should develop institutional policies and strategies that foster the availability of their quality controlled research results for the broadest possible range of users, maximizing their visibility, accessibility and scientific impact.’ Copyright Angst In academia, it has traditionally been the author of a publication who has been viewed as the copyright holder.
But that is not entirely a matter of course.
Businesses and the US and Australian governments, for example, assume that it is the employer who holds the copyright under the so called work for hire [2] clause.
Discussions also regularly arise as to the copyright in teaching materials.
This article will restrict itself to scientific/scholarly publications.
Where the identity of the copyright holder is concerned, it will reflect current academic practice.
It is the copyright holder who decides on the conditions for distribution and reuse of their publication.
Laws do, however, provide for fair use [3] exceptions.
Libraries also have certain rights that are mainly associated with their task of preserving material.
When everything was still published on paper, authors of certain types of academic/scholarly publications (articles, books, some conference proceedings) often transferred their whole copyright exclusively and irrevocably to the publisher of the work concerned.
The publisher required them to do so in exchange for the layout and the distribution of the publication and for organising the review process.
It should be noted that the work would be reviewed by colleagues – “peers” – as part of their research duties.
The publisher would then capitalise on the rights it had thus received through subscriptions (in the case of articles in journals) and sales (in the case of books).
Significant restrictions would apply to the distribution and reuse of the publication; in certain cases these could be bought off, for example by paying reproduction fees for reuse in educational materials.
This publication model became controversial because of the continual and significant increases in the cost of subscribing, an average of some 11% to 12% annually.
It was hoped that digitisation – with distribution via the Internet and word processors for the layout – would cause prices to fall.
That hope has evaporated, however, and many people would say that this is because of a lack of competition between publishers due to their copyright monopoly.
Early in the present century, the concept of CSR [4] found its way into academia under the name ‘Open Access’.
Authors, universities, and bodies funding research wished to improve their scientific/scholarly and social profile by offering Open Access to the results of publicly financed research.
That, however, requires the consent of the copyright holder.
If this is the publisher, consent is hardly ever granted.
Only a few of the smaller publishers allow a published article to be included in the repository of the institution concerned and released after an embargo period of between six months and two years.
More frequently, consent is given for an author’s version to be distributed, also often after an embargo period.
Authors hesitate to make use of this option, however, because of the confusion that can arise with their officially published version, for example as regards citations.
The SHERPA-RoMEO Web site maintained by the University of Nottingham (UK) gives an up-to-date overview [5] of the copyright policies of virtually all publishers.
These policies are extremely varied and are very hard for authors to follow.
Actually, there are more policies than publishers as some publishers even apply a different policy to the different journals they publish.
The extent to which an author must transfer his copyright to the publisher is also becoming increasingly a matter for negotiation.
To assist authors in this regard, SURF has developed a legally sound publication licence [6].
By issuing the licence, the author grants the publisher the right to publish his article but retains all the other rights, including the right to make the published article freely accessible – after a maximum wait of six months – via his institution’s repository.
A new generation of publishers – Open Access publishers – has now come into existence who no longer require that the copyright be assigned to them in return for publishing an article but who require an immediate publication fee to be paid.
Articles are published immediately after acceptance in a freely accessible digital journal, and thus become available throughout the world.
The author also retains the full copyright in his article and can therefore do whatever he wants with it, for example upload it to his own Web site, publish it again in a different language, or include it in his institution’s repository.
In the latter case, the author can also specify what the repository is allowed to do with the article.
SURF has also produced a standard repository licence [7].
Some traditional publishers, e.g.
Springer, have associated themselves with this model in that for some or all of their journals they allow the author to choose between transferring his copyright and paying a publication fee.
Lund University (Sweden) maintains a list of all peer-reviewed Open Access journals 8.
Recommendation 1 Transferring the copyright in a publication has become a relic of the past; nowadays a “licence to publish” is sufficient.
The author retains the copyrights.
Institutions should make the use of such a licence part of their institutional policy.
Lust for Prestige The principal gauge for the prestige of scientific/scholarly authors is the impact factor of the journals in which they publish.
That yardstick is not an undisputed one.
Michael Mabe [9], the then director of Public Relations for Elsevier, was of the following opinion: ‘Extending the use of the journal impact factor from the journal to the authors of papers in the journal is highly suspect; … [impact factors] are not a direct measure of quality and must be used with considerable care.’ The impact factor of a journal is a fraction calculated by counting all the citations of all items in that journal that can be found in a selected group of indexed journals, during a specific period, and dividing it by the number of ‘real’ scientific/scholarly articles in the journal.
The quality of an article is only one of the many factors that can influence the number of times it is cited.
Other known factors are the age of the article (the older it is, the more citations), the number of authors (the more authors, the more citations); the type of article (a wide-ranging subject review article will be cited more regularly than a highly specialised article); and the discipline (researchers in the ‘hard’ sciences give more citations than those in the humanities).
Articles that have become notorious in some way – perhaps because of fraud – are also cited very frequently.
‘Decorative’ citations are also a well-known phenomenon: it looks sophisticated, for example, to cite a Nobel Prize winner even if you have not actually read his article.
There are also ‘citation syndicates’, in other words groups of authors who like to cite one another.
These are a few of the factors that can determine the numerator in the fraction.
But the impact factor can also be influenced via the denominator, i.e.
the number of “real” scientific scholarly articles.
After all, the smaller the number of items in the journal that are considered to be “real” articles, the larger the result when one uses it to divide by.
The measurement period (usually two years) and the selected group of indexed journals are also constantly the subject of discussion.
But the most fundamental criticism of the use of the impact factor as a yardstick for an author’s prestige is that it represents an average number of citations for all the articles in a journal.
It is as if one were judging a school pupil according to the average performance of his or her classmates.
Managers and bodies that finance research do realise this, but they often justify using this method because they lack of anything better.
Rankings for research institutes are in fact based on these impact factors.
A manager whose institute is high up in the rankings will probably tone down any criticisms that he has.
Until 2004, the ISI company had a global monopoly on determining the impact factor for some 7500 journals (out of a total of about 25,000).
Since then, Elsevier has provided impact factors (via Scopus) for roughly double that number.
In competition with one another, the two organisations have since expanded the scope of their services, including providing the number of citations per article; this has not yet led, however, to any price reductions.
Also in 2004, Google brought out Google Scholar (GS).
GS basically covers all scientific/scholarly publications for which the metadata are available on the Internet, giving all the citations for each publication.
This approach responded to the criticism levelled at the use of the classic impact factor as a yardstick for the prestige of individual authors.
One disadvantage, however, is that the ranking of publications in GS is based on a secret algorithm.
Moreover, the fact that GS is only available in the form of a beta version does not contribute much to its status as a measuring tool.
There are now a number of other citation databases available, for example CiteSeer (computer and information science), Repec (economics), Scirus and getCited (both cover all disciplines).
Like GS, all these databases are freely accessible.
Now that the number of citations per article is becoming clearer, it is possible to base an author’s prestige directly on that statistic rather than on averages for journals.
In this regard – and despite criticism – the h-index [10] is steadily gaining in authority.
If an author has published n articles, he has an index of h if h articles are cited more than h times and the other n h articles are cited a maximum of h times.
The h-index reflects, as it were, both the breadth and depth of the author’s oeuvre.
Analysis of citations has shown, for example in a study by Eysenbach [11], that Open Access publication greatly increases the number of citations.
Partly because of this, a number of Open Access journals have been able to achieve a good impact factor within a relatively short time.
Nevertheless, it is still, in general, the established traditional subscription journals that are ranked highest in their respective disciplines.
One would seem to be dealing here with the ‘Matthew effect’ [12].
In addition to citations, the number of times an article is downloaded can also serve as a yardstick for the extent to which it is used, for example in teaching.
It is obvious that the download score for Open Access articles will be higher than that for pay-for-use articles.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States has announced the release of MESUR [13] in the autumn of 2008, an application that will enable one to monitor the number of downloads of articles.
That number can then be used, in addition to citations, when determining impact measurements at article level and the prestige of authors.
Recommendation 2 The classic impact factor for a journal is not a good yardstick for the prestige of an author.
Modern digital technology makes it possible to tailor the measurement system to the author.
Institutions should, when assessing scientists and scholars, switch to this type of measurement and should also promote its further development.
Cost Control The question that remains to be answered is whether the new Open Access model is cheaper than the old subscription model.
Expectations are that Open Access will turn out to be cheaper for the academic community as a whole because the significant costs for contracts and shielding will be eliminated.
Moreover, the Open Access model is based on the operation of market forces, while the traditional model is based on copyright monopolies.
The advantages to society of Open Access to knowledge would also seem to be considerable, although it is no easy matter to arrive at reliable estimates of those advantages.
In their study John Houghton et al.
[14] make a significant contribution towards helping us answer this question for the Australian case.
At institutional level, it is relatively simple to carry out a cost comparison.
In the Open Access model, the institution pays a publication fee – which differs from publisher to publisher – for all its articles.
An up-to-date price list [15] for these fees can be found on the BioMedCentral Web site.
The calculation can take account of the fact that the bodies that finance research are increasingly viewing publication as the culmination of the study concerned and therefore accept the publication costs as forming part of the research budget.
The SHERPA-JULIET Web site gives an overview [16] of the policies of the major research financiers.
In the traditional model, an institution not only pays subscription and/or licensing fees but also reproduction fees, charges for individual articles that are requested (via interlibrary loan or directly from the publisher), and the contract costs already referred to.
The latter are difficult to calculate, but they are nevertheless considerable.
The library must first of all determine its purchasing policy; this often involves time-consuming consultations with scientists/scholars.
The accessions then need to be registered in a complex system of subscription records or laid down in licences; these are legal documents, specifically regulating access rights, that are by no means trivial and usually only drawn up after lengthy negotiations.
The institution must then implement the agreed access restrictions by means of shielding constructions such as IP addresses, passwords and proxy servers, or special software such as SFX.
Finally, these restrictions mean that filling the institution’s repository is a laborious matter and therefore needlessly expensive.
The calculations will show that the cost advantages of the Open Access model are not distributed equally between institutions.
In the age of Open Access, genuine research universities may even find themselves having to pay more than in the age of the traditional model.
Such institutions also need to spend more (than for example institutions focusing on teaching) on other research facilities such as laboratories, supercomputers and grids, and on attracting top researchers.
Indeed, noblesse oblige.
Estimates of the costs involved in publishing research results using the Open Access method range from 1.5% to 2% of the research budget.
Recently two Higher Education institutes in the Netherlands have done such a calculation, the results of which have been summarised in appendices to this article.
As expected, open access is very beneficial to the Institute of Social Studies with its focus on an educational programme.
The outcome for Utrecht University, a top research institution, is surprisingly more nuanced.
If research funders are prepared to pay for the publication fees for articles that result from their projects, open access is also financially advantageous to this university.
One pressing problem has become the phase transfer from A to B.
An institution that decides to use Open Access does not immediately cease having to pay its subscription and/or licensing fees.
In fact, it pays not only for publishing its own articles but also – through the subscription or licensing fees – for publication by institutions that have not yet made the switch.
This effect can be prevented if large groups switch together, although that requires co-ordination.
One example is CERN’s SCOAP3 [17] Project.
This involves CERN – acting on behalf of the high-energy physics community – defining the conditions for quality control and open distribution of articles and requesting publishers to submit quotations.
This discipline is consequently switching to Open Access all in one go.
Other examples are the Dutch university library consortium UKB and the Max Planck Gesellschaft which in experiments [18] with Springer could make the switch to Open Access publishing for all their authors in Springer journals.
The economist Ted Bergstrom has already referred, as far back as 2001, in a now famous parable [19], to the need for such co-ordination.
Recommendation 3 The traditional subscription model for circulating publications is needlessly complex and expensive.
Switching to Open Access, however, requires co-ordination that goes beyond the level of individual institutions.
Supra-institutional organisations, for example the European University Association, should take the necessary initiative.
Appendix 1 Cost Comparison: Open Access v. Subscriptions at Utrecht University Established in 1636, today Utrecht University is an internationally renowned top research university with almost 30, 000 students and over 8, 500 staff.
Annually UU publishes 5000 articles in peer-reviewed journals; of these 1500 result from externally funded research (figures 2005).
Utrecht University is a signatory of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.
Open Access Subscriptions Publication fees UU1 €6,500,000 Subscriptions and licences €4,500,000     Document supply 3 + copyright clearance fees + collection management 4 €1,000,000   €6,500,000   €5,500,000 Publication fees research funders 2 €1,950,000     Remaining costs UU €4,550,000     1.
5000 peer-reviewed articles @1300 2.
1500 peer-reviewed articles @ 1300 3.
Includes out of pocket costs to third parties (other libraries, publishers) and in-house handling costs.
4.Includes defining the collection, acquisitions and administration, shielding access and copyright issues.
September 2008 Bas Savenije University Librarian of Utrecht University Appendix 2 Cost Comparison: Open Access v. Subscriptions at the Institute of Social Studies Established in 1952, the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague is an international graduate school with typically 400 students per year.
Its research programme results in books, reports and about 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals annually.
An intangible open access advantage is the free access that ISS alumni, who are often based in developing countries, will have to these articles.
Open Access Subscriptions Publication fees ISS 1 €120,000 Subscriptions and licences €180,000     Document supply 3 + copyright clearance fees €65,000 Platform or aggregation costs 2 €25,000 Collection management 4 €60,000   €145,000   €305,000 1.
60 peer-reviewed articles @ 2000.
The publication fee is an estimate based on the pricelist published by BioMedCentral.
The list refers mainly to STM journals [20].
For social sciences the fees may be lower.
2.
ISS assumes that even in a full open access world still some aggregation or platform fees will be needed.
3.
Includes out of pocket costs to third parties (other libraries, publishers) and in-house handling costs.
4.This is a rough estimate.
Includes defining the collection, acquisitions and administration, shielding access and copyright issues.
September 2008 Michel Wesseling, Head of the Office of Library and Information Technology Services References The European University Association (EUA): EUA urges universities to develop clear strategies to advance open access, 3 April 2008 http://www.eua.be/index.php?id=48&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5btt_news%5d=518&tx_ttnews%5bbackPid%5d=1 Wikipedia: Work for hire, 26 October 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire Wikipedia: Fair use, 26 October 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): the view that socially responsible behaviour is rewarding for an enterprise.
SHERPA/RoMEO, Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ JISC/SURF, Copyright toolbox http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/ SURF, Copyright in higher education http://www.surffoundation.nl/smartsite.dws?fs=&bw=&ch=AHO&id=13660 DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/ Amin, M., Mabe, M., “Impact factors: Use and Abuse”, Perpectives in Publishing 1, Elsevier, October 2000 http://www.elsevier.com/framework_editors/pdfs/Perspectives1.pdf Wikipedia: H-index, 26 October 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index Gunther Eysenbach, “The open access advantage”, Journal of Medical Internet Research 8, no 2 2006 http://www.jmir.org/2006/2/e8/ Wikipedia: Matthew effect, 26 October 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect MESUR: MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources http://www.mesur.org/MESUR.html John Houghton, Colin Steele & Peter Sheehan, “Research communication costs in Australia: Emerging opportunities and benefits”, DEST Research Communications Cost Report, 29 September 2006 http://firgoa.usc.es/drupal/node/31598/print Comparison of BioMed Central’s Article Processing Charges with those of other publishers http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apccomparison/ SHERPA/JULIET, “Research funders’ open access policies” http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php SCOAP3 : Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics: Towards Open Access publishing in High Energy Physics http://scoap3.org/ “Together Again: Springer, Max Planck Agree To New “Experimental” Deal”, Library Journal, Reed Business Information, 5 February 2008 http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6528977.html Ted Bergstrom, “The Parable of the Anarchists Annual Meeting”, Excerpted from “Free Labor for Costly Journals?”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001 http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/anarchists.pdf BioMed Central | for authors | Article processing charge comparison http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apccomparison/ Author Details Leo Waaijers Open Access consultant: Email: leowaa@xs4all.nl Bas Savenije Librarian Utrecht University Email: b.savenije@uu.nl Michel Wesseling Head of the Office of Library and Information Technology Services Email: wesseling@iss.nl Return to top Article Title: “Copyright Angst, Lust for Prestige and Cost Control: What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open Access” Author: Leo Waaijers, Bas Savenije and Michel Wesseling Publication Date: 30-October-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 57 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/waaijers-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Internet Librarian International Conference 2014 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Internet Librarian International Conference 2014 Buzz data mobile software metadata accessibility copyright video cataloguing graphics multimedia cache aggregation ebook youtube facebook privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Zoë Hurley and Garth Bradshaw report on the Internet Librarian Conference, held at the Olympia Conference Centre in London over 20-22 October 2014.
Zoë reports from day one of the conference and Garth reports from day two.
Day 1 : 21 October 2014 I attended day one[1] of Internet Librarian International 2014 as I was sharing the conference with my colleague, Garth Bradshaw.
This was the first large conference I had attended since returning to the profession following a break from librarianship; my review reflects my thoughts following an absence of eight years from the profession, a long time in our fast moving world.
Venue and Organisation A note on the venue and general organisation to begin: I thought the Conference Centre was a good venue; roomy, clean, well-staffed, consisting of a main auditorium, conference rooms, break-out areas, and a large central space for the exhibitors all on the same level.
Refreshments and lunch, served informally in the central area, also proved very good.
The organisation of the day was exemplary: with sensible timings for the events the lengths of the sessions worked well and 15 minutes between the end of one and the start of the next meant that extra questions, writing up notes, and comfort breaks were all considered, and nothing felt too much of a rush.
Particularly interesting at this conference was ‘Track X’, running alongside the formal presentation tracks in the breakout areas and main atrium; informal pop-up talks, sharing sessions, and the ILI Unconference featured here, as well as opportunities to ‘book an expert’ for a 15-minute one-to-one with the speakers, and engage with the ILI App.
This meant that there was always something going on, even if the formal sessions didn’t appeal.
During the conference, tweeting and pictures were encouraged; there was even a dedicated ‘Selfie Space’, with prizes (notably for the most people in a selfie, with the proviso of no injuries).
The 3D printer which chuntered away throughout the day (without breaking clearly worlds away from a 2D printer) usually garnered quite an audience, myself includedscience fiction in action!
I had studied the schedule beforehand; there were three simultaneous main tracks: Track A (New Blueprints for Libraries), Track B (Technology, Innovation and Impact) and Track C (Content Innovation).
I chose to attend sessions across the tracks.
All the presentations I attended were worthwhile; for the sake of readability I shall focus on just a few.
New Blueprints for Libraries, Track A The keynote by Michael Edson, Smithsonian Institution, Open Knowledge Foundation and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) was a thought-provoking multimedia presentation entitled The Dark Matter of the Internet highlighting the types of information which we don’t yet officially recognise, value or measure – 90% of the Internet.
Michael selected many interesting examples of the types of social start-up information amateurs who are reaching a vast audience with great success; establishment information professionals may not (yet) recognise these sources as legitimate purveyors of informationbut no one has informed the third of humanity currently able to access the Internet.
Entrepreneurial information purveyors The Vlog Brothers ('raising nerdy to the power of awesome') have 6,353,850 subscribers, and have had 839,931,854 views across their 26-channel YouTube network which includes 6,173 videos [2].
Michael concluded by reminding us that Tim Berners-Lee had created the Internet as a read/write environment, and this ‘democratic vision of knowledge’ created new types of information as a result; the information profession ignores this at its peril.
The options open to the profession were either: to ignore; compete with; or to help this opportunity/threat: a message reiterated elsewhere in the conference.
Tomorrow’s World Today: Trends in Library Services: this title was wide-ranging enough to constitute a conference in its own right: but given three speakers and a half -hour time limit, each of the speakers chose two main topics: Sharon Bostick, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, opted for change management and library building design, including the phrase ‘makerspace’, (again, unfamiliar to me after my leave of absence, which would come up a lot later on in the conference); Liz McGettigan, of SOLUS, chose hybrid (physical/digital) space and staff development ( and offered the extremely tweetable titbits: ‘I’m a Librarian; if I don’t know, I can learn’, and the forthright ‘if you want change, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable.’).
So far, this was all recognisable to me, issues I remembered well from my previous professional incarnation.
Marydee Ojala, Editor-in-Chief of Online Searcher Magazine, then echoed themes that Michael had highlighted in his keynote, and chose to talk on the democratisation of information and big data, new strands for me.
She drew out the implications and opportunities for information professionals in areas such as media literacy, and also advised evolving our core competencies to take advantage of opportunities in data analysis shining a light into the dark matter.
Technology Innovation and Impact, Track B Real-world Tech: Making a Difference with 3D Printers: enough of these huge and mind-boggling concepts, time to indulge my inner nerd.
I had already spent some time in the atrium area, marvelling at the Makerbot 5.
I knew a little about the architectural and medical applications of the machines, but I was interested in the practical applications of a machine in a library environment.
Maureen Hood,Outreach Services, Dundee Library and Information Services, spoke first about using the printer in a public library, specifically as therapy for those with additional needs, although also as a crowd-pleaser (‘public libraries have image issues’), and as a tool for children’s learning (creating and constructing the characters from a specially written book).
The machine adds a creative element, allowing people a sense of achievement in creating solid objects from templates or their imaginations; bringing thoughts to life.
It can also have a practical purpose, printing accessibility aids for homes, or manufacturing equipment for the library.
Maureen talked about the possibility of recreating a child’s face from a photo, or a wedding bouquet, creating a tangibility particularly important for the visually impaired.
She also mentioned ongoing funding issues, and specialist/training issues.
Heather Moorfield-Lang, School of Library and Information Science, University of South Carolina, then spoke on 3D Printers in the Real World, explaining she was researching this burgeoning area, and having conducted some interviews across the board into real uses of the technology, she was expecting to move to the next step and start investigating the policy/copyright/privacy issues that were occurring – the formation of user agreement policies which are so far unregulated.
Although the machines have been extant for 10 years in technical/medical environments, their use in libraries was really very newmost people interviewed had only had the machines from six months to two years.
There was description of the varying uses to which the technology had been put, in a real-world library environment.
Heather then characterised the challenges of operating a 3D printer: keeping up with public demand (often very popular); understanding the differences between a good model and a bad one (understanding how to make a good model); sharing, siting, staffing and funding; and the noise the machines generate in the makerspace.
Training staff appeared as another challenge, given how new the technology is, and how relatively few ‘experts’ there are in the field available to help.
Learning was characterised by a ‘leap of faith’ approach, using YouTube videos to help, being prepared to experiment and fail.
Training users had primarily been done on a face-to-face basis, supplemented with online training and Web page information.
Heather concluded by reiterating what an exciting area this was, so innovative that that there was very little peer-reviewed research available – she really is forging ahead into unknown territory.
Content Innovation, Track C Karin Byström, Uppsala University Library, Sweden, gave an interesting session entitled Starting a Dialogue with Publishers, offering an insight into the ebook situation in Sweden.
Inspired by a presentation called ‘Publishers and librarians: We share the same values – why are we fighting?’ given by T. Scott Plutchak at the UKSG Conference in Bournemouth on 10 April 2013 [3], Karin decided to try and start a dialogue with Swedish publishers, with a view to working together to improve the current situation.
A revelatory piece of information was how tiny the ebook market is in the Swedish language.
The ebook format is primarily devoted to fiction in Sweden, for use in public libraries.
Karin suggested that there were only 1,000 or so titles available.
As for academic titles, she hazarded a guess at 100 titles which were available as ebooks; even the academics who authored the books were often unable to obtain an electronic copy of them.
So Karin organised an ‘ebook seminar’, and invited four publishers, one trade representative, two aggregators, 40 academic librarians, and the National Library of Sweden.
They had discussions on the current situation and their goals; focussing on the areas of supply and demand, models and platforms, competencies and continuing the dialogue.
Buoyed by the success of the seminar, and the possibility of a pilot scheme working together, Karin and her colleagues organised a smaller-scale, focussed workshop but the publishers turned down the invitation; and only the trade representative attended.
The publishers had withdrawn from the dialogue Karin could only assume that they were unable, or unwilling, to share ‘trade secrets’ or strategies.
Karin is now exploring other approaches trying to get to publisher meetings, and attending publisher conferences to increase her level of recognition on their turf; whilst simultaneously working with the other librarians to formalise library collaboration in order to ensure that when the publishers do engage, they will be prepared.
Although the pilot is not expected in the near future, she feels that if she can keep things hypothetical and generic, there may be a path to be trodden.
Technology Innovation and Impact, Track B Gamification Another new concept for me, in the first presentation, I learned from Jan Holmquist, Guldborgsund Public Library, Sweden, in his talk about Gamifying the Library Experience.
Gamification was the process of using ‘game mechanics and designs to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals’.
The idea of ‘Hidden Treasures’, a game created by a Danish public library which offered insights into the hidden history of its town on three different walks, really made sense to me.
Bringing the library outside and attracting new customers back into the museum/institution seemed a great idea, and the game itself seemed akin to orienteering, geo-caching or treasure-mapping.
Jan gave more examples of gamification on a global scale – I loved the idea of ‘World War M’, which took place on Moraine Valley Campus – a zombie invasion scenario game based in the library but working across the disciplines – maths: trying to predict the spread of the disease; biology: trying to find a cure; history: explaining the previous tracks of infections/plagues.
Kay Munro, University of Glasgow, and Ciaran Talbot, Digital Technologies and Services Team, University of Manchester, then gave their presentation on Engaging the Gaming Generation, explaining their joint project using Librarygame software to ‘add a social layer to the library, making it more fun’.
They had only just introduced their respective versions of the game (‘Librarytree’ in the University of Glasgow and ‘BookedIn’ in the University of Manchester), and were currently evaluating gamification as a means of increasing customer engagement.
The idea is that students gain points, badges and awards for using the library ‘properly’ (borrowing, returning), and also for engaging in additional aspects such as book reviews on items borrowed.
Good behaviour is rewarded in an environment familiar to those who use social networks – elements are very recognisable from Facebook and its ilk privacy settings, an activity timeline, friends, networks, bookshelves, review/rate recommend options, while a leader-board element appeals to the competitive game-players out there.
The figures are impressive: Glasgow has 41% of its first-year undergraduates in the game, and 27% of its postgraduates; 24% of game-users have at least one friend in the game.
There are clear successes to be had here, especially with the freshers; there is certainly something to be said for ‘the power of like’.
This conference provided lots of food for thought and much research for me to do.
I was inspired; it is indeed a brave new world of big data and open access out there, and the future for the information profession offers a positive prospect.
Overall, I thought it would be an intense and very worthwhile two-day conference, and I regretted that my visit had to be a truncated one.
I could have benefited from more time for networking, and the continuity the two days would offer (more time to engage with the ILI App and X Track activities).
The full conference, including the workshops offered on Monday 20 October 2014, and the trip to the National Library on Thursday 23 October 2014, would have made a tremendous combination.
Maybe next year.
Day 2: 22 October 2014 I attended day two [4] as this day, particularly Track B, was more targeted towards the search experience, discovery services and the experiences and perspectives of Web-based search at different institutions.
As cataloguing and metadata librarian, I am interested in the challenges faced by cataloguers in the age of resource discovery systems and how these tools have been influenced in their development by Internet search engines and Internet search behaviour.
Search and Discovery, Track B The opening keynote, Digital Inclusion – The Big Mission, was given by Rachel Neaman, CEO of Go ON UK, the digital inclusion charity.
Go ON UK sees digital literacy after reading, writing and mathematics as the fourth pillar of basic literacy and its mission is to empower everyone in the UK to reach their digital potential.
Rachel spoke about the irrevocable and not entirely controllable changes brought to our everyday lives by technology that, on the one hand, empowers people, organisations and businesses but has also led to an increasing divide and polarisation of opportunity between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.
The ‘haves’, already operating in a digital environment in which the minimum threshold of online skills is continually advancing, encounter little difficulty in refreshing their own digital literacy.
Meanwhile, the ‘have-nots’ over 4 million people on the UK of working age have low basic digital skills because they do not generally function in an online environment.
This is largely due to economic barriers arising from poverty but also partly due to a distrust of the online environment which is often believed to threaten personal security and intrude on privacy.
The ‘have-nots’ are falling behind in a world in which digital skills are increasingly required for such routine activities as banking, using government services, claiming benefits, applying for jobs and, indeed, demonstrating the technological competences now seen as the baseline marketable skills necessary to obtain and perform those jobs.
Go ON UK recognises that a successful digital arena is one that is not a divider but an equaliser.
Based on evidence across Europe showing proportionally high use in libraries of online services by disadvantaged groups (the elderly, Roma and other ethnic minorities, people from rural areas), Rachel argued for the need to harness the enormous potential of libraries – already increasingly the lifeline of the digitally dispossessed by providing free access to non-formal lifelong learning opportunities – to be at the forefront of digital inclusion initiatives.
In New Search Apps and Tools, Phil Bradley, independent consultant and information specialist, walked us through his latest findings in the world of social media tools, mobile apps and search engines including the many alternatives to Google of potential interest to information professionals and the information community that have come to his attention in the last year or so.
There followed a panel discussion, Pushing the Search Envelope.
On the panel were Marydee Ojala, Editor-in-Chief of Online Searcher Magazine, Arthur Weiss, Managing Director of AWARE Competitive Intelligence and Andrew Preater, Systems and Innovation Support Services Team Leader at Imperial College, London.
The panel asked what have librarians, having learned and taught the discipline of Boolean searching, been obliged to ‘unlearn’ in an environment where: one search engine has become dominant; where searchers have become accustomed to typing two or three keywords into a simple search box to find all they want to know; where the user deems the results obtained to be perfectly satisfactory so much so that anything not returned is automatically dismissed.
The panel considered if, in this environment, new skills and competences are required to stay one step ahead so as to be able to teach search techniques that find information of quality.
If so, what are those skills?
Or is it simply all the more important for librarians to draw upon their long-held information skills and aptitude for information literacy skills teaching so as to educate users to consider search strategies critically and to cast a more discerning eye over search results.
The panel discussed the dilemmas faced by librarians in a digital environment in which search engines and discovery tools rank, recommend and connect concepts for us automatically .
Do we really want them to do this or are we bypassing some vital steps that would normally draw upon our own instincts of independent problem-solving?
Modern search tools are indeed remarkable in their ability to interact with, second-guess, even ‘understand’ our search connecting entities and making suggestions that would not necessarily occur to us but are we trusting these tools a little too much: by whose criteria are search results returned, displayed and prioritised: ours, or the creators and configurers of the search tool?
Are the results what we want to see, or what they want us to see?
The next session comprised talks from representatives of two university libraries: one already using Ex Libris’ Primo discovery tool and another that was considering it alongside others.
Both had conducted observational studies of student search behaviour.
In her talk, What Do Students Want from Discovery Tools?, Keren Mills, Digital Services Development Officer at the Open University, described an OU project that set out to understand better students' expectations of library resource search tools.
Information gathered from search logs and traditional feedback methods in the form of questionnaires or interviews were not seen as sufficiently comprehensive or reliable to help the library understand what did or didn’t work well with discovery tools; or paint a full picture of how students interacted with them.
Respondents may not report accurately or in sufficient detail about their behaviour because of gaps in their recall, and the human tendency to answer questions that put ourselves in a favourable light.
Being able to see what students were doing would clearly bring more reliable results.
The method was to give students a selection of tasks using several discovery tools in use at different universities, including Ex Libris’ Primo at York, Proquest’s Summon at Huddersfield, Google Scholar and the OU’s own prototype discovery tool, badged as ‘One Stop Search’.
Participants worked through the exercises whilst also being interviewed remotely, thus allowing their search methods and their interaction with search results pages to be observed.
So what behaviours were observed?
They found a very common search method would be to enter a whole (44% of participants) or partial (26%) reference into the search box and, if that failed to bring the desired results, another attempt would be made with just the author’s name; only 25% of searches made use of author or title radio buttons; students vocalised a desire for search limiters but, in reality, rarely used them and the facets were perhaps more of a ‘comfort blanket’ there if needed.
Terminology was found to be important: students didn’t always associate ‘articles’ with journals; students also expressed a desire to be able to navigate their way back through previous screens since, having hit upon their desired search results, it was easy to forget the terms that had rendered their search successful.
So what did the observers find students wanted from a discovery tool?
They wanted: a simple search interface with an ‘auto-complete’ option in the search box – but not extra choices of places to search; results to appear in a new tab or window so they could easily backtrack through a search; a search results page that was clear and uncluttered; a Google-like relevance ranking from a simple search; a Google-like search experience, it being the search tool to which they have grown most accustomed; a clear indication as to whether full text was available and, if so, a clear link to it and which should open in a new window; an option to view previous searches; to receive an indication that they had viewed something before; the option of a personal library ‘shelf’ where articles and e-books could be tagged, saved, returned to and organised later.
Keren concluded that the observational study had helped the OU decide upon a discovery tool and informed how it would be configured and implemented.
Since the library’s assumptions about what users wanted had been considerably challenged by the direct involvement of the students themselves, she recommended that other institutions conduct observational research when considering future systems and service development.
Cattis Hummelstrand and Johanna Säll, both of Södertörn University in Stockholm, delivered the second part of this session with their talk, Discovery Tools: So We Have a User Study, Now What?
They described their own institution’s observation exercise, which, again was used to inform local configuration of the university’s discovery tool.
Similarly, an observational study was deemed a more reliable way of understanding search behaviour than student interviews, surveys and search logs.
Another reason for the study was that, while it was felt that the library was very well versed in seeking and accommodating user perspectives connected with the environment and services, it did not engage with the student community quite so much when it came to user views of technical provision, and it was felt important to be consistent with the inclusive approach taken in other areas.
The study was carried out using Camtasia so that face, speech, mouse and typing movements were all recorded.
Similar findings were obtained to those of the OU study: students preferred a simple and uncluttered search screen, search limiters were overlooked or of less interest, and ranking of results was regarded as important.
Cattis and Johanna compared Primo ‘out of the box’ with how the University configured it after the user observation exercise.
The difference was quite striking.
The Södertörn Primo had a significantly larger and centralised search box, very prominent, albeit surrounded by a ‘BBC-style’ graphic.
It was felt important to make the search page consistent with the corporate identity of the University, hence changes to colours and fonts.
The original positioning of the facets had been considered distracting on the left of the screen and so moved to the right, with fewer choices visible so as to reduce clutter.
Those considered the most popular were immediately visible and the hidden limiters were obtainable by the addition of a drop-down menu.
The Södertörn presenters concluded that it was important for libraries to reflect on their digital environments, that they should not be afraid to conduct analyses of user search behaviour and their interactions with the discovery tool.
Implementers must pay attention, in particular, to user navigation behaviour, the design of the interface and the language and terminology incorporated into the search tool.
Concluding the day and the conference was the presentation on the ILI Mobile App [5], devised and completed during the conference by Rebecca Bartlett and Robbie Beak representing the team at Nymbol in collaboration with the Library of Birmingham, the underlying theme being the potential of a co-creation experience.
From the conference outset, delegates were invited to send texts, emails, ‘selfies’, video clips, tweets, opinions and other contributions.
Given that the team did not know in advance what content would be received as the conference progressed, or even if the app was going to be in any way successful, their closing plenary could only be prepared during the conference itself, culminating in a spontaneous, anything-can-happen feel to their closing talk.
By the time of wrapping up, statistics from Google Analytics revealed there had been 1200 views of the app; 34 delegates had contributed from 11 different countries; 30% of visitors had revisited the app; on average, visitors spent eight minutes perusing it.
Naturally, most of these were from London, but also from as far away as Chicago and Jerusalem all in all, reflecting the international and highly interactive flavour of the conference.
Conclusion This was an energetic, intense and inspirational international event, with delegates from 29 countries and talks given by information professionals from across the globe.
There were many opportunities to be involved in activities in the break-out areas, to find out something new and talk to exhibitors in the break-out and foyer areas.
It was fascinating to hear of experiences in other countries and we came away with a feeling not of difference across the continents, but one of common practice.
Further information can be obtained from the Conference Web site [6].
References Day One Programme, Internet Librarian International 2014, 21 October 2014 http://www.internet-librarian.com/2014/Tuesday.php The Vlog Brothers http://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers The UKSG 36th Annual Conference and Exhibition, 8-10 April 2013 at the Bournemouth International Centre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akzmljj7DdM Day Two Programme, Internet Librarian International 2014, 22 October 2014 http://www.internet-librarian.com/2014/Wednesday.php ILI 2014: The 'ILI App' Your conference app with your conference content http://internet-librarian.com/2014/iliapp.php Internet Librarian International 2014 Conference Web site http://www.internet-librarian.com/2014/ Author Details Zoë Hurley Information Librarian – Acquisitions University of Bath Email: z.hurley@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/ Zoë began her library career in the Bodleian in 1995, and has worked in a variety of institutions (primarily Higher Education) since then, qualifying from the University of Bristol in 2003.
She has worked in a range of front-facing staff management roles, and has a particular interest in change management and multi-skilling in the library environment.
Following a career break, Zoë has returned to library work as an Acquisitions Librarian at the University of Bath, and is currently enjoying getting to grips with new aspects of librarianship.
Garth Bradshaw Information Librarian – Cataloguing and Metadata University of Bath Email: g.e.bradshaw@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/ Garth began his library career as a library assistant with Lancashire Libraries, before qualifying as a librarian at Aberystwyth University in 1992.
He trained as a cataloguer at the British Library and has been an information services librarian at Leeds Beckett University and the University of Lincoln.
He was a cataloguer at the University of Hull before taking on the role of Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at the University of Bath.
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Digital Preservation – The Planets Way Royal Library Copenhagen, Denmark 22-24 June 2009 http://www.planets-project.eu/events/copenhagen-2009/ Does your organisation know what to preserve digitally for the future?
Do you want to discuss your strategies for digital preservation with colleagues and experts?
Do you know how to preserve your collections for the future?
Do you know which tools and services to use for this?
There has been an explosion in the volume of information world-wide which will grow to 180 exabytes by 2011.
But if action is not taken, that information can be lost within five to ten years.
Digital Preservation – The Planets Way is an opportunity to understand what may be done to manage digital content for the long-term.
The Planets project invites you to take part in the three-day training event which will be presented by members of the Planets project and established experts in the field of digital preservation.
The event will take place at the striking Royal Library in Copenhagen on 22-24 June – and is also an opportunity to visit Denmark's capital during the Midsummer's Eve celebrations!
The event has been subsidised to enable attendance.
For the cost of 80 EUR to attend day one and 175 EUR to attend all three days, the event will help you to make a start with, or advance, digital preservation activities in your organisation.
You can see the full programme and register at http://www.planets-project.eu/events/copenhagen-2009/ Due to the nature of the event there is an upper capacity of 60 delegates on Day 1 and 40 delegates on Days 2 and 3.
If you have any questions about the event, please send an email to trainingevents@planets-project.eu Back to headlines Open Debate: Why Pay for Content?
The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS 24 June 2009, 2p.m.
Open Debate Web page An open debate sponsored by the Academic & Professional Division of The Publishers Association Will all digital content need to be free?
Does the Internet make that inevitable?
How profound is the current revolution in publishing?
Or are current experiments just accelerating natural evolution?
Will the established value chains hold up?
Should they?
How can publishers best serve the academy?
How can the academy best serve its students?
How should research outputs be funded?
Will the academic, scholarly and professional markets still pay for content?
Why should they?
Come along to the Royal Institution in London on 24 June to debate these issues first hand with an invited panel of guests some managing change in established businesses, others looking for more radical alternatives.
The debate begins at 2.00pm and will conclude with a wine reception.
The debate will run in two sessions in sequence, first one on teaching and learning in HE, then one on research and reference.
Each session will be led by opposing debaters, then the debate will be open to the floor to interact with the panel.
The event will conclude with a plenary looking to draw out ideas and observations from the debate that can help us to achieve our respective missions.
How might we act together?
How can content be sustainably delivered?
Panellists will include: Teaching and learning: Liam Earney, Collections Team Manager, JISC Collections Eric Frank, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Flat World Knowledge Roger Horton, CEO, Taylor and Francis Dominic Knight, Managing Director, Palgrave Macmillan Research and reference Nick Baker, Head of Global Medical Research, Elsevier Group Louise Edwards, Director, The European Library David Hoole, Head of Brand Marketing, Nature Publishing Group Professor Charles Oppenheim, Department of Information Science, Loughborough University Frances Pinter, Publisher, Bloomsbury Academic David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe The conference will be chaired by David Worlock, Chief Research Fellow, Outsell (UK) Ltd Who should attend?
The issues will engage all stakeholders in higher education and research: strategy and policy managers, fund holders, library professionals, academics, researchers, publishers and students.
Download the programme & registration form Nicola Swann Executive Assistant The Publishers Association 29B Montague Street London WC1B 5BW tel: +44 20 7691 1378/9191 fax +44 20 7691 9199 nswann@publishers.org.uk http://www.publishers.org.uk/ Back to headlines TEI@Oxford Summer School 2009 Oxford University Computing Services Monday 20 July Friday 24 July 2009 http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/events/2009-07/ The TEI@Oxford team is pleased to announce that we are now taking bookings for our annual summer school.
This five-day course combines in-depth coverage of the latest version of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for the encoding of digital text with hands-on practical exercises in their application.
If you are a project manager, research assistant, or encoder working on any kind of project concerned with the creation or management of digital text, this course is for you.
You should be generally computer literate (web, email, word-processors) for this course.
You may already be broadly familiar with the idea of textual editing, perhaps (but not necessarily) with some experience of producing HTML web pages, or of traditional scholarly editing.
You should be enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by digital technologies and keen to learn more.
You should be prepared to get your hands dirty at the keyboard and you should not be afraid of a little technical jargon.
At the end of the course we hope to have given you: a good grounding in the theoretical issues underlying the use of text markup, XML in particular; an understanding of the purpose and principles of the Text Encoding Initiative; a survey of the full range of modules constituting the TEI's current Recommendations; experience of how the TEI scheme can be customized for particular applications, and internationalized for different languages.
an introduction to some of the tools and methods in which TEI documents are published and processed Using OUCS' teaching facilities, we will also provide you with practical experience in: using online tools to build, verify, and document a TEI-conformant schema using XML editing software to create new encoded texts standardize existing digital texts using a variety of web-based and desktop tools to display and analyse TEI documents The course will be taught by the TEI@Oxford team: Lou Burnard, James Cummings, and Sebastian Rahtz, with the assistance of other invited TEI experts.
Further information and online booking: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/events/2009-07/ Back to headlines Digital Libraries à la Carte 2009 Tilburg University, the Netherlands 28 July 5 August 2009 http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/09carte/ Modular course to prepare librarians for the future.
Some modules are relevant to publishers, researchers, or IT specialists.
Module 1: Strategic Developments and Library Management Module 2: Change Making it Happen in Your Libraryy Module 3: Tomorrow's Library Leaderss Module 4: Integrated Search Solutions Toward Catalogue 2.0 Module 5: Institutional Repositories Preservation and Advocacy Module 6: Libraries and Research Data Embracing New Content Module 7: Libraries and Collaborative Research Communities Modules are one day each.
You can attend one or more modules.
The course is held from Tuesday 28 July up to and including Wednesday 5 August 2009.
There is a welcome reception or dinner on Monday evening 27 July and a social programme during the weekend.
Sessions start daily at 8.45 AM, end at 5.45 PM, and are followed by a course dinner.
For further information Web site: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/09carte/ Back to headlines NKOS Workshop at the ECDL 2009 Networked Knowledge Organisation Systems and Services: The 8th European Networked Knowledge Organisation Systems (NKOS) Workshop at the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) Corfu, Greece 1 October 2009 http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2009/ The 8th NKOS workshop at ECDL 2009 (http://www.ecdl2009.eu/) explores the potential of Knowledge Organization Systems, such as classification systems, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and lexical databases.
These tools attempt to model the underlying semantic structure of a domain for purposes of information retrieval, knowledge discovery, language engineering, and the semantic web.
The workshop provides an opportunity to report and discuss projects, research, and development related to Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services in next-generation digital libraries.
Modern digital information systems afford more options for mapping and presenting alternative orders of information than traditional physical libraries.
The digital environment offers more possibilities of relating information and knowledge structures from different interests and discourses.
Thus, the challenge is as much intellectual as technical when we want to develop and map knowledge organization systems that are useful and meaningful for the end-users operating in complex, interdisciplinary knowledge domains.
The workshop would address the general themes presented below, although the workshop is not limited to the predefined topics and remains open to other issues emerging from presentation proposals.
Two important new themes for this workshop are Linked Data and KOS development methods.
The workshop this year also invites proposals for posters.
Topics Linked data on the Web Models and methodologies for creation and development of KOS, its vocabulary and relations, and connected services Social tagging KOS Interoperability Terminology services User-centred design issues Semantic Web applications and implications of KOS Economic and social issues in the context of KOS creation, maintenance and application Proposals are invited for the following presentations posters Please email proposals (approximately 500 words for presentations and 200 words for posters, including aims, methods, main findings) by June 19th to Koraljka Golub (k.golub@ukoln.ac.uk).
Proposals will be peer-reviewed by the program committee and notification of acceptance will be given by July 3rd.
The early registration deadline for the conference and the workshop is July 31st.
For further information Web site http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2009/ or contact Koraljka Golub at k.golub@ukoln.ac.uk Back to headlines Internet Librarian International 2009 Novotel London West, London 15 16 October 2009 – pre-conference workshops 14 October http://www.internet-librarian.com/ It is now essential to maximise the value of the Internet for our libraries, librarians, and library users and continue to demonstrate the value and versatility of those library and information centre services within our organisations and institutions.
This applies to all types of libraries public, academic, commercial and government and for those outside the traditional library, including Web designers, content evaluators, portal creators, systems professionals and independent researchers.
Internet Librarian International shows you how: Through an extensive range of practical conference sessions, case studies, Keynotes, hands-on workshops, networking events, and a Sponsor Showcase, Internet Librarian International provides a unique professional learning experience for information colleagues from over 30 countries each year.
Coverage includes Nextgen libraries * inventing the future * inspiring programmes in libraries * future Web strategies * innovative projects * libraries as publishers * library 2.0, 3.0 * evidence-based librarianship * mobile technology * open source * content management * Web design * Web site usability * portal designs * new technologies * marketing techniques * working with non-library departments * business intelligence * collaborative working * corporate libraries * Web search tips * semantic search * federated search * multimedia searching * search as platform * search as service * taxonomies, folksonomies and metadata * digital libraries * digital collections * digital curation * virtual research environments * user needs analysis * managing e-resources * open access * managing digital projects * social media * social software * social networking * blogs * wikis * podcasts * user generated content * information policy * egovernment and information * intellectual property rights and protection * evaluating Web resources * Internet special librarians * distance learning * e-learning * gaming, libraries & learning Ariadne readers are invited to attend to understand the impact of technological change and development on your information environment, and learn how to better exploit the value of the Internet.
For further information The conference programme is published in June.
To reserve your copy, visit: http://www.internet-librarian.com/ or contact organisers, Information Today: E info@internet-librarian.com T +44 (0)1865 327813 Back to headlines 5th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC 2009) The DCC invites submission of full papers, posters, workshops and demos to the 5th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC 2009).
It also welcomes contributions and participation from individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains that are engaged in the creation, use and management of digital data, especially those involved in the challenge of curating data for e-science and e-research.
Proposals will be considered for short (up to 6 pages) or long (up to 12 pages) papers and also for demonstrations, workshops and posters.
The full text of papers will be peer-reviewed; abstracts for all posters, workshops and demos will be reviewed by the co-chairs.
Final copy of accepted contributions will be made available to conference delegates, and papers will be published in our International Journal of Digital Curation.
Back to headlines JISC SIS Landscape Study Blog JISC is funding a small study to provide a snapshot of the way the UK academic sector is using Web 2.0 tools and services in its work.
Could you help?
Although JISC has funded the development of a number of services (e.g.
JORUM, JISCmail) specifically for use within the UK HE sector, people within the sector are increasingly using services developed outside the sector, either in addition to or in some cases instead of – JISC-provided services.
In addition to using such services, people are also engaging in 'mashups' where combinations of services and content are used to provide new services or to provide added value to data already held.
The main focus of the study is to find out the Web 2.0 tools and services that people are using, and the reasons for choosing them (especially if they decided against using a JISC service that was available).
A number of approaches will be used to collect evidence from people working in the HE sector – these approaches will themselves include the use of Web 2.0 tools and services.
One evidence collection approach is the study blog.
In order to get feedback the blog has been set up with a series of pages, each looking at a different task that Web 2.0 services enables people to do; people can add comments to the various individual pages.
The next stage will be to identify and contact individuals who routinely use several tools and services as case studies.
The study team would like to hear from as many people as possible.
The study timescale is short, so the team would like people to do the following as soon as possible: Visit the blog and add your comments Encourage colleagues to participate – e.g.
post on email lists Contact the study team if you would like to be a case study.
As a thank you, a small number of Amazon vouchers will be awarded to some lucky participants in a draw.
Further information: See http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/ or contact: Ann Chapman a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk Rosemary Russell r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk [Source: UKOLN] [Received: June 2009] Back to headlines Evaluating Tools for Automated Subject Metadata Generation EASTER (Evaluating Automated Subject Tools for Enhancing Retrieval) is an 18-month project funded under the JISC Information Environment Programme 2009-11.
It started in April 2009 and involves eight institutional partners, with UKOLN as lead organisation, University of Glamorgan, Intute, City University London and Dagobert Soergel being major partners, as well as Royal School Library and Information Science, University College London, and OCLC Office of Research as non-funded supporting partners.
The purpose of the project is to test and evaluate existing tools for automated subject metadata generation in order to better understand what is possible, what the limitations of current solutions are, and make subsequent recommendations for services employing subject metadata in the JISC community.
The project is concerned both with the creation and with the enrichment of subject metadata using existing automated tools.
Subject metadata are most important in resource discovery, yet most expensive to produce manually.
In addition, they are much more difficult to generate automatically, especially in comparison to formal metadata such as file type, title, etc.
Also, due to the high cost of evaluation, automated subject metadata tools are rarely tested in live environments of use.
There is a huge challenge facing UK HE digital collections, institutional repositories and aggregators of institutional repository content as to how to provide high quality subject metadata for ever-increasing amounts of digital information at reasonable cost.
The information centre chosen as a test-bed for this project will be Intute.
Selected tools for automated subject metadata generation will be tested in two contexts: by Intute cataloguers in the cataloguing workflow; and by end-users of Intute who search for information in Intute as part of their research, learning, and information management.
The project will first develop a methodology for evaluating the tools.
The methodology will then be implemented in the above contexts.
First, all tools will be evaluated for results using a devised 'gold standard'.
The best tool(s) for the purposes of Intute will be implemented into a demonstrator that will feed its results into the cataloguing workflow which will then be evaluated.
Furthermore, a task-based study of end-users' retrieval actions will be conducted to determine the contribution of automatically assigned terms, and manually assigned terms, both alone and in combination, to retrieval success (i.e.
retrieving relevant documents) and failure (missing relevant documents and retrieving irrelevant ones).
Further information: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/easter/ [Source: UKOLN] [Received: May 2009] Back to headlines Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation Join to Create the DuraSpace Organization Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation, two of the largest providers of open source software for managing and providing access to digital content, have announced that they will join up to pursue a common mission.
Jointly, they will provide leadership and innovation in open source technologies for global communities which manage, preserve, and provide access to digital content.
The combined organization, named "DuraSpace," will sustain and grow its flagship repository platforms Fedora and DSpace.
DuraSpace will also expand its portfolio by offering new technologies and services that respond to the dynamic environment of the Web and to new requirements from existing and future users.
DuraSpace will focus on supporting existing communities and will also engage a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders in support of its not-for-profit mission.
The organization will be led by an executive team consisting of Sandy Payette (Chief Executive Officer), Michele Kimpton (Chief Business Officer), and Brad McLean (Chief Technology Officer) and will operate out of offices in Ithaca, New York State and Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
"This is a great development," said Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).
"It will focus resources and talent in a way that should really accelerate progress in areas critical to the research, education, and cultural memory communities.
The new emphasis on distributed reliable storage infrastructure services and their integration with repositories is particularly timely."
Together Fedora and DSpace make up the largest market share of open repositories worldwide, serving over 700 institutions.
These include organizations committed to the use of open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation of academic, scientific, and cultural digital content.
Further information: More information is available at the DuraSpace Web site http://duraspace.org/ including Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
[Source: Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation] [Received: May 2009] Back to headlines Large-scale Study of Collaborative Tools Available The University of California Berkeley Information Services and Technology Group has made available the results from a large-scale study of collaborative tools that it has undertaken as part of an extensive campus-wide strategy development and implementation.
Further information: http://collab.berkeley.edu/projects/cctsd/ [Source: CNI] [Received: May 2009] Back to headlines Consultation on Future Policy for Archival Services Following close work between The National Archives and MLA, the Government is asking people for their views on its proposed new policy on archives, which it published recently.
The consultation document, Archives for the 21st century, seeks to build the foundations for a sustainable future for archival services, responding to the challenges of the digital age and the opportunities to make archives accessible to a wider range of people.
The main proposals the Government is seeking views on are: Fewer, bigger, better working towards increased sustainability within the sector through the integration and collaboration of services; Strengthened leadership and a more responsive, skilled workforce; A co-ordinated response to the growing challenge of managing digital information so that it is accessible now and remains discoverable in the future; Comprehensive online access for archive discovery through catalogues and to digitised archive content by citizens at a time and place that suits them; Active participation in cultural and learning partnerships promoting a sense of identity and place within the community.
Archives for the 21st century builds on the progress made following the publication of the last policy on archives in 1999.
It reflects the challenges created by the rapidly evolving information and communication world, the need to deliver archives services by more effective and efficient means, and increased public expectation for access to archives' resources.
Comments on the policy proposals are welcome from all parties interested in archives including local authorities, universities, individual information professionals, archival organisations and the general public.
The consultation will run for a period of 12 weeks, until 12 August.
To take part, see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archivesconsultation/ Further information: The document can be downloaded from http://www.mla.gov.uk/ [Source: MLA] [Received: May 2009] Back to headlines Results Available from the Enhanced Tagging for Discovery (EnTag) Project The Enhanced Tagging for Discovery (EnTag) Project was a 12-month JISC project funded under the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme.
While it concluded successfully in October 2008, the work on further qualitative analysis will continue and so will its dissemination activities.
All results are made available at the EnTag dissemination Web page http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/enhanced-tagging/dissemination/ The project involved partners from six institutions, with UKOLN as lead organisation, University of Glamorgan, Intute and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) being the major partners, while OCLC Office of Research and Danish Royal School of Library and Information Science acted as non-funded supporting partners.
The purpose was to investigate the combination and comparison of controlled and folksonomy approaches to support resource discovery in JISC repositories and digital collections.
The specific aim was to determine whether vocabulary control and the use of established knowledge organization systems can assist in moving free social tagging beyond personal bookmarking to aid resource discovery.
The Intute digital collection and the STFC repository were used as two test beds.
For each a separate demonstrator was developed (see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/enhanced-tagging/demonstrators/) and a user study conducted.
Three major methods were adopted to collect user data, namely logs analysis, questionnaires, and interviews.
The evaluation of the Intute demonstrator involved comparing basic and advanced systems for indexing and retrieval implications.
The test setting comprised 28 students in political science and 60 documents covering 4 topics of relevance to the students.
Dewey Decimal Classification was used.
The STFC study involved 10 authors and depositors.
The ACM Computing Classification Scheme was employed.
The results showed the importance of controlled vocabulary suggestions for both indexing and retrieval in order to: help produce ideas of the tags to use; make it easier to find a focus for the tagging; as well as to ensure consistency and increase the number of access points in retrieval.
Much depended on the quality of the suggestions, both in terms of conceptual relevance to the user and in appropriateness of the terminology.
The participants themselves could also see the advantages of controlled vocabulary terms for retrieval if the terms used were from an authoritative source.
Further information: All results are made available at the EnTag dissemination Web page http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/enhanced-tagging/dissemination/ [Source: UKOLN] [Received: May 2009] Back to headlines RCUK Publishes Report on Open Access Study Research Councils UK has published an independent study commissioned by the Research Councils into open access to research outputs.
The purpose of the study was to identify the effects and impacts of open access on publishing models and institutional repositories in the light of national and international trends.
This included the impact of open access on the quality and efficiency of scholarly outputs, specifically journal articles.
The report presents options for the Research Councils to consider, such as maintaining the current variation in Research Councils' mandates, or moving towards increased open access, eventually leading to Gold Standard.
The study, conducted by SQW Consulting and LISU, Loughborough University, was commissioned and managed by a subgroup of the RCUK Research Outputs Group (ROG).
In addition, an independent Expert Panel was set up to advise the consultants, consisting of representatives from the commercial and learned society publishing sectors and university libraries, and chaired by Michael Jubb from the Research Information Network (RIN).
Further information: More information and a download of the report can be obtained from: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/news/090422.htm [Source: RCUK] [Received: April 2009] Back to headlines JISC SIS Landscape Study Blog Can you help us?
JISC is funding a small study to provide a snapshot of the way the UK academic sector is using Web 2.0 tools and services in their work.
Although JISC has funded the development of a number of services (e.g.
JORUM, JISCmail) specifically for use within the UK HE sector, people within the sector are increasingly using services developed outside the sector, either in addition to or in some cases instead of JISC provided services.
And as well as using such services, people are also engaging in 'mashups' where combinations of services and content are used to provide new services or to provide added value to data already held.
The main focus of the study is to find out the Web 2.0 tools and services that people are using, and the reasons for choosing them (especially if they decided against using a JISC service that was available).
A number of approaches will be used to collect evidence from people working in the HE sector – these approaches will themselves include the use of Web 2.0 tools and services.
One evidence collection approach is the study blog.
In order to get feedback the blog has been set up with a series of pages, each looking at a different task that Web 2.0 services enables people to do; people can add comments to the various individual pages.
The next stage will be to identify and contact individuals who routinely use several tools and services as case studies.
The study team would like to hear from as many people as possible.
The study timescale is short, so the team would like people to do the following as soon as possible: Visit the blog and add your comments Encourage colleagues to participate – e.g.
post on email lists Contact the study team if you would like to be a case study.
As a thank you, a small number of Amazon vouchers will be awarded to some lucky participants in a draw.
Ann Chapman a.d.chapman@ukoln.ac.uk and Rosemary Russell r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk URL: http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/ [Received: June 2009] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Moving Targets: Web Preservation and Reference Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Moving Targets: Web Preservation and Reference Management Buzz data framework wiki database rss atom archives metadata browser identifier blog repositories copyright preservation cache e-learning uri ulcc wordpress url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Davis discusses the role of Web preservation in reference management.
This article is based on a presentation given at the Innovations in Reference Management workshop, January 2010.
It seems fair to say that the lion’s share of work on developing online tools for reference and citation management by students and researchers has focused on familiar types of publication.
They generally comprise resources that can be neatly and discretely bound in the covers of a book or journal, or their electronic analogues, like the Portable Document Format (PDF): objects in established library or database systems, with ISBNs and ISSNs underwritten by the authority of formal publication and legal deposit.
Yet, increasingly, native Web resources are also becoming eminently citable, and managing both the resources, and references to them, is an ongoing challenge.
Moreover, the issues associated with referencing this kind of material have received comparatively little attention, beyond introducing the convention that includes the URL and the date it was accessed in bibliographies.
While it may be hard to quantify the “average lifespan of a web page” [1], what is undeniable is that Web resources are highly volatile and prone to deletion or amendment without warning.
Web Preservation is one field of endeavour which attempts to counter the Web’s transient tendency, and a variety of approaches continue to be explored.
The aim of this article is to convey the fairly simple message that many themes and concerns of Web preservation are equally relevant in the quest for effective reference management in academic research, particularly given the rate at which our dependence on Web-delivered resources is growing.
Digital preservation is, naturally, a strong theme in the work of the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC)’s Digital Archives Department, and Web preservation has featured particularly strongly in recent years.
This article will draw upon several initiatives with which we have been involved recently.
These include: the 2008 JISC Preservation of Web Resources Project (JISC-PoWR) [2], on which we worked with Brian Kelly and Marieke Guy of UKOLN; our work for the UK Web Archiving Consortium; and the ongoing JISC ArchivePress Project 3.
Another perspective that I bring is as a part-time student myself, on the MSc E-Learning programme at Edinburgh University.
As a consequence I have papers to read, and write, and a dissertation imminent.
So for this reason too I have a stake in making it easier to keep track of information for reading lists, footnotes and bibliographies, whether with desktop tools or Web-based tools, or through features in online VLEs, databases and repositories.
Why Do We Cite?
Why do we cite at all?
This statement from Edinburgh University Information Services clearly expresses the standard explanation: To allow those reading the record of what you’ve done to read the sources you have read.
To credit, and show you have read, the key relevant work and can use it to support your arguments and so indicate where your work has taken you further.
Citing and referencing work you have read and used avoids any charge of plagiarism.
[4] This would seem to be the most basic, essential description necessary for undergraduate or post-graduate students.
It is a resolutely traditional and non-technical explanation: it does not mention advanced topics, like reverse citation tracking or real-time impact metrics for the Research Excellence Framework (REF)!
Crediting sources and avoiding plagiarism are important scholarly aims.
However it is the first aim that is particularly significant as it clearly suggests that authors, researchers and scholars must try to give their readers at least a fighting chance of being able to access the same sources they consulted in arriving at their conclusions.
The onus is on an author to cite in a way that allows other people to check.
A standard set of metadata author, title, publisher, data, journal title has evolved to provide a reasonably reliable system of ‘indirection’.
What is not suggested is that authors are responsible for making those referenced works available to their readers.
And therefore, I think it is generally accepted, the reference should be to some authoritative edition of a work, authority attested by publication and legal deposit, or some other dependable chain-of-custody.
Web Preservation A standard definition of digital preservation is: ‘the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary’.
[5] As we discovered on the JISC-PoWR Project, Web preservation is all this, with the added expectation of some kind of continuity of access to Web resources over the Web, with a reference/locator/identifier that will persist.
This brings with it a number of requirements to deal with the problems of transient locators and changing identifiers which are also a feature of the Web.
Unfortunately, the same features which made the Web so easy to adopt make it arguably too easy to adapt.
Increasingly, in a post-Web 2.0 world, we also have highly volatile content, easily modified or removed by its authors and editors, without any guarantee that previously published versions, or any record of the change will persist.
Approaches to dealing with this range from Tim Berners-Lee’s thoughts on Cool URIs, [6] to a variety of systems of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and Handles and Persistent URLs.
Other ideas for time-based and version-based extensions to HTTP are emerging.
Many wikis, notably Wikipedia/MediaWiki, implement a versioning system, based on the Unix diff utility.
Some blogging platforms, such as WordPress, support access to superseded versions of posts and pages.
At the National Archives, the Web Continuity Project [7] arose from a request by Jack Straw, as leader of the House of Commons in 2007, that government departments ensure continued access to online documents, after a survey revealed that 60% of links in Hansard to UK government Web sites for the period 1997 to 2006 were broken.
Web archiving is also an important activity in this respect.
Among the most prominent endeavours in this area are the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine [8], and in the UK we have the UK Web Archive [9], begun as a joint project of the British Library (BL), The National Archives (TNA), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Wellcome Trust.
Content in these archives is copied from its original location into the archive, with the aim that it look or function more or less as it did in its original form.
We assume that, once in Web archives, Web resources will have a degree of permanence and fixity, and be reliably accessible and referenceable for a long time.
But, ideally, we should not have to depend solely on the likes of BL and TNA: sustainable, distrubuted collections of Web resources should be as widely achievable as traditional archives.
Unfortunately, at present, the various applications and components that are used to produce collections like Wayback and the UK Web Archive are not for the faint-hearted, and involve considerable investment in specialist skills and resources.
Citing Web Archives A question I would ask at this point is: are we educating students and researchers to use these kinds of reliable collections when citing Web material?
Does Information Literacy/Digital Skills training do enough to raise awareness of the issues, and the solutions?
Issues of security and trust are at the heart of information skills training requirements.
In Higher Education and research there is work going on at all levels to ensure all stakeholders are aware of the importance of using trusted resources on the Web.
One example is Intute’s Internet Detective [10], designed for students in Further and Higher Education.
(The need for trusted management of resources, in this case research outputs, is also central to the debate over Open Access.)
Not everything anyone finds useful to reference will be in a trusted archive, but over time we can expect the proportion to grow.
It is important to educate authors referencing Web content to locate and cite trusted versions whenever possible.
And the collections should be designed to support this aim too.
By way of a personal example: in a paper I wrote last year for my MSc course I decided to cite an apposite post by Brian Kelly on the JISC-PoWR project blog.
I might have cited the URL of the blog ‘in the wild’: Kelly, Brian (2008).
Auricle: The Case Of The Disappearing E-learning Blog.
In JISC-PoWR Blog.
http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/2008/09/01/auricle-the-case-of-the-disappearing-e-learning-blog/ Retrieved April 26th 2009.
Yet such a citation is of little use if Brian decides to delete or change his post, or if anything else happens to compromise the location of the blog or the service from which it is available.
Instead, in an attempt to put into practice what I preach, I cited the copy in the UK Web Archive: Kelly, Brian (2008).
Auricle: The Case Of The Disappearing E-learning Blog.
In JISC-PoWR Blog.
http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20090401212150/http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/2008/09/01/auricle-the-case-of-the-disappearing-e-learning-blog/ Retrieved April 26th 2009.
I think it is the right thing to do, as this should be a permanent and fixed representation of the resource I consulted.
But what a mouthful that URL is!
The people at TinyURL.com know that you can represent over 2 billion objects with just 6 alphanumeric characters, and I am confident there are not yet two billion objects in the UK Web Archive.
Reservations about the URL format aside: are other students and researchers doing this?
Could they?
Should they?
Perhaps I only thought to do this because I had just worked on that very same project, with my colleague Ed Pinsent, who also works on the UK Web Archive Project.
And it was a remark of Ed’s that alerted me to copies of the JISC-PoWR blog in the UK Web Archive.
I hope that it is not necessary for students to hob-nob with the inner circles of the Information Environment programme to know about such things.
The Significance of Blogs You will notice it was a blog post that I cited, and that is significant because blogs are a particularly interesting class of Web resource, that use a common approach to achieve a format of compelling utility in a wide range of journal-like activities.
For the most part they manifest themselves as public-private diaries (I’ll avoid the term ‘journals’) and many are eminently citable.
You do not have to take my word for it, this is what Peter Murray Rust has said: Blogs are evolving and being used for many valuable activities (here we highlight scholarship).
Some bloggers spend hours or more on a post.
Bill Hooker has an incredible set of statistics about the cost of Open Access and Toll Access publications, page charges, etc.
Normally that would get published in a journal no-one reads […] So I tend to work out my half-baked ideas in public.
[11] Michael Nielsen is another noted commentator on scientific scholarship: It’s easy to miss the impact of blogs on research, because most science blogs focus on outreach.
But more and more blogs contain high quality research content.
[…] What we’re seeing here is a spectacular expansion in the range of the blog medium.
By comparison, the journals are standing still.
[12] With this affirmation of the importance of blogs in mind, and the work on JISC-PoWR, and my own studies, I was also struck by a recent article of Heather Morrison’s in First Monday (“Rethinking Collections” [13]).
Heather described blogging as representing a new communications paradigm, and pointed out that it was the blog format not the academic journal that made an important endeavour like Peter Suber’s Open Access News [14] possible and useful.
Heather also made the point that institutional libraries should look beyond their traditional approaches to collections: The discrete “item” — the book, the journal article — is becoming less and less relevant in today’s interconnected world.
[…] For the library, what this means is that collections work will gradually need to shift from a focus on discrete items, to a focus on comprehensive collections and links both within and outside of collections.
[13] The idea of creating and maintaining collections of researchers’ blogs seems a sensible and logical one, particularly within the context of the institutional record and remit.
Academic institutions, after all, have the degree of authority and longevity appropriate to managing such a collection in the medium-to-long term.
After all, they generally manage archives already.
One advantage of the institutional context is that it ought considerably to reduce the rights-related issues surrounding the keeping of copies of Web material.
Dealing with copyright issues is a considerable overhead, but within the context of research done under the aegis of a particular institution, it ought to be relatively easy to establish that the institution has rights in material created by its employees or affiliates, or on its servers.
This constraint has already been exploited quite effectively by Institutional Repositories and Open Access endeavours.
The ArchivePress Project This was also, in part, the inspiration for the ArchivePress Project, part of the JISC Rapid Innovation programme, which we have been developing at ULCC, with the invaluable support of Maureen Pennock, of the British Library’s digital preservation team.
Its simple premise is to develop and testbed an easy way for any institution, group or individual to create a reliable working collection of posts on multiple blogs.
ArchivePress uses the WordPress blogging system, and is building on existing third-party plug-ins to harvest posts from RSS and Atom news feeds which are standard across all blogging platforms.
This does not address or solve every issue of Web or blog preservation.
It focuses predominantly on the text content: it can still preserve many hypertextual features, but not the look and feel, nor the bells and whistles, of any specific blog platform, theme or instance.
One justification for this approach is simply that it is easier to do this way, compared with the industrial strength harvesters of the big Web archives.
It was a conversation with Brian Kelly, when setting up the JISC-PoWR blog, that drew my attention to the fact that many ‘power-users’ use aggregating feed-reader programs to access blog content.
Chris Rusbridge (Director of the Digital Curation Centre) also expressed sympathy with this approach: [D]esign may be an issue; on the other hand I rarely see any blog’s design, since I read through NetNewsWire, so I’m inclined to think blogs represent an area where the content is primary and design secondary.
[15] Longer-term preservation of the archive created is an issue we are sidestepping, but establishing an effective framework for creating collections in an automated, straightforward way is a necessary first step.
All the technology involved is open source and uses open Web standards for content and metadata, so in that respect we can be fairly confident that collections so created are receiving a sustainable start.
We expect working plug-ins to be available early in 2010.
There are, no doubt, other and better ways to preserve institutional Web content.
Increasing use of multiple-blog systems, like the WordPress Multi-User platform, and improvements to Content Management Systems, offer an opportunity to build more sustainability features into new systems being rolled out.
But I do not think Institutions should wait too long before they start capturing valuable blog content as part of the institutional record; moreover, ideally, they should also be promoting the use of those archived collections.
Citation Archives A related Web preservation endeavour is the Citation Archive.
At the Missing Links workshop at the British Library in July 2009 [16], we heard a fascinating account by Hanno Lecher (Librarian at the Sinological Library, Leiden University) of the DACHS Citation Archive at the Chinese Studies departments of the Universities of Leiden [17] and Heidelberg [18].
Driven by the particular volatility of the Chinese Web, these Chinese studies departments have created a system that will keep snapshots of materials that their researchers reference.
The aim is to capture and archive relevant resources as primary source for later research.
The repository stores a copy of a requested page, or pages, along with appropriate metadata (including its original URL).
Not surprisingly, many objects stored in the repository are no longer available at their original URL: pages on the Chinese Web are often literally here today, gone tomorrow.
Because of this, DACHS has been developed along with strict protocols for verifying URL references, evaluating reliability of online resources, and forbidding references to unsecured online resources outside the archive.
Although this kind of activity can, theoretically, lead to copyright issues, the principle of caching Web content appears to be well-established, not least by Google and the Internet Archive: an accessible take-down or opt-out policy (in the event that a copyright owner objects to the archive making a resource publicly available) is usually considered sufficient safeguard.
One public service that offers these features is WebCite, hosted at the University of Toronto [19].
It has been adopted as a standard for Web references by a number of journals, notably those published by BioMed Central.
It is available for general use and offers automated features that facilitate robust citations including both the original URL and the URL of the archived copy.
A simple transaction with the WebCite submission form (or browser bookmarklet) yields the kind of reference for which I think we should be striving, for example: Davis, Richard.
What is the Library of the Future?
ULCC Digital Archives Blog.
2010-01-26.
URL:http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2009/04/10/what-is-the-library-of-the-future/.
Accessed: 2010-01-26.
(Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5n4ObuNP0) Conclusions As ever more information resources become available on the Web, the need for effective preservation solutions continues to grow.
The case therefore also grows for academic authors students and researchers to acquire the habit of referencing stable, reliable copies of them, rather than copies ‘in the wild’, which can easily mutate, or disappear without trace.
There may be no onus on authors to manage copies of the resources they reference, but they should aim to cite objects with a reasonable degree of authority and permanence.
There is therefore also a strong case to be made for accessible Web archives that address the needs of academic authors.
Existing Web archives should ensure the student/researcher use case is adequately reflected in their system specification and provide robust functions and features appropriate to their use as scholarly resources.
Persistent and succinct identifiers/locators, for one thing, as well as embedded rich metadata, would ensure reference management tools can work as effectively with Web archives as they do with established sources of literature.
In line with the conclusions of the JISC-PoWR Project, we should continue to encourage institutional implementation of Web applications supporting persistence, versioning and sustainability including Content Management Systems, blogs and wikis.
Institutional Web archive collections should also be encouraged, developing the new kinds of electronic collection suggested by Heather Morrison and implicit in recent initiatives like the Libraries of the Future campaign [20].
A critical mass of collections like this might in turn enable richer and even more advanced applications to become mainstream; text-mining, for example, or hypertextual content transclusion, as recently described by Tony Hirst [21].
Most of all we need to ensure that information skills and literacy efforts spread the message about the importance of Web resources and the risks associated with them and ensure that current and future generations of students and researchers have the knowledge and tools necessary to identify and cite reliable, authentic, persistent Web resources wherever possible.
References Marieke Guy (with comments by Michael Day): What’s the average lifespan of a Web page?
http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/2009/08/12/whats-the-average-lifespan-of-a-web-page/ JISC-PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources): a JISC-sponsored project http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/ ArchivePress: a JISC-sponsored project http://archivepress.ulcc.ac.uk/ Edinburgh University MSc E-learning Course Handbook 2006 Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Handbook http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20090916222019/http://www.dpconline.org/docs/handbook/DPCHandbook.pdf Tim Berners-Lee: ‘Cool URIs don’t change’ http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI The National Archives Web Continuity Project http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webcontinuity/ Internet Archive Wayback Machine http://wayback.archive.org/ UK Web Archive http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/ Intute: Internet Detective http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/ Peter Murray Rust blog post: Effective digital preservation is (almost) impossible; so Disseminate instead; comment by Richard Davis, 26 June 2009 http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2159 Michael Nielsen blog post: Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?
29 June 2009 http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/is-scientific-publishing-about-to-be-disrupted/ Heather Morrison, Rethinking collections Libraries and librarians in an open age: A theoretical view, First Monday, Volume 12 Number 10 1 October 2007 http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1965/1841 Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html Comment by Chris Rusbridge to post by Gavin Baker entitled Preservation for scholarly blogs, 30 March 2009 http://www.gavinbaker.com/2009/03/30/preservation-for-scholarly-blogs/ Missing Links: the Enduring Web: JISC, the DPC and the UK Web Archiving Consortium Workshop, 21 July 2009 http://www.dpconline.org/events/missing-links-the-enduring-web.html DACHS at Leiden University http://leiden.dachs-archive.org/citrep/ DACHS at Heidelberg University http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/dachs/ WebCite, on-demand Web archiving system for Web references http://www.webcitation.org/ JISC Libraries of the Future campaign http://www.jisc.ac.uk/librariesofthefuture Tony Hirst blog post, Content transclusion one step closer http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/content-transclusion-one-step-closer/ Author Details Richard M. Davis Repository Service & Development Manager Digital Archives Department University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) Email: r.davis@ulcc.ac.uk Web site: http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/author/richarddavis/ Return to top Article Title: “Moving Targets: Web Preservation and Reference Management” Author: Richard M. Davis Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/davis/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Development of a lightweight library catalogue Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Development of a lightweight library catalogue Citation BibTex RIS Jason Cooper describes how a lightweight temporary library catalogue system was constructed when Loughborough University opened their second campus in London.
In 2014 Loughborough University launched Loughborough University London, a postgraduate campus located in London.
Until this point Loughborough University’s Library [1] had been single site, so there were a number of factors to take into account to decide on the best way cater for the second site, including: Size the London campus library was significantly smaller than the Loughborough campus library Shared online resources the majority of online Library resources were accessible to users at either campus Complexity of switching the Library Management System (LMS) to a multi-site configuration Moving the LMS from a single-site configuration to a multi-site configuration would require a lot of time and resources Upcoming replacement of LMS The Library’s LMS (Ex Libris’s Aleph [2]) had recently been reviewed and a project was being prepared to tender for a replacement After weighing up the factors, it was decided that the best time to move to a multi-site setup of the LMS would be as part of the upcoming replacement of the LMS.
Most of the Library services would work at an acceptable level of service by placing London campus specific resources in their own collection, the main exception being the Library’s Resource Discovery Service (Primo [3]).
Adapting the Library’s existing instance of Primo to have a second interface for the London campus would have required extensive configuration changes, which could have impacted severely on Loughborough students.
It was decided that while access to Primo would be available to patrons based at the London campus for activities like checking and renewing current loans, it would also be beneficial to provide them with a lightweight online catalogue for finding London based and online resources (Databases, E-Journals, etc).
Catalogue requirements The following were drawn up as the key requirements of the system: It should allow the user to search for items either physically located at the London campus or available as an e-books collection It should list the results of a search with the core details of the items, but allow the user to click on an item to get a popup with more details Both the search results and the popup should include thumbnail images of the items It should have a form that can be used by the London campus users to request items from the larger Loughborough campus library It should provide access to a number of key Library websites It should work on multiple types of devices, from the smaller smart-phone size screens all the way up to the large screen sizes available on desktop PCs It should be able to detect that it’s running on a dedicated OPAC machine and disable functionality to suit Design decisions The team responsible for developing the system would traditionally have used a relational database (usually MySQL [4]), but a quick design of a schema showed that not only would the schema required be complex, but that it would also require complex SQL queries for searching items.
It was decided that instead of using a relational database engine that the system would be built upon a Document Store NoSQL database engine [5], as this was what the relational database schema being designed was effectively turning into.
The NoSQL database engine chosen was MongoDB [6], which uses a Document Store model and has full text indexes that can cover multiple fields and a natural search syntax, that would vastly simplify the searching routines.
While the team had played with MongoDB in the past this would be their first real project using it.
The next decision the development team made was how to structure the web interface part of the system.
The two choices available were Server side page generation (e.g.
CGI scripts) Client side AJAX style, where a JavaScript front-end makes requests to a back-end API The decision to use a Client side AJAX style structure was chosen as this would reduce the load on the server and also provide a more fluid interface to the user.
The development team had successfully used this structure in a number of projects [7, 8, 9] and found it to be very comfortable to work with.
The two options available to the development team to tackle the requirement that it should work on a range of devices from smart-phones to desktops were: Device detection Responsive web design The team chose to use responsive web design [10] as it was felt to be easier to maintain going forward due to it separating the display logic from the application logic.
Development Schema structure Designing the initial schema for the MongoDB database turned out to be very simple requiring a single collection for items to which indexes were applied on the following fields: System number Title ISBN ISSN Author Collection In addition to those indexes, a text index was applied that covered the title and author fields.
Harvesting items from the LMS Having designed the initial schema the next step was to develop the script that would update the MongoDB collection from the LMS.
After investigating both Aleph’s REST API [11] and X-Server [12] it was decided that the REST API was simpler to use and returned the results faster.
Unfortunately neither the REST API or X-Server provided an easy way to extract all items in a specific collection.
As the development team already have a lot of experience with Aleph’s underlying database it was decided that the simplest way to proceed would be to create an API, in the form of a CGI script, which given a collection code would return all the system numbers of items in those collections.
A script was then developed that, for each collection to be harvested, calls the custom API to retrieve the system numbers of items in that collection.
Then for each system number it calls the LMS’s REST API to pull back the full item’s metadata, which it would create a document object from and “upsert” it into the MongoDB item collection.
An upsert in MongoDB is where you specify the document should replace an existing one if it matches a field or expression (in our case the item’s system number), if the specified field or expression doesn’t match any existing items then it will be added.
The harvesting script was scheduled to run each night to update the items collection in the MongoDB database.
Creating the search API Once the harvesting of item records from the LMS was complete, attention was turned to developing an API that the front-end would use to find relevant items.
The API was developed in Perl[13] and consists of two stages: 1.
Parsing the search query to produce a suitable MongoDB query filter 2.
Using the query filter to extract the suitable results from the database Producing the MongoDB query filter In Perl a MongoDB query filter is a hash reference with nested hash and array references.
An example of a query filter produced for a search for “track” in the E-Book collection (collection code EB) would be: {    ’$and’ => [        { ‘collection’ => ‘EB’ },        {            ’$text’ => {                ’$search’ => ‘track’,                ’$language’ => ‘en’            },        },    ], }   The keys starting with a $ are query operators, so the $and in the example states that we’re looking for items that have a collection of ‘EB’ and that match our $text search.
The $text operator specifies a text search against the collection’s text index.
In the example we’re using the $search and $language parameters, where the $search parameter is the search terms being looked for and $language is used to control the stopwords and stemming properties of the search.
In addition to the $search and $language parameters the $text operator can also take the $caseSensitive and $diacriticSensitive parameters, where $caseSensitive indicates whether the search should be case sensitive and $diacriticSensitive indicates whether the search should consider characters with diacritical marks as being the same as their non-marked counterpart.
Constructing a suitable query filter in the API is quite simple as the only two values that differ between searches are the collection value and the $search value.
Developing the front-end.
Once the search API was complete development of the front-end could start.
The design was kept simple and the page was split into three parts, a header, a footer and a list of results (Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the final front-end design).
Figure 1: Final front end design The header The header contains the following a logo search options which category to search the search box that the user can enter their search terms into the search button, which initiates a search a help button that shows a popup box containing help on using the system including detailing the more advanced search terms available.
links to the following additional Library resources: Library website Reading Lists (LORLS [14]) E-Journals A-Z (SFX [15]) Item Request form Library Account (a deep link into Primo) a dropdown list that lets users order their results by relevance, title, order or date The results list Once the user has done a search the results list contains all the results found.
For each result the following metadata is displayed: Title Author Date ISBN Imprint Shelf Mark Notes URL (rendered as an active link to the resource) Where available a thumbnail of the item’s cover from Google Books [16] is displayed alongside its metadata.
The thumbnail is linked to the item’s entry on Google Books.
The footer The footer simply contains a mailto link that users can use to email the Library.
Responsive web design The responsive nature of the front-end interface is handled via the CSS [17] stylesheet using @media rules.
Each @media rule used is tied to the width of the screen, so as the screen width drops below certain widths how elements are displayed changes.
The actual changes required to keep the system usable on smaller screens are: below a width of 880 pixels the logo in the header is hidden below a width of 600 pixels some font sizes and padding are reduced to make the most use of the limited screen space below a width of 520 pixels the font sizes in the header are reduced again and the size of the search box and related options are altered to fit better on a smaller screen (Figure 2 shows an example of the screen at this width) Figure 2: Example of screen at 520 pixels wide.
Detecting when running in a dedicated Catalogue PC and disabling specific options.
The final feature needed to meet the initial requirements was that it should be able to detect when it was running on a dedicated catalogue machine and disable certain features.
As the Library control the dedicated catalogue machines they are able to set its browser’s useragent string to specific value.
When the front-end javaScript detects that the page is being viewed in a browser using this useragent string it makes two changes to the Document Object Model [18].
it removes the target attribute for the reading list menu entry (which means it will load the reading list in the same window) it adds a class of onOPAC to the pages body tag All other changes required are handled by the page’s CSS, specifically: all links in the header that would open in a new window are hidden the mailto link in the footer is hidden all links in results list are disabled by setting their pointer-events property to none Going live The lightweight library catalogue went live at the same time that the London campus opened and required very little maintenance.
The system met the majority of the expectations of students and staff.
The only significant feature missing was the ability to display the current availability of print items in the London campus library.
Phase 2 After the system had been in use by the London campus library for a year it had become apparent that the project to tender for a replacement LMS was going to take longer than originally thought, so it was decided to extend the lightweight catalogue by adding two new features: a new collection of career resources displaying current availability of items Adding a new collection Adding a new collection was really a couple of minor changes.
The first was to extend the Custom API on the LMS to include the system numbers of new items in its results.
The second was to add the new collection to the front-end by adding another option element to the select element of the search form.
Displaying current availability of items Adding the current availability of items in the result list was a bit more in depth than adding the new collection.
The back-end would require a new API adding for retrieving the current availability of items and the front-end would need extending to make use of the new availability API and display the item availability alongside their entry in the search results.
The new backend API developed takes a list of system numbers and then for each one call the LMS’s REST API to pull back a list of all the items for that system number along with their collection, loan type (e.g.
week loan, month loan) and current availability status.
Items statuses that weren’t in a suitable collection for the London Campus were discarded.
This left only relevant items from which the total number of items and the total number of available items could be calculated for each loan type.
The extension of the front-end to make use of the new API required additional code to be added to the javaScript routine which displayed the results list.
As each result is displayed this new code checks to see if the result is from a collection that it should show the current availability status for (i.e.
not the E-Books collection) and if so then it adds an empty field to be populated with the item’s availability later, it also adds the results system number to an array.
Once all results have been displayed, the populate availability function is called with the array of system numbers.
If the array has contents then the array is concatenated together and used to make an AJAX call to the back-end’s availability API and then uses the response to populate the empty fields added earlier with the current availability information for each result.
Conclusion The lightweight online catalogue has been in active use by the London Campus since it opened in 2014.
During this period there have been very few bugs reported, all of which have been minor.
Even though it was the first time the team had used MongoDB in a production service they found that using a NoSQL document store at the heart of the back-end reduced the development times for this style of system and simplifying the logic required in the search API.
The team also found that the use of @media rules to provide a responsive site helped keep the layout logic separate from the content being displayed.
References (2017).
Loughborough University Library [online] Available at: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/ [7th March 2017] (2017) Ex Libris the bridge to knowledge, Aleph.
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Primo Discovery and Delivery [online] Available at:  http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/PrimoOverview [7th March 2017] (2017).
MySQL.
[online] Available at: https://www.mysql.com/ [7th March 2017] (2017).
Document-oriented database.
[online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document-oriented_database [7th March 2017] (2017).
MongoDB for GIANT Ideas [online] Available at: https://www.mongodb.com/ [7th March 2017] COOPER, J. and BREWERTON, G., 2013.
Developing a prototype library WebApp for mobile devices.
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Visualising building access data.
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KNIGHT, J., COOPER, J. and BREWERTON, G., 2012.
Redeveloping the Loughborough online reading list system.
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Responsive Web Design Introduction.
[online] Available at: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_intro.asp [7th March 2017] (2017) Aleph RESTful APIs.
[online] Available at: https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/aleph/apis/Aleph-RESTful-APIs [7th March 2017] (2017) Aleph X-Services.
[online] Available at: https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/aleph/apis/Aleph-X-Services [7th March 2017] (2017) The Perl Programming Language www.perl.org.
[online] Available at: https://www.perl.org/ [6th June 2017] (2010).
LORLS Loughborough Online Reading List System.
[online] Available at: http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/lorls/ [7th March 2017] (2017).
SFX Link Resolver [online] Available at: http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/default.asp?catid=%7B7F2829F7-42E6-425C-A9A7-0BBFBD0D6959%7D 7th March 2017 Google Books APIs.
[online] Available at: https://developers.google.com/books/ [7th March 2017] (2017) Cascading Style Sheets.
[online] Available at: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ [6th June 2017] (2000) What is the Document Object Model?
[online] Available at: https://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/introduction.html Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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RefShare: A Community of Practice to Enhance Research Collaboration Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines RefShare: A Community of Practice to Enhance Research Collaboration Buzz data database dissemination infrastructure copyright preservation e-research ict refworks privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Tertia Coetsee describes a community of practice for postgraduate students in phytomedicine using RefShare, to enhance collaborative research.
The Phytomedicine Programme of the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria is a multidisciplinary and collaborative research programme investigating therapeutically useful compounds present in plants growing in South Africa [1].
The programme investigates problems in the wide area of infections, especially microbial and parasitic infections in the process of training postgraduate students.
They co-operate with many specialists in other areas in the application of extracts and isolated compounds to improve the health and productivity of plants, animals and humans.
The approach is multidisciplinary and students and collaborators come from diverse fields such as biochemistry, botany, chemistry, microbiology, parasitology, pharmacy, pharmacology, physiology, plant pathology, plant production, veterinary sciences and zoology.
The phytomedicine laboratory expertise is in extraction, bioassay and isolation of bioactive compounds from plants.
Their clients are students, scientific collaborators, industry involved in phytomedicine and users or potential users of phytomedicines.
In 2007 it was designated as a National Research Foundation Developed Research Niche Area.
This article will focus on Refshare as a tool to support a community of practice and to promote research collaboration in the Phytomedicine Programme.
It will also look at the role of the information specialist to promote information services to support research in this discipline.
It will illustrate how the information specialist plays a role in facilitating the community of practice, becomes closely aligned with the faculty department, to support education innovation and research excellence.
As many of the postgraduate students are situated off campus, often outside South Africa, the focus is on electronic information products and services for easier retrieval of information, group interaction, information sharing and collaboration and the digital preservation of intellectual products of the Phytomedicine Programme.
Problem Statement All students of the Phytomedicine Programme, should have access to important documentation.
The Phytomedicine Programme, having no permanent administration personnel, was experiencing difficulty keeping track of all activities of the students.
A community of practice seemed to be the answer to integrate all electronic information products and services and at the same time provide management possibilities.
An electronic platflorm or tool to serve this community of practice was needed.
With so many products being available on the market, care must be taken of client needs and product features.
Privacy is one of the main concerns of the Phytomedicine Programme, as the research involved patents rights, sensitive information, and unpublished research.
This platform or tool was to provide space where bibliographies, research, and monthly reports, as well as published articles and groundbreaking articles could be placed, so that all students and lecturers of the Phytomedicine Programme could share access.
Futhermore to provide a platform where they could add information; share ideas, information and progress and to stimulate a research atmosphere.
In this way postgraduate students would be able to see who else was working on similar fields of research, thereby leading to collaboration and enhancing their research output.
RefWorks, an online research management, writing and collaboration tool, subscribed to and used by the University of Pretoria since 2006, seemed to be the answer.
It is available to all of the postgraduate students and the library provides support and training in the product.
This product, however, has a feature called RefShare, especially focusing on collaboration.
RefShare RefShare is a module within RefWorks that provides users with a quick and easy way to share their databases (or folders) further enhancing collaborative research.
Users can share their RefWorks references with both members of their own institution and globally with any researcher having Internet access.
The University of Pretoria subscribes to RefWorks.
Thus RefShare is free to all university members.
RefShare can be used to post class reading lists on a central Web page, provide easy access to information for disparate researchers collaborating on a project, create and share databases of frequently requested reference queries by topic and provide a linkable database of research done by specific faculty members.
It is searchable.
RefShare facilitates dissemination of information by having a central Web page for the posting and access of research information.
It provides a collaborative research environment using the capabilities of easily accessible data via the Internet.
It enables the seamless sharing and exchange of information and allows easy transfer of information between RefWorks databases.
It can post centrally frequently needed databases of materials for research queries, class assignments, or research review.
RefShare provides easy remote access to research and collaboration globally.
Citations can be downloaded or exported and encourages the use of RefWorks.
The RefWorks marketing Web page [2] gives the following functions of the product: ‘Managing information, writing research papers and creating bibliographies…provides users with a simple-to-use online tool, to capture, organise, store, share and manipulate data generated by multiple information resources.’ The Changing Research Environment Researchers are no longer anchored to their faculty or institution.
Due to modern infrastructure they can now collaborate beyond all borders.
MacDonald and Uribe [3] mention the following regarding the changing research environment: Information and communication technologies (ICT) are transforming the way academic researchers work.
The new forms of research enabled by the latest technologies bring about collaboration among researchers in different locations, institutions and even disciplines.
Ury, Meldrem and Johnson [4] state that ‘Electronic library services and myriad online resources are shifting the roles and workloads of academic reference librarians.’ We are seeing an increasing emphasis on the changing electronic environment that libraries face today.
The expanding electronic information environment opens new opportunities for teaching partnerships or collaboration within the university environment.
It necessitates the use of a different approach to develop new pedagogical methods and team teaching for the electronic age.
This involves information professionals partnering with departmental staff.
No longer can the information specialist render the traditional services of the library.
They need to go out to their clients, find out what their needs are.
They need to be aware that most researchers think the Internet can solve all their information needs and that the library is no longer needed.
The changing situation compels libraries to enhance their services to ensure their future usefulness .
Collaboration in the Research Environment Collaboration is, according to Merriam-Webster [5] to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavour.
It is a recursive process where two or more people or organisations work together in an intersection of common goals, by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.
In this project, two examples of collaboration are present.
Collaboration between the postgraduate students and academic staff of the Phytomedicine Programme takes place on an academic level, where knowledge, and enthusiasm are shared.
Secondly there is collaboration between the latter group and the information specialist of the Jotello F. Soga Library.
This collaboration is not only the traditional library function, to assist students and staff with information literacy training, specialised information searches, access to relevant information resources (journals, books, reference sources, audiovisual sources, and e-resources), but also to promote customised information services, to support research excellence in each discipline and to support education innovation.
This includes the development of a group of Web products geared to the needs of its student and researcher/lecturer market.
It also includes knowledge of research methodology, matters of importance to postgraduate students, e.g.
plagiarism, copyright issues, citation and reference management.
The Benefits of Research Collaboration Research collaboration saves time, generates wiser more durable decisions, richer understanding of values through shared information.
It fosters action and promotes change, solves collective problems or resources, builds relationships and understanding.
It also encourages and motivates collaborators [6].
The idea is to share knowledge, skills and techniques and thus ensure more effective use of their talents.
Tacit knowledge is transferred through collaboration.
All these benefits contribute to encourage enthusiasm between collaborators.
Role of the Information Specialist Robertson, in her paper on services for postgraduate students at IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) said, ‘For too long, librarians have designed services and programs on their understanding of what is needed rather than working with academics and students in determining their information and skill needs.’ [7] At the Jotello F Soga Library of the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria, the past years have seen a change in the role of the information specialist.
Electronic resources and the e-environment changed the way we render our services.
We became collaborators, working together with faculty members to enhance our services to all our students, lecturers and researchers.
The Jotello F Soga Library has 3 information specialists (each supporting specific departments) to assist students and staff with information literacy training, and specialised information searches.
These information specialists are also responsible for the acquisition of relevant information resources (journals, books, reference sources, audiovisual sources, and e-resources) for the library.
They also undertake to add value, to promote information services to support research in each discipline and to support education innovation and research excellence.
This includes the development of a group of Web products geared to the needs of its student and researcher/lecturer market.
These e-information products (Web portals, digitised collections and self-generated electronic publications) are also relevant for the rest of Africa, especially in the SADC (Southern African Development Community) region where the Faculty plays a leading role in veterinary education and research.
According to Rapple: not only will librarians help faculty and students do research, they will also help faculty develop new pedagogical methods for the electronic age.
Many will become much more active in curriculum design, in devising and evaluating assignments, in team teaching, and in teaching for-credit courses.
They will become true partners and fellow educators with faculty.
[8] The information specialist for the Department of Paraclinical Sciences became involved with the Phytomedicine section’s information needs as this postgraduate programme developed.
Information support included building an appropriate information sources collection, designing a Website to enable easier retrieval of information for postgraduate students from various countries in Africa.
While consulting with the head of the Phytomedicine Programme, it became apparent that there was a need for ‘community of practice’ between the diverse postgraduate students and researchers.
A research tool was needed that would provide a platform where a database of core articles, all previous publications, new pre-published information and regular progress reports could be housed.
The traditional way of photocopied articles in files and other outdated practices did not serve to promote collaboration between students or enhance the research atmosphere within the Programme.
This new development highlights benefits that collaboration might represent to the postgraduate students in the Phytomedicine Programme.
We hope that the sharing of knowledge, tacit knowledge, skills and techniques, will be an enticement to fuel their enthusiasm for their research.
It should also lead to better management of the different aspects of research within the Programme.
Special Needs of the Phytomedicine Programme Collections that need to be accessed include: A collection of core articles or groundbreaking articles in the field of phytomedicine.
These articles are mandatory reading for all postgraduate students in preparation for their research at the Phytomedicine Programme.
All students are able to access these articles.
Articles may be copied and printed for individual use, or exported to students’ RefWorks folders.
A bibliographic list of the published research output of staff and students at the Phytomedicine Programme.
All full-text articles were linked.
All students are able to access the full text.
Articles may be copied and printed for own use, or exported to students’ RefWorks folders.
Masters and Doctoral students’ research information.
This includes research protocols and non-published information on which they are still working.
Access to this information is controlled, as some information is confidential, or there are patent rights involved.
Presentations at conferences and workshops presented by students and staff members of the Phytomedicine Programme.
Research procedures to be used for certain techniques are also made available, which includes safety guidelines.
PowerPoint presentations of important lectures or presentations will also be provided.
Regular Progress Reports.
All postgraduate students will have to file regular progress reports.
A template will be made available.
An email facility is available on RefShare so that students and staff will be able to share ideas and communicate with colleagues on work-related issues.
E-theses of all previous postgraduate students of the Phytomedicine Programme.
Full text linked via UPeTD (University of Pretoria’s electronic theses).
The above provides a one-stop electronic or virtual resource center that can be accessed by all of the collaborators.
Methodology A unique Web page was designed to focus on important African ethnoveterinary plants with links and content provided to support the research programme.
This Web page was included as a reference in the ‘groundbreaking articles folder’ on RefShare, for all students to be able to access [9].
In collaboration with the head of the Phytomedicine Programme, it was decided to include in the Webpage the plants on Lists A and B of the Centurion Declaration of the Association for African Medicinal Plants Standards (AAMPS).
These 51 plants form part of the most important medicinal plants of Africa.
The Web site includes: description of the plant, parts used, medicinal uses, preparation and dosage, active ingredients, pharmacological effects and the distribution of the plant and a bibliography.
It is planned later to include the pharmacopoeia of each plant.
Refshare folders were constructed for the groundbreaking articles, and the published articles of the Phytomedicine Programme.
The full-text articles in PDF format were then added.
Folders were also opened for the annual progress reports, postgraduate research and procedures and proposals.
E-mails were sent to all the postgraduate students, researchers and lecturers of the Phytomedicine Programme, inviting them to join RefShare.
A letter from the head of the Phytomedicine Programme, explaining the purpose, goal and potential of the project was attached to the invitation email.
It was compulsory for all students to participate.
Postgraduate students have a meeting once a week with staff and students of the Phytomedicine Programme.
During one of these sessions, the Information Specialist was also invited to brief students on the aims and benefits of the project.
One of the features that the students value was that RefShare not only allows users to view the contents of a folder, but they can also export specific records or create bibliographies in a specific citation style.
Data Collection RefShare allows you to see how many hits your shared folder or database has had over time.
This provided the information specialist with a quantitative tool to measure the access of students to the databases.
Figure 1 gives an illustration of the use of the different folders on the RefShare project.
The initial use in March 2010 was high, as students were encouraged to register on this platform.
We expect that the use may increase in future as students become more aware of the benefits and value of the product.
Figure 1: Total hits to different folders on RefShare for the period March 2010 to June 2010 Limitations RefShare does not allow collaborators to edit the database research findings or folders.
Students could not add their own research but had to submit their files via email to the information specialist for adding.
Consequently this created a problem in terms of waiting time.
Moreover, during the project it became clear that although responses were generally positive, the students all feared a lack of privacy.
They were reluctant to put their unpublished information in the public domain although they were constantly reassured that only participating postgraduate students and staff of the Phytomedicine Programme could access the folders.
Most of the current enrolled students were already at a progressed stage of their studies by the time the project developed.
Their studies progressed to a stage where most of the benefits of the project no longer held any interest for them.
Another limitation is that although the project started in 2009, results will only be clear at the end of the current students study programme, 2010-2011.
Research Findings It was agreed that it was an enormous advantage for students to have electronic access to bibliographies, published research and articles and core articles in phytomedicine.
It provided a one-stop platform that was easily accessed.
This access also helped to foster a sense of community between the postgraduate students.
Frequent progress reports also served as a motivational tool; students could see the progress their fellow students made.
Most disadvantages noted were related to the reluctant use of new technology rather than its functionality.
This indicates that some changes in the training of new students are necessary in order to avoid such a situation.
This is a matter which must be addressed.
It is planned to include training on the RefShare project for future students of the Phytomedicine Programme’s general orientation and database training sessions.
In that way we hope to gain the students’ trust and co-operation.
One of the post-doctoral students remarked: the Phytomedicine Refshare database is a user-friendly platform by which a number of valuable resources have been made available to students in the Phytomedicine Programme.
Many of the students rely solely on online databases to conduct literature searches, and this interface with the library staff has enabled them to become familiar with other resources available to them through the library.
Especially helpful is the Refshare resource whereby links to online previous thesis publications submitted by past students have been added, as the hard copies are not always easily available and the research has often not yet been published in scientific journals.
Also, having journal articles of interest readily available, particularly those that are not published online, will save time when students do not have to search for these articles individually.
The submission and uploading of progress reports will also be made easy by using the Refshare platform.
I believe that constant reminders to the students about the Refshare database will encourage them to become accustomed to the idea of using the database, and also to remind them to upload details of their own research so that collaborations can be fostered and other students can gain from consolidated knowledge.
The head of the Phytomedicine Programme supports these comments and adds: to me another great advantage is that we can place power point lectures that are given to students on this source.
A problem with a research focused program is that students are at different stages of completion of their studies.
If all started at the same time one could present a series of lectures that would be relevant to all at that stage of their study.
Frequently students do not appreciate the importance of lectures to their studies and they do not take notes.
What happens now is that these presentations are available to the students at the stage when it is required.
An advantage is also that very important publications from leading scientists in the world are now available and we can expect that students will use this to get background knowledge.
We are very pleased that the Phytomedicine Programme has been selected as an example to demonstrate the use of this technology to our students.
The dedicated staff of our library deserve more than gratitude for their active support and initiative.
Positive outcomes included: A much deeper understanding of the literature of their field and where it is indexed.
Knowledge of their research interests, current and former will help build stronger relationships between the librarian and the Phytomedicine Programme’s staff and students.
This will also create an opportunity for alert services introducing individuals to new materials in their specific area.
When librarians possess technical skills that can be shared with faculty, staff and students, such as knowledge of RefWorks, it reflects well on the library.
This project increased awareness and usage of RefWorks while also affording librarians a student-centered perspective on teaching and using this tool.
Students learned useful skills in addition to developing a sense of community with the library.
Students like using it; it is useful to their research, it is easy to use, and it saves them time.
Thus it can also enhance student throughput, which can earn more subsidy for the University.
Conclusion Collaboration between the Phytomedicine Programme’s staff, postgraduate students and the information specialist of the Jotello F Soga Library has been discussed.
It is clear that the information specialist and the library play an important role in enhancing research output of the Phytomedicine programme.
RefWorks (RefShare) proved to be a valuable tool to enhance this collaboration.
Easy retrieval of information, group interaction, information sharing and collaboration together with the digital preservation of intellectual products of the Phytomedicine Programme are all made possible by RefShare.
Although the project still has a few difficulties to overcome, the focus is on positive results in order to facilitate education innovation and research excellence.
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The librarian as teacher in the networked environment.
College Teaching, Summer 45, 3, 114.
Department of Library Services Veterinary Science Library http://www.library.up.ac.za/vet/phytomedicine/ Author Details Tertia Coetsee Information Specialist Jotello F. Soga Library, Faculty of Veterinary Science University of Pretoria Email: tertia.coetsee@up.ac.za Web site: http://www.library.up.ac.za/vet/tertia.htm Return to top Article Title: “RefShare: A Community of Practice to Enhance Research Collaboration “ Author: Tertia Coetsee Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/coetsee/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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From Passive to Active Preservation of Electronic Records Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines From Passive to Active Preservation of Electronic Records Buzz xml infrastructure archives tagging identifier blog repositories video preservation cataloguing ocr ead adobe dvd dspace eportfolio droid privacy standards Citation BibTex RIS Heather Briston and Karen Estlund provide a narrative of the process adopted by the University of Oregon in order to integrate electronic records management into its staff's workflow.
Permanent records of the University of Oregon (UO) are archived by the Special Collections and University Archives located within the University Libraries.
In the digital environment, a new model is being created to ingest, curate and preserve electronic records.
This article discusses two case studies working with the Office of the President to preserve electronic records.
The first scenario describes working with the outgoing president, receiving records in a manner very similar to print records, where the Archives acted as a recipient once the records were ready to be transferred.
The second scenario describes actively working with the new president’s office as records are being created with the move to the Archives’ permanent records part of the planning.
In both cases, relationship building was essential to success.
Organisation Background The University of Oregon is a public university.
As a public agency the University’s records are public records and their retention is scheduled by Oregon Administrative Rule [1].
The rules prescribe both the maximum and minimum retention period for the records created by the University.
In the case of the records created by the Office of the President and the president himself, the vast majority of those records are required to be retained permanently and made accessible in due course by the University.
Although the University Archives had previously received some electronic records, the departure of the University President in 2009 marked the first large-scale transfer of electronic records to the University Archives.
The Office of the President records, documenting the history of the institution, also represents one of the most important collections for an archives to receive.
Receiving the Records of the Outgoing President In summer 2009, the UO President retired after fifteen years in office.
During his presidency he was the first president to use email for communication extensively and create electronic records including Microsoft Office files, photographs, video files, and Web pages.
At the same time he also sent and received correspondence on paper, and his office had a policy of printing and filing documents in a triplicate filing system based chronologically, alphabetically, and by topic.
It is generally assumed that record collections are and will remain hybrid print and electronic collections for the foreseeable future.
The outgoing president’s office turned everything into print; whereas, the next president’s office would adopt a policy to turn everything into electronic copies.
There was an established routine for transfer for paper records between the Office of the President and the University Archives; however, electronic records required a separate workflow that raised many new issues for the Office.
No electronic records were transferred to the archives until the President had officially retired and they were organized by his former Executive Secretary.
Within the Office of the President and across campus, it has taken time to understand that electronic communication is covered by records laws just as much as paper communication.
Email was a particularly difficult problem as it is often -mistakenlyregarded as unofficial, with only selected important documents being printed for preservation.
There also arose a concern for security of the electronic records due to the sensitive nature of the materials.
Although records may be public, many of the documents are subject to federal and state confidentiality laws, as well as exemptions from the state’s public records law [2].
Many records creators at the University are concerned about the ease of inadvertent disclosure of electronic records, especially when disclosed out of context.
(In an earlier project, an outdated organisation chart was found in our institutional repository [3] through Google.
As a floating PDF file, there was no way to let a user know it was outdated and the archives received complaints from University administration.)
Building upon the relationship that had developed over the years between the President’s Executive Assistant and the University Archives, assurances were made that measures were within place in the preservation infrastructure that would avoid unauthorized access and limit inadvertent disclosure.
With these understandings in place, representatives of the University Libraries worked with the Executive Assistant to the President to prepare the records for transfer.
The Executive Assistant went through the documents and email collections and filed many messages, discarded junk mail, and flagged confidential messages prior to transfer.
In a collaborative meeting with campus IT and the President’s Office we ensured that everyone was comfortable with the transfer and arranged to have all of the electronic records transferred to the Library’s possession via a DVD.
Setting up a Flexible Infrastructure When deciding how to handle records received, it became clear the Libraries would not be able to implement a new content management system due to lack of the necessary additional funds and extra systems support, a position aggravated by the lack of viable systems on the market.
What we were seeking was a system: flexible enough to migrate easily to an e-records system if later implemented able to scale to handle more offices on campus able to accommodate appropriate security measures, and linked with the paper records.
Planning for Preservation In order to plan for preserving these records, The Libraries employed the PLATTER checklist developed to aid implementation of a preservation plan [4].
This tool was used to help guide decisions for ingest, migration schedules, institutional support, technical infrastructure, staffing and responsibilities, and access conditions.
The PLATTER checklist was selected over more recent tools like the Trustworthy repositories audit & certification (TRAC): criteria and checklist [5], because it had immediate applicability and did not bear as large an administrative barrier to its completion.
The OAIS model [6] was also consulted to identify areas of workflow and storage with our makeshift system.
Ingest In order to mirror the process for paper records, the Libraries wanted record creators to be able to ‘deposit’ their records with the Archives.
In the case of the retired president, they handed over a DVD, but this was never intended to become a regular transfer method.
As was learned from the ingestion of materials into the Libraries’ Institutional Repository, self-submission Web forms can be a barrier to participation when working with many faculty and departments.
In order to utilize procedures already familiar to Office of the President staff, a network shared drive was created, to which the staff could map deposit records on a regular basis.
In this model, each department has its own folder on the Libraries’ network with permissions restricted to only those in that department and representatives of the University Archives.
No new skills needed to be learned and each deposit is made with an inventory list similar to what is required for physical box deposits intended for the Archives.
The initial batch of records from the outgoing president’s office consisted of over 6,000 electronic files and additional embedded files in 24 formats.
(The subsequent collection, consisting of 3 months of the new president’s records, encompasses approximately 2,000 files.)
Once in University Archives, digital preservation strategies put in place by the Libraries were initiated and access provided through tools currently used by Libraries and Archives staff.
During the initial evaluation of the files, file names were changed to standard forms without special characters or spaces and proper file extensions were applied for those missing them.
The files were inventoried using DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) [7].
A text file was exported from DROID with the file list and saved alongside the native and converted files to be kept in a central location, where it acts as a store for all file format lists and is maintained for assessing any necessary future file migrations.
The majority of office documents in the first batch were also converted to PDF files with a footer attached identifying the document as an access copy; however, this is an experimental procedure and the documents may be returned to read-only MS Office formats.
Email once again presented a special case.
Since .pst file format has recently been released as an openly published standard [8], the Libraries opted to retain the email in its original format for preservation purposes.
The rationale for this decision is that the Outlook format provides a much easier way to read and view files, especially with the extensive mark-up and categorization within the .pst file.
With the published standard, the format can be converted to a myriad of text files or XML files in the future if necessary, but at this point another version is largely unusable.
Archival Storage, Data Management and Access Evaluation of the Libraries’ current content management systems, DSpace [9] and CONTENTdm [10], found that both systems were not ideal, as they were designed for item level cataloging, and there was concern that the burden of getting information into them was not worthwhile for closed records.
The University Archives also uses the data management system Archivists’ Toolkit [11] to enter acquisition records, and all paper collections had records in that system.
In order to accommodate all immediate needs and remain flexible, the traditional file system was used with additional workflow steps, and description residing in Archivists’ Toolkit along with the description of the paper records.
There exist three distinct sections with varying access levels, content, and procedures for the collections: The preservation layer consists of the files in their native format and structure delivered by the President’s office along with migrated versions of the files.
Records that were created in Archivists’ Toolkit to describe the files are exported into EAD XML and live on the server with the archival files.
The files are backed up in multiple locations and check-sums are run to avoid bit rot.
The log of the file types created during the inventorying process is kept to help monitor future migration needs if they arise.
Because issues of confidentiality, privacy, and state and federal record laws apply, access to this section is restricted.
The archivists’ layer consists of the preservation format of the files and is organized and tagged according to the system devised by the University Historian and Archivist.
Records in Archivists’ Toolkit are used to describe the content and point to the server location of these files along with the paper records.
This area is also subject to additional organization by the Archivist for ease of use.
The public access layer is a redacted copy of the archives of files that have been determined not to breach confidentiality or contradict any laws guiding access.
These files are available on a file server that allows for designated public terminals and staff computers to access read-only versions of the files.
Future plans include providing access to files online, as risk is assessed, alongside existing online collections of University Records [12].
Figure 1: Preservation System Actively Working with Current Office The arrival of President Richard Lariviere in July 2009 signalled a new era for records creation and management not only in the Office of the President, but across campus.
The new president brought with him an emphasis on information stewardship as a means of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
(Prior to his arrival at UO, Richard Lariviere was the Provost at the University of Kansas (Lawrence).
While Provost he oversaw the start of a campus-wide, comprehensive information management programme, which brought together digital information security, electronic records management and archives, as well as digital asset management and preservation [13].
Most notably this meant an immediate shift to a ‘paperless’ office in the Office of the President where even print documents were scanned and made available in electronic form.
With a change in many of the President’s staff, there also came a wider use of technology in both records creation and management.
The change in presidencies provided the Libraries with an exciting opportunity to move forward with latent programs for ingest, preservation, and access to permanent electronic records.
The first step was to build relationships with the new staff in the Office of the President, especially those directly responsible for the records management in the office.
They were very focused on managing their electronic records, and understood the importance of the records the office creates.
To that end they have hired a person who has as one of their express duties the management and preparation of the records for transfer to the University Archives.
The Digital Collections Coordinator and the University Archivist have also worked with the Office to develop a workflow and provide training for managing electronic records.
The three main areas for training are file migration, file naming conventions, and tagging files for retrieval.
Figure 2: Workflow of records to archives As part of a transition to a paperless office, the current Office of the President necessarily used some processes from the previous presidency.
For example electronic documents were printed out and rescanned to PDF for storage on networked file shares.
By using tools already at their disposal and creating brief instructions, the Libraries were able to train the staff to create full text-searchable PDF files from Word and other documents using Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Because the Office is not paperless, training was also given on Adobe Acrobat Pro’s native Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine for documents that were scanned, so that they may be full text-searchable, as well.
The environment of the Office of the President demands that staff be able to quickly retrieve items as needed and the staff already understood the general principles of uniqueness and easily recognisable file names.
Existing file names, however, had many special characters and spaces which the staff easily understood may cause problems.
The Libraries showed the staff how to use a simple Freeware tool, ReNamer [14], to mass apply file naming changes and strip out unwanted characters.
The most exciting part of electronic records for the Office staff was the ability to tag and categorise files without having to make triplicate print copies.
This was especially useful in the area of email, where the use of the tags and flags in Microsoft Outlook could help easily retrieve relevant emails.
The staff has begun to make lists of desired categories with consultation help from the University Archivist and Digital Collections Coordinator, with the goal of creating a standard list of category names.
Examples of these categories include: Correspondence, Reports, Speeches, Athletics, College of Arts and Sciences, etc.
Future of Electronic Records and the Archives The effect of the arrival of the new President and his emphasis on electronic records has not taken long to spread across campus.
Increasingly offices and departments understand that they can and must begin to responsibly manage the electronic records that they create.
They now look to harnessing technology to create more efficiency in their work, and using it as a tool to their advantage.
Some examples of this are the Office of Development that is migrating its donors’ visits and tracking documents to electronic form and managing it in a document library that development officers can access in their office all over campus, or on the road.
The University Senate, in order to encourage wider participation and interest in campus governance, is filming their meetings so that they can be streamed online.
As the minutes and other documents capturing the activities and decisions of the senate are considered permanent records, the recorded senate meetings will be retained and preserved by the University Archives.
There is increasing use of Web 2.0 tools for collaborative student learning on campus; most of it is ad hoc, driven by faculty staff and the demands of pedagogy, or in some rare cases, student influence.
One result is the creation of blogs for e-portfolios, particularly in business and architecture classes, and the potential for campus wide multi-user blogs for students and faculty.
These campus departments are seeking advice from the Libraries on how to preserve these records.
Conclusion By transitioning from a passive receivership role for University Archives to actively working with offices before records are created, we are able to have a more streamlined and efficient process for ingesting electronic records into the Archives.
With the flexible infrastructure in place, we can easily adapt to the needs of more departments on campus and eventually implement a large-scale content management system if selected.
The key to success in these cases is the relationships developed with the departmental staff and building upon familiar and efficient practices that also aid their daily work in addition to preparing the records for the Archives.
References Oregon Administrative Rule, Secretary of State, Archives Division, Oregon University System Records http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/rules/OARS_100/OAR_166/166_475.html Oregon Revised Statutes, Chapter 192, Records, Public Reports and Meetings (Public Records Law), http://www.leg.state.or.us/ors/192.html Scholars’ Bank Home http://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/ DigitalPreservationEurope, (April 2008), “DPE Repository Planning Checklist and Guidance DPED3.2” http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/publications/reports/Repository_Planning_Checklist_and_Guidance.pdf RLG-NARA Digital Repository Certification Task Force.
(2007.)
Trustworthy repositories audit & certification: Criteria and checklist http://www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/trac_0.pdf Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) CCSDS 650.0-B-1 Blue Book (January 2002) http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf DROID from the National Archives of the United Kingdom, PRONOM http://sourceforge.net/projects/droid/ Microsoft Corporation.
(2010).
“[MS-PST]: Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) File Format.” http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff385210.aspx DSpace: http://www.dspace.org/ ; University of Oregon’s installation:http://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/ CONTENTdm: http://www.contentdm.org/ ; University of Oregon’s installation: http://oregondigital.org/ Archivists’ Toolkit http://www.archiviststoolkit.org/ Electronic Records of the University of Oregon: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/151; Office of the President records selected by UO Honors College students: http://oregondigital.org/digcol/uopres/ Information Management: University of Kansas (KU): Office of the Provost & Executive Vice Chancellor http://www.provost.ku.edu/infomanagement/index.shtml [den4b] Denis Kozlov http://www.den4b.com/downloads.php?project=ReNamer Author Details Heather Briston University Historian and Archivist University Libraries University of Oregon Eugene Oregon USA Email: hbriston@uoregon.edu Web site: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/ Karen Estlund Digital Collections Coordinator University Libraries University of Oregon Eugene Oregon USA Email: kestlund@uoregon.edu Web site: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/ Return to top Article Title: “From Passive to Active Preservation of Electronic Records” Author: Heather Briston and Karen Estlund Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/briston-estlund/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The LIPARM Project: A New Approach to Parliamentary Metadata Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The LIPARM Project: A New Approach to Parliamentary Metadata Buzz data rdf xml archives metadata digitisation identifier vocabularies schema cataloguing multimedia uri e-research interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Gartner outlines a collaborative project which aims to link together the digitised UK Parliamentary record by providing a metadata scheme, controlled vocabularies and a Web-based interface.
Parliamentary historians in the United Kingdom are particularly fortunate as their key primary source, the record of Parliamentary proceedings, is almost entirely available in digitised form.
Similarly, those needing to consult and study contemporary proceedings as scholars, journalists or citizens have access to the daily output of the UK's Parliaments and Assemblies in electronic form shortly after their proceedings take place.
Unfortunately, the full potential of this resource for all of these users is limited by the fact that it is scattered throughout a heterogeneous information landscape and so cannot be approached as a unitary resource.
It is not a simple process, for instance, to distinguish the same person if he or she appears in more than one of these collections or, for that matter, to identify the same legislation if it is referenced inconsistently in different resources.
As a result, using it for searching or for more sophisticated analyses becomes problematic when one attempts to move beyond one of its constituent collections.
Finding some mechanism to allow these collections to be linked and so used as a coherent, integrated resource has been on the wish-list of Parliamentary historians and other stakeholders in this area for some time.
In the mid-2000s, for instance, the History of Parliament Trust brought together the custodians of several digitised collections to examine ways in which this could be done.
In 2011, some of these ideas came to fruition when JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) funded a one-year project named LIPARM (Linking the Parliamentary Record through Metadata) which aimed to design a mechanism for encoding these linkages within XML architectures and to produce a working prototype for an interface which would enable the potential offered by this new methodology to be realised in practice.
This article explains the rationale of the LIPARM Project and how it uses XML to link together core components of the Parliamentary record within a unified metadata scheme.
It introduces the XML schema, Parliamentary Metadata Language (PML), which was created by the project and the set of controlled vocabularies for Parliamentary proceedings which the project also created to support it.
It also discusses the experience of the project in converting two XML-encoded collections of Parliamentary proceedings to PML and work on the prototype Web-based union catalogue which will form the initial gateway to PML-encoded metadata.
Background: The Need for Integrated Parliamentary Metadata The UK's Parliamentary record has been the focus of a number of major digitisation initiatives which have made its historical corpus available in almost its entirety: in addition, the current publishing operations of the four Parliaments and Assemblies in the UK ensure that the contemporary record is available in machine-readable form on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, these collections have limited interoperability owing to their disparate approaches to data and metadata which renders the federated searching and browsing of their contents currently impossible.
In addition, the disparity of platforms on which they are offered, and the wide diversity of user interfaces they use to present the data (as shown by the small sample in Figure 1), render extensive research a time-consuming and cumbersome process if it is necessary to extend its remit beyond the confines of a single collection.
Figure 1: Four major collections of Parliamentary proceedings, each using a different interface A more integrated approach to Parliamentary metadata offers major potential for new research: it would, for instance, allow the comprehensive tracking of an individual's career, including all of their contributions to debates and proceedings.
It would allow the process of legislation to be traced automatically, voting patterns to be analysed, and the emergence of themes and topics in Parliamentary history to be analysed on a large scale.
One example of the linkages that could usefully be made in an integrated metadata architecture can be seen in the career of Sir James Craig, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1940.
Figure 2 illustrates some of the connections that could be made to represent his career:Figure 2: Sample of potential linkages for a Parliamentarian The connections shown here are to the differing ways in which he is named in the written proceedings, to his tenures in both Houses, the constituencies he represented, the offices he held and the contributions he made to debates.
Much more complex relationships are, of course, possible and desirable.
The advantages of an integrated approach to metadata which would allow these connections to be made have long been recognised by practitioners in this field, and several attempts have been made to create potential strategies for realising them.
But it was only in 2011 that these took more concrete form when a one-day meeting sponsored by JISC brought together representatives from the academic, publishing, library and archival sectors to devise a strategy for integrating Parliamentary metadata.
Their report proposed the creation of an XML schema for linking core components of this record and the creation of a series of controlled vocabularies for these components which could form the basis of the semantic linkages to be encoded in the schema [1].
These proposals then formed the basis of a successful bid to JISC for a project to put them into practice: the result was the LIPARM (Linking the Parliamentary Record through Metadata) Project.
The LIPARM Project The LIPARM Project, a joint venture of King's College London, the History of Parliament Trust, the Institute for Historical Research, the National Library of Wales and Queen's University, Belfast, has four core components:the definition of the XML schema recommended by the experts at the earlier meeting to define and link together core components of the Parliamentary record the compilation of controlled vocabularies for as many of these components as possible the conversion of major parts of two existing digital collections of Parliamentary proceedings to the XML schema a prototype Web-based interface to the records for these collections, forming a union catalogue of their contents.
The Parliamentary Metadata Language (PML) Schema The core of the LIPARM metadata architecture is the XML schema used to link components of the Parliamentary record.
The schema, called Parliamentary Metadata Language (PML), defines seven  concepts as central to the record: these are shown in Figure 3 with examples of their usage in the context of the UK Parliament.
Figure 3: Core components of the Parliamentary Metadata Language schema These concepts are deliberately defined in generic terms to allow them to be applied outside the context of a single legislature.
Units is used to define the  administrative sections of the legislature and their relationships; it may include, for instance, administratively defined units (such as "Government", or "Opposition"), chambers of the legislature, or geographic units (such as constituencies).
Functions records roles or offices filled by members, including named officers of state.
Calendar objects are the temporal units within which legislative activities take place (in the UK, these include Parliaments, their constituent sessions and the individual sittings which take place within them).
The remaining concepts record the proceedings themselves and their relationships to each other.
Each unitary component of the proceedings is recorded in a Proceedings object element: these may include debates, any item of business or the meetings of committees.
A particular type of proceedings object, the holding of a vote, merits its own element, Vote event, in which fine details of votes cast are recorded.
These components can then be nested together within grouping elements, Proceedings Groups, which are used to define any relevant conjunction of these proceedings objects or vote events: usually they are used to define Acts or Bills and group together all stages of the proceedings from which they result.
The top-level XML elements for each of these components have a consistent set of  attributes to define them more precisely than their generic element names allow.
A sample unit element for a Parliamentary constituency, for instance, may take this form:<unit                                ID="s-s001-v0001-constituencies-0040"                 regURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/id/unit/constituency/londonderry1920-1929"                 type="constituencies"                                                                        typeURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/id/unittype/constituency">                 <label>Londonderry</label> </unit> The unit is defined as a constituency (as opposed to other units such as chambers of Parliament, committees and so on) by the type attribute which provides a human-readable description of the category of unit to which it belongs, and the typeURI attribute, which provides a Universal Resource Identifier (URI) for this type.
A URI is a precise mechanism for providing unambiguous identifiers for any concept or object which is valid anywhere within digital space,: here the URI is defined in a controlled vocabulary (compiled by the LIPARM Project) and identifies this unit as a Parliamentary constituency.
In addition to defining the type of unit being referenced, the example also demonstrates how the content of the element is itself presented.
The label element provides the human-readable version of the element's contents which will be displayed when the file is delivered to the end-user: this is repeatable and has a lang attribute indicating the language in which the content is presented (so allowing multi-lingual versions of the data).
The regURI attribute contains the URI for a controlled form of the element's contents, in this case for the Londonderry constituency which existed from 1920 to 1929: this allows the precise identification of the content and also allows this occurrence of the data to be linked to those in the same or any other PML-encoded file.
A final attribute common to all elements is ID which contains an XML identifier for the element itself: this is used as a reference point to which linkages can be made  from other elements in the same file.
This is the key mechanism by which components of the PML are linked together in order to express the relationships central to a Parliamentary record.
One core relationship of this type is that of a contribution made by a person to a Parliamentary body or unit, to a given proceeding or to a vote: this is expressed using the widely-used contribution element which can be nested within unit, proceedingsObject or voteEvent.
A person's service as a constituency MP, for instance, may be expressed in this way:<unit                   ID="s-s001-v0001-constituencies-0053"                                                                   regURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/id/unit/constituency/queensuniversity1920-1969"               type="constituencies"                                                                 typeURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/id/unittype/constituency">          <label>Queen's University</label>          <contributions>                 <contribution                 contributorID="s-s001-v0001-persons-0036"                 type="constituency mp"                                                                                                                    typeURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/id/contributions/constituencymp"/>                startDate="1921-03-12"                endDate="1924-04-17"/>          </contributions> </unit> This generic contribution element uses the type and typeURI mechanisms outlined above to indicate the type of contribution recorded.
The mandatory contributorID attribute contains the XML ID for the person element in which the details of the MP in question are contained, and the startDate and endDate attributes indicate the temporal limits of his term of service.
This same set of attributes is used throughout the schema to record any type of contribution.
The encoding of votes requires a specialised element, voteEvent, in which the full details of all votes cast, the motions on which they are taken, the proceedings in which they occur and the roles of tellers and other participants can be recorded.
A (much simplified) entry for a division within a Parliamentary debate may take this form:<voteEvent               ID="s-s001-v0001-voteevent-00002"                   calendarObjectID="s-s001-v0001-calendarobject-015"               proceedingsObjectID="s-s001-v0001-proceedingsubject-00121"                                             type="division"                                                                 typeURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/voteevents/division"                                                                   startDate="1921-12-01">              <motionText>Division 2 That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the                             Question</motionText>              <options>                             <option                             regURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/id/votingoption/yes">                                              <label>Ayes</label>                                                                             <vote voterID="s-s001-v0001-persons0006"/>                                                             <vote voterID="s-s001-v0001-persons-0007"/>                                             </option>                                                            <option                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        regURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/id/votingoption/no">                                                                          <label>Noes</label>                                                                            <vote voterID="s-s001-v0001-persons-0004"/>                                                                                                                                         <vote voterID="s-s001-v0001-persons-0053"/>                                                           </option>                                            </options> </voteEvent> The attributes for the voteEvent element include references to the calendarObject during which the vote takes place and to the proceedingsObject element for the proceedings during which it occurs.
The votes themselves are recorded by vote elements which are nested within option elements for each of the options available: those who cast their votes are identified by the voterID attribute which contains the identifier of their person element.
In addition contribution elements can be used to encode roles other than the casting of votes (for instance acting as vote tellers).
The PML schema includes more features than can be outlined here, including source elements which provide links to the full-text or multimedia sources for the records of proceedings and external linkage elements which provide a generic linking feature to any external resource (for instance biographies of members).
The LIPARM Controlled Vocabularies The regURI attribute, common to most PML elements, is the key mechanism by which components of the PML files can be linked outside the confines of a single document.
This attribute contains a URI for the contents of its respective element, usually defined in a controlled vocabulary: these URIs may cover every feature encoded within the file, including persons, proceedings objects, votes, constituencies and proceedings groups such as Acts or Bills.
In addition, the typeURI attribute contains URIs for controlled terms for each type of component.
To realise the full potential of its linking facilities requires the parallel use of controlled vocabularies which define these URIs.
For this reason, the LIPARM Project has produced an extensive series of these vocabularies in which each component is assigned its unique URI for use in PML files.
Vocabularies have been defined for such key components of the record as Members of Parliament, Acts, Bills, constituencies and sessions for both the Westminster and Stormont Parliaments.
In addition, vocabularies have been compiled for types of PML components: these define URIs for the typeURI attribute to use in order to define these generic elements more precisely.
The controlled vocabularies are published in MADS (Metadata Authority Description Schema), an XML schema published by the Library of Congress for encoding thesauri, term lists and taxonomies in an interoperable and exchangeable format [2].
A sample record for a Westminster constituency encoded in MADS takes this form: <mads>        <authority>               <name valueURI="http://liparm.ac.uk/id/unit/constituency/croydonnorthwest1955-1997">                             <namePart>Croydon North West</namePart>              </name>              <temporal point="start">1955</temporal>              <temporal point="end">1997</temporal>     </authority> </mads> The valueURI attribute shown here records the URI for this constituency, which is used within regURI attributes in a PML file to identify it unambiguously.
Generating PML Records To test the viability of the LIPARM architecture, several years of two pre-existing collections of digitised Parliamentary proceedings are being converted to PML records.
They are from the records of debates in the House of Commons of both the Westminster and Stormont Parliaments from the 1920s which are already available on the Internet on the Millbank Hansard [3] and Stormont Papers [4] Web sites respectively.
Both collections contain as their core data XML-encoded transcripts of debates and their associated metadata.
The process of generating PML from these records is being undertaken by the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queen's University, Belfast.
PML components such as information on persons, functions, proceedings objects and votes are extracted from the XML and formatted to conform to the PML schema.
Internal linkages within the PML are set up using the XML IDs of each component, and links to the LIPARM controlled vocabularies are made by matching entries across their MADS files and embedding their corresponding URIs within PML regURI attributes.
Much of this process can be automated relatively easily owing to the shared XML architecture of PML and the data files, but much manual editing is also necessary to establish linkages where automatic matching fails.
The User Interface The final component of the LIPARM Project is a user interface to the PML-encoded metadata: this will take the form of a prototype Web-based union catalogue to the initial collections encoded by the project team.
This interface is, at the time of writing, being designed by a team at the National Library of Wales.
The interface is designed to provide access to the main components of a PML file and to enable users to navigate the links between them.
Browsing or searching by, for instance, a Member of Parliament will provide links to their offices held, the constituencies they serve and all of their contributions to proceedings from  speeches in debates to voting in divisions.
Links to the source files (in the case of the two initial collections to the digitised page on the Web site for each collection) will be provided for each entry.
The interface is due to go live in December 2012.
Conclusion The LIPARM Project sets out primarily to define an architecture and methodology for joining together Parliamentary resources, and, based on evaluation and feedback, appears so far to be meeting its objectives.
The PML schema, designed to synthesise the requirements of practitioners from a variety of interested sectors and evaluated by them after publication, appears to meet well their expressed needs in diverse environments.
Its integration with controlled vocabularies published in re-usable and interchangeable formats works well in providing cross-document linkages at a semantic level.
The practicalities of implementing the LIPARM architecture in working environments will depend to a large extent on local circumstances, but the experiences of the conversion team at Belfast have shown that the generation of PML records even from complex sources can be readily achieved with modest resources.
They have also demonstrated that the integration of the LIPARM controlled vocabularies can be incorporated into conversion workflows with little problem, only the messiness of some data requiring major manual intervention.
The work on the user interface, although not completed at the time of writing, shows that the presentation of the often complex relationships encoded in PML can be readily achieved using pre-existing technologies.
The LIPARM Project should for the first time make feasible the joining up of the scattered UK Parliamentary record and bring to fruition the potential of the digitised record which has until now remained to some extent latent.
Such an ambition has been held by many Parliamentary historians, librarians, archivists and publishers for some time, and while the project can only represent the initial steps to achieving this, it has established a robust architecture which integrates well with existing resources and so should be readily extensible as new collections, both historical and contemporary, adopt it.
The Web site for the LIPARM Project [5] contains full documentation for the schema, the schema itself, a sample PML file and the controlled vocabularies compiled by the project (in MADS and RDF formats).
References Richard Gartner and Lorna Hughes, Parliamentary Metadata Meeting: a brief report http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/wp/files/2011/07/parliamentary-metadata-2011.pdf MADS: Metadata Authority Description Schema http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/ Hansard 1803-2005 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ The Stomont Papers http://stormontpapers.ahds.ac.uk/stormontpapers/ The LIPARM Project http://liparm.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/ Author Details Richard Gartner Lecturer Centre for eResearch Department of Digital Humanities King's College London Email: richard.gartner@kcl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/cerch/people/gartner/ Richard Gartner is a lecturer in Library and Information Science at King's College London.
Before joining academia, he worked as a practising librarian for 20 years, specialising in digital libraries and metadata.
His research concentrates on integrated metadata strategies for complex digital libraries and archives, particularly within XML architectures.
In addition to acting as Principal Investigator for the LIPARM Project, he has also recently worked on projects in research information management, English place names, naval history and environmental science.
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JABES 2013 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JABES 2013 Buzz data api html dissemination portal infrastructure archives metadata doi digitisation tagging identifier blog repositories video cataloguing ebook twitter hashtag epub licence interoperability privacy research standards sushi mooc freemium Citation BibTex RIS Marlène Delhaye reports on the two-day annual conference organised by the French Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur (ABES) held in Montpellier, France over 14-15 May 2013.
In what has now become something of a tradition, the ‘Corum’ Congress Centre in Montpellier, France, hosted the twelfth in the series of the Journées de l’Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur (ABES Higher Education Bibliographic Agency) [1].
The main objectives of ABES are the development and maintainance of the shared catalogue of French academic libraries (Système Universitaire de Documentation, SUDOC) [2], the management of the theses processes and the administrative and financial support for group purchasing of e-resources for Higher Education.
Over the years, the JABES events have managed to achieve the status of indispensable rendez-vous for librarians, allowing them the opportunity to hear the experiences of international speakers, obtain news of the network, and to share their own stories with colleagues within the member libraries.
For the first time, a poster session [3] was organised this year to showcase the various projects and initiatives currently in operation: it has been a definite success, with over 15 contributions presented on various themes, such as learning centres, tools for information literacy, OpenAire, usage reporting with SUSHI, enhancement of catalogue data using SUDOC tools, etc.
Moreover, the conference was broadcast live and was supplemented by a lively Twitter feed [4].
Video recordings [5] are also available.
Day One: 14 May 2013 Keynote: Evaluating the Webscale Platforms and Their Impact on Librarianship Carl Grant, Oklahoma University Libraries In the current context of shrinking budgets, diminishing activity and an ageing workforce, Carl exposed several challenges the profession has to face: rises in Higher Education costs, changing technologies (mobiles, Internet of things, etc), growing quantity of data to handle, wider dissemination of education with MOOCs and distance learning, even smaller attention spans.
Librarians have to create new strategic spaces, offering unique value to their users.
The hard part is to provide value and differentiation while remaining consistent with the original aims of the libraries – maybe it is time to think bigger: cloud computing and extensive use of APIs are key elements in enabling libraries to cope with their readers’ needs.
Cloud computing makes it possible to share data more easily (and handle bigger amounts of data): it is a first step towards the end of the silos libraries naturally tend to create, and a way to re-focus on end-users (by providing more valuable services).
The new library platforms are based on cloud computing and allow us to scale up the opportunities to share.
APIs support wide collaboration between providers, librarians and users.
It is no longer the content that matters anymore, it is the conversation that occurs around the content, of which the user, thanks to APIs, can play a part in creating and processing (Carl cited the example of community-created metadata by the Alma community zone from Ex Libris).
The role of libraries in this context shifts from controlling the conversation (controlled vocabularies) to facilitating it (users tagging): users want the information, but they want it their way librarians have to have to build tools to support all forms of collaboration (see the example of the Trove Project of the National Library of Australia [6]).
Figure 1: Opening page of ‘Evaluating the Webscale Platforms and Their Impact on Librarianship’ Library services platforms can help libraries achieve this goal, though libraries also need to be able to connect to the numerous services on the Web where the users are, and where the discovery overwhelmingly takes place.
Developing platforms allowing users to discover established information as well as creating new material may assuredly be a path to follow for librarians.
I Just Wanted to Tell You Raymond Bérard, Director of ABES Mr Bérard, who is leaving the ABES after 7 years, summarised the agency’s development during his mandate: the gain in technical autonomy with the development of applications outside OCLC/CBS, the expansion in international partnerships (with Jisc, DART-Europe, DARIAH-EU, OCLC/Worldcat, etc), the opening up of all bibliographic data created by the ABES network through the application of the Etalab open licence [7], the start of a closer involvement of ABES in the research environment, with partnerships with research teams, the reinforcement of partnerships with research institutions and work around the IdRef [8] and ORCID [9] projects.
The growing part of e-resources purchasing and the achievement of comprehensive coverage of the theses processes completed the picture.
These achievements confirmed the major role ABES played in the current scientific information landscape in France.
Figure 2: JABES 2013 Web page Raymond also shared with us some failures (ILL modernisation, implementation of the OCLC/Collection Analysis service, e-resources shared cataloguing and a few regrets: applications that did not engage with ABES’ users, but which nobody dares close (Num-ES [10], Signets des universités (academic bookmarks) [11], RDA implementation (hard to perform without a schedule), mitigation of ISSN’s licence terms.
New tasks have to be completed during the next five years, some of which will be discussed later: e-resources signposting, for which a strong partnership with the Couperin consortium is indispensable, the pooled ILS project, and the finalisation of the metadata hub.
These projects will require closer collaboration between the agency and its partners in the field of scientific information in Higher Education: Couperin, Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe (CCSD) (the body operating the French open archive HaL [12]) and the INIST-CNRS (Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique du CNRS, a branch of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS), which M. Bérard will join in September 2013.
There is no co-ordinated policy defining the relationships between all these operators at the moment, but existing projects, particularly those revolving around metadata, often require the knowledge and expertise of all of them, regardless of their exact perimeters.
Digitisation of Public Domain Documents: Which Policies?
Panel with Jeannette Frey, Anders Toftgaard, Jacqueline Sanson, Carole Melzac, Christophe Pérales, moderated by Yves Alix The recent announcement of the private-public partnerships concluded between the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and several companies led to extensive press coverage [13], and it seemed useful to consider some of the politics surrounding the digitisation of public domain works.
Jeannette Frey, from Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire de Lausanne [14], Switzerland, is used to outsourcing the mass digitisation work to private companies: her library started with Google in 2006 with monographs, which were followed by several regional newspaper projects.
All the digitised material is available openly on the Web, which contributes to the success of this kind of project: usage reports show over 120 million visits yearly, just for the Google book titles.
Open access to the documents is a choice, strengthened by the precise contractual definition of the role of each of the partners.
The Danish Royal Library [15] began its digitisation programmes in the 1990s with medieval manuscripts, rare documents potentially of interest to an international audience.
It then extended the programme to more Danish books, realising that at some point, ‘quantity wins over quality and access over conservation’.
The Library relies on its partners for mass digitisation, and for associated services (on-demand digitisation with EOD).
Anders Toftgaard outlined the principal points of the Proquest partnership [16]: it relates to Danish books from 1482 to 1700 plus incunabula.
The Library provides the metadata, and all documents are available freely to Danish IP addresses as well as for Danish users abroad.
The books are in the public domain, but are not available to everyone: an embargo period of 10 to 15 years (for the 17th century) is imposed on works, during which period access is restricted to Denmark only.
There has been some criticism of this embargo period, but others would argue that 10 years represent quite a short term on a library timescale.
Ultimately, all documents will be placed on open access to everybody.
In a time of budget constraints, the agreement appeared very satisfactory both for the Library and for its readers.
Jacqueline Sanson then reminded us of the steps taken by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) since the 1990s in respect of digitisation: the first programmes were focused on the constitution of selected corpuses, hosting texts and images.
In the mid-2000’s, the massive projects led by Google accelerated the global move towards bigger scale programmes, and prompted the BnF to drop thematic digitisation.
With Gallica [17] since 2007, the library tends to exhaustive coverage.
Due to funding limits, the library has had to open its digitization projects to companies from the private sector in public-private partnership structures via its dedicated subsidiary, BnF-Partenariats.
70,000 books from the 17th and 18th century and 200,000 audio records will benefit from these agreements with Proquest (books) and Mnemon / Believe digital (records).
The critics that have emerged from the field rely on the 10-year embargo during which only a very small part of the collections (5%) will be available to the wide public on Gallica, the core of the documents being accessible exclusively from the BnF’s premises.
Mrs Sanson admitted the Library had made this choice in favour of a reduced exclusivity period overall; in the future, solutions more suitable for Higher Education institutions will be favoured.
Christophe Péralès, President of the Association des directeurs de bibliothèques universitaires (ADBU) [18] expressed the view of the members of the Association about the issue : private-public partnerships are neither a good or bad measure per se, but the costs have to be carefully examined, particularly in respect of the value added by the publishers: it is important to know exactly who pays what.
Finally, Carole Melzac (ABES), looked back on the notion of public domain, which is rather blurry for public institutions as far as digital copies of the work are concerned.
The report by the Lescure Commission [19], published in May 2013, makes significant proposals with regard to the protection and enhancement of the public domain in the digital world; its outcomes will need to be followed carefully.
Day Two: 15 May 2013 The Pooled ILS Project at the Crossroads Jean Bernon, project manager, ABES and members of the pooled ILS Working Group Jean Bernon first reminded us of the issues at stake for the project: setting up a signposting solution for electronic resources; developing the SUDOC by changing its core Central Bibliographic System (CBS) and thus extend its perimeter to e-resources, which are poorly covered at the moment; reducing the gap between national and local data; and enhancing collection development.
He then presented the different scenarios [20] devised by the working group : Completion of migration of all institutional members of the SUDOC network as well as the SUDOC itself to a new, cloud-based mutualised next-gen Integrated Library System (ILS) (implementation in pilot institutions to take place within 2 years) Maintainance of a shared cataloguing system on CBS and migration to a shared next-gen ILS system for several pilot institutions, with an enhanced workflow between both systems Maintainance of a shared cataloguing system on CBS and development of connectors for the various next-gen ILS systems chosen by the member institutions The various impacts of the project on member institutions were then described: they included internal workflow reorganisation; the necessary evolution within the libraries, ie switching from a long-term purchasing model to a yearly subscription model; adaptation of specific local functionalities to a pooled environment; and privacy issues.
The impact on ABES itself is important as well: less control over the quality of metadata (mainly provided by publishers); the need to create a French Resource Description and Access (RDA) profile; maintainance of all the existing workflows between the SUDOC and the various applications with which it communicates, cost issues and scope of services provided by the Agency.
The response from the project manager and the working group focused upon the need to build a national knowledge base, linked to the data hub, fed by Global Open Knowledge Base (GoKB) [21] for international data, and by the French universities for local data.
It was felt the ABES would be the appropriate agent for this work.
Figure 3: Slide from The Pooled ILS Project at the Crossroads Members of the working group, as well as those librarians in the room, expressed some reservations and concerns about the pooled ILS project: they related to the loss of specific local features (but they could be  handled through the development of APIs); the lack of consortial features in the products currently available (and no certainty as to their implementation), the fear of the creation of a captive market (just as has occurred for e-resources), the lack of visibility with regard to the costs the libraries will have to bear (though a requirement of the project is to maintain the same level of costs).
The absence of funding from the Ministry for Higher Education was also mentioned: someone from the Ministry in the room reminded us that the project began as an inter-institutional mutualisation project, so no funding had been assigned.
But as the impact of the changes mentioned took the project to a larger scale, the need for additional funding appeared crucial.
The Ministry for Higher Education might consider working out a solution.
It was reported in conclusion that the whole project would be discussed further, and that decisions as to its future would be taken at the next meeting of the Board of the ABES on 30 May 2013.
On Open Access in Freemium Mode, and Some Remarks about Unique Identification in Academia Marin Dacos, Openedition In the first part of his talk, Marin Dacos approached the issue of unique identifiers for scientific publications: the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) [22] is a cost-effective system, driven by a business model (the content providers, commercial as well as not-for-profit, such as universities, are driven to declare and pay for DOIs on all their articles).
But the process is not governed by scientific interests.
With ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) [9], the researcher identification project, Crossref aims to control the ecosystem of identifiers.
In France, we are behind the curve on these matters, although we already have infrastructures (IdRef, Identifiants et référentiels Sudoc pour l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche [8], and Isni, International Standard Name Identifier [23]) – their flaw is that they are document-centred, rather than person-centred.
In the ORCID firmament, the researchers or authors are stars, and benefit from an attractive Web environment, which motivates them to enrich the system.
Marin concluded that we have to develop our own infrastructures, and connect them with ORCID to enrich it.
In this way we will become sources of data ourselves (and keep the control of them at the same time), and will no longer be customers of a commercial system.
Being actors instead of clients was likewise the theme of the second part of the talk: knowledge and information have to break out from the silos in which we tend to confine them, and that is what Open Access is all about.
And particularly where social sciences are concerned: there are more than 10 million visits on the four French-speaking journals platforms (Revues.org, Persée, Cairn, Erudit) per month, which tends to prove they answer a real and strong social demand.
Open Access does not mean there are no longer any costs associated: platform costs have replaced print costs, and electronic publishing is qualified work, that has to be rewarded.
Consequently, new business models have to be invented to cover these costs and to maintain the widest access to knowledge possible.
Author-pays models are unfair, and prompt publishers to publish more articles, instead of concentrating on the quality of content.
What Openedition [24] (the umbrella for Revues.org’s 300 journals, Hypotheses’ 600 scientific blogs, Calenda’s 20000+ scientific announcements and soon-to-arrive 1,000 ebooks from the Books programme) proposes is inspired by the Web, based on premium models (such as Skype, where the basic service is free, while enhanced service comes at a cost).
In the Freemium model, access to the content in HTML is free for everyone, and a yearly subscription gives access to additional services (pdf and epub formats, usage reports and metadata records for libraries, etc).
These costs are reinvested within the system: 33% go to the development of the platform, and 66% go to the content providers.
With this model, 80 journals have been strengthened in their choice of open access, and 10 have left the moving wall (no embargo anymore).
94% of the journals on Revues.org are fully open access now.
Many projects are now ongoing for the Openedition team, thanks to a national grant: for example, OE Books (15,000 e-books in 7 years), OE Labs (R&D department, text mining projects).
Open access is a big issue, we need to contribute to national (Bibliothèque Scientifique Numérique, BSN) [25] and international infrastructures (DARIAH-EU) [26] to move forward.
Towards a Mutualised Knowledgebase at the International Level Maurits Van der Graaf, Pleiade Management & Consultancy, Liam Earney, KB+ (Jisc), Kristin Antelman, GOKb Maurits Van der Graaf outlined the main points of the study [27] he conducted for ABES about the eventual implementation of a national discovery tool.
After reminding us of the main goals of the project (enhanced access to print and e-collections, wide connectivity with local existing systems and provision of resolver services for libraries not as yet equipped and connection to national licensed platforms), he described the likely different scenarios: implementation of a discovery portal, creation of a centralised index, development of a national locator service.
The latter seems the most feasible option in the current French configuration.
It would seem to call for the creation of a national knowledge base (to cover local resources absent from the international knowledge bases), which would be complemented by data from existing international projects such as KB+ from Jisc and GOKb.
Data would be enriched by the metadata hub [28] currently prototyped by the ABES team as well.
The development of this national locator system is a first step in a possible migration towards a global cloud-based information infrastructure.
Figure 4: Delegates to JABES 2013 in conversation The creation of non-commercial knowledge bases is an issue Jisc has been working on for a few years: as money was scarce for building new Library Management Systems (LMS) or Electronic Resources Management systems (ERMs), the project focused on data provision.
Now at an advanced stage, the KB+ Project [29] as presented by Liam Earney, wants to become a one-stop shop for libraries, somewhere where they will find all the data they need in order signpost and better manage their resources for their users.
The idea is the creation of a centralised KB, fed by Jisc Collections [30], the section of Jisc in charge of e-resources negociations.
The data are available at the title level, and provide detailed information about local collections, machine-readable licences, information on the contracts and consortial negociations.
International co-operation with GoKB [21] makes it possible to expand the coverage of data at the package level.
The challenges to deal with are the poor quality of publishers’ metadata (even the KBART-formatted [31] data supplied contained lots of mistakes, therefore the updating work is now done only semi-automatically by Jisc’s data managers, which is a rather time-consuming process), implementation in other workflows and systems, stabilising a system in a somewhat erratic environment.
The next steps are the integration of libraries’ workflows and interoperability among different systems.
Enhancements foreseen are the enrichment of data on licences, the provision of statistics (the Analytics project aims to provide information about a community’s activity, to help governing bodies make informed decisions) and the addition of export features.
There is also a huge demand for data on ebooks and on Open Access, but the type of data has still to be defined.
Finally Kristin Antelman provided an update on Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) [21], part of the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project [32], led by the Kuali Foundation.
Started in 2011, its public release is expected in 2014.
GOKb is an open data repository of information about electronic publications developed in close collaboration with Jisc and partner libraries.
Data on journals are handled at the package level as well as the title level; the project uses normalised exchange protocols such as KBART, Onyx or EDItEUR.
Regarding the feeding and updating of GOKb, it is a pooled process, inserted in the member libraries’ usual workflow.
There is important cleaning work to be done at the first stages of the project, very time-consuming, but it is an investment for the future, the processes will be less demanding once the system is in production.
This cleaning work relies on the Open refine [33] tools (which are pooled as well) and Web apps are used to support viewing of data via a Web interface.
Conclusion The variety of themes addressed during the conference was huge, and this report does not do full justice to the richness of the sessions scheduled in the programme [34].
For example, we could not summarise in this article: tracks about heritage, about theses and about cataloguing which were very well received by the participants.
Nor could we adequately convey the dynamism demonstrated by the members of the Sudoc network.
The main trends emerging from the sessions show what could well form the next steps: transferring data and technical infrastructures into the cloud; developing APIs to adapt the systems to our users’ needs; and unlocking data from the silos in which they have become stuck.
These aspects seem to comprise a path to follow in order to guarantee better, more appropriate services for our users.
For Raymond Bérard, who brought the event to its closure, the past few days had furnished participants with a greater understanding of the projects as well as the issues at stake for libraries, both now and in the near future.
References ABES http://www.abes.fr/ SUDOC http://www.sudoc.abes.fr/ Posters http://fr.slideshare.net/abesweb/posters-numeriques-21776860 Archive of the #jabes2013 hashtag http://www.abes.fr/Media/Fichiers/Footer/Journees-ABES/tweets-jabes-version-txt French Government and National Library of France (BNF) Announce New Partnerships to Digitize Books and Recordings (LJ’s Infodocket) http://www.infodocket.com/2013/01/15/french-government-and-national-library-of-france-bnf-announce-new-partnerships-to-digitize-books-and-recordings/ Rose Holley.
"Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia".
July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/holley/ Licence Etalab http://www.data.gouv.fr/Licence-Ouverte-Open-Licence IdRef http://www.idref.fr/ ORCID http://orcid.org/ NUM-ES http://www.numes.fr Signets des universités http://www.signets-universites.fr/fr/ HaL http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ For example, 'French National Library: From privatisation to the expropriation of the public domain', ActuaLitté, 25 January 2013 http://www.actualitte.com/tribunes/bnf-de-la-privatisation-a-l-expropriation-du-domaine-public-1910.htm and 'Digitisation at the French National Library: How the nation is in the process of being rooked', blog S.I.Lex, 4 February 2013 http://scinfolex.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/numerisation-a-la-bnf-comment-la-france-est-en-train-de-se-faire-rouler/ Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire de Lausanne (BCU) http://www.unil.ch/bcu The Royal Library (Denmark) http://www.kb.dk/en/ New Online Collection from ProQuest Creates Access to Full-Colour 15th and 16th Century European Books http://www.proquest.com/en-US/aboutus/pressroom/09/20091201.shtml Gallica http://gallica.bnf.fr/ ADBU http://www.adbu.fr/ Mission « Acte II de l’exception culturelle ».
Contribution aux politiques culturelles à l’ère numérique.
Lescure, Pierre http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/var/culture/storage/culture_mag/rapport_lescure/index.htm#/ Système de gestion mutualisé.
Etude d’impact, version de travail, mars 2013 http://www.abes.fr/Media/Fichiers/Projet-en-cours/Etude-d-impact-SGBM The Global Open KnowledgeBase (GOKb) http://gokb.org/  Definition of a Digital Object Identifier http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/category/buzz/doi International service number identifier http://www.isni.org Openedition http://www.openedition.org/ Bibliothèque Scientifique Numérique http://www.bibliothequescientifiquenumerique.fr/ Dariah-EU (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) http://www.dariah.eu/ Pléiade: The ABES Discovery study: A study into three scenarios for a National Webscale Discovery Tool for scholarly e-content, March 2013, PDF format http://www.abes.fr/Media/Fichiers/Projet-en-cours/The-ABESDiscovery-Study-Pleiade Le rôle du hub de métadonnées – Carrefour de l’IST http://webcast.in2p3.fr/videos-le_role_du_hub_de_metadonnees JISC Collections KB+  http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/knowledgebaseplus/ JISC Collections http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/ KBART http://www.uksg.org/kbart Kuali-OLE http://www.kuali.org/ole OpenRefine http://openrefine.org/ JABES 2013 session materials http://www.abes.fr/Publications-Evenements/Journees-ABES/Douziemes-Journees-ABES-14-et-15-mai-2013 Author Details Marlène Delhaye E-resources Librarian Université d’Aix-Marseille Email: marlene.delhaye@univ-amu.fr Web site: http://scd.univ-amu.fr/ Blog: http://marlenescorner.net/ Marlène Delhaye is in charge of e-resources at Université d’Aix-Marseille, in southern France.
She is also member of the Board of the Couperin Consortium, for which she negociates e-resources in law and political sciences.
She has blogged since 2006 on open access issues and all things e-resources.
Her blog is called Marlène’s Corner Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Moving Towards Interoperability: Experiences of the Archives Hub Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Moving Towards Interoperability: Experiences of the Archives Hub Buzz data software database xml portal usability archives thesaurus repositories cataloguing aggregation ead ukad interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Jane Stevenson and Bethan Ruddock describe the work that the Archives Hub team has been doing to promote the sharing of content.
The Archives Hub [1] is a JISC-funded service based at Mimas, a National Data Centre supporting world-class learning and research [2].
It brings together descriptions of archives for research and education, enabling users to search across over nearly 200 repositories.
It stores descriptions in Encoded Archival Description (EAD).
Interoperability is about working together (inter-operating).
Whilst the central theme of this article is data interoperability – the ability to exchange or share information and use that information – this also requires individuals and organisations to work together; another form of interoperability.
Over the last 18 months, the Archives Hub team have been engaged on a JISC-funded Enhancements Project to promote interoperability through practical means for encouraging data sharing and working collaboratively with colleagues to help achieve that aim.
Benefits of Interoperability For the archive community, the drive towards interoperability should be seen as something that is hugely beneficial for researchers.
It is inevitable that we will move more towards the seamless integration of resources because in the digital age the ability to search for resources efficiently and effectively is a basic expectation of users.
It saves users time, it pulls together archives by name, place and subject, enabling researchers to make new connections, and it pools the experience, expertise and resources of archivists for the greater good.
Archive repositories generally feel that it is very worthwhile and valuable for them to contribute to the Archives Hub, but they do not want to create finding aids specifically for the Hub, as well as creating finding aids for their own system and maybe for other network sites, such as AIM25 and SCAN.
This duplication of work should not be required in the current environment, when we have the technical know-how to implement more efficient solutions.
One of the benefits of interoperability should be that one description can be used for various purposes.
In reality, it may be that one description needs to be modified for different purposes, but that modification should be minimal and preferably automated.
Of course, the ideal scenario is to support remote searching.
We are taking a step in this direction with the work that we are currently doing with The Women’s Library, which hosts Genesis, a portal for searching for resources relating to women’s studies.
The Archives Hub is providing remote access to our descriptions so that Genesis can remotely search a pre-defined sub-set of descriptions relating specifically to women.
This is the sort of innovative work that will take the archives community forwards towards true interoperability.
UK Archives Discovery There are many challenges involved in the sharing and cross-searching of data.
The first hurdle is to convince stakeholders that it is worth prioritising this kind of work.
The archive community has begun to come together on this, and the formation of the UK Archives Discovery network (UKAD) [3], which has evolved out of the National Archive Network (NAN) is an indication of this.
UKAD has the following objectives: To promote the opening up of data and to offer capacity for such a cross-searching capability across the UK archive networks and online repository catalogues To lead and support resource discovery through the promotion of relevant national and international standards To support the development and use of name authorities To advocate for the reduction of cataloguing backlogs and the retro-conversion of hard-copy catalogues To promote access to digitised and digital archives via cross-searching resource discovery systems.
To work with other domains and potential funders to promote archive discovery The UKAD network will be an important vehicle for sharing information, ideas, projects and outcomes.
For the Archives Hub, undertaking this sort of work in isolation is contrary to our strategic aim to foster a culture of collaboration and community [4].
However, once the will is there and the benefits are articulated, the lack of resources to tackle the challenges inherent in this kind of integration of data sources can also be a barrier.
Archivists commonly adhere to ISAD(G) as a standard for creating finding aids [5].
However, it is not a content standard and it does not lead to anything like the level of consistency in data systems, data structure and format required for pulling data sources together.
The Archives Hub has adopted EAD as a standard that is international and widely used [6], and it is helping us achieve interoperability, but it is only one option for structuring data.
Many repositories use relational databases, which provide a whole range of advantages.
But not all database systems facilitate exporting of data, or importing of data from other sources.
Even once this issue is addressed, there remains the whole gamut of data-related problems.
We are not consistent in the way we create titles, dates, reference numbers and index terms, we do not all include the same content, we do not catalogue archives to the same level of detail.
The Archives Hub has been looking at ways to tackle these issues and open up online access.
As an aggregating service and a focal point for parts of the archive community, we believe that we should promote and support standards and best practice, initiating and participating in collaborative ventures that will benefit archive users and raise the profile of archives.
Background to the Current Work In 2008 and 2009 the Archives Hub undertook enhancement work that was part of a larger Mimas Enhancements Programme funded by JISC.
The vision for the Programme was: to deliver benefits to researchers by advancing interoperability and linking through to new content; to integrate services; to share best practices to support long-term usability and sustainability across Mimas services.
As part of this project we looked into the status of export from Axiell CALM [7] and Adlib [8] and talked to our community of contributors and potential contributors to gauge the level of interest in exporting to the Hub.
We also realised that it was important to investigate the potential for exchanging data with other providers, in particular with AIM25 [9].
The project established a solid foundation from which we could continue to develop this work, and JISC agreed to fund a second enhancements project to do just that.
Working with AIM25 Over the past few years the Hub team have developed a productive relationship with AIM25, the London consortium.
There are obvious advantages in working together to the advantage of our users, and this is facilitated by the fact that we both use EAD.
The basic aim is to share data, and beyond this to benefit from working together in other areas.
In November 2007 we attended a meeting of the CALM and AIM25 Users’ Group in London.
That was the start of an initiative which eventually led to the Archives Hub taking in nearly 2,000 records from the University of London Senate House Library, Courtauld Institute of Art and Queen Mary University of London.
These records were provided to us by AIM25 and we were able to put them onto the Hub with only minimal data editing.
We are looking at ways to minimise further any editing, and if possible, automate all editing that is required.
We should emphasise that this is not editing of content, but of structure.
Our colleagues at AIM25, Geoff Browell and Francis Blomeley, agreed to work on an export routine that would provide us with ‘Hub flavour’ EAD, and we agreed in turn that we would work to create a specification for an export routine from CALM and Adlib that would be suitable for both the Archives Hub and AIM25.
By co-operating in our approach we have been able to reduce duplication of effort and benefit users.
The Enhancements Interoperability Project In April 2009 we started work on the second enhancements project, to promote interoperability by improving the ease of exporting from CALM and Adlib to the Archives Hub and AIM25.
CALM and Adlib are the two leading archival software systems used in the UK, and we decided to work with these systems to open up the benefits of the project to as many repositories as possible.
The existing CALM and Adlib export functions are currently somewhat out of date, having been put together some years ago, and one of the specific aims of the project was to update them.
Once the project had been approved, and a project officer appointed, we set out to liaise with Hub contributors in repositories across the UK.
Process We were very keen that the project should be based on real data, from real contributors.
There is very little point basing a specification on ideal data, as you are unlikely ever to encounter them in a real-world situation.
We wanted to ensure that we could cope with as many vagaries of data as possible – not only different interpretations of ISAD(G), but also differences in the way that contributors use CALM and Adlib.
We know that rules are not always applied consistently, and that each repository will have a slightly different way of using its archival software.
While we knew from the start of the project that we would not be able to accommodate all idiosyncrasies, we were determined to make the export process something that as many repositories as possible could use, without significantly altering their workflows.
To expedite this, we called for volunteers to be part of the project, and received a good response – both from existing Hub contributors, and from people interested in contributing in the future.
Overall, we received descriptions from 14 institutions which volunteered following a call on the CALM users (calm-lis) Jiscmail list.
Once we had gathered our contributors, we asked each of them to send a selection of descriptions, exported using the current export routines.
We asked that these descriptions be a variety of collection-level and multi-level descriptions; we also asked contributors not to tidy them up, or alter them in any way other than what might be required to run the export routines.
This meant that we knew we were dealing with data that would be comparable to those exported to the Hub during normal business.
Once the project officer had received these data, she built a database to handle the outputs from the processing.
This database contained every EAD field which the Hub displays with an example of ideal Hub form and syntax.
The descriptions were then examined, element by element, and each element was classed as ‘ideal’, ‘satisfactory’, or ‘unsatisfactory’.
These data were then used to build a picture of where the major problems were – if an element or attribute was consistently unacceptable, then we could be reasonably sure that the problem was with the export routine, not the contributor’s data.
To help us with this, Axiell and Adlib kindly gave us access to test copies of CALM and Adlib.
This meant that we were able to examine the descriptions in their native environment, as well as run test, or dummy, descriptions.
This gave us the freedom to experiment, and to determine which fields within CALM and Adlib produced the most satisfactory EAD descriptions.
Challenges One of the first challenges we met, which proved to be a major one, was the problem of index terms.
They are vital for the Hub’s system of resource discovery, and we recommend that all Hub descriptions must have at least the name of the creator indexed as an access point.
These access points are currently marked up on the Hub in a very idiosyncratic way, so that we can distinguish between forename, surname, life dates, etc.
We are currently in the process of reviewing this practice, because the advantages of identifying the components of an index term need to be set against the significant disadvantages of non-standard markup.
This index term markup was therefore not considered for this project.
As this markup was also the main difference between Archives Hub and AIM25 descriptions, this meant that it was much easier to produce a specification that would be satisfactory for both.
While we hoped that this would make the question of access points easier to handle, we encountered an issue in that the version of CALM to which we had access did not provide access to the CALM database of index terms.
This meant that we were unable to experiment with index terms, and had to rely on the descriptions provided by our volunteers.
This was further complicated by the fact that the majority of access points did not, in fact, export – we were faced with description after description full of empty personal name, corporate name, and geographic name tags.
Our first round of contributor visits was designed to address this problem, and so we chose to visit repositories whose access points had exported correctly.
This would enable us to see where in CALM this information was coming from, and adjust our specification, or advice to contributors, accordingly.
However, for some less used access points, such as genre form, we were unable to find examples of successful exports.
Many contributors also use links to the CALM thesaurus, resulting in an ID being present in the field in CALM, but nothing being exported.
While we have asked CALM to remedy this, we have been unable to give them any details of how to do so.
Another challenge arose from CALM being so dominant in the archival software market in the UK we only had one Adlib volunteer for the project.
This meant that, while we were able to provide a specification to Adlib, it was less comprehensive, and relied less on real-world data, than that provided to Axiell for CALM.
Current Situation We have provided both software providers with specifications for a revised and improved version of their specification, to be used both for the Hub and AIM25.
While we are keen that this improved export is implemented as soon as possible, this is now out of our hands, and we are reliant on the resources which Axiell and Adlib have available to devote to this.
We have used the knowledge gained from this project to produce guidelines for contributors on how to amend their current CALM exports so that they are ideal for the Hub.
We have tried to make this as unobtrusive to contributor workflows as possible, and have given several alternatives for contributors to manage this: in the software itself; by hand in an XML editor, or by editing descriptions once they have been uploaded to the Hub’s new EAD editor.
We are recommending that contributors use the last, as the editor has been specifically designed to facilitate the quick and easy creation of valid and interoperable EAD.
We have disseminated this guidance to contributors, and already have some new contributors who are using this method to upload their CALM descriptions to the Hub.
We hope that publishing the results of this project will encourage more contributors to do so.
Benefits This project has already realised a number of benefits, with more expected in the future.
Some are specific benefits for the Hub and AIM25; others are specific benefits for contributors, for software suppliers, and for the archive and research communities as a whole.
The improvement of interoperability, and the expansion of coverage of the Archives Hub and AIM25, is surely the most important community benefit, as it provides a larger proportion of UK archive descriptions stored in sustainable and interoperable EAD format, and increases the number of archive descriptions which are discoverable and searchable online.
The Archives Hub and AIM25 are, of course, benefitted by an increased number and variety of contributors, and also by descriptions which require less editing before they can be uploaded.
Contributors benefit by being more easily able to make their descriptions available in EAD, with the attendant benefits of interoperability and discoverability.
Conclusion For aggregation services such as the Archives Hub to thrive, they need to be responsive to the online environment, to explore innovative ways to expand and disseminate content and to strike a balance between solidity and flexibility, innovation and reliability.
We are aware that in an environment where archive repositories are increasingly stretched and where creating archival descriptions is time-consuming, we need to respond by showing that the Archives Hub is of benefit to archives as a means to disseminate information, raise awareness and provide all the benefits of cross-searching diverse archival content.
References The Archives Hub http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk Mimas http://mimas.ac.uk/ UK Archives Discovery Network http://archivesnetwork.ning.com/ Archives Hub strategic aims http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/strategy/ International Standard Archival Description http://www.ica.org/en/node/30000 Encoded Archival Description official site http://www.loc.gov/ead/index.html Axiell CALM http://www.axiell.co.uk Adlib http://www.adlibsoft.com/ AIM25 http://www.aim25.ac.uk/ Author Details Jane Stevenson Archives Hub Co-ordinator Mimas, The University of Manchester Email: jane.stevenson@ manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jane.stevenson/ Bethan Ruddock Content Development Officer, Library and Archival Services Mimas, The University of Manchester Email: bethan.ruddock@manchester.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Moving towards Interoperability: Experiences of the Archives Hub” Author: Jane Stevenson and Bethan Ruddock Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/stevenson-ruddock/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Sun Preservation and Archive Special Interest Group: May 2008 Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Sun Preservation and Archive Special Interest Group: May 2008 Meeting Buzz data software framework infrastructure archives digitisation identifier blog repositories eprints flickr preservation adobe mp3 curation dspace research Citation BibTex RIS Vicky Mays and Ian Dolphin review the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) meeting held in San Francisco in May 2008.
The third meeting of Sun's Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group took place in San Francisco in May.
The event, the third PASIG meeting in the last year, drew around 180 participants from Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America to discuss a broad range of issues surrounding digital repositories.
Presentations ranged from geographically or community-themed high-level perspectives of repositoryrelated activity, through to detailed technical analysis and reports of development activity at an institutional or project level.
The diversity of presenters, representing Higher Education institutions, national libraries, repository communities, and organisations such as the Shoah Foundation, gave a fair indication of how far preservation issues have moved away from being a purely 'library' concern.
Michael Kellor, University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources at Stanford University, and one of the founders of PASIG, summarises the PASIG purpose thus: 'The thrust of the PASIG written large is the development, elaboration, and operation of digital archives for preservation and access at individual institutions, reducing dependence upon so-called third parties and increasing the scope and rate of gathering and protecting significant digital objects for the long term by virtue of multiple, simultaneous, and perhaps even coordinated efforts.'
Although the conference touched on issues surrounding open access, this was not its primary focus; other fora exist where these issues are discussed.
The focus of the event was very much on networking and sharing best practice.
Key topics covered included tiered storage, data management and digital asset management (DAM), open storage, data curation, immersive technology, repositories and federated archives, and Web 2.0 services.
As the discussion unfolded, clear themes emerged around software and hardware architectures to support preservation, and their relationship to both the enterprise as a whole – particularly, but not exclusively in Higher Education and emerging national and international preservation infrastructure.
Highlights of a limited selection of the PASIG presentations follow, the complete programme and presentations are available online [1].
High-level Trends: Cliff Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information) Cliff Lynch's high-level trends presentation elaborated key technological, economic and social/policy questions, issues and challenges involved in broadening support for preservation activities.
Clifford Lynch's Address It is possible to download the MP3 sound file of this address and play with a suitable application.
Cliff's survey began with issues surrounding storage.
Although still focussed primarily on cost, he argued, ideas around storage were undergoing rapid evolution.
A range of technical issues surrounding storage had been largely solved; in the past, discussions about storage used to be obsessed by reliability.
It was now recognised that grid storage solutions guarded against both point failures and geographical disasters, although we still lack a rigorous sense of 'how much distribution is enough'.
It was also the case, he argued, that we had no sense of the impact of geographical boundaries, and how the cloud overlays those boundaries.
Sensitive data cannot casually cross those boundaries, and, in this context, for some jurisdictions, encryption is not enough.
Cloud storage solutions are not primarily driven by preservation requirements, but by the need for scalable information technology solutions to support day to day operations.
This has impact on the type of service level agreements available, and those that might be required for preservation purposes.
Some have looked at levels of service available from major providers and wondered how they might be integrated in a preservation strategy.
They struggle with a pragmatic set of behaviours that appear to be robust, and assurances that appear sound, but contain expressions which essentially add 'our lawyers said to tell you, you might lose it all tomorrow'.
Engineering this into a preservation solution with a defined set of properties, Cliff added, was 'really hard'.
He posed two questions of the audience: Do we give up on service level agreements in an age of cloud computing?
; Or will we see another generation of cloud services that come with the type of SLA (Service Level Agreement) we might like to see?
Whilst noting that the issue of the bandwidth was not likely to be an issue for research libraries embedded in major universities, Cliff noted that it was worthwhile remembering, as cloud solutions scaled out, that there is an implicit connection between the cloud and available network bandwidth.
In moving to the political and social aspects of preservation, Cliff indicated that those involved in preservation activities, such as LOCKSS and Portico, had correctly emphasised the need to work at significant scale with content producers and publishers.
This, he commented, was not a 'hard sell' in the abstract; publishers need a credible story to tell about preservation.
Preservation, however, is not solely concerned with the scale of collections, but also their nature.
In the past, great research collections had not been built simply by collecting at scale, but by collecting the personal and organisational papers of key figures.
This aspect, Cliff argued, should be taken forward in an era of changing personal behaviour, where more and more of our personal lives has moved to the network.
This brings a new set of problems, both technical and ethical, when we decide we want to acquire this material as part of collective and social history.
It was interesting to note, he added, a recent discussion in special collections circles, around the ethics of obtaining a series of obsolete laptops and turning loose graduate students with modern forensic tools to analyse the un-erased space on their hard disks.
In skimming the spaces, future biographers might seek information, in Flickr, Amazon purchasing histories or blogs; Cliff also noted the considerable confusion in the mind of the public about these services.
To take the example of Flickr, he posited that despite the existence of Flickr as a sharing service, people absolutely believed it to be a preservation service, and might not even retain their own copies of photographs.
This type of behaviour should be taken into account when we seek to preserve a digital record.
Cliff closed by commenting that he observed a stronger conversation regarding reuse in the preservation community, which he regarded as a positive sign.
This was particularly the case in the world of research data, and moved the discussion from abstract to very concrete ground.
It was still remarkably easy to fall into old models of physical access to archives; 'I've collected this box of material and I'm going to spend a week looking through it', whereas the future was much more likely to see a researcher deploy 'significant computational resource on an entire archive as a way of refining something out of it'.
The Stanford Digital Repository: Tom Cramer (Stanford University) The Stanford Digital Repository Project, managed by Stanford Libraries, made an early identification of three broad categories of data requiring preservation; Library digital content Institutionally generated digital content, including research data, learning objects, and other key institutional information External deposited content The project's main objective was to support long-term preservation of digital content through a secure, sustainable trusted system.
The initial project focus on library content provided an exemplar area of work under the direct control of the project sponsor.
A number of principles were established at an early stage: Any system will be largely hidden from end-users.
Interfaces facilitating access will be embedded as close to user workflow as is practicable.
The system would be as simple and as modular as possible, facilitating flexibility and adaptation to new circumstances where necessary.
Multiple copies on multiple geographically spread media The Stanford Digital Repository will serve as a common preservation infrastructure.
Stanford's experience leads them to believe that it is impractical to have a 'single' repository that is optimised for both preservation and access.
Oxford Digital Asset Management System (DAMS): Neil Jeffries (University of Oxford) Oxford's DAMS currently captures e-theses, e-prints and working/conference papers with a view to expanding this in the near future to digitised books, electronic ephemera and manuscripts.
DAMS is best described not as being a single system, but a toolset built out from a Sun Honeycomb/ST5800 hardware infrastructure, Fedora-based repository services, with Mass Digitisation Ingest Components (MDICS) providing ingest services from the output of the Google Library Project.
Neil noted the significance of the work of JISC as a key driver and shaper of the UK landscape in the United Kingdom.
Oxford's key concerns are systems integration beyond 'the repository', maintaining a diverse toolset to support preservation, and expanding the scope of repository activity over time to include new content types.
National Digital Heritage Archive: Graham Coe (National Library of New Zealand) Graham presented an ambitious project to collect, make accessible and preserve New Zealand's digital heritage.
The decision was taken early in the project to purchase a commercial repository solution, as in-house development or open source was viewed to be of higher risk.
The New Zealand National Library has partnered with the vendor to develop the product further, and has worked closely with a peer review group made up of international Higher Education institutions to this effect.
The programme took a phased approach to implementation; the first phase of the project will go live late in 2008.
The Digital Preservation System will eventually integrate with a wide variety of existing systems, including those providing collection management, reporting, and resource discovery and delivery services.
Storage and Data Management Practices for the Long Term – Raymond A Clarke (Enterprise Storage Specialist, Sun Microsystems) Legal compliance, security, and the needs of both business and research, together with requirements to keep increasing quantities of digital data accessible and discoverable are creating massive complexity for a range of organisations.
Raymond Clarke argued for a holistic approach to supporting the long-term retention and preservation of digital information; conventional strategies simply did not scale in the face of the data and information deluge.
Raymond gave examples of best practice for retention and preservation: Achieve early and inclusive stakeholder consensus on classification.
Establish retention periods on information and delete 'expired' information.
Free up space – only store what is required.
Set policies for audits – who has used the information?
Establish when, where and how to ensure integrity.
Working Groups It would be wrong to think PASIG is an extremely formal event, driven entirely by one-to-many presentations.
PASIG meetings tend to be practically oriented, and centre on networking opportunities, with space to drill down into issues with others who face similar practical problems.
In addition to the main conference sessions, five working groups met several times during the PASIG meeting: Long-Term Storage and Data Migration [2] Preservation [3] Enterprise Repositories and Federated Archives [4] ST5800-Based Architectures [5] Research Data Curation [6] DSpace, Fedora PASIG is a cross-community event, although, naturally enough for an event organised primarily by Sun Microsystems, there is a specific focus throughout on Sun hardware, software, and services.
The three principle open-source repository framework communities – DSpace, Fedora and ePrints were represented, and contributed highlevel perspectives of their roadmaps to the conference.
A lunchtime meeting, called by the Executive Directors of Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation, discussed the potential for collaboration between the communities in the light of what appeared to be shared objectives and understanding.
There was significant support for further dialogue and practical collaboration.
Sandy Payette of Fedora Commons, and Michelle Kimpton, of DSpace followed the meeting with a joint statement outlining the approach both communities would follow in coming months [7].
Developers from both communities have already met to discuss the shape of this collaboration in more detail.
Conclusion If one had to select central themes emerging from the May PASIG meeting, one such theme would almost certainly be best captured by the title of the presentation by Stephen Abrams and John Kunze of the California Digital Library: 'Preservation is not a location'.
Stephen and John, amongst others, advanced the perspective of preservation as a series of distributed services rather than a 'designated repository'.
The success of this approach is critically dependent, however, on the systems and environment at the level of the academic library, institution, or consortium (whether national or otherwise) being hospitable to the integration of those preservation services.
There are strong signals, in the work of the JISC, the NSF and the Australian National Data Service, that such thinking is being factored into national strategic approaches.
It seems less certain that this is currently occurring at anything other than a small minority of Higher Education institutions.
This speaks to a need to broaden dialogue, and ensure that preservation and other issues conventionally assigned to 'library' or 'repository space' are adequately integrated into emergent thinking around enterprise architectures for Higher Education.
It also clearly indicates the need to include a considerable range of software producers – both proprietary and open source in that dialogue.
In the course of a year, PASIG has become a valuable forum for those concerned with how these infrastructure pieces might fit together at the academic library, enterprise and national level, and what policies should be associated with them.
PASIG is the result of close collaboration between Stanford University and Sun Microsystems.
Michael Kellor of Stanford University and Art Pasquinelli of Sun Microsystems, the principle organisers, should be congratulated for the openness, energy and vision they have brought to the organisation of the event, and the PASIG itself.
References May 2008 PASIG presentations are available from http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_spring/presentations/ Long-Term Storage and Data Migration http://www.sun-pasig.org/wiki/index.php?title=PASIG_Long-Term_Storage_and_Data_Migration_Working_Group Preservation http://www.sun-pasig.org/wiki/index.php?title=PASIG_Preservation_Working_Group Enterprise Repositories and Federated Archives http://www.sun-pasig.org/wiki/index.php?title=PASIG_Enterprise_Repositories_and_Federated_Archives_Working_Group ST5800-Based Architectures http://www.sun-pasig.org/wiki/index.php?title=PASIG_ST5800-Based_Architectures_Working_Group Research Data Curation http://www.sun-pasig.org/wiki/index.php?title=PASIG_Research_Data_Curation_Working_Group DSpace/Fedora initial discussions on joint collaboration http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/dspace-general/2008-June/002034.html Author Details Vicky Mays Records Manager The University of Hull Email: v.mays@hull.ac.uk Ian Dolphin Head of e-Strategy The University of Hull Email: i.dolphin@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/staff/ Return to top Article Title: "Sun Preservation and Archive Special Interest Group: May 2008 Meeting Author: Vicky Mays and Ian Dolphin Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/pasig-2008-05-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Enhancing Collaboration and Interaction in a Post-graduate Research Programme Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Enhancing Collaboration and Interaction in a Post-graduate Research Programme Buzz data software wiki database dissemination archives blog copyright passwords podcast facebook twitter authentication ict refworks privacy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tertia Coetsee describes a community of practice for post-graduate students where RefShare is deployed for digital storage and retrieval, alongside Blackboard for the purposes of communication.
She also describes the role of the information specialist in the programme.
The Phytomedicine Programme is a multidisciplinary and collaborative research programme investigating therapeutically useful compounds present in plants growing in South Africa.
The programme was started in 1995 and was transferred to the Department of Paraclinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria in 2002.
In 2007 it was designated as a National Research Foundation Developed Research Niche Area [1].
The Faculty Plan (2007-2011) of the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria lists Phytomedicine and ethno-veterinary medicine as one of the six research focus themes that will contribute to the realisation of the Faculty’s newly formulated vision statement relevant to its research programme.
This article will focus on the role of the embedded information specialist, in the Phytomedicine Programme.
The main concern will be to incorporate the educational software, Blackboard, named ClickUP at the University of Pretoria, in the existing community of practice between staff and post-graduate students of the Phytomedicine Programme, developed since 2009.
The original research platform was developed on RefShare (RefWorks).
It will also illustrate the importance of collaboration between the information specialist, the department and the researchers in order to enhance important role of the information specialist in applying new developments and tools for education innovation and research excellence and promote and support research in this dynamic subject field.
As many of the post-graduate students are situated off-campus, often outside South Africa, the community of practice focuses on electronic information products and services for easier retrieval of information, for group interaction, information sharing and collaboration as well as the digital preservation of intellectual products of the Phytomedicine Programme [2].
Although RefShare proved to be excellent for digital storage and retrieval of the unique information sources of the Phytomedicine Programme, it failed where group interaction and information sharing were concerned.
RefShare does not allow collaborators to edit the database research findings.
Students could not add their own research but had to submit their files via email to the information specialist for adding.
This resulted in a time-consuming process.
It also did not help to promote any interaction or communication between staff and students.
Blackboard education software was to be explored and implemented.
Figure 1: RefWorks Collaboration in the Research Environment What Is Collaboration?
Collaboration is, according to Merriam-Webster to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavour.
It is a recursive process where two or more people or organisations work together at the intersection of common goals, by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus [3].
The community of practice of the Phytomedicine Programme was developed to serve more than just one goal.
Firstly it was developed to serve as a collaboration tool between the staff and students of the programme, but also between the information specialist  (library) and the staff and students of the Phytomedicine Programme.
The staff and students collaborate on an academic level, sharing knowledge, and enthusiasm.
Information specialists do not only deliver the traditional library function to assist students and staff with information literacy training, specialised information searches, access to relevant information resources (journals, books, reference sources, audiovisual sources, and e-resources), but also support research in each discipline and support education innovation and research excellence.
This includes the development of a group of Web products geared to the needs of its student and researcher/lecturer market.
It also includes knowledge of research methodology, matters of importance to post-graduate students, e.g.
plagiarism, copyright issues, citing and reference management.
Secondly, it also aimed to serve as digital preservation and collection development tool for the Phytomedicine Programme’s unique information sources e.g.
a database of core articles, all previous publications, new pre-published information and regular progress reports.
The third goal was to be a collective administration tool for the programme.
The outcome was to enhance support for research and research output.
The Benefits and Disadvantages of Research Collaboration Advantages include gaining access to a larger sample, availing the team of a mix of skills, and creating support for debate and consultation.
Research collaboration saves time, generates wiser more durable decisions, richer understanding of values through shared information.
It fosters action and promotes change, solves collective problems or resources, build relationships and understanding, decision-making skills also enhance professionalism.
It also encourages and motivates collaborators.
The idea is to share knowledge, skills and techniques and thus ensure more effective use of collaborators’ talents.
Tacit knowledge is transferred through collaboration.
All these benefits contribute to encourage enthusiasm among collaborators.
It supports the need for a culture of scholarly caring in graduate education, developed through mentoring, encouragement of diversity, and the promotion of high standards.
Disadvantages of collaborative research related to problems of status, conflict, and confusion, to authorship, workload, and proper recognition of authors.
Products and Tools to Support Research Collaboration ICT (Information and Communication Technology) collaboration tools can be divided into three categories depending on the level of collaboration: communication tools, conferencing tools, and collaborative management (co-ordination) tools.
Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, podcasts and mobile learning can be used very successfully in the research environment.
They are an excellent means of exchange of valuable information and knowledge among people.
Also available are social networking platforms, such as Facebook.
Facebook is also a powerful mediator for social interaction.
In South Africa Twitter is a new social networking development.
Google groups and Yahoo Groups also work very well.
All of them are unfortunately open access and in the public domain [2].
Most of the technologies mentioned above could have served as a platform or tool for the community of practice of the Phytomedicine Programme; they are freely available and well known.
The problem with these technologies is that they are essentially open Web pages, where anyone registered can publish to it, amend it, change it or see it.
Privacy is one of the main concerns of the Phytomedicine Programme, as the research involves patents rights, sensitive information, and unpublished research.
Restrictions can be added to the specific technology, but then one should be prepared to pay for the exclusive use.
RefWorks, an online research management, writing and collaboration tool, used by the University of Pretoria since 2006, was selected as platform for the community of practice.
It is available to all of the post-graduate students and the library provides support and training in the product.
RefWorks has a feature called RefShare, which focuses especially on collaboration.
The RefWorks marketing Web page [4] gives the following functions of the product: “Managing information, writing research papers and creating bibliographies, provides users with a simple-to-use online tool, to capture, organise, store, share and manipulate data generated by multiple information resources.”  A group can create a bibliography of references retrieved from different information searches.
RefShare then allows all group members to work collaboratively on the database and add, share or edit information.
Community of Practice  A community of practice is, according to Lave and Wenger, a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession.
The purpose of a community of practice is to provide a way for practitioners to share tips and best practice, ask questions of their colleagues, and provide support for each other, and to gain knowledge related to their field.
It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally [5].
A domain of knowledge creates common ground, inspires members to participate, guides their learning and gives meaning to their actions.
A strong community fosters interactions and encourages a willingness to share ideas.
While the domain provides the general area of interest for the community, the practice is the specific focus around which the community develops, shares and maintains its core of knowledge.
The added value of a community of practice is its facilitation of development in decreasing the learning curve of new employees and responding more rapidly to customer needs and inquiries.
It helps to reduce needless duplication of effort and prevents the "reinvention of the wheel".
A community of practice can exist as long as the members believe they have something to contribute to it, or gain from it, and if there is a high degree of trust amongst the participants.
Communities of practice help the individual bridge the gap between knowing what and knowing how [6].
A facilitator or coordinator cultivates the community, monitors and measures action, produces action plans, reports activity, metrics and evaluations.
Monitoring success criteria and impact, and managing the community of practice also form part of this role.
Communities of Practice and Knowledge Management 'Knowledge management involves connecting people with people, as well as people with information.
It is a management philosophy, which combines good practice in purposeful information management with a culture of organisational learning, in order to improve business performance.'
[7] Wasko and Faraj [8] describe three kinds of knowledge: "knowledge as object", "knowledge embedded within individuals", and "knowledge embedded in a community".
Communities of Practice have become associated with finding, sharing, transferring, and archiving knowledge, as well as making explicit "expertise", or tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is considered to be those valuable context-based experiences that cannot easily be captured, codified and stored [9].
Because knowledge management is seen "primarily as a problem of capturing, organizing, and retrieving information, evoking notions of databases, documents, query languages, and data mining" [10], the members of the community of practice, collectively and individually, are considered a rich potential source of helpful information in the form of actual experiences; in other words, best practice.
Thus, for knowledge management, a community of practice is one source of content and context that, if codified, documented and archived, can be accessed for later use.
Responsibilities of Knowledge Management The core responsibilities in Knowledge Management [11] may be summarised as: Manage content effectively (lifecycle; systems & technologies) Connect people with people Facilitate collaboration Help organisation to learn Help organisation make decisions based on complete, valid and well-interpreted data, information and knowledge Knowledge management builds a sense of community, creates bonds within the organisation and helps people to keep up to date.
It develops professional skills and promotes peer-to-peer mentoring.
It helps the organisation to drive strategy and to stay ahead of the competition.
Factors of a Successful Community of Practice Studies have shown that workers spend a third of their time looking for information and are five times more likely to turn to a co-worker rather than an explicit source of information (eg book, manual, or database) [9].
Time is saved by conferring with members of a community of practice.
Tacit knowledge and best practice are shared which can be difficult to store and retrieve outside.
This may enable another person to avoid mistakes and alleviate the learning curve.
Management of a community of practice often faces many barriers that inhibit individuals from engaging in knowledge exchange.
Some of the reasons for these barriers relate to egotism and even personal enmities, for example in a Community of Practice that has grown too large for its members comfort [8].
Motivation to share knowledge is critical to success in communities of practice.
Studies show that members are motivated to become active participants in a community or practice when they view the sharing of knowledge as meant for the public good, moral obligation and as a community interest.
Collaboration is essential to ensuring that communities of practice thrive.
One of the important factors of a successful community of practice is the creation of opportunities for open dialogue.
Communities of practice should create opportunities for participants explicitly to discuss the value and productivity of their participation in the group.
RefShare RefShare is a module within RefWorks that claims to provide users with a quick and easy way to share their database (or folders) in order to facilitate collaborative research.
Users can share their RefWorks references with both members of their own institution and globally with any researcher connected to the Internet.
RefWorks/RefShare is free to all members of a subscribing institution.
RefShare can be used to post class reading lists on a central Web page, provide easy access to information for disparate researchers collaborating on a project, create and share databases of frequently requested reference queries by topic and provide a linkable database of research done by specific faculty members.
It is searchable.
Benefits of RefShare include facilitating the dissemination of information by providing a central Web page for the posting and access of research information.
It provides a collaborative research environment by providing easily accessible data via the Internet.
It permits the seamless sharing and exchange of information and allows easy transfer of information between RefWorks databases.
It makes it possible to post frequently needed databases of materials centrally for research queries, class assignments, or research review.
RefShare provides easy remote access to research and collaboration globally.
Citations can be downloaded or exported and encourages the use of RefWorks.
Phytomedicine Special Collections The Phytomedicine Programme collated a variety of resources on RefShare for the specific use of the Programme’s staff and students: A collection of core articles or groundbreaking articles in the field of phytomedicine, mandatory reading for all post-graduate students in preparation for their research at the Phytomedicine Programme.
A bibliographic list of the published research output of staff and students at the Phytomedicine Programme, displaying linked full-text articles.
Masters and Doctoral students’ research information, research protocols.
Presentations at conferences and workshops presented by students and staff members of the Phytomedicine Programme.
Research procedures to be used for certain techniques.
Guidelines for safety will also be available.
PowerPoint presentations of important lectures or presentations relevant to students’ courses.
Regular Progress Reports of post-graduate students, to the lecturers for progress monitoring purposes.
e-Theses of all previous post-graduate students of the Phytomedicine Programme.
Full text, linked via UPeTD, (University of Pretoria’s electronic theses).
A unique Web page designed to focus on important African ethno-veterinary plants with links and content provided to support the research programme [12].
Figure 2: Professor Kobus Eloff and Phytomedicine Programme students Benefits of RefShare for the Community of Practice It was agreed that it was an enormous advantage for students to have electronic access to bibliographies, published research and articles and core articles in phytomedicine.
It provides a one-stop platform that was easily accessed.
This access also helped to foster a sense of community between the post-graduate students.
A further benefit was the unspoken encouragement of exporting and using citation styles within RefWorks, preparing students to use the correct referencing tools.
Testimony of the success of RefShare can be seen in the following extracts from emails from a post-graduate student and the head of the Phytomedicine Programme.
One of the post doctoral students remarks: .. the Phytomedicine Refshare database is a user-friendly platform by which a number of valuable resources have been made available to students in the Phytomedicine Programme.
Many of the students rely solely on online databases to conduct literature searches, and this interface with the library staff has enabled them to become familiar with other resources available to them through the library.
Especially helpful is the Refshare resource whereby links to online previous thesis publications submitted by past students have been added, as the hard copies are not always easily available and the research has often not yet been published in scientific journals.
Also, having journal articles of interest readily available, particularly those that are not published online, will save time when students do not have to search for these articles individually.
The submission and uploading of progress reports will also be made easy by using the RefShare platform.
I believe that constant reminders to the students about the RefShare database will encourage them to become accustomed to the idea of using the database, and also to remind them to upload details of their own research so that collaborations can be fostered and other students can gain from consolidated knowledge.
[2] Prof Kobus Eloff, head of the Phytomedicine Programme supports these comments and adds: ... to me another great advantage is, that we can place power point lectures that are given to students on this source.
A problem with a research focused program is that students are at different stages of completion of their studies.
If all started at the same time one could present a series of lectures that would be relevant to all at that stage of their study.
Frequently students do not appreciate the importance of lectures to their studies and they do not take notes.
What happens now is that these presentations are available to the students at the stage when it is required.
An advantage is also that very important publications from leading scientists in the world are now available and we can expect that students will use this to get background knowledge.
We are very pleased that the Phytomedicine Programme has been selected as an example to demonstrate the use of this technology to our students.
The dedicated staff of our library deserve more than gratitude for their active support and initiative.
[2] Limitations of RefShare RefShare does not allow collaborators to edit the database research findings.
Students could not add their own research but had to submit their files via email to the information specialist for adding.
This resulted in a time and trust issue.
Students were also supposed to submit regularly reports on their progress.
Also, during the project it became clear that although responses were generally positive, the students all fear a lack of privacy and open access.
They were reluctant to put their unpublished information in public domain although they were constantly reassured that only participating post-graduate students and staff of the Phytomedicine Programme can access the folders.
Most disadvantages noted were related to the reluctant use of new technology rather than its functionality.
This indicates that some changes in training of new students are necessary in order to avoid such a situation.
The lack of communication and interaction were the main disadvantage in respect of furthering the aims of the community of practice.
Although RefShare does have an email facility, but it cannot be used among all participants of the community of practice.
System emails can only be sent to invite participants to share one’s folders.
Blackboard Blackboard is an education software programme.
The Blackboard Learning System is a virtual learning environment and course management system, developed by Blackboard Inc.
Features include course management, a customisable open architecture, and a scalable design that allows for integration with student information systems and authentication protocols.
Its main purpose is to add online elements to courses traditionally delivered face-to-face, and to develop completely online courses with few or no face-to-face meetings [13].
Blackboard course management software enables faculty and students to communicate and collaborate through real-time chats, threaded discussions, class e-mail, and online file exchanges.
Since courses are password-protected, staff can limit access to materials to only registered students on the course.
In addition, Blackboard offers course management options such as a gradebook where students can check their own individual grades, an assignment manager tool for students to submit assignments electronically to the instructor, online test and survey tools, and course statistics so that staff can evaluate and measure student progress.
The built-in groups tools available in Blackboard make it possible for students to engage easily in online discussion, share files, chat, and email one another.
Communication Functions of Blackboard The communication functionality offered by Blackboard is more extensive than that of RefShare for the Programme’s purposes: Lecturers may post announcements for students to read.
These can be found under the announcement tab, or can be made to pop up when a student accesses Blackboard.
The chat function allows those students who are online to chat in real time with other students in their class section.
The discussions feature allows students and lecturing staff to create a discussion thread and reply to ones already created.
Blackboard mail allows students and teachers to send mail to one another.
This feature supports mass emailing to students on a course.
Blackboard has two separate messaging systems: an internal messaging system called "Messages", and an external messaging system called "Email".
The email and messages functions in Blackboard are separate.
Content Functions of Blackboard Likewise, as far as lecturers are concerned, there is a variety of ways of adding course content: Course content feature allows lecturers to post articles, assignments, videos etc.
Lecturers can use the calendar function to post due dates for assignments and tests.
The learning modules feature is often used for strictly online classes.
It allows lecturers to post different lessons for students to access.
The assessments tab allows lecturers to post quizzes and exams and allows students to access them anywhere where there is an Internet connection.
The assignments feature allows for assignments to be posted and for students to be able to submit assignments or reports online.
Lecturers may post grades on Blackboard via the Grade Book for students to view individually.
Videos and other media may be posted on the Media Library.
This function can be used by the librarian to add value by adding recommended sources to the prescribed information sources.
The Role of the Information Specialist Robertson, in her paper on services for post-graduate students at IFLA said “For too long, librarians have designed services and programs on their understanding of what is needed rather than working with academics and students in determining their information and skill needs” [14].
At the Jotello F Soga Library of the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria, the past years have seen a change in the role of the information specialist.
Electronic resources and the e-environment changed the way we render our services.
We became collaborators, working together with faculty members to enhance our services to all our students, lecturers and researchers [2].
The different departments of the Faculty are served by three information specialists (each supporting specific departments) to assist students and staff with information literacy training, and specialised information searches.
These information specialists are also responsible for the acquisition of relevant information resources (journals, books, reference sources, audiovisual sources, and e-resources) for the Library.
The information specialists also undertake to add value, to promote information services to support research in each discipline and to support education innovation and research excellence.
This includes the development of Web products geared to the needs of its students, researchers and lecturers.
According to Rapple [15] ‘not only will librarians help faculty and students do research, they will also help faculty develop new pedagogical methods for the electronic age.
Many will become much more active in curriculum design, in devising and evaluating assignments, in team teaching, and in teaching for-credit courses.
They will become true partners and fellow educators with faculty’.
The community of practice for the Phytomedicine Programme is a very good example of a project where the embedded librarian becomes a partner in the curriculum.
The Need for Communication and Interaction The community of practice of the Phytomedicine Programme needed better communication and interaction between the diverse, often widespread collaborators.
Lecturers of the Programme needed better control over the progress of the students’ research.
Feedback to the post-graduate students and general management within the Programme can be improved  by better interaction.
We hope that the sharing of knowledge, tacit knowledge, skills and techniques, will be an enticement to fuel the post-graduate students’ enthusiasm for their research.
It should also lead to better management of the different aspects of research within the Programme.
Methodology In January 2012 a new clickUP (Blackboard) module was requested and created for the Phytomedicine Programme.
A discussion forum was created.
Lecturers, post graduate students and the information specialist were enrolled as members of the group to ensure communication among everybody involved in the community of practice.
Students are required to post a regular summary of their own progress on the discussion board.
Group progress can now be monitored, lecturers can also check in on group-discussion boards to review the discussion contributions which allows them to ‘feel the pulse’ of the level and frequency of postings.
Group members can be emailed to check in and ensure that progress with work is being made.
Group work as well as individual contributions can also be assessed and feedback posted on the discussion board.
A letter from the head of the Department, Prof Eloff, explaining the purpose, goal and potential of the project was posted on clickUP.
A document was submitted to clickUP describing each shared folder on RefShare.
A link to RefWorks and to each folder was created providing direct access to the Phytomedicine Programme’s information sources on RefShare.
Post-graduate students have a meeting once a week with staff and students of the Phytomedicine Programme.
During one of these sessions the Information Specialist was also invited to brief students on the aims and benefits of the project.
Students were given the opportunity to ask questions.
A number of new post-graduate students enrolled this year in the Phytomedicine Programme.
They will get involved in the community of practice from the very beginning of their studies.
It will provide the information specialist with the valuable opportunity to measure the functionality and potential of the combined features of RefShare and Blackboard.
This has not been possible until now since most of the students were already at such an advanced stage of their studies by the time the project was under way.
Their studies progressed to a stage where most of the benefits of the project could no longer hold any great interest for them.
This project is an ongoing process and results will only be clear at the end of the current students’ study programme, 2012-2014.
Research Findings The lecturers involved in the clickUP (Blackboard) project were very keen to develop this new module.
They had previous experience using Blackboard with undergraduate students.
Using clickUP for post-graduate students and as a communication platform for our community of practice, provides new challenges.
A senior lecturer and deputy leader of the Phytomedicine Programme has the following to say about the new module:            The implementation of the Blackboard system will allow students to communicate more effectively with each other and with their supervisors on various aspects relating to their research projects.
Notices can be posted on the system to be accessible to all members of the group.
We have regular lectures and presentations of progress reports, which can be uploaded onto Blackboard.
Many MSc and PhD students have graduated from our group, and posting links to their online thesis submissions would be very useful.
Additionally, students and staff will have access to important review articles, project protocols and written progress reports.
Procedures for commonly used techniques as well as rules and regulations can be made available to all students.
Discussion forums are possible, and this will be of great help especially to those students who conduct their research part-time.
It will also be possible to have social aspects covered by a separate forum to encourage greater interaction among students.
The synchronous chat option may also prove useful to those students away from campus who have questions, and the ability to archive these discussions will allow students at a later stage to access the information shared.
The possibility of creating particular interest groups for students involved in related research projects could be investigated when using Blackboard.
Having smaller focus groups could provide the chance for each student to be able to contribute more meaningfully to the discussions that are more focused and not as general.
It is anticipated that using Blackboard, interaction between students and staff members will be enhanced.
Conducting practical research will be facilitated through the availability of aids such as standard operating procedures and reference texts.
Blackboard is an environment which offers our students the ability to communicate ideas and share experience with fellow post-graduate students through chat and discussion forums.
Vibrant electronic communications can dissolve the feeling of isolation and provide members with more opportunities to meet their fellow colleagues for work and play.
A variety of information on courses and seminars, conferences, research days, tips, useful links and activities can be posted for our students to inform and enhance their post-graduate experience.
We would like to encourage students to use the clickUP (Blackboard) site not just to download material, but to develop their own post-graduate community.
A student remarks, 'Blackboard  is great because it gives you flexibility and that suited me perfectly.
It also gave me good guidance for what to read, through the modules and reading lists.'
Conclusion Improved collaboration and communication between the Phytomedicine Programme’s staff, post-graduate students and the information specialist of the Jotello F Soga Library has been discussed.
It is clear that the information specialist and the library play an important role in enhancing research output of the Phytomedicine Programme.
The combination of RefWorks (RefShare) and Blackboard promises to be a valuable tool to enhance this collaboration.
Easy retrieval of information, group interaction, information sharing and collaboration as well as the digital preservation of intellectual products of the Phytomedicine Programme are assured through the use of by RefShare.
Although implementing clickUP (Blackboard) to the community of practice of the Phytomedicine Programme is still a brand new development, the focus is on positive results in order to facilitate communication and interaction towards increased innovation and research excellence.
References University of Pretoria.
Department of Paraclinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Science.
Phytomedicine Programme http://web.up.ac.za/default.asp?ipkCategoryID=3593&subid=3593&ipklookid=13&parentid Tertia Coetsee.
"RefShare: A Community of Practice to Enhance Research Collaboration".
January 2011, Ariadne Issue 66 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/coetsee/ Collaboration  2010 Merriam-Webster  http://0-www.merriam-webster.com.innopac.up.ac.za/ CSA: RefWorks http://www.csa.com/e_products/refworks.php J Lave, & E Wenger  Situated learning :  legitimate peripheral participation.
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2005, The Information Society,  109–118.
http://www.mendeley.com/research/the-art-of-knowing-social-and-tacit-dimensions-of-knowledge-and-the-limits-of-the-community-of-practice/ S Corrall, Knowledge management: are we in the knowledge management business?
December 1998, Ariadne, Issue 18 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue18/knowledge-mgt/ M Wasko, & S Faraj, It is what one does : why people participate and help others in electronic communities of practice.
2000, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 9 (2-3): 155–173.
T H Davenport, & L Prusak, Working knowledge.
How organizations manage what they know, 2000, 2nd ed.
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J C  Thomas, W A  Kellogg, & T Erickson, 2001.
The knowledge management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management.
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K Dalkir,  Knowledge management in theory and practice.
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Department of Library Services Veterinary Science Library http://www.library.up.ac.za/vet/phytomedicine/ Blackboard http://www.blackboard.com/ S Robertson, Designing and delivering information services to postgraduate students: Experiences of one librarian at the University of Melbourne.
2003,     World Library and Information Congress: 69th IFLA General Conference and Council 1-9 August 2003, Berlin  http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers/105e-Robertson.pdf B A, Rapple, The librarian as teacher in the networked environment.
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Author Details Tertia Coetsee Information Specialist Jotello F. Soga Library, Faculty of Veterinary Science University of Pretoria Email: tertia.coetsee@up.ac.za Web site: http://www.library.up.ac.za/vet/tertia.htm Tertia Coetsee is a qualified librarian/ information specialist , and a fulltime employee of the University of Pretoria, Jotello F. Soga Library, Faculty of Veterinary Science with 25 years of experience in academic libraries.
She is the Information Specialist for : Veterinary Tropical Diseases, Paraclinical Studies: Pharmacology & Toxicology, the Pharmacovigilance Lab, the Phytomedicine Programme, Veterinary Pathology, Veterinary Public Health,  the Biomedical Research Centre.
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Data Citation and Publication by NERC’s Environmental Data Centres Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Data Citation and Publication by NERC’s Environmental Data Centres Buzz data rdf framework html xml infrastructure archives metadata doi identifier vocabularies schema repositories cataloguing ascii uri curation dspace guid e-science cd-rom interoperability url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sarah Callaghan, Roy Lowry, David Walton and members of the Natural Environment Research Council Science Information Strategy Data Citation and Publication Project team describe their work in NERC’s Environmental Data Centres.
Data are the foundation upon which scientific progress rests.
Historically speaking, data were a scarce resource, but one which was (relatively) easy to publish in hard copy, as tables or graphs in journal papers.
With modern scientific methods, and the increased ease in collecting and analysing vast quantities of data, there arises a corresponding difficulty in publishing this data in a form that can be considered part of the scientific record.
It is easy enough to ‘publish’ the data to a Web site, but as anyone who has followed a broken link knows, there is no guarantee that the data will still be in place, or will not have changed, since it was first put online.
A crucial part of science is the notion of reproducibility: if a dataset is used to draw important conclusions, and then the dataset changes, those conclusions can no longer be re-validated by someone else.
Why Cite and Publish Data?
Data curation is a difficult and time-consuming job, and most scientific data producers have neither the time, funding, nor inclination to do it.
It makes sense to take advantage of economies of scale to support the expertise required for data curation, and for this reason the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funds six data centres (see Table 1 below) which among them have responsibility for the long-term management of NERC's environmental data holdings.
Researchers receiving funding from NERC, both in research centres and in HEIs, are expected to liaise with the appropriate data centre to determine how and what portions of their data should be archived and curated for the long term.
Even when most of the effort of data curation is carried out by the data centres, there is still a significant amount of work that must be done by the researchers before the datasets can be archived properly.
For example, the data must be documented in such a way that future users can understand what is measured in the datasets and have the supporting information about things like instrument calibration and location, times of measurements etc.
Data submitted to a file-based archive should be in file formats that are standard for the community and non-proprietary.
NERC and their environmental data centres want to ensure that the archived datasets are first-class scientific objects, and that the researchers responsible for creating them receive appropriate recognition for their efforts.
NERC have set up the Science Information Strategy (SIS) to provide the framework for NERC to work more closely and effectively with its scientific communities in delivering data and information management services.
Data Centre Area of Interest British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) Atmospheric science National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) Earth sciences NERC Earth Observation Data Centre (NEODC) Earth observation British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) Marine Science Polar Data Centre (PDC) Polar Science Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) Terrestrial and freshwater science,  Hydrology and Bioinformatics Table 1: List of the NERC Environmental Data Centres and their scientific areas of interest The NERC SIS Data Citation and Publication Project aims to create a way of promoting access to data, while simultaneously providing the data creators with full academic credit for their efforts.
We are therefore developing a mechanism for the formal citation of datasets held in the NERC data centres, and are working with academic journal publishers to develop a method for the peer review and formal publication of datasets.
Unsurprisingly, this process is still ongoing.
This article documents the path we took and the decisions we made in order to implement a method of data citation.
By no means is it promoted as the optimum path, but instead is presented in order to allow others to see the potholes we encountered along the way.
Previous Projects The NERC Data Citation and Publication Project began in April 2010, but before that members of the project team were involved in several initiatives looking at data citation and publication.
CLADDIER Citation, Location, And Deposition In Discipline & Institutional Repositories (CLADDIER) was funded by JISC under the Call for Projects in Digital Repositories (March 2005).
Its aim: ‘The result will be a step on the road to a situation where active environmental scientists will to be able to move seamlessly from information discovery (location), through acquisition to deposition of new material, with all the digital objects correctly identified and cited.’ The project staff did a lot of thinking about the roles, terminology, processes, etc, involved in data publication, and produced a method for writing the citation of a dataset, equivalent to how one would cite a journal paper.
Use of this suggested citation structure was implemented in the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) where dataset catalogue pages gave a recommended citation.
For example: Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), Chilbolton Facility for Atmospheric and Radio Research, [Wrench, C.L.].
Chilbolton Facility for Atmospheric and Radio Research (CFARR) data, [Internet].
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre, 2003-,Date of citation.
Available from http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__dataent_chobs.
From what we can tell from Internet searches such as Google Scholar, this form of citation does not appear to have been adopted to any great extent by the scientific community.
Lawrence et al, 2011 [1] provide a summary about the work done on data citation and publication in the CLADDIER Project.
OJIMS The Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) Project was a follow-on project from CLADDIER and was also funded by JISC and NERC.
It investigated formal journal publication of data and produced a demonstration data journal, which used overlay mechanics to create data description documents describing a dataset.
Much like CLADDIER, it did not examine the mechanics of linking (using URIs) in any depth, instead focusing on the mechanics of the overlay documents.
OJIMS also constructed and evaluated business models for potential overlay journals, and surveyed the user community in the meteorological sciences to determine their opinions of data publication and data repositories.
Further information can be found in Ariadne [2][3].
SCOR/IODE/MBLWHOI Library Data Publication Working Group This is a working group initially constituted in 2008 by the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), an international non-governmental organisation promoting international scientific collaboration, and International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE), an inter-governmental programme to promote sharing of oceanographic data.
Parallel activities in the Woods Hole Library were identified which resulted in their joining the group in 2009.
The group is currently chaired by the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) (Roy Lowry) but will be jointly chaired by SCOR (Ed Urban) and MBLWHOI Library (Lisa Raymond) from 2012.
The group was set up primarily to engage the IODE national data centres in data publication, thereby providing parallel infrastructure to the German Pangaea data centre.
There have been four meetings to date plus a related meeting of the parallel activity at Woods Hole: Ostend, June 2008 [4] Ostend, March 2009 [5] Jewett Foundation Woods Hole Data Repository Project Meeting, WHOI, April 2009 Paris, April 2010 [6] Liverpool, November 2011 [7] Data Publication Issues for Data Centres The result of this work has been the recognition of a number of data publication issues which data centres will need to address: Data centres regard datasets as dynamic concepts, whereas publishers regard a dataset as a static concept.
Whilst it might be possible to cite a dynamic entity, this has little value in the scientific context where the citation is a proxy for an instance of content.
IODE data centres conform to a model where the data are manipulated and extended (eg metadata creation) to enhance their value with particular reference to increasing the fitness of the data for future recycling.
This is a continual process largely based on changes to resources that are shared across the centre’s entire data system.
At any moment in time, dynamic datasets are assembled and served as the ‘best currently available’ version of the data.
This sits uncomfortably with a publication model based on versioning where all versions of a particular dataset are available on request.
In Paris, a decision was taken to contact IODE data centres directly to get them involved in data publication.
This resulted in an enthusiastic response.
Everybody wants to be involved in data publication.
The trouble is that nobody seems to know where to start.
In an attempt to break this impasse, BODC engaged in ‘trail-blazing’ pilot project work that was reported to the CODATA conference at the end of October 2010 and at two IODE meetings in Liege in March 2011.
The work has also become the focus of BODC involvement in the NERC SIS Data Citation and Publication Project.
BODC Pilot Projects At BODC,  Roy Lowry, Gwen Moncoiffe and Adam Leadbetter have been looking at how to map activities in the data centre to the data publishing paradigm.
The approach has been to identify data that could be tagged by permanent identifiers such as DOIs and subsequently made available as static digital objects.
This has led to the concept of the BODC Published Data Library, which began development in the latter half of 2011.
The Library comprises a catalogue of snapshot copies of datasets from one of two sources.
The first is exports of specified collections of related data that have been ingested into the BODC system.
This reproduces BODC’s data publication activities in the 1990s which created project datasets on CD-ROM and consequently has been dubbed ‘21st Century CD-ROMs’.
The data from the Marine and Freshwater Microbial Biodiversity (M&FMB) Project together with a number of specific cruise datasets have been identified for the initial trials of the Library.
The second data source is data that have not been ingested by BODC, but are destined to be ingested in the future.
Providing these data satisfy the basic criteria for publication, and are supplied to technical standards (use of long-lived formats and adequate labelling of the data streams) specified by BODC with accompanying metadata deemed satisfactory by BODC they will then be published immediately and ingested later.
This provides a route for scientists requiring citations sooner rather than later.
The Published Data Library publication procedure is as follows: Obtain a DOI through the NERC arrangement with the British Library Prepare a catalogue entry and landing page in the PDL area on the BODC Web site Store a copy in a suitable repository that guarantees that the dataset will be available and unchanged for the foreseeable future.
In the short term, the BODC Data Vault will be used, but the project will also trial the IODE Published Ocean Data DSpace repository.
Post a NERC metadata (ISO19115 profile encoded according to ISO19139 schema) record that covers the dataset (but may also cover other related datasets) Extract a Dublin Core record from this NERC metadata record.
Citation of Datasets At its most basic level (the bottom layer in Figure 1), the main job of a data centre is to ‘serve’ data to its user community, ie take in data supplied by scientists and make them available to other users.
Datasets may not be clearly defined, and will be served according to the most recent data in the archive.
Previous versions of datasets may not be kept, and no guarantees are made about the completeness or stability of the dataset.
This is business as usual for the data centres.
The top level of Figure 1 shows what the project is aiming for, ie a formalised method of peer reviewing and peer approving datasets of the sort that is traditionally associated with scientific journal publication.
This provides the dataset with a ‘stamp of approval’.
It also provides data producers with academic credit, encouraging them to ensure their data are of good (scientific) quality (which is checked via the process of peer review [8]).
Moreover, their data are stored in a trusted [9] data repository.
Note that we draw a clear distinction between publishing or serving data, ie making data available for consumption (for example on the Web), and Publishing (note the capital ‘P’), which is publishing after some formal process which adds value for the consumer: for example, a PloS ONE type review; or an EGU journal type public review; or a more traditional peer review which provides commitment to persistence of the dataset being Published.
In order to bridge the gap between formal Publication of data and simple serving of data, a method of citing datasets is required.
This citation provides a bridge between data and other publications, and is a useful object in its own right, as well as providing an essential step on the road to data Publication.
At this time, the NERC Data Citation and Publication Project is primarily concentrating on formalising a method of citing the datasets held in the NERC data centre archives.
Figure 1: Serving, citing and publishing data Citation Mechanism As mentioned in the previous section describing the work done by the CLADDIER project, the BADC has provided a recommended citation for each of its datasets, which includes a URL link to the dataset catalogue page.
These citations are not being used; we suspect in part because URLs are not trusted as a persistent link.
For this reason, we took the decision to use digital object identifiers (DOIs) to link to and cite our datasets because: They are actionable, interoperable, persistent links for (digital) objects.
Scientists are already accustomed to citing papers using DOIs, and so are familiar with and trust them.
Pangaea [10] assign DOIs, and Earth System Science Data (ESSD) [11] use DOIs to link to the datasets they publish.
The British Library and DataCite gave us an allocation of 500 DOIs to assign to datasets as we saw fit.
The British Library (acting on behalf of DataCite) set NERC up with a DOI minting account which covers all the datasets assigned DOIs in all NERC data centres.
DOIs all follow the same format; a prefix (in NERC’s case 10.5285) followed by a unique string of NERC’s choice.
The project team decided to use GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers) as the unique string.
The value of a GUID is represented as a 32-character hexadecimal string, such as {21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}, and is usually stored as a 128-bit integer.
The total number of unique keys is 2128 or 3.4×1038 — roughly 2 trillion per cubic millimetre of the entire volume of the Earth.
This number is so large that the probability of the same number being generated twice is extremely small.
The disadvantage is that GUIDs do not look attractive, and there is no NERC branding in the string.
The advantage is that the opaqueness makes them easily transferable between data centres (if needed), and researchers will not be tempted to type them in (risking typographical errors) but instead will copy and paste them.
What Makes a Dataset Citable?
Before assigning a DOI to a dataset, certain criteria must be met, namely that the cited dataset has to be: Stable: not subject to modificaton.
Complete: not subject to updates.
Permanent: by assigning a DOI, data centres are committing themselves to making the dataset available for the foreseeable future.
Of good (technical) quality: by assigning a DOI, data centres are giving it a ‘stamp of approval’, stating it is complete with all metadata made available.
Technical Quality versus Scientific Quality of Datasets When data centres cite (ie assign a DOI to) a dataset, they are confirming that, in our opinion, the dataset meets a level of technical quality (metadata and format) and that they will make it available and keep it frozen for the foreseeable future.
The scientific quality of a dataset has to be evaluated through peer review by scientists with domain knowledge.
This peer-review process has already been set up by academic publishers, so it makes sense to collaborate with them in peer-review publishing of data (see later in this article).
Knowing that a dataset meets a given level of technical quality will make the scientific review process easier for the reviewers, as this will have confirmed that: the dataset is in the right format; that files can be opened; that variables are meaningfully named, etc.
The scientific reviewer can then focus on reviewing the dataset in terms of whether the data are scientifically useful and meaningful.
The objective of data management within a data centre is to ensure that data may be reused with confidence decades after their collection without the need for any kind of communication with the scientists who collected that data.
The following technical criteria, based on good practice criteria adopted across the NERC Environmental Data Centres, must be met for a dataset to have a DOI assigned to it by NERC.
Requirements Related to Datasets The format must be well-documented and conform to widely accepted standards, such as ASCII or NetCDF.
Preferably, data formats should conform to internationally agreed content standards, such as CF-compliant NetCDF or SeaDataNet ASCII spreadsheet format.
The format must be readable by tools that are freely available now and, ideally, are likely to remain freely available indefinitely.
Data files should be named in a clear and consistent manner throughout the dataset with filenames (rather than pathnames) that reflect the content and which uniquely identify the file.
Filename extensions should conform to appropriate extensions for the file type.
Filenames should be constructed from lower case letters, numbers, dashes and underscores and be no longer than 64 bytes.
Parameters in data files should either be labelled using an internationally recognised standard vocabulary specifically designed for labelling parameters, such as the BODC Parameter Usage Vocabulary or CF Standard Names, or by local labels that are accompanied by clear, unambiguous plain-text descriptions.
Units of measure must be included for all parameters and labelled following accepted standards such as UDUNITS or the SeaDataNet units vocabulary.
Data must be accompanied by the following XML metadata documents.
The first is a Dublin Core metadata record including the dc:title, dc:creator, dc:subject, dc:period, dc:description, dc:contributor, dc:date, dc:language and dc:coverage elements.
The second is a discovery metadata record conforming to a recognised standard such as: European Directory of Marine Environmental Data (EDMED) Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Directory Interchange Format (DIF) Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) ISO19139 discovery metadata profile Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) Data must be accompanied by sufficient usage metadata to enable their reliable reuse.
Some of this information (such as spatial-temporal co-ordinates, parameter labels and units of measure) may be embedded within the data files.
The remainder should be included as standard XML documents (e.g.
SensorML or ISO19156) or descriptive documents formatted in HTML or PDF.
NERC Data Centre Responsibilities When a dataset is assigned a DOI, the data centre confirms that: The dataset will be made available indefinitely.
Note that this does not mean the dataset has to be instantly accessible by requesters (it may have to be retrieved from long-term archiving on tape for example) but that it does have to hold the same data as when its DOI was first minted.
There will be bit-wise fixity of the dataset.
There will be no additions or deletions of files or records.
There will be no changes to the directory structure in the dataset ‘bundle’.
Upgrades to versions of data formats will result in new editions of datasets.
The data centre will provide a full catalogue page (the landing or 'splash page') which will appear when any user clicks on the DOI hyperlink.
Landing Pages DataCite’s key requirement for DOIs is that they must resolve to an Open Access landing page that describes the dataset.
It would be inappropriate to have the DOI resolve at the archive level ie, giving direct access to the files in the dataset because: Users would land with only the information about the dataset, that is, just a list of filenames which makes it difficult to be certain of the correct identity of the set.
If the archive structure is changed, it requires re-mapping of all the DOIs.
Users are used to seeing landing pages when selecting DOIs since it is common practice with online journals.
DOI landing pages will be the first experience many users will have of a data centre’s metadata catalogue and archive.
Landing pages should therefore be as user-friendly and easy to understand as possible, and should offer enough human-readable information for users who arrive via a DOI to: be confident that they are in the right place to find the dataset they want.
find the data files they want to download.
discover if there are any special requirements of licensing that apply before download.
discover any updates to the cited dataset located elsewhere.
find out any information about the dataset, either by reading an abstract or finding links to other documentation.
know who the author of the dataset is, and whom to credit.
know how to cite the dataset in other publications.
Landing pages may also provide machine-readable information about the dataset in other formats such as XML/RDF.
Data centres can change the layout, or add/remove information to/from the landing page at any time.
However, the user must always be able to get to the dataset from the landing page.
Certain parts of the metadata describing the dataset should not change, specifically the DOI-mandatory metadata (see next section), as they describe the dataset and represent it faithfully.
If there is a new version of the dataset, a new DOI is needed.
The original landing page can indicate that a newer version of the dataset exists (and provide a link to the new version), but the landing page should still point to the original version of the dataset.
Landing pages can have query-based links to other things, for example, papers which cite this dataset, etc.
Structure for Citation and DOI-specific Metadata The citation and DOI-specific metadata used by the NERC data centres follow the rules laid out in the DataCite metadata schema [12] (currently version 2.1).
The schema consists of five mandatory and 12 optional properties which may be used by computers or assembled to create a human-readable citation string.
DataCite recommends a particular citation format using the mandatory properties of the metadata scheme: Creator (PublicationYear): Title.
Publisher.
Identifier  DataCite also recommend the following form when information about Version and ResourceType is required: Creator (PublicationYear): Title.
Version.
Publisher.
ResourceType.
Identifier This DOI-specific metadata should be automatically generated from the metadata record for the dataset.
Versioning and Granularity of Datasets The fundamental principle held by the NERC data centres when assigning DOIs to datasets is that datasets are stored unchanged for an indefinite period.
Should changes to a dataset be required, then this will be implemented by publishing a new version of the dataset, which will involve the following: Assignment of a new version number (a simple integer sequence that does not support the concepts of major and minor upgrades) Assignment of a new DOI Creation of a landing page for the new version of the dataset that includes its full version history Modification of the landing page of the previous version of the dataset to provide a link to the new version Storage of the new dataset in addition to previous versions Caution needs to be exercised in assigning DOIs to updated versions of datasets as the overhead involved in storing multiple versions of the same dataset which differ only slightly (but have been assigned different DOIs) will rapidly become prohibitive.
It is not necessary (and in fact should be avoided) to assign DOIs to every measurement taken in a dataset.
Common sense should apply as to how ‘thinly sliced’ a dataset should be – we want to avoid the concept of ‘minimum publishable unit’ being applied to datasets!
DOIs should be assigned to datasets which are scientifically meaningful; hence the size of these datasets will vary, according to the scientific domain of the data.
Citation versus Referencing It is of course possible to cite smaller chunks of the dataset, while using the DOI attached to the complete dataset.
For example: Bloggs, Jane and Doe, John, Years 2001, 2005 and 2009 from “Our really important measurements of birds in our garden, 2000-2010” doi:10.12345/abcdefg.
It might be helpful to think of the book/chapter/verse analogy.
DOIs provide citation at the level of the book, but further information allows the user/reader to get to exactly the required verse.
If the dataset is properly frozen, then the reference to a part of it will be easy to find and extract.
The NERC data centres draw a distinction between: Citation – where there is a data centre commitment regarding fixity, stability, permanence etc.
of a dataset, which is demonstrated by DOI assignment.
and: Referencing – where there is no data centre commitment regarding fixity, stability, permanence etc.
of a dataset.
The dataset can still be referenced and found via URL – but the link might be broken and the data may have changed since the reference was written.
Citing Changing Datasets As mentioned earlier, it is possible to reference an unfrozen dataset, i.e.
one that is still being updated, through the use of a citation string with a URL.
There is no guarantee to the user of the citation that the dataset retrieved on one date will be the same as it was when the citation was written at some earlier point in time.
The NERC data centres recognise that there are many datasets which become scientifically significant before the dataset is completed and frozen.
For this reason, we have come up with the following guidelines for dynamic datasets.
For datasets which are long term and are updated solely by appending new data/files to previous records (e.g.
instruments which have been in place for years) and where it is anticipated they will be collecting data for the foreseeable future, it is possible to break the dataset into smaller parts and assign DOIs to those parts.
When the dataset is completed in the future, a single DOI can then be issued for the whole dataset.
For example, a long-term rain gauge time series spanning 10 years can have a DOI assigned to each year as the year is completed, and then can have a final DOI assigned to the entire time series once the instrument is moved to a new location or taken out of service.
For those datasets subject to both continual data updates as well as data additions, it would be appropriate to take a fixed snapshot of the dataset and store it elsewhere in the repository, and then assign the DOI to that particular snapshot.
The snapshot would then be the stable dataset to which the DOI refers.
The frequency of these snapshots would be determined by the hosting data centre, depending on such factors as the size of the dataset and its update frequency.
A balance would need to be struck between the costs associated with storing multiple snapshots of the same dataset, versus the convenience for the citer in being able to cite exactly the data used.
Next Steps: Data Publication The NERC Data Citation and Publication Project has primarily been focusing on data citation, as it is something where the mechanisms can be (relatively) easily set up in-house.
Dataset Publication (and associated scientific peer review) could also be done in the same way, though it is outside the core remit of the data centres, and therefore it makes far more sense to team up with academic publishers in order to take advantage of the systems they already have in place.
For this reason, we are in consultation with recognized academic publishers to pilot and promote data journals.
This work has developed to the extent that a new data journal, Geoscience Data Journal (GDJ) will be launched in 2012 in partnership between the Royal Meteorological Society and Wiley-Blackwell.
GDJ will join pre-existing data journals, including Earth System Science Data [13] and Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G3) [14].
Publication of datasets, with its associated need for scientific peer review, will bring up other challenges, mainly along the lines of how one would peer review a dataset in the first place.
The CLADDIER and OJIMS projects attempted to address this problem and their conclusions will provide an excellent starting point for implementing data peer review and Publication in the future.
Conclusion The NERC Data Citation and Publication Project has been running since April 2010.
At time of writing, 15 datasets in the NERC data centres have been issued with DOIs.
We can therefore cite our datasets, giving academic credit to those scientists who are cited – making it more likely they would give us good-quality data to archive, and thereby improving transparency and traceability of the scientific record.
Phase 2 of the project began in November 2011 and will last two years.
At the end of this phase, all the NERC data centres will have: At least one dataset with associated DOI Guidelines for the data centre on what is an appropriate dataset to cite Guidelines for data providers about data citation and the sort of datasets data centres will cite Our users are already expressing an interest in data citation; this is an idea whose time has come!
References Bryan Lawrence, Catherine Jones, Brian Matthews, Sam Pepler, Sarah Callaghan.
“Citation and Peer Review of Data: Moving Towards Formal Data Publication”.
International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol 6, No 2 (2011) http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/181 Sarah Callaghan, Sam Pepler, Fiona Hewer, Paul Hardaker, Alan Gadian.
"How to Publish Data Using Overlay Journals: The OJIMS Project".
October 2009, Ariadne Issue 61 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/callaghan-et-al/ Sarah Callaghan, Fiona Hewer, Sam Pepler, Paul Hardaker and Alan Gadian.
“Overlay Journals and Data Publishing in the Meteorological Sciences”.
July 2009, Ariadne Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/callaghan-et-al/ Details of Event SCOR/IODE Workshop on Data Publishing, 17 18 June 2008, Oostende, Belgium http://www.iode.org/index.php?option=com_oe&task=viewEventRecord&eventID=273 Details of Event Second SCOR/IODE Workshop on Data Publishing, 9 11 March 2009, Oostende, Belgium http://www.iode.org/index.php?option=com_oe&task=viewEventRecord&eventID=435 Details of Event SCOR/IODE/MBLWHOI Library Workshop on Data Publication, 2 April 2010, Paris, France http://www.iode.org/index.php?option=com_oe&task=viewEventRecord&eventID=625 Details of Document IOC Workshop Report No.
244, SCOR/IODE/MBLWHOI Library Workshop on Data Publications, 4th Session http://www.iode.org/index.php?option=com_oe&task=viewDocumentRecord&docID=8098 It should be noted that, as yet, there is not general agreement on how to peer-review a set, though discussions are being carried out between interested parties in an effort to establish a clear and internationally agreed approach to do this.
This is discussed later in this article.
It is not clear at this time how exactly a ‘trusted’ data repository would be defined.
Several initiatives such as the Data Seal of Approval and World Data System data centre accreditation are in their early stages and could provide guidance on this.
In the meantime, the reputation of the data centre in its field provides an indication of how trusted it is, and therefore how stable and secure data hosted by them is considered.
Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science http://pangaea.de/ Earth System Science Data: The Data Publishing Journal http://www.earth-system-science-data.net/ DataCite Metadata Schema Repository  http://schema.datacite.org Earth System Science Data http://earth-system-science-data.net/ Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems  http://www.agu.org/journals/gc/ Author Details Sarah Callaghan Senior Scientific Researcher and Project Manager British Atmospheric Data Centre Email: sarah.callaghan@stfc.ac.uk Web site: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk Sarah Callaghan is project manager for the NERC SIS Data Citation and Publication Project.
She has both created and managed datasets in the past and has a keen appreciation of the amount of effort required in both roles!
Roy Lowry Technical Director British Oceanographic Data Centre Email: rkl@bodc.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bodc.ac.uk Roy Lowry has an extensive background in the technical aspects of data management and has been involved in many national and international projects including the NERC DataGrid (part of the e-Science Programme) SeaDataNet, and Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI).
David Walton Emeritus Professor British Antarctic Survey Email: dwhw@bas.ac.uk Web site: http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/ Professor David Walton was Head of the Environment and Information Division of the British Antarctic Survey before retiring.
He is Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Antarctic Science and has contributed to, compiled and edited six books on research in Antarctica and elsewhere.
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Supporting eResearch: The Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Supporting eResearch: The Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative Buzz data software framework wiki database dissemination infrastructure archives video multimedia visualisation mysql shibboleth e-science e-research authentication ict research Citation BibTex RIS Ann Borda reports on the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI).
The Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) [1] was the first State-funded initiative of its kind in Australia.
The establishment of VeRSI follows on the heels of the former Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) [2] decision to commission the then Australian eResearch Coordinating Committee [3] to undertake a comprehensive review of eResearch and to recommend how Australia, cognisant of efforts elsewhere, such as the UK eScience Programme [4], could coordinate a national eResearch initiative.
One of the recommendations of the Committee was the foundation of an eResearch Centre consisting of a coordinating body and six state-based nodes in each State to facilitate the transfer of eResearch methodologies to the research community [5].
The government of the State of Victoria, through Multimedia Victoria [6], had been thinking along similar lines and in 2006 announced funding for VeRSI as part of its Life Science Statement.
VeRSI was set up in the same year as an AU$8m-funded eResearch programme running over 5 years (2006-2011).
Its primary aim is to accelerate and coordinate the uptake of eResearch in universities, government departments and research organisations within the State of Victoria and to inform, through exemplars, other programmes in Australia and abroad.
VeRSI was formed as a collaborative unincorporated joint venture and comprises the following Consortium members: The University of Melbourne [7], Monash University [8] and La Trobe University [9] and the Department of Primary Industries [10].
VeRSI is overseen by a Programme Coordinating Committee (VPCC) consisting of its members and a representative from MultiMedia Victoria.
The VPCC is chaired by an independent member.
Building Capabilities The VeRSI Programme works with selected research groups to develop demonstrator use cases illustrating the benefits of eResearch to researchers, primarily in the areas of life sciences and eco-sciences – with a recent growth in other disciplines, such as the humanities.
Among its projects, VeRSI has an established relationship with the Australian Synchrotron [11] – a national facility – to support remote networking and access to several beamlines.
VeRSI’s approach is to work in tandem with researchers to ensure that their eResearch needs are met, and that resulting applications are intuitive and reflect the language the researchers expect and use themselves.
A skills matrix method is used for resourcing software development projects and this has proven more suitable than the conventional ‘project-based’ approach.
Inherent in the conventional approach is the assumption that each project contains all the skills and resources necessary for the project.
For each VeRSI project, ‘skills’ are coordinated so that they are incorporated as necessary during the project lifecycle.
Furthermore VeRSI is supportive of the agile software development methodology and relies on an iterative cycle with clients ranging from initiation to planning, to testing and deployment.
The VeRSI mode of engagement has in part been informed by the ‘collaboratories’ or ‘living labs’ examples in the U.S. and Europe respectively [12] in which a group of skilled experts is brought together to solve research problems which prove insuperable for individuals alone.
The outcomes of the ENGAGE Programme in the UK, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the National eScience Centre (NeSC) activities and NSF Cyberinfrastructure have had significant bearing on the methodologies of approach as well [13].
In terms of the capability outputs from VeRSI, they have thus far consisted of knowledge and expertise, designs and technology solutions and advanced open source software.
All of these commodities have value that are directly intended to enhance the quality of research, bring timelier research outcomes, catalyse international collaborations, and provide opportunities to both Victorian and national industry.
Data-centric Research There is widespread acceptance that eResearch is primarily about data.
Aspects of data management go across every activity of VeRSI, and a key objective of the programme is to assist researchers in managing the already huge and rapidly increasing amounts of data they are generating.
As a critical component of an end-to-end data management environment, VeRSI has established a federated data storage solution (a 474 TB storage grid) comprising nodes located at The University of Melbourne, Monash University, and La Trobe University, and a 10 TB node at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) [14] to access high-performance computing resources.
The storage grid is supporting a number of storage protocols, including Storage Resource Broker (SRB) [15], and it will be linked to the national Australian Research Collaboration Service’s (ARCS) Data Fabric [16].
In time, this proto-service will be considered in terms of added ‘services’ when more user requirements are gathered and more can be drawn from their experience of using virtualised storage.
Researchers at the Australian Synchrotron are among the first users onto the system.
This solution is intended to provide VeRSI projects the opportunity for access to the data storage and defined services as a means of supporting their data management efforts.
Not least, it is intended to raise awareness among the Victorian research community and host institutions about the importance of research data management and support of best practice in this area.
VeRSI is also committed to work with the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) [17] initiative in the support of data management planning from the researcher level upwards to whole institutional policies.
In the VeRSI Access & Use Storage Policy it specifically requests permission to view a data management plan prior to providing access to the solution, and so to ensure compliance with institutional and funding requirements.
In the absence of a local data management plan, VeRSI will aid researchers in the development of a plan [18].
An example of a data-centric solution is the Ambulatory Motion Studies Project.
The Rehabilitation Sciences Research Centre at Austin Health [19], together with the University of Melbourne, has led an ambulatory gait research programme that is using Vicon [20] video-based motion analysis systems and GAITRite [21] sensor carpets to collect gait data for analysis.
When gait analysis data are correlated with other clinical data, they can aid in the detection of serious illnesses such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease.
They can be extremely valuable in the rehabilitation of trauma and stroke patients, aid in the development and fitting of prostheses and provide insight into the construction of people-friendly built environments.
The role of the VeRSI project is to develop a data management environment that enables gait motion data to become a shareable resource and support research into diagnostics and treatment regimes.
Presently, a Web2.0 interface to a MySQL database has provided a simplified means for creating and editing patient records in a format compatible with other medical databases.
There are further features to allow automation of data upload, searching, querying and profiling together with the ability to display clinical cross-sections graphically.
It also allows the researchers to share their data with external colleagues and incorporate other researcher’s datasets.
Figure 1: Gaby Bright, VeRSI eResearch Communications Manager, testing the Gaitrite sensor carpet Collaborative Technologies Collaborative Technologies A key area of work for VeRSI is applying ICT to support and enrich research collaborations.
Two particular factors are critical to the deployment of collaborative technologies, namely: Geographical distance; and Cost-effectiveness due to finite timescale and funding.
Similarly, in environments where there are distributed systems or heterogeneous partnerships (e.g.
university and government departments), the deployment of a Virtual Organisation (VO) is one form of collaborative technology that provides a common platform for access and sharing.
In the VeRSI case, VOs are based upon the notion of a Collaborative Work Environment (CWE) that provides ‘the ability to collaborate over time and space, within and between organizations or communities […] to achieve flexibility by making best use of the knowledge and competences available’ [22].
Within this environment, researchers need to control and monitor access to resources, including information and data, research tools and services, often across different institutions where different security systems apply.
Such control requires an authentication and authorisation system that in turn relies on effective identity management.
The VeRSI Security & Access framework addresses these issues, using Shibboleth [23], and implementing Identity and Access Management in line with the Australian Access Federation (AAF) [24] recommendations.
The framework is a feature of the VeRSI VO in which VOs are accessed using Shibboleth single sign-on, and in which a single means of authentication to a range of resources is provided.
It is a prerequisite that the VO members must be registered at either an institutional Identity Provider (IdP) or authorised by VeRSI in line with the AAF policies to access the VO through a ‘VeRSI Open IdP’ [25].
An example of a VO-based project is the Futurescapes Climate Change Demonstrator.
In this initiative, VeRSI is working with the Department of Primary Industries, Monash, Melbourne and La Trobe Universities and the Department of Sustainable Environment (DSE) through the Victorian Climate Change Adaptation Project (VCCAP) [26] to provide a collaborative environment to inform agricultural, land use and built-environment policy-making into the next decades.
The vision for the project is to provide ‘a whole of Victoria platform providing public, policy & research access to knowledge to understand and plan for sustaining the ecology and economy of Victoria’.
VeRSI’s first objective was to provide the tools to support the large, online collaboration necessary for a project of this magnitude.
Subsequently, a collaborative VO was established that now supports 65 users from across the partner sites, 250 climate model files and 400 documents of importance to the collaboration.
Additionally, VeRSI is continuing to contribute to the development of visualisation tools for better communication of the research outcomes, as well as workflow and integration tools.
Figure 2: Screenshots from the Futurescapes Climate Change Demonstrator Remote Access: Australian Synchrotron The Australian Synchrotron, located in Melbourne, is one of only two synchrotrons in the southern hemisphere.
Because of the significant cost and complexity of synchrotrons they are, without exception, shared by a wide community of scientists.
The VeRSI Virtual BeamLine (VBL) [27] Project provides solutions for two specific challenges which arise when dealing with large, shared infrastructure such as the Australian Synchrotron: Researchers need to travel to the facility this is often expensive and inconvenient; and Researchers are confronted by the need to take huge amounts of observational data back to their laboratories.
One component of the VBL is an advanced, high-quality video conferencing system that enhances communication between scientists, no matter where they are, and their colleagues and beamline scientists at the synchrotron.
Using this tool, scientists can discuss problems with experts, monitor experiments from their laboratory, office or home.
A high-quality video image of the protein crystallography (PX1) beamline allows a remote scientist to observe an experiment from halfway across the world, and concurrently team leaders can mentor their staff and students as they collect data at the synchrotron site.
The video system is currently only fitted to the protein crystallography beamline but, thanks to the modular design, is being added to other beamlines.
The VBL video collaboration system is presently available to all users of the PX1 free of cost.
eResearch and the Next Generation Practitioners are acutely aware that the transition to eResearch may well be measured in years rather than months.
As a consequence, it is very important to engage with the next generation of researchers and even the generations beyond that.
The VeRSI Educational Virtual BeamLine (eVBL) [28] provides an example where science is reaching out into the education space, exciting young minds, through better awareness and understanding, to consider a research career.
The eVBL is a Web-accessible experiment designed and operated by VeRSI at the Australian Synchrotron through which teachers and students can control a real synchrotron experiment from their classroom.
Intense white light produced by the synchrotron is split into several rays in the optical diagnostic beamline; the eVBL uses one of these rays and a simple, motor-controlled experimental rig to perform Thomas Young’s classic double-slit diffraction experiment under a variety of experimental conditions (see Figure 3).
The experiment is routinely used by students undertaking the VCE Physics Unit 4, Study Area 2: Interaction of Light and Matter.
Figure 3: Images from the VeRSI Educational Virtual BeamLine (eVBL) Communications and Outreach Finally, a key objective of VeRSI is to promote an awareness of eResearch.
The VeRSI projects aim to provide real and relevant examples of how eResearch can deliver benefits to researchers the awareness programme is bringing these activities and benefits to the attention of the widest possible community.
The approach involves the VeRSI eNewsletters, weekly eCoffee [29] meetings at the eResearch Centres at Melbourne and Monash University, with plans for monthly eCoffees at La Trobe University.
This complements proactive engagement in workshops, seminars and conferences, for example, the international eResearch Australasia Conference [30], and presentations and demonstrations to discipline groups.
The recognition, for instance, of the growing contribution of researchers to humanities eResearch has led to an inaugural VeRSI eResearch award that was conferred on the PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) Project in 2008 [31].
Through these activities the eResearch community is growing in Victoria and VeRSI is becoming recognised as a connection point for researchers and technologists alike.
Many have pointed out that the challenges to eResearch communication are far from surmounted, however.
VeRSI is undertaking active investigation into the areas of eCollaboration and message dissemination as part of its programme.
Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, such as that run at the eResearch Australasia conference [32], explore opportunities for speaking directly to researchers or ICT administrators by engaging with them directly, and soliciting their views.
eCollaboration research is currently being carried out using biomedical research groups as case studies, tracking the role that collaboration tools play in supporting and enhancing international research.
As yet there remain gaps in collaboration or outreach in relation to eResearch skill development and training.
This is a continuing dialogue that has no Federal or co-ordinated solution in Australia.
However it is recognised by VeRSI and others in both the national and international community that the conversation is very necessary.
In this context it is interesting to note that an Australian group of eResearch practitioners and service providers has just established a mailing list to further the discussion, to share knowledge about existing training options and to look at developing more formal programmes [33].
Knowledge Reuse and Transfer Encouragement of open-source software, online publication and sharing of experimental data and derived results can test the ability of the eResearch community to measure real research outputs and subsequent knowledge transfer.
VeRSI is committed to addressing these barriers.
In this regard, it has a specific mandate to deploy its own solutions as modular, shareable and open.
Thus far, VeRSI has shared its project solutions with university and research organisations in the State of Victoria, and with national and international organisations, notably through the VBL activity.
VBL component solutions have been taken up by the Opal Bragg Institute [34] and the Canadian Light Source Synchrotron [35], among others.
This has proven a successful means of fostering a larger community around VeRSI activity.
A second advantage of the approach is that the models used to provide this proto-infrastructure serve as deployment guides for other organisations.
This relates to an essential aspect of VeRSI’s role to provide independent advice to the research community on technology, services, infrastructure, demonstrable use and applicability.
VeRSI is further committed to extend its collaborative activity; for instance, in terms of collaboration with service providers in the area of commodification of its solutions, hosting, and in delivering proto-services for deployment in the wider community through ARCS, for example.
More immediately, the VeRSI Consortium has three eResearch Centres among its partners, namely Monash, Melbourne and La Trobe Universities.
Each Centre has been established during the lifetime of VeRSI.
The newest entry is La Trobe and the most mature among the group is Monash.
There is particular scope to examine closer ties with these respective Centres in delivering specific programmes based on a range of identified researcher needs..
Similarly, VeRSI is seeking opportunities to work with other eResearch programmes, like the New South Wales State-funded initiative, Intersect [36], and the National eInfrastructure Architecture TaskForce (NEAT) [37], which is building and embedding e-Research methods and tools in research communities.
In these ways among others, VeRSI is steadily enriching its partnerships with a present goal to leverage and keep in alignment with State government, national and research-funded activities, and as part of its evolving strategy for a phase 3 (post-2011).
Such alignments are equally critical to scaling knowledge transfer and ‘value adds’.
International partnerships are also being sought given the common challenges, enablers, and solutions which eResearch universally shares.
Conclusion Importantly, the vision of a coordinated Victorian eResearch strategy is necessarily broader than the boundaries of VeRSI and its partners.
There is a growing, diverse and rich network that is driving eResearch in the State, for example the work by recently established University eResearch Centres, such as the Monash eResearch Centre [38], BioGrid [39], VeRNET [40], and the newly announced Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI).
The VLSCI, for instance, will be the first of its kind in Australia and is intended to be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and leading computational biology facilities [41].
Together these eResearch activities are assisting in elevating the status of Victoria’s universities and research organisations, in the delivery of faster and more exhaustive research results, and in significantly reinforcing Victoria’s position, and that of Australia, as a knowledge-based economy.
Ideally, this positioning will also encourage richer eResearch collaboration with and outcomes for the international community.
References Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) http://versi.edu.au/ DEST renamed The Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) http://www.dest.gov.au/ [which was subsequently replaced by two succeeding agencies in September 2013:  Department of Education http://www.education.gov.au/ and Department of Employment http://www.employment.gov.au/ Editor (9 July 2014)] The Platforms for Collaboration (http://www.pfc.org.au/) capability under NCRIS (http://ncris.innovation.gov.au/) builds on the work of the e-Research Coordinating Committee whose Final Report was accepted by the Australian Government in April 2007.
UK eScience Programme http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/ An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/publications_resources/profiles/e_research_strat_imp_framework.htm Multimedia Victoria (MMV) http://www.mmv.vic.gov.au/ The University of Melbourne http://www.unimelb.edu.au/ Monash University http://www.monash.edu.au/ La Trobe University eResearch Australasia 2008 http://www.eresearch.edu.au/ The Department of Primary Industries (DPI) http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/ Australian Synchrotron http://www.synchrotron.org.au/ Science of collaboratories http://www.scienceofcollaboratories.org/ and Open Living Labs http://www.openlivinglabs.eu/ ENGAGE http://www.engage.ac.uk/ ; NeSC http://www.nesc.acu.uk/ ; NSF Cyberinfrastructure http://www.nsf.gov/oci/ Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) http://www.vpac.org/ Storage Resource Broker (SRB) http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/index.php/Main_Page Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) http://www.arcs.org.au/ Australian National Data Service (ANDS) http://ands.org.au/about-ands.html See: Constructing a Research Project Data Management Plan http://www.library.uq.edu.au/escholarship/BW_dmp.pdf Rehabilitation Sciences Research Centre http://www.physioth.unimelb.edu.au/rsrc/ VICON http://www.vicon.com/ Gaitrite http://www.gaitrite.com/ Ballesteros, I. L., editor (2006).
Workshop Report on Collaborative Environments in the Future Enterprise.
European Commission, March.
Shibboleth: http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ Australian Access Federation (AAF) http://www.aaf.edu.au/ OpenIdP http://openid.net/ Victorian Climate Change Adaptation Program (VCCAP) http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/dpi/vro/vrosite.nsf/pages/climate_vccap Virtual BeamLine (VBL) http://versi.edu.au/activities/vbl.html educational Virtual Beam Line (eVBL) http://vbl.synchrotron.org.au/BeamLineAccess/eVBL/index.php VeRSI eCoffee http://versi.edu.au/versi/ecoffee.html eResearch Australasia Conference http://www.eresearch.edu.au/ PARADISEC Project http://paradisec.org.au/home.html eResearch BoF: Raising Awareness and Increasing the Uptake of eResearch http://www.eresearch.edu.au/bright2008 Education and Training in eResearch Wiki http://wiki.arcs.org.au/EREdu ANSTO Bragg Institute http://www.ansto.gov.au/research/bragg_institute Canadian Light Source http://www.lightsource.ca/ Intersect http://www.intersect.org.au/ The National eResearch Architecture Taskforce (NEAT) http://www.pfc.org.au/bin/view/Main/NeAT Monash eResearch Centre http://www.monash.edu.au/eresearch/ BioGrid http://www.biogrid.org.au/ VeRNET http://www.vernet.net.au/ Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI) http://www.vlsci.unimelb.edu.au/ Author Details Dr. Ann Borda Executive Director Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative Email: ann.borda@versi.edu.au Web site: http://www.versi.edu.au/ Return to top Article Title: “Supporting eResearch: The Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative” Author: Dr. Ann Borda Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/borda/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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NSF Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines NSF Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability Buzz software framework apache infrastructure repositories video linux provenance e-learning gpl licence e-science research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Walk reports on a two-day NSF-sponsored workshop held at Indiana University, on 26-27 March 2009.
I was recently invited to attend a 'Software Sustainability Workshop', organised by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and hosted by Indiana University at its University Place Conference Center in Indianapolis.
The invitation, which included a call for position papers, described the event as follows: The workshop will focus on identifying strategies to create sustainable models for use, support, maintenance, and long-term sustainability of cyberinfrastructure software that is developed and used by research communities working in areas related to the NSF mission.
The implications are expected to be interesting and useful to the science and engineering community.
Workshop goals include: Examination of current software evaluation and adoption models by labs and virtual organizations.
Examination of long-term sustainability models; and mechanisms for supporting sustainability via funding organizations, open source, and commercialization.
The event attracted around seventy people, predominantly from the United States, with a few international delegates such as myself and began informally with an evening reception which I unfortunately missed after a rather problematic journey from the UK.
Introduction: Brad Wheeler Brad Wheeler, Vice President for IT, Dean, & Professor, Indiana University suggested that the purpose of the workshop was to look for a "mutual understanding" of the problem outlined in the call for papers.
He urged delegates to be "outcome-oriented", recommending that the workshop aim towards "swiftly producing a paper": as he put it, "we know we have a problem, let's start from this point".
Brad also invited us to consider what we might be prepared to change, suggesting that we look at this aspect from the points of view of several stakeholders such as funders, developers, Principle Investigators and Virtual Organisations.
With, perhaps, a little wryness, Brad insisted that the subject of "tenure" was out of scope of this latter exercise.
As a visitor from outside the US I had a vague understanding of the US university system of tenure, but fellow (US) delegates kindly explained it in detail for me over lunch.
I sensed that they saw the wisdom of ruling this out of scope as a candidate for change in the proposed discussions.
Jennifer Schopf: Plenary Presentation The first plenary presentation of the day was delivered by Jennifer Schopf of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (NSF) and was called Sustainable Software as Cyberinfrastructure: Experience and Perspective from the NSF.
Jennifer gave a commendably clear introduction to the problem space, offering useful definition and scope.
She defined "sustainability" as the "ability to maintain a certain process or state".
In the narrower context of the workshop, she identified two aspects of sustainable software: that it can be reused in "broad contexts", and that it is supported with funding models which "encourage long-term support".
If software was to be deployed and supported as infrastructure, Jennifer argued, then the NSF needed to start treating it as it did other infrastructure such as hardware.
This would necessitate something of a "culture shift", requiring changes to how software was procured, budgeted for, quality-controlled, maintained, replaced, etc.
Jennifer also indicated some fundamental differences between software and and other infrastructure, pointing out that the software can be deployed for very long periods of time longer than the average hardware "refresh" cycle of approximately three years.
Furthermore, during its life-span a given software deployment will have a tendency to grow in size and complexity.
Jennifer went on to propose that if the NSF were to consider software as infrastructure, then those funded "principle investigators" (PIs) working in research which developed software as an output would also need to treat it as such.
Currently, it would seem that development teams in those research domains funded by the NSF do not generally treat the development of software in such terms.
Jennifer suggested a number of aspects which might need to be considered, such as reliability, proven quality, security and formal planning.
She suggested that development teams should have a degree of "professional engineering" expertise and experience.
She concluded this section of the presentation by underlining two points: improving software sustainability was going to require a culture change by both funders and research/development teams.
Moreover, it would not be achieved by simply spending more money.
In the next portion of her presentation Jennifer changed tack to consider features and characteristics of successful infrastructure software and to examine in a little more detail "something that worked".
Specifically, Jennifer singled out MyProxy [1] which provides, in her words, "an online credential repository for Grid portals and Globus Toolkit".
Pointing to the lasting success of this software, she identified a series of aspects which she considered to have been important, citing the projects' close alignment with user requirements and feedback, a commitment to stability at every stage (including backwards-compatibility), a simple, coherent and open design, and substantial long-term support from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
Drilling down into the issue of close alignment with users and their requirements, Jennifer identified that this is difficult and that having a member of the user community working closely with the developers is crucial.
On the subject of the avoidance of unnecessary complexity, she observed that if developers only manage to attract funding for adding features, then software will tend to become large and increasingly unsupportable.
Software which is difficult to understand or support does not thrive.
However, if funders should avoid merely funding new features, then they are still confronted with the difficult issues of deciding what actually to fund and, having so decided, devising an effective exit strategy which ensures that successful infrastructure software is sustained.
Introducing the Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) Programme [2] Jennifer outlined how the NSF planned to tackle the issues of education and provenance in encouraging the development of sustainable software through a "community approach" and the formation of a series of task forces.
A simple survey of US university-level software engineering courses revealed that some tended to be weak in certain areas fundamental to working in a serious production environment, such as team-based collaborative development, working with users, managing releases and issues, as well as operational issues, for example, performance and security.
Where other courses of this type were better in these respects, Jennifer nonetheless wondered how many computational scientists would actually take such a course.
On the subject of provenance, Jennifer made the point that the ability to re-execute computational science software code is crucial in providing the basic scientific requirement of reproducibility, implying that software in this area must be carefully curated.
However, she claimed that currently, "the majority of computational science applications cannot be run by another researcher, and results cannot be reproduced".
One particular item stood out for me: NASA provide Reuse Readiness Levels (RRLs) [3] which are used to indicate the "readiness" of software products for potential reuse.
These, and the framework from which they come, looked to be a very useful resource.
Brad Wheeler: Plenary Presentation Next up was Brad Wheeler, Vice President for IT, Dean, & Professor, Indiana University.
Brad has close involvement with community development initiatives in the Higher Education sector such as Sakai [4] and the Kuali Foundation [5].
He began by asserting that software is essential to cyberinfrastructure and that in this context the software product is a "troublesome artefact".
Through a series of revealing schematics, Brad displayed different views of cyberinfrastructure, outlining the components of such infrastructure from the points of view of both the scholarly community and the campus IT provider.
In both cases, a picture emerged of a stack of components, ranging from generic infrastructure through to domain-specific systems, and in each Brad asked where the boundary between generic and domain-specific should lie.
Or, to put it another way, at what level in the stack should components be considered part of shared cyberinfrastructure.
Pointing to a "software sustainability chasm", Brad indicated that software development in the context of the workshop is typically funded with research grants, allowing software products to get to the first couple of releases, before funding dries up and development slows to a halt.
As an advocate of the community-based open-source approach to software development and sustainability, Brad suggested that the open-source approach is gradually "moving up the stack" from its early successes with relatively low-level infrastructure components, through the development of operating systems, to server software.
He pointed to the development of applications as the next layer in this stack, and as a future objective for open source development.
The next part of Brad's talk was centred upon a model for sustainability for software development based on "Code, Coordination and Community".
Invoking Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a treatise on the contrast between the (then) typical mode of commercial development and the open-source approach, he hinted that there might be a middle way a compromise between these two radically different approaches.
Beginning with "code" and using the examples of Linux and Apache, Brad explained how it had been demonstrated that source code could be made open and be sustained, giving users the confidence that they would not be "locked into" a closed commercial product for which support could be removed at any point.
With open-source code he argued, a real issue lay in how the code evolved.
While the risk of a commercial provider deciding, unilaterally, to remove its support was not present in open-source developments, a new risk of the code "forking" in different directions was introduced.
How could one identify the "canonical" release of a code-base with various "branches" for example?
Brad suggested that these were questions of "coordination" and "community".
Moving on to "coordination", Brad again raised the examples of Linux and Apache, both of which have shown effective models of coordination.
One of the important aspects of these open coordination approaches was that intellectual property (IP) was "unbundled" from support.
In some cases, where the IP is owned by the community, coordination is sustained by partnering organisations, with options for additional commercial support for users.
Lastly, Brad pointed to the sustained and global communities which have been successfully cultivated by the Linux and Apache efforts.
Claiming that such communities are shaped by the license they use to distribute their software products, he suggested that the "bazaar" was shaped around the GPL licence, which restricts how derivative products can be licensed and used, and that the "cathedral" was shaped by commercial licensing, which protects commercial investment.
Somewhere between these two, Brad argued, was a space for what he called "open-open" licensing a model which limited restrictions on the licensing and use of derivatives.
Neatly returning to his earlier hint of a "middle way" between the "cathedral" and the "bazaar", Brad suggested that a hybrid model, which he termed "community source" was needed.
Quoting Wikipedia, he identified the distinguishing characteristic of community source as the fact that, "...many of the investments of developers' time, design, and project governance come from institutional contributions by colleges, universities, and some commercial firms rather than from individuals."[6].
In terms of the cathedral bazaar analogy, Brad proposed "The Pub…the Place Between the Cathedral and the Bazaar".
Brad concluded his presentation with "an industry view of the sustainability challenge", in which he iterated through five models of software development, identifying stakeholders and important issues in each.
They were laid out, one to a slide, in a very accessible manner I recommend them if you have a particular interest in this area.
Dennis Gannon Dennis Gannon, Cloud Computing Futures Centre, Microsoft Research, gave a brief talk about Microsoft's plans in this area.
Microsoft favours an established "framework" such as Eclipse and building upon it.
This is, in fact, what IBM have done with their Websphere products.
He pointed out that there is still confusion in the research community about what is meant by the term "infrastructure" in this context with a failure to distinguish between software as infrastructure and software as a research artefact.
Responding to a question about how Microsoft resources projects internally, he characterised a typical project as having 20% of its resources devoted to management, 40% towards development with the remaining 40% reserved for testing.
Neil Chue Hong Next up was Neil Chue Hong, Director, OMII-UK.
Neil gave an engaging presentation about the activities of OMII-UK, an open-source distributed organisation based in the Universities of Southampton, Manchester and Edinburgh in the UK.
Neil began by giving a quick overview of the investment in eScience in the UK.
Quoting John Taylor, Director General of Research Councils Office of Science and Technology, Neil pointed out that the development of infrastructure is a core component of the UK's funded eScience initiative.
Neil offered a useful breakdown of the sorts of activities which fit into a spectrum of levels of maturity of software development in research, ranging from funding and "heroic research", through "everyday research" and production use, to commercial exploitation.
Detailing some of the software development which OMII-UK has supported, Neil singled out products like Taverna a widely deployed workflow/job control system and PAG:AG "video-conferencing for anyone".
OMII-UK maintains an online support and help-desk service, and actively engages with the research community to solicit requirements and feedback using structured interviewing techniques.
Neil indicated that different parties view the issue of sustainability of software differently.
He suggested that computer science researchers do not want to have to deal with sustainability they want someone else to take over any software they produce where intellectual property arrangements allow this.
Yet for those using software, sustainability is a big issue such users are uncertain about the future of some of the systems they use, and therefore have reduced confidence in their ability to rely on such software.
From Neil's perspective, the issue is about helping software "survive the transition" through stages of development and uptake.
He identified these stages, in the context of software developed to support research, using the labels, "idea, prototype, research, supported, product".
To try to address some of these issues, OMII-UK has a Commissioned Software Programme (CSP) [7] which is designed to identify and help manage the development of appropriate software by engaging at a community level scaling up from one set of users and developers to many sets of each.
Neil described this as being "somewhere between venture capital and a foundation".
He outlined these criteria for judging progress in CSP-funded work; that the demand for the software is understood; that the number of potential users has been increased by the work done; that the use of the software has contributed to a measurable increase in the research outputs; that the community participation around the software has increased.
As an example of how the CSP works, Neil presented some timelines portraying the progress over four years of the GridSAM Project [8].
As projects such as GridSAM progress through the various stages of development, the CSP makes interventions at appropriate junctures.
Neil was able to overlay related timelines such as the history of publications arising from this work, and the progression of deployments and "value-added" developments.
Neil was careful to explain that "there isn't a single best model for sustainability".
Invoking Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, he pointed out that the "long tail" of software deployment requires investment to prevent decay over time.
Citing a workshop held at the UK eScience All Hands Meeting in 2008 [9], he described how the delegates identified a number of issues which needed to be addressed as part of the process of embedding e-Infrastructure into the research process.
The first of them was the recognition that there is "no single common e-Infrastructure".
Moving on to sustainability models, Neil made reference to what appears to be a comprehensive classification of open-source business models developed by the "451 Group" [10] before outlining a set of sustainability models for research software.
The latter ranged from the variously grant-funded, through institutional and "mixed enterprise", to the foundation and, incongruously, the "T-shirt" model.
Neil concluded his presentation by starting with the assertion that "increasing participation is the key to long-term sustainability".
The Engage Project [11] which aims to engage researchers with e-Infrastructure, has suggested that people will tend to "prioritise ease of use, support and continued development over a complete feature set".
In order to meet this priority, Neil suggested that a sustainable community and trust between the users and the infrastructure providers are the two things which need to be developed.
A sustainable community, Neil argued, demonstrates four key factors: cohesion and identity; tolerance of diversity; efficient use of resources; and adaptability to change.
Breakout Sessions and Wider Discussions I participated in a few breakout sessions, which mostly tried to unpick some of the broader issues raised in the presentations.
Overall however, I think the presentations contributed the real value of this workshop the discussions in those breakout sessions in which I participated became quite polarised, with one or two individuals with strongly held points of view dominating the discussion.
However, those sessions did also serve to corroborate some of the points made in the main presentations about the community, its requirements, and its views on infrastructure.
For example, there seemed to be a strongly held belief that the management and deployment of software as infrastructure could learn something from how hardware has been handled in this context.
My impression was that this community was rather more comfortable and experienced in managing hardware than software in this sense.
I also heard the dichotomy between science and engineering raised several times: most people present at the workshop were scientists, not engineers.
It might be fair to say that they think as scientists, but are becoming aware that they, or somebody at least, needs to apply some engineering expertise to the issue of developing software in a sustainable way.
One aspect of several discussions which threw this dichotomy into sharp relief was the recurring confusion between the notion of the sustainability of software as a research output to enable the reproducibility of scientific research, and the concept of the sustainability of software to provide stable infrastructure.
This important distinction was identified more than once, but tended to get lost in the discussions quite easily: I think this community needs to do work more to be clearer on this.
My final observation was that, despite the idea of community engagement being raised by all of the main speakers (and emphasised by two of them), this aspect did not really figure in the free-flowing discussions of the breakout sessions I attended.
Rather, those participants were more concerned with issues such as version control, quality assurance and certification of software products.
Conclusion Overall, I found this to be a fascinating workshop.
My role was a more passive one than I am used to as I am not from a science community, but I was able to contribute in the discussions around software development.
Many of the issues around sustainability are not new but I think that there are some interesting and particular issues in terms of infrastructure to support the sciences, as some of these disciplines seem to be heading into a future where a major part of research is based on computation.
I'm not entirely sure that the community-source approach, as particularly espoused by Brad Wheeler, is going to work for this community as well as it has worked in some other sectors such as eLearning.
However, Neil Chue Hong was able to point to examples of community engagement which seem to be heading successfully in this direction.
I learned a great deal from this workshop and would like to thank the organisers and some of the delegates (notably Jennifer Schopf, Neil Chue Hong, Elliot Metsger of Johns Hopkins University and MacKenzie Smith of MIT Libraries) who helped explain some aspects of practice in the US or in science research with which I was not familiar.
Some of the presentations are available in MS Powerpoint format [12].
References MyProxy Credentials Management Service http://grid.ncsa.uiuc.edu/myproxy/ Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure Programme, http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07503/nsf07503.htm NASA Reuse Readiness Levels http://esdswg.eosdis.nasa.gov/pdf/ESDSWG6RRLSlides.pdf Sakai http://sakaiproject.org/portal Kuali Foundation http://www.kuali.org/ Wikipedia entry on Community Source, 25 May 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_source#Community_Source_as_a_Type_of_Open_Source_Community Commissioned Software Programme http://www.omii.ac.uk/projects/funding.jsp GridSAM Project http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/GridSAM Report from a UK eScience All Hands Meeting Workshop, 2008 http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2009-01.pdf Open source business models http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2009/03/12/a-classification-of-open-source-business-strategies/ Engage Project http://www.engage.ac.uk/ NSF Cyberinfrastructure Software and Sustainability Workshop (March 26-27, 2009) http://cisoftwaresustainability.iu-pti.org/nsfworkshop/nsfCalendar/nsfCalendar.html Author Details Paul Walk Technical Manager UKOLN, University of Bath Email: p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "NSF Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability" Author: Paul Walk Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/nsf-2009-03-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Digital Preservation Roadshow 2009-10: The Incomplete Diaries of Optimistic Travellers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Digital Preservation Roadshow 2009-10: The Incomplete Diaries of Optimistic Travellers Buzz data archives metadata digitisation vocabularies repositories preservation curation podcast droid research Citation BibTex RIS William Kilbride and Malcolm Todd report on the Digital Preservation Roadshow an eleven month tour of the UK and Ireland designed to provide archivists and record managers with practical advice and support in managing digital resources.
A series of roadshows has been travelling up and down the country through 2009 and 2010 to spread the key message that making a start in digital preservation does not need to be either expensive or difficult.
This simple message has been delivered in eight different cities in some 80 separate presentations and to an audience of around 400 archivists and records managers.
The Roadshows are almost over: more formal evaluation will follow in due course.
In this brief report we look at the discussions which mattered to the audiences.
This anecdotal and idiosyncratic review is by definition the very opposite of cutting edge: but will be useful to those interested in knowing what needs to be known.
By identifying themes that matter to small and medium-sized archives we hold up a mirror to those involved in all aspects of data management and retrieval.
The Roadshow began out of a dialogue among The National Archives [1], the Digital Preservation Coalition [2] and the Society of Archivists [3], with sponsorship and funding from all three.
Audiences in Gloucester, York, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Manchester and Aberystwyth have heard a range of case studies, practical advice and news from all manner of speakers and institutions.
A final event for Cardiff is planned for February 2010.
Thanks are due to the National Archives of Scotland (NAS) [4], the National Archives of Ireland [5], CyMAL [6], PLANETS [7], the PRONOM and DROID teams [8] and also to the West Yorkshire Archive Service [9] for sharing time, money and staff, to all of the venue hosts and personal thanks are due to the many speakers who shared their time and experience.
They are too numerous and too generous for all to feature in this eccentric summary: omission should imply nothing more than the failed note taking of the authors and the limited scope of this article.
A complete listing and set of presentations are obtainable [10].
Some preliminary reconnaissance shows that many archivists know they have a problem managing digital data, but that many doubt they had the wherewithal to address it.
When asked to identify barriers to the ongoing management of digital records, local government archivists in England and Wales report ‘skills’ and ‘support’ as joint second behind ‘funding’ [11].
A maturation of digital preservation practice in large institutions and the focus on scientific data in recent research funding seems to have cut off many archivists from the digital preservation world.
We need to help them translate a growing body of knowledge into steps they can take appropriate to their collections, current level of experience and resources.
This will result in specific follow-on actions being defined by the organisers.
The series of Roadshows has coincided with the consultation and launch of new government policy on archives [12] which places a distinct emphasis on services rising to the challenge of digital material.
From The National Archives’ perspective, ensuring archives services have access to relevant advice and guidance is a key action.
Resources are tight across the sector and new activities will require both new partnerships and ways of working if they are to succeed.
Gloucester The Roadshow got going in Gloucester hosted by the Gloucestershire Archives [13].
Digital preservation has been dominated by some very large institutions: the Library of Congress (LoC) for example or the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS).
So what starts off as a daunting problem can seem all the more intimidating for small organisations – especially hard-pressed and poorly resourced local and community archives.
In Gloucester we learned that, although it helps to have the resources of a large organisation, there is a lot to be gained by a relatively small archive getting its sleeves rolled up.
This theme was repeated throughout the series, not least based on Alexandra Eveleigh’s experience at the West Yorkshire Archive Service [9].
It has recently negotiated its first substantial digital archive – from MLA Yorkshire.
From one perspective, this is a relatively simple story: local organisation is wound up and so local archives receive its business archive.
It is likely to be a routine exercise.
But it generates all the challenges in practice, resources and expertise that you might expect.
Specific lessons were shared such as file-naming and the time taken to transfer data.
But the key message was surely that managing and receiving real digital archives brings real experience and that the total of things to worry about is likely to be less than the total volume of literature on the topic.
You could also be forgiven for thinking that you need to be a large agency to get involved in the provision of tools and services for digital preservation.
The Roadshow gave Viv Cothey the opportunity to demonstrate a simple tool called the Gloucestershire Archive Ingest Packager (GAip).
This application has been written to construct an effective ingest package based on immediate migration to preservation formats and intrinsic metadata.
Its principal utility is the way it reduces the time – and thus cost – of ingest into an archive.
Ingest is often cited as a cost driver for preservation, so anything which simplifies this process is likely to be doubly welcome.
Presented alongside PRONOM, DROID and the PLANETS tools – all of which have received significant investment – it is hard not to be impressed with what Gloucestershire Archives have achieved.
With development support across the Severn in the form of the National Library of Wales and CyMAL, GAip seems set to go from strength to strength.
York The next stop for the Roadshow was on a hot summer’s day at the Borthwick Institute in York [14].
The Borthwick’s modern facilities within the University of York belie its origin: it predates the University by several years and, although it is now the official repository of the University’s archives, it is also the diocesan records office for Yorkshire as well as a place for legal deposit of public records.
This was an appropriate place to consider the relationships that exist between Higher Education and the archives sector and in particular how the tools and investment from the former might be adopted, adapted and deployed by the latter.
The Higher Education sector has had a significant impact on the development of digital preservation in the UK, especially through funding from JISC.
Neil Grindley gave a brief history of JISC’s involvement in this domain, signalling the importance of collaboration to HE institutions, and underlining the growing importance with which funders view ‘impact’, such as the adoption and reuse of tools and services by others.
Although the prospects for funding are not what they once were, a renewed emphasis on impact makes collaboration all the more important to funding bodies: and in this there is hope for archivists and records managers in diverse institutions participating in and deriving benefit from JISC’s investment.
Two working examples supported the argument and showed how these relationships might work in practice.
Chris Awre demonstrated recent developments at the University of Hull where an institutional repository – originally designed to capture and store research papers has been embedded within a much wider organisational system that includes examination papers and audio-visual collections as well as organisational documents.
So, based on this example, the prospect exists for any institution with a repository to consider and develop preservation services too.
If the implication of Chris Awre’s presentation was that Higher Education can provide services in partnership with other public sector agencies, Catherine Hardman’s presentation reminded us that integrated systems bring benefits back to Higher Education.
Access to unpublished material from fieldwork reports in archaeology has been an ongoing problem for researchers, exacerbated by the small size of the academic sector and the fragmentation of the discipline.
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) [15] has been slowly and very effectively addressing this problem for a few years now.
A broad coalition has allowed the ADS to develop the OASIS toolkit through which small and large agencies can share short fieldwork reports with each other and with researchers, confident in the knowledge that ADS’s preservation services will ensure continuing access.
There are now more than 4,500 reports in the OASIS ‘grey literature library’ [16].
It’s a model of what can be achieved by working together.
London By the time the Roadshow reached the Wellcome Trust [17] in London another trend had become obvious.
Digital preservation seemed daunting a decade ago but the digital preservation community has made great strides over that period.
Even a cursory glance at DPC annual reports shows how any number of agencies have moved from ‘worrying’ to ‘planning’ to ‘doing’ in the last decade.
The proliferation of projects and tools and services and the fragmentation of a burgeoning community have created two new challenges: our language has become opaque and the variety of options can seem baffling.
So how might digital preservation be integrated into other archival services?
The London audience comprised so much expertise that TNA [1] subsequently hosted an additional event in November 2009 in partnership with MLA London [18] to ensure public sector archivists in Greater London could benefit from some of the Roadshow experience.
Wellcome delegates had the benefit of two success stories from relatively straightforward but distinct institutions.
Adrian Brown took us from ‘parchment to podcast’, describing how the Parliamentary Archives [19] are developing their digital strategy.
Three basic ingredients were required before they could start to think about technology: an understanding of the surprisingly broad range of digital outputs which Parliament produces; a measured understanding of the risks they face; and a clear understanding of the function and policy of the archive itself.
In this way the daunting challenge can be tackled in bite-sized chunks and moreover it ensures that the archives, rather than the technology, are in the driving seat.
Dave Thompson of the Wellcome Library underlined this need for archives rather than technology to be the central driver.
The Wellcome Library [20] has extensive collections from the history of medicine: not just documents but objects, books and journals.
Increasing quantities of archival material only exist in digital form: so if they are not collected then the Wellcome Library will be seriously constrained in the future.
The argument for engaging with the digital domain is clear.
It is not additional to the work of the archive, it is essential to the long-term success of the service.
Wellcome has been active in the field for several years and is keen to share the lessons they have learned [21].
Perhaps the central message is that they wish they had started with digital material earlier but that they have learned a huge amount subsequently.
They started with a strong focus on producing a secure digital repository but now see this as part of a larger workflow and way of providing and supporting a set of services.
There is no substitute for experience.
Edinburgh Digital preservation can be gloomy reading.
Time and again we are warned of the digital dark ages, of the economic, legal and public fall-out from short-termism.
We talk of risk, of loss, of forgetfulness and wasteful recursive expenditure.
Two lights shone at the Edinburgh Roadshow: recognition of the extraordinary progress which Jane Brown and colleagues at the National Archives of Scotland [4] have made with their Digital Data Archive; and the subtle realisation that digital preservation is not about risk so much as opportunity.
We do not do digital preservation for the sake of the digits: we do it for people and we do it to sustain, transmit and expand opportunity.
Digital preservation supports a healthier, wealthier, safer and smarter future.
The thoughtful prophet of this transformative message was Gordon Reid of the Scottish Council on Archives [22].
He challenged us to think about the purpose of memory institutions, reminding us that the case for digital preservation is likely to represent a sub-set of those arguments already made.
Introspection does not impress; well-intentioned debate about standards, processes and procedures may be needed but is not persuasive; access is not an end in itself.
Only when we are configured around outcomes and opportunities can we hope to make the case for preservation, which means we need to keep people at the centre of our activities.
Take Glasgow Museums [23] as an example – one of the most socially engaged memory institutions in Scotland and accidental holders of a huge oral history collection.
Collections management in museums is mainly about objects and their records.
Oral history helps to interpret objects and is a popular way to ‘do’ local heritage.
But it is anomalous and it is hardly surprising that the sundry cassettes, videos, tapes and digital audio files quietly accumulating in Glasgow Museums have been neglected.
Step up Tracey Hawkins who made the obvious argument that this material is significant in its own right and that protecting an eclectic analogue collection through digitization creates the conditions where digital preservation becomes essential.
The hundreds of interviews seem deceptively mundane: couthie remembrances of Old Glasgow; holidays ‘doon the watter’; the privations of wartime evacuees; work and play; religion, politics, football; true, half-true and utterly bogus: stories told so often that they might as well be fact.
They could hardly be more circumstantial but because it is the narrative of a city delivered in the voice of its people, and curated by the officers of the people, the argument for preservation could hardly be more straightforward.
That it is good news for researchers and curators is a happy coincidence.
Dublin The Dublin Roadshow provoked the most detailed technical dialogue of the set.
The theme was set by our hosts in University College Dublin (UCD) [24] who presented a vision – and a reality – of an Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive [25].
There was nothing ‘virtual’ though about the hospitality extended by UCD and the National Archives of Ireland [5].
The aspiration to provide access to an extensive archive through digitisation is a familiar one for many archives and increasingly the workflows, equipment and expertise are becoming familiar too.
Conversation turned quickly to themes of format management and in particular compression.
Advice in digitisation – and digital preservation for that matter is generally to avoid compression, especially lossy compression, on the assumption that it may result in irretrievable loss of data; that overly aggressive compression amplifies the risks of bit rot; and compression may lock you into proprietary systems.
But managing and replicating massive volumes of data are not simple and in any case risk management ought to include consideration of ongoing costs.
Tim Gollins’s commonsense recommendation of ‘parsimonious practical preservation’ means we need to include costs and time within our preservation planning.
So perhaps it is time to reconsider compression – even lossy compression – within digitisation, if not preservation?
That is an argument beyond the scope of this report, but the concern that best practice inhibits good practice is one that many will recognise.
The Dublin Roadshow previewed a necessary debate: we will fail to make digital preservation mainstream if we make it unattainable.
Manchester The Manchester Roadshow was co-sponsored by the Records Management Society [26], which brought a subtle twist to proceedings.
The emergent theme of the day was collaboration – both internally and externally.
A thoughtful and thought-provoking presentation from Michael Day of UKOLN [27] emphasised the need for preservation to start earlier than has traditionally been the case.
This means there ought to be a close relationship between digital preservation functions of an organisation and records management.
Corporate email and Web presences provide examples of how these functions might be more thoroughly integrated, and what goes wrong when they are not.
Collaboration was also a theme of Kevin Bolton’s presentation about archives in Greater Manchester [28].
The area has eleven different public sector archives: one for each the boroughs of Bury, Bolton, Wigan, Salford, Trafford, Manchester, Stockport, Tameside, Oldham and Rochdale; plus an archive for Greater Manchester County.
Should each of these aspire to developing a trusted digital repository?
Which of these is most like NASA?
Collaboration – through the Greater Manchester Archives Group – helps these interlocking records offices develop new types of service.
So a survey and review of digital preservation needs in 2007 has lead to a joint digital archives policy and improved accessioning processes.
The model works so the future is likely to see closer co-operation between the existing partners and perhaps also a wider coalition.
Aberystwyth The Roadshow progressed to Aberystwyth on a sunny day in January 2010, sponsored this time by CyMAL [6] and hosted by the National Library of Wales [29].
Grim forecasts of snow blocking the mid-Wales mountain passes the previous day had been greatly exaggerated.
Ceredigion has something for everyone interested in digital preservation.
The extensive and impressive programmes of the National Library of Wales deserve more attention than they have received; the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales [30] offers technical complexity by virtue of the diversity of its collections; CyMAL, which has recently moved to new offices in Aberystwyth, offers policy and strategic leadership; not to mention the Information Studies Department at Aberystwyth University [31] and its online and offline programmes for librarians, records managers and archivists.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the smallest town on the Roadshow produced the largest audience.
Digital preservation events used to get lost in elaborate and unsatisfactory vocabulary competitions: fashionable terms were recursively created, defined and re-defined to the point that they lost the cleverness they were intended to convey.
So it was re-assuring to note that this obsession with obfuscation seems to have stopped – or at least does not translate into Welsh.
The subtle message from Aberystwyth was that we know that we will need access to data in the future and we have a number of tools and services that can help.
We can work out the costs; we can identify the gaps; we can minimise the risks; and we can do all of them together.
And then we can move on.
When the job is done, will anyone remember whether we called it continuity, or digital archiving, or data curation, or lifecycle management, or sustainability, or ..?
Cardiff: The End of the Road?
A final Roadshow is planned for Cardiff in February 2010 [10].
By that time it will be possible to distil and digest more completely the lessons of the previous nine months and 1,099.5 miles.
But there is no question that the Roadshows have been popular: all have been full to capacity and many have had waiting lists.
They have been deliberately practical and sought to be engaging: feedback suggests that participants have also found them encouraging and empowering.
Typically the speakers (at least these ones) have left each event with more than they brought.
Requests for additional Roadshows have been received but set aside until the current ones are completed.
Cardiff is the end of the road for now, but the success of the format and the needs of the community suggest that we may yet be taking to the road again soon.
Editor’s note: ‘Couthie’, ‘couthy’: loving, affable, cosy, comfortable.
Collins Scots Dictionary, 2003.
References The National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ Digital Preservation Coalition http://www.dpconline.org/ Society of Archivists http://www.archives.org.uk/ The National Archives of Scotland (NAS) http://www.nas.gov.uk/ The National Archives of Ireland http://www.nationalarchives.ie/ CyMAL: Museums Archives and Libraries Wales http://wales.gov.uk/topics/cultureandsport/museumsarchiveslibraries/cymal/?lang=en PLANETS (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) http://www.planets-project.eu/ The National Archives: PRONOM http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/Default.aspx West Yorkshire Archive Service http://www.archives.wyjs.org.uk/ Digital Preservation Roadshows 2009 2010 http://www.dpconline.org/training/roadshows-2009-2010.html Boyle, F, Eveleigh, A and Needham, H., 2008, Report on the Survey Regarding Digital Preservation in Local Authority Archive Services, Digital Preservation Coalition, York, p.4.
http://www.dpconline.org/docs/reports/digpressurvey08.pdf H.M.Government, 2009, “Archives for the 21st Century” http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/policy/aft21c/ Gloucestershire County Council Archives http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives Borthwick Institute, University of York http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/bihr/ The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ OASIS: Online AccesS to the Index of archaeological investigationS http://www.oasis.ac.uk/ The Wellcome Trust http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ London Museums Libraries and Archives http://www.mlalondon.org.uk/ The Parliamentary Archives http://www.parliament.uk/publications/archives.cfm The Wellcome Library http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ See for example: Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson, “Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library”, January 2007 Ariadne Issue 50 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/hilton-thompson/ Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson, “Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library”, October 2007, Ariadne Issue 53 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/hilton-thompson/ The Scottish Council on Archives http://www.scoarch.org.uk/ Glasgow Museums http://www.glasgowmuseums.com/ University College Dublin http://www.ucd.ie/ Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Project http://www.ucd.ie/ivrla/ Records Management Society http://www.rms-gb.org.uk/ UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ The Greater Manchester County Record Office http://www.gmcro.co.uk/ National Library of Wales http://www.llgc.org.uk/ Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) http://www.rcahmw.gov.uk/ Information Studies Department at Aberystwyth University http://www.dil.aber.ac.uk/en/home.asp Author Details William Kilbride Executive Director Digital Preservation Coalition Email: william@dpconline.org Web site: http://www.dpconline.org/ William is Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).
He joined the DPC from Glasgow Museums, where he initiated work on digital preservation and access to aspects of the city’s growing digital collections.
Previously he was Assistant Director of the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York and a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Glasgow.
Malcolm Todd Digital Archives Advice Manager Archive Sector Development The National Archives Email: malcolm.todd@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk Web site: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk Malcolm is charged with spreading the digital preservation message of the new government policy on archives, Archives for 21st Century.
He has been a digital records manager and archivist in government service for over a decade and at The National Archives since 2001.
Return to top Article Title: “The Digital Preservation Roadshow 2009-10: The Incomplete Diaries of Optimistic Travellers” Author: William Kilbride and Malcolm Todd Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/dp-rdshw-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Archives 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Archives 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?
Buzz data software wiki archives metadata digitisation blog preservation cataloguing ead provenance copac curation interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Joy Palmer discusses some of the opportunities and tensions emerging around Archives 2.0, crowd-sourcing, and archival authority.
In March 2009, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) based at the University of Manchester collaborated with the Archives Hub to host a small conference of approximately 50 people in Manchester.
‘Archives 2.0’: Shifting Dialogues Between Users and Archivists’ was the final event in a series of CRESC events on archiving and reusing qualitative data.
These events aimed to develop new approaches to archiving and reusing data and also to contribute to a recent rethinking of the archive in history, oral history, cultural studies The conference focused on the relationship between archivists, archives and their users, and looked at the emerging phenomenon of so-called ‘Archives 2.0,’ with the premise that this emergence is less about the integration of Web 2.0 technologies into online finding aids, and more related to a fundamental shift in perspective, to a philosophy that privileges the user and promotes an ethos of sharing, collaboration, and openness.
Though small, the conference was a marked success, attracting a wide range of delegates and speakers (at relatively short notice).
This article is based on the presentation that I gave at this conference, while I understand Ariadne hopes to commission more arising from the event.
‘If we build it, will they come?’ is a reference to the 1989 film Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner in which the protagonist takes an enormous leap of faith by building a baseball field among the cornfields of his remote Iowa farm.
He creates the field because the mystical voice in his head assures him, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ And they do (eventually).
More recently, the mantra has become an unlikely metaphorical reference for the various leaps of faith being taken in the information sector in respect of Web 2.0 initiatives.
Many of the projects that we might label ‘Archives 2.0’ have been acts of faith, based on the largely often untested belief that if we build the right tools to promote interaction, ‘they’ (our elusive users) will come.
There is increasing consensus that ‘2.0’ is more about a shift in mindset and not technology [1], and that we need to be mindful that ‘Archives 2.0’ needs to be benefits-led and not tools-led.
At the same time it is clear that we are in a period of uncertainty, where learning and experimentation will require risk-taking and leaps of faith.
We must accept that any vision for ‘Archives 2.0’ will remain necessarily elusive, especially as data and archival content will be increasingly uncoupled from the ‘traditional’ channels of the online finding aid or digital library, and instead will be made available via a plethora of alternative channels, supporting a range of different contexts and user models.
We must also accept that this shift will require a radical rethinking of some of the most fundamental tenets surrounding ‘archival authority.’ Web 2.0 and Episteme The emergence of Archives 2.0 is less about technological change than a broader epistemological shift which concerns the very nature of the archive, and particularly traditional archival practice which privileges the ‘original’ context of the archival object.
In ‘Archives 2.0’ the archive is potentially less a physical space than an online platform that supports participation.
In this potentially radical vision, users can contribute to the archive, engage with it, and play a central role in defining its meaning.
Since the term ‘Web 2.0’ was first coined in 2004, it has become a weighty signifier, a shorthand for an entire set of transformational processes that are now accelerated by the rapid evolution of technologies where users increasingly become the creators, and not just consumers, of content.
Such a transformation and opportunity has triggered a healthy strain of evangelism within the archival profession focusing upon the need to embrace ‘2.0’ as a new way of thinking about the archive [2].
The archival profession itself has been a late adopter of ‘2.0,’ a fact often decried by an (arguably) new generation of archivists, but the growing number of Archives 2.0 projects certainly points to a growing trend.
If Web 2.0 is about the zenith of remix culture, democratisation, and decentralisation of ‘traditional’ methods of information sharing, it might then be described as profoundly postmodern.
In this new paradigm, content consumers become content producers.
New modes of communicating and disseminating content now place greater emphasis upon process and how knowledge is increasingly collective and mediated.
Web 2.0 decentralises ‘official’ knowledge production in surprising ways, and is clearly changing not only the way we interact, but even our very identities.
But if the triumphal rhetoric around this shift centres on its democratising potential, then the alternative face of this celebratory stance is a more cautious or even a concerned one, revealing many of the anxieties and tensions that have existed around authority, control, truth-telling and trust.
Archival Theory and Postmodernism (or, the Problem with Provenance) In 2001, well before the term ‘2.0’ was coined, Terry Cooke identified the fundamental premise of postmodern theory: ‘Facts in texts cannot be separated from their ongoing and past interpretation, nor author from subject or audience, not author from authoring, not author from context.
Nothing is neutral.
Nothing is objective.
Everything is shaped, presented, re-presented, symbolized, signified, signed, constructed’ [3].
Archival theorists have long since made compelling cases for how archival ‘science’ and postmodernism make very uneasy bedfellows [4].
‘Traditional’ Archival Science or theory is fundamentally positivist in its approach, and stands in stark contrast to the tenets of postmodernity.
Archival theory posits ‘the archivist’ as an impartial, neutral, and therefore authoritative figure, creating an archival record that is objective, an unmediated empirical fact [5].
This organising principle has been critiqued from theoretical and practical perspectives long before the advent of ‘2.0’.
Various seminal articles question the positivist approach of archival ‘science’ and also point out on a practical level how such an approach can represent a significant hindrance to resource discovery [6].
Indeed, various studies demonstrate that users do not always want to search for collections via provenance, and that archivists need to rethink fundamentally the distinction between the management of archival collections and users’ access to.
and understanding of, those collections [7].
But if these user studies indicate in practical terms how archival practice is out of step with user needs, the potential of Web 2.0 promises to invoke an even more radical destabilisation of such premises, not just in respect of access points, search engine optimisation, or ‘enriching’ records to increase discovery, but also concernung the nature of the archive itself.
Finding Aids 2.0 The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections (PBEDC) is a landmark project that has made great strides in the exploration of how the conventional archival finding aid might be transformed in the new contexts of online resource discovery [8].
The project, which began in 2005, drew ‘inspiration from social technologies used in Websites such as Amazon and Wikipedia [and] developed an archival access system that combines existing archival practice (EAD) with ‘Web 2.0’ features, namely involving user input through social software and collaborative filtering’ [9].
The existing Web site allows registered users to comment on collection and item descriptions, and also uses a ‘collaborative filtering’ mechanism which tracks users’ pathways through information and uses these data to ‘recommend’ items to other users:‘Researchers who view this page also viewed…’ Significantly, one of the key factors for the success of the project was the existence of an established audience already engaged with the materials held in the collections.
In other words, this was not an Archives 2.0 project in search of a community – one already existed and became immediately engaged with the collections.
Indeed, the site indicates that there is an active community commenting on records, and the imminent new release of the site will allow for interaction and community-building among users in the form of more user-generated content (tags, transcripts, and notes) as well as tools for sharing bookmarks.
In the UK, The National Archives Your Archives wiki borrows from the Wikipedia model, and was launched in April 2007 [10].
Your Archives is described by the TNA as ‘an exciting and accessible resource that enables anyone to share their knowledge of Britain’s rich archival heritage and to reuse historical information in a way that has not previously been possible’ [11].
As yet, no research findings have been published about this resource [1].
However, perusal and experimentation with the wiki indicates active usage, though it is not possible to determine how many users are active.
Neither is it possible to distinguish between internal (i.e.
TNA staff) and external users.
Obviously such information would be critical in ascertaining how successful this venture has been in terms of making the archive ‘Yours’ (i.e.
the public’s).
Nonetheless, Your Archives clearly remains a critical experiment in this new terrain, allowing us to examine first hand how effective wiki software might prove as an added ‘layer’ to the catalogue.
While information on the impact and usage of Your Archives is not yet available [12], a recent presentation by Sharon Howard, describing the Old Bailey Proceedings Online Project, does shed some critical light on the usage of a wiki for user engagement with the catalogue [13].
In her talk, Howard questioned the effectiveness of adapting the wiki model for user engagement or crowd-sourcing.
So far, this wiki has generated very little user engagement; a fact she readily attributes to a lack both of active promotion and of a sense of the community to which the resource would best be offered (unlike the PBEDC Project, for instance).
But in addition to the need to develop an active marketing strategy in respect of the resource, Howard identified several other critical barriers to engagement.
For instance, contributions were heavily mediated and not transparent; as such, users could not immediately see the impact of their contribution and so feel part of the process.
If a sense of ‘instant gratification’ and ‘usefulness’ is a key motivator for effective crowd-sourcing, as projects such as Galaxy Zoo and The Great War Archive [14] have demonstrated, then ‘delayed’ gratification might only work with a diligent few (or just staff members!)
In addition, the wiki, she felt, was non-intuitive and difficult to use for this type of work – an argument to the effect that interactive tools must not only be simple but also pleasurable to use [15].
We might extend these concerns further, and consider whether the transference of cataloguing and documenting principles of the archive readily translate to the context of the wiki.
This notion perhaps represents the greatest barrier to external user interaction, as it requires the user first to be able to navigate the ‘official’ catalogue expertly, with a clear sense of the hierarchies and description standards, and then operate within the wiki layer to perform cataloguing-like functions.
Archives 2.0 = Finding Aid 2.0?
In the cases of the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Project, and Your Archives, the ‘original’ or authoritative archive remains intact [16].
The resources are organised around the traditional hierarchical principles of archival catalogue referencing.
Such approaches raise questions as to how intuitive or easy to use such an interface might prove for people without professional training.
However, they also highlight the challenges of developing ‘2.0’ layers that are interoperable with the ‘original’ foundational layer of the catalogue.
We need to ask to what extent the principles that archivists (and other information professionals) use to manage collections will also need to transfer to these new ‘social’ contexts of interaction; and to what extent such transference poses a significant barrier to uptake.
This is not to challenge the fundamental significance of such approaches.
These waters remain largely untested, and more experimentation is needed so we can gather more knowledge about this area.
The fact is, there is a great deal of knowledge held by our community, especially users, which could be used to enrich the catalogue.
A recent report by the Research Information Network (RIN) points to the need to experiment further in this area, especially within the cultural heritage sector [17].
User-generated content could lend meaningful and much-needed context to item descriptions.
Indeed, researchers are already making significant contributions to online finding aids across the museums, library and archives sector through other means, ‘providing copies of articles or other publications resulting from their research’ [17].
They are also contributing in more informal ways, building relationships with archivists and curators, and are being called upon to provide expert opinion on certain material.
While Web 2.0 tools offer great potential for leveraging this type of hidden knowledge, such moves also highlight the degree to which the ‘user’ vs. ‘archival authority’ dichotomy is a problematic one.
At the same panel mentioned above, presentations were given on more successful crowd-sourcing projects, The Great War Archive and the Galaxy Zoo projects.
A key message emerging from these talks and the ensuing discussions was that users should be treated as peer collaborators, intrinsic to the process of meaning-making, rather than outside interlopers (however welcome) who must be kept at arm’s length from the authoritative record.
This impulse to democratise and decentralise obviously triggered questions in the audience about issues of quality, standards and control.
All these projects indicated that more risk-taking in respect of crowd-sourcing was required, that the authority of ‘metadata’ experts needs to be re-examined, and that new business models were emerging as regards crowd-sourcing which are hard to ignore.
Both the Great War Archive and the Galaxy Zoo might be examples of what Huvila might term the ‘participatory’ archive.
The ‘Finding Aid 2.0’ approach is distinct from that of the participatory archive in that it limits participation to ‘around’ the archive and not within it.
At present, for example, the ‘authoritative’ voice of the Polar Project is maintained by an anonymous overlord, ‘The Archivist,’ a singular entity that represents the staff of the Bentley Historical Library, and, ‘as such, represents an authoritative source of information’ [18].
Here the ‘official’ archive is kept intact and ostensibly untouched.
Huvila’s recent article on the participatory archives argues for a much more radical approach, one which privileges ‘decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of both records and the archival process’ [19] and posits a more radical user orientation, where both archivists and users collaborate to build the archive itself.
Such an approach requires the fundamental belief that neither ‘the archivist’ nor user is neutral in relation to the archive, that the ‘archival context’ is not more authentic or authoritative, but is ‘based on an understanding that together the participants are more knowledgeable about the archival materials than an archivist alone can be’ [20].
Conclusion: The Limits of Crowds (Even Wise Ones) Does the vision for Archives 2.0 end with ‘Finding Aid 2.0’?
As we envision ‘Archives 2.0’, it is clear that we will need to lean towards this more radical user-orientation approach of the participatory archive.
This will mean the devolvement of archival control and also the freeing of archival data for reuse and repurposing across new and dramatically different contexts from the centralised online finding aid or digital library.
Archival data will be mashed and melded into new interfaces, new tools, outside our vision and control.
Users might be engaging, but they are not coming to ‘us’ [21].
These new contexts for interaction and interpretation suggest that new trust metrics and heuristics will emerge that may not necessarily privilege archival authority.
Institutions and professionals will need to negotiate this area of Web 2.0, where users are increasingly faced with a paucity of heuristics, and be prepared to establish new forms of ‘archival’ trust metrics [22].
But a belief in the value of the participatory archive is not enough.
How do we engage the crowd?
And what are the limitations of crowd-sourcing?
As we develop more services or channels for engaging with the archive, we need to ascertain which crowd-sourcing models are effective for our purposes, and which, more to the point, will provide the distinct benefits we are seeking.
In the cases of the PBEDC and Your Archives, user interaction such as comments largely takes the form of corrections to dates, names, or factual information.
The benefits are an enhanced, potentially more factually ‘correct’ finding aid.
In quite a few cases, genealogists will leave notes along the lines of ‘this was my grandfather,’ which provides the opportunity for archivists (or other users/researchers) to follow leads and discover more historical information on that individual.
In some rare cases, contributed content comes in the form of contextualising notations, for instance this example from Your Archives where the user has contributed simple but invaluable information for other users about the content of the item.
The full potential of these benefits is yet to be realised, but arguably they will largely centre on the ‘enrichment’ or minor editing of the authoritative catalogue.
The Great War Archive Project indicated that, with a honed and resourced marketing strategy, ‘they’ will come – as long as the system is easy to use and presents only a low barrier – and the contribution is meaningful to the individual.
A ‘build it and they will come’ approach is certainly misguided.
As we think about how our resources might support education and research, it is increasingly important that we do see the communities of practice for the crowds.
For even though ‘the participatory archive is about crowd-sourcing, it focuses on deeper involvement and more complex semantics rather than on larger crowds and simple annotation.’ [23].
There is overlap between the notion of the ‘crowd’ and that of ‘communities of practice,’ but some of the distinctions become vital when considering the benefits we might wish to obtain in the contexts of learning and research.
Etienne Wenger defines a community of practice (CoP) as a group of individuals participating in collaborative activity where the individuals learn and establish a shared identity through the very acts of engaging in, and contributing to, the practices of their communities.
CoPs ‘are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’ [24].
Annotations, tags, reviews – beneficial though such utilities can be – are not necessarily the means to cultivate a CoP, or more radically, a participatory archive.
The question remains as to how we can support the type of ‘deeper involvement’ of, for instance, historical inquiry and debate, and perhaps also whether the channel of the online finding aid is the appropriate space for such involvement.
References See ‘Archives 2.0?’ on Kate Theimer’s blog, Archives Next http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=203 For example, Kiara King’s recent presentation on Archives 2.0 at the 2008 Society of Archivists conference: http://www.slideshare.net/araik/archives-20-presentation; David Kemper’s post ‘What Library 2.0 Can teach Archives 2.0’ at The DIGITAL Archive blog: http://digitalpermanence.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-library-20-can-teach-archives-20.html Terry Cooke’s “Archival science and postmodernism: new formulations for old concepts.
Archival Science” Archival Science (2000); Pg 7. http://www.springerlink.com/content/p52234804l48m463/ Also available gratis at: http://www.mybestdocs.com/cook-t-postmod-p1-00.htm For example: Eric Ketelaar, “Archivalisation and Archiving,” Archives and Manuscripts (1999); Brien Brothman, “Declining Derrida: Integrity, Tensegrity, and the Preservation of Archives from Deconstruction,” Archivaria (1999).
See the Society of American Archivists provide the professionally accepted definition of ‘Provenance’ here: http://www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details.asp?DefinitionKey=196 For example, Wendy Duff and Catherine Johnson’s seminal piece, “Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information-Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives,” Library Quarterly (2002); Christopher Prom’s, “User Interactions with Electronic Finding Aids in a Controlled Setting,” American Archivist (2004); Jane Stevenson’s “‘What Happens If I Click on This?’: Experiences of the Archives Hub,” October 2008, Ariadne, Issue 57 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/stevenson/ This point is made in detailed terms in the recent OCLC report by Jennifer Schaffner’s, The Metadata Is the Interface: Better Description for Better Discovery of Archives and Special Collections, Synthesized from User Studies (2009): http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2009-06.pdf The Great Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection Web site: http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/index.pl?node_id=282&lastnode_id=1163 Elizabeth Yakel et al.
discuss their experiences with the Great Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Project in “Creating the Next Generation of Archival Finding Aids,” D-Lib Magazine, May/June 2007, Volume 13 Number 5⁄6 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/yakel/05yakel.html The National Archives Your Archives wiki http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ The National Archives (TNA): See Your Archives About http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Your_Archives:About A case study of Your Archives is to be published within the upcoming volume, A Different Kind of Web: New Connections between Archives and Our Users with Web 2.0, edited by Kate Theimer for the Society of American Archivists, and due to be published in 2010.
‘User Generated Content: Old Bailey Proceedings Online.’ A presentation by Sharon Howard at the 2009 JISC Digital Content Conference: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2009/06/sharon_howard_1e.pdf An audio recording of Howard’s presentation is available: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/avfiles/events/2009/06/lookingfuture1.mp3 The Galaxy Zoo Project was presented at the same panel session, and highlighted a ‘crowd-sourcing’ success story: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2009/06/arfon_smith_1e.pdf Also presented was The Great War Archive, another successful project which pointed to the new business models afforded by effective crowd-sourcing: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2009/06/kate_lindsay_1e.pdf Howard demonstrated the user interface of the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Project as a forceful example of effective tools http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/ This point is made by Isto Huvila in ‘Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management’ Archival Science (2008).
Discovering Physical Objects: Meeting Researchers’ Needs.
Research Information Network report (2008) http://www.rin.ac.uk/objects Reference to ‘The Archivist’ is found here: http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/index.pl?node_id=282&lastnode_id=1163 Isto Huvila, ‘Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management’.
Archival Science (2008), p. 15.
Isto Huvila, ‘Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management’.
Archival Science (2008), p. 26.
For an argument for the case for open, mashable cultural heritage data, see Mike Ellis’s “Pushing MRD out from under the geek rock’ at his blog, Electronic Museum: http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2009/07/13/pushing-mrd-out-from-under-the-geek-rock/ Geoff Bilder’s speaks on this issue with regard to trust metrics for scholarly communications.
A recent presentation on this is available http://www.slideshare.net/efsym/sausages-coffee-chicken-and-the-web-establishing-new-trust-metrics-for-scholarly-communication Isto Huvila, ‘Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management’.
Archival Science (2008), p. 27.
Etienne Wenger, ‘Communities of Practice: A Brief Introduction’ http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro.htm Author Details Joy Palmer, Ph.D. Senior Manager for Library and Archival Services (Archives Hub and Copac) Mimas University of Manchester Email: joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://joypalmer.wordpress.com Return to top Article Title: “Archives 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?” Author: Joy Palmer Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/palmer/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Developments in Virtual 3D Imaging of Cultural Artefacts Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Developments in Virtual 3D Imaging of Cultural Artefacts Buzz data software database wireless archives metadata repositories copyright preservation windows multimedia visualisation provenance flash quicktime photoshop exif gnome e-science e-research research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Collmann describes how experience using a portable Virtual 3D Object Rig in cultural institutions has led to significant improvements in apparatus design and workflow.
The collapsable, portable electromechanical Virtual 3D (V3D) Object Rig Model 1 (ORm1) (Figures 1, 2, 3) was developed to meet an obvious need found after an important Australian cultural artefact a nineteenth-century post-mortem plaster head-cast of the notorious bushranger Ned Kelly [1] was Apple QTVR-imaged (QuickTime Virtual Reality) using a large static object rig at the University of Melbourne over 2003/4.
The author requested that this moving and hyperlinked image be constructed as a multimedia component of a conjectured cross-disciplinary undergraduate teaching unit.
The difficulties encountered in obtaining permission from the cultural collection involved to transport this object some 400 metres to the imaging rig located on the same geographical campus suggested to the author that a portable object imaging rig could be devised and taken to any cultural collection anywhere to image objects in situ.
In the early to mid-19th century these physical records were taken for phrenological research purposes, however by the late-C19 this quasi-science had been largely discredited.
The underlying reasons for these practices had been forgotten; the recording and keeping was absorbed by reason of habit into accepted routine procedure; as just a part of the workflow within the State criminal justice execution process.
This procedure would be rejected out of hand nowadays, but this 19th century habit of retaining physical artefacts is fortunate for the present-day cross-disciplinary historian.
As mentioned, the author wished to use the head cast as the pivotal focus for cross-disciplinary undergraduate teaching purposes with contributions from the perspective of History of Science, Australian Colonial History, Sociology and Criminology.
It was considered by the subject contributors that such a cross-disciplinary teaching module could well benefit from a Web-based multimedia approach.
Figure 1: The Virtual 3D (V3D) Object Rig Model 1 (ORm1) The V3D digital representation of this focal artefact, together with the ability to hot-spot salient loci of interest (and hyperlink to more detailed information) on the surface of the 3D representation was the most important criterion for all subject contributors.
The known and proven technique of user-manipulable computer screen-based V3D/QTVR, derived by using a digital camera mounted on a mechanical rotatable object rig with V3D image creation using QTVR 'stitching' software, was the only feasible means, at the time, to achieve this objective.
Figure 2: Virtual 3D (V3D) Object Rig Model 1 (ORm1) ready to assemble For background information, real and simulated 3D visual experience in humans (and other animals) exploits biologically evolved mechanisms of monocular and binocular visual processing conducted in stages along the visual pathway within their brain [2].
The simulated 3D visual experience, whether artificially or photographically visualised, also involves (to varying extents) immersion in the experience partly by commanding brain-mediated attention.
Figure 3: Virtual 3D (V3D) Object Rig Model 1 (ORm1) assembled Developing the Rig Most V3D digital photographic object rigs developed since the early 1990s including the one example available in 2003/4 at the University of Melbourne, are large-scale static rigs requiring reticulated electrical power and surrounded by even larger amounts of physical space (at least 5x5x5m) to allow for the servicing of mounted artefacts and rig maintenance access.
Since most of the artefacts of interest located within geographically widely distributed institutional collections, or in-field, it became obvious that there was a need for a portable, self-contained photographic object rig to be taken to objects, rather than vice versa.
Funding was obtained from the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust [3] and the Rig was designed using SolidWorks CAD software by Eric Huwald, La Trobe University Department of Physics, in conjunction with the author.
Rig motion is controlled by Galil software [4] running on a networked (RJ-45 cable) Windows XP laptop computer using a LabVIEW [5] user interface.
The aluminium structural components were machined by Whiteforest Engineering (Bundoora, Victoria) and assembled, together with the integration of electronic and DC motor movement control, by Mechanical and Mechatronics students in the University of Melbourne Department of Engineering as part of a final (fourth-year) undergraduate project ending in late 2008.
I have found that employing student teams has advantages for some university projects: labour costs are reduced and mandatory subject deadlines mean that projects are invariably completed on time (albeit within a nine-month project duration)!
Figure 4: Schematic: Virtual 3D Object Rig model 2 (ORm2).
Virtual image created using SolidWorks CAD software After preliminary testing, which indicated that the Rig easily performed as specified within the limits of the design criteria, the ORm1 has been used, on a regular basis, within the Australian Institute of Archaeology (AIA) [6] for further testing and to image some of the thousands of Near-East artefacts held in their collections.
The original ad hoc workflow has been closely analysed over time and improvements have been made in an incremental manner over the last 18 months.
The process of doing so has led the team to the decision to construct an improved Model 2 (ORm2) (Figure 4) entirely within the La Trobe University Department of Physics and to retrofit as many improvements as possible to ORm1.
Funding for ORm2 was provided by the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) [7] and the La Trobe University eResearch Office [8], both of which had been made aware of the Rig after its construction in 2008 and of its potential imaging uses.
They have since closely followed the Rig's development.
It is interesting to note the construction cost of ORm2, although it incorporates more advanced features, has been approximately two-thirds that of ORm1.
We attribute this significant cost-saving to experience gained in the actual construction process and regular use in an institutional setting.
We cannot see that all the improvements discovered heuristically could have been modelled beforehand.
Figure 5: Rig GUI (graphical user interface) Basic Photographic Workflow The use of these QTVR-type object rigs is not new, but an examination of these well-known workflow elements might illuminate how efficiencies have been discovered.
As with most other QTVR-type object rigs, the artefact is mounted on a horizontal rotating platter with a camera moving over it in the (vertical) perpendicular plane.
Rotational movement in each plane is controlled independently in previously selected radial increments.
The selection of degree increment defines the number of stop points at which the camera shutter is automatically activated.
Motion control software is activated by a modified LabVIEW user interface (Figure 5).
The DC motors are capable of accurately moving the physical Rig elements in less than 0.1 degree increments; but in practice, 5-degree increments are used to allow acceptably smooth virtual object movement, while keeping the number of individual images within reasonable limits.
As the platter rotates, the camera arm moves over the artefact in degree increments pausing for shutter activation at each stop-point.
A 360-degree horizontal platter rotation combined with a 90-degree camera movement in 5-degree increments results in 1,296 individual images.
These separate images are stitched together and hotspots are inserted and hyperlinked using the software described below and the resulting fully user-manipulable (rotate, zoom, activate hotspots) .MOV QTVR file is displayed on a computer monitor.
Background and artefact mounts are removed from each image using image processing software (GIMP/Photoshop).
The images are stitched together using Object 2VR software [9] as single-row (V2.5D) or multi-row (V3D) moving images.
Virtual artefact movement within the .MOV image is user-controlled by mouse-over command or else it can be auto-rotated.
Figure 6: Cuneiform tablet (Ur-III, Babylon, ca.
2000 BC): stills of rotating .mov file (QTVR software required.)
Model 1 Workflow Experience Having imaged a cuneiform tablet (Ur-III, Babylon, ca.
2000 BC, see Figure 6) and a shabti (Egypt, New Kingdom, 1700-1200 BC, see Figure 7 (this interim step in the imaging workflow illustrates the result of not removing the background)) many times for testing purposes, we found that the total time to image each artefact amounted to tens of hours, and that the object mounting and scanning processes consumed around four hours, and the image processing the rest.
Figure 7: A shabti (Egypt, New Kingdom, 1700-1200 BC): stills displaying angles of virtual manipulation taken from manipulable .mov file (QTVR software required, download can be slow.)
We were therefore in a position to attempt to identify the most time-consuming workflow elements.
The advantages of having a researcher working with an eResearch (eScience) expert group (VeRSI) became evident in the workflow analysis.
Individual steps, and the decision processes within them were perceived to be: Artefact Selection More cubic or spherical objects produce more useful and satisfying V3D results using the V3DOR.
Relatively 'flatter' artefacts, ie those having a relatively broad surface in relation to depth (eg parchment, papyrii, coins), are better V3D-imaged using devices, for example, such as polynomial texture mapping (PTM) dome such as that developed at Wessex Archaeology [10], although both sides cannot be scanned in one pass.
We are currently constructing a 1-metre diameter PTM dome with visible, infra-red (IR) and ultra-violet (UV) illumination for flatter artefacts.
Artefact Mounting/Positioning Categories of shape can be made and an array of generic acrylic and wire mounts pre-constructed to reduce mounting time.
The less the intrusion, even of transparent mounts, into the visible object area, the better, as mounts must be removed using image processing software.
Positioning of the artefact around centre of rotation on platter, if not correctly performed, leads to apparent oscillation of the rotating object image around the centre of rotation.
Camera Selection The camera shutter, at the minimum of all camera functions, needs to be remote-controllable, either by electric cable or by wireless control.
Good imaging results have been obtained with Canon G10 and Canon G11 compact digital cameras.
A Nikon D90 DSLR has produced higher resolution images for specific artefacts and purposes.
Optimal lens selection is complex to determine theoretically and has been found to be best based on empirical trials.
Further improvements in digital camera technology are being incorporated as project time and funding permits.
Background Colour Selection Differently coloured backgrounds have been trialled to shorten image processing time.
A matte-black background did not contrast sufficiently with shadows on the object to enable the paint bucket (or similar) tool to be used effectively.
The same applied to a blue chromakey cloth again too dark and colour-similar.
We are currently using a lime-green background, a relatively unusual colour on artefacts.
Consequently it enables much of the background-elimination image processing to be semi-automated by colour-based batch processing.
Image Repositories The linking of discoverable metadata to image files and the presentation of images in a searchable image repository are being currently developed as a new VeRSI project in conjunction with La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne.
The V3DOR Group has been involved in defining the project specifications and is involved in on-going project development.
Investigation of the Fedora object model is among the options for use, as well as consideration being given to the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID3) as a means of managing the digital media files and integrating them into the teaching, learning and research processes of host institutions.
Improvements Incorporated in ORm2 By implication from the above workflow descriptions, these improvements might be self-explanatory in terms of time-efficiencies: tripodal vs. quadripedal design is 10 Kg lighter whilst maintaining optimum rigidity and stability.
Tripodal design also reduces Rig set-up time.
improved arm length, platter height and camera location adjustment self-contained wheels and handles for ease of translocation within institutions in-built spirit levels and more rapid mechanism for rig levelling more compact – ORm2 was specifically designed to fit in the boot of a 1984 Toyota Corolla (an example of a quite small motor car), and easily fits into medium-size Mitsubishi and larger motor cars/vans (Figure 8) 2-axis laser object positioning (around object centre of rotation) on platter wireless remote control for Rig and camera function – removes visual obstructions and trip hazards from the vicinity of the workspace The result of the workflow efficiencies attempted is that total object imaging time even for unknown artefacts is now 3 hours and is reducing further day by day!
Figure 8: The author's two testbed vehicles for assessing the rig's portability, Beechworth, Victoria, Australia Object Metadata The imaging revolution has come with certain costs.
One is an avalanche of image data.
New scanning and digital capture devices capture several times more data than earlier generations of photographic imaging devices.
3D digital imaging of artefacts using V3D generate several sets of metadata.
Each digital image generated by the V3D has its own set of source data.
These data provide information about the creation date of the image, resolution, digital camera type, etc.
An extract from a raw data file shows lens metadata: <exif:FocalLength>30500/1000</exif:FocalLength> <exif:FocalPlaneXResolution>1090370/292</exif:FocalPlaneXResolution> <exif:FocalPlaneYResolution>817777/219</exif:FocalPlaneYResolution> <exif:FocalPlaneResolutionUnit>2</exif:FocalPlaneResolutionUnit> <exif:SensingMethod>2</exif:SensingMethod> <exif:FileSource>3</exif:FileSource> By employing Photoshop (or similar applications) to view the file metadata, one can read embedded camera source data that are sufficiently detailed and provide an important record of camera settings, concerning capture, import and resolution.
The V3DOR itself can provide additional metadata (see Figure 5, the Rig GUI).
All camera positional and rig incremental settings can be incorporated in QTVR descriptive metadata.
There is still much work to be performed in respect of additional specific metadata sets in descriptive, structural and administrative categories for V3D applications that include provenance and contextual information about the object itself and the capacity to link it to associated metadata records, such as other images, photographs, et cetera.
Common and flexible file formats for archiving and disseminating V3D/3D stereoscopic scans in the museum and academic teaching sectors are yet to be agreed upon [11].
Current and Future Developments A manually controlled parallelogram-type camera mount device with the function of accurately displacing the camera by an adjustable distance (human eye-separation) for stereoscopic imaging has been trialled.
Servo-equipped automation has also been considered, but the advent of digital 3D stereoscopic compact cameras has led to the postponement of this sub-project until these cameras can be fully tested.
Trials are underway with a recently released Fuji 3D W3 digital compact camera mounted on ORm1 with the intention of capturing separate (displaced) images at each camera rest-point.
Stereo-pair hybrid synchronised QTVR .MOV images will be displayed on a 3D monitor requiring the viewer to wear 3D stereo glasses.
It has not been found that stereoscopic 3D has been combined with QTVR-type Virtual 3D photography anywhere else for this purpose.
Auto-stereoscopic monitors (glasses-free) manufactured by Magnetic 3D and NEC are being investigated.
We are further trialling infra-red and ultra-violet illumination of artefacts, although recent developments in multi-spectral and hyper-spectral imaging (using fixedor tunable-frequency-band filters), as used in the analysis of the Archimedes Palimpsest [12], have perhaps more cost-effective useful applications in our work.
A means of 'piping' full-spectral sunlight into subterranean caverns in institutions would need to be devised if imaging could not be performed above-ground.
The use of a rigid background (of a suitable colour) attached to the camera arm counterweight (opposite the camera) is being investigated.
Possible difficulties are background area size (in order to maintain complete background coverage using different camera lenses) and the rigid background frame limiting camera arm travel.
If proven feasible, a framed background opposite the camera would produce further savings in time.
Conclusions Our V3D Object Rigs have been realised thanks to following a multi-disciplinary approach to imaging hardware and software development.
They have brought 3D imaging and colour recording technologies together to develop a Web-viewable system for QTVR records of cultural objects.
They have added to the repertoire of 3D digital imaging technologies that are significantly affecting the ways in which cultural artefacts can be understood and analysed and how they may become integral to a range of functions, such as heritage documentation, exhibition, conservation and preservation.
However, there are still barriers to this virtual engagement, including resourcing, time and costs.
Although V3D/QTVR is not by any means a new technology, we believe our multidisciplinary approach has allowed significant improvements which maintain the position of V3DORs as useful, accurate, portable, inexpensive (and obviously non-contact) imaging devices.
Their functionality is being extended with newer image capture devices, such as 3D digital cameras and tunable spectral filters.
Furthermore, they can successfully act in parallel for cultural artefact imaging with more recent laser 3D surface imaging technologies [13].
It is apparent that visualisation tools such as the ORm2, especially when used in large-number artefact collections, have the ability to produce large datasets from similar object categories in this, as yet, not-quite-common V3D/QTVR form.
We hope the ORm2 (and successors) will therefore become widely used instruments which will add much information to the 'data deluge' for which even newer digital tools currently under development will provide productive data access, data mining and thus might provide emergent, creative data analysis.
V3DORm2 will be brought to EVA London 2011 [14] in July as a conference demonstrator.
If there is interest, it could be easily transported to other locations in the UK/Ireland for further demonstrations.
A compendious Web site illustrated with many more images and including V3DOR, PTM, 3D Remote Instrumentation + in-field recording and high-definition 3D Telemedicine projects is soon to be published on the World Wide Web [15].
We hope to include full CAD drawings and details of construction materials and construction experience to allow others to replicate (and, we hope, improve upon) our various apparatus.
Copyright Note Figures 6 and 7 have been chosen to illustrate some of the choices and processes to be used in QTVR-type image creation.
Fully rotating V3D/QTVR images can eventually be found at the Web site location [15].
These images are copyright © 2010 Australian Institute of Archaeology and permission for re-use for purposes other than teaching or research should be sought from the author.
Acknowledgements The author is grateful to Ann Borda, Dirk van der Knijff, Chris Davey and Monica MacCallum, amongst others, for their kind advice on the content of this article.
References The death mask and faces of Ned Kelly http://www.denheldid.com/twohuts/story10.html Kandel, E. and Schwartz, J.
(2008) Constructing the visual image.
In Kandel, E. and Wurtz, R.(Eds.
), Principles of Neural Science, 5th edition.
McGraw-Hill, New York.
Helen Macpherson Smith Trust http://hmstrust.org.au/ Galil Software http://www.galilmc.com/ LabVIEW http://www.ni.com/labview The Australian Institute of Archaeology (AIA) http://www.aiarch.org.au/ Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) https://www.versi.edu.au/ e-Research, La Trobe University http://www.latrobe.edu.au/eresearch QTVR and Flash Object Movie Software Object2VR Garden Gnome Software http://gardengnomesoftware.com/object2vr.php Polynomial Texture Mapping | Wessex Archaeology http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/computing/ptm Beraldin, J.-A., National Research Council Canada: Digital 3D Imaging and Modelling: A Metrological Approach.
2008 in Time Compression Technologies Magazine, January/February 2008, pp.35-35, NRC 49887 referenced in [13] Archimedes Palimpsest Project http://archimedespalimpsest.net/ Mona Hess, Graeme Were, Ian Brown, Sally MacDonald, Stuart Robson and Francesca Simon Millar, "E-Curator: A 3D Web-based Archive for Conservators and Curators", July 2009, Ariadne, Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/hess-et-al/ 2011 home | EVA Conferences International http://www.eva-conferences.com/eva_london/2011_home 3D Visualisation Research (under construction) http://social.versi.edu.au/3d/ Author Details Richard Collmann Researcher Art History Program and eScholarship Research Centre 2nd Floor, Thomas Cherry Building University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia Email: r.collmann@unimelb.edu.au Web site: http://social.versi.edu.au/3d/ Return to top Article Title: "Developments in Virtual 3D Imaging of Cultural Artefacts" Author: Richard Collmann Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/collmann/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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A Pragmatic Approach to Preferred File Formats for Acquisition Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines A Pragmatic Approach to Preferred File Formats for Acquisition Buzz data software framework database dissemination xml archives metadata openoffice repositories video preservation jpeg aggregation tiff provenance drm usb cd-rom standards Citation BibTex RIS Dave Thompson sets out the pragmatic approach to preferred file formats for long-term preservation used at the Wellcome Library.
This article sets out the Wellcome Library's decision not explicitly to specify preferred file formats for long-term preservation.
It discusses a pragmatic approach in which technical appraisal of the material is used to assess the Library's likelihood of preserving one format over another.
The Library takes as its starting point work done by the Florida Digital Archive in setting a level of 'confidence' in its preferred formats.
The Library's approach provides for nine principles to consider as part of appraisal.
These principles balance economically sustainable preservation and intellectual 'value' with the practicalities of working with specific, and especially proprietary, file formats.
Scenarios are used to show the application of principles (see Annex below).
This article will take a technical perspective when assessing material for acquisition by the Library.
In reality technical factors are only part of the assessment of material for inclusion in the Library's collections.
Other factors such as intellectual content, significance of the material, significance of the donor/creator and any relationship to material already in the Library also play a part.
On this basis, the article considers 'original' formats accepted for long-term preservation, and does not consider formats appropriate for dissemination.
This reflects the Library's overall approach to working with born digital archival material.
Born digital material is treated similarly to other, analogue archival materials.
The Library expects archivists to apply their professional skills regardless of the format of any material, to make choices and decisions about material based on a range of factors and not to see the technical issues surrounding born digital archival material as in any way limiting.
Why Worry about Formats?
Institutions looking to preserve born digital material permanently, the Wellcome Library included, may have little control over the formats in which material is transferred or deposited.
The ideal intervention point from a preservation perspective is at the point digital material is first created.
However this may be unrealistic.
Many working within organisations have no choice in the applications they use, cost of applications may be an issue, or there may simply be a limited number of applications available on which to perform specialist tasks.
Material donated after an individual retires or dies can prove especially problematic.
It may be obsolete, in obscure formats, on obsolete media and without any metadata describing its context, creation or rendering environment.
Computer applications 'save' their data in formats, each application typically having its own file format.
The Web site filext [1] lists some 25,000 file extensions in its database.
The long-term preservation of any format depends on the type of format, issues of obsolescence, and availability of hardware and/or software, resources, experience and expertise.
Any archive looking to preserve born digital archival material needs to have the means and confidence to move material across the 'gap' that exists between material 'in the wild' and holding it securely in an archive.
This presents a number of problems: first, in the proliferation of file formats; second, in the use of proprietary file formats, and third, in formats becoming obsolete, either by being incompatible with later versions of the applications that created them, or by those applications no longer existing.
This assumes that proprietary formats are more problematic to preserve as their structure and composition are not known, which hinders preservation intervention by imposing the necessity for specialist expertise.
Moreover, as new software is created, so new file formats proliferate, and consequently exacerbate the problem.
Working with File Formats The Library has two situations in which file formats are an issue; current formats and obsolete formats.
The first is less of an issue in that the Library works with its donor/creator community to receive material from them in current formats and on current media.
To date, formats have included Microsoft Office files, JPEG, TIFF and text files, commonly transferred on CD-ROM.
Generally this material is easier to work with because of its currency.
The second situation is one in which material is received in an obsolete format, sometimes on obsolete media.
Experience suggests that each transfer of obsolete material requires its own unique approach, is more time-consuming and much more difficult to handle.
Appraisal is complex in that much work must be done before the relevance of any material actually reveals itself.
Because of the variety of file formats, and the differing circumstances of their transfer, the Library does not intend to provide a 'set list' of file formats it can or cannot accept for accession.
Instead it sets out a series of nine broad principles against which any file format can be rated.
Acceptability of any format is based upon the Library's belief in its ability to manage and preserve that format successfully into the future, set against the intellectual 'worth' of that material.
In the Library the process is known as technical appraisal.
The Library provides three levels of confidence in its ability to preserve material: high, medium and low.
These levels of confidence are based on resources available, the availability of tools for managing digital material and experience with the life cycle management of born digital materials.
This approach is based on work done by the Florida Digital Archive [2].
The Florida Digital Archive The Florida Digital Archive has published its own table of preferred data formats [3].
Its purpose is to, '...help Florida University administrators develop guidelines for preparing and submitting files to the Florida Digital Archive.'
The table lists a series of media; text, audio, video, etc.
Using a grid, specific formats are set out under one of three preservation 'confidence' headings; high confidence level, medium confidence level and low confidence level.
High confidence is expressed in formats that are 'simple', eg text, or which have open or published specifications, eg TIFF.
Low confidence is expressed in formats which are proprietary, closed or protected by rights mechanisms, eg Real audio or Microsoft Office formats.
This approach by the Florida Digital Archive is very useful.
However, it remains prescriptive.
The Wellcome Library aims to collect a wide range of material from a diverse donor community.
To restrict acquisitions only to materials which meet a narrow set of criteria, ie format, is to set a pre-emptive selection policy that may exclude material of value.
It also sends an unhelpful message to donor/creators that format is somehow of primary importance.
Which is not the case.
The Library is seeking an approach that offers flexibility but which does so within a defined framework.
One which allows it to accept a wide range of formats, but which seeks to understand the implications of accepting any format.
The Wellcome Library's Model The Library's technical appraisal process uses nine principles to evaluate the acceptability, or otherwise, of specific formats.
The acceptability principles as used by the Library and discussed in this article are: Principle Definition Formats in current, widespread or common use Includes formats created by applications currently in widespread or common use, eg Microsoft Word.
The concept of ‘current’ will change over time Formats which are non-proprietary Includes formats created or renderable by open source/freeware or other applications designed for non-commercial use, eg OpenOffice formats.
Formats which are standards-based Includes formats which are supported by international published standard/standards defining their technical/logical/structural properties, documentation which is publicly available, MPEG.
Formats for which specifications are publicly available Includes ‘open’ formats which are supported by documentation defining their technical/logical/structural properties, documentation which is publicly and freely available, eg TIFF or OpenOffice.
Formats which offer platform-independence Includes formats which can be rendered by many applications, and have no dependence upon any single application eg JPEG, XML.
Formats which are uncompressed Includes formats which have not been committed to a type that is based upon data loss, ie ‘lossy’, eg uncompressed JPEG2000.
The remaining principles, whilst not specifically related to any one format, play an important role in the acquisition and appraisal process.
They are considered in relation to discussions regarding the consequences of accepting any format; most especially, with regard to the economic consequences of accepting formats, particularly obsolete ones, and the cost of recovering a viable datastream.
These additional principles, not directly related to format, but which affect appraisal decisions are: Principle Definition Considerations of the intellectual content of the file(s) and/or the importance of the creator Considerations of the intellectual content of the file(s) are essential and should include a format’s ability to be maintained in an ‘authentic’ condition.
Considerations of how material complements existing material Considerations of how material that is offered to the Library complements, supports and extends existing content are essential.
Economic/resource implications Consideration of the total cost of any data recovery, cost of format migration and cost of long-term management.
Factors balance economic cost with human or technical resources required.
Cost and the resources required to work with obsolete media and files will play a role in the appraisal process, although cost alone will not be a factor in the decision to accept material.
Subjective judgement will be applied to the provenance of the material and the likelihood that not only can material be recovered but that it will be historically significant and worthy of the effort of preservation.
Appraisal decisions can be challenging when archivists are holding obsolete media to which they have no access.
If they have only sketchy or incomplete evidence of the content of the media, or its context, then justifying the cost of data recovery can prove difficult.
What if the medium is blank?
What if the data that medium holds are also obsolete and so also require potentially expensive and complex data recovery?
This is the conundrum of working with obsolete media and formats.
Factors other than format affect the ability of the Library to perform life cycle management upon material.
They include the use of compression tools to create aggregations of files, and files that are encrypted or use some form of digital rights management (DRM) controls.
Files of this type or which contain these features present additional life cycle management challenges and add complexity to that process.
In some cases files in these categories may be dependent upon third-party resources to be viable, eg de-compression software.
Where these third party resources cannot be preserved for proprietary reasons, there may be little point in preserving the data.
The Library's model is based on sound archival practice.
It is similar to the one for working with analogue materials which may require a conservation appraisal or conservation intervention prior to accession.
For some material the cost and effort of any intervention may not be justifiable.
Confidence Levels for Data Formats for Preservation Purposes Starting with the table developed by the Florida Digital Archive, the Library has developed a set of 'confidence' principles for digital material.
It is used to help staff and donor/creators identify types of format for long-term preservation.
The Library's levels of confidence are based on its expertise, experience and access to technical support at the time material is offered.
Rather than being hard-and-fast 'rules,' they are guidelines on which selection and appraisal decisions can be consistently applied and based, and therefore justified.
Yet at the same time they are guidelines that allow for flexibility and for specific decisions to be applied to particular bodies of material.
Practical Considerations For current material the Library expects to have few problems with access, and work with our donor creator community helps to make this a reality.
The Library accepts transfer on CD-ROM, or portable hard drive and donors are asked to provide information about formats and creating/rendering applications.
The Library has access to a range of current hardware and software tools and applications to make this process practicable.
The principles work well in conversations with donor/creators looking to transfer material to the Library.
They provide a foundation for discussion in which considerations of practical issues can be set against intellectual appraisal.
The implications of accepting one format over another can be compared and options considered.
Justification for accepting, or rejecting, material can be set out plainly and clearly, all of which provides a useful educational process for all parties.
The Library expects this approach to evolve.
Formats will change, experience with digital material will grow, while more and different resources will become available.
The principles are flexible and pragmatic.
They can be modified or reviewed at any time, without compromising past decisions.
Basing them in professional archival practice provides a sound basis for the development of further professional archival expertise, and from this stems 'proper' management of the material.
Use of flexible principles supports the professional practice of archivists.
The principles allow archivists to use their whole professional experience and judgement in appraising material.
The principles 'free' them from having to worry about technical considerations yet provide a framework within which the latter can be addressed.
This gives archivists confidence to work with born digital archival material, an important consideration as more and more archival material is created only in digital form.
Disadvantages This approach is not without its disadvantages.
It may prove over time to be entirely wrong, for the Wellcome Library at least.
Archives that proscribe just a few formats as acceptable for deposit may find that fewer resources are required to manage that material in the future.
The long-term cost of accepting a broad range of formats may be economically unsustainable.
It is therefore a pragmatic approach based on current experience and expertise, making use of the resources to which the Library currently has access.
Equally it is an approach that helps, in the short term, to support the diversity of material ingested, but which may store up problems for the future.
The complexity of 'preserving' many file formats may prove to be beyond the Library's capability.
The principles work only for 'original' formats intended for long-term storage and preservation; they are not intended to specify dissemination formats.
The pragmatic approach does, potentially, leave the Library with a multitude of formats to manage in the digital object repository.
This is not an ideal situation, but is one that tools such as PLANETS/PLATO might assist in addressing.
At the same time this approach does not assist the Library to build closer relationships with its donor/creator community.
Since it places few 'limits' on preferred formats, it does run the risk that donor/creators may come to expect that the Library will accept 'any' format.
However it matches a 'traditional' archival model in which transfer of material to an archive is based on a negotiation between archive and creator.
Conclusion This approach is clearly based on pragmatic considerations and is appropriate for the Wellcome Library at this point in time.
It is not without risk.
It is not without disadvantages.
It is based upon our levels of expertise in dealing with born digital archival material, which are currently somewhat immature.
It is also based upon the access we currently have to tools, hardware and software to work with digital material.
All of this will change over time.
The approach is designed to strike a balance between turning digital preservation activity into a wholly technical exercise in which bit stream preservation is the sole aim, and a more aesthetic archival approach in which the aim is to provide access to meaningful material that can form coherent archival collections.
Other factors such as intellectual content, significance of the material and/or the donor creator and any relationship to material already in the Library also play a part.
With no hard and fast 'rules' for format selection, archivists are asked to make a professional judgement about material they are offered based on both technical and archival principles.
Whilst it may be imperfect, this subjective approach represents the best balance we can strike between practicable and realistic preservation and the aims of broad collection development.
The Library can only accept digital material for long-term preservation if it retains confidence in its ability to provide meaningful access to that material for the long term.
This principle applies whether material is in a current or obsolete form.
What has been set down in this article is a framework within which a level of 'confidence' can be tested and applied whilst allowing the Library to collect a wide range of material in a range of formats.
References Filext http://filext.com/ Florida Digital Archive http://www.fcla.edu/digitalArchive 'Recommended Data Formats for Preservation Purposes in the Florida Digital Archive', August 2008 http://www.fcla.edu/digitalArchive/pdfs/recFormats.pdf Author Details Dave Thompson Digital Curator Wellcome Library Email: d.thompson@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk Annex: Simple Scenarios Scenario 1 : An organisation whose records already form part of the Library's collections offers to transfer all material to the Library in digital form instead of paper.
The organisation uses a current version of Microsoft Office, but publishes its monthly newsletter as a PDF.
The organisation proposes to transfer material to the Library via USB hard drive.
Approach: The Library accepts the material given that content is already held from that organisation, though some appraisal may take place Transfer on USB hard drive is acceptable as these devices are reliable and compatible with current Library hardware MS Office is in current, widespread and common use, so formats are acceptable MS Office files can be properly identified and retained in MS Office formats for long-term preservation A qualification is placed on the PDF newsletters that they are not in a preservation format and cannot easily be migrated into a more acceptable format.
They may be accepted and held until such time as the PDF version becomes obsolete, at that time if a suitable migration approach cannot be determined they may be held as a bitstream only The Library has HIGH confidence in its ability to preserve the Microsoft Office documents, but only MEDIUM or LOW confidence in its ability to preserve the material in PDF format.
Material would not be converted to PDF/A as the process for authentic conversion to PDF/A and long-term preservation of this format is currently beyond the capabilities of the Library.
Scenario 2: The child of a scientist offers material to the Library after the parent's death.
The offer comprises ten 5¾-inch floppy disks.
The Library holds no other material by this individual.
The disks are thought to contain text or word-processed files created in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
There are no metadata about the content of the disks, the context of any content nor exactly what data may be on the disks.
Approach: The Library rejects the material based on the lack of evidence of the content of the disks and there being no other material in the Library by this individual The Library having no access to hardware that can read the 5¾-inch floppy disks, cannot assume that the disks contain data or that they can be read Data formats are likely to be obsolete Data recovery is likely to be complex, time-consuming, expensive, and with little certainty of success Information suggests that this material does not add to the Library's body of knowledge The Library has LOW confidence in its ability to preserve the material on offer.
Return to top Article Title: "A Pragmatic Approach to Preferred File Formats for Acquisition" Author: Dave Thompson Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/thompson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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CIG Conference 2010: Changes in Cataloguing in 'Interesting Times' Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CIG Conference 2010: Changes in Cataloguing in 'Interesting Times' Buzz data software wiki xml archives metadata digitisation schema blog repositories cataloguing marc aggregation lcsh aacr2 ontologies lom ebook vle frbr marc21 crm cidoc-crm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Rhiannon McLoughlin reports on a three-day conference on cataloguing in a time of financial stringency, held by the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group at Exeter University, from 13-15 September 2010.
The focus of this conference was initiatives to get through the current economic climate.
Cataloguing departments are under threat of cutbacks as never before.
Papers on streamlining, collaborative enterprises, shared catalogues and services, recycling and repurposing of content using metadata extraction techniques combined to give a flavour of the new thrift driving management.
The continuing progress of the long awaited Resource Description and Access (RDA)[1][2] towards becoming the new international cataloguing standard was another hot topic.
Monday 13 September Keynote: Facing the Future Biddy Fisher, CILIP President Biddy Fisher opened by paying heartfelt tribute to Bob McKee, previous Chief Executive Officer of CILIP, who died earlier this year.
She also referred to the fireworks generated on her blog in the run-up to this conference showing the controversy surrounding cataloguing these days!
[3] Biddy aimed to focus delegates' minds on the new need for advocacy for their positions.
There is no doubt that the socalled 'back-room' professions are under attack.
She warned that all sectors are likely to be affected.
A slideshow of the results of this year's survey 'Defining Our Professional Future' showed that the majority of information professionals themselves believe that the heart of the profession has now moved away from cataloguing and indexing and towards the seven pillars of information literacy as outlined by the Society of College National and University Libraries (SCONUL) [4][5].
In a world where everyone is used to the simplicity of a Google search where does this leave the catalogue?
What were previously regarded as core skills of the profession are no longer recognised as such by the public.
Biddy's message therefore was to 'Take heed of the new heart and make sure your heart is there as well'.
Cataloguers need to have the information literacy agenda at the forefront of their minds whenever new ideas are being developed.
The brutal economic downturn and the results of 'Defining Our Professional Future' are causing a radical rethink of CILIP's future role.
CILIP needs to evolve to become the campaigning organisation its members now desire.
However, it is equally vital that practitioners involved in cataloguing develop a positive campaigning voice for themselves.
In particular, we need to show those who seek to cut out the back room how this will endanger cultural heritage: popular digitisation projects cannot be accomplished if there are no data on which to base them.
Biddy Fisher, CILIP President and Alan Danskin of the British Library at the start of the conference RDA Discussion Session Alan Poulter, University of Strathclyde, CILIP representative of Joint Steering Committee for the development of RDA As CILIP representative of the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) for the development of Resource Description and Access (RDA) Alan had a message for all CILIP members: you're being too quiet!
He wants to act as a gateway between CILIP and its members and urged people to be in touch.
To this end, he will be setting up a wiki as a forum for discussion of ideas.
For a tense moment it appeared that he would get no comment at the conference either!
But audience nerves soon dissipated and a spirited discussion ensued.
What emerged is that RDA is still at the test stage.
Delegates were reassured Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) records will co-exist alongside the new RDA ones.
The underpinning Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model was also discussed.
The free trial of the RDA toolkit finished at the end of August 2010.
Following the official test period until the start of next year it is hoped that the Library of Congress will sign up to begin using RDA and have a positive domino effect on other national libraries to join in as well .
Alan Poulter of the University of Strathclyde and Alan Danskin of the British Library enjoying a break Standards Forum Alan Danskin, Metadata Standards Team, Collection, Acquisition & Description British Library Alan Danskin presented the conference with feedback from survey called 'RDA in the UK' conducted by the BL and CILIP CIG group.
It seems that all share in the nerves of getting to grips with the new rules and that FRBR is a primary cause for confusion!
Whilst most of the 78 survey respondents were aware to some degree of RDA and the models underpinning it, few felt confident enough to say they understood it or could explain it to someone else despite their having attended CILIP briefings.
The survey highlighted training needs.
Crucially, the reasons for adopting RDA must be explained to all staff, whilst naturally cataloguers will need the most in-depth training.
The full results of the survey will be posted on the CIG Web site.
A MARC21 update followed.
Documentation summarising RDA-related format changes (up until May 2010) are available on the Library of Congress Web site [6].
There was also discussion of the limitations of MARC21 and the future possibilities of XML.
Tuesday 14 September The Wisdom for the Cataloguers: Using Collective Intelligence to Assign LCSH Gary Steele, Electronic Services & Systems Librarian, The British Museum Gary Steele of the British Museum presenting his paper on collective LCSH Prior to the conference Gary sent an email to participants asking them to assign Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to a particular book.
15 people had responded producing a total of 23 suggested headings.
This nicely illustrated his point that inconsistencies are endemic and indeed legitimate interpretations of LCSH rules.
Gary's solution is to harness 'the wisdom of the crowd.'
This phrase term comes from James Surowiecki's theory of the same title [7].
Surowiecki's work champions the aggregation of ideas to help decision making.
LCSH are well known to have shortcomings, not least being U.S. biased.
Users increasingly search with keywords and natural language.
The new web and next generation catalogues can often show up glaringly the inconsistencies in LCSH assignation both within and between libraries.
The solution Gary has devised is a computer programme using open source software which aggregates records from different catalogues.
This is called Collective LCSH (cLCSH).
He demonstrated the software using the same book example with which he had begun his paper.
The programme supported a simultaneous search of 20 library catalogues for the same item in order to compare LCSH headings that had been applied.
From here it was a short hop to being able to choose the most common headings.
During question time the audience were keen to think of other uses for the software and Gary happily concurred that there were several he had not thought of himself!
This could be a very good training tool to be able to check the veracity of novice decisions or it could be adapted for checking classification numbers.
Improving Performance in Cataloguing and Technical Services Workflows Stuart Hunt, Data Services & Digital Production Manager, University of Warwick Library Stuart Hunt's paper on Business Process Review (BPR) came with an up-front health warning: 'coming to a library near you whether you like it or not!'
Using the University of Warwick as an example, Stuart showed the value of applying Japanese business management techniques to cataloguing or metadata workflows.
Warwick employed a company called Processfix in 2007-8 which conducted BPRs across the University.
The Library held Rapid Improvement Workshops (RIWs) in 2008-9.
Stuart demonstrated examples of BPR tools.
It is vital to use them to get a holistic view of what is actually being done first.
Critical success factors can then be found.
As applied to Technical Services, time can be measured as the speed of availability, quality as the right book at the right time, and quantity as having an adequate number of copies appropriate to user needs.
The RIWs led to improvements in the library's performance; for example, where previously shelving a book took 48 hours, afterwards it took 4 hours!
A further useful tool is a generic Japanese management tool called a process map.
A wall gets covered in brown paper and everyone in the department is asked to stick up 'post-it' notes about each activity they perform.
From the results a flow chart can be constructed to identify functional areas.
Tellingly, management is often less helpful at this point as it is too focused on future visions, whereas other staff can identify more easily with what current practice actually is.
The aim is to distinguish waste in the process.
Waste can be defined as anything that does not add value.
Examples might be defective goods such as downloaded catalogue records which do not match the item you have on your desk, or items being transported by a circuitous route through the building.
In the case of a technical services workflow, the aim is to achieve a balanced rhythm of items moving through system and the removal of bottlenecks.
Stuart also showed how the application of the FRBR model can help with identifying user needs [8].
FRBR gives recommendations for basic levels of functionality of records which in turn help them become measurable.
Empowering the Team in Interesting Times: Lean Kaizen Robin Armstrong-Viner, Cataloguing Manager, University of Aberdeen Library & Historic Collections Robin was unable to be present at the conference due to a personal emergency.
Alan Danskin gave some background to Robin's Powerpoint presentation which built on the previous session.
At Aberdeen three pathfinder projects were conducted using Lean Kaizen which was developed by Toyota in 1950s.
In Acquisitions, Cataloguing and Classification a Kaizen Blitz workshop was held over five days.
One of the goals was to reduce by 50% the time that passed between a recommendation being made and an order being sent; and then to get the item to the customer within 1 working day of receipt for urgent items and 3 working days for all other requests.
Alan gave examples from the British Library where they have actually set up an annual in-house contest for the best continuous improvement projects.
The Need for a Retrospective Cataloguing Strategy Dunia García-Ontiveros, Head of Retrospective Cataloguing, The London Library Dunia García-Ontiveros, Head of Retrospective Cataloguing, The London Library The London Library is a private library dependent on subscription fees for its income.
Garcia has found that librarians and even cataloguers are often unsure of the meaning of retrospective cataloguing!
Most people believe that all the major work of putting items onto computer catalogues was done in the 1980s.
Grant holders are reluctant to put money towards retrospective cataloguing, preferring instead the sexier digitisation projects, although modifying fundraising terms to talk about 'opening up the collection' and making it more 'accessible' helps.
The London Library is far from unusual in having a backlog.
In 1997 'Making the most of our libraries' drew on data from national surveys conducted in the 1990s to show 50 million records awaiting conversion and called for a national programme with a rather ambitious 5-year completion target [9].
The 1999 Full Disclosure Prioritisation Study also called for a national retrospective programme and set out a 10-year programme to complete 80% of work [10].
It was widely hoped that the launch of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) in 2000 (then known as Re:Source) would see it taking on the responsibility for a national strategy for retrospective cataloguing.
However, this role never materialised and the MLA is now set to cease operating in April 2012 with no clear successor to its role.
In the meantime some projects have gone ahead in a piecemeal fashion, largely within Higher Education institutions (HEIs).
Dunia, together with her colleague Maria Cotera and Ann Chapman from UKOLN, are now in charge of a JISCmail list proposing a new national strategy [11].
A new survey was launched in July 2010 together with Research Libraries UK (RLUK).
Some 80 libraries had responded by the deadline of 1 October 2010.
The running estimate is 10.6 million items outstanding.
Most of the backlog comprises special collections.
Non-book formats often have no kind of record at all.
Information about the state of ongoing projects is also being collected, many of which are under threat in the current economic climate.
The results of the survey will be published when finished.
UKOLN has proposed an Online National Register where libraries can both register their backlogs and update the information as they are completed.
This would save effort having to re-conduct large surveys in the future.
The ongoing challenge is getting people to understand that there are important collections out there which researchers would want to access if they knew of them.
Currently institutions holding such collections are reluctant to let anyone access them due to security issues.
Yet the question arises: with no records of what you have how would you know if anything went missing?
Cataloguing: A Problem Shared?
Sally Curry, Library Collaboration Programme Manager, Research Information Network (RIN) The RIN is a small policy unit (funded by the 4 Higher Education Funding Councils, 7 Research Councils and 3 National Libraries) which aims to improve access to resources for researchers.
In June 2009 it produced a report Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world, on which Sally Curry's presentation was based [12].
Universities have struggled with the pace of technological change in the past decade.
Many researchers think they do not need catalogues and see the library as little more than a book store.
The Creating Catalogues Report was produced after talking to all sections involved in catalogue creation.
It asks sharp-edged questions as to whether current balance of effort is effective in meeting the needs of users.
Sally argued that the local adaptation of records in which so many institutions engage is not really needed.
A shared HE catalogue is the answer.
There are more than 160 university libraries in the UK.
A shared catalogue would reduce costs significantly by cutting out inefficiency.
At the same time a more user-focused enhanced service could be developed.
The catalogue remains an essential tool but we need to adapt to the needs of our users rather than expecting them to change their research behaviour.
Queen's Building Exeter University where the CIG Conference took place All professionals involved, from publishers and aggregators to libraries, need to work together to establish high-quality records, particularly in the budding e-book market.
Since researchers are interested in accessing journals at article level today, journals publishers are recommended to share article-level metadata.
There is also a need to simplify licensing to halt the current confusion over what records can be shared.
A positive note is that the British Library is now making bibliographic records free to researchers and other libraries for non-commercial purposes.
Similarly, sharing is the overriding message in the case of institutional repositories.
Open Data and Data management are important upcoming issues.
Funders are increasingly requiring grant holders make their data available to third parties.
Wednesday 15 September One Ring to Rule Them All: CIDOC CRM Alan Poulter, Lecturer, University of Strathclyde, Department of Computer and Information Sciences Alan started with enthusiasm for the wealth of high-quality digital cultural content on the Internet produced by 'memory institutions' museums, libraries and archives.
The problem is how to make this terrific content more available.
The difference in professional approaches, granularity of description and descriptive data structures combine to hamper cross-domain discovery.
Since the differences are primarily at the level of data structure and syntax, the solution posed by this model is to map everything onto a schema with broad and universal semantics for the purposes of resource discovery.
CIDOC-CRM (International Committee for Documentation Conceptual Reference Model) is a domain ontology for exchanging rich cultural heritage data [13].
It is embodied in the international standard 21127:2006.
An XML application, it provides a kit to build your documentation.
CIDOC-CRM has a class hierarchy of 81 named classes interlinked by 132 named properties.
Alan demonstrated how events in CRM are the linking factors that drive the model.
He demonstrated how specific photographs and documents all fitted into the model around the central event (in this case the Yalta Agreement) to which they were all related.
The FRBR/CRM Harmonisation Group has gone further to produce FRBRoo (FRBR object orientation) which is a mix of the FRBR and CRM models.
CRM, he argued, has made the FRBR concept more fully rounded.
The final aim is to produce a universal approach in the libraries and museums sector.
CIDOC-CRM is a forwardlooking model for the semantic Web.
Alan admitted that the CIDOC-CRM is complicated and needs more road testing.
Trying to deal with such a comprehensive spectrum of information types is never going to be simple and he recommended Steven Stead's tutorial for beginners [14].
Repository Metadata Dawn H. Wood, Research Officer, Leeds Metropolitan University The Streamline Project was a 2009 JISC-funded project about extracting metadata to enable simple repository deposit [15].
Dawn began with an exercise where the conference delegates were asked to choose a few keywords for a picture of a rather bland-looking room.
It turned out to be a hotel room produced as part of a package for training hotel staff, the title of the picture being 'Finding a lost key card'.
The variety of audience keywords showed how it could easily have been used as a picture to illustrate something else.
One of the most important aims of building up digital repositories is to be able to re-purpose, reuse or recycle content or 'Learning Objects'.
One of the current problems is the lack of good-quality metadata to enable people to pick out content they might need.
Another major stumbling block is lecturer resistance to repositories.
There is both a fear of criticism and also a problem with ownership.
Lecturers also often produce content without proper referencing.
In short, staff often cannot see the benefit of sharing items in a repository.
Dawn described the alternative Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) as a 'dead end' because usually only staff and students on a particular course in a particular institution can access it.
The first part of the Streamline Project involved looking at what staff at Leeds University were actually doing when they used self-deposit repositories.
It was found that lecturers entered very few keywords which tended to be either very specific or very general, or that they entered phrases or even put in the whole title of their presentation.
This posed serious limits to keywords as a search tool.
The second part of the project entailed identifying ways of generating improved metadata in line with internationally recognised Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standards.
The Streamline team created an automatic metadata generator which took details from course and module materials and generated keywords.
Filters and using 'term frequency,' whereby the number of times that a word was repeated in a Learning Object was counted, (whilst removing small words such as 'of' and 'the'), enabled the production of a suggested keyword list.
Testing showed that lecturers found it helpful at the least as a prompt to helping them pick appropriate keywords.
Intralibrary was the repository system chosen as a result because it was the only system at the time that allowed metadata to be uploaded from elsewhere.
Open Mic Session An open microphone session was held in lieu of Robin Armstrong-Viner's second session.
Topics raised were Concerns about the increasing publication of government and other organisational information in online format only.
There is a new impetus in the current climate now that so many organisations are losing funding, being abolished or merging, as more information is likely to be lost when Web sites are taken down.
The need to extend British Library legal deposit to electronic items is urgent.
The UK is lagging behind the US in collaborative initiatives to become Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) funnels for authority control records.
The influence of shelf-ready books on libraries and their cataloguing departments.
RDA: whilst virtually all the delegates had accessed the free trial, precious few have yet signed up to the paid version.
Conclusion New software applications combined with the new austerity could see moves towards resource sharing on an unprecedented scale in the library and publishing world.
Provocative ideas from this conference will help cataloguers and managers to ask themselves hard questions about which of their activities really support the new user-focused models.
Presentations from the conference are available from the conference programme webpage [16] References "RDA: A New International Standard", Ann Chapman, October 2006, Ariadne, Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/chapman/ "RDA: Resource Description and Access", Wendy Taylor and Helen Williams, April 2010, Ariadne, Issue 63 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/rda-briefing-rpt/ Fisher, B., 'Biddy's Blog' (2010) http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/biddy/default.aspx (accessed 18 September 2010) CILIP (2010), 'Defining our professional future: Report to CILIP Council' http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/cilipfuture/Pages/default.aspx (accessed 18 September 2010) SCONUL (2004) 'The seven pillars of information literacy model', http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html (accessed 18 September 2010) Library of Congress (2010) 'RDA in MARC' http://www.loc.gov/marc/RDAinMARC29.html (accessed 18 September 2010) Surowiecki, James (2005).
The Wisdom of Crowds.
Publisher: Anchor IFLA (2008) 'Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Final Report' http://www.ifla.org/files/cataloguing/frbr/frbr_2008.pdf (accessed 17 September 2010) Byrant, Philip, Editor (1997).
Making the most of our libraries.
British Library RIC Report No 53. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/bl/blri053/ (accessed 17 October 2010) Cultural Heritage Consortium (1999) 'Full disclosure prioritisation study' http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/acrossuk/worknat/full/fdabout/fulldisc-priorityreport.pdf (accessed 17 September 2010) García-Ontiveros, D.,Cotera, M., Chapman, A.
(2010) retro@jiscmail.ac.uk (accessed 25 October 2010) Resource Information Network (2009) 'Creating Catalogues: Bibliographic records in a networked world' http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/creating-catalogues-bibliographic-records-network (accessed 17 September 2010) CIDOC, CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group (DSWG) [online] (2006) 'The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model' http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ (accessed 18 September 2010) Stead, Steven (2008).
'The CIDOC CRM, a standard for the integration of cultural information' http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc_tutorial/index.html (accessed 20 September 2010) Finlay, J., Gray, J., Wood, D. [online] (2009) 'Streamline: integrating repository function with work practice: tools to facilitate personal e-administration http://streamlinenews.wordpress.com/ (accessed 17 September 2010) CILIP CIG, (2010) 'Cataloguing and Indexing Group conference: the University of Exeter 13-15 September 2010' http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/CIG/2010/conf-exeter/programme/ (accessed 25 October 2010) Author Details Rhiannon McLoughlin Senior Learning Centre Assistant (Library Support Services) Exeter College Email: rhiannonmcloughlin@exe-coll.ac.uk Web site: http://www.exe-coll.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "CIG Conference 2010: Changes in Cataloguing in 'Interesting Times'" Author: Rhiannon McLoughlin Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/cig-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Lost in the JISC Information Environment Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Lost in the JISC Information Environment Buzz data portal infrastructure metadata thesaurus vocabularies schema blog cataloguing visualisation interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Tony Ross gives a personal reflection on his intellectual struggle to comprehend the JISC Information Environment.
The Resource Discovery iKit [1] is the result of a recently completed project to produce an information kit for tools and reports related to resource discovery created by JISC-funded projects and services.
Created by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, the iKit has exploited the Centre’s expertise in the area of digital libraries to create a dynamic retrieval system which uses multi-faceted control vocabularies to allow researchers and developers a quick and easy interface for the discovery and retrieval of a comprehensive range of quality-assessed resources.
The production of such controlled vocabularies has entailed a high-level analysis of both the language and technologies used by the JISC community.
Given the iKit’s brief to describe resource discovery tools, this taxonomic and technological analysis has required particularly close examination of the JISC Information Environment 2 and its underlying documentation, authored in large part by Andy Powell.
This documentation, along with the near ubiquitous IE architecture diagram, provided this author, as project officer for the iKit project, with an excellent orientation in the scope and purpose of current JISC research into resource discovery.
Such close scrutiny, however, means the author is perhaps well placed to offer, in turn, a high-level view of the design of the IE, its underlying architecture, and the way in which such attempts to describe and document an essentially ephemeral concept in specific language has perhaps led to misunderstanding or confusion over the extent to which, in philosophical terms, the IE has existence.
Figure 1: JISC Information Environment Architecture [3] In particular, the author seeks answers to the following questions which occurred during his work with the IE: What is the purpose of the IE, what are the particular problems it was originally envisioned to address?
Is it possible, or even necessary to attempt, to define the IE in a holistic way; is it rather a mere description of the possible ways a number of independent technological services and processes might interact in a process of resource discovery, retrieval and use?
To what extent was/is the IE intended to be prescriptive or descriptive, what is the importance of this distinction?
What problems or issues have arisen as a result of lack of clarity in these questions?
What Is It For?
: The Purpose of the IE What were the particular problems the IE was envisioned to address?
That this is not a simple question to answer is indicated by the words of Peter Brophy, leader of the EDNER project which sought to evaluate the IE and its forerunner, the DNER, from 2000 to 2004: “We realised … that it was critical to try to elucidate exactly what the DNER was or was aiming to be – and we found that the answer was by no means straightforward.
Exactly the same concern can be expressed about the current IE.” [4] As said, the IE was built upon work done on the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), described by Andy Powell and Liz Lyon as “a JISC-funded, managed, heterogeneous collection of information resources and services … of particular value to the further and higher education communities”.
They go on to advise that the IE was envisioned to implement a “set of networked services that allows people to discover, access, use and publish resources within the DNER” [5].
Over time the term DNER fell from favour and the IE term is now effectively used to describe all work done in this area.
The need for work in this area was made clear by the JISC Information Environment: Development Strategy 2001-2005 [6].
This document described the fragmented nature of online services providing digital resources at that time, and the consequent requirement for users to “navigate a complex set of different websites with different search interfaces” and “lack of mediation to provide vital signposts to explain context and relevance to the user”.
It was recognised that these constituted barriers to the take-up of digital resources by the HE/FE community.
Hence, the IE was, at root, proposed as a way to bring integration and coherence to the use of digital resources in order to encourage take-up among users.
It is against this core aim that the IE must be understood.
Even at this early stage however, it was acknowledged that complete homogeneity within the IE was impossible.
Two intractable factors were recognised by the IE strategy document: (1) that digital resources are “inherently distributed”, i.e.
that it is necessarily the case that they are delivered by multiple service providers, and (2) that “users do not all want to access information in the same way but will require a diverse range of views of resources in order to satisfy their needs” [7].
Thus while content provision is necessarily heterogeneous and distributed, users want diverse and personalisable services by which to access them.
These factors are key: they motivate the need for the work done under the IE title.
By showing total homogeneity to be impossible, however, they also remind us that the IE as an architecture can never be complete, that it is only an abstract conceptual model.
There is a danger that in seeking to aid the understanding of work done in the area of resource discovery, access and use that we misunderstand the purpose of the IE model.
It is an abstract model to aid understanding; it is not an architectural blueprint.
That the architecture diagram provides such a visually striking, seemingly easily understood, sketch of this abstract model has perhaps propagated a fallacious sense of the degree to which the IE can be said to exist.
In short, the implicit investment of too much belief in the existence of the IE concept, and of authority in the IE diagram, might allow the JISC community to envisage that they are involved in the construction of something less nebulous, ephemeral, and disjointed than they would prefer to believe.
Can It Exist?
: The Architecture of the IE UKOLN’s 2001 study, The DNER Technical Architecture: scoping the information environment, was the first attempt to define the DNER as a technical architecture, with the intention to “underpin the development of the DNER as a managed collection of resources in an integrated information environment.” [8].
To this end, the authors developed a conceptual architectural model which split IE services into four broad classes of activity, namely: provision the storage and delivery of content, fusion the bringing together of metadata about content from multiple providers, presentation interaction with the end-user, and infrastructure shared services that support other activities This basic conceptual division between services has persisted throughout the development of the Information Environment.
From the start, however, the authors of this architecture sought to make it explicit that these broad conceptual distinctions were, to a greater or lesser extent, artificial: Typically, services will not fall cleanly into these four categories.
For example, portals are likely to engage in both presentation and fusion activities, content providers will engage in provision and presentation, etc.
[9] Figure 2: DNER service categories (2001) [10] Building upon these four basic service distinctions, Andy Powell created the Information Environment architecture diagram in 2003 (see Figure 3 below).
The diagram aimed to align various technical and conceptual service features with this four-faceted conceptual view of services.
The result was an abstract architectural model which sought to aid visualisation of the ways in which services might interact.
Figure 3: IE architectural diagram (2003) [11] It is important here to note that the author of the diagram, even upon its introduction, gave explicit caveats as to the amount of authority he believed ought to be invested in it.
Thus, in separate instances, he states the diagram to be neither “intended to be definitive” [12], nor “intended to be a straightjacket into which all services must neatly fit” [13].
Prescription or Description?
The Authority of the IE Architecture Here, we might do well to ask a key question: Was the IE architectural diagram intended to be prescriptive or descriptive of the nature of the JISC IE?
That is, did it seek to prescribe what was required to constitute an ‘information environment’ or to describe components which either already existed or were in the process of being created?
This question is important because confusion between prescription and description exists implicitly in the use of the architecture metaphor.
While architectural blueprints for a building will necessarily precede a building’s construction, we can also talk of the ‘architecture’ of an existing building, to mean its design and structural features.
This duality of meaning must be made explicit to avoid conceptual drift in our use of that metaphor.
Where the IE architecture might be seen to be most prescriptive is in the area of shared infrastructure services.
There, solid units of functionality are envisioned to be necessary to support the control of meta-metadata in the IE, in order to support a common information culture.
Thus, the metadata schema registry will hold authority data on types of metadata used within the IE, etc.
Even here, though, a descriptive rather than prescriptive nature is described by Powell: The list of infrastructural services shown on the JISC IE architecture diagram … was not intended to be exhaustive.
As the community and landscape evolves we can expect to see new shared services being developed, both within and without the JISC community.
[14] Problems and Issues: Getting Lost in the IE The IE architecture was intended to be a working model, an aide to assist conceptualisation of an essentially abstract concept.
We might ask, though, to what extent this mutability has been ignored as the clarity which the diagram sought to bring was valued too highly, and allowed it to fix in people’s minds.
Powell, in a 2007 posting on his efoundations blog, reflected on time spent in meetings about JISC shared services: My JISC IE architecture diagram has stood the test of time, but not without some problems.
One problem is that the rigidity of the diagram doesn’t reflect the messiness of the real-world.
The truth is that there are no service boxes like the ones on the diagram in [real life].
It’s a myth a sometimes helpful myth, but still a myth.
[15] He argues that this becomes problematic when JISC funds programmes based on these labels, citing the Portals Programme as an example.
He goes on to refer to an attempt to define the word registry which failed to produce a definition that couldn’t just as well be applied to the word catalogue, worrying that despite this, “JISC funds cataloguing activity (e.g.
Intute) as though it was completely separate from, and different to, registry activity.” In a response to a blog posting by Brian Kelly, Powell continues this theme: “One of the problems with the diagram was that it mixed up conceptual bits of functionality with actual boxes on the network.” Continuing the theme of the diagram as not reflecting the “messiness” of the real world, he goes on to say: It wasn’t particularly intended to but perhaps I didn’t make that clear enough.
To be honest, I probably didn’t even recognise that when the diagram was first developed … As a result, we (the JISC community) ended up taking the boxes and layers in the diagram perhaps too literally on occasion.
[16] So, for Powell, it is obvious that the key virtues of the architectural diagram (those which have made it so popular over time), i.e.
its clarity and ability to be easily understood, might also have implicitly oversimplified a very complex area of research, and have made the IE seem too structured in nature.
It is clear, then, that a note of caution might be timely, to remind ourselves within the JISC community that the JISC IE architecture diagram is not a blueprint in the architectural sense – to a certain extent, it is merely descriptive of a combination of actual technical features and abstract digital library functions.
To these problems, we might add the quite spectacular fall from favour of the ‘portal’ concept, as it has come to be seen as so universally applicable as to be almost meaningless.
The iKit thesaurus still uses the term, as it is so ubiquitous within literature written about the IE as to be inescapable.
The provision layer, upon inspection, also proves problematic.
While other areas of the diagram are carved up according to their technical function or service, the components of the provision layer are distinguished only by the origin of content (i.e., JISC-funded, institutional and external content providers).
While this distinction might have important implications for issues such as intellectual property rights, is it really important enough to distinguish IE content provision in this way?
Is it perhaps the case that provision was taken to be a mere vanishing point for the IE, and that those boxes are mere placeholders, existing for the purpose of symmetry?
The iKit IE thesaurus, having to deal only with resource discovery outputs, thankfully did not attempt to define this area any further.
It is suggested here, however, that this remains an open question.
Conclusion The shape, scope, and eventual architecture of the IE should be determined only by the functional needs of end-users and institutions in UK HE/FE and by the limits of available technologies.
There are two problems attendant upon Powell’s IE architectural model.
Firstly, while it is very helpful, perhaps crucial, to present a structured and holistic view of the progress of research conducted under the IE concept, the diagram perhaps lends itself to the misinterpretation that it exists to act deterministically.
As we have seen, this is not the case; the IE diagram assists but does not dictate the outcomes of IE research.
Secondly, there is also the danger that an impossible homogeneity might be implied.
While it might provide consolation to the JISC community to be able to point towards a seminal diagram and say “we are building this”, especially given the essential ephememerality and necessary pragmatism in our area of research, this must not be allowed to skew perceptions of the (lack of) structure in what we do.
The IE does not, can not, have existence.
The term is a description of a set of interoperable services and technologies which have been created to enhance the resource discovery access and use for users in HE/FE; it exists to aid conceptualisation of this ephemeral subject.
No more, no less.
Figure 4: A true JISC Information Environment architecture?
[17] References JISC Resource Discovery iKit http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/rdinfokit/service/index.cfm JISC Information Environment http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/information_environment.aspx Figure 1 “The JISC IE architecture diagram” in: Andy Powell (2005).
A ‘service oriented’ view of the JISC Information Environment http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/soa/jisc-ie-soa.pdf Brophy, P. (2005).
The formative evaluation of the 5⁄99 Programme and its broader environment: the EDNER Project.
VINE.
35(1⁄2), p. 106.
Available: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/.
Accessed 20 May 2007.
Powell, A. and Lyon, L. (2002, March/April).
The JISC Information Environment and Web services.
Ariadne.
Issue 3 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/information-environments/.
Accessed: 7 April 2008.
Grout, C. (2001).
Information Environment Development Strategy 2001-2005.
Available: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/infoenvironment/ie_strategy.pdf Accessed 4 December 2007.
Ibid.
p.4 Powell, A. and Lyon, L. (2001).
The DNER Technical Architecture: scoping the information environment.
Bath: UKOLN, University of Bath.
Available: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/dner-arch.html.
Accessed 7 Apr 2008.
Ibid.
Figure 12 “DNER service categories” in: Andy Powell & Liz Lyon (2001).
The DNER Technical Architecture: scoping the information environment http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/dner-arch.html Appears as http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/powell/large-original.html in: Andy Powell, Mapping the JISC IE service landscape, July 2003, Ariadne, Issue 36 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/powell/ Powell, A.
(2005).
A service oriented view of the JISC Information Environment.
Pp.
3.
Bath: UKOLN, University of Bath.
Available: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/soa/jisc-ie-soa.pdf.
Accessed 7 April 2008.
Powell, A.
(2003).
Mapping the JISC IE service landscape.
Ariadne.
Issue 36.
Available: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/powell/.
Accessed: 7 April 2008.
Powell, A.
(2005).
The JISC Resource Discovery Landscape a personal reflection on the JISC Information Environment and related activities.
Pp.
22.
UKOLN, University of Bath.
Available: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/resource-discovery-review/.
Accessed 7 Apr 2008.
Powell, A.
(2007).
You sharin’?
You askin’?
Blog posting, July 02 2007.
Available: http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2007/07/you-sharin-you-.html Accessed 20 May 2008.
Powell, A.
(2007).
Comment on: From the DNER to Web 2.0 blog posting by Kelly, B.
Available: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2007/07/03/from-the-dner-to-web-20/#comments Accessed 20 May 2008.
Appears as slide no.
5 in: Andy Powell (2004).
The JISC IE: shared, global or common services?.
A presentation at: JISC Common Services Integration Meeting, 27 October 2004 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/jisc-frameworks-2004-10/intro_files/v3_document.htm Author Details Tony Ross Research Assistant Centre for Digital Library Research University of Strathclyde Email: anthony.ross@strath.ac.uk Web site: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/people/rosst.htm Return to top Article Title: “Lost in the JISC Information Environment” Author: Tony Ross Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/ross/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The Second British Library DataCite Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Second British Library DataCite Workshop Buzz data software rdf database portal apache infrastructure archives metadata doi identifier schema repositories preservation cataloguing marc ontologies prism foaf url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Alex Ball reports on a one-day workshop on metadata supporting the citation of research data, held at the British Library, London, on 6 July 2012.
On Friday, 6 July 2012 I made my way to the British Library Conference Centre for the second in a series of DataCite workshops [1].
The theme was Describe, Disseminate, Discover: Metadata for Effective Data Citation.
In welcoming us to the event, Lee-Ann Coleman, Head of Scientific, Technical and Medical Information at the British Library, said there had been some doubt as to whether anyone would turn up to an event about metadata, but as it happened there were 36 of us, drawn from across the UK and beyond.
Overview I had the honour of starting off proceedings with an overview of data citation and discovery.
I began by using the OAIS Information Model [2] as a way of explaining the different metadata requirements for the three tasks of citation, discovery and reuse.
I then fleshed out what those requirements were by first comparing four different data citation styles, and then comparing a range of metadata schemes used in data discovery portals and data archives.
I also touched on some of the issues that arise in data citation, such as how one might enumerate all the contributors to a dataset and how to apply identifiers to dynamic datasets.
DataCite Metadata I was followed by Elizabeth Newbold of the British Library, who explained how the DataCite Metadata Schema had been developed, from its conception in August 2009, to the release of version 2.2 in July 2011 [3].
Elizabeth took us through the five mandatory and 12 optional elements of the schema, explaining why each had been included and certain others left out.
There were some useful lessons for anyone thinking of developing their own schema, particularly on the costs and benefits of maintaining an authority list of element values.
The talk concluded with some hints on what the future might hold for the schema: elements for recording spatio-temporal coverage, if the encoding scheme can be agreed, and even a corresponding Dublin Core DataCite Application Profile (DC2AP).
Case Studies: Repositories and Archives Next up was David Boyd of the University of Bristol, who introduced us to data.bris, which is both a project and a research data storage facility at the University [4].
Researchers have to apply to use the facility, but once approved they can add data to it as if it were another network drive.
The really nifty feature is that the facility automatically assembles metadata for the deposited data from the files themselves (using Apache Tika [5]) and various University systems, including the new Current Research Information System (CRIS).
The system can then push this metadata to DataCite if researchers press the big red 'Publish' button, registering a DOI for the data in the process, and there are plans to have it push metadata to the CRIS as well.
After lunch, Michael Charno of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) [6] demonstrated how its in-house content management system (CMS) is being used to manage metadata for both archaeological data sets and grey literature.
The metadata are mostly elicited from depositors, though the ADS supplies technical and management metadata.
Master metadata records are kept in the CMS and then pushed out to the various systems operated by the ADS (e.g.
ArchSearch, Grey Literature Library, Heritage Gateway).
Most of these systems have their own metadata schema, but because they are all heavily based on Dublin Core, they interoperate well.
Recently a module was added to the CMS so that metadata records could be pushed out to DataCite as well; the module also handles minting DOIs and updating the corresponding URLs.
Case Studies: Discovery Portals In 2007, the British Library (BL) commissioned a study of the research data landscape, a major recommendation of which was that the BL should consider providing a data discovery service [7].
Rachael Kotarski of the BL took up the story of what happened next.
A basic set of metadata was devised that supported data discovery without going into disciplinary detail.
Sample records were then loaded into the BL's Explore service [8] and trials were conducted to see if users found the metadata set optimal.
Having established that the service would be useful and used, the BL proceeded to work out how to integrate dataset records into the main BL catalogue.
This meant mapping the metadata set to MARC fields and, because the software did not have an entry template for databases, selecting the most appropriate from those that were avaialable.
Some negotiation was required between the cataloguers and the dataset curators before everyone was happy.
Now, the remaining issues to solve relate to the ongoing maintenance of the records; tactics such as updating URLs and metadata from DataCite records and repository landing pages are being considered.
The last case study of the day came from Steve Donegan of STFC, who took us through the development of the NERC Data Catalogue Service (DCS) [9].
This is a combined catalogue of the datasets held by all the NERC data centres.
It is the third generation of the catalogue, the preceding iterations being the NERC DataGrid (NDG), with its Data Discovery Service and Data Portal, and the NERC Metadata Gateway.
Since 2007 there has been a legal requirement for NERC to make metadata for its datasets available using the profile of ISO 19115 designed for the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) [10].
NERC began writing its own profile of ISO 19115 to help it comply with this, but then found the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) was already using a workable profile, so NERC adopted that with some minor tweaks.
Now that version 2 of the UK GEMINI profile is available [11], NERC is considering switching to that instead.
Steve concluded by explaining the current and planned architecture of the DCS, in particular how it relates (and will relate) to the UK Location Portal, which implements the INSPIRE requirements for the UK.
Advanced Metadata Applications The day's talks concluded with David Shotton of the University of Oxford introducing RDF and the advanced applications to which it may be put.
He showed how he had reconstructed the DataCite metadata schema using elements from Dublin Core [12], FOAF [13], PRISM [14], the Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies (SPAR) [15], and a custom ontology [16].
He then demonstrated a Web form for entering DataCite metadata, automatically generated from this RDF scheme [17].
He then discussed the practicalities of data citation before introducing the Open Citations Project [18].
The latter is an initiative to compile a database of biomedical literature citations; so far these have been harvested from PubMed Central, but the Project intends to pull them in from CrossRef and DataCite as well.
Discussion To round things off, Caroline Wilkinson of the British Library chaired a discussion of issues raised by the talks.
Of particular concern were how to handle sensitive and embargoed data, and how to satisfy the needs of both humans and machines in DOI landing pages.
A couple of delegates said they now had a better appreciation of how DataCite's optional metadata would be used, and would therefore make a greater effort to provide it.
Conclusions Confounding what one might expect from a workshop on metadata, the day turned out to be enjoyable, informative and highly relevant on a practical level to those who attended.
I personally learned a lot about initiatives of which I had previously had a shaky grasp.
There wasn't quite the level of questioning and debate you'd expect from an event like this, but this was more a credit to the speakers for their clarity rather than indicating any lack of engagement from the delegates.
Indeed, I had the impression that the workshop will make a tangible difference to how several institutions handle their research data.
The slides from the presentations are available from the British Library Web site [19].
The third workshop in this series has yet to be announced at the time of writing, but is expected to take place in October 2012.
References British Library DataCite workshops http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/datasets/dataciteworkshops/ Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), Magenta Book CCSDS 650.0-M-2, June 2012 http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0m2.pdf DataCite Metadata Schema for the Publication and Citation of Research Data, Version 2.2, July 2011 http://dx.doi.org/10.5438/0005 data.bris Project http://data.blogs.ilrt.org/ Apache Tika http://tika.apache.org/ Archaeology Data Service http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/ British Library, Background to Datasets Activity http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/experthelp/science/sciencetechnologymedicinecollections/researchdatasets/datasets.html Explore the British Library http://explore.bl.uk/ NERC Data Catalogue Service http://data-search.nerc.ac.uk/ Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ UK GEMINI (Geo-spatial Metadata Interoperability Initiative) http://www.agi.org.uk/uk-gemini/ Dublin Core Metadata Initiative http://dublincore.org/ Friend of a Friend (FOAF) Vocabulary http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) http://www.prismstandard.org/specifications/Prism1%5B1%5D.2.pdf Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies (SPAR) http://purl.org/spar David Shotton and Silvio Peroni, The DataCite Ontology, Version 0.5, July 2012 http://purl.org/spar/datacite/ Tanya Gray and David Shotton, DataCite Input Form http://www.miidi.org:8080/datacite/ Open Citations database http://opencitations.net/ British Library, Previous Workshops http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/datasets/workshoparchive/archive.html Author Details Alex Ball Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: a.ball@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~ab318/ Alex Ball is a Research Officer working in the field of digital curation and research data management, and an Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre.
His interests include Engineering research data, Web technologies and preservation, scientific metadata, data citation and the intellectual property aspects of research data.
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SUNCAT: Ten Years and Beyond Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SUNCAT: Ten Years and Beyond Buzz data mobile software rdf sparql api database restful xml portal apache archives metadata browser identifier blog video cataloguing opac z39.50 marc aacr2 ejournal rslp frbr openurl sru facebook twitter solr licence algorithm research standards Citation BibTex RIS Celia Jenkins charts the beginnings of SUNCAT, its development over the last ten years and what the future holds for the service.
2013 marked the 10th anniversary of SUNCAT.
Back in 2003, SUNCAT (Serials Union CATalogue) started as a project undertaken by EDINA [1] in response to an observed need for better journals information in the UK, which was identified in the UKNUC report [2].
In August 2006, SUNCAT became a full service, and is now an established resource that contains serials records, including more and more e-journals information, of an ever-increasing number of libraries.
It has been further developed, with additional functionality, culminating in the introduction of a new interface last year.
This overview of SUNCAT will look at how it was started, how it has developed over the years and what the future holds for the service.
What Is SUNCAT?
SUNCAT is a Jisc[3]-funded service containing serials records at the title level, in a variety of formats held by 99 institutions.
This includes the UK National libraries and Legal Deposit libraries [4], specialist libraries and libraries of the major research universities.
It also holds records from the CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials) database [5], ISSN Registry [6] and the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) [7].
It covers libraries throughout the UK, from the University of Aberdeen in north-east Scotland to the University of Exeter in south-west England.
In addition, it contains serials records from Trinity College Dublin, which is the only non-UK Contributing Library; it is also one of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries, which can all be found in SUNCAT.
Receiving records from such a wide range of libraries all over the UK is a very important objective of SUNCAT.
Specialist libraries and Legal Deposit Libraries hold many titles which are unique to that institution.
Research universities hold a very wide range of titles, sometimes on specialist subjects.
A full list of Contributing Libraries is available on the SUNCAT Web site [8].
SUNCAT is the single most comprehensive source of information on serials holdings in the UK, and is continually adding journals data from a range of new libraries.
SUNCAT accepts all records which Contributing Libraries deem to be serials and, therefore, contains a wide variety of material, such as journals, periodicals, newspapers, newsletters, magazines, proceedings and annual reports.
It currently holds over 7.5 million bibliographic records.
In order to ensure the information on SUNCAT is kept as current as possible, the catalogue is updated on a regular basis.
The SUNCAT team sets up an updating schedule specific to each Contributing Library (CL).
Most libraries provide monthly updates, though some update more frequently while some do so less frequently.
Update schedules are arranged with each library to suit its workflows.
Who Uses SUNCAT and Why SUNCAT is a freely available service, with no log-in necessary.
It enables academics, researchers and students, and indeed anyone else, to locate journals quickly and easily and, ultimately, obtain full-text articles.
To this end, SUNCAT has developed a ToC (Table of Contents) facility.
(See SUNCAT’s ToC Service below.)
Searching SUNCAT can also help users identify other journals in a particular field, of which they may previously have been unaware.
SUNCAT is invaluable for librarians, especially those who deal with Inter-Library Loans and so need to locate where a serial is held in the UK.
SUNCAT also has a vital role to play in library collection management in general and the UK Research Reserve (UKRR) [9] specifically (see SUNCAT and UKRR below).
By identifying which organisations hold which items, librarians can make an informed choice on what to stock and what not to stock, as well as which journal subscriptions may need to be cancelled due to financial or space constraints.
A number of use cases and case studies [10] illustrating the usage of SUNCAT can be found on the SUNCAT Web site.
SUNCAT also provides access to good-quality bibliographic serials records.
In order to aid cataloguing, librarians can consult the MARC records on the Web interface and download records in Dublin Core XML and SUTRS (Simple Unstructured Text Record Syntax) formats using a freely available z39.50 connection.
There are approximately 1.2 million CONSER records in SUNCAT, and these records are of a particularly high standard.
In addition, CLs can use an authenticated z39.50 connection to download MARC records directly into their catalogues.
This is especially useful when a library is embarking on a retrospective conversion programme.
Information about the downloading facility is available on the SUNCAT Web site, including a printable guide of search tips for cataloguers using the Z39.50 connection.
Another benefit of being a CL is that these library collections become more visible to others and therefore are consulted more.
A benefits and expectations document for libraries [11] can be found on the SUNCAT Web site.
What SUNCAT Does with the Data The format and quality of bibliographic and holdings data received by SUNCAT differs for each library.
It is vital, therefore, to standardise this data as much as possible, to help ensure that records are matched together and that the holdings information is brought together and clearly displayed in SUNCAT.
Tailored data specifications are created to normalise data to a suitable form for loading into SUNCAT.
This accounts for local cataloguing practices and legacy data.
SUNCAT provides a guide to supplying records for CLs and those thinking of contributing [12].
This includes the process involved in becoming a CL, along with what data should be supplied in an ideal record, based on MARC, though SUNCAT also accepts data from non-MARC libraries.
It should also be emphasised that this level of detail is an ideal, and that the entry standard is set to a lower level to allow as many libraries as possible to contribute their serials records to SUNCAT.
SUNCAT aims to de-duplicate records for the same title so that only one record with the best bibliographic data appears for each, with all the libraries holding that title listed underneath this 'preferred' record.
This is achieved by running a complex matching algorithm that works on a points scoring system, which compares records and weighs them up against each other.
More detailed information on the matching algorithm and the merging process can be found on the SUNCAT Web site.
[13].
However, it is not always possible to achieve perfect de-duplication, largely due to the brevity of the data in some of the records supplied to SUNCAT.
Therefore, a results list will commonly contain a number of records for the same serial title and each of these may have one or more library's holdings attached, so it is necessary to look at each of these records to establish all the available holdings for that title in SUNCAT [14].
SUNCAT’s Milestones During the 11 years SUNCAT has been in existence, a number of key changes and developments have taken place that have had an important bearing on its creation and evolution.
Figure 1: SUNCAT timeline SUNCAT: The Beginning A ‘Feasibility Study for a National Union Catalogue’ (UKNUC) [2] was carried out in 2000 for the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils (JISC), the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) [15] and the British Library’s Co-operation and Partnership Programme.
Having consulted with the user community during the study, it became clear to this group that there was a real need for improved information in the UK about serials in particular.
There was a lack of quality in bibliographic and holdings data for serials overall and the data was very variable.
Through the consultation process a number of user requirements were identified.
These included: Providing a comprehensive coverage of bibliographic data from the British Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, major research libraries, and specialist libraries; Offering a good range of search access points, including subject search.
Results, especially holdings information, being clearly displayed; Being able to pre-select the libraries a user wants to search; Having a user-friendly interface; Enabling the downloading of high-quality records so that data in local catalogues can be upgraded.
This would in turn, improve both the efficiency and quality of the library community’s work, and result in better services for its users.
To this end, it was recommended that the CONSER database of serials records and the ISSN Register be included in any National Union Serials Catalogue.
Ensuring the service is designed in such a way that it can be linked to other catalogues or resources, and can form an integrated resource with added-value services developed in future.
([2], p.3-4, 8, 10) Initial funding was approved for a scoping study and specification of a serials union catalogue for the UK, which would support research, promote collaboration and integration of library collections, and help ensure free and easy access to serials.
An invitation to tender, initially for two years, was then issued by JISC and RSLP.
The contract was awarded to EDINA and its project partner Ex Libris [16], which supplies the Library Management System, ALEPH, that underpins SUNCAT.
SUNCAT: Phase One (2003-2004) Serials records of 22 libraries, plus CONSER and ISSN, were initially loaded into SUNCAT, so as to populate SUNCAT with a critical mass of titles held in UK research libraries.
The records were provided in MARC21 format.
In this project phase the libraries of the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh and Glasgow, along with the National Library of Scotland, worked closely together with the SUNCAT team.
A list of Phase 1 CLs can be found on the SUNCAT Web site [17].
Also during this first phase both the SUNCAT Steering Committee (2003-2007) and the SUNCAT Bibliographic Quality Advisory Group (BQAG) (2003-2009) were set up, with members of JISC and CLs providing invaluable help and advice [18].
SUNCAT: Phase Two (Jan 2005-Aug 2007) The coverage was increased to include specialist collections and older and rarer materials, such as those from the Natural History Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew).
Over 40 more libraries were added during this time.
The pilot project became a service in August 2006.
The downloading service commenced in December 2007, enabling staff at CLs to download records from the CONSER database.
In April 2009 the ISSN Register was added to the pool of records.
SUNCAT: Beyond Phase Two Since the end of Phase Two, SUNCAT has strengthened its position as the first reference point for information about serials held in UK libraries.
The current 99 Contributing Libraries includes 63 Higher Education libraries and 33 specialist and research libraries, covering wide geographical and subject areas within the UK and Ireland.
The serials records of CONSER database, ISSN Register and the Directory of Open Access Journals are also found in SUNCAT.
7 new libraries (4 University and 3 specialist libraries) were added during 2013 and the first half of 2014, and more are expected during the second half of 2014.
This shows that SUNCAT is committed to advancing both its geographical and subject scope.
Figure 2: Graph showing the breakdown of current SUNCAT Contributing Libraries by type as of end of September 2014 SUNCAT is also always looking to improve its functionality, and a number of developments have been made.
This includes the downloading facility and ToC (Table of Contents) service.
Changes and Challenges There have been great changes in the serials landscape in the last 10 years, as well as leaps in technology in general.
There are now far more electronic journals than ever before; institutions have less money to pay for titles, though in the main a bigger proportion is spent on journals than on monographs.
There has also been a major, though gradual, change in scholarly publishing, especially with the advent of Open Access publishing.
Users now expect direct, online access to information.
Within this changing landscape SUNCAT has a very important role to play, directing users to titles held by other libraries and providing links to actual journal articles via OpenURL where available, as well as providing good quality bibliographic serials information which is updated regularly.
This is a vital service as library budgets have been cut, so savings in time, money and space are all needed.
To ensure that SUNCAT continues to meet the needs of its end-users and to deal with various changes and challenges, it has become involved in a number of initiatives, resulting in collaboration and linking with other services and activities.
SUNCAT and UKRR As mentioned earlier, SUNCAT has a particular part to play in collection management in general and the UK Research Reserve (UKRR) in particular: “UKRR is a collaborative and coordinated approach between Higher Education Libraries and the British Library to manage the long-term sustainability of retaining low-use print journals” [19].
Since 2010, EDINA has been providing UKRR with a service to facilitate the identification of the printed serial holdings of the 29 UKRR member libraries.
The customised service involves running a script to automatically check a file of records submitted by a UKRR library against the whole SUNCAT database (27 UKRR members are also SUNCAT CLs) and the online catalogues of the two other libraries not contributing to SUNCAT.
A report is prepared and sent to UKRR and the resultant data informs decisions about freeing up shelf space in member libraries.
This means that library staff no longer have to carry out the checking manually, which results in the saving of a considerable amount of time.
During the UKRR cycle 9, which ran from June 2012 to November 2013, lists to be processed were submitted on 29 occasions by 21 UKRR libraries [20].
For more information you can read the ‘UK Research Reserve and SUNCAT’ post on the SUNCAT blog, which was written by Daryl Yang, UKRR Manager [21].
A planned enhancement is to develop a more generic collection management tool to be used by libraries seeking the holdings of a large number of serials titles.
(See Future Developments below.)
SUNCAT and KB+ Knowledge Base+ (KB+) is a new shared community service from Jisc Collections, phase 1 of which was launched in autumn 2012.
Its aim is to help UK libraries manage their e-resources more efficiently [22].
KB+ has created a database for electronic resources of information on what subscriptions are on offer to institutions, and what subscriptions institutions then take.
The knowledge base includes publication data, subscription information and licence information.
KB has been enhanced by harvesting data from SUNCAT, using an API with the following specifications: Given a SUNCAT identifier, return the following information: Title Publisher (current, or most recent for those that have ceased publication) Given a set of identifiers, return the following information for each identifier: Title Publisher (current, or most recent for those that have ceased publication) Given a partial, or complete, title string, return a list of titles (with identifiers) matching that string Given a partial, or complete, publisher string, return a list of publisher strings matching the query string Given a partial, or complete, publisher string, return a list of titles (with identifiers) linked to that publisher string SUNCAT has contributed significantly to KB+.
Approximately 2000 journal titles in KB+ (about 14% of KB+ titles) have a SUNCAT ID and have therefore been retrieved via the API.
These allow them to expose links in KB+ to the full catalogue records on SUNCAT.
SUNCAT and Linked Data There is now a push to make data reusable, through exposing, sharing and connecting structured data via the Semantic Web [23].
With this development in mind, EDINA and SUNCAT in particular have started to explore Open and Linked Data, as part of the DiscoverEDINA Project which ran from December 2011 to October 2012 [24].
The SUNCAT strand was focused on opening up metadata already found in the SUNCAT database, and on offering it in a variety of formats, including RDF (Resource Description Framework) triples, which provides linked data functionality.
Opening up such bibliographic data offers the chance for librarians and, indeed, anyone, to reuse the data in order to build innovative services for researchers, teachers, students and librarians.
This is something SUNCAT is very keen to be involved in, especially as it encourages inter-connectivity with other services.
The two aspects of the DiscoverEDINA SUNCAT strand were: licensing the reuse of data from SUNCAT CLs; and making that data available in different formats.
Both aspects have raised issues, making implementation not as straightforward as first thought.
The first task was to ask SUNCAT CLs if the data they send to SUNCAT could be re-used.
With the help of the University of Edinburgh lawyers, a licence was drawn up which would give SUNCAT permission to open up library data.
This was then sent to those libraries which expressed an interest in the project.
There are currently six libraries who have signed the licence, five of whom required amendments to the original licence.
As with drawing up SUNCAT data specifications to put library data into a form suitable for loading into the database, it quickly became clear that the choice of which data and the format in which they would be made available was decidedly specific to each library.
Essentially, most libraries would allow data of their own creation to be made open, but each library had a different way of identifying these records, so appendices for each licence had to be created to reflect these differences.
One library allowed use of all its data, as it was all created in-house.
One library restricted the formats in which their data could be released.
One library did not want bibliographic records from a specific vendor to be included in its output.
One library would allow only specific fields from all of its records to be made open.
These were challenging problems, which thankfully were resolved.
The second task was to extract the data from SUNCAT, set up a SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) endpoint for the linked data (RDF triples format) and put all the data into an SRU-enabled database, ready for querying.
The interface for the SUNCAT linked data was made available in early 2013.
The SUNCAT CLs which decided that some or all their data could be reused for this project were: the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the University of Bristol Library, the University of Glasgow Library and the University of Nottingham Library.
Further details on both the reuse of library data and the Linked Data SPARQL endpoint interface can be found on the DiscoverEDINA blog [25].
SUNCAT’s ToC Service People want seamless access to journal articles.
Indeed, the reason why they use SUNCAT is ultimately to locate a journal article.
In order to help facilitate this, SUNCAT introduced the Table of Contents (ToCs) service in October 2009.
This uses information provided by the ToCs service, Zetoc [26], to support linking through to Tables of Contents.
This development resulted from work conducted on the Discovery to Delivery Project [27] by EDINA and Mimas, which ran from 1 August 2008 to 31 July 2009.
The ToCs links appear on the SUNCAT search result screen and at the top of the full record display for a journal title which appears in Zetoc.
Each link leads to the most recent issue of the appropriate journal title, as well as presenting the user with an option to link to the full-text article using OpenURL, depending on whether the user has authenticated access to the journal.
Currently, there are ToCs links from around 20,000 journal titles, plus conference proceedings on SUNCAT, but this number will expand as new titles are added to Zetoc.
This is an important development for SUNCAT, instantly providing more information about journals found in the database.
Article details from ToCs can assist users in distinguishing journals of interest, before establishing their location via the holdings information of the 99 libraries currently available in SUNCAT.
Direct access to articles is also possible where available.
SUNCAT has also collaborated with JournalTOCs [28] to develop a RESTful Web service to integrate JournalTOCs data on SUNCAT Web pages.
The web service or API is codenamed JASS: Journals and Articles via SUNCAT Services.
This will further enhance the SUNCAT ToCs feature, allowing not just current but past and, where available, future issues of journals found in JournalTOCs to display in SUNCAT [29].
Introduction of RDA and FRBR The SUNCAT bibliographic team are starting to look at the impact of Resource, Description and Access (RDA) on cataloguing practices.
RDA is the successor to the AACR2 cataloguing rules, based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model.
The British Library has already started to implement RDA [30], with other libraries following suit.
Some RDA records are already in SUNCAT, making it more of a hybrid catalogue than ever, with several cataloguing standards being used.
As most of the SUNCAT CLs, and SUNCAT itself, will be using the MARC format for the foreseeable future, changes to MARC following the adoption of RDA will need to be monitored.
There will certainly be new fields and subfields for indexing and display.
SUNCAT distributed a questionnaire to our CLs, asking if they will be adopting RDA, and, if so, when and how they will be doing this.
This is to help ensure that no vital fields are omitted when the library metadata is processed ready for inclusion in SUNCAT.
The analysis of the answers has formed the basis of a paper that has been published in ‘Alexandria: the journal of national & international library and information issues’ (0955-7490), in a special RDA-themed issue [31].
Increasing the Visibility of SUNCAT Another challenge is to ensure that as many people as possible know about SUNCAT and that users get the most out of using it.
The SUNCAT Team is always working on increasing the visibility of the service, and has used a number of ways to raise awareness and to communicate news and developments.
Creation of SUNCAT Support Documentation Various support documentation is available on the Web site [32].
Examples include: user guides; information on more technical aspects such as searching SUNCAT via z39.50 and OpenURL linking to SUNCAT; and FAQs.
One recently created document explains how librarians can integrate SUNCAT into library Web sites and services.
This helps them to introduce and promote the service to their own users.
Creation of SUNCAT Demonstration Video A short video introducing SUNCAT [33] has been created, which demonstrates basic and advanced searching, filtering, sorting of results, the Table of Contents facility and how to get help.
Use of Social Media There has been a SUNCAT blog in existence for some time, but recently its use has been extended.
In order to promote interest in SUNCAT and the data it contains, there is a now a series of light-hearted posts on weird and wonderful titles found in SUNCAT.
Details of which libraries have recently been updated are also posted, along with information on new CLs.
A series of posts on SUNCAT feature libraries was also started late in 2013, and designed to give CLs an opportunity to tell people about their library, focusing on their serials collections.
A new-look SUNCAT blog [34] was launched in June 2013 to coincide with, as well as reflect, the new SUNCAT user interface.
The blog is becoming an increasingly important way of communicating regularly to end-users.
One particular example of this is posting information on the new SUNCAT development work.
(See Future Developments for further information.)
SUNCAT is also on Twitter (@suncatteam) [35], with automatic tweets being sent out when a blog post goes up, along with tweets sent about events being attended by the SUNCAT team.
In addition, SUNCAT has an online presence on Facebook [36].
Again the SUNCAT blog feeds into the Facebook page.
SUNCAT is very keen on increasing its use of social media, as it encourages communication with its stakeholders as well as raises awareness of the service.
SUNCAT Newsletter SUNCAT newsletters [37] come out at least once a year, providing a round-up of news and developments.
They can be found on the SUNCAT Web site.
Information about the SUNCAT Newsletter, as well as other news throughout the year, is also transmitted by various JISCMail lists.
SUNCAT Google Application In April 2011 a Google application was made available which enables the user to search SUNCAT directly from their iGoogle page or from any Web page where they choose to embed the app.
Search options include keyword, title and ISSN [38].
This feature is now no longer available as SUNCAT understands that the application will not be supported by Google in the long term.We have, therefore, not updated it to work with the new interface, though if there is sufficient interest we would be happy to investigate providing an alternative as a future development.
Participation at Conferences and Seminars Members of the SUNCAT team attend and take part in relevant conferences and seminars, for example the UKSG (UK Serials Group) Conference [39], Ex Libris Products User Group, UK and Ireland (EPUG-UKI)[40] meetings, ARLIS/UK & Ireland [41] meetings and CIGS (CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Scotland) [42] events.
This gives SUNCAT the chance to keep up to date with developments in the serials landscape, to tell people about the service, and also to talk with end-users, especially the CLs.
SUNCAT presented a poster at the Umbrella 2013 Conference in Manchester, entitled ‘SUNCAT: Transforming the service to create an open bridge from resource discovery to access.’ [43] Another notable development was the EDINA Serials Forums during March 2014 [44], which were free half-day events which focused on some of the key issues and problems in journal management, with presentations and discussion of the overarching themes, and successful approaches to addressing them.
This brings together with SUNCAT the other journal-focused EDINA activities, the Keepers Registry [45] and the UK LOCKSS Alliance [46] which focus on long-term access to journal content.
Users and Feedback As well as looking at changes and challenges, the SUNCAT Team has endeavoured to obtain and analyse feedback from users of SUNCAT.
Ever since its inception SUNCAT has engaged directly and collaborated with its stakeholders, who have given invaluable help and advice.
Impact Surveys There have been a number of surveys carried out to find out what end-users think of the service, how they use it and how they think it might be improved.
The feedback gathered helps to inform requirements for the current redevelopment of the service.
The latest SUNCAT survey was conducted online between November 2012 and January 2013 [47].
2012-13 Survey The responses were very positive and encouraging.
97% of respondents indicated that they would recommend SUNCAT to others, citing its speed and ease of use, the clear holdings information and display, and the comprehensive coverage of serials data in one source.
The most popular reason for using SUNCAT is locating journals and articles, but this is closely followed by checking bibliographic data.
89% reported that their work would take longer without SUNCAT.
Comments from respondents included: It is such a comprehensive reference source it would take me much longer to check information elsewhere.
I'd be searching in more than one place which would take longer.
Plus SUNCAT gives a picture across the research landscape of holdings and specialisms which is very useful.
SUNCAT is easy to use and its coverage of UK serial holdings is great.
Very trustworthy, fast and comprehensive.
Records are to a very high standard.
Find Suncat invaluable.
If it wasn't available I would try to source an alternative.
Don't know what though!
Surveys are particularly invaluable to find out what users of the service want.
However, some of the suggested improvements are very much dependent on the quality of data received from the CLs, such as the suggestion to provide more detailed holdings information and additional information, for example on electronic resource providers and licence restrictions on lending.
Here it must be noted that CLs can improve their data by upgrading their records using SUNCAT as a cataloguing tool as mentioned above.
As well as having good-quality records from CONSER and ISSN, SUNCAT contains records from UKRR libraries which provide more detailed holdings information.
Other recommendations concerning the improvement of the interface and searching are now beginning to be addressed in the re-development of SUNCAT (see SUNCAT Quality Improvement Plan below).
An important fact to come out of these surveys is that most of the respondents are library and information professionals.
Students and researchers are among other groups with which SUNCAT needs to engage more if SUNCAT is to be used by all kinds of people who are likely to find the service valuable.
One approach is to encourage libraries themselves to promote SUNCAT on their web pages.
To this end, a document on integrating SUNCAT into library Web sites and services, such as OPAC and other discovery systems, has been created [48].
Conducting surveys is also a very good way of identifying people who are willing to be interviewed further.
The information gained in this way is then used for testimonials and case studies.
Case Studies A number of case studies have been produced, which show specific examples of how people are using SUNCAT to help support their day-to-day activities.
At the moment, three case studies are available to look at on the SUNCAT Web site.
They are: Loughborough University Library [49], North West Libraries Interlending Partnership (NWLIP) [50] and the UK Research Reserve (UKRR) [51].
Future Developments By looking at the developments and problems emerging in the serials landscape, and also gathering feedback from end-users, the SUNCAT team has been able to identify and start work on future enhancements and developments.
Reasons for Redevelopment The impetus for this redevelopment emerged from a desire not only to provide enhanced functionality but also to be able to be more responsive to user feedback regarding suggested improvements.
Work commenced on the first phase of this development in spring 2012, with EDINA starting to design and implement an entirely new user interface for the SUNCAT service.
The Web interface has been developed in-house, using the open source enterprise search platform Solr [52] to support highly efficient searching across the millions of SUNCAT records.
EDINA considered a number of different search platform options, but Solr proved to be the best solution for dealing with the complex issues around searching and displaying records grouped into matched sets, a central component of the SUNCAT service.
Moving to this open source platform should allow EDINA to have greater control and flexibility over the functionality and presentation of SUNCAT.
The new interface [53] and the existing Aleph interface (termed ‘Original SUNCAT’) have been running in parallel since October 2013 to allow people to get used to the new-look SUNCAT.
In March 2014, the new SUNCAT interface became the primary means of accessing the SUNCAT database, and on 26 September 2014 the original SUNCAT interface was retired.
Help text has been provided and some ‘Quick Start’ guides and other documentation have been created [54][55].
In addition, the SUNCAT team demonstrated the functionality available in the new interface and shared with all participants the plans for further developments at the series of EDINA Serials Forums held in March 2014.
New and Improved Features One key area of improvement is the ability to filter search results to holdings from multiple libraries and locations.
These filters will include all the individual locations of each of our contributing libraries, rather than just locations at an institutional level, as with the current SUNCAT Mobile app service (more details below).
Another benefit will be that users will be able to select multiple locations and/or institutions by which to filter their search, so giving them greater flexibility.
The filters will now also ensure that users only see the holdings from locations or institutions in which they are interested, as any extraneous holdings will no longer be displayed.
These improvements mean that in the future EDINA will be able to provide customised views onto the service, configurable at both the individual user level, and also at a higher geographic, subject specialist or consortia level.
Another key improvement is in the area of post-search filters, which will enable people to make use of faceted browsing to lead to the most relevant journal titles and holdings.
A list of post-search filters is available on the left-hand side of the search results page.
These filters are: Institution (those holding the journals returned in the current results list); Format (includes electronic and print formats); Subject; Author (organisation associated with journals where relevant); Publisher; Year (first published); Place of publication; and Language.
Users are able to combine these filters.
Work has also been carried out to improve the ‘exact title’ search, through the refining of the exact search rules [56].
These include: It is case insensitive, for example searches on NEW YORK TIMES, new york times and NeW YoRk TiMeS will all return the same matches.
Special characters, i.e.
!”#$%&’()*+,-./:;<=>?
@[\]^_`{|}~, are ignored.
This may be tweaked after further testing and feedback.
Diacritical marks etc, are ignored, for example search terms containing an e will find ê, e and so on.
No partial matching, for example, a search on New York Times will only match serials entitled New York Times not New York Times Supplement.
This work results in directing users quickly and easily to information about specific titles of interest without the distraction of seeing similar or related titles.
An autocomplete feature has also been added so that you will be able to see partially-matched titles as you type, even though you might have selected the 'exact title' index.
There is now more integrated information about the CLs.
From the holdings display you can link to the library Web site, contact details, Google directions, the British Library code (for inter-library loans) and the date when the library’s data were last updated in SUNCAT.
Links to the local catalogues of holding libraries are also available on the holdings display, enabling you to check information directly at the source.
Other areas of new functionality will follow throughout 2015.
Mobile-friendly SUNCAT The improvements to the geographic limits are particularly important for the mobile application which is currently being explored.
A SUNCAT mobile app would allow users to find copies of journals, and also discover the nearest library to their current location.
Maps and directions to the library may also be offered.
The new SUNCAT Web interface itself now has a much more responsive layout to support viewing in mobiles and tablets.
Figure 3: Screenshot of the new SUNCAT interface, captured on 10 October 2014 The main reasons for preferring the design above included: Simpler, cleaner and more user-friendly Preferred colours and images Layout of search and filters on the screen Having a map of contributing libraries and a newsfeed easily accessible on the home page A beta version of the new platform was made available for a limited time in early April 2013, with end-users invited to try it out and provide feedback through an online survey or emails sent to the EDINA helpdesk.
Overall, the response to the beta version was very positive.
A summary of this user feedback on the re-developed service can be found on the SUNCAT Web site [57].
SUNCAT Quality Improvement Plan As mentioned earlier, EDINA regularly conducts online surveys to gather feedback on both user satisfaction with and suggestions for improvements to the service.
Suggested improvements are analysed by EDINA and incorporated into future development plans where they are technically feasible and considered of overall benefit to SUNCAT's users.
EDINA compiles these into a regularly updated Quality Improvement Plan [58].
The plan details EDINA's response to each suggestion and provides an indication of timescale for development if appropriate.
The plan has recently been updated with new suggestions from the last survey conducted in June 2014 [59], but also includes a summary of completed development work from earlier survey suggestions.
Feedback on the New-look SUNCAT The latest survey on the new-look SUNCAT ran from the end of May to the end of June 2014.
There was a largely positive response from 43 different institutions, but some areas for improvement were also identified.
The main problem encountered by respondents was a compatibility issue with using older versions of the Internet Explorer browser, which has since been rectified [60].
91% of respondents to the survey indicated that they found the new service better than the original one.
The most popular features on the new SUNCAT with the highest proportion of respondents reporting that they were either 'Very useful' or 'Quite useful' were: Links to library’s local catalogues in the holdings display (91%) Icons differentiating print and online holdings in the holdings display (90%) Electronic only/non-electronic only format limit on the advanced search page (86%) More search options on the advanced search page (86%) Library information pages (linked to from library name in the holdings display) (82%) More detailed information can be obtained from the report on the June 2014 survey results [59].
Any difficulties, as well as suggested improvements, which are identified in such surveys illustrates the importance to SUNCAT of receiving feedback from actual end-users when possible.
As a result of this latest survey we will be giving further consideration to each of the suggested improvements and where possible investigate developing these as part of future releases.
In some cases the developments are already in the pipeline and the survey provides an additional confirmation of their potential usefulness [61].
Creation of a New Matching Algorithm Work has started on developing the existing matching algorithm to yield better de-duplication.
Since September 2014 it is now possible for users to suggest matches for records that have not been linked by the algorithm, using the ‘Suggest a Match’ feature, which appears on the results list.
This allows users to select and submit records they think are a match.
It is hoped that these suggestions will inform any future development.
Work on a SUNCAT Collection Management Tool One of the requests given in the user feedback was a way of retrieving customised reports which can be used to inform collection management practices.
This is something SUNCAT considers would be a very useful and important feature, and work is currently being undertaken to achieve this.
Move to Aleph Version 20 In early 2014, SUNCAT was migrated from version 18 to version 20 of the Aleph software.
One benefit of the upgrade has been an improvement in de-duplication.
This is due to the development work to improve matching carried out on SUNCAT’s behalf by Ex Libris having been applied to v20.
The redeveloped service therefore also benefits from this as its data matching would be as on v20.
Other Developments SUNCAT is hoping to expand the download service, and is currently surveying the CLs about the existing MARC21 records downloading service and how they would like to see this develop.
SUNCAT is also actively looking to add new CLs, to include further large Higher Education institutions but also a number of specialist libraries with strong subject collections.
These libraries would expand the geographic and subject coverage of the catalogue and increase the number of unique titles in SUNCAT.
Linking to Other Services SUNCAT has started doing some work with JUSP (Journal Usage Statistics Portal) [62] data, with the aim of creating a simple demo of functionality, showing: a short list of institutions; a short list of journals; a small choice of years (2010-2013); choice of an institution, journal and year we can show a summary provided by the JUSP API and both a summary of the journal's usage over the year, and a monthly breakdown.
There is also the possibility of SUNCAT linking to the Keepers Registry [45].
The Keepers Registry acts as a global monitor on the archiving arrangements for electronic journals, and was developed by EDINA, the national data service centre at the University of Edinburgh, and the ISSN International Centre in Paris.
There are at the moment nine participating archiving agencies, each running a programme for the archiving of e-journals and making metadata on the journals in their programme available to the Keepers Registry.
The purpose of linking SUNCAT to the Keepers Registry is to make it as straightforward as possible for users of the SUNCAT service (without leaving the service) to find out if a particular electronic journal is in an archiving programme, and if so, which keeper or keepers is archiving the journal, along with the extent of the archiving.
Conclusion The occasion of SUNCAT’s 10th anniversary in 2013 has been an ideal opportunity to look back at why the service was created in the first place, how it has developed, and how it endeavours to address and adapt to the ever-changing scholarly environment.
SUNCAT has come a long way since its inception back in 2003, and has become an established service which is continually adapting to changes in technology and to the requirements of its users.
SUNCAT is continuing to advance and develop in line with what is happening in the academic environment, incorporating innovations, introducing different technologies, and working with others in order to offer a more seamless service.
Examples include SUNCAT’s established ToC facility and downloading services, the current re-development of the new interface, and work being undertaken on various improvements such as the matching algorithm and a collection management tool.
Further collaboration and flexibility is now possible and indeed required, especially through the ability to create a library-specific view for various groups of users.
It is vital not to see SUNCAT as a stand-alone service, but to work with and contribute to other services, whilst listening to end-users and taking their needs into account, and sharing data and expertise.
To this end, SUNCAT has been actively working on Linked Data initiatives and with such services as JUSP, the Keepers Registry, Zetoc, and JournalTOCs.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank members of the SUNCAT Team past and present for their help in writing this article.
We would like to acknowledge the continued support of Jisc for the SUNCAT service.
References EDINA http://www.edina.ac.uk/ Stubley, P., Bull, R. and Kidd, T. (2001).
“Feasibility Study for a National Union Catalogue: Final Report” http://www.suncat.ac.uk/description/SUNCAT-NUCrep.pdf Jisc http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ UK Legal Deposit Libraries http://www.legaldeposit.org.uk/ CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials) http://www.loc.gov/acq/conser/ ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) http://www.issn.org/ DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) http://www.doaj.org/ SUNCAT List of Contributing Libraries http://www.suncat.ac.uk/description/contributing_libraries.html UK Research Reserve (UKRR) http://www.ukrr.ac.uk/ SUNCAT Use Cases and Case Studies http://www.suncat.ac.uk/librarians/ SUNCAT Contributing Libraries: benefits and Expectations http://www.suncat.ac.uk/librarians/Benefits&ExpectationsApril2012.pdf SUNCAT Supplying records to SUNCAT A guide for contributing libraries http://www.suncat.ac.uk/support/general.html Matching records in SUNCAT http://www.suncat.ac.uk/librarians/matching.html Mulligan, Zena.
SUNCAT: the next steps for the UK's national serials catalogue.
Interlending & Document Supply, 37(4), 2009, pp.215-222.
Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) http://www.rslp.ac.uk/ Ex Libris http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/ SUNCAT Phase 1 Contributing Libraries http://www.suncat.ac.uk/description/librarylist.shtml Description of SUNCAT http://www.suncat.ac.uk/description.html What is UKRR?
http://www.ukrr.ac.uk/what/default.aspx SUNCAT Newsletter, Issue 11, December 2013 http://www.suncat.ac.uk/news/suncat_newsletter11.pdf SUNCAT Blog ‘UK Research Reserve and SUNCAT – our story so far’ written by Daryl Yang, UKRR Manager http://suncat.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2013/07/03/uk-research-reserve-and-suncat-our-story-so-far/ Knowledge Base + http://www.kbplus.ac.uk/kbplus/ Linked Data http://linkeddata.org/home DiscoverEDINA http://edina.ac.uk/projects/discoveredina_summary.html DiscoverEDINA blog http://discoveredina.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ Zetoc http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ Discovery to Delivery at EDINA and Mimas http://edina.ac.uk/projects/d2d_summary.html JournalTOCs http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/ JournalTOCs blog ‘EDINA and JournalTOCs play JAZZ with S’ http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/API/blog/?tag=suncat British Library Metadata Services Cataloguing Standards http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/catstandards.html Aburrow-Jones, Natasha.
RDA: Analysing the impact of a new cataloguing standard on SUNCAT, the UK’s Serials Union Catalogue.
Alexandria 24(2), 2013, pp.63-81.
This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Alexandria : the journal of national and international library and information issues, published by Manchester University Press.
It is available online http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/ALX.0009 Help and Support for SUNCAT http://www.suncat.ac.uk/support/ Video: Introduction to the SUNCAT service http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuJmoDpP84k#t=46 SUNCAT Blog http://suncat.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ SUNCAT Twitter page https://twitter.com/suncatteam SUNCAT Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/SUNCATUnionCatalogue SUNCAT Newsletters http://www.suncat.ac.uk/news/newsletters.html SUNCAT Google Application http://www.suncat.ac.uk/support/SUNCAT_Google_Application.html UK Serials Group (UKSG) http://www.uksg.org/ Ex Libris Products User Group, UK and Ireland (EPUG-UKI) http://www.epuguki.org/ ARLIS/UK & Ireland http://www.arlis.org.uk/ CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Scotland (CIGS) http://www.cilips.org.uk/cigs-home/ Mulligan, Zena.
SUNCAT: transforming the service to create an open bridge from resource discovery to access.
Poster at Umbrella 2013 Conference, Manchester 2-3 July, 2013. http://www.suncat.ac.uk/news/docs/poster-suncat-umbrella_final.pdf SUNCAT Blog ‘Serials Forum: Helping you manage your journal collections’ http://suncat.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2014/01/30/serials-forum-helping-you-manage-your-journal-collections/ The Keepers Registry http://thekeepers.org/ The UK LOCKSS Alliance http://www.lockssalliance.ac.uk/ Benefits and Impact Achievements – SUNCAT 2013 http://www.suncat.ac.uk/news/SUNCAT_Survey_Report_Feb2013.pdf Integrate SUNCAT into Your Library Website and Services http://www.suncat.ac.uk/docs/integrate_suncat.pdf SUNCAT Case Study: Loughborough University Library http://www.suncat.ac.uk/support/casestudies/loughborough/ SUNCAT Case Study: North West Libraries Interlending Partnership (NWLIP) http://www.suncat.ac.uk/support/casestudies/nwlip/ SUNCAT Case Study: UK Research Reserve (UKRR) http://www.suncat.ac.uk/support/casestudies/ukrr/ Apache Solr http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ New Re-developed SUNCAT http://service.suncat.ac.uk/search Getting Started Guide http://www.suncat.ac.uk/suncatdocs/Getting_Started_Guide.pdf Search Tips Guide http://www.suncat.ac.uk/suncatdocs/SUNCAT_Search_Tips_Guide.pdf SUNCAT Blog – SUNCAT Redevelopment: Focus on Exact Title Search http://suncat.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2013/08/07/suncat-redevelopment-focus-on-exact-title-search/ SUNCAT: Summary of User Feedback on Redeveloped Service – June 2013 http://www.suncat.ac.uk/news/docs/summary_of_user_feedback_on_redeveloped_service_website.pdf SUNCAT Quality Improvement Report http://edina.ac.uk/impact/quality-improvement-suncat.html Mulligan, Zena.
Feedback on the New Look SUNCAT: Report on June 2014 Survey Results http://edina.ac.uk/impact/html/suncat2014.html SUNCAT Blog.
‘Problems Using the New Service on the IE8 Browser’ http://suncat.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2014/06/18/problems-using-the-new-service-on-the-ie8-browser/ SUNCAT Blog.
‘Report on the New-Look Service’ http://suncat.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2014/08/11/report-on-the-survey-of-the-new-look-service/ Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) http://jusp.mimas.ac.uk/ Author Details Celia Jenkins SUNCAT Bibliographic Assistant EDINA University of Edinburgh 160 Causewayside House Causewayside Edinburgh EH9 1PR Email: c.jenkins@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://edina.ac.uk/ Celia Jenkins has been a member of the SUNCAT Bibliographic Team since 2008, processing and checking the data received from the Contributing Libraries.
She also writes for and maintains the SUNCAT blog.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Digital Consumers Reshaping the Information Professions Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Digital Consumers Reshaping the Information Professions Buzz html research Citation BibTex RIS Muhammad Rafiq offers us a detailed review of a work which examines digital consumers from both an historical and future perspective.
This book is a collection of articles by the members of the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER), at University College London (UCL) and associates, such as Dr Tom Dobrowolski of Warsaw University, Professor Michael Moss of the University of Glasgow, Professor Barrie Gunter of the University of Leicester.
The book is a result of the exploration of the impact of the digital world on publishing, libraries and information consumers for the past eight years and addresses widespread concerns being felt by information professionals including librarians, publishers, journalists, and archivists.
The book moved research findings into the practitioner environment, sharing relevant information amongst the information professionals and covers the wide spectrum of the people visiting the virtual space for information.
The editors claimed that this book is 'about information users, but not users as we once knew them.
They are looking for information, yes, but also for goods, services, new experiences, titillation, excitement and entertainment'.
In the first chapter, The digital consumer: an introduction and philosophy, the editors (together with Withey and Dobrowolski) provide the setting for the book and argue their choice of 'digital consumer' rather than 'digital information consumer'.
Authors argue that the search for information is often associated with e-shopping and that information is used not as an end in itself but to further guide the choice of goods and suppliers.
The chapter also discusses the content of the other chapters of the book and its intended audiences.
Richard Withey, in the second chapter, The digital information market place and its economics: the end of exclusivity, illustrates what is happening in libraries and other content industries like book and newspaper publishing.
He places particular emphasis on the rapid social evolution in publishing as social networking expands and diminishes the influence of traditional media players.
Withey illustrates the growth in online advertising spending in graphical form, demonstrating amazing growth, most notably in Central and Eastern Europe.
Chapter 3, The e-shopper: the growth of the informed purchaser, by Chris Russell, looks at the history of the development of e-shoppers, their likes, dislikes, and expectations in terms of a better understanding of the information consumer.
Russell also shows the growth curves for the e-retail sales index of UK over 2000-2007, for e-shoppers and Internet users in the UK over 1995-2007, etc., and notes that users want 'ease of finding products with efficient and common search methodologies, secure payments, easy-to-use registration and application forms, information downloads, availability of products on demand, to multiple and new devices as technology develops'.
The library in the digital age, Chapter 4, by Michael Moss, offers a historical perspective on the current and future position of the library.
The author calls for UK information professionals 'to wake up to the realities of what might be described as the second digital revolution'… 'rapidly being colonized by other disciplines'.
The author considers that 'a great deal is written about the library in the digital age with emphasis on exciting possibilities offered by emerging technology with little regard for the way knowledge production, categorization, management, distribution and consumption are being transformed'.
The chapter concludes that the information community needs to concentrate on 'collection development, leaving resource discovery to the search engines and internet providers… and it must stop thinking it knows best, otherwise it will be in danger of becoming irrelevant'.
Barrie Gunter, in chapter 5, The psychology of the digital information consumer, has conducted a useful review in which he concedes that much of online communication still makes use of text formats which lack the richness of the direct communication conducted face to face.
The author provides an insight into how we humanise technology and how an understanding of online inter-personal and human-computer interaction can support the design of more user-friendly, online communications systems.
Chapter 6, The information seeking behavior of the digital consumer: case study – the virtual scholar, by David Nicholas, Paul Huntington, Hamid R. Jamali and Tom Dobrowolski, discusses the evidence gathered from a seven-year (2001-8) research programme analysing millions of digital footprints left by information seekers.
This analysis deals with the number of pages viewed, the number of full-text downloads, the number of sessions conducted by searchers, site penetration, time spent viewing a page, time spent on a session, number of searches undertaken in a session, number of repeat visits, number of journals used, number of views per journal, type of content viewed, format of material viewed (e.g., HTML vs. pdf) and searching style.
The authors suggest, rightly, that this analysis 'provides a dataset unparalleled in terms of detail', and characterize it as a 'complete description of their model of information seeking in a digital environment'.
Chapter 7, The 'Google Generation' – myths and realities about young people's digital information behaviour, by Peter Williams, Ian Rowlands and Maggie Fieldhouse, looks at the future scholars, today's youngsters' information-seeking behaviour and 'how their practices may impact on the role of information providers and the delivery mechanisms they put in place'.
The chapter exposes some myths about the so-called 'Google Generation' and further examines the literature on information search behaviour, information evaluation skills, the social Web, and young people's use of libraries, to establish what is known about young people's use of libraries.
The chapter exposes poor information retrieval and evaluation skills amongst the subject group, which the authors suggest must be tackled early in the school curriculum.
The author considered that 'remedial information literacy programs at university level are likely to be ineffective' in this regard.
In chapter 8, Trends in digital information consumption and the future, Barrie Gunter considers that 'digital consumer society is evolving at a great pace as the communications and media landscape undergoes increasingly rapid changes'.
These changes have altered the landscape and many new players have emerged including consumers as information producers.
The chapter suggests that evolution of new ICTs is now so swift that the interval between innovation, launch, and reaching the general public is shrinking at a considerable rate.
David Nicholas, in the final chapter, Where do we go from here?, concludes the book by suggesting six principles to guide the information professional into the future information space: Live with the prospect of constant change Establish a link with information provision and access/outcomes Keep it simple.
Do not be seduced by digital fashions, they will all disappear Get social Hold on to the physical space The overall coverage of the contents in this book is comprehensive and represents a worthwhile purchase for information professionals including librarians, publishers, journalists, and archivists.
The work comprehensively examines the digital space and its consumers from both historical and future perspectives.
The chapters are written in a well-integrated manner.
I would say it is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of the information professions.
Author Details Muhammad Rafiq Senior Librarian Government College University Lahore Pakistan Email: rafiqlibrarian@yahoo.com Return to top Article Title: "Digital Consumers: Reshaping the information professions" Author: Muhammad Rafiq Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/rafiq-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Collaborations Workshop 2012: Software, Sharing and Collaboration in Oxford Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Collaborations Workshop 2012: Software, Sharing and Collaboration in Oxford Buzz data software framework dissemination blog repositories copyright video curation twitter licence research Citation BibTex RIS Simon Choppin reports on a two-day software workshop held at The Queen’s College, Oxford over 21 22 March 2012.
On the 21 and 22 March 2012 I attended a workshop which was unlike the stolid conferences I was used to.
In the space of two sunny days I found I had spoken to more people and learnt more about them than I usually managed in an entire week.
Presentations were short and focused, discussions were varied and fascinating, and the relaxed, open format was very effective in bringing people from differing disciplines together to consider a common theme.
In this case the theme was software, and whether you used or developed it, there was plenty of food for thought.
The Conference with a Difference The 2012 Collaborations Workshop [1], run by the Software Sustainability Institute, took place amidst those dreaming spires of Oxford at The Queen’s College, and I spent my time there as an agent in unfamiliar territory.
In October of last year I had been selected by the Institute as an 'Agent' [2], to represent them at conferences and report back with the 'state of play' of software in that area.
The Collaboration Workshop was the official event of the Institute and there were nine other agents in attendance.
As scientists and engineers at a software developer’s conference, we may have seemed out of place, but were at no disadvantage.
The organisers had acknowledged the difference between 'users' and 'makers' of software and asked us to identify ourselves as one or the other when signing up to attend (we were later to receive badges of a distinguishing colour so there was no hiding to which camp we belonged).
The workshop was there to provide both groups with the opportunity to discuss the issues which affected us all and to find possible solutions.
The elegant quad of The Queen's College, Oxford The Collaborations Workshop was a very different event to what I was accustomed.
In my brief career I have attended a number of conferences which stuck to a strict format to keep harassed academics firmly within their comfort zone.
At these events delegates are asked to perform a single, well-rehearsed presentation at, and for, a specific time.
When you’re not presenting or listening to others present, there are opportunities for ‘networking’ which are embraced by some and avoided by others.
Within five minutes of arriving at the Collaborations Workshop I knew things were going to be different.
As I arrived at the front desk I was greeted by neat lines of name badges guarded by a smiling attendant.
After ticking off my name and taking the conference pack I took a seat and rifled through the pack for a programme.
After a minute of searching my sweaty palms were struggling to leaf through the materials within.
No programme!?
I was incredulous, how was the workshop supposed to work without a rigid format?
The schedule is the framework to plan your time around, a helping hand to allow you to wander vacantly between sessions as if on rails.
I asked Simon Hettrick (Conference Chair) where I could find a paper copy so I could clutch it tightly for the next couple of days.
He cheerily told me that it’s changed so often that there’s no point in printing one, in fact he had made yet more amendments less than an hour previously.
A pang of fear: I was due to give a talk on the second day; was it possible that had changed too?
I had scheduled 47 minutes extra rehearsal time that very evening.
Without it my time in the spotlight would be a pale imitation of what I intended.
'Yes, you’re on this afternoon!
', Simon told me.
Devastation.
If I was going to get any kind of grasp on this crazy workshop I had wandered in on, I needed backup.
Most of the other participants seemed to be tapping away at laptops or prodding tablets, all connected, all tuned in.
They probably all knew exactly when I was supposed to be presenting.
I glanced at my pencil and pad and felt woefully ill-equipped.
Thankfully my laptop was in my room.
Once connected to the Internet and the resources the Software Institute had put online, my heart rate resumed a steady rhythm and I surveyed the days ahead.
The collaborative ideas session, held in the College’s dining room The format of the workshop was very informal and was deliberately designed to encourage debate, discussion and interaction.
Prior to the conference, an e-mail group was set up so that everyone attending the conference could reach everyone else very easily.
This method was used to share ideas and the findings of discussions which went on over the two days, and it worked very well.
At the other conferences I had attended, emphasis was on focus, with directed presentations written to discuss a single topic in detail.
The equivalents here were 'lightning talks': three minutes of talking, one slide, no questions, they were the presentation equivalent of a tweet.
The procedure was: get your message across, engage with an audience and if you interest someone you can discuss things in more detail during a break.
It was a very effective way of communicating.
After I’d seen all the lightning talks I felt like I knew at least a little about what everyone in attendance did, their background and their interests.
Perhaps this says something about me, but because the emphasis was on simplicity, I felt much more able to approach people about areas of which I knew little.
I might not be able to discuss the intricacies of their work with them, but at a more general level, we could discuss the elements that we had in common.
To demonstrate this, the first session was an exercise in finding common ground.
We were asked to talk to other members of our randomly assigned group and come up with a project on which to work together.
As we’d never met, there was an initial period of explaining our work, but in a way in which we could quickly find commonality.
It meant you had to be very receptive to ideas from the other person and also think about your own work very differently.
There was no room to focus on the finer points and problems in your research, only the bigger picture.
Each of these discussions had to yield a simple idea for collaboration.
We managed to jot down a few ideas which were put on a board for others to read and judge, being awarded a sticker of approval from anyone who liked it, with the most popular idea being awarded a prize at the end of the two days (to save you the suspense, I regret to report I failed to trouble the judges).
One of the many breakout sessions held over the two days In addition to the collaboration exercise and lightning talks, four separate sessions were held over the two days for 'breakout' discussions.
Around six topics were proposed in each session and, in the spirit of the workshop, each topic was suggested by delegates.
You chose a favourite topic for each session, so attended five breakout sessions in total.
The breakout talks themselves were guided discussions from which you had to distil the five most important points.
Quite often this would be quite straightforward: there was a clear theme and the gist of the matter came to light fairly quickly.
However in others it proved difficult to pin the key concepts down.
Examples of breakout talks conducted over the two days were: How to operate an open source software project effectively Building research and communication networks across disciplines What 'Grand Challenges' can be addressed by collaboration with software developers?
How to blog and run a blog Successful collaboration with computer scientists How to Write Code for Everyone Not Just Yourself The first breakout session I attended was 'How to write code for everyone and not just yourself'.
I was particularly interested in getting some insight from professional software developers into this subject.
I had very little experience of proper coding etiquette.
In a professional context I was able to stumble along in a couple of programming languages but was starkly aware of the gaping inadequacies that must exist in everything I’d written.
If I wanted to put some simple programs online (as I was planning) this could teach me some important lessons.
The discussion was lively and led by a few people who had experience in research and industry.
What I found interesting about the discussion was the manner in which subject was tackled, that is, in a very academic manner.
Firstly, who is 'everyone'?
We decided that 'everyone' is anyone with sufficient experience to be able to use your code.
Secondly, why should we be trying to write code for everyone?
A very good point and something I’d not considered.
The discussion swung around to the motivating factors of typical software developers, how they’re funded, why they write code and how they write it.
Badly commented, cryptic code is much quicker to write than finely crafted syntax, and if researchers see programs as tools to create publications, why would they spend any more time than necessary?
On the other hand, software programmes are the craft of the developer, in academia there are countless useful applications mouldering on hard drives, never to see the light of day, the funding dried up, the project completed.
This software has a real cost (and a real value) and without more incentives to release software into the public domain, much more software will be consigned to the virtual scrapheap.
So what can be done?
I think it was beyond the remit of the breakout session to provide definite solutions, but the group had plenty of good ideas.
Journals have a role in encouraging good practice by accepting software-based submissions.
Funding bodies need to allow for proper software development, and institutions should recognise the role of the software developer within a university structure.
With these measures in place, researchers and academics who write software might be encouraged to create code for everyone, not just themselves.
I acted as 'scribe' through this breakout session which meant it was my role to record and distil the main points from the discussion as it went on around me.
I was quite happy in this role and thought I managed to capture the crux of the argument.
However, in the style of this workshop, participation and discussion was encouraged at every opportunity.
I soon found out that it was also my role to give a short (four-minute) presentation to those attending.
I had to get across the five main points, and the problems and solutions we had discussed.
I’m not one for off-the-cuff presentations, favouring instead a robust foundation of endless rehearsal.
However, the workshop had a very relaxed atmosphere and I was happy to improvise in front of the crowd.
This was quite significant for me, I’m an engineer and am happy to talk about impact dynamics or high-speed video techniques with little warning, but standing in front of a room of professional software developers and telling them how to write code effectively is a different matter.
It surprised me that I felt happy to share our group’s findings and answer questions from others.
Credit Where Credit's Due After all the groups had fed back their findings, it was time for what I can only assume was a typical Oxford collegiate dinner, fine food and waiter service.
The discussions continued over food and everyone returned sated in mind and body.
Breakout sessions continued after lunch and because I’d been so interested in the first, I was able to attend another which carried on a similar discussion.
I’d had my eyes opened to the difficulties faced by software developers within academia.
How do you attribute credit to a piece of software?
In the traditional academic model, recognition is given through papers.
A paper is a discrete piece of research, frozen in time, and credit is attributed definitively to its authors.
While this model varies between disciplines and is subject to ‘gaming’, there is a clear path for researchers to take who want to progress in their career.
Some argued that when you write a piece of software, you can publish a corresponding paper.
However this isn’t always appropriate and there may be no obvious paper to write.
A piece of software may be continually under development, with different people adding functionality at different times.
Different additions may take different amounts of effort to complete.
Given this very different model, who gets the credit?
Does that credit change over time?
There were lots of very interesting questions raised about software in an academic context.
What was clear was that some form of recognition is necessary so that software developers can legitimately and effectively choose a career in academia.
Some journals are responding to this need, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) [3] now accepts software-based submissions, stating on its Web site: 'To support the open source movement JMLR is proud to announce a new track.
The aim of this special section is to provide, in parallel to theoretical advances in machine learning, a venue for collection and dissemination of open source software.
Furthermore, we believe that a resource of peer reviewed software accompanied by short articles would be highly valuable to the machine learning community in general, helping to build a common repository of machine learning software.'
I also learnt via the shared e-mail group that there is a science code manifesto you can sign [4]: 'Software is a cornerstone of science.
Without software, twenty-first century science would be impossible.
Without better software, science cannot progress.'
But the culture and institutions of science have not yet adjusted to this reality.
We need to reform them to address this challenge, by adopting these five principles: Code: All source code written specifically to process data for a published paper must be available to the reviewers and readers of the paper.
Copyright: The copyright ownership and licence of any released source code must be clearly stated.
Citation: Researchers who use or adapt science source code in their research must credit the code’s creators in resulting publications.
Credit: Software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition.
Curation: Source code must remain available, linked to related materials, for the useful lifetime of the publication.’ Change is happening.
My Turn in the Spotlight Next up, my lightning talk, I’d managed to check through my notes in a coffee break, which provided a framework around which I could babble for three minutes.
I adopted the ‘stomp-and-wave’ approach, in the belief that gesticulation and frantic wandering about the stage bolsters the content of any presentation.
I managed to get my point across, discuss my work in general terms and all tightly within the three-minute deadline, spontaneity can be good.
I was learning.
That evening there was a drinks reception followed by a dinner in the main hall which was as excellent as the other meal I’d had.
There was plenty of opportunity to talk to others and I found that there were plenty of people interested in my work which was encouraging.
After a 5 am start, my battery was running on empty, so as the others left to find ‘the most touristy pub in Oxford’, I blearily made my apologies and navigated the ancient corridors to bed.
Conference dinner Collaboration and Communication The second day followed a similar format with two more breakout sessions and further opportunities for lightning talks, coffee and stimulating discussion.
The first breakout session I attended was a meeting to bring together the Software Sustainability Institute’s 'Agents' (of which I was one) and the National Grid Service’s ‘Campus Champions’ [5].
In both cases the role of these individuals is to get the message and the services of their respective organisations across to the people who might want to use them.
Given their similar remits, it was thought that efforts could be co-ordinated and resources pooled to make both groups more effective.
The findings of this session were interesting.
How do you disseminate useful information most effectively?
E-mail?
Twitter?
A blog?
It’s important that everyone is able to access the information but also that its transmission doesn’t become a burden.
It was decided that no matter what the method of communication, value had to remain high, there had to be a guarantee that every item of information was of use and relevance.
How do you do this?
Restrict access.
This may seem draconian at a conference touting new software, sharing and open access, but if only one or two people can contact the group, the quality of communication can remain consistent and high.
Ivory Towers 2.0 The last breakout session I attended concerned the use of social media and Web 2.0 to reach the public and other researchers.
It was great to hear how the other delegates discussed their research with others and disseminated it to the public.
As a Sports Engineer, I’m quite fortunate that my research area has an obvious public interest, I have quite a lot of experience in public engagement and I maintain a blog [6] with others in the research centre.
So are social media an effective tool?
Blogs and Twitter are a great way to engage with an audience keen to participate.
They have to seek out your blog or subscribe to your Twitter feed.
For the less engaged, it’s important to find alternative hooks or ways for them to understand and enjoy the work you do.
The chair of the session Phil Fowler used the fascinating example of a game called 'foldit' [7].
The game requires the player to perform increasingly complex protein-folding operations and compete for high scores in an online community.
Apparently no specific scientific expertise is necessary to play the game, but the very best players can (incredibly) occasionally outperform the best computer systems designed to perform this specific task.
As an example it’s quite involved and this level of investment won’t be for everyone, but it goes to show that if you think your work has no public interest or relevance, you may not be thinking hard enough.
The delegates of the Collaborations Workshop 2012 Conclusion The workshop drew to a close with a final rounding up of the main things we’d distilled from it: incentives for developers, career options in academia and more effective ways for researchers to collaborate online.
The workshop had totalled 60 delegates, 23 discussion sessions, 23 lightning talks and 38 possible collaborations.
After a long couple of days at the workshop, I left feeling energised.
I’d made some great contacts, managed to shed some old habits in making presentations, and learnt a lot about software and sharing ideas.
I left the gates of The Queen’s College enthusiastic about the year ahead.
References The Collaborations Workshop  http://www.software.ac.uk/cw12 Software Sustainability Institute’s Agents Network http://software.ac.uk/agents Journal of machine learning research http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ Science code manifesto http://sciencecodemanifesto.org National Grid Service’s Campus Champions Network http://www.ngs.ac.uk/campus-champions/champions Engineering Sport Blog: The Centre for Sports Engineering Research http://engineeringsport.co.uk Solve Puzzles for Science http://fold.it Author Details Simon Choppin Research Engineer Sheffield Hallam University Email: s.choppin@shu.ac.uk Web site: http://engineeringsport.co.uk/ Simon Choppin is a sports engineering researcher at the Centre for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University, where he specialises in impact dynamics, high-speed video and data modelling.
His PhD at Sheffield University investigated tennis racket dynamics and involved working with the International Tennis Federation.
In 2006 he developed a novel 3D method of racket and ball tracking, which was used at a Wimbledon qualifying tournament.
His subsequent paper, presented at the Tennis Science and Technology Conference 2007, was awarded the Howard Brody Award for outstanding academic contribution.
Simon is also a keen science communicator and has taken part in several high-profile events promoting the image of science and technology.
He was awarded a British Science Association Media Fellowship in 2009 and worked with the Guardian newspaper for four weeks.
As well as pursuing his research interests he works on a large project employing neural network and genetic algorithm optimisation techniques.
He edits and contributes to the CSER blog, Engineering Sport.
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Book Review: Marketing Your Library’s Electronic Resources Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Marketing Your Library’s Electronic Resources Buzz data wiki metadata graphics cookie research Citation BibTex RIS Lizz Jennings reviews a concise and practical guide to marketing library e-resources which offers the busy professional a structured approach to planning a successful campaign.
Marketing Your Electronic Resources immediately strikes the reader as a very practical book.
With wide margins for notes and easy reference, a large section giving examples of best practice, and the main text extending over just 100 pages, this book is designed for busy practitioners.
For many librarians tasked with marketing, this kind of work forms a small part of the whole of their role and this short, practical guide is pitched very much at this type of reader.
It is not sector-specific, although many of the examples are drawn from public and academic libraries.
As an e-resources librarian, I work much more with the resources than the customer, and I was a little sceptical that I could apply what I was reading to my own role.
However, I was heartened by the introduction which placed the roots of this book firmly in the library assessment field, as the authors met following a presentation by Kennedy at a library assessment conference.
This gave me high hopes for an evidence-based book and I was not disappointed.
The introduction makes the aims of the book clear, and outlines many of the reasons why electronic resources need to be promoted in libraries.
Electronic resources can be somewhat hidden when patrons are faced with all the online information available to them.
Moreover, when libraries spend a large proportion of their budget on them, it is only logical to ensure that users are able to select and use resources that are the perfect fit for their needs from all the available options.
In my view, librarians are the ideal guides.
What is also emphasised in this book is that it is important to know what the specific reason for marketing is in your own library as this will form the basis for any other decisions taken through the rest of the marketing process.
This process is framed as a collaboration between the marketing team and the rest of the library’s staff, as well as a collaboration with the library’s users.
This is an important perspective which colours the tone of the whole book: at the core of any promotional activity should be a deep understanding of the community the library serves, its information needs and its behaviours.
Chapter One describes marketing as like shopping if you go in without a shopping list, you’ll most likely be distracted by the cookies aisle!
This analogy was carried through just enough to remind you of why the rather daunting list of steps in a marketing plan was necessary.
For example, it outlines clearly and sensibly the use of usage and cost data in knowing ‘what you already have in your pantry’ [1] and how you can ensure your library is sending out consistent messages to customers (‘thank you for shopping at Kmart"[1]), where the marketing of e-resources becomes embedded in the library’s culture.
It also reminds us that running promotional activities with no sense of purpose or a clear goal in mind is just so much noise: consultation and measurement can help to focus events, which should be aiming to differentiate resources in the users’ mind.
The authors describe how librarians create value for their users when they empower them to make use of e-resources, and emphasise that the process is a long-term one, with marketing teams being assembled for as much as five years at a time.
Chapter Two sets out the structure of a marketing plan and is key to making the most of the rest of the book.
Each component is explained, and it is made abundantly clear that this isn't so much a written plan as a cyclical process, complete with a diagram that shows the steps in a circle, which seems a little superfluous.
It is also very unclear at this point whether they are talking about a single resource or a whole collection, a confusion which eases as you read further and find that this is actually an irrelevant concern.
They give clear examples to explain each part of the plan, all based on real marketing done by real libraries, a technique used throughout the book, which gives it a real sense of being grounded in practice rather than pure theory.
As well as existing practice, they give ideas and questions designed to encourage a new marketing team to consider other options to the obvious choices.
The section about SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats) analyses is enhanced by a list of relevant questions to answer which would help guide the process to cover all angles.
Consideration of market research techniques and methods of communication leave the reader feeling keen to know more about their audience, while the focus on collaboration with users and colleagues leaves you feeling that this is not about bombarding people with promotional material, but working together to get the best from your resources.
Again, the evidence-based approach shows through with clear reasons for ensuring the plan is budgeted for in detail.
The chapter ends with an annotated list of recommended reading on market research methods, so that interest in a particular method does not detract from the flow of the book.
Chapter Three is the real meat of this book, and takes the approach of using examples from the marketing plans at the back of the book to illustrate the many different ways in which each aspect of the plan can be applied, as well as things to avoid.
Some of the plans are rather complex and it is encouraging that the authors recommend starting simple while you learn the process, and taking the best ideas from the examples.
The book then takes a rather long detour through Kennedy's personal research interest: the methods of communication used by various libraries.
This isn't irrelevant in itself; on the contrary, it is useful to know which methods are used, but the list is provided in alphabetical order with the four categories listed in the main text this would have been much clearer as a categorised table instead.
There are also graphic representations of the frequency of use which require some considerable effort to understand, followed by a breakdown by sector.
The content isn't lacking interest per se, but this section really breaks the flow of the chapter, and could have been significantly streamlined to make it as user-friendly as the rest of the work.
However, the section on School and Special Libraries provides insights about stakeholder engagement which are not really covered elsewhere.
The authors then return to their usual style, giving details of time-managing the marketing plan and a hefty dose of realism about what will happen if you miss an activity out of your reckoning.
They cover both quantitative and qualitative ideas for measuring the success of the plan against the initial goals.
They also encourage the reader to ensure assessment is a core part of the process rather than an afterthought as it will inform future plans, and will avoid the repetition of less effective approaches.
They finish with a reminder that giving users a positive feeling about e-resources and building their confidence is good for everyone, and the marketing should fill everyone with enthusiasm for the library and its resources.
The fourth chapter gives guidance for writing up the marketing plan and makes it clear that the audience will determine what kind of report should be written.
It also gives clear instructions on how to make the case presented in the executive summary persuasive, which is important in ensuring that senior management support the plan.
Examples of measures other libraries have used show how the outcomes relate to the goals, and examples from all areas of the report are included with emphasis on recognising when to use a particular approach.
Chapter Five is concerned with assessing the plan, but begins with a very helpful section on assessing the quality of the access provided to e-resources via the library Web site.
Although not directly related to the plan itself, it is critical to the success of any e-resource marketing plan to ensure that users are not going to be disappointed by the end-result.
The authors emphasise that collaboration with colleagues and users to ascertain whether problems with a resource represent a barrier to use is vital to ensuring your marketing efforts are appropriately directed a quirky resource may be better served by a training programme than a flyer.
Fault report forms provide a surprising form of marketing, but can prove a means of opening dialogue with patrons even if it begins on a negative note.
This all centres on the issue of trust, and whether users see the library as a source of frustration or a place where they are empowered to become confident users of the resources that are most useful to them.
This section seems slightly out of place here, and might have been worth a chapter in itself earlier in the book as it relates so closely to the early parts of the planning process.
The chapter continues with more information on assessing the plan itself, with a good set of questions to ask to ensure the plan achieves its goals.
This is followed by an excellent rubric for those who like more concrete methods of assessment, and could provide for ongoing analysis and comparisons between several cycles of marketing.
Assessment is also set in the context of demonstrating value for money, and ensuring that the people funding the marketing can see the impact that money has had.
The authors end the chapter with a consideration of the ethics of marketing, which was a little unexpected, but actually was an aspect that was very important to ensuring that marketing does not damage the library’s relationship with its users.
The final chapter gives readers a chance to reflect on the plan and reward themselves with cake if it has been implemented!
This part of the book largely consists of questions to ask oneself about each aspect of the plan.
As well as personal development, this process helps guide future cycles of marketing.
Successful campaigns can be reused for cyclical customer groups, such as new starters, as well as for annual events.
The book finishes by making the point that marketing is about making the value of the library evident to all.
Conclusion Overall, this book is a really useful, practical and evidence-based approach to the topic, which can be read quickly and applied effectively in any kind of library as the authors’ method is extremely flexible.
Aside from the inclusion of too much detail about communication methods in Chapter Three, and the Web site assessment section being too far removed from the earlier stages of planning where it would have sat more comfortably, this book has few weaknesses, and will suit any marketing team looking to get its own campaigns off to a flying start.
References Marie R. Kennedy and Cheryl LaGuardia.
Marketing Your Library’s Electronic Resources: A how-to-do-it manual.
London: Facet Publishing.
http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=9429 Author Details Lizz Jennings Information Librarian (E-Resources) Chartered University of Bath Email: e.jennings@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/ Lizz Jennings joined the University of Bath Library as the Information Librarian for E-Resources in 2008 and chartered shortly afterwards.
Her background has taken in workplace, public and prison libraries, but her current interests include usage statistics, wikis for e-resources and resource discovery.
Lizz has recently achieved an MSc in Information Management from The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.
She is also an active member of the CILIP Career Development Group, and currently chairs the CILIP South West Members Network.
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Book Review: Blogging and RSS A Librarian's Guide, 2nd Edition Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Blogging and RSS A Librarian's Guide, 2nd Edition Buzz rdf rss blog cataloguing aggregation perl syndication podcast twitter microblogging url Citation BibTex RIS Elly Cope reviews the second edition of this book in which the author explains how RSS and blogging can be used by librarians and libraries.
Michael P. Sauers is a trainer in Internet technologies and this book is intended for librarians who have heard of blogging and RSS and want to start using these tools as soon as possible, but who may not have the expertise or confidence in their ability to start by themselves.
The book provides a practical, how-to guide for those librarians thinking about starting a blog, whether for personal interest, professional development or for their institution.
It also covers the use of RSS (this can stand for any one of the following: Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) feeds as a tool for keeping up to date with items, news stories or blog posts of interest.
It does, of course, also tell you how to get your own blog enabled for others to follow it on RSS.
It covers micro-blogging in the form of Twitter, giving an option for people to consider whether this might be more useful for their needs.
Chapter 1: An Introduction to Blogs Chapter 1 introduces the concepts of 'blogs, bloggers and blogging.'
It explains the history of the blog and why it can be a useful tool for librarians.
Sauers looks at the differences between blogs written by individuals for their own purposes, subject blogs about particular topics and organisational blogs such as those maintained by libraries for the purposes of providing information to users.
He also examines the impact that blogs have had on traditional media and on search engines.
This provides a sound background and also serves to help readers decide whether or not a blog would be right for them.
The conclusion to the chapter is formed by Sauers answering the question 'Why blog?'
It sums up the content of the chapter and provides a good segue into the second chapter which examines a select few examples that are considered, by the author, to be excellent blogs by librarians.
Chapter 2: The Library Blogosphere This chapter mostly comprises extracts and screenshots from the selected blogs.
The title, author, URL and a brief description precede each excerpt so you can find the full blog yourself online and understand a bit more about why the blog exists and the author's reasons for maintaining a blog.
There are lots of examples and they cover the three types of blogs that were identified earlier in the book; personal, subject-related and organisational.
Chapter 3: The Library Blogosphere Following on from chapter 2, this chapter covers part 2 of the library blogosphere and looks at the people behind the blogs.
The author has contacted the writers of the blogs featured in the previous chapter, either through networking at conferences or via e-mail and asked them a series of questions including 'why do you blog?
', 'What do you see as blogging's greatest strength?'
and 'What do you see as the greatest problem with blogs?'.
The answers are very interesting.
They may help people thinking about starting a blog to decide whether it would be right for them and what they might want to write about.
However, the main piece of advice that comes from this chapter is that you should only start a blog if you have something to say, not just once, but regularly.
Chapter 4: Creating a Blog Chapter 4 is a thorough how-to guide for creating a blog.
There are step by step instructions for creating an account and a blog on Blogger.
Sauers explains his reasons for focusing on Blogger and he does say that many blog providers are very similar.
He takes the reader through the different functions available and how best to use them.
There are lots of screenshots to illustrate the steps and there are examples to follow to get a feel of how things work.
Chapter 5: An Introduction to RSS When introducing the reader to a topic for the first time, Sauers takes the approach of explaining the background to inform the reader why a certain thing is the way it is.
In this chapter he starts by covering the history of the development of RSS.
I found this useful as I like to know how something has evolved; it also helps the reader to understand why something might not be as intuitive as expected or why it doesn't quite work how you imagine it should.
However, if you're not interested in the background and just want to move on and get RSS working, then you can skip this section without serious consequences.
This chapter also covers how to find RSS feeds and what to do with them once you have found them.
This links neatly into the next chapter on how to set up and use an aggregator to get all your feeds and updates in one place.
Chapter 6: Using an Aggregator Again, this chapter has a thorough how-to guide, this time for setting up a feed aggregator (or reader).
The differences between the types of aggregators that can be used are explained and the relative merits of each type are outlined.
Using Google Reader as his example, he then takes a step-by-step approach to explaining how to set up an account and how best to get it working for your needs.
Chapter 7: Noteworthy Feeds It is pointed out at the start of this chapter that there are feeds available for the blogs discussed in the earlier chapters but that they won't be covered again.
This chapter covers more resources, beyond blogs, that could have potential use for, or be of interest to, librarians such as news, subject guides, podcasts, online shopping search updates, traffic conditions updates and even cartoons.
There are short descriptions of each resource and copious numbers of screenshots to support the text.
Chapter 8: Creating Feeds This is another liberally illustrated, how-to chapter.
Once you have set up your blog and know how to use RSS, and given how useful RSS has proven itself, it's likely that you will want to make sure other people can access your feeds.
Sauers does offer options for different ways to create feeds, but the step-by-step guide is for ListGarden, a free Perl program which allows the creation of feeds without having to write any code.
After looking at how to set up your own feeds, the chapter looks at how to get other Web content to feed into your Web site or blog, for example, headlines from a news service.
There is another how-to guide looking at a slightly more basic program and then one with more functionality; such as being able to grab content from more than one source, search it and then display the results on your site.
This is probably the most technical chapter and is one for people who are feeling confident with what they've learnt so far and want to add more functionality to their sites.
Chapter 9: Microblogging With Twitter Having covered the long form of blogging, Sauers finishes off by looking at microblogging and Twitter.
He does pose and answer his own question 'Why use Twitter?'
and if you are interested you can read further.
Some people won't be and, in that way, it makes this chapter the perfect way to round off the book.
It feels like a natural way to finish, looking to the future and new tools that could be of use in addition to blogs or as a previously unconsidered alternative.
He does, of course, do his step-by-step guide to setting up an account on Twitter.
He also provides some advice about Twitter etiquette and how to get Twitter to work for you.
This includes making sure your profile and biography are complete so that people can discover things about you and determine whether they consider you worth following or not.
This chapter is very impressive as it manages to avoid assuming a certain level of knowledge and covers the aspects of Twitter that can be confusing and off-putting for newcomers to the service such as @mentions, hashtags and retweets.
He also addresses some of the less well covered topics on Twitter such as: how to do basic and advanced searches; different Twitter clients; and Twitter-related tools that are available on the Web, and what they can add to the experience.
Conclusion This is an interesting and thorough book which uses a simple and consistent approach to help the reader with new technologies.
It reads like an extended training session (in a good way) and the approach feels friendly, while the author's experience as a trainer really shows.
If you want to use the how-to guides it would be best to have the book next to your computer so you can follow the instructions and use his practice examples to gain confidence in navigating the tools he covers.
Blogging and RSS is focused on the blogging environment in the United States of America but that is to be expected as the author is American.
However, while it does examine some American blogs and bloggers in detail, it nonetheless provides an excellent, universal guide to the mechanics of blogs (and RSS).
This is a very sound introduction to the subject and provides some history and background as well as the practical how-to guides.
It manages to be clear without patronising and does illustrate how blogging, RSS and Twitter can be used by librarians to the benefit of their services or for their own professional interest and development.
I think this book would be excellent for total beginners as well as for those readers, like me, who have picked up bits here and there but would prefer a little more knowledge and confidence in what they're doing with blogs, RSS and Twitter.
Author Details Elly Cope Information Librarian (Cataloguing) University of Bath Email: e.cope@bath.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Blogging and RSS: A Librarian's Guide, 2nd Edition" Author: Elly Cope Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/cope-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Preserving Local Archival Heritage for Ongoing Accessibility Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Preserving Local Archival Heritage for Ongoing Accessibility Buzz software framework infrastructure archives metadata digitisation accessibility repositories preservation cataloguing jpeg tiff curation edrms ict droid e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Frances Boyle, Alexandra Eveleigh and Heather Needham describe the recent digital preservation initiatives in the local authority archives sector.
Digital preservation is an area which is pervasive and challenging for many sectors – it impinges on the landscape from high-level business and e-government to an individual's personal digital memories.
One sector where the challenges of preservation and long-term access to resources are well rehearsed is within the archives sector.
There has been innovative research within the archives community including the Paradigm [1] and the DARP [2] projects.
The initiative described in this article focuses on the local authority archives sector and is an outcome of collaborative work from the authors, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) [3] and The National Archives (TNA) [4].
We discuss the drivers for the survey, outline the survey findings, and highlight the main themes found from both the survey and a consultative meeting which took place with representatives from the sector as a follow-up.
The article concludes with next steps to keep the momentum ongoing.
The Survey The aim of the survey (available from the DPC Web site) was to collect a snapshot of current preparedness for digital preservation within the local authority archive sector.
Local authority archive services collect, preserve and make available records relating to their geographical area, not only from their parent body, but also from other local organisations, families and individuals.
Invitations to respond to the online questionnaire were issued via the Association of Chief Archivists in Local Government (ACALG) in England and Wales, the Archivists of Scottish Local Authorities Working Group (ASLAWG), and the Local Government group of the Records Management Society.
ACALG and ASLAWG are the professional bodies for the heads of local authority archive services in England, Wales and Scotland respectively.
The survey was available throughout September 2008.
Responses 38 responses to the survey were received.
Regional analysis showed varied levels of uptake: no responses were received from two English regions, and only one from Wales.
Response rate cannot of course be determined due to the wide distribution of the survey but responses were received from 36% of the ACALG membership polled.
The majority of respondents were also archivists, or records managers working directly within an archive service organisational structure.
30 of the identifiable responses came from Archive Services in England and Wales, about 24% of the 126 services which National Advisory Services [5] supports, and six of the responses came from services in Scotland.
Digital Preservation Planning Most respondents (79%) chose to describe their service as 'reacting to depositors' when it came to digital preservation planning, although several services reported moving towards a more active position.
Some respondents felt that it was inappropriate to encourage deposit until they had policy or procedures in place for handling digital material.
However only two respondents (5%) actually claimed to be turning away digital material.
Figure 1: Digital Preservation Planning in Local Authority Archive Services One respondent commented that 'digital curation is currently re-active, at an experimental stage with no resources allocated to a co-ordinated effort in this area', and this would seem to describe many services' present position.
Significantly, very few services actually claimed to be turning away digital material.
Practical Digital Preservation The survey revealed a lack of knowledge about the digital material that local authority archive services already hold.
Respondents were asked to include digitised surrogate material, and in some cases this appears to be the only digital material the service holds.
But many respondents had difficulty assessing quantities simply because digital material is often 'scattered through various accessions', and on different kinds of storage media – over four fifths of respondents use CDs or DVDs for at least some of their digital storage.
A wide variety of file formats were represented in the responses.
Still image formats – jpeg and tiff (plus pdf) – are the most frequently held digital file types; presumably because many local authority archive services have invested heavily in recent years in digitisation initiatives.
Office-type documents were also frequently reported, particularly Word, Excel and Access, with a fair smattering too of older, obsolete formats, including Lotus 1-2-3, Publisher 2, and Claris Filemaker.
There was some evidence of niche proprietary formats, such as Kodak Photo CD and the family history software export format, Gedcom.
Many services also held digital moving image and sound collections, and there were two reported instances of CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Aided Manufacturing) designs.
This variety of reported file types comes as no surprise given the de facto mixed collecting remit of UK local authority archive services.
Access to Digital Archives The mission of local archives services is to provide ongoing accessibility to the preserved content for current and future users.
Very few services appear to have set about addressing this issue for digital archives; at present, 68% have to rely on ad hoc arrangements involving CDs or memory sticks accessed on site in the searchroom.
Although a few services are able to provide online access from server storage or a tape library, they too still expect users to visit the service in person to view records.
Eight respondents (26%) claimed to be providing access via the Internet, although in practice this appears to refer to galleries of digitised images rather than a comprehensive storage and access architecture for all digital material.
Storage and Handling Asked how digital records are handled when they first come in to the archive service, 42% of respondents admitted they take no action and digital records are simply stored on their original transfer media in the archive service strongroom.
On a more positive note, half of respondents would at least check to see that they could open the files, and 45% copy the files onto different media, usually to server storage.
It was clear that several services aspire to implement more managed procedures in the near future, although many also have a backlog of older material to work through.
Some services are beginning to implement procedural documentation for digital ingest, and some are already using automated tools, such as DROID [6].
Generally, the impression was that obtaining dedicated server storage for digital preservation was often the hardest challenge, particularly for digital archives received from external private depositors, which raises security concerns for IT departments.
Sometimes digital storage capacity is chargeable.
Several services saw a need for guidelines or discussions with depositors to collect metadata about the digital records being deposited.
Four services have documentation in the shape of digital accessions forms which they ask depositors to complete, although generally this kind of manual metadata collection was low.
One respondent commented that depositors themselves often lack the technical knowledge which is required to complete such a form, and favoured the use of automated metadata collection tools to circumvent this problem.
At a high policy level, 18 respondents (47%) reported that they have some kind of digital preservation policy in place, and several more claimed work was in progress or included in business plans for 2008 or 2009.
Evidently there is documentation already available which could usefully be shared across the sector.
Digital Preservation Awareness Awareness of digital preservation R&D activity was generally low.
Several respondents commented along the lines that 'a lot of the work on digital preservation is very high level and difficult to place in a "normal" archival setting' and felt that as such this 'obstructed learning, awareness and progress'.
This may simply reflect the fact that few services have yet to prioritise work on digital preservation – at least beyond sketching out a high-level policy – although the lack of knowledge of existing 'wins' within the sector was also significant.
The Digital Preservation Coalition, was well known – by 74% of respondents, but this contrasts markedly with awareness of digital preservation research projects – even The National Archives' initiatives, Seamless Flow [7] and the Digital Continuity Project [8] were recognised by fewer than half of respondents, and beyond these two projects only the UK Web Archiving Consortium [9] scored recognition levels above 40%.
Disappointingly, the East of England Digital Archive Regional Pilot (DARP) [2] and Paradigm projects [1], also registered low levels of awareness, at 37% (14 respondents) and 34% (13 respondents) respectively.
Both these projects challenge the perception that current digital preservation research is poorly aligned to the local archives context.
Gaps and Barriers to Digital Preservation Given the low levels of awareness of current digital preservation work, it is unsurprising if some respondents struggled to conceptualise what a digital preservation programme might 'look like' within their archive service.
Some respondents appeared to be muddling up digitisation – the creation of digital surrogates – with digital preservation – the curation of those digital objects.
The main barriers that were articulated can be broadly grouped into three areas: Cultural (organisation, political issues, awareness, external partnerships/relations and motivation) Resource (time, costs, funding, storage) Skills gap (training, competencies, IT) Funding was identified as the key barrier which will have an adverse effect on the other problematic issues down the line.
These findings were similar to a survey that was conducted by the DPC earlier in 2008 as a follow-up study to the 2006 Mind the Gap report [10].
Professional Relationships 87% of respondents reported having a records manager within the authority.
Most services have good working relationships with their records managers, although only about half (47%, 18 out of 31) of archive services are involved in the implementation of EDRMS (Electronic Document and Records Management System) within their authority.
There was no obvious correlation between archive service involvement in EDRMS roll-out and progress in digital preservation, although in several cases digital preservation has been included within the remit of the records manager.
In contrast to the generally good relations between archivists and records managers, working relationships with ICT support services were sometimes characterised as poor, even antagonistic.
Whilst 71% claimed to have access to ICT project management expertise, and 52% to software developer expertise, in many cases ICT development time is subject to a competitive bidding process, or is outsourced or otherwise chargeable.
Few services have been able to include funding for digital preservation activities in the archive service budget, and even fewer have experience of large-scale ICT infrastructure development projects of the kind which might be required to meet the digital collecting aspirations outlined in responses to the survey.
How Does the Sector See the Future?
There was little consensus here, either as regards potential organisational models, or future collection patterns.
In-house and regional repositories were the most popular choices for the organisational model, but as many people voted against in-house repositories as were in favour of them.
Only outsourcing to a private supplier was truly unpopular, with 11 of 38 respondents considering it not viable and a further eight marking it as the least preferred option.
As regards future collecting, it would seem most respondents favour continuity of the existing mixed public/private collecting pattern.
Unsurprisingly, 89% of respondents felt that preserving the digital records of local authorities is very important.
However 71% also gave top priority ('very important') to the records of small local 'official' organisations, such as schools and parish councils, and 63% to the records of religious organisations.
At least four fifths of respondents also regarded it as relatively or very important that local authority archive services continue to collect material created by external organisations, such as businesses, charities, local societies and private individuals.
There was some awareness that this may be problematic, given the lack of control over record creation that an external depositor relationship implies.
Skills and Training This question was completed by 89% of respondents and all agreed that there was a skills gap which needed addressing.
The suggestions ranged from softer, more generic skills, such as project management and negotiation, through to basic generic ICT skills, as well as more detailed courses addressing specific issues, for example, advice on file formats, migration strategies and digital accessioning.
From some respondents there was an acknowledgment that an array of skills was required depending on the role and responsibilities of the specific staff within the archives.
Suggestions about the mode and type of delivery varied from formal education, to customised in–house training, or online learning, through to placements and job shadowing.
A recurrent theme was the alignment of traditional and emerging competencies and skills – to support people's confidence and to address the skills shortage.
There was a call for practical training addressing specific curation processes, and for the sharing of expertise collaboratively across the community.
It is important that staff currently in post have the opportunity to address the acquisition of skills while the same is true in the case of archives professionals in training.
In future, all local authority archive staff should feel comfortable dealing with digital material.
However, there will be a need for some specialists who are able to resolve more complex issues.
There are some local specialists emerging already, as practitioners with an interest in this area develop skills and expertise.
The sharing of that expertise was highlighted at the open consultation day mentioned below.
All of the above is predicated on the assumption that there is funding for any of this activity.
From the responses received there is certainly no budget at the level of individual local authorities.
The Open Consultation Day In mid-November 2008 the National Archives invited heads of archive services in England and Wales to a consultative event designed to: promote awareness of digital preservation in general; highlight the survey and other recent initiatives in England and Wales, and; help local archives make progress with practical measures to achieve digital preservation.
Over 40 invitees attended and the day provided presentations from a range of stakeholders together with planned discussions.
The afternoon session focused on the outcomes of the survey and the delegates were divided into four syndicate groups to address some high-level questions.
The topics which the groups were asked to consider were the major themes which emerged from the survey, namely: organisational models, funding, partnerships and advocacy.
There was lively debate among all groups and at the end of the session the facilitators reported on their groups' deliberations.
Two groups were asked to consider organisational models and professional partnerships.
The remaining two groups looked at funding and advocacy issues.
This provided some level of validation and identified areas of consensus between the groups.
Feedback from the Syndicate Groups Not unexpectedly there was overlap between the issues raised amongst the groups.
For those groups considering organisational models and partnerships, the recurrent message was that local authorities' archives would work more happily in partnership with a national body rather than with an outsourced commercial player.
To progress digital preservation within the sector there would need to be joint ownership and 'buy-in' from the authority at all levels i.e.
from the Chief Executive to the IT department.
It was felt that authorities need to address these issues urgently or they will fail to meet their legal compliance responsibilities.
Advocacy was a key issue both within and external to the authority.
It was acknowledged that there was a complex set of relationships amongst the stakeholders, many of whom talked in different languages and had various expectations and drivers.
The core issues needed to be defined and articulated in an accessible manner for all players.
Reflecting on the optimum organisational model, a local in-house solution was attractive with a strengthening of shared expertise and knowledge.
The risks though were of under-achieving due to local constraints, inequalities across services and differences in the positioning of archive services within the organisational structure.
The sharing of expertise was picked up in the suggestion of a 'community of the willing'.
Another suggestion was for a collaborative approach to the development and implementation of a digital preservation framework, inspired by the Australasian Digital Recordkeeping Initiative [12].
Individual archive services could then choose to work on specific projects matching this overall strategy, incorporating the work into their own corporate business planning but sharing the results with the wider archives community.
An outsourced solution would necessitate standards and guidance in selecting contractors.
The concept of a trusted digital repository would be welcomed using tools such as DRAMBORA [13] and PLATTER [14].
Delegates were more comfortable with the notion of outsourcing to a public sector organisation, for example TNA or the British Library, rather than a commercial organisation.
It was felt that other public bodies would have the same value system and sense of intellectual control as the archivists.
In the opinion of the groups looking at advocacy and funding, the essential issue was to ensure that any initiatives were mapped onto the business drivers of the authority.
If information is recognised as a key asset by the Audit Commission it was felt this would have leverage with the major local players.
With regard to funding, successful pilot projects within the local authority archives sector would act as exemplars of good practice, help to contextualise the issues, and demonstrate the value of investment in the digital preservation area.
Both groups also felt that there was potential in working with archive colleagues from other sectors, particularly those from Higher Education and Museums.
Another strategy which might have leverage was to try and source funding from the wider local authority budget e.g.
the EDRM, pursuing the compliance and Information Assurance angle.
There was speculation about the possibility of establishing a funding pot from grant-giving organisations, as has been established by The National Archives and various organisations in order to tackle cataloguing backlogs.
There was some concern expressed about what the future role of the local authority archivists would be if digital preservation was outsourced.
Would this affect their relationships with local depositors?
It was felt that their future role within the outsourcing scenario would be to act as gatekeepers to the material; selection, appraisal and rights management expertise and skills would still be needed.
A plenary session at the end of the day rounded up these ideas and the day ended on a positive note.
The challenge now would be to keep the momentum going and to follow up on the day's actions.
Next Steps The next steps which were supported by those at the consultation event are summarised below: To hold regular meetings to maintain momentum.
It was agreed that the agenda of the next meeting would include showcasing some concrete developments and practical projects for delegates.
There was an appetite to continue to work with the DPC and TNA to promote wider co-operation across the archives sector.
There was a need for continued advocacy at a local level, particularly drawing on continuity from records management work in local government.
Scalability was seen as a crucial issue to be addressed – starting with small, prototype projects and building upwards.
To attempt to establish grant funding for digital preservation work in the local government sector.
Conclusion The work to date has not perhaps uncovered any great surprises.
However the big win has been that the conversations are happening and the sector is motivated.
The key issues to emerge from the survey results: funding, organisational models, partnerships and advocacy, were echoed by the delegates of the consultation day.
So the community has a clear message, from its own constituents, where effort and resources should be concentrated in the first instance.
The response rate also indicates that the sector needs to engage with the unengaged, and ensure that future work includes those who did not respond to the survey or attend the consultation event.
There are many other competing pressures on archive services' time and resources, and part of the advocacy strand needs to be about defining compelling arguments and business cases for prioritising digital preservation.
In the reality of competing priorities in a sector with limited resources, lack of engagement with digital preservation is not necessarily a sign of uninterest.
It is perhaps a consequence of the crowded busy landscape in which archivists are operating as they juggle an ever-increasing number of demands.
There are already exemplars of good practice within the local authority archives sector, and the beginnings of a 'community of the willing'.
So it is now up to the community to maintain this momentum as well as the confidence to take these initial steps forward with all stakeholders; in this way they can assure ongoing accessibility to local archival heritage for future users of such resources.
References Paradigm Web site http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/ DARP2 Report http://www.mlaeastofengland.org.uk/_uploads/documents/DARP2Report.pdf DPC Web site http://www.dpconline.org The National Archives (TNA) Web site http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ TNA: Services for professionals | National Advisory Services Web site http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives/ DROID Web site http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/aboutapps/fileformat/pdf/automatic_format_identification.pdf Seamless Flow Web site http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/electronicrecords/seamless_flow/default.htm Digital Continuity Web site http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/electronicrecords/digitalcontinuity/default.htm UKWAC Web site http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ Mind the Gap report Web site http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/reports/mindthegap.html Australasian Digital Recordkeeping Initiative Web site http://www.adri.gov.au DRAMBORA Web site http://www.repositoryaudit.eu/ PLATTER Web site http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/platter/ Author Details Frances Boyle (until January 2009) Executive Director Digital Preservation Coalition Email: fb@dpconline.org Web site: http://www.dpconline.org/ Alexandra Eveleigh Collections Manager West Yorkshire Archive Service Email: aeveleigh@wyjs.org.uk Web site: http://www.archives.wyjs.org.uk Heather Needham Principal Archivist (ICT) Hampshire Archives and Local Studies Email: heather.needham@hants.gov.uk Web site: http://www3.hants.gov.uk/archives Return to top Article Title: "Preserving Local Archival Heritage for Ongoing Accessibility " Author: Frances Boyle, Alexandra Eveleigh and Heather Needham Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/boyle-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 62: The Wisdom of Communities Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 62: The Wisdom of Communities Buzz data software framework api dissemination infrastructure archives metadata identifier repositories copyright video preservation ebook frbr dcmi drm ict intranet research semiotic Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 62.
Readers of last year's issues will possibly have been aware of a small initiaitive on Ariadne's part to give practitioners with in the archives field the opportunity to voice their views on developments in their airspace.
You may recall in Issue 61 an open and sincere investigation by Michael Kennedy into his views of the wider involvement of non-professionals in the generation of information for archival entries.
In Cautionary Tales: Archives 2.0 and the Diplomatic Historian, Michael looked at the value of emerging Archives 2.0 technology and practice and gave a balanced review of the advantages and disadvantages they held for archival practice.
In no way could he have been said to reject out of hand the potential of non-professional contributions to archives in general.
Reasonably enough, however, he examined the ways such practices would affect the operations in his own professional context, and, understandably enough, expressed concerns about the potential dangers of unmoderated contributions which might damage trust in the archival information supporting thre highly sensitive content of the Royal Irish Academy's Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (DIFP) series.
We now offer a contribution by Andrew Flinn which some might regard as taking a diametrically opposed view to Michael's.
However, as will become apparent in 'An attack on professionalism and scholarship'?
: Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge, Andrew's standpoint is by no means a cry of 'come all ye, and never mind the professional standards.'
What becomes rapidly clear from his contribution is that the developments that have attended the advent of Web 2.0 are likely to challenge the status quo in the world of archives.
How much and how soon remains to be seen.
The conflicting themes of authority and inclusiveness emerge quickly enough in his article.
Andrew asks, as did Michael, whether we can trust an archival model in which the professional practitioner is no longer the central and controlling influence over the choice and representation of archival material.
The question is valid, because as Michael pointed out, all the professional care of records and collections will be as nought if the integrity and neutrality of the archivist's stewardship is endangered by fear of biased non-professional interventions.
An issue of trust.
In his examination of the matter, Andrew Flinn equally properly points to a perception that failures in neutrality have occurred far further up the decision tree in terms of what is considered worthy of archival effort.
Historically, it is claimed by some, the topics of interest to society's decision-makers have received a disproportionate degree of attention from archives (and doubtless libraries and museums).
Arguably therefore, involvement in collection creation by communities whose heritage has hitherto remained overlooked can hardly be described as coming too soon.
Does that involvement therefore represent 'an attack on professionalism and scholarship'?
Andrew seeks to create light rather than heat by explaining that in fact community involvement in the creation of archives is hardly new, even if some of the attendant technologies are.
He reminds us that collections with the most potential for the future operate with a combination of a trained archival practitioner and a group of enthusiastic amateurs who support and even extend the collection.
In fact it is doubtful that many archives involving community-generated content are suffering from undue pressure from the 'wisdom of the mob' since Andrew indicates that most community groups contributing to archives are small in size.
Indeed any collection without a very high profile that sets out to draw upon the wisdom of crowds might be seriously disappointed.
Andrew explains that currently little information is to hand regarding online community efforts; their relative success or failure to date remains to be seen.
There is however a long-standing tradition of the knowledgeable amateur in this country (without whom organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would be in a parlous state).
Andrew Flinn points to the telling contribution amateurs can make particularly where the archive, as is often the case, has been established to document a community or a locality.
The sometimes unique contributions of enthusiasts, possibly managed by an archivist, must make for a richer, more engaging collection.
Does that mean that archivists should bow down to amateurs brandishing Archives 2.0 tools and hand over control of ingest?
I doubt it.
Not least because the committed amateurs are unlikely to want such control when they know the complexities and responsibilities involved.
Does this mean that Andrew Flinn and Michael Kennedy really are diametrically opposed in their views?
On my reading, I would say not.
Michael accepted that Archives 2.0 applications offered considerable potential; they just could not apply very well in the context in which he worked.
In describing the emerging community-generated archives, Andrew acknowledges the difference such tools can make and the complex situations which may arise in their wake.
They do have potential and the potential to complicate and challenge the existing professional culture.
There will in fact be very few clear-cut answers in this debate since the context surrounding each instance will differ.
Here we have a case in point: the test-bed for Michael Kennedy's views, the Royal Irish Academy's Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, are positioned a good deal further away from Andrew's My Brighton and Hove than just the width of the Irish Sea.
In describing A Research Revolution: The Impact of Digital Technologies, Dicky Maidment-Otlet and Judy Redfearn point to the enormous changes that have occurred in research with the advent of the Internet and Web-based technologies together with other developments in ITC.
Not just within Science but across most disciplines, data-intensive research has revolutionised not only the research outcomes that are now possible but also the ways in which research is conducted.
The radical increase in connections that researchers can now make through developments in the Web has changed the ways in which research is scoped, planned, funded, conducted and ultimately, it is hoped, exploited for years to come.
However, this revolution will not come without growing pains; the authors point to the various reactions of researchers to the appearance of more open and shared research.
Some are not entirely comfortable with the increase in collaboration and open sharing when until relatively recently the research model prized always those first to publish in a highly competitive, and even secret, environment.
The pressure to share however increases.
The authors point out that where research data are not planned and carefully curated in a structured programme which assures their usefulness well into the future, such data, still the majority, are likely to go uncatalogued and ultimately unused by future researchers.
Consequently the attitudes of researchers to this entire issue are central to the success of research data and to this end JISC activity this year under the banner Research 3.0 will seek to raise awareness of these issues; but as the authors assert, while conducting the debate, JISC wishes to be 'better informed about what researchers and the institutions that support them really want from advanced ICT.'
In Abstract Modelling of Digital Identifiers the authors Nick Nicholas, Nigel Ward and Kerry Blinco seek to present some of the work of their Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PILIN) Project in which they have been scoping the infrastructure necessary for a national persistent identifier service.
They point to the existing diversity of approaches in the field of persistent identifiers which have indeed been summarised within the pages of Ariadne itself.
One persistent aspect of the topic is the degree of debate that continues as to the best solution in this area.
Given the lack of persistence that continues to bedevil electronic information, there is some way still to go.
In their contribution, the authors point to the fact that identity persistence cannot be tied to specific technologies, domain policies or even information models.
Consequently what they offer in this debate is an abstract model of identifiers which, they contend, 'comes close to the understanding in semiotics of signs' and hope will still apply in the long term despite the inevitable changes in technology.
Richard Davis is equally concerned by the matter of persistence on the Web, though he comes at the problem from a different angle.
Given the degree to which our reliance on the Web for resources is only going to increase, Richard feels we need also to pay attention to an aspect that receives less attention usually: reference management.
In Moving Targets: Web Preservation and Reference Management he points out that citation and reference in research now goes well beyond the familiar locations of journals and other forms of publication.
Other Web resources which live, as he puts it, 'out in the wild' are increasingly cited, yet are far more subject to deletion or amendment without notice than those living in the shelter of an ISSN, for example.
Richard contends that just as we are concerned about the persistence of Web resources themselves, our concern should equally extend to achieving the effective management of research references on the Web.
The situation has not improved with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies.
The disappearance of whole government Web sites that he mentions in the context of vanishing references, very much Web 1.0, is now paralleled by the amendment, often without versioning or date-stamping, of individual items of content, if not outright deletion.
Before moving onto discuss a range of solutions the author sums the situation up most cogently,'Unfortunately, the same features which made the Web so easy to adopt make it arguably too easy to adapt.
Increasingly, in a post-Web 2.0 world, we also have highly volatile content, easily modified or removed by its authors and editors, without any guarantee that previously published versions, or any record of the change will persist.'
I am indebted to Anna Grigson, Peter Kiely, Graham Seaman and Tim Wales for their contribution this issue of a Get Tooled Up article on how they and their colleagues implemented an open source front end to the MetaLib federated search tool.
In Get Tooled Up: Xerxes at Royal Holloway, University of London they begin with a concise description of the dilemma that confronts Library Management System (LMS) users and the competing difficulties of reliance on commercial LMS suppliers versus the problems encountered in taking an open source route.
I feel certain this article will appeal to their peers who will no doubt recognise and sympathise with the pressures they were under to deliver a significant improvement in the service to their library users in a compressed space of time.
They describe the evaluation process they undertook to decide on the worth of the intended software, always a difficult stage when so much depends on getting that evaluation right.
There was a mix of social, technical and legal issues to be examined.
They also describe the actions taken in local development not only in terms of adapting open source software to meet local requirements, but also changes to MetaLib category and content organisation.
Readers who have been there already will equally sympathise with the unexpected complication in the form of a call to ensure the new system could grant access to federated users who were not members of Royal Holloway.
Nonetheless the story ends well and will perhaps serve as an encouragement to others pondering a dilemma.
In his article Intranet Management: Divine Comedy or Strategic Imperative?
Martin White highlights the contradictory status that many intranets share in that while possessing the potential to serve as an enormous source of support to an organisation, they are neither as well understood nor as successfully exploited as its Web site.
Martin informs us that we could tell without lip-reading what three intranet managers round the water-cooler will be discussing: how to promote their intranet up the ladder of organisational priorities.
Yet as he points out, intranets are neither new nor few and far between but intranet development has not seen anything like the interest nor discussion as have the Web sites that are public-facing; and there, I suspect, is part of the reason for their current standing in the resources pecking order.
Martin makes it clear that the development and use of an intranet is central to the ability of any organisation not only to meet its targets and support innovation through better-informed use of its content, but, in extremis, reduce its risks to tolerable proportions and so invite nothing but indifference from the tabloid press.
In her article Uncovering User Perceptions of Research Activity Data, Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin explores the outcomes of a bank of testsconducted with volunteers to assess the usefulness of the Oxford Blue Pages, a tool providing a variety of views of information on research and researchers at the University contained in the form of Research Archive Data.
It soon becomes apparent that the information the Pages contain has the potential to be of use to more than Oxford's researchers themselves.
Cecilia describes the work of the Building the Research Information Infrastructure (BRII) which aims ' to support the efficient sharing of Research Activity Data (RAD) captured from a wide range of sources.'
The BRII plans to offer an API for harvesting and querying data, a Web site as well as innovative ways of displaying the research Archive Data that these Pages expose.
The author describes the main elements of the RAD information and the contribution it can make to strategic, administrative as well as research planning and dissemination operations in effect, in the latter instance, in the scholarly communication process.
In describing the Blue Pages testing process, Cecilia points to the agile methodologies employed in the software development.
She also describes the approaches to user testing available and the value of the approach adopted which was careful to assess the different perspectives of differing users on the use of the software.
In her coverage of Lessons Learned, Cecilia provides a structured description of outcomes according to the four main aspects of the Blue Pages layout and functionality.
In their journey Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles, Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Richard Jones, Mahendra Mahey and Emma Tonkin indicate the wide variety of areas in which application profiles have been designed, including agriculture and folklore.
Many are themselves Dublin Core application profiles, or DCAPs as they are designated here, but also further defined latterly by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) as required to be based on the Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM) and including a Description Set Profile (DSP).
Given such diversity, the authors can be forgiven for confining themselves to recent JISC-funded application profiles employing application models based on variants of FRBR which comply with the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles, and principally those implemented in repositories.
Even then there is considerable diversity in terms of the aims and working practices of repositories, influenced as they are by individual institutional history and policy.
The authors intend to set out a means by which it will be possible to evaluate the effects of such diversity on repositories' metadata requirements and investigate what they describe as practical local solutions in an in-depth approach.
In addition to an overview of the chief design choices that have emerged in the development of ebook readers, in her solo contribution eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?
Emma Tonkin provides us with a background to this application that confirms that the idea of the ebook has been around far longer than we might have imagined.
As she points out, 'this is not their first time in the spotlight.'
It would appear that the principal barriers to take-up as perceived by many commentators, namely inadequate battery life and unsatisfactory screen readability, have been handled with the emergence of E Ink technology.
Yet I find myself catching snatches of that old refrain in ITC developments, 'it's never the technology that cannot be handled, only the humans.'
Firstly of course, we have the messy but arguably unavoidable way we go about developing a new technology.
Judging from the wide diversity of ebook formats available, referred to as 'The Tower of eBabel,' the video format war of the 1980s was a very tame affair.
However, that still remains within the realm of engineers; the chaos cranks up a gear when it comes to Digital Rights Management (DRM).
One problem which Emma identifies is 'the close link to a specific distribution network, meaning that different types of device may not be eligible for registration bought works cannot usually be transformed between formats or applied to different types of devices, except when explicitly supported by the distribution organisation'.
She also points to another method, employed by Apple, which she describes as device lock-down where only Apple code is tolerated.
This in turn has engendered a reaction from hobbyist owners who have grouped together to 'jailbreak' out of these commercial constraints.
As Emma points out, in the ensuing war, as ever, it is the civilians who suffer, 'the less technically inclined end-users who want to use their content in a manner not specifically permitted by the distributor, such as reading an ebook on a platform not covered by the distribution scheme.'
Early in her article Emma points to one assessment of the ebook market as having reached the tipping point; it is clear however from her description of the current confusion over prices, content formats, and even the sustainability of devices on offer, that we cannot rule out, in the present economic climate, the possibility that ebooks are instead flirting with vanishing point.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews of works on such diverse topics as plagiarism and the college culture; interpreting copyright law for libraries, archives and information services; and the virtue of forgetting in the Digital Age.
In addition of course we provide our expanded section of news and events.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 62.
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Folksonomies in archives: controlled collaboration for specific documents Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Folksonomies in archives: controlled collaboration for specific documents Citation BibTex RIS Ana Margarida Dias da Silva looks at how archives in France have made use of modern web technologies to bring user input and controlled social collaboration into metadata creation for their large numbers of records.
Abstract: Folksonomies arise in the context of the Information Society, spurred by the advent and widespread use of collaborative tools of Web 2.0, where the passive user has become both information producer and consumer.
This paper attempts to answer the question: can we talk about folksonomies in archives?
We start with the concept of folksonomy and an exploratory study in public archives, taking as an example the case of France, which seeks to know what the characteristics and specificities of folksonomies in archives are.
It uses the technique of comparative analysis in the approach of qualitative analysis of several identified projects, settled in the scientific literature on the subject.
This exploratory work seeks to be a contribution to the identification and knowledge of a poorly studied reality: folksonomies in archives.
The characteristics of archival documents, with limited access and responsiveness due to legal issues also manifest in the specificity of the analyzed projects.
Collaboration in indexing content is increasingly a reality, especially because it allows a greater degree of completeness of archival description.
However, it was concluded that both users and the creation of access points are controlled, and not the free assigning of labels.
Keywords: Folksonomies, Information Science, public archives, France, access points Introduction The institutions of memory (archives, libraries and museums) provide, beyond the functions of backup, organization and description, access to information.
This is ultimately their most important function as it will allow the recovery of relevant information either for the source institution or external users.
The access to information is traditionally made through research instruments such as guides, catalogs, inventories and indexes.
In Information Science and, especially in Library Science, it is common practice and century-old tradition to use thesaurus and categorize by subjects.
Historically, “we know that the research instrument of greatest use in archives is the Inventory and that, in practice, it is infeasible to fund the production of other, more detailed tools, by the simple fact that their preparation would be extraordinarily time consuming.” (Ribeiro, 1996: 22, my translation footnote 1).
The degree of completeness required for the creation of access points to archive documents is not in line with either with the number of professionals working in the institutions or with the available time for the provision of information.
Furthermore once information has become the center of attention of archivists work, “The particularities of internet environment, which highlights aspects such as interactivity, information access democratization, the breach of geographical barriers and the development of telecommunications technology, changed not only how to deal with patterns of representation and organization of information until then established but, also the human behavior and the form of communication of contemporary society.” (Barros, 2011: 16, my translatiom footnote 2).
In fact, “The Information Society, in which reality enters the global archival community, has changed the ways of access to information.
The appearance of World Wide Web revolutionized the relationships of users, customers and citizens with information.
The development of collaborative tools using what is known as Web 2.0 has contributed, decisively, towards collaborative construction of knowledge, using collective intelligence where all are simultaneously consumers and producers of information.” (Silva, 2013: 1, my translation footnote 3).
and that “The novelty lies in the range of interested parties and the amount of work that is clustered.” (Bouye, 2012: 1, my translation footnote 4).
At the same time, “The collaborative environments that facilitate the use of collective intelligence and usage patterns have changed the way users relate to information, and also how the information providers relate to users.” (Yedid, 2013: 14, my translation footnote 5).
This change in the relation of services to users is found with the adoption of Web 2.0 tools and the folksonomies, on the invitation made to participation and collaboration of all in functions traditionally performed exclusively by the technicians, namely, the contents description and the creation of access points.
While in other cultural domains, such as museums, the use of the Web aims to increase users and in-person visitors, the archives focus their attention on the value of the document so it “can establish a true mass dissemination of archives, and start a collaborative scientific work on them, remotely” (Moirez, 2012: 191, my translation footnote 6).
Therefore, on the perspective of availability of information on digital environment together with the collaboration made possible by Web 2.0, it was decided to analyze the folksonomies as a form of use of collective intelligence of a large number of cybernaut users to the increase of informational contents knowledge provided by the archives on digital environment.
In a first point is explained the methodology used for the implementation of the proposed objective, then several authors are confronted in on order to reach the concept of folksonomy.
Then it is explored various projects developed in French public archives which requires the collaboration of users on the documents description and, at last, it is discussed whether we really are, or not, towards folksonomies in archives.
1.
Methodology In order to carry out this work a compilation of scientific literature, domestic and foreign, specific and specialized about folksonomies was first undertaken.
The bibliography researched and adopted served, on the one hand, for determining the concept of folksonomies and, on the other hand, for the collection of examples of coeval scientific works which allowed  measurement of the achieved responses and proposed conclusions.
The first conclusion reached was that, even though there already exists wide scientific literature about folksonomies, this one falls mainly in the area of Information Science and Library Science, with few studies that address the folksonomies in archives.
An exception can be made for photographic archives where the use of Flickr is already widely documented.
The same observation was made by Lasi?-Lazi?
et al.
: “As far as different communities goes, the new user centred approach in organizing knowledge produced a number of studies from the field of libraries and museums, where folksonomies are examined as a tool to enhance access to digitized collections and library catalogues.
On the other hand, lack of research connected with archives could be noted, where folksonomies weren’t recognized as a viable approach.” (Lasi?-Lazi?
et al., 2014: 690).
The main reasons that lead researchers to study folksonomies are that, “they aim to understand this form of organization of information in digital environments and how this setting, which includes network concepts, people and contents, may contribute to the development of methodologies and instruments of representation and retrieval of information in various contexts.” (De Assis & Moura, 2013: 87, my translation footnote 7).
It is also our goal with this work to seek to understand whether or how the archives leverage the collaborative tools of Web 2.0 and the collective intelligence for the construction of knowledge.
The identification of two articles about collaborative indexing and folksonomies in French archives (Bouye, 2012; Moirez, 2012) very much helped our work.
At the same time, an on-line search was made in order to locate collaborative projects in public archives.
Once more the obtained results were not satisfactory, with the larger number of examples referring to the use of Flickr for the identification and description of photos.
The French case turned out to be the most reliable, since it was possible to identify numerous projects that fit within the area of the research we proposed to carry out.
We have limited the case study to the French public departmental archives (footnote 8).
Given the search results and the collected bibliography, it was found that the French case is the best documented, either at bibliography level or at the level of practical cases, and therefore we adopted it as our object of study.
France emerges as the European country of democratization on the access and provision of on-line archives, a feature that comes from the French Revolution and the creation of Archives Nationales (aiming to concentrate archives and encourage widespread access to all citizens).
At the same time France promotes and stimulates the participation of citizens on the enrichment of the descriptions of its archives.
After this data collection phase, we proceeded to the technique of comparative analysis of the different projects located with the concept definition of folksonomies, within the qualitative analysis approach of the data collected.
2.
Folksonomies: an approach to the concept In this paper we will use the term folksonomy as it is the most used term in various scientific fields, although there are different definitions for the concept (Barros, 2011: 21; Guedes & Dias, 2004: 39; Lasi?-Lazi?
et al., 2014: 685; Rapetti, 2007: 19-20).
Folksonomies arise because “of elements such as collaboration, interactivity, language and sociability network” (footnote 9) where it “explores, increasingly, the natural language and the participation of informational subjects” (De Assis & Moura, 2013: 86, my translation footnote 10).
Yedid synthesizes a simple and objective definition of folksonomies: use of natural language and assignment of labels by resource users, in digital environment and in social environment (Yedid, 2013: 15).
This neologism is assigned to Thomas Vander Wal who defines folksonomy as “the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval.
The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others).
Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information.” (Vander Wal, 2007).
This definition points out, as essentials features, the personal motivation for later access and retrieval of information, the use in a digital and social environment, and the production of contents by user of information.
For Santos, “folksonomy.
It is a collaborative or democratic indexing, which is an approach focused on the user and it is related with the idea of users to collaborate with their own terms to index certain resource by labeling (from English, tagging)”.
(Santos, 2013: 93, my translation footnote 11).
In a sentence, Barros says “folksonomy, [is a] practice which allows websites users to classify the contents available on the internet.” (Barros, 2011: 17, my translation footnote 12).
We can add that, “The indexing of the same site by several people benefits the mass effect to form a core of keywords which will be a kind of consensus acceptable by a majority of users.
This type of indexing enables us to speak of folksonomy.” (Francis & Quesnel, 2007: 60, my translation footnote 13).
Common to all these definitions is the triad of user, label (tag) and content.
Each has a role in the building of the concept of folksonomy.
The folk (race, people) became central as, “pragmatic social subject, since they build relations by language and sharing of meanings.
Such phenomenon marks the passage of a passive user searching for resources that suit their information needs to an active and dynamic subject of information flows.
These changes can be viewed and analyzed in environments in which occur folksonomies.” (De Assis & Moura, 2013: 86, my translation footnote 14).
As you can see, “The peculiarity of the folksonomy is in the fact that users produce their own descriptors, using natural language.” (Barros, 2011: 17, my translation footnote 15).
Without the collaboration of users and cybernauts folksonomies does not exist.
The tags or labels are “a way of indexing, in which the people themselves, in this case the information users, classify documents and informational objects.” (Santos, 2013: 93, my translation footnote 16).
and “Even though it may receive different nomenclatures (indexing; subject cataloging; tagging; labeling; etc.)
the act of representing a document through a concept is of the same nature in the different contexts physical and digital.” (Guedes & Dias, 2004: 42, my translation footnote 17).
The assignment of labels to Web contents is done with terms chosen by common users (Gracioso, 2010: 140) and “It is a form of independent indexing, in natural language where there is no control of vocabularies, rules or policies of indexing.” (Barros, 2011: 17, my translation footnote 18).
Labels can be used by one or more users and “It is precisely this social dimension which is most useful to folksonomies in the area of information retrieval.” (Yedid, 2013: 16, my translation footnote 19).
In fact, the assignment of labels to contents and the construction of access points by a large number of participants in an environment aims to recover information and one of the arguments “to use folksonomies is that they are "better than nothing", since they introduce an element to improve the recoverability in a context where is not feasible to apply controlled languages.” (Yunta, 2009: 834, my translation footnote 20).
The mass of information and the exponential growth of content on the Web hinder professionals' function of information representation hence folksonomies are seen, “as a new method of knowledge representation, with the largest number of studies carried out through the focus of information retrieval, focused on enhancing access and description of resources and extracting meaning from social tagging systems.” (Lasi?-Lazi?
et al., 2014: 689).
It is in this sense that, “The folksonomy practice appears as an alternative of information management at the time it allows any user of web to represent and retrieve information through keywords created freely and based on the meanings of the information itself.” (Barros, 2011: 20, my translation footnote 21).
Folksonomies arise then as, “distributed classification systems, created by individual users” (Santos, 2013: 96, my translation footnote 22).
and although it differs from taxonomies, both fulfill the function of contents description (Gracioso, 2010: 151-152).
From the summary of the read and cited works we conclude the term folksonomy is the use of devices and applications of Web 2.0 which allows to user to put tags, taken from their own vocabulary and from natural language, which will form a set of access points which describe an information element.
Work that is done by the cybernaut community, under different motivations but that always have as final goal the information retrieval.
3.
Folksonomies in French public archives   As this paper does not intend to do a quantitative analysis but a qualitative approach it has selected only a few examples considered most significant of participants’ involvement on the creation of on-line access points in French public archives.
Among the French departmental archives, Pauline Moirez has identified about 20 collaborative indexing projects (Moirez, 2012: 188) and Edouard Bouyé pointed the intended achievement of 16 new projects of collaborative indexing for the 2012 year (Bouyé, 2012: 9).
In his study, Édouard Bouyé divides the archives on three groups according to the form of user participation in the index: those who gives entire freedom to cybernauts, with no need of registration (ex: Cantal, Corrèze, Eure-et-Loir, Loire-Atlantique, Nièvre, Var); those who give entire freedom to cybernauts, after a mandatory registration and signing in on the archive site (ex: Martinique, Hautes-Alpes, Rhône, Yvelines); and, a third group, where the cybernaut has a framework which demands registration, to pass paleographical reading tests and to work on previously chosen documentation by archive services (ex: Rennes, Aube, Mayenne, Puy-de-Dôme) (Bouyé, 2012: 3).
The departmental archives from Loire-Atlantique promotes the collaborative indexing and explain on their site: “The data accessible using the form below aims to facilitate your research.
They are the fruit of collective and permanent work of Internet users participating in the collaborative indexing and therefore reflect the current state of the work constantly evolving.
They were not produced or approved by the Departmental Archives of Loire-Atlantique.
They are incomplete because only a portion of the collection has been indexed and can be inaccurate.
Do not hesitate to propose your own indexing!
The Departmental Archives of Loire-Atlantique thanks you in advance for your participation”.
(my translation footnote 23)   Likewise, the departmental archives from Oise implemented the collaborative indexing and they appeal on their website: “To facilitate research, a device of collaborative indexing of documents is available to cybernauts for some collections.
The contributions from users wishing to participate are made and given free of charge at the departmental Council of Oise that holds the operating rights of the data collected.
The departmental Council is committed to not make commercial use of these data and not to transfer them to third parties, except in the context of scientific and cultural projects carried out by public bodies”.
(my translation footnote 24).
The departmental archives from Niève direct its request to a specific group of users: “In a participatory approach, genealogists can contribute directly to the indexing of scanned collections presented in genealogical research.
It is a collective indexing, because it relies on the goodwill of web users, and public, since the indexed terms (surname, place name …) will be visible to all and can be searched from the forms tab "Search".
Further involvement of web users is important, more of a large number of documents will be indexed and more targeted research on a surname for example, will be effective”.
(my translation footnote 25).
Collaborative indexing is also a tool used by Seine-Maritime archives that justifies its use: "The collaborative annotation allows users to enrich the content of the resources online.
For this, new tools are being implemented to provide web users the opportunity to give some additional information.
The goal is to use the collective contribution to offer new and better research tools.
You will find below virtual ranking annotators.
When recording an annotation, you can enter your nickname.
Each annotation will then bear your nickname and they will be accessible from the multisearch.
Those enrolled in the military have been selected to be candidates for this experiment.
All your annotations contribute to the enrichment of a collective database.
You will find tools to help you to search across all data annotated by cybernauts since the opening of the platform in January 2015”.
(my translation footnote 26).
The departmental archives Yonne bring novelty of collaborative indexing.
“Opened after September 2010, the portal proposed web genealogists make their contribution to a new goal: that of the widest possible dissemination of the records scanned.
It is accessible by search engines  and as it is not produced  by an external service provider, the departmental archives of Yonne seek the help of all of visitors to this portal.
This is an extremely controlled indexing: prerequisites are restrictive with a letter to send, we present you with batches and you have a limited choice of documents to be indexed.
It is far from the free indexing on the fly that can be encountered for example on the site of the Cantal archives, where each web user freely participate in the collective work, over the records he meets.
This model has the disadvantage of being restrictive, but its advantage may lie without a doubt in the quality and reliability of data as indexed.
It remains to be seen whether this will obtain the wide acclaim necessary to deal with the number of records (millions!)
and not be confined to the small circle of passionate volunteers...” (my translation footnote 27).
Common point to all these archives and to the appeals they make is that collaborative indexing is an individual work that can help all.
The created access points remain on a free database and available to all web users.
This will help forward further research “avoiding reading of hundreds of pages to find a surname, we arrive immediately on the record that is sought”.
(my translation footnote 28)   The documental typologies available to collaborative indexing are, mostly, parish records and civil records (baptism or birth, marriage and deaths), population census, military enrollment and local press.
For the digital objects available on-line the departmental archives from Cher, Loire-Atlantique, Nièvre, Oise, Rhône, Seine-Maritime and Yonne created an indexing system with predefined fields to be completed by user; they are: name, surname, date, nationality, residency, profession, literacy, etc.
In other cases the registration of the type of record (baptism, marriage, death, for example) is also requested.
In the case of archives of Yonne, it is necessary to register and create a user account; followed by a paleography test.
Lastly, “Cautious, Yonne archivists prefer to validate one by one the entries to ensure the quality of work that will be provided.” (my translation footnote 29)   Let us now see whether we can apply the concepts of folksonomies to the realities found in these archives.
4.
Specificities of folksonomies in archives   The first observation is that both French literature and the pages from French archives use the designations “collaborative indexing” and “participatory archives” and not folksonomies.
This issue might be related to a greater resistance to the use of foreignisms, but it is still significant for the work in question and for the conclusions we intend to reach..
Taking as starting point the simplistic view that folksonomies are the combination of user, label and content, then it can be said that the projects analyzed in archives fulfill this threefold observation.
An explicit and clear request is made for participation from web users to assist in the allocation task of access points (tags) to available digital content to improve ease in information retrieval.
At this point, the archives are not very distant from what is done in libraries or museums, for example.
However, Pauline Moirez claims, regarding archives, that although “Often abandoning superficial interactions and exchanges with their users, however they develop ambitious projects of crowdsourcing, of "participative archives" […], based on providing knowledge and skills of web users and to improve and facilitate access to their records.” (Moirez, 2012: 188, my translation footnote 30).
And concludes: “In fact, whilst the various heritage and cultural fields all make use gradually of the social web for the development and mediation of their collections, projects and achievements show decidedly different choices, in terms of strategy, relations with users, of technologies.” (Moirez, 2012: 188, my translation footnote 31).
That is, the archives use a different approach whether in strategy of representation of contents or in the relation with users, and this is what occurs if you compare the concept of folksonomy and the reality of the projects above analyzed.
Now to look at some specifics about the use of folksonomies in archives.
Starting with users, the first issue that seems to exist in archives, and as opposed to the world of libraries and museums, is the absence of a greater number of indexing projects, or of collaborative description.
This seems to be related to the lack of confidence of professionals in the capabilities of web users in creating access points; in this case, it is not justified to open the space to collaboration (Silva, 2013: 47).
Similarly, Pauline Moirez alleges that “archivists are particularly sensitive to the quality of information produced by the users” (footnote 32) but “This is why crowdsourcing operations are supervised, and usually integrated on institutional websites instead conducted on social media where the verifications are more complex to perform” (Moirez, 2012: 192, my translation footnote 33)..
In other words, these authors point out some limitations to the will of collaboration by archives mainly due to mistrust regarding the information quality introduced by non-professionals.
Is this part of the equation that results in such a tiny number of collaborative projects in archives?
The situation is surmountable through the registration on institutional sites and even the realization of paleographical reading tests (Bouyé, 2012: 7), as in the departmental archives of Yonne.
Here comes “An important factor, among others, influencing the sharing of information and knowledge organization is the user's motivation.” (Santos, 2013: 102, my translation footnote 34).
That is why several departmental archives make a specifically targeted appeal to web genealogists (the archives of Niève calls them “généanautes”) that, as “egocentric” users (Canãda, 2006), want to know more about their origins and their family, and end up sharing information with everyone.
It turns out to be, likewise, a personal appeal because each user will want to access to information related to their ancestors and if each one contributes to this identification the information will be accessible for the whole community of researchers.
This point can be connected with the quote Santos makes that “Cohen believes that individuals only share if they receive something in return.” (Santos, 2013: 99, my translation footnote 35).
ISAD(G) standards establishes the basic principle of multi-level description; beyond that the archives description is also conditioned by the levels of archival analysis, which can be summary, deep or extensive.
As noted earlier, the majority of documentation in archives is described at series level, because the degree of completeness and specificity necessary for the description of each item is not consistent either with the human capacities nor the financial possibilities of the institutions, or the delays that it would involve.
This leaves a significant number of documents untreated and “It is precisely to respond to this request that crowdsourcing operations are implemented: identification, description and indexing at the item level, even transcription of content to enable full-text search.” (Moirez, 2012: 190, my translation footnote 36).
Take a look, for instance, the request made on the site of the departmental archives of Loire-Atlantique: “The collection is very large and proposed indexing by archivists provides a first level of relevant research.
To go further and faster, the departmental Archives asks you to participate in the indexing of persons listed in the population census (1836 to 1931), for example, every time you have identified one of your ancestors.” (my translation footnote 37).
The calling for participation on indexing of contents is justifiable, on the one hand, by the volume of records and, on the other hand, by the delay in processing, which will become faster with everyone helping.
And here we come to informational contents of archives documents and the features which will affect the creation of access points, and make folksonomies in “specials” archives.
The features of archive documents, mostly their unique character, affects their treatment, and do not allow the exchange of information between institutions (Moirez, 2012: 190).
The French case presents availability of baptism or birth records, marriage and deaths, military enrollment, population census; in short, documentation with names of people and places.
Users are asked to create a univocal access point (name, surname, place, age, etc.
), a faithful representation of the information content, with no place for ambiguity, homonym, synonym and polysemy (Yedid, 2013: 18), often marked by the authors as disadvantages of folksonomies.
The access points created in these archives are close to the concept of Quintarelli of “narrow labels” that “has as an example the Flickr website that hosts and share photos, and they are characterized by few people using one or more labels, which means sharing own vocabularies and not terms so popular as in the broad folksonomies.” (Barros, 2011: 26, my translation footnote 38).
It is not intended that the indexer-collaborator-user assigns a term of the natural language, but it is demanded to indexer to read and to transcribe, with accuracy, the terms to describe, with the possibility of correction by the organization or other users (e.g.
: archives of Oise).
The end result of all created access points are alphabetical indexes (onomastic and / or geographic), which places this at the level of information representation and not to representation of knowledge (Brascher & Café, 2008).
The extraction of contents by collaborative indexing can cause an unlimited number of labels or access points for the same informational object.
In the case of archive documents that does not occur because on documents offer for projects using folksonomies (parish records, civil records, census lists of population, etc.)
only  a singleaccess point is wanted, unique and accurate: the name of the person, the birthplace, its age, etc.
This is the specificity of folksonomies in archive: it is not intended maximise labels but maximise accuracy at the point of access.
Lastly, if in a “system based on folksonomies there is no single guideline that guides the representation of documents, the task is distributed among the various users of the service, doing without a global indexing policy.” (Strehl, 2011: 111, my translation footnote 39) then that is not what is seen in case of archives in all.
The task is assigned to users but there is guidance to the work, so this paper is targeting specificities of folksonomies in archives.
Conclusions   The taxonomies, classifications and thesaurus have never been traditional instruments of representation and retrieving of information in archives.
Folksonomies do not seem to be a widespread option used by archive services, which is proved by the scarce bibliography on the subject, and the limited identification of projects and real cases.
Some of the features of folksonomies, such as ambiguity, homonym, synonym and polysemy is not seen on indexing projects in archives since what is requested is a true and accurate representation of the content.
The access points generated by users must be univocal (people names, places, etc.)
and there is a strong paleographic component which is not found on other fields (photos, maps, books, music, video) and, therefore, less inclusive of the number of people who can contribute.
The contribution of users to the description of archival contents is of undoubted value as it allows a greater access to information, mostly by the level of completeness which can be reached and that would otherwise be too time consuming and only available after a long time.
The accumulation of documents, the time consuming task of providing a level of completeness in information description and the massive provision of digital objects by archives are sufficient reasons for a greater investment on collaborative indexing.
By opting for folksonomies, the work of  archivists is no longer lonely and opens to a world of collaboration, often specialized and expert, as is the case of genealogists and local history historians.
In conclusion, in archives we have controlled collaboration for specific documents, users are not free to add random tags and, in some cases, they only can do it if they prove to have certain skills.
But nevertheless, the collaboration of users on the creation of access points in archival description still remains a potential benefit made possible by information technologies and by collaborative tools from Web 2.0.
Footnotes 1.
Original text: “sabemos que o instrumento de pesquisa de maior utilização nos arquivos é o Inventário e que, na prática, é inviável chegar à produção de outros instrumentos mais detalhados para todos os fundos, pelo simples facto de a sua elaboração ser extraordinariamente morosa.” (Ribeiro, 1996: 22) 2.Original text: “As particularidades do ambiente internet, onde se destacam aspectos como a interatividade, a democratização do acesso às informações, a quebra de barreiras geográficas e o desenvolvimento da tecnologia de telecomunicações, modificaram não apenas a forma de lidar com padrões de representação e organização da informação até então estabelecidos mas, também, o comportamento humano e a forma de comunicação da sociedade contemporânea.” (Barros, 2011: 16)   3.
Original text: “A Sociedade da Informação, em cuja realidade se insere a comunidade arquivística global, veio alterar as formas de acesso à informação.
O aparecimento da World Wide Web revolucionou a forma de relacionamento dos utilizadores, clientes e cidadãos com a informação.
O desenvolvimento de ferramentas colaborativas no que se designa por Web 2.0 veio contribuir, de forma decisiva, para construção colaborativa do conhecimento, fazendo uso da inteligência coletiva em que todos são simultaneamente consumidores e produtores de informação.” (Silva, 2013: 1)   4.
Original text: “La nouveauté réside dans l’ampleur des acteurs concernés et dans l’ampleur du travail qui est mis en commun.” (Bouye, 2012: 1)   5.
Original text: “Los entornos colaborativos, que facilitan el aprovechamiento de la inteligencia colectiva y de los patrones de uso, han modificado la forma en que los usuarios se relacionan con la información, y también la forma en que los proveedores de servicios de información se relacionan con los usuarios.” (Yedid, 2013: 14)   6.
Original text: “possible de mettre en place une véritable dissémination massive des fonds d’archives, et d’initier un travail scientifique collaboratif sur celles-ci, à distance” (Moirez, 2012: 191)   7.
Original text: “visam compreender essa modalidade de organização da informação em ambientes digitais e como essa configuração, que integra redes de conceitos, pessoas e conteúdos, pode contribuir para o desenvolvimento de metodologias e instrumentos de representação e recuperação da informação nos mais diversos contextos.” (De Assis & Moura, 2013: 87)   8.
There are 101 the French public departmental archives against 36.682 public archives (Silva, 2014: 108).
9.
Original text: “de elementos como colaboração, interatividade, linguagem e sociabilidade em rede”   10.
Original text: “explora, cada vez mais, a linguagem natural e a participação dos sujeitos informacionais.” (De Assis & Moura, 2013: 86)   11.
Original text: “folksonomia.
Trata-se de uma indexação colaborativa ou democrática, que é uma abordagem centrada no usuário e está relacionada com a ideia dos usuários colaborarem com seus próprios termos para indexar determinado recurso por meio da etiquetagem (do inglês, tagging).” (Santos, 2013: 93)   12.
Original text: “a folksonomia, [é uma] prática que permite aos usuários de websites classificar os conteúdos disponíveis na internet.” (Barros, 2011: 17)   13.
Original text: “L’indexation du même site par plusieurs personnes profite de l’effet de masse pour constituer un tronc commun de mots clés qui sera une sorte de consensus acceptable par une majorité d’utilisateurs.
Ce type d’indexation nous permet de parler de folksonomie.” (Francis & Quesnel, 2007: 60)   14.
Original text: “sujeito social pragmático, uma vez que constrói suas relações pela via da linguagem e do compartilhamento de significados.
Tal fenômeno marca a passagem de um usuário passivo em busca de recursos que atendam às suas necessidades de informação para um sujeito ativo e dinamizador dos fluxos informacionais.
Essas alterações podem ser visualizadas e analisadas em ambientes em que ocorrem folksonomias.” (De Assis & Moura, 2013: 86)   15.
Original text: “A peculiaridade da folksonomia está no fato dos usuários produzirem seus próprios descritores, utilizando a linguagem natural.”  (Barros, 2011: 17)   16.
Original text: “uma forma de indexação, em que as próprias pessoas, no caso os usuários da informação, classificam documentos e objetos informacionais” (Santos, 2013: 93)   17.
Original text: “Ainda que receba diferentes nomenclaturas (indexação; catalogação de assunto; tagging; etiquetagem; etc.)
o ato de representar um documento através de um conceito é de mesma natureza nos diferentes contextos – físico e digital.” (Guedes & Dias, 2004: 42)   18.
Original text: “É uma forma de indexação livre, em linguagem natural onde não há controle de vocabulários, regras ou políticas de indexação.” (Barros, 2011: 17)   19.
Original text: “Es precisamente esta dimensión social la que aporta mayor utilidad a las folksonomías en el área de la recuperación de información.” (Yedid, 2013: 16)   20.
Original text: “para utilizar folksonomías es que resultan “mejor que nada”, puesto que introducen un elemento para mejorar la capacidad de recuperación en un contexto en el que no es viable la aplicación de lenguajes controlados.” (Yunta, 2009: 834)   21.
Original text: “A prática da folksonomia surge como uma alternativa de gerenciamento de informação no momento em que permite a qualquer usuário da web representar e recuperar informações através de palavras-chave criadas livremente e com base nos significados da própria informação.” (Barros, 2011: 20)   22.
Original text: “sistemas de classificação distribuídos, criados por usuários individuais.” (Santos, 2013: 96) 23. http://archives.loire-atlantique.fr/jcms/chercher/archives-numerisees/genealogie/recensements-de-population/recensements-de-population-fr-t1_6155?accepte=true&portal=c_5110 Original text: “Les données accessibles grâce au formulaire ci-dessous ont pour but de faciliter vos recherches.
Elles sont le fruit de l'œuvre collective et permanente des internautes participant à l’indexation collaborative et reflètent donc l’état actuel de ce travail en perpétuelle évolution.
Elles n’ont pas été produites ni validées par les Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique.
Elles sont incomplètes car seule une partie du fonds a été indexée et elles peuvent être inexactes.
N'hésitez pas à proposer votre propre indexation!
Les Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique vous remercient par avance pour votre participation”.
24. http://archives.oise.fr/archives-en-ligne/etat-civil/ Original text: “Pour faciliter la recherche, un dispositif d’indexation collaborative des documents est mis à disposition des internautes pour certains fonds.
Les contributions des internautes souhaitant y participer sont réalisées et cédées à titre gracieux au Conseil départemental de l'Oise qui détient les droits d'exploitation des données ainsi collectées.
Le Conseil départemental s’engage à ne pas faire un usage commercial de ces données et à ne pas les céder à des tiers, excepté dans le cadre de projets scientifiques et culturels menés par des organismes publics”.
25. http://archives.cg58.fr/download.cgi?filename=accounts/mnesys_cg58/datas/cms/Guide_indexation%20collaborative.pdf Original text: “Dans une démarche participative, les généanautes peuvent contribuer directement à l'indexation des fonds numérisés présentés dans la recherche généalogique.
C’est une indexation collective, car elle repose sur la bonne volonté des internautes, et publique, puisque les termes indexés (patronyme, toponyme…) seront visibles par tous et pourront être recherchés par les formulaires de l’onglet "Chercher".
Plus la participation des internautes est importante, plus un grand nombre de documents seront indexés et plus les recherches ciblées, sur un patronyme par exemple, seront efficaces”.
26. http://www.archivesdepartementales76.net/rechercher/annotation-collaborative/ Original text: L’annotation collaborative permet aux internautes d’enrichir le contenu des ressources mises en ligne.
Pour cela, de nouveaux outils sont en cours de mise en œuvre afin d’offrir aux internautes la possibilité de renseigner certaines informations complémentaires.
L’objectif est d’utiliser la contribution collective afin de proposer de nouveaux outils de recherches plus performants.
Vous trouverez ci-dessous un classement virtuel des annotateurs.
Lors de l’enregistrement d’une annotation, vous avez la possibilité de renseigner votre pseudo.
Chaque annotation portera ensuite votre pseudo et elles seront accessibles depuis la recherche multicritère.
Les registres matricules militaires ont été sélectionnés pour être candidats à cette expérimentation.
Toutes vos annotations contribuent à l’enrichissement d’une base de données collective.
Vous trouverez ci-dessous des outils vous permettant d’effectuer des recherches sur l’ensemble des données annotées par les internautes depuis l’ouverture de la plateforme en janvier 2015”.
27. http://www.rfgenealogie.com/s-informer/infos/archives/l-yonne-passe-a-l-indexation-collaborative Original text: “Ouvert depuis septembre 2010, le portail propose aux internautes-généalogistes d'apporter leur pierre à un nouvel édifice : celui de la diffusion la plus large possible du contenu des actes numérisés.
Et cela passe par la case indexation et comme il n'est pas question de faire réaliser celle-ci par un prestataire extérieur, les archives départementales de l'Yonne sollicitent l'aide de chacun d'entre nous, visiteur de ce portail.
Il s'agit là d'une indexation extrêmement contrôlée : les préalables sont restrictifs avec un courrier postal à envoyer, on vous soumet des lots et vous n'avez qu'un choix réduit de documents à indexer.
On est bien loin de l'indexation libre à la volée que l'on peut rencontrer par exemple sur le site des archives du Cantal, où chaque internaute participe librement à l'oeuvre collective, au fil des actes qu'il rencontre.
Ce modèle a donc l'inconvénient d'être restrictif, mais son avantage réside sans doute dans la qualité et la fiabilité des données ainsi indexées.
Reste savoir s'il va remporter le large succès nécessaire au volume des actes à traiter (des millions !)
et ne pas se cantonner au cercle restreint des volontaires passionnés...”   28. http://www.culture41.fr/Archives-departementales/Rechercher-et-contribuer/L-indexation-collaborative Original text: “en évitant le feuilletage de centaines de pages pour trouver un patronyme, on arrive immédiatement sur l’acte que l’on recherche”   29. http://www.rfgenealogie.com/s-informer/infos/archives/l-yonne-passe-a-l-indexation-collaborative Original text: “Prudents, les archivistes de l'Yonne préfèrent valider une à une les inscriptions pour s'assurer de la qualité du travail qui sera fourni.”   30.
Original text: “Délaissant souvent les interactions et échanges superficiels avec leurs usagers, ils développent en revanche des projets ambitieux de crowdsourcing, d’« archives participatives » (voir encart), fondés sur l’apport de connaissances et de compétences des internautes et destinés à améliorer et faciliter l’accès à leurs fonds.” (Moirez, 2012: 188)   31.
Original text: “En effet, si les différents domaines patrimoniaux et culturels s’approprient tous peu à peu les usages du web social pour la mise en valeur et la médiation de leurs collections, leurs projets et réalisations montrent des choix résolument différents, en termes de stratégie, de relations avec les usagers, de technologies.” (Moirez, 2012: 188)   32.
Original text: “les archivistes sont tout particulièrement sensibles à la qualité des informations produites par les usagers”   33.
Original text: “C’est pourquoi les opérations de crowdsourcing sont encadrées, et le plus souvent intégrées sur les sites web institutionnels plutôt que déportées sur les médias sociaux où les vérifications sont plus complexes à effectuer”   34.
Original text: “Um fator importante, dentre outros, que influencia no compartilhamento da informação e organização do conhecimento é a motivação do usuário.” (Santos, 2013: 102)   35.
Original text: “Cohen acredita que os indivíduos só compartilham se receberem algo em troca.” (Santos, 2013: 99)   36.
Original text: “C’est précisément pour répondre à cette demande que des opérations de crowdsourcing sont mises en place: identification, description et indexation au niveau de la pièce, voire transcription des contenus pour permettre une recherche en plein texte.” (Moirez, 2012: 190)   37. http://archives.loire-atlantique.fr/jcms/chercher/indexation-collaborative/indexation-collaborative-fr-t1_6181 Original text: “Les fonds sont très volumineux et l'indexation proposée par les archivistes permet un premier niveau de recherche pertinent.
Pour aller plus loin et plus vite, les Archives départementales vous proposent de participer à l'indexation des personnes répertoriées dans les recensements de population (1836 à 1931), par exemple à chaque fois que vous aurez identifié l'un de vos ancêtres.”   38.
Original text: “têm como exemplo o Flickr, site que hospeda e compartilha imagens fotográficas, e são caracterizadas por poucas pessoas utilizando uma ou mais etiquetas, o que significa compartilhar vocabulários próprios e não termos tão populares como nas folksonomias largas.” (Barros, 2011: 26)   39.
Original text: “sistema baseado em folksonomias não existe uma única diretriz que oriente a representação dos documentos, a tarefa está distribuída entre os diversos usuários do serviço, prescindindo de uma política global de indexação.” (Strehl, 2011: 111)   Bibliographic references Barros, L. M. de S. (2011).
A Folksonomia como prática de classificação colaborativa para a recuperação da informação.
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
Retrieved from http://ridi.ibict.br/handle/123456789/737 Bouye, E. (2012).
Le web collaboratif dans les services d’archives publics.
In Rencontro annuelle des services d’arqchives départementales.
Bouyé, É.
(2012).
Le web collaboratif dans les services d’archives publics?
: un pari sur l’intelligence et la motivation des publics.
In Rencontre annuelle des services d’archives départementales (RASAD, (pp.
1–12).
Bordeaux.
Retrieved from http://archives.cantal.fr/download.cgi?filename=accounts/mnesys_ad15/datas/cms/Bouye_RASAD_Gazette.pdf Brascher, M., & Café, L. (2008).
Organização da Informação ou Organização do Conhecimento??
In IX ENANCIB (pp.
1–14).
São Paulo.
Retrieved from http://skat.ihmc.us/rid=1KR7TM7S9-S3HDKP-5STP/BRASCHERCAF%C3%89(2008)-1835.pdf De Assis, J., & Moura, M. A.
(2013).
Folksonomia: a linguagem das tags.
Encontros Bibli: Revista Eletrônica de Biblioteconomia E Ciência Da Informação, 18(36), 85–106.
http://doi.org/10.5007/1518-2924.2013v18n36p85 Cañada, J.
(2006).
Tipologias y estilos en el etiquetado social.
Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20111110154628/http://www.terremoto.net/tipologias-y-estlos-en-el-etiquetado-social/ Francis, E., & Quesnel, O.
(2007).
Indexation Collaborative et folksonomies.
Documentaliste-Sciences de L’information, 44(1), 58–63.
Retrieved from https://www.cairn.info/revue-documentaliste-sciences-de-l-information-2007-1-page-58.htm Gracioso, L. D. S. (2010).
Parâmetros teóricos para elaboração de instrumentos pragmáticos de representação e organização da informação na Web: considerações preliminares sobre uma possível proposta metodológica.
InCID: R. Ci.
Inf.
E Doc, 1(1), 138–158.
Retrieved from http://www.revistas.usp.br/incid/article/view/42310 Guedes, R. D. M., & Dias, E. J. W. D. (2004).
INDEXAÇÃO SOCIAL: ABORDAGEM CONCEITUAL.
Word Journal Of The International Linguistic Association, 15(1), 39–53.
Lasi?-Lazi?, J., Špiranec, S., & Ivanjko, T. (2014).
Tag-Resource-User: A Review of Approaches in Studying Folksonomies.
Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML), 3, 683–692.
Retrieved from http://www.qqml.net/papers/September_2014_Issue/3312QQML_Journal_2014_LasicLazicSpiranecIvanjko_Sept_683-692.pdf Moirez, P. (2012).
Archives participatives.
Bibliothèques 2.0 à L’heure Des Médias Sociaux, 187–197.
Retrieved from http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00725420 Quintarello, E. (2005).
Folksonomies: power to the people.
In: INCONTRO ISKO ITALIA UNIMIB, Milão, 2005.
Retrieved from http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm Rapetti, L. (2007).
Folksonomia: Uso e Organização da Informação na Web.
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.
Retrieved from https://www.lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/handle/10183/18728/000667018.pdf?sequence=1 Ribeiro, F. (1996).
Indexação e Controlo de Autoridade em Arquivos.
(C. M. do Porto, Ed.).
Porto.
Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10216/10721 Santos, H. P. (2013).
Etiquetagem e folksonomia: o usuário e sua motivação para organizar e compartilhar informação na Web 2.0.
Perspectivas Em Ciência Da Informação, 18(2), 91–104.
http://doi.org/10.1590/S1413-99362013000200007 Silva, A. M. D. da.
(2013).
O Uso da Internet e da Web 2.0 na difusão e acesso à informação arquivística: o caso dos arquivos municipais portugueses.
Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Retrieved from http://run.unl.pt/handle/10362/12014 Silva, A. M. D. da.
(2014).
Arquivos municipais portugueses no Facebook?
: «?Gosto?!?».
Cadernos BAD, 1, 103–114.
Retrieved from http://www.bad.pt/publicacoes/index.php/cadernos/article/view/1049/pdf Strehl, L. (2011).
As folksonomias entre os conceitos e os pontos de acesso?
: as funções de descritores , citações e marcadores nos sistemas de recuperação da informação.
Perspectivas Em Ciência Da Informação, 16(2), 101–114.
Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pci/v16n2/07.pdf Vander Wal, T. (2007).
Folksonomy coinage and definition.
Retrieved from http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html Yedid, N. (2013).
INTRODUCCIÓN A LAS FOLKSONOMÍAS: DEFINICIÓN, CARACTERÍSTICAS Y DIFERENCIAS CON LOS MODELOS TRADICIONALES DE INDIZACIÓN.
Información, Cultura Y Sociedad, 29, 13–26.
Retrieved from http://www.scielo.org.ar/pdf/ics/n29/n29a02.pdf Yunta, L. R. (2009).
Nuevas perspectivas para la difusión y organización del conocimiento.
Ix Congreso Isko-España, 2, 832–845.
Retrieved from http://eprints.rclis.org/12571/1/Comunicacion_Luis_RYunta_ISKO2009.pdf     Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Hydra UK: Flexible Repository Solutions to Meet Varied Needs Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hydra UK: Flexible Repository Solutions to Meet Varied Needs Buzz data software framework api dissemination apache infrastructure archives metadata repositories eprints video preservation cataloguing multimedia streaming vle ruby solr licence authentication research sharepoint Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre reports on the Hydra UK event held on 22 November 2012 at the Library of the London School of Economics.
Hydra, as described in the opening presentation of this event, is a project initiated in 2008 by the University of Hull, Stanford University, University of Virginia, and DuraSpace to work towards a reusable framework for multi-purpose, multi-functional, multi-institutional repository-enabled solutions for the management of digital content collections [1].
An initial timeframe for the project of three years had seen all founding institutional partners successfully implement a repository demonstrating these characteristics.
Key to the aims of the project has always been to generate wider interest outside the partners to foster not only sustainability in the technology, but also sustainability of the community around this open source development.
Hydra has been disseminated through a range of events, particularly through the international Open Repositories conferences [2], but the sphere of interest in Hydra has now stimulated the holding of specific events in different countries: Hydra UK is one of them.
The Hydra UK event was held on 22 November 2012, kindly hosted by the Library at the London School of Economics.
Representatives from institutions across the UK, but also Ireland, Austria and Switzerland, came together to learn about the Hydra Project, and to discuss how Hydra might serve their digital content collection management needs.
29 delegates from 21 institutions were present, representing mostly universities but also the archive, museum and commercial sectors.
Five presentations were given on Hydra, focusing on the practical experience of using this framework and how it fits into overall system architectures, and time was also deliberately given over to discussion of more specific topics of interest and to allow delegates the opportunity to voice their requirements.
The presentations were: Introduction to Hydra Hydra @ Hull Hydra @ Glasgow Caledonian University Hydra @ LSE Hydra @ Oxford Introduction to Hydra Chris Awre from the University of Hull gave the opening presentation.
The starting basis for Hydra was mutual recognition by all the founding partners that a repository should be an enabler for managing digital content collections, not a constraint or simply a silo of content.
Digital repositories have been put forward and applied as a potential solution for a variety of use cases over the years, and been used at different stages of a content lifecycle.
Figure 1: LSE Library (Photo courtesy of Simon Lamb, University of Hull.)
To avoid producing a landscape of multiple repositories all having to be managed to cover these use cases, the Hydra Project sought to identify a way in which one repository solution could be applied flexibly to meet the requirements of different use cases.
The idea of a single repository with multiple points of interaction came into being – Hydra – and the concept of individual Hydra ‘head’ solutions.
The Hydra Project is informed by two main principles: No single system can provide the full range of repository-based solutions for a given institution’s needs, o          …yet sustainable solutions require a common repository infrastructure.
No single institution can resource the development of a full range of solutions on its own, o          …yet each needs the flexibility to tailor solutions to local demands and workflows.
The Hydra Project has sought to provide the common infrastructure upon which flexible solutions can be built, and shared.
The recognition that no single institution can achieve everything it might want for its repository has influenced the project from the start.
To quote an African proverb, ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together’.
Working together has been vital.
To organise this interaction, Hydra has structured itself through three interleaving sub-communities, the Steering Group, the Partners and Developers, as shown by Figure 2.
Figure 2: Hydra community structure The concept of a Hydra Partner has emerged from this model of actively working together, and the project has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) process for any institution wishing to have its use of, and contribution and commitment to Hydra recognised.
Starting with the original four partners in 2008, Hydra now has 11 partners, with two more in the process of joining.
All have made valuable contributions and helped to make Hydra better.
Hydra partnership is not the only route to involvement, though, and there are many in the Hydra developer community who are adopters of the software, but who have not reached a stage where partnership is appropriate.
The technical implementation of Hydra was supported through early involvement in the project by MediaShelf, a commercial technical consultancy focused on repository solutions.
All Hydra software is, though, open source, available under the Apache 2.0 licence, and all software code contributions are managed in this way.
The technical implementation is based on a set of core principles that describe how content objects should be structured within the repository, and with an understanding that different content types can be managed using different workflows.
Following these principles, Hydra could be implemented in a variety of ways: the technical direction taken by the project is simply the one that suited the partners at the time.
Hydra as currently implemented is built on existing open source components, and the project partners are committed to supporting these over time: Fedora: one of the digital repository systems maintained through DuraSpace [3] Apache Solr: powerful indexing software now being used in a variety of discovery solutions [4] Blacklight: a next-generation discovery interface, which has its own community around it [5] Hydra plugin: a collection of components that facilitate workflow in managing digital content [6] Solrizer: a component that indexes Fedora-held content into a Solr index These components are arranged in the architecture shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Hydra architecture A common feature of the last three components in the list above is the use of Ruby on Rails as the coding language and its ability to package up functionality in discrete ‘gems’.
This was consciously chosen for Hydra because of its agile programming capabilities, its use of the MVC (Model–View–Controller) structure, and its testing infrastructure.
The choice has been validated on a number of occasions as Hydra has developed.
However, it was noted that other coding languages and systems could be used to implement Hydra where appropriate.
This applies to all the main components, even Fedora.
Whilst a powerful and flexible repository solution in its own right, Fedora has proved to be complex to use: Hydra has sought in part to tap this capability through simpler interfaces and interactions.
Figure 4: Richard Green presenting Hydra @ Hull (Photo courtesy of Simon Lamb, University of Hull.)
Hydra @ Hull Richard Green, Consultant to Library and Learning Innovation at the University of Hull, followed up the introduction to Hydra by describing in detail the implementation of Hydra at Hull, working as one of the founding partners in taking this forward.
Hydra @ Hull [7] is deliberately set up as a generic repository that can, in principle, cater for any type of digital content the University wishes to manage: as such, the repository holds a wide variety of content types.
For the most part they are managed using a common workflow, although a separate workflow has been developed for theses and there are plans to develop specific workflows for images and multimedia.
However, alongside the workflows developed purely for deposit as part of Hydra, Hull has also implemented workflows that support deposit of content from other systems in a way that then allows them to be managed through the repository.
Examples (a combination of prototypes and implementations) include: Deposit of research outputs via a CRIS Deposit of batch collections of born-digital archives Deposit of publications through Open Journals System Deposit of materials created within our VLE (Sakai) and SharePoint These workflows structure the content objects in a way that makes them Hydra-compliant, so that Hydra can work with them.
Figure 5: Hydra UK participants (Photo courtesy of Simon Lamb, University of Hull.)
Richard then highlighted aspects of Hydra as implemented at Hull that are applicable across all Hydra implementations.
Facet-driven access is provided through the Blacklight user interface.
Different content types can be displayed in different ways (allowing, for example, a Google maps integration for datasets that is not applicable for other content types).
Security within the system also enables collections to be exposed openly or delivered only to appropriate user groups.
Content can be arranged in collections of two types: hierarchical collections for structuring the repository as an aide to managing it; and flexible collections that allow the display of items from across the repository for a particular purpose and facilitate access to them (eg a combination of archival materials held in separate hierarchies).
Flexible interfaces can also be applied when creating and updating records within a repository, such that different templates can be displayed according to content type.
Different workflow steps can also be applied: Hull has, for the most part, found that a relatively simple two-stage workflow works for most items.
Everything deposited in the repository goes into a QA queue, and is then checked before being formally published.
Hull’s experience of being a Hydra partner has been a fruitful one, and we have been able to contribute in a variety of different ways (code, architecture, Web site maintenance, documentation).
It has also at times been a painful birth as we have seen the system come to life.
The work has been well worth it: Hydra @ Hull has been well-received by users, and Hull has also been able to exploit one of the Hydra components, Blacklight, further by using it as an alternative interface to the library catalogue (a role Blacklight was originally designed to support).
Future integration of catalogue and repository search is now under investigation.
Hydra @ GCU Caroline Webb, Repository Developer at Glasgow Caledonian University, spoke in her presentation on using Hydra to support the Spoken Word service at Glasgow Caledonian*,  describing how Hydra offered a community that could help sustain any solution implemented.
Caroline is solely responsible for maintaining Spoken Word, a repository of recordings from the BBC that are made available to support teaching and learning.
It had originally been decided to hold this collection using Fedora, but building an interface that didn’t have to be maintained entirely in-house has proven to be an added bonus.
Hull and GCU had previously worked together on the JISC REMAP Project [8], and, in an example of Hydra re-purposing, Caroline’s initial adoption of Hydra has been to take Hull’s Hydra head and adapt it to meet GCU’s needs.
A requirements analysis highlighted the following: User-friendly search and browse:        available Access to content restricted by role:  available Integrated content management:          available Can handle audio and video material:  not available Whilst Hydra @ Hull can hold audio and video material (and it does have such materials in the collection) in a basic fashion, it cannot currently provide easy access to them through players, or hold all the metadata that can be useful for such materials.
Adding this has been the focus of GCU’s work and is now in place.
Technically, GCU colleagues have focused on delivering the audiovisual material using progressive download or pseudo-streaming as they have had historical difficulties with streaming to different browsers.
This has worked well, using the JW player for its cross-format compatibility, although adaptive HTTP streaming may be investigated in the future.
Working with Hydra has been a steep learning curve at times, not least because the community and technology have been developing fast over the past 18 months, and Ruby on Rails training had been a necessary, though invaluable, starting point.
Once up and running, the flexibility of the framework and agility in making changes has enabled rapid progress to be made.
Hydra @ LSE Ed Fay, Digital Library Manager for the LSE Library, started his presentation by announcing that LSE has formally joined Hydra as a Partner.
This has been an end result of long-term interest to the Hydra community and adoption of some, though not all, of the technical components.
Partnership now offers LSE colleagues the chance to contribute back actively and also to inform Hydra’s development based on their experience.
The need for a system like Hydra emerged as LSE looked to manage an increasing amount of digital library material that was being generated locally through the LSE Digital Library [9].
An analysis of options was made and a business case generated, resulting in the adoption of, initially, Fedora (a process previously documented in Ariadne [10]).
The subsequent adoption of Hydra was based on a further analysis of interface solutions and recognition that Hydra and the LSE had more shared use cases.
Having said that, pragmatism in the LSE implementation has resulted in selective use of Hydra’s components at this time.
Uses Does not use ActiveFedora Blacklight Solrizer User authentication Hydra community input Web-based interface to editing content Table 1: Current LSE use of Hydra components Hydra has aided LSE’s work through support of deposit, manipulation and structuring of content objects.
The current decisions made  do not necessarily mean that further components won’t be used, rather that the LSE repository architecture, covering both preservation and access repositories, has found it beneficial to focus mainly on certain parts and address the others more locally.
For example, a local user interface solution has been created that suits current needs.
Future work planned includes doing more with digitised collections, further developing the preservation workflow, and understanding better the relationship with the existing EPrints repository used for research outputs.
Hydra @ Oxford Neil Jefferies, R&D Manager at the Bodleian Libraries, started his presentation with the revelation that Oxford doesn’t really use Fedora.
It is still used as the underpinning repository for the Oxford Research Archive (ORA), but they had become increasingly frustrated by certain aspects of Fedora that over-complicated what they would like to use it for.
Could a system be created that focused on all the best bits (primarily, the flexible generic object model for content, the semantic model, the REST API, and storage abstraction) whilst leaving behind the unnecessary wrapping of objects and, although in principle possible, a lack of modularity in the architecture?
An alternative approach was identified in the California Digital Library microservices concept [11], and they have used this to develop a CDL microservices repository with the features of Fedora they liked.
This became known as DataBank [12], software that is now available for use by others as a solution for the management of research data.
In this context, what is the link to Hydra?
In exploring interface solutions for use with DataBank, it was observed that the subset of Fedora functions implemented for DataBank were almost exactly the same as those used by Hydra heads.
Hence, it became apparent that Hydra could be used over DataBank as much as over Fedora.
A number of use cases have emerged to which Hydra can be applied within the overall repository architecture Oxford colleagues have implemented: Deposit of materials to ORA (which will be migrated off Fedora in time) Consolidation of legacy digitised materials from different sources and provision of a common metadata editor for these materials Management of archival materials Image viewing and management, making use of the Shared Canvas [13]/IIIF [14] innovations At the heart of Oxford’s development is the concept of the semantically aware object, an object that knows what it is and how it relates to other objects and information.
Hydra provides a way of working with such objects within an overall architecture.
Discussion Three discussion groups emerged in unconference style: Technology Collections management Digital preservation Technology The technical discussion proved to be the most popular, as delegates sought to understand more fully what was possible.
Discussion addressed the issue of what constitutes a Hydra content object, and how this could be best modelled, plus how different authentication options could be embedded within a single Hydra head.
Noting the emphasis during Oxford’s presentation on not using the full Fedora system, there was interest in how Hydra might be applied over other repository engines.
A more generic version of the ActiveFedora gem that enables interaction between Ruby and Fedora via the REST interface was mooted: ActiveRepository, perhaps.
Alongside specific technical topics, there was also interest in Ruby on Rails training courses, and the potential of a European Hydra Camp to provide focused training on the Hydra technologies.
Collections Management Although a few collections use cases had been proposed in scoping the discussions, the primary use cases that emerged were around research data management, and how Hydra might support this.
Experience at Hull has currently sought to keep this simple, although with the expectation that Hydra can be enhanced to accommodate evolving needs.
The role of Hydra as a data catalogue, mirrored to some extent in Oxford’s development of DataFinder, a companion service to DataBank, is feasible alongside the management of datasets.
Key issues were the ability to link versions of datasets and deal with complex content objects comprising multiple files.
Digital Preservation Those in this discussion group highlighted the range of experiences they had had in addressing digital preservation, the common theme being that there is an increasing body of material that needs preservation attention.
Themes covered the emphasis in taking what you get and making sure versioning works correctly in case subsequent copies are added.
A question for consideration was whether disk images should be broken up into their files, or indexed as a single entity and files accessed within it.
It was noted that archival processes often work better for external depositors and work to gather internal materials may need development.
Conclusion So what is Hydra?
As the project’s Web site states, Hydra can be three things: Hydra is a repository solution: it can be taken as is and used for managing digital content collections, recognising that work is involved in meeting your particular needs Hydra is a community: the project has always worked on the principle that working together enables us to address more use cases than working individually Hydra is a technical framework: the components can be applied as required to meet repository needs, as evidenced in two of the presentations given The day offered an opportunity to understand these aspects of Hydra and find out more about how it has been applied in a variety of scenarios in the UK.
The event did not touch on the many US implementations and experiences, though information is available elsewhere [15].
Delegates welcomed the practical nature of the experiences described, and the description of issues that need to be properly considered and addressed to manage digital content effectively.
Hydra UK will develop as the community needs it to by continuing to put Hydra into practice.
*Editor’s note: Readers may obtain further information from: Iain Wallace, Graeme West, David Donald.
"Capacity Building: Spoken Word at Glasgow Caledonian University".
July 2007, Ariadne Issue 52 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/wallace-et-al/ References Hydra http://projecthydra.org Hydra dissemination https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Events%2C+presentations+and+articles Fedora Commons http://fedora-commons.org/ Apache Solr  http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ Blacklight http://projectblacklight.org Hydra’s technical framework https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Technical+Framework+and+its+Parts Hydra @ Hull http://hydra.hull.ac.uk Richard Green, Chris Awre, “The REMAP Project: Steps Towards a Repository-enabled Information Environment” April 2009, Ariadne Issue 59 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/green-awre#7 LSE Digital Library http://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/ Ed Fay, “Repository Software Comparison: Building Digital Library Infrastructure at LSE” July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64  http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/fay California Digital Library microservices https://wiki.ucop.edu/display/Curation/Microservices DataBank https://databank.ora.ox.ac.uk/ Shared Canvas http://www.shared-canvas.org/ IIIF http://www-sul.stanford.edu/iiif/image-api/ Hydra applications and demos http://projecthydra.org/apps-demos-2-2/ Author Details Chris Awre Head of Information Management Library and Learning Innovation Brynmor Jones Library University of Hull Hull  HU6 7RX Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/lli/ Chris Awre is Head of Information Management within Library and Learning Innovation at the University of Hull.
He oversees the teams responsible for the acquisition, processing and cataloguing of all materials managed through the Library from both external and internal sources, the latter focusing on the development of the digital repository and local digital collections.
Chris has a background as a systems librarian and advocates the value of a broad approach to the systems used for digital repository collection development.
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To VRE Or Not to VRE?
: Do South African Malaria Researchers Need a Virtual Research Environment?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines To VRE Or Not to VRE?
: Do South African Malaria Researchers Need a Virtual Research Environment?
Buzz data software java framework wiki database dissemination portfolio portal infrastructure browser identifier blog repositories video graphics passwords e-learning curation e-science e-research algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Heila Pienaar and Martie van Deventer identify the requirements of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for malaria researchers in South Africa.
Worldwide, the research paradigm is in the process of expanding into eResearch and open scholarship.
This implies new ways of collaboration, dissemination and reuse of research results, specifically via the Web.
Developing countries are also able to exploit the opportunity to make their knowledge output more widely known and accessible and to co-operate in research partnerships.
Although there are exisiting examples of eResearch activities, the implementation of eResearch is not yet being fully supported in any co-ordinated way within the South African context.
The South African Research Information Services (SARIS) Project was started inter alia because of the extremely high costs to South African research institutes and university libraries to access the global research literature.
From the research it was very soon clear though that a new research paradigm was emerging and that this paradigm presented ‘a broader range of information support service challenges’ [1].
The project team established that ‘activities making up the family of eResearch were to be found in various stages of development in the research life of South Africa in 2004 but, typically, a “Team South Africa” approach was not evident’.
It was therefore recommended that a framework for eResearch services to the entire South African research community be created as depicted in Figure 1.
The intention was that the ‘eResearch development and innovation services’ would be jointly funded as projects (conducted by competent agents in the system).
Those projects that proved to be essential would then be transferred to the ‘service delivery’ arm (see Figure 1), where sustainable funding would be generated by those who made use of the service.
The whole system was to be co-ordinated at country level.
However, it soon became evident that there would be no national co-ordination of these efforts in the near future, and that individual institutions would have to start their own initiatives.
Figure 1: 2004 version of a proposed structure for eResearch support service for South Africa a governance and management model The SARIS project team identified the United Kingdom’s (UK) Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Virtual Research Environment (VRE) project as a prime example of an eResearch application.
Because the purpose of a VRE is to help researchers in all disciplines manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research a VRE provides a framework of resources to support the underlying processes of research on both small and large scales, particularly for those disciplines which are not well catered for by current infrastructure.
The VRE concept helps to broaden the popular definition of e-science from grid-based distributed computing for scientists with huge amounts of data to the development of online tools, content, and middleware within a coherent framework for all disciplines (all file sizes) and all types of research [2].
The SARIS team members from the University of Pretoria and the CSIR decided to develop a conceptual framework for a South African VRE in support of eResearch.
Related Previous Research The Academic Portal project of the University of Pretoria in 2001 investigated the factors that must be considered during the design and development of an academic portal that will support the personal information and knowledge management needs of academics.
A model was identified as a conceptual framework for the study.
During interviews with academics this model was validated as a sufficient framework to explain the personal management of academic information and knowledge.
The knowledge management practices (collection, retrieval, organising, processing, creating, communicating and distributing academic information and knowledge) of these academics were investigated.
The results gave an indication of the different academic practices that should be supported by an academic portal.
Although the Internet and the Web had the potential to make a huge impact on academics’ task performance, in practice the impact had been limited and these academics’ Web literacy was actually quite low.
These aspects had to be taken into account during the design and development of the academic portal.
The concept and functionality of the prototype academic portal were acceptable to these academics and it was possible to develop guidelines for the development of an academic portal.
The Infoportal was developed to accommodate these guidelines.
The reaction to the Infoportal was very favourable and the launch took place in March 2003 [3].
In practice however it was evident that the portal was used more by management, project and administrative staff than faculty.
One of the reasons for this situation is that the University’s IT department is focused on the support of administrative functions.
With this background it was understood that care would need to be taken that researchers do not perceive the development of a VRE as another initiative to support University administration.
The United Kingdom is an acknowledged leader in the field of VRE development.
However, similar undertakings are being initiated in the United States, Europe as well as in Australia.
The UK’s Integrative Biology VRE (IBVRE) [4] and Building a VRE for the Humanities (BVREH) [5] projects served as two excellent examples, when investigating the requirements of a VRE for malaria researchers in South Africa.
Research Methodology The most important research designs available to empirical research are the experiment, the quasi-experiment, the survey and the case study [6].
The case study was chosen as the overarching research design for this study, as it can be regarded as the most appropriate research design to answer the research questions.
The South African Malaria Initiative (SAMI) Project was identified as the case study.
The research design was based on that used for the University of Oxford-based investigation into the Integrative Biology VRE (IBVRE) and the UP Academic Portal projects.
Several data collection methods are available for empirical research, e.g.
objective tests and scales, interviews, questionnaires, observations and sociometrics [7].
The exploratory nature of this project meant that it was neither straightforward nor desirable to construct a very rigid, structured interview format.
Twenty semi-structured interviews were therefore held with individual malaria researchers and research managers at the following institutions: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) (9 interviews), University of Pretoria (UP) (4), University of Cape Town (UCT) (3), University of Stellenbosch (US) (2) and the Medical Research Council (MRC) (2).
These interviewees were selected randomly from a list provided by the SAMI co-ordinators.
A basic structured interview framework with two main parts was developed.
The first part directed the interviewee to provide an account of the average day in his/her life while the second part required the researchers to describe the research process as well as the tools that they were using while conducting this average day.
They were also asked to reflect on the tools they could anticipate using in the future especially where these tools could support research currently deemed impossible or where the researchers’ efficiency could be improved.
A Day in the Life of SA Malaria Researchers Several informal discussions took place but 20 interviews were captured and analysed.
The general distribution in terms of affiliation, gender, main function and age is reflected in table 1 below: Institution No.
Interviewed Male Female Management Research Age group <30 Age group 30-40 Age group >40 CSIR 9 6 3 4 5   4 5 UP 4 3 1 2 2   2 2 Other SAMI 7 4 3 2 5 1 1 5 Total 20 13 7 8 12 1 7 12 Table 1: Demographics of the interviewees From this detail it is clear that the majority of those interviewed saw themselves primarily as researchers.
The majority was male and over the age of 40.
It is perhaps necessary to reflect on the age distribution.
The majority of interviewees could not be regarded as digital natives.
It was however, not possible to establish from this research if a younger group would have responded differently.
The age distribution is however, a reality for malaria research and research in general in South Africa and would therefore need to be taken into consideration in the design of a VRE.
It also became clear that malaria is very rarely the only field of interest as the respondents’ research areas are much wider than just malaria.
The researchers’ days are taken up by activities such as: Starting the day with e-mail Wet laboratory work (the largest chunk of day is still spent in the laboratory) Articles written by teams Management of research data: majority of files only traceable via the paper lab book Completing paper lab books (electronic lab books are not used at this stage) Much time is spent on writing progress reports Research managers’ days are focused on: Scheduled meetings (their main activity) Face-to-face communication (it remains their preferred mode of communication) ‘Alone time’ is spent looking at research agendas, trends and opportunities The group appeared to understand that the current problems associated with malaria research could only be resolved by multi-disciplinary teams and that a new research paradigm is about to be entered.
Conceptual Framework The SA Malaria research cycle was developed on the grounds of the researchers’ input on how they are doing research.
They see research as an iterative and non-linear process rather than a definitive cycle but the research components was summarised in the following graphic (Figure 2): Figure 2: The preferred research process for SA Malaria Researchers The researchers themselves did not identify intellectual property management as a separate component and it was necessary to add that after feedback was given by some of the research managers.
Figure 2 consolidates the current practices of the interviewed SA malaria researchers.
The ‘agreed-upon’ research cycle was used during the interviews to elicit information about the research practices linked to every stage of the research cycle.
The importance of face-to-face communication and personal knowledge networks within the research community was stressed by all the researchers.
One of the most important discoveries was the lack of knowledge about basic tools / software and the non-integration of those tools into the research cycle as a whole.
In terms of the scientific workflow segment of the research cycle, the discrepancy between sophisticated instruments and the use of paper lab books was quite glaring.
Obviously paper lab books cannot be used for the purposes of effective collaboration and long-term curation.
Stage No.
Stage in Research Process Relevant Resources 1 Identification of research area Personal networks; face-to-face; literature; government documents 2 Literature review & indexing Preferred databases: PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus; Retrieval: Google Scholar, Browser favourites; Filing: manual; database 3 Identification of collaborators Personal networks; EU portal; literature; search engines; ACGT expert list 4 Proposal writing MS Word / Open Office; templates; generic proposal 5 Identification of funding sources Personal networks; funding agencies; institutional resources e.g.
SAMI 6 Project management CSIR: formal project management with tools & staff; UP: informal 7 Scientific workflow Sophisticated instruments with own software write data to servers; Free analysis software; Paper lab book; Referencing system between lab book and instruments; Ad hoc management of data (curation) 8 Training/mentoring etc Face-to-face; hands on; UP: e-Learning for students 9 Real time communication E-mail; face-to-face; phone; webex; wiki; web site; meetings 10 Dissemination & artefacts High impact traditional & open journals data sets required by some journals; conferences Figure 3: SAMI current practices In terms of the time distribution, it was made clear that at least 75% of all research time was spent on the scientific workflow segment of the cycle.
The rest of the activities were done on an ad hoc rather than a daily basis – either at regular intervals (such as once weekly) or when new work is being investigated.
The identified need for tools varied from the relatively simple, e.g.
lists of various types, to the quite sophisticated, e.g.
electronic collaborative lab books and a repository for experiments (see Figure 4).
In general researchers continuously emphasised the need for more sophisticated research equipment.
Stage in Research Process Identified Need 1 Identification of research area Grouping of information in once place; Access to previous work 2 Literature review & indexing List of search engines; Internal shared database of indexed articles; Person to assist in retrieval of relevant literature 3 Identification of collaborators List of researchers & topics 4 Proposal writing Document management system 5 Identification of funding sources List of funders easily accessible e.g.web site 6 Project management Proper project management system; MS Project 7 Scientific workflow Even more sophisticated instruments; Electronic lab book; Systems biology software; Experiment repository; Labs with in silico screening; Bio-information specialist 8 Training/mentoring etc e-Learning system for researchers 9 Real time communication Skype; Collaborative tools e.g.
e-Lab books; Smart board; Video conference; Project portal 10 Dissemination & artefacts Research output repository Figure 4: SAMI identified needs Even though they claimed to be aware of the change in research practice, researchers did not consider the development of collaborative research infrastructure unless they were prompted to do so.
It was surprising that they also did not verbalise any frustration in terms of sharing research with peers and partners.
Several complaints were expressed that medical modelling software is very expensive.
Similarly several respondents remarked how expensive research equipment is.
They expressed the need for SAMI members to list the equipment they have available within the pool of research organisations.
Several researchers supported the idea of in-silico experimentation.
A proper eLearning system for researchers would, one researcher remarked, increase efficiency because it would address the frustration of continuously having to explain processes/ protocols or to troubleshoot experiments.
Several researchers expressed a need for repositories.
Needs in respect of repository content ranged from compounds to datasets, to journal articles and to CVs of experts.
A consolidated model (conceptual framework) was created to represent both current and anticipated tools.
In the consolidated model (Figure 5) it became clear that some very important aspects of collaborative malaria research were not being supported.
It is therefore not surprising that they could not conceptualise the advantages nor visualise the new opportunities that a true collaborative research infrastructure would bring.
Stage in Research Process VRE components Users 1 Identification of research area Web/wiki/blog: search engines, databases; researchers & topics; funders, portals, communication, projects none 2 Literature review & indexing Internal shared database of indexed articles some 3 Identification of collaborators Expertise lists and commercial services eg Web of Science and Research Africa none 4 Proposal writing Document management system some 5 Identification of funding sources Generic software e.g.
MS / Open Office all 6 Project management Project management system some 7 Scientific workflow (Free) Data analysis software all 7 Scientific workflow Access to research networks & super computers some 7 Scientific workflow Sophisticated instruments that generate digital information and data all 7 Scientific workflow Mathematical modelling tools; numerical algorithm tools; simulation software; in silico experiments all 7 Scientific workflow Servers with data files all 7 Scientific workflow Integrated data management system none 7 Scientific workflow (Collaborative) Electronic Lab book none 8 Training/mentoring etc E-learning system for researchers none 9 Real time communication Skype, smart board, video conferences some 10 Dissemination & artefacts Repositories: research results; experiments; literature & documents none Figure 5: Consolidated model of Malaria VRE components Figure 5 indicates that: None of the researchers appear to have access to: A web / wiki / blog containing lists of search engines, databases, researchers, funders, portals, projects, software, instruments Shared repositories for research results (articles, data, etc), experiments and documents An integrated and indexed/ annotated data management/curation system Collaborative electronic lab book system An e-Learning system for researchers (e.g.
to transfer knowledge about new methodologies).
Only some of the researchers are making use of: An internally shared database of indexed articles.
(Private or individual databases (both paper and electronic) are however quite popular.)
A document management system (CSIR) A project management system (CSIR) Access to research networks, super-computers and labs with in-silico screening In-silico experiment software Electronic communication tools (Skype, Smart board, Video conferencing etc) Statistical analysis tools (‘R’ appears to be widely known but commercial products were also mentioned.)
All of the researchers are making use of: Sophisticated instruments that generate digital information and data Servers with data files Mathematical modelling tools Numerical algorithm tools Simulation software Data analysis software (mostly freeware) Generic ‘office’ type software (e.g.
MS Word and Open Write).
MS Excel is an application used by all.
While communicating research results it became clear that it would not be sufficient to share just the theoretical understanding of a VRE conceptual framework.
It was decided to attempt to build a demonstrator (not a prototype) using Web 2.0 collaboration tools.
It was believed that it would not take too much effort to demonstrate the advantages of VRE functions within a secure shared environment.
Figure 6: Interface of Malaria VRE demonstrator The demonstrator was designed around three types of workspaces i.e.
the open Internet where anyone could gain access to the information made available, a secure but shared space and a secure private workspace.
Tools were identified to deploy in each of these work areas.
The interface was designed using a very easy-to-use portal and access to the secure team and personal areas was password-protected.
Personal space was facilitated by creating blogs for individual researchers.
These blogs served as lab books.
The ‘researcher’ could give access to whom they wanted and they could upload personal material directly into the blog or link to research results and other materials which were placed in the repository.
Repository items were indexed in more detail to ensure retrievability and sharability.
Obviously, from the organisational perspective, the curation of electronic files within the repository became a more manageable task.
(See figures 6, 7, 8).
Figure 7: Tools used in Malaria VRE demonstrator The demonstrator proved to be very successful in transferring concepts and in allowing hands-on experience in what the maintenance of a VRE would require.
Figure 8 : Relationship between personal and organisational information During this phase of the VRE project (i.e.
conceptual framework and demonstrator) it became clear that the development of a VRE is a massive task.
Fortunately several developments took place internationally that could ease this process.
Explosion of International VRE-related Initiatives As mentioned above, some JISC VRE projects were watched quite closely at the start of the malaria VRE project but an explosion of international VRE-type initiatives took place during the Malaria VRE project that may have a positive impact on the development of a Malaria VRE prototype.
Three of these initiatives are therefore discussed briefly: myExperiment The myExperiment toolkit enables the research community to share digital items associated with their research — in particular, it enables the researcher to share and execute scientific workflows.
It supports individual scientists on their personal projects, forming a distributed community with scientists elsewhere who would otherwise be disconnected, enabling them to share, reuse and re-purpose experiments, to reduce time-to-experiment, share expertise and avoid reinvention — and it does this in the context of the scholarly knowledge lifecycle.
Hence myExperiment is marketed as a community social network, a market place, a platform for launching workflows and a gateway to other publishing environments [8].
The British Library’s Research Information Centre (RIC) This project is managed by the British Library and developed by Microsoft Research and it appears to hold much promise.
The beta test site was launched mid-June 2008 and malaria researchers were encouraged to participate in the test phase.
The biggest advantage of participating in the RIC lies in the ‘leapfrog’ potential that it holds.
South African malaria researchers would be immediately able to start concentrating on the collaborative way of creating content rather than having to struggle with the underlying technologies.
At this stage the timeline of the RIC prototype must still be finalised [9].
HUBzero The HUBzero platform was created by researchers at Purdue University, USA, in conjunction with the NSF-sponsored Network for Computational Nanotechnology.
The purpose was to create science gateways for scientific domains.
HUBzero allows the developer to create dynamic Web sites that connect a community in scientific research and educational activities.
HUBzero sites combine powerful Web 2.0 concepts with a middleware that provides instant access to interactive simulation tools.
These tools are not just Java applets, but real research codes that can access the Open Science Grid, and other national Grid computing resources.
Seven other science gateways are currently under construction [10].
According to an email communication from Dr. Gerhard Klimeck, Associate Director for Technology Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) and Professor of Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, the HUBzero package will become open source late in 2009.
It seems as if the HUBzero platform could inform the design of a malaria VRE – especially then in terms of including the grid technology which is necessary for modelling large datasets.
The availability of the code as open source and the possibility of customising specific VREs for different subject fields are added bonuses.
Way Forward The development of a VRE does not and should not exist in isolation.
It is recommended that the development of a prototype is aligned with the South African research cyber-infrastructure development.
The improved research infrastructure will address research efficiency improvements allowing researchers to address the grand challenges in science, engineering, medicine and humanities.
It will also improve research effectiveness – allowing multi-disciplinary research and ensuring curation of scientific content.
Not only should researchers be able to do the tasks more quickly and collaborate more easily, they should also be assured that their research efforts will be available for future reference.
This research project identified the following as priorities for our future work: The activities carried out to perform scientific experiments i.e.
the experimental workflow needs more investigation.
The wider context in which the research is conducted needs to be taken into consideration.
The tools used by the SAMI researchers have to be embedded for all before they are expanded and enhanced by new tools.
The specific collaboration needs of this group have to be the primary focus.
The nanoHUB development at Purdue University is an excellent example of how a VRE could work when placed on top of National Research Network (NREN or grid) infrastructure.
It is harnessing the power of grid computing to provide a single entry point to scientific tools, discoveries, and research on the Web without forcing researchers to download a single piece of code [11].
It is important to remember that our researchers are not working on malaria exclusively.
This aspect would need to be kept in mind in the design of the VRE and it may just be necessary to build a generic VRE that also caters for other fields of research interest or the VRE could contribute rather than resolve frustrations.
In addition the researchers confessed to working at home.
A VRE would have to be designed for home access – especially in terms of the collaborative writing component.
The next step should be to build a prototype Malaria or generic VRE that can function on top of the South African NREN with the support of the SA government and by using software elements of other international VRE-type developments e.g.
the British Library’s RIC, University of Purdue’s HUBzero and JISC’s myExperiment.
Conclusion The question remains: do our researchers need to develop VREs?
We are of the opinion that they do, that it would greatly enhance their workflow and improve researcher efficiency and allow South African research organisations to come to grips with the management of its digital research content.
The not so obvious advantage is that it would also allow for effectiveness gains especially because our researchers are already working across several areas of expertise.
It is clear however, that South Africa, as a developing country with its own particular challenges, would need to think carefully how this development would enhance our research especially then in research areas such as malaria.
It should, for example, not be used as a mechanism to control research output.
A further challenge is that it is not yet clear how our newly promulgated Act, on the protection of intellectual property created with public funding [12], will affect developments such as shared work environments.
There is therefore an urgency in raising the funding to develop a first pilot project so that challenges could be systematically addressed.
Readers may wish to refer to work associated with this article [13][14] and also to presentations at the African Digital Scholarship & Curation 2009 Conference in Pretoria, South Africa [15].
* Editor’s note: in-silico: “performed on computer or via computer simulation.” References Page-Shipp, RJ, Hammes, MMP, Pienaar, H, Reagon, F, Thomas, G, Van Deventer, MJ, Veldsman, S. (2005).
e-Research support services: responding to a challenge facing the South African research and information communities, South African Journal of Information Management, 7⁄4.
Accessed October 2008 from http://www.sajim.co.za/ Fraser, M. (2005).
“Virtual research environments: overview and activity”.
Ariadne, 44.
Accessed October 2008 from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/fraser/ Pienaar, H. (2003).
Design and development of an academic portal.
Libri, 53⁄2, 118-129.
Mascord, M. (2007).
IBVRE final report.
Acccessed October 2008 from http://www.vre.ox.ac.uk/ibvre/IBVRE-FinalReport-1a.pdf Virtual Research Environments programme (phase 1) Web site.
Accessed October 2008 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre1/bvreh.aspx Boshoff, AB.
(1988).
Navorsingsmetodiek in toegepaste geesteswetenskaplike navorsing (Research methodology in applied humanities research).
South African journal for library and information science 56,1-6.
Kerlinger.
F.N.
(1986).
Foundations of behavioral research.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston myExperiment Web site.
Accessed October 2008 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre2/myexperiment.aspx Personal communication with Stephen Andrews of the British Library on 20 October 2008.
HUBzero Web site.
Accessed October 2008 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre2/myexperiment.aspx Windham, C. (2007) The nanoHUB: Community and Collaboration.
Educause Review, 42⁄6, 144-145.
Accessed October 2008 from http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/ThenanoHUBCommunityand Col/45232 Republic of South Africa.
2008.
Intellectual property rights from publicly financed research and development Act, Act No.
51 of 2008. http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=94343 This Act has been promulgated and the regulations in preparation are currently the subject of much concern.
For one view, see the following blog entry by one South African commentator: Gray, E. 2009.
The plan for innovation, IPR and public health is adopted at the WHO.
How can this be reconciled with the IPR Act?
http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/gray-area/2009/05/28/who-and-sa-ipr-act Van Deventer, M., Pienaar, H. Advance and attack: technology demonstrator to the rescue …and beyond.
International Internet Librarian 2008 Conference.
London.
16-17 October 2008 https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/handle/2263/7878 Van Deventer, M.J., Pienaar, H. Getting Executive Buy-In: The Value of Technology Demonstrators.
Ninth Southern African Online Information Meeting.
CSIR Conference Centre, Pretoria.
3-5 June 2008 http://researchspace.csir.co.za/dspace/handle/10204/2263 African Digital Scholarship & Curation 2009 Programme http://www.library.up.ac.za/digi/programme.htm Author Details Heila Pienaar Deputy Director e-Information Strategy & e-Research Enablement Library Services University of Pretoria South Africa Email: heila.pienaar@up.ac.za Web site: http://www.ais.up.ac.za/profile/heila_pienaar/index.htm Martie van Deventer Portfolio Manager: CSIR Information Services CSIR Council for Scientific and Industrial Research South Africa Email: mvandeve@csir.co.za Web site: http://www.csir.co.za/ Return to top Article Title: “To VRE or Not to VRE?
: Do South African Malaria Researchers Need a Virtual Research Environment?” Author: Heila Pienaar and Martie van Deventer br /> Publication Date: 30-April-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 59 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue59/pienaar-vandeventer/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Product Review: The IPad and the Educator, First Impressions Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Product Review: The IPad and the Educator, First Impressions Buzz data wiki html video graphics hypertext adobe flash ebook jpg drm usb podcast itunes iphone ipad html5 Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley reports on his initial impressions of the new Apple iPad in the first three weeks since its release in the USA and what it has to offer the mobile educator.
Triumph of Design over Function?
So, you have seen and read the hype about the iPad [1]; the world release has been delayed until the US appetite has been satiated and it will be the end of May for the rest of the world.
Should you buy one or is this an example of the triumph of elegant design over function?
What follows is an initial view of an iPad bought in the US in April and the results of some playing around with it in the USA and then the UK.
It is not a comparative test with ‘netbooks’ or other e-book readers (such as Kindle and Sony), although I shall make some discrete comparisons because this review stems from an earlier discussion about e-books in Ariadne [2].
Main Impressions One complaint about existing e-book readers was, and is, that they do not have colour screens.
I want to view Web pages with images and text at a decent size and read e-books with coloured (and preferably hypertext) material.
I’d like my students to have this capability too.
The e-ink technology in a Kindle cannot currently offer anything other than greyscale so the iPad is immediately a ‘wow’ when you turn it on.
The touch screen is excellent and a size that can be used to read books as well as Web pages without lots of scrolling.
This was my main reason for trying the iPad as, apart of my desire to have students use a Personal Learning Environment (PLE, device plus appropriately chosen applications), the screen was a major consideration.
Netbooks fill the bill to a limited extent but with the 9.7” diagonal (19.5 x 15 cm screen, portrait or landscape conversion in 1 second) the iPad is more than good.
All my colleagues who have paid me £5 just to touch it have remarked on this.
Have a look at the (Guardian) Eyewitness app [3] to see what it can do.
The screen also provides a keyboard (scaling for the orientation) that can be used for typing rather than prodding with a finger or stylus but, as with the iPhone, you can only get numerals by shifting a key.
A separate Apple Bluetooth keyboard is available which is very neat, light and allows proper typing.
This review was initially typed on the iPad Notes application (‘app’ now of course), I have not yet tried the Apple iWorks suite and at this stage I am not using the iPad as a laptop replacement; but rather, as a lightweight device that can be used for basic notebook functionality with the ability to read text and view Web pages without strain or undue scrolling.
The 3G version of the iPad is not yet out but, for the moment, this does not concern me; I can ‘synch’ my iPhone and Macbook Pro when needed and my iPhone gives me some iPhone applications of usefully increased screen size (there are lots more to come specifically for the iPad of course).
Music and video (4:3 ratio) come over smoothly and video is at a reasonable size to view rather than squinting myopically at an iPhone.
The iPad was useful on a Transatlantic flight (steerage with restricted lapspace) for typing, music and film.
When necessary, you can slip it beside you and need not worry about slopping your gin and tonic over a keyboard.
Convenience is a great selling point about the iPad, battery life is excellent, a claimed 10 hours.
It took about 6 hours to recharge from 4% capacity to full.
The same power connector-USB cable (used also for data connectivity) works for the iPod and iPhone as well so you can easily charge from laptop, external AC sources, car adapter as well, as a PowerMonkey or similar external power source.
Power efficiency is mainly due to the type of computer architecture the machine uses.
It is the same Apple custom CPU (known as A4) that is used by the iPhone and so, from this point of view, the iPad is indeed a large iPhone.
The architecture differs from that used on most netbooks, which are really stripped down and relatively slow and power-hungry versions of (x86 architecture) laptops.
We should really think of the iPad as a new generation of small computer and it remains to be seen what Apple will develop in the future.
Unfortunately, Digital Rights Management (DRM) meant that I could not access iTunes myself in the USA so I had to rely on my son’s access to try a few things out.
I now have a list of applications to experiment with but I shall not report on those here, they will have to wait until the App Store opens for iPad use in the UK.
At present, you can only have one app open at a time (plus audio on the iPod application).
Apple have already indicated that the next version of the OS will have multiple-tasking, that is, keeping two applications open at the same time; currently you have to switch using the discrete ‘home’ button.
This button is on the screen, the on/off and volume controls are around the rim together with docking connector, earpiece jack socket, aperture for microphone (so you can use the iDictaphone app) and a switch to lock/unlock the screen orientation.
I mentioned DRM earlier so the only iBooks downloaded so far are Winnie the Pooh and Twelfth Night.
The former is really very good with the original E.H. Shepard coloured illustrations.
They are text-searchable (did you know that the word ‘hunny’ only occurs three times in Winnie the Pooh?
), there is a dictionary and the ability to change to one of five different typefaces and two sizes.
The text is very clear and readable in either mode and the graphics can give you a page turn as slow or as fast as you like, neat.
I also tried Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland downloaded from Stanza where there is more flexibility with fonts but the text is less crisp.
I downloaded apps for Kindle [4] and Reader Lite but did not use their offerings.
I suspect that there will be improvements from most e-book vendors with iPad optimisation in the jockeying for position that appears to be going on in the e-book world.
We have yet to see how the commercial textbook vendors deal with e-books for the iPad.
Although I might buy e-books for leisure reading with my new toy, I really want to explore the educational facilities; what can be done with technical books and the ability to hypertext and link to Web pages.
As mentioned above, this is a problem with e-books, not the iPad.
Although I might use up space with lots of full-length video there is plenty for music, podcasts (BBC versions come down just fine) etc on my 16GB iPad.
It is easy to synch with my iPhone and MacBook Pro, addresses, notebook, and music, etc.
As well as the applications I have on my iPhone.
Some of these work quite well on the iPad, although not all expand to the full-size screen.
As well as e-books, the iPad can read PDFs (the iPhone PDF reader has not yet reached ‘iPadland’ but I think it would be a useful addition).
I am crossing the Irish Sea as I write, and the ferry has a somewhat slow WiFi, but I have just searched Google Scholar, downloaded a PDF and can read this easily on the iPad.
A page fills the screen and you can use the touch screen to enlarge and inspect a bit of a diagram with ease.
This is not a pleasurable experience on an iPhone.
I can also inspect the Web pages of one of my teaching modules and do all the other things I might want to do other than upload and download material through the server.
This is one downside to the iPad, it is not designed to be a netbook and you are locked in to the available apps.
Moreover, as far as I know, this does not yet include an HTML editor or file transfer utility.
However, there is no problem in changing wiki-based teaching materials – and here I refer you to my Ariadne article where I recommend a wiki base for technical textbooks [2].
There is a 4-digit on-screen security panel that can be requested from the ‘Settings’ icon although there is no ‘Kensington-type’ security lock opening, probably because space is limited; but some security would be useful, a hand or wrist loop, for example.
I didn’t try using the iPod on public transport in Washington or San Francisco in case it was grabbed for this reason.
Similarly, for use in the field the extreme test situation for my students’ or my own use a hand grip device would be welcome.
I expect this will come, along with many other third-party gadgets and add-ons.
One thing you should consider buying is Apple’s own jacket.
This gives a secure covering back and sides with a flip cover to protect the screen.
The cover also folds back and provides a nifty inclined typing surface.
I also bought a custom waterproof cover so you really can read it in the shower or bath or in the field come to that as the touch screen can be manipulated through the neoprene cover.
The (bundled) Photos app is useful.
I downloaded images from my MacBook Pro to the Pad but the new camera docking attachment will allow you to download images (jpg or RAW) directly from a camera or memory card.
The excellent screen, with its wide viewing angle, makes this a good facility for reviewing a photography session without the need for a full laptop.
This is important in my fieldwork.
The iPad also makes a grand picture frame and is much more versatile than the frames I have seen.
While in the USA I produced some Gigapan images [5] as an example of what you might show to students on actual (or virtual) fieldwork, as long as you had a Web connection of course.
But how could they hope to see this on a screen much smaller than that of the iPad?
Unfortunately, because these images are produced in Flash the iPad, so far, cannot show them.
The CPU speed is stated as 1GHz (the 3G iPhone is about 0.6GHz) so the screen refresh etc is very good.
This again follows from the A4 chipset that will allow applications to be constructed which take advantage of this speed.
Creativity in iPhone apps has hardly been lacking, so I am sure there will be plenty on offer that will fulfil many needs to take it beyond a Web-surfing and film-watching gadget.
Hovering in the background however is the failure of Apple to implement Flash; and the Jobs-Adobe spat [6] has been well publicised, even outside the technical press.
Hence, you are tied in to Apple apps and there is no Flash player for the many Web sites that use it, BBC pages for example.
At the same time HTML 5 has been given various boosts lately and will no doubt start to gain a hold on developers, perhaps because of the iPad’s popularity.
We shall see, but Steve Jobs has a point, why use the kludge of Flash and its gobbling of resources on a machine like the iPad which (due to its chipset) is pretty efficient?
I wonder if Snow Leopard will be implemented at some time in the future; Unix on a slate?
Apple iPad wifi: from http://www.apple.com/ Conclusion In summary, should you be tempted?
It depends what you want of course.
To some extent it is a large iPhone, but so much more than that, as well as different.
Despite it being tied to Apple it has many advantages over existing netbooks.
Apple has just released the UK price, £429 for the basic model, the subject of this review.
Is it worth it?
Only you can tell, or whether you want the WiFi+3G version (£529).
Despite what might seem to be a high price, I think its advantages give it an edge over the competition.
I might also argue that it has no competition.
So expect to see iPads at conferences this autumn.
There were plenty of net books in use by delegates at ALT-C last September, I don’t expect I shall be the only person with one in Nottingham this year [7].
References For those who may not have, a couple of snapshots are available: iPad, therefore I am: When does news become advertising?, Rajan Datar, BBC World Service, 5 February 2010, 12:01 UK time http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/overtoyou/2010/02/ipad_therefore_i_am_when_does.html Apple’s tablet hype nearly over, Maggie Shiels, BBC News, 27 January 2010, 12:06 UK time http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/maggieshiels/2010/01/apples_tablet_hype.html Whalley, W.B.
“e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?” October 2006, Ariadne, Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/whalley/ Guardian iPad Eyewitness http://www.guardian.co.uk/ipad For material on Kindle see “eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?“, Emma Tonkin, January 2010, Ariadne Issue 62 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/tonkin/ Pinnacles National Park.
http://gigapan.org/gigapans/47714 and http://gigapan.org/gigapans/47844/ Apple boss Steve Jobs explains ban on Flash, BBC Technology News, 29 April 2010 22:57 UK time http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10092298.stm ALT-C 2010 http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2010/ Author Details Brian Whalley Professor of Geomorphology School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology Queens University Belfast BT7 1NN Email: b.whalley@qub.ac.uk Web site: http://web.gg.qub.ac.uk/people/staff/whalley/ Return to top Article Title: “The iPad and the Educator: First Impressions” Author: Brian Whalley Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/whalley-rvw-2/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Search Engines: Google Still Growing Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Search Engines: Google Still Growing Buzz data html database archives blog video flickr cataloguing adobe flash ark youtube url Citation BibTex RIS Phil Bradley finds it difficult to ignore some of the latest developments from Google particularly the ones that are actually quite good.
Although this is a column about search engines I normally try to avoid Google, simply because it’s well covered everywhere else.
However, in the first half of this year there have been a number of changes and dare I say it, improvements to Big G which are worth exploring.
Google Continues to Grow In actual fact, it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore Google, simply because everyone else is embracing it, seemingly with no reservations.
ItProPortal [1] is reporting from Hitwise that Google has increased its share of the UK market by 10 points to reach 87.3%.
During the same period, use of Yahoo has fallen by 8% to 4%, and both Microsoft and Ask are grubbing around on about 3% each.
Given Google’s huge market share everywhere else, it should come as no surprise that it’s increasing in the United States as well.
Hitwise has reported: ‘Its share increased from 68.29 percent in May to 69.17 percent in June, the analyst firm said.
Over the same period, Yahoo dropped from 19.95 percent to 19.62 percent and Microsoft dropped from 5.89 percent to 5.46 percent.
Fourth-place Ask.com has managed to eke out gains over the last year, though it slid from 4.23 percent to 4.17 percent from May to June.’ [2] Google Experiments, Both Good and Bad Google Experimental Search [3] is a fairly descriptive title for what the company is doing in this area of its site.
Google likes to experiment, and to involve users in those experiments.
The link takes you to Google Labs, and you can join a number of different experiments.
The ones that they’re most excited about at the moment are a combination of three timeline, map view option and info view.
The timeline option displays a graph at the top of the search page which summarises how your results are spread through time.
If you click on a timeline bar it narrows the results to that specific period.
It’s a nice idea and great if you need information on a subject which was written at a particular point in time.
The map view lets users visualise on Google maps the key places found in their results.
This is great for finding locations of conferences, events and so on.
The ‘info’ view provides a control panel to review information from a page that contains dates, measurements, locations or images.
If you’re interested, just follow the link and join an experiment.
Other experiments are suggested terms, keyboard shortcuts.
Alternatively, you can visit the Google Labs page to check out other experimental features.
I don’t expect that all of these will reach fruition, but it’s worth visiting every now and then, just to see what the company is up to.
In fact, it’s worth remembering that a lot of what Google attempts doesn’t actually work out the way they intended.
PC World have an interesting article entitled ‘Top 10 Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures’ [4] which is a listing of exactly that.
Examples include Accelerator, Answers, Catalog, Voice Search and several others.
Google Librarian Central Closes While we’re on the topic of what’s not good at Google, it’s worth remembering Google Librarian Central [5] is still not happening.
This was a team, together with a weblog that was going to do great things for the library community.
I noticed that there had been no postings since 29 June 2007 and the irony of the last post should not be lost of any of us.
In part: “[our] blog team is taking a break to think about the best ways to communicate with you and keep you updated on what’s happening with Google.
We’re not leaving you hanging, though.” LibraryStuff [6] then asked the same question; Sarah, the Librarian in Black [7] also wants to know [8], and Stephen Abram is also keen to know what the situation is [9].
The general consensus (without putting words into anyone’s mouths) is that Google is cynically trying to use librarians, and drip feeding us until they think we’re no longer important, at which point we get dropped.
It’s a cynical view, but an understandable one.
Another viewpoint is that perhaps Google is rather less the 800 lb gorilla and rather more a 4-year old child at Christmas who is constantly running from one toy to another, playing with them for a bit and then dropping them and moving to something else.
It’s now been over a year since Google posted to that weblog; furthermore they’ve not addressed the question that we’ve all raised.
Perhaps the company doesn’t think it needs to, or that librarians on the whole are happy with it, but the silence is still really rather deafening.
Since I wrote the above section Google has closed the Google Librarian Central blog [5].
It has been thinking about how best to communicate with us, and this apparently is best done by closing the weblog and reverting to a newsletter.
Is this one of the first examples of a company dumping Web 2.0 technology in favour of 1.0?
Don’t worry though Google is still committed to the goal of sharing information with us.
Stop laughing at the back it’s there in black and white.
Its staff say they’re going to be sending out the newsletter [10] ‘every few months’.
In other words they’re making it as vague as possible so we can’t easily keep a track on how bad they’re becoming at communicating.
They’ve learned a lot from us, and the most laughable comment they made is that they want to keep the dialogue open, which apparently they can do best by closing their weblog.
I don’t believe a word that they’re saying.
The weblog has become an embarrassment to them and the best way of getting librarians off their back is a) by getting rid of it and, b) making a display of continuing to talk to us with a newsletter that they’ll update when they feel like it.
Which will be what?
An annual event?
It’s worth pointing out that this is my personal view and is not necessarily representative of Ariadne as a whole.
Indeed, there are also librarians who completely disagree with this interpretation – Meredith Farkas doesn’t see what the fuss is all about, starting her blog post on the subject with “Seriously, I just don’t get it.” [11] Indexing the Dark or Invisible Web One of the problems of Internet search is trying to get to the majority of data that’s freely available, but which is hidden inside databases.
Until now it’s been very difficult to get access to that material, unless you’re prepared to locate a site with database-driven content and use that site’s local search engine.
Now however, Google has started to index this data, often referred to as the dark, hidden or invisible Web.
[12].
This is still something that is at the very early stages of development, but it’s a very positive step which if it works will enable us all to search and retrieve more data than we could possibly dream of; though of course that’s going to come with a whole host of new problems.
Site Search from Google Results A new function that you may notice when you’re searching for a particular site is that Google sometimes offers the option of searching the site directly from the results.
If you visit the engine and do a search for Argos [13] for example you’ll get a search box that pops up below the site summary.
This is pretty hit-and-miss, so don’t expect it to happen for all the companies you look for, but it’s very helpful when it is available, and means that we don’t have to worry about including a ‘site:url’ variable in the search.
Another point worth mentioning is that if you do run that search you’ll also see that Google has added in direct links to various sections of the Argos site, such as the store locator option.
These shortcuts are very helpful since they flag up key elements of a site for a searcher, and allow direct access, rather than having to waste time going to the site and hunting around for the particular section or page of the site that you want.
This option also works on sites that do not have the site search option.
So as I say, it’s pretty hit-and-miss, but it’s a helpful improvement that other search engines would do well to emulate.
Searching Flash Google and Yahoo are working with Adobe to make it easier to index Flash content.
[14] This includes Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, self-contained Web sites and anything in between.
The inability to index Flash has always been something of a mixed blessing it does limit what can be found on the Net, but equally has been something of a hold on enthusiastic people who want to make everything Flash, usually at the expense of good content.
I suppose this will now open the floodgates of a whole rash of Flash-enabled Web sites, and for the most part I don’t think this is a positive move.
However, if this is going to happen, we do need to be able to search effectively and perhaps this push will encourage other engines to look at providing the same functionality.
New Google Maps Features Google Maps [15] is a great resource and I think it’s one of the very best things that Google has done.
They’ve now added a really nice new feature when you look for a location it brings up an opportunity to explore the area through photographs, video and user-contributed maps.
They’ve provided some very useful help [16] on how to contribute your own material.
It is an excellent way of finding out more about a particular location and is an excellent example of usergenerated content.
Google and the Premier League This is a real oddity, but very welcome nonetheless.
If you type in the name of a football club, at the top of the usual results Google will give you the result of the last game the team played and details on the next.
I do however wonder where they’re getting the data from, since they don’t say.
(The next link goes to a Wikipedia article, so perhaps treat it with a little caution.)
There is an organisation called Football DataCo Ltd [17], which is a company which has been granted the power by the industry to provide content and allow organisations like newspapers to reproduce that information on payment of a fee.
In fact, the resource currently isn’t working, but that may simply be because we’re in the off season.
You can however see a screenshot from my Flickr account [18].
Domain Name Searching One of the irritating features of the Internet for me, and I know a lot of others, is the difficulty in finding out a little more about particular Web sites.
It’s sometimes helpful to see who owns a site, for how long it’s been operating, where it is based and so on.
While there are lots of different resources out there which help track this information down I’ve never found them entirely satisfactory, and I always need to try and remember where they are!
Google has now added a ‘whois’ name function.
If you run a search such as whois Ariadne.ac.uk you may get a small amount of information on when the site first went live and when it expires.
It also gives you a link to another site, Domain Tools [19], which lets you dig deeper.
This service does appear to be slightly buggy and some people have reported seeing it while others have not.
If that’s the case for you, I’d suggest jumping straight to the Domain Tools site and searching directly, or simply type their URL into the address bar followed by the URL of the site that you’re interested in the format http://whois.domaintools.com/ariadne.ac.uk This will then provide you with information such as a description of the site, related sites, indexed data, server data and so on.
Google News Adds Quotes Google News [20] has started to add in recent quotes from politicians and celebrities who are in the news [21].
Simply type in the name of your preferred person in the news and the search engine may well provide a popup of a recent quotation.
I think the value of this is limited, but it works automatically and may prove useful in some circumstances so it would be churlish to be too critical of it.
Google Launches Knol Google has just launched Knol [22] onto the world it’s previously been invitation-only.
It’s their attempt to take on the likes of Wikipedia and Britannica, by inviting people to submit articles on subjects close to their hearts.
Other people may make changes, but these have to be authorised by the original author.
There are a number of Knols already available, but from a quick look I would calculate approximately that there are only about 400 at the time of writing.
The vast majority of the articles written are currently in the medical field; my estimation is in excess of 80%.
The others are a fairly odd mix highlighted on the home page are articles on ‘How to backpack’ and ‘Toilet clogs’ which seem slightly unusual articles to focus on at the launch but perhaps that’s just me.
Articles vary in length, authority and linguistic ability.
Another featured knol on the homepage informs me that ‘Tooth pain is generally felt as a sharp or aching pain in or around a tooth.’ Well, yes.
Some knols are written by apparent experts I say apparent because while there are biographical notes about some (but not all) authors they seem to be autobiographies.
Other biographies have been left blank.
The layout of articles is good title, sub heading, author, article rating, description, alternative titles, revision history, contents list, reviews and so on.
Adverts that accompany each article are over on the right-hand side and are reasonably unobtrusive authors take a percentage of the revenue made.
This may go some way to explaining why there are so many medical knols, given that the advertisements are going to make reasonable sums of money.
I suspect this is going to bias the type of articles that are written unlike Wikipedia and Britannica where people write on subjects they are passionate about, I think a fairly large proportion of Knol authors may have monetary gain on their minds.
Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a potential bias of which users should be aware.
Setting up a knol is very simple, and looks rather like the screen you get when writing a document in Google docs.
Articles are created into one of three Creative Commons licences.
Currently it’s not possible to embed video, which is a drawback and slightly odd, given the Google/YouTube love fest, but I expect this will change in time.
Is it worth using at the moment?
In my opinion it’s not.
While I’m pretty sure that the authors are who they say they are, if I’m dealing with anything that’s medical I’d prefer to use more authoritative sources, and if it’s something else then I’d probably go to a Web site there’s a nice article on what to do in Singapore for example, but I think I’d get as good if not more information at an official tourist board site.
Of course, there’s also the problem that it’s not very big yet, so I’m unlikely to find the information that I want.
This will change over time however; so mine is not an entirely fair criticism, though accurate in the short term.
However, Knol is worth keeping tabs on to see how it grows in the future.
And Finally: As an interesting item with which to finish this column, it’s worth having a look at The Bible According To Google Earth [23].
This is a superb concept.
A group of artists have created works based on the Bible (Adam and Eve, the Ark, Parting of the Red Sea and the Crucifixion) as they may have looked if viewed by Google Earth.
It’s worth taking a few seconds to look at them; it’s a wonderful idea and well executed.
References ITProPortal.com Google Gets Monopolistic, Eyes 90% Of UK Search Market http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2008/06/11/google-gets-monopolistic-eyes-90-uk-search-market/ CNET News.com: News Digital Media: Google’s U.S. search share nears 70 percent http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9991866-93.html Google Experimental Search http://www.google.com/experimental/ PC World Top 10 Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures http://www.pcworld.com/article/146101/top_10_google_flubs_flops_and_failures.html Google Librarian Central http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/ Library Stuff: What ever happened to: Google Librarian Central?
http://www.librarystuff.net/2008/01/08/what-ever-happened-to-google-librarian-central/ Sarah Houghton-Jan http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/about.html (Editor’s note: Sarah writes on dealing with the information overload in this issue).
LibrarianInBlack: Google Librarian Central has a 7 month summer break?
http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2008/01/google-libraria.html Stephen’s Lighthouse: Google and Librarians http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/01/google_and_libr_1.html Google Librarian Central Newsletter http://www.google.com/librariancenter/newsletter/0807.html Love for sale: Information Wants To Be Free http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/index.php/2008/07/10/love-for-sale/ Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Crawling through HTML forms http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/crawling-through-html-forms.html Argos: Google Search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=argos Google and Yahoo to Make Flash Content Searchable http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-and-yahoo-to-make-flash-content-searchable/7230/ Google Maps http://maps.google.co.uk/ Explore Google Maps http://maps.google.co.uk/intl/en_us/help/maps/tour/#explore_place Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Football DataCo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_DataCo Google adds football data on Flickr Photo Sharing!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39329798@N00/2467592314/ Whois lookup and Domain name search http://whois.domaintools.com/ Whois lookup and Domain name search http://news.google.com/ For example try http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=gordon%20brown Knol http://knol.google.com/ CR Blog: Blog Archive: The Bible According To Google Earth http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/the-bible-according-to-google-earth/ Author Details Phil Bradley Independent Internet Consultant Email: philb@philb.com Web site: http://www.philb.com Return to top Article Title: “Search Engines: Google Still Growing” Author: Phil Bradley Publication Date: 30-July-2008 Publication: Ariadne Issue 56 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/search-engines/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 65: Ariadne in Search of Your Views Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 65: Ariadne in Search of Your Views Buzz data mobile software framework javascript database infrastructure archives metadata xhtml tagging browser identifier schema repositories preservation multimedia visualisation gis aggregation provenance ontologies uri curation ajax ipad e-science e-research ict droid interoperability taxonomy research Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 65.
You may have already noted in the editorial section of this issue a link to the Reader Survey which I ask you seriously to consider completing, whether you are a frequent Ariadne reader or are reading the Magazine for the first time.
Moves are afoot to give Ariadne some effort towards improvements in your experience of the publication and I cannot emphasise enough the value I place on suggestions and comments from you.
I am very keen to know what readers value and dislike in Ariadne.
(We have already conducted a survey (which will close 5 December) among a chronological group of Ariadne authors to obtain their perspective, but we need readers' ideas too.)
It goes without saying that neither your nor my wish-list is likely to be completely fulfilled, such is the nature of developmental work, but the suggestions of readers carry weight in any such exercise and this is your opportunity to give me the benefit of your perspective on the publication.
I do realise how busy practitioners are these days and I have deliberately designed a questionnaire that can be completed in minutes if you can spare only a little time, though if you can tarry long enough to give us your written thoughts on some if not all aspects of the survey, that perspective is that much more helpful.
While you are free to complete the survey anonymously if you wish, I would greatly welcome a few details on your professional background in the second and last page since information on your area of work and interest does provide a much sharper perspective on your opinions.
Finally, my thanks if you do have the time to help me out; equally no hard feelings if you are once more impossibly busy right now!
No need to turn to the Survey page, just use this link to access the Ariadne reader survey Meanwhile, back in Issue 65, in From Passive to Active Preservation of Electronic Records Heather Briston and Karen Estlund discuss two case studies which provide a narrative of how their institition's archives transformed records management from paper-only to electronic-only.
As has been noted elsewhere in this issue, [1] the processing of electronic records occasioned a separate workflow.
The authors describe a number of problems with which many practitioners in the field will be familiar: misperceptions surrounding email, anxieties, on occasions justified, surrounding security of electronic records, etc.
In assuming responsibility for the University President's records, the University of Oregon Archives looked to implement a flexible infrastructure capable of scaling up as other departments' records came under their care.
The authors describe the method of ingest adopted in order to facilitate the process of transfer.
The incoming files were subject to the existing preservation procedures and inventoried using DROID.
Special provision was accorded to the email content.
The authors describe the steps taken in order to accommodate all immediate needs and remain flexible.
They describe the preservation, archivists' and public access layers with their varying access levels, content, and procedures.
With the advent of a move to electronic-only working, Karen and Heather explain how moves were made to build relationships with the new staff in the Office of the President, especially those directly responsible for the records management in the office.
The departments involved also put together a programme of staff training with attention paid to file migration, file naming conventions, and tagging files for retrieval.
What interested me was the deliberate avoidance of bombarding staff with new technology, but instead, the employment of existing tools and uncomplicated guidance; no coincidence in my view that the success factors included building effective relationships with their 'client' colleagues and consolidation of effective current work practices.
In Locating Image Presentation Technology within Pedagogic Practice Marie-Therese Gramstadt contextualises image presentation technology and methods within a pedagogic framework for the visual arts.
Marie-Therese's own experience led her to question, for example, the merits of PowerPoint in the teaching with images and whether other technologies did a better job.
Placing padagogy before technology, Marie-Therese points to anomalies in modern students' understanding; in effect , enthusiasm for ICT does not automatically equate to adequate skills and understanding of matters such as visual plagiarism.
Such skills extend, and are needed beyond art history.
Marie-Therese provides us with some understanding of the effect and demands of teaching with image slides.
She also includes views on the appropriateness of PowerPoint in this context.
She also provides thoughts on a range of other, similar, tools and explains how some are more flexible for teaching than PowerPoint.
She also analyses some of the views received on PowerPoint extensions and developments, as well as summarising some of the functionality that respondents wished to see on new instances of PowerPoint.
At the same time, it was noted that the lecture itself was increasingly being supplemented by other teaching styles, for example, mind-mapping.
She also identifies more training as an important adjunct to involving students in the area of classroom softand hardware.
Furthermore she emphasises the enhancement of the user experience where screen-casting software can be brought to bear.
However, she does indicate that such systems may well require some effort, maybe training, to acquire the capacity to use them effectively.
She also includes some comment on the newly arrived iPad, and how it can support teaching.
[2] In conclusion, Marie-Therese wisely warns that pedagogy should still hold precedence over technology, while at the same time making some pragmatic points about the capacities of PowerPoint.
In considering how the Wellcome Trust engages with donors of born-digital material, Chris Hilton, Dave Thompson and Natalie Walters have encountered in Trust Me, I'm an Archivist four common scenarios where transfer of born-digital material is impeded.
The difficulties they represent, cannot, they contend, be ignored.
They note that donors actually seem more reluctant to transfer born-digital material than was the case with paper formats.
The authors explain the Library's operational principles that apply to the collection of such material.
As has been the case in their earlier articles, they explain that maintaining sound archival principles pertains to both analogue and digital material; communication with its originators and donors is essential.
Moreover, one should not have too many pre-conceived ideas about the donors' understanding of the process which can be more complex than one assumes.
The authors indicate how the status of digital material in terms of format can alter standards of management since it is not necessarily handled by the same archival team.
The management priorities of some staff can be ultimately inimical to long-term preservation.
The authors go on to describe what they have identified as four common characteristics as obstacles to digital transfer including an 'irrational fear of the digital.'
The authors indicate that the dynamic operating with one-person or small bodies is often different and explain why.
They illustrate how the special status accorded to born-digital material by institutions creates confusion over which department is responsible for analogue or digital archives.
They describe the best approach on the part of the service and the ideal mindset of the donor!
The authors sense that the nature of born-digital material is causing donors to react less predictably than they had anticipated.
While this might seem to be a setback, they ultimately conclude that the way in which they communicate with donors remains crucial and will always be central to their professional competence.
In Why UK Higher Education Needs Local Software Developers Mahendra Mahey and Paul Walk state the importance of software developers in Further and Higher Education (F&HE) and their role in the development of e-infrastructure, open standards and interoperability.
However, they contend, their fate is to be deployed to constant problem solving when they have the potential to affect 'a wide range of activities in and around research, teaching and learning.'
They point to the limited amount of cross-disciplinary developer co-operation currently, something which the JISC-funded DevCSI Project is seeking to address.
DevCSI has been engaged in capacity building and innovation in F&HE since August 2009.
Mahendra and Paul point to the success, among others, of JISC Developer Days and Dev8D days which have shown themselves as a very cost-effective form of peer-to-peer training, not least in the development of communication skills.
The Project's Developer Focus Group has been part of the community-building operation and 'is made up of experienced developers who help inform the project's strategy and provide advice to other developers in the sector.'
In its second year DevCSI will consolidate its initial work but also advocate for developers as well as bring them together on innovative initiatives.
Mahendra and Paul describe the value that developers represent to their institution and also how the latter can benefit from their particular skills and experience.
The Project will also explore aspects of developers' career path in F&HE when compared to the commercial sector and how they benefit the institutions that employ them.
DevCSI is currently conducting a stakeholder analysis which you are invited to view and complete.
In Academic Liaison Librarianship: Curatorial Pedagogy or Pedagogical Curation?
Allan Parsons first provides us with a definition of academic liaison librarianship through the three roles that characterise it.
However he also points to an emerging role masked by the first three: relationship building.
Allan also outlines arguments for a shift of emphasis from the collection to what is termed 'an engagement-centred model.'
Within this emerging engagement-centred model Allan then distinguishes two strands which are much alike to teaching and curation.
In both instances, the role of the academic librarian is more learner-centred, for example, by organising the collection as an explicit part of the learning environment.
This re-location of academic liaison in the learning environment moves it into what can be termed 'curatorial pedagogy or pedagogical curation; or, possibly more simply, learning advisers.'
Yet while the academic library is valued for its stewardship of archives, and funding and management of acquisitions, Allan suspects that moves to act as learning advisers will be met with resistance in some institutions.
The nature of the relationship building within the institution will relate not only to teaching and research, but to the process and goals of the institution as a whole.
Allan states that what is at stake is establishing that academic liaison librarianship is actually valuable to its institution, and that relationship building is a key determinant.
Allan acknowledges the shift in emphasis in the museums sector from collection management to its educational role and the responsibility for the visitors' experience.
Libraries, he contends, would do well to imitate it and examine their role in the enhancement of the learning experience.
In a section entitled 'Organisational Economies,' the author describes the fine balance to be achieved between avoiding 'ivory towers,' but also the demise of innovation as the HE sector responds to yet more re-organisation.
While academic libraries and their universities are difficult to characterise, Allan discerns an authoritative model to a greater or lesser degree.
He places academic liaison librarianship in the context of the ideal direction HEIs might take.
Allan goes on to explain how academic liaison as a professional, educational practice appears in a framework of what might be termed parallel economies.
He develops as a consequence of this increased complexity what he terms a taxonomy of professional practices in academic liaison librarianship as they apply to the 'combination of three orientations (client, knowledge, purpose) and three economies (commodity, public good and gift).'
Given the complexity involved, Allan identifies a real danger in practitioners attempting to fulfil all aspects of their new professional endeavour.
Allan winds up by considering the practical implications arising from his theory.
In What Is a URI and Why Does It Matter?
Henry S. Thompson provides a brief background to the URI and how the character of Web pages has altered over time.
It points to transactional and interactive uses of the Web, and how pages are often composed of data sources elsewhere.
Henry moves to examine terminology surrounding URIs which is at times badly misunderstood, concentrating on the relationship among URI, resource and representation before examining those between representation and presentation.
He goes on to describe the variety of representations of a resource which now exist and how they themselves now determine the presentation of that resource, e..g. as PDA display, print, etc.
It is the representation of the resource over time which raises interesting issues.
He draws a parallel between indexical words and time-varying resources.
He goes on to explain how Web 2.0 represents a significant change in the way that AJAX-based representations determine presentation, since a URI may identify an XHTML page that is greatly influenced by embedded Javascript and resource accesses.
Google Maps is a good example.
The increase in such Web 2.0-related operations means that the distinction between resource and representation becomes increasingly blurred.
From the javascript programmer's point of view, the URI and its associated request parameters constitute what is required of the server.
Yet, such behind-the-scenes URI usage does weaken the relationship between URI and representation.
As a result, the value proposition of the Web produced by the network effect is weakening as search engines become less effective.
The decline of hand-authored pages has changed the way in which search operates.
The increased employment of the search entry field in browsers has further attenuated the currency of URIs in Web usage to the point of their ultimate disappearance from view.
Henry points to the emergence of the URI as the generalised resource concept in the 1990s such that a resource can be 'anything that has identity.'
This evolved to the point where URIs could be used to identify anything.
This has brought us to the stage where the expectation of the representation a URI indicates becomes less distinct than heretofore.
Henry is concerned that the notion of an information resource may be compromised by these developments.
The concern is not merely linguistic; it forces the question as to what constitutes a 200 OK response from a server these days and how one responds to a URI which identifies a 'non-information resource.'
In conclusion, Henry asserts that attention to the effect that developments in the World Wide Web are having on the use of URIs is central to the successful stewardship of the World Wide Web.
In Developing Infrastructure for Research Data Management at the University of Oxford James A. J. Wilson, Michael A. Fraser, Luis Martinez-Uribe, Paul Jeffreys, Meriel Patrick, Asif Akram and Tahir Mansoori describe the steps taken by the University of Oxford since 2008 in developing a new research data management infrastructure.
They suspect these moves were timely, particularly since the public interest in research data occasioned by what has been called 'Climategate.'
However much UEA researchers were exonerated, the media spotlight fell on research data management as never before.
This 'affair' highlighted the problems occasioned by inadequate recording of day-to-day data and brought into sharp contrast the researchers' high-level aims as opposed to the low-level, mundane duties of routine data management.
To many, understandably, this routine work looks like 'non-essential record keeping', the authors admit.
Many indeed contend that the 'value of researchers to their institutions is measured in publications, not orderly filing cabinets'.
The fact remains that such demands on greater accountability are not going to go away and indeed funders are starting to make such demands on researchers from the outset of a project.
The authors' view that it is up to institutions to support their researchers in these accountability duties.
The picture, nationally, is mixed.
Some disciplines have cross-institutional repositories in place, likewise some funding bodies, for example the NERC.
However, the authors point to the perceived strong sustainability and sound track record of universities in the upkeep of an infrastructure for research data management, as compared with funders and other bodies.
In concluding their discussion of the concept of research data management the authors make the point made by so many data curation practitioners that data management must begin in the earliest stages of the research lifecycle – and careernot when the researcher is finished, or worse, dead.
The authors describe the institutional strategy of the University of Oxford within the context of its historically federated structure.
They point out that the structure that has been planned, much with JISC funding, will take time to reach full implementation, but their article will describe progress achieved so far.
They describe the Scoping Study of 2008 its outcomes.
The authors explain the next steps taken in the establishment, with JISC support under the Information Environment Programme of the Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research (EIDCSR) Project.
They describe the research processes undertaken in the existing 3D Heart Project by the research groups participating in EIDCSR.
They identified their data management requirements such as data analysis and sharing, secure storage and tools to record provenance information.
The need for a flexible and future-proofable metadata schema for this and other such projects was soon recognised.
The authors describe how their project has been developing visualisation software that enables users to browse raw image datasets quickly via a Web-based system despite their enormous size.
They also describe a plan for the Research Services Office to develop a Web portal to assist academics with discovering existing services.
Participation in the JISC-funded project, Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) demonstrated that effort on data management was unlikely to form a high proportion of overall cost.
They then turn their attention to a project complementary to EIDCSR entitled Supporting Data Management Infrastructure for the Humanities (SUDAMIH).
This project has a broader focus embracing the entire Humanities Division.
Its requirements-gathering process identified two key areas of development: the provision of training in the management of research data, and the development of an infrastructure service to support the creation and management of database applications in the Humanities.
Elements of this training will be handled in collaboration with the Digtal Curation Centre (DCC) and related initiatives.
Meanwhile work on the development of a 'Database as a Service' (DaaS) infrastructure, which will enable researchers quickly and intuitively to construct Web-based relational databases will, it is hoped, benefit researchers in other academic divisions.
Database as a Service (DaaS) allows researchers to access a database over a Web portal and which offers database population and querying in their research domain without imposing too much complexity on users.
The SUDAMIH Project intends to develop the functionality of the Web Portal so that users can view geospatial data within the browser, and to support annotated multimedia content.
The authors point out in conclusion that their institution's approach to research data management placed researchers at the heart of operations and also emphasised 'the need for intra-institutional collaboration amongst service providers,' a collaboration which must be carefully co-ordinated.
They also conclude that in engaging with researchers' requirements, service providers must adopt the language of their 'client' colleagues, not vice versa.
In Moving Researchers across the eResearch Chasm, Malcolm Wolski and Joanna Richardson point out that Australia uses the term 'eResearch' to include disciplines other than Science in the structure.
They 'examine the current research paradigm, the main drivers for researchers to engage with this paradigm, reasons for lack of engagement, and a project undertaken at an Australian university—as part of a national initiative—to start to address the problem of making data from research activity, past and current, more discoverable and accessible.'
The authors give an overview of the evolution of research paradigms from the empirical to that of eScience/eResearch which is principally characterised by data intensivity.
They describe Australia's reaction amidst the emergence of national research information infrastructures to drive national innovation and similarities between Australian and UK research evaluation models.
Central to these developments is the greater emphasis laid upon effective data management.
The background now explained, the authors turn to the question why there is such a hiatus between the early adopters of eResearch and what they term 'early majority.'
They refer in this context to Moore's Chasm.
They detail some of the frequent deterrents to adoption by researchers.
They contend that to achieve critical mass in content in eResearch, individual efforts will not suffice.
High-level collaboration, among national governments, institutions and individual researchers is essential.
In this context, the authors introduce the Australian government's NCRIS (National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy) initiative and the creation of the Research Data Australia (RDA) service to increase the visibility of Australian research collections.
They introduce Griffith University which has received NCRIS grant funding for research data identification and discovery, and its work on the aggregation of data sources for uploading to Research Data Australia.
They therefore describe the role of the Research Activity (Metadata Exchange) Hub which is a joint Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) project, the purpose of which is to develop 'a master collection of research data within the respective institutions, along with an automated update (feed) to Research Data Australia.'
They describe the architecture of the Hub and the high level of reuse of open source components.
They also describe the ontologies involved in the interchange with the RDA of research activity metadata.
They note that the interchange of research activity data with the RDA seems to be galvanising interest among researchers and encouraging the development of research centre profiles.
In conclusion, the authors contend that, 'the Griffith Metadata Exchange Hub is a first step in building local infrastructure which helps address some of the deterrents for researchers to 'cross the chasm' by removing key technology barriers,' and helps to build the local infrastructure that is integral to the national initiative.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on works on: a concept-based approach to contemporary acquisitions practices, an introduction to Information Science, the proceedings of the M-Libraries conference on mobile applications in libraries, the work of the taxonomist, and a student survival aid in the information age.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 65..... and complete Ariadne reader survey.
References Christopher Hilton, Dave Thompson and Natalie Walters, "Trust Me, I'm an Archivist: Experiences with Digital Donors."
October 2010, Ariadne Issue 65 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/hilton-et-al/ Another view of the iPad in teaching is available from Brian Whalley, "iPad: The Missing Manual", July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/whalley-rvw/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 65: Ariadne in Search of Your Views" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 69 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 69 Buzz data framework wiki api database xml usability archives metadata accessibility schema blog repositories opac visualisation cache aggregation perl ocr ebook shibboleth json drupal licence authentication refworks research standards Citation BibTex RIS The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne Issue 69.
Never blessed with any sporting acumen, I have to confess to a degree of ambivalence towards the London Olympics unfolding around this issue as it publishes.
That does not mean that I do not wish all the participants well in what after all is an enormous achievement just to be able to compete there at all.
While I admit to not watching every team walk and wave, I cannot deny that the beginning and end of the Opening Ceremony [1] did grab my attention.
Who could blame me?
I suspect we sat as a nation terrified to discover what this would say about us all.
It would be easy enough to supply a list of criticisms, starting no doubt with what other nations made of it all.
Actually for once I think that mattered less than the fact that there were things at which we might be pleased, as well as GBSOH, that we remembered as being valuable.
We are not naturally disposed in this direction (ask Bill Bryson [2]), but on something of a parochial note, it was very good to see the inclusion of the work of Tim Berners-Lee since while everyone has heard of the Web, the contribution of his work is less well understood.
With innovation in mind, and accepting that some commentators have remarked that Ariadne seems to avoid completely the adoption of themed issues (true), there may be some chiding remarks that Issue 69 seems to have been boarded by the technical contributors this time round, given the number of ‘tooled up’ articles published today.
While I would contend that editorial policy is indeed to eschew putting all one’s eggs in one basket on the grounds that we do not wish to disappoint the readers who have no interest in the chosen theme, I make no apology for three feature-length articles on technical implementations.
For indeed they are nonetheless varied: one relates to improving service to ‘extraordinary’ visitors to FHE libraries, the second is for the benefit of practitioners supporting libraries, academic departments and their students, while the third is a very timely explanation of the technology supporting the new Ariadne – and which has been on my commissioning list for some considerable time.
I will take this opportunity to welcome even more ‘tooled up’ contributions and hope that the stories offered by this issue’s output will inspire other practitioners to reject further hiding of their light and share their own ideas with our readers.
Migrating and Enhancing Legacy Material In his article Moving Ariadne: Migrating and Enriching Content with Drupal, Thom Bunting provides an overview of new Ariadne functionality as he explains the recent migration to a database-driven CMS.
Thom reminds us of a key challenge: the migration of so much (and not entirely homogenous) content.
In addition, he discusses tools and techniques that accompanied this operation.
In the course of his article he proceeds in an orderly fashion from a description of the requirements developed by UKOLN to a review of the chosen Drupal technology.
Thom gives an account of the emergence of Drupal as an open-source CMS project and explains the reasons why it has increasingly enagaged the attention not only of the developer community but also corporate, governmental and academic bodies.
Nonetheless he feels that the support Drupal has enjoyed among developers is the most important factor, not least due to the flexibility accorded by Drupal's Content Management Framework.
He also details some of the larger bodies that have adopted Drupal and how their endorsement influenced our own choice of technology.
Thom then moves us on to the decisions taken in organising the mass migration of archive material.
He explains the tasks involved and the approach adopted to implement it.
He describes the post-migration review of the articles on the new platform, and the measures adopted to ensure a higher degree of consistency which would then make it possible to expose the publication's depth of content far more effectively.
With the migration process enacted and validated, attention could now be paid to addressing the requirements devised in the planning stage through the use of key Drupal modules.
He provides an overview of these modules by the way they served in addressing the requirements laid out at the beginning of the article.
He explains how use of 'contrib', 'core' and other utility modules made it possible to implement a range of enhancements.
The use of the Data module with the Views module provided functionality in respect of information about authors, an aspect close to this editor's heart.
He also predicts that the relatively new 'contrib' module Data will prove to be useful in extending data-rich Web sites.
The process of migrating Ariadne has confirmed in his view the flexible manner in which Drupal can integrate with other technologies, both open source and proprietary.
In his view Drupal has proven responsive, whether called upon to provide charts or other visualisations, or when subjected to testing and tuning procedures.
In concluding, Thom makes it clear that the migration and enhancement of a publication the size of Ariadne was no trivial undertaking, and that the Drupal platform has shown itself equal to the task.
Enhancing Research Collaboration We welcome back to the directories of Ariadne Tertia Coetsee who brings us up to date with technological developments in her department at the University of Pretoria.
Tertia explains in the introduction to her article Enhancing Collaboration and Interaction in a Post-graduate Research Programme how the Phytomedicine Programme at the University of Pretoria has evolved since 1995 and the role of RefShare, Blackboard together with the addition of an information specialist in its development.
While it was regarded that RefShare had proven very useful for storing and retrieving information sources on the Phytomedicine Programme, limitations were identified in its usefulness in respect of information sharing and group interaction.
As a result, Blackboard was examined for possible inclusion in the Programme.
Tertia explains how the Community of Practice for the Programme was expected to work in terms of collaboration, digital preservation and collection development, as well as Programme administration.
She begins with an evaluation of the benefits and disadvantages implicit in research collaboration in which she makes it fairly clear that the former outweigh the latter.
Tertia introduces the importance of ITC in supporting research collaboration, categorising the various tools by their function.
She also why the bulk of open-access applications are not suitable for deployment on the Phytomedicine Programme and why RefWorks is more appropriate.
She explains the principles upon which a Community of Practice (CoP) operates and why it can work to all users’ advantage.
But she points out that inherent in a CoP is the sharing of knowledge as a moral obligation for the public good.
Tertia then goes on to consider how CoPs and Knowledge Management interact and the culture that they should generate.
She emphasises the central role of CoP members in establishing a culture of shared, stored experience building up good practice.
She describes the benefits of personal sharing of knowledge as opposed to seeking information stored online; but also conversely, the disadvantages that may arise due to the same human dimension.
Tertia provides a breakdown of the functionality of the RefWorks module RefShare and what it offers institutional subscribers.
She goes on to detail the resources collected on RefShare for the benefit of Programme members.
She then proceeds to a description of the pros and cons of RefShare’s capabilities.
Thereafter she describes the functionality of Blackboard which certainly appears to address some of the failings recognised in the operation of RefShare.
Turning her attention to the role of the information specialist, Tertia explains that the advent of the online environment radically altered the Library’s style of provision.
The Phytomedicine Programme is supported by three information specialists whose role she describes.
The Programme’s use of Pretoria’s ClickUP (Blackboard) module supports improved communications, particularly in respect of assuring sound progress and adherence to timelines.
Tertia explains that previous experience of deploying Blackboard with undergraduates had encouraged teaching staff to run the system with postgrads.
One commentator pointed to the advantages of both synchronous and asynchronous communications, the latter favouring part-time students in particular.
It is apparent that to date the decision to operate RefShare and Blackboard in tandem is serving the Phytomedicine Programme more effectively.
Using Assessment Technology to Support Learning In their introduction to Evaluation of Assessment Diaries and GradeMark at the University of Glamorgan, Karen Fitzgibbon and Alice Lau explain that despite the advent of technologies to support assessment, the use of technology in improving the learning experience is still patchy.
They explain that Glamorgan has identified the key role of assessment in its  attempt to improve students’ experience of learning in the light of the adoption of two assessment and feedback innovations: Assessment Diaries and GradeMark.
Both Assessment Diaries and GradeMark were adopted as a means of reducing the degree to which both students and staff suffered from two ills: assessment bunching and inadequate feedback.
The authors go on to describe the role that these two innovations in the processes of course assessment.
They also mention how the Project set about evaluating the reaction to the two innovations including the use of a survey of users.
Reactions to both schemes were generally positive.
Students felt Assessment Diaries enabled them to plan and execute assignments more effectively, avoiding too many submissions to complete at one time.
It helped staff to apply a more varied range of assessments.
Staff reaction to GradeMark was that it either improved or validated their approach to giving  feedback, though caution was required with the pre-loaded comment bank.
Likewise Assessment Diaries did not exacerbate staff workload unduly.
Indeed, it soon became apparent that Assessment Diaries also helped staff to avoid bunching on their marking schedules.
Staff reactions to GradeMark were generally positive since it removed some of the drudgery of paper-toting and –shuffling, except where members of staff found marking on-screen difficult.
There were divergences though in staff and student perceptions of how well Assessment Diaries were being used by the student body.
While the survey results do not point to an unreserved approval of the two systems, neither do they indicate any kind of wholesale rejection.
Student reactions were quite sophisticated in terms of potential pedagogical benefits.
The authors turn their attention to potential improvements particularly for staff.
The authors’ conclusions are that while there is some divergence over the means or tools to enhance assessment and feedback, there is considerable consensus over the basic principles involved.
Continued Attraction of Reading List Systems In their article Redeveloping the Loughborough Online Reading List System, Jon Knight, Jason Cooper and Gary Brewerton explain that library staff at Loughborough University rapidly recognised the benefits to themselves, let alone students when called upon to develop the Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS).
As is so often the case, there was a human dimension to be addressed which the application of technology, on this occasion, was able to improve quite radically.
The authors describe the choices made for coding and back-end database and likewise choice of licence when Loughborough University was asked to share the implementation.
Whereas some implementations prove themselves useful for a while, only to be sidelined by a more dynamic technology, or else fall into disuse as demand for its functionality dies away, changes that occurred at LU during the 2000s proved to be a driving force for the redesign of the LORLS.
They related to not only changes in teaching approaches and departmental structure, but also as a result of popularity of the system with the library staff who were using it.
Moreover, the redesign team recognised the need to move for a more definitive separation between user interface and back-end database, a descision which would facilitate modification and reuse in the future.
From this flowed the decision to define a set of APIs and XML was chosen as the format to be used.
The authors explain their thinking on the matter of how to make XML requests.
However, by comparison, it was the database which underwent the most radical change, once again in response to human behaviour which was making consistency of data increasingly difficult to achieve.
They describe their solution embodied in the LUMP (Loughborough’s Universal Metadata Platform).
They also explain how their organisation of data enables them to classify and restrict access to certain data, thereby avoiding the need to store certain information separately.
The authors describe how they deal with the advent of new elements, whether they are new types or groups for inclusion, or even new classes of user in respect of authorisation of use.
The authors admit that the implementation of a process to export data from the old database to the new schema proved demanding, but was necessary to avoid a migration run measured in days!
They also describe some of the techniques they employed to speed  up the processing of requests, including modifications to the PERL coding and the use of indexes and caching of commonplace query results.
They then move on to describe another iteration in performance improvements through the adoption of JSON and ultimately JASONP.
The client’s use of multiple threads can produce rendering of even very large lists that is fast.
However, the adoption of SHIBBOLETH to support SSO produced a number of difficulties for which they nonetheless produced a workaround.
Their development of a bookmarklet permitted academics to add to their reading list from other Web sites.
They also detail their documentation not only of the development of the new LORLS through the use of a blog but also how they prepared stakeholders for the major change.
They explain that after the launch of the redesigned system they began to gather new features from external and internal feedback, for example the inclusion of student ratings of items on the reading list.
In their well-crafted conclusions to this article, the authors point out reading list systems, despite their relative age, continue to be a well-used and fertile source of innovation that provides benefits to students, academics and librarians alike.
The Launch and Lessons of JISC eCollections Caren Milloy introduces her article Launching a New Community-owned Content Service with the rationale for launching the JISC eCollections service and its aim to work with its community of users towards improvements.
Caren reminds us of the pivotal role JISC eCollections has played in the centralised licensing of digital content to enable member organisations to access far more material than they would have been able to procure individually.
She goes on to describe the situation prior to the new platform and all the benefits its creation has generated.
She recounts the guiding principles driving the development of JISC eCollections, and it is interesting to note how dissatisfaction in respect to access to ebooks featured so prominently in these investigations.
Caren goes on to describe some of the hurdles JISC Collections and partners had to negotiate before and after launch.
The first was simplifying licence arrangements to the benefit of librarians as well as convincing providers and owners of the value of openness in respect of online metadata.
The second major task was to ensure seamless access to a large number of different sources provided by a multiplicity of owners.
The provison of seamless access is not so difficult for organisations able to exploit link resolvers, but less well-heeled users would benefit by the aggregation of originally 14 platforms into three, with greater ease of authentication.
She also explains how consideration was given to the organisation of different resources and their associated results display.
The different resources needed to be presented in a manner that maintained a consistent layout for users.
She then relates  some of the problems encountered when rolling out the service.
One related to the quality of OCR and how it could mislead even seasoned researchers.
Caren observes that an over-concentration on keyword-based search proved a disservice to researchers with more sophisticated search behaviours.
This was rectified.
Looking to the future, Caren explains that the intention is to ensure that JISC eCollections is owned and developed by its user community.
This will be realised to a large extent through the work of advisory boards of libraries, teaching staff and researchers.
Moreover, such advisory boards have it within them to engage with their communities of users in developments to collections.
For example, the JISC Historic Books Advisory Board has launched a crowd-sourced initiative that harnesses the expertise of the digital humanities community to make corrections to its OCR-generated resources.
Caren concludes that JISC eCollections has now arrived at a point where it can become a ‘valued community-owned content service that reflects evolving user behaviour and the changing scholarly environment.’ Sensible Support for Walk-in Access In their article Walk-in Access to e-Resources at the University of Bath, Kate Robinson, Lizz Jennings and Laurence Lockton highlight a major change in the independence of libraries to grant access brought about by the seismic shift from print-based to electronic journals over the last 20 years.
The adoption of licensed resources and the increasing abandonment of bought-and-paid-for publications has obliged libraries to become gatekeepers on behalf of publishers while finding themselves with far less discretion over which users may gain access.
While negotiation with publishers has improved access for groups of authorised users, the capacity of the Librarian to grant access to special cases has become somewhat curtailed.
Moreover, implementing such walk-in access is not so simple.
Whereas in the past walk-in access meant just that, replicating it in an institutional IT system is less straightforward.
The demands of widening access mean that electronic methods of granting special access to applicants other than staff and students are in increasing demand.
Just as discretionary powers of librarians are increasingly limited.
However, the need to exercise them is on the increase.
The authors identify a second difficulty which was no doubt a common feature of the early days of electronic resource collection management: the difficulty in marshalling all the collection information accrued.
The team at Bath recognised the need to deploy some form of ERM system to gain control of the disparate collection data and explain the nature of the choices before them, not forgetting the gargantuan task of data collection in order to populate the chosen system.
They describe how they pulled together and extended their existing wiki to meet their requirements and how they organised the required data for each licence held.
They explain how data on each licence was organised together with moves to improve navigation.
At the same time they were also very conscious of the weight of such decisions in the light of any future modifications required.
When it came to evaluating the effectiveness of their chosen databank, their design has scored highly on accessibility and usability among librarians of all categories.
Other benefits included the ease with which it was possible to compare licence terms among different providers.
As they had anticipated, the designers recognised that the wiki-based system was not able to produce reports or integrate into other workflows; it also required technical expertise for mark-up, modification, etc.
While it was not capable of addressing walk-in access requirements directly, the system helped considerably by identifying those resources most likely to allow such access.
Balanced against such disadvantages was the fact that the wiki made it easy to gather licence information at low cost.
Having explained how they marshalled the resource data necessary to know whether walk-in access was possible, the authors turn to how they went on to facilitate access.
The development team avoided the simple mistake of dedicating particular OPAC terminals to ‘walk-in access’-only requests since this approach would render terminals unusable to the majority of users with standard access.
They detail their own particular solution.
The authors explain the benefits of combining IP address recognition with deployment of EZproxy which produces a number of advantages – but also one drawback.
The authors raise interesting points for consideration in their conclusions and clearly approach their policy in a practical and pragmatic manner.
Getting the Most out of OR12 In describing the benefits of Making the Most of a Conference, Stephanie Taylor explains why OR 2012 was such an important event for her project but also how this time round she intended to engage with it in a more planned fashion in order to make the most of her attendance.
In addition to describing the conference she reminds us of the value of the welcome adjunct to Open Repositories, the Repository Fringe, (on which Ariadne has also reported [3]).
Steph explained that her involvement with the work of the Repo Fringe actually served the ends of her project and improved contact generally.
She then provides us with some background to her project and how it would seem very well served by attendance at Open Repositories 2012.
For the purposes of her article she divides her activities at OR12 into three main modes: transmit, receive, and de-brief.
In covering the transmission aspects she began by describing the effort undertaken in a Minute Madness session by her colleague and herself on their respective posters and how they had planned to make the most of the opportunity.
She considers the whole process of distillation involved in preparing for a Minute Madness and makes the point that such an exercise is of value for a variety of reasons in the conference and other contexts.
She goes on to draw comparisons with the Pecha Kucha style of presentation and highlights its particular strengths and provides some recommendations on how to proceed.
She also makes the point that techniques like   Minute Madness and Pecha Kucha make it possible for delegates to prioritise their time when, with so many delegates and projects involved, it could otherwise prove very hard to make the right choices.
Still in transmission mode, Steph describes her project’s direct involvement in the DevCSI Developer Challenge.
Managed by UKOLN, the DevCSI initiative has found its Developer Challenge a popular undertaking and Steph explains why.
She also mentions the value of a planned approach to using social media can represent to a project.
She explains that a key aspect of a strategy to make the most of a conference lies in the project team’s readiness to avoid over-committing itself to conference sessions in advance.
This is to ensure that it is possible for project members to seize any opportunities that arise at short notice.
Having considered how to transmit project messages, the author turns her attention to how one absorbs information at conference relevant to the project.
She gives a brief overview of what seemed of importance at OR12 to her.
From formal listening, mostly to what has been achieved, Steph passes to the monitoring of conference ‘traffic’, ie informal discussion of where things are going in the future.
Finally she explains the value of face-to-face contact with project colleagues, but also the value of keeping colleagues informed with a safe pair of hands ‘back at base’.
She also highlights the importance of passing on not only the contacts made and queries received, but also the information received that can inform progress.
In her conclusions, Steph also raises the value of taking time to reflect on proceedings after the conference and share impressions.
But more importantly, planning to share the conference activity among an attending project team represents considerable benefits to an entire project.
Reflections on Wikipedia In Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Acceptance in Academic Environments, Brian Whalley points to the paradox of Wikipedia being the source of much reference-information seeking at the same time as the target of apparent contempt in some academic quarters.
Brian’s own view is that those who make use of Wikipedia entries are not passive accepters of its content but engage with it by editing and adding to increase its utility.
Such ‘Wikipedians’ as he terms them, are not all necessarily academics and so the questions arises: ‘Are their contributions less valuable than those of expert academics?’ Brian’s aim in this article is to explore the value Wikipedia may represent in terms of digital and information literacy.
He begins by explaining his participation in the Geological Society of London (GSL) workshop on Wikipedia entry writing for GSL Fellows.
The GSL is of particular interest since it is a society for both academics and practitioners in the geological field who apparently make much use of Wikipedia.
He offers examples to support his contention.
In considering one particular but controversial entry, Brian demonstrates the manner in which Wikipedia makes the current controversy apparent and how it would be better to acquaint students with this standard Wikipedia approach as opposed to issuing a blanket ‘don’t touch’ instruction.
He then turns our attention to a comparison of the degree to which electronic and print encyclopedias can react to changes in knowledge, and so amend content.
One does not need to be an academic to guess which form can react most quickly.
He follows up the comparison of speed of reaction to changes in information by torpedoing another generalised assertion, ie that conventional publishers always retain the higher ground in degree of subject content accuracy.
Brian refers again to the status of entries in Wiki Project Geology to highlight the number of stub articles in need of a geologist’s input, but he advocates a progressive approach to their development rather than one-off full-blown expansions.
Brian returns to the matter of why some academics are so disparaging of Wikipedia when, in geology at least, it frequently surpasses other conventional sources in the amount and accuracy of the information offered, not least images.
Moreover, he contends, students who were encouraged to write for Wikipedia would be obliged observe decidedly academic practices.
In his conclusions, Brian directs our view in several directions from the initial starting point of the value of Wikipedia, some of which go to the heart of digital provision policy in FHE.
In addition Ariadne offers a range of event reports and a generous crop of reviews.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 69.
References London Olympics opening ceremony highlights, BBC News 28 July 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19022259 Bill Bryson.
Notes from a Small Island, 1996, Black Swan, ISBN 978-0552996006 Martin Donnelly.
"Repository Fringe 2010".
October 2010, Ariadne Issue 65 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/repos-fringe-2010-rpt/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design Buzz data software rdf framework html rss xml metadata xhtml standardisation identifier vocabularies schema blog repositories copyright aggregation provenance e-learning microdata wordpress json oer licence ukoer algorithm url taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Mansur Darlington describes two methods for presenting online OERs for engineering design that were developed and explored as part of the Higher Education Academy/JISC-funded DelOREs (Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design) Project.
A great deal of information is accessible on the World Wide Web which might be useful to both students and teachers.
This material, however, is of variable quality and usefulness and is aimed at a wide spectrum of users.
Moreover, such material rarely appears accompanied by guidance on how it may be most effectively used by potential users.
To make information more usable it must be made more readily discoverable and there should be clear – and preferably machine-readable – indications of its provenance and quality and the legitimate uses to which it may be put.
The recently completed HEA/JISC-funded Delivering OERs for Engineering Design (DelOREs) Project set out to explore the creation of two Web-accessible ‘collections’ of university-level Open Educational Resources (OERs) relevant to Engineering Design.
The research was led by the University of Bath in partnership with Heriot-Watt University, the former with staff having experience in engineering design and its teaching, while the latter’s staff were experienced in the provision of research and educational material using Web-based technologies.
The term ‘open’ in the context of OERs embraces the notions of free availability and as few restrictions as possible – for example, technical, legal and cost – on their use.
The users for this project were identified as being, on the one hand, undergraduate students of engineering design, and on the other, the teachers of those students.
The first collection – known as Delores Selections [1] – is one of Open Educational Resources relating to engineering design relevant to and presented in a way appropriate for teachers and students at first-year undergraduate level.
The second collection – known as Delores Extensions [2] – is one of Open Educational Resources and other openly available resources useful to higher-level students studying engineering design and the teachers of such students.
In neither of these collections are the resources held locally; rather, the collections constitute indexes to the resources themselves which are to be found on the World Wide Web, sourced from individual examples of OERs and from collections such as MIT OpenCourseWare [3], JISC UKOER Phase 1 projects [4], OCWC [5], OER Commons [6] and the SEED collection [7].
DelOREs Selections This static collection of OERs is presented using a weblog or blog interface.
WordPress, a configurable blogging software package, was selected as the blog core partly because it has a very large user base and partly because of its plug-in architecture which provides the potential for relatively easy extension of its functionality.
In addition to this, the ‘look and feel’ of the interface presented to the user is readily customisable.
The WordPress software was configured initially using standard components to allow DelOREs Project members to write single posts each of which is a formalised description of a single OER held at a Web location.
The description for each resource is based on a template which provides information relating to such things as subject content, resource description, location linking and licensing constraints.
In addition, content is provided for RSS output to interested sites which can incorporate the resource descriptions automatically in their own pages.
The WordPress content is organised using a subject-specific taxonomy, devised by the engineering design experts within the team and evaluated by independent experts, and represented in the Delores Selections interface as a nested tree.
The clickable tree, which shows, for each taxonomic label, the number of resources held at that level in the tree, provides the user access to appropriately classified content The classification tree appears as a standard element on the right in each page of Delores Selections.
The ‘custom fields’ functionality of WordPress has been used to record the resource URL, author name, publication date, licence URL, and a human-readable rights statement.
A widely used WordPress theme – Carrington [8] – was adapted so that the additional metadata fields, the category (i.e.
topic) and tags (e.g.
resource type) are displayed to the end user with each post, and also so that the link from the heading for each post (being the title of the resource) takes the user directly to the resource, rather than the more common blogging practice where the link is a permalink leading to the individual post.
DelOREs Extensions In contrast to Delores Selections, Delores Extensions is a dynamic collection of resources which requires some means of automatically selecting and updating content.
This requires in itself the means both of identifying potential content and discarding that which does not meet inclusion criteria.
A means, too, must be chosen to allow the user to select appropriate material from the collection.
The building blocks are two software packages.
To provide user access to the content, the Waypoint software package was selected [9].
This package implements an adaptive concept-matching algorithm – unique to Waypoint and developed by Chris McMahon and his colleagues – which allows browsing of material that has been classified against a set of faceted classification schemes.
The user is able to interactively ‘prune’ a classification tree list which responds in real time to the user’s multiple selection of taxonomic labels.
This means of exploration is particularly beneficial to the user who already has some conceptualisation of the ‘space’ being explored.
Delores Extensions takes advantage of the core material identified and selected manually for Delores Selections, but is augmented by using ‘conventional’ Web-based discovery techniques including RSS feeds, crawling, spidering and scraping.
Two approaches to ‘filtering’ potential content have been devised, the first is manual, the second automatic.
The first is to provide a mechanism in the delivery interface to allow users to vote on the extent to which a proffered resource matches the classification that has been given.
As a result of this, resources may be reclassified more appropriately.
The second means of filtering uses the second main building block for Delores Extensions, this being an implementation of the sux0r [10] software.
Sux0r has a number of functionalities, but crucially provides aggregation of RSS feeds which can be passed through a filtering system using naive Bayesian categorisation [11].
This function allows appropriate training sets to be used to train the sux0r implementation to distinguish between classes of input.
Once trained, the sux0r filter retains or discards resources based on the system ‘knowledge’.
Identifying Candidate OERs for Engineering Design Candidates for OERs cover a wide spectrum ranging from single stand-alone documents and Web pages, to fully structured Web sites, through webcasts to sets of lecture notes.
To provide a useful resource, material must conform to the minimal ideal requirements, these being: Subject appropriateness.
A sufficient quality.
Alignment with target audience needs.
Explicitness of licensing conditions which define an OER.
Inferring the extent to which a resource conforms to the first three criteria requires expert judgement or, when attempting to acquire the resource automatically, then some judgement-making algorithm of sufficient differentiating capacity.
These items might also be inferred from the provenance or authority of the source.
At present, entirely reliable automatic judgement-making is probably out of reach.
However, work in progress may make this more attainable in the short term.
Such work includes, for example, the Learning Registry [12] initiative which is seeking to facilitate the collection and provision of the information that would be necessary.
Likewise, work on the assessment of information value (including measures of quality) will support this sort of judgement making [13].
The final item requires no judgement, merely a clear, preferable machine-readable, statement.
The conventional criterion for inclusion of a resource as an OER is that it available for reuse under a Creative Commons (CC) licence [14] or a licence of equivalent clarity providing similarly unrestricted use.
For Delores Selections, the selection criterion was relaxed to include, in addition to CC-licensed resources, those which were offered to the reader for reuse in a spirit of sharing, and where the spirit of the CC licence (if not the letter) is conveyed by the provider.
Such material is offered in manner which conveys the desire to share with limited or no restriction couched in informal rather than formal terms.
The key findings of the DelOREs Project relate to the availability of subject-related material, the extent to which such material is made functionally re-usable as a result of suitable licensing instruments, and the discoverability of resources, especially of those which have ostensibly been placed in repositories for reuse by an identified audience.
The Availability of Subject Resources Contrary to the project team’s expectation, there is a very limited amount of material that is offered expressly for ‘open’ use and which conforms to the required licensing criteria.
The culture of making material available with minimal constraints on reuse, and clearly marked in this respect, is very immature.
There are a number of OER collections and repositories whose brief is to do this; however, the material that has been provided specifically for engineering design students and teachers is very restricted in both scope and quantity.
Whilst a good deal of material has clearly been placed in public sight with the intention of allowing its use for education purposes, the legitimate usage of this material remains unclear and, thus, it cannot be offered easily through a subject collection because of the danger of inadvertent encouraging the reuse of material in a non-legitimate manner.
Currently, there is no widespread culture of OER provision.
The ideal ‘Open Practice’ culture will be one in which individuals and institutions default to making their material available to others under appropriate licensing.
This is very far from the situation which exists at present.
Resource Visibility Before a potential open educational resource can be used as such, it must first be discovered, either by the end-user or, in the case of OER collections, by the OER collection provider.
Discovery can be achieved either using ‘pull’ techniques (i.e.
search) or ‘push’ techniques (i.e.
targeted information delivery).
The experience of the DelOREs Project shows that looking for suitable material, even when ostensibly the item to be discovered has been provided expressly as an open educational resource, requires time and effort which is not always well rewarded.
The ideal situation would be where a resource is not only made available, but that the intention for its usage, its purpose, its applicability and so on, is clearly and explicitly described, and in a way that, ideally, is machine-readable, so that it can be processed automatically.
In effect, any material that is presented for use as an OER should be self-advertising of that fact if not to machines then at least to humans.
This could be achieved in a number of ways.
An example of resources that go some way to fulfilling this ideal are those which have been placed on the exemplary MIT OpenCourseWare Web site [3].
Each resource introductory page contains a content description based on a locally standardised XHTML schema which includes such metadata as title, author, course details, version and so on.
All actual resources (which are associated through child pages from the introductory page) are presented in pdf format.
These are downloadable using a single mechanism which is easily automated, for this specific site.
Because of this standardisation and the reliance on an XML data representation and pdf format, automatic processing is possible to some extent, once the local schema is known.
Automatic Resource Discovery and Processing The discovery of OERs is difficult at present because of the limited amount of machine-readable data that is provided.
During the project the most successful approach to automatic discovery consisted of using bespoke Google search scripts to encode a set of search terms.
These terms are case-specific; for example, in the DelOREs Project, discovery was attempted using such terms as: gear, machining and other keywords more or less specialised to engineering and engineering design.
However, discovery performance is dependent on the felicity with which search terms are selected and the extent to which their matching search engine index content results in OERs being identified.
Once a resource or resource repository is found – that is, the discovery element has been achieved by manual or automatic means – it is possible to identify by inspection the schema that has been chosen to encode the resource data and metadata.
It is then possible to write a script that will extract the resource descriptive data.
During the project, successful extraction scripts were written for OER Commons, MIT OpenCourseWare and JORUM.
Some resource providers (e.g.
MIT OCW) provide content in XML format which assists script writing because this encoding is more amenable to processing than, for example, HTML or native formats such as pdf, MSWord, etc.
Representing such data in other forms (e.g.
RDF, json or microdata) would be equally beneficial.
The standardisation of the content is currently being moved forward by the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI [15]), a project co-led by the US-based Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, to build a common metadata vocabulary for educational resources.
For fully automatic discovery and data processing of OERs to be achieved, which would return optimal results, machine-readable information should be supplied which satisfies the four qualifying items for OERs identified above.
Ideally this would be represented in a way that the harvesting mechanism could access easily and use as the basis of inference without any manual intervention.
In the meantime, utilising the power of search engines could be improved by one simple expedient.
The key ingredient is the explicit identification of a resource as being an OER.
Even a statement of this fact in plain language would enhance the capacity of search engines to identify and index a resource as an OER and to deliver it in response to a search, ranking it as more valuable than material which may be appropriate by other measures but not explicitly OERs.
Conclusion The general conclusions arrived at in the DelOREs Project concern resource availability for the engineering subject area specifically, the current non-standardisation of information relating to OERs and the current OER ‘culture’.
On the one hand, it is apparent that there is a good deal of material suitable for use as educational resources, but currently not usable as such because of uncertainty about quality, fit in the educational framework, and the legitimate use to which the resources can be put.
Resources provided for open use in the subject area do exist.
These, however, are relatively few in number, and insufficient to provide a properly balanced population of resources which effectively cover the entire spectrum of teaching and learning needs across the university-level engineering design curriculum.
There is a great diversity in style, type and presentation of the limited resources.
This extends not only to the educational content of the material, but the way in which resources are identified as being OERs, the copyright and the licensing terms under which they are presented, and such information as the subject coverage, syllabus level and so on.
Related to the above is the incomplete status of standards for OER provision either for expressing OER licensing and content in human-readable form or in a manner which is machine-readable.
There is no standardisation yet of means of automatic exchange of OER material, and what content is currently machine-readable with precision is only so once the representation schema for a particular provider or resource is known.
There is no strong culture of OER provision at individual or institutional level except in a very restricted set of institutions.
The default position continues to be that of guarding rights to intellectual property, rather than of finding ways to share and add value to existing material.
On a more positive note it is clear that there is a clear understanding amongst teachers of the benefits of not only having OERs to use, but to providing their material as OERs.
This suggests that resources are needed for the provision by institutions of their educational resources for wider use.
On the other hand, from the information gained from subject experts during the project, it is clear that there is uncertainty surrounding how to go about making their material suitable as OERs and the mechanisms for publishing it as an ‘open’ resource.
This suggests that education is required in the benefits of releasing hitherto ‘private’ material for sharing and reuse, particularly within an OER framework, and how best to go about it.
Currently, as readers of Ariadne will know, the UK academic authorities are encouraging the active management of research data to ensure its availability for reuse and re-purposing; doing likewise in respect of teaching and learning materials would be highly beneficial to the cause of OERs.
In this respect there are two important points to be made.
First, nearly all the material that was included in the collections was from well-resourced institutions in the USA: there is no culture of sharing in the UK, and the current climate in HE does not support origination of shared teaching materials or indeed collaboration to achieve more efficient or effective teaching.
Secondly, the DelOREs Project has enabled the SEED collection [7] and (the remaining parts of) the now defunct CDEN/Ryerson Collection to be made available once more on the World Wide Web.
These are collections of very useful learning resources that had fallen into disuse because of the absence of financial mechanisms to sustain them – indeed much of the original CDEN material has been lost for all time.
The SEED material was originated in the 1980s – a time that was much more amenable to the origination of shared material and to collaboration in teaching.
New ways must be found to re-engender that spirit of shared endeavour and co-operation and to make it viable through appropriate financial and organisational means.
At present many of our institutions would regard the effort spent in the origination and sharing of educational resources more profitably channelled toward maximising REF scores.
In the changing climate of increasing professionalisation of teaching in HE, there must be an expectation that such resource-provision activities will be required.
It follows that the UK academic community, and the funding councils, need to find ways of rewarding those individuals and institutions who contribute open resources to the community, else little will be done.
Acknowledgements The project [16] was funded by the Higher Education Academy/JISC through the strand of the Open Educational Resources Programme Phase 2 [17] of the e-Learning programme, in particular relating to the delivery of collections of OERs based within a thematic area.
References The Delores Selections Web site http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/delores/selections/?page_id=2 The Delores Extensions Web site http://go.bath.ac.uk/delores-extensions MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm The UKOER Phase 1 Projects http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer Open Course Ware Consortium Web site http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ OER Commons http://www.oercommons.org/about SEED OER Collection http://www.bath.ac.uk/idmrc/themes/projects/delores/co-design-website/ WordPress Free Themes Directory http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/carrington-blog McMahon, C., Lowe, A., Culley, S., Corderoy, M., Crossland, R., Shah, T. and Stewart, D., 2004.
Waypoint: An integrated search and retrieval system for engineering documents.
Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 4 (4), pp.
329-338.
The sux0r software home page http://www.sux0r.org/ The Bayesian RSS Feed Filter Project home page http://bayesianfeedfilter.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/about-sux0r/ The Learning Registry http://www.learningregistry.org/ Darlington, M. J., Culley, S. J., Zhao, Y., Austin, S. A. and Tang, L.C.M., 2009.
Defining a framework for the evaluation of information.
International Journal of Information Quality, 2 (2), pp.
115-132.
The Creative Commons UK Web site http://www.creativecommons.org.uk/ The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) Web site http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI DelOREs Project Contact Details: Professor Chris McMahon (c.a.mcmahon@bath.ac.uk) – engineering design and engineering design education and Waypoint, and; Phil Barker (phil.barker@hw.ac.uk) – Web-based delivery of educational and research information and sux0r software and Bayesian feed filtering.
JISC Open Educational Resources Phase 2 Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer2.aspx Author Details Dr Mansur Darlington IdMRC (Innovative Design & Manufacturing Research Centre) Centre Manager Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Bath Email: M.J.Darlington@bath.ac.uk Web: http://www.bath.ac.uk/idmrc/ Mansur Darlington is the Centre Manager for the IdMRC at the University of Bath and a research officer in the Design Information & Knowledge Group of the Centre.
For the last 15 years he has been involved in research associated with the capture and codification of engineers’ design knowledge and the development of methods for supporting engineers’ information needs.
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Book Review: Supporting Research Students Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Supporting Research Students Buzz data hypertext multimedia gis ontologies refworks research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley reviews a work which helps Library and Information Science Staff at Higher Education Institutions to support their research students.
The purpose of this book is to support Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals at Higher Education institutions (HEIs) who may be involved with doctoral students.
Supporting Research Students emanates from Dr Allan's own experience in gaining a PhD and as a Senior Lecturer in Student Learning and Management Learning at the University of Hull.
She thus has considerable expertise in seeing postgraduate research from the student point of view and from support provision by LIS staff.
I came to this review with interest and I should lay out my own credentials.
I have had research students of my own, have been involved with courses for new academic supervisors and, for the last twenty-odd years, have been responsible for a 4-day national residential course for new research students in my research area.
This book is, according to the jacket blurb, 'an essential text for all library and information professionals in higher education institutions globally that cater for the needs of research students.
It will also be valuable reading for LIS students'.
Allan suggests that, after the Introductory Chapter 1, the remainder can be skimmed and dipped into.
Chapter 2 is an introduction to the main terminology to inform LIS staff of research and research methodologies.
In Chapters 3 and 4 there are descriptions of the research process from a research students' points of view.
Chapter 5 looks at research skills, especially information skills, required by research students.
Chapter 6 focuses on the library and information staff who provide the support and examines different ways of doing this.
Chapter 7 considers the idea and practice of a 'Virtual Graduate School' and Chapter 8 follows this with an overview of research communities.
Chapter 9 looks at professional development for LIS staff.
On its own, the book's title does not suggest that it is intended primarily for LIS staff.
However, it could be read with profit by all concerned with supporting research students, especially with the current focus on 'training' following the Roberts report in the UK [1].
New research students themselves would benefit from a number of chapters in the book (especially chapters 2, 3 and 4) although this is presented predominantly from a social science or humanities standpoint.
Potential doctoral research students would benefit from chapter 2 which is concerned with the research process itself.
Although there is a certain amount on what the new research student should expect, only the basics are here.
There are no hints about the complexities there may be in having more than one supervisor (who may see things in rather different ways) or the lack of personal chemistry between student and supervisor, or indeed the project that will not work.
The notion of 'differentiation' from the first year to full registration is not discussed and yet this can be a very stressful time for new research students.
Unfortunately, scientists and engineers are given short shrift in chapter 2.
They would probably wonder why ontology and epistemology were necessary for their research, even if it did not send them scurrying to Wikipedia to find out what they meant.
This apparent lack of concern for the scientist and engineer is somewhat disturbing if it reflects the general support given by LIS staff at institutions in general.
For example, there is mention of the SPSS statistical package but not of S, or R (or Minitab or Matlab or Maple).
Indeed, there is no discussion about open source applications or applications other than of a rather restricted (and Microsoft-centred) nature.
This is also evident in Chapter 4, 'Moving forward and completing the research,' which is a general overview but includes specific advice on occasions, for instance bibliographic tools (RefWorks and Endnote are mentioned but not BibTex), MindMaps but not Concept Maps in my view an important step further, or concept linkage tools such as C-Link and the ability for Google Scholar preferences to produce a citation for EndNote or the use of Zotero.
Maybe I am being unduly critical here as there is a level of detail that a book such as this cannot easily cover.
Further, to highlight lack of awareness of information technology in research students, I recently met a second year PhD student who kept all thesis references in an Excel file, and a surprising number who did not know about Google Scholar.
Chapter 6 suggests a course in MS Project might be taken but a simple review project management process and the use of Gantt charts would be sufficient for most students.
Such cases illustrate the importance of the integrated support that HEIs should provide for their students which is what this book is mainly about.
Supervisors may not always be aware of the tools available to help their research students and this is what their training is concerned with and where LIS staff can help greatly.
Chapter 5, 'Research Skills Training' is a useful introduction to the possible needs of research students and where LIS staff would be most interested.
It uses a UK Research Council benchmark, again tending towards the social sciences.
I would have thought that with computer scientists moving into education support in a variety of ways, research projects would be increasingly science related and thus LIS staff should be aware of scientists' research needs in HEIs.
Chapter 6 is perhaps the heart of the book, 'Supporting research students in academic libraries and information services'.
The emphasis is on what to provide and how to do it.
There is a useful discussion on online course provision and it also covers the targeting of support and provision.
The chapter also has a self-assessment table, 'How do you support your research students?'
This should be filled out by all responsible for research students in academic departments as well as LIS staff.
The chapter has a very good review of some integrated courses and training sessions.
The importance of integrated courses, rather than just short, 'one-off' sessions on a topic is well made.
However, this is just from the LIS point of view; multimedia services and computing facilities do not really get a look-in.
Nor does the increasing importance of GIS (Geographical Information Science (or Systems)).
For an integrated approach, these aspects of research student support should be part of the whole.
In some HEIs they may well be integrated but, when computing lies at the heart of modern data and information handling, I feel a better case could be made for it here.
Of particular interest is Chapter 7 as it discusses virtual graduate schools (VGSs).
This is mainly in the form of case studies and reports on the Hull VGS and Graduate Virtual Research Environment.
Although related to a specific institution the overall comments and significance are well made and staff concerned with support provision in HEIs (undergraduate as well as postgraduate) would benefit from reading this chapter.
Chapter 8 deals with research communities, an important topic and very relevant to the theme of the book.
A few Web 2.0 tools are mentioned along with academic conferences and networking sites and facilities.
A note on the implications for library and information workers highlights the enthusiasms research students often have for networking and here computing staff and facilities need to be integrated into support.
This is not mentioned, but is important as, for example, WiFi and sophisticated conferencing facilities will need technical expertise.
To preserve some sort of sanity, every research student should also be aware of PhD Comics (Piled Higher and Deeper [2]).
Chapter 9 is a wrap-up chapter dealing with professional development.
It covers, in brief, items such as professional organisations and engagement with the research community and offers examples of a workshop on supporting research students.
I found the index rather poor, somewhat surprising for a book from publishers specialising in library and information skills.
If you dip into it, as suggested, then the indexing is very poor as the reader lacks a guide to what is covered elsewhere.
It seems to me that this would be an ideal book to publish electronically (but not just as pdf pages) with appropriate hypertext to help the reader.
It would also make additions and updates so much easier to make in a field where advances are rapid and where supplementary notes are needed.
Having said that, there is a great deal in this book that would benefit the new, or potential, research student as well as LIS and related information support services.
Although the statement at the start of this review provides the audience, it does not quite fit the bill; insufficient for a new postgraduate, incomplete from a supervisory overview and not wide-ranging or detailed enough for LIS.
It is almost two distinct books struggling for somewhat different readerships.
Overall however, Barbara Allan's book does live up to the last paragraph of the book by contributing to LIS workers, 'juggling with heavy workloads and competing demands' who certainly will be able to use it to support research students.
References SET for Success: Final Report of Sir Gareth Roberts' Review, April 2002 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/documents/enterprise_and_productivity/research_and_enterprise/ent_res_roberts.cfm Piled Higher and Deeper http://www.phdcomics.com/ Author Details Brian Whalley Professor of Geomorphology School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology Queens University Belfast BT7 1NN Email: b.whalley@qub.ac.uk Web site: http://web.gg.qub.ac.uk/people/staff/whalley/ Return to top Article Title: "Supporting Research Students" Author: Brian Whalley Publication Date: 30-April-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 63 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/whalley-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Fedora UK & Ireland / EU Joint User Group Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Fedora UK & Ireland / EU Joint User Group Meeting Buzz data mobile software rdf framework wiki database xml portal usability infrastructure metadata repositories eprints flickr linux gis dspace youtube e-science e-research rdbms research Citation BibTex RIS Chris Awre reports on the first coming together of two regional user groups for the Fedora digital repository system, hosted by the University of Oxford in December 2009.
The Fedora digital repository system 1 is an open source solution for the management of all types of digital content.
Its development is managed through DuraSpace [2], the same organisation that now oversees DSpace, and carried out by developers around the world.
The developers, alongside the extensive body of Fedora users, form the community that sustains Fedora.
Although there have been regular international user group meetings for the Fedora community, hosted in recent years as part of the Open Repositories conference, there have also been a number of more regional initiatives to foster interaction amongst Fedora users and provide assistance to those adopting the software.
The Fedora UK & Ireland User Group was founded in May 2006 and has held meetings approximately every six months since that time, promoting the exchange of views, information and experience while fostering collaboration between organisations on subsequent projects.
Whilst many delegates are University-based, the user group also encompasses commercial consultancies, the BBC and National Libraries amongst other organisations with an interest in how Fedora can support their work.
The Fedora EU User Group was founded in 2008 as a way of bringing together a growing body of knowledge and expertise across EU countries, and as a way of fostering collaboration within the EU.
Distance has limited meetings to roughly annual intervals, though there have also been discussions at the Open Repositories conference and other relevant meetings (e.g., ECDL).
Those attending predominantly come from Denmark and Germany, though the meeting in Oxford also welcomed representatives from Sweden and Holland.
The organisation of the annual UK All Hands meeting and IEEE e-Science conference, with its Digital Repositories and Data Management track [3], in Oxford prompted the idea of a joint meeting between the user groups at the same time, to maximise value for those colleagues travelling.
The meeting covered two themes: e-research environments and content models [4].
e-Research Environments An ongoing initiative of the DuraSpace organisation is to foster the coming together of virtual solution communities to help address community-wide digital content management issues and identify how digital repositories can support them.
One such area of interest is how digital repositories can support e-research, or scholarship in its widest sense.
How can repositories provide the relevant tools to support research practice?
The development of ideas in response to these questions is being taken forward by the Scholars Workbench Solution Community [5], and it was this group that led and moderated the morning’s presentations.
The first two presentations covered initiatives to provide fully fledged system environments that could be used and adapted to support research practice in different forms.
The Hydra Initiative Chris Awre, University of Hull The Hydra initiative [6] is a collaboration between the University of Virginia, Stanford University, the University of Hull and DuraSpace to model and carry out work towards development of a reusable framework for multi-purpose, multi-function, multi-institutional Fedora repository-enabled solutions.
Hydra recognises that repositories can be used to manage content at different stages in its lifecycle, and hence need to provide different points of interaction to support that management.
Like a Hydra has many heads on one body, a repository can usefully have many entry points for different purposes onto a single body of content.
Hydra is focusing on the separate service components that may be involved and how they can be combined in flexible ways using workflow technologies.
This component approach is intended to provide others with the ability to feed into Hydra in the future, and foster community collaboration and development.
eSciDoc-based Virtual Research Environments Matthias Razum, FIZ Kartsruhe The eSciDoc Project [7] has recently reached the end of its five-year funding and is now a mature framework of repository and related services based on Fedora that can be combined to serve different research needs.
Matthias described two particular examples of how the services have been combined to form virtual research environments (VREs).
One project on computer linguistics is using a repository to manage content at different stages of processing.
The project is fostering collaboration between librarians, who provide data management input, and the computer linguistic scientists, who are contributing their subject knowledge.
Another example was a method to capture lab book information into the repository, using QR codes as the means of transfer between systems.
** The next two presentations focused on the practicalities of working with researchers to support their work using repositories.
Repositories and Research Pools in Scotland James Toon, University of Edinburgh James is project manager for the ERIScotland Project [8], a Scotland-wide project based at Edinburgh, which is working with institutions and researchers across Scotland to identify effective ways of managing and disseminating outputs from research.
Scotland has introduced research pools, where funding is directed at a subject rather than an institution specifically, and researchers are having to collaborate more across institutions as a result.
This poses a challenge for institutional repository management, increasing the emphasis on the subject area, and has highlighted the disparity between researcher and library management of research outputs.
There is a risk that libraries may become myopic in their institutional repository strategy, and need to become more embedded in the research lifecycle.
Fedora for Scientific Data Repositories Mark Hedges, King’s College London Mark described a way in which repositories and information professionals can become more closely involved.
The BRIL Project [9] is working with the Department of Cell and Molecular Biophysics to establish ways of capturing research data straight from the equipment generating them.
This avoids the concept of deposit as a separate process and seeks to lower barriers to adoption.
Capturing data in this way potentially allows for processes to be re-run to validate outcomes.
Although the meeting had been organised through the Fedora User Groups, the concept of repositories supporting e-research and the Scholars Workbench is not platform-specific.
It is recognised that other repository platforms are also addressing the research support issue, and that the different platform communities have much they can learn from each other.
As such, presentations from practitioners using EPrints and DSpace were included in the day in order to highlight similarities and directions.
Institutional Research Data Management: A 10-year Blueprint Les Carr, University of Southampton The University of Southampton has long been involved in investigating how repositories can support research.
Under the JISC Research Data Management Programme, it is now examining this aspect in the long term, seeking to build policy and service-oriented computer infrastructure for the institutions as a whole [10].
Part of this work recognises that the repository is often best placed when it is supporting and enabling in a hidden capacity, and that researcher value lies outside the repository.
It also notes that the repository needs to have effective interaction with a range of other services and systems.
Edinburgh DataShare: Achievements and Aspirations Stewart MacDonald, University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh had, through the JISC-funded DISC-UK DataShare Project [11], examined a variety of issues relating to how institutions can best manage research data for its researchers.
The project is now informing the development of the Edinburgh DataShare service [12] which is looking to work with research teams within the research pools mentioned by James Toon in his earlier presentation.
The project has provided a good basis for the services, producing a policy-making guide for research data and testing the Data Audit Framework, which had helped greatly with engagement with researchers.
The morning ended with two presentations describing different instances of how repositories might support research, at the broad and focussed levels.
Metadata for Reuse: ANDS and the role of IRs Andrew Treloar, Australian National Data Service The Australian National Data Service [13] has been funded by the Australian Government to build a virtual research data commons.
It will capture data from a variety of different sources, both academic and public sector, and is seeking to make this available for reuse to increase the value gained from its generation.
This involves the generation of information to aid discovery.
(Note however, it is not being labelled as metadata, but instead is described according to what use it will be put.)
Such information will be produced so that others can find the data in the first place, sitting alongside information for appreciation of value, for access, and for reuse itself: this includes each collection having its own crawlable Web page.
One of the major challenges in collating diverse sources of data is the different infrastructural organisation at different institutions which makes it difficult to describe data collections in a comparable manner.
Fedora-based Portal for Geo-tagged Audio Comments with a Mobile Client Andreas Hense, Bonn-Rhein-Seig University of Applied Sciences Andreas presented some work he is involved with to aid the capture of audio comments into a repository using mobile devices.
The intention is to allow comments to be captured at a relevant location, and for the comments to be tagged with relevant geographic information.
These comments could then be shared in a similar way to images (e.g.
Flickr) or videos (e.g.
YouTube).
Speech-to-text translation may add to the usability of the comments, though it was noted that a high level of accuracy was required to avoid user frustration.
DuraSpace Thornton Staples provided a brief overview of developments within the DuraSpace organisation: There is now a new developer’s wiki presence [14] to aid communication to and among developers working on Fedora A developer committers community has been formed for Fedora to support the growing number of practitioners contributing directly to the Fedora codebase A ‘getting started’ site is being scoped to allow potential users to have a play with Fedora and understand better how it works The development of DuraCloud [15], DuraSpace’s cloud computing management layer service, is moving ahead and will be open for use in 2010 Content Models The afternoon session was given over to a discussion of content models within Fedora [16].
Content models are important to Fedora in defining the way digital objects are structured and managed.
As such, when creating a Fedora repository it is vital that the content is analysed and appropriate content models established to guide development and implementation.
The next two presentations highlighted the different extents to which the content model architecture in Fedora can be used.
Content Model-driven Software Asger Askov Blekinge, State and University Library, Denmark Asger’s presentation described the way in which additional information can be stored in the content model over what is often included: an enhanced content model.
His team have also taken an atomistic approach to content models, breaking materials down to their constituent parts and describing each part.
The captured information and the atomistic approach allow relationships between objects to be built up and logical views presented according to context.
Interfaces can be auto-generated from the content models according to need.
They are currently investigating how to support search using the content models, and are confident of using the enhanced content model approach as the basis for other functionality as well.
Content Models in the Hydra Project Richard Green, Hydra Initiative By contrast, the Hydra approach to content models is to keep it as simple as possible.
This is partly driven by the desire to make Hydra an environment that can be used by many, and being too specific with content models could be a barrier for some.
Hydra has separated out content from metadata describing it, and proposes separate content models for each.
However, within them, it is feasible to have optional datastreams (individual parts of the model), and it is intended that Fedora return a clean error message if a datastream is not available when the model is implemented.
Fedora was designed with the idea of using disseminators to deliver content, and Hydra will seek to use them by default (an approach also adopted by the State and University Library in Denmark see paragraph above).
Although slightly diverting from the main topic of content models at times, the next two presentations offered a contrasting view of how to manage content models within Fedora.
Fedora Content Modelling Gert Schmeltz Pedersen, Technical University of Denmark Gert presented three examples of how content models had been used, the common denominator between them being the use of XML serialisation to implement them in practice.
This was a conscious effort to use XML and RDF instead of an RDBMS approach.
Fedora Custom Database Extension Lodewijk Bogaards, DANS, Netherlands Lodewijk, on the other hand, presented an approach that reflected that some queries into Fedora can become too complicated, and that a database approach can overcome this.
It is unclear which approach is favoured, and there are performance matters to address for both, but Gert’s and Lodewijk’s approaches highlighted the flexibility that could be adopted according to need and knowledge.
*** Remaining presentations offered other examples of how content models are being used.
Their full use is still maturing, but they offer a powerful way of structuring repository content and metadata so they can be actively managed and used, rather than comprise merely a static collection within the repository.
Conclusion The day overall covered a lot of ground.
It was useful to have such a mix of people from different European countries since delegates could all bring their different perspectives; everyone left with food for thought as well as new contacts.
Future joint meetings will be held as opportunity arises.
The two halves of the day highlighted two key aspects: the use of a repository is becoming more flexible and powerful as it is applied to a range of situations in research; and the richness of Fedora, in how it is able to structure research materials, which will allow it to be used in flexible ways as demand requires.
Note Further information on Fedora User Group activity can be found through the respective JISCMail lists: FEDORA-UKI FEDORAEU References Fedora http://www.fedora-commons.org/ DuraSpace http://duraspace.org/ 5th IEEE International Conference on e-Science, 9-11 December 2009, Oxford http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/ieee/programme (see programme for details of Digital Repositories and Data Management track presentations) Details of the meeting and presentations available via the Fedora Commons wiki http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=13762803 Scholars Workbench Solution Community http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Scholars+Workbench The Hydra Project http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project eSciDoc https://www.escidoc.org/ ERIScotland Project http://eriscotland.wordpress.com/ BRIL (Biophysical Repositories in the Lab) Project http://bril.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/ Southampton Data Management: Institutional Data Management Blueprint (IDMB) Project http://www.southamptondata.org/ DISC-UK DataShare Project http://www.disc-uk.org/datashare.html Edinburgh DataShare http://datashare.edina.ac.uk/dspace/ Australian National Data Service (ANDS) http://ands.org.au/ Fedora Repository Development Wiki http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCREPO/Fedora+Repository+Development+Wiki DuraCloud http://www.duraspace.org/duracloud.php Content models in Fedora http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FEDORACREATE/Content+Models Author Details Chris Awre Head of Information Management Academic Services University of Hull Email: c.awre@hull.ac.uk Web site: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/ACS/information management.aspx Return to top Article Title: “Fedora UK & Ireland / EU Joint User Group Meeting” Author: Chris Awre Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/fedora-eu-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2012 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2012 Buzz data mobile framework archives metadata accessibility identifier repositories copyright video preservation aggregation curation chrome facebook twitter privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy reports on the 78th IFLA General Conference and Assembly held in Helsinki, Finland over 11-17 August 2012.
The Sunday newcomers session chaired by Buhle Mbambo-Thata provided us with some insight into the sheer magnitude of IFLA (as most people seem to call it) or the World Library and Information Congress (to give the formal name) [1].
This year’s congress had over 4,200 delegates from 120 different countries, though over a thousand of these were Finnish librarians making the most of the locality of this year’s event.
IFLA offers hundreds of session covering all aspects of librarianship, from library buildings, equipment, rare books and manuscripts to legal issues and new trends.
“IFLA”, Jennifer Nicholson, the secretary general, explained, “is more than just a conference it is a place at which a large international organisation does its business.” The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) [2] is actually the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users.
It is the ‘global voice of the library and information profession’.
As delegates we were encouraged to attend any open meeting in which we were interested.
The emphasis of the event was very much on allowing ourselves to ‘grow as library professionals’.
With so much on offer it is impossible to cover all aspects of the congress and conference, so I’ll focus on those that I personally found to be the most interesting or innovative.
Plenary: The Memory of the Entire World The opening keynote on the first official day of the conference was given by Peter von Bagh, a famous Finnish film historian.
Von Bagh has authored more than 30 books on film, history and popular arts and is also a film director with a speciality in compilation films.
His talk was framed around historical film clips.
He began by looking at a French adaption of Don Quixote released in 1933, the same year in which books were being burnt in Nazi Germany, using it to offer show the role of libraries in learning.
Von Bagh explained that language is very important in Finland because “language is our home” despite Finns being described by Brecht as a ‘People who can keep silent in 2 languages’.
Other clips, such as those from Von Bagh’s film Helsinki Forever, gave some insight into Finish literature and culture, though the stereotypes offered (Finns as hard-drinking, wife-beating, non-communicative television watchers) weren’t particularly in line with a vision of current Finland.
Towards the end of his talk Von Bagh showed a clip from what he believed to be the most famous film about libraries: Toute la mémoire du monde – The Memory of the Entire World, a documentary by Alain Resnais.
The film analyses the architecture, processes and contents of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
It argues that knowledge should be subject to preservation for future reference.
Helsinki Conference Centre Although Von Bagh’s homage to libraries and his emphasis on their role in preserving our past was laudable, some of his thinking was probably not ideal for an opening keynote at a current library conference.
Especially not at a time when librarians continue to redefine their role in an never-ending attempt to ‘be relevant’.
He speculated that thinking and memory would both atrophy when students relied so much  on technology, he seemed to depict the past as good and the future as bad.
His view of mobile phones (probably Finland’s main industry) was that they contributed to small talk but not much else.
Interesting that in a later session on the Google Generation, Lili Luo from the School of Library and Information Science, San José State University, California, USA pointed out that 18-24 year olds exchange an average of 109.5 text messages a day.
Could such dedication be ignored?
The Twitter stream commented: ‘puzzling defeatism and nostalgia from Von Bagh thought this was a forward-looking profession?’ Track: Cloud Computing The cloud computing track led by the Committee on Copyright and Other Legal Matters (CLM) comprised three plenary talks.
It looked at the impact of cloud computing on privacy, jurisdiction, security, lawful access, ownership and permanence of data.
Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Washington DC, USA gave a clear introduction to storage clouds, computing clouds and their implications for libraries.
He began by pointing out that cloud computing is not a new idea and began in the 1960s with notions of utility computing.
Lynch defined two types of cloud: public and private, which are used in three ways: Clouds that are about storage, clouds that are about computing, and clouds that are about applications as a service.
One of the main benefits for cultural heritage institutions are that to some degree cloud computing displaces responsibility because it puts the onus on the vendor to worry about capacity and computing power.
Cloud computing providers can operate on a scale that is beyond most organisations.
Lynch then covered aspects such as pricing, where data are stored, misuse of data, etc and how libraries should be using the information available to help them make informed choices.
Christine Runnegar from the Internet Society, Geneva, Switzerland then gave a really interesting talk entitled Privacy on the Internet: Looking to the future.
Runnegar explained how data that travel round the Internet can help those with knowledge to build pictures of individual things: interests, locations, relationships, genetics, sound and voice, video and activity, time.
We all leave digital footprints which reveal who we are and what we have done.
This can allow others to make calculated guesses about our preferences.
Her talk covered areas of concern such as the growing use of HTTPS, the communications protocol for secure connections.
Some browsers (Google and Chrome) use them by default but in reality HTTPS is only 12% secure!
Runnegar gave some interesting examples of possible misuse of data.
For example a travel company had recently started showing more expensive rooms to Mac users than PC users!
She went on to explain how the Internet Society defines online privacy: ‘consensual sharing of personal data within a specific context with an expectation of scope’.
Runnegar ended by saying that the proliferation and persistence of data, fuelled by cheap storage, will lead to new ways of working such as linked data sets, better tracking of online journeys, more correlation and aggregation of data and automated intelligence.
Patrick D. Flaherty from the Litigation Department, Torys LLP, Toronto, Canada gave further insights into jurisdiction over privacy and data protection in the cloud.
At the start of his talk he explained that he didn’t want jurisdiction issues to stop anyone from harnessing the power of cloud, but that an awareness of concerns could prevent problems further down the line.
The main existing as well as emerging concerns about privacy posed by the cloud emanated from loss of control over data when transferred to a third party.
This left potential for misuse of data, lack of compliance with retention obligations and security breaches.
The key issue was that no one set of national laws applied to the exclusion of all others and we needed to know what local law determined as our obligations and rights.
This allowed us to know and control where and to whom our data will go (ie transfer, storage and accessibility) and understand any differences with our own law or policy.
Flaherty emphasised the importance of contracts and offered a check-list for libraries and archives when making decisions about the cloud.
The ultimate mobile library Plenary: Knotworking The Tuesday plenary entitled Towards Knotworking: Designing a new concept of work in an academic library was given by Professor Yrjö Engeström, Director of the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE) at the Institute of Behavioural Sciences of the University of Helsinki.
Engeström began with gloomy warning of academic libraries facing a critical situation where researchers are less visible in libraries and librarians are failing to deliver services.
He asked who has the expertise to serve researchers?
Are there enough of us to offer them customised services?
Using a process called the Change Laboratory, academic librarians in Helsinki have become involved in research activities.
Knotworking is characterised by collaborative performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems.
The idea is to gather experts for a short period of time to solve a specific problem in the academic library.
It is clear that librarians cannot be committed to a single research group because there are not enough librarians to go round and the work is very demanding.
So at Helsinki University they have created a new model of customised and standardised services, which are currently at the implementation stage.
For example, the librarians have created a quick reference guide for one research group on how to handle research data management.
Research data management is something with which librarians have only recently become involved and they still have much to learn.
The system of knotworking was bringing research groups back to the library and generating new demand for services.
Track: Data Curation Following on from the idea of integrating research further with research support services, the Science and Technology Libraries track on the role of libraries in data curation, access and preservation consisted of six talks from nine speakers.
The opening chair pointed out that over 30 papers had been submitted for this strand and data curation was clearly an important area for librarians right now.
Achim Osswald from Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Institute of Information Science, Cologne, Germany gave a presentation entitled The role of libraries in curation and preservation of research data in Germany: findings of a survey.
He highlighted a couple of recent reports including the report Riding the Wave, NSB 2005, OECD 2007 and the High-level Expert Group 2010.
All emphasised the relevance of research data to current academic working.
Osswald asked what qualifications and skills were needed by librarians to work in this area?
He identified metadata, persistent identifiers, citation.
Osswald mentioned the DigCurV Project which established a framework for vocational training in digital curation.
He also pointed out that major revisions in LIS curricula were only made every 5-6 years and that they did not cover skills and qualifications for data curation.
Carol Tenopir, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA from the DataOne Project gave her presentation entitled Academic Librarians and Data Research Services: Preparation and attitudes.
She described a survey sent to 948 librarians at 111 ARL libraries, most of which were engaging with researchers.
223 responded.
While many who worked in Research Data Management (RDM) services felt that they had the necessary skills and training, those who worked in other areas felt unprepared for the challenges ahead.
It was clear that most libraries were very much in a transition phase.
Lynn Copeland from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada and Brent Roe, Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada gave a joint presentation on research data initiatives in Canada.
While others confessed to being new to this area, Canadian libraries have been providing research data services since the 1970s.
However these services were still not happening on a national scale and there were many funding gaps.
Copeland pointed out the Canadian open government data initiative which has made over 2,000 data sets available.
The talk Leading from the Library: Data management initiatives at the University of Northampton [3] was given by my colleagues Miggie Pickton, University of Northampton,  Sarah Jones, Digital Curation Centre at HATII, University of Glasgow and myself.
Our presentation looked at activities being carried out at Northampton as part of the UK Digital Curation Centre Institutional Engagement work.
It considered the role of librarians in research data management tasks.
The library was currently leading on most of the DCC engagements.
Possible reasons for this were that they often ran publication repositories, had good relationships with researchers and possessed a highly relevant skill set.
The final two presentations offered further examples of libraries leading the way.
Reinhard Altenhöner from the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek offered practical insights from the DFG project DP4lib (Digital Preservation for Libraries) where the library is acting as a service-broker for digital data curation.
Susan Reilly from LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche/Association of European Research Libraries), The Hague, Netherlands explained how LIBER was making the case for research libraries.
Rielly offered the Opportunities for Data Exchange (ODE) Project as an exemplar project, which shared emerging best practice.
ODE was bridging the gap as ‘libraries don’t always speak the language of the researcher’.
Exhibition and Posters One aspect of the conference that I really enjoyed was the exhibition and posters [4].
Apparently there were 196 poster presentations in the exhibition.
This impressive and interesting collection gave a quick glimpse of library initiatives taking place all round the world.
A couple that have stuck in my mind are : The Finnish libraries who have a dog on site for children to read to – apparently this improves reading confidence The Japanese libraries who are working together to support recovery after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 The Serbian library which is trying to encourage the integration of disabled people and is helping children to use sign language in the library The Ugandan library which is using a new library building to empower the low-income academic community.
The exhibition offered opportunities to look at various library products out there, to hear more talks and to find a few freebies to take home.
My personal favourite was the ‘tree in your pocket’ – a miniature tree that you have to look after by watering once a month!
Other highlights were the Tingbjerg Bibliotek mobile library bike from Copenhagen, Denmark and the stand from Axiell (sponsors of the lanyards) where an artist aimed to incorporate delegates’ ideas in a wall mural.
This was meant to relate to their quote for the week ‘to expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect’ (– Oscar Wilde).
The author reviews conference posters Conclusion Unfortunately due to other commitments I didn’t get to stay at IFLA 2012 for the whole week.
There were so many more sessions that I would have liked to attend: such as the session on libraries and environmental sustainability, and the session on disaster planning and recovery for digital libraries.
But as is sometimes the case, there was just too much to see and so little time in which to do it.
The IFLA congress 2012 offered an amazing opportunity for librarians to meet peers from all around the globe and feel proud of being part of a profession that offers so much to so many.
So to end with a few words from Ingrid Parent, President of IFLA, during her opening keynote.
Parent suggested that we ‘think globally, act locally’.
It’s a well-known expression that commends us to consider the impact of our activities on others.
When used in application to libraries and librarians it makes perfect sense.
Librarians know that libraries offer a refuge for many and such an outlook encourages collaboration and a forward-thinking approach.
The papers and slides from IFLA are available from the main Web site [1].
There is also an IFLA Facebook page [5] and an IFLA Vimeo site [6].
The World Library and Information Congress 2013 will be held in Singapore from 17  – 23  August [7].
References IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2012 http://conference.ifla.org/ifla78 The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) http://www.ifla.org Guy, M., Jones, S. and Pickton, M., 2012.
Leading from the library: data management initiatives at the University of Northampton.
In: IFLA World Library and Information Congress.
Helsinki: IFLA.
http://opus.bath.ac.uk/31283/ IFLA Poster session and Exhibition http://conference.ifla.org/ifla78/poster-sessions IFLA Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/wlic2012 IFLA Vimeo site http://vimeo.com/ifla IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2013 http://conference.ifla.org/ifla79 Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Marieke Guy is a research officer for UKOLN.
She currently works as an Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre, working towards raising awareness and building capacity for institutional research data management.
Marieke is the remote worker champion at UKOLN.
In this she works towards ensuring that the UKOLN remote workers are represented within the organisation.
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The Value of Open Access Publishing to Health and Social Care Professionals in Ireland Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Value of Open Access Publishing to Health and Social Care Professionals in Ireland Buzz data wiki database portal infrastructure archives doi accessibility repositories soap dspace research standards bibliometrics altmetrics Citation BibTex RIS Aoife Lawton and Eimear Flynn discuss the value of open access publishing for allied health professions and their work in the health services with particular reference to Ireland.
This article will focus on how open access publishing may add value to a number of health and social care professionals and their work in the health services.
The results of two recent surveys are explored in relation to the research activity, barriers and awareness about open access publishing by health and social care professionals (HSCPs) working in the Irish health system.
The majority of peer-reviewed research is published in subscription journals, which are only accessible to those in institutions, or those willing or able to pay subscription fees.
This causes research to lose its impact as it is only accessible to a small number of people [1].
Open access (OA) provides a constructive solution to this problem.
OA can be defined as free, unrestricted, immediate and online availability of high-quality scientific research results [2].
OA is invaluable in that it can add value to the economy, to research and to society.
OA research journals are not only unique because they provide a panacea to the high costs of paperback journals and subscription fees to scholarly journals, but because they offer new opportunities for niche and developing subject areas to establish resolute research outlets [2].
Gold and green open access are two distinct ways of attaining open access to peer-reviewed research results.
OA delivered by journals is referred to as gold open access, some journals may require the author to pay the subscription fee, and green open access concerns open access delivered by repositories [3].
In terms of green open access, authors may have to seek permission to publish their work in a repository from the journal in which they also wish to publish.
For example, The Lancet allows authors to publish the Word version of their peer-reviewed, accepted article on their personal or institutional Web sites any time after publication with a link to the publisher's version*.
Repositories are digital collections of research results and articles, some are institutional repositories created by universities, while others are created for the sole purpose of disseminating open access research within a specific subject or discipline.
Traditionally, scholarly journals relied upon subscriptions to maintain their operations.
OA has challenged this traditional modus operandi.
With the advent of OA, publishers have had concerns over the viability of their business model and the value that they bring to the scholarly publishing process.
Alternative business models are being put in place by some publishers which allow both publishers and societies to maintain revenue via other routes.
Examples of alternative business models are available on the Open Access Directory Wiki in operation since 2008 [4].
OA research has been inhibited in the past as a result of misrepresentation and misconceptions about its concepts.
However, at present the Registry of Open Access Repositories lists 3,817 repositories and this number is growing steadily.
Notably, several open access repositories such as ‘arXiv’ (physics and mathematics), the Social Science Research Network, and PubMed Central dominate their respective disciplines.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) reports that more than 67% of peer-reviewed journals charge no fees for publishing an article in their journals [5].
It has been reported since 2006 that 75% of non-open access journals charge author-side fees, alongside reader subscription fees [5].
The Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) project in 2011 also observed that these fees, termed as 'author fees' are paid by funders (59%) or by universities (24%); only 12% of fees are actually paid by the author [6].
This indicates that the descriptor ‘author fees’ is misleading and this should be addressed since it is commonly used as a means of dismissing Open Access.
Academics are rated on how many publications they produce, how often they publish and the prestige of the journals in which they publish.
This pressure is causally linked to the pressure on universities to improve their prestige [7].
Many health and social care professionals (HSCPs) would also be expected to produce publications yearly, albeit not to as great an extent as academics.
Although authors do not expect to be paid, due to funding issues, publishing in academic journals still remains essential due to the well known principle of ‘publish or perish’.
Imperial College’s Department of Medicine is a prime example.
The College insists that its affiliates publish at least three papers per annum, and one must be published in a respected journal with an impact factor of at least five [8].
Researchers’ careers depend on achieving publication in the most prestigious and high-impact journals, which are usually the oldest and therefore non-open access journals, regrettably.
With the exception of the publishing companies, most practitioners in the world of scholarly publishing agree that there is a need for a complete overhaul of the current system.
Open Access was developed to combat escalating subscription costs and support free and immediate access to research results.
At present, researchers can only access limited amounts of research, as institutions are unable to subscribe to all relevant journals, and the public are denied valuable and reliable resources; instead receiving their information from frequently dubious Web sites.
The objective of open access journals and repositories is not to replace existing journals and repositories, but to maximise research impact and access [9].
The value of Open Access to readers, authors, teachers, students, libraries, funders of research, governments and citizens has been well documented.
But what about patients and health professionals?
Publishers allow free access to their journal content to developing countries, making it implicit that Open Access has both value and a positive impact on patient care.
Initiatives include, for example, the Cochrane Library Collaboration, a gold standard in systematic reviews which is made openly accessible in developing countries, and the HINARI Access to Research in Health Programme.
The vision of the Cochrane Library Collaboration is 'a world of improved health where decisions about health and health care are informed by high-quality, relevant and up-to-date synthesised research evidence.'
[10] It uses bibliometrics to measure impact and reports that usage of the full text of Cochrane Reviews is high and increasing rapidly [11].
HINARI content includes some 1,500 journals from six major publishers and provides free or very low-cost online access to the major journals in biomedical and related social sciences to local, not-for-profit institutions in developing countries.
HINARI is one of four programmes that make up the Research4Life initiative.
The impact of Research4Life has been documented in an online collection of case studies called “Making a Difference: Stories From the Field: How Access to Scientific Literature is Improving the Livelihoods of Communities Around the World”, with anecdotal evidence describing how this access to content is being used for elements including clinical practice and patient care [12].
The current fight against Ebola demonstrates the value of Open Access to published scientific research for immediate patient care.
Several publishers are allowing free unrestricted access to scientific and medical databases and journals to West Africa where the battle against Ebola continues [13][14].
Health and Social Care Professionals In Ireland the organisation CORU is responsible for the regulation of HSCPs.
There are currently 12 groups of HSCP professionals who are required by the Health and Social Care Professionals Act, 2005 to register with CORU.
The 12 professional groups include: Clinical Biochemists, Dietitians, Medical Scientists, Occupational Therapists, Orthoptists, Physiotherapists, Podiatrists, Psychologists, Radiographers, Social Care Workers, Social Workers and Speech and Language Therapists.
Part of the registration and renewal process includes mandatory continuing professional development (CPD).
Research is regarded as CPD for these professions.
Health and Social Care Professionals and Research There were 15,844 people working in the Irish health system as health and social care professionals according to Health Service Executive statistics in 2013.
They work in a variety of settings including primary care, disability and acute hospitals and increasingly in multidisciplinary teams.
The Department of Health published an Action Plan for research (2009-2013) with specific actions to increase the research capacity of healthcare professionals.
The Health Service Executive (HSE) responded to the action plan in part through the Health and Social Care Professionals Research Advisory Group.
Along with hosting two annual research conferences (that included research methodology workshops) and publishing a research methodology guidebook for HSCPs [15], the Research Subgroup of the HSE’s HSCPs Education and Development Advisory Group undertook two surveys in 2011 and 2013 to build a picture of research capacity, skills and training needs of professionals working in the area of health and social care.
While both surveys generated a poor response rate, the second collated responses from 1,325 HSCPs and provided an important profile of the research capabilities and interests.
It also provided a suite of recommendations to promote research competence and activity among our HSCPs.
Results from the 2011 survey revealed that while 47.5% of the sample were involved in research, only 13% of their working time was spent on research.
The results displayed that 84% of research-active participants and 73% of research-inactive participants reported a desire to spend more time involved in research.
Lack of time dedicated to research and clinical pressures were identified as the main barriers to research.
Participants suggested increased work time dedicated to research, additional funding and improved mentorship would enhance research activities [16].
Figure 1: Proportion of Research Active Participants in 2013 The 2013 survey reported that 40.7% of the sample had been research-active within the last two years.
Research-active participants reported spending less than 10% of their working time engaged in research.
Approximately one third of projects sampled were service evaluations, similarly a third of projects were part of an academic degree.
Notably, a minority (18.8%) were funded [17].
Similar to the 2011 survey, 89.4% and 78% of research-active and research-inactive participants stated a desire to designate more work time to research alone.
In both surveys, ‘applying for funding’, ‘data analysis’ and ‘publishing research’ were reported as participants’ greatest weaknesses.
Participants’ recommendations included protected time for research, developing HSCPs' weakest research skills, online learning supports to aid the development of research skills and the establishment of research opportunities that directly improve the functioning of services.
The results of the 2013 study displayed that despite HSCPs desire for enhanced research engagement, there have been few advances in the research activities of HSCPs since 2011.
This low level of research activity can be problematic as it results in a dependence on research from other jurisdictions.
Different health services vary in terms of a number of significant factors, such as technology and clinical pressures; thus a service that is successful in one jurisdiction may not be applicable in the development efforts of a different jurisdiction [17].
It is evident that health research is significantly beneficial, specifically, due to its capabilities to advance research, evaluate and improve the service, empower professions as well as the economic benefits it provides.
Consequently, research should be an imperative component of all health and social care professionals' work.
Open Access provides an innovative and more accessible way for HSCPs to engage in research.
Figure 2: Profile of percentage of work time engaged in research Policy and Its Impact on Open Access Publishing Internationally, the policies on open access publishing differ in approach.
Some countries favour the Gold over the Green Route eg the United Kingdom.
Currently, in the UK over 90% of health science research is now produced under a mandatory open access policy.
The majority of English-speaking countries have opted for the Green Route including the USA, Australia, Canada and Ireland.
In Ireland, a National Steering Committee on Open Access Policy was set up in 2012.
The impetus for this came from the Government’s declaration of support for the National Principles for Open Access Policy statement launched in 2012 [3].
The Health Service Executive (HSE) is the main employer of HSCPs in the public health system in Ireland.
In 2013 it set up an advisory group for open access research.
Representatives from the HSCPs within the HSE are members of the advisory group.
Not surprisingly, Ireland has one of the highest rates of green OA publishing in the European Union (15.8%), just behind Portugal (16.3%).
The quantity of OA papers is steadily increasing.
As a recent study reported, as of April 2014, more than 50% of the scientific papers published between 2007 and 2012 can be downloaded for free on the Web.
It also found that fields with high availability of Gold OA included public health and health services (16%).
In a sample of papers published between 2011 and 2013, 49.9% were made openly available in the area of public health and health services [18].
There is much debate over whether Open Access increases an article's probability of increased citations and impact.
It has been suggested that open access articles have a higher rate of citations due to self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles open access, and not because of causal reasons.
Gagouri and his companions [19] observed that the rate of Open Access publishing is greater for more citable articles as a result of quality advantage, because users self-select what to use and cite, freed by Open Access from the usual restrictions of scholarly subscription journals, and not because of authors self-selecting the highest-quality articles for Open Access.
The Open Citation Project maintain a bibliography of the effect of Open Access on downloads and citations.
It displays an ‘Open Access impact advantage’ across all disciplines.
The figure below displays the percentage increase of citations for open access articles in comparison to closed access articles in the same issue of the same journal [20].
Figure 3: Percentage increase in citations with Open Access An important incentive for Open Access, and scholarly publishing generally, is undoubtedly impact.
Impact is traditionally measured by the number of citations received following the completion of research.
New models of altmetrics have emerged as an alternative or additional measure of impact.
Research continues to confirm the citation advantage of publishing research and making it openly accessible.
OA papers were between 26% and 64% more cited on average for any given year than all papers combined, whereas non-OA received between 17% and 33% fewer citations (based on a sample size of at least 10,000 papers any given year).
Additionally, on average, Green OA (defined as researchers' self-archived papers in institutional and some thematic repositories listed in OpenDOAR and ROAR) papers have the greatest citation advantage, being cited 53% more frequently than all papers [18].
As demonstrated by Archaembault in the table below, green OA archiving has greater impact in the field of public health and health services.
Figure 4: Impact contest by OA type by field, 2009-2011.
Source: Archambault (2014) Open Access Infrastructure In terms of research output in Ireland, a national portal called RIAN [21] captures research output from participating institutional repositories.
This includes all Higher Education institutions in Ireland and the national health service via its repository Lenus [22].
HSCPs working in hospitals or community settings are depositing research to Lenus, albeit slowly.
In cases where HSCPs hold academic affiliations, their open access research may also be sourced from university repositories.
In 2013 the HSE set up an advisory group for open access research.
Part of the remit of the group is to increase awareness about open access publication and to ensure that all research conducted in the HSE will be made available through Open Access.
In October 2014 during International Open Access Week, the group announced its first award for open access research [23].
This is an initiative to raise awareness about open access research amongst healthcare professionals generally, and to recognise and reward research which demonstrates health service improvements.
Awareness of Open Access among Health and Social Care Professionals The awareness about open access publishing is still quite low among HSCPs.
In order to increase awareness of open access publishing and encourage Open Access as a default for health professionals working in the HSE, the HSE’s Open Access Research Advisory Group published a position statement on open access publication in 2013.
In August/September 2014, a survey was carried out by the HSE’s library team who manage Lenus, the Irish Health Repository.
It found that of the 413 responses from HSCPs, 62.5% had not heard of open access publishing.
See Figure 5.
Figure 5: Responses to Lenus 2014 survey about open access publishing The lack of awareness was further compounded by the finding that 94.89% of HSCPs had not heard of the HSE’s statement on open access publication.
See Figure 6.
Figure 6: Responses to Lenus 2014 survey about open access publication statement Barriers to conducting research persist for HSCPs working in the Irish health system.
The main barrier cited was lack of time, followed by research not being valued by the organisational culture.
See Figure 7.
This is despite an interest in conducting research shown by respondents to the survey, with 179 health and social care respondents saying that they would like to spend more time conducting research.
These findings are echoed by previous surveys conducted on speech and language therapists and social work practice in Ireland [24][25].
Figure 7: Responses to Lenus 2014 survey about barriers to research Internationally, the awareness about Open Access is highest in research-inclined disciplines However, the SOAP project revealed that 90% of researchers in the field of humanities and social sciences, approximately 80% of medically related researchers and 90% of psychologists believed that Open Access was beneficial to their field [6].
Gargouri and his colleagues' study portrayed the percentage of usage of open access publishing between the years 2005 and 2010.
17% of health research, 28% of psychology research and 36% of social science research were published in open access journals [1].
Funding for Health and Social Care Professionals' Research In Ireland the main source of funding for health services research, population health research, clinical and biological sciences research comes via the Health Research Board (HRB).
The current strategic plan of the HRB includes one of its four top level goals as ‘building capacity to conduct high-quality population health sciences research and health services research’ [26].
These are areas where HSCPs work and represents an opportunity for research output.
According to a recent bibliometric study, the Irish health sector accounted for one third of HRB-funded research between 2000 and 2012 [26].
Other sources of funding include Science Foundation Ireland (€74 million), the Higher Education Authority (€37 million) and the Industrial Development Authority (€23 million).
Despite this expenditure, the 2011 study on HSCPs' research activity indicated that only a minority of the research projects of HSCPs are funded [16].
Systems in Use by Health and Social Care Professionals HSCPs working in the health service in Ireland have access to a number of platforms for continuing professional development and for profiling their research.
Some are freely available to them such as HSEland which is a virtual learning environment for health workers in Ireland.
Another example is open access platforms such as ResearchGate.
At the time of writing, there are 520 HSE members registered on ResearchGate with a combined impact point of 120.
However ResearchGate also has a number of other institutions in Ireland which are registered separately to the HSE where HSCPs could also work such as Children’s University Hospital, Temple Street, Dublin; Galway University Hospitals; Ireland’s Health Services; and St. Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin.
This makes data extraction and visibility of HSCPs from a platform such as ResearchGate cumbersome.
Lenus, the Irish health repository, has a dedicated collection for HSCPs in which to make their research available.
To date, this contains 329 items of research.
Awareness about Lenus amongst HSCPs is low with 44.1% of HSCPs answering that they had never heard of it in the 2014 survey.
Lenus is based on the DSpace platform and uses Google Analytics™ to track metrics and statistical use.
Lenus has been available since February 2009 and items have been added on an ad-hoc basis by library professionals and health service professionals.
The HSE has issued annual calls for research to all of the hospitals in Ireland since 2010, and many healthcare staff based in hospitals have responded by submitting research to Lenus.
A brief analysis of the Health and Social Care collection in Lenus, as highlighted below, indicates that the collection is being viewed and items are being downloaded.
Although the rate of deposit by health and social care practitioners is low in some disciplines, the collection is in use.
Four health and social care disciplines are examined, they include Psychology, Social Work, Physiotherapy and Radiography.
Open Access in Psychology There are 45 OA items in the Lenus Psychologists collection.
The criteria to submit items to this collection require, for example, that the items are peer-reviewed, published and that the primary or named author is a psychologist working in a community setting.
Research by psychologists who are working in acute settings are collected in separate hospital research collections within Lenus.
Item statistics from this collection show that items have been viewed 470 times and downloaded 2,042 times in a six-month period.
The most downloaded item in this collection was “Clinical Intake Interview Guidelines”, an article from the Irish Psychologist, September 2009.
However the number of downloads an article receives is not an accepted measure of impact.
This article is not indexed in Web of Science™, Scopus™ or PubMed, nor are any articles from the journal.
This means that bibliometric reports of impact exclude articles such as these.
The danger of this exclusion is that, arguably, psychologists may be missing out on opportunities for research funding when their research is not included by data used by commercial firms such as Thompson Reuters™ who are often used to report on national or European research output.
Figure 8: 6-month usage statistics for Psychologists collection in Lenus.
Data from Google Scholar.
A search in Scopus™ using Affiliation Health Service Executive and Subject Psychology published since 1996 returns just 13 items.
The result is that the h-index =5 (Of the 13 documents considered for the h-index, 5 have been cited at least 5 times.)
Of the 13 documents, none are openly accessible.
The items that have been submitted to Lenus by psychologists in the HSE are not being picked up by Scopus™.
Although they are visible and openly available for viewing and downloading, the official reporting of impact will remain low as long as platforms such as Scopus™ exclude repository data.
Open Access in Social Work There are only 3 items in the Social Workers collection of Lenus.
Similarly to the Psychologists collection, the Social Workers collection is for the research of practitioners working in Irish community health settings.
The statistics for 6 months show that despite the small collection, items are being viewed and downloaded.
The most accessed item was a report on “The housing preference and assessment survey: an instrument to describe the subjective housing and support needs of mental health service users” which was downloaded 232 times in two years.
Figure 9: 6-month usage statistics for Social Work collection in Lenus.
Data from Google Scholar.
Open Access in Physiotherapy There are only 6 items in the Lenus collection for Physiotherapy.
This collection is for physiotherapists working in Irish community health settings.
Research by physiotherapists working in hospitals is collected in separate hospital research collections in Lenus.
The usage statistics are low.
The most downloaded item in this collection was the ‘Item statistics for the effectiveness of a stratified group intervention using the StartBack screening tool in patients with LBF a non randomised control trial’, which was downloaded 39 times.
Figure 10: 6-month usage statistics for Physiotherapists collection in Lenus.
Data from Google Scholar.
Open Access in Radiography and Radiation Therapy Radiography holds 87 items, which is the highest number of items among the health and social professions in the Lenus Repository.
This collection includes research by radiographers and radiation therapists working in Irish hospital settings.
Despite the high number of items, the usage and download numbers are quite low.
Figure 11: 6-month usage statistics for Radiography and Radiation Therapy collection in Lenus.
Data from Google Scholar.
Usage of OA publications by HSCP professionals is demonstrated by the analytical statistics in Lenus and the survey.
A more telling answer about the usefulness of OA health-related publications was given by HSCPs to the question about how they used information that was found in Lenus.
The majority answered that they used the information in practice for patient care.
See Figure 12.
Figure 12: How information found in Lenus is used by HSCPs Other collections in Lenus include:   Health and Social Care Discipline No.
of items in collection Occupational Therapists 3 Speech and Language Therapists 7 Paramedics 2 Dieticians 13 Medical Scientists 4 Conclusions Rate of deposit by HSCPs in Ireland to Lenus, the Irish health repository, is low.
Awareness of Open Access and understanding of its value is also low.
The statistics provided by Lenus display that despite the accessibility of an open access repository, many researchers either do not publish their work in this repository or they are not engaging in research activity, as suggested in the HSCP survey in 2011 and 2014.
The current research landscape sees HSE HSCPs undertake research in collaboration with their HEI (Higher Education Insitution) colleagues.
The former publish to promote their career advancement as per current performance-review criteria, and can hold a bias towards publishing in OA Journals.
Again this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about OA.
Open Access has been proven to improve impact and to benefit economic, research and societal needs.
Research can only advance through the sharing of results, likewise the value of investment in research is only maximised through extensive use of its results.
Unfortunately, due to restrictions on Open Access, research results are often not available to those who would make most use of them.
It is imperative that results of publicly funded research should be made accessible in order to stimulate discovery and innovation, and to transform this knowledge into public benefits [27].
It is evident that HSCPs' knowledge about Open Access is lacking or else inadequate.
However, Open Access is imperative for the advancement of the research activity of HSCPs.
The value of Open Access is evident in the many benefits it provides.
At present, OA articles maintain a citation advantage over non-open access journals.
OA offers a panacea to the problems many health professionals and academics face regarding funding and subscription fees.
OA has progressed considerably since its establishment and it could provide HSCPs with a platform to develop their research activities.
Editor's note: Information for Authors, The Lancet, November 2014 http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/authors/lancet-information-for-authors.pdf Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Michael Byrne, Principal Psychology Manager, HSE West for his input.
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Highlights from the SOAP project survey.
What scientists think about open access publishing.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.5260 Cerejo, Clarinda.
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Navigating through the pressure to publish http://www.editage.com/insights/navigating-through-the-pressure-to-publish Forgues, Bernard and Sebastian Liarte.
Academic Publishing Past and Future.
M@n@gement;2013, Vol.
16 Issue 5, p739 http://www.management-aims.com/PapersMgmt/165Forgues.pdf Brody, Tim, and Stevan Harnad.
(2004).
"The research impact cycle."
PowerPoint presentation http://www.jpgmonline.com/documents/openaccess/2_Harnad_0930.pdf The Cochrane Collaboration: About us http://www.cochrane.org/about-us The Cochrane Library Oversight Committee.
Measuring the performance of The Cochrane Library [editorial].
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2012 Nov 14;(11):ED000048 http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/details/editorial/3620281/Measuring-the-performance-of-The-Cochrane-Library.html Elsevier Connect: Measuring the impact of research access in the developing world http://elsevierconnect.com/measuring-the-impact-of-research-access-in-the-developing-world/ Elsevier Connect: Free access to medical information for African countries battling Ebola http://www.elsevier.com/connect/free-access-to-medical-information-for-african-countries-battling-ebola and: Wiley: Wiley to Provide Emergency Access to Biomedical Literature to Aid Ebola Outbreak Relief Efforts, 15 August 2014 http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-111504.html National Library of Medicine (NLM): NLM Launches Emergency Access Initiative, Granting Free Access to Books and Journals for Healthcare Professionals Fighting Ebola Outbreak, August 2014 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/ebola_emergency_access.html Byrne, Michael (Ed.)
2012.
How to conduct research for service improvement a guidebook for health and social care professionals.
HSCP Education and Development Advisory Group Research Sub-group http://www.aoti.ie/attachments/da20d03f-f867-4b10-97b0-680db7b5b92a.pdf McHugh, Patrick, and Michael Byrne.
2011.
Survey of the research activity, skills and training needs of health and social care professionals in Ireland.
McHugh, Patrick, and Michael Byrne.
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Survey of the research activity, skills and training needs of health and social care professionals in Ireland 2013 Archambault, Eric, et al.
Proportion of Open Access Papers Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals at the European and World Levels—1996–2013 RTD-B6-PP-2011-2: Study to develop a set of indicators to measure open access, 22 October 2014 http://science-metrix.com/files/science-metrix/publications/d_1.8_sm_ec_dg-rtd_proportion_oa_1996-2013_v11p.pdf Gargouri, Yassine, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Stevan Harnad.
2010.
Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research.
PloS one 5, no.
10.
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2009.
Open Access and the Health Sciences in the developing world: an overview.
See rian.ie – Pathways to Irish Research http://rian.ie See Lenus, the Irish health repository http://www.lenus.ie HSE.ie: news: Open Access Research Award, October 2014 http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/media/pressrel/openaccess.html O'Connor, S. and Pettigrew, C. M. (2009), The barriers perceived to prevent the successful implementation of evidence-based practice by speech and language therapists.
International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 44: 1018–1035.
doi: 10.1080/13682820802585967 Wilson, G. and Douglas, H. (2007) “Developing a culture of evidence-based practice in social work agencies in Northern Ireland”.
In Practice,19: 19-32 Health Research Board.
Bibliometric analysis of HRB-supported publications 2000-12, Dublin:Health Research Board, 2014.
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http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/open-access/why-oa Author Details Aoife Lawton Systems Librarian Dr. Steevens' Library Health Service Executive Ireland Email: aoife.lawton@hse.ie Web site: http://www.hse.ie Aoife Lawton is the repository manager of Lenus, the Irish health repository.
She has a MLIS and BA in European Studies.
She has worked in the Irish health system since 2001.
Her interests include information systems, research, evidence based practice and library and information science.
Eimear Flynn Research Assistant Health Service Executive Laois/Offaly Ireland Email: 13046454@studentmail.ul.ie Web site: http://www.hse.ie Eimear Flynn is currently working as a research assistant in the Psychology Department of the HSE.
She has a BA in Psychology and a MSc in Psychological Science.
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eMargin: A Collaborative Textual Annotation Tool Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eMargin: A Collaborative Textual Annotation Tool Buzz data software java wiki api javascript html database xml tei metadata accessibility tagging browser blog repositories windows aggregation ebook vle moodle ajax interoperability intranet url research standards jquery Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Kehoe and Matt Gee describe their Jisc-funded eMargin collaborative textual annotation tool, showing how it has widened its focus through integration with Virtual Learning Environments.
In the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) at Birmingham City University, our main research field is Corpus Linguistics: the compilation and analysis of large text collections in order to extract new knowledge about language.
We have previously developed the WebCorp [1] suite of software tools, designed to extract language examples from the Web and to uncover frequent and changing usage patterns automatically.
eMargin, with its emphasis on manual annotation and analysis, was therefore somewhat of a departure for us.
The eMargin Project came about in 2007 when we attempted to apply our automated Corpus Linguistic analysis techniques to the study of English Literature.
To do this, we built collections of works by particular authors and made these available through our WebCorp software, allowing other researchers to examine, for example, how Dickens uses the word ‘woman’, how usage varies across his novels, and which other words are associated with ‘woman’ in Dickens’ works.
What we found was that, although our tools were generally well received, there was some resistance amongst literary scholars to this large-scale automated analysis of literary texts.
Our top-down approach, relying on frequency counts and statistical analyses, was contrary to the traditional bottom-up approach employed in the discipline, relying on the intuition of literary scholars.
In order to develop new software to meet the requirements of this new audience, we needed to gain a deeper understanding of the traditional approach and its limitations.
The Traditional Approach A long-standing problem in the study of English Literature is that the material being studied – the literary text – is often many hundreds of pages in length, yet the teacher must encourage class discussion and focus this on particular themes and passages.
Compounding the problem is the fact that, often, not all students in the class have read the text in its entirety.
The traditional mode of study in the discipline is ‘close reading’: the detailed examination and interpretation of short text extracts down to individual word level.
This variety of ‘practical criticism’ was greatly influenced by the work of I.A.
Richards in the 1920s [2] but can actually be traced back to the 11th Century [3].
What this approach usually involves in practice in the modern study of English Literature is that the teacher will specify a passage for analysis, often photocopying this and distributing it to the students.
Students will then read the passage several times, underlining words or phrases which seem important, writing notes in the margin, and making links between different parts of the passage, drawing out themes and motifs.
On each re-reading, the students’ analysis gradually takes shape (see Figure 1).
Close reading takes place either in preparation for seminars or in small groups during seminars, and the teacher will then draw together the individual analyses during a plenary session in the classroom.
Figure 1: Manual annotation of a text Through our discussions with colleagues and students in the School of English at BCU, we discovered several limitations to the traditional approach.
At individual student level, the passage of text can quickly become cluttered with underlining and notes on each successive re-reading, making it difficult to isolate particular threads of analysis or interpret the analysis at all when returning to it several weeks later (eg for revision).
Student’s annotations are very much individual and tied to their own printed copies of the text.
Students cannot see each other’s annotations and teasing out and combining these private readings at class level can be a difficult task for the teacher.
Moreover, comments and discussions are not captured in a form that can be archived or searched at a later date, or re-used by the teacher in subsequent years.
For distance-learning students, it is even more difficult to share annotations and, in addition, these students cannot take part in discussions about the text except through online chats (which require all students to be online simultaneously) or in forums (where the text and the discussion are separate entities).
The biggest challenge facing traditional academic methods of textual analysis, however, is the continued growth of electronic texts.
As the availability of e-texts has widened, many institutions have diverted increasingly scarce library budgets away from books and towards e-content platforms such as MyiLibrary [4].
In addition, there are many subject-specific databases – in our case including LION [5] and EEBO [6] – and, of course, an increasing number of e-readers like the Amazon Kindle.
Despite this proliferation of e-texts, when we began the background research for eMargin in 2007 we were rather surprised by the lack of available software to allow the kind of fine-grained annotation necessary in academic close-reading.
We found many Web sites and browser plug-ins allowing electronic ‘sticky notes’ to be associated with online texts but these were usually paragraph-level annotations at best rather than the word-level annotations required in academic study.
There had been attempts at more complex e-annotation tools in the past (e.g.
XLibris [7]) but many of them were expensive proprietary solutions which did not find favour in the academic community.
Furthermore, we were unable to find an existing tool offering the collaborative, annotation-sharing aspect required in academic group work.
For these reasons, we set to work on a prototype collaborative annotation tool and began testing it in the classroom with colleagues and students.
Designing eMargin Our initial plan was to develop a wiki-based system to allow students to collaborate on the production of a critical analysis of a literary passage.
At that time, the wiki was of growing importance in scientific research in general [8] and seemed to be a useful knowledge-aggregation tool for our specific purposes.
In a similar way to how Wikipedia works, students would have contributed ideas and teachers would have acted as ‘editors’, helping to shape the finished analysis.
However, when we shared our initial ideas with colleagues who teach literary studies, it soon became apparent that, while the end product – the critical analysis – is important, perhaps more important still is the discussion process involved in reaching consensus.
We needed to capture this discussion process in electronic format, allowing students not only to make their own textual annotations but to respond to annotations made by their peers.
A basic discussion forum would not be sufficient as, with students working in small groups or at a distance, there may be multiple discussions taking place simultaneously, associated with different parts of the literary text from paragraph level right down to single word level.
With these requirements in mind, we adopted a different approach and developed a prototype Web-based annotation system which placed the literary text itself at the centre of the interface and mirrored, as closely as possible, the process of writing notes in the margin of a printed text.
In this prototype, students were able to highlight any span of text and write comments in the pop-up box which appeared on screen when they released the mouse.
These comments would appear immediately on the screens of other students, who could then read their peers’ comments and respond if they wished.
We decided at an early stage that our system had to be Web-based.
In the academic environment, staff and students often lack the necessary permissions required to install software locally, so it was important that our tool would run in any standard Web browser.
During the prototyping stage we discovered that, independently of us, staff at the University of Leicester [9] had identified the same pedagogic issue that we outline above and had been searching, largely unsuccessfully, for pre-existing software for the collaborative annotation and discussion of literary texts.
We therefore collaborated with Leicester on a pilot study, using our prototype in their English Literature classes across three modules (two BA modules, one MA module).
This helped us to gauge student and teacher reactions to our prototype tool and to determine which features would be of most use in the final version.
Of the Leicester students surveyed, 96% found word-level commenting useful, 92% agreed that ‘reading others’ comments helped me formulate my own ideas’, and 96% found the prototype ‘easy’ to use.
We used this feedback to support a bid to the Jisc Learning & Teaching Innovation Grant scheme.
The bid was successful [10] and allowed us to develop the full-scale collaborative annotation system which became known as eMargin.
The eMargin system is hosted on our server at BCU for use by other institutions [11] and is also open-source, with code available through SourceForge [12].
In the following section we outline the main features of eMargin before going on to describe how our tool is attracting new audiences in other disciplines.
eMargin Features Basic Annotation At the centre of the eMargin workspace is the text under analysis, with a toolbox on the right of the screen giving access to the main functions of the software and allowing the user to control which annotations are visible (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Main eMargin workspace The spans of text highlighted in different colours are the annotations themselves and it is possible to open an annotation by clicking on the highlighted text.
In Figure 2, an annotation has been opened which is associated with the phrase ‘I OBSERVE’ (the title of the chapter).
In this case, both Peter and Sarah have responded to the original comment made by John and a discussion is developing around this particular phrase.
The text box at the bottom of the annotation window allows the current user to join this discussion.
The annotation window hovers over the primary text and can be dragged around the screen to wherever the user prefers.
It is possible to open multiple annotation windows simultaneously and to hide them again by clicking on the small cross in the corner.
This offers a significant advantage over the traditional model (Figure 1), where annotations, once made, are visible permanently.
As in the prototype, new annotations are made by dragging the mouse over the span of text to be highlighted.
When the mouse button is released, the annotation window appears.
We have also developed a modified version of the interface for tablets and other touch-screen devices.
It is possible, when making a new annotation, to choose the highlight colour (from the palette of six colours shown on the right of the screen).
In order to make eMargin as flexible as possible, we chose to leave it to the user to determine what the individual colours mean and how they are used in the annotation process.
In Figure 2 each colour is used to highlight a different theme in the novel but, depending on the specific text and analysis task, colours can be used in a variety of ways.
There is an option in the toolbox to associate labels with colours to make their meaning clearer.
Some of our users have employed the different colours to apply several different analytical models to a text whereas some groups of users have assigned a different colour to each group member’s annotations.
By clicking on a colour in the palette in the toolbox, it is possible to view only the annotations of that colour and this is a useful way of filtering the overall analysis in to threads or themes.
It is also possible for users to view only their own annotations or annotations made by members of their own group (see Group Management section below).
Tagging In recent years, there has been an explosion in the activity of ‘tagging’: the association of single word descriptors with online resources, from videos and photographs to news articles, academic papers and items for sale in online stores.
eMargin takes this a step further and allows tags to be associated with sub-sections of a text, down to individual word level.
The most frequently assigned tags are listed in the toolbox and it is also possible to view a tag cloud showing the most frequent tags in the largest typeface.
By clicking on an individual tag, either in the list or in the tag cloud, the user can view sub-sections of the text which have been associated with that tag.
There are therefore two different kinds of association available in eMargin: colour association and word association.
The user can choose to use one or the other or to combine them in whatever way is appropriate for the annotation task in hand.
Tags were also a way of introducing into eMargin the quantitative aspect of our previous work in the field of Corpus Linguistics.
The eMargin tagging tool gives users a basic way of carrying out a qualitative, intuition-based textual analysis but then counting which of the identified features are most frequent and, thus, perhaps most significant.
Text Upload In any annotation tool, the user must be able to insert texts for analysis and in eMargin this is achieved in one of three ways.
The user can upload a text from his or her computer, with PDF, Word, HTML and many other text-based formats supported.
Alternatively, the user can specify the URL of an online document to be downloaded.
The third option is a simple copy and paste mechanism.
If one of the first two options is chosen, eMargin processes the document and converts it to plain text and allows the user to edit this text before making it available for analysis in the main interface.
At present, eMargin does not preserve document layout or other formatting.
Whilst this is not usually significant in literary studies or other kinds of academic analysis, we are investigating ways of preserving document formatting in a future version of our software.
Group Management There are three main entities within eMargin: user, text, and group.
All registered users have permission to upload texts, in the manner described above, and to make their own private annotations.
One of the key advantages of eMargin, however, is in allowing users to share and discuss their annotations.
This is achieved through the groups mechanism.
Users who have been given enhanced permissions (teachers in the academic environment) are able to create a group and share texts with this group.
Other users can be given access to the group and associated texts through the use of ‘special access links’.
A special access link is a secret URL, which can be generated within eMargin and then shared with other people (eg by email).
Anyone clicking on the special link is given access to the group, after signing up for eMargin if (s)he does not already have an account.
The owner of the group can choose whether other users are given read-only access, standard access or moderator access (permission to delete annotations made by other users).
Look-up eMargin offers integration with external resources through its ‘look-up’ feature.
When selecting a span of text, the user is given the option to search for the corresponding word, phrase or sentence in the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, in Google, in Wikipedia or in our own WebCorp tool, amongst various other online search tools and repositories.
eMargin generates an appropriate search string automatically and takes the user directly to matches for the search term selected from the text under analysis.
The most obvious use for this feature is in looking up the definition of unknown terms but there is potential for closer integration with further repositories.
Search and Retrieval There is a search facility in the eMargin toolbox which allows users to search for words or phrases within a highlighted span of text or within the annotation and comments associated with a highlight.
Searches can be restricted by highlight colour, tag, user, group or date.
Within eMargin, all actions are logged and time-stamped so it is possible to determine exactly who contributed what and when.
This is particularly useful in the academic environment when groups of students are collaborating on an analysis.
It is also possible to create permalinks to individual annotations to aid retrieval.
Output Formats eMargin is designed primarily as an online workspace.
However, there are situations where an annotated text may be required in printed form or in machine-readable form for use by other software tools.
In the first case, eMargin offers a printable version, of the annotations only or of the annotations shown as endnotes within the full text (with colour-coding preserved).
In the second case, eMargin offers an XML output option which allows the user to export the text and/or annotations and tags in TEI-compliant XML.
eMargin Technical Details eMargin was implemented in Java, including JSP for the Web interface, and JavaScript, including jQuery and jQuery UI [13].
After exploring the available options, we decided that interactions with the database would be handled using the Java Persistence API (using Hibernate as the implementation and H2 as the relational database system).
Further technical specifications are available on the Jisc CETIS Web site [14].
In general, eMargin is a fairly standard Web application, made up of serverand client-side scripting.
The more complex element of the tool is the user interface for adding and viewing annotations.
We made use of AJAX requests to create a dynamic interface, and we found jQuery (specifically its UI sub-project) extremely useful in allowing us to focus on functionality without having to worry about building display elements.
During development of the prototype annotation interface, there was one major challenge that needed to be overcome.
Initially, our plan was for annotation to be allowed at character level, and development started along these lines.
This required the exact position in the text of a new highlight to be determined using the Web browser’s own built-in text selection mechanism.
However, we soon realised that the number of characters displayed on screen can differ from the number of characters in the HTML source and that this can vary between Web browsers.
We tried various strategies to combat this problem.
In the prototype we settled for marking the position of each annotation with specific HTML tags and then counting the characters in the source up to that position.
Deciding that this solution was too inefficient, we changed the minimum annotation level from character to word in the full eMargin tool.
Dividing a text into words (tokenisation) is something we have much experience of from our work in Corpus Linguistics.
Using our own tokenisation rules, we were able to split the text in eMargin into words and surround each word with HTML tags, clearly defining its boundaries.
This enabled us to write our own text selection system to ensure accuracy and improve performance.
A useful by-product of this was that we could adapt our selection system for touch-screen devices relatively easily.
This resulted in three methods for text selection: dragging a mouse, dragging a finger on a touch-screen device, or using a sequence of taps and a pop-up menu (for devices with limited touch support).
Widening Our Audience As explained above, our Jisc Learning & Teaching Innovation project had the study of English Literature as its primary focus.
What may have become apparent in this article so far, however, is that eMargin includes features of use in any discipline or situation where close textual analysis is important, particularly where it is carried out collaboratively.
From the early stages, eMargin attracted interest across subject areas at our own institution from Health to Law, and from Education to Fine Art.
As Rowin Young of Jisc CETIS wrote of eMargin in an October 2011 blog post ‘[b]y providing an easy means for sharing ideas […] this system will be of value in all disciplines, not just English Literature where it is being developed’ [15].
To give an example of the wider use of eMargin, a research team at Lancaster University working on the ESRC-funded Metaphor in end-of-life care (MELC) Project [16] is using eMargin to investigate the role metaphor may play in the discussion of illness and death.
The project has involved collaboration between three analysts on the manual annotation of metaphors in transcripts of interviews conducted with a variety of stakeholders, including patients, unpaid family carers, and healthcare professionals.
eMargin has allowed analysts to view one another’s annotations, make comments and reach majority decisions on tricky cases.
The XML-export option has also proved useful in passing the annotations to specialist software for further statistical analyses.
The findings of the MELC project will be relevant to the provision of end-of-life care, and to the training of healthcare professionals.
The continued growth of e-texts has meant that the need for effective digital annotation has extended beyond academia and become a mainstream issue.
A 2011 New York Times article entitled ‘Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins’ [17] traced the history of reader annotation and spoke of its ‘uncertain fate in a digitalized world’.
eMargin was discussed at the NISO meeting on Standards Development for E-Book Annotation Sharing and Social Reading at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011 [18] and in 2012 we were invited to the British Library to speak in the ‘Digital Conversations’ series about the wider applicability of our tool.
In recent years there has been a growing recognition that user-generated content like the annotations found in eMargin has great potential as a means of improving the accessibility and overall value of digital library collections [19].
We feel that user-assigned tags could be particularly useful in overcoming the limitations of traditional expert-driven taxonomic classification systems when applied to Web-scale text collections.
In a previous study [20] we analysed the potential of such tags as a source of document metadata and found that, with appropriate linguistic insight, tags could be used to improve library and Web indexing by offering an indication of textual topic.
The increased benefits offered by eMargin’s sub-document-level tags (paragraph, sentence, phrase, word) are something we plan to explore in future work.
Integration with Virtual Learning Environments In spite of the growth and diversification of the eMargin user-base during the course of its development, a point frequently made by teachers using the tool was that the need to register separately for eMargin acted as a barrier to use.
With the growth of single sign-on for university Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), intranet sites and library systems, students increasingly expect a seamless experience when using electronic resources, and we found in our trials that the introduction of a separate registration system sometimes led to a sense of disorientation.
For teachers, there was the problem of ensuring that all students in the class had registered to use the external tool.
Where students registered for eMargin using only a personal email address, there was an additional difficulty for the teacher and the system administrator in associating users with courses, groups and, in the case of our own hosted eMargin service, institutions.
For these reasons, we felt that there was a clear case for tighter integration between eMargin and the VLE, and that such integration would encourage wider uptake of our system.
To achieve this, we made use of the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification published by the IMS Global Learning Consortium [21].
LTI is a seamless way of integrating external resources with VLEs, and one that is compatible with all the major VLE systems including Moodle and Blackboard Learn.
In our case, the main benefit of LTI was in streamlining the user registration and log-in process.
We were able to secure funds from the Jisc Embedding Benefits programme [22] to produce an enhanced version of eMargin with LTI integration.
What this means is that users of any supported VLE (or other LTI-compatible software) can click on a link and have their credentials – institution, course, role, name, email address – passed securely to eMargin, removing the need to log in to eMargin separately.
It is, of course, still possible to log in using the previous method if required.
Conclusion In this article we have explained how, by gaining an insight into the pedagogical and technological challenges being faced in the close study of academic texts, we have been able to develop an effective online collaborative annotation system.
We have shown that, by making this system as flexible and user-friendly as possible and by integrating it with institutional VLEs, we have attracted users beyond our initial target audience.
In doing so, we have developed expertise and software resources which we hope will be reused by other developers working on a variety of annotation tasks.
References WebCorp: The Web as Corpus http://www.webcorp.org.uk/ I.A.
Richards (1929) Practical Criticism.
London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Brian Cummings (2002) The Literary Culture of the Reformation.
Oxford: OUP.
MyiLibrary http://www.myilibrary.com/ Literature Online  http://lion.chadwyck.com/ Early English Books Online  http://eebo.chadwyck.com/ Morgan N. Price, Bill N. Schilit & Gene Golovchinsky (1998) ‘XLibris: The Active Reading Machine’.
Proceedings of CHI '98: Human Factors in Computing Systems.
New York: ACM.
pp.
22-23 http://www.fxpal.com/publications/FXPAL-PR-98-111.pdf Mitch Waldrop, ‘Big data: Wikiomics’.
Nature Vol.
455, Issue 7209, 4 September 2008. pp.
22-25 http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080903/full/455022a.html Colleagues at Leicester were then in the early stages of their #tagginganna Project   https://sites.google.com/site/tagginganna/ eMargin – an online collaborative textual annotation resource http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/ltig/emargin.aspx eMargin  http://emargin.bcu.ac.uk/ eMargin | Free  software downloads at SourceForge.net  http://sourceforge.net/projects/emargin/ jQuery  http://jquery.com/ Project Directory  http://prod.cetis.ac.uk/projects/emargin Under development: eMargin << Rowin's Blog http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/rowin/2011/10/10/under-development-emargin/ Metaphor in end-of-life care (MELC) Project  http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/melc/ Dirk Johnson.
Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins, New York Times, 20 February 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html E-Book Annotation Sharing and Social Reading National Information Standards Organization  http://www.niso.org/topics/ccm/e-book_annotation/ Rich Gazan (2008) ‘Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections’.
D-Lib Magazine.
Vol.
14, Number 11/12 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november08/gazan/11gazan.html Andrew Kehoe & Matt Gee (2011).
‘Social Tagging: A new perspective on textual “aboutness”.
Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Vol.
6   http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/06/kehoe_gee IMS Global: Learning Tools Interoperability  http://www.imsglobal.org/toolsinteroperability2.cfm eMargin – embedding a text annotation tool in VLEs  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/embeddingbenefits2012/eMarginembedding.aspx Author Details Andrew Kehoe Director Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) Birmingham City University Email: andrew.kehoe@bcu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bcu.ac.uk/pme/school-of-english/staff/andrew-kehoe Andrew Kehoe is Director of RDUES and Deputy Head of the School of English at Birmingham City University.
Since 1999 he has worked on a series of EPSRCand AHRC-funded projects in the field of Corpus Linguistics, most recently managing the Jisc-funded eMargin Project.
Matt Gee Research Technician Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) Birmingham City University Email: matt.gee@bcu.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bcu.ac.uk/pme/school-of-english/staff/matt-gee Matt Gee is the developer behind eMargin and various other software tools and data collections released by RDUES, including the WebCorp Linguist’s Search Engine and Birmingham Blog Corpus.
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The Norwegian National Digital Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Norwegian National Digital Library Buzz data framework dissemination portal infrastructure archives metadata digitisation blog repositories copyright preservation cataloguing licence privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Marianne Takle describes the National Library of Norway's digitisation strategy and how the National Library is taking on a key role in the country's digital library service.
The National Library of Norway is in the process of establishing itself as a digital national library and of taking on a key role in the country’s digital library service.
The most ambitious outcome of this positioning is that the National Library has comprehensive plans to digitise its entire collection.
The digital national library has been given the name NBdigital, and its objective of establishing itself as a digital library is also reflected in the institution’s practices.
Resources have been redistributed so as to give priority to digitisation, and competence in digital media is being enhanced.
Growing numbers of documents are being deposited in digital format, as is the case in the collaborative project with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).
Agreements on the digital deposit of certain newspapers and of books from some publishers have also been established.
By gradually supplementing the traditional library with digitised collections, the National Library of Norway is adapting to the transition from printed books to electronic media.
The relationship between collections and digital techniques has now entered a new phase in which the most important issue is not one of having access to the catalogues by means of digital communication, but rather one of making the content of the collections available to users over the Internet.
This poses a number of new challenges of a technical, financial and legal nature.
Through active policy-making in both the technical and the political areas, the National Library of Norway has become a key participant in the development of solutions to meet these challenges.
Three Strategy Documents to Digitise All Norwegian Material In its strategy documents from 2005, the National Library defined its main goals to be to ‘form the core of the Norwegian Digital Library’ [1].
Since then, this goal has been further refined into three new strategy documents which deal exclusively with a digital national library.
The first strategy document concerning the digital national library was published in February 2005 and was entitled ‘Det digitale nasjonalbibliotek – Strategimanifest 2005’ (‘The Digital National Library– Strategy Manifesto 2005’).
The justification for the digitisation work focused on the needs of the users.
Furthermore, the strategy manifesto claimed that the Library had the potential to provide access to a rich and varied content on all desktops and in every home.
Importance was placed on the National Library’s contribution to enabling the Norwegian library community to provide new and improved services to a variety of stakeholders, and the National Library would facilitate learning and research.
In this way the Library intended to serve all user groups: students and researchers, the rest of the country’s libraries, and the entire population.
This perspective of the general public as users lent a national dimension to the digitisation project.
In December 2005, the National Library presented its second strategy document, which was entitled ‘Tilgang til digitalt innhold i Nasjonalbiblioteket.
Strateginotat for digitalisering av Nasjonalbibliotekets samling’ (‘Access to Digital Content in the National Library.
Strategy Document for the Digitisation of the National Library’s Collection’).
In this document the National Library expressed for the first time its goal of establishing a digitisation programme which would serve as the basis for digitising the Library’s entire collection.
This was a formidable task.
The digitisation programme would cover all forms of material published in Norway.
Since 1990, the Norwegian Act relating to the Legal Deposit of Generally Available Documents has applied to audio, photographic, film and electronic media as well as to written material.
This represents a vast amount and variety of material.
Furthermore, the strategy document showed that only a negligible portion of the National Library’s Norwegian material had been digitised.
According to the National Library’s estimates from December 2005, none of its collections of books or journals had been digitised.
Material which had been digitised included 100,000 newspaper editions, 570 hours of film, 54,000 hours of radio, 205,000 images and approximately 1,000 manuscripts.
These ambitious plans were followed up by action and quickly led to concrete results.
By the spring of 2009, the digital collection comprised 90,000 books, 200,000 newspapers (roughly the same number of journals as in 2005), 3,100 hours of film, 250,000 hours of radio broadcasts, more than 420,000 photographs and around 23,000 manuscripts.
The numbers of digitised documents in the other collections remained the same as for 2005 [2].
In addition to the plan for digitising all its Norwegian material, the National Library began systematically collecting from the Norwegian sector of the Internet, that is, sites registered under the ‘.no’ Internet domain.
This meant that not only would Norwegian works be preserved, but also large portions of the Norwegian digital public domain.
In Spring 2009, this entailed 1,800,000,000 files being downloaded from the Internet.
As Eivind Røssaak has shown [3], this type of downloading clearly illustrates that the National Library’s archives are undergoing a gradual change.
Even though vast amounts of material can be stored through collecting Web-based material, it does not follow that it can be made available.
In February 2006, the National Library presented its third strategy document, entitled ‘Digitalisering av Nasjonalbibliotekets samling’ (‘Digitisation of the National Library’s Collection’).
In this document the crux of the reasoning shifted from why the collection should be digitised to how the digitisation was to be imlpemented in practice.
This was followed up with a prioritisation of resources that would make it possible to achieve the goals.
The earlier ambitious visions were moderated in the description of the practical implementation.
A list of priorities was thereby incorporated into the strategy documents.
Cultural Heritage Just a Few Clicks Away The official beginning of the National Library’s systematic digitisation of its entire collection was marked by a ceremony at which Trond Giske, Minister of Culture and Church Affairs, was invited by the Library to digitise the first book on 29 March 2006.
On the same day, Vigdis Moe Skarstein, the National Librarian, wrote an article in the Aftenposten newspaper in which she declared that the goal for the National Library was to be ‘the first in Europe to have everything on computer’ [4].
In the article she also maintained that the feasibility of digitising everything was related to the comparatively modest quantity of documents in a small country like Norway.
According to the National Librarian, the goal was that the Library’s material should be made as available in the same manner as Web search engines such as Google and others which had imitated and further developed the libraries’ business concept.
She saw no reason why the content of the nation’s cultural heritage, which the National Library administrated, should not also be just a few clicks away.
Large-scale digitisation will represent an important contribution to Norwegian digital content on the Internet.
Because users generally prefer to use the larger Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo, the National Library will make both metadata and content in the Library searchable in both national and international search engines.
The reason for this is that the National Library wishes to be available via the services which users prefer to use.
The most important point for the National Library is that its material should be available and be used.
However, making new material available presupposes agreements with rights holders, which consequently entails some form of funding model, something which, in 2006, had not been discussed in detail.
The National Library’s statements regarding the relationship between digitisation and dissemination appear to be ambiguous and have been strongly criticised [5].
Whenever the Library has been criticised, it has stressed that it has plans for dissemination through NBdigital.
At the same time it is clear that, in the first phase, the Library has given priority to digitising as much material as was necessary to reach what it characterises as a critical mass [6].
Dissemination projects are continually being developed on its Web site, but their scope is generally modest.
Although the National Library is cautious and tentative in its dissemination initiatives, the institution is very active in other areas covered by the strategy for NBdigital.
In close co-operation with the Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs, the new National Library is on the way to assuming a key role in the public digital structure that is under development in Norway.
In any case, it will be this digital structure and its pertaining rights that will set the terms for the future digital dissemination of culture.
Digital Security Repository: Priorities As part of its digitisation strategy, the National Library has developed an archive for digital storage called the Digital Security Repository with a total capacity of 4,000 terabytes.
The amount of digital content in the repository increases by several terabytes (1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes) every day.
Approximately 1,200,000 digital objects of different types are stored in this digital security repository.
Around 30% of this amount comes from digitally deposited material, and this portion will grow as more media are gradually deposited.
The rest of the increase is due to the National Library’s work on digitisation [7].
The overall objective for the digitisation strategy is, as already mentioned, to digitise all the Norwegian material, though there are priority areas.
These are given in the selection criteria, which determine which areas of the collection will be digitised first.
Three Guiding Principles of Selection Selection is based on three guiding principles, the first of which is pragmatic and technical in nature and directly related to the goal of a methodical, mass digitisation.
The National Library begins with the oldest material, which has ended up in the public domain.
In the case of books, works for which several copies exist are generally selected, while in the case of newspapers, priority is given to those most in demand.
When digitising photographic material, priority is given to those collections which were deposited or donated to the National Library, and in the case of music, priority is given to digitising endangered sound formats.
The National Library has a plan to digitise all types of material.
The second guiding principle is the thematic selection of material across all media types.
This is governed by, for example, writers’ anniversaries and national and international red letter days.
One example is the digitisation of the Norwegian writer Henrik Wergeland’s collected works and other selected material in connection with the writer’s anniversary year in 2008 [8].
Since 2007 the National Library has undertaken a new role as the country’s formal national anniversary organiser, and this has created a need for new Web services.
In the wake of the anniversary celebrations for the writer Henrik Ibsen in 2006, the anniversary Web site was transferred to the National Library, which has also been assigned responsibility for continuing the Web service.
The Library has its own Web pages on the writer Knut Hamsun, and in 2010 it will organise the anniversary celebrations for the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.
This thematically based digitisation makes it possible to place material in a broader context by means of differing presentation.
In this way NBdigital can take responsibility for more cultural and knowledge-related aspects of national library tasks.
The third guiding principle for selecting material for digitisation is to follow up enquiries from other users and institutions and through co-operating with them.
This can be material which is held by the National Library or which other institutions hold and want to have digitised.
International Co-operation Furthermore, the National Library’s principles for selecting material for digitisation are linked to international co-operation projects.
Many European national libraries are co-operating on a European digital library, and the European Commission has appointed a group to develop common strategies for digitisation.
The National Library participates in three projects which are partly funded by the European Commission’s research programme: the European Digital Library (EDL) Project, European and TELplus [9].
Within this framework, the National Library will in the course of 2009 submit 1.6 million text pages to EDL, to include the works of 40 Norwegian writers dating from the 17th century through to the beginning of the 20th century.
As part of this project, the Library will digitise works that have passed to the public domain and will make them searchable in full-text format through the TEL portal, along with digital content from other European national libraries.
This is one example of co-operation between national libraries in Europe in which each country contributes with works which they themselves have chosen to publish on a common European portal.
One of the goals of the European digital co-operation project is to strengthen the presence of European culture on the Internet [10].
Other NBdigital Work To a large extent, NBdigital performs national library tasks by virtue of its co-operation with other institutions.
One of the National Library’s goals is to have gradually more of the legally deposited material deposited in digital form.
The Digital Security Repository is used on the basis of agreements and is then expanded by co-operating institutions to serve both as an archive for long-term storage and as a digital archive.
For example, the National Library has been co-operating with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) on the digitisation and digital deposit of radio programmes since 1998.
Today the security repository serves as NRK’s digital radio archive from which journalists in NRK can retrieve archive material electronically whenever required.
In 2008 the work began on transferring television programmes to data files and storing them in digital form in the National Library.
This not only ensures digital deposits, but also ties NRK directly to the National Library as a user.
This digitisation co-operation work is funded 50% by each institution [11].
In addition, the National Library has entered into a collaborative project with the Archives of the Storting (the Norwegian parliamentary archives) to digitise the Storting’s parliamentary business.
The Norwegian Library of Talking Books and Braille also preserves its digital sound productions in the Digital Security Repository.
In order to achieve larger quantities of digital deposits, the Library has entered into collaborative projects with two newspapers, Aftenposten and Stavanger Aftenblad, to digitise their newspapers.
Its ultimate goal is to see all newspapers deposited digitally.
In 2008 the National Library entered into a framework agreement with the Norwegian Publishers Association over the digital deposit of books and journals by their members.
Three publishers have entered into agreements with the Library, and practical solutions for their implementation are being worked out.
The Digital Security Repository gives the National Library a pivotal position in the Norwegian digital media landscape.
One reason is that the Digital Security Repository can both offer security and serve as a potential distribution centre.
Through its ambitious digitisation programme, the National Library will secure control of a large digital repository of media products.
The Digital Security Repository could make the Library an institution with which many partners will want to co-operate in disseminating digital material because the National Library already holds significant digitised material.
This digital repository will become a dominant factor in the digital network that is under development in Norway.
The important point in a political context, however, is that the hub of the network will be the National Library’s Digital Security Repository, and this is a government-supported, national institution.
According to Trond Giske, Minister of Culture and Church Affairs, the digital repository will also be open in the future to commercial partners who want to use it to publish material to which they hold the rights [12].
The fact that it was the Minister of Culture that performed the first digitisation of a book to NBdigital on 29 March 2006 was therefore an act steeped in symbolism.
The National Library has, however, made sure that it was in a position to take on this central role.
Through redistributing its internal resources, it has speeded up its digitisation work.
In 2006 the Library spent approximately GBP 2.1 million [13] on digitisation.
While it spent approximately GBP 1.8 million in both 2007 and 2008, it has budgeted for approximately GBP 2.8 million for 2009.
These represent considerable sums of money when viewed in light of the fact that approximately GBP 0.3 million was granted for digitisation by the Ministry in 2007 and in 2008 whereas the sum was increased to approximately GBP 1.3 million in 2009.
In the Government’s national strategy for the digital preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage, the National Library plays a central role.
In the Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs’ Report to the Storting on digitisation in April 2009, emphasis was placed on co-operation and the distribution of work on digitisation among the different participants involved [14].
Within this partnership, the National Library should be the lead partner for digitisation work in the bibliographic field, which as we have seen is already the case in practice.
In addition to the tasks which follow from the Act relating to the Legal Deposit of Generally Available Documents with Regulations, the National Library should have sole responsibility for national bibliographic standards and should create a digital solution for performing simultaneous searches for material on the catalogues of all Norwegian libraries.
Arkivverket (the National Archival Services of Norway) has been designated a similar role on the archive side.
As for the long-term preservation of national digital material, responsibility should be shared between the National Library and the National Archival Services of Norway.
Based on the National Library’s development of common searches in the library area, a common search engine is to be developed which would also include archives and museums.
This should be achieved through co-operation between the National Library and the National Archival Services of Norway [14].
Copyright The greatest obstacle to making works available to the public in digital form is not related to technology, but rather to copyright issues.
A digital library which makes its collection available over the Internet is not only a place where one gathers, preserves and lends what others have produced; by virtue of its digital presentation, one creates new copies which have the same status as the digital original [15].
A digitised library which makes its collections accessible over the Internet will function in more or less the same way as a distribution department in a publishing house.
All the National Library’s documents regarding digitisation since 2005 have alluded to the copyright challenges involved in digitising and preserving digital documents.
These documents emphasise that, in the work on a digital library and access to digital content, the National Library must comply with the rights and restrictions laid down by law.
The National Library’s digitisation programme is entrenched in the Act relating to Copyright in Literary, Scientific and Artistic Works, etc.
and the Act relating to the Legal Deposit of Generally Available Documents.
The term of protection of copyright is 70 years after the death of the author.
During this period copies of a work may only be produced with the consent of the author or the legal heirs.
Those parts of the National Library’s collection that are older than 70 years have become part of the public domain, and so can be made available immediately.
In 2007 amendments were made to regulations relating to the Norwegian Copyright Act which mean that the National Library may produce copies of works held in its collections in formats other than the original for the purposes of preservation and safe-keeping.
The Library is thereby authorised to digitise material in order to preserve it, but it is still not permitted to publish the digitised copies on the Internet without a prior and specific agreement.
Forming agreements to allow those parts of the National Library’s collections which remain outside the public domain to be made available to the public over the Internet is a demanding process.
Such access clearly exists in the National Library’s plans, but preparing the ground for reaching out to the public in this respect is an arduous process.
The National Library also plays a leading, national role in this work.
It has succeeded in putting in place two major agreements which give the public access and ensure financial remuneration of the rights holders through the central government budget.
The duration of these agreements is however limited, partly because the parties involved wish to trial them before entering into longer-term collaboration.
The agreements with rights holders regarding distribution over the Internet relate to two specific projects.
The first concerns literature relating to the High North.
The Norwegian Publishers Association, the Norwegian Authors Union, the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association, the Norwegian Critics Association and the Licensing and Collecting Society (LINO) have entered into an agreement with the National Library to make available in digital full-text version copyright-protected material relating to the High North and literature about and from northern Norway.
This agreement was signed on 14 March 2007.
Initially it lasted until 30 September 2008 and was then extended for one year.
This has given the National Library the opportunity to digitise and make available copyright-protected works relating to the High North via its Web site http://www.nb.no [16].
Users are not allowed to download or copy the material to their own computers, and the National Library must not provide the capability for users to make printouts.
While the National Library has been responsible for the digitisation work, the rights holder organisations have been responsible for clearing the rights.
Each party covers its own costs.
In addition, the National Library has paid a one-off fee of NOK 200,000 to the right holder organisations for making the works available to the public [13].
As the leaders of the rights holder organisations have themselves remarked, this is an example of how copyright issues can be resolved [17].
In the agreement over the High North project the partners expressed their common aim of making literature and other copyright-protected material available and to provide the public with an insight into and knowledge of the diversity of Norwegian cultural heritage: ‘Through this project the parties wish to gain experience that can serve as a basis for future agreements on the digital dissemination of Norwegian copyright-protected works.’ The agreement has a national scope and, not least, the national dimension is evident from the choice of the High North as the pilot project, (moreover somewhere in which Norway has important strategic interests and which represents a priority component of Norwegian foreign policy [18]).
Extended Collective Licences Based on an evaluation of the High North Project from October 2008 which showed, among other things, high figures for online visits made to a large proportion of the material, the National Library set up a new collaborative project with the rights holder organisations called Bokhylla.no (Bookshelf.no) [19].
In this project, literature from the 1790s, 1890s and 1990s was digitised and made available.
The project involves an estimated 50,000 books and is far more comprehensive than the High North Project.
While the material from the first decade and most from the second decade have become part of the public domain, literature from the 1990s is protected by copyright.
The Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs therefore appointed a working group – of which the National Librarian was a member – to examine models for paying authors for making their material available on the National Library’s Web site.
In the High North Project one had to clear the digital dissemination of material with individual rights holders to obtain consent to their work being published.
Works by authors who were not members of a rights holder organisation fell outside this agreement.
Bokhylla.no is therefore based on collective agreements.
This is a form of an extended collective licence, which means that the terms of an agreement between a user and an authorised organisation representing authors are validated.
In this way all works can be cleared through an agreement with a collective organisation.
Rights holders who are not represented by a professional organisation are also made subject to the terms of the agreement, and are in return entitled to the same rights to remuneration derived from the users.
In Norway the extended collective licence scheme was introduced in 1961 in connection with the use of works in NRK programmes.
Since then the provisions have been made applicable to new instances such as copying work for educational purposes.
In 2005 the Norwegian Act relating to the Legal Deposit of Generally Available Documents was amended to introduce an extended collective licence to permit libraries to make works available to the general public.
This provision has made it possible for the National Library to clear books for publication on the Internet.
To achieve this, the National Library entered into an agreement with Kopinor, an organisation which represents a substantial number of both publishers and authors of works that are used in Norway.
Kopinor can therefore give consent on behalf of the rights holders to copying in schools, organisations, companies, etc.
The resulting fees are collected and then distributed to the authors.
The Kopinor agreements were initially formed to accommodate photocopying but were subsequently expanded to cover digital reproduction [20].
In April 2009 the National Library entered into an agreement with Kopinor to make material available for Bokhylla.no.
[21] As in the High North Project, the material will be searchable and retrievable over the Internet, though it will not be possible to download or make print-outs.
In addition, Bokhylla.no shall only be made available to Norwegian IP addresses.
A fixed fee per page must be paid for making this material available.
The fee to the rights holders amounts to NOK 0.56 (roughly equivalent to GBP 0.056) per page per year for copyright-protected material that is made available during 2009 through to 2011.
There are no rights of reservation in the Kopinor agreements on copying, but for agreements on digital availability, such as Bokhylla.no, it will be possible to reserve rights.
This, however, will require positive action on the part of authors.
Due to poor quality digitisation and insufficient metadata, some Norwegian writers have expressed a wish to reserve their rights [22].
Depending on how Bokhylla.no works, it should be possible for the agreement to serve as a basis for similar types of extended collective licences for other types of material.
In this area, legal practice is lagging far behind both the technical potential and many users’ understanding of their personal rights.
One example of this is the Pirate Bay judgment in April 2009 and the conflict surrounding this case, as can be seen on the Web site of the Swedish courts [23].
Another example is the settlement which Google reached with American writers and publishers in October 2008.
The settlement covers books which Google had scanned in the US, but it also applied to the interests of foreign rights holders in the US.
The agreement resulted in a moderation of Google’s initial ambitions and at the same time secured financial compensation for the rights holders [24].
This makes the agreement a milestone in terms of the legal aspects of digitisation.
It is worth noting, however, that this agreement was reached between private parties and that the US Government did not become involved in the conflict [25].
What is special in Norway’s case is that the Government is an active party and that both the authors and the users are represented by professional organisations.
This will most likely become a condition for such agreements being formed in Norway.
Both the Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Research want to consolidate such extended collective licences.
One possible solution under consideration by the library sector is national licences for electronic material which could either grant access to all comers or offer different levels of access for different user groups [26].
The Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs’ Report to the Storting on digitisation, assigned national responsibility to the National Library for all pilot activities related to finding solutions in respect of digital use and copyright issues.
National competence in copyright and privacy protection should lie with the National Library and the National Archival Services of Norway, which should provide services to other archives, libraries and museums.
Given this position and the agreements into which the National Library has entered with the rights holder organisations in the High North Project and Bokhylla.no, the National Library will be involved in forming national legal practice for the digital availability of copyright-protected material.
This makes the National Library a key national institution in the area of digitisation.
Conclusion It is possible to discern a pattern in the digitisation practice of the National Library.
It consists of priorities for and the practice of digitisation, the agreements on availability with the rights holder organisations and the establishment of partnership agreements with a number of other institutions on, among other things, digital deposits, and the use of the Digital Security Repository and dissemination projects.
By virtue of these activities, the National Library is in the process of assuming a key role in the Norwegian digital media system.
The National Library has distinguished itself as a combination of political partner and national political instrument, in two areas in particular.
One is the Digital Security Repository.
This can be developed into a dominant digital repository of cultural products in Norway, under full government control.
Such a digital repository could in turn form the basis for dissemination through the library system as well as through public and private partners.
The other area where the National Library has made its mark is in the agreements it has made with rights holders.
The National Library has principal responsibility for negotiating with rights holders over the libraries’ dissemination of their works over the Internet.
This entails breaking new legal ground and is work in which the Norwegian government is directly involved as a party and financing body.
One crucial political aspect of this role is that the National Library is a state institution.
This means that the dominant media base in Norway will not be controlled by a private organisation in the same way as, for example, Google’s Internet index is.
Both digitisation activities and distribution agreements with the rights holders have a national scope and have drawn the Norwegian government in as an active party in the negotiations over public distribution.
This makes NBdigital a national, government project in an international digital media world.
References The National Library of Norway’s strategy documents http://www.nb.no/om_nb/presserom/strategi Report No.
24 (2008-2009) to the Storting http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kkd.html?id=545 Røssaak, Eivind.
2009.
The Archive in Motion.
Presentation at the conference: The Archive in Motion at the National Library of Norway 13 March 2009.
Skarstein, Vigdis Moe.
2006.
Europas første med alt på data [First in Europe with everything on computer].
Aftenposten 29 March 2006 http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article1261628.ece Newth, Eirik.
2007.
Agenda: All litteratur til folket nå!
Om Nasjonalbibliotekets digitalisering, Google Book Search og brukerne [1]All literature to the people now!
On the National Library’s digitisation, Google Book Search and the users].
Prosa.
03.
Norwegian Library Association: http://www.norskbibliotekforening.no “NB Digital: Moe Skarstein lover åpenhet, lydhørhet og fleksible løsninger.” [Moe Skarstein promises openness, receptiveness and flexible solutions].
Published 02 July 2007.
Report No.
24 (2008-2009) to the Storting.
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kkd.html?id=545 Wergeland 2008 http://wergeland2008.no/ European Digital Library EDL project: http://www.edlproject.eu/index.php Rob Davies, “Europeana: An Infrastructure for Adding Local Content”, October 2008, Ariadne Issue 57 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/davies/ Report No.
30 (2006-2007) to the Storting.
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kkd.html?id=545 Solberg, Per Olav.
2009.
Lover bransjen kommersiell tilgang.
[Promises the industry commercial access].
Bok og samfunn.
No.
8: 5. http://www.bokogsamfunn.no During 2009 the British pound (GBP) has cost anything from between NOK 9.50 to NOK 10.50.
In this overview I have fixed the exchange rate to 10 Norwegian kroner for one British pound.
Report No.
24 (2008-2009) to the Storting http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kkd.html?id=545 Lindholm, Magne.
2008.
Hva er en nettavis?
[What is an Internet newspaper?]
In Journalistikk i en digital hverdag Rune Ottosen and Arne Krumsvik (Eds.
), 41-55.
Oslo: IJ-forlaget.
The National Library of Norway’s Web site on the High North http://www.nb.no/nordomradene/ Andreassen, Trond and Mads Liland.
2008.
Hva med biblioteket?
[What about the library?]
Aftenposten 29 April http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/ Norwegian government’s High North strategy.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1 December 2006. http://www.regjeringen.no/ The National Library of Norway’s Web site on Bokhylla.no http://www.nb.no/bokhylla Slettholm, Yngve.
2009.
Digitale bokhyller.
[Digital Bookshelves].
Aftenposten 27 May 2009. http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/ Contract regarding the digial dissemination of books (Bokhylla / The Bookshelf) between The National Library of Norway on the one hand, and Kopinor on behalf of the members of (…), on the other hand.
http://www.kopinor.org/avtaler/avtaleomraader/nasjonalbiblioteket/avtaletekst Eirik Newth’s blog http://newth.net/eirik/2009/05/29/look-what-theyve-done-to-my-book-ma/ Swedish courts Web site http://www.domstol.se/templates/DV_Press____10382.aspx Google book settlement http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/r/view_settlement_agreement Robert Darnton, 2009.
Google and the Future of Books.
The New York review of Books February: 9-11.
Report No.
23 (2008-2009) to the Storting, Report No.
24 (2008-2009) to the Storting.
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kkd.html?id=545 Author Details Marianne Takle Senior Researcher / Research Director NOVA – Norwegian Social Research Email: marianne.takle@nova.no Web site: http://www.nova.no/ Return to top Article Title: “The Norwegian National Digital Library” Author: Marianne Takle Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/takle/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The MrCute Repository: The Next Phase Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The MrCute Repository: The Next Phase Buzz dissemination usability metadata blog repositories copyright video vle moodle research Citation BibTex RIS Helen Brady describes the MrCute repository project and its potential impact on the digital learning object-sharing community.
MrCute is an acronym of Moodle Repository, Create, Upload, Tag, and Embed and is a repository system for the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
It will enable the content uploaded to online course areas on the VLE to be shared with other users and used in more than one location by more than one person.
The original MrCute was a JISC-funded project by Worcester College of Technology (United Kingdom) in partnership with Learning Objectivity UK.
MrCute Version 1 was released at the end of March 2008.
MrCute 1 can be downloaded from the Moodle community Web site www.moodle.org [1].
MrCute was intended to be an optional add-on for the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment.
More specifically, it extended the functionality of the IMS Repository system originally developed by Alton College, UK.
MrCute is compatible with Moodle 1.8.2 upwards but not with earlier 1.8 versions.
The existing Alton College Moodle IMS repository system worked as a useful addition to Moodle, enabling users to browse and add NLN materials to a Moodle course.
It has been widely adopted in the UK, especially in educational sectors where National Learning Materials were available.
MrCute 1 added to this functionality by offering a means of searching for materials by keyword as well as browsing by category.
It also enabled the repository to be populated as well, where users could upload their own materials to share and tag them appropriately for searching and browsing.
MrCute Phase 2 The JISC-funded MrCute 2 Project is further developing this functionality, but also with a heavy focus on making the user interface as simple and intuitive as possible.
During the first phase of research for this project many users identified ‘ease of use’ and ‘time’ as barriers to using the original MrCute repository.
So it was deemed as very important to address these aspects as a priority as well as include the additional functions.
The planned additional functionality is for users to be able to upload multiple files as a package, instead of just the single file functionality MrCute 1 offered.
MrCute 2 is also taking the jump into linking with national repositories and collections.
The aim of MrCute 2 is to provide effective search of the NLN Web collection and Jorum repository as well as the local repository, something that should offer users a wider collection of learning materials to search from and use.
There will also be an option for users to send their own materials to the Jorum repository in the upload functionality.
The MrCute 2 Project will run from 1 July 2008 – 31 March 2009.
It is an open source project that will be shared and disseminated through the Moodle community and beyond for those who express an interest.
It is planned that a full beta-version will be available for testing on the 28th January 2009.
Project Research and Initial Findings Initial Research The first phase of MrCute 2 was research-orientated to identify key issues and inform the direction and programming of MrCute 2.
Initially this was to gauge the use and response to MrCute 1 and to identify the general perception of repository use.
The MrCute 1 Moodle site received Moodle community feedback and a number of requests for extra functionality if the project were to be developed.
Such as uploading multiple files, searching external repositories and better administration and monitoring features.
Teaching and library staff at Worcester College of Technology were also asked for their feedback on MrCute 1 as everyday users of this type of system.
Their feedback mainly consisted on the time and usability issues.
A combination of the requests and this feedback were used to put together the initial JISC bid for continued MrCute development, since it appeared that MrCute had the potential to answer many needs.
The research phase not only collated feedback from MrCute1 but also looked into earlier research of repository use, case studies and previous learning object repository projects.
It was considered important to understand the whole culture around repository use to be able to identify the target audiences needs, concerns or perceptions, not just that we had experienced with MrCute1.
There was much research available on the use of academic publishing repositories.
However MrCute was designed for the sharing of teaching and learning packages rather than academic papers, journals or research.
Academic repositories have academic publishing and acknowledgement as the key incentive of sharing for individuals.
Learning package repositories on the other hand are largely predicated upon a willingness to adopt a culture of sharing everyday learning and teaching materials.
Teaching and learning repositories have more of an emphasis on teachers being ‘willing’ to share, than mandatory sharing.
Perceived Barriers to Repository Use The research concluded that certain factors influence the use of repositories both with MrCute 1 and wider repository system use: The technical process and time to upload/download to a repository must be simple and speedy The metadata process must be easily understood and simple to achieve The user should not be forced to duplicate uploading to different places The language used to describe the repository and the process can be an issue Sharing is less resisted if the sharing process is simplified, since users are generally positive about sharing and can see the benefits of repositories Issues of quality, ownership and copyright need to be addressed Issues of fair giving and receiving resources need to be addressed Acknowledgement was deemed important for creators of learning resources The MrCute 2 Solution and Current Progress Looking at the Real Issues The variables or perceived barriers fit into the two categories of technical barriers and cultural barriers.
One particular issue that strongly came across was that the technology and relevant interfaces had to be easy to set up and use if the potential was to be maximised.
It was decided to look closely at MrCute2 through the eyes of an average user, rather than the technical and background processes.
The functionality and interface was designed with the user in mind, this has meant more work in back-end systems to accommodate a better and much simpler user-end interface to overcome many of the technical barriers.
For example, on file upload, the multiple file input elements have been hidden from the end-user; they only interact with one part of the interface, thus the user perspective is perceived as simple.
Technically this was quite complicated but achieved the outcome of simplifying the user interface.
It was identified in the research that if the process was much simpler and quicker this could have an impact on the willingness to share.
Based on user simplicity, the decision was made to split MrCute2 into two modules as there were two distinctly separate processes of ‘finding’ and ‘uploading’.
This separation meant that users were not being presented with a lot of options and information in one go, but two separate simpler interfaces.
The cultural issues of sharing could not be addressed through the product alone, but the considerations for ease of use may help.
The full impacts of cultural barriers or attitudes to sharing are being researched further in the hope of eventually putting forward a suggested approach to these issues.
The Moodle Community The community feedback and response to MrCute1 was important, it highlighted areas that needed improvment or consideration of further development with respect to MrCute2.
It was also important that the community was involved with MrCute2 in creating a product that answered as many user needs as possible.
It is anticipated that with strong community involvement, from an early stage through to completion, there will be a wide enthusiasm and awareness of MrCute2.
It is this interest, and the early adopters, who will prove useful in the dissemination and implementation of MrCute2 throughout the Moodle community.
The project has already been praised and recommended by key members of the Moodle community, such as Julian Ridden.
Julian is a Moodle consultant and evangelist for Moodle.com.au [2], Australia’s premier Moodle partner.
He is also commonly known in the international Moodle community as the Moodle Man [3].
The promotion of community involvement has even included inviting non-technical members of the community to design ideas for the MrCute2 logo.
There has been interest from teachers and librarians as well as Moodle user group members.
Early Feedback Recently a working demonstration of the ‘Find’ functionality, including a demonstration of the integrated Jorum search and embed, was made available on the MrCute2 Moodle site for the community to try out and offer feedback.
Members of the MrCute development team have presented at many national Moodle User Group Meetings, JISC-related events.
They have also disseminated working demonstrations through various mailing lists in order to invite feedback.
The overall response to the simplified interface and functionality has been excellent and useful.
The project progress has been communicated continuously at each developmental stage.
Interest from the community has been growing; the number of visitors and postings to the MrCute Moodle site has doubled since a working demonstration became available.
It has even generated interest from Australia, New Zealand and Spain.
Many institutions have expressed a keen interest in beta-testing or full implementation with the advent of 2009 and there has also been interest from non-Moodle users regarding the potential for further development as a stand-alone product for all other VLEs.
Future Aims The aims for the MrCute2 project in early 2009 involve a full beta-test release and to build stronger relationships with interested institutions.
This will involve face-to-face visits to other institutions to build upon email and telephone communications.
The aim is that with the full collaboration of at least three institutions, as well as Worcester College of Technology, case studies of use and implementation can be built up to offer guidance and best practice models for others when MrCute2 is fully released.
Conclusion The focus on user-end simplicity seems to have been a key positive in the feedback so far.
It also works to address the perceived barrier that using a repository is a difficult and extra thing to do, it is hoped that addressing these issues will increase willingness to use it.
The involvement of the Moodle community at every stage has been an effective means of marketing and generating interest in the project as it has developed.
There has been dissemination of information from high-profile members of the Moodle community, such as MoodleMan (Julian Ridden) [3] who has promoted MrCute2 through the creation of video demonstrations on his blog.
It is expected that MrCute2 will answer many of the institutional repository needs as well as offer institutions a solution that engages users with Jorum and NLN materials.
It is hoped the level of present interest will be an indicator to the future success and large-scale implementation of MrCute2.
In short, MrCute 2 aims to be more than just an institutional repository, but a wider-reaching and rich repository tool, that once implemented, will promote and encourage the sharing of quality learning packages to benefit teaching and learning.
References moodle.org: open-source community-based tools for learning http://www.moodle.org/ moodle.com.au .
: Official Moodle Partner in Australia http://www.moodle.com.au/ The Moodleman Blog http://www.moodleman.net/ Author Details Helen Brady Senior ILT Advisor & MrCute Project Research Officer Worcester College of Technology Email: hbrady@wortech.ac.uk Web site: http://www.learningobjectivity.com/mrcute Return to top Article Title: “The MrCute Repository: The Next Phase” Author: Helen Brady Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/brady/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Eduserv Symposium 2012: Big Data, Big Deal?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Eduserv Symposium 2012: Big Data, Big Deal?
Buzz data mobile database infrastructure digitisation accessibility blog gis curation usb twitter oer algorithm research nosql irods hadoop Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy attended the annual Eduserv Symposium on 10 May 2012 at the Royal College of Physicians, London to find out what are the implications of big data for Higher Education Institutions.
The annual Eduserv Symposium [1] was billed as a ‘must-attend event for IT professionals in Higher Education’; the choice of topical subject matter being one of the biggest crowd-drawers (the other being the amazing venue: the Royal College of Physicians).
The past few years have seen coverage of highly topical areas such as virtualisation and the cloud, the mobile university and access management.
This year’s theme of big data is certainly stimulating interest, but what exactly are the implications for those working in research, learning, and operations in Higher Education?
The day was opened by Stephen Butcher, Chief Executive of Eduserv, who after introducing us to the event, passed the floor to Andy Powell, Eduserv’s Research Programme Director.
A straw poll indicated that the audience comprised of many working in HEIs, a fair number working outside institutions, but very few researchers.
Andy explained that he was keen for the day not to fall into the big data hype space and instead offered perspectives from people who have actually been ‘building stuff’.
To define: big data are considered to be data sets that have grown so large and complex that they present challenges to work with using traditional database management tools.
The key factors are seen to be the ‘volume, velocity and variability’ of the data (Edd Dumbill, O'Reilly Radar [2]).
While HEIs have experience in storing, curating and managing data there is still much to learn around how you analyse data.
Andy expressed concerns that there is potential confusion with the open data agenda, particularly in the government space.
He also stressed the importance of not focusing on the technology and bearing in mind the new evolving role of data scientist: someone who likes dealing with data and telling stories around data.
Andy finished by saying that he had hoped to have a speaker who could say more about learning analytics, for example tracking the progress of users and learners, as this was potentially another interesting application of big data for HE.
Big Data and Implications for Storage Rob Anderson, CTO EMEA, Isilon Storage Division, EMC, delivered the opening keynote, a comprehensive overview of the big data landscape.
Rob Anderson presents at Eduserv 2012.
(Image by kind permission of Eduserv) Rob began by explaining why big data has come to the fore now.
The reasons are both technical (better access to data using the cloud and more sophisticated tools) and economic (now cheaper to store and analyse).
We had the first indication of the day that the big wasn’t necessarily the chief issue but rather the lack of structure, 90% of the digital universe is unstructured, that caused many of the problems.
His talk provided an overview of the types of big data we are seeing, from retail information and utilities data provided by smart meters in real-time streams, to health data with huge implications for the public sector.
This data came from rich content stores (such as media, VOD, content creation, special effects, GIS), was generated from workflows, could be newly developed intellectual property based on data and derived from consumer data.
However to be of value, the data required analysis.
Rob spent some time looking at the various aspects of big data, such as velocity i.e.
the speed at which data came into organisations.
Infographic byShanghai Web Designers 60 Seconds Things That Happen on the Internet Every Sixty Seconds.
(This figure by kind permission of Go-Globe.com) He explained that good data could be hard to obtain, and so often we ended up with no data at all.
This prevented big-data-based decisions, which could benefit everyone by making more accurate products and tailoring products more precisely for their markets.
Rob explained that at EMC they had invested in Hadoop [3] because they were committed to open source, and they had also considered the benefits of scale-out versus scale-up for storage.
Considering what was holding up the exploitation of  big data at the moment, Roy suggested that it wasn’t the technology but the failure so far to demonstrate ROI (return on investment) along with a lack of organisational change and effective aquisition of suitable talent.
Weathering the Data Deluge: Lessons Learnt from the Sanger Institute Guy Coates from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute gave interesting insights into  the world of genome data.
Guy explained that the cost of genome sequencing was halving every 12 months and that this trend was continuing.
It is more than likely that the $1000 genome would be with us by the summer of 2012.
People would soon be purchasing their own USB stick genome sequencers!
However the principal cost remained in analysing the data.
Guy pointed out some key projects working in this area: UK10K, Ensembl, Cancer Genome projects, pathogen genomics.
At the Sanger Institute staff were now using agile and interactive hardware systems; the key objective was to make stored data visible from everywhere.
He stressed the importance of data triage: you cannot keep all the data created, so data that will not be reused must be discarded: ‘No one is going to go back and re-analyse sequencing data because there is so much new data arriving all the time’.
In an effort to get away from problem of groups inventing their own data management systems at Sanger, they have implemented a centralised integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS).
Guy Coates shows the scary data.
(Image by kind permission of Eduserv) Big Data and Knowledge Engineering for Health Anthony J Brookes, professor of Genomics and Informatics at the University of Leicester began with an apology for being among an unfamiliar audience; he was one of the few researchers present, but in a position to offer the most memorable ‘fact ‘of that day: the human brain had the capacity of 2.5 petabytes!
He then asked the audience to consider if there really was a big data problem?
He wasn’t even sure that there was a ‘scale of data’ problem, ‘complexity of data’ or ‘stability of data’ problem.
However he did feel that there was a knowledge engineering issue, and that this was preventing us from getting from sequenced genomes to personalised health data.
This disastrous divide between research and healthcare (ie the divide in the management of data, eg the use of different standards) required knowledge engineering (analysis) to bridge that gap.
Anthony explained he was involved in the I4Health Network [4] (integration and interpretation), a network for linking research and practice in medicine.
The network saw knowledge engineering as providing the chain between research and health science.
Anthony went on to share his experiences of using ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) to facilitate open data discovery.
Lightening Talks Big Data: No Big Deal for Curation When asked to present at the symposium Graham Pryor, Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre, wasn’t sure what he had to offer.
He had seen big data as a technology issue and the ‘DCC doesn’t deal with “plumbing”’.
Graham took a look at some big data examples and asked himself whether they had ‘got it all sorted’.
His observation was that many weren’t managing to preserve or manage the data, which brought it back into DCC field.
Further investigation had shown him that the big data problem was in part about how you persuaded researchers to add planning into the research data management process.
These issues were central to effective data management, irrespective of size.
Ditching the Dowsing Rod:  Why Prescribed Analytics Fail to Deliver Devin Gaffney, Research Assistant & Master's Candidate, Oxford Internet Institute started with a story about a friend who had discovered himself to be an overnight expert on vampires as a result of Klout using analytics to misinterpret his writing and draw incorrect conclusions.
Devin explained that many analytics services (webtrends, peoplebrowser, google analytics) were indicating a weakness in prescribed analytics.
His offer was 140kit [5], a platform that supports the collection and analysis of Twitter posts.
JISC and Big Data In advance of the symposium Simon Hodson, Programme Manager, Digital Infrastructure, JISC, had taken a quick straw poll from two Russell Group universities.
Both believed they held 2 petabytes of managed and unmanaged data and while one currently provided 800 terabytes of storage the other provided only 300 terabytes.
One of the universities was concerned that its storage might be full within 12 months.
But then storage costs were decreasing, and storage models were changing (often to cloud computing).
Simon described a changing landscape, giving an overview of JISC Research Data Management (RDM) programmes and reiterating the need for policies, processes and best practice for research data.
Simon flagged up the forthcoming DCC guide on how to develop a RDM service from data and emphasised that community review would prove important.
The Eduserv Symposium 2012.
(Image by kind permission of Eduserv) Big Science, Big Data The real-world example for the day was given by Simon Metson, Research Associate/Ecology Engineer, University of Bristol/Cloudant.
Simon speculated that if the Large Hadron Collider had been turned on when it should have been, CERN would have found itself in trouble; nobody was ready to deal with that amount of data at that point in time.
While the LHC now produced around 15 petabytes of data annually, Simon talked about how the University of Bristol dealt with 50-terabyte datasets and how staff have transferred 100 petabytes of data to date, all over Janet.
Tools like Haddoop, NoSQL, DBCouch etc.
had improved the situation but people weare important too, and there was a need to let people do more and become better trained.
Building a suitable team was difficult given the university system of short-term grants but universities needed to build up teams to support these activities.
For Simon, ‘big data isn’t interesting anymore’ as there were no longer a need to create new systems.
The upside of this was that we could spend time on understanding our problems better and asking the right questions.
One striking statistic Simon gave to illustrate the potential of data usage was that the cost of cleaning up after El Niño was 10% of Ecuadorian GDP, which demonstrated the importance of landslide modelling.
Simon concluded that data-intensive research would become the norm and that universities were going to need access to big data resources.
We should also expect to see significant use from non-traditional fields and expect new fields to emerge.
As far as Simon was concerned, big data had hit the mainstream.
Making Data a Way of Life for Public Servants Max Wind-Cowie, Head of the Progressive Conservatism Project Demos, took a step away from the technical requirements of big data to look at how they were being used by the public sector.
He touched on the confusion that existed between the open data and big data agendas, saying that in the public sector it was necessary to work through the existing confusion until people arrived at a better understanding of the differences between the two.
While there wasn’t the expertise in the public sector to make use of vast resources of data, there was a strong case for open data.
In the public sector ‘there are no graphs because there are no facts, it’s all opinion’.
The commercial sector, he stated, had moved on, we expected Amazon and Google to personalise our data, yet the public sector was not a place where displacement happened naturally.
However data mattered, something shown in the Demos paper The Data Dividend [6], which provided the political context as well as the technical issues.
Max saw data as something that could drive public sector innovation; it was the duty of government to make such data accessible.
He explained that many public sector brands had been rendered toxic in the last few years (eg Job Centre Plus) and big data could help us to understand better how that had come about.
What was required was an inside-out approach: openness and accessibility.
The end result might be better resource allocation and better segmentation of datasets.
Ultimately big data could be used to identify interventions which could bring benefits and cost savings.
In the Questions and Answers session, Max argued for the need to have it written into commissioning contracts with public sector contractors that the data were to be shared.
A Berkeley View of Big Data The closing keynote was given by Anthony Joseph, Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Anthony started his talk with some interesting statistics: for example, Walmart handled data on one million customer transactions per hour.
One new trend was the process of analysing user behaviour rather than user input.
He gave the example of the U.S. Geological Survey Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED) [7] looking for geolocated hashtags such as #earthquake and phrases like ‘OMG!’.
Google trends have brought into being the notion of ‘nowcasting’, when, for example, more people than usual searching for flu on Google suggested that a flu epidemic was about to break out.
Anthony suggested that our need to hoard has resulted in the selection and deletion of data being the most intractable problem of big data.
He pointed out that if you ‘delete the right data no one says thank you, but if you delete the wrong data you have to stand up and testify’, he offerd the US climate trial as an example.
We often find it difficult to be selective when curating data because we didn’t yet know the question we would need to answer.
Deletion of research data was based on assumptions of what would  be of value; what if those assumptions turned out to be based on an incorrect model?
Big data are not cheap and extracting value from data presented a challenge.
Obtaining answers that were both of high quality and timely required algorithms, machines and people.
The state-of-the-art Mechanicalturk [8] Project from Amazon was a ‘crowdsourcing internet marketplace’ which required less than an hour to label (manually) a large dataset using human resources.
Anthony ended his talk by highlighting that the US government had announced more than $200 million investment in new data projects across a range of departments.
He wondered what the UK figures were like and whether we, as HEIs, were going to offer a big data curriculum?
And whether we had hired cross-disciplinary faculty and staff or had invested in pooled storage infrastructure/cloud/interor intra-campus networks?
Conclusions In his summary Andy Powell talked about the themes that had emerged during the day: We don’t need to get hung up on the ‘big’ word.
While data were increasing exponentially (something a number of scary graphs indicated) this didn’t have to be an issue, we were growing more accustomed to dealing with large-scale data.
The tools are now available.
During the symposium speakers mentioned tools such as Hadoop, DB Couch, NoSQL which all allowed people to work easily with datasets.
There was a consensus that people no longer needed to create systems to deal with big data, but coulld now spend that time on understanding their data problem better.
It’s all about the analysis of data.
While storage of data could be costly and management of data labour intensive, the analysis of data was often the most complex activity, and possibly the most worthwhile.
Processing of big data could provide valuable insights into many areas relevant to the success of your organisation.
Keynote speaker Rob Anderson from EMC explained that ‘If we’d been able to analyse big data we might have been able to avoid the last financial crash’.
He saw the future as being about making big-data-based decisions.
However, while tools had a role to play there, analysis still required human intervention.
On his blog Adam Cooper from CETIS advocated human decisions supported by the use of good tools to provide us with data-derived insights rather than ‘data-driven decisions’.
We don’t yet know what data to get rid of.
Anthony Joseph, professor at the University of California, Berkeley suggested the selection/deletion of data was the most intractable problem of big data.
It represented an on-going problem: we failed to be selective when curating data because we were unsure of the question we would ultimately need to answer.
We need data scientists.
Many of the talks highlighted the need to build capacity in this area and train data scientists.
JISC was trying to consider changing the research data science role in its programmes and Anthony Joseph asked HEIs to consider offering a big data curriculum.
In his summary Andy Powell, Eduserv’s Research Programme Director, asked us to think carefully about how we used the term ‘data scientist’ since the label could be confusing.
He noted that there was a difference between managing data, something with which HEIs were familiar, and understanding and analysing data, a fairly new area for us all.
The day ended with a drinks reception in the impressive Royal College of Physicians Library, unfortunately the rain ruined the original plan of holding it in the medicinal garden.
The day had been a really enjoyable one.
I’m not quite sure whether my own personal question, ‘how are big data relevant to HEIs (research and infrastructure aside)?’ had been answered, but then maybe the answers and insights lie in looking a little closer at the data or working out what the right questions are.
Videos of all the talks are available from the Eduserv Web site [1].
References Eduserv Symposium 2012: Big Data, Big Deal http://www.eduserv.org.uk/newsandevents/events/2012/symposium What is big data?
An introduction to the big data landscape http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/what-is-big-data.html Apache Hadoop http://hadoop.apache.org/ I4Health Network http://www.i4health.eu/ 140kit http://140kit.com/ Cowie, M & Lekhi, R. (2012) The Data Dividend, Demos  http://www.demos.co.uk/files/The_Data_Dividend_-_web.pdf U.S. Geological Survey Twitter Earthquake Detector http://recovery.doi.gov/press/us-geological-survey-twitter-earthquake-detector-ted/ Mechanicalturk https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Marieke Guy is a research officer at UKOLN.
She has worked in an outreach role in the IMPACT project creating Open Educational Resources (OER) on digitisation which are likely to be released later on this year.
She has recently taken on a new role as an Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre, working towards raising awareness and building capacity for institutional research data management.
Marieke is the remote worker champion at UKOLN.
In this role she works towards ensuring that UKOLN remote workers are represented within the organisation.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 66: Sanity Check Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 66: Sanity Check Buzz data mobile software framework database rss usability archives metadata tagging browser identifier blog repositories copyright video flickr preservation gis aggregation streaming personalisation curation podcast twitter refworks privacy research netvibes Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 66.
With institutions searching to increase the impact of the work they do, and conscious of the immediate impact of any event they organise, many will be interested to read of 10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event in which Marieke Guy provides a raft of suggestions to enhance the participants' experience of and involvement in, the event they are attending.
For the unconvinced, they will be pleased to hear it is all Lorcan Dempsey's fault when in 2007 he made reference to the 'amplified conference', but as Marieke points out, the suggestions in her article do not amount to a dismissal of professional events teams but, rather, constitute a range of strategies they might wish to adopt in an environment where the expectation is of doing more with fewer resources.
I make no apology for going off at a tangent here since the All-staff Contact Day at UKOLN at which Marieke gave her presentation, on which her article is based, also provided a debating space in which it was possible to involve all colleagues, something which is not always so easy given the deep specialisms that abound in such an organisation.
The topic of the discussion was: Are information overload and too much multi-tasking impairing our ability to focus?
And by way of exposition the meeting was treated to the tale of the Web-savvy entrepreneur who somehow managed to miss the message offering a $1.3 million deal in amongst all the other messages reaching him over a multiplicity of channels [1].
The topic of information overload has attracted considerable interest in this publication [2] in the past and it was certainly true of the debate held at UKOLN that day.
Readers unwise enough to read my editorials in the past will not be too surprised to learn that I do incline to the ayes in the debate.
I well remember my confusion when a colleague described the prospect of half the conference hall typing away on laptops during a session as a good thing.
They may be more surprised to learn that I nonetheless subscribe to the notion that careful use of a number of channels can be beneficial, and I suspect Marieke Guy would say the same for practitioners dipping their toe in the water of amplified events.
The adoption of supplementary channels and technologies has to evolve like anything else well planned, carefully, well adapted and subject to review.
And at least with the advent of quieter keyboards, the sensory impairment is at least localised!
Marieke proceeds to work through the ten strategies of the article beginning with video and how to make recordings and where to locate them for best exploitation.
While video is basically there for retrospective consideration, the second item, streaming is very much real-time and offers a variety of opportunities to include the audience, physical and virtual.
Conversely, Marieke reminds us that the files derived from podcasting take up less space and can be hived off to be heard elsewhere, e.g.
on the train to work.
While taking photos is hardly revolutionary, the use of sites like flickr to tag and store them is a welcome development since they make reuse for the purposes of, say, a blog or Web page far easier.
Similarly, slide-hosting as offered by slideshare is proving to be a means of maximising the potential of someone accessing your presentation either before, during or after the event.
Whatever reactions one may have to the effect Twitter may have on the operation of one's brain, one can see from Marieke's usage of Twitter and related applications, that it can be a powerfil means of sending immediate and immediately readable messages about reactions, resources, what will happen next, etc.
It also permits quantative evaluation of the event involved.
Meanwhile, blogging, a system that permits greater expansiveness than Twitter allows organisers to keep participants interested and informed, as well as providing extended content for absentees to visit.
Live blogging which operates for the time window of the actual event is closer to Twitter but is less restrictive as to content.
In a sense one might argue that using webinars as a form of event is not so much amplification as replacement, but avoiding hair-splitting, it is worth noting that webinars are a good way of organising the material they cover.
Likewise the process of event collation where a number of resources such as the live stream, Twitter feed, etc, are pulled together to form a lucid and comprehensive picture can be very helpful.
Marieke admits that not all can make use of outside agencies to collate their events, but it is possible to employ free collation tools of dashboard services e.g.
Netvibes, which rely principally on RSS feeds, though when combined they can grind exceedingly slowly.
Finally to round off her list of 'dos', Marieke reminds us to promote quickly, remember to archive, and preserve.
Her list complete, Marieke wisely adds a few caveats about the employment of amplification strategies.
Not surprisingly, most significant in my view, is the matter of copyright.
Just as pertinent is her warning about the danger of compromising the quality of one's output by over-reliance on DIY tools and insufficient expertise.
I would contend that working leaner is possible but not without sufficient rehearsal and testing.
In Reading Van Gogh Online?
Peter Boot invites us to consider how much may be learnt from examining our Web site's server logs to discover the patterns of behaviour of our site users.
Initially his first interest was to discover who accessed the online edition of the Van Gogh letters to see if his assumptions about them were correct.
While introducing the work of the LAIRAH Project, Peter points out that his article represents the first reported study on actual usage data of a scholarly digital edition.
He clearly explains the value of server log analysis to site owners in terms of usability, content appreciation and even for enhancements such as users' personalisation and also characterisation of site users.
While identifying the advantages of analysis of log data over methods of information collection, e.g.
questionnaires, Peter admits there is a limit to how much one can accurately infer from the requests.
For example, Peter rightly describes the limitations in respect of user behaviour that no weblog can properly quantify, such that even the description of a single user's session is invariably flawed, though he points out ways of mitigating this difficulty.
He goes on to explain the process adopted to analyse his data.
It is soon evident that he has been able to determine which functions within specific sub-page types are most and least preferred by visitors.
He equally manages to determine users' preferences in respect of search and tables of content (ToCs).
Inevitably, in Peter's description, the whole concept of site navigability emerges, and how that can influence what users seek.
Peter then turns his attention to the user behaviour identified by evidence of their search processes which, not altogether surprisingly, points to the limitations in many visitors' search skills, in particular, the analysis of terms entered for simple search which highlighted the need for spell-checker support.
Finally, Peter turns to what may be determined by examination of the individual sessions, though he admits to certain limitations.
Nonetheless, it was possible to discern certain patterns in visitors' behaviour.
While some of Peter's findings are unlikely to surprise, such as the confirmation of the discerned dislike among visitors for advanced search options, other findings pointed to assured improvements, such as thumbnails to support textual ToCs, but he also points to the value of application developers producing ways of handling server data better with less reliance on data filtering the user's browser -among other things.
While recognising the limitations of his current work, Peter sees the potential of this approach to server data and is inspired to go further!
In her article entitled Turning off Tap into Bath Ann Chapman describes for us the lifecycle of a demonstrator database and the development of a preservation policy for its content and software in respect of the project she has guided and reported on for Ariadne in a number of articles [3][4].
The project Tap into Bath successfully demonstrated the value of a database of collection descriptions with a common geographic focus.
Ann's article describes both the preservation strategy she developed as well as the steps that were taken to preserve information about the database and the software.
There were two components to Tap into Bath: the demonstrator database for collections in the Bath area and a downloadable open source resource that others could reuse to create their own collections database.
The downloadable resource was a blank version of the database used for Tap into Bath plus the associated search and results display interface software.
The look and feel of the database search and results display pages could be customised to reflect the new resource.
Additionally the labels for the data elements could also be altered.
Ann then proceeds to describe the decisions that arose from the event of 2010 that the database could not be continued in its present form and so a strategy towards preservation evolved through the consideration of a series of pertinent questions.
It was therefore decided that providing inaccurate data was not an option so the live database would be taken down; that since there was still value in offering the resource for reuse, the relevant files would be hosted on the UKOLN Web site; that we would make an archive copy of the populated database and continue to offer the database and software as a free download.
How would one describe the approach that was adopted?
A careful and thoughtful review of the components of this project followed by equally careful and comprehensive action to ensure that the project was wrapped up without loose ends or loss of either database content, project information, and perhaps, most important of all, the potential to reuse this work in the future.
The core of the Phytomedicine Programme of the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria is the investigation in which its post-graduate students collaborate with a wide range of professionals.
RefShare: A Community of Practice to Enhance Research Collaboration by Tertia Coetsee looks at the role of RefShare and the information specialist supporting the Programme's research.
The difficulty facing the Programme was the lack of personnel to provide and obtain up-to-date information in respect of the post-graduate students' work.
Tertia explains how RefWorks and, in particular RefShare, seem to meet the Programme's requirements.
She then describes how the research environment is altering with an increased drive towards information specialists engaging more closely with researchers, or as she terms them, 'clients'.
Tertia goes on to explain what benefits there are to be derived from research collabotation.
She further explains how the library supporting veterinary medicine in her institution has deployed information specialists to support staff and students.
She explains that they are there to add value which involves in part the inclusion and generation of electronic information such as Web portals, digital collections and e-publications.
Moreover, they are becoming far more involved in the pedagogical activity than would be expected of an information specialist in a more traditional setting.
In describing the work of the specialists working with phytomedicine, she identifies the need for a 'community of practice' for its students and researchers.
It would support their needs by supplying a platform for core articles, publications, pre-prints, etc.
Having detailed the content that was pre-loaded on the RefShare platform, Tertia then describes how its widespread use by the Programme was organised.
She also details how the information specialist involved is able to measure participants' usage of the RefShare databases.
Tertia also candidly details the limitations of the RefShare system which principally revolved around the lack of functionality to self-upload research findings to the database, as well as collaborators' concerns over privacy.
As is often the case, it was recognised that much of the initial difficulties experienced by RefShare users related to their own level of ease with the system, and that more targeted training would reduce their reluctance to use it.
A particular advantage was identified among the benefits offered by the platform in relation to the asynchronous progress of students across the Programme.
This meant that it mattered much less if students were at different stages of completion of their studies.
Furthermore, from the standpoint of the information specialists in the library, the support they offered the Programme's staff and students earned their library a good deal of kudos.
It is interesting to note the changing role of the information specialist as described here by Tertia Coetsee and reminds me of a similar theme elsewhere in Ariadne [5].
Readers who recall the contribution from Mona Hess and colleagues, E-Curator: A 3D Web-based Archive for Conservators and Curators [6] will be tempted by the next article.
It would seem that the difficulty encountered in moving a cultural artefact some 400 metres across his campus to be 3D-imaged inspired in Richard Collmann a whole new project: a portable object imaging rig.
In Developments in Virtual 3D Imaging of Cultural Artefacts he describes the path he followed to making improvements not just at the technical level but to the whole operation of digital artefact scanning.
Engaged in the creation of a cross-disciplinary learning object it soon became clear to all interested parties that the V3D digital representation of this focal artefact, Ned Kelly's post-mortem plaster head, had much to offer.
Moreover, the problem of moving artefacts to static imaging rigs from institutions as widely distributed as they are in Australia, only made the case for a mobile rig the more compelling.
Richard also describes some of the benefits of university-based development he was able to exploit to keep cost and delays to an advantageous minimum.
He explains that extensive use and evaluation of the initial rig led on to an improved model which has provided not only reductions in production costs but also new features, some of which can be retro-fitted to the original model.
Richard also illustrates how elements of the imaging workflow have generated efficiencies.
He points out that one of the side-effects of increasingly sophisticated imaging devices is vastly increased image metadata.
For example, it is now possible to log camera settings as well as camera positional and rig incremental settings.
He also describes possible directions in this work, and how forthcoming developments in hardware are affecting strategy.
He closes his article by emphasising the role played by the multi-disciplinary approach adopted by the Project and the effect it is having on the use and analysis of cultural artefacts.
All the technical developments apart, it seems here that just as the instruction to the creator of Coca-Cola to 'bottle it' really put the beverage on the map, so making it portable may well make the 3D scanning rig a major leap forward.
Frequent readers of Ariadne will know that file formats are central to any consideration of digital preservation strategies as expressed in previous articles [7][8], but as Steve Hitchcock and David Tarrant explain in Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles, they can also be used to reveal the fingerprints of emerging types of institutional repositories.
They begin by describing the changes to preservation of scholarly content by dint of the spread of born-digital material.
Likewise, the advent of digital content, open access and institutional repositories has greatly increased exposure.
They contend that just as institutional repositories raise the profile of scholarly material so must they fulfil the need for preservation which they argue 'should be rooted in access and usage.'
They also point out that institutional repositories also frequently possess embedded preservation tools in their interfaces, which places them well ahead in the progress towards effective digital preservation than most Web sites.
They also identify the common characteristic of larger volumes of digital content in comparison with printed resources, and all that implies.
They reiterate the frequently made point that preservation spans the while content lifecycle but emphasise the need to plan for digital content one is yet to receive, and for the emergence of new applications and file formats as yet unknown.
They then ask the reader to consider how institutional repositories might evolve, and, as they term it, 'coalesce' and point to the work of the JISC KeepIt Project and its focus on preservation concerns.
In terms of future content and its format, the authors point to methods of auditing institutional repositories' content with tools such as the Digital Asset Framework (DAF).
They go on to explain the central role of file format identification in preservation operations and the emergence of a number of tools to effect the important task of file format identification.
The authors contend that file format identification is central to the comparison of the profiles of the KeepIt Project exemplars.
They then explain how determining the predominant format profile of an institutional repository enables one to identify the differing natures of repositories.
They do point out that given the scale of some IR's content, even a digital analysis process can take time.
They also state that the subsequent interpretation of a file format profile analysis is dependent on knowledge of the features of the various audit tools and awareness of the significance of unknown and unclassified formats.
The future ability to add the characteristics of manually identified formats to the audit tool is not insignificant.
They then illustrate this capacity to add identifications to the tool memory by describing the assimilation of specialised files for crystal structures.
The authors move on from consideration of the KeepIt exemplars to consideration of the characteristics by which one determines risk to varying formats.
They point to the need to determine the technical data of the content held, including, naturally, file formats, in any effort to plan preservation.
They propose that better economic management of preservation operations through finer tuning of, and discrimination between, format identification and presentation-related decision-making, e.g.
format migration.
The approach they recommend will, they contend, will mean 'each exemplar profile gives the respective managers a new insight into their repositories.'
In their article about Saving the Sounds of the UK in the UK SoundMap, Maureen Pennock and Chris Clark point to the changes being witnessed in libraries and the experience they are offering users, including the impact born-digital materials are having on library collections.
One such example is the UK SoundMap, an online crowd-sourcing activity driven by the British Library in partnership with the Noise Futures Network to engage and build the community in development of a new born-digital audio-visual research resource, and this activity forms part of BL's Unlocking and Integrating Audio Visual Content (UIAVC) Project and works in parallel with a range of other initiatives which they describe for us.
All such activities, they explain, 'express the commitment the Library now has towards integrating audio-visual media within the research experience.'
They then turn to the significance of mobile social networking in the development of crowd-sourced real-time data.
UK Soundmap (UKSM), they contend, is ground-breaking in its exploitation of recent technological innovations including GIS and geo-tagging technologies combined with audio-visual recording and metadata creation delivered over the mobile phone.
UKSM aims to exploit the different means of using such crowd-sourced data to create worthwhile new digital resources about the UK landscape and the reactions of ordinary people towards it.
The authors then move us onto a description of the technology that can deliver such aims, including Audioboo and a Google Map interface.
Contributors to UKSM are advised on best practice in audio recording and tagging their audio file (or 'boo') and, if accepted, their boo is entered on the RSS feed of all UKSM submissions.
The use of mapping as the means of search allows site users to locate the position of all sound recordings accepted and play them immediately.
There is little doubt that experts in the field of crowd-sourcing, proponents of citizen science, etc will be interested in the profile and origins of the contributors, though detailed data are somewhat lacking at present.
They also emphasise the importance of reducing barriers to participation in this crowd-sourcing effort through the choice of accessible, user-friendly technologies.
They also provide information on the nature of the sound recordings that have been submitted.
While difficult to identify what might be characterised as a typical recording, they do describe frequent common features.
Maureen and Chris point out the inevitably lower quality of sound recordings made by amateurs with the ubiquitous but non-specialist mobile phone microphone, but indicate that most causes of rejection by the Project relate not to technical quality but for reasons such as copyright or obscene content.
In truth, they are more concerned about the quality of the file metadata which is frequently wanting.
While there is the usual caution about use of third-party technology, they feel the UKSM is low-risk in terms of technological sustainability.
They are no doubt very wise to consider inevitable human failings to represent the greater risk in what seems to be a very good example of Web 2.0 collaboration where the rapid and cost-effective accumulation of material from amateurs is balanced against the guarantee of authenticity through expert moderation.
Marking 10 Years of Zetoc, Jane Ronson provides a history of the service and an overview of developments appearing in the near future.
Jane describes what the three main features in Zetoc, Search, Alert and RSS, are designed to do to support its users.
Following her history of the service, Jane provides an overview of the evaluation conducted in 2010.
Jane goes on to explain that funding for enhancements in Zetoc has been acquired and that it will cover 'the development of personalisation features, aggregation of Table of Contents (TOC) services, the expansion of Open Access (OA) content and a new look interface.'
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, as well as reviews on works covering the topics of Resource Description and Access, what innovation and creativity really mean and the myths that surround them, how RSS and blogging can be used by librarians and on the open source community and open source software.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 66.
References Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, Matt Richtel, New York Times, 6 June 2010 http://nyti.ms/bWGtvV Sarah Houghton-Jan "Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload" July 2008, Ariadne Issue 56 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/houghton-jan/ Alison Baud and Ann Chapman, "Tap into Bath", July 2004, Ariadne Issue 40 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/baud-chapman/ Stephanie Round , "Tap into Bath Takes Off", January 2005, Ariadne Issue 42 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tapintobath-rpt/ Allan Parsons, "Academic Liaison Librarianship: Curatorial Pedagogy or Pedagogical Curation?"
October 2010, Ariadne Issue 65 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/parsons/ Mona Hess, Graeme Were, Ian Brown, Sally MacDonald, Stuart Robson and Francesca Simon Millar "E-Curator: A 3D Web-based Archive for Conservators and Curators" July 2009, Ariadne Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/hess-et-al/ Chris Rusbridge "Excuse Me...
Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?"
February 2006, Ariadne Issue 46 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/rusbridge/ Dave Thompson "A Pragmatic Approach to Preferred File Formats for Acquisition" April 2010, Ariadne Issue 63 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/thompson/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 66: Sanity Check" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Blue Ribbon Task Force Symposium on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Blue Ribbon Task Force Symposium on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access Buzz data software framework infrastructure archives digitisation blog copyright video preservation curation research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy reports on a symposium which provided an opportunity for stakeholders to respond to the recent Blue Ribbon Task Force report on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.
On Thursday 6 May 2010 an historic event took place.
The event allowed people to express their opinions on potential future action in a highly significant area.
No, not the British general election, and I'm sure the concurrence of dates was unintentional!
This event was the Blue Ribbon Task Force Symposium on sustainable digital preservation and access, held at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre in London [1].
The symposium, companion event to the national conversation which took place in Washington DC in April 2010 [2], provided an opportunity for stakeholders to respond to the recent Blue Ribbon Task Force report.
The report, entitled Sustainable economics for a digital planet: Ensuring long term access to digital information is available to download online [3].
It provides an economic framework and practical recommendations for ensuring the long-term sustainability of digital information.
On arrival delegates were greeted with a copy of the report and a very full schedule; this was going to be an interesting day.
Introduction to the Report Neil Grindley, JISC Digital Preservation Programme Manager, opened the symposium by introducing the two UK members of the Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF): Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services, University College London and the recently retired Director of the UK Digital Curation Centre, Chris Rusbridge, an independent consultant.
Paul Ayris introduced the BRTF, explaining it had been set up to answer three key questions: What shall we preserve?
Who will preserve it?
Who will pay for it?
Chris Rusbridge followed with a summary of BRTF activity and recommendations.
He explained that, despite what some might think, sustainability of resources is not just about finding money, it is about incentivising.
Yet current access to digital information does not represent a clear case; those who pay for it, those who provide it, and those who benefit from it are not necessarily the same.
With this in mind, the Blue Ribbon Task Force Report has been written with an economic framework on board.
Rusbridge also explained that it had been set down in the Report that the case for preservation is really the case for use.
People don't want digital preservation, they want access to resources: digital preservation is effectively a demand that arises from the use of resources.
The Report's conclusions offered an agenda for further action including looking at economies of scale, scope, chains of stewardship, and investigation of public partnerships.
It had laid down the foundations for a further report which would examine the next steps.
Brian Lavoie, Research Scientist at OCLC, and fellow Task Force member, then talked a little about the US launch; the products of the launch are available online [4].
Like Rusbridge, Lavoie also touched on the need to incentivise; as he explained, preservation currently is not just a priority for contributors based on present return on preservation investment.
He said that we almost need a 'good disaster' to incentivise people.
He also detailed the need to integrate preservation into the creation process of digital materials, to make output more 'archivable'.
Clarity of licensing and devices like Creative Commons have been valuable in making resources preservable; they encourage third-party curation by enshrining the right to preserve.
Lavoie also explained that with some recent cases of lost materials it was becoming clear that grants and soft money are not enough to support digital preservation.
Action and consensus was what was needed.
Apparently one of the initial criticisms of the Report had been that it was too timid and that it should have made the responsibilities of specific stakeholders clearer.
Lavoie's answer to this was that there is always a delicate balance between specific actions and a general framework.
Both Task Force members Chris Rusbridge and Brian Lavoie advocated the Report's situation in an economic context.
Although there is a wealth of technical literature on digital preservation (the 'how to do it' is relatively straightforward), it was only now that the economics of digital preservation were becoming more important.
However Lavoie stressed that it was not just about economics and formal institutions, we also needed to make room for those with a passion for preservation.
A panel session followed on what the Task Force had actually achieved.
The initial questions were posed by Paul Ayris and centred on the fact that while Open Access is now very high on everyone's agenda, digital preservation remains low, almost invisible.
It is very much a case of Open Access being today's problem and digital preservation being tomorrow's.
If this were the case, then how could we co-ordinate preservation efforts?
The answers included a suggestion that we look beyond our own shores for sustainability and take an international approach, considering strategies adopted in different countries.
One of the questions from the audience asked the panel to consider how individuals might learn about archiving through the use of Web-based resources, the questioner perceiving digital preservation as a very elitist area.
Panel session at the Blue Ribbon Task Force on sustainable digital preservation and access, Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, London, 6 May 2010.
Clifford Lynch, Adam Farquhar, Matthew Woollard, Graham Higley, John Zubrzycki Different Perspectives After a much needed coffee break the symposium moved onto session two, chaired by Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), which considered perspectives from different sectors.
The view from the heritage sector was offered by Graham Higley, Head of Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum.
Higley introduced the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) [5] at the Natural History Museum which holds about 1 million books.
Many of the resources are very old with more than half of all named species documented in literature pre1900.
The BHL has so far digitised 29,653,844 pages, 79,187 volumes and 41,491 titles.
They spend a lot of their time seeking permissions from copyright holders and have an opt-in Copyright Model.
Preservation is considered a core part of BHL work, and their approach to long-term access is LOCKSS-based on international partnership guarantees and entirely on open source software.
In the Q&A session Higley was asked about how he could guarantee to keep the disks spinning.
His response was that the Natural History Museum has to do this type of work anyway and that the marginal cost of keeping data is comparatively low and even currently declining.
Increases in energy costs may impose the need to look at renewables.
For the Natural History Museum, digitisation is the challenge, not preservation.
John Zubrzycki, Principal Technologist and Archives Research Section Leader, BBC Research, followed with a view from public broadcasting.
The BBC has 650,000 hours of video, 350,000 hours of audio, 2 million stills, 3 million items of sheet music, 400,000 'pronunciations', 1.5 million titles in 'grams library' and 100 km of shelves – that's a lot of stuff!
95% of it is for internal use only.
Over time much has been digitised, but it is estimated that it will take up to 16 years to digitise all 65 PetaBytes of existing content.
Much discussion at the BBC has been about the dangers in compression coding: preservation economics mean that storage is only 10-15% of the archive costs.
Other discussions have been about rights issues and proprietary versus open source software (staff have tended to use Fedora).
The BBC Charter states obligations on the BBC to preserve output and the BBC is aiming to provide public Web access to all its archived content by 2020.
After lunch and some discussion on how our general election might be going (though not by employees of H.M. Government who observed a strict silence!
), we all proceeded back to the lecture theatre.
The Data Manager's perspective was given by Matthew Woollard, Director-Designate of the UK Data Archive (UKDA).
The UK Data Archive [6] is a department of the University of Essex and provides infrastructure and shared services for various data archives.
The UKDA has been a legal place of deposit since 2005 and was in the process of becoming standards-compliant: ISO 27001 auditors were currently checking.
Wollard argued that it was a fallacy that researchers wanted to keep everything while priorities for selection, curation and retention were key.
In reality it costs the UKDA more to restrict access than to open it.
Wollard is currently involved in formulation of the ESRC research data policy which, he hoped , would be influenced by Blue Ribbon Task Force Report.
He ended with the suggestion that data archives should use the arguments in the Blue Ribbon Task Force Report to leverage, not necessarily more money, but more sustainable money.
The final perspective was that of the national library.
Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Library Technology, British Library (BL) where, as he observed, 'preservation is our day job'.
Adam explained that while the British Library may be entrepreneurial, it was a risk-adverse institution, so it tended to use the language of risk management rather than that of economics when it came to preservation.
BL's position was that 'why' was not an issue but the 'if's' were.
BL had to ask for permission to archive Web sites: of the 13,000 people asked, only100 have said 'no'; but then only 4,000 have responded.
It was this copyright investigation that cost time and money, consequently establishing the right legislative foundation was a priority.
Farquhar talked about their use of Datacite and Dryad to support researchers by providing methods for them to locate, identify and cite research datasets with confidence.
The British Library also has an interest in Planets [7] and the Open Planets Foundation.
Adam Farquhar presenting at the Blue Ribbon Task Force on sustainable digital preservation and access, Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, London, 6 May 2010.
There followed a discussion on how feasible cross-domain collaboration is.
Clifford Lynch summarised the presentations by saying that to him it seemed like scale is of the utmost importance and that when you have enough scale preservation becomes manageable.
There was also some debate on free riders (those who use content but do not contribute to its upkeep), who exactly they are and whether they are a problem.
Brian Lavoie explained that taxes pay for public bodies to perform preservation and therefore free use of these services is not actually 'free'.
The report itself is fairly critical of free riders, though those working in academia might believe that any use of resources should be encouraged.
Matthew Wollard pointed out that the costs of excluding free riders can be greater than those of letting them in.
Higher-level Views The final talks gave two higher-level views: that of the European Commission and the JISC.
Pat Manson, Acting Director of Digital Content and Cognitive Systems, European Commission, talked about policy initiatives at European level and how they are tackling the sustainability challenge.
Manson explained that Europeana [8] and access provide a large part of the context for digital preservation in the latest European Commission policy document The JISC vision for digital preservation was provided by Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation, JISC.
JISC is keen to ensure that organisations are prepared to undertake preservation and to embed preservation practice.
Currently JISC has taken no formal position in this area but one possibility is that, as a funder, it may create an explicit mandate for projects to follow.
It is also considering if funders in different countries could work together on further actions and if JISC should create financial incentives for private entities to preserve in the public interest.
The chair for the session, Brian Lavoie, then facilitated a discussion on 'Where do we go from here?'
One suggestion offered was to engage beyond academia and the cultural sector at a high political and governmental level, promotion of this as one of the 'big society' challenges [9], how apt on the day of the election.
Chris Rusbridge closed with the thought that the Report offered something for us to build on, but the scale of challenge required us to move on quickly.
References Blue Ribbon Task Force Symposium http://www.jisc.ac.uk/brtf A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information http://brtf.sdsc.edu/symposium.html Blue Ribbon Task Force Final Report http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2010/blueribbontaskforcefinalreport.aspx A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information: Presentations http://brtf.vidizmo.com/ Biodiversity Library http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org UK Data Archive http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ Planets http://planets-project.eu/ Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ Government puts Big Society at heart of public sector reform, Cabinet Office News, 18 May 2010 http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2010/100518-news-big-society-launch.aspx Cameron and Clegg set out 'big society' policy ideas, BBC News: Politics, 18 May 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8688860.stm Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Marieke has recently started work on the JISC Beginners Guide to Digital Preservation, a pragmatic guide to digital preservation for those working on JISC projects.
The project blog is at: http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-bgdp/ Return to top Article Title: "Blue Ribbon Task Force Symposium on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access" Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/blue-ribbon-uk-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: GLUT Mastering Information through the Ages Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: GLUT Mastering Information through the Ages Buzz software intranet research Citation BibTex RIS Martin White enjoys a random walk through a historical survey of humanity's quest to classify and categorise information.
I am fascinated by the way in which successive generations have tried to cope with a contemporary information explosion.
This is not just a 21st Century phenomenon, and as this book shows, it pre-dates manuscripts, let alone printed books.
Consider for a moment the problems that the Victorian engineers faced in managing vast collections of engineering drawings.
Such was my fascination that the moment I saw this book was available for review I instantly emailed the Editor to offer my services.
Alex Wright is the Director of User Experience and Product Research at The New York Times, and holds both a degree in English and American Literature and an M.Sc.
in Library and Information Science.
This book could only have been written by someone with a background in literature as well as information science because it is the history of some of humanity's attempts to classify and categorise the sum of human knowledge.
The author states in his introduction that in the book he traverses topics such as cultural anthropology, mythology, monasticism, scientific method, Victorian librarianship and the early history of computers that are rarely brought together in the same volume.
That is an understatement.
Among the topics covered in the book are the Canon Tables from the Lindisfarne Gospel, Diderot's Encyclopedia, the Systema Naturae developed by Carolus Linnaeus, the classification schemes devised by Cutter, Dewey and Wilkins, and the fascinating story of Paul Otlet who wrote about the concept of hyperlinking long before Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson.
The index has entries for John Milton, Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas and a substantial entry for the erosion of authority in the Roman Catholic Church.
These observations are of more use than describing the book by the chapter headings since they include 'A Steam Engine of the Mind', and 'The Astral Power Station'!
This is a book that makes you wonder at the creativity and imagination of those people from all disciplines who have tried to put edges and structures around the corpus of human knowledge.
All of us struggle with this every day with the limited collection of our own resources.
The number of times I have re-ordered the works on my own bookshelves at home is testament to this; having read GLUT I am encouraged to return and find further ways of doing so.
I doubt that this work would ever be a set text for a "Cat and Class" module in a library school, but on the other hand all students should be invited to read it to gain an important sense of the history of our profession and the need for our skills, and to show that solving the problems of information glut lie in the intellect and not in computer software.
Although well written this is not an easy book to read as the author moves so swiftly from one topic to another that there is no time to catch breath or perspective.
Wright breathes life into what to many might seem a redundant skill in the age of Google.
My only regret is that the work of Yahoo and the Open Directory Project is not covered in more detail as this is a very interesting example (and there are others) of attempts to harness computing to categorisation and classification.
That said, this book has been a constant companion on many train journeys over the last couple of weeks.
I am sure that you will find this book a stimulating and enjoyable read, and almost certainly you will learn something new or gain a new perspective on a topic with which you are already familiar.
One final thought: I have no idea in which section any bookshop would place copies of this work.
It defies classification!
Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Return to top Article Title: "GLUT: Mastering Information Through the Ages" Author: Martin White Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/white-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management Buzz digitisation repositories preservation research Citation BibTex RIS Fiona MacLellan reviews the third edition of Peggy Johnson’s text focusing on a key area for libraries: collection development.
Collection development is a key skill taught in library schools around the world, it represents one of the business as usual elements in most librarians' roles, certainly in any I have undertaken.
Getting your collection development right is a skill that takes lots of practice: like knowing which items to add to enhance your library stock; and which ones to remove to ensure that breadth of collection is not damaged; whilst making the collection inviting and easy to navigate.
These aspects form but a small part of the challenge of collection development.
At library school ten years ago, we spent time looking at selection techniques for different types of library as well as collection development policies and budgeting.
Since graduating, I have been involved in stock selection in public libraries, an independent environmental agency's staff library and a university library.
During this period I have learnt much of the practical side of collection development and management; I have also been instrumental in making sure that my places of work had collection development policies.
However, I have often felt a need to update my knowledge on the subject; after all, much could have changed in the ten years since I graduated from library school.
When this book came up for review it felt as good a time as any to review my knowledge and understanding on the topic and to get a more up-to-date viewpoint on this core area in my professional life.
Contents and Structure Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management is divided into nine chapters, plus a glossary and appendices; each chapter takes on a different aspect of collection development and management, although there is understandably overlap between some of the chapters.
A large proportion of the book concentrates on the managerial aspects of collection development, covering organisational models, staffing, policies, budgetary responsibility and marketing.
However, within each chapter dealing with a largely managerial subject, there are pockets of more practical advice that will benefit a librarian without management responsibilities.
Each chapter concludes with a case study section that provides an activity to complete if you wish to.
These activities would be useful for students reading without a practical application; however as a practitioner or manager I would not find these activities beneficial.
Johnson’s target audience for the book is quite varied which makes the pitching of the book quite difficult: Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management is intended as a comprehensive introduction to the topic for students, a primer for experienced librarians with new collection development and management responsibilities, and a handy reference resource for practitioners as they go about their day-to-day work.
[1] To create a book that can give information for students, experienced staff and practitioners is tricky, as each of these groups of readers will have a different basic knowledge and varying levels of need in terms of the information they require.
I think that Johnson manages to give the right level of information for the student and also offer a primer for the experienced librarian with new collection management responsibilities.
However, I am less convinced that she meets her aim of providing a practitioner-friendly reference resource.
Whilst some of the information in the appendices may be relevant and the odd chapter looking at the development of e-resources and explaining some of the bundle deal models are probably useful, I don’t think the book is particularly practical for day-to-day work.
That said, for practitioners such as myself who want to refresh their knowledge and understanding of the topic, the book does provide a fairly comprehensive overview and therefore has value.
The work begins with an introduction to collection development and management, setting out definitions to ensure shared understanding for the rest of the book, and also giving a brief history of libraries and their collections, with particular reference to the USA.
In this history Johnson breaks libraries down into four types: public, academic, school and special.
In dividing libraries into these categories, Johnson is then able to give more specific and relevant information reflecting differences in the collection types and missions of the different kinds of organisation.
This categorisation by library type is echoed in future chapters where variations in practice need to be highlighted.
Following the introductory chapter, the next two chapters cover the planning and setting up aspects of collection development and management.
Chapter two focuses on organisational models and staffing responsibilities, again divided by library type for the initial discussion and then touching on other related aspects such as ethics and censorship.
Chapter three covers planning, policy and budgets and is offered in part as a way of ‘increasing organizational efficiency’ [2].
Johnson explains the importance of planning and then focuses specifically on collection development policies, emphasising the importance of the policy for supporting the business decisions that are made.
Johnson states ‘selection, deselection and priority setting throughout the library occur in isolation and without coordination if the library has no recorded rationale for decisions’ [3].
Following the discussion of collection development policies, the chapter covers budget setting, fund allocation and monitoring of funds.
Chapter four looks at the development of collections focusing on selection, evaluation and acquisition of library materials, including a section on licensing and supplier choices.
Chapter five looks at collections from the management aspect and therefore covers weeding, transfer to storage (where applicable), preservation and conservation, digitisation, serials review and security of collection.
Johnson notes good practice relating to weeding: A library should have established criteria, documented in a written policy, guiding weeding and withdrawal decisions.
The library then has a measure of protection in pointing to a systematic plan for not only building but also managing its collection.
[4] Chapter six covers marketing, liaison and outreach activities.
It follows a similar format in terms of giving a general overview of the topic before breaking down via library type to give more specific information.
Johnson highlights liaison as one mechanism for assisting with collection development: A significant benefit that comes through liaison and outreach work is the information necessary to develop a collection that meets the needs of constituents.
[5] The final three chapters of the book deal with subjects that are perhaps more suitable for strategic-level managers to understand and implement.
Chapter seven covered collection analysis from a theoretical viewpoint and offered some practical techniques on how to carry out a collections analysis.
It also provides an historical overview of the topic and offers some tried and tested methods.
As you would expect from a book published in 2014, a section of this chapter is devoted to electronic resources, which are covered in detail in each of the relevant chapters dealing with collection development and management as well.
Chapter eight covers co-operative collection development, which appears to be a decision that is usually made at senior-management level rather than collections-librarian level.
This appears to be particularly prevalent in the USA, whereas I don’t think shared collections are as common in the UK; co-operatives in the UK are often finance-based rather than collections-based as far as I am aware.
Chapter nine covers scholarly communication and includes discussion of the Open Access movement along with more traditional publishing models.
Within this chapter Johnson covers what she believes to be the issues and roles for libraries and librarians within the background context of open access.
These roles include education about the changing nature of scholarly communication, open access funds, institutional repositories, discoverability, preservation and publication with a final plea from Johnson for libraries and librarians to get involved in conversations about Open Access and in shaping public policy on the matter [6].
Alongside the nine chapters there are three appendices covering resources for collection development, selection aids and some sample collection development policies.
The first two of these appendices are what appear to be fairly comprehensive lists of resources, which whilst potentially useful, will possibly date the book quickly and in my view are not particularly useful.
After the appendices Johnson has included a glossary which would be useful for readers who have never been involved in the topics discussed.
The other resource that is mentioned, in very small print at the bottom of the contents page, is a Web supplement to the book [7].
The inclusion of the Web extras is something I have seen with other non-fiction books I have read recently, and, in the main, I am happy to report they have all proven relevant and beneficial; however the extras for this book consist of reading lists and case studies for the two previous editions of this book.
I am not sure how useful they will be.
Firstly, if the items on further reading were still relevant and appropriate, then presumably they would be used in the latest edition of the book.
Secondly, the case studies again must have been updated for this edition.
I suspect that the original American publishers felt that they should include a supplementary Web page for the book, but I honestly do not think that this adds anything significant to the work.
Further Thoughts This book from the start states that it focuses on the USA and Canada [8].
When I first heard about this book I thought that would not cause too many problems, and as a general update of my knowledge that aspect does not matter.
However as a student or librarian new to the topic, then it may become slightly more problematic.
The discussions relate to USA libraries, jurisdictions and policies.
The same basic principles of collection development apply, no matter the geographic location of the library; so I feel it difficult to class this as an issue with the book perhaps it is more of an irritation for British readers.
I appreciate that the book was written and published by the American Library Association initially; however the copy I read was published by Facet Publishing which is a UK-based publisher [9].
To my mind the book would therefore have benefitted from the inclusion of British or European examples.
All of that said, I found it interesting to read more about the history of American libraries.
One other area of this book I found frustrating was the referencing.
I admit this is a pet peeve of mine; however Johnson is a librarian and according to the information on the back of the book the book has become an authoritative text [10] which therefore leads me to judge, perhaps unfairly.
In chapter two there is a reference that has either been typed or simply referenced incorrectly.
The reference refers users to 'SNONUL focus', and it should read 'SCONUL focus'.
This alongside the inconsistency of one referencing format for the chapter references and a different reference format for the further reading, which I appreciate may not bother any other readers, left me frustrated and disappointed.
I also noticed a small editing error in chapter two, which left me feeling that the book simply needed a little bit of care in order to make it a worthy purchase.
Conclusion This work meets most of its aims: it provides a comprehensive coverage of the topic, and despite the potentially dull nature of the subject is written in an accessible manner.
Despite the problems I mentioned with the text, I am glad to have read the book and I feel better informed about collection development than I did.
So perhaps my initial expectations were too high.
I would recommend that anyone interested in the subject should read the book.
However I would not necessarily recommend the book be read in its entirety; instead I would recommend using it as a reference book, dipping in and out of the relevant sections as necessary.
References Johnson, P. “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” 2014, p. ix.
Johnson, P. “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” 2014, p. 91.
Johnson, P. “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” 2014, p. 99.
Johnson, P. “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” 2014, p. 195.
Johnson, P. “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” 2014, p. 280.
Johnson, P. “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” 2014, pp.
429-437.
Web Extra: Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management http://www.alaeditions.org/web-extra-fundamentals-collection-development-and-management-fundamentals-collection-development-and Johnson, P. “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” 2014, p. ix.
Facet publishing.
About us  http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/about_us.php Johnson, P. “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” London: Facet Publishing, 2014, 554 pages, paperback, ISBN 978-1-85604-937-5.
Author Details Fiona MacLellan Academic Librarian University of Northampton Email: fiona.maclellan@northampton.ac.uk   Web site: http://www.northampton.ac.uk/directories/people/fiona-maclellan Fiona MacLellan is an Academic Librarian for the University of Northampton, with responsibility for the Schools of The Arts and Science and Technology.
She has research interests in Reading Groups in a HE setting and referencing systems affecting reading comprehension and fluency.
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CURATEcamp iPres 2012 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines CURATEcamp iPres 2012 Buzz data software dissemination apache infrastructure archives metadata identifier vocabularies blog repositories python preservation linux ebook curation twitter hashtag taxonomy standards Citation BibTex RIS Mark Jordan, Courtney Mumma, Nick Ruest and the participants of CURATEcamp iPres 2012 report on this unconference for digital curation practitioners and researchers, held on 2 October 2012 in Toronto.
CURATEcamp is ‘A series of unconference-style events focused on connecting practitioners and technologists interested in digital curation.’ [1] The first CURATEcamp was held in the summer of 2010, and there have been just over 10 Camps since then.
The activity at CURATEcamps is driven by the attendees; in other words, ‘There are no spectators at CURATEcamp, only participants.’ [2] Camps follow the ‘open agenda’ model: while organisers will typically build the activity around a particular theme within the field of digital curation, and sometimes (but not always) collect topics for discussion, there is no preset agenda.
The event’s structure is determined at the beginning of the day by having participants propose and vote on topics of interest.
The selected topics are then placed in an outline or ‘grid’ that records the day’s activity.
18 people attended the iPres 2012 camp.
The group selected four projects to work on from the list compiled prior to the Camp [3].
In addition, some participants gave lighting talks during the lunch break.
Feedback on National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Levels of Digital Preservation In September, a working group from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) [4] released for public comment a document describing levels of digital preservation [5].
This document arose as a result of a perceived lack of guidance on how organisations should prioritise resources for digital preservation; the levels do not address what to preserve, workflows, preservation platforms, and other policy or operational details.
The CURATEcamp iPres 2012 grid The document, which is presented in the form of a matrix of columns and rows, defines four levels: Level 1:  Protect Your Data Level 2:  Know Your Data Level 3:  Monitor Your Data, and Level 4:  Repair Your Data and across these levels, five functional areas Storage and Geographic Location File Fixity and Data Integrity Information Security Metadata File Formats In general, each level builds on the amount of organisational resources required to perform the preservation functions.
One of the CURATEcamp groups assembled to provide feedback on the document.
Their feedback has been posted to the NDSA blog as a comment.
[6] In summary, the group saw a need for a ‘Level Zero’, one identifying ‘something you can point at that you suspect you are responsible for.’ Content identified at this level may not even necessarily be preserved; the point is that an organisation needs to identify that it has content that needs to be evaluated for preservation.
Furthermore, the group felt that the level captions (such as ‘Know Your Data’) were not very useful and recommended removing them from the chart.
Finally, contrary to the general pattern of each successive level requiring more resources than the previous one, the group felt that this was not the case in the ‘File Formats’ functional area but that a case could be made for making file format requirements more substantial as preservation levels increased.
Curation and the Cloud This group attempted to tackle a lot for a single session: curation and the Cloud, new strategies and tools for new technology, and practical digital preservation solutions for production entities.
Ultimately, the group focused on tools and strategies that could be used to preserve cloud-based services and social media, and simultaneously preserve authenticity the myriad of issues the advent of the Cloud brings to digital preservation.
Preservation of email is not a new issue, and there are many documented workflows around it.
However, preservation and curation of Web-based email brings up new issues.
Grabbing the actual email is fairly straightforward if credentials are supplied.
But, once the email is curated, its presentation can be difficult.
How do we, or should we, present how a given user flags items?
How his or her email is organised?
Content is king, but what about context?
The group focused on curating email from Hotmail, Gmail and similar services.
Questions raised included: What is in a SIP (Submission Information Package), and what is in a DIP (Dissemination Information Package)?
What kind of tools and strategies could we use to preserve cloud-based services and social media while still preserving authenticity?
Did we have to come up with different preservation strategies and use different digital forensics tools (compared to what we use for physical media)?
Additionally, what tools did we use to provide user access to electronic material, such as emails, social media, Google docs, etc.?
Should we have levels of email preservation?
Finally, email is not the only cloud-based service that digital curators will need to work with Dropbox, online backup services, Google Docs, and social media services will also pose their own challenges.
In the very limited amount of time remaining in the session, the group raised similar questions to these other cloudbased services as they did with Web-based email, and also noted that standards and best practices for archiving social media and other cloud-based content needed to be developed by the community.
Central Toronto, venue for iPRES 2012 events Requirements for Digital Curation Micro-services A popular design pattern in digital curation and preservation is micro-services, which are single-purpose, loosely coupled tools that are combined together into workflows.
Another CURATEcamp iPres 2012 group examined the feasibility of formulating a standardised set of requirements that could aid micro-service users, developers, and integrators.
Functional requirements worth exploring included: That a micro-service can be used synchronously (i.e., run in parallel) or asynchronously (run in a particular sequence) depending on the workflow The benefits and disadvantages of allowing micro-services in the same workflow to be written in the same programming language (as one participant put it, ‘Why not just write all your services in Python?’) Categorising micro-services using a standard taxonomy, for example, the PREMIS Data Dictionary eventType vocabulary Standardised input formats, output formats, and error messages Shared guidelines for installation, user testing, and evidence-based evaluation of micro-services Examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ tools that can be integrated into workflows as micro-services are (as an example of the ‘good’) bagit by the Library of Congress [7], which is well documented (both within the source code and externally), can be included in Python scripts as a library or used as a standalone script, and is easy to install and use; as an example of a ‘bad’ micro-service, participants nominated FITS [8], which they saw as not well documented and difficult to install.
Some guidelines for developers of digital preservation micro-services already exist in the form of David Tarrant’s ‘Software Development Guidelines’ [9].
Furthermore, participants familiar with work being performed at SCAPE (SCAlable Preservation Environments), [10] revealed that that organisation was planning on producing Debian packages for its preservation tools, making them easy to deploy on standard Linux infrastructure.
Requirements for File Format Identification and Registries File format identification and characterisation are important tasks in digital curation workflows, since successful application of downstream processes (like validation and normalisation) rely on accurate identification of a file’s format.
Many tools exist that attempt to identify file formats -too many in some people’s opinion.
JHOVE, FITS, FIDO, Apache Tika, and the recently released Unified Digital Format Registry (UDFR), which unifies two other services, PRONOM and the Global Digital Format Registry, are all services or pieces of software that perform functions related to format identification and characterisation, but they all do it in slightly different ways.
Building on the work of Andy Jackson [11], Paul Wheatley [12], and the Archivematica Format Policy Registry Requirements [13], this CURATEcamp group discussed limitations of existing tools and approaches, the need for better use cases, clearer functional requirements, and performance optimisations of popular tools.
This discussion continued after the CURATEcamp and resulted in the organisation of the ‘CURATEcamp 24 Hour Worldwide File ID Hackathon’ [14], which was held on November 16, 2012 and coordinated across time zones from GMT +12:00 to GMT -8:00.
The day began in New Zealand and crossed continents with the rising sun, joined intermittently by participants interested in enhancing best practice for format identification and validation.
The group communicated on Twitter via the event hashtag (#fileidhack) and in the IRC #openarchives chatroom.
This event was a resounding success and ended with summaries provided by the Vancouver, Canada team in the final time zone.
Highlights of the outcomes included (with names of principal contributors in parentheses): Forking of the open-source FITS (File Information Tool Set) application to OpenFITS [15], so that its performance could be improved substantially (Gary McGath, Independent Consulting Developer, USA).
Creation of an OpenFITS Debian package so that OpenFITS can be installed easily on standard Linux operating systems (Artefactual Systems, Canada).
Detailed testing of OpenFITS to determine if the performance enhancements worked; the preliminary results showed that more effort is needed to increase OpenFITS’ processing speed (Artefactual Systems, Canada).
Establishment of the ‘Format Corpus’ [16], a collection of openly licensed files that exemplify a wide range of file formats (Andy Jackson, British Library).
Updates to the Precipio [17] and Fidget [18] file format signature generation and testing tools (Andy Jackson, British Library).
Creation of 13 e-book file format signatures (Maureen Pennock, British Library).
These accomplishments all happened within the same day, and involved people from organisations ranging from independent consultancies to national libraries.
Overall, the 24 Hour Worldwide File ID Hackathon proved to be an excellent example of the digital curation community’s ability to tackle a specific set of problems in a loosely coordinated yet highly focused burst of activity.
Lunchtime Lightning Talks The Camp’s organisers offered participants the opportunity to deliver a 5-minute lightning talk during the lunch break.
These impromptu presentations covered a broad variety of topics, including one institution’s experience of becoming certified as a Trustworthy Digital Repository, workflows for transferring content into digital preservation systems, specific work done to identify file formats in a large Web site archive, and low-cost disk storage options.
Lunchtime Lightning Talks at CURATEcamp iPres 2012 Conclusion Participants at this CURATEcamp felt it was a success: it generated useful discussion, resulted in some concrete outcomes, and provided a venue for digital curation practitioners and researchers to meet face to face.
Moreover, unconference events like this one are spreading in the library and archives community, and are proving to offer a productive alternative to traditional conferences and other forms of collaboration.
Part of the appeal of CURATEcamp is that it is easy to organise one; interested readers need only consult the CURATEcamp ‘How it works’ Web page [2] for more information.
References CURATEcamp home page http://curatecamp.org/ How It Works http://curatecamp.org/pages/how-it-works CURATEcamp iPRES 2012 Discussion Ideas  http://wiki.curatecamp.org/index.php/CURATEcamp_iPRES_2012_Discussion_Ideas National Digital Stewardship Alliance www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/ Help Define Levels for Digital Preservation: Request for Public Comments http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/09/help-define-levels-for-digital-preservation-request-for-public-comments/ Comment by Courtney Mumma, 20 November 2012, 6:11 pm in respect of "NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation: Release Candidate One" by Trevor Owens, 20 November 2012 http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/11/ndsa-levels-of-digital-preservation-release-candidate-one/#comment-9542 edsu/bagit https://github.com/edsu/bagit File Information Tool Set (FITS) https://code.google.com/p/fits/ Software Development Guidelines http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/PT/Software+Development+Guidelines SCAlable Preservation Environments http://www.scape-project.eu/ Biodiversity and the registry ecosystem http://openplanetsfoundation.org/blogs/2012-07-06-biodiversity-and-registry-ecosystem Don't panic!
: What we might need format registries for http://openplanetsfoundation.org/blogs/2012-07-05-dont-panic-what-we-might-need-format-registries Format policy registry requirements https://www.archivematica.org/wiki/Format_policy_registry_requirements CURATEcamp 24 hour worldwide file id hackathon, 16 November 2012 http://wiki.curatecamp.org/index.php/CURATEcamp_24_hour_worldwide_file_id_hackathon_Nov_16_2012 OpenFITS https://github.com/gmcgath/openfits Format Corpus https://github.com/openplanets/format-corpus/blob/master/README.md Precipio https://github.com/anjackson/percipio Fidget https://github.com/openplanets/format-corpus/downloads Author Details Mark Jordan Head of Library Systems Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia Canada Email: mjordan@sfu.ca Mark Jordan is Head of Library Systems at Simon Fraser University.
His interests include digital preservation, repository platforms, and metadata reuse and exchange.
Mark is a contributor to several open source applications and the chief developer of several more.
He is the author of Putting Content Online: A Practical Guide for Libraries (Chandos, 2006).
Courtney Mumma Archivematica Product Manager/Systems Analyst Artefactual Systems, Inc. New Westminster, BC Canada V3M 3L7 Email: courtney@artefactual.com Web site: http://artefactual.com/ Courtney manages Archivematica system requirements, product design, technical support, training, and community relations.
She has been a researcher and co-investigator on the InterPARES 3 Project, researcher on the UBC-SLAIS Digital Records Forensics Project, and is a member of the Professional Experts Panel on the BitCurator Project.
Courtney has been published in Archivaria and has delivered many presentations on the practical application of digital preservation strategies.
Nick Ruest Digital Assets Librarian York University Libraries Toronto, Ontario Canada Email: ruestn@yorku.ca Web site: http://www.yorku.ca/ Nick Ruest is the Digital Assets Librarian at York University.
He oversees the development of data curation, asset management and preservation strategies, along with creating and implementing digital preservation policies.
He is also active in the Islandora community, and occasionally contributes code to the project.
He is currently the President of the Ontario Library and Technology Association.
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Book Review: From Lending to Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: From Lending to Learning Buzz ebook dvd research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tim Davies reviews a spirited defence of public libraries, which tries to define their core purpose and which argues for a re-positioning of their place in society.
For those of us who work in public libraries these are, in the words of the old Chinese proverb, 'interesting times'.
The service is under scrutiny at both local and national levels, with an intensity unknown in previous generations.
Public libraries are in the news, with headline stories on the BBC's Today and Newsnight.
They are the focus of demonstrations and read-ins, as councils struggle to balance severely reduced budgets.
They have become a shorthand method of describing the difficult choices hard-pressed local authorities are having to make: such-and-such a 'backroom function' is worth x number of libraries... With scrutiny comes pressure, as librarians and library managers fight to convince those who hold the purse-strings that their service is relevant and necessary, and should continue to be funded.
Sadly, although there is much debate, many librarians feel that it is ill-informed.
The notorious Modernisation Review of 2009-2010 [1], for instance, contained interesting asides on the appeal of coffee and the popularity of private-sector DVD lending services, but precious little to address the real dilemma which lies at the heart of the modern British public library.
This dilemma could very simply be summed up as follows: we know libraries are a good thing – we, and our users, feel this instinctively, and know it to be true; yet almost everything the library does can also be done elsewhere, more attractively, more efficiently and at less cost to the public purse.
The scrutiny of public libraries is welcome – we are being forced to defend our position like never before, and this defence could be an excellent opportunity to make clear our purpose.
However, the battle for the library's soul is in dire need of reinforcements: in From Lending to Learning, Ronan O'Beirne has opened up a strategically significant new flank.
Lending and Learning In short, this book is a call to place learning (in all its many forms) at the heart of the public library.
This is unsurprising, since O'Beirne has long had an explicit interest in learning, and the library's role in supporting it.
He recognises, and celebrates, the obvious and venerable tradition of the public library acting as a top-up resource to students, and its formally organised offer of homework clubs and study support sessions; he argues that this should continue.
However, O'Beirne is in fact much more interested in informal learning, and the ways in which public library services can engage with the lifelong learner.
He gives concrete examples, including a couple of case studies from his previous professional life; but it strikes this reviewer that these are best seen as loose templates to reflect on and take as inspiration, rather than schemes to be copied wholesale across local authority boundaries – they are projects very much of their time and place.
No doubt it was indeed the author's intention simply to provide snapshots of what libraries' attempts to engage with the informal learner may look like in practice.
The true value of From Lending to Learning lies rather in the argument O'Beirne makes to expound his position.
It goes further than a suggestion that the lifelong learning agenda be slotted in alongside the many other demands on the library's time and resources: it is a call to place learning at – indeed, return learning to – the heart of public library policy, both nationally and at a local level.
Whether in the public sector or, as now, in the post-16 education sector, O'Beirne is a most reflective practitioner.
His style is persuasive, and is used to put forward a case informed not only by many years' experience but also by a healthy dose of that pragmatic theorising which is the closest our profession can get to having a philosophy.
A simplistic summary of the book's argument would be that we all need to make use of the public library as a form of (informal) learning – not in itself too shocking a proposition, but O'Beirne puts the case cogently and with force.
A brief breakdown of the chapters follows, but two paragraphs sum things up nicely: Yet if there is a case for treating the public library with respect…it is because it is a place where culture and heritage are…made accessible to all comers…It is a place, above all else, where learning happens.
(p.31) The true benefit of the public library is that space at the heart of the community, that area where a user can sit, stand or crouch without being disturbed, without having an agenda, without speaking or listening.
That space is the essence of the public library.
That part of everyone who believes instinctively that the public library is 'a good thing' and who without qualification identifies with that non-intrusive, non-political space where one is free to indulge in intellectual freedom.
It is a space where one is allowed to follow one's dreams in the most intimate way, without the judgement of others.
It is a space to learn.
(p.174) Summary of Coverage Chapter 1: For what are libraries if not for learning?
The first paragraph sums up the urgent question on which the book's argument turns – and the wider debate: 'At the heart [of it all] lies a very important, yet simple, question: what are public libraries for?’ O'Beirne is not foolish enough to ignore the fact that the library means different things to different people – or, indeed, that almost everyone believes they have the moral right to say what the library means to them.
After all, libraries are (almost uniquely amongst public institutions) truly all things to all people.
After posing this crucial question, he goes on to give a brief lesson in library history, setting it within the context of the current debate.
Any history of public libraries must, in a work like this, be a little selective, and it is not an accident that this chapter serves to remind us of the long-standing relationship between learners and libraries – a relationship which lies, of course, at the heart of the argument the book sets out to make.
Moreover, the alternative is shown to be unsatisfactory.
As is said later in the same chapter, it is misguided to set too much store by the numbers of books borrowed – the reasons for borrowing them are far more important.
To those who would argue that there is an important literacy and reader development role in the lending of literature, the author responds by asking why there is no explicit link between reader development activities and some sort of learning agenda.
Ultimately, this chapter is a thumbnail portrait of the library as something much more than just lending books.
Chapter 2: Understanding today's public libraries Chapter two sets out to look at the relationship between public libraries and the book, and ‘its iconic value’.
It also touches on the tortured relationship between libraries and their paymasters in local government.
Readers could be forgiven for approaching From Lending to Learning with some expectation (whether sceptical or enthusiastic) of finding the importance of the book diminished; replaced perhaps by yet another call for libraries to embrace the technological revolution, to stop fighting a rearguard action against the migration of reading habits from print to digital.
Yet this would do both O’Beirne and his argument a great disservice.
He describes the book as one of the ‘fundamental icons of civilisation and…one of the greatest…pieces of engineering constructed by man…[it is] ingenious.’ After a brief discourse on their importance in earlier times as mythical and religious objects, then as the vehicle of academic and scientific progress – he considers whether the days of the book are numbered.
This is followed by recognition of the very special place that libraries – and the idea of libraries – have in people’s hearts.
However, libraries and books must not be confused.
From here, O’Beirne goes on to consider library leadership.
Tellingly, he lists the areas of local authority activity where the library is relevant.
The list is a long one, running through community cohesion and regeneration to social inclusion, information literacy and Every Child Matters.
The point will be developed later, on the basis of this list, that emphasising the library’s ability to support learning can and should help library services to take a position within each of these spheres of activity.
In the meantime, the problems of service visibility and confused leadership from elected members are rehearsed, and the point made that despite many attempts by librarians to promote themselves, ‘there remains a lack of understanding…of the many roles the public library can play.’ Touching briefly on how libraries have simply extended (DVDs, Wiis, etc) rather than having truly diversified, O’Beirne goes on to argue – again not particularly controversially, these days – for proper strategic planning and an understanding by the library of its market.
It is time, he says, for the big questions to be addressed (should market demand lead the way, or do libraries have a higher social responsibility?)
and finishes by suggesting that they should place the needs of learners at the heart of everything.
Chapter 3: Public libraries lost in the learning landscape This chapter introduces the relationship between learning and libraries on which the rest of the book is based.
The first crucial distinction is between education (with its formal trappings of institutions and qualifications) and learning – ‘by necessity a process focused on the individual’.
For the purposes of O’Beirne’s argument, learning is understood to involve ‘change, development and the desire to learn more’, and to mean adult or lifelong learning.
He makes clear that he considers libraries’ provision of services to children and young people in this area to be taken as read, and the responsibly of the service to be more or less clear-cut.
With echoes, indeed, of the 1850 Public Libraries Act [2], the modern concept of lifelong learning ‘can counter social exclusion, contribute towards personal development and promote self-fulfilment.’ Moreover, the modern economy demands a workforce which is capable of intellectual flexibility, and is prepared to see ‘learning’ as an on-going, lifelong process – although the debate rages over whether more informal learning should in fact be seen as of primarily personal benefit.
The complexity of the debate around learning is merely touched on – the emphasis is on libraries’ duty to get on board.
After an overview of the recent history of lifelong learning initiatives, it is argued that whilst libraries have been excluded from the focus on learning for the last decade or so, now is a good time to (re-)assert their strong influence over informal lifelong learning.
Chapter 4: Developing learning services in public libraries This chapter sets out an introduction to what we might mean – or understand – by the use of the word ‘learning’ in relation to public libraries.
As the author says: ‘For libraries to support lifelong learning they have to understand the needs, motivations and aspirations of a range of learners.’ At the heart of the argument is a notion which builds on a 1998 speech by John Dolan – a shift from libraries as storehouses of resources to libraries as access points to information, learning and knowledge.
‘[This] identifies a place and mission for the library and, coupled with appropriate use of technology, begins the process of creating the new learner-focused library.’ It is at this point that the argument is first forcefully made for library staff to be properly trained in facilitating learning – in understanding what it entails, how learners learn (informally, particularly), and how the library can support, develop, foster and in some cases, direct – such learning.
There is some discussion of theories of learning, and the (arbitrary but useful) distinction between formal and informal learning clarified.
From here on in, the emphasis is much more on the informal learner.
The idea is touched on that libraries, in non-fiction sections, provide ‘a well-arranged series of facts which represent a particular truth’; this reviewer prefers to see libraries as offering a range of facts which contribute to a particular argument – although it is plain that this relies on the learner having the will, curiosity and ability to find the ‘truth’.
In fact, the importance of information literacy in this context is addressed in Chapter 7.
O’Beirne recognises that both formal and informal learning take place without staff intervention, and that the informal type in particular is more likely to be invisible.
Once again, the importance of (re-)training staff, possibly with a more formal advice and guidance role, is stressed.
However, it is through responding to the motivations of self-directed learners – and offering them a supportive environment that libraries can reposition themselves within the ‘information society’.
Chapter 5: Digital citizenship in a learning community The book goes on to explore the relationship between learning and citizenship – and the idea that a fuller engagement with society leads to greater inclusion, greater community cohesion, and perhaps greater intellectual curiosity.
In short, it can act as a prompt and handmaid to learning.
Moreover, as more and more government services are migrating to the Web, there is a need to engage a significant minority of the population (and not only the elderly) with information technologies.
An engaged and coherent society these days needs must be a digitally aware and IT-literate one.
The author’s argument that, ‘We can see exclusion in terms of learning and the motivations for learning’, articulates to some extent the vague notion most library staff have of the utility of their services, and how we might help.
However, it has to be recognised that reluctant learners exist – those who, perhaps, choose to exclude themselves.
It is not within the scope of the book to address this problem, but it could have merited more than a passing reference.
Chapter 6: Information and knowledge in the learning society The discussion here takes as its starting point that provision of information has changed in recent years, and how the role of the reference and information aspect of public libraries has come under threat.
The author points out that the obsession with lending (and lending figures) has not helped reference services to develop sufficiently to cope with the new information landscapes.
In a brief but passionate defence of reference provision, O’Beirne argues that they are struggling not because they are no longer necessary, but because information itself – and the way we use it – has changed.
This chapter articulates concisely one of the main dilemmas the profession faces today: if we no longer need to be the ‘intermediary’ to information, what is our role?
It proposes that the answer lies in facilitating learning or the ‘effective’ retrieval of information, rather than just retrieval; in short, Information Literacy (IL): Reference libraries should not be in decline, they should in fact be the learning engines of our society fuelled by the information explosion, tended by the information professional and stoked by an aggressive agenda of social inclusion and citizenship to bridge the digital divide.
(p.116) Satisfyingly, the author then proceeds to discuss the relationship (or difference) between information and knowledge – or, as this reviewer prefers to think of the latter term, wisdom – and highlights the way libraries can reflect the new learning: inter-textuality, imaginative literature as a learning tool, the reference interview as opening a ‘vista of possibilities’.
Everything comes round to IL again, which is ‘the key to unlocking the…library’ and ‘lays the foundation for wider engagement in society’.
Chapter 7: Technology for learning and citizenship Libraries’ adoption of technology has always been a topic of discussion and debate.
Here, the discussion shifts its attention, helpfully, onto the ‘motivation and impact of technology use.’ Having established in Chapter 6 that Information Literacy is the key, we here have a discussion of what it might mean to the public library.
An important difference in the public library sector is the random, informal nature of many readers’ learning.
The concept of ‘information creation literacy’ as potentially more important in the future than ‘information retrieval literacy’ is introduced.
Whilst this reviewer would never deny that ‘production’ is as important as any other pillar of Information Literacy, it could be argued that the concept is already inherent in the standard definition.
Granted, however, that it may be useful to loosen the definition of ‘production’ to accommodate the informality of the public library setting.
It is gently argued that public library staff might consider adopting a similar strategy to academic and college librarians, in taking on a clear role in ‘teaching’ IL – rather than guardians of knowledge, we should be guides.
Echoing back to the idea of an engaged citizen also being an information-literate one, O’Beirne points out that libraries can help avoid citizens seeking ‘moral direction’ from the banality of popular culture by facilitating access to our cultural and intellectual heritage.
There follows a real-life example from O’Berine’s experience – Pop-I [3] – which, appropriately enough was a training tool for library staff in the importance of IL.
This leads on to a valuable discussion on the use of Virtual Learning Environments, in which stress is placed on the importance of having a strategic rationale and purpose in the adoption of new technologies.
This is indeed a valuable point, well made.
The second real-life example in this chapter picks up the idea of ‘production’ – or user/learner-generated content – and draws lessons from the ‘Shipley Communities Online’ community network.
The great success of this was the birth of an organically grown, ‘bottom-up’ network of information, which had as its major by-product a collaborative learning function for those involved.
Chapter 8: Looking to the future The (perhaps slightly too lengthy) concluding chapter reminds us that libraries in 1850 were explicitly about informal learning.
Libraries have now lost this focus through their ‘pursuit of the popular’, and O’Beirne sets out a valid argument to the effect that this focus on entertainment is no longer defensible.
In chapter 8 he adds that for libraries to survive the change in emphasis, realigning everyone’s professional priorities through investment in retraining staff is essential.
A brief consideration of how information may look in the future follows, including the suggestion that even reading fiction will become a multi-media experience.
Whilst this is becoming a topic of regular discussion on arts programmes (especially as the e-book develops its true potential) there is a strong counter-argument that could be made, that audioand visually enhanced, multi-media format ‘books’ are simply not the same imaginative experience as plain text.
O’Beirne seems to imply that reading plain text fiction is a passive experience, rather than an engrossing act which requires intellectual investment and stretches and develops the reader’s imagination and humanity.
Thereafter, a select few other potential developments, within social networking and around the idea of memetics, are touched on, before the argument finally comes back round to the central tenet of the book: libraries should re-focus their priorities on supporting learning ‘by stealth’ (both by individuals and by communities), and invest in training and attracting staff who can act as indispensible guides in the overcrowded multi-media information environment.
Conclusion This book presents a challenge, both to the thinking professional, and the reviewer.
The thrust of it is sound, and the author is careful to anticipate and address potential criticism of his views.
It is the result of many years’ valuable experience and some very thoughtful and constructive reflection on that experience.
The argument it presents is one of the more valuable and useful to public libraries in the current climate.
It crams a wealth of knowledge and experience into some 200 pages.
Whilst the basic argument is simple, it requires a good deal of complex and detailed background, and the author does well to present this as concisely as he does.
There are many places in the text where further elaboration is desirable – or necessary, indeed – but impossible in a book of this length and nature.
It is to be hoped that it will act as a springboard for further research and discussion; likewise that it will spur library managers, professionals and service area directors into refocusing their services – which is urgently and critically necessary.
In the meantime, From Lending to Learning is a boost to our self-confidence, a call to arms, and a coherent defence of the importance of public libraries.
It should be read by current professionals, library managers and students on LIS courses everywhere.
References The modernisation review of public libraries: A policy statement, March 2010.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/consultations/6752.aspx Public Libraries Act 1850, Wikipedia: 17 September 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850 PoP-i Project Web site http://www.bradlibs.com/intranet/POPi_testOneRO/ProjectWelcomePage.htm Author Details Tim Davies Librarian North Lincolnshire Library & Information Services UK Email: tim.davies@northlincs.gov.uk Web site: http://www.northlincs.gov.uk/libraries Tim Davies is a librarian with North Lincolnshire Council.
With a colleague he leads on the service’s engagement with community learning, as well as taking responsibility for initiatives around health information (especially mental health), economic development, housing and digital exclusion.
He does his fair share of reference and enquiry work, and can often be found leading local history and storytelling walks around the area.
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Locating Image Presentation Technology Within Pedagogic Practice Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Locating Image Presentation Technology Within Pedagogic Practice Buzz data software wiki database portfolio portal archives safari accessibility browser blog video flickr cataloguing windows multimedia adobe e-learning flash photoshop vle usb podcast youtube facebook screencast ipad elluminate gotomeeting html5 research standards Citation BibTex RIS Marie-Therese Gramstadt contextualises image presentation technology and methods within a pedagogic framework for the visual arts.
This article presents data gathered through a University for the Creative Arts Learning and Teaching Research Grant (2009-2010); including a study of existing image presentation tools, both digital and non-digital; and analysis of data from four interviews and an online questionnaire.
The aim of the research was to look afresh at available technology from the point of view of a lecturer in the visual arts, and to use the information gathered to look more critically at the available technology.
Research Methodology I was inspired by a presentation given by Pauline Ridley entitled Teaching with images at the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) Digital Imagery seminar [1].
Pauline described different methods employed in the teaching of art history, from the printed reproductions of artworks, to dual slide projection, and more recent Web 2.0 methods.
My own experience as both learner and presenter is very much confined to Microsoft PowerPoint and postgraduate experience of art history slide lectures.
However the experience of engaging with the community through VADS projects, such as PICTIVA (2000-2002) [2], the Digital Picture (2005) [3], and of working as a Slide Librarian and Image Library Project Manager at the National Gallery, London (2007-2008) has led me to the following research questions: is PowerPoint a suitable presentation technology for teaching with images; are there other presentation technologies available better suited to teaching with images; or are there better methods for using PowerPoint in teaching with images.
The research methods included a literature review, testing of available software, four one-hour recorded interviews, and an online questionnaire.
The participants were hand-selected for the interviews: Jules Findley, Course Leader for Fashion Promotion and Imaging at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom campus, was chosen because she had previously interacted with VADS through the JISC-funded Enhancing VADS project so the author was already aware of her innovative teaching practice; Rosie Gunn, Senior Lecturer in Digital Film and Screen Art at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham Campus, was recommended by Learning and Teaching colleagues at the University; Carol Plazzotta, Myojin Curator of Italian Painting 1500-1600 at the National Gallery, London, was known to the author through previous work at the Gallery, when the limitations with using PowerPoint for images had been discussed [4]; and Pauline Ridley, Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, and Learning Area Coordinator for Visual Practices, part of the LearnHigher Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), was known to the author through conversations held at the VADS Digital Imagery seminars.
The interview participants were asked open questions with the objective of gathering qualitative data on their background, including their own experience as students, their use of presentation software, and their innovative teaching practice.
The questionnaire Locating innovative image presentation technology within existing visual pedagogic practice was an online survey targeted at academic and support staff in the UK Arts Higher Education sector.
There were 58 responses to the 150 individual targeted emails.
The individuals and JISCMail lists targeted were chosen on the basis of their interest in the topic, for example the involvement in similar projects.
There were no issues in editing the survey responses since the survey could not be submitted unless the respondent had completed every question, and the mandatory responses were pre-coded within the system.
The respondents had the option to remain anonymous if preferred.
The survey included some open discursive questions which were followed up, thereby gathering more qualitative data to supplement the quantitative data of the rest of the survey.
Non-digital Approaches to Teaching with Images Pedagogy before Technology Traditional methods of teaching with images are still relevant in today’s digital environment, both in terms of reflecting on teaching practice putting ‘pedagogy before technology’ [5][6], and in providing a richer and more haptic learning experience for the students.
In Beyond the Image Machine (2004) [7], a series of sensory explorations of the image through media experiences, Tomas writes: ‘… touch can link domains of knowledge, practices, and technologies… This is especially true when one considers the body and its sensory apparatus in relation to technologies of transportation and communication.’ Jules Findley described the way that she was taught as a student; it was about process: ‘how to do something with an outcome… printmaking, sewing… doing and making… looking at fabric and being able to touch and feel things…’ There is an apparent lack of haptic literacy with the so-called digital generation who have grown up with technology in the home, and with digital whiteboards from primary school upwards.
There has been discussion on the way that students’ experience of the digital does not necessarily mean they are confident users of digital technology within a Higher Education context, nor are they aware of issues such as visual plagiarism [8].
The Visual Practices Learn Higher Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) at the University of Brighton was funded (2005-2010) to provide resources for staff and students of all disciplines, to aid them in ‘the development of visual, spatial and tactile knowledge and skills’ [9], dealing with issues such as visual literacy, visual plagiarism, and producing effective oral presentations [10].
Although these issues relate directly to arts education, increasingly these skills are being seen as relevant to all disciplines and highlighted in Web sites such as Presentation Zen [11] Garr Reynold’s blog on improving professional presentation design, and generally in business to improve communication through visual means to get the message across more effectively [12].
The Tactile Experience of Learning and Teaching The interview participants were asked about their experience both of attending and giving slide lectures in order to try and understand the background to their current teaching practice.
The set-up of a slide lecture theatre is more dramatic in that it requires complete darkness, the equipment is normally more pronounced in terms of noise and the drama of ‘next slide’.
Slides are physical objects that can be handled.
Pauline Ridley described the physical process of putting together a slide lecture as a history of art tutor in the early 1980s: ‘you would visit the Slide Library, gather all the images that you thought might be relevant for the lecture, put them on a light box, move them around, select and discard, until you had it down to about 70 images for a one hour lecture‘ Pauline spoke about the value, for students then and now, of using printed images so the students could physically arrange them in compare-and-contrast exercises.
She also discussed how she would currently approach teaching with images with PowerPoint: ‘I would have a PowerPoint presentation with images and text which would be interspersed with practical activities… I wouldn’t … bombard them with 70 images in 60 minutes.
I would be much more selective… and let the students do something with them rather than just engage passively with them…‘ Only one person out of the 58 respondents to the Locating innovative image presentation technology survey reported using a non-digital method of presentation.
However the use of object-based, or hands-on, teaching is known to be beneficial for students [13].
Professor Val Williams, Director of the University of the Arts London Photography and the Archive Research Centre based at the London College of Communication, uses PowerPoint for presentations; but for smaller groups, she increasingly uses objects such as books, catalogues and magazines, which she finds more flexible than PowerPoint [14].
At the UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) Summer Symposium in June, participants were asked not to use PowerPoint at all; Professor Williams commented that this was very successful partly due to the resulting variety of presentations, for example some UAL PhD students held up prints and talked about them.
Linear Digital Presentation Tools Digital Slide Tools Microsoft’s PowerPoint, Apple’s Keynote, and many other presentation programmes were developed as the digital equivalent of slides; the terminology remains in the way each screen is described as a ‘slide’.
This terminology also extends to many other online tools such as Slide [15], in Facebook and other social networking sites; and to SlideShow [16] and SlideShare [17], both used for depositing and sharing presentations via the Internet.
Slide lectures can be a positive experience due to the quality of teaching [18], but Jules Findley summed up the passive quality of slide teaching in her experience as a student: ‘…that atmosphere of darkness, the projector going… and then suddenly you’re asleep, you pick up every tenth word, every three hundredth word, and you’re gone.’ This method of presenting has also transferred to PowerPoint, with the well-known phrase ‘Death by PowerPoint’ [19]; and lecturing, as opposed to presenting, as a teaching method has itself been discussed as a passive experience for the learner [20].
Techniques such as Pecha Kucha [21] can be used to avoid ‘Death by PowerPoint’, since the method is to show twenty images in twenty seconds, and therefore focuses on the visual impact of the presentation.
There have been attempts to replicate some of the functionality of slide lecturing digitally, for example the way that many image sites offer an online light box functionality to collect digital images in groups.
VADS began to offer this facility through the PICTIVA Project [22].
There are also a number of programmes available through image subscription services such as ARTstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) [23], Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) viewer [24], and Bridgeman Education’s slide show tool [25].
They offer functionality such as zooming and panning images, as well as, more easily than PowerPoint, fitting two, three or four images on the screen; the focus is on the image rather than all the additional features provided in PowerPoint.
There are also many image management systems and image viewers that offer ways to view your collection of images, with or without captions, such as ACDSee Photo Manager [26], Picasa [27], Flickr [28], IIPImage [29], IrfanView [30], XnView [31], although these are primarily designed for photographers or the home market they can be adapted for use in education [32].
‘PowerPoint corrupts absolutely’ Edward Tufte’s 2003 WIRED magazine article PowerPoint is evil (‘Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely’) argued the case against PowerPoint due to its didactic nature, whilst the case for PowerPoint was argued by David Byrne, an artist making creative use of PowerPoint [33].
The issue is not the tool but the method; another possibility is to use PowerPoint to build up a series of layers on a single slide.
Rosie Gunn spoke about using PowerPoint to display images, but also using many other approaches in her teaching including: presenting with Web sites, showing moving image files, using social bookmarking Web site delicious to build up information for students through their myUCA interface [34], teaching within software programmes, and demoing software executables on obsolete machinery.
One of the positive aspects of PowerPoint is in its ubiquity; the fact that it is compatible with so many systems including classroom software and hardware, screen-casting software, it can incorporate audio and moving images, and it can be used to create learning objects or even artworks.
In the Locating innovative image presentation technology survey, 96.5% of respondents use PowerPoint, and 87.5 % of those, do so on a PC with Microsoft Windows operating system.
However it was interesting that 32% of respondents also use PowerPoint on a Mac or other operating system.
PowerPoint seems to be favoured due to its compatibility at lecture venues, so that even though that all four of the interview respondents also had Macs in addition to a PC, they favoured PowerPoint over Keynote for this reason.
For example the Macs in the University for the Creative Arts also have Microsoft Office installed as standard [35].
Respondents mostly found basic training in PowerPoint to be non-essential (66%), although 70% would find advanced training useful or even essential.
Similarly, respondents were interested in ‘compare-and-contrast’ and ‘pan-and-zoom’ features to be made more easily available (82%), and were interested in being able to edit images from within PowerPoint (82%).
At time of writing PowerPoint has improved its image editing features and so this request from respondents may in fact be an issue to do with training or upgrading to newer versions of PowerPoint.
Although it is possible to use PowerPoint to compare or contrast images by adding multiple images to a slide, this can be clumsy and if the slide layouts provided are not suitable, may involve the creation of custom slide layouts [36].
It is also possible to use custom animation features to set up ‘pan and zoom’, however this is time-consuming and the results are not always impressive [37].
PowerPoint Extensions and Developments The latest release of PowerPoint 2010 includes improvements to the visual interface more suited to flashy business presentations and creative school-children than educational usage.
However from version 2007 onwards, PowerPoint’s tabs feature (the ribbon) enables users to apply add-ons such as Fotolia [38], and Microsoft Office Labs’ pptPlex [39].
Although pptPlex is not supported, it shows that PowerPoint does have a lot of potential to be developed further.
If pptPlex were supported by PowerPoint, this would provide a less linear presentation style.
Other tools which can currently be used as add-ons to PowerPoint include electronic voting systems or Clickers, which are known to increase student engagement and generate useful feedback [40].
Respondents to the survey commented on the benefits of having everything online or centrally located, and Windows Live Messenger’s feature of linking all social networking accounts together with one central account [41], as well as the online access to software programs such as PowerPoint [42], does meet some of these criteria.
The interview participants were asked for feedback on their usage of PowerPoint.
Rosie Gunn would like PowerPoint to allow direct links to executable files, to avoid having to switch between PowerPoint and the file on the desktop; use of multi-screens (we discussed this could be achieved with the use of whiteboards or other technology); and better support for moving image files, including more file formats and a more intuitive interface.
Rosie, and respondents to the Locating innovative image presentation technology survey, agreed that PowerPoint is not ideally suited to presenting about Web resources; although it is possible to cross between PowerPoint and an Internet browser, or to use screenshots, the transition would be improved if the Web sites could be shown within the PowerPoint screen.
This is not possible even in the online version of PowerPoint.
Non-linear Digital Presentation Tools Horses for Courses ‘Horses for courses’ refers to a comment by Andrew Worth, Learning Design Advisor at the School of Services Management, Bournemouth University [43] regarding his pedagogic use of presentation technology: ‘it is really starting to get down to horses for courses, who is the audience, what is the message, and will the tool get in the way of the message‘ The lecture has been presented as having a limited role in bringing about learning; it is likely to become one component, amongst many, in a portfolio of teacher roles [44].
Andrew Worth uses PowerPoint for quick and short, or business presentations, which fits with Bligh’s research into the method of lecturing as primarily suitable for only transmitting information [45].
Andrew also mentioned colleagues presenting using stand-alone video, podcasts, blogs, wikis, Flickr, Picasa, and Google Maps; this also fits with practice at the University for the Creative Arts and elsewhere.
Mind-mapping Software Mind-mapping software, which supports the visual representation of concepts and ideas and the relationships between them, is gaining popularity as both a teaching tool and for artist practitioners.
One example of mind-mapping software is MindManager [46]; this is compatible with Microsoft Office and enables links to be drawn between Web sites and additional documents within the programme.
Ron Sakaguchi, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at Oregon Health & Science University, introduced mind-mapping to faculty teaching which received positive feedback from the students [47]: ‘Sakaguchi says.
“Students commented that the maps were a powerful learning tool, and helpful in understanding and organizing the class material.” Each lecture is summarized in a one-page view, and twice during each term, he consolidates the mind maps and creates a summary of the previous lectures.‘ The students were also encouraged to develop their own mind maps.
The Locating Image Presentation survey included several responses from the University for the Creative Arts with staff using Prezi [48]; this supports image, video and PDF files in a mind map format.
In the survey one of the disadvantages mentioned is that Prezi was too time-consuming to learn to use properly, although another respondent liked the way the presentation only had to be updated in one place.
Classroom Software and Hardware Classroom and Lecture Theatre Hardware In the survey 70% of respondents, who regularly gave presentations, would like more training or support to use hardware such as audio recording equipment, smart boards, and interactive whiteboards.
Jules Findley uses whiteboard technology in her current teaching practice.
Jules introduced it into the department as most of her students have been brought up on interactive whiteboards since primary school, and also because it can be used like a ‘living Photoshop’.
Jules uses it to ensure the students have to be pro-active, for example asking them to hide or reveal layers, getting students to draw on it.
It is also useful in a review or revision session.
The students respond very positively to this method.
Jules described that with PowerPoint: ‘the students just go into PowerPoint mode, which actually turns them off learning.
The students are passively listening to a PowerPoint presentation without really analysing or thinking through their learning.
Our industry is vocational which includes tacit learning.
Students learn more effectively with tangible outcomes, doing much more process.
PowerPoint does not keep our students engaged.’ The University for the Creative Arts’ Careers Service have been trialling Wimba Classroom software.
I had an opportunity to view a demo of the software in March and noted the important role that the hardware has to play in ensuring the best is made of classroom software in order to provide high-quality multimedia content [49].
The benefit of the integration with Blackboard is that students would be able to access content in one course-related area.
Penny Burden, Learning and Teaching Developer at the University for the Creative Arts, previously Head of Skills and Personal Development at the University of Surrey, was responsible for setting up SPLASH, the Student Personal Learning and Study Hub, which includes hardware such as: Sympodium computers (now called SMART Podium interactive pen displays), that let you write on the screen and also project onto a screen behind you; and a wall covered in dry-erase technology like a giant whiteboard.
A visit was made to the University of Surrey, which enabled the author to appreciate the layout of the SPLASH space, including how this has been structured to suit a variety of teaching approaches [50].
The hardware used by the University included a computer on an armature to enable the sharing of the physical computer between a group of students wishing to collaborate on one piece of work.
Another example of effective use of hardware is at the University of Sheffield’s Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS), where they use huddleboards (lightweight whiteboards) to ‘record discussions, plan activities and map out knowledge’.
The boards can then be placed underneath a CopyCam which will take a digital picture that can be saved and imported into a PowerPoint or used elsewhere.
Classroom Software and Distance or Blended Learning The JISC Responding to Learners report [51] talks about the benefits of providing online learning materials for students: ‘For some, such as learners with disabilities, digital materials that they can personalise are essential to their participation in learning.’ One approach is to use screen-casting software; another is to use a more integrated complete package such as Wimba Classroom [52].
Adobe Connect [53], which replaces Macromedia Breeze, is an online Web conferencing tool based on the ubiquitous Flash Player, thereby avoiding the need to download the plugins usually associated with other tools such as GoToMeeting [54] or Elluminate [55].
However Adobe Connect, unlike Wimba Classroom, does not integrate fully into a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
There are also free tools available in order to create learning objects, such as the GLO Maker authoring tool (Generative Learning Object Maker) which focuses on the pedagogic design of the content.
The user plans their structure based on one of the available pedagogic patterns or can use a freestyle mode, then each screen can be created and content added [56].
Screen-casting Software One of the benefits of PowerPoint is that it can be used as a standalone learning object, or made available for reference purposes after a teaching session.
However the addition of audio or additional resources through screen capture tools, or screen-casting software can enrich the user experience.
JISC Digital Media have published a guide to free online screencasting tools including: Screen Toaster, Screencast-o-Matic, and Screenr [57].
Other freely available tools include: CamStudio [58], and Wink [59].
Kristy Widdicombe, Faculty Librarian for Fashion and Management at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom Campus, used Adobe Presenter with Adobe Captivate last year to produce a learning and teaching object on research as part of a University-funded Learning and Teaching research grant [60].
One of the benefits with Adobe Presenter is the way it integrates into PowerPoint enabling the creation of learning objects seamlessly from a tab within PowerPoint.
Although the software can be intuitive to use, the creating of screen-casts and other multi-media learning objects does rely on new skill sets such as the use of hardware, synchronising the audio with the visual content, and providing features to improve accessibility such as transcripts.
iPad as a Teaching and Presentation Tool Since the iPad was announced at an Apple press conference in January, there has been discussion on its use in education as both an artist’s canvas and a presentation tool.
The iPad can be used with Bluetooth-enabled devices such as a keyboard, or connected via an iPad keyboard dock USB cable to a TV, stereo, or video projector [61].
However, at time of writing, it is not possible to project Web sites, and projecting content relies on downloading the right apps in order to view certain content [62]: ‘The iPad will connect to a projector, but content is only visible in certain applications.
At the moment, only: * Keynote * Photos * Videos (non-DRMed) * YouTube * Safari (html5 video only) will show on a projector.’ Paul Ohm, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School talks about using an iPad in his teaching for drawing diagrams and projecting mind-maps [63]: ‘Using a tablet is far, far better than using a chalkboard [or whiteboard] –I get to face the class as I write, I don’t end up with chalk dust all over my clothes, the students can see what I’m writing without straining–no ghost images from the prior class; no weird lighting days–and they get to keep a copy of my notes for later study.’ A recent event held at the Edinburgh College of Art included a discussion on the iPad as a new canvas for artists and its role within the teaching of art and design [64].
Conclusion Teachers and lecturers at the University for the Creative Arts, and other institutions, are embracing new technology in all its forms with a view to improving the learning experience for students from all backgrounds and abilities.
Whilst there are many exciting developments in digital technology and e-learning, the benefits of physical objects and face-to-face sessions remain significant to the overall experience.
By using advanced software and hardware technologies it is possible to be more inclusive and interactive whilst still putting pedagogy before technology.
The role of learning technologists is central to the new developments, although academics are also leading the way in innovation.
Recommendations from this research grant are: to continue putting pedagogy before technology; to try and find new ways of using PowerPoint as a presentation tool (especially because it is so well supported in institutions and elsewhere); and to keep informed of new technologies, such as the iPad, with a view to their potential use in education.
Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the support I have received during my research grant from Karen Paton, the University for the Creative Art’s Academic Developer in Learning and Teaching Research.
I would also like to thank all the contributors to the research project including: Professor Val Williams, Director of the University of the Arts London Photography and the Archive Research Centre based at the London College of Communication; Andrew Worth, Learning Design Advisor at the School of Services Management, Bournemouth University; Penny Burden, Learning and Teaching Developer at the University for the Creative Arts; Kristy Widdicombe, Faculty Librarian for Fashion and Management at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom Campus; and in particular the four interview participants: Jules Findley, Course Leader for Fashion Promotion and Imaging at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom campus; Rosie Gunn, Senior Lecturer in Digital Film and Screen Art at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham Campus; Carol Plazzotta, Myojin Curator of Italian Painting 1500-1600 at the National Gallery, London; and Pauline Ridley, Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, and Learning Area Coordinator for Visual Practices, part of the LearnHigher Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL).
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http://www.brunel.ac.uk/learnhigher/giving-oral-presentations/designing-visual-aids.shtml Presentation Zen Web site http://www.presentationzen.com/ Morgan, J. and Wetton, P. 1992 (2nd ed.).
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for the Computers in the History of Art conference 2010 http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2010/abstracts/gramstadt.html PowerPoint presentation on ‘Death by PowerPoint’ http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-by-powerpoint Griffin, C. ‘Didacticism: Lectures and lecturing’ pp.73-89 in Jarvis, P. ed.
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Pecha Kucha Web site http://www.pecha-kucha.org/ Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) PICTIVA project http://vads.ac.uk/projects/pictiva/index.html Teaching with Images blog post http://teachingwithimages.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/artstors-public-offline-image-viewer/ MDID Blog http://mdidnews.blogspot.com/ Teaching with Images blog post http://teachingwithimages.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/discount-on-bridgeman-education-subscription/ ACDSee Photo Manager http://www.acdsee.com/ Picasa http://picasa.google.com/ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ IIPImage http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/ IrfanView http://www.irfanview.com/ XnView http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html Use of IrfanView to give a presentation in a museum, discussed on Museums Computer Group jiscmail list, February 2010 under title Stable slideshow application?
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=mcg WIRED, September 2003.
Learning to Love PowerPoint http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.html and PowerPoint is Evil http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html myUCA student portal http://community.ucreative.ac.uk/article/26963/About-myUCA Email communication with the IT department, University for the Creative Arts, 30 September 2010.
Teaching with Images blog post http://teachingwithimages.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/custom-image-slide-layout/ Microsoft Office Web site http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint-help/create-pan-and-zoom-effects-in-powerpoint-HA010232631.aspx Fotolia PowerPoint plugin http://www.fotolia.com/ribbon pptPlex http://www.officelabs.com/pptplex Imperial College, University of London (PDF).
http://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/edudev/public/Clickers.pdf How To Geek blog post on Windows Live Messenger (beta) http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/20774/integrate-social-networks-with-windows-live-messenger-beta/ Microsoft Office Live Workspace (beta) http://workspace.officelive.com/en-GB/ Teaching with Images blog post http://teachingwithimages.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/presentation-technology-horses-for-courses/ Jarvis, P. ‘Didacticism: Lectures and lecturing’ pp.73-89 in Jarvis, P. ed.
2006 (2nd ed.).
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KMWorld.com http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Managing-critical-knowledge-in-higher-education--53578.aspx Prezi http://prezi.com/ Teaching with Images blog post about Wimba Classroom demo.
http://teachingwithimages.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/fashion-promotion-and-imaging/ Teaching with Images blog post http://teachingwithimages.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/splash-university-of-surrey/ JISC Responding to Learners Overview report (PDF) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/lxpoverview.pdf Wimba Classroom http://www.wimba.com/products/wimba_classroom Adobe Connect http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/ GoToMeeting http://www.gotomeeting.co.uk/fec/ Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com/ GLO Maker http://www.glomaker.org/ JISC Digital Media Free Online Screencasting Tools http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/crossmedia/advice/free-online-screencasting-tools/ see also: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/crossmedia/advice/distributing-teaching-presentations/ CamStudio http://camstudio.org/ Wink http://www.debugmode.com/wink/ Teaching with Images blog post http://teachingwithimages.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/fashion-promotion-and-imaging/ J.D.
Biersdorfer with Pogue, D. 2010. iPad the missing manual.
California: O’Reilly Media, Inc. iPad for Edu http://ipad4edu.com/questions/3/can-you-connect-the-ipad-to-a-projector see also: http://ipad4edu.com/questions/273/can-you-connect-an-ipad-to-a-projector-wirelessly-powerpoints-made-on-pc-to-ipad PrawfsBlawg (aka Prawfs.com) http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2010/04/why-i-plan-to-buy-an-ipad-for-teaching-.html Stepping into the Future Free Art & Design Event http://www.rsc-eden.co.uk/events/event_details.asp?eid=105 Author Details Marie-Therese Gramstadt Projects Officer Visual Arts Data Service, a research centre at the University for the Creative Arts Email: mtg@vads.ac.uk Web site: http://www.teachingwithimages.wordpress.com/ Return to top Article Title: “Locating Image Presentation Technology within Pedagogic Practice” Author: Marie-Therese Gramstadt Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/gramstadt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Bring Your Own Policy: Why Accessibility Standards Need to Be Contextually Sensitive Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Bring Your Own Policy: Why Accessibility Standards Need to Be Contextually Sensitive Buzz data mobile software framework usability doi standardisation accessibility browser blog video ead e-learning youtube ict wcag cookie research standards bs8878 Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly, Jonathan Hassell, David Sloan, Dominik Lukeš, E A Draffan and Sarah Lewthwaite argue that rather than having a universal standard for Web accessibility, standardisation of Web accessibility practices and policies needs to be sufficiently flexible to cater for the local context.
Initiatives to enhance Web accessibility have previously focused on the development of guidelines which apply on a global basis.
Legislation at national and international levels increasingly mandate conformance with such guidelines.
However large scale surveys have demonstrated the failure of such approaches to produce any significant impact.
We review previous critiques of the limitations of such approaches and introduces a new scenario – content for people with learning disabilities – in order to illustrate the limitations of resource-based standards.
We describe how BS 8878, a code of practice developed in the UK which provides a standard for the processes used in the development of Web resources, has been deployed in an institutional context.
We conclude by emphasising the importance of standards, especially to support the procurement of goods and services by government bodies.
However rather than standards for describing Web content we argue that standards are needed which can be used across the wide range of uses which are being made of the Web, the variety of user contexts and the differences in interpretations of ‘accessibility’ and ‘disability’, especially across developing and developed countries.
Standardisation at national and international levels tends to focus on resource-based models such as the WCAG, ATAG and UAAG guidelines which comprise the approach to enhancing Web accessibility developed by WAI.
In this approach the emphasis is on conformance with globally agreed technical standards for creating, viewing and describing digital resources.
However despite such standards being well-established and well-known, evidence demonstrates the low level of conformance with such standards [1]: According to the latest report from MeAC (Monitoring eAccessibility in Europe) still less than 10% of all websites in the EU are fully accessible.
The EU appears to regard such evidence as a call for further standardisation based on global standards [2]: The European Commission's proposal for a new Directive aiming at the approximation of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States on the accessibility of websites of public sector bodies.
In this paper we argue that in light of the failure in over a decade in which governments have mandated conformance with global standards there is a need for an alternative approach, which allows for appropriate measures to be implemented which take into account the context of the use of a Web product.
Problems in Mandating Global Accessibility Standards Previous Work The challenges of enhancing accessibility in an e-learning context were initially addressed in 2004 [3], with the limitations of WAI’s global model for enhancing Web accessibility summarised in 2005 [4].
More recently de Santana and de Paula [5] have reported on a study involving Alexa.com’s top 1,000 popular websites and a sample of random 1,000 websites to verify and contrast the conformance of these disjoint sets with WCAG accessibility guidelines.
They reported that only 40 of the 922 (4.34%) popular Web sites had no problems whatsoever and, for the random selection of Web sites the findings were 147 out of 987 web sites (14.89%).
Despite this evidence which suggests that conformance with WCAG guidelines is still not being regarded as important the authors argue that ‘the removal of accessibility barriers is required in order to promote user interface (UI) use’ (our emphasis) and concluded by stating ‘conformance with coding guidelines is not sufficient but is necessary’.
The authors of this paper argue that the evidence of a series of large-scale analyses of WCAG conformance dating back to 2004 [6] demonstrates that other approaches are needed.
Our previous work focused on the limitations of the WAI model of web accessibility in isolation, in areas such as e-learning, highlighted the need for a contextual approach as first proposed in 2006 [7].
Recent WAI activities, such as the e2r activity [8] has highlighted the importance of contextual approaches related to the writing style used in Web resources.
In the next section we use this example to illustrate further the need for contextual approaches to accessibility.
Accessibility Values and Types of Criticism Little critical attention has been given to the values and principles that motivate and critique Global Accessibility Standards.
At present, thinking about web accessibility tends to focus on evaluating technical feasibility, practical applications and operational outcomes; indeed these concerns constitute the latter part of this paper.
However, attention to foundational concepts allow us to gain insights into the efficacy of particular approaches (as expressed in critiques of Universal Design [9]).
From this perspective, Global Accessibility Standards can be viewed as normative; Standards supply one view of acceptable practice, arguably exporting a world-view that could be counter-productive in non-Western local contexts where disability is understood and constituted very differently [10].
Indeed, although anecdotal evidence indicates that (for example in the Middle East and Africa), technical guideline conformance is seen as a means to demonstrate an enlightened approach to supporting disabled people, in line with a desire to improve conformance with the UN Convention on Human Rights, this is arguably a hierarchical political action.
Without context, it cannot fully engage with local knowledge and the reality on the ground.
From this point, many critics have demanded more evidence-based standards this has brought forward a drive towards data collection, through activity such as survey work and web analytics.
However, this has its own practical problems.
It is difficult to ensure international and comparable measures or ensure sufficiently complete data.
Moreover, as with normative and legal approaches, this way forward does not recognise how the process of categorising and sorting (disabled and non-disabled, accessible and non-accessible) shapes thinking about disability and difference itself [11].
It does not easily account for the contingent aspects of disability or grey areas that are context-dependent.
Contextually sensitive approaches allow for disability to be understood as an interaction, not a given property of a product or user.
This situates the user, the developer and the product.
From a theoretical standpoint, embedding a focus that engages local expertise and recognises the socio-cultural arrangement of diverse local contexts is essential to the evaluation of whether Standards represent the most coherent approach to creating accessible experiences with global reach.
As disability studies have shown, ‘there is no neutral language with which to discuss disability’ [12].
Only contextually sensitive approaches can account for the complex power relations that govern who is understood to be disabled and who can and cannot access digital resources, to ensure that those who are most disenfranchised are empowered and enabled online.
We now illustrate the need for context, using the example of simple language, in this case English.
Standards for Simple English Debates over simple English underscore the need for contextuality.
Simple English represents a drive to increase access to content by reducing complexity and ambiguity.
However, these concepts are not straightforward or unambiguous.
The notion of linguistic complexity has been hotly debated for over a century.
It is clear that it involves more than length of words and sentences (the main measures used for automated scores of text readability) or a particular sequence of words (Subject-Verb-Object is often mistakenly quoted as somehow more direct than alternative word orders).
We know that, according to these measures, children acquiring languages more complex than English experience little difficulty, nor do adults have much trouble in processing such structures.
Indeed, sometimes a longer form is better for communication because it provides much needed redundancy in crowded communication channels.
That's why a phone agent will use say 'A as in alpha' rather than just 'a' when spelling a word to provide more context to the customer.
Neither is ambiguity an unquestionable evil.
As any reference dictionary will reveal, on its own, every word in the English language is ambiguous.
Words need context to make any sense.
Context will make it clear what function the word has, which particular sense of the word is being invoked and what intention the speaker has.
And the same applies to phrases, sentences and even whole texts.
Reading Gulliver's Travels is a vastly different experience for a modern child compared to what it would have been for a Whig politician of the 18th century.
The former sees it as a wonderful and imaginative tale to be drawn, the other as vicious satire to be suppressed it is not just the context within the text but also the context outside text, such as the knowledge the reader possesses at the time of reading.
This will often pit the principles of simplicity against each other.
For instance, a speaker of English as an Additional Language is more likely to understand words with Latinate roots than their ‘simpler’ Germanic counterparts.
Thus, ‘frequently’ maybe be more accessible to somebody with limited English than ‘often’.
One suggested method of achieving accessibility of text is ‘being conversational and direct’.
But while ‘I get it’ is simpler than ‘I understand’, it is more ambiguous; and while direct, it is simply not appropriate for most written documents; the type of document being produced may be an equally important aspect of the context as anything else.
It implies an audience, level of formality, expectation of background knowledge, mode of delivery, etc.
‘Exsanguinate’ may be a better choice for a medical paper than ‘bleed out’ but few doctors would choose that kind of language to speak to a patient.
In short, making the content of official documents presented by government or private institutions to the public as understandable as possible is a laudable goal.
But it can only be achieved by understanding the audience, their prior knowledge, the context in which they will be accessing the content, as well as their expectation of what such a communication will look like.
A checklist of ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’ is a part of the process of achieving this, but without being accompanied by educated judgement, it may produce dire results.
Flexible and Contextual Standards The example above illustrates the limitations of standards which aim to mandate a particular approach which is independent of the context of use and the intended purpose of the Web resource.
The purpose of a Web resource has a massive impact on the cost-benefits of making it accessible.
To give an example of an edge-case: the purpose of YouTube is to allow people to share video publicly for the benefit of other people, wherever they may be located.
There are two aspects of this purpose that cause huge problems in terms of accessibility: Compared to the costs of making an image accessible, the costs of enriching a 5-minute video with captions and audio description is currently substantial.
The site owner is not in control of the amount and content of video uploaded to their site, and it is not clear whether it should be the responsibility of YouTube or the people who upload video to add those access services to the video.
The challenge is in developing a standard that enables the great diversity in use cases, context and circumstance to be addressed.
We feel that such standardisation should be based on the standardisations of the processes used in the development and deployment of Web products, rather than the particular technical aspects of the Web products or, in the case of the content, conformance with style guidelines.
The BS 8878 Code of Practice About BS 8878 BS 8878 Web Accessibility Code of Practice [13] is a process-oriented standard created in the UK to allow organisations to: understand why digital inclusion and accessibility makes good business sense; embed inclusion responsibility strategically across key job-roles, and into key policies; follow a user-centred production process which identifies the key decisions which affect inclusion and which are taken in a Web product’s lifecycle; adopt an informed way of making these decisions; adopt a way of documenting these decisions to provide a log for assessing accessibility risk and proving conformance with BS 8878; and synchronise these activities with similar processes for the inclusive design of non-digital products.
BS 8878 adds a framework to technical accessibility guidelines like WCAG 2.0 to ensure all aspects of an organisation’s activities which impact inclusion are covered.
These include: procurement and selection of production tools and CMSs; outsourcing production to third-parties; project management of inclusive production; assessment of accessibility risk and impact on budgets; selection of the more effective testing methodologies to assure accessibility alongside usability, and governance of inclusion across a programme of Web production projects.
At its heart, BS 8878 encourages organisations to make all accessibility decisions based on the purpose of their product, its specific audiences, and a clear, researched understanding of the contexts in which those audiences will use the product.
In the light of this research, organisations can then make high-level decisions on the overall degree of accessibility they wish the product to have, and more detailed decisions on the accessibility of user journeys to each of its goals based on the relative importance of the goals and the cost-benefits of making it accessible to that degree.
From there organisations are advised on the relative cost-benefits of different testing methodologies for them to use across the lifetime of the product to assure themselves that they have achieved the degree of accessibility they were aiming for.
The Benefits of a Flexible Approach Accessibility decisions are rarely made in a vacuum – with fixed project budgets and deadlines, most decisions are trade-offs of value between different users and parts of the product.
Time spent on making a media player accessible may be time deprived from finessing information structures for navigation.
Money spent on WCAG 2.0 AA auditing may be money deprived from testing the usability of the product with real people.
Money spent on adding captions to a video to help people with hearing impairments will be money deprived from adding audio description to help people with visual impairments.
BS 8878’s focus on the specific purpose, audiences, and context of the product being created helps Web site production teams to make these tough decisions, balancing the relative needs of different groups of (disabled and non-disabled) users from different parts of the product.
It prevents a ‘cookie cutter’ approach to accessibility, allowing accessibility decisions made in the creation of an online game-based site for 5-year-olds to be different from decisions made in the creation of a site to help older people appreciate Shakespeare.
It also enables up-to-the-minute changes in the context in which people use Web sites to be taken into account in decision making.
BS 8878’s process-based approach allows organisations to make sensible decisions about where to prioritise their accessibility time across mobile (browser and app), tablet and desktop versions of their product, and points to accessibility standards that can be used to help accessibility on each.
Experiences In Using BS 8878 As part of the process of updating the Web services throughout the University of Southampton, the Web4All Project [14] (see Figure 1) was established with the goal of embedding accessibility processes throughout the lifecycle of university Web products.
Figure 1: The Web 4 All Web site The 16 steps in BS8878 were grouped into sections that could be completed in stages, allowing for an agile and iterative process of user-centred design [15].
Contact with the content manager is the beginning of the user requirements phase (steps 1-6).
This is followed by an analysis of those requirements and then the allocation of team members to take the process through from steps 7-12.
Finally the production team, who have been liaising with the content manager, take on the next phase.
This sounds simple, but universities are having to accept change and increased constraints, with a difficult economic climate and an ever-widening target audience.
They require outward-facing Web services marketing ‘products’ in a similar fashion to commercial companies and yet they need to maintain academic rigour in terms of information provision.
Their Web services also have to attend to the inward-facing requirements of those working and studying within an online administrative, teaching and learning environment that hosts an enormous range of materials.
BS 8878 sets out examples for ‘common degrees of user-experience for different user groups and goals’ under the headings of ‘technically accessible, usable and satisfying’ for example, screen reader users must be able to reach the Web site, then read and navigate their way around in an enjoyable manner.
However, multicultural European-based organisations may also have to accept an increase in imagery and use of videos in order to engage those from Asian and Middle Eastern nations who are more used to visual interpretations of information [16].
Audio-visual materials with captioning and transcripts have also been shown to benefit many students but there is a cost factor [17].
These requirements must be there at the outset, along with the acknowledgement of an increased use of massive open and online course materials with their ‘pick-and-mix’ offerings from different organisations, countries and cultures.
Steps 1-6 are becoming more exacting and it is tougher to complete steps 7-12 under time constraints, not forgetting that responsive design and production needs to cater for accessibility in its widest sense, so that consumption on desktop and portable technologies is a satisfying experience.
The Need for International Standardisation We live in a global world where organisations that own Web sites are increasingly multi-national, and the nationality of the components and suppliers they use to build their Web sites is not something they wish to constrain them.
This ability to choose tools and suppliers from anywhere on the planet frees organisations to make decisions based on suitability of the tool rather than nationality of the supplier.
But this freedom also comes with hidden complications: what Standards did the supplier use to create the tool?
Was it built to the Dutch accessibility standards?
Does it have a Section 508 VPAT?
What level of accreditation did it achieve in the Hong Kong Web Accessibility Recognition Scheme?
To meet these real-world needs, proposals have been made that accessibility standards should be harmonised globally.
The proposed EU legislation [2] is one of a series of moves by cross-national organisations and companies producing tools to establish a common standard for accessibility, so companies can sell products worldwide without needing to modify them for different national standards.
The benefit for organisations monitoring or governing accessibility is a single Standard against which to monitor sites in all the countries in which they operate.
The benefits of internationalisaton are also borne out by case studies of the use of BS 8878 in organisations in the UK (e.g.
see [18]).
While Web site owners have found that BS 8878 provides them and their suppliers with a better framework than WCAG for understanding the importance of accessibility within the context of the project's user experience, leading to clear communication as well as cost and time efficiencies, the lack of international knowledge of BS 8878 compared to WCAG means that the standard needs to be introduced before it can be used.
Calls for the internationalisation of BS 8878 as an accessibility process standard to sit alongside the already internationalised WCAG 2.0 (ISO/IEC 40500:2012) have been made as far back as February 2011, and moves in this direction are expected in 2013.
What Next?
The need to provide support for all stakeholders involved in the production of Web resources, in helping them ensure these resources are as accessible as possible to their target audience, requires that global standards for accessibility strike a balance between technical accessibility of a web product and the quality of the process that was undertaken to create that product.
There are important and valid reasons for standardisation of measures of Web resource accessibility; but equally, contextual factors such as geographical location, culture and economic factors as well as purpose, target audience and intended user experience need to be taken into account when measuring resource accessibility.
Kline [19] describes the complexity of the task of promoting accessibility successfully within a large organisational structure.
To recognise this complexity, while encouraging focus on defining, implementing and documenting the process of creating accessible Web content, process standards such as BS8878 need to become more visible and given greater support at a global level.
Complementing this, we need greater sharing of success stories as narratives of problems to be addressed, constraints within which work had to take place, what was done and the measurable evidence of impact in terms of positive experiences of disabled people and of other users.
This recognises the maturation of User Experience as a key quality of an ICT system, and its close relationship to genuinely inclusive design.
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Foucault, M. (1970).
The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
London: Tavistock Publications.
Altman, B., M. (2001).
‘Disability, Definitions, Models, Classification Schemes, and Applications’ IN G. L. Albrecht, K. D. Seelman, M. Bury (Eds.)
Handbook of Disability Studies, Sage: Thousand Oaks.
British Standards International (2010).
BS 8878:2010 Web Accessibility – Code of Practice http://www.bsi-publications.com/ Web 4 All, University of Southampton http://www.southampton.ac.uk/web4all/ S. Chamberlain, H. Sharp, and N. A. M. Maiden (2006).
Towards a framework for integrating agile development and user-centred design.
In Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering: 7th International Conference, XP 2006, Oulu, Finland, pages 143-153.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1007/11774129_15 Würtz, E. (2005).
A cross-cultural analysis of websites from high-context cultures and low-context cultures.
In Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article 13 http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/wuertz.html Murphy, S.K.
(2013).
Oracle justifies the Cost of Captioning and Transcription for On Demand Video Training, 3PlayMedia http://www.3playmedia.com/2013/05/25/oracle-justifies-captioning-transcription-on-demand-training-video/ Case studies of implementing BS 8878 (2012).
Jonathan Hassell, Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/jonathanhassell/case-studies-of-implementing-bs-8878-csun-2012-12145101/31 Kline, J.
(2011).
Strategic Accessibility: Enabling the Organisation.
Live Oak Book Company http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategic-Accessibility-Organization-Jeff-Kline/dp/1936909189/ Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath UK Email: ukwebfocus@gmail.com Web site: http://www.ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/ Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/ Brian Kelly has been UK Web Focus at UKOLN, University of Bath since 1997.
Brian has published a wide range of peer-reviewed papers on Web accessibility since 2004.
Jonathan Hassell London Metropolitan University London UK Email: jonathan@hassellinclusion.com Web site: http://www.hassellinclusion.com/ Professor Jonathan Hassell is lead author of BS8878 the British Web Accessibility Standards that help organisations to embed accessibility competence within their workforce, culture and everyday business processes.
David Sloan School of Computing University of Dundee Dundee UK Email: dsloan@paciellogroup.com Web site: http://www.paciellogroup.com/ Blog: http://58sound.com/ David Sloan is an Accessible User Experience consultant with The Paciello Group.
He previously spent nearly 14 years at the University of Dundee as a researcher, lecturer and advisor in inclusive design and accessibility.
Dominik Lukeš Education and Technology Specialist Dyslexia Action Park House Wick Road Egham Surrey UK Email: DLukes@dyslexiaaction.org.uk Web site: http://www.dyslexiaaction.org.uk/ Dominik Lukeš, Education and Technology Specialist at Dyslexia Action, has published research in the areas of language and education policy.
He has also worked as editor, translator and Web developer.
E A Draffan Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton UK Email: ead@ecs.soton.ac.uk Web site: http://www.soton.ac.uk/ E A Draffan is a Speech and Language Therapist specialising in Dyslexia, as well as an Assistive Technologist and researcher in the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) Group at the University of Southampton with interests in the accessibility of digital publishing, online learning and social networks.
She has published peer-reviewed papers on the subject.
Sarah Lewthwaite King's Learning Institute King's College London London UK Email: sarah.lewthwaite@kcl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ Blog: http://www.slewth.co.uk/ Sarah Lewthwaite is a Research Associate in Student Experience at the King's Learning Institute, King's College London.
Her research interests focus on intersections between disability studies, education, social media and accessibility.
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Why Pay for Content?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Why Pay for Content?
Buzz research Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim reports on the half-day event organised by the Publishers Association at the Faraday Lecture Theatre, Royal Institution, London on 24 June 2009.
This widely publicised half-day event [1] was held at the famous lecture theatre in the Royal Institution that is used for the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures for children.
I remember going to the lectures in 1962; I can’t remember what the topic was, but I remember thinking how large the lecture theatre was.
Well, 47 years later, it seems to have shrunk in size.
At this point, I must declare an interest: I was one of the speakers; readers should bear this fact in mind when evaluating the objectivity of my report.
The event was billed as ‘an open debate’ with the following themes: will all digital content need to be free?
Does the Internet make that inevitable?
How profound is the current revolution in publishing?
Are current experiments just accelerating natural evolution?
Will the established value chains hold up?
How can publishers best serve the academy?
How can the academy best service its students?
How should research outputs be funded?
Will the academic scholarly and professional markets still pay for content?
Why should they?
The afternoon event, ably chaired by David Worlock of Outsell, was divided into two parts; the first focused on teaching and learning – in other words, the academic textbook market; the second, on research and reference, was focused on scholarly journal publishing – and indeed, most speakers (with the honourable exception of Frances Pinter of Bloomsbury Academic) took an even narrower view, focusing on the STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) market.
The whole event was an experiment by the Academic and Professional Division of the Publishers Association [2], one that is likely to be repeated in the future on other broad topics.
The debates took the form of opening remarks by two nominally opposing speakers, some even briefer remarks from some nominated ‘supporters’ of the opening speakers, and the debate was then thrown open to the 70+ audience, most of whom were publishers, though there were a few academics and other hangers-on.
A few of the speakers used PowerPoint; fortunately, those that did kept their PowerPoint to a few telling and often amusing slides.
The speakers in the teaching and learning strand were Liam Earney of JISC Collections, Eric Frank of Flat World Knowledge [3] an organisation whose structure and business plan he outlined and which I strongly commend all readers to learn more about, as this could be the way of the future for e-textbooks Roger Horton of Taylor & Francis and Dominic Knight of Palgrave Macmillan.
Despite the valiant efforts of the Chairman, both sessions turned out to show an emerging consensus rather than vigorous disagreement.
Thus, everyone was agreed that information has to be paid for in some way; the real debate was who would pay and in what way?
In case of the textbook market, it was agreed that costs of textbook production could certainly be cut back in some ways, but that alleged savings through electronic means would not be as great as some have claimed.
There was an interesting analogy with the decision whether to grow your own tomatoes, buy them from Tesco or buy them from Waitrose, though it must be said that the analogy breaks down in many ways – for example, one would never throw a rotten textbook at an unpopular politician, would one?
(OK, maybe the analogy does hold good in that case.)
Listeners were also reminded that, despite well publicised student poverty and their penchant for spending money on drinking and partying, the textbook market is still large and prosperous.
What was accepted in the teaching and learning discussion was that there will be new entrants into the marketplace, competition will get stronger, librarians are likely to cut their book-buying budgets and that not everything that is free is necessarily of low quality.
But no one seemed to be suggesting that the textbook market is doomed.
Moving to research after a tea break, again it was agreed the question as posed was a non-question and that the real question was who should pay for content and in what way?
As with teaching and learning materials, much money is spent on essentials and the potential for savings is not as high as some claim.
There was some debate on the expenditure on peer review, with Nick Baker claiming there was significant expenditure by publishers on this aspect, whilst others claimed this was primarily volunteer effort by unpaid reviewers.
As with the teaching and learning debate, it was agreed that the Web offers many value-added possibilities not hitherto possible.
It was agreed that the idea of free at the point of use was a good one, but that still did not resolve the question of where money should be injected into the system.
Despite my presence on the panel and its topicality and relevance, the famous Houghton Report [4] received only the most passing of mentions.
It was claimed that the customer decides how much should be paid for the content, but this is somewhat misleading, and by and large, the end-user of research materials does not have to pay anything to access it; rather it is the library that pays.
Frances Pinter repeatedly and rightly pointed out that much of the discussion revolved around STM outputs, and that Humanities and Social Sciences required a very different business model because of differences in funding and publishing norms in those subjects.
Most speakers and the audience seemed content with the idea that Open Access would be important, though there was considerable disagreement as to whether it would be ‘Gold’ or ‘Green’ OA that would become the major OA business model.
Overall, the conclusion of the meeting seemed to be that, whilst there would be many high-profile casualties in the scholarly publishing market, and no doubt many acquisitions and mergers, in the end we will see a better, more accessible scholarly publishing environment.
Furthermore, the complex ecology of both funding and scholarly communication practices, often tied to rigid systems established many years ago, means that the transition could be very painful indeed.
There seemed to be no consensus on who should pay for content – though arguably at the end of the day in scholarly publishing it ends up with the taxpayer.
David Prosser had tried to press the idea that the real question should be ‘what access models give the greatest return on investment?’ He was referring to research outputs, but arguably the same question should be posed for teaching and learning materials.
The Web allows all sorts of access models, many with no equivalent in pre-Internet scholarly publishing.
So was the whole event worthwhile?
Other than introducing me to a novel textbook publishing model, the main thing I learned was that publishers are much more accepting of change coming than I had previously perceived, and that they are keen to get involved in experimental approaches to publishing.
The alleged major gap between publishers and their clients does not exist, it seems, in the UK.
References Publishers Asociation: APD conference 2009: Why pay for content http://www.publishers.org.uk/en/academic/apd-conference-2009-why-pay-for-content.cfm The Publishers Association: Academic and professional homepage http://www.publishers.org.uk/en/academic/ Our Story | Flat World Knowledge http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/about John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen, Peter Sheehan, Charles Oppenheim, Anne Morris, Claire Creaser, Helen Greenwood, Mark Summers and Adrian Gourlay, Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits, January 2009 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx Author Details Charles Oppenheim Professor of Information Science Loughborough University Loughborough Leics LE1 3TU UK Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/people/coppenheim.html Return to top Article Title: “Why Pay for Content?” Author: Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/why-pay-for-content-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The Art of Community Building the New Age of Participation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Art of Community Building the New Age of Participation Buzz software digitisation linux research Citation BibTex RIS Ed Bremner reviews a work on building and supporting online communities.
The Preamble I have been building online ‘communities of practice’ for about 10 years now.
Some have thrived and others not.
It started about 10 years ago with the formation of a small association with a shared interest in classic marine heritage.
The community operated entirely online, mainly through a forum and we found that, with very little conscious effort, the community quickly grew and thrived.
It was quickly taken up as an example of good practice and evidence for what could be achieved within a small community with similar interests and aspirations.
Since then, I have been involved in establishing and supporting many other communities, for instance the TASI (now JISC Digital Media) JISCMail list.
This community was much harder to build and although we saw a healthy growth in membership, it was difficult to obtain much feeling of ‘community’ from across a worldwide group of digitisation experts.
But still it was worth it and I felt the sharing of knowledge made the exercise worthwhile.
So much so, that when I moved on from TASI, I continued to subscribe and post to mailing lists simply because I enjoyed being part of their community.
For me, online communities were rosy places, where only good things happened, then somehow the mask slipped a little.
The moderator of a large list suggested in-post that the only reason I posted was as a marketing ploy for my own business and that I just liked the sound of my own voice.
This really made me review my own reasons for spending so much time online as a member of various work and play communities.
More recently, it became obvious that even my original maritime community was not doing so well.
After 10 years of great success, the forum was busier than ever, with a quickly growing membership, but also with an associated wooliness of content.
There were rumbles of discontent, as new members joined and old members left, saying that it had somehow lost its ‘mojo’.
Things were coming to a head.
So it seemed pure serendipity to be given the chance to review Jono Bacon’s book The Art of Community, because if there was a time when I needed it … it was now!
The Introduction This book is designed for those who are actively engaged in establishing or supporting an active online community.
Although the author Jono Bacon is keen to propose that the content is useful to all communities, the focus is still primarily on ‘online communities’ and especially those with very established and professional goals, such as the ‘open-source development communities’ from which he mainly draws his stories and examples.
Therefore, for me, the key initial question for the reader is: ‘what kind of community do you have or wish to create?’.
If you have been tasked with creating or supporting a large professional project with firm established goals, outcomes and milestones, then this book could only be described as quite brilliant; however if your idea of community is more in the lines of that proposed by Etienne Wenger in his book Communities of Practice [1], then much of this book may be considered over-prescriptive for a small self-determining community.
The author, Jono Bacon is an English writer and professional community manager, now living in California who cut his teeth, working within open-source software communities such as Linux, including Ubuntu and other software.
When he proposes a theory on the management of online communities, he can talk with great authority and backs it up with real-world stories from his own experience that gives the book a hard practical edge.
The Style He writes in an upbeat and chatty way, reflecting the approach to communication that he proposes in the book.
However, it still has more of the feeling of a ‘handbook’ or ‘manual’ rather than a ‘good read’.
It can be quite dense at times, to the point of becoming quite verbose.
Although this level of detail was welcome, I still felt that for me, the book may have benefited from being written either as a much shorter and pithier ‘manual’ or as a much more readable ‘discourse’ on the subject by extending its anecdotes for the reader’s enjoyment.
Another drawback of this ‘handbook’ approach was the marked lack of illustrations within the text.
‘Community’ may not be a subject which is easily or naturally explained by images or diagrams; however the book offers very little for those of us with a more ‘visual’ learning or reading style.
The Content The book starts with a general overview of how and why communities work, covering the underlying ‘nuts and bolts’ of what makes them tick with a concentration on a community’s need for communication.
This is followed by his practical suggestions for the basis of a standardised strategy for building a community, including a set of generic objectives and goals that can easily be taken and modified for use by your own community.
The book then considers how to establish and put into place the building blocks required for running a successful community, starting with the required methods and tools for establishing clear and effective communication.
This is followed by a chapter giving practical advice on the processes and tools required to allow the community to grow in a sustainable way.
The next two chapters look at how to build the ‘buzz’ that encourages growth, and then at methods that can be used to provide real evidence of your progress.
Towards the end of the book we find the chapter which many community managers will most probably dive into first – covering the thorny subjects of governance and handling conflict within your community.
For me, this was the chapter, which promised most, but somehow delivered least.
To be fair, it may well be that it would have proved of far more use had I been more involved with the kind of large project-orientated communities with which Bacon works, rather than the much smaller and more self-governing ‘Communities of Practice’ with which I am normally involved.
The final two chapters, provided useful details about creating events for a community and also of how to go about hiring a community manager.
Useful, but again much more relevant to the larger professional project community rather than the smaller Community of Practice.
All in all, the content of this book provides a very good reference on a very wide range of topics about managing an ‘aims-orientated’ professional online community.
It is solidly grounded with sensible and practical advice on how to build online communities, written in a very ‘demonstrative’ way and in many cases you could simple copy and paste the checklists and to-do lists for direct application in your own community.
The Conclusions For me this book went deeper into the nuts and bolts of community management than I have ever wished to go, providing explanations to some of the things that I have learnt by trial and error.
It gave me guidance and clues to challenges I have yet to face… and yet for all of that, I still felt that it somehow missed the real nub of the question of what makes one community thrive and leaves another still-born.
It was as if you were being given all the words but left to write your own poetry.
In the end, this book is undeniably well constructed, full of useful information and written in an entertaining way by someone who truly believes in the power of ‘community’ and knows how to harness it; but I suspect that the core skills for community building are not those that are easily written or taught, but are the soft ‘people’ skills that are common to practitioners at the centre of all thriving communities.
References Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity.
1998.
Cambridge University Press.
Author Details Ed Bremner Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.bremner@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice)” Author: Ed Bremner Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/bremner-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Social Media Librarianship in Academic Libraries: Optimizing Trends for Real-Time User Engagement through Digital Billboards Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Social Media Librarianship in Academic Libraries: Optimizing Trends for Real-Time User Engagement through Digital Billboards Citation BibTex RIS Prince Jacon Igwe discusses the role of a Social Media Librarian in academic libraries, and presents an innovative use of digital billboards to promote the library's and institution's work whilst increasing engagement with students, academics and the public.
Abstract Academic libraries across the world are steadily incorporating social media as means to achieving their primary concern of supporting teaching and research in their respective higher institutions.
Yet, there appears to be little concern for constant and instant conversation with users on these platforms.
As a remedy, this paper makes a case for social media librarianship whereby a dedicated librarian is given the mandate of handling the social media platforms as their primary duty.
The paper discusses the need for the social media librarian to take advantage of what is trending on social media as a way of effecting greater user engagement and consequently achieving intellectual stimulation in the campus.
As a boost, the author draws on the potentials of digital billboards installed across the campus on which posts from the social media librarian and their conversation with library users are displayed live and publicly to foster interaction among the campus community.
The implications of this are also considered, in terms of professionalism, technicality and finance.
Introduction Technology is an ever-evolving phenomenon.
It changes with time, people and needs.
As new technology comes up it becomes apparent to sideline old ones.
This is what is attainable in the information technology of the internet which has evolved into what O’Reilly (2005) called Web 2.0 – a platform that enables digital collaboration and sharing.
As an institution that constantly seeks out technologies which it can utilize for greater relevance, the library has become some sort of melting point for a variety of Web 2.0 functionalities.
We continue to see the librarians’ engagement with these functionalities, the social media being one of them.
Hence, this article is a reflection on social media librarianship.
The specific objective of the paper is to present the main roles of the social media librarian (SML) as someone who sees a potential to market the academic library and its resources by leveraging on trending topics on social media and incorporating the digital billboard into making the library more visible through the social media.
Conceptual Definitions Mon (2015) explains that the term ‘social media’ envisions a new type of media that is shared and participatory in nature, involving others in the information lifecycle of creation, organization, sharing, finding, and use.
Information being the watchword is shared in such media as audio, image, video or a combination of these, also known as multimedia.
It is central to the building of the social media community which a user is a part of.
Information might not be the only reason for a user’s participation in social media.
The digital content seen on social media is also created and shared for eliciting reactions.
Social media tools may differ in utility, interface, and application, but each supports collaboration and sharing where everybody and anybody can share anything, anywhere, anytime (Joosten, 2012).
Examples include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WeChat, Google+, Reddit, LinkedIn, QZone, etc.
The popularity of these social media tools varies from one country to another.
For example, Instagram is the most popular social media tool in countries such as Botswana, Namibia, and Iran, but in New Zealand, Australia and Norway Reddit is at the peak (Vincos, 2017).
In most social media sites today, information syndication, sharing, reuse, or remixing activities by users (Farkas, 2007) result in the categorization of content into trends.
Trends or trending topics are subjects that experience a surge in popularity on one or more social media platforms for a limited duration of time (Big Commerce, 2015).
From politics to celebrity announcements and other newsworthy subjects, trends can be on anything that has found its way into a social media platform and has somehow been talked about repeatedly for some time.
Some social media platforms can tailor trends per geographical locations so that trending topics are outlined for a user based on the most popular subjects making the rounds in their area.
Other things such as a user’s recent ‘likes’, searches or who the user ‘follows’, contribute to the listing of trending topics.
Just as different social media platforms have different interfaces, trends have different ways of appearing on different network sites.
Trends on some social media platforms are mostly noted by the prefix of the hash (#) sign and are called hashtags.
Users can join the conversation by using the hashtag anywhere within their original post.
In this way, trends are always up-to-the-minute, and they often result in greater user engagement.
Engagement is the manner and length of time in which users navigate and react to the information available to them on social media while interacting with each other.
User engagement on different social media platforms can be analyzed using different parameters.
Facebook will regard engagement as likes, comments, shares, stories, and impressions, while Twitter sees it as mentions, retweets, hashtags and direct messages.
Even networks like Instagram give their users the chance to interact through mentions, comments, and hashtags (York, 2015).
Though most social networks are accessible through computers and mobile phones, many popular social networks started out as mobile apps and many users are engaged mostly through their smartphone applications.
For instance, Statista (2017) reports that for the month of November 2016 mobile Facebook users spent an average of 929 minutes on social media.
Digital billboards are electronic image displays that present multiple static advertisements on a rotating basis (Van Beest, n.d.).
Also known as Commercial Electronic Variable Message Signs (CEVMS) and Off–Premise Message Center Displays, digital billboards change advertising content using digital technology.
Instead of using paper or vinyl printed advertisements mounted on a billboard face, the technology which drives digital billboards produces static images which are changed via computer, providing a non-manual way to change billboard “copy.” Having existed for decades, digital billboards can be seen in various places – roadways, entertainments hubs, etc.
– and from various vantage positions.
In the United States alone there are estimated 450,000 billboards faces (OAAA, 2017; Advanced Planning Division, 2012).
The use of digital billboards gives the individual or the corporate body the leverage of passing time-sensitive and timely information.
Academic Library of Today and Social Media Ten years ago, Barsky and Purdon (2006) discovered that social networks which are expanding communication through social media are becoming popular and the costs involved are getting further reduced.
Yet, library executives did not see how such a phenomenon could become a part of library and information services.
They felt that the users should be left to their social media while the library carried on with its traditional roles (De Rosa et al., 2007).
This was also the case when Charnigo and Barnett-Ellis (2007) conducted a survey of 126 academic librarians and concluded that 54% of the librarians surveyed did not believe that there was an academic purpose for Facebook.
The rationale behind these librarians’ belief was that the social media was a space where students interact with each other, hence, the librarian was not welcome as their coming in might be viewed as an invasion of space.
But time has proved that as the technology of the social media became more popular, users and librarians acquired digitally literacy, and libraries, seeing an explosion of social media around it, were forced to reconsider their stance.
In a survey involving 497 international librarians, Taylor & Francis (2014) discovered that over 70% of librarians now feel that the use of social media is important.
Though the wave began with public libraries (Mon, 2015), today, libraries of every type either have a social media presence or they are seriously considering it.
Hence, the use of social media by libraries has become mainstream (Chu & Nalani-Meulemans, 2008).
This is not just because library users are in the social media space and the library is challenged to seek out the users where they are.
Social media on its own carries functionalities that open up an endless window of opportunities for libraries.
The intersection of the library of today and social media can be wrapped up using Library 2.0 – an innovative way of delivering library services through the web and a translation of the principles of Web 2.0 into the design and delivery of library services (Patridge, 2011).
As knowledge systems situated at the center of teaching and research in higher institutions, academic libraries deal directly with young people who are widely regarded as digital natives.
In doing this, the academic library needs technological support which the social media gives by promoting both active learning and collaboration.
Sodt and Summey (2009) present evidence in their study that academic libraries are incorporating social media in the library to reach out to the millennial generation.
This holds great value for the library, as a 2017 fact sheet released by Pew Research Centre reveals that the number of young adults in the U.S. who use at least one social media site stands at 86%, and Facebook is the most popular among the social media sites (Pew Research Centre, 2017).
It is worthy of note that these social media users mentioned are either patrons or potential patrons of academic libraries.
In addition, twenty-first century academic libraries must adapt to a vast world of instant gratification, e-commerce, and competition for resources as it becomes imperative that they extend beyond the walls of their individual institutions to online open access information spaces, dealing with intelligent internet sharing tools and online social communication, and networking technologies (Herman Miller, 2009; Tait, Martzoukou, & Reid, 2016).
The academic library user expects to get information services outside the traditional space of the library.
Makori (2011) agrees that social media sites have assisted university libraries in the promotion of information services to their patrons.
Accordingly, academic libraries can use social media to interact with patrons and community partners online in a bid to offer an almost-immediate service to their users (Levesque, 2016).
And, as Mack et al.
(2007) claim that there is an apparent willingness of undergraduate students to communicate with librarians by means of social media, this instantaneous interaction between the academic library and its vast number of users rubs off on the image of the library and librarian as omnipotent, reliable and friendly – three things that the library and librarian see themselves constantly trying to achieve in their relationship with clients.
It is these evidence-based facts, among many, that led academic libraries to buy into the promise of social media a long time ago.
Apart from offering information services, academic libraries use social media for other kinds of library-user interaction.
Mathews (2011) highlights the objectives of university libraries in active social media use as: To promote the library services, workshops and the events (to increase the library use) To provide better access to information To be where the users are To get feedback from users To highlight specific features of the library To create collaboration (other librarians and the users) To announce the library news.
These views are consistent with Taylor & Francis who take the stand that through the social media, the library seeks opinion on its self and its services for the sake of self-evaluation.
Doing this will better position the library to respond to the needs of the users.
In addition, being where the users are means taking advantage of virtual spaces.
Hence, the library has to push its events, services, news, etc.
to this virtual space, thereby provoking collaboration in such areas as collection development.
The library collection is an important feature of the library, and academic libraries are using the social media to promote new and existing content.
As agreed by many studies, academic libraries are using social media in ways that portray the library as both up-to-date in technological trends and relevant, even in the social life of the user.
In the Indian state of Odisha, Sahu (2016) surveyed best practices of social media using selected engineering college libraries.
He found that the social media platforms mostly used to connect with potential users are WhatsApp, Facebook, and Meebo.
The libraries also offered customer services using these platforms in addition to blog and Twitter.
Not only did these libraries collect and disseminate information using the social media, librarians were confirmed to communicate among themselves using such platforms as LinkedIn and Pinterest.
This evidence points to the interoperability of social media platforms in one library.
Library users vary in interest and, as they make varying choices regarding the social media platform to be on the library is expected to be interested in, if not all of them, the ones that are more popular within the locale.
WeChat is the most popular social media platform in China; and academic libraries, such as Shanghai University Library has an official account on this platform.
They have over 4,700 subscribers – about 10% of all faculty members and students.
Liu et al.
(2016) report that through WeChat app subscribers access the library services remotely.
On WeChat, the library disseminates information on the following: new digital resources, new books, events, lectures and seminars, posters, holidays, reading reviews, and library highlights.
This platform has come to partially replace web online reference services in the library, signaling a movement of technology to something easier and more convenient.
Because new information culture is the open and sharing culture, libraries, such as Shanghai University Library, are using social media to spread information concerning the library.
This same practice is obtainable in Yale University Science Libraries which announce workshops on library resources, provide links to online archives, and give tips on sending text messages to a librarian, using their social media platforms.
Through Twitter, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries provide brief announcements regarding essential academic activities in the libraries such as workshops, classes, and study group information (Kim & Abbas, 2010).
In most of these academic libraries studied, the library websites serve as points through which users can get into their social media platforms.
The shortcut icons of these social media platforms are located at conspicuous areas on their homepage and, apart from connecting with the library on social media, library users can share posts published by the library.
This trend is evident in such academic libraries as Amelia V. Gallucci-Cirio Library in Massachusetts, USA.
LeBlanc and Kay (2014), after analyzing the application of Web 2.0 tools in the library’s homepage, report that two Web 2.0 tools are prominently displayed for patron usage and interaction.
Conceptualizing Social Media Librarianship through its Evolution The concept of social media librarianship owes its origin to the gradual transformation in information and communications technology in the library, from the use of correspondence mail to teletype and then telephone for selective dissemination of information and communication.
This moved from the experimental use of email in the 1980s for reference services to ‘chat reference’ in the mid-2000s (Borgendale & Weise, 1986; Ryan, 1996; Ware, Howe, & Scalese, 2000).
Libraries began to own websites in the wake of the 2000s, incorporating such things as digital reference services there.
The birth of the first generation of social media (SixDegrees and Friendster) began to draw the users to this participatory technology.
And, by the time MySpace and Facebook appeared on the scene in 2003 and 2004 respectively, academic interest began to move towards the potentials of these platforms in boosting library and information services.
As stated before, it dawned on librarians that the social media was a flexible tool which could help the library in so many ways.
According to Mon (2015), in about 2005–2007, the first pioneering libraries began to explore possible uses of social media technologies, and MySpace’s popularity with teens gained it a strong early popularity among libraries.
With libraries opening social media accounts, a challenge arose as to who should manage these accounts.
There was a significant lack of staff members in the library who were familiar with the way social media sites worked.
Spending time on their personal social media accounts and taking advantage of Web 2.0 training materials circulating on the internet librarians began to gain the practical and cognitive competencies possessed by users of social media; they began to have the motivation to employ these media effectively and appropriately for social interaction and communication with their ever growing and sophisticated patrons (Ezeani & Igwesi, 2012; Vanwynsberghe & Verdegem, 2013).
In 2014, Taylor & Francis reported that over 70% of libraries are using social media tools, and 60% have had a social media account for three years or longer while 30% of librarians are posting at least daily on such social media platforms as Facebook and Twitter.
This provides evidence that social media librarianship kicked off at the libraries’ realization of the promise of social media.
Furthermore, the status of the SML shows that this library staff member is one who applies their knowledge and experience in librarianship to the day-to-day management of the library’s social media accounts.
Hence, the SML makes professionally-sound decisions, knowing the right way to fine tune posts about anything happening in the library.
Since library staff roles have evolved, highlighting the importance of staying current with new media and digital trends, as well as modern approaches to information seeking and use, sharing and communication (Curral & Moss, 2008), library and information schools have incorporated the teaching of social media in their curriculum.
Tyner (2010), giving his thoughts on the question, “Is there a Social Media Librarian in Your Library’s Future?” reveals that the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) has been running Social Media for Information Professionals course since Fall of 2009.
Highlighting the roles and duties of a Web Services Librarian who was hired from SLAIS to work in Okanagan College Library, he explained that the staff investigates and implements social media.
Considering this, the library would be doing itself tremendous good if it should have a member of staff officially appointed as the SML because the social media has become a cultural force in the world, bridging the gap between traditional library (and its collections) and the new generation of users whose first point of call for information has become Google.
In reaching out to students, the SML should transcend the formal academic environment and should reach out to students in more direct and meaningful ways.
As Mon (2015) explains, one of these ways is to engage with shared culture and communication styles as there are on social media.
She gives an example deciding to regularly use certain appropriate “day of the week” postings like popular “days of the week” hashtags such as #MusicMonday, and #FridayReads to engage with the users.
The Social Media Librarian and Trending Topics Oh, Ozkaya and LaRose (2014) purported that users who engaged in a certain quality of social media interactivity perceived an enhanced sense of community and life satisfaction.
This is clear in the way that heightened communication and collaboration make the social media a rallying point for them.
As students and faculty members build communication without barrier the social media practice advances within the framework of the community; it moves from a one-dimensional online broadcast platform to a multidimensional socially connected space that creates value for both the library and library users (Young & Rossman, 2015).
It can then be rightly said that since the library’s social media is a community almost in the way that the university community is it needs constant building.
Though cyclic communication and collaboration on social media can be a pointer to success, they are not the only conditions to take into consideration when one is looking at building the social media community.
It is important to guide the SML through outlined Social Media Goals (SMGs).
These SMGs which serve as the building blocks can be monitored over time as the SML informs, interacts and communicates with users.
SMGs can contain the following principal components mentioned by Young and Rossman: audience focus, goals, values, activity focus, tone and tenor, posting frequency, posting categories, and posting personnel.
All these components touch on the issue of trends or trending topics which can serve to build a stronger and better social media community.
Figure 1: Sample Post on the University of Nigeria Nsukka Library to Promote their Special Collection At every hour of the day on social media, as users interact using certain words and expressions, trends emerge, jostling for top spot.
When one loses its popularity, it is replaced by another.
As words (and, sometimes, phrases) that are contained in posts made and shared by social media users, these trends provide real-time insights into ‘the talk of the moment’.
As a professional who has their ears to the ground, it falls on the SML to take advantage of these trends to stimulate user engagement on the library’s social media platform.
How can this be done?
Figure 2: Steps in Real-Time Trends-Based Social Media Librarianship One of the duties of the SML is to keep an eye out for items of interest – in fact, that is one of the duties of every librarian.
Like the time in the past when users’ popular interests are used to formulate ready reference, trending topics can be added to posts made by the SML.
These posts will certainly be content that have to do with what the trends are about.
A SML should be intuitive enough to know that trends are like questions and users are often interested in answers.
This is why the trends are there in the first place, and this is why most users click on them to read through posts that are made on that trend and to get information about ‘what’s up’.
Hence, at the emergence of any interesting/worthy trend, the SML should quickly collaborate with the different sections that there are in the library to get information on the trending topic from resources that are available in the library.
With the information gotten from the resources, the SML should come up with one or a series of striking posts that present information to users on the trending topic while also making it clear that the information shared is contained in a resource that is available for consultation in so-and-so section of the library.
It is important to tag relevant faculty members whose area of interest relates to the trend.
By doing this, the SML would not only be fulfilling an information need, they would be creating an avenue on the platform for users (mostly students and faculty members) to cyclically communicate and collaborate on the post made.
Cyclic communication and collaboration are the chief factors of user engagement.
Synergizing Real-Time Trends-Based Social Media Librarianship and Digital Billboards There is an overwhelming inclination of social media users toward mobile technology.
This has made social media sites develop apps as alternatives to the wide screen of computers.
In fact, the primary means of accessing the social media, for most users, has become the mobile app, and computers now serve as alternatives.
But for a campus where students and faculty members hardly have the time in the day to take a peep at what the library is posting (the little time they have in between academic activities are devoted to scrolling through the things they can immediately see in their social media feeds) it becomes clear that the library has to devise a way to create another means of display on campus that will focus on its trends-based posts while also serving as a medium for other kinds of communication and announcement.
This is where digital billboards come in.
Evidence shows that 90% of people notice messages on digital billboards some or most of the time (Arbitron, 2008), and, with the flexibility and dynamic content such as delivering real-time information which the digital billboard has, academic libraries have to consider them as necessary appendages in social media librarianship whereby students and faculty members can be stopped in their tracks and informed of what is currently happening in the world and where they can get information on the trending topic in the library.
The digital billboards will also serve as flashpoints for the collaboration and communication (in the form of comments, shares, retweets or RTs, replies, etc.)
that the library, students, and staff would have on the trending topic.
As we live in a world where people want to have their ‘voices’ heard on social media, students and faculty members will be encouraged to air their opinions on the trending topic from their own point of academic/research interest so that they can be heard, at least, by the university community.
Those who have not joined the library’s social media will reconsider and join the train out of the excitement that the digital billboards bring, and user engagement will see an exponential growth.
The digital billboards will not only serve as an alternative display for the campus in relation to the social media of the library.
It will bridge the gap for students and faculty members who have not connected with the library on social media, or who, for one reason or another, do not have social media accounts.
It will give them insight into the working of social media while also providing a means through which they can learn trending topics in real-time that have academic relevance.
Ultimately, academics will be stimulated and strengthened through this cycle.
Figure 3: Social Media Librarianship and Digital Billboard Synergy Cycle Implications of Real-Time Trends-Based Social Media Librarianship and Digital Billboards Synergy For the inclusion of digital billboards to real-time trends-based social media librarianship to work, there are important implications that the SML and the library at large must consider.
These implications touch on a lot of things that might adversely affect user engagement and make the work of the SML seem either too tough or unyielding.
Here, they are divided into professional implications, technical implications, and financial implications.
Professional Implications Social media librarianship involves constant updates on the part of the SML.
In the flood of duties and responsibilities such as attending to clientele, research and others which threaten to overwhelm the librarian, librarians believe that social media platforms are time-consuming and too engrossing to use, as they need to be constantly updated (Collins & Quan-Haase, 2012).
This might serve as a challenge to the SML if he is given other duties and responsibilities in the library apart from managing the social media platforms.
So, it would help to make the SML a member of staff who is solely devoted to the social media of the library alone.
This will allow them to focus on updates happening both in the social media and the profession, and follow accordingly by learning and unlearning.
This will also allow for perfect accountability as it would seem out of control to give all staff access to posting on the social media on behalf of the library.
The library is an official institution (although posts on its social media might sound informal), and the SML needs to take cognizance of trends that may be perceived as inappropriate by the library community on social media.
It is important to know what kinds of trends the SML can wade into and those they should stay away from.
In addition, the way trends are approached is also important.
These are things that the SMG should make clear on.
Hence, deliberations are necessary among a group of staff in the library who are conversant with the way social media works.
A proper SMG that will show what the library is about can be drafted and vetted to confirm that it is in accordance with the institution’s social media policy, if any exists.
In addition, the library might want to conduct surveys among library users, presenting them with classes of topics and sample posts with trends.
This can better inform them in formulating the SMG based on the views of the users.
Studies such as Chu and Nalani-Meulemans (2008) and Connel (2009) proposed that students did not want to connect with the library on the social media.
Time has proven that if this was existent, it is no longer attainable as students and faculty members are now in constant communication with their institutions’ libraries on the social media.
This being the case, even though the university might have to propose to faculty members and students to give out their social media details so that the library can connect with them there, it is important to find out what they think about the library mentioning or tagging them in posts.
Where users give their consent, the SML should not take it as a privilege to use as they please.
Indiscriminate mentions and tags to posts might be translated by students and faculty members as disturbance if not an utter invasion of space.
The SML must be careful, then, as he tags only relevant faculty members and students.
Tagging, say, a Professor of Chemistry on a post about the Nobel Prize for Literature is not proper as the subject of the post is not chemistry.
In tagging faculty members and students, discretion should be exercised with caution.
As social media gives people the illusion of not being held responsible, the SML should moderate the communication on the library’s social media platform.
Communication can go the wrong way, and the library’s social media must not become a platform for insults or disagreements that are not well presented.
The SML should promptly delete any form of comment or reply that is denigrating in any way.
If possible, defaulters should be warned discretely through their inbox and told to desist from such.
This will foster healthy user engagement and ensure that users are comfortable enough to communicate and collaborate.
Copyright issues come into play too.
In sharing any form of information gotten from a resource in the library, the SML is under the mandate of their profession to ensure that it does not contradict copyright law in any way.
If not the library might become entangled in a legal issue that could have been avoided.
Technical Implications The installation of digital billboards is not what the library can handle on its own.
Technical hands are needed for proper installation and connection to the central social media unit in the library.
Tait, Martzoukou and Reid (2016) rightly pointed out that as academic librarians are called to assert their roles in changing technological and blended learning environments, there is a need for a wider exchange of information and collaboration with other professional groups, both academic and support staff who can provide their expertise on technology and educational/instructional design.
Hence, the library should either find qualified help in the engineering departments of the university or hire them from outside to support the installation.
Either way, for the potential of the billboards to be realized their locations might be deliberated at the university level with every faculty and the department concerned with the campus environment well represented.
The use of the digital billboards should be according to the regulations that guide them in a country.
It becomes the duty of the library and SML to understand these regulations and work with them as posts come up on the digital billboards.
As the library is indirectly advertising itself, its resources and services the SML should serve as the mediator in any case where the advertising agency of a country begins to find interest in the library’s use of digital billboards.
Financial Implications For academic libraries that do not have SMLs yet, it might prove too much to start employing one.
Alternatively, two or three staff who are technology-savvy can be selected and trained on the use of social media as it applies to the library.
The library administration will find this cheaper compared to the addition of another staff or group of staff on its payroll.
Having a social media that is geared towards taking advantage of trends means that the library must stock up on resources that are up-to-date culturally, politically, scientifically and otherwise.
This is to produce contents that are satisfactorily aligned with most trends.
Where possible, the SML can anticipate trends per the (political, cultural, scientific) climate of the moment and help the library in deciding what resources it should purchase in the future.
It is understood that resources purchase will have a strain on the library’s budget.
Libraries across all sectors are known to have battled finance cuts at some point as their host institutions channel money into other areas.
However, the library administration must realize that currency of collection is one of the assessment parameters for libraries.
The importance of the social media to the library can be used to plan collection budgets accordingly.
On the digital billboards, libraries will be forced to properly consider the pocket of their host institutions and draw up a workable plan for their purchase.
Where the host institution can handle it, the library can buy the number of digital billboards it needs at once.
Where this is not possible, the library can start with one or two and subsequently acquire more.
Conclusion Librarianship is a profession that takes from technology to keep being relevant and exciting at the same time.
Today’s librarians have an arsenal of technology at their beck and call to step up the library’s visibility to the clientele.
This paper has looked at social media and how it can be applied to academic librarianship.
The SML is at the center of this as they are the professionals who manage the library’s social media.
The promise that social media trends or trending topics have on building the community following on the library on social media has been extensively explored as they can serve as means through which the SML can advertise the resources and services of the library while building the community and stimulating intellectual discourse in the campus.
As alternatives to users’ phone and computer screens (since they are engaged in academic activities most of the day) digital billboards have been proposed as means through which the SML’s posts can get out there – a way of sparking a sense of community in the campus and including students and faculty members who are not on social media.
The implications of this practice have been properly outlined and discussed so that, in effecting this synergy academic libraries, will know what they are going in for and how they can handle it all.
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Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles Buzz data software rdf xml metadata identifier vocabularies namespace schema repositories eprints copyright video oai-pmh cataloguing gis doc frbr dcmi dspace interoperability dcap url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Talat Chaudhri makes a detailed assessment of the FRBR structure of the Dublin Core Application Profiles funded by JISC.
Efforts to create standard metadata records for resources in digital repositories have hitherto relied for the most part on the simple standard schema published by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [1], the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, more commonly known as 'simple Dublin Core' [2].
While this schema, by and large, met the aim of making metadata interoperable between repositories for purposes such as OAI-PMH [3], the explicit means by which it achieved this, a drastic simplification of the metadata associated with digital objects to only 15 elements, had the side effect of making it difficult or impossible to describe specific types of resources in detail [4].
A further problem with this 'flat' metadata model is that it does not allow relationships between different versions or copies of a document to be described.
The extension of these 15 elements in DCMI Terms, known as 'qualified Dublin Core' [5] was an effective admission that richer metadata was required to describe many types of resources.
Arguably it remains feasible to use 'simple Dublin Core' fields for certain resource types such as scholarly works in cases where especially complex metadata are not required.
The problem has been that almost every repository uses these elements to some extent according to local needs and practice rather than adopting a standard.
Inevitably this has had a negative impact on interoperability.
Consequently, the concept of application profiles (APs) was developed.
In essence, these are "...[metadata] schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces… and [are] optimised for a particular local application."
As they were originally formulated, they were intended to codify the practice whereby it was acknowledged that "...implementors use standard metadata schemas in a pragmatic way."
Consequently, on the principle of the "...maxim 'there are no metadata police', implementors will bend and fit metadata schemas for their own purposes."
[6] On the other hand, the engagement of both standards makers and implementors led first to the development of the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) and subsequently a range of other JISC-funded Dublin Core Application Profiles (DCAPs) [7].
Following the precedent of SWAP, the DCAPs were based on a conceptual model inherited from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [8], in which the key structural entities of the digital object (Group 1) are Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item [9].
The rationale behind the specific choice of the FRBR structure over any other entity-relationship model remains undefined in the documentation for SWAP and the other DCAPs.
Such a choice presupposes that the ability to define relationships between conceptual entities both within and between digital objects represents a core aim.
In other words it introduces the concept of complex and systematic versioning as part of a common standard.
Figure 1: left: FRBR Group 1: Entities and 'vertical' relationships; right: FRBR: Creators, contributors and agents.
Since the explicit purpose of the DCAPs is to recommend standard usage for certain identified resource types [10], the tacit return of the "metadata police" may be seen as something of an irony, although the original customised model based on local needs is still in use elsewhere in a variety of projects and services.
The new definition also assumes that DCAPs are built on the DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM) [11].
GAP (the Geospatial Application Profile) is exceptional in that it does not include an entity-relationship model, because it is designed to be a modular add-on to other DCAPs.
Unfortunately, the differing requirements of heterogenous resource types has led to a good deal of structural variation between the DCAPs, so it may be doubted whether the relationships in a complex digital object that contains multiple resource types could easily be described in a way that is discoverable by software tools.
The example which perhaps illustrates this best is the Images Application Profile (IAP) [12], in which the Expression level inherited from FRBR was rejected [13].
The conclusion was reached by explicit comparison with SWAP, which has set a broad precedent for the ongoing development of the other JISC-funded DCAPs.
It was felt that changes to an image directly modify its physical Manifestation and are not in any meaningful way the kind of intellectual changes that produce a new Expression in the terms expressed by FRBR.
The Expression entity was correspondingly omitted.
The solution for the problem of complex digital objects containing multiple resource types and thus described by multiple application profiles may well be found in the development of a standard common vocabulary of metadata terms, possibly also requiring a common 'domain model'.
Together these could comprise a 'core DCAP'.
This could allow common query patterns to be applied to DCAPs that are sufficiently similar in structure to the proposed 'core DCAP' [14].
However, the difficulty may be that resource types require specific and relevant metadata that are not common to all, limiting such queries to generic fields.
The whole issue requires considerable further analysis and practical testing.
It is perhaps unfair to make the unqualified observation that the DCAPs have been implemented virtually nowhere, since all but SWAP are still under development to a greater or lesser degree.
On the face of it, SWAP might appear to be simple to implement, due to the relatively simple metadata requirements for scholarly works; and because the bulk of content in institutional and subject repositories consists of published academic papers or textual works.
Yet the only implementation so far has been in the WRAP repository at Warwick University, in which SWAP has been problematic thus far within the context of institutional needs at Warwick, using the EPrints 3.0 software [15].
This case study needs further analysis, but there seems too little basis on which to conclude that SWAP cannot succeed more widely.
The issue of greatest concern is that despite the completion and availability of an application profile for scholarly works since mid-2006, there has been little interest in developing the major software platforms to support SWAP implementation.
In the fast-moving world of Web technologies, this lag appears significant and it has become clear that the reasons for the lack of implementation deserve closer scrutiny.
The most obvious area of concern is the complexity of the FRBR model.
It needs to be made clear whether the model fits the needs of resource delivery on the Web and, if it does, which factors have prevented implementation and how they can be addressed.
The FRBR Entity-Relationship Model The FRBR entity-relationship model (sometimes known as FRBRER) contains several more entities than the subset inherited by SWAP [16].
The latter has only the crucial Group 1 entities and an amalgam of the Group 2 entities, whereas several of the other DCAPS include Group 3 entities: Group FRBR SWAP IAP TBMAP LMAP Group 1 Work Scholarly Work Image Work Work   Expression Expression   Expression Expression   Manifestation Manifestation Manifestation Manifestation Manifestation   Item Copy Copy Item Copy             Group 2 Person Agent Agent Person Agent   Corporate Body Agent Agent Corporate Body Agent             Group 3 Concept   Concept Concept     Object   Object Object     Event   Event Event     Place   Placew Place         Person   Context Note that Person in IAP is a Group 3 entity, as its FRBR namesake in Group 2 is amalgamated with Corporate Body as Agent.
In LMAP, the entity Context is an innovation which is not inherited from FRBR.
As GAP is intended to be a modular extension to the other DCAPs, it does not have an entity-relationship model.
There is currently no available model for SDAP, which is consequently omitted here.
Entities On the basis of the above table, it seems that interoperability issues emerging purely from differences between the entities are not especially difficult.
In addition to the missing Expression entity in IAP, there are minor issues in each of the groups: Group 1 There is a relatively insignificant difference in nomenclature in the top and bottom levels of Group 1, i.e.
SWAP Work > Scholarly Work, IAP Work > Image, TBMAP Item like FRBR but others Item > Copy.
This is easily resolvable through mappings to a future 'core DCAP' in order to ensure interoperability.
It should be simple enough for software to establish automatically how the entities in the various DCAPs correspond to each other.
Other than in IAP, the vertical relationships between entities, i.e.
Is Expressed As, Is Manifested As and Is Available As, make this entirely transparent.
However, any such process would presume that the machine-readable encodings were available that could be of practical use in software development.
The assumption has been that the DCAPs would need to be serialised using XML Schemas, since this has been done for other APs, e.g.
eBank [17].
There are other potential alternatives such as RELAX NG and RDF.
No such schemas have been published to date and it remains unclear to what purpose they might be put in terms of practical development projects.
Since the idiosyncratic DC-TEXT notation used for SWAP has not led to development, it seems that speculative provision of such a schema in a mainstream format might at least provide tools for some initial development and perhaps a better understanding of what may be required in future.
One potential problem in automatically establishing correspondences between the differently named entities is likely to arise in IAP, where Image and Manifestation are linked by the relationship Is Manifested As.
From this relationship in FRBR one could normally deduce that Image corresponds to Expression, whereas here it corresponds to Work.
Compounding the problem, the entities Agent and Manifestation are related directly by Is Created By in the IAP model, in contrast to Agent and Work (or the equivalent) in the other DCAPs.
Presumably the conceptual model implies that images are directly manifested, although why this does not hold true just as well for a scholarly paper or a video clip is perhaps a moot point.
However, it will be apparent in any schema that Image is the top-level entity.
The main issue raised by these discrepancies is how any future 'core DCAP' would take account of variant models.
Group 2 The amalgam of Group 2 entities as Agent in all but TBMAP is not a matter of particular concern, since the attribute entityType makes it clear to which FRBR entity the metadata corresponds, and it is thus a matter of mapping.
Consequently it may not be crucial whether or not the entities are distinguished in a future 'core DCAP'.
Group 3 The Group 3 "subject" entities are not included in SWAP and LMAP as they are in the other DCAPs.
The omission of these entities was evidently by design and reflects the relative lack of importance of making such fine distinctions in subject metadata to the framers of these DCAPs.
It is worth noting that these entities differ from those in Groups 1 and 2 in the respect that they generally contain a very limited number of metadata fields, usually just a single field.
The Group 3 entities are clearly intended for the purposes of adding semantic information to subject metadata to assist search tools.
Since none of the DCAPs that employ Group 3 entities are fully developed, it has not yet been explored whether existing or future search tools could usefully exploit them, which would no doubt depend heavily on the quality of metadata.
If the 'core DCAP' is to be based on what the DCAPs have in common, i.e.
a subset approach, it is presumably unnecessary to include specific Group 3 entities in a future 'core DCAP'.
However, this would imply that the 'core DCAP' would be of more limited use in facilitating cross-searching of resources by subject.
The alternative would be to include all possible entities, even though they would be unexploited by SWAP and LMAP.
Semantic subject searches on this basis would then prove impossible for these two application profiles.
It remains to be seen which of these two approaches will prove most useful.
In any case, the Has As Subject relationship makes it clear to any potential software that any entities so described are for the purposes of search interfaces.
The issue of whether to include the Group 3 entities in the 'core DCAP' for the purposes of search tools needs further analysis, but it should not greatly affect more general interoperability between the DCAPs.
Non-structural Relationships It has already been noted that the structural relationships between entities are by and large consistent, and that it will be necessary to analyse whether irregularities such as those in the IAP entity-relationship model will create interoperability problems or not.
Apart from the relationships that exist purely as a part of the entity-relationship model, there are 'sideways' relationships that are essentially metadata fields that contain the URL of an entity in another digital object, i.e.
part of or a whole separate Work entity.
For example, Has Translation in SWAP provides a method to indicate a translation, whatever the status of that resource in itself.
Unlike in the structural relationships, which consist of an attribute of this kind linked to an identifier in the target entity, it may not be possible to guarantee that the relationship will be bi-directional if (1) the other digital object is not held in the same repository; or (2) the metadata was updated at a different time or by another individual who did not necessarily make the same cataloguing decisions, perhaps in part because not all of the resources then existed or because there existed resources of which the individual was then unaware.
Ideally of course, there would be a software mechanism to inform the repository manager that the link had been created and that a reciprocal link needed to be created, although it would require interoperable software and metadata.
Inevitably, there will always be occasions when this is impossible, such as for example when the resource is on the Web but not in a repository.
In general, it is possible to consider 'sideways' relationships within DCAPs in the same way as any other attributes.
However, their distribution within the entity models, which is largely inherited from FRBR, seems to raise special problems in describing the relationships between digital objects accurately.
Using SWAP as an example, a number of areas of potential inflexibility arise as a result, for example: An adaptation might have been made from a particular version of a digital object, i.e.
Expression, or else from several versions, or alternatively the version used may be unknown.
It is only possible to use Has Adaptation within the Work entity, so there is no scope for stating that one particular Expression was used.
(It might equally be desirable to describe several specific versions that were used.)
Conversely, the more general attribute Has Version in the Expression entity allows a 'version, edition or adaptation' to be described.
It does not allow any specific qualification about which of the above is intended, so the use of these two relationships for adaptations is ambiguous.
For types other than adaptations, it is clearly impossible to state that, for example, an edition was produced from a Work but it is not known which Expression was used to produce it.
Translations may be indicated by Has Translation in the Expression entity, but again it is only possible to indicate that the translation was carried out on the basis of one particular Expression rather than on the basis of the Work where it is not known which version was used, although it is possible for several Expressions to be related to one resource using Has Translation attributes.
(From the point of view of any one of these Expressions, this might tend to give the misleading impression that only that specific Expression had been used.)
It appears that the framers of TBMAP have attempted to foresee the possible relationships that would be likely to occur between entities belonging to different digital objects.
There is a plethora of different relationship types, especially within the Expression entity.
Exactly how these various relationships should be tested against sample metadata records, especially within the context of any 'core DCAP", may require considerable further analysis and user testing.
Again, the question of which relationships to include in this 'core DCAP' depends upon whether the latter is intended as a subset of the commonalities between the DCAPs or as a potentially highly complex superset containing all of the relationships required.
If any new DCAPs were later added, the latter approach could create problems for backwards compatibility.
It remains difficult to decide between these options without a much clearer analysis of the intended purpose and practical applications of such a common metadata set and entity model.
Attributes Similar difficulties arise with assigning certain attributes to the FRBR entities in the DCAPs.
It may not be the case that all resources fit the metadata requirements predicted by the FRBR model.
For illustration, SWAP and IAP will be used here as the main examples because an entity model and a list of attributes is available for them both in a finalised form (but for simplicity, in some cases the attributes mentioned do not necessarily occur in both).
The principle is likely to apply more widely, however.
Work and Expression It is perfectly possible to have a grant that applies only to one Expression of a whole Work, e.g.
to a particular report commissioned by a funding council but not to an academic paper that came out of the same conceptual idea or Work.
The use of Grant Number and Funder is only allowed at the Work level of SWAP, however, which makes it impossible to describe the two satisfactorily as different Expressions of one Work where that would be appropriate.
The same is also true of Grant Number in multiple Manifestations of one Image in IAP.
In the nature of images, some derived images may have been produced for different purposes from the others and thus not fall under the same grant; yet they may best be represented as a single Image as a conceptual work.
Similarly, the inclusion of Supervisor in the Work level of SWAP makes it impossible to describe a thesis and a derived monograph as two Expressions of a single Work, no matter that they are clearly related versions rather than separate endeavours, as the supervisor would be incorrectly assigned to the book as well.
The addition of affiliated institution in SWAP is a further confusion: for example, one Expression might well have been produced at a different institution from the rest.
Abstracts, descriptions and subject metadata are only allowed at the Work level in SWAP, though these too could vary between different Expressions, e.g.
revisions in editing, or certain Expressions only representing part of the endeavour and thus only covering certain subjects or aspects of the whole.
An example of this could be a chapter of a book published as an article.
While it seems unlikely (but perhaps not impossible) that the subject of an Image could change without producing a new work, the description might differ between Manifestations if the changes made to the formatting required additional comments.
In the case of an edition of a text book, it is even possible that an additional chapter could have been written by a new author, and so one of the creators listed at the Work level would be incorrectly ascribed to the other Expressions.
It is not necessarily clear that this should be a new Work in the context of online repositories, even though this would be the normal approach in library cataloguing.
It makes obvious sense to list the various versions as forms of each other for the purposes of Web delivery.
Conversely, titles are allowed in both Work and Expression entities in SWAP (but only at the Image level in IAP, which is unaffected here), although this makes it difficult to decide which is canonical for the whole work if the titles of the various Expressions differ.
Such changes might well occur between pre-prints and post-prints during the process of peer review.
It should not be the role of a DCAP to require that the repository manager decide whether the original title of a pre-print or the published title of a post-print is more appropriate for the whole Work, especially if those titles are appropriate to a specific version.
In this instance, the Work entity exists purely as a container for its various forms: a conceptual derivation produced retrospectively.
In the case of a digital object where the Work represents a known conceptual endeavour, such as Homer's Iliad, it makes far more sense to employ the FRBR model.
Addressing the issues raised above in the context of this example, it may be noted that (1) issues of funding or supervision clearly do not arise; (2) all editions will have the same subject and canonical title.
It is still possible that the description may vary if there has been an abridgement, or to describe the particular manuscripts used in producing a certain reading.
It would be possible to consider translations either as Expressions if they introduced no novel work or, for example in the case of verse translations, as new Works where they added substantially new intellectual content created by a new author.
A further small anomaly is that it is impossible to indicate that such a Work had an original language if the manuscripts themselves are not catalogued as separate Expressions, which would appear rather pointless in a digital repository unless they had been digitised.
At this stage in the analysis it is important to recall that these are fringe areas of scholarly works in repositories, whose impetus for development has by and large been published journal articles.
In most cases, it is readily apparent that the Work level is little more than a container.
The lesson to be drawn from the comparison of a few different models of potential resources in SWAP and IAP is that a one-size-fits-all approach is likely to be inappropriate for a significant quantity of resources.
This is likely to depend heavily on the resource type, so FRBR may fit certain resource types better than others.
The very fact that IAP departs from the FRBR model is evidence of this.
The process of developing new DCAPs has generally followed the precedent of SWAP with respect to FRBR, without sufficient testing against metadata samples and user requirements being published in the documentation.
In the case of SWAP at least, it seems clear that the partition of Work and Expression is an artificial one, and that it might be better to employ a more flexible model that allows both for the container pattern (i.e.
pre-print and post-print) and the recursive pattern (i.e.
the Iliad containing various versions that may also be discrete works in their own right).
The relationships between the 'structural' entities Work and Expression on the one hand, and on the other the 'sideways' relationships to related resources, are perhaps too rigidly differentiated since the cataloguing choices that will be made in practice are often a matter of considerable interpretation.
It remains to be seen whether this is more widely true of other resource types.
The approach taken in the development of GAP is perhaps illustrative here, since it was intended that geospatial information could be attached to any resource type described by another DCAP.
The lack of an entity model effectively makes metadata attributes available for use with any entity.
This flexibility avoids all of the issues described above, and it seems to be a useful demonstration of the value of avoiding an overly prescriptive approach.
Manifestation and Copy/Item The purpose of creating a separate Manifestation level in FRBR was to state that every Item (or Copy in SWAP, IAP and LMAP) contained therein is identical in format.
Hence a PDF file that appears to the eye to be identical to the DOC file from which it was produced are different Manifestations but the same Expression.
An author's formatted post-print is equally a different Manifestation from the publisher's typeset version, but remains the same Expression provided that the content is the same.
There is a potential grey area in which minor corrections and typological changes may alter the content to a small degree, which could perhaps be overlooked as long as it remains substantially the same.
In the case of resources which have a great deal of metadata relating to their physical nature, such as images or time-based media, it is easy to see that differentiating between the entities is potentially useful.
By contrast, in SWAP, the only metadata items (excluding those required purely by the FRBR structure) are Format, Date Modified and Publisher.
These all raise interesting problems and arguably fit better elsewhere in the model.
It could be seen as rather pointless to record the file format as metadata, since the bitstream itself records this, and all repositories separately record the MIME type, file hashes and file length.
If two files are not of the same format, de facto they are not the same Manifestation either (although the fact that they are of the same format does not guarantee the reverse).
File hashes and file length may be different, although for practical purposes there is no difference between two files.
While the date that the Manifestation was last modified may be relevant to an image or a video clip, it is harder to see why it is useful to differentiate between the date that a particular Expression of a textual document was modified and the date that a Manifestation thereof was modified, since the former is conceptual rather than physical and must be deduced from the earliest existing physical copy.
The bitstream carries this information itself, although the date of copies may not be reliable.
In the same way, the date that a Manifestation was modified is ultimately deduced, although in practice the information might be obtained from a publisher's Web site in the case of a publisher's formatted post-print.
It may be useful to provide, or at least allow, a date for each entity, but not necessarily as it currently exists based upon FRBR.
It is curious that some metadata related to publication are in the Expression entity in SWAP, such as version number, copyright holder and editor, whereas the name of the publisher is indicated in Manifestation.
The rationale would appear to be that the author's formatted post-print should not be associated with the publisher, yet this conflicts with the fact that peer review was arranged by that publisher.
It should not be the place of application profiles to make ideological distinctions.
It seems sufficient to record to whom the copyright of the Expression and any copies deriving from it belong, where the formatting belongs to the publisher.
Overall, the Manifestation entity in SWAP is, unlike in the case of IAP and TBMAP, largely a container whose existence serves to state whether or not copies are identical, along with some metadata distinctions of questionable use in their context, and it remains untested whether a different entity model would perform better.
Conclusion The process by which the DCAPs came to be modelled on FRBR was not based on published results from user testing or analysis of the suitability of the entity model based on sample metadata records.
In fact, the rationale appears to have been more practical: it is a reasonable assumption that where multiple DCAPs follow the same structure, there will be interoperability benefits.
The reasons behind the adoption of FRBR in SWAP remain unexplained in the published documentation.
However, this precedent has been followed unless there was an overriding objection, as in the cases of IAP and GAP.
The important point is that FRBR was designed for library catalogues, not repositories.
The purposes and requirements of Web delivery of resources through repositories are very different to those of library systems.
It seems unwise, therefore, to adopt a library-based standard such as FRBR for repository metadata without explicit justification.
Any unnecessary complication may have an adverse effect upon the ability of a repository to collect good metadata and of developers to produce intuitive, user-friendly workflows for metadata entry.
The purpose of the slight modification in collapsing FRBR's Person and Corporate Body into a single Agent entity seems unclear, but there no significant modifications to the entity models except IAP that would affect mapping, other than trivial differences of nomenclature.
Where the DCAPS differ most is within the entities.
Since the majority are incomplete and good testing needs to be based on domain-specific knowledge, it is difficult to comment specifically on what the impact of the FRBR structure may be upon these DCAPs.
The example of SWAP, however, tends to indicate that there are at least theoretical objections that require practical testing, since the FRBR model may remove the flexibility required to describe heterogenous textual resources and may impose inappropriate decisions about canonical Work level metadata.
Merging entities may risk the loss of valuable information, but it should not be simply assumed that all metadata are necessarily valuable within a given entity.
The question remains as to whether FRBR is suitable for Web delivery within repositories, and for which specific resource types and DCAPs.
Until this is answered with practical testing, it will be difficult or even impossible to frame a 'core DCAP' and subsequently analyse whether the concept would be of practical use.
Metadata need to be flexible and re-usable in the fast-changing world of repositories.
In order to make best use of the specific improvements to repository metadata that the DCAPs have provided, it may be to their advantage to re-analyse their entity models.
References Dublin Core Metadata Initiative http://dublincore.org/ Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (Version 1.1) http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ The Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html It may be noted that from time to time there have been variations in the precise implementation of these 15 elements, notably between the DCMI and OAI recommendations for implementing DC, as well as software specific issues, e.g.
the use of dc.contributor.author instead of dc.creator in DSpace.
DCMI Terms http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel, Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas, Ariadne, September 2000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/ Listed at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Application_Profiles.
There are other APs based largely on Dublin Core, but 'DCAPs' here means those funded by JISC, unless noted otherwise.
Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf Note that item was renamed as copy to avoid confusion with the wider use of that term in repositories to mean "digital object", e.g.
document, image etc with metadata record.
Pete Johnston & Rosemary Russell, JISC Metadata Application Profiles, Data Models and Interoperability http://www.scribd.com/doc/3845648/JISC-Metadata-Application-Profiles-Data-Models-and-Interoperability 2, §4.
Dublin Core Abstract Model http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/ Images Application Profile http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Images_Application_Profile ibid., 3.
Pete Johnston & Rosemary Russell, JISC Metadata Application Profiles, Data Models and Interoperability http://www.scribd.com/doc/3845648/JISC-Metadata-Application-Profiles-Data-Models-and-Interoperability 3.2.2, §5 WRAP, University of Warwick http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/entry/swap_and_e-prints/ http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Scholarly_Works_Application_Profile, 1, §1.
eBank http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ebank-uk/schemas/ Author Details Talat Chaudhri Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: t.chaudhri@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.chaudhri/ Return to top Article Title: "Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles" Author: Talat Chaudhri Publication Date: 30-January-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 58 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/chaudhri/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Evaluation of Assessment Diaries and GradeMark at the University of Glamorgan Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Evaluation of Assessment Diaries and GradeMark at the University of Glamorgan Buzz data software database dissemination blog vle research Citation BibTex RIS Karen Fitzgibbon and Alice Lau describe a JISC-funded project in evaluating the pedagogical and workload impact that two assessmentand feedback-related innovations have on students and staff and report on lessons for the sector.
Assessment and feedback practice in Higher Education has long been the major source of student dissatisfaction (National Student Surveys) [1].
While technologies are increasingly being used as a tool to improve the learning experience for students and staff, the use of technologies in improving the assessment experience is still patchy.
In particular, in the JISC call for proposals for the assessment and feedback programme, it was suggested that ‘many institutions have yet to put in place well-embedded, supported and sustainable technology-enhanced assessment and feedback practices.’ Background of the Project The University of Glamorgan has long identified as part of its strategic vision the key role assessment has as the crucial element to improving the student learning experience.
Technology has played a significant part in developing and implementing a revised approach to curriculum design at the University by placing assessment at the heart of learning.
Two major assessment and feedback innovations, Assessment Diaries and GradeMark, were introduced as part of the institutional wide Change Academy Project “Putting assessment at the heart of learning” [2] supported by the Higher Education Academy and the Leadership Foundation in 2009-2010.
The two innovations, Assessment Diaries and GradeMark, have since been gradually introduced and implemented across the institution.
As is the case with many innovations in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), these innovations were interpreted and adopted at different levels across the University.
As part of the wider JISC assessment and feedback programme [3] aimed at improving assessment experience via the use of technologies, the project aims to evaluate both the Assessment Diaries and the use of GradeMark.
These tools were designed to address the issue of assessment bunching and poor feedback to students.
Assessment bunching is a term used to describe what happens when several assessment deadlines fall on the same date.
For example, a student studying six modules with varying assessment tasks finds that four of the modules have submission deadlines on the same date.
The issues associated with assessment bunching are commonly identified as less time being spent on each of the assessments, thus impacting on the quality of the submissions, and lower attendance in lectures and seminars whilst students are concentrating on the multiple assessments to be submitted.
It is self-evident that poor-quality submissions will affect individual student performance but they may also lead to academic staff being obliged to explain poor performance in a module during their annual review.
Similarly, poor attendance can have a detrimental impact on the whole class as it limits the opportunities for collaborative learning and may result in a more tutor-centred learning experience.
The quality of feedback on assessments is an integral part of the learning process and can enable students to develop their approach to assessments as well as enhance their knowledge acquisition, communication and critical thinking skills.
Feedback that comprises only ticks and a grade allows students to understand they did something correctly in that piece of work, but does not engage them in a dialogue about what was right, or how they could transfer that approach to future work.
Both assessment bunching and poor feedback have been frequently highlighted in the literature as major challenges towards improving student and staff assessment and learning experiences.
For example, the NUS (National Union of Students) [4], Bloxham and Boyd [5] and the REAP (Re-engineering Assessment Practices) Project [6] have also stressed the need for time on task and speedy and detailed feedback.
The University of Glamorgan project team believes that the key to resolving these two issues lies with using technologies to support and enhance dialogues not only between students and staff, but also amongst staff.
Assessment Diaries The Assessment Diary is essentially a simple list of module codes and titles, dates for assessment submission and return of feedback.
This information is posted on the institution’s VLE, Blackboard.
The diary uses an in-house Web-based front end which is provided within Blackboard.
The assessment diaries are populated with assessment data taken from the centralised database of validated modules.
The type of assessment is automatically populated and cannot be changed.
This provides an additional quality assurance mechanism in that if tutors wish to change the type of assessment – say from essay to a time-constrained test – they will be required to process that change through the University’s quality assurance procedures.
Module tutors are able to view their own modules and a course overview that enables them to see when other deadlines have been set.
The tutors then follow a series of simple steps to create new deadlines and also input the date on which feedback to students will be provided.
Students can view the assessment diaries in three formats – by module, by course or by calendar view – enabling them to see the detail of each module’s assessment deadlines and feedback due dates (in module view) or all their assessment deadlines and feedback dates (in course view) or through an electronic calendar allowing them to plan their time (in calendar view).
Tutors can view all the assessment and feedback dates for all assessments in a simple list.
A series of automated reminders to students are generated two weeks before submission, one week before and on the day of the submission deadline.
Tutors receive automated reminders requesting them to populate the assessment diaries if assessment and feedback dates have not been provided.
GradeMark GradeMark is an online marking tool that is part of the Turnitin plagiarism software and it provides tutors with a facility to annotate comments directly onto the student’s work.
Tutors can also set up comment banks of commonly used phrases and record up to three minutes of oral feedback.
Students are able to access their marked work via the University’s VLE.
Having marked work available online has significantly reduced the number of uncollected scripts.
Moreover, tutors are also able to see when students have read their feedback meaning that it is possible to identify the extent to which students are engaging with feedback.
The project team view GradeMark as more than a tool to improve the quality of feedback.
Rather, it is seen as a tool that could significantly improve student and staff experience of assessment by better managing the feedback process, and offering an opportunity to maintain a meaningful dialogue with students.
Methods An online questionnaire was used to gather baseline information on the student experience of Assessment Diaries and GradeMark.
Over 220 students completed the questionnaire.
This was followed by 5 focus groups with students in order to explore some key themes identified from the questionnaire.
Interviews were used to capture the views and experiences of academic, technical and administrative staff on the two innovations.
In particular, the interviews focused not only on pedagogical impact but also workload impact.
The evaluation of the two innovations, focusing on tackling the two issues would be of great benefit to the wider sector in improving the assessment and feedback experience for both staff and students.
The team have explored the use of Assessment Diaries and GradeMark with both users and non-users.
Some findings to date are presented below.
Major Findings to Date Pedagogical Impact of Assessment Diaries A common theme emerging from the analysis of interviews so far was the expected comment that use of the Assessment Diaries helps to prevent bunching of assessment deadlines for students.
Some staff expected the diaries to enable students to make ‘submissions that were better planned and executed.’  The course overview of the Assessment Diaries enabled staff to see the balance between types of assessment methods and ensure appropriate variety of approaches.
One interviewee in particular felt the diaries made a significant contribution to quality assurance in highlighting where assessment details on validated module specifications did not match actual practice.
In this particular example the interviewee had responsibility for an entire course of study and was able to see where there were mismatches between the type of assessment noted on the validated module documents compared to the type of assessment the tutors were seeking to enter in the assessment diary.
This led to a discussion among all module tutors to ensure that assessment practice matched the validated course specifications.
Interestingly it also led to some agreed changes in the validated specification and a better balance of assessments in terms of the mix of presentations, essays, reports and examinations.
Pedagogical Impact of GradeMark A number of interviewees felt that GradeMark enabled them to improve their feedback to students.
For example, one interviewee felt able to provide more detailed feedback and another commented that when students queried their grade he was able to go back and look at all his comments and see how the grade had been awarded.
Other staff felt that GradeMark simply enhanced what they have always done and it was fortuitous that GradeMark was able to enhance those existing assessment and feedback processes.
Some staff felt that the comment bank may usefully build up over time for things like referencing and directing students to further sources of support.
However, they were cautious about over-using the same comments because they want the students to feel they have had personal feedback.
Workload Impact of Assessment Diaries Initially staff thought that where large groups were involved, it was going to be difficult meeting the handback dates.
However, experience showed that ‘as long as you communicate to students and explain why it might be a bit late, students are fine’.
The students commented that they just need to know when the feedback is due and at the same time, staff felt that ‘the diary opens a line of communication.’ Some staff felt that publishing the handback dates was a good way to ‘stop emails from students 3 days after the submission deadline asking for feedback.’  However, an unexpected outcome was the number of staff who referred to the Assessment Diaries as a mechanism to manage their own marking deadlines to ‘avoid personal bunching’ and manage their marking loads.
One interviewee mentioned that as staff know when they plan to set assessment deadlines, the Assessment Diaries present no extra work.
However, as the co-ordinator she felt that the ‘workload comes from chasing staff to give me the dates.’ Workload Impact of GradeMark Interview respondents were divided on whether GradeMark reduced or increased marking time.
Several mentioned the elimination of paper handling as a positive aspect of online marking and that the process was quite intuitive and offered them flexibility in terms of location for marking i.e home or work.
Interestingly one interviewee felt that marking on GradeMark took longer ‘but it was easier than marking on paper and there were no worries about losing scripts no trudging around with piles of scripts.’  However, there were conflicting views from some respondents who found it much more difficult to mark on screen than on paper.
Of those that found it easier, the use of the comment bank was often mentioned as a benefit in terms of marking speed.
One respondent no longer asks students to submit a hard copy of their essays alongside their electronic submission (previous convention) on any module he teaches ‘better for them and better for me.’ Student Experiences of the Tools The most frequent comment to emerge from the questionnaire was that students found that the diary enabled them to plan their time better.
However this was not always the consensus view expressed in the student focus groups, where some students used the diaries to refer to the dates and information, but did not mention using it to plan their time more effectively.
This is interesting when compared with the staff expectation that students would use the diary to improve their time and task management of assessment.
It is worrying to note that students stated that the Assessment Diaries are often incomplete.
This occurred in various ways and included – inaccurate assessment information, missing deadlines and/or feedback dates.
This comment from the student focus groups expresses the point well: Whether students use the diaries depends on the module that we are doing, if we are confident in the lecturers and we have been discussing when the assessment is due, rather than just checking on the diaries.
Depends on the modules.
From the questionnaire, only two students indicated a positive relationship between incomplete information and the diary making no difference to their time management, showing that although the information may be incomplete, the tool was effective in aiding student time management.
Overall, judging from the students’ experience of using GradeMark, the picture remains somewhat unclear – with almost the same numbers of students saying they were more engaged with their feedback online as those who found it more difficult to engage with feedback provided online.
When asked what they saw as the main disadvantage of electronic feedback, 38% of students said that they were limited to online access, 33% reported reading feedback on-screen as the main disadvantage, with a large proportion of the sample (29%) saying they saw no disadvantages in using online feedback.
The main benefits students saw with using online feedback were that it was easily stored and re-accessed (64%) and that they were spared illegible handwriting by on the part of tutors (60%) while 52% stated the main advantage was easy access which somewhat counterbalances the 38% who saw online access as the main disadvantage.
The key advantages were related to the technical/online/system/process aspects of GradeMark whereas students’ suggestions as to improvements derived more from a pedagogical perspective and related to the quality of feedback and their engagement with that feedback.
Observations on Potential Future Developments One major future development for Assessment Diaries is to provide an overview of all assessment dates for all staff to view which would be similar to the student view currently provided.
At present, staff can see the diary for their own module but only certain staff roles such as Award Tutors or Programme Leaders have an overview of the entire course.
A further need is to provide different submission dates for distinct tutorial groups of students who are registered on the same module.
For GradeMark users it has become apparent that some staff are willing to forgive the limitations of the technology – even when GradeMark freezes on IE browsers.
This tolerance stems from the fact that they like the underpinning pedagogy and processes involved in online marking.
Most have been willing to share their opinions about how the tools could be enhanced.
The most significant improvement for these colleagues would be to link GradeMark with the University of Glamorgan student record system (Quercus Plus) to prevent their having to duplicate mark entry process as is currently the case.
For non-users of GradeMark, there was some way to go in terms of engaging with the practice of online marking.
It was apparent that the non-users were committed to their existing methods of providing feedback, and that these were often very successful.
It was interesting for the project team to reflect on the reasons tutors gave for not engaging with online marking as it became clear that those in the technical disciplines felt it would work well in the social sciences, and vice versa.
The project team formed the view that if tutors did not wish to use online marking, they would suggest a discipline-based reason why they should not – even if other colleagues in their discipline had used it successfully.
Clearly further dissemination of practice by staff who have found online marking to be effective may inform colleagues’ future decisions about marking online.
One theme that the project team did not expect to emerge is how some staff are using the Assessment Diaries and Grademark to support student retention.
Innovative examples include: tracking student progression through engagement with Assessment Diaries and facilitating personal tutor/student conversations.
One interviewee noted that the diaries had been: [u]seful as a prompt for Personal Tutors who can initiate conversations saying 'how did the assessment go on Friday?'
etc.
The interviewee was a Personal Tutor and had accessed student assessment diaries with her tutees to engage them in a dialogue about their learning from feedback in different modules on the same course.
She felt that this approach promoted a much more meaningful dialogue with her tutees than the generic ‘how are things going?’ approach she had used previously.
Conclusion The project team has gathered insights into the barriers preventing staff from engaging with the tools and have begun to see a clearer picture of activities that the University can put into place to support some of these staff as they begin to use these technologies.
The project interviews were stimulating and highlighted some fresh perspectives concerning the tools in relation to pedagogy and workload.
Overall, it is fair to say that whilst staff may share divergent views about the tools, they are agreed on the principles behind these developments.
The project team are confident that the project will produce valuable outcomes for the institution and the sector.
References The National Student Survey (NSS) http://www.thestudentsurvey.com/ Higher Education Academy Change Academy Project: Putting assessment at the heart of learning http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/digiassess_puttingassess.pdf JISC  Assessment and Feedback Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/assessmentandfeedback.aspx The NUS assessment and feedback campaign http://www.nus.org.uk/en/campaigns/higher-education/assessment-feedback-/ Bloxham, S. & Boyd, S. (2007) Developing Effective Assessment in Higher Education – a practical guide.
Maidenhead; OUP/McGraw Hill The Re-engineering Assessment Practices in Higher Education(REAP) Project http://www.reap.ac.uk/ Author Details Dr. Karen Fitzigibbon Deputy Head of the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching University of Glamorgan Email: kfitzgib@glam.ac.uk Web site: http://celt.glam.ac.uk Karen is currently the Deputy Head of the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the University of Glamorgan.
She was involved in the first phase of the Change Academy Project and became the project manager for the second phase of the Change Academy project 'Putting Assessment at the Heart of Learning'.
She is also leading the Higher Education Academy First Year Experience Group which shares good practice on themed first-year student experience initiatives throughout institutions in Wales.
Alice Lau Research Fellow (Assessment) University of Glamorgan Email: amlau@glam.ac.uk Web site: http://celt.glam.ac.uk Project Blog: http://assessdiariesgrademark.wordpress.com/ Alice is currently working as a research fellow in the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the University of Glamorgan.
She is responsible for research on assessment at Glamorgan and supports the implementation of the assessment policy.
She seeks to make assessment a support for the student learning experience rather than simply a measure of it.
Alice was heavily involved in the research for the Change Academy projects.
She is currently working on a part-time PhD entitled ‘Assessment for Learning in Higher Education’.
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Editorial: Welcome to New Ariadne Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial: Welcome to New Ariadne Buzz drupal Citation BibTex RIS The editor introduces readers to the new Ariadne.
I have it on good authority, from one of those who were there, that when the first issue of the JISC-funded electronic publication Ariadne was launched in January 1996, water was coming down the wall of their office in the hours of darkness; but they pressed on regardless.
Having been present at the launch of one or two new publications myself, I can well imagine their apprehension.
These days, the Library and Learning Centre at the University of Bath, an innovative institution itself, in being the first HE library in the UK to offer readers 24/7 access, is rarely subject to such concerns; but continues to be, I am pleased to say, the location of UKOLN which has published Ariadne since that turbulent night.
It is now my pleasure, after a series of enhancements over the years effected on the existing platform, to welcome you to the new-look Ariadne which is able to do so much more than its predecessor.
While conscious that not everyone wants to listen to the entire saga of one’s life-changing operation, Ariadne will nonetheless be relating some of the aspects of the work, not least because the transfer to a Drupal-based platform has involved the migration of a sizeable volume of legacy material.
Developers of new systems have understandable feelings about the impact of such a legacy on their plans [1] and I suspect some readers will be interested in that aspect.
Brian Kelly has written, ‘I am pleased to announce developments to Ariadne which not only enhance the user interface but also, perhaps more importantly, provide much richer access to the large number of articles which have been published during its lifetime.
Ariadne was launched at a time when mailing lists provided the main communications channel with Web sites acting primarily for publishing information.
In today's environment there is a much greater diversity of communications and publication channels including blogs, wikis, Twitter and social networks.
Ariadne continues to have a valuable role to play in this space and we hope the developments which have been launched in this issue will appeal to both existing readers and those who may not have come across Ariadne previously.
In light of the changing landscape we have reduced Ariadne's publication frequency from four to three times per year.
We feel Ariadne provides a valuable publishing channel which is positioned between the many blogs which describe digital library developments and peer-reviewed journals.
We hope you enjoy the new-look Ariadne and welcome your feedback.’ I have held to the view that too often we can become so fascinated and even obsessed with the nature of the carrier that we risk losing sight of the content.
However, this is an occasion when I too welcome the nature of the new vehicle because it helps us to expose much more about that content, providing more context and detail than was possible before.
Yet thinking of those early days of the publication, it has become apparent to me as we have worked on checking the adoption of content prior to this latest issue, how seemingly small was the eLib community which Ariadne set out to serve.
The earliest authors were so familiar to their readers that it was not regarded as necessary to post copious details about them since the assumption was everyone already knew them.
In many instances I had real trouble in establishing enough data to produce an author profile such as is now offered and which will be updated on receipt of every new article or via updates from previous authors who are requested to send them via Contact Ariadne.
Just as that community has grown and diversified, so has Ariadne’s scope and readership and we have recognised the need to provide readers with more and up-to-date detail.
Attaching to authors therefore, wherever possible, are data such as their institution, affiliation and location as well as a plethora of themes that can be derived from their articles.
The publication is now configured so as to be able to make access and navigability easier, even to its earliest material and, as was remarked upon by one of its original editors, John Kirriemuir, when we asked him to look over the new platform, …as the editor of the first ten issues, [I] am also glad that (finally) the magazine has one universal style throughout.
… It's also good that you are keeping everything; Ariadne acts as one of the very few unbroken records of digital library development.
With many websites turned off, or just plain deleted, much of the second half of the 90's, and more recent material, is no longer accessible or even in existence.
Moreover, such is the size of the content held in back issues, it has permitted the use of applications to identify trends in our community’s thinking, recognise points where certain ideas have taken off, and, pursuant to the Gartner hype principle [2], go through crests and troughs, when not finishing their days altogether.
I must readily confess that, by the nature of my work, my own perspective is largely one that is directed towards the future; as you will note from the new front page and the Forthcoming tab ‘below the fold’, I am keen to share such thinking with readers.
I suspect this is typical of practitioners in most areas of IT since we are all aware that developments in technology are never-ending; indeed they are the very raison d’être of this publication.
However, wiser heads also make the point that the early days of the Web are behind us, Web 2.0 has not turned out to be a minor squib and lo and behold, IT in general and certainly the developments within our own ‘airspace’ have most certainly come to form a history.
Ariadne is, thanks to the many more channels  and connections to its content, now better placed to offer a clearer view of that history; as well as continue with its task of examining the new and emerging.
When I joined UKOLN I soon discovered, as Philip Hunter, my predecessor, once put it, that ‘we have at least 50 new acronyms to learn before breakfast’.
I am very conscious that Ariadne ought to be helping readers who are not only new to a topic but also conceivably new to their job, ie, on their first day, first assignment and their third working language.
(The reason therefore why language in the feature articles is fairly standard and most acronyms and abbreviations are expanded to give non-native English readers a fighting chance.)
Now Ariadne is able to offer extra help with those acronyms, not only by expanding them, but by treating them and other terms as keywords, and providing not only an explanation but also a list of the material Ariadne holds that may be relevant to the reader’s requirements that day.
To that end also, we would like to hear if you consider a term has been overlooked, particularly if you see content in the journal that would support it.
Let us take just one example of how Ariadne might help with some recently developed technology: Elluminate, could be an example (renamed to Blackboard Collaborate after its recent purchase), of which one may have heard, but never used in anger.
Selecting Keywords from the tab line on the front page gives you an overview of all the tags operating on Ariadne and you have the option to seek out ‘elluminate’ or click on the filter option and place it in the  search field.
The page devoted to Elluminate supplies not only an explanation of the term to ensure you have found what you are looking for, but also gives background on its usage within the journal and even how recently it has emerged as an item of interest (October 2010).
Best of all, it tells you which authors have mentioned it and even who appears to be most interested in Elluminate, in this instance, Julian Prior and Marie Salter -  and their article is waiting below for you to read.
You can click through quickly to the most likely article, or linger over other information such as the fact that the term ‘blackboard’ is also associated, which represents another lead you might wish to follow.
I should add, of course, that you still have the option to search on ‘Elluminate’ over Ariadne from the search field on the front page (top right), which, I discover, offers Julian and Marie, and their article, as the first in the result rankings.
Doubtless readers will be able to tell me when that does not work so well, or a significant term is missing, and we would like to hear from you if you would like to get in contact with us.
And this is another aspect of the Ariadne community which we would like to continue to use: your views.
They have been at the centre of what has been produced starting from the initial discussions within UKOLN on a new platform through the development phase and pre-launch feedback.
Rest assured that we are still keen to hear readers’ views and are maintaining an analysis of which aspects are attracting comment, favourable or otherwise and our experience with developing the system so far leads us to think that it has the flexibility to allow of further developments.
That flexibility derives from the scale on which Drupal seems to have been designed and rather seems to bear out the decision which we took when it came to consider the system to adopt for this work.
The other strong contender, no surprise, was WordPress, but while it has been deployed at UKOLN with success in a variety of roles, I had reservations about its capacity to handle the amount of material Ariadne retains [3].
Therefore it was indeed most fortunate that our colleague Dr Thom Bunting had been using Drupal in the development of content for UKOLN’s Innovation Support Centre and other systems.
Thom agreed that Ariadne ought to prove a very suitable case for the Drupal treatment and so began the work on making the journal more accessible and navigable, so meeting the principal requirements of respondents to our surveys.
Not only does the publication now offer readers far more information than formerly, it has now gathered together the disparate styles of the earlier issues and holds the legacy material from 1996 in a far more discoverable form.
Thom and I have worked to ensure that the new platform properly presents the more idiosyncratic material and I would like to record my sincere thanks to Thom for his patience (with all my queries and requests) and dedication to the long and complex task.
Thanks also go to Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly and staff in UKOLN’s Software and Systems, as well as colleagues at JISC who have supported and encouraged this major development.
In this context I would like to express our thanks also to Joy Palmer of Mimas with whom we discussed plans to renovate Ariadne and whose advice encouraged us to keep users’ opinions central to how the scheme was approached.
Which brings me to my final and most important acknowledgement: of the readers and authors who, whatever the platform, have continued to read, write for and support Ariadne and whose opinions have been so encouraging and thought-provoking.
They have influenced how this publication is presented and navigated, and will continue to do so.
References 1.
‘When the "state of the art" operation in Hampshire opened in January [2002], it was already six years overdue.’  'Swanwick: Dogged by problems', BBC news, 19 December, 2002, 10:22 GMT http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1993586.stm 2.
Figure 1: Gartner Hype Cycle 2000 in: Marieke Guy.
"Integration and Impact: The JISC Annual Conference".
July 2005, Ariadne Issue 44 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/jisc-conf-rpt/#figure-1 3.
Nathan Smith.
“Why Drupal?” Sonspring Journal, 5 August 2010 http://sonspring.com/journal/why-drupal Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Mining the Archives: Metadata Development and Implementation Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mining the Archives: Metadata Development and Implementation Buzz data software framework portal archives metadata tagging repositories oai-pmh frbr e-science interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Martin White looks through the Ariadne archive to track the development and implementation of metadata in a variety of settings.
I was an early starter in the world of metadata.
Within hours of arriving at the offices of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in Euston Street, London, in 1970 to start a career as an information scientist I was writing my first abstract.
‘Writing’ is the correct verb as my A3 abstract would be typed up on an IBM golfball typewriter for production.
At the bottom of this form was a section called ‘Index Terms’ and it was made very clear at the outset that mistakes in the abstract were regrettable, but mistakes in indexing were unforgivable.
A small team would take my index terms and cut holes in 10,000-hole optical coincidence cards to enable anyone in the Association to find information of importance to them.
An error in indexing could well mean that the article might be lost for ever, or turn up in a totally unrelated search.
The word ‘metadata’ was never used, but to this day I can remember the care with which the list of controlled terms was compiled, and the pleasure I gained when my suggestion for adding Memory Alloys to the list was approved.
In this column I am working back through the Ariadne archives on metadata.
The term is now so pervasive in information management that my choice has been a very personal one, highlighting a few of the many papers that at the time of publication set out new directions for metadata standards and adoption.
There is no better place to start than with Paul Miller’s definitive paper [1] from 1996 on the structure and value of metadata.
Paul trained as an archaeologist but was soon moving towards a life-long interest in applying structure to information and data through metadata.
Paul currently runs the Cloud of Data Consultancy [2].
It remains one of the classic papers on metadata, providing a good bibliography of early developments and a summary of the key elements of the Dublin Core metadata framework.
Paul is slightly vague about the origin of the use of the term metadata and since I like an information discovery challenge, the earliest reference I have found is by Philip Bagley in a 1968 US Air Force research report entitled 'Extension of Programming Language Concepts' [3].
Only after finding this document did I check out the Wikipedia entry on metadata [4] and found the same reference.
By 1997 UKOLN [5] had appointed a Metadata Officer, Michael Day, and he contributed a short paper to Ariadne on the implications of metadata for digital preservation.
Michael set out five important questions which to this day still represent challenges for the profession: Who will define what preservation metadata are needed?
Who will decide what needs to be preserved?
Who will archive the preserved information?
Who will create the metadata?
Who will pay for it?
It is good to know that Michael is currently Digital Preservation Officer at the British Library and no doubt continues to muse upon the questions he has raised over the years.
1997 was also the year in which the Metadata Corner series [6] was established in Ariadne, usually written by one of the Metadata Group team at UKOLN.
I’ve not considered these columns in this review, a decision made on space and not on value, which was enormous in guiding practitioners through the challenges and opportunities of metadata implementation.
Early in 1998 Paul Miller was reporting on a meeting organised by the Telematics for Libraries Programme of the European Commission's Directorate General XIII (of fond memory!)
to consider how to integrate metadata, and in particular Dublin Core, into the projects being funded by the Telematics Programme of the European Commission.
Normally I do not include conference reports in this column, but this event was especially important in recognising the value of high-quality metadata in a European context.
The title of the report was “Dublin Comes to Europe” [7], a reminder that the initial work on the Dublin Core was initiated at a meeting organised by OCLC in Dublin, Ohio in 1995.
In my opinion metadata came of age with the launch of the Resource Description Network [8] in November 1999.
RDN had its origins in the 1994 Follett Report on IT in Higher Education [9].
The description of the event by Alistair Dunning brought back many memories as I attended the conference and emerged really very excited by the potential of RDN; but Alistair also hints at the amount of work and politics behind the scenes to set up RDN with Kings College and the University of Bath (UKOLN) as the lead institutions.
I was also present at one of the early meetings on the RDN initiative and, given some of the comments made, was amazed that it was launched at all.
To move out of chronological sequence for a moment, a very good review of the subsequent development of RDN was published in Ariadne in 2006.
Debra Hiom provides a narrative history [10] and a complementary timeline [11].
The date on the top of the timeline paper is December 2011.
A little metadata problem!
* To return to the story, arguably one of the most important of the contributions published on metadata in Ariadne was an early description of application profiles.
The problem that application profiles addressed is elegantly summarised by Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel in their paper “Application Profiles: Mixing and Matching Metadata Schemas” [12] in which they refer to the respective roles of standards makers and implementors: Both sets of people are intent on describing resources in order to manipulate them in some way.
Standard makers are concerned to agree a common approach to ensure inter-working systems and economies of scale.
However implementors, although they may want to use standards in part, in addition will want to describe specific aspects of a resource in a “special” way.
Although the separation between those involved in standards making and implementation may be considered a false dichotomy, as many individuals involved in the metadata world take part in both activities, it is useful to distinguish the different priorities inherent in the two activities.
[12] The importance of application profiles cannot be over-stated, as without them metadata schemas would have grown into metadata silos, and arguably much of the development of resource discovery (I use the lower case with deliberation) could not have taken place.
The clarity of the paper is typical of the ethos of Ariadne under editors Philip Hunter and Richard Waller.
Another aspect of the editorial direction of Ariadne was the willingness to publish papers on initiatives that had encountered difficulties on the way and which described how they were handled.
A good example is a paper by David Little, “Sharing History of Science and Medicine Gateway Metadata Using OAI-PMH” published in 2003 [13].
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) was developed by the Open Archives Initiative.
The subsequent history of OAI is a subject in its own right so I won’t dwell on it any further, but it does represent another aspect of the importance and the difficulties associated with cross-domain metadata harvesting and integration.
The challenges of metadata development and implementation are substantial, requiring all concerned to possess a very high degree of patience.
A good example is the development of metadata for learning objects.
Carol Jean Godby outlined the initial work on learning object metadata [14] in 2004 in the context of the development of application profiles.
Four years later, Sarah Currier summarised the progress in “Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008” [15] in which she highlighted the number of initiatives underway in this area of activity.
There is more than a hint of frustration at the lack of coherence and progress.
Only relatively recently has the Learning Resources Metadata Initiative started to fulfil the ambitions of the IEEE in particular, expressed over a decade ago.
These things really do take time and have to balance the work involved in tagging with the benefits to the user.
This will continue to be a challenge for all involved in metadata development and adoption.
To end on a positive note, take a look at the paper by Richard Gartner on the Linking the Parliamentary Record Through Metadata (LIPARM) Project for the UK Parliament [16].
The LIPARM Project should for the first time make feasible the joining up of the scattered UK Parliamentary record and bring to fruition the potential of the digitised record which has until now remained to some extent latent.
Such an ambition has been held by many Parliamentary historians, librarians, archivists and publishers for some time, and while the project can only represent the initial steps to achieving this, it has established a robust architecture which integrates well with existing resources and so should be readily extensible as new collections, both historical and contemporary, adopt it.
[16] This article exemplifies what can be achieved in resource discovery through carefully matching metadata schemas to user requirements, and combines both a detailed account of how the project was undertaken with a vision of what the benefits will be.
I read it and was immensely encouraged, but even so it is just one step in a particular domain.
There remains plenty of work for metadata visionaries to define and accomplish, and I look forward to reading further success stories in a few years time.
Figure 1 of "The LIPARM Project: A New Approach to Parliamentary Metadata": Four major collections of Parliamentary proceedings, each using a different interface [16] Reading articles in Ariadne, in common with any Web magazine, the length, depth and width of an article is difficult to appreciate.
Furthermore one of the attributes of Ariadne is the range of content, from short reviews to a major contribution of nearly 6000 words.
The paper I have in mind was written by a team from UKOLN working on a Jisc-funded project on application profiles for digital repositories [17].
In 2010 Talat Chaudri [18] and his co-authors highlighted the need for a collaborative approach to the development of application profiles.
I’d like to quote a paragraph in full because it should be on the desktops (virtual or physical) of any development team.
Application profiles, in order to be workable, living standards, need to be re-examined in their constituent parts in far greater detail than before, and that a range of implementation methods need to be practically tested against the functional and user requirements of different software systems.
This can only be achieved through a process of engagement with users, service providers (such as repository managers), technical support staff and developers.
While the ideal target audience are the end-users of the repository service, it is in practice difficult to engage them in the abstract with unfamiliar, possibly complex, metadata schemas.
So much of the process must inevitably be mediated through the repository managers' invaluable everyday experience in dealing directly with users – at least until the stage in the process when test interfaces, test repositories or live services can be demonstrated.
In order to engage developers in the process of building and testing possible implementation methods, it is absolutely crucial to collect and present tangible evidence of user requirements.
It is highly likely that practical implementation in repositories will vary greatly between individual services based on different software platforms.
However, it may well be that there are other more significant factors in individual cases.
[17] This paper also shows the depth of expertise in metadata at UKOLN.
Talat paid special attention to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic records which IFLA started to develop in 1998 and which I have to admit I never really understood even with the help of a very clear exposition of the FRBR Entity-Relationship [19] that Talat contributed to Ariadne in 2009.
Figure 1: left: FRBR Group 1: Entities and 'vertical' relationships; right: FRBR: Creators, contributors and agents.
From "Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles" [19] I felt much more at ease with the 2006 paper by another UKOLN metadata specialist, Emma Tonkin [20], on plain text tagging using folksonomies [21].What is remarkable about this paper is that the term ‘folksonomy’ [22] had only been coined a couple of years previously and yet already UKOLN was considering the opportunities and challenges of crowd-sourced tagging.
Figure 1: The sum of the records from various tagging services creates a 'tag ensemble'.
From "Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-text Tagging" [21] Compiling this review caused me to go back to look at the origin of the term.
One of the many benefits from working my way through the Ariadne archive is uncovering the timeline of library and information science.
We often forget, or do not have the time to check on, who invented what over the last couple of decades, and we sometimes fail to remember the rich research heritage that is now just a click away.
Editor's note: Actually, it represents the date Debra's timeline was restructured during Ariadne's platform re-design in 2011.
Pragmatism ruled: too time-consuming to alter.
References Paul Miller.
"Metadata for the Masses".
September 1996, Ariadne Issue 5 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue5/metadata-masses/ The Cloud of Data http://cloudofdata.com/ Philip Bagley.
(1968).
'Extension of Programming Language Concepts'.
US Air Force research report (.pdf format) http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/680815.pdf Wikipedia entry on Metadata, 3 October 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Ariadne Metadata Corner articles: Michael Day.
"Metadata Corner: Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research".
July 1997, Ariadne Issue 10 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/metadata/ ; Rachel Heery.
"Metadata Corner: Naming Names Metadata Registries".
September 1997, Ariadne Issue 11 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue11/metadata/ ; Tony Gill, Paul Miller.
"Metadata Corner: DC5 the Search for Santa".
November 1997, Ariadne Issue 12 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/metadata/ ; Michael Day, Rachel Heery, Andy Powell.
"Metadata Corner: CrossROADS and Interoperability".
March 1998, Ariadne Issue 14 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue14/metadata/ ; Michael Day.
"Metadata Corner".
July 1998, Ariadne Issue 16 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue16/delos/ Paul Miller.
"Dublin Comes to Europe".
March 1998, Ariadne Issue 14 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue14/dublin/ Alistair Dunning.
"RDN: Resource Discovery Network".
December 1999, Ariadne Issue 22 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/dunning/ Lynne J. Brindley, (1994) "Joint Funding Councils' Libraries Review Group (the ‘Follett’) Report — the contribution of the Information Technology Sub?committee", Program, Vol.
28 Iss: 3, pp.275 – 278.
See also: Joint Funding Council's Libraries Review Group: Report (The Follett Report), December 1993 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ Debra Hiom.
"Retrospective on the RDN".
April 2006, Ariadne Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/hiom/ Debra Hiom.
"RDN Timeline".
April 2006, Ariadne Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/hiom Rachel Heery, Manjula Patel.
"Application Profiles: Mixing and Matching Metadata Schemas".
September 2000, Ariadne Issue 25 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/ David Little.
"Sharing History of Science and Medicine Gateway Metadata Using OAI-PMH".
January 2003, Ariadne Issue 34 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/little/ Jean Godby.
"What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the Learning Object Metadata Standard?".
October 2004, Ariadne Issue 41 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/godby/ Sarah Currier.
"Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008".
April 2008, Ariadne Issue 55 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/currier/ Richard Gartner.
"The LIPARM Project: A New Approach to Parliamentary Metadata".
November 2012, Ariadne Issue 70 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/gartner Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Richard Jones, Mahendra Mahey, Emma Tonkin.
"Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles".
January 2010, Ariadne Issue 62 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/chaudhri-et-al/ Talat Chaudhri Network & Editing Services http://talatchaudhri.net/ Talat Chaudhri.
"Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles".
January 2009, Ariadne Issue 58 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/chaudhri/ Emma Tonkin: Research Portal, King's College, London https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/emma.tonkin.html Emma Tonkin.
"Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-text Tagging".
April 2006, Ariadne Issue 47 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/tonkin/ Thomas Vander Wal.
Folksonomy Coinage and Definition.
2 February 2007, vanderwal.net http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd 12 Allcard Close Horsham RH12 5AJ UK Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Martin White has been tracking developments in technology since the late 1970s, initially in electronic publishing in the days of videotext and laser discs.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the iSchool, University of Sheffield, since 2002 and is Chair of the eScience Advisory Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event Buzz mobile software wiki dissemination rss archives metadata tagging blog copyright video flickr preservation streaming avi odp usb wordpress podcast opml youtube webinar facebook twitter ustream hashtag mp4 elluminate licence research netvibes pageflakes storify Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy describes new tools and services that can help you get your event heard.
In 2007 Lorcan Dempsey coined the phrase ‘the amplified conference’ [1].
He used the term to refer to how event outputs (such as talks and presentations) were being amplified ‘through a variety of network tools and collateral communications’.
The term ‘amplified event’ is now fairly well recognised within the academic and cultural heritage sectors and is used as an umbrella expression for many practices and technologies that allow not only those external to an event to participate but also those who are actually there to get more out of the event.
Brian Kelly’s blog post Escaping the Constraints of Space and Time [2] explores the idea that such approaches can save “talks from the walled garden of the place and time at which they were given”.
More discussion of what event amplification is and the implications it has are given in the Event Amplifier blog [3] written by Kirsty Pitkin and in a series of blog posts written by Joanne Alcock [4].
Amplifying the Cheap and Easy Way This article is based on a presentation [5] given to a group of colleagues at a UKOLN all staff contact day.
The presentation was intended as a way for those present to share experiences and tips and discuss how UKOLN staff could as a whole improve how they amplify their event outputs.
This article looks at what you can do as an individual, or an event organiser, or as an organisation, to amplify the outputs in your control.
There are many reasons why one might want to amplify events.
Possibly the most important of these given the current economic and political climate is to increase the impact and value of an output.
You might give an interesting talk on your new project to your 10 team members.
Sharing a video of your talk could reach a hundred more people, sharing the slides you used could reach quite a few more, and it is quite possible that one of those people, armed with a better understanding of what you are doing, may contact you to see if you can work together in the future.
Of course not every talk is for external ears and there are occasions when you would rather not share what you have to say.
However within the public sector there is an expectation that we are open and make good use of tax-payers’ money.
Amplifying events can be an effective way to do both.
Many of us have fewer resources than we have had in the past, hence cheap-and-easy amplification is the way forward.
The approaches suggested here should not detract from those professional teams who use professional tools to amplify events.
They too have a role to play.
Unfortunately doing more with less is what is required of many of us in the public sector and so cheap and easy is one strategy explored here.
The challenges cheap and easy presents are discussed at the end of this article.
It is worth noting that this article seeks to identify the current situation.
The technologies it examines are today’s darlings, they may not be tomorrow’s.
Tools can come and go, they can also change, for example, a free tool can transform into one that costs money.
This article is based on the experiences of a few individuals and it is important to remember that different tools suit different people.
Each practice and each tool has its own set of issues, problems and opportunities.
It is important to be open-minded when you use them.
So what are the 10 cheap and easy ways in which you can amplify your event?
Video It As soon as you video a talk it can be watched again.
People who were absent can watch it, you yourself can watch it.
These days video-recording devices are generally more accessible (cheaper and easier to use) and video is increasingly being created and used by ‘lay people’.
Although a video camera will give better-quality footage a ‘point-and-shoot’ camcorder like a Flip camera will work perfectly for anything short (the newest Flips will record up to 120 minutes).
Flips are easy to use and usually have a flip-out USB arm which plugs directly into a PC.
Flips are also great for creating ‘Vox Pop’ shorts of people at events talking about what they have learnt or enjoyed.
This can make great future marketing material.
Easy-to-use camcorders also tend to be more tailored for Web use and are more likely to output your video in a Web-friendly format like AVI, MPEG, MP4.
Once you have created your videos you will want to upload them onto your PC.
Placing them on an online video site (such as Vimeo [6], YouTube [7] or Blip [8]) has a number of benefits.
It normally makes it easier for you to embed them elsewhere(such as in a blog) and it will also bring more people to your video.
Some video sites have limitations on the length, file size and formats they will accept, it is also important to make sure you add good metadata to your videos as this will help their categorisation and enable others to find them.
On some occasions you may want to edit your video, for example cut down its length, add titles etc.
There are lots of free applications that will allow you to do this, a good example is VideoSpin [9].
Figure 1: Screenshot of Video Spin editing software Stream It While videoing a talk will give people the ability to watch it later, streaming it will allow them to watch it at the same time as it takes place.
This has many added benefits for an audience: for example, they can participate in live discussion, ask questions, offer feedback.
Live streaming used to be a complicated activity that required a dedicated team and a collection of expensive tools.
A reasonable effect can now be achieved using online services and similar tools to those mentioned in no.
1 above.
Some of the most popular tools are Livestream 10, justin.tv [11] and Ustream [12].
Bambuser [13] and Qik [14] are primarily geared towards your live streaming using a mobile phone.
An account can take only minutes to set up.
Twitcam [15] streams live onto Twitter Podcast It Video is not always the right medium and there can be value in allowing your presentations to be made available or streamed in audio format.
One reason for this is that audio files tend to be smaller in size than video.
Moreover, podcasts of talks or interviews can be listened to easily by people on their daily commute.
Although it is possible to record using a headset or microphone, good digital voice recorders can be picked up for a reasonable price.
There are many services that will help you distribute and store your audio files including Audioboo [16], iPadio [17], Internet Archive [18] and PodOmatic [19].
Audacity [20] is an excellent piece of downloadable open source software which can be used for recording and editing sounds; however to use it to its full potential may require some training and use.
Snap It Good, reusable photos of an event are an excellent resource.
They can be used as marketing material, in event write-ups and as an indication of the impact of the day.
Photos of people, outputs (such as flip boards) and technology in action are particularly useful.
Again a phone camera will do the job here, but a dedicated camera is likely to achieve better results.
It could be argued that artistic ability has a bigger role to play with taking photographs than videoing.
A photo is easy to take, but a good photo is not so easy to take.
Once taken, photos can be shared publicly or among a group using a service like Flickr [21] or Google Picassa [22].
Many people who attend events share photographs and if an event tag has been assigned, it is likely that you will be able to find some good photographs shared.
Some photographs will have a Creative Commons licence and can be reused as long as the original source is cited.
If people from your organisation take many work-related photos it may be worth setting up an organisational Flickr account or pool (a shared collection of images from different individual accounts).
The photos added can be tagged by event hashtags, location details and individuals’ names.
Once photos are available in Flickr they can be easily embedded in blogs and Web pages in the form of badges.
Figure 2: Screenshot of UKOLN Flickr site Slide It Most presentations involve slides of some shape or form.
Although many people still use PowerPoint or Keynote, there are other options like Prezi [23] or SlideRocket [24], which will create more interactive presentations and mean your ‘slides’ are already available on the Web.
Slideshare [25] will allow you to upload your slides (from ppt, pptx, odp, pdf or keynote) onto a shared space on the Web.
You can add information and tags to the presentation making it easier for others to find.
Slideshare will also allow you to create slidecasts using your slides and audio.
The groups and events facilities means that several presentations can easily be linked and the Slideshare presentation pack allows you to collate sets of presentations in a bundle.
Authorstream [26] is similar to Slideshare but will also let you present your slides live over the Internet.
You will need someone to help you move to the next slide if you choose to do this.
Posters and documents may sit better in Scribd [27], a social publishing site.
Figure 3: Screenshot of Slidecast in Slideshare Tweet It Twitter [28] is a micro-blogging service which allows users to send brief posts up to 140 characters long.
The last few years have seen it become an international phenomenon with over 100 million users worldwide.
Twitter works especially well at events and can be used by organisers, delegates and speakers alike.
Organisers can create an account offer updates and alert followers to important occurrences in a similar way to an RSS feed.
Prior to an event this may take the form of general publicity material.
During an event it could be used to alert delegates to problems and in the form of a Twitterwall (such as Twitterfall [29]) which is a public screen with all the Twitter posts in respect of one keyword or hashtag relating to the eventbeing followed.
After an event it could be used to alert followers to where resources are held.
Delegates can sign up for the event Twitter account and also tweet during the event using the hashtag.
There are many Twitter tools available which could aid with event amplification.
One of the more interesting is iTitle [30] which is a tool for creating new subtitle files for Twitter search results [31].
The end result is a mash-up of the video footage of a talk with the Twitter stream relating to that talk.
Another tool Summarizr [32] will provide statistics from Twitter use at an event.
There are many approaches now taken to archiving Twitter through use of Twapper Keeper [33] and other services.
The Tweets can be used at a later date for trip reporting, event analysis, impact investigation etc.
Blog It There are two different types of blogging you can use to amplify an event: normal blogging and live blogging.
Posts on blogs can be used to promote an event and set the scene, they can also be used as a place for trip reports after the event.
An event blog established purely to support an event, like the Institutional Web Management Workshop blog [34], can be used before, during and after the event in many different ways.
There are opportunities to highlight talks and workshops, allow sponsors to market themselves, publish guest posts, introduce people involved in the event and interview participants.
When the blog is no longer being used it should be closed down to avoid issues with spam etc.
While normal blogging tends to consist of posts with a reasonable amount of content, live blogging is much more like Twitter: brief comments on the event.
Live blogging is publishing your notes taken during a session and publishing them throughout the event, in real time.
Probably the best known service that supports live blogging is Coverit Live [35], other services include Scribble Live [36].
There are also number of Live Blogging Wordpress plugins.
Webinar It People are increasingly running online events and workshops.
One way to do this and offer a package that can be reused afterwards is to organise a Webinar.
Elluminate [37] and Gotowebinar [38] are two of the best known Webinar services.
BigBlueButton [39] is an open source alternative and is being taken up by the academic sector.
Panopto [40] is a lecture capture service that is currently used at the University of Bath with great success, read Nitin Parmar’s post for more details [41].
Figure 4: Screenshot of Presentation given in Elluminate Collate It Amplifying events can result in many resources and for clarity it is useful to pull these all together.
Often this is done through a Web site or service.
In 2009 Eduserv streamed its annual symposium, held at the Royal College of Physicians, London and used a company called Switch New Media [42] to pull together a number of resources including the live stream, the programme, live Twitter feed, live blog (Scribble Live) and speaker details.
The result was impressive.
Figure 5: Screenshot of Eduserv Symposium 2009 However if you do not have the budget to pay for an external service to do this another option is to use some of the collation tools available.
Services like Netvibes [43] and Pageflakes [44] provide the ability to create a personalised page, or dashboard, by collating RSS feeds.
Many of the services talked about in this article (Twitter, Flickr, Slideshare, Vimeo etc.)
will create RSS feeds for their content so the process is straightforward.
There are also options to embed other content such as localised RSS feeds for news and weather and even live streaming.
One of the issues with social personalised homepages that use RSS is the time they take to load, because they are pulling together so many different content streams they can be very slow.
RSS Feeds can also be collected together using OPML.
More recently a number of services have arrived that collate information in slightly different ways from the dashboard services, these include Storify [45], Livebinders [46] and Lanyrd [47] Lanyrd in particular is proving to be an interesting service and offers many ways for users to ‘get more out of conferences’.
All regularly add new features and it is likely that in the future there will be many online environments that allow the bringing together of amplified resources.
Promote, Share & Archive It Once you’ve created your amplified resources then next step is likely to be their promotion.
The usual marketing techniques apply: sending details to email lists, mentioning them on blogs and Web pages, tweeting them, adding them to Facebook [48] and linking to them in articles and papers.
It makes sense to have your resources available as soon as possible after an event to use the interest that has already been raised and to benefit from use of event hashtags.
If an event has a community attached to it, maybe through the use of Crowdvine [49] or an event wiki or blog, then try to make use of it.
After the initial dissemination many resources promote themselves with good tagging and metadata and you will find that if the subject matter continues to be relevant that there will a steady flow of people accessing them over time.
If you would like your resources to be available for as long as possible then some thought should be given to archiving them, and digital preservation.
When using externally hosted services there are always digital preservation issues, many of which have been discussed in the JISC PoWR Project [50] and in the Beginners Guide to Digital Preservation [51].
Issues, Problems and Opportunities Copyright One of the biggest challenges when creating online resources relates to copyright and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
The ins and outs of copyright and IPR are not a matter for this article but all who carry out amplification of events need to be aware of certain boundaries.
For example if the presenter is yourself and you have asked someone else to video you then this is not a problem, providing the material you are presenting has no associated copyright issues.
If however you are videoing or photographing others then you may need to obtain their permission to reproduce it on the Web.
Many events clarify matters such as these in booking forms (e.g.
If you attend our event you may be videoed) but you should always take a common-sense approach to any actions.
When releasing materials, using a Creative Commons licence will make it easier for others to reuse them.
There are a collection of UKOLN Introbyte briefing papers that consider risk management and third-party services [52].
Ownership is also a matter necessary for consideration.
There may be occasions in which the boundaries between personal use and work use become blurred, for example when using a Flickr photo-sharing account.
If possible, try to clarify these boundaries through the creation of institutional accounts that use generic accounts.
If this is not possible, some policy writing in this area may be beneficial.
Quality One of the biggest tensions to expect when amplifying events on a budget is quality versus cost.
When you begin to move away from professional tools and professional teams who know how to use these tools there is always going to be a drop in quality.
The question you will need to ask yourself is: what quality is appropriate for this event, or in this situation?
Small events can be amplified at very little cost resulting in huge added value, larger events may require more thought and more outlay.
There needs to be a balance in what you do.
Conclusion This article has looked at some cheap and easy ways in which event outputs can be amplified.
I hope they have offered some food for thought on what can be achieved on a budget.
I believe that the future will bring fewer face-to-face events and more online and virtual ones; our environmental and financial situation will dictate this.
The result of this is that we will need to make the time that we are physically located in the same space truly count.
There has been a number of recent arguments from well known academics supporting this idea and in favour of turning the whole conference idea on its head flipping it [53].
Amplifying events is already one step in this direction.
References Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog: The Amplified Conference: http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001404.html UK Web Focus: Escaping the Constraints of Space and Time http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/escaping-the-constraints-of-space-and-time/ Event Amplifier blog http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com/ Event Amplification: what’s it all about?
http://www.joeyanne.co.uk/2010/10/28/event-amplification-whats-it-all-abou/ Slideshare: 10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify your Event http://www.slideshare.net/MariekeGuy/10-cheap-and-easy-ways-to-amplify-your-event Vimeo http://vimeo.com/ YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ Blip http://blip.tv/ Video Spin http://www.videospin.com/ Livestream http://www.livestream.com/ justin.tv http://www.justin.tv/ Ustream http://www.ustream.tv/ Bambuser http://bambuser.com/ Qik http://qik.com/ Twitcam http://twitcam.livestream.com/ Audioboo http://audioboo.fm/ iPadio http://www.ipadio.com/ Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ PodOmatic http://www.podomatic.com/ Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ Google Picassa http://picasa.google.com/ Prezi http://prezi.com/ Slide Rocket http://www.sliderocket.com/ Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ Authorstream http://www.authorstream.com/ Scribd http://www.scribd.com/ Twitter http://twitter.com/ Twitterfall http://www.twitterfall.com/ iTitle http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/ititle/ Twapper Keeper, Tweets and Captioning http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/twapper-keeper-tweets-and-captioning/ Summarizr http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/ TwapperKeeper http://twapperkeeper.com/index.php Institutional Web Management Workshop blog http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/ Coverit Live http://www.coveritlive.com/ ScribbleLive http://www.scribblelive.com/ Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com/ Gotowebinar http://www.gotomeeting.com/fec/webinar BigBlueButton http://bigbluebutton.org/ Panopto http://www.panopto.com/ Ramblings of a Remote Worker: Introducing Lecture Capture at the University of Bath http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/introducing-lecture-capture-at-the-university-of-bath/ Switch New Media http://www.switchnewmedia.com/ Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com/ Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/ Storify http://storify.com/ Livebinders http://livebinders.com/ Lanyrd http://lanyrd.com/ Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ Crowdvine http://www.crowdvine.com/ JISC PoWR project http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ Beginners Guide to Digital Preservation http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-beg-dig-pres/content/what-exactly-do-i-need-to-preserve/jisc-project-outputs/event-information UKOLN Cultural Heritage Briefing Documents on Risk Management http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/documents/#risk-management Flipping lectures http://www.johnniemoore.com/blog/archives/002678.php Author Details Marieke Guy Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.guy/ Marieke Guy is a research Officer at UKOLN.
She writes on remote worker issues and many of the technologies and services she mentions in this article are covered in more detail in her blog: Ramblings of a Remote Worker.
http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/ Return to top Article Title: “10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event” Author: Marieke Guy Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/guy/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Trust Me, I'm an Archivist Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Trust Me, I'm an Archivist Buzz data software archives blog preservation cataloguing provenance research standards Citation BibTex RIS Christopher Hilton, Dave Thompson and Natalie Walters describe some of the issues of engaging with donors when it comes to transferring born-digital material to the Library.
Born-digital archival material represents the single most important challenge to the archival profession for a generation or more.
It requires us to rethink issues and assumptions around acquisition, preservation, cataloguing and reader access.
Not least is the problem of getting donors to transfer their born-digital material to us.
We have encountered four common scenarios that seem to act as blocks to the transfer of such material.
We also need to change the way we engage with donors.
This is a challenge that we cannot duck unless we wish to condemn our collection to increasing irrelevance.
The Problem?
Managing born-digital material is difficult.
We all have trouble finding, storing and managing the data we create.
Yet we have an attachment to this transient and ephemeral stuff that we find hard to relinquish.
We seem to have a stronger emotional attachment to digital material than we did with paper.
Thus, donors who have happily donated paper archival materials to the Library struggle with the challenges of donating born-digital material, challenges that are not always technical.
The Current State of Play Two previous articles in Ariadne [1][2] have reported on the Wellcome Library’s engagement with born-digital material: for readers who have not seen these it is appropriate to begin by recapitulating the themes established there.
The Wellcome Library is a collecting institution and the majority of its archival holdings are acquired from outside bodies or individuals by purchase, deposit or gift.
The Library has no mandate to require an organisation or individual to lodge their records in the Library, and little influence over their use of particular formats or technologies.
Conversely the Library is not required to take in any given material.
The archivists have the freedom to decide what material to accept or if a particular format is too problematic to acquire when set against the material’s informational value.
The Library’s work with digital material is based on two central principles: That sound archival practice is wholly appropriate to working with born-digital materials.
That if the Library does not acquire born-digital archival material then its future relevance as a research Library is compromised.
Starting from First Principles Learning from experience has been crucial to the Wellcome Library, and much of this article will be concerned with those lessons.
Archival first principles, the concepts of respect for provenance, authenticity and original order issues common to all archival material whether paper or digital – form a sound foundation for working with digital material.
A similar call to start with archival first principles and develop a methodology from them, rather than working up from specific projects, was made in a recent blog-posting by Christopher Prom [3].
This includes close working relationships with an archive’s donors and creators.
We have focused upon the first phases of the process; acquisition, educating donors and the Library’s ability to take in born-digital material and apply a preservation strategy to it.
Conversations with donors have emphasised the importance of born-digital material and our desire to support them in transferring digital material; for most, a new activity.
The Library’s Web site provides frequently asked questions (FAQs) and other information setting out the basics of working with born-digital material and we always encourage potential donors to come and talk to us.
Experiences with Donors There is, then, a continuous process of feedback, of reality-testing, between our basic assumptions, the first principles of archival practice, and the specific challenges set by born-digital material.
The encounter between assumptions and reality is not confined solely to the Library taking in material: it is something also experienced by the creators of born-digital material who become involved in transferring that material to an archive.
Whether they have previous experience of transferring paper records, or are encountering the archival process for the first time, they will bring assumptions to the operation which will shape its execution for both depositor and archive.
Our encounters with born-digital material suggests that donors are not simply carrying over their past experiences in working with paper materials.
It Used to Be Simple Despite our conviction that the key aspect of born-digital material is its content, that is, the information within it, for the creator the different physical nature of born-digital material makes it seem somehow different to paper material.
One experience of ours highlights this clearly in the separation of responsibilities in organisations between paper and digital records.
We encountered one organisation in which paper material flowed down a well-established path to a single information professional charged with the organisation’s records management.
Guidelines were set on what should be retained, what discarded and what had only a fixed-term importance.
They had previously set up periodic transfers of this paper material to the Library.
Here was a mature and organised records management set-up seemingly ripe for extension to cover born-digital material.
However, technical issues outranked information management principles and born-digital material was seen solely as the responsibility of the IT department, whose remit was confined to short-to-medium term access to material without regard to long-term preservation.
Born-digital material went down a completely different management track to paper records: one in which the main concerns were to maximise server space by deleting material seen as no longer current, and in which material no longer accessible because of software changes had simply been deleted.
Much material was permanently lost with no consideration to its value.
Obstacles to Digital Transfer In our dealings with donors and/or creators, we have frequently observed four characteristics in relation to their transferring born-digital material to the Library.
Lack of Long-term Planning When it comes to the preservation of digital material, there seems to be less awareness of the need for long-term thinking.
There is an acceptance that paper needs to be stored somewhere if it is to be retained, but, somehow, not digital material.
Perhaps digital material creates ‘invisible clutter’ which can be ignored.
Many of the paper donations to the Library come about as a result of offices becoming full, or the space being needed for other things.
Whilst digital clutter can also be inconvenient for an organisation (e.g.
by making it harder to locate files), the organisation’s chief executive is not going to trip over it and break his or her neck when paying an unexpected visit to the office!
IT vs Records Management The separation of IT and Records Management functions within an organisation has already been mentioned above.
One of the problems associated with this is that if server space is needed, one of two things tends to happen: either new space is bought and the ‘digital clutter’ is temporarily forgotten, or the IT department takes it upon itself to delete any documents older than a certain date.
Whilst the former is problematic in its own way, it is the latter that causes the most problems for archivists.
The date a document was last accessed is no indicator of its archival value.
There is a broader issue here in how organisations manage their own records that goes beyond the simply archival that we have been unable to tackle effectively.
Duplication and Abundance Whilst capricious disposal can be a problem for archives, so can the reverse.
It is easier than ever before to create and duplicate records.
Recently a medium-sized medical organisation donated its papers to the Library.
This organisation has been archiving the papers of its yearly conference with the Library for some time, including the obligatory group photograph of the conference participants.
However, when they began to produce the conference papers in born-digital format, instead of the usual official photograph, the papers were accompanied by hundreds of digital photographs (taken by the honorary archivist with personal camera), none of which were remotely archival.
The problems of abundance become problems of appraisal and of the time taken to appraise large donations.
The Fear of Digital However, the most common problem we have faced so far has been in regard to access.
Organisations which have been giving us their paper archives for decades suddenly seem reluctant to continue to pass the same documents to us because they are now produced and circulated in digital form.
There appears to be a fear, perhaps born of ignorance, about making their material available.
The fear is that ‘anyone can see it’ just because it is digital.
Despite familiarity with donation agreements, withholding agreements and the experience of past practice, some organisations’ staff assume that ‘digital’ must mean ‘unrestricted access’.
Not Everyone Is the Same The above issues have emerged in our dealings with largeto medium-scale organisations.
A slightly different dynamic is at work in our dealings with individuals and very small bodies.
Here it is likely that the initial approach has been from the individual to the Library, rather than from the Library to the organisation.
A much greater degree of interest in the material is common, in which individuals are dealing with their own records or a small organisation has devolved responsibility for record keeping to an interested member of staff or volunteer.
In such instances, we may not be battling inexperience or indifference, but, instead, over-enthusiastic engagement.
A common feature in such cases is a misplaced willingness to migrate between formats (something that can also occur with larger organisations).
This may take the form of suggesting that all born-digital material should be printed out for transfer as paper records.
This would be laborious, would falsify the experience of the material both for its creators and future researchers, and in the case of some formats would simply be impossible.
Surprisingly we have also encountered the suggestion that all paper material should henceforth be scanned and transferred to the Library as .pdf.
It seems clear that potential donors of born-digital material see the change of format as betokening not simply new technical problems but as somehow changing the dynamic of how they relate to the Library.
More ominously, this suggests that our donor education efforts are failing.
Somehow the messages we thought were clear are obviously not.
Perhaps our approach of treating digital and physical materials as the same, at least in terms of donation, is too simplistic.
It might be that the passive FAQ approach is not sufficient in delivering the message.
Perhaps we need to return to first principles and work more closely with our donors.
Whom to Educate and How?
There is a difficulty in differentiating between personal and professional in the digital realm.
Whilst professional correspondence taken in by archives has always included a personal element, it is clear that the boundary is even more blurred when it comes to digital material.
For example, a lecturer at a university recently tried to send his digital personal papers to the Library.
The university’s IT department decided that he had no right to do this as the material was the property of the university, not of the individual.
However, it seemed to have no problem with the individual sending his paper archives to the Library.
As archivists we have too little experience in dealing across a wide range of organisations, and in dealing with multiple interested parties.
It would be difficult in this case to know to whom exactly to talk: the IT department may be following a set procedure, and senior management may in fact have no interest in the archiving of an individual’s papers.
It has become ever more apparent as we engage with digital material and its creators that we are educating our donor/depositor community at the same time as we are learning and adapting our procedures.
In particular, if we are sure that the most important principles involved in this exercise are archival ones – that born-digital material is simply information in a different guise we need to convince our donor/depositor community of this truth.
The value of early engagement is clear.
It can be a matter of years from initial contact to deposit, whilst the issues involved are sorted out to the donor’s satisfaction.
Time and again, the simple rule of having a single point of contact during this process has proved most valuable.
If that point of contact is the same person who deals with paper records, and thus is someone familiar with some basic concepts already, this is even more helpful.
Although this article has presented a number of examples where the transition from paper to digital has not been a smooth one, this is not always necessarily the case.
There is a small medical organisation with which we have been dealing which has been extremely helpful.
This organisation has been donating its paper records to the Library for some time, and when these records started to be generated in digital formats, it contacted the Library to discuss their transfer.
The staff there are well organised, ready to ask questions of us and confident about what records they need to retain as an organisation, and therefore what they can transfer to the Library.
They are also prepared to engage with technology and to learn how to perform functions beyond the basics.
The result is that the transition from paper archives to born-digital archives has been incredibly smooth.
The bonus has been a closer working relationship.
This shows what can be achieved by communication and early intervention.
We can only hope that other organisations and individuals follow their example!
Conclusion We remain convinced that sound archival principles are the key to working with born-digital archival material.
We are convinced that engagement with our donor community is absolutely necessary.
Yet the ‘old’ paper model does not fit the digital world as perfectly as we had thought.
Our education and engagement efforts to date have not resulted in donors simply handing over their archives in digital form.
We can see that what our donors are doing with their digital material is not always to the greatest advantage of that material.
Somehow we are powerless to stop them.
We have clearly underestimated the differences in the way individuals ‘feel’ about their digital material.
We do not yet have a new model for engagement with our donors.
We can see where currently we are failing to get the message across; consequently we need to change the way we present information, about how we work with digital material and about how we can support and assist our donors.
It is as if we need to re-convince them that we can be trusted, in the advice we give, in the assistance we provide, and in our ability as archivists.
We already knew that only by engaging with our donors/depositors could we test our hypotheses, learn from our experience and move forward.
It has become apparent that in addition to this the degree of engagement that is standard practice with paper records will not suffice for born-digital material: our interaction with depositors will ideally be even closer and even more frequent, as we help them deal not merely with new technical challenges but with the plethora of soft-skills issues, of preconceptions and of attachments that surround them.
But maybe this, again, is nothing new: the archivist once more is being asked to combine specialist knowledge with ‘bedside manner’.
We return, as ever, to one of the basic core skills of the profession.
References Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson.
“Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library”, January 2007, Ariadne Issue 50, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/hilton-thompson/ Christopher Hilton and Dave Thompson, “Further Experiences in Collecting Born Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library”, October 2007, Ariadne issue 53, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/hilton-thompson/ Christopher J. Prom, “Re-imagining Academic Archives”, 27 May 2010, Practical e-Records blog, http://e-records.chrisprom.com/?p=1219 (accessed 18 October 2010).
See also Christopher J. Prom, “Making Digital Curation a Systematic Institutional Function”,Forthcoming, Proceedings of the 6th International Digital Curation Conference, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
December 6-8 2010, for a development of this theme.
Author Details Dr Christopher Hilton Senior Archivist Wellcome Library 183 Euston Road London NW1 2BE Email: c.hilton@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ Dave Thompson Digital Curator Wellcome Library 183 Euston Road London NW1 2BE Email: d.thompson@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ Natalie Walters Archivist Wellcome Library 183 Euston Road London NW1 2BE Email: n.walters@wellcome.ac.uk Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “Trust Me, I’m an Archivist: Experiences with Digital Donors” Author: Christopher Hilton, Dave Thompson and Natalie Walters Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/hilton-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Review of "Library Management in Disruptive Times: Skills and knowledge for an uncertain future" Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review of "Library Management in Disruptive Times: Skills and knowledge for an uncertain future" Citation BibTex RIS Tanya Butchers reviews the Facet publication, "Library Management in Disruptive Times: Skills and knowledge for an uncertain future" edited by Steve O’Connor.
With a cover description that promises a book that “identifies the key skills and attitudes needed by the library leaders of today and tomorrow” I anticipated a collection of  practical, experience-based chapters describing situations the authors had found themselves in, accounts of how they had approached the issues, the lessons they learned and reflections on what they would do differently the next time.
As a current library service manager within the UK Public sector I hoped to be able to identify with those situations, reflect on the accounts and apply some of the lessons to my own experiences.
Unfortunately this isn’t that kind of book, rather it is a collection of nine largely theoretical, introspective articles from international researchers, academics or managers of large academic institutions, which reflect on research undertaken by the authors, things they have read about or things that may happen in the future.
Articles include: “Leading change: knowledge for success” by Ian Smith; “Management fads and fashions and their impact on the LIS community” from Bill Fisher; “The Five Rules of Engagement for librarians aux Ranganathan’s laws of library science” by Choy Fatt Cheong; “Library management, disruption and consortia: an Australian example” by Michael Robinson; “No regrets; just lessons: economic crisis is changing our life and the management of libraries” by Petros A. Kostaglios; “Introducing agile principles and management to a library organization” by Daniel Forsman; “The role of professional associations in changing times” by Susan Henczel and “What is behind the meaning of disruption?
Or, thinking of management strategies from the outside” by Steve O’Connor.
Whilst each article in the book is interesting in it’s own way, to my mind the collection doesn’t present a coherent narrative and I have struggled to identify the target audience.
Practitioners hoping to be able to identify with and learn from the experience of colleagues, are unlikely to find inspiration or new ideas here and as for students in the field of library and information, I personally feel that there are many other change management texts out there that will give the theory and reflect on the practice of this art in a more digestible and usable form.
For me the one notable exception is the article by Dr. Colin Storey entitled “And the walls came tumbling down… The library profession confronts all-invasive new managerialism” in which uses his decades of experience to proffer advice and hints for library managers, albeit in a slightly tongue-in-cheek manner.
This is the closest to practical and usable advice that we get with several of the sentiments expressed chiming with my own experience.
Indeed some of the comments gave me a less-than-comfortable pause for thought as I started to reflect on the statements and my own attitudes or behaviour, so not all is lost and colleagues may look forward to some improvements!
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Book Review: Libraries Designed for Kids Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Libraries Designed for Kids Buzz graphics Citation BibTex RIS Sara Wingate Gray considers a practical guide to implementing design change in children's libraries and how to manage a consistent approach.
Published simultaneously as a US and UK edition, this is a practical 'how to' manual in creating children-oriented library spaces.
It is a good starting point for practitioners involved in redesigning children's library spaces, and those lucky few who have been given the go-ahead to start from scratch and who wish to engage properly with the design and creation process before committing funds.
The book is divided up into the following chapters, which give an idea of the basic issues that should be addressed: Introduction: Improving Service by Design Chapter 1: Innovative Children's Library Models Chapter 2: Planning a New Children's Library Chapter 3: Assessing Physical Needs Chapter 4: Design Considerations Chapter 5: Organizing the Children's Area Chapter 6: Entrances, Displays, Graphics, and Lighting Chapter 7: Age-related Design Chapter 8: Designing Programme, Activity, and Staff Areas Chapter 9: Furnishings and Equipment Chapter 10: Quick Fixes and Common Mistakes Practically Essential...
This book is a solid starting point for anyone required to deal with some of the most basic issues when it comes to creating library spaces for kids.
There is a good deal of useful, if elementary information, spanning such issues as: how to implement zone and boundary areas (Chapter 5); considering seating design (Chapter 9); as well as considering how to create complementary areas and spaces for all the age ranges your library space must serve (Chapter 7).
If much of this information seems obvious to a children's library professional, that's probably because it is, but it's all too easy to forget some of this most basic, and yet important, information when you get caught up in the realisation of creating and implementing your designed library space.
It is also useful to point out that despite this user group being one of the key stakeholders in library services, in these troubled economic times library professionals may find themselves plugging gaps that others cannot fill.
Not all libraries will have the opportunity to hire and support dedicated children's librarian professionals, who necessarily have many of the skills and know-how that this book offers in a concise, and very readable form.
This, I would argue, is one of the target audiences for this title: if your staff budget has been cut, or if you just don't have the resources to dedicate to a proper feasibility study and consultation on how to rejuvenate your children's library space – yet you need to go-ahead and just 'make do' and come up with your own changes within your own budget, resources, and time-frame, then this is the title for you.
...Yet Essentially Basic Where this title falls short, however, is in negotiating any of the aspects of Children's Librarianship that fall outside of the 'practical'.
I would have welcomed additional thoughts and discussions relating to many of the issues each chapter covers, for instance, Chapter 1's 'Innovative Children's Library Models' was crying out for a more detailed exploration of how and why our models have shifted over the decades.
Such an exploration, appended to each chapter, would have rounded out this title to be a really meaty, and weighty tome of both practical and conceptual use.
However, I must add the caveat that this is not at all what the book itself purports to be, as the author clearly states in the Preface that 'Libraries Designed for Kids is a one-stop resource for both architects and librarians…intended to serve [as a]... 1.
Guide to the planning process 2.
Manual for planning a children's library 3.
Reference book for specifications and details critical to effective library design'.
Conclusion In judging the book from this perspective, it then certainly 'does what it says on the tin', and one of the most useful, interesting, and thought-provoking additions to this book is the inclusion of Case Studies, as well as direct quotations and feedback from real user groups, libraries and affiliated organisations and individuals.
There is nothing like hearing it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, to add real value and validity to suggestions and models; after all, it's just as important to hear what hasn't worked, as well as what has, when considering such an important issue as a new, or newly rearranged, children's library space.
There is one final significant, albeit small point that can be made about this work.
What could be seen as very useful Appendices E and F (a list of suppliers and architects) is let down by a wholly US-focused list, with UK readers instead referred to a Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) administered Web site [1], which on my cursory initial check gave me one sole listing for Children's Furniture, versus the plethora of suppliers listed in the book itself (but solely USA-based).
Finding good, and tried and tested, architects and suppliers is surely a rather practical issue too?
It seems a shame that Facet wasn't able to address this issue for the UK edition by devoting time and resources to correcting this anomaly.
In the meantime, I guess I'll just write my own conceptual chapter additions and generate a list myself for the personal pleasure of completeness!
References Nolan Lushington, Libraries Designed for Kids, Facet Publishing, 2008, ISBN 978-1-85604-657-2, p.155: 'For readers in the United Kingdom and Europe, please refer to this online resource updated daily by CILIP': http://www.buyersguideonline.co.uk Author Details Sara Wingate Gray MPhil/PhD student Department of Information Studies University College London Email: librarian@tipl.info Web site: http://www.tipl.info Return to top Article Title: "Libraries Designed for Kids" Author: Sara Wingate Gray Publication Date: 30-July-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 60 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/wingate-gray-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: University Libraries and Space in the Digital World Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: University Libraries and Space in the Digital World Buzz prism research Citation BibTex RIS Hugh Murphy reviews a collection of essays which charts the development and impact of the physical library space and its use in our digital world.
Despite the economic adversity faced by many academic bodies and their libraries, there are still some institutions lucky enough to be in a position to refurbish, extend or commission a new building.
University Libraries and Space in the Digital World is undoubtedly for the many people involved in such projects, but is quite clearly designed for a wider readership too.
This is a good thing, as it would be hard to think of a library user or staff member who is not affected by the issue of library space.
This is a book which offers a broad array of views on what some might consider a comparatively narrow topic.
However by soliciting such a variety of contributors and focussing on specific and distinct areas, it offers readers the option of selectivity allowing them to look at a specific area (the chapter on staff accommodation was a particular personal favourite) or read it cover to cover, offering the broadest possible view and the option to consider the issue of library space in its entirety.
In terms of structure, it is well conceived, with logical links from topic to topic.
The editors have assembled a sizeable number of commentators, who come from both academia and professional librarianship, and all display considerable knowledge and expertise, both theoretical and practical the latter being particularly important for a work such as this.
With 14 chapters and a considerable variety in subject, tone and style, the succinct preface proves useful, both in offering a snapshot, but also in stressing the importance of the first and last chapters.
This is sound advice, as, while every chapter is of merit, some may resonate with the reader more than others.
But chapters 1 and 14 offer both a view of the issue of library space now, but also, critically, in the future.
While there is a refreshing acknowledgement in this work that issues of library space are multifaceted and deal not simply with the physical, it should be noted that its main focus is the question of physical space in the modern digital era.
This question is addressed through the historical and general in the first three chapters, then from the perspective of technology and print.
Following this are a series of chapters looking at redevelopment of spaces, new builds, the sharing of space and the use of space to facilitate research and learning.
The inclusion of chapters on staff space, as well as one on ‘green’ issues and sustainability, ensures that this book is exceptionally comprehensive.
Understandably John Feather's chapter on the history of library spaces occurs early in the book and serves to offer a fascinating trip down memory lane, tracing the physical evolution of the library.
While in some ways of less immediate relevance than later chapters, it does draw attention to one very salient point: issues of physical space are not new for libraries.
Olaf Eigenbroadt's piece on current approaches to university library space builds on the previous chapter and offers a useful overview of the idea and paradoxes of our ‘knowledge society’ and the concomitant need of the library to respond to this.
It offers example and critique and prompts consideration of the all-important 'why' of library space which should inevitably accompany the architectural 'how'.
Robert P Holley focuses on issues of technology and, as with Chapter 2, offers some neat vignettes of bygone eras.
This chapter works well in synthesising a lot of issues of which librarians are undoubtedly aware, but depending on their professional background, to which they may not have given that much consideration recently.
Interestingly, some ideas articulated in this chapter, do not chime with our local experience in NUI Maynooth, which is a useful reminder that every library's approach to space will inevitably be informed by its local situation.
Needless to say, this is a critical point and it is welcome to see so many diverse commentators make it throughout the book.
The chapter focussing on technology is complemented nicely by Louise Jones’ chapter on library space and print, which looks at this critical issue mainly through the prism of the David Wilson Library, University of Leicester, UK.
The decisions taken and lessons learned as detailed here resonated strongly with me and are of inestimable value for anyone who is beginning the reorganisation of physical space or critically evaluating their print stock.
There are a number of chapters which serve as case studies, looking at issues of space in both new-build (Aberdeen) and redeveloped space (Edinburgh).
Both are useful, rooted as they are in actual experience.
As with almost every chapter, this ‘real-world’ experience is both informative and illustrative, dealing with both the large-scale issues, such as communications, consultation, liaison with architects, but also more ‘nuts and bolts’ issues such as where best to locate shelving and why.
Given the rising numbers of academic institutions electing to offer converged services, Leo Appleton’s chapter on sharing space proves very interesting, perhaps even more so if one has not experienced the good and the bad of shared services.
It manages to offer a rationale for such moves, considering the merits, while also engaging in a very measured critique of the impact this tendency has on university libraries.
It also links deftly to the chapters on learning by Peter Jamieson and research space by Hill and Ramaswamy.
Jamieson’s chapter  looks at the rise of informal and student-centred  learning and considers them in the context of the author’s home institution, the  University of Melbourne, where the library design bucked the current trend of flexible space, readily amenable to a variety of uses.
Hill and Ramaswamy look at the capacity of the library to meet the demands of the modern postgraduate and researcher, choosing a number of examples from Canada, the USA, New Zealand and the UK to highlight how institutions have endeavoured to meet the needs of a multifaceted researcher community.
Arguably, it would be easy to consider Jon Purcell’s chapter on staff accommodation as less important and certainly staff accommodation in many libraries (both new and old)  might suggest that for many involved in the design of libraries, staff accommodation does not exactly rank highly on their agenda.
Thankfully, the author offers a strong counterargument to this notion, and while focussing mainly on open-plan staff areas, illustrates the issues which can arise and why they are important.
Rounding out the book, the final three chapters give regard to evaluating space, consideration of sustainability in ‘green’ issues and finally a chapter looking at what the future holds for library space.
The chapter on evaluating space works well, offering both theory and practice, via a case study of Tampere University Library in Finland.
This is probably the most ‘practical’ chapter in the book as it provides solid and adaptable methods of evaluation.
Graham Matthews’ chapter on ‘green’ issues offers a series of examples, but it would have been preferable to see a fuller consideration of the issues to complement this.
That said, this is an area that is in its comparative infancy as far as libraries are concerned, and there is a paucity of information out there.
The final chapter outlines the results of a project which attempts to suggest how the future library space will evolve, some of which chime with current thinking, but some which suggest that the community needs to continue to work assiduously to ensure that the physical library will remain at the heart of the campus.
It would be interesting to consider these results further in conjunction with other forward-facing projects, which are mentioned, such as the ‘Libraries of the Future’ Project [1].
Conclusion This is a timely and very useful work.
Through its breadth it manages to consider comprehensively the full spectrum of issues which we as librarians face when dealing with our beloved and occasionally beleaguered physical space.
It should prove of value to those who are involved in any aspect of the library’s space – from the person considering a new configuration for a print collection or teaching room, through to those who are embarking on a major new building programme.
When one considers how the pace of change seems to be ever increasing, it seems logical to assume that its impact will continue to be felt in all aspects of our work.
In terms of the physical library, this book can act as a valuable aid.
References Libraries of the Future Web site http://www.futurelibraries.info/content/ Author Details Hugh Murphy Senior Librarian National University of Ireland Maynooth Ireland Email: hugh.murphy@nuim.ie Web site: http://library.nuim.ie Hugh was appointed Senior Librarian, Collection Management Services in October 2010, having worked previously in University College Dublin Library and in the National Library of Ireland.
Since 2005 he has acted as an occasional lecturer in the School of Information and Library Studies in UCD, teaching resource description, organisation of information, and in the past, social networks and Web 2.0.
He has been one of the key staff members involved in the delivery of a new €20 million extension to the library in NUI Maynooth.
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'Does He Take Sugar?
': The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 'Does He Take Sugar?
': The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language Buzz software framework dissemination doi accessibility vocabularies blog multimedia e-learning wcag algorithm research standards bs8878 Citation BibTex RIS Brian Kelly, Dominik Lukeš and Alistair McNaught highlight the risks of attempting to standardise easy-to-read language for online resources.
The idea that if we could only improve how we communicate, there would be less misunderstanding among people is as old as the hills.
Historically, this notion has been expressed through things like school reform, spelling reform, publication of communication manuals, etc.
The most radical expression of the desire for better understanding is the invention of a whole new artificial language with the intention of providing a universal language for humanity.
This has had a long tradition but seemed to gain most traction towards the end of last century with the introduction and relative success, at that time, of Esperanto.
But artificial languages have been a failure as a vehicle of global understanding.
Instead, in about the last 50 years, the movement for plain English has been taking the place of constructed languages as something on which people pinned their hopes for clear communication.
Most recently there have been proposals suggesting that “simple” language should become a part of a standard for accessibility of Web pages alongside other accessibility standards issued by the W3C/WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative).
The W3C/WAI Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) [1] is hosting an online symposium on “Easy-to-Read” (e2r) language in Web Pages/Applications“ (e2r Web) [2].
This article highlights risks of seeking to develop standards when the complexities of language and understanding are not fully understood.
WAI’s Easy to Read Activity The WAI’s Easy to Read activity page [3] provides an introduction to their work: Providing information in a way that can be understood by the majority of users is an essential aspect of accessibility for people with disabilities.
This includes rules, guidelines, and recommendations for authoring text, structuring information, enriching content with images and multimedia and designing layout to meet these requirements.
and goes on to describe how: Easy to Read today is first of all driven by day to day practice of translating information (on demand).
More research is needed to better understand the needs of the users, to analyze and compare the different approaches, to come to a common definition, and to propose a way forward in providing more comprehensive access to language on the Web.
It provides a list of potentially useful tools and methods for measuring readability: Flesch Reading Ease; Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level; Gunning Fog Index; Wiener Sachtextformel and Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook (SMOG).
The aim of this work is to address the needs of people with disabilities such as: People with cognitive disabilities related to functionalities such as Memory Problem solving (conceptualising, planning, sequencing, reasoning and judging thoughts and actions) Attention (e.g.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD) and awareness Reading, linguistic, and verbal comprehension (e.g.
Dyslexia) Visual Comprehension Mental health disabilities People with low language skills including people who are not fluent in a language Hearing Impaired and Deaf People for whom “incidental accretion” of vocabulary via overheard conversations and background media is much more limited.
Sign language users may regard written English as a second language with an entirely different syntax and grammar.
Previous Work in This Area The W3A WAI have previously sought to address this area.
In March 2004 a draft of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines [4] for Web accessibility provided the following guideline: Guideline 3.1 Ensure that the meaning of content can be determined.
and went on to describe level 3 success criteria which could demonstrate that this guideline had been achieved: Syntax Using the simplest sentence forms consistent with the purpose of the content For example, the simplest sentence-form for English consists of Subject-Verb-Object, as in John hit the ball or The Web site conforms to WCAG 2.0.
Using bulleted or numbered lists instead of paragraphs that contain long series of words or phrases separated by commas.
Nouns, noun-phrases, and pronouns Using single nouns or short noun-phrases.
Making clear pronoun references and references to earlier points in the document If that version of the WCAG guidelines had been implemented, and had you required your Web site to conform with WCAG Level 3, you would have had to ensure that you avoided complex sentences, such as those with a sub-ordinate clause.
Conformance with Level 3 guidelines were intended to ensure Web resources are “accessible to more people with all or particular types of disability“.
The guidelines explained how “A conformance claim of “WCAG 2.0 AAA” can be made if all level 1, level 2, and all level 3 success criteria for all guidelines have been met.” Such guidelines would be helpful for people with cognitive disabilities: those with Asperger’s syndrome, for example, find it difficult to understand metaphors such as “It’s raining cats and dogs“.
The guidelines seem to have been developed by those who wished to implement the vision of “universal accessibility“.
But we can see that seeking to address accessibility in this fashion is flawed for reasons explained below.
Challenges Accessible or Patronising?
The early draft of WCAG 2.0 guidelines suggested that “John hit the ball” conformed with the goal of ensuring that the meaning of the content can be determined.
Would WCAG 2.0 checking tools flag the passive formulation of “the ball was hit by John” as an accessibility error, meaning that the Web page could not achieve the highest accessibility rating?
And what about the well-known UK sports headline: “Super Caley Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious” – a headline which brings a smile if Mary Poppins was part of your cultural background and you recognise Celtic as a football team, but which is clearly not universally accessible.
Mandating reading levels as an accessibility requirement could be regarded as patronising as people with disabilities are no more coherent a group than people without disabilities.
Matching the level, style and character of information to the intended user is simply good practice.
Understanding your audience and recognising the range of people with different disabilities who are likely users of your Website is also basic good practice.
However conflating ‘disabled people’ with ‘won’t understand very much’ is wrong, as has been highlighted in the past by the title of the former BBC Radio 4 programme “Does he Take Sugar?”.
Equally inadvisable is applying the same rules to all contexts.
Major Difficulties The key to the Easy Read guidance is in the phrase “Providing information in a way that can be understood by the majority of users”.
Shopping, ticketing and core government services are contexts where it is entirely appropriate to make the reading level as accessible as possible to everyone.
But there are many other contexts with very different user profiles.
It is vital to distinguish between content, culture and context – nuances that can be easily perceived by a human reader but much less reliably tested by an algorithm.
This is particularly so in the context of education where clear communication is only one of several desirable outcomes.
Other, potentially contradictory, outcomes might include: Linguistic precision: BBC Bitesize [5] has terms that are meaningless to many people (preposition, perfect continuous etc.)
but essential in the context of language learning.
This site has a far higher reading age than most of the UK daily newspapers.
That does not make it inaccessible or inappropriate.
Technical terms: this overlaps with linguistic precision but applies more widely.
Here the accessibility argument can be reversed.
Confident use of technical terms streamlines communication and enhances meaning.
“Convection currents in the asthenosphere move tectonic plates together at subduction zones” means little if you are not studying geology but if you are then it is a very concise way of saying some quite complicated things.
Many users benefit from shorter sentences – especially dyslexic users and screenreader users.
Metaphor, simile and cultural references: communication is not primarily about words but about ideas.
There are contexts where ideas can be more powerfully expressed by metaphors than by mechanical statements of fact or opinion.
Hildegaard’s “Thus am I a feather on the breath of God” could be expressed in more functional dispassionate prose, but it would be neither Hildegaard, poetry or very memorable.
Resources aimed at particular subcultures need to adopt appropriate language if they are to communicate with the target group.
As highlighted by JISC TechDis [6] accessibility in education does not lend itself to a blanket solution but to a more holistic approach: “the only way to judge the accessibility .. is to assess it holistically and not judge it by a single method of delivery” [7].
Accessibility compliance will become meaningless if it does not reflect the real needs of real people in real contexts.
Why Is Language Inaccessible?
The problem is that most proponents of plain language (as so many would-be reformers of human communication) seem to be ignorant of the wider context in which language functions.
There is much that has been revealed by linguistic research in the last century or so and in particular since the 1960s that we need to pay attention to (to avoid confusion, this does not refer to the work of Noam Chomsky and his followers but rather to the work of people like William Labov, Michael Halliday, and many others).
Languages are not a simple matter of grammar.
Any proposal for content accessibility must consider what is known about language from the fields of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics.
These are the key aspects of what we know about language collected from across many fields of linguistic inquiry: Every sentence communicates much more than just its basic content (propositional meaning).
We also communicate our desires and beliefs (e.g.
“It’s cold here” may communicate, “Close the window” and “John denied that he cheats on his taxes” communicates that somebody accused John of cheating on his taxes.
Similarly choosing a particular form of speech, like slang or jargon, communicates belonging to a community of practice.)
The understanding of any utterance is always dependent on a complex network of knowledge about language, about the world, as well as about the context of the utterance.
“China denied involvement” requires the understanding of the context in which countries operate, as well as metonymy, as well as the grammar and vocabulary.
Consider the knowledge we need to possess to interpret “In 1939, the world exploded” vs. “In Star Wars, a world exploded”.
There is no such thing as purely literal language.
All language is to some degree figurative.
“Between 3 and 4pm”, “Out of sight”, “In deep trouble”, “An argument flared up”, “Deliver a service”, “You are my rock”, “Access for all” are all figurative to different degrees.
We all speak more than one variety of our language: formal/informal, school/friends/family, written/spoken, etc.
Each of these varieties has its own code.
For instance, “she wanted to learn” vs. “her desire to learn” demonstrates a common difference between spoken and written English where written English often uses clauses built around nouns.
We constantly switch between different codes (sometimes even within a single utterance).
Bilingualism is the norm in language knowledge, not the exception.
About half the world’s population regularly speaks more than one language but everybody is “bi-lingual” in the sense that they deal with multiple codes.
The “standard” or “correct” English is just one of the many dialects, not English itself.
The difference between a language and a dialect is just as much political as linguistic.
An old joke in linguistics goes: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.
Language prescription and requirements of language purity (incl.
simple language) are as much political statements as linguistic or cognitive ones.
All language use is related to power relationships.
Simplified languages develop their own complexities if used by a real community through a process known as creolization.
(This process is well described for pidgins but not as well for artificial languages.)
All languages are full of redundancy, polysemy and homonymy.
It is the context and our knowledge of what is to be expected that makes it easy to figure out the right meaning.
There is no straightforward relationship between grammatical features and language obfuscation and lack of clarity (e.g.
It is just as easy to hide things using active as passive voice or any Subject-Verb-Object sentence as Object-Subject-Verb).
It is difficult to call any one feature of a language universally simple (for instance, SVO word order or no morphology) because many other languages use what we call complex as the default without any increase in difficulty for the native speakers (e.g.
use of verb prefixes/particles in English and German) Language is not really organised into sentences but into texts.
Texts have internal organisation to hang together formally (“John likes coffee.
He likes it a lot.”) and semantically (“As I said about John.
He likes coffee.”) Texts also relate to external contexts (cross reference) and their situations.
This relationship is both implicit and explicit in the text.
The shorter the text, the more context it needs for interpretation.
For instance, if all we see is “He likes it” written on a piece of paper, we do not have enough context to interpret the meaning.
Language is not used uniformly.
Some parts of language are used more frequently than others.
But it is not enough to understand frequency.
Some parts of language are used more frequently together than others.
The frequent concurrence of some words with other words is called “collocation”.
This means that when we say “bread and …”, we can predict that the next word will be “butter”.
You can check this with a linguistic tool like a corpus, or even by using Google’s predictions in the search.
Some words are so strongly collocated with other words that their meaning is “tinged” by those other words (this is called semantic prosody).
For example, “set in” has a negative connotation because of its collocation with “rot”.
All language is idiomatic to some degree.
You cannot determine the meaning of all sentences just by understanding the meanings of all their component parts and the rules for putting them together.
And vice versa, you cannot just take all the words and rules in a language, apply them and get meaningful sentences.
Consider “I will not put the picture up with John” and “I will not put up the picture with John” and “I will not put up John” and “I will not put up with John” It seems that many advocates of plain language do not take most of these factors into account.
An Alternative Approach The Need for Other Approaches Do the concerns highlighted above mean that we should give up on trying to make communication more accessible?
Definitely not!
Rather, as outlined above, there is a need to understand the complexities of language and the limitations of the WAI model which attempts to shoe-horn best practice into a single set of universal guidelines.
The challenge lies in providing the contextualisation needed to be able to respond to a diverse range of requirements.
BS 8878 Can Provide the Required Contextualisation The need for contextual approaches which enable the complexities of Web accessibility to be addressed was highlighted by Sloan et al [8].
A follow-up paper [9] emphasised the importance of policies and processes and coined the term “Accessibility 2.0” to describe such approaches.
The paper defined the characteristics of Accessibility 2.0 as: User-focussed: As with Web 2.0, the emphasis is on the needs of the user.
Accessibility 2.0 aims to address the needs of the user rather than compliance with guidelines.
Widening participation rather than universal accessibility: The approach taken to Web accessibility is based on widening participation rather than in a belief based on the notion of universal access.
Rich set of stakeholders: In contrast with traditional approaches to Web accessibility, which places an emphasis on the author of Web resources and, to a lesser extent, the end-user, Accessibility 2.0 explicitly acknowledges the necessity of engaging with a wider range of stakeholders.
Sustainability: Accessibility 2.0 emphasises the need for the sustainability of accessible services.
Always beta: There is an awareness that a finished perfect solution is not available; and that, rather, the process will be one of ongoing refinement and development.
Flexibility: A good-enough solution will be preferred to the vision of a perfect technical solution.
Diversity: Recognition that there can be a diversity of solutions to the problem of providing accessible services.
Social model for accessibility: Rather than regarding Web accessibility based on a medical model, Accessibility 2.0 adopts a social model.
Devolved, not hierarchical: Solutions to Web accessibility should be determined within the specific context of use, rather than advocating a global solution.
Emphasis on policy, rather than technical, solutions: Although there are technical aspects related to Web accessibility, Accessibility 2.0 tends to focus on the policy aspects.
Blended, aggregated solutions: Users want solutions and services, but these need not necessarily be a single solution; nor need the solution be purely an IT solution.
Accessibility as a bazaar, not a cathedral: The Cathedral and the Bazaar analogy [10] can be used to compare Accessibility 1.0 and 2.0.
The WAI approach is based on complex sets of guidelines which are difficult to understand.
This results in developments which are slow-moving in responding to rapid technological change.
Accessibility as a journey, rather than a destination: Rather than regarding Web accessibility as something that is solved by providing AAA compliance, Accessibility 2.0 regards accessibility as a never-ending journey, in which richer solutions could always be provided.
Decision-making by broad consensus: Decisions on the extent to which accessibility is supported is determined by a broad consensus as to what is reasonable, rather than WAI’s definitions.
As summarised by Hassell [11], the UK’s BS 8878 Code of Practice subsequently provided a framework which addressed these approaches.
The heart of BS 8878 document is a 16-step plan: Define the purpose Define the target audience Analyse the needs of the target audience (note this was not covered in PAS 78) Note any platform or technology preferences Define the relationship the product will have with its target audience Define the user goals and tasks Consider the degree of user experience the Web product will aim to provide Consider inclusive design and user-personalised approaches to accessibility Choose the delivery platform to support Choose the target browsers, operating systems and assistive technologies to support Choose whether to create or procure the Web product Define the Web technologies to be used in the Web product Use Web guidelines to direct accessibility Web production (ie to guide the production of accessible Web content) Assure the Web product’s accessibility through production (i.e.
at all stages) Communicate the Web product’s accessibility decisions at launch Plan to assure accessibility in all post-launch updates to the product It should be noted that step 13 is the only one which is directly relevant to WCAG guidelines.
The BS8878 standard provides a more comprehensive framework which enables the complexities of Web accessibility to be addressed.
We recommend use of BS 8878 by those working in the UK and suggest that BS 8878 would be an appropriate building block for the development of an international standard.
Further Research This article summarises previous work in seeking to provide guidelines on the writing style for Web content.
We have identified dangers of providing recommendations on writing style in future versions of WCAG guidelines.
It gives an alternative route to the adoption of emerging practice in which content providers can select appropriate guidelines based on processes described in BS 8878.
The relevance of BS 8878 in enhancing accessibility of Web products has been described elsewhere [12] and reflects approaches provided in the TechDis Accessibility Passport [13].
In addition to understanding the relevance of BS 8878 in the context of readability of text we feel that current research in this areas focuses too much on comprehension at the level of clause and sentence.
Further research, we suggest, should be carried out to assist comprehension at the level of text including the following areas.
How collocability influences understanding: How word and phrase frequency influences understanding with particular focus on collocations.
The assumption behind software like TextHelp is that this is very important.
Much research is available on the importance of these patterns from corpus linguistics but we need to know the practical implications of these properties of language both for text creators and consumers.
For instance, should text creators use measures of collocability to judge the ease of reading and comprehension in addition to or instead of arbitrary measures like sentence and word lengths.
Specific ways in which cohesion and coherence affect understanding: We need to find the strategies challenged readers use to make sense of larger chunks of text.
How they understand the text as a whole, how they find specific information in the text, how they link individual portions of the text to the whole, and how they infer overall meaning from the significance of the components.
We then need to see what text creators can do to assist with these processes.
We already have some intuitive tools: bullets, highlighting of important passages, text insets, text structure, etc.
But we do not know how they help people with different difficulties and whether they can ever become a hindrance rather than a benefit.
The benefits and downsides of elegant variation for comprehension, enjoyment and memorability: We know that repetition is an important tool for establishing the cohesion of text in English.
We also know that repetition is discouraged for stylistic reasons.
Repetition is also known to be a feature of immature narratives (children under the age of about 10) and more “sophisticated” ways of constructing texts develop later.
However, it is also more powerful in spoken narrative (e.g.
folk stories).
Research is needed on how challenged readers process repetition and elegant variation and what text creators can do to support any naturally developing meta textual strategies.
The benefits and downsides of figurative language for comprehension by people with different cognitive profiles: There is basic research available from which we know that some cognitive deficits lead to reduced understanding of non-literal language.
There is also ample research showing how crucial figurative language is to language in general.
However, there seems to be little understanding of how and why different deficits lead to problems with processing figurative language, what kind of figurative language causes difficulties.
It is also not clear what types of figurative language are particularly helpful for challenged readers with different cognitive profiles.
Work is needed on typology of figurative language and a typology of figurative language deficits.
The processes of code switching during writing and reading: Written and spoken English employ very different codes, in some ways even reminiscent of different language types.
This includes much more than just the choice of words.
Sentence structure, clauses, grammatical constructions, all of these differ.
However, this difference is not just a consequence of the medium of writing.
Different genres (styles) within a language may be just as different from one another as writing and speaking.
Each of these come with a special code (or subset of grammar and vocabulary).
Few native speakers never completely acquire the full range of codes available in a language with extensive literacy practices, particularly a language that spans as many speech communities as English.
But all speakers acquire several different codes and can switch between them.
However, many challenged writers and readers struggle because they cannot switch between the spoken codes they are exposed to through daily interactions and the written codes to which they are often denied access because of a print impairment.
Another way of describing this is multiple literacies.
How do challenged readers and writers deal with acquiring written codes and how do they deal with code switching?
How do new conventions emerge in the use of simple language?
Using and accessing simple language can only be successful if it becomes a separate literacy practice.
However, the dissemination and embedding of such practices into daily usage are often accompanied by the establishment of new codes and conventions of communication.
These codes can then become typical of a genre of documents.
An example of this is Biblish.
A sentence such as “Fred spoke unto Joan and Karen” is easily identified as referring to a mode of expression associated with the translation of the Bible.
Will similar conventions develop around “plain English” and how?
At the same time, it is clear that within each genre or code, there are speakers and writers who can express themselves more clearly than others.
Research is needed to establish if there are common characteristics to be found in these “clear” texts, as opposed to those inherent in “difficult” texts across genres?
Conclusion All in all, introducing simple language as a universal accessibility standard is still too far from a realistic prospect.
Our intuitive impression based on documents received from different bureaucracies is that the “plain English” campaign has made a difference in how many official documents are presented.
But a lot more research (ethnographic as well as cognitive) is necessary before we properly understand the process and its impact.
References Research and Development Working Group (RDWG), W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/ Easy-to-Read on the Web, Online Symposium 3 December 2012, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/easy-to-read/ Easy to Read, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/wiki/Easy_to_Read WCAG 2.0, Working Draft 11 March 2004, W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-20040311/ Bitesize, BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ Holistic Approach, JISC TechDis, (no date) http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/techdis/pages/detail/floating_pages/Holistic_Approach Kelly, B., Phipps, L. and Howell, C. Implementing a Holistic Approach to E-Learning Accessibility, ALT-C 2005 12th International Conference Research Proceedings http://opus.bath.ac.uk/441/ Sloan D., Kelly B., Heath A., Petrie H., Hamilton F. & Phipps L. Contextual Accessibility: Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines.
Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A) Edinburgh, Scotland, 23 May 2006.
New York: ACM Press, pp.
121-131 http://opus.bath.ac.uk/402/ Kelly, B., Sloan, D., Brown, S., Seale, J., Lauke, P., Ball, S. & Smith, S. Accessibility 2.0: Next Steps For Web Accessibility, Journal of Access Services, 6 (1 & 2).
DOI: 10.1080/15367960802301028 http://opus.bath.ac.uk/12828/ Raymond, E.S.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar, essay, September 2000, v.3.0 http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/ Hassell, J., BS 8878 web accessibility standards (supersedes PAS 78) – all you need to know http://www.hassellinclusion.com/bs8878 Cooper, M., Sloan, D., Kelly, B.
& Lewthwaite, S. A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First.
In: W4A 2012: 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, 16-18 April 2012, Lyon.
DOI: 10.1145/2207016.2207028  http://opus.bath.ac.uk/29190/ JISC TechDis Accessibility Passport: Building a Culture of Accessibility, (no date) http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/techdis/pages/detail/online_resources/JISC_TechDis_Accessibility_Passport Author Details Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath UK Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/ Accessibility papers: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/#accessibility Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus at UKOLN, University of Bath.
Brian has published a wide range of peer-reviewed papers on Web accessibility since 2004.
Dominik Lukeš Education and Technology Specialist Dyslexia Action Park House Wick Road Egham Surrey TW20 0HH Email: DLukes@dyslexiaaction.org.uk Web site: http://www.dyslexiaaction.org.uk/ Dominik Lukeš, Education and Technology Specialist at Dyslexia Action, has published research in the areas of language and education policy.
He has also worked as editor, translator and Web developer.
Alistair McNaught JISC TechDis Higher Education Academy York Email: alistair@techdis.ac.uk Web site: http:/www.jsictechdis.ac.uk/ Scoop.it: http://www.scoop.it/t/inclusive-teaching-and-learning Alistair McNaught is a Senior Advisor at JISC TechDis with considerable experience in using technology for teaching and learning.
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An Attack on Professionalism and Scholarship?
Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines An Attack on Professionalism and Scholarship?
Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge Buzz data framework wiki dissemination archives digitisation identifier blog repositories preservation cataloguing curation research Citation BibTex RIS Andrew Flinn describes some recent developments in democratising the archive and asks whether these developments really deserve to be viewed as a threat to professional and academic standards.
This article was originally delivered as a paper for the ‘Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues Between Users and Archivists’ conference organised by the University of Manchester’s ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) in March 2009.
The paper came at an opportune time.
I was absorbed in a research project examining independent and community archival initiatives in the UK and exploring the possibilities of user(or community-)generated and contributed content for archives and historical research [1].
Furthermore I had just received referees’ comments on a proposed research project examining the potential impact of the latter developments on professional archival practice.
Whilst two of the reports were very positive, one was more than a little hostile.
The reviewer was scathing about the focus of the proposed research on the democratisation of knowledge production, dismissing the notion as part of a short-term political agenda that was detrimental to the idea of scholarship and one with which the archive profession should not concern itself.
In particular, scorn was reserved for the idea that, in future archive catalogues, many ‘voices’ might be enabled ‘to supplement or even supplant the single, authoritative, professional voice’, an idea which was described as being, in extremis, ‘a frontal attack on professionalism, standards and scholarship’.
At the time of receiving this review and considering my response, I was also beginning to write my paper for the conference and had already decided that my theme would be democratising the archive.
However I realised that these comments neatly encapsulated a powerful and genuine strand of thinking within the archive profession and academia more generally, which one might loosely term ‘traditional’.
Although there are now many user-generated content archive and heritage projects in existence, and terms such as participatory archives, Archives 2.0 and even History 2.0 are an increasingly common part of professional discourse [2], some, perhaps many, archivists and scholars remain deeply sceptical about the need for a democratisation of the archive and of scholarship.
In the end the research project was supported by the AHRC despite the critical review and has now commenced [3].
However, in this brief article I will try to respond to this strand of thinking by, first identifying what is meant by the democratisation of the archive and why advocates of such a thing believe it to be important.
I will then briefly introduce two different but linked developments (independent or community archives and useror community-generated content), which in harness with new technologies might play a role in such a democratisation, and in so doing challenge aspects of traditional archival thinking and practice.
Finally I will offer a few thoughts on the shifts in our understanding of the archive and the resistance to those shifts.
Ultimately, I will suggest that rather than viewing this debate as one between the expert (or the academic or the professional) and the crowd, it is in the concept of communities that the key might be found.
A successful democratised and participatory archive is one which recognises that all those who come into contact with the archive (directly or indirectly), the ‘community of the record’, can and do affect our understanding and knowledge of that archive.
Democratising Knowledge Production and the Democratised Archive In essence, the call for a democratisation of archival practice arises from an understanding that the archive (and broadly speaking that means public archives, notably national archives) and archival practice overwhelmingly privilege the voices of those with power and influence in society.
Moreover, it is contended, they tend to support national (and/or local) histories and heritage which exclude and subordinate many (perhaps the majority) within society on the basis of gender, class, politics, sexuality, race or faith [4].
When these ‘others’ do appear in the archives, they rarely speak with their own voice, but rather appear as the objects of official interest and concern.
The demand for the transformation of archives and the histories that are constructed upon them is not new.
Indeed, attempts have long been made, using different technologies of communication (from the subversive folk tale, underground pamphlets and papers, unofficial and supplementary education materials, independent libraries and community resource centres to the radical digital ‘archive’) to disseminate alternative histories and views on the organisation of society.
Intertwined with various political and social movements, such initiatives became ever more frequent in the twentieth century, and particularly since the 1960s, with many different groups demanding that their histories be told, their voices be heard and that the archives reflect their lives and experiences.
Calls for a democratisation of the archive and of history may not but new but why are they important?
Many, like Stuart Hall, believe that the inclusions and exclusions from our histories and national stories mirror and reinforce the same inclusions and exclusions in wider society.
In an influential address on the subject of transforming Britain’s national heritage, Hall argued that: ‘A shared national identity thus depends on the cultural meanings, which bind each member individually into the large national story … The National Heritage is a powerful source of such meanings.
It follows that those who cannot see themselves reflected in its mirror cannot properly “belong”’ [5] So histories and the memory institutions which tell those histories can play a significant role in bolstering the shared identity which underpins the ‘imagined’ community of the nation or a region; but these histories also have important lessons about ‘belonging’ for those who do not find their stories reflected in the archive and the museum and thus are not invited to share in the meaning.
Inclusion of one’s story (or of the story of people who were like you in ways with which you identify) in a public history can support an identification with a place and a local or national community.
Equally exclusion, absence from, or misrepresentation in those narratives can engender a sense of alienation and non-identification.
This is an issue for the whole of society, not just for those individuals or communities whose stories might otherwise be excluded or ignored.
The positive role that memory institutions, including archives, might play in supporting more cohesive and equitable societies is undermined if the stories they tell, or make available, exclude or misrepresent.
As Lonnie Bunch (now the director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History & Culture) has argued: ‘Ultimately, cultural institutions are special places; touchstones of the past, keepers of our collective memories, sites that enrich and places that inspire.
Yet without fully embracing the challenges of diversity, these institutions cannot be the glue that helps to bind a city or a nation together.
Without fully embracing diversity, they cannot be the safe places that help us to conceptualize our world and to visualize the possible’ [6].
If archives and other memory institutions are really going to fulfil their potential as bodies that inspire and enrich all by reflecting the full cultural diversity of society, then these institutions and those that work in them are going to have to embrace the transformative change in their practice suggested in initiatives such as the Mayor of London’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage and the subsequent Heritage Diversity Task Force [7].
For archivists, it means that the full range of decisions and duties undertaken by the archive need to examined – for instance decisions about collection and accession; about what is included and what is excluded, but also about how things are described and by whom; about how and to whom archive collections are made accessible; and the extent to which commercial imperatives should drive what is to be madee available digitally and how that digitisation is to be paid for?
Fundamentally however, what is required is an understanding of a national ‘archive’ which is not just a building or an institution down in Kew but an idea, a concept.
Not a ‘total’ archive necessarily, but an ‘archive without walls’ which conceptually at least holds within its remit the obligation to reflect the archival heritage of the whole nation or relevant community, including but not confined to, only government and other official records.
This means an archive that acknowledges and seeks to make available the traces of other voices and other stories which might be held outside the walls of formal established archives, located in other physical and virtual spaces.
Hall has suggested that the process of transforming and challenging hegemonic heritage has taken two forms.
First, the slow but definite extension of collections and collecting policies to incorporate a range of different groups previously under-represented within archives, museums and other heritage organisations.
Second, a growing challenge to the authority of many institutions, including heritage bodies, to represent and tell the stories of others; a challenge which is accompanied by a demand to tell ‘our own stories’ [8].
In terms of questioning elements of traditional archival practice and thinking, independent community participation in description combine elements of both Hall’s democratic challenges.
Both are also linked and, perhaps, transformed to some degree by technology, particularly collaborative technologies.
However, they are not confined or defined only by technology.
Although new technologies offer considerable potential for democratising heritage, technologies are only tools that better support and extend ideas and practices that have significant histories of their own.
Independent or community archives and the involvement of users in archival practices have long existed in the analogue world.
It may well be that in the not too distant future technologies will transform and extend the impact of these democratic impulses.
However, in themselves, new technologies do not guarantee such a transformation.
As Tara Brabazon and others have written, in practice the Internet and many Web 2.0 applications, rather than extending democracy and empowering the under-voiced, have actually reinforced already dominant views and powerful elites [9].
Nevertheless it is also probable that the dissemination and collaborative potential of the virtual world does represent real opportunities for constructing more democratised archives and histories; both in terms of what is kept and made available (personal and group archiving), and also how the access routes (via transformed descriptive and cataloguing practices) to those materials are extended and broadened.
As a number of writers have pointed out, what is at stake with Archives 2.0 and History 2.0 is not just the potential of new collaborative technologies but a culture shift which embraces democratisation, a de-centring of authority and perspective, a refiguring of thinking and practice, and a thorough-going participatory ethos [10].
Community Archives Recently designated as independent or community archives, the grassroots activity of collecting and sometimes creating materials relating to the history of a particular community (self-defined by place, ethnicity, faith, sexuality, occupation, other interest, or combination of these and more) has a long heritage.
Such materials might otherwise never have appeared in other more established, formal heritage institutions.
In some cases, individual community archives have their roots in local history activity going back 50 years or more.
Recent professional recognition and interest in community archives in the UK really developed from the early 2000s with the Community Access to Archives Project and the Archive Task Force’s 2004 report and its then quite ‘radical’ finding that archives held in the community could be as important as those held in public archives.
By this time, groups such as Eastside Community Heritage had already been in existence for over ten years collecting and creating an oral and digital photographic archive which documents working-class life and experiences in the East End of London [11].
Of course many museums, archives and libraries were already working with local groups but the Task Force’s explicit acknowledgement of the value of the collections and the activity was new.
What is immediately noticeable in any study of independent or community archives is their great variety – including the types of material collected (incorporating many things not traditionally considered archival), the relative size and stability of the organisations, their many physical or virtual manifestations, and the relationship with formal heritage institutions [12].
In the course of our research at UCL, we looked at many different archives, particularly those concerned with the preserving and making accessible the histories of those of African, Asian and other diverse heritages.
Amongst all this variety we also identified a few commonalities.
First, although some community archive activity begins as a result of an initiative from a mainstream heritage or other governmental body, many initiatives also emerge organically from within the group or community whose history they are seeking to document.
They have a strong ethos of independence and autonomy.
Whilst the majority of these groups wish to work with local formal heritage organisations, many also wish to do so on their own terms and in ways that do not compromise their independence [13].
Secondly the motivation and guiding objective for people participating in this kind of activity is almost universally related to a determination to tell a story (of a place, or an occupation, or the experience of a class or an ethnicity) which is not otherwise represented in formal heritage collections and histories.
For some (say black, lesbian and gay, or feminist) archives, rooted in (and best understood as) social movements seeking political change, this is quite an explicit motivation but even those conforming to a less explicit political agenda, frequently exhibit a sense that they are documenting lives and stories that would not otherwise be told [14].
Whilst many community archives collect physical materials and operate in physical spaces not too dissimilar to those of more established archives, the recent upsurge in independent community archive activity has been in part related to the developments in establishing and sharing digital collections and the easy adoption of new technologies which have made this possible.
The growth of sites such as My Brighton and Hove [15] which allow people from all over the world to upload and then share their photographs and other digitised materials about a particular place, identity, or occupation (in this case Brighton), significantly raises the profile and the potential impact of such initiatives.
Whereas previously most community archive activity was by necessity limited by geographic proximity, the Web and Web 2.0 technologies in particular have opened up the possibilities for a whole range of distributed collaborative heritage activities.
Perhaps the most interesting and potentially significant aspect of this is the ability offered by collaborative technologies not only to upload and passively share digital heritage but also to engage and participate in collective discussion and discovery.
So the functionality offered by My Brighton and Hove and similar sites to comment on and add to descriptions and memories uploaded by other members of the community can result in extending knowledge about particular communities (identifying people, buildings, events).
It also offers the opportunity to share memories and build upon that would otherwise most likely remain uncaptured.
What then are the implications of community archives for professional archivists and academics?
Many independent or community archives face long-term challenges relating to resources and in some cases technical expertise to ensure their sustainability and long-term preservation.
It may be that ultimately many of their collections will find their way into more formal repositories.
But it should also be incumbent upon archivists and other heritage professionals to support, in creative and in post-custodial ways, the physical and digital futures of those independent archives which are outside the walls of the formal archive or museum.
If this can be done then independent and community archives may continue to help to democratise our archival heritage, contributing to a national archive that exists beyond the National Archives, a record of the public that draws upon more than the public record and ultimately to histories in which those previously with little or no voice can speak clearly for themselves.
Communities of Use and Participation in Archival Practice Consideration of how archive services might better support user participation and make use of community knowledge in their services, builds on both the collaborative example of community archive sites such as My Brighton & Hove.
However, it also builds on the recognition that communities (of use, of practice, of knowledge, of interest) may be formed around any number of identifications and interests.
They may include archive collections, areas of study and academic disciplines.
These communities typically hold deep and often shared knowledge which is simply not available to outsiders, including the professional archivist.
If these knowledge-rich communities can be persuaded (and acknowledged and properly rewarded) to share their knowledge, then there is great potential for deepening and extending the detail (and hence access points) contained within the descriptions of archive and other heritage collections.
As one commentator on the impact of these methods on heritage practice has suggested, this ‘opens up the museum to the possibility that expertise exists elsewhere; and that the museum could benefit from the knowledge of many communities’ [16].
This assertion is echoed for archives by the Finnish researcher Isto Huvila who has argued that the reason for ‘emphasising radical user orientation in the participatory archive’ is: ‘to capture richer descriptions and links between records…The radical user orientation is based on an understanding that together the participants are more knowledgeable about the archival materials than an archivist alone can be’ [17].
It is this potential pool of knowledge held, frequently untapped, within the ‘community of the record’, including the creators, the users as well as the professional archivists, into which the National Archives’ (TNA) Your Archives wiki seeks to tap.
Staff, record creators as well as TNA’s community of users are able to contribute corrections, discussion, guidance and advice regarding individual or classes of records, to sit alongside (but not within) the professional published catalogue [18].
As with the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Project at the University of Michigan, the aim is to encourage the participation of knowledge-rich user communities in order to enrich and enhance professional description, and ultimately to improve future access to collections for all [19].
However once again, encouraging non-professional participation in description is not really a new development.
In museums: ‘historically we have acknowledged that specialists (and awkwardly often enthusiasts) have a better understanding of aspects of museum collections than the professionals charged with their care.
There is an opportunity for this knowledge to converge with that of the museum’ [20].
Responding to a posting on the ArchivesNext blog as to whether the future of archives might be ‘“passionate amateurs” doing “detailed curating”’, a number of professional archivists acknowledged the role already played by volunteers and other ‘passionate amateurs’ in cataloguing in their institutions [21].
Archivists (and others) have long used volunteers and drawn on the specialist knowledge possessed by their users to support their cataloguing but this has rarely been openly acknowledged.
At least in theory, such descriptive activity ought to have been appropriately supervised, mediated and ironically given the discussion about this in the digital environment, moderated.
Indeed the collection and utilisation in professional areas such as appraisal and cataloguing of such ‘community’ knowledge has been further advocated and formalised in other recent face-to-face participatory models such as the Revisiting Collections and Revisiting Archive Collections in the UK, and those described by Katie Shilton and Ramesh Srinivasan in the USA [22].
In both these cases, the aim is to provide richer and thicker description by involving non-professionals in the professional practice, ultimately aiming to support the creation and description of multicultural archive collections more effectively.
However all this interaction and participation are still ultimately controlled and mediated by professionals.
The potential for how such participatory practices might be transformed and extended by technology clearly does pose some new questions and problems.
The evidence regarding the success or otherwise of online collaborative initiatives, even of the largest such as Your Archives is limited at present and something researchers at UCL and elsewhere will be trying to rectify as a priority.
Over the next few years we will need to explore how best to support and encourage communities to contribute to such initiatives, to find out what works and what does not, to explore how the reliability of the entries is to be gauged, to examine the continued role for professional mediation, and what is the relationship to the professional catalogue.
Nothing is fixed here, but we should be careful neither to exaggerate the potential of these developments nor to close down or ignore the opportunity that they offer.
Initial reports suggest that the success of such initiatives has been mixed.
Many user commentary initiatives have tended towards providing not unimportant identification of personal information (naming an individual for instance) and the correction of errors.
However, rather more rarely have they contributed significant amounts of data which extend existing descriptions in new ways [23].
Furthermore, the number of users who are prepared to become actively engaged in such initiatives appears to be relatively small; this may have serious consequences for approaches relying on the ‘wisdom of crowds’.
In this situation, single-user interventions will often provide useful information, identification or correctives, but this does not allow for the extra benefits which might arise from community collaboration and self-regulation.
What reasons might we find for these nominal levels of engagement?
Generally it is still too early to tell and we will know more when detailed analysis of large, relatively long-running sites such as Your Archives appear.
However, as Joy Palmer’s article makes abundantly clear, simply building Archives 2.0 initiatives does not mean that users will come to use them.
It is essential that users feel some sense of ownership before they will share and actively contribute.
What difference might it make, if as in the examples mentioned here, archivists keep their ‘peer collaborators’ and their contributions distinct from the main catalogue or mediated and moderated by a professional authority who decides what is allowed in and what is not?
Might this more traditional perspective restrict the sense of ownership and partnership that a more truly participatory and collaborative approach might engender [24]?
Levels of participation (both in terms of numbers and activity) may also vary greatly depending on the project and the community which the project seeks to engage.
Some communities of interest such as family historians, already readily share information with each other.
Family history is to some extent a social activity, and in terms of advice and guidance there is a predisposition to share [25].
It is rarely competitive in the same way that expert, academic practice often is.
Some of the evidence from the experience of community archive and heritage initiatives suggests that those sites that do best in engaging their users in activity are those ones which grow up organically, building a community around them which has strong sense of ownership.
Whilst there has been a number of suggestions about how participatory heritage sites established by mainstream archive and heritage bodies might seek to maximise that sense of ownership through ‘Living Heritage Practice’, Affleck and Kvan wonder whether the traditional passive relationship most users have with such mainstream institutions inhibits such feelings and hence active participation [26].
Even if we were successful in actively encouraging greater user participation in archival practice, would this really represent a challenge to professionalism and scholarship?
Are we really moving into an era of where ‘We Think’ might replace ‘I think’ [27]?
Possibly, though it does not need to be viewed in this dichotomous fashion.
Individual and collaborative scholarship and knowledge production are not completely separate modes of working or thinking; they can co-exist and even interact, informing and extending each other.
Whilst the accuracy and reliability of collaborative projects like Wikipedia remain controversial and debated, many studies suggest that it is not wildly inaccurate compared with traditional sources or, perhaps more importantly, that it necessarily excludes expert views or scholarship.
In fact the significant point seems to be that most entries in these models are created by experts in their particular field and then maintained by larger numbers of less specialist gardeners [28].
For those who advocate the democratising potential of these developments, prospects for change and transformation perhaps lie not so much with the idea of the ‘crowd’ but that the experts are drawn from a much broader, less elitist notion of where knowledge and expertise can be found.
Here the idea of the ‘community of the record’ might be crucial.
If the large numbers engaged with crowd projects such as Wikipedia are not easily recruited for Archives 2.0 and History 2.0 initiatives, might not the successful projects be those ones which correctly identify and enthuse all their potential communities of users and fully embrace their expertise?
[24] Ultimately I am sympathetic to Jennifer Trant’s conclusions on the growing challenges to the assumed authority of the professional and the opportunities posed to the heritage professions by relaxing our views on our authority and opening up our space to other voices: ’…professionals can only ensure that cultural institutions are relevant by changing their stance about the nature of their role; it is possible to contribute authenticity without demanding authority…demanding authority is an act, often of arrogance, that denies the contribution of others to the development of knowledge…within the rapidly developing environment of social computing, communities of practice are forming that could contribute significantly to the development of the museum’ [29].
If heritage professions are going to prosper in the future, supporting and including wider knowledge about their collections will be essential.
Replacing the single professional voice through more collaborative and participatory approaches offers the possibility of transforming not only professional practice but scholarship and knowledge production as well.
Some Conclusions The project of democratising the content and access to archives, heritage and history is a continuous process not a finite one.
Writing history is a living and continuously fluid activity and an archive (especially a national archive) is also a living thing, being constantly extended, reformed and re-imagined [30].
So the activity of democratisation is not something that can be completed, it must be an ongoing process.
However the strength of the earlier reviewer’s criticism of these endeavours indicates that there is still strong resistance to such ideas within the archive profession and perhaps in academia more generally; representing what might be viewed as a ‘traditional’ position on ‘professionalism, standards and scholarship’ and viewing such changes as being allied to a short-term and irrelevant external political agenda.
A sense of the strength of these attitudes within those working and using archives in the UK is further evidenced in other writing and research on the profession.
David Lowenthal’s important, comprehensive and otherwise sympathetic overview of the changes and challenges facing the modern archive profession, occasionally betrays concern about the drift of the profession away from traditional notions of archival neutrality and about other non-elite voices finding their way into the archive [31].
Ian Mortimer’s call for privileged services for academic users was evidence of a widespread but often unspoken concern about the archive profession’s perceived shift away from serving traditional academic and professional researchers to a more egalitarian focus on all users, in particular family historians [32].
Indications of similar concerns within the archive profession were apparent in a recent piece of research carried out by UCL and the National Council on Archives into the impact of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s (HLF) funding on the archive profession and its perceptions of its role and professional duties [33].
A significant strand of thinking amongst younger and more recently qualified professionals was ambivalent (and, on occasions, hostile) to their perception of the HLF’s non-archival and ‘politicised’ agenda on extending access and supporting the preservation of and engagement with the histories of new diverse audiences.
Such views represent not only a misreading of the HLF’s strategic aims but also a influential current of thought within the archival profession.
If we believe as I do, that national archives and national histories should as far as possible reflect all and should allow all the opportunity to speak with their own voices, then different initiatives which seek to broaden and even democratise the content and access routes into the archive must be explored and supported by both professionals and archival users, inside and outside the academy.
This need not be seen as an attack on professionalism or scholarship.
Rather non-professional participation in online archival activity provides an opportunity to re-think how future professionalism and scholarship might be supported in a more collaborative, inclusive and democratic context.
Such an approach, if successful, will result in a richer and more diverse archival heritage which will benefit communities of scholars, archivists and all other actual and potential users of archives as well as the consumers of the histories, public or otherwise, which are written from them.
References UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project, ‘Community archives and identities: documenting and sustaining community heritage’, 2008-2009.
This research would not have been possible without the help and partnership provided by all our case studies (Future Histories, rukus!, Moroccan Memories, Eastside Community Heritage) and all the other participants and interviewees, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/icarus/community-archives/.
For examples of the emergence of this discourse in the UK and US, one only need look at the debates on the Archives Hub http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/ and ArchivesNext http://www.archivesnext.com blogs as well as the papers given to the annual conferences of Society of Archivists and Society of American Archivists in 2008 and 2009.
AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Award, ‘We Think, Not I think: Harnessing collaborative creativity to archival practice; implications of user participation for archival theory and practice’, jointly supervised by UCL and the UK National Archives, 2010-2012.
Schwartz, J., Cook, T., ‘Archives, records and power: the making of modern memory’, Archival Science 2 2002, p. 14.
Hall, S., ‘Whose Heritage?
Un-settling “The Heritage”, Re-imagining the Post-Nation’ in The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’, eds.
J. Littler, & R. Naidoo, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 24.
Lonnie Bunch, 2001 quoted in Adkins, E., ‘Our Journey Toward Diversity – and a Call to (More) Action’, The American Archivist 71, 2008, p. 25.
Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage, Delivering Shared Heritage, London: GLA 2005 http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/equalities/docs/mcaah_dsh.rtf Mayor’s Commission Heritage Diversity Task Force, Embedding Shared Heritage, London: GLA 2009 http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/publications/2009/11/hdtf-report.jsp A discussion of the relevance of the work of the Mayor’s Commission to diversifying archives can be found in: Flinn, A., ‘Migrations, disputed heritages and multicultured identities: archives in a post-colonial society’, Archives and Manuscripts 36-2 2008.
Hall, S., ‘Whose Heritage?
Un-settling “The Heritage”, Re-imagining the Post-Nation’ in The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’, eds.
J. Littler, & R. Naidoo, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 27-28.
Brabazon, T., (ed.
), The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded – Dissent in the digital age, Chandos: Oxford 2008, pp.226-27.
Theimer, K., ArchivesNext blog 9 August 2009 http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=324 Huvila, I., ‘Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management’ Archival Science 8 2008; Palmer, J., ‘Archives 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?‘, July 2009, Ariadne, Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/palmer/ Archives Task Force, Listening to the past, speaking to the future, MLA: London, 2004, p. 43; Community Access to Archives Project (CAAP), http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/partnerprojects/caap/; Eastside Community Heritage, http://www.hidden-histories.org.uk/.
For an introduction to the history and variety of independent and community archive activity in the UK see Flinn, A., ‘Community histories, community archives: some opportunities and challenges’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 28(2) 2007; Flinn, A., Stevens, M., Shepherd, E., ‘Whose memories, whose archives?
Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream’, Archival Science 9 2009; Mander, D., ‘Special, local and about us: the development of community archives in Britain’, in Community archives: the shaping of memory edited by Bastian, J., and Alexander, B., Facet: London 2009.
Stevens, M., Flinn, A., Shepherd, E., ‘New Frameworks for Community Engagement in the Archive Sector: From Handing over to Handing on’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 16: 1&2, 2010.
Flinn, A., Stevens, M., ‘“It is noh mistri, wi mekin histri”.
Telling Our Own Story: Independent and Community Archives in the United Kingdom, Challenging and Subverting the Mainstream’ in Community archives: the shaping of memory edited by Bastian, J., and Alexander, B., Facet: London 2009, pp.6-8.
My Brighton and Hove Web site: http://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/.
Trant, J., ‘Curating Collections Knowledge: Museums on the Cyberinfrastructure’ in Museum Informatics: People, Information and Technology in Museums edited by Marty, P., Jones, K., Routledge: London 2008, p. 285.
Huvila, I., ‘Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management’, Archival Science 8 2008, p. 26.
The National Archives (TNA), Your Archives, http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/.
University of Michigan, Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection, http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/.
Trant, J., ‘Curating Collections Knowledge: Museums on the Cyberinfrastructure’ in Museum Informatics: People, Information and Technology in Museums edited by Marty, P., Jones, K., Routledge: London 2008, p. 290.
Theimer, K., ArchivesNext blog 23 January 2009, http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=228 For details of the Revisiting Collections and the Revisiting Archive Collections, see the Collections Link Web site http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/Increase_Access/revisiting_collections Also: Shilton, K., Srinivasan, R., ‘Participatory appraisal and arrangement for multicultural archival collections’, Archivaria 63 2008.
Krause, M.G.
& Yakel, E., ‘Interaction in Virtual Archives: the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Next Generation Finding Aid’, The American Archivist 70, 2007 pp 311-312.
Jessica Sedgwick ‘Let me tell you about my grandpa: a content analysis of user annotations to online archival collections’, paper to conference of Society of American Archivists, 13 August 2009, available at http://www.slideshare.net/jmsedgwick/let-me-tell-you-about-my-grandpa-a-content-analysis-of-user-annotations-to-online-archival-collections.
Palmer, J., ‘Archives 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?‘, July 2009, Ariadne, Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/palmer/ Yakel, E., Torres, D., ‘Genealogists as a “Community of Records”’, The American Archivist, 70 2007.
Theimer, K., ‘Clark Shirky on how to successfully (or unsuccessfully) attract online collaborators’ ArchivesNext blog 8 October 2009 http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=454 Giaccardi, E., Palen, L., ‘The Social Production of Heritage through Cross-media Interaction’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 14:3 2008 Affleck, J and Kvan, T., ‘A Virtual Community as the Context for Discursive Interpretation: A Role in Cultural Heritage Engagement’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 14:3, 2008.
Leadbetter, C., We-Think, Profile Books: London 2008.
Shirky, C., Here comes everybody.
The power of organising without organizations, Allen Lane: London, 2008; Kittur, A et al, ‘Power of the Few vs.
Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie’.
Alt.CHI, 2007; Olleros, F., ‘Learning to Trust the Crowd: some Lessons from Wikipedia’, at International MCETECH Conference on e-Technologies, 2008.
Trant, J., ‘Curating Collections Knowledge: Museums on the Cyberinfrastructure’ in Museum Informatics: People, Information and Technology in Museums edited by Marty, P., Jones, K., Routledge: London 2008, p. 290.
Hall, S., ‘Constituting an Archive’, Third Text (54) 2001, p. 89.
Lowenthal, D., ‘Archival Perils: An Historian’s Pliant’, Archives 114 2006.
Mortimer, I., ‘Discriminating between Readers: the case for a policy of flexibility’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 23 2002.
Ray, L., Flinn, A., Journal of the Society of Archivists 2010, forthcoming.
Author Details Andrew Flinn Senior Lecturer University College London Email: a.flinn@ucl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/andrew-flinn/ Return to top Article Title: “An attack on professionalism and scholarship?
: Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge “ Author: Andrew Flinn Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/flinn/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Making Datasets Visible and Accessible: DataCite's First Summer Meeting Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Making Datasets Visible and Accessible: DataCite's First Summer Meeting Buzz data java framework portal infrastructure archives metadata doi browser vocabularies blog repositories copyright cataloguing graphics visualisation syndication curation mashup facebook e-research interoperability foi privacy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Tom J Pollard and J Max Wilkinson report on DataCite's First Summer Meeting, a two-day event focused on making datasets visible and accessible, held in Hannover, Germany, in June 2010.
Over 7-8 June 2010 DataCite held its First Summer Meeting in Hannover, Germany.
More than 100 information specialists, researchers, and publishers came together to focus on making datasets visible and accessible [1].
Uwe Rosemann, German Technical Library (TIB), welcomed delegates and handed over to the current President of DataCite, Adam Farquhar, British Library.
Adam gave an overview of DataCite, an international association which aims to support researchers by enabling them to locate, identify, and cite research datasets with confidence.
Adam described DataCite as a ‘CrossRef for data’ and called for delegates to work together to explore roles and responsibilities for publishers, data centres, and libraries.
Session 1: Metadata for Datasets: More Than Pure Citation Information?
The session kicked off with Toby Green, OECD Publishing, describing datasets as the ‘lost sheep’ in scholarly publishing.
Metadata, Toby said, were the sheepdogs that help authors to cite, publishers to link, discovery systems to find, and librarians to catalogue.
Toby demonstrated how OECD Publishing were using metadata to present datasets and highlighted some key citation challenges, which included dynamic datasets, different renditions of datasets, and what he referred to as the ‘Russian Doll Problem’, where datasets are progressively merged.
Jan Brase, DataCite and the German Technical Library, explained how the German Technical Library had used metadata to create a discovery service linking to external resources of data, such as data centres.
Making data citable, Jan said, increases visibility of datasets, and supports not only easy reuse and verification, but also metrics for assessing the impact of data sharers.
Jan noted that DataCite had agreed a core set of metadata elements (Creator, Title, Publisher, Publication Date, Discipline, and DOI) and was now focusing on optional elements and vocabularies.
Following Jan, Wolfgang Zenk-Moltgen, GESIS, Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, gave an overview of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), which aims to create an international standard for describing social science data [2].
The latest version of the documentation, DDI 3.1, has a complex lifecycle model that allows for metadata collection at all stages of a study, from conception to publication.
The documentation, said Wolfgang, could support data collection, distribution, discovery, analysis, and repurposing.
Session 2: Peer-review Systems and the Publication of Datasets: Ensuring Quality Starting positively, Hans Pfeiffenberger, Earth System Science Data Journal, declared that ‘we who care about publishing data have won’.
His comment referred to the vision statement of a European group of funders, who had called for ‘open access to the output of publicly funded research and permanent access to primary quality assured research data’ [3].
Hans suggested that publishing data through peer-reviewed journals could help to ensure quality.
Earth System Science Data Journal, he explained, asked reviewers to consider the originality, significance, and quality of data as part of the peer review process.
Not only did this help to ensure quality, he said, but it helped to reward researchers for data publication.
After Hans, Matthias Razum, Fachinformationszentrum (FIZ) Karlsruhe, Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, introduced eSciDoc, an e-research environment that supports collaboration among science communities [4].
eSciDoc aims to support the whole research process from acquisition to archiving.
By integrating with existing research systems, eSciDoc allows the context of research to be collected as metadata, helping to ensure quality.
The ability of researchers to produce ever increasing volumes of data has led to a ‘structural crisis of scientific publishing’, said Michael Diepenbroek,World Data System.
Michael said that simply increasing access to data was not enough, because knowing the quality of data was also important.
Issuing DOIs to datasets raises the possibility of cross-referencing DOIs between publications and constructing novel metrics.
This is an attractive incentive for both those who produce data and those who publish data.
Michael Lautenschlager, German Computing Centre for Climate and Earth System Research (DKRZ), discussed the development of a Web-based workflow for publication of climate data.
The workflow focused on four stages of data publication: permission to publish, scientific quality assurance, technical quality assurance, and final publication.
The project team was developing quality assurance toolboxes and browser interfaces to assist scientists and publication agents with each of the workflow stages.
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international initiative to facilitate free and open access to biodiversity data worldwide.
Vishwas Chavan, GBIF, said that the GBIF had identified five components in the data-sharing challenge: technical and infrastructure; policy and political; socio-cultural; economic; and legal.
Changing researcher behaviour, suggested Vishwas, represented a greater challenge than developing the technical infrastructure, and until the value of data was recognised, he said, it would always be considered the by-product of an article.
His answer to this was a data usage index (DUI) allowing the impact of data publication to be measured [5].
In the final talk of the day, Andreas Hense, Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University, looked to Australia, which he said was a world leader in data publication.
Andreas said the key to achieving quality data publication was motivating researchers and facilitating the publication process.
Motivation could be achieved, he said, through creating renowned data publications and increasing the visibility of data.
Andreas described the ARCS Data Fabric, which provides reliable storage for early phase research, assists with metadata capture, and simplifies publication [6].
Session 3: Trustworthiness of Data Centres: A Technological, Structural and Legal Discussion Tuesday 8 June opened with a talk by Henk Harmsen, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), who gave an overview of the DANS Data Seal of Approval [7].
The Seal of Approval is a minimum set of 16 requirements that DANS considers necessary for a responsible data centre, including three for data producers, three for data consumers, and ten for data repositories.
Approval consists of a self-assessment, which must be made publicly available via the repository’s Web site, followed by a review by the Data Seal of Approval Board.
Henk noted that self-assessment was simple to implement, taking no longer than a day.
By September 2010, he added, a tool would be available to streamline the self-assessment process.
Jens Klump, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, spoke next, presenting the Nestor Catalogue of Criteria for Trusted Digital Repositories [8].
The criteria, which have been developed to determine dependability of data centres, take into account service adequacy, measurability, documentation, and transparency.
There could be no ‘one-size fits all’, Jens said, so the guidelines had been deliberately designed in an abstract way to allow application across a broad range of organisations.
The final presentation in the session by Stefan Winkler-Nees, German Research Foundation (DFG), gave a funder’s perspective.
Stefan suggested that up to 80-90% of research data produced from projects funded by DFG, the largest funding body in Germany, ‘never see the light or are actually lost’.
DFG’s vision, he said, was that ‘research data should be freely accessible…easy to get … and professionally curated on a long-term basis’.
Achieving this vision, Stefan explained, would have numerous benefits, such as allowing new interpretations of data, preserving unique and non-reproducible data, and promoting quality scientific practice.
Stefan estimated that as much as €10 million could be saved annually if scientists in Flanders saved 1% of their working hours by using a professional data management service.
The major challenge, said Stefan, was creating incentives for scientists to share their data.
Session 4: Best Practice and Examples: What Can Be Done and Is Done Worldwide Merce Crosas, DataVerse, Harvard University, opened the session with an overview of DataVerse, an open source application ‘to publish, share, reference, extract and analyse research data’ [9].
The idea of DataVerse, said Merce, was to solve the problems of data sharing with technology, reducing the burden for researchers, research institutions, and data publishers.
By installing a DataVerse Network, an institution is able to create multiple DataVerses for its research groups, providing a data publication framework that supports author recognition, persistent citation, data discovery, and legal protection.
After Merce, Adrian Burton, Australian National Data Service (ANDS), gave an overview of ANDS, a federally funded initiative to support the reuse of research data throughout Australia.
Trends driving ANDS, he said, included the rise in data science, increasing openness of public data, and the rising prominence of Freedom of Information (FOI) laws.
Adrian highlighted the Government 2.0 Taskforce, which had been established by the Australian government to look at ways of using Web technologies to communicate with the public [10].
The recommendations of the taskforce were widely accepted by the government and had paved the way for public data to be used in interesting ways.
He gave the example of a ‘Know Where You Live’ mashup, created using Australian Bureau of Statistics data [11].
Open access to the Bureau data, he said, had supported the creation of this beautiful and compelling interface.
Adrian said that despite trends towards data sharing, there were still few incentives for researchers to share their data.
ANDS is therefore working on creating services to create incentives, including ‘Identify my Data’ which helps researchers by persistently identifying data, and ‘Register my Data’ which helps researchers to describe data.
Adrian said that while ANDS provides a discovery portal for searching for data, he was not convinced of its impact, because of the already widespread provision of similar portals.
Instead, he said, ANDS took a syndication approach, taking descriptions of inaccessible collections and publishing them onto readable Web sites, allowing search engines to index the data.
Next up, Gert König-Langlo, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, acquainted delegates with the Earth’s radiation budget, which considers incoming and outgoing radiation as a key driver of the world climate system.
Gert gave an overview of the Baseline Surface Radiation Network, which has a well established system for data collection and publication.
Radiation measurements are taken via 47 data stations around the world.
Each station has a data scientist who is responsible for submitting data to the World Radiation Center on a monthly basis.
Following quality checks, datasets are assigned DOI names and archived in Pangaea.
Lee Dirks, Microsoft Research, gave an overview of projects at Microsoft Research, including collaborations with organisations such as DataCite, Open Planets Foundation, Creative Commons, and DataONE.
Lee highlighted several developments, including a Creative Commons add-in for Word, allowing licences to be embedded within documents, and a data curation add-in for Excel created in collaboration with DataONE.
Responding to a question from the audience, Lee said that Microsoft Research had no immediate intention to develop a data archive, but he would not rule this out.
Following Lee’s presentation, William (Bill) Michener, DataONE and University of New Mexico, offered a choice: ‘better data management or planetary destruction’!
Bill highlighted the environmental threats facing the planet and said that better data publishing, sharing, and archiving could help to tackle these threats.
The Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE), he explained, aimed to provide open access to Earth data in order to help people to understand and conserve the environment.
Bill went on to say that citizen science could provide exemplars for how we deal with data.
He gave the example of eBird, a citizen science network allowing recreational bird-spotters to record bird sightings.
Data from the network had been instrumental in guiding cleanup efforts of the Gulf of Mexico oilspill [12] and was incredibly successful in getting people to archive and reuse data.
DOIs had not been used here, he explained, which was something to be considered when trying to change the cultural paradigm.
Hannes Grobe, Pangaea and Alfred Wegener Institute, gave an overview of Pangaea, an open access repository of geoscientific and environmental data which has been working in partnership with a range of publishers since 2009.
Referring to a Nature editorial entitled ‘Empty Archives’, Hannes said that by far the biggest challenge for data centres was acquiring data, and he stressed the importance of metadata, noting that ‘Nothing exists in any useful sense until it is identified’ [13].
Hannes demonstrated the power of Geographical metadata by finding a dataset based in Hannover [14], and nicely rounded off the session with an example of one of the ‘interesting things you may find behind a DOI’: a singing iceberg [15].
Session 5: Visualisation of Datasets: More Than Meets the Eye Jürgen Bernhard, Interactive Graphics Systems Group, University of Technology Darmstadt, focused on the use of visual methods for searching data.
So, for example, a researcher could sketch a profile on a graph and identify data with similar trends.
Jürgen’s project was in its early stages, only six months into a PhD project, and was focused on developing a prototype search tool and researching possible use cases.
Great visualisations tell stories said Toby Green, OECD Publishing, in his second talk of the meeting.
As an example Toby showed Charles Minard’s elegant representation of the fate of Napoleon’s soldiers on their march to Moscow [16].
He went on to introduce some of OECD’s visualisation tools, using OECD Regional Statistics to demonstrate how dynamic visualisations could draw attention to events that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.
The key to a successful visualisation, Toby noted, was tailoring it to the audience.
He highlighted some visualisation sites that he liked, including a chart showing evolution of privacy settings on Facebook and a map showing the flow of taxis in the city of New York.
Toby finished his talk by drawing attention to some popular data-related sites, including Swivel [17] and Many Eyes [18], which support data sharing and visualisation, and the Guardian DataBlog [19].
Brian McMahon, International Union of Crystallography, last to speak in the session, discussed visualisation of chemical data.
Brian categorised crystallographic data into three groups: raw data (for example photographic film), primary data (analyses of raw data), and derived data (created from primary data).
Publication of derived data was already widely practised, Brian said, and there was a movement towards publication of raw and primary data to support data mining and validation.
Brian showed how crystal structures were commonly displayed within articles through embedded Java applets, and demonstrated an enhanced toolkit allowing users to create custom visualisations of published data.
Session 6: Datasets and Scholarly Communication: A Perfect Combination?
Beginning the final session, Susanne Haak, Thieme Publishing, introduced a collaborative project in which Thieme was working alongside the German Technical Library (TIB) to publish primary data in chemistry journals.
The partnership, which was one of too few between publishers and libraries, said Susanne, had created a simple workflow allowing articles and data to be published independently but linked via DOI names.
The workflow was still in development with open questions in areas such as peer review, legal ownership, and copyright.
Continuing in a similar vein, IJ Aalbersberg, Elsevier, explained how articles in ScienceDirect were being linked to underlying data.
Aalbersberg suggested that attaching data to articles as supplementary material belonged in ‘the past’.
Publishing data as supplements, he said, meant the data was distributed in multiple locations, frozen in time, and limited in size.
According to the recent Parse.Insight study, said Aalbersberg, researchers preferred data to be stored in repositories independent of the publisher [20].
This was already happening, he noted, in partnerships between publishers and data centres such as Pangaea.
In the future, Aalbersberg said, closer interoperability between data centres and publishers could provide a richer user experience by creating single-page environments giving access to both the article and the data.
Beginning in the following week, Aalbersberg said, ScienceDirect would be taking a step towards this future by launching a new ‘extended view’ for chemistry articles, allowing supplementary data to be rendered directly within an article.
Delivering the final talk of the meeting, Eefke Smit, International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, gave two key messages.
Firstly, she said, it was time for stakeholders to converge and form partnerships.
Secondly she called for data and article publishing to be considered in the context of each other to support integration of services.
Eefke noted that the PARSE.Insight report had found that scientists have a strong wish to see better ways of sharing and discovering data, and said that publishers had ‘willingness in abundance’ to make this happen [20].
Time for Convergence The benefits of making datasets visible and accessible were universally accepted and the meeting provided strong examples of how the research community is moving towards this aim.
The overwhelming message was that the greatest challenge would be to encourage a research culture that was motivated to share, manage and make data persistent.
Attaining this, it seems, requires better tools for data management and incentives for researchers to make their data visible and accessible, such as standards for data citation.
The mood of delegates was positive and there was a keen willingness amongst stakeholders to work together.
If this convergence is achieved, the goal of visible and accessible data could quickly become a reality.
References DataCite Web site http://www.datacite.org/ Data Documentation Initiative Web site http://www.ddialliance.org/ The EUROHORCs and ESF Vision on a Globally Competitive ERA and their Road Map for Actions to Help Build It, EUROHORCs-ESF Science Policy Briefing 33 http://www.esf.org/publications/science-policy-briefings.html eSciDoc Web site http://www.escidoc.org/ Chavan V and Ingwersen P, BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10(Suppl 14): S2.
doi:10.1186⁄1471-2105-10-S14-S2 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/S14/S2 ARCS Data Fabric Web site http://www.arcs.org.au/index.php/arcs-data-fabric DANS Data Seal of Approval Web site http://www.datasealofapproval.org/ Nestor Catalogue of Criteria for Trusted Digital Repositories Web site http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/tools-and-applications/nestor The DataVerse Network Project Web site http://thedata.org/ Government 2.0 Taskforce Web site http://gov2.net.au/ Know Where You Live Web site http://www.hackdays.com/knowwhereyoulive/ eBird Gulf Coast Oil Spill Bird Tracker Web site http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/new-gulf-coast-oil-spill-bird-tracker Nelson B, “Data Sharing: Empty Archives”, Nature 461, 160-163 (2009).
doi:10.1038/461160a http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090909/full/461160a.html Hannover dataset http://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.206394 The Singing Iceberg http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1117145 Napolean March Visualisation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png Swivel Web site http://www.swivel.com/ Many Eyes Web site http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/ The Guardian DataBlog http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog PARSE.Insight Report http://www.parse-insight.eu/downloads/PARSE-Insight_D3-6_InsightReport.pdf Author Details Tom Pollard Datasets Outreach Officer The British Library London UK Email: tom.pollard@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk/datasets J Max Wilkinson Datasets Programme Manager The British Library London UK Email: max.wilkinson@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk/datasets Return to top Article Title: “Making Datasets Visible and Accessible: DataCite’s First Summer Meeting” Author: Tom J Pollard and J Max Wilkinson Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/datacite-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Powering Search The Role of Thesauri in New Information Environments Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Powering Search The Role of Thesauri in New Information Environments Buzz usability metadata thesaurus accessibility vocabularies repositories graphics visualisation lcsh interoperability url taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Leonard Will reviews a comprehensive survey of the literature on the use of thesauri in information search processes and interfaces.
Powering Search is a comprehensive review and synthesis of work that has been done over the past 50 years on the use of thesauri to make searching for information more effective.
The book does not discuss the principles and practice of construction of information retrieval thesauri in any detail, but concentrates on the search process and on the user interface through which a searcher interacts with a body of information resources.
It is written clearly: each chapter begins and ends with a summary of its content, and the first and last chapters summarise the whole book.
There are copious references throughout and a full index.
As the author says in his conclusion: 'This book has taken a new approach to thesauri by critiquing the relevant literatures of a variety of communities who share an interest in thesauri and their functions but who are not, it should be noted, closely collaborating at this time – research communities such as library and information science, information retrieval, knowledge organization, human-computer interaction, information architecture, information search behavior, usability studies, search user interface, metadata-enabled information access, interactive information retrieval, and searcher education.'
One consequence of these disparate approaches is that terminology varies across communities: there are many interpretations of the meaning of facet, category, keyword or taxonomy, for example, which the author acknowledges, but he then uses these terms without saying precisely what definition he gives them.
Information Search Processes Chapters 2 and 3 review studies on how people go about searching for information, leading to the perhaps self-evident conclusion that there are two types of approach.
If a specific and well-defined piece of information is sought, people will amend and refine their queries in the light of initial results to get closer to what they seek.
On the other hand, if the search requirement is less well defined, a browsing or 'berrypicking' approach is adopted to explore a subject area, picking up and assembling pieces of information and changing the destination as the exploration progresses.
Both these approaches use an iterative procedure, within which a thesaurus can serve to make a search more precise, in the first case, or to show the broader context, in the second.
Chapter 4 deals with thesauri in Web-based search systems, and gives several examples of thesauri in digital libraries, subject gateways and portals, digital archives and linked data repositories.
This is one way of grouping these examples, but it is not clear that there is any distinction in principle between the way thesauri can be used in each of them, or indeed in search interfaces to other types of document collections.
The main distinction, which is not fully addressed, is whether the information resources being searched have been indexed with terms from the thesaurus being used, or whether the thesaurus is just a source of possible terms for searching the text, and possibly the metadata, of documents.
More weight needs to be given to the statement in the introduction to ISO 25964 -1: 'If both the indexer and the searcher are guided to choose the same term for the same concept, then relevant documents will be retrieved.
This is the main principle underlying thesaurus design ...' In fact the book generally talks about terms rather than the approach taken by the current standards of considering unambiguously defined concepts, with terms just serving as convenient labels for these.
Each concept may have many labels by which it can be retrieved, including one chosen as preferred for each language covered by the thesaurus.
Standards Chapter 5 deals with search and browsing functionalities in 'new thesaurus construction standards', discussing mainly BS8723 and ANSI/NISO Z39.19, because unfortunately the newest standard, ISO 25964 [1][2], was published too recently to be dealt with fully, though it is just mentioned.
This is not a serious problem, because there are no major changes of principle between these standards, but the later one expands and clarifies many areas.
The standards do contain recommendations on some aspects which this book does not discuss – it would be useful to know whether any research project has investigated the usefulness and understanding of these, such as: arrays of sibling concepts within a facet, introduced by a node label showing a characteristic of division.
For example, within the objects facet there may be arrays introduced by labels such as <vehicles by fuel> or <vehicles by colour>.
These arrays are sometimes displayed separately, and the book refers to them as facets or subfacets, but that is not in accordance with the usage in the standards.
The expression node label does not appear in the book, though such labels are important elements in structuring the hierarchical display of a thesaurus.
compound equivalence, where a thesaurus does not contain a compound concept such as coal mining but contains the explicit or implicit direction that it should be expressed by a combination of the two component concepts represented by the terms coal and mining.
This is also important in mapping between one controlled vocabulary and another, where a concept which occurs in one vocabulary may have to be mapped to a combination of concepts in another.
the role of pre-coordinate indexing, where a knowledge organisation scheme provides for concepts to be combined in a prescribed manner at the time of indexing rather than applying them independently to a document for possible combination at the time of searching.
This is particularly useful for browsing, where results can be ordered in a logical sequence, helping a searcher to 'navigate proximal to relevant documents' to use Shiri's words.
The book does not show an awareness of the complications of mapping between the individual concepts of a thesaurus and the compound concepts of a pre-coordinate scheme such as Library of Congress Subject Headings or the Dewey Decimal Classification.
User Interfaces The meat of the book is in chapters 6 to 9, dealing with the design of thesaurus-enhanced search user interfaces.
Many examples are given, from the earliest prototype interfaces to those in current commercial use, as well as some experimental graphical displays.
The screen images illustrated are rather small, though just legible, but their being in black and white means that, when different colours are used to distinguish elements, their significance is lost.
In some cases URLs to the live interfaces are given, though they are in the list of references and not adjacent to the illustrations.
(The one URL that is given in the text, to a project in which the author participated, leads to an index page with broken links.
The correct links can be found on the author's personal home page.)
Even the live search screens sometimes breach accessibility guidelines, with one of them having small pale grey text written vertically on a green background with very little contrast.
Chapter 9 includes a brief discussion of general principles of screen design, but some basic issues such as legibility can be overlooked in the attempt to fit many elements in to a visually attractive and comprehensible layout.
In the conclusions, the author gives graphic visual interfaces the faint praise 'visualization of thesauri may appeal to some users and may assist them in their understanding of the links and relationships'; it is notable that none of the commercial interfaces illustrated uses them.
They are interesting for browsing around, but perhaps not very practical for serious searching.
Evaluation The discussion of user-centred evaluation in chapter 8 reviews many experiments, and recognises that it is difficult to separate the assessment of the value of thesaurus support per se from the assessment of the interface through which it is accessed.
Though individual differences in users' experience, familiarity with searching and with the topics concerned all have an effect, predominant conclusions included the following:      thesaurus navigation was found useful and informative ... users prefer interactive query formulation using thesaurus-enhanced search interfaces as opposed to automatic, behind-the-scenes query expansion.
Guidelines Perhaps the most useful part of the book is the two-page summary at the end, entitled 'Categorization of guidelines and best practices in the design of thesaurus-enhanced search user interfaces'.
This encapsulates the lessons that have been learned from all the preceding studies, and, though it would be challenging to design an interface that complied with all these recommendations, many interfaces would be greatly improved if they took account of this important checklist.
To pick out and comment on just a few items: Provide clear instructions on Boolean search functions across facets and thesaurus terms.
We can interpret this, though the author does not, as deprecating the simplistic instructions so often found requiring a searcher to choose between 'any' or 'all' of the terms in a search statement.
A search statement of any complexity normally contains a combination of two or more concepts, each of which may be labelled by one or more terms.
The general form of the search is thus on the lines of (a OR b) AND (x OR y OR z) – for example: (crawl OR freestyle) AND (style OR technique OR breathing).
Such a statement is fairly self-explanatory, and it is surely underestimating the intelligence of most searchers to say that it is too hard for them to understand.
It need not be expressed in words, as above, and many interfaces express it by grouping concepts with a tick box beside each, using OR to combine concepts within a group and AND to combine groups.
Provide the original query in an editable format on the results page.
As the studies of search processes showed that searches are generally iterative, a user should be able to see, modify and re-run a search in the light of results.
Provide a large query entry box for both the thesaurus and the collection search feature.
The small query boxes frequently provided do not allow the entry of a search of any complexity, and even if they allow scrolling it is inconvenient not to be able to see the full search statement.
Integrate thesaurus browsing and results examination to allow seamless access to the thesaurus and the retrieved results.
If it is necessary to switch to a different window with a different interface to choose or modify search terms, this is almost as cumbersome as having to refer to the printed version of the thesaurus.
It should be possible to copy thesaurus terms, and subtrees, into search statements without retyping them, for example by drag-and-drop or double-click, with assistance in combining them with a valid search syntax.
Conclusion This book is an important and useful review which will provide essential background and guidance for anyone designing search interfaces.
As it deals only with the search aspects and not with the underlying principles of thesaurus construction and use, it should be complemented by other guidance such as ISO 25964 to provide a full understanding of the techniques and benefits of thesaurus-based information storage and retrieval systems.
There is still much work to do in the design and evaluation of such systems, but this is an excellent starting point.
References ISO 25964.
Information and documentation – thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies     Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval.
Geneva : ISO, 2011.
152 pages.
238 CHF (Swiss francs).
Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies.
Geneva : ISO, 2013.
99 pages.
196 CHF (Swiss francs).
Both parts are available on paper or in pdf format.
They are also available through national standards bodies.
ISO 25964 – the international standard for thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies.
The official Web site for information about ISO 25964, giving summaries, contents, and links to related materials http://www.niso.org/schemas/iso25964/ Author Details Leonard Will Information management consultant Willpower Information Email: L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk Web site: http://www.willpowerinfo.co.uk/ Leonard Will has been working as an independent consultant in information management since 1994, having previously been Head of Library and Information Services at the Science Museum, London.
He has special interests in faceted classification and thesaurus construction and use, and was a member of the working parties that drew up BS8723 and ISO25964.
He is a member of ISKO (the International Society for Knowledge Organization), and a chartered member of CILIP and of the BCS.
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Book Review: The Information Society A Study of Continuity and Change Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The Information Society A Study of Continuity and Change Buzz data infrastructure digitisation blog ebook foi privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Muhammad Rafiq offers us a detailed review of a work, now in its sixth edition, which examines the information society, its origin, development, its associated issues and the current landscape.
The Information Society offers a detailed discussion on the concept and dynamics of the information society from a historical perspective to the present era of information societies.
The book offers in-depth discussion and analysis of how information has been accumulated, analysed and disseminated in the past, and focuses on great shifts in the paradigm of human communications that have taken place in the history of mankind.
It offers a detailed account of the development of human communication, mass media, Internet, Web 2.0 as well as the economic and political dimensions of information, and the role of the information profession in the context of the information society.
The author considers that human society has been witnessing a technological and information revolution especially over the last two decades.
The computer is the symbol and leader of this revolution that has affected every domain of human society.
The book is divided in to 4 main sections: The historical dimension The economic dimension The political dimension The information profession The Historical Dimension This section contains two chapters namely: From script to print and Mass media and technology.
Prof. J. Feather narrates the origins of writing and alphabets, use of images, sounds and numbers in the early communication of human beings.
Natural substances, such as rocks, bone or wood were the earliest media to communicate information that was greatly revolutionised with the development of the book as a physical entity.
The development of the book grew from the development of paper.
The author considers the development of paper as the first revolution and discusses the influence of the book as a medium of information communication and as well as the emerging trade in books in the first chapter.
The second chapter Mass media and technology gives a detailed account of the popularity of the pictorial image in the 19th century followed by the recording and transmission of sound in societies.
Furthermore, this chapter focuses on mass media, ie radio, cinema and television along with computer and mobile phone which have transformed everything in the context of information communication.
Nevertheless, those mass media themselves were changed and greatly influenced by digitisation, the emergence of multifunctional devices as well as the vast range of applications developed for their use.
These developments have altered the fundamental concepts of society including friendship, meetings, shopping, banking, etc.
Blogs, tweets, and social networking are now commonplace in modern life especially among the ‘Google generations’.
These interactive media have so changed the norms of mass media in terms of the voice of ordinary people and the individual, that blogs and tweets now have considerable reach and are becoming a significant part of mass media.
However, the author sees such technological development as a paradox and writes, ‘Technology has made more information more available to more people than any time in tens of thousands of years of human history.
But the same technology has made access to it more difficult’.
The author also expresses his fears about the threat of exclusion of the people who have no access to or cannot use these new forms of media.
The Economic Dimension The second part of this work consists of chapters 3 and 4, ie The information market-place and Access to information.
Chapter 3 discusses authors’ and publishers’ perceptions, their roles and relationships from a historical perspective and up to the present era of commercialisation.
This chapter also covers the publishing industry, its diversity, new directions, the evolution of the ebook, interdependent media, the concept of the market and market fragmentation, and competition.
The chapter provides a discourse on editors and the editorial role in a comprehensive manner.
The discussion on the evolution of the ebook and the interdependent media is very thought-provoking and enlightens us on the evolution and convergence of news media, radio and television in a scholarly fashion with the latest statistics and a discussion of the causes and trends that have affected the development and convergence of such media.
The discussion of the economic dimensions includes consideration of the market in terms of print, electronic books and serials.
Feather writes: It now contains a multitude of competing and complementary sectors.
Although print continues to predominate in some of these, in others it is supplemented and in some it has been replaced.
Others again are completely new; they are sectors into which printed word never went and indeed could never go.
Competition has introduced a sharper edge to the commercial element which has always been intrinsic in the process of information transfer… (Page 72) Chapter 4,  Access to information, explains the different areas related to information access.
It extends the debate into the context of the price of books and the cost of broadcasts; the cost of libraries; public good or private profit; electronic communications: access and costs; the World Wide Web; networks: an electronic democracy?
; electronic publishing: towards a new paradigm?
; and the cost of access: issues and problems.
The world has emerged as a global village and the new concepts of being information-rich and information-poor, coined because of the increasing gap between people in terms of access to information.
Feather points out that, ‘Information has never been “free”, but now it can be realistically costed’.
Publishers were well aware of the cost of information and exploited it commercially.
However, technological developments, especially the Internet and the World Wide Web, have ‘made more information more available to more people than at any other time in human history’.
Nevertheless, the cost of these technologies is high, and ‘… the cost of gaining access to information through them, made it often difficult and sometimes impossible for information to be obtained by its potential beneficiaries’.
This infrastructure is usually supported by public funds, for example in the form of public libraries.
However, there is a change in the relationship between information providers and information consumers.
Large parts of the public sector have been transferred into private hands.
We have seen an exponential growth in electronic communications which has transformed the means of access to information.
Electronic networks, and most importantly, the World Wide Web, have changed the paradigm of information access.
These developments have offered unparalleled advantages over the traditional methods of information storage and retrieval.
Nevertheless, ‘the cost of network [information] access is high; this is not altered by the fact that, for many users, it is hidden and may indeed generate savings elsewhere in such diverse areas as secretarial services and library provisions’.
The Political Dimension The third part of the book covers chapters 5 and 6.
Chapter 5, Information rich and information poor, covers a wide range of topics including the value of information, information in developing countries, wealth and poverty in terms of information and economic development, information delivery systems, the world publishing industry, Eastern Europe, and the limits of wealth:  information poverty in the West.
The ‘value of information is not intrinsic to the information itself… We have largely dealt with the financial aspects of the supply of information rather than the value of information’.
The author provides a detailed discussion on information in developing countries and very vivid contrasts among different information systems including CD-ROMs and recorded taped material as used in developing countries such as Pakistan.
In terms of the world publishing industry, British and American publishers continue to enjoy the advantages accorded them by their pre-eminence in a truly global market.
‘The continued dominance of English-language publishing by the British and American publishers and distributors, able to exploit huge domestic markets and global sales organizations… The southern countries are forced to compete in an arena dominated by northern countries whose inherent economic strength rests on an infrastructure which the South cannot replicate’.
A different sort of information poverty exists in Eastern Europe as their telecommunication infrastructure was quite intentionally not developed, especially in the totalitarian regimes which persisted until the end of 1980s and where television, radio, etc.
were used only for propaganda.
In other words, such heterogeneity, dominance, and deprivations in different parts of the world are all very much part of the debate in an information society.
The author wrote: The installation of a fully developed communications and information infrastructure will, however, take time, and the cost means that their availability will still be limited.
It is not difficult to envisage a situation in which a country appears to be information rich, but contains large pockets of information poverty, which might even encompass the majority of the population.
Chapter 6, Information, the state and the citizen, provides an account of the role of the state in terms of the protection of intellectual property, data protection, personal privacy, censorship, freedom of information, and other contemporary dilemmas related to the role of state.
The role of the state is fundamental in the development of the information society.
Policy making and policy implementation lie at the heart of the development of an information society.
The chapter provides an exhaustive discussion of the issues, current practices and the role of state in this context.
The Information Profession Last but not the least, the fourth part of the book presents a detailed account of the role of information professionals related to information society.
It covers the role, work, and transition of their role from archivist to record managers.
The position of information professionals, Feather contends, is very much an evolving one which is proving not only challenging but sometimes daunting.
The work of information professionals has been diversifying while information technology has changed everything from practice and processes to the basic paradigm of beliefs.
Conclusion This book is recommended for policy makers, theorists, writers, teachers and students in the domains of information society, publishing industry, communication, mass communication, and library and information science professionals.
It will essentially help them to understand the phenomena of the information society and its related philosophies.
The book presents a detailed landscape from North to South, East to West, and may be designated as a reference work as much as a mandatory text book on the topic.
Author Details Muhammad Rafiq, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Library and Information Science University of Sargodha Sargodha Pakistan Email: rafiqfsd@hotmail.com  Web site: http://uos.academia.edu/MuhammadRafiq Cell: +92 (0) 333 311 0909 Skype : rafiqlibrarian Dr. Muhammad Rafiq is Assistant Professor at the Deptment of Library and Information Science, University of Sargodha, Pakistan.
He has over 14 years of  experience of teaching and managing university libraries and information services of national and international organisations including the Punjab University, Lahore; GC University Lahore; National Textile University, Faisalabad; International Islamic University Islamabad; Development Alternative Inc. USA; and International Relief & Development Inc. USA.
He is an HEC-approved PhD Supervisor.
Dr. Rafiq also has international awards to his credit including the Jay Jordan IFLA-OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship 2004, OH, USA; Winner of 2009 International Research Paper Contest of American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T); and Associate to Mortenson Center for International Library Programs, IL USA.
Dr. Rafiq has professional alignment with the ALA, the SLA, ASIS&T, the PLA, and the PULISAA.
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The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2012 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2012 Buzz data mobile api database infrastructure archives accessibility tagging browser repositories video preservation graphics visualisation widget twitter oer licence authentication wcag ukoer xcri-cap foi plone cookie url research standards storify bs8878 kis Citation BibTex RIS Kirsty Pitkin reports on the 16th Institutional Web Management Workshop held at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower between 18 20 July 2012.
The 16th Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 12) took place at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower – a building with a stunning panoramic view over the volcanic city.
The event brought together 172 delegates and attracted an additional 165 viewers to the live video stream of the plenary sessions over the three days.
This year's theme focussed on embedding innovation, and the event featured a range of case studies and examples of embedded practice.
Fittingly, the workshop saw the formal launch of the new JISC-funded Event Amplification Toolkit [1], which seeks to embed some of the experimental practices explored at previous IWMW events to bring the workshop to a wider audience beyond its traditional geographical and temporal constraints.
The event encompassed many of the key innovations highlighted in the report, including formal support for remote participants, who were again able to follow the event via a live video stream, and take part in amplified discussions using tools such as Twitter.
The legacy of this amplification means that resources that enable you to relive the event in full are available at the IWMW 12 web site [2] together with the event Lanyrd page [3], should this report whet your appetite!
In this report, I will outline the key messages delivered by a range of expert speakers in the 12 event plenaries.
However, it is important to note that the event also provided the opportunity for delegates to explore relevant issues in more detail through a series of interactive workshops covering topics such as cookie legislation, developing digital literacies, xcri-cap files and data visualisation.
Data and the Web Manager Kevin Ashley, Digital Curation Centre Kevin Ashley's opening keynote focused on research data management and the ways in which web managers can use their skills to assist their institutions in this area.
Kevin provided an overview of the research data management landscape, highlighting the pressures placed upon institutions and individual academics to provide data management plans, and address issues of data storage, preservation, access and discoverability.
He emphasised that research data are expensive, so even without these demands from funders, obtaining value and reuse from this investment was vital for universities, whilst the various legal and regulatory issues associated with managing ever-increasing quantities of data also required careful consideration.
View of Edinburgh from the Appleton Tower Ashley introduced the work of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), which aims to help institutions to improve their capacity to deal with research data on a large scale.
To illustrate the scope of this work, Ashley described several tools developed by the DCC, including the DMPOnline tool, which enables researchers to produce the data management plans required by most funding bodies.
Whilst this is run as a centrally hosted service, it can be customised to suit specific institutional needs and branded to appear as an institutional service.
Members of the the IWMW community may be involved in this blending process.
Kevin further highlighted the valuable role that web managers can play in this area by observing that the discovery of research data was essential, so skills such as search engine optimisation and integrating data within the institutional web presence could allow web managers to play a much stronger role in supporting their institutions.
However, he warned against creating data silos, with systems such as publication repositories, OER repositories and data management systems being viewed as separate information environments.
He agreed that there should be different IT systems for administrative convenience, but this should be buried within the infrastructure.
The skills of web managers to surface and blend data from these different systems will prove extremely valuable to institutions as they seek to make their research data visible, reusable and shareable.
Delegates enjoying a ceilidh at the end of day one Open Data Development in the City of Edinburgh Council Sally Kerr, City of Edinburgh Council, and Suraj Kika, Jadu Sally Kerr from Edinburgh City Council gave an overview of the state of open data development across Scotland, the funding streams driving this forward and the aspirations they had for future hyperlocal open data projects.
City of Edinburgh Council was working with local organisations that already had expertise in open data,  such as the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics and EDINA, to help them move forward in this area.
Kerr outlined some of the initiatives that were already underway in Edinburgh, including the Turing Festival and a NESTA-funded Make It Local Project.
She observed that opening up data involved a lot of work, so the council had decided to place an emphasis on developers explaining what they wanted to do with the data and how the council would benefit in order to help the council make a business case for the work involved in opening up the data required.
In the meantime, Sally’s team was working towards opening up as much data as possible through the council's API, defining a strategy by collaborating with other agencies, identifying a senior champion within the organisation, and improving training on open data within the organisation.
Sally stressed that it was important to sell the internal benefits of open data, such as improved internal sharing, simplification of data management, improved perception of transparency for the Council, and the potential for cutting the number of repeat FOI requests.
Finally, Sally described their NESTA-funded Make It Local green spaces project, which had involved tagging 34,000 trees across Edinburgh and creating a series of trails and lists of facilities within the city's green spaces.
All of these data were available via an API key on the Web site, which they were able to supply through the Jadu CMS.
Suraj Kika provided a quick demonstration of this API, including how developers could request access to the API by providing a brief explanation of what they wanted to do with the data, and showed how this could be used with the app building tool Weejot [4] to build a simple mobile application.
Data Visualisation: A Taster Tony Hirst, Open University, Martin Hawksey, JISC Cetis Tony Hirst opened by defining the difference between what he termed 'presentation graphics' and visual analysis.
He used visualisation as a tool for himself to help make sense of large datasets, to look for patterns and structures in the data, and to look for outliers.
However, with presentation graphics the story had already been decided.
They were effectively explanatory visualisations, where you already knew what you wanted to communicate.
However, exploratory visualisation was produced purely as a way into the data to find a story.
Tony introduced the notion of macroscopes, which gave a view of a dataset as a whole.
He went on to demonstrate how visualisations could help to express structure by showing examples of visualisations built to show the relationships between courses and units within the Open University's Open Learn database, and visualisations that mapped interest networks using Twitter.
Martin Hawksey provided a case study to illustrate the value of this type of work for the sector by walking us through his recent work to visualise #ukoer resources in Jorum using tools such as Google Refine to clean up the data, Gourse, and NodeXL.
He emphasised that he had not bought a single tool, so there were a lot of free resources available and a strong community able to offer assistance.
Hawksey concluded by stressing that data use equals data validation.
By going into the Jorum data he was able to identify various issues, which the Jorum team could start to fix and therefore improve the data quality for future users.
Key Information Data Sets Andrew Oakley, HESA Andrew Oakley provided an overview of the implications of the new requirements for institutions to display Key Information Set (KIS) data as a widget on each course page on their Web site.
They were designed to provide comparable information for prospective undergraduate students to help them choose a course and an institution.
Oakley talked through the sample widgets and sample reports to demonstrate the key features and the statistics that they presented, such as average salary after graduation, the number of students who went on to work and/or study, the cost of halls of residence and the percentage of the course spent in scheduled learning and teaching.
He also outlined the data sources used to compile the statistics.
Oakley noted that every individual course has a KIS, so there should be one widget per course on an institution's Web site.
It was therefore important to clarify what HESA is classifying as a course.
Put simply, they considered a course to be ‘something you can apply to study.’  He emphasised the key milestones before the 31 October 2012 deadline for compliance, and outlined how data could be updated after this point if errors are detected.
In conclusion, Oakley confirmed that the KIS data will be openly available for reuse, but the terms had yet to be agreed.
He outlined the most likely terms, and expressed his hope that they will be using one of the standard open licences, such as the Open Government Licence.
Beyond WCAG: Experiences in implementing BS 8878 E A Draffan, University of Southampton E A provided an overview of efforts at the University of Southampton to implement the BS 8878 Web accessibility code of practice.
She stated that we all had preferences when we visit Web sites that helped us to enjoy them more.
However, there were a lot of research papers showing that a lot of our students were still experiencing difficulties in accessing services such as online journals, library Web sites, and virtual learning environments.
E A explained that BS 8878 aimed to break down the guidelines described in WCAG 2.0 to help institutions to think about the online services they provided to their students and the skills that might be required to access those services.
She stressed that this was not about accessibility for a small group of students, but a large cohort, including ourselves as we got older.
E A described the approach taken at the University of Southampton, where the Diversity Officer put a project board together consisting of senior users representing the main members of the university to provide policy and guidance, as described on the Web4All Web site [5].
She highlighted some of the key lessons, including the importance of baking inclusivity in at the beginning of the process, rather than retro-fitting, and keeping a record of accessibility choices and changes over time.
She also described several of the tools they had been using, including the Web2Access Assistive Technology (AT) bar.
E A concluded that BS 8878 effectively presented the business case for accessibility, gave advice about how to embed accessibility, and demonstrated a process.
It made you ask repeatedly: Do you know who your audience is?
Going Online: Do Universities Really Understand the Internet?
Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, Robert Gordon University Ferdinand von Prondzynski gave a controversial presentation highlighting things he disliked about a number of institutional Web sites and how he felt universities could improve their approach to communicating via the Web.
He noted that this criticism was not aimed at those present who designed institutional Web sites, but at those like himself who were briefing and signing off the designs, who he felt did not really understand what they were doing with the Web or what they wanted to achieve from a policy perspective.
Ferdinand discussed several features of university home page design that annoyed him from a strategic perspective.
That included what he saw as an overreliance on newsfeeds, arguing that nobody cared about your institution’s news.
He dissected several examples of university home pages that he disliked, before concluding that he believed a university home page should have a very small number of links that led on logically.
Ferdinand stressed that more joined-up thinking was required for institutions to make better strategic use of the Web, as there were still lots of people within universities who knew they must use the Web, but didn't know how.
Do I Need an App for That?
Rob Borely, Headscape Voted the best presentation of the conference, Rob Borely provided a compelling argument for when apps were appropriate and when they were not.
Rob stressed that it was important not to be swayed by fashion or into following the flock, but instead to consider the case for an app carefully.
He believed apps should be used for behaviour-oriented tasks, whilst the Web should be used for content.
Apps have become disposable, so you not only had to come up with something to entice users to download your app, you also had to encourage them to continue using it.
“If you have a clearly defined task, it belongs in an app.
If it is something your users will do regularly, there is a case for an app.” This was not a presentation about the merits of Web vs native: in fact, he argued that the battle between Web and native apps didn’t exist.
They were both on the same side, they just served different purposes.
Borely argued that whilst we didn't yet know if mobile would become more significant than desktops for Web browsing, mobile-first might become the design norm.
He concluded by urging the Web managers in the IWMW community to consider the options available carefully against their strategic aims, and to remember that apps were for tasks, whilst the Web was for content.
IWMW 12 delegates enjoy the reception at Our Dynamic Earth What Do You Really Want?
Dawn Ellis, University of Edinburgh Dawn Ellis told a story of a wise old academic from a far away land, who wished to attract more students to his ancient seat of learning in competitive times.
He implemented a content management system to help provide editorial and structural consistency across its Web site so they could respond to the ever-changing landscape.
Of course, this fairy story was not fictional.
Dawn discussed some of the human difficulties the University of Edinburgh encountered when it embarked upon this journey, in response to audience questions.
She explained that content editors were not allowed to touch the CMS until they had undertaken training in writing for the Web, and described some of the issues they had encountered when merging with Edinburgh College of Art.
Dawn stressed that it was very easy to say ‘let's involve this new technology’ but this could be a distraction.
She believed that it was only when you got round the table to talk about the user journey and the department's key objectives that you could start moving things online appropriately.
Serving Two Masters: Creating Large-scale Responsive Web Sites Keith Doyle, Navopia, and Paddy Callaghan, University of York In a double-act discussion of responsive web design, Keith Doyle opened by stressing that a responsive web site was not a mobile site, it was a web site that worked on any device or browser.
He drew parallels with the concept of responsive architecture, which inspired the term, and emphasised the key features a site design had to satisfy to be considered responsive, including providing the full web site content in a useable form, rather than a cut-down version, as one would find on a mobile web site.
Keith also highlighted the key benefit: that responsive design resulted in one web, with one URL per page.
Following on from this conceptual introduction, Paddy Callaghan from the University of Bradford gave a practical overview of work to develop the first responsive web site for the institution.
Staff had worked on a mobile-first principle, as they noted that their target market of 16-25 year olds were making a conscious choice to use mobile devices to browse the web.
Therefore they needed the university web site to work for those users.
“They are not choosing mobile because they have to, it is their format.” Paddy highlighted several of the practical issues they had encountered, including how to handle navigations and make better use of breadcrumbs.
He also described some of the changes they would be making following user testing, such as repurposing the carousel feature.
Doyle concluded the session by predicting that in three years time we would not be talking about responsive design.
It would become standard as we sought to make web sites accessible and usable for visitors, regardless of their device.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: 2 Years of Running a Content Management Service Helen Sargan, University of Cambridge Helen Sargan described the circumstances that led her team at University of Cambridge to adopt the open source content management system, Plone, to create a service offering fully supported, hosted sites for various schools and projects across the institution.
She described their key requirements for the solution, such as fitting existing templates into the CMS and being amenable to their authentication system.
She also traced how the project progressed from the proposal in 2009 to the present day.
Helen provided a live demonstration of the service, showing what was available in a plain vanilla site and how it could be customised.
She also described the business model they had adopted, whereby departments were charged £100 per site to help cover the hardware costs involved.
Staff were also offered a training course before they took on a site and were supported via email.
In concluding, Helen summarised the good, bad and ugly elements of the project.
The good included pent-up demand and an improvement in the quality of sites; the bad included site managers who were devoted fiddlers and inter-related problems with Plone plugins; and the ugly included the ways site administrators could style their sites, and the obscure ways people could break things.
Measuring Impact Stephen Emmott, London School of Economics Stephen Emmott provided an overview of the complexity of the web presence at LSE, and most other institutions, and the importance of monitoring and reviewing services regularly to manage such complexity.
He noted that whilst there were many ways to review and measure the impact of the services managed under the banner of web services, and such an abundance of data from measurement tools, there were only finite time and resources to analyse them.
He argued that data are just one step in the review process: web managers needed to extract information from these data to communicate impact effectively.
Stephen advocated a model for a measured web presence with a fixture of the boundaries.
He suggested that this could be achieved by auditing what was managed, collecting data for what was managed, then providing authorised, self-help access to those data so appropriate people could use them.
At LSE they were doing this by providing data-driven dashboards to provide summary statistics, rather than customised reports.
This enabled the web team to focus on producing performance dashboards and investigations, rather than reporting.
Stephen concluded by stressing that he did not believe that web managers should be expected to measure impact.
It was the job of the web manager to provide data and tools so others could assess impact.
Conclusions Brian Kelly Described by one member of the audience as ‘like a DJ mixing tracks’ Brian Kelly summarised IWMW 12 by calling on multiple sources.
He asked delegates to tweet their insights gained from the workshop, and showed examples of how social media activity from the event was being collated using tools like Paper.li [6] and Storify [7][8].
Not all of the tweets were digital... An “old skool” tweet using blackboard technology Brian shared some of the visualisations generated using data from the #iwmw12 hash tag, observing that the explosion in open data provided a real opportunity to those in web management.
He also highlighted some more traditional visualisations of the workshop, as generated by Kevin Mears from the University of Glamorgan.
IWMW 12 Poster by Kevin Mears (Picture by kind permission of Kevin Mears (@mearso) of the University of Glamorgan.)
Looking to the future, Brian asked for feedback to establish how the community could be carried forward, inviting comments from members of existing regional groups.
He also gauged the appetite for a DevCSI hack day looking at data visualisation to follow up on the inspiration given by Tony Hirst and Martin Hawksey in their keynote presentation.
He also highlighted other amplified events in the sector to help web managers extend their professional development.
Brian  concluded by thanking the staff at the University of Edinburgh, the speakers and the participants for all their support throughout the event.
Edinburgh Skyline References Greening Events II: Event Amplification Toolkit http://opus.bath.ac.uk/30275/ IWMW 12 Key Resources http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2012/key-resources/videos/ IMWM Lanyrd Page http://lanyrd.com/2012/iwmw12/ Weejot http://weejot.com/ University of Southampton Web 4 All web site http://www.southampton.ac.uk/web4all IWMW 12 Paper.li Archive 20 July 2012 http://paper.li/iwmw/1339403501?edition_id=93ddb0b0-bab2-11e1-84c4-0025907174dc Storify: IWMW 12 Day 2 http://storify.com/eventamplifier/iwmw-12-day-two/ Storify: IWMW 12 Day 3 http://storify.com/eventamplifier/iwmw-12-day-three/ Author Details Kirsty Pitkin Event Amplifier TConsult Ltd Email: kirsty.pitkin@tconsult-ltd.com Web site: http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com Kirsty Pitkin is a professional event amplifier who works closely with conference organisers to help extend the impact of their events using online media.
She received an MA in Creative Writing and New Media from DeMontfort University, which stimulated her ongoing interest in communicating stories across a variety of social media and digital platforms.
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Migrating Ariadne from Drupal to a Static Site Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Migrating Ariadne from Drupal to a Static Site Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Jason Cooper describes how the Ariadne journal has recently been moved from a Drupal based site, to a static site managed by Hugo and git.
Introduction At the start of 2019 Ariadne[1] moved from being a Drupal[2] site to being a static site.
This move realised a number of benefits for the journal including an improvement in the site performance and a reduction in the ongoing effort required for site maintenance.
Why move away from Drupal?
When the technical running of Ariadne moved from the University of Bath to Loughborough University in 2015 it was decided to upgrade Drupal to the latest version[3].
This turned out to be far more intensive task than was originally envisaged.
This trend continued with each security update for Drupal requiring significant effort to apply to the site.
Within a few weeks of going live, it became obvious that Drupal also required far more resources than expected.
A number of unfriendly bots had to be blocked from accessing the site due to their aggressive harvesting practice, which would quickly bring the server load up to unacceptable levels.
Another mitigation implemented to reduce the tendency for the Drupal setup to have high server loads was to place it behind a Varnish cache[4].
As published journal articles don’t change after being published the pages can be cached for a long period.
This caching did resulted in a significant reduction in the number of requests that needed to be served by the Drupal setup itself.
The downside to the addition of the Varnish cache in front of Drupal was that it was an additional application that needed to be maintained by the technical team and the learning curve for new members of the technical team to pick up the system was already very steep with just the intricacies of Drupal and its configuration.
As well as the technical effort required, Drupal was also impacting on the editorial process.
The process of laying out an article was at times more of a black art than a science.
In summary the decision to move away from Drupal to an alternative process for publishing Ariadne can be summed up with the following sentence: It took up too many resources, both server-wise and person-wise when it should have been a lot easier and quicker for everyone.
Requirements for the new solution Given the issues with the Drupal setup, the technical team drew up the following list of requirements for a new solution: Low maintainence effort Any updates or security patching process should be kept to a minimum.
Low resource impact on servers The solution should be able to serve a large number of pages quickly without significantly impacting on the host server.
Simple editorial process The process to add a new article and issue should be simple and easy to document.
Reduced learning curve Where possible the solution should use technologies in common use by the technical team.
WordPress The technical team has quite a bit of experience of configuring and using WordPress and so spent some time experimenting with trying to get a WordPress instance that would meet the identified requirements.
The technical team found that it was certainly lower maintenance effort for them and they had a lot of trust in WordPress’s automated updates.
The impact on the server was also less than Drupal’s.
However, the editorial process was still more complex than required, especially adding new author profiles.
After a while it became obvious that despite being closer to meeting the requirements when compared to the existing Drupal setup, it still wasn’t as good a solution as the technical team would like.
The ideal solution While experimenting with using WordPress the technical team commented on a number of occasions that the ideal solution from a server resource perspective would be to simply produce a static site, served by a standard web server.
Their main reasoning being that once published the content of an article should never change.
In fact the only time that parts of the site should change are: when a new article is published when a new issue is published when a journal policy is updated when the site’s theme is updated A suitable solution presented itself when one of the technical team was learning about Hugo[5] and realised that it would be ideally suited for generating a static site for Ariadne.
How Hugo works?
Hugo lets you separate a site’s content from its style.
When you generate the site, Hugo goes through each piece of content and applies the suitable templates for the content type.
Each piece of content may have multiple templates applied to it, for example an issue will have the table of contents template applied to produce the HTML table of contents, but it could also have an RSS feed template applied to it as well to generate the RSS feed for that issue.
Structure of the Hugo project Ariadne’s Hugo project uses the following directories: archetypes content public static themes archetypes Archetypes are empty content types.
When you create a new piece of content with Hugo it will use an archetype as the base for the new content file, if one is available.
This avoids people having to remember what each piece of front matter is required for each content type.
Ariadne has four archetypes defined: article the archetype for all new Ariadne articles issue the archetype for all new Ariadne issues author the archetype for all new Ariadne author profiles page the archetype used for any pages that aren’t articles, issues or author profiles content Hugo content consists of two sections, the first section is the front matter which is structured metadata about the content.
The second section is the content itself.
The front matter can be structured using either YAML[6], TOML[7] or JSON[8] and the content itself can be either Markdown[9] or HTML.
Unless explicitly overridden the directory structure under the content directory maps directly through to the final static site’s directory structure.
public Hugo renders the final static site in the public directory.
static Any static files required by the site’s content are stored in the static directory.
The underlying directory structure and content is copied into the public directory when building the final site.
themes The themes directory stores the themes that can be used when rendering the final site.
Ariadne’s theme directory contains the one ariadne theme.
Each Hugo theme directory contains all the resources specific to that theme, e.g.
layout templates, CSS style sheets, theme images.
Developing the core Ariadne theme To get a starting point to develop the Ariadne theme from, a couple of issues along with their articles and related author profiles, were manually migrated into site content files and then the static site was generated using Hugo’s default templates.
One by one new templates for each content type were added to the theme.
New front matter fields were added to the articles and issues as the need arose.
Once the core theme templates were complete (articles, issues, author profiles, generic pages and homepage see figure 1) and the required front matter fields were known, the archetypes for each content type was created.
figure 1: Ariadne Homepage Extracting existing content from Drupal With the core archetypes, content directory structure and theme started, the next step was to extract the existing content from Drupal and populate content files for each one in the appropriate location in the Hugo project’s content directory.
A few of the top level pages were migrated manually (Homepage, Guidelines, Privacy Statement and Access Terms and Copyright), but for Issues, Articles and Author Profiles it was decided that it would be easier to write a Perl script to extract the data directly from Drupal’s database and create the related content files for the Hugo project.
Developing the export script took about 3 days of effort overall, which was not only significantly faster than a manual migration would have been, but also resulted in a consistent migration.
Luckily the images for each article were a lot easier to migrate, as they were stored under a single images directory in the Drupal setup which could simply be copied over to the static project directory.
In addition this also removed any requirement to update the image URLs in migrated content as the actual URL of the image would stay the same.
Revisiting the theme Once all the content files from Drupal were ready the theme could be revisited.
This time concentrating on the larger browsing lists (Archives, Authors and Articles) and taxonomies (e.g.
Authors, Domains, Buzz a.k.a article keywords), all of which couldn’t be easily developed without having a large number of articles migrated.
Once the theme was complete we could generate a static site version of Ariadne using Hugo and, while we could manually generate the site and upload it when publishing a new article, it was decided to investigate automating the publishing process.
Designing the continuous deployment pipeline The manual process to publish new content (article, issue, author profile, etc.)
was: Create the new content with a draft status Edit the new content Generate the site and push it to the staging environment Proof reading by the authors (if anything needs correcting then return to step 2) Remove the draft status from the new content Generate the site and push it to the staging environment Final proof read by the Editor Push the site to the production environment As the Hugo project is under git[10] version control and using GitLab[11] as the master repository, a GitLab Continuous Integration (CI) / Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline was created.
The CI / CD pipeline was very simple with just one deploy stage consisting of two tasks.
The first task runs on each push into the GitLab repository and generates the static site, including draft content, which it then pushes out to the staging environment via scp.
The second task needs to be manually triggered via the GitLab web interface (see figure 2) and generates the static site, excluding draft content, and then pushes it out to the production environment, also via scp.
Figure 2: GitLab CI/CD pipeline interface Citations In the Drupal version of Ariadne there was a section that listed a citation for each article.
As part of the migration it was decided not to recreate this section, as how a citation should be formatted is entirely dependent on where the citation is being published.
Instead it was decided to provide a BibTeX[12] and RIS[13] file for each article to enable people to easily add the article to their citation manager software.
To get Hugo to generate the BibTeX and RIS files required the definition of two new media types to be added to the project’s configuration (application/x-bibtex and application/x-research-info-systems) then define two new output formats (BIBTEX and RIS) and, finally, set the output types for pages to include these new output formats.
At this point Hugo would try to render the BibTeX and RIS versions of the pages, but fail as it didn’t yet have a template for them.
Adding the appropriate templates involved creating two new page layouts in the Ariadne theme, one for BibTeX and one for RIS.
Hugo would then use these to generate the .bibtex and .ris files to accompany the HTML version of the file.
Once the BibTeX and RIS files were being generated the articles template in the theme was updated to include links to them in the article’s aside box.
Going live The process for going live with the new static site version of Ariadne consisted of removing the Varnish cache and Drupal from the server and pointing the Apache[14] virtual host for www.ariadne.ac.uk at the static site files on the web server.
The most noticeable difference for the new site was the responsiveness.
Previously the response time between pages had widely varied depending on whether the page was present in the Varnish cache or not.
With the new static site the performance was not only fast, but also consistent between pages.
Conclusion Moving to a static site generated via Hugo involved quite a bit of effort, but the benefits realised for both the editorial and technical aspects has significantly reduce the ongoing effort required, both by the technical team and the editorial team.
Of course the biggest benefit is that readers of Ariadne now have a smoother online experience than previously.
References (2019).
Ariadne [online] Available at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk [7th March 2019] (2019).
Drupal Open Source CMS [online] Available at https://www.drupal.org [7th March 2019] KNIGHT, J.
2015, Editorial: Ariadne: the neverending story.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/74/editorial/ (2019).
Varnish HTTP Cache [online] Available at https://varnish-cache.org [7th March 2019] (2019).
Hugo The world’s fastest framework for building websites [online] Available at https://gohugo.io [7th March 2019] (2019).
The Official YAML Web Site [online] Available at https://yaml.org [7th March 2019] (2019).
GitHub toml-lang/toml: Tom’s Obvious, Minimal Language [online] Available at https://github.com/toml-lang/toml [7th March 2019] (2019).
JSON [online] Available at https://www.json.org [7th March 2019] (2019).
Markdown Wikipedia [online] Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown [7th March 2019] (2019).
Git [online] Available at https://git-scm.com [7th March 2019] (2019).
GitLab [online] Available at https://about.gitlab.com [7th March 2019] (2019).
BibTeX [online] Available at http://www.bibtex.org [7th March 2019] (2019).
RIS (file format) Wikipedia Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIS_(file_format) (2019).
Welcome!
The Apache HTTP Server Project [online] Available at http://httpd.apache.org [7th March 2019] Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles Buzz data software java framework wiki html database dissemination xml archives metadata css accessibility identifier schema blog repositories eprints video preservation graphics windows hypertext latex jpeg gif adobe flash quicktime photoshop php csv curation droid mpeg-1 research standards Citation BibTex RIS Steve Hitchcock and David Tarrant show how file format profiles, the starting point for preservation plans and actions, can also be used to reveal the fingerprints of emerging types of institutional repositories.
Preservation: The Effect of Going Digital Preservation of scholarly content seemed more straightforward when it was only available in printed form.
Production, dissemination and archiving of print are performed by distinctly separate, specialist organisations, from publishers to national libraries and archives.
Preservation of publications established as having cultural significance printed literature, books and, in the academic world, journals fall into this category is self-selecting and systematic in a way that has not yet been fully established for digital content.Digital content brings other advantages: new voices and a proliferation of channels and, for scholarly research papers, open access, for example.
Research typically builds on earlier work: it is not simply about reading papers on that work but about acting on results and data and making new connections.
Efficient, modern research, especially in science, needs to access to all parts of the published corpus, quickly and without barriers [1].
We have an excellent way of providing open access, through institutional repositories (IRs) on the Web.
Where content is freely accessible in repositories and journals it has been shown to be more visible, is downloaded more and cited more [2].
This enhanced impact is made possible by digital content, the Web and open access, so we can see that IRs have a critical role to play.
While it is good to be able to access content easily, we may want to return and use it again, as will others for highly cited work.
That is why, when we have a significant body of good content that is well used in a repository, we find ourselves concerned with preservation: preserving access.
However much we might wish to retain a semblance of the system of print preservation for digital content, we can see already how the landscape has altered: expanded range of content, new forms of presentation, improved access and changing audiences, all leave us seeking to recalibrate cultural values against which to select digital content for preservation.
This is why digital preservation should be rooted in access and usage.
We know this view of what IRs do must be broadly accepted because it is embedded in Wikipedia: ‘An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating – in digital form – the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.’ Notice how this unwittingly combines responsibilities that are separate for print publications.
No self-respecting IR appears to be willing to deny these functions, despite the fact that most repository software in use has been designed primarily to support collection and dissemination and less so preservation [3], although that is changing through the embedding of preservation tools in repository interfaces, as we shall discover.
Yet, in terms of preservation, any IR that brings institutional support and an organised management framework to the purpose of collecting and disseminating content is already ahead of most Web sites that perform these same functions, and in many cases a long way ahead.
As we have alluded to with regard to repository software, it is not a complete preservation solution, however, for which the growing IR will need to develop policy and engage in some active planning and decision-making.
There’s another important difference between digital and print, from a preservation perspective: when it comes to digital content, there is a lot more of it.
At a personal level, just compare how many digital photographs you produce compared with those from film cameras.
For some repositories it might not seem so, but institutions produce a wide range of digital content in large volumes from research papers to data and teaching materials, across science and the arts and humanities and repositories that have recognised this are growing fast.
When content grows as fast as we find with digital, the old means of curation and archiving break down.
New rules, procedures and tools have been developed and applied for digital curation, and now we want to widen usage to non-specialists, including repository administrators.
While a common understanding of digital preservation is to ensure continuing access at some point in the future to the content we can access and use today, what is less obvious is that digital preservation is also about ensuring the same for content a repository might receive tomorrow or at some later date.
In other words, it involves planning for content we do not yet have.
Far from preservation being just a task for the end-of-life of a digital object, it thus spans the whole content lifecycle.
The lens of digital preservation can provide the vision for shaping the repository context.
This anticipation of future content is important if we are to approach the management of digital content as systematically as with print.
Another characteristic of digital content is that formats change and, driven by new applications and requirements, new formats keep emerging from HTML of the original Web, for example, to Web 2.0 blogs, wikis and other forms of social content, not to mention that by definition digital is a computed environment where content can be transformed and interconnected for presentation.
There may be hundreds of popular digital authoring applications at any given time, and thousands of formats.
The repository has to produce its preservation plan against this background of ongoing change, because a plan that fails to anticipate change is not a good preservation plan.
Institutions: Growth of New Types of Repository We have already indicated how the role of IRs has begun to evolve to encompass new and wider forms of digital content.
More specifically, we now have open access repositories, data repositories, teaching and learning repositories, and arts repositories, each institutional in scope, at least prospectively in some cases.
Now imagine that such repositories were to coalesce into a single, coordinated institutional repository.
Caution might dictate decisions on the scope of IRs, but it would be an omission and a failure if an IR were not to include a major type of output from the institution simply by being unaware of it rather than assessing the full implications and making a conscious decision to include or exclude such content.
We do not have such broad repositories today, but could this be the IR of the future, representing all outputs of the functions of a research and educational institution?
To begin to answer this and other questions the JISC KeepIt Project, which recently completed its 18-month programme, worked with four exemplars, including one of each of type of repository: research papers repository (NECTAR, University of Northampton) science data repository (eCrystals, University of Southampton) arts repository (UAL Research Online, University of the Arts London) educational and teaching repository (EdShare, University of Southampton) We will discover more about these repositories in this article as we profile them in a revealing new light.
The focus of the project was on the preservation concerns of these different repositories, and what each would choose to do when aware of the methods and tools for preservation [4].
As well as for scope and content, repositories were selected for their willingness to engage in these issues, rather than to indicate any special status.
It is also instructive to recognise the differences in approach, as these have implications for a possible institution-wide composite repository.
One way of anticipating new forms of content is by auditing the institution using tools such as the Digital Asset Framework (DAF) [5][6].
Another way is monitoring the profile of content deposited in a repository, and this will be our focus here.
Profiles can be based on various factors, but one that matters for digital preservation is file format.
Most computer users will at some time have been passed files they are unable to open on their machines.
While this is not usually insurmountable it demonstrates again the process of change in types of digital content and formats.
To combat the problem of format obsolescence [7] an emerging preservation workflow combines format identification, preservation planning and, where necessary, transformative action such as format migration [8].
Formats are therefore monitored for the purposes of digital preservation, and tools have been developed for this.
One tool that has been adopted by three of the four KeepIt exemplars is the EPrints preservation ‘apps’ [9].
This bundles a range of apps, including the open source DROID file format identification tool from the National Archives [10], to present a format profile within a repository interface.
Another tool that performs format identification, also validation and characterization, is JHOVE [11].
Both DROID and JHOVE can be found in the File Information Tool Set (FITS) from Harvard [12] and, Russian doll-like, FITS itself has been spotted in a format management tool as developers seek to generalise usage through targeted interfaces [13].
Format profiles are the starting point for preservation plans and actions.
Such profiles can be produced and viewed from a dry, technical perspective, but these format profiles in effect reveal the digital fingerprints of the types of repositories they measure.
The article will show this graphically by comparing the profiles of the four exemplars.
Format Profiles Past and Present Format profiles of repositories are not new and have been produced using earlier variants on the tools [14].
What we have now are more complete and distinctive profiles for different types of repositories.
One obvious similarity we can note, however, between the KeepIt exemplars and earlier profiles, is the dominance in each profile of one format, that is, the total number of files in that format stored in the repository.
This is followed by a power law decline in the number of files per format, the ‘long tail’.
For open access research repositories the typical profile is dominated by PDF and its variants and versions (Figure 1a/1b).
In the case of our KeepIt exemplars only one, the research papers repository, has this classic PDF-led profile.
We can now reveal how the others differ, and thus begin to understand what preservation challenges they each face.
Figure 1a/1b: Example research repository format profiles dominated by PDF, from Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), charts captured 22 December 2010: a, Hispana, aggregates Spanish repositories and other national resources; b, institutional repository, RepositoriUM, Universidade do Minho, Portugal Producing Format Profiles Before we do this, bear in mind how the profiles were produced.
For the scale of repositories with which we have been working, this is now a substantial processing task that can take hours to complete.
For three repositories the counts include only accepted objects and do not include ‘volatile’ objects.
The fourth (University of the Arts London) includes all objects, including those in the editorial buffer and volatiles.
Repositories use editorial buffers to moderate submissions.
Depending on the repository policy, there may be a delay between submission, acceptance and public availability.
Volatiles are objects that are generated when required by the repository – an example would be thumbnail previews used to provide an instant but sizeably reduced view of the object.
These are growing repositories, so the profiles must be viewed as temporary snapshots for the dates specified.
They are provided here for illustration.
For those repositories that have installed the EPrints preservation apps, the repository manager is provided with regular internal reports including an updated profile, and will need to track the changes between profiles as well as review each subsequent profile.
Understanding and Responding to Format Profiles We also need to understand some features of the tools when reviewing the results.
In these results we have ‘unknown’ formats and ‘unclassified’ formats.
Unclassified may be new files that have been added since a profile scan began (scans can take some time) or since the last full scan.
More critical for preservation purposes are files with unknown formats.
To identify a file format a tool such as DROID looks for a specified signature within the object [15].
If it cannot match a file with a signature in its database it is classified as ‘unknown’.
In such cases it may be possible to identify the format simply by examining the file extension (.pdf .htm .gif, etc.).
In most cases a file format will be exactly what it purports to be according to this extension.
The merits of each approach, by format signature or filename extension, can be debated; neither is infallible, nor has the degree of error been rigorously quantified for the different tools used.
It is up to the individual repositories how they interpret and resolve these results.
The number of unknowns will be a major factor in assessing the preservation risk faced by a repository and is likely to be the area requiring most attention by its manager, at least initially until the risk has been assessed.
We believe that in future it will be possible to quantify the risk of known formats [16], and to build preservation plans to act on these risks within repositories [17].
For formats known to specialists but not to the general preservation tools, it will be important to enable these to be added to the tools.
When this happens it will be possible for the community to begin to accumulate the factors that might contribute to the risk scores for these formats.
As long as formats remain outside this general domain, it will be for specialists to assess the risk for themselves.
We will see examples of this in the cases below.
Producing format profiles is becoming an intensive process, and subsequent analysis is likely to be no less intensive.
Science Data Repository (eCrystals, University of Southampton) A specialised science data repository is likely to have file types that a general format tool will fail to recognise.
For this repository of crystal structures we anticipated two such formats – Crystallographic Information File (CIF) and Chemical Markup Language (CML) – and signatures for these formats were added to the identification tool.
What we can see in this profile is how successful, or not, these signatures were.
That is, successful for CIF, but only partially successful for CML.
For this repository, which uses a customised version of EPrints and therefore has not so far installed the preservation apps, we ran the tool over a copy of the content temporarily stored in the cloud.
Figure 2 shows the full profile for this repository, including unknowns (in red, 5000+), those formats not identified by DROID but known to EPrints (showing both the total and the breakdown in yellow (see text/* files)), as well as the long tail of identified formats.
All but two CIF files were identified by DROID.
Had all the instances of CML been recognised it would have been the largest format with most files (adding the yellow and blue CML bars), but almost half were not recognised by DROID.
Figure 2: eCrystals: full format profile including formats ‘unknown’ to DROID and the repository (in red), the breakdown of those classified by the repository (yellow bars), as well as the long tail of formats classified by DROID.
Chart generated from spreadsheet of results (profile date 1 October 2010).
As it stands, the format with the largest number of files known to DROID was an image format (JPEG 1.01).
We will see this is a recurring theme of emerging repository types exemplified by our project repositories.
Also with reference to the other exemplar profiles to follow, it will be noticeable that this profile appears to have a shorter long tail than others.
However, in this case we can see that ‘unknown’ (to DROID and EPrints) is the largest single category, and when this is broken down it too presents a long tail (Figure 3) that is effectively additive to the tail in Figure 2.
These include more specialised formats, which might be recognised by file extension.
Figure 3: eCrystals ‘unknown’ formats by file extension (profile date 1 October 2010).
As explained, clearly these unknowns will need to be a focus for the repository managers, although in preliminary feedback they say that many of these files are “all very familiar, standard crystallography files of varying extent of data handling that often get uploaded to ecrystals for completeness.” This is reassuring because file formats unknown to system or manager or scientists could be a serious problem for the repository.
Even so, as long as such formats remain outside the scope of the general format identification tools, the managers will need to use their own assessments and judgement to assure the longer-term viability and accessibility of these files.
Arts Repository (University of the Arts London) What is the largest file type in an arts repository?
Perhaps unsurprisingly it is an image format, in this case led by JPEGs of different versions.
As can be seen in Figure 4a (or Figure 4a large format), the number of unknowns, highlighted among the High Risk Objects, is the fourth largest single category in this profile and so requires further investigation.
Once again there is a long tail (Figure 4b or Figure 4b large format ).
Figure 4.
Format/Risks screen for UAL Research Online Repository: a, top level; b, long tail.
These screenshots of the profile were generated by the repository staff from the live repository using the installed tools.
(Date 13 September 2010).
First indications in Figure 5, showing the expansion of the high risk category, suggest many of them will turn out to be known formats but which have not been recognised by DROID.
It may be possible to resolve and classify many of them by manual inspection, the last resort of the repository manager to ensure that files can be opened and used effectively.
Figure 5: High-risk objects (top level examples) in UAL Research Online Repository.
This profile was generated by the repository staff from the live repository using the installed tools.
(Date 13 September 2010.)
Teaching Repository (EdShare, University of Southampton) The first notable feature of the EdShare profile (Figure 6) is that the largest format is, again, an image format.
Evidently, like an arts repository (perhaps predictably) and like a science data repository (less predictably), it seems the emphasis of a repository of teaching resources may be visual rather than textual.
Figure 6.
EdShare: Largest formats by file count (top half of long tail).
Chart generated from spreadsheet of results (profile date 14 October 2010).
Another feature of the profile is the classification of LaTEX (Master File), the second largest format in this profile.
Until now this format was unknown to DROID, but a new signature was created and added to our project version of DROID, in the same way as for CIF/CML (and was submitted to The National Archives (TNA) for inclusion in the official format registry).
The effect of this was to reduce the number of unknowns from nearly 2,500 to c. 550, and thus instantly both to clarify and reduce the scale of the challenge.
As usual with the long tail, preservation planning decisions have to be made about the impact and viability of even infrequent formats.
For reference, Table 1 shows the formats not included among the largest formats by file count in Figure 6.
Plain Text File 20 Rich Text Format (Version 1.7) 17 Windows Bitmap (Version 3.0) 15 Acrobat PDF 1.6 Portable Document Format (Version 1.6) 15 Waveform Audio 12 Document Type Definition 11 Macromedia FLV (Version 1) 11 MPEG-1 Video Format 9 Icon file format 9 LaTEX (Sub File) 9 XML Schema Definition 8 Macromedia Flash (Version 7) 8 Windows Media Video 6 Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (Version 1.1) 5 Rich Text Format (Version 1.5) 3 TeX Binary File 3 Acrobat PDF 1.1 Portable Document Format (Version 1.1) 3 Java Compiled Object Code 2 Encapsulated PostScript File Format (Version 3.0) 2 Exchangeable Image File Format (Compressed) (Version 2.2) 2 Scalable Vector Graphics (Version 1.0) 2 Adobe Photoshop 2 Microsoft Web Archive 2 Audio/Video Interleaved Format 2 JTIP (JPEG Tiled Image Pyramid) 1 Comma Separated Values 1 OS/2 Bitmap (Version 1.0) 1 Acrobat PDF 1.7 Portable Document Format (Version 1.7) 1 PHP Script Page 1 Microsoft Word for Windows Document (Version 6.0/95) 1 Quicktime 1 Hypertext Markup Language (Version 2.0) 1 Applixware Spreadsheet 1 PostScript (Version 3.0) 1 Table 1: Long tail of formats by file count in EdShare Again, the unknowns present a potent challenge.
Figure 7 is a breakdown of what we think we can tell from file extensions.
Unlike the case of unknowns in eCrystals, here there was less anticipation of specialised formats that were unlikely to be found in a general format registry, so this list is a something of a revelation.
In many of these cases an error in the file may be preventing recognition of an otherwise familiar format.
Here we can see extensions such as Flash files, various text-based formats such as HTML, CSS, etc., which may be malformed, and possibly some images.
In such cases the relevant file should be identified and an attempt made to open it with a suitable application.
In this way it may be possible to begin to assess the reasons for non-recognition, to confirm the likely format, and take any action to repair or convert the file if necessary.
Files with unfamiliar extensions (.m) will need particular attention.
Figure 7: EdShare: Unknown formats (profile date 14 October 2010).
Another feature of this repository’s format profile not illustrated here is the difference when the profile is based on file size (the amount of storage space consumed) rather than file count.
In this case the largest format by file size remains JPEG 1.01, but the next largest file types are all MPEG video formats, which is not so evident from Figure 6 and Table 1.
It is not hard to understand why this might be: video files tend to be larger than text files or other format types.
At first sight the profile by file count might have the stronger influence on preservation plans, but this further evidence on file size might be used strategically as well.
Research Papers Repository (University of Northampton) Figure 8 (or Figure 8 large format) is a classic, PDF-dominated profile of a repository of research papers.
Although an apparently small repository, what this shows is a repository that has so far focused on records-keeping rather than on collecting full digital objects.
We have seen already how investigations to expand the scope of this repository have begun [6].
There is nothing in this profile that would surprise the repository manager.
It acts as confirmation, a snapshot of the repository and can be viewed as a platform for deciding where the repository should head in future.
The tools will help the repository manager to monitor growth and the implementation of future plans.
Figure 8: NECTAR format profile from live repository screenshot Format Profiling: Not Just Preservation, But Knowing What You Have Much of the impetus for format profiling and management has been to serve a preservation workflow based on the recognition that digital formats can become obsolete.
Rosenthal has challenged this approach on the basis that format obsolescence is the exception rather than the norm, at least since the mid-1990s and the wide use of networked services such as the Web [18].
If correct, this view has implications in particular for the economics of preservation based on a format workflow, and the case is made for a more efficient re-allocation of resources to other preservation activities.
Would this make format profiling redundant?
It looks unlikely for large digital repositories of heterogeneous digital formats or those that acquire content by author self-archiving, such as some we have just profiled.
The starting point for preservation is to know what content you have, not just in terms of bibliographic metadata such as title, author, etc., but also in terms of technical metadata, including file formats.
The methods we have demonstrated are currently the best means of extracting, updating and monitoring this information efficiently.
The economic question about implementing a full preservation workflow suggests that resources should initially be weighted to the earlier stages such as format identification, while the questions on what to do with identified formats – e.g.
migrate or not – will have to be answered by preservation planning.
This has typically been the missing link in preservation workflows that pre-emptively migrate formats.
A preservation planning tool such as Plato has been integrated into repository software [17], and provides a more flexible approach to format acquisition than has been proposed, for example, for the Wellcome Library [19].
When preservation planning is supported by comprehensive, open format registries [20], then it should be possible for a repository with a clear policy or mandate and costing plan to specify the preservation workflow that suits its requirements.
Conclusion Digital and institutional repositories are changing, and rapidly growing repositories targetting new types of digital content, including data and teaching materials, from science to the arts, now complement the established research papers repository.
For the first time we have been able to compare and contrast these different repository types using tools designed to assist digital preservation analysis by identifying file formats and producing profiles of the distribution of formats in each repository.
While past format profiles of repositories collecting open access research papers tended to produce uniform results differing in scale rather than range, the new profiles reveal potentially characteristic fingerprints for the emerging repository types.
What this also shows more clearly, by emphasising the differences, are the real preservation implications for these repositories based on these profiles, which could be masked when all profiles looked the same.
Each exemplar profile gives the respective managers a new insight into their repositories and careful assessment will lead them to an agenda for managing the repository content effectively and ensuring continued access, an agenda that will be the more clearly marked for recognising how the same process produced different results for other types of repository.
This agenda will initially be led by the need to investigate digital objects for which the format could not be identified by the general tools, the ‘unknowns’.
We have seen that science data repositories, and even less obviously specialised examples, can produce large numbers of unknowns.
These are high-risk objects in any repository by virtue of their internal format being unknown, even though on inspection many may turn out to be easily identified and/or corrected.
For the known formats, especially the largest formats by file count, these profiles show where effort is worth expending on producing preservation plans that will automate the maintenance of these files.
Based on these exemplars, all repositories with substantial content are likely to produce format profiles displaying a long tail.
An intriguing finding of this work is that the emerging repository types, rather than open access institutional repositories founded on research papers, are dominated by visual rather than textual formats.
All these exemplars either are, or plan to become, institutional in scope even though limited to a specified type of content.
One original idea that motivated the KeepIt Project was that truly institutional repositories are, one day, likely to collect and store digital outputs from all research and academic activities, such as those represented by these exemplars.
Thus, combined, the exemplars might represent the institutional repository of the future.
It is worth bearing in mind how the combined format profiles might look, and the consequent implications for preservation, when contemplating the prospect.
Acknowledgements We are grateful to the exemplar repositories for allowing us to reproduce these profiles.
The KeepIt Project was funded by JISC under the Preservation strand of its Information Environment programme 2009-2011.
References Roberts, R. J., et al., “Building A ‘GenBank’ of the Published Literature”, Science, Vol.
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5512, 23rd March 2001, 2318-2319 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318a Hitchcock, S., “The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies”, Last updated 6 December 2010; first posted 15 September 2004 http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html Salo, D., “Preservation and institutional repositories for the digital arts and humanities”, Summer Institute for Data Curation, University of Illinois, 21 May 2009, slides http://www.slideshare.net/cavlec/digital-preservation-and-institutional-repositories Pickton, M., et al., “Preserving repository content: practical steps for repository managers”, Open Repositories 2010, Madrid, July 2010 http://or2010.fecyt.es/Resources/documentos/GSabstracts/PreservingRepositoryContent.pdf See also KeepIt preservation exemplar repositories: the final countdown, Diary of a Repository Preservation Project, November 30, 2010, http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/keepit/2010/11/30/keepit-preservation-exemplar-repositories-the-final-countdown/ Data Asset Framework Implementation Guide, October 2009 http://www.data-audit.eu/docs/DAF_Implementation_Guide.pdf Alexogiannopoulos, E., McKenney, S., Pickton, M., “Research Data Management Project: a DAF investigation of research data management practices at The University of Northampton”, University of Northampton, September 2010 http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/2736/ Pearson, D., Webb, C., “Defining File Format Obsolescence: A Risky Journey”, International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol.
3, No.
1, 2008 Brown, A., “Developing Practical Approaches to Active Preservation”, International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol.
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1, 2007 http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/37 EPrints preservation apps: from PRONOM-ROAR to Amazon and a Bazaar, Diary of a Repository Preservation Project, 15 November 2010 http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/keepit/2010/11/15/eprints-preservation-apps-from-pronom-roar-to-amazon-and-a-bazaar/ Using DROID to profile your file formats, The National Archives, undated http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/using-droid-to-profile-your-file-formats.pdf Abrams, S., Morrissey, S., Cramer, T., “ “What?
So What”: The Next Generation JHOVE2 Architecture for Format-Aware Characterization”, International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol.
4, No.
3, 2009 http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/139 File Information Tool Set (FITS), Google code http://code.google.com/p/fits/ Thomas, S., scat @ Gloucestershire archives, futureArch blog, 11 March 2010 http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/2010/03/scat-gloucestershire-archives.html Brody, T., Carr, L., Hey, J.M.N., Brown, A., Hitchcock, S., “PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services”, International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol.
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2, 2007 http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/53/ Brown, A., “Automatic Format Identification Using PRONOM and DROID”, Digital Preservation Technical Paper 1, The National Archives, 7 March 2006 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/aboutapps/fileformat/pdf/automatic_format_identification.pdf Tarrant, D., Hitchcock, S., Carr, L., “Where the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 meet format risk management: P2 registry”, International Journal of Digital Curation, accepted for publication, 2011, also in iPres2009: The Sixth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, October 5-6, 2009, San Francisco http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17556/ Tarrant, D., Hitchcock, S., Carr, L., Kulovits, H., Rauber, A., “Connecting preservation planning and Plato with digital repository interfaces”, in 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES2010), 19-24 September 2010, Vienna http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21289/ Rosenthal, D., “Format Obsolescence: Assessing the Threat and the Defenses” Library Hi Tech, 28 (2), 195-210, 2010 http://lockss.stanford.edu/locksswiki/files/LibraryHighTech2010.pdf, see also “The Half-Life of Digital Formats”, dshr’s blog, November 24, 2010 http://blog.dshr.org/2010/11/half-life-of-digital-formats.html Thompson, D., “A Pragmatic Approach to Preferred File Formats for Acquisition”, Ariadne, No.
63, 30 Apr 2010 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/thompson/ Thomas, D., “Linked data and PRONOM”, The National Archives Labs, October 2010 http://labs.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wordpress/index.php/2010/10/linked-data-and-pronom/ Author Details Steve Hitchcock Project Manager, KeepIt Project IAM Group, Building 32 School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ Email: S.Hitchcock@ecs.soton.ac.uk Web site: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/keepit/ David Tarrant Developer, KeepIt Project IAM Group, Building 32 School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ Email: dt2@ecs.soton.ac.uk Web site: http://preservation.eprints.org/ Return to top Article Title: “Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles” Author: Steve Hitchcock and David Tarrant Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/hitchcock-tarrant/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial: Makerspaces, Agile, Reading Lists and Migrations Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial: Makerspaces, Agile, Reading Lists and Migrations Citation BibTex RIS In issue 78 we move Ariadne to a new delivery platform, have articles about makerspaces and digital scholarship centres, agile website usability testing, embedding reading list materials into a virtual learning environment, and include some event information and reports.
Ariadne has changed many times over its 20+ year life so far, and this year is no exception.
When we inherited Ariadne at Loughborough we upgraded the Drupal based system that Bath had been using for some time and we have run with that for a couple of years.
However we’ve found it increasingly time consuming to maintain for little gain to the journal many of the Drupal blogging features we don’t need or use get regular updates and security patches for example.
So during the life of this issue we moved Ariadne from Drupal to a static web site managed by Hugo and git.
As this migration might be of interest to other sites, Jason Cooper has documented the process we used.
Makerspaces are a popular addition to libraries, both academic and public.
Heila Pienaar, Isak van der Walt and Sean Kruger describe how the University of Pretoria Library built a Digital Scholarship Centre on the success of the Library’s Makerspace.
They show how such a centre can be established, how it can fit with inter-disciplinary work and how Makerspaces and Digital Scholarship Centres overlap.
Helen Singer and Jane Bilson provide an explanation of how the University of Hertfordshire followed ‘Guided Learner Journey’ principles by embedding resources in their VLE.
This will be of interest to many academic librarians looking at how library reading lists can be leveraged to make more impact and improve the student experience.
Over in the USA, Kathryn Gucer presents a case study of how Agile methods can improve web site usability testing.
This was based on her experiences working with the Animal Welfare Act History Digital Collection at the USDA’s National Agricultural Library.
They used a low-cost, in-house Agile approach and she explains how this testing method allowed them to quickly home in, and correct, usability problems and misconceptions in the design of the collection’s new web user interface.
We also have a couple of event reviews to round out this issue: Dan Towns tells us of his experience Figshare Fest 2018 where he joined many Institutional Repository and Research Data Managers.
Meanwhile Richard Goodman provides a conference report from Educause 2018, the large educational techology conference held in Denver, Colorado, USA.
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Get Tooled Up: Xerxes at Royal Holloway, University of London Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Get Tooled Up: Xerxes at Royal Holloway, University of London Buzz data software wiki api html database xml portal stylesheet xslt repositories opac linux solaris ejournal php ebook mysql gpl licence authentication interoperability refworks research standards sfx vufind Citation BibTex RIS Anna Grigson, Peter Kiely, Graham Seaman and Tim Wales describe the implementation of an open source front end to the MetaLib federated search tool.
Rarely is software a purely technical issue, though it may be marketed as ‘technology’.
Software is embedded in work, and work patterns become moulded around it.
Thus the use of a particular package can give rise to an inertia from which it can be hard to break free.
Moreover, when this natural inertia is combined with data formats that are opaque or unique to a particular system, the organisation can become locked in to that system, a potential victim of the pricing policies or sluggish adaptability of the software provider.
The speed of change in the information world in recent years, combined with the actual or expected crunch in library funding, has made this a particular issue for library management system (LMS) users.
While there is general agreement on the direction to take more ‘like Google’ LMS suppliers’ moves in this direction can prove both slow and expensive for the user.
Open source software has often been suggested as an alternative, but the nature of lock-in means that the jump from proprietary to open system can be all or nothing; in effect too big (and complex) a risk to take.
No major UK university libraries have yet moved to Koha, Evergreen, or indeed any open source LMS [1].
The alternative, which brings its own risks, is to take advantage of the pressures on LMS suppliers to make their own systems more open, and to use open source systems ‘around the edges’ [2].
This has the particular benefit of creating an overall system which follows the well-established design practice of creating a clean separation of ‘view’ (typically the Web interface) from ‘model’ (here the LMS-managed databases) and ‘controller’ (the LMS core code).
The ‘view’ is key to the user experience of the system, and this separation gives the ability to make rapid changes or to integrate Web 2.0 features quickly and easily, independently of the system back-end.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it is relatively fragile, being dependent on the willingness of the LMS supplier to provide a detailed and stable application programming interface (API).
There are several current examples of this alternative approach.
Some, like the Vufind OPAC, allow the use of plug-ins which adapt the software to a range of different LMSs.
Others, like Xerxes, are specialised front-ends to a single system (MetaLib from ExLibris [3]).
This has an impact on evaluating the software: in particular, the pool of active developers is likely to be smaller in the latter case.
Royal Holloway Library Services Within this general context, Royal Holloway Library Services were faced with a specific problem.
The annual National Student Survey had given ratings to the Library well below those expected, with many criticisms centred on the difficulty in using the Library’s MetaLib federated search system.
MetaLib is a key access point to the Library’s e-resources, incorporating both A-Z lists of major online databases available to library users, and a federated search tool.
Feedback showed that many users found the interface less than satisfactory, with one user commenting that: ‘MetaLib is possibly the worst and most confusing library interface I have ever come across’ The Library Management Team decided to remedy this as a matter of urgency and set a deadline of the start of the 2009 Autumn term.
There was no funding available to acquire an alternative discovery system so the challenge was to identify a low-cost, quick-win solution for the existing one.
With this work in mind, the incoming Associate Director (E-Strategy) had already recruited two new colleagues over the Summer vacation: a systems officer with Web development experience, the other an experienced e-resources manager.
The first possible route to the improvement of MetaLib was modification of the existing MetaLib Web interface.
This was technically possible but presented several major difficulties: the underlying ExLibris designs were based on the old HTML 4.0 and pre-dated current stylesheet-based design practice; the methods to adapt the designs were opaque and poorly documented, based on numbered variables with semantics that changed depending on context; and perhaps most importantly, the changes were to be made over the summer months, giving no time for user feedback on the details of the changes to be made.
The second possibility was the use of Xerxes [4].
Xerxes offered the advantage of an interface design which had been user-tested on a range of (US) campuses, partially solving the user feedback issue.
It was not, however, entirely cost-free, as ExLibris charges an annual maintenance fee for the MetaLib X-server API on which Xerxes depends.
Evaluation The questions that arose before deciding whether to adopt Xerxes were those needed to evaluate any open source software: Are the software dependencies easy to satisfy?
How reliable is the distribution method for updates?
Is the development team large enough to ensure continuity?
What is the quality of the software?
How responsive is the development team to feature requests and bug reports?
How responsive is the community to requests for help?
What is the quality of the documentation?
Are there any licensing or trademark issues?
Will the software need modification for local use?
Consequently, there is a mix of social, technical and legal issues to consider.
They comprise a subset of the questions asked in formal methodologies such as the method for Qualification and Selection of Open Source software (QSOS) [5].
A full-scale formal QSOS evaluation was not felt appropriate for two reasons.
Firstly because of the lack of other options: this was a decision on whether or not to use a particular piece of software, rather than a comparison between competing options.
Secondly, because the use of Xerxes did not represent an irreversible decision: since it was simply providing an alternative view of the MetaLib back-end, it was always possible to revert to the native MetaLib view.
The local implementation could itself be considered an extended evaluation.
The approach taken instead was to carry out test implementations on different systems.
As the final intended host was running RedHat Enterprise, only Linuxbased systems were used; although Xerxes is also known to run on Microsoft Web servers.
The first installation was on a laptop running Gentoo Linux.
The installation with all basic functions supported took one morning with no significant interaction with the development community.
As a result of this experience, most of the technical evaluation questions could already be answered.
The software was then installed on a pair of machines running CentOS (a free equivalent to RedHat Enterprise), one to be used for testing and development, the other to be employed in user evaluation.
This installation was required to provide the full functionality needed for the local environment, which led to significant interaction with the development community.
The initial questions could now be answered: Xerxes depends on recent versions of the PHP language with its PEAR libraries, and the MySQL database.
Not a problem for our new Linux installation (though it would have been for our former elderly Solaris host).
The software is available as an official release or as the development version available from a subversion repository [6].
As the repository version was known to be a significant improvement on the last release, this was adopted as the basis for development work with the intention of switching to a stable version later.
The development version itself was found to be kept in a good, working state, and its use has not presented difficulties (though no direct updates from this version are made to our live server, as described below).
There were only two main Xerxes developers.
Normally this might have proven problematic, though it was inevitable that the pool of developers for a project that depended on a particular proprietary product would be smaller than that for an equivalent standalone one.
Fortunately the two developers were energetic and involved, worked in different institutions, and the project also benefited from a larger periphery of occasional contributors who might step in when problems arose.
The software was well organised (being built around standard PHP design patterns such as the FrontController pattern) and clean, without accumulated bug fixes.
In particular it was designed to allow parts particularly the XSLT templates to be overridden without any need to touch the core code.
This meant that difficulties in integrating local changes with updates to the main codebase were kept to a minimum.
The development community turned out to be a dream to work with (even though, so far, we have been nearly all ‘take’ and very little ‘give’).
Requests for help were answered within hours; and requests for advice on local changes were more likely to be answered with ‘that’s now added to the core code’ than ‘here’s how to do it yourself’.
We never found the need to report any bugs to the developers, although we observed that bugs reported by others were fixed within days or even hours.
Documentation proved perfectly adequate: installation and configuration documentation was placed on a wiki, which for once is kept up to date.
The code was reasonably well commented.
Moreover, the application was in any case small enough to be comprehensible.
The licence was the GPL [7], one of the two most common free software licences, which therefore did not attract any legal surprises.
Xerxes is not trademarked (and did not even then have its own logo).
As a courtesy, a ‘powered by xerxes’ link was added to our installation.
This left the final issue: what changes needed to be made to the software for local use?
Local Development Local changes divided into two main categories: changes to the Xerxes interface itself, and changes required in the categorization of content in MetaLib to suit the simplified user interface.
Changes to Xerxes Almost any implementation of open source software needs some adaptation to local requirements; the goal here was to minimise the number of local changes that would impose long-term support and complicate future updates.
Xerxes is designed to make this simple: the output from the Xerxes code is XML, which is then processed by XSLT scripts to generate the Web pages the user sees.
In many cases all that is needed for local changes is to override the supplied XSLT code, which does not even need to be replaced.
This technique was used both to apply the Royal Holloway branding and to split the list of displayed categories into two lists one organised by format, the other by topic: to add new menu options in order to integrate Xerxes into the Royal Holloway Library Web site, and; to add short descriptions to the search results (which defaulted to title/author information only).
Other changes needed some coding; this was either done by request to the developers (e.g.
incorporation of an SFX journal list, which was made easier by building in support for locally defined ‘actions’) or in Royal Holloway (e.g.
addition of a facility to stop long searches while still in progress, a change which was fed back to the developers for incorporation in the trunk).
The end result has been a system for which locally developed material consists only of XSLT scripts and a short script to integrate with the Patron Directory Services (PDS)/Athens authentication system used by Royal Holloway.
This minimises the work needed in applying Xerxes upgrades.
Changes to MetaLib Category and Content Organisation As well as difficulties with the federated search interface, feedback showed that users had difficulty navigating the A-Z database lists in MetaLib.
Our first step was to review the resources included in the A-Z list.
MetaLib listed over 600 resources, over 75% of which were freely available Internet resources.
Usage statistics showed that few users were interested in the free resources, so we removed the low-use free resources to leave a more manageable list of around 150 resources, most of which were high-quality, paid-for resources.
Our second step was to review the subject categories.
As well as single A-Z browse list of all resources, MetaLib supported subject A-Z lists, each of which was further divided into multiple sub-categories.
We simplified these categories by reducing the number of sub-categories to just two per subject ‘Core’ for key resources, and ‘More’ supplementary resources, creating more easily browseable lists which highlighted the key resources for each subject.
We also added new categories grouping by format, for example adding A-Z lists of all resources for ‘e-journals’, ‘e-books’ and ‘newspapers’.
The result was a set of A-Z menus which made it much easier for users to locate key resources, either by subject or by type.
Combined with the improved Xerxes interface, it also made it much easier to select resources for federated searching.
SWan Partner Access One extra element of complexity was introduced to the implementation late on in the process.
Royal Holloway is a member of the SouthWest London Academic Network (SWan) [8] along with Kingston University and St Georges’s Medical School, University of London.
SWan was established to offer joint courses in biomedical, health and life sciences.
Each member was asked to provide library access to their individual collections of electronic resources for SWan users for the start of the 2009⁄10 academic session.
Once legal advice on licence conditions had been taken from JISC Collections, the challenge for each institution was how to ensure SWan users had access to only the subset of each institutions’ eresources they were entitled to access, and; how to present such access in an efficient and simple way without confusing users.
In the case of Royal Holloway, the Library needed to identify SWan users, authorise those users employing AthensDA to access a selected set of its e-resources subject to licensing arrangements, and present that set of resources in MetaLib, clearly indicating that SWan users could use them.
The first step was to identify SWan users.
The Library added new user statuses to its Aleph library user database.
Then, SWan user information was added to Aleph.
In the case of SWan students, details were obtained via a feed from the College’s student record system.
The next step was to create SWan permission sets at Athens.
Then, the script, handling authentication for MetaLib and Athens authorization, was changed to identify SWan users when it looked up user details in Aleph, assign them to the appropriate permission sets, and transmit this information to Athens.
At this point SWan users would be authorized to use the resources in the SWan permission set to which they had been assigned.
The final step was to change the MetaLib log-in process so that SWan users were identified in the MetaLib database, thus enabling resources to be clearly designated as being available to SWan users.
This was done using MetaLib’s secondary affiliation mechanism.
Data from the script was used to assign SWan users with a SWan secondary affiliation.
The SWan secondary affiliation was also added to resources available to SWan users.
This enabled MetaLib to display the resources appropriately, depending on whether the secondary affiliations of the users and resources matched or not.
The independence of Xerxes from the MetaLib back-end meant that this work could be carried out in parallel with the Xerxes implementation, with Xerxes enabled to discretely signpost user entitlements for each resource and offer an automatically generated browse list of SWan resources that could be linked to from the College Portal.
Final Setup Our final configuration involved four hosts: our Solaris host running MetaLib; then a test server running our development version of Xerxes; a staging server, with a version of Xerxes guaranteed to be running; and the live Xerxes host, a virtual Linux server.
Local enhancements were developed on the test server, backed by a local sub-version repository, tested on the staging server, and then uploaded to the live server.
Updates to the core code were downloaded from the remote repository to the test, staging and live servers in sequence.
Now development work is largely complete this configuration will probably be simplified by removing the test server.
All three servers connect to the MetaLib X-server to carry out queries.
But Xerxes also holds information locally: users’ saved searches and records are held in a local database since the ExLibris API does not allow them to be queried remotely, while subscription databases and subject categories are also listed locally for speed of lookup.
These latter data need to be syncronised periodically with MetaLib’s own database (for which a script is provided).
At this point both Xerxes and the MetaLib native interface were available to end users.
Just before the start of the September 2009⁄10 term, we switched the links from our Library Web site to the native interface to point to Xerxes instead [9].
We had made the decision not to confuse students by introducing yet another library application name (in addition to MetaLib, SFX, Refworks, the OPAC..).
So we decided to retain the ‘MetaLib’ name and existing students users were simply told that there was an updated interface to MetaLib.
Initial reactions were largely positive.
A small number of users gave concrete feedback; e.g.
: ‘[I find] the new MetaLib significantly improved… the interface is obviously much better (even paging backward and forward was an issue before)… research is quicker and more focused.’ and ‘I used MetaLib to find material on Molière for an essay; I’m impressed by how easy it was to find things, including material in French.’ One existing user found there was functionality missing from Xerxes which we could not provide immediately (namely a user-specific list of frequently used journals).
That user was simply pointed to a link to the MetaLib native interface, and a request for the extra functionality was sent to the Xerxes mailing list.
Next Steps The relatively painless introduction of Xerxes has encouraged us to experiment further along these lines.
Future anticipated projects include: Improving our user statistics: we can only justify continued work if we can show a quantifiable impact on user behaviour (before the next National Student Survery comes around!).
The Xerxes installation showed up the weakness of our current collection of statistics.
Work on the SFX user interface.
Here we believe that that simplifying the native interface may provide many of the benefits of switching to the open source front-end Umlaut [10] with less support work.
But Umlaut also offers new integrated functionality such as article citation data and pre-populated interlibrary loan forms.
We need to evaluate both options.
Work on the Aleph OPAC user interface.
This suffers from some of the same issues as MetaLib, but as we are currently upgrading to a more recent version of Aleph, we are taking advantage of this process to try local improvements directly on the Aleph interface itself.
At a later stage this will give us a fairer comparison with the two open-source alternatives, Vufind and Blacklight.
Conclusion It seems likely that we are moving with the grain of current developments and thereby addressing some of the recommendations in the JISC/SCONUL LMS report (e.g.
increasing interoperability and ‘sweating assets’) [2].
If, in future, LMS suppliers will be concentrating on the core LMS functionality with an increasingly large proportion of the periphery occupied by other options, almost certainly largely open source (though the same changes that make open source applications possible in this role open a space for niche suppliers of specialised proprietary software; the development of Serial Solutions’ Summon [11] in conjunction with Vufind is an early sign of this trend).
If this situation is financially viable for LMS suppliers in the long term, then the mix could be a healthy one for libraries, with a range of competing proprietary and open source products reducing the risks inherent in dependence on a single supplier.
On the other hand, if this situation proves not to be stable (or financial constraints change greatly) early usage of open source products at the periphery of the system will put libraries in a better position for a larger transition.
Our experience with Xerxes has shown us that such early usage is relatively low risk and low maintenance, and can provide a positive contribution to the user experience.
References Some smaller libraries have already begun to take this step; see Bissels, G, Implementation of an open source library management system, Emerald Group Publishing Ltd http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0033-0337.htm A tendency discussed in Adamson, V., et al, “JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study” 2008.
Sero Consulting Ltd with Glenaffric Ltd and Ken Chad Consulting Ltd http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/resourcediscovery/lmsstudy.pdf MetaLib http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/MetaLibOverview Xerxes Metasearch http://xerxes.calstate.edu/ The lead developers of Xerxes are David Walker, Library Web Services Manager, California State University and Jonathan Rochkind of John Hopkins University.
The QSoS methodology has recently been used for an evaluation of three open source LMSs http://www.qsos.org/ Subversion is a widely used software version control system http://subversion.apache.org/ The GNU General Public License GNU Project Free Software Foundation (FSF) http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html SWAN: SouthWest London Academic Network http://www.swlacademicnetwork.ac.uk/ Actual use requires a University account, but the front page can be seen at http://xerxes.rhul.ac.uk/ Umlaut http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Umlaut Summon http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/ Author Details Anna Grigson E-resources Manager Royal Holloway Library University of London Email: Anna.Grigson@rhul.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/information-services/library/ Peter Kiely Library Systems Officer Royal Holloway Library University of London Email: Peter.Kiely@rhul.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/information-services/library/ Graham Seaman Library Systems Officer Royal Holloway Library University of London Email: Graham.Seaman@rhul.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/information-services/library/ Web site: http://www.grahamseaman.info/ Tim Wales Associate Director (E-Strategy) Royal Holloway Library University of London Email: Tim.Wales@rhul.ac.uk Web site: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/information-services/library/ Return to top Article Title: “Xerxes at Royal Holloway, University of London” Author: Anna Grigson, Peter Kiely, Graham Seaman and Tim Wales Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/grigson-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Internet Librarian International Conference 2010 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Internet Librarian International Conference 2010 Buzz data mobile software wiki database dissemination rss infrastructure archives metadata digitisation tagging browser identifier blog copyright video flickr preservation cataloguing opac marc ejournal frbr curation rfid wordpress mashup youtube facebook twitter iphone android pode licence microblogging research standards Citation BibTex RIS Claire Tylee, Katrin Flemming and Elly Cope report on the two-day Internet Librarian International Conference focusing on innovation and technology in the information profession, held in London on 14-15 October 2010.
Thursday 14 October Track A: Looking Ahead to Value A102: Future of Academic Libraries Mal Booth, University of Technology Sydney (Australia) Michael Jubb, Research Information Network (UK) Mal Booth from the University of Technology Sydney started the session by giving an insight into current plans and projects underway to inform a new library building due to open in 2015 as part of a major redeveloped city campus.
As this new building should be able to respond to demands for many years to come, Mal emphasised how important it is to consider the future users as well as library and technology developments.
The plans include an underground automated storage and retrieval system which will be able to hold one million books and serials leaving around 250,000 books on open access.
For this to work, library staff are aiming to implement RFID tagging before the relocation of most of the collection underground in 2013.
Besides creating a new, practical and also attractive space, there is the opportunity to re-think the concept of services offered.
The idea is for the library to become a mobile service provider and move away from the traditional role of librarians being passive collectors to being creators that aren’t hidden away in their offices.
There is also the aim to establish the library as a cultural and social hub for the University community.
More details on this can be found online [1].
Michael Jubb gave an overview of recent findings with regards to financial developments within the Higher Education sector.
Although expenditure on libraries has risen over the last ten years, so have student numbers, and research activity and libraries have to share the overall budget with more and more stakeholders.
The important question is how to deal with budget cuts and where to save.
The research carried out by the Research Information Network (RIN) shows that so far many libraries only seem to be implementing short-term solutions; for example, temporary recruitment freezes and not replacing posts after staff have retired.
However, what is really needed is a re-think and a re-structuring.
Libraries should see the current situation as an opportunity to reconsider and firmly establish what the library is and does and take on new areas, for example information literacy training, open access and data curation.
Developments that might influence the everyday work include user-generated acquisition, the move to electronic-only access, outsourcing of routine tasks and big consortia deals.
It seems that, more and more often, everything comes down to return on investment and proving value for money.
The full RIN report is available online [2].
A104: Evolution of Working Environments Helen Leech, Surrey County Library Service (UK) Xoliswa Matroko, Council for Scientific and Industry Research (South Africa) This session focused on two examples of practical applications of Web 2.0 technologies to better organise a library’s workflow and communicate with users more efficiently.
As the world of communication is moving on, libraries need to go where their users are going and aim to provide 24⁄7 access to services and resources.
The Surrey County Library Service has taken this to heart and realised that their staff need targeted training to keep up with developments and to feel confident working in the Web 2.0 environment.
An online learning programme based on ‘23 Things’ was created.
This has developed into a partnership with three other library authorities and is supported by the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL).
Amongst other things the course introduces library staff to blogging, social networking (i.e.
Facebook) and microblogging (i.e.
Twitter) [3][4].
The course should go live in January 2011 and participants will be issued with an SCL-endorsed certificate upon completion.
Xoliswa Matroko from the Council for Scientific and Industry Research (CSIR) explained how the information services department followed the idea of embedded librarianship.
CSIR carries out multi-disciplinary research in South Africa and beyond and is organised in several operating units and research impact areas that are based in and around Pretoria.
The information services staff experienced difficulties reaching individual researchers and their units as they were not able to move constantly between them.
Using Web 2.0 technologies offered an ideal solution.
The staff created a wiki network for individual research impact areas.
This not only provides access to electronic resources and useful information targeted specifically at researchers in the particular area, but also offers a platform for idea sharing and discussions.
Staff have also started exploring mobile technologies in order to reach their users.
A105: Visionary Views Tony Hirst, The Open University (UK) Bethan Ruddock, Mimas, University of Manchester, UK Tony Hirst from the Open University started this session, giving a very inspiring overview of areas of improvement he identified during an Arcadia Fellowship at the Cambridge University Library and how they can be tackled.
The six areas covered were information skills and the Google generation, mobile applications, library catalogue innovations and custom search, the library’s role in teaching and learning, the Cambridge library system and rapid prototyping skills and techniques.
Just by walking through the library for a few days and observing users, it became clear that very often they don’t use the library’s resources as a first step.
Discovery of information and potentially useful books or articles happens through Google and other search engines, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that resources can be accessed in this way.
Tony suggested helping users to develop skills enabling them to use Google better; over time, they will come to see its limitations and realise that there are more powerful resources available to them.
Other examples of improved services included the use of QR codes in catalogue records to eliminate the need to print or make a note of title details; creating RSS feeds to keep reading lists up-to-date; creating mobile applications to support users’ desire to have information available at their fingertips 24⁄7 and to make library Web sites more accessible.
The session was concluded by Bethan Ruddock, a new professional, who, concentrating on the most recent developments in the library world, dared ask the question whether libraries and librarians have a future.
The very clear answer was ‘yes of course’, but librarians do need to adapt.
With the challenges lying ahead of us, we as professionals need to take charge and lead the inevitable changes rather than attempt to stop them.
Bethan supported her arguments by reporting on a number of recent initiatives, for example, the LIS New Professionals Network [5], the Library Routes Project [6] and Voices for the Library [7]; they can offer a new image of librarians and information professionals and lead the profession as a whole in a new direction.
Her complete talk is available online [8].
Track B: Information Discovery B102: Next-generation Information Discovery Anna-Lena Westrum, Oslo Public Library (Norway) Nancy Moussa, University of Michigan (U.S.A) Anna-Lena Westrum, project manager of Pode, (meaning growth) spoke with her project assistant Anne Karine Sandberg on their work which aims to find new ways of using metadata in their catalogue, particularly mashups.
While using traditional protocols as provided by their library management system, they have been working on converting their catalogue data to the FRBR model in order to provide linked library data.
They have found that the OPAC is very limited in terms of access and presentation, and they wanted to update it so it could be simple, user-friendly and provide intuitive hit lists (much like Amazon).
The particular prompt for this was where there were long results lists for fiction queries, especially when the work has many expressions; they thought that users probably care more about the title than the editions when it comes to fiction.
Rather than convert the whole catalogue, they selected a test sample of four authors: J.R.R.
Tolkien, Shakespeare (for the sheer number of records!)
and Norwegian authors Per Petterson and Knut Hamsun.
They converted the records with the aid of Professor Trond Aalberg, an expert on FRBR.
Within the constraints of NORMARC (Norwegian MARC) they utilised indicators and previously unused tags to establish key aspects of the manifestation including translated title, actual title and author’s title.
They did feel that MARC wasn’t really up to the job with the possible age of the semantic web approaching; and that Linked Data might be one possible route to take, as it would enable the catalogue to interact with the Web and use the information that’s out there.
They are starting to create mashups with their catalogue, embedding information about authors from Wikipedia -but not coding it in the MARC records.
They consider that the future of the catalogue is about open standards, mashable catalogues, programmable interfaces and being able to present the data as you like.
They also say that as it’s hard to know what users want, they should be allowed to contribute information to the catalogue, theoretically so that it will reflect more closely how users search and so be more appropriate to their needs.
Others should be able to play with the data and this can only create a greater understanding of the information and what to do with it.
The full presentation is available on Slideshare [9], they blog about the project in both Norwegian [10] and English [11] and the full text of their presentation is available through their blog [12].
The second talk in this session, by Nancy Moussa, was about another project using open source and social media for cataloguing.
This time it was about a project to catalogue and digitise 1,100 significant Islamic manuscripts at the University of Michigan.
They started with the traditional method of cataloguing, using MARC to create records for the manuscripts.
After they have been catalogued, they are passed to the digitisation team (so far about 742 have been digitised).
The manuscripts can then be searched and viewed online using HathiTrust, a digital library catalogue.
They are now using WordPress to harvest the MARC records and access images from the HathiTrust.
This can then be searched and academics and scholars can view the catalogue record and the manuscript.
They are then able to post comments for each other as well as the cataloguer if they see something they feel needs changing.
The cataloguer checks the messages and can make the amendments or add the extra information.
Nancy offered some observations made through working on the project: there is a small community of researchers but they have been willing to engage with the project and each other.
The collaboration has helped the work of the cataloguer and the records and manuscripts are now much more accessible, especially as they have been included on the main university catalogue rather than a separate, special collections catalogue.
Looking to the future, they would like the cataloguer to be able to select specific MARC fields for different templates, improve the Web site interface and be able to share MBlog which is their WordPress plugin.
B103: Discovery Dissemination and Outreach Esben Fjord, Gladsaxe Public Library (Denmark) Rob Haran, Shire (UK) Esben spoke about the project that ‘wasn’t a project,’ but a never-ending experiment with digital platforms; they deliberately had no criteria, set outcomes, resources or organisation so that all staff could have the freedom to explore the beta culture, have fun, and experiment.
Their aim was to expose e-resources in different contexts and search platforms to try and make accessing them easier, taking the electronic resources into the physical space which users occupy.
Although they set out to try and improve access and awareness of their online materials, it seemed more like they’d ended up with interactive resources that encouraged play.
They introduced 10 screens across the library service to provide digital signage.
They display information such as reviews, recommendations and details of forthcoming events.
They use a content management system and there are ten editors who can make changes.
In the future they would like these screens to be interactive and they are exploring the possibility of working with other Danish libraries to try and make this happen.
In the children’s area there is a cartoon drawing machine with a touch screen interface.
The basic characters come from a national Web portal for children so they are recognisable but also customisable.
There is a printer attached so they can take home copies of their creations.
Ideally they would like a better interface for the machine and a new version of the software.
The other innovation has been a ‘sonic chair’ with built-in speakers.
It looks like a hoop and has a touch screen attached for selecting music from the library’s collections.
Librarians create playlists and they have had success in persuading patrons to try new types of music.
They also use content from Youtube and Grooveshark, but would also like to make use of the national music service BibZoom.
To make it even more interactive, they would like to introduce other kinds of media, allow user-created playlists and, again, have a better user interface.
Possibly the best innovation is the ‘Cube,’ which is an interactive floor.
An image is projected onto the floor and users can play with it.
They used it recently to enhance their exhibition on the theme of ‘water in books’.
There is a video of it being demonstrated which is available on YouTube [13].
It is a useful tool for engaging with users as they think it’s funny.
Ideally it will be used in the future to expose more of the library’s electronic resources but this is currently hampered by licence restrictions.
They are facing difficulties over restrictions placed on them by copyright and digital rights management; currently e-resources are made for searching, not communication and dissemination.
Their ambitions are also being checked by the technical infrastructure and back-end interfaces, and, to a certain extent, a limit to their own competence and knowledge.
Work will be continuing on the project that ‘isn’t a project’ although it may develop into something more organised if a project manager is appointed.
Rob Haran spoke about marketing and outreach at Shire, a pharmaceutical company with offices around the world.
The company is growing so each of the offices is at a different developmental stage.
The size of each office means that it is not cost-effective to have a physical information team present on each site.
As a result, the five members of the information services team have to be able to operate flexibly to meet the needs of each office and the growing company.
The Information Services team have created a brand and identity for themselves to make sure their advertising is immediately recognisable (a pink logo to stand out from the corporate blue).
There is the InfoZone which provides e-resources, services and training guides to all staff and there are InfoHubs which are physical spaces at key research and development sites that hold print copies of key resources.
They use marketing principles to get the message out about their services: passive marketing techniques include email straplines, ‘out of office’ messages and posters that are regularly changed and updated; active marketing includes sending a welcome email to new employees and engaging with them by asking about their new role which also enables the team to provide information about the most relevant resources; self-marketing, talking to people and getting word of mouth working for them.
Rob Haran advocates being brave and taking opportunities.
Talk to the decisionmakers and engage with them because they might actually listen.
By commenting on the CEO’s blog about the library space, Rob managed to get a new area in a much better location for the InfoHub which is now an extremely well used area.
They have also made sure that they have a presence at team meetings, so they can promote the services with a quick soundbite or tip that is relevant to what is being discussed.
Training is another key area and at Shire they have found that by tailoring the training, making it relevant and targeting it for users, they have higher attendances.
Classroom-based training wasn’t working as it was too long and the timing couldn’t work for people with dynamic schedules.
People take more away from the training now because they feel it is relevant, short and to the point.
Friday 15 October Track A: Going Social A202: What Phil Has Found Phil Bradley, Internet Consultant (UK) Phil’s presentation very much concentrated on Web sites, technologies etc, that he had recently discovered as part of his everyday work.
There were too many to mention in this article, but the complete presentation is available online and very worthwhile viewing [14].
What Phil emphasised the most is that it is important to keep up to date with the least possible effort.
Creating a personal start page in your Web browser combining e-mail functionality, RSS feeds, blogs, news etc, is key.
A204: Social and Mobile Karen Wallace, Sheffield Libraries, Archives and Information (UK) Nancy Dowd, New Jersey State Library (USA) Karen Wallace gave a very enthusiastic and honest account of Sheffield’s initiatives with regard to using social media.
Staff felt the need to be more up to date with current Web 2.0 technologies in order to be on the same level with their users.
To achieve this, they created accounts with different online services.
The Twitter account (@Shefflibraries) is used to promote events, recommend books and announce important news.
Through Flickr the public can access archival material including photographs documenting important regional events and pictures giving an insight into the daily work of the archive staff.
For two projects, the Sheffield Children’s Book Award and the Summer Reading Challenge, the use of blogs was explored.
A number of problems were encountered along the way.
The main one was the restricted access to some of the above services that was imposed by Sheffield City Council.
At the time of the presentation, Karen was still in negotiations with the IT team and other parties involved about her wish to have a Facebook account.
Nancy Dowd and her team from the New Jersey State Library explored a different angle of getting in touch with their users – mobile marketing.
Nearly everybody has a text message-enabled phone, so this seemed an ideal solution to reach a lot of people at the same time with very little effort.
This method of marketing doesn’t work on its own though.
It has to be combined with visuals like posters, bookmarks and postcards which include small chunks of information that the library wants to get across.
If users are interested, they can text the library to sign up for a messaging service to receive more details (the how-to instructions being advertised on the visuals).
Amongst other things, this means of getting in touch with people was used to keep parents up to date about children’s activities planned, to organise book clubs and to promote events to users who aren’t native English speakers and who didn’t feel confident enough to approach staff because of possible language barriers.
Track B: Trending Information B201: Turning E in the 21st Century Fred Guy, EDINA (UK) Fred’s session provided an overview of the PEPRS (Piloting an E-journal Preservation Registry Service) Project, led by EDINA and the ISSN International Centre in Paris and assisted by JISC funding.
There is no current mandatory requirement to deposit journal material in the UK or the USA.
This causes concern over content preservation once a title is discontinued or transferred by a publisher or if a publisher ceases trading.
The PEPRS service aims to fill this gap.
The database is searchable by ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), Phrase from Journal Title or Keyword and browsable by Agency, Publisher or Journal Title.
It aims to detail which agencies (e.g.
Portico, LOCKSS, British Library) have access to a title and their preservation coverage.
A project of this scale has its challenges, not least the inconsistency of terminology used by different agencies and inaccuracies in relation to to ISSNs.
It is hoped that the full service will be available to the academic community towards the end of 2011.
B202: Taking It With You Esben Fjord, Gladsaxe Public Libraries (Denmark) Esben outlined a joint project between Gladsaxe Public Libraries and Axiell, the supplier of their library management system, to develop a smart phone application (iPhone and Android).
The driving force behind the project was to reach out to both existing users and potential new clientèle and present the library service as ‘tech-savvy’.
The result is an interesting way to interact with the content of the service’s catalogue, with the ability to create favourites and receive news from their Web site via RSS feed on the Start Page.
The marketing of the app was very sophisticated and used a combination of posters, stickers and QR codes to whet the appetite.
This approach particularly appealed to High School students – great pains were taken to avoid the word ‘library’.
There are plans to include some form of music recognition in the next phase, possibly using the music discovery engine Shazam.
This will undoubtedly be well received and open up the library resources to a wider audience.
B203: Hot Topics in Innovation Ulla de Stricker, de Stricker Associates (Canada) Karolien Selhorst, Association of Flemish Provinces, WP (Belgium) Unlike the other presentations at ILI 2010, this one was not prepared by the speakers in advance.
All conference attendants were encouraged to leave ideas for the content on a flip chart beforehand so that this could develop into an interactive session driven by the audience.
The key topic identified by the session chairs was the question ‘what is happening to individuals in the library profession with regards to current challenges’.
Discussions on how to answer this question focused around offering added value and branding yourself and your service.
It was agreed that it can be very hard to sell your service.
What should be tried instead is to create a mindset so users realise that the librarian / the library is able to help.
Ulla de Stricker emphasised the importance of ‘social capital’ – do people favours and make friends; by listening in, giving hints and offering help, people will come to you over time.
Depending on the sector you work in, it can also be very useful to see what the competition is doing in order to sell new ideas to the management.
Always focus on potential benefits and how services can be improved and relate ideas to any existing planning documents.
B204: Induction, Instruction Issues Sara Batts, Reed Smith LLP (UK) Alice Burnett, Weill Cornell Medical College (Qatar) At Reed Smith there are four intakes each year of new trainees.
These trainees are given a very full induction programme over their first few weeks.
The library has a session during this induction but staff frequently received feedback that complained of information overload.
The issues with induction identified by the library were: a lack of clear aims, induction overload, a familiarity with the main resources but no knowledge of more specific ones, and the fact that library training was seen as an optional extra when other activities were deemed more important.
To combat these problems they set out their aims: ‘integration, relevance and professionalism (ask, don’t Google)’.
They approached external trainers about integrating presentations by the library service into courses so the advice would be tailored to the specific group.
This had the benefits of ensuring relevance and being short and targeted thus aiding the retention of information.
They also made sure that invitations to training sessions were sent out by the Learning and Development department in order to validate the invitation and give it the same importance as other training courses.
The emails included the aims and objectives of the course and explained the relevance to the staff members.
The Weill Cornell Medical College (Qatar) was established in 2001 and the Library is comprised predominantly of electronic resources; it serves users globally.
In order to provide 24⁄7 help at time of need for people accessing resources from various time zones, they decided to create instructional videocasts.
They chose videocasts because their students are comfortable with technology and for the majority of them English is their second language, so a more visual slant to the instruction proved more effective.
The project fitted perfectly with the ‘resources & experiences’ and ‘user engagement & learning’ aims of their strategic plan.
The list of topics to be covered was created through workshop experiences, requests from faculty and students, and interactions with their users.
To create the videos they used SnapzProx as they were mostly dealing with Mac users and their preferred software, Camtasia, wasn’t available for Mac when the project started.
Aside from the difficulties they faced with the software, they also had to consider the content.
Consistency across all the videos was a major factor and, when designing and creating a videocast, the main points they were looking at were: script, goal, audience, topic, presenter, timing/length and precision/accuracy.
They have completed several instructional videocasts and are working through the topics they have identified as most important to users.
The completed ‘DeLib Casts’ are available through their Web site [15].
Track C: The Techno Beat C202: Connecting Scholars with Information Terence Huwe, University of California, Berkeley (U.S.A) Social media is governed by people and it evolves to meet user need.
There is a growing trend of multi-disciplinary approaches in research.
The Institute for Research in Labor and Employment (IRLE) (U.S.) takes such an approach in supporting doctoral-level study.
The faculty members hail from more than 12 schools and departments.
There have been changes recently in research patterns.
Now they are tending to start with a search on the open Web and there is a growing preference for online information.
However, faculty members are slower to adopt these approaches and sciences still lead humanities in using these methods to start their research.
The approach taken at University of California, Berkeley has seen an increase in appointments of people to positions outside their native discipline, for example economists being appointed to public health roles.
This is because they feel that an increasingly complex world requires fresh approaches and there are areas of multi-disciplinary research to be explored.
The scholars are responding; working in groups and consulting with each other more with a greater emphasis on cohort working.
They are becoming more aware that the most important information may lie outside their own zone of expertise and are rapidly adopting new discovery techniques to help them research within these new areas.
The library service has positioned its services at the heart of the Institute by getting involved with everything.
Staff monitor the environment and look for potential new roles they can play.
As a service they have been willing to take on new things and experiment.
By so doing they have become the digital publisher for IRLE and have managed to change faculty members’ perceptions of Library staff; they are now seen as buyers and facilitators as well as an archive.
They have created blogs, wikis and list-servs to help educate and offer counsel to users.
Terence emphasised the importance of conducting your own user research and acting on the results.
Also, if possible you should try to become the buyer and publisher as well as being the gatekeeper.
If you can embed yourself at the forefront of new developments then you should be in a better position to connect scholars with information as they will already be looking to a dynamic library service for answers.
C203: Words, Words, Words Amanda Hill, Hilbraith Ltd (Canada) The Names Project is an initiative led by Mimas and the British Library and addresses the lack of precision encountered in the recording of author names.
Even Zetoc, the electronic table of contents service, only records author surnames and initials, not full forenames.
This has obvious implications for academic authorship where an individual’s full corpus of work may need to be retrieved and not confused with the work of a similarly named person.
The draft ISO standard, ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) seeks to enable individuals, organisations or other parties to cite themselves in a unique way to help overcome this ambiguity.
Closing Panel: Library Futures Thomas Brevik, Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (Norway) Ake Nygren, Stockholm Public Libraries (Sweden) The conference was closed by two Scandinavian librarians replicating a discussion they’d had about the future of the library and librarians.
Unfortunately much of it seemed hypothetical, but two ideas that stood out were: firstly, ‘You can have a librarian without a [physical] library, but not a library without a librarian’ and secondly that librarians should work like spiders, building lots of little nets, connecting with lots of different people and departments so the word about the importance of the library and its services is spread.
Further information can be obtained from the Conference Web site [16].
References Booth, M., McDonald, S., Tiffen, B., “A new vision for university libraries: towards 2015,” February 2010 http://tinyurl.com/28rkltq Research Information Network, “Challenges for academic libraries in difficult economic times: a guide for senior institutional managers and policy makers,” March 2010 http://www.rin.ac.uk/challenges-for-libraries 23 Things http://23things.wetpaint.com/ Leech, H., “23 Things in Public Libraries”, July 2010, Ariadne, Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/leech/ LIS New Professionals Network http://www.lisnpn.spruz.com/ Library Routes Project http://libraryroutesproject.wikkii.com/ Voices for the Library Web site http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk Ruddock, B., “Do libraries have a future?
ILI 2010” http://bit.ly/c1Td90 Pode project presentation http://www.slideshare.net/annek/pode Pode project blog in Norwegian http://www.bibpode.no/blogg Pode project blog in English http://www.bibpode.no/blogg/?cat=74 Pode project paper http://www.bibpode.no/blogg/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/B103_Sandberg_Paper_ILI_2009.pdf Video of ‘The Cube’ at Gladsaxe Bibliotek http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln12B_McULw Bradley, P., “What Phil has found,” October 2010 http://www.slideshare.net/Philbradley/what-phil-has-found DeLib casts from Weill Cornell Medical School (Qatar) http://qatar-weill.cornell.edu/elibrary/delibCasts/delibCast.html Internet Librarian International 2010, 14-15 October 2010, Novotel London West, London http://www.internet-librarian.com/2010/ Author Details Claire Tylee Bibliographic Services Librarian University of Bath Library Email: c.tylee@bath.ac.uk Katrin Flemming Information Librarian (Acquisitions) University of Bath Library Email: k.flemming@bath.ac.uk Elly Cope Information Librarian (Cataloguing) University of Bath Library Email: e.cope@bath.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: “Internet Librarian International Conference 2010” Author: Claire Tylee, Katrin Flemming and Elly Cope Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/ili-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Building an Organisational Approach to Web 2.0 Buzz data mobile software framework html portfolio infrastructure archives metadata digitisation tagging blog copyright video flickr cataloguing windows youtube facebook twitter licence ict url research Citation BibTex RIS Paul Bevan outlines the National Library of Wales' development of a strategic approach to meeting user needs in a post-Web 2.0 world.
The National Library of Wales has recently published a new Strategy for the Web [1] which integrates Web 2.0 with the existing Web portfolio and seeks to provide an approach to Web 2.0 which is focused on the organisation.
Rather than centring on technical developments, this paper outlines a strategic research approach and discusses some of the outcomes which may speak to others seeking to engage with emerging Web technologies and approaches.
But Why...?
If Web 2.0 is a grass roots, organic and personality-focused shift in technology and approaches – as it is so often touted – is it not it counter-intuitive to think about an 'organisational approach' or to consider trying to write a strategy for development in this area?
Over the past five or so years Libraries, Archives, Museums and other organisations both within and outside the cultural sector have begun to experiment with a wide range of approaches aimed at engaging or interacting with their users via the Web.
Moreover, in expertly designed courses staff at all levels are shown how to create blogs, re-use Flickr images, upload video to YouTube and create a corporate presence on FaceBook.
In the course of researching for the Library's new Web Strategy we came across many organisations which had firmly sought out opportunities to use social networking and other tools to meet their users 'on their own terms' and which had become disenchanted with the level of commitment required, and the lack of interest from those users.
At the same time, lots of individuals and cultural heritage bodies have involved new and existing audiences in lively and interesting discussions about their future, or provided free public reuse of their resources in innovative ways.
Whilst what distinguished success from failure in these instances was often not a paper document outlining what was to be achieved but a combination of organisational support, a willingness to experiment (and to fail) – and most importantly – a clear understanding of what was achievable.
To be successful, both organisations and individuals had genuinely to believe in the potential of any new service and to follow through on that belief with support for staff and technological developments.
A strategic approach allows us to scope and outline such 'beliefs' in order best to begin to realise – on an organisational scale – the full potential of Web 2.0, beyond the personal level.
Furthermore, this strategic approach engages directly with the most important aspect of what might loosely be defined as 'Web 2.0' – philosophical, cultural or attitude change, rather than mere technological novelty.
The advantage of an organisational approach is that rather than simply exercising the potential and passion of individuals, the potential for long-term and widespread engagement can be harnessed through a cohesive network of individuals with a shared strategic aim.
Whatever we come to understand by the term 'Web 2.0', it is clear now that it is not a single instance of change, to which we must re-tool and respond, but rather a signifier of an ongoing change in user expectations and a strategic approach which provides a platform for organisations to reflect and change in order to meet this need in the future.
Defining the Problem The National Library of Wales is not an organisation unused to the Web, we have provided a wide range of services via the Web for over 10 years with a consistently growing range of resources available online, and a strong growth in user numbers.
The Library is also committed to an ambitious digitisation programme which will result in large parts of the collections being available online, at no charge, to users.
Like many organisations our current Web portfolio is the result of extended organic growth, providing new and exciting content or applications to users in response to particular project requirements.
In the course of the last 10 years the Library has also undertaken a number of extensive redesign/restructuring tasks – the last being in 2007 when the Library moved from a mostly static HTML infrastructure to the open source Typo3 Content Management System [2].
We also have a variety of experimental projects involving Web 2.0 technologies, particularly in relation to building presences on external Web sites.
These individual pilots have provided us with a great deal of useful experience, and they have also raised many interesting questions: Why did our number of 'fans' grow whilst the number of daily views stayed level?
Why do users not talk on our 'official' page but they do on community-generated ones?
How come the 'same people' seem to sign up to all of our external pages?
Why do Wikipedians seem to worry more about the copyright restrictions on the images we share with them than their quality or content?
We had begun to see that Web 2.0 would be a change which affected all aspects of our business – that we would have to grow our own understanding of what 'Web 2.0' was in order to respond appropriately.
In response, the Library convened a task group in 2007 to bring together our understanding of all aspects of Web 2.0 – technological and non-technological – in order to inform the Library's general strategic planning.
The resulting discussions greatly enhanced our understanding of the different interpretations of the term, and the potential for misunderstanding in seeking to change our approach.
It also highlighted the need for us to develop further in this area – and quickly – in order to avoid a significant gulf between our Web presence and our users requirements emerging over the coming years.
As a result, when the Library published its 2008-9 to 2010-11 strategy Shaping the Future a clear commitment to renewing our approach was made, stating that we will: [Take] advantage of new online technology, including the construction of Web 2.0 services, to develop progressive ways of interacting with users.
It is expected that the Library itself will provide only some specific services on its website.
Instead, the intention is to promote and facilitate the use of the collections by external users, in accordance with specific guidelines.
[3] Researching the Strategy With this commitment in place, the Library appointed a Senior Research Officer for six months to undertake the research, planning and writing of a new strategic document which would underpin our work in this area.
As anyone who has tried to write such a document knows, there are two essential requirements for creating any effective, and achievable, strategy: knowing where you are and knowing where you want to be.
Without a clear and collectively recognised view of these requirements, no organisation can ever hope to do more than wander in the interesting but ineffective wilderness of experimentation.
With this in mind, our strategic research began by taking the time to look internally at our current activity and to discern our potential for development before looking at examples of success and from other similar and markedly different organisations in the public, private and third sectors.
This approach defined the nature of our eventual strategy.
Rather than following the route of detailing our existing infrastructure we were able to confidently outline the strategic objectives which would move us from our current approach to one in which we could continue to meet user expectations into the medium and long term.
Ready for Web 2.0?
It might seem self-indulgent, and even restrictive, to begin the process through introversion.
However, by asking the question 'Are we ready for Web 2.0?'
we were able to both answer the concerns of those who felt that our organisational culture would not support attempts to engage effectively in these new ways and to look outwards with a realistic view of what might be achieved within the three-year life of the strategy.
This portion of the research fell into four key areas: a re-analysis of the statistical data we were already collecting; a skills analysis of staff involved in working with the Web at the Library; a review of what content sources we already had, and how they were used; and more open discussions and surveys with staff across the organisation.
In the sections below I give examples of the kind of insights which arose from this portion of the research.
Statistics It would be rare to find an organisation which does not keep and monitor its Web statistics; providing headline figures to relevant committees, funders and other interested bodies.
However, rather than looking at the constant positive growth within our access data, we sought instead to look for significant patterns which might indicate either problems or potential within the content currently available to users.
One of the first issues which arose through this was that much of the detailed information simply was not there, or could not be relied upon to provide consistent – deep – data about user activity.
Although we were using the same reporting software for all of our locally run sites, it was not easy to track users across 'microsites,' and harder still to see if any of the external presences we operated were effectively linked to our centrally managed content.
At the same time, it was difficult to separate headline usage figures from the areas of Web content we were seeking to push at any time – we 'knew' that a link from the BBC News Web site to one of our digitised manuscripts brought many more visitors, and could relatively easily tell that they visited that specific content, but knowing whether they explored the rest of our Web offering, or 'bounced' (left almost immediately), took hours of painstaking analysis.
However, we were able to find some interesting trends in our data – ones which drove home the impact which Web 2.0 approaches and technologies were having on the way our site was found, accessed and navigated.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of users of our Web site came to us direct from search engines.
However, whilst Google made up around 85% of our search engine referrals the remaining visitors were split across other well-known search engines and the social bookmarking site 'StumbleUpon' (See Figure 1) – which on the basis of only a few user-added links provided the same level of visits as Yahoo!
or Windows Live Search.
Figure 1: Search Engine Data for June November 2008 It was clear from the data that what users were doing in relation to our site was as important as any search engine optimisation we might have undertaken in-house.
Gone are the days of encouraging users to bookmark our sites in their browsers, now a digg mention, tweet or delicious entry brings in the visitors.
With search engines being such a key element of our visitor sourcing we also sought to understand more about what those users were seeking from our site.
Unsurprisingly we found that key relevant terms (library, archive, family history, and so on) made up around 18% of our search engine visitors.
However, the remaining 82% came from a long tail [4] of place and personal names and other weird and wonderful search terms.
The overwhelming majority of our users were viewing our site for reasons we had never anticipated – and these users represent an audience which can be attracted to visit the catalogue, digital exhibitions or online shop.
Figure 2: The 'Long Tail' of Referring Keywords One point which became clear was that high-level visit and hits numbers are not really useful in managing and developing Web content.
Positive growth of these figures will probably indicate that a Web site is expanding, but cannot tell you whether those visitors get 'value' from the content, and cannot tell you where you should position new content types to give the best user experience or whether your users take the time to visit more of the site than the page which the search engine suggested to them.
Finding real and important trends within statistical data is not an easy task, however tools such as Google Analytics [5] provide much more interpretation than traditional Web statistics software and can be helpful for anyone looking to see the impact of their Web portfolio.
Skills Perhaps one of the most difficult elements of the research was understanding which skills were already present within staff both working with the Web and in other, less directly related, positions.
Only by reviewing both formal training and informal self-development were we able to understand the breadth of skills within staff, and the potential gaps which might require further development.
We were able divide our skills into three key areas: technical, content management and content producers.
In simple terms the technical skills allowed us to 'build' services, the content producers gave us the raw material to populate and run the services, and the staff with content management skills allowed us to shape, manage and grow them.
What was clear was that our technical staff were well equipped to develop rich and innovative Web applications.
However, this in itself required an increased focus on content production and management.
To avoid being purely technically led would require us to develop and maintain the 'softer' skills of content scoping and development.
However, within the organisation we already have a growing community of bloggers, twitterers and social networkers – alongside experienced writers.
Key to our future development of content creation would be the channelling of these skills into improving our online services to users.
Finally, in order to sustain this focus – and indeed to develop the potential into the future – we would need to improve the skills of staff across the organisation.
However, our experiences with the Library's own Content Management System had shown that merely running training sessions would not deliver real skills development.
Instead a more innovative approach, such as the 23 things model [6], is required to support the personal digital development of staff – enabling them to see these skills as useful within their own work.
Sources What arose from both evaluating our current Web offering, and discussions with staff responsible for managing and providing access to the collections, was that we had a huge potential for offering more, and more effective, content and services via the Web.
Whilst we had a mature and diverse range of digital content available through both the Library's catalogue and Web-based digital exhibitions, there was a significant proportion of material which was not being exposed to the extent that it might be.
We were able to define four distinct 'source types' which would make up our Web content into the future: Information: Resources which describe the Library and its provision of services (Opening Hours, News and Events, Promotional Images or Video), professional information (including staff presentations and papers) and the products of events held at the Library (such as videos of invited speakers).
Interpretation: Resources which make use of staff knowledge and experience to provide added value to users of the collections (Family History Information, Enquiry Responses, Research Support).
Metadata: Data which is explicitly about the collections, most commonly held in the Library Catalogue but also as additional finding aids.
Digital Content: Products of the Library's digitisation programmes or, in the future, content collected in digital form, including full text automatically extracted from scans.
It is these sources that fuel, and will continue to fuel, our Web portfolio into the future and we were quickly able to see how the information which was currently available online did not necessarily reflect the true extent of useful information at our disposal.
Culture Initially the research had hoped to simply appraise staff experiences of the current Web operations, and to try and explore whether our current infrastructure and approach was delivering on the potential that each part of the organisation had recognised.
However, throughout a series of group discussions with key teams of content gatekeepers and front-line service providers, a wider theme of 'cultural capacity' began to be identified.
Staff at all levels were actively interested in engaging with new ways of providing user services and with sharing the Library's collections, metadata, professional activity and events through new ways of working.
However, they felt disenabled and unconfident in undertaking this work themselves, without formalised approval from groups or committees.
This 'cultural' element has become an integral thread in how the Library's approach is defined, and will be central in future implementation tasks and actively reinforcing organisational support for this work, at all levels, and is a significant benefit from the strategy itself.
Future Directions The second half of the research involved working alongside organisations from around the world to explore how different technologies and approaches had been successful in engaging new and existing users.
Rather than spelling out in detail the various positive and negative outcomes of different approaches and technologies, in this section I will draw together some of the more interesting themes which supported successful Web 2.0 services.
Community Understanding By far the most important success factor for any Web service, most especially those which focus on interaction, is an understanding of the community which it serves.
This, of course, is also true of physical services however it is common for people to consider Web 2.0 functionality as 'added value' without fully understanding how it might be used.
User-created metadata, for example, is often held up as a triumph for both the 'crowd' and the content owners; but the reality of such projects is that unless a community of taggers can be built around the service, the result is little more than a few disparate, generalised, tags.
Although some projects had been surprised by the communities which used their services (expecting, for example, family history researchers, but instead getting young people looking for homework help), those who respond and engage with these new communities are rewarded with interaction.
Projects which do not re-evaluate their expectations of the community feel, instead, disappointed by engagement of 'the wrong type' of users.
Agility One of the reasons that Web 2.0 is looked to as a potential benefit to organisations is the way in which innovative services can be delivered quickly and cheaply.
In fact, with most Web 2.0 applications a large number of staff, significant budget or extended timescale can be a considerable disadvantage.
Instead, effective Web 2.0 services normally rely on a small committed group to deliver an initial product quickly, often a beta, and then to continue to develop new services or to engage actively with the community of users.
This agility comes from a level of personal commitment from the staff involved.
Because of the lack of long-term experience with many Web 2.0 approaches, it is difficult to see how this agility can be retained in the longer term, given staff turnover and loss of interest (see Sustainability and Risk below).
Appropriate Content in Appropriate Environments Anyone who has responsibility, knowledge or often just an interest in Web 2.0 will tend to be regularly asked questions along the lines of 'Shouldn't we have a presence on Twitter/FaceBook/MySpace?'
However the most effective Web presences, and particularly those that use Web 2.0 elements, are notable by their focus on one particular category of type of service.
Selecting the right type of content for the right kind of environment is essential to success.
It is important to understand that whilst organisations might wish to share detailed information on their activity, FaceBook or Twitter may not be the right place to do so.
Organisations often feel that we must 'go to where the users are' but to do this successfully we must understand what they are doing there.
Adding an organisational presence on a space which users regard as 'social' or 'relaxationfocused' may be seen as invasive or inappropriate.
Similarly, organisations need to be prepared to tailor or select content in a way which fits the environment.
The hardest question for those evaluating whether they should invest resources in a Twitter stream, blog or social networking profile is whether they add value to the users' experience.
Too much or too little relevant content can cause more damage than simply accepting that your voice is best heard elsewhere.
It is not possible simply to recycle existing content in multiple environments without making it clear to users that you see one or many of the outlets as merely a passive broadcast.
Finally, any organisation or project must accept that, without enough relevant things to say, any form of social networking or interaction will be unsuccessful.
In short, each of us must ask the question for every social content stream – are you really as interesting as you think you are?
Sustainability and Risk One of the most common concerns expressed about using Web 2.0 services, particularly in relation to those provided for free by Web companies such as Google, is the long– or even medium-term sustainability of the service.
It is true that organisations and individuals invest significant amounts of time in such services with little or no guarantee that they will continue to be supported, or even available, in the future [7].
The same is also true of services (such as blogging) which can become personality-centred – staff move on, become uninterested or refocused, and this can severely undermine such services.
The simple answer to this problem is that Web 2.0 is not an environment which can be 'moved to' but is, rather, the next step on the service provision journey.
At some point all of these services will change, become ineffective, or unused, regardless of the sustainability of the project.
This is not a risk that can be mitigated but instead represents a fundamental understanding that the Web is temporary by its nature, and that all content should have a clear lifespan.
Truly persistent services can only reliably be provided through locally run or managed sites, but this does not undermine the potential of external services and points of presence.
Even if FaceBook could guarantee its survival for the next 20 years it is unlikely that those of us running profiles will want to communicate through the service in 2029 – the community we are seeking to engage with will have moved on far before then.
Effective planning involves balancing the resources spent on a service (Web 2.0 or otherwise) with the likely lifespan and moving on to more appropriate environments when required – not maintaining a portfolio of unmaintained and underused 'digital curios'.
Services and Content Spaces It was clear from the research that the nature of service and content delivery on the Web is still undergoing a fundamental shift.
Web 2.0 had provided 'new places' and 'new ways' for us to reach users but it was also a symptom a wider change in the way in which we will understand and experience these services into the future.
The traditional view of the Web was that each new service required its own content space, so the development of a new element of user provision would require its own attractive URL, brand and interface.
More recently this approach has broken down and, whilst services which are regarded as 'important' are often still treated as separate entities, many additional features are merely added to existing content spaces – improving the experience of existing users by upgrading the existing service provision.
The most innovative services are now developed in the clear knowledge that they do not require their own content space, that there may never be a 'primary' point of access, but instead that the service might be accessed from other Web sites, Virtual Learning Environments, social networking sites, iGoogle or from a mobile phone application.
Rather than focusing on the superficiality of an attractive interface – and creating yet another content space – these services leverage the potential of other content spaces to provide the framework for their interface, and the ready crop of users.
The drive to produce a standalone Web site is still very strong, particularly outside the rapidly developing digital media industry.
What is obvious, however, is that users are spending more time in 'their' spaces and less in 'ours' and that time and resources spent on delivering a 'content silo' are wasted from the point of view of a user who 'dips in' to sites from other destination Web sites, or from search engines.
An Organisational Approach The final strategy itself takes the Library's existing resources, skills and, most importantly, potential, and outlines how this might be applied as a foundation for shortand longer-term development.
Rather than creating a separate strategy for 'Web 2.0' activity, and running the risk of disassociating the significant resources already deployed, the final document refers to all of our Web activity – regardless of environment.
This will, through the life of the strategy, provide the underlying support for current and future activity in all online spaces as well as acting as the catalyst for innovation in new areas which we cannot as yet identify.
The strategy itself details five strategic objectives which are broken down into 24 individual goals; however below I will discuss three groups of activities which could be considered 'transferable' by other organisations seeking to make the most of Web 2.0 opportunities.
Consolidation and Configuration Rather than seeing Web 2.0 as a 'bolt-on' technology which will enhance existing user experience, we have identified the need to look in depth at both our content and technology in order to move towards a fully integrated Web 2.0 platform.
In its simplest terms this involves identifying key platform-pages and content areas for delivering interactive services – allowing us to roll out different approaches across our existing content or to reconfigure that content better to fit the needs of our users.
Defining a content structure based on general user types (physical visitors, external users and fellow professionals) allows us to focus the content so as to ensure that users can navigate across relevant and attractive services.
This will increase the number of pages visited by each user and treat each search engine referral as an opportunity to 'convert' users, to encourage them to look around the site.
At the same time, a clearly defined technical infrastructure – built around core components – will help to make better use of our development resources as well as building skills around a focused framework.
Using technologies, design and layout to ensure that our various different platforms (including the catalogue) feel comfortable to users is also an essential part of this work.
Moving from an environment where each project, output and group can be directly involved in defining its own distinct Web identity (specifically tailored to their own view of the future users of their content) to a single 'family' of brands is a difficult decision for any organisation.
It takes a strong 'brand manager' to sell the benefits of an umbrella organisational approach over bespoke environments, balancing the requirements of funding bodies with the needs of users, and we have yet to see how this approach might be fully realised over the next three years at the National Library of Wales.
Collaboration and Sharing Part of our move towards a more forward-facing Web environment has involved accepting that in many cases we may have a role providing resources but not necessarily services based on them.
As an organisation, indeed as a sector, we have traditionally been open to sharing; however, the modern user is increasingly requiring (or assuming) the right to reuse our content on a personal level.
The first step towards this approach will be determining which Library-produced content (such as interpretive text) can be made freely reusable under a Creative Commons [8] licence.
However we will be going beyond this by reviewing the potential (where possible) of relaxing the rights over our digital content and metadata – so encouraging the open and free reuse of this content by end-users.
These important changes will begin to shift our relationship with external users fundamentally, and we will build on such changes by adding more content – particularly in the form of events, alternative content outlets (such as blogs), professional documents and presentations – to our Web offering.
Looking further ahead we will also be looking for partnerships in order to exploit the semantic markup of our data and to explore ways of exposing our content in increasingly machine-readable ways.
Measuring Our Success Fundamental to supporting our continuing development, outside and beyond the life of this strategy, will be our re-evaluation of how we determine a 'sucsessful' Web presence.
Rather than just counting visits and hits, we will be looking at key trends for content, evaluating 'micro-feedback' in the form of page ratings, reducing the bounce rates of our key entry pages, and counting the number of Active Interactions.
We define Active Interactions as being activities above and beyond simple viewing – such as a user making the effort to 'friend' the Library on a social networking site, playing an online game, tagging content or leaving a comment.
These elements themselves will allow us to judge the success of all of our Web 2.0 activities and reduce the risk of developing underused or undervalued services.
Conclusion As we step forward into a three-year implementation phase, we can begin to see the value of this organisational approach.
Staff from across the Library are now becoming more involved in the design, delivery and construction of our online Web presence.
We have also taken some significant decisions in terms of how we will resource and support this work within the organisation – combining distributed roles into a single Digital Media Unit, tasked with supporting the wide variety of work required across the organisation.
However we will only really begin to judge the benefits when we can see developments for new ways of delivering content and services coming from within the wider organisation.
By spending time and resources undertaking a significant research and planning exercise, we have been afforded the opportunity to place ourselves as a sharing, collaborative innovator in the eyes of our colleagues, funders and – most importantly – our users.
For the Library, the next challenge is to realise this opportunity.
References Share.
Collaborate.
Innovate.
A Strategy for the Web 2009-11 http://www.llgc.org.uk/fileadmin/documents/pdf/2009_Web_Strategy.pdf Typo3 CMS http://typo3.com/ Shaping the Future: The Library's Strategy 2008-9 to 2010-11 http://www.llgc.org.uk/fileadmin/documents/pdf/nlw_strategy_s.pdf Anderson, C. (2005) The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ 23 Things Model http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/02/the_23_things_l.html Kelly, B., Bevan, P., Akerman, R., Alcock, J., Fraser, J., 2009.
Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends.
Program Electronic Library and Information Systems, 2009, 43 (3), pp.
311-327 (and also a range of other excellent work in this area by Brian Kelly) Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ Author Details Paul Bevan Head of ICT National Library of Wales Email: paul.bevan@llgc.org.uk Web site: http://www.llgc.org.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Share.
Collaborate.
Innovate.
Building an Organisational Approach to Web 2.0" Author: Paul Bevan Publication Date: 30-October-2009 Publication: Ariadne Issue 61 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/bevan/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop Buzz data software framework xml infrastructure metadata identifier vocabularies schema blog repositories ontologies curation research standards cerif Citation BibTex RIS Rosemary Russell reports on a two-day workshop on research information management and CERIF held in Bristol over 27-28 June 2012.
A workshop on Research Information Management (RIM) and CERIF was held in Bristol on 27-28 June 2012, organised by the Innovation Support Centre [1] at UKOLN, together with the JISC RIM and RCSI (Repositories and Curation Shared Infrastructure) Programmes.
It was a follow-up to the CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery [2] held in Bath in February.
Workshop Scope and Aims The aim was to bring together people working on the various elements of the UK RIM jigsaw to share experience of using CERIF and explore ways of working together more closely.
While the first day focused specifically on RIM, the second day widened to explore synergies with the repositories community.
Participants therefore included JISC RIM and MRD projects and programme managers, support and evaluation projects, Research Councils, funders and repository infrastructure projects.
There were around 30 participants [3] in total, with some variation across the two days, given the different content.
The event was chaired by Josh Brown, RIM Programme Manager and Neil Jacobs, Programme Director, Digital Infrastructure, both at JISC.
All presentations as well as breakout session outputs are available via the UKOLN ISC Events site [4].
The New CERIF Support Project at the ISC, UKOLN The UK community was pleased to welcome Brigitte Jörg [5] to the meeting, in the first week of her new role at UKOLN’s Innovation Support Centre as National Coordinator for the CERIF Support Project.
Brigitte is already well known to British practitioners working with CERIF – both in her role as as CERIF Task Group Leader [6] at euroCRIS and as advisor to several existing JISC projects.
We look forward to working with her on further initiatives – her CERIF expertise will be a huge asset for Research Information Management support and coordination in British Higher Education.
UK CERIF Landscape There is certainly extensive RIM-related activity in the UK currently, which looks set to continue.
The landscape was outlined in the scene setting sessions by myself, based on the CERIF adoption study [7] carried out earlier this year.
The rate of CRIS (Current Research Information System) procurement has increased very rapidly in the last few years, particularly during 2011.
For example the first Pure system in the UK was procured jointly by the Universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews in May 2009; now there are 19 UK universities using Pure.
Since all CRIS on the market are CERIF-compatible (to a greater or lesser extent) this means that a large number of UK institutions are CERIF users (again, to varying degrees) – around 31% [7].
The two other CERIF CRIS being used in the UK are CONVERIS (Avedas, Germany) and Symplectic Elements (UK-based); only one UK CERIF CRIS is being developed in-house, at the University of Huddersfield.
There is therefore a significant potential user base for the many CERIF-based services discussed over the course of the workshop.
Particularly as more institutions reach the end of their CRIS implementation phase, they are going to be looking for opportunities to exploit the interchange benefits offered by CERIF.
UK Involvement in euroCRIS and Other International Initiatives As a reflection of the intensity of UK CRIS activity, the UK has the largest number of institutional members of euroCRIS – 25.
The next country in terms of membership is Germany, with just 13 members (and then the Netherlands, with seven).
It is also notable that there were six UK papers (up from three in 2010) at the recent euroCRIS conference in Prague (all openly accessible from the euroCRIS website [8]), reflecting the growing UK presence at international level.
This indicates the significant impact of JISC programmes both RIM and MRD (Managing Research Data).
At euroCRIS meetings other European countries have expressed some envy of the resources currently available in the UK to support RIM development!
Brigitte Jörg, newly appointed National Coordinator for the CERIF Support Project Brigitte highlighted some of the current CERIF-related international activities.
euroCRIS is a partner in three EU projects: OpenAIRE+ (which has adopted parts of CERIF), ENGAGE and EuroRIS-Net.
CASRAI (the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information) which is based in Canada, has recently formed strategic partnerships with both euroCRIS and JISC.
CASRAI also collaborates with the VIVO project (originally at Cornell University) which has developed an open source ontology and software system.
To complete the circle, VIVO and euroCRIS in turn have a strategic partnership.
It is interesting that a range of international initiatives are coming together at the same time – coherence across research information internationally is clearly needed by researchers.
HE Data and Information Landscape Report However Andy Youell from HESA highlighted the lack of coherence in the current UK national landscape: the HE Data and Information Landscape report [9] had just been published the previous week, recommending a governance framework to collectively manage the information landscape.
Until now there has been no body to lead across the HE sector on areas such as data standards.
Key information and data issues need to be raised out of the ‘nerd space’ to senior management level.
A CERIFied Research Outputs System Launched Breaking news on the first day of the workshop was the announcement by Dale Heenan of RCUK that a test version of a ‘CERIFied’ Research Outputs System (ROS) [10] had been made available that morning.
A demo can be viewed showing CERIF import [11].
The system will also export required research data back to institutions, as part of the two-way process.
Live use is planned within several weeks.
With NERC taking the decision to move to ROS, there will shortly be five Research Councils using the system; ROS is also working with Researchfish e-Val in order to make transfer of data as painless as possible.
Interestingly, ROS plans to harvest from institutional repositories, which will avoid PIs having to submit individual outputs.
ROS staff are working closely with the JISC CERIF in Action (CIA) project.
Close parallels with the IRIOS2 project also emerged – both are linking research outputs to grants.
A ROS user forum is being set up by ARMA (Association of Research Managers and Administrators UK) to provide informal advice on future development.
JISC Research Information Management CERIF Workshop Gateway to Research and Community Development The Gateway to Research (GtR) [12] has been another exciting CERIF-based development this year, and provides a very public UK endorsement of the standard [13].
It was a big focus for discussion at the workshop.
Plans for the GtR were announced by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills in December 2011 as part of the Innovation and Research Strategy [14] which set out the Government’s approach to boosting investment in innovation and enabling UK success in the global economy.
David Willetts maintains an interest in the project and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia is a high profile advisor.
Whereas ROS will be used for institutional input, GtR is designed to provide access to information about research funded by all the Research Councils.
A particular aim was to encourage access by SMEs, but it will also serve the general public as well as researchers themselves.
The aim is for ‘a seamless join’ between ROS and GtR.
Since data will be sourced from six different Research Council systems (including e-val) with no common ontology, a data dictionary is being developed.
An issue discussed was the potential disparity between results from a cross-RC system, and individual systems.
A common data model is the key deliverable.
The project has been advised to concentrate on making the data available in a standard format (CERIF) and not to worry about the interface – instead prize challenges will be offered to communities for developing applications.
The project plans to work with DevCSI at the Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN.
As much existing work as possible will therefore be used, to avoid duplicating development elsewhere.
Darren Hunter (EPSRC) reported that there is already a lot of engagement with institutions, with many developers enthusiastic about the opportunities.
There will also be prize challenges offered for best use of the data provided by GtR.
During the GtR breakout session David Shotton suggested the ontology work he is carrying out at Oxford as potentially useful for the project.
The GtR system is to be launched at the end of 2013.
It is aimed to link to research datasets at a later date.
Identifiers As might be expected in the context of RIM discussion, the issue of identifiers reared its head again.
HESA emphasised the ‘big opportunities’ for person identifiers in particular.
The JISC Researcher Identifier Task and Finish Group has recently recommended ORCID as offering the best likely solution to the need for a common UK researcher ID; Verena Weigert of JISC reported on the community consultation just conducted – responses indicated the necessity of researchers being able to see that it benefits them and puts data control into their hands.
The prospect of a ‘UK ORCID’ was discussed, alongside the business case.
There were some concerns about data security issues – there was a strong preference for a potential system to be based in the UK instead of the US.
JISC will be turning its attention to organisational identifiers next.
The workshop agreed that this will be a much more difficult task.
Options may range from a formal ontology-based solution, with complex relationships to record eg name changes/mergers etc, or a very simple solution which would just assign new IDs when changes occurred; an alternative is just to adopt an existing identifier eg HESA numeric ID.
It was suggested that until you know the purpose for which people need the information, it is difficult to decide what you need to record.
UKRISS: UK Research Information Shared Service The UKRISS (UK Research Information Shared Service) project is currently conducting a feasibility and scoping study for the reporting of research information at a national level, based on CERIF.
Requirements gathering and analysis includes a landscape study and stakeholder interviews.
Institutions still managing research on spreadsheets are also included.
After scoping the metadata requirements for a national shared service, UKRISS will specify mappings to CERIF.
The second phase will deliver a proof-of-concept solution.
The aim is to simplify the gathering of research information in order to reduce the burden of research reporting – as well as enabling improved benchmarking and analysis.
This is a key initiative for the UK; Simon Waddington (Project Manager at KCL) also reported from CRIS 2012 that other countries are looking to the UK approach to provide pointers for their own national systems [15].
Project Snowball Project Snowball [16] is specifically concerned with enabling cross-institutional benchmarking, as described by Anna Clements of the University of St Andrews.
It is based on recommendations of the JISC RIM1 project conducted by Imperial College London and Elsevier.
A group of eight HE institutions has been working with Elsevier to agree a standard set of metrics to support strategic decision making, as well as methodologies for calculating these metrics.
The project has demonstrated the feasibility of scalably inputting data from three sources to generate metrics and benchmarks.
The next stage is to CERIFy – a meeting is planned for September 2012 to take this forward.
Also plans are underway for a global standard – institutions also benchmark against overseas counterparts.
Repository Infrastructure As indicated, repository infrastructure and support projects joined the workshop on the second day, so the programme included a number of repository-related presentations and discussions.
In his introduction to the sessions, Neil Jacobs suggested that research management ‘silos’ are starting to work together – data needs to flow between them.
Quick wins are needed to demonstrate that the current work is really worth doing (there is also a need to identify what these wins might be).
A key current project is UK RepositoryNet+ (RepNet) [17] which is based at EDINA: ‘a socio-technical infrastructure supporting deposit, curation and exposure of Open Access research literature’.
It aims to increase the cost effectiveness of repositories.
A range of deposit, reporting and policy tools is already in place.
Andrew Dorward suggested that gold OA may happen more quickly than originally expected; alongside the focus on repositories and green OA, RepNet also supports gold OA.
A soft launch of RepNet is taking place at Open Repositories 2012 in Edinburgh (July).
Transition from project to service is planned to take place in March 2013.
The work being carried out by the RIOXX Project is a key dependency for RepNet.
One of the RIOXX outputs is a set of metadata guidelines for repository managers.
Paul Walk of the Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN presented some of the guiding principles and options to be used in the guidelines.
Primary concerns are how to represent funders and project/grant (it was pointed out in the discussion that project and grant should not be conflated – they are different).
Options include using qualified Dublin Core, OpenAIRE 2.0 draft guidelines, or DOIs provide by CrossRef (‘FundRef’) – which could possibly link to GtR.
However it was stressed that these are interim guidelines some aspects are expected to be superseded by a CERIF-based approach.
(As noted above, OpenAIRE+ is also adopting parts of CERIF.)
A question to be resolved is who should maintain the metadata?
Information flows breakout session: repositories Breakouts A range of breakout groups covered topics including: managing impact data priority vocabularies and authority files challenges in managing institutional repositories and CRIS (eg further work is required on data exchange between CRISs and IRs) improving inter-project collaboration research data (a followup meeting on research data was proposed for later in the year) options for maintaining CERIF outputs from JISC projects (proposed that euroCRIS should be responsible for maintaining a schema (initially based on CIA outputs) which other projects could then feed into, on an ongoing basis) how to represent the relations between entities (projects, outputs etc) and funding streams (grants etc) CERIF for REF The REF breakout discussion resulted in agreement with HEFCE to develop a CERIF XML template for research groups, staff and outputs submission and to initiate a test pilot for submission (with KCL and the University of Bath – both to be approached).
A test pilot will allow valuable learning within a proper framework – import/export of CERIF XML is planned to start in September 2012.
It was suggested that a JISC statement was needed to provide a vision of where UK HE wants to be in relation to CERIF in three years time (eg will it just be accepted underlying technology?)
Information flows draft diagram (Josh Brown, JISC) Another breakout session focused on the information flows draft diagram introduced by Josh Brown.
Groups were asked to develop ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ diagrams for the four key areas in the draft: institutions, services, Research Councils and repositories.
The group outputs are available [18].
It is planned to synthesise this work to produce a more detailed picture reflecting community views.
Information flows breakout session: institutions Conclusion There is a lot happening in the RIM communities.
The CIA project blog commented that the workshop could easily have been extended to four days and still not have covered everything [19].
However many significant RIM-related initiatives were presented and discussed, with ways forward proposed.
There is a feeling of momentum, with new work building on projects successfully completed.
We are in a much better place than three years ago CERIF is now firmly embedded in UK HE and real progress is being made in exploiting the data interchange opportunities offered.
However there is still a large amount of data duplication.
As Josh Brown pointed out, the biggest challenge is RIM harmonisation across all areas there is a need to communicate and integrate all the work being carried out, also bearing in mind the different levels of maturity (eg in institutional repositories and CRIS).
The workshop therefore provides a step towards this goal.
References Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN, University of Bath: http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/ CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery in Bath, 13 February 2012 http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/2012/02/13/impressive-turnout-at-cerif-tutorial-and-uk-data-surgery-in-bath/ JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop: Delegate list http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/rim-cerif-2012-06/#delegate-list JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop: Programme: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/rim-cerif-2012-06/programme/ Brigitte Jörg and the CERIF Support Project, 27 March 2012 http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/2012/03/27/brigitte-joerg-and-the-cerif-support-project/ CERIF Task Group http://www.eurocris.org/Index.php?page=taskgroups&t=1 Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN: Adoption of CERIF in UK HEIs, 15 March 2012 http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/2012/03/15/adoption-of-cerif-in-uk-heis-report-just-published/ CRIS 2012 papers: http://www.eurocris.org/Index.php?page=CRIS%202012%20-%20Prague&t=1 Redesigning the higher education data and information landscape: Project report, June 2012 http://landscape.hesa.ac.uk/ Research Outputs System: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/ResearchOutcomesProject.aspx Research Outputs System (ROS) CERIF demo (M4V file format) http://researchoutcomes.rcuk.ac.uk/demo/ros_cerif_opt.m4v Gateway to Research http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/gtr.aspx Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN : Gateway to Research endorses CERIF, 21 June 2012 http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/2012/06/21/gateway-to-research-endorses-cerif/ Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth, December 2011 (NB: .pdf format) http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/i/11-1387-innovation-and-research-strategy-for-growth.pdf UKRISS poster at CRIS 2012, 18 June 2012  http://ukriss.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/ukriss-poster-at-cris-2012/ Project Snowball http://www.projectsnowball.info/ UK RepositoryNet+ : a socio-technical infrastructure supporting deposit, curation and exposure of Open Access research literature http://www.repositorynet.ac.uk/blog/ JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop: Day 2 Breakout Discussions Morning (11.30-12.30)  http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/rim-cerif-2012-06/programme/#day2am-breakouts CERIF in Action: RIM CERIF Workshop, Bristol 27-28th June 2012: A brief synopsis, 29 June 2012 http://cerifinaction.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/rim-cerif-workshop-bristol-27-28th-june-2012-a-brief-synopsis/ Author Details Rosemary Russell Research Officer Innovation Support Centre UKOLN University of Bath Email: r.russell@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/ Rosemary Russell is a Research Officer within the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN.
Her current work focuses on Research Information Management (RIM) and the provision of support and advice for the JISC RIM programme.
Rosemary participates in euroCRIS activities and is a member of the Best Practice Task Group.
She also has an interest in institutional repository management and the integration of repositories and CRIS.
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Motivations for the Development of a Web Resource Synchronisation Framework Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Motivations for the Development of a Web Resource Synchronisation Framework Buzz data software framework api html database portfolio rss xml atom portal archives metadata doi identifier namespace repositories eprints preservation oai-pmh cataloguing hypertext z39.50 rfc passwords cache aggregation provenance syndication uri srw dspace sru twitter ftp interoperability oai-ore url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Stuart Lewis, Richard Jones and Simeon Warner explain some of the motivations behind the development of the ResourceSync Framework.
This article describes the motivations behind the development of the ResourceSync Framework.
The Framework addresses the need to synchronise resources between Web sites.
Resources cover a wide spectrum of types, such as metadata, digital objects, Web pages, or data files.
There are many scenarios in which the ability to perform some form of synchronisation is required.
Examples include aggregators such as Europeana that want to harvest and aggregate collections of resources, or preservation services that wish to archive Web sites as they change.
Some of these use cases are described in this article, along with concrete examples of them in practice, together with issues that they may pose to the Framework as it is developed.
Background Interoperability lies at the heart of the Internet.
Without protocols, standards, and frameworks, the Internet would not and could not exist.
These standards are used to determine how clients and servers communicate with each other, how resources are transferred, and how they are described in order to support their use.
Each standard has been developed in response to a need for some form of resource handling or description.
Within the library, repository, and general Web resource world, there are a number of protocols and frameworks used to work with resources.
They include well-known standards such as: Transfer: HTTP [1]: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol FTP [2]: File Transfer Protocol SCP [3]: Secure Copy Metadata Harvesting: OAI-PMH [4]: Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Search: OpenSearch [5]: Search results in a syndication format Z39.50 [6]: Searching remote library databases SRU/SRW [7]: Search and Retrieve via URL or Web Service Discovery: RSS [8]: Rich Site Summary (often known as Really Simple Syndication) feed format Atom [9]: Syndication feed format Deposit: SWORD [10]: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit One requirement that spans several of these areas, yet is a distinct problem in its own right, is that of resource synchronisation.
We define resource synchronisation as the need to keep two or more collections of resources synchronised, or ‘in sync’: that is, additions, updates, and deletions from one collection are reflected in the other, so that, subject to any delay in synchronisation, they contain identical resources.
There are variations on this definition related to factors such as whether the whole or part of the collection needs to be synchronised, the number of sources or destinations that are kept synchronised, or the latency between changes occurring in the source collection and being reflected in the destination collection.
The process of defining these differences allows the gathering of requirements for a generalised Web resource synchronisation framework.
Terminology The use cases in this article are described using a number of conventions that are described below: Source: When two collections are being kept in sync, the source is the collection that is being copied.
Destination: The destination is where the source is copied into.
Synchronisation: The process of keeping the destination in sync with the source such that the destination has accurate copies of the resources at the source.
Mode of deployment: The fashion in which the combination of source and destination are configured.
For example this could be a typical pattern of one source syncing to one destination, many sources to a single destination, or one source to many destinations.
Push and Pull: When a resource is to be synchronised, there are two ways that the transfer can be initiated: the first is the source can push the content to the destination, and the second is that the destination can pull it from the source.
ResourceSync Background This article defines a series of use cases for Web resource synchronisation.
They are being used by the NISO and OAI ‘ResourceSync’ project.
The project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and JISC, aims to research, develop, prototype, test, and deploy mechanisms for the large-scale synchronisation of Web resources.
These use cases provide both the motivation for the development of a Web resource synchronisation framework, and the requirements that it must fulfil.
When developing anything new, be that a product, service, or framework, use cases [11] provide an easy method to think about ways in which that new development will be used.
When developing use cases, actors (the bodies involved) and actions are put together to describe the different behaviours or goals that must be supported.
The use cases below show different purposes for a Web synchronisation framework, and therefore help to define the requirements it must fulfil.
When evaluating the success of the new framework, it can be judged by whether it can fulfil all of the identified use cases.
Dimensions There are a number of dimensions that are useful in parameterising the use cases.
These dimensions vary between each use case, and the combination of the dimensions makes each use case unique in the requirements-gathering exercise for ResourceSync: Number of items: How many items there are to synchronise?
Rate of change of items: Do the items change (and therefore require syncing) relatively frequently or infrequently?
Types of change: What is the type of changes, for example the addition of new items, the modification of existing items, or deletions of old items?
Resource size(s): Are the resources large, medium, or small?
Access restrictions (to resource and/or change communications): Are there requirements to keep the resources protected by a username and password, or a similar method?
Network type (local, open Web, etc): Are the source and destination a local private network and therefore close to each other with fast transfer speeds, or at geographically distant locations on the Internet connected at varying connection speeds?
Data formats: What type of files or resources are being transferred?
Transfer protocols: What protocols are used to transfer the resources from the source to the destination?
Use Cases 16 use cases have been defined that are guiding the development of the ResourceSync Framework.
Each one is briefly described and is accompanied by a diagram showing the source of the resources, the destination of the synchronisation action, and a pictorial expression of the resource(s) being synchronised.
The diagrams were drawn during the first project technical meeting in Washington, DC, on 14 June 2012.
In order to explain the use cases, each has a description of how that case is unique, how it is typically deployed, some concrete examples of systems that need this requirement which they are already providing via an alternative method, and, if relevant, a list of issues that need to be considered when defining functionality to fulfil this particular use case.
1.
One-to-one Sync between Two Systems Two paired systems a Source and a Destination that are collections of resources.
The Destination must be kept up to date with the Source.
Figure 1: One-to-one sync between two systems Features of Use Case This is the most basic synchronisation use case, and deals with the all the essential features of ResourceSync: initial synchronisation, incremental update, and baseline audit to ensure the collections are indeed synchronised.
Mode of Deployment One Source, one Destination.
It is possible that the Source and Destination are formally aware of each other, but this is not always necessary.
Concrete Examples arXiv.org [12] mirrors.
The arXiv repository service hosted at Cornell University is mirrored to a number of geographically dispersed sites.
This provides both data redundancy (for disaster-recovery purposes) and speed of access via local mirrors.
2.
Aggregator (Many-to-one) A single Destination system that is synchronising from multiple Sources for the purposes of building an aggregation of their resources.
Figure 2: Aggregator (many-to-one) Features of Use Case In this case, a single system is attempting to represent the content from multiple systems, possibly in some kind of union catalogue (eg for cross-searching).
Mode of Deployment Multiple Sources, one Destination.
The Sources may not be formally aware that the Destination is synchronising their content if they are offering their content on the open Web for harvesting.
Concrete Examples OAISter [13] Europeana [14] OAISter and Europeana are aggregators of metadata and content.
They harvest them from many sources using public interfaces, and then offer the aggregated resources via their own search service.
Issues Resources that are duplicated across the Source systems (not necessarily within one Source) may result in duplicates in the Destination.
3.
Master Copy (One-to-many) Many Destinations synchronise from a single Source.
This is considered to be the most likely scenario for ResourceSync usage from the perspective of a Source.
Figure 3: Master copy (one-to-many) Features of Use Case There is a single Source that is providing resources to multiple Destinations, which will, therefore, be either mirrors or partial mirrors of that Source.
Mode of Deployment One Source, multiple Destinations.
The Source is unlikely to have any agreement with or be formally aware of all the Destinations.
Concrete Examples Many traditional institutional repositories are harvested in this way.
They offer their open content and metadata for harvesting and reuse.
4.
Selective Synchronisation The Source wishes to supply and/or advertise sub-sets of its full set of resources, to allow Destinations to synchronise with one or more of those sub-sets.
If the Destination wishes to synchronise selectively from the Source, the criteria for selection is that provided by the Source.
Figure 4: Selective synchronisation Features of Use Case It indicates that the Source is not just a large aggregation of resources, but that each of those resources may have properties or belong to sets or collections about which the Destination may be interested in knowing, prior to any synchronisation attempt.
Mode of Deployment One Source, advertising metadata to be used for selection, and any number of Destinations, each of which may wish to synchronise a different sub-set of the Source’s resources.
Concrete Examples To provide similar or equivalent functionality to OAI-PMH Set [15].
For example DSpace provides its content in ‘Collections’, which are logical divisions in the overall repository content.
Issues There are two ways that this could be presented to the Destination: As metadata associated with the full aggregation, so that filtering of resources can be performed at the Destination As an API, so that the Destination can request the sub-sets it requires from the Source An alternative approach would be to avoid support with a Source but instead present multiple Sources, one for each collection to be exposed.
In this way a Destination would select the appropriate Sources to synchronise with (which could have overlapping content).
5.
XML Metadata Harvesting / Identification The set of resources in the Source may include some that are metadata records for other resources in that Source.
The Destination may want to only synchronise the metadata records, but may also want the option in future to trace back to the other resource(s) that the metadata record describes.
Figure 5: XML Metadata Harvesting/Identification Features of Use Case It indicates that the Destination may care about what kind of resource a given resource is, and which other resources it is related to.
Mode of Deployment One Source with a mixture of metadata records and other resources, and any number of Destinations interested in synchronising metadata only.
Concrete Examples OAI-PMH is used to synchronise collections of XML datastreams that are identified by an item identifier, a metadataPrefix [16], and a datestamp.
6.
Statistics Collection A Service wishes to listen to change notifications from a Source, and keep a record of the changes that have taken place (perhaps including types of change, frequency, etc), and to make available statistics regarding the Source.
The Service does not, at any point, synchronise the resources itself.
Figure 6: Statistics collection Features of Use Case In this use case we are not so much interested in the change, as in the fact that a change has occurred.
This is a very simple use case, as it does not require any content synchronisation.
Mode of Deployment One Source providing change communication with sufficient metadata for the one Service listening to create the desired statistics.
Concrete Examples Sites such as the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) [17] and the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) [18] are already using OAI-PMH for similar purposes (eg providing resource counts).
7.
Large Data Files In some environments the resources to be synchronised may be very large (in the order of many gigabytes for research data systems).
Due to the load this may place on the consumer, and limits imposed by transfer protocols or file systems, they may require some specific information about the size of the resource in advance of the synchronisation taking place, or the option to synchronise only part of the resource.
Figure 7: Large data files Features of Use Case It deals not so much with the need for synchronisation as for the need to make consumers aware of what the implications of the synchronisation action will be, and/or to offer them appropriate synchronisation options (such as partial synchronisation of changed content using a tool such as diff).
Mode of Deployment One Source and one Destination exchanging large data files.
The Source may need to provide an indication of the size of the resource, any available retrieval/diff protocols, whether it is an interesting change (from a Destination perspective), when it was last modified, and fixity information.
It is likely that to use more specialist retrieval/diff protocols will mean that the Source and the Destination will need to be formally aware of each other.
Concrete Examples Research Data Management can require the movement of large files or packages of files over the network asynchronously from the usage or production of the data.
The DataFlow [19] Project at the University of Oxford is transferring zipped research data between a client (DataStage) and server (DataBank) environment using SWORDv2.
Issues We separate out the notion of providing hooks for the efficient update of large data files from the transfer methods themselves.
There are various complexities around providing alternative synchronisation options which are Out of Scope.
8.
Protected Resources / Access Control Some information systems keep their sensitive content hidden for a number of reasons.
However some require, for example, a separate public user interface to publish those materials that can be public.
The key to this use case is that the synchronisation is carried out over an authorised trust boundary.
Figure 8: Protected resources/access control Features of Use Case The publisher of changes is likely to be a private system, requiring a trusted or protected relationship with the synchronising downstream system.
Mode of Deployment One Source and one Destination, where there is likely to be a trusted one-to-one relationship between them.
The synchronisation will need to be able to expose resources which are not publicly accessible.
Concrete Examples CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) often manage and store information about the research outputs of an institution.
Some of these may be surfaced through a repository or research portal.
Whilst they often employ PUSH technologies, a PULL technology allowing synchronisation could be an alternative.
Legal deposit of digital published content (to a national library repository) would require a framework where only trusted Destinations could harvest the content.
Issues Successful interaction in the context of Web trust and security mechanisms is in scope.
Development of additional ResourceSync mechanisms is Out of Scope.
9.
Link Maintenance A resource on the Source has changed its identifier or has moved from its original URI to a new one.
The Destination does not need to re-sync, but it may need to update its references.
Figure 9: Link maintenance Features of Use Case No synchronisation of the physical resource needs to take place, but the Destination needs to be aware that a change has taken place, and to be able to update its references.
Mode of Deployment One Source which has moved some of its resources, and a Destination which has previously synchronised resources from the Source.
Concrete Examples Any Web-based system holding resources that moves resource identifiers internally.
Issues Is there a difference between a resource ‘move’ and a resource ‘delete followed by a (re-)create’?
Should we treat a move as a combination of a related deleteand-create?
10.
Migration / One-off Sync Sometimes a system will want to migrate all of its data to a newer environment as a one-off operation, prior to shutdown of the legacy system.
The use of a protocol like ResourceSync would be to alert the new system of the resources that it needs to import and then to provide the resources.
Figure 10: Migration / one-off sync Features of Use Case It is a one-off operation, and also may need to guarantee a prompt response from any service that is synchronising the legacy data, to ensure that migration takes place in a timely way prior to the shutdown of the legacy system.
Mode of Deployment One Source (the legacy system) and one Destination (the new system), which are formally aware of each other.
There are also likely specific rules that the new system would want to implement over the legacy system’s data to import them into a new structure, and it is unclear at this point whether there is a role for ResourceSync there or not.
Large-scale migration is usually down at least twice; first time for testing the new system, and a last and final full migration is done just before cutover.
The original system during the final migration is either down or read-only.
Parallel work on both the legacy system and the new would allow staged cutover.
Concrete Examples Any system migration which needs to maintain legacy data will have this kind of requirement; examples are numerous and unbound.
A concrete example might be an institution moving from an EPrints [20] repository to a DSpace [21] repository.
Issues Expecting systems outside the legacy/new system pairing (which might have synched with the now defunct legacy system) to understand that this operation has taken place is Out of Scope, unless a redirect at the protocol level is practical.
11.
Service Description A Destination has discovered a ResourceSync endpoint, and wants to know what the capacities/features/supported components of that endpoint are, as well as other relevant administrative information regarding the service.
Figure 11: Service description Features of Use Case This focuses on how a Destination learns about the Source’s features prior to engaging in any synchronisation activities.
Mode of Deployment One Source providing information about its service, and one Destination determining which features exposed by the Source it can take advantage of.
Concrete Examples A similar example is used in AtomPub [22] and SWORD that provide a Service Document that describes the capacities of the server.
Registries such as ROAR [17], OpenDOAR [18], could use such a description to populate their registry knowledge base.
Issues None 12.
Auto-discovery A user or user agent is at a Web site and wishes to discover any ResourceSync endpoints on behalf of the Destination which will then use them.
Figure 12: Auto-discovery Features of Use Case This is about how the ResourceSync service provided by a Source is discoverable from its normal Web site representation.
Mode of Deployment One Source, with a front-end or other interface that can direct the user or Destination server to the appropriate place to carry out synchronisation processes.
Concrete Examples There are lots of examples of auto-discovery on the Web, including: Host-Meta [23] robots.txt [24] sitemap [25] .wellknown [26] 13.
Discovery Layer / Directory It will be necessary for potential consumers of content to be able to find sources to synchronise from (assuming that the relationship between the client and server is not by prior arrangement).
This use case addresses the need to provide directories of potential Sources that support the ResourceSync protocol.
Figure 13: Discovery layer / directory Features of Use Case It is concerned not so much with the synchronisation of resources as with the discovery of Sources with which to be synchronised.
Mode of Deployment Many Sources being discoverable by a Destination, possibly via some kind of aggregator or directory service.
The Source must present enough information to allow the construction of such directories.
Concrete Examples In the domain of Open Access Repositories there are registries of systems (such as OpenDOAR [18], ROAR [17] and re3data [27]) that support the discovery of repositories, the kinds of content they hold, the API endpoints they have, and other information about the collection.
Issues Building a Directory itself is Out of Scope for the project.
14.
Pre/ Smart-caching A Destination synchronises all or a subset of resources from a Source in order to provide a cached copy.
Figure 14: Pre/ Smart-caching Features of Use Case Only a subset of the “operational” copies of the resources need to be synchronised, and they are not being permanently synchronised, only for the purposes of speeding up delivery.
Mode of Deployment One Source, providing the master copies of resources, and one Destination acting as a local cache of the resources in the Source.
Concrete Examples Content Delivery Networks (CDN) [28] which provide a global network of local caches or mirrors for the efficient and fast transfer of content.
Issues Usage statistics of the resources at the Source need to be accumulated from all cache destinations; however this is an issue for all cache use cases, not just for this project.
15.
Cache Invalidation An application that consumes data from one or more remote datasets uses cache that stores local copies of remote data.
These caches need to be invalidated when the remote data are changed.
That is, locally cached content is marked as invalidated if the resource changes in the Source.
Figure 15: Cache invalidation Features of Use Case This uses the change communication as a trigger for local behaviour changes, rather than strictly for synchronisation (although synchronisation may ensue, it is not the primary consequence) Mode of Deployment One Source, providing the master copies of resources, and one Destination acting as a local cache of the resources in the Source.
Concrete Examples DSNotify [29] Issues Notification (push) for low latency may be required.
Possible important notification types: Updated, Deleted, Expired 16.
Linked Data Triple Synchronisation The Source is or has a large triple-store, and the Destination does not want to synchronise the entire dataset whenever a triple in that store changes.
A dataset consumer wants to mirror or replicate (parts of) a linked dataset.
The periodically running synchronisation process needs to know which triples have changed at what time in order to perform efficient updates in the Destination dataset.
Figure 16: Linked data triple synchronisation Features of Use Case Effectively this means that the resolution of the identifiers available in the Source is more granular than the resolution that the Destination actually wants: only parts of a resource are being synchronised, not the whole resource.
Mode of Deployment One Source that is or contains a triple-store, and a Destination which wishes to keep up to date without transferring the whole dataset each time.
Concrete Examples Any triple store that needs to be synchronised, for example DBpedia, the structured data form of Wikipedia.
Issues This is a specific case of ‘diff’, at the level of the entire dataset unless portions of the triple-store are exposed as resources that can be separately synchronised.
Use Cases Judged Out of Scope The following use cases have been designated Out of Scope for an initial specification of ResourceSync, but they should be taken into account as the development goes on, to ensure that no avenues are closed off for future versions.
Reasons for being out of scope are given in the ‘issues’ section for each use case.
1.
Temporary Resources / TTL The resource will only be available for a known (by the Source) fixed amount of time.
There may be some systems that only hold content for a limited period of time before it is deleted, such as systems that are used for staging content in workflows.
The content that is announced via ResourceSync then might have a known time to live (TTL), before it is no longer available.
Figure 17: Temporary resources/TTL Features of Use Case It suggests that the resource in the change communication may only be available for a limited time, and so the Destination must synchronise in a timely manner.
Mode of Deployment One Source, which contains resources which will only be available for a fixed amount of time, and one Destination which is capable of responding sufficiently quickly.
Concrete Examples Twitter search results are often only available for a fixed length of time due to the complete mass of tweets being too large to all be fully indexed.
Any system which offers support to a workflow, and expects the content to move on in time (such as a staging repository), or other environments which only retain information for a short period of time.
2.
Destination-defined Selective Sync The Destination wants to synchronise with a sub-set of the total set of resources held by the Source, and wants to provide a set of query parameters to the Source in order to be given a set of change communications which meet those criteria.
Destination-defined Selective Sync Features of Use Case It places the onus on the Source to provide an API that has the ability to provide filtering on queries sent by the Destination.
Mode of Deployment One Source that supports Destination-defined queries, one Destination which wants to query for sub-sets of the Source’s resources.
Concrete Examples OAI-PMH Sets are similar, except they are usually defined by the Source, not the Destination.
Issues This has significant overlap with the notion of an interoperable search facility.
It would rely on agreed information about resources being indexed.
3.
Complex Web Objects Sometimes it will be necessary to synchronise not only atomic resources but larger complex resources (such as those represented by an ORE [30] Resource Map).
While resource maps themselves could be synchronised like atomic resources, the synchronisation may require referenced resources to also be synchronised.
Furthermore, if synchronising such resources results in their URIs being translated into the namespace of the target system, then the resource map being synchronised may need to be rewritten as it is synchronised.
Some composite objects may also need to be transferred atomically.
Figure 19: Complex Web objects Features of Use Case It suggests that the synchronisation operation is both a) not a strict copy, as some parts of the synchronised resource may need to be localised in the target system, and b) not limited to synchronising just the primary resource but also resources which it references.
Mode of Deployment One or more Sources providing composite objects which may span across multiple sources, and one Destination wishing to synchronise those resources.
Concrete Examples This scenario refers to any resource that references other resources in order to provide their full expression.
Examples would include ORE Resource Maps, which describe an aggregated set of resources to be viewed as a whole; an HTML page which references images and other embedded content; or a SWORD Statement which references its various packaged resources.
Issues How would it handle synchronisation recursion depth for resource references?
How to handle cross-site resources?
4.
Reuse Conditions of Content Some content will have reuse conditions which are required to ensure that the synchronised resource is not inappropriately passed on by the Destination to other Destinations.
Figure 20: Reuse conditions of content Features of Use Case Some resources have metadata associated with them that is specifically to do with the rules by which they should be synchronised.
Mode of Deployment One Source with licensed content, one Destination.
Concrete Examples Licensed content.
Embargoed content with release conditions.
Private->Private-Public synchronisation chains where the first sync may be between two private systems; however future downstream synchronisations then make the resources openly available.
Issues This is a complex topic for which only partial solutions in limited domains currently exist.
5.
Intra-application Event Notification Software applications, for example traditional institutional repositories are often made up of discrete components in a Service Oriented Architecture [31] style allowing the platform to be installed on a single server, or to scale-out and be split across multiple servers.
Applications such as this often have change event mechanisms to inform other components when resources have changed and need to be propagated.
If applications such as this will be developing and deploying ResourceSync, this could replace some of the intra-application communication with a standardised protocol, allowing more interoperability between components from different platforms.
Figure 21: Intra-application event notification Features of Use Case ResourceSync is being used to replace internal change event notification systems as well as providing an outward-facing change event publisher.
Mode of Deployment One publisher of changes, only a few internal consumers of those changes, even though it is likely there are external consumers of the same change notification system (although would the internal version contain different / more information?).
A low level of latency would be required, and should be possible due to the natural inter-relatedness of the components.
Concrete Examples The search indexers used in DSpace receive event notifications when resources have changed, so that they can re-index them (and create / delete events for adding / deleting resources from the index).
Issues ResourceSync may be useful within applications but the focus of this project is the Web.
Applications using ResourceSync internally may want to namespace or extend event types.
6.
Cyclic Synchronisation Some systems require synchronisation in both directions from a source to a destination, and then back again.
These may be chained together in several steps.
For example: A -> B -> C -> A How do we prevent unstoppable cycles of synchronisation?
Figure 22: Cyclic synchronisation Features of Use Case The systems involved will need to track identifiers and versions of records as they move through the synchronisation chain to ensure that change events do not constantly cycle around the system.
Furthermore, parallel updates need to be flagged and notified on.
Mode of Deployment A tree of nodes, with changes being made at the bottom by a large number of nodes, propagating up the tree to fewer and fewer nodes, which then propagate back down to larger numbers of nodes.
Concrete Examples Library catalogue records often sync up to union catalogues and beyond (perhaps local to regional to national to international).
Changes are made at the local level, and can then propagate up to other systems.
Changes also propagate down from higher union catalogues.
Issues How to know that two Web resources are the same?
This could be a provenance issue.
But equally it might just be the fact that the content has changed (otherwise the fixity information will be the same).
Some advice needs to be given to implementers, even though this is considered Out of Scope.
Conclusions This article has described the purpose of the ResourceSync Framework that is currently under development.
In particular it has described both the use cases that will guide the development, but also the purpose of use cases in the development process.
The variety of use cases shows that the ResourceSync Framework will be able to fulfil many different uses, from transferring large datasets in a laboratory, to populating Web archives of frequently changing Web sites; from providing mirrors of Web sites, to performing wholesale migrations of resources from old to new sites.
When the Framework is fully developed, this list of use cases, together with their associated issues for consideration, can be used as a checklist to ensure that the Framework supports all of the functions and modes that it needs to.
Acknowledgements The ResourceSync team gratefully recognises the support of the Sloan Foundation for its support of the project.
In addition the team members acknowledge the generous support of JISC in funding the participation of several UK members to the technical committee of ResourceSync.
This set of use cases was initially formed by the authors of this article, but was subsequently developed and completed by the whole project team.
The core project team consists of: Los Alamos National Laboratory and The Open Archives Initiative: Martin Klein, Robert Sanderson, Herbert Van de Sompel Cornell University and The Open Archives Initiative: Berhard Haslehofer, Simeon Warner NISO: Todd Carpenter, Nettie Lagace, Peter Murray Old Dominion University and The Open Archives Initiative: Michael L. Nelson University of Michigan and The Open Archives Initiative: Carl Lagoze The technical group consists of: Manuel Bernhardt, Delving B.V. Kevin Ford, Library of Congress Richard Jones, Cottage Labs Graham Klyne, University of Oxford Stuart Lewis, University of Edinburgh David Rosenthal, LOCKSS Christian Sadilek, Red Hat Shlomo Sanders, Ex Libris Inc. Sjoerd Siebinga, Delving B.V. Ed Summers, Library of Congress Paul Walk, UKOLN Jeff Young, OCLC References Hypertext Transfer Protocol, RFC 2616 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt File Transfer Protocol, RFC 959 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc959.txt Secure Copy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_copy Open Archives Initative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html OpenSearch http://www.opensearch.org/ Z39.50 http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/Z39-50-2003.pdf SRU/SRW http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS The Atom syndication format, RFC 4287 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) http://swordapp.org/ Use cases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_case arXiv.org http://arxiv.org/ The OAIster database http://www.oclc.org/oaister/ Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/ OAI-PMH sets http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#Set OAI-PMH metadataPrefix http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#MetadataNamespaces Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) http://roar.eprints.org/ Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) http://www.opendoar.org/ DataFlow Project http://www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk/ EPrints repository platform http://www.eprints.org/software/ DSpace repository platform http://www.dspace.org/ The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), RFC 5023 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023 Web Host Metadata, RFC 6415 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6415 About robots.txt http://www.robotstxt.org/ Sitemaps.org http://www.sitemaps.org/ Defining Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers, RFC 5785 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785 Registry of Research Data Repositories http://www.re3data.org/ Content delivery network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network Popitsch, N., Haslhofer, B., “DSNotify – A solution for event detection and link maintenance in dynamic datasets”, Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 9 (3), September 20122 DOI:10.1016/j.websem.2011.05.002 ORE Specifications and User Guides http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc Service-oriented architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture Author Details Stuart Lewis Head of Digital Library University of Edinburgh Email: stuart.lewis@ed.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ed.ac.uk/ Stuart Lewis is Head of Digital Library Services at the University of Edinburgh where he is currently responsible for a service portfolio including acquisitions, metadata, e-resources, digital library development, information systems, repositories, and research publications.
He has worked with open repositories in various roles over the past six years and has a particular interest in interoperability issues.
He is the Community Manager of the SWORD v2 Project, which continues to develop the SWORD repository deposit standard.
Prior to working at Edinburgh, Stuart held the position of Digital Development Manager at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and before that led the Web Applications and Repository Projects Team at Aberystwyth University.
Richard Jones Founder Cottage Labs Email: richard@cottagelabs.com Web site: http://www.cottagelabs.com/ Richard Jones has been working in Open Source and in/around Higher Education for over a decade.
He is a long-term contributor to open source software, and in particular the DSpace repository platform.
He is also an advocate of Open Access, and has written numerous articles on the subject, as well as co-authoring a book on a related topic.
He has worked for a number of large HE institutions over the years, including the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bergen and Imperial College London.
Subsequently he moved out of HE and first into commercial research and development (at HP Labs and Symplectic), and then on ultimately to founding Cottage Labs.
Simeon Warner Director of the Repositories Group Cornell University Library Email: simeon.warner@cornell.edu Web site: http://www.cornell.edu/ Simeon Warner is Director of the Repositories Group at Cornell University Library.
Current projects include development of an archival repository, the arXiv e-print archive , and Project Euclid .
He was one of the developers of arXiv and his research interests include Web information systems, interoperability, plagiarism detection, and open-access scholarly publishing.
He has been actively involved with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) since its inception and was one of the authors of the OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE specifications.
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Implementing Kuali OLE at SOAS Library Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Implementing Kuali OLE at SOAS Library Citation BibTex RIS Simon Barron describes the organisational and technical implementation details of Kuali OLE, an open source library management system, in the library of SOAS, University of London.
1.0: Background In April 2015, SOAS Library implemented an open-source, next-generation library management system.
It is the third library in the world to implement Kuali OLE and the first in Europe.
During the 9-month implementation cycle, the project team faced challenges in all areas: functional challenges related to the business's unique library processes and technical challenges related to IT, infrastructure, and system development.
The OLE project at SOAS Library required extensive collaboration between library teams and IT teams: more so than a project led by a vendor or a private-sector company.
This article will demonstrate how innovation in the information sector requires a blend of library and IT skills.
It should also help others to plan large-scale system implementations particularly of open-source systems.
1.1: Kuali OLE OLE (Open Library Environment) is a next-generation, library management system from the Kuali Foundation, a non-profit corporation that develops open-source software for Higher Education.
OLE is the foundation's first piece of library software and was implemented by two early adopters in the USA in August 2014: The University of Chicago Library (Kuali, 2014a) and Lehigh University Library (Kuali, 2014b).
Along with Koha and Evergreen, OLE is one of the few open-source library management systems on the market (1).
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is becoming more widely used in libraries as an alternative to expensive proprietary software provided by large corporate vendors.
FOSS generally offers greater ownership over the product, more opportunities for bespoke customisation, and crucially allows libraries to keep their money in their mission (2) by spending it on developing services rather than paying for expensive and exploitative software licenses from proprietary vendors.
At the second Kuali Days UK event, John Robinson (2014), Director of SOAS Library, explained the moral imperative for libraries to protect their metadata from corporate interests and how FOSS allows freer access to metadata than a big supplier keeping it in a data centre as a 'cloud-hosted' solution.
Preater (2012) points out that FOSS is already widely used in libraries since it is embedded in proprietary software: Apache Solr and Lucene are both widely used in next-gen search and discovery engines; other systems make use of PostgreSQL, Apache Tomcat, and the Apache http server.
Preater goes on to argue that “while proprietary software suppliers enjoy the benefits of OSS themselves they’re not so keen on passing those freedoms onto us, libraries that buy their software and support services.” Kuali OLE is developed with a collaborative and open approach emphasising a blend of library and IT.
There is a Project Board comprised of library directors and thought leaders and a Functional Council comprised of academic librarians; on the other side is a Technical Council comprised of library systems experts and HTC Global Services, the company developing the codebase.
Each institution contributing to OLE assigns staff to the Functional Council and the Technical Council to make their voice heard on both library-specific and technical issues.
The councils work together, rely on each others expertise, and in so doing have designed software that is made by librarians for libraries.
1.2: SOAS The formation of the Bloomsbury Library Management System consortium and its decision-in-principle to adopt OLE are covered in detail elsewhere (3).
To summarise: in 2011 staff from a number of academic libraries in the Bloomsbury area of London came together to discuss their shared need for new, next-gen library management systems.
After thorough research and horizon-scanning looking at proprietary systems and open-source systems, the group made a decision-in-principle to adopt OLE as a shared service working together for hosting and support.
Over time, partners fell away and SOAS Library pressed ahead.
SOAS' resilience on the OLE project is partly due to the organisation's long-standing ethical roots.
SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, a college of the University of London) has a tradition of innovative and radical approaches to HE informed by a strong moral core: the school has a particularly politically active student population; trade unions are very active at SOAS ensuring that workers have a say in decision-making; SOAS recently announced its intention to become the first university in London to fully divest from fossil fuels (4).
SOAS Library has a higher risk-appetite than other Bloomsbury partners and was therefore more willing to pursue an innovative open-source solution.
1.2.1: FOSS at SOAS OLE is the latest in a series of FOSS products implemented at SOAS Library.
It implemented VuFind (5) as its library catalogue and discovery interface in summer 2014.
The library is also in the process of adopting SobekCM (6) as digital repository software for digitisation projects.
Although many FOSS systems are free as in beer (Stallman, 2011) and result in cost-savings, this was not the case for OLE.
Implementing OLE rather than a vendor system may result in long-term savings but this was not the main impetus for SOAS: “... a choice between an open-source or vendor-based, proprietary solution is not about saving money.
As consortium partners we made a decision early-on that our project is designed to obtain better outcomes for the same levels of expenditure, through a shared-service approach and an open mind about the new possibilities which modern technologies offer.
We are also clear that a significant capital investment will be required to realise our vision.” (Robinson, 2012).
SOAS has fewer library systems staff than the previous two OLE implementers and so contracted HTC Global Services – a Kuali Commercial Affiliate and member of the OLE Project Board – to provide development, support, and integration services (7).
The internal project team started with a Project Manager who pushed the project through the politics of the University of London and took it from a concept to a reality.
A Business Analyst and Analyst Programmer were also recruited alongside additional staff resource from other IT teams, library staff, and a Project Board of library and IT managers.
“Too often, IT departments and information services are separated and even in competition for money, staff or responsibility over systems.” (Schneider and Barron, 2015, p. 55).
The challenges that the project team faced functional challenges and technical challenges highlight the extent to which this project required IT and information services to work together blending strong technical skills with strong library skills.
The OLE project at SOAS was a project driven by librarian-IT hybrids (Barron, 2013).
2.0: Functional challenges Functional challenges are those related to the ‘business’ side of the implementation: related to the workings of the library and the university.
With the exception of the Analyst Programmer, the project team did not have a background in librarianship.
Team members had previously worked on systems implementations in the private sector and faced steep learning curves in understanding library working practices and library-specific jargon, metadata, and protocols.
2.1: Millennium OLE at SOAS is a replacement for the legacy library management system, Millennium.
Millennium is a Java-based proprietary library management system from Innovative Interfaces Inc. (or III).
The system had been in place at SOAS since 1999 (Robinson, 2015) and many staff members had never used any other library management system.
As often happens under long-running systems, the system had come to define the library’s workflows and processes.
With FOSS the system can be changed to meet local requirements but with proprietary software the library needs to change its processes to meet the demands of inflexible systems.
At SOAS, circulation staff did things a certain way because the system demanded it and membership was defined a certain way because of the constraints of the system.
Even the metadata structure for all records primarily bibliographic but also item records, serial records, and patron records had come to be defined not by the structure of MARC or the professional standards of AACR2 or RDA but by Millennium’s database structure.
Over 16 years, processes and structures had become so embedded into the workflows of the library that staff no longer saw them as constraints of the system but as the only way to work.
2.1.1: New ways of working Library systems change is an opportunity for rethinking outdated and inefficient workflows and processes.
The open-source nature of OLE meant that the staff had more opportunity to refine the system as well as their processes to fit an ideal.
In the early stages of implementation, thorough business analysis and process mapping defined and mapped the workflows at SOAS Library.
One example of how OLE led to new ways of working was cataloguing practice.
Cataloguing at SOAS used Millennium’s built-in MARC editor: downloading records from a collaborative database using Millennium’s Z39.50 connector and then editing the record directly in the LMS.
OLE was not designed for that.
Although it has a built-in MARC editor, the software is better equipped for the practice of downloading MARC files outside the LMS, editing them in separate software like OCLC Connexion or MarcEdit, and then batch importing them into the LMS.
This is a cataloguing practice more prevalent in the USA than in the UK.
OLE forced the cataloguing staff at SOAS to think of MARC records outside the confines of the LMS: as discrete files and records rather than as part of a single database held solely within Millennium.
The project provided the opportunity for them to develop their professional skills, learn new software like MarcEdit, and rethink their approach to bibliographic cataloguing.
They also learned the processes of batch importing and creating profile tables for data import skills previously confined solely to the Systems Librarian.
By thinking outside the confines of the pre-existing system, the staff rethought their work, approached processes in a new way, and developed themselves.
2.2: User engagement Open-source system implementation requires more engagement from end-users than implementation of a proprietary system.
Users have more control over how the software works and so engaged users can steer development to meet their unique requirements.
Library staff need to be involved so that, prior to go-live, they can make sure that the system meets their operational needs.
OLE’s community-led development is guided by the engagement of library staff from all libraries in the partnership.
Project groups hold regular meetings using WebEx, communicate using Skype, and attend face-to-face workshops in the USA.
The development roadmap is defined in shared Google Drive documents, documentation is collaboratively written in a Confluence wiki (8), and bugs, issues, and features for development are captured in a Jira issue tracker (9).
SMEs (subject matter experts) from each area of library services (cataloguing, circulation, acquisitions, etc.)
also represent the library at SME meetings on WebEx.
Keeping track of these meetings and ensuring the library has a consistent voice is a lot of work and requires contributions from staff across the library.
The library staff at SOAS Library had never previously been involved in a large-scale system implementation.
Staff were not used to working on community-led systems projects, were not used to software testing, were unfamiliar with PRINCE2 project management methodology, and, in some cases, were unwilling or unable to stop using the legacy LMS.
2.2.1: Software development in the library Particularly for early adopters, FOSS needs more testing and development than proprietary software.
OLE is developed using an Agile approach (10) which arguably required more user testing than the traditional waterfall model for software development.
After each patch, we performed regression testing and user-acceptance testing.
After each enhancement, we checked the new functionality and checked that it didn’t break existing functionality.
After every database load, we checked for data integrity issues and ensured that the data matched our expectations.
Since we wanted wide staff input from the library, this meant encouraging a rigorous and professional software development from users with library backgrounds: staff with no prior experience of software testing or development.
Software testing is a labour-intensive process and we struggled to get buy-in from staff used to proprietary software working ‘right out of the box’.
When preoccupied with the day-to-day work of operational library services, staff found it difficult to make time for rigorous testing.
To overcome this, the project team ran a beta test of OLE’s ‘Describe’ module (the cataloguing module) from December 2014 to February 2015.
This allowed users to get used to the system and to naturally discover bugs and issues.
The beta was partially successful in that cataloguers got to the know the system before go-live and performed on-the-job testing but, due to workloads, several users did not work on the beta until the last couple of days when they rushed to finish their assigned work.
A sudden spike in concurrent users led to the performance issues outlined in Section 3.2.
It also meant we were less able to respond to bugs and issues because they were reported late in the development process.
2.2.2: Working with staff For some staff, the control that FOSS provides was not worth the inconvenience of the extra work.
This kind of resistance requires firm direction from management and leaders guiding the project.
Other staff had a conservative attitude to change and struggled to adjust their existing ways of working.
Again this required strong leadership from the top in order to bring all levels of library staff along on the same journey.
The levels of user engagement required for large-scale, open-source implementation should not be underestimated.
User expectations need to be managed and users must be engaged in the extra work that FOSS requires.
Staff resistance valid or otherwise can make a difficult project impossible unless carefully acknowledged and addressed.
“It is perfectly clear that large-scale modernist schemes of imperative coordination can, for certain purposes, be the most efficient, equitable, and satisfactory solution… Where such schemes run into trouble... is when they encounter a recalcitrant nature, the complexity of which they only poorly comprehend, or when they encounter a recalcitrant human nature, the complexity of which they also poorly comprehend.” (Scott, 2012, pp.
36-37) 3.0: Technical challenges Technical challenges are those related to the OLE software itself, to the infrastructure of SOAS’ library systems, and to making the system operational.
With a small project team, the project relied on technical expertise in the SOAS IT teams and on HTC as external contractors.
3.0.1: System structure OLE is a Java application that runs on Apache Tomcat using web application deployment (11).
The program runs as a web application with two WAR files: the OLEFS (Financial Services) application which handles all circulation and acquisitions features and the DocStore which handles the retrieval of data from the database.
The DocStore uses an Apache Solr search engine and SolrMarc indexer to power its internal search and browse functions for bibliographic, holdings, and item data.
All data is held in a MySQL or Oracle database.
When a user performs a function in the web application, OLEFS will run a query on the database to check and update it: for example, if a user borrows an item, the application will run queries to update the item table and the loans table to update item status, current borrower, due date, checked-out date, etc.
These queries are all logged in Tomcat’s catalina.out file.
In contrast to proprietary systems, transactions and their effect on the database are simple and transparent.
The core of SOAS’ infrastructure are three virtual servers for the OLE application and database: dev server, UAT (user acceptance testing) server, and live server.
SOAS uses CentOS 6.5 as the Linux operating system (a free-as-in-beer Red Hat Enterprise fork offering the robustness of Red Hat without the cost) and MySQL for the underlying database.
Library systems are a small network within the larger enterprise-level network.
SOAS Library’s systems comprised six virtual servers for VuFind, the public-facing catalogue and discovery layer (two versions one linked to OLE and one to Millennium each with dev, UAT, and live); a virtual server for Sentry Isis (12); a virtual server for Confluence knowledge management and wiki software; and five desktop PCs running 3M self-service software (13).
This new library systems network also required links to other university systems: online fines payment; Identity Vault for student records; Shibboleth for authentication; etc.
3.1: SIP2 The SIP2 server is a representative challenge faced in systems integration.
SIP2 is the protocol for communication between LMS and 3M self-service machines (14).
Neither Chicago nor Lehigh had required SIP2 functionality in OLE and so SOAS had to lead on the development of this feature.
HTC wrote an open-source SIP2 server from scratch to run on the OLE server.
This feature highlights the difficulties of working internationally on a software implementation.
HTC’s developers were in Chennai, India with no access to SOAS’ 3M machines in London, UK and so the project team had to test on the actual machines for every code change that HTC made.
This required strong and precise communication using every tool available: email, Skype, shared online drives.
As of writing, the SIP2 server on OLE performs all necessary functions including loans, returns, and renews.
However there are noticeable performance issues compared to the SIP2 server on Millennium: response times are poor and bad error-handling causes machines to hang whenever OLE generates an error.
This puts more pressure on circulation staff to do manual circulation and to help users use the machines.
The SIP2 code needs to be cleaned up, the circulation rules in OLE need to be refined, and, ideally, the SIP2 code should run on a dedicated separate server.
3.2: Performance issues Every early adopter of OLE underestimated the hardware required to run the software.
After Chicago went live, they were restarting the application regularly during the working day because it kept crashing.
The SOAS Project Manager was aware of this and recommended higher-spec hardware than we predicted we would need.
This still underestimated the hardware.
While conducting training with 20+ concurrent users or at the end of the beta (Section 2.2.1) when staff scrambled to finish work, the software would run out of allocated Java memory and crash requiring a manual restart.
With lots of users, response times for basic functions like loans and returns were also slow.
OLE provides analytics on server performance and application performance through JavaMelody code.
Using JavaMelody and htop, we monitored performance in real-time to diagnose performance issues.
We iteratively increased the hardware spec on the servers and tested performance by running CPU-intensive tasks (batch exports, bulk renewals, wildcard searches, etc.).
By go-live, we had an optimum server specification that didn’t crash with concurrent users: 8-cores, 64GB RAM, and two hard-drive partitions of 32GB for boot and 128GB for the application.
Crucially we also increased the RAM allocated to Java for running Tomcat: from 3GB to 16GB.
With 3GB, Java’s ongoing memory would quickly fill with ongoing threads and slow to a crawl.
16GB proved to be ample memory for production use.
After go-live and as of writing, the live OLE application has not crashed.
The application is automatically restarted at midnight to clear hanging threads and free up memory.
In the future, SOAS plans to improves to performance further by separating the application and the database onto separate servers.
3.3: Metadata Metadata is the core of a library management system.
Since one of the main drivers of the OLE project was maintaining control of our data rather than giving it to a vendor, we had to ensure metadata was carefully handled to meet SOAS’ unique requirements.
3.3.1: Internationalisation As the first library outside the USA to implement OLE, SOAS was the first to look at internationalisation.
The software had to get rid of hard-coded US-based values and formats for dates, currency, phrases like ‘Forgive fines’, etc.
and replace them with customisable parameters.
This was necessary for operations at SOAS and essential for OLE to expand its market outside ot the USA.
SOAS pushed for internationalisation at the Functional and Technical Councils ensuring that Kuali kept it as a priority.
3.3.2: Unicode SOAS’ unique collections required accurate handling of non-Roman characters in metadata.
SOAS has a focus on Eastern and Middle-Eastern languages which meant that OLE had to handle languages in non-Roman scripts from Arabic and Farsi to Thai and Chinese.
The VuFind catalogue was already optimised for display and search in non-Roman scripts but the underlying OLE database also had to handle the full range of Unicode characters.
The University of Chicago has extensive Oriental collections and had already discovered that the MySQL database needed to be set to use the utf8mb4 character set rather than the standard utf8 set.
utf8mb4 uses four bytes per character and supports more complex supplemental character than utf8.
As well as this, we had to take care exporting data from Millennium and importing it to OLE to ensure that the process didn’t strip unique characters.
Innovative upgraded our export tables to export in UTF8 and we performed thorough testing in OLE after every data import to ensure vernacular languages were preserved.
3.3.3: Clean-up As mentioned in Section 2.1, Millennium had not only defined the workflows at SOAS Library but determined the metadata structure as well.
Cataloguing practices changed over the years but old or legacy records were not updated for parity which meant that, taken as a whole, the bibliographic database was riddled with inconsistencies: fields other than 880’s used for vernacular scripts; 900 fields used all manner of junk data; barcodes entered into item records inconsistently; no consistent practice for notes fields in patron or item records.
The cataloguers and the project team did metadata clean-up in Millennium before import into OLE.
Iterative testing on data loading into OLE refined the process to ensure that data came across correctly.
Classmarks present an illustrative example of the customisation required (15).
SOAS’ practice was to use the 082 field in the Marc record for classmarks where a bib record had one item.
Subsequent items added to that bib had classmarks encoded in the item record (so the first item had an empty classmark field and picked its classmark up from the 082).
Millennium handled this natively, assigning the 082 classmark to whichever item had been first.
Every item record with an empty classmark field in Millennium had an empty classmark in OLE.
HTC had to adjust their import logic to copy the 082 field from the linked bib to any item with an empty classmark field.
The metadata clean-up at SOAS was more extensive than expected.
Even after go-live, errors in the database had to be fixed using MySQL update queries.
Metadata clean-up was a case where technical staff communicated extensively with library staff to understand unique cataloguing practices.
Library staff had to take ownership of their metadata and better understand the new system’s data structure.
4.0: Conclusion Large-scale open-source implementation is challenging.
FOSS requires a trade-off of convenience for control.
Compared to proprietary software, FOSS offers more control and greater ownership: “...if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” (Doctorow, 2010) FOSS can be opened, code can be tinkered with, it can be customised and changed.
The user is free (as-in-freedom).
The downside is that FOSS requires more time, more skills, and more commitment.
Open-source software can be buggy, complicated, and less slick than a well-rounded commercial product.
For many institutions, it is simply easier and more convenient to spend money on a proprietary system.
SOAS Library valued control and freedom over convenience.
Thanks to the long-term vision of management and thanks to the work of a small project team, SOAS Library went live with Kuali OLE on schedule.
It now has full control over its own data and the ability to customise both systems and workflows to optimise its service.
Open is the shape of things to come.
Open-source library systems implementations require a unique combination of library skills and IT skills whether through collaboration between library teams and IT teams or in the work of specialised librarian-IT hybrids equally comfortable with library and IT (Schneider and Barron, 2015, p. 49).
An international systems project requiring such a diverse range of skills is challenging.
But facing challenges is the route to innovation.
As the third library in the world to implement an open-source next-generation library management system, SOAS Library points the way towards the future of library systems.
5.0: Acknowledgements Acknowledgements to the extremely dedicated past and present members of the OLE project team: Amirun Ali (Senior Analyst Programmer), Anne Clarke (Business Analyst), Lina Lakhia (Project Manager), and Claudia Mendias (Business Analyst).
Thanks to Liz Maggs (Corporate Systems Manager) and John Robinson (Director of Library and Information Services) for their management and leadership.
Special thanks to Sharon Penfold (Project Manager) without whose hard work and dedication SOAS could never have implemented OLE and without whom I would not have been involved with the project.
This article is an expression of the opinions of Simon Barron and not those of SOAS, the University of London, the Kuali Foundation, or the OLE project team at SOAS.
6.0: Notes (1) Kuali OLE is licensed under the Educational Community License Version 2.0 (ECL-2.0).
The source code is open and freely available at https://www.kuali.org/download/ole (2) The words of the Kuali Foundation's slogan: http://www.kuali.org/choice (3) See the Bloomsbury Library Management System blog: http://www.blms.ac.uk (4) See SOAS press release here: http://www.soas.ac.uk/news/newsitem101976.html (5) VuFind is developed by Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).
SOAS Library’s VuFind library catalogue is available here: https://library.soas.ac.uk/ (6) SobekCM is developed by University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Library and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).
(7) Particular acknowledgement to Srini Induri and Giri Sankar of HTC Global Services for their extraordinarily dedicated work.
(8) As well as the Kuali wiki, Confluence from Atlassian was used to document everything on the BLMS project including contracts, procurement information, implementation documentation, and systems guides.
(9) Jira from Atlassian is an issue and project tracking web application used by OLE and other Kuali projects.
(10) Agile is a software development approach that emphasises coding ‘sprints’: bursts of coding and continuous development interspersed with iterative testing and documentation.
See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development (11) For more information on Apache Tomcat web application deployment, see https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/deployer-howto.html (12) Sentry Isis access control software from Telepen controls the library turnstiles and patron blocks.
(13) Self-service hardware and software from 3M is the main way for library users to loan, return, and renew items.
(14) More information than you require on the 3M Standard Interchange Protocol version 2.00 is available in 3M’s lengthy documentation: http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/355361O/sip2-protocol.pdf (15) And internationalisation: ‘classmarks’ are referred to as ‘call numbers’ throughout OLE.
7.0: Bibliography Barron, S., 2013.
‘Rise of the cyborgs: the growth of librarian-IT hybrids’ delivered at Umbrella 2013 in Manchester, UK, 2013-07-03 <http://www.cilip.org.uk/sites/default/files/Beyond%20Information%20Matters%20-%20Simon%20Barron.pdf> Doctorow, C., 2010.
‘Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either).’ Boing Boing, 2010-04-02 <http://boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-yo.html> Kuali, 2014a.
‘University of Chicago Launches Kuali OLE and New Catalog’ on Kuali Foundation website, 2014-08-21 <https://www.kuali.org/news/2014/08/21/university-chicago-launches-kuali-ole-and-new-catalog> Kuali, 2014b.
‘Lehigh University Launches New Open-Source Library Environment’ on Kuali Foundation website, 2014-08-19 <http://www.kuali.org/news/2014/08/19/lehigh-university-launches-new-open-source-library-environment> Preater, A., 2012.
‘Free and Open Source Software and distributed innovation’ on Ginformation Systems blog, 2012-12-01 <http://www.preater.com/2012/12/01/free-and-open-source-software-and-distributed-innovation/> Robinson, J., 2012.
‘We scanned the horizon and found something interesting’ on Bloomsbury Library Management System blog, 2012-12-10 <http://www.blms.ac.uk/scanning-the-horizon/> Robinson, J., 2014.
‘UK View On the Implementation of Kuali Products’ delivered at Kuali Days UK in London, UK, 2014-06-19 <http://lanyrd.com/2014/kduk14/sdbdxg/> Robinson, J., 2015.
‘Library System Change’ at SOAS Library website, 2015-05-01 <https://www.soas.ac.uk/library/lib-sys-change/> Schneider, L., and Barron, S., 2015.
‘The hybrid librarian-IT expert’ in Schopflin, K., 2015.
A handbook for corporate information professionals, London: Facet Publishing, pp.
45-56.
Stallman, R., 2011.
‘What is free software?’ on GNU Operating System website, <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html> Scott, J. C., 2012.
Two cheers for anarchism: six easy pieces on autonomy, dignity, and meaningful work and play.
Woodstock: Princeton University press.
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Improving Evaluation of Resources through Injected Feedback Surveys Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Improving Evaluation of Resources through Injected Feedback Surveys Buzz data software framework api html apache infrastructure metadata css cataloguing visualisation uri php authentication url research standards jquery sushi Citation BibTex RIS Terry Reese suggests a novel approach for providing intercept survey functionality for librarians looking to simplify the gathering of user feedback for library-provided materials.
Assessment of electronic resources has long proven a difficult challenge for librarians when looking to make collection development decisions.
Often, these decisions are made by looking at usage statistics provided by the vendor, and through informal conversations with selected faculty within affected disciplines.
The ability to capture point-of-use information from users remains a significant challenge for many institutions.
The purpose of this paper will be to suggest a novel approach to providing intercept survey functionality for librarians looking to simplify the gathering of user feedback for library provided materials.
Background Libraries have long excelled at utilising a wide range of tools when attempting to assess electronic resource usage.
Initiatives like COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources [1] and SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative [2] have provide librarians with new tools and more reliable methods for analysing raw usage data.
Because of the availability of these data, library assessment efforts tend to focus most intently on these types of vendorprovided usage statistics.
Utilising statistics provided, librarians can make broad assumptions on the general usefulness of a set of resources, which helps them understand who is currently using specific content.
However, while these broad assessments can help to determine the general overall usage of a set of resources, they have a difficult time in capturing the actual impact of those resources on students’ or faculties’ current and future research.
While statistics can give broad snapshots of usage, libraries have begun to shift their metrics when assessing electronic resource purchases to metrics of impact.
To measure impact, librarians need a very different set of information, information not found in usage statistics but provided directly by users at the point of need.
Typically, this type of information would be gathered through the development of surveys that could be presented to the user while working within a specific electronic resource.
However, these types of injection surveys typically are difficult and unwieldy to create and manage, often making them beyond the reach of many libraries to implement – but they do not have to be.
The purpose of this article is to describe a novel approach to developing customised injection surveys around an institution’s proxy server, thereby providing libraries with a new method of collecting direct user feedback to determine the real impact of specific electronic collections.
The development of this approach came out of the Oregon State University Libraries (OSUL) participation in the MINES [3] for Libraries® programme out of StatQual [4].
OSUL has participated in the MINES survey over two previous years as a way to capture user-provided feedback on how electronic resources purchased by the Library were being employed by students and faculty staff to support their non-instructional research activities.
The MINES survey is designed to run over a period of 12 months with the expectation that the survey will be injected into all workflows where users can retrieve electronic resources.
Because of the scope and breadth of the survey, and the scope of the materials covered, the survey’s implementation and presence can represent a significant project for a library.
In order to participate, OSUL worked with the MINES survey administrators to develop a simple survey to capture feedback both about the user and why the user was utilising the information provided by the Library.
Working with the MINES survey administrators, OSUL then evaluated the current access points available to users seeking to access electronic information in order to determine the optimal location within the process to inject the survey.
After a careful examination of the Library’s workflows, it was determined that the Library’s proxy server, EZProxy [5], represented the most straightforward point of access.
Since all the University’s electronic resources provided by the OSUL always filter through the proxy server, it represented the most logical point of mediation within the resource delivery workflow where we could be certain of capturing a user’s feedback.
In order to make the MINES survey work, the proxy URLs needed to be rewritten so that users were sent first, through the survey, then redirected back to the proxy server to access the individual content.
Consulting with the MINES survey administrators, OSUL discussed a number of different methods used by other institutions participating in the survey.
By and large, the most common method of achieving this type of redirection was to manually rewrite the necessary URLs found within the Library’s various online systems.
For the process to be successful, this meant rewriting tens of thousands of URLs within the Library’s catalogue, Web site and external applications to support the injection of the survey URL.
Moreover, at the end of the 12-month survey period, it meant rewriting those same URLs within the Library’s catalogue, Web site and external applications to remove all references to the MINES survey.
During the OSUL’s two previous experiences with this survey, this URL rewriting process proved to be fraught with errors as content would sometimes be rewritten incorrectly or failed to be found and corrected at the survey’s end, ultimately affecting the user’s ability to access the information.
Moreover, new resources purchased during the survey period were not often set up to work with the survey, so access to these resources was largely absent from the final survey results.
Designing a New Workflow In 2012, the OSUL decided that it would participate in the MINES survey for a third time.
However, since the previous surveys, the electronic resources environment had undergone major changes.
In previous years participating in the survey, the OSUL has been in the process of transitioning much of our journal access to electronic resources – but for many of our patrons, electronic journal access was still the secondary access point.
Today, that is no longer the case.
By and large, the OSUL does not purchase print scholarly journal publications, meaning electronic access is the primary method of access for scholarly communication at OSUL.
In previous years, the number of URLs in need of rewriting was high, but fairly manageable.
By and large, such URL rewriting would be limited to the Library catalogue, the Web site and a handful of third-party tools.
Today, not only would it be very difficult to determine the number of URLs that would need to be rewritten, but the Library’s use of external tools and systems that provide access to our electronic resources are widely varied and difficult to quantify accurately.
Essentially, the amount of content that the OSUL purchases and manages for the University had become much too large and too diverse to support the previous survey methodology.
A new process needed to be developed that did not involve the rewriting of any data, and would continue to support the wide range of resources currently accessing the OSUL’s content.
In looking at all the ways the OSUL’s electronic resource landscape had changed in the three years since the last MINES survey, one specific piece of the puzzle had stayed the same.
While the OSUL licenses and provides access to many more resources, the centrality of the OSUL’s proxy server within the access workflow has remained the same.
As in previous years, the proxy server remains the primary point of access for all electronic resources served by the Library.
However, in the intervening years between the last MINES survey, the function of the proxy server had changed as well.
Since the last survey, the proxy server’s functionality has been expanded to support a number of different applications and workflow processes.
For the OSUL, the most radical change revolved around OCLC’s WorldCat Navigator [6] Project and its integration with the proxy server to support lending with our consortial partners using the product.
Moreover, additional integration projects with our discovery system, locally developed applications, and development carried out by departments at the University outside the Library made it imperitive that we consider the broader effects that any change to the proxy server’s behaviour might have upon our users.
While the proxy server certainly remained the single best access point for implementing an injection survey, the fact was that the proxy server’s role within the Library had expanded, making it difficult to work directly with the component.
To overcome this difficulty, the Library took a novel approach to restructuring our proxy workflow, essentially creating a public and private proxy configuration that allowed the Library to rethink how we could support these types of injection style surveys while preserving transparent access to our resources.
The overall goal of this project was to create a generic infrastructure that would allow the Library to support not just the MINES survey for the next 12 months, but to provide a generic surveying framework that could be used as part of the Library’s resource assessment toolkit.
Looking specifically at the proxy workflow, the OSUL proposed modifying our current workflow where EZProxy was the front-facing proxy – to a workflow where EZProxy would be proxied and traffic would be redirected to the appropriate workflow component, based on the context of access.
The new public proxy would act as a decision engine, redirecting traffic to the survey application or EZProxy, based on the type of access being requested.
The survey application then would manage the various surveys being run by the Library, determining when to display a particular survey or simply redirect the user through the private proxy and to the specified resource.
The diagram in Figure 1 captures the new simplified workflow being operated by the Library.
Figure 1: Workflow diagram The benefit of this approach is that it allows the Library to modify the underlying proxy workflow without having to change any of the underlying proxy URLs currently scattered throughout the Library.
For example, if the proxy URI for an institution was http://proxy.domain.edu, this URL would remain valid.
Within this workflow, the proxy URL would be transferred to the public proxy, with the private proxy taking on a new URL.
This approach allows all the previous URLs in use by the Library to remain valid, while at the same time providing the hook needed to support direct user assessment when resources are requested.
Furthermore, implementation of the new workflow proved to be relatively straightforward.
Rather than attempt to work with EZproxy, the OSUL implemented a common Apache [7] proxy to function as our public proxy server.
Apache made a lot of sense for this project due to its flexibility and support for proxy transactions.
For our implementation, the OSUL utilised the mod_proxy and mod_rewrite modules to preserve state and redirect content to the appropriate point in the workflow.
For example, the OCLC WorldCat Navigator Project utilises our proxy for user authentication so requests made by this service need to pass straight through to the EZproxy server and forgo the server (since these requests are machine-automated).
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/userobject/(.
*)$ http://ezproxy.proxy.library.oregonstate.edu/userobject/$1 RewriteRule ^/userobject(.
*)$ http://ezproxy.proxy.library.oregonstate.edu/userobject$1 Using a simple set of rewrite rules like those above, the Apache proxy would be able to preserve the expected access and functionality of the Navigator component.
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/login(.
*)$ http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/survey/ics/login.php$1 Moreover, this same process can be adopted to allow the Apache proxy to emulate the EZproxy URL structure, allowing the Apache proxy to preserve and support all existing URLs used by the Library to access content.
By making a handful of simple modifications to the proxy workflow, the OSUL was able to develop a secondary survey engine that could then be injected into the process whenever necessary without the need to alter any current access points.
Consequences of the New Workflow While the new proxy workflow solves some specific difficulties, it also creates some new ones.
In general, the problems encountered divided into one of three categories: 1.
Maintaining Secure Transactions While many of the resources that OSUL licenses do not require secure transactions to retrieve scholarly content, a number of our high-use resources do.
In our previous workflow, EZproxy easily supported this use case.
However, by placing EZproxy behind a proxy, the new workflow had to maintain a secure transaction throughout the various steps of the workflow.
To ensure that the transactions remained secure, each server within the workflow was given a certificate and placed within the same domain.
So, the resulting workflow comprises three secured servers, running under the same domain, i.e.
: public server:  http://proxy.domain.edu survey server: http://survey.domain.edu             and private proxy: http://private.proxy.domain.edu    By keeping the workflow servers under the same domain, the process maintains a secure session throughout the retrieval process, thereby preventing users from receiving unsightly access errors or errors related to server security.
2.
Supporting External Applications The primary purpose of the public proxy server is to act as a decision engine and redirect user traffic to the appropriate resource based on the request context.
In many cases, the context of the request can be determined from the URI allowing the server to redirect the user’s request using a simple URL rewrite.
However, we found other instances where this type of redirection was insufficient.
The most difficult of these to overcome was OCLC Navigator’s integration with EZproxy for lending.
While the public proxy could be used to redirect the request correctly, the OCLC software would not take the response back from the private proxy due to the URI mismatching.
In this case, the only way to solve the issue was to reset our proxy URL in OCLC’s Navigator product to the private proxy URL.
3.
Supporting Special EZProxy Syntax While links through the proxy server are largely regular, we found a small number of URIs to resources like Gartner, which represent special content made available by EZProxy.
These URIs do not rewrite in a regular manner and presented special problems when being served through the survey application.
Therefore, employing the new workflow, OSUL was able to re-implement the MINES survey instrument for the 2012-2013 academic year in a matter of hours.
What is more, the process has proved to be much more reliable than previous attempts which relied on numerous processes and on staff rewriting tens of thousands of URLs.
It has been far more transparent for both the staff and the Library’s patrons.
Survey Tool Redesigning the proxy workflow allowed the Library to take a closer look at how it could potentially support a more user-directed assessment programme.
Like many libraries, OSUL is looking for new ways to demonstrate not just use of services, but their impact on our user populations.
The ability to interact directly with users as they utilise specific services or resources represents a unique opportunity which had not been available to the Library in the past.
Due to some of the time constraints of the MINES survey, the initial version of the survey tool [8] is relatively straightforward.
Utilising PHP for quick development, the application was developed employing a basic model/view structure.
Utilising a master ‘controller’, the application imports defined journal lists (for targeted surveys) as well as a global survey option that is then used to determine and generate the appropriate survey instrument.
Survey templates are harnessed to support rapid survey generation and JQuery is employed to provide support for multiple-user interfaces.
While the initial version of the survey tool was created primarily to support the MINES survey instrument, the tool is currently being revised to support a much wider implementation at OSUL and to support a wider range of contexts for its implementation.
At present, the primary ‘controller’ works to emulate the EZproxy URL structure so that these URLs can be preserved.
In the future, the entry point into the tool will be abstracted further so that the survey instrument can emulate practically any URL structure and support the ability to capture user feedback from a wide variety of tools and services.
Targeted Surveying One of the perceived benefits of the new survey methodology is the ability to run multiple surveys over the same period that target specific resources.
While preparing the MINES survey, we recognised that the new workflow could potentially change the way collection development librarians procure feedback when evaluating resources, as well as provide new tools for broader assessment of resources and services provided by the library.
At OSUL, there is a specific interest in determining the long-term feasibility of this new methodology to assist in making collection development decisions.
As collections development librarians evaluate specific electronic resources for continued access or withdrawal, the ability to survey users directly to capture information related to overall impact would provide a new rich set of metrics to help guide those collection decisions.
As a proof of concept, OSUL developed a survey that would only display when accessing specific library science-related resources.
Figure 2: Proof of concept specific journal survey To evaluate the feasibility of such an approach, a proof of concept survey was created, with the intention of targeting a very specific set of niche resources utilised primarily by humanities students and scholars.
The proof of concept allowed OSUL to test a number of different aspects of the process: It allowed the Libraries to introduce this notion of user-targeted feedback within the academic setting and gauge how users responded to this intrusion.
This was a serious concern.
Unlike the MINES survey which runs over discrete periods for a couple hours a day, this feedback implement was designed to run over extended periods, potentially exposing users to multiple instances of the instrument.
Attempting to balance the Libraries’ desire to capture a user’s feedback regarding impact against the danger of over-surveying a specific user population is one of the issues librarians at OSUL will be continuing to explore.
It allowed the Libraries to evaluate the workflows around developing new surveys and the flexibility of the templates.
While the survey tool was designed to be easy to understand and implement, there is an assumed level of familiarity with PHP, HTML, and CSS, but resulted in the ability to create very complex surveying instruments.
However, to encourage wide-spread use among the faculty, a more straightforward method of survey design probably needs to be developed – preferably one that integrates well with existing toolkits and reuses existing expertise.
To that end, OSUL will be exploring integration with Qualtrics [9], utilising its API, enabling faculty staff already familiar with the tool to create their own surveying instruments and integrate these tools into the application.
The process allowed OSUL to begin looking at how user data might be able to be evaluated in aggregate between departments and potentially organisations.
While the tool was initially developed to measure and capture qualitative information the better to determine true user impact of resources for a specific set of resources, the proof of concept process raised a number of interesting questions concerning the ability to aggregate this type of information around institution types, location and focus.
It is our hope that the Libraries will be able to work with a handful of peer institutions to determine if this approach could be used to inform shared collection development decisions as well as track research trends among similar organisations.
The proof of concept demonstrated that it was possible to provide targeted user surveys for specific journal resources.
Working with the survey application, a list feature was implemented allowing librarians to define a set of journal URLs and customised survey forms that could then be employed to capture this type of individualised feedback.
The long-term goal of this process is to obtain a clearer understanding of how resources and services, provided by the Libraries, affect research on the campus, and, we hope, provide a better set of metrics to inform collection development decisions.
Having tested the proof of concept and evaluating the type of rich information captured over a short two week period, there is definitely significant interest  to move forward and conduct a more rigorous pilot programme in the Summer of 2013.
The formalised pilot programme will seek to investigate the quality and scope of data that can be captured, as well as the long-term viability of this type of use.
Conclusion As service organisations, libraries will always play the role of information provider for their users.
However, how libraries assess the use of this information is changing.
While raw usage data used to be the gold standard for making collection development decisions, the move to try and measure the impact of the resources libraries provide to their patrons offers libraries new opportunities to evaluate novel ways of collecting user feedback.
At OSUL, this has meant rethinking how our users’ access information provided by the Library, and considering innovative approaches to exploiting those workflows to encourage a wider conversation with our patrons.
And it is through these conversations that we hope not only to understand the true impact that our library is having on users, but also to identify where we could be doing better.
References COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) http://www.projectcounter.org/ SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi see also: Paul Meehan, Paul Needham, Ross MacIntyre.
"SUSHI: Delivering Major Benefits to JUSP".
November 2012, Ariadne Issue 70 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/meehan-et-al Martha Kyrillidou, Terry Plum & Bruce Thompson (2010): Evaluating Usage and Impact of Networked Electronic Resources through Point-of-Use Surveys: A MINES for Libraries™ Study, The Serials Librarian, 59:2, 159-183.
STATSQual http://www.statsqual.org/ OCLC EZProxy authentication and access software http://www.oclc.org/ezproxy/ OCLC WorldCat Navigator http://www.oclc.org/navigator/default.htm Apache HTTP Server Product http://httpd.apache.org/ OSUL Survey Tool Source https://github.com/reeset/ics Qualtrics http://www.qualtrics.com/ Author Details Terry Reese Head, Digital Initiatives The Ohio State University Libraries Email: reese.2179@osu.edu Web site: http://blog.reeset.net Terry Reese is the current Head of Digital Initiatives at The Ohio State University Libraries.
In this role, he oversees the strategic development of The Ohio State University Libraries digital initiatives programme.
His research interests include metadata analysis, data mining and visualisation, and system architecture design.
Mr. Reese was the previous holder of the Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services at Oregon State University.
It was in this role that this paper was developed.
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Educause 2018 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Educause 2018 Citation BibTex RIS Richard Goodman gives a conference report from Educause 2018 held in Denver, Colorado, USA, a vast conference looking at the breadth of technology available for use in educational organisations and their libraries.
In 2018, I was one of the lucky recipients of a UCISA bursary, which enabled me to attend the Educause conference in Denver, Colorado.
The Educause conference is something that has been on my radar for 20 years, and it’s no coincidence that it is celebrating 20 years this year.
The younger me would have been overawed at the sheer size of this event, but after having presented at and attended conferences for the last 20 years, I felt ready for it.
It was an absolutely enormous event, with around 8,000 attendees registered in 2018.
That’s over 10 times larger than most of the UK conferences in this area, which is why they need a venue the size of the Colorado Convention Centre to host it.
I sought advice from past attendees (including past UCISA bursary recipients), and one common theme was “be prepared, don’t be overwhelmed” as well as being ready to cope with very long days.
Educause brings together many thousands of people under the broad heading of technology in education, with a broad mix of attendees from junior learning developers through to project managers and all the way up to CIOs and CTOs.
UCISA very helpfully hold an informal networking event for UK attendees, and this was very useful for putting faces to some of the people that I had been interacting with on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the conference.
The backdrop to this conference is of a world which has various parts in chaos.
In the UK HE sector, 2018 was a very tricky year, with a once-in-a-generation strike affecting much of the sector (concerning pensions), and institutions looking for more and better systems to support and improve the experiences of students whilst at university.
Blockchain is background noise.
Cloud is commonplace now.
The MOOC bubble has burst (in the UK at least).
One of the big themes of the conference was around diversity, equity and inclusion.
These are areas that have resonated in many places in the last few years, even though the political arena (in the UK and the US at least) appears to have veered off in the opposite direction to this agenda right now.
The opening keynote from Michele Norris, talking about the Race Card project, reflected this theme.
This is the first time I’ve ever been to a keynote at a venue that has seen Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Elton John, Neil Young and Tori Amos taking to the very same stage.
I threw myself in headlong to each day of the conference, up at silly o’clock every morning to take part in “brain dates”, sharing experiences of learning technology with international colleagues from universities and colleges, and a nice gentleman from a start up company who are looking to get into the world of online learning with an interesting web tool.
The tables and chairs inside the corrugated cardboard booths were perfectly pleasant.
The 1970s “Barbarella” style swinging chairs were less conducive to a friendly chat.
However, nothing was as bad as the chairs made out of skis, which were massively uncomfortable and almost impossible to get out of!
You might also spot some swings in the background it’s hard to talk about serious subjects when wobbling around on a swing!
The conference schedule was absolutely crammed with loads of conflicting sessions, and it’s the sign of an engaging conference when there’s so much to go to and too much to choose from.
I hope I made the right choices, but I’ll never know.
Sessions on learning analytics dashboards, student data, accessibility, ITIL, change management, projects and relationships, privacy and ethics and onboarding were certainly a varied bunch, with a good mix of listening and more interactive sessions.
The conference was utterly exhausting but hugely rewarding.
The exhibition was enormous.
There were 333 exhibition stands to choose from, with multiple Google stands (including half a basketball court), an enormous Service Now stand and plenty of the usual suspects with massive stands (costing $57,000 for the largest ones!)
Technology has become a tool which guides change and there’s big money to be made through securing a new contract with a new institution.
It was far more interesting to me to talk to the smaller providers and those in “start up alley”.
Once you’ve seen the latest laptop from Lenovo or Dell or a Microsoft Surface, you’ve seen enough shiny fondle slabs to last you for a year.
There were some familiar faces on the Moodle stand, as well as a few other suppliers who I could chat with about existing projects.
It was very handy for one particular project we were working on at the time, as I could show something to the supplier which they could relay back to their implementation team, as we both happened to be in the same time zone for the first time in the project lifecycle.
There’s so much still to reflect upon and that will happen naturally over the next year when thinking back to some of these conference experiences and the presentations that were shared.
There was a very lively social media community on the #edu18 hashtag too.
Communication and collaboration have been key themes that have resonated long since the conference finished.
I’ll leave you with a last image of Colorado, a very slight glimpse of the Rocky Mountains that have always been visible from somewhere each day.
This was the view from the A-Train (officially called the University of Colorado A Line for sponsorship reasons) from Denver to the airport.
A fantastic conference experience in an amazing city.
Before coming here I would never have put Denver on my “cities to visit” list.
Having been here, I’m eager to come back and explore more one day.
It’s very much an “outdoor city” with so much provision for walking and cycling, far more than I’d been expecting.
Wherever you turn, there are people speeding along pavements on scooters.
You can explore so much on foot, or catch trains, buses and trams to get around the city and beyond.
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Book Review: Access, Delivery, Performance The Future of Libraries Without Walls Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Access, Delivery, Performance The Future of Libraries Without Walls Buzz mobile software framework infrastructure archives metadata accessibility vocabularies repositories flickr preservation cataloguing e-learning vle moodle facebook wcag research Citation BibTex RIS Michael Day reviews a Festschrift celebrating the work of Professor Peter Brophy, founder of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management.
It is normal in some subject disciplines to publish volumes of edited papers in honour of a respected colleague, usually to mark a significant birthday or career change.
The contributors to such Festschriften* are usually made up of former colleagues or pupils of the person being honoured.
This volume celebrates the work of Professor Peter Brophy, the founder of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), which since 1998 has been based at the Manchester Metropolitan University.
This volume contains twelve chapters written by sixteen contributors, many of them colleagues or ex-colleagues of Professor Brophy.
Peter Brophy has had an outstanding career both as a librarian and researcher.
Alan MacDougall, Visiting Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University provides an outline in the opening chapter.
A career that started at the Library Research Unit at Lancaster University in the early 1970s progressed to professional posts at Strathclyde University and Teeside Polytechnic, before Brophy eventually became Librarian at Bristol Polytechnic.
From there, he moved to the University of Central Lancashire in 1989, where in 1993 he set up CERLIM.
A selected bibliography of works by Professor Brophy fills eleven pages at the end of the volume, revealing the range and diversity of his research interests over the past few decades.
The contexts of the early years of Professor Brophy's career are sketched in more detail in the opening chapter by Michael Buckland, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Buckland was a colleague of Brophy's at the Library Research Unit at Lancaster in the early 1970s.This chapter gives a good flavour of how library and information research was undertaken in this time when the libraries at what were then 'new universities' had an active interest in innovation and when almost all library research in the UK was funded by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information of the Department of Education and Science.
Libraries and e-Learning The remainder of the book is organised into four broad themes.
The first covers libraries' role in supporting e-learning.
The opening chapter in this section is by Gill Needham and Nicky Whitsed of the Open University.
It is a series of reflections on a decade of developing library services for distance learners.
Starting with the Follett Report of 1993 [1], the chapter identifies three main phases in the Open University's approach to delivering services to around 200,000 students and 8,000 tutors.
The first phase was concerned with fairness; knowing exactly when to introduce online services at a time when a majority of Open University students did not have access to the relevant technologies or skills and when many tutors were reluctant to change their traditional ways of working.
Responses to this included the development of library-mediated collections of quality-controlled Internet resources, supplemented by an online skills tutorial focused on generic information skills.
Despite all of this, actual use of online resources remained relatively low (p. 30).
The second phase, therefore, was mainly about integrating online services more deeply into the core learning activities of courses.
The focus switched to the training of tutors and the integration of information resources within the university's emerging virtual learning environment (VLE), based on Moodle.
In the interim, a pilot project using the open source MyLibrary software was found to be useful in helping to integrate library services into the learning experiences of individual students.
The third phase which Needham and Whitsed note is still ongoing concerns the embedding of information literacy and resource-based learning concepts within the university more widely.
The chapter ends with some comments on the, perhaps inevitable, tension between the 'invisible library' – 'quietly and strategically … [insinuating] resources and services into all those places where they have the most impact' and the need to defend library budgets and status within the wider institution (pp.
35-36).
The following chapter, by Professor David Baker of the University College Plymouth St Mark and St John, is a general overview of the development of e-learning technologies in UK Higher Education over the past decade.
Starting again with Follett, Baker explains how e-learning concepts and technologies have been taken up, focusing in particular on the facilitating role taken by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in providing a national-level approach to the provision of both infrastructure (e.g., networks, access management tools) and content.
In addition, the chapter refers to a number of JISC-funded programmes and initiatives focused on breaking down the barriers that prevent the sharing and re-use of e-learning content.
The final sections look at some wider factors influencing the current transformation of learning, teaching and assessment practices.
These include the need to integrate institutional services like VLEs with the generic social networking tools and mobile devices familiar to new generations of learners.
However, successful integration is not just a matter of technology but of overcoming cultural differences.
Baker uses a synthesis of the JISC-funded Learner Experiences of e-Learning projects [2] to note that there might have been 'an increasing "divide" between the needs, expectations and wishes of the learners and the expectations of the teachers, who were more "traditional" and perhaps not engaged with e-learning in the same way' (p. 49).
Widening Access The next three chapters are on the theme of widening access to information.
The first, by Jenny Craven of CERLIM, provides a UK perspective on the development of library services for visually impaired people, a phrase used to refer to anyone with a 'serious sight problem,' including 'total blindness, partial sight or low vision, as well as cognitive impairments such as dyslexia, which may result in a print impairment' (p. 58).
The chapter commences with an outline of things that mainstream libraries can do to support visually impaired people, including reading aids and Web sites that adhere to guidelines like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) [3].
After a brief review of historical developments like Share the Vision and the Revealweb union catalogue [4][5], Craven returns to the Web accessibility topic, noting that developments in Web technologies in the late 1990s had actually had a negative impact on the accessibility of Web sites.
CERLIM projects like REVIEL (Resources for the Visually Impaired users of the Electronic Library) and NoVA (Non-Visual Access to the digital library) had respectively looked at accessibility challenges and attempted to understand the retrieval behaviour of visually impaired people.
The chapter then identifies some ongoing activities that aim to support accessibility, including the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), whose four principles of making Web content accessible – e.g.
as embodied in WCAG 2.0 – means that all content needs to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust (the POUR principles).
The chapter concludes with a look at future prospects, including new accessibility challenges posed by social networking services and other (so-called) Web 2.0 technologies and the continuing importance of education and training.
The following chapter is by John Dolan, formerly Head of Library Policy at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).
This is a set of reflections on how Dolan considers that UK public libraries have evolved over time to meet new needs and challenges, starting from the development of community librarianship in the 1960s.
After a few observations on wider political, social and cultural contexts, Dolan goes on ask whether the intrinsic value of public libraries will be recognised amongst its perceived need to contribute to key policy priorities and targets (p. 78).
The chapter describes the heady optimism of the mid-1990s, when initiatives like the People's Network and projects funded by the New Opportunities Fund fleetingly provided an exciting vision of what public libraries might have hoped to achieve with an increased investment in information and communication technologies.
However, the remainder of the chapter is an overview of the challenges that face public libraries as they attempt to adapt to current needs.
These challenges include the need to develop targeted strategies for particular communities (especially the disadvantaged) and the potential to deliver skills training and other aspects of what is now known as 'informal adult learning.'
Dolan also sees public libraries as a useful public space, 'a unique place in the community in being non-judgemental and freely open to all' (p. 87).
Finally, the chapter explores how these community-building and communitylearning principles might be supported by technologies and the people who work in libraries.
Dolan's chapter had mentioned that the use of Web 2.0 technologies was often 'inhibited by a local authority culture of caution and an apprehension about the implications of free access' (p. 88).
Chapter 7, by Juliet Eve of the University of Brighton, is a more detailed assessment of the use of social networking technologies in public libraries.
The chapter starts with some general background on Web 2.0, including the popular definition provided by Tim O'Reilly and the invocation of now familiar social networking services like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr.
While Eve is aware of criticism of Web 2.0 as merely 'jargon' or a 'marketing slogan,' she is happy to concede that the term is used as a 'shorthand for a new set of virtual spaces to engage in, as well as potentially new ways for businesses … to engage with customers, and for those customers to create content as much as they consume it' (p. 98).
Eve then turns to discuss the derivative term 'Library 2.0.'
Here there is even less consensus, with disagreement even over the extent to which it is a new concept.
Eve sensibly comments that similar 'rhetorical flourishes' have emerged before from the library community, not least in the expectations of the People's Network (p. 101).
After a brief overview of how selected libraries have started to use Web 2.0 technologies, Eve concludes her chapter with some comments on the so-called 'Google Generation' and the challenges of providing public library services to young people.
Eve's measured conclusion is that some of the rhetoric that surrounds the use of Web 2.0 tools in libraries is unhelpful: 'at worst it is technical determinism at its crudest, and at best it is an overstatement of what technologies may facilitate, if that is what public library users call for and begin to develop' (pp.
107-108).
Information Delivery The following two chapters are on a general theme entitled 'changing directions of information delivery.'
The first of these is an introduction to institutional repositories by Rowena Cullen and Brenda Chawner of the Victoria University of Wellington.
This starts from first principles the key functions of scholarly communication and goes on to consider the perceived benefits of institutional repositories, the technologies and standards they are built on (including metadata), and some of the key issues that need to be considered when creating and managing a repository.
In these sections, Cullen and Chawner show a wider interest in sustainability challenges than many repository enthusiasts, referring to the RLG's work on identifying the attributes of trusted repositories and the JISC-funded LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) Project's attempts to calculate costs for digital lifecycles and preservation.
The chapter is honest in admitting that the growth of content in repositories has 'not reached early expectations' (p. 127).
On this topic, Cullen and Chawners are well aware of the factors that inhibit the deposit of content as well as some of the strategies that have been proposed to increase deposit rates.
Chapter 9 is on the changing nature of controlled vocabularies and is by Richard Hartley of Manchester Metropolitan University.
This provides an overview of traditional approaches to controlled vocabularies, including enumerative classification schemes, faceted classification, subject headings, thesauri and name authorities.
Hartley argues that the high cost of maintaining controlled vocabulary schemes combined with doubts about their effectiveness when compared with keyword searching meant that 'through the 1980s and 1990s there was a steady decline in their use for both indexing and searching' (p. 151).
The rise of the Web, however, has seen a resurgence in the potential and actual use of controlled vocabularies, both, for example, as part of the vision of a Semantic Web and as part of social networking tools like Flickr and Connotea that encourage users to apply their own free-form keywords (or tags).
Evaluating Performance and Quality The final three chapters are on the themes of performance, quality and leadership, topics on which Professor Brophy has written widely.
The first chapter on this theme, by Charles McClure and John Snead of the Florida State University provides an overview of the development and implementation of a Web-based evaluation decision management system (EDMS) designed for use by public libraries.
The system provides a framework that would help librarians and managers determine the most appropriate evaluation approaches and to match these to local needs and requirements.
The chapter concludes with some observations of the challenge of integrating these tools with the Web 2.0 paradigm.
Evaluation is a key part of the following chapter, on measuring the quality of services and resources in academic libraries.
In this, Jillian Griffiths of CERLIM provides an introduction to the quality concepts developed by David Garvin in the 1980s and how these had been adapted for use by libraries and information services, not least by Professor Brophy himself.
One result of this was a framework of ten quality attributes that were used to evaluate certain aspects of projects funded to support the development of the JISC Information Environment [6].
The final chapter in the book is a review of the role of leadership in academic libraries.
Jennifer Rowley of Manchester Metropolitan University and Sue Roberts of the Victoria University of Wellington open their chapter in a provocative way by doubting whether the information professions would be able to offer any kind of leadership.
They cite a range of critical opinions, the consensus of which is that library managers focus disproportionately on information skills at the expense of leadership and strategy.
Rowley and Roberts then attempt to explain the changing contexts of academic libraries, e.g.
the increasing need to work collaboratively with others and to take leadership roles within the wider institution.
After a quick attempt to define leadership, the chapter proposes a new 'leadership diamond' based on four attributes: personal qualities, working with others, vision and direction, and managing performance and implementation (pp.
203-204).
The remainder of the chapter provides an overview of some new leadership theories, proposes ways of influencing people and dealing with complicated institutional power bases.
Rowley and Roberts conclude with some observations on a future vision that incorporates: capacity building for leadership, recognising the importance of innovation and creativity, and the need for a deeper involvement in shaping knowledge management and scholarly communication.
Common Themes The chapters in this volume are a fitting tribute to Professor Brophy.
Their topics range across a number of his research interests, and many of them play direct tribute to him, for example, Brophy being described as 'an inspiration to all of us working in this field (Needham, p. 23), and an 'exemplar of the influential leader' (Rowley and Roberts, p. 198).
There are several common themes.
Perhaps the most striking one is the largely uncritical adoption of the concept of a 'Google generation,' a phrase that features at some point in most of the chapters in this book.
So, for example, Rowley and Roberts say that this generation 'of students expect fast and straightforward access to information and are intolerant of interfaces that require multiple stages to arrive at the full text of a document' (p. 197).
Reading this volume, one might think that the existence of a 'Google generation' was well established.
However, the CIBER report cited by two of the chapters is actually rather sceptical about the existence a Google generation, questioning its evidential basis and the noting that, in any case, 'the demographics of internet and media consumption are rapidly eroding this presumed generational difference' [7][ 8].
Juliet Eve's chapter considers the changing needs of younger library users in more detail.
While public libraries may not feature highly on the 'image management' priorities of teenagers, Eve cites a MLA report that suggests that they are still seen to be important in supporting learning (p. 105).
She concludes that the provision of alternatives to the virtual spaces that young people already inhabit might be 'a far better use of the time and energy of public librarians than a reactive, potentially too tardy, response to what may be yet another passing technological fad' (p. 107).
Another common theme of the book is the ongoing need to integrate both services and personnel with the wider institutional context.
This might include, for example, embedding information services within learning or research environments (Needham and Whitsed, p. 32-33) or the participation of library managers in wider institutional roles (Rowley and Richards, p. 199).
When discussing the 'Library 2.0' concept, Juliet Eve quotes Ken Chad and Paul Miller's comment about libraries harnessing 'technological potential and community capability in order to deliver valuable, valued and world-class services directly to those who stand to benefit from them, whether or not they (ever) physically enter a library building' (p. 99) [9].
In turn, however, this kind of approach has the danger that the 'invisible library' may become difficult to defend in times of financial austerity.
Moreover, some of the perceived benefits of public libraries outlined in John Dolan's chapter depend upon them remaining, at least to some extent, physical spaces.
Conclusions Like others published by Facet, this volume is well produced and the layout very clear and easy to read.
Even though the chapters are in the main overviews of work previously undertaken, most of them have some value in providing a wider context and understanding of the topics they cover.
The volume should be of particular interest to all readers interested in the development of library services in a rapidly changing environment, especially those thinking about the longer-term potential of social networking technologies for e-learning.
Juliet Eve's chapter is particularly useful in cutting through the hype that surrounds much of the current discourse around Web 2.0.
However, there are important topics that are not covered by this volume.
For example, apart from Cullen and Chawner's chapter on institutional repositories, there is very little about how academic libraries might need to evolve to support research activities more widely.
There is also very little about the longer-term sustainability of content, although there is a level of overlap with the principles underlying Web accessibility discussed in Jenny Craven's chapter.
In the end, however, this is a volume that has been specifically designed to match the research interests of Peter Brophy, so there is no need for it to be comprehensive.
As in many edited volumes there are a few inconsistencies, both in detail e.g.
CIBER (p. 36) and Ciber (p. 72), no citation for Cronin on p. 138 and style.
Sometimes this is a matter of referencing style, as in Chapter 3, where it is not entirely clear why some Web references are included in parentheses within the text while others are cited more formally.
John Dolan's chapter on public libraries is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, reading at times like a political tract 'important parameters have to be set ... to protect the needs of the many from the preferences of the few' (p. 87) while some pages (e.g.
p. 79) are almost completely made up of indigestible bullet points.
Given recent political changes in the UK, Dolan's chapter also felt as if it was the one most in need of an update.
Dolan's focus on a proactive public library delivering content, services and experiences to disadvantaged communities might need to give way to a vision of libraries where there is less co-ordination from central government and more focus on what the present Culture Minister might mean by communities 'determining the shape of the public service and what it delivers' [10].
So it just remains for me, also, to send my own (belated) congratulations to Professor Brophy for his long and successful career at the interface of library management and research.
*Editor's note: The German 'die Festschrift' best translates as 'commemorative publication.'
References Joint Funding Councils' Libraries Review Group, Report (Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council for England, 1993).
Joint Information Systems Committee, In their own words: Exploring the learner's perspective on e-learning (London: JISC, 2007) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/intheirownwords Currently: Caldwell, B., Cooper, M., Reid, L. G, Vanderheiden, G., Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
W3C Recommendation, 11 December 2008 http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ RNIB Library Catalogue http://librarycatalogue.rnib.org.uk/ For more information on Revealweb, see the UKOLN Bibliographic Management pages http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bib-man/projects/revealweb/ Griffiths, J. R., and Brophy, P., "Student searching behaviour in the JISC Information Environment," Ariadne 33, September-October 2002 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/edner/ Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., and Huntington, P., Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (London: British Library and JISC, 2008), p. 21.
Linked from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/resourcediscovery/googlegen.aspx Williams, P., and Rowlands, I., Information behaviour of the researcher of the future: WPII The literature on young people and their information behaviour (London: British Library and JISC, 2007) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/resourcediscovery/googlegen.aspx Chad, K., and Miller, P., Do libraries matter?
The rise of Library 2.0, Talis white paper, 2005 http://www.talis.com/applications/downloads/white_papers/DoLibrariesMatter.pdf Flood, A., "Ed Vaizey puts libraries at heart of 'big society'," The Guardian, 1 July 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/01/ed-vaizey-libraries-big-society Author Details Michael Day Research Officer and Team Leader UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Access, Delivery, Performance: The future of libraries without walls" Author: Michael Day Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/day-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Research data management:  A case study Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Research data management:  A case study Citation BibTex RIS Gary Brewerton explains how Loughborough University have tackled the requirements from funding bodies for research data to be made available by partnering with not one, but two cloud service providers.
In April 2014 Loughborough University launched an innovative cloud-based platform [1] to deliver long-term archiving and discovery for its research data.
The platform was based upon the Arkivum/100 [2] digital archiving service from Arkivum and the figshare for institutions solution from Figshare [3].
This article discusses the background and implementation of this new platform at the University.
Background Like many other Universities, Loughborough faced a number of challenges in meeting the expectations of its research funders, in particular: publishing the metadata describing the research data it holds where appropriate providing access to the research data preserving the research data for a minimum of ten years since last accessed.
In addition to these challenges, the University also wanted to further promote its world-leading research and believed that one method of doing so, was by exposing the underlying data that supported the research to its peers, future collaborators and the public at large.
In autumn 2012 the University formed a Steering Committee to engage with both local stakeholders and funders to identify the issues around research data management (RDM) and recommend to the University, at large, a solution.
The committee was formed of active researchers drawn from varying disciplines and at different points in their academic career, it was chaired by the University’s Research Office and included representatives of IT Services and the University Library.
One of the first actions of the steering committee was to undertake a survey of Loughborough’s research groups to determine their existing data management practices and storage requirements.
The storage requirements were of particular note to the committee as unlike traditional research outputs, such as articles and reports which are mostly text, the underlying data could take a variety of formats and therefore varying dramatically in size.
It was also recognised that not all the data collected by the researchers would need to be preserved, particularly where this data was derivable or not relevant to the findings of the research.
Both of these factors made it exceptionally difficult to predict the storage required with any degree of certainty.
The committee also undertook a survey [4] of other Universities’ preparations for managing their research data.
From the survey responses it was clear that many other institutions were either at the same stage as Loughborough, or were awaiting a commitment for additional resources (e.g.
project managers, data storage) before being able to progress their plans.
Figure 1.
Chart showing status of RDM service at other institutions The steering committee were also active in advocating changes in the research environment to local academics and researchers (including PhD students).
In this activity the committee were greatly assisted by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [5] who provided materials and speakers for local events aimed at researchers and support staff.
In-house training was subsequently developed and delivered by the Library based upon these initial sessions.
With a better understanding of the business needs of the University and through engagement with local researchers, the committee developed a draft RDM policy [6] with assistance from the DCC.
Key to this policy was the need for researchers to produce RDM plans in support of the expectations of their funders.
The policy also reiterated the general requirements of research funders and encouraged the deposit of data that had value to the wider research community or was potentially of historical interest, even if not mandated by the funder.
The next step for the steering committee was to evaluate possible solutions to recording and managing its research data.
The University already had an established institutional repository [7] for other forms of research output (e.g articles, reports, theses, posters).
However the, at times, laborious nature of the deposit process and concerns over digital storage requirements, meant this was unlikely to be suitable.
Instead the committee undertook a review of the embryonic market for archiving and discovery solutions and short-listed two possible candidates: Arkivum/100: a digital archiving service from Arkivum guaranteeing long-term preservation of data deposited figshare for institutions: a new institutional offering from the figshare cloud-based research sharing repository.
Each solution answered a different aspect of the RDM problem for the University.
Arkivum could provide the storage and preservation required, whilst figshare addressed the light-touch deposit process and discoverability of the research data.
The steering committee therefore decided to approach both suppliers and ask them to work together to develop a platform to meet all the University’s needs.
Proposed solution A proposal was submitted by the steering committee to the University in February 2014, asking for funding to develop a platform to manage research data and two posts (a research data manager based in the Library and a post in IT Service to manage the research data system) to support ongoing operation of the platform.
The proposal went through a number of committees and iterations before approval and funding was provided to implement the new platform and a two tier implementation group (management board and working group) was established to replace the steering committee, chaired by the University’s Chief Operating Officer.
Key requirements identified for the platform included: use the University’s existing Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) [8] to act as a register of all research data even if not held locally provide an intuitive and light-touch, user interface for depositing research data allow for metadata only records where research data is stored elsewhere (e.g.
in the UK Data Archive [9]) allow for the embargo of research data until a given date, or after a specific time period mint a Loughborough branded Digital Object Identifier (DOI) [10] upon publication of the research data preservation of the research data for a period of at least ten years allow easy searching of metadata and direct access to available research data provide metrics on access to the metadata and downloads of the associated research data to go live before the 1st May 2015.
Implementation In September 2014 a meeting was held between Arkivum, Figshare, Symplectic (suppliers of the CRIS) and the University to confirm the scope of the project, determine responsibilities and agree milestones.
As part of these discussions it was decided to manage the project using the cloud-based Basecamp [11] application and so a number of “to-do” lists were setup and tasks assigned among the development partners.
For the University, the assigned tasks included: determine storage quotas for researchers and other depositors provide branding material (e.g.
logos, pictures) for the interface configure local SAML 2.0 [12] identity provider (IdP) to work with Figshare provide a feed of users details.
During the meeting it was agreed that the initial launch of the RDM platform would be mediated by the University Library, to better support researchers during the transition from development project to live service.
However, it was also discovered that integration between the proposed platform and the CRIS was not feasible with such a tight implementation timescale.
Therefore, it was decided that this development would be better left until after the launch of the service.
This initial meeting set the scene for future face-to-face meetings which were held every two months throughout the project; of particular importance to the attendees was the continued provision of lemon drizzle cake.
More regular communication between the partners occurred via the forums on Basecamp, email and through fortnightly catch-up calls using Google Hangouts [13].
Figure 2.
Interrelationship between existing University systems and the proposed research data management platform The first project milestone was achieved a month ahead of schedule, with the early installation of a server at Loughborough by Arkivum.
The server acted as a cache to aid with the rapid uploading and downloading of content from the University.
The next milestone involved Figshare working directly with Arkivum to utilise their digital archive, as opposed to the Amazon AWS storage [14] they commonly use, for deposit of the University’s research data.
During this development and implementation phase there were still some outstanding issues in need of resolution.
Chief among these issues was whether the platform needed to include an approval stage before any research data was published.
Researchers consulted by the working group varied in their views on whether the approval stage was needed and importantly who should be doing it (e.g.
the Research Office, a departmental administrator, Dean of School, the Library, etc).
In the end it was decided that rather than create a potentially burdensome extra process, responsibility for any approval would lie with the depositor.
However, it was thought that a check of the metadata by Library staff, at least in the first six months after launch, would be a good idea.
The third and most significant milestone was the delivery of the figshare for institutions service which would in effect be the interface to the RDM platform.
Whilst the University awaited access to this new interface, which was unfortunately delayed by approximately five weeks, advocacy with local researchers took a back step to other activities.
One of these activities was the realisation that by agreeing for the Library to initially mediate the service, there was a need for library administrators to be able to “act as” other users of the system so as to be able to upload content on their behalf, which hadn’t been previously considered.
Functionality to allow users to “act as” other users was on the development roadmap for figshare for institutions but wasn’t planned for delivery until well after the launch of the RDM platform at the University.
Rather than disrupt the existing development effort the University instead choose to implement this “act as” functionality within its IdP authentication service [15].
Figure 3.
Screenshot of the RDM platform showing the add content form The interface was made available to the University in mid-April 2015 for testing.
The working group uncovered a few minor issues (e.g.
missing branding, licence not displayed) during testing which were quickly remedied by Figshare.
With testing complete the RDM platform was wiped clean of test content and a file of active researchers manually uploaded.
Figshare were able to import some pre-existing research data sourced from the Public Library of Science (PLOS) [16] into the platform, ready for the launch.
Launch and beyond The RDM platform was launched as a mediated service towards the end of April, four days before the 1st May project deadline.
A number of workshops were organised for researchers both in central locations, such as the Library, and in academic departments.
From these initial workshops it soon became evident that having taken a back step in our advocacy during the project’s implementation phase the University now had to remind its researchers of their funder’s expectations before demonstrating the solution.
Reaction to the platform has been very positive with researchers impressed with the elegant interface and simple deposit workflow.
The ability to mint, and even reserve, DOIs for their research data is valued by the researchers, as is the ability to easily “drag and drop” citations into documents.
Figure 4.
Screenshot of the RDM platform showing a deposited item Development of the RDM platform continues apace with new features such as projects, which are collaborative spaces for groups of researchers, appearing.
Recently steps were taken to integrate the platform with the University’s CRIS whereby the metadata of research data deposited is automatically harvested and imported into the CRIS.
The Research Office and University Library are working together to embed RDM into the ongoing workflow of all researchers.
In particular, the creation of RDM plans either pre-award or shortly after funding is approved is seen as a key means of promoting what is potentially a disruptive process into simply business as usual.
The future Mediation of the RDM platform by the University Library will soon come to an end, with researchers in future taking responsibility for depositing their own research data.
However, it is clear that the researchers have appreciated the second pair of eyes provided by the Library in providing a “sanity check” of their deposit before it is published to funders, peers and the world at large.
Therefore the University is working again with its development partners to develop this concept into a light touch review/approval process.
Conclusions The RDM platform was delivered on-time, within budget and has exceeded the expectations of both the University and its research funders.
It is emerging as a showcase of Loughborough research and means that the University is in a fantastic position to take advantage of funding opportunities and hopefully attract future collaborators.
The project is a great example of what public/private partnerships can achieve and this platform is one that other institutions could readily adopt.
However, it remains to be seen how researchers will engage with the platform in the midto longterm, but it is clear that advocacy will need to remain an ongoing process if the platform is going to achieve continued success.
Acknowledgements Any project of this sort requires a legion of people to make it a success and if I was to list them all it would undoubtedly double the length of the article!
So just a few thank yous.
Thank you to our development partners, Arkivum and Figshare and Symplectic.
Thank you and good luck to Dr Gareth Cole our recently appointed Research Data Manager.
And lastly, but certainly not least, special thanks go to Dr Sue Manuel (RDM Project Manager) whose sterling work as part of the University’s Steering Committee made the following implementation project so straightforward.
References Loughborough University’s Research Data Management Platform.
https://lboro.figshare.com/ Arkivum/100 Service.
http://arkivum.com/arkivum100/ Figshare for institutions.
http://figshare.com/services/institutions Hamilton, M. and Manuel, S. (2013) UK HE RDM Survey.
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare .817926 Digital Curation Centre.
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/about-us Loughborough University’s Draft Research Data Management Policy.
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/research/offcampus/docs/ResearchDataManagementPolicy-Draft.pdf Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository.
http://dspace.lboro.ac.uk Elements.
http://symplectic.co.uk/products/elements UK Data Archive.
http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/ Cite your data, DataCite.
https://www.datacite.org/services/cite-your-data.html Basecamp.
https://basecamp.com/ Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) V2.0 Technical Overview.
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/27819/sstc-saml-tech-overview-2.0-cd-02.pdf Google Hangouts.
https://hangouts.google.com/ Amazon Web Services.
https://aws.amazon.com/ SimpleSAMLphp.
https://simplesamlphp.org/ Public Library of Science.
https://www.plos.org/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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The ARK Project: Analysing Raptor at Kent Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The ARK Project: Analysing Raptor at Kent Buzz data mobile software wiki database xml infrastructure identifier blog sql repositories cataloguing csv shibboleth licence authentication research standards sharepoint raptor ldap Citation BibTex RIS Leo Lyons describes how University of Kent librarians are benefitting from Raptor's ability to produce e-resource usage statistics and charts.
It is indisputable that the use of e-resources in university libraries has increased exponentially over the last decade and there would be little disagreement with a prediction that usage is set to continue to increase for the foreseeable future.
The majority of students both at undergraduate and post-graduate level now come from a background where online access is the de facto standard.
Add to this the ubiquity of mobile devices in the form of netbooks, tablets and smart phones and it is apparent that a considerable percentage of the service provision from libraries does and will continue to involve on-line resources.
By online resources we are not referring solely to journals and databases but also to local resources such as library catalogues and research repositories and even local ‘live’ services such as the ‘Find a free PC’ service, provided via a mobile app at the University of Kent, and similar services in many other Higher and Further Education institutions.
The number and range of on-line resources a university may be supplying to its staff and students is now enormous and continues to grow.
Similarly the offer from many online subscription services continues to increase in breadth as well as size as more and more archived resources are digitised and made available electronically.
Managing access to these on-line resources is key to the provision of library services which satisfy the needs of the library’s users.
The ability to manage provision and access to these services successfully is greatly enhanced by the availability of accurate and timely statistics on current and past usage of e-resources and the identification of trends which can inform future subscriptions and the provision of infrastructure to facilitate access.
Answers to  Librarians’ Questions Library managers need answers to questions such as: Are the e-resources subscriptions we provide being used at the level we expect?
Is there a usage trend upwards or downwards?
Which schools or departments are the main users of a resource?
There may be other questions relating to security and compliance – can we be confident that only those authorised by the terms of the licence are accessing these resources?
Until recently data relating to the usage of e-resources has not been readily available to library staff in a granular form that gives the degree of detail needed.
When a user accesses an e-resource at Kent they do so through EZProxy middleware or through Shibboleth-federated access management software.
These methods are common to many university libraries though alternatives do exist.
Using either of these methods to authenticate to e-resources creates an entry in a log file.
Log files usually take the form of small text files which contain a log of events relating to the use and release of an application.
Primarily log files are there to help with diagnostics when things go wrong and to provide an audit trail of usage.
They can also be used to analyse security issues and to identify weaknesses in a system.
The main problems with log files for the average non-technical user is that they are written in an almost impenetrable form and that each log file refers to only one event – ie access by a single user on a single occasion.
For a member of the library staff, compilation of these log files to provide useful information for analysing access to e?resources would be a tedious and complex task.
However in 2011, a team at Cardiff University, with funding from JISC, developed the Raptor Tool Kit which takes a lot of the work out of this process and makes the data stored in the log files accessible in the form of graphs and downloadable data tables [1].
How Raptor Can Help So what does Raptor actually do?
In a nutshell, Raptor sits on a system monitoring, in the case of library e-resources, authentication events.
It extracts the relevant information from the log files of these events and stores that information in a database.
The front end of Raptor accesses that database allowing users to view the event information in summary or queryable form.
The University of Kent was an early adopter of Raptor and experimentation in 2010 convinced the IT and Library teams that the tool kit had strong potential to become a useful tool.
Early tests on temporary hardware did not provide an opportunity for detailed exploration of Raptor’s installation, performance and use as a production service.
For these reasons, and because we were convinced that Raptor outputs could make a real difference to our understanding of the way e-resources were being accessed, we were very pleased that our bid for JISC funding to continue working with Raptor was successful.
The ARK Project (Analysing Raptor at Kent) [2] began in June 2012 and final reports will be published in January 2013.
The main aims of the Analysing Raptor at Kent Project were: to install Raptor as a production service; to design and publish reports and graphs in collaboration with stakeholders in the Templeman Library; to evaluate and analyse the usefulness of these reports to inform the strategic planning of  library and other staff.
We also wanted to explore the possibilities for hooking up the Raptor database (or an exported copy of it) to other analysis and presentation tools such as Microsoft Reporting Services.
Raptor is still in the early stages of development and I think it is fair to say that the user interface and some of the processes necessary to customise and set parameters for output have proved to be somewhat obscure to some library staff.
Installation of Raptor proved to be straight-forward and documentation in the Raptor wiki was adequate to get the job done.
Matthew Slowe in our Server Infrastructure Team documented the process and will make this available to the wider community.
Early meetings with all stakeholders produced a list of reports that librarians felt would be most useful to them.
Raptor comes with some standard reports out of the box – the number of authentications over set periods (day, week, month, year), authentications per school, authentications per affiliation type etc.
Additional reports specific to the e-resources to which the hosting organisation subscribes can be added – for instance Authorisations to Science Direct resources grouped by School.
The process for the creation of bespoke reports involves externally editing XML files on the server and would not likely be seen as a task appropriate to library staff (though of course some organisations may employ librarians with sufficient technical skills).
This is one of the limitations of the current version of Raptor since even though some post-processing, formatting and customising is possible within the application interface setting time periods and sorting results for instance new reports and major changes would not be available without reliance on IT staff.
Once configured with a relevant set of standard reports, Raptor provides the non-technical user with a quick route to producing and customising a number of charts and tables which can be output as a combined PDF file.
For instance a library user may wish to create a report of authentications to a particular online journal provider, say Science Direct and can select this from the Raptor reports menu.
Raptor will display, under separate tabs, a graph, a table of results and export and print options using the report’s default values.
Standard UI tools are provided to customise the report.
The start and end dates can be set using date pickers, drop-downs control the ranking of the results and the number of results displayed can be set to make the graph more readable.
Within Raptor the user can also choose from a number of other options to set the graph type and position of labels.
Raptor also gives the user the option to use filters and to change the grouping of results; but in the current version some knowledge of the underlying data from the log files is required to make meaningful choices.
The drop-downs and auto-complete features, whilst convenient and easy to use, draw directly from the log files or from LDAP, so terms presented may be somewhat obscure to non-technical staff.
Despite these limitations, these reports have been well received and staff likely to be responsible for producing them have provided mainly positive feedback on the user interface and ease of use.
Raptor also features an export facility to allow users to work externally from the application on Excel formatted and CSV data.
Many library staff are experienced Excel users and saw great value in being able to further analyse data and to present it in a wider variety of ways than those available in the current version of Raptor.
Exporting the Raptor data to Excel does give users, depending on their Excel skills, a much broader range of options.
The data can be filtered, sorted and normalised and Excel features a huge range of chart and graph types.
The facility to add, format and position labels and annotations is much improved over the native application.
Excel users can also aggregate data from more than one Raptor report, or even from other databases into a single Excel spreadsheet.
Advanced users might use look-up tables and calculated fields to enhance results and presentation.
However, ad hoc Excel graphs and spreadsheets are still limited to the data output from pre-configured Raptor reports.
Further Development Currently the Analysing Raptor at Kent team is exploring how we might use Microsoft Reporting Services (MRS), a tool which already has a user community at Kent, to publish standard time-based reports to Web pages or to Sharepoint – authentications for the last month by school or resource for instance.
MRS, through the much improved Report Builder 3.0 tool,  may also be a route to equipping library ‘super-users’ with robust analysis and presentation tools without adversely affecting either the resources of the IT teams or the performance of Raptor.
Data sets, SQL queries and data views can be defined and published to all users.
Well-designed wizards within Report Builder make the creation of visually excellent charts and parameterised reports with drill-down features a possibility for a wide range of staff without the need for specialist skills and training.
We are also looking at how we might interface with other databases to enrich the Raptor data further.
This might be basic look-up tables to resolve LDAP abbreviations for schools to more meaningful terms, but the possibilities go much wider.
There may be value in cross–referencing results against e-resource usage or in identifying unusual patterns of use by individuals or groups which could identify areas for concern or help to target additional support.
Should we be looking at offering more support to students who do not appear to be using e?resources in the expected way or whose patterns of resource access suggest they might be struggling to meet deadlines?
Building on the work of the LIDP Project at the University of Huddersfield [3], we would be interested in looking for correlations between e-resource usage and student grades.
Could we drill down further and examine whether there are particular disciplines where online journals can be demonstrated to have a positive influence on outcomes?
The RAPID Project at Newcastle University [4] also looked at further uses for Raptor and concluded that, with a little work, the application could be used to record and analyse a diverse range of access events such as entry and exit to and from a building or room – perhaps a PC cluster room, via an electronic door.
Many libraries employ entry gates software so the opportunities for interfacing Raptor with this task and the resultant data seem an obvious area for investigation.
We have also been able to use Raptor to provide evidence of e-resource usage by the students of schools who were not previously thought to be accessing these resources.
Raptor provides very valuable business intelligence which, combined with other indicators, can support the development of internal resource-charging models.
One area that needs a little thought is that of compliance with the Data Protection Act.
There is great value for the Library and the University in analysing archived logs, but we may need to anonymise these data beyond a certain period.
We need to decide on processes and schedules to make sure data are anonymised on a rolling schedule whilst preserving the richness of the information held in the log files.
The username is a link to a great deal of other data – programme of study, modules taken, personal details such as age, gender and status.
There is a risk that the opportunity for useful analysis would be lost if we do not take this in to consideration when designing the anonymisation procedure.
Conclusion Raptor is in the early stages of development but has already proved itself as a useful tool for librarians and other staff.
The standalone version of the software will continue to develop and provide further features and options.
The ARK Project has shown that Raptor can be used by non-technical staff to produce useful information quickly which will assist library staff and senior managers to design better targeted  e?resource provision and to be confident that charging models are appropriate and fair.
The data produced by Raptor can be used with other database and presentation tools to give further options for analysis and the production of rich reports and charts.
Cross-referencing Raptor data with other databases presents exciting opportunities for learning more about the impact and potential for the use of e-resources in Higher and Further Education institutions.
Although brief, Analysing Raptor at Kent has proved to be an interesting and useful project, allowing us to build on our early experience with Raptor.
I am confident that Raptor will continue to develop, and skilled analysts will glean interesting and previously undiscovered insights into how library resources are used and how they might be used in the future.
Further information and discussion on the ARK Project can be found on the Project blog [5].
Acknowledgements We are grateful to JISC and our programme manager Chris Brown for supporting us in our efforts throughout the course of the ARK Project.
References The Cardiff Raptor Project Web site http://iam.cf.ac.uk/trac/RAPTOR Analysing Raptor at Kent Web site: http://www.kent.ac.uk/is/projects/ark/ LIPD Project at the University of Huddersfield http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/ The RAPID Project at the Newcastle University http://research.ncl.ac.uk/rapid/ The ARK Project blog http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/ark/ Author Details Leo Lyons Project Manager Learning & Research Development University of Kent Email: l.lyons@kent.ac.uk Leo Lyons is a project manager at the University of Kent working within the Learning and Research Development department.
Over a 20-year career in IT he has been a trainer, has run help desks, and designed and coded database management systems for the public sector.
His work in recent years has included projects on engaging with alumni, e-folios and improving the presentation of university course data.
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News and Events Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines News and Events Buzz data software framework wiki database dissemination portal usability infrastructure archives metadata accessibility blog repositories copyright video flickr preservation cataloguing ontologies marc21 openurl curation podcast youtube facebook twitter authentication ict interoperability e-government foi privacy intranet research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.
UKeiG Intranet's Forum: ERM's Knowledge Sharing Platform – February 2010 UKeiG Intranet's Forum: ERM's Knowledge Sharing Platform: A chance to see one of the world's top 10 best intranets Free informal Intranets Forum meeting for UKeiG members ERM, 2/F Exchequer Court, 33 St. Mary Axe, London EC3A 8AA Friday 26 February 2010, 4.00 5.30 p.m. http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the world's leading environmental consultancy firm was recognized in a recent survey by Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) as having one of the world's top 10 best intranets.
Dr Bonnie Cheuk, Global Head of Knowledge and Information for ERM will demonstrate ERM's intranet, known as Minerva.
Find out more about Minerva at http://www.erm.com/News-Events/News/ERMs-Knowledge-Sharing-Platform-recognized-as-one-of-the-worlds-top-10-best-intranets-/ Further information: Location: ERM, 2/F Exchequer Court, 33 St. Mary Axe, London EC3A 8AA Map: http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=533301&Y=181348&A=Y&Z=110 Bookings: If you would like to attend this meeting, please contact: Janet Corcoran Imperial College London j.m.corcoran@imperial.ac.uk If you are not a member of UKeiG but would like to come along to this meeting, visit the UKeiG Web site http://www.ukeig.org.uk/join/index.html for joining details.
Back to headlines 4th Research Data Management Forum The fourth meeting of the Research Data Management Forum with the theme of Dealing with Sensitive Data: Managing Ethics, Security and Trust will take place over 10 – 11 March 2010 at Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre, University of Manchester.
The Forum is designed for researchers, digital repository managers, staff from library, information and research organisations, data curators, data centre managers, data scientists, research funding organisations and research networks.
The keynote speaker is Professor Iain Buchan, Professor of Public Health Informatics and Director of the Northwest Institute for Bio-Health Informatics (NIBHI) at the University of Manchester.
Professor Buchan will speak on "Opening Bio-Health Data and Models Securely and Effectively for Public Benefit".
Other confirmed speakers and topics include: Kevin Ashley, University of London Computer Centre: "Providing a Service: Managing issues of confidentiality, ethics and trust" Nicky Tarry, Research Data Transfer Security, Department for Work and Pensions: "DWP Research Data Handling: Doing the right thing and doing it in the right way" Veerle Van den Eynden, UK Data Archive Research Data Management Support Services: "Sharing and managing sensitive data in research with people" Melanie Wright, UK Data Archive Secure Data Service: "Providing a Service: Secure approaches to data management" In addition there will be breakout groups chaired by Graham Pryor of the DCC on the following topics: Identifying a good practice checklist for an HEI dealing with sensitive data Assessing optimal technical approaches for data curation systems and services Scoping training requirements for UK HE data managers For more information, and to register for the event, visit the DCC Web site Back to headlines NISO: Discovery to Delivery: Creating a First-Class User Experience Georgia Tech Global Learning Center, Atlanta, Georgia, USA Tuesday 23 March 2010 http://www.niso.org/news/events/2010/d2d/ The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has organised a one-day forum on Discovery to Delivery: Creating a First-Class User Experience on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center, Atlanta, GA. NISO educational forums are routinely praised for their excellent selection of speakers representing a diversity of viewpoints across the scholarly information community and the small size which provides opportunities to network with speakers and other attendees.
About the Forum There is information everywhere today and access to it relies on a seamless discovery process that offers all appropriate options to the unassisted information seeker.
The journey between discovery and delivery is accomplished with a variety of differing technologies and processes, many of which depend on a reliable and accurate knowledge base of coverage information.
As demands on these technologies change and expand, NISO supports a variety of efforts to strengthen and improve them.
This forum will explore new and innovative ways to meet user's needs and expectations for discovery and delivery of content in the networked world.
Speakers and Topics Keynote Address -Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information Maintaining the OpenURL Registry -Phil Norman, Director Reference and Resource Sharing Development, OCLC Seamless Access to Resources -Adam Chandler, Database Management and E-Resources Librarian, Cornell University Library Usability in Georgia -Speaker TBA bX Recommender Service -Nettie Lagace, Product Director, Ex Libris, Inc.
Improving Single Sign On (SSO): Perfecting a Seamless, Item-Level Linking through SSO Authentication -Harry Kaplanian, Director, Product Management, Serials Solutions The BookServer Project -Peter Brantley, Director BookServer Project, Internet Archive Further information: Registration NISO members receive a substantial discount.
Early bird discounts for all registrants are available through 12 March 2010.
A student discount is also available.
For more information and to register, visit the event Web page: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2010/d2d/ Back to headlines CILIP Executive Briefing: RDA: Resource Description and Access: Meeting the challenges of strategic change CILIP Executive Briefing: RDA: Resource Description and Access: Meeting the challenges of strategic change 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE Tuesday 23 March 2010 http://www.cilip.org.uk/rda-2010/ Library managers face major challenges and key decisions in the lead up to the implementation of RDA: Resource Description and Access.
Its launch in June 2010 will be one of the biggest changes in standards for bibliographic data management and access since MARC21 a decade ago.
RDA's launch is expected to transform cataloguing standards that have been virtually unchanged for 30 years.
Existing standards, as laid out in the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules, have struggled to keep pace with new publishing formats and new publishing practices.
RDA will provide a more flexible framework for resource description and access, and make bibliographic information accessible on the Web.
To help all those affected get to grips with this major strategic development, CILIP has secured leading experts from across the library and information community for a new Executive Briefing.
Entitled RDA: Meeting the challenges of strategic change, it will be presented in London on 23 March 2010, and look at the new cataloguing code and its implications, highlighting the issues that really matter to those working at a strategic level.
The event will begin with Ann Chapman (UKOLN) outlining the development process, followed by an exclusive video presentation by Shawne Miksa (University of Texas) focusing on how the new code fits with traditional and newer cataloguing processes.
Alan Danskin (British Library) will describe the BL perspective on the transition to RDA and demonstrate the new RDA software, followed by Anne Welsh (University College London) who considers the impact of RDA on the cataloguing community.
Finally Heather Jardine (City of London Libraries) focuses on how libraries can manage the change to the new code and Gwyneth Morgan (Nielson Book) presents the suppliers perspective on the transition.
Further information: For further details on this event and how to book your place, visit http://www.cilip.org.uk/rda-2010/ Back to headlines Legal Issues in Web 2.0 The Dome, 14 George Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2PF Wednesday, 24 March 2010, 09.30 16.30 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2010/Legalissues.html Course Outline Find out the legal issues raised by using Web 2.0 applications in libraries and information centres.
Blogs, wikis, YouTube, podcasts, Slideshare, Flickr, Connotea, Facebook, Second Life and Twitter all raise legal problems for those managing them or using them.
This workshop will look at the reality of Web 2.0: what causes problems and how to assess risks.
The course will start with a brief overview of Web 2.0 and what it means.
It will then look in more detail at how Web 2.0 activities can cause legal problems.
These potential problems include: Defamation Data protection and privacy Pornography and other illegal materials Copyright, database right, moral rights and performers rights Accessibility Contract and employment law E-security Freedom of Information Conflict of law and international jurisdictions The liability of the hosting organisation There will be an in-depth discussion on identifying and managing risks.
The course will include exercises based on scenarios for discussion, and all the presentations will be available electronically.
Attendees are encouraged to exchange ideas and experiences with each other.
Who should attend?
This course is aimed at anyone using Web 2.0 applications and those responsible for managing Web 2.0 services.
Course Presenter: Professor Charles Oppenheim Charles Oppenheim is Emeritus Professor and former Head of the Department of Information Science, Loughborough University.
Previous posts in academia and the electronic publishing industry include working for The City University, International Thomson, Pergamon and Reuters.
Charles is the author of "The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information" and is a well-known authority on copyright and other legal issues having written many articles on the subject.
He has been a member of JISC and served on some of its committees since 1992.
He is currently a member of the JISC Scholarly Communications Group and of the Legal Advisory Board of the European Commission.
Further information: To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk.
Further details are also available via the UKeiG Web site at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Back to headlines Research Data Access and Preservation Summit: An ASIS&T Summit In cooperation with the Coalition for Networked Information, a co-sponsor of this event.
Phoenix, Arizona, USA, Hyatt Regency Hotel 9-10 April 2010 http://www.asis.org/Conferences/IA10/ResearchDataAccessSummit2010.html Researchers in all fields generate and analyse enormous quantities of digital data.
In fields ranging throughout the sciences and humanities, managing, preserving, and sharing these data require substantial capital and human resources and new kinds of information professionals who are able to integrate technology, content, and policy skills.
This summit aims to bring together leaders in data centres, laboratories, and libraries in different organisational and disciplinary settings to share ideas and techniques for managing, preserving, and sharing large-scale research data repositories with an eye toward achieving infrastructure-independent access and stewardship.
The summit will engage three kinds of leaders: those from projects with experience in integrating high-performance technologies; those from large-scale collaboratories in science, social science, and the humanities; and those from institutions coping with the challenges of integrating different technologies and data collections.
The summit will address three main questions: What data access and preservation capabilities are required within and across research groups?
What technical solutions exist to meet these needs and how do they scale across domains?
What are the social contexts under which research communities assemble to share data?
The summit will take place in Phoenix over 9-10 April 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
The plan is to have a full day (Friday) of invited panels and presentations with an evening poster and demo session (with food).
The poster/demo session and 30-minute breaks between sessions are designed to maximise participant interaction.
The demo session will provide an opportunity to display existing technology solutions and their application to specific research collaborations.
Saturday will be a half-day of sessions.
The formal meeting ends at noon.
Saturday afternoon tutorials will be given for those who wish to focus on particular concepts and systems.
We expect to have a panel on each of the above questions led by leaders who have practical experience dealing with the associated challenges, and a few invited speakers.
Participants will have ample opportunities to interact with speakers and each other and present techniques and concepts via posters and semi-structured discussions.
Demonstrations of integrated systems that address data management challenges will be held, with opportunities to compare approaches and ask implementation details.
Further information: More information is at: http://www.asis.org/Conferences/IA10/ResearchDataAccessSummit2010.html Register at: https://www.asis.org/Conferences/IA10/rdap10regform.php Early rates end 26 February 2010 Back to headlines JISC Conference 2010: Technology: at the heart of education and research Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London 12-13 April 2010 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/events/2010/04/jisc10.aspx This will be the 8th annual conference, bringing JISC's expertise and knowledge on technology in education to over 750 academics, IT experts, library professionals, policy makers, research staff, senior managers, students and teachers from across education within the UK and internationally.
The conference theme Technology: at the heart of education and research confirms JISC's view that universities and colleges must integrate technology into all aspects of their strategic planning to ensure their survival in the coming years.
Over the last 15 years JISC has provided expertise, support and guidance to those working in higher and further education to help them maintain the UK's world class reputation.
This conference is free of charge to attend and will be of interest to all those in post 16 and higher education and research involved in planning for and supporting the use of technology, including: Senior managers and those responsible for developing and implementing policy and strategy Staff who play a role in supporting the use of technology in educational organisations, including practitioners Staff with responsibility for e-resources within their institution Teachers and researchers with an interest in the use of technology Priority is strictly given to registrants from academic institutions from within the UK.
JISC reserves the right to move any registrants who are not from an academic institution to a waiting list until further notice.
Further information: Programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/04/jisc10/Programme.aspx Register online http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/04/jisc10/registration.aspx Back to headlines Museums and the Web 2010 (MW2010) The international conference for culture and heritage on-line Denver, Colorado, USA 13-17 April 2010 http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/ Descriptions of more than 40 Demonstrations have been added to the MW2010 Web site.
The full program is now online at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/sescal/ Pre-Conference Workshops Filling Up Many of the workshops at MW2010 have limited enrolment to ensure that they are great learning experiences.
If you've been thinking about adding a workshop to your registration, do so soon to avoid disappointment.
Best of the Web Nominations We're running the Best of the Web entirely on the conference community site this year.
For details, see http://conference.archimuse.com/page/best_web_2010_nomination_process and check out the new category definitions at: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/best/categories.html Nominate your favourite site, review the sites nominated, and watch for the announcement about voting for 'MW2010 People's Choice'.
MW on the Social Networks Connect with the Museums and the Web community on various social network platforms.
See: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/online/ for links to where you can find us, and follow our tags: #mw2010 for conference-related things or #museweb for general items.
Further information See https://www2.archimuse.com/mw2010/mw2010.registrationForm.html Back to headlines Tipping the Scales: Tackling information obesity to ensure productive and sustainable information resources A joint UKeiG/BDA Knowledge Management meeting British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G8YS Tuesday, 29 June 2010, 9.30 16.30 http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2010/infoobesity.htm Course Outline 'Information obesity' describes a condition whereby available information resources are not being used in a productive and sustainable way by individuals or communities.
Like physical obesity, it is not just the result of consuming too much, but is linked to declines in the information's quality, and individuals' and communities' awareness of problems which arise through over-consumption.
Fitness and (mental) exercise also come into play.
The consequences of information obesity may be severe if left unchecked; it will lead to a decline in our ability to manage knowledge, both in our communities and our workplaces.
As a teaching strategy, information literacy (IL) can partly help to combat the condition.
However, as traditionally defined, IL does not address the ways in which the structure of organisations and our own innate cognitive biases prevent us acting as independent and self-aware evaluators of the information we find.
This course will help participants understand these biases and how, through work at the community level, they may be overcome, in order that we start using information to sustain ourselves and our communities, and not just consume it unthinkingly.
This one-day course will include time for plenty of discussion and practical activity.
Participants will be encouraged to share their experiences with others and also to build a network of practice after the event.
Sessions will include: Identifying information obesity: structural, individual and community-level explanations How information literacy helps: and how it is limited Cognitive biases, and why they matter How organisations affect the way we think The holistic approach to IL: subjective, objective and inter-subjective value Problem-based learning; studentand community-led research projects Who should attend?
Anyone working with information in formal, non-formal or informal education, who has an interest in enhancing their teaching of information studies and/or knowledge management, to students or to colleagues as part of their professional development work.
This includes: information professionals; teachers/lecturers at any level of education; managers (particularly, but not only, those with responsibilities for information and knowledge management and dissemination); other stakeholders in education.
Course Presenter: Dr Andrew Whitworth is the Programme Director for the MA: Digital Technologies, Communication and Education at the University of Manchester.
He has published widely in the field of information literacy including the 2009 book with Chandos, Information Obesity.
His Media and Information Literacy course at Manchester was recognised by the LLIDA (Learning Literacies for a Digital Age) project as an exemplar of learning literacies education.
Further information: To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email meetings@ukeig.org.uk.
Further details are also available via the UKeiG Web site at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/ Back to headlines New Report: The Challenges, Application and Benefits of Social Media within Higher Education Institutions UCISA Corporate Jadu has recently concluded an in-depth research study into the social media challenges, usage and benefits being generated by UK HEIs.
The report entitled The Challenges, Application and Benefits of Social Media within Higher Education Institutions is based on research with 60 respondents, within 44 HEIs in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
The research report identifies the key benefits being gained from the use of social media and highlights the impact of these technologies on established ways of working.
The research also identifies a number of strategic questions.
HEI management is looking for a stronger business case to invest in social media.
The strategic approach to managing social media is evolving.
A more integrated approach to managing information and content will be required to protect the brand and reputation of institutions.
Can unrestricted usage continue?
As usage grows it is likely that privacy, intellectual property and data protection issues will increase in profile and impact.
Increased awareness is needed to address cultural issues.
'Generational and cultural issues' were identified as a major constraint to social media usage Further information: To download a copy of the full report please go to http://www.jadu.co.uk/heisurvey Jadu further advises: Please note to ensure that Higher Education Institutions gained maximum benefit from this research, Jadu has sought comment and feedback from Brian Kelly of UKOLN in its preparation, application and analysis.
[Source: Jadu] [Received: February 2010] Back to headlines Dutch Higher Education Sector Convinced of Need for Open Access EUR 2.5m available for Open Access to research results Open Access – meaning free access to scientific and scholarly information – is winning ground, and more and more information is becoming freely accessible to the public.
The parties concerned – including publishers – are increasingly accepting Open Access as the norm.
At the Open Access seminar organised by SURF in Amsterdam, Prof. Jos Engelen, chairman of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), announced that his organisation would be providing a special Open Access budget of EUR 2.5m.
At the well-attended seminar – held to mark the conclusion of SURF's 'Open Access Year 2009' – discussion focused on the issue of how we can speed up progress towards achieving the Open Access ideal.
Much has already been achieved in the Netherlands.
More than 200,000 publications have now been made freely accessible via the NARCIS scientific portal.
These will now be joined by publications by the lectors who organise knowledge networks at Dutch universities of applied sciences.
Unanimity Leading figures from the world of Higher Education and research expressed unanimous support for the view that scientific and scholarly publications that have been financed by the taxpayer should be available online free of charge.
Derk Haank, CEO of the Springer Publishing Group, went so far as to say that if scientific and scholarly publishing were to start again today, Open Access would be the logical route to pursue.
Publishers The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has reached agreement with Springer that in 2010 all articles by Dutch researchers in Springer journals will be made available Open Access, subject to the author agreeing.
Other publishers too are providing opportunities for Open Access publication because they are following Springer in allowing researchers to arrange for Open Access when publishing their articles.
Almost all publishers already allow researchers to upload the definitive author's version of their article to their institution's repository.
The Problem One problem for scientists and scholars is the need to publish in prestigious and expensive journals so as to receive a good rating, which is important when applying for grants from organisations such as the NWO.
Prof. Engelen said that the NWO would investigate ways of ensuring that publications in Open Access would count more significantly towards the author's 'impact factor'.
Paul Doop – a member of the board of Amsterdam University and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and chair of the ICT and Research platform board of SURFfoundation – argued that the problem could be solved by including a provision for mandatory Open Access in collective labour agreements.
Many of those attending the seminar thought that was going too far.
Prof. Engelen said, however, that his organisation was keeping close track of developments and that if insufficient progress had been made in a year's time, the NWO would see whether it could make Open Access obligatory, as its sister organisations in the United Kingdom and the United States have already done.
Further information: Further information on the seminar and the video registration (in Dutch): http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/themas/openonderzoek/OpenAccess/Pages/Default.aspx NARCIS: http://www.narcis.info/ [Source: SURF] [Received: February 2010] Back to headlines MLA: Accreditation Modernisation The MLA has welcomed the findings of two studies which it commissioned to help inform its review of museum Accreditation, and detailed its plans to streamline, update and refocus the scheme.
MLA Chief Executive Roy Clare said: "Accreditation has proven its value over the last 21 years.
As the UK standard for museums it is crucial for the long-term success of the sector.
We are listening and acting on consistent feedback that Accreditation is highly valued and has made a real difference to museums, but it must be less bureaucratic and more representative.
It must also serve as a key tool in the improvement of museum services with a focus on the impact they make for the public.
"We are very grateful for all the feedback, which gives us a very strong base for a refreshed scheme that has simpler process, increased flexibility for museums to demonstrate success, a louder voice for consumers and a demonstration of responsiveness to communities."
Further information: http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press/releases/2010/accreditation_development [Source: MLA] [Received: February 2010] Back to headlines Digital Funds for Libraries Library services have a chance to bid a new £30 million government investment in UK online centres.
The funding was announced in December's Smarter Government report that recognised the potential to reduce the cost of public services by increasing the amount of online transactions.
The report recognised that online government had to mean 100% online citizens and awarded £30 million to UK online centres to help get one million people online by 2012.
The first round of grant funding is now open for applications from all library services.
The closing date for applications is 10 February 2010 for projects that will run from 1 April 2010 to 31 March 2011.
Natasha Innocent, MLA senior policy adviser, said: "Library services are at the forefront of bridging the digital divide and supporting grassroots digital inclusion.
The MLA is delighted to be working with UK online centres to promote this funding opportunity to library services.
Libraries play a key role in supporting people to get online and this funding stream could support them to reach out even further to deeply excluded groups, and target areas of high deprivation and low network coverage."
Applications are welcomed from any library meeting the criteria and willing to become a member of the UK online centres network to deliver their funded project.
Over the next three years, many hundreds of libraries services, ICT and support centres will benefit from funding, and from being part of a building network sharing resources and expertise, taking advantage of new products, services, training opportunities and marketing campaigns.
Further information: http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press/releases/2010/uk_online_funding [Source: MLA] [Received: February 2010] Back to headlines JISC Briefing Paper: Assessing the Business Case for Standards A recent briefing entitled Assessing the Business Case for Standards: An introduction for strategy planning and resourcing committees provides advice to help people incorporate standards in their ICT-related business cases.
Making a business case for interoperability and standards is a challenging task for those involved in the strategic planning of IT systems in educational institutions.
This briefing written by Adam Cooper and Wilbert Kraan of JISC CETIS, is intended to provide advice and supporting materials to help people to incorporate standards in their ICT-related business cases.
It assumes some familiarity with the way IT systems are presently deployed and maintained in educational institutions, and will be of interest to Information Services managers and senior managers for strategy planning and resourcing.
Further information: The briefing is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/bpbusinesscaseforstandards.aspx [Source: JISC CETIS] [Received: January 2010] Back to headlines Successful Reuse of Research Data Requires Integrated Approach On 23-24 September 2009 an international discussion workshop was held in Berlin, prepared and organised by Knowledge Exchange.
The main focus of the workshop was on the benefits, challenges and obstacles of re-using data from a researcher's perspective.
The most important message from the wide variety of presentations was that successful reuse not only requires efforts directed at the technical issues, but also at providing incentives for researchers, both to share and re-use.
These incentives can be provided by funding opportunities, but also by incorporating data sharing and re-use in the research assessment.
The issue of data re-use would be a lot more relevant to researchers if publishers, for example, asked authors for data to underpin their publications.
Alternatively researchers' data being cited in a journal should be rewarded.
Technical aspects should also be addressed, e.g.
by supporting data storage and sharing facilities.
This requires not only specialised staff but also agreed standards (metadata, ontologies) which will allow different datasets to be evaluated, compared and combined.
Researchers will need to be trained, but awareness will also need to be created at a higher level.
Bottom-up and top-down approaches need to work in unison.
At the workshop the use cases presented by researchers from a variety of disciplines were supplemented by two keynotes and selected presentations by specialists from infrastructure institutions, publishers, and national and European funding bodies.
Thanks to this broad approach it became clear that certain challenges and obstacles are comparable across disciplines and organisations.
As a general recommendation the participants agreed that it is time to cooperate in more ambitious international activities to establish reliable and sustainable support for initiatives in the field of data related research infrastructure as Prof. John Wood (Imperial College London) put it in his keynote: "You can no longer separate the data management issue from the planning and running of research infrastructures".
The workshop was organised by the working group Primary Research Data of Knowledge Exchange.
Further information: Knowledge Exchange http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/ For further information on the workshop please see: http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=324 [Source: Knowledge Exchange] [Received: January 2010] Back to headlines Libraries Bridge the Digital Divide New research findings highlight the key role of public libraries in opening up free online access and providing support to help people get online.
A new survey has highlighted the extent free Internet access is available to the public in libraries throughout England, during the day, in the evening and at weekends.
The research, conducted by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) highlights the crucial role public libraries play in supporting the delivery of the national digital priorities set out by the Government and the Digital Champion, Martha Lane Fox.
Heads of library service, library managers and IT specialists from 112 local authorities in England took part in identifying the extent of available Internet access; support for people to get online; and digital training of library staff.
The report, prepared by CFE on behalf of the MLA, confirmed that 79 per cent of library services in English Local Authorities do not charge for internet access at all and a further 12 per cent do not make any charge for the first hour (91per cent in total).
There is an average of 762 hours of Internet access available across all libraries in a Local Authority area per week.
Nearly all Local Authorities (98 per cent) provide this access in the evening and at weekends with over half (59 per cent) providing Internet access on Sundays.
Further information: 'Role of public libraries in supporting and promoting digital participation' is available from the MLA page: http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press/releases/2010/digital_participation [Source: MLA] [Received: January 2010] Back to headlines TV Archive Project to Supply Europeana EUscreen is a new project that will supply TV archive footage to Europeana.
Its project Web site, www.euscreen.eu has gone live.
The Web site contains a blog, information about the project and the partners, publications and events.
Visitors can also subscribe to the EUscreen mailing list or follow the project on Twitter or Facebook.
EUscreen is a three-year project funded by the eContentplus Programme of the European Commission.
During that time over 30,000 items that capture Europe's television heritage (videos, photographs, articles) will be channelled into Europeana.
EUscreen will also develop its own multilingual portal that will specialise in information about TV archives and television research.
The portal will be launched in 2011 and will be directly connected to Europeana.
The EUscreen consortium is co-ordinated by the University of Utrecht and consists of 27 partners (audiovisual archives, research institutions, technology providers and Europeana) from 19 European countries.
Further information: Euscreen http://www.euscreen.eu/ [Source: KB] [Received: January 2010] Back to headlines Return to top Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/newsline/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 68 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 68 Buzz data software framework dissemination rss xml archives metadata doi digitisation standardisation identifier blog repositories eprints copyright preservation cataloguing opac multimedia aggregation ocr openurl lucene wordpress facebook twitter oer solr ict foi taxonomy research sfx sharepoint vufind Citation BibTex RIS The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne issue 68.
I am pleased to introduce you to the content of Issue 68, and to have the opportunity to remind you that you have a far larger number of channels into the publication’s content.
You can do so by using the Archive (for back issues), Authors or Articles tabs on the front page to search for material or information (in addition to the general search field top right) or you can casually browse the material offered by Today’s Choice, view the passing articles in the Gallery block to the right, or drill down into the Gallery from its tab.
Furthermore you will note it is possible to browse over the Keywords that have been generated across all the content of the Magazine.
In addition, you will find FAQs on the new functionality to explain how it is best employed.
I trust you will find that Ariadne  is considerably more connected up as a result of this development and I sincerely hope it will encourage you to range farther afield within its content, whether recent or not.
I am also announcing that from Issue 69, Ariadne intends to publish material under Creative Commons licensing.
We trust that this will meet with general approbation and hope that you will consider writing to offer or discuss a contribution of your own.
Data Citation and Publication At a time when the true importance of datasets in support of research is becoming increasingly apparent, Sarah Callaghan, Roy Lowry, David Walton point out in their article Data Citation and Publication by NERC’s Environmental Data Centres that data are the basis on which scientific endeavour operates.
Yet as data have become more and more abundant, the difficulty of publishing them has grown commensurately.
They also point to the importance of uninterrupted access to data, and how that is not always easily maintained when they are published on the Web.
Furthermore, where such data can no longer be accessed, they cease to fulfil their role of validating the research that produced them.
The authors describe the role of the six NERC-funded data centres in supporting researchers in the management of their data; and the importance of the effort involved in ensuring that datasets archived are supported by the contextual information such as calibration and location data which ensure they remain of use to researchers far into the future.
This article is about their approach to promoting access to data while at the same time working to ensure that data creators are properly credited for the considerable work involved.
It describes the path they took towards implementing sound data citation, though the authors do not claim they have achieved perfection.
The authors provide us with some background to the work they are undertaking by examining projects funded by JISC which have preceded and informed their own.
They also explain some of the issues surrounding the publication of data with which data centres need to engage.
They point out the irreconcilable nature of the traditional versioned publishing model with that of the ever-changing nature of data for publication.
They also provide an overview of BODC pilot projects centred on the concept of the BODC Published Data Library.
They explain the principal resources of data from within and outside BODC, their attendant requirements for publication and the procedure through which the Published Data Library works to publish them.
The authors go on to describe the involvement of data centres in the publication of data in two different areas.
The first is the day-to-day serving of data, and the Publication of datasets that have been enhanced and strengthened by a process of peer review and management.
But they also point to the need to bridge the gap between the mundane provision of data and the enhanced process of data Publication by formalising a method of dataset citation.
In the context of NERC data centres’ adoption of DOIs for datasets, they also draw a distinction between the technical quality of datasets destined for peer review and publication as against the scientific quality of their content which is evaluated by scientists with the relevant expertise.
But the assurance that the dataset meets the necessary technical standards in terms of format, access, etc means that peer review can be undertaken.
They provide an overview of the principal technical requirements relating to datasets, in particular, the format of files, together with description of the associated XML metadata documents.
The authors go on to detail the responsibilities data centres undertake when they assign a DOI to a dataset, including the proper formulation of landing pages.
They also provide a number of prescriptions in respect of such pages to ensure not only that users can obtain as much information as possible, but also that the correct dataset is identified!
The authors explain the structure of citations and DOI-specific metadata employed by the NERC centres and examine the principles that govern the assignment of DOIs, and how centres approach the whole matter of revised datasets as well as the granularity involved in assigning DOIs to measurements in datasets.
At the same time, they also realise that some datasets become scientifically significant before they reach maturity and can be frozen forever.
They explain how ongoing sources of data can be handled and how their DOI assignment is best approached.
Open Educational Resources In his article Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design, Mansur Darlington describes two methods for presenting online OERs for engineering design that were explored and developed as part of the Higher Education Academy/JISC-funded DelOREs (Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design) Project.
He points out how so little of material of potential use to staff and students actually comes with effective guidance on its educational exploitation.
He describes the aims and work of the DelOREs Project and how its two collections have been mounted for dissemination and management purposes.
He also raises the central difficulty in obtaining sufficiently clear information, particularly licensing details, with which to make discovery and adaptation of OERs a simple task.
He offers an incisive view of the surrounding culture and changes necessary if OER collections are to thrive.
In this article, Mansur also explains the background behind the choice of software to present the DelORES Selections material, the configurability and extensibility of WordPress being major determinants together with many users’ familiarity with it.
Mansur goes on to explain how descriptions of OER resources are created, how such information is organised, and the the effective exploitation of RSS to disseminate them.
A subject-specific taxonomy designed by team members underlies this description process.
Further more, the ‘custom fields’ functionality of WordPress affords, he maintains, the opportunity to record other data while other familiar aspects of Word Press are also moulded to these description purposes.
He explains that while the Selections content is static, its stable-mate DelORES Extensions is a dynamic collection which requires the means to select and update content by the user, as well as discard it.
Mansur explains the role of Waypoint software for user access and how it has been adapted by the project.
The collection is augmented through conventional Web-based discovery techniques.
He also describes how the project has organised filtering of potential content which benefits by a two-handed approach, one manual, to allow of human selective processes, and the other automated.
In this way it is possible to develop a system ‘knowledge’ which provides criteria for retention or discard of resources.
Mansur describes the very varied formats of candidate material for adoption as OERs but points out that it must conform to certain minimal requirements relating to quality, relevance and clarity of legal status.
As regards legal clarity, all that is required is a machine-readable statement of the material’s acceptable usage.
The basic notion of licensing actually centres on the spirit when not the letter of Creative Commons.
However, Mansur also notes that material displaying minimal constraints on reuse is not very common, nor is  the culture for making it ‘open’ very mature.
Neither can the irony be lost on OER collators that, even where material has been placed in ready view of potential reusers, the lack of clarity about its legitimate reuse discourages collection owners in fear of being seen as advocating anything less than clear, legitimate reuse.
As a consequence, Mansur bemoans the absence of a clear ‘open-practice’ culture to date.
Nor, he continues, is the process for OER collection providers of resource discovery and adoption a straightforward one since even resources obviously intended as an OER lack all the required information, though he cites the exemplary MIT OpenCourseWare approach as the ideal.
The lack of machine-readable data therefore makes the discovery of OERs a difficult task.
Mansur describes the solution trialled by the DelORES Project.
He goes on consider the approaches to resource description and the value of formats such as XML over native formats; advances are being made in standardisation of descriptive data.
The fact remains, in his view, that fully automated OER discovery and processing relies on the provision of machine-readable information that satisfies the above-mentioned minimal requirements which are easily harvested.
Finally, Mansur compares the different cultures reigning in the USA and UK in relation to the sharing of material and the current climate here is unlikely to help matters.
He identifies a decided need to define appropriate financial and organisational mechanisms if that unhelpful climate is to change – and that resource provision efforts in UK HE need to be incentivised if they are to be sustained and extended.
Public Libraries in Africa In their article Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa, Monika Elbert, David Fuegi and Ugne Lipeikaite describe the principal findings of the ground-breaking study of the same name which served to provide evidence of how public libraries are perceived by their stakeholders.
Ariadne has been fortunate indeed to receive articles from David and Monika in the past about the work they have been doing with libraries in developing countries, and so I am very pleased that they and Ugne have been able to offer these insights into the perceptions not only of users of libraries, but also non-users and the officials who influence their development.
While we have heard much about the views of users of public libraries in developed countries recently, sadly so often in the context  of contesting cuts in budgetary support, it is thought-provoking to be offered the perceptions of citizens whose use of public services is rarely taken for granted.
It is also important to underline that these stakeholder perception studies were undertaken the better to understand not just the public’s perceptions but also those of the national and municipal decision makers who influence library finance and planning.
This article gives not only an overview of the usage behaviour of the public but also their opinions of library service quality as well as where and how their opinions are formed.
The authors contend that the manner in which these perceptions were gathered may prove of use to researchers seeking to gather evidence to support advocacy for improved library investment and planning elsewhere.
In their interpretation for us of the study Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa they highlight the fact that opinions were sought of citizens who do not currently use public libraries, an approach that is far-seeing since such a constituency could so easily be overlooked.
I have no doubt but that identifying such subjects may have proven less than straightforward.
It becomes apparent in reading this article that the views of library users in Africa and say, here in the UK, are not so very divergent at times, for example in relation to the relevance of material on offer to readers and the quality and ambiance of their library’s physical surroundings.
In other respects we may consider ourselves as more than a little fortunate: for example in the degree to which new media and ICT in general have penetrated public consciousness and have influenced expectations.
One interpretation of certain data might be that the greater availability of of such media can blind us to the fact that the expertise of the librarian in underpinning library services remains central, something arguably more readily understood by less fortunate library users in Africa.
A rather encouraging finding was that, whether they prioritised library funding or not, the local government officials surveyed did largely recognise the economic benefits to be derived from public libraries in addition to the more readily recognised advantages such as literacy and education.
On the other hand, it is clear that how libraries in Africa engage pro-actively with that economic agenda is less well perceived.
It is very much to be hoped that, as the authors conclude, the ‘findings of the study, once they have been validated by the local library communities in the countries concerned, will constitute a substantial body of evidence that potentially can be used to inform evidence-based library management and advocacy campaigns.’ Second Life In his article Has Second Life Lived up to Expectations?, Paul Gorman examines to what degree Second Life (SL) has justified the claims made for it by its evangelists with particular regard to education.
His initial remarks relate to the manner in which some adopting institutions fail to grasp its primary characteristic, its interactivity, and are often doomed to repeat the errors of their real-world organisation.
Paul begins his article by tracing the visibility and popularity of SL from its launch in 2003 to the present day.
He examines whether and to what extent SL has realised its potential for education and refers to the interest that was shown in UK Higher Educations institutions (HEIs), so much so that by summer 2010 the involvement of British HEIs in virtual worlds of one variety or another was almost universal, although the degree to which that was true varied considerably.
Paul then goes on to give his personal view of SL’s virtual world as an education user.
In that context he contends it would be inaccurate to describe SL as widely used among students and goes on to question to what extent it can be argued that SL has trumped the value of computer-mediated communication such as instant messaging.
He also points to what one might describe as SL’s ‘Achilles Heel’ in comparison with say, Skype or Facebook.
Paul is not convinced that the approach adopted by certain institutions, in which they ‘slavishly’ recreate in SL the dimensions of their physical entity is of any value at all.
By and large, he contends, they simply reproduce the non-interactive (my emphasis) characteristics of conventional teaching, for example the copying of notes off a screen.
Adopting the other tack, however, Paul goes on to extol the virtues of those same interactive characteristics where they are allowed to apply.
He provides a clear example in the matter of role-play.
It can range from barristers’ advocacy, and customer service, to that of medical students (though I was unclear whether this included the much needed ‘bedside manner’ in some instances) and provides opportunities to practise beyond the circumstances that could easily be reproduced in real life.
However, the author does issue a word of caution on the degree to which role-play can be employed as a means of representing ‘true’ experience.
Paul points out that SL also offers other forms of person-to-object intervention that provide scenarios that cannot be replicated in reality, such as scenes from the distant past.
Nonetheless, the use of virtual worlds has been beneficial to the understanding and practice of students from a wide range of disciplines.
Though he is a strong advocate of its interactive potential, Paul is obliged to point out some long-term failings.
He identifies the principal weakness in the SL experience in terms of its failure to provide a convincing sense of ‘being there’ and why that has come about.
All in all, I feel the author has taken a balanced view of the educational benefits and weaknesses of SL’s offer, reserving his strongest criticism not for a particular failing so much as the length of time that some have persisted.
Increasing Arts Research Deposit In Kultivating Kultur: Increasing Arts Research Deposit, Marie-Therese Gramstadt discusses how the JISC-funded Kultivate Project is encouraging arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.
In its mission to increase arts research deposit in institutional repositories, Kultivate works to engage with the arts research community to share and support best practice.
The Kultur Group is a key element in this community and has set up IRs that are better suited to arts researchers.
Marie-Therese describes her research methodology, including desk research and surveys, to gain a picture of the arts research repository landscape.
She begins her examination of the barriers that hinder arts research deposit by identifying the wide range of stakeholders and relationships that exist in an IR.
Even terminology to describe an IR affects potential users’attitudes and how easily they can become an integral part of a researcher’s day-to-day workflow.
Moreover, the requirements of arts researchers in the use of an IR differ from other disciplines in terms of presentation and context of outputs.
As a result, enhancements to the EPrints platform are in hand.
Marie-Therese admits that there is a continuing debate about what constitutes artistic research and which aspects of work would be suitable for deposit.
Surveys conducted pointed to the singularity of arts research output in IRs and how its theory differs markedly from other disciplines.
She also indicates the possible conflict between the nature of IR-handling of arts output and how that is viewed  by researchers discomfited by notions of audit.
Similarly, institutional control could exclude researchers from their own output when they move on.
This instance caused great resistance to reusing IRs when work could not be accessed.
Ease of access to amend work held in an IR was another source of debate.
In this context, Marie-Therese described the model operated by the Journal for Artistic Research which works in a manner more sympathetic to arts researchers’ needs.
No one will be surprised to learn that the operation of rights in this field is far from straightforward.
Much could be characterised as a forest of different combinations and layers of rights issues.
A Kultivate survey highlighted copyright as a significant barrier to arts research deposit, though use of depositors’ work by others can be better controlled thanks to using repository software.
Marie-Therese points to correlations between Kulivate and the JISC MRD programme, in particular Project CAiRO (Curating Artistic Research Output) and JISC Incremental.
Unsurprisingly, their findings reflected the usual dichotomy between researchers’ generally favourable stance on the principle of data sharing and the much lower rate of actual deposit.
Kultivate’s survey identified the time required to deposit as a major determinant.
Feedback from Kultur II Group meetings and other JISC-funded projects indicated that a reduction in the complexity of the deposit process would increase participation.
The group also examined the DepositMO work which supports deposit by MS word on a desktop using the SWORD protocol and provides automatic cataloguing of deposited images even if subject terms and keywords are not yet included.
Progress has been made in reducing the number of fields and improving workflow in the deposit process; a demonstrator ARTSUK has been made available to the Kultur II Group by Kultivate.
The Kultivate project proposal draws attention to the assertion by OpenDOAR that arts content is noticeably under-represented in UK IRs (to something in the order of only 3%).
The project has been investigating the upload of content via Mahara software.
Marie-Therese points to the importance of advocacy to encourage regular and further deposits once the initial wave of deposits dissipates, and how embedding the deposit process in research practice is a central issue.
She also mentions the work of the Repositories Support Project (RSP) in advising Kultivate.
However, this article clearly recognises that advocacy for arts research differs considerably from other disciplines given ‘the cultural and specialised needs of artistic researchers who often have different workflow processes, complex multimedia research outputs, and operate in a different context in terms of their relationship to the institution and their research.‘ Descriptions of work which seeks to highlight for depositors the effect their work may be having is very reminiscent of the approach developed at Hokkaido [1].
The Kultivate Project survey work also highlights the central position of the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the motivation of researchers and institutions, to the point where deposit in the IR is the only way to enter evidence for the REF 2014.
In her conclusions, Marie-Therese includes a mixture of technical, managerial and organisational solutions in order to increase arts research deposit in UK institutions.
The CLIF Project In The CLIF Project: The Repository as Part of a Content Lifecycle, Richard Green, Chris Awre and Simon Waddington describe how a digital repository can become part of the technical landscape within an institution and support digital content lifecycle management across systems.
They describe the JISC-funded CLIF (Content Lifecycle Integration Framework) Project.
Part of its work was to co-operate with partners to understand the interaction of the authoring, collaboration and delivery of materials using three systems used within Higher Education institutions, namely Fedora and SharePoint, on the one hand, Fedora and Sakai on the other.
There is no underestimating the importance of embedding the Institutional Repository in the digital content lifecycle and the extensive integration work required which has highlighted the need for more up-to-date standards to be adopted by systems and greater concentration on making export of content as easy as import.
The authors point to the work at Hull on which CLIF reposes and the danger that repository content could become another silo of digital material.
The plan to develop software which would reduce this danger was strengthened by the collaboration between Hull and KCL.
The authors raise the matter of standards in the development of software to transfer content between systems and the approach to constructing digital objects, particularly where Fedora Commons software is concerned.
To this end, Hydra-compliant objects are seen as addressing the greater flexibility of Fedora digital objects.
The authors’ literature review identified considerable diversity in the approach to digital content lifecycle management, and highlighted the need to identify the appropriateness of different systems at different stages of the management lifecycle.
They then describe how, in gathering user requirements, they recognise different needs among colleagues working mostly with research data, and others operating largely with test-based materials.
This situation generated the development of two generic use cases to reflect that dichotomy, and CLIF worked towards supporting functionality for both SAKAI and Sharepoint.
The project’s technical review considered the functionality offered by Fedora, Sharepoint and SAKAI, and where interaction among them could take place in the content lifecycle.
It also examined the best approach to software integration, favouring point-to-point architecture over Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs).
Supported by its technical review, the project began work on integrating Sharepoint with Fedora, and SAKAI with Fedora.
The authors describe how CLIF extends the functionality of Sharepoint’s MySite.
They describe how document deposit to a repository is configured for users by an administrator, and, where possible, takes place together with depositors’ assignment of metadata.
The authors then move to the integration of Fedora into the SAKAI resources tool.
It is possible to configure the level in the repository structure where movement of content between SAKAI and repository folders operates.
This management functionality means that preservation of material is facilitated.
The authors remind us that provision and transfer of metadata for SAKAI is somewhat limited.
The authors then describe the apparent ‘copy-and-paste’ functionality of the SAKAI-Fedora integration work as concealing a high degree of complexity.
They also sought  many stakeholders involved in the development of use cases in order to seek their opinion of the integration work and summarise their views.
Users’ feedback was overall encouraging.
They also describe the steps to be fulfilled at Hull in terms of SAKAI integration code that will support Hull’s QA processes while at the same time creating the opportunity to address the limited nature of SAKAI content’s descriptive metadata.
In their conclusion the authors consider the profile of such practical considerations in the literature.
They point to the considerable strength repositories possess in the area of archival capability and the need for institutions to understand better the potential of differing content management systems in operating over the different stages of the digital content lifecycle.
Digitisation in Armenia In Peculiarities of Digitising Materials from the Collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Alan Hopkinson and Tigran Zargaryan give an overview of their experience of digitising paper-based materials in the Fundamental Scientific Library (FSL) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Armenia, including some of the obstacles encountered during image processing and optical-character recognition.
While providing us with some background to Armenian scientific publications, the authors describe the situation in the light of the enormous effect the Internet has had upon the scene, and the aims of the project they are steering to address the present and ever-increasing demands for digitisation.
They provide a wealth of practical detail in their approach to the digitisation process and the difficulties encountered, not least the problems relating to multiple alphabet forms which will give some practitioners pause for thought.
They begin by providing a broad-brushstroke picture of the stage to which publishing in Armenia has developed and the anticipated and increasing sophistication of electronic resource description and information discovery and retrieval.
They go on to describe the evolution of scientific publication in Armenia, produced in a variety of languages as well as Armenian and how Armenian publishing spread in particular to urban concentrations of the Armenian diaspora.
Alan and Tigran describe the principal aims of their project and the nature of the bid they submitted to the British Library together with a description of the digitisation and preservation processes they established on receipt of a BL grant.
They also outline their strategy based on experience of photographing originals.
They provide some very useful advice for practitioners about to undertake similar digitisation activity in their position, particularly in terms of camera hardware and colour.
The authors go on to describe the processes they developed in recording and storing image data and give readers an indication of the resources that must be dedicated if digitisation on such a scale is to succeed.
They also describe the decisions taken with regard to open-source or proprietary solutions and their associated thinking.
Heartened by the success of their initial digitisation project, staff at the FSL were encouraged to initiate another: placing NAS scholarly content online.
They did so despite the hurdles generated by the scale of the work they were undertaking.
The authors explain the significance of the OCR conversion process in the digitisation effort.
The capacity to render text in picture format to text that is searchable, and even executable, represents an enhancement of a major order, and a development of significant benefit to all using their material.
Adapting VuFind In the first ‘Tooled Up’ article in new Ariadne, Graham Seaman describes in Adapting VuFind as a Front-end to a Commercial Discovery System, the adaptation of an open-source discovery tool, VuFind, to local needs, discusses the decisions which needed to be made in the process, and considers the implications of this process for future library discovery systems.
He also provides an understanding not only of the requirements involved in this development work, but also the approaches adopted to meeting them in the context of the needs of Royal Holloway Library (RHL).
In addition to providing us with detail of the problems and solutions he encountered along the way, Graham also shares with us thoughts on the nature of next-generation discovery systems and how he sees them in the context of his work described in this 'Tooled Up' article.
In his opening Graham reminds us that VuFind ‘was one of the first next-generation library discovery systems in the world, made possible by the open source Solr/Lucene text indexing and search system which lies at the heart of VuFind’.
He goes on to explain the most striking features of this next-generation discovery system, comparing it with the look and functionality of older OPAC interfaces.
As adoption increased, Graham notes, so proprietary offerings also emerged, which were capable of accessing data outside library control, and publisher metadata as well.
Nonetheless, he contends, VuFind and its stablemate Blacklight remain easy to adapt to local needs and supply a single front end for services as well as a single interface for adopters choosing open source solutions.
But they will also act as a front end to proprietary discovery services such as Summon.
This article covers Royal Holloway Library’s interest in interfaces to new services.
Graham continues by explaining how RHL opted to move from federated search using Xerxes and Metalib to combined catalogue, repository and archive discovery, as well as for journal articles.
He explains how the intention to reduce the number of interfaces for readers via data aggregation was foiled and examines the solutions examined while also detailing some of the difficulties that were encountered, both within and outside his institution.
Under such circumstances, he relates, VuFind started to look like a possible means of providing a practical and user-friendly front end to Summon.
He goes on to identify the key features of the requirements for implementing such a solution, focusing on the ILS driver, the Summon interface and integration with RHL’s OpenURL resolver, among others.
The requirements described represented a range of difficulties for the VuFind system, ranging from the relatively simple to the complex, involving modifications to the core functions of VuFind.
He explains the RHL policy of feeding their modifications back into the main VuFind development path.
He also provides an insight into the maintenance of trunk and experimental versions of VuFind under development, and also into the implementation decisions confronting the RHL team.
In describing the creation of their local instance of VuFind, Graham goes into detail about the decisions made and the problems encountered on the way, associated with matters such as the LMS driver, OpenURLs, the rigidity of SFX look-and-feel, and catalogue browsing.
He goes on to describe the work involved in modifying VuFind to operate with Summon as its primary search engine, and at the same time avoid duplication of effort.
He also describes the project’s reactions to the changes in the format of record identifiers and the relevant solutions adopted.
But he also provides yet another example in software development of how few changes are entirely free of unwelcome consequences.
In his conclusions, Graham provides a balanced view of the benefits and difficulties involved in the approach adopted.
He points to two possible useful lessons for fellow developers relating to the evaluation of open-source applications and the nature of ‘next-generation’ discovery, a view formed by RHL’s experience of working with VuFind.
Welsh Libraries and Social Media In Welsh Libraries and Social Media: A Survey Alyson Tyler looks at the usefulness to Welsh libraries of social media sites and the outcomes of two surveys conducted to investigate the current degree of access as well as interest in exploiting such sites.
Alyson analyses responses from different kinds of libraries and goes on to advise on how they might effect a change in their organisations’ policy towards social media usage.
In offering, to this end, a business case approach, she supplies not only the essential considerations to address but also some sound advice on how to handle the social media tools once accessed.
The picture that Alyson’s analysis of the survey responses produced was decidedly a mixed one in all but the Higher Education libraries where no barriers to social media existed.
In other sectors, a variety of polices seemed to apply in either denial or restriction of use, based on status, age and even the time of day.
Respondents to her survey gave equally varied reasons as to why access to social media was blocked or restricted, although reasons of security and organisational policy featured most frequently.
Nonetheless it also emerged during the course of the survey that the majority of libraries contacted already used or planned to use Web 2.0 technologies.
Alyson goes on to supply us with the flavour of the responses received, which demonstrate the technologies being employed by responding libraries.
She remarks that, as is no doubt often the case, early adopters in work frequently reflect their even earlier adoption in a personal capacity, which has fuelled their professional enthusiasm.
Alyson then moves on to findings from an internal survey of opinion conducted by the Society of Chief Librarians (Wales).
She writes that results indicate that in the intervening year between the two surveys, more local authorities have relented and permitted library staff to access social media sites.
She asserts that library staff need to advise and support readers even if they personally are unimpressed by such media.
In offering her own business case, she encourages potential applicants to think through a variety of considerations that, if properly addressed, will strengthen their application to access social media.
They include aims, objectives, audience, evaluation processes, resource and risk implications, and, by no means least, how such use relates to an overall communications strategy.
Alyson enjoins potential adopters to consider the importance of the functions of differing social media tools, their expected audiences, the successful engagement with the latter.
She also considers bi-lingual blogging.
Nor should one overlook legal issues such as FOI requests over Twitter, as well as incidents of defamation.
In concluding, Alyson reminds us that all social media do is provide other channels of communication, which represent other means of libraries being able to talk to their users.
Events and Reviews I am also pleased to assure you that Ariadne continues to offer a range of reports of events from the calendar, some well established, others new; as well as its usual range of reviews, which in this issue includes reviews of: an anthology of perceptive essays on the challenges presented to archival thought and practice by Web 2.0; a spirited defence of public libraries; a collection of essays that examine the transformation of academic libraries as they become part of digital learning environments; a book which formalises the processes of being innovators and entrepreneurs of the Information Age; an O’Reilly work entitled Making Software What Really Works, and Why We Believe It, and; a collection of essays on a wide range of current topics and challenges in information retrieval.
I hope you will enjoy Issue 68.
References Suziki Masako, Sugita Shigeki.
"From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project".
October 2006, Ariadne Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/suzuki-sugita/ Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Acquisitions in the New Information Universe Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Acquisitions in the New Information Universe Buzz framework archives ebook Citation BibTex RIS Eilidh Mackay reviews a work which takes a concept-based approach to contemporary acquisitions practices.
In Acquisitions in the new information universe, Jesse Holden provides a comprehensive introduction to fundamental acquisitions concepts, and strategies for translating these into practice in the twenty-first century.
Jesse Holden has worked in acquisitions for many years, and is currently an instructor for the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) online course 'Fundamentals of electronic resource acquisitions'.
As such he is well positioned to give guidance on the day-to-day work of acquisitions departments.
He imparts this knowledge effectively throughout the book – pitching it so as not to alienate those who may be new to acquisitions, whilst providing practical guidance for more experienced professionals.
In the preface to the book, Holden states that acquisitions units within libraries have 'mostly focused on incorporating new developments into existing models'.
This is not meant to be critical of acquisitions units – in fact Holden draws attention to the myriad of challenges and technological developments that acquisitions staff have had to master.
He uses these challenges as a prompt for acquisitions units to rethink their existing process-driven workflows and move towards a more user-oriented and outcome-led approach.
This is a theme which recurs throughout the book.
Content The first chapter, The New Information Universe, starts by describing the current information age and information environment in which libraries, and in particular, acquisitions professionals, find themselves, and the fundamental paradigm shift ('What is information?')
that has prompted changes in the way we produce, locate and utilise information.
The author takes this opportunity early in the book to introduce what is to become a key theme: the need to rethink the entire function of acquisitions, rather than just adjusting parts of existing workflows, to accommodate the innovations associated with the new information universe.
This is something he admits is very different to previous practice, so I was hoping that the rest of the book would provide some specific guidance on how to achieve it.
In chapter 2, Spheres of access, we are introduced to the concept of ethics within the acquisitions framework, the understanding and practice of which Holden thinks is more crucial than ever in the new information age.
I was disappointed then that the ethical guide I was directed to (ALCTS's 'Statement on Principles and Standards of Acquisitions Practice') dated from 1994.
Holden describes this as a 'critical guide' and refers to it throughout the book.
Although I don't disagree with Holden about the usefulness of this ALCTS statement to an acquisitions practitioner, the sub-title of this book ('Core competencies and ethical practices') had lead me to expect a more up-to-date ethical framework.
The chapter subsequently describes changes to the information supply chain (both internal and external to the library) and interestingly illustrates why existing, linear approaches to collection building are no longer fit for purpose.
There is also a helpful, thorough discussion of how to work with vendors as strategic partners.
I feel this section would be useful to those reviewing their current vendor as well as those establishing a relationship for the first time or going through the tendering process.
Holden returns to the topic of vendor relationships in the following chapter.
Also in this chapter, the author introduces his concept of a 'sphere of access', which he describes as 'all the information available to the library community, whether or not it is owned by or contained in the library'.
He again highlights the problems that can arise from using linear and process-driven acquisitions workflows in the new information universe.
Instead a more proactive approach is emphasised, and a reconsidering and reorientation of workflows to adapt to the new paradigm.
Chapter 3, Routes to access, begins with a neat introduction to the multiplicity of formats now available in the 'information universe'.
Holden turns to look at one format in detail – e-books – briefly describing models of publication, purchasing and access.
The author also touches upon the Open Access movement and other 'free' materials (e.g.
donations) and the potential impact they have on the library's sphere of access.
There is also much useful information in this chapter for those working in archives, including guidance on how to develop an archival trajectory and acquisitions strategy.
Just as one might getting carried away with the thought of reinventing the acquisitions wheel, Holden reminds us that acquisitions has always been about connecting people with content and that content in tangible forms (e.g.
print books) 'remains an important part of developing the library's sphere of access'.
Again, the emphasis is on acquisitions staff and processes becoming versatile and proactive in the new information universe.
Chapter 4, Service and feedback, begins by explaining that the function of acquisitions 'Is not simply the purchase of materials… [it] is a service-orientated unit of the library and serves the community of library users to the same degree as other aspects of the library do'.
This opening sets the tone of this chapter, which examines the service and feedback aspects of acquisitions work in contemporary practice.
Holden convincingly makes the case for acquisitions units to reposition themselves and define themselves in terms of service, rather than processes, by responding to the new demands of users.
The author then details the plethora of 'behind the scenes' functions which are now associated with acquisitions works – a list which may well be an eye opener to non-acquisitions practitioners.
He gives concise and instructive introductions to potential solutions for helping to manage such a broad range of functions, including ERMS (electronic resource management solutions).
The second half of the chapter looks at the proliferation of feedback mechanisms which have evolved, and notes that 'establishing access and receiving feedback is a critical piece of the emerging acquisitions environment in the new information universe'.
The concluding chapter, Acquisitions in a new paradigm, gives a brief overview of recent technological developments and their potential impact on acquisitions work.
Holden encourages acquisitions professionals not just to be aware of these developments, but to actively incorporate them – despite the challenges and unfamiliarity – into their daily work.
He concludes his book as he began it – to encourage acquisitions practitioners to move towards a more flexible and proactive approach.
Conclusion For such a slim volume (135 pages, including 16 pages of selected resources and indices) this book does provide a comprehensive overview of acquisitions work in the new information universe.
Although the book doesn't introduce any new, groundbreaking topics it certainly prompted me to think about acquisitions processes and procedures in a new way, and identified potential strategies for responding to changes.
I did find the subtitle of the book – 'Core competencies and ethical practices' – to be quite misleading.
As mentioned above, the emphasis on ethical practices was much less than the subtitle had implied, and in my opinion the author did little to add to the existing ALCTS guidelines.
I also feel that more could have been made of the 'core competencies' – perhaps a checklist to signpost which competencies had been identified in each chapter.
This could be particularly helpful for new professionals or those moving into acquisitions work for the first time.
Like many Facet publications, this book clearly laid out and easy to read.
Figures are used aptly to illustrate various workflows and concepts.
It is disappointing though given the nature of the content that this title is not available to purchase as an e-book.
Due to the author's background in university libraries, I was expecting this book to focus on academic libraries.
It is to Holden's credit that while many of the examples he gives are from this sector, the fundamental lessons of the book can be applied in a range of settings, including archives and public libraries.
The intended audience of the book is both new information professionals and more experienced acquisitions practitioners, and I feel this book is suitable for both.
Holden's emphasis on redefining acquisitions work away from processes and towards a more service-orientated approach will be a change of perspective for some existing practitioners and a contemporary introduction to new professionals as to what can be achieved by acquisitions units in the new information age.
Furthermore, it will be a useful book for those libraries developing, evaluating or streamlining their acquisitions unit – which in the current economic climate may be many of us.
Author Details Eilidh Mackay Assistant librarian University of the West of England Email: eilidh2.mackay@uwe.ac.uk Web site: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library Return to top Article Title: "Acquisitions in the new information universe: Core competencies and ethical practices" Author: Eilidh Mackay Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/mackay-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: The New Digital Scholar Exploring and Enriching the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The New Digital Scholar Exploring and Enriching the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students Buzz data framework database usability copyright research Citation BibTex RIS Julia Robinson reviews a substantial and timely collection of essays related to the research and writing practices of NextGen students.
Expressing a call for change in the way educators approach Information Literacy teaching, this book invites the reader to redefine, re-evaluate and reflect on what we think we know about students’ research practices today.
McClure and Purdy bring together a mix of perspectives, from librarians and lecturers to professors and programmers, to give voice to the very timely concern in Information Literacy (IL) teaching, that we are not equipping our students for the future as we hoped.
So-called NextGen students are engaging with information online in their personal, social and educational lives in ways that are shaping new approaches to and conceptions of research.
At the same time, those teaching IL, whether librarians or writing instructors, are basing lesson plans and interventions on traditional pedagogies, arguably unfit for a research landscape so altered by the pace and change of information technologies.
Students, IL instructors and academics occupy different spaces in the digital environment and work at cross-purposes.
Traditional IL instruction has encouraged students to understand information sources in binary terms, right or wrong, leaving them disoriented and disengaged as they undertake research.
Students should instead be encouraged to see research as a recursive conversation.
IL instructors need to collaborate with academics to reposition themselves in this conversation and join students in their digital space at the point of need.
Structure and Content The book is divided into four parts and sixteen chapters (see Appendix for full Table of Contents).
In the introduction ‘Understanding the NextGen Researcher’, McClure and Purdy set out their premise that NextGen students are prolific writers, readers and researchers, using a multitude of digital technologies to engage in these activities simultaneously, and: Because digital technologies intertwine research and writing, this book takes as its premise that we – as professionals from a variety of fields – cannot ignore, marginalize (sic), or leave to others the commitment to understand and help the new digital scholar.
In its four parts, this collection explores the facets of that commitment.
(p.2) Part One: NextGen Students and the Research Writing ‘Problem’ moves through defining Information Behaviour (Chapter 1), giving a history of the research paper (Chapter 2), identifying key IL frameworks (Chapter 3) and introducing deep learning (Chapter 4).
All of these chapters set the scene by providing a broad theoretical basis and shared language with which the reader can access the rest of the book.
Most interestingly, McClure defines Information Behaviour as separate and distinct from Information Literacy.
He bases his argument on the American Library Association definition of IL, where information-literate people ‘recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information’ [1].
However, he reframes the ALA’s definition, instead describing it as: A set of abilities requiring individuals to (my emphasis) recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.
(p.20) McClure goes on to argue that if IL is a finite set of skills or abilities then Information Behaviour ‘is concerned with the complex processes and influences on the information seeker’ (p.20).
Whilst his intention to highlight behaviour is laudable, he adapts the definition of IL to make his point.
Indeed, many readers in the UK would see a focus on behaviour and influence as inherent to IL, and already accounted for within the term.
For example, the SCONUL Seven Pillars Model of Information Literacy states that: Information literate people will demonstrate an awareness of how they gather, use, manage, synthesise and create information and data in an ethical manner and will have the information skills to do so effectively.
[2] Information skills are separate here too, but they are part of IL, they do not constitute IL itself.
The focus on how accounts for behaviour.
Conceptions of IL are detailed and discussed throughout the book along with related but distinct terms such as Digital Literacy, Multiliteracies (both Chapter 7), Digital Agency (Chapter 9), Hyperliteracy (Chapter 13) and Technological Literacy (Chapter 16).
Part Two: Explorations of What NextGen Students Do in the Undergraduate Classroom details experiments in student research practices including sentence mining (Chapter 5), student self-perceptions of research-writing behaviour (Chapter 6), research strategies (Chapter 7) and using databases (Chapter 8).
It becomes clear that the students featured here are disengaged with information sources; ‘students do not know how to read academic sources or how to work with them to create an insightful paper’ (p.126).
They conceive of information in binary terms, right or wrong, scholarly or unscholarly, an approach which: [M]ight reflect how in earlier years of schooling students frequently were permitted to use only sources already vetted by others and were not allowed to use other internet sources and, therefore, did not gain experience in evaluating sources on their own.
(p.144) Current IL instruction does little to counter this approach, with library databases ‘good’ and Google ‘bad’ (p.151).
Students should instead conceive of research as a conversation, and be able to talk about a subject in different formats and to different audiences, showing their understanding (p.110-111).
IL instructors can help by opening up conversations, encouraging contextual approaches (p.151) and recognising that research tools (search engines and databases) are not ‘neutral’ (p.189) but affect practice.
For example, if a tool returns a ‘no results’ page: A savvy researcher would likely identify this as a database limitation, whereas a novice researcher may perceive a no-results page as an indication of a topic’s limited breadth.
(p.162) Thus our instruction should make an example of database quirks (p.205) and show students how to exploit and evaluate Google, if that’s where they prefer to start (p.203).
Part Three: Pedagogical Solutions to Enrich the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students continues with the evidence-based recommendations for future IL instruction.
We are invited to position students as knowledge workers (Chapter 9), researcher-writers (Chapter 10), empowered learners (Chapter 11) and primary researchers (Chapter 12).
In this way we recognise and validate a student’s contribution to the research conversation, helping them to engage with information.
Most thought-provoking in this part is the work of Teston and McNely on ‘the development of the researchable question’ (p.219) and the problems students encounter when defining their purpose as being to find information on a broad-based topic instead of answering a question (p.219-221).
The authors advocate a pedagogical shift in approach to: Questions, not topics.
Conversation, not verification.
(p.223) Questions demand development, articulation, purpose and perspective where topics lead to generalised reporting of accepted fact: Students, when invited to ask researchable questions rather than report on fixed topics, might more readily embrace the ways in which knowledge does not exist a priori, but is actively and collaboratively constructed.
(p.223) This opens students’ minds to the subjectivity of information sources and the tools for finding them, bringing information behaviour to the fore.
Part Four: Programmatic Solutions to Enrich the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students focuses on practical ideas for moving the pedagogical approaches of Part Three into IL teaching.
Key themes from throughout the book are revisited and incorporated into potential activities, for example, separating topic formulation from the research question (Chapter 13), creating effective collaboration between writing instructors and librarians (Chapter 14), designing instruction to account for the ‘Google effect’ (Chapter 15) and developing ‘Just In Time’ IL interventions (Chapter 16).
Many tools and techniques are discussed including the Think Aloud Protocol (or Research Aloud Protocol in Chapter 16) where student research practices are captured and analysed: Student volunteers are asked to spend approximately ten minutes online, conducting research for a writing project.
Using Camtasia Studio, the videos capture what the students are doing on the computer screen as well as the students’ voices detailing what they are doing and why.
(p.357) This approach allows IL instructors to counterbalance and compare students’ self-perceptions of their IL with the evidence of their research practices.
Such an approach could provide a valuable avenue for assessing the impact of IL instruction at key points in the curriculum.
McClure and Purdy conclude the book by identifying six common insights, five common ideas and four suggestions for the future.
This makes for a very accessible, succinct conclusion which could easily be adapted for institutional meetings, ensuring the call for change is all the easier to articulate and take forward.
Conclusions and Recommendation McClure and Purdy have brought together a substantial and timely collection of essays related to the research and writing practices of NextGen students.
I will certainly use the evidence and ideas presented to reflect on my current IL teaching practice and think about basing my sessions on research conversations.
I can see that my students do suffer the disengagement with information sources highlighted in this book and I believe the pedagogical and practical ideas for re-engaging students presented here could bear fruit.
One potential barrier to implementing the call to action is that so many of the session ideas are based on regular and repeated interaction with students in a given semester.
As the book is designed for writing instructors and librarians working together, it assumes a level of interaction with the students very few UK librarians get to enjoy.
The authors recognise the limitations of the ‘one-shot’ approach to teaching IL and focus on the benefits of collaboration.
Whilst these benefits are easy to see, it does not make the task of creating and embedding IL collaboration any easier.
Any pedagogical shift is unlikely to arise in the immediate term.
That said, this book does invigorate the reader with fresh and evidence-based ideas which make you want to close down the Power Point presentation you had planned, grab the phone and talk to the lecturer about embedding IL where it will make a difference.
References American Library Association (1989) Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report.
http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/presidential.
Accessed: 29 May 2013.
SCONUL (2011) The SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy: Core Model, p.3  http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf Accessed: 28 May 2013.
Author Details Julia Robinson Assistant Liaison Librarian Newcastle University Email: julia.robinson@ncl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/library/ Julia Robinson is an Assistant Liaison Librarian at Newcastle University Library.
She currently offers information literacy teaching and research support services to the students, staff and researchers across the Science, Agriculture and Engineering Faculties.
She has special interests in Open Access publishing, EndNote, reference management and copyright.
She collaborates with people across Newcastle University and the LIS sector to offer information and guidance in these areas.
Appendix: Table of Contents.
Foreword .
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xi Alison J.
Head and Michael B. Eisenberg Acknowledgments .
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.xv Introduction: Understanding the NextGen Researcher .
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.1 Randall McClure and James P. Purdy   PART ONE: NextGen Students and the Research-Writing “Problem” Chapter 1: Min(d)ing the Gap: Research on the Information Behaviors of NextGen Students ..19 Randall McClure Chapter 2: The Research Paper Project in the Undergraduate Writing Course .
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41 Karen Kaiser Lee Chapter 3: Professional Statements and Collaborations to Support the New Digital Scholar .
.65 John Eliason and Kelly O’Brien Jenks Chapter 4: Fighting for Attention: Making Space for Deep Learning .
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83 Brian Ballentine   PART TWO: Explorations of What NextGen Students Do in the Undergraduate Writing Classroom Chapter 5: Sentence-Mining: Uncovering the Amount of Reading and Reading Comprehension in College Writers’ Researched Writing .
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.109 Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard Chapter 6: Scholarliness as Other: How Students Explain Their Research-Writing Behaviors ..133 James P. Purdy Chapter 7: Can I Google That?
Research Strategies of Undergraduate Students .
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.161 Mary Lourdes Silva Chapter 8: Encountering Library Databases: NextGen Students’ Strategies for Reconciling Personal Topics and Academic Scholarship .
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.189 Ruth Mirtz   PART THREE: Pedagogical Solutions to Enrich the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students Chapter 9: Undergraduate Research as Collaborative Knowledge Work .
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211 Christa B. Teston and Brian J. McNely Chapter 10: Re-Envisioning Research: Alternative Approaches to Engaging NextGen Students .233 Rachel A. Milloy Chapter 11: Embracing a New World of Research .
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..253 David Bailey Chapter 12: NextGen Students and Undergraduate Ethnography: The Challenges of Studying Communities Born Digital .
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.271 Neil P. Baird   PART FOUR: Programmatic Solutions to Enrich the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students Chapter 13: Teaching Researching in the Digital Age: An Information Literacy Perspective on the New Digital Scholar .
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295 Barry M. Maid and Barbara J. D’Angelo Chapter 14: Teaching and Assessing Research Strategies in the Digital Age: Collaboration Is the Key .
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.. .313 Thomas Peele, Melissa Keith, and Sara Seely Chapter 15: Understanding NextGen Students’ Information Search Habits: A Usability Perspective .
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.331 Patrick Corbett, Yetu Yachim, Andrea Ascuena, and Andrew Karem Chapter 16: Remixing Instruction in Information Literacy .
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.349 Janice R. Walker and Kami Cox   Conclusion: The New Digital Scholar and the Production of New Knowledge  .
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.369 James P. Purdy and Randall McClure Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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International Digital Curation Conference 2010 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines International Digital Curation Conference 2010 Buzz data mobile software rdf framework wiki database xml infrastructure tei archives metadata tagging identifier blog repositories eprints video preservation cataloguing windows linux visualisation aggregation provenance ontologies ark curation twitter e-science authentication interoperability research standards sharepoint irods Citation BibTex RIS Alex Ball reports on the 6th International Digital Curation Conference, held on 7-8 December 2010 in Chicago.
The International Digital Curation Conference has been held annually by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] since 2005, quickly establishing a reputation for high-quality presentations and papers.
So much so that, as co-chair Allen Renear explained in his opening remarks, after attending the 2006 Conference in Glasgow [2] delegates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offered to bring the event to Chicago.
Thus it was that the sixth conference in the series [3], entitled ‘Participation and Practice: Growing the Curation Community through the Data Decade’, came to be held jointly by the DCC, UIUC and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).
Pre-conference Workshops The conference was preceded by a day of workshops: ‘Digital Curation 101 Lite’, a training course run by the DCC, focusing this time on data management planning; ‘CURATEcamp’, the second in a series of unconferences on digital curation tools (the first having been held at the University of California, Berkeley, in August 2010); ‘Improving researchers’ competency in information handling and data management through a collaborative approach’, an introduction to the Research Information Network’s Working Group on Information-Handling [4]; ‘Introduction to the Data Curation Profile’, the latter being a requirements-gathering tool developed by librarians at Purdue University and researchers at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC [5]; and ‘Scaling-up to Integrated Research Data Management’, organised by the I2S2 Project [6] as an exploration of data management issues arising from working across organisational boundaries and at different scales of science.
Tuesday, 7 December 2010 Opening Keynote Addresses Chris Lintott, Principal Investigator, University of Oxford and Adler Planetarium Chris Lintott opened the conference with an inspiring talk about the potential of citizen science.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which ran between 2000 and 2008, represented a new way of performing astronomy: instead of teams identifying interesting objects and then booking telescope time to examine them, a telescope was set up to collect data from entire strips of the night sky, for astronomers to examine later.
In the end, about a quarter of the sky was mapped out in this way.
This is, of course, a lot of data, and any astronomers deriving results from the whole dataset soon run up against issues of scale.
One team, interested in the frequency with which certain types and orientations of galaxy appear, found that, even at a rate of 50,000 galaxy images a month, they could not hope to classify them all by hand in a reasonable amount of time.
Neither could they fall back on computer classification, this being of insufficient quality.
The solution they came up with was to enlist the help of the public, and so Galaxy Zoo was born [7].
This platform made it quick and easy for anyone to classify galaxies; it proved so popular that within one month around 80,000 volunteers had made over 10 million classifications.
Before long, each galaxy image had been independently classified by upwards of 20 volunteers, meaning the confidence in each classification could be measured.
There were other, unexpected benefits of having so many eyes on the data.
The volunteers were spotting unusual phenomena in the images and reporting them in the Galaxy Zoo forums.
This led to discovery of a frog-shaped object now known as Hanny’s Voorwerp, and a class of green spheroids that were nicknamed ‘peas’.
The original Galaxy Zoo project has now concluded, but it proved so successful that its Zooniverse platform has been developed further and now supports eight different projects, three of which are new Galaxy Zoo projects, and one of which is nothing to do with astronomy (it concerns transcribing ships’ logs to extract climate data).
Lintott drew three lessons of citizen science from the Galaxy Zoo experience.
First, people are better motivated to participate if they understand the purpose, context and consequences of the activity.
Second, volunteers prefer to be treated as collaborators rather then test subjects.
Lastly, projects should not waste people’s time by, for example, soliciting comments that will never be read, or inviting people to participate in activities that make no real contribution.
Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre In his talk, Kevin Ashley asked how many curation services are enough.
He identified three centres for digital curation in the US, but these centres do not provide just a single service, and in any case there are many stakeholders: libraries, archives, data centres, publishers and so on.
He went on to consider some of the services one might need for digital curation: A decision support tool for selecting the best home for a dataset based on the research’s funder, lead institution and partners, and the anticipated uses of the data.
An infrastructure for associating publications with their supporting data, and associating related datasets.
Support tools for constructing data management plans, and guidance for those marking data management plans in the context of the bidding process.
Revisiting comments made by Martin Lewis at the 2008 Conference [8] about the roles university libraries could play in digital curation, Kevin noted that while some of them had come to pass raising awareness, leading on data management policy issues, working with institutional IT services others had not: for example, promoting data literacy, and training staff in digital curation.
Ashley also gave an update on the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS); plans are complete for a pathfinder service consisting of local data archiving capability at four UK institutions, with support and co-ordination provided nationally by a small team.
There are still questions to be resolved, however.
Will all institutions have a UKRDS node?
Will the role of subject data centres change?
Which services should be local and which national?
Will there be an international role for UKRDS?
How will data curation fit in with other aspects of research administration within institutions?
Kevin concluded with some thoughts about the uses to which research data might be put if made available, pointing to courses for journalists on telling stories from data, and the Globe4D system for visualising and interacting with planetary data [9].
Plenary Talks Antony Williams, Vice President of Strategic Development, ChemSpider, Royal Society of Chemistry There is a lot of chemical information and data on the Internet, but a substantial proportion of it is wrong, some dangerously so.
Even trusted chemical databases contain a surprising number of errors and inconsistencies.
In response to this, Antony Williams and colleagues set up ChemSpider as a community catalogue of chemical structures [10].
It collects links to information – physical properties, toxicity data, metabolism data, safety information, associated journal papers, database entries and patents, etc.
– from over 400 different data sources, including journals, vendor databases and individual chemists.
This information is then curated by a hierarchy of volunteers.
One of the major tasks is to ensure that the identity relationships within the database – linking structures to the right identifiers, names and information – are correct and complete, but there is also work to do in correcting typographical errors, deprecating low-quality information, and so on.
Williams drew several lessons from his experiences with ChemSpider.
The ‘crowds’ in crowdsourcing can be quite small: ChemSpider has validated over a million structure-identifier relationships over three years with only 130 volunteers.
It is possible to perform subtle analyses with volunteer effort: for example, the Spectral Game [11] uses player mistakes to locate poor-quality spectra in the database.
Lastly, all chemical databases would benefit from accepting and displaying comments from users: ChemSpider has uncovered many mistakes in this way, while only experiencing three cases of vandalism.
Barend Mons, Scientific Director, Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre and Biosemantics Group, Leiden University Medical Centre Systems biology is a discipline where a vast amount of data has to be gathered before patterns begin to emerge and conclusions can be drawn.
Barend Mons described an effort to make this rather easier using Linked Data.
The approach of the Concept Web Alliance [12] and their partners in the Open PHACTS Consortium is to translate life sciences papers (for example) into sets of assertions expressed as subject-predicate-object triples, with each part of the triple expressed using a non-semantic Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) to eliminate ambiguity.
Each of these triples, when combined with meta-assertions concerning authorship, date and provenance, form a nano-publication.
These nano-publications are entered as evidence into the ConceptWiki triple store.
From the nano-publications a set of canonical assertions is generated: that is, nano-publications that all make the same assertion are grouped together, so the end-product is a canonical assertion supported by one or more nano-publications.
In this way, one ends up with a database of unique assertions, where the trustworthiness of each assertion can be judged using the number and quality of supporting nano-publications.
An inference engine can then run over the database to generate new knowledge.
The messages drawn by Barend from this work were that scientific data are most useful when in a form that allows computers to reason from them, and that there is a role for the crowd in performing quality-control over the assertions.
He saw data publication and data citation metrics as priority issues to address for this approach to work.
John Unsworth, Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science and Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In the humanities, ambiguity is an area of interest, rather than something to be eradicated, but this raises all sorts of tensions.
John Unsworth took as an example the process of turning a messy Wittgenstein manuscript into clean text for printing.
Normalisation of orthography and grammar may be important for retrieval, and thus for discovery, but the variations may be important evidence of an author’s thought processes and creative style.
John went on to describe MONK, a digital environment allowing humanities scholars to perform text mining over a corpus currently consisting of American literature and the works of Shakespeare [13].
The process for ingest into the corpus includes transformation of the source digital texts into TEI Analytics format, tagging for parts of speech and cataloguing.
Again, there is plenty of scope for crowdsourced activity – proof-reading the texts, correcting the tagging and metadata – but there needs to be caution over eliminating potentially valuable information.
Posters and Demonstrations The early afternoon was set aside as a ‘Community Space’, allowing people to interact with the authors of posters, experience demonstrations, or hold their own informal meetings, curation clinics and so on.
As in previous years, this was preceded by a session entitled ‘Minute Madness’, wherein poster authors and demonstrators gave one-minute pitches to attract delegates to their stand.
All those participating rose to the challenge admirably, with the chair, Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins University, only having to intervene once with his referee’s whistle.
Best Peer-reviewed Paper Youngseek Kim, Syracuse University The School of Information Studies at Syracuse University has set up courses designed to train students to be eScience professionals.
Youngseek Kim described the method by which the curriculum was designed.
Interviews and focus groups were set up with laboratory directors and researchers to determine the key characteristics of an eScience professional position, and this information was used to search for vacancies; 208 were found over a period of a month.
The job requirements for these vacancies were analysed in collaboration with the focus group participants and interviewees to determine common work tasks, worker qualification requirements and organisational environments.
This information was used to put together a prototype master’s course.
Researchers then followed the progress of five of the students as they undertook summer internships.
Daily activity logs and exit questionnaires were used to collect information about the tasks they performed and the knowledge and skills they had to use.
This information was analysed in a similar way to the earlier data, and provided strong confirmation of the previous results.
The recommendations arising from this research was that the course should focus on cyberinfrastructure, data curation and team communication.
Symposium Sheila Corrall, Professor of Librarianship and Information Management, University of Sheffield, and Christine Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, UCLA The theme of the late afternoon symposium was set in two short presentations by Sheila Corrall and Christine Borgman.
With the recent announcement that the National Science Foundation would start mandating data management plans (DMPs), delegates were asked to discuss what DMPs actually comprise, who should be leading data management strategy, and who should be the teachers and students of data management.
On the first matter, what constitutes a DMP, the discussion started with an argument that DMPs should be written by data creators, guided by institutional policy on what data management processes are supported.
Delegates then considered issues such as measuring the success of data management, finding sustainable funding models – parallels were drawn with open access publishing – and ensuring data are archived by trustworthy hosts.
Several different models were proposed for the governance of data management.
At Cornell University, a virtual organisation has been set up to provide data management services.
Another delegate suggested a bottom-up approach to data management, though others were not convinced this could be effective: at the very least a senior advocate is needed within the institution.
Which people are involved does make a difference to the way data management is handled: archivists have a more ruthless attitude to data appraisal than librarians, and no doubt legal teams would bring an entirely different perspective should data management be seen as a compliance issue.
Consideration should also be given to the service levels that are possible when using external data management services.
A wide spectrum of approaches were advocated with regard to data management education: everything from optional courses to intensive master’s courses or doctorates.
This reflected that fact that data management is relevant to so many people: not just professional curators, but also researchers, journalists and the general public.
It may be possible to construct a common, core conceptual infrastructure for data management, but one shouldn’t try to prescribe a common skill set: there is too much variability in what the different roles demand.
Summing-up of Day One Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information The themes of the day were brought together by Clifford Lynch.
He started by considering the implications of DMP mandates: if principal investigators only have ambitions to archive data for five to ten years, this shifts the emphasis away from representation information and preservation metadata, towards bit preservation and other storage issues.
Similarly, in the context of vast data resources, the most pressing curatorial challenges lay around quality-control and aggregation rather than preservation.
The ease with which data can be replicated means that databases can be corrupted as never before, but the talks earlier in the day had shown the power of crowdsourcing and citizen science in improving (and even expanding) the scientific record.
The momentum of digital curation curricula shows that the discipline is approaching maturity, although there is plenty of scope for more joined-up thinking in the area, particularly in the US.
There is also much more thinking to be done about handling ambiguity, contradictory data, levels of certainty of knowledge, and the contrasts between measurement and interpretation.
An excellent conference dinner was held at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Wednesday, 8 December 2010 Keynote Address MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology, MIT Libraries MacKenzie Smith opened proceedings on the second day with a talk on the interdisciplinarity (or metadisciplinarity) of data curation.
She started by identifying seven functions that define digital curation.
Finding data is currently an unsolved problem.
Provenance information – authorship, authority, development history – is needed to make sense of data.
Tools have been developed to help researchers analyse, visualise and reproduce results, that is, work with data, but they are not well catalogued, archived or accessible at the moment.
There is much to be gained from aggregating data, but doing so in practice is hard: domain conventions vary, and even if the Resource Description Framework (RDF) is used as a common syntax, someone still has to do the semantic mappings between encodings.
Furthermore, the laws surrounding data are not interoperable either.
Methods of publishing data are just beginning to emerge.
Referencing data is even trickier: how can one cite data at the right level of detail, giving due credit to data creators, without drowning aggregated datasets in a sea of attributions?
By now we have a good understanding of curating data; the problem is how to fund this activity.
MacKenzie then provided technological, functional and organisational views on what she termed the curation ecology, and went on to describe the roles she saw each type of organisation playing.
For example, she argued that researchers should focus on providing data with provenance metadata and clear statements on intellectual property; institutions should contribute data policy, incentives for researchers and a stable financial basis for data curation; and libraries should provide support to researchers, work on data models and metadata ontologies, and define archiving services in support of long-term preservation.
These last points were illustrated using case studies from the University of Chicago, responsible for curating the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and MIT.
Best Student Paper Laura Wynholds, UCLA One of the innovations at this year’s conference was the introduction of a prize for the best student paper.
The inaugural recipient of this accolade was Laura Wynholds, for her paper on managing identity in a world of poorly bounded digital objects.
She argued that, in order to make the problem tractable, four conditions must hold: digital objects must be given neat boundaries, semantically and logically; digital objects should have identifiers embedded within them; it should be possible to retrieve digital objects using their identifiers; and identity management should be embedded within a scholarly information system, so that identifiers can also be used to retrieve information about authorship, intellectual property rights and so on.
Another innovation this year was the introduction of a second method of submission aimed at practitioners, where selection was based on abstracts rather than full papers.
With more papers accepted than ever before, presentations had to be split between three parallel tracks of two sessions each.
I attended the two sessions in the third track, which were more loosely themed than the other four.
Curation in Institutions Christopher Prom (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) described his Practical E-Records Project, in which he assessed digital curation tools from an archival/records management perspective, developed policy templates, formulated recommendations, and posted the results to a blog [14].
James A. J. Wilson (University of Oxford) presented the latest results from the Sudamih Project [15], which is developing training modules to improve the data management skills for researchers in the humanities, and setting up a simple Web-based system to offer them databases-as-a-service.
Patricia Hswe (Penn State University) introduced her institution’s Content Stewardship Program [16].
Among other things, the programme saw an overhaul of Penn State’s digital library platforms and the development of a Curation Architecture Prototype Service (CAPS), which uses microservices to fill in the gaps left by the other platforms, as identified by reference to the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model.
W. Aaron Collie (Michigan State University) argued the case for using electronic thesis and dissertation workflows as a testbed for data publishing in the wider field of scholarly communication.
Wendy White (University of Southampton) gave an overview of the IDMB Project [17], which is producing an institution-wide framework for managing research data, comprising a business plan for data management, pilot systems for integrating a data repository into researchers’ workflows (using SharePoint and EPrints), and training courses and materials.
Robin Rice (University of Edinburgh) enumerated the various research data management initiatives underway at her institution, including the Data Library, Edinburgh DataShare (a data repository hosted by the Data Library), the Research Data Management Training (MANTRA) Project (responding to gaps identified during five Data Asset Framework case studies) and working groups on research data management (RDM) and research data storage (RDS).
National Perspectives on Curation Policy Adrian Burton (Australian National Data Service) explained the ANDS Data Connections strategy and projects.
In brief, the idea is to provide registers of identifiers so that data can be linked together more easily.
So, for example, the Office of Spatial Data Management provides a scheme to identify locations, the National Library of Australia provides identifiers for people, research councils would provide identifiers for research activities, the Australian Bureau of Statistics would provide identifiers for academic fields derived from the Australia/New Zealand Standard Research Classifications, and so on.
Ellen Collins (Research Information Network) revealed the results of a survey looking at who is using the UK subject-based data centres and for what purposes, how much they use them, and what impact the data centres have had.
The survey found the data centres were credited with improving data sharing culture, improving research efficiency and reducing the time required for data acquisition and processing.
Ixchel Faniel and Ann Zimmerman (University of Michigan) argued that research into the increasing scale of data sharing and reuse has focused too narrowly on data quantities.
They identified at least three other issues that should be addressed: broader participation, in terms of both interdisciplinary and citizen science; increases in the number and types of data intermediaries (archives, repositories, etc.
); and increases in the number of digital products that contain data.
MacKenzie Smith (MIT Libraries) and Kevin Ashley (Digital Curation Centre) discussed the matter of digital library policy interoperability, defined as the ability to compare another organisation’s values and goals with one’s own in order to conduct business with them.
The DL.org Project [18] conducted a survey of digital libraries.
While all respondents had policies of some description, attempts to harmonise them with those of other libraries had only been made in the areas of preservation, access, collection development and metadata (and not, for example, authentication or service level agreements).
Metadata, Ontologies and the Semantic Web Kate Zwaard, United States Government Printing Office (GPO) Kate Zwaard introduced the Federal Digital System (FDSys) in use at the US GPO.
It is a content management system, preservation system and search engine designed to cope with the specific demands of government publications.
For example, people generally need to search for specific information rather than particular documents, but a naïve full-text search would not take into account the repetition between different editions of a document; FDSys therefore uses a faceted interface to support quick filtering, and document relationships to provide automated navigation.
David Walling, Texas Advanced Computing Centre David Walling described how the Texas Advanced Computing Centre is using iRODS to automate the extraction of metadata from archaeology data collections held by the University of Texas’ Institute of Classical Archaeology.
In fact, iRODS delegates most of the work to an extractor script written in Jython.
This script not only uses the File Information Tool Set (FITS) to extract metadata from individual files, and a specialist tool to retrieve metadata from the existing Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK) system, but also parses file and directory names for additional metadata.
Michael Lesk, Rutgers University Michael Lesk explored the problem of how to integrate social science data automatically.
Combining data from two studies is not as simple as translating the terms of one study of those of another: the problem lies not just in synonymy but also in ambiguity, difference of emphasis (e.g.
warfarin as drug, versus warfarin as poison) and difference in how a question has been asked.
Ontologies can go some way to help, but it is hard to make accurate mappings between them when the terms are so terse, and when they view concept space from very different perspectives.
The semi-automatic approach seems more promising, that is, computers using ontological mappings to find possible correspondence between datasets, and leaving humans to decide whether and how to combine the data.
Huda Khan, Cornell University Huda Khan introduced Cornell University’s Data Staging Repository (DataStaR).
The compelling feature of this repository is that it uses an RDF triple store to hold metadata for the data files deposited into the system.
This makes metadata entry highly efficient, as assertions applicable to many items (e.g.
the contact details for an author, the funder for a project) need only be entered once.
There were some problems to overcome, though, such as how to deal with an author having different roles in different projects, or how to apply access restrictions to metadata.
The solution was to use named private graphs: sets of triples that ‘belong’ to a particular dataset, overriding the public triples in the database; hiding the dataset also hides its private graph.
Digital Curation Education Catharine Ward (University of Cambridge) outlined how the Incremental Project [19] went about assessing the training and support needed by researchers at Cambridge and Glasgow with regards to data management, and how the project is seeking to address these needs through guidance documents, courses, workshops and one-to-one advice.
Peter Botticelli (University of Arizona) and Christine Szuter (Arizona State University) talked about the challenges of and opportunities for teaching digital curation.
Three courses were given as examples: the University of Arizona’s graduate certificate programme in digital information management (DigIn); Clayton State Univeristy’s Master of Archival Studies programme; and Arizona State University’s Scholarly Publishing graduate certificate programme.
Lisa Gregory (State Library of North Carolina) gave a candid assessment of how the DigCCurr I master’s course at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill prepared (or did not do quite enough to prepare) her and fellow student Samantha Guss for their current library positions.
Data Curation Case Studies Felix Lohmeier (State and University Library, Göttingen) and Kathleen Smith (University of Illinois) introduced the TextGrid Virtual Research Environment [20], consisting of the TextGrid Laboratory application, a unified interface to a collection of research tools, and the TextGrid Repository, a grid-based archive providing long-term storage, access and preservation for research data.
Martin Donnelly (DCC/University of Edinburgh) presented findings about researchers’ perspectives on data curation issues, gained from observing project meetings and interviewing key team members of the team working on the MESSAGE Project [21].
Another set of case studies had been performed by the DCC on behalf of the Research Information Network and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
Angus Whyte and Graham Pryor (DCC/University of Edinburgh) explained what these case studies had revealed about the perceived benefits of open data among researchers in astronomy, bioinformatics, chemistry, epidemiology, language technology and neuroimaging.
Emulation, Format Conversion and Visualisation Aaron Hsu, Indiana University Running software on an emulated operating system is an attractive preservation technique, but often overlooked is the matter of system library dependencies.
Windows programs in particular are shy of declaring which versions of which system libraries they require.
This is not usually a problem: common Windows libraries do not change much within a single version of the operating system, and installer programs usually bundle unusual libraries.
The problem comes when installing multiple programs in a single emulated OS, as some programs attack each other, or use conflicting versions of the same library.
Aaron Hsu argued that what is needed is, in short, a system like a Linux software repository for Windows programs.
As a first step towards building such a database, he and his colleagues have built a tool for extracting DLL dependencies from archives of Windows software.
It runs, somewhat ironically, on Linux.
C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC Michael Sperberg-McQueen presented a technique for testing the quality of a translation from one XML format to another, similar in philosophy to techniques for ‘proving’ software.
Put simply, a document is written in the source format, and from it a set of sentences is derived, each sentence being an inference licensed by the occurrence of the markup in the document.
The document is then translated into the target format, and a second set of sentences derived.
One can check for information loss by checking that every sentence in the source set follows from the translation set of sentences; equally, one can check for the introduction of noise by checking that every sentence in the translation set follows from the source set of sentences.
Sperberg-McQueen admitted these were costly operations, and probably only justified for critical format translations; there are also complications with applying the technique, such as sentences that properly apply to just one of the two documents, or pairs of formats whose semantics overlap in messy ways.
Nevertheless, Sperberg-McQueen was confident that the technique could be extended to all digital formats.
Maria Esteva, University of Texas at Austin Maria Esteva demonstrated a tool for visualising at a glance the properties of entire collections of records.
Hierarchies of directories are represented as nested rectangles within the visualisation; the size and colour of each rectangle represent different properties depending on the view.
For example, in the general view, the size of a rectangle corresponds to the number of files within the corresponding directory.
Each rectangle has three (or fewer) coloured areas: an outer black border, the area of which corresponds to the number of files of unrecognised format; within that, a white border, the area of which corresponds to the number of files in a format that is recognised but without a sustainability score; and a central square, the area of which corresponds to the number of remaining files, and the colour of which represents the average sustainability score for the formats used.
A selector view allows a curator to configure the visualisation to display different statistics (e.g.
file size rather than frequency).
Closing Keynote Address Stephen Friend, President and CEO, Sage Bionetworks The conference was brought to close by Stephen Friend, who in his keynote address argued that the drug discovery process must, and now can, undergo a shift of paradigm and scale similar to that seen in the physical sciences during the Renaissance.
It currently takes 5–10 years to develop a drug and get it approved, at a cost approaching US$2 billion; and even then, approved cancer drugs only work in a quarter of cases.
Changing this is not simply a matter of constructing clinical trial cohorts more precisely; the whole paradigm of drug development needs to move away from cancelling symptoms to making precise corrections to the operation of the body.
With machines now capable of sequencing genomes within a couple of hours, at a cost of a few hundred dollars, we are in a better position to do this than ever before.
Gene interactions are complex – there are buffers to make genomes resilient to small changes – so linear maps are not enough: we need to understand genes as control networks.
Sage Bionetworks is an enabling forum for research in this area [22]; one of its key aims is to build up a data commons from contributions of scientists around the world.
For example, genomes and data are being collected from clinical trials trying to identify a biomarker to indicate if a patient would fail to respond to approved cancer drugs.
Further genome/drug response data are being collected from the control (i.e.
established drug) and placebo arms of industry clinical trials.
Stephen identified several success factors from this work.
Hoarding data harms everyone’s results: the Structural Genomics Consortium collected protein structures, asking that they be made public domain, and as a consequence managed to get high-quality research results far more quickly than would otherwise have been possible [23].
This pattern has been repeated by the Sage Federation: researchers working with their pilot commons of ageing, diabetes and Warburg data managed to publish three Nature papers in four months.
Furthermore, it is counter-productive to thrash out standards and ontologies prior to collecting data; it is much easier to construct ontologies once a substantial body of data has been collected.
Lastly, clinical and genomic data and models benefit from being handled in the same way as software, that is, with versioning, tracked branching and merging, automated workflows, and so on.
Stephen concluded by giving an overview of the SageCite Project [24], which is bringing together the Sage data commons, Taverna workflows (via the myExperiment community), digital object identifiers (via DataCite) and journals to create a system of persistent identification for data alongside a credit system aligned to this new, more effective way of conducting science.
Conclusion The International Digital Curation Conference seems to get bigger and better each year.
This year was no exception: at the last count there were over 270 delegates, more than ever before.
The inspirational nature of Chris Lintott’s opening keynote set the tone for the entire conference; while there was no loss of realism about the size of the task facing data curators, especially in difficult economic times, there was nevertheless a palpable positivity about what has already been achieved and what is now within reach.
It was notable that the emphasis this year had shifted away from long-term preservation and towards the more contemporaneous aspects of curation, in particular the removal of technical, legal and procedural barriers to integrating, refining and using data, for both professional and citizen scientists.
The NSF data management plan mandate was not quite the elephant in the room that Clifford Lynch described.
It did cast a long shadow over proceedings, but rather than shy away from it, my impression was that people recognised it as an opportunity to push the curation curriculum agenda, both in terms of researchers and professional curators.
Which is not to say people were not daunted by the rapidity with which action must be taken.
All in all, I came away from the conference enthused about the place digital curation has taken within mainstream academia, and looking forward to attending again next year.
The conference was opened up for remote participation as never before, so as well as being able to browse through the slides and posters on the conference Web site [3] one can also view recordings of the keynote addresses, peruse specially recorded interviews with some of the speakers [25], and sift through the many tweets posted about the event [26].
References The Digital Curation Centre Web site http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Ball, A., Patel, M., “2nd International DCC Conference 2006: Digital Data Curation in Practice”, January 2007, Ariadne, Issue 50 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/2-dcc-conf-rpt/ The 6th International Digital Curation Conference Web site http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/conferences/6th-international-digital-curation-conference The RIN Working Group on Information-Handling Web site http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/researcher-development-and-skills/working-group-on-information-handling The Data Curation Profiles Project Web site http://wiki.lib.purdue.edu/display/dcp/Purdue-UIUC+Data+Curation+Profiles+Project The I2S2 Project Web page http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/I2S2/ The Galaxy Zoo Web site http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ Lewis, M., “University Libraries in the UK Data Curation Landscape”, presented at the 4th International Digital Curation Conference, Glasgow, December 2008 http://www.dcc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/events/dcc-2008/programme/presentations/0840_Martin_Lewis.ppt The Globe4D Web site http://www.globe4d.com/ The ChemSpider Web site http://www.chemspider.com/ The Spectral Game Web site http://www.spectralgame.com/ The Concept Web Alliance wiki http://wiki.conceptweballiance.org/index.php/Concept_Web_Alliance The MONK Project Web site http://www.monkproject.org/ The Practical E-Records blog http://e-records.chrisprom.com/ The Sudamih Project Web site http://sudamih.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ The Content Stewardship at Penn State blog http://stewardship.psu.edu/ The Institutional Data Management Blueprint (IDMB) Project blog http://www.southamptondata.org/idmb-blog.html The DL.org Project Web site http://www.dlorg.eu/ The Incremental Project Web site http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/preservation/incremental/ The TextGrid Web site http://www.textgrid.de/en.html The Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments (MESSAGE) Project Web site http://bioinf.ncl.ac.uk/message/ The Sage Bionetworks Web site http://sagebase.org/ Edwards, A. M., Bountra, C., Kerr, D. J., Willson, T. M., “Open access chemical and clinical probes to support drug discovery”, Nature Chemical Biology 5, pp.
436–440, 2009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchembio0709-436 The SageCite Web site http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/sagecite/ The IDCC 2010 video archive http://www.vimeo.com/idcc2010 The IDCC 2010 Twitter archive http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/idcc10 Author Details Alex Ball Research Officer UKOLN, University of Bath Email: a.ball@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: “International Digital Curation Conference 2010” Author: Alex Ball Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/idcc-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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UX Made EZ: An Agile Approach to Testing a Digital Collection Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines UX Made EZ: An Agile Approach to Testing a Digital Collection Citation BibTex RIS Kathryn Gucer provides a case study describing her experience in designing and conducting usability testing of a subject-based digital collection at the National Agricultural Library: the Animal Welfare Act History Digital Collection.
While information professionals in libraries increasingly express a need for conducting flexible, low-cost, in-house usability testing on their digital collections, little literature exists addressing this need.
This article speaks directly to readers among these groups and offers them a model for developing their own user tests based on Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy and, more broadly, on Agile methodology.
INTRODUCTION In March 2018, after more than two years of development, the creators of the Animal Welfare Act History Digital Collection (AWAHDC, awahistory.nal.usda.gov ) were poised to launch this unique new digital library.
We had encountered and solved many problems with the workflows (as described in Gucer et al.
2019) throughout the process of designing and implementing this collection in house at the National Agricultural Library (NAL, nal.usda.gov).
These backend problems had delayed the completion of our user interface until the last stages of the project, but in the late spring of 2018 were finally ready to go live with this interface—almost.
There was one thing left to do: conduct user testing.
From the beginning of the project, we had envisioned testing the usability of our interface before launching the collection.
But this was new territory for our development team and for the library in general.
Although NAL had created and launched digital collections in the past, it had not conducted user testing on these products.
We had no in-house model or policy to follow and our time was limited to a few months.
Nor did we have funds in our budget to hire a usability professional.
So, when a colleague casually mentioned Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems by Steve Krug (Krug 2009), our ears perked up.
As the title suggests, Krug’s slim volume offers website creators a flexible, low-cost, low-stress, time-limited method for conducting user testing of websites.
What is more, Krug’s approach to user testing is based in Agile methodology, an approach originally developed in the software industry.
We on the AWAHDC team had already had success in incorporating elements of the Agile approach into the development of this digital collection, so Krug’s book was all the more appealing for this reason.
Krug’s method was attractive for two further reasons.
First, it assumes that amateurs can do user testing that is effective and will make their websites better.
While Krug recommends hiring usability experts if funds are available, he says that the lack of such resources should not prevent amateurs from running their own tests.
Secondly, we found that our production team perfectly fit the creators Krug describes as benefitting most from his method for user testing: “This book assumes that usability testing is not your life’s work and is probably not even part of your official job description.” The point is to get website creators to do some testing because so many do not (Krug 2009, p. 5).
In the following case study, I describe how we adapted Krug’s method to test the AWAHDC, how we implemented our protocol, and then reflect on our experience.
Our perspective will be of interest to librarians and other information professionals in libraries or other nonprofit contexts.
Although Krug pitches the book at all website creators, there is an emphasis in his examples and online materials on the websites of smallto medium-sized companies who sell and ship products to the public.
Our experience shows how Krug’s method can be adapted to a non-profit, library context where “users” are researchers and students, and the “product” is public or otherwise available information that has been brought together and curated in a digital resource with specialized instructions, search, and faceting functions.
We sense that there is a need among these professionals for practical, how-to information on usability testing.
A cursory search of the LIS literature suggests that little has been written on the user testing of small subject-oriented collections, much less agile methods in such user testing.
What is more, whenever we have promoted the AWAHDC among librarians and information professionals at other libraries, they have been very keen to learn about our agile method and have lamented the lack of user testing of similar products in their organizations.
This article speaks directly to readers among these groups and offers them a model for developing their own user tests.
This article is not a replacement for Krug’s book.
Readers interested in conducting usability testing on the model presented here should obtain and read Rocket Surgery Made Easy.
Krug offers many instructions, details about, and options within, his method of user testing that we do not cover.
In fact, the method that we fashioned from Krug’s book is a slimmer version of his already sleek model.
At times we point to these differences but we do not cover them in detail or comprehensively.
This case study shows how we used Krug’s method in our library and presents some highlights from our results as a way of whetting librarians’ appetite for usability testing and convincing them that it can be done.
The article also reveals the significant payoff that libraries will get from testing their digital products for relatively little cost and effort.
BACKGROUND This section describes the AWAHDC briefly and then summarizes how our usability tests fit into the digital production process at NAL.
It thereby situates this method in the context of digital curation in a library.
The AWAHDC is a free, full-text, and fully searchable, collection of US government publications in PDF documenting the legislative and regulatory history of the Animal Welfare Act, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966.
It was designed by the author of this article, a postdoctoral fellow in digital curation at the University of Maryland, and the director of the Animal Welfare Information Center (AWIC), which sponsors the AWAHDC and is based at the library.
The AWAHDC is a key tool in fulfilling an important mission of the center to inform the members of the community regulated by the Animal Welfare Act, including research scientists and breeders, as well as the general public, about the intent and history of the act.
Together, the director and I organized a team of librarians, cataloguers, web developers, and programmers at the library and oversaw the production of the collection from 2015 through to 2018.
The user testing we describe here took place at the end of this this process, beginning in March 2018, once we had produced a working beta version of the collection’s interface (Figure 2), which is built in the open source content management system, Drupal (drupal.org).
At the outset, we imagined that our collection would contain 900 publications, but we quickly decided to scale back that number to 200.
For various reasons that are outside the scope of this article, we realized that we would need to streamline the collection in order to push it through the digitization pipeline at the library in stages rather than all at once.
This turned out to be a good decision in several ways.
For one thing, it led us to investigate Agile methodology (Beck et al.
(n.d.)) and incorporate its principles—which emphasize a “lean” mentality, responsive teamwork, and a flexible iterative approach to project management—into our production plan.
The first round of production resulted in a beta version that we soft-launched in August 2018 and that was the result of the user testing that we describe below.
As this schedule suggests, and as Krug points out (Krug 2009, pp.
30-37), organizations do not have to wait for a fully finished, or even largely finished, product to begin user testing.
We began testing the AWADHC, when the frontend user-facing interface was basically usable and we felt that we it could benefit from usability testing.
In this way, we folded usability testing into the digital production process at its last stage.
TEST DESIGN Our testing protocol consisted of three rounds conducted with nine participants at one-month intervals across three consecutive months, as described by Krug (Krug 2009, pp.
22-29).
In each round, three participants took the same test one after another in one morning, with 15-minute intervals between each session.
Each session lasted no more than one hour.
The sessions were conducted one-on-one with the participant and the author, and with one silent observer (AWIC’s director).
I was seated slightly to the side and behind the participant so that I could view the screen.
The silent observer was seated well behind the participant and the author.
She had her own monitor, on which she observed the participant’s screen using screen-sharing software (we used Webex but Skype is also an option), and a notebook in which she kept notes.
These interviews were recorded using screen and audio capture software–in our case Camtasia (techsmith.com/video-editor.html).
After all interviews in each round were complete, the director and I discussed what we had learned from these interactions, what were the most significant problems, and how to go about fixing them before the next round of user testing.
From beginning to end, each round took between five and six hours.
The sessions were highly structured.
I read from a script from the beginning to the end of each session, encouraging the participant to vocalize their experience and, when necessary, keeping them on task.
A sample test script is provided in Krug’s book and we largely adopted it.
While reading out loud can feel artificial, this protocol ensures that the test will be uniformly conducted and that all questions and issues will be covered.
The core of the test was four tasks that the participant was to perform using the AWAHDC, without any help from external websites (see an example in Figure 1) or from us.
After a participant received a task, we asked them to talk through their process of performing the task as they completed it.
This verbal description of their experience was, by far, the most important aspect of the test, not whether a participant completed the task successfully.
As Krug repeatedly points out, the participant’s immediate and authentic experience of the website provides the most revealing and useful information for its designers.
Of course, it feels good for all when a participant completes a task.
But the point of user testing is to find and fix problems with the site.
So the more the participant talks through their moment-to-moment exploration of and reactions to the site, the more information the designers gain.
Failure or partial success, if it involves a lot of interaction and feedback is far more informative than easy, immediate success.
As the above description suggests, the goal of each round is to identify basic problems with the site so that we could fix them before the next round of testing.
“Working software,” as the Agile Manifesto puts it, “is the primary measure of progress” (Beck et al.
), not a perfect or even completely finished product.
Figure 1: Sample Task RESULTS In this section I highlight two results of our usability test that illuminate its impact on our collection.
Drawing these highlights from rounds one and three, I focus on a major payoff from each round that significantly improved the AWAHDC.
Round One The first round of usability testing had the biggest impact on the AWAHDC because all three of our participants had the same immediate response to the homepage: they were confused about the website’s identity and purpose.
This confusion arose at the very beginning of the session, before we even got to the four main tasks.
We asked the participants to look at the homepage and, without clicking on anything, describe what they saw.
In response, all three expressed the same confusion arising from an unintended contradiction on this page.
Specifically, the words identifying the site — that is, “The Animal Welfare Act History Digital Collection” — were in the largest font on the page and were located in the right section of a horizontal banner across the upper part of the screen, where the Google-type search bar was also located.
But the majority of the page was taken up by an interactive timeline that drew users’ attention to a large colorful image of animals in the center of the page and an accompanying description of the timeline’s function.
The timeline prompted users to click on white arrows to the right of the screen that led them through a series of ten panels, with engaging images and information on the act.
Figure 2: Home Page of the AWAHDC in Round One The participants in this first round were all so drawn to this timeline that they did not explore the rest of the page.
Or, when they did, they expressed confusion about the site.
“Is this website a timeline, an exhibit, or is it a digital library?” was a common response.
This confusion carried over into the rest of the session, as participants repeatedly returned to the timeline looking for answers it could not provide.
There was, we realized, an unintended mixed message embedded in the homepage that could prevent our users from understanding what the AWAHDC was, what it was for, and from discovering its full functionality Payoff: Usability Testing Reveals What’s Hidden in Plain Sight User testing allows website creators to see aspects of their site to which they have become blind.
To our participants the mixed message in the design of the homepage was as plain as day, but after months of rethinking and tweaking the site, we had become inured to its most obvious flaw.
Early on we had discussed the possibility that the timeline would draw users away from the site’s main functionality: the search, retrieval, and organization of documents in the collection.
But we had balanced this concern against a desire to inform general users up front about the act and its history in a visually engaging form.
This first round of testing brought us back to our senses and told us to keep it simple.
In the month before the next round of user testing, we worked with the web developer on our team to redesign the home page so that it emphasized the site’s main purpose and functionality.
The revised homepage (Figure 3) removed the timeline from the homepage to another page.
The search bar was now squarely in the center of the page next to the image of the animals.
Underneath the search bar we added a call to action, alerting users to the timeline for general users: “Not sure where to start?
Take a look at our Interactive Timeline!” Figure 3: Revised Homepage of the AWAHDC for Round Two Round Three Round Three in our user testing illuminated the solution to a problem we had become aware of throughout the first two rounds of testing but for which we had no single clear solution.
Specifically, in order to use the AWAHDC effectively, users need to have a basic understanding of the two processes by which US laws are enacted in United States Congress and subsequently enforced in the executive agencies: the legislative and regulatory processes respectively.
We therefore created an infographic informing readers about these processes and how they relate to the documents in the AWAHDC.
This infographic appears on the “How to Use” page on our site.
Users can access the page using the “How to Use” link in the main menu on the homepage (Figure 4): Figure 4: Main menu on the AWAHDC’s home page Our problem was how to ensure that our users clicked on this link and encountered this infographic in time for it to guide their searches.
Without this information, their experience of the site would be diminished and they might not understand the AWAHDC’s full significance and utility.
They might even leave the site frustrated and disinclined to return.
We therefore designed one of our tasks so that participants would, we hoped, encounter this page and use its information in the retrieval of a specific piece of information.
In practice, however, the paths our participants took in solving this task did not take them to this “How to Use” link or the related page.
The result was that, if they found the piece of information required by the task (i.e., the title of a government serial, Congressional Record), they used other routes to get there.
Payoff: Usability Testing Reveals Solutions, Not Just Problems Ironically, these repeated failures eventually offered us a solution to our problem.
As our participants increasingly found their way to the “Congressional Record” by way of alternate paths than the one we had imagined, it dawned on us that we could create multiple routes to the page we wanted them to find and accentuate those paths.
This realization resulted in some very simple changes to the existing site, including adding a link to the words “legislative and regulatory documents” in the description of the collection at the center of the homepage.
We knew from earlier rounds of testing that this text’s central position next to the eye-catching image of the animals on the home page immediately drew users’ attention in ways that the “How To Use” link in the menu bar did not.
This experience illuminated a wiser, more flexible perspective on the elements (e.g., text, images, white space, organizational features) within our site—that is, as potential pathways within a virtual space whose constituent parts were separate but nonetheless interconnected and navigable.
In this and other ways, conducting our own usability testing increased our expertise in our own site, and in the development of good sites more broadly.
CONCLUSION Given the enormous advantage of conducting usability testing, it is surprising how little of it gets done in libraries that sponsor digital collections.
This situation may be based in the belief that such testing has to be a ‘big deal’ expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming and that it will distract from the development process.
Our experience shows that such a belief is mistaken.
Indeed it also shows that Krug’s low-cost, flexible method of DIY usability testing can prevent huge expenditures of time and money by incorporating the learning gleaned from these tests into the development process.
In our model, there is no distinction between the usability expert and development team, which prevents problems from taking root and becoming larger and more intractable down the road.
“The funny thing about usability testing,” Krug says, “is it just works” (Krug 2009, p. 15).
This has certainly been our experience.
The author would like to thank Rachel Donahue for her invaluable suggestion of Krug’s book.
REFERENCES Beck, K. et al.
(n.d.).
Manifesto for agile software development.
Retrieved from http://agilemanifesto.org Gucer, K., Adams, K., Schoppet, C., Punzalan, R. (2019).
Getting to Beta: Building a Model Collection in a World of Digital One-Offs.
International Journal of Digital Curation, 13(1), 271-285. doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v13i1.554 Krug, Steve.
(2009).
Rocket Surgery Made Easy: the Do-It-Yourself Guide To Finding and Fixing Usability Problems.
New Riders, San Francisco, CA.
Animal Welfare Information Center, USDA.
(2019).
Animal Welfare Act History Digital Collection.
Retrieved from http://awahistory.nal.usda.gov Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Redeveloping the Loughborough Online Reading List System Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Redeveloping the Loughborough Online Reading List System Buzz data software framework api javascript html database restful xml archives zip metadata schema blog sql z39.50 cache perl e-learning soap mysql shibboleth chrome gpl moodle ajax json licence authentication refworks cookie standards jquery Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight, Jason Cooper and Gary Brewerton describe the redevelopment of Loughborough University’s open source reading list system.
The Loughborough Online Reading Lists System (LORLS) [1] has been developed at Loughborough University since the late 1990s.
LORLS was originally implemented at the request of the University’s Learning and Teaching Committee simply to make reading lists available online to students.
The Library staff immediately saw the benefit of such a system in not only allowing students ready access to academics’ reading lists but also in having such access themselves.
This was because a significant number of academics were bypassing the library when generating and distributing lists to their students who were then in turn surprised when the library did not have the recommended books either in stock or in sufficient numbers to meet demand.
The first version of the system produced by the Library Systems Team was part of a project that also had a ‘reading lists amnesty’ in which academics were encouraged to provide their reading lists to the library which then employed some temporary staff over the summer to enter them into the new system.
This meant that the first version of LORLS went live in July 2000 with a reasonable percentage of lists already in place.
Subsequently the creation and editing of reading lists was made the responsibility of the academics or departmental admin staff, with some assistance from library staff.
LORLS was written in Perl, with a MySQL database back-end.
Most user interfaces were delivered via the web, with a limited number of back-end scripts that helped the systems staff maintain the system and alert library staff to changes that had been made to reading lists.
Soon after the first version of LORLS went live at Loughborough, a number of other universities expressed an interest in using or modifying the system.
Permission was granted by the University to release it as open source under the General Public Licence (GPL)[2].
New versions were released as the system was developed and bugs were fixed.
The last version of the original LORLS code base/data design was version 5, which was downloaded by sites worldwide.
Redesign By early 2007 it was decided to take a step back and see if there were things that could be done better in LORLS.
Some design decisions made in 1999 no longer made sense eight years later.
Indeed some of the database design was predicated on how teaching modules were supposed to work at Loughborough and it had already become clear that the reality of how they were deployed was often quite different.
For example, during the original design, the principle was that each module would have a single reading list associated with it.
Within a few years several modules had been found that were being taught by two (or more!)
academics, all wanting their own independent reading list.
Some of the structuring of the data in the MySQL database began to limit how the system could be developed.
The University began to plan an organisational restructuring shortly after the redesign of LORLS was commenced, and it was clear that the simple departmental structure was likely to be replaced by a more fluid school and department mix.
Library staff were also beginning to request new features that were thus increasingly awkward to implement.
Rather than leap through hoops to satisfy them within the framework of the existing system, it made sense to add them into the design process for a full redesign.
It was also felt that the pure CGI-driven user interface could do with a revamp.
The earlier LORLS user interfaces used only basic HTML forms, with little in the way of client-side scripting.
Whilst that meant that they tended to work on any web browser and were pretty accessible, they were also a bit clunky compared to some of the newer dynamic web sites.
A distinct separation of the user interface from the back-end database was decided upon to improve localization and portability of the system as earlier versions of LORLS had already shown that many sites took the base code and then customised the user interface parts of the CGI scripts to their own look and feel.
The older CGI scripts were a mix of user interaction elements and database access and processing, which made this task a bit more difficult than it really needed to be.
Separating the database code from the user interface code would let people easily tinker with one without unduly affecting the other.
It would also allow local experimentation with multiple user-interface designs for different user communities or devices.
This implied that a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) would need to be defined.
As asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)[3] interactions had been successful applied in a number of recent projects the team had worked on, XML was chosen as the format to be used.
At first simple object access protocol (SOAP) style XML requests was experimented with, as well as XML responses, but it was soon realised that SOAP was far too heavy-weight for most of the API calls, so a lighter ‘RESTful’ API was selected.
The API was formed of CGI scripts that took normal parameters as input and returned XML documents for the client to parse and display.
Database Design However, the major change for the redesign for LORLS version 6 though was the need to overhaul the MySQL database schema.
The original LORLS design included a generic ‘item’ database table that contained enough fields to handle books, book chapters, journals and journal articles.
However as the item type was not explicit, many academics had added data that made it difficult to programmatically distinguish the item type for each entry in the table, especially if the ISBN and ISSN fields were empty.
Therefore in LORLSv6 a move was made to strong typing of item records, so that each item could easily be identified as a book, journal article, etc.
It was also desirable for the typing system to be dynamically extendible, so having separate tables for each item type was quickly rejected.
The database design that achieved the easily extendible item types was named ‘Loughborough’s Universal Metadata Platform’ (LUMP).
Figure 1: Simplified entity relationship diagram The fundamental element in LUMP is a table containing rows of ‘Structural Units’ (SUs).
An SU could be a reading list, an item on the reading list (book, journal article, etc), a department, a module or even a whole organisation.
Each SU has a single Structural Unit Type (SUT) that supplies this typing.
The actual SU table entries only really contain links to the SUT table entry and a bit of administrative metadata (for example whether the SU has been published or deleted, when it was created or last modified and by whom).
The data for each SU is held in one or more rows in a separate Data Element (DE) table.
Each DE has a link to a defined data type, stored in the Data Type (DT) table, its value and some administration metadata.
Each DT entry contains a name (author, title, ISBN, module code, etc), default value, validation pattern (in the form of a regular expression) and a suggestion as to how the type should be rendered by the client (text input, radio button, check boxes, etc).
The DTs are themselves grouped into Data Type Groups (DTGs).
DTGs serve two purposes.
Firstly they are used as a suggestion to the client how the DTs (and thus DEs) should be grouped together.
For example a book’s bibliographic DTs such as author, title, ISBN and public notes are grouped together, whilst private notes and holding suggestions from academics to library staff are grouped into another DTG while internal library information used by library assistants is grouped into a third DTG.
The client may render the DTGs in a way that visually separates them, such as using tabbed forms or an accordion.
Figure 2: Screenshot of editing form showing different data type editing representations and accordion rendering of data type groups Secondly the DTGs are used as part of the permissions system in LORLSv6, allowing some DTGs to be hidden from some classes of user.
This allows internal library information to be visible to systems staff, librarians and library assistants, but not to academics, departmental admin staff or students.
The DTGs are tied back to the SUT of which they are all part.
This results in a loop of tables: an SU has a type given by an SUT, which in turn has a set of DTGs associated with it, the DTGs contain collections of DTs that then provide metadata for handling the data in DEs and, lastly, each DE instance is tied to that particular SU.
Beyond this, each SU can be related to one or more other SUs in the system by entries in a Structural Unit Link (SUL) table.
Parent and child relationships are defined, but a strict hierarchy is not enforced.
This provides a lot of flexibility: for example, an SU representing a reading list will have a collection of SUs for books, articles, and similar as its children, but it might itself be a child of several different modules or, indeed, other reading lists.
This allows academics to have one reading list that they can use for several modules (which is handy as courses run for different departments are often taught together).
As meshes can be generated there is an extra complication in some of the code to ensure that it does not become trapped in infinite recursive loops whilst traversing the mesh.
There are also relationships maintained between the different SUTs in the system.
They are held in a Structural Unit Type Link (SUTL) table.
This dictates what sort of SUTs can appear as parents or children of each SUT.
A book can be a child of a reading list, and a reading list can be a child of a module for example, but it would not make sense to allow a module to be a child of a book.
SUTs, DTGs, DTs, SULs, and SUTLs are all extensible and editable via an admin web interface.
New types, groups and links are just rows in these tables, so do not need changes to the database schema or the Perl code that forms the API.
The system needs to consider the permissions that people hold when interacting with these data structures.
Previous version of LORLS had groups based on academic staff, departmental admin staff, library assistants, librarians and systems admin staff as classes of users.
This had worked well, so it was decided to keep them, but also to design an authorisation system that would also allow other classes of user to be easily added.
For authentication LORLS would use existing systems such as Active Directory or Shibboleth.
The permissions are maintained using Access Control Lists (ACLs) and user groups.
Individual users are members of one or more user groups and the ACLs indicate what SUs and DTGs the members of each user group can view and/or edit.
ACLs allow user groups to be given default rights which can then be overridden for specific SUs and DTGs.
Whilst this complicates the ACL checking code somewhat and made development and debugging a slow process, it does mean that the system has far fewer rows in the ACL table and therefore quick authorisation look-ups.
To ease the move from earlier versions of LORLS to LORLSv6, time was spent in producing code to export data from the old database and into the new schema.
This was not as simple as it might have first appeared.
The size of the reading list database meant that a simplistic set of single row inserts into each table was not feasible; trying to perform such a migration resulted in run times measured in days.
Instead, the migration code had to be able to generate files of batched SQL queries that allowed thousands of rows to be inserted at a time.
As the tables are all inter-related, the Perl migration program had to keep track of items that had previously been added to the SQL files but not yet inserted into the MySQL database.
Rendering Output and Performance The user interface to LORLSv6 has gone through several iterations.
Initially some time was spent on devising a templating system that was accessible through the API.
Administrators could define templates that contained fragments of HTML that would then be populated with the results from database searches using other API calls.
The templates were held in the database so that LORLS administrators did not need to have file system access to the server that hosted the system (not an issue for the developers at Loughborough, but some other sites had presented difficulties where library systems staff did not have command line access to the servers that hosted their systems).
Figure 3: Screenshot of reading list Whilst this worked it was rather slow, so it was abandoned in favour of the next iteration in which a JavaScript client was written using the JQuery library [4].
This client used the XML output from the APIs and made the rendering decisions locally.
This became known as the "Client for LUMP" or CLUMP.
The use of JQuery allowed a rich and attractive user interface to be generated, and the client-side scripting reduced some of the load on the servers.
As the API was used it was possible (using a small CGI API proxy) to allow the HTML and JavaScript of the user interface to be hosted on a different server to the API and database.
The performance was improved, but it still was not as fast as users would like.
Several techniques were tried at the back-end to speed things up: re-coding some of the low-level database interactions to use more streamlined SQL queries carefully deciding where indexes would help in the database compressing API results on the fly building in the ability to cache some common query results in the Perl API so that the SQL database did not need to be hit so often.
One of the biggest performance improvements was made by replacing the general Perl XML::Mini::Document module [5] with a more specific home-grown XMLout() sub-routine.
This saved up to half a second on each XML API call, which really improved rendering performance in situations where the front-end code needed to make multiple API calls to render a display.
Employment of client-side profiling using Google Chrome's developer tools and server-side profiling of Perl code using NytProf [6], made spotting performance bottlenecks such as this much easier.
The next round of performance improvements involved switching from XML output firstly to JavaScript object notation (JSON) and then JSON with padding (JSONP).
The use of JSON for encoding returned data structures required far less client processing than the XML tree traversals that it previously had to perform.
It also resulted in smaller, cleaner, more easily understandable code.
Switching the APIs to outputting in JSON, instead of XML, was made easy by the use of Perl’s JSON module [7], which accepted the same parameters as the XMLout() sub-routine.
JSONP streamlined things further by allowing a callback routine to be specified in the outgoing request which helps to sidestep some of the limitations of straight XML and JSON interactions and, again, to speed up the overall system.
One slight downside of JSONP is the lack of synchronous calls; when needed this has to be worked round using blocking whilst waiting for callbacks to be invoked.
The client makes use of multiple threads where possible, rendering the items that the user will see first even it is going to take a while to completely finish all the API requests required.
This allows CLUMP to give a response that most users perceive as fast even on really large reading lists with more than 1000 items on them.
JavaScript and JQuery also allow some extra tricks for improving perceived performance.
For example light-boxes are used for rendering the details of ‘terminal nodes’ in the SU mesh (things like books and journal articles that cannot have children SUs).
This looks good to the user and has the big advantage that the reading list in the underlying page does not need to be reloaded when the light-box is closed.
Figure 4: Screenshot of light-box rendering of terminal node The CLUMP front-end also integrates with a number of other systems.
Bibliographic information can be retrieved from the Library Management System (Aleph at Loughborough) via Z39.50, which can be used to fill in work details for academic and library staff after they have provided just the ISSN or ISBN.
For the students, links are made where possible to Google Books, allowing the display of either cover art or even the full text of the book in some cases.
The later integration of Shibboleth [8] to allow Single Sign On (SSO) posed a number of problems.
Shibboleth does not seem to be really designed to authenticate an AJAX-style API as it wants to redirect the web client to an identity provider (IDP) site if the machine does not have suitable cookies.
These cookies are stored by the user's web browser and are not necessarily easily available to JavaScript code, especially if it is being redirected to another site.
To work round this, CLUMP makes use of iframes and the back-end web server is configured to allow an API call that can check if Shibboleth authentication has worked or not.
Another client-side development to help academics in generating their reading lists is BibGrab.
This is a small ‘bookmarklet’ code that allows users to find interesting works in a web page, highlight them and then import them into one or more of their reading lists in LORLS.
Academics can thus build and update their reading lists directly from other material that they or colleagues have placed online.
Development Process, Testing and Deployment As the redevelopment of LORLS was likely to take a relatively long time, it was decided fairly early in the redesign process that a development diary would be kept on the blog site [9].
This provided both communication with stakeholders and gave the development team a way to record why certain design decisions were made.
After a significant level of development had taken place, the development diary was made visible off-site, so other sites using LORLS could follow the redesign and submit suggestions.
Early in the beta testing process, a demo system was made available to allow them to see how the new system worked from the point of view of an end-user.
More time was spent on making the installation process easier than earlier versions as well to help other sites install the new code, which made far heavier use of external modules and tool sets than previous versions of LORLS had.
The release of beta test versions of LORLSv6 allowed us to demonstrate the system to stakeholders on campus and elicit feedback on what they did and did not like.
This also alerted library staff, academics and also staff in other support service departments that the LORLS system would be changing at some point, allowing them to prepare support materials and ensure that it would integrate with other systems on campus (such as the Moodle-based virtual learning environment).
LORLSv6 was launched into production use on 14 February 2011.
The new system was promoted both before and after production use at a number of events (e.g.
local e-Learning showcase, presentations at departmental meetings) to help ensure that academics were ready to use the new system and gather more feedback on the system from them.
Overall, feedback from staff and students has been both positive and constructive.
Further Development After the initial production launch had proven successful at Loughborough, a copy of the code was made available online as well for other sites to download.
However development did not halt at this point, as a number of performance improvements were made and new features added.
Suggestions for new features have come from a variety of users including both those internal to Loughborough University (e.g.
Library staff, academics, students) and external (e.g.
attendees at the Summer 2011 ‘Meeting the Reading Lists Challenge’ workshop [10]).
New features that are currently in the internally released beta version include a new API call that allows a SU to be converted from one SUT to another, including mapping different DTs onto one another.
This allows staff to change a book into a book chapter for example, whilst still maintaining the strong typing in the system and preserving as much data as possible.
Currently code is being developed that can import references in BibTeX, RefWorks or RIS formats into reading lists.
This will allow academics to create lists quickly from their existing bibliographic management tools, and complements similar code that allows students to download reading lists references in the same formats.
A start has been made on coding of the next version of LORLS.
Major version numbers in LORLS tend to be increased when the database schema is altered, in the case of LORLSv7 the main changes made so far are to permit the implementation of item ratings.
This is intended to allow students to indicate whether they consider particular items good or bad.
This information may be of use to other students in choosing which works they will use from large reading lists, as well as providing feedback to academics on what their students think about the works on the lists.
Another development is some code to parse Microsoft Word files in "DOCX" format and extract Harvard style citations.
DOCX is effectively a ZIP compressed archive of XML files, so standard XML parsing tools can extract information from them fairly easily.
The extracted XML is combined with a set of Perl regular expressions that attempt to extract paragraphs that appear to be in Harvard format.
This is more of an art than a science as many students (and some academics!)
have rather liberal views on what constitutes a Harvard style citation.
The initial code has been developed against a number of Word documents used by academics on campus, and, if generally successful, will fulfil an often repeated request from academics to be able to submit their reading lists as part of a larger Word document that they give to their students.
Conclusion Redesigning a successful, decade-old system that forms a core of the Library's online offering was a large task.
However it has produced a far more flexible system that is more user-friendly and has provided a platform for on-going developments.
The new database schema provides the dual benefits of strongly typed items held within the system whilst allowing new types to easily be deployed.
Strong typing allows the front end code to provide type specific user interactions and also eases subsidiary tasks such as import and exporting to bibliographic reference maintenance software.
Having a separated client using an API to talk to the back-end has allowed a division of development labour and permitted the use of a richer set of user interface designs than previous versions of LORLS have had.
These have been popular with both student and staff users of the system.
Performance of such a system can easily be a stumbling block, but it has been found that the combination of profiling tools and multiple performance enhancements in both the backand front-end code can pay dividends.
The use of JSON and JSONP provides significant performance improvements over XML for web-based APIs, which may be something to consider when designing other asynchronous client-server web systems.
The integration of Shibboleth with an XML or JSON/JSONP based API has proved possible, but only by some rather inelegant hacking with iframes.
It is not clear if this is a limitation in the design of Shibboleth or the particular implementation in use.
One thing is clear though: reading list systems are still a fertile place for developments and trying out new features.
They are heavily used by students, allow libraries to manage their stock more effectively and can help academics support their teaching.
LORLS has thrived for a decade and looks set to continue development well into the future.
References Brewerton, G. and Knight, J., 2003.
From local project to open source: a brief history of the Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS).
VINE, 33(4), pp.
189-195 https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/handle/2134/441 GNU General Public License, version 2 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html Powers, S., 2007.
Adding Ajax: Making Existing Sites More Interactive.
O’Reilly Media.
jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library http://jquery.com/ XML-Mini-1.2.7: XML::Mini::Document  http://search.cpan.org/~pdeegan/XML-Mini-1.2.7/lib/XML/Mini/Document.pm Devel-NYTProf-4.06: Devel::NYTProf http://search.cpan.org/~timb/Devel-NYTProf-4.06/lib/Devel/NYTProf.pm JSON-2.53: JSON http://search.cpan.org/~makamaka/JSON-2.53/lib/JSON.pm Shibboleth: What's Shibboleth?
http://shibboleth.net/ Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS) development diary http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/lorls/development-diary Loughborough University: Meeting the reading list challenge http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/mtrlc/ Author Details Dr Jon Knight Library Systems Developer Loughborough University Email: j.p.knight@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/ Dr Jon Knight works for several departments at Loughborough University, including the library.
He has been involved with digital libraries and library systems for approximately 20 years.
Dr Jason Cooper Library Systems Analyst/Programmer Loughborough University Email: j.l.cooper@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/ Dr Jason Cooper has been a member of the Library Systems at Loughborough University for 8 years.
He develops and maintains a number of key systems for the Library.
Gary Brewerton Library Systems Manager Loughborough University Email: g.p.brewerton@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/ Gary Brewerton is the Library Systems Manager at Loughborough University and is interested in library automation, information and communication technology, and open source development (e.g.
LORLS).
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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E-books and E-content 2010: Data As Content Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines E-books and E-content 2010: Data As Content Buzz data rdf framework sparql database infrastructure archives metadata doi identifier repositories eprints video preservation multimedia streaming flash ebook mp3 ogg foi research Citation BibTex RIS Brian Whalley reports on a meeting dealing with academic data management and some JISC projects concerned with institutional responses to the need to manage research data more effectively.
This meeting on 11 May 2010, chaired by Anthony Watkinson, was organised by the University College London Department of Information Studies.
Some 40 people attended the ‘e-book’ conference with the specific title; ‘Data as Content’.
Eight papers were presented with a final panel question and answer session that explored some of the issues that had arisen during the day.
Papers Presented Unfortunately, the first billed presentation, by Matthew Day (Nature) on ‘The role of publishers in data management, now and next’, had to be cancelled.
His talk was to have considered the role of academic publishers as bodies to publish and archive data as well as papers themselves.
In its place, Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives, CrossRef, gave a talk entitled ‘Data and text mining: the search for unknown knowns’.
This used the ‘Rumsfeldian unknown’ to approach data mining and its associated, but not cognate, term ‘text mining’.
However, this was rather more than using the mining metaphor; it is not the data we are searching for but information that we (perhaps uniquely) require within the data-dirt.
So this was what data mining is not; neither data nor information retrieval, nor extraction, nor indeed analysis, on their own.
Information is something researchers have problems with in data extraction and in keeping up with the literature.
How can we get computers to help?
After these clarifications, Geoffrey then went on to look at the Semantic Web and its role as a means of efficient searching of Web-based data for required information and why computers have problems in getting sense out of sentences whereas humans find it (relatively) easy to do so.
We then had a brief review of metadata embedding, the creation of query tools and on to the Resource Description Framework (RDF).
Semantic Web (Web 3.0) technology provides an answer and queries (using tools such as SPARQL) can be usefully extracted from these RDF encodings.
But how to make the ‘researcher as author’ more efficient as ‘researcher as reader’?
Geoffrey ended by pointing out how little time the Internet age had been developing compared with print literature from Guttenberg onwards.
The point however was that we currently treated text, a pdf say, as incunabula and that we were afraid to let go of that with which we were familiar.
So, the final question posed was, ‘why do we publish text?’ The next paper was presented by Simon Hodson, Programme Manager, JISC, ‘Research data as content: ‘Challenges and opportunities for UK HE’.
The main gist of his presentation was the role of the universities, especially the research-oriented institutions, in the investment in research data and knowledge production – the value of data as content.
This is part of a shift towards including data as a prominent part of scholarly output.
These general notions mean that there must be specific responses from individual institutions.
There are tools now available demonstrating the benefits of this approach.
The importance of skills development was outlined and Simon illustrated JISC involvement with reference to, for example, the Peg-Board Project (Bristol) for palaeoclimatological data [1].
The ‘data deluge’ is evident in this area as in so many in collaborative science.
The significant Nature paper Data’s shameful neglect [2] was discussed and how data management should be woven into all science courses.
There was also a mention of the various models for data publication and charging.
This is a complex area and one that is hardly realised as necessary in most institutions.
The final suggestion was that there might, ultimately, be a general institutional statement about data publication.
Michael Jubb, Director, Research Information Network (RIN), gave a talk entitled, ‘To share or not to share?
Researchers’ perspectives on managing and sharing data’.
RIN is a research and policy unit funded by the four Higher Education funding councils, the three national libraries and the seven research councils to investigate ways in which UK researchers can make use of information resources; and how they are (or are not) looking after data for example.
His approach was bottom-up and pointed out that many researchers were unaware of the need for this approach.
Michael looked at a list of verbs associated with data in the research process (gather, … evaluate … manage … present … disseminate) but pointed out that data are acquired differently in diverse disciplines and he produced a cognitive map of how one team of researchers set about resolving the process.
But there are complex factors involved; esteem, competition and altruism are as important as size of dataset and ethics.
Some researchers do not trust others’ data, especially where teams are involved or the data are complex.
Furthermore, there is a dearth of people who know how to handle datasets.
These complexities require leadership and co-ordination, top-down as well as bottom-up.
Not least, incentives must be provided for researchers.
This was an interesting view of the intricate personal as well as institutional relationships involved in sharing data.
There are clearly many questions to be asked, perhaps of each generation of researcher.
The contribution by Helle Lauridsen, Discovery Services, Serials Solutions, added to this complexity.
‘Metadata management and webscale searching making (all kinds of) data discoverable’ addressed further aspects of the user experience.
Libraries are still physical and thought of as storage of books.
Does the ‘Net generation’ realise how best to use data and make data discoverable?
They expect all search systems to behave like Google and know only a small pool of quality resources.
(Unfortunately, tutors’ views of data and information are often little more advanced than their students.)
Helle then explored some of these problems from the user’s standpoint by looking at difficulties with gateways.
The paper of Tenopir [3] is a way to look at the ‘value gap’ between the perceived value of a library as a gateway and the amount spent on materials.
Can the Web help?
Yes, but Google Scholar is not delimited enough, you get everything; so what about better indexing of metadata?
Fine, if the metadata are there.
Webscale discovery is a development by Serials Solutions, the ability to search within articles etc and the merging of metadata, including data in the cloud around the article.
However, the data alone may not be that significant since they may need to be filtered by peer review.
There are different approaches to adopt, for example, via Link Resolver (National Library for Health/ Health Information Resources) and other discovery tools.
Library use is changing, but how fast will this be for the majority of researchers?
This was another thought-provoking paper reporting developing ideas of meaningful searching through the data sea.
Adam Farqhar, Head of Digital Technology, British Library (BL), presented a paper ‘DataCite,’ a review of the progress of this project [4] designed to make access to scientific data easier.
This is a new International Data citation initiative which aims to make it easier to gain access to scientific research data on the internet, to increase the acceptance of research data as a contribution to the scientific record and to support data archiving.
This was achieved by reviewing Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and their effectiveness including costs of visibility (DOI registration and searching is cheap compared with data harvesting and production).
Adam reported on the UK pilot initiative and the US pilot (Dryad) with an example from Science Direct by following links through a small database of DOIs.
This was an interesting look into a near-future practical application.
After these papers came three presentations which illustrated JISC-funded initiatives and projects.
James Wilson, University of Oxford gave a talk entitled ‘The SUDAMIH Project: Developing Data Infrastructure for the Humanities – requirements and attitudes’ as its Project Manager.
Research in the humanities tends to produce different problems of data production, storage and use than in the sciences.
This is not only due to its ‘life’s work’ approach but also because data are conceived of in different ways from that of scientists.
The project is concerned with ‘Supporting Data Management Infrastructure in the Humanities’ and exploring why there are these differences and what they mean for data management as well as current and future practices in universities.
This includes use, sharing and attitudes towards data, which are as valuable in the humanities as elsewhere.
The project shows how current practices can be improved, especially through the development of institutional practices.
The two main outputs are the ‘Database as a Service’ system and the development of training modules.
The latter may prove hard to promote – especially as most people are inundated with opportunities to attend conferences and workshops.
One important aspect mentioned here was the importance of encouraging graduate students to attend workshops a few months after starting on their research.
June Finch, Project Manager, MaDAM, University of Manchester, presented a talk entitled ‘MaDAM – A Data Management Pilot for Biomedical Researchers at the University of Manchester’.
This is a first step in the introduction of a university-wide data management infrastructure and service.
June explained about the local circumstances and the development of user-driven pilot groups.
The involvement of users was considered essential and the embedding of needs and working practices was to the fore, as was the sustainability of the project’s results, the latter being evaluated with a cost-benefit analysis and financial models.
The key challenge was managing the expectations of users and the culture change.
The University has a Fedora-based repository (eScholar) dealing with theses etc, but not data.
Data management practice varies widely across the University and a main issue was to standardise a structure and to take into account the existing ‘Manchester Informatics’ system.
The talk also showed ideas that were being developed in respect of bringing data directly from instrumentation to a Fedora Commons storage and management system.
When this project finishes (summer 2011), its findings should have consequences on how other institutions manage their data.
Finally, Kenji Takeda, Senior Lecturer in Aeronautics, University of Southampton, talked about the way in which Southampton was developing its existing facilities (such as the well known Eprints and National Crystallography Centre).
A team of people across departments (Chemistry, Engineering and Archaeology as well as the Library and Information Services) were involved in this project and Kenji presented this as an ‘Institutional Data Management Blueprint’.
The aim of this project is to create a practical (and attainable) institutional framework for managing research data.
As at Manchester and Oxford, surveys were undertaken to look at existing infrastructures and the need to bring together aspects of this ambitious project.
They looked at research ‘stuff’, from PostIts to high-volume data output and incorporated aspects of archiving and preservation.
Results of these surveys were illuminating in themselves as were the aspirations of researchers (‘seamless integration from papers to source data’, ‘e-lab notebooks’ etc) to frustrations (‘metadata’, ‘responsibility and ownership’, ‘Freedom of Information’).
The use of data systems was outlined on a graph, ‘degree of structure’ plotted against ‘ease of sharing’ which showed the diversity and lack of integration across the University.
The projected structure was outlined and again key conclusions were that a two-pronged approach was required; bottom-up to augment the researcher’s world and a top-down to provide support and guidance.
The other conclusion, that, ‘good data management is vital for better research’ summarised the thrust of the meeting as whole.
Conclusion The title ‘Data as content’ sounds a somewhat dry topic, perhaps best fitted for ‘info-geeks’.
Not so; this was an interesting day with excellent speakers presenting a range of current investigations and glimpses to the future.
I hope the summaries above have provided something to whet your appetite for finding out more.
Certainly Higher Education institutions in the UK are going to have to get to grips with the issues discussed at this meeting.
I am pleased to report that multimedia recordings [5] of the E-books and E-content 2010 Conference are now available.
You will find good video streaming of the presentations as well as downloads (Flash, MOV, OGG and MP3 formats).
There are exciting developments out there for academic as well as information researchers; watch out for these developing tools in the future.
Perhaps, less explicitly, there are challenges for institutions and Research Councils and other grant-awarding bodies as well as universities.
Some of these challenges and issues may well be continued in another UCL initiative, the Fourth Bloomsbury Conference on E-publishing and e-Publications (24-25 June 2010) [6].
References PEG-BOARD Project Site http://www.paleo.bris.ac.uk/projects/peg-board/ Editorial.
(2009) Data’s shameful neglect.
Nature 461: pp.
doi:10.1038/461145a.
Tenopir, C., King, D. W., Edwards, S., & Wu, L. (2009) Electronic journals and changes in scholarly article seeking and reading patterns.
Perspectives, 61: pp.
5-32.
DataCite http://www.datacite.org/ Multimedia recordings of ‘E-books and E-content 2010’ conference held 11 May 2010, River Valley TV http://river-valley.tv/conferences/ebooks-econtent-2010 Fourth Bloomsbury Conference on E-publishing and e-Publications (24-25 June 2010) http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/e-publishing/ Author Details Brian Whalley Professor of Geomorphology School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology Queens University Belfast BT7 1NN Email: b.whalley@qub.ac.uk Web site: http://web.gg.qub.ac.uk/people/staff/whalley/ Return to top Article Title: “E-books and E-content 2010: Data as Content” Author: Brian Whalley Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/ebooks-ucl-2010-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial: Ariadne: the neverending story.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial: Ariadne: the neverending story.
Citation BibTex RIS Jon Knight, the latest in the long line of Ariadne editors, explains some of the changes that the journal has undergone this year, and introduces the articles in issue 74.
Welcome to issue 74 of Ariadne!
This is the first issue of the magazine that we have hosted here at Loughborough University, with an editorial team spread over a number of institutions, after we took over the reins (and the software and database) from Bath University back in April.
You might have noticed a few changes since the move that I’ll hopefully explain in this editorial.
The largest change behind the scenes, and the one that took quite a lot of work from my colleagues Jason Cooper and Garry Booth, was the move from an older version of Drupal that Ariadne was hosted on in Bath, to the latest release.
We did this at the same time that we moved the database over to Loughborough, and we have to thank the folk at Bath for patiently waiting for us to get it all ship shape before switching public traffic over to our servers.
For the more technically minded of our readers, here’s “the science bit” about the software changes.
We look after a number of Wordpress installations and small Drupal installs in our day jobs, but Ariadne’s Drupal configuration was somewhat more complex to update.
Drupal’s update system is not as streamlined and automated as that in Wordpress, so patching modules is a task that takes far longer and far more effort.
Ariadne’s Drupal installation relied on modules in the older release that did not necessarily have a direct equivalent in the latest Drupal code base, so those had to be removed or replaced with alternatives.
Over the years some of the custom written back end code has also suffered from the inevitable “bit rot” and so we had to guesstimate how some parts were supposed to work!
As a result of updating the content management software we also refreshed the look and feel of the site a little.
Not a massively radical overhaul, but more removing items that we’d had negative feedback on or that Drupal no longer supported, tweaking some of the styling, and aiming to make it easier and quicker to get to the actual article content.
After all, providing the articles and reviews are what Ariadne is really all about, so we felt that was where we should focus our efforts on.
We’ve also moved to a slightly different publishing model.
Rather than collecting articles and reviews, having the editorial team review them all, getting all the corrections in place and producing finalised texts before releasing an issue, we’ve decided to try a “rolling” issue model.
When an article comes in, it is reviewed and corrected as before, but once we and the authors are happy with it, we mount it on the Ariadne web server and make it live immediately.
This means that the current issue is always partly finished, right up to the point where it is “capped” with an editorial article such as this and we start building the next issue.
This rolling issue model has a number of advantages.
The most important from the point of view of authors and readers is that articles are made available as soon as we have a finalised version of the text.
This means that information exchange is more timely, as an author submitting an article at the start of a new issue phase doesn’t have to wait for all the other articles to be submitted and processed before theirs is made available to the public.
Hopefully the rolling issues are a reasonable compromise between the traditional print based issue model and the far more dynamic information flow we find around us on the Web today.
Talking of articles, issue 74 contains a broad range of different articles, which we hope will be of interest to our varied audience in libraries, museums and archives: Ana Margarida Dias da Silva has an interesting piece on how social media such as Facebook is (or is not!)
being used by municipal archives in Portugal to engage with their local communities.
With the need for libraries, museums and archives to continually prove their worth to funders and politicians, looking at ways in which public participation in the activities of these organisations can be improved would seem to be a vital task.
Simon Barron’s article is a library systems administrator view of the implementation of the Kuali OLE at SOAS Library, University of London.
Kuali OLE is open source software which, along with Koha and Evergreen, are being increasingly used in libraries as a way to make budgets stretch further.
Simon describes how the choice to go with Kuali OLE was made, how the library staff and patrons were engaged in the process and some of the issues to be wary of.
Digitization of text is a common problem in our fields, made harder when the source text is coming from older manuscripts that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) struggles with.
Patrick Randall explains how games technology can be used to crowdsource improvements in the text captured from OCR software.
He provides details on how the games were made, how well the system worked and some of the pluses and minuses of crowdsourcing volunteer labour via this route.
In the UK, funding councils are pushing Universities to make sure that data supporting research results is made publicly available so that research results can be checked and built upon.
Gary Brewerton describes how Loughborough University has tackled this Research Data Management demand, using an innovative combination of two cloud service providers.
We have two book reviews in issue 74 as well.
John Kirriemuir has reviewed Understanding Gamification by Bohyun Kim, published by the American Library Association.
This book aims to provide a high quality introduction to the subject of gamification in libraries and learning spaces.
Meanwhile Kevin Wilson has provided a review of Information 2.0: New models of information production, distribution and consumption by Martin de Saulles, published by Facet Publishing.
This work looks at how we create information in our modern web based world, and then how that information is processed, shared and utilized by various actors, including the big corporations such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Hopefully our readers will find these articles informative and useful.
If you are member of staff in an archive, library or museum and you have worked on something within your organisation that you feel would be of benefit to other practitioners in the field, please get in touch if you’d like to submit an article about it.
Similarly, if you’d like to volunteer to review books that we are offered by publishers, please let us know.
Lastly, a quick note to point out that the next issue of Ariadne is a little bit special.
It will be both the 75th issue and the 20th birthday of the launch of Ariadne back in 1996.
The digital libraries landscape has changed tremendously since those early days for Ariadne in the mid-1990s, and Ariadne has, and will continue, to change with it.
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Book Review: Using Mobile Technology to Deliver Library Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Using Mobile Technology to Deliver Library Services Buzz mobile ebook sms rfid licence research Citation BibTex RIS Fiona MacLellan reviews a practical guide to mobile technology and its use in delivering library services.
My initial thought upon seeing Using Mobile Technology to Deliver Library Services was available for review was that it was a topic of which I have limited knowledge – but part of its appeal was that I could learn about a new subject.
After I registered to review the book I then had second thoughts.
I began to worry that the book would be too advanced for me.
Part of the reason I know little about the topic relates to the fact that I have a simple mobile phone which only supports calls, texting and media messages.
Thankfully this minor worry was banished when I received the book and started reading.
I am pleased to say the book explained anything that required knowledge or experience of using mobile technology above ‘basic’.
Contents and Structure The book consists of eight chapters, plus introductory and concluding chapters.
The introduction provides the context of the book as well as giving an outline so that readers could skip to the chapter that is most relevant to them at the time of reading.
Each chapter covers a different area of mobile technology and what this might mean for library services.
Whilst the layout and structure of each chapter is necessarily different, Walsh removes some of the uncertainty for readers by including a chapter introduction and summary along with references and an annotated ‘further reading’ section.
The first chapter, introduction aside, covers what mobile services students actually want, rather than what we as library services professionals either think they want or are able to provide.
The chapter focuses on a study carried out by Walsh in his own institution during 2009.
He sets the context for his research and then discusses the findings, offering practical suggestions that may be transferable to other institutions.
He also recognises the danger of assuming the findings from his institution are relevant to all other institutions; throughout the book he recommends that users are consulted before implementation of any new projects.
Chapter two focuses on existing models in mobile information literacy and goes on to comment on the differences between mobile and fixed information literacies.
Understanding the difference between the two, according to Walsh, is the key to ensuring that we are providing services that are relevant to users’ needs.
Again Walsh urges readers to reflect on what mobile services are relevant to their own users and will make the best impact on their own library service.
Chapter three looks at the idea of the mobile librarian both in terms of moving from the library to where our users are in order to support them as well as using mobile technology in order to maximise our own productivity.
The overall message of this chapter is a positive one: using mobile technology will enhance our services or the work of our users, and enable us to function more efficiently as information professionals.
Chapter four concentrates on one aspect of mobile technology, that of texting in a library context.
Walsh sets this chapter out from the standpoint that, even if users are not advanced mobile users, they are familiar with text or SMS services.
The chapter begins with library services sending out messages to users’ mobile devices and includes a case study showcasing one library’s experience with using mobile technology to communicate with its students.
The chapter then looks at the use of texting within teaching, again using a case study to provide useful examples and discussion.
The chapter ends with a brief look at some other ideas that could make use of text messaging within libraries.
Chapter five enters the debate of mobile sites versus mobile apps.
Walsh reiterates the need to work with what your users want and are most likely to use.
He then explains the advantages and disadvantages of apps and mobile sites, again using case studies to give weight to the discussion.
Chapter six suggests different ways in which mobile technology may be able to help connecting the physical and virtual aspects of library services in order to provide the best services for our users.
Walsh focuses on three specific technologies that assist with this connection: QR codes, Near Field Communications (and RFID), and Augmented Reality.
For two of these technologies (QR codes and Augmented Reality) he provides case studies, while he suggests how all three can be used.
He follows up by then debating the pros and cons of each technology.
The chapter provides a practical way of linking the digital world with the physical space commonly known as ‘the library’, thereby offering us the opportunity to engage users in our space with the extra wealth of information available in the virtual world.
Chapter seven looks at the use of mobiles in teaching, expanding considerably on the use of text messages mentioned in chapter four.
The chapter starts from the (all-too-common) situation where students are expected to turn their mobile phones off when entering places of education.
Throughout the chapter, Walsh challenges this with different ways of ensuring students engage via the mobile devices rather than cutting them off from what could be viewed as an important educational tool.
What Walsh advocates here and throughout the book is a step change in attitudes to mobile usage the better to fit the experience of our students.
Again he makes use of appropriate case study material to add real life experience to the discussion.
The rest of this chapter looks at a selection of ways in which mobiles can be used, including use of text messages, polls, recording activities and, one that I personally found quite inspiring, using mobile devices to run library scavenger hunts or inductions.
Walsh ends the chapter with a warning ‘Remember, however, that they [mobile devices] are just a tool.
A fun, flexible, valuable tool, but a mindless tool none the less.’ [1] Chapter eight discusses the use of e-books with mobile devices beginning with the issue of different formats of e-book; Walsh then discusses licence issues before deploying a case study which deals with training needs of staff and e-book provision in a library in Australia.
The rest of the chapter focuses on the different ways of providing e-books for mobile devices, concentrating on the issues of lending that will particularly affect libraries.
Walsh does well in this chapter not to become distracted by the many debates in this area, managing instead to inform readers of the basic facts.
Both the introductory and final ‘so what now?’ chapters accomplish the tasks assigned to them.
The concluding chapter recaps on the areas which recur throughout the book, such as considering what students, or users, actually want alongside that which it is possible for staff to deliver.
Walsh also emphasises the need to ensure that review and continuous assessment of the suitability and necessity of any implementation is undertaken.
The part of the book that has impressed me most, aside from learning about new ways I could use mobile devices within my institution, is the annotated bibliography section Walsh has included as part of each chapter.
I found this useful as a means of expanding my knowledge of different areas of research on the topics in this work, but without the main text turning into a literature review, which I feel would have been inappropriate for this particular book.
The only slight concern I have with the addition of the annotated bibliographies is that it makes the end of each chapter seem a little confused.
Most of the chapters have footnotes, providing extra bits of information or Web site links, a reference list.
As a result, with the annotated bibliography having all of these extra bits of information, it means the end of each chapter risks looking a little crammed.
However I do feel that the annotated bibliography is very important and putting this separately at the end of the book would have removed some of the impact of its information.
Conclusion Walsh has written a book that I feel is valuable as a starting point for anyone interested in finding out about mobile devices in libraries.
He offers some great ideas and the advice he gives is clear, concise and well thought out.
The book benefits from the extra content Walsh has included, such as the case studies which provide context and real life examples.
The annotated bibliographies offer more information than the book would otherwise be able to contain.
Using Mobile Technology to Deliver Library Services aims to be a ‘practical guide’ and ‘jargon-free’, and I feel Walsh did an admirable job of achieving this.
The book is filled with practical applications for mobile services in libraries and any jargon that is used is clearly explained.
I would recommend the book to anyone interested in developing mobile services within their own service, or who is interested to see what applications mobile technology can have.
The format and style of the book make it easy to read and even easier to dip into specific segments of interest when required.
I will certainly be passing the title onto colleagues with responsibility for services of this nature within my own institution.
References Andrew Walsh.
“Using mobile technology to deliver library services: a handbook.” 2012, p. 106.
Author Details Fiona MacLellan Academic Librarian University of Northampton Email: Fiona.MacLellan@northampton.ac.uk Web site: http://www.northampton.ac.uk/people/fiona.maclellan Fiona MacLellan is an Academic Librarian for the University of Northampton, with responsibility for the Schools of The Arts and Science and Technology.
She has research interests in Reading Groups in a HE setting and referencing systems affecting reading comprehension and fluency.
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Why UK Further and Higher Education Needs Local Software Developers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Why UK Further and Higher Education Needs Local Software Developers Buzz data software rdf infrastructure metadata accessibility blog repositories eprints video python ulcc rdfa interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Mahendra Mahey and Paul Walk discuss the work of the Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) Project which focuses on building capacity for software developers in UK Further and Higher Education to support innovation in the sector.
Software developers are important to Further (FE) and Higher Education (HE).
They are needed to develop and implement local FEI (Further Education Institution) and HEI (Higher Education Institution) solutions, to build e-infrastructure, and to innovate and develop ideas and prototypes that can be exploited by others.
They also play an important part in the development and uptake of open standards and interoperability.
With the increasing accessibility and affordability of high-quality development tools, collaborative environments and industrial-grade infrastructure, the potential for even a single software developer advantageously to affect a wide range of activities in and around research, teaching and learning has never been so great.
Yet, within Further and Higher Education, developers are rarely recognised as individually valuable, or exploited as a strategic resource.
Typically, a problem is identified and a certain amount of 'developer resource' is allocated to solving it.
This tends to mean that developers actually become engaged in a continuous loop of problem solving; even when they have a larger perspective to offer, they find themselves locked into relatively straightforward, functional roles.
Developing an FE and HE Developer Community An important issue is the sometimes relative isolation of the developer in FE and HE.
While developers are often advanced in their use of distributed networks of peers, naturally exploiting an array of technologies to support this, these networks are often founded on a common interest or endeavour in a particular technology, product, or technical project, but whose proponents are widely distributed geographically.
Much software development in FE and HE is carried out at individual institutions and there has tended to be a limited number of channels for developers to meet, share ideas and experience and collaborate on solving problems even if they are working in similar areas.
While this type of development is valuable, there has been a lack of any strong sense of community among developers working in the FE and HE sector.
Moreover, just as these developers' input into the sector has been insufficiently recognised, so has their wider interest in, and loyalty to, this sector been underestimated.
We believe that encouraging the development of such a community is a route to giving developers more of a 'voice' in Further and Higher Education.
It was in response to these issues that the DevCSI Project [1] was born, a project funded by JISC [2] and based at UKOLN [4].
Figure 1: The DevCSI home page banner.
Project Aims The project has been running since August 2009 and has primarily been concerned with building capacity for software developers professionally and for innovation in UK Further and Higher Education.
The primary foci of the work in the first year centred largely on two parallel activities: Supporting and developing the individual developer (e.g.
through training events and showcasing individual / group work) Developing a community capable of responding to challenges in more innovative and effective ways (e.g.
creating and maintaining a Developer Focus Group, a mailing list for developers and enabling network opportunities, etc.)
The project initially concentrated on generating energy, interest and engagement amongst developers in Further and Higher Education so that they could begin to feel they were part of a supportive community that met some of their own staff development and support needs.
The project reached over 1000 people face-to-face in the first year through directly organised or supported innovative events, such as the JISC Developer Days / Dev8D 2010 [4] which involved some professional development as well as the opportunity to work on innovative challenges [5].
Feedback from these events has generally been extremely encouraging: "They gained a huge amount.
They came back very enthusiastic and full of good ideas.
It did a great deal for morale and motivation….
It's a very powerful thing when your peers say that you are doing something the best," "...decided to use the momentum of Dev8D to move forward with agile working and the List8D project by providing the development team with two very important assets: physical and mental space."
Some preliminary analysis reveals that these events can represent an extremely cost-effective means of providing high-quality professional development as they largely entail peer-to-peer training, as compared, for example, to commercial courses.
An example of the kind of training event where developers have empowered their own staff development was the Rapid Innovation in Development Media Training workshop, DevCSI's first event in September 2009 [6].
All developers, warned beforehand, were asked to pitch their project in 45 seconds to their peers and in front of video cameras.
Afterwards, and something of which they were not forewarned, developers were told they would have to pitch again the next day, but would only have 20 seconds.
This came as a bit of a surprise.
In the meantime they were given expert feedback and coaching from media and technical experts on their videoed pitch in a 'Dragon's Den' style (based on the popular BBC television series [7]).
Developers were also interviewed by professional journalists giving them another opportunity to practise their pitch before they would have to do their own 20-second pitch.
The improvements were remarkable in many cases, some even good enough to be subsequently used for marketing purposes.
The event was very innovative, intense and took many developers out of their comfort zone.
Figure 2: Shiraz Azizali won the 'most improved' pitch award.
Work from the Rapid Innovation in Development event is available on the DevCSI Showcase blog as well as other examples showcasing developers' work [8].
(If you know of some great work by software developers in the UK Further and Higher Education sector, please let us know.)
The project also has formed a Developer Focus Group 'which is made up of experienced developers who help inform the project's strategy and provide advice to other developers in the sector'.
They have created an active and open mailing list, called Developer Contact, where they share ideas, discuss problems, etc [9], examples include, 'How do I get started on Oracle Berkeley DB', 'Can anyone recommend a python library for working with RDF?'
or 'Suggestions for a real-time data store, to be used for tracking state in a distributed control environment'.
Anyone identifying himor herself as a developer, or who is interested in software development, is free to join up.
Furthermore, a 'Developer Challenge' [10] was organised, the first international challenge to get users, domain experts and developers collaborating successfully, 'bringing remote services to bear in a local context', with a specific focus on digital repositories.
Figure 3: Rory McNicholl and Richard Davis, both from the University of London Computer Centre, winners of the Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2010 (Madrid).
What judges particularly liked about Rory and Richard's entry was how it directly provided evidence of one of the underlying beliefs of the DevCSI Project.
It was a fantastic example of how a local developer, working with a local user, brought remote services to bear in a local context they understand (they added links generated dynamically to a Repository Abstract page by mapping embedded RDFa metadata to an external list of selected services in a Google docs spreadsheet).
Figure 4: ULCC Developer Challenge Entry at OR10.
EPrints Abstract page with added links generated dynamically by mapping embedded RDFa metadata to an external list of selected services.
DevCSI has been successful in attracting funding for a further year and the main emphasis in year 2 of the project is to consolidate and build on the work that has taken place so far.
However, in addition it will concentrate on: obtaining evidence as to the value of a community for software developers in Further and Higher Education; ensuring that growth in the community is sustainable; and that ensuring institutions can demonstrate the significant advantage of having local developers.
The DevCSI Project will continue to bring developers and users/domain experts together to try and innovate in a number of domains and will focus on supporting the sector's capacity to practise 'disruptive innovation' in a local context [11][12].
How FEIs and HEIs Can Contribute We believe that: FEIs and HEIs need to create and/or maintain organisational 'space' within which 'disruptive innovation' can occur FEIs and HEIs need to invest in local software development capacity, which is convenient, affordable and, crucially, allows them to apply local context-specific knowledge and requirements to the development of solutions which will, inevitably, carry an element of outsourced, remote provision.
The capacity for technical innovation is a strategic resource which needs investment in the institution and in the sector.
Technical innovation can itself be regarded as an investment.
A current trend in FEIs and HEIs towards the outsourcing of technical services is understandable from the point of view of the pressing need to find cost-saving efficiencies.
However, maintaining a local capacity to innovate, possibly through exploiting remote services in a local context, is crucial.
The local software developer can mediate between local users/domain experts and remote services, having a better understanding of local business processes and context.
FEIs and HEIs that innovate to meet the challenges of the economic recession will increase their chances of survival in the short term, and will flourish in the long term.
Bringing Developers, Users and Software as a Service (SaaS) Together Figure 5: The role of local developers in mediating local and remote contexts.
Characteristics of the FE and HE Developer We hope to test and gather evidence for some of the tentative assumptions we have made in the project about software developers in Further and Higher Education , namely that they: understand the local context of their institutions better than externally procured services (in some contexts) and can act as a bridge between remote service providers and local end-users can take the remote service which is helping the FEI and HEI to realise economies of scale and add value by integrating it into the local context/systems can benefit greatly from being 'networked' in a loose community of overlapping, domain-specific interests and endeavours can work together and closely with end-users and can deliver innovation which can then be shared to the benefit of the sector as a whole, demonstrating the value of how innovation sometimes happens in a local context benefit end-users in FEIs and HEIs in terms of their understanding and developing expectations as well as providing a better appreciation of what is technically possible by working closely with developers, even in an occasional, incidental way can offer extremely cost-effective training to their peer community, especially through ad hoc training events DevCSI will also explore: whether FEIs and HEIs offer developers a suitable career path (especially when compared to the commercial sector) and; whether the promotion of successful developers leads to their taking roles which may not maximise their skills fully, or whether they have taken on roles that appear unsuitable.
We will also examine what the impact is of the resulting loss of invaluable tacit knowledge of the local context when developers leave.
We hope to do this by commissioning a number of case studies and are very keen to hear from you if you feel your institution might be able to provide a suitable story.
Currently we are conducting a UK-wide stakeholder analysis, if you would like to participate and tell us your stories, please read more about it on the DevCSI blog [13] Conclusion We have a number of events organised this year (please see our blog [5] or calendar of events [14]).
However, we really want to hear from you if you have a good idea for an event, workshop or meeting; especially if it involves developers from different domains sharing experiences, giving advice as well as working together with users on innovative challenges.
References Developer Community Supporting Innovation Web site http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ JISC Developer Days http://dev8d.org/ DevCSI Blog http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/ Rapid Innovation in Development http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jiscri-2009/ BBC TV – Dragon's Den – About the Show, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/about DevCSI Demonstrator http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/demonstrator/ Developer Contact http://groups.google.com/group/developer-contact?pli=1 Open Repositories Developer Challenge http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/or10dev/ Scott Anthony, Can Established Companies Disrupt?
Harvard Business Review, blog entry, 4:40 PM Wednesday December 10, 2008 http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2008/12/can_established_companies_disr.html Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/christensen.htm DevCSI Stakeholder Analysis, DevCSI Blog, 18 November 2010 http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2010/11/18/devcsi-stakeholder-analysis-%E2%80%93-tell-us-your-stories/ DevCSI Calendar http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/calendar.html Author Details Mahendra Mahey Project Manager DevCSI and Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk Paul Walk Deputy Director UKOLN University of Bath Email: p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk Return to top Article Title: "Why UK Further and Higher Education Needs Local Software Developers" Author: Mahendra Mahey and Paul Walk Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/mahey-walk/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Saving the Sounds of the UK in the UK SoundMap Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Saving the Sounds of the UK in the UK SoundMap Buzz data mobile rss portal archives metadata browser copyright video preservation gis mp3 sms curation twitter iphone android flac privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Maureen Pennock and Chris Clark introduce an innovative initiative from the British Library to map a 12-month soundscape of the UK.
The impact of the digital age upon libraries has been profound, changing not only the back office, services, and the range of materials available to users, but also the public face of libraries and the relationship between the library and its users.
Within this changed relationship, collaboration, participation, and online social networks play an increasingly important role in the user experience, especially in large university and national libraries.
At the same time, a shift is taking place in the type of collection items held in libraries, and the percentage of born-digital materials acquired is increasing on a daily basis.
The British Library is no exception, making use of a wide range of online services and tools to engage with users and enhance access to the collections, both digitised and born-digital.
Numerous initiatives are currently taking place across the Library to engage with users and address these changes, and one in particular has sought to capitalise on both the increase in participatory networks and the opportunities afforded by born-digital material.
This initiative is the UK SoundMap, an online crowd-sourcing activity driven by the British Library in partnership with the Noise Futures Network to engage and build the community in development of a new born-digital audio-visual research resource [1][2].
Unlocking and Integrating Audio-Visual Content at the British Library The UK SoundMap is being carried out as part of a wider project by the British Library’s Sound & Vision Department: Unlocking & Integrating Audio Visual Content (UIAVC).
The UIAVC project seeks to address changing user needs in a multi-media research environment by establishing the building blocks for a redefined and integrated sound and moving image service within the Library.
Other, complementary initiatives in the project include: Modernising and enhancing interactive features in the existing Archival Sound Recordings (ASR) portal, which currently provides access to over 45,000 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments [3].
Establishing a New Music Network to select and capture content from musicians whose work is produced outside the usual commercial channels Exploring and piloting new R&D Tools to improve resource discovery through new search and analysis tools for speech and music [4] Increasing the amount of digital audio and video content accessible to users at the Library (i.e.
onsite), and remotely Overall, the project is key to meeting the Library’s audio-visual strategy, which aims to unlock and integrate audio-visual content across the library according to user needs.
The initiatives interrelate to a significant degree as they each follow the content path from acquisition to curation to integrated delivery.
They each focus on digital content (both born-digital and digitised analogue content), they embrace both onsite and remote (Web) access, and collectively they express the commitment the Library now has towards integrating audio-visual media within the research experience.
The UK SoundMap: Mobile, Crowdsourced Curation The UK SoundMap uses innovative methods to engage users in recording and contributing relevant born-digital field recordings using mobile technology for public access both onsite and online.
The ability to share information in real time and at the right place is changing the way we run our lives and organise our thoughts.
Mobile social networking has become a commonplace 21st-century activity, currently accounting for 50% of all mobile Internet traffic in the majority of developed markets, and over 50% in a number of emerging markets [5].
Whilst opinions may vary about the value of academic and scientific research generated over mobile social networking platforms, no one can deny the potential offered by low-cost, even free applications for generating and recording data in a range of formats ‘in the wild’, particularly for those who are motivated to extend the corpus of human knowledge.
UK SoundMap breaks new ground through the deployment of several technologies at once.
Maps are a powerful visual alternative to traditional text search and browse, particularly where geo-tagged files are concerned.
UK SoundMap uses crowd-sourcing to acquire soundscape recordings, images and metadata, and social networking to stimulate engagement with users.
It uses the ubiquitous mobile phone and the free Audioboo app, coupled with realtime curation and GoogleMaps browsable interface – all at a very low cost – to deliver a valuable dataset of everyday sounds for preservation and future reuse.
UK SoundMap project home page The project has three main objectives: To explore the potential for mash-ups using data accumulated by cutting edge applications to build significant resources for digital scholarship To map the evolution of the national landscape and how people feel about it To involve the public in contributing to British Library acquisitions of research material.
We are now roughly halfway through the project and aim to complete by the end of June 2011.
The Technology The popular Audioboo service provides the underlying audio file creation and sharing technology [6].
Users need an Audioboo account, which can be created independently at the Audioboo Web site or using Twitter credentials.
Most audio files (so-called ‘Boos’) are created using a smart phone application – Audioboo apps for both the iPhone and Android phones are currently available free of charge though a Web-based interface is also available [7].
A particular advantage of smart phone use is the automatic inclusion of geo-location data, enabling files to be accurately plotted on the GoogleMap interface.
Guidance on creation of Boos is available on the UK SoundMap Web site, including how to avoid unwanted audio interference when using recording devices outdoors.
Users are asked to title their Boos appropriately, to provide location details if these have not been automatically added, to tag entries with relevant keywords, and to add the all-important #uksm tag, which enables all Boos submitted to the UK Sound Map to be monitored and moderated by Library staff.
Once selected, recordings are given an additional tag (a ‘magic tag’) that allows Library staff to list all files destined for inclusion in the SoundMap in an RSS feed.
Boos are converted from their original upload formats (usually FLAC) to MP3 format and plotted onto a Google Maps interface, embedded into the UKSM Web site.
On accessing the map in a browser, red pins identify locations against which Boos have been uploaded.
Clicking on a single pin generates a pop-up bubble with details of the Boo, namely the title, duration of the recording, username and tags.
A simple audio player is embedded in the page that enables the audio file to be played and heard by the user without leaving the Web site or requiring any other technology.
A search facility is available and results are highlighted on the map using large blue pointers.
Screenshot of UK SoundMap All submissions are acknowledged by moderators and promoted over the Audioboo and Twitter networks via the @uk_soundmap account.
The Crowd There are currently more than 300 different contributors to the UK SoundMap.
The basic profiling data we have suggests that the crowd is not heavily dominated by one particular gender group, and that a reasonable spread of age ranges is represented.
However, little hard demographic detail is available as there is no requirement for users to provide complete profiles and background details.
As a result, there are currently no plans to harvest user profiles from Audioboo, though this may change as the project matures and we gain a better understanding how people’s interests and personal circumstances impact on the type of sounds they choose to record and submit.
As the success of the project depends on the participation of users, the technologies used in the project were selected not least because of their suitability for the task at hand, but also their user-friendliness.
We want submissions from as many contributors as possible, regardless of their background, experience, age, profession, and interests.
The registration and participation process is quick and simple, in order to encourage contributions, and new contributors are welcome to join the project at any time [8].
The Content Since the project launched in mid-2010, over 1,200 files have been successfully uploaded to the SoundMap.
The types of sounds represented on the map are a fascinating mix of old and new – though admittedly, perhaps less of the new than one may expect.
The typical UK SoundMap recording is made during the daytime, in a built-up urban area, in the street, with one or more voices present, and the sound of traffic in the background.
More than 90% of all recordings have been made during the day, and half of them in cities and large towns [9].
However, 27% were also made in villages, small towns and suburbs; 12% in the countryside; and 11% by the sea and in seaside resorts.
Within these broad geographical categories are more precise settings, ranging from fields and footpaths to homes and gardens, transport hubs, commercial establishments, and leisure or heritage locations.
Smaller numbers have come from settings as diverse as boats, places of worship, street markets, public demonstrations, and festivals.
Settings in the UK SoundMap The voice in some form is the most common sound, appearing in over half of all recordings.
In 40% it consists of a single voice (other than that of the recordist) or several voices, and in 10% a hubbub of many voices.
9% include the sound of an electrically amplified voice, including loudhailers, PA or tannoy systems, radios and televisions.
Female voices predominate in public announcements.
A disproportionate number of street recordings are made in pedestrianised areas too, where the speech of passers-by can rise above the background growl of traffic, though sounds of transport dominate the London recordings.
In another 9% of recordings the recordist’s own voice is heard, often describing the scene for the benefit of the listener.
But this rarely occurs in built-up areas.
More often the recordist speaks at home or when in the countryside, sometimes with humour, sometimes to express pleasure at what they are hearing.
The sounds of water occur in nearly 15% of recordings, including rain, dripping taps, fountains, the guttural noises of drains, and the sound of the sea.
Water in its gassy state is represented with nearly a dozen recordings of steam-driven vehicles, and the sounds of coffee machines and boiling kettles.
We are also gathering disappearing sounds; as the landscape and society changes, so do the sounds associated with them.
Whistling, for example, is hardly represented at all.
As more contributions come in, so the dataset will grow richer, and more in-depth statistical explorations will become possible.
Technical quality is typically lower than in professional sound recordings.
This is not surprising given the use of commonplace recording devices rather than professional audio recording equipment, as well as the lack of professional training typically experienced by contributors.
For the purposes of this project however, a lower technical quality baseline is acceptable and only around 7% of submissions are rejected, often for reasons other than quality (for example, inclusion of copyrighted music/speech or obscenities).
Metadata is a challenge for this project.
Whilst all contributors include the #uksm tag, few add keywords distinctly different to the basic information already contained in the title.
As a result, we are not getting the additional value that the research community requested and may have to consider options for adding this retrospectively before the files are archived for long-term preservation.
Risks and Issues Most of the risks in the initiative derive from the crowd-sourcing element – for example, special interest groups may exploit the initiative for political gain, whilst other content may be submitted that is deemed inappropriate because it infringes personal privacy or copyright.
This can be mitigated with appropriate moderation and intervention.
The dependence of the initiative on third parties is also a risk – particularly given that we rely not just upon external contributors for the content but also the Audioboo service and Google Maps for the underlying technology.
Despite this, the project is considered to be, by and large, a low-risk project, due to the strength of the Audioboo app and the Google Maps technology, as well as the established SoundMap community.
Perhaps a larger risk is that we do not engage with the critical mass of contributors needed to gather a truly representative soundscape of the UK; for this reason we plan to embark on a new publicity drive for the remaining term of the project and stimulate new interest.
We are currently working to solve two technical issues.
The primary issue at the moment is the collection of files that have had the #uksm tag added retrospectively.
The current harvesting method does not gather these and the team is working to develop a new, more inclusive ‘catch-all’ approach.
The other concerns the file formats – the MP3s are generated for access purposes only and we will archive the original audio files with their original metadata.
As the format of the original files may vary, we must explore the impact this may have on our long-term preservation approach and our options for normalisation.
Conclusion The UK SoundMap is an innovative and unique example of crowd-sourced curation, using mobile apps to generate a new corpus of audio research data tied to specific geographical locations over a 12-month period.
The coupling of moderation and support from British Library staff with third-party applications and contributors has proven to be a rapid and cost-effective way to collect large amounts of data that augment existing research collections.
Though selection (in the guise of moderation) remains a manual activity, the process has proven an efficient and enjoyable way to engage the public with our collection and ‘democratise the curator’s role’.
The success of the initiative has already been clear – the rate of submissions is steady, and the team was delighted to win the Public Sector category at the 2010 some comms UK Social Media Awards in December [10].
Submissions to the UK SoundMap will be accepted up until the end of June 2011 – why not add your sounds whilst you can and contribute to the UK SoundMap?
References UK SoundMap http://sounds.bl.uk/uksoundmap/ Noise Futures Network is an UK-based interdisciplinary research group http://www.noisefutures.org/ Archival Sound Recordings portal http://sounds.bl.uk/ The New Music Network pilot project was recently carried out in the West Midlands prior to wider rollout http://www.pilot-project.co.uk/ Perez, Sarah ‘Social Networking More Popular Than Voice, SMS by 2015’, ReadWriteWeb, 15 November 2010 (Accessed 4 January 2011) http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2010/11/social-networking-more-popular.php Audioboo Web site http://audioboo.fm/ Between July – October 2010, 82% of recordings were made with mobiles.
Information on how to participate is available at http://sounds.bl.uk/uksoundmap/takepart.html Figures relate to the month of November 2010.
More information on the somecomms awards is available from http://www.dontpanicprojects.com/somecomms/ Author Details Maureen Pennock UIAVC Project Manager and Digital Curator The British Library Email: maureen.pennock@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk Chris Clark UK SoundMap Workstream Leader Head of Digital Research and Curation team The British Library Email: chris.clark@bl.uk Web site: http://www.bl.uk Return to top Article Title: “Saving the Sounds of the UK in the UK SoundMap” Author: Maureen Pennock and Chris Clark Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/pennock-clark/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Understanding Gamification Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Understanding Gamification Citation BibTex RIS John Kirriemuir reviews the ALA Tech Report "Understanding Gamification" by Bohyun Kim, and finds a high quality introduction to the subject.
Need There is a vast range of articles, reports, papers, stories and other ephemera concerning ‘gamification’, both online and in print.
As an increasingly weary reader of several hundred of these items, it is obvious that there are extreme variations in the quality, bias, depth, analysis, and related and cited research within many.
Though unsure of whether the world needs yet another introduction, or perhaps just needs a few high quality pieces, I reviewed this particular publication for Ariadne.
Format The report [1] is a 35 page, A4 2 column print publication, published in early 2015 and also available online.
Highlighted examples appear regularly in the text, as do (black and white) screenshots of examples.
The text is non­technical in nature, and is suitable for people with little gaming, and no gamification, knowledge or experience.
A careful read and study of the references should take around 2 hours.
Surprisingly, for an ALA publication, there are a few typographic errors in the text.
However, unsurprisingly for a text from the ALA, the references and citations are of a consistently very high quality and pleasingly well­ presented.
Chapter 1: The popularity of gamification This chapter forms an introduction, positioning gamification as an emerging technology enabled by the increasing use of mobile services e.g.
apps, and social networking.
Pleasingly, the author gives a clearer definition of gamification than most publications: “As the term suggests, gamification is not quite creating a game but transferring some of the positive characteristics of a game to something that is not a game, thus, gami­fy­ing it.” The chapter introduces and describes several social and commercial examples of gamification systems, though with mention of educational applications such as the Quest to Learn charter school [2].
Though the chapter ­ and report ­ are largely neutral, a few more counter­arguments against gamification may have been useful.
For example, the three annual NMC Horizon Higher Education reports, from 2012 to 2014, are mentioned in this chapter in terms of their positive inclusions of gamification or game­ based learning.
However (though this may be unfortunate publication timing) the 2015 [3] report is not mentioned, where the NMC no longer predict gamification being a mainstream tool in the classroom.
Chapter 2: Gamification The chapter describes fourteen game­ based and gamified systems, using examples that address areas as diverse as household chores, fuel efficiency and personal contentment.
It moves on to examine five definitions of gamification from different researchers, and considers the relationship of the concept to games and playful design.
The chapter concludes with a sensible argument for gamification not to be considered (as many do) solely in terms of a PC­ oriented technology, but one which can be implemented on mobile devices, and analog media such as simple paper and pen.
Chapter 3: Game mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics This short chapter starts with mentions of the most well­ known gamification mechanics, such as badges, points and leaderboards, but moves on to list a few of the many other elements, such as narratives, avoidance, pride, quests and appointments.
Some are explained in more detail; for example: “... behavioral contrast means the shift in behavior depending on changed expectations ... free lunch means a situation in which a player gets something because of the efforts of other people ...” The chapter introduces the MDA framework, which can be used to define a game in terms of mechanics (rules), dynamics (system) and aesthetics (fun).
These three categories are discussed, and the chapter concludes with a mapping of some gamification elements into them.
Chapter 4: Gamification in education and libraries This chapter discusses the blurring of the division between ‘serious games’ and ‘gamification’, and how it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between the two concepts.
Several examples from the business world which straddle this division are described.
It progresses to examine several gamified systems from the education sector, such as Fantasy Geopolitics [4] (where students hunt for political news stories concerning specific countries), and a variety of badge oriented systems.
The chapter points out that libraries (and librarians) have functions such as education, self­ marketing and PR which provide a variety of possibilities for gamified library systems and services.
Several are introduced and described, including Scout [5] which encourages people to explore the content available at Pierce County Public Library, and Lemontree [6], which gamifies and hopefully further encourages the use of resources in the library of the University of Huddersfield.
The chapter concludes with examples of gamifying library instruction and library orientation, and examples of library gamification apps.
Chapter 5: Designing gamification in the right way This chapter opens with the (correct) point that the gamification base currently lacks a significant body of systemic and robust studies.
The need for clear goals before, and during, gamified system design is stressed.
Users (or players) of such system are put under the spotlight, in terms of how to define their relevant characteristics and how to match them to effective types of gamification mechanisms.
Other attributes of system users, such as age, gender and academic performance are discussed, with a reference to research showing that serious games, and possibly gamification, is of more benefit to those students with less self­ motivation and (initially) lower grades.
The chapter continues with a discussion of which types of knowledge are possibly best suited to which gamification mechanics.
It concludes with a discussion on a controversial and oft ­discussed critique of gamification, that the extrinsic motivations introduced by a system, such as winning badges for attaining learning goals, can harm already­ existing intrinsic motivations, such as an interest in the learning subject matter or self­ esteem.
Summary This is a high quality introduction to gamification, far better than the large majority of similar texts available in print or online.
It is not a comprehensive discussion, or analysis of gamification; there are several books and academia meta ­reviews which provide more depth.
However, for an introduction to the topic which is relatively unbiased, non-technical, non­commercial, factually accurate, contains a good spread of relevant examples from many sectors, describes many of the essential concepts of gamification, and has a very high quality list of references and citations, there are few better guides available.
Though not cheap to purchase in print form, the report is free to download [7] and I highly recommend this text.
Reviewer John Kirriemuir Independent researcher Games and gamification in education http://www.silversprite.com References [1] The report in the ALA online shop.
https://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=11370 [2] Overview of the gamified aspects of the Quest to Learn charter school in New York.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHtj6PCpyLQ [3] Report: Is it Game Over for Gamification?
http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2015/06/k-12-nmc-horizon-report-preview-it-game-over-gamification [4] Alex Magdaleno, “How a High School Teacher Is ‘Gamifying’ World News,” Mashable, February 3, 2014. http://mashable.com/2014/02/02/high-school-fantasy-geopolitics [5] Scout.
https://scout.pcls.us/ [6] Lemontree.
https://library.hud.ac.uk/lemontree/ [7] Downloadable versions of the report.
http://journals.ala.org/ltr/issue/view/502 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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DataFinder: A Research Data Catalogue for Oxford Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines DataFinder: A Research Data Catalogue for Oxford Buzz data software rdf api database xml infrastructure archives metadata identifier vocabularies schema repositories eprints preservation oai-pmh cataloguing passwords aggregation purl uri curation solr wireframe algorithm jacs url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sally Rumsey and Neil Jefferies explain the context and the decisions guiding the development of DataFinder, a data catalogue for the University of Oxford.
In 2012 the University of Oxford Research Committee endorsed a university ‘Policy on the management of research data and records’ [1].
Much of the infrastructure to support this policy is being developed under the Jisc-funded Damaro Project [2].
The nascent services that underpin the University’s RDM (research data management) infrastructure have been divided into four themes: RDM planning; managing live data; discovery and location; and access, reuse and curation.
The data outputs catalogue falls into the third theme, and will result in metadata and interfaces that support discovery, location, citation and business reporting for Oxford research datasets.
This concept of a tool that supports a comprehensive listing of research data outputs of the University, coupled with the ability to find, cite and report on such outputs has resulted in the University anticipating that the catalogue, named DataFinder, will be the hub of the RDM infrastructure tools and services for the institution.
The general view is that it will provide the glue between services, both technical and non-technical, and policies, across the four themes listed above.
To this end, DataFinder will provide a listing of Oxford research data outputs, using metadata that supports discovery and standard citation.
DataFinder will make tools available to administrators to enable the University to report both internally and externally on its research data outputs.
To fulfil these user requirements, the catalogue has been designed in such a way to meet the needs of its users, whilst complying with common standards.
During the design and implementation process, a number of decisions were taken about the design.
Inevitably, compromises had to be made in order to make the service useful to and usable by researchers, administrators and other users.
How comprehensive DataFinder will be is dependent on a number of factors: the willingness of researchers to interact with the service and the ability to gather automatically and reuse existing metadata.
Its usage will be governed by visible and demonstrable efficiency savings and impact, and by the intelligence it provides for individuals, research groups and for administrative units.
DataFinder’s Role in the Oxford Data Chain When considering the applications that will be available in the short to medium term to Oxford researchers to support RDM, one can imagine them as a data chain, each linked to those either side as a series of services, relevant at different stages of the research data lifecycle (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Data chain At the outset of the research process, there will be Oxford DMPOnline [3] where data comprising a data management plan is captured with a view to providing requisite information for funding agencies, but also providing vital intelligence for internal use to aid planning and research administration.
The next stage is that of data creation and manipulation, usually carried out at local (departmental/individual) level.
The data at this stage of the process is often described as ‘live’ i.e.
being actively worked on or still in a raw state prior to manipulation.
In addition to local systems, there are two new applications being created at Oxford that will be available centrally for researchers to use: DataStage [4] and ORDS (Online Research Database Service) [5].
Once the dataset has a version that can be classed as in a stable state and ready for archiving and possibly publication, it will be deposited for longer term archiving and storage.
Researchers might choose (or be required) to use archival services provided by a national service such as the UKDA [6], they might deposit in a trusted local departmental system, or in the University’s institutional data archive, DataBank [7] which is being developed by the Bodleian Libraries.
There is no compulsion for researchers to choose DataBank.
It is at this latter stage in the data creation process when the University would ideally like to ensure a record of the data is created, wherever the actual dataset might be stored or published.
In addition to the benefit of retaining a record for the University of what data have been created by Oxford researchers, DataFinder can assist Oxford and external researchers to find potential research collaborators, and could even help inspire new research.
Therefore DataFinder: enables researchers to comply with their funder’s policies by publishing required metadata, displaying the details of the funding sponsor, providing a link either directly to the data or provides the location of the data (which may comprise a URL, physical location or details to request access), and offering a means of reporting outputs to funders.
supports data citation and links to related publications.
Links to related publications could resolve to the publication record held in ORA (Oxford University Research Archive) which is being developed to be the University’s comprehensive online research publications service.
Conversely, citations and links to data catalogue records in DataBank can be included in ORA publication records.
enables the University to manage better its research data and other research outputs more generally Metadata The aim wherever possible is to create a metadata chain reaction whereby metadata describing the dataset can be passed along the data management services, be they internal or external, eventually providing the information required for describing, discovering and citing the dataset in DataFinder.
Although the descriptive metadata may start out as being minimal (there is little specific dataset metadata in DMPOnline as the data will not yet have been created at the project proposal stage), there is the capacity for it to be expanded and improved as the research process proceeds.
The minimal metadata drawn from Oxford DMPOnline might be enhanced with additional metadata from DataStage and/or DataBank or with metadata harvested from an external source.
Metadata captured in DMPOnline can form a stub record in DataFinder that can then be enhanced at a later stage.
There are however, a number of routes in to metadata deposit in DataFinder and some datasets will have records harvested only from external sources.
See Figure 2.
Figure 2: Metadata input and enhancement Metadata relevant to DataFinder for each service in the data chain are as follows: DMPOnline.
Eight fields have been identified that can be directly mapped to DataBank and DataFinder: Principal investigator (and contributors); affiliation(s); data manager; funding agency and grant number; project start date; project keywords.
DataStage.
Requires DataCite minimum five elements to be able to deposit in DataBank: title; creator; publisher; unique identifier; date.
DataBank.
Ditto DataCite minimum.
This minimum is required so that DOIs can be assigned to datasets.
A core minimum metadata set has been defined for DataFinder to enable basic citation, description and location (see Table 1).
Contextual metadata can be inserted to comply with funder policies and for datasets that require such information.
A large number of Oxford research projects are not funded and so funder details are not relevant to all researchers, so the context of the dataset drives the metadata required.
The addition of further metadata by depositors is encouraged to allow assessment of usefulness by others and a description of the data so they can be understood and re-used.
1 Data creator name 2 Creator affiliation 3 Data owner 4 Output a product of funded researcher Y/N 5 Title 6 Description 7 Subject headings 8 Publication year 9 Publisher 10 Earliest access date (open access/embargo) 11 Digital format Y/N 12 Terms and conditions 13 ID + other automatically assigned metadata Table 1: Core minimum metadata for manual deposit A distinction should be drawn between records which are manually created (and/or enhanced) in DataFinder and metadata which is harvested from other sources.
In order to be displayed it has been agreed that records should comply with the DataCite core minimum five metadata fields.
Harvested records which do not comply will be retained as a stub record for later improvement (by the data creators or other individual).
On the other hand, users who create records manually using the online form will be forced to complete a number of mandatory fields, resulting in slightly richer metadata.
For example, if the manual depositor indicates that the research is externally funded, they will be required to insert information about the funder and grant reference.
The mandatory fields have been kept to a minimum to encourage record creation in DataFinder because of easy participation, rather than making the task too onerous and therefore off-putting for researchers.
It is therefore critical that suitable training, information and communications are provided so that researchers are aware of the benefits to themselves of providing rich metadata and comprehensive documentation for their datasets.
Controlled vocabularies and auto-completion will be employed in the manual data entry process wherever possible.
This is both to ease data entry and to ensure consistency.
Consistency across library and other systems will assist future data compatibility across the wide variety of digital systems used by different units of the University and when interacting with external systems.
Manual depositors will log on to DataFinder using their Oxford single sign-on credentials.
This is linked to the Oxford core user directory (CUD) and will provide additional data such as internal affiliation.
The Bodleian Libraries are working closely with the University’s Research Services Office which has provided a list of funders who sponsor Oxford research and has included alternative funder names and abbreviations for accurate disambiguation.
Selection of a subject classification scheme has been difficult as there are too many conflicting interests for any one scheme to stand out as the obvious choice.
FAST  (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) [8] has been selected initially because of its breadth and relative simplicity for non-expert users as a recognised standard and because it has a linked data version.
The Libraries will keep a watching brief on other schemes (such as RCUK (Research Councils UK) [9] and JACS (Joint Academic Coding System) [10] and the RIOXX initiative [11]) and mappings across schemes to facilitate reporting and policy compliance.
DataFinder will permit deposit by researchers of XML files of subject-specific terms and vocabularies which are common in disciplines such as maths, economics and the bio-sciences.
Content A series of policies are in preparation to govern the content and management of DataFinder and use of the service.
These policies are still in draft form, but will be submitted to the Research Information Management Sub-Committee (of the University Research Committee) for approval in due course.
DataFinder has to serve all researchers across the wide spectrum of disciplines at Oxford.
It is therefore expected that there will be differences in the types of datasets recorded in DataFinder.
The policies will clarify rules governing which datasets are eligible to be deposited in DataFinder as well as other areas such as retention and deletion.
It is not a requirement by the University that researchers provide a record for their datasets in DataFinder.
As with publications repositories, it will therefore be important for researchers to understand the benefits and requirements for ensuring their datasets are listed.
To support this, it will be crucial that informative and clear guidance is provided to researchers as to why and how they should provide records of their datasets depending on future University policies.
Such information may also be applicable to research students.
If it can be demonstrated that there are obvious benefits to individuals (such as to save time reporting to funders, to encourage collaboration or provide citations and a landing page), researchers may be more inclined to use DataFinder both for records of their own outputs and for finding out about the research outputs of others.
DataFinder Software The DataFinder dataset catalogue was intended to be a simple component with an emphasis on persistence and auditability from which other services could be derived.
In order to achieve this with the minimum of effort, it was decided to use our DataBank data repository as the basis for the new service, essentially stripping out the ability to store datasets, and augmenting the metadata-capture and -processing capabilities.
Some of these improvements would, in turn, be rolled back into DataBank, since DataBank metadata would naturally feed into DataFinder.
At the outset we evaluated a number of other options such as CKAN, which provides a rich set of tools for interacting with published data.
For our purposes, however, the solutions that we evaluated all appeared to be the types of service that we would  envision implementing over Databank or DataFinder rather than providing the core storage and preservation functionality – and in due course we expect to do so.
In particular, the DataBank/DataFinder architecture has the following key characteristics which will become more important as the content volume grows: File system orientation: an object and its metadata are localised in a single directory on the filesystem and can thus be recovered from the storage in the absence of any of the overlying software or services.
The ‘burn-line’ for disaster recovery is thus set at the storage layer.
The REST API that DataBank/DataFinder provides to access objects therefore needs only to be a slight modification to direct web file serving.
Semantic focus: the internal structure of an object (whether files contain metadata or data and respective format information) and its relationships to other objects are expressed as RDF.
Object directory paths are based on the object URIs used in the RDF.
This provides both a native ability for content to participate in the Semantic Web but also improves recoverability as these critical structures are relatively human-readable.
Versioning: objects are versioned on-disk using symbolic links where components are unchanged with updates logged by time and author.
Both of these aspects are thus explicitly visible in the on-storage structure while the linking approach keeps storage requirements under control.
Collection management: objects are segregated into ‘silos’ which are assigned to a curator who is responsible for the content of the silo and can make ultimate decisions about the destiny of those objects.
This reflects the reality of physical collection management where expertise in the nature of the content is distinct from the expertise in the stewardship of the content.
In the case of DataFinder, silos will segregate records harvested from different sources as well as managing manually created records which will come under the aegis of the relevant organisational unit when an individual creator moves on.
Aggregation: DataFinder is designed to provide the ‘landing page’ for searches and interactions with Oxford’s data collections wherever they are.
In practice, products such as CKAN [12] and services such as ColWiz [13] may provide layered functionality over the top of the catalogue and retrieval requests will redirect to a number of archives of which DataBank will be just one.
However, as much as possible, DataFinder is intended to be a, possibly fleeting, participant in these interactions so that they can be recorded.
Data Reporter DataReporter is designed as an adjunct to DataFinder/DataBank which is used to generate reports and statistics in various formats (see Figure 3).
It was designed as a separate component since it is targeted at a different audience and may well be operated and maintained by parts of the organisation concerned with research information as opposed to research data.
DataReporter can make use of both access/usage statistics and contents statistics to give a complete view of activity in the area.
At this stage, we have identified demand for several key types of report: Volume and rate of research data generation – for capacity planning and budgeting Usage statistics to comply with funder mandates for retention/preservation Validation of timely deposition to comply with funder mandates for deposit Data publication records for assessment activities such as REF Figure 3: DataReporter prototype Look and Feel The design of the DataFinder user interface began with the construction of user journey diagrams that show how users navigate to the pages they require, following a logical sequence.
The individual pages featured in the user journeys were then translated into wireframes incorporating draft functions and information deemed crucial for each page.
Once these pages had been created, the first iteration was developed (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: DataFinder demonstrator interface Solr index and search [14] allows faceted searching and Piwik software [15] provides a useful means to display usage information.
These applications are in wide use already within BDLSS (Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services) systems, so it made sense to employ them.
Most DataFinder pages are freely available, however some such as the contribute form and reporting information, are password protected (using the Oxford single sign-on).
The aesthetic design was influenced by the design of ORA.
BDLSS is gradually developing a core look and feel that will be implemented across many services as they are built and rolled out.
Data Model The data model for DataFinder and DataBank is necessarily generic and flexible as the definition of ‘data’ within the remit of the systems is very broad.
In the case of DataFinder, references to physical artefacts are valid records.
However, at the same time, the systems should be capable of capturing and making use of all the metadata that a researcher may want to make available in order to increase utility and the consequent resulting reuse and possible citation.
At the highest level, the object model is based on the FEDORA Commons [16] idea that an object is simply a set of ‘datastreams’ that, in practice, are frequently represented as files.
These can contain metadata or data as detailed in a manifest that describes the structure of the object in question, and is itself part of the object – in the DataBank model the manifest is expressed using RDF.
Crucially, this mechanism allows us to have multiple metadata datastreams within an object, allowing us to accommodate the core metadata that are common to all objects (based on the DataCite kernel), discretionary metadata based on additional funder requirements, and domain-specific metadata that depend on the source.
They can be documented in the manifest and if XML formats are used, the advent of tools such as Elastic Search and later versions of Solr allow us to provide schema-less indexing and querying of this arbitrary metadata without having to specifically support a multiplicity of specialised XML schemas.
Additionally, we also implement a relational database-like disaggregation of key entities such as funders and researchers, creating distinct objects within the system to represent them.
Again, RDF is then used to map these external relationships as well as links to other datasets and publications within ORA.
These additional ‘context’ objects are used as authority sources for information on the entities in question – storing name variations, foreign keys in external systems for harvesting and integration purposes and disambiguation information.
For example, an author may have several ‘unique’ identifiers within systems which provide content to DataFinder: ORCID, ISNI, Names, ResearcherID and HESA ID to name but a few.
Objects within the system are given a universally unique identifier (UUID) when they are created which provides the basis for a persistent URL which is registered with the Oxford PURL resolver (purl.ox.ac.uk).
This is also the identifier that is used to reference the object internally as they have robust uniqueness characteristics, allowing generation in multiple locations (which aids horizontal scaling of the data repository) and providing an identifier that can be readily moved to other repositories without fear of collisions.
Roles and Permissions The first release of DataFinder incorporates a very simple set of roles for users that are similar to those in use in DataBank and ORA: Researchers can create records within DataFinder.
Records are, however, not published immediately.
Researchers can create records that are attributed to others.
Reviewers review deposited records prior to publication and, if necessary, refer them back to the researcher if they are incomplete or there are other queries.
Reviewers and researchers updates are logged in the audit trail for the record.
Administrators can delete records, return them to the review state, and also define new metadata sources for harvesting.
At the moment, reviewers need to validate records when a depositor has acted as a proxy for another.
Whether an automatic group level role needs implementing to somewhat automate this process remains to be seen.
This has not been an issue for ORA but, research data may show a markedly more rapid growth in activity that may necessitate such functionality.
Metadata Import and Export DataFinder will have the ability to harvest data records from other repositories, to build a complete picture of Oxford’s data holdings.
In the first instance, harvesting will be carried out using OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) as it is not only well established in the repository world in general, but it is also implemented in DataBank for precisely this purpose.
While DataBank records, by design, will meet the metadata requirements of DataFinder and DataCite (to permit the issue of data DOIs), it is recognised that this may not be the case for records sourced from elsewhere.
DataFinder must therefore handle the following cases individually and in combination: Datasets may be located in more than one repository so we will acquire duplicated records, possibly with different metadata.
Different versions of the same dataset may be in existence Harvested metadata may fall short of DataFinder and/.or DataCite requirements Harvested sources may not permit updates to their records Harvested sources may update their records independently of the state of DataFinder   Reconciling these different conditions programmatically in a deterministic manner would be an extremely complex, if not impossible undertaking, so DataFinder does not attempt this task.
Harvested data records are maintained within the system as is and updated only when the source system presents a new record.
Duplicates and version mismatches are handled by manually creating an additional record that acts as a parent for the all the variant records.
The metadata in the parent may be based on the child records but can also be corrected manually.
The parent record is used for the basis of indexing and discovery with the child records displayed for information purposes and linking to the various versions/copies.
The same mechanism with a single child record can, of course, be used to augment inadequate metadata with improved material.
While it is not possible to fully automate the handling of these awkward cases, the creation of these parent records can be automated to some degree based on the fact that we have authority lists and some metadata available in the system already.
The extent to which these will be implemented depends largely on the volume of such cases that we encounter.
DataFinder also supports another, indirect, source of metadata in the form of DMPOnline Data Management plans which are archived in Databank as separate digital objects in their own right.
While these plans do not usually explicitly describe individual datasets, they do provide some information about people, projects and funders relating to data-generating activities.
This information can be used to improve the manual entry experience by pre-filling some fields or providing limited selection lists for others.
This extra information can also be useful for enhancing the accuracy of automated processing of harvested material where this occurs.
Conclusion The choices made and decisions taken when designing and developing DataFinder have resulted in a service that we believe is fit for the institution’s purpose.
Exactly how successful those decisions have been will not become evident until the DataFinder has been running as a full mainstream service for some time.
Some of the decisions have been governed by external drivers such as funder requirements: others have been taken in order to simplify the deposit process for hard-pressed, busy researchers.
Underpinning the development has been the concept that metadata should be reused, entry simplified, and terms made consistent wherever possible to encourage deposit and creation of as many records as possible.
We expect to provide a first release mid-2013 working towards a mature service (once a suitable business model has been agreed) by the end of 2014.
References Policy available at http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm/ Damaro Project http://damaro.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ Oxford DMPOnline http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/dmponline/oxforddmponline.aspx DataStage http://www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk/index.php/about/about-datastage ORDS (Online Research Database Service) http://ords.ox.ac.uk/ UK Data Archive (UKDA) http://data-archive.ac.uk/ Oxford DataBank [in development] https://databank.ora.ox.ac.uk/ FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) http://fast.oclc.org/searchfast/ RCUK Research Classifications http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Efficiency/Pages/harmonisation.aspx JACS Joint Academic Subject Coding http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=158&Itemid=233 RIOXX http://rioxx.net/ CKAN http://ckan.org/ ColWiz http://www.colwiz.com/ Solr index and search http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ Piwik Web analytics http://piwik.org/ Fedora Commons http://fedora-commons.org/ Author Details Sally Rumsey Digital Research Librarian The Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford Email: sally.rumsey@bodleian.ox.ac.uk Web site:  http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ Sally Rumsey is Digital Research Librarian at the Bodleian Libraries where she manages the institutional publications repository, ORA.
She is working with colleagues across the University of Oxford to develop and implement a range of services to support research data management.
Sally is Senior Programme Manager for the University’s Open Access Oxford programme.
Neil Jefferies Research and Development Manager The Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford Email: neil.jefferies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ Neil Jefferies, MA, MBA is Research and Development Project Manager for the Bodleian Libraries, responsible for the development and delivery of new projects and services.
He was involved with the initial setup of the Eprints and Fedora Repositories at Oxford and is now working on the implementation of a long-term digital archive platform.
Alongside his commitments to Cultures of Knowledge, Neil is Technical Director of the IMPAcT Project, Co-PI on the DataFlow Project, and an invited contributor to the SharedCanvas Project.
He also represents the Bodleian on the Jisc PALS (Publisher and Library Solutions) panel.
Previously, he has worked in a broad range of computer-related fields ranging from chip design and parallel algorithm development for Nortel, writing anti-virus software for Dr Solomon’s, and developing corporate IT solutions and systems for several major blue-chips.
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The Third Annual edUi Conference 2011 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Third Annual edUi Conference 2011 Buzz data mobile framework html usability archives metadata css xhtml accessibility browser blog video cataloguing graphics windows aggregation mis widget youtube twitter android html5 research Citation BibTex RIS Danielle Cooley reports on the third annual edUi Conference, held over 13-14 October 2011, in Richmond, Virginia, USA, an opportunity for Web professionals in colleges, universities, libraries, museums, etc to discuss the latest developments in Web trends and technologies.
The third annual edUi Conference [1] was held October 13-14, 2011, in Richmond, Virginia, USA.
The sold-out event saw 225 ‘Web professionals serving colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and beyond’ join together to discuss the latest and greatest in Web trends and technologies.
The all-volunteer conference was presented by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and major sponsors included Microsoft, the University of Richmond, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
The two-day event consisted of four tracks [2]: For beginners, ‘Web 101’ addressed fundamentals of user interface and user experience design and development.
The ‘Toolbox’ track provided information about specific tools or technologies.
‘Problem Solved’ included a variety of case studies from the higher education Web world.
‘The Edge’ covered such emerging technologies as HTML5 and CSS3.
Included in the conference registration for each delegate was one of four half-day workshops representing the four conference tracks: Kicking Off Your Content Strategy (Web 101) by Margot Bloomstein Progressive Prototyping (Toolbox) by Matt Ventre and Todd Zaki Warfel Designing Mobile Experiences (Problem Solved) by Brian Fling Practical HTML5 (The Edge) by Christopher Schmitt Keynotes were provided by Siva Vaidhyanathan (‘The Googlization of Everything’) and Jeffrey Zeldman (‘Content First’) [3].
This article summarises some of the presentations and the prevailing themes of the two-day event.
Thursday, 14 October  2011 Plenary: The Googlization of Everything In his opening address to the conference, Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia discussed the research involved in writing his book The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) which appeared in March 2011.
As the book and presentation titles suggest (and we all understand), Google has its corporate fingers in just about everything – search (Google, of course), online video (YouTube), blogging (Blogger), mobile (Android), mapping (Google Maps), restaurant reviews (Zagat), photos (Picasa, Picnik), and so much more.
Between these tools, Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Checkout, you can spend just about your entire online existence on various Google-owned tools and not miss out on too much.
They even own security (reCAPTCHA) and facial recognition (PittPatt) tools.
Figure 1: Todd Zaki Warfel leading his session entitled Progressive Prototyping – Condensed.
Image courtesy of fhwebdev.
But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Google says its motto is ‘Don’t be evil.’ (Actually, it turns out they never officially said that, but it’s a fair description of their supposed philosophy.)
But in the end, Google is a publicly traded company, and their primary goal is to make as much money as they can.
And, since we have put all of our electronic eggs in Google’s basket, we won’t have much recourse if they do decide to be evil.
Indeed, Google’s ubiquity can be dangerous in many ways.
Figure 2: Siva Vaidhyanathan presenting his plenary address.
Image courtesy of fhwebdev.
Web 101: Web Building Blocks: Core Concepts for HTML and CSS In this one-hour presentation, Joseph Gilbert of the University of Virginia provided an overview of HTML and CSS and how both have evolved over the years.
Intended for the novice developer, the presentation laid out the basic philosophy behind HTML and CSS, and described how they should be used properly to maximise usability, findability, and accessibility.
He first described the inherent hierarchical nature of HTML.
The <title> tag is a child of the <head> tag, for example.
<h1> and <p> belong in the <body>, and everything gets wrapped in an <html> tag set.
He provided a brief explanation of several different specific tags, including <div>, <span>, <a>, <img>, <h1>, <p>, <ul>, <table>, and <em>.
He emphasised the importance of semantic mark-up as well.
The <em> tag being a better alternative to the <i> tag, for example, since it provides some information about the content being tagged.
Other tags commonly (mis)used purely for presentational effect are <b>, <table>, and <br>.
Joseph then illustrated the evolution to the more natural language of HTML 5, showing that ‘<div id=”header”>‘ in XHTML is now just ‘<header>‘ in HTML5.
Figure 3: Side-by-side comparison of XHTML and HTML5 layouts (courtesy of Joe Gilbert)  Moving on to CSS, we started with some basic syntax of various selectors.
The concept of inheritance was explained, as were such properties as height, width, colour, font, float, padding, and margin.
Joe illustrated how CSS can be used for both normal and relative positioning of screen elements and content blocks, including floated elements and cleared floats.
While I had hoped to leave the session with the ability to write a line or two of good, up-to-date HTML/CSS, that was not to be.
But the presentation did provide an excellent overview, and it will be helpful background to have when exploring online tutorials from places like W3Schools or A List Apart.
Problem Solved: Hoarders, Library Website Edition: A Data-Driven Website Redesign in 120 Days Harish Maringanti, Joelle Pitts, and Tara Coleman from Kansas State University Libraries presented a case study of their recent redesign project.
After identifying issues with the current state of their Web site, they identified five key user groups to inform the redesign.
Using analytics and qualitative methods, they determined that much of the 3,000+ page site was seeing little to no use and determined that much of the content could be eliminated.
Not so surprisingly, the team encountered resistance when they asked content owners to make a ‘keep, modify, or archive’ decision about each piece of their content.
Content owners wanted to keep pages that had been viewed only twice over the course of a year or more, ‘just in case’ anyone wanted that information later.
In the end, the redesign team had to make some tough decisions for the greater good.
(As founder of the ‘Less Content, More Strategy’ movement, I found this to be a particularly interesting development.
The inclusion of the term ‘hoarding’ in this presentation title is apt, as much of the psychology of hoarding possessions also applies to hoarding Web content.)
Then, just when they were about to roll out their thoughtful, user-centred redesign, the University released a new set of Web standards that all departments were to follow.
Unfortunately, this development kept them from achieving success in the initial 120-day timeline, but the team was able to take what it had learnt and produce rather quickly a new site that both supported their user groups and conformed to the University’s new guidelines.
Web 101 Workshop: Kicking Off Your Content Strategy Margot Bloomstein of Appropriate, Inc. began this workshop with a basic introduction to Content Strategy – a definition (‘Planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, and appropriate content in an experience.’), explanation of its purpose (keeping projects focused and easing the future tasks of maintenance and revision), and a brief ‘how-to’ (Message Architecture, Content Audit, style, metadata, and governance guidelines).
The workshop then went into further detail about how to create a message architecture, including a fascinating example from Mini USA.
The message architecture is helpful because it is relatively inexpensive to produce and serves as a guiding document for all future content – text, graphics, photography, microcopy, tweets, traditional advertising – everything.
Workshop participants got to experience an attribute-sorting exercise in which a hypothetical company’s message architecture was derived from a set of approximately 250 adjectives (‘fun,’ ‘compelling,’ ‘trendy,’ ‘formal,’ ‘relaxed,’ etc.).
Each adjective is printed on an individual card, and stakeholders sort them into groups of adjectives that do and don’t represent their desired message.
From there, Margot began outlining the process for conducting a content audit.
In this admittedly tedious process, the Content Strategist evaluates each piece of a Web site’s content – every photo, every headline, every <title> tag, everything – to determine how well or poorly it aligns with the company’s Message Architecture.
Margot provided helpful Excel templates and some tips for making Excel work for you.
It was an excellent workshop.
I think everyone left with tools they could immediately apply in their work.
Reception: Library of Virginia The Library of Virginia, just down the street from the conference hotel, was the setting for the conference’s evening reception.
What’s to say about the reception?
The food was excellent, the drink tickets were relatively easy to come by, and the conversation was wonderful.
Friday, 15 October  2011 Web 101: Personas at Work: Effectively Communicating Your Research Friday morning began for me with a quick overview of Personas by Carol Smith of Midwest Research and how they might best be used.
Personas are ‘fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.’ [4] While this talk did not cover the process for developing personas, it did cover a lot of the ‘whats,’ ‘whys,’ and best practice for their use.
Carol emphasised that Personas are a tool for facilitating communication and decision-making within a project, not just something to check off a list.
An unused or underused Persona isn’t adding value.
Keeping Personas physically visible during design and development helps ensure that the needs of the end-user are kept in the forefront of the project team’s minds.
She suggested several different ways to use Personas throughout the project lifecycle: Once Personas have been developed, introduce them in-person to team members, just as you would a new employee.
(‘This is Olivia.
Olivia has …’) Have someone (perhaps a formal Persona Curator) channel the various Personas in team meetings.
(‘Speaking as Dr. Chen, I’m not sure that feature is really all that important to me.’) Conduct a panel session, with people representing each Persona as the panelists.
The project team can pose questions and get thoughtful answers from their ‘users’ without the time and expense of extensive additional user research.
Have a birthday party for your Persona.
(With cake!)
Create physical artifacts – posters, stand-up cutouts, desktop cutouts, etc.
of each Persona.
Place these artefacts in highly visible spots near the project team’s workspace.
Give the Persona a workspace, populated with books they might refer to in their work and pictures of their family and pets.
She also emphasised the important fact that Personas are a product of significant user research and field study, not brainstorming.
A good Persona includes the user’s goals, needs, how they will use the product, their challenges/problems they are trying to solve, and yes, irrelevant information (e.g., their dog’s breed and name) to help make the Persona memorable to the members of the project team.
Web 101: Field Research for User Experience The main points of my talk were the advantages and disadvantages of conducting Field Research compared to other user research methods, ‘how-to’ and the difficulties often faced when conducting Field Research, as well as something on best practice in reporting results.
In order to explore Field Research in the intended context, we compared it to such techniques as lab-based usability testing, online surveys, focus groups, and journaling [5].
Clearly, the main advantage of Field Research is the information it provides about context of use.
Lab-based testing alone won’t uncover issues presented by the environment.
For example, if your product is going to be used on a loud manufacturing floor, it shouldn’t rely on audio cues to communicate important information.
If the product is going to be used outdoors, maybe in bright sunlight, screen contrast suddenly becomes a serious concern.
Figure 4: The author Danielle Cooley during her presentation on Field Research for User Experience.
There are a few different types of Field Research.
The most commonly known is the formal Contextual Inquiry, introduced by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt in 1997 [6].
If necessary, this technique can also be performed remotely, though doing so won’t reveal as much information about context and environment as one might hope.
And on-site Usability Testing can be a nice way to get specific information about how well or poorly customers can use a product while also providing contextual information.
To conduct a Field Study, keep in mind the usual rules about participants’ rights, documentation, minimising bias, and building trust.
There are practical issues to consider as well, such as the analyst’s physical security, site security issues that may prevent the use of recordings or photographs, productivity concerns on the part of the participants’ managers, and the pure logistics of finding and travelling to several different sites.
Collecting such artefacts as photocopies, videos, photos, and office measurements is a key component of Field Research.
Users’ homemade job aids often provide critical insight into the most challenging parts of an application or workflow.
For analysis and reporting, it’s helpful to compile the notes using affinity diagramming, mind mapping, or a similar process – either electronic or analogue.
To accommodate short attention spans, the report should begin with a brief executive summary.
Explain the methodology (number of participants, for what duration, over which dates).
Report both positive and negative findings, and provide visual explanations of such findings whenever possible.
Remember always to protect your participants’ anonymity, and include those artefacts!
Figure 5: Due Date Card catalogue at a community college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Including photographs like these can be helpful in illustrating Field Research findings.
Keynote: Jeffrey Zeldman: Content First This year’s keynote was given over lunch on Friday.
Jeffrey Zeldman is probably best known as the founder and executive creative director of Happy Cog and creator of A List Apart and its offshoots A Book Apart and An Event Apart.
Given the undercurrent of Content Strategy at this year’s edUi, (Content Audits, semantic mark-up, hoarding), his keynote address was decidedly appropriate.
Jeffrey’s principal point was that good Web design starts with content.
It’s difficult to design a Web site or other interactive product without a good understanding of the content it will house.
Will it be image-heavy?
Text-heavy?
Will Widget X be described in one paragraph or one page?
Without good answers to questions like these, it’s very difficult to design and build a good experience, and it’s nearly impossible to do so within typical timelines and budgets.
Thus, content is a design problem.
Further complicating the life and work of the modern Web designer is the proliferation of small screens of varying sizes and aspect ratios.
To accommodate such mobile devices, teams can design and code for every screen variant in existence or adopt a responsive design philosophy.
Responsive Design uses CSS techniques, fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to create a single codebase that displays content neatly on any screen size.
Figure 6: A full house for Jeffrey Zeldman’s keynote address entitled “Content First” Jeffrey also brought up the use of ‘dark patterns’ on the Web [7], where unethical designers use tricks to get users to do things against their will.
A simple and not-too-‘dark’ example is the opt-out checkbox for email subscriptions.
An opt-in checkbox is a much more user-friendly paradigm.
A more sinister example would be popping an ad when the user clicks a page background, when the user almost definitely only intended to bring focus back to the browser window.
His main point in raising this was that dark patterns that hurt the user also hurt the business that uses them, through loss of customer loyalty and poor reputation.
Aside from avoiding dark patterns, good Web design starts with content.
Many typical Web projects might start with committee feature requests, IT requirements, and ‘greeked’ visual design comps before content is even considered.
By contrast, a better process would be to consider the content first, in the context of the user’s needs and business goals.
Only then should the project team go on to User Experience activities, content governance models, design, and coding.
Happy Cog doesn’t use greeked or other filler content for comps and prototypes, and, Jeffrey maintained, there’s no good reason for anyone else to do so.
In short, a Web designer’s main job is to serve the customer, and the best way to do that in 2011 is to start designing with content first, avoid dark patterns, and employ a responsive design to accommodate today’s small screens.
Not surprisingly, Zeldman is an engaging and entertaining speaker, and it really was a pleasure to hear him at edUi this year.
Toolbox: Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing: Good or Evil?
Kyle Soucy of Usable Interface felt that new tools like UserZoom, Loop11, and Keynote claim to provide valuable usability data for a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional, in-person usability testing.
But there is much debate in the usability world about the real value of unmoderated remote usability testing.
Does it provide real insight?, she asked.
Can you infer the cause of users’ issues from pure task failure rates?
Do study participants really include valuable feedback in comment areas, or do they tend not to bother?
Kyle evaluated several of the dozens of different unmoderated remote usability testing tools in an attempt to answer those questions.
Figure 7: Kyle Soucy presenting on Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing.
The different tools provide different types and quantities of data.
Most provide pure task completion rate information and analytics.
Some also provide click count and clickstream data.
Time on task and time on page are also metrics some of these tools report.
Most, moreover, include some kind of satisfaction rating scale to gather subjective information about the users’ experiences.
To run a successful test, define the study goals and recruit participants.
As with lab-based testing, it’s helpful to run a pilot session to work out any kinks in the test plan before launching the test and emailing the link to the participants.
Being able to test a site with a large number of participants is one advantage of unmoderated remote usability testing.
The cost of this type of testing is usually much less than that of traditional lab-based studies.
Using a tool like this also eliminates the issue of no-show participants, and results come in very quickly.
On the other hand, some participants might only be interested in collecting the honorarium for the study, rather than providing valuable, actionable feedback.
And, of course, what people say they do is rarely what they actually do, making the subjective satisfaction results unreliable.
Ultimately, nothing can fully take the place of watching participants in real time and being able to ask probing questions about what they are doing as they do it.
While unmoderated remote testing has its place, it should be used as a complement to moderated research techniques, not as a replacement for them.
Web 101: Make Quality Content Count with Web Analytics Rick Allen of ePublish Media began by saying the world of Web analytics is full of question and controversy.
While most people agree that analytics are important, there is much disagreement about: which metrics matter the most; how accurate analytics really are, and; whether analytics findings are really actionable.
While analytics reveal a lot about the ‘what,’ they do little to reveal the ‘why.’ It’s one thing to know that a certain page has a high bounce rate, but it’s an entirely different thing to understand why the bounce rate is so high in order that the right issues are addressed by the analyst.
To create a useful analytics framework, one must consider business objectives, user goals and what key performance indicators (KPIs) would best illustrate whether those business objectives and user goals are being met.
Further, one must establish targets for those KPIs.
If bounce rate is an important indicator, what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ bounce rate?
Finally, if demographic data are being collected, one must carefully consider which data (age?
location?
browser and version?)
would provide the greatest insight.
Web analytics can validate assumptions and help prioritise brand attributes.
If you suspect some of your content is outdated or confusing, poor analytics for that content might indicate those suspicions are correct.
The analytics may also hint at the level of severity of any content or navigation problems.
Because analytics do not answer the critical ‘why’ question, it’s important to use them to augment, not replace, such qualitative research as usability testing and journaling studies.
A low bounce rate might be a good thing, if it means the user is finding the information they need quickly.
A high page hit count might be a bad thing, if it’s not really the page the users are looking for.
Qualitative research will provide answers to these questions.
Web 101: Sophisticated Web Design: Taking your Site to the Next Level In this talk, Wren Lanier of INM United described subtle techniques for making Web sites look more professional and trustworthy, pointing out that a single pixel in a repeating image can be enough to give a site the dimension and texture found on professionally designed sites.
By pointing out some of these tricks, she intended to make better design accessible for groups that may have amateur designers on staff but are not able to afford the full-time efforts of a professional designer.
Her first point: design for your content.
(Seeing that ‘Content First’ thread emerging again here?)
Every site’s content is unique, so it’s very likely that your content won’t fit neatly into an existing template.
Although creating new layouts takes more time than using out-of-the-box templates, the result is a better overall experience.
Second point: Use whitespace to your advantage.
When designers fill the entire page with content or images, it’s often difficult for users to determine which content is most important.
Consider not using a sidebar or extra images or copy.
Figure 8: Stephen Hockman tweet in reaction to Wren Lanier’s presentation.
Third point: take care of your typography.
This is where many Web designers fail the ‘common sense’ test.
Readability is the most important thing about typography, and it’s entirely possible to find Web fonts that are both beautiful and readable.
When choosing typography, consider size, contrast, colour weight, and space for comfortable visual flow.
While experts may be able successfully to mix a large number of typefaces, novices should limit themselves to two or three in a single site or page.
Fourth point: Texture.
It was during this part of Wren’s talk that Jeffrey Zeldman was nodding so much we thought his head might come clean off.
The world is not flat, and your Web site shouldn’t be, either.
By introducing subtle colour variations, gradients, shadows, and textures, even the novice designer can make a Web site feel more ‘real.’ She didn’t really address the subjective part of determining what is and is not appropriate in a texture treatment.
I suspect many people using garish background images may well consider them simply ‘texture.’ Fifth point: Colour!
There is no one good, or bad, way to use colour in Web design.
For some sites, really bold colour can be an asset.
For others, a fairly subtle and muted palette would be more appropriate.
Remember, too, that certain industries need not feel tied to a single colour.
Not every financial services Web site needs to be green, for example.
Sixth and final point: Responsive Web design.
The concept was addressed many times throughout the conference, and Wren gave us one more parting reminder of the value of this development philosophy.
Fun: Richmond Folk Festival The organisers of edUi intentionally scheduled the conference to conclude just before the start of the Richmond Folk Festival.
Several of us sauntered over to the festival on Friday evening to enjoy some food, drink, and fine music.
There were fried Oreos, people.
Fried Oreos!
Conclusion Overall, my experience of edUi was incredibly positive.
The event was very well-run.
The only significant glitch was with the hotel’s WiFi on Thursday, and that was completely resolved by the next day.
The delegates were clever, engaged, and interested, and the speakers were all very knowledgeable about their subject matter.
The inadvertent focus on Content Strategy, Responsive Design, and HTML5/CSS3 was a very faithful reflection of the issues currently faced by Web design teams everywhere, both within and beyond Higher Education and libraries.
The bonus?
Food!
Christopher Schmitt’s talk, ‘HTML5 Does All That… AND I Can Haz Cheeseburger?
You bet!’ included actual cheeseburgers for the delegates.
Todd Zaki Warfel served beer in his Prototyping Workshop.
And several other speakers included candy and other tasty incentives for audience participation.
It definitely kept things interesting and amusing.
edUi 2012 will be held in Richmond, Virginia, USA over 24-26 September 2012.
Three 2012 keynotes – Jared Spool, Jeff Gothelf, and Jay Blanchard – were announced on 28 February 2012, and the rest of the programme promises to be just as exciting.
I hope to make it, and I hope to see you there!
References The Third Annual edUi Conference http://eduiconf.org/ The Third Annual edUi Conference tracks   http://eduiconf.org/schedule/ The Third Annual edUi Conference speakers http://eduiconf.org/speakers/ Persona (marketing) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_%28marketing%29 In this context, 'journaling' refers to a type of user research in which participants work autonomously and record their thoughts about their experiences in an electronic or written journal, which is later returned to the user researcher for analysis.
See http://usability.jameshom.com/journals.htm and http://usability.jameshom.com/selfrept.htm Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt.
Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems (Interactive Technologies).
1997, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN-13: 978-1558604117 Home: Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People http://wiki.darkpatterns.org Author Details Danielle Cooley Independent User Experience Consultant Email: danielle@dgcooley.com Web site: http://dgcooley.com Twitter: @dgcooley Danielle Gobert Cooley is an independent User Experience consultant with over 12 years of experience in a multitude of user research and usability analysis methods.
She has applied her skills to a wide variety of applications, including hardware, Windows, Web, telephone, and mobile.
Her successful designs have been implemented at such large and small, public and private companies as Pfizer, Sargento Foods, Navy Federal Credit Union, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and MasterCard Worldwide.
Active in the field, she was the founding Vice President of the Boston chapter of the Usability Professionals Association and served on the committees of the 2007, 2008, and 2012 Usability Professionals' Association Annual Conferences.
She has a BE in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and a MS in Human Factors in Information Design from the Elkin B. McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
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Building a Digital Scholarship Centre on the Successes of a Library Makerspace Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Building a Digital Scholarship Centre on the Successes of a Library Makerspace Buzz Citation BibTex RIS Heila Pienaar, Isak van der Walt and Sean Kruger discuss the exciting opportunity to build a Digital Scholarship Centre in the University of Pretoria Library based on the huge success of the Library’s Makerspace.
This article looks at the possibility to develop a Digital Scholarship Centre on the foundation of a successful Library Makerspace.
The University of Pretoria Library Makerspace is the first known Academic Makerspace in a university library on the African continent.
The origin of Digital Scholarship in general and Digital Scholarship Centres in libraries are discussed.
The overlap in functions of a Makerspace and a Digital Scholarship Centre is also illustrated.
By combining the Library Makerspace services with that of a Digital Scholarship Centre, a comprehensive Digital Scholarship Centre in the Library can be established.
Introduction The 2017 Library Edition of the well-known Horizon Report (NMC Horizon report, 2017) describes ‘Digital Scholarship Technologies’ as one of the important developments in technology for Academic and Research Libraries.
According to the report “The concept of digital scholarship has origins in the late 1990s in the United Kingdom.
Originally referred to as e-science, the idea of applying new technology and data analysis tools to scholarship cycled through other names like cyber-infrastructure and e-scholarship, before landing on the current umbrella term.
This umbrella term comprises several information technologies including high performance computing, visualisation technologies, database technologies, and high-performance networking.
Thus, digital scholarship has ushered in a new paradigm of data-intensive science.
Academic libraries were quick to position themselves as incubators for this transformation of research, by developing shared virtual and physical places for fostering scholarly inquiry.
The physical spaces are known as digital scholarship centres”.
In addition, the report also highlights that “The Consortium of Networked Information (CNI) characterizes these spaces as being placed in academic libraries rather than faculty-run institutes, focused on digital humanities, and cross-disciplinary in nature”.
Some of these digital scholarship centres e.g.
McMaster University, Canada, were initially grounded in the humanities, but has developed a Makerspace later on as part of their digital scholarship offering (Lippincott et al, 2014).
In South Africa digital humanities is a recent development and still in its infancy.
According to the SpeckKit 350: Supporting Digital Scholarship (Mulligan, 2016), published by the Association for Research Libraries 19 Digital Scholarship activities have been identified by participating institutions.
These activities are: GIS and digital Mapping Digitisation / imaging of analogue material Making digital collections Metadata creation Digital Preservation Data curation and management 3-D modelling and printing Statistical analysis / support Digital exhibits Project planning Digital publishing Project management Computational text analysis / support Interface design and / or usability Visualisation Database development Technical upkeep Encoding content Developing digital scholarship software According to the survey results, support for 84% of digital scholarship activities are provided by the library, the rest elsewhere in or outside the institution; it therefore creates demand for a coordinated effort of current and new library services in a physical and virtual manner 1.
The University of Pretoria (UP) Library Makerspace 1.1 Rationale Dr Heila Pienaar, Deputy Director: Strategic Innovation, UP Library Services, extensively investigated the new trend of Makerspaces from 2014 onwards.
A Makerspace can be described as a multidisciplinary collaboration and creative hack space, where students and staff, irrespective of discipline, can engage and share resources to explore and experiment through an inquiry-based learning approach.
This space provides a unique contribution and enables creativity through resources such as 3D printers, 3D scanners and other electronic equipment to generate novel and exciting new approaches to problems within the makers field of interest or expertise.
The idea of a Makerspace originated in the United States, where it was introduced into libraries to further their educational goals.
At the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, the UP Library made an investment in purchasing the necessary equipment, preparing a suitable space and appointing a student assistant to oversee the daily operations of the Makerspace.
The Makerspace was first introduced to students and parents during the 2015 Welcoming Day on the 17th of January 2015 (Department of Library Services Annual Reports and Reviews, 2015; Olivier, 2015) The Makerspace since has been showcased as a key supportive mechanism across departments within the University of Pretoria, to not only showcase technological trends which support teaching and learning, but also drive research outputs with access to key services.
1.2 Services delivered by the UP Makerspace To foster collaboration and support academics, current services of the UP Library Makerspace include an array of technologies and tools to support the maker culture, research as well as hybrid teaching and learning.
These services include: 3D Modelling, scanning and printing 3D Modelling 3D Scanning and modelling has various applications in research, teaching and learning.
Figure 1 is an example of how 3D scanning was used to scan a bust of a well-known South African opera singer (Mimi Coertze) in high-resolution for digital preservation.
This 3D model can now be used for replication, modification, studying or long-term preservation.
3D Scanning also allows users to experience and grasp the process of creating 3D models to apply within their specific disciplines.
The Makerspace not only facilitates the physical aspect of 3D scanning but provides access to software to further enhance, modify or design new and existing models.
Figure 1: 3D Scan of Museum Piece for digital collections and preservation 3D Printing 3D printing has allowed for increased capacity to make and create.
Figure 2 demonstrates an example of how 3D printing has assisted in the advancement of malaria research and sustainable control thereof.
This was achieved by investigating customized tools and techniques to create ancillary tools to test and distribute samples for malaria testing.
One of which was diffusers for mosquito feeding.
This was in collaboration with the Malaria Parasite Molecular Laboratory, a Division of Biochemistry, Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology.
Figure 2: 3D Printed mosquito feeders ‘Mini-me’ 3D scanning and printing In order to showcase to students and academics in a fun and interactive way the process of digitalisation, modelling and 3D printing, “Mini-me’s” as a service is offered.
An example is shown in Figure 3 below.
Figure 3: Mini-me scans and printing Provision and Training in electronics At the basis of training in electronics is Arduino.
This is used as it offers a vast community platform and support basis, as well as various application areas.
Whilst training is conducted, coding fundamentals are covered and then applied to the kits to demonstrate the concept of and inter-relations of the Internet of Things (IoT).
This allows students or academics, irrespective of discipline to begin applying technology across fields of expertise and achieve new research outputs.
One example of coding practices is shown in Figure 4 below, to link coding to physical outputs.
Figure 4: Coding practical and 3D design teachings To relate this code to actual robotics, a robotics training and collaboration also occurs within the Makerspace.
Figure 5 demonstrates students building a robotics kit where Figure 6 shows the completed running unit.
Figure 5: Students building a robot in the Makerspace Figure 6: The robot in action Integration into aspects of the curriculum for hybrid learning support.
The collaborative nature of the Makerspace and access to tools and technologies has seen it being adopted by lectures as part of their teaching and learning for students.
Since its inception, the Makerspace has played an integral part of the curriculum for the following subjects: Manufacturing Systems Module (3rd Year) Informatics 1st Years module Electromechanical Engineering (3rd Year) Information Science (3rd Year) Figure 7 is an example of 3rd year students that had to make use of additive manufacturing for their assignments.
The Makerspace facilitated the 3D printing as well as guidance on designs, the department makes use of the space annually for this specific module.
Figure 7: 3rd Year Engineering Students making use of the Makerspace To further enhance the teaching and learning experience of our students the Makerspace strategically integrated into the UP Business incubator (rapid prototyping of products and entrepreneurial support).
This allows our students to skill themselves up beyond the stage of just prototyping into a space where they can develop actual products that can go to market.
Hosting Hackathons with industry partners This is also a method in which we expose students to industry challenges by giving them a glimpse into the work environment.
Some of the Hackathons hosted by the Makerspace are: Intel Hackathon #GirlCode Hackathon Microsoft AI Hackathon The South African Resilience Lab Standard Bank Challenge Hackathon LaunchLab Challenges Physical Collaboration space In addition to some of the aforementioned services the physical space is one that fosters collaboration and creativity.
The Makerspace is flexible to the extent that the venue can change to accommodate a variety of activities ranging from hosting workshops and lectures to a playground for robotics.
Figure 8 is an example of a Senior Lecturer hosting a lecture on innovation in the Makerspace to make the concepts relevant.
The Makerspace activities are not bound by its physical location, some of the training and consultation that the Makerspace facilitated at various external locations are: Software and Data Carpentry Training Design Thinking Workshops Veterinary Science Skills Lab Figure 8: Collaboration Session with Entrepreneurship students 1.3 Applications/ Practical Examples In the early months running up to the official opening of the UP Library Makerspace, the increase in 3D printing requests and income from 3D materials showed that students were actively using the facility.
This has continued to steadily increase year on year as awareness and applications within curriculum expands.
A number of collaborative projects have been done with campus partners and departments such as the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Department of Industrial Engineering, Department of Electro Mechanical Engineering, Department of Informatics, Department of Computer Science, Department of Communication Pathology, Department of Neuro-Physiotherapy, Department of Anatomy, Veterinary Sciences Skills Lab, Virtual Mining Lab (Kumba Virtual Mining Lab), and the South African Resilience Lab (SARILab).
The Maker Movement and Makerspaces have a very strong focus on Do It Yourself (DIY), and by guiding users on the application and integration of technologies into their field, irrespective of discipline, has enabled them in like never before.
Part of the movement is collaboration, which further broadens horizons where expertise is not immediately available within the space.
As such, the Makerspace is not limited in terms of expertise, but rather, a physical point for researchers to test and explore concepts through a hands-on approach.
This is also a perfect starting point for young entrepreneurs, who can ideate, test, and if they fail, fail quickly to revise until a viable concept is found.
As such, the Library, in collaboration with the Department of Business Management, also formed a strategic working relationship that sees the Makerspace becoming the primary rapid prototyping platform during the business incubation process.
This interdepartmental collaboration has provided students an easy point of entry for assistance with their entrepreneurial ideas and ventures.
Thus, this space also provides a bidirectional link to a whole range of services provided by the Library, the University of Pretoria Business Incubator and the Library Makerspace (Department of Library Services Annual Reports and Reviews, 2016).
A direct outcome has been research projects across faculties (Economic and Management Sciences, Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, Health Sciences, Humanities and Natural and Agricultural Sciences).
In Figure 9 below, a research project with the Department of Human Nutrition, in the Faculty of Health Sciences is one such example.
The aim of the project was to measure human perceptions of food portions in different environments and plate designs.
This required consistent food portions.
As such food models were scanned and modelled to specification and then pointed to test and obtain the required data for the research project.
Figure 9: 3D Designed and printed food designs for research in portion size perceptions Another example is a smart glove being used in the Veterinary Sciences field.
The researcher is investigating pressure sensitive situations while testing bovines.
In order to do so a smart glove was required to obtain this data using force touch sensors.
An example of the glove is shown in Figure 10 below.
Figure 10: Smart Glove for research in veterinary sciences From a teaching and learning support perspective, the Makerspace worked closely with an ingenious lecturer Dr. Punchoo to develop best methods and practices by using 3D technologies in new ways.
This collaboration allowed the Makerspace to work across disciplines and aid a visually impaired student.
The images used were derived from prescribed readings in the field of Human Physiology, and, through several tested techniques, adapted for easier use and eligibility in physical form.
Methods in the 3-D print design employed tracing, CAD software, mechanical reproduction with the printers and finally braille-labelling.
A legend was created in order to follow the tagged graphs to allow audio-feedback.
The student, tutor and lecturer were interviewed for feedback and confirmed revision areas required for 3-D print amendments.
By making the human physiology imagery legible in physical form, key concepts which aligned to studying strategies could be deployed, to allow teaching and assessment.
This can now be applied to other fields for enhanced learning.
An example is shown in Figure 11 below.
Figure 11: Printing a 3D diagram for a visually impaired student.
Poster about this project won first prize at the SAAHE 2018 conference 1.4 Challenges With the drive towards innovation, especially in a tertiary institution environment, challenges do arise.
The planning and coordination of setting up the 1st Academic Makerspace in South Africa meant that we did not have a local blueprint to follow, so there was a risk in whether the model would work locally Internally there was resistance by staff on the repurposing of space used for studying Organisational awareness challenge in that the majority of staff and students did not know the purpose of a Makerspace.
Makerspaces in general have issues around sustainability so there was a challenge on how we would fund and maintain the Makerspace once it was implemented Finding qualified staff to manage and coordinate the space 2.
Why a Digital Scholarship Centre (DSC) in the Library?
2.1 Rationale As mentioned in the introduction, academic libraries were quick to position themselves as incubators for this transformation of research, by developing shared virtual and physical places for fostering digital scholarly inquiry (NMC Horizon report, 2017).
According to the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) & the Coalition for Networked Coalition (CNI) report on international advances in digital scholarship “The digital scholarship centres (DSC) that have become fashionable are often located in the library providing a focus for this type of activity (broad set of digital services to support research)” (Lynch et al, 2016).
In his article “The University Library as Incubator for Digital Scholarship” (Sinclair, 2014) Brian Sinclair, associate dean, Public Services, at Georgia State University Library, describes the natural extension of existing library services into supporting Digital Scholarship and appropriately states that “In all of these ways, libraries can be seen as digital scholarship Makerspaces”.
2.2 Examples of international Digital Scholarship Centres Several international examples of Centres for Digital Scholarship in Academic Libraries exist, e.g.
: Centre for Digital Scholarship, University of Leiden Library, the Netherlands (Universiteit Leiden Centre for Digital Scholarship web site) The Leiden Centre for Digital Scholarship organises meetings and workshops and it is available for researchers to contact for questions, consultancy, and training on the following topics: Data management, Text & data mining, Open access, Publication advice, Copyright, Collaborative environments and GIS.
The Centre also offers services and advice for digital research projects.
Centre for Digital Scholarship, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, UK.
(University of Oxford Bodleian Libraries Centre for Digital Scholarship web site) The Centre works through diverse partnerships across the Bodleian Libraries, the wider University collections, the sciences, medical sciences, social sciences, humanities, and with the community to subvert and transform scholarship and provide international leadership in the field, by Defining and disseminating emergent digital scholarship Inspiring digital curiosity, and Opening imaginations Centre for Digital Scholarship, University of Queensland Library, Australia (University of Queensland Centre for Digital Scholarship web site) The Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS) is a purpose built teaching, research and presentation space in the Library that is ideal for analysing, visualising and interacting with most types of digital content in a highly collaborative environment.
The Centre for Digital Scholarship also recognises the changing needs of learning and assessment.
Increasingly, students are required to produce digital outputs such as digital objects or web content and online exhibitions.
In the Centre for Digital Scholarship, students will be able to access multi-functional spaces, technology and support.
Digital Scholarship Center, Temple University, USA (Temple University Digital Scholarship Center web site) The Digital Scholarship Center is a space for collaborative research in digital humanities, digital arts, cultural analytics, and critical making, ranging from web-scraping to textual analysis, from 3D modelling and printing to engineering with Arduinos.
The centre offers a wide-range of technical equipment, software, and support for scholarly practices involving digital methods for interdisciplinary research and pedagogy, including text mining and analysis, working in and creating 3D spaces, using geospatial technology, incorporating games into education, and much more.
The Digital Scholarship Center Makerspace offers space, equipment, and support for collaborative and critical making for academic and personal projects.
Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library, USA (Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship web site) The Center for Digital Scholarship, a cross-departmental group in the Brown University Library, supports digital scholarship for the Brown community and beyond by supporting scholarly and academic activities that are conducted or enhanced through the use of digital technology, or that engage with its effects.
Services include: Data curation Visualisation Spatial analysis Metadata creation, and Digital Humanities And DiRT (digital research tools) Directory, which is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use.
DiRT makes it easy for those conducting digital research to find resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mind mapping software (DiRT Digital Research Tools web site).
2.3 Services A study of the current services of Digital Scholarship Centres shows that there are a wide variety of services.
It can include the following: Research data management, including Data and Library Carpentry workshops Text & data mining Open Access Publication advice Digital Copyright Collaborative environments e.g.
Virtual Research Environments GIS 3D software & hardware Digital Humanities Services and advice for digital academic projects: Creating and managing digital collections Meta-data services Management of projects using digital research methods Long-term preservation Digitisation of analogue primary sources 3.
Current Digital Scholarship services that the Library provides The Library has delivered the following ‘Digital Scholarship’ services for several years, even prior to the establishment of a Makerspace: Research Data Management services Digitisation services Open access services via the Institutional Repository.
Metadata Creation Creating Digital Collections 4.
Expanding the Library Makerspace concept to create an UP Library Digital Scholarship Centre As Digital Scholarship Centres develop over time, they tend to include tools and technologies similar to those found in Makerspaces, further supported by other services also offered within the Library.
At UP we started with a successful Makerspace that can be leveraged to naturally extend and evolve into a fully-fledged Digital Scholarship Centre.
Currently the UP Library Makerspace addresses some of the needs for Digital Scholarship, but with the addition of new services, facilities and infrastructure can be turned into fully operational Digital Scholarship Centre.
The affordances of and existing Makerspace allows for the following overlapping Digital Scholarship services: 3D scanning, printing and design projects Training in coding, electronics and robotics Library and Data carpentry training e.g.
OpenRefine, Python, R Studio and Terminal Making space available for digital projects Services and advice for digital projects Virtual space for digital tools and virtual training Research data management portfolio Digitisation service e.g.
digitisation on demand Digital exhibits Repository for digital objects Virtual Research Environments (VRE’s) e.g.
Open Science Framework (OSF) Computational and Text Analysis Data Visualisation 6.
Conclusion The UP Library is privileged to have initiated a successful Makerspace that can form the basis for the development of digital scholarship services.
Activities and services that can be defined and classified as Digital Scholarship Activities are already being facilitated by the Library Makerspace, this makes the Makerspace the ideal unit from which to leverage and start a Digital Scholarship Centre.
Combining the features and services of a Makerspace with existing library services can quickly expedite establishing a fully functional centre.
Developing a Digital Scholarship Centre has also been identified as one of five strategic focus areas to transform the UP Library into a modern, dynamic academic library.
REFERENCES Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship website.
http://library.brown.edu/cds DIRT Digital Research Tools.
https://dirtdirectory.org/ Department of Library Services Annual Reports and Reviews.
(2015), The new Makerspace.11-12.
http://www.library.up.ac.za/aboutus/annual%20reports.htm Department of Library Services Annual Reports and Reviews.
(2016), Makerspace integration into the Entrepreneurship programme, 12. http://www.library.up.ac.za/aboutus/annual%20reports.htm Lippincott, J., Hemmasi, H., Lewis, V. (2014).Trends in Digital Scholarship Centers.
Educause Review.
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2014/6/trends-in-digital-scholarship-centers Lynch, C., Brown, S., Keene, C. Bruce, R. (2016).
International Advances in Digital Scholarship.
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/international-advances-in-digital-scholarship Mulligan, Rikk.
(2016).
Supporting Digital Scholarship.
SPEC Kit 350.
Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries May 2016. https://doi.org/10.29242/spec.350 https://publications.arl.org/Supporting-Digital-Scholarship-SPEC-Kit-350/ NMC Horizon Report.
(2017) Library Edition.
https://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2017-library-edition/ Olivier, E. (2015).
South Africa’s first Library Makerspace opens at the University of Pretoria.
https://www.up.ac.za/en/news/post_2062883-south-africas-first-library-Makerspace-opens-at-the-university-of-pretoriaSinclair, B.
(2014).
The University Library as Incubator for Digital Scholarship.
Educause Review.
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2014/6/the-university-library-as-incubator-for-digital-scholarship Temple University Digital Scholarship Center website.
https://sites.temple.edu/tudsc/ Universiteit Leiden Centre for Digital Scholarship web site.
https://www.library.universiteitleiden.nl/research-and-publishing/centre-for-digital-scholarship University of Oxford Bodleian Libraries Centre for Digital Scholarship web site.
https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/digitalscholarship/about University of Queensland Centre for Digital Scholarship web site.
https://web.library.uq.edu.au/locations-hours/centre-digital-scholarship All the web sites mentioned were accessed on 15 October 2018 Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial Introduction to Issue 64: Supporting the Power of Research Data Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial Introduction to Issue 64: Supporting the Power of Research Data Buzz data mobile software framework database infrastructure archives metadata digitisation blog repositories preservation cataloguing frbr curation dspace itunes twitter iphone ipad drupal vim e-science interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 64.
In these cash-strapped times among all the admonitions to save money here, and resources there, I rather hope to hear much about the necessity of protecting and building the knowledge economy if the UK is to make its way in the globalised world, since we cannot pretend to compete easily in other areas of endeavour.
Hence research has to be regarded as one of the aces remaining to us, and thus I hope the importance of gathering, managing and preserving for long-term access research outcomes will be widely appreciated and supported.
Consequently I am pleased to see Ariadne's small contribution to this end in the form of articles from Dorothea Salo and Brian Westra on how the role of data stewardship can be adopted by institutions and the support that data needs assessment can render to e-Science researchers.
In contributing her views on Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge, Dorothea Salo accepts that digital libraries and digital repositories should seem well placed to be stewards of digital research data.
However, she points out that the characteristics of research data do not automatically suit them to library workflow and infrastructure.
Library administrators will find that achieving a viable fit between the data and their systems is far from straight-forward.
Dorothea provides an overview of the salient characteristics of research data for such purposes in terms of their usage and scope, pointing out that small volumes of data can present as many difficulties as the large volumes.
Unless there has been some unanticipated conferring in preparation of their Ariadne articles, Dorothea and Brian Westra [1] seem to be thinking on much the same lines when it comes to the demands on projects made by large and small volumes of data.
Not least are the difficulties that arise in terms of human resources where big data projects at least benefit rapidly from a relatively small amount of expert intervention unlike their smaller counterparts.
She also describes the difficulties created by the wide variety of research data forms and the attendant variety of file formats thus generated.
The data may be neither interoperable nor preservable but the way in which researchers interact with data must also be carefully understood.
Dorothea identifies a further difficulty for libararies in that they cannot count on a 'clean slate'; the data in question may have been organised inexpertly or saved in formats ill-suited to long-term reuse, not forgetting that there is still a significant amount of research data in analogue form which remains expensive to digitise.
The foregoing problems are then compounded by the culture of project organisation which does little to encourage the accumulation of good data practice, or encourage the curation of intermediate data unlikely to make it into final results and publications.
The absence of widespread use of common data standards can only exacerbate the situation.
Having provided an overview of the nature of data on the one side of the equation, Dorothea furnishes a portrait of the characteristics of digital libraries and how their technical and in organisational infrastructure are likely to match to a data stewardship role.
A primary characteristic that is far from promising in terms of handling the backlog is the high-volume, labour-intensive nature of their digitisation process.
Their curatorial approach is unlikely to cope readily with the diversity of format and (she would contend, sometimes dubious) quality of much of researchers' data.
Dorothea then turns her attention to the characteristics of institutional repositories and identifies the reality of their being best suited to standard research publications, while other kinds of data struggle in such an environment as do their depositors.
She also points out that IRs' responsibilities frequently extend beyond the boundaries inside which they were designed to operate.
For example, a researcher has only to move on from their institution to create real difficulties.
Meanwhile from the end-users' point of view, the interaction with IR software is frequently less polished than in the case of dedicated platforms such as SlideShare and lacks a flexible architecture.
Having characterised so cogently the characteristics of the various candidates for the data stewardship role, the author goes on to offer recommendations for them all.
I am indebted to Brian Westra for his article Data Services for the Sciences: A Needs Assessment in which he points out that 'Academic libraries are beginning to examine what the expansion of data-intensive e-science means to scholarly communication and information services, and some are reshaping their own programmes to support the digital curation needs of research staff'.
He states that where libraries are looking to support e-science work in the management of research data, 'A needs assessment can help to characterise scientists' research methods and data management practices, highlighting gaps and barriers, and thereby improve the odds for libraries to plan appropriately and effectively implement services in the local setting.'
Brian describes the approach adopted by Oregon's Science Data Services Librarian in the conduct of a science data needs assessment.
Notable was the decision to include a wide range of staff when recruiting participants to develop a project plan.
The literature review provided useful resources and the Data Asset Framework (DAF) methodology was identified as a tested approach.
The author points to the value of one of its recommendations, namely the benefit to be derived from a business case set in the local context as a convincing approach to obtaining managerial buy-in.
It was interesting to note the effective use of face-to-face interviews combined with the nimble development environment offered by Drupal to create a clear understanding of context and needs on the human front supported by the opportunity to review and add information on scientists' data assets after the face-to-face interview, though uptake of the latter opportunity was underwhelming.
Brian provides a summary of the data management issues most frequently identified by the interviewees.
They included anxieties surrounding back-up and storage of data, data management tools, access issues, among others.
Not for the first time, as does Dorothea Salo, Brian identifies the need for a common understanding of terminology.
It is also interesting to note that the issue of 'big' and 'small data' surfaced in these interviews.
Brian would be gratified to learn that respondents, while asserting that data management needs arose only in 'big data' projects, also admitted ultimately that small-scale datasets could be significant in their work, and, as Dorothea Salo would contend [2], in need of proper management.
Brian reports that the needs assessment has shown itself to be useful in discovering the data curation requirements of research scientists and that the employment of the DAF assessment tool was 'critical to our ability to implement an assessment in a timely and successful manner.'
Ariadne can perhaps claim something of a passable record in its efforts to keep track of the developments in digital repository software [3][4][5][6] over the years and so it is pleasing to be able to publish the contribution by Ed Fay entitled Repository Software Comparison: Building Digital Library Infrastructure at LSE.
LSE Library collects materials for both research and teaching across a range of boundaries and its Digital Library Management and Infrastructure Development initiative has been engaged in the comparison of repository software, a summary of which Ed kindly provides in his article.
He begins by providing an overview of the project's methodology, explaining how they reached the capability to conduct an effective analysis of different repository software.
By early 2010, the project was in a position to understand the core functional criteria necessary to carry out a high-level comparison of the repository software options.
Ed goes on to describe the various materials held in the LSE's digital collections, how they are currently stored and managed and their related functional requirements in terms of operation and preservation.
Ed then goes on to describe LSE Libraries' digital technical aims for these diverse holdings and the project's decision to adopt a modular approach to the development of the new functionality and the associated benefits, such as, for example, the manner in which a modular architecture facilitates interfaces with existing systems such as catalogues.
In reporting the testers' findings, Ed rightly emphasises the fact that repository software will prove more or less useful in the particular context of the testers.
Ed goes on to detail the testers' findings in terms of functional area, testing criteria and a summary of findings and also supplies notes on the resource implications for the project's choice in terms of the human effort as well as the anticipated effort required to set up the chosen repository software.
Ed completes his contribution with some down-to-earth conclusions about the development and maintenance of digital library infrastructure at the local level.
In Rewriting the Book: On the Move with the Library of Birmingham, Brian Gambles introduces the motivation behind the Library of Birmingham project entitled 'Rewriting the Book' which seeks to address the digitally driven user-oriented future the Library envisages.
BG outlines for us the explosion in mobile device usage with the advent of the iPhone and the enormous take-up of apps in the cultural heritage sector with advances in GPS applications offering users considerably more than the apps delivering static content.
The increasing influence of mobile usage has brought about a change in the traditional library-library user relationship where greater emphasis is placed upon collaborative working and the contribution the public can make.
In the light of the increasing acceptance of the omnipresence of mobile connectivity, Brian details for us the strategy has evolved at LoB by way of response.
Brian details the principal characteristics of mobile connectivity as they realate to the changes libraries and archives must contemplate.
To emphasise the point, he describes the effects of just a few of the disruptive technologies that have emerged in the past few years.
Brian then provides an overview of LoB's thinking aloud about the mobile systems under current consideration such as iPad, iTunes U, etc., the latter for example representing much potential as a means of disseminating better expert library and archives knowledge.
He also emphasises the importance his library places upon information on users' experience and mobility.
The difficulty, he perceives, lies in how to discover exactly what that is.
In Public Library 2.0: Do We Need a Culture Change?, Sarah Hammond looks into the state of UK public libraries' involvement in social media, taking forward previous research which examined the engagement of public libraries with, in particular, blogging.
Her findings are not altogether encouraging.
A significant number of blogs has become inactive though few are actually defunct.
Findings from the USA were not dissimilar.
The public library-based blogs did not compare very favourably with HEI counterparts.
Neither were the causes of the relatively low level of public library engagement with blogging particularly surprising: technological and organisational barriers, together with lack of knowledge, engagement and resources.
While the emphasis on the worst difficulties besetting intending bloggers seemed to differ between US and UK respondents, a theme of operational resistance to professional adoption of blogging nonetheless emerged either side of the Atlantic.
Notably the author is able to discern green buds of recognition among senior managers that were less than apparent as recently as 2008.
Moreover, whereas some practitioners in public libraries and elsewhere have come to regard Web 2.0 applications as a catalyst, the re-structuring of public library organisations does not provide an environment in which staff will naturally tend to experiment, let alone adopt.
Managers hungry for justificatory usage statistics would be misguided in laying too much reliance on the quantity of users' comments, Sarah points out, but she does recommend that organisations using blogs should actively manage links to and from their home page in order to sustain their blogs effectively.
She likewise highlights the importance of content feeds in keeping material fresh and up to date.
She points to research that indicates, whatever managers may feel, that library staff derive considerable benefit from reading other public library staff's blogs, not just in terms of information and improvements in practice, but from the standpoint of staff morale.
Even more compelling are the benefits that emerge when the users are able to read their public library's blog.
Researchers have discovered notable and increased usage of resources that have been publicised in a library blog.
Arguably, where public libraries' adoption of blogging and other Library 2.0 applications can have most telling effect is among young people.
Given the low floor of usage by that age group, any increase in their uptake will be measurable to the delight of any hard-pressed manager.
Equally significant, of course, is that it is an age group that, as early adopters, will embrace Library 2.0 opportunities much more than average.
She goes on to describe success factors that have been identified in thriving blogs.
One, very importantly (and close to my heart), identifies the importance of attention to content rather than vehicle, and equally the value of integrated promotion based on widely linked content.
Given she had favourtable things to say about the 23 Things programme, I feel certain Sarah will be pleased to see the contribution from the following public library colleague.
While accepting that some of the statistics for use of social networks were doubtless open to debate, Helen Leech argues in 23 Things in Public Libraries that there is little doubt that social media and Web 2.0 applications have changed many users' behaviour radically.
As a consequence, so have practices within public libraries.
Helen explains the drivers behind greater public library response to increases in use of social media and Web 2.0 applications as diverse as the push to involve the public in Race Online, the shift away from email to more collaborative methods of communication, the impetus from government in the form of Communities in Control, as well as professional and economic drivers.
Helen consequently regarded Helen Blowers' 23 Things as a welcome answer to the training needs of many colleagues in public libraries.
That it was gratis and unrestricted in blog form was, for the time, revolutionary.
Since 2006, some of Blowers' material had aged and so moves were made to update it and also orientate it towards UK users in the public library domain.
Helen describes efforts to create the new material more appropriate to the needs of public library staff.
This work was not without its own difficulties in terms of technology use, but it also benefitted from feedback from their supporters.
Areas of effort were also identified that may prove common to many public library authorities, eg, bench-marking.
23 Things does strike the interested bystander as something of a welcome development.
In her article Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia, Rose Holley describes a major development in Australian digital cultural heritage.
In fact she even welcomes the disruptive technologies that are emerging, of which Trove arguably is representative.
She seems them as an advantage since they create a role for the interested public.
Rose maintains that the public's increasing involvement is to be welcomed since it emphasises society's interest in creating cultural content.
She makes the case for libraries as a vanguard of innovation in terms of their greater sustainability in comparison with commercial organisations such as Google.
She also maintains that their aim to provide universal access sits well with current trends in innovation in this direction and points to the National Library of Australia's strategic objectives as evidence; and Rose sees Trove as an outcome of this approach.
Trove differs from most search engines since it explores resources held on the deep web as in collection databases.
However the Trove team wishes to see more commonly used engines harvesting their resources as well.
In their description of the work and impact of Intute, Angela Joyce, Linda Kerr, Tim Machin, Paul Meehan and Caroline Williams remind us in their article Intute: Reflections at the End of an Era that in the 1990s there were not many services that brought together academic content that was easily accessible.
The authors point to the enormous influence that Google and subsequently Google Scholar had upon their field as they reached deeper into the hidden web, but they also point to the failings they exposed in inexperienced hands as indicated by Brabazon [7].
A key aim of Intute has been to support the development of critical analysis of burgeoning Web content.
They also point to the research-related work that has derived from initiatives such as the ViM (Value for money in automatic Metadata generation) Project, and now PERTAINS and EASTER projects.
They accept that communicating to researchers the developments in other specialist Web content had not been straight-forward.
The authors describe the effect of reduced funding on service capabilities and the project's efforts to explore other business models than grant-funded operation.
The project's unique selling point of human selection and description of Web sites appeared to lose out to the current trend Web 2.0-driven contributions, yet questions that arise in respect of Web 2.0-driven contribution patterns have been asked before, principally will such a model jeopardise public trust [8] in the service?
In FRBR in Practice: The Celia Library for the Blind, Finland , Wendy Taylor and Kathy Teague introduce their work by describing the services offered by the RNIB which include the need to catalogue all RNIB holdings on its accessible formats catalogue.
It was to see whether FRBR might offer them a means of investigating the 'possibility of cataloguing the accessible format, e.g.
Braille at the manifestation level rather than as a holding attached to the bibliographic record describing the print book' that they sought and won the Ulverscroft/IFLA Best Practice Award.
Wendy and Kathy also provide a brief comparison of the two libraries, there being significant differences between the charity, RNIB, and the state-funded Celia Library.
They also describe the particular nature of cataloguing material in multiple formats for people with visual impairment, which is further complicated in Finland by the fact the country is relatively rare in that many of its citizens are readily conversant with the language of their neighbour Sweden and so the need to describe the correct language format is a frequent one, facilitated by the nature of FRBR.
As usual, we offer our At the Event section, which has seen what I suspect may be a record number of contributions from across many fields of endeavour, combining fresh instances of events Ariadne frequently covers as well as reports from new areas of interest which I hope you will also find interesting.
This issue also offers reviews on on a work on building and supporting online communities, a Festschrift celebrating the work of Professor Peter Brophy, founder of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management, a manual to help support your use of an iPad, and work which examines the future of digital information and emerging patterns of scholarly communication.
In this last instance, readers who know or have read reviews by Muhammad Rafiq in the past will doubtless join with me in relief at the news that none of his family in Pakistan has been affected by the appalling floods that continue to ravage the country at the moment.
There seems little sign of a let-up and the numbers of people seriously affected are on an unprecedented scale [9][10][11].
I will no longer, however, enjoin you to peruse the news and events section Ariadne has offered; in recognition of the changing times, we are discontinuing the Newsline and have already instituted an Ariadne twitter channel [12] which will serve you with news items relating to Ariadne's output, authors and other related matters.
But as ever, I do hope you will enjoy the bumper Issue 64.
References "Data Services for the Sciences: A Needs Assessment" Brian Westra, July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/westra/ "Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge" Dorothea Salo, July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/salo/ "Fedora UK & Ireland / EU Joint User Group Meeting" Chris Awre, January 2010, Ariadne, Issue 62 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/fedora-eu-rpt/ "E-Archiving: An Overview of Some Repository Management Software Tools," Marion Prudlo, April 2005, Ariadne, Issue 43 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/prudlo/ "Versioning in Repositories: Implementing Best Practice' Jenny Brace, July 2008, Ariadne Issue 56 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/brace/ "DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations" Richard D Jones, January 2004, Ariadne Issue 38 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/jones/ "The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age" (Review), Judy Reading, January 2008, Ariadne Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/reading-rvw/ "Cautionary Tales: Archives 2.0 and the Diplomatic Historian" Michael Kennedy, October 2009, Ariadne Issue 61 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/kennedy/ Bereaved Pakistanis speak of flood horrors, BBC News, 5 August 2010 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10879273 DEC Pakistan floods appeal: UK donations reach £10.5m, BBC News, 12 August 2010 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10952844 Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) http://www.dec.org.uk/ Ariadne twitter channel http://twitter.com/ariadne_ukoln Author Details Richard Waller Ariadne Editor Email: ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "Editorial Introduction to Issue 64: Supporting the Power of Research Data" Author: Richard Waller Publication Date: 30-July-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 64 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/editorial/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Mob Rule Learning Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Mob Rule Learning Buzz archives blog twitter hashtag research Citation BibTex RIS Fiona MacLellan reviews a book which discusses the current unconference phenomenon and highlights the learning opportunities that these environments offer.
The unconference phenomenon is something that I have heard lots about and have previously tried to read information about; however what this basic research has never been able to do is convince me of the necessity for the unconference or camp environment.
Michelle Boule in this concise and easy-to-read book has managed to go at least part way to achieving this.
Through use of case study, interview and example, the book provides an overview of the history of the unconference alongside the benefits it may represent to individuals and organisations.
Boule illustrates the benefits of traditional conferences whilst also identifying their limitations, and therefore demonstrates where the unconference fits in.
Contents and Structure The twelve chapters of the book are divided into two sections, and they proceed in what to my mind is a logical order.
The chapters follow an identical format in each of the two sections, starting with a look at the traditional aspect, and then defining what the author perceives as different in the new movement.
The middle two chapters of each section then highlight possible ways for readers to set up aspects of the unconference approach for themselves.
The final two chapters look at real examples and the future.
More details for each of the sections are shown in the next two paragraphs.
The first part of the book covers the unconference movement and what it actually means.
The chapters in this part cover information such as where the unconference idea originated and why the author and other cited experts felt it was a necessary development.
There is also a useful chapter on how to plan a camp or unconference which can act as a checklist as well as giving more details on the various aspects on the list.
The penultimate chapter of this part covers case studies of seven different unconferences which give a great real-life look at how an unconference can develop and operate at a practical level.
The first part of the book ends with a look at how the unconference concept can be applied in the future.
I found it useful and interesting to learn the history of the unconference and have the rules and guidelines explained whilst also being encouraged to look forward and identify ways the elements of the unconference could be applied in my own organisation.
The second part of the book looks at how unconferences change the manner in which we learn and interact with learning.
It focuses more on the education and learning gained rather than the unconference event itself.
Boule starts the second part with a look at traditional learning events and conferences, and discusses the aspects of those events which may fail to benefit learners to any great degree.
This overview then leads nicely onto the benefits of updating the conference experience and then expounds upon the advantages to organisations of using the ‘mob’ available to them in order to create learning events and opportunities.
A further chapter covers how to get the most out of the people involved in the unconference or camp by looking at the obstacles that might crop up and how to overcome them.
There is also a section on how to encourage the individuals who take part in such an event.
The penultimate chapter of this section again offers case studies, in this case four separate ones that focus on the application of the unconference and mob learning in education.
Again, repeating the format of the first section, the final chapter is looking forward to the future of allowing groups of people to educate themselves rather than relying solely on a single figurehead speaker or even multiple figureheads in the more conventional didactic conferences.
I feel that this second section, whilst restricting itself to the educational aspects of unconferences, may be the most influential in terms of demonstrating opportunities to apply the idea to every-day work or learning opportunities.
The book also makes reference to a supporting Web site [1] which offers ‘links to new tools and information’ [2].
Unfortunately the Web site is not as formally structured as the book, which I guess is to be expected given the nature of the format, but it makes using the Web resource confusing and many of the ‘recent articles’ section, articles written by Boule, are available only to subscribers.
The book also includes a twitter hashtag to promote discussion of the book, however there appears to be no discussion undertaken recently, perhaps an inclusion of a twitter archive on the Web site could improve the facilitation of discussion as twitter searches only bring back tweets from the previous week [3].
So, whilst I understand and notionally welcome the addition of a Web resource page, in this particular case I feel the execution may need some improvement before I would consider it relevant enough to be of real use.
Further Thoughts This book proved useful to me since, having never attended an unconference or camp, I now feel I have a better understanding of the phenomenon and would be able to make an informed decision as to participation in such an event in the future.
I would however also say that I imagine the book may not be as useful for readers who have experienced an unconference themselves, although I feel they would still appreciate the background historical information and some of the theoretical applications.
The author’s view that unconferences are a step forward from traditional conferences is however one to which I do not entirely subscribe.
Boule makes her case well, and with plenty of examples to support her argument; however I’m not convinced that they are a replacement for traditional conferences.
In various places throughout the book Boule does acknowledge the fact that unconferences are not right for every setting; nor does she belittle the traditional conference setting, which I welcomed.
I felt that the book gave a balanced and rational look at the unconference movement, arguing that the traditional conference is not meeting all the needs of its target audience.
Boule even suggests a halfway house between the emerging unconference setting and the traditional conference: If traditional conferences incorporated some unconference elements into their programming, they could add a level of energy not found with a simple speaker behind the podium.
[4] The book also makes repeated reference to the concept of a ‘backchannel’ which is the conversation that exists online simultaneously during the conference or learning event (p.88).
This element which exists at every conference I’ve attended, whether in the online spaces such as twitter and blogs, or face-to-face discussions among delegates over the refreshment break, is the instrument that I believe challenges Boule’s assertion that traditional conferences are becoming ‘dull and uninspiring’ [4].
The very existence of backchannels suggests that although the traditional conference is still following a conventional structure it need not be seen as a one-way conversation.
Perhaps I’ve been lucky in that all the conferences I’ve been able to attend have included some form of unconference style element, either through the inclusion of a twitter hashtag or sessions that are interactive and enable multi-way conversations to take place.
The final part of the book, and well worth a mention as far as I’m concerned, is the ‘tools and glossary’ section at the end.
The beauty of this section is that it gives examples of the different tools that can assist with running an unconference event.
It also offers a discussion of some of the key points to consider when picking the tools, for example whether to opt for hosted or non-hosted services, and what the difference between the two options really means.
For some, perhaps more technically minded readers, this may seem a little patronising, but I felt it was written in a reader-friendly style and gave me new ways of thinking about and explaining the differences.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the list of tools, many of which I had heard of or indeed used, but remarked also that, for each of the sections of tools, there were one or two new ones for me to explore and investigate further.
Conclusion Whilst I found this book an interesting read, I do wonder whether it might get a bit lost in terms of its approach.
Proponents of the unconference movement will not need convincing of its benefits; however those who are more cynical about the phenomenon will, I feel, not choose to read the book, thereby placing it between two stools in terms of potential readership.
I would however recommend the book to anyone interested in finding out more about the unconference movement.
Whilst reading the book has not been able to convince me that unconferences are necessarily the type of environment I personally would learn in, it has nonetheless taken some of the mystique and fear out of future participation.
I would also suggest that the book may provide some interesting ideas on how to change team meetings and brainstorming sessions for managers of teams, particularly if radical change is required.
However I would add the caveat that, for the unconference concept to work, not only do the participants have to be willing and feel supported, but senior management needs to accept the suggestions offered and be willing at least to try some of them out.
Overall I enjoyed reading the book and feel I’ve learned more about a topic that seems to be assuming greater importance in my professional life.
References Boule, M. 2011.
“Mob Rule” http://www.wanderingeyre.com/mobrule Boule, M. “Mob rule learning: camps, unconferences, and trashing the talking head.” 2011, p. xiii.
Phan Hong Thong.
“Search’s time limit” https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/465 Boule, M. “Mob rule learning: camps, unconferences, and trashing the talking head.” 2011, p. 88.
Author Details Fiona MacLellan Academic Librarian University of Northampton Email: fiona.maclellan@northampton.ac.uk Web site: http://www.northampton.ac.uk/people/fiona.maclellan Fiona MacLellan is an Academic Librarian for the University of Northampton, with responsibility for the Schools of The Arts and Science and Technology.
She has research interests in Reading Groups in a HE setting and referencing systems affecting reading comprehension and fluency.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Practical Open Source Software for Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Practical Open Source Software for Libraries Buzz data software wiki database firefox openoffice repositories graphics linux dvd dspace wordpress podcast moodle drupal licence cd-rom interoperability research vufind Citation BibTex RIS Muhammad Rafiq takes a look at a work on the open source community and open source software.
Open source (OS) usually refers to an application whose source code is made available for use or modification in line with users’ needs and requirements.
OS projects usually develop in the public domain where contributors participate in a collaborative manner and update or refine the product.
OS offers more flexibility and freedom than software purchased with licence restrictions.
Both the OS community and the library world share many common principles.
They share and promote open standards and believe in sharing.
Open source software (OSS) often provides greater freedom of choice and is considered by many as more cost-effective.
Although certain costs are associated with OSS such as the cost of technical support, training and further development, it is argued that OSS remains less expensive than many proprietary choices.
However, the major reason to choose an OS application is the freedom it confers to change the source code for individual requirements.
This book provides an extensive introduction to the OSS concept, the OS community and discusses the OSS choices available to libraries.
The OSS covered in this title spans everything from day-to-day, Web access and applications, media, collections, research tools, and automation software.
This title also offers an overview of common barriers, both real and imagined, to apply OSS in real world.
Case study interviews with people using open source applications in libraries around the world are also included and present real-life examples from libraries and librarians of all types and locations.
In other words, this title provides a toolbox of practical software that librarians can use both inside and outside the library to meet their technological needs.
However, it may well be considered as an introductory text.
The book is based on the author’s extensive practical experience with OSS both within and beyond the library community.
The book is divided into two sections: Introduction to Open Source, and Practical Applications for Libraries.
The first section consists of four chapters which define OS, explains the facts about OS, and OS principles for libraries.
They debunk the common myths and provide a brief overview of the history of open source software.
The second section comprises seven chapters that encompass the OS tools for day-to-day library operations and the technological needs of an information organisation.
Chapter 1, What is Open Source, defines and discusses some of the hallmarks of open source history and give an understanding of the ideals surrounding open source activity.
The author establishes that OSS projects normally start to address an individual problem, ‘scratching an itch’.
Linux, the most popular OS project on the Web today, is an example of this approach.
An important characteristic of OS applications is the freedom to change or distribute the software free of cost.
Sharing is another important characteristic of OSS development as free collaborative approach we see in action.
Chapter 2, Community and Open Source, identifies the key patterns of operation to build an active and healthy community for OSS development.
OSS communities work as volunteers adopt and pursue threads of effort in line with their own preferences and expertise.
There are certain rules, unwritten, of OS community working: extensive communication through mailings lists, bug databases, forums, wikis, etc.
There is an etiquette which promotes openness and honesty; respect for each other; a willingness to teach, and transparency.
Governance of such communal effort is achieved through designating particular members or bodies to tasks, for example by making one person or body to test and include the new codes and patches in the source code of the product.
Debunking the Myths, Chapter 3, exposes the common myths people propose about OSS.
The author stresses that home-grown software is not OSS.
A home-grown system is managed and maintained by the home organisation while OSS is managed and maintained by an entire community that normally ranges across international borders.
Another myth is the security of OSS.
Engard rejects this myth by offering the comparison of Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Another myth, the risks associated with OSS is also rejected by the author.
She considers that the both proprietary software and OSS attract the same level of risk, but OSS presents less risk because of the higher level of transparency and interoperability with which it is associated.
In Chapter 4, Open Source and Libraries, the author advocates the alignment of libraries and the OS community.
Both libraries and the OS community practise the common principles of free access, freedom to use information, and gift culture.
Gift culture is giving something without expecting any monetary benefits in return, is a common characteristic between libraries and the OS community.
She further presents the reasons for libraries to adopt OSS.
Libraries are facing shrinking budgets while OSS offers cost-effective solutions for the development of technological applications.
Gift culture, not to expect any monetary benefits in return, is a common characteristic between libraries and the OS community.
Chapters 5 to 11 introduce the readers to OSS applications in a concise but effective way.
Case studies are available for every application, which also present the general points of view of the people who were involved in these OSS applications.
Chapter 5, Open Source for Day to Day Operations, gives a brief introduction of OSS options available to perform day-to-day and general operations: Linux as operating system; VirtualBox to use multiple operating systems on a single computer; OpenOffice suite for word-processing, spreadsheet, presentations, etc.
; Libstats to collect reference statistics in libraries; and LimeSurvey to conduct polls and surveys.
Chapter 6, Open Source Web Access, introduces the reader to open source Webbrowsing tools: Firefox, LibX, and Zotero.
These tools offer an enhanced and value-added Web experience for library users.
Mozilla’s Thunderbird for emailing and Pidgin for instant messaging are also discussed.
There are certain OS applications available for media applications.
Chapter 7, Open Source Media Application, familiarises us with: GIMP, a suite for photo editing and graphic operations; Scribus for desktop publishing; Audacity for audio editing; CamStudio for screencasting.
Audacity may be used to produce podcasts.
CamStudio enables us to record videos from our computer screen that may be used to produce tutorials and training materials.
Libraries are developing new roles like Webmasters, etc.
Chapter 8, Open Source on the Web, offers a glimpse of some OS applications that are available for the librarians and people who are performing such jobs.
Filezilla is an easy-to-use application for file transfer from a local machine to Web server.
A concise introduction is also available for content management (CMS) solutions, a major task for libraries in today’s world.
Engard discusses Joomla, Drupal, MaiaCMS, and WordPress as content management solutions.
Discussion on wikis, an alternative to CMS, is also discussed.
Wikis are growing in popularity and enable users to participate in the creation of content.
Libraries are making their collections accessible to wider world through their Web sites.
Digital libraries and institutional repositories are entering in the sphere of library users to offer access to full-text information remotely.
In chapter 9, Open Sourcing Collections, the author presents OS tools to build digital libraries and institutional repositories.
The book introduces us to Greenstone, DSpace, and Kete.
Greenstone is an easy-to-use digital library software to build digital libraries on the Web or to distribute data via digital media such as CD-ROM or DVD.
DSpace offers an enhanced ability to store various data types and offer remote access to stored content.
Kete allows the library to host and moderate the content added by the community members as well as to publish library’s contents.
Libraries, currently, are not only offering digital access to their own collection but also connecting the users to related resources on other Web sites.
Libraries offer lists of links on specific topics.
Chapter 10, Open Source Research Tools, introduces us to OS applications that may help libraries to support such activities.
SubjectPlus and Library à la Carte™ allows library staff to create dynamic subject guides without having any knowledge of Web design or development.
The library’s responsibility to teach and train its users about library use, new technologies, research practices, etc is more visible nowadays.
This title introduces us to Moodle, an OS course management system which helps to manage course materials, online lectures, research references, etc.
Chapter 11, Open Source Library Automation, presents the OS choices for libraries to automate their basic but imperative functions.
This book briefly introduces us to a wide range of OS automation solutions including Scriblio, VuFind, Blacklight, SOPAC2, Koha, and Evergreen.
In addition to the 11 chapters, there are three appendices.
Appendix 1, provides an OSS Survey that received responses from all over the world.
Appendix 2 has Web links cited in the book while Appendix 3 contains additional references.
This book is recommended for staff at all levels within Library and Information Services as well as LIS students studying to become librarians.
Author Details Muhammad Rafiq PhD Scholar Department of Library and Information Science University of the Punjab Lahore Pakistan Email: rafiqfsd@hotmail.com Return to top Article Title: “Practical Open Source Software for Libraries” Author: Muhammad Rafiq Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/rafiq-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Europeana Open Culture 2010 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Europeana Open Culture 2010 Buzz data framework database dissemination portal archives metadata digitisation blog copyright video flickr gis aggregation provenance authentication standards Citation BibTex RIS David Fuegi and Monika Segbert-Elbert report on the annual Europeana Conference, held at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam in October 2010.
The Europeana Conference is a free annual event which highlights current challenges for libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual archives and which looks for practical solutions for the future.
It connects the main actors in cultural and scientific heritage in order to build networks and establish future collaborations.
The Europeana Open Culture 2010 Conference [1] was the third annual conference and the biggest so far.
It focused on how the cultural institutions can create public value by making digital, cultural and scientific information openly available.
The conference attracted more than 360 people from every country in Europe to explore the risks and rewards of openness of code, data and content and showcase sites and activities that are the best European examples of Open Culture.
Amongst the speakers were representatives of Google Books, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the European Commission.
As usual, many pre-conference and post-conference meetings clustered around the event involving, for example, the Europeana Foundation Board, the newly formed Council of Content Providers and Aggregators, and Europeana v1.0 workgroup members.
A Word about Europeana Itself Europeana.eu is about opening access to Europe's cultural and scientific heritage and making Europe's rich and diverse content easily available to users whenever they want and wherever they are.
It's also about giving material from trusted sources, and how these sources can keep up with evolving needs of their users, especially the Web 2.0 generation.
For the institutions involved, which number more than 1500 content providers already, Europeana provides a unique opportunity to open up their collections to millions of users from all across Europe as well as other parts of the world.
It is a means to drive more traffic to their sites, since Europeana always refers to the original source of the material.
Europeana also brings institutions from the cultural and scientific sectors together and facilitates knowledge exchange among them, providing a way to learn about new projects, best practices and technological developments in the heritage sector.
It also helps institutions build and expand professional networks, meet potential project partners, and be part of a key initiative that continues to attract strong endorsement from the European Commission.
Elisabeth Niggemann, Chair of the Europeana Foundation, welcomes the delegates.
"Europeana is the EU's most visible expression of our digital heritage," the European Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in her opening speech at the Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century (AVA21) Conference [2] in Ghent, Belgium, on 13 October 2010.
Indeed, currently Europeana gives multilingual access to over 13 million items.
It shares diverse content from world famous works to hidden treasures, from books to film, inspiring innovation, creativity and collaboration.
Conference Overview Jill Cousins, Director of Europeana Foundation Jill gave the first presentation at the conference and explained that Open Culture 2010 was about openness: open content, open data, open source code; and how museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections can create public value by making digital, cultural and scientific information openly available.
Jill began with the question 'What are we now?'
She noted Europeana's progress from prototype to public service over the last two years and highlighted key developments Europeana has to take into consideration to remain pertinent to its stakeholders, namely, users, content providers and policy makers.
Open Culture 2010: More than 360 people from all across Europe participated in the conference.
There is increased political and economic understanding that access to culture is the foundation for a creative economy.
Culture is perceived to lead to creativity, which in turn leads to social innovation and to cultural and economic growth.
With geo-political fragmentation and growing nationalism in Europe, politicians believe it is increasingly important to create more understanding on a European level through culture.
At the same time, potential end-users of Europeana are evolving from passive consumers into active participants.
They expect content to be free and easily accessible through the channels with which they are used to working.
Cultural institutions, on the other hand, have to deal with major intellectual property rights (IPR) issues at a time when a lack of funding and of good business models limit their ability to make content accessible, while digitisation requires them to make significant shifts in their organisational cultures.
Europeana, for its part, has to relate positively and effectively to users, content providers and policy makers, and constantly adapt to the present realities of the market.
Having set the scene, Jill moved on to answer the questions "What should we be?"
and "What shall we do?"
Europeana sees its future as following four main paths.
Firstly, it will aggregate content and build the open trusted source for European digital cultural material.
Secondly, it will distribute this material and make it accessible to users wherever they are, whenever they want it.
Thirdly, it will facilitate innovation in the cultural heritage sector.
Fourthly, to achieve these aims, it will continue to engage all the relevant players to create dialogue, participation and increasing consensus.
Conference Themes and Structure Besides plenaries and keynotes, the conference offered three parallel thematic tracks on the key topics in the heritage sector: linked data; user-generated content; and the risks and rewards of opening up data and content.
Thematic Tracks Three lead experts briefly introduced the three main themes of the conference, after which delegates went into break-out sessions on each of the themes.
In these interactive sessions, conference participants formed discussion groups, where they shared their experience, exchanged ideas, addressed main challenges, and looked for practical solutions.
The panel of specialists helped moderate these discussions, offering their indispensable expertise and capturing main outcomes of the discourse.
Applications of Conference Themes Several Web initiatives were presented the next day, demonstrating outstanding applications of the conference themes: 1001 Stories about Denmark – User-generated Content Solar Stormwatch Crowdsourcing BBC Wildlife Finder Linked Data Institut National de l'Audiovisuel – Remixing content (unfortunately, the speaker was unable to present but the presentation is available) These Web initiatives demonstrated the rewards that opening up brings, since their popularity and success emanates from their commitment to openness and making information widely available.
Linked Data Interest is growing in the potential of the semantic web to link online data and, by so doing, create a powerful resource for knowledge sharing and creation.
Europeana's vast authority-controlled metadata index provides a critical mass of raw material for innovative experiments.
Together with its related projects, Europeana offers a unique locus from which to link cultural heritage data sources.
Applications can be developed that follow their noses through overlapping or complementary sets of data, making connections as they go.
Culture's institutional linked data can make use of these applications and benefit from enrichment and connection to other domains' data, or to user-generated data.
Delegates were invited to consider case studies and think about questions such as possible usage scenarios envisaged for cultural linked data, how the cultural heritage domain should position itself to take advantage of these opportunities and Europeana's role in facilitating this process.
User-generated Content Folksonomies, Flickr commons and Wikipedia highlight the value of the user's contribution – a value starting to be taken seriously by the professional heritage expert.
Users' specialist information, their unique artefact, their photo of a monument, of planets, of people, etc, can make an important contribution to the historic record or lead to scientific discoveries.
Whilst there is recognition of the value of user-generated content, there are practical issues around implementation.
Delegates therefore focused on one main issue: how can heritage organisations – and Europeana best harness users' enthusiasm, authenticate their offerings and mediate their engagement?
Risks and Rewards Opening up data or content for reuse, potentially in a commercial context, can seem a high-risk strategy for heritage institutions.
On the other hand, the rewards in terms of new applications, innovation and creative enterprise have wide social benefits.
Equally, institutions need to remain relevant in the 21st century; to wall off their content is to risk marginalisation.
This is why they find themselves continually engaged in a struggle to solve an equation with two unknown variables: the risks of opening their content; and the returns, both financial and promotional, that such openness can generate.
The issues considered by delegates in this stream included: Does openness threaten current revenue streams, control over data standards and content, or scholarly standards of provenance and authentication?
What are the legal risks of digitising and displaying orphan works online?
How do we manage the dichotomy of making money while honouring the public domain?
What are the potential rewards; and how can Europeana help to secure them?
Keynote Speech 1: Peace, Love and Metadata: A Cultural Collaboration with Wikipedia Liam Wyatt, the British Museum's first Wikipedian in Residence Liam Wyatt (a.k.a.
'Witty lama'), the first Wikipedian in Residence, rightly pointed out in his keynote speech that people always overestimate risk and underestimate reward in the digital world.
If given a chance, rewards can be huge, in terms of engagement with users, hits on institutions' sites, and revenue streams.
Liam sees it as his role to build bridges between the free and open Internet as represented by Wikipedia and the 'GLAM sector' [3] as representatives of the knowledge industries.
The aim of Wikipedia is to make all human knowledge available to all in their own language, an aim with which cultural institutions can surely sympathise.
The issues are how can we create and share culture in a way that is relevant to the 21st century?
Wikipedia and libraries have not related to each other much in the past, but now they are beginning to do so.
Wikipedia needs the expertise of librarians and curators to continue improving its product, whereas the GLAM sector can greatly benefit from the Wikipedia's massive user base.
So the question is what they can do to ensure both sides benefit.
The British Museum residency was a pilot project to investigate this matter without either side needing to change its major policies.
As Wikipedian in Residence, Liam aimed to build a relationship between the Museum and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities both internally and public-facing.
These activities included: creating new or expanding existing articles about notable items or subjects of specific relevance to the collection and the Museum's expertise; supporting Wikipedians already editing articles related to the British Museum both locally and internationally; and working with Museum staff to explain Wikipedia's practices and how they might be able to contribute directly.
Among the various results of the pilot was better (and wider) Wikipedia coverage of many aspects of the Museum's collections, and greatly increased online exposure for the Museum, both through Wikipedia and by click-throughs to its own site.
Liam pointed out that many GLAM institutions have volunteer organisations, but as yet they lack digital volunteer programmes or e-volunteers, something which represents an area of significant opportunity.
Keynote Speech 2: The Present and Future of Google Books James Crawford, Engineering Director of Google Books James explained that his job is to organise the world's books and make them universally accessible and useful.
So far about 15 million books have been scanned.
Google estimates that there are about 130 million books.
Of those, some 2.5 million are public domain, 2.5 million in print, and the rest (more than 100 million) are only available through libraries.
He stated that Google was looking at how to rank books in terms of their popularity or relevance to a searcher.
This was an area where librarians had relevant expertise.
Access to public domain books is greatly increased by scanning and access to all books is increased by indexing them.
Sales of in-print books should also increase through increased awareness.
The European Commission's Perspective Luca Martinelli of Directorate General Information Society and Media of the European Commission Luca recalled that Europeana and its related projects had been funded through the eContent plus Programme and that the Competitiveness and Innovation (CIP) Framework Programme continued to make financing available for projects on content aggregation and digitisation, including co-funding Europeana under CIP until the end of 2013 [4].
Furthermore, the Commission's Digital Agenda for Europe [5] has this as its Key Action 15: 'By 2012 the Commission will propose a sustainable model for financing the EU public digital library Europeana and digitisation of content.'
The Commission has other policy initiatives underway that support Europeana's work.
It plans to create a legal framework to facilitate the digitisation and dissemination of cultural works in Europe by proposing a Directive on orphan works in 2010.
This will invite the stakeholders to explore further measures on out-of print works, complemented by rights information databases.
Other elements of the Digital Agenda state that: 'Fragmentation and complexity in the current licensing system also hinders the digitisation of a large part of Europe's recent cultural heritage.
Rights clearance must be improved, and Europeana the EU public digital library should be strengthened,' and 'The Commission by 2012 will review the Directive on Re-Use of Public Sector Information, notably its scope and principles on charging for access and use.'
From now to 2020 through the European Digital Agenda, the Commission will continue its efforts to bring European cultural heritage online and bring about convergence towards openness by addressing issues such as open source, open standards, open access, open data, open content and open culture.
Launch of Public Domain Mark The finale of the Open Culture 2010 Conference was the launch of the Public Domain Mark in association with Creative Commons [6].
This mark will enable works free of known copyright restrictions to be labelled in a way that clearly communicates that status.
With the use of the mark, public domain works will be easily discovered over the Internet, making them more readily accessible to the public.
The mark also makes it clear to teachers and students, artists and scientists, that they are free to reuse material.
Its release benefits everyone who wishes to build upon the rich and vast resources that are part of the shared public domain.
On the Europeana portal, the Public Domain Mark will become the standard symbol for works free of known copyright.
It will play an important infrastructural role in the EU's efforts to ensure that all works shared online are marked with rights information.
In addition, Europeana also published the Usage Guide for public domain works.
This is not a legally binding contract, but a token of goodwill.
It calls for endorsing efforts to enrich the public domain, giving credit where credit is due and showing respect to original work.
The public domain mark further supports the Europeana Public Domain Charter [7] which was launched in May 2010 and which articulates the view that the Public Domain must be preserved, and that works in the public domain should not be removed from the public domain when they are digitised.
Jill Cousins presenting the Public Domain Mark Conclusion The Europeana Open Culture 2010 Conference was simply great!
This is what you could hear participants saying, tweeting, and blogging.
Moreover, a remarkable venue (a disused gas works!
), an interesting programme, inspirational speakers and terrific audience.
The event marks another step in Europeana's progress from being a concept (the European Digital Library) to becoming a real service, a force in policy development and advocacy for the cultural heritage sector in Europe and a player on the world stage of open digital culture in the age of Web 2.0.
Europeana is not afraid to address the big issues and is moving forward at impressive speed.
In Amsterdam the GLAMs were listening and taking heed.
For readers who want more details of the event, the presentations are available [8] on the conference site and the video blog This Week In Libraries features interviews with some of the Europeana conference speakers [9].
References Europeana Open Culture 2010 home page http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-plenary-2010/ Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century (AVA21) Conference, October 2010 http://www.ava21.be/en/index.php GLAM: A 'wikimedian' term for 'galleries, libraries, archives and museums'!
See: The Europeana group for the current list http://version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/home Europa Information Society: Digital Agenda for Europe http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/index_en.htm Creative Commons: Public Domain Mark 1.0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/ Europeana: Publications: project http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/publications/ Europeana: Presentations: 14 October 2010 http://www.group.europeana.eu/web/europeana-plenary-2010/presentations/ Video blog This Week In Libraries: interviews: TWIL #24: Europeana Open Culture Conference http://vimeo.com/15904526 Author Details David Fuegi MA (Cantab.)
MCLIP Principal Consultant, Eremo srl Email: david@eremo.net Web site: http://www.eremo.net/en/home.php Monika Segbert-Elbert, MBE FLA (Hon.)
Director Eremo srl Email: monika@eremo.net Web site: http://www.eremo.net/en/home.php Return to top Article Title: "Europeana Open Culture 2010" Author: David Fuegi and Monika Segbert-Elbert Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/open-culture-rpt/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Abstract Modelling of Digital Identifiers Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Abstract Modelling of Digital Identifiers Buzz data mobile database xml infrastructure archives metadata doi browser identifier vocabularies namespace repositories cataloguing rfc ascii dns aggregation e-learning purl ontologies uri ark openurl curation cordra ftp interoperability url research semiotic Citation BibTex RIS Nick Nicholas, Nigel Ward and Kerry Blinco present an information model of digital identifiers, to help bring clarity to the vocabulary debates from which this field has suffered.
Discussion of digital identifiers, and persistent identifiers in particular, has often been confused by differences in underlying assumptions and approaches.
To bring more clarity to such discussions, the PILIN Project has devised an abstract model of identifiers and identifier services, which is presented here in summary.
Given such an abstract model, it is possible to compare different identifier schemes, despite variations in terminology; and policies and strategies can be formulated for persistence without committing to particular systems.
The abstract model is formal and layered; in this article, we give an overview of the distinctions made in the model.
This presentation is not exhaustive, but it presents some of the key concepts represented, and some of the insights that result.
The main goal of the Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PILIN) project [1] has been to scope the infrastructure necessary for a national persistent identifier service.
There are a variety of approaches and technologies already on offer for persistent digital identification of objects.
But true identity persistence cannot be bound to particular technologies, domain policies, or information models: any formulation of a persistent identifier strategy needs to outlast current technologies, if the identifiers are to remain persistent in the long term.
For that reason, PILIN has modelled the digital identifier space in the abstract.
It has arrived at an ontology [2] and a service model [3] for digital identifiers, and for how they are used and managed, building on previous work in the identifier field 4, as well as semiotic theory [9].
The ontology, as an abstract model, addresses the question ‘what is (and isn’t) an identifier?’ and ‘what does an identifier management system do?’.
This more abstract view also brings clarity to the ongoing conversation of whether URIs can be (and should be) universal persistent identifiers.
Identifier Model For the identifier model to be abstract, it cannot commit to a particular information model.
The notion of an identifier depends crucially on the understanding that an identifier only identifies one distinct thing.
But different domains will have different understandings of what things are distinct from each other, and what can legitimately count as a single thing.
(This includes aggregations of objects, and different versions or snapshots of objects.)
In order for the abstract identifier model to be applicable to all those domains, it cannot impose its own definitions of what things are distinct: it must rely on the distinctions specific to the domain.
This means that information modelling is a critical prerequisite to introducing identifiers to a domain, as we discuss elsewhere [10]: identifier users should be able to tell whether any changes in a thing’s content, presentation, or location mean it is no longer identified by the same identifier (i.e.
whether the identifier is restricted to a particular version, format, or copy).
The abstract identifier model also cannot commit to any particular protocols or service models.
In fact, the abstract identifier model should not even presume the Internet as a medium.
A sufficiently abstract model of identifiers should apply just as much to URLs as it does to ISBNs, or names of sheep; the model should not be inherently digital, in order to avoid restricting our understanding of identifiers to the current state of digital technologies.
This means that our model of identifiers comes close to the understanding in semiotics of signs, as our definitions below make clear.
There are two important distinctions between digital identifiers and other signs which we needed to capture.
First, identifiers are managed through some system, in order to guarantee the stability of certain properties of the identifier.
This is different to other signs, whose meaning is constantly renegotiated in a community.
Those identifier properties requiring guarantees include the accountability and persistence of various facets of the identifier—most crucially, what is being identified.
For digital identifiers, the identifier management system involves registries, accessed through defined services.
An HTTP server, a PURL [11] registry, and an XRI registry are all instances of identifier management systems.
Second, digital identifiers are straightforwardly actionable: actions can be made to happen in connection with the identifier.
Those actions involve interacting with computers, rather than other people: the computer consistently does what the system specifies is to be done with the identifier, and has no latitude for subjective interpretation.
This is in contrast with human language, which can involve complex processes of interpretation, and where there can be considerable disconnect between what a speaker intends and how a listener reacts.
Because the interactions involved are much simpler, the model can concentrate on two actions which are core to digital identifiers, but which are only part of the picture in human communication: working out what is being identified (resolution), and accessing a representation of what is identified (retrieval).
So to model managing and acting on digital identifiers, we need a concept of things that can be identified, names for things, and the relations between them.
(Semiotics already gives us such concepts.)
We also need a model of the systems through which identifiers are managed and acted on; what those systems do, and who requests them to do so; and what aspects of identifiers the systems manage.
Our identifier model (as an ontology) thus encompasses: Entities including actors and identifier systems; Relations between entities; Qualities, as desirable properties of entities.
Actions are typically undertaken in order to make qualities apply to entities.
Actions, as the processes carried out on entities (and corresponding to services in implementations); An individual identifier system can be modelled using concepts from the ontology, with an identifier system model.
In the remainder of this article, we go through the various concepts introduced in the model under these classes.
We present the concept definitions under each section, before discussing issues that arise out of them.
Resolution and Retrieval are crucial actions for identifiers, whose definition involves distinct issues; they are discussed separately from other Actions.
We briefly discuss the standing of HTTP URIs in the model at the end.
Entities The following concept definitions apply to entities: Whatever exists and can be referred to in the model is a thing.
In formal terms, “thing” is the root of this ontology.
Users and Administrators of systems are modelled as parties: people and groups that participate in activities.
Authorities are parties who are responsible for other entities: they include system administrators, and people responsible for setting policies.
Policies are sets of rules about entities, some of which can be enforced through systems.
A name is an association of a label (a symbol) with a context that the label is in.
Contexts define how the label is to be made sense of.
There is only one instance of a given label in any one context.
Contexts can impose policies on their labels.
Typical policies for contexts are: a label format policy (what labels are allowed in the context); an access policy (what parties are authorised to carry out particular actions on the label); and an association policy (how the label is used in an identifier).
Identifiers are an association of a name with a single thing.
The name is said to identify the thing.
The range of things that may be identified is defined through an information model.
The range of things that will be identified is defined through an association policy.
Contexts are identified by identifiers of their own.
Labels may be mapped to other labels through an encoding scheme.
Actions are triggered by parties, typically through a system; actions may produce results, which may be entities or changes in quality.
Actions are subject to authorisation.
In the following examples, we notate names as (context, label), and identifiers as (name, thing) = ((context, label), thing).
Example: Parties: The University of Hard Knocks Joe Bloggs the IT Department Authorities: The University of Hard Knocks, responsible for the local PURL identifier system.
Label: 8323 cat document1.pdf Context: University of Hard Knocks Purl Server Context (defined by the university’s PURL system) URL (defined by DNS and the Internet as a concrete network) Employees of BHP French Literature Name: (University of Hard Knocks Purl Server Context, report/312) (Australian Mobile Phone Numbers, 0482321234) (Employees of BHP, Joe Bloggs Policies: Label Format: “All labels must be four digits long, and start with 8” Policies: Access: “Information on the label 8323 can only be looked up by staff members” Policies: Association: “All labels in this context are only used to identify SIM cards” (i.e.
this is a context for mobile phone numbers) Identifiers: ((Australian Mobile Phone Numbers, 0482321234), “my phone”) ((University of Hard Knocks Purl Server Context, report/312), “the report on global warming from last week”) Identifiers: Contexts: (http://purl.org/uni-hardknocks/, “University of Hard Knocks Purl Server Context”) These definitions support the following insights: Any association of a name with a thing by anyone establishes an identifier.
A name is not an identifier unless it identifies something.
(E.g.
an unassigned phone number is a name, but not an identifier.)
An identifier is not restricted to an association of an ASCII string or a stream of ones and zeros with a thing; a spoken word or a picture also count as identifiers.
(Identifiers are in fact defined as linguistic signs.)
The context of the name differentiates instances of a label from each other, and determines which particular instance is being associated with a thing.
This allows the same label to mean different things in different contexts [12].
An identifier management system delimits its own context for the identifiers it manages; so the same label, managed by two different identifier management systems, forms two different identifiers.
Isolated facets of identifier management systems, such as protocol and encoding scheme, may also be considered part of the identifier context meaning that a change in either brings about a different identifier.
But this is a matter of identifier management policy: a particular identifier system model can also decide that its identifiers remain the same regardless of protocol or encoding.
Policies are specific to contexts.
In some instances, particular policies in fact set the context of an identifier (see below).
Relations: Equivalence The following are definitions of relations for identifiers: Two identifiers are equivalent if they identify the same thing at a given point in time.
Any claim of equivalence is only meaningful with reference to a specified time.
Two identifiers are synonymous if some authority claims that they are equivalent.
(i.e.
we trust the authority that they are equivalent, rather than confirm it for ourselves.)
An identifier is an alias of another identifier (called a target) if the identifiers are synonymous, and the alias is managed to be dependent on the target for its equivalence.
A preferred identifier is one out of a set of synonyms that an authority privileges, and which the authority is responsible for keeping persistent.
Two names are the same only if they contain the same label in the same context.
Example: Equivalent Identifiers: ((Employees of BHP Staff Numbers, 8336), “my cousin Fred”) ((Human Names, Fred Q. Bloggs), “my cousin Fred”) Synonymous Identifiers: “Taiwan Province of China” and “Taiwan” are synonyms according to the authority of the People’s Republic of China (but not according to the authority of the Republic of China) Preferred Identifier: ISBN 0195306090 (as opposed to “Shirk, S. 2007.
China: Fragile Superpower” or NLA:an40693053), according to the International ISBN Agency Not Same Name: (Names of soccer players, Pelé) is not the same as (Names of asteroids, Pelé) (Handle Server 102.100.272, Pelé) is not the same as (PURL Server purl.nla.gov, Pelé) even if both refer to the same thing Equivalence between two identifiers may happen to be true at a given point in time; it does not mean that the two identifiers will always mean the same thing, or should always be treated as interchangeable.
Judging whether two things are the same or not presupposes an information model for the things being compared.
Synonyms presuppose an authority which weighs in on the equivalence of two identifiers; the authority can also weigh in on which identifier should be preferred in given contexts.
This is still only one authority’s claim, and other authorities can make different judgements; but the claim matters for any systems for which that authority is also responsible, as the authority is assumed to enforce its claims throughout its domain.
By introducing responsibility, synonymy is a stronger claim than equivalence.
Aliases require that the authority does not just assert equivalence, but actively manages the equivalence itself: it is responsible for making sure the two identifiers stay equivalent while they are being managed, and do not drift apart in what they refer to.
The identifier model constrains when two instances of labels count as the same name.
If their contexts differ, they may currently be equivalent when used as identifiers; but nothing guarantees that they will stay equivalent, because the association policies of the two contexts are independent—that is, the two names are managed separately.
The model deals with this case by saying that the labels may be the same, but the names are different (since their contexts are different), so they belong to different identifiers.
In the example above, the Handle Server and the PURL server may currently agree to use the same label to point to the same thing; but nothing prevents one of the authorities reassigning the identifier later on, and the other keeping it as is.
Other existing information models may have a larger or smaller repertoire of relations for identifiers.
This set of relations may map to existing information models in different ways, but is intended to make explicit the role of authorities, which is often left implicit.
Relations: Other The following additional definitions apply to relations: Entities have one or more representations, which can be used to communicate the entities to an audience.
Labels are represented through encoding schemes appropriate to the medium of communication; e.g.
URL-encoding is necessary for labels occurring inside URLs.
Representations of names (context + label) can combine a context identifier with a label in the one representation.
Two representations can look different, because of different encodings, but still represent the same name.
The representation of an identifier is the same as the representation of the identifier name.
An identifier management system manages an entity if it is used to record and update representations of the entity and its attributes, which parties can then consult through the system.
A system manages an entity to enable an authority to be responsible for that entity: the authority initiates management actions on the entity, to maintain the entity’s desirable qualities.
A context (enclosing context) contains another context (subcontext) if all labels in the enclosing context are also in the subcontext, and all policies enforced by the subcontext are also enforced by the enclosing context.
Some entities are concrete, meaning that they are managed by a specific identifier system.
Entities that are not concrete are abstract.
In particular, an identifier management system defines a single concrete context specific to it.
Abstract contexts are defined instead by their purpose and owner.
Concrete and abstract contexts define concrete and abstract names, which in turn define concrete and abstract identifiers.
Concrete contexts realise abstract contexts, if the concrete context’s identifiers correspond to the abstract context’s identifiers, and the two contexts’ policies are consistent.
Correspondingly, a concrete identifier can realise an abstract identifier.
Realisation is necessary because abstract identifiers cannot be managed by a specific system, by definition.
Two concrete identifiers are homologues if they are equivalent and realise the same abstract identifier with the same label.
Homologues are a simple way of realising a single abstract identifier in multiple systems.
Example: Representation: identifier ((University of Hard Knocks Purl Server Context, report/312), “the report on global warming from last week”) : represented as: http://purl.org/uni-hardknocks/report/312; Representation: name (Handle Server 102.100.272, XYZZY) : represented as: hdl:102.100.272/XYZZY; Representation: label Pelé : represented as: Pel%E9 (URL encoding scheme) .–…-.. ..-.. (Morse Code encoding scheme) Pele (ASCII) Same Name, different representation: (Names of soccer players, Pel%E9) = (Names of soccer players, Pelé): There are several soccer players named Pelé, but the name is the same regardless of what it refers to Context: Concrete: University of Hard Knocks Purl Server Context (defined by the university’s PURL system) URL (defined by DNS and the Internet as a concrete network) Australian Mobile Phone Numbers (defined by the mobile telephony system) Context: Abstract: University of Hard Knocks Library Employees of BHP French Literature Homologues: ((Handle Server 102.100.272, Pel%E9), “Pelé”), ((PURL Server purl.nla.gov, Pel%E9), “Pelé”) or as representations, hdl:102.100/272/Pel%E9, http://purl.nla.gov/ Pel%E9 .
Both identifiers realise the same abstract identifier ((Names of soccer players, Pel%E9), “Pelé”), are equivalent, and have the same label.
Changing the encoding scheme of a label does not change the label itself; so different encodings of an identifier are not considered distinct identifiers—so long as we know what the encoding scheme is.
So the IRI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelé and the URI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pel%e9 are not considered to be distinct identifiers, but different encodings of the same identifier.
Allowing different representations of labels lets us treat labels as Platonic ideals, which can be realised in several ways, for example: a spoken URL, a handwritten URL, and a URL transmitted in an HTTP request are the same identifier.
The alternative of treating each as a distinct identifier is untenable.
Contexts are seldom made explicit in digital identifiers.
Contexts have identifiers of their own, but they are seldom included when citing an identifier.
However scheme prefixes in URIs identify contexts at least partly: http://www.example.com is a distinct identifier from ftp://www.example.com, because the named protocol provides a distinct system context for the label proper, www.example.com.
Identifiers and identifier contexts are not defined by the services provided for them, or the protocols enabling those services: the contexts exist independently of them.
For example the RFC 3986 [5] definition of HTTP URI specifies that an HTTP URI is not constrained to be processed through HTTP [13].
This seems to contradict our preceding claim that http://www.example.com and ftp://www.example.com are distinct identifiers.
Our claim does hold up though: the two identifiers share the same DNS domain but are managed separately.
http://www.example.com/a.pdf can be a different document from ftp://www.example.com/a.pdf (because the respective server roots are different).
That immediately makes them distinct identifiers.
That said, http://www.example.com/a.pdf could be accessed through the FTP protocol instead of HTTP, without becoming identical to ftp://www.example.com/a.pdf.
In general, a digital identifier can be acted on through several services and several protocols, but remain the same digital object, managed in the same identifier management system.
The critical distinction is the management system for the identifier, not the service protocol for accessing it.
It can be useful to point out that the nominated context for an identifier is a subcontext of another, whose policies have already been specified.
Because the larger context determines policies for the identifier which the subcontext follows, the larger context is of more interest to users: its policies are more generally applicable.
And if the larger context’s policies have already been specified, there will be much less policy to specify for the subcontext.
The nesting of contexts is also useful to point out if the two contexts will end up managed through the same identifier management system.
For instance, we could argue that in the PURL http://purl.foo.com/net/jdoe/bar, the label is bar, and the context name is http://purl.foo.com/net/jdoe/ .
We could instead argue that the label is net/jdoe/bar, and the context name is http://purl.foo.com/ .
Both segmentations are legitimate; but http://purl.foo.com/ defines a larger context for identifiers than does http://purl.foo.com/net/jdoe/ (all PURLs vs. all PURLs in the net/jdoe subdomain); and any constraints set by the enclosing context (e.g.
“is resolved by purl.foo.com”) also apply to the net/jdoe subdomain.
So we take the enclosing context as the starting point for understanding the PURL, rather than the subdomain.
Identifiers can exist in the abstract, as mental constructs; but they can only be managed and acted on in the physical world, through identifier management systems, as digital objects.
Systems allow interaction with identifiers digitally, which enables actions on the identifiers; but they also allow the identifier administrators to take responsibility for the identifiers, and to maintain the identifiers as digital objects.
An abstract identifier and a concrete identifier are not the same thing: the identifier management system can place no constraints on the abstract identifier.
Instead, the identifier model has the concrete identifier realise a corresponding abstract identifier.
This means that one abstract identifier can be realised by more than one concrete identifier.
This happens when two different identifiers, in two different identifier schemes, are managed to be equivalent—e.g.
both a Handle and an ARK, or URLs in two different domains.
This equivalence makes sense only if the two identifiers are understood to be fulfilling the same underlying purpose (and not merely contingently).
So the identifier model accounts for the statement that http://www.example.com/pdf/a.pdf is migrated to http://cms.example.com/repository/a.pdf (an ostensive change in identifier), by claiming that both concrete identifiers realise the abstract identifier (“example.com’s PDF repository”, “a.pdf”).
The concrete identifiers are defined by particular servers and systems; the abstract identifier is defined by the management and intention common to both.
If the label in the two concrete identifiers is the same, then the same label, in different contexts, is used to identify the same thing.
The contexts are still different, so the two are not guaranteed to remain synonymous.
Because the two concrete identifiers can nonetheless be confused as being the same, the identifier model gives them a distinct name (homologues).
Retaining the same label across contexts is useful in managing multiple contexts.
The identifier model’s approach distinguishing abstract from concrete identifiers is not common: usually if two concrete identifiers are distinct, no attempt is made to model any underlying identity between them.
In some approaches, this differentiation even extends to differences of encoding, or of names of contexts.
(For example, the URIs doi:10.1000⁄182 and info:doi:10.1000⁄182, are distinct strings, and some systems will process them as distinct identifiers for that reason even though they are in fact different encodings of the same identifier.)
However the notion of an abstract identifier allows us to capture the intent behind associating a label with a thing, which ultimately resides in an authority rather than a specific system let alone a particular encoding or representation.
This allows identifiers to be considered not merely equivalent, but synonymous (deliberately and reliably equivalent), because the same authority intends them to mean the same thing.
Because identifiers are signs used meaningfully, this intent is important to capture.
Qualities The following are definitions of qualities of entities: A thing is unique if there exists only one of the thing within a given scope.
(A scope is a subset of the universe of all things.)
An identifier is universal if it is the unique identifier identifying a thing within a given context.
An entity or quality is persistent if it is managed and maintained for a defined period.
(This does not have to be forever: the model emphasises uninterrupted maintenance of the entity, rather than chronological duration.)
An entity or quality is accountable to a party, if that party can access well-maintained information on its previous and current responsible authorities.
Accountability is realised through accountability data, such as authority metadata.
An entity is trusted by a party if that party is confident that their use of the entity meets certain expectations.
Accountability helps establish trust.
Meeting expectations about system performance (e.g.
uptime, load handling) makes the entity reliable.
An entity is nameable if it may be treated as a name (i.e.
it has a representation).
Other qualities are defined with respect to the actions realising them.
These include registered, actionable, resolvable, reserved, published, citable, verified, verifiable.
It is critical to this model that identifiers identify things uniquely; what that means is determined by the information model used for the things identified.
An identifier can identify an aggregation (which is a single thing, but has multiple components); it can also identify an abstraction, which may encompass multiple concrete things (e.g.
different versions of a digital object can be identified by the same identifier, because the identifier does not identify a single version.)
Uniqueness is only meaningful relative to a scope.
For example, “Perth” is not unique in the scope of city names on Earth (let alone in the scope of the universe); but it is unique in the scope of city names in Western Australia.
The scope of uniqueness of a name motivates the definition of a context for the name.
So defining the context of the name “Perth” as “city names in Western Australia” means “Perth” can still be used as an identifier unambiguously, in the given context.
Universality is useful for discovery: if only one identifier exists for an object in a registry, then searching for all instances of that identifier in the registry will discover all references to the object.
If the object is known to have multiple identifiers, on the other hand, then discovery requires a separate search for each identifier.
If the context for an identifier is “all known naming systems” (the global context), universality is not a realistic expectation.
There cannot be only one possible identifier in the world for a given thing, so long as any authority can set up its own identifier management system.
However, various alternate strategies emulate universality particularly preferred identifiers: an authority can advocate that one identifier should be preferred over its synonyms in its specific sphere of influence.
This allows the search space for discovery to be constrained.
Establishing preferred identifiers is the motivation for normalising names in catalogues and databases.
If the context for an identifier is “a single identifier management system”, by contrast, universality is often realised: a particular identifier management system will often have only one identifier for a given thing.
Both “persistent” and “accountable” are second-order qualities when applied to identifiers.
Identifiers are not persistent or accountable in themselves, but persistent or accountable with regard to other qualities, such as resolvability, citability, registration, association, and so on.
Persistence is not defined through a timeframe alone.
It is defined through an assertion that the given quality of the identifier will be maintained throughout a nominated timeframe.
Because persistence is an assertion, it needs to gain users’ trust through demonstrating that appropriate management is taking place.
Making an identifier persistent is a matter of policy and not technology.
The ability to redirect actions on an identifier to another management system (as done under DNS, Handle, and “Cool” HTTP URIs [14]) makes it easier to implement identifier persistence policy; but it does not automatically make the identifiers persistent.
Qualities need to be associated with digital objects, if they will be acted on in the digital realm.
Accountability, for instance, is realised through accountability data; persistence, as shown below, is realised through maintaining association data.
Actions The following are definitions of actions applied to entities: Actions on identifiers typically are realised through an identifier management system.
If an identifier does undergo an action through an identifier management system, it is said to be actionable.
(This means that any identifier managed through an identifier management system should be actionable.)
Some actions change the state of an identifier in the identifier management system.
These can be referred to as read/write actions, and include the following.
To Create a thing is to bring it into being To Register a thing is to start maintaining and managing it in a system.
Entities can be created without being registered, but well-behaved identifier systems require registration.
To Update a thing is to alter characteristics of the thing as it is maintained in a system.
It presupposes that the thing is registered.
To Deregister a thing is to delete it from a system; it is the opposite of Register, rather than Create.
To Destroy a thing is make it cease to exist; it is the opposite of Create.
To Reserve a thing is to assign it a temporary or ‘in use’ status; it is used to mark an identifier object in a system as not yet fully populated.
To Identify a thing is to associate it with a name.
This action creates an identifier.
To Publish a thing is to enable access to it through a given non-curatorial action, from outside the curation boundary (see next section for details)   Other actions do not change the status of the identifier on the identifier management system.
These can be referred to as read actions, and include: To Cite a thing is to communicate a representation of a thing to an audience.
Identifiers can be cited, as can identifier actions (e.g.
service calls).
Depending on what the representation is embedded in, the thing is citable in different ways, e.g.
Web-Citable, or Print-Citable.
To Query an entity is to obtain selected information about the entity from a system.
To Resolve an identifier is to get information which distinguishes the thing identified from all other things.
To Retrieve through an identifier is to access a representation of the thing identified.
To Verify an entity is to confirm that a value for an entity, managed in a system, is what it should be.
What the value should be is decided with regard to particular qualities, such as accountable and resolvable.
Entities are verifiable with regard to a quality, if the Verify action is possible for that entity and quality; entities are verified if the Verify action has actually taken place.
As digital objects, identifiers can be registered and deregistered.
That is distinct from creating and destroying identifiers: if someone has made the connection between a name and a thing in their head, they have created an identifier, and only erasing their memory will destroy that association.
Though concrete identifiers exist only by virtue of their management systems, identifiers can be recorded outside those management systems.
(This is important for archival purposes: we can still use deregistered identifiers to identify things in a historical sense.)
Actions on concrete digital identifiers are realised through services on identifier management systems.
The usual target of verification is the resolvability of an identifier: verification confirms that the identifier resolves to something, and moreover that it resolves to the correct thing.
Actionability on an identifier requires the use of an identifier management system.
Citing an identifier, for instance, does not depend on the existence of an identifier management system; so citing an identifier (e.g.
writing the identifier name down on a piece of paper) does not make the identifier actionable.
When an identifier is referred to as Actionable, what is usually meant is that the identifier is Resolvable.
The distinction between Resolve and Retrieve is discussed further below.
Publishing The following concept definitions relate to the action of publishing entities: Read/Write actions are curatorial actions, which take place in order to manage entities that is, to realise or maintain desirable qualities of the entities.
A party authorised to perform curatorial actions on an entity through a system is an administrator on that system.
A party authorised to perform Read actions but not Curatorial actions on an entity through a system is an end-user on that system.
Systems have a curation boundary [15], defined by who is authorised to perform curatorial actions through the system i.e.
who the system administrators are.
Curatorial actions occur within the curation boundary of a system: only administrators can undertake such actions.
An entity crosses the curation boundary, when end users are granted access to the entity: this is what is commonly understood by publishing an entity.
Granting an end-user access to an entity means allowing them to perform actions on the entity.
Those actions, by definition, are Read actions.
The notion of a curation boundary helps us distinguish between administrators and end-users — even if the community of administrators is distributed and sizeable.
Making an identifier accessible to an administrator remotely does not count as publishing it, any more than is making it available locally for editing.
An identifier is only published when a user who cannot update the identifier is newly given the ability to act on the identifier in some other way (typically as we will see, to resolve it).
Publishing an identifier depends on who is allowed to act on it, as well as on how they can act on it.
An identifier may be resolved by administrators, while it is being prepared for release.
But it is only considered published once end-users are also allowed to act on it.
Querying and verifying identifiers are actions typically undertaken in order to curate the identifier, though they are not write operations, and might be accessible outside the curation boundary.
This definition of publishing centres on authorising Read actions through a system.
An alternate definition of publishing depends on who has knowledge of the entity published: if an end-user becomes aware of an identifier, and can, for example, cite it, we could speak of the identifier being published.
But the definition adopted here requires the end-users to perform actions through the identifier management system: if they can write the identifier down, but they cannot yet resolve it, this definition does not consider it as published yet.
Resolution and Retrieval The following concept definitions relate to the actions of resolving and retrieving on identifiers: To Resolve an identifier is to get information which distinguishes the thing identified from all other things (association data).
This information tells us what the thing identified is: it “identifies” the thing.
Resolving an identifier is a way of dereferencing it: navigating from the identifier to the thing identified.
Information on how to access the thing (the locator of the thing) is one type of resolution data: the locator distinguishes the thing to be accessed from all other things, which have different locators (or no locators at all).
But resolving an identifier does not involve actually providing access to the thing.
An identifier is Resolvable if it can be resolved, and Web-Resolvable if it can be resolved to information usable directly on the Web (e.g.
resolvable to a locator, i.e.
a URL).
Retrieval on an identifier provides access to a representation of the thing, via a locator.
Access is typically the responsibility of an external system.
The representation is domain-specific, and can take various forms.
An identifier can be resolved without being retrieved, if the thing it identifies is not an online resource; e.g.
XML namespaces, vocabulary terms.
Resolve is the main non-curatorial action used with identifiers; when an identifier is published, that is normally understood to mean making it available for resolution by end-users.
For instance the identifier info:hdl:102.100.272/XYZ may be resolved to the locator http://www.example.com/a.pdf through a Handle Resolver.
But accessing the latter URL, and downloading the PDF at that location, is a distinct action of retrieval, enabled by the www.example.com HTTP server rather than the 102.100.272 Handle server.
An identifier can have multiple instances of association data, all of them providing access to the same thing according to the system’s information model.
Such identifiers can undergo multiple resolution, in which all instances of association data are returned to the requester.
Multiple resolution typically feeds into an appropriate copy selection process, which determines which association data is the best to use for the request [16].
For instance, a document is stored in multiple repositories.
The identifier for that document has association data that includes multiple URL locators, one for each copy of the document.
This is allowed by the information model: the thing identified is the abstract document, and not just a particular instance of the document on a server.
So all the URLs are distinctive to the underlying abstract document (they are not associated with any other abstract document), even though they are also distinct from each other (as different concrete copies of the document).
Any of the locators can be returned to the requester as resolutions of the identifier, because they are information distinguishing the abstract document from all other abstract documents (under a particular information model dealing with abstract documents).
All of the locators can be returned to the requester, as a multiple resolution of the identifier.
Association data captures the association in an identifier management system of an identifier’s name and the thing identified.
Maintaining this data is the primary responsibility of an identifier management system.
However, an identifier record, as a digital object, may also contain other information.
Resolving an identifier is different from querying it.
Querying a Handle identifier is done by viewing the entire Handle digital record including not only any URLs registered (as association data), but also timestamps, permissions, and other metadata.
Resolving a Handle identifier, on the other hand, typically involves mapping the Handle to one of the registered URLs.
Resolution and retrieval are often conflated.
Resolution distinguishes what the identifier identifies from what it does not; it does not necessarily involve accessing what is identified.
In contemporary digital identifier systems, some sort of resolution to a locator is a prerequisite for retrieval.
However metadata describing a resource are an acceptable way of resolving an identifier so long as that metadata uniquely discriminates the thing identified from all other candidates.
In the HTTP protocol, resolution and retrieval can be distinguished as HEAD vs. GET.
Multiple resolution is intrinsic to the functioning of appropriate copy protocols like OpenURL [17], which assume that a single abstract resource can have multiple concrete instances, each with its own locator.
Multiple resolution is also commonplace in the operation of large-scale, mirrored Web sites.
Usually the selection of one of the multiple instances is a process hidden from the user.
It bears repeating that digital identifiers do not apply exclusively to the digital realm.
Not all things identified by digital identifiers are online digital objects, so they cannot all meaningfully be retrieved (e.g.
a vocabulary item or an organization although the description of the organisation may well be a digital object, such as a Web page).
Not all identifiers are associated with services to resolve or retrieve the identifiers digitally (e.g.
a name roster in Excel); in fact, digital identifiers need not provide retrieval as an option at all.
However, there is a strong expectation that online identifiers should at least be resolvable: a user should be able to determine, through some service, what is being identified.
A request for a service call on an identifier is logically distinct from the identifier itself.
For example, the URI http://www.example.com as an identifier is logically distinct from an HTTP GET request on http://www.example.com (although the distinction has been blurred in the history of HTTP).
This distinction is important because: More than one service may be associated with the same identifier.
The identifier should not be bound or restricted to the specified service.
Best practice for persistent identifiers is to manage the association between the name and thing, independent of whatever service is used to retrieve the thing.
The way the thing is retrieved may not persist; but the association between name and thing should persist.
For example, a request to retrieve a resource by its URI identifier (HTTP GET on the URI) can be distinct from a request for the most appropriate copy of the resource, or metadata concerning the resource (HTTP GET on the URI embedded in an OpenURL request), or an archived version of the resource (HTTP GET on the URI embedded in a Wayback Machine [18] request).
Under the Semantic Web, HTTP URIs identifying abstractions may not be intended for derefencing at all even if they hyperlink to descriptions of the thing identified (see e.g.
XML namespaces, or the Semantic Web use of HTTP Status Code 303 See Other [19]).
For persistent identification of digital resources, identifier management systems should maintain association data independently of the locator used to retrieve the resource e.g.
as a prose description identifying the resource.
Even if the network location of the resource is compromised or no longer maintained, administrators should be able to recover what was supposed to be identified.
Universality of HTTP The HTTP protocol is currently close to universal for interacting with resources on the Internet; this has proven of great benefit in expanding the reach of the Internet and guaranteeing its integrity.
Any digital identifier scheme used online realistically needs to provide at least some services through the HTTP protocol.
This amounts to exposing those identifiers as HTTP URIs as is already commonplace, e.g.
with Handles, XRIs and ARKs, through resolution and retrieval services.
It is also clear from the foregoing, and from the current definition of HTTP URIs [5], that HTTP URIs qualify as identifiers (and are no longer bound to be locators, as URLs).
Provided they are appropriately managed, nothing prevents them being used as persistent identifiers.
There is of course a long history of HTTP URLs not being managed appropriately; but persistence has always been a policy matter.
There is no technical barrier to HTTP URIs being persistent, as indeed Tim Berners-Lee pointed out in 1998 [14].
That said, we take issue with the following common assumptions, that do not follow [20]: A universal service protocol (such as HTTP) is the same thing as a universal identifier scheme.
HTTP URIs are the preferred identifier for all authorities (although they may well be preferred for HTTP-oriented authorities); HTTP URIs are the preferred identifiers in contexts where HTTP services are not relevant (e.g.
internal document management); HTTP will always be a universal protocol, and persistent identifier providers should assume it will be; HTTP URIs will capture all functionality, data, or services presented by other identifier schemes; Identifiers in other schemes should be maintained only to the extent of exposing them under HTTP.
All identifiers, even when mapped to an HTTP URI, must be meaningfully dereferencable through a Web browser.
Different identifier schemes address different business requirements, by presenting users with different services and policies.
The HTTP protocol has a deliberately restricted repertoire of services, consistent with a resource-oriented rather than a service-oriented view of architecture; and it does not natively support a rich environment for managing identifiers, such as we believe is necessary to support identifier persistence properly [10].
Other identifier schemes, more explicitly oriented towards persistence, provide users with different levels of support and management.
It is important for the Web that all digital identifiers behave as HTTP URIs for dereferencing resolution and/or retrieval.
This has made the modern Web architecture possible.
But this does not mean all digital identifiers have to be HTTP URIs, and in particular managed as HTTP URIs, in order to achieve interoperability with other identifiers.
HTTP as a service protocol for identifiers does not address all purposes equally well, and there is a place in the Web for other identifier schemes to continue in use, so long as they are exposed through HTTP.
Conclusion Under the PILIN Project, we have sketched a model for identifiers and identifier services.
This model has allowed us to compare different identifier schemes, and identifiers used in different domains, without losing sight of their underlying commonalities.
One of the major problems in debates on persistent identifiers has been the different understanding of terminology between proponents of different identifier schemes: these have led to misunderstanding, or inordinate focus on incidental details.
The ontology allows us to analyse identifier systems in terms of their base functionality and the requirements they fulfil, rather than being distracted by implementation specifics.
To give an example, debate over how identifiers are actionable is simplified by a comparison of how identifier systems dereference identifiers, and by the recognition that all contemporary digital identifier systems provide retrieval, but only some provide resolution.
This more abstract layer of comparison brings clarity to the identifier debates; it enabled us to articulate identifier policy guidelines in a much more focussed manner.
Identifier systems can then be mapped back to the business requirements they satisfy more accurately.
The model as presented here is not novel: it represents a convergence of views in various identifier communities, even though communication between those communities has often been difficult.
The basic notions underlying the model are drawn from semiotics, and are much older.
However, making such a model explicit helps establish which differences between identifier schemes are essential, and which are incidental.
It does so especially by foregrounding the requirements users have for identifiers, as desirable identifier qualities.
We hope that our model can help others in the identifier community likewise approach the recurring debates over identifier systems with more clarity and less risk of confusion and in that way, can focus discussion on issues which truly make a difference to identifier managers and users.
Acknowledgements This article reports on work done under the PILIN project and the PILIN ANDS Transition Project.
PILIN was funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) as part of the Commonwealth Government’s Backing Australia’s Ability An Innovation Action Plan for the Future (BAA).
The PILIN ANDS Transition Project was funded by the Australian Government as part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), as part of the transition to the Australian National Data Service (ANDS).
The authors wish to acknowledge the support and feedback of the rest of the PILIN team.
We also thank Dan Rehak for his feedback.
References PILIN Project http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/pilin2/ Nicholas, Nick.
2008.
PILIN Ontology for Identifiers and Identifier Services http://resolver.net.au/hdl/102.100.272/G9JR4TLQH The present article is an expansion of the PILIN Ontology Summary http://resolver.net.au/hdl/102.100.272/T9G74WJQH Nicholas, Nick & Ward, Nigel.
2008.
PILIN Service Usage Model.
Version 1.1. http://resolver.net.au/hdl/102.100.272/0LHBLDTRH An overview of current identifier schemes, and of issues in identifier resolution and persistence, is given in Tonkin, Emma.
2008.
“Persistent Identifiers: Considering the Options”.
Ariadne, Issue 56 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/tonkin/ Berners-Lee, Tim, Fielding, Roy & Masinter, Larry.
2005.
Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax.
IETF RFC 3986 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt The Digital Object Identifier System http://doi.org/ OASIS Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) TC http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xri Kunze, John & Rogers, R.P.
Channing.
2008.
The ARK Identifier Scheme.
IETF Internet Draft http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kunze-ark-15 For an introduction to semiotics, see e.g.
Chandler, Daniel.
2001.
Semiotics: The Basics.
London: Routledge.
Nicholas, Nick, Ward, Nigel & Blinco, Kerry.
2009.
A policy checklist for enabling persistence of identifiers.
D-Lib 15.
1⁄2.
doi:10.1045/january2009-nicholas http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january09/nicholas/01nicholas.html PURL (Persistent Uniform Resource Locator) http://purl.oclc.org/ The identifier model’s notion of context is deliberately vague, and is built in to the name: once the name is tied to a specific context, it can be associated with a thing without ambiguity.
Semiotics proper does not keep its associations static: it allows context to play a role in how the name is associated with the thing (cf.
Charles Peirce’s “interpretant” with the identifier model’s association policy; on the interpretant, see e.g.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#prag).
For digital identifiers, however, this simpler model is adequate.
§1.2.2 (pp.
8-9): “Although many URI schemes are named after protocols, this does not imply that use of these URIs will result in access to the resource via the named protocol.
[…] Even when a URI is used to retrieve a representation of a resource, that access might be through gateways, proxies, caches, and name resolution services that are independent of the protocol associated with the scheme name.” Berners-Lee, Tim.
1998.
Cool URIs don’t change http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI On the ‘curation boundary’, see Treloar, Andrew, Groenewegen, David & Harboe-Lee, Cathrine.
2007.
The Data Curation Continuum: Managing Data Objects in Institutional Repositories.
D-Lib 13: 9⁄10.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september07/treloar/09treloar.html On appropriate copy, see e.g.
Rehak, Daniel R. 2005.
The Appropriate Version Problem: Separating Learning Designs and Course Structures from Learning Object Versions, Variants and Copies.
CORDRA: Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture http://hdl.handle.net/2000.01/D6E3BF9462684182AC293D64D3DDE192 Ex Libris Group, OpenURL http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/sfxopenurl Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#The_Wayback_Machine www-tag@w3.org list , post from Roy T. Fielding 18 June 2005 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Jun/0039.html see also Sauermann, Leo & Cyganiak, Richard.
2008.
Cool URIs for the Semantic Web.
http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/ Further discussion in Nicholas, Nick.
2008.
Using URIs as Persistent Identifiers http://resolver.net.au/hdl/102.100.272/DMGVQKNQH Author Details Nick Nicholas Business Analyst Link Affiliates Australian Digital Futures Institute Distance and e-Learning Centre West Street Toowoomba QLD Australia 4350 Email: opoudjis@optusnet.com.au Web site: http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au Nigel Ward Technical Director Link Affiliates Email: nward@internode.on.net Web site: http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au Kerry Blinco Director, Strategy Link Affiliates Email: kblinco@powerup.com.au Web site: http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au Return to top Article Title: “Abstract Modelling of Digital Identifiers” Author: Nick Nicholas, Nigel Ward and Kerry Blinco Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/nicholas-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Implementing Technology in Libraries Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Implementing Technology in Libraries Buzz ebook licence research Citation BibTex RIS Elizabeth McHugh reviews a first published work that she feels is a straightforward, jargon-free guide on how to implement technology solutions in libraries.
At some point in our careers there may, indeed in these fast moving technological times, will be a period or periods when we will be required to be part of, lead or manage a project implementing technology solutions in libraries.
At 173 pages long, with 13 chapters and 5 appendices, the author seeks to provide the reader with a clear, practitioner-written, jargon-free guide to doing so.
The author, Karen Knox, is a public library librarian who has been working in the sector for over 10 years.
Although this book is written from the perspective of implementing technology in public libraries, it could be read by librarians of all sectors.
Content The Contents pages clearly show the chapter headings and subheadings, allowing readers to see which of them would be most appropriate for their needs.
The book is not too heavy on references – there are approximately 10 in total split across three chapters and the introduction to the book.
This book is about the process of identifying technological needs, implementing them via projects and following the projects through to conclusion.
It avoids using project management jargon and as such could be used by both the experienced and inexperienced practitioner alike.
Anyone looking for the words “Prince 2” will not find them in this book.
The author points out (p. 120) that the book does not seek to be the ultimate solution to the needs of librarians, nor does it take account of the project implementation requirements and methods of their organisation.
However, although the author does not herself state this, the book can provide the experienced practitioner with an aide-mémoire and the inexperienced worker with an accessible introduction to the process.
There are a few “Spotlight” sections in the chapters.
These sections move the reader away from the topic at hand and highlight in more specific detail an issue connected with the chapter.
However, they do not interrupt the flow of the chapter overmuch.
Examples Provided To provide the reader with an example of how the process of implementing technology solutions in libraries might be achieved, the reader is introduced to “Info City Public Library”, a fictitious library where one project is implemented and followed through.
While this device is used to provide a worked example of the points highlighted in the chapters, and is helpful in places, there are times when the chapter concentrates overmuch on the worked example and not enough on expanding the chapter heading – Chapter 6 being a case in point.
Chapter 13 provides a small selection of other projects (Web site redesign, online credit card payments, etc) which are used as examples of how they could be implemented.
Again, the author does not claim that the list is exhaustive (p.110) and encourages the reader to consider adapting these examples where necessary.
There are six appendices starting from page 121.
Four of them provide a Sample: Technology Plan; Request for Proposal; Review Tool; Recommendation for Vendor Solution.
The remaining two provide example templates for constructing an IT Inventory and an IP Planner.
Again, they should be considered as being adaptable to company circumstances.
Supplementary Web Site There is a Web site [1] which should provide access to the resources referenced in the book, along with copies of the documents in the appendices.
A disclaimer at the bottom of the page points out that the Web page is subject to change or discontinuation without notice.
The Web site contains links to a short biography about the author, the appendices (which can be downloaded) and presentations given by the author.
Conclusion The fact that cost information in the appendices are expressed in $US while technology specifications are equally US-based does place British readers at something of a disadvantage.
While this might not daunt experienced UK practitioners, their inexperienced UK counterparts may find this information less helpful than it could might have been.
Some might consider that the price, at $35 US or £26.85 for the paperback edition, is steep.
Although the Kindle edition is cheaper, it is not cheaper by much £20.53 at the time of writing, with the cheapest used version currently showing in Amazon at £17.90.
That said, the book is a useful, well-written, easily read work on project management for implementing technology solutions in libraries and is recommended on that basis.
List of Chapters Chapter 1 Identify the Library's Needs Chapter 2 Project Teams and Initial Research Chapter 3 Research Further and Identify Vendors Chapter 4 Contract With a Vendor Chapter 5 Plan for Implementation Chapter 6 Step Through the Implementation Chapter 7 Plan Again Chapter 8 Customize and Finalize the System Chapter 9 Train Staff, Prepare Users, and Promote Chapter 10 Launch the New System Chapter 11 Smooth Out the Rough Edges Chapter 12 Take a Look Back Chapter 13 Reality Check Appendices Appendix A: Sample Technology Plan Appendix B: Sample Request for Proposal Appendix C: Sample Review Tool Appendix D: Sample Recommendation for Vendor Solution Appendix E: IT Inventory Template Appendix F: IP Planner Template References Karen C Knox: The Book: Implementing Technology Solutions in Libraries http://www.karencknox.com/ITSiL.php Author Details Elizabeth McHugh Electronic Resources Manager University of the Highlands and Islands Email:elizabeth.mchugh@uhi.ac.uk Web site: http://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/libraries/e-resources Elizabeth McHugh is the Electronic Resources Manager for the University of the Highlands and Islands, a federated university in the north of Scotland.
She has been in this job since 2005.
Prior to this she worked in Further Education in England and Scotland for 9 years.
Her current role involves acquiring and making available all online information to support teaching, learning and research.
Her professional interests include resource discovery and access, e-resource licence agreement development and the expansion of e-book use in Higher Education.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Portuguese municipal archives on Facebook: “Like!” Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Portuguese municipal archives on Facebook: “Like!” Citation BibTex RIS Ana Margarida Dias da Silva looks at how social media such as Facebook is currently used by local municipal archives in Portugal, and the potential for future public engagement using such tools.
Introduction The growing use of Web-based social platforms by archives, libraries and museums has raised interest in the analysis of Facebook use by the Portuguese municipal archives on their dissemination of and access to archival information.
The Portuguese municipal archives, responsible for the management of documentation and information produced and received by the city councils, as well as for access and outreach, are theoretically closer to the interests of citizens.
This was the main reason for the choice of this type of archive as the object of this study.
The search on the Web 2.0 platform was done using the terms “municipal archive”, “municipal historical archive” and “municipal photographic archive”, in the first stage in November 2013, and in a second stage in April 2014.
The paper starts, therefore, with the search for a definition of the Web 2.0 and Archives 2.0 concepts; then, an analysis of the presence of the Portuguese municipal archives on Facebook and the way the archives makes use of the social media tool in the outreach and access of archival information.
These were the main objectives of the study.
An approach to the Archive 2.0 concept Web 2.0, a concept that appears for the first time in 2004, is characterized by a change of attitude, more than a new technology (Alvim, 2011: 16), where active and collective participation are present in the creation, edition and publication of content.
In fact, for Margaix Arnal (2007: 100) the real revolution is in the change of attitude in which users are no longer information consumers but participatory elements in the development and management of content.
Limiting content to static HTML pages, when PDF documents, Word and other formats are already available (Acuña e Agenjo, 2005: 409), is not valid for the beginning of the 21st century.
The connection to users, no longer passive actors but interveners in the process of knowledge construction, has had a great impact on the development of new services (Margaix Arnal, 2007: 95).
The Web 2.0 concept changed the way institutions working with information act, since it includes a philosophy of openness, inclusion, tolerance of disorder and valorization of the “amateur” contribution (Carver, 2008: 3).
More than the physical organization of documents, information is increasingly based on a net concept and circulation of knowledge (Cerdá Díaz, 2002a: 8), since accessing information is important regardless of the medium, physical location and holder.
For Adam Crymble (2010: 128) Web 2.0 is not limited to expensive or technologically advanced services; neither does it have to involve tagging.
An archive need not adopt all Web 2.0 services to offer an effective, web-based outreach program.
There are many tools under the Web 2.0 umbrella that can help to serve the mandate of an archive without requiring heavy investments of time or money.
These tools fall under the blanket terms of “social media” or “social networking,” which refer to an increasing number of online services, almost all free.
For O’Reilly (2005), the Web 2.0 applications are those that take advantage of the intrinsic features of the Web in a permanent upgrade of services, and improve as many people use it, including individual users, who offer their own data to be reused by others in ‘an architecture of participation’ net.
The relationship between archives, the Internet and the Social Web is unavoidable and the professionals who work with information must pay attention to all of these phenomena.
According to Cerdá Díaz (2002a: 5), “Internet nos obliga por tanto a una gran esfuerzo de adaptación si queremos ocupar el lugar que nos corresponde en esta nueva geografía de la difusión y acceso a la información”.
The increase of the availability of archives in a digital format is also the result of the idea that information, which was previously available to a limited number of researchers, is now accessible to a large group (Samouelian, 2009: 43).
The collaborative tools available for Web 2.0 changed the way information is outreached and accessed, especially due to the participation of users, and archives, libraries and museums will tend to develop the ability to fit the cyberculture reality and to follow the evolution of technology.
Unlike other cultural domain, the policy of outreach of archival services on the web is largely focused on the value of documents.
So, the archives’ services do not have the particular will to bring, via Social Web, users to the physical reading rooms as opposed to museums, which use the Web to increase attendances in their institutions.
It is, therefore, possible to build a true massive dissemination of fonds and begin a collaborative scientific work like this, long distance.
(Moirez, 2012: 191).
The Internet started a true revolution related to information access and use (Cerdá Díaz, 2002a: 1) and archives and archivists should take advantage of the possibilities that the Internet and collaborative technology offers.
“The unstoppable urgency of the so called information society is a unique opportunity to give prestige to the archival function, since information is increasingly intended to be converted into a source of knowledge.” (Alberch Fugueras, 2000: 6).
In recent studies, 48.8% of the Portuguese population over 15 years old is believed to use the Internet, and individuals who finished secondary education (88%) and university education (94%) are among those who regularly use the Internet (Leitão, 2011: 108), either for leisure or work.
The Internet is thus considered a primary vehicle for information communication and dissemination, and the archives that make content available on the Web are becoming more so (Cerdá Díaz, 2008: 153).
Currently, Web 2.0 development has made available to archives a set of collaborative tools and platforms that allow more interaction and new opportunities for institutional promotion (Nogueira, 2010: 1).
The tools made available by Web 2.0 can be used by information professionals, since the ubiquity of the Internet allows greater visibility to a larger number of users, and being able to involve the public is a way of bringing archives out of the darkness and showing them as centres of culture, heritage and social concerns (Sinclair, 2011: 1), since the work developed by archives aims to meet the information needs of a countries’ citizen (Sinclair, 2011: 6).
Summing it up in a sentence: “Web 2.0 is about connecting people (Facebook, MySpace, Ning), in an interactive (instant messaging, multimedia) collaborative workplace (slideshare, flickr, technorati, tagging) that everyone can edit (wikis, blogs)” (Crowley, 2009: 1).
If, as António and Silva (2011: s.p.)
state, “a disponibilização da informação através de guias, inventários ou catálogos deixou de ser a forma privilegiada de comunicação» by archives, the Internet allows the combination of «funções próprias da descrição e gestão dos documentos de arquivo com soluções de gestão de conteúdos através da nova visão dos Arquivos 2.0”.
So, archives open up to the participation and collaboration of users, when they choose to adopt the Social Web’s technological tools.
Theimer (2011) proposes a broader definition of Archives 2.0, that is, it goes beyond the mere use of the Web 2.0 applications.
This author actually establishes a comparison between Archives 1.0 and Archives 2.0 to highlight the changes that have occurred, presenting an opposition between, “the qualities of the present and future that I’m calling Archives 2.0 and general characteristics of Archives 1.0 that represent a rapidly fading past”: Table 1 Differences between Archives 1.0 and 2.0 according to Theimer (2011: 60-65) Archives 2.0 Archives 1.0 Open Not Closed Transparent Not Opaque User Centered Not Record Centered Facilitator Not Gatekeeper Attracting New Users Not Relying on Users to Find Them Shared Standards Not Localizated Practice Metrics and Measurement Not “Unmeasurable” Results Iterative Products Not “Perfect” Products Innovation and Flexibility Not Adhering to Tradition Technology Savvy Not Technology Phobic Value Doing Not Knowing Confident about Lobbying for Resources Not Hesitant Beggars In her paper, Nogueira (2010: 1) presents the impact and benefits of both Archives 1.0 and 2.0, as well as the resistance and disadvantages in the use of these tools.
This author states that the use of these Web 2.0 applications affects the way services and their products are accessible to the public and that they benefit the image of archives through greater recognition from the public and accessing more diverse users.
Several authors already quoted consider the use of Web 2.0 collaborative tools as a way to increase the number of users and a mechanism for adding value to collections.
These tools affect the way information is made available to the public and how the service is delivered.
Nogueira (2010: 2) mentions some resistance due to a lack of knowledge and the non recognition of these tools as ‘official’ or valid applications.
Nonetheless, more advantages than obstacles are acknowledged, such as their free and immediate access (ex: Facebook, Blogs, Wiki) which, because of the ease involved in editing, do not need IT support.
Portuguese municipal archives on Facebook Social networks like Facebook are defined by the creation of public profiles of natural or legal persons, public or private, who share information, communicate and talk with other users in a network (Alvim, 2011: 18).
The users of this social network make an informed option to create a public profile and an account (Crymble, 2010: 129).
In Portugal, this is the favourite platform of 4 billion users and is used mostly by adults (Leitão, 2011: 112).
In the same work, Paulo Leitão states that Facebook is mostly used by 25 to 34 year old people, also pointing out a growth in the 45 to 54 and the 18 to 24 age groups, meaning a total of 30 000 new users in 2010 (Leitão, 2011: 111-112).
In Spain, for instance, 4.7 billion users between 16 and 45 years old have a profile on a social network, and the major part of Facebook users are university students (Margaix Arnal, 2008: 592).
From the methodology point of view, in order to identify the Portuguese municipal archives that use Facebook, the terms ‘municipal archive’, ‘municipal historical archive’ and ‘municipal photographic archive’ were searched on this platform.
The results are sparse: among the 308 Portuguese municipal archives, only 9 (2.92%) could be found on Facebook at the time of the search.
They are Oliveira de Azeméis (district of Aveiro), Guimarães (district of Braga), Figueira da Foz (district of Coimbra), Alenquer and Lisboa (district of Lisboa), Valongo (district of Porto), Torres Novas (district of Santarém), Ponte de Lima (district of Viana do Castelo) and Mangualde (district of Viseu).
In his study, Crymble (2010: 135) identified 104 archives with Facebook pages and also 64 archives and 27 archivists using Twitter.
The author studied the Twitter and Facebook usage by the archival community (archives and archivists) between August and September 2009, using the terms “archives”, “archive” or “archivist”, and found a total of 195 institutions and individuals.
For the French scope, Pauline Moirez and Édouard Bouyé studied the use of the collaborative Web by the public departmental (101) and municipal (36 682) archives.
Only 13 had a Facebook account, 6 a Twitter account and about 20 services developed collaborative projects of indexing documents and image identification (Moirez, 2012: 187).
16 new projects of collaborative indexing were expected for 2012 (Bouyé, 2012: 9).
According to the Portuguese results, 3 municipal archives have profiles (Figueira da Foz, Alenquer and Mangualde) and the remainder have institutional pages.
In order to join, the creation of a Facebook account is required, which can be a profile (mainly used by private individuals who add ‘friends’ and keep an updated profile sharing information, images, videos, and in which levels of privacy can be defined) or a page (very similar to a profile but especially directed to institutions due to its self-promotion features).
The major difference between them is that Facebook pages are accessible to the public and can be seen by anyone who has a Facebook account and not only by pre authorised friends, which does not happen with an individual profile (Crymble, 2010: 131).
For this work, these two situations will be treated equally, since analysing the way Facebook is used to access and outreach archival information is what matters.
Likewise, the ‘Likes’ on institutional pages or the ‘Friends’ on profiles are an example of the archives’ popularity on Facebook, as well as the number of followers and interested people in the content that is made available.
According to research, joining of the identified institutions to Facebook has been progressive and mainly in the second decade of the 21st century.
The Municipal Archive Alfredo Pimenta in Guimarães is the oldest on Facebook (September 2, 2010), followed by the municipal archives of Ponte de Lima (December 13, 2011) and Oliveira de Azeméis (February 17, 2012), the Photographic Archive of Figueira da Foz (October 2013) and more recently the Municipal Archive of Lisbon (February 26, 2014).
The remainder of the municipal archives does not mention the Facebook joining date but they joined by at least September 2013.
The most popular archive at the time data were collected was the Municipal Historical Archive of Valongo with 4,492 ‘Likes’ on its Facebook page.
It is important to mention that the ‘Municipal Arxiu of Barcelona’ had 1,671 ‘Likes’ on the same date.
The ‘Alenquer Archive Museum’ is the second most popular with 1,085 followers and the Municipal Archive of Torres Novas is the third with 1,071 Likes’.
These are the only archives with more than a thousand followers at the time of the search.
The remainder have a few hundred: Photographic Archive of Figueira da Foz 815; Municipal Archive Alfredo Pimenta 761; Ponte de Lima’s – 675; Lisbon’s – 641; Mangualde’s – 575; and finally Oliveira de Azeméis’ – 207.
In terms of the content, at the time searches were done the archives of Guimarães, Lisbon, Oliveira de Azeméis, Ponte de Lima and Valongo had on their Facebook page their mission, information about their services, a brief presentation and institutional contacts.
Besides gathering, safeguarding, preserving and treating the documentation/information, outreach work was referred as a priority by the archives.
The Municipal Photographic Archive of Figueira da Foz and the Municipal Archive of Torres Novas only showed institutional contacts and the municipal archives of Alenquer and Mangualde did not have information about the institution, and did not present their purpose or aims on their Facebook pages.
The following section focuses on how municipal archives use Facebook to develop outreach work and provide access to the archival information they manage.
The Municipal Archive Alfredo Pimenta and the Municipal Archive of Ponte de Lima establish a connection between the archive’s Facebook page and the website, publicising new search tools and documents which have been described and made available through a link that connects the two platforms.
The Municipal Archive Alfredo Pimenta, for instance, on sharing ‘Highlights’ and ‘Historical Documents’, takes the visitor to the archive’s webpage through a link on Facebook.
The Municipal Archive of Ponte de Lima shares on Facebook virtual exhibits available on the archive’s website.
The municipal archive of Oliveira de Azeméis promotes the “My dummy will make history” initiative, which aims to gather dummies of the locals and Facebook is used to promote it to the community.
The municipal archive of Valongo has the “Document of the Month” (with a link directing to the city council’s portal).
This archive presents the context of every available image, whether “Document of the Month”, photos or albums of visits to the archive, educational activities and exhibitions that have taken place, and also a commemoration of the International Day of Archives.
The municipal archive of Torres Novas promoted the “One Month, One Poem”, by José Lopes dos Santos” (with a link to the document and the reference code) in 2013.
These documents, which were made available every month, related to the 45th anniversary of the municipal stadium.
According to observations, all these services use Facebook mainly for sharing photos (single photos or albums, with or without archival context and reference code) which mirror the initiatives of the educational service and cultural extension sector, documental exhibitions and lectures on commemorative days, such as the anniversary of the archive or the International Day of Archives.
The page is also a means of publicising activities of the archive or events related to archives and Archival Science.
Some textual or photographic documents are sporadically presented with a description, reference code or sharing of information related to the city, its inhabitants, history and heritage.
The analysis shows that no archive uses Facebook for collaborative construction of knowledge, and this feature of Web 2.0 could engage Internet users in identifying and indexing photographs or helping to describe and transcribe documents.
For example, the Municipal Archive of Barcelona, on its Facebook page, shows pictures and asks for help in identifying people and places.
Another example is the Municipal Archives of Angoulême, on whose Facebook page, “lancent un appel à la population concernant le prêt de documents divers: photographies, affiches, tracts, bons de réquisitions, tickets de rationnement, correspondances, laisser-passer…” to the organization of an exhibition about the 70th anniversary of the town’s liberation during World War II.
The private documentation, correctly described and dated between 1940 and 1945, complements the information in the Municipal Archives of Angoulême.
These are two examples of the engagement of the citizens in the construction of knowledge.
Conclusion We may conclude, according to our study of identifying and analysing the Facebook accounts of the Portuguese municipal archives, that this Social Web platform is not currently of much interest to the 308 archives: according to the collected data, only 9 joined this platform.
Facebook is mostly used to publicise initiatives related to archival information and initiatives organized by archives or, less frequently, to share findings.
However, the idea of participative archives, in which Internet users and nonprofessionals’ knowledge and skills are used in collaborative indexing for the identification of images, that is, for a better understanding of archives and information access (Moirez, 2012; Theimer, 2011), is far from being a reality in the Portuguese municipal archives, according to our collected data.
If these services are theoretically closer to citizens, virtual closeness in a digital environment should also result from this physical proximity, in which Web 2.0 collaborative tools would contribute to the sharing of knowledge and the use of collective intelligence.
Nonetheless, concerning Facebook, this does not occur; that is, users may ‘like’ a page and its contents, may share and comment, but they are not invited to participate in their description, indexation and identification, characteristic features of Web 2.0 and archives 2.0.
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INFO 2002: Congresso Internacional de Información, La Habana (Cuba) [Online].
(February 2002) [Consult.
12 Dec. 2012].
Available on: http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/15224/1/CERDA_DIAZ_Julio_La%20socializaci%c3%b3n%20de%20los%20archivos.%20Internet%20en%20las%20nuevas.pdf CRYMBLE, Adam (2010) – An Analysis on Twitter and Facebook use by the archival community.
Archivaria [Online].
70 : 125-151 [Consult.
12 Dec. 2012] Available on: http://www.crymble.ca/adam/cv/publications/Crymble-Archivaria.pdf CROWLEY, Mary Joan (2009) – Web 2.0 and libraries [Online].
Conferência, Roma, 6 March 2009.
[Consult.
23 Nov. 2012].
Available on: http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/12962 LEITÃO, Paulo Jorge Oliveira (2011) – A Web 2.0 e os seus públicos: o caso português.
Páginas a & b [Online].
Porto, n.º 8, série 2: 107-131 [Consult.
12 Dec. 2012].
Available on: http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/17943/1/A%20Web%202_PORTUGAL_UTILAZACAO.pdf MARGAIX-ARNAL, Dídac (2007) – Conceptos de web 2.0 y biblioteca 2.0: origen, definiciones y retos para las bibliotecas actuales.
El profesional de la información, [Online].
16, nº.
2 (Marzo-abril 2007): 95-106.
[Consult.
30 Sept. 2013].
Available on: http://eprints.rclis.org/9521/1/kx5j65q110j51203.pdf MARGAIX-ARNAL, Dídac (2008) – Las bibliotecas universitarias y Facebook: cómo y por qué estar presentes.
El profesional de la información [Online].
17, n.º 6, (noviembre diciembre, 2008): 589-601.
[Consult.
30 Sept. 2013].
Available on: http://eprints.rclis.org/12568/1/articulo_Facebook_Margaix.pdf MOIREZ, Pauline (2012) – Archives participatives.
Bibliothèques 2.0 à l’heure des médias sociaux.
Editions du Cercle de la librarie [Online].
(2012) : 187-197 [Consult.
30 Jan. 2013].
Available on: http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/72/54/20/PDF/ArchivesParticipatives_PMoirez.pdf NOGUEIRA, Marta (2010) – Archives in Web 2.0: New Opportunities.
Ariadne [Online].
63 (April 2010).
[Consult.
13 Dec. 2012] Available on: http://repositorio.ul.pt/bitstream/10451/1850/3/MNogueira_Archives_in_Web_2.0 O’REILLY, Tim (2005) – What is web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software.
In O’Reilly Network [Online].
30 de Setembro 2005.
[Consult.
30 Sept. 2013].
Available on: http://www.im.ethz.ch/education/HS08/OReilly_What_is_Web2_0.pdf SAMOUELIAN, Mary (2009) – Embracing Web 2.0: Archives and the Newest Generation of Web Applications.
The American Archivist [Online].
72 (Spring/Summer 2009): 42-71 [Consult.
19 Sept. 2013].
Available on: http://archivists.metapress.com/content/k73112x7n0773111/fulltext.pdf SINCLAIR, Joan Marguerite (2011) – The Interactive Archives: Social Media and Outreach.
[Online].
Tese apresentada à Faculdade de Estudos Graduados da Universidade de Manitoba para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Artes, Novembro 2011.
[Consult.
14 Dec. 2012].
Available on: http://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/handle/1993/8461 THEIMER, Kate (2011) – What Is the Meaning of Archives 2.0?.
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74 (Spring/Summer 2011): 58-68.
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Available on: http://bing.exp.sis.pitt.edu/661/1/AA_Web_2.0.pdf   Ana Margarida Dias da Silva Archive of University of Coimbra Centre of History, Society and Culture, University of Coimbra margaridadiasdasilva@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Introductory Concepts in Information Science Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Introductory Concepts in Information Science Buzz software accessibility repositories copyright url research bibliometrics Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim takes a look at an introduction to Information Science but fails to be impressed.
With a title like that, one would expect a primer, introducing all the key concepts of information science to someone studying the topic for the first time at undergraduate or Masters' level, and possibly for the interested layman.
Such a book would be a worthy successor to Chris Hanson's Introduction to Science Information Work, and Roger Meetham's Information Retrieval, both of which were first published about 40 years ago.
Sadly, however, this book does not fulfil the promise of its title.
The book comprises 12 chapters, seven of which were written by Norton herself, four by other authors, and one chapter comprises the reproduction of two journal articles.
The book starts with a history of information science; however, the discussion of whether information science deserves the name 'science' is spoiled by the failure to mention, even in passing, the key philosopher of science, Karl Popper.
It further fails to notice that the first use of the term 'information science' was by Farradane in the 1950s, and the first organisation to have the words in its name was the Institute of Information Scientists, founded in 1958.
Instead, it discusses the American Society for Information Science, which adopted that name ten years later.
So the history is partial and misleading.
Chapter 3, on communication, is probably the best in the book.
Here, Norton provides an interesting analysis of what information is and how it relates to communication.
The next chapter, on information retrieval, is a weak one; with no references more recent than 1999, with a description of a 1998 article as 'recent', the average age of the references cited is nearly 25 years old.
Furthermore, with a citation to a 1992 edition of Rowley's Organizing Knowledge, when the most recent edition was in 2008, this is an out-of-date chapter lazily recycled.
The next chapter, on indexing, is a poor introduction to the topic, failing as it does to discuss the classic experiments by Cleverdon at Cranfield; more could have been said about how Google goes about indexing the Web.
The next chapter, on background to repositories (which means all library collections in this context), has a minor factual error, claiming that the British Library was founded in 1753, when it fact it was founded in 1973.
In 1753 the core of the British Museum Library was founded.
It ends with a totally irrelevant list of the URLs of a random collection of US libraries.
The next chapter, on digital repositories, is partly based on an unpublished Masters dissertation.
This chapter uses 'information' and 'knowledge' interchangeably, repeats itself in places, and also provides a random list of URLs of various repositories.
The chapter uses, but fails to explain, the term 'open access'.
It also fails to present the arguments for and against Open Access, and fails, moreover, to distinguish the various types of Open Access.
The next chapter, on digital libraries, offers the fascinating, but totally incorrect notion at its start, that Vannevar Bush's proposed Memex was an electronic system (it was a mechanical one using microfilm), and gets the lifetime of copyright wrong at the end; but in between offers a reasonable overview of the topic.
Chapter 9, on bibliometrics, has some factual errors (bibliometrics does not encompass qualitative research methods; the Lotka's Law description confuses absolute numbers with percentages).
The chapter quotes a 1998 article stating that the Web cannot develop without a good indexing system, failing to notice that a certain company beginning with the letter G does that just fine.
The author misunderstands Bradford's Law, claiming that Bradford's results 'only' identified 32% core journals, missing the remaining 68%, when Bradford's whole intention was to split the literature into chunks of a third each.
The discussion on following citations over time fails to mention the successful Histcite software and how it works.
The next chapter, on economics, fails to discuss the economics of scholarly communication or the concept of Return on Investment for library and information services.
The next chapter, on value of information, claims that the Velcro fastener was a result of the NASA programme to reach the moon in the late 1960s, when in fact it was invented in the early 1950s, well before the space race, and not by NASA.
This chapter fails to discuss the value and impact of information services, information audits or information resource management.
The final chapter, on digital accessibility, did not cover questions of the digital divide or social informatics.
The book fails to mention several key information science themes, such as legal, ethical and regulatory matters; user needs; models of user behaviour; the evaluation of quality of information; or the information professions and how they might develop in the future.
All told, this book cannot be recommended.
That good basic introduction to information science still waits to be written.
Author Details Charles Oppenheim Department of Information Science Loughborough University UK Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/people/coppenheim.html Return to top Article Title: "Introductory Concepts in Information Science" Author: Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-October-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 65 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue65/oppenheim-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: Copyright Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Copyright Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services Buzz data wiki database archives blog copyright licence intranet Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim sees much to like in the new edition of this work by a well-known authority but identifies one potentially major drawback.
This is the fifth edition of what is, obviously, a very successful title.
The previous edition was published in 2004, and five years is a long time in copyright law and practice, so it was felt no doubt that a new edition was due.
However, as I will explain at the end of this review, that decision may have been unsound.
The book follows its normal format of a series of questions regarding UK copyright law and practice, with brief answers.
The author is a well-known UK copyright expert and has a gentle, witty writing style, which makes it possible to read the book cover-to-cover if you so wanted.
The main chapters, covering the basics of copyright, the major media types, licences, electronic copyright and other matters, is followed by lists of useful addresses and sources of information, and a good index [1].
It is always difficult to achieve the magic combination of accuracy and approachability in legal matters, but Cornish largely manages this.
I did identify errors and niggles though.
For example, question 2.11 [1] on copyright in facts fails to cross-refer to protection of collections of facts in databases, which is covered elsewhere in the book; the claim in 3.19 and 4.27 that a library, archive or museum when given a bequest of unpublished works can assume that it has also acquired the copyright in such materials unless it is told otherwise is incorrect; in 4.3, the author makes reference to 'trivial works' without explaining what he means by the term; in 4.37 it is claimed that a slide or PowerPoint of a book page made for teaching cannot be made legally, but this is not true, as there could be an argument that the reproduction is for criticism or review, and so is permitted (in any case, the CLA's scanning licence will also often allow this); when discussing the communication to the public right in 4.54, the author fails to note that placing copyright material on an Intranet or as an e-mail attachment is also prohibited; in 6.8, it is claimed that someone who transcribes an interview will own the copyright in the transcription, when in fact the transcriber will jointly own the copyright with the interviewer and interviewee; in 11.64, the author claims it is always an offence to remove or alter rights management information, when in fact it is only an offence when it is done with the intention of enabling or concealing copyright infringement a very important distinction.
Finally, in 9.7, it is claimed that all databases enjoy database right, but then later the author corrects himself by noting that not all databases get database right; however, the author then gets into a tangle about what qualifies for database right, stating that to get database right, once must have used effort in obtaining the data, when in fact the law states that one must have used effort in either obtaining, verifying or presenting the information – a quite different thing.
As a result, the author makes incorrect statements about when database right does, or does not exist.
This is the most important mistake in the book.
The list of recommended readings includes one book that is 10 years old and is now seriously dated, as well as failing to note the latest edition of Butterworths Intellectual Property Law Handbook [2].
In addition, the list of recommended Web sites is somewhat restricted, and certainly the web2rights site [3] should have been given a mention.
I was surprised to see no mention of Web 2.0, wikis, blogs and so on, or any mention of cloud computing.
All of these applications raise significant copyright issues, and libraries and archives are getting increasingly involved in storing or creating such materials.
There was also little mention of informed risk management, which is really what copyright is about for information professionals.
No mention is made in the book of the important exception for judicial proceedings, which libraries with significant law or sometimes other collections may find themselves having to rely on.
The Copyright Tribunal is mentioned several times in the book without any explanation of what it does.
Finally, an explanation of my remark at the start of this review.
As I write this review, there are major copyright law amendments being considered by the UK Parliament; it is likely that by April 2010 we will know whether they have been passed, and in what form.
If there is no change to the law, then this book will serve well.
But the chances are there will be significant changes to the law, which will make this (and indeed other books on copyright) obsolete.
So the timing of this new edition is very unfortunate.
Despite the book's generally high accuracy and readability, I do not recommend purchase until the UK legal position is clarified.
References For a list of the contents of Copyright, see below.
Butterworths Intellectual Property Law Handbook (9th Revised edition), Phillips, Jeremy, LexisNexis UK, December 2009, ISBN 9781405737081.
The Web2Rights project http://www.web2rights.org.uk/ Contents Author's note Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction Section 1 Definition and law Section 2 What is covered by copyright?
Section 3 Rights and limitations Section 4 Literary, dramatic and musical works Section 5 Artistic works Section 6 Sound recordings and performers' rights Section 7 Films, videos and DVDs Section 8 Broadcasts Section 9 Databases Section 10 Licensing schemes and licences Section 11 Computer programs, websites and the electronic world Section 12 Other matters Appendix 1 List of useful addresses Appendix 2 Selected further sources of information Appendix 3 Statutory declaration forms Index Author Details Charles Oppenheim Head of Department of Information Science Loughborough University UK Email: c.oppenheim@lboro.ac.uk Web site: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/people/coppenheim.html Return to top Article Title: "Copyright: Interpreting the law for libraries, archives and information services" Author: Charles Oppenheim Publication Date: 30-January-2010 Publication: Ariadne Issue 62 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/oppenheim-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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SUSHI: Delivering Major Benefits to JUSP Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines SUSHI: Delivering Major Benefits to JUSP Buzz data software java html database xml portal archives identifier repositories windows multimedia passwords perl php openurl csv shibboleth authentication interoperability research standards raptor sushi Citation BibTex RIS Paul Meehan, Paul Needham and Ross MacIntyre explain the enormous time and cost benefits in using SUSHI to support rapid gathering of journal usage reports into the JUSP service.
A full-scale implementation of the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) would not be possible without the automated data harvesting afforded by the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol.
Estimated time savings in excess of 97% compared with manual file handling have allowed JUSP to expand its service to more than 35 publishers and 140 institutions by September 2012.
An in-house SUSHI server also allows libraries to download quality-checked data from many publishers via JUSP, removing the need to visit numerous Web sites.
The protocol thus affords enormous cost and time benefits for the centralised JUSP service and for all participating institutions.
JUSP has also worked closely with many publishers to develop and implement SUSHI services, pioneering work to benefit both the publishers and the UK HE community.
JUSP: Background to the Service The management of journal usage statistics can be an onerous task at the best of times.
The introduction of the COUNTER [1] Code of Practice in 2002 was a major step forward, allowing libraries to collect consistent, audited statistics from publishers.
By July 2012, 125 publishers offered the JR1 report, providing the number of successful full-text downloads.
In the decade since COUNTER reports became available, analysis of the reports has become increasingly important, with library managers, staff and administrators increasingly forced to examine journal usage to inform and rationalise purchasing and renewal decisions.
In 2004, JISC Collections commissioned a report [2] which concluded that there was a definite demand for a usage statistics portal for the UK HE community; with some sites subscribing to more than 100 publishers, just keeping track of access details and downloading reports was becoming a significant task in itself, much less analysing the figures therein.
There followed a report into the feasibility of establishing a ‘Usage Statistics Service’ carried out by Key Perspectives Limited and in 2008 JISC issued an ITT (Invitation To Tender).
By early 2009 a prototype service, known as the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) had been developed by a consortium including Evidence Base at Birmingham City University, Cranfield University, JISC Collections and Mimas at The University of Manchester; the prototype featured a handful of publishers and three institutions.
However, despite a centralised service appearing feasible [3], the requirement to download and process data in spreadsheet format, and the attendant time taken, still precluded a full-scale implementation across UK HE.
Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice in 2009 however mandated the use of the newly-introduced Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol [4], a mechanism for the machine-to-machine transfer of COUNTER-compliant reports; this produced dramatic efficiencies of time and cost in the gathering of data from publishers.
The JUSP team began work to implement SUSHI for a range of publishers and expanded the number of institutions.
By September 2012, the service had grown significantly, whilst remaining free at point of use, and encompassed 148 participating institutions, and 35 publishers.
To date more than 100 million individual points of data have been collected by JUSP, all via SUSHI, a scale that would have been impossible without such a mechanism in place or without massive additional staff costs.
JUSP offers much more than basic access to publisher statistics, however; the JUSP Web site [5] details the numerous reports and analytical tools on offer, together with detailed user guides and support materials.
The cornerstone of the service though is undeniably its SUSHI implementation, both in terms of gathering the COUNTER JR1 and JR1a data and as developed more recently its own SUSHI server, enabling institutions to re-harvest data into their own library management tools for local analysis.
JUSP Approach to SUSHI Development and Implementation Once the decision was made to scale JUSP into a full service, the development of SUSHI capability became of paramount importance.
The team had been able to handle spreadsheets of data on a small scale, but the expected upscale to 100+ institutions and multiple publishers within a short time frame meant that this would very quickly become unmanageable and costly in staff time and effort constraints that were proving to be a source of worry at many institutions too: while some sites could employ staff whose role revolved around usage stats gathering and analysis, this was not possible at every institution, nor especially straightforward for institutions juggling dozens, if not hundreds, of publisher agreements and deals.
Two main issues were immediately apparent in the development of the SUSHI software.
Firstly, there was a lack of any standard SUSHI client software that we could use or adapt, and, more worryingly, the lack of SUSHI support at a number of major publishers.
While many publishers use an external company or platform such as Atypon, MetaPress or HighWire to collect and provide usage statistics, others had made little or no progress in implementing SUSHI support by late 2009 where SUSHI servers were in place these were often untested or unused by consumers.
An ultimate aim for JUSP was to develop a single piece of software that would seamlessly interact with any available SUSHI repository and download data for checking and loading into JUSP.
However, the only client software available by 2009 was written and designed to work in the Windows environment, or used Java, which can be very complex to work with and of which the JUSP team had limited expertise.
The challenge therefore became to develop a much simpler set of code using Perl and/or PHP, common and simple programming languages which were much more familiar to the JUSP team.
We started the process of SUSHI implementation by first developing client software that would work with the Oxford Journals server [6].
You would imagine that with a specified standard in place and with guidelines to work from, it would be plain sailing to develop such a tool.
However, the lack of any recognised software to adapt inevitably meant there would be a great deal of trial and error involved and so we scoured the specific NISO SUSHI guidelines and trawled the Internet to find bits of code to work from.
Access to the Oxford Journals server is relatively straightforward, requiring only one authentication identifier (the "Customer Reference ID") and a registered IP pertaining to the institution in question.
Within just a few days, we were successfully retrieving our first JR1 reports using a Perl language SUSHI client; then it was a case of working with the publisher to allow sites to authorise JUSP to gather their data directly.
This can now be done by institutional administrators, who need merely to authorise JUSP to collect data on their behalf using a Web-based administration interface, and then supply us with their username (which doubles as the aforementioned Customer Reference ID in the request we send).
At a stroke we now had a working piece of software which could be used to gather Oxford Journals JR1 usage data for any participating institution.
A minor tweak then allowed us to use the same software to collect the supporting JR1a data, the number of successful full-text article requests from an archive by month and journal.
We were thus able to collect a full range of JR1 and JR1a files for all JUSP sites within a very short period of time dating as far back as the Oxford Journals server would allow (January 2009).
Buoyed by this triumph, we then began work on developing clients which would talk to SUSHI servers belonging to other JUSP publishers: some fell into place very rapidly as various publishers had established usage statistics platforms, for example Springer was using MetaPress and Publishing Technology had their own system in place.
However, several publishers, including some of the larger providers, did not offer a SUSHI service prior to joining JUSP, or were inexperienced in supporting the standard.
This meant that JUSP often pioneered SUSHI development, notably with Elsevier, with whom we became the first organisation to use such a method of gathering usage data.
Publishing Technology is delighted to be involved in this important industry initiative.
By making usage statistics for http://www.ingentaconnect.com available to the Journal Usage Statistics Portal via SUSHI librarians will have the latest and most comprehensive usage data for their collections, helping to inform strategic decisions for digital content purchasing.
Rose Robinson, Product Manager, Publishing Technology [7] The files we retrieve are fairly basic XML files, containing set fields for each journal.
These include a journal title, a publisher, one or more electronic identifiers (Print and Online ISSN) and several "count" fields such as the number of full text downloads, and the breakdown of that figure by HTML, PDF and occasionally other formats such as postscript (PS).
Note that while most SUSHI servers have near-identical implementation in terms of the COUNTER-compliant output fields they supply, they can vary widely in their precise implementation.
Thus it was thus far simpler in the early days to develop a new SUSHI client instance for each publisher or platform from which we wished to retrieve data.
For example, different providers have differing requirements in terms of authorisation parameters, and this was a significant barrier to overcome.
By Autumn 2011 we had around a dozen functioning SUSHI clients, and that number has continued to expand into 2012; by September 2012, we were using 27 different Perl-based and one PHP SUSHI client to collect monthly data for 33 publishers, with software developed and ready for when other vendors join JUSP.
Creation of the client code base has been relatively simple after the initial learning curve, and has enabled us to generate new clients in a very swift manner as new publishers join JUSP.
In terms of what this means for libraries, JUSP is thus already saving manual download of thousands of reports on a monthly basis, and also provides a suite of tools to check and process the data prior to loading into the portal.
Institutions are reassured that the data we collect has been audited according to the COUNTER guidelines in addition to undergoing a rigorous set of tests at Mimas before the data are loaded into the system.
By September 2012, over 100 million individual data entries had been collected; this represents three and a half years' worth of data for 140 institutions some sites have access to more than 30 sets of data within JUSP, and with some institutions not yet providing us with access to all their resources, the scale of usage data that can be collected and analysed is clear!
Data Collection in a Typical Month The benefit of SUSHI becomes apparent when looking at a typical monthly data collection.
In May 2012 we gathered usage data from 26 active publishers and host intermediaries for approximately 140 institutions.
This comprised a grand total of 1833 JR1 and 976 JR1a files: a number of publishers do not offer a JR1a report, preferring instead to provide a JR5 JUSP does not handle JR5 reports at present due to a lack of standardised implementation and its optionality.
Before SUSHI, the concept of handling 2809 files in a single month would have been unthinkable; even at a highly conservative estimate of 15 minutes per file to download and an equivalent time to check and process, that corresponds to around 180 working days a month; eight full time staff in effect just to handle data collection and processing!
By stark contrast, the entire download time required to gather those 2809 files by SUSHI was approximately 24 hours with an automated collection procedure running overnight and out of working hours, the time and effort saving that SUSHI affords is immediately apparent!
Note of course that the data are released by providers at different times during the month: some data become available within the first few days, whereas other datasets appear in the final few days.
It is a COUNTER requirement for data to be provided within 28 days of the end of the reporting period in question (i.e.
May 2012 data should appear no later than June 28) and this is almost always achieved.
Very occasionally a publisher may experience difficulty in providing the usage data in this timeframe, but we are generally notified if this is the case.
Once the files have been collected, it is necessary to check that they have transferred correctly: we visually inspect file sizes to determine their validity before we run the files through our processing tools.
The SUSHI collection is not always flawless, as evidenced by May's manual checks, which discovered a number of minor download errors.
22 files out of 250 for one publisher timed out during the data collection, while 41 out of 133 for another failed for the same reason.
These files were subsequently re-gathered.
However, a successful collection of 97.8% of data can be considered a decent return.
Some months we have achieved 100% accurate data collection first time for every publisher, while occasionally we do run into these timeout issues for one or two platforms.
The average time taken to download a single file varies widely from publisher to publisher and platform to platform.
Various factors can play a part, such as the file size to be collected (dependent on the number of included journal titles), differences in server configurations and the way reports are generated prior to transmission, and even the time of day.
The average throughout May was for a single file to transfer from a publisher/platform to JUSP in 31 seconds, with times on individual platforms ranging between 1 second per file to 4 minutes per file.
More than a dozen datasets, comprising thousands of files, transferred at an average rate of under 3 seconds per file with 100% accuracy.
Processing of these 2809 files was then achieved by a combination of automated checking tools and manual error corrections.
The files were individually run through a Perl script which performed a wide range of checks, looking for things such as data integrity, correct formatting, the presence of journal titles and at least one identifier per record matching these against title and identifier records held in the JUSP database tables the presence of full text total counts, and various other criteria.
If a file failed to meet all the checks, the ensuing warning messages were analysed and we then undertook further investigation to remedy the problem(s).
By far the most common issue that occurs when analysing datasets is the inclusion of new journal titles within publisher reports; titles are obviously added to collections or switch publisher year-round, and this is immediately identified by our checking software.
In May 2012, we identified over 40 new journal titles across a handful of publishers; these were added to the journals table and then the relevant files were reprocessed.
May's data processing runs threw up an interesting series of issues in addition to the expected ‘new journal’ collection.
You might expect that for a large dataset an error would be reproduced across all files, but this is very rarely the case.
For example, one file out of 54 for a publisher had a missing pair of identifiers, but these were present in the remainder.
The failed file was manually edited, the identifiers added, and the checking proceeded with no further hitch.
The next publisher dataset showed one failure in processing 266 files: in this case a badly-encoded special character was the issue, and replacing it fixed the problem.
One slightly bigger issue affected around 15% of files from one publisher; missing identifiers had been replaced with a combination of random text entries or whitespace characters; again, globally removing these solved the problem.
When a systematic error is spotted across a dataset, we notify the publisher and/or data provider in question; JUSP has had great success working closely with the publishers, and the solution of issues which might otherwise have been reported by 100 or more individual libraries is evidence of the value we can bring in this area.
Although SUSHI is a recognised standard, errors in the production of files can and clearly do still occur periodically.
The combination of initial manual checks, a sophisticated file checking tool and then visual inspection of the loaded data both by our team and by the institutions results in increasingly efficient error reporting and the (almost!)
complete elimination of any systematic problems.
Taking into account all the above issues, and the sheer scale of files to be processed, May's entire checking procedure for 2,809 corrected files took just 244 minutes, at an average of around five seconds per file.
An additional five hours were required to manually correct all the data issues outlined above, but even with this manual work the entire checking procedure for 26 publishers in May 2012 took the equivalent of a single working day.
When comparing this to the (conservative) 180 working days to collect and handle spreadsheets, the benefits of SUSHI in saving time and staff costs are immediately obvious.
Building and Implementing a SUSHI Server for JUSP Having the ability to gather COUNTER reports from publishers on behalf of libraries, using our various SUSHI clients, is all well and good but it is only half the story.
As an intermediary between publishers and libraries, it is also our responsibility to maintain the chain of COUNTER-compliance by being able to re-expose those reports via a SUSHI server, as mandated by the COUNTER Code of Practice.
The work we had carried out developing the clients and consuming COUNTER reports, as described above, proved to be invaluable when it came to creating our own SUSHI server.
We had learnt a lot about the SUSHI protocol, both in theory by referencing the SUSHI standard [8], and in practice as we wrestled with the XML reports we were ingesting from publishers.
Forewarned is forearmed, though, so the task of creating the JUSP SUSHI server was not difficult, although it was exacting: the standard is very detailed and XML is quite unforgiving about mark-up errors.
Our server implementation, written in PHP, conforms to version 1.6 of the SUSHI protocol and release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases.
During the coding process we referred extensively to the standard, following it through, step by step, to make sure we implemented everything exactly as it should be.
The whole process, from start to finish, took a little under three weeks to complete.
One vital aspect that we had to consider was that of authentication.
It is extremely important that confidentiality be maintained and that access to data is restricted to the relevant parties.
For the most part the SUSHI specification gives extensive guidance on its implementation, but in the key area of authentication it actually has very little to say.
Access to statistics within the secure JUSP portal requires users to login using Shibboleth/ OpenAthens in order to identify themselves.
For machine-to-machine interaction via SUSHI we need a different method of authentication and authorisation.
The SUSHI specification includes a field – the Requestor ID – which is used to identify who is making a request for data, but that is not sufficient in itself to guarantee the identity of the requestor: an institution’s Requestor ID could potentially get hijacked and be used by an unauthorised party.
So an additional layer of authentication is required.
Having seen for ourselves the difficulties caused to harvesters by the idiosyncratic use of extensions to SUSHI, we decided to keep things simple and straightforward: following the lead of Oxford Journals, we adopted IP address authentication to verify requestor identities.
Participating libraries are required to register the IP address(es) of the machine(s) that will send SUSHI requests to our server.
The combination of IP address and requestor ID ensures that only those truly authorised can access their usage data.
However, not all of our participating libraries want to harvest directly from us.
Some of them use a third-party software package, such as Ex Libris’ UStat software, to analyse their usage statistics.
So, in addition to setting up authentication for direct consumers of our SUSHI service, we have also put in place procedures to allow access to data by authorised third-parties.
In 2011, we worked closely with Ex Libris over a number of months to get procedures in place to allow JUSP and UStat to interoperate.
Now, for a library to authorise UStat to harvest on its behalf requires nothing more than the checking of a box on their JUSP SUSHI administration page.
More recently we have also worked with Innovative Interfaces to ensure that JUSP functions with their Millennium statistical package.
At the moment, we have a stable, reliable, canonical SUSHI service conforming to release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice in place.
But we cannot rest on our laurels: looming on the horizon is the new release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice.
Release 4 is ‘a single, integrated Code of Practice covering journals, databases and books, as well as multimedia content’ which has a deadline date of 31 December 2013 for its implementation [9].
To supplement the new release, the NISO SUSHI Standing Committee has a created a COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile [10] which sets out ‘detailed expectations for both the server and the client of how the SUSHI protocol and COUNTER XML reports are to be implemented to ensure interoperability’.
By harmonising implementations, adoption of the new profile should make life easier for both producers and consumers of SUSHI alike.
So, over the coming months, along with other vendors and services, we will be working on developing a new SUSHI server meeting the requirements of release 4. Review of Findings Table 1 highlights the enormous time savings that SUSHI affords across a range of publishers.
We have anonymised the publishers, but these represent typical low, medium and high-use datasets for the UK HE community.
Figures included are for May 2012 but are typical of any given month.
We have estimated that it would take each institution an average of 15 minutes to log onto a publisher Web site, collect the relevant month's file(s) and transfer them to an in-house package for analysis.
This does not take into account any time spent looking up passwords, any connection problems, or time spent moving the files onto the JUSP server for processing.
We have also included figures showing the time taken to process and check files using our automated checking software.
Before SUSHI became available and we collected files in that way, it took one member of staff an average of 15 minutes hands-on time to process manually one spreadsheet of data for one institution per month; the actual staff time savings indicated below are in reality even greater, as much of the processing is done automatically and only requires manual intervention when errors arise.
This figure is as valuable a metric as the download time, as an individual institution would need to perform visual inspections manually on each JR1/1a file before reporting figures files can contain thousands of individual journal titles, so a figure of 15 minutes is reasonable to assume as the average checking time.
Publisher A Publisher B Publisher C Publisher D Subscribing institutions 96 133 125 132 Files to download 192 266 250 264 Average file size (kB) 30 370 1500 1320 Total time for all sites to gather files and pass to JUSP (mins, estimated) (a) 1440 1995 1875 1980 Total SUSHI download time for all files (mins) 5 16 100 48 SUSHI download time per file (seconds) 1.5 3.6 24 11 Files collected first time (%) 100 100 100 100 SUSHI time saving (%) 99.7 99.2 94.7 97.6 Manual processing time (b) (all files, mins) 2880 3990 3750 3960 JUSP software processing time (all files, mins) 4 15 48 39 JUSP error processing (all files, mins) 0 0 40 2 Processing time saving (%) 99.9 99.6 97.7 99.0 Table 1: Actual and estimated download and processing time savings for four publishers using SUSHI and in-house checking software Notes to Table 1: (a) estimated 15 minutes per institution to log onto the publisher site, download that month's file(s) and email them to JUSP (b) estimated 15 minutes manual processing time per file in CSV/spreadsheet format The time savings across the board are thus clearly huge.
Factor in the ability for JUSP to gather and replace data very quickly when a publisher indicates that data have been restated or altered and the time and effort saved becomes even starker.
One JUSP publisher recently restated nine months’ worth of usage data, and using SUSHI we were able to completely replace these data for more than 130 institutions in under two hours sites dealing manually with usage data simply could not do this, even if they were aware that the statistics had been regenerated!
JUSP thus affords great efficiencies for its participating institutions and the UK HE community.
Expanding the table above to encompass all JUSP publishers sees similar economies of time and effort; in May one dataset proved more problematic than the rest, requiring numerous attempts to gather some files due to time-out errors and other errors in data processing.
Even so, the time saved compared to manual gathering and processing was still more than 88% using the above criteria.
Across the board in May, 97.2% of files were gathered correctly on a first pass this figure can be 100% some months, but is generally around the 97-99% mark.
Lessons Learned and Recommendations The key lesson that can be drawn from our experiences is that a centralised, reliable harvesting service based on using SUSHI to collect data is practical, cheap to run, and provides enormous economies where staff time is concerned.
JUSP simply could not operate at its present budget without SUSHI, and anyone contemplating setting up a similar service would do well to follow a similar course.
The SUSHI protocol, allied with COUNTER compliance, has been a real godsend for the provision of standardised journal usage statistics.
Meanwhile work has been progressing to develop a stand-alone single instance of the code which any institution can access and repurpose for its own use.
This ‘SUSHI Starters’ code is a Web-based client written in PHP and is available from the project Web site [11] technical assistance is available to help install this locally if required.
We would also recommend to sites that wish to gather usage data for loading into their own statistics management software packages to make use of the JUSP SUSHI server.
A handful of JUSP institutions have successfully downloaded hundreds of datasets from us, knowing that we have already checked the data from the publisher.
Ex Libris and Innovative Interfaces have also added JUSP as preferred vendors within their statistics packages (UStat and Millennium, respectively), enabling downloads of data from the JUSP SUSHI server directly into their software.
A survey of JUSP users carried out in Spring 2012 [12] supports these findings.
74.1% of users reported time savings as a result of using JUSP; participants who took a majority of deals with publishers not yet included in JUSP mainly accounted for the rest.
Over 60% indicated that removing duplicated effort was a major advantage, and 70% reported that the speedy collection and reliability of data within JUSP afforded better decision making in terms of journal renewals and budgeting.
81.7% of librarians also felt that if they did not have access to JUSP it would have an adverse effect on their service, with one commenting: We [would] have to go back to doing all the harvesting ourselves when we have used the staff time freed to enhance other services/resources and those services would have to go/be reduced.
The benefit of the JUSP SUSHI server, with the ability to extract data directly from JUSP into library management and statistics analysis tools, has also been reported.
A librarian from Leeds commented: Going to JUSP to download 20 spreadsheets is much faster than going to 20 vendor Web sites, and having the data harvested automatically to the Innovative ERM is even faster.
The data acquisition involves little effort once it has been set up; and I can have the harvest happen on a schedule.
Conclusion SUSHI allows JUSP to collect (and provide access to) audited, COUNTER-compliant usage data on an unprecedented scale and to do so with accuracy and a high degree of reliability.
Without it, a service such as this would either be unfeasible or would require a lot of additional staff to handle the data processing alone.
Not only is there a significant time and cost saving within JUSP itself, the time saved at each of the 140 participating institutions is also evident; no longer is there a requirement for a member of staff to connect individually to dozens of individual publisher platforms, download spreadsheets, and then load them into whatever package that site uses to analyse its data.
Moreover, the additional checks that JUSP performs on the data ensure the highest possible chance that the figures will be presented to the end-user without any problems or errors.
JUSP is also providing publishers with an additional level of quality assurance.
The use of SUSHI has demonstrably saved JUSP and the UK HE community hundreds of thousands of pounds of staff costs since its inception; add in an estimated 97%+ of time in data collection and processing every month and the dual benefits are enormous; as more publishers join, this efficiency will continue to increase.
In an age of funding cuts and budget restrictions, the combination of JUSP and SUSHI thus affords an economical, high-quality alternative to the previously onerous and unending task of journal statistics gathering and management.
References The COUNTER code of practice Journals and Databases release 3 (2008) http://www.projectcounter.org/r3/Release3D9.pdf Conyers, A., Dalton, P. "NESLi2 analysis of usage statistics: summary report", March 2005 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/nesli2_usstudy.pdf JISC Usage Statistics Portal scoping study Phase 2: summary report, January 2010 http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Reports/Usage-stats-scoping-study/ NISO SUSHI Web site http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi JUSP Web site http://jusp.mimas.ac.uk/ Cradock, C., Meehan, P. R., Needham, P., "JUSP in time: a partnership approach to developing a journal usage statistics portal", Learned Publishing, 2011, 24(2), pp 109-114.
The Journals Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP).
"AiP, Nature and Publishing Technology now participating in the JISC Journal Usage Statistics Portal".
Press release, January 2011 http://jusp.mimas.ac.uk/news/pressrelease_jan11.html The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/6569/The%20Standardized%20Usage%20Statistics%20Harvesting%20Initiative%20%28SUSHI%29%20Protocol.pdf COUNTER Codes of Practice http://www.projectcounter.org/code_practice.html COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/7639/RP-14-201X_SUSHI_IP_draft_for_comment.pdf SUSHI Starters project Web site http://cclibweb-4.dmz.cranfield.ac.uk/projects/sushistarters/ JUSP Community Survey, June 2012 http://jusp.mimas.ac.uk/docs/JUSPSurveyPublic_june12.pdf Author Details Paul Meehan Senior Development Officer Mimas The University of Manchester Email: paul.meehan@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://mimas.ac.uk Paul Meehan is a Senior Development Officer, working at Mimas, the UK National Data Centre at The University of Manchester.
Paul's main role is as developer and administrator of the JUSP service, as well as involvement in a range of other Mimas projects and services including IRUS UK, the e-Tekkatho Project to deliver academic resources to Burma and work with Arthritis Research UK.
He previously held key roles in the Intute and CrossFire services.
Paul Needham Research & Innovation Manager Cranfield University Email: p.a.needham@cranfield.ac.uk Web site: http://www.cranfield.ac.uk Paul Needham is the Research and Innovation Manager at Kings Norton Library, Cranfield University.
Paul is responsible for Application Development within JUSP.
Recent projects he has worked on for JISC include ETAS (Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service), SUSHI Starters, PIRUS2, IRUS and RAPTOR-JUse.
Paul is a member of the NISO SUSHI Standing Committee and the Technical Advisory Boards of COUNTER and the KnowledgeBase+ Project.
Ross MacIntyre Senior Manager Mimas The University of Manchester Email: ross.macintyre@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://mimas.ac.uk/ Ross MacIntyre currently works within Mimas, the UK National Data Centre at The University of Manchester.
Ross is the Service Manager for the ‘Web of Knowledge Service for UK Education’, ‘JUSP’ (JISC’s Journal Usage Statistics Portal), ‘EuropePMC+’ and ‘Zetoc’.
He is also responsible for Digital Library-related R&D services and had formal involvement with Dublin Core and OpenURL standards development.
Recent projects for JISC include PIRUS2 (extending COUNTER to article-level) and IRUS (applying PIRUS2 findings to UK institutional repositories).
Ross is Chair of UKSG and a member of the Technical Advisory Boards of COUNTER and the UK Access Management Federation.
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Book Review: Information 2.0.
New models of information production, distribution and consumption Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Information 2.0.
New models of information production, distribution and consumption Citation BibTex RIS Kevin Wilson reviews Information 2.0 by Martin de Saulles, a book which looks at how information is produced, distributed and consumed in our modern, Internet connected world.
The previous edition of this title was published a mere three years ago (reviewed in Ariadne here), but such are the changes in the digital information landscape since, it is entirely right that de Saulles should revise and the update the title.
De Saulles sets himself an ambitious task; to survey the entire digital information landscape and consider the implications of changes in technology for the information industry, which includes those who publish information, such as broadcasters and publishers, to those who manage information, such as information professionals.
Because of the potential scope of this topic, it is to de Saulles’ credit that he is able to summarise these changes in a concise paperback.
He accepts that he cherry-picks examples, using real-life case studies, but these more than adequately illustrate the changes in information and the direction in which it is heading.
Information 2.0 is a linear text; that is de Saulles follows the information life-cycle in order, devoting a chapter each to information production, distribution and so on.
However, he reiterates the point that these chapters and processes should not be seen in isolation, but that they are inextricably entwined.
De Saulles’ introduction defines what ‘information’, a nebulous term at the best of times, actually is.
He confirms how important the rapid flow of information is through the means of an anecdote about financial markets.
In 2010, Spread Networks spent $US300 million to lay fibre optic cables that would shave four-thousandths of a second from the time it takes to financial traders to send and receive data.
The potential value of this is worth billions, which confirms how valuable information is to the world’s economy.
At the same time, de Saulles explains how information is booming just in terms of how prolifically it is being produced; 90% of the information ever created by humans, spanning thousands of years, was created in the previous two years.
These are dizzying statistics but they endorse how important it is to understand the information landscape.
Chapter Two looks at new models of information production in existing (newspapers, book publishing) and new industries (social media, wearable technologies), and de Saulles explores the key debates that emerge from these new models of information production, concentrating particularly on economic and ethical issues.
Blogging and social media, for instance, have had irrevocable changes upon print and digital media, as well as being agents for social change (e.g.
The Arab Spring).
A significant example here is that of the Daily Mail, which sells about a million and a half copies per day in the UK, yet has 56 million unique visitors to its website each month, many from outside the UK.
The revenue generated from online advertising more than negates what is lost from its declining print sales.
At the same time, our use of Google isn’t benign either; our searches are financially lucrative for them and there are ethical issues about what Google knows about us.
Chapter Three is concerned with how information is stored.
Whereas before, technologies would have become obsolete and discarded, and information would have been lost or destroyed, now organisations and institutions are keen to preserve the Internet, whether it’s the public-spirited Internet Archive or the likes of Google or Facebook, who see preservation as having profit-making potential (see Facebook recently opening new data storage facilities in Sweden).
Many universities now have institutional repositories populated with the research undertaken by their staff, whilst the likes of Tesco and Sainsburys retain data about their customers’ buying habits with their Clubcard and Nectar schemes.
Cloud services, too, allow us to outsource data storage, whether it is via Dropbox or Google Drive, but these cloud storage suppliers have experienced high-profile hackings.
Chapter 4 considers new models of information distribution.
The arrival of the Internet and changes in communications globally has created a networked world.
Half of the world is connected to the Internet, whilst 90% of the world has a mobile phone and this is where and how we are consuming information.
De Saulles illustrates how the Internet changed distribution models by giving examples of how the various sectors were shaken out of their lethargy.
Napster allowed listeners to share their music collections long before any legal means of listening to music were available.
Now iTunes is where most listeners purchase music, and even those who are not interested in buying music stream through Spotify instead.
Youtube has changed how video content is distributed, whilst Netflix has caused nothing short of a television revolution.
Models of education are being challenged by the likes of the Khan Academy providing free, non-profit education.
Chapter 5 examines new models of information consumption.
Whilst the sensory functions involved are the same, de Saulles outlines how the methods and devices for consuming information have changed dramatically.
Barriers such as time and location no longer constrain us.
Of particular interest to de Saulles here is the rise of the smartphone, which allows us to be constantly networked and able to consume information; even more so with the even more prolific rise of the app (by mid-2014, 75 billion apps had been downloaded from the Apple Store).
De Saulles chillingly suggests there is almost no hiding place; that privacy is almost non-existent.
Information 2.0 is an informative and thorough title that makes sense of how changes in technology are impacting all aspects of society; economics, education and more.
It is even-handed throughout; there are arguments made about the democratizing influence of the Internet and how barriers that might have constrained our access to information have been reduced.
Yet there are still cautionary tales.
The likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, which aimed to make information via the Internet accessible to us all, are the now the new monopolies and there are significant issues about how they use our information.
Although we live in an era of information overload and that information seems difficult to control or keep on top of, de Saulles reiterates the need of the information professional and that its role is equally vital in the ‘Wild West’ free-for-all new information landscape.
This is a title that is very readable and clear.
De Saulles uses case studies to outline his points and does not veer into jargon that might leave the casual reader to engage in head-scratching.
Information 2.0 is just as valuable for the casual reader as for the information professional and it clarifies what otherwise is a very confusing picture.
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Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa Buzz data software framework dissemination infrastructure archives cataloguing ejournal sms ict e-government research Citation BibTex RIS Monika Elbert, David Fuegi and Ugne Lipeikaite describe the principal findings of the study Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa which served to provide evidence of how public libraries are perceived by their stakeholders.
This article presents a summary of some results of the study Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa [1] which was conducted to research perceptions of stakeholders and the public towards public libraries in six African countries.
The study is closely linked with the EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme [2], which awarded grants to public libraries in developing and transition countries to address a range of socio-economic issues facing their communities, including projects in Kenya, Ghana and Zambia.
The goal of the study was to understand the perceptions of national and local stakeholders (municipalities, ministries, public agencies, media, etc.)
and the public (including non-users) in respect of public libraries in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe about the potential of public libraries.
It also aimed to understand how these stakeholders could best be positively influenced to create, fund, support or to use public libraries.
It is hoped that stakeholders in the countries studied will choose to assess the findings as a potential tool to improve library management and advocacy.
The study was commissioned by EIFL from the Kenya office of TNS RMS [3], a leading market research company with offices in many African countries.
Geoffrey Kimani managed the research for TNS RMS.
This article is based on the final report of the research completed in July 2011 which is also available [1].
A number of library perception studies were completed in recent years, providing a strong basis of data for advocacy campaigns, mainly aiming to argue against library budget cuts and closures.
Most of these studies focus on libraries in highly developed countries like the United States (U.S.) and the United Kingdom (UK), while the study of perceptions of stakeholders in developing or transitional countries remained relatively neglected.
Enabling access to knowledge through libraries in developing and transition countries is a key focus of EIFL, an international not-for-profit organisation which launched the Public Library Innovation Programme (PLIP) [2] in 2010 and awarded a first round of projects to grantees from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
These local public library projects aimed to help transform lives through innovative services.
In relation to this activity, EIFL identified a gap in research on perceptions of public libraries in developing or transitional countries and a strong need for related advocacy actions.
It therefore initiated this survey of perceptions across multiple stakeholder audiences to assess the feasibility of such work in poorer countries and eventually to find out how local stakeholders would use the results.
Figure 1: ICT usage in Ghanaian library The study found that most people in the six African countries surveyed believe public libraries have the potential to contribute to community development in important areas such as health, employment and agriculture.
However, libraries are small and under-resourced, and most people associate them with traditional book lending and reference services rather than innovation and technology.
The countries selected for study were chosen on an ad hoc pragmatic basis, taking into account the existing national public library infrastructure and the budget available for the study.
Knowledge of users’ and other stakeholders’ perceptions is potentially a useful tool for advocacy on behalf of public libraries and evidence-based management.
Whilst librarians in countries including the USA and the UK can take such information for granted, this is not the case everywhere.
EIFL decided to find out whether this kind of information could be collected in Africa.
Having completed the study, EIFL is now encouraging stakeholders in the countries studied to evaluate the results and consider how best to act on them.
The study looks at the general state of current awareness, perceptions and attitudes towards public libraries.
As regards the public (users and non-users) it also investigates library usage behaviour and frequency of use, sources of information about libraries, satisfaction levels with the library and librarian, barriers to library use and willingness to use them in future.
Such information has long been available to librarians in countries such as the UK.
In case of national and local level officials, the study aims to identify their priorities for libraries and how they perceive the importance of libraries as potential players in local and national development.
This article covers a field which has not yet been much explored and provides background for evidence-based advocacy and evidence-based management for public libraries in Africa.
Furthermore it aims to contribute to the methodology and effectiveness of practical research on public perceptions of public libraries, mainly by making available the instruments used for potential adaptation and reuse by librarians in other countries on a national or local scale.
Research Context Investigating the perceptions of various stakeholder audiences has always been a focus of library research.
Our work in Africa was inspired and influenced by many other studies and we list at the end of this article some recent studies which inspired us.
Figure 2: Computer-based reading lessons, Zambia EIFL is an international not-for-profit organisation with a base in Europe and a global network of partners.
EIFL was founded in 1999, with a mission of enabling access to knowledge through libraries in developing and transition countries to contribute to sustainable economic and social development.
It began by advocating for affordable access to commercial e-journals for academic and research libraries in Central and Eastern Europe.
EIFL now partners with libraries and library consortia in close to 50 developing and transition countries in Africa, Asia and Europe.
Today its work includes a range of programmes and initiatives as part of two core initiatives: Access to Knowledge for Education, Learning and Research: ensuring well-resourced libraries, modern Information Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and skilled staff are available to provide essential support to students and scholars.
Access to Knowledge for Sustainable Community Development: helping to transform lives through innovative services in public libraries.
In 2010 EIFL launched the Public Library Innovation Programme, recognising that the use of technology offers new opportunities to increase access to knowledge, helping to improve standards of living and to transform lives.
For many people in developing and transition countries, the public library is the only place to access computers and the Internet, together with quality-assured information resources.
Through technology, public libraries are also well positioned to extend access to previously under-served communities.
Yet in many countries where the need is greatest, public libraries are under-resourced.
The Public Library Innovation Programme aims to spark innovative services in public libraries to improve lives.
Under this programme, EIFL encourages public libraries to reach out to their communities through pilot projects.
In April 2010, the first year of a planned three-year programme, EIFL funded 12 such projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
In 2011 it plans to fund another 20 projects in the fields of support for children and youth at risk, support for farming and farmers, provision of health information and improving people’s employment prospects.
The new projects will take their inspiration from relevant first-round projects.
Figure 3: Health information provision in the Kenya National Library Service Initiating this study, EIFL aims to understand the perceptions of different stakeholders of public libraries in Africa, and in particular in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and Uganda; about the potential of public libraries so as to understand how these stakeholders could best be positively influenced to create/fund/support or use public libraries.
This study has the potential for further communication campaigns or actions designed to raise public awareness of the potential contribution of public libraries to sustaining livelihoods or improving libraries’ performance in response to users’ and non-users’ preferences, criticisms and comments.
The changes in perceptions would then lead to increased awareness of innovative ways that libraries can serve public needs and funding for public libraries.
The study is just a starting point and the process would need to be driven forward by library stakeholders in the countries studied.
Research Findings Library Users and Non-users The research revealed that libraries in Africa are mainly used by young people (48% of users are aged between 21 and 30 years old while 39% aged between 16 and 20 years old).
70% of users are men.
Data show that library users have quite a high level of formal education: 30% of them have undertaken some form of post-secondary study in universities or technical institutes, 30% have some secondary education, while 17% completed secondary education.
80% of library users are single and the majority (64%) of them are students.
Most users visit the library on a weekly basis, and on average almost all users will visit the library once a month.
Meanwhile, the typical library non-user is aged between 21 and 30 years (54%), has a relatively lower level of education: 27% have completed secondary education, 19% some secondary, while 18% only completed elementary.
In comparison with library users, among library non-users there are more women (52%) and a greater proportion have families (39%).
74% of library users talk about their experience of using a library, mainly with friends or adult family members.
Maybe partly for this reason, the awareness of one’s local library is quite high across all countries, about half (53%) of library non-users.
The majority of non-users across all countries claim that being busy is a key barrier to usage of libraries (64%).
Data indicate, that relevant books would be the key motivator to likely future usage as almost half (45%) of non-users cite this as a key determinant in their future use of libraries.
Other important factors would be more convenient locations (36%) and longer opening hours (35%), more materials accessible online (29%) and more computer workstations (24%).
Despite their perceived shortcomings, libraries are valued and are seen as important both by library users and non users.
Users appreciate the value of libraries to both the individual as well as the community while non users tend to see libraries as essential to the community but not necessarily to themselves.
As regards the associations they make with libraries, for both users and non-users, libraries mainly represent for them books and a quiet place to study.
Only a small percentage of people associate libraries with technologies.
Spontaneous associations (Users) Total Kenya Uganda Tanzania Ghana Base: 1990 499 498 499 494   % % % % % Information/knowledge storage and acquisition.
74 75 80 64 77 Books.
67 61 69 73 64 Space: Quiet place/peaceful place for study, relaxation, etc) 54 48 43 72 51 Newspapers/ Current affairs/ Magazines.
9 9 13 10 4 Computers.
5 7 8 2 2 Educative videos.
5 2 8 6 3 Librarians.
1   1   2   Spontaneous associations (Non-users) Total Kenya Uganda Tanzania Ghana Base 1201 300 300 301 300   % % % % % Books.
73 66 78 74 73 Information/knowledge storage and acquisition.
67 74 68 67 59 Space: Quiet place/peaceful place for study, relaxation, etc).
46 36 35 61 50 Newspapers/ Current affairs/ Magazines.
8 10 10 7 4 Educative videos.
7 2 21 5 2 Computers.
5 7 9 1 3 Librarians.
1 1   2 2 Tables 1 & 2: Spontaneous associations with libraries, users and non-users.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p.16) When asked what they actually used libraries for in the previous 12 months, users gave these responses: Services utilised by users in past 12 months   Total  Kenya  Uganda  Tanzania  Ghana Base: Total Sample 1990 499 498 499 494   % % % % %  Ask a librarian for help, advice or consultation 68 73 69 71 58  Use reference materials, e.g.
encyclopedias  54 70 57 19 68  Take out books for grown-ups  49 58 53 67 16  Use quest rooms/ spaces for study   45 39 39 45 55  Meet other people   35 30 39 43 27  Take out books for children   19 13 24 29 10  Learn languages   18 10 15 39 6  Take a class or workshop   8 3 10 15 2  Use computer software   7 9 9 6 4  Attend an event   7 5 11 12 1  Use children’s section  6 4 7 7 5  Connect to Internet with one’s laptop   5 4 7 7 3  Take out CDs or videos   4   6 8 1  Hear a speaker, see a film   3 3 3 4 1  Reading courses/books   1 1 2 3   Table 3: Services employed by users in last 12 months.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p. 24) When asked about the purpose of their visits (rather than what they actually did), the key reason given for using libraries was education, with about 91% in all countries using the libraries for this purpose.
Among library non-users, libraries are also seen as a place to develop new skills or learn something new (90%) or obtaining helpful information for learning (78%).
The full responses for users can be seen in Table 4: Purpose of library visits by (users) Total  Kenya  Uganda  Tanzania  Ghana Base: Total Sample 1990 499 498 499 494   % % % % % Educational purposes (for homework or to take a class)    91 94 90 86 95 National news or information                              34 37 36 32 30 Local news or information                                 28 33 34 28 15 Entertainment                                              26 16 19 29 38 Information on health issues                               20 18 22 17 22 International news or information                         15 14 9 22 12 To conduct a job search or write a CV 12 14 14 14 5 Borrow books                                                11 12 2 2 28 To seek information on starting/running business 10 15 14 6 6 Table 4: Purpose of users’ visits to library.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p. 26) The highest-rated aspects of library services are the competence of librarians, library facilities and opening hours.
Computing and digital resources in libraries are rated lowest and this is further emphasised by the poor rating of librarians’ skills in that area.
It is also worth noting that there are significant levels of concern regarding books and periodicals with 30% citing dissatisfaction with books and 25% citing dissatisfaction with periodicals.
The data suggest  that the look and feel of the physical space are the key drivers of satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the key source of dissatisfaction with libraries is the low relevance of materials available to users.
Figure 4: Users’ ratings of different library aspects;  38% rated computers and other equipment as either ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p.
29.)
Librarians The survey of librarians shows that the traditional definition and role of libraries as lenders of books is still a key element in services offered by libraries in all the countries surveyed.
However, the survey also identified a huge number of users seeking advice and consultation, which tends to suggest that the presence and competence of the librarian are vital.
Digital services such as CDs, videos and computer and Internet services are not readily available across all libraries in the countries sampled.
The librarians interviewed said that the following services were available in their libraries: Services  provided Total  Kenya Uganda  Tanzania  Ghana  Zim  Ethiopia Base = Librarians 283 63 50 48 67 35 20   % % % % % % % Opportunity to ask a librarian for help, advice, etc 90 94 86 81 97 94 75 Take out/lend books for grown-ups 87 97 76 83 88 89 90 Reading newspapers or magazines 84 97 86 83 91 60 60 Use of reference materials, e.g.
encyclopedias  79 98 58 67 99 74 45 Opportunity to meet other people 78 87 78 69 88 60 70 Take out books for children 75 97 78 79 61 71 40 A children's section 65 86 72 46 66 60 35 Opportunity to take a class or workshop 45 52 64 33 51 31 10 Opportunity to hire rooms/ spaces for study or meetings 40 35 52 29 55 17 35 Use of public Internet access 36 60 18 13 58 20 10 Opportunity to learn languages 34 37 58 50 10 34 Opportunity to hear a speaker, see a film or attend an event 31 70 22 25 19 20 Take out CDs or videos 27 49 22 29 18 20 5 Use of computer software 27 41 18 25 36 11 5 Connection to Internet with one’s laptop 25 38 16 4 54 3 5 Table 5: Services provided.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p. 43) When it comes to the level of automation in their own libraries, the librarians gave the answers in the following table.
Overall, the level of automation in the public libraries of countries surveyed is quite low.
No more than 16% of the libraries have some kind of automation, the worst being computerised circulation which only 9% of the libraries surveyed claim to have.
In Ethiopia the situation is even worse as none of the librarians surveyed said they had a computerised catalogue, circulation system or ownership of a Web site though some libraries did have computers.
The low number of library Web sites (and their limited functionality due to lack of back-office automation) indicates a need for libraries to help their users reach out to resources and services on the Web rather than looking inwards to their own often outdated information sources.
Automation   Total Kenya Uganda Tanzania Ghana Zim Ethio Base = Libraries   116 20 28 17 17 21 13     % % % % % % % Computerised catalogue Yes 16 15 18 29 18 10     No 83 75 82 71 82 90 100   Partly 2 10               % % % % % % % Computerised circulation system Yes 9 10 7 18 18 5     No 89 90 89 82 82 90 100   Partly 2   4     5       % % % % % % % Own Web site Yes 16 40 7 18 18 10     No 84 60 93 82 82 90 100 Table 6: Automation in libraries.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p.
45.)
When asked about access to technology-related services in their own libraries, the librarians gave these replies: Librarians who said they offer these technology-related services Total Ke Ug Tz Gh Zim Ethio Base 283 63 50 48 67 35 20   % % % % % % %  The Internet 35 62 18 10 54 20 15  Computer-based training materials 30 38 24 19 52 17  Printing 23 10 26 33 33 17 10  Online reference materials 21 30 16 2 39 14  Office software 21 32 18 23 24 9 5  Online inquiry 20 24 18 10 30 17 5  Electronic library catalogues 17 10 14 23 31 6  Technology help or advice 17 16 24 13 24 9 5  Scanning 16 29 10 15 12 14 10  Technology aids for disabled 14 54 2 6 1  Computer literacy training 12 8 4 13 24 17  Binding and lamination                         3 13  Photocopying                                   1 3  SMS telephone services for renewing books      2  Computer typing                                2 Table 7: Technology-related services offered, by country.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p. 49) The overall atmosphere in libraries was rated good and librarians also rated themselves highly on competence.
Despite claims by librarians surveyed as to their good level of expertise in working with the computer, the ‘digital library’ aspect of their library rated the poorest by patrons.
A comparison of users’ and librarians’ ratings of various aspects of library services shows librarians rated themselves more highly than did their patrons.
Like the other target groups investigated, librarians see learning and developing skills as key benefits from using the library (96%).
41 percent of librarians claim that they would like to provide computer and Internet access services in their libraries.
In the view of librarians, libraries are generally considered friendly, but they are lacking in technology and modernity, both of which receive a rather low rating across all countries.
The main challenges faced by libraries are minimal reading space, limited number of books, few computers, lack of funding, inadequate staff, lack of current information, and outdated books.
If more funding were provided, the great majority (86%) of librarians would give top priority to equipment.
Moreover, not only would new technology be necessary to equip African libraries in an increasingly technologically driven world, but also a programme of training for librarians on the delivery of technology-supported services.
Currently 38% of librarians feel insufficiently trained to provide technology-related services.
As regards the impact on the community, librarians claim that learning and development of literacy are the main areas where libraries can create an impact.
A majority also think libraries can contribute to adults’ employment outcomes.
In the context of economic development, the lending and borrowing functions of the library are positively seen as a way for users to save money.
Librarians also positively evaluate their potential to improve the health of individuals and communities by providing access to health information.
Librarians believe that they can provide access and promote local content.
However, slightly fewer of them think libraries have potential as venues for cultural events.
Librarians consider libraries as being potentially very effective as a channel for dissemination of government information as well as information on agriculture.
Local and National Officials The survey of local officials revealed that libraries are considered essential both by the representatives of local municipalities which fund libraries and by those which do not.
Figure 5: Rating of libraries’ importance.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report, p. 63) The main reasons for satisfaction with library services concern the physical library environment i.e.
ambience and convenience.
Staff are also an important driver of satisfaction.
Overall satisfaction with current library services is not very high with only 55% saying they are fairly or very satisfied with the service.
The highest-rated aspects are library opening hours (77% rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’) and librarians’ competence (69% rated either ‘good’ or ‘excellent’).
The main reasons for dissatisfaction are the lack of relevant materials and computers, as well as limited space.
It is quite clear that local and national officials associate libraries with the very traditional roles of lending books and providing a study environment for educational purposes.
The top three benefits of visiting libraries in their opinion are developing new skills, acquiring new ideas and obtaining helpful information.
87% of the municipalities which fund local libraries mention education, suggesting that libraries are mainly seen as extensions of institutions for formal education.
When it comes to reasons for dissatisfaction with their libraries, local authority representatives operating libraries gave the following reasons for dissatisfaction:   Total Kenya  Uganda  Tanzania  Ghana  Zim.
Ethiopia Base  = (officials of local authorities that operate libraries) 202 30 31 38 14 40 49 Attribute % % % % % % % The range of books is not good enough   64 64 92 50 50 68 54 Not enough computers   53 55 69 20 33 58 58 Not enough seats available   47 64 62 30 17 26 63 They don't have the books I like   33 36 77 10 33 21 25 I don't like the environment   28 36 31 11 54 Too noisy   25 9 46 26 38 Nowhere to get refreshments   20 9 31 50 Problems entering building (i.e.
poor disabled access)   19 9 15 10 5 46 Not enough activities for children   18 27 23 17 5 29 Opening hours aren't long enough   17 23 17 5 38 My nearest library is too far away/not convenient   14 15 20 17 5 25 You can't borrow books for long enough to read them   14 9 54 10 13 Not enough activities or courses going on   14 27 31 10 5 13  The area isn't safe  13 9 31 16 13 Difficulty reaching library (e.g.
parking restrictions, poor public transport) 10 9 23 10 5 8 Table 8: Views of local authority officials.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p.
68.)
It is interesting to note that 96% of representatives of municipalities which do not fund libraries agree that public libraries deserve more funding.
As regards the impact of libraries on their community, local stakeholders are highly convinced that public libraries can contribute to solving community issues.
Among the main challenges that could be addressed by libraries, poverty as well as illiteracy are mentioned most frequently.
Libraries’ potential contribution to learning, literacy and employment is almost universally accepted.
Their potential contribution to various aspects of economic development was recognised by more than 80% of respondents.
Libraries’ potential contribution to various aspects of health improvement are also recognised by more than 80% of respondents, but there are some doubts about their ability to act as venues for health-related events.
More than 80% recognise that libraries can provide a forum for meeting and building relationships even online.
More than 75% understand libraries’ contribution to culture but there is some skepticism about their potential to act as a venue for local cultural events.
Libraries’ potential to contribute to social inclusion and community development is also recognized, but some doubts are expressed by a minority as to their serving as event venues or helping the disadvantaged.
Their potential to further social cohesion is recognised by about 90% of respondents.
A minority of about 25% disagrees about the potential role of libraries in providing e-government services, but this could be an indication that some governments do not have such services.
The idea that libraries could disseminate government information is accepted.
About three quarters of respondents can see a potential role for libraries in supporting agriculture.
It is encouraging that local officials, whether they run libraries or not, can see libraries’ potential to support policy strands outside what are perceived to be their core competences of education, literacy and culture.
The fact that officials readily accept the notion that libraries could contribute in the areas of economic development, employment, health, agriculture and the digital divide, gives librarians a good foundation on which to build if they wish to move towards getting support to provide more innovative services which will be seen as relevant to the solution of major policy problems.
The small sample of national officials who gave their views also appears to have been expressing progressive and supportive attitudes to public libraries’ potential.
The challenge will be building on the apparent goodwill to turn it into tangible progress and valuable impact on society’s pressing problems.
73% of them say that libraries are under-funded, so the door is at least ajar.
The following table shows in more detail the level of appreciation of public libraries’ potential by this group.
Purposes served by libraries (Spontaneous) –national level officials Total Kenya Uganda TZ Ghana Zim Ethiopia Base: Total Sample 112 18 20 14 20 20 20   % % % % % % %  Educational purposes (for homework or to  take a class)    89 89 85 100 80 95 90  Information on health issue   29 28 20 29 25 50 20  Local news or information   29 28 20 43 20 30 35  National news or information   29 22 25 21 20 45 40  Entertainment   28 39 35 15 35 35  Information on agriculture    23 22 15 29 30 35 10  International news or information   23 11 10 36 15 35 35  Information and use of electronic government  services     16 22 21 25 20 10  To help children to do homework   16 11 10 7 50 15  Financial or investment news or information   8 6 7 15 20  Contact with distant friends or relatives   7 17 5 7 10 5 Table 9: Purposes served by libraries in view of national officials.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Full Report p.
89.)
Methodology Research took place in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and Uganda.
Our research partner for this study was the Kenya office of TNS.
The study covered five broad sample groupings: A survey of users of public libraries (a user was defined as anyone who has used a library open to the public in last 12 months); A survey of non-users of public libraries (a non-user was defined as anyone who has not used a library in the past 12 months); A survey of public librarians and library officials (library directors/managers, deputy directors/managers, professional librarians, assistant librarians and support staff); A survey of local officials (the representatives of local authorities/municipalities, which do or do not fund local libraries); Qualitative research in the form of in-depth interviews (IDIs) carried out with the officials from the ministries, national agencies and national media.
The surveys were carried out nationwide in each country focusing on the public libraries, urban and rural structural units, including community-run libraries.
Sampling of respondents was conducted on the basis of the geographical distribution.
The research applied random and targeted sampling.
Random sampling was applied in surveys of the public libraries’ users and non-users, public librarians and library officials, representatives of local stakeholders’ institutions.
Targeted sampling was used when performing surveys of representatives of national stakeholders’ sub-groups such as ministries, national agencies and media.
In surveying library users, respondents were selected at the sampled libraries.
Surveys of users were conducted using both entry and exit interviews.
With regard to non-users, respondents were selected from within a catchment area of approximately 20km surrounding the sampled library.
Households were selected using the random route technique and a screener question used at the house to select the respondent and verify eligibility as a non-user.
For the target group of librarians, a sample of libraries was drawn from the universe and assigned librarian samples.
Often more than one librarian was interviewed in a library, depending on library size and location.
All libraries selected for the users sample automatically included a librarian sample.
In most of the countries, the librarian sample was distributed between public libraries and community libraries.
For the local officials, the sample was distributed among local and municipal authorities funding and managing libraries, and those who are not running libraries.
The national-level officials were identified with the help of EIFL coordinators in the respective countries.
Samples and methods varied by target groups and are summarised in the tables below: Target Group Method Sampling Library users Face-to-face library exit interviews Random sampling Library non-users Face-to-face random interviews Random sampling Public librarians/library officials Face-to-face interviews Random sampling Local Stakeholders Face-to-face interviews Random sampling (50/50 of officials who run/do not run public library in the area) National stakeholders In-depth Interviews Targeted sampling Table 10: Samples and methods applied to varying target groups Planned sample sizes Users Non-users Librarians Local Stakeholders National Stakeholders Kenya 500 300 60 50 20 Uganda 500 300 50 50 20 Tanzania 500 300 50 50 20 Ghana 500 300 60 50 20 Ethiopia 20 50 20 Zimbabwe 35 50 20 Total 2,000 1,200 275 300 120 Table 11: Planned sample sizes.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Detailed Methodology Report p.
4.)
Actual sample sizes Users Total number of libraries sampled Non-users Librarians Local Stakeholders National Stakeholders Kenya 500 20 300 63 51 18 Uganda 500 22 300 50 50 20 Tanzania 500 17 301 48 38 14 Ghana 500 15 300 67 40 20 Ethiopia       35 49 20 Zimbabwe       20 50 20 Total         2, 000   1,201 283             278  112 Table 12: Actual sizes of samples.
(Source: Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa: Detailed Methodology Report p.
4.)
All research instruments were developed by the EIFL research team with the input of TNS RMS, based on their knowledge and experience.
As these instruments were based on international experience and had not been tested in Africa, the instruments had to be adapted to local context and piloted prior to the survey.
10 pilot interviews per country were done to pre-test each of the quantitative questionnaires.
The interviewers checked the clarity of the questions, ability of respondents to answer all questions both in terms of relevance and questionnaire design, the flow of the questionnaire, relevance of translation to local languages and all other issues helping to improving the questionnaire.
Thorough quality control mechanisms were used both during fieldwork and data processing stages.
In the fieldwork stage, it included training of interviewers as well as de-briefing sessions with their teams during the process of data collection, performed by team leaders.
The team leaders observed 5% of all interviews conducted, another 10% of all interviews conducted by each interviewer were back-checked by supervisors who got in touch with the respondent and re-asked a few relevant questions to ascertain that the interview was in fact done.
100% of questionnaires were checked by the team leader going through completed questionnaires before data processing.
All the questionnaires used in the study have been published and are available in English and Kiswahili for potential reuse or adaptation by others [1].
Conclusions Public libraries are available in the countries surveyed offering the traditional service of lending books and an environment for studying.
Most of them are small with limited space and have limited resources.
It is evident that most lack technology-related facilities and, in some cases, books relevant to the needs of users.
Across all groups surveyed, i.e.
from policy makers to users and non-users, a significant majority have positive sentiments about libraries.
Although libraries are perceived as mainly offering study-related information and therefore an extension of the educational process, there are plenty of people who perceive their potential in less traditional areas.
Librarians are seen as competent to perform their traditional role but to have limitations in the technology-related services.
Low staff skill levels in technology services are a result of the lack of the facilities that would enable them to improve their competency.
Libraries are seen as essential to the individual as well as communities in general.
However, they need to engage with the community at a more tangible level that goes beyond just providing information, e.g.
facilitating community inter-action with service providers of health, agriculture, culture and entrepreneurship.
Going digital, which is currently a clear deficiency, would perhaps provide a new way for libraries to be seen as more dynamic and innovative.
It is also important for libraries to create and demonstrate their value to the community outside the recognised core areas of lending of books and facilitating study.
This is quite challenging in the light of a significant number of librarians admitting to lacking the necessary skills to advocate for greater visibility and stronger support.
One of the research results was the locally adapted library perceptions research methodology.
It combines quantitative and qualitative research methods and research instruments, adapted to local conditions.
The empirical study helped to test it and confirmed its validity in the local context.
Although the work was quite hard, EIFL and its research partner TNS RMS found it feasible to do this kind of study in the countries addressed.
The study has resulted in a rich body of knowledge to start discussions with stakeholders about the role that libraries play in the community, and their potential for ensuring the development and sustainability of library services.
Even more important, it starts to sign-post the way to exploring the potential of the public library to support individuals, communities and decision makers in their pursuit of improving lives and livelihoods through access to information and knowledge.
In fact, a workshop ‘Public Libraries as catalysts for development, innovation and freedom’ at the important multi-stakeholder Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Nairobi, in September 2011 [4] led to lively discussions about the findings of the study, and how decision makers and library managers can develop a shared vision of Internet-enabled public libraries that contribute to development and to achieving the Millennium Goals.
The findings of the study, once they have been validated by the local library communities in the countries concerned, will constitute a substantial body of evidence that potentially can be used to inform evidence-based library management and advocacy campaigns.
The progressive attitudes towards libraries widely expressed despite a context of widespread resource constraints gives hope that library stakeholders in these countries could mobilise to push open a door which seems to be ajar.
In each country they will wish to assess and understand fully what this report is saying to them and learn any valid lessons.
There is plenty of food for thought.
EIFL is therefore in the process of working with the library communities in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda to raise awareness of the findings of the study and the potential of libraries for development, seeking to create a dialogue with the policy makers at the national and regional level.
The study including the instruments used can be found at EIFL Web site [1].
It consists of overall conclusions, 6 country reports and a methodology report to make take-up more accessible to national stakeholders.
A first report on the study was presented at IFLA in 2011 [5].
Previous Work That Influenced Our Study OCLC (2010).
Perceptions of Libraries, 2010.
Context and Community.
Retrieved 28 March, 2011 from http://www.oclc.org/reports/2010perceptions.htm OCLC (2008).
From Awareness to Funding.
A study of library support in America.
Retrieved 28 March, 2011 from http://www.oclc.org/reports/funding/default.htm OCLC (2005) Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources Retrieved 29th August 2011 from http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (2010).
What do the public want from libraries?
User and non-user research report.
Retrieved 28 March, 2011 from http://research.mla.gov.uk/evidence/download-publication.php?id=1645 Flores, E., Pachon, H. (2008).
Latinos and Public Library Perceptions.
Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, 2008.
Retrieved 28 March, 2011 from http://www.webjunction.org/latino-perceptions/resources/wjarticles Public Agenda (2006).
Long Overdue: a Fresh Look at Public and Leadership Attitudes About Libraries in the 21st Century.
Retrieved 28 March, 2011 from http://www.publicagenda.org/files/pdf/Long_Overdue.pdf References EIFL Perception Study http://www.eifl.net/perception-study EIFLPLIP: Public Library Innovation Programme http://www.eifl.net/plip TNS Global Market Research: Kenya Market Research  http://www.tnsglobal.com/global/alm/kenya/ Internet Governance Forum (IGF), Nairobi, Kenya, 27-30 September 2011 http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/content/article/42-igf-meetings/761-2011-igf-meeting Public libraries in Africa – agents for development and innovation?
Current Perceptions of local stakeholders (2011).
David Fuegi, Monika Segbert-Elbert and Ugne Lipeikaite.
In IFLA 2011, San Juan, Puerto Rico, August 2011 http://conference.ifla.org/sites/default/files/files/papers/ifla77/183-fuegi-en.pdf Author Details Monika Elbert, MBE FLA (hon)     EIFL Piazza Mastai 9 00153 Rome Italy Email: monika.elbert@eifl.net Web site: http://www.eifl.net/ Monika Elbert has worked with EIFL since its beginnings in the year 2000, in particular with its Consortium Management Programme, geographic expansion, and strategic developments such as the Public Library Innovation Programme.
In addition, she has been involved in recent years with European projects to create Europeana, the European digital library with content from libraries, archives and museums, and the Global Libraries Programme of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Monika believes deeply in the potential of public libraries for community development, and in equitable access to knowledge for library users especially in developing and transition countries.
David Fuegi MA (Cantab.)
MCLIP David Fuegi 51 Grosvenor Place Colchester CO1 2ZD UK Email: David@Fuegi.info David was a public librarian in the UK for a number of years, working in senior positions in large authorities before joining the UK Civil Service in the mid-1980s as a principal Library Adviser.
After that he was instrumental in developing the Libraries Programme with the European Commission.
For the last 13 years he has been an independent researcher and project manager, mostly leveraging EU money for libraries, most recently mainly connected with Europeana.
Ugne Lipeikaite, Ph.D. Research Consultant EIFL Piazza Mastai 9 00153 Rome Italy Email: ugnelip@gmail.com Web site: http://www.eifl.net Ugne Lipeikaite is working with EIFL on research study of perceptions of public libraries in Africa as well as follow-up activities to raise awareness of the potential of public libraries targeted at decision makers.
She is also leading impact planning and assessment activities of a national wide library public access computing project in Lithuania, funded by Global Libraries Programme of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Her field of experience includes ICT diffusion and adoption projects, eInclusion initiatives and development of impact assessment frameworks for ICTrelated projects and programmes.
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10 Years of Zetoc Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 10 Years of Zetoc Buzz data software database rss identifier repositories cataloguing z39.50 aggregation copac soap personalisation openurl shibboleth sru authentication research Citation BibTex RIS Jane Ronson looks at how Zetoc has developed and what the future holds for the service.
Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, Zetoc [1] provides quality-assured, comprehensive journal table of contents data for resource discovery that users can search and have delivered straight to their in-box or desktop.
In a nutshell, Zetoc is all about convenience, current awareness and comprehensive coverage.
In a recent survey, one academic commented: 'This is a "one-stop shop" for relevant literature'.
What is Zetoc, what has it achieved and where is it going?
In this article I will look at the history of the service and how it has developed over the past decade.
I will also preview some of the exciting enhancements due to be launched in the coming months.
What is Zetoc?
Zetoc provides access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents [2] and is provided by Mimas [3] at the University of Manchester in collaboration with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [4].
For those puzzled by the 'Z', this refers to Z39.50-compliant access [5] to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC) database (Figure 2 shows more interface options.)
With time being of the essence, most academics and researchers are not able to spend as long as they would like in finding and accessing material.
The three main features in Zetoc, Search, Alert and RSS, are designed to make life easier, but without compromising on quality.
Figure 1: The Zetoc Web site 10th anniversary banner Figure 2: Zetoc interface options Search Zetoc supports cross-disciplinary searching and alerting on data from 1993 onwards and its coverage is regarded as unique by its users: one academic, from the University of Surrey, commented that Zetoc contains a 'wide range of articles, especially on the subjects/practitioners I can't seem to find anywhere else.'
Along with key, mainstream journals such as the BMJ and Harvard Business Review, you can search Zetoc for less well-known journals, non-current articles and papers and a significant amount of non-English material.
Due to Zetoc being Z39.50-compatible, it can be searched using bibliographic software such as Reference Manager, EndNote and ProCite.
Alert Zetoc Alert is a Table of Contents alerting service, emailing the contents pages of your selected journals each time a new issue is loaded into the database (with daily updates to the database).
Along with selected journals, alerts can be set-up for keywords from article titles and in association with author names.
Links are provided to the full text, depending on the subscriptions available to the user through their institution or organisation, and Zetoc includes a page to allow inter-library loan enquiries.
In addition, any article in Zetoc can be ordered directly from the British Library.
RSS Zetoc offers the choice of receiving the table of contents of researchers' favourite journals via an emailed Alert or as an RSS feed, whichever is the most convenient.
Emailed Alerts and RSS feeds can be set up even for journals still only available in print.
Key Features and Coverage Key features of Zetoc can be described as follows: Contains approx.
40 million journal and conference records Around 20,000 current journals and 16,000 conference proceedings published every year Coverage from 1993 to date Updated daily – 10,000 records added and 10,000 Alerts sent Alerts can be sent as soon as 72 hours after journal publication 40% of material is from outside the UK and USA Well-embedded: interface options include Z39.50, SRU or SOAP In terms of content, the subjects Zetoc currently covers are as follows: Technology Science Medicine Law Finance Engineering Business Arts and Humanities Who Can Use Zetoc?
Zetoc is free to use for members of JISC-sponsored UK Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils.
Subscription to the service is available and current subscribers include: NHS England, Scotland and Northern Ireland Midwives Information and Resource Service (MIDIRS) Natural History Museum National Library of Wales Fire Service College Office for National Statistics There are also overseas users, such as Subito Publishing, a German-based document delivery service, and trial subscriptions to Zetoc have been taken up by Stanford University, NATO headquarters and Hewlett-Packard Labs.
Milestones Figure 3: Zetoc timeline Zetoc was launched on 26 September 2000, originally as a project making the British Library's ETOC database available to universities across the UK until at least August 2003.
The initiative was welcomed by academics as demonstrating the commitment between the British Library and the Higher Education sector in working together [6] and came as part of JISC's plans to establish The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), a managed environment for accessing quality-assured information resources on the Internet.
In October 2000 the Zetoc Alert feature became available, closely followed in December by the availability of usage statistics, such as Top 20 Journal Alerts.
2002-03 The Zetoc service was evaluated in Spring 2002 by Mimas in collaboration with the Department of Human Sciences at Loughborough University.
There were 659 responses to the questionnaire which revealed that users were happy with the service, finding it easy to use and agreeing that it helped to keep them up to date in their research.
However, users wanted to be able to reach full text from Zetoc records [7], so in November Zetoc began supporting OpenURL resolver software, enabling users to go from the Zetoc full record to the range of services provided by their institution.
For example, to go straight to full text.
Also introduced was the ability to search Zetoc via OpenURL software as a 'target'.
2005 The OpenURL resolver support was enhanced to allow institutions to customise the link text that takes users from Zetoc to the resolver and to provide a relevant image.
2006 Zetoc users have always been able to order any article in Zetoc directly from the British Library.
As part of the ongoing commitment to improve functionality, a new and improved service was introduced: British Library Direct, enabling users to choose from a range of delivery options, including instant download and Secure Electronic Delivery (SED), so that users can choose the delivery time and the format which best suits their needs.
Zetoc RSS was also introduced, providing an RSS link alongside each of the journals in the RSS journal list and enabling users to subscribe to feeds for individual journals.
Each article has a link to the full record page in Zetoc.
2008 Changes to the way Higher Education users authenticate to the service (due to many institutions moving from Athens to Shibboleth), meant that Mimas had to prepare for the complication of large numbers of users' transferring their Zetoc Alerts over to be associated with their new Institutional identifier.
The changeover process went quite smoothly, though not without a little confusion at times!
Meanwhile, a JISCMail list was set-up MIMAS-ZETOC to help keep our users informed about news and service information [8].
2009 Due to the Zetoc Alert list names being automatically generated (with names such as 'hw5yzw') feedback from list owners requested that they should be able to change the name to something more meaningful.
We responded by giving the list owner's the ability to rename their Alert list.
Also in response to demand, Mimas worked with the British Library to enable the inclusion of Abstracts in Zetoc records.
When present, they are included on the 'Full record' display and are included in the 'All fields' search.
Inclusion of the Abstract data is by agreement between the British Library and the publisher.
Although not all new articles include abstracts, the number continues to increase as further agreements are reached.
Using data extracted from Zetoc, both Copac [9] and the Serials Union Catalogue (SUNCAT) [10] became able to display the table of contents for a journal.
2010 An online survey was presented on the service home page in December 2009 and January 2010 with the results made available (see 'Evaluation' below).
Following a second online survey later in the year, further research is being conducted (at the time of writing), consisting of in-depth interviews with Zetoc users to examine how they use the service.
Zetoc continues to grow and now contains around 40 million records.
This continual growth means that searches require more resources.
During July 2010, Zetoc, along with a number of Mimas services, was moved to new hardware.
Happily, vastly improved search times have been forthcoming.
Challenges Google Scholar For many, the advent of Google Scholar, first launched in October 2004 [11], presented an appealing way of searching for articles.
It also includes an alerting service, so Google could be perceived as a threat to Zetoc.
There are a number of differences between the Zetoc and Google Scholar but just to consider two: all the ETOC data has been through the British Library's selection and quality-control processes, whereas the quality of records found via Google Scholar can vary.
In terms of search results, Zetoc Search can display over a million records, while the number of results in Google Scholar is limited to one thousand per search.
However, Zetoc and Google Scholar can complement each other.
For example, links are provided from Zetoc to Google Scholar, (along with Scirus, a science-based search engine, [12] and Copac [9]) for those whose institution does not have its own link resolver.
The Move in HE from Athens to Shibboleth In 2008 changes to the way Higher Education users authenticate to the service (due to many institutions moving from Athens to Shibboleth), meant that Mimas had to prepare for the complication of large numbers of users' transferring their Zetoc Alerts over to be associated with their new institutional identifier.
Every Alert owner was sent notification and instructions on transferring their Alerts via a 'one-click' facility developed by Mimas.
In common with all authenticated services, some Zetoc users were confused by the change from Athens to Shibboleth, but the overall changeover process went quite smoothly.
Full Text: Expectations and Misunderstandings An issue we regularly have to contend with is the expectation that Zetoc contains full text records and the resulting disappointment of some users when they find that it does not.
There is also a common misunderstanding that Zetoc does not link to full text.
However, this has been possible since 2002 either via customised links to an institution's OpenURL resolver or via Google Scholar etc.
(as discussed in the 'Google Scholar' section above).
Zetoc also contains Open Access material provided by Mimas, and with direct links from the Zetoc full record.
We need to continue to try to address this misunderstanding.
It could in part be due to links to full text, or other options, not being visible enough in the Zetoc full records.
Evaluation 2010 A survey of the Zetoc service was carried out via the Web site between 3 December 2009 and 14 January 2010 [13].
There were 514 respondents to the questionnaire.
Survey results included: The 'Most Valued Zetoc Feature' (see table in Figure 4).
Alerts/RSS feeds were the most valued (23%), followed closely by coverage (22%) and ease of use, search facilities (21%).
'Work Sector' (see table in Figure 5): most respondents were based in Higher or Further Education (64%), followed by the Health sector (22%).
When asked about 'Work Value', 76% of all respondents agreed that Zetoc is valuable in carrying out their work.
Figure 4: Most valued Zetoc feature   Figure 5: 2010 survey: Respondents' work sector Respondents were also given the opportunity to comment on the Zetoc service and the features they valued most.
Comments were received from academics, researchers and librarians from a range of disciplines/sectors and included: 'It is the most comprehensive and reliable service of its kind.
In many ways it is a baseline service that all libraries need to have access to.'
'We value the accuracy of records, the alert service, and the ease of navigation.'
'Convenient links to my institutional library's journal subscriptions (i.e.
article finder)' 'Wide range of articles, especially on the subjects/practitioners I can't seem to find anywhere else.'
'It helps me keep up to date with current developments and issues in librarianship.
I can check the contents of "my" periodicals for items of interest and follow through on accessing them.
I wouldn't have the time to regularly go to relevant websites to check the periodical titles themselves for new issues and their contents.
Zetoc makes a big difference to my professional development.'
In addition to the online survey, the option of participating in a 20-minute interview was also offered to UK academic researchers or lecturers who use Zetoc.
As a result of this, five semi-structured interviews were conducted with Zetoc users in order to gain a better understanding of the way the service is used in their work.
A further questionnaire was issued in August 2010 to consult with the Zetoc community about how they would like the service to be developed.
Several in-depth, follow-up interviews are currently taking place (at the time of writing).
In the interviews so far, we have received more positive feedback on the service, such a comment made by the Associate Dean at the University of Chester: 'Zetoc tends to be the first place I go to for my research.'
However, we have noted that some users are still unaware that they may be able to link from Zetoc Search or Alert to the full text of articles, courtesy of their institution.
This suggests that some marketing and awareness activities may help the research community to get the most out of Zetoc.
The Future of Zetoc JISC have made available some additional funding for Mimas to develop Zetoc further to improve functionality and content.
We want Zetoc to have a new look and greater flexibility, and consultation with our users has confirmed that this would be welcome.
As such, the 'Zetoc Enhancements 2' Project will centre on four main areas: the development of personalisation features, aggregation of Table of Contents (TOC) services, the expansion of Open Access (OA) content and a new look interface.
Personalisation Features Using a similar model to the Copac service, which introduced personalisation to its service in 2010, the new personalisation features in Zetoc will include 'My Searches', where a personalised 'Search History' will mean that users can edit, tag and annotate their searches.
A 'My References' function will also be introduced to enable users to select bibliographic records from Zetoc to store and annotate.
Searching within the bibliography will be supported by the generation of a tag cloud.
Aggregation of Table of Contents Zetoc RSS will include TOC data from ticTOCs [14], a JISC-funded project on which Mimas have collaborated with Liverpool University and Heriot-Watt University.
Expansion of Open Access Content Additional Open Access (OA) articles will be added to expand the coverage of OA content in Zetoc.
Sources will include publishers, institutional and subject repositories.
This will build upon the OA data currently harvested from UK PubMed Central and Biomed Central.
Interface We are conscious that the current interface needs to be re-visited.
It has remained largely unchanged since the inception of Zetoc and this may discourage new users.
However, the new interface, to be developed following the enhancements to functionality and content, will be more engaging and dynamic.
For example, predictive text will make journal searching easier, e.g.
when a journal title is being typed in the search box.
Conclusion Over the last ten years Zetoc has been developed from a project designed for the UK Higher Education sector, to a service with additional usage across the UK Further Education, health, charity and commercial sectors and growing non-UK usage.
It has adapted to changes in technology, such as the inclusion of the RSS feed format, and in the authentication methods for HE users, i.e.
Shibboleth.
Figure 6: Screenshot of Zetoc news item on the Mimas Web site Regarding the 10th anniversary of Zetoc, Service Manager, Ross MacIntyre, commented: After 10 years, there's still nothing else like Zetoc it contains around 40 million articles and papers across all subject areas and many languages.
The records go back to 1993 and we're adding valuable new material and archived records every day.
It's very easy to access and use for example, there's just one place to set-up your preferences.
But don't be fooled by its simplicity, it's a very powerful research tool.
We look forward to launching the new enhancements to the service in the coming months.
References Zetoc Web site http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ British Library Web site http://www.bl.uk/ Mimas Web site http://mimas.ac.uk/ Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Zetoc Interfaces page, Zetoc Web site http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/interfaces.html "Research costs slashed by funding bonus", British Library press release (2000) http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/pressrelease.html Stevenson, J.
"What everyone wants: an evaluation of the zetoc service", Sconul Newsletter, Spring 2003; 28: 50-53 http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publications/newsletter/28/ART17.PDF Zetoc mailing list, JISCmail Web site https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=mimas-zetoc Copac Web site http://copac.ac.uk/ Serials Union Catalogue (SUNCAT) Web site http://www.suncat.ac.uk/ Google History, Google Web site http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html Scirus Web site http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/aboutus Zetoc survey 2010 results, Zetoc Web site http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/survey.html ticTOCs Web site http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ Author Details Jane Ronson Development Officer Mimas University of Manchester Email: jane.ronson@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ Return to top Article Title: "10 Years of Zetoc" Author: Jane Ronson Publication Date: 30-January-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 66 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/ronson/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Augmented Reality in Education: The SCARLET+ Experience Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Augmented Reality in Education: The SCARLET+ Experience Buzz data mobile framework wireless portal infrastructure archives firefox digitisation accessibility smartphone blog copyright video graphics windows multimedia e-learning youtube oer ipad ftp url research Citation BibTex RIS Laura Skilton, Matt Ramirez, Guyda Armstrong, Rose Lock, Jean Vacher and Marie-Therese Gramstadt describe augmented reality in education case studies from the University of Sussex and the University for the Creative Arts.
Augmented reality, a capability that has been around for decades, is shifting from what was once seen as a gimmick to a bona fide game-changer.
[1] Augmented Reality (AR) has been listed in the Horizon Reports, key predictors of the potential impact of new technology on education.
The 2011 Report [1] sparked the idea for an innovative project SCARLET: Special Collections using Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching.
The Jisc-funded SCARLET Project was led by the Learning and Teaching team at Mimas [2], a national centre of expertise at The University of Manchester.
A mixed team was pulled together dedicated to enhancing the student experience through the application of technology.
This team comprised librarians, academics, learning technologists and students.
The team went on to win the 2nd prize for the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year team award [3].
Critical to its success was the embedding of the technology into teaching practices from the outset, as well as student evaluations.
Follow-on funding was made available for a second project, SCARLET+, which aimed to transfer and embed all the skills, knowledge and experience gained at The University of Manchester to the University of Sussex and the Craft Study Centre at the University for the Creative Arts.
To date, the use of AR within education has mainly focused on its marketing potential, echoing perhaps the use of AR in advertising and at high-profile events, such as the London 2012 Olympics.
The SCARLET and SCARLET+ Projects are enabling us to understand better the value of AR to education, and to special collections materials and objects.
The significant interest from the library and learning communities indicates the huge potential for developing this work further.
What Is Augmented Reality (AR)?
AR can be defined as the process where computer graphics are layered on the real world through a camera controlled by the user.
It may recognise an object or image using a visual search or a point of interest (POI) from GPS co-ordinates such as a building or landmark to provide contextual information.
Although AR can be implemented on a desktop computer, it has a greater potential when used on portable devices such as a smartphone or tablet.
Figure 1: SCARLET Augmented Reality User Journey.
© Mimas, University of Manchester, video on YouTube From prototypes in the early 1990s, AR has become more mainstream; recent technical advances and the proliferation of smartphones have made its use more viable.
Early examples of AR can be seen in marketing and industry, but it is increasingly being used in other areas such as education.
On a technical level, there are broadly two categories of AR: marker-based, and marker-less systems.
Marker-based systems use physical patterns or images to act as reference points for computer graphics to be overlaid.
In contrast, marker-less systems use location-based data through inbuilt phone sensors such as GPS, to verify the user’s position in the physical world and query datasets to influence what will be displayed on screen.
The SCARLET Project The SCARLET Project (June 2011May 2012) addressed one of the main obstacles with the use of special collections in learning and teaching: the fact that students are required to consult archives, manuscripts and rare books within the controlled conditions of reading rooms, isolated from much of the secondary supporting materials and a growing mass of related digital assets.
This is an unfamiliar experience for students who are accustomed to an information-rich wireless world, and it is therefore perceived to be a barrier to their use of special collections.
AR can enable students to experience simultaneously the magic of original primary materials, such as an early printed book in the library, whilst enhancing the learning experience by surrounding the book with digitised content, for example, images, texts, online learning resources, and information on related objects.
Figure 2: Dr Guyda Armstrong shows her students a selection of early printed editions of Dante.
© Mimas, University of Manchester One of the project’s key findings was that the two academics who trialled the use of AR in their classes, received different responses from their students.
Where AR can enhance the learning experience by providing additional in-context information, this seems to meet with most approval and provides most benefit for the students.
Simply attaching existing resources to an object is not enough.
AR is more effective when enhancing physical objects, such as manuscripts, papyri and books, rather than signposting to Web-based support materials, even if they are mobile-specific.
By taking advantage of the team’s diverse academic expertise, learning and teaching was embedded at the heart of the project, ensuring that the focus remained on the student experience and not the technology.
Student evaluation was critical to the success of the project, with their learning experience feeding into an iterative development of the application created [4].
SCARLET+ Following on immediately after the Jisc-funded SCARLET Project, SCARLET+ (June 2012 – April 2013) built upon its successes in order to pilot AR with two other UK universities [5].
Working with staff from Special Collections at the University of Sussex [6] and the Crafts Study Centre at the University for the Creative Arts [7], the project’s aim was to embed both the knowledge and skills needed to use AR, and to test and refine the SCARLET toolkit [8].
Figure 3: AR content shown over an image of the papyri fragment of the Gospel of St. John [9].
© Mimas, University of Manchester.
Photo: Marie-Therese Gramstadt The SCARLET+ Project took the lessons learnt from SCARLET, together with Mimas’s new understanding of the knowledge, skills and barriers to developing AR, to other institutions and different types of collections mass observation and 20th-century crafts.
This project has further built Mimas’s understanding of the application of AR in education, and transferred knowledge across the wider community.
Crucial to its success was ensuring that, as with SCARLET, a mixed team approach was adopted.
This has ensured that the AR developed made an impact on learning and teaching as well as enabling AR skills to spread across the institutions.
The following two sections present case studies of work in progress at the University of Sussex and the University for the Creative Arts.
It is worth noting these sections cover some of the implications for future AR development within the education sector.
Special Collections at the University of Sussex The SCARLET+ Project at the University of Sussex has worked with the Mass Observation (MO) collections [10] held by Special Collections [6], with particular focus on material digitised as part of the Jisc-funded Observing the 1980s Project [11].
Mass Observation was established in 1937 as a written social observation project in which people around the country were recruited to become what Mass Observation’s founders described as ‘the cameras with which we are trying to photograph contemporary life’.
The move in the 1970s of the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) material to Sussex inspired the establishment of a second phase of collecting which began in 1981, named the Mass Observation Project (MOP) [12].
Mass Observation provides researchers with a vast collection of qualitative data on many subject themes, and over the past ten years the Archive has been involved in various projects to increase their accessibility to researchers and anyone wishing to use it to teach at all levels.
The Observing the 1980s material is being used to create a number of Open Educational Resources (OERs) that will be embedded in a second-year History course run at Sussex by Dr. Lucy Robinson.
Towards an Augmented Reality Application for Sussex The first step towards creating the SCARLET+ application was a workshop in July 2012 [13] during which Laura Skilton, Matt Ramirez and Dr. Guyda Armstrong introduced potential applications of AR in learning and teaching.
This pivotal workshop inspired and supported Sussex and facilitated discussions of what actually to build.
Represented at the workshop were a wide range of Sussex staff members including Stuart Lamour, an e-learning developer with experience in AR; Dr. John Davies, an educational developer; Dr. Lucy Robinson, Sussex history lecturer and SCARLET+’s academic lead; Jill Kirby, project manager for Observing the 1980s, as well as a variety of Special Collections and Library staff.
Having input at this initial brainstorming stage from people with such different skills and experience was invaluable as it widened the project’s concept of what was possible both in learning and teaching and with the AR technology itself.
Figure 4: SCARLET+ University of Sussex workshop review by Dr Lucy Robinson.
© Mimas, University of Manchester, video on YouTube The original idea was to make use of the vast amount of copyright-cleared material digitised for Observing the 1980s as the core of the application, but the project team quickly came to realise that simply replicating this resource did not make full use of AR’s potential.
Moreover, since AR is accessed through a device that can already access the Observing the 1980s Web-based content it seemed rather pointless.
Eager to make sure that AR added something unique to Dr. Robinson’s teaching, the idea of using the application to present additional voices and their attitudes towards MOP was suggested.
This fitted the bill perfectly.
The SCARLET+ application at Sussex presents three Mass Observers through their digitised writings, the MOA Assistant, Jessica Scantlebury and a student historian who has used MOP in her research.
Jessica and the student historian were filmed talking about their experience of and feelings about Mass Observation.
One of the biggest bonuses of this structure, which concentrates on the interpretation of archival material, is that it could be applied to any discipline and any collection.
For example an application could be created that uses part of Special Collections’ Bloomsbury papers to present disparate voices from an archivist, to a literature fan to Virginia Woolf herself.
Minded to include a further set of voices, the project team also investigated the possibility of students using the application and adding their own comments; thereby creating a living, growing resource that is somewhat akin to MO itself.
Unfortunately this was not a simple function to develop, so it was decided that it could not be part of the original application but could be something to add in the future.
Ups and Downs of Creating an AR Application Rose Lock, Senior Archive Assistant and SCARLET+ Project Officer, University of Sussex comments: The AR applications I looked at initially had such an impressive ‘wow’ factor that I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to learn how to construct something that looked so complicated and technical.
Rose went on to experiment with a range of different programmes designed to create AR applications, but found them either very simple to use but extremely limited in their capabilities, or wonderfully flexible but which erected a technological ‘brick wall’.
The SCARLET+ Project then brought the Project Officer from University of Sussex and the Educational Technologist from University for the Creative Arts together in Manchester for a technical workshop.
This made an enormous difference for both institutional partners and was a real turning-point in the AR technical development for the project.
Both the Project Officer and Educational Technologist found that having a face-to-face training session with Matt Ramirez, the SCARLET+ multimedia content developer was invaluable.
This was particularly necessary for getting to grips with AR, as there were few how-to guides available and they were normally designed for commercial and technical developers.
By providing carefully explained and commented lines of code, and by demonstrating what happens when different sections are changed, Matt provided the project officers with both the framework and the confidence to create their own AR applications.
The process of creating University of Sussex’s AR application has been a roller-coaster of triumphs and tribulations.
Some of the problems with AR development can be quite subtle to solve; for example, for a long time the device would not recognise the trigger image and so this held up development with the rest of the application.
The breakthrough came when Matt suggested creating the tracking file for the trigger image through the Mozilla Firefox Web browser (as opposed to Internet Explorer).
This apparently simple solution worked and enabled Rose to start getting into the nitty-gritty of how changing code changes the application, learning about linking, and coming up with the first rough version.
Figure 5: AR content displaying on a tablet device held in front of the trigger image with a physical wall.
© Special Collections, University of Sussex Once a basic working AR application was created, Special Collections staff were invited to a session to play with it.
This was intended to keep them up to date with project progress, give them a window into the processes involved in creating an AR application, and to invite them to provide feedback.
As the whole idea of SCARLET+ is to embed the skills into Special Collections, these sessions have been an essential part of the project as they help the rest of the department to see how an application is made.
It was important to hold the sessions using half-built, slightly shoddy-looking first-draft AR applications, rather than have no contact or feedback and then suddenly produce a finished app.
‘What has it got in its Pockets-es?’ Introducing AR to Students As the staff sessions have always been successful, mostly due to the enthusiasm of the staff, it was therefore a bit of a shock when the first attempt to introduce the newly created Voices In Your Pocket application to University of Sussex students was less than a roaring success.
At the end of November 2013, an archive box was packed with three iPads, print-outs of the trigger image, and basic AR how-to-instructions – to be used in an MA History seminar on the 1980s.
Figure 6: Example materials for the AR session using the Voices In Your Pocket app.
© Special Collections, University of Sussex From the project team’s experience of talking about and demonstrating AR with colleagues, a fairly high level of enthusiasm was expected.
Unfortunately this was not the case.
Most of the students were hesitant about even picking up the iPads, commenting that they were not used to ‘being given toys’.
It was difficult to gauge the level of interest in the material itself as the group was not forthcoming with their comments [14].
Lessons learned from the experience include: set defined questions for the students to answer during the session – perhaps with a written form for those who do not wish to contribute verbally; do not assume a certain level of knowledge and confidence with new technology or devices – provide clear step-by-step instructions; and ensure that AR applications are underpinned with a clear pedagogy.
AR in a University Museum Context: The Crafts Study Centre The Crafts Study Centre is a university museum that holds a collection of outstanding 20th-century and contemporary crafts [7].
Its collecting policy is based on quality and innovation.
In terms of its audiences, it looks in several directions: inwards towards the staff and students of its hosting organisation, University for the Creative Arts (UCA), and outwards to an international academic community.
For example, the archives of crafts practitioners such as the renowned 20th-century potter, etcher, writer and protagonist for the crafts, Bernard Leach, attracts readers from Japan, North America and Australia.
Figure 7: Portrait photograph of Bernard Leach, 1946.
© Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts The Centre also looks outwards in another direction, that of a wider, albeit specialist public whose interests lie in the subject areas represented in its historic and contemporary collections: calligraphy; wood and furniture; ceramics; and printed and woven textiles.
It has two public galleries and an annual rolling programme of exhibitions.
In addition to staging themed exhibitions which display the Centre’s permanent collections, it shows the work of established contemporary artists whose work pushes the boundary of craft practices, across a wider range of subject disciplines.
The challenge and remit set by Mimas was to embed an AR application within the pedagogical practices of our institution and to establish a meeting point between curatorial, teaching, library and technical staff.
The SCARLET+ project has required UCA to build awareness and acceptance of a technology which is relatively new to the cultural sector.
The aim is that this cultural change at an institutional level will increase the students’ use of the Crafts Study Centre collections, bring us closer to the University’s teaching practices, and through new ways of accessing knowledge, enrich the student experience.
In time and depending on resources, the Centre also plans to extend this experience to the museum visitor; for example AR applications have the potential to support the interpretation of objects displayed in an exhibition.
The SCARLET+ project has been an opportunity to use augmented reality as a way to encourage engagement with the collections.
This has been one of the differences between the Crafts Study Centre and other uses of AR by Special Collections which have looked at how to make fragile items more accessible without physical access to the objects.
From its inception the Crafts Study Centre has encouraged handling of the collections, and, as a Research Centre and specialist university museum, it also has a remit to facilitate and support research both with the University’s own staff and students, and beyond.
The approach at the Crafts Study Centre has been three-stranded: to engage with staff across the University throughout the project; to identify a lead academic and ensure that the focus of technical development work is based upon learning and teaching; and to use and understand AR technology with the support of Mimas at The University of Manchester.
What Is AR?
The Crafts Study Centre Perspective First sight of AR in action is generally very impressive and one of the most exciting aspects of working on the project has been the newness and potential of the technology in education.
This has been tempered with the reality of working with technology in education developing augmented reality applications requires FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to a Web server from a computer as well as simultaneous access to a compatible device and a strong Wi-Fi connection in order to test the application [15].
Figure 8: The essentials for technical development (excluding content & learning objectives).
© Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts In addition to all the parts of the technology which can fail, there is also the issue of finding ways to communicate the new technology to users to enable them to engage with it.
None of the technical development work carried out would have been possible without the training and support provided by Mimas.
Engaging with Staff across UCA Jean Vacher, Institutional Lead on the SCARLET+ project and Curator of the Crafts Study Centre, began the project by setting up meetings with a variety of staff across the University.
This included representatives from: the Visual Arts Data Service Research Centre [16] and host of the Crafts Study Centre’s collections online [17]; the University’s newly established Digitisation Unit; the University Archivist; Head of Collections in the Library and Student Services Department; academics from the School of Crafts, Visual Arts and Design and the School of Media and Culture; Professor of Ceramics at the Crafts Study Centre; a learning technologist; and the Animation Research Centre.
These conversations were followed up by Marie-Therese Gramstadt, when she joined the project team in September 2012 as an educational technologist; the IT Department was also contacted about the project.
Initially it was a challenge to talk about AR without a tangible example from the Crafts Study Centre; however examples from the Museum of London’s Streetmuseum application [18] and the original SCARLET Project certainly helped.
Also following the Mimas technical workshop in October 2012 both project partners’ understanding of AR was growing; for the educational technologist at the Crafts Study Centre this was partly about understanding the new terminology used in developing AR, terms such as pattern or tracking image, and call-back URL and which are contained in a glossary of terms [19].
The contacts across the University were kept up to date about the project’s progress and invited to contribute to the SCARLET+ workshop hosted at the Farnham campus in December 2012.
This was an opportunity for colleagues to learn more about AR from the Mimas team, to discuss its implications for their own areas of work and to view and feedback on the first iteration of the Crafts Study Centre app.
Figure 9: AR content appears on top of an image of the interior of The Little Gallery, set in its archival box context.
© Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts.
Photo: Matt Ramirez Feedback received on the day included: What was most useful?
To see how material culture studies can take this technology further in this type of institution to contrast with a university classroom setting.
Very exciting to see demo and explanation of thinking behind CSC use of Augmented Reality – set my brain thinking in several directions about the applications to my own work.
[20] Pedagogy before Technology In keeping with the overall SCARLET+ Project aims of integrating AR within the institution, the Crafts Study Centre application has been developed with a lead academic Adrian Bland, Contextual Studies Co-ordinator, School of Media and Culture.
The application was designed to be tested with second-year students as part of the Contextual Studies module; because the students come from a variety of different degree courses, it was important that the content presented would also be wide-ranging, covering ceramics, metalwork, jewellery, glass and textiles.
The application, a work in progress, aimed to address the following three objectives: to present the AR technology as a contextual framework in its own right; to showcase four types of content (ceramics, metalwork and jewellery, glass, textiles) which students can themselves critically evaluate and thereby use to position their own practice; and to focus on the role of the Crafts Study Centre as a resource for research and making this appear more accessible to students who may not consider visiting a museum or gallery [15].
Following useful feedback on the application at the AR workshop in December, at the time of writing we are now looking forward to testing the application with students before honing and developing it further.
Conclusion In conclusion, the two SCARLET+ projects have built on and taken the SCARLET Project in new and exciting directions, and have proved to be a very valuable learning experience for all stakeholders: Special Collections at the University of Sussex, Crafts Study Centre at the University for the Creative Arts, and the Mimas team at The University of Manchester.
Although the two case studies were necessarily small-scale, due to funding and time constraints, both have succeeded in showcasing unique holdings at their institutions.
Each of these projects also created their own implementation which highlighted particular features of the source objects.
For Sussex this was the notion of voices, framing and enhancing the thousands of anonymous voices captured in the Mass Observation records themselves.
Meanwhile the Crafts Study Centre application demonstrated the spatial possibilities of the technology by showcasing key items from the Craft Study Centre’s collections that could have been, and in some case were, sold in The Little Gallery a key historic site for British 20th-century crafts and an innovative model for selling crafts.
Building on the lessons learned from the Manchester SCARLET project, these unique AR applications have already shown us new directions to explore in further iterations of the SCARLET toolkit and AR technology.
Sharing expertise was always at the heart of both the SCARLET and SCARLET+ projects, and the team hope that others will now be inspired by the possibilities of AR in education.
References 2011 HORIZON report, section on augmented reality http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2011/sections/augmented-reality/ Mimas http://mimas.ac.uk/ SCARLET team are joint second in learning and teaching awards, 13 September 2012 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/scarlet-team-are-joint-runner-up-in-learning-technology-awards/ SCARLET Focus Group, 23 November 2011 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/scarlet-focus-group/ SCARLET+, a new project adding Augmented Reality skills and knowledge to the community, Team SCARLET blog post, 29 May 2012 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/scarlet-a-new-project-adding-augmented-reality-skills-and-knowledge-to-the-community/ Special Collections at the University of Sussex http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/specialcollections Crafts Study Centre at the University for the Creative Arts http://www.csc.ucreative.ac.uk/ SCARLET Toolkit http://scarlet.mimas.ac.uk/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page St John Fragment AR content, 25 October 2012 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/st-john-fragment-ar-content/ Mass Observation Archive http://www.massobs.org.uk Observing the 1980s, Jisc-funded project http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/ The Mass Observation Project (1981-) http://www.massobs.org.uk/mass_observation_project.html SCARLET+, adding Augmented Reality to the University of Sussex’s Toolkit, Team SCARLET blog post, 31 July 2012 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/scarlet-adding-augmented-reality-to-the-university-of-sussexs-toolkit/ SCARLET+ ‘What has it got in its Pockets-es?’ – introducing Augmented Reality to students without getting them lost in the dark, Team SCARLET blog post, 13 December 2012 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/scarlet-what-has-it-got-in-its-pockets-es-introducing-augmented-reality-to-students-without-getting-them-lost-in-the-dark/ Triangles and teapots: AR technology development, Team SCARLET blog post, 14 December 2012 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/triangles-and-teapots-ar-technology-development/ Visual Arts Data Service Research Centre http://vads.ac.uk/ Crafts Study Centre digital collections online at VADS http://vads.ac.uk/collections/CSC.html Museum of London’s Streetmuseum AR application http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Streetmuseum.htm Portal to another world, Team SCARLET blog post, 15 November 2012 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/portal-to-another-world/ Discovering augmented reality at UCA, Team SCARLET blog post, 14 December 2012 http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/discovering-augmented-reality-at-uca/ Author Details Laura Skilton Jorum Business Development Manager Mimas The University of Manchester Email: laura.skilton@manchester.ac.uk Laura Skilton develops and manages technology-enhanced projects and services to support and improve learning and teaching.
This includes Hairdressing Training, Jorum and Augmented Reality projects such as SCARLET (Special Collections using Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching).
As Jorum Business Development Manager, Laura supports organisations and institutions to exploit Jorum’s technical infrastructure and expertise in finding and sharing Open Educational Resources (OER), using co-funding to develop ‘windows’ onto their resources via Jorum.
She also works with a large charity, Cats Protection, on their use of e-learning to train their 7,000 volunteers, including OER development.
Matt Ramirez Multimedia Content Developer Mimas The University of Manchester Email: matthew.ramirez@manchester.ac.uk Matt Ramirez is currently working on the technical development and support of the Jisc-funded SCARLET+ Augmented Reality Project, this follows on from his involvement in the award-winning SCARLET Project.
He is also involved in the delivery and technical support of a number of teaching and learning projects including Hairdressing Training and Jorum.
Matt’s role is also concerned with the research and development of new technologies such as various iBook/mobile/multimedia development projects with the Manchester Medical School which aim to improve the student experience by embracing innovative learning methods.
Guyda Armstrong Senior Lecturer in Italian The University of Manchester Email: guyda.armstrong@manchester.ac.uk Guyda Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Manchester, specialising in medieval Italian literature with an interdisciplinary approach which combines textual  and material studies, with translation and the digital humanities.
She has a long-standing research interest in the digital humanities and their application to literary studies.
She is the Principal Investigator for the Manchester Digital Dante project, a British Academy Project which digitized culturally significant editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy held in the University of Manchester’s Special Collections.
She was also lead academic on the award-winning JISC-funded SCARLET Project (Special Collections using Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching), which developed a mobile app to allow students to integrate iconic material from the University’s special collections into their learning and teaching.
Rose Lock Special Collections Supervisor University of Sussex Email: r.lock@sussex.ac.uk Rose Lock is the Special Collections Supervisor at the University of Sussex Library.
She is also the Project Co-ordinator for SCARLET+ at Sussex.
She works with the extensive 20th Century literary and socio-historical collections held by the Library which include the Mass Observation Archive, and the personal papers of Virginia Woolf and Rudyard Kipling, amongst others.
More recently she has been heavily involved in the planning and preparation of the move of the collections to a new resource centre, The Keep, which will hold the collections of East Sussex, Brighton and Hove and the University of Sussex.
Jean Vacher Curator, Crafts Study Centre University for the Creative Arts Email: jvacher@ucreative.ac.uk Jean Vacher’s main area of personal research has been the history, culture and identity of the Balkan people in the early part of the 20th century, viewed through their textiles.
Key research methods have used material culture held in public collections including that of the Crafts Study Centre (CSC), the archives of such bodies as the Royal Institute of Anthropology and other primary and secondary sources relating to this area of interest.
She would like to extend these methods to other cultures where these have been represented in the CSC’s practitioner’s reference collections.
Marie-Therese Gramstadt Educational Technologist, Crafts Study Centre, Research Associate, Visual Arts Data Service University for the Creative Arts Email: mtg@vads.ac.uk Web site: http://www.research.ucreative.ac.uk/profile/60 Marie-Therese Gramstadt is currently managing the KAPTUR Project (Jisc, 2011-13) working with Goldsmiths, University of London, The Glasgow School of Art, University of the Arts London and University for the Creative Arts, to improve the management of arts research data.
She is also a Researcher and Digital Cataloguer for the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Archive (Jisc, 2011-13), making use of her MA in the History of Dress (Courtauld Institute of Art).
Marie-Therese has recently re-joined the Crafts Study Centre to work on the SCARLET+ Project using augmented reality with the Muriel Rose Archive (Jisc, 2012-13).
Previous projects include: Kultivate (Jisc, 2010-11), eNova (Jisc, 2011) and three Learning and Teaching Research grants (2010, 2010-11, 2011-12).
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Figshare Fest 2015.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Figshare Fest 2015.
Citation BibTex RIS Gary Brewerton reports on figshare fest 2015, held in London on 12th October.
Figshare [1] is a cloud-hosted repository where users can upload their various research outputs (e.g.
figures, datasets, presentations, etc.)
and make them publically available so they are discoverable, shareable and citable.
Earlier this year they launched an institutional offering which aims to ease compliance with open data mandates, measure the impact of research outputs and act as a showcase for an institution’s entire spectrum of research.
figshare fest 2015 was the first event to bring together institutional customers, advocates and friends of figshare to talk not only about the repository but about open data in general.
Morning After ensuring you’ve caught the right train, the next challenge when attending any conference is making sure you arrive at the correct venue.
The instructions provided seemed easy enough to follow, and having checked out the location on Google Maps, I thought I knew where to go.
I was wrong.
Luckily figshare staff had considered this situation and were on hand to direct lost lambs to the correct building where we could register, pick up our environmentally friendly goodie bags and grab a coffee before the event officially started.
The keynote presentation was delivered by Daniel Hook, Managing Director at Digital Science (supporter and development partner of figshare).
Despite suffering from a bad cold, Daniel provided a great start to the day with his talk on the expanding universe of academic publication.
He noted that universities were increasingly becoming global in their ambitions and that research was becoming a marketing tool to help promote their identities worldwide.
Daniel also talked about the issues with small data, in particular putting the memory stick on trial for misleading researchers into thinking it was a safe, secure place to store all their work.
[Figure 1 Daniel Hook delivers the keynote at figshare fest 2015] Following Daniel was Mark Hahnel, founder and CEO of figshare.
Mark stated that from the beginning figshare has always been about the researcher, in particular himself as he sought to better promote his own research.
However, rather than talking about the past Mark was more interested in the future of open data and what this meant for the development of figshare.
During his talk I was pleasantly surprised when Mark put up a diagram showing a simplified view of how a research data management service could interact with other institutional systems, surprised because I had created the diagram [2] about a year earlier when trying to understand the situation myself.
Next on the agenda was lunch.
Having had a fairly early start of the day this was a welcome opportunity to refuel ready for the afternoon session.
However, I would be remiss in my report of the day if I didn’t thank Chris George (Product Manager at figshare) for presenting me with a lemon drizzle cake during lunch.
Afternoon After lunch there were three customer presentations.
The first of these was by yours truly and Gareth Cole, Research Data Manager at Loughborough University.
I won’t comment on our presentation [3] other than to note that it’s available online via figshare.
David Clay and Hannah Baker from Salford University gave the next presentation having launched their new pilot research data service earlier in the week.
Salford is a strong supporter of open access/open data, having recognised the benefits of sharing so their service is not just about funder compliance.
They began gathering requirements and establishing policy in March 2013 before putting a business case to the University in January 2015.
Key requirements identified were storage and better collaboration tools.
There has been a positive response to the new service which they intend to scale up before rolling out across the University.
The final presentation of the day was from David Groenewegen, Research Director at Monash University.
He began by giving an overview of Monash before explaining that unlike in the UK there was no mandate yet from Australian funders to make data openly available, instead the drive at Monash was to promote the researchers and the institution.
Monash employs a variety of software solutions as part of its research data ecosystem so it was important when implementing figshare it was seen to be obviously better than what researchers were already doing.
With researchers able to manage and make their research data discoverable, they hope to build upon their reputation so that globally people want to collaborate with, work at or study at Monash.
[Figure 2 Monash’s research data ecosystem] The final part of the day was taken up with three workshops looking at researcher engagement, the figshare roadmap and reporting requirements.
This was a great opportunity for existing and potential customers to feed back to figshare staff about their experiences and the future development of the service.
Not content with hosting figshare fest 2015 and giving out t-shirts, Mark Hahnel then invited the remaining attendees for a drink or two and a bite to eat at a pub conveniently located at a nearby station.
All I can say is the beer was very good and the excellent company made the wait for my train a pleasure.
Conclusions This was an interesting, fun and more importantly useful event.
As someone who has recently been involved in the implementation of figshare’s institutional offering it is always gratifying to hear about other customer’s experiences.
In particular, David Groenewegen’s talk not only echoed but validated many of the decisions we’d made at Loughborough.
As always with such events it was also an incredibly useful opportunity for customers to network with each other and build contacts for the future.
Roll on figshare fest 2016!
References [1] figshare.
http://figshare.com [2] Brewerton, Gary (2015): RDM the Loughborough Solution.
figshare.
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1604781 [3] Brewerton, Gary; Cole, Gareth (2015): Loughborough's RDM Story.
figshare.
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1600895   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Assessing the impact on the student experience of embedding information resources in the Guided Learner Journey at the University of Hertfordshire Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Assessing the impact on the student experience of embedding information resources in the Guided Learner Journey at the University of Hertfordshire Citation BibTex RIS Helen Singer and Jane Bilson explain how the University of Hertfordshire followed ‘Guided Learner Journey’ principles by embedding resources in their VLE using the Talis Aspire reading list system and their assessment of how this has affected the student experience at the University.
The Guided Learner Journey At the University of Hertfordshire, a series of consultative workshops with academic staff and students established the aims and principles for the student Guided Learner Journey (GLJ) back in 2014.
The GLJ aims included providing an excellent student learning experience, meeting sound pedagogic principles and student expectations, taking advantage of technological developments and a full range of online services for a holistic student experience.
The GLJ also established key principles including a consistent delivery of learning activities and resources, students’ ability to comment on and supplement resources and learning activities and customisation and simpler mechanisms to provide links to journals, ebooks and other external resources.
The university procured a VLE to replace its own inhouse system, StudyNet.
Canvas was chosen as the closest to helping us provide the framework for the Guided Learner Journey, and it was decided to implement Talis Aspire reading lists at the same time.
A Talis Reading List template was designed to reflect the same structure as the Canvas module.
The full reading list is embedded in the Canvas module and can also be linked at unit level using an LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability).
In 2016 we undertook a pilot of Talis for approximately 30 modules to help define workflows for book acquisitions and other processes.
Following this pilot all first year undergraduate modules moved to the new learning environment in 2017-18 (approximately 500 modules), with the rollout to all other modules ready for the academic year 2018-19.
Prior to this, reading was either in the Online Library section of StudyNet, in module guides or powerpoint slides.
Background to research project Other institutions have demonstrated improvement in students’ use of resources with the Canvas platform and the Talis Resource List Management System, for example Harper and James (2017) at Birmingham.
At Loughborough University the importance of developing a reading strategy was highlighted (Brewerton, 2014), including giving clear guidance to students and the importance of keeping lists up to date.
Stokes and Martin (2008) established the need for discussion around reading lists, and greater understanding of expectations from both staff and students.
At Hertfordshire, reading principles were drawn up and were discussed with academic Schools.
These provide general principles for staff in using reading lists and set draft ratios of the number of copies of books depending on the importance level allocated.
This paper reports on a project which received funding from the university’s Learning and Teaching Innovation Centre.
Working alongside the project to deliver the Guided Learner Journey, we aimed to use a scholarly approach to validate both the GLJ principles and the reading principles, and to assess their impact on the staff and student experience.
We measured the impact of using Canvas on students’ learning experience and staff perceptions of student engagement by focusing on a sample of first year undergraduate Semester A modules The methodology used comprised both quantitative research to review levels and patterns of engagement and qualitative research to understand the student experience and the learning and teaching impact of engaging with embedded reading.
Method We selected 7 first year undergraduate modules across a variety of disciplines where embedded reading was used for a variety of purposes: Sports Science: students were asked to watch videos before practical sessions Engineering: students were asked to read book chapters and manuals before workshops Business: students were asked to read articles and book chapters each week, to be assessed by exam Child Nursing: students were asked to read prior to a lecture (flipped classroom approach) Law, Creative Arts and Humanities had more traditional lists broken down into weekly topics.
For each module we set up a module profile to note the number of students, and identify key milestones related to significant reading activity such as assessment dates.
Several of the lists had been set up during the reading list pilot.
A new level 5 Law module in Canvas was included so students could compare this with their previous experience of the StudyNet module.
The length of the lists varied from 14 items (Business) to much longer lists for Humanities (162 items) and Creative Arts (304 items).
The reading lists were all structured by weekly topics and annotated with guidance from academic staff such as specific chapter or pages from the core textbook and the purpose of reading specific items.
We recorded a 5 minute video to show students the functionality of the lists Quantitative data Early in the project we found that the Talis analytics via the Talis Dashboard did not work when the lists were embedded in the Canvas modules.
As an alternative, colleagues in our department ran API scripts every week to show student behaviour by recording Canvas clicks to the Reading units across time.
Other colleagues obtained usage data to show use of print and ebooks and digitisations for each reading list.
We were not able to record use of journal articles or websites.
The harvested data was represented by our data analyst using Tableau, a data visualisation tool.
Although we are still analysing the data, a clear picture of student behaviour is emerging.
We can see the number and timing of clicks on Reading items in Canvas, for example in Fig 1 below where Engineering students were asked to read in preparation for laboratory work.
This is useful in terms of staff seeing the benefits of designing activities that encourage their students to read.
We can also see use of e-books and print books for each module, along with digitisation requests.
The very long reading lists had some books that were never borrowed.
Further work is needed to look at the impact on use of books where tutors have added reading labels such as Essential or Recommended, and guidance for students.
Fig 1: Data showing clicks on weekly Reading links in an Engineering module In an overview, Chad and Anderson (2017) predict the role that analytics, including data from reading lists, will play when combined with data on student performance and retention and this is something that we would like to pursue in future.
Qualitative data We sent surveys using Microsoft Forms to the 7 module leaders and all the students.
Of the approximately 700 students we obtained feedback from 83, over 11%.
We then ran focus groups for five of these students in a newly designed student study room within one of our Learning Resources Centres, using user experience (UX) techniques, as suggested by Priestner and Borg (2016).
The techniques used were observation, annotation of lists, post-it notes answering questions on our glass write wall, and love and break up letters.
These provided us with rich feedback in a varied and fun environment and allowed us to engage with the students in an active way.
Fig 2: Focus groups using UX techniques Main findings The main themes that emerged were consistent with the findings from previous research and our own checklist of good practice criteria which listed the importance of a structured list, whether the list had been sent for review, use of importance labels and tutor guidance.
Back in 2003, Thompson, Mahon and Thomas (2003, p.60) established that students valued tutors’ annotations of lists and found evidence of use of readings lists in citations in students’ work.
(Siddall, 2016) recommends using institutionally agreed labels and the use of reading lists broken down into sections to aid navigation.
An evaluation at Huddersfield (McGuinn, Stone, Sharman, & Davison, 2017) provided feedback showing that students appreciated lists to aid understanding, as a guide to further reading, for ease of use, and that they appreciated advice from tutors, weekly reading and labels, and the need for lists to be an appropriate length and up to date.
The findings from our project can be grouped into student behaviour and preferences, the learning and teaching impact and staff views.
Student behaviour and preferences In our research, we found evidence that students liked having advance notice of the module reading.
This reinforces the results of the university’s induction survey results from 2017.
When asked about book purchase intentions, one student said “Definitely!
I wanted to buy all books prior to starting the year while I had the money”, whilst another reported that “The prices for books are usually high and the majority of the books can be found in the library.” Weekly reading was unanimously popular, with 90% of replies finding this helpful.
Comments include: “Having it weekly helps me schedule my time, can’t imagine trying to do it without” and “weeks were better.
Long list would have been a disaster”.
When asked whether students preferred to consult the whole list or the weekly readings, one student said “I used the reading list to buy the books at the start of the year, but then accessed week by week to see the chapters needed for each week.” The focus group students appreciated guidance from their tutors: “Yes, helps me identify the hard concepts” and liked weekly reminders about the reading.
We were interested in the work of Piscioneri and Hlavac (2013) who looked at shorter, quality annotated lists for Arts and Humanities students.
In our research, some lists were seen to be too short “perhaps a few more books so if you don’t like one you have the option to choose another” whilst others complained about the very long lists, for example in this ‘break-up letter’: “You’re too long!
I enjoy the reading and want to get ahead but so much extra reading is intimidating.” “There was far too much to read every week on top of everything else you have to read in other modules.” Given the length of the Humanities and Creative Arts lists, this is probably not surprising.
In the survey 67% of respondents said the length of the list was about right.
88% of students said the level of the reading was about right, while 11% found the reading too advanced: “Some of the readings were easy to understand while others were more complicated and required a lot of time.”   Fig 3: Student survey results example Learning and teaching impact A member of staff commented that “Having the resources embedded allowed us to build the session around the pre-course reading.” Students found it helpful to have the list to prepare for workshops and assignments in this flipped classroom model: “enables easy access to specific and required content for lab sessions and assignments.” 98% of students in the survey agreed that the reading aided their understanding: ”The reading helped me to consolidate my ideas, and to understand more.” 84% of respondents found the reading helped with their revision and assignments: ”The reading was very important for this module because the entire exam was based on the readings.” 63% of respondents said that the reading also acted as a springboard for further reading with comments such as: “Found very interesting and did further research” and “Some of the reading I found interesting and lead to further reading” and “I found that by reading it gave me a base line of understanding helping me in practical sessions and also other modules.” Further reading was found in the university’s Online Library, on Google Scholar, YouTube and the Internet.
Staff views on embedding reading and student engagement Staff were positive about the benefits of having a structured template corresponding to Canvas units, averaging a 5 out of 5 star rating.
Ease of use and embedding the Talis links into Canvas were rated with 4 stars, with one member of staff saying that he did not find this intuitive.
Regarding set up time, one tutor said “It works fine once the time has been taken to set it up,” another said it only took 2 hours to set up whilst those with longer lists complained about the length of time involved.
The staff were also enthusiastic about embedding weekly reading: “The guided learner journey helps to point the students in the right direction to get through the course.” Another member of staff commented: “Overall Talis is good because it allows students to have a structured approach to their reading, and it is easier for them to find the relevant material and access it remotely week-by-week.” All the staff felt that the embedded reading had a positive impact on student engagement.
Comments included: “Student practical grades have increased this year”, “The more integrated function is more uniform and looks more professional” and “I think students were more likely to do the reading.” When asked what ideas they have for encouraging reading, there were some valuable suggestions, for example: “I ran an exercise to get them to think about what they found interesting in the article /chapter rather than what they thought was important.
We snowballed this and voted on what the most interesting things were” Another member of staff commented: “Student are very assessment driven so potentially telling them it will benefit their coursework or final exams.”   Fig 4: Staff survey results example Conclusions In addition to assessing the impact of the student experience of embedded reading, the project aimed to disseminate good practice.
Some good ideas about promoting use of the lists to staff are advocated by Atkinson et al., (2011) whilst the importance of using the Review function was highlighted by Cameron, C. and Siddall (2015).
It is clear that academic staff value a simple system that is easy to use so clear training is needed.
Library staff need to ensure that academic staff see the value of reviewing their lists.
The findings from this project can be used to demonstrate the benefits to the student experience of embedded reading.
As part of the project, we made a short video of staff discussing the benefits.
We have drawn up the following Guidelines for good practice based on the evidence from the research: Early access to reading lists may better prepare students before they start their university course.
Students value structured lists that reflect the structure of their modules and can aid students’ organisation and time management skills.
Embedded reading can aid students’ preparation, understanding, and revision.
Students appreciate their tutors’ guidance, in the form of reading importance and annotations.
Students are more likely to use the lists if an activity is centred round the reading and not overlong.
Students often don’t buy the recommended core textbook due to costs but rely on ebook versions if available.
In addition, we will publicise the top tips to students from their fellow students: Reading is important and a valuable part of studying, “1 hour reading will help in the long run” Use the reading list to prepare for lecture or seminar and afterwards to reinforce learning and extend understanding Practise reading academic texts before starting your course REFERENCES Atkinson, S., Conway, N., Taylorson, B., & Smith, C. (2011).
Reading lists – pitching it right!
| SCONUL.
Retrieved from http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publication/reading-lists-–-pitching-it-right Brewerton, G. (2014).
Implications of Student and Lecturer Qualitative Views on Reading Lists: A Case Study at Loughborough University, UK.
New Review of Academic Librarianship.
http://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2013.864688 Cameron, C. and Siddall, G. (2015).
Academic staff perceptions and use of reading lists for book ordering | SCONUL.
Retrieved April 7, 2018, from https://www.sconul.ac.uk/publication/academic-staff-perceptions-and-use-of-reading-lists-for-book-ordering Chad, K., & Anderson, H. (2017).
The new role of the library in teaching and learning outcomes Briefing paper.
http://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14688.89606 Harper, P. and James, A.
(2017).
issue 68 | SCONUL.
Retrieved April 7, 2018, from https://www.sconul.ac.uk/tags/issue-68?page=1 McGuinn, K., Stone, G., Sharman, A., & Davison, E. (2017).
Student reading lists: evaluating the student experience at the University of Huddersfield.
The Electronic Library.
http://doi.org/10.1108/EL-12-2015-0252 Piscioneri, M., & Hlavac, J.
(2013).
The minimalist reading model: Rethinking reading lists in arts and education subjects.
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 12(4), 424–445.
http://doi.org/10.1177/1474022212459035 Priestner, A., & Borg, M. (2016).
User Experience in Libraries: Applying Ethnography and Human-Centred Design.
http://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/weave.12535642.0001.505 Siddall, G. (2016).
University academics’ perceptions of reading list labels.
New Library World.
http://doi.org/10.1108/NLW-02-2016-0012 Stokes, P., & Martin, L. (2008).
Reading lists: A study of tutor and student perceptions, expectations and realities.
Studies in Higher Education, 33(2), 113–125.
http://doi.org/10.1080/03075070801915874 Thompson, L., Mahon, C., & Thomas, L. (2003).
Reading lists -How do you eat yours?
Background and rationale.
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Launching a New Community-owned Content Service Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Launching a New Community-owned Content Service Buzz data database portfolio archives metadata schema preservation cataloguing graphics multimedia passwords marc aggregation ocr provenance ebook licence research Citation BibTex RIS Caren Milloy describes some of the challenges overcome and lessons learned by JISC Collections during the development of JISC eCollections.
JISC eCollections is a set of e-resource platforms launched in November 2011 by JISC Collections, in partnership with the JISC data centres EDINA and Mimas.
The platforms (Figure 1) are JISC MediaHub, JISC Historic Books and JISC Journal Archives; together, they are intended to provide a sustainable, value-for-money alternative to accessing licensed content on publisher platforms, by consolidating and hosting the broad range of historical book, journal archive and multimedia content purchased by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK education community.
The vision is to provide a world-class collection that ensures users’ broadest information needs are well met, and to work in partnership with the community to improve and develop the platforms around evolving student and researcher expectations.
Background The primary role of JISC Collections is the licensing of content on behalf of its UK Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) member organisations.
Over the last 10 years, JISC Collections has invested over £40 million in centralised licensing of digital content, in perpetuity, on behalf of all its members.
The first agreement was signed in 2002 for ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Since then, national licences have been negotiated for historic books, journal archives and multimedia content (Figure 1), such as documentaries and educational films.
In 2010, JISC Collections invested a further £2.5 million in film and image content, representing UK and world history since 1987, specially selected for teaching and learning.
The majority of JISC Collections’ member organisations would be unable to afford per-institution subscriptions to these book, journal and multimedia collections, so centralised licensing is critical to broadening access.
Figure 1: The three platforms that make up the JISC eCollections service Why Develop JISC eCollections?
The platforms contain more than 4.5 million resources from over 20 providers.
JISC Collections members were previously required to access this content via a range of separate services, each with different user interfaces and administrative requirements, and with a complex funding set-up including both JISC subsidies and publisher access fees payable by each institution.
JISC Collections felt that its existing – and future – investments in content would best be protected and preserved by developing an independent service, as an affordable alternative to relying on content providers for access to perpetually licensed content.
Such a service would allow the education community to take ownership of its acquisitions and assure it of future control.
In 2011 each group of resources was consolidated into one platform to increase discoverability, simplify the user experience (making it more inclusive to users at all academic levels), reduce the administrative burden, and thereby enable maximum value to be derived from the initial content investments.
Figure 2: Home page montage from JISC MediaHub, giving a flavour of the kinds of resources available.
The main image, of a hotspring in Yellowstone National Park, is from the Getty (Still Images) Collection.
It was envisaged that this approach would help expose the content to a wider range of institutions, particularly in Further Education, and help their users feel more confident in exploring and exploiting the content in teaching and learning.
What Principles Guided the Development?
The development of the three platforms was guided by a range of studies on the behaviour, information-seeking strategies and digital and information literacy of students and academics (Figure 3).
They were undertaken in the UK and US (an overview of these studies is provided in the Digital Information Seeker Report [1]).
Many of these studies were funded by JISC, with a focus on providing institutions with practical recommendations on how to improve library services to support the needs of users, and how to keep such services simple for end-users (‘the “simple” philosophy’).
One of the studies, the JISC national e-books observatory project [2] was managed by JISC Collections and provided a great deal of insight into the frustrations and issues faced by users in accessing and using e-book platforms.
The most influential study, however, in terms of the development of the JISC eCollections platforms, was the User Behaviour in Resource Discovery (UBiRD) study undertaken by Wong et al.
at the Middlesex University Interaction Design Centre [3].
The findings and recommendations of this study supported the user behaviour observed and the feedback gathered during the e-books observatory project, and also the frustrations expressed by librarian members of JISC Collections at various advisory board meetings.
For JISC, as the funder of the studies, and JISC Collections, as a shared service for its members, it was important to take on board the recommendations of the studies in order to base design and development decisions on the evidence gathered.
Figure 3: The development of the JISC eCollections platforms was guided by several studies into user behaviour, information-seeking strategies and digital / information literacy By the Community, for the Community: Preand Post-launch Challenges Developing and launching content delivery platforms is a new venture for JISC Collections and its partners.
We have learned some valuable lessons and continue to identify problems and implement recommendations to help the service improve.
In the interests of sharing our experiences with our members and the wider education community, I have written this paper to share the preand post-launch challenges we have encountered, and explore some of the ways we have addressed them to date.
Challenge 1: Many Publishers, Two Licences JISC Collections uses a model licence for all its agreements.
The model licence helps to standardise the many terms and conditions of use, acts as stamp of approval and helps librarians communicate these terms to users.
In presenting the 'simple' philosophy to end-users and librarians, JISC Collections negotiated variations with all 42 publishers to ensure that librarians only had to sign two sub-licences – one for the JISC MediaHub platform and one to cover both JISC Historic Books and JISC Journal Archives.
This was a major undertaking with some hard negotiations taking place to include text and data mining, open metadata and the creation of new metadata to supplement that which had been provided by the publisher.
In developing JISC MediaHub, metadata and thumbnails for all the content were made fully open and discoverable on the Web.
Agreeing these clauses meant giving detailed explanations to providers, extolling the benefits to educational users – and to the content owners themselves – of openness.
Challenge 2: Many Resources, Seamless Access Research by Head and Eisenberg [4] suggests that students apply a ‘consistent and predictable information-seeking strategy’ and therefore a 'less-is-more' approach may be more suitable in guiding students to resources’.
Meanwhile, the 2006 Research Information Network (RIN) report, Researchers and discovery services: Behaviour, perceptions and Needs [5], highlighted that for researchers, access remains an issue.
Connaway and Dickey state that this is especially the case for journal backfiles which are ‘particularly problematic in terms of access’ [1].
The same report, which summarised the findings across 12 studies, notes that is commonly found that ‘library systems must do better at providing seamless access to resources’.
This aligns with the feedback that JISC Collections hears directly through its close relationships with UK librarians.
Providing seamless access is not a simple task when dealing with a plethora of resources and different providers.
While linking to multiple platforms may not be a major issue for some institutions (for example, those who make use of link resolvers to support their users’ discovery of resources), for others – especially those that have not previously been able to afford access fees, typically in FE – Head and Eisenberg’s ‘less is more’ approach simplifies and supports seamless access.
By grouping the content formats together onto three platforms, the aim was to assist libraries in simplifying the user journey.
Instead of linking to over 14 platforms, librarians need only link to three in order to direct their users to the content.
In addition, users need only authenticate once, using their institutional username and password, on entry to each platform (Figure 4) and no more than once.
Figure 4: Logging into JISC MediaHub Challenge 3: Complex Capabilities, Clean Interfaces Keeping the interfaces of the platforms clean and simple was a requirement based on Connaway and Dickey’s recommendations, which they summarise by saying that the ‘evidence provided by the results of the studies supports the centrality of Google and other search engines’ [[1].
The clear message is that users value familiarisation and convenience [6] and that ‘library systems and interfaces need to look familiar to people by resembling popular Web interfaces, and library services need to be easily accessible and require little or no training to use’ [7].
Simple, clean interfaces make users feel comfortable, and familiar architecture helps reduce confusion when transitioning between services.
These principles were taken forward in the development of the three interfaces, which feature plenty of white space and simple search boxes to help users feel comfortable and confident in the environment.
Challenge 4: Different Search Behaviours Students and academics employ different search strategies across subject areas and at various stages of their academic career.
Hampton-Reeves et al found that ‘students predominantly use keyword searches on a mixture of tools including internet search engines, library catalogues and specialist databases’ [8].
The RIN study of researchers found that the most common search strategy was ‘refining down from a large list of results’ [5].
However, across all the studies, the Google-type approach of entering keywords was a common strategy.
Consequently, each platform aimed to offer search functionality that reflected the findings of the studies described above, while also taking into account how best to display the results for the content format and how to distinguish the provenance of the content (i.e.
which collection it comes from).
The JISC Historic Books platform landing page in its first iteration offered a single ‘Google-like’ search box to users (Figure 5).
Figure 5: First iteration of JISC Historic Books home page All three platforms support filtering of search results by common parameters such as date.
However, as aggregations of several resources, the results also needed to be filtered by each collection.
For JISC Historic Books, which contains three collections – Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Early English Books Online and the British Library 19th Century collections – filtering was applied using colours and tabs as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Search results display for JISC Historic Books, showing option to filter by colour-coded tabs (see detail) representing each collection within the platform For JISC MediaHub and JISC Journal Archives, where too many collections are aggregated to support the tabbed approach, the filtering techniques and iconography used to indicate the source of the results displayed needed much more thought and testing in order that it remained intuitive (Figures 7 and 8).
Figure 7: Search results display for JISC Journal Archives, showing ability to filter by graphic icons (right) representing each collection within the platform Figure 8: Search results display for JISC MediaHub, showing ability to filter by graphic icons (see detail below) representing different location and / or access rights for content Challenge 5: Consistent Interfaces The studies discussed above show that the efficiency and effectiveness of the user experience is driven by familiarity; when faced with an unfamiliar platform, users have to spend much more time thinking about where things are and how to get to them.
This was evidenced in the deep log analysis of user behaviour and feedback from JISC national e-books observatory project focus groups where students struggled with interfaces, were frustrated at having to search to find the function buttons and often gave up [2].
The UBiRD study sums this up well: ‘navigating from one system to another – all of which have different functionalities and different bells and whistles with respect to searching, limiting / refining, indexing, saving and storage or exportation – is confusing to users’ [3].
In moving between different publishers’ platforms, Wong suggests that users are wasting valuable time as they have to ‘re-frame’ their minds each time to work out where the log-in is, where the print button is and so forth.
The need for consistency to support familiarity is another key principle behind the aggregation of the historic book, journal archive and multimedia collections on their respective platforms; for example, there are over 50 collections on JISC MediaHub, searchable and viewable in one central location.
Users of JISC eCollections need only become familiar with three platforms, rather than a plethora of different provider platforms.
Challenge 6: Information Literacy The UBiRD study found that users often do not understand the structure, organisation or contents of e-resource platforms [3], and therefore make assumptions about what the resource contains or how it functions.
This finding had a specific resonance in the development of JISC Historic Books: the quality and contents of search results for this platform are highly dependent on the quality of metadata associated with each book and on the existence and quality of full text created either by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) [9] or by Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
Because neither process is completely accurate (Figure 9), it was decided to make the OCR / TCP full text and metadata available alongside the page images in order that users could see why the book had appeared in their search results; where there was no OCR / TCP full text for a book, this would be made clear to the user.
The implications of this approach are discussed further below.
Figure 9: Example of original image and associated OCR text from JISC Historic Books, intended to help users understand how content might have appeared in their search results, but with evident weaknesses that led to some user misconceptions about quality.
Mistakes and Solutions: The Case of JISC Historic Books In developing JISC eCollections and the platforms in accordance with the principles outlined above, issues have arisen, mistakes have been made, and solutions to challenges been found.
This article is now going to focus on JISC Historic Books (JHB) and share some of the complications that arose and lessons learned in developing this platform.
Lesson 1: Poor Information Literacy Can Distort Judgement Showing the OCR / TCP supporting each digital image was intended to support users by helping them evaluate the content and understand the limitations of the search (because of its dependence on the quality of the OCR / TCP and metadata).
Those users who had previously used EEBO on the ProQuest platform were familiar with this approach, as the ProQuest platform also displays the TCP full text where it is available; however, some users had previously accessed ECCO content on the Cengage platform, which does not display the OCR alongside the images.
Soon after launch, we began to hear comments from researchers in institutions that had transferred to JHB from Cengage, suggesting that our OCR was of poorer quality than that on the Cengage platform.
It is natural for users to compare and contrast JHB with the platforms they previously used – this was expected and has led to the development of a great deal of new functionality since launch – but in this case, we had actually licensed the content from Cengage using the same OCR.
What was not expected was that it would be researchers – typically seen as adept users of historical book content – who were not fully aware of the limitations of OCR (because they had not seen it previously) and its impact on the accuracy of their search results.
It is evident therefore that information literacy levels, with regards to evaluating and assessing historic book content, need to be improved.
Making the OCR visible to all users of JHB is a crucial first step in this awareness-raising exercise.
We will continue to support the UBiRD principles by working with the JHB Advisory Board to develop users’ information literacy skills further, with regards to the content available on the platform, and its limitations.
Lesson 2: One Size Cannot Fit All The original design of JHB, with a simple Google-style interface (as in Figure 1), was intended to support common student search strategy (keywords) and help them see JHB as a familiar interface.
It was thought that this approach would also align with the aims of JISC eCollections to be more inclusive of all users, regardless of their academic level and to make the content more approachable to users in FE colleges.
However, upon release of the beta version in August 2011, the simple search and consequent filtering was rejected by researchers as inadequate for their search strategies.
Those researchers who had in the past used Cengage and ProQuest to access the JHB content had developed search strategies in line with these platforms; in other cases, researchers were using their comprehensive knowledge of the content to undertake very specific searches, for example using the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) number.
The feedback from researchers at this early stage led to a complete overhaul and implementation of the advanced search functionality (Figure 10), with the assistance of the JHB Advisory Board.
With hindsight, it became clear that we had focussed too closely on findings around keyword search, and could have paid more attention to the UBiRD finding that different user groups use ‘different combinations of search components … depend[ing] on their level of literacy and the domain knowledge’ [3].
Figure 10: Revised home page for JISC Historic Books following community consultation and redevelopment Lesson 3: Do Not Undervalue Metadata The agreement JISC Collections made with ProQuest to license the EEBO content in perpetuity on behalf of all UK HE and FE institutions, did not include the MARC records; at the time, there were insufficient funds to cover the costs of licensing the metadata at a national level, so institutions were only able to obtain the MARC records by purchasing them directly from the publisher.
In some cases, digital transcriptions of the images were available (created by TCP) but in the case of EEBO, only 20% of the content (25,000 of 125,000 volumes) has TCP text.
For the remaining 100,000 volumes, only basic citation metadata (author, title, and image ID number) was available to JISC Collections as part of the licensed work.
This meant that 80% of EEBO content could only be surfaced in searches if the user knew and entered the title or author of the book.
To rectify this situation, considerable time was spent exploring options to license high-quality metadata to support the EEBO content.
For example, the British Library and ESTC North America jointly own the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), which includes detailed and high-quality metadata for the titles within EEBO.
The viability of each option was assessed in light of the approaching launch date, and it was decided to purchase the MARC records directly from ProQuest for use within the platform only as, again, it was not affordable to license the records at a national level for all.
Once purchased, it was necessary to integrate the MARC records with the existing schema applied to the ECCO and BL metadata.
This schema had been devised by developers, rather than MARC record or historic books metadata experts, and it became clear that some fields of potential value to researchers had not been included; for example, the metadata for the British Library’s nineteenth-century books included tags for visual elements such as images and portraits, which had not been recognised in the schema.
JISC Collections is now working to include such elements in order to surface them in searching.
In summary, an analysis of the metadata from all three providers would have been a useful first step in the development process for JHB.
Who Will Lead eCollections Development?
The core vision of JISC eCollections is that of a ‘community-owned content service’ – developed by the community, for the community, to protect and preserve existing investments.
The service enables the education community to take ownership of the content licensed on its behalf and drive forward developments to the service.
Advisory boards, consisting of librarians, teaching staff and researchers – all experts in their fields – have been set up for each platform and are in charge of the service.
The remit of these boards is to discuss new opportunities and to make sure that future developments and content licensing support use in education and research, and contribute to the ongoing sustainability of the service.
The advisory boards have control over how the service fee revenue [10] is reinvested into the service, to ensure its development, expansion and preservation in line with the long-term expectations and needs of members.
For example, the JISC Historic Books Advisory Board [11] has set itself an ambitious Terms of Reference, focussing on pioneering new technologies, partnerships and ease of use.
The board discusses, agrees and prioritises developments to the platform against the budget, provides guidance to JISC Collections on content acquisition and is the driving force behind new experiments.
One particular project that the board is exploring is crowdsourcing corrections to OCR text in partnership with Eighteenth Century Connect, ProQuest and Cengage.
By crowdsourcing and sharing corrections at an international level, the scholarly community would be working collaboratively to improve the quality of and use of historic book collections.
This is an extremely complex and ambitious project, but the Advisory Board members believe in harnessing the power of the digital humanities community and see this as an important development for the future of JISC Historic Books and its users.
Conclusion In the last two years, JISC Collections has faced some serious challenges and made some errors of judgement in its attempt to develop an independent service that protects and preserves the community’s content investments, simplifies access and use in line with information-seeking research, and cedes ownership to the community.
Throughout the process we have welcomed feedback from the community and have benefited from its support and recommendations.
Sitting firmly within the education community it serves, and with the advisory boards in charge, I believe JISC eCollections is now well placed to become a valued community-owned content service that reflects evolving user behaviour and the changing scholarly environment.
References Connaway, L., and Dickey, T. “The digital information seeker: Findings from selected OCLC, RIN and JISC user behaviour projects.” JISC Report.
March 2010 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2010/digitalinformationseekers.aspx Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Clark, D., Jamali, H., and Nicholas, T. “JISC national e-books observatory project: key findings and recommendations.” JISC Collections Final Report.
November 2009 http://observatory.jiscebooks.org/reports/ Wong, W., Stelmaszewska, H., Bhimani, N., Barn, S., and Barn, B.
“User Behaviour in Resource Discovery.” JISC Report.
November 2009 http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Reports/UBiRD/ Head, A. and Eisenberg, M. “Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age.” 2009 http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_Fall2009_finalv_YR1_12_2009v2.pdf Research Information Network.
“Researchers and discovery services: Behaviour, perceptions, needs.” November 2006 http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/researchers-and-discovery-services-behaviour-perc Prabha, C., Connaway, L., & Dickey, T. “Sense-making the information confluence: The whys and hows of college and university user satisficing of information needs.” 2006 http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/past/orprojects/imls/default.htm Connaway, L., Dickey., T., and Radford, M. “If It Is Too Inconvenient, I’m Not Going After It: Convenience as a Critical Factor in Information-seeking Behaviors.” Library & Information Science Research, v33n3, pp179-90.
July 2011 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2010.12.002 Hampton-Reeves, S., Mashiter, C., Westaway, J., Lumsden, P., Day, H, Hewertson, H., et al.
“Students’ use of research content in teaching and learning.” JISC Report.
2009 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/studentsuseresearchcontent.pdf The Text Creation Partnership is funded by more than 150 libraries around the world to create electronic text editions of early print books http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/Text Creation Partnership Institutions pay a single service fee to support the cost of hosting and maintaining the JISC eCollections platforms.
The service fees are transparent, kept as low as possible, and profits are ring-fenced for reinvestment in the long-term maintenance and development of the service.
This JISC Historic Books Advisory Board is detailed at http://www.jiscecollections.ac.uk/advisory-board/jhbadvisoryboard/ Author Details Caren Milloy Head of Projects JISC Collections Email: c.milloy@jisc-collections.ac.uk Web site: http://www.jiscecollections.ac.uk Caren Milloy joined JISC Collections in 2003.
She has since negotiated a wide range of agreements for digital content, and managed several projects including the JISC national e-books observatory.
As Head of Projects, she  manages an extensive portfolio of projects that research changes in user behaviours, pilot new business models, create new tools and develop new consortia licensing models.
An essential part of this role is to ensure that the projects are delivered in a professional manner and that the recommendations and findings are embedded into the core licensing work of JISC Collections and are communicated to the scholarly sector.
She is currently managing OAPEN-UK, a project that will pilot open access business models for scholarly monographs.
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Online Information 2012 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Online Information 2012 Buzz data mobile software framework database metadata identifier vocabularies blog repositories copyright video flickr cataloguing marc streaming uri youtube facebook twitter oer rdfa junaio licence interoperability privacy algorithm research Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy reports on the largest gathering of information professionals in Europe.
Online Information [1] is an interesting conference as it brings together information professionals from both the public and the private sector.
The opportunity to share experiences from these differing perspectives doesn’t happen that often and brings real benefits, such as highly productive networking.
This year’s Online Information, held between 20 21  November, felt like a slightly different event to previous years.
The conference had condensed down to 2 days from 3, dropped its exhibition and free workshops and found a new home at the Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, London.
The changes resulted in a leaner, slicker, more focussed affair with even more delegates than last year.
Presentations were clustered around 5 key topics which ran in three parallel tracks: the multi-platform, a multi-device world; social collaboration; big data; search; and new frontiers in information management.
This event report will cherry-pick the most interesting and engaging talks I attended.
Cory Doctorow: Opening Keynote to Day One It’s always refreshing to see Cory Doctorow talk.
Cory is the editor of Boing Boing [2] blog, and contributes to many UK papers, he rarely uses slides and talks at rapid pace in his Canadian drawl.
His keynote considered the idea that there is no copyright policy; there is only Internet policy and following on from this, there is no Internet policy; there is only policy.
Doctorow explained that copyright as it is today serves way too narrow a purpose and uses an outmoded business model.
Its use is primarily a regulatory framework for the entertainment industry and so it is failing digital content by use of the ‘copy rule’ as deciding factor.
Doctorow pointed out that there is little difference between streaming and downloading, the only way a file can render on your computer is for a copy to be made.
There is a real need for the entertainment industry to come up with a new rule; the Internet and computers are vital to everything we do, Internet use enhances every aspect of our lives.
Research looking at communities in socially deprived areas found those with Internet access achieved better grades at school, were more civically engaged, more likely to vote, had better jobs and better health outcomes.
Doctorow’s talk was filled with thought-provoking examples of failing policy: When Amazon discovered that it had been selling the digital version of the novel 1984 without the full rights to it, the company reclaimed all copies from customers’ Kindles – they took back the book, something no traditional seller of books could ever do with print copies.
In a school in the US, MacBooks were given out to all pupils, however the operating system had been gimmicked and the camera was configured to be activated remotely.
The aim was to record anti-social behaviour and aid with tracking discipline cases.
The school was in effect spying on its students.
Similar activities were carried out by a laptop leasing company, the aim being to recover computers if payment stopped.
The entertainment industry has now called for easy censorship of networked material through ‘notice and take down’.
It is demanding judicial review of all online content.
Viacom has recently taken a case out against YouTube claiming YouTube is acting illegally by failing to review every minute of video before it goes live.
YouTube currently receives 72 hours of uploaded video every minute of the day; there are not enough copyright lawyer hours remaining between now and the end of the time to examine every piece of uploaded video.
In the UK we have the Digital Economy Act [3], which applies a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ law against copyright infringement.
It is clear that copyright is not fit for purpose for regulating the Internet nor for regulating the entertainment industry, either.
Copyright law must be changed; it must not be used to rule the Internet.
The Internet is so much more than the copyright industry.
The Power of Social: Creating Value through Collaboration Social Business in a world of abundant real-time data Dachis Group MD for Europe, Lee Bryant, gave a talk that considered the abundance of data out there but asked what will happen when we start to take these data back into our narratives?
He explained that there is no point in collecting data unless you can translate them into action and that algorithms alone are not enough to analyse big data, you need passionate individuals to do this.
Small data are what turns an impersonal space into something personal.
Companies need better tools and filters so they can understand their data better.
There is also a need for social analytics to be applied internally as well as externally.
Bryant advocated the creation of performance dashboards produced in the open because it is ‘no longer about sharing but about working in the open’.
Transforming How Business Is Done Alpesh Doshi, Founder and Principal, Fintricity, UK began by asking for a show of hands for different work areas: the audience consisted predominantly of public sector workers, yet the session was about business.
Doshi continued Lee Bryant’s argument by saying that while currently social media were external, they could be used to transform internal business, this was in effect social business.
Social business is about bringing business transformation, operational transformation and marketing transformation and will be engaged, transparent and agile.
Failures are key, which is a new thing for businesses, we move on and learn from them.
Doshi explained that big data was a route to small data finding that nugget that will make a difference.
Special Collections + Augmented Reality = Innovations in Learning Jackie Carter, Senior Manager, Learning and Teaching and Social Science, University of Manchester, explained how MIMAS had reacted to the 2011 Horizon report that predicted that augmented reality (AR) will bring ‘new expectations regarding access to information and new opportunities for learning.’ MIMAS had put together a mixed team and began the SCARLET Project [4] exploring how AR can be used to improve the student experience.
SCARLET began by pioneering use of AR with unique and rare materials from the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.
The SCARLET approach has since been applied at the University of Sussex and UCA.
Lecturers have been able to use the AR application in a matter of weeks.
Carter carried out a demo using the Junaio open source software [5].
She pointed the scanner at the QR code and then viewed one of the Dante (14th Century manuscript) images.
This allows layers to appear on the image; the digital content is glued on top.
Users can see a translation of the inscription in modern Greek.
MIMAS is now looking for follow-on funding to allow it to embed the lessons learnt into its learning and teaching resources.
Carter’s key points to take away were that when using AR it is really important to get the right mix of people in the team.
Also use of AR should be contextual, rather than an add-on.
Much AR in the past has been location-based, whereas the SCARLET Project has focussed much more on embedding in learning and teaching something students could not get in any other way.
Tony Hirst of the OU speaking on Data Liberation: "Opening up Data by Hook or by Crook" (Photo courtesy of Guus van den Brekel, UMCG.)
Making Sense of Big Data and Working in the Cloud Welcome to the University of Google Andy Tattersall, information specialist in the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) Library, University of Sheffield began his presentation with a proviso: The University of Sheffield hadn’t been renamed the University of Google and he wasn’t even that big a Google fan.
He explained that he had the ‘same relationship with Google as I have with the police: underlying distrust but they are the first place I go when I need something”.
In 2011 the University of Sheffield made the paradigm shift to the cloud-based workplace.
The decision was made because the existing student email system wasn’t fit for purpose, storage was inadequate and staff were using external services anyway.
Tattersall explained that lots of staff and students were sharing data on Github, Flickr, Dropbox, Slideshare, Scribd etc., but the University IT services weren’t providing a mechanism to support this activity, they were just stepping away.
The Sheffield approach was carried out in two phases: first students, then staff.
All services had been rebranded with University of Sheffield logo and training sessions held.
Tattersall explained that the result was that individuals had more autonomy; it had made it a lot easier to create Web sites on the fly.
The rollout itself was successful because it involved significant amounts of training and the use of ‘Google champions’advocates for Google from different departments.
In the question-and-answer session, Chris Sexton, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at Sheffield explained that the security and sustainability concerns that they were always asked about were unfounded.
Sheffield had carried out a risk analysis prior to the move and Google data storage was just as secure as any other options.
The Google apps education bundle [6] (Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive etc.)
that the University has bought were under contract, so while some experimental consumer apps could be withdrawn, the main ones could not without compensation.
Making Sense of Big Data Mark Whitehorn, Chair of Analytics, School of Computing, University of Dundee, Scotland gave a very different overview of big data to those I’ve seen before.
He explained that data has always existed in two flavours: 1) stuff that fits into relational databases (rows and columns) tabular data, and 2) everything else: images, music, word documents, sensor data, web logs, tweets.
If you can’t handle your data in a database then it’s big data; but big data do not necessarily have to be huge in volume.
You can put big data into a table but you probably won’t want to; each class of big data usually requires a hand-crafted solution.
Whitehorn explained that big data have been around for over 30 years, since computers first came about, but that we’ve focussed on relational databases because they are so much easier.
Two factors have changed recently: the rise of machines and an increase of computational power.
Whitehorn gave the example of the Human Genome Project completed in 2003.
Scientists haven’t done anything with the knowledge yet, this is because there are 20,000 25,000 genes in the human genome, but they all have different proteins within them.
These data are big and more complex than tabular data and are going to need to be analysed.
Whitehorn noted that for most organisations out there it is it probably easier to buy algorithms from companies (for example to mine your Twitter data) than it is to develop them.
He suggested that we choose our battles and look for areas where real competitive advantage can be gained.
Sometimes it is in the garbage data where this can actually be achieved.
For example, Microsoft spent millions on developing a search spell-checker, Google just looked at misspellings and where people went afterwards.
Many of these practices are the work of a new breed of scientist: the data scientist.
Dundee are rolling out the first data science MSc course in UK from next year [7].
Gerd Leonhard: Opening Keynote to Day Two Gerd Leonhard is the author of five books and 30,000 tweets and is unsure which matters more these days.
He began by explaining that he was a futurist, so deal with foresights, not predictions [8].
During his talk ‘The Future of the Internet: Big Data, SoLoMo, Privacy, Human Machines?’ Leonhard delivered so many interesting snippets of information in his 40 minutes that only viewing of the video would do his talk justice.
The premise was that technology was still dumb, but getting cleverer.
Social-local-mobile (SoLoMo), a more mobile-centric version of the addition of local entries to search engine results, is one example.
Human-machine interfaces (such as cash registers) were rapidly evolving and becoming commonplace.
The way we communicate, get information, create, buy and sell, travel, live and learn were all changing.
Was it only a matter of time until there was a Wikipedia implant for Alzheimers patients?
Everything was going from stuff to bits, and being stored in the cloud– money, education, music and, of course, data.
The explosion of data, or the data economy as some like to refer to it, may be worth a trillion dollars in the next few years.
Data were the currency of the digital world and we needed to do better things with it than we have done with oil.
Data spills were becoming more regular, we should almost see Facebook as public.
However, while Facebook knew what you were saying, Google truly knew what you are thinking.
We share more private information with Google than we do with our nearest and dearest.
What will define human in five years from now?
As a warning Leonhard quoted Tim O’Reilly: "If you take out more than you put in the ecosystem eventually fails”.
Rather than letting technology think for us it should support us, design and emotions have become the real assets.
Brands use intangibles to sell; likes, loves and sentiments, for example ‘likenomics’ – the requirement that we ‘like’ something.
We need to explore the idea of the 'networked society' and our becoming more interdependent.
Issues of climate change should drive us too.
The future of the Internet and of nature require that we be networked or die.
We should move from an egosystem (centralised, scheduled, monolithic, proprietary, owned) to an ecosystem (distributed, real-time, networked, interoperable, shared).
We need to embark on sense making, we need better curators and there needs to be more humanisation of technology.
New Frontiers in Information Management From Record to Graph Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist, OCLC, UK explained that Libraries have been capturing data in some shape or other for a long time: hand-written catalogue cards, Dewey, to Machine-Readable Catalogue (MARC) records.
They have also been exchanging and publishing structured metadata about their resources for decades.
Libraries were fast to move onto the Web: online OPACs began emerging from 1994, and they were also keen to use URIs and identifiers.
However as they move into the Web of data does their history help?
Libraries are like the oil tankers set on a route, it’s very hard for them to turn.
A history of process, practice, training, and established use cases can often hamper a community's approach to radically new ways of doing things.
OCLC’s WorldCat.org [9] has been publishing linked data for bibliographic items (270+ million) since earlier this year.
The core vocabulary comes from schema.org [10], a collection of schemas co-operated by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
The linked data are published both in human-readable form and in machine-readable RDFa.
WorldCat also offer an open data licence.
The rest of the Web trusts library data so this really is a golden opportunity for libraries to move forward and Wallis believes that lots of libraries and initiatives will publish linked bibliographic data in the very near future.
Robin Rice speaking on Building Research Data Management Services at the University of Edinburgh: A Data Librarian's View (Photo courtesy of Guus van den Brekel, UMCG.)
Research Data Management A final mention goes to the Research Data Management (RDM) session, which comprised presentations by myself and Robin Rice, data librarian at the University of Edinburgh.
My talk looked at supporting libraries in leading the way in research data management [11].
RDM initiatives at several UK universities have emanated from the library and much of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) institutional engagement work is being carried out in conjunction with library service teams.
It has become apparent that librarians are beginning to carve a new role for themselves using their highly relevant skill set: metadata  knowledge; understanding of repositories; direction of open sharing of publications; good relationships with researchers and good connections with other service departments.
I began by looking at work carried out in understanding the current situation, such as the 2012 RLUK report Re-skilling for Research, which found that there are nine areas where over 50% of the respondents with Subject Librarian responsibilities indicated that they have limited or no skills or knowledge, and in all cases these were also deemed to be of increasing importance in the future.
Similar reports have indicated that librarians are overtaxed already, lack personal research experience, have little understanding of the complexity and scale of issue.
They need to gain knowledge and understanding of many areas such as researchers’ practice and data holdings, research councils and funding bodies’ requirements, disciplinary and/or institutional codes of practice and policies and RDM tools and technologies.
I then took a look at possible approaches for moving forward such as the University of Helsinki Library’s knotworking activity, the Opportunities for Data Exchange (ODE) Project which shares emerging best practice and Data intelligence 4 librarians training materials at the University of Delft.
I also looked at UK-based activities such as RDMRose [12], a JISC-funded project led by the University of Sheffield iSchool, to produce OER learning materials in RDM tailored for information professionals.
My overview was complemented by Robin’s University of Edinburgh case-study [13].
Edinburgh had an aspirational RDM policy passed by senate in May 2011.
The policy, which was library-led and involved academic champions, has been the foundation for many other institution’s policies.
Some of the key questions for the policy were: who will support your researchers’ planning?
Who has responsibility during the research process?
Who has rights in the data?
Rice explained that when developing policy you need to be aware of the drivers from your own institution, be able to practise the art of persuasion and have high-level support.
Consider the idea of a postcard from the future – what would you like your policy to contain to produce a future vision?
Rice gave an overview of training work carried out in Edinburgh including the MANTRA modules [14] and tailored support for data management plans using DMPOnline.
She also highlighted the University’s DataShare, an online digital repository of multi-disciplinary research datasets produced at the University of Edinburgh, hosted by the Data Library in Information Services.
In her conclusion she talked about the challenges for librarians moving in to RDM: a lack of time for these activities, the need for new partnerships, establishing credibility in a new area of expertise and getting their hands dirty with unpublished material.
Conclusions The 15-minute wrap-up session led by the programme committee was a little rushed.
Floods and a bad transport situation beckoned, so people were keen to leave, but I think more attempt could have been made to pull the themes together.
Big data was one of the more noteworthy themes with a dedicated strand and a number of presentations on this area.
Maybe this is a relatively new phenomenon for the information professional but there could have been more consideration of what practical actions the community could take rather than just overview.
Another key theme, and one for which I unfortunately attended relatively few sessions was looking at building new exciting services in the current regulatory environment (security issues, etc.)
This sits alongside the need for openness and data sharing.
Other emerging themes were the role of digital curation, the need to avoid defining ourselves by tools and the humanisation of technology.
I really enjoyed Online Information but at times it felt as if the information profession is one that is unsure of which direction to take.
For example, I loved the idea of a conference app, they used Vivastream [15], potentially a way to connect with those at the conference interested in similar topics to you.
Unfortunately the wifi at the event was flaky at best, and being in the basement meant we had little or no network connection.
Many of us were willing to connect but were not able… Most Slides from Online 2012 are available at from the Incisive Medai Slideshare account [16].
References Online Information 2012 http://www.online-information.co.uk Boing Boing blog http://boingboing.net Digital Economy Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Act_2010 Team SCARLET blog http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com Junaio http://www.junaio.com/home/ Google Apps for Education http://www.google.co.uk/apps/intl/en/edu/index.html University of Dundee, MSc in data science http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/study/postgrad/degreedetails.asp?17 MediaFuturist http://www.mediafuturist.com OCLC WorldCat http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/ Schema.org http://schema.org Supporting Libraries in Leading the Way in Research Data Management   http://www.slideshare.net/MariekeGuy/supporting-libraries-in-leading-the-way-in-research-data-management RDMRose http://rdmrose.blogspot.co.uk Building research data management services at the University of Edinburgh: a data librarian's view http://www.slideshare.net/rcrice/building-research-data-management-services-at-the-university-of-edinburgh-a-data-librarians-view MANTRA http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/index.html Vivastream http://www.vivastream.com Online 2012 Slides http://www.slideshare.net/Incisive_Events Author Details Marieke Guy Institutional Support Officer, DCC UKOLN University of Bath Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.dcc.ac.uk Marieke Guy is an Institutional Support Officer at the Digital Curation Centre.
She is working with 5 HEIs to raise awareness and build capacity for institutional research data management.
Marieke works for UKOLN, a research organisation that aims to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of: digital libraries, information systems, bibliographic management, and Web technologies.
Marieke has worked from home since April 2008 and is the remote worker champion at UKOLN.
In this role has worked on a number of initiatives aimed  specifically at remote workers.
She has written articles on remote working, event amplification and related technologies and maintains a blog entitled Ramblings of a Remote Worker.
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Events: OER16 Open Culture.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Events: OER16 Open Culture.
Citation BibTex RIS Lorna M. Campbell introduces the Open Educational Resources Conference 2016 (OER16).
This will be held in April at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and will focus on the theme of "Open Culture".
Participants will be looking at how open culture can be embedded into institution's learning, teaching and research offerings.
In April 2016 the University of Edinburgh will host the international Open Educational Resources Conference, OER16, which is coming to Scotland for the first time in its seven-year history.
The OER Conferences have their roots in the Jisc/HEA Open Educational Resources Programmes (UKOER) which were funded by HEFCE between 2009 and 2012.
Since the conclusion of the UKOER Programmes, the conference has gone from strength to strength and now attracts a diverse range of international speakers, delegates and keynotes.
This year’s Conference Committee has welcomed members from the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Greece, Saudi Arabia, India and Mauritius.
OER16 is being co-chaired by Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Webservices at the University of Edinburgh, and Lorna M. Campbell, Digital Education Manager at EDINA and OER Liaison at LTW.
The Association for Learning Technology is supporting the conference.
The University of Edinburgh has a long tradition of openness and civic engagement, a world class reputation for encouraging innovation in open education and a forward looking vision for sharing OER.
The sharing of open educational materials is in line not only with the University of Edinburgh’s mission, but also with a global movement in which research-led institutions play a significant role.
The theme of OER16 is Open Culture and the conference will focus on the value proposition of embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research.
Conference themes include: The strategic advantage of open and creating a culture of openness.
Converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access.
Hacking, making and sharing.
The reputational challenges of openwashing.
Openness and public engagement.
Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education.
One aim of the conference is to start to break down some of the barriers between different open communities: open education, open knowledge, open data, open GLAM; and with this in mind, a diverse range of keynotes and invited speakers has been lined up.
John Scally, Chief Executive and National Librarian at the National Library of Scotland, will focus on the Library’s new strategy: “The way forward: 2015-2020”, which lays out the path to turn the NLS into a digital destination making its 24 million items accessible online over the next 10 years.
John will outline the range of approaches the NLS is taking to opening up access to cultural resources and discuss the challenges for leadership in this area at a national level.
“Our role is to be the guardian of the published and recorded memory of Scotland for current and future generations.
Our aim is to make the knowledge held within our collections as widely available as possible.”   Catherine Cronin, of the National University of Ireland, Galway, will be asking “If ‘open’ is the answer, what is the question?”, and exploring how we can broaden access to education in ways that do not reinforce existing inequalities.
Catherine believes that engaging with the complexity and contextuality of openness is important, if we wish to be keepers not only of openness, but also of hope, equality and justice.
Jim Groom, of Reclaim Hosting, ds106 and edupunk fame, will be asking: what would happen if we could imagine technical infrastructure as an open educational resource?
How would our conception of OERs expand if we could easily and efficiently create and share applications across institutions?
With the shift in web infrastructure to the cloud, and the advent of APIs and containers, we may be entering a moment where the open culture of networks, rather than pre-defined educational content, is representative of the future of OER culture.
Melissa Highton, Director of LTW, University of Edinburgh, will discuss the challenges for leadership in open educational resources, the role of universities in open knowledge communities and reflect upon the returns and costs associated with institutional investment.
Melissa believes that “there are shared areas of the internet, where we all have a civic responsibility to contribute and participate.
The big cultural organisations such as universities have an important role to play.”   Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Oxford, will reflect on her many years producing OER in her own discipline area, through initiatives such as Great Writers Inspire, and the opportunities it has brought for her colleagues, students and her own research.
Emma’s talk will provide participants with open educational practice inspiration just in time for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death on April 23rd.
Further information about the OER16 Conference is available from the OER16 website and on twitter (#oer16).
Registration will open in early February.
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Figshare Fest 2018 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Figshare Fest 2018 Citation BibTex RIS Dan Towns provides us with a report from Figshare Fest 2018, attended by a range of institutional repository and research data managers from across the world.
Why am I here?
At Loughborough University we have been working with Figshare (1) to provide a cloud hosted repository (2) to house the institution’s research outputs (datasets, presentations, diagrams and figures etc.)
since 2015.
At the same time the University’s ‘Institutional Repository’ (3) for publications (Journal articles, conference papers, book chapters etc.)
has been hosted locally using an instance of DSpace (4).
This DSpace instance has become more than a little long in the tooth and the University recently went out to tender to replace that system.
The winner of that exercise was Figshare and so we are now gradually working towards both publications and research data appearing in the one repository.
When I joined the team looking after library systems in IT Services the purpose of both DSpace and Figshare were explained to me.
The arrangement of having two separate repositories provide what appeared to be very similar functions seemed odd to me and so I find the idea of moving to one repository appealing.
And so this is how we answer that question posed back at the start, why did I attend Figshare Fest 2018?
My boss had spoken highly of the inaugural event 3 years earlier (5), so when presented with the opportunity to head to Figshare Towers in London for a conference I jumped at the chance to learn more and meet other people from other institutions to hear their insights.
The location Figshare are located on the 7th floor of Kings Place a short 5-minute walk from St. Pancras.
You know you have found the right location when are greeted at the door by the CEO and Founder of the company.
Mark Hahnel was directing traffic to the correct location and advising on where to get a cup of the hot stuff.
On the subject of coffee, I have to admit to a fair amount of jealousy when it comes to the Digital Science (6) offices hosted by WeWork.
There can’t be many offices boasting their own barista making coffee to order.
The conference part 1 – Before lunch Armed with a steaming hot americano I settled in for the start of the conference.
Mark had swapped his meet and greet guy hat for his CEO and Founder hat and gave the opening talk centred on updates of activities within Figshare.
It was clear to me from Mark’s talk that he isn’t a CEO who has been installed to run a technology company but rather having founded the company and coming from an academic background he understands the area his company is working in very well indeed.
Mark discussed at length what lies ahead for the product with one area of particular interest to us Loughborough folks being the development work to make Figshare a more viable product for operating as an Institutional Repository.
Mark Hahnel’s opening presentation at Figshare Fest 2018, photo by Alan Hyndman Following the opening Figshare update we moved on to discussing data curation for repositories which included some interesting debate about how to handle curating data from co-authors based at different institutions both using Figshare.
This was followed by an introduction to FAIR Data by Luiz Bonino, International Technology Coordinator of Go Fair (7).
The FAIR principles, standing for Finadable Accessible Interoperable Reusable, were first published in 2016 as a set of guidelines intended to be used for the management and stewardship of scientific data (8).
Luiz talked us all through the various things that can be done to meet the FAIR principles such as using unique persistent identifiers and describing data with rich metadata which includes the persistent identifier.
Some time was given over to discussing how Figshare could be used to help meet these principles.
Our final session before lunch was a whistle-stop tour of the public development roadmap for Figshare by Chris Blumzon.
So keen was Chris to get through all the items he wanted to talk about that he had to be told to stop and breath at one point.
We got to hear about the great many things in the pipeline from the Figshare development team such as the minting of handles, a new improved admin area, custom item types, faceted searching, custom and private metadata, comment moderation and custom thumbnails to mention a few of the things we can potentially expect to see arriving over the next 12 months.
The conference part 2 – After lunch After lunch and another visit to see the barista, the first part of the afternoon was given over to case studies of how various institutions are using Figshare.
This was kicked off by Loughborough University’s own Research Data Manager Dr. Gareth Cole who gave a presentation on how we are preparing to use Figshare as our institutional Repository.
Other case study presentations were made by Middlesex University and Carnegie Mellon University.
Listening to David Scherer from Carnegie talk about "Kilthub" (9) it was clear that they have faced and are facing many of the same challenges that we are finding here at Loughborough.
The second part of that afternoon was taken up by my highlight of the day.
Jan Willem Tulp from the eponymous TULP interactive (10) gave an almost hypnotic presentation on visualising data.
He showcased some of the projects he has worked on taking raw data and turning it into an interactive visual representation.
These included Trillions of Trees for Nature (11), Coral and Fish for Figshare (12) and the fascinating ESA Star Mapper (13).
I would highly recommend visiting not just those projects but also the others linked to from his website.
They are great illustration of how, with the right skill set and a not inconsiderable amount of imagination, huge data sets can be turned into something informative, engaging and visually stunning.
Jan also shared with the group some of the process he goes through in developing the visualisations, showing us that it was very much an iterative process to find what looks good and what works.
It was clear this often takes a good deal of thought and experimentation.
Afterwards I spoke with Jan about the technology he used to create his visualisations as his presentation left me wanting to have a go at trying to build a visualisation myself.
Visualisation of Coral and Fish populations, picture from tulpinteractive.com The conference proper was closed by a keynote on “Undiscovered Openness” from Dr. Erinma Ochu, Lecturer in Science Communication and Future Media at The University of Salford.
Her talk was introduced by Alan Hyndman whilst holding a pint of cider and he also included the somewhat distracting announcement that whilst the barista had finished for the day the beer and cider taps now had been turned on (WeWork offices come with a feature they call “Craft on Draft” which means later in the day you can enjoy a pint at your desk!).
The conference part 3 – Après Conference After the conclusion of the closing keynote Alan Hyndman announced that Mark Hahnel would now lead the way to the pub.
I dutifully followed and discovered the pub was on the ground floor of the same building.
Suffice to say I was very glad I had booked an open return to Derby and very much enjoyed the company and a drink or two.
In conclusion I have to say that the conference was a very enjoyable and interesting experience for me.
I had the opportunity to meet a great many people from other institutions and hear about their experiences.
Much of the time I found myself listening to what was being discussed rather than actively taking part but this is mostly down do not being involved in the day to day operation of a repository.
As is no doubt already apparent the part of the conference I found most interesting came from Jan Tulp and his data visualisations.
This may be because of my history of working in IT on databases but I think no matter what your background you would have been hard pushed not to find that subject engaging.
Hopefully I will be able to get a pass to attend Figshare Fest 2019.
References Figshare https://figshare.com/ Loughborough Figshare instance https://lboro.figshare.com/ Loughborough DSpace instance https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/ DSpace https://duraspace.org/dspace/ Brewerton, G., 2015.
Figshare Fest 2015.
Ariadne, 75. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/75/brewerton Digital Science https://www.digital-science.com/ Go FAIR https://www.go-fair.org/ Wilkinson, M.D., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I.J., Appleton, G., Axton, M., Baak, A., Blomberg, N., Boiten, J.W., da Silva Santos, L.B., Bourne, P.E.
and Bouwman, J., 2016.
The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.
Scientific data, 3. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18 Carnegie Mellon – Kilthub https://www.library.cmu.edu/kilthub/about TULP Interactive http://tulpinteractive.com/ Ehrenberg, R., 2015.
Trillions of trees.
Nature News, 525(7568), p.170.
https://doi.org/10.1038/525170a" Coral and Fish https://knowledge.figshare.com/noaa/ ESA Star Mapper http://sci.esa.int/star_mapper/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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eSciDoc Days 2011: The Challenges for Collaborative eResearch Environments Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines eSciDoc Days 2011: The Challenges for Collaborative eResearch Environments Buzz data software framework database dissemination infrastructure archives metadata digitisation browser repositories copyright preservation visualisation provenance ejournal ebook soa curation licence e-research authentication interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Ute Rusnak reports on the fourth in a series of two-day conferences called eSciDoc Days, organised by FIZ Karlsruhe and the Max Planck Digital Library in Berlin over 26-27 October 2011. eSciDoc is a well-known open source platform for creating eResearch environments using generic services and tools based on a shared infrastructure.
This concept allows for managing research and publication data together with related metadata, internal and/or external links and access rights.
Development of eSciDoc was initiated by a collaborative venture between FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) and was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Today, both partners promote its further development as an open source project supported by a growing number of scientific communities.
The source code of the eSciDoc infrastructure can be downloaded from the eSciDoc Web site [1].
This is the fourth time the two organisations have held the eSciDoc Days, providing extensive information about the challenges of collaborative eResearch environments.
The topics addressed included the sustainable management of an ever-increasing volume of data of differing kinds throughout the research process and the provision of a publishing environment for research results together with research data.
Scientists in research organisations and academic institutions, information experts and software developers discussed the latest developments in building the underlying digital information infrastructures.
More than 100 international participants with a variety of backgrounds attended the conference, including repository managers, librarians as well as academics from different disciplines ranging from traditional engineering and sciences to the arts and the humanities.
Keynote: The JISC Managing Research Data Programme Simon Hodson, Programme Manager, for Managing Research Data, JISC UK Simon Hodson, Programme Manager for Managing Research Data (JISCMRD), was the keynote speaker at this year‘s eSciDoc Days.
In his presentation entitled “Helping UK Universities meet the research data challenge, lessons and implications”, Simon addressed challenges, opportunities and benefits and shared his expertise in promoting and supporting good data management and data sharing in Higher Education and research.
The rapidly growing amount of research data, together with the increasing awareness that such data represent a distinct asset, challenge academic institutions to re-think their research data management.
It is not just a matter of addressing storage issues, but also one of guidelines for good practice as well as incentives to make research data available for verification and reuse.
To address these challenges, JISC established its MRD programmes [2] that are funding projects to provide the UK Higher Education sector with examples of good research data management throughout the full data lifecycle.
Similar discussions are underway in other countries, for example, the Alliance of German Science Organisations adopted the “Principles for the Handling of Research Data” in June 2010.
The focus of the first JISCMRD from 2009 to 2011 was more on general topics like RDM infrastructure and systems, planning tools, advice and guidance, and also training materials.
The current JISCMRD lays greater emphasis on institutional development with pilots and the transition to a service.
Simon’s presentation introduced the current UK projects and initiatives and highlighted the benefits of the UK national data centres in research data management that are summarised by the study report “Data centres: their use, value and impact”.
A key factor in mastering these challenges is to clarify who will bear the costs.
EPSRC, the main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and the physical sciences, stated that ‘it is reasonable and appropriate to use public funds for research to also fund the associated data management costs’.
Eventually, effective data management throughout the research lifecycle will ensure that data will continue to work as productively as the research that produced them.
eSciDoc: Concepts and Generic Approaches Malte Dreyer, MPDL & Matthias Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe The first day provided an overview of eSciDoc with its concepts, basic services and customised applications as well as its growing community.
Malte Dreyer, Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) and Matthias Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe, who are responsible for the eSciDoc project at their organisations, gave an overview of the concepts and generic approaches.
eSciDoc was developed for the global and interdisciplinary collaboration of academic communities.
Librarians, software developers and researchers can access research data, create new methods of publication and pioneer new ways of academic collaboration.
The open source platform eSciDoc has laid the foundations for an open and sustainable access to research data from academic institutions and research organisations.
Core features of eSciDoc are a central repository with basic data management services (ie ‘eSciDoc Infrastructure’, mainly with Fedora) and numerous complementary services including access rights management, metadata organisation, support of data imports, analysis tools, etc.
(‘eSciDoc Services’).
The infrastructure provides the basis for specific applications (‘eSciDoc Applications’) that use its internal services and, if necessary, also integrates external services provided by third parties.
The main asset of eSciDoc is certainly the modular structure behind it.
The service-oriented architecture (SOA) allows for implementing any kind of eResearch scenario.
The eSciDoc software is issued as open source under the “Common Development and Distribution Licence” and is available from the eScidoc Web site [1].
eSciDoc Applications and Their Usage Scenarios The main target of the eSciDoc platform is to provide sustainable research data management together with a publishing environment for research data and research findings.
Based on the eSciDoc Infrastructure, scientists from various disciplines are developing application software for individual research tools or for entire eResearch environments.
eSciDoc Applications for Publication Management Michael Franke (MPDL) presented the current status of PubMan [3], an eSciDoc application which allows members of research organisations to store, manage and enrich their publications and provide these data for reuse by other Web services.
PubMan has been running in production mode since May 2009.
As an Open Source repository software, it is continuously developed.
Both end-users and developers are invited to join the PubMan Community and to share ideas on improvements and new features.
Also including aspects of publication management, the following presentations were focused on research data management in different disciplines, ranging from art history images to electronic lab-book data.
eSciDoc Applications for Research Data Management in the Arts and the Humanities The presentation given by Andreas Vollmer, Karsten Asshauer (Humboldt-University of Berlin), and Julian Röder (Free University of Berlin) was about their further development of the current eSciDoc image research application software, called Imeji [4].
They use it for the new virtual research environment (VRE) and repository at the Institute for Art and Visual History.
Imeji enables users to create their own image collections, to use different metadata schemata describing various types of images, and to share them with artists or artist groups.
Even large quantities of images, mainly historical collections and works of art, can easily be  uploaded and efficiently managed via the browser.
Jean-Philippe Magué (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon) introduced Amalia, an eSciDoc-based solution for collaborative corpus management in the humanities and the social sciences.
The project is creating an integrated access to digital data and documents using the strengths of eSciDoc: the powerful central repository for reliable data storage, authentication with object-based authorisation, and realisation of the whole document lifecycle together with version management.
Currently, the only weakness in Amalia is that eSciDoc does not provide an appropriate workflow for digitisation projects.
The recently started project Digitization Lifecycle has as its chief goal the comprehensive support of the digitisation endeavours within the MPG, including proposals for digitisation workflows [5].
Andrea Kulas (MPDL) described the development of this integrated service environment which provides generic tools.
He also explained that in addition to the technical developments, guidelines for digitisation projects are to be established and an advisory group of experts will be formed.
The project results will be made available to other institutions including the open source software.
eSciDoc Applications for Research Data Management in Science and Engineering Guido Lonij (RWTH Aachen) gave a status report on a project which aims to build a virtual work environment for mechanical engineers focusing on the early design stages of gear mechanisms and the related transmission systems.
The German universities of Aachen (RWTH) and Ilmenau (TU) and FIZ Karlsruhe are working together in this project, called e-Kinematix [6].
They are planning to integrate the existing information resources of the digital mechanisms, the gear library DMG-Lib, patent information systems, library systems, e-journals and e-books as well as visualisation tools.
The technical realisation is on the basis of the eSciDoc Infrastructure which supports an open and modular development strategy.
The presentation of Masao Takaku (National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS)) outlined the activities of the growing eSciDoc community in Japan.
NIMS eSciDoc is a research information infrastructure based on the eSciDoc Infrastructure using the eSciDoc Applications PubMan and Imeji.
The information system for NIMS’s outreach activities consists of the NIMS Digital Library as a self-archiving and dissemination platform for publications, the NIMS Researchers Database SAMURAI [7] as directory service for researchers’ profiles linked with the Digital Library, and The Library of Materials Science as a research data repository.
Interoperability with internal and external services is a key issue in the step-by-step expansion of content and functionality.
Jens Klump (GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences) explained that projects at GFZ generate a great variety of research data big data as well as small datarequiring a flexible data management toolbox combined with an institution-wide data management infrastructure.
Research data objects may have more than one metadata object, or different metadata schemata are chosen according to the project requirements.
To meet these requirements, the project panMetaDocs [8] enhances the current information exchange platform panMetaworks by changing the storage mechanism from a file system to the eSciDoc Infrastructure.
Furthermore, the authentication feature of the eSciDoc Infrastructure is integrated.
On the second day, Matthias Razum (FIZ Karlsruhe) gave a project summary of BW-eLabs [9].
In this project the universities of Stuttgart and Freiburg, Stuttgart Media University (HdM) and FIZ Karlsruhe are working together to create digital environments for virtual and remote control laboratories based on the eSciDoc Infrastructure.
Key concepts include the reproducibility of experiments, the discoverability of and access to primary data as well as the storage and curation of all artefacts that are created throughout the research process.
Scientists doing research in nanotechnology will be given efficient and easy access to cost-intensive laboratory equipment by providing remote access to real laboratories and by the allocation of virtual laboratories.
Information Infrastructure and Integration Projects The second day’s sessions focused on the topics “Infrastructure and Integration Projects” and “Research Data Management” with up-to-date information and talks with practical relevance that also covered non-eSciDoc scenarios.
Patrick Harms (SUB Göttingen) opened with a brief overiew of the initiative DARIAH (DigitAl Research Infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities).
Entering into more detail, Patrick explained that DARIAH [10] will facilitate long-term access to, and use of, all European arts and humanities digital research data.
The DARIAH infrastructure will be a connected network of people, information, tools, and methodologies for investigating, exploring and supporting work across the broad spectrum of the digital humanities.
Within the project, the eSciDoc partner MPDL is producing specific generic software packages compatible with the repository software of the DARIAH infrastructure.
Experience gleaned from eSciDoc service concepts are proving of great benefit.
An effective depiction of the project goals in the presentation by Jochen Büttner (Max Planck Institute for History of Science) gave his audience a vivid idea of how the project proposal Digital Scrapbook could be put into practice.
A scrapbook provides an individual workbench for researchers with a window on relevant publications and research data together with tools for annotating, commenting and linking any digital sources (e.g.
texts, images).
Interlinking existing scrapbooks as soon as they have been released by researchers is also an important issue.
The speaker is a strong supporter of the new publication paradigm in a world of dynamic objects: ‘publish as early as possible and update frequently.’ It is planned to use the eSciDoc software to realise such demanding project goals.
Andreas Vogler and Natasa Bulatovic (MPDL) presented the MPG-driven project Astronomer’s Workbench (AWOB) [11].
AWOB is a Web-based platform for communication and collaboration which enables scientists to access measuring data and scientific information jointly, supports them in sharing and discussing their findings, provides a means of handling metadata, and offers persistent storage.
The challenge in the astrophysical community is to provide this environment for project teams with anything up to hundreds of collaborators handling huge amounts of data in observational and theoretical astrophysics.
Applications such as AWOB show the potential of eSciDoc.
The eSciDoc Service Infrastructure allows for using existing eSciDoc Applications such as PubMan, for plugging in existing external research tools and for developing new components.
Research Data Management Ross King (Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT)) introduced SCAPE [12], an EU-funded project for building a scalable digital preservation environment.
SCAPE is about planning and managing computing-intensive (digital) preservation processes such as the large-scale ingestion or migration of large (multi-Terabyte) datasets.
The SCAPE consortium, co-ordinated by AIT, bundles a broad spectrum of expertise across 16 international partners (among them FIZ Karlsruhe) from universities, memory institutions, research labs, data centres, and industrial companies.
SCAPE will enhance the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows, and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system.
The project results will be validated within three large-scale testbeds from diverse application areas: digital repositories from the library community, Web content from the Web archiving community and research datasets from the scientific community.
Dirk Fleischer (IFM-GEOMAR) took a less technical, but more organisational and cultural view on research data management.
Filling a research data repository [13] requires data sharing.
Most researchers happily embrace the idea of sharing, but, in practice, the advantages often fail to outweigh their concerns and uncertainty about the further usage of their own research data.
No doubt, data sharing opens up the possibility of independent scrutiny, fosters new partnerships and encourages further investigation of existing datasets.
But currently, the advantages of data sharing are not particularly appreciated.
Therefore institutions need to take action to provide appropriate research environments in order to make data capture as convenient as possible for researchers.
Research sites should provide tools that capture raw data together with meta information at the time of creation, store analytic procedures as provenance information, and transfer data by a simple mouse click from one structured data repository to another.
eSciDoc: Getting Started and Demos The subject of this session was how to take the first steps in setting up one’s own eSciDoc application using the eSciDoc Infrastructure and/or existing eSciDoc Applications.
The new tools eSciDoc Browser [14] and eSciDoc Admin Tool [15] were presented in detail by Frank Schwichtenberg (FIZ Karlsruhe).
These tools make it easier to start development with the eSciDoc Infrastructure by supporting the creation of one’s own environment(s) with content models, and to define organisational units, contexts, users and roles.
Demos of existing eSciDoc Applications showed how solutions can be developed and operated in various environments and scientific disciplines: PubMan with the service Control of Named Entities (CoNE) [3] for creation of institutional repositories, Virtual research platform for the digital preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage content (ViRR) [16] and Digitization Lifecycle (DLC) [5] for publication and usage of digitised objects and IMEJI [4] for image data management.
Developer Workshop On the second day, an additional ‘hands-on’ workshop with comprehensive tutorials gave participants with a technical background the opportunity to familiarise themselves with installing the eSciDoc Infrastructure (Basic concepts of eSciDoc, Getting core services up and running) and developing their own individual eSciDoc Applications (Installation and customising, Configuring own eResearch environments).
Conclusion Reliable, efficient research data management has become one of the most important demands on research institutions, scientific organisations, and enterprises involved in R&D.
eSciDoc is a well-known open source platform for creating eResearch environments and represents the basis for numerous international R&D projects.
Its role is: to ensure that research findings in the digital age can be securely stored and that controlled access is guaranteed; to assist researchers in collecting, processing and documenting their own research data, and to provide researchers with easy, fast and sustainable access to other research data; to support researchers in collaborating in virtual work groups across all disciplines and across all geographic frontiers; and to increase the visibility of research results by supporting sustainable publishing with due consideration for copyright issues.
References eSciDoc the Open Source e-Research Environment  http://www.escidoc.org JISC Managing Research Data programme (JISCMRD) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd.aspx PubMan the eSciDoc Solution for Publication Management http://colab.mpdl.mpg.de/mediawiki/Portal:PubMan IMEJI an eSciDoc application to manage images together with their specific metadata  http://www.imeji.org/ Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL): Digitization Lifecycle DLC   http://www.mpdl.mpg.de/projects/intern/dl_en.htm e-Kinematix a virtual research environment (VRE) targeted at mechanical engineers http://misc.jisc.ac.uk/vre/projects/e-kinematix NIMS Researchers Database SAMURAI  http://samurai.nims.go.jp/index-e.html panMetaDocs a tool for collecting and managing digital objects in a scientific research environment  http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/panmetadocs/ BW-e Labs: Knowledge Management in Virtual and Remote Labs   http://www.bw-elabs.org/ DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities)  http://www.mpdl.mpg.de/projects/extern/dariah_en.htm Astronomer’s Workbench  http://www.mpdl.mpg.de/projects/intern/awob_en.htm SCAPE SCAlable Preservation Environments  http://www.scape-project.eu/ Data Management of Kiel Marine Sciences  http://www.geomar.de/en/institute/central-facilities/rz/daten/ eSciDoc Browser a Rich Internet Application allows browsing digital assets through a eSciDoc Core infrastructure  https://github.com/escidoc/escidoc-browser eSciDoc Infrastructure Administration Tool https://www.escidoc.org/JSPWiki/en/ESciDocInfrastructureAdministrationTool ViRR a virtual research platform for the digital preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage content  http://colab.mpdl.mpg.de/mediawiki/ViRR Author Details Ute Rusnak Head of Public Research and Education FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure Germany Email: ute.rusnak@fiz-karlsruhe.de Web site: http://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de Ute Rusnak is Head of Public Research and Education at FIZ Karlsruhe.
She holds a university degree in biology and has an additional qualification as a software engineer.
For many years her focus has been on the design and development of reference databases and academic information portals.
Currently, she provides project support for information infrastructure developments.
She is interested in the ongoing changes in academic data management and its development towards the coverage of the entire research data lifecycle.
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Book Review: The E-copyright Handbook Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: The E-copyright Handbook Buzz data database dissemination copyright streaming url research standards bibliometrics Citation BibTex RIS Charles Oppenheim takes a look at the latest of Paul Pedley’s copyright guidance books, and, in some respects, finds it wanting.
Paul Pedley is a name that needs no introduction to aficionados of copyright textbooks, being the author of several such books published by Facet Publishing in the past (and reviewed by Ariadne [1][2][3][4][5]).
His latest effort, The E-copyright Handbook, attempts to cover the fast-moving and complex world of electronic copyright, using an interesting approach.
Rather than the traditional way of such books, describing the media and describing the rights granted to copyright owners, the way the law applies to each media type, exceptions to copyright and so on, his approach is a mixture but with some emphasis on activities, as a glance at the chapter titles shows: Introduction, Content Types, Activities, Copyright Exceptions, Licences, the Digital Economy Act, Enforcement and The Hargreaves Review.
It is a complex approach, which requires careful cross-referencing and also checking that material is neither duplicated, nor that is anything is overlooked.
It is not clear to me whether the book is meant for reading through, or whether it should be just dipped into when a particular issue causes someone to check the law; but I found the approach confusing.
The book also suffers from being in a fast-moving area, where the law, and technology, change fast and although it is clear that Facet got the book published in record time, as there are numerous references to 2012 developments in the text, the work is already out of date in several places, and will no doubt get more out of date as the months go on.
Another problem is that the book cannot make up its mind whether it is written for UK readers, or readers in the EU, or in the USA.
All too often, different countries’ court cases are mentioned together; one is (say) a UK case and another is a US case.
Without the understanding that US law and UK law in this field are very different, people will come to incorrect conclusions about the significance of the cases to them in their day to day work.
Moreover, all too often the cases are described without any court decisions relating to them being provided; so one is left with the worry ‘why did the author mention this case at all?’ The book is supported by a list of abbreviations, an index of court cases and of legislation, a fairly basic general subject index and a bibliography.
Notes and references, and useful practice points and advice support the chapters.
The abbreviations list is helpful, but unfortunately the abbreviations ALCS, CC, HMRC, PLS and UCLA are in the text but are not explained in the list of abbreviations; in addition, the term ‘sui generis’ is mentioned several times in the text without explanation.
The difference between webcasts and streaming (if there is indeed a difference) is not explained.
Sometimes, the advice given is unhelpful; for examples, bloggers are advised that if they are going to copy a third-party item, they should only copy an insubstantial part – without any explanation of how they can achieve that and what the term ‘insubstantial’ means.
The Berne Convention is mentioned in passing in the book, but is not explained.
There are a few factual errors: on page 55, an image is referred to as a ‘literary work’, when in copyright law it is an ‘artistic work’.
On page 57, it is incorrectly implied that a single deep link could infringe database right when in fact it would require copying a large number of links from a database of URLs to infringe any database right in that collection of links.
On page 61, it is stated ‘In the UK, people often refer back to the 19th century case Hird v Wood….’, when I suspect the vast majority of people have never heard of it, and indeed the standard legal textbook on copyright, Copinger and Skone James on Copyright does not make a single mention of it.
On page 62, the author says an action might infringe database right because it prejudices the substantial investment made by the database owner in the selection and arrangement of the contents of the database – but database right does not protect such things.
It protects the investment made by the database owner in obtaining, verifying and presenting the data – something very different.
In a number of places, the author claims that multiple copies can never be fair dealing, when there is nothing in the law which says multiple copies cannot be fair dealing.
Indeed, the reproduction of extracts from works on TV and in print for film and book criticism and review purposes demonstrates that multiple copies can be made and still be fair dealing.
It is true that it is much less likely to be fair dealing if multiple copies are made, but that’s a quite different legal position than that which the author asserts.
The claim on page 121 that Open Access journals are subject to thorough quality controls will bring a hollow laugh from those many academics who are plagued by invitations to contribute to thoroughly disreputable Open Access journals with no quality controls in place at all.
Disappointingly, the author says nothing at all about the controversial status of librarians under the Digital Economy Act of 2010.
The book is already out of date in its discussion of so-called orphan works, minimum standards for collective licensing organisations, the implementation of the Digital Economy Act, the Google Books case [6] and the Georgia State University case [7].
In the coming weeks I predict it will become out of date on the Hargreaves Review of UK copyright law as well.
This is not the author’s or the publisher’s fault, of course, but an occupational hazard of writing such a book in the first place!
However, these are just minor niggles; my most fundamental criticism of the book is that it seems to have been thrown together in haste.
In any given chapter, subheadings are provided almost as if this was the next thing that the author decided should be included, rather than putting the chapters together in a coherent fashion.
Too often there is duplication of materials between chapters as well.
This is inevitable in such a book, but appropriate cross-referencing is often lacking.
I regard this book as a lost opportunity.
There is a need for a book that looks at the actions that one might take with electronic works and to assess the risks involved in terms of copyright law in taking those actions.
But this book doesn’t provide them.
The jumbling together of topics, and of UK, European and US cases leads to confusion.
There is some material on risk management scattered about, but the book really needed a chapter in its own right on the topic.
The book also needs a rounding-up chapter where the author draws conclusions about the state of play, what is unsatisfactory, and makes predictions for likely changes in the future.
The book has excellent tips and guides to useful resources; this is one of its strengths.
What a pity the author did not strengthen the main text as well.
References Stuart Hannabuss.
"Book Review: Staying Legal".
July 2004, Ariadne Issue 40 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/hannabuss-rvw/ Stuart Hannabuss.
"Book Review: Managing Digital Rights A Practitioner's Guide".
April 2005, Ariadne Issue 43 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/hannabuss-rvw/ Stuart Hannabuss.
"Book Review: Essential Law for Information Professionals".
October 2006, Ariadne Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/hannabuss-rvw/ Stuart Hannabuss.
"Book Review: Digital Copyright".
January 2008, Ariadne Issue 54 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/hannabuss-rvw/ Stuart Hannabuss.
"Book Review: Copyright Compliance".
July 2008, Ariadne Issue 56 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/hannabuss-rvw/ "Google settles book scanning lawsuit".
BBC News 4 October 2012, 16:16 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19835808 "GSU wins copyright case".
Georgia State University news release, 13 August 2012 http://www.gsu.edu/news/61650.html Author Details Professor Charles Oppenheim Independent consultant Email: c.oppenheim@btinternet.com Charles Oppenheim was, until he retired in 2009, Professor of Information Science at Loughborough University, and is currently a Visiting Professor at Queensland University.
In his past life, he has held a variety of posts in academia (Plymouth University, City University, University of Strathclyde, de Montfort University and Loughborough University) and in the electronic publishing industry, working for International Thomson, Pergamon and Reuters at various times.
He has carried out research in, given talks on, consulted on, and published widely on the legal issues (especially, but not only copyright) involved in the creation, dissemination and consumption of information.
He has also carried out research, and remains actively interested in, research assessment, bibliometrics, open access, cloud computing, and the scholarly publishing industry.
He is the author of the recently published The No-Nonsense Guide to Legal Issues in Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing (Facet, 2012).
He is a copyright consultant to JISC and to other organisations.
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Walk-in Access to e-Resources at the University of Bath Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Walk-in Access to e-Resources at the University of Bath Buzz data wiki database usability infrastructure firefox accessibility browser smartphone cataloguing opac windows passwords opera solaris ejournal licence authentication intranet url research ldap Citation BibTex RIS Kate Robinson, Lizz Jennings and Laurence Lockton outline a low-cost solution to walk-in (visitor) access to licensed e-journals, drawing on their practice at the University of Bath with a wiki ERM and OPAC terminals.
Although the move from print to electronic journals over the last two decades has been enormously beneficial to academic libraries and their users, the shift from owning material outright to renting access has restricted the autonomy of librarians to grant access to these journals.
The Problem Licence restrictions imposed by publishers define and limit access rights and librarians have increasingly taken on the role of restricting access on behalf of the publisher, rather than granting access on behalf of their institution.
In other words, librarians and their institutions are no longer free to decide who may read this material as they no longer own it.
This situation has been the subject of negotiation for some time, and it is fair to say that an accommodation has been reached in many cases through less restrictive licensing terms.
Some clearer definition of groups who can use e-journals has eased the situation for 'authorised users', such as those teaching students of an institution who are not directly employed by the institution itself, for example, through franchised courses.
However, there is still a group of potential users who do not have a relationship with an institution other than a wish to access the Library's holdings to further their research or their curiosity.
In the past, such access was at the discretion of the Librarian but with regard to e-journals it is now set out in publishers’ licences, usually under the terms of 'walk-in access' to these resources.
This in itself is a positive move and seemingly restores some access control to the Librarian.
In practice, however, it has not proved to be straightforward to implement.
In general terms e-journal access, although via the Web, piggybacks on established University IT systems and safeguards which have not always been specifically designed to support the licence restrictions of publishers.
The definition of an authorised user for walk-in access is usually one who has been granted access to the Library building.
This requirement for e-journal material to be restricted to the actual library building, not just University premises, presents a technical challenge.
It is not reasonable to expect a University's IT infrastructure to be redesigned to accommodate the needs of those who are not part of the institution.
However, there is a balance to be struck as a tipping point has been reached, with journal holdings become increasingly e-only and widening participation becoming increasingly important to institutions.
There are a growing number of groups who would like would and benefit from walk-in access.
In recent years requests for access to e-journals have become more frequent from library users, such as researchers who already use and borrow hard-copy materials through the SCONUL Access scheme, and school/college students undertaking Extended Project or International Baccalaureate qualifications.
Clearly it is desirable to support the research community of which we are part, and to encourage EP/IB students whose next steps may well be into Higher Education.
Visits for school/college groups are increasingly encouraged at institutional level and often include teaching and other intensive support from library staff; support which increases as the range of material they are authorised to access decreases.
Research areas and subjects for these pieces of work are diverse and cannot be easily satisfied through textbook material or residual hard-copy journal holdings.
In this climate, we need to look again at how to implement walk-in access to open up resources wherever possible.
To do this we first need to take two steps: to identify which online material we can allow access to and to facilitate access through a route which meets licence terms, that is, to this material only within the library building.
The Solution: Identifying Licence Terms Background The University of Bath Library has been managing an electronic resource collection for several years, but as with many HE institutions, this activity has expanded and gathered a vast quantity of information in its wake.
As deals and licences change, it is important to manage this information effectively, and many institutions have purchased or developed Electronic Resource Management (ERM) systems.
With budgets stretched tightly, it was important that we were able to manage our resources, while retaining as much budget as possible for the purchase of the actual resources themselves.
We had little information about our licences outside the documents themselves, which had usually been studied before signing, but no further analysis had been undertaken once the resource was established.
Additionally, there was often a large amount of information from publishers and from subject librarians about decisions and clarifications which resided in people’s personal email inboxes.
This information was usually remembered by those who had received it, but when making decisions or solving problems in the absence of these people, key facts were often obscured.
It became clear that a central resource which gathered together these strands of information in a structured and accessible way would be very useful.
The e-resources team at Bath had seen a number of demonstrations of commercial ERM systems, and decided to assess our options.
Three possibilities were considered: using a commercial ERM, using an open-source ERM, or using our existing Confluence wiki-based intranet.
It soon became apparent that whichever system we chose, we would need to spend a considerable amount of time and effort in gathering the relevant information to populate it.
Although some commercial ERM systems had a level of automation, we were concerned that their default options would not represent our own agreements, and that detailed checking would be required.
Open Source ERMs were an attractive alternative, but would require additional systems expertise to customise.
The wiki had the advantages of being already installed, familiar to and accessible only to all library staff, as well as being editable by any of them, but did not offer the same flexibility to link resources or extract reports.
Approach We decided to use the existing wiki and build our own databank.
This offered us complete flexibility in choosing which items of information to record, and could either be a starting point for future migration to a more powerful system, or a final system in its own right, depending on how successful it was.
We agreed that gathering the information together in some format was a necessary first step in understanding our licences and resources.
The databank was originally designed using a basic hierarchy of sections: Figure 1: Hierarchy of wiki pages for the e-resources databank This design pulled together existing sections of the wiki, such as the statistics collection, with information about licence terms and conditions, access information, title lists and information about decisions.
For each licence we held, we scanned or saved the document, and analysed it for generalised terms and conditions using a pro forma, designed to extract those pieces of information which were interesting to us.
The form was based on the ERMI licence data elements list [1], but simplified considerably to ensure the resulting tables were not unwieldy, nor the process of analysis too time-consuming.
This was then transferred to the wiki page, in a tabbed arrangement, with the scanned document linked in: Figure 2: Example of a wiki page showing the licence terms for a resource Finally, a set of structured labels was added, which were then pulled through to a summary page listing the key features of each licence:   Figure 3: Table showing an overview of licence terms Once the licence had been analysed, a section detailing access information and titles available from that provider was created, while a home page with links to these sections, and the relevant statistics page, was also created.
This process was followed for a selection of licences, and evaluated for usability and problems.
Some revisions were made, and an overall navigation system was added to improve the interaction.
More licences were added, and it became obvious that even minor changes to the structure would be very slow and unwieldy to implement, as changes needed to be made on every relevant page.
However, changes to individual pages are simple, and this has been particularly useful on the title pages, where the range of providers’ services can be huge.
Evaluation The databank has been successful in several of its original aims.
The accessibility of the information on the wiki has worked well, with all library staff being able to access information, even when e-resources staff are on leave.
The ability to view key terms and conditions at a glance was particularly useful for some departments, and the fact that the checklist was tailored to our own particular interests helped in this regard.
In all areas, the flexibility to include or omit information depending on the particular details of a given licence, meant that the databank could easily expand for larger, more complex resources without obscuring smaller or simpler ones.
The systematic collection and presentation of the information was useful, as it was easy to identify gaps in our information, and the presence of a licence triggered the investigation of the availability of usage statistics, and vice versa.
It also meant that comparisons between licences were easier, as the information was held in a predictable place.
The use of structured labels meant that information could be manipulated for other sections, for example a list of providers permitting the provision of single articles to other libraries as inter-library loans, a benefit noted by others such as Ruth [2].
As expected there was limited scope for producing reports from the data.
As a result, the system was not able to integrate into the department’s workflows, and did create additional steps in the acquisitions process.
However, the system has resulted in improved responses to enquiries and better management of changes.
Additionally, as the databank uses a number of ‘macros’ which require knowledge of wiki markup to implement, it is not easily updatable by those outside the e-resources section.
Walk-in Access Information The wiki databank provided minimal information about walk-in access, but was sufficient to begin the process of assessing our resources, as we could quickly discount those resources which did not permit guest user access, and were able to access licence information for those which did.
As a result, the analysis of licence terms was made easier when the project came about, and we were quickly able to determine suitable resources.
In addition, the list of service providers set up in EZproxy, through which we were providing the technical part of the solution, fed into the data collection process, and we were able to add a large number of additional resources to our databank on the wiki as a result.
Conclusions on Use of a Wiki The use of the wiki as an electronic resources management system has been successful, and has contributed to improved information control and a deeper understanding of the resources to which we subscribe.
It does not have the sophistication of a commercial system, but is adequate for our current needs.
It is embedded in our existing system, which ensures it is used regularly, and is flexible enough to store relevant information to the level of granularity required by each resource.
The lack of reporting functions and inability to integrate directly with workflows are the major drawbacks.
Regardless of the system chosen, time and expertise to analyse licence terms was necessary, and by using a wiki-based system, we were able to gather the information and store it systematically at very low cost.
The information gathered saved time and improved the quality of responses both to enquiries and ongoing activities such as the walk-in access project.
The Solution: Facilitating Access to Licensed Material Using OPAC Terminals In December 2007 UCISA published a Best Practice Guide on Higher Education Access to e-Resources in Visited Institutions (HAERVI) [3].
This made recommendations for facilitating access to e-resources to students and researchers visiting from other institutions.
Some of the advice given in the guide is also relevant to the problem of facilitating access to visitors who are not affiliated to a Higher Education institution.
The technical solution we have achieved is similar to the “locked down kiosk facility” suggested in the HAERVI guide.
We did not want to provide computer terminals which are dedicated to walk-in visitor access, largely because of the space they would occupy, a reluctance to engage with authentication/login administration requirements and the cost of maintaining them; but also because we did not want students seeing terminals in the Library which they cannot use, given the pressure on student computing provision.
We also wanted there to be a sufficient number of terminals available for the groups of sixth formers visiting from local schools and for them to be available 24/7 to match our opening hours.
We therefore made access to e-resources available on the 20 existing dedicated catalogue terminals (“OPAC terminals”) which are located on four floors of the Library.
The catalogue terminals were originally set up as kiosks, providing access only to the library catalogue in a locked-down Web browser, so all that was required was to extend access to the limited set of Web sites now identified as being available for “walk-in access” under the terms of the licences.
The catalogue terminals are Sun Ray thin clients, which connect to servers running the Solaris operating system and display a browser in an X-windows session.
The Opera browser was used originally, because this has a kiosk mode built in, which means the browser window can be made to run with many of the functions disabled, and a ‘whitelist’ of URLs can be set [4].
However, one problem with Opera’s implementation of this feature is that if a user follows a link to a URL which is disallowed, nothing appears to happen at all: there is no indication to the user that the link isn’t working because it has been disallowed.
As it happens, when we started investigating the technical solution we found that Opera was no longer supported on Solaris.
We therefore found an alternative solution which provided some benefits over Opera: an add-on to the Firefox browser named OpenKiosk, which was commissioned by Brooklyn Museum [5].
OpenKiosk has a similar URL whitelisting facility, but instead of simply refusing to load a page which is disallowed, it redirects to an alternative page in which we can advise the user as to why access to the resource has not been granted.
Figure 4: University of Bath Library, first 24/7/365 HE library in the UK The Web sites on which the e-resources are hosted are not themselves listed in the OpenKiosk URL whitelist.
We use an existing service for providing authenticated access to remote Web sites: EZproxy [6].
The addresses of the EZproxy servers were added to the OpenKiosk whitelist, and EZproxy controls access to the e-resource Web sites.
The primary purpose of EZproxy is to enable members of an institution to access remote sites to which access is controlled by IP address.
IP address is the most commonly used method of authenticating access to publications licenced by libraries.
This makes it very easy for the members of an institution to access resources while they are using a device (PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone) connected to the institution’s network.
EZproxy provides a simple mechanism to allow users whose device is not directly connected to the network to access the Web sites.
What makes EZproxy “easy” is that the user does not need to configure their device or browser in any way.
EZproxy fetches Web pages and rewrites the URLs in the page so that they point to EZproxy server rather than to the publisher’s server.
So to the user’s browser, the Web site appears to be hosted on a server on the institution’s network, and also to the publisher’s Web site the requesting client appears to be hosted on the institution’s network.
Access to resources via EZproxy must be restricted to members of the institution, and it offers numerous methods to authenticate and authorise users.
Typically users will be required to log in using their institutional username and password and be authorised by a lookup against an LDAP-compliant directory.
One of the methods of authentication is by IP address, known as ‘autologin’ because the user doesn’t have to provide credentials.
Because a ‘walk-in’ user is using a browser running on one of the Sun Ray unix servers, EZproxy can be configured to recognise that a login request is from one of those servers by its IP address and automatically start a session.
EZproxy allows Web sites to be placed in groups, so that access to some resources can be restricted to a particular set of users.
We have used this feature to divide the resources into one group which can only be accessed by members of the institution when they have logged in, and another group of Web sites which can be accessed by ‘autologin’ users as well.
Just as the OpenKiosk Firefox extension redirects the browser to an alternative Web page, when an autologin session attempts to access a resource to which they are not entitled, EZproxy redirects the browser to the same Web page which explains why access has been denied.
This means that EZproxy is used to maintain the configuration of e-resource Web sites for the two different purposes of facilitating access to members of the university when off-campus, and to walk-in visitors to the Library.
Because EZproxy controls access to Web sites by host or domain, if two resources with different access conditions were hosted on the same site we would not be able to grant access to one but deny access to the other.
We have not come across this situation, however.
EZproxy provides a menu of Web sites in its configuration which we have used to show the definitive list of resources which can be accessed by visitors.
However it is not expected that users would want to select a resource by publisher or database name, but to find a specific book, article or other type of document in the catalogue and follow the link straight to that document.
We have not found a simple way to indicate within the catalogue whether a document can be accessed, the user simply has to try their luck.
Within this setup there are no options for the user to print, e-mail or download a document.
We would like to be able to offer at least one of these options, but as it stands users are at leisure to read the resources on screen and we put no time limit on use of the terminals.
Conclusions In general terms, this approach has been a success.
We have provided access to licensed resources wherever possible to visitors to the institution.
The time and expense of this solution has been relatively low and its impact on, for example, school visits has been very much appreciated both by the students and by library staff.
We continue to request visitor access from publishers when licenses are renewed and to provide instruction for visitors regarding how they can access our permitted e-resources.
We are looking closely at collecting usage data for walk-in access, especially in the light of possible moves by publishers to linking usage to pricing and the possibility of our cost per download figures, on which we base our on-going renewal decisions, being skewed by visitor access figures.
For the moment, however, we will continue to allow access to our licensed e-resources where we can.
References Jewell, T.D., et al., 2004.
Electronic resource management: Report of the DLF ERM initiative.
Washington DC: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Ruth, L.B., 2008.
License mapping for ERM systems: Existing practices and initiatives for support.
Serials Review, 34(2), pp.
137-143.
HAERVI guide, UCISA http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/publications/haervi_guide.aspx Opera: Kiosk Mode http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/kiosk/ OpenKiosk add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-kiosk/ EZproxy http://www.oclc.org/ezproxy/ Author Details Kate Robinson Head of Academic Services The Library University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: k.m.robinson@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/ Kate Robinson is Head of Academic Services within the University of Bath Library.
She is responsible for the subject teams, their teaching and collection development, the institutional repository and the Library's reader-facing services.
Kate will be taking up the post of University Librarian in August 2012.
Lizz Jennings Information Librarian (E-Resources) The Library University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: e.jennings@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/ Lizz Jennings joined the University of Bath Library as the Information Librarian for E-Resources in 2008 and chartered shortly afterwards.
Her background has taken in workplace, public and prison libraries, but her current interests include usage statistics, wikis for e-resources and resource discovery.
Lizz has recently achieved an MSc in Information Management from The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.
She is also an active member of the CILIP Career Development Group, and currently chairs the CILIP South Western Division.
Laurence Lockton Systems Librarian The Library University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email: l.g.lockton@bath.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/ Laurence Lockton has been Systems Librarian at the Library of the University of Bath since 2002.
As well as the day-to-day administration of the Symphony library management system, he has been responsible for the implementation of systems for resource discovery and linking, remote access to electronic resources, campus cards and door access control, printing and photocopying, and numerous others.
Previously he worked for Sirsi Limited, providing support, implementation and training for the Unicorn library management system.
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Review of: Kristin Briney, Data Management for Researchers.
Organize, maintain and share your data for research success.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Review of: Kristin Briney, Data Management for Researchers.
Organize, maintain and share your data for research success.
Citation BibTex RIS Gareth Cole, the Research Data Manager at Loughborough University Library, reviews the book Data Management for Researchers.
Organize, maintain and share your data for research success by Kristin Briney.
Researchers (particularly those in the University sector) have a lot of demands placed upon them.
The process of actually doing research has changed over the last few decades and one of the latest changes is an expectation that researchers actively manage the research data they use and create as part of their work.
Many, if not all, researchers will have always managed data.
However, the standards to which that data was managed would have varied across disciplines, departments, and individuals.
Increasingly, researchers working in Universities have to show that they are managing data efficiently and effectively.
In addition, many institutions, publishers, and funders expect that data created or used is now made available to other researchers in as open a manner as possible.
Briney begins the book with an outline of landscape and explains that data management is an international theme with the term itself growing up in the mid-2000s (p.2).
She also goes on to add that there is no one definition for what research data actually consists of, nor indeed, as to whether the word itself is plural or singular.
Both the OECD and US Office of Management and Budget use the word “factual” to describe data.
Briney herself uses a broad definition for this book: “data is anything you perform analysis upon.” (pp.
4-6).
None of these definitions are entirely satisfactory: What about information which is created but not analysed?
Does it not become data until it is analysed?
The OECD and OMB definitions seem to discount physical objects as being data: Are a mouse or geological samples “factual”?
These brief questions highlight what a difficult task Briney has set herself in this book.
If no one can actually define what data is, how can you possibly write a book on managing data?
Briney attempts this by splitting her book up into chapters which follow the data lifecycle.
The chapters are headed: “The data problem”, “The data lifecycle”, “Planning for data management”, “Documentation”, “Organization”, “Improving data analysis”, “Managing sensitive data”, “Storage and backups”, “Long-term storage and preservation”, “sharing data”, and “Data reuse and restarting the data lifecycle”.
Each chapter is a standalone segment which researchers could read to get an understanding of that topic.
In addition, each chapter is helpfully broken down into sub-sections which again aid reading of specific issues and solutions.
Finally, there is a chapter summary which is clearly labelled and highlights the key points from the chapter.
The book is clear to read and well-presented and written and provides an excellent introduction to data management for researchers.
However, it is not without its faults.
Briney makes it clear throughout the book that she comes from a research background (Physical Chemistry).
Indeed, the fact that this is written by someone who has felt frustrations and inefficiencies due to bad data management practices is a strength of the book.
However, Briney’s Chemistry background is obvious throughout the book.
She seems to use the terms “Researcher”, “Research Scientist” and “Scientist” interchangeably.
This reviewer, who has a Humanities background, could identify with the first term but not the latter two.
In addition, in the documentation chapter Briney devotes nearly 8 pages (pp.36-44) to a description of lab books and Electronic lab notebooks.
This is only relevant for a sub-set of researchers.
There is no equivalent section for those researchers who don’t use lab books.
For example, how should a researcher document notes taken from books, ethnographic research, or archives.
It is a difficult balance to strike, but this reviewer felt that in some places the background of the writer got in the way of providing generic advice for all researchers and thus limited the usefulness of the text as a whole.
What Briney does do well is to emphasise how complicated the environment can be for today’s researcher.
Funders, publishers, and Universities increasingly have policies on data management and very few of these entirely align with each other.
In addition, much research is now international in nature.
Briney focusses mainly on the US and EU in her text but even within this context the myriad of policies and legislation is hard to grasp.
Briney has written a useful primer on data management for researchers which provides practical advice throughout on managing data.
It is easy to read and clearly structured.
It is not without its faults but these just demonstrate how difficult it is to provide generic advice in a comparatively short book (170 pages of text).
This reviewer read the paperback edition of the book which is reasonably priced at £24.99 (although a price below £20 would perhaps provide a larger readership).
The hardback price of £49.99 would seem to this reviewer to be a little steep.
Gareth Cole Loughborough University Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Towards Interoperabilty of European Language Resources Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Towards Interoperabilty of European Language Resources Buzz data software java framework database xml metadata tagging identifier repositories e-science uima ict interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Sophia Ananiadou and colleagues describe an ambitious new initiative to accelerate Europe-wide language technology research, helped by their work on promoting interoperability of language resources.
A core component of the European Union is a common market with a single information space that works with around two dozen national languages and many regional languages.
This wide variety of languages presents linguistic barriers that can severely limit the free flow of goods, information and services throughout Europe.
In this article, we provide an overview of the META-NET Network of Excellence [1].
This is an ambitious initiative, consisting of 44 centres from 31 countries in Europe, aiming to improve significantly on the number of language technologies that can assist European citizens, by supporting enhanced communication and co-operation across languages.
A major outcome of the project will be META-SHARE, a searchable network of repositories that collect together resources such as language data, tools and related Web services, covering a large number of European languages.
The resources within these repositories are intended to facilitate the development and evaluation of a wide range of new language processing applications and services.
Various new applications can be built by combining together existing resources in different ways.
This process can be helped greatly by ensuring that individual resources are interoperable, i.e., that they can be combined together with little or no configuration.
The UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework [2][3] is concerned specifically with ensuring the interoperability of resources, and the U-Compare platform [4][5][6], built on top of UIMA, is designed especially to facilitate the rapid construction and evaluation of natural languageprocessing/text-mining applications using interoperable resources, without the need for any additional programming.
U-Compare comes together with a library of resources of several different types.
As part of META-NET, this library will be extended to cover a number of different European languages.
The functionality of U-Compare will also be enhanced to allow the use of multi-lingual and cross-lingual components, such as those that carry out automatic machine translation.
By integrating and showcasing the functionality of U-Compare within META-SHARE, it is intended to demonstrate that META-SHARE can serve not only as a useful tool to locate language resources for a range of languages, but also act as an integrated environment that allows for rapid prototyping and testing of applications that make use of these resources.
A recent survey requested by the European commission [7] found that users of the Internet in Europe often have to resort to using services and Web pages in languages other than their own for various different purposes: 57% of users purchase goods and services in languages other than their own.
Similarly, 55% of users read or watch content in foreign languages whilst 35% use another language when writing emails, sending messages or posting content on the Web.
In all of the above cases, English is by far the most frequently used language, other than the users’ own, when performing activities on the Web.
According to the above statistics, European citizens who cannot speak a foreign language could be considered to be at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the use of technology.
Given the increasingly pervasive nature of technology in our everyday lives, this situation needs to be addressed in order to ensure that European cultural and linguistic diversity is preserved, and that maintaining one’s mother tongue does not become a disadvantage.
META-NET META-NET is a Network of Excellence created with the aim of responding to issues such as those introduced in the section above.
Consisting of 44 research centres from 31 countries, it is dedicated to building the technological foundations of a multi-lingual European information society, in order to provide users of all European languages with equal access to information and knowledge.
The achievement of this aim is dependent on the ready availability of data, tools and services that can perform natural language processing (NLP) and text mining ™ on a range of European languages.
They will form the building blocks for constructing language technology applications that can help European citizens to gain easy access to the information they require.
Among these applications will be systems that can automatically translate Web content between multiple languages, semantic search systems that will provide users with fast and efficient access to precisely the information they require, and voice user interfaces that can allow easy access to information and services over the telephone, e.g., booking tickets, etc.
Although NLP and TM technologies are well-developed for English, this cannot be said for all European languages, and in some cases, very sparse resources are currently available.
It is for this reason that a concerted, substantial and continent-wide effort in language technology research and engineering is needed in order to make applications such as those outlined above available to all European citizens.
It is the main aim of META-NET to stimulate, drive and support such an effort.
META-NET has founded the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance (META).
This brings together a large number of stakeholders (currently over 250 members in 42 countries), including researchers, commercial technology providers, private and corporate language technology users, language professionals and other information society stakeholders.
The input, expertise and influence of these stakeholders are intended to drive research in the right direction, in order to ensure the success of the initiative.
As part of the initial work of META, a technology visioning process is taking place.
The purpose of this visioning process is to produce ideas and concepts for visionary language technology applications and to provide input for technology forecasts.
Three vision groups were set up for this purpose, corresponding to Translation and Localisation, Media and Information Services and Interactive Systems.
The outcome of the visioning process will feed into the creation of a strategic research agenda for Europe’s Language Technology landscape.
The agenda will contain high-level recommendations, ideas for visionary applications, and suggestions for joint actions to be presented to the EC and national as well as regional bodies.
META-SHARE One of the major outcomes of META-NET will be the META-SHARE platform, which will be an open distributed facility for the sharing and exchange of resources.
It is here that the outcomes of the research effort described above will be made available.
META-SHARE will consist of a sustainable network of repositories of language data, tools and related Web services for a large number of European languages, documented with high-quality metadata and aggregated in central inventories, allowing for uniform search and access to resources.
Data may include annotated corpora, to be used for training and/or evaluation of tools, thesauri, dictionaries, etc., whilst tools and services may include both complete applications, e.g., semantic search systems or automatic translation systems, as well as individual components, e.g., part-of-speech (POS) taggers, syntactic parsers, named entity recognisers, etc, that can be reused, repurposed and combined in different ways to develop and evaluate new products and services.
Work is currently ongoing to prepare an initial set of resources for inclusion in META-SHARE.
Research groups from a range of European countries are examining, cleaning, upgrading and documenting their resources in order to ensure the quality of these initial resources.
Each group is also responsible for attracting external parties to make their resources available on META-SHARE.
The platform will permit different licences to be associated with different resources, with either open or restricted access rights.
It will also be possible to make available not only resources that are usable free-of-charge, but also those that require a fee for use.
According to this flexibility, it is hoped to attract a large number and variety of tools to be made available on META-SHARE.
This will allow it to grow to become an important component of a language technology marketplace for Human Language Technology (HLT) researchers and developers, language professionals (translators, interpreters, content and software localisation experts, etc.
), as well as for industrial players, especially small and medium enterprises, catering for the full development cycle of HLT, from research through to innovative products and services.
Interoperability As stated above, a major aim of META-NET is to facilitate the development and evaluation of a wide range of new language technology applications, by making readily available the building blocks (e.g., component language processing tools such as tokenisers, sentence splitters, part-of-speech taggers, parsers, etc.)
from which such applications can be constructed, through reuse and combination in various ways.
The planned functionality of META-SHARE will be a huge asset in this respect, in that, thanks to the central inventories and the high-quality metadata accompanying each resource, detailed and accurate searches may be carried out for many different resources dealing with different languages.
However, even assuming that a set of resources providing the appropriate functionalities to build the required application can be located using the META-SHARE search functionality, a major potential issue that still remains concerns the ease with which the resources located can be combined together to create the application.
Especially if the selected resources have been developed by a range of different groups, one or more of the following issues of compatibility between the resources may arise: Tools may be implemented using different programming languages Input/output formats of the tools may be different.
For example, a particular part-of-speech tagger may produce plain text output.
However, other tools that require part-of-speech tagged data as input (e.g., a syntactic parser) may require this data to be in a different format (e.g.
XML).
Data types required or produced by tools may be incompatible.
For example, the syntactic constituent types produced by a particular parser may be different to the ones required by a tool that requires access to parsed data (e.g., a named entity recogniser).
Having to deal with such issues can be both time-consuming and a source of frustration, often requiring program code to be rewritten or extra code produced in order to ensure that data can pass freely and correctly between the different resources used in the application.
At the University of Manchester, one of our major contributions to META-NET will be to promote and facilitate the interoperability of resources that are made available in META-SHARE.
By interoperability, we mean that a set of resources can be combined together (i.e., they can ‘talk’ to each other) with little or no configuration required, thus alleviating the potential issues outlined above.
In recent years, the issue of interoperability has been receiving increasing attention, as evidenced by efforts such as [8][9][10].
The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) provides a flexible and extensible architecture for implementing interoperability, as explained in more detail below.
As part of our work, we will encourage the adoption of the UIMA framework by other project partners, and showcase the benefits that this can bring to the rapid prototyping and evaluation of NLP systems, through the use of the U-Compare platform.
U-Compare U-Compare has been developed by the University of Tokyo, the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) at the University of Manchester and the University of Colorado, with the main purpose of supporting rapid and flexible construction of NLP applications and easy evaluation of applications against goldstandard-annotated data.
U-Compare provides a graphical user interface (launchable via a single click from the Web site), which allows users to construct NLP applications using simple drag-and-drop actions.
Each resource is simply dragged from a library of available components (which may be locally deployed or running as Web services) onto a workflow ‘canvas’, in the required order of execution.
Once a complete workflow has been specified, it can be applied to a set of documents at the click of a button.
An example of a possible workflow for carrying out named entity recognition is the following: Tokeniser ?
POS Tagger ?
Syntactic Parser ?
Named Entity Recogniser A workflow will typically add one or more types of annotations to the documents, corresponding to sentences, tokens, parts of speech, syntactic parses, named entities, etc.
Different annotation viewers make it possible to visualise these annotations, including more complex annotation types such as syntactic trees and feature structures.
Additional features include the ability to save and load complete workflows, and to import/export both workflows and individual resources.
Figure 1 shows the U-Compare graphical user interface, with the library of available components on the right, and the workflow canvas on the left.
Figure 1: U-Compare interface Special facilities are also provided in U-Compare for evaluating the performance of workflows.
With a task such as named entity recognition, it is often the case that tools need to be reconfigured each time a new training corpus or dictionary is released.
Such reconfiguration may be due to a different data format or additional information that is present in the new resource.
Following reconfiguration, even seemingly insignificant changes in the performance of individual tools could result in a lower performance of the system as a whole.
Since performance issues may be a direct consequence of a suboptimal workflow, it is here that the real power of U-Compare becomes apparent, in that several different possible manifestations of a workflow (e.g., with particular individual components substituted for others) may be applied to input texts in parallel.
This is illustrated in Figure 2, where the each step of the workflow may be undertaken by a range of different tools that perform similar tasks.
Provided with such banks of tools, U-Compare will automatically compare the performance of each possible combination of tools against gold-standard (i.e., manually produced) annotations.
Figure 2: A reconfigurable workflow Results are reported automatically in terms of performance statistics that measure the correctness of the annotations produced, i.e., precision and recall as well as F-measure, which is the harmonic mean of precision and recall [11].
Figure 3 illustrates the display of workflow evaluation data.
On the left are the performance statistics and on the right are the annotations produced by the various tools under evaluation.
Figure 3: Evaluation in U-Compare The utility of U-Compare with respect to issues such as those introduced above has recently been demonstrated in the recognition of chemical named entities in scientific texts [12].
This work was concerned with a well-established named entity recogniser for the chemistry domain, Oscar3 [13], whose rigid structure made it difficult to modularise and to adapt to new and emerging trends in annotation and corpora.
Oscar3 was refactored into a number of separate, reconfigurable U-Compare components, and experiments showed that the substitution of a new tokeniser into the workflow could improve performance over the original system.
The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) The ease with which workflows can be built in U-Compare is dependent on the resources in its library being interoperable.
This is mainly achieved and enforced by the fact that U-Compare is built on top of UIMA [3].
The main way in which UIMA achieves interoperability is by virtue of a standard means of communication between resources.
Each resource to be used within the UIMA framework (and hence within U-Compare) must be ‘wrapped’ as a UIMA component.
This means that it must be specifically configured to obtain its input by reading appropriate annotations from a common data structure called the Common Analysis System (CAS), which is accessible by all resources in the workflow.
Output is produced by writing new annotations to the CAS, or updating existing annotations.
For example, a tokeniser may add token annotations to the CAS.
A POS tagger may subsequently read token annotations, and add a POS feature to them.
This standard mechanism for input/output in UIMA allows components to be combined in flexible ways by alleviating the need to worry about differing input/output formats of different tools.
It is only necessary to ensure that the types of annotation required as input by a particular component are present in the CAS at the time of execution of the component.
Given that existing tools have varying formats of input/output, some initial work is required to wrap these tools as UIMA components.
This generally involves writing some extra code to carry out the following steps: Read appropriate annotations from the CAS Convert the UIMA annotations to input format required by the tool Execute the tool with the given input Convert the output of the tool to UIMA annotations Write the UIMA annotations to the CAS The UIMA framework also deals with another issue of interoperability, in that after resources are wrapped as UIMA components, the original programming language is hidden and thus becomes irrelevant.
Writing the UIMA wrapper is fairly straightforward when the resource is implemented in either Java or C++, or if the tool is available as a Web service or as a binary.
Type System Each UIMA component must declare the types of annotations that it requires as input and produces as output.
These annotation types are defined in a separate file, and may be hierarchically structured.
For example, a type SemanticAnnotation may contain the subtypes NamedEntityAnnotation and CoreferenceAnnotation.
Each annotation type may additionally define features, e.g., the token type may have a PartOfSpeech feature.
The file containing a set of annotation types is called a Type System.
Examining the input and output annotation types of different components can help to determine which sets of components can be combined together into workflows, and how, by considering their dependencies.
U-Compare makes this process easy, by displaying the input/output types of each component within the graphical user interface.
Different NLP research groups have produced different repositories of UIMA components, e.g., [14][15].
However, because the UIMA framework itself does not attempt to impose any restrictions or recommendations regarding the use of a particular annotation system, each group generally defines its own type system.
This means that components developed by one group cannot be seamlessly combined or substituted easily with those developed by another group, because their different type systems may use different names or have different hierarchical structures, even though functionalities of the components may be similar.
Such issues can be a major obstacle for interoperability.
Ideally, in order to achieve maximum interoperability, a single, common type system would be imposed, to be followed by all developers of UIMA components.
However, this is not considered a viable option, as it would be difficult to achieve consensus on exactly which types should be present, given, for example, the various different syntactic and semantic theories on which different tools are based.
As a partial solution to fostering interoperability between resources developed by different groups, U-Compare has defined a sharable type system, which aims to define the most common types of annotation, both syntactic and semantic, that are produced by NLP applications.
The idea is that all components available in U-Compare should produce annotations that are compatible with this type system.
As the U-Compare type system consists of fairly general types, it is permissible to create new types that correspond to more specialised types of annotations, as long as these new types can form sub-types of one of the existing U-Compare types.
This ensures that compatibility between components developed by different groups can at least be achieved at an intermediate level of the hierarchy.
U-Compare is distributed with over 50 components, constituting what is currently the world’s largest library of type-compatible UIMA components.
These components include sentence splitters, tokenisers, POS taggers, abbreviation detectors, named entity recognisers, etc., which currently have a strong bias towards biomedical text processing.
All of these components are compatible with the U-Compare type system, providing evidence that conforming to a shared type system to enhance interoperability is a feasible task.
U-Compare has been used in many tasks by both NLP experts and non-expert users, from the individual level to worldwide challenges.
They include the BioNLP’09 shared task [16] for the extraction of bio-molecular events (bio-events) that appear in biomedical literature, in which U-Compare served as an official support system, the CoNLL-2010 shared task on the detection of speculation in biomedical texts [17], the BioCreative II.5 challenge [18] of text mining and information extraction systems applied to the biological domain, and linking with Taverna [19], a generic workflow management system.
U-Compare and META-SHARE As part of META-NET, we want to demonstrate that incorporating U-Compare functionality within the META-SHARE platform would be a huge asset, in order to allow users not only to search for and download individual resources, but also to build and evaluate complete systems in a very simple way.
The current library of U-Compare components deals almost exclusively with the processing of English text, with a handful of Japanese components.
In order to illustrate the feasibility of integrating U-Compare within META-SHARE, we plan to expand the U-Compare library to include components corresponding to resources in other European languages.
As a starting point for this activity, resources will be provided by project partners covering the languages of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Romanian and Maltese.
According to META-NET’s aim to enable enhanced communication and co-operation across languages, cross-lingual components to carry out tasks such as automatic translation should also be made available.
In order to allow such components to be integrated into workflows, it will also be necessary to extend the functionality of U-Compare to facilitate the display of multi-lingual annotations.
The creation of UIMA components for several different languages will present an interesting challenge for the U-Compare type system, allowing us to verify to what extent it is language-independent, or whether it is feasible to make it so, and what sort of changes will be necessary.
If a language-independent type system is indeed possible, this would certainly increase the feasibility of adopting U-Compare and its type system as a standard to be followed in META-SHARE, and beyond.
In order to showcase the potential and versatility of U-Compare and UIMA in contributing towards the rapid development of the European language technology landscape, our work will include the creation of a set of workflows, ranging from simple to complex, that make use of these new components, both monolingual and cross-lingual.
Making such workflows available within META-SHARE will allow them to act as templates for carrying out important language processing tasks, which can be changed or configured according to the requirements of different types of applications.
By providing facilities for META-SHARE users to make their own workflows available to other uses, and to provide feedback about existing workflows, the process of creating new applications could become even easier.
Conclusion META-NET is an exciting and challenging initiative which, through the backing and guidance of a large and dedicated community of interested stakeholders, has the potential to make an impact on the lives of all European citizens.
This impact will be realised through the increased availability of language technology applications that make it easier to obtain information and knowledge, without the concern of language barriers.
Since many of these language technology applications share common processing steps, such as tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, etc., the ready availability of tools that can carry out these processing steps in different languages and for different types of text is a prerequisite for facilitating a rapid increase in the availability of new applications.
The launch of META-SHARE, which will allow numerous repositories of language resources to be queried along multiple criteria from a single point of access, will help to achieve this requirement.
The speed and ease with which new applications can be developed using component language resources is also heavily dependent on the amount of work that must be performed by system developers to allow components to communicate with each other in the correct manner.
We have described how, by wrapping resources as UIMA components whose annotation types conform to the U-Compare type system, greater interoperability of the resources, and with it, easier reuse and more flexible combination, can be achieved.
As part of META-NET, we are intending to create a significant number of new UIMA components that are compatible with the U-Compare type system for a number of different European languages, together with a range of example workflows that make use of these new components.
It is hoped that the planned integration of the U-Compare system within META-SHARE will contribute to a more rapid and straightforward expansion of the European language technology landscape, by allowing users to benefit from both running and configuring existing workflows, and creating new workflows with only a few clicks of their mouse, and without the need to write any new program code.
Acknowledgements The work described here is being funded by the DG INFSO of the European Commission through the ICT Policy Support Programme, Grant agreement no.
270893 (METANET4U).
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Author Details Sophia Ananiadou Professor School of Computer Science University of Manchester and Director National Centre for Text Mining Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre 131 Princess St Manchester M1 7DN Email: Sophia.Ananiadou@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ Web site: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ Paul Thompson Research Associate National Centre for Text Mining School of Computer Science University of Manchester Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre 131 Princess St Manchester M1 7DN Email: Paul.Thompson@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ Web site: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/paul.thompson/ Yoshinobu Kano Project Assistant Professor Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS) Faculty of Engineering Bldg.
12 The University of Tokyo 2-11-16, Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku Tokyo 113-0032, JAPAN Email: kano@dbcls.rois.ac.jp Web site: http://u-compare.org/kano/ John McNaught Deputy Director National Centre for Text Mining School of Computer Science University of Manchester Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre 131 Princess Street Manchester M1 7DN UK Email: John.McNaught@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ Web site: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/profile.php?member=jmcnaught Teresa K Attwood Professor Faculty of Life Sciences & School of Computer Science Michael Smith Building The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PT Email: teresa.k.attwood@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bioinf.manchester.ac.uk/dbbrowser/ Philip J R Day Reader in Quantitative Analytical Genomics Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre University of Manchester 131 Princess Street Manchester M1 7DN Email: philip.j.day@manchester.ac.uk John Keane MG Singh Chair in Data Engineering School of Computer Science University of Manchester Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre 131 Princess St Manchester M1 7DN Email: John.Keane@manchester.ac.uk Dean Andrew Jackson Professor Cell Biology Faculty of Life Sciences Michael Smith Building The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PT Email: dean.jackson@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/Dean.jackson/ Steve Pettifer Senior Lecturer School of Computer Science Kilburn Building The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email: steve.pettifer@manchester.ac.uk Web site: http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/people/srp/ Return to top Article Title: Towards Interoperability of European Language Resources Authors: Sophia Ananiadou, Paul Thompson, Yoshinobu Kano, John McNaught, Teresa K. Attwood, Philip J. R. Day, John Keane, Dean A. Jackson, Stephen Pettifer Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/ananiadou-et-al/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Editorial: Happy 20th Birthday Ariadne!
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Editorial: Happy 20th Birthday Ariadne!
Citation BibTex RIS Ariadne hits its 20th birthday, and its 75th issue.
Back in 1994 the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) was set up by the JISC, paid for by the UK's funding councils.
One of the many projects funded by eLib was an experimental magazine that could help document the changes under way and give the researchers working on eLib projects a means to communicate with one another and their user communities.
That magazine was called Ariadne.
Originally produced in both print and web versions, it outlived the project that gave birth to it.
We are now at the point where we can celebrate 20 years of the web version of Ariadne.
Much has changed in electronic libraries and information systems over the last two decades and we have two articles considering these changes.
Your current editor got together with several of the past editors of Ariadne to look back life in the mid-1990s eLib world, what has happened since, and some thoughts on where the process will go in the near future.
The future is always difficult to predict, but JISC's Futurist, Martin Hamilton, considers how eLib influenced current services and what a future "moonshot" funding inititive might bring, with an interesting idea for long term archiving.
After looking back at eLib, we come right up to date with Tom Roper, Sam Burgess and Holly Case.
They describe how they set up and run a Twitter chat for health library professionals called #ukmedlibs.
Social media chats such as this are a great way of developing contacts within your field, discussing current hot topics and sharing knowledge.
Knowledge sharing is one of the aims of the Semantic Web.
But what happens if the semantics behind words drift over time and how does that affect our ability to preserve, index and search information over time?
Emma Tonkin delves into this topic, as well as considering the semantics behind particular communities and what happens when their resources disappear.
Ariadne has always been an Open Access journal.
This means that it is free for both writers and readers.
John Kirriemuir reviews the benefits of writing for such journals, and provides a useful list of such journals in the library field to consider.
We also have several event related articles.
Marieke Guy reviews the QEN Event: Embedding Digital Literacies, whilst Gary Brewerton describes what happened at Figshare Fest 2015.
Meanwhile Lorna M Campbell introduces the OER16: Open Culture event that is going to take place during April 2016 at Edinburgh University.
To round up our reviews, we have a book review by Gareth Cole of Kristin Briney's Data Management for Researchers.
Organize, maintain and share your data for research success.
We hope you enjoy our 20th anniversary issue, and we look forward to the next 20 years with your continued support.
Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Engaging Researchers with Social Media Tools: 25 Research Things@Huddersfield Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Engaging Researchers with Social Media Tools: 25 Research Things@Huddersfield Buzz data software framework wiki dissemination rss archives metadata tagging identifier blog repositories flickr aggregation e-learning streaming technorati wordpress podcast librarything mashup facebook twitter diigo interoperability research Citation BibTex RIS Graham Stone and Ellen Collins investigate whether 25 Research Things, an innovative online learning programme, could help researchers understand the value of Web 2.0 tools.
This article explores whether an online learning course can help academic researchers to become more familiar with social media tools, and seeks to understand how they can put them to use within their research and teaching activities.
It does so by considering the development, implementation and evaluation of a pilot Web 2.0 course, 25 Research Things, an innovative online learning programme developed at the University of Huddersfield, which gives researchers a structured way to engage with selected Web 2.0 tools.
Based upon previous work undertaken at Huddersfield, 25 Research Things was the first online course in the UK to follow on from the 23 Things [1] concept in order to specifically engage with researchers about social media tools and technologies.
The programme ran in two cohorts and was hosted via a WordPress blog.
A number of Web 2.0 tools were introduced each week and the participants or ‘Thingers’, ranging from 1st-year PhD students to professors, were given specific tasks which encouraged them to experiment with the aim of helping them to interact with, and to assess the value of Web 2.0 tools and technologies.
All participants established and maintained a blog of their own to report on their experiences with each tool.
This approach helped to build a supportive community, with participants commenting on each other’s blogs.
Background O’Reilly [2] cites the bursting of the dot.com bubble in late 2001 [3] as a turning point for the Web and the introduction of the concept of Web 2.0, coined in 2004 by Dale Dougherty, Vice President of O’Reilly Media Inc. One key concept of Web 2.0 was a move from passive use of the Web to one of co-operation and participation where users add value to Internet services such as wiki style collaborative editing.
By 2009, O’Reilly and Battelle [4] argued that there were many clear-cut examples of social media use from business decisions based on customer tweets to the Obama presidential campaign; and that ‘(t)he Web is no longer an industry unto itself -the Web is now the world’.
The increasing presence of Web 2.0 in everyday life has prompted several investigations into its usage within academic communities.
Prensky’s work [5] posits a difference between ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’, arguing that, ‘…Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an out-dated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to reach a population that speaks an entirely new language’.
A two-year ethnographic study of the student research process, undertaken by ERIAL [6] has tried to explode the myth of the ‘digital native’ by implying that just because today’s researchers have grown up with technology does not mean that they know how to use it to its full advantage and that more information literacy skills were required.
Indeed, Bennett, Maton and Kervin [7] argue that, ‘…much of the current debate about digital natives represents an academic form of moral panic’.
White and Le Cornu [8] suggest an ‘accurate representation of online behaviour’ to Prensky’s Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants in their ‘Visitors and Residents’ continuum, which argues that individuals move along the continuum rather than starting out as visitors and then becoming residents.
Snee [9] has also examined some of the unique pressures upon academic researchers which may limit their uptake of social media, including ethical issues in social science research.
In 2007, the development of Web 2.0 technologies was investigated for Jisc [10].
In its conclusion, the report posed a number of issues and challenges to UK Higher and Further Education, not least the use of Web 2.0 technologies at the time, stating that although there was some use of these technologies [11], ‘too many researchers see the formal publication of journal and other papers as the main means of communication with each other’.
In addition, Harley et al.
[12] found that traditions such as peer review override the new ‘opportunities’ afforded by Web 2.0.
There is evidence that researchers have moved from complete scepticism about social media to occasional use [13].
A 2011 study of 2,000 researchers [14] has shown that social media is used at all stages of the research process from the identification of research opportunities to the dissemination of results.
However, there is also evidence that take-up of social media is still restricted to a relatively small group of enthusiasts [13].
The low take-up of social media may be down to the technologies on offer at institutions being inadequate or inappropriate to research student needs.
Alternatively, it may be because institutions’ current methods of engaging with researchers regarding social media is ineffective, with researchers preferring to turn to their peers for help [15].
Many have stated that they were more likely to use social media if their peers were more accepting of this medium [16], indeed Weller [17] argued that, ‘[f]or community-based approaches to become widespread in education and training, there needs to be a market pull for such learning experiences’.
However, many scholarly societies have themselves become increasingly accepting of social media and are keen to point out their participation [18].
The overall picture is one of researchers demonstrating interest in these new tools, while being as yet unsure as to how they can be used to best effect.
Policy-focused research reports, such as that undertaken by RIN [13], have recognised this, and argue that library and information services can be an important resource for researchers seeking to improve their understanding of Web 2.0.
But it is not clear that librarians themselves have fully engaged with the opportunities offered by social media.
One study found that 54% of librarians see no academic value to social media, and that while they may, for example, create a Facebook page, they spend very little time on the updating and maintenance that is required to achieve meaningful engagement with users [19].
Certain university library services have recognised that their staff need a better understanding of Web 2.0 tools and services, and have developed training programmes to facilitate this.
Chief among these are activities based upon the ‘Learning 2.0’ model [20] developed by the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (PLCMC).
This methodology was based upon Abrams’ [21] suggestion that, by incremental learning and self-discovery, learners could increase their knowledge in small steps, and that this was an ideal way of learning about social media.
Learning 2.0 was aimed at encouraging staff to learn about the new and emerging Web 2.0 technologies that many of the public libraries users were already familiar with in order to better serve PLCMC's mission; ‘Expanding minds, Empowering individuals and Enriching our community’.
Blowers adopted a ‘stealthese-ideas’ approach by licensing the programme under Creative Commons.
Learning 2.0 and the ‘stealthese-ideas’ approach are practical extensions to Weller’s concept of learning objects and ‘adoption through succession’, where objects are reused and modified by the community [22].
In this case the ‘community of practice’ [17] is both the programme cohort, via blog comments, and the library community, via a series of re-writes and updates on the original idea.
Blowers’ Learning 2.0 approach uses blogging as a way to encourage participants to create ‘a distributed debate’, that is, bloggers posting comments on other blogger’s postings [17], Kirkup describes the recent literature about the usefulness of blogging for students ‘as a reflective journal, as a notebook to record events and developing ideas, as an aggregator of resources, and as a tool for creating community and conversation with fellow students’ [23].
Nearly 500 libraries across the world have adapted Learning 2.0 for their own workplace [24].
The University of Huddersfield was one of the first Library 2.0 programmes in UK Higher Education [25].
25 Research Things at the University of Huddersfield The success of 25 Things for library staff at Huddersfield, and the findings of the RIN report (among others), which suggested that librarians and information professionals should play a more prominent role in helping researchers to explore and make use of social media, led to the development of a new Learning 2.0 programme: 25 Things for Researchers.
The technique also reflects the importance of peer support in ensuring researchers engage effectively with Web 2.0 tools [13][15], creating a small community of people who can help each other with the tasks that they are all undertaking and allowing more experienced participants to pass on their skills and insights to more recent adopters.
When deciding on the content of the course the authors looked at the original Huddersfield 25 Things course for library staff.
Findings from the RIN report were also taken on board, for example, the report found that Facebook was not seen as a relevant tool for research.
25 Research Things was written as a blog and loaded onto a local installation of WordPress [26] in advance.
The Things were grouped into themed weeks (table 1).
The first task for ‘Thingers’ was to create their own blog, even after the course, a number of these blogs are still being used as researchers ‘open research’ blogs.
Week Themes Tool 1 Survey Blogs Bristol Online Surveys WordPress 2 Blogs & RSS Feeds   Technorati Google Reader 3 Organising your favourite content   Diigo LibraryThing Mendeley CiteULike 4 Social Networks   Twitter Lanyrd LinkedIn 5 Sharing content you created   SlideShare Prezi Google Documents Creative Commons 6 Images   Flickr Mashups Online Image Generators 7 Play week MyExperiment or arts-humanities.net Wikipedia 8 Audio-Visual   You Tube Podcasts 9 Reflection   Bristol Online Surveys WordPress Table 1: Themes covered in 25 Research Things The objectives of the course were to: assist researchers to make sense of the Web 2.0 tools and services available to them provide a programme to help researchers interact with Web 2.0 tools and technologies assess the level of awareness of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in early career postgraduate research students within the University support the University Strategic map by strengthening and enhancing its research capability foster practical implications of the RIN research Each Thing was described in an informal way using streaming media and Wikipedia definitions to help explain each concept.
‘Thingers’ were encouraged to have fun when discovering each Thing.
However, this was then brought back to the research agenda in order to keep the overall focus of the course.
An example of this was the ‘Social Networks’ week, which started out by looking at Twitter by encouraging ‘Thingers’ to follow each other, and ended with a suggestion for a serious use of Twitter as a method for following conferences.
The course ran from November 2010 to January 2011; it was then edited and re-run from January 2011 [27].
Participants in both cohorts were given the option of blogging anonymously if they wished.
It was felt that this might encourage participation in those who were very new to social media.
Each blog was added to the 25 Research Things blog in the ‘blogroll’ and ‘Thingers’ were actively encouraged to read other participants’ blogs and to comment.
The project authors were also on hand to help with any problems the participants may have had, and to post on the blogs too, with words of encouragement and support or to enter into some of the discussions.
Methodology In order to evaluate the success of the course, we used two main forms of data collection.
The first was a preand post-course questionnaire, run with each cohort of participants.
The second was the blogs themselves.
A key part of the methodology for 25 Research Things was asking participants to reflect upon their experiences, behaviours and practices as they explored the new tools and techniques, and expressing this publicly on a blog.
This represented a very rich source of data on researchers’ feelings about the course, although with some limitations, as discussed below.
16 researchers created blogs for the first round of 25 Research Things, and 21 did so for the second round.
Of the total 37 participants, 28 completed the initial survey, and just 8 completed the final survey: this perhaps reflects the low completion rate for the course itself.
For this reason, we have used the initial survey to identify characteristics and backgrounds of the various participants, including their familiarity with Web 2.0, but relied on the blogs to understand their experience of the course: the final survey has not been used at all in the analysis which underwrites this article.
The blog entries were coded by the two authors, working independently and using a grounded theory approach whereby important themes were allowed to emerge from the literature.
This approach carries risks: not least, that the subjective interests of the authors will tend to influence the types of themes they observe within the data and subsequently emphasise within their presentation of the research findings.
We sought to limit the effects of this bias by having the two authors code the findings independently: because they are from different backgrounds (policy/research and academic librarianship) they were able to bring different perspectives to the data and thus identify themes that are not the product of just one set of interests or preoccupations.
Nonetheless, as with all qualitative research, this report remains simply one interpretation of the data.
Since all the blogs are in the public domain, it will be entirely possible for other researchers to replicate our study and challenge our findings, if necessary.
There are other limitations to our methodology.
As has been noted, only a small proportion of the participants actually completed the course: since our methodology involved analysing blog posts, those who did not finish the course will be under-represented within our findings.
Although some of them did use their blogs to chart their struggles and eventual decision to give up, others simply disappeared without trace: we will not have fully captured their experience.
The small scale of the project would also be a significant limitation if any attempts were made to claim that it can fully represent a wider population.
We make no such claims: rather, we offer it as an example of one intervention which made some progress in engaging academics with social media tools, and consider the success of this specific project.
Participants were not informed that their blogs would be used as part of the project evaluation.
We considered the ethical implications of this, but concluded that, since the blogs are in the public domain, it was an acceptable approach.
Informing the participants that their blogs would form part of the evaluation might have affected what and how they chose to post, and it was important that the blogs represented an honest reflection of their experience.
Of course, a risk remained that they would shape their posts to reflect their perceptions of our ‘desired’ outcomes – particularly given that we were active commenters on their blogs: as with the ‘dropout’ bloggers, it is likely that our analysis over-emphasises the positive experiences and under-represents the negative ones.
Findings As Figure 1 shows, almost half the participants in the project were first-year PhD students.
This probably reflects recruitment strategy, which focused heavily upon promoting the course in the Postgraduate Research (PGR) induction process and via the PGR email list.
Overall, 19 of the 24 respondents who answered this question were PhD students.
Figure 1: Career stage of project participants Most participants were familiar with basic Internet and computing, and used these skills on a regular basis.
Figure 2 shows that the most common average internet use was 1-3 hours a day, and 23 out of 27 participants who responded to this question used the internet on a daily basis.
Furthermore, two-thirds of the participants rated themselves as either ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ with computing and IT in general.
Figure 2: Participants’ average use of Internet However, researchers’ experience of specific Web 2.0 tools and technologies was much more varied (Figure 3).
This can probably be ascribed to the high recognition of social networks such as the ubiquitous Facebook.
In other areas, however, specific named services achieved lower recognition than general themes for research.
Also worth noting is the low number of researchers who are aware of tagging, as this is becoming an increasingly important way for researchers to organise and make visible information on the Web [28][29].
Figure 3: Participants’ experience with specific tools At the start of the course, half the participants expressed a desire to improve their existing skills and learn more about these technologies.
15 of the 28 respondents were seeking to use Web 2.0 technologies within their work; either learning completely new skills, or understanding how the tools they use in their social lives might benefit their professional practice, in terms of both research and teaching.
Several participants saw these tools as new ways to connect with people -building professional networks and communicating their research outcomes.
A few participants mentioned specific tools that they wanted to understand better; blogging was the most prominent among them.
Two of the participants mentioned the need for support and guidance as being important factors in their decision to participate in the course.
As part of each week’s task, participants were asked to record their experience with Web 2.0 tools on their personal project blog, reflecting in particular upon whether they could see any value in continuing to use it.
In addition, the final task was to reflect upon their overall experience of the course, exploring the problems they had faced and the tools they had particularly enjoyed.
By reviewing participants’ experiences and preferences as expressed in their blog posts, we can gain an insight into the overall success of the course in meeting both the project aims and the individual researchers’ expectations, remembering of course the limitations outlined in the methodology section.
The next section draws on the project blogs to explore evidence in relation to these aims and expectations.
Each theme can be identified in more than one blog but few, if any, can be identified in most of them.
As we have said before, we make no claims to overall representativeness.
The participants have all had different – and in some cases contradictory – experiences, and our representation of the findings reflects this.
Evidence from Project Blogs The course clearly succeeded in its aim to introduce researchers to new tools and techniques.
In some cases, these were tools that they had never used before: ‘I really have learned a lot, discovered things I never thought would be useful in my research and signed up to things I probably would never have found myself without this course’.
In other instances, researchers had another chance to re-examine (in a more structured way) tools that they had previously experimented with, but had never fully understood or integrated into their research activity: ‘Most of what was covered in 25 Research Things I was very aware of and had tried, but perhaps not as an active user.
So it was refreshing to revisit many and have another go’.
‘It is as if suddenly I have got the hang of the language in a foreign country, and rather than being surrounded with meaningless noise which I simply pass through, oblivious, I can hear that people are trying to attract my attention’.
In several cases, the researchers found that social media tools were more valuable than they had expected: ‘I am surprised at the amount of up-to-date material on Wikipedia.
Just found a really interesting article in the references as well’.
‘I have joined Twitter (which I hate to admit is a lot better than I thought it would be)’.
The course’s focus upon academic applications of social media was important for many participants, giving both legitimacy and value to the course activities.
Indeed, the most popular tools were the ones that participants could see would solve some enduring research problems, often related to information management and sharing.
Google Docs was seen as a useful tool for collaboration: ‘I’m working on a joint grant application with people at another university and I know we are about to get to the problem of version control on the documents we need to prepare…this seems a good way of doing that’.
‘I have always suffered from the problem of having documents with many versions which is sometimes frustrating when working in a team or on research with one or more partners.
So I think Google Docs is a good solution for this issue’.
Diigo and Mendeley generated considerable enthusiasm among researchers, who particularly valued the ability to organise and annotate documents electronically.
This perhaps reflects the increasingly peripatetic research practices of many academics.
[On Mendeley] ‘JOY AND JUBILATION – I now have a system on computer that I can use to annotate PDFs rather than take copious handwritten notes.
In addition this system will immediately give me an overview of what I have read and from where’.
[On Diigo] ‘It’s amazing.
I can now highlight and add sticky notes to any Web page I visit.
So when I go to it again I’ll be able to see exactly which bit of that page was useful.
I hate to admit it but this may be one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever come across’.
Other participants focused more upon the possible teaching applications of the tools they were using.
Prezi was particularly popular for this: ‘I’ve just converted a PowerPoint presentation on travel writing into a Prezi ready to unleash it on unsuspecting students next week.
I must admit, it looks a lot more exciting and less pedestrian than the usual lecture presentations’.
‘Prezi looked impressive.
I might well try to transfer one of my lectures into Prezi format.
I found that the best ones were quite sparse in detail and I like that for teaching and learning because it encourages students to think for themselves’.
Some participants took this further, resolving to use course content or techniques (as opposed to the tools showcased) with their students.
The Commoncraft videos went down well with most participants, and one suggested that he or she would use it with students.
Another felt that the course process would be useful for a particular group of students: ‘The format of the blog with tasks linked to other blogs responding to tasks has been really good and I am now just about to replicate this with my teacher trainees.
They are due to go out on block placement so we won’t see them for six weeks and we had always intended to set up online activities for them.
The platform of choice by default was to be Blackboard but I have chosen to use blogs and [I am] going to trial the same model with minor differences in terms of the workload’.
Finally, several participants noted that social media helped them to stay up-to-date with recent developments at the University of Huddersfield, either in their discipline or in Higher Education more generally.
‘One useful thing about Twitter – Hudds Uni Graduate Centre tweets have put me in touch with some very interesting blogs by other researchers further down the road on their PhD journey’.
‘I really like it when keynote conference presentations are available on Slideshare as it gives you the gist of what was talked about without the expense of being there’.
[On LinkedIn] ‘I think it would be useful if you were looking for a new job, so with the HE cuts ahead of us, it probably does no harm to get involved and build your network, so that you are established if and when you really need it’.
All these responses show the importance of 25 Research Things in helping academics and researchers to see the hidden potential of tools that they had previously considered unrelated to their work – or, indeed, had not considered at all.
But an equally important outcome of the project was to help researchers reject tools, based on experience rather than uninformed perceptions about usefulness.
Many participants, perhaps representing White and Le Cornu’s [8] ‘visitors’, recognised the value of the course in helping them to understand what they did and did not find useful: ‘For me a lot of these ‘tools’ are just distractions.
But if I only use two or three of them long term it will be worth it I guess’.
‘Having an unenthralled week with this…But looking around allows one to make choices so fine’.
In some cases, this simply confirmed existing opinions about usefulness: ‘Twitter (which I still don’t understand by the way, even this course couldn’t change my mind about that)’.
In others, researchers made decisions following their experiments with tools that they had not previously tried: ‘Librarything was ok – I was completely egotistical and only added books by me to my library!
I don’t think it is something that I would use again, I have to say’.
Researchers mused upon what had led them to reject specific tools.
In general, a tool would be rejected if it was not intuitive, did not slot easily into their existing work habits, or (as mentioned above) did not solve an existing work-related problem.
However, even rejections need not be final: ‘At this point I can’t see any benefit of Mendeley for me, though it might change in the future’.
This participant recognised that his or her research needs may change, and has mentally bookmarked one tool as a solution to possible future problems.
Participants were prompted to reflect on their experience of the course in the blogs.
Online learning was a new process for many of them, and clearly they enjoyed the process – in particular, the opportunity to interact with colleagues that they perhaps did not know before the course began.
This was evident throughout the process as participants commented on each other’s’ blogs, both in the comments section and in their own posts: ‘My fellow course members have been great and I’ve enjoyed reading their blogs – some have made me laugh out loud.
It’s also shown me how an on-line course can work so well’.
‘I have really enjoyed the little community that we have built here and look forward to finding out more about people who work at Hudds Uni, which was one of my aims for the course’.
But there were also some challenges for participants, and it was clear from the high proportion of non-completers that the course did not meet everyone’s needs.
One particular challenge was catering to the needs of complete novices and relatively experienced users of social media with a single set of activities.
One participant clearly felt this to be a problem: ‘I am feeling a little out of sorts with this when I read others’ work on the blogs.
I am just past week two and although I can get myself around this site, it feels like being a dog with one leg’.
As we have mentioned, the experiences of those who dropped out of the course are under-represented in this study, and it is possible that this attitude was more widespread than the blogs themselves suggest: if bloggers chose not to blog about their problems but simply to abandon the course (as some did), we will not have captured their reasons for doing so.
Participants also recognised that their level of familiarity with specific tools affected the time they spent each week.
As one said: ‘It was a lot of hours, particularly in the first few weeks where there were lots of new things that I spent a long time thinking about and setting up – in later weeks we were looking at things I knew about so it wasn’t so intensive for me’.
And while participants appreciated the comments and input of their fellow bloggers, the support offered by the project team was seen as a bit more patchy, with both bad and good experiences recorded in the project blogs: ‘There was lots [sic] to do each week and not much backup.
I’m sure my experience of blogging via the MSc in E-learning will be much better due to more structured tutor and peer support’.
‘I got stuck this week, big style.
I gave up after an hour and had to ring Graham, who I must say was very helpful and incredibly patient’.
Good technical and personal support is clearly very important to researchers who are struggling with a number of new ideas, systems and techniques.
Discussion Both the introductory survey and the blogs suggest that researchers are primarily interested in the value that this course can add to their professional lives.
This is particularly evident when considering the tools that researchers suggested they would continue to use after the end of the course.
Tools such as Diigo, Google Docs, Mendeley and DropBox were the most popular.
These tools help researchers to curate and store information sources or share and collaborate on their own work.
It is interesting to note that DropBox was not included in either course, but was recommended by one of the cohort [30].
However, researchers clearly enjoyed some of the less research-focused uses of tools, suggesting that the combination of serious applications and more light-hearted suggestions was important to the success of the course.
The course was designed to focus upon the benefits to research activity.
However, many of the participants who also had teaching and learning responsibilities identified ways that the tools could help with that part of their work.
This encouraging response shows, first, that participants were really engaging with the techniques and reflecting upon how they could integrate them into different aspects of their professional lives, and second, that the scope of the course could be considerably greater than originally anticipated.
Participants also saw the value of networking through social tools, using them to stay up to date with developments in their field, their wider discipline, their institution or in academia and Higher Education policy.
This is something that had been anticipated, but perhaps could be drawn out more in revisions of the course.
Another important outcome for a number of participants was not so much identifying tools that would be immediately useful to them, but rather to identify those which they could happily do without.
It seems to have been important to participants that they had an opportunity to try tools in a relatively structured way and reject those for which they could not find a use.
Many commented that if they finished with only two or three tools which continued to be useful, they would consider the course to have been worthwhile.
As the introductory survey showed, most participants were experienced internet users, and most rated their skills with computers quite highly.
However, familiarity with the specific tools was mixed, and this clearly showed as the course developed.
Some struggled with exercises that were considered to be relatively simple, sometimes for reasons that had not been anticipated: for example, one participant could not set up a Google account because (s)he did not have a mobile phone.
The team tried to graduate some of the tasks, giving participants an opportunity to stretch themselves, but it may be that in fact some of the tasks needed to be pitched at a more basic level to ensure participants felt they were keeping up.
On the whole, participants enjoyed the process of the course, and felt in particular that the support of their peers helped them to engage more effectively with the tools on offer.
A nascent community did begin to share experiences and tools, and to comment on each other’s’ blogs, and this was evidently important to researchers, as shown in some of the comments outlined above.
This said, many commented that they would have welcomed more input from the 25 Research Things team.
On reflection, the team lost ‘the educational narrative’ and should have been more visible.
As Weller [22] states: ‘The educator’s role is significant here, in creating a dialogue that helps students to draw connections among the learning objects and incorporate them into higher-level themes’.
This would have helped to identify and encourage those who needed it and may also have resulted in a higher completion rate.
Conclusion As a pilot and proof of concept, 25 Research Things was a success.
The small sample showed that some researchers are interested in using Web 2.0 tools to enhance their professional practice, and demonstrated that an online interactive learning course is an effective way to help them do so.
The course helped them to distinguish the tools that were useful now from those that would potentially be useful in the future, and also to identify and eliminate tools for which they could see no use within their research activity.
It also stimulated creative thinking, leading researchers to use tools in ways that were not necessarily envisaged by the course creators (for example, in teaching and learning as well as in research).
The pilot also identified some important issues that need to be resolved for a future 25 Research Things project.
Drop-outs may be an inevitable feature of a course like this, where participation is not mandatory; however, there seems to be a link between dropping out and expressing dissatisfaction with elements of the course – particularly the volume of material each week, the length of the course and the lack of physical (as opposed to virtual) support.
Figure 4: Howorth & Walsh The Informed Researcher at Huddersfield The course will be run again in 2012/13, as part of the ‘Informed Researcher’ project at Huddersfield, which aims to build an information literacy framework for researchers at the University [31].
The project is aligned with the information literacy lens on the Vitae Professional Development Planner [32].
Informed Researcher will encourage reflective blogs and these will form part of a revised 25 Research Things programme.
The new course will also incorporate a face-to-face element, so that participants can meet each other and the administrators.
This may help foster the online interactions that proved an important support to participants in the first two rounds of the project, and may encourage struggling researchers to seek help rather than dropping out.
References Helen Leech.
"23 Things in Public Libraries".
July 2010, Ariadne Issue 64 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/leech/ O’Reilly, T. (2005), What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html Jorn Madslien.
Dotcom bubble burst: 10 years on.
BBC news, 23:27 GMT, Tuesday, 9 March 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8558257.stm O’Reilly, T. and Battelle, J.
(2009), ‘Web squared: web 2.0 five years on’, in Web 2.0 summit, 20-22 October, San Francisco CA http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194 html Prensky, M. (2001), ‘Digital natives, digital immigrants’, On the Horizon, vol.9, no.5, pp.1-6.
Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries.
(2012) ERIAL project http://www.erialproject.org/ Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L. (2008), ‘The ‘digital natives’ debate: a critical review of the evidence’, British journal of educational technology.
vol.39, no.5, pp.775-786.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00793.x White, D.S.
and Le Cornu, A, (2011), ‘Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement’, First Monday, vol.16, no.9.
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 Snee, H. (2008), Web 2.0 as social science research tool, British Library, London.
http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/bldept/socsci/socint/web2/report.html Anderson, P. (2007), What is web 2.0?
Ideas, technologies and implications for education, JISC Technology and Standards Watch, London.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2007/twweb2.aspx Murray-Rust, P. (2008), ‘Chemistry for everyone’, Nature, vol.451, pp.648-651.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/451648a Harley, D. et.
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(2010), Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines, Center for Studies in Higher Education, Berkeley http://escholarship.org/uc/item/15x7385g Research Information Network (2010), If you build it, will they come?
How researchers perceive and use web 2.0, RIN, London.
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/use-and-relevance-web-20-researchers Rowlands, I. et.
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(2011), ‘Social media use in the research workflow’, Learned Publishing, vol.24, no.3, pp.183-195.
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(2011), Researchers for tomorrow: annual report 2010-2011, Education for change, London.
http://explorationforchange.net/attachments/061_Researchers%20of%20Tomorrow%20Year%202%20report%20final_110510.pdf Proctor, R. (2010), ‘Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications’, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society A, vol.368, no.1926, pp.4039-4056.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0155 Weller, M. (2007), ‘The distance from isolation: why communities are the logical conclusion in e-learning’, Computers and education, vol.49, no.2, pp.148-159.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.04.015 Mahapatra, A.
(2010), ‘Researchers in a brave new web 2.0 world’, ACS Chemical Biology, vol.5, no.9, pp.799-800.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/cb100268t Hendrix, D, Chiarella, D, Hasman, L, Murphy, S and Zafron, M. (2009) ‘Use of Facebook in academic health sciences libraries’.
Journal of the Medical Library Association, vol.97, no.1, pp.44-47.
http://dx.crossref.org/10.3163%2F1536-5050.97.1.008 Blowers, H. (2006), Learning 2.0: http://plcmcl2-about.blogspot.com/ Abrams, S. (2006), ‘43 things I might want to do this year’, Information Outlook, February 2006.
Weller, M. (2007), ‘Learning objects, learning design, and adoption through succession’, Journal of computing in higher education, vol.19, no.1, pp.26-47.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF03033418 Kirkup, G. (2010), ‘Academic blogging: academic practice and academic identity’, London review of education, vol.8, no.1, pp.75-84 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14748460903557803 Blowers, H. (2006), Hblowers learning2.0Libraries Del.icio.us links: http://del.icio.us/hblowers/learning2.0Libraries Barrett, L. et.
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(2009), ‘Getting to know Web 2.0 tools’, CILIP update.
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(2011), 25 Research Things 2011: http://25researchthings2011.wordpress.com/ Vitae (2011), Digital Researcher conference 2011: http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/315321/Digital-Researcher.html Collins, E. and Stone, G. (2011), Social Citation, in Digital Researcher Conference, 14 February 2011, London, UK: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/9564 Folley, S. (2010), My research blog: http://25thingssuefolley.wordpress.com/ Walsh, A. and Howorth, N. (2012), Creating the informed researcher: adapting the information literacy lens of the Vitae Researcher Development Framework for local needs.
In: Vitae Researcher Development International Conference 2012: Realising the Potential of Researchers, 3-4 September 2012, Manchester.
http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/14663/ Vitae (2011), Research Development Framework: http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/428241/Researcher-Development-Framework.html Author Details Graham Stone Information Resources Manager University of Huddersfield Email: g.stone@hud.ac.uk Web site: http://www.hud.ac.uk/ Graham Stone is Information Resources Manager at the University of Huddersfield, his responsibilities include the library information resources budget and management of the Acquisitions and Journals and E-Resources Teams.
He also manages the University Repository and University of Huddersfield Press Initiative.
Graham has managed a number of Jisc-funded projects including the Library Impact Data Project and the Huddersfield Open Access Publishing project.
He is UKSG Publications Officer and member of the Insights journal editorial board, the Electronic Information Resources Working Group (EIRWG), the PALS metadata and interoperability working group, the OAPEN-UK Steering Group and chair of the Jisc Collections Journal Archives Advisory Board.
He is currently undertaking a Doctor of Enterprise at the University of Huddersfield, which is looking at the viability of the University Press as an Open Access publisher.
Ellen Collins Research Consultant Research Information Network Email: ellen.collins@researchinfonet.org Web site: http://www.researchinfonet.org/ Ellen Collins is a Research Consultant at the Research Information Network, where she has initiated, developed and managed projects for clients including academic publishers, librarians, funders and policymakers.
She is particularly interested in how researchers find, use and share information, and the ways that their behaviour is changing in response to new communications platforms and business models.
She has worked on a number of projects around researcher use of Web 2.0, and is currently working with several publishers to explore the research community’s aspirations around open access.
She is also the lead researcher on OAPEN-UK, a collaborative research project to explore open access scholarly monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
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Book Review: Managing Research Data Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Managing Research Data Buzz data framework wiki infrastructure archives doi identifier blog repositories curation foi research Citation BibTex RIS Sally Rumsey reviews a book which describes and explains the topics of interest central to practitioners involved with research data management.
Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in the UK are planning and implementing infrastructure and services to manage research data more urgently than they did for research publications.
One policy framework sent to UK vice-chancellors from a major UK funding body (EPSRC), which set out clear expectations of responsibilities for data management at institutions within a given timetable, appears to have been the spark that prompted research data management (RDM) to be taken up by the upper echelons of management, and concrete activities set in place to start addressing the problem.
Setting Out the Context RDM provision will incur significant extra cost to institutions at a time of shrinking budgets.
Despite this, institutions are taking the matter very seriously.
This is because there are a number of critical factors that have forced institutions to consider RDM provision a core issue.
Theey include the emergence and subsequent policing of research funders’ requirements, the fact that there are few existing institutional safe archival stores for research data, the realization that researchers do not generally have easy access to other researchers’ data in the same way that many of them do to journal articles, and that key journals are increasingly demanding a reliable citation to research data underpinning articles.
Moreover, there have been a couple of recent high-profile negative data stories in the national press, for example, the so-named ‘Climategate’ incident, and the tree ring data collected by an academic at Queen’s University, Dublin and requested under a Freedom of Information request [1][2].
Also, as Proctor et al.
state in chapter 7 of Managing Research Data, institutions are aware of the risks to their reputation if they do not in future ‘provide a fit-for-purpose research data management service.’ It is accepted that there are possible ways of using research funding to pay for RDM services, but this does not resolve the entire sustainability problem.
Basically, RDM is something most institutions recognise they must do, even though they are wrestling with how they will fund provision in the long term.
A Practical Guide Managing Research Data opens with information about the significant financial investment made in the UK to produce research data.
It goes on to describe the data landscape that faces those involved in managing research data, particularly information professionals.
The book serves as an excellent practical primer and guide to the world of RDM, especially for those coming fresh to this topic.
In addition, existing information professionals who find themselves working in the area of RDM would benefit from consulting the book.
Chapter 1 would make a worthy item on library and information courses’ ‘required reading’ lists.
It sets out the context clearly, complete with the dilemmas, difficulties and complexity that anyone involved with research data has to tackle.
It is written with a sensitive understanding of the academic community and its viewpoints, for example a general distaste for high-level decrees, and how data curation can often work best as a collaborative effort between discipline expert and data curators.
It is accepted (in chapter 7) that a combination of provision of RDM services within HEIs with data management mandates imposed by other bodies is not enough to change research practice overnight.
The structure of the book is that each chapter covers a broad topic relevant to research data management, such as policies, roles and responsibilities, and data management planning; the editor and authors should be commended for creating a volume that does this in a way that is clear, concise and of real practical value.
The complexity of the landscape is acknowledged, including the impact of dealing with sensitive data.
It is inevitable in a book such as this that it provides a general, largely theoretical view.
What those involved with RDM face daily is the more messy, real-life situations.
For example, the expectation is that the large amounts of data are influenced by policies and requirements for data management plans imposed by funders.
However the reality is that some institutions are faced with data produced by research that is unfunded and therefore not governed by external policies, or that is not, for whatever reason, able to be deposited in a specialist national data centre.
Institutions need to work out what to do in these instances: what is to be retained, how to manage it, and how to pay for its curation.
Sarah Higgins describes the data management lifecycle, as conceptualised by the DCC (Digital Curation Centre) [3].
The discussion of the separate stages of the lifecycle could each stand perfectly well as independent briefings for those wanting a short overview.
The chapter describing developments in Australia and the US provides a contrast to the overall UK perspective of the book.
It gives a useful overview of different models for broaching the problem of data management.
I always admire the Australians and their propensity to think big, roll up their sleeves and act.
There is a lot we in the UK can learn from what has been achieved and is planned on the other side of the world.
The section on the US was interesting too, although it wasn’t clear how, if at all, DataOne relates to Data Conservancy, nor was it clear (as it was with the Australian model) how the US developments are being funded and how they therefore might continue in the long term.
Who Should Read This Book?
In the preface, the editor, Graham Pryor, explains that ‘initially, the aim of this book was to introduce and familiarise the library and information professional with the principal elements of research data management.’ He goes on to say that he believes it will serve a wider audience.
I definitely agree, although I doubt that one group, active researchers who produce data, will read the book themselves (although I’d be delighted to be proved wrong).
Each chapter of the book provides a succinct and clear overview of key areas involved in RDM.
Most notably, the chapters on policies, sustainability, emerging infrastructure and on data management planning.
One topic I would like to have seen expanded is that of legal matters, rights, licensing and data ownership.
These are areas that, as Angus Whyte says ‘represent the most significant barrier to sharing data.’ Therefore this topic would merit longer discourse within the book.
Legal matters are key to the management and reuse of data and where there is a certain lack of knowledge.
Practitioners implementing RDM infrastructures need to ensure adequate provision of information and guidance.
As Brian Lavoie points out in his chapter, researchers have generally lacked incentives to store, manage, curate and share their data.
This is a key point.
The situation does appear to be changing, and reliable data citation is becoming more important.
The DataCite service [4] and the use of DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) [5] are becoming de facto standards for identifying and referencing data.
I believe that this is going to become more accepted, and researchers will soon expect datasets to be published and cited using persistent identifiers and links.
I have a bit of a gripe about the tables and diagrams in the book.
Table 3.1 giving details of research funders’ data policies is not laid out in a way that makes it easy to compare policy details.
The shading in figure 9.3 showing the OAIS and Data Conservancy mapping is not clear, neither was the explanation of the diagram in the text.
The reader is referred to nodes depicted as triangles and dots in the diagram demonstrating the conceptual overview of DataOne (Fig.
9.4), but they are too small to be immediately noticeable or useful.
Conclusion This is an excellent book for anyone, not just information professionals, looking to ‘introduce and familiarize’ (Pryor, in the preface) themselves with a complex and challenging, yet increasingly important topic.
The book benefits from a prestigious line-up of knowledgeable authors, including those who are actually ‘doing’ research and research data management.
As an edited volume it fits well together as a single entity even though written by a number of individuals: chapters reference other chapters and the reader is not left with a sense of a ‘cobbled-together’ mix of disparate topics from different people.
The content can equally well be dipped into, as read from cover to cover.
There is always a danger with this type of book that the environment will have moved on since writing and publication, and indeed it has, with a fresh batch of JISC RDM [6] projects underway and significant reports being published.
There are also emerging social network services such as collaboration tools like Colwiz [7] and Mendeley [8], sharing tools like Figshare [9], as well as blogs and wikis that are being increasingly used by researchers and which will have an impact on the research data management environment.
However, I expect this book will remain a valuable resource for those working or intending to work in the field for some while yet.
List of Chapters 1.
Why manage research data?
Graham Pryor 2.
The lifecycle of data management Sarah Higgins 3.
Research data policies: principles, requirements and trends Sarah Jones 4.
Sustainable research data Brian F. Lavoie 5.
Data management plans and planning Martin Donnelly 6.
Roles and responsibilities – libraries, librarians and data Sheila Corrall 7.
Research data management: opportunities and challenges for HEIs Rob Procter, Peter     Halfpenny and Alex Voss 8.
The national data centres Ellen Collins 9.
Contrasting national research data strategies: Australia and the USA Andrew Treloar, William     Michener and G Sayeed Choudhury 10.
Emerging infrastructure and services for research data management and curation in the UK       and Europe Angus Whyte References BBC News, 'Show Your Working': What 'ClimateGate' means.
1 December 2009  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8388485.stm BBC News, University told to hand over tree ring data.
19 April 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8623417.stm DCC (Digital Curation Centre) http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ DataCite http://datacite.org/ DOI (Digital Object Identifiers) system http://www.doi.org/ JISC RDM http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd.aspx Colwiz, Collective Wisdom http://www.colwiz.com/ Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/ Figshare http://figshare.com/ Author Details Sally Rumsey The Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford Email: sally.rumsey@bodleian.ox.ac.uk Web site: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ Sally Rumsey is Digital Collections Development Manager at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
She manages the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) publications repository, and is involved in  developing and implementing services to support Oxford’s emerging research data management infrastructure.
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The Future of the Past of the Web Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Future of the Past of the Web Buzz data software api dissemination archives metadata doi digitisation browser identifier blog repositories flickr preservation visualisation cache aggregation uri ulcc curation wordpress youtube twitter lod interoperability algorithm url research warc Citation BibTex RIS Matthew Brack reports on the one-day international workshop 'The Future of the Past of the Web' held at the British Library Conference Centre, London on 7 October, 2011.
We have all heard at least some of the extraordinary statistics that attempt to capture the sheer size and ephemeral nature of the Web.
According to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), more than 70 new domains are registered and more than 500,000 documents are added to the Web every minute [1].
This scale, coupled with its ever-evolving use, present significant challenges to those concerned with preserving both the content and context of the Web.
Co-organised by the DPC, the British Library and JISC, this workshop was the third in a series of discussions around the nature and potential of Web archiving.
Following the key note address, two thematic sessions looked at ‘Using Web Archives’ (as it is only recently that use cases have started to emerge) and ‘Emerging Trends’ (acknowledging that Web archiving activities are on the increase, along with a corresponding rise in public awareness).
Keynote Herbert van der Sompel, The Memento Project The keynote address presented a solution to navigating the Web in the past, and how this might be applied to the preservation and examination of the scholarly record.
The Memento Project aims to provide a solution to a basic problem: the Web was built with the notion of the 'perpetual now' [2], and at any moment in time it is only possible to obtain the current representation of a resource through a URI.
When using a past resource, you cannot navigate in the past; the links take you to current versions of resources, rather than providing the contemporary context.
The Memento Project seeks to tackle this problem by bridging the gap between an 'original' resource (for which we want to find a prior version) and a prior resource (or 'memento') by introducing a ‘TimeGate’ that provides an intermediary resource linking them at the level of HTTP protocol.
Working tools are already available, with a browser plug-in that allows you simply to select a date from time.
William Kilbride opens proceedings.
The characteristic of publications from the ‘paper era’ are that they are frozen in time.
This has changed with the advent of the Web: now we are not only citing a paper, but also Web resources, which both exist within a broader Web context.
All of this is subject to the blight of the ‘eternal now’, in that you can only see a publication in its current context.
Is it possible to recreate context from the time of publication?
Currently we can’t recreate that context because we are only archiving the papers themselves.
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) provide redirection for link persistence to documents, but redirections change and new resources emerge; the browser only sees the current redirection and not the previous resource we wanted.
You therefore need a TimeGate for the DOI itself, providing a link to the right resource.
In conclusion, Herbert stated that we should be looking beyond the papers themselves and towards the context that surrounds them, and this is crucial for examining the scholarly record.
Herbert van der Sompel takes questions on the Memento Project.
Using Web Archives Web Archiving: The State of the Art and the Future Eric Meyer, Oxford Internet Institute Recent research [3] by the Oxford Internet Institute [4] reveals that there is reason to be dissatisfied with a ‘persistent gap’ between researchers and the creation of Web archives.
There is a fear that Web archives could become the ‘dusty archives’ of the future.
This is ironic, since so many of the dusty archives of the world are now being moved onto the Web.
What steps can be taken to engage researchers?
Core user groups (historians and social scientists) appear to lack both engagement and understanding concerning Web archives.
This is a challenge: we acquire disciplinary bias early in our careers, which discourages innovation, and Web archives are not part of that acquired scholarly behaviour.
Yet there are massive events going on in the world; and if a scholar is interested in collecting evidence from the Web of what is happening, the pity is that most people do not know how.
We need someone to help people archive this material on an individual basis and develop ways to engage collecting.
Enhancing Access to Web Archives: Web Continuity at the National Archives Amanda Spencer and Tom Storrar, The National Archives Amanda and Tom explained that The National Archives (TNA) started archiving UK Government Web sites in 2003.
Initially this provided only a ‘snapshot’ of Government Web publications, but now includes all government departmental groups, public enquiries, royal commissions, and even some NHS Web sites.
Parliamentary librarians noted early on that URLs cited in UK Government publications could no longer be found, prompting TNA to develop the Web Continuity Initiative for link persistence within important government information, employing software to redirect users to the UK Government Web Archive [5].
Having identified the limitations of their current conventional search solution, a semantic search is being developed, launching next year with a user interface for non-technical users, and an API for developers.
Case Study: Researchers and the UK Web Archive Project Peter Webster, Institute of Historical Research Peter Webster presented a curatorial view of Web archiving, describing examples of guest curation in the UK Web Archive [6], covering subjects such as: independent artist-led organisations, digital storytelling and the politics of religion in the UK since 7/7 [7].
Web sites of interest are those which attempt to represent previous ages, and touch upon history and the media, or those which illustrate major events, new developments in national life, and older movements that are ending.
The implications of legal deposit will be significant: if new legislation is passed next year this will remove difficulties over permissions.
Currently, only 25-30% of requests for archiving are successful.
Legal deposit would mean more comprehensiveness, but the focus then shifts from selection to curation.
He felt there was an opportunity to use the crowd; the social media tools are there for users to browse and tag materials that they find interesting.
Emerging Trends Analytical Access to the UK Web Archive Maureen Pennock and Lewis Crawford, British Library Data mining is on its way and real user value means data-level exploitation of Web archive content.
Instead of page level access, a new interface now has more access options, including a 3D visualisation wall, word cloud access to special collections and an N-gram search function for instances of terms over time.
By extracting the metadata behind images, there is also an enhanced image search.
Collections are curated before they are collected, so they are broken down into various subject headings.
It is a relatively small archive, containing only 1% of UK domains.
To demonstrate data mining, 42,000,000 relationships were identified between Web pages and post codes.
This then revealed the density of post code records across the UK.
If, for example, they were filtered by a category like ‘business’ and some associations disappeared between 2007-2009, could it be possible to map the recession?
Emerging Trends and New Developments at the Internet Archive Kris Carpenter, Internet Archive Kris Carpenter presented a forward-looking perspective on the Internet Archive’s activities [8].
She identified two trends: first, individuals produce 70-80% of Web content; second, everyone wants to pull together the resources they use.
How do we address diverse modes of access?
The Internet Archive is trying to develop scalable architecture to mine data on a large scale to get clues about the content within a resource.
There’s an interest in taking a wide range of data types and making them available, but how do you make them a part of the broader ecosystem?
In the case of social networking, how will we represent it for examination twenty years from now?
Collecting this content is easy, the challenge is re-rendering it from an archive to show the original resource by which it was referenced.
You need a hybrid architecture that reveals all the elements required to re-render a resource (often composed of around 35 different files).
So far, the Internet Archive has identified 200-300 million unique entities that they could represent as aggregations for study.
The Arcomem Project: Intelligent Digital Curation and Preservation for Community Memories Wim Peters, University of Sheffield There are a number of challenges in archiving the social Web: there are many communities; there is uncertainty of future demand; and the technical challenges are significant.
You can’t rely on a collect-all approach, it needs to be filtered and measured against criteria of demand: community memories that reflect communities’ interests.
What is a reasonable way to create valuable collective memories?
Arcomem is trying solve this by relying on crowds for intelligent content appraisal, selection, and preservation [9].
The overall aim is to create an incrementally enriched Web archive that allows access to various types of Web content in a semantically meaningful way.
The main challenge is to extract, detect and correlate events and related information from a large number of varied Web resources.
Archivists can select content by describing their interests by using reference content, or by a high-level description of relevant entities.
Arcomem will be interoperable with external resources with linked open data, event and entity models.
BlogForever Project Richard Davis and Ed Pinsent, ULCC BlogForever is an EU-funded blog archive [10].
Some might consider blogging ‘old hat’, but it appears that this particular communications paradigm is here to stay.
You can preserve the content of a blog page, but somehow it’s not the same as it is in its original context.
The objective of BlogForever is to develop robust digital preservation management and dissemination facilities, while capturing the rich essence of blogs.
The outcomes are the definition of a generic data model for blog content metadata and semantics, as well as the definition of digital preservation strategies for blogs.
Unstructured blog information is collected and then given a shape that can be interrogated in all sorts of ways.
A survey was conducted of bloggers’ attitudes to preservation: 90% never used an external service to preserve their blog, but relied on the blog provider for preservation; 30% used re-mixed data, so this could raise permissions issues.
The result will be a Weblog digital archiving solution.
Web Archiving: A Commercial Perspective Mark Williamson, Hanzo Archives Hanzo Archives, and several other companies, are now offering commercial archiving services, confirming commercial interest in the field [11].
Commercial organisations are beginning to worry about research problems and many of their Web pages are extremely complicated.
Companies have large amounts of digital data and are interested in discoverable content, such as trying to pull out social identities.
The new trend emerging in the last few months is that people are coming to commercial archives wanting to collect not just for the sake of the content, but because they are interested in data and scale.
Notably, they perceive the term ‘archive’ as an old word, a dead word.
In many cases the individual pages are pretty dull, but it’s about the big data.
There is a huge tide of these data, and there are not enough archives to collect them.
Hanzo will be opening up tools via an API to bring Web archiving to everybody in the near future.
Panel Session & Discussion: What is to be done, why and by whom?
Are Web archives heading in the right direction?
Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre opened the panel session, remarking that in many ways the expectations held during the last discussion two years ago have been exceeded: what we want to do we can do, in some cases we have gone beyond.
Thinking of the Web as data can help to address the problem that we can’t keep everything.
Perhaps in some cases we can afford just to keep the wrappers around content, showing us what links to what, rather than exactly what was said.
Is there a role for these stripped-down cases?
Access isn’t about a new user interface, it’s about prompting different means and methods for access.
Kevin Ashley leads off the panel session and discussion.
Martha Anderson from the Library of Congress (LOC) commented that no one can serve up the whole of Twitter (not even Twitter themselves), and so of course the whole of the Web will not survive.
Web pages as a medium are already dying and the idea of a Web page is similar to our idea of a bound book; we find it very hard to imagine something with which we are so familiar changing before our very eyes.
This revelation came for the Library of Congress during a project to document the Japanese tsunami [12].
LOC staff found that it was the social media that told the story, not Web pages constructed to commemorate the disaster.
What people are interested in is becoming more and more granular.
In Web archiving our practice is shaped by the media with which we are dealing.
Why hasn’t anyone mentioned Google?
Kris Carpenter noted that Google has been able to preserve its original search engine code.
Computer scientists in the US are also interested in working on the now defunct Altavista search code.
Herbert van der Sompel added that there is certainly confusion in the user experience within Web archives, especially with different versions of the same documents.
The technology that Google has already displayed to help put search results under one heading would be better, rather than sending users straight into an archive to become lost.
At that level, one could use search engines more to access archives, it’s not asking for a huge leap to take place since the technology already exists.
Though search engines play a role in search, they don’t play a role in Web archiving.
You can’t use their cache programmatically.
They could play a larger role, but currently do not.
Does the decentralised Web mean more individual archiving?
Peter Webster wondered that, while the Web is decentralised on an individual level, has the Web centralised on a community level?
Martha Anderson answered that people used to have personal Web sites, now they have blogs that serve as an aggregation facility for many of them.
When Library of Congress staff started archiving, they were collecting pages, because they thought people would be looking at pages.
They also found that when researchers came, they were not interested in pages and pictures, but brought scripts on pen drives that they ran across the aggregate.
We see this accelerated now with apps on portables because the Web pages do not exist anymore; the data is pulled from them and delivered instead.
With so many more people creating content now, does this mean that they will be more concerned about archiving?
The BlogForever survey said that 90% of bloggers thought their blog provider would preserve their blog.
What do we say to them?
We have said: ‘You realise your blog won’t be preserved at the moment,’ to scare them, and now we want to focus on the positive aspects.
How do we bring in these users?
Martha Anderson, Director of Program Management at the Digital Preservation Program, Library of Congress, reported that her programme discovered several years ago that it was fine to convince congressmen that this was important but they needed grass-roots advocacy, so they introduced personal digital archiving.
They have talked to thousands of people, often focusing on personal photographs, saying, ‘You need to think about what you really care about and take some measures.’ Perhaps some day we’ll see posters on buses that say, ‘Preserve!
Are you saving your digital stuff?’ But there is a cultural barrier: many people don’t think this is important enough to campaign for.
Personal digital archiving is probably the way to go – one person at a time getting the message out.
Should we approach providers?
William Kilbride of the DPC wondered about a gap regarding Google, or YouTube, or Flickr: all it takes is for Flickr to switch off and everything disappears.
Should we be doing more in that space, too?
Kevin Ashley responded that, while one approach is that you go to providers, the other is that you go to individuals and say, ‘If that’s where you’re storing it, in Flickr, it’s not safe.’ It’s been found that during a presentation of these issues to 8-9-year-olds, they understood the risk to digital content, and the awareness was there.
At one point there were some companies which had been targeting individual bloggers – offering a permanent archive of their blog for a one-off sum of money.
This was actually patented.
Are those companies still here now?
And did they make any money?
Kris Carpenter added that there are some changes in private sector thinking about these issues, because the consumer has started wanting to archive: Wordpress has been interested in developing tools that allow a user to ask for their blog to be archived to a specific repository.
The time is right to take the lead in this community – not forcing archiving on anyone but presenting the option.
Having worked on this for ten years, what should we now focus on?
Helen Hockx-Yu, Web Archiving Programme Manager at the British Library, asked where the focus of our efforts in this field should now lie.
Martha Anderson provided an example of the organisation Global Voices [13], which collects citizen blogs from countries involved in the Arab Spring and events all over the world.
Its representatives visited the Library of Congress with concerns about preserving their content.
It was a curated collection, but they were not librarians or archivists, and they were concerned.
There was the potential: hundreds of blogs in one collection that don’t need to be looked at; people should take advantage of the community out there, and take a broader approach.
Rather than using a single interface for the whole Web, we could encourage communities to devise bespoke methods for access.
The bridge between institutions and communities is not as strong as it could be.
Are librarians happy with tools for automated selection?
Herbert van der Sompel echoed the day’s prediction that data mining will be ‘really big,’ adding that this was not to advocate against keeping traditional navigation.
Kevin Ashley recalled that at the first DPC discussion on this in 2002, there was already an algorithm better than human selection.
Now we have far better technology, yet there’s a feeling that somehow we can’t quite trust this in libraries and archives.
It’s not that there is no role for humans, but we have these technologies, and in ten years not that much has changed since it is still not accepted by librarians.
Do we need standards?
Neil Grindley, Digital Preservation Programme Manager at JISC, asked whether, despite the grand challenges and the divergence in how we need to work illustrated by the preceding talks, we should also look at developing standards.
There were lots of ways of doing this, should we think about convergence?
We’ve got WARC (Web ARChive) format [14], do we need more?
Helen Hockx-Yu briefly updated us on the fact that both ISO and BSI have been working on things, putting together a report that could be used to assess Web archives, though probably more from a service provision point of view.
It is work in progress.
What are the next steps?
William Kilbride questioned Eric Meyer directly about his thoughts for the future.
His response was that there is a lot of room for optimism, certainly based on the  examples presented at this workshop.
The next step is to get such examples into communities that can see uses for them.
Time and again, the best way to communicate this is for peers to present to each other within the same domain.
It’s difficult to just be shown these tools, but if you present it to historians as a way of answering a historical question, for example, then there may be more uptake.
Those are the next steps.
It needs to percolate out to those who will dream up lots of clever things to do with these archives given the right tools and incentives.
Conclusion As Mark Williamson of Hanzo Archives put it during his talk, the Web is the first medium in history that has no way of being inherently ‘kept’; yet it is where the majority of human creation is now happening.
The significance and potential of Web archiving was reflected in the large number of delegates from all over Europe and the United States in attendance, many of whom noted their appreciation of the range and depth of the presentations.
While large technological advances have been made and ambitious projects exist to tackle the intricacies of Web archiving (in particular the social Web), it’s clear that there is concern about the uptake of these advanced technologies in host institutions and the apparent gap between Web archives and their primary user groups.
In particular, most of the presentations alluded to the emergence of the analysis of large data aggregates extracted from Web archives, which was not a widely considered use during the initial Web archive developmental phase some ten years ago.
Having identified these challenges, it was widely accepted that we are in the midst of a new phase in Web archiving which offered many opportunities for growth, evolution and user engagement.
This was a well-organised, informative and motivating day that provided the delegate with some powerful means and incentives to push Web archiving forward.
References Future of the Past of the Web DPC workshop event page http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/35-future_past_Web?xref=35 The Memento Project: Adding Time to the Web http://www.mementoWeb.org/ Dougherty, M., Meyer, E.T., Madsen, C., Van den Heuvel, C., Thomas, A. and Wyatt, S., “Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: State of the Art”, Final Report for the JISC-funded project ‘Researcher Engagement with Web Archives’, 2010 http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/544/ The Oxford Internet Institute http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ UK Government Web Archive http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/Webarchive/ The UK Web Archive http://www.Webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/ Editor’s note: ‘7/7’ a short-hand form (similar to the US ‘9/11’) for the multiple terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13301195 The Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine http://www.archive.org/ The Arcomem Project http://www.arcomem.eu/ BlogForever – FP7 EU Project http://blogforever.eu/ Hanzo Archives – Leading Social Media and Website Archiving http://www.hanzoarchives.com/ Editor’s note: Japan earthquake: The path of the tsunami, BBC News, 14 March 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12735023 Japan earthquake: Meltdown alert at Fukushima reactor, BBC News, 14 March 2011  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12733393 Global Voices – Citizen media stories from around the world http://globalvoicesonline.org/ WARC (Web ARChive) format http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000236.shtml Author Details Matthew Brack MA Digital Asset Management King’s College London Email: matthew.brack@kcl.ac.uk Web site: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh Matthew Brack is a student on the MA in Digital Asset Management at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, and works as Digitisation Support Officer at the Wellcome Library.
His current research focuses on bridging the gap between digital content and the user, and innovation within digital collections.
He blogs on these topics at: http://mattbrack.blogspot.com/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Seb Schmoller Replies Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Seb Schmoller Replies Buzz software archives blog copyright video e-learning adl twitter licence ict research mooc Citation BibTex RIS Stepping down from his pivotal role as CEO at ALT, Seb Schmoller kindly answers a few questions from Ariadne on his perspective on online learning.
Ariadne: Seb, please tell us a little about yourself.
I’ve lived in the same house in Sheffield since 1976, having moved here from London via Cambridge in 1975.
Between 1978 and 2002 I worked in Further Education.
I did two main things.
Between 1978 and 1996 I mainly ran and developed courses for trade union representatives under the auspices of the TUC Education Service.
Between 1996 and 2002 when I was made voluntarily redundant in a reorganisation, I was The Sheffield College’s Learning Technology Development Manager, responsible with others for developing Learning To Teach On-Line (LeTTOL) [1], an early online course about how to be on online tutor.
I then combined independent work and half-time employment with the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) [2] for nearly 10 years from 2003 until May this year, when, having hit 60, I decided to take my teacher’s pension and become a bit more of a free agent.
Ariadne:   How did you first come to be involved in online learning?
I bought a two floppy disk Amstrad PCW in 1985 mainly for word-processing, and for trade union work.
(I was very involved in my union NATFHE, and in what was at that time known as the “hazards movement”, campaigning for better regulation of occupational safety health and supporting workplace trade union representatives who deal with the hazards of work.)
In the early 1990s I was fortunate to be asked by the TUC to run the UK end of a European project called TUDIC.
The aim of TUDIC, which was led by LO Denmark with LO Sweden (each the equivalent of the TUC) and UNI?C [3](which played a similar role to JISC in the UK), was to use “computer conferencing” in the creation and then running of an online course for trade union representatives about European integration.
This was my first exposure to working online and to online distance education.
Ariadne:   One recalls the struggles of other educators with early ICT that was never designed to meet their requirements.
How user-friendly was yours, and how did you and your students cope?
For TUDIC we used a conferencing system called PortaCOM, originally developed by the Swede Jacob Palme [4].
The nice thing about it was that UNI?C [3] provided us with some handy client software (called BettyCom) which handled the otherwise tortuous login process, and which provided a well-organised front-end to PortaCOM through which users interacted with PortaCOM.
What’s more, BettyCOM created for the user a local archive of messages, which allowed users to work off line.
This entirely got away from the need for users to work from a command line interface, which was common in many other conferencing systems from that time.
Ariadne:   What sort of online learning was there before there was the Web?
Yes, these were pre-web days.
If you worked in a university you might have had a networked PC on your desk, which might have been connected to the Internet.
In homes and ordinary workplaces, connected PCs were rare, and getting online was complicated and very expensive.
In the case of TUDIC, we each connected through a 2400 Baud modem to a “point of presence” (in our case the point of presence – for all the UK learners was a BT phone line in Rotherham).
There being no Web, there was not the mass of learning resources “out there”.
Online learners had to rely on what they themselves created, on paper-based materials, and on texts provided as part of their course.
Ariadne:  Despite, to newcomers’ eyes, the limited capabilities at that time, what prompted you to get so involved in online learning?
I became sold on it because I could see how productive even a primitive system of the kind described was for learners; how much effort being an online learner engendered, and how enthusiastic learners were for the medium.
And though with hindsight I can see that what we had was primitive, it did not seem so at the time.
Figure 1: Content from the pre-Web online course for shop stewards in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK about European integration in a posting on our PortaCOM Conferencing System Ariadne:  With the benefit of hindsight, how important do you feel the LeTTOL Project was to the development of online learning?
I’m not the best person to answer this question, and to the best of my knowledge there’s been no empirical work done on the impact of LeTTOL course, apart from an evaluation that we commissioned in 2001 from Adam Warren at the University of Southampton [5].
It was an unusual course for that time, and not just for FE, since it had  tutors in the UK, Australia, and Canada, together with a proper case-loading system where tutors were paid or given time according to the number of learners they were supporting.
A large number of people undertook it, from all over the world, and it still runs, albeit on a much smaller scale than during the early 2000s.
And The Sheffield College has made a particular success of applying the LeTTOL approach to the design of online courses to a wide range of courses from NVQ level 1 to 5.
A recent example includes the College’s recently launched course entitled “Human Trafficking Uncovered” [6].
Ariadne:  How does Open Content fit into the development of online learning in your view?
It depends on what you mean by Open Content.
In point of fact LeTTOL used David Wiley’s Open Content licence [7] almost from the start, and the absence of imitators taught me that it is not the content but the process of running an online course that is where an organisation’s main IP resides.
Moreover, despite the success of LeTTOL, as far as I know no-one reused the content, though they could have done, convincing me that the risks of “going Open” are misunderstood as well as over-stated.
Of course the world has changed since the late 1990s and the obvious point to make is that the Web as a content-rich searchable open environment for learning makes the learning resources side of course design much more straightforward, with the focus needing to be more on the design of learning activities than on the instructional content.
(An exception here might be in the design of courses that rely on carefully structured sequences of instructional video or context-related explanation which are likely to need creating from scratch.)
Figure 2: Copyright statement from the LeTTOL course Ariadne:  How important in your view has been the role of the Association for Learning Technology in the evolution of online learning?
I’ve been too closely involved in ALT for too long to have any kind of objective view about this, so I will pass on this one.
Ariadne:  What do you consider to be the most important things you have learned in your work in this field?
I would say: Concentrate on process more than on content.
Iterate.
This means that you should not separate content creation from running courses, and that you need to use feedback from courses in use to influence future versions of a course.
Understand that it is the learners who have to do the learning.
Two powerful quotes support this:  1) Learning is inherently lifelong and life-wide: Figure 3: Learning is life-wide and lifelong This diagram by Professor Roy Pea at Stanford elegantly demonstrates how, from a citizen’s point of view, such a tiny proportion of life is spent in a formal learning environment, and how relatively more important (in terms of available time) is the informal learning environment.
and in contrast to models such as this: Figure 4: ADL and the Sharable Content Object Reference Model [8] 2) Unlike pizza, learning cannot be delivered.
Instead we must at all times remember that effort by learners is a necessary but insufficient condition for learning, and that it is learners not teachers that create learning.
For me these further two quotes serve as touchstones; the first is:  Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks.
The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.
Herb Simon while the second occurred during the 2007 ALT Conference:  ..  the big trap is that teachers do not create learning.
That’s true—teachers do not create learning, and yet most teachers behave as if they do.
Learners create learning.
Teachers create the conditions under which learning can take place.
Dylan Wiliam I think this perspective is very important when thinking about the role of markets and the private sector in education, since markets tend to work well where the value of what is bought is clear at the start.
That is simply not the case where learning is concerned, since the value of your learning depends on you.
Separately there are broader issues about the responsibilities of the state to ensure that citizens are educated, and the unsuitability of the market to ensure this.
Finally: Strive to innovate with an eye on the steady state funding that will be available if your innovation is successful, rather than with an eye on the next grant.
Ariadne:  What in your view have been the most successful developments in online learning over recent years, whether they are technical organisational in nature, or indeed something else?
Peter Norvig’s and Sebastian Thrun’s mass online AI course was for me a complete eye-opener.
The very striking thing about the course (which I know because I spent five to 10 hours a week for 10 weeks as one of its students last year) was that despite its 160,000 enrolments, 50,000-plus active students and 20,000 completers, the course made us learners feel that we were receiving one-to-one instruction from Norvig and Thrun.
As Rob Rambusch, a fellow student of mine, put it: "The class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who is explaining something you haven't yet grasped but are about to."
The course engendered focused and mass engagement in learning at extremely low cost.
It is this above all that justifies the attention that MOOCS and other large-scale learning technologies are now getting.
Ariadne:  Whom do you consider the most influential contributors to this field?
Placing them in no particular order other than alphabetical, I would suggest: Donald Clark (for his iconoclastic and challenging melding of learning theory with practical and business-related insights); Stephen Downes: because of the extraordinary way in which he has steadily and systematically documented and played a part in initiating developments in our field; John Daniels: for continuing to contribute profound insights into how to organise Higher Education, world-wide, at scale; Diana Laurillard: because of her book Rethinking University Teaching and her more recent work on teaching as a design science; Robin Mason RIP: for doing a lot of the ground-work about online distance learning – see, for example her and Tony Kaye’s 1990 Mindweave – Communication, Computers and Distance Education; Eric Mazur: for managing to combine leadership in a theoretical field with leadership in the teaching of that field, with public work to change for the better teaching and learning more generally; Sugata Mitra: because of the continuous freshness of his thinking, and for his focus on the learning not the teaching; Peter Norvig: because of the open and accessible way in which he makes hard-core computer science intelligible to the layperson; Diane Ravitch: for her tireless defence of the underlying principle that education is a public good; Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales: for bringing Wikipedia to fruition; Aaron Sloman: for his work on computational thinking; Sherry Turkle and Jaron Lanier: for challenging – from different perspectives – the assumptions that are made about technology as a force for good; Sebastian Thrun: for having had the ‘bottle’, with Peter Norvig, to envisage and then create the ‘Stanford’ online AI course; Audrey Watters: because of how she astutely mixes the technical, political, business and personal in her writing about learning technology; David Weinberger: because he understood so early the way that the Web would affect how we organise and access information, writing about it with wit and clarity; Dylan Wiliam: for his work on formative and summative assessment, and on strategies and methods to improve learning more generally.
Ariadne:  As you step away from all your work with ALT, how do you see the shape of online learning at the present moment?
I think that the take-off of MOOCs and the interest they have generated has finally put online learning – and hence the Learning Technology field – centre-stage in thinking about the long-term future and structure of publicly available education.
Ariadne:  Do you consider that MOOCs realistically represent a major improvement in the education chances of people in developing countries with basic connectivity – or is this just hype?
Yes, undoubtedly, as some of the stories told by Sebastian Thrun about learners in, say, Pakistan, demonstrate.
Clay Shirky has also recently written persuasively about this issue from the angle of how MOOCs represent a major improvement in the education chances of people who would otherwise attend a not very illustrious college: In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class.
Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it.
And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.
If this happens, Harvard will be fine.
Yale will be fine, and Stanford, and Swarthmore, and Duke.
But Bridgerland Applied Technology College?
[9] Ariadne:  What do you consider to be the chief difficulties currently confronting institutions in respect of online learning?
Doing things at a big enough scale to be cost-effective and in a way that does not involve parallel invention of the same wheel in many places at once.
Ariadne:  Finally, Seb, if we asked you to place the developments in your field in the context of the history of publishing and scholarly endeavour, what degree of importance would you attach to it?
When we look down at the surface of the road we are on we are so close to it that it rushes past in a blur, making it impossible easily to judge what is important.
But if you stand back you can see that the ‘Internet and computing revolution’ is now affecting profoundly the formal and informal learning of hundreds of millions of people, despite the fact that it is only 20 years since the invention of the Web.
At the same time – and the diagram below attempts to illustrate this – we are talking about an extremely recent phenomenon within the overall sweep of human history.
Figure 5: My diagram prompted by a discussion of a thought experiment by the biologist John Maynard Smith in The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.
[10] So for the moment we’ll have to live with the contradiction that: 1) it is far too early to say; and 2) developments in the learning technology field are very profound.
References LeTTOL at The Sheffield College http://www.online.sheffcol.ac.uk/index.cfm?ParentID=7f6d8400-59f1-45ae-b10d-03b0b3f97d8b About the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)  http://www.alt.ac.uk/about-alt UNI•C, The Danish IT Centre for Education and Research http://www.uni-c.dk/generelt/english/ Jacob Palme.
History of the KOM Computer Conferencing System, First version May 1990.
Latest revision: 22 October 2000 http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/s1/history-of-KOM.html Adam Warren.
"An evaluation of the LeTTOL course".
7 February 2001 http://schmoller.net/documents/LeTTOL_evaluation_by_Adam_Warren_2001.pdf Human Trafficking Uncovered, The Online College, The Sheffield College, July 2012  http://www.online.sheffcol.ac.uk/index.cfm?pid=d4222c09-7b8d-452c-9121-0e8173874946 OpenContent: OpenContent License (OPL) Version 1.0, July 14, 1998 http://web.archive.org/web/19990129013417/http://www.opencontent.org/opl.shtml Source of Figure 4: ADL via Norm Friesen and from: Slosser, S. (2001) "ADL and the Sharable Content Object Reference Model."
MERLOT 2001.
Clay Shirky.
Napster, Udacity, and the Academy.
Clay Shirky blog, 12 November 2012 http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/ Richard Sennett.
The Craftsman.
Penguin, February 2009, paperback, 336 pp ISBN-13: 978-0141022093.
Interviewee Details Seb Schmoller independent online learning and e-learning consultancy Email: seb@schmoller.net Web site: http://www.schmoller.net/ Fortnightly Mailing: http://fm.schmoller.net/ Twitter: @sebschmoller Seb Schmoller has been actively involved in online learning since the early 1990s.
Between 1996 and 2002 he led The Sheffield College's successful efforts to develop online courses in a range of subjects including on how to be an online tutor.
From 2003 until May 2012 Seb worked for the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), the UK's leading membership organisation in the learning technology field, latterly as ALT's Chief Executive.
Seb is a Governor of The Sheffield College and a non-academic member of the ESRC’s Peer Review College.
For the last 10 years Seb has written a regular blog: Fortnightly Mailing.
You can also find him on Twitter as @sebschmoller.
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Book Review: Envisioning Future Academic Library Services Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Envisioning Future Academic Library Services Buzz data mobile framework dissemination digitisation blog copyright preservation cataloguing personalisation ebook curation muves ict research Citation BibTex RIS John Azzolini reviews a timely collection of essays that highlights the values of institutional leadership and resourcefulness in academic librarianship's engagements with Web 2.0.
Since networked information technology has initiated a breathtaking transformation of knowledge practices, librarians have had a generous supply of thought leaders whose lifetime experience has permitted them to issue credible translations of the 'writing on the wall'.
Recently, however, there seems to be many more analysts (and soothsayers) and much more anxious observation and published interpretation of such writing.
And the message comes in a red ink, in bold, and with distinct portent, when not downright ominous.
Perhaps the exponential nature of change has propelled us into a state of perpetual diagnosis and alarmist hand-wringing.
Perhaps.
But as Envisioning Future Academic Library Services: Initiatives, Ideas and Challenges demonstrates, these transformations also generate perceptive big-picture commentary that underscores the field's priorities and advocates salutary actions for its practitioners.
Yet as its authors make clear, all is not spiralling out of control.
Something can be done, and done with telling effect.
The trends are in plain sight.
We just have be open to the guidance of reasonable counsel.
One such prescription dominating the foreground is the re-invention of the means of librarianship's calling (its tasks and workflow) without losing sight of the ends (its commitment to service and access).
Of course, the hitch comes in actually applying or even knowing the everyday details necessary to realise this much-vaunted balance.
Contents of the Book Envisioning Future Academic Library Services is an example of this reasonable counsel, offering its overviews and admonitions in twelve concise chapters (in about 250 pages).
A very brief foreword by Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, nicely captures the tone of the selections to follow with four words: 'Whither the academic library?'
That is, swept up in the grand narrative of breakneck change in technology and expectations, what is to become of the library?
She broaches the issues that flow from this theme: the meaning and implications of Web 2.0, the call for powerful new leadership and innovation among librarians, a questioning of current economic models, and the recognition that the prodigious changes we are experiencing transcend academic librarianship and encompass the nature of the university and of learning.
An Introduction 'We Create the Future!'
by editor Sue McKnight carries on this master theme of change as she gives a synopsis of each author's contribution.
Taking inspiration from Billings[1], she frames her summaries in terms of 'wild cards,' characterised as game-changing events or trends that are largely uncontrollable or unpredictable.
Her suggested cards are the assumptions and needs of the 'Google Generation' (sometimes called 'digital natives'), the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies, the emergence of new scholarly publishing frameworks, and the occupational and structural pressures from the recent global financial crisis.
McKnight's opening essay reflects the book's optimistic and forward-thinking disposition, which 'provides a window on what is possible so that we can plan a transformative agenda and manage change effectively' (p. xxii).
In Chapter 1, 'Waiting for the Barbarians: Seeking Solutions or Awaiting Answers?
', Derek Law focuses on the distinct mind-set and assumptions of the millennial generation and how this quite large (and growing) demographic is driving many of the elemental changes faced by libraries.
Many librarians can concur with the knowing descriptions of some of the cognitive attributes of these digital natives.
The author talks of these users' demands for instant results and gratification and for 24/7 access from any place, especially from their mobile devices, as well as their preference for convenience over quality.
Several of his perceptive observations stand out but one in particular offers rich food for thought: 'Libraries have never been better managed but we are increasingly servants, not partners in the academic process' (p. 8).
Penny Carnaby continues the spotlight on generational differences in cognitive and practical stances toward knowledge and how this will continue to challenge the library profession's adaptability on technological, cultural, and political fronts.
The suggestively titled Chapter 2, 'The Delete Generation: How Citizen-Created Content is Transforming Libraries,' does an excellent job of directing the reader's attention to the potential value of information generated through non-traditional means such as social networking sites, blogs, and personal Web sites.
Carnaby illustrates the issues with three very short case studies from her native New Zealand.
The questions she raises regarding the authoritativeness and preservation aspects of citizen-created content are important to consider.
Chapter 3, Andrew McDonald's 'Libraries as Places: Challenges for the Future,' addresses the academic library as a 'place' as this term is understood in its spatial, metaphorical, and resource-related connotations.
Despite what some people might see as a paradox in a world of mass digitisation, the physical embodiment of the library its books, learning spaces, and gathering areas is alive and well and evolving to meet the demands of its many types of users.
As the author states: 'Rather than libraries becoming replaced by ICT, the technology has moved into libraries' (p. 48).
He presents the reader with ten 'qualities of good library space,' culled from his ample professional experience.
These attributes are deemed essential if a library is to fulfil its institutional mission as a place of learning and creativity.
A deeper exploration of Web 2.0 is found in Chapter 4, James Neal and Damon Jaggars' 'Web 2.0: Redefining and Extending the Service Commitment of the Academic Library.'
They stress the 'human' motivations driving the large-scale adoption of social networking and content-sharing sites and mobile devices, such as participation, personalisation, and openness to knowledge sharing.
One crucial transformation has been that of scholarly workflow and production, which are now continuous and distributed ('24/7 anywhere connectivity').
The authors advocate a more thorough integration a 'mainstreaming' of Web 2.0 information methods into the library model in order to uphold its level of service.
In Chapter 5, 'Second Life and Libraries: Boom or Bust?
', P. Charles Livermore suggests the potential for disruptive innovation, or at least major change, in teaching and knowledge dissemination via multi-user-virtual environments (MUVEs).
For the uninformed (such as myself), this chapter is a good introduction to the Second Life virtual world as a library-based tool for instruction delivery and collaboration.
Livermore does a good job of describing his professional and personal experience of this environment, touching upon its drawbacks as well as its advantages.
The emergence of wide-scale digitisation has had substantial impacts on scholarly publishing.
The ramifications for current and possible business models in academic humanities and social science publishing are probed in Chapter 6, Frances Pinter's 'Some New Business Ideas in the HSS Publishing Space: What May Librarians Expect?'
The author, a publishing veteran, briefly delves into thorny industry issues such as copyright, licensing, open access, and financing.
She reports on the development of an innovative e-book product at her imprint, Bloomsbury Academic, which illustrates the contemporary access and pricing dilemmas facing publishers and libraries.
Despite varying interpretations, Web 2.0 is a term frequently cited without explication.
Paul Coyne draws attention to what is perhaps an inevitable coinage Library 2.0.
In Chapter 7, 'Loosely Joined: The Discovery and Consumption of Scholarly Content in the Digital Era,' he offers additional perspectives on the broader themes central to this book, in particular, the influence of digital natives and mobile technologies on library services.
Library 2.0., a concept also eliciting multiple definitions, is properly perceived by Coyne as 'a cultural shift, rather than a technological advance' (p. 116).
He makes two notable points, that the thrust of the mobilisation trend is in its deep reconfiguration of users' relationships, 'with time, space and other people' (p. 111), and that the initiatives meant for the satisfaction of Web 2.0 users will have the effect of improving service and content delivery for all users, regardless of generational niche or student status.
Helen Hayes and Philip Kent make a solid case for a disciplined engagement with knowledge management programmes in university learning and alliance-building.
Chapter 8, 'Knowledge Management, Universities and Libraries,' convincingly argues for an explicit turn to systematic knowledge-capturing methods for enhancing collaborative relationships within academia and between higher learning and external communities such as local cultural institutions.
Hayes and Kent emphasise the powerful potential of knowledge transfer, specifically.
They lend detail and weight to their position by offering several examples of dedicated knowledge-enriching projects from their current workplace, the University of Melbourne.
One area that does not receive the attention it deserves is 'Libraries and the Management of Research Data,' the title and topic of Chapter 9 by Martin Lewis.
He defines 'research data management' as 'the storage, curation and preservation of, and provision of continuing access to, digital research data' (p. 145).
Enormous quantities of scientific, technical, and economic data sets are being generated by research projects at universities, alone and in conjunction with governmental bodies.
Lewis begins with the question of just how responsible academic librarians can (or should) be in administering these data, considering the wide scale and multiple stakeholders involved in the data's lifecycle.
He makes a persuasive case that librarians should be closely involved in the process, underscoring the professional benefits as well as the positive outcomes for academic research in general.
Especially constructive are the author's practical recommendations on how librarians can take active steps toward being recognised as key stakeholders in the data management mission.
After nine pertinent selections, Chapter 10, 'The Leadership of the Future,' seems quite anomalous.
The contributor, Liz Wright, diagnoses the weaknesses of current leaders generally and offers breathless predictions about leadership trends.
For the development of more effective leaders, she advocates use of the 'Star Cluster Model of Leadership Capabilities for the 21st Century,' a model created by her consulting firm, The Leadership Cafe.
Except for a single platitudinous sentence made in passing, this chapter makes no mention at all of libraries.
Revealingly, the author's biography at the book's front contains no professional affiliations with libraries, and even this chapter's bibliography does not contain any library-related sources.
Indeed, as it contains many over-generalisations about future leadership and workplaces, Wright's language often has the feel of marketing material.
There is definite value for librarians from contemplating outside perspectives, but including a chapter that never raises the subject of libraries comes across as an editorial misstep.
Leadership issues are integral to librarianship's handling of change; however, they have to be addressed in the context of libraries.
Otherwise, their discussion is so broad as to be immaterial.
In Chapter 11, 'Adding Value to Learning and Teaching,' Sue McKnight focuses on the core mission of academic librarians: the support of students and faculty in pursuit of educational goals and scholarly production.
The task is for librarians to sustain and even enhance their relevance to those they serve in the university.
Practitioners frequently beseech each other with hollow pleas to re-formulate fundamental values but McKnight gives substance to this entreaty by pointing to real-life examples of innovative practices as well as making her own interesting suggestions.
Among these are 'academic services hubs,' where librarians would join other campus professionals to offer students a more seamless and integrated learning and developmental space, and Yale University's Personal Librarian programme, where each entering freshman is assigned his or her own librarian until they declare a major, whereupon they are connected to their own Subject Specialist.
Michael Robinson's 'In Search of the Road Ahead: The Future of Academic Libraries in China' (Chapter 12) takes a balanced look at the various social, political, and economic developments of the past two decades that have contributed to the current state of China's university libraries.
He notes amazing progress in the field, discussing the role of the Internet's growth, government investment and modernisation programmes in Higher Education, the expansion of library buildings and collections, and the establishment of union catalogues.
To his credit, Robinson does not reflexively turn to the stock narrative on China heavy on images of unmitigated economic progress and reminders to Western readers that a new global contender has arrived (so watch out).
He discusses the accomplishments as well as the more sobering reality behind the eye-catching statistics, such as the significant developmental differences between China's geographical regions, the tenacious presence of government-imposed Internet censorship, and a focus on library size to the detriment of collection quality.
This is an excellent snapshot of trends in Chinese academic librarianship with a fine bibliography for going into greater depth.
Conclusion Envisioning Future Academic Services casts a discerning eye on the university library's evolving relationships with the numerous manifestations of Web-driven information content and services.
Its field of inquiry is shape-shifting and restless, but it achieves its objective with straightforward writing, coherent arguments, and a credible distillation of ideas from personal experience.
The book's intended audience is the academic library community but any type of librarian would admit its relevance.
Students are not the only digital natives out there.
Private service organisations, local and national policy bodies, and business corporations also have their career-commencing natives.
These individuals will soon constitute the bulk of knowledge workers, so the librarians serving them would gain much insight from this book.
I am a private law firm librarian who works with young attorneys on a daily basis and found its perspectives to be applicable to my professional situation.
I noticed one theme in this work that deserves comment.
That is, several of the contributors endorse methods found commonly, perhaps more hospitably, in the realm of business strategising.
In librarianship's front line engagement with disruptive change, these practitioners have betrayed a propensity toward market positioning, continual process improvement, and customer management techniques (or at least their functional equivalents).
Derek Law, for example, states: 'Determining what the market wants and then providing it will be a key component of building relevant and appropriate services' (p. 11).
Those who enjoin us to undergo a holistic re-purposing seem adamant in their call for its implementation via economic means.
As Neal and Jaggars put it: The 2.0 academic library builds new strategies for marketing products and services ...
This means ... extending the market and developing new markets, and diversifying the product line.
(p. 67) Is the library world's embrace of economic tools to manoeuvre through its struggles merely an indicator of the market model's cross-disciplinary serviceability?
Or is it testament to the model's paradigmatic grip on problem-solving efforts in all knowledge domains?
In other words, are we all compelled to adopt the walk and talk of the adaptive business enterprise manager?
I am not implying a value judgment by bringing up this issue.
It is just one of the thoughts evoked by this very stimulating book.
It is my individual reading of the writing on the wall.
References Billings, H. 'The Wild-Card Academic Library in 2013.'
College & Research Libraries 64(2), March 2003, 105-109.
Author Details John Azzolini Reference Librarian Clifford Chance US LLP New York Email: john.azzolini@cliffordchance.com John Azzolini has been working in private law firm libraries in New York City for over ten years.
He began in technical services and cataloguing but later realised that the challenges of reference were too tempting to pass up.
John is always interested in discovering new legal research content and methods as well as in the continuing possibilities of digital libraries.
Return to top Article Title: Envisioning Future Academic Library Services: Initiatives, Ideas and Challenges Author: John Azzolini Publication Date: 4 July-2011 Publication: Ariadne Issue 67 Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/azzolini-rvw/ Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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FIGIT, eLib, Ariadne and the Future.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines FIGIT, eLib, Ariadne and the Future.
Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy, Philip Hunter, John Kirriemuir, Jon Knight and Richard Waller look back at how Ariadne began 20 years ago as part of the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), how some of the other eLib projects influenced the web we have today and what changes have come, and may yet come, to affect how digital libraries work.
Ariadne is 20 years old this week and some editorial board members thought it might be useful to look back at how it came to be, how digital library offerings have changed over the years, and maybe also peer into the near future.
To do this, we’ve enlisted the help of several of the past editors of Ariadne who have marshalled their memories and crystal balls.
Back to the beginning...
The story of Ariadne actually begins in the early 1990s.
From the late 1980s onwards there had been a notable growth in student numbers, and 1992 saw the binary divide between Universities and Polytechnics swept away.
It was also a period that saw rapid developments in information systems, computer networking, monograph and journal pricing and the need for IT literacy in both teaching and research.
With this background the four funding councils that cover England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland convened a Review Group in 1992 to investigate the new challenges facing academic libraries, and propose some potential ways to tackle them.
This group was chaired by Professor Sir Brian Follett and the report they produced a year later in 1993 became known as the Follett Report [Follet1993].
One of the conclusions of the Follett Report was that libraries in the academic sector would be affected by developments in IT systems.
Students were seen as being more aware of different sources of information, and both they and University staff wanted networked access to as much of it as possible at their desks.
However we have to bear in mind that at that stage the World Wide Web was still relatively new [Berners-Lee1996], and searching on the Internet was still in its infancy.
Philip Hunter remembers that period well: How small the internet was in March 1994, when I first had access!
And navigation was tricky.
There were three main options for getting around: use lists of sites on already known sites, explore via a random URL generator, or search the internet for resources with Gopher, which was effectively a real-time site crawler, and it could take twenty minutes or so to report back.
There were no proper search engines as such for the web till about 1996.
That's hard to believe now.
Yahoo existed, but it wasn't a proper search engine at the time.
Google grew out of the Stanford University search engine, which officially became Google in 1998.
The Follett Report was well received and lead to the funding councils allocating £4.75 million in 1994 to help fully implement its recommendations.
The funding councils tasked the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to administer these funds, and they in turn created a sub-committee called the Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology (FIGIT) [JISC1994].
This led to a number of “FIGIT-funded” Electronic Library Programme (or “eLib”) projects being set up covering electronic document and article delivery, electronic journals, digitisation, on-demand publishing, training & awareness and access to networked resources [UKOLN2001].
One of the recipients of such funding was Ariadne.
Set up initially with both a print and electronic version, it rapidly became the place the JISC-funded eLib projects reported their meetings, news and results, as well as a place that librarians in a range of institutions could share knowledge.
Before Marieke Guy became one of our editors, she had experienced Ariadne as a student: I first encountered Ariadne while studying for an MSc in Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1997.
It had recently been created to support the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) and was available both offline (as a glossy printed magazine) and online.
To a young librarian it struck me as pretty cutting edge and made a refreshing change from the usual journal articles that comprised the recommended reading list.
Here were people writing in an honest and engaging way about real-world activities in the digital library world!
I quoted content in more than a few of my course papers.
After being a student, Marieke then moved from using eLib provided resources to helping keep existing ones such as Ariadne moving forward whilst also building new ones: When I joined UKOLN, a digital information research centre based at the University of Bath responsible for publishing Ariadne, in 2000 as an information officer I began by editing two online web magazines (Exploit Interactive and Cultivate interactive) delivered as part of the dissemination activity for two European projects.
It was my first editing role and being let loose on the web filled me with excitement and trepidation.
Once I'd got the hang of things I began helping the Ariadne editor at the time, Philip Hunter, with bits of editing work.
My first published article was a book review for 'Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook' by Stuart D. Lee, and in June 2001 I managed to persuade Philip to let me write the editorial.
Since then I have written over 25 articles for Ariadne ranging from book reviews and event reports to thought and research pieces.
Whenever I've had something to say to the information and library profession and I've needed a place in which to say it then Ariadne has come to the rescue.
Of course Ariadne did not stand still as the technology around it changed.
The original print version eventually ceased to be produced, and the way the web version was created and delivered also changed.
The original Web version that John Kirriemuir edited was simple HTML files marked up by hand using the Notepad program in Windows 3.1.
By the time Richard Waller took the helm, there was a need to move on to newer ways of both presenting the material to readers (including ultimately the migration to Drupal) and managing the volumes of articles being generated: During the 10 years on my watch for Ariadne (2003-13), Web publishing witnessed a plethora of technological developments ranging across formats, platforms and new media.
Undoubtedly the most disruptive of those technologies was Web 2.0 which in some ways had as much an effect upon Web publishing as digital publication had upon the entire publishing landscape.
The current editorial team have had to continue with this revision of the technologies we use to run Ariadne, whilst at the same time trying to make sure that we provide access to resources that were written two decades ago.
Accessing Networked Resources The FIGIT funding of eLib projects lead to a number of services being set up.
Access to network resources was a major strand in the scheme, and your current editor was lucky enough to be involved with a couple of them, as well as working part time in Loughborough University library trying to make networked CD-ROM products actually work.
Metadata became a popular topic of conversation, and the projects were also involved with developments in the wider world such as EU-funded projects [Hartland1997], Dublin Core [DCMI], Warwick Framework [Thiele1997] and the IETF standard process [IETF].
When Philip Hunter became Ariadne editor access to network resources projects were coalescing into the Resource Discovery Network [JISC1999]: Things developed very fast in the digital library community in the late 1990s, mostly supported by funding from JISC and other stakeholder organisations.
It was obvious within the library community that a standards-based approach to development would be important for usable internet-based services, in a world of competing commercial interests.
And that resource discovery was going to be the big thing.
By the time I became editor of Ariadne in October 1997 that was the way things were going the Resource Discovery Network was launched in 1998 in London.
Metadata was already very important, but it was surprising how many people did not know what it was.
The way resource discovery has developed is something we could not predict back in the mid-1990s.
When the Follett Report was written and Ariadne was subsequently funded, there was a diverse range of early networked information systems and search tools.
The range and quality of data have also changed out of all recognition from those early days.
John Kirriemuir, the first Web editor of Ariadne, recalls some of these changes: The past 20 years, eh?
Well, many things changed; social media came, as did better web browsers.
Some things went; gopher, resource descriptions artisanally-crafted by librarians (though the Scout Report is still going), the blink HTML tag, university websites that focused on useful information rather than press releases and shameless alumni begging.
Philip Hunter pointed out that the eLib projects’ consideration of metadata and the idea that the academic community would be building their own search engines around it didn’t really come to pass in the end: Where are we now?
Google does not make use of metadata, and instead uses the text of the pages which it indexes to generate its links.
They decided to go down this route on the grounds of the cost of the manual creation of metadata.
It works pretty well, though it is not as nuanced as real metadata, and Google doesn’t tell the users what their ranking algorithms do to the results of a search, which means it is unclear what you are not seeing, and why.
Since academia has not gone down the route of developing its own resource discovery tools, the result is that Google is usually the preferred option for discovery.
For now at least, searching with Google Scholar brings up details of where an OA copy of an article may be accessed.
So resource discovery is pretty well catered for at the moment, with the power of Google search, and the facilities it offers.
But gaining instant access to research outputs in general, is not.
That struggle will continue for some time yet.
Supporting research was one of the goals of the Follett Report, but it is only now that Research Data Management is being embedded within funding body requirements and institutional processes [RCUK2015].
Richard Waller sees this coupled with “big data” as one of the major developments we are going through: Data, Big, Open, etc.
To pull the focus more closely upon Research and Scholarly Publishing, during my watch the scientific community reached a tipping point which changed the presentation and above all management of research data.
And little wonder, since for the first time the number of researchers making reuse of previously collected data exceeded that of researchers obtaining data through their own (increasingly expensive) observations.
The whole status of data in publishing changed as methods of collection, analysis and storage evolved.
Enter the era of dataset publication in scholarly publishing.
The financial imperative will enforce that trend as funding councils' requirements on data are integrated into research project expectations.
The evolution of the area of Research Data Management in the current economic climate will continue apace.
Changes in network access and use One aspect of access to networked resources that a couple of the past editors have noted is actually how the networking is provided, and the devices used.
When eLib was being born, networking was very much based on cables with terminals, desktop PCs and workstations attached to them, mostly grabbing data off servers down in the local computer centre.
John Kirriemuir identified wireless networking as a post-eLib game changer for resource access: But the most profound change has been the expansion of wifi coverage.
Lovely, sexy, addictive, essential, wifi.
Twenty years ago you had to go to a computer which had tubes connecting it to the other tubes of the Internet.
Now, in the home, the college, on the bus or train or plane, in the cafe or the library or supermarket, in the bath or on the couch or in bed or the hot tub, Internet Come To You!
Take out your laptop, smartphone, tablet, handheld games console and you are connected to whatever or whoever you want.
Definitely, the swipe right of the last twenty years.
Similarly Marieke Guy noted that cloud computing, social media and mobile devices have changed the information landscape in the last couple of decades: Over the last 20 years the information landscape relevant to Ariadne and its readers has completely transformed.
The web has enabled access to a huge amount of content and changed how we learn, social media has changed the way we share things, search technology has changed how we find things, cloud computing has changed where we store things and digital data has changed the way we understand things.
And let's not forget that tablets, mobile phones and wifi have allowed us to be able to do all of this all of the time.
There is no drama intended when we talk of a digital revolution, it's a revolution that I've thoroughly enjoyed observing and participating in.
Richard Waller also noticed the development of social media and the way IT has shaped human interaction as a major change over the last 20 years: Just as the development of digital platforms had a profound influence upon the dimensions of publication time and content space, so the advent, for example, of social media brought about a paradigm change in the relationship between publisher and reader.
While innovations on Planet Web 2.0 continue to proliferate I can foresee plenty of further material for editorial comment on an aspect that frequently attracted my interest: the effect of new technology on its users and resultant human behaviour.
We have only to consider the effect of the mass migration of content to mobile platforms to see one such radical effect upon our customs.
So we will have to come to grips with the disadvantages as well as benefits of those innovations (take, for example, Citizen Science) and not without some pain.
We can expect continued difficulties in the handling of social media, and not just for the young.
There have been several instances of clever adults failing to grasp the essential point that Web 2.0 makes publishers of us all and the responsibility that goes with it.
Social media is certainly a useful way to engage with students, readers and fellow professionals.
The trick is finding the right social media for the right audience at the right time.
This can be especially difficult for academic institutions trying to keep up with the tools and sites used by each new intake of students.
There often appears to be “fashionable” social media tools that blossom for one group of users for a period of time before people move on to something new or different.
Open Access Ariadne has always been an Open Access journal, free for both authors and readers.
Ever rising costs of journals had been one of the drivers behind the Follett Report, and that is something that is still a problem for many HEI Libraries today, especially with the rapid growth in journal numbers as well.
A number of eLib projects (and British Library-funded projects before them [Knight1995]) looked at provision of electronic journals and the digitisation of copyrighted materials.
As well as being an example of an Open Access journal, Ariadne also covered the discussions and arguments around closed versus open access.
Again Philip Hunter was editing whilst this was happening: Open Access became an important concept, partly because of the rising cost of subscriptions to journals, and because electronic delivery of journal articles was already happening.
The problem and the apparent solution arrived at about the same time.
Ariadne covered the development of OA from the beginning (it was discussed at the eLib conference in December 1999).
The next big thing was Research Data Management, which Ariadne also covered in its infancy.
In 2003 I stopped editing Ariadne and became part of the research group at UKOLN, and ran the European-funded Open Access Forum, which ran services and conferences for the OA community across Europe.
Open Access had been around before Ariadne and eLib of course.
Philip Hunter pointed out one of the early success stories that many have tried to emulate: The model for genuine open access is still arXiv, which was originally started as an FTP site, at the end of the 1980s.
The community of physicists upload their papers, usually before peer review, and in draft form, and they can be found by searching the site, often within hours.
The whole physics community can therefore see the entire body of current research available to them.
This may take some time to achieve across other fields of research.
Of course the debates over open and closed access, copyright and the value that traditional publishers add to the academic process continues to rumble on today.
Indeed John Kirriemuir suggests that the fact we still have costly printed books might upset some of the fresh-faced eLib workers from the 1990s: The most profound thing that didn't change: publishing worthy academic research in dead tree format, at great cost to the reader or their institution, and which hardly anyone reads.
It would have surprised and disappointed many, those twenty years ago, that this model still holds sway; the swipe left of academic development since the mid nineties.
Peering into the future Trying to predict the future more than a year or two out is always a tricky job, though that’s really what the Follett Report and eLib set out to do back in the early to mid-1990s.
We still try to do it of course, as institutions and funders want to have an idea where to put their money.
Today the JISC have a “Futurist” working for them [Hamilton2014]  to try to tease out what technologies or social changes might be coming along that will improve or disrupt academic life.
John Kirriemuir has his own thoughts on where the future might take us: The future?
Once the Greenland ice sheet melt accelerates, academics will discover whether their MacBook Air makes for a good flotation device (it's about the same size and shape as the floats we used in 1970s primary school swimming lessons, so there's hope).
Assuming we survive that, the coming pandemic, and four years under President Trump, we should see more haptic net devices, an evolutionary development from the current wave of VR kit.
Excellent!
I don't want to just see pictures and videos of deep fried butter on a stick at a midwest American state fair; I want to feel, smell and taste and swallow it as well.
Through my browser.
Think how much improved the Great British Bake Off, or every Nigella Lawson cooking programme, would be when experienced through a full sensory Internet browser.
(Jamie Oliver: not so much) What else of the future?
After the 2020 election sweeping cuts will be ordered by Prime Minister Boris.
Examination passes, from age 6 months to postgraduate level, will be rewarded solely with badges.
Siri, replacing teachers, will be sentient and predictive, telling you what you need to know before you know you need to know it.
But much will stay as it is.
Twitter will still be full of angry work colleagues, and Facebook still full of angry relatives; the Internet will still predominantly consist of cat videos; professors will still reply-all to email; MARC will still be an annoying, and annoyingly used, format; academic meetings will still be utterly pointless; and Birmingham New Street railway station will still have inadequate seating.
Virtual reality, funding cuts and the lingering death of MARC do sound like predictions that could have been heard back in the eLib days.
Certainly the pace of change in technology development shows little sign of letting up; our computers get smaller, cheaper and more powerful, whilst the range of information sources continues to grow.
Surprisingly none of the previous editors mentioned Artificial Intelligence as a future disruptive technology, despite its promise to help people deal with the large volumes of information available, the large amounts of money being invested into it and the warnings that some smart people are making about its potential downsides.
I think I’ll leave the last, positive word to Marieke Guy though: Yet despite all this change I still genuinely believe that libraries are more relevant now than ever before.
There is a growing movement around openness and access and information professionals have played a pivotal role.
The digital world is evolving but there will always be a need for adventurers to help navigate the maze.
References   [Berners-Lee1996] Berners-Lee, Tim (August 1996).
"The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future".
Available from: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html [DCMI] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative website at http://dublincore.org/ [Follet1993] Follett, Brian (chair) (1993), "Joint Funding Council’s Libraries Review Group: Report, Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council for England".
HTML version available from: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ [Hamilton2014] Hamilton, Martin (2014) "Tomorrow is the Question!
My new role as Futurist for Jisc".
Available from: http://blog.martinh.net/2014/03/tomorrow-is-question-my-new-role-as.html [Hartland1997] Hartland, David (March 1997) "From MERCI to DESIRE: European Digital Library Projects", Ariadne issue 8.
Available from: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/netskills-corner [IETF] Internet Engineering Task Force website: http://www.ietf.org/ [JISC1994] JISC (June 1994) "Circular 2/94: Implementation of IT Recommendations".
Available from: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/circular-294-implementation-of-it-recommendations-01-jun-1994 [JISC1999] JISC (December 1999) "The Resource Discovery Network (RDN)".
Available from: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/the-resource-discovery-network-rdn-01-dec-1999 [Knight1995] Knight, Jon and McKnight, Cliff (June 1995) "Project ELVYN: Implementing an electronic journal", Computer Communications, Elsevier, 18(6), 418-422.
[RCUK2015] Research Councils UK (September 2015) "Concordat On Open Research Data".
Available from: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/RCUK-prod/assets/documents/documents/ConcordatOpenResearchData.pdf [Thiele1998] Thiele, Harold (January 1998) "The Dublin Core and Warwick Framework: A Review of the Literature, March 1995 September 1997", D-Lib Magazine.
Available from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january98/01thiele.html [UKOLN2001] UK Office of Library Networking (2001) "eLib: The Electronic Libraries Programme 1995-2001".
Available from: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/   Facebook Twitter Google+ E-Mail Pinterest LinkedIn Ariadne is published by Loughborough University Library © Ariadne ISSN: 1361-3200.
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Book Review: I, Digital – A History Devoid of the Personal?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: I, Digital – A History Devoid of the Personal?
Buzz data archives repositories preservation mis ebook curation wordpress youtube facebook twitter privacy research Citation BibTex RIS Chris Rusbridge reviews an edited volume that aims to fill a gap in ‘literature designed specifically to guide archivists’ thinking about personal digital materials’.
We are all too familiar with the dire predictions of coming Digital Dark Ages, when All Shall be Lost because of the fragility of our digital files and the transience of the formats.
We forget, of course, that loss was always the norm.
The wonderful documents in papyrus, parchment and paper that we so admire and wonder at, are the few lucky survivors of their times.
Sometimes they have been carefully nurtured, sometimes they have been accidentally preserved.
But almost all were lost!
If this is true for important, official documents, how much more true it is of documentation of everyday life.
Our great libraries and archives store documents from a very few lives, mostly of those considered important.
The everyday life of the past is lost to us; our archives are not big enough to hold a tiny fraction of one percent of the documentation from everyday lives, should we make this a goal.
Cal Lee points out in I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era that even those archives that attempt to document the lives of some of the famous and important among us are still mostly focused on ‘papers’.
Meanwhile nearly everyone, including the famous and important, has shifted their documentary activity to the digital world.
In his Introduction, Lee notes ‘the literature designed specifically to guide archivists’ thinking about personal digital materials has long been limited to a few scattered journal articles and research project websites’.
With this book he aims to fill this gap.
Content The book has an Introduction and three parts, comprising 9 chapters.
A couple of the contributors were clearly invited to revisit earlier articles they had written on this topic; this was perhaps a mistake, as the resulting sections are less interesting and somewhat self-admiring.
Several of the chapters are excellent, however, and one or two are really well written, happily including the last, allowing the book to finish (as shall I) on an optimistic, hopeful note.
Each chapter has a set of end notes; they are mostly references (sometimes portmanteau collections of many references), but a few are indeed notes.
Perhaps this is common in such volumes, but I found it confusing.
There is also a bibliography, list of contributors, and index.
I am uncertain how comprehensive the bibliography is attempting to be, but I suspect it is simply a collection of the references from the chapters.
The review copy is a well-constructed paperback, but suffers from printing problems on a small percentage of its pages, with areas of fading text (an unlikely problem in any e-book version that might emerge).
Likely Readership Obvious possible audiences for this book include: archival researchers, archival students, archivists, the famous and important subjects already selected for future archiving of their personal digital collections, and the rest of us.
It seems clear that the book is mainly aimed at the first and third of these categories.
When considering the weight to give to this review, you might remember that this author is clearly in the last group: infamous, unimportant and unqualified for the job!
Strengths I believe this volume is a valuable contribution to, and provides some progress for an important subject.
As already noted, some chapters are excellent.
Catherine Marshall’s chapter on Challenges and Opportunities in particular is excellent writing, based on real research on real people.
However, she gives us a quite pessimistic and jaundiced (but realistic) view of human nature and our ability to manage our personal information.
There are so many great quotable quotes; here is a selection: “It is also important to realize that deletion comes with an associated cost.
Why fight against intellectual gravity?
… as yet there is no Nobel prize or Oscar awarded for maintaining a neat, well-pruned file system.”  “There is another, more principled, reason to keep everything.
This perspective stems from the idea that the computer will eventually serve as the ultimate memory prosthesis.
… Deleting files is tantamount to deliberately making a hole in one’s memories, inducing amnesia…”  “… people seem to be relying on disk crashes, technology failure, and periodic obsolescence as a way of pruning their collections.”  “Thus, from a collections standpoint, what we are looking for varies with value, and that value is not a guaranteed attribute of an item.” “… professional archivists are developing best practices for the stewardship of these personal collections.
But the question is, how relevant are these best practices to the consumer at home who has neither the resources, inclinations, skills nor time to apply them?” In the end, it seems that benign neglect may be the best we can hope for!
Kristina Spurgin has also provided an excellent and thought-provoking chapter on practices amongst serious leisure practitioners in the field of photography, based on a study of one year’s worth of postings on a photography forum.
It is clear that this is a thoroughly biased sample, but that is the point; this is a group which is mostly trying hard to develop and apply good practice in managing personal digital collections that are really important to them.
She is not quite so clear on the implications for archiving this material, despite a section on applying principles from the oft-mentioned Paradigm Project [1].
Her article is also full of quotable remarks; here is a small selection: “… information management is a set of tasks that are, at best a low priority, and often indefinitely postponed.”  “Many people dread losing their home mode [sic] photos; often described as irreplaceable, family photos are among the most cherished objects in the home.
Ironically, their digital collection-keeping often contradicts their stated values in this matter.”  “As Catherine Marshall points out, lots of copies may keep things safe, they also make it even harder to keep track of what one has.” I would pass over much of Sue McKemmish’s chapter, but two things stand out.
The first is the wonderful quotation that inspires her title (from a novel by Graham Swift [2]): “Keep them, burn them, they are evidence of me.” This is a valuable reminder of the potential role of the traces of our lives as evidence of our very existence, and the fragility of that evidence.
The last part of her chapter is a discussion of extensive archival configurations (ie archives that go beyond any single place or organisation), and also the idea that individuals own the records about them in some deep way.
Discussing the archive of the Koorie indigenous community in south-eastern Australia, ‘a space in which Koorie oral memory can be captured, shared and linked to archival sources’, she mentions the impassioned cry of Rene Baker, one of the Stolen Generation [3]: “They’ve got me up there in Canberra”… The last chapter is by Susan Thomas, Digital Archivist at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
This is a sensible, practical discussion based from considerable experience of actually doing digital archiving, through the Paradigm Project already mentioned, and Oxford’s futureArch programme [4].
This is the solid heart of the book, and it would be worth its price even if this were all that you read!
She does not shy away from advice, for example: “… during discussions with creators and families, it is imperative that archivists sketch a detailed map of the creators’ online data stores, and determine with them which aspects of their online presence will form part of their archives.
This entails making provisions that enable the library to acquire the specified digital content from third party web services at the right time…” Not So Strong… As any edited volume, this is patchy.
I was tempted to reach for the comment about the curate’s egg; “good in parts” is the common version, but on checking (Wikipedia I’m afraid [5]) I realised that this saying is commonly misquoted and even more misunderstood.
What is more, it underlines the importance of keeping ‘original’ sources [6](ie not Wikipedia) to remind us how things change in common understanding over time.
We need our archives for that.
Do check it yourself!
“Your mileage may vary” as they say in Internet circles; what I found confusing or less interesting, those more closely involved may find involving and insightful.
For example, Leslie Johnston’s chapter on tools developed at the University of Virginia may be helpful to those moving into this area, but left me rather unengaged.
I suspect as editor, Cal Lee found himself without obvious candidates for some areas, and as a result he appears as author of a couple of the more difficult chapters (in addition to the Introduction).
First, the chapter he co-authored with Robert Capra on necessary connections between research in Personal Information Management and Archives and Records Management (PIM and ARM in the chapter) is quite off-putting.
It comes first, immediately after the Introduction, but seems to be an inconclusive mapping of the different approaches.
A stronger editorial hand might have relegated this chapter to some less prominent position, and allowed some of the greater delights to tempt the reader on.
As it is, this chapter together with the rear-view mirror chapter from Adrian Cunningham stand as rather a road-block that the reader must circumvent before getting to Marshall’s piece.
Lee is also the author of the chapter on the ‘externalised me’, the place of the social Web in personal archiving.
The social Web is clearly of crucial importance in gathering a rounded view of the digital traces of many lives today.
Of course, anything written in this area tends to get outdated quickly as the world moves on so quickly, and it is possible that this otherwise interesting chapter was largely written in 2008-9.
It tends to focus on the blogosphere, YouTube and other services where most content is publicly accessible.
There does not appear to be a serious discussion on the more recent emergence of the social Web as multiple ‘walled gardens’, or the current dominance of Facebook.
Although the metaphor ‘walled garden’ is often used for these services, as a hint that they attempt to separate themselves from the open Web, privacy concerns of users mean that each service is partitioned internally into many private areas, each allowing access to a select set of ‘friends’.
A better metaphor might be ‘gated community’ [7].
This presents real challenges to the archivist, not discussed in this chapter.
The quotation from Thomas above indicates that the Bodleian is addressing this, and it would have been helpful to have more to read on the subject.
Lee does draw attention to the “… numerous risk factors associated with reliance on web service providers for persistent access to personal materials.” I wasn’t sure what to make of the chapter on the ‘implications of personal records in electronic form’ from Rachel Onuf and Thomas Hyry (another 1990s revisit).
I very much hated the idea of the vanishing non-digital: “We all increasingly live in a world where information not available online may as well be information that does not exist.” Harrumph.
Well, yes, in everyday life maybe, but I hope never in scholarship.
We the people demand scholars who care about their sources, no matter how inconvenient their location or encoding!
However, this was good: “While a great deal is appropriately made of the cost of developing digital repositories and preserving digital assets, paper collections provide their own enormous and at times hidden or assumed costs…” And they have a positive view that underlines the importance of this area: “Archivists have the ability to document the human experience like never before.” Conclusion Although most documentation of the human experience will continue to be lost, as Onuf and Hyry imply, personal collections have amazing potential for the future of history.
For that potential to be realised, we rely on archivists to identify important candidates and to act timeously (a wonderfully appropriate Scots word) to bring those collections across the archival threshold.
Death is too late!
This will be very difficult; personal practice is extremely fractured, and both it and the digital environment are changing rapidly.
Clear advice is needed, for archivists, and for individuals who may be potential subjects.
This volume does not offer that clear advice, but it is a step along the way.
What we need now is more experience along the lines of that at Oxford, the British Library and other institutions, sensibly documented, and moving towards guidance.
For that, we need archives the world over to understand that their world has irrevocably changed, that they cannot continue as before tending their collections of papers, that they must invest in dealing with the I, Digital.
The last word should go to Susan Thomas: “In defiance of the scare stories about digital black holes – a history devoid of the personal – perhaps the phenomenon of the personal archive in the research library may yet survive, even thrive, once the digital tipping point truly hits us.” List of Chapters Introduction to I, Digital Christopher A. Lee And Now the Twain Shall Meet: Exploring the Connections between PIM and ArchivesChristopher A. Lee and Robert Capra  Ghosts in the Machine: Towards a Principles-Based Approach to Making and Keeping Digital Personal RecordsAdrian Cunningham  Challenges and Opportunities for Personal Digital ArchivingCatherine C. Marshall Evidence of Me .
.
.
in a Digital WorldSue McKemmish  “Three Backups Is a Minimum”: A First Look at Norms and Practices in the Digital Photo Collections of Serious PhotographersKristina M. Spurgin Collecting the Externalized Me: Appraisal of Materials in the Social WebChristopher A. Lee Take It Personally: The Implications of Personal Records in Electronic FormRachel Onuf and Thomas Hyry Making It Usable: Developing Personal Collection Tools for Digital CollectionsLeslie Johnston Curating the I, Digital: Experiences at the Bodleian LibrarySusan Thomas References The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (paradigm) project  http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/ Graham Swift, Ever After.
Picador, February 1992,  ISBN 9780330323314 ReconciliACTION: Stolen Generations Fact Sheet, 28 July 2007, updated 21 Feb 2012 http://reconciliaction.org.au/nsw/education-kit/stolen-generations/ The futureArch Project (2008-11), Bodleian Electronic Archives and Manuscripts (BEAM) http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/beam/projects/futurearch Wikipedia: The Curate’s Egg, 14:48, 17 July 2012  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curate%27s_egg du Maurier, G. (1895).
True Humility.
Punch.
I am indebted to Sheila Morrissey of Ithaka for this suggested term, via Twitter.
Author Details Chris Rusbridge Consultant Chris Rusbridge Consulting Chris Rusbridge is a Consultant specialising in digital preservation and research data curation.
He was the Director of the UK’s Digital Curation Centre from February 2005 until retiring from that post in April 2010.
That appointment followed five years as Director of Information Services at the University of Glasgow.
There his responsibilities included the Library and Archives, together with IT, MIS, and A/V services.
For the previous five years, he was Programme Director of the JISC Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), a major digital library R&D Programme.
During his tenure at JISC, one of his major interests was preservation of digital materials, the subject of a set of JISC-funded studies and major international workshops in 1995, 1999 and 2005, held at Warwick.
Previously he held a number of management positions in academic and library computing in the UK and Australia.
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Has Second Life Lived up to Expectations?
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Has Second Life Lived up to Expectations?
Buzz wiki usability blog video graphics e-learning facebook twitter research avatar Citation BibTex RIS Paul Gorman examines to what degree Second Life has justified the claims made for it by its evangelists with particular regard to education.
Second Life (SL) is a virtual world created and owned by a company called Linden Lab and was launched in 2003.
By 2006, SL was increasingly visible in the UK media and by 2007 SL had secured over 600 mentions in UK newspapers and magazines [1].
However, media interest in SL evaporated rapidly with references to it dropping by more than 40% in 2008 and even further since.
During this peak period SL attracted large investment in virtual land from multi-national corporations, businesses and also attracted significant interest from educational institutions.
In the UK alone, 15 universities had invested cash in SL land by mid-2007 [2].
Proponents of the use of SL in education argued that it offered great benefits with even greater future potential in years to come.
Influential think-tanks argued that virtual worlds would be ubiquitous educational tools within two to three years [3].
This paper will seek to examine to what extent the use of SL in education has made good on this potential in the period since its popularity peaked.
Features of Second Life Users of SL access the virtual world by downloading a free client.
Once they have done this they must create a virtual representation of themselves known as an avatar.
Using this avatar, users can explore miles of virtual land within the SL world by walking, flying or teleporting.
Users can communicate with each other through text chat and audio functionality.
There are no set goals within SL and you can spend your time there doing whatever you like – exploring, building, socialising, shopping or learning [4].
Personal Experience of Second Life as a Learner I first experienced SL as a postgraduate student in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh in 2007, just as coverage of SL peaked in the mainstream media.
SL was used as a medium to facilitate discussion with classmates, who, as distance learners, were unable to interact on a face-to-face basis.
My reaction to SL was mixed.
Although the potential educational benefits of a virtual world were transparent enough, I felt that its ability to make good on this potential was somewhat compromised by access limitations, problems with functionality, pedagogical use and concerns over control of the virtual environment.
SL has certainly developed and expanded since this 2006-07 period when I first used it.
The number of UK universities active in virtual worlds grew from around 41 in summer 2007 to all universities by summer 2010 (though it should be noted that the definition of 'active' varies greatly [5]) with SL being the most popular [6].
Has Second Life Achieved the Educational Breakthroughs?
Let us take a look at some of the key benefits of SL for learners that were identified in the 2006-07 period when it impinged most strongly upon public consciousness and examine how far its promise has been achieved since then.
Interaction with Learners on 'Their' Territory Commentators have long argued that those in education need to ‘...reduce the perceived chasm between education and 'real life'...’ [7] real life being regular use of video games, social networking sites and other Web 2.0 tools.
Working with learners using an already popular service such as SL could be seen as as an effective means of achieving this.
The only problem was that SL neither is, nor was, particularly popular.
Even in its heyday, circa 2007, usage amongst students was low in comparison with social networking sites, wikis or blogs [8].
Moreover, it is not easy to interpret SL’s usage figures accurately since many of its users opt to create more than one avatar thereby tending to exaggerate the true level of individual usage; just as, additionally, other users create just one avatar, but barely use it (if) at all [9].
If educators really want to collaborate, converse and teach using tools with which their students are familiar and comfortable, it is highly debatable whether SL would be anywhere near the top of the list.
SL has long since seen its status as the Web wonder kid replaced by Facebook and Twitter [10].
One could easily argue that greater engagement with students and the reduction of the ‘…perceived chasm between education and 'real life'...’ [7] could be far better achieved through the use of applications such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and wikis as opposed to SL.
Online Class Discussions Person-to-person interaction within SL allows for virtual class discussion.
This is particularly useful in courses of distance or online learning in which it is not possible for the class discussions to take place in the same physical space.
As ‘...the attrition rate of online learners...(is)...brought about in large part by a sense of isolation’ [11], the use of virtual meetings within SL can help to combat this.
Proponents of SL argued that it is an ideal tool for this kind of social/group activity, superseding other forms of computer-mediated communication such as instant messaging [2].
This is extremely debatable, with some comparing SL unfavourably as a social space when compared with social networking sites and general online forums [1].
Moreover, the central problem for those who wish to access SL the fact that it requires a relatively high specification computer and a powerful graphics card in order to run as well as the high bandwidth requirements has never been adequately solved despite some improvement over recent years [12].
Inability to access the service that your classmates are using for class discussions is hardly likely to ameliorate feelings of isolation for the learner and as long as SL requires relatively high-specification hardware, it will likely be trumped by services such as Skype and Facebook for peer-to-peer discussion.
Virtual Recreations of the Campus Educators can also create virtual university campuses and conduct virtual lectures in virtual lecture halls.
Several institutions have chosen to recreate all or part of real-life campuses in SL.
Lecturers can then lecture to their classes using a whiteboard for a PowerPoint presentation for example.
However, as understandable as this may be, it represents a largely wrong-headed approach, negating the possibilities of a virtual world not bound by the rigidity of real life in which anything is possible.
In many cases, educational institutions have chosen slavishly to recreate the real world in the shape of virtual campuses and virtual lecture theatres, echoing previous academic criticism of virtual learning environments in that they ‘...tend to be skewed towards the simulation of the classroom, lecture hall, tutor's office and the student common room...’ [13].
Using a tool that is designed to be interactive to conduct activities that are non-interactive (such as sitting in a virtual lecture hall and taking lecture notes from the screen) is largely unprofitable.
The non-interactive activity (such as a lecture) could be just as easily carried out and be better suited to a real lecture or podcasted lecture for example.
It has been pointed out that ‘...Virtual Worlds should not be used to automate existing learning approaches and models: A virtual classroom with virtual students...is not the end-game for learning in VWs...’ [14].
Unfortunately, that does seem to have become the end-game in a significant number of cases, with recreations of real-life campuses appearing like ghost towns in which ‘…one can visit some campuses and leave without a clue if they [institutions] are actually using their presence in Second Life’ [15].
Role Play Another form of person-to-person interaction in SL is role play.
Educational institutions can create virtual environments that allow students to learn important skills relevant to their course through role play exercises.
For example, Harvard Law School built a courtroom in SL in which students could practise their advocacy skills [16].
Other role-playing opportunities could include creating virtual hotels to allow hospitality students to gain customer-service skills, virtual medical clinics in which medical students can practise patient encounter strategies and so on.
Advocates of SL argued that students can take turns playing different roles and can see encounters ‘...from different perspectives, which would be difficult or impossible to do in real life...’ [17].
Some also see educational potential in the ability to experience social contact with others using an identity vastly different from one’s real-life identity.
For example, users have reported on the different attitudes displayed towards them when using avatars of a different race [18].
However, in saying that, the author feels that the claims of SL proponents on the value of certain aspects of role play are rather inflated.
For example, it seems somewhat facile to claim that choosing an avatar of a different gender or race gives a user any truly meaningful appreciation of how society reacts to these groups in reality.
One could just as easily argue that playing the combat game Call of Duty online gives one a truer appreciation of what it must be like to come under fire on the battlefield.
Tools and Simulations Avatars can also interact with the objects within the virtual world as well as with other avatars.
As mentioned, users or groups can buy land and create their own structures.
A huge range of objects can be built in SL and this has proved to be one of its key successes: students of subjects ranging from molecular biology [19] to engineering and computing [20] have benefited from this capability.
One can easily imagine, for example, how the ability to create virtual buildings can benefit architecture students or the ability to change the designs of building interiors could be useful for interior design students.
Other forms of person-to-object interaction could have useful educational potential.
The ability to create virtual buildings within SL means that educators can conduct virtual class visits to locations that would otherwise be impossible to do in real life.
Moreover, teachers can allow their students the opportunity to visit other time periods virtually which ‘...gives participants a sense of being there...’ and allows students to become immersed in the environment [21].
Deficiencies in the User’s Experience The ability SL gives to create simulations presents a wonderful tool for teachers and learners but is let down by fundamental flaws which Linden Lab has long failed to rectify.
Linden Lab has not been able to simplify to any appreciable degree the learning process required to permit users to immerse themselves effectively in the SL environment.
Newcomers still experiencing real difficulties in trying to control their avatars [22].
The unwieldiness of controlling one’s avatar is unlikely to give a user the sense of being anywhere other than in a poorly programmed game.
Movement around the SL world is at times rather clunky and the interface is not entirely intuitive.
In order for SL to be used as a teaching tool, a significant amount of training time is required to teach students how to join and navigate the virtual world [22] possibly at the expense of teaching course material.
Moreover, SL still has a tendency to lag whenever a large number of avatars are gathered in the one location which can be frustrating.
SL also suffers from occasional downtime.
One could argue that this, combined with time lag, awkward movement and a less-than-intuitive interface make it far from ‘...easy for them [students] to suspend their disbelief and feel immersed in their environment...’ as has been claimed [21].
On the contrary, these problems act as a constant reminder that one is on a computer, moving an avatar around (perhaps not very successfully) and not really immersed in the virtual world.
Conclusion There can be no doubt that SL can be a useful tool for educators, to argue otherwise would be absurd.
Even a cursory scan of the available literature reveals this [23].
SL seems to be at its most useful in allowing users the ability to create and observe three-dimensional models, giving SL particular applicability for students of courses such as design, architecture and the sciences.
It is less useful as a delivery method of non-interactive activities such as lectures.
Moreover, hardware requirements and limitations in usability mean that it may not be ideal for peer-to-peer discussion and collaboration when compared with other social media services.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, SL is still beset by several problems which, as long as they persist, will preclude it from becoming the ‘game changer’ for education that many hoped it would be.
It certainly does not deserve the sometimes hostile reception it has received from many academics [24] though one cannot help but feel this reaction may partly be due to SL’s failure to live up to the hyperbole of the early evangelists’ claims on its behalf.
In its current form, SL is just another useful tool for educators along with blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 innovations, and it may be best marketed to educators in this way – another weapon in their armoury rather than as an educational panacea.
From a personal perspective, the most disappointing aspect is that many of problematic issues highlighted above are not new, many having been identified as far back as 2006 and 2007 [19].
Unfortunately, SL has not been able to gain enough ground: in making it easier for users to be able to run SL (either at home or in educational institutions); in reducing the learning curve required to satisfactorily navigate the virtual world, or: in improving the functionality and stability of the platform.
That is not to say that some progress has not been made in these areas, just not at rapid enough a pace.
Credit is also due in dealing with previous ethical concerns over creating educational spaces in close virtual proximity to such morally dubious locations as gambling dens and strip clubs.
This has for the most part been dealt with by banning gambling and removing the sex industry to a cordoned-off island of virtual sybaritism.
Despite the relatively modest improvements made by SL over the course of the last four years, virtual worlds are not going away, though it may well be that, in future, other players in the virtual world market may be better placed to deliver educational benefits than SL [25].
In the meantime, the jury will remain out on how much of a learning revolution SL really represents.
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http://www.nmc.org/horizonproject/2007/virtual-worlds Hedreen, R., Johnson, J. Lundy, M. et al., 2008.
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http://virtualworldwatch.net/2010/06/09/how-many-uk-universities-are-active-in-virtual-worlds/ Kirriemuir, J., 2010.Virtual world activity (Spring 2010).Virtual World Watch.
http://virtualworldwatch.net/snapshots/virtual-world-activity-spring-2010/ Elliot, B., 2007.
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http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2009/03/04/Second-Life-Engaging-Virtual-Campuses.aspx?Page=1 Tobin, L., 2009.
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The Guardian, 21 April 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/apr/21/elearning-university-of-london?INTCMP=SRCH Antonacci, D. and Modaress, N. (2005).
Second Life: the educational possibilities of a massively multiplayer virtual world http://www2.kumc.edu/ir/tlt/SLEDUCAUSESW2005/SLPresentationOutline.htm Real-World Behavior And Biases Show Up In Virtual World, 2008.
Science Daily, 11 September 2008. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080909074104.htmx John Kirriemuir.
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Students’ first impression of Second Life: a case study from the United Arab Emirates.
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Digital Learning World http://digitallearningworld.com/3d-virtual-worlds-flat-classroom-conference Author Details Paul Gorman Librarian City of Glasgow College North Hanover Street Library 60 North Hanover Street Glasgow G1 2BP Email: Paul.Gorman@cityofglasgowcollege.ac.uk Web site: http://library.cityofglasgowcollege.ac.uk/ Paul Gorman is a librarian at City of Glasgow College and is responsible for collections management and academic liaison for the schools of Creative Industries and Sport.
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The Tablet Symposium Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines The Tablet Symposium Buzz data mobile wireless usability video multimedia ebook curation facebook ipad android taxonomy research standards Citation BibTex RIS Ryan Burns reports on a one-day symposium on tablet computers, e-readers and other new media objects held at the University of Sussex on 10 April 2013.
The Tablet Symposium [1] brought together researchers and practitioners to examine questions about uses of tablet computers and e-readers across many walks of life, including academic, artistic, pedagogical, corporate and everyday contexts.
As a co-organiser of the event, I was thrilled by the range of presentations that we were fortunate enough to be able to include in the symposium.
It was fascinating to see such a broad range of perspectives being applied to such a very focused object of study.
I was particularly struck by the fact that, although every speaker was talking about the same object, everybody attributed a slightly different set of meanings to that object.
The Tablet Symposium highlighted how in some domains such as comics, the role of tablets is very well-defined, while in others such as museum curation, the role of tablets is still uncertain.
The range of speakers and topics created a truly interdisciplinary event with a delightful collegial atmosphere in which many ideas were shared and developed.
Panel 1: Usability Pass the iPad: Tablet Computers  for Collaborative Creating and Sharing in Groups at Home and School Nicola Yuill, University of Sussex; Yvonne Rogers, University College London; Jochen Rick, Saarland University; Stefan Kreitmayer, Open University Nicola presented the findings of her team’s research comparing the role of tablets to that of paper.
Specifically, they were interested in whether tablets can be used for collaborative work, rather than merely for the sort of personal uses such as gaming that we might more commonly associate with tablets.
Nicola emphasised that she was not asking whether tablets were better than paper; rather she was interested in how any specific medium such as tablets or paper might affect workflow.
A starting-point for this research was the idea that most screen-based computing devices such as mobile phones and PCs are understood to be personal.
With tablets, however, their size, shape and wireless nature means that they could be much more readily shared than other screen-based devices, perhaps allowing them to be simultaneously personal and communal devices.
Presenting research based on analysis of the game of picture consequences [2] at the 13th Brighton Science Festival in February 2013 [3], Nicola showed that tablets can be used as ‘scrap computers’ or communal devices that are handed around amongst a team.
The collaborative nature of the task meant that tablets were experienced as communal, rather than personal, objects.
Nicola’s paper raised some interesting questions in particular about the extent to which we conceive of tablets as personal devices.
Using tablets in a collaborative task such as picture consequences highlighted how a tablet user may sometimes feel a strong relationship to the material object, and at other times feel that it is the intangible data contained within the object that they really ‘own’.
The Distance Between Us: Incorporating the Advancements of Touchscreen Technology into Current Museum Touring Exhibition Practices Clair Battison and Louise Egan, Victoria and Albert Museum Clair and Louise’s presentation gave a concrete illustration of the comparison of paper and tablet computers.
They outlined a pilot project at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which used tablets to replace paper in the recording of information about exhibits being displayed in touring exhibitions.
When a museum exhibition goes on tour, a huge variety of documents are required to accompany each object to ensure that it is transported and displayed correctly.
A single complex object may require 150 photographs to illustrate sufficiently how it should be displayed once it reaches its destination.
The trial used tablet computers to record various types of data including written descriptions and photographs of touring exhibits.
Clair and Louise explained that the trial proved intuitive and efficient.
The benefits of tablets in the trial were that they could store vast amounts of data on many different objects without taking up the same large space as paper documents.
The image clarity and ability to zoom removed the need to annotate images, in turn saving time and removing language problems that can be encountered when the exhibit is being displayed abroad.
The ability to use Skype or other Internet-based video communication tools was incredibly useful, as exhibitors abroad could contact curators at the V&A to ask questions about how to display an object, using live video to help explain the problem they were having.
The drawbacks were that the Internet connection was not always reliable when the tablet was sent to other locations.
Most problematic, however, was the fact that IT at the V&A would not support the use of apps.
In conclusion, Clair and Louise questioned whether the benefits experienced were due to specific tablet computer features such as a touchscreen, or whether these benefits would be attained by any portable computer.
Tablets: Specific, Generic, Perfect?
Ryan Burns, University of Sussex In my paper, I sought to critique a perception that I have encountered in interviews and observations with users of tablet computers: namely, that tablets are perfect.
I have found that users often seek to blame something external to the tablet computer whenever it goes wrong.
Users may blame poor Internet connection, a lack of useful apps for a given task, a lack of suitable third-party add-ons such as Bluetooth keyboards, or even simply a minor design flaw in their otherwise perfect device.
So even when they fail, tablets are regarded as infallible: any given problem is always something else’s fault.
I proposed that this sense of tablets as perfect results from a lack of clear understanding about what exactly a tablet computer is.
Is my tablet computer this generic material device that I’m holding?
Or is it the collection of specific apps and files that are located inscrutably and immaterially ‘inside’ the device?
I argued that generic tablet computers are regarded as perfect, while specific apps and files are seen as fallible.
This allows users to experience all sorts of failures and problems when using a tablet computer, yet retain the belief that tablets are perfect.
I concluded that the tendency to blame the specific and regard the generic as infallible reflects our understanding of technology more generally.
While a given technology may be fallible, technological solutions in general are regarded as, potentially, perfect.
Ubiquitous Computing at  our Fingertips: Everyday  Practices  and  Experiences  in  the  Context  of Tablet Computing Mareike Glöss, Uppsala University Mareike took a perspective based on her background in cultural anthropology to critique the idealised aim of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to achieve ‘ubiquitous computing at our fingertips’.
Arguing that HCI has been limited by the idea of people sitting in front of a PC, Mareike claimed that ubiquitous computing is not something that we should aim for: it is already here.
It is just so messy that it is difficult to see.
Because of the messy way in which ubiquitous computing devices are spread through our lives, Mareike argued that to study tablet users requires more than just interviews.
An understanding of tablets as embedded in everyday life is required, and we must analyse experience, materiality and practice as three related ways in which users make sense of their tablets.
Mareike constructed some spider diagrams to illustrate how tablets belong to assemblages of co-constituting objects and influences.
Our experience of the tablet as a material object, for example, often relies on an invisible relationship to the table or desk on which it is placed as well as to the body of the person holding it.
The overall message of Mareike’s presentation was that it is really impossible to study tablet computers as a standalone object.
The ways in which they are understood in relation to a range of other objects, devices and uses – and whether they are considered as a new mobile device or a new personal computing device – are essential components of any analysis of tablet computers.
Panel 2: In Practice Touch: Sensitive?
Democratising the Composer Performer Listener Triangle within the Digital Score Mick Feltham, University of Sussex Mick spoke about his practice-based research into relationships between composers, performers and listeners, and how they are affected by digital objects such as tablets.
Describing digital technology that would allow the audience to influence the score of a piece as it was being played, Mick argued that tablets represent a new paradigm for artistic and social interaction.
Addressing the consequences of this new paradigm, Mick asked whether the audience’s ability to influence the score paradoxically removes them from their original role as witness to a musical performance.
Mick concluded by asking whether, compared to the transparent technology of musical instruments, the ‘black box’ of tablet technology might allow artists to retain their sovereignty in the composer-performer-listener triangle.
Reinventing Painting: the Relationship Between Tradition and Technology in the Age of Mobile Devices Nadja Ryzhakova, iPad Artist Nadja uses her iPad to create works of art: a practice that she calls ‘iPainting’ [4].
Nadja turned to New Media Art quite recently, believing that new media technologies can enhance the art of painting by bringing new types of hybridity to the form and making painting more instantaneous.
Against a perception that new technologies might damage or reduce traditional artistic practices, Nadja traced a history of the interrelation of art and technology.
The camera obscura is one example of a (once-)new technology that developed alongside artistic practices.
And, of course, no fine art form is entirely immaterial; even Nadja’s digital art relies on the specific material features of the iPad.
Nadja’s presentation raised the interesting question of whether tablet technology could have more impact on the production of art or its consumption.
David Hockney’s 2012 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London [5] illustrated how the display and consumption of even digital paintings still relies on traditional gallery settings.
Nadja herself sells her artwork as prints, rather than as digital reproductions.
Touch as Puppetry: Achieving Subtle and Nuanced Performance through Tangible Touch Interfaces Ian Grant, University of Sussex Ian’s presentation evaluated the problematic relationship between touch interfaces and users.
Ian argued that the touchscreen interface essentially aims to turn specific movements of a person’s fingers into a coherent visual experience.
With tablets, unlike PCs, the input (fingers) and the output (screen) share the same material surface: the glass screen.
Although in the short history of computing technology this seems radical, Ian built on his background as a puppeteer to argue that the idea of turning specific movements of the fingers into a coherent visual scene has been the central facet of puppetry for millennia.
Ian went on to critique the perception that touchscreen devices provide a natural or intuitive interface.
Against the notion that interfaces should be invisible to users, Ian argued that we have to learn a specific ‘taxonomy of gestures’ in order to use tablets in what comes to feel like an intuitive way.
Ian concluded that the intuitive or natural touch interface cannot really be considered as such, because it is totally defined by prescribed gestures that manufacturers build into their devices.
Game Comics: An Analysis of an Emergent Hybrid Form Daniel Goodbrey, University of Hertfordshire While a common media response to tablets and the iPad in particular was one of bewilderment – what is the iPad actually for?
– the comics world instantly fell in love with tablets.
It was immediately obvious that they would allow comics authors a previously unknown freedom to exploit an infinite visual space that could be traversed and manipulated by readers in unique ways that were impossible using print media.
Daniel spoke about ‘game comics’: video games that use the language of comics.
To evaluate whether tablets could support this emerging hybrid form, Daniel presented his own game comic, ‘A Duck Has an Adventure’ [6].
Available as an Android app and as a Web version, Daniel’s game comic makes creative use of the tension between reading and playing.
I recommend readers visit the site or download the app and play/read it to get a sense of this tension, and to enjoy the light-hearted game comic for themselves.
This is perhaps the best way to judge whether the tablet computer does in fact feel like the perfect medium for this type of game comic hybrid.
Figure 1: Daniel Goodbrey's game comic ‘A Duck Has an Adventure’ Panel 3: Ubiquity Tablet Edition: Public Habits and Uses of the Mobile Internet and Online News Media Jeremy Matthew, King’s College London Building on a quote from Rupert Murdoch, who in 2010 claimed that the iPad would be the saviour of newspapers, Jeremy assessed the current state of tablets as news providers.
A central theme of his presentation was the question of how to define meaningful engagement with news media.
Although two-thirds of tablet users access news on their devices, the type of news content that they access is different from print-based or even Web-based media, with tablet news apps often using video, images and brief written summaries.
Jeremy described how the news consumption patterns of tablet users often ignore traditional channels.
Many tablet users receive news through social networks, with trending topics a potential equivalent of headlines.
Amongst other problems with defining news-worthiness for tablet users, Jeremy argued that trending topics might be described as performative displays by users wishing to demonstrate their knowledge of current affairs, rather than representing true engagement with any given news story.
Touching the Screen: Immediacy and Discrepancy in the Use of Tablet Computers Timo Kaerlein, University of Paderborn The fact that touchscreens have been called ‘natural user interfaces’ indicated to Timo that something of a birth myth surrounded tablets when they were first introduced.
The idea that tablet interfaces are invisible, natural and intuitive seemed to play into a tradition in Western thought from Aristotle through to Heidegger and phenomenology in which touch is figured as the epitome of intimacy.
In the ideal vision of HCI, a perfect touchscreen would become invisible to the user, allowing an unrestrained connectivity in which the user and device formed one unified object.
Against this sense of intimacy that is attributed to tablets, Timo explained that no matter how intimate users regard the relationship with their device, the device only ever ‘perceives’ the person touching it as merely a source of electrical conductivity.
The immediacy of touchscreen interfaces necessarily involves frustrating side-effects.
Tiny amounts of oils and dirt on a human finger disrupt the touchscreen by leaving marks on the screen.
Touching the screen has the simultaneous effect of obscuring it.
Rather than an intimate relationship between user and object, then, the human component actually prevents the smooth operation of touchscreen devices.
Timo’s critique revealed the disconcerting idea that in HCI contexts, the human being is often in fact a disruptive and problematic element, unsettling the otherwise perfect functioning of a tablet device.
e-Book Usability: Reading Time and Comprehension Hannah Lee,  Thomas Young & Claudia Roda, The American University of Paris Hannah’s presentation dealt with a question that is relevant to almost any use of tablet computers: the difference between reading time and comprehension when using tablets compared to paper.
Hannah presented a pilot study in which reading time and comprehension were compared on e-ink readers and on paper, for both fiction and non-fiction texts.
It was found that reading time and comprehension do differ between paper and e-readers, although the limits of the study prevented firm conclusions as to why this may be.
Tablet computers can be broadly divided into dedicated e-readers such as the Kindle or Nook, and multimedia devices such as the iPad, Samsung Galaxy and Kindle Fire.
As it stands, the e-ink technology used in dedicated e-readers is incompatible with the technology in multimedia tablets.
This forces the user to make significant decisions about what a tablet computer could or should be used for, in turn having major consequences for how we define what a tablet computer is.
Tipu’s Tiger: Killer App?
Ruth Adams, King’s College London   Tipu’s Tiger is a wooden music box depicting a European man being mauled by a tiger [7].
It was commissioned in the 1790s by the Sultan of Mysore in South India, an enemy of the colonising forces of the East India Company, and is currently on display at the V&A in London.
In 2009, the V&A released an app called Tipu’s iTiger to market the exhibit and the museum.
Rather than an examination of the app itself, Ruth’s presentation questioned how the existence of the app affects our understanding of the original museum object.
Against the criticism that the app trivialises the real exhibit, Ruth argued that Tipu’s Tiger was always a toy.
Although its current status as a museum object lends it a certain importance and solemnity, the object was originally an item of fun.
Furthermore, there is an argument that, as a museum object, Tipu’s Tiger has already been decontextualised.
Ruth argued that the museum object, like its digital counterpart, exists in an inauthentic context.
Instead of worrying that a digital version may remove the object from its proper surroundings, we should recognise that this decontextualisation is the common fate of all museum objects.
Panel 4: As a Book Mostly Unreliable?
: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Re-invention of the Book Caroline Bassett, University of Sussex Caroline told a story of how the iPad came to be, working against technical histories which see the tablet computer as the latest in a line of computing or communications technologies.
Treating the history of technology and the history of Science Fiction (SF) as related, Caroline argued that the iPad is one example of the mutual influence of SF and technology.
A folk history has built up around the iPad which says that Douglas Adams, creator of the SF series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [8], originally conceived the iPad, and Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, went on to create the actual object.
Caroline argued that the link that does indeed exist between Adams and Jobs is more complicated than this story would have us believe.
Caroline argued that by re-telling the history of the iPad with a focus on its role and position within a series of textual objects, we can reconstitute the object that we hold in our hands today.
If we take the mutual influence of the Hitchhiker’s Guide and the iPad seriously, we must confront the Hitchhiker’s Guide that features in the fifth and final novel in the written series, Mostly Harmless.
By that stage, the Guide had become a frightening and powerful object that treated its human users as subordinate.
By re-telling the story of the iPad to include this textual history, we can reveal aspects of today’s tablet computers that would otherwise remain hidden.
Off the Shelf: How e-Readers Recapitulate Books’ Multi-function Pasts Caroline Hamilton, University of Melbourne; Gerard Goggin, University of Sydney Against the idea that tablets or e-readers might introduce less virtuous or useful types of reading, Caroline argued we need to reconsider the role of the book.
We tend to consider extended, focused reading as a useful intellectual pursuit, unlike skimming through random pages for example.
If tablet users tend to use their devices to flick quickly between different texts, we may criticise these devices for encouraging bad reading habits.
A historical study of the codex book, however, reveals a great diversity of types of reading and uses of books.
From Ramelli’s ‘bookwheel’ [9] which allows a reader to flick between several heavy tomes while sitting in one comfortable chair, to the mid-16th Century ‘album amicorum’ [10] (which Caroline wittily described as ‘Old Facebook’), readers have always adopted various styles of reading and uses of books.
Caroline argued that extended reading is not and has never been ‘natural’.
In fact, the codex book that we associate with this style of reading is actually logically best suited to navigating non-linear texts – i.e.
flicking through a book.
For extended reading of a linear text like a novel, a scroll is a more suitable book form.
Based on a historical reappraisal of books, Caroline argued that tablets are not creating any revolution in reading.
Even if they are changing how we read, this has always been an on-going process in the ever-changing materiality of information devices.
Assemblage: Tablets as Desire Machine Russell Pearce, University of Sussex Russell traced the history of the potential of the tablet computer.
At various stages in what we now retrospectively call its lifespan, the tablet computer represented different potentialities.
By analysing the potential or possibilities that were invoked at specific points in the tablet’s history, we can learn something about digital culture at that time.
The Apple Newton and other early Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) used handwriting recognition as a way to overcome the perceived clunky disconnect of the keyboard.
For Russell, it was the removal of wires that allowed PDAs to start to resemble a book rather than a computer.
A striking difference between the marketing of the Apple Newton and the marketing of tablets today is summed up by the Newton being promoted as ‘so engaging that people would want to change the way they do things’.
Compared to the current mythology that tablets are intuitive and natural, the idea that users would adapt their own practices to fit in with the Newton operating system represents a radically different potential from the one we associate with tablets today.
Russell brought these ideas together by arguing that the potentiality of each new PDA, slate or tablet device was discussed in a type of media coverage in which news and marketing converged: a model that continues today especially in media coverage of Apple product launches.
Magic, Rhetoric and the iPad Ryan Eanes, University of Oregon Ryan discussed the cultural connection between technology and magic.
Taking Arthur C Clarke’s ‘third law’ that ‘any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ as a starting point, Ryan addressed our cultural understandings of technology generally and the iPad in particular.
The iPad was described as ‘magical and revolutionary’ in its initial press release.
One definition of magic offered by Ryan was ‘mistaking ideal connections for real connections’.
This idea is manifested as a willingness to ignore the fact that the technology of the iPad was not actually new or revolutionary: multi-touch screens being a particularly common example of an old technology presented as novel in tablet computers.
Ryan outlined the history of magic in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in which magic is banned because it challenges the sovereignty of God.
Ryan proposed that using an iPad is a very personal experience for reasons of touch, intimacy and the way we select our own set of suitable apps.
Combining these two ideas, the iPad suddenly takes on an impressive quality: it turns the user into a deity.
Being in control of this magical technology, making the device obey us, work for us, appear to ‘know’ us in some way, gives the user a sense of being able to command magic themselves.
In a self-fulfilling mechanism, the magical rhetoric that pervades media coverage of tablet computers is thus experienced as real by tablet computer users, perpetuating the idea that this technology is magical.
Conclusion My impression after the first panel ‘Usability’ was that culturally we are still unsure exactly what a tablet could and should be used for, and what an individual’s relationship with the tablet computer should be.
Is it an object that belongs to an individual?
Can it be shared?
Can it be used to replace paper?
Should it?
These questions set the theme for the day, and each subsequent paper shed new light on how to answer them.
Each speaker in the second panel ‘In Practice’ had a clear idea of what the tablet is for.
Perhaps most significantly, each speaker was consciously engaging with new technology in their artistic practice.
Rather than treating a tablet computer as a mere tool, the speakers in this panel were all conscious that using a tablet computer would have an impact on their practice.
I had the strong impression that without a similar type of conscious engagement with the technology, users would find it very difficult to simply pick up a tablet and start using it effectively and without problems.
The third panel ‘Ubiquity’ addressed the question of what a tablet computer is or could be, by discussing ways in which tablets might be ubiquitous.
Where the speakers in Panel 2 had discussed ways in which we might successfully integrate tablet technology to our everyday lives, the third panel questioned the necessity of doing so.
Whether in news consumption, reading or museum attendance, the introduction of tablets may solve a perceived problem or offer an apparently novel experience, but this always comes at a cost.
My main impression from this panel was that while using tablets can bring rewards, they are always counterbalanced by certain, possibly unforeseen, drawbacks.
The final panel ‘As a Book’ drew together some of the questions that had been raised throughout the day by focusing on one specific and well-defined use of tablets: as e-readers.
Yet even here, the main lesson was that it is naïve to think of reading as a well-defined practice.
While we tend to either celebrate or condemn new practices brought about by new technologies, the clear message from this panel was that so-called new practices are often anything but.
I believe there are two useful responses to this idea.
Firstly, we can use this idea to critique the marketing discourses that describe successive technologies as novel, revolutionary, and innovative.
Secondly, we can reject altogether the idea that there are proper, standard or acceptable uses of technology.
We can treat the emergence of new technologies like tablet computers as an opportunity to redefine what practices count as normal.
In so doing, we have an opportunity to mobilise this technology for the benefit of the political, artistic, academic or pedagogical practices that we value.
References The Tablet Symposium http://www.sussex.ac.uk/rcmdc/projects/tablet An explanation of picture consequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_consequences Brighton Science Festival 2013 http://www.brightonscience.com/2013/about/ Nadja Rhyzakova’s Web site http://ipainting.pro/#!/ David Hockney at the Royal Academy http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/ A Duck Has An Adventure http://e-merl.com/stuff/duckadv.html Tipu’s Tiger http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/tipus-itiger/ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy Ramelli’s Bookwheel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookwheel Album Amicorum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autograph_book Author Details Ryan Burns PhD researcher School of Media, Film and Music University of Sussex Web site: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/275228 Email: r.burns@sussex.ac.uk Ryan is a doctoral researcher whose work examines science, technology and everyday life.
Ryan critiques concepts of digital culture by examining specific uses of tablet computers, in particular the use of tablets by science researchers.
His PhD thesis entitled ‘Tablet computers and technological practices within and beyond the laboratory’ will be completed in Autumn 2014.
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21st-century Scholarship and Wikipedia Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines 21st-century Scholarship and Wikipedia Buzz data software rdf framework wiki infrastructure archives identifier smartphone blog repositories e-learning uri oer research Citation BibTex RIS Amber Thomas explores the ways in which emerging research practices and Wikipedia illustrate the changing boundaries of academic work.
Wikipedia, the world’s fifth most-used Web site [1], is a good illustration of the growing credibility of online resources.
In his article in Ariadne earlier this year, “Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Academic Acceptance” [2], Brian Whalley described the debates around accuracy and review, in the context of geology.
He concluded that ‘If Wikipedia is the first port of call, as it already seems to be, for information requirement traffic, then there is a commitment to build on Open Educational Resources (OERs) of various kinds and improve their quality.’ In a similar approach to the Geological Society event that Whalley describes, Sarah Fahmy of JISC worked with Wikimedia and the British Library on a World War One (WWI) Editathon [3].
There is a rich discourse about the way that academics relate to Wikipedia.
The EduWiki Conference in September 2012 [4] organised by Martin Poulter, brought together educators and Wikipedia authors to explore the ways that we can develop Wikipedia contribution and use.
The relationship between OERs, open access, open academic practices and Wikipedia were very strong in the discussions, alongside issues surrounding digital literacy as well as citation and referencing practices.
Wikipedia has made it very clear that as a reference work it should not be quoted as a primary source within academic work [5].
I presented on 21st-century Scholarship and the role of Wikipedia.
I find myself increasingly using the word ‘scholarship’ to encompass academic practice at its best, whether in teaching, research or public engagement.
In this article I will focus on four key trends that link scholarship and Wikipedia.
The full slidedeck and poster are also available [6].
Scholarship Is Evolving There are growing trends in the way that researchers work.
They are not mainstream but I contend that these are key directions for scholarship, and they are directions that information professionals need to understand.
Figure 1: Four directions in which scholarship is evolving Trend One: The Wiki Way aka Perpetual Beta A common phrase in Web software development is 'perpetual beta'.
Whereas alpha means the polished product, beta means the step before, when there is still the possibility of change.
Smartphone users will be familiar with the way in which apps often need updating for the latest functionality and fixes ('patches').
This is more commonplace now than when we mostly used desktop software rather than 'apps': partly because connectivity and account management make it possible to make rapid updates easier, and partly because software developers are more comfortable working on a continual release model.
Perpetual beta is the byword for acknowledging that the product will continue to develop, a fact they present as a virtue rather than a fault.
‘Wiki’ famously comes from a Maori word 'wiki', meaning a particular type of fast bus.
It has come to mean a way of working on the Web that is highly collaborative, where people can contribute and edit, and there is wiki software designed for this purpose.
The 'wiki way' is more the philosophy of collaborative Web publishing, or even of working more generally, where working is fairly fast, it is done in public, feedback is invited, and thus the whole process is both more social and more visible.
I think both of these trends are manifested in emerging scholarly practices.
Scholarly method has always recognised that the process by which knowledge is constructed is as important as the way that it is presented.
Whether researchers work in the hard sciences, the social sciences, the humanities or the arts, transparency of methodology is a key element of scholarly communication.
The digital age provides ways of sharing that method more explicitly.
This is a deepening of scholarly principles.
The concept of reproducibility of research results [7] drives the sharing of data and experiment design, behind the Open Notebooks model [8] and platforms such as MyExperiment [9].
Working in the open can include blogging book chapters as they are written [10], or writing a doctoral thesis online [11].
There are platforms designed to support open collaborative writing, such as booktype [12].
When researchers do their work in the open, they can develop a profile, increase the impact of their work, they can reach the like-minded, attract the respect of peers, and most importantly, do what they do better.
Services like Google Scholar, figshare, academia.edu and peerJ are starting to obtain traction in representing the researcher’s ‘digital footprint’, now aided by the development of individual Researcher Identifiers such as ORCID.
Trend Two: Many Eyes This is a principle from within the open source software movement [13].
As described by Linus Torveld, ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’ [14]; … with many eyes ‘almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone.’ This is because people working together can bring more accuracy.
In a very immediate way I have often benefited from this in my own work.
When I blogged an extract of my OER Rapid Innovation Call for Proposals [15], it sent a pingback to the CUNY Academic Commons in a Box [16] Project.
The project leader spotted that I had mistakenly credited SUNY instead of CUNY and requested a correction.
That would not have happened had the text remained within the PDF of the Call Document.
The sheer ‘linkiness’ of blogs gives a rich opportunity for content owners to improve each other’s work.
This example also highlights the vulnerabilities of openness.
Had I not blogged my error, no one would have detected it, including me.
The many eyes approach represents a trade-off between personal control and collective accuracy.
Research has long recognised the value of review, both of the research process and of its outputs.
The digital era is forcing questions of how best research can be peer-reviewed: at which stage of the process, the relationship of peer review to publication, the different ways that this can be funded and managed.
Within this rethink are key questions about the purpose of scholarly publication.
Is it mainly to facilitate knowledge exchange between researchers within the same field?
Or across fields?
Or outside research institutions?
The notion of extended participation in research is also one of the drivers behind in opening up scholarly activities to participation from the public.
Projects like Transcribe Bentham [17], Old Weather [18], iSpot [19] and the many projects from Galaxy Zoo [20] utilise the involvement of non-academics to collect and transform data.
This approach is not without controversy, as described by Andrew Flinn in his article on “An Attack on Professionalism and Scholarship?
Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge” [21].
These mass participation approaches use the Web to achieve scale and depth in ways that would have been incredibly hard to do before the digital age.
They make the boundaries of scholarship more porous.
Trend Three: Beyond Dewey As readers of Ariadne will know, the Dewey Decimal System was for organising books on a shelf: one book, one shelf.
The digital age is about multiple views onto the same content.
Information professionals have been adjusting their methods to this new reality for decades now: this is not a new trend.
I would argue that Wikipedia is a good illustration of the tipping point in the public consciousness of the interconnectedness of information.
We are becoming used to text being clickable: without knowing about concepts of “the semantic web”, people understand that to click a name, a place, a thing, an idea, is to visit it.
Wikipedia represents this perfectly.
I am not advocating giving up on classification and categorisation, but I am saying that at the presentation layer, information needs to be aggregated and represented in more fluid ways than the print paradigm of Dewey’s time.
At the extremes there are models of bottom-up folksonomical approaches [22], but common mainstream practices on the Web already reflect this shift: we are already post-Dewey.
This is reflected in how we navigate online content.
JISC’s Digital Information Seeker report [23] examined how people read online researchers ‘bounce’ and ‘whirl’: they explore, jump, browse, they click about.
This multidimensional content structure reflects more authentically the complexity of knowledge.
New pedagogies are being explored to develop the way that can be supported by educators [24].
This information landscape is rich and deep and calls for improved digital literacies such as the approaches supported by JISC’s programmes [25].
Developing our digital literacy means adjusting our information handling practices to an abundance of information.
We cannot assume something is true just because it is online: we need to apply our information literacy, cultural frameworks and critical thinking to decide for ourselves.
The sheer clickability or ‘linkiness’ of the Web can make it feel like exploring new territory.
My university library was wasted on me as an undergraduate.
I read what I had to read and some of what I wanted to read too.
I do not recall ever reading a journal.
Even as a very engaged and conscientious student of philosophy, journals were intimidating and alien.
Had I been studying in 2012, I would have been far more likely to encounter articles online, either through searching within library holdings and/or finding open access versions online.
I would have explored more.
The possibilities of island hopping, of moving diagonally and serendipitously between information are far greater than they ever have been.
Trend Four: Knowledge is Networked Wikipedia is an excellent illustration of how this multidimensional landscape works.
It is full of rich linking.
Some analysis of Wikipedia is particularly interesting in how it surfaces those patterns.
Simon Raper [26] and Tony Hirst [27] have both graphed the links between pages about philosophy and philosophers.
Visualising those links shows how the work of thinkers becomes a node in a network.
I like to imagine that for modern scholars we will see the equivalent of Rock Family Trees [28] emerging: a deepening live graph of each academic’s role in the network, each node in what Minksy termed the Society of Mind [29].
There are such rich opportunities in the digital humanities, where text becomes structured data, and structured data becomes images, helping us visualise the network, the connections between ideas.
I mentioned in the opening section of this article that there is consensus between Wikipedia and academics that Wikipedia should not be cited as a primary source in academic work.
But thinking of my own digital practices, I often use a Wikipedia entry as an identifier for a concept.
When I want to cite a person or a theory, my first point of call is often Wikipedia.
I see it as a set of identifiers in a linked data way.
My reference for this paragraph is a case in point.
I went to get the definitive definition from linkedata.org and it cited Wikipedia’s definition within its own: “Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods.
More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as “a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.” http://linkeddata.org/ However I am not so much talking about linked data as about utilising the inherent linkiness of the Web.
Imagine blog-style trackbacks for all links, improved intelligence on inbound and outbound links, being able to see how one piece of content is linked to the Web.
The technology for this may come not from the traditional information sciences but from the new practice of ‘digital marketing’.
Marketers are rushing to understand the way that they can find audiences, detect semantic content (eg positive and negative responses), analyse the networks between people, understand patterns of social influence, predict buying trends and track the spread of information.
In short, they are trying to understand how networks work.
Public Scholarship It is far more fashionable to question public participation in research than to embrace it.
Andrew Keen’s “Cult of the Amateur” [30] is still widely referred to.
In this work Keen identified the Internet, and in particular Web 2.0 practices, as running counter to the process of professionally produced knowledge.
He questions the reliability of ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ and fears that the expansion of ‘unfiltered knowledge’ does not bode well for the future.
I have always found that a rather misanthropic view.
Our social structures of validating knowledge have always changed over time, whether within apprenticeship, craftsmanship, the “professions” such as law and medicine, or the arts: shifts in the way we organise our knowledge are part of the process of knowledge construction and I see no reason for this era to be the first one in history that fails to adjust.
I am more optimistic, particularly given that that we have yet to see the effects on our popular culture of mass Higher Education within the UK.
Figure 2: Public scholarship and the education level of Wikipedia users Melvyn Bragg recently described the idea of a mass intelligentsia [31] which is a positive perspective on the emerging effects of mass Higher Education.
Bragg hosts BBC Radio 4’s  In Our Time  which surfaces a long tail of academic knowledge in an engaging way.
‘High-brow’ broadcasting is no longer constrained to radio either.
The relationship which the UK Open University developed with the BBC has moved well beyond filming tweedy maths professors at 2am, and towards cross-platform projects like the Blue Planet which receives huge viewing figures.
I see reasons for optimism there.
Beyond the UK, the Commonwealth of Learning has been highlighting the huge gap between demand and supply of higher-level learning [32], pointing to a potentially huge growth in university-level courses globally.
Rising to meet this demand is a new breed of education provision, of experimentation with mass online courses, different models of accreditation and partnerships between providers collectively known as ‘open education’.
The means by which this gap might be addressed is the subject of fierce and heartfelt debate which is not the subject of this article.
But it shows a demand.
And I hope that if this demand is met, we will have an increasingly educated global public.
Online academic content, in the form of open access research, open educational resources and initiatives around public engagement [33], all have their part to play in nurturing this rich information landscape.
Figure 3: How educators can contribute and benefit Universities can benefit from Wikipedia engagement.
Brian Kelly of UKOLN has been collating data on the importance of Wikipedia as a referrer to academic work [34].
Wikipedia is itself a rich source of data for scholarship, particularly in the digital humanities.
As I described above, the potential to mine the relationships between people, places and ideas is fascinating, and layered above that is Wikipedia as a visible collective construction of knowledge itself, with all the editing history available to view.
Try looking up a controversial topic such as “MMR” and examining the chat and editing history, and you can see knowledge construction at work.
The recent announcement that Wikipedia is making anonymised search logs available [35] opens up a wealth of possibilities for academics: what are the current points of intersecting interest across cultures, across languages?
Can we visualise what people look for and what they find?
Wikipedia is therefore not just a reference source but also a living social project with much to interest researchers.
The partnership between education and Wikipedia is potentially very powerful.
Wikimedia UK is keen to work with universities to engage more academics through its Education Strategy [36].
Figure 4: The whole picture Conclusion I have described the ways that Wikipedia is reflective of the story of knowledge in the digital age.
In some areas of scholarship these new ways of working have been embraced, particularly in the e-sciences, but there is still so much untapped potential.
Wikipedia is an illustration of the way that academic work needs to change to benefit from a more educated public, a more networked world, in an age of information abundance.
21st-century scholars should be working with it, not against it.
References Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en Brian Whalley.
"Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Acceptance in Academic Environments".
July 2012, Ariadne Issue 69 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue69/whalley Sarah Fahmy.
“Rewriting History: The JISC/ Wikipedia World War One Editathon”, blog post, 3 July 2012 http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/07/03/rewriting-history-the-jisc-wikipedia-world-war-one-editathon/ EduWiki Conference 2012 http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/EduWiki_Conference_2012 Jeffrey R. Young.
“Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 June 2006 http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/wikipedia-founder-discourages-academic-use-of-his-creation/2305 C21st Century Scholarship and Wikipedia base http://bit.ly/C21wiki The Reproducibility Initiative Science Exchange, PLOS  and figshare https://www.scienceexchange.com/reproducibility Cameron’s LaBLog: The online open laboratory notebook of Cameron Neylon http://biolab.isis.rl.ac.uk/camerons_labblog myExperiment  http://www.myexperiment.org/ Gráinne Conole.
"Book: Designing for learning in an open world".
25 July 2010   http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2155 Doug Belshaw.
The Never Ending Thesis http://neverendingthesis.com/ Sourcefabric | Booktype  http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/ JISC Open Source Software Watch  http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/beginners.xml Linus' Law: Wikipedia Entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27_Law Amber Thomas.
Digital Infrastructure to Support Open Content for Education JISC blog post Call Extract.
1 December 2011 http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/12/01/oerri_extract/ CUNY Academic Commons http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/ Transcribe Bentham Project http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/ Old Weather Our Weather's Past, the Climate's Future http://www.oldweather.org/ iSpot Project http://www.ispot.org.uk/ Galaxy Zoo Project http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ Andrew Flinn.
"An Attack on Professionalism and Scholarship?
Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge".
January 2010, Ariadne Issue 62 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/flinn Folksonomy: Wikipedia Entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy JISC Digital Information Seeker Report.
5 July 2010 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2010/07/podcast108digitalinformationseeker.aspx Innovating Pedagogy | Open University Innovations Report #1 http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/innovating/ JISC Digital Literacy Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/developingdigitalliteracies Simon Raper.
Graphing the history of philosophy.
Drunks and Lampposts blog, 13 June 13, 2012 http://drunks-and-lampposts.com/2012/06/13/graphing-the-history-of-philosophy/ Tony Hirst.
Visualising Related Entries in Wikipedia Using Gephi.
OUseful.Info, the blog… 3 July 2012, 10:05 am http://blog.ouseful.info/2012/07/03/visualising-related-entries-in-wikipedia-using-gephi/ BBC Two TV Series: Rock Family Trees http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0070y2d Society of Mind: Wikipedia Entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind Andrew Keen.
"Cult of the Amateur": Wikipedia Entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cult_of_the_Amateur Melvyn Bragg on the rise of the mass intelligentsia.
Philosophy for Life Web site.
4 July 2012 http://philosophyforlife.org/melvyn-bragg-on-the-rise-of-the-mass-intelligentsia/ Commonwealth of Learning Bridging the Higher Education Gap: the 3-R challenge http://www.col.org/resources/speeches/2012presentations/Pages/2012-08-30b.aspx Manifesto for Public Engagement | National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/why-does-it-matter/manifesto Brian Kelly.
Importance of Wikipedia.
UK Web Focus blog.
September 2012  http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/key-posts/wikipedia/ Emil Protalinski.
Anonymous Search Log Files for Wikipedia Released.
The Next Web, September 2012  http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/20/wikimedia-releases-anonymous-search-log-files-wikipedia/ Education strategy Wikimedia UK http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_strategy Author Details Amber Thomas Programme Manager JISC Email: a.thomas@jisc.ac.uk  Web site: http://www.jisc.ac.uk Amber Thomas was a JISC programme manager until December 2012 and is now working at the University of Warwick managing the Academic Technology Support Service.
At JISC she led work on open educational resources and repositories such as Jorum.
She oversaw JISC’s projects on the technical and IPR issues which surround putting resources online.
Amber not only has experience and expertise of Higher Education but also of Further Education with experience gained with Becta as content officer of the National Grid for Learning and the Ferl Online Service that provided support on information and learning technology (ILT) in Further Education.
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QEN Event: Embedding Digital Literacies.
Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines QEN Event: Embedding Digital Literacies.
Citation BibTex RIS Marieke Guy reports from the Quality Enhancement Network (QEN) "Embedding Digital Literacies" event held on 11th November 2015 at Birmingham City University (and then repeated in Southampton the following day).
The QEN events are run regionally throughout the year by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) which is an independent body set up to monitor and advise on standards in Higher Education in the UK.
The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) is the independent body entrusted with monitoring, and advising on, standards and quality in UK higher education.?
The scale, shape, structure and purpose of learning provision are continually changing in the UK and around the world.
The QAA has a very important role in anticipating and responding to these changes in order to safeguard the reputation of UK higher education, support economic opportunity for the UK, and provide assurance to those who invest in and undertake learning.
To further this mission the QAA team run a number of regional Quality Enhancement Network (QEN) events throughout the year that are open to QAA subscribers (which include all UK universities and many Further Education Colleges and alternative providers).
These events bring together quality assurance professionals, practitioners and others with an interest in higher education to share practice and experience, and to discuss and debate current issues.
While the QEN events promote good practice the events are very much an opportunity to share all practice and reflect on both successes and failures.
The Higher Education Reviews carried out by the QAA on individual higher education have a core element and a thematic element.
The thematic element, or theme, is selected by the Higher Education Review Group which includes representatives of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Universities UK, GuildHE and Association of Colleges and changes periodically.
One of the two themes for 20152016 is digital literacy, the other is employability.
Providers undergoing reviews in 2015-16 will be required to explore one of these themes.
The challenges posed by the digital literacy agenda apply to all higher education providers.
The benefits add value to UK higher education and enhances its attraction to a global education market.
The impact of digital technologies on the higher education experience both of staff and students has implications for the quality of learning and teaching.
This makes digital literacy a valuable additional consideration during QAA reviews.
Introducing digital literacies The QEN Embedding digital literacies event (held at Birmingham City University on 11th November and repeated in Southampton on the following day) provided an opportunity for those involved in learning, teaching and quality within higher education institutions to explore approaches to embedding digital literacy and discuss key quality assurance challenges such as programme design, e-assessment, staff skills and experience faced by higher education providers.
The Birmingham event was live streamed to remote participants who were unable to attend.
Digital literacy is defined by Jisc as “the capabilities which fit someone for living, learning and working in a digital society”.
For those new to this area I recommend you take a look at the Guardian article: 20 ways of thinking about digital literacy in higher education.
The article is over three years old now but still offers an excellent introduction, primarily because it explores different perceptions and understandings of the topic.
Digital literacy is by its very nature difficult to define, and therein lies the rub!
The Embedding digital literacies workshop was opened by QAA staff: Tim Burton, Head of Standards, Quality and Enhancement, Natalja Sokorevica, Development/Project Officer and Gemma Long, Assistant Director in the Quality Assurance Group.
They began by highlighting the dual function of the UK Quality Code for Higher Education, which provides co-regulation and a resource to support higher education providers.
They explained how the Code is relevant to those who seek to embed digital literacies in HE.
The UK Quality Code sets out 19 Expectations that all providers of UK higher education are required to meet and covers areas including recruitment, programme design, learning and teaching, student engagement and assessment.
Indicators of sound practice, agreed by the sector, help providers reflect on their approach to assurance and enhancement and ensure their approach is sustainable over time.
In light of the digital literacies, the Quality Code can be used to reflect on the following areas: Strategic leadership Is there a vision for digital literacy?
Who manages it?
Do you lead by example, encourage some staff or all staff?
How do you maintain momentum?
What resources do you commit?
Is it a job for specialist staff?
The impact of digital literacy on staff and students How does digital literacy impact on students?
Can the curriculum provide a framework?
What are the issues with regard to programme development and digital skills development?
What support is there for developing student skills, are there opportunities to think about redesign.
What are your recommended technologies?
How do you utilise your staff?
How staff are supported to develop inclusive provision?
What are staff capabilities?
How staff are supported to develop their capacity to embed digital literacies in learning and teaching practice?
How sharing of good practice amongst staff who teach and who supports learning in other ways is encouraged?
Tim Burton and Natalja Sokorevica from QAA open the day Jisc and digital literacy Jisc Educational consultant Helen Beetham provided a potted history of Jisc’s work in the digital literacy area, which dates back to 2009.
Their initial Digital literacies programme offered joined-up approaches to digital literacy development to support student achievement and employability.
Prior to this projects like SliDA – supporting effective learners in a digital age – looked at institution-wide strategies for supporting learners.
More recently the Building Digital Capability work has been looking at effective use of digital technology by university and college staff in providing a compelling student experience and in realising a good return on investment in digital technology.
The programme has a developed some very useable resources.
The digital capability framework (shown below) describes the skills needed by staff in a wide range of academic, administrative and professional roles to thrive in a digital environment.
The digital student benchmarking tool, a student-led project, is still under development but has the potential to be an incredibly useful tool.
The tool is a starting point for discussions between staff and students about what is working in the digital learning environment and what can be improved.
It can be used in student-staff liaison meetings, or students’ unions can use the tool to facilitate a discussion with course representatives to identify good practice and areas for enhancement.
Jisc see the digital capabilities challenge as a current priority area for the higher education sector.
Helen Beetham from Jisc presents while her talk is filmed and streamed to remote participants The main body of the day was then split up into a two groups of case-study presentations followed by opportunities to discuss the issues in more detail in breakout groups.
Case Studies: University of Northampton and London Metropolitan University The first case study was presented by Alejandro Armellini, Director of the Institute of Learning and Teaching at higher education, and Rob Howe, head of the Association for Learning and Teaching team, both from the University of Northampton.
Their quality enhancement work in this area is built on three approaches: Responsive-reactive; developmental-incremental and radical-innovative.
There is excellent practice and ‘not so good’ practice across all three.
They shared three examples of current activities: supporting colleagues as they redesign courses for active learning; improving the VLE and online submissions; and C@N-DO – a professional development scheme.
Alejandro concluded by saying that that one important aspect of the blended environment is to make sure that students make sense of their digital resources i.e.
engage in critical thinking.
He explained “Tasks for sense-making are essential, what matters is not the resource, but what students do with it”.
Slides for the Northampton case-study are available on Slideshare.
The second case study from Chris O’Reilly, educational technologist at the London Metropolitan University, continued this line of thinking by explaining that students should be creative with digital technologies but also ensure that they are critical of digital media and practices.
Chris is situated in the CELT research group.
His work with Jim Pettiward looks at digital skills for the 21st century student.
Their website – clued up!
– is an online app for digital literacies.
One of the most interesting aspects of their work is the co-ordination of digital student ambassadors.
Chris and his team have also run a network webinars series and digital literacy workshops for the careers service at London Met employability award scheme.
Break-out The break-out sessions offered an opportunity for reflection on the first case-studies.
Delegates were invited to share the steps that their institutions are taking to embed digital literacies to enhance student experience and also reflect on the challenges faced and lessons learnt.
The very nature of QEN events, in that they are open to all subscribers, ensures a really interesting mix of higher education providers: from traditional universities and Further Education Colleges, to private providers.
The diversity also extended to how far along in the digital literacy embedding the institutions attending were.
While some already have all parts of the submission process online, offer most feedback digitally, use digital tools (such as plagiarism tools) as part of assessment and are moving on to writing a digital literacy strategy; to others these are only aspirations and they sit very much at the scoping stage.
It is worth pointing out here that there the recent FELTAG (Learning Technology in Further Education) report Paths forward to a digital future for Further Education and Skills recommends that funding bodies “mandate the inclusion in every publicly-funded learning programme from 2015/16 of a 10% wholly-online component, with incentives to increase this to 50% by 2017/2018.” Digital literacy and online learning is very much at the forefront in further Education Colleges However despite a growing recognition of the importance of digital literacies their embedding within the curriculum still faces many challenges.
Those discussed in the group include: Different digital skill sets requirements between disciplines Embedding in curricula Resourcing issues Apathy from students Apathy from staff Managing expectations More in-depth notes from the discussion sessions are available to all QAA subscribers contact enquiries@qaa.ac.uk for details.
While there are no easy answers to many of these problems is clear that embedding digital literacy in a quality culture is likely to result in more successful outcomes.
There was also an agreement that sometimes the best approach is a flexible one that involves others and can be refined over time.
Case Studies: Open University and the University College of Estate Management Interestingly the final two case-studies were from institutions that predominantly offer their courses as distance learning.
Katharine Reedy from the Library services department at the Open University shared the OU’s learning design approach and their recently developed digital and information literacy strategy.
The Framework is divided into five competence areas: Understand and engage in digital practices Find information Critically evaluate information, online interactions and online tools Manage and communicate information Collaborate and share digital content The purpose of the framework is to provide a common reference point for module, programme, and qualification teams to use in determining markers of progression in digital literacy that can be integrated with other learning outcomes and student attributes.
The framework is available as a PDF under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence for others to use and build on.
The Open University have also recently implemented Open Tree, an online social environment for students that awards library use and student skills through gamification.
Those interested in finding out more may want to take a look at their badged open course on digital literacy.
The Open University are excellent at reflecting on their own pedagogical practice and research projects like the OER Research Hub and the KMI institute provide a wealth of knowledge.
First competence area of the Open University digital and information literacy strategy The final case-study of the day was from CEM – now UCEM (the College of Estate Management has recently achieved university college title and has become University College of Estate Management (UCEM), a private college with degree awarding powers accredited by the University of Reading and the Open University).
The college is regarded as the leading provider of supported online learning for Real Estate and Construction professionals.
Over the past year Lynne Downey, Head of Online Learning at CEM, has developed an online learning team and adapted the college’s curriculum into and accessible online resource.
Lynne related how the college had students in over 100 countries and used to print out course materials and deliver them by post.
The lecturers worked on study materials and had limited connection with students.
The college has since changed its academic offer and no longer sends out course materials.
It implemented a programme called ‘engaging our students’: a 5 week compulsory programme for all CEM tutors.
The programme, designed to help tutors build online course content and curricula, initially met with some resistance.
It has been instrumental in changing staff approach to digital literacy.
The programme is now part of the induction module for all new tutors.
The CEM team involved in delivery of the programme are now investigating potential to share programme with others in HE and FE.
Through the process of delivering the course Lynne has made some interesting discoveries related to staff ability to embrace digital literacy.
Staff who are great at delivering online content and engaging with students are not necessarily good at designing courses, and vice versa.
The two often require a different skillset.
Conclusions As the workshop came to a close delegates began to think about practical lessons they could take forward and implement at their own institution.
My second breakout group focused on building capability in digital literacy among staff.
How do you play to the strengths of the good digital developers and good digital deliverers?
How do you bring others on board?
We were all left with a lot to think about.
During the day the QAA team collated a lengthy list of top tips on how to embed digital literacies at an institution.
My personal favourites are: Engage with learning and teaching coordinators in each faculty, inspiring them to inspire others Offer a fortnight drop-in sessions with different themes for students and staff to communicate and to share their digital experience Learnt through FEjust normalise it and embedded in lesson plansit’s a different culture to HE Think about digital literacy as a graduate attribute Recruit students from previous years' groups to form a consultancy group to promote digital literacy among students Develop staff and then keep them!
There are lot more!
If you are a QAA subscriber and would like more details contact enquiries@qaa.ac.uk and the QAA subscriber engagement team will pass on the resources from the events.
The workshop ended with an optional surgery facilitated by Helen Beetham from Jisc exploring resources that can support embedding digital literacy in institutions.
Helen Beetham, Jisc, facilitating an optional surgery exploring resources to support digital literacies.
The hashtag for the day was #QENetwork.
Jisc has created a Storify of tweets from the Birmingham event and QAA have released a Storify combining the Birmingham and Southampton days.
Future Quality Enhancement Network events are listed on the QAA website.
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Book Review: Crisis Information Management Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Book Review: Crisis Information Management Buzz framework dissemination usability infrastructure metadata tagging repositories preservation twitter research Citation BibTex RIS Emma Tonkin offers a review of a thought-provoking overview of crisis informatics.
In her introduction to this collection, Hagar [1] – who coined the term ‘crisis informatics’ [2] begins by providing the following definition of the term ‘crisis’ (taken from Johnston, The Dictionary of Human Geography,  2002 [3]) ‘an interruption in the reproduction of economic, cultural, social and/or political life’.
This book discusses crises as diverse as wartime disruption, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, viruses and terrorist activity.
As a central theme, the concept of crisis is broad.
These events are as varied in their impact as in their duration.
As described in this book, some of these events, such as discussions of the Haiti and Chile earthquakes and volcanic eruption in Indonesia, are, whilst extremely destructive, also brief in duration and in aftermath.
Other chapters describe crises that are several years in length, such as Semaan et al’s documentation of the experiences of civilians living in Iraq during the second Gulf War and the conflicts that preceded it.
In fact, this is likely to be a result of the contributors’ varied viewpoints, focuses and methods of investigation.
Contributors describe their research in their own words and frames of reference.
Some contributors consider the long-term aftermath in their contributions, whilst others do not.
Considering the book as a work of synthesis, it is as well to state my major criticism as early as possible: the book never brings together the lessons and findings from these case studies.
There is no final chapter which analyses the various contributions, so no general overview of the roles of libraries in crisis information management is presented to the reader, although Hagar’s introduction (p. 1) goes some way towards this.
This is something of a pity, primarily because so many situations are explored in authors’ contributions, in which libraries and library networks take many different roles, both shortand long-term, in crisis warning, mitigation and management.
A synthesis would be very useful, just to give the reader a framework through which to think back through the book’s ten chapters.
Structure of the Book The book has a very straightforward structure, presenting a series of studies and reviews in crisis information management.
Not all chapters involve specific events or types of event; some review technologies or suggest ideas of relevance to crisis informatics.
Chapter 1, written by Semaan, Mark and Al-Ani, reports on interview-driven studies focusing on experiences of the Gulf War and the Israel-Lebanon war.
This chapter discusses the immediate needs for support, such as moment-to-moment information needs on subjects such as transportation information and sharing, sharing class notes with students who are unable to attend classes and arranging work from day to day.
The authors also cover the longer-term effects on society in the aftermath of war.
Returning to the previous point made about the breadth of the concept of ‘crisis’, Semaan et al make a distinction between crisis and disaster: disasters disrupt society to the extent that ordinary life is put on hold.
Disruption caused by war, on the other hand, may last for several years.
Citizens’ social life, education, and work, their daily routine, all must continue.
In Chapter 2, Heverin and Zach (p.25) describe a research study exploring Twitter as a crisis communication tool for law enforcement agencies.
They describe the role of public information officers, analogous to that of public relations officers in other contexts, in distributing information to the public; some agencies make use of social media for this purpose.
Of 60 major cities in the USA, Heverin and Zach found that 30 had active, publicly available Twitter accounts; they collected tweets from these accounts and supplemented analysis of this content with a sequence of interviews.
The chapter clarifies the viewpoints held by law enforcement agency officers towards Twitter in particular and social media tools in general.
The Twitter theme continues into chapter 3 (p.43), which discusses a proposed syntax for enabling ‘citizen reporting’ through the medium of microblogs.
This approach depends on what is essentially structured tweeting, with specialised hashtags (subject location, as well as metadata indicators such as #name #loc #info and #contact) used to ‘mark up’ a tweet.
The approach raises questions from a user perspective, not least because it clearly requires substantial explanation.
The authors themselves note that problems with usability remain.
However, the authors provide evidence that the syntax was used successfully in a number of contexts.
One question unanswered in this chapter might be just how much more difficult it would be to parse tweets without this mark-up.
Chapter 4 discusses disaster ‘as a social process’, which is to say, both an event and an event viewed through the eyes of observers.
As such, crisis events leave behind a legacy; Liu, Palen and Giaccardi (p.65) argue that this heritage should not be lost.Three cases are discussed: Bhopal [4], September 11th [5] and Hurricane Katrina [6].
In the remainder of the chapter, an agenda is set out for the elicitation and preservation of peoples’ stories.
The subsequent chapter returns to support of information during a crisis, in this case the UK’s 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak.
The approaches adopted to information seeking, both through formal and informal channels, are discussed, alongside the types of information and support sought.
The channels available (Internet, telephone and television, for example) and their uses are reviewed and discussed.
Gannon (p. 103) discusses Ericsson Response, a volunteer subset of employees from Ericsson who provide support for aid missions .
Ericsson Response linked to UN aid agencies such as the United Nations Children’s Fund, the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the UN’s World Food Program.
The chapter separates phases of emergency response into ‘first response’ (days 1-14), ‘establishment’ (days 15-30) and consolidation (days 30+).
The initial phase involves establishing accessible and usable security communications, meeting the needs of first responders and ensuring available inter-agency communication; the second involves stabilisation and expansion of operations, whilst the third shifts to restoration of normal services.
This article sets the scene for thinking about crisis operations so effectively that it is a pity that it did not appear earlier in the reading order.
Chapter 7, too, provides an overview: this time of the components of the information environment.
The authors make the point that information must be accessible to be of use.
Data visualisation and exploration for collaborative problem-solving and information sharing is, by and large, the focus of this chapter.
This chapter is a little disjointed, but nonetheless makes many useful points for system designers.
Chapter 8 – which shares many themes with Chapter 6, which perhaps should be adjacent in the reading order for this reason returns to a detailed case study, this time of the role of a community radio initiative, the Internet and social media in response to emergency situations such as volcanic eruptions.
The key point made in this chapter is that living in a high-risk area means that the potential for natural disaster is part of residents’ everyday life.
A permanent radio station set up for locals living in the area of an active volcano, intended as an emergency service, proved itself to the extent that the approach was consolidated, reproduced and developed to enable monitoring and reporting, information sharing and communication.
Significantly, people who had experienced the events themselves were able to share their stories through this medium.
The Library in Crisis Management Chapter 9 focuses on the role of the public library in crisis management, through discussion of hurricane response on the Gulf Coast of the USA.
The chapter describes libraries as a centre for various service roles, particularly information dissemination, assistance in administrative activities such as relief aid requests, facilitating communication between authority and individuals, and providing emotional support and comfort.
The discussion includes a review of the phases involved in crisis preparation, response and recovery and the tools that are available for that purpose.
The final chapter provides an analogous discussion, this time a comparative analysis of the role of academic libraries.
Thematically and in subject specifics it connects well with the previous chapter, since two case studies discussed involve the Deepwater Horizon [7] and Hurricane Katrina [6], again taking place on the Gulf Coast.
The point is made that academic libraries are well-connected and often well-equipped to provide some level of support, but equally that specialist libraries may have unavoidable priorities of their own: for example, the need to protect rare, even unique collections.
The Curious Case of the Missing Crisis This book successfully highlights ways in which the library can support the information needs of many stakeholders during events such as those described above.
However, the crisis that has led to the quiet closure of more than 200 libraries in the UK during 2012 [8] was neither flood nor riot; rather, the cause was economic in nature.
Library closures in the UK, US and Ireland mean that the public can no longer count on the availability of a local library [9].
There is something rather odd about the book’s silence on the subject of economic crises.
As far as they go, the book’s remarks on the public library or academic library’s role(s) in disaster management seem eminently solid, and yet as the distances between user and diminishing numbers of libraries increase, the argument for treating them as local centres for disaster response become less relevant, as do the arguments for treating libraries as community centres.
Today, library systems support the information needs of those affected by economic crisis.
In the UK and internationally, libraries offer services for the unemployed , such as training in IT skills and programming [10], helping readers search for jobs and providing them with necessary Internet access [11].
According to Rooney-Browne [12], demand for UK library services rises as the economy declines.
Miller [13] and Becker et al [14] describe a similar rise in US library demand.
There is considerable historical precedent, too, for library involvement in mitigating economic crisis, deprivation and poverty.
During the Great Depression library organisations not only sought political change [15], but also spread information where there was none [16]; for example, the ‘pack horse librarian’, women of the Appalachian mountains who delivered books to remote schools and residences [17].
The library network has a long history of providing information in the absence of alternative infrastructure.
It would be good for the book to talk a little more about information provision and knowledge sharing in crisis, when consolidation and the need to return to normality are primary concerns.
Conclusion Overall this book is a very worthwhile read.
Almost all chapters work well as standalone articles, and taken together the chapters present an insightful overview of the issues and themes currently dominant in crisis informatics.
One criticism of the book is that it does not separate clearly between informatics requirements during a disaster and those required once the immediate danger is past, when the main aim is to help people to re-establish their daily lives and work towards relative normality.
It is clear that priorities and requirements are quite different in these times, even though planning for disaster response would involve planning for both of these cases.
References Hagar, Christine (2011).
Crisis Information Management: Communication and technologies.
Chandos Information Professional Series.
ISBN-13: 978 1 84334 647 0 Palen, Leysia, Sarah Vieweg, Jeannette Sutton, Sophia B. Liu, and Amanda Hughes.
(2007).
Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World.
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on E-Social Science, Ann Arbor, MI, Oct 7-9, 2007.
Johnston, R. J.
(2002).
Dictionary of human geography (pp.
123-5).
4th ed.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Bhopal recalls gas leak disaster.
BBC news, 11:43 GMT, Tuesday, 19 January 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/business/2009/bhopal/default.stm 9/11: Ten Years on.
BBC News 8 February 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14760962 Hurricane Katrina.
BBC News 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/americas/05/katrina/html/default.stm BBC News BP oil disaster (Deepwater Horizon Disaster).
BBC News.
8 February 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special_reports/oil_disaster/ Flood, Alison (2012).
UK lost more than 200 libraries in 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/10/uk-lost-200-libraries-2012 O’Connor, Sean (2011).
Public and Academic Library Closures in the U.S., U.K., and Eire, Part I. http://www.examiner.com/article/public-and-academic-library-closures-the-u-s-u-k-and-eire-part-i Manchester 2013.
Digital sessions for unemployed women http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/500142/library_news_and_events/5914/free_training_sessions/1 FT.com (2009) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0cfee4a6-7df7-11de-8f8d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2NkWTL4kb Christine Rooney-Browne, (2009) "Rising to the challenge: a look at the role of public libraries in times of recession", Library Review, Vol.
58 Iss: 5, pp.341 – 352.
Miller, Rebecca (2010).
Fundraising in the Downturn.
Library Journal, v135 n1 p48-50, January 2010.
Becker, S., Crandall, M.D., Fisher, K.E., Kinney, B., Landry, C., & Rocha, A.
(2010).
Opportunity for All: How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at U.S.
Libraries.
(IMLS-2010-RES-01).
Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Washington, D.C. Luyt, B.
(2007).
The ALA, public libraries and the Great Depression.
Library History, 23(2), 85-96.
Jordan, Angela.
(2012).
Libraries During the Great Depression.
http://archives.library.illinois.edu/ala/libraries-during-the-great-depression/ Boyd, Donald C. (2007).
The Book Women of Kentucky: The WPA Pack Horse Library Project, 1936-1943.
Author Details Emma Tonkin Research Officer UKOLN University of Bath Email: e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.tonkin/ Emma Tonkin is now a research programmer at KCL.
Previously, she was employed as Technical Innovation Co-ordinator at UKOLN, University of Bath.
Originally educated as a physicist, she discovered an interest in human-computer interaction and has worked around technology and the Web ever since, continuing her studies at the University of Bristol.
At UKOLN, she worked on a number of JISC-funded projects, including: metadata authoring tools; repository registries; palaeoclimate data management; low-cost pervasive computing; and text analysis.
Emma is a co-moderator of the Dublin Core Registry community, the Dublin Core Social Tagging interest group and an ASIS&T SIG-CR officer.
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International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012 Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012 Buzz data software dissemination archives metadata thesaurus digitisation blog preservation graphics multimedia visualisation ontologies frbr skos facebook twitter interoperability research standards Citation BibTex RIS Anna Mastora and Sarantos Kapidakis report on TPDL 2012 held at Paphos, Cyprus, over 23-27 September 2012.
The 16th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012 [1] was another successful event in the series of ECDL/TPDL conferences which has been the leading European scientific forum on digital libraries for 15 years.
Across these years, the conference has brought together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries by addressing issues in the area where theoretical and applied research meet, such as digital library models, architectures, functionality, users, and quality.
After being held in 11 different countries, the conference moved to the beautiful island of Cyprus.
The conference was organised by the Cyprus University of Technology in collaboration with the University of Cyprus and the City University London and took place at Paphos during 23-27 September 2012.
Conference Overview and Some Statistics The Conference Committee consisted of Panayiotis Zaphiris from the Cyprus University of Technology as General Chair, George Buchanan from the City University and Edie Rasmussen from the University of British Columbia as Programme Chairs, and Fernando Loizides from the Cyprus University of Technology as Organising Chair [2].
Each year the conference committee selects a general theme of special interest; for this edition it was Cultural Heritage and the means of addressing the challenge of combining our digital futures with the digital past.
This is why the aim of the conference was to attract contributions in four major areas, namely Applications and User Experience, Supporting Discovery, Digital Humanities, and Research Data.
Posters and demos session TPDL 2012 (Source.)
The conference was sponsored by Microsoft Research, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Austrian Airlines, the Cyprus Tourism Organisation and Facet Publishing.
The proceedings were published by Springer Verlag in LNCS 7489 (2012) [3].
Keynote Speakers Following the tradition of past years, the TPDL 2012 conference brought together important figures from the field of digital libraries worldwide.
The keynote speakers’ presentations made a significant contribution to the success of this conference.
The first to open the main conference was delivered by Mounia Lalmas from Yahoo!
Research Barcelona who addressed User engagement in the digital world  referring to the quality of the user experience that emphasises the positive aspects of the interaction with digital technology and, in particular, the phenomena associated with wanting to use that technology longer and more frequently.
The second keynote was by Andreas Lanitis from the Cyprus University of Technology who talked On the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Through Digitization, Restoration, Reproduction and Usage, focusing on research work related to the digital preservation of Cypriot Cultural Heritage artefacts.
Cathy Marshall from Microsoft Research gave the third, outstanding, keynote entitled Whose content is it anyway?
Social media, personal data, and the fate of our digital legacy.
Cathy looked into the challenges of personal digital archiving challenges that arise from the nature of digital material, existing practices, the rise of social media and the complexities of ownership and the implications they held for libraries and other memory institutions.
Main Conference Doctoral Consortium The conference began – as is customary in recent years with the Doctoral Consortium Session on Sunday 23 September.
Since this kind of session is by tradition closed to the public, we will take the word from the participants that it proved to be a worthwhile experience.
PhD students had the opportunity to receive helpful comments and guidance both from their peers and the mentors.
Interdisciplinary domains such as digital libraries are attracting researchers from different schools of thought, and such exchanges, particularly for researchers in the early stages of their career, are beginning to play a significant role in amalgamating research cultures and enriching individual perspectives on research questions and approaches.
Monday 24 September On Monday 24 September, the main conference began with an enthusiastic keynote by Mounia Lalmas.
A great opening for the conference since Mounia talked persuasively about the role of the user, who is sometimes overlooked within the research domain of Information Retrieval.
Yet the user is a multi-faceted actor, and consequently research about the user has to bring together perspectives on different research domains, such as techniques from Web analytics and information science, multimodal human computer interaction as well as cognitive psychology.
Mounia’s presentation put the User in the centre of research in order to measure user engagement with digital technology.
Two parallel sessions took place before lunch, namely “Linked Data” and “Analysing and Enriching Documents”, followed by “Folksonomy and Ontology” and “Extracting and Indexing”.
The “Minute Madness” took place after the coffee break during which all participants with accepted posters and demos had to present to the delegates their work within a minute (no doubt about where the “madness” comes from!)
and make it interesting and attractive for others to pay a visit to their stands.
The shoreline at sunset on the Akamas Peninsula, Cyprus (Source.)
The Poster/Demo session was clearly a hit since there was much lively discussion, either in smaller or larger groups of participants in a well-filled room, and contact details were exchanged when common research grounds were identified.
Best Demo award was given to Tanja Mer?un, Maja Žumer and Trond Aalberg for their “FrbrVis: An information visualisation approach to presenting FRBR work families”.
Discussions looked like over-running the scheduled session, but fortunately the welcome reception, scheduled to follow it, was being held in the same area, so the discussions had only to adjourn next door.
Tuesday 25 September On Tuesday 25 September the conference opened to the second keynote speaker, Andreas Lanitis, an associate professor at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of Cyprus University of Technology.
He presented several current projects being implemented in Cyprus, all in the area of better presentation of its rich and diverse cultural heritage – from knowledge on wine production to 3D reconstruction of historical buildings.
In his inspirational talk he explained that while currently various types of heritage were ‘segmented’, the wealth of experience across the projects surely meant that in the future we would see more holistic solutions.
Besides the interesting insights into the methods applied to particular types of objects, Andreas’ presentation also had the nice touch of immersing the audience in the spirit of the Cypriot cultural heritage.
A further two parallel sessions were held before the lunch break: one focused on “Mobiles and Place” and the other on “Content and Metadata Quality” – an excellent illustration also of the range of issues generated by the major conference theme of cultural heritage.
After lunch, the conference continued with two further topics: “Preservation” and “Organising Collections”.
Following the coffee break, there was a further session about “Information Retrieval”.
At the same time, a very interesting panel discussion was taking place about “Evaluating Digital Libraries: Methodologies and Challenges”.
The panel was formed by Anne Adams (Open University, UK), Jose Borbinha (IST, Portugal), Mick Khoo (Drexel University, USA) and Mounia Lalmas (Yahoo Research, Spain) presented their personal perspectives on evaluation which provided a good mix of information retrieval considerations, user-centred observations and software engineering hints.
The audience was particularly engaged with the topic which was to reappear later during the conference workshops.
One impression from the discussion was that while there were evaluation models specifically coined or refined within the digital library community, they were neither widely known nor applied [4].
Wednesday 26 September The last day of the main conference, Wednesday 26  September, Cathy Marshall opened the day’s work with the third keynote speech keeping the audience on its toes.
Cathy delivered an interesting, sharp and well-prepared presentation and saved the day!
The last parallel sessions of the conference addressed the topics of “Heritage and Sustainability” and “User Behaviour”.
During the latter session, Michael Khoo presented the paper (co-authored with Catherine Hall) “What Would ‘Google’ Do?
Users’ Mental Models of a Digital Library Search Engine” which was awarded the Best Paper award.
Additionally, the paper “Identifying References to Datasets in Publications” by Dominique Ritze, Katarina Boland, Brigitte Mathiak and Kai Eckert was assigned the Best Student Paper award.
Workshops The final day of the event, Thursday 27 September, three workshops took place in parallel.
Following a successful tradition starting dating from 2000, the 11th European Networked Knowledge Organisation Systems (NKOS) Workshop was held during this year’s TPDL.
A large part of the workshop was dedicated to the ISO-25964 Thesaurus Standard, as well as SKOS-related issues.
The 2nd International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives (SDA) also took place on 27 September addressing the issues of digital preservation, recommender systems, semantic technologies and ontologies, along with challenges and opportunities for digital archives.
Finally, the International Workshop on Supporting Users' Exploration of Digital Libraries (SUEDL) took place for the first time.
The aim of the workshop was to stimulate collaboration among experts and stakeholders in digital libraries, cultural heritage, natural language processing and information retrieval, in order to explore methods and strategies to support exploration of digital libraries, beyond the white box paradigm of search and click.
Among the highlights of this workshop were the keynote speech by David Haskiya (Europeana) entitled Browsing Europeana Opportunities and Challenges and the very lively discussion that was stimulated by the panel.
While this event was not part of a series, there was a common feeling that it should be held again in the future.
Social Events It is not only the time attending the conference sessions that matters.
Interesting discussions take place during the social events organised as part of the conference.
The welcome reception on the lovely terrace of the conference venue was an opportunity both to discuss further the poster and demo presentations, and catch up with old friends and acquaintances from the community and find out what they were currently up to.
Exploiting Social Media The conference enjoyed an active presence in the social media, like Facebook and Twitter, which served to support the dissemination of up-to-date information.
[5] TPDL 2013   Save the date for the next TPDL conference [6] which bears the general theme  Sharing meaningful information  and will take place in Valetta, Malta over 22-26 September 2013.
General Chairs of the event have been appointed: Milena Dobreva from the University of Malta (Malta) and Giannis Tsakonas from the University of Patras (Greece).
The Programme Chairs of TPDL 2013 will be Trond Aalberg from the Norwegian University of Technology and Science (Norway) and Christos Papatheodorou from the Ionian University (Greece).
Given their experience gleaned from organising past events, we can be confident that next year’s TPDL will be an opportunity not to miss.
In the photo below, the TPDL 2013 Chairs share the front row during the closing ceremony of this year’s conference.
Front row, the Chairs of TPDL 2013: Milena Dobreva, Giannis Tsakonas, Trond Aalberg and Christos Papatheodorou (Source.)
Conclusion:  The Big Digital Library Picture The selection of a topic for each conference reflects the general ideas and topics that are currently attracting – or requiring – more research in the overall community.
The cultural heritage domain is one of the areas to have been addressed very early on in digital library projects, and subsequently, in research outcomes.
What makes it so attractive to the digital library community and what is the value that this type of research brings to the larger digital library domain?
In the wake of the 2012 conference, one can come up with a wide range of answers to the questions above.
Admittedly, there are still unresolved issues about how best to present and access cultural heritage in digital form.
But beyond the complexity and variety of the artefacts (which are also expanding in the direction of the documentation of intangible cultural heritage), this domain now has to resolve the issues of increased scale, interoperability, better resource discovery – all matters of significance within ‘core’ digital library research.
It was amazing, for example, to realise how many different user-related issues also need to be tackled – ranging from use of different scripts and orthographic variation, to the need to offer users of vast cultural collections more intuitive content-based retrieval instruments.
Moreover, to make things even more complicated, while listening to the keynote speeches in particular, one could appreciate more clearly that although our community tries to resolve problems identified some time ago, new ones arise to demand our attention.
The fact is that in order to gain a proper understanding of how people use digital libraries we should not be thinking in terms of obtaining  a ‘snapshot’, but, instead, of seeking to understand a process subject to constant evolution.
To this end and in a variety of ways , the topics discussed at TPDL 2012 contributed to the expansion of knowledge on digital libraries [7].
If one looks at the recently edited collection of research perspectives on digital libraries edited by G. Chowdhury and S. Foo [8], particular domains such as cultural heritage – as in the case of TPDL 2012 are not discussed from the standpoint of which challenges need to be addressed.
This actually highlights the importance of selecting the theme for a conference – because it allows us to see how well the topics emerging from the domain – and from real life – compare with the current state of the art in digital libraries.
References The 16th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012 http://www.tpdl2012.org/ Equally important roles were held by other community members such as Maria Poveda (Publicity Chair), Trond Aalberg (Demo Chair), Fabrizio Sebastiani (Workshop Chair), Rudi Schmeide and Andri Ioannou (Panels Chairs), Christos Papatheodorou (Tutorials Chair), as well as Stefan Gradmann and Birger Larsen (Doctoral Consortium Chairs).
For online access, please visit Springer Verlag, LNCS 7489 (2012) http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-33290-6/page/1.
Readers keen to find further information on this topic are directed to the edited collection Tsakonas, G., Papatheodorou, C. Evaluation of digital libraries: An insight into useful applications and methods.
Chandos, 2009.
Some readers might also be interested to follow blogs about the conference experience; in the time of writing we could identify two: Blog of Research and Teaching Updates from the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2012/11/2012-11-06-tpdl-2012-conference.html and Blog of the Pozna?
Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) Network Services Department http://dl.psnc.pl/2012/10/08/tpdl-2012-theory-and-practice-of-digital-libraries/ TPDL 2013 http://www.tpdl2013.info/ Research topics in digital libraries and their dynamics over time are themselves a subject of study, see for example the paper from ICADL 2011 of Son Hoang Nguyen and Gobinda Chowdhury.
Digital Library Research (1990-2010): A Knowledge Map of Core Topics and Subtopics.
(Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011, Volume 7008, Digital Libraries: For Cultural Heritage, Knowledge Dissemination, and Future Creation, pp.
367-371).
Chowdhury, G.,and Foo, S.
(Eds.)
Digital Libraries and Information Access.
Research perspectives.
Facet, 2012.
Author Details Anna Mastora, MSc Information Professional, PhD cand.
Department of Archives and Library Science Ionian University Corfu Greece Email: mastora@ionio.gr Web site: http://dlib.ionio.gr/ Anna Mastora is a PhD candidate (holding the Greece-EU co-financed “Heracleitus” scholarship) at the Department of Archives and Library Science, Ionian University.
She holds a Library Science degree from the Technological Educational Institute in Athens (Greece) and an MSc in Information Management from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (UK).
She has worked for the National Hellenic Research Foundation / National Documentation Centre as a metadata and software development librarian, while she has also taught student librarians information-searching techniques.
Currently she works at the Secretariat General of Information and Communication – Secretariat General of Mass Media (Greece) as a collection and reference librarian.
Her main research interests comprise digital libraries, search engines, information-searching techniques, user behaviour and language-processing techniques.
As a member of the Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing, she actively participated in the Organising Committee of the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) in 2009.
Professor Sarantos Kapidakis Director of the Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing Department of Archives and Library Science Ionian University Corfu Greece Email: sarantos@ionio.gr Web site: http://dlib.ionio.gr/ Sarantos Kapidakis is Professor at the Department of Archives and Library Science, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece, and Director of the Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing.
He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the National Archives of Greece.
In the past, he has been employed by the National Documentation Centre, Greece, MIT, USA, the University of Crete, and the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas.
He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1990.
He also holds a MSc.
from Princeton University and a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens.
As part of his research on Digital Libraries, he participated in the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, and was the Chair of the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) in 2009.
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Case Studies in Web Sustainability Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Case Studies in Web Sustainability Buzz html infrastructure archives css blog passwords youtube twitter url research standards Citation BibTex RIS Scott Turner describes issues around making Web resources sustainable.
At the moment organisations often make significant investments in producing Web-based material, often funded through public money, for example from JISC.
But what happens when some of those organisations are closed or there  is no longer any money or resources to host the site?
We are seeing cuts in funding or changes in governmental policy, which is resulting in the closure of some of these organisations.
What happens to those Web resources when the organisations are no longer in existence?
Public money has often been used to develop these resources - from that perspective it would be a shame to lose them.
Moreover, the resources might be needed or someone may actually want to take over the maintenance of the site at a later date.
How do we make these sites more sustainable?
Is there any way we can move sites to somewhere that is free to host the Web pages, and can be left there or modified when needed?
JISC previously funded three projects to look at this area through a programme called Sustaining ‘at risk’ online resources [1].
One of these projects, which ran at The University of Northampton, looked into ‘rescuing’ one of the recently closed East Midlands Universities Association’s online resources.
This resource, called East Midlands Knowledge Network (EMKN), lists many of the knowledge transfer activities of 10 of the East Midlands universities.
The project looked at options on how to migrate the site to a free hosting option to make it make it more sustainable even when it is no longer available on the original host’s servers.
This article looks at this work as a case study on Web sustainability and also included a case study of another project where Web sustainability was central.
What Is Sustainability?
Sustainability is one of those phrases that can have many meanings, but in the  context of a Web site, it means the Web site: Can still be viewed, even if there is no money or paid resources to host it, usually via free Web hosting; Can be updated; Must have a mechanism to transfer ownership, add new editors, etc, easily.
Should ideally be able to transfer the content of the site between hosts relatively easily.
Should, ideally, in terms of its management, be relatively simple.
It should not rely on the person managing the site to have Web-programming skills.
The following two case studies aim to illustrate these general principles.
Case Study 1: At-risk Web Sites Introduction East Midlands Knowledge Network (EMKN) is an online resource which was at risk, due to the demise of regional development agencies.
Matters were complicated by not only the closure of the East Midlands Universities Association (EMUA), which created the resource, but also the closure of the company upon whose server it sits.
However the information held within the site, technologies, business services and facilities within EMUA’s institutions, is considered valuable; particularly as face-to-face Business Link (BL) services are being axed and the government has indicated that the channel for publicly funded business advice (information, advice and guidance) will be online.
A central feature of the site contains an image (‘Tube Map’) that links to various parts of the site showing various services; this was felt especially important to keep.
Therefore this project looked at options on how to use free hosting sites as a means of protecting a valuable resource in an economical and sustainable way, using the EMKN as a case study.
A blog [2] of the progress, activities and issues was kept.
Some of the conclusions and results from the project are presented here.
Figure 1: East Midlands Knowledge Network: original site [3] Approaches Investigated Four Web-hosting options were investigated: Google Sites [4] was investigated as the alternative platform for several reasons:  It is a freely available resource, allowing this approach to be replicated with other at-risk resources.
It allows changes to individual pages or the entire site remotely by subscription  It integrates with a number of Google-based tools (such as Analytics, Webmaster tools, YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa).
Use of DropBox [5] as a free hosting option was examined.
Though DropBox is quietly used as cloud storage, it also has the ability to act as relatively simple Web server.
When HTML documents are placed inside the public folder that comes as standard with any account they can be made literally public.
By Right-clicking [control-click for a Mac] on the home page file and choosing ‘Copy Public Link’ produces a URL that anyone with the link can follow.
The final approach was to use Amazon Web Service (AWS) [6] which provides Web services free for a year.
What Was Learnt?
With regard to Google Sites, each page essentially needs to be produced individually; producing templates of portions of the site helps, but each page does need to be produced individually.
Consequently, for a site with a large number of pages this is extremely time-consuming.
A further problem for this project with the use of Google Sites is that CSS cannot easily be transferred; though, to a large extent, HTML can.
However, the formatting of the site has to be redone.
For this site, with around 500 pages which ought to look as close as possible to the original, Google Sites is not the most appropriate solution; whereas other techniques investigated are more suitable.
Google Sites is an appropriate solution if the number of pages is small, the formatting of the pages is not too complicated and it is a new Web site.
Figure 2: East Midlands Knowledge Network: Google sites version [7] A quick option is to use the public folder of a DropBox account where a URL can be created.
If you want the content to remain publicly accessible and that content is not going to change, this represents a reasonable option.
It is free (if you have a free account) and publicly accessible, but it does have some drawbacks: The URL produced is a little cryptic it does not really bear a direct relationship with the site's name or content.
So represents a poor option in terms of Search Engine Optimisation.
It is difficult to add some common Web analysis tools.
Google Analytics can be added relatively easily if you have used it before.
Tools such as Google Webmaster tools are much more difficult to work with in a DropBox environment.
It is only really useful for static content.
As with all the free options there is the concern that it is only an option while the service running is available.
Overall, though this is a reasonably quick route to hosting content that is unlikely to change.
Moreover,  if the DropBox account and a new email address to set up the account are specifically created solely for the project, then transferring ownership or sharing access is uncomplicated it just means giving the email and password to the incoming administrator.
Amazon cloud route is an alternative to DropBox, though there are still some of the drawbacks common to the Dropbox approach, namely: The URL produced is a still a little cryptic it does not really bear a direct relationship with the site's name or content.
So, again, it offers a relatively poor option in terms of Search Engine Optimisation.
However, it is a little better than the DropBox option as you can include a site name within the URL.
You can, moreover, add to the site tools not available to the DropBox options such as Google and Bing Webmaster tools.
Overall though, this is a good hosting option that is unlikely to be lost due to the backing of Amazon but is only free for one year.
Directly transferring the site is problematic, but not from technical standpoint but rather from an administrative one.
A credit card is required when setting up the initial account; those details would need to be changed early in the transfer process.
Amazon is appropriate for both new sites and those where previously developed material is being migrated.
More details on setting this up can be found at either Dan Frost’s article in .Net magazine [8].
Both Amazon and DropBox are appropriate for new and old sites.
Case Study One: Findings Google Sites-based solutions are appropriate if there are a small number of pages within the site, where you have some flexibility over the design of the site (especially if the site it is not reliant on CSS) and the pages themselves are essentially static.
If your site does not match any one of these criteria, it is best to look at other options, such as DropBox and Amazon S3.
However, Google Sites can be a good option, especially as it has the backing of a major company.
As with all sites (and in particular with sites which, while remaining useful, no longer enjoy support), following good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) principles is important.
The site, we hope, is going to be used by others, but the resources supporting the site are likely to be minimal.
Following good SEO principles at least gives the site an improved chance of being picked up by the search engines.
One possible advantage of the Google Sites approach is that the URL produced as standard is a little easier to interpret than with some of the other techniques, which would have some benefits from the perspective of effective Search Engine Optimisation.
Case Study Two: Starting from Scratch Introduction This concerns a smaller project, where a Web site was required as a vehicle to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) outreach activities in Northamptonshire.
The challenge here was to make the site sustainable without any further financial investment (ie through the use of free Web hosting and Web tools), but also easy to manage (easy to edit with limited Web skills, and also straightforward to transfer editorial control).
This project had two parts: The first part of the project was to look at what the various options were when there was no requirement to move resources produced, as in case study 1, then choose an approach.
Produce the Web site using the selected approach Figure 3: Trial site STEM Northamptonshire [9] What Was Found?
The first part of the project was to examine what further various options (other than those discussed in Case Study 1) were possible, where movement of  resources produced is not required as was the case in Study One.
Eight free Web-based tools and free hosting options, including Google sites [4] were investigated.
It was decided to use Weebly [10].
Weebly had several features that led to its adoption: Its ‘drag-and-drop builder’ was fairly easy to use It came with free hosting It made it possible to download the files onto the hard drive so they could be edited using tools but equally it proved straightforward to move site content about Adding new editors to the site was relatively simple It was possible for users to add their own features to the basic ones available provided they have some ability in HTML.
Case Study Two: Findings Free Web-building tools and hosting tools such as Weebly offer another sustainable approach.
It was relatively quick to get a new site up and running, and adding a new person to the editorial team was not difficult.
Further Sustainability The sustainable maintenance of usually public-funded Web resources is one thing, but perhaps an aspect that is not immediately clear is their value in their own right as a record.
Even if these sites are never added to, maintaining them means that a snapshot of the activities of partnerships, issues, and the kind of activities carried out remainsavailable for future use.
Web sites – when combined with blogs, social networking, and comments - are starting to be seen as a rich source of archive information; in effect, they contribute to a digital legacy.
A recent article by Sumit Paul-Choudhury [11] discussed such a legacy from the perspective of personal Web sites, blogs and social networking.
This also applies to the legacy of organisations and projects, providing more than just the content that is explicitly on the site, but perhaps details of how particular subjects were viewed or geographical areas of expertise at a particular point in time.
We can expect to see more people ‘digging’ through Web sites in the future, perhaps in the same way archaeologists sift through layers of soil.
Conclusions The area of sustainability of Web sites should be an important consideration for any funding that involves public money, both during the life-time of the project and afterwards.
Government-funded agencies are being rationalised.
Finding ways to keep the sites going even if they are not maintained has some value, they still provide a ‘snap-shot’ of the resources at a particular point in time.
A sustainable Web solution should be included in proposals for funded projects.
In part because we are often talking about using a scarce resource public money.
To get the best value for that money if a resource has been developed using that money, should it not be available for those who paid for it  the public?
If a resource merited investment, why would it not be worth something later?
The nature of the resource may also change over time, conceivably changing from a resource about current activity to one of historic interest.
There are a number of free options.
Google Sites [4] is an appropriate solution if the number of pages is small, the formatting of the pages is not too complicated and it is a new Web site.
Amazon is appropriate for both new and previously developed material is being migrated.
Dropbox [5] is as in the Amazon solution appropriate for new and previously developed sites and is appropriate if only basic tracking tools such as Google analytics are needed.
Free Web-building tools and hosting tools such as Weebly [10] offer another approach that is sustainable.
Sustainable Web solutions proposed are good as a back-up or archiving solution; but also can be used as the main site if the domain name were redirected to the new site.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to the JISC Infrastructure for Education and Research Programme: Geospatial (15/10) for providing the funding for the initial project for the East Midlands University Agency.
My thanks go to Ahsan Andersen for the STEM Northamptonshire work as well as to the Nuffield Science Bursaries Scheme for its support.
References Sustaining online ‘at risk’ resources http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/sustainingatriskonlineresources.aspx Web sustainability blog http://websitesustainability.blogspot.com/ East Midlands Knowledge Network http://emkn.org.uk Google Sites www.google.com/sites/overview.html Dropbox http://www.dopbox.com Amazon Web Services http://aws.amazon.com/free/ East Midlands Knowledge Network Google sites version https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ Frost D  “The web dev’s intro to the cloud (part 1) “ .Net, summer 2011, pp.
100-102 http://www.netmagazine.com/ STEM Northamptonshire site: http://stemnorthamptonshire.weebly.com Weebly http://www.weebly.com/ Paul-Chouhudry S “Forever Online: Digital Legacy” New Scientist, 23 April 2011 http://www.newscientist.com/special/digital-legacy Author Details Dr Scott Turner Senior Lecturer Learning and Teaching and Widening Participation Co-ordinator Field Chair for Computing (Postgraduate provision) UoN Teaching Fellow School of Science and Technology University of Northampton NN2 6JD Tel: 01604 893028 Web site: http://www.computing.northampton.ac.uk/~scott/ Email: Web site: http://www.northampton.ac.uk/people/scott.turner Blog: http://computingnorthampton.blogspot.com/ Blog: http://apslandt.blogspot.com/ Personal Twitter: @scottturneruon Group twitter:@UoNComputing Public Engagement Ambassador: http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/how-we-help/ambassadors/dr-scott-turner Scott Turner is a Senior Lecturer in Computing at the University of Northampton.
He has been teaching modules in Artificial Intelligence, problem-solving and computer systems for 10 years.
Recently he has become also the School of Science and Technology’s learning, teaching and widening participation co-ordinator.
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Hita-Hita: Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Japan Ten Years On Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Hita-Hita: Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Japan Ten Years On Buzz data database dissemination infrastructure archives metadata digitisation standardisation identifier blog repositories copyright cataloguing facebook twitter research Citation BibTex RIS Ikuko Tsuchide, Yui Nishizono, Masako Suzuki, Shigeki Sugita, Kazuo Yamamoto and Hideki Uchijima introduce a number of ideas and projects that have enhanced the progress of the Open Access movement and institutional repositories in Japan over the last ten years.
In Japan, Chiba University established the country's first institutional repository, CURATOR [1] in 2003.
Since then, over the last 10 years or so, more than 300 universities and research institutions have set up repositories and the number of full-text items on repositories has exceeded one million [2].
All the contents are available on Japanese Institutional Repositories Online (JAIRO) [3] operated by the National Institute of Informatics (NII) [4] in Japan.
One of the chief characteristics of the Open Access (OA) movement in Japan has been the small amount of government involvement or disputes over the promotion of OA on either of the Gold and Green roads, unlike in Europe and North America.
Consequently, there have been no politically imposed deposit mandates thus far in Japan.
Instead, librarians in institutions have been serving as repository managers and have contributed to the development of repositories and the OA movement with the financial support of the Cyber Science Infrastructure (CSI) programme [5] by NII.
Their bottom-up, grass-roots activity basically gives stakeholders a voice and a sense of participation and involvement which leads to a true understanding of the repositories and OA.
This article introduces several ideas and projects that have enhanced the penetration of the OA movement and development of institutional repositories in Japan.
Moreover, it also outlines the activities of Digital Repository Federation (DRF)[6], a repository managers’ community made up of 145 universities and research institutions that has supported such ideas.
The term ‘hita-hita’ means to be tenacious, persevering and to work step by step without giving up.
We adopt the term as the title of this article as we believe ‘hita-hita’ accurately expresses the character of our continued activity in this area.
Repository Managers in Japan As mentioned above, the numbers of both institutional repositories and the amount of content have been steadily increasing in Japan.
As in most countries, it is mainly academic librarians who assume the role of repository managers and their approach to, and interaction with researchers operate behind the scenes of any IR development.
In order to increase open access content, it is important to encourage researchers' understanding of the current situation in scholarly communication and the true significance of Open Access.
In particular, we have found that face-to-face communication about the benefits of OA as described in the next section is the most effective approach.
However, it is worth noting that in Japan, academic librarians change roles periodically, the same as other administrative staff.
These periodic transfers are designed to ensure that librarians experience a wide variety of services in libraries or institutions.
They occur on average once every three years.
Librarians may be required to transfer to different departments of their libraries, to libraries of other universities, or even further afield.
The number of repository managers per institution is approximately on average 1.0 FTE (full-time equivalent) and, in many cases, they are in charge of other services at the same time.
In round figures, on average, 60-70 new repository managers are created with each three-yearly cycle of transfers.
As a consequence, it can be fairly difficult to maintain and develop experience, knowledge and relationship with faculties that each manager has cultivated during his or her stewardship of their repository.
It is necessary for repository managers to acquire basic knowledge and technical understanding of their repository and to have opportunities to exchange and share information across their institutions.
DRF, a community of repository managers, has been working to support those exchanges.
The Activities of the DRF are described below.
Hita-Hita: Librarians’ Grass-roots Activities Institutional repositories in Japan have been promoted by the grass-roots activities of repository managers.
In each institution, they make presentations about their repository at faculty meetings and distribute publicity material (posters, hand-outs, leaflets).
Furthermore, we have seen an increase in the number of managers who feel that individual advocacy is the most effective approach in terms of promoting Open Access as well as being quite beneficial as regards overall library activity.
Repository managers in each institution undertake various activities designed to appeal to researchers and promote content development.
In the DRF community, early adopters report on their experiences and what to them constitutes good practice, whether at workshops or over mailing lists, for the benefit of later adopters, all of which serves to encourage other repository managers to become more actively involved.
Round-number Interviews To operate a round-number interview, one interviews the authors of the paper which figures as a ‘milestone deposit’, for example the 100th or 1000th to be deposited in an IR.
Hokkaido University started with 10,000th deposit interviews in 2006, following the 1,000th deposit interviews conducted by Cranfield University in the UK.
The interview mainly consists of the content of the article or paper concerned, the theme of its research and authors’ opinion of Open Access.
Faculties can anticipate something of a positive effect when their researchers get the opportunity to talk to colleagues in the same institution about the merits of self-archiving.
Moreover, publishing the interview on the Internet allows their high-quality research to achieve far greater exposure with other researchers and other interested parties.
The opportunity to conduct interviews or visits to laboratories is not limited to the large round-number ‘milestone deposits’.
Otaru University of Commerce has conducted an interview for every 100th paper deposited since 2008, and has increased its commemorative interviews for the different total numbers of downloads and the arrival of new faculty members.
The total number of interviews that Otaru University of Commerce has conducted so far amounted to 55 as of December 2012.
Hokkaido University colleagues employ the ‘Iitomo operation’ (‘Iitomo’ means ‘friend of a friend’) in which they ask the researcher whom they have just interviewed to introduce several other researchers to be visited next, which serves to generate many further opportunities to visit colleagues’ laboratories.
Figure 1: Interview report Figure 2: Interview report Focused Approach to Encouraging Self-archiving The effective approach to researchers can be described as ‘Not Just Any Paper, But a Specific Paper’ [7].
It is obvious that high efficiency is obtained not by requesting ‘any of your papers’ but by requesting specific papers of each researcher.
Therefore, repository managers first examine both recent publications by every researcher using Web of Science, Scopus or CRIS (Current Research Information System)-like systems, and each publisher's copyright policies on self-archiving.
With the publications list, they then visit laboratories or join briefing sessions.
Or, in some libraries, librarians put those lists in full view on the library counter so that when researchers come to the library on some errand, they pick up the list and spot their invitation to deposit in the repository.
Figure 3: Publications list inviting researchers to self-archive (originally in Japanese) Figure 4: Individual advocacy at the library counter Service to Notify Authors of the Number of Downloads In order to persuade researchers of the advantages of self-archiving, some institutions implement customised functionality such as informing regularly email subscribers of the statistical data regarding their deposited items.
These data include access and usage statistics such as download counts, page views and origin of accesses (by country and domain) and are sent automatically.
Reaction from researchers is very good and a number of favourable reports such as ‘I am very surprised to know my paper is read by so many people like this.’ and ‘It encourages me!’ are received.
It can be said that evidence is superior to any form of advocacy, in other words, ‘To see is to believe’.
Moreover, regular email alerts from the institutional repositories can be seen as an effective reminder of the important role that repositories play.
Some institutions even change the form of greetings in their emails with every season and insert important news items in their text.
Figure 5: Monthly usage report by email (an example from Otaru University of Commerce originally in Japanese) Tools for Public Relations In addition to forms of advertising such as posters, promotional catalogues, hand-outs and newsletters, many of the institutions create sundry items with the name of their institutional repositories and make use of them for publicity.
In addition, more recently some institutions raise the profile of their institutional repositories as a topic in posts on their blog, on Twitter or on their library Facebook page or university Web site.
Tokyo Dental College has a blog specially set up for its repository.
The main content of the blog is reports about the current status of the deposited items and show messages ‘Thank you for sending the paper’, ‘The paper is now available in the repository’, ‘Since the publisher imposes a one-year embargo, the paper is going to be uploaded after six months’ and so on, which appears to be a very effective form of communication with researchers.
Figure 6: Tokyo Dental College's blog Figure 7: Report on library Facebook page Figure 8: Promotional sundry items (from the upper left, University of Tsukuba, Otaru University of Commerce, Hokkaido University, Otaru University of Commerce, University of Tsukuba) Some Projects Supported by NII In order to promote the development of content in their institutional repositories, some projects are working with the support of the NII.
Some representative examples follow: Society Copyright Policies in Japan (SCPJ) There are approximately 2,500 scholarly societies in Japan.
Each of them publishes its own journal(s) in Japanese.
Japanese researchers write their main major papers in English and this is because but also they write some in Japanese for domestic publication.
Furthermore, there are a lot of fields for which Japanese papers are important such as domestic law, area studies and Japanese literature.
Copyright policies of such journals are not registered on the  SHERPA/RoMEO database.
Therefore, SCPJ (2006-) has been built by University of Tsukuba and other collaborators [8].
SCPJ is the SHERPA/RoMEO for Japanese journals and approximately 1,500 copyright policies are already entered, based on consultation with the societies.
Most of the Japanese societies are small and only publish one or at most a few titles.
Many of them do not have a permanent secretariat.
Therefore, there are a great many cases of unclear regulations for self-archiving and more than 50% of papers are categorised as ‘grey’.
Figure 9: Policy rate of association in Japan in the SCPJ Repository Outcomes Assessment Tool (ROAT) The ROAT Project (2006-2013) [9], hosted by Chiba University Library, aims to develop a standardised method of capturing, refining and reporting the ‘real’ accesses to repositories’ content with a view to assessing reliably the social impact of the dissemination of knowledge through repositories.
It has published guidelines for organising the log data of accesses by users, and developed a system that removes superfluous as well as robot accesses on a par with COUNTER Guidelines to report the article-level reality in terms of bibliographic metadata provided by JAIRO.
Figure 10: ROAT concept diagram [10] IRcuresILL   The IRcuresILL Project (2008-2010) [11] is being conducted by Otaru University of Commerce.
As described above, in Japan repository managers are also librarians.
The initial idea of the project is that an institutional repository and interlibrary loan/document delivery service (ILL/DD) are equivalent services in terms of literature supply to users who need to access them.
Once an item of literature handled over ILL/DD is converted to OA in a repository, demand for that literature on ILL/DD will disappear.
An ILL/DD log analysis between all university libraries in Japan has revealed that identical items of literature in ILL/DD occurred up to 118 times a year.
The project’s aims are to see that the universities employing the authors of papers sought over ILL/DD services should as institutions seek to persuade their researchers to deposit their work on their IR.
The project created explanatory hand-outs and posters designed for ILL/DD users on that very issue in the OA week in 2009 and sent them to all university libraries in Japan.
Figure 11: Hand-out stating 'Someone in the world is missing your papers, someone just like you today.'
This handout is for researchers and students seeking resources via interlibrary loan since they cannot obtain the required papers via open access.
Figure 12: Poster encouraging ILL users to ‘Wait a while!
Search online before making your request’ Repository Liaison Project (rliaison) rliaison (2011-) is the successor to the IRcuresILL Project.
It is being led by Otaru University of Commerce working with other partners.
It has worked on the development of both institutional Open Access advocacy and policy including the above-mentioned pyramid initiative as well as a personal librarian programme.
The latter aims to share information and facilitate discussion on scholarly communications, focusing not only on building up repository content but also on strengthening relationships with faculties.
MaiIdentity When you want to see the complete research results for a researcher, it is necessary to disambiguate them from those of authors bearing the same name and clarify different name notations.
However, it is difficult to identify names based on the character strings of the author notations.
As a method of disambiguation, the MaiIdentity Project (2010-2012) has worked to promote author identifiers.
Kanazawa University played a key role in this work and continues this effort in co-operation with the NII.
Moreover, it is expected that when handled by CRIS-like systems, all research papers in repositories will be easily associated with their author(s) through the use of author identifiers.
Community Support of Development of Institutional Repositories DRF is a nationwide community established in 2006, in which 145 universities or research institutions already participate.
It has been acting as a focus for information sharing and continuing professional development (CPD) which are essential to the continuous and efficient administration of institutional repositories.
Planning and operations are carried out by DRF members on a voluntary basis.
Membership is free and DRF activity has been financially supported mainly by the NII.
One method of information sharing is an open discussion list on which the total number of posts now exceeds 4,400 since its establishment in November 2006.
Topics range widely, from practical matters to local and worldwide issues about Open Access development, such as precise metadata description, OA mandates, reuse of contents and the Finch Report.
Sometimes translated versions of overseas articles are posted by volunteer members.
Another form is the DRF Web site.
The number of visits to the Web site has risen to more than 270,000 since it opened in October 2006.
Principal content is announcements of and reports of events, use case examples or technical information as well as the monthly newsletter.
Repository managers edit the magazine DRF Monthly [12] in turns every issue.
Its look and feel differs with every edition and therefore readers can enjoy pages full of innovations in each number in addition to the content itself.
Occasionally, an English version is also published.
Workshops (nationwide / by region / by topic / by IT issues) and training are organised for continuing professional development.
Since 2011, training courses have been categorised for early-career and senior repository managers.
Issues surrounding the entire scholarly communications and repositories landscape feature in  senior repository managers’ training.
Both categories of training attach great importance to group discussion and the development of presentation skills.
For example, in 2012 training for early-career repository managers began to include a mock presentation to faculty staff to promote self-archiving.
Meanwhile for senior repository managers there are discussion sessions and training in preliminary tasks such as planning an Open Access week or forming strategy for convincing an institution to adopt a complete policy on the conduct of its own IR.
The training is popular with participants since it offers content of a practical nature and does much to raise awareness about potential problems.
These training sessions even include comedy sketches on the themes of authors’ rights and Open Access as well as quizzes and games to render the advocacy material more engaging.
Furthermore, based on a Memorandum of Understanding, agreed with similar initiatives such as the Repositories Support Project (RSP) and the United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) in the UK in March 2012, international community co-operation on professional training is going to be developed and the DRF has immediately adopted the idea of communication skills training and an RSP residential school.
What has supported the development of institutional repositories in Japan, where OA mandating of research results is by no means as yet common, is the steady advocacy effort of every repository manager, supported by the repository community in which the DRF plays a leading role.
One of the principal characteristics of development of institutional repositories in Japan is the consortial repository.
Earlier instances, for example White Rose Research Online [13] and SHERPA-LEAP [14] in the UK are well known.
In Japan, regional consortial repositories, where several institutions gather together on a prefectural* basis have been developed since around 2007.
Moreover, a shared repository system, JAIRO Cloud, provided by the NII started operations in April 2012 [15].
Since hardware and repository systems are shared by several institutions, leading to a reduction of the load on each institution, the consortial repository plays a very significant role for smalland medium-size institutions which would otherwise encounter major difficulties in establishing a repository for themselves single-handed.
About half of all private and local public universities as well as all junior colleges and national colleges of technology have set up their repositories using the consortial repository system [16].
The total number of institutions of Higher Education in Japan is now more than 1,200 [17], of which 324 institutions already have their own repository [2].
We believe the consortial repository system will contribute to an increasing number of them and, in the process, institutions will benefit as much from the widening community involvement that supports repository development as from the financial advantages of sharing hardware [18].
Conclusion Initial effort on digitisation of scholarly papers has only served, in our view, as an electronic simulation of the distribution of papers in print form.
We believe that proper electronic distribution has only finally been realised with the advent of Open Access.
During this period of transition, it is necessary to get back to the original starting point and review the present situation most carefully.
In its origins, distribution was effected by authors themselves, whereas nowadays it has become technically possible (thanks to the Internet) to allow and/or to gain access to the article freely and unrestrictedly for all scientists; while the distributive process will be systematically guaranteed by the institutional repository.
By dint of the efforts described above, we librarians have noticed that researchers, that is authors, do not always immediately appreciate the current situation in scholarly communications surrounding them.
We have also observed that such a problem is by no means confined to Japan alone.
In order to promote an improved awareness among researchers as authors of scholarly literature, and generally increase recognition, advocacy driven by human effort is important.
We believe it will become a commonplace matter across all partners involved in repository activity.
On the other hand, Japanese librarians work to a professional regimen peculiar to Japan, that is, the systematic expectation to remain generalists through frequent job rotation, and therefore with far fewer opportunities to extend skills as repository specialists.
The ‘hita-hita’ approach is therefore an effective means of mitigating their situation by promoting and supporting their efforts to extend their repository skills and experience, while encouraging them to get back to their first and personal principles of direct communication and co-operation with their faculty colleagues.
We have no doubt that ‘hita-hita’ is proving, and will continue to prove, a highly effective strategy.
*Editor’s note: Japan consists of 47 prefectures, each overseen by an elected governor, legislature and administrative bureaucracy.
Each prefecture is further divided into cities, towns and villages.
(Wikipedia, citing McCargo, Duncan (2000).
Contemporary Japan.
Macmillan.
pp. 84–85.
ISBN 0333710002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan ).
References CURATOR http://mitizane.ll.chiba-u.jp/curator/index_e.html Statistic by NII.
http://www.nii.ac.jp/irp/en/archive/statistic/irp_2012_statistic.html JAIRO http://jairo.nii.ac.jp/en/ National Institute of Informatics http://www.nii.ac.jp/en/ Promoting the Cyber Science Infrastructure http://www.nii.ac.jp/en/service/general/ Digital Repository Federation http://drf.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/en/ Masako Suzuki, Shigeki Sugita.
"From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project".
October 2006, Ariadne Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/suzuki-sugita Society Copyright Policies in Japan http://scpj.tulips.tsukuba.ac.jp/?lang=en Repository Output Assessment Tool http://www.ll.chiba-u.jp/roat/ Yoshinori Sato.
"On unsolved points in the methodology for IR usage analysis: some lessons learned from the ROAT project".
International Seminar on Standardization of IR Usage Statistics, 11 January 2011. http://www.ll.chiba-u.jp/roat/document/20110111_Yoshinori_Sato.pdf IRcuresILL http://drf.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/drf/index.php?IRcuresILL%20%28in%20English%29 DRF Monthly.
http://drf.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/drf/index.php?DRF_Monthly White Rose Research Online http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ SHERPA LEAP http://www.sherpa-leap.ac.uk/ As of 20 January 2013, 14 regional consortial repositories are in operation and more than 40 institutional repositories have been created in the JAIRO Cloud.
The percentage of consortial repositories was calculated by Institutional Repositories DataBase Contents Analysis which is operated by the NII http://irdb.nii.ac.jp/analysis/index_e.php Result of MEXT School Basic Survey, 2012. http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statistics/ See the following for the development of consortial repositories in Japan; ShaRe Project http://www.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/share/share.html and see also; Takeo Ozono, Daisuke Ueda and Fumiyo Ozaki, "Shared Repositories, Shared Benefits: Regional and Consortial Repositories in Japan".
Ariadne (in press).
Author Details Ikuko Tsuchide Librarian Life Sciences Library Osaka University Japan Email: tsuchide@library.osaka-u.ac.jp Web site: http://www.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/index_eng.php Ikuko Tsuchide is a librarian, working at Osaka University Library.
Her current role is ILL/DD and circulation.
She is also a former head of the International Relations Working Group of the Digital Repository Federation (DRF).
Yui Nishizono Librarian Academic Contents Unit Information Management Division Academic Information Department Kagoshima University Japan Email: nish@lib.kagoshima-u.ac.jp Web site: http://www.lib.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/ Yui Nishizono is a librarian, working at Kagoshima University Library.
Her current main role is as repository manager of Kagoshima University.
She is also a member of Planning and Co-ordinating Working Group of the Digital Repository Federation (DRF).
Masako Suzuki Librarian University Library Asahikawa Medical University Japan Email: msuz@asahikawa-med.ac.jp Web site: http://amcor.asahikawa-med.ac.jp/ Masako Suzuki is a Head of Library and Information Affairs Division of Asahikawa Medical University and a member of the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) Executive Board.
In 2009, when she was in Otaru University of Commerce, she started the IRcuresILL Project.
Before that, she worked in Hokkaido University Library and co-wrote “From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project” with Shigeki Sugita in Issue 49 of Ariadne.
Shigeki Sugita Librarian University Library Otaru University of Commerce Japan Email: ssugita@office.otaru-uc.ac.jp Web site: http://barrel.ih.otaru-uc.ac.jp/ Shigeki Sugita is a member of the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) Executive Board and a former Vice Chairperson of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR).
He wrote this article while working for Otaru University of Commerce, since when he has moved to Chiba University.
Please see his author profile for his current details.
Kazuo Yamamoto Librarian University Library Hokkaido University Japan Web site: http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/index.jsp?locale=en&lang=en Kazuo Yamamoto has undertaken a number of roles including: 1999-2006: EJ Negotiator in the Chiba University Library, the University of Tokyo Library and the Ibaraki University Library.
2002-2003: Secretariat, EJ Consortia of the Japanese National University Libraries.
2010-2012: Secretariat, Digital Repository Federation.
He wrote this article while working as a member of the secretariat of the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) in Hokkaido University, since when he has moved to Yokohama National University.
Please see his author profile for his current details.
Hideki Uchijima Librarian University Library University of Tsukuba Japan Email: huchijim@tulips.tsukuba.ac.jp Web site: https://www.tulips.tsukuba.ac.jp/mytulips/home/index/en Hideki Uchijima is a Head of the Division of Information Processing and Management at the University of Tsukuba Library.
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Kultivating Kultur: Increasing Arts Research Deposit Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Kultivating Kultur: Increasing Arts Research Deposit Buzz data software framework database portfolio archives metadata vocabularies schema blog repositories eprints copyright cataloguing graphics multimedia curation dspace exif screencast research Citation BibTex RIS Marie-Therese Gramstadt discusses how the JISC-funded Kultivate Project is encouraging arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.
Funded by the Deposit strand [1] JISC Information Environment programme and led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts, Kultivate will increase arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.
Through community engagement with the Kultur II Group [2] and technical enhancements to EPrints, Kultivate is sharing and supporting the application of best practice in the development of institutional repositories that are appropriate to the specific needs and behaviours of creative and visual arts researchers.
The Kultur II Group consists of participants of the Kultur JISCMail list, a closed email list set up during the JISC-funded Kultur Project (2007-09), and participants at the meetings held after the end of the Kultur Project from 1 October 2009 to September 2011.
The Kultur Project established institutional research repositories at the University of the Arts London and the University for the Creative Arts which were more appropriate for arts researchers, and which were visually enhanced to display multimedia outputs [3].
The Kultur II Group is open to all specialist creative arts institutions, departments within larger multidisciplinary institutions, and researchers in the UK; members include repository managers and administrators, researchers, librarians, technical staff, academics, and research office staff.
Research Methodology This article presents an overview of the current arts research repository landscape in the UK.
Data has been gathered through a literature review investigating current and recent JISC-funded projects and other initiatives, focusing primarily on the UK research repository community.
Qualitative and quantitative data have also been acquired through the Kultur II Group and the wider repository community through two surveys: Kultivate Events Feedback, completed by delegates to the four community-led workshops and conference; and an Advocacy for arts research survey [4] that was sent to the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) and Kultur II Group JISCMail lists.
Each workshop has included open and frank discussion which has been recorded in detailed minutes, quoted in this article as anonymised anecdotal evidence.
In addition, a simple matrix was employed in gathering data from four one-hour recorded interviews.
Participants included: A: one experienced specialist creative arts institution with the Kultur enhancements; B: one experienced multidisciplinary institution with the Kultur enhancements; C: one specialist creative arts institution about to install the Kultur enhancements; and D: one multidisciplinary institution that had recently installed the Kultur enhancements.
Barriers to Increasing Arts Research Deposit What is a Repository?
An institutional research repository could be described as an online environment that enables researchers to make their research outputs publicly available.
A more in-depth analysis of this question would need to take into account the different stakeholders and relationships that the repository facilitates, including but not limited to: institutional policies, funder mandates, socio-cultural and ideological concepts, and administrative processes.
Repositories present particular challenges in the arts.
The words ‘institutional repository’ represent the first hurdle in integrating a research repository into the researchers’ day-to-day workflow.
During the Kultivate community-led workshop on Advocacy, February 2011, a session on terminology discussed alternatives to replace words such as ‘institutional repository’, ‘IR’, ‘post prints’, ‘author's final version’, ‘pre-prints’, ‘EPrints’, and Open Access terminology such as ‘green’ and ‘gold’.
The group agreed that instead of words that suggest a final output, terminology such as ‘curated exhibition’ and ‘documenting the process/journey’ might be more applicable to artistic research.
This is confirmed by feedback from artists who have spoken about their research as an ongoing process [5].
Cooke (2007) writes: 'Context and presentation are often considered as part of the work by artists, and work is conceived for a particular context.
'[6] During the Kultivate Archiving and Curation workshop, March 2011 [7], the visual artist Ruth MacLennan presented an archive of her work using the workshop as a new context, a new performance for her work.
Repository managers mediating deposit have also described the complexity of hierarchical relationships in archiving artistic research with examples of outputs that may be presented in different ways in a variety of exhibitions and contexts [8].
As a result the Kultivate Project will include technical enhancements to the EPrints repository platform, used by the majority of Kultur II Group members, in order to address this issue by contextualising and presenting deposits more effectively.
At time of writing, September 2011, of the 24 members of the Kultur II Group with live repositories, 79.1% use EPrints.
A further 5 members are building EPrints repositories which are not yet live.
What is Artistic Research?
Even in the case of visually enhanced research repositories, such as those established through the Kultur Project, the question 'What is artistic research?'
still remains to be answered.
This question lies outside the scope of the Kultivate Project; however it must be acknowledged that it underpins what can validly be deposited within an institutional research repository.
This question has also inhibited the deposit of arts research with anecdotal evidence from the Kultur II Group at the Archiving and Curation workshop, pointing to a lack of clarity regarding which elements of practice-led art are considered research.
Another example was given by a delegate at the Kultivate Advocacy workshop, of a researcher who had been commissioned to produce an international exhibition who was not sure whether it was good enough to be deposited in the institutional repository.
The answer was definitely 'yes'.
This is also an issue at the institutional level; in the case of interview participant (A), some senior management have held back from validating outputs as research in order to debate the issue of  'what is artistic research?'
more adequately first [9].
All four interview participants were asked about the cultural and disciplinary differences between the arts and other subjects.
Both of the specialist creative arts institutions mentioned the variety of research outputs, the uniqueness and breadth of content.
The multidisciplinary research institutions noted the disparity between artistic research and research in other disciplines.
Greater clarity regarding the nature of artistic research is needed, but also brings conflict, for example one arts researcher who stated the importance of both theory and practice, at the same time notes that 'A definition becomes a possible limitation' [10].
Biggs (2010) discusses the relationship between traditional academic research and arts research in terms of similarities and differences, for example: ‘Artistic knowledge seems to have more potential in relation to the human individual, their experience, their emotions and their embodied relationship with the world rather than something as abstract as the scientific concept of knowledge.’ [11] As the keynote speaker at a University of the Arts seminar entitled ‘What is Art and Design Research?’ Professor Biggs presented clearly and visually a model for defining artistic research.
In the resulting discussion one of the points made by a member of the audience was: ‘Finding connections may let you take steps, but labels often get in the way.’ [12]  One of the features of a repository is to label and catalogue the research in order for it to be discovered and cited.
So although the research outputs may be edited and added to, a repository can also be perceived as an archive of academic work; one arts researcher reported feeling suspicious about how her institution may intend to use the records, for example for performance appraisals [13].
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1995 book Mal d'Archive describes the archive in political terms: ‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.’ [14] Derrida (1996) presents the archive as the place of control, the word itself originating from the Greek ‘arkheion’, ‘the residence of ... the archons, those who commanded’ [15].
Interviewee (B) noted that, ‘There’s also resistance to audit culture as a political position...’ [16] within her institution.
Elsewhere an artistic researcher who had deposited in an institutional research repository discovered that once she had moved to another institution, she could no longer make changes to previously deposited work; she had lost control of her work and said this would put her off using institutional repositories in the future [17].
At the Kultivate Metadata workshop, May 2011, the issue of control and access was also raised; a specialist arts institution reported that researchers needed to be able to edit their records so they could add exhibitions held at different venues; however, currently this required the repository manager to return the item to the review area which removes it from public view until it goes through the deposit workflow again.
Another specialist arts institution reported trialling editing privileges for researchers for their own work, on a discreet basis offered to those who asked for these privileges.
A multidisciplinary institution at the same workshop reported that they had customised their repository to include a 'Request Amendment' button which sent a request to the repository staff.
The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) takes a different approach to a research repository.
Although it is sponsored by academic institutions, it sits outside institutional control, and instead of depositing peer-reviewed final outputs, artists begin with depositing one or more objects into a holding area.
These objects can then be set in an individually designed context as they choose to ‘expose’ their work as research, designing ‘expositions’ which can then be peer-reviewed and published.
The approach is designed to display artistic practice in a manner that ‘respects artists’ modes of presentation’ [18] allowing them a flexible and visual online space, instead of the inflexible traditional journal article format.
Despite these artistic freedoms, there is still a rigorous copyright policy which requires those registering accounts to print, sign, and post an agreement form [19].
JAR and the Research Catalogue, which is the software that sits behind the Journal, were presented at the Kultivate Archiving and Curation workshop.
Recognising and Clarifying Rights As part of the Kultur Project, VADS produced guidelines and scenarios for copyright [20]; and Gray (2009) highlighted that there was a need to ‘allay fears, misconceptions and ignorance in respect of copyright and IPR’ [21].
Despite JISC initiatives such as Web2Rights [22], RoMEO [23], and the Copyright Toolbox [24], copyright with artistic research remains problematic.
As described in the Kultur Project scenarios [20] this can be: due to the use of third-party material; arts practices such as collage and reinterpretation; layers of rights issues with performance works; and combinations of rights issues occurring in collaborative creative projects.
Interviewee (D) mentioned the example of a graphic designer who illustrates books, but in recording his work cannot capture the text as it is copyrighted; they have had to be inventive in taking images of their work to document their own research without infringing the copyright of the author [25].
The quantitative data gathered in the Kultivate Advocacy for arts research survey also points to copyright being a significant barrier to arts research deposit.
For question 23 which gave a weighting (from strongly agree to strongly disagree) to question 22 ‘What issues do researchers perceive as barriers to deposit?’ three of the top four responses were: ‘concerns regarding clearing copyright with a publisher’; ‘concerns regarding clearing Third Party copyrights’; and ‘concerns regarding the use of their work by others’.
In terms of how their work will be used, one of the advantages of using repository software is that levels of access can be provided, whether through temporary embargoes or simply by making lower-resolution images available.
In the case of textual arts research, such as journal articles and publications, repository managers can be proactive in increasing deposit, for example interviewee (A) has set up Google alerts when the institution's name is mentioned in order to try and increase full text items in the repository [9], and they also use SCOPUS [26] and RoMEO [23] to acquire publications' information.
However, in the case of non-textual arts research, this may be more difficult to find in the first place owing to the lack of appropriate documentation or metadata.
Support for Managing Research Data There has been a correlation with the work of the Kultivate Project and the JISC Managing Research Data programme [27] in particular relating to Project CAiRO (Curating Artistic Research Output) and JISC Incremental; both projects presented at the Kultivate Archiving and Curation workshop, and a Kultivate case study was produced on 'Documenting Performance Art for the Archive' [28].
Project CAiRO held a Summer School for PhD researchers at the University of Bristol in June 2011 [29], and has also produced an online training module entitled Managing Creative Arts Research Data, tailored to the specific needs of artistic researchers and including case study examples [30].
In the JISC Incremental end-of-project blog post, they highlighted that: 'researchers ... are positive about data sharing in principle, though almost universally reluctant in practice' [31] This is reflected in the results of the University of Huddersfield's Open Access survey (2010) in which: '88% of those who responded were in favour of the principles of Open Access and 86% were in favour of adding their research to an Open Access Repository.
This compares to only 29% of content which is available in full text in the University Repository. '
[32] The Kultivate Advocacy for arts research survey’s qualitative data suggests that one of the key barriers for researchers to deposit is a lack of time.
For question 22 'What issues do researchers perceive as barriers to deposit?'
comments in the free text box included: ‘Time is by far the biggest barrier...’ and ‘...complaints about the time it takes to deposit...’.
Interviewee (D) cited time as the biggest barrier for arts research deposit, as the process takes longer for arts items than for a journal article [25].
Interviewees (C) [33] and (A) [9] mentioned time as the top barrier to deposit; interviewee (B) also mentioned time as a key barrier to deposit [16].
Embedding a Culture of Arts Research Deposit Making Arts Research Deposit Easier Feedback from other JISC-funded projects, such as DepositMO,  and from the Kultur II Group meetings suggest that making the deposit process as easy as possible by reducing the steps in the workflow will encourage an increase in deposit as this will save researchers’ time.
The Kultur II Group has been interested in the DepositMO Project which supports deposit into the repository via the Microsoft Word application from a researcher's desktop using the SWORD protocol [34].
At the JISC Programme meeting, March 2011, Steven Hitchcock demonstrated how DepositMO could be used with 'watch folders' to upload images; although the lack of metadata supplied with images currently means that the tool is not as effective for uploading images as it is for Word documents.
The concept and terminology of 'watch folders' is also used by the database software Extensis Portfolio, which is designed for photographers and ‘creatives’; images added to watch folders are automatically catalogued with a variety of image metadata standards supported, including EXIF and IPTC [35].
This nonetheless fails to include subject terms or keywords unless they have been written into the image files by the photographer during image capture or processing, although it is possible to add groups of keywords across an entire folder of images simultaneously.
The Royal College of Art produced a Kultivate case study entitled Implementing a Repository for Research Practice in Postgraduate Art, Design, and Visual Communication [36].
It describes how the College staff worked closely with the researchers at their institution and with EPrints Services in order to streamline the deposit workflow, building further on the Kultur Project enhancements.
The case study includes a screenshot showing the original Kultur metadata schema next to their streamlined version which has 18 fewer fields [37].
The study also discusses how they improved the deposit process by moving the request to upload files to the end of the workflow, before deposit, instead of at the beginning of the process.
The Kultivate Project has provided a demonstrator service, called ARTSUK, to the Kultur II Group to use as a test site for both the Kultur enhancements, and the new proposed Kultivate technical features.
ARTSUK is an EPrints repository platform with the Kultur enhancements pre-installed; users can create a login and have permission to upload content.
At the Kultivate Technical workshop, January 2011, delegates reported that there were problems with cataloguing projects, particularly those which may need to be revisited, edited or supplemented.
Building on the Readiness4REF [38] Project containers feature, and the latest version of EPrints 3.3, Kultivate is working with EPrints to address the levels of complexity that occur through relationships and workflows of artistic research.
For example, a piece of artistic research could be an object that is incorporated into one or more exhibitions, on each occasion being given a different context, the object and exhibitions could also include supporting material such as reviews, tickets, programmes, signage, preparatory research, documentary material such as videos, and there could also be learning and teaching objects associated with the research outputs.
These issues were discussed by members of the Kultur II Group during the Technical workshop.
The Kultivate Project container feature will save researchers' time and also improve the discoverability of research for those accessing institutional research repositories as a resource.
Building Arts Research Repositories The original Kultur Project brought together the University of Southampton, University of the Arts London, University for the Creative Arts, and VADS; Leiden University was an associate partner.
The first meeting of the Kultur II Group, as it is now known, took place on 1 October 2009 following the end of the Kultur Project, as a result of the community's interest in both the Kultur enhancements and the issues of increasing arts research deposit.
The Kultur II Group now consists of over 40 institutions, organisations, and projects [39].
As discussed at the Kultivate Advisory Group meeting, May 2011 [40], it can be difficult to quantify the impact of the Kultivate Project, and the Kultur II Group, due to the timescale and the variables at each institution; one institution reported that although it had followed the Kultur Project's developments since 2007, it was only now at a stage in 2011 where it was beginning to implement the Kultur enhancements [41].
As outlined in the original Kultivate proposal, OpenDOAR suggests that arts content is under-represented within UK institutional repositories; searching across the categories ‘Arts and Humanities General’ and ‘Fine and Performing Arts’, there are only five repositories listed out of a total of 145 UK institutional research repositories [42].
Many institutions are at early stages in terms of arts research deposit, whether they have existing repositories or are in the process of building them.
Ten institutions from the Kultur II Group are either in the process of building, or planning to build, institutional research repositories.
A Kultivate case study from the University of Falmouth details the stages in 'Initiating an Arts Repository: the gateway to research at University College Falmouth' [43], and the Royal College of Art case study describes building a repository [36].
A sub-group of GuildHE [44], the CREST Research Network [45], is working to integrate an EPrints repository platform with other institutional research repositories to form CREST Collections, and to create a social networking area for researchers called CREST Collaborate, using the open source Mahara software.
The researchers from GuildHE institutions will also be able to upload content into the research repository via Mahara.
A Kultivate case study has been written about progress so far, entitled EPrints and Mahara: sustainable approaches to conserving Art/Design/Media/Performing Arts outputs using a consortia model [46].
Even before a repository goes live, advocacy is a vital part of the process, and this is one of the aspects that the CREST Research Network supports through its community engagement.
Advocacy, Advocacy, Advocacy Advocacy is an area that is relevant to all institutional research repositories, and something that needs to be continuously worked at; one of the issues tackled by the University of Exeter, through the JISC-funded RePosit Project, was how to sustain regular deposits after an initial surge in deposit which then dwindles [47].
William Nixon, speaking about the University of Glasgow's approach to embedding their repository at the JISC ‘Repositories: Take-up and Embedding’ programme meeting, talked about the importance of building relationships [48]  and aiming for the repository to be ‘culturally, technically and holistically ... stitched into the institution’ [49].
Interviewee (B) mentioned the new PhD students were getting to grips with the repository so it is becoming embedded in their practice and will eventually be embedded in the research culture that way [16].
The Repositories Support Project (RSP) has produced documentation on advocacy [50] and held events; at an event discussing Open Access the University of Nottingham mentioned that: ‘no matter how much advertising you do there is always room for more – advocacy’ [51] The RSP presented at the Kultivate Advocacy workshop, and provided advice on the Advocacy for arts research survey and Kultivate Advocacy toolkit [52].
Advocacy for arts research deposit has many similarities with the approach needed for other subject areas; lessons learned suggest that advocacy must be ongoing, it must reach all stakeholders i.e.
not just aimed at depositors, and that it requires both a carrot and stick approach [53].
Where advocacy for arts research differs, is in the cultural and specialised needs of artistic researchers who often have different workflow processes, complex multimedia research outputs, and operate in a different context in terms of their relationship to the institution and their research.
One repository manager evaluating a Kultivate workshop commented: ‘Not being artistic, I'm keen to learn more about what is a very different world!’ [54] Gray (2009) notes that during the Kultur Project 'the visual aspect of the repository loomed large in all our minds' as the team were: ‘dealing with an arts community which by definition has a highly ‘tuned’ sense of the visual aesthetic’ [21] This was echoed in feedback from members of the Kultur II Group, and from interviews, particularly from multidisciplinary institutions.
For example, interview participant (D) mentioned that she wanted to incorporate the Kultur enhancements into her existing repository in order to increase arts research deposit; the reaction from demonstrating it to the researchers was, ‘That’s good that’s what we want.’ [25] Another multidisciplinary institution reported being very successful with deposit from other subjects, but after demonstrating the Kultur features to its arts researchers was unable to encourage them to deposit until it installed the promised features [8].
Three of the six JISC ‘Repositories: Take-up and Embedding’ projects [55] are looking to implement the Kultur enhancements in order to encourage greater use and engagement with their research repositories, two in EPrints repositories and one for a DSpace repository.
Two of the six Kultivate case studies focus on the theme of advocacy; at the University of the Arts London ‘Developing a Screencast of the Research Deposit Process’ [56] and ‘Art and advocacy: designing dialogues’ [57] from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Statistically speaking, the approach at Goldsmiths, as detailed in its case study, led to a ‘1,000% increase in deposit activity’ in the six months following its tailored advocacy programme with the Art Department [58].
At the University of Huddersfield, staff use the IRStats plugin for EPrints to encourage take-up of the repository by researchers.
One of the features of IRStats is to show download statistics by country of origin; Stone (2011) provided the example of a researcher who as a result is now: ‘pursuing collaborative research projects with music studios and researchers in Mexico and Norway.’ [59] The Kultivate Project is working to enhance the IRStats plugin visually, based on feedback received from the Kultur II Group through the Kultivate Advocacy workshop.
As part of her advocacy strategy, Interviewee (B) reported demonstrating a Google search to show the high ranking of research outputs from the repository [16].
Interviewee (D) presents the repository as enabling researchers to ‘build up esteem; build up a name; build up their career’ [25].
The role of the repository in building up a research profile especially in terms of measuring impact is of importance with the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF).
All four interviewees were unanimous in their answer to the question ‘What motivates researchers to deposit?’: answer ‘the REF’.
Although the REF 2014 is an important and useful motivator, advocacy also needs to keep the wider agenda of Open Access part of the strategy to sustain deposits in the longer term.
The Future of Arts Research Deposit It remains to be seen how repositories handle the REF submission process and how relationships to Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and other institutional systems, develop and enhance, or change, the position of institutional research repositories, and therefore affect the rate of deposit.
All four interviewees reported that none of their institutions have a CRIS at the moment, although this is planned for both the specialist arts institutions, interviewees (A) and (C) [9] [33].
The Research Information Management System (RIMS) projects [60] were mentioned by interviewee (D) since at his institution this will facilitate: ‘...pulling repository data, HR data and ... Research Office [data] ... into one place ... integrating everything, that’s then the CRIS...’ [25] Interviewee (D) explained that senior management is sending a clear message that the repository is now ‘the single point of truth in the University’, meaning that ‘if the research isn’t in the repository it won’t go into the REF’ [25].
It will be interesting to see the pattern that emerges in the next few years across the UK research repository landscape and how this will influence the rate of arts research deposit.
Conclusion: Increasing Arts Research Deposit The key factors that encourage arts research deposit in UK institutional research repositories can be summarised as follows: Make the repository more visually appealing; a better showcase for artistic research and multimedia research outputs.
Carry out tailored and continuous advocacy.
Demonstrate statistics, international interest, and good visibility in Google's search engine results.
Foster arts researcher champions and senior-management support for the repository.
Reflect on the use of terminology and the language of ‘repository-speak’ versus the arts researchers' own vocabularies and understanding.
Make the deposit process as easy and streamlined as possible, saving time with data entry and avoiding duplication of effort.
Support and foster good practice in managing arts research data, including training in respect of both researchers' own IPR and clearing third-party copyright.
Acknowledgements Thanks are due to JISC, the Kultivate Project team and Advisory Group, and to EPrints Services.
The Kultivate Project is grateful to all members of the Kultur II Group: those who have shared their stories at the project workshops; provided feedback via online surveys; and, in particular, the authors of the six case studies and the four interview participants.
References JISC Information Environment,  Deposit strand #JISCdepo http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/jiscdepo.aspx Kultur II Group Web site http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/ Kultur Project Web site http://kultur.eprints.org/ Kultivate Advocacy Survey Brief Results (Word document) http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/toolkits/advocacy/files/Kultivate_advocacy_toolkit_brief_survey_results.doc Anonymised information received 16 November 2010, 26 January, 23 March, and 31 March 2011.
Cooke, Jacqueline (2007) 'A visual arts perspective on open access institutional repositories'.
In: Digital Archive Fever: 23rd CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) Annual Conference., Birkbeck, 8-9th November, 2007.
[Conference or Workshop Item] (In Press) pp.4.
http://eprints.goldsmiths.ac.uk/140/ Kultivate Project blog post 'Kultivate Archiving and Curation workshop, 23rd March 2011' http://vads.ac.uk/kultivate/news/?p=97 Anonymised information received 11 January 2011.
Anonymised information from recorded interview held on 7 April 2011.
MRes Arts Practice, Graduate School, Camberwell Chelsea Wimbledon, University of the Arts London.
2011.
Why?...
Research!
Interviews about Art & Design Research.
London: MRes Arts Practice.
pp.
29.
Biggs, M. and Karlsson, H.
(eds.).
2010.
The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts.
Abingdon: Routledge.
pp.2.
Kultivate Project blog post 'What is Art and Design Research?'
http://vads.ac.uk/kultivate/news/?p=88 Anonymised information received 16 November 2010.
Derrida, J.
1996.
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.
Chicago: University of Chicago.
pp.4.
ibid pp.2.
Anonymised information from recorded interview held on 6 April 2011.
Anonymised information received 29 June 2011.
Journal for Artistic Research Web site http://www.jar-online.net/ Research Catalogue Web site Account page http://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/account Kultur Project copyright factsheet, flowchart and scenarios: http://www.research.ucreative.ac.uk/copyright.html Andrew Gray.
"Institutional Repositories for Creative and Applied Arts Research: The Kultur Project".
July 2009, Ariadne Issue 60 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/gray/ Web2Rights http://www.web2rights.org.uk/ SHERPA RoMEO http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php Copyright Toolbox http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/ Anonymised information from recorded interview held on 12th April 2011.
SCOPUS http://www.scopus.com/home.url JISC Managing Research Data Programme #JISCMRD http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd.aspx Kultivate case study: 'Documenting Performance Art for the Archive' (PDF) http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/casestudies/Bristol2011.pdf Kultivate Project blog post 'CAiRO (Curating Artistic Research Output) Summer School' http://vads.ac.uk/kultivate/news/?p=102 Managing Creative Arts Research Data (MCARD) training module http://www.projectcairo.org/module/unit1-0.html JISC Incremental project blog post: 'Farewell from the Incremental team.'
http://incrementalproject.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/farewell-from-the-incremental-team/ Stone, Graham (2010) Report on the University Repository Survey, October-November 2010.
Research Report.
University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield.
(Unpublished).
Available from: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/9257/ Anonymised information from recorded interview held on 4 May 2011.
Modus Operandi for Repository Deposits (DepositMO) Project blog http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/depositmo/ Gramstadt, Marie-Therese (2008) Cross-departmental initiative to produce an online Image Library for staff at the National Gallery, London.
VRA Bulletin, 35 (2).
pp.74.
Available from: http://www.research.ucreative.ac.uk/763/1/VRA_Journal_Summer_2008.pdf Kultivate case study: 'Implementing a Repository for Research Practice in Postgraduate Art, Design, and Visual Communication' (PDF) http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/casestudies/RCA2011.pdf ibid pp.8.
Readiness4REF Project blog http://r4r.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/ Kultur II Group Web site, Contacts page http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/contacts.html Kultivate Project blog post 'Kultivate Metadata workshop, 24th May 2011' http://vads.ac.uk/kultivate/news/?p=100 Anonymised data received 24 May 2011.
OpenDOAR Web site http://www.opendoar.org/ accessed on 20th September 2011 using the search terms 'Institutional' and 'United Kingdom'.
Kultivate case study: ' Initiating an Arts Repository: the gateway to research at University College Falmouth' (PDF) http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/casestudies/UCF2011.pdf GuildHE http://www.guildhe.ac.uk/ Consortium for Research Excellence Support & Training (CREST) http://www.crest.ac.uk/ Kultivate case study: 'EPrints and Mahara: sustainable approaches to conserving Art/Design/Media/Performing Arts outputs using a consortia model' (PDF) http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/casestudies/CREST2011.pdf RePosit Project blog post 'University of Exeter Advocacy Plan available' http://jiscreposit.blogspot.com/2011/01/university-of-exeter-advocacy-plan.html Twitter post from @kultivateproj quoting William Nixon http://twitter.com/#!/kultivateproj/status/42950701512531968 Twitter post from @kultivateproj quoting William Nixon http://twitter.com/#!/kultivateproj/status/42951905466531840 Repositories Support Project (RSP) Web site, Advocacy section http://www.rsp.ac.uk/grow/advocacy/ and the RSP Advocacy Wiki: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/issueswiki/index.php/Main/AdvocacyResources Kultivate Project blog post 'RSP event: Open Access the Impact for Libraries and Librarians' http://vads.ac.uk/kultivate/news/?p=87 Kultivate Project Advocacy Toolkit http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/toolkits/advocacy/index.html The carrot and stick approach was mentioned by Bill Hubbard in his presentation on 'Institutional Mandates and Compliance' available from: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/rsp-summer-school-2010/ Anonymised feedback received through the online workshop evaluation questionnaire, submitted 2nd March 2011.
Kultivate Project Conference Fringe featuring the JISC RTE projects, Lanyrd Web site http://lanyrd.com/2011/kultivate-july-2011/sfpwb/ Kultivate case study: 'Developing a Screencast of the Research Deposit Process' http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/casestudies/UAL2011.pdf Kultivate case study: 'Art and advocacy: designing dialogues' http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/casestudies/Goldsmiths2011.pdf ibid pp.3.
Stone, Graham (2011) Advocacy at the University of Huddersfield: Making research visible to a world audience.
In: Kultivate Advocacy workshop, 28 February 2011, HEFCE, Centre Point, London.
(Unpublished).
Available from: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/9644/ UKOLN Web site, Research Information Management http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/rim/ Author Details Marie-Therese Gramstadt Kultivate Project Manager Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) University for the Creative Arts Email: mtg@vads.ac.uk Web site: http://www.vads.ac.uk/kultur2group/   Marie-Therese Gramstadt has been involved with the Kultur II Group since it was formed in October 2009.
She managed both the JISC-funded Kultivate (2010-11) and eNova (2011) projects.
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My first experience of information consulting was as the manager of an information broking business in 1977.
The British Library kindly sponsored a trip to the USA to meet a range of information brokers in Washington, New York and San Francisco, including Sue Rugge, the founder of Information on Demand.
At that time information broking and information research seemed to be the place to be, and in 1981 I wrote a book (long since out of print!)
entitled ‘Profit from Information’ about how to set up and run an information research business.
The early 1980s were a good time to be in this business as online information retrieval services flourished.
In 1983 John Gurnsey and I developed a set of guidelines for the Library Association that set out an ethical framework for consultants working in librarianship and information science.
This led to us being approached by the Library Association to write a book on the subject and so Information Consultancy [1] was published by the LA in 1989.
Subsequent pleas to write a second edition fell on deaf ears so the arrival on my desk of the book I am now reviewing was of particular personal interest.
I chose to be an information consultant.
In 1977 I had a number of career development options but information consulting had a particular appeal.
Many of the consultants I have met and worked with since then have not been so fortunate, having been made redundant by their organisations or found that there were no obvious career development routes.
Cut-backs in library and information services in all sectors over the last few years have resulted in many experienced information professionals deciding to fly solo.
Unlike learning to fly an aircraft, it is difficult to gain experience of life as a consultant whilst still in employment, so planning ahead for take-off is very important.
Consultancy 101 A good place to start is to talk to other consultants.
However you will quickly find that everyone you talk to will have different objectives, different approaches and often conflicting advice to give.
If they are potential competitors they are very unlikely to talk about the fees they charge.
If they are working in a very different sector then even if they do talk about rates it will not be of much help.
The key issues in setting a pricing strategy are how much do you need to earn and how many days you are able to work on fee-earning projects.
The amount of time needed to chase prospects, undertake marketing and other promotional activity, as well as just keeping up to date with your sector, can come as quite a surprise to new entrants to consulting.
It is this sort of very practical advice I was expecting to find in this book given the experience of the authors.
First impressions As a consultant you quickly learn the importance of the first impression you give a potential customer, who probably decides in the first couple of minutes of a conversation or a meeting whether or not to hire you based mainly on secondary evidence and not your professional skills.
Opening up the book under review you are presented with seven pages of background information on the three authors.
The first chapter is entitled ‘What is information consulting?’ This is a good question and one that the authors fail to answer.
A fundamental problem with this book is that the authors seem unable to decide what they regard as information consulting.
A paragraph on p3 takes about providing information based on the tools found in public, academic, special and research libraries.
This is the classic information broking role.
Four pages later and a very useful table expands the scope into what might be regarded as information management consulting.
Subsequent chapters cover the advantages and challenges of information consulting, business planning, the legal environment, marketing and client relations.
In principle they are all very relevant topics.
Chapter 8 offers advice from ‘veteran’ information consultants.
They are not named and frankly the chapter is a waste of space as the topics are covered in other chapters.
The same goes for Chapter 10, in which clients speak about their experience of working with consultants.
An Appendix describes seven case studies of consulting projects which again adds little to the overall value of the book as (quite understandably) the clients are not named.
Two Is Company, Three Is a Crowd This is a much quoted idiom and this book seems to be an excellent example.
When John Gurnsey and I wrote our book we spent several months working with Alan Day, the Series Editor, on the structure and deciding which of us would write each chapter.
Looking back at our book I find it very difficult to remember which chapters we each wrote as we also tuned and integrated our writing styles.
Regrettably this is not the case with the book under review.
I sometimes felt that all three authors had been involved in one short chapter as the text changed direction and style in the space of a single page.
Much of the advice given in the book is of value but there are also some substantial omissions.
A key issue for someone starting out as a consultant is whether to work as a sole trader or set up a limited company and the issues surrounding this decision are not considered.
This is not just about legal and tax issues but also the image you want to present to potential customers.
For example, most people know that I am the only employee of Intranet Focus Ltd, but for major corporations (my core client base) Intranet Focus Ltd is far more acceptable to procurement and finance departments than Martin White and Associates.
Another major omission is a discussion about technology options for sharing files and other project information with clients.
Examples include BaseCamp as a project management application or Huddle or Dropbox for file sharing.
The issues around project management are totally ignored.
The authors also have virtually nothing to say about the importance of a Web site or social media in marketing professional services.
Indeed there is no index entry for ‘Web site’ though there is for ‘bank account’ and ‘Appendix’.
Overall I get the sense that this book was written from the bottom upwards, with each author listing what he or she wanted to write about, rather than from a top-down perspective of deciding what a potential information consultant needed to know.
Final Impressions There is no doubt that the authors are experienced consultants and that the advice given is based on considerable practical experience.
What their clients would say about a project report written in the style of this book is a matter for some debate.
The list of References at the end mentions authors such as Mary Ellen Bates [2] and Reva Basch (who is no longer working in this sector) but includes no relevant bibliographic information on them.
There is a reference to a 1995 paper on how to choose an information broker!
Sue Rugge is also mentioned although the book she wrote was published in 1997 (pre-Internet) and she died in 1999.
The index entirely fails to come up to the mark, including entries for ‘uncertainty’ and ‘scoop creep’ (sic).
Chandos should look to its laurels.
At various points in the 198 pages of this book there is some invaluable wisdom about life as an information consultant.
However if this is the only book you decide to read before setting out on consultancy as a career, then I fear your career prospects will be quite limited.
In my view, Mary Ellen Bates has written the definitive book on working as a self-employed information professional [3], offering readers a style, authority and passion which is sadly lacking in this new work.
References John Gurnsey and Martin White.
Information Consultancy.
London, Library Association Publishing, 1989.
Bates Information Services  http://www.batesinfo.com/ Mary Ellen Bates.
Building and Running a Successful Research Business.
Medford, NJ, USA.
2nd Edition, 2010.
Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd. Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Martin White started his consulting career with NPM Information Services in 1977, subsequently working as a consultant for Creative Strategies International, Link Resources, International Data Corporation, Logica and TFPL.
He set up Intranet Focus Ltd. in 1999 as an intranet and information management strategy consulting practice but now spends much of his time on enterprise search projects.
He is a Visiting Professor at the iSchool, University of Sheffield and Chair of the eScience Advisory Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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Mining the Archive: eBooks Ariadne Web Magazine for Information Professionals Home Coming issue Archive Authors Articles Guidelines Mining the Archive: eBooks Buzz data mobile wireless usability ebook epub ipad e-science standards Citation BibTex RIS Martin White looks through the Ariadne archive to track the development of ebooks.
My definition of being rich is being able to buy a book without looking at the price.
I have long since lost count of the number of books in my house.
The reality is that if I did carry out a stock-take I might be seriously concerned about both the total number and the last known time I can remember reading a particular book.
Nevertheless I have few greater pleasures than being asked a question and knowing in which of our two lofts one or more books will be found with the answer.
On many occasions I have found a definitive answer much more quickly than using Google.
To me it is not just the information (and more importantly knowledge and wisdom) contained within the covers of a book but the act of sitting down, opening it up and starting to read it, often beginning at a page deep inside, without the need to look at the list of contents or the index.
Over the last year my iPad has transformed my approach to personal information management and after some years with feature phones my new Nokia Lumia phone provides a wonderfully clear image of a pdf or Office document.
However, either using the iPad as an ebook reader or purchasing a Kindle or similar device has not been a priority.
I will admit to planning ahead for holidays by hiding slim but challenging (to understand) books away until the time comes to back our bags.
The time may now be approaching when I take the plunge and invest in an ebook reader for travel purposes, having seen the convenience of the devices on many a crowded train or in airport departure lounges.
Apple iPad wifi: from http://www.apple.com/ On the day that I am writing this column, the Publishers Association helpfully released book sales data for 2012 [1] which showed that total retail ebook sales have continued to rise in 2012, by 134%, reaching £216 million.
Total digital sales have risen by 66%, reaching £411 million.
These digital formats (encompassing ebooks, audiobooks downloads and online subscriptions) accounted for 12% of the total invoiced value of book sales in 2012, with this share rising from 8% in 2011, and from 5% in 2010.
There is still life left in physical books but clearly ebooks are now an established feature of the commute, the beach and probably bed-time reading.
In this issue I am looking back just at the articles that have appeared since 2001.
I was somewhat surprised by how few there are (excluding conference reports and book reviews) but the quality of the writing and erudition is very high indeed.
2000 – 2005 Trials and Tribulations The first article to be published on ebooks appeared in the January 2001 issue and had the wonderful title of “It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine), Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the E-Book” [2].
It was written by Sarah Ormes, who at the time was working for UKOLN.
This is a superb place to start an ebook journey as the author manages to raise all the issues in a single article, with a special reference to how libraries are going to manage ebook collections.
It is worth remembering that the Kindle, frequently regarded as the prototypical ebook reader, was not launched until 2007, so Sarah Ormes’ experience with early ebook technology (the Gemstar Rocket) is of considerable interest.
eboni: Electronic Books ON-screen Interface It was recognised early on in the development of ebooks that usability was going to be a very important issue in gaining widespread adoption because people read more slowly from a computer screen than from a printed page.
The EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface) project was set up in 2000 at the University of Strathclyde with funding from the Jisc Learning and Teaching Programme to investigate with the aim of producing a set of best practice guidelines for publishing electronic textbooks on the Web which reflected the usability requirements of students and academics throughout the UK.
These have been somewhat overtaken by technology but nevertheless set a baseline for ebook usability at a very early stage.
The project came to a close in 2002 but the project Web site is still accessible [3].
The value of this project is more in the evaluation methodology than perhaps in the guidelines themselves and this methodology is set out with clarity in the Ariadne article [4] written by Ruth Wilson.
The pace of development was quite spectacular around this time and in the October 2001 issue Ruth Wilson (now at the University of Aberdeen) evaluated some of the early portable ebook readers that had been available in the USA for a couple of years but were only just arriving in the UK.
The article [5] begins with a very useful condensed history of ebook technology, in which the author reminds us that the concept dates back to Alan Kay and the Dynabook in 1996.
Do treat yourself to a read of a masterly paper by Kay [6] on a personal computer for all children which dates from 1972.
There really is nothing new in the world!
The interest in ebooks in the 2000-2004 period is indicated well by the rate at which Ariadne published articles on the topic.
In January 2002 Brian Kelly wrote about mobile ebook readers [7] without any reference to Ruth Wilson’s paper published in the previous issue!
The arrival of the first ebook standard, the OpenEBooks standard, is highlighted, though this was eventually to be overtaken in 2007 by the EPUB standard.
The conclusions to Brian’s article are worth stating: “We have seen how different communities may have very different views of the role of the e-Book within an educational context.
There is a need for a clear definition of the term.
Of equal importance is the need for the various communities with an interest in the broad area of e-Books to establish dialogue.
Finally there is a need for organisations wishing to publish e-Book resources to have a publishing strategy which supports the reuse of resources.” At the time of the publication of Brian Kelly’s contribution, OCLC acquired netLibrary, a major electronic books (e-books) company.
OCLC's acquisition included the e-book Division of netLibrary, which OCLC integrated as a division of OCLC, and netLibrary's MetaText eTextbook Division, which become a for-profit subsidiary of OCLC.
An article by Shirley Hyatt and Lynn Silipigni Connaway [8] described the rationale and background of the acquisition, the overall vision of the information environment that was being pursued, and the benefits that libraries would experience as a result.
I will readily acknowledge the importance of this initiative though the article reads like a long PR statement and does not place the acquisition into a wider context.
Almost every paragraph begins with ‘netLibrary’.
Nevertheless it is of value to understand the vision that OCLC had for ebooks at the time of the acquisition.
Reading these early papers what came across to me was that the emphasis (and partly this is due to the Ariadne readership) was on the provision of textbooks and other educational material, and the idea that ebooks would become a mass consumer market was still some way off.
By late 2003 the benefits and challenges of ebook provision were increasingly widely recognised and the state of play was elegantly summed up in a seminal article [9] by Penny Garrod (UKOLN).
She wrote that: “The audience for ebooks in public libraries is much harder to quantify and usage is not guaranteed.
Marketing is therefore vital, as people will not use ebook collections if they do not know they exist or if they cannot see the purpose of them.
Ebooks should be linked to, and integrated with, existing collections rather than simply bolted on if usage is to be maximised and costs justified.” In my view those three sentences of wisdom took some time to sink in and be appreciated.
To be fair, ebook technology was still in its infancy and the reference to Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) devices is a good indication of how slow the progress had been since 2000.
2006 – 2010 New Beginnings It is perhaps indicative of the slow rate of technology development and the small size of the market that Ariadne took a sabbatical from the ebook scene and did not return with a major article until 2006.
The wait was worthwhile as Brian Whalley [10] wrote a masterpiece of an article entitled “e-Books for the Future: Here but Hiding?” I will admit to skimming through the papers that I’ve mentioned so far in this column but I took time out to read through this quasi-polemic several times, enjoying it more on each occasion.
In just 4,000 words the author sums up the state of play just before the arrival of the Kindle, and raises many issues about the future for ebooks and the role they might play when integrated with other learning applications.
Man With Kindle Close Up.
Image courtesy of Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Ariadne did not return to ebooks for another four years, during which time Amazon in particular decided that the future was with ebooks and threw money at the technical and marketing problems in quite amazing quantities.
The early commitment by Sony to ebooks is also worthy of notice because it probably hastened the arrival of Kindle.
In 2010 Emma Tomkin of UKOLN makes up for lost time with a comprehensive review of developments post-Kindle in “eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?” [11] The title somewhat mirrors the earlier contribution by Brian Whalley in considering whether ebook technology was about to become a mass market.
Emma writes: “The present resurgence in interest is fuelled by devices such as: the Sony Reader, launched – this time in the United States in 2006; Amazon's original wireless Kindle, launched in 2007; the descendants of these devices, and the various other e-Ink devices currently on the market.
The following part of this article discusses hardware, ebook device types, and other considerations such as cost and platform integration.
In this article, a few general-purpose devices are also discussed – specifically, the iPod and Apple's new iPad.
This is due to the fact that, in the US, the iPad's marketing places it within the range of devices used as an ebook reader.” This paper not only documents the pace of change between 2006 and 2010 but with the benefit of hindsight helps to show just how far ebooks had come in the previous three years.
Emma Tonkin was not so sure about the potential of the iPad as an ebook reader, but Brian Whalley was convinced of its value in the future just one issue of Ariadne later he produced a very detailed review of iPad technology [12] and what the potential of the device represented for the education market: “Despite what might seem to be a high price, I think its advantages give it an edge over the competition.
I might also argue that it has no competition.” Spot on!
Conclusion I too am now an ebook author [13].
Since publication in late November 2012, around 65% of the sales have been as an ebook and, from the comments I have received, it is more about the speed of delivery than the usability of the format that has driven the ebook sales.
As an author it is very easy for me to update the book as frequently as I feel is appropriate though I have decided to do so on an annual basis.
When I began work on this contribution I had no idea that ebooks dated back over a decade.
It could be that they would not have reached the current market penetration without the intervention of Sony and Amazon and the adoption of the EPUB standard.
OCLC also played an important role.
The next stage of development is going to be interesting as the functionality of ebook readers seems to be increasing to the point where ebook readers and tablet devices become indistinguishable.
We need Brian Whalley to dig out his crystal ball again, but until he does so Nancy Herther is a good alternate source of vision and insight [14].
References “Publishing Industry Continues to Grow with Sales of Consumer ebooks rising by 134%”, The Publishers Association, news release, 1 May 2013 http://www.publishers.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2480:publishing-industry-continues-to-grow-with-sales-of-consumer-ebooks-rising-by-134-&catid=503:pa-press-releases-and-comments&Itemid=1618 ….
Sarah Ormes.
"It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine), Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the E-Book".
January 2001, Ariadne Issue 26 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/e-book/ Electronic Books ON-screen Interface (EBONI) http://ebooks.strath.ac.uk/eboni/ Ruth Wilson.
“E-Books for Students: EBONI”.
March 2001, Ariadne Issue 27   http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/e-books Ruth Wilson.
“Evolution of Portable Electronic Books”.
October 2001, Ariadne Issue 29 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/wilson Alan C. Kay.
A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html Brian Kelly.
“Web Focus: Mobile E-Book Readers”.
January 2002, Ariadne Issue 30  http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/web-focus Shirley Hyatt and Lynn Silipigni Connaway.
“Utilizing E-books to Enhance Digital Library Offerings”.
October 2002,  Ariadne Issue 33 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/netlibrary Penny Garrod.
“Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where Are We Now?” October 2003, Ariadne Issue 37 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/garrod Brian Whalley.
"e-Books for the Future: Here but Hiding?".
October 2006, Ariadne Issue 49 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/whalley/ Emma Tonkin.
"eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?".
January 2010, Ariadne Issue 62 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/tonkin/ Brian Whalley.
"Product Review: The IPad and the Educator, First Impressions".
April 2010, Ariadne Issue 63 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/whalley-rvw-2/ Martin White.
Enterprise Search.
O’Reilly Media 2013 http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025689.do Nancy Herter.
Ebook Trends 2013 – The Transformation Accelerates http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Ebook-Trends--The-Transformation-Accelerates-87062.asp Author Details Martin White Managing Director Intranet Focus Ltd 12 Allcard Close Horsham RH12 5AJ UK Email: martin.white@intranetfocus.com Web site: http://www.intranetfocus.com Martin White has been tracking developments in technology since the late 1970s, initially in electronic publishing in the days of videotext and laser discs.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the iSchool, University of Sheffield, since 2002 and is Chair of the eScience Advisory Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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